The last of Anglo-Ireland?
Denis Donoghue
Last Essays T. 25.50) R. Henn (Cohn Smythe Sean O'Casey and His World David Krause (Thames and Hudson £3.50)
Cin 6 October, 1970, one of Ireland's big houses was burnt down, a place called Paradise in County Clare, a house owned by the Henn family since the late seventeenth century. I have no information about the fire, or Whether it was set by human malice or the malice of the gods, but it symbolised for the scholar T. R. Henn the end of a phase of history. He referred to it in a lecture printed in Last Essays, where the official theme is the Big House, and Henn argued that the AngloIrish tradition embodied in such houses had served its turn and was now dead, defeated by the nature of decaying things. Paradise, during the last decade of its life, had passed out of Henn's ownership, into 'alien hands', as he called them. Germans? I don't know. Hut in any case a tradition three hundred Years old was now gone. Henn identified himself with the Anglo-Irish, but he eventually thought its defeat inevitable; it had created 'beautiful lofty things', but it had fed itself upon a self-regarding dream. I do not think he assented to this conclusion, but he accepted it with grace good enough to turn ;Ile occasion into a Stoic achievement. In a 'ecture atTrinity College, Dublin, in 1965 he referred to one of Swift's epigrams on 'the 13,!13 that accompanied Lord Chief Baron Brienn on the Munster Circuit in 1704', the aron being the scholar's great-great-grand'ather's father. A man who carries such Ithings in his mind is likely to record with dis,_ress the end of a tradition which included th the Baron and the author of Gulliver's irfIvels. In the end he agrees that 'the Anglot.rish race failed', but he postpones recognitii°p" of the end as long as possible, perhaps
f he was ready to 'accept his own death, our .,, Years after the loss of Paradise.
he loss of a home is a Yeatsian theme, ,oursuco ...., in several of Yeats's most lordly tTe etris• It is clear from Last Essays that Wisnn turned to those poems to find many of rh c'vvn feelings embodied in a congenial hit,,e1(Iric; the high style came naturally to aS a scholar-critic, especially when Yeats Ni;ut-o the text. In The Lonely Tower and Nickr hooks he expounded with notable symw,,_7 several of Yeats's major themes, the c'e:firit olism of the central poems, the political plot the neo-Platonic affiliations, Plato, Fjs,sa °US, Blake. But I see now, with Last in hand, that the crucial thing in Anglo-Irish literature, according ibriiirn's sense of the texts, was the responitN IY implicit in house, land, race, religion, Property. Style in poetry was sensuous
proof that the poet understood his responsibility and sustained it. Lecturing to the Yeats Summer School in Sligo in 1968, Henn declared his values in terms not essentially. different from those which Yeats expressed in his last poems and On the Boiler: a politics culminating not in the democratic mass but in the single great man. 'For in the last resort, responsibility for any great action returns always to one man': this is Henn's version of a Yeatsian theme, but he offers it on his own authority, based upon his experience in peace and war. He is not intimidated by the fascist label attached to Yeats. I have never heard Henn described as a fascist, but I fancy he would turn the word aside as a mere catchword, in any case.
The work collected in Last Essays is mainly concerned with Yeats; then with AE, George Moore, and Synge. Henn was a somewhat lordly scholar, sonorous in lectures, expansive and warm in personal manner. His poets were Shakespeare and Yeats, and he attended upon both in a spirit suitably grand. Especially sensitive to tragedy and to the high tragic style, he constantly resorted to his two poets and to the Bible for the consolation of finding that the terrible themes of suffering, loss, and death have at least been understood and registered. He told me a few years ago that he was bringing together a collection of his essays under the title The Weasel's Tooth. Yeats would provide many of the themes as well as the title, from 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen': We, who seven years ago Talked of honour and of truth, Shriek with pleasure if we show The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth.
When tasked him if the essays would be as bitter as the title, he said with a smile: 'per haps not'. In the event 'The Weasel's Tooth' is merely one of the Last Essays, and the tOne of the book as a whole is mellow rather than bitter, though bitterness keeps breaking in.
And some prejudice. 1 do not find that political thought comes naturally to him; it seems strained when he engages in it. At one point he refers to 'the irony of a situation in which the government of the [Irish] Repub lic has encouraged foreign investment in in dustry, mining, land, by means of tax concessions to some who had been historic enemies of the United Kingdom'. Germans ?
But the tax concessions were made available to foreign investors of any race, the Germans received no privilege denied to the British or the Dutch. Again Henn says that the young Free State 'in its attempt to compose a Senate from the landed aristocracy and from the intellectual elite failed to establish an Upper House of any considerable moral or cultural authority'. In fact, the senators were an impressive assembly, and Yeats was not their sole star; they would have made a fair showing by comparison with the House of Lords then or indeed now. And when Henn says that 'a law indifferent to blame or praise, to bribe or praise . . . is not the least of its possessions that Ulster is reluctant to relinquish,' can he seriously claim that Ulster has such a thing or that Yeats's phrase accurately describes the old Stormont ?
I find Henn mete convincing when he sticks to his proper business; poetry, Yeats, Shakespeare, symbols, rhetoric, art. It is good to have these Last Essays .not only for the warmth and generosity which characterised their author but for a permanent record of his work at the Yeats Summer School. Henn was its chief if not its only begetter. I can still hear his voice when the talk came round to Knocknarea, Lough Gill, Drumchile, Ben Bulben, Glencar; to the place of choice and chance in life in general and Yeats's life in particular; to the themes of love and war and death. He got into the habit of giving the first and the last lecture of the School each year: it seemed appropriate to us that the School should begin and end upon Tom Henn's note. These Last Essays recall that note, and the impassioned values which it defined.
David Krause's book is a brief biography of Sean O'Casey, eked out with pictures. Nothing new in the biography, or in most of the pictures. Krause is unfailingly on O'Casey's side, telling him to keep his sword swinging. James Agate become 'the facetiously erudite Agate', Kingsley Martin is presented 'looking down from his editorial altar'. A full-page photograph of O'CaseyIS
flanked by another (same size) of Pope John XXIII, a juxtaposition occasioned by Krause's ludicrous assertion that the two men were in some respects comparable. O'Casey's sillinesses are offered as the truest wisdom, and Krause draws the line only when his master talks palpably gross nonsense about Russia and Communism.
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