UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
Anglo-Irish
ByJOHN PRATT (Queen Mary College, London)
IRELAND seems a wonderful place in which to study English civilisation. For it is pre-eminently one large and glorious English landscape of the eighteenth century, and the English-speaking country-people who live in its Georgian cottages and fine gracious houses have more in common with any rural community in provincial England than they have with the civilisation which produced the Book of Kells. Indeed, through their long traditions of close if unwilling association, they seem to have more affinities with English civilisation than do the Welsh people, who, despite a more carefully preserved nationality, remain loyal to the British Crown. Nor, I think, should Ireland be ashamed of its long liaison with the more general British civilisation. The extent of its anglicisation, the wealth of its contributions to English culture, were only marks of its continuing importance as one of the major British countries.
We should all be forced to recognise that the fine Irish towns, their architecture and society—even the landscape itself—were largely the contributions of the " hated English." Nor is it likely that they were equally hated in all periods. Any- way, the influence is staring us in the face; it has been there ever since the stone ring-fort gave waY'to the Norman English and then the Edwardian castle, and it is evident in the pre- Reformation church architecture as well as in the Georgian. Of course, there is no need to confine one's attention to the obvious physical influence. It is said, with apparent accuracy, that the Norman English established the Catholic faith itself in Ireland, even as William the Conqueror had confirmed it in England. (The true " old faith " of Ireland was not Roman at all in form, but the native British Christian rite—the "monastic " Church which has completely disappeared.) The Anglo-Norman clergy and baronage fostered a slow change of rite and discipline, and an orientation to Rome, thereby establishing the truly Roman Church in Ireland much more securely than their Reformation descendants and successors managed to disestablish it again. It must thus be conceded by the mischievous Protestant " that the Irish masses may be backward in their religion, but they are not backward enough to subscribe to the ' old faith.' " There were times when signs in Gaelic (if there were such things) would not have been tolerated in the proud city of Dublin, and long ago there was a time when the once advanced Celtic civilisation was reduced to a scrabble of bearded chieftains living " beyond the Pale." But even this is not something to be hated or ignored in the new Irish history, but should certainly be recognised as an important phase in the making of the Ireland and the Irishman of today. For he is no longer a harp-playing, manuscript-illuminating Celt, but a modem English-speaking Briton, whose ancestry somehow makes contact with the language at the point of its Elizabethan vigour, and undergoes the eighteenth-century age of taste and reason with brilliant results. All this is as indelibly stamped upon his character as the Fenian movement, and its effects may last much longer. Even so, a people's particular history is a fine thing to remember, and even to cultivate, so long as it does not tend to become History. By this I mean that peculiar twentieth- century phenomenon of totalitarian conditioning—a mixture of fact, emotion and fantasy which tends to ignore whole blocks and centuries of true history, and to bridge these enormous gaps with bogus continuities. Its symptoms are the same in every community; it is a recognisable seizure upon certain facts, legends and survivals, and the elevation and dis- tortion of those facts and legends into such a pronounced bias over the face of history that present-day actuality soon ceases to make sense in the light of it. Any modern European country can grasp one of its old cultural strains and treat all later political and cultural infusions—perhaps the major ones—as the " enslavement " of this. Saxon England, for instance, had essentially the same development side-by-side with Gaelic Ireland, and was, for the most part, even subject to the same series of kings, the same hierarchies of barons from outside and in. But how differently does modern England regard this common history from the way modern Ireland regards the same phenomenon ! There is no yearning in England to live in sod huts and sing the praises of the Saxon heroes.
It is my belief (perhaps insufficiently founded) that the cul- tural health of the Irish people is in grave danger from the Kultur kind of history. For it is the mark of Kultur that it often tends to obscure the most basic and obvious traditions, continuities and influences bearing upon the refinement of a people. Instead, it seeks 'to establish a complete reorientation in terms of an earlier civilisation—a reorientation which can never be anything but synthetic anyway, since no earlier civilisation can be re-created, or even built upon in a healthy way, when its continuity is severed, or it has long formed a minor channel of the national life.
All this is important, for instance, when it comes to an ana- lysis of the failure of the " Gaelic Revival." That the " Gaelic Revival " is a failure can hardly be denied, on the evidence of many Irish observers. We can all enjoy the modem vision of the Anglo-Irish country gentleman in Dublin, demanding stoutly of the passers-by that they translate the signs on the Government doors, so that he may find the proper nest of bureaucrats he has to deal with. But the failure of the " Gaelic Revival " is by no means confined to the Anglo-Irish. The official revival of the Gaelic language seems to have failed simply because it has so little to offer the average Irishman. It remains something official—imposed artificially from above. It has nothing to do with his social, literary or business interests, and is thus completely alien to his culture. There seems to be a widespread reluctance to see the " old language " die out in the isolated regions where, it is spoken naturally, but I also found a widespread reluctance to the making of " Gaels " out of those who are not, and who have not been for hundreds of years. Meanwhile, the strong dialects of good English speech remain the truest Irish language, as every tourist knows.
I have said at the beginning that Ireland seems to me a wonderful place in which to study 'English civilisation, and I believe this is so on many levels, and for several reasons. First, Ireland, as a country close to Britain, has always received the direct force .of English influence. Secondly, it is a separate country, and this gives' the student an unparalleled chance to determine precisely what the English contributions were—what was exported 'to Ireland besides hatred and injustice, and what took root there. In the third place Ireland has .a largely English civilisation which has had practically no nineteenth century at all. It, remains an eighteenth-century agricultural nation—a perfect " period " piece. One could not go far in this, of course, without realising that the Irish people themselves have made the English culture what it is in Ireland, Perhaps " Anglo-Irish civilisation " would be a better term, were it not loaded with the wrong implications, for no one can read the English literature of Ireland without being conscious of the Irish element in it.
It strikes me that this civilisation is a true heritage of the present Irish people, and that it is upon the largely uncon- scious continuities springing from it that their political, economic, social and cultural life depends for form and direc- tion. It seems to me, then, that the Irish educational system has its choice. It can level everything down to the senseless clods through inaccuracy, bias and a silly " Celtic " emphasis; or, following the example of the modern Irish writers, it can recognise, and infuse with new life, a rich heritage of continuities. This heritage is something to which England has contributed strongly, and in which England is intimately involved.
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