Irish StudiesThis recent welcome contribution to the Field Day Monographs' series Critical Conditions has on its cover a photograph of a girl dancing before a rapt audience at an outdoor feis in 1904. By that time the major interrelated movements so thoroughly analysed by P.J. Mathews in Revival had all entered the stage.
Some had peaked and withdrawn to make room for Sinn Féin the following year, while others continued to evolve into unexpected institutions.
In this stimulating study highlighting "important movements of mutual significance" during the period 1899 to 1905, Mathews rightly points out that scholars have too readily overlooked the number of players who crossed class, party, and philosophical lines to create the heady mix of new ideas and projects that provided the groundwork for contemporary Ireland. He discounts the canonical view that the Irish Revival was a consensual movement based on nostalgia, spiritual aesthetics, and anti-materialism and therefore outside of the political realm. Instead we are offered a lively debate between the makers of art and the purveyors of public opinion, the development of co-operatives and the battle for native language and literature, the forms that literature should take and the representation of Irish identity.
Yet the lines of division were never clear - Horace Plunkett turned against his own party and through collaboration with George Russell founded not only creameries but the influential Irish Homestead. William Rooney (one of the heroes of the book) laid the groundwork for Sinn Féin but then Arthur Griffith took it down a different, sometimes contradictory, path. The founders of the Irish Literary Theatre spent more time in political manoeuvring and apologetics than in seeking out Irish actors for their plays or fully grasping the significance of the street theatre being utilized by the Irish Transvaal Committee, Inghinidhe na hÉireann, and Cumann na nGaedhal. Douglas Hyde famously urged "de-Anglicisation" and effectively challenged the anti-Irish stance of Trinity College; yet by collaborating with the founders of the Irish Literary Theatre provoked arguments from his own Gaelic League.
Everyone had a finger in the political/ideological pie, and everybody claimed the plum. Yet all recognized, though offering different representations of national identity, that cultural self-belief was fundamental not only to economic prosperity but to national independence itself. All, in Mathews' telling phrase, were actively seeking "alternative modernities", "innovation rather than passive cultural consumption".
Surprisingly, it was George Moore who first publicly drew the analogy "between a system of rural banking and co-operative dairies and the poetry of Mr Yeats". Yet the poet, campaigner for libraries and literature, critic of the West Britonism of Dowden and Trinity College, and an inveterate planner of public demonstrations, is seen here to be less politically astute (sometimes downright naive) concerning the web of events than "the ever-expedient" Augusta Gregory. And John Synge emerges as yet another hero in his clear-sighted awareness of the frustrating situation created by Gaelic League tactics on the one hand and on the other the Irish Homestead's encouragement of confined middle-class domesticity for women.
One of the most provocative strategies of the book is the selection of Irish Literary Theatre productions less for their intrinsic literary value than for the way they reflected this ferment of evolving movements, both grass roots and intellectual, and illustrated the conflict between theory and practice within each. Thus Yeats's The Countess Cathleen becomes a key factor in the debate between pagan "Celticism" and contemporary Catholicism, the Gaelic League's idealized Irish peasant and the potential for an Irish literature written in English.
Similarly, George Moore's The Bending of the Bough is perceptively analysed as a comment on the Childers Commission on the financial arrangements between Britain and Ireland. Yeats and Moore's devastatingly mismatched Diarmuid and Grania becomes a focus for the debate on Celticism and Irish Ireland, drawing in both the aristocratic Standish O'Grady and the bourgeois nationalist D. P. Moran. Even James Joyce's short stories (the first of which was published by AE in Plunkett's Irish Homestead) are examined in the light of the co-operative movement. A notable omission from this catechism is Edward Martyn's The Heather Field, a heartbreaking cautionary tale of enthusiastic land reclamation. Instead, Synge's The Shadow of the Glen becomes a pivotal point in the 1904-05 year, bolstered by his perceptive reports of the Congested Districts Board, an intriguing parallel with Plunkett's articles. Perhaps inevitably, the Yeats/Gregory contribution Kathleen ni Houlihan is seen as marking the end of rapprochement between Cumann na nGaedhal and the theatre movement.
The bibliography, though impressively thorough, ends before the publication of the important Field Day volumes four and five. Although Alice Milligan's plays are briefly noted and Augusta Gregory is rightly emphasized, there were others working alongside these major players whose contributions to the "self-help" movements were crucial. In this and in discourse and format Revival betrays its origins as a doctoral dissertation. Yet Mathews' insights provide convincing argument that it is time we stopped oversimplifying the impetus of the revival as a battle between nostalgic dreamers and materialist doers, a conflict of civilizations. It was far more than that, and this book offers a much-needed reappraisal of the forces of civic nationalism operating - sometimes in contradiction - in all camps.
Ann Saddlemyer is Professor Emeritus of the University of Toronto, Canada. Her most recent book, Becoming George - The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats, was published by Oxford University Press in 2002
Irish Studies
Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Féin, The Gaelic League and
the Co-operative Movement
By P.J. Mathews
Cork University Press, 208pp. €29