592
PAR TIS AN REV lEW
the pressure of an adverse human environment by dreaming of an
Elysium hidden in the bosom of the Ocean .. .
Thus Toynbee in
A Study of History
on the Celts: the perpetual
imaginative escape from the intolerable situation. And it is obvious
that most of the characteristics that I, and others, have ascribed to
the Irish are the result of a passionate people being imprisoned by
an endless stasis: historical, political, religious, cultural, sexual, and
personal, with the resulting ambiguity of a people and a culture that
is at one and the same time violently rebellious and anarchic and
inhumanly passive and acquiescent, given, culturally, to musing over
past glories in a dull and tedious present, as in the "Cyclops" episode
of
Ulysses,
or given, personally, to mulling over the personal past,
its motivations, its mistakes, its total determinism over the present, as
do characters of
Long Day's Journey.
This peculiarly retrospective
mood under which the past is both a lost and glorious paradise and
an unyielding tyrant who has fixed his inflexible and murderous hold
upon the present (the mood of Mary Tyrone, in short) can be de–
scribed in two ways: either it can be called an absence of the sense
of time (time means nothing to the Tyrones), or an overly acute
sense of the past, which makes
it
the living and the present. Both
methods of description have been employed, appropriately enough,
by Sean O'Faolain in his two books on Irish character and culture.
The lack of a time sense is precisely the feeling that O'Faolain in
The lrish-A Character Study
attributes to the ancient Celt's idea of
Paradise: "His [the Celt's] idea of Heaven is free of Time but it is
rooted in place." But a stranger entering modern Dublin may think
of this sense, as O'Faolain describes it in
The Story of Ireland,
as
that of living in the past:
He [the traveler] soon realizes that there are two clocks in Dublin.
Some might say--of this world and the next; it is going far enough to
say--of today and a very far-off yesterday. He will soon come up
against an attitude to life that he will call either traditional or anti–
quated ; venerable or primitive, according to his philosophy.
History, collective and individual, is a "nightmare," in Joyce's words,
from which nobody can awake.
