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PARTISAN REVIEW
1156-Pope Hadrian IV's bull
Laudabiliter
granting Henry II the right
to incorporate Ireland in his realms.
1169, May-First Landing of the Normans
1171, October 16-Henry II arrives in Ireland
ll72-Synod of Cashel assembled under the authori
ty
of Henry II.
A council, called by some a parliament, held by Henry II at Lismore.
Davis does not mention the never-to-be-forgotten-or-forgiven
Diarmait and Dervorgilla "who brought the Norman in," as the young
man on the run from the General Post Office in 1916 keeps reminding us
in Yeats's The
Dreaming
if
the Bones.
However, since 1172, according to
Davis and the Young Ireland writers, Ireland has been merely a province.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, it was not universally agreed
that Ireland had ever been a nation. Between December 1865 and May
1866, Matthew Arnold gave four lectures at Oxford on the study of Celtic
literature in which he argued that the Celts, and specifically the Irish and
the Welsh, had for centuries been a race but not a nation. He spoke of "the
shrunken and diminished remains of this great primitive race," but only to
remark their "failure to reach any material civilisation sound and satisfy–
ing, and not out at elbows, poor, slovenly, and half-barbarous." In effect,
Arnold claimed that the Celts had never achieved the degree of composi–
tion that would issue in a polity. The epigraph he chose for the lectures
was a line from Macpherson's
Poems of Ossian:
"They went forth to the war,
but they always fell." Taking his bearings from Renan's
Essay on the Poetry
if
the Celtic Races
and Henri Martin's
France bifore
1789, Arnold spoke up
for the Celts, but on the clear assumption that they had never become a
nation or entered into history. They were a race, recognizable in their spir–
it or genius, but they had never exceeded that condition. The genius of the
Celtic peoples counted for something "in the inward world of thought and
science," but for nothing "in the outward and visible world of material
life." As late as 1887, Arnold said that the Irish could be "a nation poeti–
cally only, not politically."
I use the words "race" and "nation" with the liberty of an amateur. I
will assume, in default of an erudite sense of the matter, that a race, as dis–
tinct from a nation, is what sociologists call a "social imaginary." Its status
is ideal or virtual rather than palpable.
It
is what people living in the same
country-a certain small island in the Atlantic Ocean, say-think of them–
selves as being: their feeling is primordial rather than historical, social, or
economic. In that sense, the Irish race has left traces of itself in poems, sagas,
and artifacts, but it has not otherwise entered history.
It
is what one imag–
ines, on the evidence of archaeological and linguistic remains. But a nation
