DENIS DONOGHUE
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as a race was that Arnold proposed to rescue them from their civic penury
by attaching them to England; Moore tormented them for the grim fun of
it. Arnold blamed successive British governments for keeping the Irish in
their barbarous condition. Moore sneered at every institution in sight:
Gladstone, Parnell, the Catholic Church, the Land League, Irish peasants,
the worthies of Dublin Castle.
It
was as
if
his rhetoric had only one figure of
thought and he meant to keep it employed.
But Moore's irony did not inhibit the work of cultural nationalists.
Nor did Joyce 's attacks on Yeats and the Irish literary movement. I have in
mind "The Holy Office" (1904), "Gas from a Burner" (1912), and the
account of political life after Parnell, as Joyce gives it in "Ivy Day in the
Conunittee Room," a story set in Dublin on October 6, 1902. But these
are not definitive; they do not tell the whole story of Joyce's relation to
Nationalism or even to Yeats and his companions. Joyce was as deeply
involved in the values of "kinship, race, and inheritance" as he was com–
mitted to those of art and the Europe of Flaubert and Ibsen. There is no
reason to think that he is being ironic at Stephen Dedalus's expense when
he has him exclaim: "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality
of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated con–
science of my race." It is possible to read that declaration ironically, but
the irony soon becomes ashamed of itself.
In any event, none ofJoyce's interventions, or Moore's, deflected Yeats
from his purpose as a cultural nationalist, to summon the Irish race into his–
torical existence as a nation. I do not claim that he accomplished this with
his own hands. The work of cultural nationalism began, according to one
persuasive account, when the antiquarian Edward Bunting and his assistants
transcribed and published the songs played at the great harpists' festival in
Belfast in 1792. The early phase of modern Irish nationalism includes pre–
eminently Isaac Butt, Michael Davitt, John O'Leary, and Parnell, and in
other respects Hyde and the Gaelic League, Michael Cusack and the Gaelic
Athletic Association, Lady Gregory and the Abbey Theater, and many men
and women whose purposes did not coincide with Yeats's. Nor was Yeats the
first to prepare the ground: he had many precursors, none of them his equal;
Davis, Gavan DuffY, Standish O'Grady, Mangan, Ferguson, and Allingham.
I acknowledge, too, that Yeats did not express Ireland at every point of its
feeling and desire, as references to Maud Gonne, the Countess Markiewicz,
Pearse, Connolly, Griffith, and Collins are enough to indicate. But Parnell,
Yeats, and Hyde are the major figures in the early years of Irish nationalism.
Yeats's main achievement in his early poems, plays, and essays was to bring to
composition and form a plethora of national desires that hardly knew them–
selves to be desires. He told many Irish men and women what they felt, what
they wanted, and the more strenuous things they should now want.
It
was an
