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PARTISAN REVIEW
not through the eyes or in history, or even in the future, but where the
monks found God, in the depths of the mind." The word "nation"
occurred to Yeats when he thought of a people being impelled toward self–
expression and self-transformation. In the same essay he spoke of the
nation as "a dumb struggling thought seeking a mouth to utter it or hand
to show it, a teeming delight that would re-create the world." The poet
was its representative voice, the bard.
Yeats's first authority for these motifs was Standish O'Grady's
History
of Ireland,
especially its first volume,
The Heroic Period
(1878). The second
volume,
Cuculain and his Contemporaries
(1880), was more easily superseded
in later years by the stories Lady Gregory assembled in her
Cuchulain of
Muirthemne
and
Gods and Fighting Men.
Although Yeats protested that he
wanted to see pagan Ireland and Christian Ireland lying down together in
peace, it was crucial to him that he could divine the unity of the Irish race,
to begin with, mainly in pagan terms. In the debate between Oisin and
Patrick, Oisin should have the deeper experience and the better lines.
Christianity must be made to appear a fine enough thing in its way,
though Yeats did not emphasize the monastic and the missionary traditions
as Joyce did, especially in his lectures in Trieste in 1907. Nor did he spec–
ulate on linguistic relations between Phoenicia, Crete, Greece, Egypt, and
Ireland, as Joyce did when his mind was on
Ulysses
and
Finnegans VUlke.
It
was rhetorically compelling for Yeats to present early Irish Christianity as
a much reduced system of belief and practice, by comparison with the
heroic values of the legendary, pagan Ireland it displaced.
When it came to a further choice, after the Reformation,
Protestantism was a more agreeable form of life, in Yeats's view, than
Catholicism even if its theology was undemanding. He was often bi tter,
as O'Grady was, when he pondered the declined social status of
Protestants in nineteenth-century Ireland. In several essays and two or
three poems Yeats maintained that a distinctively Irish form of
Nationalism had been promulgated by Molyneux, Swift, and especially by
Berkeley; that it animated the otherwise diverse lives of Burke,
Goldsmith, Grattan, Wolfe Tone, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Emmet,
Davis, and Mitchel; and that it culminated in Parnell. It was a Protestant
achievement, but Yeats liked to think of it as still at one with heroic,
pagan, antinomian impulses. A primitive form of it was expressed in
Gavan DuffY's and Davis's work for the Young Ireland movement, but
Yeats knew that he must refine upon the spirit of the nation by submit–
ting its patriotic zeal to a much wider and more imaginative range of
considerations . That was his justification for claiming, in "To Ireland in
the Coming Times," that his rhymes, more than those of Davis, Mangan,
and Ferguson, told "Of things discovered in the deep, / Where only
