DENIS DONOGHUE
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body's laid asleep." He respected Davis, but he thought that the Young
Ireland movement had encouraged Irish people to settle for facile senti–
ments and vulgar arguments:
Young Ireland had taught a study of our history with the glory of
Ireland for event; and this, for. . .lack of comparison with that of other
countries, wrecked the historical instinct. The man who doubted, let
us say, our fabulous ancient kings running up to Adam, or found but
mythology in some old tale, was hated as if he had doubted the
authority of Scripture. Above all, no man was so ignorant that he had
not by rote familiar arguments and statistics to drive away amid famil–
iar applause all those that had found strange truth in the world or in
their minds, and all whose knowledge had passed out of memory and
become an instinct of hand or eye. There was no literature, for litera–
ture is a child of experience always, of knowledge never. ...
In "To Ireland in the Coming Times" Yeats included himself in the kin–
ship of Protestant nationalists, and in other poems he took up in cultural
terms the work that Parnell had tried to do in political terms. The senti–
ment he proclaimed was Parnell's, a Protestant conviction, different in kind
from the Catholic impulse of O'Connell, a man Yeats affected to despise
and impugn as the great comedian. O'Connell was a populist. Parnell was
a tragic hero, lonely, subjective, antithetical: he was an ambiguous, equivo–
cal force, maintaining his personality as a secret, his demon. He spoke in
whatever voice he chose and on his own sole authority.
Yeats's strategy was culturally emphatic. Parnell regularly invoked "the
Irish nation" and "the Irish race" which he proposed to lead, but, as
F.
S.
L.
Lyons has noted, he seems never to have asked himself what he meant
by those phrases, "and the idea that Ireland might possibly contain two
nations, not one, apparently never entered his head." Yeats emphasized
Unity of Race, at least to begin with; divisions would be recognized later
and with regret.
It
is regularly maintained that he posited for the Irish peo–
ple a fixed identity, as if such a quality were independent of circumstances
and forces. I don't think he did. His reflections on race, type, and national
character seem to me not at all essentialist. He always allows for mobility
by making every postulate yield to the transforming power of one's imag–
ination. He submits the ostensibly fixed concepts of nature, history,
character, self, and origin to subjective transformation, such that they
become forms of freedom, gesture, personality, and style. Irish identity is
what he wants to create, by many acts of summoning and conjuring; it is
not deemed to be already there in a fixed form. Yeats's motive was
