366
PARTISAN REVIEW
Synge's
The Playboy
of
the ['#stern World
to the controversy over Hugh
Lane's paintings and the Dublin Lock-Out of 1913-Yeats was no longer
a cultural nationalist in the original sense: he was a poet at a distance from
the people he summoned to come forth; he was a critic, a satirist, a polemi–
cist; his note was contempt rather than exhortation. But, leaving Yeats
aside for the moment, it would be reasonable to argue that the work of cul–
tural nationalism came to a crisis in 1915 when Hyde resigned from the
presidency of the Gaelic League on the grounds that the League had
become a political rather than a cultural organization. In the same year
Pearse dissociated himself, in his pamphlet
Ghosts,
from constitutional
nationalists as men who had allowed themselves to be defeated by the fall
and death of Parnell. It soon became clear that the conviction of identity
which Yeats, Hyde, Lady Gregory, and their colleagues provoked in those
who attended to them had issued in desires that those writers could not
have anticipated, desires that could not be appeased by Home Rule in any
of the forms in which it had been proposed.
Pearse was the crucial figure in bringing about this change and in for–
cing Ireland to the extremi ty of becoming, after bloodshed and the Civil
War, a state. The word "state" appears only once in the Proclamation of
the Irish Republic-the text is the work of Pearse, James Connolly, and
Thomas MacDonagh, of Pearse mainly-but that once is fundamental:
"we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent
State." There are four references to the Irish "people," three to the
"nation," one to "nationhood," three to the "republic," and one to
"Poblacht na hEireann." It was as if the founding of a state were the cul–
minating act in a series of acknowledgements testifying to a conviction of
nationhood and identity. The sense of identity floats free of its mere his–
tory. Like Yeats, and like de Valera in the Constitution of 1937, Pearse
appeals not to Irish history as the record of events in the order in which
they have occurred but to the nation that has existed and continues to
exist "in the minds and loyalties of its people," as Liam de Paor has
expressed it, "independently, as it were, of its own history of some cen–
turies past." Pearse implies that the true history of Ireland, as distinct from
the specious history it has officially had, is not a record of the English
presence in Ireland for more than seven hundred years but of the six
attempts in the past three hundred years to remove that presence: presum–
ably he means certain acts of insurrection in 1641,1689,1798,1803,1848,
and 1867. The only reference in the Proclamation to the refusal of
Unionists in certain parts of Ulster to countenance any nationalist pro–
ceeding is in this sentence:
