preferred, however, to live out that process in Ireland than to seek refuge from it in an English villa. Perhaps at the back of minds well versed in fane Austen's Mansfield Park was a faint hope that, somehow or other, renewal might yet come from without.
Augusta Gregory, for her part, was one of the first Irish aristocrats to make the link between the Irish case and the wider challenge posed by the anti-colonial world. At first she sympathized with distant rebels inEgypt and India, only later to make the scandalized discovery that the troublemakers at her estate gates were hardly very different. That recognition led to her transformation from a colonial wife to an independent modern woman; and, in the course of that transformation, she emerged as a major artist.
YEATS: LOOKING INTO THE
LION'S FACE
YEATS: LOOKING INTO THE
LION'S FACE
At the outset, the aspiring young poet W. B. Yeats was sure that a literary career of any worth would only be possible in London. Ireland, for him, would be an "imaginary homeland", the sort of place endlessly invented and reinvented by exiles who fear that, if they do not give it a local habitation in words, it may entirely disappear. There was some justification for that fear.Friedrich Engels in a letter to Marx had described post-Famine Ireland as "an utter desert which nobody wants", a place with a number of big houses "surrounded by enormous, wonderfully beautiful parks, but all around is waste land". 1 The exiled patriotJohn Mitchel concurred: "the very nation that I knew in Ireland is broken and destroyed; and the place that knew it shall know it no more". 2 Yeats may eventually have returned to Ireland tike so many exiles before and since, simply to make sure that it was still there.
But first in London he busied himself with the invention of a literary movement and the shaping of a post-Parnellite culture. He had his poems published by a prestigious house, in whose offices he wore the black cloak of a professional Celt. (Some said that this gave him a priestly appearance, appropriate to the leader of a new cult: but the satirist George Moore quipped that it made him look like an umbrella left behind after a picnic.) At all events, London was the crucible in which the elements to make a modern Ireland were distilled On the streets of that city, diverse persons and types met and conspired. Their haunts were theIrish Literary Society (founded in 1891), the Gaelic League (1893), and of course the Gaelic Athletic Association (set up in 1884). The political activists of a later period as well as creative artists, first formed an idea of Ireland at these meetings: the list would includeMichael Collins, first a young post office clerk but subsequently to become one of the most lethal guerrilla commanders of the new century;Desmond FitzGerald, 1916 rebel and minister of
the first Free State Government;Pádraic Ó Conaire, author of the first novel in the Irish language;W. P. Ryan, one of the great crusading journalists of his day and a constant orchestrator of significant meetings and clubs.
This loose federation of personalities was one of the very first groups of decolonizing intellectuals to formulate a vision of their native country during a youthful sojourn in an imperial capital – and then return to implement it. Many would follow their example in other parts of the world, but the Irish had only one precedent to which to turn for inspiration: the invention of the American republic byWashington and Jefferson, and of its democratic culture by Whitman and Emerson.
Yeats was perhaps the most gifted and charismatic member of that group of exiles. In the fate of Wilde and Shaw – great artists reduced to the status of mere entertainers by a public too scared to confront their radical ideas with full seriousness – he found a warning for himself and for his friends. If they were to create an authentic movement, Irish writers must commune above all with themselves and with their own
Augusta Gregory, for her part, was one of the first Irish aristocrats to make the link between the Irish case and the wider challenge posed by the anti-colonial world. At first she sympathized with distant rebels inEgypt and India, only later to make the scandalized discovery that the troublemakers at her estate gates were hardly very different. That recognition led to her transformation from a colonial wife to an independent modern woman; and, in the course of that transformation, she emerged as a major artist.
YEATS: LOOKING INTO THE
LION'S FACE
YEATS: LOOKING INTO THE
LION'S FACE
At the outset, the aspiring young poet W. B. Yeats was sure that a literary career of any worth would only be possible in London. Ireland, for him, would be an "imaginary homeland", the sort of place endlessly invented and reinvented by exiles who fear that, if they do not give it a local habitation in words, it may entirely disappear. There was some justification for that fear.Friedrich Engels in a letter to Marx had described post-Famine Ireland as "an utter desert which nobody wants", a place with a number of big houses "surrounded by enormous, wonderfully beautiful parks, but all around is waste land". 1 The exiled patriotJohn Mitchel concurred: "the very nation that I knew in Ireland is broken and destroyed; and the place that knew it shall know it no more". 2 Yeats may eventually have returned to Ireland tike so many exiles before and since, simply to make sure that it was still there.
But first in London he busied himself with the invention of a literary movement and the shaping of a post-Parnellite culture. He had his poems published by a prestigious house, in whose offices he wore the black cloak of a professional Celt. (Some said that this gave him a priestly appearance, appropriate to the leader of a new cult: but the satirist George Moore quipped that it made him look like an umbrella left behind after a picnic.) At all events, London was the crucible in which the elements to make a modern Ireland were distilled On the streets of that city, diverse persons and types met and conspired. Their haunts were theIrish Literary Society (founded in 1891), the Gaelic League (1893), and of course the Gaelic Athletic Association (set up in 1884). The political activists of a later period as well as creative artists, first formed an idea of Ireland at these meetings: the list would includeMichael Collins, first a young post office clerk but subsequently to become one of the most lethal guerrilla commanders of the new century;Desmond FitzGerald, 1916 rebel and minister of
the first Free State Government;Pádraic Ó Conaire, author of the first novel in the Irish language;W. P. Ryan, one of the great crusading journalists of his day and a constant orchestrator of significant meetings and clubs.
This loose federation of personalities was one of the very first groups of decolonizing intellectuals to formulate a vision of their native country during a youthful sojourn in an imperial capital – and then return to implement it. Many would follow their example in other parts of the world, but the Irish had only one precedent to which to turn for inspiration: the invention of the American republic byWashington and Jefferson, and of its democratic culture by Whitman and Emerson.
Yeats was perhaps the most gifted and charismatic member of that group of exiles. In the fate of Wilde and Shaw – great artists reduced to the status of mere entertainers by a public too scared to confront their radical ideas with full seriousness – he found a warning for himself and for his friends. If they were to create an authentic movement, Irish writers must commune above all with themselves and with their own
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