people. They must go back to Dublin and there found a national theatre and publishing houses, in the attempt to gather around them a truly national audience.
Six
Childhood and Ireland
Most writers of the Irish Revival identified their childhood with that of the Irish nation: those hopeful decades of slow growth before the fall into murderous violence and civil war. In their subsequent autobiographies, childhood was identified as a kind of privileged zone, peopled with engaging eccentrics, doting grandmothers and natural landscapes. What they were describing, of course, was childhood in a colony, and there could have been few experiences as intense as that of family life in such a setting. The subject people owed no allegiance to the state, its courts, its police, its festivals, and so all the energies which might in a normal society have been dispersed over such wide areas were instead invested in the rituals of family life. AsG. K. Chesterton remarked "wherever there is Ireland there is the family, and it counts for a great deal". 1 That comment was made after a visit to the family ofJohn Butler Yeats inLondon, proving that habits so deeply rooted survived the experience of emigration, even among those like the Yeatses whose background was in the minor landowning class. The neighbours of the Yeats family in London, hearing the raised voices of father and son, sometimes falsely concluded that the two were locked in a violent quarrel, when in fact they were engaged in animated discussion of the family's life. Their friends in Blenheim Road could not understand, in the words ofLily Yeats, that this was simply "the Irish way". 2
Whenever sons revolted against fathers in a revival text, the confrontation was soon metaphorized as the story of Ireland. The writer, typically, began the autobiography as a subject in the colony, clashed with and surmounted a father, and ended as the citizen of a free state or of a state intent on freeing itself. Beginning as a nonentity, he or she grew into an Irish person. Like Americans of the same period, me Irish were not so much born as made, gathered around a few simple symbols, a flag, an anthem, a handful of evocative phrases. In the process, childhood – like Ireland itself – had to be reinvented as a zone of
innocence, unsullied and intense, from which would emerge the free Irish protagonist.
The celebration of the peasant by artists like Yeats was intimately connected with these aspirations: one of his favourite rhymes was "wild" and "child". It was a legacy of theEnglish Romantics, whose peasants achieved Coleridge's ideal of carrying the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood. The unselfconsciousness of the countryman's sense of place, as in the poetry ofWilliam Allingham, permitted Yeats to question the more programmatic and "conscious patriotism" of Davis and Young Ireland. For Yeats, as for Synge, the child's earliest feelings were for the colour of a known and concrete locality, which even a baby could express in gibberish and syllables of no meaning. As a boy in Sligo, Yeats had often thought how terrible it would be to go away and live where nobody would know his story or the story of his family. "Years afterwards", he wrote, "when I was ten or twelve years old and in London, I would remember Sligo with tears, and when I began to write it was there I hoped to find my audience". From that moment on, Sligo became a place sacred to the youth who longed to hold a sod of earth in his hand. "It was some old race instinct", he recalled, "like that of a savage". 3
At the Godolphin School in London, he felt himself a stranger among the other boys: "there was something in their way of saying the names of places that made me feel this". 4 The Sligo of his early childhood became a dream landscape, a never-never-land to which it was hopeless to expect to return, "for I have walked on Sinbad's yellow shore and never shall another's hit my fancy". For Yeats, that fall came
Six
Childhood and Ireland
Most writers of the Irish Revival identified their childhood with that of the Irish nation: those hopeful decades of slow growth before the fall into murderous violence and civil war. In their subsequent autobiographies, childhood was identified as a kind of privileged zone, peopled with engaging eccentrics, doting grandmothers and natural landscapes. What they were describing, of course, was childhood in a colony, and there could have been few experiences as intense as that of family life in such a setting. The subject people owed no allegiance to the state, its courts, its police, its festivals, and so all the energies which might in a normal society have been dispersed over such wide areas were instead invested in the rituals of family life. AsG. K. Chesterton remarked "wherever there is Ireland there is the family, and it counts for a great deal". 1 That comment was made after a visit to the family ofJohn Butler Yeats inLondon, proving that habits so deeply rooted survived the experience of emigration, even among those like the Yeatses whose background was in the minor landowning class. The neighbours of the Yeats family in London, hearing the raised voices of father and son, sometimes falsely concluded that the two were locked in a violent quarrel, when in fact they were engaged in animated discussion of the family's life. Their friends in Blenheim Road could not understand, in the words ofLily Yeats, that this was simply "the Irish way". 2
Whenever sons revolted against fathers in a revival text, the confrontation was soon metaphorized as the story of Ireland. The writer, typically, began the autobiography as a subject in the colony, clashed with and surmounted a father, and ended as the citizen of a free state or of a state intent on freeing itself. Beginning as a nonentity, he or she grew into an Irish person. Like Americans of the same period, me Irish were not so much born as made, gathered around a few simple symbols, a flag, an anthem, a handful of evocative phrases. In the process, childhood – like Ireland itself – had to be reinvented as a zone of
innocence, unsullied and intense, from which would emerge the free Irish protagonist.
The celebration of the peasant by artists like Yeats was intimately connected with these aspirations: one of his favourite rhymes was "wild" and "child". It was a legacy of theEnglish Romantics, whose peasants achieved Coleridge's ideal of carrying the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood. The unselfconsciousness of the countryman's sense of place, as in the poetry ofWilliam Allingham, permitted Yeats to question the more programmatic and "conscious patriotism" of Davis and Young Ireland. For Yeats, as for Synge, the child's earliest feelings were for the colour of a known and concrete locality, which even a baby could express in gibberish and syllables of no meaning. As a boy in Sligo, Yeats had often thought how terrible it would be to go away and live where nobody would know his story or the story of his family. "Years afterwards", he wrote, "when I was ten or twelve years old and in London, I would remember Sligo with tears, and when I began to write it was there I hoped to find my audience". From that moment on, Sligo became a place sacred to the youth who longed to hold a sod of earth in his hand. "It was some old race instinct", he recalled, "like that of a savage". 3
At the Godolphin School in London, he felt himself a stranger among the other boys: "there was something in their way of saying the names of places that made me feel this". 4 The Sligo of his early childhood became a dream landscape, a never-never-land to which it was hopeless to expect to return, "for I have walked on Sinbad's yellow shore and never shall another's hit my fancy". For Yeats, that fall came
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