The Hidden Ireland E-Book

L.M. Cullen

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1989

Beschreibung

Daniel Corkery's The Hidden Ireland: A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century, has had sustained appeal since its publication in 1925. There Corkery used literary evidence to sustain a picture of relieved poverty and oppression, spiritual counterpart to the social and economic conditions described by the Victorian chroniclers Froude and Lecky. In 1969 Professor Louis Cullen exposed Corkery's uncomplicated view of the period, coloured by the early twentieth-century national revival, in this classica revisionism (the name whereby historians interpret Ireland's mythologies). Here Cullen suggests a closer investigation of the Irish poets' milieux, from which emerges a richer, more subtle pattern than that imposed by earlier generations. This important text, supplemented with a new Postscript and English-language translations of the poetry cited, is now available to the general reader, literary critic, historian and student of Irish affairs alike.

Leseprobe

THE HIDDEN IRELAND

Reassessment of a Concept

Louis M. Cullen

THE LILLIPUT PRESS 1988

Contents

Title Page

EDITOR’S PREFACE

The Hidden Ireland: Reassessment of a Concept

Notes With translations by Máirín Ní Dhonnchada

Postscript

Further Reading

Copyright

Editor’s Preface

This new series called ETCH, Essays and Texts in Cultural History, fills the gap between short articles in obscure journals and lengthy books at inflated prices. The field is the cultural history of Ireland in the broadest sense, including both work in Gaelic and English, non-literary material, and foreign commentary on Irish culture. The series includes essays originally commissioned, reprints of valuable items from the past, translations … indeed any kind of material which can increase our awareness of cultural history within Ireland, cultural history as it affects Ireland. W. J. Mc Cormack’s TheBattleoftheBooks:TwoDecadesofIrishCulturalDebate (Lilliput, 1986) can be regarded as the prototype of the series.

ETCH I – Louis Cullen’s analysis of eighteenth-century Gaelic poetry, first published in StudiaHibernica in 1969, is a sustained critique of Daniel Corkery’s notion of a ‘hidden Ireland’. For over sixty years Corkery, whose book TheHiddenIreland was issued in 1925, has been a powerful influence in the debates surrounding Irish nationalism, its relation to the Gaelic language and to literature generally, and – more recently – in the controversies raised by the Field Day pamphlets. Where Corkery generalized from his reading of certain Munster poets to suggest an unproblematic national identity preserved in times of repression and deprivation, Cullen applies a unique combination of skills – of the economic historian and the chronicler of differentiated cultural groups – to advance a dissenting interpretation of the poetry and of the highly diverse Irish eighteenth century. The relevance of this argument today can hardly be exaggerated, as younger scholars reassess ‘Georgian Ireland’ or debate rival definitions of ‘Protestant ascendancy’. Theatre audiences for Brian Friel’s Translations and supporters of the revival of the Gaelic language will equally benefit from this provocative, well-informed and timely argument.

For the convenience of readers who have no knowledge of Gaelic, this edition of Professor Cullen’s essay includes English prose translations of his copious quotations from the original literature. These have been prepared by Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha.

THE HIDDEN IRELAND

Reassessment of a Concept

I

The concept of a ‘hidden Ireland’ is now long established as an aspect of the interpretation of the eighteenth-century economic and social history of Ireland. The term is Daniel Corkery’s, and since its first publication in 1925 his book of this title has run through four impressions and is now in paperback as well. Concept and book have both been influential. For Corkery, the hidden Ireland was ‘that side of Irish life, the Gaelic side, which to him [Lecky] and his authorities was dark’1 So far the concept would seem to suggest simply a corrective to Lecky’s HistoryofIrelandintheeighteenthcentury or a reminder that there were sources on which Lecky did not draw at all. But in Corkery’s view the consequences of using the sources which were inaccessible to Lecky were not only significant but sweeping; they would alter Lecky’s picture: ‘We shall make on for thresholds that they [the historians, Lecky especially] never crossed over, in hope that what we shall further discover will not only complete the picture they have given, but frankly alter it …’ (p. 5). Thus, while Corkery’s book was first and foremost a literary argument based on literary sources, it was also, and was so regarded by Corkery, an historical work based on what Corkery described as a ‘body of literature, almost all of which may be spoken of as explicitly or implicitly historical’ (p. x). The success of Corkery’s book has had a substantial impact on the understanding of the eighteenth century in Ireland. His concept of a hidden Ireland was in practice more than a merely cultural one: subsequent use of the term by literary men and historians alike has tended to be even less qualified.

An essential aspect of Corkery’s theme was that Gaelic literature mirrored the outlook of the people. Indeed, he even goes so far as to intimate that the outlook of the people depended on their literature, ‘the national life … being bound together by a national literature, depending indeed for its existence on that literature’ (p. 95). Literature held the key to their outlook: his own ‘immediate task is to show that Lecky presents us, for all his industry and learning, with only a body that is dead and ripe for burial … To that Hidden Ireland of the Gaels, then, we turn our faces’ (pp. 3-4). What the literature—the poetry—expressed was the fact that ‘for two whole centuries our people were, we may say, down in the trenches, suffering so deeply that they sometimes cried out that God had forsaken them: their souls were therefore quick with such sensations as must find utterance in poetry or none’ (p. 95). Continuity of outlook was marked: while Corkery recognised the aristocratic basis of the earlier poetry, ‘tutoring years’ in time made the ordinary people ‘the residuary legatees of all the culture of the Gaelic ages’ (p. 168). The poetry of the eighteenth century testifies to growing oppression: ‘indeed, it may be that the vast distress in striking it quickened that soul into a new urgency of declaring itself, of uttering its cry’ (p .95). Corkery’s conclusion was that the cultural situation which he postulated had wide implications for Lecky and the historians: ‘from his own pages one would never feel that the soul of the Gael is one of the more enduring features of our national life. Yet this very fact becomes daily more evident, and all future historians will more and more have to wrestle with it’ (p. vii). Quoting Stopford Brooke’s view that three elements could be found in poetry by Irishmen in the English tongue—nationality, religion, rebellion—Corkery wrote: ‘now, one goes only a little way into the Irish poetry of the eighteenth century when one comes on the same three notes, the same, yet how vastly different! How much deeper, louder, stronger, fiercer!’ (p. ix).

Had Corkery confined himself to making a purely intellectual or cultural case, his argument might have been stronger. But in his book the thesis that continuity can be traced from the cultural background to the political arena appears to be explicit: ‘many years had to go by before they learned, out of a thousand experiences, that, outlawed and all as they were, they could still by combination resist oppression and exert influence, that they were indeed the historic Irish nation, that they would grow and be heard’ (p. 168). This assumed continuity emerges strongly when he asserts: ‘if instead of backwards we go forward twenty years from 1740 we are entering the period of Whiteboyism—evidence enough that the sufferings had come to a head and broken out’ (p. 18). Here the Whiteboy Movement is regarded as a fulfilment of the outlook which he attributed to the poetry. At several points in Corkery’s book the years around 1760 seem to be regarded as marking a transition from aristocratic to democratic, from bad to worse in terms of the degree of oppression, from poetic expression to organized resistance.