The Wild Soul of the Celt

...He was a child when Orange yeomen burst into the wretched Carleton cabin, prodded his sister with bayonets and roughed up the family...

...Each of the five novelists chosen for Thomas Flanagan's brilliant study has recorded in his own "fiery shorthand" the life of that crumbling Ireland...

...For the class-conscious, caste-ridden Irish of the early 19th century there were many Irelands but there was, in oversimplified stratification, a dual society...

...The native Catholic majority formed the base of a submerged Celtic nation alien to, yet yoked with, the Protestant Anglo-Irish landlords, an anarchic and flamboyant breed whose speech and cultural frame of reference were English...

...A member of a class ridiculed by the Ascendancy and deplored by the old Catholic gentry, the small shopkeeper's son named John Banim was enabled, by the easing of anti-Catholic restrictions, to choose a career as writer...

...Banim was the first and in some ways the ablest of Ireland's historical novelists...

...William Carleton, to whom the scorched earth of Ulster was home, did...

...His novelists come off as interestingly as their fictional characters...

...By that time the Ireland of the Edgeworths was dead and, all too literally, the Ireland of the peasant Gael was in its death throes...

...While she wrote as an Ascendancy chatelaine, her work revealed a protective compassion that, during the Great Famine, would prompt her to strain her resources to help the stricken peasantry...

...The former, guided by Daniel O'Connell, was making his emergence into the modern world...

...Carleton was—and is—the most misunderstood of the five novelists here studied, but, in the judgment of Yeats, modern Irish literature begins with him...

...In its vivid pages unfolds a panorama of provincial society, picturesque but doomed: the gentry of the Big Houses, middle-men torn between loyalty to their Gaelic past and aspirations toward Anglo-Irish gentility, the English of the Garrison and—far below them — the peasantry, shopkeepers, boatmen and ropemakers...

...Even so, his pot-boiling fiction was a muddy well in which truth often lodged at the bottom...

...Steeped in all his colorful material, Flanagan combines literary scholarship of a high order with courageous sociological criticism...

...To Maria Edgeworth, the wryly observant daughter of a long dynasty of Ascendancy landlords, the island was most truly represented by the Protestant aristocracy of the Big Houses...

...It was a benevolent aim, but it compromised his integrity as an artist...

...The Collegians, his finest and most popular work, was not a novel about Ireland but an Irish novel...

...the latter saw his way of life crumbling...

...Her elegiac, faintly ironic masterpiece, Castle Rackrent, traced the decline of a family of her own class...

...Increasingly, too, she was aware of the anachronistic culture that survived in remote bogland and glen...

...even to a murderer, a certain passport to concealment and protection...

...Taken straight out of that secret domain of the Gael so dimly apprehended by Maria Edge-worth, these characters defied the conventions of English fiction...

...Gerald Griffin, another and more gifted middle-class Catholic, resented the idea of making Ireland good copy for the English...

...their oblique symbolism is probed with delicate insight...

...He became a Ribbonman...

...As historian of the peasantry, neither Banim nor Griffin could be said to have written from the inside...

...Reviewed by Ann F. Wolfe Contributor, New York "Times Book Review," "Saturday Review" IN 1880 one of my ancestors, a recent emigrant from County Tyrone, was thus comforted by an American Job: "Why even the wild Irishman has a soul...

...England's curiosity about the Irish, whetted in part by Maria Edgeworth, provided the ideal emotional climate for Lady Morgan's Ossianic nostalgia...

...There was no one who recorded so passionately and intimately the way of the roadside starveling, the Ribbon conspirator and the Lough Derg pilgrim, no one who spoke more eloquently—both in a spiritual and a semantic sense—the language of the hedge school...

...He was Joyce's forerunner in ambivalence toward country and church: he mirrored in himself his society's incohesiveness...

...a wandering scholar and a hedge poet, each an archetypal figure in his Gaelic world...

...Her banished Gaelic chieftains, fallen minstrels, melancholy ruins and legends of a noble past became a vogue...

...Self-styled Ultimas Romanorum...

...Most remarkable of all, for a writer with an Irish name, Flanagan steers a dispassionate course through subject matter charged with passion...

...According to the code of both the rakish half-sir and his peasant '"follyers," legal denunciation afforded...

...In the accursed generations of Rack-rents the author sadly perceived "a society which was destroyed by self-deception," a mood that increasingly pervaded her later novels...

...He turned renegade to Catholicism and hired his pen out indiscriminately to sectarian or literary polemicist and political propagandist...

...Gaelic and Latin the languages of cultivated discourse and English a foreign tongue useful in selling a cow...

...In both his stories of peasant life and his historical novels he aimed at "the formation of a good and affectionate feeling between England and Ireland...

...True, he anticipated Synge in making dramatic use of the peasant's vigorous, poetic speech and he drew on a strong sense of "history as tragic experience...

...It was the late 19th century, yet Ireland's "aboriginal inhabitants," once dispraised by Spenser for defending "their own lewde libertie," were still stigmatized as barbarians...

...It was for English readers that these novelists, with the exception of William Carleton in his early tales, sought to unravel the incendiary mystery that was Ireland...

...And small wonder...

...It was the measure of Griffin's art that, in handling the more intractable aspects of violence, he made his sublest psychological approach by way of symbolism...

...Her histrionic first novel, The Wild Irish Girl, not only brought her coveted social success but made her a spokesman of early 19th century nationalism...

...Yet too often he failed to lift his murderous White Boys and their gallows humor above the level of penny-dreadful luridness...

...He was born into the world of the cabins, the lost, splendid, terrible world of the Celtic peasantry...

...That mystique was to stand young Ireland and the independence movement in good stead...

...These Gaelic-speaking Irish, brutalized over the centuries by campaigns of extermination and programs of attrition, by religious persecution, mass eviction and starvation, made it a point of honor to operate outside the hated law with their own fierce retaliatory justice...

...In chronicling the civilization of his native Munster, he was portraying his people—the gentlemen smugglers, the busy rope-makers, the horsetraders and the hedge schoolmasters for whom the Greek and Latin classics were living things...

...It is hard so see how a sounder or more exciting book could be written about these novelists or, indeed, about the Ireland of their time...

...But beneath the country's envenomed factionalism, tangled loyalties and agrarian terrorism, both helot and master were changing...

...From her sentimental rhetoric blossomed a mystique of patriotism that complemented the racial obsession with history...

...In the course of his picaresque career the author of Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry was a priest (though a "spoiled priest...

...Though she wrote out of middle-class Protestant origins, her "national tales" evoked sympathy for the hapless Catholic gentry...