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The Politics of Irish Literature
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Settled down once again in Dublin to wait until his turn would come again, O'Leary looked about him and found that he did not care at all for Parnell's "stalwart lieutenants." The political prosperity of the Bantry band necessarily dismayed him, though unrecorded are his thoughts upon T. D. Sullivan's elevation to lord mayor of Dublin, that honored post which would in due time make him eligible for coded listing in Finnegans Wake. Nor did he take a reading of Healy's personal horoscope. His general objections to "a certain sort of people going into parliament" cited Thomas Sexton as his bad examples Willy O'Brien and John Dillon he thought a pair of clowns. O'Brien's nine trips to jail did not seem to him much of a martyrdom. He was appalled that the Irish parliamentary party had scrapped the Fenians' principle of no priests in politics and surrendered the ancient nonsectarian redoubt. The Union of Hearts O'Leary particularly condemned. He had once warned Parnell that Irish members could not long resist the corruption of Westminster, and now he thought he saw their corruption manifest. Irishmen had no cause to love the Gladstone of the Hawarden kite, he said; it was the same Gladstone who had sent Parnell to jail. English generosity was merely a healthy respect for Irish force. "If Mr. Gladstone, for his own ends, choose to come a certain way in our direction, well and good. But that is quite his concern."s The fixed base of Irish political behavior seemed to him as simple and clear and as true for 1886 as it had been for 1865 "We hear constantly of the diminution of disaffection in Ireland, and even of late we have been hearing of the growth of affection, but all that is very idle talk. Disaffected we have been, disaffected we are, and disaffected we shall remain, till the English let go their grip of us." O'Leary's automatic impulse was to start organizing. Lectures delivered at Cork in February 1886 and at Newcastle-on-Tyne in December 1886, one just before and one just after the defeat of the first Home Rule bill, sounded like the Old Fenian editor, as though the twenty years of absence had been merely the time before next Saturday's issue of the Irish People. He set about to resuscitate a dormant network of Young Ireland clubs by recruiting, according to an authoritative witness, from "clerks" and "farmers' sons" in the manner of the old Confederate clubs of 1848. Rowing against the Home Rule tide, he made only modest headway. His reported remark to Yeats that he possessed (and sought) no more than "two or three" disciples suggests an attempt to put the best face on an enterprise not thriving. O'Leary found already in existence a Gaelic Athletic Association, fiercely anticricket and prohurling. Its cantankerous founder was Michael Cusack, known to readers of Joyce as "the citizen" of Ulysses and under his proper name in Stephen Hero and A Portrait. Cusack had made enemies, who then dethroned him, and the association passed under the patronage of Archbishop Croke, a keen sportsman. O'Leary believed that Irish sport needed Fenian guidance more than ecclesiastical sanction. IRB men moved in and took control of the GAA, and O'Leary became one of the editors of the Gael, the organ of revolutionary anticricket athleticism. III Unquestionably, O'Leary's most spectacular national-cultural enterprise was literary. Everybody knows that shortly after he came home from exile, he made the acquaintance of W. B. Yeats, a newborn infant when the convict first entered prison in England; and that the providential conjunction of the two extraordinary minds marks the point of origin of the modern Irish literary movement. As an actor in Irish history in his own right, Yeats now appears in situ in our narrative for the first time since he was hurried out of Sligo in his crib during the Fenian troubles. At the Dublin Cosmopolitan Club, an intellectual-discussion society where, the two first met, O'Leary startled the assembled members (all but the one) with the pronouncement that the young poet, then twenty-one, was the only person in the room "who will ever be reckoned a genius." No other Fenian had that percipience. When genius is up for bid, one cannot be pedantic about inconsequentials, but genius apart, Yeats was not the perfect nationalist recruit. His great-grandfather and grandfather had been Anglican rectors serving "the enemy," the Ascendancy pales in Sligo and Down. His father, a gentle, loquacious bohemian, could discern that the Irish nationalists were not outright lunatics, though his sympathies were aloof and critical. Yeats's mother's family, the Pollexfens of Sligo, were loyalist businessmen, "hucksters" in the common if not in the Yeatsian usage of that term. According to John Butler Yeats, the Pollexfens were not readily distinguishable from ordinary Orangemen in the narrowness of their outlook, an opinion not contradicted in Yeats's memoirs and poems. Yeats was hardly Irish even in the geographical sense. He had been born in Dublin, but the family moved to England when he was two. Except for holidays in Sligo, he had grown up a Londoner. In the early 1880s the Yeatses were back in Dublin again and were living there when the meeting with O'Leary took place, but shortly afterward they left for London once more, this time for good. Irishmen nursed a persistent suspicion that the convert Yeats was not really converted, and that on social and political issues, at least, the rebirth had failed to take. Yeats's Unionist biographer Joseph Hone was puzzled that O'Leary's raid could ever have succeeded at all. "I never quite understood, nor did he ever fully explain, what brought him into the Irish movement," he said, adding that all Dublin Unionists were naturally expected to grouse about the Union and to invent sarcasms at the Englishman's expense, but that actually to associate with "papists" and separatists was carrying criticism too far -- the old syndrome of Grattan's Parliament once more." Yeats himself once said musingly of O'Leary, "I often wonder why he gave me his friendship." If Yeats's Irish bond was somewhat spongy by and large, it made a sturdy knit along the literary branch. When he met O'Leary, his poetic imagination was unattached. The localized English affections he would never find attractive. Decades of physical residence in Chiswick, Bloomsbury, and Oxford, from childhood to old age, were to leave not the slightest trace of English mannerism upon his work. As for English letters, he came on the scene to find them at dead end as the great line of romantic poetry petered out in "the tragic generation" and expired in the eccentricities of Swinburne, Wilde, and Symons. The family's distinguished friend William Morris was searching for a fresh poetic elixir even as far as the mists of Iceland. Yeats at age twenty-one was searching, too, groping to find his path in Clapham orientalism, in imitations of Shelley and Spenser, in an art school. Just then O'Leary appeared. He told him to forget the art school-he was a poet. He gave him armloads of books by Irish authors unknown in London and disdained as subliterature in Edward Dowden's and Sir John Mahaffy's Dublin drawing rooms.* Among O'Leary's Irish writers (besides Mitchel, Davis, and Mangan, whom we have already met) there was Ulster-born William Allingham, latterly a friend of Tennyson's and a colleague of J. A. Froude's on Fraser's Magazine. In Fenian times he had written an authentic Irish classic, a volume of couplets on the agrarian problem in the style of George Crabbe, called Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland.** O'Leary had praised it highly in the Irish People and printed lengthy excerpts to save his impecunious subscribers the purchase price. It was an impressive work, and it is impressive yet, but Yeats had no interest in grievances and passed it by. He studied carefully, though, a number of Allingham's short nostalgic lyrics that, in Yeats's phrase, wedded race to Ballyshannon's "hill and wood"; and he was especially excited when the poet got around to the fairies. Then there were the works of Samuel Ferguson, who died at a venerable age in the same year that Yeats and O'Leary met. Since his youthful exploits on the Dublin University Magazine, where we last saw him, he had settled into a knighthood, a rich marriage, and a government sinecure. Along the way he had written a farce called Father Tom and the Pope, a lampoon against Catholic illiteracy, which he attributed to the priests' sabotage of the national schools on the grounds that "ignorance is the thrue mother of piety." It is the solitary literary masterpiece of Orangeism as such, an honor so ambiguous that he kept his authorship a secret to his dying day. In the year of the monster meetings he had toyed with Davis' nationalism. The residue was an elegy on Davis and a testy farewell to Davis' heirs:
But all the while he remained a poet in after hours, pursuing his old hobby of trying to adapt Irish prosody to English verse. A lifetime of patient work never surpassed a single happy impulse in his twenty-third year:
Many years later George Russell told Austin Clarke that he and Yeats had taken their "twilight hue" and their "vowel music" from these Gaelic "internal assonances" in "The Fairy Thorn," a more convincing explanation than T. S. Eliot's stereotyped attribution to "the pre-Raphaelite mode." Every romantic, Yeats among them, carried an identical emotional set against the new nineteenth-century urban jungle, against William Cobbett's "Great Wen"; and each found cherished affections in primitivism, the obverse of the coin. Out of the variety of experience was engendered a variety of primitivisms. Cobbett himself exalted the Wiltshire yeoman who brewed his own ale; Morris, the medieval handicraftsman; Synge, the endlessly fresh individuality of the Aranman whose world had not yet been fractured by "the division of labor." Ferguson has singled out the Ulster peasant's tenacious piety toward his pre-Christian superstitions. When the fairies and assonances joined in Ferguson's harmonious combination, they overwhelmed Yeats. To London and Dublin he proclaimed his finding: Ferguson was "the greatest poet Ireland has produced," and he seconded O'Leary's judgment that this Belfast Orangeman had served the Irish nation better than the Old Fenian veteran himself. Yeats's youthful discovery of Allingham and Ferguson provided the base for his unique contribution to Irish thought, the proposition that Ireland's purest essence was located in the peasants' primitive belief in holy wells and fairy thorns and in those supernatural "pale windy people" who dwelt with "white lillies among dim shadows, [in] windy twilights over grey sands." His great find possessed substantial virtues. It was militantly antiphilistine. It was courteously anticlerical. It destroyed the old stage Irishman, setting a new one in his place. It was not a fantasy primitivism: the base was "really there," and hence it was almost populist. It was literally inexhaustible, so that when the folklore commission set out after the Treaty to gather up all the riches, it found itself in possession of a billion words more or less, endless iterations of Yeats's Celtic Twilight. Moreover, it actually generated poetry, filling a special and unique little niche in the English literary canon. But it also invited Yeats and more particularly his imitators, his "fleas," to the artistic vice of quaintness. Among the Irish ethnic traits that presented themselves to an observer in 1886, the belief in fairy thorns was undoubtedly one. But to insist that it was the sole trait of importance was bound eventually to outrage good sense, as Yeats himself concluded at last. Ferguson's antiquarianism had also stumbled upon the Irish sagas and had begun to exploit them. One adaptation in an epic called Congal constitutes his major work. Yeats paid it formal deference but complained of its length, always a suspicious criticism, although its fourteen-syllable line (compelling a mental accompaniment to the tune of "The Wearing of the Green") does give a physical sensation of taskwork:
And yet the reader will catch in the internal half-ryhmes a stunt with which Ferguson's young imitator would ornament his fame. In point of fact, Congal is the best example we have of a successful exercise in the mode with which James Macpherson's Ossian failed. Ferguson also wrote several shorter versions of the sagas, including the Deirdre story. Another, called "Conary," a very free Victorianized translation of "The Raid on Da Derga's Hostel," Yeats occasionally nominated, though not convincingly, as the best poem ever produced in Ireland. Ferguson had broken open the main storehouse of the Irish saga, but the choicest exhibit, the hero Cuchullain, the Irish Achilles, he left almost untouched. By right of discovery this priceless claim fell to Standish O'Grady. In 1878 O'Grady had published a prose translation of the Cuchullain myth treated as an objective record in the history of Ireland, his intuition having told him that it could not be other than true. Like his model, the "historian" James Macpherson, he released himself from the "curb of history" and was thus free to "give full expression to the feelings that arose within." A special flamboyance colors O'Grady's epic style. It was not taken from Carlyle now, but from Macpherson spiced with Lang, Leaf, and Myers' familiar unloved translation of the Iliad. While his distressing prose mannerism was later to be ridiculed by James Joyce and Flann O'Brien, there were some (George Russell, for example) who loved it; and his pages delineated the original outline of Yeats's Irish mythology. The sensation of a sudden burst of splendor was common among the Irish writers at this moment in their careers. O'Grady had no hesitation in asserting that his bonanza was "incomparably higher in intrinsic worth than the corresponding ages of Greece." George Moore's metaphor for rediscovered Ireland was "The Untilled Field," and Yeats (momentarily matter of fact) wrote to Katharine Tynan, "I think you will be right to make your ballad Irish, you will be so much more original-one should have a specialty." Latecomers would find difficulty in rekindling the pioneer's mood. Joyce, for example, could see nothing in the old Irish literary tradition worth his time, and he pronounced Lady Gregory's folklore "sorrowful and senile." But in the beginning everything was golden and morningfresh, and Yeats recaptured Davis' emotion when he had cried out under a very different stimulus, "Arigna must be pierced with shafts." Yeats set everybody an example of courage, said Moore. He also set an example of solid and uninterrupted literary accomplishment, starting from the moment when the suddenly released flood of his Irish poems and essays burst into the press in 188'7 (see the bibliographical listing of his first publications in chronological order in Allan Wade, A Bibliography of the Writings of W. B. Yeats [London: R. Hart-Davis, 1951]). "In the presence of his theme," he became overnight not just a poet, but a very good poet. With O'Leary rounding up patrons to pay the printer, he published at age twenty-three The Wanderings of Usheen, the finest sustained apprentice poem to appear in the English language in half a century. IV The Parnell-Gladstone Union of Hearts soon escaped out of its strict political environment to operate as an aesthetic influence. For poets, the moral issue it raised was to be painful and complicated, and no final stability of attitude toward it could ever be found. The greater audience for Irish writers was always to be among Englishmen, less spontaneously poetical than Irishmen but more dutiful in the actual cash purchase of printed pages. It was therefore thought wise not to outrage English feelings, as Yeats's delicacy in withholding "Easter 1916" and The Dreaming of the Bones from publication during wartime showed. But there was very little impulse to flatter English opinion, either; and the stance of the "West Briton" was altogether unthinkable. "She had no right to call him a West Briton before people," said Gabriel Conroy in Joyce's "The Dead." Deference to England carried social stigmata, disaffection being the norm. It also carried occasionally pangs of private guilt. Above all, it was a heavy weight upon the imagination. Anybody with an urge (like Anthony Trollope) to conceive a West Briton novel was quite certain to give birth to an aesthetic cretin, and Yeats was moved more than once to state in public his contempt for all the belles-lettres ever composed in the penumbra of Trinity College loyalism. O'Leary's advice on this quandary of the sensibility was unclear. He insisted that Irishmen should be Irish, like Ferguson's "kindly Irish of the Irish, neither English nor Italian." Still, the noisy Irish pothouse patriot was no less distressing to him than he would later be to Joyce and Yeats "Abuse of England is too often but the mere stock-in-trade of canting agitators, frequently the imperfect utterance of the illiterate." And he proposed the paradox that the Union of Hearts and the "abuse of England" were identities: "Queerly enough, the canting agitator has changed his stock-in-trade since. Now he sings the praise of the Saxon. He is all for the Union of Hearts and full of faith in the English democracy. But'tis only the Englishman who believes him, and in him [the Englishman] is only listening to the echo of his . . . own unwisdom." There was perhaps a valid point here; but if one was not permitted either to praise or to abuse England, one would naturally be puzzled to know just what attitude was allowed. A popular solution to this aesthetic impasse was to be found in Matthew Arnold's essay, "The Study of Celtic Literature" (1867). This work had been published in the year of the Fenian rising, a time when it was not a dissociation of ideas for earnest Englishmen, when thinking of the Irish, to wish "to fairly unite, if possible in one people with them." According to Arnold's ethnology, the Teutonic and the Celtic temperaments are polarities: the one masculine, energetic, and heavy; the other feminine, artistic, and incompetent. The Celt and the Saxon harmonized sweetly when joined together, though in isolation each was a cacophony. The Victorian personality he thought enriched by a partial "commingling" of the two polarities, and he cited the authority of John Morley, a future chief secretary for Ireland, for the opinion that except for "the lively Celtic wit," infused through the Celtic "blood" of the Norman, "Germanic England would not have produced a Shakespeare." But as Arnold saw it, the fusion of the two creative opposites was still incomplete. It seems transparent that Arnold was offering, besides an ethnopoetic theory, topical advice on "the Irish problem." He declared the Union of Great Britain to be a natural organic unity: Saxon cum Celt. The racial mission of any Saxon was to command the practical world of politics and business, encircling the world with "doors that open, windows that shut, locks that turn, razors that shave, coats that wear, watches that go." Yet who could deny it?
The Celt too was indispensable and his racial mission, like that of Evelyn Waugh's Welshman --just to sing. Some critics thought from the start that the ethnicism of Arnold's Celtic essay was nonsense. Their dour scientism did not prevent it from building up an enormous influence. It has always held interest for Irishmen, in part, no doubt, because of the novelty that a distinguished Englishman could find any virtue at all, even of a secondary sort, in the Irish temperament. Irish poets have particularly cherished the essay, for it said in effect that their imagination was the sole thing of importance in Ireland and it commanded English readers to pay it the honor it deserved. Every Irish writer, from Yeats's first beginnings down to Frank O'Connor's valedictory eighty years later, has felt an urge to work within Arnold's categories, though not always toward Arnold's conclusions. The simplest Irish adaptation of Arnold's ethnicism was to take it as it stood. William O'Brien, a partisan of the Union of Hearts, expropriated the idea complete with all its parts. In his novel the good priest explains the theory to an Irish miller: "Do you know, Myles, whenever I look at your fire I never despair of a union between Ireland and England! The coal has the staying power, the body; give me the turf for the poetry, the glow, and the soul of the thing; but the two make a capital blend." Such literal-minded plagiarism from Arnold was rare, though George Russell's peculiar dualistic combination of aether and animal husbandry somewhat resembled it. Yeats's own adaptation of Arnold held fast to his appraisal of the poetics of the Celt, leaving intact all the listed virtues: sentiment, magic, poetry, titanism, melancholy, style, and intensity. He also preserved Arnold's dualism, but he made the two halves discordant instead of complementary. His poetic imagination declared a holy war against a paraphernalia of trigonometry, Newton, economic grievance, George Eliot, "the good citizen," logic, adding-machine religion, social leveling, and the antipoetry of doors that open and windows that shut. At first he gave this cluster of vices no specific ethnic designation. Arnold's complement of Saxon and Celt emerged from Yeats's mind as an antithesis, formulated in the well-known battle standard: "the war of the soul against the intellect." "The soul" was Celtic, just as Arnold had said. But Arnold's creeping Saxon dropped out of the dualism, supplanted in the beginning by faceless abstract international philistines, of no fixed address, but gradually localized as Irishmen who "hated the Playboy," and old "Paudeen of the fumbling wits." V O'Leary could hardly have anticipated that his disciple would honor the injunction against the "canting abuse of England" with such high scrupulousness. One might suppose that the word "England" would be indispensable to speech in a great corpus of verse whose governing theme was modern Ireland. Yet for the first thirty years of his career Yeats succeeded in banning it from his poetry absolutely. During the next twenty years, the word got into the poems once, in "Easter 1916":
It also got into the plays once, in the Dreaming of the Bones, subversively as Yeats thought, in the phrase "English robbers," which he immediately corrected with the chivalrous concession:
So a half-century of his career had passed. Meanwhile the First World War had come and gone, giving him occasion to scold Pearse for being a "pro-German," though one entitled to the benefits of "the truce of the Muses," and to berate Mitchel, normally his favorite, for having "exalted the hatred of England above the love of Ireland." The "gaping harpies" that are "on our rooftree now" he blamed upon Mitchel, the main event taking place as he wrote being the opening battles of the First World War. A few years before he died the tabooed word appeared again in the famous conundrum from "The Man and the Echo"
There was one additional appearance. But otherwise Ireland's colonial condition, the root fact of Irish history, was represented in the verses of Ireland's national poet by an almost total blank. In the last year of his life, Yeats broke this silence with a poem called "The Ghost of Roger Casement," a sarcasm on the Chamberlain family's imperial chickens come home to roost, reinforced with indignation against the willingness of the English government to use the frame-up as an instrument of statecraft if and when necessary:
Sub specie aeternitatis this is piercing satire. But how odd that Yeats should have taken up his theme at that tardy hour after a lifetime of shying away from it. When we turn to Yeats's letters, we find on February 11, 1937, a letter to Ethel Mannin offering a gloss on the poem as follows: "I am an old Fenian and I think the old Fenian in me would rejoice if a Fascist nation or government controlled Spain, because that would weaken the British empire, force England to be civil to Indians, perhaps to set them free and loosen the hand of English finance in the East of which I hear occasionally." I assume that the non sequitur of Yeats's rejoicing for India upon Franco's victory needs no elucidation. Less obvious is the peculiarity of his timing. The elementary message that Davis, Mitchel, Gavan Duffy, and Pearse could not put through to him in half a century of iteration had come instantaneously by way of Joseph Goebbels and Wyndham Lewis -- just when it was no longer apposite to Ireland. The unspoken burden of his song is: Wir fahrengegen Engelland! (We are marching against England!). Sir Roger Casement's function in the poem is to signify that if he could come back to Wilhelmstrasse in 1938 he would find Unity of Being there, not the cynical decadence that greeted him in 1916. One could no doubt search and find Old Fenians who might have said that (though many more probably would not). One difference between them and Yeats was that at least they had been saying it all their lives. The Casement poem is something special and unique. Mostly the Union of Hearts governed Yeats's imagination. He occasionally argued that even Cathleen ni Houlihan was -- if the truth were known-really nonpolitical, a startling contention at variance with his original dedication (quickly dropped) "To the Memory of William Rooney," a proto-Sinn Feiner whose patriotic frenzy made Arthur Griffith's seem tepid. Still, it is true that the word "England" is missing from the play, too, its place filled by "strangers" who had got possession of the Old Woman's "four beautiful green fields," it does not say how. The Irishman of the play is about to be translated into eternity in the passive voice, but no agent is actually going to kill him. The Abbey audience was undoubtedly in on the secret of who the "strangers" might be, but when the play was staged in Stockholm during Yeats's Nobelaward festivities, the point was lost. Not recognizing the "strangers" and never having heard of "Killala" before, the Swedish producer was forced to depart from the Abbey's classic direction for acting the play. Yeats reported that the Swede's alterations were most agreeable to him, since the play was really "symbolic," that is, nonreferential-and as relevant to any random time and place as to Mayo-Sligo in 1798. This was stretching credibility thin, but had O'Leary himself not disapproved of the "canting abuse of England"? There was a price exacted for this accommodation to the Union of Hearts. It cost him a measure of emotional severance from those Irishmen who were incapable of his impartiality. It led him into a mare's nest of historical confusions. It brought him around to a sort of inverted Union of Hearts in which the Celtism of the Celt rather than the Saxonism of the Saxons was blamed for all the trouble, even back to the fall of man. His best-known formulation of the Irishman's human nature says:
Evidently, the original sin of Ireland is unmotivated fanaticism, "mere anarchy." And that being the case, the poet is doomed with the rest, and he proposes to enjoy his sinful tantrums to the full limit, fag an bealach! clear the road! For all that, Yeats's Union of Hearts stratagem had immeasurable pragmatic value unappreciated by those fellow countrymen of his who were always asking him to show them some results. In the nationalist division of labor, he made the most winning of all the Irish ambassadors-at-large. His historical task was not militance at home but diplomacy abroad; and it would be hard to find fault with George Russell's statement on the Abbey's twenty-fifth birthday that "it was our literature more than our political activities which created outside Ireland a true image of our nationality." By breaking through the Englishman's guard and surging in on him with the winsome qualities that Arnold thought the Celt's "special charm and power," Yeats undoubtedly helped to soften the imperial bond. He led hostile Englishmen gently toward the difficult new idea that if Ireland should ever finally succeed in forcing a separation, they need not panic. The infant nation could be expected to flow abundantly with Celtic sentiment, magic, poetry, titanism, melancholy, style, and intensity. For Joyce a Union of Hearts between himself and the "brutish empire" never tempted in any guise. Both A Portrait and Ulysses explicitly state their contempt for the Union of Union of Hearts.*** The sodden Saxon vices depicted in Arnold's essay Joyce endorsed in full, adding his own embellishments, "beer, beef, bibles, bulldogs, battleships, buggery and bishops." All his Englishmen are clowns and scoundrels, barring only Shakespeare and Dr. Newman. The Saxon delegation in Ulysses is particularly rich in comic monsters: Haines, the Oxford dilettante; Orangeman Deasy; the hangman Horace Rumbold of Liverpool; Private Carr and Private Compton; Lieutenant Colonel Tompkins-Maxwell ffrenchmullan Tomlinson of Limehouse; the flagellating Mrs. Mervyn Talboys; and Edward VII, who brings onstage in the "Circe" chapter a bucket with the label defense d'uriner. He dances "slowly, solemnly, rattling his bucket" and sings "with soft contentment"
These fine forays speak of affections that Joyce's fellow countrymen could fully share, for to say of an Irishman that he is Anglophobic is not to communicate anything very astonishing. When Yeats's good offices got Joyce put on the British pension list, it could not be said that his benefactors got any reciprocal value whatever, other than the strictly aesthetical.
"The Politics of Irish Literature" © Copyright 1973 Malcolm Brown * At the same moment that Yeats received O'Leary's Irish books, he found A. P. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism. Irish nationalism and the occult thus came to occupy the center of his life simultaneously. O'Leary railed at the rival, but Yeats held firm. He reasoned that magic was simply another spirituality like Ireland itself. To take a stroll to Soho for an afternoon with a medium was precisely equivalent to a journey into Sligo "to sit at turf fires" and, as time passed, a good deal more convenient. **It stands beside When We Were Boys in Bloom's extraordinary Eccles Street library. *** From Ulysses on the Union of Hearts: "Prove that he [Bloom] had loved rectitude from his earliest youth. . . "In 1885 he had publicly expressed his adherence to the collective and national economic programme advocated by James Fintan Lalor, John Fisher Murray, John Mitchel, J. F. X. O'Brien and others, the agrarian policy of Michael Davitt, the constitutional agitation of Charles Stuart Parnell (M.P. for Cork City), the programme of peace, retrenchment and reform of William Ewart Gladstone (M.P. for Midlothian, N.B.) and, in support of his political convictions, had climbed up into a secure position amid the ramifications of a tree on Northumberland road to see the entrance (2 February 1888) into the capital of a demonstrative torchlight procession of 20,000 torchbearers, divided into 120 trade corporations, bearing 2,000 torches in escort of the marquess of Ripon and John Morley." The last two persons on this list were Gladstone's lieutenants, a category for which Joyce's contempt was boundless. See Ulysses, p. 701; also Joyce, Critical Writings, pp. 197-200 and 209-13 for an extension of remarks on Ripon, Rosebery, and Morley. On Gladstone, see also A Portrait, pp. 249-50.
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