We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of ancient idealism.
(Prospectus for the Irish Literary Theatre drafted by Lady Gregory, 1897; page 188)

This is a much more substantial work than O’Connor’s 1975 history of the Easter Rising. That was a slender pocket-sized 180 pages, this is a bigger format 416-page book complete with hefty index, 17-page bibliography and all. But like the earlier book, it’s still very much a personal account, and based on biography and anecdote rather than more scholarly history.

O’Connor (1928 to 2019) wrote a lot but he was neither a professional historian nor literary critic. He was more an erudite and impassioned amateur. And so this isn’t a scholarly or historically profound account, more an attempt, in his own words, ‘to convey the energy and elation of an era on Europe’s last island, perhaps the last in a series of renaissances which flourished in different countries since the Italian one in the fourteenth century’.

As with the earlier book, O’Connor is not shy about describing his own connections with the various settings and people involved, which makes for sweet anecdotes which, however, tend to bring out its rather home-made feel.

I was led to believe it’s a group biography of the key figures of the Celtic renaissance but, as you can see from my summary (below), it’s more like an interlocking series of biographies of all the Irish writers of the time, plus a fair few political figures.

One by one O’Connor introduces them to us and gives pen portraits. (I double checked I was using this phrase correctly. A pen portrait is ‘a brief, vivid and written description of a person, providing a “snapshot” of their character, lifestyle, and key traits, rather than just objective data’, which seems accurate enough.)

First of all we’re introduced to the key figures in chronological order and then, as they begin to work together, write for each other’s magazines or theatres, introduce each other to new ideas etc, the stories overlap and intertwine to build up a mosaic portrait of a major literary movement. At key moments when the central players, Griffiths, Yeats, Lady Gregory, AE, Edward Martyn, see their vision for a mature national Irish literature come to fruition, it can be very moving. And the figure of George Moore, the mocking dandy novelist, weaves in and out of the story like Puck, helping, mocking and memoiring.

The key players are:

Standish O’Grady (1846 to 1928)

Son of a Church of Ireland minister, O’Grady retained his aristocratic Unionist beliefs till the end of his life, but he played a pivotal role in the Celtic Renaissance by researching, writing, publishing and publicising the ancient legends of Ireland. His academic works – ‘History of Ireland: Heroic Period’ (1878–81) and ‘Early Bardic Literature of Ireland’ (1879) – didn’t sell so he realised he needed to dramatise them and romanticise Irish legends in a series of historical novels including ‘Finn and his Companions’ (1891), ‘The Coming of Cuculain’ (1894), ‘The Chain of Gold’ (1895), ‘Ulrick the Ready’ (1896) and ‘The Flight of the Eagle’ (1897). His insistence that the ancient Irish legends ranked with the tales of Homer inspired Yeats and others, leading to the title ‘Father of the Celtic Revival’. A lot later Yeats wrote: ‘whatever is Irish in me he kindled to life’ (p.25).

Douglas Hyde (1860 to 1949)

Son of a Church of Ireland rector, Hyde was home schooled among gillies and labourers, where he heard Gaelic spoken and started to study it. He began transcribing folk songs and discovered the people of Connacht remembered courtly songs and poems, which he translated and published. It was his poems published between 1890 and 1894 that inspired Yeats and Lady Gregory to realise the folk culture could be the basis for a national revival.

Around 1880 Hyde joined the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language. Between 1879 and 1884 he published more than a hundred pieces of Irish verse under the pen name An Craoibhín Aoibhinn.

In 1886 Hyde met and became close friends with W.B. Yeats (then 21). They often met and discussed each other’s poetry.

In 1892 Hyde helped establish the Gaelic Journal, and wrote a manifesto called ‘The necessity for de-anglicising the Irish nation’ arguing that Ireland should follow its own traditions in language, literature, and dress. O’Connor sees it as a pivotal moment (p.165) because it led to…

In 1893 he helped found Conradh na Gaeilge (the Gaelic League) to encourage the preservation of Irish culture, music, dance and language. Ten years later there were 600 branches with a membership of 50,000. The next generation of Irish republicans (including Pádraig Pearse, Éamon de Valera, Michael Collins) became politicised through their involvement in Conradh na Gaeilge.

In the same year he published ‘Love Songs of Connacht’. The book had Gaelic poems on one page and prose and verse translations on the other. O’Connor thinks it ‘set the style of the literary renaissance’ (p.170).

Charles Stewart Parnell (1846 to 1891)

1875: Charles Stewart Parnell elected MP for Meath. O’Connor thinks the crucial fact of his life was that his other was American, from a family of heroes who fought against the British. By 1880 Parnell had succeeded Isaac Butt as leader of the Irish Party. In 1888 he was vindicated by an enquiry into his role in the Phoenix Park Murders (which Skin-the-Goat in James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ was meant to be the getaway driver for). Here and in his Easter Rising book, O’Connor thinks Parnell’s achievement was to bring together land reformers, constitutionalists and physical force advocates into one party to win the electoral success which gave them 70 or so seats in the London House of Commons and so made them the decisive force in British politics during the 1880s.

Parnell generated an energy which fuelled the elation unleashed in the national being.

Parnell had been having an affair with Katherine ‘Kitty’ O’Shea, a married woman, lived with her and fathered two children by her, when her husband, Captain O’Shea, brought a divorce suit against her, citing Parnell as co-respondent. The case came to court in November 1890 causing a scandal. The Catholic hierarchy turned against him, Gladstone was forced to criticise him. His closest associates in his own party deserted him to form the Irish National federation. The alliance of nationalist forces he had carefully assembled fragmented, and Irish nationalism was set back by a generation.

The following year he died of tuberculosis in Hove, aged just 45. His body was brought back to Dublin and given the biggest funeral procession ever seen. Yeats wrote several poems about it. So did the 9-year-old James Joyce, who went on to dramatise the bitterness surrounding his fall in the famous Christmas dinner scene in ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’.

O’Connor thinks Parnell united the Anglo-Irish and the Gaelic Irish into the new identity of the nationalist Irish. (O’Connor nowhere really tackles the more obvious divide between Protestant and Catholic.)

Yeats believed part of the inspiration for the Irish Literary Renaissance was that the people’s creative energies were turned away from politics by Parnell’s fall and sought alternative outlets: folk stories, pagan religion, poetry and drama.

Lady Gregory (1852 to 1932)

Isabelle Augusta Persse, Lady Gregory was the 14th of 18 children! From a Protestant low church background but had a Catholic nanny who told her rebel stories. Met and married Sir William Gregory, recently retired as governor of Ceylon, 62 to her 28. Engaged in political campaigns. Affair with Wilfrid Blunt, the explorer, adventurer, poet and anti-imperialist. Jailed for chairing an anti-eviction meeting in Galway. Husband Sir William died in 1892 aged 74, leaving Augusta aged 40, mistress of Coole Park. She needed income so set about writing, and turning the Park into a venue for Irish nationalist writers. Her momentous meeting with 31 year-old Years was in 1896.

Agreed to create an Irish Literary Theatre for him, to be funded by Edward Martyn.

Studied Gaelic and collected folktales in west of Ireland, heading towards ‘Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland’, published in 1920 with notes and two essays by W.B. Yeats.

Memorably wrote: ‘I defy anyone to study Irish history without getting a dislike and distrust of England’ (p.201).

By the later 1890s Coole Park was recognised as a meeting place for writers, with Yeats often there, and AE, Douglas Hyde, Martin. George Bernard Shaw visited and John Masefield. When she heard Irish literature being condemned by Trinity College academics it inspired her to devote two years to retelling the stories from O’Grady’s History of Ireland but in her own style which she had developed over years of translating. The result was ‘Cuchulainn of Muirthemne: The Story Of The Men of the Red Branch Of Ulster arranged and put into English by Lady Gregory, with a preface by W. B. Yeats’, published in 1902. The book is a centrepiece of the literary renaissance. It was well reviewed, and Yeats later used stories in it as the basis for no fewer than five plays, and Synge based his last play, Deirdre, on it.

George Moore (1852 to 1933)

Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist. Moore came from a landed family of Catholics who lived at Moore Hall in Carra, County Mayo. The estate had 12,000 acres and his father had not only a stables but a full scale racecourse built on the model of Aintree racecourse in Liverpool.

Moore’s father wanted him to go into the Army but young George wanted to be a painter and so went to Paris in 1873 to study art. There, he befriended many of the leading French artists such as Manet (who painted his portrait) and Degas, and writers such as Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and Mallarmé. Failing as a painter he had a go at poetry but was bad at that, too. At which point he commenced writing prose fiction which turned out to be his metier. He wrote in the naturalist style pioneered by Émile Zola. According to Richard Ellmann, his writings influenced the early James Joyce.

In 1880 he heard his estate was in trouble and so returned. The 1879 harvest had been as bad as the potato famine years and tenants were refusing to pay rents. Moore toured the estate and was shocked at their abject poverty. Having sorted out new, lower rents in order to maintain the estate, he moved to London and started writing at a prodigious rate:

• A Modern Lover, 1883
• A Mummer’s Wife, 1885 – Kate Ede, bored housewife in the Potteries, runs away to join a troupe of travelling actors
• A Drama in Muslin, 1886 – satire on the annual season at Dublin Castle
• A Mere Accident, 1887
• Parnell and His Island, 1887 – factual often scathing essays and portraits
• Confessions of a Young Man, 1888
• Modern Painting, 1893 – factual book introducing the French Impressionists
• Esther Waters, 1894 – portrait of a serving girl
• Celibates, 1895 – three characters explore love, sex and social conventions
• Evelyn Innes, 1898

He had a love-hate relationship with his country, writing in the factual book ‘Parnell and His People‘ that Ireland was ‘a primitive country and barbarous people’, and:

Ireland is a bog, and the aborigines are a degenerate race — short, squat little men — with low foreheads and wide jaws.

Fifteen years later he would write about the British Empire and its administrators in much the same terms. O’Connor quotes Martyn saying Moore observed himself, his actions and beliefs with the detached attitude of a scientist.

Edward Martyn (1859 to 1923)

Another landlord of a large estate and urban property except that Martyn’s family was Catholic. He was cousin and boyhood friend with George Moore: George the sensualist and Edward the ascetic. They visited Bayreuth together.

Tulira Castle Martyn was eccentric. He comprehensively renovated the family property, the Gothic Tulira Castle, but chose to live in a spartan bedroom. He was a connoisseur of church music. Tulira was and is only 4 or so miles from Coole Park, home of Lady Gregory.

Music He was a fine musician in his own right, giving memorable performances for guests on an organ he had installed at Tullira.

Cultural sponsor Martyn used his wealth to benefit Irish culture. His activities and sponsorships included:

• 1897: co-founder and endowing of the Feis Ceoil
• 1903: foundation of the Palestrina Choir (the resident choir at the St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral, Dublin)
• funding and direction of St. Brendan’s Cathedral, Loughrea
• president of Na hAisteoirí, the Irish-language drama group
• sponsored and guided An Túr Gloine, Ireland’s first stained-glass workshop
• sponsored the Irish Theatre

Martyn was reportedly pivotal in introducing William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory to each other in 1896. The three founded the Irish Literary Theatre, for whom Martyn wrote his best and most popular plays ‘The Heather Field’ and ‘A Tale of a Town’. He covered the costs of the company’s first three seasons, which proved crucial to establishing the company and the future of the Abbey Theatre.

Irish republicanism He became involved with the political work of Maud Gonne and Arthur Griffith. He was a vocal opponent of the visit of Queen Victoria to Ireland in 1897 and of Edward VII in 1903, this time as chairman of the People’s Protection Committee.

He became close friends with Griffith and funded the publication of his tract ‘The Resurrection of Hungary in 1904’ which publicised Griffith’s abstentionist strategy i.e. non-cooperation with every aspect of the British administration.

From 1905 to 1908 he was the first president of Sinn Féin (the party only taking that name in the latter year). In 1908, he resigned from the party and politics in general to concentrate on writing and his other activities.

He was on close personal terms with Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Mary Plunkett and Patrick Pearse and mourned their executions in the aftermath of the Easter Rising. A parish hall and church that he founded at Labane, near Tullira, were burned by the Black and Tans. In ‘A Terrible Beauty’ O’Connor quotes the letter Yeats wrote to the Times protesting this.

John Butler Yeats (1839 to 1922)

From an Anglo-Irish = Protestant family, he studied at Trinity College, briefly pursued the law before switching to painting. He became a prolific portrait painter but was not a good businessman, so he and his family were always hard up and regularly moved. ‘In a material sense he had been a hopeless parent’ (p.110).

In 1863 he married Susan Pollexfen (1841 to 1900) daughter of a Sligo merchant and shipowner. She was dismayed when he abandoned the law. They had six children: three sons and three daughters, the oldest son being the Nobel Prize winning poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats. The two daughters most mentioned are Lily and Elizabeth, known as Lolly. Apparently, Susan went slowly mad.

Surprisingly, in 1907 at the age of 68, he travelled to New York aboard the RMS Campania with his daughter Lily and never returned to Ireland, dying in a boarding house in New York.

William Butler (W.B.) Yeats

J.B. was an atheist materialist, a follower of Comte and Darwin. His son, Willie, reacted against this into his Celtic Dawn love of fairies and spiritualism, describing himself as ‘a voice of the revolt of the soul against the intellect’ (p.150). In reaction against his Victorian materialist father, from his teenage years onwards Yeats subscribed to every spiritualist fad available, setting up the Hermetic Society with a friend, meeting Madame Blavatsky and getting into Theosophy, studying ancient Indian texts etc.

In the 1880s father John moved the family to London, to Bedford Park, introducing young Willie to Oscar Wilde among others. One day in June 1889, Maud Gonne turned up on their doorstep. She was already a legend and said to be the most beautiful women in Europe.

Yeats joined the Order of the Golden Dawn led by Mcgregor Mathers. He took to Rosicrucianism as an ideal synthesis of Christianity and paganism. In 1889 he had published his first book of poems, ‘The Wanderings of Oisin and other poems’, supported by the Fenian John O’Leary.

• W.B. Yeats bibliography

In 1890 Yeats along with Welsh poet Ernest Rhys founded The Rhymers’ Club which met at the London pub ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese’ in Fleet Street.

• The Rhymers Club

Later Yeats and others glamorised members of the club as the ‘doomed generation’ because so many died of poverty, alcoholism or disease. Hmm. This is a typical example of literary types’ self-mythologisation. Compare the peace and plenty they enjoyed with the experience of the generation who reached manhood as the First World War broke out; who were the real doomed generation?

The most notable of the Rhymesters was Arthur Symons who wrote an excellent book ‘The Symbolist Movement in Literature’; read to Yeats from French and Latin poetry; and gave Yeats introductions to key literary figures in Paris (Verlaine, d’Adam) when he went to visit the French capital.

1894 production of his first play, ‘The Land of Heart’s Desire’ in London. In it a young woman about to be married is lured into the otherworld by a fairy. George Moore attended and was put off Yeats by his posing in a big black cloak and walking up and down the back of the dress circle wearing a ridiculous sombrero. He had a pathological dislike of Ibsen and issue-led theatre, thus profoundly disliked Shaw’s plays.

Hard up, in autumn 1894 Yeats went to stay out in Sligo with his uncle George Pollexfen. Although a successful merchant, George was also into mysticism and a member of the Hermetic Dawn. He was single, living alone apart from a serving girl he was convinced had second sight.

In 1896 Yeats, aged 30, moved to rented rooms at 18 Woburn Buildings in London where he would live for the next 15 years.

In August the same year, Edward Martyn invited Yeats and Arthur Symons to visit him at Tulira. The visitors asked if they could take a boat to the Isles of Aran, the most remote and unspoiled part of Ireland, which they did for five days. During the visit Lady Gregory invited them to nearby Coole Park. This was the decisive visit which began their collaboration. Amusingly, Symons witnessed their conversation and instantly realised that she would seduce Yeats away from lyric poetry. He ever afterwards referred to her as ‘the witch’ (p.182).

In 1897 Yeats went for another stay with Martyn. While Martyn was elsewhere Yeats was left with Lady Gregory, lamenting that there was nowhere for him to get his plays produced in a Dublin dominated by plays and entertainments imported from England. Within an hour she had mapped out a scheme to set up an Irish national theatre. She would call on her connections via her dead husband with establishment figures and ask them all to cough up £25 for three years to fund the thing. When Martyn rejoined them and heard the plan, he immediately signed up.

In 1898 Yeats, exhausted by his unrequited love for Gonne, came back to Coole. Lady Gregory let him rest in bed, created a daily timetable, had his food sent up, let him walk through the grounds and round the lake where he got to know the wild swans. For the next 20 years she was to be his rock and support until he married in 1917, and she had a hand in arranging that.

George Russell (A.E.) (1867 to 1935)

Met Yeats at art school. The Russell and Yeats families lived near each other. Professional seer of visions which he depicted in his drawings, sacred mountains, druids, the Hindu and Irish gods were related. He did a painting of a divine being and, wondering what to call it, heard the word ‘aeon’ being whispered to him, a few weeks later opening a book about the Gnostics and discovering ‘aeon’ was the name they gave to the first order of beings created by the Divine Mind. From that moment till his dying day he signed his works AE and the brand stuck. He used to go to the esplanade at Bray and hold forth to passersby about the glories of the ancient religion of mankind. Standish O’Grady heard him and was impressed.

In the late 1880s he gave up painting and got a job as a draper’s assistant during the day, so as to be free to practice mystical mind exercises at night.

Despite all this he had a practical side: at Yeats’s suggestion, Horace Plunkett appointed Russell assistant secretary of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS), an agricultural co-operative society Plunkett founded in 1894. He was responsible for developing the credit societies and establishing Co-operative Banks in the south and west of the country.

From 1905 to 1923 he was editor of the influential Irish Homestead, the journal of the IAOS.

O’Connor quotes a good thing A.E. said to a Catholic friend who was twitting him about his mystical beliefs: ‘Like all Irish Catholics you are an atheist at heart’ (quoted page 157).

Sir William Wilde (1815 to 1876)

From a Protestant family, Wilde was an ophthalmologic surgeon and the author of significant works on medicine, archaeology and folklore, particularly concerning his native Ireland. Also, the father of Oscar Wilde.

Wilde was a founder member of the Irish nationalist Home Government Association, established by his Trinity College Dublin colleague Isaac Butt as the precursor to the Irish Parliamentary Party.

In 1851 Wilde married the poet Jane Francesca Agnes Elgee, who wrote and published under the name of Speranza. The couple had two sons, William (Willie) and Oscar, and a daughter, Isola Francesca, who died in childhood.

He was knighted in 1864, mostly for his help conducting a census in Ireland.

Wilde was promiscuous (‘Sir William had a name as a lecher’, p.101). He fathered three children by two women before he married Jane. In 1864 his reputation was damaged by the Travers libel trial. There’s a good summary in the Irish Times:

• The other Wilde trial: the Mary Travers libel case

Wilde is important for O’Connor because he a) spoke Irish like a native and b) collected folklore from his estate in the west of Ireland.

Jane Francesca Agnes Elgee Wilde (Speranza) (1821 to 1896)

From a prosperous Protestant family in Dublin. The plaque on the grave of her husband describes her as ‘Speranza of The Nation, writer, translator, poet and nationalist, author of works on Irish folklore, early advocate of equality for women, and founder of a leading literary salon’.

Speranza As a young woman in the 1840s, Elgee wrote for the Young Ireland movement, publishing patriotic ballads in The Nation under the pseudonym of Speranza, calling for Irish independence and anti-British. Charles Gavan Duffy was the editor when ‘Speranza’ wrote commentary calling for armed revolution in Ireland as a result of which the authorities at Dublin Castle shut down the paper and brought Charles Duffy to court but he refused to name the person who had written the offending article.

Marriage In 1851 Elgee married the successful society doctor and ophthalmologist, William Wilde, thus becoming Jane Wilde. When he was knighted in 1864, she became Lady Wilde.

Folklore When Wilde died in 1876, the family discovered that he was virtually bankrupt. Lady Wilde joined her sons in London in 1879, living with Willie in poverty, supplementing their meagre income by writing for fashionable magazines. She wrote several books based on the research of her late husband into Irish folklore, notably ‘Ancient legends, mystic charms, and superstitions of Ireland’ (1887). O’Connor thinks it ‘contains some of the most beautiful folk tales in existence’ (p.100), although he tells us that the expert, Douglas Hyde, was sceptical about them, given that Jane didn’t actually speak Gaelic. Yeats on the other hand thought they were so good he didn’t care if Lady Jane had embellished them or not (p.115). There’s an obvious study to be done comparing Jane’s folk stories and her son Oscar’s fairy stories…

Feminist Jane was an early advocate of women’s rights, and campaigned for better education for women. She invited the suffragist Millicent Fawcett to her home to speak on female liberty. She praised the passing of the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, which prevented a woman from having to enter marriage ‘as a bond slave, disenfranchised of all rights over her fortune’.

Oscar Wilde (1854 to 1900)

Yeats’s father moved the family to London and introduced young Willie to Oscar, who he knew through his parents. Wilde was ten years older than Willie and tried to help the young poet. Willie was impressed by Oscar’s attempt to make every aspect of his life beautiful but he deprecated the older man’s sloth. O’Connor points out that when Oscar toured the USA for almost the whole of 1882, he was feted among Irish audiences as much for being the son of the nationalist Speranza as for being a London aesthete. George Bernard Shaw, 2 years older than Oscar, thought him ‘a very Irish Irishman’.

• Oscar Wilde reviews

John O’Leary (1830 to 1907)

An Irish separatist and a leading Fenian. He studied both law and medicine but did not take a degree. For his involvement in the Irish Republican Brotherhood, he was imprisoned for five years in England. He spent time in Paris among other political exiles and developed a strong sense of the importance of having a national culture in order to promote independence. He’s important to this narrative because he got to see W.B. Yeats debate and orate and came to believe he was the national poet Ireland was waiting for.

O’Leary was on the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and inducted Yeats into it. Yeats was to remain involved for the rest of his life. The IRB would regard Yeats as ‘their man’ in the literary movement. Later Yeats would say ‘to him I owe everything I set my hand to’. O’Leary arranged for the publication of Yeats’s first volume, and introduced him to folklorists who supplied the material for his books ‘

Maud Gonne MacBride (1866 to 1953)

Born of an English mother and father in the army, brought up in the barracks, lived with the family in Austria and the south of France, attended the 1886 season at Dublin Castle, attended balls and was presented to the Prince of Wales. But Maud rebelled against her upbringing to become a firebrand Irish nationalist and suffragette.

In 1889 she was introduced to W.B. Yeats who was driven mad with love for her, but she refused to become his lover a) because she was already having an affair with a Frenchman Lucien Millevoye, later b) because she later fell in love with and married (in 1903) the nationalist activist John MacBride (one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, executed by the British in 1916).

William Morris (1834 to 1896)

English textile designer, poet, artist, writer, and socialist activist associated with the British Arts and Crafts movement. In the late 1880s and 90s he was for a while an idol of Yeats’s (‘one of the few men he ever really worshipped’, p.138), who visited him at Kelmscott House and attended meetings of his Socialist League. When Yeats’s collection of essays, ‘the Celtic Twilight’ was published in 1893, the Morris group hailed it as the Irish equivalent of their own pre-Raphaelite movement. What they had in common was a rejection of Victorian pragmatism, mercantilism and science in favour of romantic worlds of faerie. But O’Connor suggests the difference was that the pre-Raphaelites were nostalgic for a vanished English past whereas Yeats was trying to instil the folk culture of Ireland in the here and now.

Eventually they split after Yeats sat through a socialist meeting consisting of attacks on religion before getting to his feet and insisting that only through religion and imagination could the revolution come, before being told to desist and sit down. He never attended another meeting.

George Bernard Shaw (1856 to 1950)

Of Protestant Anglo-Irish descent, Bernard Shaw was a playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His father was an alcoholic corn merchant, but his mother, Lucinda, was a noted opera singer, she sang at the Castle and was congratulated by the Lord Lieutenant. Shaw grew up in a household saturated with classical music which is why he was able to become a music critic when he moved to London in 1876. This was encouraged by the mentorship of George Lee who formed a sort of menage with the Shaw household and organised classical concerts. He was also a Catholic who introduced young George to Irish nationalism.

He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1923). He worshipped Ibsen for confronting the middle classes with truths they’d prefer to ignore.

His first success was Arms and The Man, first staged in 1894. It was funded by Shaw’s lover, Florence Farr and staged alongside Yeats’s first play ‘The Land of Heart’s Desire’. Wilde wrote to congratulate Shaw.

• George Bernard Shaw reviews
• Ibsen reviews

John Millington Synge (1871 to 1909)

Another protestant, from a wealthy Anglo-Irish background, Synge went to Paris to study music. Realising he was not going to become a composer, he met Yeats on a visit to the capital, who advised him to go to the Aran Islands (which Yeats had visited only months before) to learn from the peasants. Two years later, in May 1898, Synge did just that. He made five visits over the next few years. By the end he was fluent in Gaelic. It helped that he was a fine violinist and picked up many airs and tunes which he played for the locals.

(In between these trips he spent five successive summers at Coole Park, collecting stories and folklore, perfecting his Irish, but living in Paris for most of the rest of each year.)

Then he set about writing the half a dozen plays that he is remembered as a key figure of the Irish Literary Revival.

Horace Plunkett (1854 to 1932)

Phenomenally posh, Plunkett was born in Sherborne, Gloucestershire, the third son of Admiral Edward Plunkett, the 16th Baron of Dunsany, of Dunsany Castle, Dunsany, near Dunshaughlin, County Meath, and the Honourable Anne Constance Dutton (daughter of John Dutton, 2nd Baron Sherborne).

Raised in County Meath, Plunkett was Anglo-Irish, raised in the Church of Ireland, educated at Eton College and University College, Oxford.

However, he appears in this story because he went to Wyoming in America to try and cure his incipient tuberculosis, spending ten years there and turning out to have a talent for running ranches at a profit. And when he returned to Ireland, in 1891, he ended up, through a series of initiatives, becoming a pioneer of agricultural cooperatives. In 1894 he set up the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS).

Among many other appointments, he heard about Lady Gregory’s good works in Galway and went down to visit. Here he met Yeats who he initially thought an ass until he heard him address a meeting of local farmers and realised there was more to him than first appeared. Plunkett needed an organiser to tour the west of Ireland. Yeats recommended his friend AE who had developed practical experience working for his draper’s company. After years on the road, in 1901 he became editor of the co-op’s magazine, The Irish Homestead.

Irish Literary Theatre

The first plays staged in the theatre’s first season, in 1899, were:

1. Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen, first published in 1892: is set during a famine in Ireland, where the noblewoman Countess Cathleen sells her soul to demons to save the starving peasantry.
2. Edward Martyn’s The Heather Field: Carden Tyrrell, a visionary landowner, becomes obsessed with reclaiming a barren, heather-covered field and transforming it into fertile pasture, mortgaging his estate and ignoring his family’s needs, causing conflict with his practical wife, Grace; as the project fails, Tyrrell withdraws into madness.

O’Connor gives a humorous account of the runup to the productions, which Yeats got George Moore to help with, and he was a tyrant who enraged everyone, writing a letter to Martyn so offensive that the latter threatened to withdraw his play.

The famous thing is that the Catholic hierarchy and traditional nationalists got wind of the plot and decided it was a libel on Irish peasantry and Irish womanhood etc. A claque of students attended the first night to yell abuse and boo, but they were combated with cheers. George Moore had played a vital role in securing appropriate actors and directing them. He now sent London critics over to Dublin who loved it. So he had a big hand in launching the theatre.

A celebration dinner was held for all involved at the Shelborne Hotel. Moore described it in his Autobiography:

Yeats rose, and a beautiful commanding figure he seemed at the end of the table, pale and in profile, with long nervous hands and a voice resonant and clear as a silver trumpet. He drew himself up and spoke against Trinity College, saying that it had always taught the ideas of the stranger, and the songs of the stranger, and the literature of the stranger, and that was why Ireland had never listened and Trinity College had been a sterile influence. The influences that had moved Ireland deeply were the old influences that had come down from generation to generation, handed on by the story-tellers that collected in the evenings round the fire, creating for learned and unlearned a communion of heroes.

The second season was staged in 1900 at the Gaiety Theatre and featured two plays by Edward Martyn – Maeve, The Tale of a Town – and The Last of the Fianna by Alice Milligan. The mere fact that these were successfully staged at the 1,200 seat Gaiety and not the 500-seat Antient Common Rooms, showed how the theatre was becoming a commercial as well as cultural success.

Arthur Griffith (1871 to 1922)

Griffith was a key but complicated figure. He was an Irish writer, newspaper editor and politician who founded the political party Sinn Féin. He led the Irish delegation at the negotiations that produced the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, and served as the president of Dáil Éireann from January 1922 until his death that August.

But back in the period O’Connor is covering Griffith is important because he articulated an entirely new strategy for achieving independence. Parnell thought he could do it in the English Parliament; physical force revolutionaries thought they could do it through targeted assassinations and taking on the British Army of occupation. Griffith suggested a third way which was for the Irish to retire entirely from British politics – the policy of ‘abstentionism’ – and instead set up their own administration entirely separate from the British: for the MPs elected in the (British defined) constituencies to not only not go to London, but to set up their own Parliament (the Dail), giving everything Irish Gaelic names, to create their own laws, their own budget, their own courts and system of justice, to create a parallel and independently Irish administration at all levels. Hence the name of his organisation, Sinn Fein which means ‘ourselves alone’.

This was a compelling new idea which caught everyone’s imagination (it’s even mentioned several times in James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’).

Yeats’s anti-Britishness

1898 – elected president of the committee to celebrate the centenary of the 1798 uprising.

1899 – October, second Boer War broke out and Yeats, Gonne and Martyn became members of the Transvaal Committee protesting Britain’s treatment of the Boers.

1900 – April, the same group plus others formed a committee to protest a planned visit of Queen Victoria to Dublin. (The old queen was 81). (Here as in his Easter rising book, O’Connor tells us that Maud Gonne’s future husband, John Macbride, was in South Africa leading a brigade of Boers against the British.)

O’Connor quotes a letter by Yeats to the Daily Express on 3 April 1900 which gives you a real feeling of his anti-British republicanism. Speaking of Victoria, he writes:

She is the official head and symbol of an empire that is robbing the South African republics of their liberty, as it robbed Ireland of hers. Whoever stands by the roadway cheering for Queen Victoria cheers for that empire, dishonours Ireland, and condones a crime. But whoever goes tomorrow night to the meeting of the people and protests within the law against the welcome of that Unionists and time-servers will have given this English Queen, honours Ireland and condemns a crime.

Moore moves back to Dublin

The Boer War prompted George Moore to revise his opinions of England and Ireland. He began to hate the former and romanticise the latter, forgetting all about his amusingly insulting opinions of 15 years earlier. Strikingly, he is quoted saying he has come to hate the English language and wants to flee the English country and English people (p.282).

He moved back to Dublin in 1901. He’s in this account a) because he was an important novelist in his own right but b) because of his close relationship with the founders of the Literary Theatre, which extended, as O’Connor shows, to a major rewrite of one of Edward Martyn’s plays, which infuriated his old friend. It must be said, his droll insouciance and wit make him one of the most attractive characters in the book. O’Connor devotes quite a few pages to just comic anecdotes from his own autobiography and other people’s reminiscences.

O’Connor gives a comic account of Moore and Yeats struggling to collaborate on a play based on the legend of Diarmuid and Grania, Moore’s attitude is priceless. He was then chosen to direct a production of Douglas Hyde’s play ‘The Twisting of the Rope’ but resigns after 3 weeks. Hyde himself played the lead role of Hanrahan the poet and turned out to be sprightly and antic onstage, completely the opposite of his sober, scholarly everyday persona. The two plays were performed in October 1901. Grania wasn’t a success whereas ‘The Twisting of the Rope’ was the first play to be performed in Irish and was joyously received by nationalists. The audience sang patriotic songs. The audience mobbed Yeats at the stage door. In the audience was John Millington Synge, who saw the language and imagery he had been collecting on the Aran Isles come to life onstage. Within a few months he’d written his first play and within a year the first of his five masterpieces.

Joyce

Joyce loathed these productions and wrote a savage indictment of their success titled ‘The Day of the Rabblement’. He thought Yeats and Co were catering to the low, debased tastes of the Irish people by sinking themselves deeper into the mire of illiterate peasant superstition, whereas Joyce wanted to join and become a star in the great European tradition. Which is why he had to leave Ireland altogether.

Joyce walked across Dublin one night to AE’s house and waited till the established writer returned at midnight. They talked till 4 in the morning. Easy-going AE was impressed and wrote to Lady Gregory warning him about this ‘spectre of fastidiousness’ (p.296). When Joyce left Ireland for Paris in 1904, Lady Gregory gave him money.

The Fays and the Abbey Theatre

The origins of the famous Abbey Theatre in the work of two brothers, William and Frank Fay. In the 1890s, William had worked with a touring company in Ireland, Scotland and Wales while Frank was heavily involved in amateur dramatics in Dublin. After William returned, the brothers began to stage productions in halls around the city. O’Connor gives his usual pen portrait and explains how Frank asked AE permission to use a play which he, AE, had written solely for literary interest, ‘Deirdre’. Discovering it wouldn’t fill a whole evening they approached Yeats for a short filler and he gave them ‘Cathleen Ni Houlihan’ and suggested Maud Gonne play the lead role. Amazingly, she agreed. The brothers hired the cramped St Theresa’s Hall on Clarendon Street for the production. Opening night was 2 April 1902. Deirdre was well received but the Yeats play is about the allegorical figure of Ireland depicted as a long-suffering old crone, who is transformed into a beautiful queen by the sacrifice of a young man. There were cheers throughout and, at the end, a standing ovation. Partisans like Arthur Griffith saw it as the start of a national revival. I’ll now quote from Wikipedia because the events surrounding the foundation of the Abbey Theatre are a bit convoluted and not fully explained by O’Connor:

Encouraged by the St Theresa’s Hall success, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Æ, Martyn, and John Millington Synge founded the Irish National Theatre Society in 1903 with funding from Annie Horniman. Horniman was a middle-class Englishwoman with previous experience in theatre production, having been involved in the presentation of George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man in London in 1894. An acquaintance of Yeats from London circles, including the Order of the Golden Dawn, she came to Dublin in 1903 to act as Yeats’ unpaid secretary and to make costumes for a production of his play ‘The King’s Threshold’. They were joined by actors and playwrights from Fay’s company.

At first, they staged performances in the Molesworth Hall. When the Mechanics’ Theatre in Lower Abbey Street and an adjacent building in Marlborough Street became available after fire safety authorities closed it, Horniman and William Fay agreed to buy and refit the space to meet the society’s needs.

On 11 May 1904, the Society formally accepted Horniman’s offer of the use of the building. As Horniman did not usually reside in Ireland, the royal letters patent required were granted in the name of Lady Gregory, although paid for by Horniman. The founders appointed William Fay theatre manager, responsible for training the actors in the newly established repertory company. They commissioned Yeats’ brother Jack to paint portraits of all the leading figures in the society for the foyer, and hired Sarah Purser to design stained glass for the same space.

On 27 December 1904, the curtains went up on opening night. The bill consisted of three one-act plays, ‘On Baile’s Strand’ and ‘Cathleen Ní Houlihan’ by Yeats, and ‘Spreading the News’ by Lady Gregory. On the second night, ‘In the Shadow of the Glen’ by Synge replaced the second Yeats play. These two bills alternated over a five-night run.

In addition to providing funding, Horniman’s chief role with the Abbey over the coming years was to organise publicity and bookings for their touring productions in London and provincial England.

‘The Shadow of the Glen’ caused a furor. I have written a separate blog post about it.

Codas

Towards the end of the book, O’Connor deals increasingly briskly with his charges.

Joyce He portrays Joyce leaving for the continent, helped with cash from Lady Gregory, and even Yeats who met him at Euston station, bought him breakfast and helped him catch the boat train to Paris. In O’Connor’s portrait Joyce comes over as fiercely arrogant, angry, bitter and determined. In Paris he met Synge but the two didn’t get on at all. He’d only been there a few months when his father telegraphed him to return to Dublin because his mother was dying. It was then that occurred the famous occasion when Joyce refused to kneel and pray for his mother, letting her die distraught that her son was an atheist, leaving him gnawed with guilt which provides a central thread to ‘Ulysses’, where he grandly renames it ‘agenbite of inwit’. It was on 16 June 1904 that he had a second date with an uninhibited Galway girl who kissed him and touched his willy through his trousers, thus persuading the highly sexed Joyce that she was the girl for him, and indeed they spent the rest of their lives together, and she was the rock which enabled him to write his masterpieces.

Lady Gregory Having been midwife to numerous plays, Lady Gregory now started writing her own. Amazingly, she ended up writing about 100, and many were very popular. Her best works are probably ‘The Rising of the Moon’ and ‘The Workhouse Ward’. It was seeing plays like these on the Abbey Theatre’s first tour of America, which apparently inspired American playwright Eugene O’Neill to write his first plays. In the 1920s, when finances were tight, she persuaded the new Free State government to give the Abbey Theatre a stipend, making it the first state-sponsored theatre in the world.

Climax and aftermath

It turns out that those 1904 productions are the climax of O’Connor’s book. The precursor to the Abbey Theatre had been created and Yeats, Gregory, AE had seen their vision of a native Irish theatre based on native Irish legends and themes come true. From left-field came J.M. Synge whose Aran Island-inspired plays would expand and consolidate the genre.

So instead of continuing to take things forward at the slow incremental pace he’d used up till now, rather surprisingly O’Connor leaps forward to the first night of Sean O’Casey’s ‘The Plough and the Stars’ in 1926. After a vivid description of the protests and catcalling which forced Yeats to call in the police, again, O’Connor relaxes on the final pages of his book and turns into lists. The renaissance was underway and he lists the next generation of playwrights which came through along with a sudden interest in painting, which had until these last few pages only received passing mention in reference to John Yeats. Now there’s a sudden list of Irish painters who flourished in the 00s, 10s and 20s. The outstanding art collector Hugh Lane left his collection to the Dublin Art Gallery. In less than a page he skips over the East Rising and civil war to the creation of the Irish Free State, and then the last 3 or 4 pages concern the afterlives of his central characters.

Edward Martyn broke with the Abbey Theatre founders, founded his own rival theatre, died in 1924.

George Moore argued with everyone in the movement and, in 1912, left Ireland a second time, reverting to his initial contempt for his homeland. He died in 1933. He always felt James Joyce had plagiarised his ‘Confessions of a Young Man’ in his ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, and stole his famous short story ‘The Dead’ from the end of his novel ‘Vain Fortune’. But the pair met in Paris in 1929 when Joyce was eager to conciliate the older man and they got on surprisingly well.

Lady Gregory stopped writing plays in the 1920s, negotiated a government subsidy for the Abbey Theatre in 1925. Her son Robert was killed serving in the air force in 1918. Coole Park had to be sold off, along with its wild swans and the tree she had her famous writers carve their names into. She died in 1932.

W.B. Yeats came to be recognised as one of the greatest poets of the age, receiving the Nobel Prize in 1924. He was made a senator in the new Free State. In 1928 he entered a late flowering period of creativity with ‘The Tower’. He died in the south of France in 1939.

Douglas Hyde was installed as president of Ireland in 1938. He had faded out of public life after refusing to let his Gaelic League get involved in politics. The decision to bring him out of retirement paid homage to his work as a young man in rescuing the Celtic language and its stories.

O’Connor ends with a charming story, of how the following year, when war broke out, coal became scarce, so Hyde opened the coal cellars of the Viceregal Lodge to the population of Dublin. Instead he had turf brought from the countryside so that the grand dinning, ball and state rooms of the palace, which had echoed to the social life of the conqueror for so many years, were now filled with the aromatic smoke betokening authentic Irish peasant life.

Firesides

O’Connor is a romantic, sometimes sentimental author. Peasants are noble. Aristocrats are noble. All his upper class characters are fine riders and excellent shots. He takes a heroic view of Irish patriots. One aspect of this is his fondness for ‘firesides’ as a symbol of authenticity, especially, of course, the firesides of the people and peasants.

[Henry Grattan]’s speech at the inauguration [of the 1782 parliament] would become a hymn of nationalism recited around the firesides of nationalist Ireland in the nineteenth century. (p.15)

Under the name of Speranza [Francesca Elgee] wrote patriotic ballads about the Fenians and English misrule, like ‘The Famine Year’ which was recited around firesides throughout the country. (p.100)

Soon [Synge] had mastered the Irish jigs and reels and slow airs, and he would sit at night near the firelight in the cottages and play his airs for the dancing boys and girls. (p.191)

This [lines from a Yeats poem] could be from the court of Aquitaine; or that its sentiment is a trifle extravagant, the address of a Cavalier. Least of all does one think of it as a poet’s address to his country in one of the traditional names which were used for Ireland in the seventeenth century, and that this was perfectly understood by the people when it was sung for them round their firesides or in the fields. (p.214)

[Of ‘In the Shadow of the Glen’] It was, after all, a daring theme for those days to depict a wife leaving a husband, however aged, for a tramp travelling the roads. The fact that it was based on an Irish folk tale told around the firesides of the west would not make it any more palatable when it would be acted out in front of urban audiences who would lack the Rabelaisian acceptance of farmyard life. (p.333)

The story of how Cuchulain inadvertently kills his own son whom he had had (unknown to him) by a Scottish princess, Aoife, was still told around the country firesides in the west. (p.352)

Documentary

There are many documentaries on the subject. This one is an easy-going complexity-free example, bolstered by extensive interviews with the eminent academic Fintan O’Toole. Most interesting for me was the section about Patrick Pearse’s objections to the movement which he said ought to be ‘strangled at birth’. He thought Yeats and Lady Gregory, Protestants both, were denying the Catholic faith of the peasants they depicted, and Ireland as a whole, in order to promote their own personal vision of a pagan Ireland, the Ireland of the myths and legends they collected and they promoted.

There was also a class aspect, because the revivalists’ plays focused on peasants or aristocrats, itself an ancient binary, with no space for the majority population of working and middle class. In this sense, their vision was utterly unrepresentative of Ireland’s realities. (Just one reason for James Joyce’s complete rejection of their vision and aesthetic, although the movement was, eventually, to be large enough for the working class dramas of Sean O’Casey.)

Credit

‘Celtic Dawn: A Portrait of the Irish Literary Renaissance’ by Ulick O’Connor was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1984.

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