In Search of an Audience: Notes on the Progress of Irish Literature, 1891-1941

Abstract

It is a commonplace of Irish history that from 1891, the year of Parnell's death, to 1916, when the Irish Republic first glimpsed the light of day, intense cultural activity supplanted conventional political endeavour. To one participant, at least, such a development was foreseeable: 'A couple of years before the death of Parnell, I had wound up my introduction to ... selections from the Irish novelists with the prophecy of an intellectual movement at the first lull in politics'.1 In the event, something more complex than 'an intellectual movement' emerged. The period saw the rise of a number of different though broadlyspeaking complementary groups which were neither solely made up of intellectuals nor concerned exclusively with intellectual matters. At least as significant in its effect on the nation as the Yeats-inspired Irish Literary Theatre was the Gaelic Athletic Association, founded by Michael Cusack with the aim of stimulating public interest in native Irish games. Arthur Griffith's political and economic reformulation of the Home Rule concept, embodied in the name of the organization which propagated it, Sinn Fein ('Ourselves'), projected a view of the future closely related to that implied by the initially apolitical Gaelic League, the Irish language promotion society, founded by Yeats's friend, Douglas Hyde. In turn, as it were, Hyde's celebrated address, 'The Necessity for de-Anglicising Ireland'2 found many an echo in the less polished but, if anything, more fervent apologetics of freelance propagandists and ideologues, the most prominent of whom, D. P. Moran, was working out his own philosophy of 'Irish Ireland' in his paper, The Leader. The scope, diversity, and organizational flair of these agencies gave Irish cultural life a more complex and energetic character than it had previously possessed, as the following sketch suggests: This was 1900. In Dublin these were the great days of the Gaelic League, of innumerable little clubs and societies, of diverse mo[ve]ments, aimed at the establishment of a new national order.... Dublin bristled with little national movements of every conceivable kind: cultural, artistic, literary, theatrical, political. I