Who Fears to Speak ?

George Bernard Shaw's contention that, for the young Irish writer of his generation, 'London was the literary centre for the English language, and for such artistic culture as the realm of the English language could afford' is particularly relevant in understanding the Irish men of letters that came of age in the wake of the 1798 rebellion. No artist exists in a vacuum and even the cosmopolitanism of a Beckett or a Joyce involves subtle transpositions and rewritings of cultural affiliations and identities. For their early 19th century predecessors the issue was particularly fraught. Their first language, the educative institutions of their country and the greatest part of their prospective audience all drew them into a London-centred literary scene which, more often than not, had not the capacity to appreciate their different, non-English talents. Furthermore, these were the decades before The Nation magazine provided a forum for politically committed nationalist sentiment; before, in other words, there was a 'national' literature in English to write or speak of.

Writers responded to this state of affairs in a number of different ways. William Maginn, a staunch Unionist, found a niche at the centre of London journalism as editor of Fraser's Magazine. Success as an Irish man of letters in England, however, seemed his being fitted to the role of rollicking, goodnatured, dissolute stage-Irishman, a role which eventually led to debt and broken health. Fr. Francis Sylvester Mahony, another Corkman, best known under his pseudonym of 'Fr. Prout' drew on the Continental ties of Roman Catholicism to cultivate a unique idiom and identity, at once deeply conservative, irreverent and rational. Jeremiah Joseph Callanan, a native of my own parish of Ballinhassig is probably the most tragic figure of the era. Inspired by a sense of an ancient Irishness, he strayed between the translation of Gaelic lyrics and the evocation of the past in an idiom that owed much to Byron and Walter Scott. Never entirely at home outside of his nostalgic vision of a bygone rural Ireland, he died of T.B. in Lisbon, trying to board a boat for his beloved Cork. He was only 34.

In this context Thomas Moore (1779-1852) would appear to have most successfully adapted to his Anglo-centric environment. A colonial administrator in the Bermudas for a number of years (although the post was not suited to his temperament) he was proclaimed the National Poet of (British) Ireland, his volumes of Irish Melodies having won almost

universal acclaim. His ability to conform, in fact, has often led to his characterisation as a kind of traitor - Patrick Kavanagh,

among others, seeing in him 'the cowardice of Ireland'. And yet

he was a close friend of Robert Emmet's at Trinity, and a self-

professed patriot. The usual answer to this dilemma is to see in his overt patriotism a covert establismentarianism. Indeed, in those Melodies that deal with nationalist subjects it is difficult not to feel that a sanitisation process is at work, in deference, perhaps, to a British readership (or rather, parlour audience). As a reading of Joyce's 'The Dead' shows, the Melodies were for almost a century, an integral part of the idea of 'Irish gentility', for which nationalism was a matter of myth, endless defeat and regret. The life of Robert Emmet, still resonant at the time of writing of 'Oh Breathe Not His Name', has much the same significance in that lyric as do the exploits of 'Brien the Brave': both are misty, distant and unreal figures, raised to legendary status. By Joyce's day the Irishness which the Melodies had represented was as dead as the figures in Moore's own poem that move like men who live .../ to haunt this spot where all/ those eyes that wept your fall,/ and the hearts that wailed you, like your own, lie dead. The modernist escape from history and the eruption into violence were about to ensue.

But Moore's adoption of, for want of a better phrase, the role of British gentleman of Irish origin with Romantic outlook, allowed him to more directly approach the 'Irish problem'. Moore had, at times, a lot of the eighteenth century satirist about him and he often outraged Tory critics with attacks on government and administration which they considered little less than revolutionary (incidentally, this 'eighteenth century' quality is a common trait of Irish writers of the period, and its acknowledgement is important in understanding their particular character, I feel). Moreover - a fact often passed over in short accounts of his life until recently - he directly criticised British policy in Ireland in two prose works, one dealing directly with the events of '98. In his biography of Edward Fitzgerald and Memoirs of Captain Rock, a fictional account of Whiteboy insurrection told from the perspective of the rebels, he even argued the case for violent action in the face of corrupt government, a move which unnerved his Whig friends and patrons.

Although Thomas Moore might appear to be the least contentious of Irish writers in the early 19th century, a man whom desire for success made a glosser- over and gentrifier of vital issues of nationhood, we find in his work open-eyed and unequivocating confrontations with the meaning of 1798.

Fergal Gaynor