Douglas Hyde & Ireland

ELT: VOLUME 35:2 1992 campaign. He was defeated in November 1912, and was then out of Parliament and out of the Labour Party. In the political wilderness, Lansbury became ever more committed to the feminist movement and even endured a brief imprisonment on behalf of the "cause." But he soon found Christabel Pankhurst's authoritarian style and anti-male fulminations distasteful and broke with her W.S.P.U. By this time, many of his contemporaries and friends felt that Lansbury had committed political suicide in support of the right cause but the wrong people and had "relegated himself to the periphery of British politics." As he labored to rally and unify the left for socialism and the feminist movement, the coming of the war in 1914 put an end to Lansbury's efforts and fragmented the suffragette movement. Indeed, the 1914-18 war changed his life as "it led him from one great cause, feminism, to another, pacifism." On behalf of this doomed cause, Lansbury also displayed between 1914 and 1940 "a doggedness in the face of adversity, and a willingness... to risk all... that was astonishing" even to his critics. Schneer is convinced that Lansbury's pacifism during the 1930s was "more significant, politically, than has been recognized generally" and that by espousing unilateral disarmament, he "bequeathed to Labour a legacy which has troubled it ever since." Unfortunately , "unilateralism" destroyed Lansbury's political career as it did, in the 1980s, the leadership of that dedicated Socialist Michael Foot. Schneer's interesting but over-priced study is enhanced by a most helpful "Chronology of Lansbury's life," an abbreviated bibliography, and a serviceable index. J. O. Baylen, Emeritus Eastbourne, England Douglas Hyde & Ireland Janet E. and Gareth W. Dunleavy. Douglas Hyde: A Maker of Modem Ireland. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, xiii + 462 pp. $35.99 DOUGLAS HYDE'S is one of those names that hovers in discussions of modern Irish literature and history, seldom at center stage but always there as marking a necessary if somewhat ambiguous presence: the Irish squire, the self-made comparative linguist and folklorist, the dependable and well-mannered organizer and mediator who often makes action possible for the more colorful and daring. What the Dunleavys have achieved in their extensive biography of Hyde is to bring the man and his life's work into focus, reminding us that in the complexity we call Irish history, there are many overlapping stages on which the 266 BOOK REVIEWS drama of national identity has been played out. The claim implicit in the book's subtitle, A Maker of Modern Ireland, means that the Hyde the Dunleavys trace for us is always clearly set within the contexts of the historical forces at work both on the individual and the developing nation. The conflicts the young Hyde encounters are those shared by so many of the other makers of modern Ireland as they sought to make themselves out of what Yeats would have called the contraries of their lives. Hyde came from a strong Protestant church background, for his father was Church of England rector at Frenchchurch in County Roscommon, with the attendant ascendancy sympathies one would expect, and yet much of young Douglas's natural bent was toward the people of the cottages, the Catholic peasantry and working class, before whose fires he heard Irish folk tales and developed his desire to learn the spoken dialect. It was a boyhood divided between the tennis courts of neighboring big houses and the wholly different world of the cottages. As the Dunleavys show, the double persona which developed served both to conceal Hyde's Irish interests from his family and friends and to nurture the beginning stages of Irish patriot and scholar. Thus was An Croaibhin Aoibhinn ("the delightful little branch") bom to conceal the true identity of the author of poems in Gaelic and English and essays on the status of Ireland—a protective mask not only from his family but also from the professors who would decide on his suitability for Trinity College. Also like many other major figures of his time (Synge is one notable exception), Hyde was a great founder, joiner, and organizer...