Representing the National Landscape in Irish Romanticism

5. Foreign Landscapes and the Domestication of the National Subject

168 5 Foreign Landscapes and the Domestication of the National Subject Oh, but this butterfly! It fled the cloister’s gloom. Poor insect! how natural! Unwittingly I pursued its devious flight. Its rich wings of purple and gold, expanded to every gale, glittered to every sun-beam. It revelled in such variety of bliss, so free, so wild, so uncontrol[l]ed, that I sighed, and wished to be a butterfly. —lady morgan, The Novice of Saint Dominick (1805) I pushed open the casement, and, without waiting to look behind me, I ran with my utmost speed, scarcely feeling the ground under me. —j. sheridan lefanu, “A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess” (1838) As Benedict Anderson suggests in his essay “Long-Distance Nationalism,” “The nativeness of natives is always unmoored, its real significance hybrid and oxymoronic,”1 a belated effect of globalization and the circulation of languages, cultures, and bodies across the borders that nationalism would entrench. For instance, in 1825 William Maginn, living in England and about to move to France, contended in a Scottish periodical that songs circulated in England as Irish were not actually Irish, citing as evidence his own authority as a native (“us Irish people”), especially on the subject of Irish idiom: Foreign Landscapes and Domestication • 169 “I must protest that I never heard the word ‘joy’ so used in Ireland by anybody, and yet it is a standing expression put into our mouths by every writer of Irish characters.”2 Later, he notes the use of the name “Bailie” in a song and asks, “What part of the world does that name belong to?” and concludes that “the author of the Irish Wedding . . . is a Scot.”3 Maginn roots national identity in cultural knowledge, especially language use, which allows him to maintain his own Irishness from outside of Ireland on the basis of that knowledge. Maginn’s essay appeared as Herderian nationalism, and especially its emphasis on the connection between people and land, was becoming increasingly significant in the wake of the folkloric project that proceeded in part from exchanges between German and Irish romanticism (such as those between the Grimms and Thomas Crofton Croker in the mid-1820s), and in the wake of a growing diaspora . The relationship between Herderian nationalism and diaspora is traceable, for instance, in the pages of The Nation, where reports from globally dispersed Irish correspondents jostle for space with a positive racial discourse of Irishness. Hence, one early issue of The Nation comments under the title “National Character,” It is only the Celts, who yielded their solemn woodlands, clear flowing rivers, and wide domains, to the barbarian Goths—it is the Celts alone who can tell why those patriarchal titles were conferred on the hills of Europe by the “world’s gray fathers.” Those military brigands who slaughtered, devastated, or enslaved us, knew not why the graphic and poetic genius of the ancient primitive ancestors of Europe coined their beautiful epithets, or crowned the towering cliffs with descriptive appellatives to last them for ever. It was reserved for the gentle and yielding Celt to come from the caves and howling wilds to which truculent, victorious barbarism relegated him—’twas for him to point to the hills, and, like the Hebrew seer in the Assyrian’s presence, interpret the words which time had only chiselled deeper. He has done so; every mountain has vindicated his claims to primogeniture, despite the malignant grin of envious incredulity; and they who were sceptics in other times, are now believers.4 170 • Representing the National Landscape Simultaneously tying “the Celts” to an essential national character and to a fundamental relationship with the land, such passages ground identity not only in biology, but also in the landscape itself. Drawing on similar premises, Thomas Davis praises the publication of Charles Gavan Duffy’s Ballad Poetry of Ireland (1843): Worse than meeting unclean beds, or drenching mists, or Cockney opinions, was it to have to take the mountains with a book of Scottish ballads. They were glorious to be sure, but they were not ours, they had not the brown of the climate on their cheek, they spoke of places far, and ways which are not our country’s ways, and hopes which were not Ireland’s, and their tongue was not that we first made sport and love with. Yet how mountaineer without ballads, any...