Daniel Corkery's Cultural Criticism: Selected Writings

Daniel Corkery

fight he loses something of the wholeness of the vision at which he aims, i think the last person who should chide him is the deluded man he is trying to save [. . .] * * * daniel Corkery1 [. . .] The book on Synge [. . .] contains the application to anglo-irish letters of the historical attitude outlined in The Hidden Ireland. The introduction sums it all up, and is a marvellous piece of special pleading, though written in elusive english that is often vague and sometimes quite meaningless. in sum (according to this point of view) anglo-irish Literature, since 1900 in particular, is ‘astray’ as an interpretation of irish life, gives ‘no adequate expression’to the forces ‘that work their will in the consciousness of the irish people,’and – a typically suggestive but unprecise sentence – its practitioners did not ‘use such intellectual equipment as they possessed,’: ‘sometimes admirable in itself, for the high purposes of art – the shaping out into chaste and enduring form of a genuine emotional content, personal to themselves but conscionable to the nation.’2 Writing for an english market (‘keeps its eyes on the foreign merchants who are to purchase its wares’) it has been ‘misled’ from the start.3 in brief, anglo-irish literature is not an adequate interpretation of irish life. to illustrate this Corkery takes a hurling-match at Thurles, a crowd of thirty thousand country and town folk, and says, it was while i looked at that great crowd i first became acutely conscious that as a nation we were without self-expression in literary form. The life of this people i looked upon – there were all sorts of individuals present, from bishops to tramps off the road – was not being explored in a natural way by any except one or two writers of any standing . . . . one could not see yeats, Æ, Stephens, dunsany, Moore, robinson, standing out from that gathering as natural and indigenous interpreters of it. on the other hand there seems to be no difficulty in posing Galsworthy, Masefield, Bennett, Wells, against corresponding assemblies in england . . . . Those english crowds are 100 per cent. english: and the writers who best express the individual souls that make them up are 100 per cent. english . . . .The writers in a normal country are one with what they write of.4 230 Daniel Corkery’s Cultural Criticism. Selected Writings to those who have accepted anglo-irish literature as literature this will sound painful.to those who approach it as the expression of a high-hearted Nationalism it will be (and was) a trumpet-call. With a little alteration it would equally well trumpet encouragement to all Nazis, fascists, Communists, and every other type of exclusivist for whom the essential test of literature is a political, racial, or religious test. all a Nazi need do, to make that passage personally gratifying, is to put for ‘yeats, Æ, Stephens, etc.’ – Ludwig,5 feuchtwanger,6 toller,7 etc., with 100 per cent.teuton in his mind and a meeting at the Munich Spielplatz instead of Thurles. one may pass over the disingenuousness of Corkery’s choice of lyric writers from the irish group (yeats, dunsany, Stephens, Æ) instead of o’donnell, o’Connor, o’Casey, and such like as possible interpreters of the ‘mob’; and of Naturalistic writers from the english group, Bennett, Wells, Galsworthy. He is, after all, fighting here for a propagandist idea and may be forgiven a little sharp practice. But one does not so easily forgive his suggestion that ‘the writers who best express the individual souls of england’are Bennett, Wells, Galsworthy. Not because they may not but because one knows well that Corkery sincerely thinks these writers very small beer: one knows that his spiritual affinities are writers like Musset and turgenev, the feminine lyrists; that, if anything his own romantic image of life is far nearer to that of yeats and Stephens, than to Bennett and Wells: that he is being disloyal to himself as an artist in trying to make his theory fit. and that is unforgiveable. of course,the fact is that The Old Wives’Tale,8 or The Country House,9 or The New Machiavelli10 do not interpret an english cup-final crowd at Wembley.to ask art to do things like that is to socialise it, and that precisely is what Mr. Corkery’s nationalism means – the nationalisation of culture. That is the core of the weakness of this approach.it is not a critic’s approach. it is a politician’s, and...