Journeys in Ireland: Literary Travellers, Rural Landscapes, Cultural Relations (review)

Journeys in Ireland: Literary Travellers, Rural Landscapes, Cultural Relations, by Martin Ryle; pp. vii + 190. Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999, £42.50, $74.95.

Martin Ryle defines his theme as "the development of a culture of scenic tourism: a culture born out of Romantic landscape aesthetics (which already prized 'remote' Celtic scenes), and later inflected in a new context of overdevelopment in the European metropolis, depopulation of peripheral rural regions, and discourses of 'tradition' and environmentalism" (2). His project is an ambitious one: to examine the work of selected writers, English and Irish, from the Romantic period to the present, who have described Ireland and Irish life, in order to discover how the literary representation of Ireland has evolved.

English visitors to Ireland have usually delighted in scenic beauty, especially in the West, lamented the exotic squalor of the peasantry, and found amusing turns of phrase and attitude in the guides, coachmen, and servants they encountered. Their usually brief tours tended to emphasize the picturesque in landscape and behavior. Sometimes they criticized the landlord system and its inefficiencies. After the establishment of the Free State in 1922, they often adopted a tone of cautious encouragement or, alternatively, nostalgia for the old Anglo-Irish order. With England becoming increasingly suburbanized, the silence and emptiness of the Irish countryside became a popular theme.

As for Irish literary travelers, until recently they were often members of the landlord class who had been converted to political or cultural nationalism. If the English travel writer emphasized how different Ireland was from familiar England, the Irish traveler went in search of the "real" Ireland, usually along the western seaboard in places where Irish was still spoken. "Go to the Aran Islands," William Butler Yeats advised J. M. Synge, when they met in 1896, "express a life that has never found expression" (W. B. Yeats: Essays and Introductions [1961 edition] 299). Connemara and Aran were exotic even to most Irish men and women at that time; Douglas Hyde and Patrick Pearse would make them a kind of inner sanctuary for the national identity.

Not all Irish writers accepted this notion, which equated Irish identity with speaking Irish, and with living in great poverty. Ryle reminds us of William Bulfin's Rambles in Eirinn (1907), at once nationalist and uninterested in the literary movement's cult of the West. Bulfin declines to visit and describe the seats of the Anglo-Irish gentry, focusing instead on the Irish midlands and the south coast, the places that, under Home Rule, will make Ireland prosperous. Ryle also quotes, a little self-indulgently, from Flann O'Brien's An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth [1941]), which brilliantly parodies autobiographical accounts of life in the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking areas) and their acceptance of poverty and deprivation.

Ryle's choice of travel writers is eclectic and his categories imprecise. While he does give us a sense of changing attitudes about Ireland from the Romantic period to the present, he does not fully deliver on his promise to study the "development of scenic tourism." From time to time, he recognizes the importance of political and economic observations, especially when discussing the reluctance of many travel writers to visit Northern Ireland--in the nineteenth century because it was not romantic enough, in the twentieth for obvious reasons. But for the most part, the writers he has chosen to examine travel in the paradoxically enclosed world of the tourist. His study would have greater authority if he had chosen to consider also the many Irish novels, especially in the nineteenth century, which were written to introduce Ireland to English readers, and to some extent are formed around a tour: an Englishman, often the absentee owner of an Irish estate, visits the country, meets various representative types, sees various Irish landscapes, and decides in future to rule his estates more prudently. Maria Edgeworth wrote this novel several times, notably in Ennui (1809) and The Absentee...