Nationalism as a tragedy in Yeats
‘Easter, 1916’—among its many additions to Irish folk memory—wound a tragic thread into the mostly-defiant nationalist twine of the wearing of the green with its final stanza:
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Circle back to the first stanza. In it, Yeats remembered how in years gone by he would have seen the soon-to-be rebels in the street, and while he was nodding or politely acknowledging them, he would often be thinking
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
The contrast I want to focus on is one that is slightly odd and perhaps for that reason underplayed: between green clothes and motley.
‘Motley’, of course, is the name for the outfit worn by a mediaeval fool or jester; it is a symbol of comedy. The complementary to comedy is tragedy, but Yeats does not contrast motley with any particular obvious worn symbol of tragedy. Instead, the false presumption of the wearing of motley is replaced with a vision of the wearing of the green. Comedy is contrasted, not with tragedy, but with nationalism.
Now, the contrast is not meant to set comedy and nationalism up as logical contraries; they are framed differently, and the contexts for the lines are not the same. (And motley can be green!) But I do think it’s a clue for how Yeats thought about moments of nationalist convulsion like 1916: as tragedy.
In 1910, aiming to defend Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows (which he himself had completed and staged after Synge’s death) from its critics, Yeats wrote an essay outlining his unique and distinctly non-Aristotelian ideas about the difference between tragedy and comedy.1 His ideas here were based on a distinction between two distinct forces that Yeats thought drove human action, which he labelled ‘character’ and ‘passion’. In comedy, ‘character is continuously present’, while in tragedy (or at least, ‘much tragedy’, including all classical tragedy) the place of character ‘is taken by passions and motives, one person being jealous, another full of love or remorse or pride or anger.’
Now, what Yeats meant by character and passion may not be immediately clear (in a letter he called this whole account ‘rather a long story… connected with a whole mass of definitions’),2 and indeed the distinction might not be all that philosophically defensible in the end,3 but let’s give it a go. Yeats described character as ‘the power of that daily mood’, and seemed to think of it as a set of dispositions that are built up over time through our experiences in the world. It is almost a Humean concept: ‘character can only express itself perfectly in a real world, being that world’s creature’. Yet character is also what helps define us inwardly as unique individuals—it is character, the peculiar habits we’ve picked up in our peculiar life, that explains what is unique about any given individual. Yeats quoted a letter of William Congreve, which defines ‘humour’ as a ‘singular and unavoidable way of doing anything peculiar to one man only’; Yeats noted that ‘humour’ is ‘the foundation of comedy’, and so we can reasonably understand him as repurposing this definition for the notion he took to be the foundation of comedy, character.
But for tragedy, ‘we must bring more to it than our daily mood if we would take our pleasure’—we must bring passion. Passion is a break from the quotidian and the everyday, borne out of the universal capacities for ‘exaltation’, ‘excitement’, and ‘dreaming’. As the contrary concept to character, Yeats did not think passion could be individual or unique, and as such it is inevitably drawn with broad strokes in drama. But this is precisely what gives it its appeal. Tragedy is ‘the confounder of understanding’, and ‘moves us … by alluring us almost to the intensity of trance’; it is collective and shared, almost part of a ritual.
[T]ragedy must always be a drowning and breaking of the dykes that separate man from man, and that it is upon these dykes comedy keeps house.
In his early works, Yeats’ poetry was concerned with the development and expression of individualistic will and character, and in this sense he sought to be a comedian. But this individual project was not separate from his Revival nationalism. Yeats sought to escape the prevailing (Catholic) notions of Irishness precisely by creating a new and unique way of being Irish. He had not yet made the distinctions between passion and character, individual will and collective dyke-breaking, that he would by 1910.
By contrast, in 1910 he found himself arguing that ‘you can find but little of what we call character’—and thus, little successful comedy—‘in unspoiled youth’. Character ‘grows with time like the ash of a burning stick’. I don’t think it’s much of a risk to guess that Yeats had his own earlier works in mind here. To take a common example, the narrator’s project of self-assertion and will in ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree‘ has been noted over and over through the years. Yet ‘Innisfree’ ended up being, not individual and unique, but so universally Irish that it has literally ended up in the passport.4 It’s notable that it was also in 1910 Yeats called the Rhymers, the group he was at the centre of as a young man, ‘the tragic generation’. By that point he had ended up believing that individual character emerges from years of individual habit formation, the slow daily construction of ‘dykes that separate man from man’. And for this reason, what seems to a young person to be an assertion of their individual character will almost certainly just be an outburst of (perhaps-clichéd) passion.5 ‘Innisfree’ was based on such passion; it was tragedy.
Indeed, from the perspective of the later Yeats, what value there was in ‘Innisfree’ came from precisely its rejection of the comedy of the everyday, its escape from the modern world of praying and saving. The narrator’s retreat from the reality of ‘the pavements grey’ to what is found in ‘the deep heart’s core’ could almost have been Yeats’ definition of passion. Yet Yeats came to think that (whatever Stephen Dedalus hoped) such passion could not forge the conscience of the race. Indeed, I think we can understand the way he distinguished between tragedy and comedy in the context of his growing disillusionment with nationalism between 1898 and 1916. Where earlier he had seen a continuum between the individual and the nation, now he was trying to draw a distinction that tore these things apart.
Of course, much of this came from his growing disdain for the ordinary character of Irish life. In ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ from the 1930s, Yeats would call O’Connell ‘the Great Comedian’. Now, the Liberator was actually a decent comedian in the ordinary sense; it was he who made the famous joke about Wellington, that ‘being born in a stable does not make a man a horse’. But more importantly for Yeats’ concept of comedy, O’Connell was the political representative of ordinary, Catholic, Irish life, the life lived by the kind of Irishman Yeats would mock as ‘our old paudeen’. By the early 1910s, Yeats knew that the Anglo-Irish ascendancy he increasingly romanticised (the men who had been born in the stable) had been disappearing since the Land War. And if character is formed by the context of everyday life, he had little hope for the Irish national character that might be forged in everyday Irish life; little hope for comedy.
And at the same time, his pessimistic Nietzscheanism left him little hope that, after Parnell’s failed attempt, the ‘best’ could forge a new Ireland in an act of brilliant and tragic passion, either. Seamus Deane’s lovely prose describes it well: Yeats became ‘preoccupied with gloomy predictions and fears of the end of civilisation’, and joined the ‘general chorus of lamentation’ about the modern world.6 And so, seeing no options left for Irish nationalism, he famously insisted that (in the modern world that he felt forced to inhabit) ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave.’
Or rather, again famously, this was what he insisted until Easter 1916. It’s notable that the ‘vivid faces’ of 1916 were a motley crew (no pun intended). From Thomas McDonagh (who was ‘daring’, ‘sweet’, ‘sensitive’, and ‘might have won fame in the end’) through to John MacBride (the ‘drunken, vain-glorious lout’), the characters of the rebels ran the gamut. But for Yeats it was not character that united them. Even MacBride
… has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly…
MacBride resigned comedy in favour of tragedy. Comedy is ‘casual’, workaday, quotidian—yet simultaneously individual (and individualistic), peculiar. Tragedy, its contrary, is orthogonal to an individual’s character and indeed often emerges out of collective endeavours, but for exactly that reason Yeats now hoped that it could break through the everyday order of things. This was the great contribution of the Rising—for what is ‘terrible beauty’, if not a definition of tragedy?
As mentioned above, Yeats did not mean to assert that tragic passion and comic character were incompatible, that the cultivation of one must suppress the other. But in a weaker sense he did think they were contrary concepts.7 Precisely because tragedy comes at a unique point in time, set apart from everyday life, the tragic moment eventually ends and everyday comic life inevitably returns (albeit, perhaps changed). That is to say that, if we take Yeats’ distinction seriously, it would seem that tragic nationalism cannot ever take on the kind of long-term significance that it is often imbued with; it is of a particular moment, not of an era.
Yet Ireland is a state that is (reluctantly) built on the ideology of tragic nationalism. So it should be little surprise that the refrain of ‘September 1913’ has retained such power so long after Yeats himself repudiated it in 1916. And as Yeats’ disdain grew for the politics of the Free State and for the interwar world, where ‘passionate intensity’ increasingly became the preserve of ‘the worst’—while Irish character continued to be shaped by a modernity he rejected and a Catholicism he was alienated from—he sought to weaken his contrast between comedy and tragedy. Conor Cruise O’Brien once analogised Yeat’s nationalism to bipolar disorder, having depressive and manic phases;8 and if 1916 pushed him into mania, by the 1930s he was well into depression. ‘The Statues’ is a hideously difficult poem, but on this topic it is perfectly clear:
Pythagoras planned it. Why did the people stare?
His numbers, though they moved or seemed to move
In marble or in bronze, lacked character.
But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love
Of solitary beds, knew what they were,
That passion could bring character enough,
And pressed at midnight in some public place
Live lips upon a plummet-measured face. [Emphasis mine.]
Here Yeats is desperately hoping—in the face of all the evidence accumulated between 1922 and 1932—that revolutionary passion can remake everyday life for good, shape the character of the people across the long term. But, if we remember that for Yeats passion on its own cannot ground individuality and is always liable to be a collective affair, we can see how the ‘character enough’ that passion can bring would have to submerge individuality in a collective or even corporate system. I’m speculating a bit, but perhaps this explains something of the specific form of Yeats’ corporatism.
In the event, the one group that might have threatened to enact Yeats’ vision—the Blueshirts—annoyed him as much as he confused them, and his strange Irish Salazarism went nowhere. But the strangeness of his reactionary ideology was made necessary by the weight that he asked passion to bear. So opposed was he to the comedy of early twentieth century Ireland, so degenerated did he suppose urban Irish character to be, that he could only found his nationalism on moments of pure tragedy.
Following the Rising, he worked hard to ensure that this vision was the one shared by the Irish people. And, to a certain degree, he succeeded. After 1916 and especially after 1918 the Redmondites found themselves rejected out of hand, Home Rule a disgraced proposition and revolution increasingly inevitable. Throughout the country people were convinced by the logic Yeats expressed in ‘Sixteen Dead Men’: the tragedy of the Rising superceded all other considerations.
You say that we should still the land
Till Germany’s overcome;
But who is there to argue that
Now Pearse is deaf and dumb?
And is their logic to outweigh
MacDonagh’s bony thumb?
But ‘Easter, 1916’ itself does not display this full-throated rejection of Home Rule, nor the unqualified embrace of revolutionary violence. In the very short term after the Rising, Yeats’ judgment had not yet been overtaken by the requirements of his politics. Those politics, the rejection of everyday Irish life, demanded a complete embrace of the tragedy of nationalist revolution. But while the events were still fresh in his mind, Yeats could see very clearly the death, the destruction, and the risk of pointlessness of the Rising.
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
The Rising was a tragedy in Yeats’ sense; but it was also, before its transformation into a symbol of a coming revolution, a tragedy in the prosaic sense. Yeats’ grand vision demanded that this be forgotten, and indeed he did forget it; but his sensitivity did not allow him to forget it without first facing up to it. In that moment, Yeats could not find the certainty to insist that the rebels’ ‘passion could bring character enough’ for the Irish nation. All he could do was murmur their names.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
‘The Tragic Theatre’, published in the American edition of The Cutting of an Agate. (And maybe also the British edition, though I can’t find it and I know it had radically different contents.)
Quoted on p. 416 of volume one of the Roy Foster autobiography.
To jump ahead a bit, I think the great hope of that most admirable of twentieth-century writers, Bernard Williams, could be phrased in Yeatsian terms as follows. Williams thought we could have a synthesis between tragedy and comedy: in one way, by seeing how passions that seem to be imposed on us ‘from outside’ can be understood as actually arising from our own characters and dispositions; on the other, by grasping the inherent tragedies of everyday life, taking a non-Humean view of habit and disposition.
(Of course, this is not how Williams himself would have put it; he understood tragedy differently to Yeats.)
Or at least, it had; I think they’re redesigning the passport, and it might not have ‘Innisfree’ in it any more. I hope that any redesign removes the blatant error in the transcription of Amhrán na bhFiann in the document that I noticed six or seven years ago and desperately tried, and failed, to get the government to fix.
First quote from ‘The Literary Myths of the Revival’, in Celtic Revivals, p. 35. Second from the introduction to his edition to Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, p. viii.
Yeats wrote in King of the Great Clock Tower that ‘I am Blake’s disciple, not Hegel’s: “contraries are positive. A negation is not a contrary.”’
‘Introduction’ to Passion and Cunning, p. 2.