The Celts

part 10

While the majority of the Gaelic-speaking Irish remained Catholic during the Reformation and its aftermath (with the majority of the Protestant communities in Ireland composed of those of planter stock, including, it is worth noting, Scottish planters of impeccably Celtic ancestry), continued adherence to Catholicism did not, as we have seen, require continued support of the Gaelic culture. For a time, it is true, the Catholic clergy were generally supportive of the preservation of the Irish language, seeing it as a kind of linguistic insulation against Protestantism. But in time this attitude changed.

As it became clear that a mass conversion to Protestantism was unlikely, and as the Catholic bourgeoisie and comfortable farming class increasingly showed that anglicisation in speech and other ways did not mean abandonment of Catholicism, the Catholic Church changed from being, in the words of one historian, 'a negative collaborator' to an active agent in the process of linguistic and more general cultural change in Ireland. A Catholic revival did not mean a Gaelic revival. The so-called 'patriot [i.e. Jacobite] parliament' of 1689 did not seek to restore the Gaelic social or political order, but to restore property and a measure of power to Catholics who had lost both in the preceding century. The Catholic revival of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century had no Gaelic trappings.

The new Catholic colleges and seminaries, established as Catholic self-confidence grew in step with the removal of discriminatory laws, saw English established as the language of Catholic higher education, and, as the priests went out from these seminaries in increasing numbers, of a more systematic and effective system of pastoral care and community leadership.

Nor was the cultural shift a matter of language-change only. The mission of a revitalised Catholic Church in the nineteenth century (and especially from mid-century) involved the systematic implementation of Tridentine practice in the devotional as well as the doctrinal aspects of Irish Catholicism. This occasionally meant official church disapproval and attempted reform or eradication of some traditional or customary devotional customs and social habits (e.g. in the waking of the dead) which had long been accepted as part of the Gaelic or Celtic cultural inheritance. Again, the social and moral emphases of the Catholic Church in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century reflected or imitated some of the dominant values and virtues espoused by Victorian middle-class non-conformity in Britain (temperance, restraint, respectability).

In the drawing rooms of urban and rural Ireland the social standards to which the late Victorian middle-classes aspired (and theirs was the dominant influence in determining cultural norms) were the standards which obtained among the British middle-classes. With the significant exception of religious belief and practice, by the later nineteenth century the more prosperous, or indeed even comfortable, elements throughout most of Ireland had achieved or accommodated to a substantial measure of 'anglicisation', or to put it another way, of incorporation into the cultural fabric of the larger (English-dominated) British society. As for those least affected by the process of 'anglicisation' - those whose speech and general cultural features remained substantially Gaelic - enlightened opinion assumed that this state of innocence was due to their remoteness from the main currents of modern life and that it would inevitably give way before the tide of progress and improvement which had already washed over the rest of the country.

Yet, remarkably (and in some ways, perhaps, paradoxically), it was during the nineteenth century; and in particular in the middle decades of that century; as the more 'objectively' distinctive aspects of the old Celtic culture seemed in a rapid decline and doomed to extinction, that the concept of an archetypal Celtic temperament or genius, in effect an ethnic stereotype, was elaborated and came to enjoy a wide currency among the literate classes in Europe and especially in Britain.

There were many sources for this sustained surge of interest in and theorising about the Celt and his distinct genius. Disciples of the Romanticism of the later eighteenth century settled on the Celt as a perfect illustration of the child of nature, wild, elemental, innocently alive to the promptings of the emotions and the senses. Cultural nationalism and antiquarianism both, in their different ways, sprang from the Romantic impulse.

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