The Celts

In Ireland, the flowering of interest in the Celtic past - myth, literature and legend, antiquities and music - whatever it owe to MacPherson's bogus Ossian, survived to sustain a succession of 'Celtic revivals' (Seamus Deane's phrase) from Brooke's and Bunting's work in the late eighteenth century, through Moore, and on to Ferguson (with his scholarly circle of friends and his excursions into heroic poetry); on further to Standish O'Grady, and climaxing in the most spectacular Celtic revival of all at the close of the last century, in which Yeats and Hyde (notwithstanding their differences in ideological and intellectual preoccupation) were the key figures.

External influences were crucial. The contribution of continental scholarship in philology stimulated a more informed discussion of the Celtic languages. The extraordinary spread of interest in ethnography ñ which, in a more sinister form, combined later with versions of social Darwinism ñ was responsible for more ambivalent attitudes towards the Celts, ancient and modern. As with all major intellectual fashions, some voices and texts are especially important in the story of the nineteenth-century stereotype of the Celt. One such voice was Ernest Renan, himself a Breton, who registered what seemed to him as the inexorable decline of the Celtic languages (the distinctive Celtic voice) in the face of the new dominant zonal languages throughout the old Celtic lands (i.e. the French and English language).

In his treatise of 1854, La Poesie des Races Celtiques, Renan sought to identify (and in large measure to defend and to celebrate) the salient features of the Celtic genius or character. Renan did not ignore the failings of the Celt, but the balance of his judgement lies heavily on the positive characteristics. Thus, for Renan, the Celt was possessed of an essentially feminine temperament ñ shy and gentle, giving full reign to the play of sentiment and the imagination, proud and loyal and with a strong sense of justice, deeply committed to personal loyalties and to the family, and this to such an extent that it had 'stifled all attempts to attain more complex social and political organisation'. This weakness in devising political structures had been fatal to the Celts and had resulted in their political defeat.

Here in Renan's profile of the Celt we have virtually all of the ingredients of the stereotype of the Celt which was to prove remarkably enduring. But it was not all Renan (whose book was not translated into English until 1893), but Matthew Arnold whose version of the Celt exercised a dominant influence on readers in the English-speaking world since the middle of the last century. Arnold's Oxford lectures of 1865-6, published in book form soon afterwards under the title On the Study of Celtic Literature, were, on the face of it, pleading for the ending of the chronic ignorance of the Celtic languages and literatures in British universities in general, and in particular a plea for the establishment of a Chair of Celtic at Oxford. But Arnold had other and more significant ends in view. By using Celtic as a foil, Arnold made a sustained criticism of the materialistic and depressingly philistine character of the English middle-classes. As Seamus Deane has succinctly put it, '... everything the philistine middle-classes of England needed, the Celt could supply.

The dreamy, imaginative Celt, unblessed by the Greek sense of form, at home in wild landscapes far from the metropolitan centres of modern social and political life, could cure anxious Europe of the woes inherent in Progress.' Arnold's essay was, above all else, the vehicle for a restatement - but with some important differences of emphasis - of Renan's classification of the essentially racial characteristics of the literatures of different people, and in particular the characteristics of Celtic literature. For Arnold there was a distinct and recognisable Celtic genius and temperament, and Arnold was as generous in his praise of its virtues as he was trenchant in describing its failings. Setting imagination, emotion and perception against a lack of balance, measure and patience, Arnold went on:

An organisation quick to feel impressions, and feeling them very strongly; a lively personality therefore, keenly sensitive to joy and to sorrow; this is the main point. If the downs of life too much outnumber the ups, this temperament, just because it is so quickly and nearly conscious of all impressions, may no doubt be seen as shy and wounded; it may be seen in wistful regret, it may be seen in passionate, penetrating melancholy; but its essence is to aspire ardently after life, light and emotions, to be expansive, adventurous and gay... the Celt is often called sensual, but it is not so much the vulgar satisfactions of sense that attract him as emotion and excitement....

Arnold's version of the Celt as the antithesis of the stolid, sober and (materially) successful but unimaginative Birmingham non-conformist was echoed in Ireland by, among others, Ferguson and, of course, Yeats. Indeed, when applied to the real Ireland of the later nineteenth century it is not difficult to understand why the unspoilt (preferably poor and uneducated) western peasantry cam to be identified as the living repositories of the essential, the authentic Celtic Weltanschauung - in short, as the 'real' native Irish. But the Victorian passion for ethnography and racial classification produced a model of the Irish Celt a good deal more malign than Arnold's. This malign model, in which an aggressively Anglo-Saxonist ethnography combined with vulgar social Darwinism, classified the Irish Celt (by which was generally meant the poorer Catholic peasant) as being on a lower plane of civilisation to the Anglo-Saxon. This hostile view of the Celtic Irish stereotype is illustrated by Disraeli's denunciation of the agitating Irish in 1836:

This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character.... They hate our order, our civilisation, our enterprising industry, our sustained courage, our decorous liberty, our pure religion.... Their fair ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry. Their history is describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.

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From the Appletree Press title: The People of Ireland (currently out of print).
Also see A Little History of Ireland.