Inventing Ireland (59 page)

Little wonder, then, that his characters are often so anxious to bring their lives into conformity with a revered text ("and a story will be told forever"),
¹⁵
though Synge was also aware, from his painful arguments with his mother, of the suffering to which this could give rise.

There was nothing triumphalist about the cultural Protestantism of such writers. Far from it. As in the case of Joyce, their conscious use of religious terminology was often subversive of the codes from which they had ripped it. They were exemplary instances of the mind "employing the energy imparted by evangelical convictions to rid itself of the restraint which Evangelicalism had laid on the senses and intellect; on amusement, enjoyment, an; on curiosity, on criticism, on science".
¹⁶
What distinguished them from Joyce, however, was the fact that so many of them came from families with ecclesiastical or rectory backgrounds – so many, indeed, that
Vivian Mercier once joked that "the true purpose of the Irish Literary Revival was to provide alternative employment for the sons of clergymen after
disestablishment had reduced the number of livings provided by the Church of Ireland".
¹⁷

In fact, it was the convulsions wrought by
Darwinism and the Higher Criticism which left these intellectuals unable to embrace the faith of their ancestors along traditional lines. (Had Catholic priests and nuns been allowed to marry, it is arguable that the intellectual life of Catholic Ireland might have been enriched by their offspring: but, under the rules of the Catholic Church, this was impossible.) Refusing to follow the clergyman's calling, the scions of the rectory sought to aestheticize elements of Protestant belief, in the conviction that the place once held by the priest would now be taken by the
literatus.
As soon as the Bible had been reduced to mere literature, it was inevitable that writers would assume burdens once thought more appropriate to the leaders of
religion. With the waning of Christian belief came a crisis in the spiritual leadership of the Protestant community, which passed from clerical to lay intellectuals. The latter confidently expected to be held in the same esteem as the clergy had once been, and were often dismayed when their reluctance to preach the old beliefs led to their being disowned by family and by Anglo-Irish kindred.

Caught in the no-man's-land between the two main island traditions, they attempted to "theorize" their position, and to construct Utopian schemes. The absence of a truly metropolitan culture in Dublin in the later nineteenth century, along with a centuries-old feeling of exclusion from real political influence over their land, was all the more conducive to such idealistic thinking. Standish O'Grady said "I have not come out from my own camp to join any other. I stand between the camps and call".
¹⁸
One of the attractions of the ancient Gaelic world lay in the fact that such people could identify with it as they could never have identified with post-Reformation Gaelic Ireland. It was sufficiently remote and vague to be malleable to their current purposes, but it also provided – pagan rituals and all – the bedrock on which a common Irish culture had been built before later divisions. Yeats, deprived by
Huxley and Tyndall of "the simple-minded religion of my childhood", made a new religion, "almost an infallible Church of poetic tradition", of a fardel of Celtic stories.
¹⁹

Nor was this enough. All of these writers wished for a fusion of two traditions, not just Gaelic with Anglo-Irish, but Catholic with Protestant as well. Their dream was of a wonderful new hybrid, nicknamed a
Protholic
or a
Cathestant.
²⁰
George Moore's threat to convert from Catholicism to Protestantism in the letters column of
The Irish Times
was a jocular expression of this
Weltanschauung:
but the life and writings of Oscar Wilde provide a more contemplative example.

Wilde, though born and baptized a Protestant, died attended by a
Dublin Passionist. His art oscillates between a puritan distrust of art (
Dorian Gray
is a highly moral critique of the Paterian cult of intensified experience) and a luxurious surrender to the idea of the
filix culpa
or educative effects of sin ("Experience is the name that Tuppy gives to his mistakes").

The thesis of the Catholicized Protestant and the Protestantized Catholic had been implicit in the Irish Revival from the outset. It was hugely ironical that while Protestants like Hyde, Lady Gregory and Yeats went about collecting legends of healing wells and peasant miracles, the Catholic clergy was resolutely attempting to extirpate these beliefs, or at least, to subordinate them to a more rationalized theology. Each side appeared to be taking on some protective coloration from the other, in keeping with Yeats's declaration in his essays of the need to "bring the two halves together". His father, John Butler Yeats, had taught that the Catholic Church was "good for the heart but bad for the brain", adding that "had the Irish been Protestants they would long ago have thrown off the English tyranny".
²¹
This fully anticipated Shaw's statement that a true Protestant was
ipso facto
an Irish Republican.

All this did not mean that John Butler Yeats or George Bernard Shaw despised Catholicism: they simply felt that a fusion of both traditions would produce a new Ireland greater than the sum of its parts. If Matthew Arnold had hoped that Irish imagination could raise and ennoble English pragmatism and that both could couple in a complete British person, John Butler Yeats deftly repeated this manoeuvre, but in the opposite direction, recruiting the pragmatism of the English Protestant for an expanded and enhanced Irish personality. This appropriation was but another example of a "Celticist" idea reinterpreted by a Yeats in subtle and unexpected ways: for, while Arnold had proposed his fusion of Celtic and Saxon elements in order to deny the separatist claims of the Irish, John Butler Yeats mischievously modified it, with the strategic purpose of
asserting
that very claim. "Given the Protestant's natural efficiency", he told
John Quinn, "the Catholic Irishman would leap to far higher altitudes than the Protestant will ever attain – because of his imagination and traditions".
²²
The implication was inescapable: a true Irish intellectual would be a spiritually-hyphenated being, a well-balanced person with a chip on each shoulder. Every honest Catholic could henceforth become his or her own best priest; and, equally, all Protestants should be able to confess their sins, once in a while, not just to their God but to someone else.

It was Shaw, more than any other writer, who argued that without strong doses of Protestant self-reliance, the Irish Catholic mind would never free itself of imperial occupation. If Joyce could refer to

O Ireland, my first and only love
Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove . . .
²³

Shaw contended that the unquestioning obedience given by Catholics to a priest whom they called "father" (rather than "brother") merely fostered in them a submissiveness which had proved invaluable to the English too. Shaw's own career, which he obliquely recounted in his version of
Saint Joan,
blasted a way out of that colonial impasse in its rejection of
all
fathers, paternal, ecclesiastical or imperial. Instead, he asserted the glory of the self-invented person, who fathers him- or herself. This attack on father-figures eventually led Shaw into a crusade against "bardolatry" or the worship of Shakespeare as the father of English literature. Set free of his birth certificate, which was burned during the shelling of government offices, Shaw managed to escape all the constraints of family, class and, indeed, nation. Though born into a family which had pretensions to wealth and position, he soon became what he jocosely termed a "downstart": he lost one class, but he entered no other.
²⁴
Similarly, by emigrating to London, he lost a country, but embraced no other, for he was never accepted nor did he seek acceptance as an Englishman. Bohemia would henceforth be his native country: and in its open spaces he was free to create GBS
ex nihilo
(virtually), and to write plays which explored Protestant ideas of self-invention or self-determination.

In England, he discovered that he was apparently Irish, and also what this might be made to mean. He came to associate Dublin with poverty, failure and begrudgery, and London with ideas of self-help, will-power and energetic reform. Success came neither quickly nor easily, but by a disciplined programme of hard work, wide reading and relentless self-promotion, he achieved his goals, becoming in the process more and more enamoured of the puritan virtues which he found in a sub-stream of English authors from Milton and
Bunyan down to Blake and beyond. It was this which convinced him of the need for real Protestantism back in Ireland. Ireland had been kept apart from the mighty stream of European Protestantism by its preoccupation with its own unnatural condition. A fixation on articulating grievances had kept the country light years behind others in social and industrial development. The remedy, however, was not to ignore the colonial wound, but to clean and cure it. Despite his internationalism, Shaw did not scruple to use a phrase like "this open wound of the denial of our national rights", asserting the entitlement of a people to be misgoverned (if need be) by themselves rather than efficiently repressed by others. "I would
rather be burned at the stake by Irish Catholics", he announced, in yet another half-identification with Joan of Arc, "than be protected by an Englishman".
²⁵

"A man always describes himself unconsciously whenever he describes anyone else", wrote Shaw. On another occasion, he phrased the same idea slightly differently by saying: "The best autobiographies are confessions, but if a man is a deep writer all his works are confessions".
¹
The relationship between Protestantism
and autobiography is well documented and is based on the fact that the Protestant confession is made to the self. In seeking a narrative of expiation, such a mind produces autobiography, sometimes taking the form of poetry as in the case of Wordsworth's
The Prelude
or of drama in the writings of Shaw.

Saint Joan, as depicted by the playwright, is, without ever knowing it, one of the earliest exponents of Protestant self-interrogation. She listens to her inner voices and follows their dictates, in the conviction that no mere priest or bishop should come between herself and her god. She upholds that right to private judgement which would, in later centuries, become a cornerstone of Protestantism. So Shaw, brought up as an Irish Protestant, came to interpret the career of this French Catholic peasant girl as a parable of emerging Protestantism in a Catholic-dominated society. In other words, he read her life in France as an allegory of his own youth in Ireland. As a boy he had believed that every Catholic, including famous ones such as
Pope Pius DC or even Joan of Arc, would burn in the flames of hell:

Then when I was seven years old, Pope Pius DC ruled that I, though a little Protestant, might go to heaven in spite of my invincible ignorance. But I made no reciprocal concessions at the time. I hope this service of mine to the Church (the play
Saint Joan
) may be accepted as a small set-off against the abominable bigotry of my Irish Protestant childhood, which I renounced so ingloriously when I grew to some sort of discretion and decency
that I emptied the baby out with the bath, and left myself for a while with no religion at all.
²

This is tongue-in-cheek stuff, for it is as a nascent Protestant that Joan is celebrated by Shaw.

In his later years, the playwright did come to see himself as a versatile religious man, a kind of Catholic-Protestant. "My own faith is clear", he wrote somewhat jauntily, "I am a resolute Protestant, I believe in the Holy Catholic Church, the Holy Trinity of Father, Son (or Mother, Daughter) and Spirit, in the Communion of Saints, the life to come, the Immaculate Conception . . ."
³
Perhaps it is wisest, therefore, to see his Joan as an equivalent kind of Protestantized Catholic, a "Cathestant" imagined by a "Protholic".

If Shaw's childhood in Ireland may have helped him to feel his way into the situation of Joan, how truer still must this have been of his experience as a tongue-tied and timid young Irishman among the self-confident lions of literary London. His story, after all, was remarkably similar to Joan's: the youth from the provinces who comes to a big city, renounces a former role as one of life's losers, and proves twice as capable as any of his former masters. Moreover, the resolute feminism which caused Shaw to wonder whether God might not be a woman and Jesus his daughter would also have increased his identification with Joan, for she made herself manly, even as he sought to become womanly.

Shaw was himself convinced that, if Joan had been less manly and more womanly, she would probably have been canonized a saint long before the year 1920, when the honour was finally bestowed. Her emphasis on private judgement was, of course, a massive threat to the order of the medieval church and state, but so also was her sexual ambiguity construed as a challenge to the hierarchical relationship of male and female. She demanded the right to wear a soldier's clothes, and to have her hair bobbed in the manner of a young buck. This causes titters among the court ladies at the start of Shaw's play; but it was also one of the reasons for which she was eventually burnt at the stake as a witch. "I am a soldier", says Joan to her French comrade Dunois in the middle of the play, "I do not want to be thought of as a woman".
⁴

The teaching of the Catholic Church on the issue of women in men's clothing was clear enough. The Book of Deuteronomy had taught that all who put on the garments of the opposite sex were "an abomination unto the Lord thy God". The historical Joan not only failed to relent, but – unlike Shaw's character – steadfastly refused to give any explanation
of her behaviour, such as the preservation of her chastity among an army of uncouth and lewd men. One of her most recent biographers,
Marina Warner, has accounted for that obstinacy in the following way:

Through her transvestism she abrogated the destiny of womankind. She could thereby transcend her sex; she could set herself apart and usurp the privileges of the male and his chums to superiority. At the same time, by never pretending to be other dun a woman and a maid, she was not only usurping a man's function but shaking off the trammels of sex altogether to occupy a different, third order, neither male nor female, but unearthly, like the angels whose company she loved.
⁵

So Marina Warner contends that
Joan's transvestism unsexed her, but that it did not confer manhood, leaving her instead an "ideal androgyne", to be known not as a woman but as a person. She goes on:

There is no mode of being peculiar to the third sex, or to androgyny. But as the rejection of femininity is associated with positive action, it assumes the garb of virtue in the classical sense VIRTUS; and so she borrowed the apparel of men, who held, at least in theory, a monopoly on virtue, on reason and on courage, while eschewing the weakness of women, who were allotted to the negative pole, where virtue meant weakness and humility, and nature meant carnality.
⁶

So the historical Joan saw herself not as male, but as "not-female", an epicene being who, in cutting her hair, renounced and transcended sexuality. The paradox was that, in the eyes of her inquisitors, this transvestism constituted an abomination, whereas under the eye of eternity that sexlessness gave her the appearance of saintliness, on the Pauline principle that after baptism "there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus". Marina Warner contends that such transcendence can never be complete, because the imitation of Christ is still the imitation of a man, and a man, moreover, who is taken as the human touchstone. "Ironically", she concludes, "Joan's life, probably one of the most heroic a woman has ever lived, is nevertheless a tribute to the male principle".
⁷

This final judgement might be qualified. The
overt
appeal of a woman in man's clothing may well be to some vestigial concept of male superiority: but this would only be so if that clothing were obviously
borrowed
from a man, as in Shakespearian comedy. This is not at all the impression conveyed by Shaw's Joan. She does not seem
enamoured of manliness: rather, she is embarrassed by the constrictions of gender. She is shown as one committed to breaking through the superficial trappings of personality to authentic selfhood, as in the early scene where she cleverly punctures the disguises of the Dauphin and Gilles de Rais, who have swapped robes in order to test her clairvoyant powers. Joan has, of course, no difficulty in doing this, even though the Dauphin is a stammering neurotic and Gilles de Rais has a naturally magnificent bearing. She drags out the retiring Dauphin by the arm, saying tenderly: "Gentle little Dauphin, I am sent to you to drive the English army from Orleans and from France, and to crown you king..."
⁸

That feat of identification seems supernaturally sanctioned: and so the timid Dauphin is moved to a new self-confidence by her daring: "You see, all of you; she knew the blood royal. Who dare say now that I am not my father's son?" One of the most touching features of the ensuing play is the tender, yet probing, badinage between these two, as if Shaw had set out to illustrate Freud's contention that manly women are attractive to, and attracted by, womanly men. Just as the powerless peasant Joan donned male clothes to achieve saintly as well as military standing, so also as a political activist she worked through a male, this pliable Dauphin, in order to shape the destiny of France. Through him she put on male political clothing as well.

At many different points during Shaw's play, Joan's selflessness seems manifest – when she beseeches Captain Robert de Baudricourt at the start to permit her to go as a soldier in company to the Dauphin; or again before her interrogators; or, ironically this time, at the end in the face of her admirers. Deeper still, however, is the audience's awareness that only a woman of massive independence of mind would dare to expose herself to such risk. So she never seems more strong than when she seems most weak. No man in the world of the play ever conceives of her as a sexual object: and it is said by herself that she is not even good-looking. She appears to some, therefore, not so much as the virgin as a prototype of the witch; and it was doubtless as such that she was burned. This dimension makes her a logical precursor of today's feminists, and Shaw is at pains to exploit the connection between the historical figure and the liberated women of the 1920s in which the play was written. He particularly recreates her in the image of the Fabian woman of the Bloomsbury set, the kind of woman with whom Shaw mixed in London's intellectual circles.

This requires some explanation. All through the nineteenth century, men had put women on a pedestal of purity: by very definition, women
were holier, purer, and more refined than men. The reasoning behind the ploy was clear enough: if women were refined, their delicacy must not be corrupted by the workaday world. The woman's place was in the home, as an angel of the house, preserving the values of civilization. Traditionalists argued that because she was refined, she was excused the burden of labour; but suffragists began to claim that because she was acquiescent, woman was denied the right to work and to vote in public affairs. The suffragists were right. Superior in theory, woman was deemed inferior in practice. What was fascinating, however, was the selective nature of the argument as advanced by many subsequent feminists. Although they rejected the notion of the woman's place being in the home, they never rejected the theory of woman's superior refinement and sensitivity. On the contrary, they used that as an argument for female independence and, in some extreme cases, for female dominance over men. In the Bloomsbury years, the 1910s and 1920s, this movement reached its flowering in a spectacular range of non-sexual relationships between
androgynous women and passive men, the assumption being that woman, by her fastidiousness and grace, might civilize and ennoble her comrade.

Joan is a precursor of that tradition. In her relation with the Dauphin, she casts herself in the part of feminist civilizer. It is, of course, the woman in the Dauphin who is responding to the man in Joan, the woman who by tradition longs to have the world explained to her by a resourceful and canny man. However, in this case the explainer is the manly woman Joan. She contains both masculine and feminine attributes, as do many adolescents in whom gender orientations are as yet unresolved. In this also lies a clue to her stature as a comprehensive and universal heroine: the fact that, as a seventeen-year-old, she is in some ways still a child. Her final victory is the triumph of youth over age: she compels the old to adjust to the standards of the young, and the result is human progress. Even more subtly, in the part of a guileless child, she is able to confront the moral theologians with peasant proverbs and country wisdom, attempting – like a dynamic conservative – to hold them true to the deepest implications of their own Christian tradition, a tradition which had been occluded and almost lost amid the rationalizations of priests.

This cuts to the core-value of the play: Shaw's Protestant distrust of a separate, self-appointed priesthood and his alternative view that every person should be his or her own priest. The deepest drama of the Protestant tradition is the one enacted between the individual soul and its God. To come between a sinner and his God is a terrible deed, for
Protestantism has a rooted distrust of the Catholic confessional (and what are the central inquisition scenes of Shaw's play but an obscenely protracted confession?). The Protestant confession tends to be a nonspecific admission of guilt, but in the play the inquisition is cruelly pedantic in its pursuit of every possible detail of Joan's behaviour. For Shaw, a true confession is made to oneself and not to another person, much less an assembled gallery. This insistence was not just theological. He applied it also to doctors, dentists, lawyers, and all professions which claimed mastery of an arcane and learned discipline. He accused each profession of being "a conspiracy against the laity".

So, what better way to depict the obfuscations of the professional than by confronting the learned theologians with a child-mystic, by confronting the scholars of books with the listener to voices? As
H. L. Mencken wrote in his book
The Nature and Origin of
Religion:

The business of wrestling with omnipotence tends to fall into the hands of
specialists, which is to say, into the hands of men who by habit and training are sub-normally god-shy and have a natural talent for remonstrance and persuasion. These specialists, by trial and error, develop a professional technique, and presently it is so complicated and highly formalized that the layman can scarcely comprehend it.
⁹

Joan does not think of herself as a theologian, rather as a plain country girl caught in an unfamiliarly magnificent room with princes of the church whose words she cannot understand. She says what she thinks, because she is honest by nature and also because she is blissfully unaware of what she is supposed to think. Other Shavian heroines – such as Mrs. Warren or Raina – were painfully aware of how they appeared to others, and constantly viewed themselves through the eyes of an implied male. Joan, by contrast, is unaware of the courtly art of self-presentation. For Shaw she was just a paragon of ferocious simplicity: a country girl, rough-hewn and unadorned, and
not
a stained-glass saint. The play stresses the
accidental
nature of sainthood – given or withheld at the whim of vain professionals – and the intrinsic nature of a
saintliness which is never conscious of itself as such. Since saintliness is innate rather than learned, Shaw slyly implies that it is impossible for the learned to be saintly. In this way, he dismantles the age-old association in the Catholic Church of learning and piety.