Inventing Ireland by Declan Kiberd Read Free Book Online Page B

notice that its end was near. By its famous no-rent policy of "boycott" – so named after Captain Boycott, one of its victims in Mayo – theLand League helped win many famous victories; and Parnell's shrewd obstructionist tactics did the rest.
    Throughout the later nineteenth century, Ireland functioned as a sort of political and social laboratory in which, parabolically, the English could test their most new-fangled ideas – ideas about the proper relation between religion and the state, about the changing role of the aristocracy, above all about the holding and use of land. Indeed, experiments of this kind can be traced as far back as the 1830s, when Ireland was given a streamlined system of national education and a country-wide postal network years ahead of England, which only

adopted the models after they were seen to thrive and prosper. All this may help to explain the seeming paradox of amodernist literature and cultural politics in a country too often noted for its apparent backwardness. In fact, by the 1880s and 1890s, Ireland was in certain respects clearly advanced by contrast with England. In politics, it was confronting its national question (something which, even today, the English have not done), dismantling church-state connections, and evolving a republican politics based on a theory of citizens' rights. A highly-educated younger generation, finding few positions available commensurate with its abilities or aspirations, was about to turn to writing as a means of seeking power: out of the strange mixture of backwardness and forwardness everywhere, it would forge one of the most formally daring and experimental literatures of the modern movement.
    As a laboratory, of course, Ireland had also known some less pleasant experiments – laissez-faire economics, oscillations from conciliation to coercion, curfews and martial law – for it was a crucible in which Britain not only tested ideas for possible use back home, but also for likely implementation in other colonies. The process was reciprocal. Inevitably, the arriving Irish, in their tens of thousands, occupied and used England as a laboratory in which to solve many of their own domestic problems at a certain useful remove. The career of Parnell, no less than those of Wilde and Shaw, might be read as an instance of the theme.
    The crisis which overtook the aristocracy under the challenge of Parnellism can be understood with reference to a quip of Oscar Wilde: property, he joked, gives people a position in society, but then it proves so expensive to maintain that it prevents them from keeping it up. In some ways, this had been a problem long beforeGladstone devised his Land Acts, a problem which was traceable back to 1800. After the Act of Union, Dublin was a "deposed capital"; its season was no longer splendid; many landlords spent more and more time in England; and the self-confidence which had characterized the Anglo-Irish of the eighteenth century began rapidly to wane. One frustrated leader of this enfeebled aristocracy,Standish O'Grady, berated his peers in a pamphlet of 1886: "Christ save us! You read nothing, know nothing!" 24 Parnell, assisted by the Land League, was simply delivering the final blows which would complete the fall of feudalism in Ireland. He never overtly endorsed the violence deployed by agrarian insurgents, but he could not help being its beneficiary: in this, too, Parnell remained an enigmatic and ambivalent figure, despite repeated British attempts to discredit him with links to organized crime. In the end, just when

Home Rule seemed a real possibility, he was broken by his love for Kitty O'Shea, a woman married to a member of his parliamentary party. Cited as a co-respondent, he was abandoned by Gladstone (whose High Anglican conscience was outraged) and denounced as a public sinner unfit for leadership by the bishops and priests of the Catholic Church. His party split amid terrible rancour and he died in his beloveds arms at