Or then being upset that they are only 10% Irish when they are soooo Irish.
There is an analogy to England.
The director of
Ensy Man and
Bait, two films steeped in Cornish tradition, said in an interview that he was not 'English' but a celt. I winced when I read it. He was postering. What he was saying was hollow and without meaning, but it is not an uncommon position. Depending on their circumstances, English artists like to emphasis what faint traces they may have to other cultures. They are, like the director, simply trying to escape history, the nightmare from which none of us can wake up from. Do they hate England? I used to think so. Now I think they are simply following a very English tradition of self-loathing.
I was educated in a Catholic school. Growing up, the attitude to think oneself as Irish, rather than English, was common. One Irish grandmother outweighed the importance of the other three English (or Scottish) grandparents. Even I indulged such thoughts: “I am not
just English; you see I am also Irish. My blood is not completely lacking in vigour! What? I have never seen those faraway lands, or touched those mystical stones, but I feel it in my bones, more or less.” The Scouse, the most plastic of all paddies, have a saying: Scouse, Not English.
Famous
converts to the Faith, Newman, Evelyn Waugh, Hopkins, have always sincerely been English, how could they not? All three were educated at Oxford. They lacked that Irish part of the story that so many English Catholics do. Their feelings towards the Irish were bog standard for the period they lived in: Waugh hated Ireland when he visited. Hopkins wrote some lovely poems about how lonely he was when sent there by Church authorities.
Newman spent his later career arguing that he was not an interloper and traitor to his country due to his conversion. His greatest work, the
Apologia pro Vita Sua, is a justification after years of suffering abuse from men who really wished to convert themselves but lacked the courage.
All three writers were not confused men. They were as English as you and I and, I now believe, shared much of the same attitudes those pseudo-Irish students did and do. Waugh, Hopkins, and Newman could not pretend to be of a nation that they barely visited, but those students could and they did.
It is exotic to claim to be a celt or Irish when one's whole life is spent in England, but it can only be done performatively. I can drink Guinness, learn Gaelic, and develop an interest in Polytheism, but I was raised in England, around its customs and traits, and what came before me cannot be ignored. To identify with a foreign or dead belief system because one finds England dull is an immature mindset; and now that people are expected not to grow up, it persists and withers even the most interesting of flowers.
Personally, I share the view of Morrisey: English Heart, Irish Blood. My history, right or wrong, is my own. I cannot argue against it, for it has already happened; I cannot reject it because it lingers in these bones. That I try to understand and accept it is all I can do. People like that director or those supposedly Irish students, will only make themselves unhappy and confused. They will wear ill-fitted clothes and never come to terms with why they think they way they do. I am not suggesting we reject foreign ideas or avoid reading French literature (learning a language really is access to a new way of thinking), but that we should seek out works that may bore us in the way cabbage does. Of the many reasons to read national literature or study English philosophy and history, one of the best is that you begin to realise yourself in these people. A philosophy is often just an expression of a national mindset. When you read JS Mill or Hobbes, you might discern attitudes or prejudices that you may have. You may realise that your thoughts are not so original. Characters and situations from our lives are found in the novels of Austen or Trollope. I have never met a Dickens character in real life, but I have met several people who were Dickensian in nature. We can grow from this sort of learning; we are humbled by it.
People of this nation, as is the case for most western countries, like to see themselves as modernists, alienated from the past, but that is not true. They are the products of the past. That is beautiful, not to be whimpered over. We are a part of a narrative (England, European) that we barely realise in the present, but perform unconsciously. TS Eliot captures my feelings on the subject:
Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
The best modernists, Eliot, Joyce, Mann, understood that one shpuld not run away from the past but should question it, work out what it means, and embrace what may come of it. It is the only way we can progress ourselves beyond our thoughts and feelings. If we avoid history, we may come up with a novel perspective, we may receive a cult following, but it will be a temporary existence. We will be, to quote Eliot again, messiahs only for a generation:
“It is fatally easy, under the conditions of the modern world, for a writer of genius to conceive of himself as a Messiah. Other writers, indeed, may have had profound insights before him; but we readily believe that everything is relative to its period of society, and that these insights have now lost their validity; a new generation is a new world, so there is always a chance, if not of delivering a wholly new gospel, of delivering one as good as new. Or the messiahship may take the form of revealing for the first time the gospel of some dead sage, which no one has understood before; which owing to the backward and confused state of men's minds has lain unknown to this very moment; or it may even go back to the lost Atlantis and the ineffable wisdom of primitive peoples. A writer who is fired with such a conviction is likely to have some devoted disciples; but for posterity he is liable to become, what he will be for the majority of his contemporaries, merely one among many entertainers. And the pity is that the man may have had something to say of the greatest importance: but to announce, as your own discovery, some truth long known to mankind, is to secure immediate attention at the price of ultimate neglect.” After Strange Gods
Man must come to terms with who he is. He must seek what has come before him. His living will never changes, but his intellect and knowledge can influence and help him understand.
…
The nationalist instinct has never been too vocal (not to say explicit. We had an empire) in England. Think of a couple days ago when people celebrated Burns Night. Robert Burns was a great poet, deserving of his national stature. But who is England's national poet? Do we have Burns Night or Bloomsday? We have never felt the need. Our national poet is Shakespeare, a man of a world following. We have not needed days of celebration, which are often bad replacements for religious holidays and expressions of insecurity. People of good health do not need cheering up:
“I know from life and from history something you have not thought of: often the outward, visible, material signs and symbols of happiness and success only show themselves when the process of decline has already set in. The outer manifestations take time - like the light of that star up there which may in reality already be quenched when it looks to us to be shining at its brightest.” - Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks
Victims of our own success. It is a bad cliché, but it is true. We have never needed a Bloomsday or Burns Night. Personally, I found it quite embarrassing to celebrate holidays like that. I like Burns, I love
Ulysses and Shakespeare, but I do not need a day to celebrate them. Great art inhabits my heart and speaks to my mind every day.
But then, many people need reminding of their country’s individual glory...
…
I think there is two types of men that our country has produced: there is the cultural Englishman, which is a natural product of a mostly English history, and then there is the civilisational Englishman, which stems from a liberal tradition and is artificial. Among them number: Joseph Conrad, VS Naipaul, George Santayana, Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Fernando Pessoa, Schopenhauer, and Tocqueville. These men would not consider themselves English, but they would happily live (as some did) here because they saw England as the finest export of liberty. It is quite a cosmopolitan attitude, very intellectual, and unable to be produced on a mass scale. Most people hate freedom, struggle to understand its value, and prefer to join hands with the nearest army of the night for their thrills. The political liberty of any country is always a brief experience, and the individualist's fate is to be a nomad, burrowing his home in whatever dirt he can find. These might be the 'British Values' that our politicians speak of, but the English are not ideas, but people, with homes and souls and the right to breathing space. In the end, they are worthy of the choice to decide their own fate, whatever it may be.
