the bell: an anglo-irish view

The Bell: An Anglo-Irish ViewAuthor(s): Hubert ButlerSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring, 1976), pp. 66-72Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25477105 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 14:28

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Edinburgh University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to IrishUniversity Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.96 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 14:28:06 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=eup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/25477105?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Hubert Butler

The Bell: An Anglo-Irish View

In my generation we have had several good Irish journals, but two

whose influence surpassed that of all the others. When I was growing

up, there was the Irish Statesman, which led me and many others out

of the Anglo-Irish ghetto in which we had been brought up and reminded

us that we were Irishmen. For our parents of the ascendancy it was easy and obvious to live in Ireland, but we of the 'descendancy' were surrounded

in the 'twenties by the burnt houses of our friends and relations. England beckoned us and only an odd obstinate young person would wish to

stay at home.

In fact, we who stayed were rather odd. I had met AE and Sir Horace

Plunkett and had been enchanted by them. I had seen W. B. Yeats

prancing up and down the floor of the Oxford Union, declaiming

against English politicians. Empires were crashing all round us and

Oxford was full of scheming young students from the new resurgent nations. I was proud that I belonged to one of them. I was, however, too young and inexperienced to know that Plunkett and AE, and the

other older men who ran the Irish Statesman, were already tired and

disillusioned, although the final insult to Plunkett?the burning of

Kilteragh?had not yet happened. But many of their creameries had

already been destroyed by the Black and Tans, who believed that the

farmers hatched sedition over their milk churns. It was round the creamer

ies that AE's new Ireland was supposed to develop: a community of spirit was to grow organically from the cooperative marketing of eggs, beef

and butter.

In 1923 Plunkett persuaded me to join the Irish county libraries and

in them I found many likeminded people, such as Lennox Robinson, Thomas McGreevy, Geoffrey Taylor, Robert Wilson, the poet, Frank

O'Connor and Helen Roe. It was the writers who brought calamity on the libraries, as one can read in Lady Gregory's journals, when they collided with Irish piety and prudery. The result was that the central

organisation moved to Dunfermline in Scotland and we all dispersed, [n 1927 I went off as a teacher to Egypt, then to Russia and to Yugoslavia, and only returned to Ireland in 1938. The Irish Statesman was gone. Plunkett and AE had left for England, with the result that we remnants

66



THE BELL: AN ANGLO-IRISH VIEW

of the Anglo-Irish 'intelligentsia' would have been nobody's children, had The Bell not taken us under its wing.

There were in fact quite a few of us. There were survivors from the

days when Irish writing had been focussed on Coole Park: Joseph Hone, Lennox Robinson and the Yeats brothers; there were those who had

made their names in England: Cecil Day Lewis, L. A. G. Strong, Elizabeth

Bo wen; there were Northerners: Louis MacNeice and W. R. Rodgers; and there were my own contemporaries: Geoffrey Taylor, Arland Ussher,

Denis Johnston, Monk Gibbon, Harry Craig, Arthur Power, all of us

rather odd and not finding it easy to put Ireland first.

Taylor became literary editor of The Bell, later on I became its review

editor. We both knew the country as a whole. We had organised new

libraries in the north, in Derry and Antrim, and knew the truth of what

O'Faol?in had written in an editorial for one of his Ulster numbers.

Partition, he declared, had resulted from the stupid rivalry between

the "hypernationalism" of the south and the "hyperinternationalism" of the north. The Ulsterman, cut off from his roots, was being suffocated

by the indiscriminate flood of news and views that poured in on him

from overseas, as we were in the south by our intense introversion.

In my Coleraine library I had also learnt a little about Ulster intransigence,

although I met more Anglo-Irish nationalists there than in Kilkenny.

O'Faol?in's attitude to Ulster was generous and imaginative and he

met with a generous response. In the pages of The Bell the Dean of

Belfast defended the Ulster Protestant with firmness and courtesy, as

did Frederick Leahy, a northern clergyman. Others took part in the

dialogue. Leahy maintained that the Ulsterman fears 'principles' not

people, that his Protestant faith is very dear to him, that his loyalty to the English monarch is dependent on the Protestant succession and

that his religion is rooted in Ulster, whereas the creed of the south is

international and must be judged not in Ireland alone, but by what happens all over the world, in Spain, South America and Canada. Yet, he ended

as follows: "North and South we both love Ireland. May God yet unite

us peaceably and securely!" Thomas Carnduff, an Ulster poet, wrote

in the same way:

We Belfastmen love Ireland. Every sod and stone and mountain

and lake is part of us . . . Yet the Orange movement began with

the people, it has remained with the people . . . The sneers and

67



IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

gibes at Orangeism have only strengthened its hold upon the

Ulster men.

A symposium of 'the five strains', which omitted the Scottish strain,

provoked a memorable letter from James Auchmuty, which possibly has relevance today. He said, just as Leahy had, that the northern Presby terian looks to Scotland as his spiritual home. "He is sprung from the

same Gaelic granite as his fellow-countrymen but moulded to a different

pattern." I believe that for the truth about Ulster you must still look to

The Bell and not to the sensationalism of the contemporary press. But as

I reread Auchmuty, I remember a prophecy which I read not long ago in a Dublin daily by a Belfast sociologist, A. E. Spencer: that, after many

vicissitudes and much bloodshed, Ulster might become a part of a new

self-governing Scotland, enriched by oil and federated with England. Ulster had once been the bridgehead between two branches of the Gael; in this way history would only be repeating itself. That indeed would

be the end of a dream that many of us believed in, but I can conceive of

worse endings.

The Bell ceded out its invitation to all those who loved the Irish

language and loathed the way that the politicians, the pedagogues, the

urbanised peasants had sucked the life and beauty from it. Those who

inherited it as a mother tongue used it to pass examinations aniget jobs in Dublin. The East Gael used it to oust the West Briton who here and

there still administered the institutions his ancestors had built up. The true lovers of the language, O'Faol?in himself, Daniel Binchy or

Myles Dillon, bitterly turned on those who by compulsion had made it

something to be shirked and scorned. To Arland Ussher, an Anglo Irishman, it had been "his first love in languages, abounding in a beauty and expression of phrase of which the Irish-English of Synge alone

could give some idea." "It was", he wrote,

the great language of conversation, of quips, hyperboles, cajoleries, lamentations, blessings, cursings, endearments, tirades. Its un

suspected rhythm had even given an intimate and personal quality to the great Irish writers of English. It was the winged word in

its flight that was beautiful. Stuffed and mounted on the page of

a school book, it stank.

I have quoted Ussher more fully than others, because the Irish National

68




Movement, like the Gaelic League and the 'Literary Revival', has often

been attributed to a rebel faction of the Anglo-Irish who, like Ussher, were tired of 'broad horizons' and empire building but found at home

a promise of warmth, stability and intimacy in which the shyer, more

complex talents might expand. Once in 1941 O'Faol?in looked back

forty years and thought of those who" had kept the air vibrant with their

patronage, curiosity, optimism and width of interest". Now that Anglo Ireland seems all but dead and the defence of Protestantism left to the

northerners, there can be no chauvinism in recalling that more than half

of those he mentioned were Anglo-Irish Protestants. As O'Faol?in said,

they were national, not 'nationalistic', and in the pages of The Bell you will observe how difficult was the task that confronted them. The old

strands of affection and loyalty had to be unravelled and woven tenderly into a new pattern. There were British imperialism and Catholic universal

ism; there was Irish and English racialism; and there Was the many sided dissent of Protestantism.

Michael Lennon described in two articles how, years before, Douglas

Hyde steered the Gaelic League past all these rocks and shoals and whirl

pools. For example, because Lord Castletown, who was proud of his

Gaelic ancestry, was serving in South Africa, Hyde discouraged pro-Boer demonstrations. In Kilkenny, Standish O'Grady, who edited a local

Protestant newspaper, declared that it was not '98 that Ireland should

commemorate but the Convention of Dungannon in 1782, when all

Ireland had united to secure an independent parliament. He maintained

that only the Irish gentry, degenerate as they were, could now prevent Ireland from lapsing into squalid anarchy or the clutches of "the ignoble rich". He persuaded Otway Cuffe, brother of the Earl of Desart, and his

sister-in-law, the Dowager Countess, to start a branch of the Gaelic

League, to have an annual feis in the town, and to support many cultural

and industrial enterprises. Not many of our parents caught the Gaelic

infection but few were insensitive to the 'vibrations in the air', the curiosity, the optimism. Then came World War I, the Easter Rebellion, the

disastrous 'twenties. Adult Anglo-Ireland withdrew to England or sulked

among the ruins, scornfully watching the antics of what it called 'the

Dale', and sourly waiting for O'Grady's grim prophecy to fulfil itself.

In the very first number of The Bell Elizabeth Bo wen, still tethered

to Ireland by her home and many family ties, considered what role,

if any, the Big House could still play. It no longer carried privilege with

it, but loneliness, isolation, expense. Yet one held on. Old houses crumble,

69




but the vigour and resolution that built them takes a long time to die.

Miss Bo wen mentioned the strength that these houses impart, the great

feeling of independence:

One lives by one's own standards, makes one's own laws and does

not care within fairly wide limits what anybody outside the demesne

wall thinks . . . The purpose of our big rooms was social. 'Cannot

we', they seem to ask, 'be as never before social? Cannot we

scrap

the past with its bitterness and barriers and all meet, throwing in

what we have?' . . . The doors of the big houses stand open all day. The stranger is welcome just as much as the friend . . .

in fact he is the friend, if he does not show himself otherwise.

But who ever walks in? Is it suspicion, hostility, irony, that keeps so much of Ireland away from the big house door? If this lasts,

we impoverish life all round.

She wrote and reviewed fairly frequently for The Bell and it was

there, I think, rather than at her own front door that she met Catholic

Nationalist Ireland. Yet her book, Bowens Court, which, celebrating one

Anglo-Irish family and one dearly loved region, in effect celebrated

them all, was written behind demesne walls and by its rare independence of spirit might seem to justify them. Yet her grandmother's house in

Tipperary, which was my grandfather's, kindly but traditional people, had been burnt in 1923 and Elizabeth Bowen well knew that the ghosts of the ascendancy haunted these long avenues and scared away all but

those realists to whom O'Faol?in appealed. She filled Bowen's Court

for many summers with English writers and the few Irish ones that sought her out. But then her husband died and The Bell died and finally she

allowed Bowen's Court itself to die. When I last met her in County

Kilkenny, just before her own death, she spoke of Ireland with such

bitterness that I have tried to persuade myself that it was her last illness

that was speaking and not her utter disillusionment.

A few years after O'Faol?in had left The Bell, something happened which brought him to my defence in its pages and earned him my deep

gratitude. In 1941 the long tension between Catholic and Orthodox

in Yugoslavia exploded and the Croats, 'liberated' by the Nazis, had

formed a strongly Catholic government in the new independent Croatia

and it had decreed the expulsion, forced conversion or extermination

of some two million Orthodox. Some hundreds of thousands had been

70




massacred and 240,000 converted. I decided to go out again and see

what had happened. A Croat friend had joined the Partisans and become

Tito's principal interpreter. It was easy to get permission to inspect the

Church papers of 1941-45 at the Ministry of Justice; it was obvious

that the Church had enthusiastically backed the campaign against the

Orthodox but was shocked by the inevitable violence with which it

was carried out. When I came home I read how Artukovitch, the

Minister of Religion and Justice, who had passed the decrees outlawing the Orthodox, had taken refuge in Ireland under an assumed name.

(It was not until later that I learnt that he had been escorted by the acting Provincial of the Croat Franciscans and had stayed for a year in Rathgar).

When, in October 1952, I was invited to a discussion on Yugoslavia at the International Affairs Association in Dublin, I tried to tell about

the massacres and the conversions. Many writers, like Arnold Toynbee and Carlo Falconi, have since described them, but at the time the subject

was unmentionable and the Papal Nuncio, whom we had not expected to be present, rose up after I had said a few sentences and stalked out

blazing with fury. There was wild excitement and when I got home

every public body in the county, even the creamery committees, held

meetings to denounce me. I had to resign from every committee, public and private, of which I was a member. I had long before published the

relevant documents in the Church of Ireland Gazette, but the only pro minent people who dared to come publicly to my defence and to the

defence of free speech were Sean O'Faol?in, in February 1953? and Sean

O'Casey. O'Faol?in wrote at length. It was perhaps an accident of history that the Catholics massacred the Orthodox rather than vice-versa, but in

our country and in our time it was surely unwise to deny or belittle

the force of religious passion, or to pretend that it cannot be as barbarous

and destructive as any other ideology. The Bell had a

special quality about which I have not spoken. No

doubt they used rejection slips in plenty, but in its early days Frank

O'Connor, as poetry editor, and Geoffrey Taylor treated their con

tributors as friends, explaining their refusals with comments and advice

and sometimes in a friendly foreword criticising what they printed. O'Faol?in too worked as though he were not merely making a magazine but shaping a literature or calling it into being. Given time, that is what

The Bell might have done. Peadar O'Donnell carried on worthily for

six or seven years after O'Faol?in retired; then he too found the strain

too much and increasingly withdrew from it. I never learnt why The

71




Bell died. Slowly it began to sag like a balloon from which the air is

escaping. Some strong puff of passionate conviction might have inflated

it again, but none came. For a while it had kept hope alive; for a while

O'Faol?in's enthusiastic vision kept it going. "When the will of Ireland", he wrote, "becomes intense again, Romantic Ireland will return. When

the will of the world, now barely hanging by its finger nails, becomes

intense again, romance will warm life all over the globe."

72



the bell: an anglo-irish view

Documents