Late Celticism in Irish and Scottish literature: binding ties

The publication of James Macpherson’s Ossianic poetry was a pivotal event in the development of the English-language literatures of Scotland and Ireland. In addition to being the works that virtually invented Celticism and Romanticism, Macpherson’s texts Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Fingal, and Temora (all published in the early 1760s) inspired and influenced countless Irish and Scottish texts over the following centuries.

A product of post-Culloden Scotland, Macpherson’s poetry sparked a Celtic craze across Europe and had a massive influence on continental culture and scholarship. Macpherson claimed to have discovered and translated Scottish Gaelic poetry by the bardic figure Ossian (or Oisín), but much of the poetry had been Macpherson’s own creation and his work is often dismissed as fake or as a hoax. This is unfair to an extent, since Macpherson did actually work with some authentic Gaelic sources, themselves derived from the Fenian and Ulster cycles of literature shared between Ireland and Scotland.

As opposed to a highly enthusiastic response across much of continental Europe, reactions in Ireland to Macpherson’s work were often hostile, as scholars and novelists objected to what they regarded as his appropriation of Irish culture. The Ossian controversy had largely died down by the nineteenth century and it is sometimes thought that Celticism ended when the Irish and Scottish Celtic Revival movements of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries faded away. However, later figures of Irish and Scottish culture – such as James Joyce, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Seamus Heaney – also worked with Celtic themes.

Some late Celticism, including texts by the Scottish modernist poet Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve), was a reaction against the ‘false Celticism’ of Celtic Revival writers such as W.B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory, and Fiona Macleod (the female authorial persona of the Scotsman William Sharp). That era of Celticism had epicentres in Dublin and Edinburgh but was far from a unified, pan-Celtic movement.

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Although it overlapped with an actual pan-Celtic organization (the Celtic Association, founded in 1888), there was little in the way of substantial collaboration between Irish and Scottish Celtic Revivalists aside from some correspondence and planning between Yeats and Macleod/Sharp and the publication of Irish writers such as Douglas Hyde, Standish James O’Grady, and Katharine Tynan in Patrick Geddes’ Edinburgh-based journal The Evergreen.

Indeed, William Sharp was eventually ejected from the Yeats/Gregory crowd as an originally Celtic-themed theatre project (which included plans to put on plays by Fiona Macleod) became the more Ireland-focused Irish Literary Theatre. Sharp also became a persona non grata among Irish Celticists after making a holy show of himself with some visionary treehugging antics at a summertime Celticist party at Tulira Castle in 1897.

Hugh MacDiarmid welcomed Irish migration to Scotland and, as a Scottish nationalist, regarded Ireland’s ‘long struggle’ towards freedom as a ‘magnificent example’ for his own country. MacDiarmid claimed that he had once urinated in a Dublin alleyway together with Yeats after a heavy night of lemonade drinking at George Russell’s house. But he never met James Joyce, probably his main Irish literary inspiration. Despite this, MacDiarmid felt a Celtic connection to Joyce and he was clearly inspired by Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

By naming his massive 1955 poem In Memoriam James Joyce, MacDiarmid was signalling the artistic context he wished his work to be considered a part of but he was also attempting to link himself to Joyce through what he saw as a common Celtic background.

By naming his massive 1955 poem In Memoriam James Joyce, MacDiarmid was signalling the artistic context he wished his work to be considered a part of – the culture of large-scale, challenging, complex modern books – but he was also attempting to link himself to Joyce through what he saw as a common Celtic background. Still, the works of the two writers are vastly different in technique and outlook.

In Memoriam, a unique monument of materialist Celticism (a neat inversion of Matthew Arnold’s influential concept of the Celts as being inherently spiritual), stands in contrast to the philosophical idealism and scepticism of Joyce’s work, particularly his final major text, Finnegans Wake. MacDiarmid’s work also differs greatly to Joyce’s in terms of language. The multilingual melding and patterning Joyce achieved so spectacularly in Finnegans Wake is not at all matched by MacDiarmid’s In Memoriam, in which a selection of words and phrases from a range of world languages is inserted into a primarily English language text. MacDiarmid’s poem certainly has an arresting style, but this is achieved through the application of intentionally sterile and technical vocabulary, rather than through Joyce’s type of linguistic and structural virtuosity.

Nevertheless, both writers were interested in placing themselves within a Celtic tradition and in defining themselves partly through a distancing from ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture. Joyce’s relationship with Celticism and Irish-Scottish connections is complex, similar to the complexity of his feelings and attitudes towards Ireland itself. Though he parodied the Celtic Twilight or ‘cultic twalette’ in Finnegans Wake and had satirized ‘The Celtic note’ in his Dubliners story ‘A Little Cloud’, Joyce also demonstrated a fascination with Scottish culture and with Celticism. Joyce was particularly interested in the history of the migration of the ancient Scoti people from Ireland to Scotland and what he saw, rather provocatively, as the modern mirror image of that process – Scotland’s role in the seventeenth century plantation of Ulster.

Joyce’s work also expresses an anxiety towards the fate of the ‘Celtic world’ in its struggle against the domination of ‘a stronger race.’ Furthermore, the atmosphere of doubt and uncertainty in Finnegans Wake is influenced by the more sceptical strains of Scottish Enlightenment culture, especially the work of David Hume. According to Joyce, Hume was a ‘Celtic philosopher’ like the Irishman George Berkeley.

Later in the 20th century, Seamus Heaney also demonstrated a sustained interest in Irish-Scottish connections and in Celtic themes. In his book Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish, published during the Troubles, Heaney revisits the ancient Sweeney story as a way of appealing to both sides of the political/religious divide in the north of Ireland. However, the events in the book take place across what Heaney (like Joyce) called ‘the Celtic world’, both around Ireland and in several Scottish locations. Sweeney Astray looks in the opposite direction to many texts of modern Irish poetry in that it surveys the west of Scotland rather than the west of Ireland.

Much of Heaney’s book – and the original manuscripts that form J.G. O’Keeffe’s version of Buile Suibhne, Heaney’s source text – is set north of a line Heaney imagined ‘between Berwick and Bundoran’ and, elsewhere in his work, Heaney notes the linguistic links between Scotland and the north of Ireland that formed following the Ulster plantation. The introduction to Sweeney Astray speaks of an Irish-Scottish cultural affinity in Sweeney’s era that could be an exemplar to everyone in modern Ulster. Heaney hoped that his book might help unionists in the north feel a greater sense of kinship with their neighbours in the rest of the island and that it might encourage nationalists in the north to consider their connections to Scotland.

Literary Celticism as a whole can be divided in two basic periods; the early Romantic Celticism of Macpherson and the Irish and Scottish Revivals of the late 19th/early 20th centuries, and the late, anti-Romantic Celticism of the post-1922 period displayed in texts by Joyce, MacDiarmid, and Heaney.

Of those two long stages of Celticism, pan-Celtic sentiment is – perhaps surprisingly – more conspicuous in the latter era. The lack of Irish-Scottish harmony in early Celticism is mainly due to the divisive nature of James Macpherson’s claims and practices in the eighteenth century and the negative reception of his work in Ireland. The scarcity of Celtic solidarity in the Irish Revival can partly be explained by the generally nationalist rather than internationalist aspirations of Celtic Revival figures such as Gregory and Yeats in Ireland.

In contrast, within late Celticism, Joyce considered how the ‘sister’ nations Ireland and Scotland might be linked through similar philosophical traditions, MacDiarmid saw modern Irish cultural and political developments as a source of inspiration for Scotland, and Heaney turned to the Buile Suibhne story as a way of stressing cultural commonalities between the north and south of Ireland, as well as between Ireland and Scotland.

Richard Alan Barlow is the author of Modern Irish and Scottish Literature: Connections, Contrasts, Celticisms (Oxford University Press).