Portrait of the artist as a young hack

`The rabble spit forth their bile", snorted the writer Friedrich Nietzsche, "and they call the results a newspaper". That was a definitive statement of the chasm which had opened between artist and journalist in central Europe by the close of the 19th century.

In theory, universal literacy should have been celebrated by writers as a basis for an expanded readership and artistic income; in fact, they castigated the coarsening of all language by the purveyors of penny dreadfuls and the yellow press. So the artists set out to make their works more learned and forbiddingly complex, in the effort to keep art pure from the masses. To complete this secession, many huddled together in bohemian enclaves: Montparnasse, Soho, and so on. Thus was opened a fatal gap between "highbrow" and "common" culture, between the outrageous personal lives of artists and the prosaic outrage of the journalists who reported on them.

Except in Ireland. Though a poet like W.B. Yeats might sometimes couple the words "drunken" and "journalist" (long before the era of expense accounts and Lunchtime O'Booze), he had a profound respect for newspapers. He dreamed that some of his ballads might one day re-enter the anonymity of folk tradition and was delighted when a late poem, "The Ghost of Roger Casement", won him popularity with readers of The Irish Press.

By far the chunkiest of Yeats's published works are the two posthumous volumes titled Uncollected Prose, comprising well over 1,000 pages of his journalism, in which he tried to give shape to the Irish Renaissance. Even more influential than such articles at the time, however, were the essays published in United Irishman by Frank Fay: they provoked a public debate about the proper components of a national theatre, leading to a flow of recruits for the Abbey company and audience. Appearing in a patriotic journal, they cemented links between political and cultural nationalism.

It was, of course, Yeats's more artistic (and self-serving) accounts which remained in print - but in their day, Fay's articles were decisive. Similarly, most of the major themes of the Irish Renaissance were first developed in works of journalism (long out of print). A debate upon the suitable topics for a national theatre was followed by the public in 1899 in a linked series of articles run by the Dublin Daily Express.

Among the contributors was George Russell (AE), who won fame as editor of The Irish Homestead. In that farmer's journal he routinely published the week's manure prices alongside mystical poems (leading the young James Joyce to dub it the Pig's Paper and to cover the embarrassment of having a short story published in it by resorting to the pen-name "Stephen Daedalus"). Russell saw all; the major movements of the period - from the Gaelic League through the Abbey Theatre to Co-Operation - as versions of national self-help following the failure of the British to deliver Home Rule.

Most supporters of these movements had not been to university and were scathing about the "ascendancy" style of Trinity College. Democrats by instinct, they took to journalism as the sole profession for which a college degree was not a prerequisite: and they were consequently more in touch than the academics with the emerging national sentiment. If the Gaelic League functioned as a cross between the Fabian clubs and the Workers' Education Movement, papers such as United Irishman, An Claidheamh Soluis and the mass-selling Irish Worker were its bibles and texts. Some of the contributors were world-class journalists: Arthur Griffith, for instance, resisted many tempting offers from this or that media empire overseas.

Another attitude which distinguishes Irish modernists from their continental counterparts was their utter trust of literary market forces. They did not share in the quasi-romantic suspicion of money and market success. When Shaw met the film mogul Louis Mayer, he complained: "You keep talking about art, whereas all I'm interested in is money." Likewise, Oscar Wilde sought "red gold" by editing the Ladies' Home Journal but found it ultimately with The Impor- tance of Being Earnest. Though he jocularly compared the modern press to the medieval rack, he was so shrewd in using newsmen to build the cult of his own personality that his press interviews and recollections run to two volumes.

Shaw invented "GBS" as a newspaper phenomenon. He became (in the words of Max Beerbohm) "the most brilliant and remarkable journalist in London" long before turning himself into its top-earning playwright. And even the other-worldly Yeats, on receiving news from The Irish Times of his 1923 Nobel Prize, cut short the editor's congratulations with a brutal query: "How much is it worth?"

Because there was so little respect for aristocratic values among these artists (apart from Yeats), the cult of the artist as one living above the swinish mob had little appeal: their cheerful espousal of a free market in ideas was of a piece with their democratic values. For that reason, they all wrote well and often for newspapers (even the fastidious Joyce and Synge), feeling empowered rather than demeaned by a mass-audience. In this they were conscious of following the great Jonathan Swift, whose Drapier's Letters, two centuries earlier, had closed the gap between journalism and art.

Joyce was mesmerised by the daily production of a newspaper with as much reading-matter as a book. In the "Aeolus" episode of Ulysses, he traced all aspects of that process (the machinery, typesetting, headline-addition). Between 1850 and 1900, newspapers had been enabled by technical advances to deal in massive, near-exclusive detail, with the events of the previous 24 hours rather than with expanses of days or weeks. Ulysses may be Joyce's slow-motion alternative to the paper of June 16th 1904, modern art's attempt to assimilate the mass product that was accused by some of assimilating traditional art. Like the newspaper, it asked its readers to construct a coherent world-picture out of disparate materials, all juxtaposed in ways that made the extreme seem ordinary and the ordinary seem extreme.

Since that period, newspapers in Ireland have done much to promote the arts. Novelists from Ben Kiely to John Banville have served as newspapermen, while journals such as The Irish Press and Sunday Tribune have discovered new authors. The Irish Times publishes poems on a regular basis while, in the person of the late Christina Murphy, it kept alive the educational debates initiated by Patrick Pearse.

What is needed now is a one-volume collection of the best of Irish journalism over the past century, edited perhaps by a rising young scholar. It is a pity that the word "journalistic" should now carry as negative a freight for many journalists as the word "journalistic" does among academics. Such usages savour more of the Gentlemen-versus-Players tradition of our neighbouring island, with the academic writers now cast as ex-Gentlemen and the newspaper people as ex-Players. The truly major intellects of our country never succumbed to such snobberies. In Ireland, as in that other modern republic of letters the US, there has rather been a relationship of mutual respect and creativity between artist and journalist. Long may it flourish.

This is a shortened version of the Christina Murphy Memorial Lecture delivered at the National Council for Educational Awards. Declan Kiberd is Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at UCD.