Mysticism and butter preservation.

Kennedy, Sean

NICHOLAS ALLEN. George Russell (AE) and the New Ireland, 1905-30. Four Courts Press, 2003, 45.00 [euro]

IF WE ARE WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND, then proponents of George Russell/AE may have cause for concern. The poetry is slight, oftentimes awful, and the paintings, especially when viewed in the same room as the more considerable achievements of his friend Jack Yeats at the Niland Gallery in Sligo, for example, seem ethereal to say the least. Nicholas Allen, however, is keen to recover a neglected aspect of Russell's legacy: Ills extraordinary industry as editor of the Irish Homestead (1905-23) and the Irish Statesman (1923-30). In this reading, we are confronted with an able and resourceful individual, a man rooted in the quotidian, who felt compelled, over a sustained period, to intervene in debates regarding the political future of his homeland. As his name may indicate, George Russell/AE is a man "under partition" (14), commonly viewed as the poet and painter who also, rather oddly, organized co-operatives, and Allen has set himself the task of having George Russell step out from behind AE, so that a more integrated portrait of the whole man can emerge.

The obvious temptation in trying to foreground Russell in his more down-to-earth mode would be to downplay the significance of his mysticism, swapping the current emphasis on Blavatsky for one on butter preservation. Allen avoids that pitfall. admirably, stressing, in fact, how Russell's visionary disposition served to fuel his practical engagement in politics, and gave him a breadth of vision that was often denied those whose eyes were focused more intently on all things Irish. By his appointment to the IAOS, Russell found a practical conduit for an evangelical sense of necessity, and was able to channel his energies towards the creation of a "new Ireland of his own mind's eye" (26).

The "New Ireland" of the title does not only refer to Russell's vision for Ireland in the period Allen has elected to write about. It is also the imagined product of a new analysis of Ireland that would move beyond the anthologies, and the familiar, "time-worn" images of religious conflict (14), to embrace a more fugitive, fragmentary practice capable of gauging the "constant motion of political manoeuvre" at a time of profound change (15). The occasional journal and fleeting editorial would serve as the source for such an engagement, and enable a more processual account of the birth of the Irish Free State to emerge. Allen wants us to imagine Russell's work as "a series of conversations held with his contemporaries" (15), so that Russell emerges as a man wholly of his time, which was a time of immense possibility as well as protracted conflict.

Russell's aim was nothing less than the reconstruction of Irish life, an attempt to supplant an existing preoccupation among the Irish with the achievement of an independent State with a desire to achieve a fully-fledged Irish character or "national being" (71). According to Russell, independence would not be viable without a prier change in the Irish temperament, and he felt a personal sense of obligation to help realize that change. Russell envisaged a rural civilization in which industry was regulated by culture, but, also, and perhaps equally importantly, by men of Russell's own standing. From the outset, Russell retained something of the "patrician bearing of his caste" (28), and shared with his colleague Horace Plunkett a desire to revive ascendancy-by consent. He saw the proper role for an Irish elite as one of guiding the evolution of Irish nationalism in order to prevent the Irish peasant from further destabilizing Ireland. Co-operation, modelled on ideas of mutual aid described by the Russian anarchist Kropotkin in 1902, was to be the means by which that necessary transformation would occur, sponsoring a sense of mutual obligation among the Irish peasants that would "redeem Ireland" (46).

Russell's urge to reconstruct the national character aligned him, at various times, with Sinn Fein and James Connolly. All agreed that Ireland must change, though they often differed markedly on the ways in which that change should express itself. Russell shared with Connolly a jaundiced view of the dehumanizing effects of the state, and this allowed them to form an alliance in which both were disposed to selective readings of the other's ideas. Russell was dismayed by the events of 1916, however, preferring evolution to revolution. "What we require more than men of action," he wrote in that year, "are scholars, economists, scientists, thinkers, educationalists, and litterateurs, who will populate the desert depths of national consciousness with real thought and turn the void into a fullness" (73).

As it turned out, however, there was no shortage of void, and events subsequent to the Rising, and in particular the failure of the Irish Convention of 1917-18, served to radicalize Russell, sponsoring a preference for rapid evolution that was more akin to the revolutionary methods of his late friend Connolly. Russell found himself closer to the causes of labor and nationalism, and increasingly contemptuous of the "blunt realities of Convention politics" (84). Again, Allen shows us a man who is not merely impractical, making a telling, if at times impatient, contribution to the Convention, before displaying his abilities as an astute propagandist for the Irish case in the British media. At all times, as Allen makes clear, Russell's practical pursuit of political ends was sustained by his own personal sense of mission, viewing himself at this time as a "conduit for the national will" (111). Not everyone saw it in the same light of course, but there is no doubting the sincerity of his position. With the birth of the Irish Free State, Russell chose to support the pro-Treaty party, Cumann na nGaedheal, and accommodate forces he deemed necessary for the survival of the new Irish state. This was a later phase in Russell's vision of industry regulated by culture, one that grappled with the cold hard facts of industrial capitalism. In perhaps the strongest section of the book, Allen gives an extended analysis of Russell's The Interpreters (1922) as a text in which Irish industrialists (embodied in the character "Heyt") are schooled in the need for an ongoing engagement between capital and national culture. Accommodating the businessmen was a predominant concern of the Cumann na nGaedheal administration, and Russell shared their concerns regarding the potentially disastrous effects that a large scale flight of capital would have on the Irish Free State's prospects. The Irish needed to settle down, and quickly. That they did not immediately do so left Russell predisposed to a benevolent view of aspects of Italian fascism. He was not altogether dismayed by the prospect of a "wise autocracy" (195) in the advent of continuing disorder, a slightly exasperated response, perhaps, to the recalcitrance of those children of a young nation who did not quite seem to know what was good for them. Russell had always been "distrustful of the common mass" (124), and this fed into a broadly elitist political culture in Cumann na nGaedheal generally. So it was that, after initial misgivings regarding audience, Russell accepted the editorship of the Irish Statesmen and turned to lobbying the leaders of the Irish state. The Irish Homestead was incorporated with this new journal, but soon fell silent as the agenda of the Statesman began to predominate. Russell himself became more openly elitist in this period, describing the Irish as a "perfectly undistinguished people" in the absence of an Anglo-Irish tradition (177), and voicing the common assumption among the Anglo-Irish that the Irish language was incapable of functioning in an internationalist economy. What Ireland needed was, coincidentally, Anglo-Ireland, as part of an alliance of the best elements of Irish society that would serve to reinvigorate the Irish race.

Russell shared Cumann na nGaedheal's initial complacency regarding the rise of Fianna Fail, and failed to perceive a growing distance between his own position and that of a significant portion of the Irish people. His decision to support the builders of the dam at Ardnacrusha against the demands of the workers in 1925 can be taken as symptomatic of a broader drift away from the common man. When Fianna Fail took their seats in 1927, Russell and his political allies were laced with a formidable opposition, and Cumann na nGaedheal realized too late that their neglect of organization at local level had allowed de Valera to consolidate his position in Irish politics.

Panicking, they set about recovering something of a popular support base, and their decision to introduce a Censorship Bill in 1928 caused deep dismay to Russell, who found himself out of sympathy with the governing party. When Fianna Fail took over the reins of government in 1932, Russell wasn't quite sure where to turn, and, in 1935, he joined many others of his caste in Anglo-Irish solitude abroad.

Nicholas Allen's fine book ensures that it will not be possible again to allow the poet/dreamer AE to obscure the significance of George Russell's practical contribution to Irish life. It is an impressive account of Russell's ongoing engagement with Irish politics over a period of twenty-five years. Russell's subsequent disillusionment and exile, a fate he shared with so many Irish Protestants of the 1920s and 30s, should not obscure Russell's genuine attempt to serve as "the prophet of a nation as yet unveiled" (84). The fact that he could not feel at home in the nation that emerged when the veil was lifted only serves to underline the tensions that were inherent in his position from the outset.

--NUI Galway