justice to the audacity of that enterprise.
The odds against it were massive.Karl Marx had complained of the lamentable tendency of persons on the brink of some innovation to reduce history to costume drama by modelling themselves on some ancient Roman orGreek analogy, with the result that ghosts invariably appeared and stole their revolution. This was the mistake of all previous uprisings: to have presented themselves as revivals, so that the gesture of revolt could not be seen as such. Oscar Wildes theatre, as has been seen, had suggested that the self was plastic and that it could show a people how to refuse their assigned place and instead assume a better one. Its ultimate lesson, however, was that the imitation of any model, no matter how exalted, was slavery: the real challenge was to create a new, unprecedented self. One historian of culture has stated the problem very well:
Rebellions in moeurs, in manners broadly conceived, fail because they are insufficiently radical in terms of culture. It is still the creation of a believable personality which is the object of a cultural revolt, and, as such, the revolt is still enchained to the bourgeois culture it seeks to overturn. 20
The adoption of a pose was one step: what the second was might soon become more clear. The first stage demanded the violation of propricties
and the wearing of exotic clothes, but the second would move beyond that reactive affectation to an account of how a renovated consciousness might live. Such freedom had no precedent, except perhaps in theThermidorean first years of revolutionary France, where the streets "were to be places without masks" and where "liberty was no longer expressed concretely in uniforms: now there appeared an idea of liberty in dress which would give the body free movement". In the century after Thermidor, that barely-glimpsed freedom had been lost, but the experimentaltheatre of the 1890s, led by Wilde and Yeats, "created an expression for the body that went beyond the terms of deviance and conformity" and which contrasted utterly with the restrictive costume of the streets. "People turned toward the theatre to solve the problematics of the street", writesRichard Sennett, "to find images of spontaneity". 21 Ordinary people, having lost belief in their own expressive powers, turned to artists and actors to do what they could not, and to teach them accordingly how to repossess their own emotions.
Whereas O'Connell's rapport with the people had offered a model for artists to emulate, now the artists were to be heroic exemplars for the politicians: but this was to involve no slavish imitation of external qualities. Yeats sought not to inspire imitation in others, preferring to teach them to become themselves: "we move others not because we have understood or thought about those others, but because all life has the same root". 22 He saw that every Irish life was a ruin among whose debris might be discovered what this or that person ought to have been. His plays do not tell onlookers to be like Cuchulain, but to invent themselves: "The greatest art symbolizes not those things that we have observed so much as those things that we have experienced, and when the imaginary saint or lover or hero moves us most deeply, it is the moment when he awakens within us for an instant our own heroism, our own sanctity, our own desire". 23
This was exactly the achievement of the 1916 rebels, who staged the Rising as street theatre and were justly celebrated in metaphors of drama by Yeats. All the mirrors for magistrates of ancient England had taught that "to be fit to govern others we must be able to govern ourselves": and the rebels had done just that. During Easter Week's performance, they were enabled both to show feeling and to control it: and so, in the eyes of their audience, both Irish and international, they had literally governed themselves. This ultimately invested them with a power far greater than their power to shock. Yeats had
The odds against it were massive.Karl Marx had complained of the lamentable tendency of persons on the brink of some innovation to reduce history to costume drama by modelling themselves on some ancient Roman orGreek analogy, with the result that ghosts invariably appeared and stole their revolution. This was the mistake of all previous uprisings: to have presented themselves as revivals, so that the gesture of revolt could not be seen as such. Oscar Wildes theatre, as has been seen, had suggested that the self was plastic and that it could show a people how to refuse their assigned place and instead assume a better one. Its ultimate lesson, however, was that the imitation of any model, no matter how exalted, was slavery: the real challenge was to create a new, unprecedented self. One historian of culture has stated the problem very well:
Rebellions in moeurs, in manners broadly conceived, fail because they are insufficiently radical in terms of culture. It is still the creation of a believable personality which is the object of a cultural revolt, and, as such, the revolt is still enchained to the bourgeois culture it seeks to overturn. 20
The adoption of a pose was one step: what the second was might soon become more clear. The first stage demanded the violation of propricties
and the wearing of exotic clothes, but the second would move beyond that reactive affectation to an account of how a renovated consciousness might live. Such freedom had no precedent, except perhaps in theThermidorean first years of revolutionary France, where the streets "were to be places without masks" and where "liberty was no longer expressed concretely in uniforms: now there appeared an idea of liberty in dress which would give the body free movement". In the century after Thermidor, that barely-glimpsed freedom had been lost, but the experimentaltheatre of the 1890s, led by Wilde and Yeats, "created an expression for the body that went beyond the terms of deviance and conformity" and which contrasted utterly with the restrictive costume of the streets. "People turned toward the theatre to solve the problematics of the street", writesRichard Sennett, "to find images of spontaneity". 21 Ordinary people, having lost belief in their own expressive powers, turned to artists and actors to do what they could not, and to teach them accordingly how to repossess their own emotions.
Whereas O'Connell's rapport with the people had offered a model for artists to emulate, now the artists were to be heroic exemplars for the politicians: but this was to involve no slavish imitation of external qualities. Yeats sought not to inspire imitation in others, preferring to teach them to become themselves: "we move others not because we have understood or thought about those others, but because all life has the same root". 22 He saw that every Irish life was a ruin among whose debris might be discovered what this or that person ought to have been. His plays do not tell onlookers to be like Cuchulain, but to invent themselves: "The greatest art symbolizes not those things that we have observed so much as those things that we have experienced, and when the imaginary saint or lover or hero moves us most deeply, it is the moment when he awakens within us for an instant our own heroism, our own sanctity, our own desire". 23
This was exactly the achievement of the 1916 rebels, who staged the Rising as street theatre and were justly celebrated in metaphors of drama by Yeats. All the mirrors for magistrates of ancient England had taught that "to be fit to govern others we must be able to govern ourselves": and the rebels had done just that. During Easter Week's performance, they were enabled both to show feeling and to control it: and so, in the eyes of their audience, both Irish and international, they had literally governed themselves. This ultimately invested them with a power far greater than their power to shock. Yeats had
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