The Divided Inheritance of Ireland’s Language(s)

Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce’s surrogate in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” tells his snobbish classmates at fashionable Clongowes Wood that his father is a gentleman. In Victorian Ireland, gentility was still a crucial mark of social identity. In the mid-18th century, when another small Irish boy, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, left for Harrow, the barriers that hived off gentlemen from ordinary people were even taller and more formidable, being guarded, literally, by swords. Gentlemen dueled only with other gentlemen.

In Joyce’s day, it was possible for a Roman Catholic to be accounted a gentleman, but just barely. In Sheridan’s boyhood, legislation against Catholics denied them entry into the learned professions or into the army as officers. Among other defects of character, they were thought to be disloyal to the crown. These were disabilities that Sheridan himself, in the London Parliament, would strive to lift, displaying in the effort a zeal and a consistency rare in his sinuous and slippery political career.

Sheridan had the good fortune, socially speaking, to be a Protestant, but for him there was a different barrier. His grandfather, Thomas Sheridan, had been a clergyman and the literary crony of the great Jonathan Swift. But his father, also Thomas, was not only manager of a Dublin theater but had trod its boards as an actor. He was a man of scholarly attainments, but this did not remove the stain of being a commercial actor. Once he had to fight off the stage rowdy Trinity College students, crying, as he did so, “I am as good a gentleman as you are.” Sheridan himself would later describe, with tears, how at Harrow he was “slighted by the master and the boys, as a poor player’s son.” Part of his problem, as he discovered when he reached manhood, was that gentility, especially if dubious, required not only a sword but money and servants. The only way to acquire them was through the family’s theatrical trade.

He addressed himself to the task with an energy and skill that Balzac would have envied, although disguising it behind a gentleman’s mask of indolence and mild dissipation. Within a few years, he had become manager and part-owner of London’s Drury Lane theater, had written two of the most brilliant comedies in the language, “The Rivals” (1774) and “The School for Scandal” (1777) and had created Mrs. Malaprop and other immortals of the English drama. For most of his later career, he would be involved with Drury Lane but not as a writer. He ceased entirely to write plays and, although his masterpieces were often revived, he refused to have them published. Instead, he turned to politics.

First, however, the awkward “gentleman” business had to be settled once and for all. He settled it in a manner that joined sensibility and shrewdness: by fighting a duel with a cad who had impugned the honor of the beautiful young singer with whom Sheridan had eloped and by conducting himself on the field of honor with courage if not great skill. It was more an armed scuffle than a duel, but at its close, Sheridan demanded and received his opponent’s sword. Sheridan was now a gentleman. His wife, Elizabeth, apparently one of the great sopranos of the day, never again performed commercially. Ladies did not. It reads like a comedy by Sheridan, and in a sense it was.

Sheridan’s career in politics was to stretch across 40 years, beginning with a blaze of rhetorical glory in his two speeches denouncing Warren Hastings, the corrupt administrator of British India. Sheridan was a member of Charles James Fox’s wing of the Whig Party, which held advanced, indeed radical, views toward Irish independence and toward the revolution in France. As Fox himself did, he became an advisor to the Prince of Wales, the future George IV, from whom much was to be expected once the old king, George III, either died or went permanently insane. It is a mark either of Sheridan’s essential innocence or of his gambler’s recklessness that he relied upon the promises of this royal buffoon, to whom gratitude was an alien concept. When the king once again plunged into looniness, the prince became prince regent and celebrated by abandoning his friends. Sheridan ended his days a drunkard and a bankrupt, his mind at times badly astray, in and out of debtor’s prison. Being a gentleman is hard on the liver. In his final years, he spent his time regaling the young Lord Byron with tales of the old days.

Fintan O’Toole is one of the very ablest of Ireland’s new generation of critics and essayists. Equally at home in narrative and theory, in the 19th century and the 20th, and especially in matters Irish, he commands a wide historical and literary range. (A selection of his essays, “The Lie of the Land: Irish Identities,” has been published by Verso.) He conducts us with skill through Sheridan’s dramatic and literary careers, seldom condescending to his subject, who was a strange compound of brilliance, melancholy and thwarted ambition. O’Toole argues that Sheridan’s imagination was shaped by Ireland’s divided inheritance and that his life looks contradictory because it was “lived in two different places--a real England and a passionately imagined Ireland.” This presumably is what literary critic and biographer (and herself an Anglo Irishwoman) Victoria Glendinning means when she says in an early review that “his book is more than a biography; it is a history of one aspect of Irish genius.”

O’Toole rightly and generously acknowledges his indebtedness to Conor Cruise O’Brien, whose book on Edmund Burke, “The Great Melody,” suggested the way “an Irish life could affect English politics in the eighteenth century.” The comparison is tempting but risky: two young Irishmen with careers to make in London, both possessed of literary style bordering on genius, both members of the loose-knit Whig Party. They were allies in the campaign against Hastings but never personal friends. In England’s public debate over the meaning of the French Revolution, they became bitter antagonists. If they were both “Irish,” then that word can mean very different things. And indeed it does.

Burke, as Cruise O’Brien has demonstrated, was a conservative whose sense of political and social life was deeply affected by his Irish origins. He came from a family of the middling gentry who had turned Protestant only a generation earlier and who remained thickly webbed within the Catholic and nominally Protestant families of County Cork, although Burke was himself a sincere Anglican. He attended school in rural Ireland and went on to Dublin’s Trinity College, in his day an entirely Protestant institution. Today, the college flourishes proudly on its front lawn a splendid statue of one of its greatest sons. From the London Parliament, he kept up his varied Irish contacts. His passionate protests against the anti-Catholic laws came from intimate knowledge of their retrograde effect upon Irish lives.

Sheridan, by contrast, left Ireland for Harrow as a small boy and never returned, not even when he stood for an Irish parliamentary seat. If, somewhere within his chameleon-like nature, he nourished “a passionately imagined Ireland,” he kept it well concealed. Burke’s passionate denunciations of the revolution in France, at once prophetic and unmeasured--his accurate fears of a Terror that had not yet begun--were nourished by roots sunk deep into a culture that had known civil war and anarchy. Sheridan, it is true, argued strenuously for Catholic rights and, as Ireland moved closer to its 1798 rebellion, expressed his sympathies for the United Irishmen, by now an underground organization moving toward revolution. He was on friendly terms with the aristocratic rebels, Arthur O’Connor and Lord Edward Fitzgerald. (The friendship with Fitzgerald cooled a bit after he seduced Sheridan’s wife. Sheridan seems to have regarded this as retribution for his own notorious philandering. In any event, gentlemen were expected not to fuss about such matters.) But such pro-Irish sentiments were shared by, among many others, Fox and Tom Paine, in neither of whose veins was lodged a single globule of Irish blood, either literally or culturally. They were the common store of the radical Whigs, springing from the hopes and fears of the Enlightenment.

In making his case for Sheridan’s “Irishness,” O’Toole is at his best, that is to say his cleverest, when he is at his most literary. He traces, generation by generation, the curious matter of the family’s fascination with language. It begins in the 1640s. “Sheridan” looks like one of those sturdy English names brought over by conquerors--like “Burke,” for example. In fact, it is the anglicization of the Gaelic name “O Sioradain.” In that decade, three O Sioradains who had been converted to Protestantism were given holy orders by William Bedell, the Anglican bishop of Dromore, and set to work on his grand project of translating the Bible into Gaelic. In the turmoil of Ireland’s 17th century, this was less quixotic a project than might appear. Bedell, a man whose wide human sympathies were respected even by his enemies, was engaged in what O’Toole, whose style cheerfully courts overstatement, calls “the bravest, oddest, and potentially most far-reaching enterprise in Irish history: the attempt to found, in the drumlins of Cavan, a Gaelic Protestantism, to escape the identification of Catholic and Irish, Protestant and British, that would bedevil that history for centuries.” In the great rebellion of 1641, the Catholic rebels spared Bedell, whose honesty of purpose they respected, and they spared his Sheridan disciples. It is a rare, poignant moment in that bloody century.

From that time forward, however, the destiny of the Sheridans would be bound up with Protestantism, with the exploitation of the English language and with what O’Toole regards as a provisional and slippery loyalty to the British crown. Donnchadh O Sioradain, now Dennis Sheridan, would produce in the 17th century five clergyman-sons. Their Gaelic fell, inevitably but slowly, into disuse. One son, William, a bishop, was deposed by the victorious Williamites as a “traitor”; he died “exceeding poor and crazy.” In a final letter, to his doctor, he wrote that “I shall no longer be a false prophet.” As O’Toole puts it: “Even as they made their way in the world, the shadow of madness, poverty, and treason would always follow the descendants of Dennis Sheridan.”

What did follow, generation by generation down to the playwright, was an extraordinary interest in language, its equivocations and evasions and especially its political instability and potential ambiguity. The letters between Thomas Sheridan and his friend Jonathan Swift are exchanges of puns, word games, anagrams, riddles, with occasional advice upon matters of rhetoric and casuistry. Language and its boundaries were the very soul of the relationship. And especially the multiple uses of irony, a mode by which the literal is rendered subversive. “It was an inheritance of linguistic attitudes, of ways to use words to keep afloat in the dangerous cross-currents of loyalty and betrayal that swept the shores of Irish Protestant radicals.”

The playwright’s father, Thomas, aside from those theatrical performances that had placed his gentility in question, was a teacher of elocution and rhetoric engaged in a longer struggle to reform English society by reforming English speech. An Irishman from County Cavan, who himself either had a thick brogue or, more likely, had painfully eradicated it, was offering instruction in the pronunciation of polite English to the Englishmen themselves. As O’Toole puts it: Thomas’ obstinate belief in the spoken rather than the written word “was itself a legacy of his family’s complex relation to language, pulled between Gaelic and English, between an oral literature and a written one.”

And so we come to Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whose arts were precisely those of the spoken rather than the written word: the dazzling playwright, whose Mrs. Malaprop is forever stumbling into verbal errors which make their own surreal sense, and the superb parliamentary creator of the speeches against Warren Hastings, unmatched in his century. It strengthens O’Toole’s argument about Sheridan’s preference for the spoken rather than the written word that only at the end of his life, broken and impoverished, would Sheridan allow his plays and speeches to be published.

But this argument, tracing through the generations a specific linguistic propensity, is more allusive and suggestive than it is persuasive. Attitudes toward language are not passed along in the genes, like left-handedness or colorblindness. What has really captured O’Toole’s imagination is the way in which for all Irish writers, there lurks behind the English they use the ghosts of another language--Gaelic, maimed and defeated. It has given many Irish writers, including O’Toole himself, an awareness of language as both presence and absence, an awareness of its duplicities and treasons and loyalties. O’Toole proves his own “Irishness” in this learned, witty and adroit book.