Landscape with Figures by Liam de Paor Four Courts Press 254pp, £30/ £17.50
In 1997 the late Liam de Paor published Ireland and Early Europe, a collection of essays on Ireland and its relationship with medieval Europe. In this book he comes towards our own time with a similar collection, which ranges across topics of art, history, culture and literature from conservation to the Great War to Brian Merriman, and from US Congressman Hamilton Fish to Wittgenstein and Modernism. An abiding humanism links these and the many other topics discussed, all of them anchored by his abiding absorption in the matter of Ireland, its identity, development and relationship to Europe and America.
His concern for Ireland is that it should learn to embrace its own diversity, that "loyalty to the people of the mud cabins" might not exclude "sympathy for the people of the big houses in their declining fortunes of later years". This should not be achieved by amnesia or fudge, but by an appreciation "that all the traditions of our country form part of our heritage, and that what was well made, by whomsoever, should not be wantonly destroyed".
As if to test this proposition against the coarsest grain, he contrasts headstones from the pets' cemetery which he noticed abandoned against a garden wall at Coole, with the famine graveyard at nearby Quin. A resolution of such antagonistic images would be trite, and he does not attempt one, proceeding instead to the historical observation that those such as Douglas Hyde, Otway Cuffe and Lady Gregory who attempted such resolution must have realised that they were thus "contributing to the destruction of their own curious subculture".
These essays exemplify history's place as a branch of literature; consciously crafted, they are alert to nuance of both word and event, and contrast with the virtual unreadability of much contemporary academic writing, not least that which purports to concern itself with literature itself. De Paor uses words knowingly and precise, in particular the word "colonialism", key to all mythologies in the new academic bauble but here used sparingly and then only within a precise historical and textual context.
The collection allows one to plot the development of de Paor's own thought from the Fifties to the present, so that the text of a 1958 lecture to the Printing Industry Co-operative Society on "The Future of the Irish Past" becomes itself a fragment of that past. This was the year in which Ken Whitaker published Economic Development, and de Paor's lecture sought similarly to turn Ireland away from isolationism. The lecture, given at the highpoint of emigration, takes as the poles of cultural debate in that period "fear of the influence of the English-speaking world", the language revival and Ireland's Catholic character. Rather than belittle the latter, he tries to give it positive force as a way of nudging Ireland toward wider involvement, creating a role for itself as "an interpreter of the Catholic tradition of European culture to the great group of English-speaking nations of which she forms a part".
The lecture emphasised the primary need for the language revival to support the speaking of Irish in the Gaeltacht itself; the existence of the language elsewhere is seen as "more or less artificial". High culture had been exclusively available to the Ascendancy class, and he argued that as a consequence its heritage had a value at least equivalent to that of the folk culture valorised by the cultural commissars of the day at the expense of the mature embrace for which the lecture argued.
Despair at and for Ireland seems to have set in by the time he published in his Roots series in this newspaper "The Hag and the Queen" (unfortunately undated). This never mentions the Northern "Troubles", but clearly has them as the context of its despair. The piece takes as its subject the hag who became the beautiful Sovereignty, when Niall of the Nine Hostages lay with her. While sentimental nationalist palaver such as the song, Four Green Fields, emphasises her beautiful aspect, her ugliness is equally important and he quotes the Yeats lines
all that was said in Ireland is a lie
Bred out of the contagion of the throng
in support of the contention that "poets and artists perceive what political nationalists deny, that Ireland is a truly barbarous country, and therefore ugly, its people being, in that other Yeatsian image, the eunuchs who ran through Hell to stare enviously `upon great Juan riding by'."
Seamus Heaney has often been stimulated into poetry by the work of archaeologists, and in what is possibly the outstanding essay in this collection de Paor brings his understanding and personal experience as an archaeologist to bear on Heaney's poem, "Seeing Things". Heaney, he states, "begins, like an archaeologist, with the material culture; begins, of necessity therefore, with the material itself, a very difficult thing to do". Difficult too for the historian - but here achieved.