Standish O'Grady and Douglas Hyde were alike in many ways: both were the sons of Church of Ireland rectors; both had connections with the landed gentry; both were graduates of Trinity College Dublin; both retained many of the characteristics of their class, and both made a significant contribution to the cultural revival that occurred in Ireland at the end of the 19th century, writes Brian Maye.
But O'Grady, who died 75 years ago tomorrow, is hardly as well remembered in Ireland today as Dr Hyde.
Standish James O'Grady was born in Castletown, Co Cork in 1846. Having studied law and being called to the Irish Bar in 1872, he stumbled upon his life's passion almost by accident. As he told the story himself, he was stranded in a country house in the west of Ireland on a wet day in the early 1870s and, while leafing through an old history of Ireland, he came upon an astonishing fact that no one had ever told him before: his country not only had an ancient past but the bardic poetry of the heroic age had recorded the legends and myths of its prehistory.
So unaware had O'Grady been that, although he knew Samuel Ferguson socially, he had no idea that the respected antiquarian was also a poet who had found subject matter and inspiration in those same myths and legends to which O'Grady himself now felt so attracted. Driven by his new knowledge, he studied the texts that had been collected by the Royal Irish Academy and other sources. From his studies he worked out the story of what in Irish is called the Ruaraíocht and in English the Red Branch or Ulster cycle of tales, involving Concúir Mac Neasa, Cúchulainn, and Deirdre among others.
Although O'Grady did not know Irish, this did not deter him from writing his two-volume History of Ireland: The Heroic Period (1878-81), as well as Early Bardic Literature of Ireland (1879) and The Coming of Cúchulainn (1894). He also took a great interest in Elizabethan Ireland, which he illuminated for his contemporaries in The Bog of Stars (1893) and The Flight of the Eagle (1897).
Some of the material that he used in his History had been used before by Ferguson but O'Grady brought to it a passion and vividness that Ferguson never possessed. The History did not have a large sale but its impact on the rising generation was incalculable. It profoundly influenced W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and many lesser-known figures and earned O'Grady the title "father of the Irish literary revival".
Coming from an ascendancy background, he firmly believed in the right and duty of his class to govern, but he was so untypical an ascendancy man that Lady Gregory called him a "Fenian Unionist". He had little time for democracy or nationalism but he knew his own class had almost missed its chance and he appealed again and again to the gentlemen of Ireland to play their proper part before their hour had irretrievably passed.
Home Rule seemed imminent in 1886 and O'Grady was deeply affected by this. He was also deeply impressed by Lord Randolph Churchill's message of Tory democracy and he issued an address "to the landlords of Ireland" in language they were not used to hearing: "I say that even still you are the best class in the country, and for the last two centuries have been; but, see, the event proves that you were not good enough, had not virtue enough. Therefore you perish out of the land, while innumerable eyes are dry."
Deep down, O'Grady had little hope of reinvigorating the landlords. He felt they were deaf or blind to anything he might say. "Christ save us all," he exploded, "you read nothing, know nothing. This great modern, democratic world rolls on with its thunderings, lightnings and voices, enough to make the bones of your heroic fathers turn in their graves, and you know nothing about it, care nothing about it. Of you, as a class, as a body of men, I can entertain not the least hope; indeed, who can?"
So he appealed, not so much to the class, but to individuals here and there who might still be saved, and especially to the young. Their hearts were "not yet hardened by contact with the rest or worn out by that grinding attrition". He warned them, in the strongest possible terms, against the nationalism that Parnell was leading, which he saw as destroying class divisions.
His words can be seen as strangely prophetic: "If you are quite satisfied to lose all that you have inherited, to be stripped naked, and in the slime to wrestle with dragons and gorillas hereafter for some morsel of official income which you will not get, then travel that way. If you are satisfied to see all the worth, virtue, personal refinement, truth and honour which you know to be inherent in your own order wiped, as with a sponge, out of Ireland - maybe a bloody sponge - then travel that way.
"If you wish to see anarchy and civil war, brutal despotisms alternating with bloody lawlessness, or, on the other side, a shabby, sordid Irish Republic, ruled by knavish, corrupt politicians and the ignoble rich, you will travel the way of égalité".
For most of the first decade of the 20th century, O'Grady edited and wrote much of the All-Ireland Review in the cause of a constructive Unionist contribution to Irish life. But affairs in Ireland did not work out as he hoped and he spent the last decade of his life in frustrated exile on the Isle of Wight, where he died in 1928..
Yeats's poem "Beautiful Lofty Things", written near the end of his life, recalled a dinner given by T.P. Gill in honour of the Irish Literary Theatre in May 1889. Two of the lines refer to "Standish O'Grady supporting himself between the tables/ Speaking to a drunken audience high nonsensical words" - an image, perhaps, of his futile pleas to a doomed ascendancy.