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Douglas Hyde and the Generational Imperative

In an introductory tale to the Táin Bó Cuailnge , or "Cattle Raid of Cooley," Senchán Torpéist, an Irish laureate of the seventh century, convenes the poets of Ireland for the purpose of reconstructing this most famous of Irish epics, the centerpiece of ancient Ireland's mythic and cultural traditions. The poets are unsuccessful. As a last hope one of their number is sent to Gaul to recover what he can from a "certain sage" there. On the way he stops in Connacht, at the grave of Fergus mac Roich, a major figure of the Táin and the last man known to have had the entire narrative in his head. Fergus himself appears; the lost epic is recovered; the tradition is preserved intact.

The concept of a generational link among Irish poets, scholars, heroes, leaders—of the responsibility of each, during his or her lifetime, to assure the future by preserving the past—has continued to bind successors to Fergus mac Roich and Senchán Torpéist, even to the twentieth century. "When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side, what stalked through the Post Office?" asked W. B. Yeats, whose poetic vision of modern Ireland etched ancient traditions on the events of 1913–1923. An image from the Táin , Oliver Sheppard's Death of Cuchulain , was the nation's answer. Today, guarding the entrance to the Dublin General Post Office, it commemorates not only the martyred leaders of 1916 but all of Ireland's champions, past, passing, and to come. Bound by their generational imperative, poets and historians continue to fuse future, past, and present as the years make and remake modern Ireland. Visible in the changing pattern—now prominent in the foreground,

now unnoticed in the background, by turns in and out of focus—is the figure of Douglas Hyde.

One bright, beautiful day in May 1968 in Frenchapark, county Roscommon—uncharacteristic weather for the small west-central Irish village nestled among hill and bog where rains fall generously in the spring of the year—a large official vehicle maneuvered confidently along narrow twisting roads and through crossroads, attracting the attention of pedestrians and bicyclists engaged in daily errands. Beyond the village center, on the road to Ballaghaderreen, it stopped at a churchyard nearly within sight of historic Rathcroghan, the plain pregnant with prehistoric monuments where legend has it that the Táin began. The familiar-looking stranger who stepped from the car was tall and thin, with the military manner befitting a man called "the Chief." Eamon de Valera had come to kneel at the grave of Douglas Hyde. With him were his grandchildren. Bob Connolly, the sexton, was the only other person present. After a few moments de Valera entered the empty church where the Reverend Arthur Hyde, Jr., rector of Frenchpark, had presided from 1867 to his death in 1905. In that church, as a boy, Douglas, fourth son of the Reverend Arthur Hyde (third to survive infancy), had listened unwillingly to his father's sermons, silently formulating conflicting opinions based on a broader vision of the world. There during his adolescent years he had obediently but reluctantly conducted Sunday school classes for children of the Big House landlords and local squirearchy who comprised his father's flock, and had assisted with other church duties. Manhood had taken him to Dublin, to London, to the Continent, and to North America, where his own ideas had flourished. Yet throughout his long life he had returned often to this same cemetery of the Church of Ireland in the parish of Tibohine in the village of Frenchpark to kneel at the graves of mother, father, daughter, brother-in-law, wife. Here, before Vatican II, in predominantly Catholic Ireland, with hundreds crowding near to bid him farewell and thousands more paying tribute along the route of the funeral procession from Dublin to Frenchpark, he himself had been buried in 1949.

Far more than an ecumenical gesture, de Valera's 1968 visit to the grave of Douglas Hyde was the personal tribute of a younger maker of modern Ireland to his mentor and predecessor; of one old friend, old comrade, to another; of modern Ireland's third uachtarán , or president, to its first. It was also an affirmation of the generational link forged by Senchán Torpéist centuries before, of the obligation each

Irish leader has to Ireland's past and future. Others had come the preceding day to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Gaelic League, the organization Hyde had helped to found and had led during a long and significant chapter of his life. Churchyard and church had echoed with familiar oratory. But this personal pilgrimage Eamon de Valera had chosen to make alone, with only his grandchildren to accompany him. He had not come to shout speeches to the crowd, calling out, "People of Ireland! People of Ireland!" with the note of urgency characteristic of his public addresses, but to whisper softly to the man who, like Fergus mac Roich, had made of himself a link in a great chain of national being, creating a commodious vicus of recirculation more accessible than that of James Joyce through which the old-new nation, modern Ireland, might be sustained.

Whispering at the grave of Douglas Hyde in the May sunshine of 1968, de Valera might have recalled the mission of the seventh-century poet to the grave of Fergus mac Roich. More likely his memories were of his own late-night visits to Áras an Uachtaráin when Hyde was president. The purpose of their nightly meetings had not been to reconstruct the past but to consider the present and develop strategies for the future. Hyde had been de Valera's personal choice for the presidency established under the Constitution of 1937. Few had understood why. Even after Hyde's unanimous election in 1938, newspapers and gossip mongers had talked of de Valera's "sop" to the Protestant Ascendancy, to the Gaelic revivalists, to the Trinity intellectuals, and to the Church of Ireland, as if ever in his political career this stern man had given weight to such considerations. No, de Valera had chosen Hyde for himself—for his experience, his judgment, and his political skills, honed over a period of nearly half a century; for his ability to move easily and smoothly in circles of which de Valera had never been part; for his shrewd understanding of Americans, Canadians, the British, the French, and the Germans at a crucial time in modern history when an independent Ireland was about to take its place on the world stage.

By 1938 de Valera, born in 1882, had been a schoolteacher, a mathematician, a soldier, a leader of the republican insurrectionists, and an architect of the Free State. His political strengths had been his determination, singleness of purpose, and endurance, his ability to inspire others to degrees of patience, fortitude, loyalty, and courage of which they might not have thought themselves capable. Hyde, born in 1860, had been a poet, a folklorist, a playwright, a philologist, a literary historian, a university professor, an antiquarian, a leader of the Gaelic Re-

vival, a pioneer of the Irish Literary Renaissance, and an Irish Free State senator. Cosmopolitan, politically sophisticated, and an easy conversationalist comfortable within a wide range of social contacts, during fifty years of public life he had proved adept at probing the thoughts and feelings of others while revealing little of himself, at signaling from offstage and providing onstage support to others who assumed major roles, and at concealing his own confrontational intentions behind a benign exterior. On the question of Ireland, the two men had long shared ideals and goals. De Valera was better understood, a strong and forceful leader whose life was like an arrow shot through the air. Hyde was an enigma, a man whose career, by 1938, had given rise to a myth, an internally inconsistent accretion of half-truth, misunderstanding, presumption, expectation, rumor, and opinion that until now has not been challenged by evidence. Clues to Hyde's motivation, goals, character, and personality lead through public and private records and personal memories to extraordinary conclusions. As in all good detective stories, investigation must begin with a review of documented and objective facts, with the public scaffolding of the private life.