"The Discipline of Vanity"; The Historical Sense in Yeats and Bowen

In a previous post I took Yeats’s story Rosa Alchemica to be a kind of historical snapshot. The ancestral family portraits decorating the narrator's Dublin Georgian house were portraits of Irish political and public dignitaries, people of status. One imagines a kind of mantle handed down through the generations, a mantle which the narrator - severed from his ancestry by history- has now discarded and replaced with a private, idiosyncratic, rather than collective iconography. The vacancy left by history has been filled by personal arcania, even as the narrator is aware how precarious these recent acquisitions are

This might be one instance of Yeats’s “historical sense” – his awareness that he is not just “living through history”, as we say when some great event is taking place, but “living history”, in the sense that one is not the spectator of the event but an agent, that one's experience carries history's watermark.  

The historical sense, as George Lukacs and others have argued*, becomes available only under certain conditions:  in times of war or disruption in particular, or (perhaps as part of that) when a certain class or ruling bloc (the case of the Protestant Ascendancy) is playing out its endgame, has reached the stages of its terminal decline. In the case of the Ascendancy in Ireland, this decline was accelerated by forces external to Ireland itself. The locus of power did not simply pass to from one class to another through internal struggles, but was also abruptly removed through Westminster edict, and through the 'foreign' political and economic imperatives of what we might call the colonial power.

There is, presumably, a kind of indignity in that, a sense of not being able to fully “own” your decline. And there are, in response, countervailing Ascendancy strategies to retain dignity and self-image in the face of historical departure. Few writers have catalogued this whole process, the experiential and ideological correlatives of the historical loss of power, more than the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen.

Bowen’s Court was one of a number of Anglo-Irish Big Houses, the estate houses of the Protestant Landed class in Ireland, many of them attacked or destroyed in the Irish War of independence. It was owned by the Bowens' until the 1950’s, Elizabeth being the last of the line. The house is the most obvious symbol and repository of family - and class - tradition:  “[T]he family house felt the authority of its long tradition”. For much of this time, she suggests, “[the Bowen’s] relation to history was an unconscious one”. They are aware of tradition but not the fact of being historical. There is a subtle but important difference. For an awareness of being historical is also an admission of eventual decline and originary injustice.

She is able - as they were not - to see historically the family, and the class that it represented:

Having obtained their position through an injustice, they enjoyed that position through privilege. They honoured, if they did not justify, their own class, its traditions, its rule of life. If they formed a too-grand idea of themselves, they did at least exert themselves to live up to this: even vanity involves one kind of discipline.

“The discipline of vanity” is a beautifully apt phrase for, among other Anglo-Irish figures, W.B. Yeats. But this is also something that becomes visible only at the end of the line. In retrospect, or at least twilight, the fragility of the collective self-image, its raison d’etre, the precariousness of its foundations become available where they had before been only implicit or disavowed. At the end of line we pass from amnesia to remembrance.

What also becomes visible at this terminal point are the “ghosts”:

No, life in the big house, in its circle of trees, is saturated with character: this is, I suppose, the element of the spell. The indefinite ghosts of the past, of the dead who have lived here and pursued this same routine of life adds something, a sort of order, a reason for living, to every minute and hour. This is the order, the form of life, the tradition to which big house people still sacrifice much.

This ‘presence of the dead’ is what constitutes tradition, the sense of invisible governance – the sense that you’re not just inventing your actions, form of life, but participating in immemorial habits etc. But what’s interesting is that elsewhere in Bowen’s Court, she says that she wasn’t initially ‘conscious’ of them as ghosts. Once you become conscious of them as ghosts, that’s a symptom that tradition has ‘snapped’. Their invisible hand is no longer effortlessly at work in the present. They have left the body of the present and been set adrift. There is a line separation, across which they become visible. 

Its in this context – the loss of historical authority and power, and the emergence of a now “ghostly” past - that the historian Roy Foster interprets the occult and magical interests of Yeats and other Protestant intellectuals. The occult and secret societies were theatrical set-ups where power and authority, lost as historic realities, were somehow both reclaimed and staged by absurd contrivance - as if to display their arbitrariness. And it is at this time too that the Anglo-Irish develops its antiquarian interest in the Gaelic speaking peasant culture of the West of Ireland, also in decline, also populated with ghosts. It as if the Anglo-Irish seek out what is both an escape from and a mirror image of its own situation.

I’d like to look at Yeats’s relation to both these in a future post.

*"Hence the concrete possibilities for men to comprehend their own existence as something historically conditioned, for them to see in history something which deeply affects their daily lives and immediately concerns them"