著者

日下 隆平 Ryuhei Kusaka 桃山学院大学文学部

雑誌

桃山学院大学総合研究所紀要 = ST.ANDREW'S UNIVERSITY BULLETIN OF THE RESEARCH INSTITUTE (ISSN:1346048X)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.29, no.1, pp.1-14, 2003-07-15

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In recent years, there has been a growing inclination to re-examine the nineteenth-century Celtic Revival in colonial England. The goal of this study is to discuss the meaning of Celtic Revival through the work of William Butler Yeats. He was a distinguished figure of this movement and a descendant of Anglo-Irish family. He felt the necessity to reconcile the Protestant Ascendancy and the Irish Catholic tradition in his mind. Yeats wrote a famous essay in which he expressed his response to On the Studies of Celtic Literature by Matthew Arnold. Arnold’s writing was important to Yeats because he mystified the Celtic character and introduced the Celtic idea as a differentiating fact between Ireland and England. Arnold attempted to bring about ‘healing measure’ by blending the delicacy and spirituality of the Celtic peoples with ‘Philistinism’of British middle-class. The mystification of the Celt becomes, in effect, the romanticizing of the Irish Catholic in Revivalists. Yeats tried to discover an aristocratic element within the Protestant Ascendancy and to associate this with the spiritual aristocracy of the Catholic and Celtic peasantry in his mind. In the first chapter, the Irish identity under colonialism will be examined. In the second chapter, Arnold’s Celtic essay will be discussed. He admitted the femininity and the spirituality of Irish Celt into the British character. In the last chapter, I will examine Yeats’s prose based on the Celtic material. He knew from O’Grady’s writing that there was the bardic tradition in Ireland. The bard (in Irish file or ollamh) was ‘highly trained in the use of a polished literary medium.’ The monks and even the abbot in the monastery are afraid of a wandering poet’s rhyme in ‘The Crucifixion of the Outcast.’ This is derived from the legend that people in the old Gaelic society were afraid of the satire of the file poet. Finally, his attempt to ennoble the Irish peasantry, as represented in the Irish folklore and legend, can be accounted for by the same logic that Arnold admitted the Celtic sensibility into the national character. This is, at the same time, true of his Ireland he invented in Celtic Revival.