With three months to go before the actual centenary, it’s still a bit early for definitive judgment. Even so, almost 100 years on from Yeats’s grim assessment, romantic Ireland seemed to have a bit of life left in it yet this week.
No doubt the weather helped. As usual when air temperatures climb above about eight degrees Celsius, people took to parks and beaches in thousands, and to dressing like they lived in Palermo rather than Dublin or Cork.
Meanwhile, bad as the country’s economic problems are, they don’t look like being – even by September – as dire as the ones that partly inspired the famous poem. Somehow the Haddington Road (dis)Agreement doesn’t have the same resonance as the 1913 Lockout.
Nor is emigration, 2013-style, quite as bad as the lonely exile of which Yeats wrote. A generation of Ireland’s energetic young may be forced to seek work overseas, but their worst fate – to update the poem – is to be with O’Leary (Michael) in a plane. At least they can get home frequently.
In the meantime, many of them were to be seen singing at Wembley on Wednesday night – an occasion that gave the football romantics of Ireland new hope.
Not only was that much-denigrated phrase, “the Long ball”, rehabilitated – changed utterly, even – by Seamus Coleman’s perfect cross. But despite the game finishing in the now traditional 1-1 draw, Shane Long’s header allowed us claim yet another moral victory over England. Our goal was better that theirs.
Then there was that other Irish-English stalemate – the one at the centre of Yeats’s poem – which has just taken another of its periodic twists, to Ireland’s advantage.
After decades of argument about Hugh Lane’s intentions for his art collection, all but eight pictures were permanently returned to this country some years ago. The remaining octet were split into two groups, which now take turns to visit Ireland for six years at a time.
Strictly speaking, this means a recurring four-all draw between the National Gallery in London and Dublin’s Hugh Lane. But as it happens, a Manet picture from the outgoing quartet had been returned months ago for a special exhibition, so the latest exchange has resulted in a narrow 4-3 win for Ireland.
Thus it is that this week, ironically, Renoir’s famous painting of umbrellas was again on show in the Hugh Lane gallery, when – just for once – there were no umbrellas to be seen outside.
As readers may recall from their Leaving Cert poetry, September 1913 was inspired by Yeats's anger with Ireland's new Catholic middle class. Which was very new then, apparently; by his own account appearing somewhat later than French impressionism.
It had first declared its power, Yeats believed, during the bitter Parnellite split of the 1890s, which he said demonstrated “how base at moments of excitement are minds without culture”.
Well, benefiting belatedly from Yeats’s campaign to improve the Dublin bourgoisie, I learned this week that Renoir’s umbrella painting is also in part a reflection on class. To wit: most of the figures portrayed in it are well-to-do. But by contrast, the pretty, hatbox-holding young woman who is its focal point is a dress-maker and therefore working class.
It was not always thus. X-rays show that, in an earlier version of the picture, she too was dressed in bourgeois finery. Which version dates from about 1881, when Renoir was in thrall to the Impressionists. By the time he reworked it, a few years later, his tastes had changed. In the process, the female figure lost her hat and was transformed into a grisette, one of the young working women so called because of the cheap, grey fabric they typically wore.
The grisettes were a Parisian cliche, romanticised by generations of (usually male) writers and artists as poor but beautiful, unsophisticated but charming, respectable but open to offers, etc. In short, the sort of delightful company with which impoverished students of the Latin quarter could forget for a while their lack of food and money.
So great was the grisettes' fame that Mark Twain, visiting Paris in 1869, affected to be heart-broken by the less picturesque reality, denouncing the traditional image as "another romantic fraud".
Oh well, the romantic grisette is alive and well at the Hugh Lane gallery, at least. As for romantic Ireland, the periodic revisionism continues. And of course it started with Yeats himself. Who, a bit like Renoir, revisited his September 1913 canvas only a few years afterwards and reworked it, in sombre but heroic colours, as Easter 1916.
fmcnally@irishtimes.com