Peter CostelloThe other week at the Trinity College Books sale, one of the high holidays for Irish books lovers, I picked up a book published in 1935 – the whole purpose of such a sale is to enable people like myself to rediscover older books as an escape from the tidal waves of new ones that beset the modern reader.
The book in question was The Fool: His Social and Literary History, by Enid Welsford, published by T. S. Eliot’s firm, Faber & Faber. The author was one of those formidable Cambridge women at Newnham College who pioneered the role of women in modern scholarship.
Oddly enough, she was something of a celebrity many years before that. In 1904, at the age of 12, she published a book of poems, The Seagulls, some composed before she had ever learnt to write, which she had dictated to her mother. This became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. It was said she never read other poets. But as her father was a house master at Harrow School, it is likely that she had, all unknowingly, absorbed the poetry that must have lain around the house.
Yet this astonishing child prodigy, rather than fading away, matured into a profound scholar. In Cambridge she was also a great friend of Nora and H.M. Chadwick, who did so much to enlighten the world about the inner spirit of the Celtic mind. But today Enid Welsford’s star seems to have faded. This is a great pity on the evidence of what I have been reading.
The Fool is a study of the buffoon or comic in history, largely through the role of court jesters, such as the Fool in King Lear. But from the Chadwicks, she derived the idea of the fool/poet/prophet. She writes about Suine geilt – the medieval Irish romance of a mad, but inspired king. Suine, too, plays a large role in the drama of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds, and is echoed in a poem by Seamus Heaney. Nora Chadwick also wrote a very relevant book on poetry and prophecy.
This idea of the inspirational nature of the comic is not one that is much in vogue these days. Comedy today is probably at a very low ebb, it seems to me; but this may be a failure of insight on my part.
Surprising conclusion
Having surveyed in a truly magisterial but highly readable manner the social history of the fool, both as a social figure at the various courts of Europe, and in literature from the earliest times, Enid Welsford reaches a conclusion, which some may find surprising, but which may cast new light even on such a phenomenon as Father Ted.
“But if the fool is an emancipator, if comedy is essentially foolery or clownage, does it not follow that the comic writer is committing the capital literary offence, and is producing that bugbear of the modern critic – poetry of escape ?
“Well, certainly, that is precisely what he is doing, but whether you regard it is a capital offence or not depends upon your point of view. Many of our contemporaries combine Hamlet’s idea that the world is a dungeon with a curious reluctance to unlock the prison door, a reluctance, however, which undoubtedly springs from courage, for it is due to the notion that the prison is coextensive with the universe and that therefore the only possible escape is the unworthy lapse into a drugged sleep.
“0n these matters it must simply be admitted that equally sincere and intelligent thinkers come to completely incompatible conclusions. To those who do not repudiate the religious insight of the race, the human spirit is uneasy in this world because it is at home elsewhere, and escape from the prison house possible not only in fancy but in fact.
“The theist believes in possible beatitude, because he disbelieves in the dignified isolation of humanity. To him, therefore, romantic comedy is serious literature because it is a foretaste of the truth; the fool is wiser than the humanist; and clownage is less frivolous than the deification of humanity. ‘The world to me is but a dream or mock-show, and we all therein but Pantalones and Anticks to my severer contemplations’.”