Inventing Ireland (11 page)

Although they numbered only one tenth of the population of Britain, the Irish held the balance of power in the House of Commons, whose business seemed dominated by Irish grievances and questions. Shaw, for his part, was perfectly convinced that Ireland was a far happier and freer country than England. He believed that Britain, too, had unresolved national questions: and Home Rule
for England became one of his more lasting hobbies. With perfect consistency, however, he refused
to take
his hat off for the playing of the English national anthem until Ireland was recognized as a free state with its own house of parliament. He was terrified, nevertheless, that a separatist agitation might go the whole hog and completely sever the English connection. The Irish, through their political affiliation, wielded a considerable and benign influence over the English, but total separation would leave them with no hold at all, while the iron laws of economics would allow England to retain a great deal of power over Ireland without attendant responsibilities.

Shaw liked to joke that "when people ask me what
Sinn Féin
means, I say it is the Irish for
John Bull".
²⁸
He foresaw just how abjectly Irish
nationalism would mimic its English model, and he feared that in that process the republican aspiration might die. That aspiration was to maximize national sovereignty, while cultivating beneficial links of trade and culture between peoples. "There are more republicans in England today than in Ireland", he wrote, "and a severance between them and the republicans of Ireland may or may not be expected on other grounds; but it is anti-republican".
²⁹
Absolute independence was a delusion of the kind which had prevented the chauvinistic English from acknowledging their dependence on Ireland. It would be a disaster if Irish nationalists were to repeat this ancient English mistake. Shaw was absolute in his conviction of the need for a closer relationship, conducted on a voluntary basis, between the two island peoples.

As offspring of Dublin's Protestant middle class, both Wilde and Shaw found it perfectly natural to seek a career in London which was, after all, the metropolitan centre of culture in the English-speaking world Such a move was much less obvious for members of the Protestant aristocracy. England by the final decades of the nineteenth century, was a very changed place, heavily industrialized and filled with a new élite, whose social standing derived more from money than from land. Many leaders of English society were now openly hostile to aristocrats: and even those who admired people of caste were by no means certain that the occupants of draughty, decaying mansions in windswept Irish landscapes really counted as "top drawer".

Ever since the time of Jonathan Swift, there had been a pressure on the Anglo-Irish to throw in their lot with the natives. Faced with an uncomprehending monarch and parliament, Swift had urged his compatriots, by way of surly revenge, to burn everything English except coal Over the century and a half which followed, it became more and more clear that a strange reciprocity bound members of the ascendancy to those peasants with whom they shared the Irish predicament. Many decent landlords genuinely cared for their tenants and felt responsible for their fate: that care was often returned with a mixture of affection and awe. Others were negligent and some cruelly exploitative: but these attitudes served also to emphasize the kindness of the better sort. Ascendancy women, employing kitchen maids and domestic staff, often enjoyed rather developed relationships with a whole network of families in the wider community: they shared in the joy of christenings and weddings, the sadness at sickbeds and wakes. When the doom of the big houses was sealed by the Land Acts, Shaw was not the only commentator to wonder whether the lot of the landless labourer would prove happier under peasant proprietors than it had under paternalistic landlords. These fears were most often articulated by ascendancy
women, among whom
Edith Somerville,
Violet Martin and Augusta Gregory were the outstanding literary figures.

It was the new economic pressure which compelled both Somerville and Martin to turn to art for a living which the big house could no longer provide but also for a fully comprehensive image of the crisis. Their profound Christian convictions led them to a tragic sense of the underlying injustice of their own privileged position, while their concern for family tradition led them to lament what seemed sadly like the end of the line. They preferred, however, to live out that process in Ireland than to seek refuge from it in an English villa. Perhaps at the back of minds well versed in fane Austen's
Mansfield Park
was a faint hope that, somehow or other, renewal might yet come from without.

Augusta Gregory, for her part, was one of the first Irish aristocrats to make the link between the Irish case and the wider challenge posed by the anti-colonial world. At first she sympathized with distant rebels in
Egypt and India, only later to make the scandalized discovery that the troublemakers at her estate gates were hardly very different. That recognition led to her transformation from a colonial wife to an independent modern woman; and, in the course of that transformation, she emerged as a major artist.

Of all the major Irish writers, Edith Somerville and Martin Ross (whose real name was Violet Martin) are the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness. Some of their readers have struggled to reconcile the seemingly superficial nature of their subject-matter with the near absolute command of human experience evident in the success of their presentations. For decades,
Irish Irelanders refused to read them at all, on the basis of a notorious review of
The Real Charlotte
which depicted its authors as finished
shoneens,
abject imitators of English ways. The fact that some of the sharpest satire in the novel is reserved for the absurd preconceptions of a visiting Englishwoman, Miss Evelyn Hope-Drummond, did not give such detractors pause. Nor did the stubborn choice of the authors to stay on and work in Ireland rather than marry and settle in England (as so many others were doing) cut any ice. "My family has eaten Irish food and shared Irish life for nearly three hundred years", wrote Edith Somerville, "and if that doesn't make me Irish I might as well say I was Scottish or Mormon or Pre-Diluvian!"
¹

Accused of creating stage-Irish rogues and buffoons for consumption in England, Somerville and Ross did something far more subtle – "they sold their intimate knowledge of Ireland in order to remain living in it".
²
Like most of their class, they had little love for England, feeling quite betrayed by its leaders. So far were they from stage Irishry that they noted with dismay the willingness of Irish country people to play Paddy or Biddy for the amusement of their social superiors. Charlotte Mullen is a dire example of the rising new breed:

"Well, your ladyship", she said, in the bluff, hearty voice which she felt accorded best with the theory of herself that she had built up in Lady Dysart's mind, "I'll head a forlorn hope to the bottom of the lake for you, and welcome; but for the honour of the house, you might give me a cup o'tay first!"
Charlotte had many tones of voice, according with the many facets of her character, and when she wished to be playful she affected a vigorous brogue, not perhaps being aware that her own accent scarcely admitted of being strengthened.

This refinement of humour was probably wasted on Lady Dysart.
³

The failure of this ploy anticipates the self-defeating nature of Charlotte Mullen's more grandiose plots in the book, illustrating just how alert Somerville and Ross were to the small details by which people give themselves and their destinies away. But it also proves just how deep was their understanding of rural Irish society, so deep, indeed, that it raised in them the severest reservations about the representation of the peasantry in the dramas of the
Abbey Theatre. Courted by Lady Gregory to write a play for it, Violet Martin was given a sample copy of Synge's
The Well of the Saints
for her comments. She was not impressed and wrote a bracing and blunt reply:

This is cast in a form so simple as to be at times too simple as far as mere reading goes. I suppose the dialect is of the nature of a literal translation of Irish, but it seems to me to lack fire and spontaneity – you know, and no one better, what the power of repartee and argument is among such as these. It is inimitable in my opinion, I mean that no one who is not one of them themselves can invent it – and it is so much a part of themselves that to present them without it makes an artificial and unreal picture . . .
⁴

Edith Somerville also refused to be recruited to the movement, finding its plays a strange mix of Gaelic saga and modern French situations. Violet Martin was beguiled so far as to visit
Coole Park, where she met W. B. Yeats: later, she sent her partner a wonderfully savage account of the outing on which she permitted him to carve her initials on the famous tree:

WHY did the carving, I smoked, and high literary conversation raged and the cigarette went out and I couldn't make the matches light, and he held the little dingy lappets of his coat out and I lighted the match in his bosom. No one was there, and I trust no one saw, as it must have looked very funny.
⁵

The Abbey directors said that they wanted a "Shoneen play": "I suppose that means middle class vulgarity", wrote a mordant Martin to her partner.

As always, Yeats's instincts were remarkably keen. Violet
Martin did know almost as much about the middle class of
Dublin as she did about the Anglo-Irish gentry in their country houses. When her brother Robert had abandoned the
family seat at Ross as unviable in 1872, she had gone with her mother to live on Dublin's northside, a place evoked in all its scrupulous meanness in the opening pages of
The Real Charlotte.
The experience, though a social humiliation, was priceless to the artist. "She learned much of that middle sphere of human existence that has practically no normal points of contact with any other class, either above or below it",
⁶
recalled Somerville, who marvelled at how well her partner retained her poise and nobility of bearing. The cousins' portrayal of the northside is bleak in the extreme, catching nothing of its vivacity or scruffy charm (these would await Joyce and O'Casey), but it is bleak for a simple enough reason: the petty gradations of snobbery which characterized shabby-genteel city life were quite lacking in the countryside, where class differences existed on a much grander scale, but were negotiated by people in a mode of mutual courtesy. Or at least, thought the cousins, those small snobberies had been quite lacking until the confounded English liberals had contrived to unleash the forces which would destroy the old feudalism in Ireland.

The Martins of Galway had been among the most benign of
landlords, bringing their estate to the verge of ruin by the generosity with which they provided for starving tenants during the famines of the 1840s; but in 1872, that
annus horribilis
in the family history, the old reciprocity was broken and the tenants, ungrateful and energized, voted for the Home Rule candidate against Violet's father. He died a broken man: "It was not the political defeat, severe as that was; it was the personal wound and it was incurable". Martin herself returned to Ross, years later, with her mother, in hopes of reopening the house: and she used her earnings as a writer to that end. But the old relationships would never be restored.

The resident magistrates, of whom the pair wrote in a mode of hilarious comedy, were henceforth as likely to be shot by defiant rebels as hoodwinked by fundamentally loyal but roguish retainers. Decades earlier,
Maria Edgeworth in
Castle Rackrent
had imagined a trusting and easy commerce between landlord and tenant which, by the time she wrote the book in the aftermath of the Act of Union, was strictly historical; and so it was for the Irish cousins. An increasingly disconsolate Martin wrote to Somerville in 1894, marvelling at the popularity of Aylmer Somerville as master of the Rosscarbery hunt:

I really don't see or hear of any other pan of Ireland where the farmers are so friendly and the rebel paper will back up the gentlemen in improvements and in sport I see that one day the Skibbereen district will be a fifth province in Ireland – refusing to receive Home Rule, and governed by Aylmer, under a special warrant from the Queen.
⁷

It was, of course, a fantasy. Even the more nationally-minded Somerville, who as a child had nursed a sneaking regard for Fenian rebels, could write with real bitterness of how "Parnell and his wolf-pack were out for blood, and the English government flung them, bit by bit, the property of the only men in Ireland who, faithful to the pitch of folly, had supported it since the days of the Union".

The bright, sparkling surfaces and fluent narrative method cannot conceal the dark undertow of
The Real Charlotte,
their greatest novel, published in 1894: while the form is jaunty with the ironies of good social comedy, the content is a tragic tale of the collapse of
big house culture. This is what gives their writing its power to haunt the mind in ways that seem out of all proportion to its easy, middlebrow charm, for even as the style sings of hope the message is despair. The hope, always fragile, lay in the prospect that the declining aristocratic family of Bruff House would receive an injection of vitality in the form of Francie Fitzpatrick, a vivacious but uncultured young woman for whom the effete heir, Christopher Dysart, finally conceives a fondness. Though the traditional comic conclusion in a happy and sensible marriage is teasingly dangled before the reader, it is not to be.

Francie will commute between the squalor of lower-middle-class Dublin and the elegance of Bruff, much as Fanny Price commutes between her disorderly family home in Portsmouth and the splendour of Mansfield Park: but a
Jane Austen-style ending is not possible, for Francie is too high-spirited to be amenable to Christophers pallid pleas. The big house will not be renewed, as Charlotte Mullen, Francie's plotting cousin, had planned: instead of a purposeful fusion of classes, there is a noisy and pointless collision. Everyone's designs are thwarted, most of all those of the reader, whose sympathies are aroused and subsequently defeated by almost all the characters. The comic ending promised is delivered, with interesting reservations – Francie weds the shady but besotted land-agent Roddy Lambert – only to be taken away at the latest possible juncture and turned into absurdist terror, when the Dubliner falls fatally from her horse.

At this very moment, Charlotte Mullen, who has loved Roddy for two decades, is finally free to claim him, but before the news comes she
avenges herself on him by revealing her own part in the exposure of his financial corruption to the Dysarts. Even she, the master-plotter all through, fails in the end to save either Bruff House or herself, and in her failure may be read the defeat of an entire society. The new peasant proprietors are depicted in
The Real Charlotte
as having nothing of lasting value to contribute, beyond a greedy materialism: and so Somerville and Ross are driven to dismiss their
dramatis personae at
the close with an amused but exasperated shrug. Their final wrench from desperate hilarity to blank terror has been criticized as melodramatic, but it perfectly captures the psychological dynamic of Anglo-Ireland in the nineteenth century, of a people who swung between disintegration and intermittent comedy. If the mere Irish often struck a happy-go-lucky pose in the face of dire poverty, the gentry found that it had no inner resources of a similar kind. In Charles Lever's novel
Tom Burke of Ours,
Darby-the-Blast shrewdly noted the reason why a whimsical mood or a vivid phrase could be an asset in dealing with the landowners:

The quality has ne'er a bit of fun in them at all, but does be always coming to us to make them laugh.
⁸

There is a real sense in which the literature of the Irish revival arose out of the ironies of such a master-servant relationship. Francie Fitzpatrick is simply the final consummation of this tradition, whereby an exhausted upper-class seeks not just humour, but also sexual release, in a vibrant under-class.

That such redemption might not only be possible but also reciprocal is made very clear early on, when Christopher saves Francie from drowning in the lake. She brings out in his personality something of the lost hero, convincing him in the process that he may yet confront "the mysteries of life into which he had thought himself too cheap and shallow to enter".
⁹
Equally, she learned at Bruff a sense of the value of social decorum and "some vision of the higher things". The suggestion is that Francie has real potential, beneath her rather gaudy surface, and that it takes a true lover to see it: "he had found out subtle depths of sweetness and sympathy that were, in their responsiveness, equivalent to intellect".
¹⁰
There is also, inevitably, the possibility that Christopher is fooling himself, a possibility to which he, as a natural sceptic, remains open. Yet the moments of shared intensity between the pair are as near as he comes to grace.

Before their meeting, his personality has already set in a pattern of self-negation: we meet him as a man without a role, happy to retrieve a
ball at a tennis-party, "an occupation that demanded neither interest nor conversation". Though twenty-seven years of age, he is neither aggressive enough to be a soldier, nor sporting enough for a gentleman, being "'between the sizes', as shopmen say of gloves".
¹¹
A
dandy without a court, he is immobilized by his very intelligence:

He had the saving, or perhaps fetal power of seeing his own handiwork with as unflattering an eye as he saw other people's. He had no confidence in anything about himself except his critical ability, and as he did not satisfy that, his tentative essays in painting died an early death. It was the same with everything else. His fastidious dislike of doing a thing indifferently was probably a form of conceit: it brought about in him a kind of deadlock.
¹²

The result is that, when Francie refuses his offer of marriage, he is easily repulsed and does not press his suit. The servants at Bruff are amused at her non-existent table-manners, but Gorman the butler, with a shrewd instinct for the survival of his employers, "gave it as his opinion that Miss Fitzpatrick was as fine a girl as you'll meet between this and Dublin, and if he was Mr. Christopher, he'd prefer her to Miss Hope-Drummond, even though the latter might be hung down with diamonds".
¹³
Francie has not only the glamour of youth but an energy that brooks no compromise: and in this, at least, she is superior to the Dysarts. lacking follow-through, Christopher concludes that he is as ineffectual in love as in other arts: he seems saddened by the fact that he is saddened so little at its failure, and so he takes up another inconsequential diplomatic posting.

One of Christopher's first admissions in the book is that he does not understand the recent Land Acts: neither does Roddy Lambert, his agent, but he at least exploits the accompanying confusion in order to embezzle his master's funds. Like
George Eliot's Middlemarchers on the eve of the Reform Bill, the citizens of Lismoyle show scant interest in the politics of the outside world: this is more a judgement on them than on the body politic. Charlotte Mullen is a type of the new gombeen class, living on usurious earnings and on unscrupulous profiteering, but Somerville and Ross rather unusually make their gombeen-woman a Protestant (perhaps to avoid accusations of sectarian bias). With no representative of the rising Catholic middle class in the novel, Somerville and Ross are enabled to imply, with a touch of ascendancy arrogance, that the decline of Anglo-Ireland had nothing to do with any social forces outside its own.