Authors: Declan Kiberd
Possibly, also, the fact that she had no children placed her at a disadvantage with the matrons of Lismoyle, all of whom could have spoken fearlessly with their enemies in the gate; it deprived conversation with her of the antiphonal quality, when mother answers unto mother of vaccination and teething-rash, and the sins of the nursery-maids are visited upon the company generally.
33
None of the main characters in
The Real Charlotte
enjoys a fulfilled family life: and children play a far less important part than animals in the narrative. It would be naïve to deduce that the authors were anti-family propagandists: after all, they both spent a large portion of their earnings in the defence of ancestral family seats. Edith Somerville had been in love with a charming but penniless young engineer named
Hewitt Poole: his poverty put marriage out of the question, and this devastating experience may have caused her "to develop her own resources and to support herself financially".
34
She tended, thereafter, to speak affectionately of her books as her children, and to seek fulfilment of her nurturing impulses in art. In the process, she became a type of the New Woman of the Nineties. Of her friendship with Violet Martin she would later write:
The outstanding fact, as it seems to me, among women who live by their brains, is friendship. A profound friendship that extends though every phase and aspect of life, intellectual, social, pecuniary. Anyone who has experience of the life of independent and artistic women knows this.
35
She became, in time,
President of the
Munster Women's Franchise League. The ways in which the police abused and manhandled working-class suffragists convinced her that it was the duty of aristocratic women to put their bodies on the line at demonstrations. In notes for speeches given across Minister, she asserted that the taxation of women who earned money and upheld the law without reciprocal political representation was a scandal. She was critical not of the family institution as such, so much as of the manner in which middle-class men, themselves active in the community through their professional work, nonetheless sought to isolate and maro
on women in the home. Mocking the cultural corollary of this tendency, she found the women featured in the writings of
Rossetti,
Thackeray and
Trollope quite unbelievable: less flesh-and-blood females than women as men would have them to be. Such figures in life were to be distinguished from servants, she somewhat snobbishly suggested, only by the fact that they did not wear a cap and apron.
Within the movement for women's suffrage, Edith Somerville came to know colleagues who were also ardent Irish nationalists: after the death of her partner, who was a unionist, she appears to have moved closer to the separatist cause. National self-determination was the logical political corollary of the doctrine of Protestant self-election, but the movement for independence, far from engaging the energies of many rural Protestants, coincided rather with the enfeeblement of the reform churches in much of Ireland. The authors of
The Real Charlotte
had foreseen as much. There they recorded the collapse of Irish Protestantism into social decorum (viewed through Christopher Dysart's sardonic eye as he sat to pray in Lismoyle church):
There was nothing suggestive of ethereal devotion about Pamela's neighbours. Miss Mullen's heaving shoulders and extended jaw spoke of nothing but her determination to outscream everyone else. Miss Hope-Drummond and the curate, on the bench in front of him, were singing primly out of the same hymn-book, the curate obviously frightened. The Misses Beanie were furtively eyeing Miss Hope-Drummond's costume; Miss Kathleen Baker was openly eyeing the curate.
36
Thus the situation in gentry Cork. In lower middle-class Dublin things were no better, for it was a city whose parents sent their children to Sunday school so that they themselves might be free to snooze untroubled and unmolested after an ample lunch. A great point is made of the fact that, although Francie Fitzpatrick is herself a Sunday-school
teacher, her religion is neither a social nor a spiritual reserve, when her time of suffering comes:
. . . her mind was too young and shapeless for anything but a healthy, negligent belief in what she had been taught, and it did not enter her head to use religion as a last resource, when everything else had turned out a failure. She regarded it with respect, and believed that most people grew good when they grew old, and the sense passed over her with a vaguely pleasing effect of music and light.
37
These lines could only have been written by women who understood the full force of Oscar Wilde's jibes that to be an Irish Protestant was to have no religion at all, but who in their own lives, by their professions and by their actions, indicated that they would have wished the situation otherwise.
From the beginning, Augusta Persse's experience of life among the aristocracy was negative. It began at midnight on 14 March 1852, when her exhausted mother laid the newborn child to one side and tried to reconcile herself to the fact that the new arrival was not a boy. Neglected and forgotten, the baby almost choked. Her mother coolly remarked that she "would have been sorry for such a loss, because the other children would have been disappointed at not having a new baby to play with".
1
The father of the household was scarcely less monstrous: he believed in the Protestant doctrine of
"election" and, having convinced himself that he would be among the saved, gave free rein to self-indulgence. The observant young Augusta was quick to notice the implications for Victorian womanhood: her father was able to control her mother, "treating her as a spoiled child, doing as he liked in great things, giving her a dress or paying her compliments to pacify her".
2
Like many another child of the nineteenth century, Augusta turned from these flawed exemplars to a more reliable set of parents, choosing nature for her mother and God for her father. Most of all, however, she began to read the songs of those Young Ireland poets who, a generation earlier, had rejected their
Anglo-Irish lineage and thrown in their lot with the common people. As her biographer records it: "The literature of Young Ireland, like the literature of most subject peoples, is an attempt to make up for the huge injury of having had, in a national sense, bad parents".
3
Rewarded with sixpences for her proficiency in memorizing the Protestant bible, the child secretly spent the cash on rebel songbooks. These gestures were hardly, at this stage, political: rather they were a healthy defiance of a parental regime which banned dancing lessons and performances of
Cinderella,
because "you can't tell where it might lead to".
4
Equally predictable was an adolescent crisis during which the high-spirited girl was filled with scruples and began to fear that her defiance
would leave her among the damned: now the pocket-money was spent on helping the poor and the ill. So the patterns of her personality were set in the form of a strong woman whose self-sufficiency was mitigated by a social idealism. When
George Moore eventually met her, he found himself imagining Augusta "without a mother, or father, or sisters, or brothers,
sans attaché".
5
It was an astute description of a woman who fathered and mothered herself. In the decades to come, her closest collaborator, W. B. Yeats, would respond warmly to her androgynous style, singling out her "masculine imagination" for particular praise. This conceit pleased him, since it confirmed his theory that the Irish were a feminine race with masculine imaginations, and the English a masculine race with feminine imaginations.
It was not completely surprising, in such a context, that her first passionate affair should have been with
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who also admired her "masculine intellect".
6
She met him in Egypt in the winter of 1881: by then, she was safely married in the Victorian fashion to a much older man,
Sir William Gregory, a former governor of Ceylon and now a landlord at Coole. Their first child, Robert, had been born in the summer of that year, and Sir William, for all his gentle ways, had not proved the most supportive of husbands: during the difficult pregnancy, he spent a great deal of time in London, fussing over his own health while his young wife was seriously ill. Even after the birth, he made it clear that the boy was not going to spoil the couple's travel plans and "privately voiced the wish that the child be shut up at least until the age of seven".
7
By the time the couple reached
Cairo, Lady Gregory was pining for her baby and ready to console herself with a little romance.
Blunt was a horseman, a poet, and an uncommonly dashing womanizer: an English Tory landlord by background and conviction, he was none the less a supporter of independence for the colonies. Meeting him at Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo, Lady Gregory "first felt the real excitement of politics" and "tumbled into a revolution".
8
The Gregorys had arrived in November, shortly after the Revolt of the Colonels led by
Arabi Bey. These men sought not only a constitutional bill of rights and an enquiry into the grievances within the army, but also a measure of Egyptian home rule. Arabi was one of the peasant
fellaheen
who had risen, by personal merit and magnetism, through the ranks. His shrewd leadership had helped to foil an attempt on the part of the authorities to kidnap him and his sympathizing generals. Summoned to the Khedives palace, he simply told his soldiers, "if we are not back at sunset, come for us" – and they did. No accusation had been made
against him, but he had been described as "a man with ideas" better removed from the centre of action. Fascinated by the story, the Gregorys went to see him: "Arabi did not deny that much good had been done by foreign officials, but he thought it unfair that his countrymen were kept out of any important office".
9
Sir William wrote eloquent letters to
The Times
in defence of Arabi and of the Egyptian cause. So did Blunt, who went so far as to buy a compound in
Heliopolis, at which he and his wife pitched a tent, burned incense, ate nougat, and put on Bedouin costume in which to receive visiting sheikhs. Arabi, amazed at the speed with which Blunt could go native, began to wonder whether he might not be a British spy: but he need not have worried. The Blunts had already convinced themselves that "Arabi was right, that it would lead to the Turks, as well as the Christians, being turned out from the control of Egypt. And beyond that they had the vision of an Arab Caliphate, an independent Arab race".
10
They must have made a strange quartet, the Blunts and the Gregorys, as they moved among the close-knit British community in Cairo. Some of its members were not slow to point to the anomaly in their position, as landlords in Britain and Ireland calling none the less for the abolition of similar privilege in Egypt. One colonial official, a Galway-man named
Gerald Fitzgerald, "would sometimes threaten to come in return and wave the green Land League flag at the gates of Coole".
11
Sir William, notwithstanding his concern for the Arab underdog, was not above removing two sculpted heads, of Pan and Serapis, from the treasure-trove at
Karnak, doubtless at a knockdown price.
Back in England the authorities favoured intervention, to clip Arabi's wings. Blunt grew philosophical, predicting "bloody war" but adding that "liberty was never gained without blood". It was hard, however, to whip up much public interest in the case: all the talk was of Ireland, where the Invincibles had so recently killed Chief Secretary Cavendish and Under-Secretary Burke. Not for the first time would Ireland distract Westminster statesmen from equally pressing business in farther-flung places. As for the generality of politicians, they were bored by all such questions and more exercised by domestic issues. "But what do you think of the Hares and Rabbits Bill?" asked one of a returned Lady Gregory. "That is a really important question".
12
At the Queens annual garden party on 13 July, the company heard that
Alexandria had indeed been bombed by their forces: ignobly, Blunt suspected that this was why
Victoria was "beaming".
The British propaganda machine began its predictable campaign to
discredit Arabi, with fantastic accounts of the opulence in which he and his family lived. As
British troops advanced in the summer of 1882 on Arabi's forces, Lady Gregory wrote up an account of a visit she and Lady Blunt had made on Arabi's wife and children, stressing the modesty of their quarters, their generosity to visitors, and the dignified warmth of their manners. She stayed with Blunt in Sussex and together the pair talked treason. He begged her to issue "Arabi and His Household" forthwith. Lady Gregory's first published work appeared in
The Times
on 23 September 1882 under her own name, though, inevitably, some unworthy souls suspected her husband's authorship. The underlying psychological tactic would prove of service in years to come and to more than Lady Gregory: "A lady may say what she likes, but a man is called unpatriotic who ventures to say a word that is good of the man England is determined to crush".
13
Chenery, editor of
The Times,
could not pay her for the work, but proved sympathetic to Arabi. Why then, she asked, did he continue to print hostile reports from his correspondent in Cairo calling for Arabi's punishment? "Because of the influence of the European bondholders over
The Times",
he confessed. "Don't tell that to Blunt", joked her husband, "or he'll have sandwich-men walking with it down Piccadilly tomorrow!"
14
Tel-el-Kebir duly fell to the English, and then Cairo itself. Arabi was captured and put on trial. Gladstone, distracted by Ireland, knew little of Egypt and foolishly left the formulation of policy to Foreign Office administrators. At his own expense, Blunt sent lawyers to Egypt, but couldn't bear to go back to a place where all his friends were either in jail or in hiding. "As to Cairo, what I cared most for in it is gone beyond recovery", he said: "Egypt may get a certain share of financial ease, but she will not get liberty, at least not in our time, and the bloodless revolution, so nearly brought about, has been drowned in blood".
15
Arabi disappointed Blunt (though saving him a small fortune in cash) by pleading guilty and being banished to
Ceylon, where Sir William Gregory did much to ease his condition.
As for Lady Gregory, the whole experience did a number of things. It launched her as a writer, and it opened her mind to the powers of
cultural nationalism, which would blossom years later in her work for Ireland. It also left her with an abiding distrust of politicians and political methods:
That was the end of my essay in politics, for though Ireland is always with me, and I first feared and then became reconciled to, and now hope to see an even greater independence than, Home Rule, my saying has been long,
"I am not fighting for it, but preparing for it". And that has been my purpose in my work for establishing a National Theatre, and for the revival of the language, and in making better known the heroic tales of Ireland. For whatever political inclination or energy was born with me may have run its course in that Egyptian year and worn itself out; or it may be that I saw too much of the inside, the tangled webs of diplomacy, the driving forces behind politicians.
16
As the final phase of the Egyptian tragedy unfolded, Augusta Gregory finally yielded to Blunts entreaties and they became lovers. After a visit to Madame Tussaud's to inspect a new wax model of Arabi, they returned to Sussex together and there she found "the joys I was so late to understand".
17
In a remarkable sequence of sonnets to Blunt, she recorded her feelings:
I kiss the ground
On which the feet of him I love have trod,
And bow before his voice whose least sweet sound
Speaks louder to me than the voice of God.
18
For her the
affair with Blunt could never be more than a lyric fling: by it she not only transgressed the social proprieties of her age, but the borders of the politically acceptable as well. She encouraged Blunt in the writing of poems which fiercely denounced the behaviour of Europeans in Africa and Asia: and, in later years, she circulated his book
Ideas on India
as widely as she could. She herself visited India in 1886 and was not surprised to find his indictment justified. After just a month there, she wrote, "I have not met one single English officer or official, with the sole exception of Cordery, who has the least idea or takes the smallest interest in the history of the country, in its races or religion . . ."
19
Through all these years, the Land War in Ireland gathered momentum: some landlords were shot, others were boycotted, and across the countryside the air was thick with the cries of families who were evicted for non-payment of rents. Nothing less than Home Rule would now satisfy Parnell, the leader of the Irish nationalists who was himself from the Protestant gentry. Lady Gregory was quite unimpressed by it all. She believed her husband to be a model landlord and remained convinced that the tenants loved, as well as respected, good masters. Blunt, although he continued to enjoy the privileges of his own holdings in Sussex, became a rapid convert to Pamellism. She scolded her friend,
telling him that it was a vulgar and violent movement, "so unlike the Irish people, the poor who are so courteous and full of tact even in their discontent". He, for his pan, found it "curious that she, who could see so clearly in Egypt, when it was a case between the Circassian Pashas and the Arab
fellaheen,
should be blind now that the case is between English landlords and Irish tenants in Galway". But property blinds all eyes, he moralized with no trace of self-irony, and "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for an Irish landlord to enter the kingdom of Home Rule".
20
By the time he wrote this,
Blunt had been sickened by an eviction he witnessed in Ireland: "a brutal and absurd spectacle, 250 armed men, soldiers in all but name, storming the cottages one after the other of half starved tenants, and faced by less than half their number of women and boys . . . The houses were ransacked, the furniture thrown out, the fires quenched, and a bit of thatch was taken possession of as a token in each case that the landlord had reentered his rights. Then the inhabitants were turned adrift in the world".
21
So
moved was he that he agreed to address a Land League meeting to protest against the
evictions carried out by Lord Clanrickarde, a neighbour of the Gregorys. The meeting was proscribed; Blunt broke the ban and was arrested; and he was sentenced to two months' hard labour in Galway jail (making him perhaps the first Englishman to go to prison for the Irish cause).