Authors: Declan Kiberd
The gentry exulted and joked that a prison haircut would prevent his posing as an Oriental for some time to come: but Lady Gregory was deeply troubled. In a poem she wrote:
My heart is in a prison cell,
My own true love beside,
Where more of worth and beauty dwell
Than in the whole world wide.
22
In between bouts of picking tar from old rope, Blunt wrote his book of prison poems
In Vinculis,
which she later saw through the presses for him in 1888. By then the physical affair between them was well and truly over, and Blunt had moved on to other conquests: but he would always claim, somewhat complacently, that whatever she achieved of value in her subsequent years, he had kindled into life. Recalling "the timid unambitious woman" whom he first met in Cairo, he marvelled that "she so long was content with an almost silent part in her own house",
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leaving all the talking and acting to Sir William. Yet this was the woman who went on, after her husband's death, to become the
inspirer of the Irish literary movement: "She is the only woman I have known of real intellectual power equal to men and that without having anything unnaturally masculine about her". It would be hard to find sentiments which so brazenly mixed astute analysis and appalling smugness.
In the end, Lady Gregory herself had mingled feelings about the affair, fondly recalling its passion and excitement, while despising herself for the deceit of her own husband:
What have I lost? The faith I had that right
Must surely prove itself than ill more strong.
For all my prayers and efforts had no might
To save me, when the trial came, from wrong.
And lost the days when with untroubled eyes
Scorning deceit, I could hold up my head.
I lead a double life – myself despise
And fear each day to have my secret read.
No longer will the loved and lost I mourn
Come in my sleep to breathe a blessed word.
Tossing I lie, and restless and forlorn,
And their dear memory pierces like a sword.
In thy dear presence only have I rest,
To thee alone naught needs to be confessed.
24
A Woman's Sonnets
were written as a farewell to their passion: she put them into Blunts hand after their last night of love. The pain remained for years, and she was tortured by scruples long after Sir William's death in 1892. The gain was only "a little charity", a recognition that she must never be one of the smug who cast the first stone at a sinner.
By 1907 Lady Gregory was an ardent Home Ruler, a director of the Irish National Theatre Society, and an emerging dramatist. She was also a victim of her success: after the
Playboy
riots, nationalists on the council in Coole instructed local children to boycott her house and to refuse all gifts from her. In the Abbey Theatre, she had connived in the appointment of
Ben Iden Payne as a director, an Englishman criticized as a rather incongruous addition to an Irish national theatre. In this charged context, Lady Gregory wrote
Dervorgilla,
one of her most complex plays, which deals with an unfaithful wife of
O'Rourke, King of Breffny, who eloped with
Dermot McMurrough, a king of Leinster. O'Rourke then waged war on McMurrough, who asked for help from
Henry the Second of England: thus began the occupation of Ireland by the Normans.
The play itself is set in Dervorgilla's declining years, which she spends doing good works and praying at the Abbey of Mellifont: she has the status of a saint among her people, and only her closest servants know the guilty secret from her past, which they can be relied upon to protect. The mood is festive and jovial, much to Dervorgilla's relief: "it seems as if those were wrong who said the English would always bring trouble on us; there may be a good end to the story after all".
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This was still a tenable position when it was written in 1907, at a time when many still believed that England would keep faith – and such optimism is echoed by the serving-man Flann: "There will be a good end, to be sure. A bad-behaved race the people of this country are. It is the strong hand of the English is the best thing to be over them". The sentiments are impeccable Anglo-Saxonist theory, suitably placed on the lips of a self-hating underling. However, Lady Gregory is also making fun of the irony of a literary revival which, to some degree, arose out of a master– servant relationship.
What makes her play so spellbinding is its insistence on confronting not just that sordid history, but the very sources of the
colonial wound. Nobody knew better than the unhappy young girl at Roxborough that the accusations of a guilty conscience can seem endless:
Was it not I brought the curse upon O'Rourke, king of Breffny, the husband I left and betrayed? The head I made bow with shame was struck off and sent to the English King. The body I forsook was hung on the walls shamefully, by the feet, like a calf after slaughter. It is certain that there is a curse on all that have to do with me. What I have done can never be undone. How can I be certain of the forgiveness of God?
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By way of contrast, her servants enjoy the easy confidence of the Catholic – quite unhistorical, to be sure, in a pre-Reformation setting – that a good confession to the priest, with the blessed Virgin Mary acting as "attorney for souls" every Saturday, will wipe the moral slate clean: "why not, or who would people heaven?" The ghost of William Gregory and the shadow of Blunt lurk not far below the surface of the text, as Dervorgilla grows increasingly desperate: "But if that neighbour, that stranger, that race, should turn kind and honest, or could be sent back, and all be as before, would not forgiveness be gained by that?"
27
She puts that question to the songmaker, who, like all choruses, tends to be more objective, less compliant, than the servants: sooner a
cat become a kitten again, he says. The song he sings seems an anticipatory conflation of images from Ó Rathaille and other Gaelic poets of the dispossessed:
The wild white fawn has lost the shape was comely in the wood,
Since the foreign crow came nesting in the yewtree overhead.
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D'aistrigh fia an fhialchruth do chleachtadh sí ar dtúis
Ó neadaigh an fiach iasachta i ndaingeanchoill Rúis . . .
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Even the songmaker concedes that excuses must be found for all who are dead, and for that Dervorgilla whom the world imagines to be long gone.
Her loyal retainers, Flann and Mona, advise her to return to the confines of the Abbey and abandon her acts of charity to the poor, acts which have their source in her futile attempt to allay her own sense of guilt. They even go so far as to invent excuses for her dereliction: "It was not you went to Diarmuid McMurrough. It was not you followed after him to Leinster. It was he came and brought you away. There are many say it was by force. There are many that are saying that. That is the way it will be written in the histories".
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If those books will be written by winners, popular lore – what is remembered by singing beggars – may tell a different story; and so Dervorgilla thirsts for accusation, taking upon herself full responsibility for her actions:
O'Rourke was a good man, and a brave man, and a kinder man than Diarmuid, but it was with Diarmuid my heart was. It is to him I was promised before ever I saw O'Rourke, and I loved him better than even my own lord, and he me also, and this was long ... It was he cast down the great, it was the dumb poor he served . . .
31
Here the author is still trying to explore the psychic effects of
her infidelity with Blunt, who did in truth serve the inarticulate and the oppressed: but she is also asserting the stubborn power of tradition to outlast the falsehoods in the history-books, the persistence of oral tradition over the lies of obliging lackeys. Near the close, Dervorgilla's serving-man Flann tries faithfully to prevent a clown from singing for the men of England: first he speaks reproachfully in his ear, then he puts his hand over his mouth, but to no avail. The subversive power of the artist cannot be denied, even if it is the casual ferocity of the
colonizer that makes it possible, when one of the English sends an arrow through Flann's body rather than brook further irritation.
At the end, Flann is slain and his wife, beside herself with grief, lets slip the name of Dervorgilla. The latter feels strangely relieved at the knowledge mat some of her entourage now spurn her: "there is' kindness in your unkindness, not leaving me to go and face Michael and the Scales of Judgement wrapped in comfortable words, and the praises of the poor, but from the swift, unflinching, terrible judgement of the young!"
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This lucid passage seems almost to presage the
Easter Rising (which came less than a decade after the play) as a sort of Last Judgement on the Anglo-Irish: the fact that the local children coldly return to Dervorgilla prizes which she so recently gave them has a chilling autobiographical ring to it.
Yet the tragedy is more complex still. Dervorgilla speaks nothing more than the truth when she says of Flann "that old man had forgiven me and he had suffered by the Gall. The old, old woman, even in her grief, she called out no word against me". There Lady Gregory, with almost unbearable foresight, fastened upon the saddest paradox of all: that the Anglo-Irish – or at least a good number of them – had actually begun to be
liked,
as well as respected, at just that moment when they were about to be extirpated. Out of such a painful discovery Yeats would create the final epiphany of
"Leda and the Swan". Yeats, of course, was a songmaker: and in the play, too, it is Dervorgilla who sinks slowly to die and the songmaker who wins out, with the ferocious objectivity of the artist. Dervorgilla must accept her role as mythic villainess:
The rat in the cupboard, the fire in the lap;
The guest to be fattening, the children fretting;
My curse upon all that brought in the Gall,
Upon Diarmuid's call, and on Dervorgilla!
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The entire play is no more than a dramatized ballad which, despite intermittent delays and postponements, insists on taking its final shape as the listeners recognize in it the words and music of necessity. The woman who wrote it had come a long way from her days as an apologist for empire: now she could surprise Yeats by joking that Tennyson had as his
God the British Empire and Queen Victoria as his
Virgin Mary.
34
If in
Dervorgilla
Lady Gregory allowed events from her secret past to flash forth in a moment of danger, then her treatment of the legend of
Grania in 1908–9 was one intense attempt to confront the full implication of her affair with
Blunt. She chose Grania because of her willpower; she was a woman who "for good or evil twice took the shaping of her life into her own hands".
35
In the legend Grania had been betrothed to the elderly chief of the Fianna named Finn, but had chosen to elope with Diarmuid, the most handsome man in the land.
A Woman's Sonnets
had made it clear that their author saw herself guilty of "the crime of having loved thee yet unwooed" (a debatable interpretation in any
amour
involving Blunt, who needed little prompting): and so Grania, like the strong Celtic women of the romances, is portrayed as the one who takes the initiative and who must, in consequence, take upon herself the guilt:
It is not his fault! It is mine! It is on me the blame is entirely! It is best for me to go out a shamed woman.
36
This might seem like a reprise of Dervorgilla's more charged confessions, but there has been a significant change of approach between the two plays. Here the guilt of the Anglo-Irish as invaders is not equated with the authors disloyalty to her husband, but with her betrayal of her deeper feelings for the nationalist Blunt. Grania begins the drama seeing in the wounded Diarmuid an image of the strong-man-in-pain: and this appeals both to her sensitivity and to her strength. Sensing a challenge, Finn threatens death to any rival who steals his beloved, and Diarmuid readily agrees that this would be only just. He has no wish to elope with Grania and solemnly promises Finn that theirs will be a chaste liaison.
This is reminiscent of a vow made in the summer of 1883 by Augusta Gregory and Wilfrid Blunt that their sexual relation "should be replaced by one of a saner and less passionate kind".
37
The repeated use of Christian symbolism in the play suggests that the violation of her own religious code haunted Lady Gregory most painfully. Looking at the moon, Finn tells the departing pair that "before its lessening you will have lied to me"
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: but Diarmuid, still convinced that he can remain chaste, promises to send unbroken bread in token of his pledge.
The second act, set seven years later, shows that a life of rambling and hunting in natural settings may finally pall: those who should have lived in leisured ease have been reduced to wandering tramps. Grania fears that she will lose her looks under stress of the elements, youthful looks which are cannily conserved by the settled, pampered women of the aristocracy: and she also worries that Diarmuid may soon tire of
hunting and wish to rejoin the warrior band of the Fianna. Above all, however, Grania yearns to find a social context for their love: "certain it is by the respect of others we partly judge even those we know through and through".
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Finn arrives, in the disguise of a messenger, only to be told by Grania that "as the bread that is broken and torn, so is the promise given by the man that did right in breaking it". This audacious use of Christian symbolism to underwrite a necessary sacrifice seems subversive in the extreme. Some might see it as parodic of Christian imagery, but it is more likely pan of Lady Gregory's attempt to Christianize a pagan tale of the Celtic Revival and to endow her own love affair with some of the qualities of a saintly martyrdom. Finn equates all too easily with Sir William, in his hypochondria and in his rationalizations of his own failure to take revenge: "Yet, in the end there are few do it, for the thought of men that have passed their midday is mixed with caution, and with wisdom, and the work they have in hand".
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Indeed, Grania's failure to recognize Finn beneath his disguise is symbolic of her real attitude to him: but it would also be true to say that even her lover Diarmuid can relate to
her
only at the level of myth and image. In this he depressingly resembles the Blunt who rather complacently took unto himself the credit for Lady Gregory's own achievements. It is all too symptomatic that the woman in
Grania
is condemned to only a supporting role in a man's love-affair with his own image.