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.
Four
Somerville and Ross – Tragedies of Manners
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 th
e 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.
The problem of the Dysarts is that of so many of the big house families in the novels of Jane Austen: a stasis that amounts to torpor. Their denizens' every gesture seems self-cancelling, as when the mother of the house plants duckweeds in the mistaken belief that they are asters. (The visiting Englishwoman is, of course, amazed that such a lady should be doing the gardener's work at all.) Against that torpor, the impulse-ridden Francie has a certain jaunty nobility, the nobility of a beautiful wild thing rather than that of the domesticated and tamed. Somerville and Ross debated long the advisability of killing her off at the end: "It felt like killing a wild bird that had trusted itself to you. We have often been reviled for that, as for many other incidents in The Real Charlotte, but I think we were right".14 Edith Somerville's mother was one of the many readers who could find no nobility, only vulgarity, in Francie. "She deserved to break her neck for her vulgarity", she wrote rather harshly, "the girls had to kill her to get the whole set of them out of the awful muddle they had got into".15 "All here loathe Charlotte", she intoned, protesting against the general nastiness of the characters and the weakness of Christopher.
Like many early reviewers, Mrs. Somerville admired the brilliant writing and cordially despised the "disagreeable characters", ignoring the fact that the novel is at its best in recording the plight of females in a small-town culture, the impossibility of their being away for long from disagreeable people. Even in the writing of it, Somerville and Ross were repeatedly chided for their dereliction of social duty on tennis-court and lake: the former complained that her suitor Herbert Greene had a persistent habit of ignoring the fact that she had work to do.16 A century earlier, Jane Austen had complained that women had "scarce a half-hour they can call their own": and E
dith Somerville's reports to her partner suggest that in the interim little had changed:
To attempt anything serious or demanding steady work is just simply impossible here, and I feel sickened of even trying – we are all so tied together – whatever is done must be done by everyone in the whole place and as the majority prefer wasting their time that is the prevalent amusement.17
Their problem was that of their characters: to learn how to keep on terms with an often disagreeable social world without too great a dishonesty to themselves. Their satire was a classic instance of Austen-esque "regulated hatred":18 they sought by it to find a mode of existence within society for critical attitudes which, if taken any further, might destroy it altogether. As a duo they could form a sort of alternative society, offering one another mutual protection and support: only an individual as steely as Austen could hold out against the mindless sociable consensus. Edith Somerville saw in her mother's misreading of her greatest novel incontrovertible evidence of the collapse of cultural standards in Anglo-Ireland. "It shows a failure of understanding that is awful in the light it sheds on the gulf between our and their mental standpoints", she confided to Martin: "My feeling is that any character is interesting if treated realistically. They care for nothing but belted earls or romantic peasants".19 Again, the contempt for conventional taste is Austenesque, recalling that artist's determination to create a heroine "whom nobody will like very much". Francie Fitzpatrick is no Emma Woodhouse, but she shares some of her qualities of self-deception, impulsiveness and, at times, heedlessness. Of her Violet Martin said, "I think she ought to be in some way striking or in some way typical of her type, but not necessarily with leanings towards perfection".20
For all her flaws, Francie is far more charming than Mrs. Somerville allowed, and that charm is repeatedly heightened by contrast with her cousin. Where Francie comes across as insouciant and guileless, Charlotte appears as painfully manipulative; the former is all feminine vivaciousness, while the latter, even if she is blessed with a colourful use of language and a taste for advanced novels, tends to employ her intellect mainly to sardonic effect. Though named for Charlotte, the book begins and ends with the Francie who fails hopelessly to read her cousin's real motives. "The central struggle of the novel", in the words of one commentator, "is a struggle in which Francie scarcely knows she is engaged".21 The narrative cannot, therefore, be continuously centred in her consciousness, if only because she has so little inner life to report: but what fascinates in The Real Charlotte is the author's elegant refusal to privilege any one consciousness at all. If Francie's is too rudimentary for constant interest, Charlotte's is too malign for ongoing empathy, Christopher's too tentative in its movements, Roddy's too self-caressing; and Hawkins (for whom Francie falls) appears to have no spiritual life at all. The result is a decentred narrative, in the course of which even household animals – cats, dogs, cockatoos – have fleeting moments of dramatized awareness.
Inventing Ireland Page 10