The social world of Lismoyle is the more fully rendered in consequence: we see the characters not only as they see themselves, but through all the fluctuations of public opinion. Because Francie can move so easily from place to place, or from one social setting to another, the reader builds up something approaching a total portrait of a society, observing the amusing differences between one code and another, as she moves through its different layers. The indeterminate status of Charlotte Mullen, equally, allows her to speak on self-confident terms with the lady of the manor or, conversely, employ the Irish language to intimidate her tailor, Danny Lydon, or her powers of English to frighten the washerwomen tenants of her cottages. The filth of these cottages she sees more as a rebuke to the occupants than to herself: it is clear that Somerville and Ross, raised on the notion of responsible landlordry, would not share the view. They have the moral courage in such a scene to raise problems for which they have no ready answer. The Real Charlotte thus becomes one of the very rare Irish narratives which is actually a novel in the comedy-of-manners mode, calibrating itself to the layers of a fairly complex (if restricted) society.
Intending to criticize a society which they yet wished to remain within, Somerville and Ross chose to express their ultimate values by technique, with irony as a prevailing narrative point of view. Like other novels of manners, this is designed not just to be read but re-read, and its art is a strategy of preparations. The authors have an overall design in mind; the characters may be seen to fight it as it slowly envelops them; but in the end that design wins out and is shown to have been unavoidable. Every seemingly casual conversation or minor epiphany points forward as well as back, gaining resonance and meaning. When Roddy Lambert uses too much topsail on his boat, thereby almost drowning himself and his crew, something permanent has been implied about the self-destructive showiness of a man living well beyond his means: and so we are not surprised, hundreds of pages later, when his new wife proves also unequal to her challenges, "like a little boat staggering under more sail than she can carry".22 The novel begins with a moment when Roddy Lambert saved Francie from falling from a bolting horse-and-cart; it progresses to a scene in which he warns her that "someday you'll be breaking your neck"23 and with warnings that Francie is no great shakes as a rider; it plays tragic variations on her early reluctance to have him for rescuer ("Botheration to him! Why couldn't he have been somebody else?"); and it ends with her terrible and final fall. This patterning, as subtle as it is pervasive, suggests a controlling intelligence which is not simply sceptical but also definitive of social value, and an intelligence, moreover, which is embodied in the overall design. Amidst all the off-key notes struck repeatedly by most of the characters, the authors now and then strike a clear and singular sound, against which all others are heard as wanting. This is what lifted their art above the provincial guffawing of which they were sometimes accused, for as C. S. Lewis has written: "Where there is no norm, nothing can be ridiculous, except for a brief moment of unbalanced provincialism in which we may laugh at the merely unfamiliar. Unless there is something about which the author is never ironical, there can be no true irony in the work".24
Much of the irony is at Charlotte Mullens expense. Though she is the character left to pick up what pieces remain at the end, she is also a classic study of "the banality of evil". In another world, and blessed with better looks, she might have been a cigar-smoking Emma Bovary, as well as the reader of French fiction which she is: but in this one, her attempt to import her orphaned cousin to reanimate a big house proves wholly abortive. Indeed, when Francie quite coolly refuses the offer of marriage from Christopher Dysart, for which Charlotte so long had plotted, it is as if the Heathcliffean element in the story passes from Francie (in whom it was benign) to Charlotte (in whom it festers). Thwarted in her desire for Roddy Lambert by Francie's marriage to him, she is left with nothing to pursue but her revenge, and so "the real Charlotte's will and the terror of her personality"25 are finally allowed to show through. That personality has always been "amphibious", in the sense that the surface bubbles betrayed the real creature beneath, whom few in Lismoyie had suspected of having anything to conceal: and the ease with which she effects this deception suggests that her inventors were, to some extent, gleefully complicit in her contempt for a society so easily misled. Yet, in the final analysis, even her attempts at vengeance peter out into triteness and insignificance, as when she "looses" the new Mrs. Lambert (in the absence of her husband) to the predatory Hawkins.
If The Real Charlotte dismisses its characters with a shrug that is more exasperated than amused, that is only because the writers have been unable to imagine anyone surviving long in this society with an intelligence similar to their own. In Lismoyle provincialism and ridicule remain the order of the day, and this cannot but disappoint in a book which sought to ask the question: who shall inherit Ireland? The answer appears to be: nobody in particular, except for a few, random profiteers, and certainly not the Francie Fitzpatricks. At the closing scene, the servant Norry carries the terrible news of her fall to the now hopelessly-divided Charlotte and Roddy:
Neither Charlotte nor Lambert heard clearly what she said, but the shapeless terror of calamity came about them like a vapour and blanched the hatred in their faces. In a moment they were together at the window, and at the same instant Norry burst out into the yard, with outflung arms and grey hair streaming. As she saw Lambert, her strength seemed to go from her. She staggered back, and, catching at the door for support, turned from him and hid her face in her cloak.26
This is an ominous image of a landless class left rudderless in a new Ireland, whose putative inheritors are quite unequal to the challenges with which they have confronted themselves. Yet – and this is strange – at various moments in the unfolding of the tale, it is such persons who act as a choric voice within the plot for the authors' overall design.
Julia Duffy, facing ruin and appearing quite drunk to Christopher and Francie, can nonetheless encapsulate the entire second half of the novel in her ranting complaints:
Where's Charlotte Mullen, till I tell her to her face that I know her plots and her thricks? 'Tis to say that to her I came here, and to tell her 'twas she lent money to Peter Joyce that was grazing my farm, and refused it to him secondly, the way he'd go bankrupt on me, and she's to have my farm and my house that my grandfather built, thinking to even herself with the rest of the gentry. . .27
That Miss Duffy should be at once a landless peasant and ruined aristocrat increases the suspicion that Somerville and Ross implied more here than they cared to say. In the fate of a demoralized peasantry, hiding its terrified face in its cloak, they read the failure and the destiny of their own class. Near the very end, another rudderless old retainer, Billy Grainy, repeats the warning first given to Francie by Julia Duffy: "Ah-ha! go home to himself and owld Charlotte, though it's little thim regards you".28 Miss Duffy had earlier mocked Francie: "Lady Dysart of Bruff, one of these days, I suppose . . . That's what Miss Charlotte Mullen has laid out for ye ...",29 followed by a derisory laugh. Second time around, in the lamentations of Billy Grainy, Francie intuits some sense of her fate in the faces of peasants at a passing funeral. "The faces in the carts were all turned upon her, and she felt as if she were enduring, in a dream, the eyes of an implacable tribunal".30 A moment later the keen has broken out and she is dead. Somerville and Ross, in that gesture, implicitly concede that theirs has been an unconscionably jaunty book about a hopeless situation.
The cousins' concern about the fate of women in society led them to a stria investigation of some of its most persistent codes: and they are unsparing in the attitude which they adopt towards those "turkey hens" among their female characters, who abjectly defer to husbandly ways. The first Mrs. Lambert is slaughtered thus casually in a passing parenthesis, for the crime of uttering the words "Mr. Lambert" in conversation:
Mrs. Lambert belonged to that large class of women who are always particular to speak of their husbands by the
full style and title.31
This woman, who will later mistake a Shakespearian quotation for a strange term in cookery, dies an early death; and it is not altogether clear that the authors dissent from Charlottes accounting of her as "that contemptible, whining creature".32 Indeed, Charlotte, precisely because as an unmarried forty-year-old she lives at a certain angle to Lismoyle society, becomes in the hands of Somerville and Ross an invaluable instrument for social satire, more often vehicle than target:
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 maroon 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.
Five
Lady Gregory and the Empire Boys
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 land
lord 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
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