by Iris Murdoch
‘No, thanks.’
Andrew had long been aware that Frances did not like Aunt Millicent, but he had never been able to make out why. Among the generalizations about women which passed freely around his regimental mess was one to the effect that women never like each other, since every woman regards every other woman as her rival. Andrew, while attending with interest to all such distillations of worldly wisdom on a subject which was still very mysterious to him, suspected that this one was over-simple. It was true that women, leading more isolated and emptier lives, were naturally, when opportunity offered, more frantically anxious to attract attention and more ruthless in their pursuit of the opposite sex than were men who had, after all, other interests, as well as more chances to know each other in an atmosphere of free fraternal co-operation. Or so it seemed to Andrew, who saw men as inherently dignified animals and women as inherently undignified animals. However, in his own experience, when he had noted a marked dislike of one woman for another there had usually been some reason for this other than the postulated general rivalry.
In the matter of dislike of Aunt Millicent, his mother for instance disliked her out of envy for her title and her money, and because she failed to further Hilda’s social ambitions. While Aunt Kathleen disliked her because of Uncle Arthur. Kathleen had it seems been very attached to her brother Arthur and had, rightly or wrongly, felt him to be in some way slighted or belittled by Millie, who was in fact fairly universally said to have married Arthur for rather worldly reasons. Uncle Arthur’s early death was also somehow vaguely felt to be Millie’s fault. ‘Poor Arthur,’ Hilda used to say. ‘Millie simply ate him. Kathleen never forgave her.’ Frances’ dislike, which could hardly be put down to loyalty to either Kathleen or Hilda, persons from whom to say the least she felt detached, could perhaps after all be more simply explained as the nervous envy felt by a young girl who, however much she might officially despise such values, recognized in an older person a kind of elegance and glitter which she could never hope to emulate. Or more simply still it might be that Frances had weighed Millie in some spiritual balance and found her wanting. Andrew noted, sometimes a little uneasily, that his fiancee was capable of making quite uncompromising moral judgments.
‘I hear there is to be mixed bathing at the Kingstown baths,’ said Hilda, pursuing some train of thought concerned with the enormities of the modern world. ‘I cannot approve. Not with the bathing costumes people wear nowadays. Frances and I saw a girl at the Ladies Bathing Place at Sandycove who was showing nearly the whole of her legs. Do you remember, Frances?’
Frances smiled. ‘She had very pretty legs.’
‘I’m sure you have very pretty legs, my dear, but they’re nobody’s business but your own.’
Andrew, feeling an entirely private amused resentment at this judgment, suddenly found himself catching Christopher’s eye. Christopher gave him a faint secretive smile. Distressed, Andrew dropped his gaze and pulled at his moustache. There was something curiously improper about catching Christopher’s eye just then. It was almost like an exchange of winks. He felt suddenly mocked and threatened. He could never make Christopher out.
Christopher, perhaps to cover what he had apprehended of Andrew’s embarrassment, went on at once, ‘In fact nothing may come of the mixed bathing idea. Father Ryan has already protested about it. You and the Holy Romans see eye to eye on this, Hilda.’
‘They’re certainly very full of themselves these days,’ said Hilda, ‘protesting against this and demanding that. I expect it’s the prospect of Home Rule. “Home Rule will be Rome Rule” may prove but too true. We must prepare ourselves.’
‘Indeed,’ said Christopher. ‘And yet they’ve opposed it all along the line. It’s the Church not the Castle that has really kept this country down. All the great Irish patriots have been Protestants, except for O’Connell. The Church was against the Fenians, against Parnell.’
‘Oh well, Parnell —’ said Hilda. The judgment was vast, vague, crushing.
Andrew here caught the eye of Frances, who was a devotee of the great man thus dismissed. He saw her draw breath to protest, decide not to, and half smile at him as if asking for approval, all in two seconds. He was pleased by the quick little exchange.
His mother was going on, ‘I can’t understand why recruiting is going so slowly in Ireland. I saw an article about it this morning.’
‘I don’t think it’s going slowly. Irishmen are streaming into the British Army.’
‘Well, yes, but so many remain behind. And the attitude of people. Last week I heard a man singing a song in German in the public street. And in Clery’s yesterday I heard a woman say to another that Germany might win the war. She said it casually as if it were quite an ordinary thing to say!’
Christopher laughed. ‘Of course, the English never ever for a second conceive that they can lose a war. It’s one of their great strengths.’
‘Why do you say “they”, Christopher, and not “we”? You’re English after all.’
‘True, true. But having lived over here for so long I can’t help seeing the dear old place a little bit from the outside.’
‘Well, I think it’s very disloyal to talk in that way about the Germans, as if they could possibly win. After all, England and Ireland are really one country.’
‘So the English soldiers evidently think when they sing “It’s a long way to Tipperary”. But it’s always easy for the top dog to extend his sense of identity over his inferiors. It’s a different matter for the inferiors to accept the identification.’
‘I can’t understand this talk about inferiority. No one regards the Irish as inferior. They are loved and welcomed all over the world! And I can’t stand this jumped-up Irish patriotism, it’s so artificial. English patriotism is another thing. We have Shakespeare and the Magna Carta and the Armada and so on. But Ireland hasn’t really had any history to speak of.’
‘Your brother would hardly agree with this judgment.’
‘I am not impressed by a few moth-eaten saints,’ said Hilda with dignity.
‘Ireland was a civilized country when England was still barbarous,’ said Frances, tossing her hair back.
‘My dear Frances, you are parroting your Uncle Barnabas,’ said Hilda. ‘You know very little about it.’
This, Andrew thought, was probably just. Frances was no scholar, and her views on politics, though often vehement, were extremely confused and discontinuous. Frances had always been very attached to Hilda’s brother, and had never associated herself with the scandalized or mocking attitudes of the family towards the convert. Uncle Barnabas and her father between them had been her school and her university, and once for a short while she had helped her uncle with some aspect of his study of the early Irish Church. It was something, she used vaguely to say, about the date of Easter, and more Andrew could not gather. Long aware of a friendship between Frances and ‘Barney’, Andrew felt an undiminishing jealousy which he recognized to be both unworthy and irrational. He had never for a second been able to take his Uncle Barnabas seriously. While Christopher seemed to him, and rather formidably, a real scholar, he could not imagine Uncle Barnabas’s toils as other than childish vanities, and Frances’ muddled account of them seemed to confirm the view. ‘Barney’ shambled on the outskirts of the family caravan, an irredeemable figure of fun.
‘And all this nonsense about reviving the Irish language,’ Hilda was going on. ‘With all due respect to you, Christopher …’
‘Oh, but I entirely agree with you. Gaelic should be left to us scholars. One should be content to be born to the language of Shakespeare. And in fact the Irish have always written the best English.’
‘The Anglo-Irish have.’
‘True for you! Those aristocrats who think themselves superior both to the English and to the Irish!’
‘And when you think of all the money we’ve poured into this country. . . . The Irish farmers have never been better off.’
‘Not everyone would agree with t
hat,’ said Christopher. ‘I read an article in the Irish Review only yesterday saying that Alsace-Lorraine was far better off under German rule than Ireland under English rule.’
‘That couldn’t possibly be true. It’s just Irish spite. I wonder why people think the Irish have such sunny characters? Don’t they realize there’s a war on? Now they’ve been promised Home Rule and everything they want they ought to be grateful.’
‘Perhaps they don’t feel they’ve got much to be grateful for,’ said Frances. ‘A million people died in the potato famine.’
‘My dear Frances, that was regrettable but has nothing whatever to do with the present situation. You argue like a street-corner orator. There may have been some unfortunate things in the past, but they’re all long ago now, and I’m sure England never purposely hurt Ireland, it was just economics.’
‘There’s something in what Hilda says,’ said Christopher. ‘Ireland had several bits of sheer historical bad luck, and one of them was that the potato famine coincided with the hey-day of Manchester free trade. In the eighteenth century England would have relieved the famine.’
‘What were the other bits of bad luck, sir?’ asked Andrew.
‘Eighteen hundred and one and nineteen fourteen. It was very unfortunate that this war started just before Home Rule went through. Remember Churchill saying that if Belfast wouldn’t submit to Home Rule the British fleet would teach them to? The Liberals were really exasperated with the North. A year or two of enforced religious toleration and everything would have settled down. Whereas now we shall have endless trouble. But the Act of Union was the big Irish disaster. English government in the eighteenth century was the most civilized government in history. Fear of the French put an end to eighteenth-century civilization. Perhaps it put an end to civilization. It certainly put an end to the Irish parliament. Ireland was really becoming an independent country, the great landowners thought of themselves as Irish. And of course that began to scare the English stiff. Hence the Act of Union and all our tears.’
‘You think Ireland might have had a quite different history if it hadn’t been for that?’ said Andrew.
‘I do. There was a real Irish culture at that time, a culture with its own brilliance and with international ties. Do you remember that monument I once showed you, Hilda, in St Patrick’s Cathedral, which talks about “that exalted refinement which in the best period of our history characterized the Irish gentleman”? The date of that is twelve years after the Act of Union. Oh, they knew what had happened all right. If the Irish parliament had survived, Ireland wouldn’t be the provincial backwater it is today.’
‘Home Rule will make it even more provincial,’ said Hilda.
‘I fear it may,’ said Christopher. ‘And idiots like Pearse don’t help when they invent a romantic Irish tradition which just ignores the English ascendancy. Ireland’s real past is the ascendancy. Ireland should turn back to the eighteenth century, not to the Middle Ages. Goldsmith and Sterne would turn in their graves to hear the nonsense about Holy Ireland that’s talked nowadays.’
‘All that can’t be quite right,’ said Frances. ‘I mean, you seem to be talking as if Ireland were just the grand people. You remember what Grattan said about we are not the people of Ireland. It’s everyone having always been so poor that’s awful. Compare the Irish countryside with the English countryside. There are no real towns and villages in Ireland. There are the same little featureless houses or hovels everywhere, and then nothing else till you come to the country mansions and the cathedrals of Christ the King.’
‘Catholicism is the curse of this country,’ said Hilda. ‘If only Ireland had followed England at the Reformation.’
Christopher laughed. ‘You mean the Irish, having rejected the most civilized religion in the world, Anglicanism, deserved their fate? That’s arguable! But they were just that much farther away, and the Fitzgeralds and the O’Neills went on being Catholics and being warlords in a quiet way. As for Ireland being the grand people, it’s unfortunately true that until lately history has been made by the grand people. Frances is really right, though. What this country lacks is a yeomanry. The Irish peasant remained primitive and remained poor.’
‘Why?’ asked Andrew.
‘It’s largely the same answer. No parliament. Think how important parliament was in England from the very start. Ireland remained a country of overlords. The big estates were political prizes. Ireland was always a property being handed about. An insecure ruling class without a parliament is soon demoralized. And ever since the Irish princes sold out to Henry the Second there’s been collusion between Irish gentry and English power. “Her faithless sons betrayed her”, as the song says. Ireland’s only hope of pulling herself out of feudalism was to develop a steady ruling class with its own culture and its own civilized organs of power, and that began to be possible in the eighteenth century, only the Act of Union wrecked it all just as it was becoming a reality. And by eighteen fifteen standards in English political life had declined so much, England was so gross with triumph, there was no help for Ireland there.’
‘So it looks as if the French are the villains of Europe,’ said Andrew. ‘A view I’ve long held!’
‘Why do people in Ireland always talk about history?’ said Hilda. ‘My head’s always swimming with dates when I’m over here. English people don’t talk about English history all the time.’
‘They don’t have to ask the question, What went wrong?’ said Christopher. ‘For them nothing went wrong.’
‘Well, I’m afraid Ireland is a thoroughly self-centred country.’
‘All countries are, my dear Hilda. Only selfishness shows more in the unfortunate.’
‘And now there’s all this Trade Union nonsense and stopping the trams. It’s so demoralizing. And all this playing at soldiers and marching about in green uniforms and so on. Even Barney got tied up with it at one time. Something ought to be done about it. People ought not to play at war when there’s a real war on.’
Christopher blew out a curl of blue smoke and watched it rise to where the rain was running steadily and now almost silently along the glass roof of the conservatory. A soft salty mist was filling the garden, penetrating the curtain of the rain. There was a raw smell of the sea. Christopher spoke now with a more deliberate slowness, like one who feels he has been too vehement or is afraid of becoming so. ‘After the Ulster Volunteers came into existence, and especially after they were armed, it was inevitable that there would be a similar movement down here. After all, it’s the right of free men to prepare themselves to defend their freedom.’
‘The British Navy will defend their freedom. It always has done!’
Andrew, who sensed that both Christopher and Frances were getting a bit tired of hearing from his mother, interposed in his most objective and manly manner, ‘Wasn’t it rather a mistake, sir, for the British Army not to recognize the Volunteers in the South? I gather General Mahon recommended it to Kitchener. Especially after the Ulster Volunteers were formed into a division.’
‘Yes,’ said Christopher. ‘You’ll find the Red Hand of Ulster in the British Army, but there’s no sign of the Harp.’
‘Kitchener is afraid to arm the Irish,’ said Frances.
‘I’m sure he’s no such thing,’ said Hilda. ‘He told Mr Redmond and Lord Carson that he’d like to knock their heads together.’
‘Do you agree,’ said Andrew, adopting Christopher’s slow tempo, ‘with the people who say that Redmond ought to have demanded immediate Home Rule in exchange for Ireland’s participation in the war?’
Christopher laughed. ‘Good heavens no. I’m not an extremist. Home Rule is a certainty after the war. Or else a hundred thousand men back from the army will know the reason why!’
‘Is it conceivable that the Castle would be so insane as to try to disarm the Volunteers?’
‘No, no. The English will behave correctly. After all, people are watching them.’
‘So you agree with Casement that the
Irish question is an international question now, and not a local British matter any more?’
‘Oh no! The notion of “joining Europe” is just another illusion. Poor old Ireland will always be a backwater. Imagine the most god-forsaken hole in the world and go on several hundred miles into the unknown and there you’ll find Ireland!’
‘I can’t hear calmly about that man Casement,’ said Hilda. ‘To go over to the Germans and try to stab England in the back like that just when she’s up against it….’
‘It’s the old story. “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity.” Casement belongs to a classical tradition. And in a way I can’t help admiring the fellow. It must be a lonely bitter business out there in Germany. He’s a brave man and a patriot. He does it purely for love of Ireland. To love Ireland so much, to love anything so much, even if he’s wrong-headed, is somehow noble.’
‘He does it for love of gold, you may be sure,’ said Hilda. ‘It’s the traitor mentality.’
Christopher thought for a moment. ‘I think that word “traitor” ought to be removed from the language. It’s just a muddled term of abuse. Casement’s crime, or mistake, if it is one, is much more complex than anything that blunted word could name.’