Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  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).

  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",23 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".25 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?26

  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.28

  D'aistrigh fia an fhialchruth do chleachtadh sí ar dtúis

  Ó neadaigh an fiach iasachta i ndaingeanchoill Rúis . . .29

  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".30 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!"32 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: