Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  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!33

  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"38: 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".39 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".40 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.

  Finn begins the third and final act behaving like an ageing fetishist, kissing the print left by Grania's foot upon the fields of Ireland. His desire has grown mimetic, being no more than a lust for the Grania whom he knows to be already wanted by Diarmuid. To Grania his real sin is malice, "putting a hedge between myself and Diarmuid". She rails against the unnatural bond laid on Diarmuid by his leader, and "he was a fool to make it, and a worse fool to keep it".41 The result is that a king's daughter is living like a wandering tramp, an image of the Anglo-Irish gentry fallen upon hard times, like the Gaelic nobility which preceded them. Throughout the play, indeed, there is much talk of nobles experimenting with a life of beggary, just as the language of the play itself represents, in its homely directness, a critical attempt by Lady Gregory to explore the relation between the noble tale and the peasant Ireland in which it lingered. Diarmuid, having been tricked by the disguised messenger into fighting the King of Foreign, returns badly wounded.

  When he regains consciousness, he believes that he is already dead and asks Finn to pardon him for an ill-remembered offence committed in the past. All of his thoughts are about Finn, his former Comrade of the blutbrüderschaft, and not about Grania: "It would be a very foolish thing, any woman at all to have leave to come between yourself and myself. I cannot but laugh at that".42 Because his desire is only mimetic, Finn loses his interest in Grania at that very moment when Diarmuid seems to abandon her himself. She will have none of this, however, and insists that she will return to Finn:

  He will think to come whispering to you, and you alone in the night time.

  But he will find me there before him!43

  In fact, her return is purely technical: at the close, she has so little respect for any of these pallid men that she is compelled to crown herself queen.

  The mocking laugh at the conclusion, which may come from the dead Diarmuid, or even from his still-living comrades, is surely at the expense of Finn who says:

  I thought to leave you and to go from you, and I cannot do it. For we three have been these seven years as if alone in the world . . . And now there are but the two of us left, and whether we love or hate one another, it is certain that I can never feel love or hatred for any other woman from this out, or you yourself for any other man.44

  Grania is beyond such care: "there is not since an hour ago any sound that would matter at all, or be more to me than the squeaking of bats in the rafters, or the screaming of wild geese overhead". As she walks royally out, the peal of laughter stops as suddenly as it started, for she has in that very gesture invented and given birth to herself. Abandoned by male suitors who love only their own reasons for "loving" her, she steps outside their discredited system altogether. A world filled with male fantasists leaves women no choice but to get real: "It is women are said to change, and they do not, but it is men that change and turn as often as the wheel of the moon. You filled all Ireland with your outcry wanting me, and now, when I am come into your hand, your love is rusted and worn out".45 That could have been the voice of the child who arrived, an unwanted and unloved female, at Roxborough House in 1852.

  Grania was never performed in Lady Gregorys lifetime. She said that a three-act play with only three characters would tax even the most indulgent audience: but it may well be that the public ventilation of its very private themes would have taxed the author most of all.

  YEATS: LOOKING INTO THE

  LION'S FACE

  YEATS: LOOKING INTO THE

  L
ION'S FACE

  At the outset, the aspiring young poet W. B. Yeats was sure that a literary career of any worth would only be possible in London. Ireland, for him, would be an "imaginary homeland", the sort of place endlessly invented and reinvented by exiles who fear that, if they do not give it a local habitation in words, it may entirely disappear. There was some justification for that fear. Friedrich Engels in a letter to Marx had described post-Famine Ireland as "an utter desert which nobody wants", a place with a number of big houses "surrounded by enormous, wonderfully beautiful parks, but all around is waste land".1 The exiled patriot John Mitchel concurred: "the very nation that I knew in Ireland is broken and destroyed; and the place that knew it shall know it no more".2 Yeats may eventually have returned to Ireland tike so many exiles before and since, simply to make sure that it was still there.

  But first in London he busied himself with the invention of a literary movement and the shaping of a post-Parnellite culture. He had his poems published by a prestigious house, in whose offices he wore the black cloak of a professional Celt. (Some said that this gave him a priestly appearance, appropriate to the leader of a new cult: but the satirist George Moore quipped that it made him look like an umbrella left behind after a picnic.) At all events, London was the crucible in which the elements to make a modern Ireland were distilled On the streets of that city, diverse persons and types met and conspired. Their haunts were the Irish Literary Society (founded in 1891), the Gaelic League (1893), and of course the Gaelic Athletic Association (set up in 1884). The political activists of a later period as well as creative artists, first formed an idea of Ireland at these meetings: the list would include Michael Collins, first a young post office clerk but subsequently to become one of the most lethal guerrilla commanders of the new century; Desmond FitzGerald, 1916 rebel and minister of the first Free State Government; Pádraic Ó Conaire, author of the first novel in the Irish language; W. P. Ryan, one of the great crusading journalists of his day and a constant orchestrator of significant meetings and clubs.

  This loose federation of personalities was one of the very first groups of decolonizing intellectuals to formulate a vision of their native country during a youthful sojourn in an imperial capital – and then return to implement it. Many would follow their example in other parts of the world, but the Irish had only one precedent to which to turn for inspiration: the invention of the American republic by Washington and Jefferson, and of its democratic culture by Whitman and Emerson.

  Yeats was perhaps the most gifted and charismatic member of that group of exiles. In the fate of Wilde and Shaw – great artists reduced to the status of mere entertainers by a public too scared to confront their radical ideas with full seriousness – he found a warning for himself and for his friends. If they were to create an authentic movement, Irish writers must commune above all with themselves and with their own people. They must go back to Dublin and there found a national theatre and publishing houses, in the attempt to gather around them a truly national audience.

  Six

  Childhood and Ireland

  Most writers of the Irish Revival identified their childhood with that of the Irish nation: those hopeful decades of slow growth before the fall into murderous violence and civil war. In their subsequent autobiographies, childhood was identified as a kind of privileged zone, peopled with engaging eccentrics, doting grandmothers and natural landscapes. What they were describing, of course, was childhood in a colony, and there could have been few experiences as intense as that of family life in such a setting. The subject people owed no allegiance to the state, its courts, its police, its festivals, and so all the energies which might in a normal society have been dispersed over such wide areas were instead invested in the rituals of family life. As G. K. Chesterton remarked "wherever there is Ireland there is the family, and it counts for a great deal".1 That comment was made after a visit to the family of John Butler Yeats in London, proving that habits so deeply rooted survived the experience of emigration, even among those like the Yeatses whose background was in the minor landowning class. The neighbours of the Yeats family in London, hearing the raised voices of father and son, sometimes falsely concluded that the two were locked in a violent quarrel, when in fact they were engaged in animated discussion of the family's life. Their friends in Blenheim Road could not understand, in the words of Lily Yeats, that this was simply "the Irish way".2

  Whenever sons revolted against fathers in a revival text, the confrontation was soon metaphorized as the story of Ireland. The writer, typically, began the autobiography as a subject in the colony, clashed with and surmounted a father, and ended as the citizen of a free state or of a state intent on freeing itself. Beginning as a nonentity, he or she grew into an Irish person. Like Americans of the same period, me Irish were not so much born as made, gathered around a few simple symbols, a flag, an anthem, a handful of evocative phrases. In the process, childhood – like Ireland itself – had to be reinvented as a zone of innocence, unsullied and intense, from which would emerge the free Irish protagonist.

  The celebration of the peasant by artists like Yeats was intimately connected with these aspirations: one of his favourite rhymes was "wild" and "child". It was a legacy of the English Romantics, whose peasants achieved Coleridge's ideal of carrying the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood. The unselfconsciousness of the countryman's sense of place, as in the poetry of William Allingham, permitted Yeats to question the more programmatic and "conscious patriotism" of Davis and Young Ireland. For Yeats, as for Synge, the child's earliest feelings were for the colour of a known and concrete locality, which even a baby could express in gibberish and syllables of no meaning. As a boy in Sligo, Yeats had often thought how terrible it would be to go away and live where nobody would know his story or the story of his family. "Years afterwards", he wrote, "when I was ten or twelve years old and in London, I would remember Sligo with tears, and when I began to write it was there I hoped to find my audience". From that moment on, Sligo became a place sacred to the youth who longed to hold a sod of earth in his hand. "It was some old race instinct", he recalled, "like that of a savage".3

  At the Godolphin School in London, he felt himself a stranger among the other boys: "there was something in their way of saying the names of places that made me feel this".4 The Sligo of his early childhood became a dream landscape, a never-never-land to which it was hopeless to expect to return, "for I have walked on Sinbad's yellow shore and never shall another's hit my fancy". For Yeats, that fall came early with the enforced emigration of his family to London, in order that his artist-father could pursue an already-flagging career. "Here you are somebody", said a Sligo aunt to the nine-year-old departee, "there you will be nobody at all".5 It was a fall from a pastoral landscape into a world of urban blight, war and treachery, as he would recall in the later poem "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen":

  We too had many pretty toys when young:

  A law indifferent to blame or praise,

  To bribe or threat. . .6

  The deeper the world plunged into the chaos of imperial wars and freedom struggles, the more necessary did it become for the poet to secure the Sligo idyll against accusations of naïveté, and the harder. The more he sought to recapture the dream, the more it seemed to elude him. When the much older man finally brought his newly-wed English wife on a boat-trip across Lough Gill, he failed ignominiously to locate, much less land on, the lake isle of Innisfree: a sign, perhaps, that the past in that simple-minded version was not easily recoverable.

  Some of the less sophisticated texts of the early Yeats were attempts to deny civilization and its discontents by escaping to the Happy Islands of Oisín and Tír na nÓg, the land of the forever young. Similarly, the short stories of Patrick Pearse often stressed the redemptive strangeness of the child, bearing to fallen adults messages from another world. The paradox was that these texts, which so nourished Irish national feeling, were often British in origin, and open to the charge of founding thems
elves on the imperial strategy of infantilizing the native culture. What was lacking in them was what Yeats would later call the vision of evil, without which art was merely superficial, unable to chronicle the tragedy of growth and change.

  It was just such an unreal state of changlessness which the writer seemed to endorse in his 1894 play The Land of Heart's Desire. Here a young man still in his twenties used a fairy-child to voice his disenchantment with the ageing process:

  But I can lead you, newly-married bride,

  Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,

  Where nobody gets old and godly and grave . . .7

  It is significant that when the young wife dies in the play, the child leaves the stage: experience has not so much been confronted as denied in this Celtic version of Peter Pan. All this is in keeping with the tendency of British authors of the late nineteenth century to confuse innocence with inexperience, whereas the earlier romantics Blake and Wordsworth had taught that the root-meaning of innocence (in-nocentes) was openness to the injuries risked in a full life. In the judgement of one critic, after the novels of Charles Dickens in the mid-century, "children no longer grow up and develop into the maturities of Wordsworth's Prelude . . . The image is transfigured into the image of an innocence which dies ... of life extinguished, of life that is better extinguished, of life, so to say, rejected, negated at its very root".8