Writers and Politics

by Conor Cruise O'Brien

  “Ye lie!” says the bandmasther, bein’ a thrifle fulsome after his luncheon.

  Well, when I seen them comin’ to me, and Driscoll about the length of the plantation behind Clancy, I let a couple of bawls.

  I declare to ye when owld Bocock’s mare heard them roars she sthretched out her neck like a gandher, and when she passed me out she give a couple of grunts, and looked at me as ugly as a Christian.

  “Hah!” says I, givin’ her a couple o’ dhraws o’ th’ ash plant across the butt o’ the tail, the way I wouldn’t blind her; “I’ll make ye grunt!” says I, “I’ll nourish ye!”

  Well whether it was over-anxious he was, turnin’ around the way I’d hear him cursin’, or whether it was some slither or slide came to owld Bocock’s mare, I dunno, but she was bet up agin the last obstackle but two, and before ye could say “shnipes,” she was standin’ on her two ears beyond in th’ other field! I declare to ye, on the vartue of me oath, she stood that way till she reconnoithered what side would Driscoll fall, an’ she turned about then and rolled on him as cosy as if he was meadow grass!

  The blood was dhruv out through his nose and ears and you’d hear his bones crackin’ on the ground! You’d have pitied the poor boy.

  “Was he hurt, Slipper?”

  “Hurt is it? Killed on the spot! Oh, divil so pleasant an afthernoon ever you seen; and indeed, Mr. Flurry, it’s what we were all sayin’, it was a great pity your honour was not there for the likin’ you had for Driscoll.”

  That is callous enough, if you take it literally, and I suppose it could be called capering to amuse the foreigner. Certainly the Irish R.M. books must have been read by more English people than Irish: after all, there are more of the English and I am afraid they read more books. But I suggest that it is time, in this matter of literary criticism, that we should apply the essential principle of Sinn Fein. I mean by that that we should judge a book not by how we think it may affect a hypothetical foreigner, but solely by how it actually does affect ourselves. In short, if Slipper’s story and the Irish R.M. books in general do seem funny to us, they need no other justification. They will not, of course, seem funny if we feel, for instance, that their idiom is divorced from any living Irish speech or that the scenes and traits of character that they describe have no roots in Irish life. But this is not the case with Somerville and Ross; they exaggerate, obviously, as every comic writer does, but their exaggeration is firmly based on Irish ground which they knew well and which in their own way they loved deeply. They lived in Ireland for almost all their writing lives and they had, as a writing team, a sensitive ear and a penetrating, humorous eye. If their writing is not part of the literature of Ireland, then Ireland is a poorer place than many of us believe it to be.

  Let us get back to Driscoll, for a moment, whom we left for dead under his horse. The end of that story is that Driscoll appears, at the climax of Slipper’s story, with a face like “a red-hot potato in a bandage” and thirsting for vengeance on Slipper. Does that remind you of any other scene in our literature? It seems to me to resemble rather strikingly the return of the supposedly murdered da in Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. There is something of the same rodomontade, there is the same macabre relish for violent death, the same vengeful return from the dead. I do not know whether the parallel has been pointed out before—such writers on Synge as I have consulted do not mention it. In any case the Irish R.M. was published in 1899, and The Playboy was written in 1905–6, so it is at least possible—I think myself it is probable—that “Lisheen Races, Second-hand” was at the back of Synge’s mind as he wrote. The world of Somerville and Ross may not be quite as remote from the world of the Literary Revival as we sometimes suppose. I make a present of the point to Professor Corkery; it suits his thesis; indeed I cannot think why he missed it. Could it be that he has never read the Irish R.M.?

  Martin Ross died in 1915, and in 1915 also the last collection of Irish R.M. stories appeared. Edith Somerville continued to write as Somerville and Ross—and in fact maintained that the collaboration extended beyond the grave—but Slipper and Flurry Knox appeared no more. Probably the survivor in the partnership, which was also a close friendship and affinity, felt she could no longer maintain the lighthearted mood of the R.M. stories; also the grimmer climate which set in in 1914 might have been less kind to Slipper and his friends. But there had from the beginning been a tragic side to the work of Somerville and Ross. This had predominated in such early novels as An Irish Cousin; Naboth’s Vineyard, which contains one of the best descriptions of boycott that have been left to us; The Real Charlotte, which is generally regarded as their masterpiece; and The Silver Fox, to which we shall return. All of these novels were published before 1899, the year in which the first Irish R.M. scored its immense success with, as Professor Corkery would wish me to point out, the English public. From that date until the death of Martin Ross in 1915 the tragic vein almost disappears from their writing, although signs of it may occasionally be glimpsed even in the R.M. series. After that date it reappears in two important novels, Mount Music in 1919 and The Big House of Inver in 1925, and in the less successful but interesting An Enthusiast (1921), which deals with “the troubles.” The Big House of Inver is their last important work, although there were many occasional publications, and one rather slight novel, French Leave, between then and Edith Somerville’s death in 1949, in her ninetieth year. Those who are interested in her long life and remarkable character and in the nature of her literary partnership with Martin Ross should read Miss Geraldine Cummins’s valuable biography, published in 1952.

  Three novels are more important than the rest—The Real Charlotte, Mount Music, and The Big House of Inver. Mr. Stephen Gwynn, speaking out of his wide knowledge of the subject, has said that The Real Charlotte is one of the most powerful novels of Irish life ever written. Its central figure, Miss Charlotte Mullen, is certainly a massive and formidable concentration of evil intent working in commonplace detail, without any thunderclaps or blue flame. Evil has often been more dramatically exhibited, but I do not think it has ever been more convincingly worked out in humdrum action, or brought home with such a terrible cumulative effect as an element in everyday life. The people on whom she brings ruin—the common, pretty Francie Fitzpatrick, and common, swaggering Lambert the agent —are satisfactory enough as experiments in ruin, but somehow the class convention—which is particularly hard and disdainful in this book—comes between them and our pity, and between the book as a whole and complete success. Francie and Lambert are not wellbred, not therefore quite human. Charlotte Mullen is of course of the same class, but one feels her to have attained a certain aristocracy of evil like Satan in Pandemonium:

  by merit rais’d

  To that bad eminence.

  The middle class—which is, by the way, here a Protestant middle class—occupies the centre of attention—a circumstance which is unique in the work of Somerville and Ross. Above is a highly idealized Ascendancy family, the Dysarts; below are the peasants, who are in this book a collection of grotesques envisaged bleakly and without sympathy. For the rest, the book is exceedingly well and sparely written and more carefully constructed than any of their other novels—although the pace at the finish is, as is usual with them, recklessly forced. The Real Charlotte is generally considered the best of their novels, and I think it is so. It is also, unfortunately, the one most marred by evidence of lack of sympathy with outsiders. Professor Corkery, in a striking phrase, denounces the presence in our literature of “an alien ascendancy streaked with the vulgarity of insensibility.” The verdict itself has a little streak of the same, and its harshness is unjust, as far as most of the work of Somerville and Ross is concerned. But in The Real Charlotte the streak is noticeable and it harms an otherwise splendid achievement. That does not mean, however, that I think The Real Charlotte is un-Irish. There is nothing un-Irish about aristocratic pride; a great part of our Gaelic literature throbs with a full and blue-blooded contempt for the lowborn
.

  The two other main novels, Mount Music and The Big House of Inver, are much more loosely written, but with more generous feeling. The ice has melted—there are twenty-five years after all between The Real Charlotte and Mount Music—and the style has lost some of its edge, the edge that I think Martin Ross put on it, for good and ill. The central theme of Mount Music is one of which Irish writers have in general tended to fight rather shy, that of religious intolerance, on the part of both Protestants and Catholics. Miss Somerville calls it, cheerfully enough, the Spirit of the Nation and follows its devious workings and its double language with remarkable detachment. The whole subject is of course now utterly out of date, and such a spirit can scarcely be conceived by the modern Irish reader, who positively drips with tolerance. Nonetheless the book may be read for its antiquarian interest.

  Although both Mount Music and The Big House of Inver lack style as compared with The Real Charlotte, they have not lost the power of generating a daemonic force in a credible character. Such is Dr. Francis Mangan in Mount Music; such, in The Big House of Inver, is Shibby Pindy, the illegitimate greathearted daughter of a gentle family, who has had a peasant upbringing, but whose passion is to restore, through her half-brother, the glories of The Big House, which stands empty at the beginning of the novel and is in flames at the end. The Big House of Inver, were it not for something a little blurred and loose in the writing, would surpass The Real Charlotte. I am not indeed quite sure that it does not surpass it as it is, for if there is a blur in the writing, there is no such smudge of meaningless character as in the Dysart family group in the earlier novel.

  What we regret, then, among so much that we admire, is that, as imaginative sympathy deepened, style declined. The youthful arrogance which somewhat blunted the moral perception yet carried itself extremely well. The quality of unwavering intelligence was in the writing—an intelligence not worried by clichés, but never allowing a cliché to come between it and the reality of the given moment. This alertness flags in the later works, which have wider vision but a less precise one. Perhaps had it not been for the success of the R.M. stories, which diverted them for so many and such important years from their vein of tragedy, Somerville and Ross might have given us a work of their maturity which would have been as alert as it was humane.

  You have heard, near the beginning of this talk, a passage from the Irish R.M. illustrating the comic side, which is the better-known side, of Somerville and Ross. I want you to hear, before the talk ends, a passage in their tragic vein. The passage I have selected is from one of the less-known works, a short novel called The Silver Fox, which appeared in 1897, three years after The Real Charlotte, and two years before the first of the R.M. books. It was the last novel of tragic temper published in the lifetime of Martin Ross. As a story it is not fully thought out—probably the minds of the two writers were already beginning to turn towards the Irish R.M.—but it has certain scenes where we glimpse that balance of alertness and humanity which is never quite sustained in any of their major novels. The passage which you are going in a few moments to hear Miss Lynch read is one of these rare scenes, or so it seems to me. The Silver Fox is about hunting and about the supernatural; the fox itself is an unearthly creature, of which the peasantry stand in terror and which the hunt vainly and ruinously pursues. Maria Quin belongs to a peasant family and she has lost her brother and her father because, she believes, of the fox and of the hunt. As the hunt passes near the house in which her brother lies dead she rushes out “full of a blind indignation against those who, for their own amusement, had wrecked the fortunes of a family, and now came to gallop past the house of death, guided by that grey and ill-omened thing.” She finds that a horse and rider, having cleared a high bank, have fallen deep into an unsuspected cleft. She manages to rescue the rider, an Englishwoman, Lady Susan French, who had on the previous day seen her brother Tom Quin’s body lifted from the river.

  “Is the horse killed?” [Lady Susan] said hoarsely, scrambling on to her feet and looking down through the naked branches that fringed the long cleft.

  Even the first glance could certify that Solomon had met his death in an instant. He lay in a heap in the obscurity forty feet below, on loose rocks among dark water; his head was doubled under his chest at an impossible angle that told the tale of a broken neck. The uttermost effort of a good horse had not been enough to save him, when he had tried to jump out from the top of the high bank across a chasm nearly twenty feet wide. That endeavour and all his simple and gallant life seemed expressed in the wreck of strength and intelligence that lay below, with the water washing over the flap of the saddle, over the shapely brown fetlocks, over the thin and glossy mane.

  It was mysterious water, an underground stream that slid out of the dumb and sightless caverns of the rock, and passed away into them again with a swirl, a stealthy swift thing, escaping always from the eye of day, and eating the foundations of the limestone walls that sheltered it.

  Lady Susan still held the hand that had rescued her; it led her through the brushwood to open ground, till the short wet grass was under her foot and the mist blew in her face. She turned her head away, and the sobs broke from her. Any one who has loved horse or dog will know how and where they touch the heart and command the tear. Let us trust that in some degree it is known to them also, that the confiding spirit may understand that its god can grieve for it.

  Maria Quin looked at Lady Susan with eyes that were as dry as glass. The Irish peasant regards the sorrow for a mere animal as a childishness that is almost sinful, a tempting of ill fate in its parody of the grief rightly due only to what is described as “a Christhian”; and Maria’s heart glowed with the unwept wrongs of her brother.

  “What happened him?” she asked, and the knot of pain and outrage was tight in her voice.

  “I tried to pull him back when I saw what was coming,” said Lady Susan, with difficulty. “I couldn’t stop him; he had too much way on. I only did harm. I think he would have got across only for that.” She stopped and gulped down the sob. It was dreadful to her to cry before an inferior. “He all but got over, but he dropped his hind legs into it and fell back. I somehow caught those branches just as he was going, and he dropped away from under me, and I hung there. I couldn’t climb up. Then you came.” She recovered herself a little, and turned towards her rescuer. “I haven’t thanked you yet. It was awfully good and plucky of you.”

  Their eyes met, and it seemed as if till then Lady Susan had not recognized Maria Quin. She visibly flinched, and her flushed face became a deeper red, while the hand that had begun to feel for her purse came out of her pocket empty.

  “Little ye cried yestherday whin ye seen my brother thrown out on the ground by the pool,” said Maria, with irrepressible savageness, “you that’s breakin’ yer heart afther yer horse.”

  Lady Susan, you remember, is an Englishwoman, and the dialogue between her and Maria is, in the full sense, an Anglo-Irish dialogue; a dialogue also in the writers’ hearts, torn by irreconcilable things. As long as England and Ireland are neighbours I think that dialogue must continue in some form, and the work of Somerville and Ross will not easily go out of date.

  THE FALL OF PARNELL

  This book* is the first thorough investigation of the period of Irish history between the O’Shea divorce case (November 1890) and the death of Parnell (October 1891). It covers the stormy interregnum between Parnell’s years of power and the deceptive years of “collective leadership,” already dealt with in Dr. Lyons’s The Irish Parliamentary Party, 1890–1910. This interregnum is a crucial period which probably determined much in the subsequent pattern of Irish political history. Such hope as there was of a peaceful evolution of Anglo-Irish relations, on something like “Canadian” lines, succumbed at this time. The political influence of the Church, publicly displayed, suffered hidden diminution. Parnell and the Catholic Hierarchy working together—as they did in a broad political sense during most of Parnell’s time of leadership—brought t
o bear a powerful moderating influence on the development of Irish nationalism. When Parnell and the Bishops bitterly clashed, that influence was weakened in a number of ways. Parnell took up an “extremist” posture. The Bishops, while being drawn deep into politics, were inhibited from taking up any clear political position at all, since their ground for intervention was “the moral issue” and that alone. Difficult ground, for the Bishops had spoken out, not after the divorce-court verdict—which clarified “the moral issue”—but after Gladstone’s letter, which shed no further light on morals, but was decisive on an important political issue: the attitude of the Liberal party towards Parnell’s continued leadership. The Bishops, with this flank exposed to the most telling propaganda weapon of the Parnellites—“sacrificing the greatest of Irish leaders at the bidding of an Englishman”—were forced to accept a loss of real political influence, in the long-term sense, at the very moment when the hollow “victory” over Parnell seemed to show that influence at its height. The effects of the sordid, scurrilous struggle on the spectators were also destructive of the hopes of moderate men. Among the young in Ireland the spectacle engendered contempt for constitutional politicians; among the English it fostered contempt for the Irish. The contempts converged in the ruin of the Irish party and the rise of Sinn Fein.

  Short as it is, the period discussed by Dr. Lyons in The Fall of Parnell is therefore eminently worthy of the detailed attention he gives it. The Fall of Parnell is a work of most exacting scholarship, bringing a clear, steady light to bear on a time darkened by a multitude of controversial reminiscences. His cool and lucid narrative, with its scrupulous fairness to all the contestants, is a more moving record of this tragic time than all the eloquent and embattled pages that have been devoted to it before now. In following what might be called the “diplomatic history” of the Parnell split—the attempts of the “moderates,” John Dillon and William O’Brien, to find some firm basis for compromise—Dr. Lyons has explored, with tact and thoroughness, a set of situations which were of great importance for Ireland’s future, and were indeed perhaps of wider significance. “Violence,” William O’Brien had said much earlier, “is a way of securing a hearing for moderation.” This is a tenable argument but, as O’Brien was himself to experience in repeated political failures, it has its counterpart; if moderation, having secured a hearing, does not achieve a quick solution, the violence resumes and the moderates are doomed. Psychologically, the Parnell split marked the resumption of violence. In that climate of denunciation, no compromise was possible. Parnell had to win or die. Parnellism in its old form was dead already, once the leader’s personal authority was turned against the policy of accommodation with Britain—the “liberal alliance”—which he had made his own. The men who had been most identified with the spirit of the old Parnellism came to seem irrelevant in the new conditions.