Lady Gregory's Toothbrush (3 page)

No one denied Sir William's personal concern about his tenants during the Famine, but the Poor Law clause he proposed in the House of Commons became one of the main causes of suffering in Ireland in those years. The importance of the Gregory Clause was emphasized during Sir William's lifetime by Canon John O'Rourke, author of the first history of the Famine, which was published in 1874 and remained in print as the only serious account for many years. Canon O'Rourke wrote: “A more complete engine for the slaughter and expatriation of a people was never designed … Mr Gregory's words – the words of a
liberal and pretended friend of the people – and
Mr
Gregory's
clause – are things that should be forever
remembered
by the descendants of the slaughtered and expatriated small farmers of Ireland.”

S
ir William's “evil reputation” was as much a part of the legacy of Coole as his good name as a landlord. His famous clause helped to undermine the very class that Yeats and Lady Gregory later sought to exalt. Neither Yeats nor Lady Gregory wrote plays or poems about the Famine. It was not part of the Ireland they sought to
celebrate
or lament or dream into being. And there is
something
astonishing in the intensity with which Yeats sought to establish Coole Park and its legacy as noble, with “a scene well set and excellent company”,

Lady Gregory's response to her ambiguous legacy is fascinating. There was nothing impetuous in her nature. In the years after she had edited her husband's autobiography, she began to learn the Irish language, she went once more to the Aran Islands, and she began to study Irish history in order to edit the letters of Sir William's grandfather.
Gradually,
her unionist sympathies dissolved, disappeared. The transformation was slow. She did not go the way of other women of her class such as Constance Gore-Booth or Maud Gonne. She did not become a firebrand or a
revolutionary
. Her personality was calm and steadfast, and there was an odd wisdom in the way she lived after the death of Sir William. She loved Coole and she wished to remain true to her husband's memory and keep the estate and the house in order until Robert, her only child, could come into his inheritance. And slowly she began to love Ireland also, in the way that other nationalists of her time loved Ireland, inventing and discovering a rich past for her, and imagining a great future, and managing to ignore the muddy and guilt-ridden history in between this ancient glory and the time to come.

She was intelligent enough to manage the
contradictions
in her position, to allow her own response to her
heritage
to remain natural and easy. Fortunately, she was not introspective. She lacked vanity and this preserved her from too much self-examination.

She gave part of herself up to re-inventing Ireland. “Irish”, she would write, “is the most ancient vernacular literature of modern Europe.” In these last years of the nineteenth century she discovered that the “great bulk of [Irish] literature is certainly older than the twelfth century, but we can carry it back much farther, certainly to the
seventh
century. The Cuchulain stories were put into
permanent
literary form at about the same date as
Beowulf
, some 100 to 200 years before the Scandinavian mythology
crystallised
into its present form, and at least 200 years before the oldest Charlemagne Romances, and probably 300 years before the earliest draft of the Nibelungenlied.”

Her old friends began to notice the change in her. After the publication in 1898 of
Mr Gregory's Letter-Box
, the correspondence of her husband's grandfather, Sir Frederick Burton told her that he saw a tendency to Home Rule on her part. “No, not Home Rule,” she replied, “but I defy anyone to study Irish history without getting a dislike and distrust of England.” She began to defend her new self to her friends. In a diary entry in 1900, she wrote about a
dinner
party with members of the establishment: “At dinner I had a fight for the Irish language. Lord Morris says that he never spoke against its being taught in the schools, for he never heard any proposal at all being made for it at the Board:– if he had he would only have laughed at such an absurd craze. Lecky, defending his Trinity professors, sneered at me for calling Irish a modern language. I said yes, just in the same way as modern Greek; and Lady
Morris
told him it is spoken all around Spiddal.”

In February 1898, however, when Yeats told her that Maud Gonne was inciting hungry tenants in Kerry to kill their landlords and seize food, Lady Gregory reverted to
her role as property-owner: “I was aghast and spoke very strongly, telling him first that the famine itself was
problematic
, that if it exists there are other ways of meeting it, that we who are above the people in means and education, ought, were it a real famine, to be ready to share all we have with them, but that even supposing starvation was before them it would be for us to teach them to die with courage than to live by robbery.”

L
ady Gregory first saw W.B. Yeats in the spring of 1894, as she noted in her diary: “at Lord Morris' met Yates [
sic
] looking every inch a poet, though I think his prose ‘Celtic Twilight' is the best thing he has done”. In the summer of 1896 she met him again when he was
staying
with Arthur Symonds at Edward Martyn's house, which was close to Coole. “As soon as her terrible eye fell upon him,” Symonds later said, “I knew that she would keep him.” She invited Martyn's house-party to Coole and invited Yeats to return. When he came again to Edward Martyn's house the following summer, both he and Lady Gregory were fresh from protesting against Queen
Victoria's
jubilee, he by walking in a procession in Dublin in the company of Maud Gonne behind a coffin with the words “British Empire” inscribed on it, she by refusing to light a bonfire, much to the disgust of her neighbours and friends
the Goughs, “on the grounds of the Queen's neglect of the country”. On a rainy afternoon that summer in a
neighbour's
house Yeats and Lady Gregory began the
conversation
that resulted in the Abbey Theatre.

She had a typewriter and servants and a big house. She typed out letters to the great and the good seeking support for their theatre. She began to collect folklore in the
immediate
area (“An old man in the workhouse”, she wrote, “has a long poem but very few teeth, and the Moycullen priest, an Irish expert, is coming to help me interpret it tomorrow”); she offered Yeats two hundred thousand words for his use, which he put into shape and considered his own and published under his own name in six long essays. She later wrote with great reverence about folklore collecting: “It was a changing of the table of values, an astonishing excitement … It was not to the corners of newspapers or even to the Broadsheets of ballads sung in the little towns I looked now for poetry and romance, it was to stone-breakers and potato-diggers and paupers in the workhouse and beggars at my own door.” Others were not as reverent about her activities among the people in those years. The writer Brinsley MacNamara wrote that she gathered “material for her books and plays in the
cabins
and cottages of Clare-Galway, where she had been industriously plied with folklore specially invented for her visits, and all of which she had innocently accepted”.

In the early years of their relationship, Yeats had a sense of her practical and dutiful nature, but none of her talent. She dreamed that she had been writing some
articles
, and that Yeats had said to her: “It's not your business to write. Your business is to make an atmosphere.” Her life as a writer began slowly and tentatively. It began with her writing out the stories she heard in the area around Coole.

Her folklore collecting was not part of an unusual ambition, nor was her urge to create popular, or readable, versions of the ancient sagas. Her best friend in London, Lady Layard, who had given her the gift of her typewriter, was the daughter of Lady Charlotte Guest, who had made a readable and popular translation of the Welsh epics known as
The Mabinogion.
In 1878 her cousin Standish James O'Grady published his
History of Ireland: The Heroic Period
, in which he told the story of the sagas: “The forefront of Irish History we find filled with great heroic personages of a dignity and power more than human … Century after century the mind of the country was inflamed by the
contemplation
of these mighty beings whom … men believed to be their ancestors.” In 1892 Standish Hayes O'Grady, also her cousin, had published his
Silva Gadelica
, which included translations from ancient Irish sagas that were stilted and literal but accurate. Lady Gregory had met
during
her years in London figures such as Edward Clodd, who wrote about the power of ancient stories, and Alfred
Nutt, who had published in 1900 a tiny pamphlet called
Cuchulain, The Irish
Achilles. For further reading, Nutt
suggested
Eleanor Hull's
The Cuchulain Saga in Irish Literature.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the study of an ancient Ireland had become part of the cultural life of certain (and indeed uncertain) Irish Protestants. Both of Oscar Wilde's parents had collected folklore or studied archaeology. It was part of the harmless idealization of the Irish landscape that is also to be found in the painting of the period, and in the songs of Thomas Moore. (It was part of the invention of tradition that also occurred in Scotland and Wales as traditional forms of life began to disappear.) Oscar Wilde's mother's extreme nationalism was unusual; most of the antiquarians, including both O'Gradys, remained unionists or apolitical. But this began to change in the 1890s. In 1898 Lady Gregory, through Yeats, met Douglas Hyde, who had founded the Gaelic League as a non-political organization aiming to revive Gaelic culture, but who remained alert to the political implications of such a revival. The Gaelic League, Hyde wrote to Lady Gregory, aimed “at stimulating the old peasant popish aboriginal population”.

Hyde spoke Irish and translated songs and poems and stories, but he also enjoyed landed-gentry pastimes such as shooting at birds. Lady Gregory later wrote that when some ladies heard that a gentleman, namely Hyde, “had
been talking Irish to the beaters while shooting with us said that was nonsense because no one who spoke Irish could be a gentleman. They also had never heard the
language
had the dignity of a literature.”

In February 1900, as a result of pressure from the Gaelic League to introduce Irish as a school subject,
Professor
Robert Atkinson of Trinity College in Dublin wrote a report which stated that Irish literature “has scarcely been touched by the movements of the great literatures; it is the untrained popular feeling … My astonishment is that through the whole range of Irish literature that I have read (and I have read an enormous range of it) the smallness of the element of idealism is most noticeable … And as there is very little idealism there is very little
imagination
… The Irish tales are devoid of it fundamentally.”

In that same year an English editor asked Yeats to write a version of these sagas, but he refused, saying that he did not have the time. When Lady Gregory suggested that she might do a translation, Yeats was not enthusiastic; he had no confidence in her literary skills. But she set to work, and when she showed him a section she had done, he changed his mind and encouraged her. Yeats, she later wrote, “was slow in coming to believe I had any gift for writing and he would not encourage me to it, thinking he had made better use of my folk-lore gathering than I could do. It was only when I had read him one day in London
my chapter ‘The Death of Cuchulain' that he came to look on me as a fellow writer.” Her aim was to refute Atkinson, to produce a version of the Cuchulain story that would display all its ingenuity and intricacy but also would be accessible to the general public. She thought it “might be used as a school book”, which meant that she took great care not to include material that would shock the prudish. Much had been published over the years in fragmentary form; Lady Gregory now sought to stitch it together,
making
use of earlier translations, so that as a narrative it would make sense; she invented an idiom for it which was neither a direct translation nor standard English. She translated it into the English of Kiltartan, she said, the area around Coole, but much of it, in fact, is quite plain and natural, almost neutral in its tone.

Lady Gregory was nervous about the reception of
Cuchulain of Muirthemne
and about her own credentials as a translator. On 9 January 1902 she wrote to Yeats about his proposed introduction: “Whatever you write will be
beautiful
, but I don't think you need write much, the chief thing is to show that you, representing the literary
movement
, accept the book, and that it is not rubbishy amateur work, as critics might be prepared to think.” His
introduction
was grandiloquent. It began: “I think this book is the best that has come out of Ireland in my time.” He wrote about the language of the translation: “As she
moved about among her people she learned to love the beautiful speech of those who think in Irish, and to
understand
that it is as true a dialect of English as the dialect that Burns wrote in. It is some hundreds of years old and age gives a language authority.”

She dedicated her translation to the people of
Kiltartan
. The page-long introduction managed a number of astonishing false notes, as though Lady Gregory had been caught halfway in the act of self-invention. In attacking Professor Atkinson, the mistress of Coole left herself open to mockery: “And indeed if there were more respect for Irish things among the learned men that live in the college in Dublin, where so many of these old writings are stored, this work would not have been left to a woman of the house, that has to be minding the place, and listening to complaints and dividing her share of food.” She
mentioned
at the end of the dedication that the people of
Kiltartan
“have been very kind to me since I came over from Kilcriest, two-and-twenty years ago”. For a moment,
Roxborough
, with its English colonial sound, was being wiped off the map. The place she came from, in this final
sentence
, would have an Irish name.