The Fall of the House of Wilde (42 page)

29

Colonial Resistance

Jane often attended social functions with Oscar and Constance, and cut a strange contrast to their self-consciously chic appearance. ‘Eccentric' was the impression she made on the author Marie Corelli, who on one occasion came across the three at a reception in Upper Phillimore Place in London. Corelli afterwards recorded her impression in her diary,

Mrs Oscar Wilde, a very pretty woman, interested me, in a Directoire costume with tall cavalier hat and plume, and a great crutch stick . . . Lady Wilde, his mother, was there in a train-dress of silver grey satin, with a hat as large as a small parasol and long streamers of silver grey tulle all floating about her! She did look eccentric.
¹

Corelli would not have been surprised to learn that
Ancient Legends
, published in 1887, was Jane's most recent work. Questions as to whether the Egyptian lamentation, ‘
Hi-loo-loo! Hi-loo-loo
,' cried over the dead, was the original form of the Irish wail, ‘
Ul-lu-lu
,' itself the same cry as the Greek, ‘
Eleleu
,' was hardly mainstream fare, nor, for that matter, the type of fare to yield gold. Jane was in desperate need of money and had a knack for making literary material go a long way. Jane found material William had left unfinished in a shoebox and worked up the notes to produce two volumes, both published by Ward and Downey. The first volume,
Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland, with sketches of the Irish past
, was published in 1887, the second,
Ancient Cures, Charms, and Usages of Ireland
, in 1890. She also recycled some of the contents – ‘The Story of St Patrick' and ‘Whitsuntide in Ireland', for instance – and published them in the
Pall Mall Gazette
on 17 and 21 May 1888, and ‘Hallow Tide in Ireland', in the
Queen
on 24 November 1888.

It is difficult to know how much William had written and how much was added by Jane after his death. But since the general premise of the work comes from William's lifelong research in ethnology, one can reasonably assume he wrote the bulk. As Darwin showed humans evolving out of natural forms,
Ancient Legends
shows how cultures evolve out of each other. Though at first glance
Ancient Legends
appears as little more than a compendium of ritual and custom, it is in fact much more: a book on the mind and the connections it typically makes. It shows how the human mind, across a variety of human cultures and times, and especially when trained upon the religious and the magical, displays similar patterns. The book discusses the modes of thought of the first cultured races – their myths and legends – to see which patterns of thought have survived into Irish culture. The persistence into later ages of characteristics from earlier ages was termed ‘survivals', and first discussed by the Oxford professor of anthropology, E. B. Tylor, in his book
Primitive Culture
in 1871. That vestiges of ancient myth exist in our thinking and behaviour excited many artists, not least of them Yeats, who made profitable use of
Ancient Legends
for his folkloric stories and poetry. Writing in
Women's World
in February 1889, Yeats was one of the few to recognise the book's importance as a foundation of culture.

Climate and geography, the book maintains, account for most but not all differences in thought patterns. For instance, the prevalence of sun and light in Greece goes some way to explain why they constructed no theory of the devil, no hell, no dogma of eternal punishment, and why their gods communicated transparently with mortals. By contrast, Teuton and Gothic races faced a life of endless warfare against a demonic nature – thus did they construct hideous idols with unseen powers. It is therefore surprising, according to
Ancient Legends
, how little trace there was in Irish legend of Thor or Odin or the Frost Giants, even though the Danes had held the east coast of the country for 300 years. That Irish legends point to the east for their origin, not to the north, to a warm land, not to icebergs, explains why serpent worship once prevailed in Ireland. St Patrick had famously axed the serpent idol Crom-Cruadh and cast it into the Boyne, from whence arose the legend that St Patrick banished all venomous things from the island. As the Irish climate could never produce a serpent, this worship must have come from the east. Similarly, the book locates the origins of Irish wakes in the funeral ceremonies of Egypt, Greece and other eastern climes, from whence the Irish brought the customs of the death chant, the mourning women and the funeral games. But the subject is no more Ireland than it is ancient Egypt or Greece. These places simply exist as exempla of the thought processes by which early people governed their lives.

More controversially, the work shows that religions are based on the same premise as superstitions. Although the work does not brandish the parallel, the resemblance of peasant customs and ideas to the doctrines of Christianity is striking and cannot have been unintentional. Christians would not have wanted to be told ancient societies also had religions, or that what purported to be sacrifices or deeds can sometimes be explained as magic, or that magic might be at the root of the religion. This is implied in
Ancient Legends
in the superimposition of superstition and religion, and in the equivalence set up in cultures so apparently unalike. The early century had proved the textual instability of Holy Writ and of the radical similarity between Judaeo-Christian traditions and those of pagan religions. David Strauss's
Das Leben Jesu
(1835–6), translated by George Eliot, had been a counter-gospel for William's and Jane's generation as Ernest Renan's
Vie de Jésus
(1869) was for Oscar's and Willie's. In this work, William's Protestant-inspired exegetical honesty turns against itself – he had always been an iconoclast without seeming to be one.

Equally controversially,
Ancient Legends
emphasised the commonality in the patterns of human thought across time and place. It therefore exposed the sham in imperialist assumptions of innate superiority pertaining to certain races. In culture at the time, much was predicated on the superiority of the Saxon over the Celt, the Indian and the African. By this time, the late 1880s, a battalion of ethnographers were using empirical analysis to argue that, from Persia to the west of Ireland, the mind of man is the same. Relying, as Jane put it in the preface, on ‘broken fragments of the primal creed, and broken idioms of the primal tongue', they argued that there is no difference in essence between one ethnicity and another; all difference they attributed to the influence of climate and geographical location on culture, which in turn shapes history.
²

At the base of Sir William's work is the premise: it is not we who make mythology; it is mythology that makes us. If we wish to know ourselves better, it is to ancient myth that we must turn. Oscar would later develop the mantra ‘life imitates art', which is similar. The work contains the seeds of thought James George Frazer would later develop and publish in 1889 as
The Golden Bough
, a book named as the harbinger of modernism in art. Great artists from T. S. Eliot to Stravinsky mined Frazer's compilation of ancient mythology; Eliot most conspicuously for the pagan baptismal rites in
The Waste Land
and Stravinsky for
The Rite of Spring
. Had
Ancient Legends
been published in the 1870s, when most of it was written, it would have anticipated much of the ethnological debate.

The reviews were lukewarm. The reviewer in the
Athenaeum
, 27 August 1887, wrote ‘we find among them little trace of the fantastic and original imagination that abounds in the old Celtic romances', though he appreciated ‘the simplicity, charm, and raciness' with which they were told. Among other reviewers, the clearest expression of how far the values informing the political tension between Ireland and Britain reached beyond Parliament into cultural life can best be seen in the
Academy
. The reviewer, referring to the preface, suspected a political motive behind the work.

Lady Wilde writes, ‘The three great sources of knowledge respecting the shrouded parts of humanity, are the language, the mythology, and the ancient monuments of the country.' I felt puzzled when first I read this sentence, and I am puzzled still. What does ‘the shrouded parts of humanity' mean? Does it refer to physical qualities, or to mental qualities? Can it mean little-known obscure nationalities? Is it a euphemistic term for the Irish race?
³

The
Academy
was obliged to wait until the publication of the second volume,
Ancient Cures, Charms, and Usages of Ireland
, in 1890 for Jane to express her political views.

In the second volume she included a handful of miscellaneous essays of relevance to the history of Ireland. One of the pieces, entitled ‘American Irish', is most compelling for its prescience. There Jane forecasts the unstoppable unrest of Ireland, and says North America will – indeed is – influencing Irish affairs in a way barely visible to Britain. Though first written in 1878, it was substantially altered to take account of the defeat of the Home Rule Bill in 1886. The Bill, proposed by Gladstone, had offered little more than local government, with Crown, defence, trade and revenues controlled by the imperial Parliament. Opponents feared the bill would set a precedent for the break-up of Empire. That that was Jane's now disappointed hope is clear from this essay, where she explores how far the values informing the hostilities can best be understood in the context of history.

What needs to be taken into account was the fact that for centuries England and Ireland had been out of sync in their educational and economic development, and just as important, according to Jane, out of sync in temperament. For Jane, ‘There is also some instinctive antagonism, or deficiency of sympathy between English and Irish nature, to account for the eternal war of races, and religions, and temperaments through so many centuries.' She saw it manifested in their different attitudes to religion. From the early centuries, Ireland was an intensely religious country, and much of its art and philosophy was influenced by religion. Bishop Berkeley's proposition that things only exist when perceived is but one example of a tradition of thought that favours the invisible over the material world. The Irish novel, from
Gulliver's Travels
and
Melmoth the Wanderer
through to
The Portrait of Dorian Gray
and
Dracula
, prefers fantasy to reality, and much Irish thought is idealist in tendency, from the ninth-century philosopher John Scottus Eriugena through to Berkeley and the aesthetics and utopianism of Oscar Wilde – to which we will return. It is no surprise that in the 1850s Jane and William had dabbled in mysticism, to which she retained an attraction, for in the mid-eighties she influenced Constance in this direction. There is a resistance to reason in Irish culture, though not of the kind satirised by nineteenth-century
Punch
cartoons, with their images of the Irish as idiots. The point Jane was making was that the country had a distinct way of thinking, even if it didn't have its own parliament.

Jane thought that would all change in the not too distant future. Of most significance to Ireland's political future was the influence of America. The descendants of the immigrants who had left Ireland during the famine had won power in their adopted country, and could appreciate the value of ‘human rights', Jane wrote in ‘American Irish'. ‘The regeneration and re-creation of Ireland will not come through “Home Rule” as understood by its present supporters and leaders, if, indeed, that hollow fiction is not even now fully extinct.' Jane thought that the old authority could not simply be replaced by a new authority, dressed up as ‘Home Rule' but ‘with its old feudal distinctions of class and caste', because the people would reject that pantomime of equality. As she saw it, new alignments would be made with America and with Europe, for Ireland had never shaped its history alone. These alignments would challenge the fundamentally static notion of Britain and Ireland that had been at the core of the imperial thought. Americans would expand the horizon of debate, for it was America that was showing what a truly independent spirit looked like.

One thing, however, is certain . . . the feverish unrest that has driven the young generation of Ireland to America will one day drive them back again all alight with her ideas, and ready to proclaim that in a Republic alone is to be found the true force that emancipates the soul and the life of man . . . England should have counted the cost before compelling the Irish to take shelter in the arms of the mighty mother of freedom.

She added, ‘There is nothing to alarm in the word “Republic”. It simply means the Government of common-sense for the common good.' She wrote this knowing that for Westminster a republic was as unacceptable as it was unthinkable.

She concludes: ‘What the unknown future may bring, none can predict, but another half-century will witness assuredly a new order of things in society and politics.' She expects that there will be a clash of war before Ireland wins its freedom; as she put it, ‘the iconoclasts will precede the constructors', for ‘the present time is emphatically iconoclastic'. Finally she suggests that England should pay attention to ‘the influences from America that are so powerfully affecting the tone of Irish thought, for Ireland may yet be the battle-ground where the destinies of the Empire will be decided'. Then again,

all-powerful England, may effect a social revolution peacefully, and without any danger to the integrity of the Empire, if wise and just measures are organised in time for the true advancement and posterity of Ireland; and the Irish people, in return, will stand faithfully by England in those hours of peril which seem gathering in clouds of darkness upon the horizon, and threatening dangers which only a united Empire can overcome.
⁴