In 1879, the 27-year-old Augusta Persse from Roxborough in Co Galway, while accompanying her mother and her brother to Nice, renewed her acquaintance with their neighbour Sir William Gregory, a widower, who owned Coole Park. He was 35 years older than her, he had been a member of parliament for both Dublin and Galway and had also been governor of Ceylon. He lived mainly in London. He was interested in books and paintings and, when he came to Ireland, he gave her the run of his library at Coole. In 1880 she married him.
The house he took her to, and the life he gave her in their 12 years of marriage, and indeed his own connections and history, offered her a rich set of associations. The most important and enduring relationship of those years began in Egypt in December 1881. Wilfred Scawen Blunt, a handsome English poet and anti-imperialist, was travelling in Egypt with his wife, a grand-daughter of Byron. Both couples became interested in Egyptian nationalism and especially in the fate of Arabi Bey, the Egyptian leader who sought a degree of freedom from the control which Britain and France exercised over his country. Blunt and Gregory began to write letters to the Times, whose editor was a friend of Gregory's, which went against British official policy. As the British government became more alarmed, Sir William slowly withdrew support. Yet Lady Gregory remained on Blunt's side. With Sir William's wavering approval, she sought to win support for Arabi in England by writing about her meeting his wife and children for the Times.
Sir William died in March 1892. By temperament and upbringing his widow was skilled in the art of "dutiful self-suppression," in James Pethica's phrase, and skilled too in the art of discretion. It is possible that nobody noticed anything special or peculiar in the twelve sonnets entitled A Woman's Sonnets which Wilfred Scawen Blunt published under his own name at the end of January 1892, just more than six weeks before Sir William Gregory's death.
The sonnets were, in fact, written by Lady Gregory and they make clear that she was in love with Blunt and had an affair with him which began during their Egyptian sojourn, when she had been married for less than two years, and ended 18 months later. Her image after Sir William's death was that of a dowager who exuded dryness and coldness and watchfulness, who wore black and modelled herself on Queen Victoria. The sonnets on the other hand disclose someone else:
"If the past year were offered me again,
And the choice of good and ill before me set
Would I accept the pleasure with the pain
Or dare to wish that we had never met?
Ah! Could I bear those happy hours to miss
When love began, unthought of and unspoke -
That summer day when by a sudden kiss
We knew each other's secret and awoke?"
After her husband's death she worked on the incomplete manuscript for his "autobiography". While this work seemed to Wilfred Scawen Blunt merely a widow's "pious act", it was at the same time a piece of careful re-positioning and re-invention which would become the basis not only for Lady Gregory's life at Coole and her work with Yeats, but it would also become the basis for many of Yeats's poems about Coole and many of his Anglo-Irish attitudes. It would emphasise that Sir William was loved by the people, that he and his family were respected as landlords.
In the table of contents for the autobiography, Chapter V11 contains a section entitled: The Gregory Clause. In March 1847 in the House of Commons, Sir William Gregory proposed a clause which was to have far-reaching implications. He proposed that no one who held a lease for more than a quarter of an acre of land should be allowed into the workhouse or allowed avail of any of the relief schemes. "Persons," Sir William said in the House of Commons, "should not be encouraged to exercise the double vocation of pauper and farmer."
In his autobiography, Sir William wrote: "Though I got an evil reputation in consequence, those who really understood the condition of the country have always regarded this clause as its salvation."
Sir 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 whom 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.
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 to the Aran Islands and she began to study Irish history to edit her husband's grandfather's letters. Gradually, her Unionist sympathies dissolved, disappeared. The transformation was slow. 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.
Lady 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 at Edward Martyn's house which was close to Coole. She invited Martyn's house-party to Coole and invited Yeats to return. On a rainy afternoon in a neighbour's house Yeats and Lady Gregory began the conversation which resulted in the Abbey Theatre.
In 1900 an English editor asked Yeats to write a version of the Cuchulainn 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.
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 half way in the act of self-invention, when her new struggling self had not been fully formed. 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."
Cathleen N∅ Houlihan was Yeats's third play. At Coole in the summer of 1901, a year after she had determined to keep out of politics, Yeats told Lady Gregory of a dream "almost as distinct as a vision, of a cottage where there was well-being and firelight and talk of a marriage, and into the midst of that cottage there came an old woman in a long cloak" who was "Ireland herself, that Cathleen N∅ Houlihan for whom so many songs have been sung, and about whom so many stories have been told and for whose sake so many have gone to their death". This woman would lead the young man of the house away from domestic happiness to join the French who had landed at Killala.
It is now absolutely clear that most of Cathleen N∅ Houlihan was actually written by Lady Gregory rather than Yeats. The idea belonged to Yeats and Yeats wrote the chant of the old woman at the end. But he could not write naturalistic peasant dialogue, and the play depends on the naturalistic setting, the talk of money and marriage, the sense of ease in family life in a small holding. In the manuscript held in the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, Lady Gregory has written in pencil on the first section of 10 pages: "All this mine alone" and "This with WBY" at the beginning of the second section.
The play was performed with George Russell's play Deirdre in Dublin in April 1902 with Maud Gonne playing Cathleen. The critic Stephen Gwynn attended the performance and wrote: "I went home asking myself if such plays should be produced unless one was prepared for people to go out to shoot and be shot . . . Yeats was not alone responsible; no doubt but Lady Gregory helped him to get the peasant speech so perfect; but above all Miss Gonne's impersonation had stirred the audience as I have never seen another audience stirred."
In these years Lady Gregory applied the same zeal to collecting her folklore as to collecting her rents. But she was also, on at least one occasion, frightened enough by what she herself had created to write to Frank Fay in 1907: "I particularly didn't wish to have Gaol Gate (in Galway) in the present state of agrarian excitement, it (might) be looked on as a direct incitement to crime."
Her plays could incite crime; but when crime came close to her, it kept her awake. There was no irony or jokes about a cattle raid at Coole in her letter to Yeats in May 1912 about her tenants: "Dear Willie, I am in great trouble this week - my brother wrote last week that he had had a meeting with the tenants but that they could not come to terms at present. Then Monday was rent day and he wired 'Tenants demand 6/- in the pound reduction - no rents paid.' This was a shock and gave me a sleepless night and in the morning I had a letter from him saying the tenants are trying to blackmail us - and that he is making preparations to seize their cattle end of this week or beginning of next, which will he thinks bring them to reason."
Lady Gregory's mixture of high ideals and natural haughtiness gave her an inflexibility and sturdy determination which were invaluable when dealing with those who opposed her. Both she and Yeats had the strength of will, the class confidence and the belief in their cause to do battle, when necessary, with the rabble, the Catholic church, the lord lieutenant and, when the time came, the new Irish state.
Towards the end of 1906 the young nationalists who had crowded in to see Cathleen N∅ Houlihan heard a rumour that there was a new Synge play in closed rehearsal at the Abbey Theatre which was likely to be even more offensive than The Shadow of the Glen to which they had strongly objected.
What remains fascinating about the riots and controversies surrounding Synge's The Playboy of the Western World is how, once under pressure, the founders of the Abbey Theatre reverted to their ascendancy and Protestant backgrounds. After a week of riots in the theatre, there was, on Yeats's suggestion, a public debate held in the Abbey on February 4th. Yeats took the stage, referring to a priest in Liverpool who had withdrawn a play because of the public's objection, he said of the Abbey directors: "we have not such pliant bones and did not learn in the houses that bred us a suppliant knee." Yeats's father in the same debate referred to Ireland as an island of saints and scholars and then, sneeringly, referred to "plaster saints". Lady Gregory's nephew led a group of Trinity students to the theatre to defend the play and offer what was perhaps most missing in the debate - a rendering of "God Save the King". In 1909, two years after The Playboy, Lady Gregory acidly placed the conflict between the Abbey directors and the Catholic nationalist mob in stark terms: "It is the old battle," she wrote to Yeats, "between those who use a toothbrush and those who don't."
Between February 16th and March 8th 1909 George Bernard Shaw wrote his own version of The Playboy; it was a short play called The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet: A Sermon in Crude Melodrama and it was set in America, Blanco being an unrepentant non-toothbrush-owning horse thief with strong views on the Almighty. There were also several foul-mouthed women, and a lot of very funny, sometimes silly and often irreverent and blaspheming dialogue. In London, the lord chamberlain banned the play. The chamberlain's remit did not extend to Dublin, however, and when Shaw handed the script to Lady Gregory, she took it to Yeats and they decided to produce it at the Abbey.
This would prove that the Abbey Theatre would oppose censorship from every quarter. Yeats and Lady Gregory had stood up to the rabble; now they would, with the same hauteur and moral authority, stand up to Dublin Castle. In August 1909 Lady Gregory herself directed the play. Soon, the authorities wrote to her threatening to remove the theatre's patent if she produced the play.
In Our Theatre Business, Lady Gregory described with great relish the meetings which she had with the authorities. "Can you suggest no way out?" they asked her. "None, except our being left alone." At first, Yeats and Lady Gregory decided to give in. And then: "When we had left the Theatre," Lady Gregory wrote, "and were walking through the lamp-lighted streets, we found that during those two or three hours our minds had come to the same decision, that we had given our word, that at all risks we must keep it or it would never be trusted again; that we must in no case go back, but must go on at any cost." Dublin Castle caved in and the play opened, to capacity audiences and huge publicity, on August 25th. Even Patrick Pearse was impressed.
Yeats wrote many of his greatest poems about Coole. In his relationship with Lady Gregory he displayed both an astonishing closeness and a sporadic tactlessness. When her son Robert was shot down over Italy in the first World War, Yeats wrote four poems. Two of them, 'In Memory of Major Robert Gregory' and 'An Irish Airman Forsees His Death' show an enormous understanding of the shape of her grief. (Indeed, she and Robert's widow Margaret oversaw the first of these, making many suggestions.) The two other poems, 'Shepherd and Goatherd', written early in 1918, and 'Reprisals', written in November 1920, displeased her. Yeats sent the latter poem to her from Oxford on hearing about the Black and Tans on the rampage in Galway. He suggested that Robert Gregory, who, although Irish, had fought with the British army and was thus among "the cheated dead":
"Half-drunk or whole-mad soldiery
Are murdering your tenants there;
Men that revere your father yet
Are shot at on the open plain;
Where can new-married women sit
To suckle children now? Armed men
May murder them in passing by
Nor parliament, nor law take heed:-
Then stop your ears with dust and lie
Among the other cheated dead."
- November 23 1920
On the envelope, which is in the Berg Collection in The New York Public Library, she wrote: "I did not like this and asked not to have it published." The poem did not appear in any periodical of the time, nor in any collection by Yeats. It was first printed in a magazine in 1948 when they were both dead under the title "Reprisals".
As the new Irish State came into being, both Lady Gregory and Yeats needed all their social and political skills to ensure the survival of the Abbey. They offered it to the State, but instead agreed to accept a subsidy. The price of the subsidy was a government representative, the economist George O'Brien, on the board of the theatre. This was the context in which Yeats and Lady Gregory's last great battle about censorship and freedom of expression would take place.
In August 1925, O'Casey submitted his new play The Plough and the Stars, which dealt with Easter Week 1916, to the Abbey. Yeats and Lennox Robinson and Lady Gregory liked the play ("she is an extraordinarily broad-minded woman," O'Casey wrote to a friend) and it was to be staged in February 1926. By early September there were problems. The play allowed Irish nationalists to mix with prostitutes; it also showed a Tricolour being brought into a pub. But the overall message of the play was even more offensive: it did not glorify those who fought for Irish freedom at a time when many of them were hungry for glory. Soon, the play was read by George O'Brien who wrote of "the possibility that the play might offend any section of public opinion so seriously as to provoke an attack on the Theatre of a kind that would endanger the continuance of the subsidy". His letter suggested that he was within his rights to demand the removal of words, characters and undue emphasis.
When Yeats came to Coole to discuss this, Lady Gregory, according to her journal, "said at once that our position is clear. If we have to choose between the subsidy and our freedom, it is our freedom we choose. And we must tell him that there was no condition attached to the subsidy".
On February 11th there was a riot in the theatre. Lady Gregory was at Coole and read about it in the newspaper on her way to Dublin. Yeats met her at the station. He wanted to have another debate, as they did after the Playboy riots, but she realized that this was different, many of the rioters were women who had lost men in 1916 and the War of Independence; they were not the rabble, and they would always have the support of the public. Some of them owned toothbrushes. Lady Gregory had very little time for women, and no interest in debating with them. She had a rule, which she wrote down in her journal for September 29th,1919, "of never talking of politics with a woman". Thus there was no Abbey debate.
In February 1929 James McNeill, the governor general, invited Lady Gregory to stay in his house, the old viceregal lodge. She came with her grand-daughter, Catherine. As they were shown around the house, Lady Gregory said that Catherine's grandfather, Sir William, had come to this house when his own grandfather was under secretary and also lived in the Pheonix Park. Sir William had learned his Latin lessons from the viceroy, Lord Wellesley in these rooms.
Lady Gregory was in a unique position in the new State. She, whose family was steeped in the history of Anglo-Irish power, was welcome in the house of the Irish governor general that had been the seat of English power for so long. Others who came from her class and espoused the cause of Irish nationalism were too extreme now and opposed the compromises which the new regime had made. Most of her class had left the country. She lived in two worlds: one of them became the Irish Free State and she was proud of that. The other one disappeared. In 1930, Robert had his 21st birthday at Coole. "But it is a contrast," she wrote, "to Robert's coming of age, with the gathering of cousins and the big feast and dance for the tenants - Coole no longer ours. But the days of landed gentry have passed. It is better so. Yet I wish some one of our blood would after my death care enough for what has been a home for so long, to keep it open".
Reprinted with permission from The New York Review of Books where an extended version of this essay appeared in the August 9th issue. (c)2001, Nyrev, Inc.
The seventh annual Lady Gregory Autumn Gathering takes place at Gort in Co Galway September 28th - 30th, and will be opened by Colm Toib∅n. This year's theme is "The European Connection". Those participating will include Dr Rosangela Barone, Robert O'Byrne and Kevin Myers. Details from 091-521836