The Fall of the House of Wilde (14 page)

Jane warmed instantly to Lotten. At twenty-nine, Lotten was seven years younger than Jane when they met and had the social confidence Jane appreciated in women, having been brought up in court society in Sweden. She also had brains. In Sweden, she became a respected woman of letters, edited a magazine of modern culture,
Our Time
, and ran a salon where literati found themselves surrounded by regal splendour. Being privileged did nothing to thwart Lotten's professional ambitions and liberal sympathies. She used her position in society to support the emancipation of women. She would endow a scholarship at the University of Uppsala for women, which, by virtue of her advocacy and that of others, would become one of the first educational institutions to grant degrees to women.
³

Lotten wrote an account of the visit to Ireland and published it in a Swedish magazine some years later. When she and the baron arrived at Merrion Square, they were ushered into William's gorgeously old-fashioned study. He appeared at 1 p.m., sharp. Then forty-two, William had a slight stoop, which Lotten put down to his dedication to ‘ceaseless work' rather than age. She saw behind ‘his thick, grey-streaked hair [that] falls around his open, broad forehead a strange, wilful manner'. With his hurried gait, Lotten wrote, he gave the ‘impression that his time is extremely precious'. The two struck up an appreciative rapport. ‘Darling little Lotten', was how William referred to her.
⁴
Lotten, on her part, admired William's ‘noble' demeanour. She found him a tender father. She liked the care and sensitivity with which he handled his children. On that first afternoon, William had gone to fetch the children to introduce them to the guests, and Lotten described him ‘carrying a small unruly boy on his arm and holding another by the hand'. She thought ‘his eyes rest[ed] on them with pleasure'.

Jane was the last to appear. To Lotten Jane looked like ‘a Roman matron must have looked at one time, with her classic pure features and with a Junoesque figure and bearing'. Lotten saw ‘fire in her gaze' and found ‘a mixture of soulful and attractive liveliness in her temperament'. Jane spent the first afternoon of their visit escorting the baron and Lotten through the streets of Dublin, guiding them through the museums, libraries and churches, participating in their excitement while depicting historical events.

The Kraemers returned on the Sunday evening to dine with the Wildes and their friends. Lotten spoke of the convivial and informal atmosphere, of the guests gathering on the balcony of the first-floor drawing room to watch the passing of a religious procession led by an orchestra. The meal followed; roast beef was served. The conversation revolved around Swedish history, legends and antiquities. In offering a toast to the Kraemers' health, William said he hoped the next time would be in Sweden. Lotten asked if Jane would accompany him, and William replied, ‘You must know I always say only “I” when it means both of us.' Lotten was perceptive enough to see how fiercely ‘independent' William was. The children were once again shown off. Oscar, with his ‘brown curly hair and the great dreaming eyes', was sent by his father to fetch a book from his library. Music rounded off the evening with a soprano singing one of Thomas Moore's nostalgically gloomy melodies.
⁵
With their masochistic delight in suffering, Moore's plaintive airs evoke a very Irish sentiment, as we see in James Joyce's
Dubliners
. Jane's charm and coquetry earned her the compliment of a letter in Swedish from the baron, a portrait of himself, and a verse to ‘Ireland's Daughter'.
⁶
It is unlikely that the baron would have guessed that behind the beguiling Jane was a former revolutionary who had called for the abolition of monarchy.

Lotten gave Jane access to a new spirit, a spirit whereby women bonded together to speak about their rights. They began a correspondence that lasted almost twenty years, until 1885, although we do not have Lotten's letters to Jane. Jane wrote to Lotten in February 1858: ‘You must believe me when I tell you that you gained all hearts here – You have so much intellect united with such highbred ease and grace & such sweet natural affectionate manners.' Lotten affected Jane in various ways, ranging from admiration to a tinge of envy, having distinguished herself in paths Jane might have pursued had not fate and marriage diverted her. The state trials of 1848 had, in effect, ended Jane's political ambitions. Material comfort and motherhood dampened her ambition. Certainly, she was working at the time on the translation of a German novel ‘that fell in my way', as Jane put it to Lotten in February 1858. The novel was called
Eritis sicut Deus
(
Ye shall be as God
). Jane liked it for, as she said, ‘it has reference throughout to the modern philosophy of Germany',
⁷
but it took her a further five years before it was ready for publication. Lotten reminded her of what she had once hoped to achieve.

At the time of the Kraemer visit William was working feverishly on a project that would consume him over the next five years. It was the largest task in the building of the Celtic archive: a history of the origins of Irish antiquities for the Royal Irish Academy. Their origins had to be established, their history and use had to be catalogued, before they could be meaningfully presented to the public. The Royal Irish Academy had struggled for years to get the project off the ground. They had set up a committee for the purpose, headed by Petrie, but had dithered over every step. They wanted to use the new photographic processes for a pictorial catalogue, and purchased the apparatus, but for one reason and another, photographs failed to materialise. Years passed, from 1853 to 1856, and still they made no advancement. William watched their inept bungling with mounting and unconcealed exasperation. In the spring of 1857 matters became more urgent, as the first Dublin gathering of the British Association for the Advancement of Science was to take place in Ireland, in August of that year. Naturally the Royal Irish Academy wanted to have something to show. William offered to take on the task himself. The undertaking had conquered a committee for three years and he promised to catalogue, describe and illustrate thousands of articles in sixteen weeks. The Academy agreed, gave him £250 for expenses, and relieved Petrie and the committee of the responsibility.

Did William stop and wonder what he had taken on? He had to face a mass of mute, incoherent objects, and unfold their history. No sooner had William started than disputes arose. The Royal Irish Academy wanted the objects to be ordered chronologically. William disagreed. He wanted to classify them according to their nature and use, arguing that this system would overcome the inevitable uncertainty over the exact age. He wrote to one academy member. ‘Don't you think it would be stupid to have a silver brooch in the same case with a stone Celt of a thousand years anterior, while said brooch would form part of a beautiful group of such articles in our silver collection?' William fought his ground with salty language and battled on, but the controversy continued. More disputes arose over photography. William knew it produced inexact replicas. The Academy tried to insist. William put down the opposition and employed illustrators to draw the articles and engravers to transfer the drawings onto wood.

Anyone who could help was dragooned. John Gilbert, then writing the
History of the City of Dublin
(published 1859), was at his beck and call: ‘Just make a note of the following subjects, and get answers thereon . . .' In another note to Gilbert, ‘have you any correspondent at Nantz of whom you can ask a question for me about the man who sent me the figure of the Celt – Mr Krauenflect?' A further note to Gilbert shows the frenzied pace at which he worked. ‘I have been so busy I have not had time to visit you. I have finished the spears, and hope to conclude in about three more sheets. I am now up to the food implements, and want you to give me some references to cauldrons, cooking vessels, or anything pertaining thereto. I have sent you a proof to do your endeavours upon. I have just heard that the set of casts from Mayence are on their way to Dublin. If the vessel arrived, and that we could get them through the custom-house before the Academy meeting on Monday evening, they might be exhibited.'
⁸
Gilbert remained his loyal companion throughout.

Only days before the British Association meeting was due to begin, the glass cases were unfinished and tempers rose. Few were exempt from William's cracking whip. Were it a struggle for finite rewards – as most historical knowledge is – it might admit of finite solutions. But investigations produced an outgrowth of possibilities. Incapable of slapdash work, William soon realised the impossibility of completing the catalogue for the British Association meeting. He focused, therefore, upon three categories – stone, earthenware and vegetable materials, leaving the objects of gold, animal materials, bronze, silver, iron, coins and other miscellanea to be completed at a later date.

Parts I and II of
The Catalogue of Irish Antiquities
was presented to an extraordinary meeting of the Royal Irish Academy on 24 August 1857, three days before the British Association gathered in Dublin. It is safe to say no other member could have pulled off this gargantuan task, at least in such a short time frame. The catalogue was no mere inventory of objects. It provided a detailed description of every article, together with its history and provenance, demanding in turn a vast hinterland of numbered references, historical suggestions and quotations. Yes, the Royal Irish Academy thanked William – but one has to ask whether they really appreciated the effort he had exerted and the extent of his achievement.

After the debates and the festivities of the British Association for the Advancement of Science were over, William arranged for a group of the delegates to visit the Aran Islands, off the coast of Galway. No fewer than seventy members took part in the expedition. Among the notable foreign participants were Professor Simpson of Edinburgh, an eminent Celtic scholar, and C. C. Babington, FRS, of St John's College, Cambridge, who later published an account of the trip. On 3 September, the party left Dublin for Galway, where they boarded a yacht and after some thirty miles went ashore on Aran Mór, or Inishmore, the largest of the islands.

The Aran Islands are one of the most isolated spots in Europe. Not even the potato blight of the 1840s reached there. Richly endowed with dolmens, cromlechs, round towers, crosses, castles, forts, churches, the islands offer a rich spread of archaeological treasure in these prehistoric and Christian remains. With the assistance of Petrie, William guided the party around the island for two days. Petrie discoursed on the stump of a round tower, William on a pagan stone fort here, a Christian settlement there. William led the party to the ‘richly sculptured stone cross' he had reassembled on an earlier visit. He had found bits of the cross in fragments across the neighbourhood of the Seven Churches, and had painstakingly put it together. To protect it from the trespass of cattle, he built a low wall of dry stone. He used the occasion to publicly thank one of the islanders, Martin O'Flaherty, for having watched over the fragmented cross.

On the evening of the second day the party climbed to a steep-sided pagan fortress, Dun Ængus, reputed to be the most magnificent primitive monument extant in Europe. There in the gathering dusk, with the hollow vibrations of the Atlantic, the delegates set up their banquet in the crumbling pagan fortress. If the evening was magical, it was also strange. Whatever the incongruity of men dressed for city streets paying homage to megaliths, the Aran Islands were a world and a time apart. Everything about the islanders – their homespun garb, their pagan-Christian faith, their anatomy, their work – declared that they had not lost their identity to the contradictions besetting modern man. All accounts of the visit speak of the timelessness of the people. ‘Resilient', ‘contained', ‘noble', ‘pure' were the recurrent words of the Celtophiles. William did not engage in this primitivist idealising. He could see that if the islanders were resilient, it came naturally to a people who could be swallowed up whole by nature, dependent as they were upon rough seas for their livelihood.

Petrie and William were toasted and thanked, and it was proposed that a book should be published to commemorate the expedition, detail the antiquities of Aran, and serve as a lasting memorial to Dr Wilde in appreciation for his services. The book did not materialise. William addressed the gathering, and spoke to the people of Aran in Irish, urging them to preserve the monuments from decay.
⁹
William never lost an opportunity to make others aware of the importance of preserving history.

It might be easy to mock the lofty remoteness of the Royal Irish Academicians from the common people, but there was nothing ludicrous or out of touch about their enterprise. A handful remained on the Island – Petrie, Stokes, Ferguson, O'Curry and Burton were joined by Lady Ferguson, Whitley, Margaret and Mrs Stokes. They stayed to delve more deeply into the culture. Burton painted the islanders, and joined Ferguson and Margaret Stokes to sketch the ruins and other antiquarian objects, while Whitley Stokes worked at the ancient inscriptions. But Petrie's music gathering best captures their endeavours. When evening fell, Petrie, along with the Gaelic expert, O'Curry, visited cottages known to house people ‘who had music'. There the singer would sit on a stool in the chimney corner, while Petrie and O'Curry sat opposite. The first time the song was sung, O'Curry would record the words, then it would be repeated more slowly for Petrie to note down the music. When Petrie had mastered it, he would play it on the violin. Many gathered for these evenings of music-sharing. Ferguson describes the ‘blazing turf-fire', the interior crowded and animated with ‘curiosity and pleasure'. Thus did instruction pass from low to high, from the peasant to the intellectual. Petrie was preserving the music, as William was the oral culture. This collaborative venture encapsulates the paradoxical mix of the ancient and avant-garde, which prevailed among these dissident but enlightened intellectuals.