The Fall of the House of Wilde (43 page)

Jane was no Cassandra – she was writing against the lineaments of an astonishingly durable imperial world view.

The same energy to comprehend and engage with society, tradition and history made her an 1848er. At that time she scarcely imagined that the tenant class, who appeared either subservient (to their priests and landlords) or sullenly uncooperative (in not responding to the 1848ers' call for rebellion), were ever going to be capable of making her give up a role at the helm of Irish society, or of saying anything that might contradict, challenge or otherwise disrupt the prevailing discourse. Writing some thirty years later, from London, the exilic city par excellence, she had the capacity to see the need for Ireland to rid itself of ‘caste and class', for a new order was needed.

She was anti-imperialist at a time of largely uncontested European imperial enthusiasm, progressive when it came to rendering fearlessly and pessimistically the self-affirming, self-deluding corruption of British domination, and in affirming Ireland's independent history and culture, which she thought Britain had violently disturbed. She was a creature before her time, and had the courage to see that no imperialist schemes ever succeed – because they trap the dominant party in illusions of omnipotence that cannot be sustained. If Jane hoped that readers and critics of her book might use it to further lines of argument about the historical experience of imperialism, then she must have been sorely disappointed to read the comment in the
Athenaeum
that saw nothing but partisanship. ‘It is sad to think that all the years Lady Wilde has dwelt in London have taught her nothing but hatred.'
⁵
Given that only 355 copies of the book sold, and that those who bought it would most likely have done so to read the ancient lore, we can assume her essay went largely unnoticed.
⁶

The two countries had been at loggerheads for centuries. Edmund Spenser, in his position as administrator overseeing Ireland, wrote in 1596, in
View of the Present State of Ireland
, that the Irish were barbarous enough to justify extermination.
⁷
Revolts began early and the exceptional talents of Goldsmith, Swift and Burke gave Irish resistance a discourse of its own. Sir William's recording of the genealogical fables speaks to another aspect of this cultural resistance: specifically, the capacity of colonialism to separate the individual from the instinctual life, breaking the generative lineaments of the cultural identity. Unquestionably, the recovery of geographical territory is at the heart of decolonisation. But the recovery of cultural territory was, for Sir William, more important.

From the beginning, William's cultural projects were acts of resistance. Recovery of memory and history were behind the archaeology. The search for the true origin, as opposed to that provided by colonial history, informed his
The Beauties of the Boyne and the Blackwater
. There, and in his later
Lough Corrib
, William attempts to restore the geographical and historical identity of the land, to repeople the territory with its heroes, histories, myths and battles. By instinct an archaeologist, William wanted to go back and back, to dig deeper and deeper, and recording the legend and lore, the expression of instinctual consciousness of the people, was a complementary aspect of this ambition. Jane's completion of the project was a way of keeping faith with this ambition. They both wanted to celebrate things on the edge of experience, but their motives were slightly different. William was driven by an insatiable curiosity – he simply wanted to know – whereas Jane was constitutionally disobedient, and liked to swim against the current.

That Jane's compilation of the ancient lore fired Yeats's imagination but left the critic of the
Academy
, 27 September 1890, calling for order, says it all.

Everything which real students most desire – mention of authorities, local touches, chronological and topographical details; anything that would render it possible to separate genuine ancient legend from modern invention or artistic embellishment – all these are either carelessly omitted or carefully supressed.
⁸

Wanting the tales referenced, as the
Academy
did, was to miss the point; these were records of the soul, of dreams – a kind of proto-surrealism. The
Academy
expected the material to be straightened out, when this was a record of what was, in the same context, called ‘the crookedness of the Gaelic mind', its anti-rationalist bias.

The two volumes of ancient lore furnish a necessarily incomplete record of communal memory. They formed the backbone of the imaginative terrain that Yeats mined for his poetry. In ‘The Tower', for instance, Yeats speaks of sending imagination forth, ‘and call[ing] images and memories/ From ruin or from ancient trees'.
⁹
Yeats wanted to inhabit the land imaginatively, to forge a new literature informed by folklore and legend. He drew on
Ancient Legends
for his edited collections of
Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
, published in 1888 and 1892. In the preface to his 1888 collection he rates Jane's collection as ‘the best book since Croker'. He dismisses some compilations for trying to make literature out of the tales, or others for making a science of it – trying ‘to tabulate their results like grocers' bills' is how Yeats put it. Rather, what he is looking for is ‘the primitive religion of mankind', ‘the Celt dreaming' – which was what he claimed to find in Jane's compilation.
¹⁰

In his capacity as writer of a regular letter to the
Boston Pilot
, Yeats glances at Lady Wilde's second book of Irish folklore,
Ancient Cures, Charms, and Usages of Ireland
; he has not yet had time to do more than turn the pages of the proverbs at the end. Some of these he quotes, and we can see one of them, ‘The lake is not encumbered by its swan; nor the steed by its bridle; nor the sheep by its wool; nor the man by the soul that is in him,' sinking into his memory, to be murmured over and over again, and to come out in altered form as poetry. He quotes this proverb in the introduction to his
Irish Fairy Tales
, dropping out the weakest of the four phrases, ‘nor the sheep by its wool', giving the quotation the symmetry of an Irish triad.
¹¹
Yeats inherited from earlier revivalists, from Sir William's generation, the belief that Ireland had to recover its imaginative culture before a new literature could be forged. He, along with J. M. Synge and Lady Gregory, would go on to form a movement, the Celtic Revival. But, as we have said, the work for the Irish renaissance had been going on behind the scenes, by Sir William and his generation, half a century before the curtain went up on the National Theatre in Dublin's Abbey Street.

Ancient Legends
prompted in Yeats a curiosity to meet Jane. To Katharine Tynan, Yeats speculated in a letter dated 28 July 1888, ‘I wonder if I shall find her as delightful as her book – as delightful as she is certainly unconventional.'
¹²
Equally allergic to the language of rationalists, the two were a pair of moles burrowing away in the same direction. After their first meeting they exchanged several letters, and Yeats attended Jane's at-homes. Jane always referred to the thin, black-coated, bespectacled Yeats, then in his twenties, as ‘the Irish poet' and their mutual admiration was sealed when Yeats memorialised the loquaciousness of the Wilde family for an American audience in the
Boston Pilot
. He wrote in September 1889:

Lady Wilde still keeps up, in spite of London's emptiness, her Saturday afternoon receptions, though the handful of callers contrasts mournfully with the roomful of clever people one meets there in the season. There is no better time, however, to hear her talk than now, when she is unburdened by weary guests, and London has few better talkers. When one listens to her and remembers that Sir William Wilde was in his day a famous raconteur, one finds it no way wonderful that Oscar Wilde should be the most finished talker of our time.

Not only was Oscar the best talker and the ‘most accomplished scholar' but, for Yeats, he was ‘also the best Irish folklorist living', not the epithet that most associate with Oscar Wilde. Yeats was wise enough to see that in Oscar's fairy tales the Irish element of the legend is concealed, giving them the quality essential to all great art, universality. When
The Happy Prince and Other Tales
was published in May 1888, the
Athenaeum
compared Oscar to Hans Christian Andersen.

Jane's involvement in 1848 intrigued Yeats. He plied her for anecdotes and wanted her to write of the movement. Indeed, he went so far as to encourage her in public, writing in the
Boston Pilot
, ‘Lady Wilde would do good service if she would write her memoirs, the appearance and ways of our '48 men are often so scantily known to us. [She] can say something vital and witty of them all.'
¹³
Yeats's remark was probably prompted by a piece Jane included in the second volume of ancient lore on the poets of 1848. Ostensibly a review of a collected edition of Irish poems,
Irish Minstrelsy
, written for the
Pall Mall Gazette
, 29 November 1887, Jane expands to discuss the spirit of that time and the idealism that had inspired its poetry. She speaks of the literature of 1848 as narratives of emancipation and enlightenment, the ballads coming from the popular instincts for ‘right and justice'. Young Ireland's strategy to promote culture she thought was exemplary, given that narratives allowed colonised people to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history. They were narratives of inclusion, not exclusion – ‘even the peasants and the artists of the time became poets'. It was a time ‘when the whole life of the nation moved to music', when ballads were penned by those excluded from society but now fighting for a place. Jane saw culture and education as endowing people with ‘self-respect', ‘dignity' and the independence of mind she thought as the essential step to political independence. The power to narrate, to block other narratives from forming, was the stance against imperialism that Young Ireland adopted. Jane saw the move as pioneering and thought it would ‘remain[s] an influence for all time'. In that she was right, for the twentieth century has shown that the desire of the colonised to narrate is one of the cultural consequences of Empire. Part of restoring a people's self-belief comes from the writing of narratives in which a people can contest their history and identity. As the Empire disintegrated, the colonised, from James Joyce to Salman Rushdie, have written back, showing that nations themselves are narrations. Jane was optimistic that the literary value of 1848 would last, but she was probably speaking for herself when she acknowledged that ‘the passionate dreams of political enthusiasts die away'.
¹⁴

The bloom of youthful idealism was well past for Jane. She was by 1888 sixty-six years old and showing a brave face, given her dire circumstances. Her fellow 1848er, Charles Gavan Duffy, was then in London finishing his memoir of Thomas Davis, the man who had inspired Young Ireland. In a letter to Duffy, Jane made no attempt to gloss her circumstances – she told it straight. ‘Mine is indeed a sad case,' she wrote, explaining that the Moytura estate generated no income and ‘that Willie has nothing but his salary from the
Daily Telegraph
and on that it is difficult to keep himself, and the home, and myself'.
¹⁵
She told Duffy of her efforts to secure a grant from the Royal Literary Fund.

With financial problems of his own, ‘over worked and very miserable at times', according to Constance, Oscar took the time to lobby on Jane's behalf.
¹⁶
He secured the backing of many prominent names, among them Lord Lytton, Sir Theodore and Lady Martin, A. C. Swinburne, G. O. Trevelyan, J. P. Mahaffy and Edward Dowden. He also approached Gladstone for a signature of support, no doubt hoping that his understanding of the agrarian chaos in Ireland would elicit sympathy for Jane's cause. Gladstone refused to sign, as Lady Wilde had ‘two sons who ought to provide for [her]'.
¹⁷

Jane had had deep reservations in making the first application for state support shortly after William's death. Then the disaster that had befallen her did not concern the public. It was the responsibility of the family to arrange their affairs better, and she saw no reason why the state should come to her aid. Now, however, her financial circumstances were gravely worsened by political events in Ireland. Her application to the Royal Literary Fund for a grant makes this clear. It was based on a ‘state of affairs in Ireland' that had deprived her of an annual income of £200, and had from 1880 to 1888 yielded only £150. ‘Her son, Mr Oscar Wilde,' read the statement, ‘has on many occasions given her help and assistance but she is anxious now to secure some small independence of position until the Irish property is placed under more favourable conditions.'
¹⁸
The application was dated November 1888. Never a stickler for age, least of all when distorting it might be in her favour, Jane gave her age as sixty-seven, the first time she added rather than subtracted the years.

In November 1888 Jane was awarded £100. When Sir Theodore Martin emphasised in his letter of support that Jane had been forced to make the application ‘under the pressure of extreme necessity', he told the truth. She wrote to thank Sir Theodore, the Scottish poet who had also supported her previous application, for his assistance, and the warmth of his reply pleased her. He told her the application had been backed by Mr Lecky, the Trinity professor, ‘& the grant was given at once'.
¹⁹
Then, in May 1890, fourteen years after Sir William's death, Jane was finally given a Civil List pension of £70 per annum. It was awarded ‘in recognition of the services rendered by her late husband, Sir William Wilde, MD, to statistical science and literature'. And, in the summer of 1891, she was also awarded on her own account. The Dublin magazine
Lady of the House
ran a survey to name the greatest living Irishwoman. Jane won, having received 78 per cent of the vote. In July Ward and Downey published a collection of her essays,
Notes on Men, Women and Books.
They included for the most part essays Jane had written during her Dublin years, some from
Dublin University Magazine.