Malcolm Kelsall

Only Connect: Violet Martin and Edith Somerville

With his invocation of Gibbon in The Kellys and the O’Kellys Trollope linked the decline and fall of the country house order in Ireland to a greater historical theme. In 1848 it was only a visionary prolepsis. ‘Imperialism’ was still far from its apogee (indeed it still awaited Disraeli). The emergence of the Land League was unpredictable, let alone the distant absurdities of 1914, the Easter Rising of 1916 and the stock- market crash of 1929. A retrospective imposition of historical teleology is always false to the necessary myopia of historical agents. Nonetheless it is easy (but facile) to find parallels to Trollope’s decline and fall motif. William Allingham’s country house verse novel, Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland (1864), raises the imperial issue, which also informs the early political prose of Aubrey de Vere. Perhaps most remarkable is the pro- leptic vision by that vigorous historian of the imposition of ‘civilisation’ upon ‘savagery’ and ‘anarchy’, J. A. Froude, who nonetheless claimed in 1882 to have been aware from the beginning of the degeneration of the post-Union Irish ruling classes. He wrote: ‘All things have their appointed end, and English dominion over Ireland must come to an end also…. We can govern India: we cannot govern Ireland. Be it so. Then let Ireland be free.’ In the Biblical resonances of ‘all things have their appointed end’ Froude invokes a divine teleology that takes him back beyond Gibbon to St Augustine as a historian of decline and fall.1

Trollope as Mr Kurtz

For Lever, the tower was a regressive icon, returning Ireland to a symbolic order that preceded the establishment of the country house. There might have been other architectural signifiers of the history of the place. Had Wolf Tone in the 1790s become the Washington of the United Irishmen, the Palladian villa might have become the locus that embodied the rational culture of the national aristoi, in the same way as Monticello, Mount Vernon and the White House in the United States. (Castletown, appropriately, is now the headquarters of the nascent Irish Georgian Society.) Alternatively Christian Gothic might have provided an ecumenical architectural symbolism for a vigorous and conservative unionism. Kylemore Abbey, it has been argued, embodies many of the ideals of Lever’s ‘Gwynne’ Abbey, if only in subliminal suggestion, and by appropriate historical mutation Kylemore has become a (Roman Catholic) school, a fountain of culture. But the tower, as icon, takes one back historically beyond even Ormond’s ‘brave mansion’ at Carrick- on-Suir to the Ur place, the fortified site that Ormond, in vain it seems, wished to transform into an open manor house. Ireland is a locus that denies the progress of (that kind of) civilisation.

‘The Duchess Too is Dead’: Bowen and Gregory

Elizabeth Bowen’s Bowen’s Court (1942) and Lady Augusta Gregory’s Coole (1931) conclude this enquiry.1 Both works were written after the dissolution of the political Union, and thus chronological limitation is violated. But both writers were born into the old country house order and the actual houses iconised by Bowen and Gregory belonged to that other union, the imaginary European civilisation (rather than the separ- atist nation) from which the architectural form of the houses and their literary idealisation derive. The history of the houses is a kind of ‘time trope’. Both writers desired (in vain) to preserve the fabric of court and park. Bowen and Gregory were chatelaines, one by inheritance the other by marriage, but their houses now exist only in what Bowen called ‘thought-form’.2 The causes of the loss were mundane: exigent market forces. That in itself had an iconographic function: it separated the loss of these houses from the demonology of Irish history: the republican auto-da-fe in which ‘the garrisons’ were burnt out.

Edgeworth’s Heir: Charles Lever

Charles Lever’s The Martins of Cro’Martin (1856) derives from the history of Mary Martin of Ballinahinch. Unlike Edgeworth, Lever wrote after the famine.1 The tale begins by taking the reader on the same westward journey as that taken by Maria Edgeworth but with greater rapidity of the imagination. We leap the ‘wild’, the barren mountains, the rare and ‘miserable hut’ and the wet potato fields. Then ‘the grateful sight of young timber’ announces the approach to another world, and ‘winding round the base of a steep mountain, the deep woods of a rich demesne appear’ and armorial bearings above a gatehouse announce the approach to ‘the ancient seat of the Martins’. The symbolic function of this ancient seat, at this juncture, is merely conventional, that of the ‘happy rural seat’:2