Parnell and His Island E-Book

George Moore

• Herausgeber: UCD Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Classics of Irish History
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 290

Beschreibung

Moore spares neither landlords nor tenants, priests or nationalists in his narrative.

Das E-Book Parnell and His Island wird angeboten von UCD Press und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
Irish history, Home Rule, Land League, Land War

Leseprobe

PARNELL AND HIS ISLAND

CLASSICS OF IRISH HISTORY

General Editor: Tom Garvin

Original publication dates of reprinted titles are given in brackets

Walter McDonald, Some Ethical Questions of Peace and War

Standish James O’Grady, To the Leaders of Our Working People

P. S. O’Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Féin (1924) (Centenary Classics edition, 2015)

Joseph Johnston, Civil War in Ulster (1999) (Centenary Classics edition, 2015)

Arthur Clery, The Idea of a Nation (1907)

Padraig de Burca & John F. Boyle, Free State or Republic? (1922) (Centenary Classics edition, 2015)

Mossie Harnett, Victory and Woe (2002) (Centenary Classics edition, 2015)

Robert Brennan, Ireland Standing Firm (1950)

William McComb, The Repealer Repulsed

Arthur Griffith, The Resurrection of Hungary (1904)

Thomas Fennell, The Royal Irish Constabulary

Eugene Davis, Souvenirs of Irish Footprints over Europe

Michael Davitt, Jottings in Solitary (ebook available, 2016)

George Moore, Parnell and His Island (1887) (ebook available, 2016)

Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Irish Recollections (1841/47 as Personal Recollections)

Oliver MacDonagh, Ireland: The Union and Its Aftermath (1968)

Standish James O’Grady, Sun and Wind

James Mullin, The Story of a Toiler’s Life

John Sarsfield Casey, The Galtee Boy: A Fenian Prison Narrative

William and Mary Ann Hanbidge, Memories of West Wicklow: 1813–1939 (1939)

A. P. A. O’Gara, The Green Republic (1902)

William Cooke Taylor, Reminiscences of Daniel O’Connell (1847)

William Bruce and Henry Joy, Belfast Politics (1794)

Annie O’Donnell, Your Fondest Annie

Joseph Keating, My Struggle for Life (1916)

John Mitchel, The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) (1858/9)

Maria Edgeworth, An Essay on Irish Bulls (1802)

Harold Gegbie, The Lady Next Door (1914)

Thomas Kettle, The Open Secret of Ireland (1912)

D. P. Moran, The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (1898–1900)

David W. Miller, Queen’s Rebels (1978)

Frank Frankfort Moore, In Belfast by the Sea

Ernie O’Malley, Rising Out: Seán Connolly of Longford (1890–1921) (Centenary Classics edition, 2015)

John Devoy, Michael Davitt: From the Gaelic American (ebook available, 2016)

Richard Twiss, A Tour in Ireland in 1775 (1776)

Wilfrid Ewart, A Journey in Ireland 1921 (1922)

Sir John Pope Hennessy, Sir Walter Ralegh in Ireland (1883)

Patrick Pearse, Short Stories (1917)

James Stephens, The Birth of the Fenian Movement

Charles Stewart Parnell, Words of the Dead Chief, compiled by Jennie Wyse-Power (1892)

John Joseph Horgan, Parnell to Pearse (1917)

Darrel Figgis, A Chronicle of Jails (1917) (Centenary Classics edition, 2015)

John Sarsfield Casey, A Mingling of Swans: A Cork Fenian and Friends ‘visit’ Australia

J. F. X. O’Brien, For the Liberty of Ireland at Home and Abroad

James Fintan Lalor, ‘The Faith of a Felon’ and Other Writings

Father S. Dinneen, Queen of the Hearth (1915)

Fanny Taylor, Irish Homes and Irish Hearts (1867)

PARNELL AND HIS ISLAND

George Moore

edited byCarla King

University College Dublin Press

Preas Choláiste Ollscoile Bhaile Átha Cliath

CONTENTS

Introduction by Carla King

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Text

PARNELL AND HIS ISLAND

DUBLIN

THE CASTLE

THE SHELBOURNE HOTEL

THE KILDARE STREET CLUB

MRS RUSVILLE

AN IRISH COUNTRY HOUSE

THE HOUSE OF AN IRISH POET

THE LANDLORD

THE TENANT-FARMER

THE PRIEST

THE PATRIOT

A CASTLE OF YESTERDAY

A CASTLE OF TO-DAY

AN EVICTION

A HUNTING BREAKFAST

CONCLUSION

Editor’s Notes

INTRODUCTION.

Carla King

Few who have ever walked the Vico Road as it winds its way above Dublin Bay could fail to respond to the beguiling depiction of it with which Moore draws the reader into this book. We have the still mirror of water, the ‘blue embaying mountains’, seagulls, sailboats, villas, pine-trees, young girls in white dresses playing tennis—the idyll of a calm summer afternoon. But very soon, like the zooming in of a film camera, we are shown that the poetry of the vision masks the prosaic reality of decaying grandeur: ‘The white walls shine in the sun and deceive you, but if you approach you will find a front-door where the paint is peeling, and a ruined garden.’ And inside the door languishes an impoverished and parasitic gentry, struggling to maintain the appearance of respectability. The counterpoint between a landscape lovingly described with painterly precision and a society, poor, and morally bankrupt, lies at the centre of Parnell and His Island.

These essays first appeared separately under the title ‘Lettres sur l’Irlande’ as a series of six weekly articles in Le Figaro, 31 July to 4 September 1886, written originally in English but translated for publication in the paper.1 They were published in volume form in French with some additions, as Terre d’Irlande early in 1887.2 Moore experienced difficulty in finding a London publisher prepared to risk taking them on; finally Herbert Wigram, editor of Swann, Sonnenschein, agreed to bring out the book on condition that he be allowed to delete what he considered the most objectionable parts of the text.3In June 1887 it appeared in English in a somewhat toneddown form (and with one amendment to the order of chapters) as Parnell and His Island.4 In this edition of the book, the passages removed by Wigram have been replaced in the notes, in the French in which they appeared in Terre d’Irlande, and in English translation.

The origins of Parnell and His Island lie in two crises: one was the outbreak of the Land War between landlords and tenants. The last years of the 1870s were very difficult for farmers who endured a combination of harvest failures, brought on by adverse climatic conditions, and low prices caused by competition from producers in the New World. Irish tenant farmers faced the prospect of a sharp reduction in their incomes, throwing many, especially those on the small, impoverished farms in the West, into real hardship. In order to force landlords to reduce rents and deter them from evicting in the case of non-payment, the Irish National Land League of Mayo was founded in Castlebar, on 16 August 1879, less than twenty miles from the Moore family’s estate. This was relaunched as a national organisation in Dublin two months later. The movement spread throughout the country, and was linked to a newly militant Home Rule Party in the House of Commons, with Charles Stewart Parnell becoming leader of both the parliamentary and popular organisations. Many of the League’s leaders and activists were former Fenians who saw in the new body a more practical way of applying their energies after the unsuccessful rising of 1867. Its success greatly alarmed both government and landlords and it was effective in achieving rent reductions, although the number of evictions continued to rise; between 1879 and 1883 some 14,600 tenants were evicted. 5 Part of its novelty lay in the tactics it employed, which—at least in theory—were confined to passive resistance. Boycotting, stopping the hunt and peaceful demonstrations at the scene of evictions were all the more difficult for the authorities to deal with because they were not, in themselves, criminal activities. But however often its leaders deplored it, the popular mobilisation resulted in an increase in crime, traditional in many parts of the country in the form of agrarian ‘outrage’. This varied from sending threatening letters, to mutilating livestock, damaging property or shooting landlords or their bailiffs. By 1880 the country was becoming ungovernable. Incidents of agrarian crime, which normally averaged around 200–300 per annum, rose to 863 in 1879, 2,585 in 1880 and 4,439 in 1881.6 Frightened landlords remitted an estimated figure of at least £3 million of their rents, or perhaps one fifth of the total rental in 1879 and a further £4 million in the first seven months of 1880.7 This was the beginning of a social revolution, what Michael Davitt called ‘the fall of feudalism in Ireland’, that would bring about the transfer of Irish land from some ten thousand landlords to approximately half a million tenants.

The outbreak of the land crisis brought another, more personal one for George Moore. He had been living happily as an absentee landlord in Paris, studying art, writing poetry and revelling in the vibrant cultural life of the city. He had become friendly with many of the leading French artists and writers of the time, and was a regular visitor to the Café Nouvelle Athènes, frequented by Impressionist painters such as Manet, Pissarro and Degas. He became particularly friendly with Edouard Manet, attending the evening gatherings in his studio and was painted by him several times (there are three extant portraits). Manet died on 30 April 1883, and Terre d’Irlande is dedicated to him: ‘L’ami que nous aimions, le peintre dont nous adorons le génie.’8

Moore’s life in Paris came to an abrupt end following a letter in August 1879 from his uncle, Joe Blake, who had been acting as his agent in Mayo. Blake wrote to say that the tenants were refusing to pay rents and that he was afraid to risk his life by serving eviction orders to collect them. Moreover, Moore had been allowed an advance that he could no longer recoup from rents and his uncle now wished to be repaid some £3,000. Blake added that, as he wished to give up the agency, Moore should come home to put his affairs in order and find a new agent. The letter threw Moore into a panic. With one of the 300 largest estates in Ireland and a nominal income of £3,596, the blow was unexpected. In Confessions of a Young Man (1889), he parodied his indignation that ‘some wretched miners and farmers should refuse to starve that I may not be deprived of my demi-tasse at Tortoni’s, that I may not be deprived of my beautiful retreat, my cat and my python—monstrous’.9 Malcolm Brown claims that ‘The traumatic shock of Blake’s letter was the most memorable experience of Moore’s life.’10

As a result of Blake’s letter, Moore abandoned Paris and threw himself into writing. Paris had formed him intellectually and he mourned his break with it, but with no certainty that the tenants would ever pay rents again he believed that he would henceforth have to live on his earnings. For the next few years he moved between London, Dublin and Moore Hall, publishing four novels, a pamphlet and a considerable amount of journalism between 1883 and the appearance of Parnell and His Island. 11 He was to remain a hard-working and productive writer for the rest of his life.

Had Moore’s only intention been to make money from his writings he would never have written the books he did. While in France, he had read widely in French literature, particularly the works of Balzac (which he claimed to know by heart),12 Flaubert, and Zola, among many others. He was greatly influenced by Naturalism, of which Émile Zola was the chief exponent in France. According to the programme that Zola sketched out for the movement, writers should take their subjects from social reality, and preferably from the writer’s own experience. Naturalists believed that people are conditioned by their surroundings and used description of milieux to explain their characters. They also paid close attention to portraying appearance, dress and behaviour, spheres in which Moore, with his keen memory for detail, excelled. They were influenced by Darwin’s evolutionary theories in stressing the importance of hereditary characteristics in their characters and in emphasising the contiguity of man’s instincts with those of animals.13 Moore had known several writers of the Naturalist school in Paris, although he only became friendly with Zola in the early 1880s, after he had championed Naturalism in the British press and began a translation (never completed) of Zola’s L’Assommoir. But with the publication of his first novels he emerged as the leading Naturalist writer in English. This brought him into immediate conflict with upholders of Victorian morality in the shape of the circulating libraries, W. H. Smith and Mudie’s Select Library, which banned his books from their shelves. Thus, even before the publication of Parnell and His Island, Moore had already made his name as ‘The bad boy of English literature’, in Susan Mitchell’s phrase.14

Moore returned to Ireland in the winter of 1880–1, when he stayed at Moore Hall and visited relatives in Mayo and Galway. He toured his property with Blake, met his tenants and appointed Tom Ruttledge as his new agent. The impressions gained on this return to Ireland and during subsequent sojourns during 1883–4 and 1884–5 form the basis for both A Drama in Muslin (1886) and Parnell and His Island.

A Drama in Muslin tells the story of two sisters, Alice and Olive Barton, daughters of a Catholic landlord in Galway, as they return home on completing their convent education in England and negotiate the marriage market of the Dublin Season. There is a counterpoint between the girls: the beautiful but silly Olive, attracted to the ‘unsuitable’ Captain Hibbert but pushed by her mother into pursuit of title and money in the form of a match with Lord Kilcarney, and the clever, plainer sister Alice, who feels stifled by the emptiness of the life around her. Alice finally escapes to a more intellectually satisfying life as a writer in London, through marriage to a man her family considers beneath her, a doctor whose practical idealism matches her own. Set in 1882–3, the novel explores landlord attitudes and responses to the land war. Moore describes the bargaining over rent, landlord fears of venturing away from home in case of attack, and their concern about the future of their way of life. The setting and atmosphere of the novel were to be echoed in Parnell and His Island, although the essays are darker in tone.

As Brendan Fleming has pointed out, Moore employed the metaphor of Dublin Bay in the opening pages of Parnell and His Island as a mirror ‘enabling perfect reflection of the present condition of Ireland and prediction of the country’s future’.15 The essays were originally intended to present Ireland and the land conflict to a French readership, a response to the lively interest with which events in Ireland were followed in France. They were written after A Drama in Muslin and revisit many of the themes touched upon in it—indeed, it may be seen as a companion piece to the novel.16 However, A Drama in Muslin had been roundly denounced by reviewers, appalled by its feminism, its atheism and the openness of its treatment of unwed pregnancy, adultery and lesbianism, as well as its naturalistic style. But rather than restrain his pen in response, Moore seems to have been goaded into unleashing the full fury of his satire and transgressing the boundaries of Victorian taste and morality still further in Parnell and His Island. In February 1886, following the serialisation of A Drama in Muslin, which had commenced in January, he wrote to his mother: ‘I am very sorry indeed I cannot go to Moore Hall this year. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to spend a few months with you in the old place but I hear my book has given so much offence that it would be better for me to keep away.’17 If his novel had offended his Irish relatives, publication of Parnell and His Island was a definitive burning of bridges. He was not to return to Moore Hall until the death of his mother in 1895.

As reflected in Parnell and His Island, Moore’s attitude to his tenants and the land question was complex. In his childhood he had found them frightening and alien but on his return to Moore Hall in 1880 he came to a shocked realisation of the hardship of their lives. Letters to the Freeman’s Journal and the Mayo Examiner in the autumn of 1880 urge agreement between landlords and tenants to propose a land bill that would offer relief in the crisis.18 Like his father, George Henry Moore (1811–70), he was in favour of Home Rule and, in Adrian Frazier’s words, ‘bleakly supportive of Gladstone and Parnell’.19But Moore also depicts the degeneration of the Land League from its early idealism into terrorism in the countryside and cynicism on the part of the leaders. In the penultimate scene of A Drama in Muslin, as Alice Barton and Dr Reed, her new husband, leave Galway, they come upon an eviction. Reed rescues the family by paying their rent, only to see the onlookers offering to show the eviction party the way to the next victim for the price of a drink. He exclaims:

And to think . . . that they are the same peasants that we once saw so firmly banded that it seemed as if nothing would ever again separate them, that nothing would ever again render them cowardly and untrue to each other; is it possible that those wretched hirelings, so ready to betray, so eager to lick the hand that smites them, are the same men whom we saw two years ago united by one thought, organised by one determination to resist the oppressor, marching firmly to nationhood?20

His disillusion seems to echo that of the author. Yet if Moore holds out little hope for the tenant side, he feels a deep sense of shame for his role as a landlord (see p. 3 below). The institution of landlordism in Ireland is indefensible and Moore, who accepts ‘the socialist axiom that capital is only a surplus-value coming from unpaid labour’, is well aware of its exploitative nature.21 Indeed, his decision to make the land crisis a theme of A Drama in Muslin and Parnell and His Island may have arisen from a need to explore his own mixed emotions about the issue.

Ireland was much visited by travellers and commentators in the nineteenth century, the majority of whom would have started from Dublin, as did another absentee landlord, Lord Colambre in his investigation of his native land in Maria Edgeworth’s novel, The Absentee (1812). Moore’s narrative follows this pattern, the first chapters treating the capital and its society, after which the location moves westward to the countryside of his native Mayo. The opening chapter, after characterising Dublin as shabby, like ‘an old clothes shop’, and intellectually barren (‘nobody reads and nobody thinks’), is divided into four parts that Moore see as representing the city: ‘The Castle’; ‘The Shelbourne Hotel’; ‘The Kildare Street Club’; and the establishment of the dressmaker, ‘Mrs. Rusville’. His points of focus are those of the Irish landed gentry, although he is also aware of the seamier side of the city, which he notes with an artist’s eye for detail and the naturalist’s relentless will to describe it.22 Dublin Castle was the centre of the British administration in Ireland. As a member of the Catholic landed gentry and the son of an Irish Nationalist MP, his attitude to the Castle was ambivalent.23 His background gave him entrée to the Castle and he took part in the Dublin ‘Season’ in 1883 and 1884, attending the Levée, the Drawing Rooms and Castle Balls.24 He had not, however, been to a State Dinner and had the temerity to write to the chamberlain, Colonel Dease, to ask for an invitation, for the purposes of researching background for his novel. The Castle officials, not wishing to see their ceremonies exposed, tried to put him off and finally rejected the request. Moore then mischievously published the correspondence in the Freeman’s Journal,25 earning him the approval of Justin Huntly McCarthy, son of the Nationalist MP, Justin McCarthy. A writer and journalist like Moore, McCarthy wrote of how pleased he was ‘at your battle with the Castle blunderers and at your very decided victory over the Prince of the power of the air’, adding, ‘I regard you as our best ally in our crusade against that stronghold of shame’.26 In Parnell and His Island, Moore’s approach is merciless, depicting the Viceroy’s ‘mock court’, in which the girls presented, in a parallel ceremony to presentation to the Queen, submit to being kissed by the Lord Lieutenant, in a ceremony which Moore hints has unsavoury echoes of the droit de seigneur.27 The girls ‘brought out’ for the Dublin season are described as ‘muslin martyrs’, exhibited in society with the sole intention of attracting husbands, also a central theme in A Drama in Muslin. Moore’s sympathy for women is evident in much of his writing; many of the main characters of his novels are women struggling against the restrictions imposed on them by society.28 Here he depicts the pitiless competition for dancing (and ultimately marriage) partners acted out in the ballroom, which ‘for the majority is a place of torture and despair’.

The subject of the marriage race is continued in Moore’s account of the Shelbourne Hotel, where many of the girls stay during the Dublin season.29 In Parnell and His Island, the comfort of Dublin’s premier hotel provides the setting for the frank discussion about marriage prospects taking place among the women. Just around the corner from the Shelbourne Hotel was the Kildare Street Club, ‘one of the most important institutions in Ireland . . . a sort of oyster-bed into which all the eldest sons of the landed gentry fall as a matter of course’. He describes its denizens watching, open-mouthed, from the club’s windows as a National League procession passes in the street. Mrs. Rusville, the fashionable dressmaker, appears in A Drama in Muslin as Mrs. Symonds, although in Parnell and His Island her establishment is portrayed in more lurid tones of drunkenness and scandalmongery, in line with the progression in Moore’s negativity from Drama to Parnell. Like so many of her clients, she seeks an opportunity to launch her three daughters at a Vice-Regal ball. He was referring in his portrait to Mrs. Sims, the famous Dublin dressmaker, whom the Countess of Fingall described in her memoirs: ‘The position of Worth in Paris could not have been more firmly established and more magnificent than that of Mrs. Sims in Dublin of those days. . . . She kept us in our places, and we were humble before her.’30

From Dublin, the scene shifts to a country house in Mayo, where Moore relates the circumstances of his host, a landlord and land agent, who must endure life under constant armed guard to protect him against Land League assassins.31 Nevertheless, he points out that despite the perceived dangers, ‘the gentry in Mayo enjoy themselves very well indeed’. Several of the details of Moore’s account were based on the homes of his relatives, the Blakes, O’Connors and Ruttledges, with whom he had stayed in 1880–4. It was somewhat disingenuous of him to claim in a letter to his mother that: ‘I am more sorry than I can say that the Ruttledges are under the impression that I described Cornfield [the Ruttledges’ home] in The Figaro: I never thought of doing any such thing.’32 He had given the agent the same first name as Tom Ruttledge, whom he had appointed his own agent in 1880. Meanwhile his uncle’s name, Blake, is given to his account of a landlord, who, after a prolonged affair with the daughter of one of his tenants, decides to marry for money and packs her and their five children off to America. He adds ‘I know of no novelist who has touched this subject, and yet how full it is of poor human nature: vice, degradation, pity, hard-heartedness, grow on its every branch like blackberries in an autumn hedge.’ The fact that the story was actually true makes Moore’s indiscretion breathtaking.33 While for the most part he blends, distorts and caricatures real individuals in Parnell and His Island, the book is sufficiently autobiographical to have invited attempts to identify characters in it. Moreover, he was sensitive enough to have known what effect these portrayals would have. Could it be that they were, to some degree at least, acts of revenge for a childhood in which he had been mocked by his parents and relatives as stupid and ugly?34 Here was the ugly duckling returned as, if not a swan, at least a moderately successful, urbane author, whilst his re-engagement with his native land may have stirred memories of past humiliations.

‘The House of an Irish Poet’ is the most intriguing of these essays, in that in the account of a day trip to ‘Lake Mount’ (Moore Hall), Moore makes an appearance, not as the narrator but in the character of the Irish poet, the ‘Landlord M–—’, newly returned from Paris. Here he shows a very keen understanding of how he must have appeared to others—odd in his French clothes, with his books of poetry, out of place and slightly absurd. But this was not the Moore of 1887 but himself in 1880. As Elizabeth Grubgeld points out, this portrayal is of his younger self. ‘. . . the explicit designation of “Landlord M–—” as a poet identifies him with the author of Flowers of Passion (1878) and Pagan Poems (1881), while distinguishing him from the author who, by 1887, was known almost exclusively as a novelist.’35 He reproduces an interview between M–— and his tenants which closely follows that between Arthur Barton and his tenants in A Drama in Muslin,36 both of which were probably based on exchanges between Moore and his own tenants in 1880–1.

In ‘The Tenant-Farmer’ we see Moore expressing all the prejudice and class fear of the Irish landlord. If writers such as Yeats, Lady Gregory and, to a lesser extent, Synge, tended to idealise the Irish peasant, in their supposed lack of materialism, their spirituality and their strong ties to the soil,37 Moore veers in the opposite direction. Micky Moran is compared in social-Darwinian terms to ‘some low-earth animal whose nature has not yet risen from out the soil. He is evidently of a degenerate race—a race that has been left behind—and should perish, like the black rat perished before the brown and more ferocious species.’ (p. 36 below) But instead of dying out, this race is making way against the ‘superior races’ owing to ‘their extraordinary power of reproduction’. If Moore excoriated the landlords for their parasitic role, his description of the population of the West of Ireland, whom he identified as ‘Fins’, describing them as ‘the most illfavoured race that ever trod the earth’ is extraordinarily racist. Nevertheless, he understands very well the tenant’s terror of eviction and how the prospects of deterring landlords from evictions and winning rent reductions were powerful reasons for supporting both the Land League and engaging in agrarian violence. Despite his claims of being out of touch with his own affairs as a landed proprietor, Moore here shows himself to be fully conversant with the realities of the peasant economy, providing details of crop acreage and Moran’s expected income from migrant labour in England. His account of Mary Moran and her seduction and banishment from her family’s home demonstrates his concern for the outcast single mother, a theme to which he was to return in his most successful novel, Esther Waters (1894).

Miserably unhappy schooldays at the fashionable but harsh Catholic boarding school of Oscott left Moore with a deep hostility to Catholicism. In Confessions of a Young Man, he claimed ‘Two dominant notes in my character—an original hatred of my native country, and a brutal loathing of the religion I was brought up in.’38 In 1903 he converted to Anglicanism as a protest against Maynooth’s reception of King Edward VII, but in fact he was a life-long atheist, having ceased to believe in God in his teens.39 Catholicism as an institution was, however, a recurrent theme in several of his novels, including The Lake, Evelyn Innes, Sister Teresa and portions of his three-volume autobiography, Hail and Farewell (1911–14). In his treatment of Fr Tom Shannon, in the essay on ‘The Priest’ in Parnell and His Island, we see a man ‘proud, ostentatious, overbearing’ but, as Moore points out, of limited intelligence. He is well informed about politics but neither the covert Fenian of much of the pro-landlord writing about priests,40 nor the saintly figure of many of the nationalist treatments.41 In Parnell and His Island, Fr Shannon, the son of a grocer, steers a difficult course between landlords and tenants. He dislikes the Land League, especially its radical, violent following, yet he remains powerless to oppose it.42

James Daly, the leader of the local Land League branch, is the subject of the next essay, ironically entitled ‘The Patriot’. Daly, the son of a bailiff who had been dismissed for stealing, insolence and drunkenness, becomes a cattle grazier and journalist, a founder of the Land League and is later elected as a Member of Parliament. Once in London, he finds himself seduced by the city and its comforts; his manners and tastes are refined as he ‘frequents fashionable restaurants, sips champagne and chats fluently with actresses’. In one of the passages removed by the publisher of the English edition, Moore has Daly delighting in the clean body of the common London prostitute, since his previous sexual encounters were with beggar-women in a dirty field amid the cow-pats, outside the walls of the county town.43 He will not return to the West of Ireland with its ‘rank smells of the dung-heap, the pig, the damp cabin, the dirty paraffin-oil odour of the West’ but make his way in London or America. Moore is once more being provocative, even libellous here, as there was a well-known James Daly, editor of the Connaught Telegraph and a founder of the Land League, who had also earned his living from cattle-grazing. While Daly declined to run for parliament, he was in the late 1870s what one historian has called ‘the most influential man in Mayo’.44 Grubgeld has suggested that the character of James Daly was based on a composite of the real James Daly and John O’Connor Power, MP for County Mayo and Daly’s ally. She proposes that in rejecting the Daly/O’Connor type as unrefined, he may also have been trying to make a distinction between opportunist politicians such as these and the idealism of other nationalists, personified by Michael Davitt. Several months prior to Moore’s visit to Ireland in 1880–1, a breach between Davitt and O’Connor Power had become public and would have been widely discussed in Mayo and elsewhere.45 However, while individuals like the Daly portrayed by Moore may have existed among Irish Party members, his portrait in Parnell and His Island was an unjust slur on the characters of both the real Daly and John O’Connor Power, neither of whom resembled the nonentity he depicts. Daly and O’Connor Power differed with Parnell and his followers on issues of principle—most notably in their claims that the interests of small farmers of the West were being overlooked by the land movement and in resisting the centralising tendencies of the parliamentarians.46 Like Moore’s Daly, O’Connor Power was unable to resist the lure of upperclass London society, while in Tim Healy’s words, he ‘reeked of the common clay’.47 Healy relates that ‘Parnell’s aristocratic sensitiveness recoiled’ in Power’s presence but he was a strong enough figure to pose a real challenge to Parnell’s leadership.48 Moore’s understanding of Irish politics was much less sure than his grasp of Irish society. In 1880, a leader in Daly’s paper, The Connaught Telegraph, in announcing the appointment of Tom Ruttledge as Moore’s new agent had described him as ‘the degenerate son of a worthy father’.49 Perhaps there was an element of settling old scores in his veiled attack on its editor.

‘A Castle of Yesterday’ introduces a hint of Gothic horror into Moore’s narrative. While duck shooting on Lough Carra in the early morning, the author and his friend Dacre come ashore by Castle Carra. Sheltering in the ruins, the narrator begins to fantasise about its inhabitants centuries earlier, ‘strong days that were better and happier than ours’. He is startled by a strange sound and ghostly shape that he takes for the ‘white spirit of death’. ‘The stair descends to an embrasure in the wall, and the moonlight is streaming through, and there is something there—a soft low snoring in the moonlight; the staircase descends before me, but I cannot follow it, I cannot pass this ghostly ray of moonlight.’ (p. 63) It is in fact a snowy owl, which Dacre shoots by mistake on leaving the castle. However, Brendan Fleming has suggested that the scene may be read as a metaphor for the threat posed to landlords such as Moore by ‘Captain Moonlight’, the popular term applied to agrarian crime. ‘The attempt to seek escape into a nostalgia for a time preceding the land agitation is undone by the omnipresent moonlight.’50

From the ruined Castle Carra, ‘A Castle of Yesterday’ or in the French edition ‘Un chateau mort’, Moore moves to describe, in ‘A Castle of To-Day’ a visit to Ashford Castle, the neo-Gothic home of Lord and Lady Ardilaun at Cong. Moore exclaims over the beauty of the setting, remarking that ‘after a week spent in the thin, mean poverty of the north-west, amid the sadness of ruined things, this strangely beautiful castle renders me singularly happy’. Lady Ardilaun, herself a painter, was interested in what Moore could tell her about the new artistic movements in France and they were to enjoy a long friendship. During Moore’s visit Lord Ardilaun, the Guinness magnate, was having a moat constructed to protect him against possible attack by dynamiters. He is unpopular, Moore is told, partly because he is wealthy enough to resist the Land League, and also because he is a Protestant and a Conservative. There is an element of snobbery in Moore’s relish of his visit but his admiration for Ardilaun’s philanthropy is sincere.51 In the 1890s Moore was friendly with the group of reformers around Horace Plunkett who attempted to improve conditions in the countryside—work that became known as ‘constructive unionism’, recognising the practical value of their efforts (if at times lampooning them).52

The elegance and enchantment of Ashford Castle contrast starkly with the images that follow in ‘The Eviction’. Eviction scenes were a common feature of novels of the period dealing with the land question.53 Moore’s contemporary, J. M. Synge, with similarly complex attitudes concerning his own landlord background, wrote movingly about the distress caused by evictions on Inis Mhean in The Aran Islands (1901). Moore had included an eviction in A Drama in Muslin54 but his treatment in Parnell and His Island is striking in its relentless attention to sordid detail. The brutality of the scenes, in which the pitiless and drunken landlord Miss Barrett and her companion Miss McCoy revel in the expulsion of the tenants from their homes, were intended to shock. It is possible that the author’s focus on a female landlord was intended to deepen the horror, given the assumptions about women current at the time.

It is in this chapter that the influence of Zola and the naturalist school is most evident. In turn, Moore’s essays may have influenced Zola’s writing of La Terre, and Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel, En Rade. Zola had read and complimented Moore on the publication of the essays in Le Figaro at a time when he was engaged in writing La Terre. In a letter dated 15 August 1886, he wrote to Moore that his articles