Lady Gregory and Irish National Theatre

Art, Drama, Politics

Eglantina Remport

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319766102
• eBook ISBN: 9783319766119
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Industria dell'intrattenimento

This book is the first comprehensive critical assessment of the aesthetic and social ideals of Lady Augusta Gregory, founder, patron, director, and dramatist of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It elaborates on her distinctive vision of the social role of a National Theatre in Ireland, especially in relation to the various reform movements of her age: the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, the Co-operative Movement, and the Home Industries Movement. It illustrates the impact of John Ruskin on the aesthetic and social ideals of Lady Gregory and her circle that included Horace Plunkett, George Russell, John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, and George Bernard Shaw. All of these friends visited the celebrated Gregory residence of Coole Park in Country Galway, most famously Yeats. The study thus provides a pioneering evaluation of Ruskin's immense influence on artistic, social, and political discourse in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

© The Author(s) 2018

Eglantina RemportLady Gregory and Irish National TheatreBernard Shaw and His Contemporarieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76611-9_6

Begin Abstract

The Light of the World: Christianity, Cultural Politics, and Constitutional Reform

Eglantina Remport¹

(1)

Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

Eglantina Remport

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Christianity and Social Reform

Lady Gregory once compared an artist to a candlestickmaker who ‘holds up the light and hands it on from generation to generation, taking it from under the bushel that it may search the dark corners of the house’. ¹ This image of the artist as the bearer of light was a reminder of the well-known Victorian painting, The Light of the World (1851–1853), by William Holman Hunt . The painting depicts Jesus as he is approaching the door of a house that symbolises the human soul, while he is holding a beautifully ornamented glowing lantern in his left hand. Ruskin himself gave the following interpretation of the famous painting:

Christ approaches it in the night-time,— Christ, in his everlasting offices of prophet, priest, and king. He wears the white robe, representing the power of the Spirit upon him; the jewelled robe and breastplate, representing the sacerdotal investiture; the rayed crown of gold, inwoven with the crown of thorns; not dead thorns, but now bearing soft leaves, for the healing of the nations.

Now, when Christ enters any human heart, he bears with him a twofold light: first, the light of conscience, which displays past sin, and afterwards the light of peace, the hope of salvation. The lantern, carried in Christ’s left hand, is this light of conscience. ²

Ruskin believed the scene to comprise an intricate symbolism: Jesus was the ‘Light of the World’ who carried the ‘light of conscience’ and the ‘light of peace’, and whose light contributed to the ‘healing of the nations’. This reading holds great significance when it comes to the way in which Lady Gregory interpreted an artist’s social role and responsibility: throughout her life she was trying to build paths towards peace and reconciliation in Ireland.

As a child, Lady Gregory would attend the Persse family’s ‘friendly little Killinane [sic] Church’, where the services were held by a Wesleyan priest. ³ Rev. John Wesley wrote at great length on the significance of the biblical ‘light of the world’ imagery for those of the Christian faith, especially in the fourth discourse of his sermon on Jesus’s ‘Sermon on the Mount’ from the Gospel of Matthew. ⁴ Jesus himself used the luminous imagery to reveal his nature and the purpose of the Christian life: ‘I am the light of the world; anyone who follows me will not be walking in the dark but will have the light of life’. ⁵ These sentiments were later developed in his parable of the lamp:

No one lights a lamp to cover it with a bowl or put it under a bed. No, it is put on a lamp-stand so that people may see the light when they come in. For nothing is hidden but it will be made clear, nothing secret but it will be made known and brought to light. So take care how you listen: anyone who has will be given more; anyone who has not, will be deprived even of what he thinks he has. ⁶

Wesley combined these two parables to form the main argument of his sermon on Christian life. He argued that faith, as given by God, is itself the ‘light of the world’ and those of the Christian faith are themselves the ‘lights of the world’. By their behaviour and by spreading the redemptive message of the Gospels, Christians illuminate the world with God’s light. ⁷ Reiterating Jesus’s words from the Gospel of Matthew (5:13–16), Wesley assigned a missionary role to those of the Christian faith:

‘Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works’:—So far let a Christian be from ever designing, or desiring to conceal his religion ! On the contrary, let it be your desire not to conceal it; not to put the light under a bushel. Let it be your care to place it ‘on a candlestick, that it may give light to all that are in the house’. Only take heed, not to seek your own praise herein, not to desire any honour to yourselves. But let it be your sole aim, that all who see your good works, may ‘glorify your Father which is in heaven’. ⁸

This message of living one’s life in the service of spreading the Gospel message stayed with Lady Gregory throughout her adult life. Her desire to lead a dutiful life was deeply rooted in her Christian faith; it was not merely shaped by her acceptance of the rules of the patriarchal society into which she had been born. The influence of Wesley was an element that Lady Gregory shared with Bernard Shaw. In his ‘Preface for Politicians’ of 1906 for John Bull’s Other Island, Shaw mentions that although he was baptised in the Church of Ireland, he was sent to a Wesleyan school. ⁹ This may account in part for the image of ‘the light of the world’ that Shaw introduces when he criticises nationalism in Ireland and the folly of the British Government in not introducing Home Rule and thereby bringing the Irish pre-occupation with nationalism (to the detriment of more important issues) to a conclusion. ¹⁰

The idea of Christian service had been instilled in Lady Gregory early in her life. She wrote in Seventy Years that after returning from the Sunday School in Kilchriest she and her family would spend the day reading Evangelical literature. ¹¹ Because of the passionate Evangelicalism of her mother and sisters, the bookshelves of the Persse household were filled with volumes of nineteenth-century religious literature for children. ¹² Maria Charlesworth ’s Ministering Children, A Tale Dedicated to Childhood taught children the purpose of Christian life. Doing and Suffering, Memorials of Elizabeth and Frances, Daughters of the Late Rev. E. Birkersteth told the story of two sisters who bore illness with great humility and who were strengthened in their daily struggles by their deep Christian faith. Mary Martha Sherwood ’s The History of Henry Milner and The History of the Fairchild Family recounted nineteenth-century household stories that carried a strong religious message. Both Sherwood’s Stories Explanatory of the Church Catechism—written for British soldiers stationed in India—and Catherine Marsh ’s The Sketch of the Life of Capt. Hedley Vicars, The Christian Soldier promoted the idea of Christianity serving the maintenance of the British Empire. Despite the fact that the Persse family held the teachings of the Scottish minister Rev. John Cumming in high regard, his anti-Newmanite, anti-Catholic and anti-Irish feelings did not chime with those of the young Augusta. As she remembered, she spent the little time that she had for herself with her nurse Mary Sheridan , who told her stories of old Catholic Ireland. ¹³

Ruskin’s mother and her passionate Evangelicalism had left a clear mark on the young man, who developed his own kind of orthodox Evangelicalism early on in his life. As Mark Frost emphasises, the art critic’s early writings exuded a strong religious message; this included the first volumes of Modern Painters . Everything, including nature, argued Ruskin, should be ‘read typologically in pursuit of salvation’, a message which combined his mother’s orthodox Evangelicalism with his own brand of natural theology. ¹⁴ Ruskin first began his friendship with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood because he saw their work as expressing his own theory of natural theology, according to which every element in a painting—every plant, flower, or animal—had to be a representation of divine beauty pointing towards the redemptive message of Christ’s sacrifice. Ruskin was fascinated with their use of ‘symbolic realism’ as he saw it expressed in their early works, such as Collins’s Convent Thoughts. In this work, almost all natural details of the garden function as religious symbols. Ruskin was flattered that the Pre-Raphaelites’ ‘symbolic realism’ was derived from his own ideas as formulated in the first volumes of Modern Painters . Mark Frost draws attention to the fact that for about a decade between 1858 and 1868 the art critic turned away from the strict Evangelicalism of his youth, a turn which led to ‘extended struggles for self-definition’ but which also resulted in Ruskin’s developing a ‘more tolerant, inclusive faith that could be reconciled to science and mythology’. ¹⁵ Between 1858 and 1868 Ruskin became increasingly involved in the art circles of his friend Gabriel Rossetti, who was leaving behind the dogmatic realism of his early youth to develop a new set of aesthetic ideals with the help of Swinburne, Baudelaire, Désiré Nisard , and Théophile Gautier . Rossetti and Swinburne met first during the painting of the Oxford Union murals in the late 1850s. They invited Ruskin into their circles to discover together the writings of those French aesth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction
• ‘My Education’: Sir William Gregory, the Grand Tours, and the Visual Arts
• ‘The “whorl” of Troy’: Celtic Mythology, Victorian Hellenism, and the Irish Literary Revival
• ‘Ní neart go cur le chéile’: Education, Social Reform, and the Abbey Theatre
• ‘See a play as a picture’: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Sister Arts, and the Irish Plays
• The Light of the World: Christianity, Cultural Politics, and Constitutional Reform
• Conclusion
• Back Matter