‘No Wild Utopian Theory” The Antiwar Writings of Eva Gore-Booth by Andrew S. Rogers A Capstone Project Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Liberal Studies At Rice University December 1, 2018 ABSTRACT: Eva Gore-Booth (b. Co. Sligo, Ireland, 1870; d. London, England, 1926) was a poet and dramatist, part of the Irish literary revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Simultaneously, she was a political and social activist, an early intersectional feminist focused on the lot of poor and working-class women in urban England. As a committed pacifist, Gore-Booth took a strong stand against the First World War, articulating Gospel-based non-resistance and championing peace and the rights of conscientious objectors. This capstone argues that the depth and profound integration of her thinking is revealed in her response to armed Irish nationalism in the form of the April, 1916, Easter Rising, in which her sister, Constance Markievicz, was a principal participant. Far from the nationalist, or “provisional” defender of anti-colonial violence, Gore-Booth is sometimes held to be, our analysis of her political, poetic, and theological writings reveals Eva Gore-Booth’s fundamental rejection of nationalism, hierarchy, and political rule in favor of a universalist ethic of love transcending artificial divisions. 2 © Copyright by Andrew S. Rogers, 2018 All Rights Reserved 3 It is very difficult to persuade people to try something new. It is almost pathetic the way they go on putting their faith in the old outworn methods of coercion and compulsion that have brought our world to its present physical suffering and destruction, and mental condition of hatred and suspicion. — Eva Gore-Booth untitled manuscript April 1919 4 Acknowledgements Even though working on this capstone consisted to a large degree of me sitting in a room reading, thinking, and typing my thoughts onto a screen, many people played a crucial role in turning a series of vague ideas into a completed project. First among them is my advisor Newell Boyd, PhD, whose repeated encouragement to get out of that room and into the archives transformed this project … as of course he knew it would. When I was struggling to make the transition from research to writing — there’s always another book, another article, what if I miss something? — he taught me that you’ll never know if you have “enough.” You just have to start putting the words together. Again he was right. I appreciate his guidance and support. In my first course in Rice’s Master of Liberal Studies program, Deborah Barrett, PhD, explained that “the goal of academic writing is to add to the conversation.” Adding something of value to the conversation surrounding Eva Gore-Booth is my goal with this capstone, and I thank Dr. Barrett for serving as my second reader. A moment should be taken to remember the late John Freeman, PhD, professor emeritus and research professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and founding director of the Master of Liberal Studies program, who, at the end of my admissions interview told me, “You’re exactly the sort of person the MLS program was designed for.” The current academic director, Mark Kulstad, PhD, and administrative director Rebecca Sharp Sanchez, have both been exceptionally encouraging and helpful. My thanks to them. If all philosophy is a footnote to Plato, then surely all scholarship on Eva Gore-Booth is a footnote to the work of Sonja Tiernan, PhD, of Liverpool Hope University. The amount of space Dr. Tiernan’s publications occupy in my bibliography attest to both her importance and her 5 energy, but just as welcome has been her evident enthusiasm in response to my occasional tweets on the progress of this project. I very much appreciate her encouragement of a decidedly nonprofessional historian tip-toeing nervously around her turf. Many thanks to Szabolcs Karikó for permission to use his amazing illustration of Eva Gore-Booth on my capstone presentation slides. Check out his work at skariko.com. My visit to the Special Collections Library at Penn State University was both rewarding and enjoyable thanks to the skillful help of Meredith Anne Weber and her Research Services staff, to whom I am much obliged. Thanks are also due to Orla Brady, an Irish actor, whose work — most relevantly, A Love Divided1 and Silent Grace2 — helped animate my fascination with Irish history and culture, and integrate it with a parallel interest in women’s narratives of social change, radicalism, revolution, and war. She thus played a part in the mental evolution that led to this capstone, and deserves my acknowledgement of her unwitting inspiration. But most of all, I must extend my love and my thanks to my beautiful bride Karen Rogers, who from my first mention of the MLS program has been unfailingly supportive of her husband’s odd new hobby — from making the beautiful cookies for which I am best known and most welcomed among my MLS classmates, to her sharp and discerning eye while reading this manuscript, to lately whispering in my ear those little words, both empowering and flattering, “You should go for a Ph.D.” If I may quote Eva Gore-Booth, “my love is yours for all time.”3 1 A Love Divided, directed by Syd Macartney (1999; Dublin: Radio Telefís Éireann 1999), television program. 2 Silent Grace, directed by Maeve Murphy (2001; Dublin: Crimson Films, Ltd, 2004), film. 3 Eva Gore-Booth, The Buried Life of Deirdre, 1930, in The Plays of Eva Gore-Booth, Frederick S. Lapisardi, ed., San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1991, 211. 6 Introduction Known during her lifetime, Eva Gore-Booth’s reputation faded following her death in 1926. She was a suffragist leader who, along with her partner Esther Roper, fundamentally transformed the nature of that movement. Gore-Booth also established herself as a significant labor organizer, educator, political campaigner, and feminist. Simultaneously, Eva Gore-Booth was a talented poet, whose work was read around the world, and praised by leaders of the Celtic Revival school, including Yeats and George Russell. She was a pioneering gender theorist, an advocate for the rights of sexual minorities, and an original theologian and moral philosopher. Gore-Booth has been rediscovered in the last decade, with both academia and popular culture engaging in a long-overdue reassessment of her accomplishments and influence. In this process, one area that received relatively less attention is her antiwar writing. While her pacifism is widely acknowledged as part of her broader world view, much room remains for a deeper analysis of her writing in opposition to World War I and in defense of the rights of conscientious objectors. Nor has the complicating factor of the Irish nationalist movement, particularly its violent expression in the Easter Rising of April, 1916, been satisfactorily reconciled with her fundamental ethic of nonresistance. One critic, for instance, holds that Eva Gore-Booth saw “freedom as the ultimate value, and one worth fighting and killing for.”4 Another, however, draws from Gore-Booth’s poetry the conclusion that, “true to her pacifist convictions, [Gore-Booth] does not support the shedding of Maureen O’Connor. “Eva Gore-Booth’s Queer Art of War,” in Women Writing War: Ireland 1880-1922. Edited by Tina O’Toole, Gillian McIntosh, and Muireann O’Cinnéide, Dublin: 4 University College Dublin Press, 2016, 88-9. 7 blood, even in a cause dear to her as an Irishwoman.” “On balance,” he argues, “it would seem Gore-Booth’s conclusion was to adhere to her pacifism, but such adherence was always provisional. As a poet she never quite settles with any conclusion.”5 Neither interpretation is fully satisfactory. A close reading of Gore-Booth’s antiwar writings — particularly when read through the lens of her theological work — reveals a remarkable consistency and integration in her thinking. All her writing, whether on War, conscription, the Rising, or Irish nationalism, comes from a deep-seated commitment to the sanctity of the individual conscience and the primacy of individual lives. Not only did GoreBooth not believe the Easter Rising justifiable, it is arguable whether she can accurately be described as an “Irish nationalist” under any traditional understanding of nationalism. Early Life and Influences Eva Gore-Booth’s antiwar philosophy was strongly influenced by — and a profound reaction against — the circumstances of her upbringing. Paul Gore arrived in Ireland from London in 1599.6 By the time his descendant Eva Selena Laura Gore-Booth was born on May 22, 1870, the family had acquired a baronetcy, the additional surname “Booth,” and the mansion and estate of Lissadell in County Sligo, Ireland. The Gore-Booth family was part of the “Anglo-Irish Ascendancy,” the wealthy, landed aristocracy that dominated society and politics7 — but unlike Terry Phillips. Irish Literature and the First World War: Culture, Identity and Memory. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015, 114. 6 Dermot James. The Gore-Booths of Lissadell. Dublin: The Woodfield Press, 2004, 6. 7 Historian of the Ascendancy Mark Bence-Jones considers “Anglo-Irish” a “misleading” term, since the ethnic background of the landholding class was far broader than simply English. Besides, “the vast majority of Ascendancy people in the 1870s would have considered themselves 5 8 many of these families, the Gore-Booths lived in Ireland full-time, living off the income of landholdings in England and Ireland, and fully engaged with their Sligo community. Eva’s grandfather, Sir Robert Gore-Booth, was “a resourceful and innovative landlord,” committed both to the economic and agricultural sustainability of his land and the welfare of his tenants.8 During the Famine of 1845-1849, Sir Robert spent thousands of pounds of his own money to import and distribute food, and to create and operate soup kitchens, to feed his tenants and those of neighboring estates. Historian of the family Dermot James quotes a contemporary account: “From what I have stated it is no exaggeration to affirm that the people are dying from starvation by dozens daily, but for Sir Robert Gore-Booth they would be dying by fifties.”9 Sir Robert was elected to Parliament in 1850, and held the seat until his death in 1876, when Eva Gore-Booth’s father succeeded to the baronetcy. Sir Henry, as he then became, inherited not only the 32,000 acres of Lissadell and his father’s other lands, but also his progressive approach to landlordism. During the so-called “mini-famine” of 1879-80, the family again provided food for tenants and area families. As the newspaper The Graphic reported: as Irish.” Brian Walker points out that many of the so-called “Anglo-Irish” resented the term, considering its use by nationalists a deliberate effort to limn the Ascendancy outside the “true” Irish nation. In a letter to the Manchester Guardian, Eva Gore-Booth described herself as “an Irish woman.” Mark Bence-Jones. Twilight of the Ascendancy. London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1987, 15. Brian M. Walker. A Political History of the Two Irelands: From Partition to Peace. New York: Palgrave Macmillan Limited. 2012. 75. Eva Gore-Booth, “To the Editor of the Manchester Guardian,” Manchester Guardian, July 29, 1916, 4. Accessed at Newspapers.com. 8 Sonja Tiernan. Eva Gore-Booth: An Image of Such Politics. New York: Manchester University Press, 2012, 4. 9 James, Gore-Booths, 32. 9 There is satisfaction in the thought that the sad distress existing in Ireland has given the opportunity to the landlords and others of the well-to-do classes to show their sympathy in a practical manner — an opportunity of which they have not been slow to avail themselves, as is proved by the cheerful way in which the Relief Committed devote themselves to the task of assisting the distressed. … Lissadell, the seat of Sir H.W. Gore-Booth, Bart., is a centre of distribution for the large district of Drumcliff. The Riding School, a large building attached to the stables, has been turned into a Corn Exchange, one corner being fitted up as a shop, with a counter, scales, weights, &c., complete; and here Sir Henry and Lady GoreBooth, and the members of the Relief Committee, work con amore. Business is done on strict ready-money principles, meal, flour, sugar, tea, and other commodities, being sold at wholesale prices (the cost of carriage being defrayed by her ladyship), and every transaction is entered in a ponderous day-book, to the intense satisfaction of the customers.10 The Graphic’s fawning notwithstanding, “intense satisfaction” was seldom a feature of Irish life in this era, particularly among the marginalized. The Irish Land League, formed during this time, began a national campaign for reform of the land-ownership system and an across-the-board lowering of rents to the level of Griffith’s Valuation, a survey of land and property carried out between 1848 and 1864. With no legal requirement to do so, and despite heavy mortgages on the estate following the famine relief efforts, Sir Henry lowered rents at Lissadell to the Griffith level, substantially reducing not only the burden on his tenants but also his own income.11 When conditions in Ireland grew still worse, he lowered rents yet further to below market value. “The Distress in Ireland — Sketches at Lissadell,” The Graphic: An Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, April 10, 1880, 8. Accessed at newspapers.com. 11 James, Gore-Booths, 57. 10 10 The year after he succeeded to the title, Sir Henry married Georgina Hill, daughter of Colonel John Hill of the 7th Hussars and his wife Lady Frances, a kinswoman of the Earls of Scarborough.12 Together they had five children: Constance (b. 1868), Josslyn (1869), Eva (1870), Mabel (1876), and Mordaunt (1878). Lissadell would seem an almost ideal physical environment in which they could grow up: In her teenage years, Eva enjoyed roaming the local countryside on horseback and became taken by her surrounding nature. On their frequent horse rides, Constance and Eva stopped at cabins to speak with the local tenant farmers. During these visits Eva became enthralled with tales of Celtic legends and the history of Sligo. She thrived on folklore, in particular folk tales which recounted stories and legends of the High Queen of Connacht, Maeve, reputedly buried on the cairn of Knocknaree Mountain not far from Lissadell House.13 And yet, in remembering Eva’s childhood, her governess would write, “As she was two years younger than Constance, and always so delicate, she had been, I think, rather in the background and a little lonely mentally.”14 In The Inner Life of Child, an autobiographical essay discovered after her death, Gore-Booth recalls “the lonely moods and bewildering eternities of childish life.”15 Her first biographer, Esther Roper, writes that Gore-Booth at this time “seems to have been haunted by the suffering of the world, and to have had a curious feeling of responsibility for its inequalities and injustices. Once, when very young, she was found taking off her coat to give Joseph Jackson Howard, Visitation of England and Wales, Vol. 13, privately printed, 1905, 723. Accessed at books.google.com/books?id=PP0qAAAAMAAJ 13 Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 16. 14 Quoted in Esther Roper, “Introduction,” Poems of Eva Gore-Booth, Complete Edition with The Inner Life of a Child and Letters and a Biographical Introduction by Esther Roper. Edited by Esther Roper. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1929, 6. 15 Eva Gore-Booth, “The Inner Life of a Child,” Poems of Eva Gore-Booth, 51. 12 11 to a child by the roadside, and nothing could persuade her that this was wrong. She could not believe it right to possess what others had not.”16 Such sensitivity was hardly the norm among the landholding class. “On the whole, the ladies of the Ascendancy did not devote quite so much of their time to good works as did the wives and daughters of the English squirarchy.”17 And yet, it was characteristic of the three oldest Gore-Booth children, all of whom “while in their twenties … were seen by some to share certain socialist ideals.”18 It was around this time (the chronology is unclear) that the sisters rode 30 miles to attend a Land League meeting, “where they openly declared that they were on the side of the people and against class privilege.”19 As Eva Gore-Booth’s political conscience formed over these years, some of the key themes of her future life and work can begin to be identified. These include a rejection of her class inheritance and social position, a deep attraction to mystical spirituality, a sense of connection with the natural world, and — in contrast to Constance but apparently in common with her brother Josslyn — an “abhorrence” of violence.20 She was also committed to the cause of the Irish people, as illustrated by one of her relatively early poems: “Tricolor” Roper, “Introduction,” Poems of Eva Gore-Booth, 8. Bence-Jones. Twilight. 59. 18 James, Gore-Booths, 98. 19 James, Gore-Booths, 203-4. If this is the same meeting described in a 1922 New York Times profile of Constance, it may be worth pointing out that, Lady Gore-Booth being “equally determined that they should not get there,” and having taken “every precaution of cutting off all means of conveyance,” Constance and Eva “took two horses from a neighboring stable” in order to attend. Kathleen M. O’Brennan, “Sinn Fein’s Extremist Woman Leader,” The New York Times, January 1, 1922, 93. Accessed at Newspapers.com. 20 James, Gore-Booths, 98. 16 17 12 In liberty of thought, Equality of life, The generations sought A rest from hate and strife. Hard work on common ground, Strong arms and spirits free, In these at last they found Fraternity. 21 With its title and references to the revolutionary motto “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” this poem is clearly “about” the French Revolution — one of several of Gore-Booth’s early works to fit that description. However, it also by implication invokes the green-white-orange tricolor flag of Ireland, which, as Gore-Booth’s biographer Sonja Tiernan explains, “was first used in Ireland in 1848 at a Young Ireland rally in celebration of yet another French Revolution.”22 The French Revolution had a significant impact on the development of an organized Irish nationalist rebellion. … The formation of the United Irishmen [who led an anti-British rebellion in 1798] was inspired by the success of the French rebellion. … The Irish tricolour was not popularly adopted in Ireland until after the Easter Rising when it was flown over the GPO. With Gore-Booth’s knowledge of history and her support of Irish Home Rule she would have been aware of the Irish tricolour when she published this volume.23 Eva Gore-Booth, Eva Gore-Booth: Collected Poems. Edited by Sonja Tiernan. Dublin: Arlen House, 2018, 80. The spelling tricolor, and not the expected tricolour, is Gore-Booth’s own. 22 Sonja Tiernan, “Introduction,” Eva Gore-Booth: Collected Poems. Edited by Sonja Tiernan. Dublin: Arlen House, 2018, 20. 23 Ibid. 21 13 The significance of this iconography in Gore-Booth’s poetry deserves further emphasis. The recognized flag of Irish nationalism at this time was in fact not the tricolor, but a gold harp on a green field. As a modern Irish government publication explains, Although the tricolour was not forgotten as a symbol of hoped-for union [between Irish Protestants and Catholics] and a banner associated with the Young Irelanders and revolution, it was little used between 1848 and 1916. Even up to the eve of the Rising in 1916, the green flag with harp held undisputed sway.24 Joseph E. Donovan adds the important fact that the tricolor “was a symbol of rebellion for which its partisans could be criminalized.”25 In recalling the tricolor instead of the dominant vexillological symbol of Irish nationalism, the green flag, Gore-Booth was aligning herself with the most radical expression of nationalism seen to that point — a drive, not for Parliamentary solutions, but for rebellion. Not for Home Rule, but for an independent Irish republic. Despite Eva Gore-Booth’s passion and commitment, however, outlets for those passions were few for a woman of her age and station in northwest Ireland. Uninterested in the conventional program of marriage and children (Eva and Constance each made their debut to London society in the traditional fashion, being presented to Queen Victoria in 1887; Constance enjoyed the whirl of parties, but Eva preferred to attend concerts and meet artists and writers; Department of the Taoiseach. “The National Flag,” n.d., 5. www.taoiseach.gov.ie/eng/ Historical_Information/The_National_Flag/. In “The Irish Flag,” an essay published days before the Rising, labor leader James Connolly makes repeated reference to “the green flag of Ireland.” James Connolly, “The Irish Flag,” Workers Republic, April 8, 1916, in The James Connolly Reader. Edited by Shaun Harkin. Chicago: Haymarket Books. 2018, 434-6. 25 Joseph E. Donovan, “Two Irish Flags: A Comparative Analysis.” Raven: A Journal of Vexillology. Vol 11, 2004, 75. 24 14 neither returned home with a husband),26 Eva seems to have been at something of a loose end, particularly after Constance left Lissadell in 1893. Her activities during this period include a tour of North America with her father, and her first meeting with Yeats, who stayed at Lissadell for several days in late 1894, read and commented encouragingly on her poetry,27 and formed the impressions of Eva and her sister recorded in the poem that may be the thing for which GoreBooth’s name is best known today. “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz” (excerpt) The light of evening, Lissadell, Great windows open to the south, Two girls in silk kimonos, both Beautiful, one a gazelle.28 In 1896, Gore-Booth and her mother traveled to Beyreuth for the Festspiele, and later to Italy. While in Venice, Gore-Booth became very ill, and was encouraged to remain on the Mediterranean instead of returning to the less salubrious climate of northwest Ireland. She stayed at Bordighera, a town near the French border, in a villa owned by the Scottish pastor, poet, and theologian George MacDonald. While there, Gore-Booth had an experience that would transform her life, giving it an energy, direction, and purpose it had previously lacked, and which would sustain it for the rest of her life. And yet, that same “connection” may very well be the Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 18. Yeats found her to have “some literary talent, and much literary ambition, and has met no literary people.” Jacqueline Van Voris. Constance de Markievicz in the Cause of Ireland. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1967. 40. 28 W.B. Yeats. The Poems. Edited by Daniel Albright. London: Everyman’s Library, 1992. 283. The gazelle is Eva. 26 27 15 principal reason Eva Gore-Booth’s name was, until recently, almost entirely absent from both the political and the literary history of her time. That’s because what — or rather who — Gore-Booth encountered in Bordighera was a young woman named Esther Roper. Esther Roper was a remarkable person, herself deserving closer academic and popular attention. She was born in 1868, the daughter of a Church of England minister and missionary. Unlike the Gore-Booths, the Ropers were not wealthy. In fact, Edward Roper had evidently chosen the mission field, not only out of religious enthusiasm, but as a way to escape the factory labor he had been performing in Manchester since childhood. In the 1850s, he was sent as a missionary to British West Africa. In 1860, he was captured by Ibadan tribal forces and held hostage for three years before escaping and returning to England. In 1867, he was ordained, and also married Annie Craig, the daughter of Irish immigrants. Just months after Esther was born, her parents returned to Africa, leaving their daughter with her mother’s parents. This would be the pattern for much of Esther’s childhood, until her father died in 1877, aged only 39. Annie received a pension from the Church, which also paid for Esther, already a promising intellect, to enter Owens College (today the University of Manchester) in 1886.29 While at Owens, Roper involved herself in several organizations to support and benefit female students, who labored under many restrictions which their male colleagues were spared. Upon Annie’s death in 1889, she took on the additional responsibility of raising her 13-year-old brother, Reginald. Despite these accumulated burdens, Roper graduated in 1891 with examination prizes in English Literature, Latin, and Political Economy, making her among the Biographical details from Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 28-42, and Gifford Lewis. Eva Gore Booth and Esther Roper: A Biography. London: Pandora, 1988, 28-60. 29 16 earliest women in England to be awarded a bachelor’s degree on equal standing with male students.30 After graduation, she took a job as secretary of the Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage. Roper reorganized and reenergized the group, formed a new board of directors (which included Emmeline Pankhurst), and merged it with another organization to create the North of England Society for Women’s Suffrage. Crucially, Roper also “ensured for the first time that the interests of working-class women were included in the campaign for suffrage. The North of England Society began to fight for votes for all women, regardless of whether they owned property or not. This was a fundamental change in suffrage campaigning.”31 While Roper was earning a place “at the centre of [the] national movement” for women’s suffrage, she also took a leading role in the creation of the Manchester University Settlement, an initiative to bring social classes together for education, cultural activities, and improved understanding. She was elected to the governing committee of the Settlement in 1896. Thus, Within just five years of graduating from Owens College, Roper became a highly respected campaigner for women’s suffrage. She fundamentally altered the focus of the suffrage movement, including a new concentration on the needs of working-class women. She was a respected social activist who actively improved the impoverished district of Ancoats [where the Settlement was based]. While Roper was submerged in both paid and volunteer work she successfully raised her brother Reginald … It is not surprising that by the end of 1896 Roper was overworked and suffered from acute exhaustion which necessitated her respite in Italy.32 “Sessional Examinations,” Manchester Guardian, June 26, 1891, 8. Accessed at Newspapers.com. 31 Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 37-8. 32 Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 41-2. 30 17 In the somewhat understated (and third-person) prose of her biographical introduction to the collected poems of Eva Gore-Booth, Roper recalls their meeting: In 1896, in the house of George Macdonald at Bordighera, where both were staying, she met the writer of this sketch, who for two years had been working in Manchester for the political and economic enfranchisement of women. For months illness kept us in the south, and we spent the days walking and talking on the hillside by the sea. Each was attracted to the work and thoughts of the other, and we became friends and companions for life.33 Characteristically, Gore-Booth described the same event in a poem: “The Travellers (To E.G.R.)” Was it not strange that by the tideless sea The jar and hurry of our lives should cease? That under olive boughs we found our peace, And all the world’s great song in Italy? Is it not strange though Peace herself has wings And long ago has gone her separate ways, On through the tumult of our fretful days From Life to Death the great song chimes and rings? In that sad day shall then the singing fail, Shall Life go down in silence at the end, And in the darkness friend be lost to friend, And all our love and dreams of no avail? 33 Roper, “Introduction,” Poems of Eva Gore-Booth, 9. 18 You whose Love’s melody makes glad the gloom Of a long labour and a patient strife, Is not that music greater than our life? Shall not a little song outlast that doom?34 After their months together in Italy, the women parted, Roper to return to Manchester, and Gore-Booth to Lissadell. Shortly after her return, and no doubt inspired by Roper’s example, Gore-Booth engaged in one of her earliest acts of overt activism by organizing a Sligo branch of the Irish Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association. Yet she may well have already decided her future no longer lay in Ireland. In 1897, she left Lissadell to rejoin Esther Roper. They would live and work together, first in Manchester and later in London, “shar[ing] everything in life for over thirty years,” until Eva’s death.35 Gore-Booth’s relocation, and what it says about her relationship with Roper, is important on many levels. As Tiernan writes, The move was an enormously significant decision and would most likely have caused concern among Gore-Booth family members, because the women’s relationship crossed culture and class boundaries at a time when society frowned on such interactions. The move from a rural area, with clear air and the luxuries of a privileged life-style, to smoke-bound industrial Manchester and Esther’s terraced house might also have adversely affected Eva’s delicate health.36 Gore-Booth, Eva Gore-Booth: Collected Poems. Edited by Sonja Tiernan. Dublin: Arlen House, 2018, 173. 35 Esther Roper, letter to Mrs. MacMurray, December 19, 1927. Author’s collection. 36 Sonja Tiernan. “Challenging Presumptions of Heterosexuality: Eva Gore-Booth, A Biographical Case Study,” Historical Reflections, Vol. 34, no. 2 (2011), 62. 34 19 Roper recalled later that Gore-Booth’s “friends prophesied her speedy death owing to the somewhat harsh climate” of Manchester.37 And indeed, just four years after her move, GoreBooth made out her will, surely an unusual move for a 29-year-old. Significantly, she left her full estate to Roper.38 The contrast between the dark, polluted city and the clean, free, “green world” of nature would be a trope of Gore-Booth’s poetry for the rest of her life. Gifford Lewis, author of a joint biography of Gore-Booth and Roper, is at some pains to argue that the women’s partnership was intellectual and philosophical, driven by a shared commitment to female emancipation in all its forms, and resolutely not romantic or sexual. She concludes, in a phrase quoted frequently in subsequent studies, that “Eva Gore-Booth and Esther Roper never entered each other’s bedrooms except in illness.”39 Lewis’ justification for this conclusion is sketchy, relying as she does primarily on the lack of any contrary evidence — she herself writes, “It is difficult to discover the tone of their private life together” — and her motives for reaching it have been called into question.40 Nearly all academic and popular writers today acknowledge Gore-Booth and Roper as partners in a lifelong lesbian relationship, with the nature of the physical expression of that relationship, if any, both unprovable and irrelevant. What matters for this essay is “to acknowledge Eva’s sexuality in order to fully appreciate her Esther Roper. “Eva Gore-Booth: An Address given at the unveiling of a window placed in her memory in the Round House, Ancoats, on June 11th, 1928.” Manchester University Settlement papers, No. 1, 1928. Pennsylvania State University Archives, Eva Gore-Booth Collection, Box 2: Folder 14. AX/B40/RBM/00139. 38 Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 48. 39 Lewis, 8. 40 Lewis, 6. Tiernan, “Challenging…” 37 20 philosophical writings and extremely radical views of gender” — views reflected in her antiwar writings — and to recognize that “their lives together testify to the strength of their love.”41 Gore-Booth’s Philosophy as Seen in Her Pre-War Activism and Writing Eva Gore-Booth and Esther Roper’s political and social activism in Manchester, and after 1910 in London, is a fascinating subject. We refer interested readers to chapters 3-6 of Tiernan’s Eva Gore-Booth: An image of such politics, already cited. In this section, we will identify themes of her work during this era that will inform our analysis of her antiwar writing. It soon becomes clear that Gore-Booth was an “intersectional feminist” some 90 years before such a term existed. Upon arriving in Manchester, Gore-Booth began assisting Roper in organizing female workers. “Gore-Booth cast an imposing image: she was tall, slender, and strikingly beautiful. Surprisingly her aristocratic background and genteel manner did not create a barrier for her interacting with the labouring classes.”42 The women soon diversified their efforts, sometimes working together, sometimes in parallel, but always in partnership for the benefit of economically, politically, and socially marginalized women. Writing of Eva and her sister Constance at a later period, Maureen O’Connor says, in a statement that applies equally well to Eva and Esther, “Neither would rank these causes; they would have seen them as aspects of a single advocacy, that of the universal right to self-determination.”43 Tiernan, “Challenging…,” 59-60, 62. Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 54. 43 O’Connor, 86. 41 42 21 Gore-Booth’s exposure to working women, many of whom were Irish immigrants, deepened her understanding of the conditions they lived and worked under, and convinced her that the electoral impotence of working-class women was part of the web that kept them trapped in poverty and oppression. A petition to Parliament drafted by Esther Roper in 1900 declared, That in the opinion of your petitioners the continued denial of the franchise to women is unjust and inexpedient. In the home, their position is lowered by such an exclusion from the responsibilities of national life. In the factory, their unrepresented condition places the regulation of their work in the hands of men who are often their rivals as well as their fellow workers.44 While male opposition to women’s suffrage was often patriarchal and protective in expression, Roper and Gore-Booth recognized that it was motivated at least as much by male workers’ desire to exclude economic competition. Under the banner of the Lancashire & Cheshire Women Textile and Other Workers’ Representation Committee, Gore-Booth wrote that, It has often been said “Money is Power,” it is equally true that Power is Money. With social traditions at his back, or real political influence to support him, the individual finds it easy enough to make good his claim to a fair share of the wealth, intellectual or material, owned by the community. Taking this fact into account, it will be seen that the working woman’s position is, indeed, a forlorn and difficult one. She has no social or political influence to back her. Her Trade Union stands or falls by its power of negotiating; it cannot hope to have the weight with employers that the men’s Unions have, for instead of being a strong Association of Voters, bound together in common interests in trade and politics, and able by numbers to change the issue of elections, and force its policy on the House of Commons, it is merely a band of workers carrying on an almost hopeless 44 Lewis, 87, 22 struggle to improve conditions of work and wages forced on them by arbitrary authority.45 A notable example of Gore-Booth’s work in this area is her opposition to the effort to exclude women from working as barmaids. Although ostensibly meant to “free” women from unhealthy, unsafe, and morally hazardous conditions, the clear intent was simply to reserve those jobs for men. Gore-Booth and Roper spearheaded opposition to these restrictions, establishing the Barmaids’ Political Defence League to press their cause.46 This came to a head in 1908 when the incumbent MP for Northwest Manchester, Winston Churchill, was appointed to a place in the Cabinet, necessitating, under the law of the time, a by-election. After a spirited campaign in which Gore-Booth, Roper, and the Barmaids’ League played a prominent and energetic role — and into which Eva’s sister Constance was also recruited — Churchill went down to defeat.47 By this time, a split had occurred within the suffrage movement. Gore-Booth and Roper’s focus was on organizing women, lobbying MPs, exerting pressure in elections, painstakingly analyzing bills (Tiernan credits Gore-Booth with uncovering the restrictive employment Eva Gore-Booth. “Women workers and parliamentary representation,” c. 1905, The Political Writings of Eva Gore-Booth. Edited by Sonja Tiernan. New York: Manchester University Press, 45 2015, 22-23. 46 “Barmaids and Suffragists,” Manchester Guardian, April 17, 1908, 5. Accessed at Newspapers.com. 47 Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 123-6. Intriguingly, the barmaids’ campaign is not mentioned as a cause of Churchill’s defeat in any of several Churchill biographies I consulted, including the eight-volume Official Biography, except in passing in Roy Jenkins’ Churchill (2001). For biographers, the 1908 election is overshadowed by Churchill’s courtship of Clementine Hozier, whom he wed later that year. In any event, Churchill was soon returned to Westminster from a safe seat. See also, “In defence of barmaids: the Gore-Booth sisters take on Winston Churchill,” History Ireland, 20:3, May/June 2012. www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporaryhistory/in-defence-of-barmaidsthe-gore-booth-sisters-take-on-winston-churchill. 23 language that had been buried deep within the 1908 Licensing Bill48), and generally doing the unglamorous but essential work that underlies successful political activism. Their efforts were rewarded, in part, when the Labour Representation Committee — forerunner of the Labour Party —formally endorsed in 1904 a motion calling on LRC MPs to introduce and support a women’s suffrage bill in Parliament.49 However, impatience with the slow advance of the movement through such methods caused the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Sylvia, to adopt more militant methods. Another daughter, Christabel Pankhurst, had been a protégé of Gore-Booth’s earlier in the decade. With Roper’s assistance, Pankhurst had enrolled in Owens College, eventually obtaining a law degree.50 Pankhurst worked intimately with both women for two or three years, and “developed a particularly close relationship” with Gore-Booth — a friendship of which Emmeline Pankhurst was said to be “intensely jealous.”51 That had changed by 1904, however, when Christabel joined her mother and sister in increased militancy. The following year, Christabel and another activist, Annie Kenney, were arrested after disrupting a public meeting featuring Winston Churchill and Sir Edward Grey. Pankhurst was further accused of spitting at a policeman. Although Gore-Booth and Roper presented Pankhurst with flowers upon her release from prison, the path of militancy, disorder, Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 122. Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 90. 50 Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 61. 51 Ibid; James, Gore-Booths, 215. 48 49 24 heckling, and violence down which the “suffragettes” were moving was one that Gore-Booth was unwilling to follow.52 Her reasons were threefold. At base, “Eva, a dedicated pacifist, abhorred the militant actions of the WSPU, which sometimes resulted in tragedy, such as Emily Davison’s death after she threw herself under the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby in 1903.”53 Additionally, GoreBooth recognized that violent acts of the sort that landed Pankhurst and Kenney in prison for several days were a privilege of the well-off. Poor and working women literally could not afford to be imprisoned and kept from their employment and their children. Tactically, Gore-Booth, Roper, and their colleagues argued that violence and political theatrics like interrupting meetings would not speed success, but in fact slow progress by alienating potential supporters — male parliamentarians like Churchill and Grey whose votes would be required for any suffrage measure, but also the very working women who were their particular concern, and “whose dignity is very real to them.”54 By 1906, Gore-Booth and Roper were at pains to publicly distance themselves and their wing of the movement from the militant suffragettes, for fear of being themselves tarnished in the eyes of the women they represented. We can by this point identify two important themes in Eva Gore-Booth’s activism. First, the intersectional nature of her “intrinsically female-centered” work: she viewed organizing, Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 94. Although suffragette was coined by newspapermen as a term of ridicule, it was adopted by the militant wing of the movement that followed the Pankhursts. Thus, a distinction exists in Britain between suffragist and suffragette that does not correspond to American usage, where suffragette is now widely seen as disparaging. 53 Sonja Tiernan, “’No Measures of “Emancipation” or “Equality” Will Suffice’: Eva Gore-Booth’s Revolutionary Feminism in the Journal Urania,” in Women, Social and Cultural Change in Twentieth Century Ireland: Dissenting Voices? Edited by Sarah O’Connor and Christopher C. Shepard. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, 177. 54 Letter from Eva Gore-Booth and Esther Roper to Millicent Fawcett, quoted in Lewis, 114. 52 25 education, suffragism, socialism, and political campaigning as equally vital elements of progress toward women’s emancipation and self-determination.55 Indeed, Gore-Booth and those she influenced would later criticize a feminist movement they saw as too narrowly focused on winning the vote.56 The second theme is that denying women self-determination was not, however it was rationalized, a “natural” feature of civilization, but an explicit and ongoing campaign by men to exercise political, economic, and social control over women. While Gore-Booth was becoming a pioneering campaigner for women’s freedom, she was also establishing her reputation as a poet. Her first collection, Poems, was published to encouraging reviews in 1898. In 1904, the influential poet and critic George Russell (who published under the diagraph Æ) included several of her poems in New Songs, a selection of works by promising Irish poets. That same year, two additional volumes of her poetry, Unseen Kings and The One and the Many, also appeared. The Three Resurrections followed in 1905, and The Egyptian Pillar in 1907. These latter show some important differences in style and content from Poems, most relevantly for this analysis some early expressions of pacifism. Many poems not only give voice to the marginalization of women she was combatting in Manchester, but also display a feminist and lesbian revisioning of Irish history and Celtic myth.57 From the many poems we could cite to illustrate, we will emphasize two.58 Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 86. Tiernan, “’No Measures,’” 166-67. 57 Tiernan, “Introduction,” Collected Poems, 26. 58 We should also note that, in addition to “The Travellers (To E.G.B.),” quoted above, The One and The Many also contains “The Little Waves of Breffny,” a nostalgic invocation of GoreBooth’s native northwest Ireland. This was the poem, and probably the one endeavor in any medium or field, for which she was best known during her life. 55 56 26 Eva Gore-Booth’s rejection of her inherited social position has been a theme of this paper. In fact, it is not too far to say, as Sonja Tiernan does in the first line of her biography, that “Eva Gore-Booth despised her aristocratic heritage.”59 Even knowing this, the intensity of GoreBooth’s denunciation of the landholding class — of which her brother, Sir Josslyn (Sir Henry having died in 1900) was a leading, if somewhat uncomfortable, example —is noteworthy: “The Land to a Landlord” You hug to your soul a handful of dust, And you think the round world your sacred trust — But the sun shines, and the wind blows, And nobody cares and nobody knows. O the braken waves and the foxgloves flame, And none of them ever has heard your name — Near and dear is the curlew’s cry, You are merely a stranger passing by. Sheer up through the shadows the mountain towers And dreams wander free in this world of ours, — Though you may turn the grass to gold, The twilight has left you out in the cold. Though you are king of the rose and the wheat, Not for you, not for you is the bog-myrtle sweet, Though you are lord of the long grass, The hemlock bows not her head as you pass. 59 Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 1. 27 The poppies would flutter amongst the corn Even if you had never been born With your will or without your will The ragweed can wander over the hill. Down there in the bog where the plovers call You are but an outcast after all, Over your head the sky gleams blue — Not a cloud or a star belongs to you.60 Although this poem was most likely written when Eva Gore-Booth was fully engaged in social and political activism in Manchester, her denunciation of landlordism is not based on the relations between aristocrat and tenant with which she was so familiar. This is not a farmer, a seamstress, or a millworker denouncing the landlord: it is the very earth itself. And while the landlord is unquestionably male, nature is female, or at least feminine (“the hemlock bows not her head”). As playwright, novelist, and historian Emma Donoghue writes, “Although she never directly accuses men of being primarily responsible for the rape of the earth, Gore-Booth makes her point by setting the impotent patriarch of this poem against a world of feminized plants.”61 A similar vision is expressed in a second poem: “Women’s Rights” Down by Glencar Waterfall There’s no winter left at all. Every little flower that blows Gore-Booth, Collected Poems, 165-6. Donoghue, Emma. “’How could I fear and hold thee by the hand’: The Poetry of Eva Gore Booth,” in Sex, Nation, and Dissent in Irish Writing. Edited by Éibhear Walshe. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. 23. 60 61 28 Cold and darkness overthrows. Every little thrush that sings Quells the air with brave wings. Every little stream that runs Holds the light of brighter suns. But where men in office sit Winter holds the human wit. In the dark and dreary town Summer’s green is trampled down. Frozen, frozen everywhere Are the springs of thought and prayer. Rise with us and let us go To where the living waters flow. Oh, whatever men may say Ours is the wide and open way. Oh, whatever men may dream We have the blue air and the stream. Men have got their towers and walls, We have cliffs and waterfalls. Oh, whatever men may do Ours is the gold air and the blue. Men have got their pomp and pride — All the green world is on our side.62 Donoghue describes “this triumphantly powerful poem” as “the nearest thing Eva ever wrote to a separatist manifesto.” 62 Gore-Booth, Collected Poems, 234-5. 29 As if she knows that the struggle for female suffrage is not nearly over — it was to take another twelve years before women over thirty would be granted the vote in Britain — in this poem Gore-Booth is shifting her battleground to the realm of the symbolic. Suffragism was a movement of streets and railings, urban rallies and prisons, but Gore-Booth manages here to invest it with all the charms of the open countryside. Even at her most feminist, Gore-Booth’s focus is never on hating men, but on enjoying the company of women. The males in “Women’s Rights” are not dramatic villains, but sad bureaucrats in dusty offices, watching the women canter off to the waterfalls together.63 In Gore-Booth’s eyes, the masculine seeks to contain and control, to bureaucratize and brutalize. The feminine rejoices in life. It’s hard to ignore her implied conclusion that, “the worst things about human society are male.”64 By attempting to assert dominion, men have alienated themselves from nature and life. Put another way, male dominance is unnatural. The Biblical reference in the eighth couplet should not escape mention. “Living fountains of waters” are presented as an aspect of heaven in Revelation 7:17. In his discussion with the Samaritan woman in the Gospel of John, Jesus describes his gift of eternal life as “living water” (4:10). More than simply “cantering off to waterfalls,” for Gore-Booth, women are closer to heaven, and better able to commune with the divine, than are men inside their frozen fortresses. While Eva Gore-Booth’s poems were read and loved around the world, the four plays published during her life, and two additional posthumous titles, have received scant attention from professional dramatists. Their significance to us in this paper will be how she used them to 63 64 Donoghue, 24-5. Donoghue, 22. 30 express her ideas.65 Like much of her poetry, many of Gore-Booth’s plays draw from the rich field of Irish history and legend. However, as she retold ancient Celtic stories, she re-centered them, placing women, and the relationships between women, at the core. Gore-Booth’s Growing Interest in Theology As Martin Ceadel writes in his study, Pacifism in Britain 1914-1945, pacifism “is not primarily a political ideal but, rather, a moral creed.”66 Gore-Booth’s moral creed was intimately tied to her beliefs about God and to “those ideas that have gradually taken shape in my conscious life” of the nature of God, the ministry of Jesus, and what a life lived in union with the God of Love would truly look like. 67 Although the Gore-Booth family was at least nominally Protestant, it does not seem to have been so in any orthodox way. In fact, they “became publicly associated with spiritualism in the mid-nineteenth century,” and this “engagement with séances and supernatural phenomena was shared by the next generation.”68 As she later recorded in “The Inner Life of a Child,” GoreBooth, Gore-Booth believed children, herself most certainly included, to be highly receptive to spiritual and mystical experiences, and, having been particularly affected by the death of her For a history and analysis of her drama, qv. Frederick Lapisardi’s introduction in Eva GoreBooth, The Plays of Eva Gore-Booth. Edited by Frederick S. Lapisardi. San Francisco: EMTexts, 1991, and Sonja Tiernan’s introduction in Eva Gore-Booth, Fiametta: A Previously Unpublished Play by Eva Gore-Booth. Edited by Sonja Tiernan. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2010. 66 Martin Ceadel. Pacifism in Britain 1914-1945: The Defining of a Faith. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1980. 5. 67 Eva Gore-Booth, “Peace of S Francis,” manuscript, undated. Pennsylvania State University Archives, Eva Gore-Booth Collection, Box 1: Folder 15. AX/B40/RBM/00139. 68 Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 18-9. 65 31 beloved grandmother when she was nine, experienced repeated visions of her grandmother. Writing of herself in the third person, Gore-Booth recalled, “Oddly enough, the child, who in theory was terrified of ghosts, had no thought of fear, nor even did she think it strange, she was simply delighted to be with her again.”69 This cannot necessarily be classified as “religion,” however. In her adolescent diary, Constance wrote, “I have no God, nothing to worship & I feel the want.”70 It is possible to imagine Eva expressing a similar idea, if less vehemently. Death is a frequent concern in her poetry, but her early works in particular betray little evidence of belief in an afterlife or other typical expressions of religious faith.71 Nevertheless, at some point after Gore-Booth’s arrival in Manchester, she and Roper — the daughter, we recall, of an Anglican priest — began attending the Labour Church, an urban ministry that promoted itself as “the spiritual expression of the Labour movement.”72 Before long, both women were regular speakers there. Tiernan suggests Gore-Booth’s “preoccupation” with death led her to study theology as an adult, and while many of her poems remained steeped in Celtic legend and lore, from 1904 they also begin to display increasing familiarity with Hindu and Buddhist writings. In “From East to West,” the first poem in Unseen Kings, Gore-Booth implies that Ireland, “a twilight land in the west, / where old unquiet mysteries / and pale discrownèd spirits dwell,”73 would be uniquely receptive to “dreams” and “new tales” from the East. This focus on eastern thought reflects Gore-Booth’s growing interest in Theosophy, an Gore-Booth, “Inner Life,” 54. Arrington, Revolutionary Lives, 10. 71 Tiernan, “Introduction,” Collected Poems, 18. 72 Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 62. 73 Gore-Booth, Collected Poems, 135. 69 70 32 esoteric spirituality popular among feminists of Gore-Booth’s era.74 At some point in this period — as Joy Dixon aptly notes, “it is difficult to date precisely the phases of Gore-Booth’s religious thought”75 — she became involved with the Theosophical Society (TS). Officially, the TS (then as now) had no dogmas, but it did develop a distinctive set of teachings, which most members identified as theosophy. These teachings emphasized an immanentist and evolutionary vision of spirituality: the universe, seen and unseen, was One Life, which evolved to consciousness (in a series of immensely complicated cycles) through a diversity of forms, governed by the mechanisms of karma and reincarnation. These teachings, theosophists claimed, were the divine wisdom, the esoteric truths of all religions and scientific systems. … Theosophists also tended to emphasize the importance of ancient written texts at the expense of popular ritual and customary practice, and they privileged Hindu and Buddhist texts over Judaic, Christian, or Islamic ones.76 This emphasis on textual analysis over dogma would remain central to Gore-Booth’s exegetics, even as in later life she returned to a more explicitly, if not conventionally, Christian faith. Equally significant was the fact that, Joy Dixon. Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001. 5. 75 Dixon, 259 n57. 76 Dixon, 4. Dixon makes the important observation that “the racial politics of empire were crucial in framing the context for the emergence of a feminine/feminist spirituality within” the TS, and that “the inequalities of power that structured exchanges in the colonial context mark theosophy’s syncretizing impulse as a distinctively colonial one.” The claim that one could discern secrets within Hinduism or Buddhism that had escaped the religionists themselves, “was therefore a kind of middle-brow orientalism (in Edward Said’s sense)” (11). Yet here, too, GoreBooth defies easy classification. As a daughter of the Ascendancy who fiercely denounced her class privilege in favor of socialism and egalitarianism, Gore-Booth arguably had a foot in the camps of both colonizer and colonized. 74 33 The “First Object” of the Theosophical Society, and the only item to which members were required to subscribe, was a commitment “to form the nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color.”77 Although Gore-Booth did not formally join the TS until 1919,78 theosophy’s principles and “distinctive set of teachings” are evident in her writings long before then, particularly an emphasis on the unity of life. Gore-Booth chronicles this in a poem in The Many and the One: “The Quest” For years I sought the Many in the One, I thought to find lost waves and broken rays, The rainbow’s faded colours in the sun — The dawns and twilights of forgotten days. But now I seek the One in every form, Scorning no vision that a dewdrop holds, The gentle Light that shines behind the storm, The Dream that many a twilight hour enfolds.79 Eva Gore-Booth’s belief in the unity of all life expressed itself in another way. From 1912, Gore-Booth and Roper joined (historian Lauren Arrington says they helped create) an organization called the Aëthnic Union, founded (or co-founded) by Thomas Baty to promote the Dixon, 3-4. Dixon writes that, “In the division between the ‘classes’ and the ‘masses,’ the TS was clearly on the side of the classes — a political, economic, cultural, and intellectual elite dominated by a relatively small and cohesive set of familial and marital relationships” (8). Perhaps this explains why Gore-Booth, a woman who so definitively rejected political and economic elites in other aspects of her life, waited more than 15 years before officially joining the TS? 79 Gore-Booth, Collected Poems, 151-2. 77 78 34 rejection of gender distinction, and anything in law or culture grounded in the belief in essential differences between individuals based on their gender.80 This led, in the busy year of 1916, to Gore-Booth, Roper, and three others founding Urania, a remarkable journal “advocating the elimination of sex/gender and proposing to reform the categories of men and women into one ideal feminine form. This central argument was consistent throughout every issue; challenging mainstream feminism, medical sexology and society’s gender norms.”81 Urania is a fascinating reflection of Gore-Booth’s thought (an article almost a decade after her death refers to “our former leader Eva Gore-Booth”) and helps cement her place as a pioneer of radical and postmodernist feminism.82 Most relevant to our discussion is how Urania reinforces themes we have already discerned in her activism, poetry, and drama. These include the essential “Oneness” of life; violence and war as an expression of masculinity, and idealization of “feminine” traits such as empathy, imagination, and peacefulness. [V]iolence is viewed as the main negative aspect of masculinity in Urania. The journal points to the masculine training of boys in schools as a precursor to violent wars, “so long as the male arrogant and torture-tolerant spirit is inculcated in schools, so long will channels be found for its exhibition in life.” In a later issue Irene Clyde clearly states Urania’s philosophy, that masculinity should be replaced by the superior characteristics of femininity; “as regards the comparative merits of Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 145. Lauren Arrington, “Liberté, égalité, sororité: the poetics of suffrage in the works of Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markievicz,” in Irish women’s writing, 1878-1922: Advancing the cause of liberty, Edited by Anna Pilz and Whitney Standlee. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. 212. 81 Sonja Tiernan, “’Engagements Dissolved’: Eva Gore-Booth, Urania and the Radical Challenge to Marriage,” in Tribades, Tommies and Transgressives: Histories of Sexualities Volume I. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, 128. 82 Tiernan, “No Measures,” 166 f1. 80 35 the masculine and feminine ideals, we have never made any secret of our conviction that the latter is immeasurably superior.”83 As Tiernan clarifies, “This statement does not claim that women are superior to men, rather that feminine characteristics are the desired attributes” of the one perfected human gender or form.84 Key elements of Eva Gore-Booth’s philosophy are thus clearly evident by 1914. These included firm opposition to all forms of hierarchy and orthodoxy; the central place of women in her analysis, her activism, her literary expression, and her personal life; a methodological intersectionality that viewed suffragism, labor organizing, education, theology, and other fields as facets of a single commitment to the right of the individual to choose how to live her life; a belief in the Oneness of life as a sign of God’s love; identification of violence and war as symptoms of a masculinity alienated from nature and God; and an anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist ethic. The First World War and the Case for Pacifism When the Great War began in the late summer of 1914, Eva Gore-Booth and Esther Roper undertook, in Roper’s words, “the visiting and relieving of German women and children and the few older men who were not interned.”85 While the women remained committed to their belief in the unity of all humanity, many of the circles in which they lived and worked suffered Tiernan, “No Measures,” 175. The influence of English public schools in instilling the militarism that lead to and sustained the War is the centerpiece of Peter Parker, The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-School Ethos, London: Hambledon Continuum, 1987. 84 Ibid. 85 Esther Roper, “Biographical Sketch,” Prison Letters of Countess Markievicz, Also Poems and Articles Relating to Easter Week by Eva Gore-Booth and a Biographical Sketch by Esther Roper. Edited by Esther Roper. 1934. Reprint New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1970. 103. 83 36 severe, and often irreparable, division. Across Europe, leaders of what they had assumed to be a trans-national labor and socialist movement were shocked and dismayed by the speed at which their members abandoned cross-border solidarity at the first blast of the trumpets and rallied to their respective flags. The Church backed the State in support of the War, and even the Theosophical Society, which as noted held as its “First Object” the “Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without distinction,” believed the War “a final sweeping-away of old forms that would usher in the New Age, and as a struggle between good and evil on a cosmic scale.”86 The suffrage movement divided along lines reflecting the fracture over tactics almost a decade before, with nonviolent suffragists, including Gore-Booth, Roper, and Charlotte Despard, sister of Field Marshal Sir John French, opposing the War. They were joined by Sylvia Pankhurst, who thus broke, permanently as it turned out, with her mother and sister. Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst led the militant suffragettes in enthusiasm for the War that was fervent to the point of savagery. While this patriotic sentiment may well have been authentic, there were undoubtedly political calculations involved, as they realized this would allow the suffragettes “to leave the political fringe where their unpopular campaign of rock throwing and arson had put them” and “bring them closer to their great goal of winning women the vote.”87 Similar calculations were being made across the Irish Sea, where Nationalists divided over the question of participation in the Empire’s war effort. After decades of effort, an Irish Home Rule bill had been passed by Parliament and received the Royal Assent almost coincident with the start of the War, though its implementation was shelved for the duration. At this point, “the Dixon, 87-8. Adam Hochschild. To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. 107-8. 86 87 37 essence of the Irish nationalism for which [Irish Parliamentary leader John Redmond] and the vast majority of the Irish people stood was that, individual as it was, [Ireland] was a part of a wider family relationship with the rest of Great Britain. That family was now threatened with one of the greatest crises in her history.” 88 An enthusiastic Irish response to the colors was held, not only to be appropriate, but capable of proving Ireland worthy of self-rule.89 It was only a handful of nationalists who considered it immoral for Irishmen to fight for the “the rights of small nations” while Britain held their own people in subjugation. These nationalists were “widely regarded as a clique of almost unknown cranks.”90 In spite of these divisions among her friends and colleagues, Gore-Booth took an early and uncompromising public stand against the War, with peace work supplanting her focus on suffrage. In addition to her relief work for German and Austrian refugees, she and Roper were among 101 British and Irish women who in December, 1914, signed an open letter to German suffragists, sending season’s greetings and urging a maintenance of prewar links to the extent possible.91 A few months later, Gore-Booth was one of the first to endorse a proposed international meeting in the Netherlands — now known as the Women’s Peace Congress — to bring pacifist women from around the world together to work for an end to the War. Unsurprisingly, the British government denied most requests for travel visas to this Congress, while the Royal Navy closed the Channel to crossings, citing the risk of German U-boats.92 Robert Kee. The Green Flag: The Turbulent History of the Irish National Movement. New York: Delacorte Press, 1972. 515. 89 Ibid. 90 Kee, 520. 91 Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 149. 92 Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 150-1. 88 38 Also in December 1914, Gore-Booth made her first significant public statement against the War, addressing a meeting of the National Industrial and Professional Women’s Suffrage Society (NIPWSS) in London. The speech, later published as a pamphlet, expresses themes we saw in her suffrage work, including women’s emancipation, gender relations, and the individual right of self-determination, adapted to the new reality of the War. She begins by addressing the terrible cost of War, inflicted on soldiers and terrorized populations alike, not only for the current generation, but also for the future development of society. She argues that war is not an accident of nature, nor is it… …the consequence of some uncontrollable elementary force: it is the deliberate and calculated result of human will power and intelligence, determined by some extraordinary paradoxical impulse on the destruction of everything that is of value to human life.93 Gore-Booth introduces a concept that will be key to our analysis of her antiwar writings: the immorality of attempting to employ “a dreadful means to a righteous end.”94 Now almost every problem of modern morality results from the different views the people take of this fundamental question, how far the ends justify the means. We no longer sell our souls to the devil; we make an instrument of the devil and use him to fight against evil.95 Gore-Booth rejects the idea that “fighting in the cause of righteousness and justice” can justify war, for the simple reason that every combatant believes that is what he is doing. Gore-Booth, “Whence come wars?” December 12, 1914, Political Writings, 139. Ibid. 95 Ibid. 93 94 39 In all events, there is nothing new in the idea. A large percentage of the admittedly worst deeds done in the more modern history of the human race, have been done as force to defend righteousness. Every heretic murdered in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, every priest tortured and burnt at Smithfield, every harmless old woman persecuted and hunted and finally burnt as a witch, every innocent mortal beheaded in the French Revolution, was a martyr to the delusion that you can defend righteousness with force. We look back with horror on what are to us the foolish atrocities of the Middle Ages. Yet we seem to have changed in little except our idea of righteousness. We no longer defend religion by force, but we are still ready to kill and destroy in the name of those things we hold sacred, such as science, the good of the State, our country, and even liberty itself.96 Gore-Booth profoundly believes “no amount of noble purpose can justify an evil deed” — “you cannot train the devil and force him to serve God.”97 Then follows this notable paragraph: Of course, the argument depends altogether on what view you take of evil. Perhaps I have taken it too much for granted that people will take the New Testament view of it, that it is an absence of love or goodwill in one’s dealings with life outside oneself. To those who deny the existence of good and evil I would suggest that the same result would be reached by speaking of goodwill and hate as opposites. To those who take the Old Testament view of evil as disobedience to arbitrary regulations imposed by Providence, and who can look upon religion as obedience to authority, I can only say I hope that the result of blind obedience to authority may horrify them into disbelief in the divine nature of external powers.98 Gore-Booth, “Whence come wars?” 139-40. Ibid. 98 Ibid. 96 97 40 “The world,” she says, “seems strongly convinced that the true way to ensure justice and righteousness is not by being just and right oneself, but by going out and killing other people for failing in the same virtue.”99 Yet soldiers do not fight out of anger, but …because they think it their duty, their minds are full of courage and selfsacrifice, their only fault is that they have submitted their wills and their consciences to the dictation of other people. The life and death struggle and clash of interests is not between the nations, not between the soldiers, but between the politicians.100 Although the final sentence in that paragraph makes a dramatic rhetorical point, Gore-Booth’s key idea is in the previous line: the greatest fault displayed by soldiers (and others who acquiesce in the waging of war) is that “they have submitted their wills and their consciences to the dictation” of others. Just as the 1908 Barmaids Bill was an attempt to dictate to women the conditions and circumstances under which they could work to feed their families … just as the point of denying women the vote was to preclude them from influence on the political conditions under which they live … so too is war, and the nationalism and jingoism it produces, intended to alienate people from their own conscience in order to advance the interests of powerful others. Now, she argues, we are seeing the consequences of that: During the last fifty years all over the world women have struggled and worked for Women’s Suffrage. And the Governments of Europe have tacitly said to them over and over again, “We can do quite well without you, thanks: men can manage the affairs of the world; we have no need for your assistance.” They have had it all their own way. And now look what they have brought the world to. They have 99 Gore-Booth, “Whence come wars?” 142. Gore-Booth, “Whence come wars?” 144. 100 41 absolutely broken down in their proper function. They have turned the world into a vast slaughter-house. … The blind have led the blind, and we are standing by to see the result.101 Several months later, Gore-Booth made another significant statement in opposition to the War, speaking on the “Religious Aspects of Non-Resistance” to a conference on the pacifist philosophy of life. Initially, the speech parallels her earlier address to the NIPWSS, opening with a review of the “fearful, destructive and cruel” nature of the War, which is “causing the most gigantic accumulation of pain and misery and death that the world has ever seen.”102 Noting that as humans advance in their knowledge of science, the wars they wage become more terrible and costly, Gore-Booth places humanity at a crossroads: Now it is no wild Utopian theory, but a hard practical fact, that those among us who think life worth preserving as in itself a good and beautiful thing, who have some kind of faith or interest in the human race, have only two courses open to them, to make war on science and to save ourselves through stupidity, or to make war on war.103 She repeats that “every war that has ever been fought, civil or international, has been fought for at least two good reasons, one on each side, because naturally every cause is a good cause to its adherents,” and that “one often thinks that the cruelest deeds of the world have been done by those human beings who have been able to convince themselves that strong measures are Gore-Booth, “Whence come wars?” 145. Gore-Booth, “Religious aspects of non-resistance,” July 8, 1915, Political Writings, 146. Although Gore-Booth did not shy away from “pacifist,” she often employed “non-resistance” as a more precise term for the practical expression of her beliefs. 103 Gore-Booth, “Religious aspects…,” 147. 101 102 42 justified in the defence of all that they hold most sacred, be it religion or patriotism, or liberty, or even the safety of those they love.” As she turns to the need to find “some other way of serving liberty and justice and noble causes,”104 Gore-Booth reveals the centrality of the individual, rational mind to “the pacifist philosophy of life:” Now it sounds paradoxical, but is nevertheless true, that nobody will arrive at the idea of non-resistance unless he has most strongly cultivated his powers of mental resistance to suggestion. For to arrive at the substitution of goodwill for force in human relations one must be able to resist the sway of a host of ideas and assumptions that have come to be an integral part of the subconsciousness of a great many people.105 These ideas, she says, include being ready to fight “for a great and noble cause,” the need to protect friends and “crush” enemies, the moral obligation to protect the weak by “knock[ing] down the strong,” to “face fearful odds in the defence of all that is dear to you,” and generally to be ready to “use force and coercion, though with regret, when it is necessary to secure the triumph of good against evil.” She concedes that these ideas are attractive because “they have a certain amount of truth in them.” But in practice, violence in human relations “has caused great havoc and suffering.” Not only does fighting “turn our weapon against our friends” — that is, against others with whom we should seek unity — but causes us to “lose ground in the real battle, the battle of evolution, by which the human race is seeking to wrest knowledge and unity, happiness and beauty out of a world of stubborn and adverse forces.”106 Gore-Booth, “Religious aspects…,” 149. Ibid. 106 Gore-Booth, “Religious aspects…” 149-50. 104 105 43 Gore-Booth invokes the theosophical “First Object,” noting that it can be defined “in its old Eastern form” as the unity of the Universe, or in “modern theological language” as the Fatherhood of God. However understood, “this haunting sense of the oneness of reality has inspired revolutionary genius in the attempt to bring new values and relations into our mental and moral outlook.” This idea, she argues, can be found in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount,” where he proclaimed “Blessed are the merciful,” and “Love your enemies.” However, he developed these ideas still further, when …he expressed his own ideas in words so familiar that I need not quote them, about not resisting evil, and turning the other cheek, and so on. And then he justifies his position by a startling appeal to his conception both of the nature of God and the divine nature of human life. To those who have been taught to conceive of God as the Lord of Hosts, the Judge and Avenger of the Jews, it must have been rather shocking and startling to be appealed to to prove their identity with an unflinching, logical, impartial force of kindness and goodwill, to be asked to show themselves children of “your father who is in heaven, for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.”107 This reveals the cornerstone of Gore-Booth’s pacifism: This appeal to our identity with the divine impartiality leads of course straight to what one might call the foundation idea of non-resistance, for it implies that one should treat other people according to what one is oneself, not according to what they are.108 107 108 Gore-Booth, “Religious aspects…” 153. Ibid. 44 Difficult as this is, she says, it is in fact “a gain in strength of character” to be able to remain true to principles regardless of outside pressures or changing circumstances. To those people who wanted to call down fire from heaven to consume those whom they honestly felt to be the enemies of God, Christ answered, “You know not what spirit you are of.” Violence, force and hatred in public or private life only become possible when we have mistaken our own nature, and have allowed ourselves to be swept away by the pressure of circumstances, from the truth that is in us, till we are out of touch with the overwhelming inevitable purpose of all things, that spirit of unfaltering goodwill what we call God, the light and love that is also the deepest principle of our own minds.109 For Eva Gore-Booth, war is a state of untruth, an alienation from the guiding, uniting spirit of God in the same sense as the alienation of the landlord from the land, or of men from nature in her 1904 poetry. Even when war is waged for allegedly “noble” causes, the act of committing violence is itself a betrayal of what we most deeply know to be true. Conscription and the Rights of Conscientious Objectors Through the first sixteen months of the War, Eva Gore-Booth’s focus was on making the philosophical and theological case for non-resistance, maintaining some manner of connection with suffragists on the Continent, and on providing assistance where she could to refugees, internees, and displaced persons, regardless of their nationality. The journalist and historian R.M. Fox, who met Gore-Booth during these years, later recalled that, 109 Gore-Booth, “Religious aspects…” 154. 45 …throughout the war she gave her generous help to war victims, English and German wives of interned prisoners, who were in a pitiable plight. She and Miss Esther Roper helped them directly, not through any organisation. I have been told how they spent one Christmas taking huge bundles of good things to these unfortunate victims of national strife. I know, too, how she presented an East London club for little girls, in an exceptionally poor district, with three hundred oranges at Christmas, much to the joy of the children. Children always liked her. She helped many in distress through poverty and unemployment. She was not a rich woman, and much of her income went this way.110 As 1915 turned into 1916, however, a threat that had been looming since the start of the War became real. Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, giving in to pressure from military and political leaders, announced his intention to introduce conscription: All males between 18 and 41 not already in uniform would immediately be called up for War service. The legislation to facilitate this allowed for the possibility of conscientious objection, if objectors could convince members of tribunals of the sincerity of their objection on pre-existing religious grounds; mere objection to the War then underway would not be sufficient. Objectors whose claims were accepted would be excused from active service, either unconditionally, or on a conditional basis, in which case they would be expected to perform other services of “national importance.”111 Many so-called “absolutists,” however, refused to serve in any capacity — a refusal that put them at risk of long and arduous prison terms, or even a death sentence. R.M. Fox. Rebel Irishwomen. Dublin: The Talbot Press Limited, 1935. 46. F.L. Carsten. War Against War: British and German Radical Movements in the First World War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. 66-7. 110 111 46 In December, 1915, shortly before conscription legislation was formally introduced, Gore-Booth published in the Manchester Guardian a letter warning of “The Danger of Conscription.” She noted that, while there is “a large body of citizens” who believe it their duty “to sacrifice not only their prosperity and their lives but their free will and right of private judgment to the needs of the moment and the decision of the Government,” there is also “a mass of people who, rightly or wrongly, put their duty to their own conscience and what they would probably call their duty to God far above the claims of the State.” For them, she argued, “to be forced to kill a fellow-creature (no matter for what cause) would be an inconceivable and unbearable outrage.” For them to do so would be at the cost of “what is to them the most precious thing in life,” their conscience and, indeed, their souls. Gore-Booth adds that, on the continent, “anti-militarists have had ample warning of what would be expected of them,” and therefore they had time, before war ever began, to escape their country and go to America. However, in England, “we have all been brought up in absolute confidence that the right of freedom of conscience would never again be questioned in England,” and therefore, potential objectors had no opportunity to decamp from the UK in advance. “If conscription is sprung on us here in the middle of a war, when men of military age are not allowed to leave the country, the results must be a far more crushing tyranny than that imposed by the Continental system.”112 In a remarkable handwritten document produced around this time, Gore-Booth explains her objections to conscription, writing that this era was “now again face to face with [an] attempt Eva Gore-Booth, “The Danger of Conscription,” Manchester Guardian, December 9, 1915. 11. Accessed at Newspapers.com. 112 47 to force people to outrage their conscience.”113 There is a “great cleavage of thought,” she says, between “People who believe that humanity exists for the sake of states and governments,” on the one hand, and “People that believe that government and state exists for the sake of humanity” on the other. “People who believe in Government and States,” she writes, claim Your duty to the country you were born in [is] your highest duty. You must be ready to go out and kill and die if your country calls on you. The same principle that makes you if you are born in London willing to go out and kill people who are born in Vienna makes you if you are born in Vienna ready to go and kill people for being born in London. In fact you make a god of geography, and no holocaust of human lives is too great to be sacrificed to this amazing God. This great human sacrifice is the supreme expression of the religion of patriotism.114 “What is the object of this religion,” Gore-Booth asks. “What does the god of geography want?” The answer, always and everywhere, is “Empire — power and property.” In pursuit of Empire, the religion of this god of geography “has been taught to suffering millions in schools all over the country, in churches and chapels, [and] in so-called Christian homes.” In contrast to the acolytes of this god, however, “through the ages there has been a protest of individuals” who “thought more about the sufferings of humanity than about political geography.” They knew “all the power and property in the world is not worth the sacrifice of one human life,” and that “no command of any government or self-interest of any state can justify the shedding of human blood.”115 Eva Gore-Booth, undated manuscript, Pennsylvania State University Archives, Eva GoreBooth Collection, Box 1: Folder 17. AX/B40/RBM/00139. 114 Ibid. Underlining in original. 115 Ibid. Underlining in original. 113 48 Through the influence of these individuals, “the ideas of liberty, fraternity, and human rights began to creep into popular thought.” “Conscription,” she writes, “is the modern answer to the growing force and freedom of democracy.” As she approaches the end of her argument, Gore-Booth’s handwriting, generally neat and ordered, becomes in this manuscript larger, messier, and more erratic. Four, five, and six lines at a time are underlined. Very strong feelings are obviously being translated to paper. “What is conscription,” Gore-Booth asks. Her answer is that it is “every man robbed of free will and liberty of conscience, forced to become a machine for destruction, a sword in another man’s hand.” “We are asked to give up our liberty of conscience because we are fighting for liberty,” she concludes. “Shall we not be better champions of liberty by being free in one’s own words, souls, and action?”116 When, inevitably, conscription was enacted in mid-1916, the object of Gore-Booth’s antiwar work changed. While she remained passionately committed to non-resistance as a general life stance, she now concentrated her specific efforts on conscientious objectors. Esther Roper later recalled, “Many of our friends were imprisoned for refusing Military Service. Many were court-martialed, constantly tried by tribunals or deprived of posts.”117 As a woman — to say nothing of her age, weak eyesight, or history of poor health — Eva Gore-Booth was of course in no personal danger of being sent into combat. That does not mean, however, she faced no risks in defending conscientious objectors. At a time when the full voice of State, Church, press, and mass opinion spoke (or shouted) of the righteousness of the War, to place oneself against that tide was to court fiery public criticism … or worse. Thomas C. Kennedy, 116 117 Ibid. Underlining in original. Roper, “Biographical Sketch,” Prison Letters, 103. 49 author of a history of the No-Conscription Fellowship, “by far the most important and most vigorous organization to oppose conscription and the war,”118 notes, Even without the sensationalism of the Daily Mail or the demagoguery of Bottomley’s John Bull, hostility to conscientious objectors was part and parcel of the belligerent, semihysterical mood of the civilian populace. One need not be a C.O. to be a victim of it.119 In June, 1916, police raided the NCF’s offices and seized all its publications, its list of members and donors, “and all money found on the premises.” As late as April, 1918, police raided the printshop where the NCF’s journal The Tribunal, was produced, with “instructions to break up the whole of the plant and machinery.” The Crown prosecuted Joan Beauchamp, co-editor of The Tribunal, and fined her £60 for publishing material that could have a “diabolical effect” on Allied morale.120 At one point or another during the War, all the national committee-members of the NCF spent time in jail, including Gore-Booth’s friend Fenner Brockway, founder of the NCF, Joan Beauchamp, and NCF honorary secretary Violet Tillard.121 The tribunals that judged conscientious objectors’ claims were public hearings, and throughout 1916 Gore-Booth, “ill as she was,”122 traveled widely for the NCF, serving as a “watcher” in these proceedings. Her account of these experiences was published by the National Carsten, 66. Thomas C. Kennedy. The Hound of Conscience: A History of the No-Conscription Fellowship, 1914-1919. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1981. 113. 120 Carsten, 68, 205, 245. Bertrand Russell was imprisoned for his part in this same offense. 121 Tiernan, Political Writings, 138. Kennedy, 249-50. 122 Roper, “Biographical Introduction,” Poems, 23. 118 119 50 Labour Press under the title The Tribunal (not to be confused with the NCF journal of the same name). It opens with a poem: “Conscientious Objectors” For the Hidden One in every heart, Lost star in the world’s night, Fire that burns in the soul of art, The Light within the light — For the gentleness of Buddha’s dream And Christ’s rejected truth, The treasure under the world’s stream, Pearl of pity and ruth — Before six ignorant men and blind Reckless they rent aside The vail of Isis in the mind … Men say they shirked and lied.123 Gore-Booth originally wrote The Tribunal in the first-person, but later edited her manuscript to tell the story from the third-person perspective of an unnamed “watcher in the gallery.”124 It recounts the appearances of several applicants before a tribunal, all of whom, Eva Gore-Booth, “The Tribunal,” c. 1916, Political Works, 155. In theosophy, the vail [more usually “veil”] of Isis represents the timeless but hidden truths of the Divine, which can only be comprehended by those who have made the effort to understand and internalize them. (It has similarities to the Christian concept of “Holy Wisdom.”) By boldly articulating their beliefs to the “six ignorant men” on the tribunal with no regard for the price they would pay for doing so, the COs become Christ-like deliverers of “rejected truth.” See H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol. 1, 1877, Theosophical University Press Online Edition, www.theosociety.org/pasadena/isis/iu101.htm. Blavatsky was a founder of the TS. 124 Pennsylvania State University Archives, Eva Gore-Booth Collection, Box 1: Folder 2. AX/B40/RBM/00139. 123 51 regardless of argument or attitude, see their claims rejected. One conscientious objector, an “obviously sincere and intensely nervous” young man, “was fair game for the Tribunal, especially for its clerical representative, who seemed to pursue him with the relentless animosity of the professional for the enthusiastic amateur.” The applicant is quickly broken down under intense pressure from the Church — tellingly, Gore-Booth frequently refers to the “clerical representative” on the tribunal as simply “the Church” — and “after the usual ‘careful consideration’ of a minute-and-a-half, the man’s claim to a conscience was dismissed and he himself was hustled out.” After several more cases, Gore-Booth’s narrative takes an unexpected turn. One final applicant appears, making his claim on the basis “that the spirit of God in the hearts of men has no power to hurt or kill anyone.” This causes “the watcher,” who was about to leave, to return to her seat and listen attentively as the man explains that, “I am not here for any church but for the sake of Reality and Truth.” He insists that, “Power to hurt is an evil thing, therefore the Spirit of God has no power to hurt anyone … the truth in a man’s soul is the Spirit of God. Therefore, a man who knows his own soul can never hurt or kill a living thing. It is only they who do not understand themselves who can do such things.” This bewilders the tribunal, and they try for some time to entrap or out-argue him, without success. The Church invokes Jesus’ teaching to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and the man replies, “Yes, but so few things are Caesar’s … some metal coins he has minted, the house he has built, the land he has seized, but never my soul or yours. My soul, my life, my conscience, my mind have nothing to do with the State. They are free as the sunshine and the air, for they belong to God alone.”125 125 Gore-Booth, “The Tribunal,” 160. 52 After the usual “most careful consideration,” the Tribunal rejects the man’s claim. He turns to leave without a word, and looks into the gallery to make eye contact with “the watcher” and “the woman with the note-book” who has been seated beside her — and here, whether deliberately or by editorial oversight, Gore-Booth’s narrative returns to the first person. There was something in his face, seen at a new angle, that startled me. I had a sudden attack of curiosity. “Who is that queer young man,” I said to her, “I seem somehow to have heard him speak before, but I don’t know when or where. … “Oh, do you not know, she said, “it is Someone I have been hoping all my life to meet — people said He would come here again, but, indeed, I never thought to find Him here.126 Eva Gore-Booth had been for many years a friend of C.P. Scott, the famous editor of the Manchester Guardian. Many of her arguments against conscription and for the right of conscience were published in letters to the Guardian. Its news pages, in turn, are among the best way to track her public efforts during this period. Her letter of December 9, 1915 has already been cited. The issue for Monday, January 17, 1916, reports on “a demonstration attended by about a thousand men and women in Stevenson Square” and organized by the Manchester and Salford No-Compulsion Committee the previous Saturday, where, following addresses by several speakers including Miss Eva Gore-Booth, “a resolution opposing military and industrial conscription … was adopted by an overwhelming majority.”127 Two columns to the right, a second article reports on a “Women Workers’ Protest” that took place the next day in the Milton Ibid. Ellipsis in original. “A Manchester Protest,” Manchester Guardian, January 16, 1916. 8. Accessed at Newspapers.com. 126 127 53 Hall, Manchester, called by the National Industrial and Professional Women’s Suffrage Society, the Lancashire and Cheshire Women’s Textile and Other Workers’ Representation Committee, and the Manchester and Salford Women’s Trades and Labour Council.” At that meeting, GoreBooth moved the resolution “that compulsory military service involved the abolition of personal liberty and of industrial freedom; that it also deprived citizens of the right to be judged by the civil courts, and that it was to be feared it would cause industrial trouble.”128 She had noticed [the article reports her saying] that some newspapers in referring to conscience put the word between inverted commas, as though it were a thing of which they had never heard before. (Hear, hear.) But conscience was a real thing and should be treated with respect. Conscription would enslave the country, and all the causes for which they had been working would be absolutely doomed. Militarism in any country sooner or later became a barrier to democratic movement.129 The article reports that the motion was seconded by Miss E. Roper, who also spoke. Four days later, a letter from Gore-Booth appeared in which she noted that, since a conscientious objector’s claims will be judged by members of a local tribunal, and since the Compulsion Bill allows for capital punishment to be inflicted on those who refuse to fight, a conscientious objector “may pay with his life for the private militarist views of members of his district council.” To judge by what one reads in the press, many people have, quite honestly, lost all their respect for a man’s right to his own soul and conscience, and are ready to try “Women Workers’ Protest,” Manchester Guardian, January 16, 1916, 8. Accessed at Newspapers.com. 129 Ibid. 128 54 to force anyone by threats and even extreme punishment to do what he thinks wrong. Of course, in many cases men of local standing and influence may be able to gain consideration, but what is to happen to the poor and friendless man, who has surely as good a right to his own conscience and life as the son of a local magnate?130 Further letters concerning conscription and the rights and treatment of conscientious objectors appear throughout the War, and even afterwards: An article dated 17 December 1918, more than a month after the Armistice, reports that Gore-Booth was one of the “chief speakers” at a meeting in London at which attendees pledged “themselves never to relax their efforts” until imprisoned conscientious objectors “had been released and conscription abolished.”131 In his valuable “Notes on Nationalism,” George Orwell — admittedly, writing two decades and a world war after Eva Gore-Booth’s death — dismissively observed of the pacifists of his day, that Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of the western countries. … All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty.132 “Death Penalty,” Manchester Guardian, January 20, 1916. Accessed at Newspapers.com. “Release of C.O.’s Demanded,” Manchester Guardian, December 17, 1918, 4. Accessed at Newspapers.com. 132 George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism,” Polemic: A Magazine of Philosophy, Psychology & Aesthetics, No.1, October, 1945. In Essays, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968, 2002. 878. 130 131 55 It should, we hope, be clear by now that Eva Gore-Booth’s pacifism was emphatically not of this type. Her writings on the War do not center on the outrage of Belgium, or “the rights of small nations,” or the “scrap of paper.” They neither claim “one side is as bad as the other,” nor demonize Britain or Germany as exceptionally monstrous. Instead, they are profoundly personal, grounded in her philosophical commitment to the individual right of conscience, the unity of all life within the love of God, and — to recall a phrase first used to in our discussion of her activism in Manchester — “the universal right to self-determination.” Though she always denounces the cruelty and destructiveness of the War, her arguments are neither situational nor nationalist. As Fox recalls her telling a “little group of anti-militarists” early in the War, “I am one of those quite hopeless people who do not believe in fighting in any circumstances.”133 The Rising and Irish Nationalism In his memoirs of the Great War “disguised as a history of the universe” (the phrase is Balfour’s), Eva Gore-Booth’s old electoral adversary Winston Churchill describes a scene in at 10 Downing Street in July, 1914. Churchill is First Lord of the Admiralty, and the Cabinet is debating Home Rule, “the Irish Problem,” and, in this instance, the “inconceivably petty” question of the boundary to be drawn between Fermanagh and Tyrone. “To this pass had the Irish factions in their insensate warfare been able to drive their respective British champions,” Churchill grumbles.134 A messenger enters, and hands Sir Edward Grey a dispatch from the Fox, 42. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911-1918, Volume 1. London: Odhams Press Limited, 1938. 154. 133 134 56 Foreign Office, which he begins reading aloud “in quiet grave tones.” It is the text of the AustroHungarian note to Serbia following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He had been reading or speaking for several minutes before I could disengage my mind from the tedious and bewildering debate which had just closed. We were all very tired, but gradually as the phrases and sentences followed one another, impressions of a wholly different character began to form in my mind. … The parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began immediately, but by perceptible gradations, to fall and grow upon the map of Europe.135 Almost two years later, in late April, 1916, much the reverse happened to Eva Gore-Booth. She and Esther Roper had maintained an exhaustive schedule opposing conscription, defending the right of conscience, assisting COs, and speaking on the philosophy of non-resistance. Then, utterly without warning, her homeland of Ireland thrust itself to the center of her attention. Around noon on Easter Monday, April 24, armed members of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, united under the name “Irish Republican Army,” seized the General Post Office (GPO) and other key locations in Dublin, proclaimed the establishment of an independent Irish Republic, and raised the tricolor over the GPO. Over the next several days, Dublin police and British armed forces battled the rebels for control of the city. News in London of what became known as the Easter Rising was sketchy at first — the Irish rebels had chosen the GPO as the headquarters for their effort, not only because of its strategic position and sturdy construction, but because all telegraph traffic out of Ireland, including on the transatlantic cable to America, was controlled from there, as was Ireland’s embryonic telephone system. Bit by bit 135 Churchill, World Crisis, 155. 57 the flow of information improved, and on the following Sunday, Gore-Booth read in Lloyd’s Weekly News, not only that the rebels had surrendered, but that, on St. Stephen’s Green in central Dublin, had been found the dead body of her sister, Constance. At this point, therefore, we must bring the biography of Constance Gore-Booth up to date. After several social seasons in which she continued to have no interest in marriage, Constance prevailed upon her parents to let her take the bohemian, not to say scandalous, step of enrolling in art school, first in London and later in Paris, where she received formal training in the painting and illustration at which she had excelled since childhood. There she met, and in 1900 married, Count Casimir Markievicz, a Polish aristocrat and lawyer turned artist, whose first wife had died a few years before, leaving him with a young son, Stanislaus. After their wedding, Constance Gore-Booth became “Countess Markievicz.”136 From 1903, Constance and Casimir lived in Dublin, where they settled easily into rulingclass society, drew and painted, had their work displayed in exhibitions, and soon also began writing for, and performing in, Dublin’s theatrical world. Through this, they became associated with the same, broadly nationalist, “Celtic Revival” movement with which her sister’s poetry was also classified. Although Constance and Eva had both, years before, “declared that they were on the side of the people and against class privilege,” Constance at this time had little exposure to, or experience with, “the people,” and her life in Dublin was still largely one of class privilege. Over Markievicz was Polish by nationality and a subject of the Russian czar. His family’s estates were in modern Ukraine. There was some question at the time of the engagement whether Markievicz had a right to the title, “Count.” Constance’s family ultimately was satisfied that he did, but the issue remains disputed. See the discussion in James, Gore-Booths, 142-47, and Patrick Quigley, The Polish Irishman: The Life and Times of Count Casimir Markievicz. Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2012, passim. Unlike her sister, Constance Markievicz has been the subject of numerous biographies. The best is Arrington, Revolutionary Lives, already cited. 136 58 time, “the cultural activities of the Irish revival radicalized Constance Markievicz, but suffrage was her first introduction to political activism,” in the form of Eva’s enlistment of her in the 1908 barmaids’ campaign discussed earlier.137 In so doing, Gore-Booth “offered Constance a new direction which was to shape the remaining years of her life,” not only radicalizing her on suffrage, but helping her understand “that economic and political reform were intrinsically linked.”138 This experience, combined with her growing exposure to nationalist currents in Dublin, made 1908 a pivotal year in Markievicz’s political evolution. Within the next few years, she had become active in several nationalist and workers’ organizations (where, before she had proven her commitment, she was often met with suspicion due to her family background, aristocratic accent, and expensive taste in clothes), founded Na Fianna Éireann, a nationalist alternative to Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts, become a leader of the nationalist women’s organization Cumann na mBan, and grew close to several future leaders of the Rising, most significantly labor leader James Connolly. His syndicalism and socialism were to be nearly as influential on Markievicz as Eva’s intersectional feminism. Connolly, too, was a feminist, asking in his The Re-Conquest of Ireland (1915), “Of what use … can be the reestablishment of any form of Irish state if it does not embody the emancipation of womanhood.”139 Markievicz was an early member of Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army (ICA), created in 1913 to protect striking Arrington, Revolutionary Lives, 50. Sonja Tiernan, “’The Revolt of the Daughters?’ The Gore-Booth Sisters,” in A Century of Progress? Irish Women Reflect. Edited by Alan Hayes and Máire Meagher. Dublin: Arlen House, 2016. 70. Sonja Tiernan, “Countess Markievicz and Eva Gore-Booth,” in The Shaping of Modern Ireland: A Centenary Assessment. Edited by Eugenio Biagini and Daniel Mulhall. Sallins, Co. Kildare, Ireland: Irish Academic Press, 2016, 188. Italics in original. 139 Connolly, Reader, 427, 430. 137 138 59 workers. When he reorganized the ICA the next year as a formal militia, she became a vice-chair of the Army Council. By 1916, therefore, Markievicz was fully committed to the labor movement, socialism, and radical nationalism, and well established as a militant speaker, writer, agitator, and activist for those causes. Throughout, her particular emphasis, echoing Gore-Booth and Roper’s work in Manchester, was always to bring working-class women into the nationalist movement and, in turn, to compel Nationalism to recognize and address the concerns of working women. Along the way, she made a break with her privileged past that was, if anything, more complete even than Eva’s. While Gore-Booth and Roper continued to visit Lissadell throughout their lives, James reports that Markievicz never returned to the family home after 1908.140 Around that same time, Constance and Casimir’s lives diverged, and although they stayed married, and affectionate on the increasingly rare occasions they met, Casimir spent most of the rest of his life in Poland. With Casimir and his son there and Maeve, Constance’s daughter with Casimir, growing up at Lissadell, by 1915, “all her friends and associates were by now in one way or another involved with the political movement.”141 The exception was Eva, with whom Constance remained extremely close. As Markievicz’s militancy grew, however, she intentionally kept Eva in the dark. “She did not speak much to us of the revolutionary side of her life,” Esther Roper recalled, adding “Constance, knowing how opposed her sister was to violence, said nothing [about the impending Rising], wanting to spare James, Gore-Booths, 153. Years later, during a tenants’ strike in which Sir Josslyn was obliged to milk his own cattle, Constance unsympathetically reminded her brother that he came from a family of “tyrants and usurpers.” Bence-Jones, Twilight, 194. 141 Anne Haverty. Constance Markievicz: Irish Revolutionary. London: Pandora, 1988. 130. 140 60 her anxiety as long as possible. So it was that the news of Easter Week came as a terrible shock”142 When she read in Lloyd’s Weekly News that her sister had been found dead, Eva raced throughout London, trying to find someone who could give her more complete and accurate news.143 She eventually learned the report was an error — Markievicz was not dead, but had been arrested by British troops, and, as Dublin had been placed under martial law, was now facing a court martial. She was duly convicted in a closed trial on May 4, and, like all the principal leaders of the Rising, sentenced to death by firing squad. Two days later, however, her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment “on account of her sex” — an expression of sexism that disgusted Markievicz herself, who told the Court, “I wish you had the decency to shoot me.”144 Eva and Esther pulled strings to be permitted to visit Markievicz in prison, and arrived in Dublin on May 12 to the devastating news that James Connolly had been executed that morning. Gore-Booth later spoke of that visit to Dublin to see her sister in prison.145 As they prepared to cross the Irish Sea on a beautiful morning, “the glamour of the scene” was shattered by the arrival of “a great mass of khaki-clad soldiers,” which brought to Gore-Booth’s mind a vision of centuries of English soldiers going, “as they are going now, to conquer and hold down Ireland.”146 Upon arrival in Dublin, Gore-Booth and Roper went to Mountjoy Prison, where their visit with Markievicz was conducted “across a passage with a wardress in it, to a head appearing Roper, “Biographical Sketch,” Prison Letters, 13-14. Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 172. 144 Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 173. Arrington, Revolutionary Lives, 143. Naughton 178. 145 Eva Gore-Booth, “Holograph account of a visit to Dublin in the aftermath of the Easter Rising,” 1916, Political Writings, 192-200. 146 Ibid, 193. 142 143 61 at a window opposite.”147 Roper wrote of the women’s visit that afternoon to Markievicz’s home, which had already been torn apart by soldiers. As we came out, we were surrounded by a crowd of people who stared in amazement, mistaking Eva for Constance. Many people told us Eva went in danger of her life because of her striking likeness to Constance. Some soldier would fire at her, they feared. For hours on end we tramped the streets until our search for the Commandant’s wife was successful, and we were able to carry out Constance’s earnest wishes. But I knew after this visit some of the horrors of war, even though only on a small scale.148 To her already exhausting antiwar work (one of her letters to the Guardian on the subject of conscription appeared on May 1, during the period between Markievicz’s arrest and trial), Gore-Booth now added the extra burden of giving aid and comfort to her sister as best she could. A notable example of this, and the most relevant for this study, is Gore-Booth’s 1916 adaptation of her 1905 play The Triumph of Maeve into The Death of Fionavar. Like much of Gore-Booth’s drama, Fionavar is a revisioning of Celtic mythology, a feminist and pacifist retelling of classic tales. The play recounts the story of the mighty warrior queen Maeve and her daughter, Fionavar, of whom it was foretold that she would die on the battlefield. Maeve therefore sends her daughter away to keep her from being caught up in tribal warfare. However, Fionavar returns in the wake of a particularly terrible battle, and, going into shock as she comprehends for the first time the horrible human cost of war, dies literally on the battlefield, transforming her mother’s great triumph into profoundest tragedy. As Arrington notes, The Triumph of Maeve, 147 148 Ibid, 195-6. Roper, “Biographical Sketch,” Prison Letters, 55. 62 … is not simply feminist in its recasting of female characters in the lead. Rather, she rewrites the very nature of the heroic in order to reinforce her pacifist convictions. Acts of violence are the result of sinister influence, not heroism, and the heroic character is reimagined as a strong leader who holds the affections of the people but who refrains from combat.149 In a preface, Gore-Booth writes that “the story of Maeve stands to me as a symbol of the worldold struggle of the human mind between the forces of dominance and pity, of peace and war.”150 Marian Eide has provided an insightful analysis of Maeve, comparing it to the “Religious Aspects of Non-Resistance” speech discussed earlier. She argues Gore-Booth reworked Maeve in order to engage Markievicz in “a coded conversation about the ethics and politics of insurgency” in which Maeve the warrior represents Constance, while the peaceful Fionavar is Gore-Booth herself.151 In fact, “reflecting the marginalized and sequestered environments of their collaboration — in which neither could readily express her beliefs — Gore-Booth’s writing suggests the closet-drama form: a work to be read in secret rather than performed in public.”152 This was carried out in a remarkable exchange, in which Gore-Booth sent pages of Fionavar to Markievicz in prison. Constance then illustrated those pages with pen-and-ink drawings of natural motifs, mythological scenes, and religious iconography that “allowed her to pursue a political conversation with her sister.”153 When the illustrated play was published later that year, attention focused on the alleged incongruity of the “rebel countess” illustrating a Arrington, “Liberté, égalité, sororité,” 215. Quoted in Roper, “Introduction,” Poems, 19. 151 Marian Eide. “Maeve’s Legacy: Constance Markievicz, Eva Gore-Booth, and the Easter Rising,” Éire-Ireland, Vol. 51, nos. 3-4 (2016): 81. 152 Eide, 87. 153 Eide, 94. 149 150 63 pacifist play. The New York Times, for example, published a lengthy piece on Fionavar in which Gore-Booth is described as “a poet of extraordinary power and charm,” whose “Little Waves of Breffny” “has received such high praise and been so widely quoted that it may be called a contemporary classic.”154 The Times’ writer concludes, The play is, it may be said, a plea for peace, a glorification of nonresistance, a Goethe-like defense of thought against action. There is something ironical about the fact that the pages of this most passionately pacifist work should be made by so convinced and practical a direct actionist as Countess Markiewicz [sic], the woman with the sword, who with her little band of fighting men helped hold the streets of Dublin for days and nights against the British machine guns.155 Her life sentence notwithstanding, Markievicz was included in a June 15, 1917, general parole issued to prisoners held since the Rising. After spending several days with Gore-Booth and Roper in London, she returned to Dublin, where she was welcomed by great crowds. She would be in and out of British prisons for the next several years, as authorities played cat-and-mouse with the nationalist movement. These were extremely stressful times for Gore-Booth, who kept in as close contact as possible with her sister. As Fox wrote years after both women’s death, [Gore-Booth] was no pacifist in the sense that a suet dumpling is passive. She became a pacifist because of that fine, keen sensitiveness to human wrongs which made her sister, Countess Markievicz, become a leader in the 1916 Irish Rebellion and face a death sentence for her part in that struggle. The gap dividing the sisters “Irish Rebel Illustrates Nonresistance Play,” The New York Times Magazine, September 10, 1916, 86. Accessed at Newspapers.com. 155 Ibid. The article also states, “Count Markiewicz and his wife threw themselves heart and soul into the movement which brought about the Easter Week uprising,” which is at best only half true. Casimir had joined the Russian army early in the War, and by April, 1916, was in Poland recovering from wounds sustained at the front. 154 64 is much smaller than many people realise, although they seem at opposite poles. Both were rebels against all that they regarded as mean and unworthy. Their passionate selfless sincerity drove them in different directions. … Paradoxical as it may seem, somewhere behind this diversity of conduct was a unity — a devotion to truth.156 The life and welfare of her sister was far from Gore-Booth’s only concern following the Rising. Although Markievicz was preeminent emotionally, nearly as significant, both for GoreBooth personally and for her antiwar writings, were the events surrounding two other figures of the Rising: Francis Sheehy Skeffington and Sir Roger Casement. Francis, or Frank, Sheehy Skeffington was, like Gore-Booth, a pacifist and a feminist. When, as Francis Skeffington, he married Hanna Sheehy in 1903, they combined their surnames “as proof of their absolute commitment to the equality of the sexes.”157 They were active alongside Markievicz in the Irish suffrage and labor movements, and were also well-known to Gore-Booth. On the outbreak of war, Francis organized anti-recruitment efforts, arguing at one meeting “The only power that has ever done us any harm is England. The only power that is doing us any harm now is England.” That earned him six months hard labor in prison. When the Rising began, Sheehy Skeffington attempted to organize a citizen force to protect the people of Dublin, caught in the literal crossfire between insurgents and troops, and to prevent looting. He was arrested on the first evening of the Rising, and later that night, was taken from his cell by the captain of the guard, and forced to accompany British troops on patrol through Dublin, his hands secured behind his back. The next morning, the same captain, with no justification given 156 157 Fox, 43-4. Margaret Ward. Hanna Sheehy Skeffington: A Life. Cork, Ireland: Attic Press, 1997. 19. 65 then or since, gave orders, immediately carried out, that Sheehy Skeffington and two other civilians be shot. Gore-Booth and Markievicz were distraught on hearing of Sheehy Skeffington’s killing. In the “holograph account” in which she describes her visit to Markievicz in prison, Gore-Booth writes that her sister “asked a great many questions and seemed only really puzzled by one thing: ‘Why on earth did they shoot Skeffy?’ she said. ‘After all, he wasn’t in it. He didn’t even believe in fighting. What did it mean?’”158 That same afternoon, Gore-Booth and Roper visited Hanna at her home, which had been torn apart by English soldiers seeking post facto justification for the killing. Although Gore-Booth would later argue “righteous indignation” is impossible because only God is righteous, her commentary on the death of Sheehy Skeffington is some of her most bitter prose. Hearing Mrs. Skeffington talk, one realised that though her husband never had a weapon in his hand, militarism was wise in its generation, and in Sheehy Skeffington militarism had struck down its worst enemy — unarmed yet insurgent Idealism. It was not for nothing that the half-mad officer who carried out the murder was promoted a week afterwards. The authorities knew their business well.159 In words that could describe herself as well, Gore-Booth eulogizes her friend: All his life Skeffington had never “ceased from mental fight” against all forms of tyranny, oppression, and cruelty. He was a born rebel, a questioner of ancient 158 159 Gore-Booth, “Holograph account,” Political Works, 195. Gore-Booth, “Holograph account,” Political Works, 198. 66 traditions, a shaker of ancient tyranny. He refused to go out against authority, but because he did not acquiesce in any violence between human beings. In a social state founded entirely on blind obedience to certain traditions and ideas, mental freedom means disaster, and the man who knows no obedience is the enemy. … Individual conscience in the Army means mutiny. It is the deadly and most fatal enemy of militarism.160 Her memorializing of Sheehy Skeffington shows there is nothing passive about her pacifism: Skeffington, on fire with hatred of violence and cruelty, attending forty recruiting meetings, speaking in the street against war, defending the cause of Labour, denouncing all repression in the name of Liberty, Mercy, and Kindness, was a greater danger to the authorities than many a more violent revolutionist. For revolutions and counter-revolutions are familiar in this weary world, but his voice was the voice of a new era, a terrible possibility, that nightmare of individual evolution and militant goodwill that shakes the dreams of militarism with a strange threat.161 Ultimately, Gore-Booth answers her sister’s question: “Truly, it was easy enough to understand ‘Why they shot Skeffy,’ though the only crime they could accuse him of was an effort to persuade a hooligan crowd not to loot shops. Militarism has a true instinct and a short way with its enemies. But perhaps the future is with Skeffington.”162 When she published The Death of Fionavar, Gore-Booth dedicated the drama, “To the Memory of the Dead. The Many who died for Freedom and the One who died for Peace.” The One was Francis Sheehy Skeffington. Ibid. Gore-Booth, “Holograph account,” Political Works, 199. 162 Ibid. 160 161 67 “Skeffy” was Gore-Booth’s friend. The other person whose situation absorbed much of her physical, mental, and emotional energy in the weeks and months following the Rising was a man she had never met. Born in Dublin, Roger Casement served in the British Foreign Office, earning a knighthood in 1911 for his diplomatic service in Africa and South America, where he uncovered gross abuses committed by Belgium in the Congo, and by Brazil and Peru against indigenous workers in South America. These experiences on the front lines of colonialism soured him on the imperial project, and generated in their place a growing Irish nationalism. After retirement, he became active in Irish nationalism. The start of the War found him in America, whence he traveled to Germany in hopes of obtaining weapons and leadership for a guerrilla war in Ireland that might draw British forces away from the Western Front. So far from home, Casement was not involved in planning the Rising. When he heard, through his network of contacts, that the Rising was imminent, he returned to Ireland aboard a German U-Boat, only to be arrested almost immediately upon arrival. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London and charged with treason. Seeking to fill the gallery with supporters of Casement, his cousin Gertrude Bannister, a friend of Gore-Booth’s, asked Eva to attend the trial. She agreed, more from a sense of obligation than desire.163 Tiernan writes, Extraordinarily, when Casement first came in to court and saw Gore-Booth sitting in the public gallery, he instantly smiled at her, she smiled back and he waved to her as if saluting an old friend. Bannister described it as “a curious sort of affinity in their two characters. Both were mystics, Gore-Booth more so than Roger, both hated cruelty and deceit, both loved Ireland and idealised it — both worked in their several spheres to help the lot of the downtrodden — both incurred the 163 Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 186-7. 68 enmity and cheap sneers of the worldly and materialistic.” Gore-Booth later commented that she felt as if she had known Casement all of her life.164 It came as no surprise when Casement was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. GoreBooth led the effort to win clemency for Casement. She wrote to her old associate C.P. Scott of the Guardian, who in turn forwarded her letter with his own endorsement to David LloydGeorge. In his cover letter, Scott told Lloyd-George that although Gore-Booth “is personally connected with the Sinn Feiners [i.e., through Markievicz], she is herself an ardent pacifist and condemns the whole bloody business of the insurrection.”165 The Cabinet Office file on the Casement appeal includes letters from Gore-Booth, with the comment, “Similar letters have been addressed by Miss Gore-Booth to the Prime Minister, Lord Bryce, Lord Emmott, and the Home Secretary, in which the same point is made that Casement came to Ireland on a desperate, selfsacrificing errand to stop the Sinn Fein rising.”166 That was indeed Gore-Booth’s argument, and she not only bombarded politicians and journalists with letters, but contacted both witnesses and influential figures in Ireland whom she thought could strengthen the case for clemency.167 Ibid. Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 189-90. 166 Eva Gore-Booth, “The case of Roger Casement,” 1916, Political Writings, 203. 167 Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 191. Whether stopping the Rising was really Casement’s intent is still debated. Among prominent historians, for example. Diarmaid Ferriter (A Nation and Not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution, 1913-1922, 2015) and Roy Foster (Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923, 2014), accept that Casement did want to prevent, or at least postpone, the insurrection. Charles Townshend (Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion, 2006) simply says his motivations were unclear. Tiernan points out that Casement never made this claim in his own defense (Eva Gore-Booth, 190), though Gore-Booth herself is not surprised that “an Irishman would rather be hung than state publicly that he had tried to stop the Sinn Fein rising.” (“The Sinn Féin rebellion,” 1916, Political Writings, 211). James cites Eoin Neeson’s speculation that “the theory that [Casement] came from Germany to ‘stop’ the Rising may have originated with Eva Gore-Booth” (Gore-Booths, 225). 164 165 69 Tiernan notes that, in addition to the figures mentioned in the Cabinet report above, Gore-Booth also “persistently lobbied” Prime Minister Asquith and Sir Edward Grey, the foreign minister, all ultimately without success. Casement’s appeal was denied and a date was set for his execution. In a last-ditch attempt to save Casement, Gore-Booth led a delegation of women to Buckingham Palace, to plead with King George V to use his royal prerogative to grant clemency or a pardon. Unfortunately, he explained he could only use such authority on the advice of his Government — specifically, of the very Home Secretary whom Gore-Booth had been lobbying unsuccessfully from the start of her campaign. Ultimately, Gore-Booth could do little more than kneel with others in prayer outside Pentonville Prison in August, 1916, when Casement was executed. Early the next year, Gore-Booth published Broken Glory, a collection of poetry inspired by the War and the Rising. It contains some of her most powerful and evocative verse, which is also some of her most significant antiwar writing. The murdered Roger Casement and Francis Sheehy Skeffington, and the imprisoned Constance Markievicz, are present in many of these poems. While the entire volume is worthy of study, we will again focus our attention on two poems. The second poem in the book is particularly noteworthy: “Government” The rulers of the earth, savage and blind, Have dug Gethsemane for all mankind. For their honour and their glory and their pride, In every age the heroes of all nations died. Thus Joan of Arc and Socrates were slain By the world’s bane, Jesus Christ a thousand years ago, They servèd so, 70 And Roger Casement, just the other day, Went the same way. Now is their hour of power and life’s despair From blasted earth and desecrated air The universal death that is their dream Flows o’er the earth in a great lava stream, Whelming men’s thoughts in floods of liquid fire, To light the old world’s funeral pyre. Shall then our hearts in hell-fire burn To serve their turn? God’s splendid rebels, and men’s stupid slaves Earn the same graves. Oh! rather let us scorn life’s baser gains, The joyless spoils of death-strewn battle plains, Where for our rulers’ glory and their lust Some million human brains are bloodstained dust. Far better labour for that purpose known Unto the gods alone, That hides behind the darkness and the storm In every human form, If but to die on God’s dear battle plain, Where daisies mount to life through sun and rain, Whilst the wild winds their rapturous tumults rouse, And the trees fight for beauty in green boughs. Peace be to those who rule and hate and kill — The world’s true will 71 Has brought, in this dark hour of pain and strife, A violet to life.168 This text reflects many ideas central to Gore-Booth’s philosophy of pacifism and non-resistance. The initial lines of both stanzas, as well as the title, reflect her conviction that the War is the result of the scheming and blind power-lust of the world’s rulers. This is an age-old story. Heroes like Joan of Arc, Socrates, and Jesus were killed by jealous and prideful politicians and authoritarian religious hierarchies, and now Roger Casement has joined their number. Joan of Arc may seem a problematic hero for a pacifist, given her role as a defender of the French Crown. However, in an undated manuscript we’ll study in more depth shortly, Gore-Booth explains that Joan was killed by a combination of “English Militarists,” for obvious reasons, and “French Moralists,” who objected to her claim to have received direct communications from God.169 Casement, like Joan, could be said to have been destroyed by an alliance of Militarists and Moralists — the former, again, for obvious reasons. During Casement’s trial, the British government leaked excerpts from his seized diaries revealing he was a closeted gay man and a writer of erotic fiction. The resultant moral outrage did irreparable damage to what was left of Casement’s reputation among the public. Both stanzas of “Government” invoke the pointless destruction being inflicted on the natural world for no good purpose. We should, rather, seek to understand God’s true will by looking beyond this world’s chaos to the truth that exists within us. The last four lines are Gore-Booth, Collected Poems, 291-2. Eva Gore-Booth, undated manuscript. Pennsylvania State University Archives, Eva GoreBooth Collection, Box 1: Folder 17. AX/B40/RBM/00139. While undated, an internal reference to the Amritsar massacre “the other day” strongly situates this in April or May, 1919. 168 169 72 particularly interesting. Violets have a very long association, in legend and literature, with death, resurrection, and immortality. In Christian iconography, violets grew on the hill where Jesus was crucified. The violet coming forth in the final line of the poem symbolizes the new life that will emerge out of the hell-scape of death politicians have created — but, critically, only after humanity passes through Gethsemane and faces death on “God’s dear battle plain.” There is a second interpretation possible in these lines, as well. As ancient as the association of the violet with death and resurrection is its association with love between women, dating to the poetry of Sappho, who would weave tiaras of violets for her lovers.170 Goodin writes that “the color violet has often served as a secret code of identification for lesbians and as a marker for lesbianism which, historically, only lesbians could identify.”171 Gore-Booth’s was unquestionably familiar with Sappho: A quotation from Sappho that Gore-Booth references in one of her later poems is on her and Roper’s shared headstone in a London churchyard. Gore-Booth could well be comforting her readers with the thought that the new life that will emerge will be the idealized, egalitarian love anticipated in the pages of Urania — the love between women, or at least between the perfected, feminine, human form. A second significant poem in Broken Glory is Gore-Booth’s encomium to “Skeffy.” “Francis Sheehy Skeffington Dublin, April 26, 1916” Robert Hemmings. “Of Trauma and Flora: Memory and Commemoration in Four Poems of the World Wars.” University of Toronto Quarterly, 77:2 (2008), 747. Tony Scupham-Bilton. “Flower Power - Violets.” The Queerstory Files blog, April 6, 2012, queerstoryfiles.blogspot.com/2012/04/flower-power-violets.html 171 Sharon V. Goodin. “Visions of violet: Hollywood images of lesbians in The Color Purple and Boys on the Side.” (Master’s thesis, Iowa State University, 1995), 1. lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/167 170 73 No green and poisonous laurel wreath shall shade His brow, who dealt no death in any strife, Crown him with olive who was not afraid To join the desolate unarmed ranks of life. Who did not fear to die, yet feared to slay, A leader in the war that shall end war, Unarmed he stood in ruthless Empire’s way Unarmed he stands on Acheron’s lost shore. Yet not alone, not all unrecognized, For at his side does that scorned Dreamer stand, Who in the Olive Garden agonized, Whose Kingdom yet shall come in every land, When driven men, who fight and hate and kill To order, shall let all their weapons fall, And know that kindly human freedom of the will That holds no other human will in thrall.172 In Gore-Booth’s memory, Sheehy Skeffington wears, not the laurel wreath of the conqueror, but the olive branches of peace. The description of “the desolate unarmed ranks” (in which desolate means lonely), recalls one of Gore-Booth’s first poetic statements of pacifism, “The Desolate Army” in 1904’s The One and the Many: “In the world’s praise and love we have no place,” she wrote then, “Yet have we seen a glimpse of radiant forms / Behind the blackness of these smoke-stained hours.”173 Fired by that vision, Sheehy Skeffington took on Empire unarmed 172 173 Gore-Booth, Collected Poems, 296. Gore-Booth, Collected Poems, 165 (excerpt). 74 (the ironic invocation of “the War to end War” is obvious), and now stands at the side of Christ, whose kingdom will come when dominion and power are supplanted in human hearts by love. The Attempt to Impose Conscription in Ireland Initial public reaction in Ireland was strongly against the Rising: Markievicz and her comrades were jeered and cursed by the people of Dublin as they were marched to prison. However, a combination of the harsh British response, including the executions of Casement and the leaders of the Rising, and a mythologizing of the Glorious Dead as martyrs for the cause of Irish independence, prompted a rapid change in sentiment and a rise in nationalist sympathy.174 It was therefore met with shock and outrage in Ireland when, in April, 1918 — within days of the second anniversary of the Rising — the British Government announced their intention to impose conscription upon all males in Ireland between the ages of 18 and 50 (Ireland had previously been exempt from the conscription enforced in England). It was almost incomprehensible to Irish people, not least Eva Gore-Booth, that the British would think Irishmen would willingly fight for the Crown when the wounds of the Rising were still so fresh. With remarkable unanimity, the Irish people — including political, labor, and even Church leaders — rose in opposition to the scheme. On the pretext of the discovery of a German plot, the British arrested dozens of Irish leaders, including Markievicz, and held them without trial.175 Characteristically, Gore-Booth’s response to these events took several forms. In an April 26, 1918, letter to the 174 175 Tiernan, Political Writings, 185. Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 212. 75 Guardian that fills almost a full column of newsprint, Gore-Booth warns of “The Ruin Preparing in Ireland.” She reports, in her first sentence, on The union of all classes [in Dublin] in determined resistance to conscription, a resistance to the death which is being undertaken in a spirit of passionate revolt and religious faith which may turn Ireland into a nation of rebels and martyrs, but never into an army of conscripts.176 “What is remarkable in this crisis,” she continues, “is the way in which many who might be expected to side with the authorities have thrown in their lot with the nation in what is considered by many her death struggle.” And she informs her readers that, The attitude of the general public, as manifested in the extraordinary and most impressive services and pledge-takings on Sunday and the one day’s strike on Tuesday, is well known. They are determined to resist provocation and stick to passive resistance as long as possible, but it is an understatement to say that threequarters of the male population will not allow themselves to be taken alive.177 By the time of the Armistice, conscription had not been successfully imposed in Ireland. Reviewing Gore-Booth’s opposition to the Irish conscription effort, Tiernan writes, Gore-Booth’s campaign against the introduction of conscription in Ireland differs immensely from her previous campaigns in England. Her work there was based on ideals of pacifism and the promotion of choice for the individual. In her campaign against conscription in Ireland, Gore-Booth never mentions pacifist Eva Gore-Booth, “The Ruin Preparing in Ireland,” Manchester Guardian, April 26, 1918, 8. Accessed at Newspapers.com. 177 Ibid. 176 76 ideals but focuses instead on the fact that the introduction of conscription is yet another forced oppression of Irish people by British forces.178 There is strength to this analysis. But one of the themes of this paper is the remarkable integration of Gore-Booth’s thought, and we believe that by taking Tiernan’s analysis a step further, these apparently immense differences can indeed be reconciled. While it is true that Gore-Booth does not make pacifist arguments in her opposition to conscription in Ireland, neither do her arguments turn purely upon Britain’s history of imperial oppression. She adds an additional ingredient: the opinions of the Irish people themselves. As seen in the above excerpts, “The Ruin Preparing in Ireland” is not a philosophical statement. Instead, it is a report on the determination of individual Irish people to refuse their consent to conscription. Her argument is not based on theories of oppression per se. Instead, it is grounded firmly in the right of conscience — the explicit conclusion by individual Irish men and women that their personal sense of justice revolts at the thought of wearing a British uniform or killing in the name of the British Crown. Precisely the same ground, in other words, in which her case against conscription in England is rooted. Inspired by events, Gore-Booth in 1918 published a brief play, The Sword of Justice. Set in medieval Italy, The Sword of Justice confronts a peaceful man, Gualberto, with the consequences of his earlier decision to pardon and forgive his brother’s murderer, Malvolio. As Gore-Booth writes in her Preface to the play, she deliberately forces Gualberto to address an especially extreme example of the moral struggle that often faces those “who believe in goodwill 178 Tiernan, Political Works, 189. 77 and forgiveness as the only really powerful way of combatting evil.”179 Late in the play, Maria, a woman whose husband and child Malvolio has also murdered, arrives with a sword, planning revenge. In an exchange with a soldier-turned-wanderer identified as Pilgrim, Maria and Gualberto wrestle with questions of vengeance, evil, and justice. PILGRIM: That is true, Maria. The balance of one evil deed against another is the secret of the eternal life of evil. Only by refusing vengeance can you destroy that life. MARIA: Pilgrim, you confuse my thoughts with your words, but everything is really quite clear … If I kill this man my just vengeance will wipe out his crime. PILGRIM: Can you wipe out a bloodstain by pouring more blood on it? … I say you must have something different. GUALBERTO: This balance of yours is a terrible thing, Maria. Think of it, through the ages tossing to and fro the ball of misery. MARIA: I do not understand you. Surely you will not deny that justice is the will of God? PILGRIM: The justice that is the will of God is the balance of mercy with mercy. GUALBERTO: Alas, too often it seems the balance of sorrow with sorrow. PILGRIM: Nay, Gualberto, by refusing the sword you have found the most wonderful thing in the world — the road that leads at last to the end of sorrow.180 179 180 Eva Gore-Booth, Preface to “The Sword of Justice,” Plays, 131. Gore-Booth, “The Sword of Justice,” Plays, 143. 78 England and Ireland have been “tossing to and fro the ball of misery” for eight centuries. Could Gore-Booth be arguing the Rising was an error … or worse? We will attempt to address this question in the next section. Gore-Booth’s Theology as Key to Her Antiwar Writings The Easter Rising presents difficulties for students of the antiwar writings of Eva GoreBooth. While her denunciation of the First World War and defense of the rights of conscience and personal self-determination are unmistakable, her thoughts on the Rising are more nuanced. Clearly, she found the resort to violence, and the toll it extracted on the Irish nation, including many people she loved, heartbreaking. And yet, the way she writes about the Rising, and the larger question of Irish independence, is very different from how she discusses the War and those who prosecuted it. The ambiguity of her feelings are captured in many poems. “Easter Week” Grief for the noble dead Of one who did not share their strife, And mourned that any blood was shed, Yet felt the broken glory of their state, Their strange heroic questioning of Fate Ribbon with gold the rags of this our life.181 Similarly, the final poem in Broken Glory is dedicated to a poet who died shortly after the Rising, allegedly of a broken heart. Gore-Booth tells her, “You died of the grief that broke my heart.”182 181 182 Gore-Booth, Collected Poems, 292. Gore-Booth, “To Dora Sigerson Shorter ‘The Sad Years,’” Collected Poems, 309. 79 Yet despite her grief, Gore-Booth uniformly describes those who carried out the Rising, and particularly those who died, as noble, heroic, and glorious. In our introduction, we proposed the thesis that, while Eva Gore-Booth loved and cared deeply about Ireland and its people, she was not a nationalist, and that her antiwar writings present an integrated rejection of nationalism in favor of a universal ethic of love and life. To justify this conclusion, we must now step away from a chronological narrative and review GoreBooth’s original and esoteric theology, particularly as expressed in the work that dominated the final years of her life, A Psychological and Poetic Approach to the Study of Christ in the Fourth Gospel (hereafter Fourth Gospel).183 Although not published until 1923, the roots of the ideas she articulates in Fourth Gospel are evident in the poetry, prose, and drama of the previous quarter century. They show a consistent, original, and — in the true meaning of the word — deeply radical thinker. Dixon points out that “although [Gore-Booth] presented her insights as merely ‘personal intuitions and ideas,’ with no claims to scholarship, she had spent considerable time learning both Greek and Latin in order to make her own translations from manuscripts in the British Museum.”184 This reveals Gore-Booth’s rationalist approach to theology: her conviction that the nature and purpose of God can be understood through the exercise of the human mind. As she explains early in Fourth Gospel, The puzzle [of understanding to alleged paradoxes of John 1:1] may be merely due to the space and time limitations of our thinking that somehow turn most truths into paradoxes. … It is necessary to clear one’s mind of these before one can think Eva Gore-Booth, A Psychological and Poetic Approach to the Study of Christ in the Fourth Gospel. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1923. Reprint edition: SN Books World, n.d. 183 184 Dixon, 192. 80 one’s way into the multitude of implications and suggestions that seem to lie behind the short, essential positiveness of John’s gospel.185 This individualistic and rationalistic heuristic is consistent in Gore-Booth’s writing. In her “Whence Come Wars” speech of 1914, she said, “If you want to get rid of the tyranny of a phrase, the only thing to do is to analyse it,” while in a 1925 letter, she comments, “One has to turn one’s mind upside down, and change all the values, before one can understand real things at all.”186 This is necessary because, as she explains both in Fourth Gospel and in “The Cry of the Dumb,” an essay published in her posthumous collection The Inner Kingdom (1926), the Bible is an unreliable narrator: it has been written, rewritten, edited, translated, modified, “corrected,” “clarified,” and “interpreted” so frequently over the centuries that it is no longer possible to discern the nature of God from its words alone.187 We must use our rational mind to build from the cornerstone idea of Gore-Booth’s theology, which is … knowledge of the identity of all these three, the adorable truth that universal, absolute Love, essential, absolute Truth, and Everlasting, infinite Life are one. And that one is God.188 A proper understanding of God must be built around this sense of identity: God is everlasting, infinite, and universal Love. That Love embraces all life without distinction, and any teaching or belief that is inconsistent with the idea of an infinitely loving God (such as hell, for example) Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 15. Gore-Booth, “Whence come wars,” Political Writings, 140. Eva Gore-Booth to Margaret Wroe, November, 1925, in Poems, 87. Italics in original. 187 Eva Gore-Booth, “The Cry of the Dumb,” The Inner Kingdom. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1926, 71-2. 188 Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 17. 185 186 81 must be dismissed.189 As humans, we have a “divine potentiality” within us that longs for unity with God and to share eternally in the Love, Truth, and Life that is God. Gore-Booth calls this something the psyche, and says it is distinct from both the mind and the soul.190 The purpose of life, therefore, is to achieve the “mysterious transmutation … through the purification of the psyche or desire nature that Christ calls all men to receive the gift of God, eternal life.”191 This purification occurs as the psyche responds to God’s call upon it by approaching, and achieving, a perfect expression of Love, Truth, and Life in a person’s earthly existence. Such perfection is not easily achieved, however. And instead of condemning the unsuccessful psyche to eternal damnation after a single attempt, Gore-Booth argues God gives us “a new chance to find the way to Eternal or Divine or Real life” through reincarnation.192 Failure is thus a temporary setback. God’s Love allows the striving psyche repeated opportunities to achieve purification and unity with God and, through that, with all life and creation. The forgoing — difficult, convoluted, and “recondite”193 as it is — is yet a somewhat reductionist rendering of Gore-Booth’s thought. However, it lays out certain key ideas that are essential to properly contextualizing her antiwar writings. These include: • God is eternal, absolute, and universal Love, Truth, and Life. • The universality of that Love embraces all life. Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 29. Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 18, 25-6. 191 Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 44. 192 Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 30. 193 Dixon’s word for Gore-Booth’s theology, 192. 189 190 82 • The psyche longs for unity with God, which is achieved over time through a process of purification. • The psyche is continually moving closer to, or further away from, God, based upon the extent to which choices made in a sequence of earthly lives reflect and transmit God’s Love, Truth, and Life. Gore-Booth applies these ideas in her analysis of John’s Gospel in a way that is also applicable to our understanding of her antiwar writings. For instance, in discussing the psyche as “the battlefield of good and evil” in which both life and death are manifest, Gore-Booth says this explains why nature, often so transcendently beautiful, also contains much “ugliness, cruelty, and death.” Unfortunately, “some people have made out of this side of things a philosophy of life,” she says. They have thought that human life too should be as what we call Nature is, beautiful and ugly, strong, happy, struggling, cruel, self-assertive and destructive. From this belief, what we sometimes call “militarist” ideals are quickly evolved. Many militarists think we are of the same nature as all other living beings, only greater, because we have more force of self-assertion and power of domination. In this and this alone is human “greatness,” and strength is simply the power to coerce others. The animals, the plants, the seas, the earthquakes, and the lightnings know no pity, why should we? To these people pity and love seem a morbid growth, unnatural, unhealthy, mawkish. Such qualities lead to weakness. True life expresses itself in the ruthless strength of narrow, unfaltering personal will. This point of view, unquestioned and sometimes even unconscious, underlies the organisation of political and industrial life at present.194 194 Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 49. 83 The “militarist” drive for self-assertion, domination, and ruthless, pitiless, “greatness” is thus an expression of a fundamental misunderstanding of nature and the psyche. It results, not in true spiritual strength, but in the same estrangement from life and the natural world Gore-Booth described decades before in “The Land to a Landlord.” The importance of this “narrow, unfaltering personal will” can easily be misunderstood and exaggerated by people who suppress or ignore their internal longing for God. However, … there are not so many who understand that will in itself is easily thwarted, but combined with humility, love, and prayer it becomes the will of God, that is love in us, and is a terrific and unlimited force. It is not often so combined, because people who want power, often think humility and prayer signs of weakness and parasitic helplessness. Indeed, they avoid a humble attitude of mind as likely to hinder their success. But these are usually people who want to dominate, assert themselves and force their will on others. Because of this extraordinary safeguard in the nature of things, the power they are able to get is very fleeting and unreal. It is only a magnetic power of drawing out into expression all the latent evil in their environment and in other people’s wills.195 This is a remarkable statement, and clarifies a good deal of Gore-Booth’s thinking. The closing lines of her poem “Francis Sheehy-Skeffington,” for example, reflect precisely this idea when they envision the day when Christ’s Kingdom is established and “driven men, who fight and hate and kill” will instead “know that kindly freedom of the will / That holds no other human will in thrall.” Attempts by humans to assert power and “force their will on others,” Gore-Booth argues, 195 Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 54. 84 can only result in evil. The Kingdom of God will be manifest when men no longer seek dominion. She clarifies this in the paragraph that follows: But to Christ, who had no desire to dominate, and whose will was one with the Will of God, or Love, no power was denied, and from Him no truth was hid. And the threefold force of humility, love and prayer must bring to everyone in their degree, truth and power. That is the real power (or love) of God in them. For Love is the only real power, the power of God.196 Christ “had no desire to dominate,” and therefore for man to seek dominion is to separate himself from God’s love. Only through “humility, love and prayer” can humans unite with God, “for Love is the only real power.” As God is universal Love, so too is God absolute Truth. But to the psyche separated from God, the only way of judging truth or falsehood, good or evil, Gore-Booth says, is by “what is pleasant or unpleasant to one’s individual self.” This leads to the erroneous conclusion that truth does not exist. This, she says, “lies perhaps unconsciously at the root of the mentality that makes war possible.” One cannot fight for truth, because truth is love, and the Kingdom of Heaven, and includes all living things in union, leaving nothing out (or else it could not be impersonal). You can fight for personal or corporate sensations, “my own, my native land,” or my honour, my reputation, my life, or even my friend or brother, or my property, or my money. But you cannot fight for the whole world, all life, all men, because 196 Ibid. 85 there would be no enemy. Nothing but love brings one into relation with all life, and love is truth, and also God.197 The sorts of “personal or corporate sensations” that lead a person into battle against others are ultimately false, and an expression of disunity with God. Indeed, “self-identification with Christ means nothing if it does not work out into self-identification (or progress towards selfidentification) with all life. Because nobody can share Christ’s life without living actively and tremendously outwards from the new centre of love to God and one’s neighbour.”198 In this sense, all life is one, which is, Gore-Booth says, “the terribly intimate reason for the command: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’” Ignorance of this fact makes all violence, and cruelty, possible, and makes it possible for prisons, armies, executions to be organised and murders to be carried out: it makes people able to coerce, hurt, and punish one another. In extreme cases, it allows cruelty to become atrocity. A person who honoured the living psyche in all men could not bring himself to insult, outrage, torment or massacre others. The power to do such things is founded on the deep and subtle inner conviction that there is something more valuable, more honourable, more worthy of consideration than the living psyche, which need not then be treated with absolute unconditional respect. This something may be an abstract thing, such as liberty. Or it may be science or art. Or it may be the greatest good of the greatest number, or a nation, or a class; or a very tangible thing, like money or empire; or it may be evil like power, or it may be something as subtle as what we imagine to be the good or prosperity of the person concerned. 197 198 Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 66-7. Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 99. 86 Religious people will hardly say that they honour their country more than God, but many will think it a virtue to honour it more than they honour the living psyches of their neighbours. If this were not so, war would be impossible.199 The concern that people love their country more than they honor God and their neighbors is a longstanding one for Gore-Booth. It recalls the undated but circa 1915 manuscript200 in which she argues that those who are prepared “to go out and kill and die if your country calls on you” have made “a god of geography” and a “religion of patriotism,” the supreme expression of which is the “great human sacrifice” of the First World War. This idea appears in another poem from Broken Glory: “Dreams” (excerpt) Alas! our dreams are only of the dread Red fields of France where unreaped harvests rot, And the One Soul by all the world forgot Moves silently amid the hosts of dead. German or French or English, words most vain To that which knows not any nation’s pride, Whose pity is as all men’s sorrow wide, Folded about our broken world of pain. Knowing no foe in any death or life, Moving in dreams in every darkened mind, 199 200 Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 113-4. See note 112. 87 Whilst still to death the blind lead on the blind, That comradeship is deeper than our strife. True to all life, war-worn and battle-tossed Doth the One Spirit, faithful to the end, Live in that peace that shall be the world’s friend, The dream of God by men so lightly lost.201 As the One Soul moves over the carnage of battle, God does not see nationality, does not honor the god of geography or the religion of patriotism. God sees only death, and dreams of the day when humans shall see the world as God does, “true to all life.” Humans should look on the world the same way, Gore-Booth stresses, arguing that John’s Gospel “gives rise to the idea that people should not be thought of in groups, or in relation to groups, distinguished from one another by race, class or sex, but everyone, however humble, separately, in the greatness of an intimate relation to the Universal and the Eternal.”202 Gore-Booth’s statement that “people should not be … distinguished from one another by … sex” is of course consistent with the beliefs of the Aëthnic Society and the editors of Urania. As in all her work, Gore-Booth’s theology places women at its center, arguing that the esoteric, “deep,” “Inner Knowledge” of Jesus was shared, not with all his disciples, but with his mother Mary and Mary Magdalene, as well as with the author of the Gospel of John. A third woman privileged by Jesus “to be the custodian and transmitter of some of his deepest teaching” 201 202 Gore-Booth, Collected Poems, 301. Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 160. 88 was the Samaritan woman in John 4. With her, he shared the knowledge that “God is Spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in Spirit and Truth.”203 Christ thus gives, to a woman by the wayside, a true revolutionary idea of God, sweeping on one side all those narrow limited psychic conceptions of a Supernatural Judge or King that have haunted the imaginations of priests and wise men in all ages. He substituted for the idea of a God to be sought in special places and times, and formal attitudes and ceremonies, a God beyond space and time, or any psychic passion or hate and anger; a God to be sought in Love, for God is Spirit.204 A “general real knowledge” of the implications of this teaching would change the world. Those strange fanatics who destroyed millions of human lives, for the sake of trying to rescue the sepulcher of the ever-living Christ from the Saracens, would have been robbed of their motive, so would all the persecutors of the Middle Ages. Indeed, those who worship the Spirit that is universal Love and Truth, in the Spirit of Universal Love and Truth, could not pray for victory over any enemy, or indeed call anyone or any country their enemy. For to quarrel with any human being is to declare war against the Light of God, which is universal Love in one’s own soul.205 Jesus entrusted his revolutionary message of “that Love and Truth which is selfidentification with God, and that the only real temple is not in time or space, but in the deeps of one’s own being,” to the Samaritan woman, and she shared it as his messenger. Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 188. Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 189. 205 Ibid. 203 204 89 And this idea has gone on spreading through the ages, not among hierarchies and authorities, but here and there from one person to another, gently and silently, whist the official churches still strive against its disintegrating influence.206 Recall the role of “the Church” in The Tribunal, Gore-Booth’s 1916 narrative of the committees judging the claims of conscientious objectors. The clergyman on the committee was not there to probe the philosophical validity of the applicant’s pacifism, nor model the living Christ to his fellow committee members. The clergyman is a representative of the Established Church, part of the State, and his function is to secure obedience to the State’s policies and its demands on the individual. Gore-Booth seldom uses the word sin, but among her earliest philosophical principles we noted an opposition to hierarchical structures of all forms. Decades later, unthinking obedience to hierarchical authority remains close, in Gore-Booth’s opinion, to sin. “Christ’s teaching is often held to be revolutionary in social life,” she writes, “but it is in the world of thought that his teaching is so tremendously revolutionary, and subversive to all authority.”207 Truth is God, and the vibrations of God are the life of every man who comes into the world. Everyone, then, has the possibility of direct access to real truth, by responding with ever renewed force and outgoing power to Universal Love.208 There is, therefore, no need for intermediaries like churches, or clergy-members who lay out the officially-sanctioned interpretations of Scripture. This fact angers those who simply want to be told what to believe — people like the crowd in John 7 who want to see Jesus arrested. Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 190. Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 221. 208 Ibid. 206 207 90 The very obedience of mind that makes them submissive to the religion that has been taught them by accredited authorities, has stopped and congealed the natural flow of the inner psyche waters into a sort of stable ice, impenetrable for the time being to the disturbing force of truth. Wind cannot move ice.209 If people seeking to align themselves with Love and Truth and Life cannot be blindly obedient to authority, nor can they, exercise authority over others, she argues. Gore-Booth cites the example of the early Church Father Tertullian, who considered whether a Christian could serve as an official of the State. He concluded that he could, so long as he did not sit in judgment on another (as a judge or magistrate), nor “condemn nor pre-condemn (as a legislator).”210 Tertullian seems to regard it as obvious that a Christian cannot take part in such actions. Indeed, the doctrine that a thing is right because the State orders it, is very alien from Christ. It is wrong according to him for one individual to kill another. And it is just as wrong, no more and no less, if a thousand individuals, or the whole Jewish nation, decide to kill one person, no matter what that person has done. If the individual has failed in Love, that is no reason why the rest of the nation should fail.211 When Jesus is condemned by Caiaphas in John 11, Gore-Booth writes, the High Priest offers “the usual political argument” that it is permissible to sacrifice one man for the good of the nation, in the name of “the greatest good of the greatest number, the subordination of the interests of the individual to the interests of the community, which has, through the ages, been responsible for so much cruelty.”212 She notes that the Crucifixion was, therefore, “from one point of view, the Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 222-3. Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 227. 211 Ibid. Emphasis added. 212 Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 254. 209 210 91 result of an honest desire to support a righteous cause with force.” This reintroduces the idea we first saw articulated in “Whence Come Wars,” in which she decried the immorality employing “a dreadful means to a righteous end,” and rejects the idea that war can be justified “in the cause of righteousness and justice.”213 She now expands on this, writing, To a politician with a sincere love of his country and nationalist ideals, it might, indeed, seem an entirely insignificant necessity that one man should be put to death for the sake of national security and peace. For are not, every day, thousands sacrificed cheerfully by every nation in the same cause?214 For her part, Gore-Booth will have none of it: But in Christ, one life, with all its Divine latencies and possibilities, is a greater thing than the prosperity of an Empire, or an oppressed nationality. “In so much as ye have done it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”215 At this point, we need to step away from Gore-Booth’s Fourth Gospel to further explore her argument that ends do not justify means — or, as she phrases it, “a good cause is no excuse for an evil method.” This phrase is found in an untitled and undated manuscript in Gore-Booth’s hand in which she discusses “two sets of people” by whom “the world is practically ruled today, Militarists and Moralists.216 The Militarist, she says, “is ready to kill people in order to annex their possessions and glorify or enrich the British Empire.” The Moralist, on the other hand, “is ready See note 92. Op cit. 215 Ibid. 216 Eva Gore-Booth, undated manuscript. Pennsylvania State University Archives, Eva GoreBooth Collection, Box 1: Folder 17. AX/B40/RBM/00139. Hereafter, “Militarists and Moralists.” 213 214 92 to kill people for the betterment of social conditions, or the improvement of humanity.” These two types have existed side-by-side throughout history. Militarists kill for material gain, while It’s extraordinary how many attempts there have been in history, by wellintentioned people, to set the world to right by getting a lot of people to kill one another in the interests of virtuous living or the regeneration of Society. A good cause is no excuse for an evil method. You cannot stop wrongdoing by the massacre of a battle, for massacre itself is wrong. As she phrases the idea in “Whence Comes War,” “We no longer sell our souls to the devil: we make an instrument of the devil and use him to fight against evil.”217 Gore-Booth believes “there are comparatively few militarists in any country, but the muddle headed moralists are many. By muddle headed moralists I mean people who have really honestly persuaded themselves that it is right to do evil that good may come.” Militarists thus work to persuade “muddle headed moralists” that their wars “will advance a good and holy cause,” because “they will have no dealings with a war unless they are sure it is for freedom, or to end war, or to save the world from destruction by a horde of ruthless inhuman savages. They would think it wrong to fight for Empire, but right to fight for Justice and Liberty.”218 Gore-Booth rejects any such justification for warfare. In fact, I question whether ever war has ever been fought for a good cause, though the soldiers who fought it may have been deluded into thinking so. One sometimes thinks that the whole art of party politics is to dress shop windows with beautiful motives and noble aims so as to take in the public and keep them quiet while they 217 218 Gore-Booth, Political Writings, 140. “Militarists and Moralists.” 93 are carrying out wholesale robberies and murders in the safe seclusion of Government Offices and Departments.219 “The only safety for the public,” Gore-Booth argues, “is to insist that methods should be as noble as motives.” But this raises a practical difficulty. “We all want to get rid of militarism and hatred … but how are we to attain this?” After the end of the Great War, with its horrors and suffering and disease and death on an unprecedented scale, “it is natural that many people should dream of turning their tanks into barricades and conscripts into a Red Army and fight to pull down our present social system and destroy all the justice and misery caused by it.” Now this I think is the point of view of the moralist who is an antimilitarist. He believes in love and good will as the ideal relationship between human beings. But, he says, you must be practical. You cannot have a state of goodwill unless you are prepared to imprison or kill the enemies of good will, that is you cannot have kindness without killing people. You cannot have liberty unless you imprison the enemies of liberty. You cannot have freedom without enslaving people. You cannot have peace unless you fight the Militarists. You cannot have peace without war. In fact no perfect state can be established without the cruel and futile methods and machinery of the old order: punishments, prisons, courts of justice, and an army.220 Ibid. One is strongly reminded of Mencken’s insight the previous year that, “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” I have as yet found no evidence to indicate either writer was familiar with the other’s work. H.L. Mencken. In Defense of Women. 1918. Project Gutenberg eBook #1270, 2008. www.gutenberg.org/files/1270/1270-h/1270-h.htm#link2H_4_0016 220 “Militarists and Moralists.” 219 94 We must state clearly that the above paragraph is Gore-Booth writing in the voice of the “practical” Moralist, articulating for the sake of argument a point of view she herself rejects. This is necessary because Terry Phillips, perhaps misinterpreting a phrase of Tiernan’s, presents the above lines in his Irish Literature and the First World War (2015) as Gore-Booth’s own beliefs, and on that basis concludes, as quoted before, that Gore-Booth’s pacifism is “provisional.”221 In context, however, it is clear these “practical” justifications for prisons, punishments, and wars are just what she is refuting — they are the “evil methods” Moralists employ in pursuit of their “good cause.” As she makes clear on the next page of the manuscript, this is precisely “why revolution has never meant anything but a change of tyrants.” Many moralists are persuaded that you cannot save good government from being wiped out by its enemies without defending it with machine guns, bombs, and prisons. Now to my mind that means no good government is safe unless it is defended by bad government. For the essence and being of bad government is force.222 In contrast, “Christ took the opposite view to the moralist whose idea is to use force to make other people do right,” Gore-Booth says. “His idea was, Do right yourself, which means universal love and kindness, and then you will not be able to use force on other people. In other words, turn your ideas into methods. In fact, for the regeneration of Society, he looked not to the change of institutions, but to the practice of love and friendliness.” This assertion that Jesus prescinds “the change of institutions” — in other words, that Christ’s Gospel was not intended as a battle plan for an immanentized “Kingdom of God” — 221 222 Phillips, 116, citing Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 196. “Militarists and Moralists.” 95 brings us back to Fourth Gospel, where Gore-Booth emphasizes that, when appearing before Pilate, Jesus makes clear he did not come to initiate a new form of government or be an earthly ruler. Jesus rejects Pilate’s “wholly nationalist point of view” toward his ministry. In fact, Christ makes an opportunity of telling him that his kingdom is not a national one. If he were a political leader, his followers would fight to save him. His kingdom is not “from hence.” … His kingdom is identified with Truth. His followers are “of the Truth.”223 She further develops this cornerstone argument in four powerful paragraphs: For no man can fight for Truth. Simply because to fight at all is to destroy truth. For it is to destroy Love, even to try to destroy Life, and Love and Life and Truth are one; so that the relative absence of any one of the three is a relative absence of all, and all fighting is a turning away from God. So is anger and hate. There is no such thing as righteous indignation. For only God is righteous, and God is Love, and Love is the only Truth. … It is obvious that no one who really believed that God is Love and God is Truth, could be deceived by any of those strange and fatal fanaticisms that have over and over again, in history, urged people to do angry and even terrible deeds, in defense of some “good cause” or other. From time immemorial the world has been drenched in blood and torn with agony, by those who were defending what they thought to be their holiest ideals, or fighting and dying and killing for their religion, or their honour, their Church, their friends, or their Country, or Christianity. 223 Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 326. 96 But these ideals, ideals that men can fight for, are not the ideals of Christ, they are of this Kosmos, psychic illusion and not spiritual truth. Many have died for Love and Truth and Life, that is for Christ or God, but none have ever, or can ever, fight for the Kingdom of God.224 Even more significantly — both spiritually and for our understanding of Gore-Booth’s writings — Jesus’ acceptance of his impending death also shows, she argues, his complete rejection, not only of political power, but of all expressions of power. “There is no Divine Power except Love,” she writes. “Every step made by every humble individual towards following Christ, always involves a loss of ‘power.’”225 That Pilate condemned Jesus to death shows that Pilate was what Gore-Booth earlier described as a Moralist, someone “who did wrong from a sense of duty and respect for authority.” He was not himself cruel, perhaps, but “the cruelty of the minority of human beings could not torment the whole human race with wars, massacres and executions, if it was not for the docile and disciplined dutifulness of the majority.” 226 As we have seen, Gore-Booth sees docile obedience to hierarchical authority as among the worst of human failings. Earlier, in another manuscript dating to around 1915, she spoke of “the old church and state standard of right and wrong identifying good with obedience and evil with revolt,” which produces “a submission of the will so profound, that just as it will shrink from no act of heroism and self-devotion, it will also shrink from committing no crime commanded by authority.” “In view of the events of the past,” she adds, “it seems strange that we should go on Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 327-8. Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 331. 226 Ibid. 224 225 97 carefully teaching our children to confuse goodness with obedience and evil with disobedience.”227 Speaking in Fourth Gospel of Jesus’ granting his followers the power to forgive sins, she laments that such a gift should have been twisted into a tool for human dominance: It seems rather strange that people should think that these universal injunctions of Christ really meant nothing but the consecration of a special set of men, endowing them with power from heaven to forgive other people’s sins. Christ deals always with the individual and the universal. But many people’s minds seem to be obsessed with the ideas of grades and ranks, and assemblies and organisations. And these have willingly co-operated with those whose unconscious minds could not be satisfied without power and privilege. Till, from the living words of Eternal life, addressed by Christ to all men for the guidance and transformation of their inner selves, there has been evolved a set of rules for the founding and control of a society.228 Gore-Booth sees this use of the Gospel as a means of social stratification and control to be, not simply a perversion of Christ’s message, but in fact a complete inversion of it. “It was not Brutus who was the real enemy of Caesar,” she wrote during the War, “it was Jesus Christ.”229 In 1918, she observed in the Manchester Guardian that the ancient Romans “regarded Christianity, as perhaps it is, as a danger to any well-organised State.”230 Ultimately, Gore-Booth comes Eva Gore-Booth, “Some Ideas of Good and Evil,” undated manuscript. Pennsylvania State University Archives, Eva Gore-Booth Collection, Box 1: Folder 3. AX/B40/RBM/00139. Internal references suggest it was written during the War, after the introduction of conscription. 228 Gore-Booth, Fourth Gospel, 350. 229 Gore-Booth, “Some Ideas of Good and Evil.” 230 Eva Gore-Booth, “The Sanctity of Conscience,” Manchester Guardian, March 25, 1918, 8. Accessed at Newspapers.com. 227 98 tantalizingly close to arguing a State is in fact incompatible with both Jesus’ message and with human liberty. In another War-era manuscript, she writes, Peace without freedom among human beings is only sentimentalized cruelty, the kind of thing you do when you keep people in order for their own good. Governments do this all the time. In fact, you might say what people call good government is an attack on human freedom, whilst bad government is an attack on happiness, and therefore most lovers of free human life and happiness in the end turn into rebels against all government.231 Did Gore-Booth Approve or Disapprove of the Rising? We have made our painstaking way through the theological ideas of Eva Gore-Booth in order to equip ourselves with the insights we need to answer the key unresolved questions surrounding her writings about the War and the Rising. To remind ourselves, those are: Did she conclude that the Rising, tragic as it was, was in the final analysis justified as a response to centuries of British injustice? To put it another way, was Gore-Booth’s pacifism, to use Phillips’ word, “provisional,” mitigated, per O’Connor, by her belief in “freedom as the ultimate value, Eva Gore-Booth, “Peace of S Francis.” In his classic essay “The State,” the progressive American poet, essayist, and antiwar activist Randolph Bourne (1886-1918) wrote, “We cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against the State. And we cannot expect, or take measures to ensure, that this war is a war to end war, unless at the same time we take measures to end the State in its traditional form.” One suspects Bourne and Gore-Booth would have found they held many ideas in common. Sadly for the possibility of this exchange, Bourne died in the postwar Spanish flu pandemic. “The State,” unfinished at the time of his death, was published posthumously. Randolph S. Bourne, War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915-1919. Edited with an introduction by Carl Resek. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 1964, 1999. 80. 231 99 and one worth fighting and killing for?” And we have introduced what we believe to be an even more fundamental question: Was Eva Gore-Booth truly an “Irish nationalist?” As we observed, the answer to this latter question depends heavily on how we define nationalist. Nationalism is not necessarily a synonym for jingoism, although there can be a broad overlap between the two. Patrick Pearse, President of the provisional government established during the Rising, and the man who read out the Proclamation of the Irish Republic from the steps of the GPO, wrote in 1913 that he used the term to mean all “people who accept the ideal of, and work for, the realisation of an Irish Nation, by whatever means.”232 Orwell’s “Notes on Nationalism,” already cited, defines the term as “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” It is, Orwell writes, “inseparable from the desire for power.”233 Eva Gore-Booth cared profoundly about Ireland, its people, their culture, their liberty, and their future. This is not in question. That alone, however, does not make her a “nationalist.” She did not, except in the broadest literary manner in her earliest poems, “work for the realisation” of Irish statehood, nor did she, in Orwell’s terms, identify herself exclusively with Ireland and the Irish people. On the contrary, the writings we have cited here make clear GoreBooth’s conviction that the universality of “the Love that is God” allows for no intermediate associations or affiliations like nations or States. The decade after the Rising, the final decade of Gore-Booth’s life, was arguably the most divisive period in the modern history of Ireland, encompassing as it did the War of Independence, the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and the Civil War. Patrick Pearse, “The Coming Revolution,” November, 1913, in The Coming Revolution: The Political Writings and Speeches of Patrick Pearse. Cork: Mercier Press, 2012. 80. 233 Orwell, Essays, 865-6. 232 100 However, Gore-Booth does not engage with these events. Nor, as we shall see, does she any longer (as she once did in her early poem, “Tricolor”) advocate a particular political outcome, whether Home Rule or independence, as a solution for “the Irish Question.” Instead, the concerns she addresses in these years include the unjust treatment of prisoners, the cruelty and immorality of capital punishment, and — in a particularly moving piece that draws on her own experience in 1916 — the suffering of the family and friends of prisoners condemned to death.234 In other words, even as her mind and heart drew her back to Ireland, Gore-Booth’s deepest causes and concerns were, as they always were, universal. Rather than nationalism, Gore-Booth was motivated by what the German writer Rudolf Rocker called “love of home” or “home sentiment,” in which: The love of home has nothing in common with the veneration of an abstract patriotic concept. Love of home knows no “will to power;” it is free from that hollow and dangerous attitude of superiority to the neighbor which is one of the strongest characteristics of every kind of nationalism. Love of home does not engage in practical politics nor does it seek in any way to support the state. It is purely an inner feeling as freely manifested as man’s enjoyment of nature, of which home is a part. When thus viewed, the home feeling compares with the governmentally ordered love of the nation as does a natural growth with an artificial substitute.235 As we hope this essay makes clear, Eva Gore-Booth had no “will to power.” She rejects that utterly. Rocker’s invocation of “enjoyment of nature, of which home is a part,” is also apt, as we Eva Gore-Booth, “The Victim’s Friends,” April, 1923. Political Writings, 225-6. Rudolf Rocker. Nationalism and Culture. Translated by Ray E. Chase. St. Paul: Michael E. Coughlin, Publisher. 1947, 1978. 214-5. 234 235 101 have seen from Gore-Booth’s poetry, as is his claim that “home sentiment” refuses collusion with the State. All of these ideas are clear in both the life and the antiwar writings of Eva Gore-Booth. In fact, with her rejection of hierarchy and compulsion in human relationships, her assertions that bad government is force and even good government is an attack on human freedom, that the greatest enemy of Caesar is Christ, and her conclusion that, “most lovers of free human life and happiness in the end turn into rebels against all government,” we find ourselves tantalizingly close to seeing in Gore-Booth something explicitly anti-nationalist: a philosophical anarchist.236 Gore-Booth assured her imprisoned sister that “Yours is that inner Ireland beyond green fields and brown, / Where waves break dawn-enchanted on the haunted Rosses shore.”237 Eva, too, had an “inner Ireland”238 — a vision in which humans had extended their self-identification to encompass all of life, were no longer estranged from nature and the green earth, and were freed from conventional categories of class, gender, and nationality. The wild scenes of Irish nature she revisited in her mind on sooty Manchester days or cold London nights, of Glencar waterfall and the little waves of Breffny, were her mental setting for a perfected world that was The Spanish labor activist José Llunas Pujols (1850-1905) defined “anarchy in practice” as “the whole organization of society stripped of power, domination or the authority of some over others.” Contemporary writer William Gillis argues, “the very phrase an-archy (‘without rulership’) presumes that rulership — relations of domination — is something we can be free of. This is the beautiful idea.” These definitions closely align with statements of Eva Gore-Booth’s we have cited in this paper. By the last decade of her life, she was clearly anarchist in her ethics, even if her social and political work never expressed itself along those precise lines. Her ideas bear obvious similarities to the Christian anarchism of Tolstoy, who likewise emphasized Gospelbased non-resistance. It would be a worthwhile subject of further research explore the degree to which Gore-Booth anticipated modern anarcha-feminism. José Llunas Pujuols, “What is Anarchy,” 1882, in Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas: Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE to 1939). Edited by Robert Graham. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2005, 126. William Gillis, Twitter post, September 10, 2018, 6:05 am, twitter.com/rechelon. 237 Gore-Booth, “To Constance – In Prison,” Collected Poems, 293. 238 Her own private Sligo, as it were. 236 102 anything but dependent upon artificial and divisive constructs like statehood. A world where independent, striving, rational minds no longer believed the liberty of “an oppressed nationality” was “worth killing and dying for.” In concluding that Eva Gore-Booth was not a nationalist, however, we necessarily reopen the question of why, then, she did not denounce the Rising and armed Irish nationalism. As much as Gore-Booth loved her sister, the explanation cannot be as simple as loyalty to Markievicz. The uncompromising and systematic thinker we have been exploring would not cast aside her most deeply held convictions, even for the sake of the person whom, next to Esther Roper, she loved most in the world. Markievicz herself recognized this, as seen both in her decision not to tell Gore-Booth about the Rising in advance, and her fear her sister would not come to visit her in prison afterwards, so strong was Eva’s disapproval of violence. Gore-Booth’s conclusions on the Rising are deeply layered, yet profoundly consistent with her guiding principles. Her response to the Rising did not render her pacifism “provisional,” nor qualify her opposition to the War or her rejection of violence. To borrow a phrase of Lapisardi’s, her writings on Ireland “present a philosophy far more complex than Gore-Booth has ever been given credit for.”239 Those writings, particularly her “holograph account” and “The Sinn Féin Rebellion,” demonstrate great sympathy for the Rising, and a clear-eyed understanding of why it occurred. Acknowledging the tragic and heroic stories of the leaders of the Rising, and of martyrs like Casement and Sheehy Skeffington, who have been translated “into the realm of romance and 239 What, never? Well, hardly ever. Lapisardi, Plays, 3. 103 glory forever,”240 there were deeper, systemic causes for the stirrings that exploded into rebellion in April, 1916. These included the systemic poverty of the Irish people, the terrible conditions in the slums of Dublin (said to be the worst in the British Empire), the brutality with which strikes and protests were suppressed, the diseases endemic to rural Ireland, and, insult to injury, the ignorance or apathy of the British people to the conditions that prevailed across the Irish Sea.241 As is clear from her poetry, Gore-Booth regrets the carnage and death that resulted from the Rising. It was, she writes, “a blow to all who hoped for a gradual lessening of hostility” between English and Irish. And yet, “the severity with which the rebellion was crushed was, many of us believe, a far worse blow.”242 More than that, however, Gore-Booth’s opinion of the British reaction might be summarized by the phrase (mis-)attributed to Talleyrand regarding an impulsive act of Napoleon’s: “It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.” That’s because, in suppressing the Rising as it did, and turning its leaders into martyrs to the cause of Ireland, the British government threw away any chance “for killing with clemency the old tradition of hatred and the memory of the atrocities of ’98 that have festered so long in the imagination of the Irish people.” This dooms both sides to continual struggle and animosity, she fears, since “There is no solution of the Irish question possible that is not founded on goodwill between the two nations.”243 This is where we see clearly that Gore-Booth does not endorse any particular political arrangement as a “solution of the Irish question.” Instead, once we recall that Gore-Booth defines goodwill as a synonym for love, it becomes clear that the individual humans who identify Gore-Booth, “The Sinn Féin Rebellion,” Political Writings, 213. Ibid. 242 Gore-Booth, “The Sinn Féin Rebellion,” Political Writings, 215. 243 Ibid. 240 241 104 themselves as “English” or “Irish” must enfold one another in the universal Love she later defined more explicitly in Fourth Gospel. At this point, we must introduce our final example of the antiwar writings of Eva GoreBooth, a 1917 pamphlet titled Rhythms of Art.244 Although this begins as a meditation on creativity and artistic expression, it contains some of her most profound statements on war and revolution. Writing on the “whirlwinds,” “tempests” and “fiery energy” that confront the artist “the more we probe into the heart of things,” — “vibrations” of “great elementary forces” that strongly resemble her descriptions of the vibrations of the Love that is God in the human psyche — Gore-Booth notes that a recognition of the power of these energies “leads straight on to the study of those mysterious movements in the realm of will and thought that hide the secret foundations of character.”245 “[I]n those living and vibrating rhythms that surge upward into manifestation in the strange living and dying of Christ,” she writes, “one recognizes the completion of that subtle suggestion that haunts and eludes and promises the smile of an archaic Apollo.” 246 The human psyche, in other words, is capable of perceiving, responding to, and reflecting into the world the subtle rhythms of creativity and art in the same way it does God’s Love and Truth. However, not all of us respond to the same art in the same way. This has profound consequences, as Gore-Booth explains in two remarkable and telling paragraphs: On these lines one would say that the evils of life exist for the same reason that people prefer bad art to good, second rate to first rate, the primitive, fourth vibrations of the sorting out and conglomeration of matter to the more subtle Eva Gore-Booth, “Rhythms of Art,” Political Writings, 162-8. Gore-Booth, “Rhythms of Art,” Political Writings, 165. 246 Ibid. 244 245 105 rhythm of the upward struggle of human thought and feeling. We tolerate wars for the same reason we prefer Rudyard Kipling as a poet to Shelley, or Pinero to Ibsen, or a musical play to a Greek tragedy, “God Save the King” to Wagner. Thus the “Dark Rosaleen” is a far more beautiful poem than “Rule Britannia,” because the rhythm that finds vent in rebellion, imperfect as it must be, or else it could not find vent in violence, is still a more subtle and beautiful rhythm than the vibration that expresses itself in the ponderous pomposity and violence of Empire.247 In this, we find the final clue we need to contextualize armed Irish nationalism in GoreBooth’s thought, and explain why, in Tiernan’s words, “Gore-Booth is careful not to denigrate the Easter Rising.”248 For her, participants in the Rising were pursuing eminently elevated goals: the liberation of the Irish people from centuries of unjust rule, and the supplanting of empire with self-determination for Irishmen and Irishwomen. The Irish refusal to remain obedient is beautiful to her. The heartbreaking errors of the leaders of the Rising were that their rebellion “found vent in violence” — that they employed a bad method for a good cause — and that they concluded fighting and killing for “an oppressed nationality” was a higher value than the lives of the people who inevitably would die, some heroically, some ignominiously, in the effort. As a resort to coercion and force, the Rising was a step away from the Love that is God. However, as distressing a choice as the Rising was ontologically, it was nevertheless less objectionable than the British response to the Rising — and indeed, than the previous 800 years of British rule in Ireland. “Dark Rosaleen,” a passionately allegorical poem in which the poet Gore-Booth, “Rhythms of Art,” Political Writings, 166. Arthur Pinero (1855-1934) was a contemporary British playwright. 248 Tiernan, Political Writings, 181. 247 106 pledges his life to free his beloved from slavery and restore her to her “throne of gold,” is more beautiful than heavy-handed nationalist hymns like “God Save the King” or “Rule, Britannia,” because the quest for freedom is always more beautiful than is the drive for power and empire.249 But this is not to conclude, following O’Connor, that Gore-Booth sees “freedom as the ultimate value, and one worth fighting and killing for.” O’Connor writes that, In an 1924 letter, however, [Gore-Booth] asserted that “There is no passive alternative to violence.” The fairly straightforward distinction that Gore-Booth recognizes is between militarism in an imperial and in a colonial context.”250 Gore-Booth does make this distinction. But if O’Connor is interpreting the recognition of this distinction as a concession by Gore-Booth that in certain circumstances violence is therefore an acceptable, or even the sole, option, that interpretation cannot be supported. Rather than the implied conclusion that Gore-Booth endorses “anti-colonial militarism,” our analysis reveals the nuances of her thought, in which the Rising, while relatively morally superior both to the centuries of injustice that preceded it and to the repression that followed it, is objectively still negative. Therefore she could never have endorsed it. This is evident in the fuller context of the very letter O’Connor quotes. Replying to a letter from her friend the pacifist academic and author T.P. Conwil-Evans, in which he gave vent to “a lamentable wail about the wickedness of the world,” Gore-Booth writes, I do agree with you about violence, it’s everywhere mixed up with everything people do, but you know what I think and you know it’s true: there’s only one real James Clarence Mangan, Dark Rosaleen, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50353/darkrosaleen 250 O’Connor, 92. Emphasis in original. 249 107 alternative to violence, and that’s Christ. Because there is no passive alternative to violence, nothing but Love.251 For Eva Gore-Booth, pacifism is never passive. In fact, “a pacifist has need in his work of all the fiery energy and fierce, concentrated, ruthless inexorableness of war, although,” she adds, “he will not allow any of those things to enter into his relations with other people.”252 In those relations, she explains in Art and Peace, one of the last works published in her lifetime, Hate is the opposite of love but love is something far more than the opposite of hate, or the opposite of anything. It is an atmosphere of mind, a temperament, a way of living, a force, but, in its relation to war, you might call it peace.253 The Buried Life of Eva Gore-Booth In a profile of “Sinn Fein women” syndicated in several American newspapers, Constance Markievicz is described as “the sister of a gentle poetess (Eva Gore-Booth).”254 While gentleness may have defined Gore-Booth’s literary reputation, particularly outside the United Kingdom, looking at her work and thought as a whole, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that she, not Markievicz, was the more radical — or, in Maureen O’Connor’s phrasing, at least the “less conventional”255 — sister. In so many areas of her life, Eva Gore-Booth not only personally rejected the conventional, but challenged and undermined it. She turned her back on the social Eva Gore-Booth, Letter to T.P. Conwil-Evans, 1924, Poems, 96. Emphasis in original. Gore-Booth, “Some Thoughts of Good and Evil.” 253 Gore-Booth, “Art and Peace,” January, 1926, Political Works, 176. 254 Selfridge Hannagan, “Sinn Fein Women are Trusted with Secrets of Life and Death in Fight for Freedom,” Asheville Citizen-Times, January 3, 1922, 2. Accessed at Newspapers.com. 255 O’Connor, 85. 251 252 108 expectations for a woman of her class and era, and had an “intense, passionate, and uncompromising” relationship with a woman of another social class and nationality that lasted the remainder of her life.256 Joining with her partner Esther Roper, she transformed the suffragist movement, no longer permitting it to be solely a reflection of upper-middle class concerns, and incorporating it as part of a larger movement for the economic, political, and social liberation of women. Though classified — to the extent she is remembered — as a poet in the Celtic Twilight tradition of Yeats, many of her poems, in the words of Eilís Ní Dhuibhne, “are quite independent of this influence and indeed do not seem to fit easily into any school of Irish writing.”257 In a time of hyper-militarism, lockstep nationalism, and a national campaign to silence dissenters, she championed individual conscience and the right to protest, up to and including open rebellion, and she lionized those who refused to fight, not merely comparing, but equating, them with Christ himself. She denied the deeply-entrenched, but ultimately artificial, ways we categorize and subdivide humans into “the Many” — nations, classes, races, genders — and she sought the One in Whom, she said, there are no divisions. She took her hammer to the architectonic dogmas of Church and State — the hierarchies, the orthodoxies, the things “everyone knows” to be true, the Kiplingesque gods of the copybook headings — and said, “One has to turn one’s mind upside down, and change all the values, before one can understand real things at all.”258 And she tried to show that, having done so — because we do have the ability to do so — humans can abandon fear in exchange for Life, give up obedience for the sake of Truth, and reject power, and force, and Tiernan, “Challenging …” 68. Eilís Ní Dhuibhne, Voices on the Wind: Women Poets of the Celtic Twilight, Dublin: New Island Books, 1995. 258 Gore-Booth to Margaret Wroe, November, 1925, in Poems, 87. Italics in original. 256 257 109 violence, and the not only un-Christian, but anti-Christian, desire for power and dominion, in the name of Love. Eva Gore-Booth died of intestinal cancer on June 30, 1926, one month after her 56th birthday.259 Over the following years, Esther Roper worked heroically to preserve Gore-Booth’s memory, publishing collections of her poetry and essays and, in 1929, a complete edition of Gore-Booth’s poems and other writing. Roper also spearheaded an effort to memorialize GoreBooth’s life and work through a stained-glass window installed in the Round House in the Ancoats district of Manchester, where the two women had done such important work decades before. This was achieved in 1928, and Roper was the featured speaker at the unveiling. Constance died little more than a year after her sister, having further assured her place in history by becoming, in 1918, the first woman elected to the British House of Commons,260 and then the first female cabinet minister in western Europe, serving as Minister of Labour in the first Sinn Féin government. In 1934 Roper published The Prison Letters of Constance Markievicz, with a preface by Éamon de Valera, head of government of the Irish Free State, who had delivered the eulogy at Markievicz’s funeral. Roper died in 1938. She and Eva Gore-Booth are buried together in a north London churchyard, just steps from their final home together. They lie under a common headstone, inscribed with a line from Sappho that Gore-Booth had quoted in one of her poems: “Life that is Love is God.”261 Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth, 252. In keeping with Sinn Féin policy, Markievicz refused to take her seat in Westminster. Nancy Astor was the second woman to be elected (1919), and the first to take her seat in the House. 261 Gore-Booth, “In Praise of Life,” Collected Poems, 321-2. 259 260 110 In the decades that followed, and despite Roper’s best efforts, Eva Gore-Booth faded from memory, both in her Irish homeland and in the Britain where she lived and worked most of her adult life. The reasons for this — some of which are political and social, others of which have to do precisely because she so defies easy classification — are outside the scope of this essay, but eminently worth studying.262 Over the last decade, and due in no small measure to the heroic work of Sonja Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth’s life and legacy are being rediscovered in Ireland and the UK. This rediscovery centers around Gore-Booth’s work as a pioneering suffragist and feminist, and, to a secondary extent, as a gender theorist. Though recognized as an uncompromising pacifist, her antiwar writings (and still less, her esoteric and “recondite” theological works) have thus far received much less attention and make up a smaller part of her rebuilding reputation. In a day when nationalism, militarism, and authoritarianism are again on the march, it may be time for this to change. “Comrades” The peaceful night that round me flows, Breaks through your iron prison doors, Free through the world your spirit goes, Forbidden hands are clasping yours. For readers interested in the social and political parameters of this topic, we recommend Ann Matthews, Dissidents: Irish Republican Women 1923-1941; the Epilogue to Senia Pašeta’s Irish Nationalist Women, 1900-1918; and Mary McAuliffe’s chapter in Palgrave Advances in Irish History, “Irish Histories: Gender, Women, and Sexualities,” among many other sources that could usefully be cited, including just about anything from the pen of Margaret Ward. 262 111 The wind is our confederate, The night has left her doors ajar, We meet beyond earth’s barrèd gate, Where all the world’s wild Rebels are.263 263 Gore-Booth, Collected Poems, 295. 112 Bibliography Archival sources Pennsylvania State University Libraries: Rare Books and Manuscripts, Eva Gore-Booth Collection. Primary Sources Blavatsky, H.P. Isis Unveiled, Vol. 1, 1877, Theosophical University Press Online Edition, www.theosociety.org/pasadena/isis/iu1-01.htm. Bourne, Randolph S. 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