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them is the ability to perceive Celtic and British character with
a double eye and to be vehemently critical of both. The dangers
are the fatal facilities of so-called "Irish charm," and when least ex–
pected, even by the perpetrators of them, wild flights of Celtic irony
and speculation occur. The division in the Anglo-Irish heart is an em–
bittered, critical loyalty to both Celtic and thoroughly English states of
being-and weak-fibered Anglo-Irishmen of elder generations wept
as easily over the virtues of the Queen as over the misfortunes of an
unhappy Belfast or Dublin.
The immediate surroundings of the Graves household were
neither of Dublin nor Belfast; Graves was born in London, and the
infant Graves reclining in his carriage was kissed by the prematurely
aged, withered, shy, bald-headed Swinburne, who could never resist
the spell that "a pretty babby" cast around him. How and why Swin–
burne hovered over the infant Graves was not an accident; Alfred
Percival Graves, son of the Protestant Bishop of Limerick as well as
Robert's father, had his own share of literary reputation; he was an
authority on Irish folk songs, and for his own amusement, composed
mock Irish popular ballads that were sung by sentimental Irish on
both sides of the Atlantic.
a
Another element in the Graves household
was Graves's mother's family, the von Rankes, a German academic
family, noted for its scholarship in medicine and history; the infant
was christened Robert von Ranke Graves. The child was not sent out
to day or boarding school, but until he entered Charterhouse, with
its memories of Charles Lamb and Coleridge, he was encircled by
the family library. Graves's writing of historical novels has a natural
source and so has his often too heavily weighted concern with specu–
lative scholarship; he had discovered them without the aid of a
schoolmaster, and they were belligerently his private property.
The dangers of facile Irish charm shine like a revolving beacon
in the figure of the elderly Alfred Percival Graves, yet in his father
2. The best known of Alfred Percival Graves's ballads is "Father O'Flynn";
the least known of his writings is a brilliant, well-informed essay on Sheridan
Le Fanu which served as an introduction to Le Fanu's book of poems, a col–
lection of verse that anticipated James Joyce's verbal wit in
Finnegans Wake.
See Elizabeth Bowen's introduction to Le Fanu's
Uncle Silas
and V. S. Pritchett's
introduction to Le Fanu's
In A Glass Darkly;
A. P. Graves deserves credit for
being the first to perceive the unusual quality of Le Fanu's contribution to
nineteenth-century literature and its probable influence on Anglo-Irish writers.
