perhaps, the quality which the authors would ascribe to what they
consider their best work, _The Real Charlotte_--an estimate in which
Mr. Stephen Gwynn agrees with them. This is a fine sombre story of
a middle-aged woman's jealousy, for Charlotte is a kind of Irish
Cousine Bette. But, if the subject is comparable to that of Balzac's
novel, the treatment is certainly not so, and that is my reason for
not regarding this as the work by which their achievement can best
be judged. It is the work in which they have aimed highest, and the
measure of their success is not small, but the theme of Charlotte's
jealousy and the havoc in other lives which it caused needed for its
convincing development all the powers of a great tragic artist. It is
with no want of recognition of the authors' artistic aims or want of
sympathy with their regret at abandoning them for others less lofty
that this is said: but the work of an artist can best be judged from
that part of it which most nearly reaches perfection. Miss Somerville
and Martin Ross most nearly reached perfection in their lighter stories
of Irish life, and it says much for their acumen that they saw the line
on which their talent could naturally reach its maturity, courageously
turning their backs on higher and more tragic paths likely to tax them
beyond their capabilities. At the same time, it would be unjust not to
point out that even in their best work comedy does not exclude the more
poignant feelings. It would be the greatest mistake to regard these two
writers as nothing more than jesters. Their humour is the true humour
which runs hand-in-hand with pity, and the sympathy mingled with their
laughter robs it of any taste of bitterness. There is a chapter in
_Some Irish Yesterdays_ which shows how their hearts were touched.[28]
It treats of marriage and love, death and birth among the peasantry in
the south-west of Ireland with a delicacy of feeling which is beyond
praise, and shows that the writers did not observe with the aloofness
of an explorer among savages, but that for them seeing and describing
alike were deeply-felt emotional experiences. The chapter opens with a
memory of a wedding in the little Roman Catholic chapel of the village,
a simple ceremony, after which the bridegroom hauled his wife up beside
him on to a shaggy horse and started for home at a lumbering gallop.
Then, in a brilliant transition by way of Tom Cashen's reflections on
marriage and a glimpse of his married life, we are introduced at Tom
Cashen's funeral to the bride of twenty-five years ago, "a middle-aged
stranger in a frilled cap and blue cloak, with handsome eyes full of
friendliness," with her ill-health, her profusion of children, and
"himself" whose "nose glowed portentously above a rusty grey beard and
beneath a hat-brim of a bibulous tint." Then listen to the passage
which follows:
[28] In _Irish Memories_ Miss Somerville says that this
chapter is the reprint of an article by Martin Ross--a
fact which throws some light on the respective
contributions of the two collaborators. I should like
to mention another passage in which these writers
touch the pathetic with distinction. It is that
chapter in _Dan Russell the Fox_ in which, while
tending a poisoned hound, the Irish mother tries
vainly to persuade her younger son to propose to the
infatuated young lady. He rejects her suggestion as
an outrage on the lady, and sets his face towards
America. As the saved hound licks her hand, "It's no
good now, poor puppy," she says.
The sunny Shrove Tuesday in early March lived again as she spoke, the
glare of the sunshine upon the bare country brimming with imminent
life, the scent of the furze, already muffling its spikes in bloom,
the daffodils hanging their lamps in shady places. How strangely, how
bleakly different was the life history summarised in the melancholy
October evening! Instead of the broad-backed horse, galloping on
roads that were white in the sun and haze of the strong March day,
with the large frieze-clad waist to meet her arms about, and the
laughter and shouting of the pursuers coming to her ear, there would
be a long and miry tramping in the darkness, behind her spouse, with
talk of guano and geese and pigs' food, and a perfect foreknowledge
of how he would complete, at the always convenient shebeen, the
glorious fabric of intoxication, of which the foundation had been
well and truly laid at the funeral.
From the funeral we pass again to the cottage in which "the Triplets"
are holding their reception, the three day-old babes cradled in the
stuffy room, hazy with the smoke of the turf fire, the crowd in the
doorway, the old woman rocking the cradle:
Obscure corners harboured obscure masses, that might be family
raiment, or beds, or old women; somewhere among them the jubilant
cry of a hen proclaimed the feat of laying an egg, in muffled tones
that suggested a lurking-place under a bed. Between the cradle
and the fire sat an old man in a prehistoric tall hat, motionless
in the stupor of his great age; at his feet a boy wrangled with a
woolly puppy that rolled its eyes till the blue whites showed, in a
delicious glance of humour, as it tugged at the red flannel shirt of
its playmate.
Such a passage in a Russian novelist would warrant ecstasies on the
part of our _illuminati_: let us no less highly praise our own art
when it is possible. The chapter concludes with some lights on the
commercial methods of matrimony practised by the peasant class: the
writers do not defend them, but call attention to the surprising bloom
that is apt to spring from them. "From them springs, like a flower from
a dust heap, the unsullied, uneventful home-life of Western Ireland."
"There is here no material, of the accepted sort, for a playwright;
no unsatisfied yearnings and shattered ideals, nothing but remarkable
common sense, and a profound awe for the sacrament of Marriage.
Marriage, humorous, commercial, and quite unlovely, is the first act;
the second is mere preoccupation with an accomplished destiny; the
last is usually twilight and much faithfulness." The dialogue is a
masterpiece throughout, epigram, heart-piercing pathos, with humour,
heavenly and inveterate, lubricating all. Of an elderly couple,
married by a happy thought some thirty years before, it was said, as
the authors' record, "their hearts were within in each other." This
chapter, through which breathes all the soft beauty and humour of the
soil, is a sufficient answer to those who would tax these writers with
a uniform attitude of rather heartless derision or with following--what
a blind criticism!--in the benighted footsteps of those who have given
us the dreary horror of the traditional stage Irishman.
Then, again, there is another spirit that breathes delicately
through these stories, tempering their outlines as the mists of the
Atlantic those of the craggy western hillside. It is the spirit of
natural beauty, which, to the hearts of Miss Somerville, herself an
accomplished draughtsman, and Martin Ross, makes ever the sharpest
appeal. They make the reader plainly feel that if the unconventional
dignity and penetrating wit of the Irish folk clutches powerfully at
their feelings, the inexhaustible beauty of its surroundings pierces
to their very marrow. Quotation after quotation might be given to show
their remarkable gift of rendering the scenery which has so moved their
imaginations. I can only choose a few, embarrassed at the richness of
the field of choice. The last chapter of _Some Irish Yesterdays_ opens
with an example which it is hard to surpass:
The road to Connemara lies white across the memory--white and very
quiet. In that far west of Galway, the silence dwells pure upon the
spacious country, away to where the Twelve Pins make a gallant line
against the northern sky. It comes in the heathery wind, it borrows
peace from the white cottage gables on the hillside, it is accented
by the creeping approach of a turf cart, rocking behind its thin grey
pony. Little else stirs save the ducks that sail on a wayside pool to
the push of their yellow propellers; away from the road, on a narrow
oasis of arable soil, a couple of women are digging potatoes; their
persistent voices are borne on the breeze that blows warm over the
blossoming boglands and pink heather.
Scarcely to be analysed is that fragrance of Irish air; the pureness
of bleak mountains is in it, the twang of turf smoke is in it, and
there is something more, inseparable from Ireland's green and grey
landscapes, wrought in with her bowed and patient cottages, her
ragged wails, and eager rivers, and intelligible only to the spirit.
Here is another landscape, the _Irish R. M.'s_ view of his own demesne:
Certainly the view from the roof was worth coming up to look at. It
was rough heathery country on one side, with a string of little blue
lakes running like a turquoise necklet round the base of a firry
hill, and patches of pale green pasture were set amidst the rocks and
heather. A silvery flash behind the undulations of the hills told
where the Atlantic lay in immense plains of sunlight.
What, again, could be a more delightful overture to the lifelike
description of the regatta on Lough Lonen than the short paragraph
which conveys in a few touches all the beauty of the scene?
A mountain towered steeply up from the lake's edge, dark with the
sad green of beech-trees in September; fir woods followed the curve
of the shore, and leaned far over the answering darkness of the
water; and above the trees rose the toppling steepnesses of the hill,
painted with the purple glow of heather. The lake was about a mile
long, and, tumbling from its farther end, a fierce and narrow river
fled away west to the sea, some four or five miles off.
In these descriptions there is no striving for elaborate effect: the
authors simply place the scene before our eyes with that aptness of
language which is like the unerring needle of a master etcher. To
travel on the wings of Miss Somerville and Martin Ross gives one
constant thrills of amazement at their hawk-like swoops after a
telling phrase: they catch an apt simile on the wing with an arresting
suddenness which adds moments of breathlessness to the already
exhilarating flight of their rapid narrative. Instances can be picked
out from any of the stories like plums from a pudding.
In the depths of the wood Dr. Hickey might be heard uttering those
singular little yelps of encouragement that to the irreverent suggest
a milkman in his dotage....
It was a gleaming morning in mid-May, when everything was young and
tense, and thin and fit to run for its life, like a Derby horse....
I followed Dr. Hickey by way of the window, and so did Miss M'Evoy;
we pooled our forces, and drew her mamma after us through the opening
of two foot by three steadily, as the great god Pan drew pith from
the reed....
Old McRory had a shadowy and imperceptible quality that is not
unusual in small fathers of large families; it always struck me
that he understood very thoroughly the privileges of the neglected,
and pursued an unnoticed, peaceful and observant path of his own in
the background. I watched him creep away in his furtive, stupefied
manner, like a partly-chloroformed ferret....
Miss McRory's reins were clutched in a looped confusion, that
summoned from some corner of my brain a memory of the Sultan's cipher
on the Order of the Medjidie.
Like smuts streaming out of a chimney the followers of the hunt
belched from the lane and spread themselves over the pale green
slopes....
Though the temptation is almost irresistible, I refrain here from
displaying this incisive power applied to character, notably to Irish
character. The success of our authors in this respect is so notorious
that further testimony is superfluous. If we have any appreciation of
their art at all, the Major and the gentle Philippa, his wife, Flurry
and Sally Knox, old Mrs. Knox looking as if she had robbed a scarecrow,
with her white woolly dog with sore eyes and a bark like a tin
trumpet, against the inimitable background of her ramshackle mansion
of Aussolas, scene of many wit-combats between her and Flurry, Miss
Bobbie Bennett, the McRory family, John Kane, Mrs. Knox's henchman, and
Michael the huntsman, all are as vivid to us as our dearest friends.
It is worth pointing out, however, that an almost diabolical power of
delineation is not the only compelling quality in these portraits.
There is in their introduction of their characters that natural
dramatic instinct which they have so humorously observed in their
Irish neighbours. I need only instance the ingenuity by which Mrs.
Knox is first heard "off," easily vanquishing in speech that doughty
antagonist, an Irish countrywoman: or the introduction of John Kane in
"the Aussolas Martin Cat," in two inimitable pages, which are followed
by another perfect passage of comic drama, the entry into the old
demesne of Aussolas of vulgar Mr. Tebbutts, the would-be tenant:
Away near the house the peacock uttered his defiant screech, a
note of exclamation that seemed entirely appropriate to Aussolas;
the turkey-cock in the yard accepted the challenge with effusion,
and from further away the voice of Mrs. Knox's Kerry bull, equally
instant in taking offence, ascended the gamut of wrath from growl to
yell. Blended with these voices was another--a man's voice, in loud
harangue, advancing down the long beech walk to the kitchen garden.
As it approached the wood-pigeons bolted in panic, with distracted
clappings of wings, from the tall firs by the garden wall in which
they were wont to sit arranging plans of campaign with regard to the
fruit. We sat in silence. The latch of the garden gate clicked, and
the voice said in stentorian tones:
"My father 'e kept a splendid table."
Every gathering of their countrymen--the meet, the run, the horse show,
the races, the regatta, the auction--have an intensity of motion and
character which is achieved not by the tiresome enumerative methods of
some modern realists, but by the skilful selection of the practised
artist, and by a clever condensation of observations--their only form
of exaggeration--gathered over a wide range of times and places.
Finally--the word starts up all too soon--let us praise the powerful
sweep of their narrative, for it is this rapidity and staying power
which sets the crown on their achievement. When they are out with the
hunt, whatever be the quarry, they are as "crabbed leppers" as ever
moved the picturesque admiration of an Irish hunt following. They are
off at the first cry of the hounds and nothing stops them, they drop
over the slaty fences, change feet on the banks, thread the rocky
paths of steep ascents and career down the craggy hills, like Flurry
Knox's mounts to the discomfiture of staider Saxon hunters. With them,
moreover, there is never a check; they gallop hot on the scent from
first to last, and run the story to a triumphant death in an ecstasy
of unquenchable laughter. Their climaxes are marvellous, led up to as
they are by a brilliant and sustained crescendo. Think of the _mêlée_
at the end of "High Tea at McKeown's," or of the "Dane's Breechin',"
with its exquisite interlude of the search for the "pin" in the village
post-office; think of the finale to "Philippa's Foxhunt," with the
Irish clergy and Mrs. Knox pulling the small boy out of the drain; or
of Lady Knox's ominous arrival at the end of "Oh, Love! Oh, Fire!" and
the escape of Sally in Mrs. Knox's pony-chaise, or of the combined
catastrophe that fell upon the Major's household in "A Royal Command."
For pure art in narrative construction these finales are unexampled in
English literature of to-day, all the more because they are free from
all buffoonery. Here is one that starts a movement _con brio_:
A shout from the top of the hill interrupted the amenities of the
check. Flurry was out of the wood blowing shattering blasts upon his
horn, and the hounds rushed to him, knowing the "gone away" note that
was never blown in vain. The brown mare came out through the trees
and the undergrowth like a woodcock down the wind, and jumped across
a stream on to a more than questionable bank; the hounds splashed and
struggled after him, and as they landed the first ecstatic whimpers
broke forth. In a moment it was full cry, discordant, beautiful, and
soul-stirring, as the pack spread and sped, and settled into line.
It is only one of many such. Let me send the reader to his shelf to
take down _In Mr. Knox's Country_, and read "Put Down Two and Carry
One," with its account of the events which led to Miss McRory's riding
pillion behind the Major into the scandalised sight of Lady Knox, or to
expire once more over the mingling of Mrs. McRory's golden butterfly
with Philippa's hat-trimming at the harvest festival ("The Bosom of the
McRorys"). I am compelled to quote, for its rendering of the purely
ludicrous, from the incident of Playboy's nocturnal rescue in "The
Conspiracy of Silence" (_Further Experiences of an I.R.M._). Major
Yeates, as deputy master in Flurry Knox's absence, has taken the hounds
over to hunt with Mr. Flynn, who, after a run full of incident, has
connived at the secretion of Playboy, a fine hound of the old Irish
breed, in a bedroom at the top of the house. The Major is warned of
this by the youngest boy, whose gratitude he has earned by giving him a
mount that day. The pair thereupon grope their way upstairs to raid the
bedroom in its owner's absence:
A dim skylight told that the roof was very near my head; I extended a
groping hand for the wall, and without any warning found my fingers
closing improbably, awfully, upon a warm human face.
[It was the servant, Maggie Kane, bringing up a drumstick of a goose
to pacify the hound. They open the door of the room, and Playboy is
revealed tied to the leg of a low wooden bedstead.] He was standing
up, his eyes gleamed green as emeralds, he looked as big as a calf.
He obviously regarded himself as the guardian of Eugene's bower,
and I failed to see any recognition of me in his aspect, in point
of fact he appeared to be on the verge of an outburst of suspicion
that would waken the house once and for all. We held a council of
war in whispers that perceptibly increased his distrust; I think it
was Maggie Kane who suggested that Master Eddy should proffer him
the bone while I unfastened the rope. The strategy succeeded, almost
too well, in fact. Following the alluring drumstick, Playboy burst
into the passage, towing me after him on the rope. Still preceded by
the light-footed Master Eddy, he took me down the attic stairs at a
speed which was the next thing to a headlong fall, while Maggie Kane
held the candle at the top. As we stormed past old Flynn's door I
was aware that the snoring had ceased, but "the pace was too good to
inquire." We scrimmaged down the second flight into the darkness of
the hall, fetching up somewhere near the clock, which, as if to give
the alarm, uttered three loud and poignant cuckoos. I think Playboy
must have sprung at it, in the belief that it was the voice of the
drumstick; I only know that my arm was nearly wrenched from its
socket, and that the clock fell with a crash from the table to the
floor, where, by some malevolence of its machinery, it continued to
cuckoo with a jocund and implacable persistence. Something that was
not Playboy bumped against me. The cuckoo's note became mysteriously
muffled, and a door, revealing a fire-lit kitchen, was shoved open.
We struggled through it, bound into a sheaf by Playboy's rope, and in
our midst the cuckoo clock, stifled but indomitable, continued its
protest from under Maggie Kane's shawl.
And now, if I may close with a recollection of what is, perhaps, the
most brilliant of all these brilliant narratives, I will call to the
reader's mind the story of "The Pug-nosed Fox," from the same volume.
Every gift of language, delineation, vigorous intensity, dramatic
gradation, and swiftness of progress over a series of crises to a
perfect culmination has been lavished by the authors on this story.
From the misguided efforts of the photographer to take a picture of
the hounds on a sweltering August day, all through the untimely chase
of the old fox to the discovery of Tomsy Flood sewn up in a feather
mattress in the loft of the McRorys' stable, and the raid of the hounds
upon the wedding breakfast at the moment of the entry of the guests,
there is not a moment in which to draw breath. It is life itself, with
all the added quickness to its revolutions and intensity to its vision
that art can give. With this memory I must leave this little classic to
its future, but so that art, rather than criticism, shall have the last
word, a typical passage, showing the authors' ease of transition from
beauty to comedy, shall close this grateful appreciation:
At the top of the hill we took another pull. This afforded us a
fine view of the Atlantic, also of the surrounding country and
all that was therein, with, however, the single exception of the
hounds. There was nothing to be heard save the summery rattle of the
reaping-machine, the strong and steady rasp of a corn-crake, and
the growl of a big steamer from a band of fog that was advancing,
ghost-like, along the blue floor of the sea. Two fields away a man
in a straw hat was slowly combing down the flanks of a haycock
with a wooden rake, while a black-and-white cur slept in the young
after-grass beside him. We broke into their sylvan tranquillity
with a heated demand whether the hounds had passed that way. Shrill
glamour from the dog was at first the only reply; its owner took off
his hat, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, and stared at us.
"I'm as deaf as a beetle this three weeks," he said, continuing to
look us up and down in a way that made me realise, if possible, more
than before, the absurdity of looking like a Christmas card in the
heat of a summer's day.
"Did ye see the HOUNDS?" shouted Michael, shoving the chestnut up
beside him.
"It's the neurology I got," continued the haymaker, "an' the pain
does be whistlin' out through me ear till I could mostly run into the
say from it."
"It's a pity ye wouldn't," said Michael, whirling Moses round.
FORGOTTEN SATIRISTS
By ALDOUS HUXLEY
All readers of the literary Press must often have noticed that the
most ardently contested and the most prolonged controversies, among
all those that fill correspondence columns with the rumour of inkpot
wars, turn almost invariably upon subjects remote from actuality and
of a nature profoundly trivial. Questions of philology and spelling,
questions of dates and names and little odd facts--it is on such
circumscribed arenas that month-long combats clash and sway and would
go on clashing and swaying for ever if it were not for the editor's
tyrannically-imposed peace. To the practical man, intent on the
immediate, as well as to the philosopher in his abstract world of
ideas, this preoccupation with facts that are irrelevant both to the
money-maker and the seeker after truth seems at first sight quite
incomprehensible. But the explanation is simple. We have leisure and
we hate being bored. We must find something that will keep our mind
busy without exhausting it. We might, to be sure, occupy ourselves by
studying the Einstein theory; but the effort, the agony of trying to
think abstractly! No, decidedly the Einstein theory is too much of a
good thing. So we fall back on stamp collecting or on what is more
absorbing even than stamp collecting--on the inexhaustible past. We
turn to history, not for any ambitious Wellsian ideas about humanity,
but for the anecdotes, the innumerable bits of Notes and Queryish
information which a little patience and curiosity can pick up like
shells on a dry beach. How pleasant it is and how restful, after an
effort of abstract reasoning (if one has been unwise enough to make
that effort), to turn to Disraeli's _Curiosities of Literature_ or
to the _Literary Recreations_ of Sir Edward Cook! We are amused,
absorbed, instructed, and all without the least expense of spirit.
What song the sirens sang, what were Mr. Gladstone's favourite Latin
quotations--these things we learn and a thousand more, pleasantly,
effortlessly, without tears.