Part 2

But the tragic note is sounded in the close of "An Irish Cousin"--Miss Martin and Miss Somerville have never lost sight of the abiding dualism enshrined in Moore's verse "Erin, the tear and the smile in thine eyes"--and it dominates their next novel, "Naboth's Vineyard," published in 1891, a sombre romance of the Land League days. Three years later they reached the summit of their achievement in "The Real Charlotte," which still remains their masterpiece, though easily eclipsed in popularity by the irresistible drollery of "Some Experiences of an Irish R.M." To begin with, it does not rely on the appeal to hunting people which in their later work won the heart of the English sportsman. It is a ruthlessly candid study of Irish provincial and suburban life; of the squalors of middle-class households; of garrison hacks and "underbred, finespoken," florid squireens. But secondly and chiefly it repels the larger half of the novel-reading public by the fact that two women have here dissected the heart of one of their sex in a mood of unrelenting realism. While pointing out the pathos and humiliation of the thought that a soul can be stunted by the trivialities of personal appearance, they own to having set down Charlotte Mullen's many evil qualities "without pity." They approach their task in the spirit of Balzac. The book, as we shall see, is extraordinarily rich in both wit and humour, but Charlotte, who cannot control her ruling passion of avarice even in a death chamber, might have come straight out of the pages of the _Comedie Humaine_. Masking her greed, her jealousy and her cruelty under a cloak of loud affability and ponderous persiflage, she was a perfect specimen of the _fausse bonne femme_. Only her cats could divine the strange workings of her mind:

"The movements of Charlotte's character, for it cannot be said to possess the power of development, were akin to those of some amphibious thing whose strong darting course under the water is only marked by a bubble or two, and it required almost an animal instinct to note them. Every bubble betrayed the creature below, as well as the limitations of its power of hiding itself, but people never thought of looking out for these indications in Charlotte, or even suspected that she had anything to conceal. There was an almost blatant simplicity about her, a humorous rough-and-readiness which, joined to her literary culture, proved business capacity, and her dreaded temper, seemed to leave no room for any further aspect, least of all of a romantic kind."

Yet romance of a sort was at the root of Charlotte's character. She had been in love with Roddy Lambert, a showy, handsome, selfish squireen, before he married for money. She had disguised her tenderness under a bluff _camaraderie_ during his first wife's lifetime, and hastened Mrs. Lambert's death by inflaming her suspicions of Roddy's fidelity. It was only when Charlotte was again foiled by Lambert's second marriage to her own niece that her love was turned to gall, and she plotted to compass his ruin.

The authors deal faithfully with Francie FitzPatrick, Charlotte's niece, but an element of compassion mingles with their portraiture. Charlotte had robbed Francie of a legacy, and compounded with her conscience by inviting the girl to stay with her at Lismoyle. Any change was a god-send to poor Francie, who, being an orphan, lived in Dublin with another aunt, a kindly but feckless creature whose eyes were not formed to perceive dirt nor her nose to apprehend smells, and whose ideas of economy was "to indulge in no extras of soap or scrubbing brushes, and to feed her family on strong tea and indifferent bread and butter, in order that Ida's and Mabel's hats might be no whit less ornate than those of their neighbours." In this dingy household Francie had grown up, lovely as a Dryad, brilliantly indifferent to the serious things of life, with a deplorable Dublin accent, ingenuous, unaffected and inexpressibly vulgar. She captivates men of all sorts: Roddy Lambert, who lunched on hot beefsteak pie and sherry; Mr. Hawkins, an amorous young soldier, who treated her with a bullying tenderness and jilted her for an English heiress; and Christopher Dysart, a scholar, a gentleman, and the heir to a baronetcy, who was ruined by self-criticism and diffidence. Francie respected Christopher and rejected him; was thrown over by Hawkins, whom she loved; and married Roddy Lambert, her motives being "poverty, aimlessness, bitterness of soul and instinctive leniency towards any man who liked her." Francie had already exasperated Charlotte by refusing Christopher Dysart: by marrying Lambert she dealt a death-blow to her hopes and drove her into the path of vengeance.

But the story is not only engrossing as a study of vulgarity that is touched with pathos, of the vindictive jealousy of unsunned natures, of the cowardice of the selfish and the futility of the intellectually effete. It is a treasure-house of good sayings, happy comments, ludicrous incidents. When Francie returned to Dublin we read how one of her cousins, "Dottie, unfailing purveyor of diseases to the family, had imported German measles from her school." When Charlotte, nursing her wrath, went to inform the servant at Lambert's house of the return of her master with his new wife, the servant inquired "with cold resignation" whether it was the day after to-morrow:--

"'It is, me poor woman, it is,' replied Charlotte, in the tone of facetious intimacy that she reserved for other people's servants. 'You'll have to stir your stumps to get the house ready for them.'--'The house is cleaned down and ready for them as soon as they like to walk into it,' replied Eliza Hackett, with dignity, 'and if the new lady faults the drawing-room chimbley for not being swep, the master will know it's not me that's to blame for it, but the sweep that's gone dhrilling with the Mileetia.'"

Each of the members of the Dysart family is hit off in some memorable phrase; Sir Benjamin, the old and irascible paralytic, "who had been struck down on his son's coming of age by a paroxysm of apoplectic jealousy "; the admirable and unselfish Pamela with her "pleasant anxious voice"; Christopher, who believed that if only he could "read the 'Field,' and had a more spontaneous habit of cursing," he would be an ideal country gentleman; and Lady Dysart, who was "a clever woman, a renowned solver of acrostics in her society paper, and a holder of strong opinions as to the prophetic meaning of the Pyramids." With her "a large yet refined bonhomie" took the place of tact, but being an Englishwoman she was "constitutionally unable to discern perfectly the subtle grades of Irish vulgarity." Sometimes the authors throw away the _scenario_ for a whole novel in a single paragraph, as in this compressed summary of the antecedents of Captain Cursiter:

"Captain Cursiter was 'getting on' as captains go, and he was the less disposed to regard his junior's love affairs with an indulgent eye, in that he had himself served a long and difficult apprenticeship in such matters, and did not feel that he had profited much by his experiences. It had happened to him at an early age to enter ecstatically into the house of bondage, and in it he had remained with eyes gradually opening to its drawbacks until, a few years before, the death of the only apparent obstacle to his happiness had brought him face to face with its realisation. Strange to say, when this supreme moment arrived, Captain Cursiter was disposed for further delay; but it shows the contrariety of human nature, that when he found himself superseded by his own subaltern, an habitually inebriated viscount, he committed the imbecility of horsewhipping him; and finding it subsequently advisable to leave his regiment, he exchanged into the infantry with the settled conviction that all women were liars."

Nouns and verbs are the bones and sinews of style; it is in the use of epithets and adjectives that the artist is shown; and Miss Martin and Miss Somerville never make a mistake. An episode in the life of one of Charlotte's pets--a cockatoo--is described as occurring when the bird was "a sprightly creature of some twenty shrieking summers." We read of cats who stared "with the expressionless but wholly alert scrutiny of their race"; of the "difficult revelry" of Lady Dysart's garden party when the men were in a hopeless minority and the more honourable women sat on a long bench in "midge-bitten dulness." Such epithets are not decorative, they heighten the effect of the picture. Where adjectives are not really needed, Miss Martin and Miss Somerville can dispense with them altogether and yet attain a deadly precision, as when they describe an Irish beggar as "a bundle of rags with a cough in it," or note a characteristic trait of Roddy Lambert by observing that "he was a man in whom jealousy took the form of reviling the object of his affections, if by so doing he could detach his rivals"--a modern instance of "displiceas aliis, sic ego tutus ero." When Roddy Lambert went away after his first wife's funeral we learn that he "honeymooned with his grief in the approved fashion." These felicities abound on every page; while the turn of phrase of the peasant speech is caught with a fidelity which no other Irish writer has ever surpassed. When Judy Lee, a poor old woman who had taken an unconscionable time in dying was called by one of the gossips who had attended her wake "as nice a woman as ever threw a tub of clothes on the hills," and complimented for having "battled it out well," Norry the Boat replied sardonically:--

"Faith, thin, an' if she did die itself she was in the want of it; sure, there isn't a winther since her daughther wint to America that she wasn't anointed a couple of times. I'm thinking the people th' other side o' death will be throuncin' her for keepin' them waitin' on her this way."

Humour is never more effective than when it emerges from a serious situation. Tragedy jostles comedy in life, and the greatest dramatists and romancers have made wonderful use of this abrupt alternation. There are many painful and diverting scenes in "The Real Charlotte," but none in which both elements are blended so effectively as the story of Julia Duffy's last pilgrimage. Threatened with eviction from her farm by the covetous intrigues of Charlotte, she leaves her sick bed to appeal to her landlord, and when half dead with fatigue falls in with the insane Sir Benjamin, to be driven away with grotesque insults. On her way home she calls in at Charlotte's house, only to find Christopher Dysart reading Rossetti's poems to Francie FitzPatrick, who has just timidly observed, in reply to her instructor's remark that the hero is a pilgrim, "I know a lovely song called 'The Pilgrim of Love'; of course, it wasn't the same thing as what you were reading, but it was awfully nice, too." This interlude is intensely ludicrous, but its cruel incongruity only heightens the misery of what has gone before and what follows.

"The Silver Fox," which appeared in 1897, need not detain us long, though it is a little masterpiece in its way, vividly contrasting the limitations of the sport-loving temperament with the ineradicable superstitions of the Irish peasantry. Impartial as ever, the authors have here achieved a felicity of phrase to which no other writers of hunting novels have ever approached. Imagination's widest stretch cannot picture Surtees or Mr. Nat Gould describing an answer being given "with that level politeness of voice which is the distilled essence of a perfected anger," or comparing a fashionable Amazon with the landscape in such words as these:--

"Behind her the empty window framed a gaunt mountain peak, a lake that frittered a myriad of sparkles from its wealth of restless silver, and the gray and faint purple of the naked wood beyond it. It seemed too great a background for her powdered cheek and her upward glances at her host."

But the atmosphere of "The Silver Fox" is sombre, and a sporting novel which is at once serious and of a fine literary quality must necessarily appeal to a limited audience. The problem is solved to perfection in "Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.," a series of loosely-knit episodes which, after running a serial course in the "Badminton Magazine," were republished in book form towards the close of 1899. There is only one chapter to cloud the otherwise unintermittent hilarity of the whole recital. The authors have dispensed with comment, and rely chiefly on dialogue, incident, and their intimate and precise knowledge of horses, and horse-copers of both sexes. An interested devotion to the noble animal is here shown to be the last infirmity of noble minds, for old Mrs. Knox, with the culture of a _grande dame_ and the appearance of a refined scarecrow, went cub-hunting in a bath chair. In such a company a young sailor whose enthusiasm for the chase had been nourished by the hirelings of Malta, and his eye for points probably formed on circus posters, had little chance of making a good bargain at Drumcurran horse fair:--

"'The fellow's asking forty-five pounds for her,' said Bernard Shute to Miss Sally; 'she's a nailer to gallop. I don't think it's too much.'--'Her grandsire was the Mountain Hare,' said the owner of the mare, hurrying up to continue her family history, 'and he was the grandest horse in the four baronies. He was forty-two years of age when he died, and they waked him the same as ye'd wake a Christian. They had whisky and porther--and bread--and a piper in it.'--'Thim Mountain Hare colts is no great things,' interrupted Mr. Shute's groom, contemptuously. 'I seen a colt once that was one of his stock, and if there was forty men and their wives, and they after him with sticks, he wouldn't lep a sod of turf.'--'Lep, is it!' ejaculated the owner in a voice shrill with outrage. 'You may lead that mare out through the counthry, and there isn't a fence in it that she wouldn't go up to it as indepindent as if she was going to her bed, and your honour's ladyship knows that dam well, Miss Knox.'--'You want too much money for her, McCarthy,' returned Miss Sally, with her air of preternatural wisdom. 'God pardon you, Miss Knox! Sure a lady like you knows well that forty-five pounds is no money for that mare. Forty-five pounds!' He laughed. 'It'd be as good for me to make her a present to the gentleman all out as take three farthings less for her! She's too grand entirely for a poor farmer like me, and if it wasn't for the long, weak family I have, I wouldn't part with her under twice the money.'--'Three fine lumps of daughters in America paying his rent for him,' commented Flurry in the background. 'That's the long, weak family.'"

The turn of phrase in Irish conversation has never been reproduced in print with greater fidelity, and there is hardly a page in the book without some characteristic Hibernianism such as "Whisky as pliable as new milk," or the description of a horse who was a "nice, flippant jumper," or a bandmaster who was "a thrifle fulsome after his luncheon," or a sweep who "raised tallywack and tandem all night round the house to get at the chimbleys." The narrative reaches its climax in the chapter which relates the exciting incidents of Lisheen races at second-hand. Major Yeates and his egregious English visitor Mr. Leigh Kelway, an earnest Radical publicist, having failed to reach the scene, are sheltering from the rain in a wayside public-house where they are regaled with an account of the races by Slipper, the dissipated but engaging huntsman of the local pack of hounds. The close of the meeting was a steeplechase in which "Bocock's owld mare," ridden by one Driscoll, was matched against a horse ridden by another local sportsman named Clancy, and Slipper, who favoured Driscoll, and had taken up his position at a convenient spot on the course, thus describes his mode of encouraging the mare:

"'Skelp her, ye big brute!' says I. 'What good's in ye that ye aren't able to skelp her?'... Well, Mr. Flurry, and gintlemen,... I declare to ye when owld Bocock's mare heard thim roars she stretched out her neck like a gandher, and when she passed me out she give a couple of grunts and looked at me as ugly as a Christian. 'Hah!' says I, givin' her a couple o' dhraws o' th' ash plant across the butt o' the tail, the way I wouldn't blind her, 'I'll make ye grunt!' says I, 'I'll nourish ye!' I knew well she was very frightful of th' ash plant since the winter Tommeen Sullivan had her under a sidecar. But now, in place of havin' any obligations to me, ye'd be surprised if ye heard the blaspheemious expressions of that young boy that was riding her; and whether it was over-anxious he was, turning around the way I'd hear him cursin', or whether it was some slither or slide came to owld Bocock's mare, I dunno, but she was bet up against the last obstackle but two, and before you could say 'Shnipes,' she was standin' on her two ears beyant in th' other field. I declare to ye, on the vartue of me oath, she stood that way till she reconnoithered what side Driscoll would fall, an' she turned about then and rolled on him as cosy as if he was meadow grass!' Slipper stopped short; the people in the doorway groaned appreciatively; Mary Kate murmured 'The Lord save us'--'The blood was druv out through his nose and ears,' continued Slipper, with a voice that indicated the cream of the narration, 'and you'd hear his bones crackin' on the ground! You'd have pitied the poor boy.'--'Good heavens!' said Leigh Kelway, sitting up very straight in his chair. 'Was he hurt, Slipper?' asked Flurry, casually. 'Hurt is it?' echoed Slipper, in high scorn, 'killed on the spot!' He paused to relish the effect of the _denouement_ on Leigh Kelway. 'Oh, divil so pleasant an afthernoon ever you seen; and, indeed, Mr. Flurry, it's what we were all sayin', it was a great pity your honour was not there for the likin' you had for Driscoll.'"

Leigh Kelway, it may be noted, is the lineal descendant of the pragmatic English under-secretary in "Charles O'Malley," who, having observed that he had never seen an Irish wake, was horrified by the prompt offer of his Galway host, a notorious practical joker, to provide a corpse on the spot. But this is only one of the instances of parallelism in which the later writers though showing far greater restraint and fidelity to type, have illustrated the continuance of temperamental qualities which Lever and his forerunner Maxwell--the author of "Wild Sports of the West"--portrayed in a more extravagant form. On the other hand it would be impossible to imagine a greater contrast than that between Lever's thrasonical narrator heroes and Major Yeates, R.M., whose fondness for sport is allied to a thorough consciousness of his own infirmities as a sportsman. There is no heroic figure in "Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.," but the characters are all lifelike, and at least half-a-dozen--"Flurry" Knox, his cousin Sally, and his old grandmother, Mrs. Knox, of Aussolas, Slipper, Mrs. Cadogan, and the incomparable Maria--form as integral a part of our circle of acquaintance as if we had known them in real life. "The Real Charlotte" is a greater achievement, but the R.M. is a surer passport to immortality.

The further instalment of "Experiences," published a few years later did not escape the common lot of sequels. They were brilliantly written, but one was more conscious of the excellence of the manner than in any of their other works. The two volumes of short stories and sketches published in 1903 and 1906 under the titles of "All on the Irish Shore" and some "Irish Yesterdays" respectively show some new and engaging aspects of the genius of the collaborators. There is a chapter called "Children of the Captivity," in which the would-be English humorist's conception of Irish humour is dealt with faithfully--as it deserves to be. The essay is also remarkable for the passage in which they set down once and for all the true canons for the treatment of dialect. Pronunciation and spelling, as they point out, are, after all, of small account in its presentment:--

"The vitalising power is in the rhythm of the sentence, the turn of phrase, the knowledge of idiom, and of, beyond all, the attitude of mind.... The shortcoming is, of course, trivial to those who do not suffer because of it, but want of perception of word and phrase and turn of thought means more than mere artistic failure, it means want of knowledge of the wayward and shrewd and sensitive minds that are at the back of the dialect. The very wind that blows softly over brown acres of bog carries perfumes and sounds that England does not know; the women digging the potato-land are talking of things that England does not understand. The question that remains is whether England will ever understand."

The hunting sketches in these volumes include the wonderful "Patrick Day's Hunt," which is a masterpiece in the high _bravura_ of the brogue. Another is noticeable for a passage on the affection inspired by horses. When Johnny Connolly heard that his mistress was driven to sell the filly he had trained and nursed so carefully, he did not disguise his disappointment:

"'Well, indeed, that's too bad, miss,' said Johnny comprehendingly. 'There was a mare I had one time, and I sold her before I went to America. God knows, afther she went from me, whenever I'd look at her winkers hanging on the wall I'd have to cry. I never seen a sight of her till three years afther that, afther I coming home. I was coming out o' the fair at Enniscar, an' I was talking to a man an' we coming down Dangan Hill, and what was in it but herself coming up in a cart! An' I didn't look at her, good nor bad, nor know her, but sorra bit but she knew me talking, an' she turned into me with the cart. 'Ho, ho, ho!' says she, and she stuck her nose into me like she'd be kissing me. Be dam, but I had to cry. An' the world wouldn't stir her out o' that till I'd lead her on meself. As for cow nor dog nor any other thing, there's nothing would rise your heart like a horse!'"

And if horses are irresistible, so are Centaurs. That is the moral to be drawn from "Dan Russel the Fox," the latest work from the pen of Miss Somerville and Miss Martin, in which the rival claims of culture and foxhunting are subjected to a masterly analysis.