The adverse opinion of her old and once-trusted comrade, Mrs. X., in the matter of “The Delegate” was not the only trial of the kind that Mrs. Martin had to face. I imagine that few things in her life had given her as much pleasure as Violet’s success as a writer. She had a very highly cultured taste, and her literary judgment, builded as it was upon the rock of the classics, was as sound as it was fastidious. Had a conflict been pressed between it and maternal pride, I believe the latter would have been worsted. Fortunately, her critical faculty permitted her to extend to Martin’s writing the same entire approval that she bestowed upon her in all other regards. It is usual to make merry over a mother’s glorying in her young, but there are few things more touching than to see a brilliant creature, whose own glories are past, renew her youth, and yet forget it, in the rising sun of a child’s success.
No one expects to be a prophet in his own country, but when Martin and I first began to write, we have sometimes felt as if a mean might have been discovered between receiving our books with the trumpets and shawms, suggested by Sir William Gregory, and treating them as regrettable slips, over which a cloak of kindly silence was to be flung. My cousin Nannie and—though in less degree—my mother, were both out for trumpets, and the silence of their acquaintances (a silence that Martin and I did not fail to assure them was compassionate) filled them with wrath that only each other’s sympathy could assuage. (It is, I am sure, unnecessary to say that each was comfortingly aware that her own daughter had done all the work. But this did not invalidate the sympathy.)
The formula touching the superfluity of kneebuckles to the Highlander was, however, sustaining; and this was fortunate, as each of Martin’s articles, as they appeared in the World, called it into requisition. If “The Delegate” had staggered the Highlanders, they literally reeled when “Cheops in Connemara” was offered for their learning by Mrs. Martin, who had a pathetic hope, never realised, that some day they might find grace and understanding.
It was of “Cheops” that a lady, who may be called Mrs. Brown, said to my cousin Nannie,
“Oh, Mrs. Martin, I loved it! It was so nice! I couldn’t quite understand it, though I read it twice over, but I showed it to Mr. Brown, and he solved the problem!”
Wonderful man, as Martin commented when she wrote the story to me.
It was this same Mr. Brown whose criticism of the “Irish Cousin,” wrung from him by Mrs. Martin, was so encouraging.
“I found it,” he wrote, “highly imaginative, but not nonsensical, unusual in a work of legendary character. In fact, it is not bosh!”
The singular spring from the clouds to every day’s most common slang was typical of good Mr. Brown. He is now beyond the clouds, or, in any case, is, I am sure, where he will not be offended if I recall one or two of his pulpit utterances. In my diary at this time I find: “Interesting sermon. Mr. Brown told us that ‘a sin, though very great, is not as great as one that exceeds it; but remember that sin can only find entrance in a heart prepared for it, even as matches strike only on the box. And oh friends, it is useless to trust in those whose names are fragrant in Christian society to pull you through.’”
Martin was much attached to Mr. Brown, who was as kind a man, and as worthy a parson, as ever was great-grandson to Mrs. Malaprop. In a letter to me she says: