An Autobiography

by Elizabeth Butler

And now a new country opened out for my admiration and delight in days so long before the dreadful cloud had fallen on it under which I am now writing these Recollections—so long, so long before. It looks like another world to me now. One might say I had had already a sufficiently large share of the earth’s beauties to enjoy, yet here opened out an utterly new and unique experience—Ireland. Our wedding tour was chiefly devoted to the Wild West, with a pause at Glencar, in Kerry. I have tried in happier political times to convey to my readers in another place[7] my impression of that Western country—its freshness, its wild beauty, its entrancing poetry, and that sadness which, like the minor key in music, is the most appealing quality in poetry. That note is utterly absent from the poetry of Italy; there all is in the major, like its national music, so that my mind received, with strange delight, a new sensation, surprising, heart-stirring, appealing. My husband had given me the choice of a local for the wedding tour between Ireland and the Crimea. How could I hesitate?

My first married picture was the one I made studies for in Glencar—“‘Listed for the Connaught Rangers.” I had splendid models for the two Irish recruits who are being marched out of the glen by a recruiting sergeant, followed by the “decoy” private and two drummer boys of that regiment, the old 88th, with the yellow facings of that time. The men were cousins, Foley by name, and wore their national dress, the jacket with the long, white homespun sleeves and the picturesque black hat which I fear is little worn now, and is largely replaced by that quite cosmopolitan peaked cap I loathe. The deep richness of those typical Irish days of cloud and sunshine had so enchanted me that I was determined to try and represent the effect in this picture, which was a departure from my former ones, the landscape occupying an equal share with the figures, and the civilian peasant dress forming the centre of interest. Its black, white and brown colouring, the four red coats and the bright brass of the drum, gave me an enjoyable combination with the blue and red-purple of the mountains in the background, and the sunlight on the middle distance of the stony Kerry bog-land. Here was that variety as to local colour denied me in the other works. It was a joy to realise this subject. The picture was for Mr. Whitehead, the owner of “Balaclava.”

The opening day of my introduction to the Wild West was on a Sunday in that June: “From Limerick Junction to Glencar. I had my first experience of an Irish Mass, and my impression is deepening every day that Ireland is as much a foreign country to England as is France or Italy. The congregation was all new to me. The peasant element had quite a cachet of its own, though in a way an exact equivalent to the Tuscan—the rough-looking men in homespun coats in a crowd inside and outside of the church, the women in national dress; the constabulary, equivalent to the gendarmes, in full dress, mixing with the people and yet not of them. This Limerick Junction was the nucleus of the Fenian nebula. In this terrible Tipperary the stalwart constabulary, whom I greatly admire, have a grave significance. I have never seen finer men than those, and they are of a type new to me. How I enjoy new types, new countries, new customs! The girls, looking so nice in their Bruges-like hoods, are very fresh and comely.

“We left at noon for the goal of our expedition, and I think I may say that I never had a more memorable little journey. The distant mountains I had looked at in the morning took clearer forms and colours by degrees, and the charm of the Irish bogs with their rich black and purple peat-earth, and bright, reedy grass, and teeming wild flowers, developed themselves to my delighted eyes as the train whirled us southwards. At Killarney we took a carriage and set off on my favourite mode of travel, soon entering upon tracts of that wild nature I was most anxious to experience. The evening was deepening, and in its solemn tones I saw for the first time the Wild West Land, whose aspect gradually grew wilder and more strange as we neared the mysterious mountains that rose ahead of us. I was content. I was beginning to taste the salt of the Wilds. What human habitations there are are so like the stone heaps that lie over the face of the land that they are scarcely distinguishable from them; but my ‘contentment’ was much dashed by the sight of the dwellers in this poor land which yields them so little. Very strange, wild figures came to the black doors to watch us pass, with, in some cases, half-witted looks.

“The mighty ‘Carran Thual,’ one of the mountain group which rises out of Glencar and dominates the whole land of Kerry, was on fire with blazing heather, its peaks sending up a glorious column of smoke which spread out at the top for miles and miles, and changed its delicate smoke tints every minute as the sun sank lower. As we reached the rocky pass that took us by the remote Lough Acoose that sun had gone down behind an opposite mountain, and the blazing heather glowed brighter as the twilight deepened, and circles of fire played weirdly on the mountain side. Our glen gave the ‘Saxon bride’ its grandest illumination on her arrival. Wild, strange birds rose from the bracken as we passed, and flew strongly away over lake and mountain torrent, and the little black Kerry cattle all watched us go by with ears pricked and heads inquiringly raised. The last stage of the journey had a brilliant finale. A herd of young horses was in our way in the narrow road, and the creatures careered before us, unable or too stupid to turn aside into the ditches by the roadside to let us through. We could not head them, and for fully a mile did those shaggy, wild things caper and jump ahead, their manes flying out wildly, with the glow from the west shining through them. Some imbecile cows soon joined them in the stampede, for no imaginable reason, unless they enjoyed the fright of being pursued, and the ungainly progress of those recruits was a sight to behold—tails in the air and horns in the dust. With this escort we entered Glencar.”

Nothing that I have seen in my travels since that golden time has in the least dimmed my recollections of that Glencar existence; nor could anything jar against a thing so unique. I have fully recorded in my former book how we made different excursions, always on ponies, every day, not returning till the evening. What impressed me most during these rides was the depth and richness of the Irish landscape colouring. The moisture of the ocean air brings out all its glossy depth. Even without the help of actual sunshine, so essential to the landscape beauty of Italy, the local colour is powerful. In describing to me the same deep colouring in Scotland Millais used the simile of the wet pebble. Take a grey, dry pebble on the seashore and dip it in the water. It will show many lovely tints. Our inn was in the centre of the glen, delightfully rough, and impregnated with that scent of turf smoke which has ever since been to me the subtlest and most touching reminder of those days. Yet with that roughness there was in the primitive little inn a very pleasant provision of such sustenance as old campaigners and fishermen know how to establish in the haunts they visit.

The coast of Clare came next in our journey, where the Atlantic hurls itself full tilt at the iron cliffs, and the west wind, which I learnt to love, comes, without once touching land since it left the coast of Labrador, to fill one with a sense of salt and freshness and health as it rushes into one’s lungs from off the foam. I was interested in making comparisons between that sea and the other “sounding deep” that washes the rocks of Porto Fino as I looked down on the thundering waves below the cliffs of Moher. Here was the simplest and severest colouring—dark green, almost amounting to black; light green, cold and pure; foam so pure that its whiteness had over it a rosy tinge, merely by contrast with the green of the waves, and that was all; whereas the sea around Porto Fino baffles both painter and word-painter with its infinite variety of blues, purples, and greens. These are contrasts that I delight in. How the west wind rushed at us, full of spray! How the ocean roared! It was a revel of wind where we stood at the very edge of those sheer cliffs. Across their black faces sea birds incessantly circled and wheeled, crying with a shrill clamour. That and the booming of the waves many fathoms below, as they leap into the immense caverns, were the only sounds that pierced the wind. The black rocks had ledges of greyer rock, and along these ledges, tier above tier, sat myriads of white-headed gulls, their white heads looking like illumination lamps on the faces of titanic buildings. The Isles of Arran and the mountains of Connemara spread out before us on the ocean, which sparkled in one place with the gold beams of the faint, spray-shrouded sun.

Then good-bye to Erin for the present on July 15th and the establishment of ourselves in London till our return to the Land that held a magnet for us on September 21st. There we paid a visit to the Knight of Kerry, at Valentia Island. What a delightful home! The size of the fuchsia trees told of the mild climate; the scenery was of the remotest and freshest, most pleasing to the senses, and the ever-welcome scent of turf smoke would not be denied in the big house where the sods glowed in the great fireplaces. My surprise, when strolling on one of the innocent little strands by the sea, was great at seeing the Atlantic cable emerging, quite simply, from the water between the pebbles, as though it was nothing in particular. Following it, we reached a very up-to-date building, so out of keeping with the primitive scene, filled with busy clerks transmitting goodness knows what cosmopolitan corruption from the New World to the Old, and vice versâ.

I would not have missed the Valentia pig for anything. A taller, leaner, gaunter specimen has not his match anywhere, not even in the little black hog of Monte Cassino, whose salient hips are so unexpected. There is something particularly arresting in a pig with visible hips.[8] All the animals in the west seemed to me free-and-easy creatures that live with the peasants as members of the family, having a much better time than the humans. They frisk irresponsibly in and out of the cabins—no “by your leave” or “with your leave”—and, altogether, enjoy life to the top of their own highest level. The poorer the people, the greater appears the contrast caused by this inverted state of things.