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:—