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."