Every gathering of their countrymen—the meet, the run, the horse show, the races, the regatta, the auction—have an intensity of motion and character which is achieved not by the tiresome enumerative methods of some modern realists, but by the skilful selection of the practised artist, and by a clever condensation of observations—their only form of exaggeration—gathered over a wide range of times and places.
Finally—the word starts up all too soon—let us praise the powerful sweep of their narrative, for it is this rapidity and staying power which sets the crown on their achievement. When they are out with the hunt, whatever be the quarry, they are as "crabbed leppers" as ever moved the picturesque admiration of an Irish hunt following. They are off at the first cry of the hounds and nothing stops them, they drop over the slaty fences, change feet on the banks, thread the rocky paths of steep ascents and career down the craggy hills, like Flurry Knox's mounts to the discomfiture of staider Saxon hunters. With them, moreover, there is never a check; they gallop hot on the scent from first to last, and run the story to a triumphant death in an ecstasy of unquenchable laughter. Their climaxes are marvellous, led up to as they are by a brilliant and sustained crescendo. Think of the mêlée at the end of "High Tea at McKeown's," or of the "Dane's Breechin'," with its exquisite interlude of the search for the "pin" in the village post-office; think of the finale to "Philippa's Foxhunt," with the Irish clergy and Mrs. Knox pulling the small boy out of the drain; or of Lady Knox's ominous arrival at the end of "Oh, Love! Oh, Fire!" and the escape of Sally in Mrs. Knox's pony-chaise, or of the combined catastrophe that fell upon the Major's household in "A Royal Command." For pure art in narrative construction these finales are unexampled in English literature of to-day, all the more because they are free from all buffoonery. Here is one that starts a movement con brio:
A shout from the top of the hill interrupted the amenities of the check. Flurry was out of the wood blowing shattering blasts upon his horn, and the hounds rushed to him, knowing the "gone away" note that was never blown in vain. The brown mare came out through the trees and the undergrowth like a woodcock down the wind, and jumped across a stream on to a more than questionable bank; the hounds splashed and struggled after him, and as they landed the first ecstatic whimpers broke forth. In a moment it was full cry, discordant, beautiful, and soul-stirring, as the pack spread and sped, and settled into line.
It is only one of many such. Let me send the reader to his shelf to take down In Mr. Knox's Country, and read "Put Down Two and Carry One," with its account of the events which led to Miss McRory's riding pillion behind the Major into the scandalised sight of Lady Knox, or to expire once more over the mingling of Mrs. McRory's golden butterfly with Philippa's hat-trimming at the harvest festival ("The Bosom of the McRorys"). I am compelled to quote, for its rendering of the purely ludicrous, from the incident of Playboy's nocturnal rescue in "The Conspiracy of Silence" (Further Experiences of an I.R.M.). Major Yeates, as deputy master in Flurry Knox's absence, has taken the hounds over to hunt with Mr. Flynn, who, after a run full of incident, has connived at the secretion of Playboy, a fine hound of the old Irish breed, in a bedroom at the top of the house. The Major is warned of this by the youngest boy, whose gratitude he has earned by giving him a mount that day. The pair thereupon grope their way upstairs to raid the bedroom in its owner's absence:
A dim skylight told that the roof was very near my head; I extended a groping hand for the wall, and without any warning found my fingers closing improbably, awfully, upon a warm human face.
[It was the servant, Maggie Kane, bringing up a drumstick of a goose to pacify the hound. They open the door of the room, and Playboy is revealed tied to the leg of a low wooden bedstead.] He was standing up, his eyes gleamed green as emeralds, he looked as big as a calf. He obviously regarded himself as the guardian of Eugene's bower, and I failed to see any recognition of me in his aspect, in point of fact he appeared to be on the verge of an outburst of suspicion that would waken the house once and for all. We held a council of war in whispers that perceptibly increased his distrust; I think it was Maggie Kane who suggested that Master Eddy should proffer him the bone while I unfastened the rope. The strategy succeeded, almost too well, in fact. Following the alluring drumstick, Playboy burst into the passage, towing me after him on the rope. Still preceded by the light-footed Master Eddy, he took me down the attic stairs at a speed which was the next thing to a headlong fall, while Maggie Kane held the candle at the top. As we stormed past old Flynn's door I was aware that the snoring had ceased, but "the pace was too good to inquire." We scrimmaged down the second flight into the darkness of the hall, fetching up somewhere near the clock, which, as if to give the alarm, uttered three loud and poignant cuckoos. I think Playboy must have sprung at it, in the belief that it was the voice of the drumstick; I only know that my arm was nearly wrenched from its socket, and that the clock fell with a crash from the table to the floor, where, by some malevolence of its machinery, it continued to cuckoo with a jocund and implacable persistence. Something that was not Playboy bumped against me. The cuckoo's note became mysteriously muffled, and a door, revealing a fire-lit kitchen, was shoved open. We struggled through it, bound into a sheaf by Playboy's rope, and in our midst the cuckoo clock, stifled but indomitable, continued its protest from under Maggie Kane's shawl.
And now, if I may close with a recollection of what is, perhaps, the most brilliant of all these brilliant narratives, I will call to the reader's mind the story of "The Pug-nosed Fox," from the same volume. Every gift of language, delineation, vigorous intensity, dramatic gradation, and swiftness of progress over a series of crises to a perfect culmination has been lavished by the authors on this story. From the misguided efforts of the photographer to take a picture of the hounds on a sweltering August day, all through the untimely chase of the old fox to the discovery of Tomsy Flood sewn up in a feather mattress in the loft of the McRorys' stable, and the raid of the hounds upon the wedding breakfast at the moment of the entry of the guests, there is not a moment in which to draw breath. It is life itself, with all the added quickness to its revolutions and intensity to its vision that art can give. With this memory I must leave this little classic to its future, but so that art, rather than criticism, shall have the last word, a typical passage, showing the authors' ease of transition from beauty to comedy, shall close this grateful appreciation:
At the top of the hill we took another pull. This afforded us a fine view of the Atlantic, also of the surrounding country and all that was therein, with, however, the single exception of the hounds. There was nothing to be heard save the summery rattle of the reaping-machine, the strong and steady rasp of a corn-crake, and the growl of a big steamer from a band of fog that was advancing, ghost-like, along the blue floor of the sea. Two fields away a man in a straw hat was slowly combing down the flanks of a haycock with a wooden rake, while a black-and-white cur slept in the young after-grass beside him. We broke into their sylvan tranquillity with a heated demand whether the hounds had passed that way. Shrill glamour from the dog was at first the only reply; its owner took off his hat, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, and stared at us.
"I'm as deaf as a beetle this three weeks," he said, continuing to look us up and down in a way that made me realise, if possible, more than before, the absurdity of looking like a Christmas card in the heat of a summer's day.
"Did ye see the HOUNDS?" shouted Michael, shoving the chestnut up beside him.
"It's the neurology I got," continued the haymaker, "an' the pain does be whistlin' out through me ear till I could mostly run into the say from it."
"It's a pity ye wouldn't," said Michael, whirling Moses round.