Martin Ross

“ Linked inseparably with those years of London life was my mother’s cousin, W. G. Wills, the playwright, poet and painter, who in these early ’seventies had suddenly achieved celebrity as a dramatist, with the tragedy of “Charles I.” If a record could be discovered of the hierarchs of the Bohemians it would open of itself at the name of Willie Wills. Great gifts of play-writing and portrait-painting rained upon him a reputation that he never troubled himself about; he remained unalterably himself, and, clad in his long grey ulster, lived in his studio a life unfettered by the clock. ”

“ February is a bad month for the West of Ireland, but there are places, like people, that rely on features and are independent of complexion. Ross was grey and cold, windy, rainy, and snowy, but its beauty did not fail. Martin and I heeded the occasional ill-temper of the weather as little as two of the wild duck whom we so assiduously strove to shoot. We had been lent a boat and a gun, and there are not many pleasanter things to do in a still February twilight than to paddle quietly along the winding waterways among the tall pale reeds of Ross Lake ”

“ Martin and Rickeen and I discoursed, I remember, for some time upon these subjects. The mysterious pack of white hounds who hunt the woods of Ross, whose music has been heard more than once, and the sight of which has been vouchsafed to some few favoured ones, was touched on, and Martin told of an Appearance that had come to her and some of her brothers and sisters, one dusky evening, in the Ross avenue. Something that was first like a woman walking quickly towards them, and then rose, vast and toppling, like a high load of hay, and then sank down into nothingness. ”

“ Rooks in the tall elms behind the stables, feeding their young ones, made a pleasing undercurrent of accompaniment to the Puppet’s soprano solo. There was a bloom of green over the larches; scraps of silver glinting between the tree stems represented the lake. The languor of spring was in the air, and it seemed exercise enough to watch Rickeen’s wondrous deftness in marking, cutting, and lifting the scraws on the blade of his narrow spade, and tossing them accurately on to their appointed spot on the rising wall.
Martin had a Maltese charm against the “Mal Occhio” ”

“ Those were light-hearted days, yet they were indelible in Robert’s memory, and the strength and savour of the old Galway times were in them as inextricably as the smell of the turf smoke and the bog myrtle. Nothing was conventional or stagnant, things were done on the spur of the moment, and with a total disregard for pomps and vanities, and everyone preferred good fun to a punctual dinner. Mingling with all were the poor people, with their cleverness, their good manners, and their unflagging spirits ”

“ I can see Rickeen on a fair May morning pulling off his black slouch hat to Martin and me, with the shine of the sun on his high forehead, on which rings of sparse black hair straggled, his dark eyes beaming, and I can hear his soft-tuned Galway voice saying:
“Well, glory be to God, Miss Wilet, this is a grand day! And great growth entirely in the weather! Faith, I didn’t think to see it so good at all to-day, there was two o’ thim planets close afther the moon last night!” ”

“ The Martins’ house in Dublin was one of the gathering places for the clans of the family. Dublin society still existed in those days; things went with a swing, and there was a tingle in life. Probably there was no place in the kingdom where a greater number of pleasant people were to be met with. Jovial, unconventional, radiant with good looks, unfailing in agreeability, they hunted, they danced, they got up theatricals and concerts, they—the elder ones, at least—went to church with an equal enthusiasm, and fought to the death over the relative merits of their pet parsons. ”

“ He was born on June 17th, 1846, the first year of the Irish famine, when Ireland brimmed with a potato-fed population, and had not as yet discovered America. The quietness of untroubled centuries lay like a spell on Connemara, the country of his ancestors; the old ways of life were unquestioned at Ross, and my father went and came among his people in an intimacy as native as the soft air they breathed. On the crowded estate the old routine of potato planting and turf cutting was pursued tranquilly ”

“ We walked enormously; visiting the people in the little villages on the estate, making exciting and precarious short cuts across bogs; getting “bushed” in those strange wildernesses, where hazel and blackthorn scrub has squeezed up between the thick-sown limestone boulders of West Galway, and a combination has resulted that makes as impenetrable a barrier as can well be imagined. We wandered in the lovely Wood of Annagh, lovely always, but loveliest as I saw it later on, in April, when primroses, like faint sunlight, illumined every glade and filled the wood with airs of Paradise. ”

“ 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. ”

“ London may be attractive or repellent, but it will be heard, and it made strong music for a nature that loved the stir of men and the encounter of minds. Four hundred miles away lay Ross in the whispering stillness of its summer woods, and the monotony of its winter winds, producing heavy bags of woodcock{32} after its kind, while its master “shot folly as she flew,” and found his game in the canards of Fleet Street and Westminster. It was inevitable as things stood, but in that alienation both missed much that lay in the power of each to give. ”

“ Two griefs, the death of her eldest brother, Robert, and of the sister next to her in age, Edith Dawson, struck her with a force that can best be measured by what the loss of two people so entirely lovable meant to others less near to them than she. Handsome and amusing, charming and generous, one may go on heaping up adjectives, yet come no nearer to explaining to those who did not know Edith what was lost when she died. Many of the times to which Martin looked back with most enjoyment were spent with Edith and her husband, Cuthbert Dawson. ”

“ Reading aloud rounded off the close of those early days at Ross, Shakespeare and Walter Scott, Napier and Miss Edgeworth; the foundation of literary culture was well and truly laid, and laid with respect and enthusiasm, so that what the boy’s mind did not grasp was stored up for his later understanding, among things to be venerated, and fine diction and choice phrase were imprinted upon an ear that was ever retentive of music. Everyone who remembers his childhood remembers him singing songs and playing the piano. ”

“ Splendid feuds, thoroughly made, solid, and without a crack into which any importunate dove could insert so much as an olive-leaf.
Ireland was, in those days, a forcing bed for individuality. Men and women, of the upper classes, were what is usually described as “a law unto themselves,” which is another way of saying that they broke those of all other authorities. That the larger landowners were, as a class, honourable, reasonably fair-minded, and generous, as is not, on the whole, disputed, is a credit to their native kindliness and good breeding. ”

“ Martin had a very special gift of encouraging people to talk to her. There was something magnetic about her, some power of sympathy and extraction combined. Together with this she had a singular gift of toleration for stupid people, even of enjoyment of stupidity, if sincerity, and a certain virtuous anxiety, accompanied it. She was wont to declare that the personal offices of a good and dull person were pleasing to her. The fumbling efforts, the laboured breathing of one endeavouring—let us say—to untie her veil; a man, for choice, frightened, but thoroughly well-intentioned and humble. ”

“ On the Ross estate a new agent had inaugurated a new policy, excellent in theory, abhorrent to those whom it concerned, the “striping” of many of the holdings, in order to give to each tenant an equal share of good and bad land. Anyone who knows the Irish tenant will immediately understand what it means to interfere with his land, and, above all things, to give to another tenant any part of it. It was done nevertheless. The long lines of stone wall ran symmetrically parallel over hill and pasture and bog, and the symmetry was hateful and the equality bitter to those most concerned. ”

“ For anyone who knew the perfection of Martin’s rendering of the tones of West Galway, of the gestures, the pauses, that give the life of a story, the words lying dead on the page are only a pain. Perhaps, some day, portable and bindable phonography will be as much part of a book as its pictures are.
Phonetic spelling in matters of dialect is a delusive thing, to be used with the utmost restraint. It is superfluous for those who know, boring for those who do not. ”

“ Martin once wrote that “the essence of good housekeeping is to make people eat things that they naturally dislike. Ingredients that must, for the sacred sake of economy, be utilised, are rarely attractive, but the good housekeeper can send the most nauseous of them to heaven, in a curry, as in a chariot of fire.”
It must be admitted that neither artistic housekeeping, nor even the lower branches of the art, were my cousin Nannie’s strong suit. It is related of her that one day, returning from a tea-party, she remembered that her household lacked some minor need. ”

“ The aim of the foregoing résumé of family history has been to put forward only such things as seem to have been determining in the environment and heritage to which Robert was born. The chivalrous past of Galway, the close intimacy with the people, the loyalty to family ties, were the traditions among which he was bred; the Protestant instinct, and a tolerance for the sister religion, born of sympathy and personal respect, had preceded him for two generations, and a store of shrewd humour and common sense had been laid by in the family for the younger generation to profit by if they wished. ”

“ Between those points, among those heavenly blues and greens and purples, that change and glow and melt into each other in ecstasies of passionate colour, history has been made, and unforgettable things have happened. But standing up there in the wind and the sun, on that small green circle of grass, hearing the sea-birds’ wild and restless cries, watching the waves lift and break into snow on the flanks of the Stag Rocks far below, it is impossible to remember human insanity, impossible to think of anything save of the overwhelming beauty that encircles you. ”

“ There are dangerous elements in Ireland, and strong ones, Irish-American, Gaelic League, Sinn Fein, and what I feel very uncertain about is whether straight and genuine and tolerant people, like you, will have the power to control them. With the Home Rule banner gone, what is to keep them in hand?... I am sure that you will despise this feeling on my part. You feel that the Church of Rome is with you, and that with its help all will fall into line. And you feel that men of high and practical talent are with you and must prevail.... ”

“ There was no change made in the destined professions for the sons; it was on themselves that my father and mother economised; and with effort, and forethought, and sheer self-denial, somehow they “made good,” and pulled through those bad years of the early ‘eighties, when rents were unpaid, and crops failed, and Parnell and his wolf-pack were out for blood, and the English Government flung them, bit by bit, the property of the only men in Ireland who, faithful to the pitch of folly, had supported it since the days of the Union. ”

“ Thus my cousin concludes her story, not without a certain approbation of our ancestress.
Indisputably the coming of the Palefaces slackened the moral fibre of Castle Townshend; the fire has gone out of the fights and the heat out of the hatreds. I do not claim for the later generations a higher standard; peace is mainly ensued by lack of concentration; it is not so much that we forgive, as that we forget. ”

“ We had rooms in a tall and filthy old house in the Rue Madame, one of those sinister and dark and narrow streets that one finds in the Rive Gauche, that seem as if they must harbour all variety of horrors, known and unknown, and are composed of houses whose incredible discomforts would break the spirit of any creature less inveterate in optimism than an Art student. ”

“ It was Fanny Currey, by the way, who called Patsey “The Puppet” (as a variant of “The Puppy”) . There are not many people with any pretensions to light and leading who did not know Miss Fanny Currey of Lismore. She is dead now, and Ireland is a poorer place for her loss. I will not now try to speak of her brilliance and versatility. She was, among her many gifts, a profound and learned dog-owner, and though her taste had been somewhat perverted by dachshunds (which can degenerate into a very lowering habit) , it was an honour to any little dog to be noticed by her. ”