I think that the final impulse towards the career of letters was given to us by that sorceress of whom mention has already been made. By her we were assured of much that we did, and even more that we did not aspire to (which included two husbands for me, and at least one for Martin); but in the former category was included “literary success,” and, with that we took heart and went forward.

It was in October, 1887, that we began what was soon to be known to us as “The Shocker,” and “The Shaughraun,” to our family generally, as “that nonsense of the girls,” and subsequently, to the general public, as “An Irish Cousin.” Seldom have the young and ardent “commenced author” under less conducive circumstances. We were resented on so many grounds. Waste of time; the arrogance of having conceived such a project; and, chiefly, the abstention of two playmates. They called us “The Shockers,” “The Geniuses” (this in bitter irony), “The Hugger-muggerers” (this flight of fancy was my mother’s); when not actually reviled, we were treated with much the same disapproving sufferance that is shown to an outside dog who sneaks into the house on a wet day. We compared ourselves, not without reason, to the Waldenses and the Albigenses, and hid and fled about the house, with the knowledge that every man’s hand was against us.

Begun in idleness and without conviction, persecution had its usual effect, and deepened somewhat tepid effort into enthusiasm, but the first genuine literary impulse was given by a visit to an old and lonely house, that stands on the edge of the sea, some twelve or thirteen miles from Drishane. It was at that time inhabited by a distant kinswoman of mine, a pathetic little old spinster lady, with the most charming, refined, and delicate looks, and a pretty voice, made interesting by the old-fashioned Irish touch in it; provincial, in that it told of life in a province, yet entirely compatible with gentle breeding. She called me “Eddith,” I remember (a pronunciation entirely her own), and she addressed the remarkable being who ushered us in, half butler, half coachman, as “Dinnis,” and she asked us to “take a glass of wine” with her, and, apologising for the all too brief glimpse of the fire vouchsafed to the leg of mutton, said she trusted we did not mind the meat being “rare.”

The little lady who entertained us is dead now; the old house, stripped of its ancient portraits and furniture, is, like many another, in the hands of farmer-people; its gardens have reverted to jungle. I wonder if the tombstone of the little pet dog has been respected. In the shade of a row of immense junipers, that made a sheltering hedge between the flower garden and the wide Atlantic, stood the stone, inscribed, with the romantic preciosity of our hostess’s youth,

But it was the old house, dying even then, that touched our imaginations; full of memories of brave days past, when the little lady’s great-grandfather, “Splendid Ned,” had been a leading blade in “The County of Corke Militia Dragoons,” and his son, her grandfather, had raised a troop of yeomanry to fight the Whiteboys, and, when the English Government disbanded the yeomen, had, in just fury, pitched their arms over the cliff into the sea, rather than yield them to the rebels, and had then drunk the King’s health, with showy loyalty, in claret that had never paid the same King a farthing.

We had ridden the long thirteen miles in gorgeous October sunshine; before we had seen the gardens, and the old castle on the cliff, and the views generally, the sun was low in the sky, but we were not allowed to leave until a tea, as colossal as our lunch had been, was consumed. Our protests were unheeded, and we were assured that we should be “no time at all springing through the country home.” (A suggestion that moved Martin so disastrously, that only by means of hasty and forced facetiousness was I enabled to justify her reception of it.) The sunset was red in the west when our horses were brought round to the door, and it was at that precise moment that into the Irish Cousin some thrill of genuineness was breathed. In the darkened faÇade of the long grey house, a window, just over the hall-door, caught our attention. In it, for an instant, was a white face. Trails of ivy hung over the panes, but we saw the face glimmer there for a minute and vanish.

As we rode home along the side of the hills, and watched the fires of the sunset sink into the sea, and met the crescent moon coming with faint light to lead us home, we could talk and think only of that presence at the window. We had been warned of certain subjects not to be approached, and knew enough of the history of that old house to realise what we had seen. An old stock, isolated from the world at large, wearing itself out in those excesses that are a protest of human nature against unnatural conditions, dies at last with its victims round its death-bed. Half-acknowledged, half-witted, wholly horrifying; living ghosts, haunting the house that gave them but half their share of life, yet withheld from them, with half-hearted guardianship, the boon of death.

The shock of it was what we had needed, and with it “the Shocker” started into life, or, if that is too much to say for it, its authors, at least, felt that conviction had come to them; the insincere ambition of the “Penny Dreadful” faded, realities asserted themselves, and the faked “thrills” that were to make our fortunes were repudiated for ever. Little as we may have achieved it, an ideal of Art rose then for us, far and faint as the half-moon, and often, like her, hidden in clouds, yet never quite lost or forgotten.

* * * * *

Probably all those who have driven the pen, in either single or double harness, are familiar with the questions wont to be propounded by those interested, or anxious to appear interested, in the craft of letters. It is strange how beaten a track curiosity uses. The inquiries vary but little. One type of investigator regards the mÉtier of book-maker as a kind of cross between the trades of cook and conjurer. If the recipe of the mixture, or the trick of its production, can be extracted from those possessed of the secret, the desired result can be achieved as simply as a rice pudding, and forced like a card upon the publishers. The alternative inquirer approaches the problem from the opposite pole, and poses respectfully that conundrum with which the Youth felled Father William:

“What makes you so awfully clever?” “How do you think of the things?” And again, “How can you make the words come one after the other?” And yet another, more wounding, though put in all good feeling, “But how do you manage about the spelling? I suppose the printers do that for you?”

With Martin and me, however, the fact of our collaboration admitted of variants. I have found a fragment of a letter of mine to her that sets forth some of these. As it also in some degree expounds the type of the examiner, I transcribe it all.

The question put by this lady, as to which of us held the pen, has ever been considered of the greatest moment, and, as a matter of fact, during our many years of collaboration, it was a point that never entered our minds to consider. To those who may be interested in an unimportant detail, I may say that our work was done conversationally. One or the other—not infrequently both, simultaneously—would state a proposition. This would be argued, combated perhaps, approved, or modified; it would then be written down by the (wholly fortuitous) holder of the pen, would be scratched out, scribbled in again; before it found itself finally transferred into decorous MS. would probably have suffered many things, but it would, at all events, have had the advantage of having been well aired.

I have an interesting letter, written by a very clever woman, herself a writer, to a cousin of ours. She found it impossible to believe in the jointness of the authorship, though she admitted her inability to discern the joints in the writing, and having given “An Irish Cousin” a handling far more generous than it deserves, says:

“But though I think the book a success, and cannot pick out the fastenings of the two hands, I yet think the next novel ought to be by one of them. I wonder by which! I say this because I thought the conception and carrying out of ‘Willy’ much the best part of the character drawing of the whole book. It had the real thing in it. If Willy, and the poor people’s talk, were by one hand, that hand is the better of the two, say I!”

I sent this letter to Martin, and had “the two hands” collaborated in her reply, it could not more sufficingly have expressed my feelings.

On January 3rd, 1888, we had finished the first half of “An Irish Cousin.”

I find in my diary: “A few last revisionary scratches at the poor Shocker, and so farewell for the present. Gave it to mother to read. She loathes it.”

All through the spring months we wrote and rewrote, and clean-copied, and cast away the clean copies illegible from corrections. Intermittently, and as we could, we wrote on, and in Martin’s diary I find a quotation from an old part-song that expressed the general attitude towards us:

Martin and I were the dolphin and the stag. As a propitiatory measure the Shocker was read aloud at intervals, but with no great success. Our families declined to take us seriously, but none the less offered criticisms, incessant, and mutually destructive. In connection with this point, and as a warning to other beginners, I will offer a few quotations from letters of this period.

Following on this, a protest is recorded from another relative, on the use of the expression “he ran as if the devil were after him,” but the letter ends with a reassuring postscript.

“Mother has just said that she thought Chapter IX excellent, ‘most fiery love’; though she said it had rather taken her by surprise, as she ‘had not noticed a stream of love leading up to it—only jealousy.’”

At length, in London, on May 24th, the end, which had seemed further off than the end of the world, came. The MS., fairly and beautifully copied,—typewriters being then unborn,—was sent off to Messrs. Sampson Low. In a month it returned, without comment. We then, with, as Dr. Johnson says, “a frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure, or from praise,” placed it in the hands of a friend to do with it as he saw fit, and proceeded to forget all about it.

It was not until the following December that the dormant Shocker suddenly woke to life. It was on Sunday morning, December 2nd, 1888, that the fateful letter came. Messrs. R. Bentley & Son offered us £25 on publication, and £25 on sale of 500 copies of the book, which was to be published in two volumes at half a guinea each.

“All comment is inadequate,” says Martin’s diary; “wrote a dizzy letter of acceptance to Bentley, and went to church, twice, in a glorified trance.”

(Thus did a huntsman of mine, having slain two foxes in a morning, which is a rarer feat in Carbery than—say—in Cheshire, present himself in gratitude at the priest’s night-school.)

Passing over intermediate matters, I will follow the career of the Shocker, which was not published for six months after its assignment to Messrs. Bentley, six months during which Martin had written several admirable articles for The World (then edited by Mr. Edmund Yates), and I had illustrated a picture-book, “The Kerry Recruit,” and written an indifferent short story, and we had begun to think about “The Real Charlotte.” For some reason that I have now forgotten, my mother was opposed to my own name appearing in “An Irish Cousin.” Martin’s nom de plume was ready to hand, her articles in The World having been signed “Martin Ross,” but it was only after much debate and searching of pedigrees that a Somerville ancestress, by name Geilles Herring, was selected to face the music for me. Her literary career was brief, and was given a death-blow by Edmund Yates, who asked “Martin Ross” the reason of her collaboration with a grilled herring; and as well as I remember, my own name was permitted to appear in the second edition.

This followed the first with a pleasing celerity, and was sold out by the close of the year. Any who have themselves been through the mill, and know what it is to bring forth a book, will remember the joys, and fears, and indignations, and triumphings, that accompany the appearance of a first-born effort. Many and various were the letters and criticisms. Our vast relationship made an advertising agency of the most far-reaching and pervasive nature, and our friends were faithful in their insistence in the matter at the libraries.

“Have you ‘An Irish Cousin?’” was demanded at a Portsmouth bookshop.

“No, Madam,” the bookseller replied, with hauteur, “I have no H’Irish relations.”

Looking back on it now, I recognise that what was in itself but a very moderate and poorly constructed book owed its success, not only with the public, but with the reviewers, to the fact that it chanced to be the first in its particular field. Miss Edgeworth had been the last to write of Irish country life with sincerity and originality, dealing with both the upper and lower classes, and dealing with both unconventionally. Lever’s brilliant and extravagant books, with their ever enchanting Micky Frees and Corney Delaneys, merely created and throned the stage Irishman, the apotheosis of the English ideal. It was of Lever’s period to be extravagant. The Handley Cross series is a case in point. Let me humbly and hurriedly disclaim any impious thought of depreciating Surtees. No one who has ever ridden a hunt, or loved a hound, but must admit that he has his unsurpassable moments. “The Cat and Custard-pot day,” with that run that goes with the rush of a storm; the tÊte-À-tÊte of Mr. Jorrocks and James Pigg, during which they drank each other’s healths, and the healths of the hounds, and the sÉance culminated with the immortal definition of the state of the weather, as it obtained in the cupboard; Soapey Sponge and Lucy Glitters “sailing away with the again breast-high-scent pack”—these things are indeed hors concours. But I think it is undeniable that the hunting people of Handley Cross, like Lever’s dragoons, were always at full gallop. With Surtees as with Lever, everyone is “all out,” there is nothing in hand—save perhaps a pair of duelling pistols or a tandem whip—and the height of the spirits is only equalled by the tallness of the hero’s talk. That intolerable adjective “rollicking” is consecrated to Lever; if certain of the rank and file of the reviewers of our later books could have realised with what abhorrence we found it applied to ourselves, and could have known how rigorously we had endeavoured to purge our work of anything that might justify it, they might, out of the kindness that they have always shown us, have been more sparing of it.

Lever was a Dublin man, who lived most of his

life on the Continent, and worked, like a scene-painter, by artificial light, from memoranda. Miss Edgeworth had the privilege, which was also ours, of living in Ireland, in the country, and among the people of whom she wrote. Of the Irish novels of Miss Lawless the same may be said, though the angle at which she chose to regard that many-sided and deeply agreeable person, the Irish peasant, excluded the humour that permeates Miss Edgeworth’s books. (One recalls with gratitude the “quality toss” of Miss Judy McQuirk.) That Miss Edgeworth’s father was a landlord, and a resident one, deepened her insight and widened her opportunities. Panoramic views may, no doubt, be obtained from London; and what a County Meath lady spoke of as a “ventre À terre in Dublin” has its advantages; but I am glad that my lot and Martin’s were cast “in a fair ground, in a good ground, In Carbery:”—(with apologies to Mr. Kipling)—“by the sea.”

* * * * *

I will not inflict the undeservedly kind comments of the reviewers of “An Irish Cousin” upon these pages, though I may admit that nothing that I have ever read, before or since, has seemed to me as entirely delightful as the column and a half that The Spectator generously devoted to a very humble book, by two unknowns, who had themselves nearly lost belief in it.

August, 1889, was a lucky month for Martin and me. We had a “good Press”—we have often marvelled at its goodness—we were justified of our year of despised effort; the hunted Shockers emerged from their caves to take a place in the sun; we had indeed “Commenced Author.”