Martin Ross

The adverse opinion of her old and once-trusted comrade, Mrs. X., in the matter of “The Delegate” was not the only trial of the kind that Mrs. Martin had to face. I imagine that few things in her life had given her as much pleasure as Violet’s success as a writer. She had a very highly cultured taste, and her literary judgment, builded as it was upon the rock of the classics, was as sound as it was fastidious. Had a conflict been pressed between it and maternal pride, I believe the latter would have been worsted. Fortunately, her critical faculty permitted her to extend to Martin’s writing the same entire approval that she bestowed upon her in all other regards. 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. My cousin Nannie and—though in less degree—my mother, were both out for trumpets, and the silence of their acquaintances (a silence that Martin and I did not fail to assure them was compassionate) filled them with wrath that only each other’s sympathy could assuage. (It is, I am sure, unnecessary to say that each was comfortingly aware that her own daughter had done all the work. But this did not invalidate the sympathy.)

The formula touching the superfluity of kneebuckles to the Highlander was, however, sustaining; and this was fortunate, as each of Martin’s articles, as they appeared in the World, called it into requisition. If “The Delegate” had staggered the Highlanders, they literally reeled when “Cheops in Connemara” was offered for their learning by Mrs. Martin, who had a pathetic hope, never realised, that some day they might find grace and understanding.

It was of “Cheops” that a lady, who may be called Mrs. Brown, said to my cousin Nannie,

“Oh, Mrs. Martin, I loved it! It was so nice! I couldn’t quite understand it, though I read it twice over, but I showed it to Mr. Brown, and he solved the problem!”

Wonderful man, as Martin commented when she wrote the story to me.

It was this same Mr. Brown whose criticism of the “Irish Cousin,” wrung from him by Mrs. Martin, was so encouraging.

“I found it,” he wrote, “highly imaginative, but not nonsensical, unusual in a work of legendary character. In fact, it is not bosh!”

The singular spring from the clouds to every day’s most common slang was typical of good Mr. Brown. He is now beyond the clouds, or, in any case, is, I am sure, where he will not be offended if I recall one or two of his pulpit utterances. In my diary at this time I find: “Interesting sermon. Mr. Brown told us that ‘a sin, though very great, is not as great as one that exceeds it; but remember that sin can only find entrance in a heart prepared for it, even as matches strike only on the box. And oh friends, it is useless to trust in those whose names are fragrant in Christian society to pull you through.’”

Martin was much attached to Mr. Brown, who was as kind a man, and as worthy a parson, as ever was great-grandson to Mrs. Malaprop. In a letter to me she says:

“Last Sunday’s sermon was full of ‘jewels five words long.’ I noticed first an allusion to Jacob’s perfidy to Esau. ‘Which of us, Beloved, would not have blushed if we had been in—in—in the shoes in which Jacob was then living? Or if we had been his mother?’

“There was something in this so suggestive of the tale of the Old Woman, who with her family, lived in a shoe, that I found my seat in the front row of the choir inconvenient, more especially when one recollected that in Jacob’s time sandals were the usual wear. Mr. B. then proceeded to tell us of ‘The Greek Chap’ who held the gunwale of the boat and ‘when his right hand was chopped off, held it with his left, and that being cut off, caught it in his teeth. Then his head was cut off! Think of him, Beloved, who, when his head was cut off, still with his teeth held the boat impossible!’

“The last word was doubtless the nearest he could get to ‘immoveable.’ At this two prominent members of the choir laughed, long and agonisingly, as did many others. I never smiled. Had you been there I might have been unequal to the strain, but I felt sorry for poor Mr. Brown, as it was only a slip to say ‘head’ for ‘hand.’ He got through the rest pretty well, only saying, a little later, that we should not ‘ask the Almighty for mercies to be doled out to us, like a pauper’s gruel, in half-pints.’ He gave us another striking metaphor, a few Sundays ago. ‘Dear friends, to what shall I liken the Day of Resurrection, and the rising of us, miserable sinners, from the grave? Will it not be like poor, wretched, black chimney-sweeps, sticking their heads up out of chimneys!’”

Martin’s pitifulness to incapacity, whether mental or physical, could be almost exasperating sometimes in its wide charity. Failure of any kind appealed to her generosity. Her consideration and tenderness for the limitations and disabilities of old age were very wonderful and beautiful things, and no one ever knew her to triumph over a fallen foe. For myself, I am of opinion that, with some foes, this is a mistake, akin to being heroic at a dentist’s. However, the question need not now be discussed.

That “An Irish Cousin” had satisfied Messrs. Bentley’s expectations was evidenced by a letter from Mr. R. Bentley in October, 1889, in which he suggested that we should write a three-volume novel for them, and offered us £100 down and £125 on the second 500 copies. We were then at work on a short novel that we had been commissioned to write. This was “Naboth’s Vineyard,” which, after various adventures, was first published by Spencer Blackett, in October, 1891. The story had had a preliminary canter in the Lady’s Pictorial Christmas number as a short story, which we called “Slide Number 42.” It was sufficiently approved of to encourage us to fill it up and make a novel of it. As a book it has had a curious career. We had sold the copyright without reservation, and presently it was passed on to Mr. Blackett. We next heard of it in the hands of Griffith and Farran. Then it appeared as a “yellow-back”

E.Œ.S. CANDY. SHEILA. V.F.M.

E. B. C.

at 2s. Tauchnitz then produced it; finally, not very long ago, a friend sent us a copy, bound rather like a manual of devotion, with silver edges to the pages, which she had bought, new, for 4d.; which makes one fear that Ahab’s venture had not turned out too well. It was a story of the Land League, and the actors in it were all of the peasant class. It was very well reviewed, and was, in fact, treated by the Olympians, the Spectator, the Saturday Review, the Times, etc., with a respect and a seriousness that almost alarmed us. It seemed that we had been talking prose without knowing it, and we were so gratified by the discovery that we decided forthwith to abandon all distractions and plunge solemnly, and with single-hearted industry, into the construction of the three-volume novel desired by Messrs. Bentley.

This was not, however, as simple a matter as it seemed, and the way was far from clear. I was doing illustrations for a children’s story (and a very delightful one), “Clear as the Noonday,” by my cousin, Mrs. James Penrose, and I was also illustrating an old Irish song of Crimean times, “The Kerry Recruit,” which has been more attractively brought to the notice of the public by another cousin, Mr. Harry Plunket Greene. Martin was still enmeshed in her World articles and in Ross affairs generally, and though we discussed the “serious novel” intermittently it did not advance.

Ross was by this time restored to the normal condition of Irish country houses, comfortable, hospitable, unconventional, an altogether pleasant place to be in, and with visitors coming and going, it was not as easy as it had been for the daughter in residence to devote herself to literature, especially serious literature.

During one of my many visits there, the honourable and unsolicited office of domestic chaplain had been conferred upon me. Martin has written that “Hymns and Family Prayers are often receptacles for stale metaphor and loose phraseology; out of them comes a religion clothed to suffocation in Sunday clothes and smelling of pew-openers. Tate and Brady had much to answer for in this respect; some of their verses give at once the peculiar feeling of stiff neck produced by a dull sermon and a high pew.”

In this condemnation, however, the family prayers at Ross were not included. When I knew them they took the form of selections from the Morning Service, and included the Psalms for the day; nothing more simple and suitable could be imagined; nevertheless, there were times when they might, indisputably, have been more honoured in the breach than in the observance. I have already alluded to my cousin Nannie’s sense of humour, and its power of overwhelming her in sudden catastrophe. On some forgotten occasion, one of those contretemps peculiar to the moment of household devotion had taken place, and the remembrance of this, recurring, as it did, daily, with the opening of the Prayer-book, rarely failed to render impossible for her a decorous reading of the prayers. This was the more disastrous, because, like very many of “The Chief’s” descendants, she specially enjoyed reading aloud. With much reluctance she deputed her office to Martin, but, unhappily, some aspect of the affair (which had, it may be admitted, some that were sufficiently absurd) would tickle the deputy, and prayers at Ross, which, as I have said, included the Psalms for the day, ended, more than once, at very short notice. I may say that during my tenure of the office, although I could not, like Martin, repeat all the Psalms from memory, I acquitted myself respectably, if quite without distinction. This, as far as I know, has been achieved by but one reader, who will, I trust, forgive me if I abandon, for once, the effort to refrain from mention of existing contemporaries, and quote Martin’s account of her success.

In spite of our excellent resolutions, the serious novel was again put on the shelf, and the next work we undertook was a tour on behalf of the Lady’s Pictorial. This was provoked by a guide-book to Connemara, which was sent to Martin by an English friend. She wrote to me and said, “E. H. has sent me an intolerably vulgar guide to Connemara, and suggests that you and I should try and do something to take its place. It is written as it were in description of a tour made by an ingenuous family party. ‘Jack,’ very manly; the Young Ladies, very ladylike; a kind and humorous mother, etc. ‘Jack’ is much the most revolting. The informant of the party gives many interesting facts about the disappearance of the Martins from the face of the earth, and deplores the breaking up of the property ‘put together by Cromwell’s soldier’!”

I think it was this culminating offence that decided us to supplement the information supplied to the ingenuous family. Our examination into the conditions of Connemara, and our findings on its scenery, hotels, roads, etc., were not accomplished without considerable effort. In 1890 there was no railway to Clifden, hotels were few and indifferent, means of communication scant and expensive. We hired a jennet and a governess-cart, and strayed among the mountains like tinkers, stopping where we must, taking chances for bed and board. It was uncomfortable and enjoyable, and I imagine that our account of it, which was published as a book by Messrs. W. H. Allen, is still consulted by the tourist who does not require either mental improvement or reliable statistics.

In the autumn of ’91 we went, by arrangement with the Lady’s Pictorial, to Bordeaux, to investigate, and to give our valuable views upon the vintage in that district. This developed into a very interesting expedition; we had introductions that opened to us the gloomy and historic portals of the principal “Caves”; we saw claret in all its stages (some of them horrible); we assisted at a “Danse de Vendange,” a sort of Harvest Home, at which we trod strange measures with the vintagers, feeling, as we swung and sprang to the squeals of pipes and fiddles, as though we were in comic opera; we gained a pleasing insight into the charm of French hospitality, and we acquired—and this was the tour’s only drawback—a taste for the very best claret that we have since found unfortunately superfluous.

These articles, also, were republished with the title “In the Vine Country,” Martin’s suggestion of “From Cork to Claret” being rejected as too subtle for the public. Such, at least, was the publishers’ opinion, which is often pessimistic as to the intelligence of the public.

Since I am on the subject of our tours, I may as well deal with them all. It was in June, 1893, that we rode through Wales, at the behest of Black and White. The articles, with my drawings, were subsequently published by Messrs. Blackwood, and were entitled “Beggars on Horseback.” We were a little more than a week on the road, and were mounted on hireling ponies and hireling saddles (facts that may enlist the sympathies of those who have a knowledge of such matters). I may here admit that, in spite of certain obvious advantages of a literary kind, these amateur-gipsy tours are not altogether as enjoyable as our accounts of them might lead the artless reader to imagine. They demand iron endurance, the temper of Mark Tapley, and the Will to Survive of Robinson Crusoe. I do not say that we possessed these attributes, but we realised their necessity.

Only once more, and in this same year, 1893, did we adventure on a tour. This time again on behalf of the Lady’s Pictorial, and, at our own suggestion, to Denmark. We had offered the Editor four alternatives, Lapland or Denmark, Killarney or Kiel. He chose Denmark, and I have, ever since 1914, deeply regretted that we did not insist on Kiel.

The artistic and social difficulties in dealing with this class of work have not, in my experience, been sufficiently set forth. We were provided with introductions, obtained variously, mainly through our own friends. We were given, editorially, to understand that the events, be they what they may, were ever to be treated from the humorous point of view. “Pleasant” is the word employed, which means pleasant for the pampered reader, but not necessarily for anyone else.

Well, “pleasant” things, resulting from some of these kind, private introductions, undoubtedly occurred, but it is a poor return for full-handed hospitality to swing its bones, as on a gibbet, in a newspaper. Many have been the priceless occurrences that we have had to bury in our own bosoms, or, in writing them down, write ourselves down also as dastards. It is some consolation to be able to say this here and now. For all I know, there may still be those who consider that Martin Ross and E. Œ. Somerville treated them, either by omission or commission, with ingratitude. If so, let me now assure them that they little know how they were spared.