1 minute read
I have many people to thank, for many things, and I have an explanation to make, but the thanks must come first. I offer my most sincere gratitude to Mrs. Butler and to Professor Edgeworth, for their kindness in permitting me to print Miss Edgeworth’s letters to Mrs. Bushe; to Lord Dunsany, for the extract from “Plays of Gods and Men,” which has said for me what I could not say for myself; to the Editors of the Spectator and of Punch , for their permission to use Martin Ross’s letter and the quatrain to her memory; to the Hon. Mrs. Campbell, the Right Hon. Sir Horace Plunkett, P.C., Captain Stephen Gwynn, M.P., Lady Coghill, Colonel Dawson, and other of Martin Ross’s friends, for lending me the letters that she wrote to them; even when these are not quoted verbatim, they have been of great service to me, and I...
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King. What is this child of man that can conquer Time and that is braver than Love? Eznarza. Even Memory. He shall bring back our year to us that Time cannot destroy. Time cannot slaughter it if Memory says no. It is reprieved, though banished. We shall often see it, though a little far off, and all its hours and days shall dance to us and go by one by one and come back and dance again. Why, that is true. They shall come back to us. I had thought that they that work miracles, whether in Heaven or Earth, were unable to do one thing. I thought that they could not bring back days again when once they had fallen into the hands of Time. It is a trick that Memory can do. He comes up softly in the town or the desert, wherever a few men are, like...
1 minute read
Perhaps I ought to begin by saying that I have always called her “Martin”; I propose to do so still. I cannot think of her by any other name. To her own family, and to certain of her friends, she is Violet; to many others she is best known as Martin Ross. But I shall write of her as I think of her. * * * * * When we first met each other we were, as we then thought, well stricken in years. That is to say, she was a little over twenty, and I was four years older than she. Not absolutely the earliest morning of life; say, about half-past ten o’clock, with breakfast (and all traces of bread and butter) cleared away. We have said to each other at intervals since then that some day we should have to write our memoirs; I even went so far...
54 minute read
A few years ago Martin wrote an account of her eldest brother, Robert, known and loved by a very wide circle outside his own family as “Ballyhooley.” He died in September, 1905, and in the following spring, one of his many friends, Sir Henniker Heaton, wrote to my cousin and begged her to help him in compiling a book that should be a memorial of Robert, of his life, his writings, and of his very distinguished and valuable political work as a speaker and writer in the Unionist cause. Sir Henniker Heaton died, and the project unfortunately fell through, but not before my cousin had written an account of Robert, and, incidentally, a history of Ross and the Martins which is in itself so interesting, and that, indirectly, accounts for so many of her own characteristics, that, although much that she had meant to write remains unaccomplished, I propose, unfinished...
13 minute read
It is a commonplace, even amounting to a bromide, to speak of the breadth, the depth, and the length of the ties of Irish kinship. In Ireland it is not so much Love that hath us in the net as Relationship. Pedigree takes precedence even of politics, and in all affairs that matter it governs unquestioned. It is sufficient to say that the candidate for any post, in any walk of life—is “a cousin of me own, by the Father”—“a sort of a relation o’ mine, by the Mother”—and support of the unfittest is condoned, even justified. I am uncertain if the practice of deifying a relationship by the employment of the definite article is peculiar to Munster, or even to Ireland. “The fawther,” “the a’nt.” He who speaks to me of my father as “The Fawther,” implies a sort of humorous intimacy, a respect just tinged with facetiousness, that...
19 minute read
There is a portrait of Mrs. Bushe that is now in the possession of one of her many great-grandchildren, Sir Egerton Coghill. It is a small picture, in pastel, very delightful in technique, and the subject is worthy of the technique. Nancy Crampton was her name, and the picture was probably done at the time of her marriage, in 1793, and is a record of the excellent judgment of the future Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. It would be hard to find a more charming face. From below a cloud of brown curls, deep and steady blue eyes look straight into yours from under level brows. The extreme intellectuality of the expression does not master its sweetness. In looking at the picture the lines come back— No wonder that in the troublous days of the Union, when bribes and threats assailed the young barrister who was already a power in...
13 minute read
Chief Justice Bushe died in 1843, and Maria Edgeworth in 1849, but Mrs. Bushe lived on till 1857, a delight and an inspiration to her children and grandchildren. To her, even more than to the Chief, may be ascribed the inevitable, almost invariable turn for the Arts, in some form, frequently in all forms, that distinguishes their descendants, and to her also is attributed a quality in story-telling known as “Crampton dash,” which may be explained as an intensifying process, analogous to the swell in an organ. But few of their grandchildren, that potent and far-reaching first cousinhood of seventy, now remain. Bushes, Plunkets, Coghills, Foxes, Franks, Harrises, they were a notable company, and I imagine that in the middle and later years of the last century they made a clan of no small power and influence. “Dublin is my washpot, over Merrion Square will I cast out my shoe,”...
8 minute read
I have already commented on the social importance, and value, of the feuds of a century ago. Fights were made, like the wall-papers, the carpets, the furniture, to last. Friendships too, I daresay, but though it was possible to dissolve a friendship, the full-fledged fight, beaked and clawed, was incapable as an eagle of laying down its weapons. Such a fight there was between two sisters, both long since dead. They were said to have been among “The Beauties of the Court of the Regent”—delightful phrase, bringing visions of ringlets and rouge, and low necks and high play—and both were famed for their wit, their charm, and their affection for each other. Still unmarried, their mother brought them home to Castle Townshend (for reasons not unconnected with the run of the cards), not quite so young as they had been—in those days a young lady’s first youth seems to have...
11 minute read
I have spoken of that first cousinhood of seventy, the grandchildren of the Chief Justice, of whom my mother and Martin’s were not the least notable members. I want to say something more of these two, and if such tales as Martin and I have remembered may seem sometimes to impinge upon the Fifth Commandment, I would, in apology, recall the old story of the masquerade at which Love cloaked himself in laughter, and was only discovered when he laughed till he cried, and they saw that the laughter was assumed, but the tears were real. I have come upon a letter of my cousin Nannie’s, undated, unfortunately, but its internal evidence, indicating for her an age not far exceeding seven years, would place it in or about the year 1830. “ To Mrs. Charles Fox : “ My dear Mama , “I am very sorry for touching that stinking...
12 minute read
The men and women, but more specially the women, of my mother’s family and generation are a lost pattern, a vanished type. I once read a fragment, by John Davidson, that appeared some years ago in the Outlook . I grieve that I have lost the copy and do not remember its date. It was called, if I am not mistaken, “The Last of the Alanadoths,” and purported to be the final page of the history of a great and marvellous tribe, whose stature was twice that of ordinary beings, whose strength was as the strength of ten, and in whose veins blue and glittering flame ran, instead of blood. These, having in various ways successfully staggered ordinary humanity, all finally embarked upon an ice-floe, and were lost in the Polar mists. “Thus perished,” ends the chronicle, “the splendid and puissant Alanadoths!” I have now forgotten many of the details,...
12 minute read
“It was on a Sunday, the eleventh day of a lovely June,” her sister, Mrs. Edward Hewson, has written, “that Violet entered the family. A time of roses, when Ross was at its best, with its delightful old-fashioned gardens fragrant with midsummer flowers, and its shady walks at their darkest and greenest as they wandered through deep laurel groves to the lake. She was the eleventh daughter that had been born to the house, and she received a cold welcome. “ ‘ I am glad the Misthress is well,’ said old Thady Connor, the steward; ‘but I am sorry for other news.’ “I think my father’s feelings were the same, but he said she was ‘a pretty little child.’ My mother comforted herself with the reflection that girls were cheaper than boys. “At a year old she was the prettiest child I ever saw, with her glorious dark eyes, and...
18 minute read
I have deeply considered the question as to how far and how deep I should go in the matter of my experiences as an Art student. Those brief but intense visits to Paris come back to me as almost the best times that life has given me. To be young, and very ardent, and to achieve what you have most desired, and to find that it brings full measure and running over—all those privileges were mine. I may have taken my hand from the plough, and tried to “ cultiver mon jardin ” in other of the fields of Paradise, but if I did indeed loose my hand from its first grasp, it was to place it in another, in the hand of the best comrade, and the gayest playboy, and the faithfullest friend, that ever came to turn labour to pastime, and life into a song. I believe that...
12 minute read
“ Sure ye’re always laughing! That ye may laugh in the sight of the Glory of Heaven!” This benediction was bestowed upon Martin by a beggar-woman in Skibbereen, and I hope, and believe, it has been fulfilled. Wherever she was, if a thing amused her she had to laugh. I can see her in such a case, the unpredictable thing that was to touch the spot, said or done, with streaming tears, helpless, almost agonised, much as one has seen a child writhe in the tortured ecstasy of being tickled. The large conventional jest had but small power over her; it was the trivial, subtle absurdity, the inversion of the expected, the sublimity getting a little above itself and failing to realise that it had taken that fatal step over the border; these were the things that felled her, and laid her, wherever she might be, in ruins. In Richmond...
16 minute read
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...
17 minute read
Before I abandon these “Irish Cousin” years at Drishane, I should like to say something more of the old conditions there. I do not think I claim too much for my father and mother when I say that they represented for the poor people of the parish their Earthly Providence, their Court of Universal Appeal, and, in my mother’s case, their Medical Attendant, who, moreover, provided the remedies, as well as the nourishment, that she prescribed. The years of the ’eighties were years of leanness, “years that the locust hath eaten.” Congested District Boards and Departments of Agriculture had not then arisen. Successive alterations of the existing land tenure had bewildered rather than encouraged the primitive farmers of this southern seaboard; the benefits promised were slow in materialising, and in the meantime the crops failed. The lowering or remission of rents did not mean any immediate benefit to people who...
24 minute read
It was in June, 1888, that Mrs. Martin became the tenant of Ross House and that she and her daughters returned to Galway, sixteen years, to the very month, since they had left it. It would demand one more skilled than I in the unfathomable depths of Irish Land Legislation to attempt to set forth the precise status of Ross, its house, demesne, and estate, at this time. It is not, after all, a matter of any moment, save to those concerned. Mrs. Martin had been staying in Galway, and had paid a visit to Ross, with the result that she decided to rent the house and gardens from the authorities in whose jurisdiction they then were, and set herself to “build the walls of Jerusalem.” The point which may be dwelt on is the courage that was required to return to a place so fraught with memories of a...
17 minute read
The journey from Drishane to Ross was first made by me in February, 1889. As the conventional crow flies, or as, on the map, the direct line is drawn, the distance is no more than a hundred miles, but by the time you have steered east to Cork, and north-west to Limerick, and north to Ennis, and to Athenry, and to Galway, with prolonged changes (and always for the worse), at each of these places, you begin to realise the greatness of Ireland, and to regard with awe the independent attitude of mind of her railway companies. It would indeed seem that the Sinn Fein movement, “Ourselves Alone,” might have been conceived and brought forth by any one of the lines involved in the trajet from Cork to Galway. I cannot say what are the conditions now, but there was a time when each connecting link was separated by an...
10 minute read
In our parts of Ireland we do not for a moment pretend to be too civilised for superstition. When Cromwell offered the alternative of “Hell or Connaught,” with, no doubt, the comfortable feeling that it was a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other, more creatures than he knew of accepted the latter refuge. And when, in the County Cork, the ancient saying was proved that “Beyond the Leap”—which is a village about twelve miles inland from the Western Ocean—was indeed “beyond the Law,” and that the King’s writ, if it ran at all, ran for its life in the wrong direction, sanctuary was found there, also, for more than the hard-pressed people of the land. The “Fairies and Bridhogues and Witches” of the old song fled west and south; in Galway, in Kerry and in Cork, they are still with us. Have I not...
12 minute read
There is, I imagine, some obscure connection between the Fairies and the Evil Eye. There was “an old Cronachaun of a fellow,” who lived in the parish of Myross, who was said to be “away with the Fairies” a great deal, and, whether as a resulting privilege or not I cannot say, he also had the Bad Eye. It was asserted that he could go to the top of Mount Gabriel, which is a good twenty miles away, in five minutes. It seems a harmless feat, but it must be said that Mount Gabriel, in spite of its name, is not altogether to be trusted. It is the sort of place where the “Fodheen Mara” might come on at any moment. The Fodheen Mara is a sudden loss of your bearings, and a bewilderment as to where you are, that prevails, like a miasma, in certain spots; but, Rickeen has...
16 minute read
Taking the publication of “An Irish Cousin” as the beginning of our literary work, its next development was a series of short articles on Irish subjects that Martin wrote, single-handed, for the World . The sap was beginning to run up; more and more things began with her to throw themselves, almost unconsciously, into phrases and forms. Her thoughts blossomed in the fit words, as the life in the tree breaks in leaves. Everything appealed to her in this new life at Ross, which was the old, and while she weeded the flower-beds in the garden, or painted doors in the house, or drove her mother for long miles on the outside car, she was meditating, and phrase-making, and formulating her impressions. These, presently, passing through her letters to me, as through a filter, developed into an article, which was primarily inspired by the death of one of the older...
14 minute read
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...
16 minute read
Throughout these very discursive annals I have tried to keep in remembrance a lesson that I learnt a few years ago from a very interesting book of Mr. Seton Thompson’s called, I think, “In the Arctic Prairies.” In it he began by saying that travellers’ accounts of their sufferings from mosquitoes were liable to degenerate into a weariness to the reader; therefore he determined to mass all he had suffered into one chapter. Thenceforward, when the remembrance of the mosquitoes became too poignant for endurance, a pause came in the narrative, and a footnote said (with an audible groan), “See Chapter So and So.” Thus it has been with me and dogs. This is Chapter So and So, and I honourably invite the Skip of Defiance already several times advocated. M. Maeterlinck has written of dogs with deep discernment, yet not, I think, in quite the right spirit. No dogs,...
17 minute read
“ The Real Charlotte” can claim resemblance with Homer in one peculiarity at least, that of a plurality of birthplaces. She was first born at Ross, in November, 1889, and achieved as much life as there may be in a skeleton scenario. She then expired, untimely. Her next avatar was at Drishane, when, in April, 1890, we wrote with enthusiasm the first chapter, and having done so, straightway put her on a shelf, and she died again. In the following November we did five more chapters, and established in our own minds the identity of the characters. Thenceforward those unattractive beings, Charlotte Mullen, Roddy Lambert, The Turkey-Hen, entered like the plague of frogs into our kneading-troughs, our wash-tubs, our bedchambers. With them came Hawkins, Christopher, and others, but with a less persistence. But of them all, and, I think, of all the company of more or less tangible shadows who...
21 minute read
For the remainder of the year ’94 the exigencies of family life kept Martin and me apart, she at Ross, or paying visits, I at home, doing the illustrations for our Danish tour, with complete insincerity, from local models. My diary says, “Impounded Mother to pose as the Hofjägermesterinde, and Mary Anne Whoolly as a Copenhagen market-woman—as Tennyson prophetically said, ‘All, all are Danes.’ ” In the meantime “The Real Charlotte” continued to run the race set before her, with a growing tide of approval from those whose approval we most valued, and with steadily improving sales. In November I went to Leicestershire (a visit that shall be told of hereafter), and thence I moved on to Paris. In January, 1895, Martin went to Scotland, and paid a very enjoyable visit to some friends at St. Andrews, a visit that was ever specially memorable for her from the fact that...
10 minute read
In February, 1895, I met Martin in London, and found her in considerable feather, consequent on her reviving visit to St. Andrews, and on that gorgeous review in which we had been called hard and pitiless censors, as well as sardonic, squalid, and merciless observers of Irish life. We felt this to be so uplifting that we lost no time in laying the foundations of a further “ferocious narrative.” This became, in process of time, “The Silver Fox.” It had the disadvantage, from our point of view, of appearing first in a weekly paper (since defunct). This involved a steady rate of production, and recurring “curtains,” which are alike objectionable; the former to the peace of mind of the author, while the latter are noxious trucklings to and stimulation of the casual reader. That, at least, is how the stipulated sensation at the end of each weekly instalment appeared to...
17 minute read
We returned to Drishane in October, having by that time written and illustrated the third story of the series. Which was fortunate, as on the first of November, “November Day” as we call it in Carbery, we went a-hunting, and under my eyes Martin “took a toss” such as I trust I may never have to see again. It happened in the middle of a run; there was a bar across an opening into a field. It was a wooden bar, with bushes under it, and it was not very high, but firmly fixed. I jumped it, and called to her to come on. The horse she was riding, Dervish, was a good hunter, but was cunning and often lazy. He took the bar with his knees, and I saw him slowly fall on to his head, and then turn over, rolling on Martin, who had kept too tightly her...
19 minute read
I have thought of leaving it to our books to express and explain the part that hunting has played in Martin’s life and mine; but when I remember (to quote once again those much-quoted lines) how much of the fun that we have had in our lives has been “owed to horse and hound,” I feel an acknowledgment more direct and deliberate is due. Almost the first thing that I can remember is the duplicity of my grandfather on my behalf in the matter of the hounds. He had been forbidden by his doctor to hunt; he had also been forbidden by the ladies of his household to permit the junior lady of that establishment, then aged five, to “go anywhere near the hounds.” None the less, by a succession of remarkable accidents, not wholly disconnected with the fact that my grandfather had had the West Carbery hounds himself at...
11 minute read
As had been the case with “The Real Charlotte,” so were we also in Paris when “Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.”—to give the book its full and cumbrous title—was published by Messrs. Longman in November, 1899. It was probably better for us both that we should be where, beyond the voices, there was peace, but it meant that most of the fun of publishing a book was lost to us. The thrill, for example, of buying a chance paper, and lighting upon a review in it. One might buy all the papers in Paris without a moment of anxiety. After a time, however, congested envelopes of “press cuttings,” mostly of a reassuring character, began to arrive. Press-cuttings, received en gros , are liable to induce feelings of indigestion, and with their economy of margin and general suggestion of the waste-paper basket, their tendency is to crush the romance out...
21 minute read
In a Swiss Valley. * * * * * The effort of writing the twelve “R.M.” stories against time, and before she had even began to recover from the effects of the hunting accident, told upon Martin more severely than we could either of us have believed possible. For the following four years, 1900 to 1903, it was impossible for her to undertake any work that would demand steady application, and it was out of the question to bind ourselves to any date for anything. In looking over our records, the fact that has throughout been the most outstanding is, how seldom she was quite free from suffering of some kind or other. For a creature who adored activity of any kind, and whose exquisite lightness of poise and perfectness of physical equipment predisposed her for any form of sport, her crippling short sight was a most cruel handicap, and...
23 minute read
While I have been writing this book the difficulty of deciding between the things that interested Martin and me, and those that might presumably interest other people, has been ever before me. In the path of this chapter there is another and still more formidable lion, accompanied—as a schoolchild said—by “his even fiercer wife, the Tiger.” By which I wish to indicate Irish politics, and Woman’s Suffrage. I will take the Tiger first, and will dispose of it as briefly as may be. Martin and I, like our mothers before us, were, are, and always will be, Suffragists, whole-hearted, unshakable, and the longer we have lived the more unalterable have been our convictions. Some years ago we were honoured by being asked to join the Women’s Council of the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association; she was a Vice-President of the Munster Women’s Franchise League, and I have the honour...
6 minute read
I have come to what must be the final chapter, and the thought most present with me is that in writing it I am closing the door on these memories of two lives that made the world a pleasant place for each other, and I find now that although I began them with reluctance, it is with reluctance still that I must end them. It has been hard, often, to leave untold so many of those trivial things that counted for more, in the long run, than the occasional outstanding facts of two quite uneventful lives. I fear I have yielded too much to the temptation of telling and talking nonsense, and now there remains only the Appendix in which to retrieve Martin’s character and mine for intelligence and for a serious concern for the things that are serious. To return to our work, which for us, at all events,...
9 minute read
Charles Kendal Bushe to Mrs. Bushe . Waterford. (Undated.) Probably July or August, 1798. “Within this day or two the United Irishmen rose in the Co Kilkenny and disarm’d every gentleman and man in the County except Pierce Butler. O’Flaherty, Davis, Nixon, Lee, and Tom Murphy was not spar’d and they even beat up the Quarters of Bob’s Seraglio, but he had the day before taken the precaution to remove his arms, and among them my double barrell’d Gun, to Pierce Butler’s as a place of safety, so that no arms remain’d but the arms of his Dulcinea, but what they did in that respect Bob says not. The United men have done one serious mischief which is that they have discredited Bank notes to such a degree that in Wexford no one wd give a Crown for a national note or take one in payment and here tho they...
1 minute read
The following is written by Captain Stephen Gwynn , M.P., Member for Galway City, who has very kindly permitted me to include it among these memories. Probably no one can have really known “Martin Ross” who did not spend some time in her company either in Connemara or West Cork. I, to my sorrow, only met her once, at a Dublin dinner table. That hour’s talk has left on my mind a curiously limited and even negative impression. She looked surprisingly unlike a person who spent much of her life in the open air; and it was hard to associate her with the riotous humour of many “R.M.” stories. What remains positive in the impression is a sense of extreme fineness and delicacy, qualities which reflect themselves in the physical counterparts of that restraint and sure taste which are in the essence of all that she signed. That one meeting...
3 minute read
In trying to include in these divagations the names of some of the chief among the friends of Martin Ross, I am met at once by the thought of her brothers and sisters. These were first in her life, and they held their place in it, and in her heart, in a manner that is not always given to brothers and sisters. 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...
8 minute read
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY R. CLAY AND SONS, LTD., BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E. 1, AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK. FOOTNOTES: [1] Robert has told me how, hearing from Willie Wills that “the money-market was tight,” he went to proffer assistance. In Willie’s studio he was about to light a cigarette with a half-burned “spill” of paper, when he became aware that the “spill” was a five-pound note, an unsuspected relic of more prosperous times, that had already been used for a like purpose. E. Œ. S. [2] This sentence was subsequently introduced in the article “At the River’s Edge,” by Martin Ross, The Englishwoman’s Review . [3] In these, and all the following letters, I have left the spelling, punctuation, etc., unchanged. [4] Solicitor-General. [5] Daniel O’Connell. [6] Among the letters in the old letter-box of which I have spoken was a paper, the contents of which may be offered...