BOOKS.
TWO IRISH COUSINS.*
I•r is just two years since a literary partnership for which no parallel can be found in fiction for its perfect unanimity seas broken by the untimely death of " Martin Ross "—Violet Martin—but her spirit lives on in every page of these Irish Memories. They, include a brilliantly written fragment of family history, hitherto unpublished, originally intended to form the introduction to a memoir of her brother, Robert Martin, and a number of her letters, so that her name rightly stands on the title-page Strictly speaking, the book is an informal autobiography, but in essence and for the greater part it is the record of two lives lived in close and unbroken intimacy for nearly thirty years. Though cousins, and members of a clan in which relationship counted for much, Mien Somerville and Miss Martin did not meet till they were both grown up, but they both inherited in a peculiar degree gifts and interests common to three generations of ammeters. In some families this might have engen- dered rivalry ; here it only led first to friendship, and then to that fruitful and inimitable collaboration which began in 1887 will, An Irish Cousin and lasted without a check till 1915. They wore both the great-granddaughters of the " silver-tongued " and " incorruptible " Chief Justice I3usho and his fascinating wife, the "very dear Mrs. Bush° " of Maria Edgeworth, from whom, besides a love of the Arts, they inherited the "Crampton dash,- equality in story-telling which may be explained as an intensifying process analogous to the swell in an organ." (A good example of this may be found in Slipper's narrative of Lisheen Races.) In the " potent and far-reaching first cousinhood of seventy" who represented " the Family" in the middle and later years of the last century, talent was impartially distributed amongst both sexes. Mrs. Martin and Mrs. Somerville were both remarkable women, highly educated in an old-fashioned way, imperious, unconventional, and magnanimous. Miss Somerville, in the portrait, at once candid and affectionate, of her mother, tells us that she frequently mid what other people did not even dare to think. The knack of vivid, racy speech was a family possession. In other respects the two cousins grew up in very similar environments, remote but not unfriended, and certainly neither melancholy nor slow, in the transition period that marked the decline and fall of the old feudal *init. The Martine were of old Galway stock, the Somervilles had been settled in West Cork since the days of Cromwell. Both cousins were hereditary lovers of dogs and horses, both had the stimulating discipline of belonging to a large family and finding the critic permanently enthroned on the hearth. In lean times and good times they never missed an opportunity of associating with " the people." Their equipment when they " commenced authors " is summed up in a truly luminous passage by Mies Somerville, in which she modestly accounts for the success of their first book by 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 clauses, and dealing with both unconventionally. Lever's brilliant and extravagant books, with their ever.enchanting Micky Frees and Conley Delaneye, merely created and throned the stage Irishman, the apotheosis of the English ideal. It was of Lever's period to be extravagant. The Handley Cram series is a case in point. Let me humbly and hurriedly disclaim any impious thought of depreciating Surtees. No one who hes ever ridden a hunt, or loved a hound, but must admit that he has his unempaasable moments.. . . But I think it is undeniable that thehuating people of Handley Crow, like Lever's dragoons, were always at full gallop. With Surtees as with Lever, every one 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 hove realised with what abhorrence we found it applied to ourselves, and could have known how rigorously we had mdeavoured to purge our work of anything that might justify it, they might, out of the kinthwes 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 ammo painter, by artificial light, from memoranda. Miss Edgeworth bad the privilege, which was also ours, of living in Ireland, in the country, and among the people of whom she wrote."
Miss Somerville had once harboured other aims. She cannot remember a time when she had not a pony and a pencil. She " adored both about equally," and before meeting her cousin had
• Irish Memories. B E. (E Somerville arid Marne Boar. With 23 Illustrations from lintatogra by E. IE.' Somerville sad from Photographs. London : Longman. and Ca. 112, ad.
spent laborious and delightful days as an art student in Damsel. dorf and Paris. Her new allegiance caused her to some extent to take her hand from the plough, though her spirited illustrations are evidence to the contrary, but, as else nays, "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." An Irish Cousin, the fireffruits of their partnership, was originally planned as a "shocker," but a chance visit to a genuinely haunted house deflected the authors from their aim " the insincere ambition of the ' Penny Dreadful ' faded, realities asserted them- selves, and the faked thrills that were to make our fortunes were repudiated for ever." They had a " gond Preen," and Miss Somer- ville speaks all too kindly of the appreciation of the Spectator, to which in after years " Martin Rose was an occasional and highly valued contributor. It is the privilege of reviewers to acclaim genius, and no reviewer with half an eye in his head could have failed to recognize the brilliant promise revealed in their earliest effort and so radiantly fulfilled in their later work. Their collabor- ation provoked much comment and curiosity. It was founded 011 ties of blood, common intermits, kinship of soul. An" Martin Ross said, they had "a very strange belief in each other, joined to a critical faculty." Their method invariably began in conversation ; they talked themselves into their subject ; it wasa matter of chance which held the pen, and a succession of rough drafts,laboriouslyre- vised, preceded the copying out of the MS. in its final form. Miss Somervilleexpresely disclaims any general resort to portrait fiction. " Of all the people of whom we have written, three only have had any directprototype in life "—" Slipper and " Maria " in the R.M.. and Charlotte Mullen in The Real Charlotte ; and the original of Charlotte " had left this world before we began to write books." The secret of the popularity of the two authors with the English, public was largely due to the fox.htuding in their stories. Only a limited number of their readers recognized in them, beyond an irreaistiblehumonr, perfect command of style and a deep insight into the tragicomedy of Irish life. Their own conviction that The Real Charlotte was their best work was not shaken by the etupidity of publishers' readers or the adverse criticism of reviewers, and it was amply confirmed in the sequel. They had written a great novel in the spirit of Balzac without ever having read a word of him. Francis Fitzpatrick was their favourite heroine ; they knew that there could be but one fate for Francie, but " it felt like killing wild bird that had trusted itself to you." Their most popular work, Some Experiences of an Irish R.M., grew out of a cornmisaion for n series of hunting atories from the Badminton Magazine, nod 41114 written at high proesure at a time when " Martin Ross " had been disabled by a very bad hunting accident and hardly ever hums whet it was to be out of suffering. The reception of the R.M. might have turned the heads of less self-critical authors ; here were the " shawins and trumpets " which Sir William Gregory had erroneously imagined would greet The Real Charlotte ; but Miss Somerville reviews the chorus of praise dispassionately, though the naturally welcomes the tributes of old hunting-men of the school of Surtee.•, exiles on the verge of Empire, and most of all of the officers who since 1914 turned to the pages of the P.M. for refreshment and for oblivion of their surroundings.
Commis.sions for travel books on Connemara, the Bor- deaux district, and Wales, but, above all, the popularity of the R.M. and the revival of hunting—Miss Somerville has been for many years M.F.H. of the West Carbery Hunt—conspired to divert, them from writing a successor to The Real Charlotte, but their pens were seldom idle, and their last book, in Mr. Knox'. Country, published a few months before Miss Martin's death, triumphantly disproved the rule which governs the fate of sequels. We have nut space to dwell on the interludes which diversify this record of partnership—chapters which tell of horses and hounds and dogs; of Irish peamnt types and of faith and fairies ; of visits to Paris and Oxford and St. Andrews, where Andrew Lang acted as " Martin Roses" cicerone and is drawn to the life in her letters. Tin picture of Martin Ross " that emergee from thrum pages will delight those who only knew her from her books, and uwuke deep emotion in those who loved her or were honoured by her friendship, She was indeed a rare creature, with a masculine mind and a woman's heart ; frail in form and intrepid in spirit ; modest and magnanimous to a fault ; a true lover of her country and Itcr countrymen, in whom future she never lost confidence. We congratulate Miss Somerville on the courage that has enabled her to fulfil a difficult teak—to reveal" the other half of her own soul "— and on the exquieite literary skill shown in the portraiture. Had "Martin Ross" been the survivor, she could not have dune it better.
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