Читать книгу From sketch-book and diary - Elizabeth Butler - Страница 2

MY diary must introduce you to Glenaragh, where I saw a land whose beauty was a revelation to me; a new delight unlike anything I had seen in my experiences of the world’s loveliness. To one familiarized from childhood with Italy’s peculiar charm, a sudden vision of the Wild West of Ireland produces a sensation of freshness and surprise difficult adequately to describe.

“ – June ‘77. – At Killarney we left the train and set off on one of the most enchanting carriage journeys I have ever made, passing by the lovely Lough Leane by a road hedged in on both sides with masses of the richest May blossom. For some distance the scenery was wooded and soft, almost too perfect in composition of wood, lake, river, and mountain; but by degrees we left behind us those scenes of finished beauty, and entered upon tracts of glorious bog-land which, in the advancing evening, impressed me beyond even my heart’s desire by their breadth of colour and solemn tones. I was beginning to taste the salt of the Wilds.

“The scenery grew more rugged still, and against ranges of distant mountains jutted out the strong grey and brown rocks, the stone cairns and cabins of the Wild West land.

“To be a figure-painter and full of interest in mankind does not mean that one cannot enjoy, from the depths of one’s heart, such scenes as these, where what human habitations there are, are so like the stone heaps that lie over the face of the land that they are scarcely distinguishable from them. When observed they only convey to the mind the sense of the feebleness of man, overpowered as he is here by the might of the primeval landscape. This human atom stands timidly at his black cabin door to see the stranger pass, often half-witted through privation; or he silently tills the little patch of land he has borrowed from the strong and barbarous earth that yields him so little.

“The mighty ‘Carran Thual,’ one of the mountain group which rises out of Glenaragh and dominates the whole land of Kerry, was ablaze with burning heather, its peak sending up a glorious column of smoke which spread out at the top for miles and miles and changed its exquisite smoke tints every minute as the sun sank lower. As we reached the rocky pass that took us by the wild and remote Lough Acoose that sun had gone down behind an opposite mountain, and the blazing heather glowed brighter as the twilight deepened, and circles of fire played fiercely and weirdly on the mountain-side. Our Glen gave the ‘Saxon lady’ its grandest illumination on her arrival.

“Wild strange birds rose from the bracken as we passed, and flew strongly away over lake and mountain torrent, and the little black Kerry cows all watched us go by with ears pricked and heads inquiringly raised. The last stage of the journey had a brilliant finale. A herd of young horses was in our way in the narrow road, and the creatures careered before us, unable or too stupid to turn aside into the ditches by the roadside to let us through. We could not head them, and for fully a mile did those shaggy wild things caper and jump ahead, their manes flying out wildly with the glow from the west shining through them. Some imbecile cows soon joined them in the stampede, for no imaginable reason, unless they enjoyed the fright of being pursued, and the ungainly progress of those recruits was a sight to behold, – tails in the air and horns in the dust. The troop led the way right into the eye of the sunset. With this escort we entered Glenaragh.

“ – June 1877. – We rode in to-night after a long excursion amidst the mountains of this wild land of Kerry, rode down into the glen where our little inn stands in a clump of birch and arbutus trees. That northern light which in these high latitudes and at this season carries the after-light of the sunset on into the dawn, lighted our path for the last hour with surprising power. Were we sufficiently far north, of course, the sun itself would not dip below the horizon at all, but here we have only the upper portion of his aureole from his setting to his rising. Oh! the wild freedom of these mountain paths, the scent of the cabin turf fires, the round west wind rolling through the heather; what cool wells of memories they fill up for the thirsty traveller in desert places far away. That west wind! This is the first land it has swept with its wings since it left the coasts of Labrador. For purity, for freshness, for generosity, give me the Wild West wind of Ireland.

“‘Carran Thual’ is still on fire; it signals each night back to the northern light across the glen in a red glare of burning heather. The moon, now in her first quarter, looks green-gold by contrast with all this red of sky and flame, and altogether our glen gives us, these nights, such a display of earthly and heavenly splendour that it seems one should be a spectator all night of so much beauty. And to this concert of colour runs the subtle accompaniment of rushing water, for all these mountains are laced with silvery torrents leaping down to the lakes and rivers that reflect the glory of the sky. Glenaragh! loveliest of wild valleys, where is the poet that should make thee the theme of his songs?

“Coming through ‘Windy Gap’ in this illuminated gloaming we met a lonely horseman riding fast, a rope for his bridle, his pony very shaggy. He passed us over the rocks and rolling stones, and, looking back, we saw his bent figure jet black against the west for a moment, ere he dipped down through the ‘Gap’ out of sight. We knew who he was. Some peasant was dying on the mountain-side beyond, and the priest was anxious to be in time with the Viaticum.

“A strange little creature came out of the kitchen of the inn to see us after supper, and I made the acquaintance of a Leprechaun. Tiny, grey, bald little manikin; a ‘fairy,’ the people call him. I do not want to know why they are like that. I would rather leave them mysterious and unexplained.

“The people speak Gaelic here, amongst themselves, and the priest preaches in it in the little chapel with the mud floor up on the hill over the torrent. The language and the torrent seem to speak alike, hurrying headlong.

“But the chapel! Shall I ever forget the tub of holy water, on my first Sunday, placed before the rickety little altar on the mud floor, where the people, on coming in, splashed the water up into their faces? The old women had all brought big bottles from their homes in far-away glens to fill at the tub, and nothing could surpass the comicality of their attitudes as they stooped over their pious business, all wearing the hooded cloak that made them look as broad as they were long. One old lady, in her nice white cap, monopolized the tub an unconscionably long time, for, catching sight of her wind-tossed tresses in that looking-glass, she finished her devout ablutions by smoothing her few grey hairs with her moistened fingers into tidy bands, with alternate signs of the cross. The windows were all broken, and the men and boys stuffed the holes with their hats and caps to keep out the mountain blast.

“Last Sunday, a very hot day, the tub happened to be placed outside the door, and it was well my horse was not tied up within reach, or a former catastrophe might have been repeated, and a ‘blessed baist’ have carried me home. The heat in the rickety little gallery, where the ‘quality’ have their seats, was such that I went out into the open air and followed the rest of the service with a rock for my hassock, and two rosy pigs toddling about me in that friendly way I notice as characteristic of all the animals in these parts. They seem to feel they are members of the family, and you see calves, goats, pigs, and donkeys sauntering in and out of the cabin doors in a free-and-easy harmony with the human beings which takes my fancy greatly. But the beasts are by far the happiest; their lives seem passed in perfect contentment and satisfaction, whereas the poor human animals have a hard struggle for existence in this stony and difficult land of Kerry.

“The other day when W. and I dismounted at a cabin door on a wild mountain that holds, still higher up, a little dark lake which the people declare has no bottom to it, and on the shores of which ‘worms as big as a horse’ come out and bellow in the evenings, the gaunt pig that seemed to act watch-dog charged at me like a wild boar and sent me home in ‘looped and windowed raggedness.’ I never thought to find excess of zeal in a pig! The inmates of the cabin could not do enough for us to make up for such want of reticence.

“On one occasion at church in Tipperary, I noticed a rather satanic goat come pattering up the church and occupy an empty pew, where he lay down with perfect self-complacency and remained quiescent, chewing the cud, while we knelt; but each time the congregation stood up, up jumped the goat, his pale eyes and enormous horns just appearing over the high front of the pew. Then as we knelt again he would subside also, till he was startled to his feet once more by the rustle of the people rising, and then his wild head was again visible over the top of the pew, staring about him. Not a single person took any notice of the weird creature or seemed to think him out of place or at all funny. And so he continued to rise and fall with the rest to the end.

“Our chapel here is too small for the congregation that streams in from places as far as fifteen miles away among the mountains, and on one pouring wet Sunday I saw the strangest rendering of what is called ‘a chapel-of-ease.’ Not much ‘ease’ there, for some dozen men and youths who could find no place inside were kneeling about the door in running water, with a stone placed under each knee. Every day I see some incident or episode which has for me a surprise and all the charm of a new and striking experience. I feel more ‘abroad’ in this country than I do on the Continent.

“See, again, this little scene. A friend journeying to our inn and missing the road got belated in the defiles of the ‘Reeks.’ Dismounting at one of those mud cabins, which, at a little distance, are indistinguishable from their rocky surroundings, to ask the way, he was invited inside and offered a meal. The light was waning, so two little girls stood on either side of the stranger, each holding a bit of lighted candle as he sat at table. These wild-eyed and ragged little creatures made a pretty pair of dining-table candlesticks! I wish I could have seen them in the dim twilight of the black, smoke-dimmed cabin interior, their faces lighted by the candle flame.

“The beauty of the children here is a constant pleasure to me. We are here in the land of blue eyes and black lashes, or golden ones, when the hair, as it so frequently is, is ruddy. The young women are quite beautiful. I wish a painter of female beauty could have seen the girl we passed to-day who was minding some calves in a bit of bog-land bordered with birch-trees. It was a symphony of green; her head shawl was green plaid, her petticoat another tone of green, the background and all her surroundings gave every cool and delicious variation of green, and her ruddy limbs and red-gold hair, tossed by the breeze and shone through by the sun, looked richer in colour by the contrast. Her great blue eyes looked shyly at us and the shawl soon covered her laughing face. What a sweet picture, ‘In the Green Isle’!

“Every day I am more and more struck with the light-heartedness and gaiety of the animals. Whether it is emphasized by the poverty-stricken and quiet, saddened, demeanour of the human beings in these parts I cannot tell, but certainly the beasts seem to have the best of it. As to the dogs that belong to the mud cabins, never have I seen such jolly dogs, full of comic ways, especially when in puppy-hood, and all so valiant in confronting us as we near their strongholds. But on our near approach that puppy who looks mighty fierce afar off usually bolts under some door and sticks there. Then the pigs, who generally are less valiant than our wild boar of Lough Cluen, seized with apparent panic, rush round and round in the yard, and the flurried ducks that scuttle from under our horses’ hoofs end by falling on their sides in the ditches – surely all in fun? And invariably the cows and calves by the way-side prefer to be pursued along the roads, and keep up a splendid burst of galloping with tails in the air for miles before a tumble happening to one of them suggests a movement to the rear. All the lower creatures are ‘jolly dogs’ here, and only man is care-worn.”

In the autumn we came back to our well-loved glen, and I gathered materials there for my first married Academy picture – the ‘Recruits for the Connaught Rangers.’ W. found me two splendid ‘bog-trotters’ for models. The elder of the two had the finer physique, and it was explained to me that this was owing to his having been reared on herrings as well as potatoes, whereas the other, who lived up in the mountains, away from the sea, had not known the luxury of the herring. I wish we could get more of these men into our army. W. at that time was developing suggestions for forming a Regiment of Irish Guards, and I was enthusiastic in my adhesion to such a project and filling the imaginary ranks with big men like my two models. However, he was some twenty-three years too soon, and the honour had to be won for Ireland through yet another big war.