The most vivid remembrance of my first return to Ireland is the sharp sensation of ugly sound conveyed in the flat Dublin drawl. I have never since been able to surmount this unjust antipathy to the accent of my native town. The intolerable length of the syllables, the exaggerated roundness of the vowel sounds, the weight and roll of the eternal r\'s—it is all like the garlic of Provence, more seizing than captivating.
And then the squalor, the mysterious ugliness of the North Wall! The air of affronted leisure that greets you on all sides. A filthy porter slouches over to you, with an indulgent, quizzical look in his kindly eyes. "Is it a porther ye\'ll be wanting?" he asks, in suppressed wonderment at any such unreasonable need on your part. When he has sufficiently recovered from the shock, he lounges in among the boxes, heroically resolved to make a joke of his martyrdom.[Pg 189] He meets your irritated glance with a reassuring smile, nods, and drawls out cheerily: "Aisy, now, aisy. Sure an\' \'twill be all the same in a hundred years." When at last your trunks are discovered in the disorderly heap, he volunteers, with the same suggestion of indifferent indulgence: "I suppose \'twill be a cab or a cyar you\'ll be wanting next." By implication you are made to understand that the cab or the cyar is another exorbitant demand on your part, and that properly speaking you should shoulder your trunk yourself and march off contentedly to your inn or lodging or palace. "If ye loike, I\'ll lift it on to the cab for you," he adds, good-naturedly.
There are travellers whom these odd ways of Erin amuse; others there are who are exasperated to the verge of insanity by them. But they amply explain the lamentable condition of the island and the imperturbable good-humour of the least troubled and least ambitious of races. The porter\'s philosophy resumes the philosophy of the land: "Aisy, now, aisy. Sure an\' \'twill be all the same in a hundred years."
With patience and good-humour on your side, and much voluble sympathy and information on that of your driver, you are sure to arrive[Pg 190] somewhere, even from such remote latitudes as that of the North Wall and the Pigeon-house. You are jerked over two lock-bridges, and you thank your stars with reason that the discoloured and malodorous waters of the Liffey have not closed over you and your luggage. The catastrophe would find your driver phlegmatic and philosophic, with a twinkle in his eye above the infamous depths of mire that suffocated you, assuring you that when a man is ass enough to travel he must take the consequences of his folly. For Erin and Iberia, moist shamrock and flaunting carnation, meet in their conviction that the sage sits at home and smokes his pipe or twangs his guitar in leisure while the fool alone courts the perils of foreign highways.
As soon as the hall-door opened, and I stood with my foot upon the first step of the familiar stairs, a chorus of young voices shouted my name in glee. "An—gel—a!"
How flat and strange and inharmonious sounded that first greeting of my name in ears attuned to accents shriller and more thin! The English Angela was quick and clear; but the long-drawn Dublin Angela set all my teeth on an edge, and such was the shock that the ardour of my satisfaction in seeing them all again, and[Pg 191] of appearing in their midst as a travelled personage, was damped.
"How odd you all talk," I remember remarking at tea, and being promptly crushed: "It\'s you with your horrid English accent that talks odd."
Still, in spite of this slight skirmish, they were glad enough to see me. The quaint little booby of Kildare, whom they had bullied to their liking, had grown into a lean, delicate, and resolute fiend, prepared to meet every blow by a buffet, every injustice by passionate revolt. I no longer needed Mrs. Clement\'s submissive protection. I had tasted the glory of independent fight, and henceforth my tormentors were entitled to some meed of pity, though justice bids me, in recording my iniquities, to remember that their misfortunes were merited and earned with exceeding rigour.
The first thrill of home-coming, that inexplicable vibration of memory\'s chord, which so early marks the development of the creature, and signifies the sharp division of past and present, ran like a flame through all my body when the noise of Mrs. Clement\'s big bunch of keys, rattling below stairs, reached me through the open drawing-room door.
"Mrs. Clement is down-stairs!" I shouted joyously, and instantly the band of blond-headed scamps carried me off in triumph.
Into whose hands has that sombre town-house of my parents passed? Heaven grant the children that play there are happier than ever I was; but if the old store-room, with the big linen-presses, and the long china-press with upper doors of wire-screen, the long table and square mahogany and leather armchairs and sofa, gives to the occupants to-day half the pleasure it always gave me, they are not to be pitied whatever their fate.
The wide window looked out upon a hideous little street, but in front there was a stone terrace, with two huge eagles, where Mrs. Clement kept pots of plants and flowers that, alas! never bloomed, watered she them never so sedulously; and above the terraces, if you ignored the sordid street, the sunset traced all its fairest and rarest effects upon the broad arch of heaven that spanned the street opening. Those Irish skies! you must go to Italy and Greece to find hues as heavenly. How many a sorrow unsuspected, that filled me with such intensity of despair as only childhood can feel, has been smoothed by that mysterious slip of sky between two dull[Pg 193] rows of houses, against which in the liquid summer of blue dusk the eagles, with all the lovely significance of a romantic image, were sketched in sculptured stone. I dried my eyes to dream of lands where eagles flew as common as sparrows. I cannot now tell why, but I remember well that I grew to associate that distant glimpse of heaven from the old store-room with the isle of Prospero and Miranda. And when I learnt the Sonnets—which I knew by heart, as well as "The Tempest" and "The Merchant of Venice" before the holidays were over—I always found some strange connection between the abortive, sickly cowslips and primroses Mrs. Clement cultivated on her terrace in wooden boxes and those magic lines—
"From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything."
What can it be that poetry says to children, since they can neither understand the rhythm, nor metre, nor beauty, nor sentiment of it? And the child who (as I was then) is susceptible to the charm of poetry that sweeps through the infinite, weeps with delicious emotion without the ghost of an idea why. I was but a child of nine, when my sister in response to my prayer, with[Pg 194] my cheek still stinging from that blow along the Warwick road, opened the fairyland of Shakespeare to me. With a rapture I would I now could feel, I thrilled to the glamour of the moonlight scene of the "Merchant." We never went to bed without rehearsing it, each in turn being Jessica or Lorenzo. I only remember one other sensation as passionate and vivid and absorbing, my first hearing of the Moonlight Sonata, also at an age when it was perfectly impossible that I should understand more than a mouse or a linnet a particle of its beauty or meaning. Yet there they stand out in extraordinary relief from a confusi............