The Snake's Pass: A Critical Edition

By Bram Stoker, Mark Doyle, William Hughes and 2 more

In 1890, The Snake’s Pass was published in serialized form in the periodical The People. It is the story of Arthur Severn, an Englishman who has inherited wealth and a title through an aunt who took him under her wing to the exclusion of closer relations. His inheritance includes land in Ireland, and now that he is a man of leisure, he decides to tour the west of Ireland. As Bram Stoker’s first full-length novel, The Snake’s Pass is a heady blend of romance, travel narrative, adventure tale, folk tradition, and national tale. This early novel shows that, long before Dracula, Stoker used the genre of the novel to engage with questions of identity, gender, ethnic stereotype, and imperialism.

In this critical edition, Buchelt offers detailed and studied insight into both the novel and Stoker’s life, demonstrating the significance of The Snake’s Pass within the canon of late Victorian literature. The supplementary textual notes, scholarly material, and critical responses enhance the novel without distracting from the text. Readers will find a complexly layered and nuanced work that presents a pointed critique of British cultural attitudes and political positions concerning the Irish and Ireland.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Sep 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9780815653509

Bram Stoker

Bram (Abraham) Stoker was an Irish novelist, born November 8, 1847 in Dublin, Ireland. 'Dracula' was to become his best-known work, based on European folklore and stories of vampires. Although most famous for writing 'Dracula', Stoker wrote eighteen books before he died in 1912 at the age of sixty-four.

Book preview

Being of Ireland

An Introduction to Bram Stoker’s Irish Novel

LISABETH C. BUCHELT

The story is very skillfully narrated, and the author’s knowledge of Irish manners and modes of life has enabled him to produce a vivid, and indeed, brilliant romance which will carry the reader’s interest without pause from the first page to the last.

—Review of Bram Stoker’s novel The Snake’s Pass in Murray’s Magazine: A Home and Colonial Periodical for the General Reader (1891)

The Snake’s Pass first appeared in serialized form in the periodical The People in 1890. It is the story of Arthur Severn, an Englishman who has inherited wealth and a title through an aunt who took him under her wing to the exclusion of nearer relations. Part of his inheritance is some land in Ireland, and now that he is a man of leisure, he visits some friends in Clare. But before doing so, he decides to improve [his] knowledge of Irish affairs by making a detour through some of the counties in the west. The Snake’s Pass is Bram Stoker’s first full-length novel and the only one set in Ireland. Sold to The People for £150 to start on or about 20 July, it is a heady blend of romance, travel narrative, adventure tale, folk tradition, and national tale.¹ It also demonstrates that long before Dracula (1897), Stoker used the genre of the novel to engage with questions of identity, gender, ethnic stereotype, and imperialism. And as has been shown to be the case with its later and more famous vampiric relation, The Snake’s Pass is much more than a melodramatic pseudo-gothic tale or even a brilliant romance; it is a carefully researched, complexly layered, and nuanced work that presents an examination and sometimes a pointed critique of British cultural attitudes and political positions concerning the Irish and Ireland.

In a letter dated February 18, 1890, The People editor W. T. Madge offered Stoker this amount for all serial rights to The Snake’s Pass for three years "from the date of its commencement in The People. The letter, which acted as the contract, also offered Stoker half of any amounts we may receive for American or other foreign and colonial serial rights. Madge signed off with the instructions that Stoker needed only to write back a single line of acceptance of the offer. Stoker, employing his law degree, recopied into his reply all of the proposed contract, crossing out the lines about American or other foreign and colonial serial rights and replacing it with any amounts we may receive for serial rights outside the United Kingdom" (MS 11076/4/8, Stoker Archive, Manuscript Collections, Trinity College Dublin, viewed on Sept. 26, 2013).

Bram Stoker was born on November 8, 1847, the third of seven children: William Thornley, Matilda, Bram, Thomas, Richard, Margaret, and George. At the time, the family was living in what was quickly becoming a commuter suburb of Dublin, Clontarf. Stoker, although very athletic in his Trinity College days, indeed famously so, was apparently sickly as a child, but it is unknown exactly which ailment rendered him so. His mother, Charlotte, employed a nurse, Ellen Crone, of whom Stoker was very fond and who provides at least one of the proverbial sayings repeated in The Snake’s Pass: people would do little for God’s sake if the devil were dead.² Stoker attended Trinity College Dublin from 1864 to 1870, where he was auditor of the College Historical Society and president of the University Philosophical Society and was voted University Athlete. Stoker may have been very active in extracurricular activities and was much in demand socially, but as a student he was only average. He did eventually graduate from Trinity, but not with honors in mathematics, as he later claimed in Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving; there are no college records of him having done so.³

Paul Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), 23.

Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, vols. 1 and 2 (London: William Heinemann, 1906), 1:32.

Nominally Protestant, the Stoker family, contrary to what many critics of Stoker’s fiction have asserted, was middle class—often struggling to stay middle class—and not of the socially prominent, landowning, and often wealthy Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy ruling class in Ireland. Stoker worked through much of his college years, having joined the Civil Service in Dublin at the age of eighteen, starting work there in an unspecified position. By the time he resigned from the Civil Service in 1878, he had risen through the ranks of the junior Petty Sessions clerks to a newly created position, clerk of inspection. Stoker was the first to be appointed to this position, so when he left the Civil Service to join with Henry Irving and the Lyceum Theatre, he was actually leaving what promised to be a powerful and lucrative career in government. He instead opted for a very successful career as the general manager for one of the most famous theater companies of the nineteenth century. While managing the Lyceum, Stoker also decided that he would like to study for the bar in 1886; in four years, he was called to the bar at the Inner Temple. The Midland Evening News wrote: Mr. Stoker is a genial good fellow, most popular in the theatrical profession, and we have no doubt that he will become equally so amongst his new associates who are engaged ‘in the law.’⁴ He was apparently quite proud of his legal qualification, though he never actually practiced law; on the 1891 census he said his occupation was, in this order, barrister, theatrical manager, author.⁵

Quoted in Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula, 115.

The census materials are dated June 5, 1890. See Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula, 114–15.

Although Stoker was not a member of Ireland’s ruling Ascendancy elite, his position at the Lyceum Theatre brought him into the social circle of the Ascendancy class, which led to a great friendship with Sir William Wilde and Lady Jane Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s parents. Another connection to Oscar Wilde is through Stoker’s wife, Florence Balcombe. She was deemed one of the great Dublin society beauties of the day, and Wilde fell in love with and proposed to her but was rejected. Soon after that, she married Stoker, and together they had one child, Noel.

Stoker’s position as Henry Irving’s theatrical manager also brought him into contact with many of the leading politicians of the day. British prime minister William Gladstone, to whom Stoker sent a copy of The Snake’s Pass, frequented the Lyceum Theatre between 1881 and 1895, and he and Stoker apparently had many discussions about the political developments of the day—something about which Stoker, who described himself as a philosophical Home Ruler, was very proud.⁶ After Gladstone received his copy of The Snake’s Pass, they discussed the novel. Stoker writes that Gladstone spoke of the book very kindly and very searchingly and was particularly intrigued by Stoker’s portrayal of Irish rural life and especially by the oppressive gombeen man, or moneylender, Black Murdock, the novel’s villain.⁷ It may be that the political subtext of The Snake’s Pass—laced as the novel is with references to nineteenth-century property law and landlord–tenant relations; evictions of Irish tenants and the later acquisition of the land by usually absentee English landlords; and the often violent rural secret societies associated with the Land War—was not lost on Gladstone, who was a supporter of Irish Home Rule. Stoker certainly felt this to be the case, writing, [I]t must be remembered that, in the interval between his getting the book and when we met [and talked about it], had occurred one of the greatest troubles and trials of his whole political life. . . . And yet in the midst of all he found time to read—and remember, even to details and names—the work of an unimportant friend.⁸ These details, many of which seem little more than descriptive asides of Irish manners and modes of life, are what make the novel more than an adventure-romance and demonstrate that The Snake’s Pass, like the later Dracula, was carefully researched and thoughtfully constructed.

Stoker, Personal Reminiscences, 2:31. Home Rule was the political movement that advocated for the repeal of the Act of Union with Great Britain of 1800 and for self-government of Great Britain and Ireland within the United Kingdom. There were several views of what this self-government could be. At one end of the spectrum was an Irish Parliament in charge of Irish domestic affairs but leaving imperial concerns to the Parliament in London. Most politicians endorsing this definition were looking to gain Irish Home Rule through legislative and parliamentary means and did not usually advocate the use of violence. At the other end of the spectrum were total separation and complete autonomy from Britain as well as the use of physical force, if necessary, to achieve this end.

Stoker, Personal Reminiscences, 2:29.

Ibid., 2:26–29. The greatest troubles to which Stoker refers may be Gladstone’s announcement on November 26, 1890, that the reelection of Charles Stewart Parnell as the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, after Parnell’s affair with Mrs. O’Shea became known to the general public with her divorce trial, would lead to the loss of the general election and render Home Rule for Ireland impossible.

Rather than simply dashing off a slipshod but relatively exciting penny dreadful, in writing The Snake’s Pass Stoker already exhibited authorial traits that mark his entire oeuvre. Entries from Stoker’s recently collected and published early journal for the years 1874, 1878, and 1881 record chance encounters and conversations with local people while he was on vacation in County Clare; an epidemic among cattle and horses; and even an initial plot outline for The Snake’s Pass—all of which shows that Stoker was researching, conceptualizing, and writing this novel at least sixteen years before its initial publication as a serial.⁹ Biographer Paul Murray has suggested that an article about an actual catastrophic bog slide at Dunmore in the Dublin Evening Mail on November 18, 1873, also played its part in the creation of the plot.¹⁰ The construction of the narrative itself draws inspiration from Irish folktales and folk tradition, much of which Stoker most likely obtained from the antiquarian work of Sir William Wilde and Lady Jane Wilde. Even more indicative that Stoker was carefully fashioning The Snake’s Pass are several ways in which the novel intervenes with other popular novel genres and cultural commonplaces or stereotypes as well as its complex narrative construction. The love and marriage plot line is a fissured version of Sidney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806) as well as of other imperial-inflected romances or national tales, such as those by H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Walter Scott.

Bram Stoker, The Dublin Years: The Lost Journal of Bram Stoker, edited by Elizabeth Miller and Dacre Stoker (London: Robson Press, 2012). An entry for 1874 includes a conversation with a car driver named Andy, complete with replicated dialect; an entry for 1878 describes an incident concerning animal disease that gets mentioned in chapter III of the novel; and an entry for 1881 includes the rough and ultimately much revised plot outline.

Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula, 157.

Stoker also provides his readers with the narrative technique of an unreliable narrator in the first-person voice of Arthur Severn, a literary technique that Stoker brings to a level of brilliance with the multiple narrators in Dracula and is arguably a hallmark of all his longer fiction. Throughout the novel, Arthur constructs himself as a sophisticated, educated, insightful, and capable example of British manhood. He is confident that he is able to decode the Irish rural locations’ meanings and the rural characters’ intentions and desires in spite of their apparent lack of (British) sophistication and (British) education. Yet for Arthur the landscape never moves much beyond an object that reproduces the proper sublime aesthetic response for his tourist gaze. In addition, though the readers are told that Arthur has gone to the West to improve his knowledge of Irish affairs, he never fully understands why the local constable feels compelled to warn him against his nighttime wanderings—his moonlighting—and instead becomes frustrated when the constable cannot understand his explanation about enjoying the effects of the moonlight, in which he uses highly technical artistic terms such as chiaroscuro. In Arthur’s view, the fault lies with the uneducated rural constable, not with his own lack of knowledge about the political debates and, indeed, the highly publicized violence surrounding the ownership of land in Ireland. And these are only two examples of his limitations as a narrator. Moreover, largely because of Arthur’s inherent narrative instability, the reader is left to wonder to what extent the rural Irish characters—with Stoker’s careful duplication of a West of Ireland dialect—are performing the Irishness that Arthur and much of Stoker’s reading audience would expect to find in the rural Wesht. The rural characters, after all, are always one step ahead of the somewhat slow-on-the-uptake Arthur, as in Andy’s extended joke connecting Norah with the bog. Furthermore, the fictional stories that various characters tell or create about the bog replicate the Irish storytelling tradition of dinnseanchas (stories about place) in all the narrative techniques particular to this indigenous genre, which Stoker reproduced in an accurate and apparently knowledgeable way.¹¹ The bog of Shleenanaher may loom too large within the novel to be a realistic plot device; the characters may appear too idealized or too vilified at first glance to be much more than melodramatic stereotypes; and the plot may appear too clichéd to be considered anything more than that of an adventure-romance meant only for a quick, light read. As this very brief introduction has suggested, however, Stoker provides readers with many details, narrative techniques, and subtexts that complicate and trouble a surface reading of this text.

For more on Arthur as an unreliable narrator and on the technicalities of Stoker’s narrative style, see Lisabeth C. Buchelt, "‘Delicate Fantasy’ and ‘Vulgar Reality’: Undermining Romance and Complicating Identity in Bram Stoker’s The Snake’s Pass," New Hibernia Review 16, no. 1 (2012): 113–33.

It is, perhaps, the general perception of The Snake’s Pass as nothing more than a rehearsal space for the true masterpiece, Dracula, that has limited critical engagement with Stoker’s first novel thus far. Stephen D. Arata, in his seminal article from 1990, "The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization," was perhaps the first critic to link The Snake’s Pass with other Stoker works in which seemingly unrelated narratives of imperial expansion and disruption themselves disrupt the primary story.¹² But the year 1995 was something of a watershed year for critical examinations of The Snake’s Pass, with Nicholas Daly, David Glover, William Hughes, and Christopher Morash all writing essays that inaugurated a more thoughtful appreciation of this novel’s possibilities, using the critical frameworks provided by a consideration of it within its Irish cultural milieu. Morash suggests that in The Snake’s Pass the soil of Ireland . . . constitute[s] a locus of anxiety . . . the clearest instance of Stoker using the literary fantastic to write the condition of Ireland as unnatural. Hughes writes in the essay included in this volume that the bog encodes a reading of Irish problems and British solutions into the fabric of a supposedly local issue. For Daly, the bog appears to represent the limits of the text’s ability to contain colonial space; and for Glover, the bog is a symbolic source of horror and laughter, knowledge and uncertainty, standing in at various moments . . . for the Irish homeland and its womanhood, the story of its past carrying sediments of the country’s history of underdevelopment.¹³ As is evident, in all these initial forays into a new critical assessment of the novel, the bog, once seen as overpowering the novel’s structure to its detriment, becomes the embodiment of the overarching concern of nineteenth-century British–Irish politics: the land.

Stephen D. Arata, "The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization," Victorian Studies 33, no. 4 (1990): 625.

Christopher Morash, ‘Ever under Some Unnatural Condition’: Bram Stoker and the Colonial Fantastic, in Literature and the Supernatural: Essays for the Maynooth Bicentenary, edited by Brian Cosgrove (Dublin: Columba Press, 1995), 110; William Hughes, "‘For Ireland’s Good’: The Reconstruction of Rural Ireland in Bram Stoker’s The Snake’s Pass," Irish Studies Review 3, no. 12 (1995): 18; Nicholas Daly, "Irish Roots: The Romance of History in Bram Stoker’s The Snake’s Pass," Literature and History 4, no. 2 (1995): 48; David Glover, ‘Dark Enough for Any Man’: Bram Stoker’s Sexual Ethnology and the Question of Irish Nationalism, in Late Imperial Culture, edited by Roman de la Campa, Ann E. Kaplan, and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1995), 69.

Since 1995, critics have routinely situated the novel firmly within nineteenth-century colonial discourse, whether that discourse is focused on race and ethnicity, on questions of modernity and modernization, or on gender politics. Stoker himself called The Snake’s Pass an Irish novel . . . being of Ireland and dealing with Irish ways and specially of a case of oppression by a ‘gombeen’ man under a loan secured on land.¹⁴ The bog and its metaphoric possibilities still loom large, and rightly so, in critical interpretations. Luke Gibbons has read it as standing in for those aspects of the Irish past which will not go away, but whose threats to the social order are actively reproduced by the forces of modernization which consigned the poorest of the peasantry to these outlying areas. Cara Murray, in contrast, reads the bog as the signifier in the novel that ultimately embraces change in the form of development in Ireland. In one of the most recent critical explorations, Derek Gladwin, combining postcolonial and imperial cultural studies with ecocriticism, suggests the novel is part of an ongoing subgenre of Anglo-Irish literature, the bog gothic.¹⁵ The interdisciplinary range of essays in this edition—written by an historian, two literary and cultural critics, and an art historian—seeks to broaden further the interpretive possibilities for this novel.

Stoker, Personal Reminiscences, 2:28–29.

Luke Gibbons, ‘Some Hysterical Hatred’: History, Hysteria, and the Literary Revival, Irish University Review, Spring–Summer (1997): 14; Cara Murray, Catastrophe and Development in the Adventure Romance, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 53, no. 2 (2010): 157; and Derek Gladwin, The Bog Gothic: Bram Stoker’s ‘Carpet of Death’ and Ireland’s Horrible Beauty, in EcoGothic, special issue of Gothic Studies 16, no. 1 (2014): 39–54.

Mark Doyle’s contribution, "The Snake’s Pass and the Irish Question(s), looks at the role of the land and the subtextual references to nineteenth-century agrarian agitations in the novel from an historian’s perspective. Doyle suggests that the central conflict for Stoker’s story of love and agronomy is that most vexing of Irish questions . . . Who is to own the land? He examines how this question was the center point around which all the other Irish problems of poverty, emigration, and self-rule revolved, underscoring how well versed Stoker was in the complex politics of land ownership in Ireland. In other words, Stoker was not merely following a subgenre of travel writing that routinely romanticized the western peripheries in the novel’s obsessive focus on land and landscape but was instead invoking for his readers a political, cultural, and social problem with which they would have been very familiar. Contextualizing the particular political and emotional resonance of the land in Ireland by examining three major themes of the novel—the land itself, the policy of land improvement, and the legal machinations—within the historical era of the Land War, Doyle looks at how in the novel the land of Knockcalltecrore is something for which men are willing to fight and die. It is captivating and deadly, changeable and haunted, but also capable of yielding great joy and abundance. Doyle suggests that although Stoker’s novel raises the conundrum of Irish land, it is indeed British organization and law that ultimately save the day for the rural inhabitants of Knockcalltecrore and environs. From one perspective, Doyle writes, Arthur’s decision to buy up a bankrupt estate—enabling some tenants to emigrate and others to buy their holdings at reasonable prices, after which he puts the locals to work quarrying limestone and building harbors—is the very soul of benevolent British ‘improvement.’ But from another perspective, as Doyle also notes, these actions must be questioned: Has anybody, apart perhaps from Norah and Phelim Joyce, asked Arthur to turn their home into a capitalist ‘fairyland’? Is there any evidence of a groundswell of support for these ‘improvements’? . . . These questions do not seem to have occurred to Arthur, but they should occur to us. Doyle posits that in the novel’s happy ending Stoker’s narrator, Arthur, sees law as a benevolent force that can be used to settle the land question" and its attendant colonial implications once and for all.

The second essay, by William Hughes, is a reprint of one of the foundational critical engagements with The Snake’s Pass in the mid-1990s. In it, Hughes turns away from the then typical critical practice of placing The Snake’s Pass within the context of Dracula, choosing instead to focus on ways of interpreting the Irishness of the novel to explore what it may reveal about Stoker’s ambiguous relationship to Ireland and the Irish. Hughes finds that reading the novel without the shadow of the vampire upon it reveals a complex and at times perverse network of signification, where signifiers both from Irish legend and English (or British) prejudice intersect, realigning the former within the cultural and political aspirations of the latter. He suggests that The Snake’s Pass functions essentially as a fable of reconstruction, a synecdoche in which supposedly representative Irish ‘problems’ are identified, and an arena where these [problems] are overcome through the intervention and energy of an outsider rendered the more conspicuous through his nonparticipation in the well-wrought dialect of the fictional peasants.

Nicholas Daly’s essay, "The Snake’s Pass and the Limits of Romance," is a reprinted excerpt from his book Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle (1999). This foundational contribution to the scholarly discussion of Stoker’s Irish novel places the text within much of the same cultural context of the land question detailed by Doyle. Rather than examining Stoker’s careful deployment of legal and parliamentary frameworks within the larger context of the Irish problem, however, Daly looks at Stoker’s engagement with other popular nineteenth-century literary genres—for example, the national tale—through the love plot between Arthur Severn and Norah Joyce, which Daly sees as participating in the long narrative tradition of representing Anglo-Irish relations in terms of interethnic courtship and marriage. However, Stoker’s metaphorical connection of Norah with the dangerous bog complicates the symbolic marriage between colony and metropole, and Daly suggestively posits that "in equating the dangers of the bog and the native woman . . . The Snake’s Pass demonstrates how Anglo-Irish anxieties of origin undercut the seemingly optimistic fantasy of political union. For Daly, the novel’s failure as a fantasy of imperial control and its attendant defamiliarization of readers’ expectations of the textual strategies of the romance ultimately makes us see how in the age of empire and its aftermath any attempt at a ‘whole’ reading must be doomed to failure."

The final essay suggests that Stoker knowingly provided his readers with the aesthetic descriptions they expected from a novel set in a Celtic periphery in order to subtly subvert them. Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch’s essay, The West as Metaphor: A Reading in Word and Image, seeks to bring together the ideas about the West of Ireland in the visual arts and literary descriptions that were helping to form the discourse of Irish cultural nationalism. She suggests that many Irish writers and painters were involved in establishing a distinctive cultural identity through antiquarianism, folklore, music, the Irish language, art, and illustration and that depictions of land were central to this project. Her essay looks at ways in which Stoker’s powerful descriptions of the landscape deployed visual tropes of the period to complicate the constructions of Irishness. Bhreathnach-Lynch suggests that the uniting of the disciplines of art history and literary criticism enables readers to see that Stoker’s multilayered novel, with its detailed literary descriptions invoking what were already visual stereotypes of Irish land, interiors, and people, helps to reveal more fully the rich, diverse mine of cultural nineteenth-century nationalists discourses.

In the promotion of the novel a year before its initial publication in serial form, Stoker created a type of dinnseanchas about the origins of the story when he told a number of London newspapers that he was engaged in writing a novel, the idea of which had come to him while he was on vacation in the West of Ireland. He made this announcement in September 1889, but, as has been shown, Stoker had already been working on the novel for years, and many elements of the plot were already in his mind long before he took his inspirational holiday in the West in 1889. By putting out the idea that he had written his novel about the West of Ireland while in the West of Ireland, Stoker allowed his readers of the time to speculate that perhaps he, like so many nineteenth-century antiquarian collectors of folktales and ancient rural traditions, was providing them with true insight, gathered from native sources, into the Irish and Ireland itself through the medium of his novel. Stoker’s characteristic narrative ambivalence leaves the reader uncertain as to whether the novel ultimately endorses or critiques its depictions of identity, gender, ethnic stereotype, and the machinery of empire and imperialism. The Snake’s Pass is another work in Stoker’s oeuvre that shows him to be a good—perhaps even a great—writer, not just a writer of one good—perhaps great—vampire novel.

Part One

The Snake’s Pass

BRAM STOKER

Contents

I. A Sudden Storm

II. The Lost Crown of Gold

III. The Gombeen Man

IV. The Secrets of the Bog

V. On Knocknacar

VI. Confidences

VII. Vanished

VIII. A Visit to Joyce

IX. My New Property

X. In the Cliff Fields

XI. Un Mauvais Quart D’Heure

XII. Bog-Fishing and Schooling

XIII. Murdock’s Wooing

XIV. A Trip to Paris

XV. A Midnight Treasure Hunt

XVI. A Grim Warning

XVII. The Catastrophe

XVIII. The Fulfilment

I

A Sudden Storm

Between two great mountains of grey and green, as the rock cropped out between the tufts of emerald verdure, the valley, almost as narrow as a gorge, ran due west towards the sea. There was just room for the roadway, half cut in the rock, beside the narrow strip of dark lake of seemingly unfathomable depth that lay far below between perpendicular walls of frowning rock. As the valley opened, the land dipped steeply, and the lake became a foam-fringed torrent, widening out into pools and miniature lakes as it reached the lower ground. In the wide terrace-like steps of the shelving mountain there were occasional glimpses of civilization emerging from the almost primal desolation which immediately surrounded us—clumps of trees, cottages, and the irregular outline of stone-walled fields, with black stacks of turf for winter firing piled here and there. Far beyond was the sea—the great Atlantic—with a wildly irregular coast-line studded with a myriad of clustering rocky islands. A sea of deep dark blue, with the distant horizon tinged with a line of faint white light, and here and there, where its margin was visible through the breaks in the rocky coast, fringed with a line of foam as the waves broke on the rocks or swept in great rollers over the level of expanse of sands.

The sky was a revelation to me, and seemed to almost obliterate memories of beautiful skies, although I had just come from the south and had felt the intoxication of the Italian night, where in the deep blue sky the nightingale’s note seems to hang as though its sound and the colour were but different expressions of one common feeling.

The whole west was a gorgeous mass of violet and sulphur and gold—great masses of storm-cloud piling up and up till the very heavens seemed weighted with a burden too great to bear. Clouds of violet, whose centres were almost black and whose outer edges were tinged with living gold; great streaks and piled up clouds of palest yellow deepening into saffron and flame-colour which seemed to catch the coming sunset and to throw its radiance back to the eastern sky.

The view was the most beautiful that I had ever seen, and, accustomed as I had been only to the quiet pastoral beauty of a grass country, with occasional visits to my Great Aunt’s well-wooded estate in the South of England, it was no wonder that it arrested my attention and absorbed my imagination. Even my brief half-a-year’s travel in Europe, now just concluded, had shown me nothing of the same kind.

Earth, sea, and air all evidenced the triumph of nature, and told of her wild majesty and beauty. The air was still—ominously still. So still was all, that through the silence, that seemed to hedge us in with a sense of oppression, came the booming of the distant sea, as the great Atlantic swell broke in surf on the rocks or stormed the hollow caverns of the shore.

Even Andy, the driver, was for the once awed into comparative silence. Hitherto, for nearly forty miles of a drive, he had been giving me his experiences—propounding his views—airing his opinions; in fact he had been making me acquainted with his store of knowledge touching the whole district and its people—including their names, histories, romances, hopes, and fears—all that goes to make up the life and interest of a country-side.

No barber—taking this tradesman to illustrate the popular idea of loquacity in excelsis—is more consistently talkative than an Irish car-driver to whom has been granted the gift of speech. There is absolutely no limit to his capability, for every change of surrounding affords a new theme and brings on the tapis a host of matters requiring to be set forth.

I was rather glad of Andy’s brilliant flash of silence just at present, for not only did I wish to drink in and absorb the grand and novel beauty of the scene that opened out before me, but I wanted to understand as fully as I could some deep thought which it awoke within me. It may have been merely the grandeur and beauty of the scene—or perhaps it was the thunder which chilled the air that July evening—but I felt exalted in a strange way, and impressed at the same time with a new sense of the reality of things. It almost seemed as if through that opening valley, with the mighty Atlantic beyond and the piling up of the storm-clouds overhead, I passed into a new and more real life.

Somehow I had of late seemed to myself to be waking up. My foreign tour had been gradually dissipating my old sleepy ideas, or perhaps overcoming the negative forces that had hitherto dominated my life; and now this glorious burst of wild natural beauty—the majesty of nature at its fullest—seemed to have completed my awakening, and I felt as though I looked for the first time with open eyes on the beauty and reality of the world.

Hitherto my life had been but an inert one, and I was younger in many ways and more deficient in knowledge of the world in all ways than other young men of my own age. I had stepped but lately from boyhood, with all boyhood’s surroundings, into manhood, and as yet I was hardly at ease in my new position.

For the first time in my life I had had a holiday—a real holiday, as one can take it who can choose his own way of amusing himself.

I had been brought up in an exceedingly quiet way with an old clergyman and his wife in the west of England, and except my fellow pupils, of whom there was never at any time more than one other, I had had little companionship. Altogether I knew very few people. I was the ward of a Great Aunt, who was wealthy and eccentric and of a sternly uncompromising disposition. When my father and mother were lost at sea, leaving me, an only child, quite unprovided for, she undertook to pay for my schooling and to start me in a profession if I should show sufficient aptitude for any. My father had been pretty well cut off by his family on account of his marriage with what they considered his inferior, and times had been, I was always told, pretty hard for them both. I was only a very small boy when they were lost in a fog when crossing the Channel; and the blank that their loss caused me made me, I dare say, seem even a duller boy than I was. As I did not get into much trouble and did not exhibit any special restlessness of disposition, my Great Aunt took it, I suppose, for granted that I was very well off where I was; and when, through growing years, the fiction of my being a schoolboy could be no longer supported, the old clergyman was called guardian instead of tutor, and I passed with him the years that young men of the better class usually spend in College life. The nominal change of position made little difference to me, except that I was taught to ride and shoot, and was generally given the rudiments of an education which was to fit me for being a country gentleman. I dare say that my tutor had some secret understanding with my Great Aunt, but he never gave me any hint whatever of her feelings towards me. A part of my holidays each year was spent in her place, a beautiful country seat. Here I was always treated by the old lady with rigid severity but with the best of good manners, and by the servants with affection as well as respect. There were a host of cousins, both male and female, who came by the house; but I can honestly say that by not one of them was I ever treated with cordiality. It may have been my fault, or the misfortune of my shyness; but I never met one of them without being made to feel that I was an outsider.

I can understand now the cause of this treatment as arising from their suspicions when I remember that the old lady, who had been so severe with me all my life, sent for me when she lay on her deathbed, and, taking my hand in hers and holding it tight, said, between her gasps:—

Arthur, I hope I have not done wrong, but I have reared you so that the world may for you have good as well as bad—happiness as well as unhappiness; that you may find many pleasures where you thought there were but few. Your youth, I know, my dear boy, has not been a happy one; but it was because I, who loved your dear father as if he had been my own son—and from whom I unhappily allowed myself to be estranged until it was too late—wanted you to have a good and happy manhood.

She did not say more, but closed her eyes and still held my hand. I feared to take it away lest I should disturb her; but presently the clasp seemed to relax, and I found that she was dead.

I had never seen a dead person, much less anyone die, and the event made a great impression on me. But youth is elastic, and the old lady had never been much in my heart.

When the will was read, it was found that I had been left heir to all her property, and that I would be called upon to take a place among the magnates of the county. I could not fall at once into the position and, as I was of a shy nature, resolved to spend at least a few months in travel. This I did, and when I had returned, after a six months’ tour, I accepted the cordial invitation of

Reviews for The Snake's Pass

[feidhlimm_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Bram Stoker was an Irishman who considered himself too good to consider himself as much. Living at a time when to better oneself was to Anglify oneself he done as much to the extreme. His magnus opus is the over-rated Dracula. With Dracula, Stoker had the good luck to happen upon an excellent historical character he could capitalise on, but the book has very little else going for it. Based in England with English characters it was when his West Briton condition had gone full-blown. The Snake's Pass was written several years earlier than Dracula and was in fact Stoker's first book and here he condescends to send his English protagonist to the west coast of Ireland. The opening chapter of the book is full of promise the young gentleman describes an oncoming storm over the ocean in gothic glory and you warm to the prospect of a horror classic about to unfold. With his driver the gentleman, Art, takes refuge in a local cottage, where many another travellor has fled to from the rain. Whisky and potatos are passed around and stories are told. Here is where the story reaches its height. Old men tell the tales of the King of the Snakes who once lived in the local mountain in whose shadow they all live. Saint Patrick confronted this snake and it ran deep into the mountain where its golden crown is still said to be. Another tale is told about how some lost French soldiers after the 1798 rebellion got lost with their chest of gold on the mountain also. This is all told in a very accurate depiction of the Connaught accent: '"Catch me first!" sez the Shnake; an' wid thathe pops undher the wather, what began to bubble up and boil. Well thin! the good Saint stood bewildhered, for as he was lukin' the wather began to disappear out of the wee lake - and then the ground iv the hill began to be shaken as if the big shnake was rushin' round and round to down deep undher the ground.'Art and Andy his driver then arse about for an unnecessary amount of time until Art comes to meet Dick an old school friend. Dick and Andy go on and on about bogs in an indecipherable way. I think you'd need to have an avid interest and a fair amount of background knowledge to gather what the hell they are on about. A man known locally as black Murdock an evil money lender has swindled Phelim Joyce out of his land and has hired Dick to help him look for the hidden treasure on it. Everyone hates Murdock, Dick included and his employment under him is made all the worse due to the fact that the woman he loves is Phelim Joyce's daughter Norah and Norah won't have anything to do with him because he's helping Murdock. Art himself has fallen in love with a woman whose name he does not know and he has also never laid eyes on Dick's Norad or so he thinks. And so a large amount of time is taken up with these love affairs and it's painfully obvious throughout that it's the same woman. Andy knows and it's a Shakespearean style plot with mistaken identities and the fool in the middle who knows everything trying to orchestrate a happy conclusion.In effect though it's just boring. You wonder how Art could be so stupid and Dick so pathetic and you forget that there's this hidden treasure storyline that is pretty much set aside for a while.Norah is a horribly empty character. Treated as nothing more than a love object with no personality. The more we get to know about her the more pathetic she becomes. If you have any concept of feminism you'll hate Stoker's Norah to death. So servile to her father and to her suitor and such a weak person as to be nothing more than a caricature The story is ultimately predictable and badly told. It's a very short hidden treasure story split in half with a big wedge of crap confused love story in the middle and it has too much complex language about bogs that just doesn't make sense. Art is an arrogant, unlikeable fool and for a tale that "speaks most openly about the contemporary political climate in Ireland" all I see is a rich English man coming over and condescending to the lowly, unworthy, uneducated Irish peasants, as they are portrayed. Their only apparent hope of any improvement is through the English man's benevolence. There's really no commentary on Irish politics to speak of. In fact, I thought it very crude of Stoker to have Art buy off the peasants lands and have them go to America. Are we really supposed to like this man? A book written during the Land War and here we have a English man actually re-taking land of the Irish rather than the other way around. I really disliked this crap book. Bram Stoker was not a great writer or man. I liked the mythology facet and at first I really expected to like this book. The tales of the King of the Snakes and the French soldiers hooked me initially but it really doesn't do enough with this. It's like Stoker wrote and made the book up as he went along and after a few chapters went on this bog talking, confused romance tangent that no-one could possibly enjoy.In story telling and general idea it can keep you interested and though I have my hang-ups I wasn't completely disgusted with it. It can be readable and I think many people will like it despite me. It's nothing along the lines of Dracula though so do not expect horror for this is a thriller/romance novel. I rate it 3 stars as I think that's fairest. It has an anti-Irish sentiment in it that I can't overcome and it is lacking in overall vision and structure but it has a pulp appeal