Irish Books and Irish People | Page 8

and an easy cheerful
way of looking at life. Lover can raise a laugh, but his wit is horseplay
except for a few happy phrases. He has no real comedy; there is
nothing in Handy Andy half so ingenious as the story in Jack Hinton of
the way Ulick Bourke acquitted himself of his debt to Father Tom. And
behind all Lever's conventional types there is a real fund of observation

and knowledge which is absolutely wanting in Lover, who simply
lacked the brains to be anything more than a trifler.
A very different talent was that of their younger contemporary J.
Sheridan Le Fanu. The author of Uncle Silas had plenty of solid power;
but his art was too highly specialised. No one ever succeeded better in
two main objects of the story-teller; first, in exciting interest, in
stimulating curiosity by vague hints of some dreadful mystery; and then
in concentrating attention upon a dramatic scene. It is true that,
although an Irishman, he gained his chief successes with stories that
had an English setting; but one of the best, The House by the
Churchyard, describes very vividly life at Chapelizod in the days when
this deserted little village, which lies just beyond the Phoenix Park, was
thickly peopled with the families of officers stationed in Dublin. Yet
somehow one does not carry away from the reading of it any picture of
that society; the story is so exciting that the mind has no time to rest on
details, but hurries on from clue to clue till finally and literally the
murder is out. Books which keep a reader on the tenter-hooks of
conjecture must always suffer from this undue concentration of the
interest; and in spite of cheery, inquisitive Dr. Toole, and the
remarkable sketch of Black Dillon, the ruffianly genius with a
reputation only recognised in the hospitals and the police-courts (a
character admirably invented and admirably used in the plot) one can
hardly class Le Fanu among those novelists who have left memorable
presentments of Irish life. It is a pity; for plainly, if the man had cared
less for sensational incident and ingenious construction, he might have
sketched life and character with a strong brush and a kind of grim
realism.
Realism Lever does not aim at: he declines to be on his oath about
anything. What he gives one, vividly enough, is national colour, not
local colour; he is essentially Irish, just as Fielding is essentially
English; but he aims at verisimilitude rather than veracity. The ideal of
the novel has changed since his day. Compare him with the two ladies
who stand out prominently among contemporary writers of Irish fiction,
Miss Jane Barlow and Miss Emily Lawless. To begin with, Lever's
stories are always concerned with the Quality; peasants only come in

for an underplot, or in subordinate parts; and the gentry all through
Ireland resemble one another within reasonable limits. It is different
with the peasantry. In every part of Ireland you will find people who
have never been ten miles away from the place of their birth, and upon
whom a local character is unmistakably stamped. The contemporary
novelists delight to mark these differences, these salient points of
singularity; and their studies are chiefly of the peasantry. They settle
down upon some little corner of the country and never stir out of it.
Miss Lawless is not content to get you Irish character; she must show
you a Clare man or an Arran islander, and she is at infinite pains to
point out how his nature, even his particular actions, are influenced by
the place of his bringing up. Lever avoids this specialisation; he prefers
a stone wall country for his hunting scenes, but beyond that he goes no
further into details. Again Miss Lawless both in Grania and in Hurrish
makes you aware that young Irishmen of Hurrish's class are curiously
indifferent to female beauty. Lever will have none of that: his Irishman
must be "a divil with the girls," although Lever is no sentimentalist, and
does not talk of love matches among the Irish peasantry.
The greatest divergence of all, however, is in the temper attributed to
the Irish. Lever makes them gay, Miss Lawless and Miss Barlow make
them sad. No one denies that sadness is nearer the reality, but it is
unreasonable to call Lever insincere. Naturally careless and
lighthearted he does not trouble himself with the riddle of the painful
world; the distress which touches him most nearly is a distress for debt.
But if Lever is not realistic he is natural; he follows the law of his
nature as an artist should; he sees life through his own medium; and if
books are to be valued as companions, not many of them are better
company than Charles