Irish Books and Irish People | Page 9

O'Malley or Lord Kilgobbin; for first and last
Lever was always himself.
Yet, I must own it, it does not do to read Lever soon after Miss Barlow.
Her stories of Lisconnel and its folk have a tragic dignity wholly out of
his range. It is a sad-coloured country she writes of, gray and brown;
sodden brown with bog water, gray with rock cropping up through the
fields; the only brightness is up overhead in the heavens, and even they
are often clouded. These sombre hues, with the passing gleam of

something above them, reflect themselves in every page of her books.
She renders that complete harmony between the people and their
surroundings which is only seen in working folk whose clothes are
stained with the colour of the soil they live by, and whose lives
assimilate themselves to its character. She has a fineness of touch, a
poetry, to which no other Irish story-teller has attained.
Yet, Miss Barlow has never succeeded with a regular novel: and she
may have been only a forerunner. All great writers proceed from a
school, and there does exist now undeniably a school of Irish literature
which differs from Miss Edgeworth in being strongly tinged with the
element of Celtic romance, from Carleton in possessing an admirable
standard of style, and from Lever in aiming at a sincere and vital
portraiture of Irish life.
1897.

A CENTURY OF IRISH HUMOUR.
In a preface to the French translation of Sienkiewicz's works, M. de
Wyzewa, the well-known critic, himself a Pole, makes a suggestive
comparison between the Polish and the Russian natures. The Pole, he
says, is quicker, wittier, more imaginative, more studious of beauty,
less absorbed in the material world than the Russian--in a word,
infinitely more gifted with the artistic temperament; and yet in every art
the Russian has immeasurably outstripped the Pole. His explanation, if
not wholly convincing, is at least suggestive. The Poles are a race of
dreamers, and the dreamer finds his reward in himself. He does not
seek to conquer the world with arms or with commerce, with tears or
with laughter; neither money tempts him nor fame, and the strenuous,
unremitting application which success demands, whether in war,
business, or the arts, is alien to his being.
The same observation and the same reasoning apply with equal force to
the English and the Irish. No one who has lived in the two countries
will deny that the Irish are apparently the more gifted race; no one can

deny, if he has knowledge and candour, that the English have
accomplished a great deal more, the Irish a great deal less. Nowhere is
this more evident than in the productions of that faculty which Irishmen
have always been reputed, and justly reputed, to possess in peculiar
measure--the faculty of humour. Compare Lever, who for a long time
passed as the typical Irish humorist, with his contemporaries Thackeray
and Dickens. The comparison is not fair, but it suggests the central fact
that the humour of Irish literature is deficient in depth, in intellectual
quality, or, to put it after an Irish fashion, in gravity.
'Humorous' is a word as question-begging as 'artistic,' and he would be
a rash man who should try to define either. But so much as this will
readily be admitted, that humour is a habit of mind essentially complex,
involving always a double vision--a reference from the public or
normal standard of proportion to one that is private and personal. The
humorist refuses to part with any atom of his own personality, he
stamps it on whatever comes from him. "If reasons were as plenty as
blackberries," says Falstaff, achieving individuality by the same kind of
odd picturesque comparison as every witty Irish peasant uses in talk, to
the delight of himself and his hearers. But the individuality lies deeper
than phrases: Falstaff takes his private standard into battle with him.
There is nothing more obviously funny than the short paunchy man, let
us not say cowardly, but disinclined to action, who finds himself
engaged in a fight. Lever has used him a score of times (beginning with
Mr. O'Leary in the row at a gambling-hall in Paris), and whether he
runs or whether he fights, his efforts to do either are grotesquely
laughable. Shakespeare puts that view of Falstaff too: Prince Hal words
it. But Falstaff, the humorist in person, rises on the field of battle over
the slain Percy and enunciates his philosophy of the better part of
valour. Falstaff's estimate of honour--"that word honour" ("Who hath it?
he that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it?"), the "grinning honour"
that Sir Walter Blunt wears where the Douglas left him--is necessary to
complete the humorist's vision of a battle-piece. Lever will scarcely
visit you with such