Irish Books and Irish People | Page 8

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 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.