To The Earl of Malmesbury.
“Hôtel d’Odessa, Spezzia, Feb. 16, 1863.
“My dear Lord,—I am sincerely obliged by your lordship’s note in acknowledgment of ‘Barrington.’
“I am sure you are right in your estimate of Kinglake’s book.* Such diatribes are no more history than the Balaclava charge was war.... It was, however, his brief to make out the Crimean war a French intrigue, and he obeyed the old legal maxim in a different case—‘Abuse the plaintiff’s attorney.’
* The allusion is to the alleged personal cowardice of the
third Napoleon. “No man,” declares Lord Malmesbury, “could
be less exposed to such an accusation. I saw him jump off
the bridge over the Rhine at Geneva when a youth; and all
men can feel what must have been his agonies when riding all
day at the Battle of Sedan with his deadly malady upon
him.”—E. D.
“Italy is something farther from union than a year ago. In dealing with the brigandage, Piedmont has contrived to insult the prejudices of the South by wholesale invectives against all things Neapolitan. French intrigues unquestionably help to keep up the uncertainty which all Italians feel as to the future, and the inadequacy of the men in power here contributes to the same. Indeed, what Kinglake says of the English Generals—questioning how the great Duke would have dealt with the matter before them—might be applied to Italian statesmen as regards Cavour. They have not a shadow of a policy, save in their guesses as to how he would have treated any question before them. To get ‘steerage-way’ on the nation, Cavour had to launch her into a revolution; but if these people try the same experiment they are likely to be shipwrecked.
“It would be both a pride and a pleasure to me to send your lordship tidings occasionally of events here, if you cared for it.”
After some half a dozen letters had passed between Lever and John Blackwood concerning Magazine papers, Lever took courage and again asked the question which he had asked in 1861. This time his way of putting it was: “I have a half-novel, half-romance, of an Irish Garibaldian in my head—only the opening chapters written. What would you say to it?” To this Blackwood replied: “It is a serious business to start a long serial, and I would not like to decide without seeing the bulk of the work. I do not know how you have been in the habit of writing, whether from month to month, or getting a good way ahead before publication is commenced. If the latter is your usual plan, I have no hesitation in asking you to send me a good mass of the MS., and I will let you know as speedily as possible what I think and can propose.”
From this point onward—from 1863 to 1872*—the story of Charles Lever’s literary life is told mainly in his letters to the House of Blackwood: the current of his correspondence, which at one time had streamed into Ireland, was now diverted, and Lever ingenuously revealed himself and his methods of work and play to Mr John Blackwood.
* In Dr Fitzpatrick’s biography only a scant account of the
novelist’s life during this period is furnished; but a
number of Lever’s letters to Mr John Blackwood are given in
Mrs Blackwood Porter’s Life of her father. I am indebted to
Mrs Porter for permission to include some of these with the
others, and also several letters from Mr John Blackwood to
Lever.