Charles Lever, His Life in His Letters, Vol. II

by Charles James Lever

XXIII. LOOKING BACKWARDS 1871-1872

[The autobiographical and bibliographical notes which Lever
arranged to supply for a new edition of his novels were
written during the latter part of 1871 and the spring of
1872. Unfortunately he did not live to complete the intended
series of prefaces. They disclose highly interesting and
amusing glimpses of his career and opinions, and they
contain very open confessions of his loose literary methods,
as well as some acute criticisms of his writings.]

‘HARRY LORREQUER.’

That some thirty years after the sketches which form this volume were written I should be called upon to revise and re-edit them is strange enough to me, well remembering, as I do, with what little hope of permanence they were penned, how lightly they were undertaken, and how carelessly thrown together. But there is something still stranger in the retrospect, and that is, that these same papers—for originally they were contributed to ‘The Dublin University Magazine’—should mainly have directed the course of my future life, and decided my entire career. I may quote from a former preface that I was living in a very secluded spot when I formed the idea of jotting down these stories, many of them heard in boyhood, others constructed out of real incidents that occurred to my friends in travel, and some again—‘The Adventures of Trevanion’ and ‘The French Duellist,’ for instance—actual facts, well known to many who had formed part of the army of occupation in France. To give what consistency I might to a mass of incongruous adventure, to such a variety of strange situations befalling one individual, I was obliged to imagine a character, which probably my experiences—and they were not very mature at the time—assured me as being perfectly possible: one of a strong will and a certain energy, rarely persistent in purpose and perpetually the sport of accident, with a hearty enjoyment of the pleasure of the hour, and a very reckless indifference as to the price to be paid for it. If I looked out on my acquaintances, I believed I saw many of the traits I was bent on depicting, and for others I am afraid I had only to take a peep into myself. If it is an error, then, to believe that in these Confessions I have ever recorded any incidents in my own life, there is no mistake in supposing that in sketching Harry Lorrequer I was in a great measure depicting myself, and becoming, allegori-cally, an autobiographist. Here is a confession which, if thirty odd years had not rolled over, I might be indisposed to make; but time has enabled me to look back on my work, and even on myself, with a certain degree of impartiality, and to feel, as regards both, as the great Paley said a man feels after he has finished his dinner, “That he might have done better.” It is perfectly unnecessary that I should say when and where I wrote these sketches; no thought of future authorship of any kind occurred to me, far less did I dream of abandoning my profession as a physician for the precarious livelihood of the pen. Indeed their success, such as it was, only became known to me after I had left Ireland and gone to live abroad, and it was there—at Brussels—my publishers wrote to me to request a continuance of my Confessions, with the assurance that they had found favour in the world and flattering notice from the press. Though I have been what the sarcastic French moralist called “blessed with a bad memory” all my life, I can still recall the delight—I cannot call it less—with which I heard my attempt at authorship had been successful. I did not awake, indeed, “to find myself famous,” but I well remember the thrill of triumphant joy with which I read the letter that said “Go on,” and the entrancing ecstasy I felt at the bare possibility of becoming known one day as a writer. I have had, since then, some moments in which a partial success has made me very happy and very grateful, but I do not believe that all these put together, or indeed any possible favour the world might mete to me, would impart a tithe of the enjoyment I felt on hearing that ‘Harry Lorrequer’ had been liked by the public, and that they asked for more of him. If this sort of thing amuses them, thought I, I can go on for ever; and believing this to be true, I launched forth with all that prodigal waste of material which, if it forms one of the reasons of success, is, strictly speaking, one among the many demerits of this story. That I neither husbanded my resources nor imagined that they could ever fail me were not my only mistakes; and I am tempted to show how little I understood of the responsibilities of authorship by repeating what I have told elsewhere,—an incident of the last number of ‘Harry Lorrequer.’ The MS. which contained the conclusion of the story had been sent through the Foreign Office bag from Brussels, and possibly had been mistaken for a despatch. At all events, like King Theodore’s letter it had been thrown on one side and forgotten. In this strait my publishers wrote to me in a strain that “the trade” alone knows how to employ towards an unknown author. Stung by the reproaches (and they were not mild) of my correspondent, I wrote back, enclosing another conclusion, and telling him to print either or both—as he pleased. Years after, I saw the first MS. (which came to hand at last) bound in my publisher’s library and lettered, “Another ending to H. L.” When the great master of fiction condescended to inform the world on what small fragments of tradition or local anecdote the Waverley Novels were founded, he best exalted the marvellous skill of his own handiwork in showing how genius could develop the veriest incident of a life into a story of surpassing power and interest. I have no such secrets to reveal, nor have I the faintest pretension to suppose the public would care to hear about the sources from which I drew either my characters or my incidents. I have seen, however, such references to supposed portraiture of individuals in this story, that I am forced to declare there is but one character in the book of which the original had any existence, and to which I contributed nothing of exaggeration. This is Father Malachi Brennan. The pleasant priest was alive when I wrote the tale, and saw himself in print and—worse still—in picture, not, I believe, without a certain mock indignation, for he was too racy a humourist and too genuine a lover of fun to be really angry at this caricature of him. The amusing author of ‘The Wild Sports of the West’—Hamilton Maxwell—was my neighbour in the little watering-place where I was living,* and our intimacy was not the less close from the graver character of the society around us. We often exchanged our experiences of Irish character and life, and in our gossipings stories were told, added to, and amplified in such a way between us that I believe neither of us could have pronounced at last who gave the initiative of an incident, or on which side lay the authorship of any particular event.

* Portstewart

It would have been well had our intercourse stopped at these confidences, but, unfortunately, it did not. We often indulged in little practical jokes on our more well-conducted neighbours, and I remember that the old soldier from whom I drew some of the features I have given to Colonel Kamworth was especially the mark of these harmless pleasantries. Our Colonel was an excellent fellow, kind-hearted and hospitable, but so infatuated with a propensity to meddle with every one, and to be a partner in the joys, the afflictions, the failures, or the successes of all around him, that, with the best possible intentions and the most sincere desire to be useful to his neighbours, he became the cause of daily misconceptions and mistakes, sowed discord where he meant unity, and, in fact, originated more trouble and more distrust than the most malevolent mischief-maker of the whole country-side. I am forced to own that the small persecutions with which my friend Maxwell and myself followed the worthy Colonel, the wrong intelligence with which we supplied him, particularly as regarded the rank and station of the various visitors who came down during the bathing season; the false scents on which we sent him, and the absurd enterprises on which we embarked him, even to the extent of a mock address which induced him to stand for the “borough”—the address to the constituency being our joint production,—all these follies, I say, more or less disposed me, I am sure, to that incessant flow of absurd incident which runs through this volume, and which, after all, was little more than the reflex of our daily plot-tings and contrivings. I believe my old friend the Colonel is still living: if he be, and he should read these lines, let him also read that I have other memories of him than those of mere jest and pleasantry—memories of his cordial hospitality and genial good nature,—and that there are few things I would like better than to meet and talk with him over bygones, knowing no one more likely to relish a pleasant reminiscence than himself, no one more certain to forgive a long-past liberty taken with him. If there are many faults and blunders in this tale which I would willingly correct, if there be much I would curtail or cut out altogether, and if there be also occasionally incidents of which I could improve the telling, I am held back from any attempts of this kind by the thought that it was by these sketches, such as they are, I first won the hearing from the public which for more than thirty years has never deserted me, and that the favour which has given the chief pride and interest to my life dates from the day I was known as Harry Lorrequer. The life of a physician has nothing so thoroughly rewarding, nothing so cheering, so full of hearty encouragement, as in the occasional friendships to which it opens the way. The doctor attains to a degree of intimacy, and stands on a footing of confidence so totally exceptional, that if personal qualities lend aid to the position, his intercourse becomes friendship. Whether, therefore, my old career gave me any assistance in new roads, whether it imparted to me any habits of investigation as applicable to the full in morals as in matter, it certainly imparted to me the happy incident of standing on good terms with—I was going to say—my patient (and perhaps no better word could be found for him who has heard me so long, trusted me so much, given me so large a share in his favours, and come to look on me with such friendliness). It would be displaying the worst in me if I did not own that I owe to my books not only the most pleasant intimacies of my life, but some of my closest friendships. A chance expression, a fairly shadowed thought, a mere chord struck at random by a passing hand, as it were, has now and then placed me, as mesmerists call it, en rapport with some one who may have thought long and deeply on what I had but skimmed over; and straightway there was a bond between us. No small satisfaction has it been to me occasionally to hear that out of the over-abundance of my own buoyancy and light-heartedness—and I had a great deal of both long ago—I have been able to share with my neighbour and given him part of my sunshine, and only felt the warmer myself. A great writer—one of the most eloquent historians who ever illustrated the military achievements of his country—once told me that, as he lay sick and careworn after a fever, it was in my own reckless stories of soldier life that he found the cheeriest moments of his solitude: and now let me hasten to say that I tell this in no spirit of boastfulness, but with the heartfelt gratitude of one who has gained more by hearing that confession than Harry Lorrequer ever gained by all his own. If to go over again the pages that I wrote so many years ago is in a measure to revisit in age the loved scenes of boyhood, and to ponder over passages the very spirit of whose dictation is dead and gone,—if all this has its sadness, I am cheered by remembering that I am still addressing many old and dear friends, and have also for my audience the sons and grandsons, and, what I like better, the daughters and granddaughters, of those who once listened to Harry Lorrequer.

‘CHARLES O’MALLEY.’

The success of ‘Harry Lorrequer’ was the reason for writing ‘Charles O’Malley.’ That I myself was in nowise prepared for the favour the public bestowed on my first attempt is easily enough understood. The ease with which I strung my stories together—in reality the ‘Confessions of Harry Lorrequer’ are little more than a note-book of absurd and laughable incidents—led me to believe that I could draw on this vein of composition without any limit whatever. I felt, or thought I felt, an inexhaustible store of fun and buoyancy within me, and I began to have a misty half-confused impression that Englishmen generally laboured under a sad-coloured temperament, and were proportionately grateful to any one who would rally them, even passingly, out of their despondency, and give them a laugh without much trouble for going in search of it. When I set to work to write ‘Charles O’Malley,’ I was, as I have ever been, very low with fortune, and the success of a new venture was pretty much as eventful to me as the turn of the right colour at rouge-et-noir. At the same time, I had then an amount of spring in my temperament, and a power of enjoying life, which I can honestly say I never found surpassed. The world had for me all the interest of an admirable comedy, in which the part allotted to myself, if not a high or a foreground one, was eminently suited to my taste, and brought me, besides, sufficiently often on the stage to enable me to follow all the fortunes of the piece. Brussels (where I was then living) was adorned at the period with most agreeable English society. Some leaders of the fashionable world of London had come there to refit and recruit, both in body and estate. There were several pleasant people, and a great number of pretty people; and so far as I could judge, the fashionable dramas of Belgrave Square and its vicinity were being performed in the Rue Royale and the Boulevard de Waterloo with very considerable success. There were dinners, balls, déjeuners, and picnics in the Bois de Cambre, excursions to Waterloo, and select little parties to Boisfort (a charming little resort in the forest), whose intense Cockneyism became perfectly inoffensive, being in a foreign land and remote from the invasion of home-bred vulgarity. I mention these things to show the adjuncts by which I was aided, and the rattle of gaiety by which I was, as it were, “accompanied” when I tried my voice. The soldier element tinctured our society strongly, and, I will add, most agreeably. Amongst those whom I remember best were several old Peninsulars. Lord Combermere was of this number; and another of our set was an officer who accompanied—if indeed he did not command—the first boat party who crossed the Douro. It is needless to say how diligently I cultivated a society so full of all the storied details I was eager to obtain, and how generously disposed were they to give me all the information I needed. On topography especially were they valuable to me, and with such good result that I have been more than once complimented on the accuracy of my descriptions of places which I have never seen. When, therefore, my publishers asked me could I write a story in the Lorrequer vein,—a story in which active service and military adventure could figure more prominently than mere civilian life, and where achievements of a British army might form the staple of the narrative,—I was ready to reply: “Not one, but fifty,” Do not mistake me, and suppose that any overweening confidence in my literary powers would have emboldened me to make this reply: my whole strength lay in the fact that I could not recognise anything like literary effort in the matter. If the world would only condescend to read that which I wrote precisely as I was in the habit of talking, nothing could be easier. Not alone was it easy, but it was intensely interesting and amusing to myself to be so engaged. The success of ‘Harry Lorrequer’ had been freely wafted across the German Ocean: it was very intoxicating incense, and I set to work on my second book with a thrill of hope as regards the world’s favour which—and it is no small thing to say it—I can yet recall. I can recall, too,—and I am afraid more vividly still,—some of the difficulties of my task when I endeavoured to form anything like an accurate or precise idea of some campaigning incident, or some passage of arms, from the narratives of two distinct and separate “eye-witnesses.” What mistrust I conceived for all eye-witnesses from my own brief experience of their testimonies! What an impulse did it lend to me to study the nature and the temperament of the narrator as an indication of the peculiar colouring he might lend his narrative! And how it taught me to measure the force of the French epigram that it was the alternating popularity of Marshal Soult that decided whether he won or lost the battle of Toulouse! While, however, I was sifting these evidences, and separating, as well as I might, the wheat from the chaff, I was in a measure training myself for what, without my then knowing it, was to become my career in life. My training was not without a certain amount of labour, but so light and pleasant was the labour, so full of picturesque peeps at characters and of humorous views of human nature, that it would be the rankest ingratitude if I did not own that I gained all my earlier experiences of the world in very pleasant company, highly enjoyable at the time and with matter for charming souvenirs long afterwards. That certain traits of my acquaintances found themselves embodied in some of the characters of this story,* I do not seek to deny. The principle of natural selection adapts itself to novels as well as to nature, and it would have demanded an effort above my strength to have disabused myself at the desk of all the impressions of the dinner-table, and to have forgotten features which interested or amused me. One of the personages of my tale I drew, however, with very little aid from fancy. I would go so far as to say that I took him from the life, if my memory did not confront me with the lamentable inferiority of my picture to the great original which it was meant to portray. With the exception of the quality of courage, I never met a man who contained within himself so many of the traits of Falstaff as the individual who furnished me with “Major Monsoon.” But the Major—I must call him so, though that rank was far beneath his own—was a man of unquestionable bravery. His powers as a story-teller were to my thinking unrivalled; the peculiar reflections on life which he would passingly introduce—the wise apothegms—were of a morality essentially of his own invention; he would indulge in the unsparing exhibition of himself in situations such as other men would never have confessed,—all blended up with a racy enjoyment of life, dashed occasionally with sorrow that our tenure of it was short of patriarchal. All these idiosyncracies, accompanied by a face redolent of intense humour and a voice whose modulations were managed with the skill of a consummate artist, were above me to convey; nor indeed, as I re-read any of the adventures in which he figures, am I other than ashamed at the weakness of my drawing and the poverty of my colouring. In order to show that I had a better chance to personify him than is usually the lot of a novelist,—that I possessed, so to say, a vested interest in his life and adventures,—I will relate a little incident; and my accuracy, if necessary, can be attested by another actor in the scene who yet survives. I was living a bachelor life at Brussels—my family being at Ostend for the bathing—during the summer of 1840. The city was comparatively empty, all the so-called society being absent at the various spas or baths of Germany. One member of the British Legation, who remained at his post to represent the mission, and myself, making common cause of our desolation and ennui, spent much of our time together and dined tête-à-tête every day. It chanced that one evening, as we were hastening through the park on our way to dinner, we espied the Major—as “Major” I must speak of him—lounging about with that half-careless, half-observant air which indicated a desire to be somebody’s—anybody’s—guest rather than to surrender himself to the homeliness of domestic fare.

* ‘Charles O’ Malley.’

“There’s that confounded old Monsoon!” said my diplomatist friend. “It’s all up if he sees us, and I can’t endure him.” Now I must remark that my friend, though very far from being insensible to the humouristic side of the Major’s character, was not always in the vein to enjoy it, and when he was so indisposed he could invest the object of his dislike with something little short of repulsiveness. “Promise me,” said he, as Monsoon came towards us, “you’ll not ask him to dinner.” Before I could make any reply the Major was shaking a hand of either of us, rapturously expatiating over his good luck at meeting us. “Mrs M.,” said he, “has got a dreary party of old ladies to dine with her, and I have come out here to find some pleasant fellow to join me and take our mutton-chop together.”