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.
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 reflections, for the humorist of Lever's type never stands apart and smiles; he laughs loud and in company. Still less will he give you one of those speeches which are the supreme achievement of this faculty, where the speaker's philosophy is not reasoned out liked Falstaff's, but revealed in a flash of the onlooker's insight. Is it pardonable to quote the account of Falstaff's death as the hostess narrates it?
"How now, Sir John, quoth I, what, man! be of good cheer. So a' cried out God, God, three or four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him a' should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet."
Humour can go no farther than that terrible, illuminating phrase, which is laughable enough, heaven knows, but scarce likely to make you laugh. Contrast the humour of that with the humour of such a story as Lever delighted in. There were two priests dining with a regiment, we all have read in Harry Lorrequer, who chaffed a dour Ulster Protestant till he was the open derision of the mess. Next time they returned, the Protestant major was radiant with a geniality that they could not explain till they had to make their way out of barracks in a hurry, and found that the countersign (arranged by the major) was "Bloody end to the Pope." Told as Lever tells it, with all manner of jovial amplifications, that story would make anyone laugh. But it does not go deep. The thing is funny in too obvious a way; the mirth finds too large an outlet in laughter; it does not hang about the brain, inextricable from the processes of thought; it carries nothing with it beyond the jest. And just as tears help to an assuaging of grief, so in a sense laughter makes an end of mirth. Give a feeling its instinctive vent, and you will soon be done with it, like the child who laughs and cries within five minutes; check it, and it spreads inward, gaining in intellectual quality as it loses in physical expression. The moral is, that if you wish to be really humorous you must not be too funny; and the capital defect of most Irish humour is that its aim is too simple—it does not look beyond raising a laugh.