Overrated in the early stages of his career, Lever paid the penalty of his too facile triumphs in his lifetime, and his undoubted talents have latterly been depreciated on political as well as artistic grounds. His heroes were drawn, with few exceptions, from the landlord class or their faithful retainers. The gallant Irish officers, whose Homeric exploits he loved to celebrate, held commissions in the British army. Lever has never been popular with Nationalist politicians, though, as a matter of fact no one ever exhibited the extravagance and recklessness of the landed gentry in more glaring colours. And he is anathema to the hierophants of the Neo-Celtic Renascence on account of his jocularity. There is nothing crepuscular about Lever; you might as well expect to find a fairy in a railway station.
Again, Lever never was and never could be the novelist of literary men. He was neither a scholar nor an artist; he wrote largely in instalments; and in his earlier novels was wont to end a chapter in a manner that rendered something like a miracle necessary to continue the existence of the hero: “He fell lifeless to the ground, the same instant I was felled to the earth by a blow from behind, and saw no more.” In technique and characterisation his later novels show a great advance, but if he lives, it will be by the spirited loosely-knit romances of love and war composed in the first ten years of his literary career. His heroes had no scruples in proclaiming their physical advantages and athletic prowess; Charles O’Malley, that typical Galway miles gloriosus, introduces himself with ingenuous egotism in the following passage:
“I rode boldly with fox-hounds; I was about the best shot within twenty miles of us; I could swim the Shannon at Holy Island; I drove four-in-hand better than the coachman himself; and from finding a hare to cooking a salmon, my equal could not be found from Killaloe to Banagher.”
The life led by the Playboys of the West (old style) as depicted in Lever’s pages was one incessant round of reckless hospitality, tempered by duels and practical joking, but it had its justification in the family annals of the fire-eating Blakes and Bodkins and the records of the Connaught Circuit. The intrepidity of Lever’s heroes was only equalled by their indiscretion, their good luck in escaping from the consequences of their folly, and their susceptibility. His womenfolk may be roughly divided into three classes; sentimental heroines, who sighed, and blushed and fainted on the slightest provocation; buxom Amazons, like Baby Blake; and campaigners or adventuresses. But the gentle, sentimental, angelic type predominates, and finds a perfect representative in Lucy Dashwood.
When Charles O’Malley was recovering from an accident in the hunting field, he fell asleep in an easy-chair in the drawing-room and was awakened by the “thrilling chords of a harp”:
“I turned gently round in my chair and beheld Miss Dashwood. She was seated in a recess of an old-fashioned window; the pale yellow glow of a wintry sun at evening fell upon her beautiful hair, and tinged it with such a light as I have often since then seen in Rembrandt’s pictures; her head leaned upon the harp, and, as she struck its chords at random, I saw that her mind was far away from all around her. As I looked, she suddenly started from her leaning attitude, and, parting back her curls from her brow, she preluded a few chords, and then sighed forth, rather than sang, that most beautiful of Moore’s melodies—
‘She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps.’
Never before had such pathos, such deep utterance of feeling, met my astonished sense; I listened breathlessly as the tears fell one by one down my cheek; my bosom heaved and fell; and when she ceased, I hid my head between my hands and sobbed aloud.”
Lever’s serious heroines, apart from the fact that they could ride, did not differ in essentials from those of Dickens, and a sense of humour was no part of their mental equipment. The hated rival, the dark-browed Captain Hammersly, was distinguished by his “cold air and repelling hauteur,” and is a familiar figure in mid-Victorian romance. Lever’s sentiment, in short, is old-fashioned, and cannot be expected to appeal to a Feminist age which has given us the public school girl and the suffragist. There is no psychological interest in the relations of his heroes and heroines; Charles’s farewell to Lucy is on a par with the love speeches in “The Lyons Mail.” There is seldom any doubt as to the ultimate reunion of his lovers; we are only concerned with the ingenuity of the author in surmounting the obstacles of his own invention. He was fertile in the devising of exciting incident; he was always able to eke out the narrative with a good story or song—as a writer of convivial, thrasonic or mock-sentimental verse he was quite in the first class—and in his earlier novels his high spirits and sense of fun never failed.
In his easy-going methods he may have been influenced by the example of Dickens—the Dickens of the “Pickwick Papers”—but there is no ground for any charge of conscious imitation, and where he challenged direct comparison—in the character of Mickey Free—he succeeded in drawing an Irish Sam Weller who falls little short of his more famous Cockney counterpart. For Lever was a genuine humorist, or perhaps we should say a genuine comedian, since the element of theatricality was seldom absent. The choicest exploits of that grotesque Admirable Crichton, Frank Webber, were carried out by hoaxing, disguise, or trickery of some sort. But the scene in which Frank wins his wager by impersonating Miss Judy Macan and sings “The Widow Malone” is an admirable piece of sustained fooling: admirable, too, in its way is the rescue of the imaginary captive in the Dublin drain. As a delineator of the humours of University life, Lever combined the atmosphere of “Verdant Green” with the sumptuous upholstery of Ouida. Here, again, in his portraits of dons and undergraduates Lever undoubtedly drew in part from life, but fell into his characteristic vice of exaggeration in his embroidery. Frank Webber’s antics are amusing, but it is hard to swallow his amazing literary gifts or the contrast between his effeminate appearance and his dare-devil energy.