While “Lord Kilgobbin”—which ran as a serial in the “Cornhill Magazine” from October, 1870, to March, 1872—was not wholly free from Lever’s besetting sin, it is interesting not only as the most thoughtful and carefully written of his novels, but on account of its political attitude. Here Lever proved himself no champion à outrance of the landlords, but was ready to admit that their joyous conviviality was too often attended by gross mismanagement of their estates. The methods of Peter Gill, the land steward, are shown to be all centred in craft and subtlety—“outwitting this man, forestalling that, doing everything by halves, so that no boon came unassociated with some contingency or other by which he secured to himself unlimited power and uncontrolled tyranny.” The sympathy extended to the rebels of ’98 is remarkable and finds expression in the spirited lines:—
| “Is there anything more we can fight or can hate for? The ‘drop’ and the famine have made our ranks thin. In the name of endurance, then, what do we wait for? Will nobody give us the word to begin?” |
These must have been almost the last lines Lever ever wrote, unless we accept the bitter epitaph on himself:
| “For sixty odd years he lived in the thick of it, And now he is gone, not so much very sick of it, As because he believed he heard somebody say, ‘Harry Lorrequer’s hearse is stopping the way.’” |
The bitterness of the epitaph lies in the fact that it was largely true; he had exhausted the vein of rollicking romance on which his fame and popularity rested. For the rest the charge of misrepresenting Irish life is met by so judicious a critic as the late Dr. Garnett with a direct negative:—
“He has not actually misrepresented anything, and cannot be censured for confining himself to the society which he knew; nor was his talent adapted for the treatment of such life in its melancholy and poetic aspects, even if these had been more familiar to him.”
Of the humorous Irish novelists who entered into competition with Lever for the favour of the English-speaking public in his lifetime, two claim special notice—Samuel Lover and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Lover has always been bracketed with Lever, whom he resembled in many ways, but he was overshadowed by his more brilliant and versatile contemporary. Yet within his limited sphere he was a true humorist, and the careless, whimsical, illogical aspects of Irish character have seldom been more effectively illustrated than by the author of ‘Handy Andy,’ and ‘The Gridiron.’ Paddy, as drawn by Lover, succeeds in spite of his drawbacks, much as Brer Rabbit does in the tales of Uncle Remus. His mental processes remind one of the story of the Hungarian baron who, on paying a visit to a friend after a railway journey, complained of a bad headache, the result of sitting with his back to the engine. When his friend asked, “Why did not you change places with your vis-à-vis?” the baron replied, “How could I? I had no vis-à-vis.” Lover’s heroes “liked action, but they hated work”: the philosophy of thriftlessness is summed up to perfection in “Paddy’s Pastoral”:—
| “Here’s a health to you, my darlin’, Though I’m not worth a farthin’; For when I’m drunk I think I’m rich, I’ve a featherbed in every ditch!” |
For all his kindliness Lover laid too much stress on this happy-go-lucky fecklessness to minister to Irish self-respect. His pictures of Irish life were based on limited experience; in so far as they are true, they recall and emphasise traits which many patriotic Irishmen wish to forget or eliminate. An age which has witnessed the growth of Irish Agricultural Co-operation is intolerant of a novelist who for the most part represents his countrymen as diverting idiots, and therefore we prefer to represent him in this volume by “The Little Weaver,” one of those mock heroic tales in which Irishmen have excelled from his day to that of Edmund Downey. No better example could be given of his easy flow of humour in genuine Hiberno-English or of his shrewd portraiture of such simple types of Irish peasant character.
The case of Le Fanu is peculiar. His best-known novels had no specially characteristic Irish flavour. But his sombre talent was lit by intermittent flashes of the wildest hilarity, and it was in this mood that the author of “Uncle Silas” and “Carmilla” wrote “The Quare Gandher” and “Billy Malowney’s Taste of Love and Glory,” two of the most brilliantly comic extravaganzas which were ever written by an Irishman, and which no one but an Irishman could ever have written.