M. H.
LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Christy Carew. By May Laffan, author of "The Honorable Miss Ferrard," etc. (Leisure-Hour Series.) New York: Henry Holt & Co.
The novels to which Miss Laffan gives a sponsor in affixing her signature to the latest, Christy Carew, present two strong and distinct claims to our notice in the vigor and realism with which they are written, and the thorough picture they give of Ireland, politically and socially, at the present day. They are no mere repetitions of hackneyed Irish stories, no sketches drawn from a narrow or partial phase of life, but the result of large and penetrating observation among all classes, made in a thoroughly systematized manner, so as to form a thoughtful and almost exhaustive study of a country which is more dogmatized over than understood. Ireland has never been depicted with so much interest and sympathy by any novelist since Miss Edgeworth wrote her Moral Tales, and both the country and the art of novel-writing have advanced since then, the latter possibly more than the former. Miss Edgeworth, indeed, has been singularly unfortunate. She drew from life, and her talent and observation were worthy of a more lasting shrine, while the artificiality of her books has caused them to decay even faster than those of some of her contemporaries. Her successors in Irish fiction, with no lack of talent, have been too often careless in using it, or have preferred story-telling to observation. Miss Laffan wields a genuine Irish pen, graphic, keen of satire, with plenty of sharp Hibernian humor, but she shows in its exercise a care and directness of aim which are not the common qualities of Irish writers. In beginning her career as a novelist she had the courage to refrain from the pursuit of those finer artistic beauties which lure to failure so many writers incapable of seizing them: she even put aside the question of plot, and strove to give a sound and truthful representation of life and manners.
That end was gained with masterly success. No one reading the anonymous novel Hogan, M.P., would have been likely to set it down from internal evidence as a woman's book: it is one of the stoutest and most vigorous pieces of fiction which have appeared for years. We can find no trace of its having been reprinted in this country, and are at a loss to account for the omission: its distinctively Irish character ought to form an attraction. Hogan, M.P., is a political novel as realistic as Anthony Trollope's, but more incisive in tone and wider in scope. Instead of confining her energies to the doings and conversations of one set of people, Miss Laffan looks at politics as they are mirrored in society, sketching not alone the wire-pulling and petty diplomacies, but phases of life resulting therefrom. In Hogan, M.P., we have a vivid coup d'œil of Dublin society, with its sharp, irregular boundaries, its sects and sets, its manner of comporting and amusing itself. The field is a wide one, but Miss Laffan has the happy art of generalization—of portraying a whole society in a few well-marked types. There is no confusion of character, and though we seem to have shaken hands with all Dublin in her pages, from great dignitaries to school-boys, the picture is never overcrowded.
"A drop of ditch-water under a microscope" Hogan calls the society of his native city—"everybody pushing upward on the social ladder kicking down those behind." This zoological spectacle is not confined to Dublin, but there appears to be a combination of strictness and indefiniteness of precedence belonging peculiarly to that place. At the top of the ladder, though not so firmly fixed there as before the Disestablishment, is the Protestant set, regarding the Castle as its stronghold and looking down on the Roman Catholic set, who reciprocate the contempt. These grand divisions are separated by a strict line of demarcation, even the performance of the marriage ceremony between Protestants and Catholics being forbidden in Dublin. They contain an endless ramification of lesser groups, whose relations we may attempt to illustrate by quoting from the book before us an account of the mutual position of Mrs. O'Neil and Mrs. Carew, the former the wife of a tradesman shortly to become lord mayor, the latter a "'vert" from Protestantism and the spouse of a Crown solicitor in debt to his future mayorship. "The lady mayoress elect, conscious of her prospective dignity in addition to the heavy bill due by the Carews, was the least possible shade—not patronizing, for that would have been impossible—but perhaps independent in manner. She did not turn her head toward her companion as she addressed her; she put more questions to her and in a broader accent than she usually did in conversation; and she barely gave her interlocutor time to finish the rather curt contributions she vouchsafed toward the conversation. On her side, Mrs. Carew, mindful of her position and of her superior accent, which implied even more, wanting to be condescending and patronizing, and half afraid to be openly impertinent, was calm and self-possessed. She grew more freezingly courteous as the other lady grew less formal."
We have said that Miss Laffan began with realism pure and simple. Hogan, M.P., remains, so far, to our mind, her strongest book, but there are finer and sweeter qualities in her other writings. We should be inclined to rank The Honorable Miss Ferrard as an artistic rather than a realistic book, though it is based on the same soundness of observation as its predecessor. It is an episode, suggestive, rather analytic in treatment, with the freshness of a first impression—le charme de l'inachevé. The heroine is a singularly original, fresh and attractive conception. The book deals almost wholly with the outside aspects of things, with picturesque rather than moral traits, though a breath of feeling true and sweet is wafted across it and heightens its fine vague beauty.
A deeper humanity is shown in the short story Flitters, Tatters and the Counsellor, which made its first appearance in this magazine in January, 1879. This sketch gained a quicker popularity than her longer novels, and drew forth warm eulogies from critics so far apart in standard as Ruskin, Leslie Stephen and Bret Harte.