“What Ireland wants,” said an old gentleman not very long ago, “is a Walter Scott.” The remedy did not seem very practical, since Walter Scotts will not come to order, but the point of view is worth noting, for there you touch the central fact about Irish literature. We desire a Walter Scott that he may glorify our annals, popularise our legends, describe our scenery, and give an attractive view of the national character. In short, we know that Ireland possesses pre-eminently the quality of picturesqueness, and we should like to see it turned to good account. We want a Walter Scott to advertise Ireland, and to fill the hotels with tourists; but as for desiring to possess a great novelist simply for the distinction of the thing, probably no civilised people on earth is more indifferent to the matter. At present, indeed, a Walter Scott, should he appear in Ireland, would be apt to have a cold welcome. To write on anything connected with Irish history is inevitably to offend the Press of one party, and very probably of both. Lever is less of a caricaturist than Dickens, yet Dickens is idolised while Lever has been bitterly blamed for lowering Irish character in the eyes of the world; the charge is even repeated in the Dictionary of National Biography. That may be patriotic sentiment, but it is not criticism.

Literature in Ireland, in short, is almost inextricably connected with considerations foreign to art; it is regarded as a means, not as an end. During the nineteenth century the belief being general among all classes of Irish people that the English know nothing of Ireland, every book on an Irish subject was judged by the effect it was likely to have upon English opinion, to which the Irish are naturally sensitive, since it decides the most important Irish questions. But apart from this practical aspect of the matter, there is a morbid national sensitiveness which desires to be consulted. Ireland, though she ought to count herself amply justified of her children, is still complaining that she is misunderstood among the nations; she is for ever crying out for someone to give her keener sympathy, fuller appreciation, and exhibit herself and her grievances to the world in a true light. The result is that kind of insincerity and special pleading which has been the curse of Irish or Anglo-Irish literature. I write of a literature which has its natural centre in Dublin, not in Connemara; which looks eastward, not westward. That literature begins with the Drapier Letters: it continues through the great line of orators in whom the Irish genius (we say nothing of the Celtic) has found its highest expression; and it produced its first novelist, perhaps also its best, in the unromantic person of Maria Edgeworth.

Miss Edgeworth had a sound instinct for her art, disfigured though her later writings are by what Madame de Stael called her triste utilité. Her first story is her most artistic production. Castle Rackrent is simply a pleasant satire upon the illiterate and improvident gentry who have always been too common in her country. In this book she holds no brief; she never stops to preach; her moral is implied, not expressed. A historian might, it is true, go to Castle Rackrent for information about the conditions of land tenure as well as about social life in the Ireland of that day; but the erudition is part and parcel of her story. Throughout the length and breadth of Ireland, setting aside great towns, the main interest of life for all classes is the possession of land. Irish peasants seldom marry for love, they never murder for love; but they marry and they murder for land. To know something of the land-question is indispensable for an Irish novelist, and Miss Edgeworth graduated with honours in this subject. She was her father’s agent; when her brother succeeded to the property she resigned, but in the troubles of 1830 she was recalled to the management, and saved the estate. Castle Rackrent is, therefore, like Galt’s Annals of the Parish, a historical document; but it is none the worse story for that. The narrative is put dramatically into the mouth of old Thady, a lifelong servant of the family. Thady’s son, Jason Quirk, attorney and agent to the estate, has dispossessed the Rackrents; but Thady is still “poor Thady,” and regards the change with horror. Before recounting the history of his own especial master and patron, Sir Condy Rackrent, last of the line, Thady gives his ingenuous account of the three who previously bore the name; Sir Patrick, Sir Murtagh, and Sir Kit. Sir Patrick, the inventor of raspberry whiskey, died at table: “Just as the company rose to drink his health with three cheers, he fell down in a sort of fit, and was carried off; they sat it out, and were surprised in the morning to find that it was all over with poor Sir Patrick.” That no gentleman likes to be disturbed after dinner, was the best recognised rule of life in Ireland; if your host happened to have a fit, you knew he would wish you to sit it out. Gerald Griffin in The Collegians makes the same point with his usual vigour. A shot is heard in the dining-room by the maids downstairs. They are for rushing in, but the manservant knows better: “Sure, don’t you know, if there was anyone shot the master would ring the bell.” After Sir Patrick, who thus lived and died, to quote his epitaph, “a monument of old Irish hospitality,” came Sir Murtagh, “who was a very learned man in the law, and had the character of it”; another passion that seems to go with the land-hunger in Ireland. Sir Murtagh married one of the family of the Skinflints: “She was a strict observer for self and servants of Lent and all fast days, but not holidays.” However, says Thady (is there not a strong trace of Swift in all this?).

“However, my lady was very charitable in her own way. She had a charity school for poor children, where they were taught to read and write gratis, and where they were well kept to spinning gratis for my lady in return; for she had always heaps of duty yarn from the tenants, and got all her household linen out of the estate from first to last; for after the spinning, the weavers on the estate took it in hand for nothing, because of the looms my lady’s interest could get from the Linen Board to distribute gratis.... Her table the same way, kept for next to nothing; duty fowls, and duty turkeys, and duty geese came as fast as we could eat them, for my lady kept a sharp look-out and knew to a tub of butter everything the tenants had all round.... As for their young pigs, we had them, and the best bacon and hams they could make up, with all young chickens in the spring; but they were a set of poor wretches, and we had nothing but misfortunes with them, always breaking and running away. This, Sir Murtagh and my lady said, was all their former landlord, Sir Patrick’s fault, who let ’em get the half year’s rent into arrear; there was something in that, to be sure. But Sir Murtagh was as much the contrary way ”

I have abridged my lady’s methods, and I omit Sir Murtagh’s, who taught his tenants, as he said, to know the law of landlord and tenant. But, “though a learned man in the law, he was a little too incredulous in other matters.” He neglected his health, broke a blood-vessel in a rage with my lady, and so made way for Sir Kit the prodigal. Sir Kit was shot in a duel, and Sir Condy came into an estate which, between Sir Murtagh’s law-suits and Sir Kit’s gaming, was considerably embarrassed; indeed, the story proper is simply a history of makeshifts to keep rain and bailiffs out of the family mansion. Poor Sir Condy; he was the very moral of the man who is no man’s enemy but his own, and was left at the last with no friend but old Thady. Even Judy Quirk turned against him, forgetting his goodness in tossing up between her and Miss Isabella Moneygawl, the romantic lady who eloped with him after the toss. She deserted before Judy; here is a bit of the final scene. Thady was going upstairs with a slate to make up a window-pane.

“This window was in the long passage, or gallery, as my lady gave orders to have it called, in the gallery leading up to my master’s bedchamber and hers. And when I went up with the slate, the door having no lock, and the bolt spoilt, was ajar after Mrs. Jane (my lady’s maid), and as I was busy with the window, I heard all that was saying within. ‘Well, what’s in your letter, Bella, my dear?’ says he. ‘You’re a long time spelling it over.’ ’Won’t you shave this morning, Sir Condy?’ says she, and put the letter into her pocket. ‘I shaved the day before yesterday,’ says he, ’my dear, and that’s not what I’m thinking of now; but anything to oblige you, and to have peace and quietness, my dear,’ and presently I had the glimpse of him at the cracked glass over the chimney-piece, standing up shaving himself to please my lady.”

However, the quarrel comes on in a delightful scene, where Sir Condy shows himself at all events an amiable gentleman; and so my lady goes home to her own people. There you have Miss Edgeworth at her very best; and, indeed, Castle Rackrent received such a tribute as no other novel ever had paid to it. Many people have heard how when Waverley came to the Edgeworth household, Mr. Edgeworth, after his custom, read it aloud almost, as it would appear, at one sitting. When the end came for that fascinated circle, amid the chorus of exclamations, Mr. Edgeworth said: “What is this? Postscript which ought to have been a preface.” Then there was a chorus of protests that he should not break the spell with prose. “Anyhow,” he said, “let us hear what the man has to say,” and so read on to the passage where Scott explained that he desired to do for Scotland what had been done for Ireland: “to emulate the admirable fidelity of Miss Edgeworth’s portraits.” What Maria Edgeworth felt we know from the letter she posted off “to the Author of ‘Waverley,’ Aut Scotus aut Diabolus.”

It would be unkind to compare Scott with his model. For the poetry and the tragic power of his novels one would never think of looking in Miss Edgeworth. Her work is compact of observation; yet the gifts she has are not to be under-valued. She is mistress of a kindly yet searching satire, real wit, a fine vein of comedy; and she can rise to such true pathos as dignifies the fantastic figure of King Corny in Ormond, perhaps the best thing she ever did. But she had in her father a literary adviser, not of the negative but of the positive order, and there never was a more fully developed prig than Richard Edgeworth. His view of literature was purely utilitarian; to convey practical lessons was the business of all superior persons, more particularly of an Edgeworth. In Castle Rackrent his suggestions and comments are happily relegated to the position of notes; in the other books they form part and parcel of the novel. The Absentee, for instance, contains admirable dialogue and many life-like figures; but the scheme of the story conveys a sense of unreality. Every fault or vice has its counterbalancing virtue represented. Lady Clonbroney, vulgarly ashamed of her country, is set off by the patriotic Lady Oranmore; the virtuous Mr. Burke forms too obvious a pendant to the rascally agents old Nick and St. Dennis. It is needless to say that the exclusively virtuous people are deadly dull. It is the novel with a purpose written by a novelist whose strength lies in the delineation of character. Miss Edgeworth can never carry you away with her story, as Charles Reade sometimes can, and make you forget and forgive the virtuous intention.

What was unreal in Miss Edgeworth became mere insincerity in her contemporary, Lady Morgan. Few people could tell you now where Thackeray got Miss Glorvina O’Dowd’s baptismal name; yet The Wild Irish Girl had a great triumph in its day, and Glorvina stood sponsor to the milliners’ and haberdashers’ inventions ninety years before the apotheosis of Trilby. O’Donnell, which is counted Lady Morgan’s best novel, gives a lively ideal portrait of the authoress, first as the governess-grub, then transformed by marriage into the butterfly-duchess. But the book is a thinly-disguised political pamphlet. “Look,” she says in effect, “at the heroic virtues of O’Donnell, the young Irishman, driven to serve in foreign armies, despoiled of his paternal estates by the penal laws; look at the fidelity, the simplicity, the native humour (so dramatically effective) of his servant Rory; and then say if you will not plump for Catholic Emancipation.” “My dear lady,” the reader murmurs, “I wondered why you were so set upon underlining all these things. Can you not tell us a story frankly, and let us alone with your conclusions?”

Unfortunately, very much the same has to be said of a far greater writer, William Carleton, even in those tales which are based upon his own most intimate experience. The Poor Scholar, his most popular story, proceeds directly from an episode in his own life. He had himself been a poor scholar, had set out from his northern home to walk to Munster, where the best known schools were, trusting to charity by the way to lodge him, and to charity to keep him throughout his schooling for the sake of his vocation, and for the blessing sure to descend upon those who aided a peasant’s son to become a priest. Nothing could be more vivid than the early scenes, the collection made at the altar for Jimmy McEvoy, the priest’s sermon, the boy’s parting from home, and the roadside hospitality; there is one infinitely touching episode in the house of the first farmer who shelters him. Then come the school itself, and the tyranny of its master, till the boy falls sick of a fever, and is turned out of doors. Then, alas, the conventional intervenes in the person of the virtuous absentee ignorant of his agent’s misdoings: the long arm of coincidence is stretched to the uttermost; and we have to wade through pages of discussion upon the relations of landlord and tenant till we are put wholly out of tune for the beautiful scene of Jimmy’s return home in his priestly dress.

Carleton did for the peasantry what Miss Edgeworth had done for the upper classes. In her books the peasants have only an incidental part, and she describes them shrewdly and sympathetically enough, but with a mind untouched either by their faith or by their superstitions; seeing their good and bad qualities clearly in a dry light, but never in imagination identifying herself with them. Superior to Miss Edgeworth in power and insight, he is immeasurably her inferior in literary skill. One should remember, in commenting upon the poverty of Irish literature in English, that, so far as concerns imaginative work, it began in the nineteenth century. Carleton only died in 1869, Miss Edgeworth in 1849; and before them there is no one.

On the other hand the speech of Lowland Scots, with whose richness in masterpieces our poverty is naturally contrasted, has been employed for literature as long as the vernacular English. A king of Scotland wrote admirable verse in the generation after Chaucer; the influence of the Court fostered poetry, and the close intercourse with France kept Scotch writers in touch with first-rate models. Dunbar, strolling as a friar in France, may have known Villon, whom he often resembles. In Ireland, till a century ago, English was as much a foreign language as Norman French in England under the Plantagenets. Among the English Protestants, settled in Ireland, and separated by a hard line of cleavage from the Catholic population, there arose great men in letters, Goldsmith, Burke, Sheridan, who showed their Irish temperament in their handling of English themes. But in Ireland itself, before the events of 1782 added importance to Dublin, there was no centre for a literature to gather round. Such national pride as exists in English-speaking Ireland dates from the days of Grattan and Flood. And Irish national aspirations still bear the impress of their origin amid that period of political turmoil, than which nothing is more hostile to the brooding care of literary workmanship, the long labour and the slow result. Irishmen have always shown a strong disinclination to pure literature. The roll of Irish novelists is more than half made up of women’s names; Miss Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, Miss Emily Lawless, and Miss Jane Barlow. Journalists Ireland has produced as copiously as orators; the writers of The Spirit of the Nation, that admirable collection of stirring poems, are journalists working in verse; and Carleton, falling under their influence, became a journalist working in fiction. In his pages, even when the debater ceases to argue and harangue, the style is still journalistic, except in those passages where his dramatic instinct puts living speech into the mouths of men and women. Politics so monopolise the minds of Irishmen, newspapers so make up their whole reading, that the class to which Carleton and the poet Mangan belonged have never fully entered upon the heritage of English literature. If an English peasant knows nothing else, he knows the Bible and very likely Bunyan; but a Roman Catholic population has little commerce with that pure fountain of style. Genius cannot dispense with models, and Carleton and Mangan had the worst possible. Yet when it has been said that Carleton was a half-educated peasant, writing in a language whose best literature he had not sufficiently assimilated to feel the true value of words, it remains to be said that he was a great novelist. He cannot be fairly illustrated by quotation; but read any of his stories and see if he does not bring up vividly before you Ireland as it was before the famine; Ireland still swarming with beggars who marched about in families subsisting chiefly on the charity of the poor; Ireland of which the hedge-school was plainly to him the most characteristic institution.

Carleton does not stand by himself; he is the head and representative of a whole class of Irish novelists, among whom John Banim is the best known name. All of them were peasants who aimed at depicting scenes of peasant life from their own experience. What one may call the melodramatic Irish story, in which Lever was so brilliantly successful, has its first famous example in The Collegians of Gerald Griffin. The novel has no concern with college life, and is far better described by its stage-title, The Colleen Bawn. Here at least is a man with a story to tell and no object but to tell it. Griffin belonged to the lay order of Christian Brothers: his book deals principally with a society no more familiar to him than was the household of Mr. Rochester to Charlotte Bronte; and his method recalls the Brontes by its strenuous imagination and its vehement painting of passion. The tale was suggested by a murder which excited all Ireland. A young southern squire carried off a girl with some money, and procured her death by drowning. He was arrested at his mother’s house and a terrible scene took place, terribly rendered in the book. Griffin, of course, changes the motive; the girl is carried off not for money but for love, and she is sacrificed to make way for a stronger passion. Eily O’Connor, the victim, is a pretty and pathetic figure; the hero-villain Hardress Cregan, and the mother who indirectly causes the crime, are effective though melodramatic; but the actual murderer, Danny the Lord, Hardress Cregan’s familiar, is worthy of Scott or Hugo.

In his sketches of society, Hyland Creagh, the duellist, old Cregan, and the rest, Griffin is describing a state of affairs previous to his own experience, the Ireland of Sir Jonah Barrington’s memoirs; he is not, as were Carleton and Miss Edgeworth, copying minutely from personal observation. Herein he resembles Lever who, when all is said and done, remains the chief, as he is the most Irish, of Irish novelists. It is true that Lever had two distinct manners: and in his later books he deals chiefly with contemporary society, drawing largely on his experiences of diplomatic life. Like most novelists he preferred his later work; but the books by which he is best known, Harry Lorrequer and the rest, are his earliest productions; and though his maturer skill was employed on different subjects, he formed his imagination in studies of the Napoleonic Wars and of a duelling, drinking, bailiff-beating Ireland. His point of view never altered, and the peculiar attraction of his writings is always the same. Lever’s books have the quality rather of speech than of writing; wherever you open the pages there is always a witty, well-informed Irishman discoursing to you, who tells his story admirably, when he has one to tell, and, failing that, never fails to be pleasant. Irish talk is apt to be discursive; to rely upon a general charm diffused through the whole, rather than upon any quotable brilliancy; its very essence is spontaneity, high spirits, fertility of resource. That is a fair description of Lever. He is never at a loss. If his story hangs, off he goes at score with a perfectly irrelevant anecdote, but told with such enjoyment of the joke that you cannot resent the digression. Indeed the plots are left pretty much to take care of themselves; he positively preferred to write his stories in monthly instalments for a magazine; he is not a conscientious artist, but he lays himself out to amuse you, and he does it. If he advertises a character as a wit, he does not labour phrases to describe his brilliancy; he produces the witticisms. He has been accused of exaggeration. As regards the incidents, one can only say that the memoirs of Irish society at the beginning of this century furnish at least fair warranty for any of his inventions. In character-drawing he certainly overcharged the traits: but he did so with intention, and by consistently heightening the tones throughout obtained an artistic impression, which had life behind it, however ingeniously travestied. His stories have no unity of action, but through a great diversity of characters and incidents they maintain their unity of treatment. That is not the highest ideal of the novel, but it is an intelligible one, not lacking famous examples; and Lever perfectly understood it.

If one wishes to realise how good an artist Lever was, the best way is to read his contemporary Samuel Lover. Handy Andy appeared somewhat later than Harry Lorrequer. It is just the difference between good whiskey and bad whiskey; both are indigenous and therefore characteristic, but let us be judged by our best. Obviously the men have certain things in common; great natural vivacity, and an easy cheerful way of looking at life. Lover can raise a laugh, but his wit is horseplay except for a few happy phrases. He has no real comedy; there is nothing in Handy Andy half so ingenious as the story in Jack Hinton of the way Ulick Bourke acquitted himself of his debt to Father Tom. And behind all Lever’s conventional types there is a real fund of observation and knowledge which is absolutely wanting in Lover, who simply lacked the brains to be anything more than a trifler.

A very different talent was that of their younger contemporary J. Sheridan Le Fanu. The author of Uncle Silas had plenty of solid power; but his art was too highly specialised. No one ever succeeded better in two main objects of the story-teller; first, in exciting interest, in stimulating curiosity by vague hints of some dreadful mystery; and then in concentrating attention upon a dramatic scene. It is true that, although an Irishman, he gained his chief successes with stories that had an English setting; but one of the best, The House by the Churchyard, describes very vividly life at Chapelizod in the days when this deserted little village, which lies just beyond the Phoenix Park, was thickly peopled with the families of officers stationed in Dublin. Yet somehow one does not carry away from the reading of it any picture of that society; the story is so exciting that the mind has no time to rest on details, but hurries on from clue to clue till finally and literally the murder is out. Books which keep a reader on the tenter-hooks of conjecture must always suffer from this undue concentration of the interest; and in spite of cheery, inquisitive Dr. Toole, and the remarkable sketch of Black Dillon, the ruffianly genius with a reputation only recognised in the hospitals and the police-courts (a character admirably invented and admirably used in the plot) one can hardly class Le Fanu among those novelists who have left memorable presentments of Irish life. It is a pity; for plainly, if the man had cared less for sensational incident and ingenious construction, he might have sketched life and character with a strong brush and a kind of grim realism.

Realism Lever does not aim at: he declines to be on his oath about anything. What he gives one, vividly enough, is national colour, not local colour; he is essentially Irish, just as Fielding is essentially English; but he aims at verisimilitude rather than veracity. The ideal of the novel has changed since his day. Compare him with the two ladies who stand out prominently among contemporary writers of Irish fiction, Miss Jane Barlow and Miss Emily Lawless. To begin with, Lever’s stories are always concerned with the Quality; peasants only come in for an underplot, or in subordinate parts; and the gentry all through Ireland resemble one another within reasonable limits. It is different with the peasantry. In every part of Ireland you will find people who have never been ten miles away from the place of their birth, and upon whom a local character is unmistakably stamped. The contemporary novelists delight to mark these differences, these salient points of singularity; and their studies are chiefly of the peasantry. They settle down upon some little corner of the country and never stir out of it. Miss Lawless is not content to get you Irish character; she must show you a Clare man or an Arran islander, and she is at infinite pains to point out how his nature, even his particular actions, are influenced by the place of his bringing up. Lever avoids this specialisation; he prefers a stone wall country for his hunting scenes, but beyond that he goes no further into details. Again Miss Lawless both in Grania and in Hurrish makes you aware that young Irishmen of Hurrish’s class are curiously indifferent to female beauty. Lever will have none of that: his Irishman must be “a divil with the girls,” although Lever is no sentimentalist, and does not talk of love matches among the Irish peasantry.

The greatest divergence of all, however, is in the temper attributed to the Irish. Lever makes them gay, Miss Lawless and Miss Barlow make them sad. No one denies that sadness is nearer the reality, but it is unreasonable to call Lever insincere. Naturally careless and lighthearted he does not trouble himself with the riddle of the painful world; the distress which touches him most nearly is a distress for debt. But if Lever is not realistic he is natural; he follows the law of his nature as an artist should; he sees life through his own medium; and if books are to be valued as companions, not many of them are better company than Charles O’Malley or Lord Kilgobbin; for first and last Lever was always himself.

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.

1897.