THE FUN OF THE FAIR.
CHARLES LEVER was right, after all. As the lads who leaped at his books as a new revelation in humour grew into men, they doubted if their appreciation was quite justified, declared that he was too farcical even for a jester, and complained that his best scenes were spoiled by their " too obvious exaggeration." Ireland never could be such a land of unreason as he depicted. There could not be, in particular, such contempt as he described for the decencies of quarrelling, such readiness among priests to descend into the very arena, such an eager- ness among the people to resort to the blackthorn, such a. motiveless willingness to take sides, and then go half-crazy with partisanship. Above all, there could not be so much social disorder, disorder as of a fair when everybody is drunk, without society going to pieces, and anarchy or military rule taking the place of organisation. This reaction against the novelist was deepened by political events and Mr. Gladstone's exhortations, until at last poor Lever was wholly discredited, and a new Ireland grew up before the British vision, an Ireland disordered, indeed, but longing for order, if only oppression would cease ; an Ireland full of love and good-will and sweet reasonableness, only the more to be admired because here and there evidence transpired of momentary " deviations " from the paths of civilised humanity. At last, however, Mr. Gladstone gave his famous pat to the fair bubble, and now, if the spirit of Charles Lever can look down—let us hope from a happier world, for he was not a bad person, though with Irish ideas about grandeur and about debt—how it must rejoice to see his literary memory so cleared ! He, and not his critics, had the insight of genius. We declare there has not been this week a single report of proceedings in Ireland which does not read like a suppressed chapter from one of Lever's novels. All his characters are there, except, indeed, the Charles O'Malleys, who are waiting in barracks the command to restore order,—the little gentry of free life and evil tongues ; the fighting priests so eager for a cause ; the villagers so delighted with a " ruction ;" the leaders who look upon fighting as a regular part of the play ; the populace so savage and yet so jolly, ready to murder with their blackthorns, yet always catching a joke ; above all the humourists, who would seem possessed by the very spirit of blackguardism, were it possible to avoid laughter at their broadest jests. Lever used to pay queer Irishmen whom he met to pour out themselves before him, and so provide his genius with material ; and there has not been a speaker this week whom he would not willingly have paid. Stay, we do not know that he quite conceived of the central figure, the saturnine Irish squire who was mistaken in England for an Englishman, who ruled by force of impassiveness and will, but who, in the hour of trial, threw off the mask and showed himself a fierce desperado, able and willing to bandy curses and vitupera- tion with the veriest ruffian among the crowd opposed to him, a speaker in whom insolence rises to such a height, that it has all the appearance and something of the reality of force. Lever would have put in him touches which are not in the real man, a capacity for humour of which we cannot see a trace, a fine contempt for opponents instead of a green anger, and, above all, the bloodhound courage which is the redeeming feature in Considine, and which would have taken Mr. Parnell on horseback into the centre of his foes. He must have courage, or he could not have done the work of the past fortnight, but it is not of the daredevil kind with which Lever loved to invest the heroes of his tales. But Mr. Healy, with his keen, attorney-like ability, his wonderful readiness in verbal hitting, his astounding coarseness when his temper is gone, coarseness as of Dame Quickly, Lever would have published his speeches as they stand, and have believed on internal evidence that he himself wrote them. He would have sketched in the priests so lovingly, the priests half-alarmed and half-delighted at the row, with their furious tongues and their appeals to reason, their umbrellas used as shillelaghs, and their indescribable air, which is somehow rendered by the reporters as well as it could have been by Lever, of surprise at their own presence there, and consciousness of disapproving episcopal eyes in the near distance. [The scene in Cork, by-the-way, with. the Canon trampled and the Vicar corporeally thrashed, Lever would not have inserted, for in his time the mob, evaded but never struck the priest.] And Michael. Davitt, the plucky one-armed demagogue who fights his way through the blackthorns right up to the enemies' brake, apparently, so far as we can see, for no reason except that he had said he would, who walks straight into a threatening crowd, and by mere force of character compels them to hear him quietly, and who is adored by thousands who would kill him rather than that his favourite idea should be carried out,—what a figure Lever would have made of the plebeian leader. who has more grit and capacity in him than half the- leaders by whom he is superseded, and yet who can never win ! And the scene itself at Ballinakill, the two parties drawn towards each other by hate as by an. irresistible attraction, till they united in one forest of uplifted clubs ; the foaming leaders pouring insults on each other ; the raging priests, now shrieking threats, now asking for a. lull ; the mad mob plying its weapons it hardly knew on whom, with reckless delight in the very fighting ; and the cool agents of British authority looking on from the outer ring, calmly observant lest the melodrama should. pass into a, tragedy !—Mr. Lever died too soon.
We have no wish to deduce a moral from the scene in North Kilkenny. That has been done by a hundred pens ;.. and if the English people do not know what it means ; if they do not understand that these men shrieking bargee- insults at each other would, had Mr. Gladstone's Bill, but passed, have been at this very moment the rulers of Ireland; that Mr. Parnell would have been Premier and Mr. Healy Chancellor ; that they would have passed all laws. and voted all money, and created all new establishments,. —then heaven itself could not instruct such dupes. We only desire to notice the strange revelation of Mr. Parnell's • inner self, the " impassive statesman " roaring like a tub- ranter, the cool strategist hurling insults at the party chiefs whom, if he is to win, he must bind together again— calling Mr. Davitt, for example, who suggested to him the agrarian revolution as the only road to victory, " that hound: Davitt "—the cautious orator using words as if they would be forgotten next minute, and contradicting himself and the facts in every three sentences,—this is an unknown. Mr. Parnell, not the Irish leader of the House of Commons,. not even the defiant witness before the Royal Commission, but another man, of lower grade and hotter temper,. and no statesmanship at all. Even his intellectual power seems to have undergone a change, for the speeches he makes in this campaign are not really good ; they contain only one idea, an appeal to the gratitude of Irishmen for what he has already done, which, judged by the total result, is nothing ; and only one argument, that his opponents are " gutter-sparrows," things which he took out of the mud and made men of, and- which are now picking him in his eyes. He is growing more violent too, and his latest appeals are to that revo- lutionary spirit which it has been the professed object of his career to hold in curb. He may be right as regards. his countrymen, though we begin to doubt it, for the oppo- sition grows not only fiercer but bolder; but he is destroying his hold over Englishmen, which it was at least his second object to strengthen, and which he avowedly holds to be essential to the attainment of Home-rule.
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