BOOKS.

WILLIAM CARLETON THE IRISH NOVELIST.*

IT is the fate of most autobiographies to be incomplete, and this unfortunately is the case with Carleton's, which Mrs. Cashel Hoey scarcely exaggerates in calling a marvellous document It is assuredly a curious revelation of character, and one wonders whether the writer was conscious how closely the picture he has drawn of himself resembles the representa- tions of Irish nature depicted in his Traits and Stories. The book exhibits with amazing candour the vanity and weakness of the writer, his strange recklessness, his lack of forethought and his love of exaggeration. In his • The Lifp of William Carlston. Being his Autobiography and Letters, and an amount of his Life and Writings from the poiot at which the Autobiography breaks off, by David J. O'Donoghue. With an Introduction by Mrs. Cashel Rosy. 2 vols. with Portraits. London : Downey and ea

portrayal of Irish life and character, Carleton is one of the most faulty of writers, and also one of the most excellent. No novelist has ever represented the virtues and vices of the Irish peasantry more vividly or with so deep a

pathos. Himself a peasant, and blessed or cursed with the instincts and hereditary failings of the class, he knew his subject well, and had the art of expressing what he knew. It is said that when somebody told him that his piotures of Irish life were more reliable than those of Mrs. S. C. Hall, he

replied, "Why, of course they are! Did she ever live with the people as I did ? Did she ever dance and fight with them as I did? Did she ever get drunk with them as I did ?" All the rashness, all the warmth of affection, and much of the vindictiveness of the Irish character were combined in Carleton with a genius which almost entitled him to consider himself—as he undoubtedly did—one of the greatest of Irish novelists. As he wrote nothing but fiction, and many of his

books were widely popular, he should have made a good income ; but we are told that it is doubtful if he ever earned more than £150 a year by his pen, and it was by his pen that Carleton had to live and to bring up a large family. The

truth is that he had neither perseverance nor discretion, and his biographer faithfully records as a characteristic trait of this wayward man, that on anticipating, without any suffi-

cient reason, an increase of pension from the Government, he borrowed on the strength of it.

He was born in 1794, and was the youngest of fourteen children. His father, he says, was a very humble man, but possessed an "absolutely astonishing memory," and could repeat "nearly the whole of the Old and New Testaments by heart." His mother possessed "the sweetest and most exquisite of human voices ; " whenever it was known that she would be present at any festival, people flocked to hear

her, and perhaps there never lived a human being capable of giving the Irish cry or keen with such exquisite effect."

In one of Carleton's most pathetic stories, he relates the adventures and sorrows of a "Poor Scholar." In that tale the novelist describes his own experiences upon leaving home with the same object in view ; but Carleton's expedition,

unlike that of Jemmy M'Evoy's, had by no means a heroics conclusion. At one of the little inns where, being a scholar, he

received bed and board gratis, the home-sick youth dreamt that he was pursued by a mad bull. This sufficed to change his pur- pose, and upon leaving in the morning he" turned to the right- about, and started for home with a great heart." Irish-like,

the return of the wanderer caused much delight in the family, and his mother fainted in his arms. At the local schools he

now gained some measure of education, and made good pro- gress in Latin, which he learnt to speak as well as to construe ; without knowing what it meant, he also became a Ribbonman.

As Carleton grew into manhood he was renowned, he tells us, for skill and strength. In real jig or hornpipe he was "un- approachable," and invented several hornpipe steps which he "never saw surpassed" :—

"No wake missed me, no dance missed me. I was Duringpc this

leaping, and throwing the stone and sledge

queer period of my life I was considered one of the finest and best made young men in the parish. I was then in the very bloom of youth—six feet high—with, it was said, a rather hand- some and intelligent set of features—my early fame at all athletic exercises was still unrivalled ; and in fact I was looked upon as a kind of local phenomenon."

As to cards, "there was not a man living who understood the game better." Yet Carleton assures his readers that he was not a vain man. All this time be was idle and living upon his friends. What to do he knew not, but the perusal of Gil Bias having excited an irrepressible passion for adven-

ture, he resolved to "go upon the world," and take what might turn up.

Having had his fortune told, he was induced to go to Dublin, where, after knocking down two or three men, riding in a hearse, and washing in a lake the only shirt he possessed, he arrived with two shillings and ninepence in his pocket.

This small sum was soon exhausted, and having been turned

out of his lodgings, he took refuge in a cellar inhabited by beggars :— "The cellar was very spacious. I ..;hould think that tbe entrance into Dante's Inferno was paradise compared with it. I know, and have known Dublin now for about half a century better probably than any other man in it. I have lived in the Liberty and in every close and outlet in the City of the Panniers, driven by poverty to the most wretched of its localities, awl must confess that the scene which burst upon me that night stands beyond anything the highest flight of my imagination could have con- ceived without my having an opportunity of seeing it. Burns must have witnessed something of the sort, or he could never have written the most graphic and animated of all his productions, 'The Jolly Beggars.'"

Carleton now resorted to every kind of expedient to gain his daily bread. He became amanuensis to a tailor whose vanity prompted him to write his life, and when he could not pay the rent of one lodging, ran off to another ; but at length his scholarship stood him in good stead, and he was able for a time to obtain employment as a teacher. Then having secured a clerkship—an uncertain one it proved—he fell in love and married, which led to some strange complications, his wife on

one occasion having been locked up in her uncle's house, while Carleton, in attempting to rescue her, had to perform the trifling feat of knocking down half-a-dozen watchmen.

At this time Carleton's mother-in-law was a grievance to him. She bad, he said, much to his disgust, the sort of Northern

sharpness which is not to be found outside Ulster, and although "no mother since the creation of woman ever loved a daughter with more affection," she could never understand 4' why a young fellow, going about in the dress of a gentle-

man, should not be able to support his wife,"—a perplexity that seems reasonable enough.

When the first child was born the young couple were living under her roof and on her bounty, and Carleton had not ten shillings in his pocket. Need we wonder that his mother- in-law and he "could not pull together " ? When the auto- biography closes, the novelist figures as a schoolmaster in Carlow, after a similar occupation in Mullingar, where he had been arrested for debt. At this period he had only written a few essays, including the Lough Derg Pilgrim, which, he observes, "is probably one of the most extra- ordinary productions that ever appeared in any literature."

When Mr. O'Donoghue takes up the story, Carleton is once more in Dublin, living for a while in the utmost poverty, and then earning a little by his writings. The publication of the first series of the Traits and Stories, in 1830, brought him a goodly measure of fame—there were even critics who declared that for humour he might rank with Shakespeare and Cervantes—but the book failed to raise him out of the money

difficulties from which he was never destined to be free. He neither knew how to make proper arrangements with his publishers, nor how to use the small sums that he received.

Carleton's " Life " relates once more the old and too familiar story of genius wasting much of its power from lack of high principle and resolute purpose. "He was industrious," his biographer writes, "by fits and starts, not steadily, and did not possess that attribute of genius which has been mistaken for its entity : an infinite capacity for taking pains. Under the influence of the inspiration of his work of the hour he would plan other work, pile up ideas which came to him with wonderful facility, and act as though these had actually taken

form." When Mr. O'Donoghue adds that for his children's sake, to whom he was passionately attached, Carleton became

a back-writer, which was, "no doubt, agonising to his extreme sensibility," he omits to add that at least half of the novelist's troubles were due to his own extravagance and to the careless way in which he was content to live. Instead of blaming him- self he blamed his countrymen for not sufficiently appre_ ciating him, and spoilt more than one of his stories by the rancorous spirit he displayed. "He was throughout his life," it is said, "beset by the notion that he deserved every con- sideration from his fellows, and that to refuse him a service was a disgraceful, mean, and cruel proceeding."

In search of money and fame, Carleton paid his first visit to London in 1850, about which he writes with his usual exaggeration, but he has no praise for its inhabitants, observing that the men are so packed and crowded that

they have no room to grow, and that he did not see a single woman that he could call interesting or beautiful. "You have no notion of my great reputation here," he writes, "I

could not have believed it. They place me next to Sir Walter

Scott, whom they say I resemble in features as well as in the character of his writings." He spent "an endeared day" with Thackeray, who "was pleased to tell me quite sincerely

that in point of graphic delineation of life, I was all their master." In the novelist's absence, an execution was levied on his house, and on his return, he wrote as follows to Landells the engraver :—

"After a dreadful voyage across the Channel, I got safe home about one o'clock on Sunday. But such a scene as my return occasioned cannot be described. There was not a dry eye under my roof—all was weeping and ecstasy—for joy has as many tears as grief, only they are sooner dried. My eldest daughter—my darling and best beloved child—fainted in my arms, and was insensible for ten minutes. lathe meantime my life is a siege, and a painful one. My creditors will have it that I got lots of money in London."

Unfortunately, Carleton's children were as impecunious as himself, and he writes of having had three families to support for some years, his eldest son, with a wife and three children, and a married daughter and her three children, and his own

large family "consisting principally of daughters." Doubtless he was justified in saying that he had large domestic claims upon him, but so far from finding these claims a burden, Mr.

O'Donoghne states that "when some of his children returned to the parental roof after being, as he fondly imagined, settled

comfortably elsewhere, he did not demur, but rather wel- comed the addition to his burdens, and indeed seems to have urged them to refill the void they had created."

From Mr. O'Donoghue's narrative some uninteresting de- tails concerning Carleton's quarrels might have been omitted with advantage. On the whole, the work is highly creditable to the writer's critical judgment. He is one of the most im- partial of biographers, and points out that there is hardly another author between whose best and worst writing there is so wide and deep a distinction. "His failures," he says, "are actually more easily accessible than his finest work," and it would be a happy day for Carleton's fame if a popular edition of his best tales were to supersede the inferior, and in some cases offensive, stories which now hamper his reputation.