CHARLES LEVER.
IN days which long preceded Mr. Disraeli's theory of "a melancholy ocean," with its action upon the sister-isle, and the awakening of the world to the conviction that Irishmen were not by any means "jolly dogs," and that" Irish" humour was as extinct as the Irish elk, the author of the " Rollicker " novels was regarded as a typical Irishman, of the social, rattling, non- political, Castle-frequenting, ball-going kind. The first surprise which Mr. Fitzpatrick's biography* of the last of the "dashing" novelists prepares for its readers is the discovery that Charles Lever, although he was born in Dublin, was not an Irish- man. His father, who came of a respectable Lancashire family, was a carpenter and builder, but was generally called an architect. He was an excellent man, and very much attached to his wife, who, though also estimable, must have been a little disconcerting in society, for she is described by an admiring cousin as" generally sitting on her husband's knee at dinner, helping everybody, and seldom eating anything herself." It is impossible to resist the suspicion that these good people were much embarrassed many times by the vagaries of their clever, erratic, younger son ; and they did not live to enjoy and take pride in the great and long-lasting success which attended his adoption of literature as a profession, so that there is a touch of pathos about their otherwise prosaic history. Although his biographer has accumulated a great number of details, and secured the testimony of some of the school- fellows of Charles Lever to the events and the characteristics of his early life, the general effect of the narrative is somewhat confused; and thero is not, at this distance of time, ranch to interest us in the stories of his reckless high-spirits, which indicate that no work and all play was his line of predilection, beyond the tracing of the influence of his boyhood upon the productions of his after-years. The homely entries in his father's day-book afford us a glimpse of the disposition which was afterwards fully revealed, and indeed acknowledged by himself, all through his life, of the absence of self-restraint and self-sacrifice, the " must have" so-and-so, at any cost, which, however it may be tempered by seemingly generous impulses, or covered up by flattering phrases, is the very essence of selfishness. Good looks, high spirits, a striking talent for mimicry, and a passion for practical joking, good abilities, but no love of study, a pleasant talent for invent- ing and telliug stories, but no sense of the effort which his father made, by procuring for him. a good and expensive educa- tion, to secure to him a social position superior to his own,— such is the sum of the impression which Mr. Pitzpatrick's account of the young Lover makes on us. And yet it is touched with the pardonable enthusiasm of a biographer, without which, indeed, any biography must be dull reading. Among Lever's early acquaintances. was John Ottiwell, the original of Frank Webber, certainly the most humorous character he over drew, and perhaps the cleverest, next to his chef d'oouvre, Micky Free. The gifted personage, who rode, ran, jumped, composed verses and sang them, ven- triloquisecl, had a voice as rough as that of a bear and a, fal- setto as clear as a bell, who had all hie features under separate command, and could " desave the (Evil himself" as to his identity, was the boy's preceptor and Admirable Crichton. What glorious fun they must have had together, we may gather from the annals of old Trinity in the collegiate days of Charles O'Malley, and from the episode of Miss Judy Mann; records of which we decline to believe the world is tired, although it is the fashion to talk of Lever as out of date, with other and greater writers than he. The youth laughed and joked and danced and idled his way through school life, visited his plodding brother, a clergyman, at Portumna, sailed upon the Shannon, picked up local stories everywhere, made many acquaintances, chiefly military, attended hunts and races, devoured novels, and entered Trinity College, Dublin, as * Life of Cllarles Lever. By W. J. Ft EzpntrIck. 2 vols. London : Chapman anti Ball.
a pensioner, at the age of sixteen years and a half. Of his Uni- versity career, Mr. Fitzpatrick says only :—"He went through his course without incurring any distinction. He seems chiefly re- membered for his rollicking fun, and unflagging industry in the manufacture of pleasant tales." He was an adept in the com- position of street ballads, and he Rang them with great humour and spirit ; he was popular among his fellow-students ; he did not drink,—and it was a drinking period then in Dublin,— he never got into any scrape reflecting on his character ; and he fell in love with his future wife, with whom he remained in love all her life long, and from whose death he never tried or wished to recover.
If there is nothing great in Lever's university career— and indeed greatness does not apply to him in any way —it is at least a pleasant portion of his life to road about; pleasanter than that which succeeds it, when we find him undertaking the charge of an emigrant-ship bound for Que- bec, on the strength of his two years' " standing " as a medical student, with a light-heartedness which says little for him, and less for the system under which such an appointment was possible. ." It is impossible," says his biographer, "to ascertain the name of the vessel, or any particulars of the voyage ;" but he claims to trace reminiscences of this adventure in several chapters of "Con Cregan," and also in " Lorrequer," and "The Knight of Gwynne." Mr. Fitzpatrick then proceeds to relate a wonderful story about Lever's adventures in America, on the authority of a letter, addressed to him, in February, 1876, by the Rev. Samuel Hayman. "He wrote to me," says Mr. Hayman, "in June, 1843, saying, that in return for a secret I confided to him, he would tell me one respecting the story of 'O'Leary,' then appearing. The shipmate, the tale, and the adventures were facts, and happened to himself." Then follows a narrative of how Lever joined the Red Men, was admitted to tribal privileges by an Indian sachem, grew weary of his adven- ture, was helped to escape by a squaw, subsequently performed the series of forest and hunting feats which lie narrates in" The Adventures of Arthur O'Leary," and ultimately reached Quebec in safety. The story concludes thus :--" I walked through the streets in the mocassins and with head-feathers. I found a mer- chant who knew my father, and gave me the reward for the guide, and who crowned his kindness by lodging and boarding me until he paid my passage back to Europe." Mr. Hayman adds, " I give you Lever's narrative as nearly as I can in his own words." We do not doubt this, but Mr. Hayman and Mr. Fitzpatrick must both forgive us for declining to believe a word of the story. Lever was the last man in the world to have concealed exploits which even at the present day would make the hero of them "the fashion," and in 1830 would have constituted him a very great lion indeed. His most admiring friends have never imputed to him retiring modesty, and hero would have been the very opportunity, and a quite legitimate one, for pushing himself into notoriety. To suppose that he neglected it, and made no further use of such adventures than to introduce them years afterwards into one of his inferior novels, is to do ludicrous injustice to Lever's common-sense, and that readiness which was among his prominent qualities. Besides this consideration, which lies on the surface, there is another, as con- clusive. Since "O'Leary" was written, a number of travellers in North America have published works treating of that country and the Red Indian tribes ; and a merely cursory comparison of their statements with the O'Leary and Be,genal Daly stories, would at once make it evi- dent that the latter are only clever efforts of imagination.
That "Dr. Maunsell remembers Charles Lever's bringing home a canoe from Canada," is evidence of the story of the sachem, the squaw, and the friendly merchant, about as valuable as Dickens's instance of the mounting-stone at the Maypole Inn, which remained to testify that Queen Elizabeth had actually boxed her page's ears when standing upon it. Lever 'returned, with the attesting canoe, to Dublin,And amid the wildest gaiety, and in an atmosphere of "larks," he "pursued his medical studies," but was, his biographer tells us, "more re- markable for acuteness in prognosis than in diagnosis."
We doubt his being remarkable for either, as we observe, in the first place, that his father thinks of "putting Charles to the Bar," just then, which does not look as if Charles were much nf a medicine-man on his native soil ; and in the second, that he never took his Doctor's degree at Trinity. He went to Gottingen—it is not clear when—for a short time, purchased a Louvain degree, and in 1832, after the death of his mother, and a little before that of his father, he was appointed by the Board of Health to " minister professionally to the suffering people of Clare," in which county cholera was then making havoc. Here we get the first touch of the serious element in Lever's life,—the first instance of strong contrast, which evidently appealed forcibly to his imagination, and of which he made such striking and impressive use in several of his novels, especially in "Tom Burke" and "The Martins." He did, indeed, write prescriptions in rhyme and temper treatment with epigrams, but he observed closely, and his experiences at Kilrush and Kilkee proved valuable, less to the medical practi- tioner than to the novelist. "Harry Lorrequer " takes its local colour from Kilkee, and Father Tom Loftus, in "Jack Hinton," one of Lever's best achievements, is said to be drawn from Father Comyns, its celebrated P.]?. Despite the depressing surroundings "the docthor " made out a good deal of jollity, and indeed found Dublin comparatively dull, when he returned thither. His next employment was as dispensary doctor at Portstewart, where he was the idol of the society of the place—very good society, too, for all the Derry gentry flocked there in Bummer-time—and where his proceedings, as described by Mr. Fitzpatrick, remind us of the immortal Alfred Jingle's "bang the field-piece, twang the lyre 1 " by their alternations between medicine and merriment. We are shown him "now whirling in the waltz, a few minutes later by the bed-side . of danger. Back to the ball again ! engaging Miss Dashwood for the lancers, hurrying away to see the cataplasm removed, and with his own hand administering relief, or spreading the balm. He arrives just in time to take his place with the belle of the ball," &c.; and not the least singular part of it all is, that his salary was £80 a year !
Presently he repaired to Navan, where he applied himself to courting Miss Kate Baker, the daughter of the master of the en- dowed school there. Lever's father very reasonably objected to the marriage of his son, who had no means, with a lady as ill- dowered by fortune ; but he died about this time, and his son married Miss Baker within a few months, on the strength of the small income to which he then succeeded. The marriage proved a very happy one, but economy, or even rationality in expendi- ture, made no element in its felicity. The record of the married life of the pair begins with a fancy ball at Lady Garvagh's, for which Lever organised the Coleraine contingent, and which he attended, dressed as Jeremy Diddler ; and then it goes on as a catalogue of merry-makings, practical jokes, and pleasant association with William Maxwell, the novelist, who was Lever's immediate precursor, and eke Rector of Balla, an imperfectly administered cure of souls in the wild west. The parson and the doctor were about on a par in pro- fessional zeal; they were alike hampered by pecuniary diffi- culties, and equally resolved on having a liberal share, at any cost, of the good things of this world. With Lever's return to Portstewart, and the foundation of the Dublin University Magazine, by six collegians, of whom the late Mr. Butt was one, and its subsequent sale to the Dublin publisher, M'Glashan, the true and distinguished career of the novelist began, when, after some unconsidered trifles, he wrote for the political ally and literary rival of Blackwood and Fraser a serial novel, called "The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer." With Lever's novels we have no present concern.. They have their niche in the temple of fame ; the mind of reading mankind is made up about them ; his Life has quite another interest, and it is of a mixed and dubious kind.
Lever's literary life commenced in 1833, when he was either twenty-four or twenty-seven years old (there is some uncertainty about the date of his birth) ; he was then married, poor, and.
extravagant. The reckless self-indulgence of this period, at which he "drove a pair of grey bloods, lived in good style," and once spent £20, his only "ready rhino," on a ball-gown for his wife—which, by-the-by, he commissioned a friend, who was at once a clergyman and a schoolmaster, to buy—and was always in debt, was also unhappily a characteristic of his after-years, and was, no doubt, at once the source and the encouragement of that practical untruthfulness which pervaded them. A man who is always spending more money than he possesses must be always pretending to be what he is not, and this pretence we find throughout Lever's career. He never was Physician to the British Embassy at Brussels, although he as- sumed to have filled that post when he returned to Dublin, after a sojourn in Brussels, whither he had gone, under pecuniary difficulties, with introductions from Sir Philip Crampton, and
'" visions of Brussels lace and Brussels carpets." Mr. Fitz- patrick is eloquent in his praise of the high-spirits and happy disposition of the young man, "who, when his struggles were hardest, could with great facility construct ellAteaux en Espagne ;" but " struggles " are not necessarily meritorious or respectable, and nothing is clearer in this history than that Lever need not have struggled at all, if he had ever been content to live within any income which he actually earned. Struggles for perpetual "company," for balls, dinners, blood-horses, carriages, cham- pagne, whist, and costly notoriety, are not edifying to the observer, any more than they are satisfactory to the struggler; and the same page on which we find the record of the visions of Brussels lace and Brussels carpets with which the builder's son and the schoolmaster's daughter repaired to the Belgian capital, contains, oddly enough, the neatest possible comment upon the career of which that episode has been regarded as the turning. point. "In one of his last confidences to a gifted friend," says Lever's biographer, "he sadly remarks that both had failed in life, and expresses regret that he should have ever ceased to be the humble dispensary doctor of Derry." The world cannot share that regret, but those who have most thoroughly enjoyed the writings of the novelist will most deeply regret that they cannot feel much respect for the man. The calamities of his life were the result of his self-indulgence, of his want of disci- pline of mind, and elevation of character. There was a fatal touch of the mountebank in him. When he rode about, at home and abroad, with his children in fantastic dresses, he was amused at being taken for the proprietor of a circus; when he enter- tained the acquaintances of all ranks and sorts with whom he was perpetually surrounded, and among whom he found types for the characters in his novels, he liked to astonish them by his profusion. He had a great deal of self-admiration, but little .self-respect; he talked very well, but too much; he worked very hard, but irregularly, under the influence of excitement, with- out system ; he was good-natured, but not scrupulous in his relations with his friends ; touchy, but placable ; energetic, but fitful ;• the streak of vulgarity that runs through his writings was conspicuous in his life. He forced the note in everything, left Brussels in debt ; lived at his country-house near Dublin in the style of a man of large fortune, when he was merely editor of the Dublin University Magwine and its chief contributor; went abroad when he gave up his editorship, "warned by some .earebral stings that change of scene was needed," taking "his horses and carriages ;" gambled disastrously at Baden, kept open house at Carlsruhe, and in 1845 is described as "wading through the last 250 he had in the world "—galloping through it would be a more appropriate term—" without even the chance of medical fees to look to to eke out a livelihood." In 1846, Lever writes to Mr. Hayman that he has a perfect abhorrence of all labour, but most of writing books,—" which," adds Mr. Fitzpat- rick, in a not very comprehensible comment, " was, after all, the sorriest mode a man of his taste or feeling could get his bread by." Why ? His " taste " seems to have been for reckless pleasure, expense, and self-indulgence ; and his "feeling," that he ought to gratify his "taste." The writing of clever and popular novels can hardly be called a " sorry " means,—not so the end for which, in early and middle-life, at all events, they were written ; that indeed was "sorry," that indeed was "the pity o't." He has said himself that "life after five-and-thirty is very poor fun, if it were oven pleasant up to that ; but the run home, after a man has turned the corner of middle-age, is unmitigated dreariness." A sad re8114/1A5 of the Creator's gift, a forcible comment on the unwisdom of regarding life as " fun " at any time, and a painful view for a man who had considerable and varied talents, and the blessings and responsibilities of domestic ties ! There is significantly early mention of his "shattered system," and for many years Lever was a victim to gout ; but while his biographer asks our pity for the novelist's sufferings and our admiration for his cheerfulness and "go "—especially in the years during which he was British Consul at Trieste—he makes casual remarks which somewhat weaken both. Here is one of them,—
Two good things were certainly to be found at Trieste. Maraschino, made from the marasca cherry, was its special pro- duct ; and in that great fish-market, largely fed from the Medi- terranean, Lever found in perfection his favourite phosphorescent food." In his later years, his occasional visits to Ireland were sunny gleams, and on those occasions Lever is seen at his best. The evening of life was dreary to him, and that poor resource, " filling his house with guests of rank," which he tried in 1871, turned out to be a heavy penalty. The tone of society no longer suited him. "In fact," says Mr. Fitzpatrick, "there was, for his taste, not enough of Sir Lucius O'Trigger, and too much of Sir Charles Coldstream." His old friends were either dead, or far away; his former energies were destroyed by illness, when the blow, from which he never tried to rally—his wife's death—fell upon him. There is one ray of undimmed brightness in Lever's life ; it is the perfection of his married happiness. He was not the wisest, but he was the most loving of husbands, his Kate's true lover from his boyhood to his grave ; and one passage in Mr. Fitz- patrick's work carries all hearts with it :—" Her last moments were peaceful and painless, and a smile of more beauty than he had ever seen bade him farewell. Thero would. be no such mercy as to take him from this world now. All his daily ways and habits had been woven into her life ; no strength of frame could withstand the pining agony of a broken heart." Lever survived his wife only a few months, and died, unexpectedly, and in his sleep. "He left," says his biographer, "his affairs in perfect order, even the amount to be expended on his burial was found in an envelope." Years had then corrected his worst faults ; we should. have welcomed some clearer record of the process of amelioration. It is to be regretted that Lever has not been permitted to say more for himself; the suppression of his corre- spondence, although we understand Mr. Fitzpatrick's point of view in withholding it, is unfortunate, insomuch as it prevents us from observing the shades of character which would, no doubt, have made the portrait of the individual more pleasing and sympathetic than his bio- grapher, although a warm admirer, and animated by the best intentions, has been able to make it. We are told that Lever "had a wonderful power of attaching you to him, and winning, not merely liking and regard, but love and affection ;" and we are quite ready to believe that it was so. It is pointed out that his writings are all of unexceptionably moral tendency, and that not the slightest coarseness ever marred. their pure and sparkling fun ; and we are glad to acknowledge that, and to hail the assurance of his biographer that Lever's life was as pure as his books. It was not, however, in any sense a noble life; his weaknesses were more conspicuous than his qualities, and we are as much depressed by the record of the man, as we used to be exhilarated by the productions of the novelist.
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