Volume Ii Part 50 (1/2)

The favour with which the public received 'Charles O'Malley,' and the pleasant notices forwarded to me by my publisher, gave me great courage; and when asked if I could be ready by a certain date with a new story, I never hesitated to say Yes. My first thought was that in the campaign of the Great Napoleon I might find what would serve as a ”pendant” to the story I had just completed, and that by making--as there would be no impropriety in doing--an Irishman a soldier of France, I could still have on my side certain sympathies of my reader which would not so readily attach to a foreigner. I surrounded myself at once with all the histories and memoirs I could find of the Consulate and the Empire; and, so far as I could, withdrew my mind from questions of home interest, and lived entirely amidst the mighty events that began at Marengo and ended at Waterloo. Whether I failed to devise such a narrative as I needed, or whether--and I suspect this must have been the real reason--I found that the vast-ness of the theme overpowered me, I cannot at this distance of time remember. But so it was, that I found much time had slipped over, and that beyond some few notes and some scattered references, I had actually done nothing; and my publisher had applied to me for the t.i.tle of my story for advertis.e.m.e.nt before I had begun or written a line of it. Some disparaging remarks on Ireland and Irishmen in the London press, not very unfrequent at the time, nor altogether obsolete now, had provoked me at the moment; and the sudden thought occurred of a reprisal by showing the many instances in which the Englishman would almost of necessity mistake and misjudge my countrymen, and that out of these blunders and misapprehensions, situations might arise that, if welded into a story, might be made to be amusing. I knew that there was not a cla.s.s nor a condition in Ireland which had not marked differences from the correlative rank in England; and that not only the Irish squire, the Irish priest, and the Irish peasant were unlike anything in the larger island, but that the Dublin professional man, the official, and the shopkeeper, had traits and distinctions essentially their own. I had frequently heard opinions p.r.o.nounced on Irish habits which I had easily traced to that quizzing habit of my countrymen, who never can deny themselves the enjoyment of playing on the credulity of the traveller,--all the more eagerly when they see his note-book taken out to record their shortcomings and absurdities. These thoughts suggested 'Jack Hinton,' and led me to turn from my intention to follow the French arms, or rather to postpone the plan, for it had got too strong a hold on me to be utterly abandoned. I have already acknowledged that I strayed from the path I had determined on, and, with very little reference to my original intention, suffered my hero to take his chance among the natives. Indeed I soon found him too intensely engaged in the cares of self-preservation to have much time or taste for criticism on his neighbours. I have owned elsewhere that for Mr Paul Rooney, Father Tom Loftus, Bob Mahon, O'Grady, Tipperary Joe, and even Corny Delaney, I had not to draw on imagination, but I never yet heard one correct guess as to the originals. While on this theme, I may recall an incident which occurred about three years after the story was published, and which, if only for the trait of good-humour it displayed, is worth remembering.

I was making a little rambling tour through Ireland with my wife, following for the most part the sea-board, and only taking such short cuts inland as should bring us to some spot of especial interest.

We journeyed with our own horses, and consequently rarely exceeded five-and-twenty or thirty miles in a day. While I was thus refres.h.i.+ng many an old memory, and occasionally acquiring some new experience, the ramble interested me much. It was in the course of this almost capricious journey--for we really had nothing like a plan--we reached the little town of Gort, where, to rest our horses, we were obliged to remain a day. There was not much to engage attention in the place. It was perhaps less marked by poverty than most Irish towns of its cla.s.s, and somewhat cleaner and more orderly; but the same distinctive signs were there of depression, the same look of inertness that one remarks almost universally through the land. In strolling half listlessly about on the outskirts of the town, we were overtaken by a heavy thunder-storm, and were driven to take shelter in a little shop where a number of other people had also sought refuge. As we stood there, an active-looking but elderly man in the neat black of an ecclesiastic, and with a rosette in his hat, politely addressed us, and proposed that, instead of standing there in the crowd, we would accept the hospitality of his lodging, which was in the same house, till such time as the storm should have pa.s.sed over. His manner, his voice, and his general appearance convinced me he was a dignitary of our Church. I thanked him at once for his courtesy, and accepted his offer. He proceeded to show us the way, and we entered a very comfortably-furnished sitting-room, where a pleasant fire was burning, and sat down well pleased with our good fortune. While we chatted freely over the weather and the crops, some chance expression escaped me to show that I had regarded him as a clergyman of the Established Church. He at once, but with peculiar delicacy, hastened to correct my mistake, and introduce himself as the Roman Catholic Dean O'Shaughnessy. ”I am aware whom I am speaking to,”

added he, p.r.o.nouncing my name. Before I could express my surprise at being recognised where I had not one acquaintance, he explained that he had read--in some local paper which described our mode of travelling--of my being in the neighbourhood, and this led him at once to guess our ident.i.ty. After a few flattering remarks on the pleasure something of mine had afforded him, he said, ”You are very hard upon _us_, Mr Lever.

You never let _us_ off easily, but I a.s.sure you for all that we bear you no ill-will. There is a strong national tie between us, and we can stand a good deal of quizzing for the sake of that bond.” I knew he was alluding to his order; and when I said something--I cannot remember what--about the freedoms that fiction led to, he stopped, saying, ”Well, well! the priests are not angry with you after all, if it wasn't for one thing.”

”Oh, I know,” cried I, ”that stupid story of Father D'Array and the Pope.”*

”No, no, not that; we laughed at that as much as any Protestant of you all. What we could not bear so well was an ugly remark you made in 'Harry Lorrequer,' where--when there was a row at a wake and the money was scattered over the floor--you say that the priest gathered more than his share because--and here was the bitterness--old habit had accustomed him to sc.r.a.pe up his corn in low places! Now, Mr Lever, that was not fair; it was not generous, surely!” The good temper and the gentleman-like quietness of the charge made me very uncomfortable at the time; and now, after many years, I recall the incident to show the impression it made on me--the only atonement I can make for the flippancy. I had begun this story of 'Jack Hinton' at Brussels, but on a proposition made to me by the publisher and proprietor of 'The Dublin University Magazine' to take the editors.h.i.+p of that periodical, I determined to return to Ireland. To do this, I was not alone to change my abode and my country, but to alter the whole destiny of my life. I was at the time a practising physician attached to the British Legation, with the best practice of any Englishman in the place, a most pleasant society, and, what I valued not less than them all, the intimacy of the most agreeable and companionable man** I ever knew in my life, whose friends.h.i.+p I have never ceased to treasure with pride and affection.

* A story told in 'Harry Lorrequer.'

** Sir George Hamilton Seymour.

I dedicated to him my first book, and it is with deep grat.i.tude and pleasure I recall him while I give the last touches to these volumes.

There is one character in this story to which imagination contributed scarcely anything in the portraiture, though I do not pretend to say that the situations in which I have placed him are derived from facts.

Tipperary Joe was a real personage; and if there are, among my readers, any who remember the old coaching days between Dublin and Kilkenny, they cannot fail to recall the curious figure, clad in a scarlet hunting-coat and black velvet cap, who used, at the stage between Carlow and the Royal Oak, to emerge from some field beside the road, and, after a trot of a mile or so beside the horses, crawl up at the back of the coach and over the roof, collecting what he called his rent from the pa.s.sengers,--a very humble tribute generally, but the occasion of a good deal of jest and merriment, not diminished if by any accident an English traveller were present, who could neither comprehend the relations between Joe and the gentlemen, nor the marvellous freedom with which this poor ragged fellow discussed the pa.s.sengers and their opinions.

Joe--I must call him so, for his real name has escaped me--once came to see me in Trinity College, and was curious to visit the Chapel, the Library, and the Examination Hall. I will not pretend that I undertook my office of cicerone without some misgivings, for though I was prepared to endure all the quizzings of my friends and acquaintances, I was not quite at my ease as to how the authorities--the dons, as they are called elsewhere--would regard this singular apparition within academic precincts. Joe's respectful manner, and an air of interest that bespoke how much the place engaged his curiosity, soon set me at my ease; while the ready tact with which he recognised and uncovered to such persons as held rank or station at once satisfied me that I was incurring no risk whatever in my office as guide. The kitchen and the sight of those gigantic spits, on which a whole series of legs of mutton were turning slowly, overcame all the studied reserve of his manner, and he burst into a most enthusiastic encomium on the merits of an inst.i.tution so admirably suited to satisfy human requirements. When he learned, from what source I do not know, that I had put him in a book, he made it--not unreasonably, perhaps--the ground of a demand on my purse; and if the talented artist who had ill.u.s.trated the tale had been accessible to him, I suspect that he, too, would have had to submit to the levy of a blackmail, all the more heavily as Joe was by no means pleased with a portrait which really only self-flattery could have objected to. Hablot K. Browne never saw him, and yet in his sketch of him standing to say his ”good-bye” to Jack Hinton at Kingston, he has caught the character of his figure and the moping lounge of his att.i.tude to perfection.

Indeed, though there is no resemblance in the face to Joe, the pose of the head and the position of the limbs recall him at once. I have already said elsewhere that the volume amused me while I was writing it.

Indeed I had not at the time exhausted, if I had even tapped, the cask of a buoyancy of temperament which carried me along through my daily life in the sort of spirit one rides a fresh horse over a swelling sward. If this confession will serve to apologise for the want of studied coherency in the narrative, and the reckless speed in which events succeed events throughout, I shall deem myself indebted to the generous indulgence of my readers.

'THE O'DONOGHUE.'

It was in wandering through the south of Ireland I came to visit the wild valley of Glennesk--a scene of loneliness and desolation with picturesque beauty I have never seen surpa.s.sed. The only living creature I met for miles of the way was a very old man, whose dress and look bespoke extreme poverty, but who, on talking with him, I discovered to be the owner of four cows that were grazing on the rocky sides of the cliff. He had come some miles, he told me, to give his cows the spare herbage that cropped up amongst the granite boulders. As I had seen no house or trace of habitation as I came along, I was curious to know where he lived, but his answer, as he pointed to the mountain, was, ”There, alone,” and this with evident unwillingness to be more freely communicative. Though not caring to be interrogated, nor, like most Irish peasants, much inclined to have a talk with a stranger, he made no scruple to ask for alms, and pleaded his wretched rags--and they were very miserable--as a proof of his poverty. I did not think that the pittance I gave him exactly warranted me in asking how the owner of the cows we saw near us could be in that condition of want he represented; at all events I preferred not to dash the pleasure I was giving him by the question. We parted, therefore, on good terms, but some miles farther on in the glen I learned from a woman, who was ”bulling” her clothes in the river, that ”ould Mat,” as she called him, was one of the most well-to-do farmers in that part of the country; that he had given his daughters, of whom he had several, good marriage portions, and that his son was a thriving attorney in the town of Tralee. ”Maybe yer honor's heard of him,” said the woman,--”Tim O'Donoghue.” It was no new thing to me to know the Irish peasant in his character as a h.o.a.rder and a saver. There is no one trait so indicative of the Celt as acquisitiveness, nor does Eastern story contain a man more given to the castle-building that grows out of some secret h.o.a.rd--however small--than Paddy. He is to add half an acre to his potato-garden, or to buy another pig, or to send the ”gossoon” to a school in the town, or to pay his pa.s.sage to New York. This tendency to construct a future, so strong in the Irish nature, has its rise in a great reliance on what he feels to be the goodness of G.o.d: a firm conviction that all his struggles are watched and cared for, and that every little turn of good fortune has been given him by some especial favour, lies deep in his nature, and suggests an amount of hope to him which a less sanguine spirit could never have conceived. While I thought over the endless contrarieties of this mysterious national character, where good and evil eternally lay side by side, I wondered within myself whether the new civilisation of latter years was likely to be successful in dealing with men whose temperaments and manners were so unlike the English, or were we right in extinguis.h.i.+ng the old feudalism that bound the peasant to the landlord, ere we had prepared each for the new relations of mere gain and loss that were in nature to subsist between them? Between the great families--the old houses of the land and the present race of proprietors--there lay a couple of generations of men who, with all the traditions and many of the pretensions of birth and fortune, had really become in ideas, modes of life, and habits, very little above the peasantry about them. They inhabited, it is true, the ”great house,”

and they were in name the owners of the soil, but, crippled by debt and overborne by mortgages, they subsisted in a s.h.i.+fty conflict with their creditors, rack-renting their miserable tenants to maintain it.

Survivors of everything but pride of family, they stood there like stumps, blackened and charred, the last remnants of a burnt forest, their proportions attesting the n.o.ble growth that preceded them. What would the descendants of these men prove when, dest.i.tute of fortune and helpless, they were thrown upon a world that actually regarded them as blamable for the unhappy condition of Ireland? Would they stand by ”their order” in so far as to adhere to the cause of the gentry? Or would they share the feelings of the peasant to whose lot they had been reduced, and charging on the Saxons the reverses of their fortune, stand forth as rebels to England? Here was much food for speculation and something for a story. For an opening scene what could I desire finer than the gloomy grandeur and the rugged desolation of Glenflesk! And if some patches of bright verdure here and there gleamed amidst the barrenness,--if a stray sunbeam lit up the granite cliffs and made the heather glow,--might there not be certain reliefs of human tenderness and love to show that no scene in which man has a part is utterly dest.i.tute of those affections whose home is the heart? I had now got my theme and my locality. For my name I took 'The O'Donoghue'; it had become a.s.sociated in my mind with Glenflesk, and would not be separated from it. Here, then, in one word, is the history of this book. If the performance bears but slight relation to the intention,--if, indeed, my story seems to have little reference to what suggested it,--it will only be another instance of a waywardness which has beset me through life, and left me never sure when I started for Norway that I might not find myself in Naples. It is not necessary, perhaps, for me to say that no character in this tale was drawn from a model. I began the story, in so far as a few pages went, at a little inn at Killarney, and I believe I stole the name of Kerry O'Leary from one of the boatmen on the lake; but, so far as I am aware, it is the only theft in the book. I believe that the very crude notions of an English tourist for the betterment of Ireland, and some exceedingly absurd comments he made me on the habits of people which an acquaintances.h.i.+p of three weeks enabled him to p.r.o.nounce on, provoked me to draw the character of Sir Marmaduke; but I can declare that the traveller aforesaid only acted as tinder to a mine long prepared, and afforded me a long-sought-for opportunity--not for exposing, for I did not go that far, but--for touching on the consummate effrontery with which a mere pa.s.sing stranger can settle the difficulties and determine the remedies for a country in which the resident sits down overwhelmed by the amount, and utterly despairing of a solution. I have elsewhere recorded that I have been blamed for the fate I reserved for Kate O'Donoghue, and that she deserved something better than to have her future linked to one who was so unworthy of her in many ways. Till I re-read the story after a long lapse of years, I had believed that this charge was better founded than I am now disposed to think it. First of all, judging from an Irish point of view, I do not consent to regard Mark O'Donoghue as a bad fellow. The greater number of his faults were the results of neglected training, irregular--almost utter want of--education, and the false position of an heir to a property so swamped by debt as to be valueless. I will not say these are the ingredients which go to the formation of a very regular life or a very perfect husband, but they might all of them have made a worse character than Mark's if he had not possessed some very sterling qualities as a counterbalance. Secondly, I am not of those who think that the married life of a man is but the second volume of his bachelor existence. I rather incline to believe that he starts afresh in life under circ.u.mstances very favourable to the development of whatever is best, and to the extinguishment of what is worst in him. That is, of course, where he marries well, and where he allies himself to qualities of temper and tastes which will serve as the complement, or, at times, the correctives, of his own. Now Kate O'Donoghue would instance what I mean in this case. Then I keep my best reason for the last: they liked each other. This, if not a guarantee for their future happiness, is still the best ”martingale” the game of marriage admits of. I am free to own that the book I had in my head to write was a far better one than I have committed to paper, but as this is a sort of event which has happened to better men than myself, I bear it as one of the accidents that authors.h.i.+p is heir to. A French critic--one far too great to have his dicta despised--has sneered at my making a poor ignorant peasant child find pleasure in the resonance of a Homeric verse; but I could tell him of barefooted boys in the South, running errands for a scanty subsistence, with a knowledge of cla.s.sical literature which would puzzle many a grown student to cope with.

'THE KNIGHT OF GWYNNE.'

I wrote this story in the Tyrol.* The accident of my residence there was in this wise: I had travelled about the Continent for a considerable time, in company with my family, and with my own horses. Our carriage was a large and comfortable _caleche_, and our team four horses, the leaders of which, well-bred and thriving-looking, served as saddle-horses when needed. There was something very gipsy-like in this roving uncertain existence (that had no positive bent or limit, and left every choice of place an open question) which gave me intense enjoyment.

It opened to me views of Continental life, scenery, people, and habits which I should certainly never have attained by other modes of travel.

* As a matter of fact--though the fact in itself is of little importance,--Lever composed about one-half of 'The Knight' at Carlsruhe. The novel began to appear in monthly parts early in the year 1846.--E. D.

Not only were our journeys necessarily short each day, but we frequently sojourned in little villages and out-of-the-way spots where, if pleased by the place itself and the accommodation afforded, we would linger on for days, the total liberty of our time at our disposal, and all our nearest belongings around us. In the course of these rambles we had arrived at the town of Bregenz, on the Lake of Constance, where the inn-keeper, to whom I was known, accosted me with all the easy freedom of his calling, and half-jestingly alluded to my mode of travelling as a most unsatisfactory and wasteful way of life, which could never turn out profitably to me or mine. From the window where we were standing as we talked I could descry the tall summit of an ancient castle or _schloss_, about two miles away; and, rather to divert my antagonist from his argument than with any more serious purpose, I laughingly told my host, if he could secure me such a fine old chateau as that I then looked at, I should stable my nags and rest where I was. On the following day, thinking of nothing less than my late conversation, the host entered my room to a.s.sure me that he had been over to the castle, had seen the baron, and learned that he would have no objection to lease me his chateau, provided I took it for a fixed term, and with all its accessories, not only of furniture but cows and farm-requisites. One of my horses, accidentally p.r.i.c.ked in shoeing, had obliged me at the moment to delay a day or two at the inn, and for want of better to do, though without the most remote intention of becoming a tenant of the castle, I yielded so far to my host's solicitation as to walk over and see it.

If the building itself was far from faultless it was s.p.a.cious and convenient, and its position on a low hill in the middle of a lawn finer than anything I can convey, the four sides of the _schloss_ commanding four distinct and perfectly dissimilar views. By the north it looked over a wooded plain, on which stood the Convent of Mehreran, and beyond this, the broad expanse of the Lake of Constance. The south opened on a view towards the Upper Rhine and the valley that led to the Via Mala.

On the east you saw the Gebhardsberg and its chapel, and the lovely orchards that bordered Bregenz; while to the west rose the magnificent Lenten and the range of the Swiss Alps--their summits lost in the clouds. I was so enchanted by the glorious panorama around me, and so carried away by the thought of a life of quiet labour and rest in such a spot, that, after hearing a very specious account of the varied economies I should secure by this choice of a residence, and the resources I should have in excursions on all sides, I actually contracted to take the chateau, and became the master of the Bieder Schloss from that day.*

* Dr Fitzpatrick, in his 'Life of Lever,' furnishes a more prosaic account of the annexing of the Tyrolean castle,--Mr Stephen Pearce being given as the authority for the unromantic statement that the _schloss_ was advertised ”to let,” and that while the Levers were sojourning in Carlsruhe negotiations were opened with Baron Pollnitz, and Mr Pearce was despatched to Bregenz, where he entered into an agreement for a short lease of ”the premises.” This, of course, spoils the story which Charles Lever tells; but I have in my possession a letter written by Mr Pearce at Riedenburg on May 26,1846, quoted at p. 210 of vol i., which would seem to bear out the tale told by the author of 'The Knight of Gwynne' in 1872.--E. D.

Having thus explained by what chance I came to pitch my home in this little-visited spot, I have no mind to dwell further on these Tyrol experiences than so far as they concern the story I wrote there. If the scene in which I was living, the dress of the peasants, the daily wants and interests, had been my prompters, I could not have addressed myself to an Irish theme; but long before I had come to settle at Riedenburg, when wandering among the Rhine villages, on the vine-clad slopes of the Bergstra.s.se, I had been turning over in my mind the Union period of Ireland as the era for a story. It was a time essentially rich in the men we are proud of as a people, and peculiarly abounding in traits of self-denial and devotion which, in the corruption of a few, have been totally lost sight of, the very patriotism of the time having been stigmatised as factious opposition or unreasoning resistance to wiser counsels. That nearly every man of ability in the land was against the Minister; that not only all the intellect of Ireland but all the high spirit of its squirearchy and the generous impulses of the people were opposed to the Union,--there is no denying. If eloquent appeal and powerful argument could have saved a nation, Henry Grattan or Plunkett would not have spoken in vain; but the measure was decreed before it was debated, and the annexation of Ireland was made a Cabinet decision before it came to Irishmen to discuss it. I had no presumption to imagine I could throw any new light on the history of the period, or ill.u.s.trate the story of the measure by any novel details; but I thought it would not be uninteresting to sketch the era itself; what aspect society presented; how the country gentleman of the time bore himself in the midst of solicitations and temptings the most urgent and insidious,--what, in fact, was the character of that man whom no national misfortunes could subdue, no ministerial blandishments corrupt; of him, in short, that an authority with little bias to the land of his birth has called--The First Gentleman in Europe. I know well, I feel too acutely, how inadequately I have pictured what I desired to paint; but even, after the interval of years, I look back on my poor attempt with the satisfaction of one whose aim was not ign.o.ble. A long and deep experience of life permits me to say that in no land nor amongst any people have I ever found the type of what we love to emblematise by the word gentleman so distinctly marked out as in the educated and travelled Irishman of that period. The same unswerving fidelity of friends.h.i.+p, the same courageous devotion to a cause, the same haughty contempt for all that was mean or unworthy: these, with the lighter accessories of a genial temperament, joyous disposition, and a chivalrous respect for women, made up what, at least, I had in my mind when I tried to present to my reader my Knight of Gwynne. That my character of him was not altogether ideal, I can give no better proof than the fact that during the course of publication I received several letters from persons unknown to me, asking whether I had not drawn my portrait from this or that original,--many concurring in the belief that I had taken as my model The Knight of Kerry, whose qualities, I am well a.s.sured, fully warranted the suspicion. For my attempt to depict the social habits of the period I had but to draw on my memory. In my boyish days I had heard much of the period, and was familiar with most of the names of its distinguished men. Anecdotes of Henry Grattan, Flood, Parsons, Ponsonby, and Curran jostled in my mind with stories of their immediate successors, the Burkes and the Plunketts, whose fame has come down to the very day we live in. As a boy it was my fortune to listen to the narratives of the men who had been actors in the events of that exciting era, and who could even show me in modern Dublin the scenes where memorable events occurred, and not infrequently the very houses where celebrated convivialities had taken place. Thus, from Drogheda Street, the modern Sackville Street, where the beaux of the day lounged in all their bravery, to the Circular Road, where a long file of carriages, six-in-hand, evidenced the luxury and tone of display of the capital, I was deeply imbued with the features of the time, and I ransacked the old newspapers and magazines with a zest which only great familiarity with the names of the leading characters could have inspired. Though I have many regrets on the same score, there is no period of my life in which I have the same sorrow for not having kept some sort of notebook, instead of trusting to a memory most fatally unretentive and uncertain.