Charles Lever - Writing

Writing

Trollope praised Lever's novels highly when he said that they were just like his conversation. He was a born raconteur, and had in perfection that easy flow of light description which without tedium or hurry leads up to the point of the good stories of which in earlier days his supply seemed inexhaustible. With little respect for unity of action or conventional novel structure, his brightest books, such as Lorrequer, O'Malley and Tom Burke, are in fact little more than recitals of scenes in the life of a particular "hero", unconnected by any continuous intrigue. The type of character he depicted is for the most part elementary. His women are mostly roués, romps or Xanthippes; his heroes have too much of the Pickle temper about them and fail an easy prey to the serious attacks of Poe or to the more playful gibes of Thackeray in Phil Fogarty or Bret Harte in Terence Deuville. This last is a perfect bit of burlesque. Terence exchanges nineteen shots with the Hon. Captain Henry Somerset in the glen. "At each fire I shot away a button from his uniform. As, my last bullet shot off the last button from his sleeve, I remarked quietly, 'You seem now, my lord, to be almost as ragged as the gentry you sneered at,' and rode haughtily away." And yet these careless sketches contain such haunting creations as Frank Webber, Major Monsoon and Micky Free, "the Sam Weller of Ireland".

Superior, it is sometimes claimed, in construction and style, the later books lack the panache of Lever's untamed youth. Where else shall we find the equals of the military scenes in O'Malley and Tom Burke, or the military episodes in Jack Hinton, Arthur O'Leary (the story of Aubuisson) or Maurice Tiernay (nothing he ever did is finer than the chapter introducing "A remnant of Fontenoy")? It is here that his true genius lies, even more than in his talent for conviviality and fun, which makes an early copy of an early Lever (with Phiz's illustrations) seem literally to exhale an atmosphere of past and present entertainment it is here that he is a true romancist, not for boys only, but also for men.

Lever's lack of artistry and of sympathy with the deeper traits of the Irish character have been stumbling-blocks to his reputation among the critics. Except to some extent in The Martins of Cro' Martin (1856) it may be admitted that his portraits of Irish are drawn too exclusively from the type, depicted in Sir Jonah Barrington's Memoirs and already well known on the English stage. He certainly had no deliberate intention of "lowering the national character". Quite the reverse. Yet his posthumous reputation seems to have suffered in consequence, in spite of all his Gallic sympathies and not unsuccessful endeavours to apotheosize the "Irish Brigade".

A library edition of the novels in 37 volumes appeared 1897 to 1899 under the superintendence of Lever's daughter, Julie Kate Neville.