Imágenes de página
PDF
ePub
[blocks in formation]

It may seem idle to be thus quoting poems well known ; but we who knew them, have been reading them again with fresh pleasure, and wish to make our readers sharers in it. This is no time for any critical estimate of Mrs Browning's genius, nor for any enumeration of the many and obvious defects which accompanied, and sometimes marred, her magnificent gifts. Her place among the immortals is secure; her rank among them will be settled hereOne thing only we feel called upon to remark, and that is the beneficent effect which flows from her writings, in stirring the nobler emotions, and impressing her readers with high thoughts. The sense we have of the presence of a genuine and delicate womanhood, raised by genius and culture to the heights of modern thought, gives to the perusal a more serious pleasure and more penetrating and lasting benefit, than would be given by ten times the amount of talent, or a much more faultless taste. It is a soul speaking, not a talent: the verses are the musical expression of actual experience, not a trick of

phrase, and solicitude for effect. The soul is imperfect, erring, but earnest; that of a sensitive, impressionable, saddened, but loving woman. Its experience has not been manifold, but intense, and is recorded in sincerity.

Another remark we would make is on the essentially musical nature of her genius. She is emphatically a Singer; one in whom thought is so blended with and suffused by emotion, that it may be doubted whether she could have written anything but poetry. The music so resonant in her verse was first the music in her mind; and even the great abstractions which philosophy presented to her, became great emotions in passing through her soul. This may explain her affluence; she sang as the birds sing, pouring forth "strains of unpremeditated art," even when her poetic ambition made her most thoughtful of art. Now this quality, at any high power, is extremely rare. Men and women can be found, in abundance, who have exquisite sensibility, and others who have intellectual activity; but the union of the emotional and intellectual, both at a high degree, yet neither stifling the other, each intensifying each, is rarely found. It is from this cause that in all ages the Singers have been rare. In no previous age has such a singer been found among women. Mrs Browning will be variously criticised, and cannot escape censure on many subordinate points; but the final result will still leave her immovable on her high pedestal, and will leave her poems a real boon to her generation.

WORKS OF CHARLES LEVER.

THE name of Charles Lever is still chiefly associated with those novels by which his popularity as a writer was first secured, and by which, perhaps, his subsequent literary reputation has been in some measure overpowered. These works have probably met with a more cordial reception from the public than from the critics. Their author may, in a certain sense, defy criticism by exclaiming, like Horace, "Pueris canto!" He has been the biographer of boyhood. In all his earlier works he especially addresses himself to that happy portion of mankind whose digestion is yet unimpaired, whose nerves are unshaken, in whom the breath of life has no resemblance to a sigh, and who (as he himself portrays them) are ever ready to risk, with unabated ardour, a broken neck or a broken heart at every turn in the joyous chase of existence. To the verdict of such an audience Mr Lever has every right to appeal as gaily and as confidently as Anacreon appealed to the Loves. It would undoubtedly be as ungracious to reproach the author of 'Charles O'Malley' with the absence of those pretensions to literary dignity which he himself disclaims with so merry a laugh at dignities of every sort, as to denounce the Greek lyrist for his resolute refusal to celebrate the exploits of Atrides. To the most captious critic Mr Lever may fairly

say,

"Non potes in nugas dicere plura meas Ipse ego quam dixi."

And he that can follow the adventures of Harry Lorrequer, Charles O'Malley, Jack Hinton, and Tom Burke, without the frequent interruption of hearty laughter, has probably survived all sense of enjoyment in the society of the young. In any case, he is not a man to be envied. To us, indeed, there is

something of pathos in the reperusal of these books. It is like reading one's old love-letters, or hearing an old friend recount the frolics of one's own youth. We turn the pages with a certain tender incredulity, and there steals over us a sensation like that

"Smell of violets hidden in the green,"

which the poet declares to have "Poured back into his empty soul and frame

The times when he remembers to have been

Joyful, and free from blame."

;

Mr Lever's blooming young heroes, if not invariably blameless, are at least exceedingly joyful. Like the first mariners, they launch into the sea of life with breasts fortified by oak and triple brass their constitutions are Titanic. To watch them from the beaten highroad of tame and ordinary experience, dashing and glittering through a stupendous steeple-chase of astounding and never-ending adventure, literally takes away our breath. We cannot but sigh as we ask ourselves, "Was life indeed, then, at any time, such an uncommonly pleasant holiday?" Has not the world itself grown older and colder since those jaunty days when the dazzling Mr Lorrequer drove his four-in-hand through all the proprieties? Is it possible that Mr Lorrequer's son and heir, whom we presume to be now a hopeful cornet in the Blues, can be such a merry dog as we all remember his father to have been? Would not any such artless, but not invariably harmless, ebullitions of youthful mirth as those recorded with infinite gusto in the biography of the elder gentleman, be now visited with the severest penalties at the disposal of Bow Street, and denounced with the angriest eloquence at the command of the 'Times'? We suspect that the younger Mr Lorre

[blocks in formation]

quer is a man of much sadder complexion. It would not, alaş! surprise us to learn that, notwithstanding a prudent regard for his health, he is occasionally not altogether free from low spirits, especially when his natural hilarity is tempered by the prospective shadow of a competitive examination, or vexed by the aggressive attentions of the Civil Service Commissioners. The fact is, that times are changed with us. Napoleon's Paladins are pulvis et umbra. Beau Brummel

has paid his last debt. Duelling is a thing forsworn. Notwith standing Dr Parr's celebrated receipt for the gout, consisting of "prayer, patience, and port-wine," this latter source of human comfort is all but extinct. The epitaph of it is already written by Mr Cobden in the French Treaty. The Union is an historical reminiscence. The Encumbered Estates Bill has done its work. "After life's fitful fever," O'Connell agitates no more. And Harry Lorrequer, and Charles O'Malley, and Jack Hinton, and Tom Burke, and Bagenal Daly, look down upon us from the distance of an age no longer ours. We have no hope ever again to meet them cantering in the Phoenix Park, or swaggering down Sackville Street, or dancing at Dublin Castle. They are all “ gone proiapsoi to the Stygian shore." Like Achilles, and Ajax, and all the fortes ante Agamemnona, they rest in an elysium of which the beatitude appears to us shadowy and unreal. But they have quaffed their last bumper, and shot their last shot

"They lie beside their nectar, and their

bolts are hurled."

And although their glittering ghosts yet hover about the fading splendour of the "good old times," as the Scandinavian warriors are said by the Swedish poet to hover in the light of sunset over the horizon of the Baltic, yet we can no more recall them to tangible existence than we can renew the race of the Anakim.

Mr Lever has himself survived his first progeny. That in growing an older, he had also grown a wiser, and in some respects a sadder man, his more recent writings bear witness. Job's second batch of sons and daughters, who were, doubtless, a much steadier set of young people than the first, could not have differed from that jovial crew who were overwhelmed in a whirlwind whilst "eating and drinking wine," more strongly than Mr Lever's later works differ from his earlier ones.

The author of Harry Lorrequer' has given unquestionable proof of powers matured by time and enriched by cultivation. His more recent novels evince a greater mastery in the craft of authorship, a larger experience, and more skilled faculty of construction. But whether these qualities exist in so great a degree as entirely to compensate the reader for the absence of that vivacity, freshness, and continuous flow of high animal spirits, which have rendered Mr Lever's first books so widely and so justly popular, is a question which we shall presently have occasion to consider. Meanwhile, to say of such novels as 'Harry Lorrequer' and its immediate successors that they abound in extravagance, is to detract nothing from the merit of them. Youth is in itself the grandest of all extravagances; and these books are an emanation from, and an embodiment of, all the joyous audacity of young manhood. We cannot too largely estimate the extent to which Mr Lever possesses the merit most essential to popularity in narrative lates incidents with a relish, and composition-viz., gusto. He reaccumulates them with a fecundity of invention and a rapidity of movement that never flag. Of all qualities in the genius of an author, this is the most necessary to the successful conduct of narrative interest; and we must the more admire it, wherever it is displayed, because it is innate, and neither to be acquired by labour, nor replaced by experience. It is to this rush

To re

and flow of vigorous animal life that we must attribute the indescribable attraction exerted by Homer upon the sympathies of all ages and conditions of men; and we accord to the Father of Verse a supremacy felt to be unattainable by any other poet, in recognition (which is perhaps partly unconscious) of the completeness with which he has expressed the high spirits and dauntless health of the boyhood of mankind. A recent poet, who deserves to be better known, has said that "the old gods were only men and wine." Their godship is certainly the extravagant idealisation of the merely human faculties at their highest pitch. The same extravagance gives to the Homeric heroes their colossal proportions. Achilles and Hector will, to the end of time, be a head-and-shoulders taller than all other men, because it is impossible that any man should realise so intensely, or define so distinctly, as Homer, the supernatural dimensions of all natural faculties and sensations. present human beings precisely as they are, is not a necessary condition of art of any kind. A deformed saint by Massaccio may be truer in art than a correct anatomical study by Mr Etty. Nor is there any reason why that extravagance of design which dilates either human actions or human emotions, or even the situations of human life, to perfectly impossible proportions, should be in itself a defect. For what is impossible in fact may be proper in art. Ariosto is undoubtedly one of the greatest of narrative poets, and it is probably in his extravagance that we shall find the secret of his indefinable power. The humour of Quevedo is often most irresistible when it consists entirely of what might be called pure extravagance of expression. And such extravagance as is to be found in Mr Lever's earlier novels is occasioned by the overflow of that exuberant vitality which constitutes their special excellence. The plan and character of these

books are obviously panoramic rather than dramatic. It is by the narration of humorous incident that the interest of the reader is to be carried on. For this, rapidity and gusto are the best of all qualifications. No great writer of narrative fiction has ever been wholly without them. Le Sage possessed them largely; they are to be detected in the sadder and more profound genius of Cervantes; they are not wanting to the elaborate minuteness of De Foe; they give vigour to the most envenomed creations of Swift; they are remarkable in Sir Walter Scott, than whom, certainly, there is no happier master of the art of telling a story. Fielding, though his genius philosophises while it frolics, was far from neglecting those means of exciting interest which depend upon the rapid movement and striking effect of incident. Smollett certainly possessed the gift of high spirits to a pre-eminent degree. The extraordinary impulse and animation of his genius is such, that his narrative, though often extremely digressive, always rushes away with the reader, and carries him, like a runaway horse, over every obstacle, “turbine raptus ingenii."

But

In this respect Mr Lever, of all modern novelists, most resembles the author of 'Roderick Random.' There is, indeed, not only much similarity of character between the works of Charles Lever and those of Tobias Smollett, but also no inconsiderable coincidence in the circumstances which may possibly have given to the genius of both authors something of the same tendency.

The Irish humorist, like his great Scotch predecessor, was, we believe, brought up for the medical profession, and for some years practised as a doctor. Whether, indeed, Mr Lever found his profession as little profitable to him as it would appear to have proved to Dr Smollett, or whether he was simply impelled to abandon so sober a

career by the consciousness of those powers of humour and that facility of composition which he evinced at an early age, we do not know; but it is difficult to believe that the pen which wrote Charles O'Malley,' or that which wrote 'Peregrine Pickle,' would have been equally well employed in signing prescriptions. To the experience of medical life, however, to the opportunities for the study of character thereby afforded, and the quickness of penetration and habits of observation thus acquired, it is highly probable that both Smollett and Lever have owed much excellent material for humorous fiction. Both authors appear to have early evinced, and long retained, an extreme predilection for a military life. Smollett, indeed, never forgave his grandfather for thwarting his inclination to enter the army; and he never omits an occasion for introducing into his novels some description of martial scenes and events. There is fair reason to attribute to both Smollett and Lever some carelessness, not so much of composition, as of writing. They both appear to have written hastily. Of Smollett it is told that (whilst writing the 'Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves'), "when post-time drew near he used to retire for half-anhour or an hour to prepare the necessary quantity of copy, as it is technically called in the printinghouse, which he never gave himself the trouble to correct, or even to read once." And we may assume that Mr Lever, speaking through the mask of Harry Lorrequer, is not very wide of the truth when he says, "I wrote as I felt-sometimes in good spirits, sometimes in bad always carelessly-for, God help me! I can do no better." Smollett is, indeed, the more correct writer of the two; his style, though often hasty, is never inaccurate, and, for the most part, his English is very pure. Mr Lever's language, on the contrary, is in places so heedless that the grammar of it is sometimes more conventional than correct. In VOL. XCI.NO. DLVIII.

[ocr errors]

one place he speaks of "purchasing a boon," and in another he describes an Irish member waiting "till the House was done prayers.' Nevertheless he has great powers of description. He represents objects and actions with a touch that is always vivid, often masterly. He is always happy in the open air; in his love of nature and hearty relish of out-of-door life, as well as in the force and fidelity with which he depicts them, he is certainly unsurpassed, and perhaps unequalled, by Smollett himself. The veracity, freshness, and power with which he describes scenery is deserving, we think, of higher appreciation than it has yet received. His pictures of Irish landscape, sea scenery, and all effects of wind and weather, are full of the truth and intensity which belong to poetry. It is for such reasons all the more to be regretted that an author entitled on so many grounds to hold a permanent place in literature should ever be forgetful of the duty which is owed by eminent writers to the language they bequeath to posterity. Some expressions throughout Mr Lever's works, so incorrect as to be obvious oversights, have passed through so many editions that we must believe the yeygapa yiygapa sentiment to be in him unusually strong, and that what he writes he never revises. The bent of such minds as those of Mr Lever and Dr Smollett is instinctively conservative, loyal, and inclined to the maintenance of institutions which have been tested and endeared by time. On the one hand, a shrewd appreciation of life as it is, and a keen sense of the ludicrous and incongruous, indisposes them to indulge in the dreams of democracy; whilst, on the other hand, a certain cheerful chivalry of disposition induces them to side with a cause which, by the very nature of it, must always be that of the party attacked. Conservatism, therefore, has found in each of these writers a warm and ready adherent. To continue any further this passing comparison between

2 H

« AnteriorContinuar »