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Tagus would have produced no more food or forage had Napoleon commanded Marmont's divisions in July 1811; the guerillas would have cut off French despatch-carriers no less surely because the messages they carried were Napoleon's.

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To the second question M. Fournier offers several answers (ii, 124). It was generally expected that Napoleon would return to Spain after Wagram, but 'some declared he would not risk his life in a land seething with fanaticism, others that his divorce prevented him.' To this last view Prof. Oman inclines; he thinks the Emperor did genuinely intend to return to Spain, but stayed back on account of the dissolution of his marriage, not because the news of Ocana made him think all was over. Still, it looks as if he failed to realise the difficulties of the task. M. Fournier thinks he had no conception of the terrible significance of the guerillas.' Prof. Oman finds the fundamental error which wrecked Masséna's expedition in the Emperor's refusal to reckon the Portuguese regulars as serious opponents. M. Fournier himself leans to the view that distrust of Talleyrand, Fouché and other intriguers made Napoleon reluctant to betake himself to so great a distance from the centre of his policy.' Prof. Oman tells us that the Peninsula was saved from the presence of the Emperor in 1811 because of the necessary limitations of a one-man power. Napoleon dared not leave the centre of affairs; at Vienna or Berlin he was still in touch with Paris, in Portugal he would have been at the end of the world.' From Spain he could not hope to supervise the rigid enforcement of the Continental blockade at Dantzic and Trieste. In 1810 he might perhaps have been able to risk going, yet, as Prof. Lindner argues (vii, 351), the Emperor may well be excused for thinking victory already in his grasp, for the enormous reinforcements he was pouring into the Peninsula seemed amply sufficient to secure success. But in 1811 his relations with Russia were far too strained to permit him to go. His only chance then would have been to have entrusted the supreme command to Soult and to have abandoned the futile attempt to conduct from Paris a war of whose peculiarities he could never form a correct idea.

C. T. ATKINSON,

Art. 2. THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE.

1. An Irish Cousin (Bentley), The Real Charlotte (Ward and Downey), The Silver Fox (Laurence and Bullen), Some Experiences of an Irish R.M., All on the Irish Shore, Some Irish Yesterdays (Longmans), Dan Russel the Fox (Methuen). By E. E. Somerville and Martin Ross, 1889-1911.

2. Spanish Gold, The Search Party (Methuen), The Major's Niece, The Red Hand of Ulster (Smith, Elder), The Simpkins Plot, The Inviolable Sanctuary (Nelson). By George A. Birmingham, 1908-12.

3. The Novels of Charles Lever. Collected edition. Thirty-seven vols. London: Downey, 1897-9.

IN a survey of the Anglo-Irish humorous novel of recent times, the works of Charles Lever form a convenient point of departure, for with all his limitations he was the first to write about Irish life in such a way as to appeal widely and effectively to an English audience. We have no intention of dwelling upon him at any length -he belongs to an earlier generation-but between him and his successors there are points both of resemblance and of dissimilarity sufficient to make an interesting comparison. The politics and social conditions of Lever's time are not those of the present, but the spirit of Lever's Irishman, though with modifications, is still alive to-day.

Lever had not the intensity of Carleton, but he was less uncompromising in his use of local colour, and he was far more cheerful. He had not the tender grace or simplicity of Gerald Griffin, and never wrote anything so moving or beautiful as 'The Collegians,' but he surpassed him in vitality, gusto, exuberance and knowledge of the world. Overrated in the early stages of his career, Lever paid the penalty of his too facile triumphs in his lifetime and his undoubted talents have latterly been depreciated on political as well as artistic grounds. His heroes were drawn with few exceptions from the landlord class or their faithful retainers. The gallant Irish officers, whose Homeric exploits he loved to celebrate, held commissions in the British army. Lever has never been popular with Nationalist politicians, though as a

matter of fact no one ever exhibited the extravagance and recklessness of the landed gentry in more glaring colours. And he is anathema to the hierophants of the Neo-Celtic Renascence on account of his jocularity. There is nothing crepuscular about Lever; you might as well expect to find a fairy in a railway station.

Lever never was and never could be the novelist of literary men. He was neither a scholar nor an artist; he wrote largely in instalments; and in his earlier novels was wont to end a chapter in a manner which rendered something like a miracle necessary to continue the existence of the hero: He fell lifeless to the ground, the same instant I was felled to the earth by a blow from behind, and saw no more.' In technique and characterisation his later novels show a great advance, but if he lives, it will be by the spirited loosely-knit romances of love and war composed in the first ten years of his literary career. His heroes had no scruples in proclaiming their physical advantages and athletic prowess; Charles O'Malley, that typical Galway miles gloriosus, introduces himself with ingenuous egotism in the following passage:

I rode boldly with foxhounds; I was about the best shot within twenty miles of us; I could swim the Shannon at Holy Island; I drove four-in-hand better than the coachman himself; and from finding a hare to hooking a salmon, my equal could not be found from Killaloe to Banagher.'

The life led by the Playboys of the West (old style) as depicted in Lever's pages was one incessant round of reckless hospitality, tempered by duels and practical joking, but it had its justification in the family annals of the fire-eating Blakes and Bodkins and the records of the Connaught Circuit. The intrepidity of Lever's heroes was only equalled by their indiscretion, their good luck in escaping from the consequences of their folly, and their susceptibilities. His womenfolk may be roughly divided into three classes; sentimental heroines, who sighed and blushed and fainted on the slightest provocation; buxom Amazons like Baby Blake; and campaigners or adventuresses. But the gentle, sentimental, angelic type predominates, and finds a perfect representative in Lucy Dashwood. His serious heroines, except that they could ride, did not differ in essentials from those of

Dickens, and a sense of humour was no part of their mental equipment. Lever's sentiment, in short, is oldfashioned, and cannot be expected to appeal to a Feminist age, which has given us the public school girl and the suffragist. There is no psychological interest in the relations of his heroes and heroines; Charles's farewell to Lucy is on a par with the love speeches in 'The Lyons Mail.' There is seldom any doubt as to the ultimate reunion of his lovers; we are only concerned with the ingenuity of the author in surmounting the obstacles of his own invention. He was fertile in the devising of exciting incident; he was always able to eke out the narrative with a good story or song-as a writer of convivial, thrasonic or mock-sentimental verse he was quite in the first class-and in his earlier novels his high spirits and sense of fun never failed. For he was a genuine humorist, or perhaps we should say a genuine comedian, since the element of theatricality was seldom absent. The choicest exploits of that grotesque Admirable Crichton, Frank Webber, were carried out by hoaxing, disguise, or trickery of some sort. But the scene in which Frank wins his wager by impersonating Miss Judy Macan and sings 'The Widow Malone' is an admirable piece of sustained fooling: admirable, too, in its way is the rescue of the imaginary captive in the Dublin drain. As a delineator of the humours of University life, Lever combined the atmosphere of 'Verdant Green' with the sumptuous upholstery of Ouida. Here, again, in his portraits of dons and undergraduates Lever undoubtedly drew in part from life, but fell into his characteristic vice of exaggeration in his embroidery. Frank Webber's antics are amusing, but it is hard to swallow his amazing literary gifts or the contrast between his effeminate appearance and his dare-devil energy.

While Lever's last novel Lord Kilgobbin '-which ran as a serial in the Cornhill Magazine' from October 1870 to March 1872-was not wholly free from his besetting sin, it is interesting not only as the most thoughtful and carefully written of his novels, but on account of its political attitude. Here Lever proved himself no champion à outrance of the landlords, but was ready to admit that their joyous conviviality was too

often attended by gross mismanagement of their estates. The sympathy extended to the rebels of '98 is remarkable and finds expression in the spirited lines:

'Is there anything more we can fight or can hate for?
The "drop" and the famine have made our ranks thin.
In the name of endurance, then, what do we wait for?
Will nobody give us the word to begin?'

These must have been almost the last lines Lever ever wrote, unless we except the bitter epitaph on himself:

'For sixty odd years he lived in the thick of it,
And now he is gone, not so much very sick of it,
As because he believed he heard somebody say,
"Harry Lorrequer's hearse is stopping the way."

The bitterness of the epitaph lies in the fact that it was largely true; he had exhausted the vein of rollicking romance on which his fame and popularity rested. For the rest the charge of misrepresenting Irish life is met by so judicious a critic as the late Dr Garnett with a direct negative:

'He has not actually misrepresented anything, and cannot be censured for confining himself to the society which he knew; nor was his talent adapted for the treatment of such life in its melancholy and poetic aspects, even if these had been more familiar to him.'

Of the humorous Irish novelists who entered into competition with Lever for the favour of the English-speaking public in his lifetime, two claim special notice-Samuel Lover and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Lover has always been bracketed with Lever, whom he resembled in many ways, but he was overshadowed by his more brilliant and versatile contemporary. Yet within his limited sphere he was a true humorist, and the careless, whimsical, illogical aspects of Irish character have seldom been more effectively illustrated than by the author of 'Handy Andy' and 'The Gridiron.' Paddy, as drawn by Lover, succeeds in spite of his drawbacks, much as Brer Rabbit' does in the tales of Uncle Remus. His mental processes remind one of the story of the Hungarian baron who, on paying a visit to a friend after a railway journey, complained of a bad headache, the result of sitting with his back to the

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