BOOKS.
LORD KILGOBBIN.*
MR. LEVER will find no one to echo the wish with which he closes the melancholy dedication of his latest novel, that this effort may be his last. On the contrary, all who like good novels will wish themselves many happy returns of such books as his ; but the phrase suggests remembrance and comparison of those first efforts which were so successful, and which have since been so well sustained. Mr. Lever's late works are in some respects as distinct from his early novels as Lord Lytton's Caxton' series, in which be turned over so many new leaves with such a prodigious rustling, is from the Bulwerian romances, which were considered delightfully dangerous in the days when poetical and rhetorical vice was in fashion. But the change in the author of Charles O'Malley and Lord Kilgobbin is only change, it is not atonement, for nothing of the sort was ever needed. The dashing dragoons, the brilliant attach6s, the meteors of fashion, the beautiful young ladies who witched the world with noble horsemanship and " twinkling " ankles, all the gallant and gay company who talked epigrams and never left off doing wonderful things, with no more reference to the restric- tions of time and strength, or the vulgar necessity for sleep, than Ponson du Terrail's people ignored common-sense, and outraged probability. But they did not ignore good- ness, virtue, and purity, they did not outrage domestic feel- ing or good manners, and one felt that the world would not only be pleasanter if some of the phantoms of that brilliant fancy could be made real, and have place in it, but better too. The delightful vivacity, the untiring spirit of those books were potent charms ; they have not ceased to act even yet. The young people of this blasé and materialistic day, who cannot understand how anyone could have read Scott for pleasure, read Charles O'Malley, Tom Burke, Jack Hinton, and The Knight of Gwynne ; and the middle-aged people read them over again. Thus the author lives to enjoy the popularity he won many years ago, and a present popularity of another kind, which is, however, mainly due to the infusion of similar elements into wholly different scenes, incidents, and dramatis personx ; to the art with which he draws a portrait with exquisite accuracy, in the midst of a group of imaginary beings, challenging instant recognition, and admirably set off by its surroundings. Mr. Lever reminds one of the Italian artist who painted to the life a cardinal whom he disliked among the number of the condemned at the Last Judgment, a scene of the wildest, most unsupported imagination, with one well-known face to make it all real. The materials with which the novels are constructed are similar an fond to those which the writer used in the earlier ones ; he has the art of an almost infinite variety of treatment. His English exquisite, visiting Ireland with preconceived notions of its barbarism, who is captivated and refused by a clever and beautiful Irish woman, and who has a jilted cousin of high birth and supercilious coldness of demeanour in the background, is as inevitable as Mr. Trollope's wary young man, wavering between a portionless girl whom he likes, and a rich young widow who likes him,—a Florence Burton or a Lady Ongar, a Lucy Morris or a Lady Eustace. The only difference is that in the days of Jack Hinton the Sassenach who came to conquer and was conquered was a bold dragoon and gold-laced aide-de-camp ;—in the days of Lord Kilgobbin, indeed ever since Davenport Dunn's time, he is a private secretary, with a fine flavour of " F. O.," and he talks and writes politics and social tactics at a swinging canter, instead of feats of arms and the romance of the Peninsula. He is not a bit more real, but neither is he less pleasant, nor less surely foiled by the Irishry he comes prepared to puzzle and to patronize. Just as the author treated war in old times he treats politics now—with the same incisive judgment, the same conviction that he sees at a glance everything that many wise men have long peered at through the spectacles of experience without being quite sure of details and results even yet, the same rapid generalization, the same tendency to settle things with epigrams, the same unbounded exaggeration. His rising dip- lomatists, his brilliant journalists, take the obstacles in their path just as Charles O'Malley took' the stone walls in Galway and • Lord Filyobbin: a Tale of Ireland in Our Own Time. By Charles Lever, LL.D. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. the mule-cart in Madrid, and get their promotion with ats even more astonishing rapidity. His dialogues are racy with humour, aptness, and liveliness, but no more like real talk in real society than the dialogues in Sheridan's plays, in which everybody is " a fairy who speaks pearls ; " and the letters, written off-hand, and so frequently read by the wrong person that this has become a portion of Mr. Lever's machinery as familiar as his heroine's taste in gastronomy, and his good' young lady's knowledge of farming, are marvels of flippancy, fluency, and fun. There is the same disdain of the small niceties and intricacies of book-making which, though it rendered the invraisemblance of his earlier works all the more evident, made them so pleasant, so free, so capricious, so convincing that they were written with zest and glee. No laborious building of a story, no seeing to the hinges, no oiling of the cranks, made the mechanism of his novels obtru- sive, in days when public taste would have condemned the artifices which pass for art in ours, and he does not resort to them now. There is more skill in construction, it is true, in the later works ; but it is art, not carpentry, and it has the character- istic defects, together with the old familiar charm, the mixture of shrewdness and shallowness, of acuteness and extravagance, the little dash of vulgarity which makes him describe a reduced household and dwell upon restricted means, and then give a pic- ture of living which could only be compatible with much money ; the truth and beauty of home scenes in which he ventures to be homely ; the miserable stageyness in attitude and talk of all his great people, the charming confidence and carelessness which enable him to reproduce identical situations without a misgiving. Mr. Trollope, who grinds novels as the Thibet lamas twirl prayers, would hardly have brought his first gentleman to have his broken arm nursed by the leading lady, and then brought his second gentleman to have his broken bead nursed by the second lady, in the same place, after a considerable interval of time, the several fractures having been effected in different rows.
Almost as frequent in Mr. Lever's novels, as the brilliant, fortu- nate, supercilious Englishman, who has his previous ideas dispersed; at no small cost in discomfiture, in Ireland, is the beautiful, half- Irish, half-foreign girl, who comes, a dependent and a stranger, among her Irish relatives, bringing her foreign airs and graces to captivate their fancy and revolutionize their home. She is the splendidly handsome woman who sings like a prima donna, and dances like the fairy of Mickey Free's song ; who has flirted with ambassadors, and had all " F.0." at her feet ; who is quite desti- tute, and magnificently dressed ; who patronizes her Irish cousin-, from whom she only borrows her betrothed,—giving him up when she tires of the flirtation ;—who tries Irish country life, rendering it endurable by pretty political intrigues ; who wheedles everybody, and is always flashing " insolent " looks, and making " insolent " gestures. She is a charming impossibility-, and in this particular case she is more than ever charming and impossible. Her name is Nina Kostalergi ; she is half Greek, and Lord Kilgobbin's niece. She is a flirt of the most heartless and omnivorous kind, and intensely worldly ; she has no prin- ciples—she is deceitful, and ungrateful ; she mocks at everything and everybody ; she is entirely inconsistent with the letter by which she implores her uncle's protection, she captivates and she betrays, she is extremely elegant and singularly discourteous, she is very fastidious, she will not endure the simplicity of Kil- gobbin Castle and its guests, and she runs away with an escaped Fenian, who is introduced to the reader as a person who. puts his thick muddy boots to bake inside the fender in his bedroom, and leaves coarse tobacco and a half-empty pot of porter on his table. But Nina is delightful from first to last, though no woman ever talked as she is made to talk on every con- ceivable subject, and any woman who did would be an intolerable nuisance, and though she behaves ill to everyone, including the• Fenian, whose future it would hardly be pleasant to investigate, when he has taken the Greek girl with such tastes and such a. temper out to New York.
Lord Kilgobbin is a medley of real and imaginary, in Mr. Lever's happiest style. The queer old man who gives his name to the book is an admirably drawn character, but his son is a total failure. Young Kearney is nothing but a snob,—selfish, heartless, and vulgar, so distinctly drawn at first, and then permitted to sink into such vagueness that it looks as if the author had changed his plan about him ; as the story closes in, he seems to have for- gotten him. Many pictures of Irish life and character, full of truth, quaintness, and humour, are to be found in the book ; but the effect of the whole is vague and unreal, partly because the first chapters are very superior to any which follow, and the , diminishing process sets in steadily with the commencement of the
second volume ; and partly because the author has been tempted into such gross caricature in the instance of Joseph Atlee, a character in the conception and early manipulation of which he puts forth ability as fresh, as powerful, and as original as any of his works can show. If he had kept within bounds in this instance, if he had not strayed into the farcical extravagance of a trans- formation-scene in incidents, if he had not allowed his humour to run utterly wild, Joe Atlee would have been a great character, and would have made of Lord Kilgobbin a great book. But the ad- venturer is much too wondrously assisted by happy accident, which sends him up to Dublin as surgeon in attendance on a private secretary, and then pitches him across into Wales to become con- fidential friend and envoy to an Irish viceroy, who knows nothing at all about Ireland, but a great deal about Greece. Lord Danes- bury is a portrait easily recognizable, and the politics of the limner are those of Cornelius O'Dowd. Joe is too brilliant, too clever, too successful, to false, and much too industrious. To write all the articles in all the reviews and all the newspapers, from all points of the political compass ; to draw all the caricatures, com- pose all the songs, and pull all the wires ; to keep up all the cor- respondence, betray all the causes, and do all the dirty work as- signed to him in this marvellously brilliant story, Joe Atlee must have been three gentlemen at once, and not only "plus fin qu'un autre, mais plus fin que tons les mitres."
As a sketch of political and social actualities, Lord Kilgobbin is not of any remarkable value. It is shallow, but that is no fault in a novel, unless it professes to be deep, which this one does not quite do, though Mr. Lever would, no doubt, like his English readers to give him credit for depth. He cannot hope to get such credit from his own countrymen. But while they feel that he touches subjects off with a light hand which even in a work of fiction, if introduced at all, ought to find graver treatment, they also can best appreciate the truth and the humour, the grace and the purity with which he depicts Irish home life and 'Irish women. Kate Kearney is a charming girl, and every Irishman knows where her prototype may be found.
Why did Mr. Lever give her to such a mere shadow as Gorman O'Shea ? The one distinctly comic personage, Miss O'Shea, is as clever as Miss Judy Mason. The village scenes are equal to those in The O'Donoghue, and the key-note to the whole is struck in the last few lines, a brief dialogue between Cecil Walpole, the English swell, and Joe Atlee, the Irish adventurer, who has brought him the news of Nina's elopement with the escaped _Fenian :-
"' What news from Kilgobbin ?' cried Walpole, as Atlee landed at Kingstown.—' Nothing very rose-coloured,' said Atlee, as he handed the note.—' Is it true ?' asked Walpole.—' All true.'—' Isn't it Irish ? Irish the whole of it.'—' So they said down there, and, stranger than all, they seemed rather proud of it.' "
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