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LITERAR Y NOTES.Charles Lever, the indefatigable novelist, has died at Trieste, in his 67th year, prematurely, we might say, judging from the unabated vitality and buoyancy of spirits evidenced in his latest works, though viewed as the author of Harry Lorrequer and Charles O’Malley, our surprise is, perhaps, rather to find that he has not been with us longer. They belong to the boisterous, inorganic type of fiction, of which Smollett is the great representative ; and though they can still be read with amusement, their humour requires to be supplemented by a virtuous consciousness, that one is studying in them an instructive phase in the history of light literature. Lever became popular as a painter of Irish character, and yet no successful novelist ever troubled himself less about character, properly so called. He could tell one good story after another so volubly as to keep up an unbroken chuckle from the first chapter to the last, which stood in lieu of a coherent plot, while his heroes fell in love and out, and won and lost fortunes and battles neither he nor they much cared how or why. But unity of purpose, action, or conception, were not natural to his novels, and when he changed his style, a quarter of a century ago, it was because a fine tact warned him that, for better or worse, the public taste was no longer what it had been. His least successful and characteristic works belong to this period, when he aimed at constructing an ordinary novel of incident without a thoroughly congenial or inspiring motive. In 1858 he became vice-consul of Spezzia, and about that time he hit upon a new vein, which, with varying but considerable success, he continued to work until his death. Instead of therollicking, happy-go-lucky Irishman of his early works, his herois henceforward a deep diplomatic conspirator, generally belonging to an obscure nationality, but exercising as mysterious a sway over the fortunes of Europe as any of Mr. Disraeli’s magnates. This new type is not more faithful to nature, nor of more permanent artistic value, than the wild Irishman of whom the public had got tired ; but Lever’s knowledge of the travelling Briton, who is at once his butt and his public, his unflagging spirits and lively invention, which disguise the essential sameness of his subject, were quite enough to account for his fresh success. Without being profound or veracious, he was almost always readable, and it does not detract from his merit that he attained this result by trifling with such contemporary foibles as a taste for ethnological “ questions.”
Newspaper Details
London Academy Volume III
London, Middlesex, GB
Sat, Jun 15, 1872
Page 5
Full Page
Clipped by
Anonymous
MD, USA 11 Mar 2022
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