There is always a temptation to hold a brief for Lever, because he has been most unjustly censured by Irishmen, even in so august and impartial a court as the _Dictionary of National Biography_, as if he had traduced his countrymen. Did Thackeray, then, malign the English? The only charge that may fairly be brought against him is the one that cannot be rebutted--the charge of superficiality and of scamped work, of a humour that only plays over the surface of things--a humour which sees only the comic side that anybody might see. And because I cannot defend him, I say no more. Lever is certainly not a great humorist, but he is delightful company.
One may mention in passing the excursions into broad comedy of another brilliant Irishman--Le Fanu's short stories in the _Purcell Papers_, such as the _Quare Gander_, or _Billy Molowney's Taste of Love and Glory_. These are good examples of a particular literary type--the humorous anecdote--in which Irish humour has always been fertile, and of which the _ne plus ultra_ is Sir Samuel Ferguson's magnificent squib in Blackwood, _Father Tom and the Pope_. Everybody knows the merits of that story, its inexhaustible fertility of comparison, its dialectic ingenuity, its jovialty, its drollery, its Rabelaisian laughter. But, after all, the highest type of humour is humour applying itself to the facts of life, and this is burlesque humour squandering itself in riot upon a delectable fiction. Humour is a great deal more than a plaything; it is a force, a weapon--at once sword and shield. If there is to be an art of literature in Ireland that can be called national, it cannot afford to devote humour solely to the production of trifles. _Father Tom_ is a trifle, a splendid toy; and what is more, a trifle wrought in a moment of ease by perhaps the most serious and conscientious artist that ever made a contribution to the small body of real Irish literature in the tongue that is now native to the majority of Irishmen.
Of contemporaries, with one exception, I do not propose to speak at any length, nor can I hope that my review will be complete. There is first and foremost Miss Barlow, a lady whose work is so gentle, so unassuming, that one hears little of it in the rush and flare of these strident times, but who will be heard and listened to with fresh emotion as the stream is heard when the scream and rattle of a railway train have passed away into silence. Is she a humorist? Not in the sense of provoking laughter--and yet the things that she sees and loves and dwells on would be unbearable if they were not seen through a delicate mist of mirth. The daily life of people at continual handgrips with starvation, their little points of honour, their little questions of precedence, the infinite generosity that concerns itself with the expenditure of six-pence, the odd shifts they resort to that a gift may not have the appearance of charity,--all these are set down with a tenderness of laughter that is peculiarly and distinctively Irish.