Amongst his entertainers in Dublin was the Viceregal Court. His vis-à-vis at a dinner at the Viceregal Lodge was Sir Bernard Burke, the Ulster King-at-Arms. The remainder of the company was interested merely in military affairs or Court functions. No one at the table seemed to care whether the Irish humourist spoke or was silent—no one there was interested in such a paltry entity as a mere man of intellect; so Lever, the life and soul of Florentine salons, preserved silence for most of the evening. When he did join in the conversation, he happened to venture an opinion that Sebastopol would not be taken for at least another year, and this resulted in his having to incur “as much ridicule as was consistent with viceregal politeness to bestow, and the small wit of small AD.C.‘s to inflict.” So far as he was concerned, this dinner-party was a dismal affair: it recalled some equally dismal dinner-parties, or receptions, at the grand-ducal court of Baden.
Apparently Lever made no headway in Dublin with the matter of the Magazine, but his visit to Ireland refreshed and invigorated him. The sight of Irish faces and of Irish scenery and the sound of Irish voices dissipated some Florentine languorousness, and enabled him to set to work spiritedly at his new novel, ‘The Martins.’
During the autumn of 1854 he submitted to M’Glashan a proposal for an interesting series of papers—“Stories of the Ruined Houses of Ireland.” Nothing came of this. Towards the end of the year he contributed some further papers on Italian politics to ‘The Dublin University.’ One upon Sardinia and Austria created some attention in Italy, and a translation was published in Turin. English politics and foreign politics, viewed from the British standpoint, were affording him keen interest, and he had the privilege of discussing them under his own roof with a very distinguished personage, the Lord President of the Council, Lord John Russell.
Thoughts of entering Parliament were again crossing Lever’s mind at this period; but his best friends, notably his brother John, sought to dissuade him from embarking upon a career which, for a man of his temperament, would be full of pitfalls, and would in all likelihood end in Nowhere.
The story of young Charles Lever—such of it as may be evolved from his father’s letters and from other sources—is by no means uninteresting in itself, and it is intimately concerned, for a period, with the story of his father, who loved him dearly, and who looked forward to seeing the youth making a distinguished figure in the world. The profession of engineering did not hold him long. He was smitten with the military fever which had smitten his father before he had adopted medicine as a profession; but the novelist’s son was trained in a school which differed widely from the school in which the novelist had been trained. Everything that could conduce to unsettle a high-spirited youth fell to the lot of young Charles Lever. Moreover, he could, and did, imbibe from his father’s books a passion for military adventure. This in itself would have been nothing to cause uneasiness to a parent, but in addition to his longings for the adventurous career of a soldier, the novelist’s son had developed, at an early stage, a thorough contempt for “the simple life.” The only son of a father to whom reckless generosity was an easy virtue, who looked upon thrift—or anything resembling it—merely as a subject for ridicule, it would have been wellnigh impossible for young Lever to have regarded money except as a commodity difficult at times to obtain, but imperative to spend as quickly and as lavishly as possible. Early in 1855 the young engineer decided to abandon his civil profession; and seeing that there was no use in trying to keep him out of the army, his father purchased a commission for him, and he was gazetted to a cornetcy in the Royal Wilts Regiment, then stationed at Corfu. “I own to you,” Lever writes to Spencer, “I do not fancy the career, but he does not, and will not, settle down to anything else. We must only let him take his chance and try to be a Field Marshal, which in these times ought not to be so very difficult a matter, if one only thought of the competitorship.”
Having had his attention drawn to military affairs, Lever now conceived a literary project in connection with them—a work to be entitled ‘The Battlefields of Europe.’ He submitted the idea to M’Glashan, but the publisher was in no condition to offer advice or to enter into speculations off the regular track.
A serious attack of gout in the stomach prostrated the novelist in June, and for weeks he was unable to sit at his desk. He describes himself as being “covered with rugs and leeches, and warm-bathed to half his weight.” He was so ill and so depressed that he felt he was going to die. When he was able to hold a pen he wrote to M’Glashan imploring him to send sixty pounds for his life insurance premiums. “I had almost hoped,” he said, “that I was going to cheat the company and give them the slip.” He had now concluded a bargain—a somewhat loose one—for the new serial for ‘The Dublin University.’ The novel was entitled ‘The Fortunes of Glencore.’ Soon after he had despatched the first instalment, he was disturbed by receiving a letter from Dublin which contained ill news of M’Glashan.
To Mr Alexander Spencer.
“Florence, Casa Capponi, July 5, 1856.
“This is to thank you for so promptly answering Chapman. The delay was not his fault, but mine,—at least, so far as anything can be culpable which a man cannot help. Two feet of water would suffice to drown a baby; and though it takes a quarter of a million to smash Strahan & Paul, a very few hundreds would do all that mischief to Charles Lever.
“I have just made arrangements for a story to be contributed to ‘The Dublin University Magazine,’ but at the same instant I have received the most alarming tidings of M’Glashan’s health. I am, in fact, informed—and on such authority as I must believe—that disease of the brain has displayed itself, and aberration already become apparent. Total loss of memory I could collect from his letters to myself,—they were latterly nothing but a repetition of the same queries, and occasionally almost incoherent.
“It is a great pity, for, without being an original mind or one of high order, it was the rarest intellect I ever met for the gift of identifying others, looking out for the right man, and making him do the thing he was capable of. He overworked to a dreadful extent, and then, by gradual cultivation, he had so elevated his faculties above those of his associates, that he left himself companionless. Hence all the mischief.
“I hope—but I scarcely have courage to assure myself—that you like ‘Cro-Martin.’ At the same time, I think its more reflective characters will please you, and I own I wrote it with due thought.
“It is just possible that events might bring the Magazine into the market. If so, there is nothing I’d make such an effort to obtain. It would be in my hands a property—a great one.
“Charley is dallying at Corfu, and anxiously hoping to see the Crimea. I tell him not to hurry: he’ll be in good time for the taking of Sebastopol—in ‘56 or ‘57.”
Early in September Lever received a pitiful letter from M’Glashan: “I am utterly ruined in health and fortune; they have given me a pittance to live on, but taken away the Magazine and all that I care to live for. You have always treated me generously and never made hard bargains with me. Now I hope you will look to yourself, and not give ‘Glencore’ away without being well and handsomely paid.”
To Mr Alexander Spencer.
“Spezzia, Sept. 1855.
“My contract for ‘Tiernay’ and ‘Carew’ was £20 a sheet, the copyright remaining mine, and my name not to be disclosed as author. These were terms conceded to M’Glashan out of personal regard to himself. So disadvantageous were they to me, that when pressing me to contribute my present tale of ‘Glencore’ M’Glashan said, ‘Make the arrangement as will suit and fairly reimburse you, and do in all respects what you think right between us.’ In this way, and without any more definite understanding, I began, nor have we to this hour any real contract between us.
“I want you to see Mr Wardlaw, and (amongst other inquiries) demand £2 per page—£32 per sheet—for ‘Glencore,’ copyright to be preserved to me.
“In your conversation with Wardlaw could you ascertain whether the present proprietors, whoever they are, might be disposed to treat with me for the editorship? You might suggest that such an arrangement would be very likely to meet liberal acceptance at my hands. The state of the Magazine when before under my management might be referred to for evidence of its success.”
To Mr Alexander Spencer.
“Spezzia, Sept. 12, 1855.
“The deaths in Tuscany [from cholera] are reported at 700 a-day. I am not myself afraid of the disease, but I am more than usually anxious about my children.
“As to M’Glashan: the last letter said the Magazine had been reserved to him by some arrangement, and would, he hoped, yield him wherewithal to live on; but my impression is that the creditors have only done this in the prospect that his days are numbered, and not wishing to do anything like severity to a man so painfully placed.... Wardlaw, who encloses the proofs, says, ‘M’Glashan grows more and more helpless.’ I believe his malady is softening of the brain—and if so, incurable.”
To Mr Alexander Spencer.
“Spezzia, Sept. 17, 1855.
“If I could obtain the Magazine for myself it would be a great object. I’m sure Chapman would assist in the purchase, or take some share in it.
“My fear is that J. F. Waller, at present acting as editor, will step into it before any one can interfere, and the assignees may not know that I would willingly resume it—either as editor or owner.”
To Mr Alexander Spencer.
“Spezzia, Sept. 27, 1855.
“A letter written by M’Glashan and merely addressed ‘Charles Lever’ was posted in Dublin on the 15th of August last, and by some accident was included in the American mail, and arrived duly in New York on September 1st, when by an equally strange accident it was re-directed there, and addressed ‘Spezzia,’ and to-day it came to my house here.
“How M’Glashan forgot to append my address is easy enough to see. How any one in New York knew it, and re-directed the letter, is more difficult to explain.
“If my demand [for ‘Glencore’] be thought too high, I have no alternative save leaving ‘Glencore’ as a ‘payment’ to the Magazine, reserving to myself its completion elsewhere. Wardlaw must be distinctly given to understand that I never contributed this story even to M’Glashan on my previous terms, still less would I do so to those with whom I have no ties of personal intimacy or friendship. You can, I know, learn much from Mr Wardlaw, whom I have ever found a straightforward honest man,—cold as a Scotchman, but to be depended on.”
To Mr Alexander Spencer.
“Florence, Oct. 16,1865.
“I almost fancy I can read the whole web of this small intrigue, and detect the hand of J. F. Waller throughout it.
“The trustees might, by a reference to the Magazine account, have seen that while I myself edited the Magazine I paid for a story extending through 18 Nos., and to a nameless author who had never written fiction before, £20 a sheet.”
To Mr Alexander Spencer.
“Casa Capponi, Nov. 7, 1856.
“The opening of ‘Glencore’ having already appeared in the Magazine, will, I now find, seriously damage its continuance elsewhere, since no periodical will republish the past chapters, nor can they take up a story thus interrupted, and when commencement must be sought for elsewhere.... Now Mr Wardlaw knows, and the books will prove, that my terms with M’Glashan were £20 per sheet. By a dodge in a mere laughing conversation at breakfast he made a sheet to mean sixteen or seventeen pages, and as I never haggled about anything, he actually took advantage of my easiness, and paid me £20 per seventeen pages.... In a pure matter of business I have no right to dwell upon the want of consideration towards an old friend and supporter of the Magazine like myself, but I do feel deeply the scant courtesy with which I have been treated, and the little regard paid either to my interests or my sentiments as an author.”
To Mr Alexander Spencer.
“Florence, Dec. 5, 1865.
“I thank you most heartily for keeping me au courant to the destinies of the Magazine. I have just learned that H[urst] & B[lackett] have become the proprietors, with the intention of publishing in future in England, as I see ‘The Dublin Evening Mail’ has already announced. H. & B. are also, as I am informed, about to write to me,—probably about ‘Glencore,’ but not impossibly about editorship. Many of the difficulties and ‘disagreeables’ which my friends anticipate for me as editor of the Magazine would be probably obviated by publishing in England. Indeed from that moment the journal would cease to be Irish—at least, in all the acrimonious attributes of that unhappy adjective; and if H. & B. would propose such terms as I could accept, I’d accede, if only as a valid and sufficient reason to draw nearer to England, wherefrom I have, for my own and my children’s interests, too long separated myself. I also think that with capital, and London publishing to back it, the Magazine might be raised into a very worthy rivalry with ‘Blackwood’s,’ its one solitary competitor. However, I am merely speculating on all this, and rather weaving a web of hopes and wishes than of solid reason and sound expectation.
“It would be well if the Dublin people (in 50 Sackville St.) could be brought to book for the part ‘Glencores’ at once. There are also a few pp. about politics in the August No., written at M’Glashan’s request. They cost me more work than double as much fiction.
“I hope you continue to like ‘Cro-Martin.’ They say in England it is the best I’ve done,—but I scarcely hope it myself.”
The year 1855 closed, with plenty of work to do and plenty of interest in the work, with the usual shortage of supplies, with hopes and fears and projects chasing each other through the brain which had coined them.
‘The Martins’ was rapidly advancing towards its close. The serial course of ‘Glencore’ had been interrupted by the difficulties which had beset the Magazine, and these difficulties were not surmounted until the spring of 1856, when Lever made a journey to London and entered into an arrangement with Hurst & Blackett to continue the story, payment to be at the rate of £20 per sheet. In London he heard that his brother was seriously ill. He intended to cross over to Ireland, but John Lever’s doctors warned him that he must not visit his brother, as his only chance of recovery depended upon perfect rest; so the novelist returned, gloomily, to Italy. By this time ‘The Martins’ had been published in volume form. He was more sensitive than usual about criticisms of this book, and the opinion of a London literary weekly that “Mr Lever had committed his one dull novel” caused him intense chagrin. His own opinion was that the more reflective characters would please his friends; and Mary Martin was one of his best-loved heroines—therefore his friends should admire her.
He was able now to devote his attention exclusively to ‘Glencore,’ and all would have been well with him, only that he was very much disturbed about his son. The young soldier had been sowing a considerable crop of wild oats.
To Mr Alexander Spencer.
“Casa Capponi, Florence, Nov. 21, 1856.
“I have just learnt that Charley is idling about in Dublin, his regiment having been disbanded, and he himself, having passed some bills and contracted other debts, being probably unwilling to face us here at home. I say probably, because he has not written to any of us, and it is only through Maxwell having met him that I know of his being in Dublin.
“Passing over the distress and disappointment that this has occasioned me, I address myself at once to the question—What is to be done with him? Now, as he must earn his bread in some fashion, and as he has himself closed the [? gates] against him by his misconduct, I want to ascertain if he is disposed to work at any career, and what? If medicine, I can, through my Dublin professional connection, have him apprenticed, and will do my best to support him—not in extravagance and debauchery, but suitably and becomingly—as long as I am able.
“To broach this myself directly to him would be to weaken any influence his past misconduct should exert over him, so that the suggestion, to be effectual, ought to come from another,—none so fit as you, whose attachment to me he well knows. Now if you would sound him, and say that if he were really disposed to make amends for all he has done and steadily to devote himself to study and application, you would at once acquaint me with this resolve and endeavour to effect an arrangement to carry it out. We could thus at least approximate the knowledge of whether he desires to be of use to himself, and in what capacity. Had he come straight back here at once I should have set him down to read with a tutor, but as this has not happened, and as I see great disadvantages in his coming to a place like this with such habits as he has now acquired, I deem the best thing will be to try if he can be settled down to learn in Dublin either the rudiments of a career or to prepare himself for a merchant’s office.
“If he has not called on you ere this, he will of course be heard of through Miss Baker or Mr Saunders of Mount Street; but I trust that you have already seen him. If you find that he rejects the overtures as to a profession, and will not give such pledges as may lead us to hope for amendment, you must give him £20 to come home at once (there is something now due to me from the Magazine). At the same time, it is essential that he should come at once home, and not remain to spend the money at hotels.
“But the chances are that he may prefer to embrace a career, and I have only to hope that he may be taught by past experience that a life of debt and dissipation cannot lead to credit or honour. His present liabilities have thrown me into great, almost too great, embarrassment. How I am to pay them and support myself and my family is a problem that will depend upon my gaining back a little of that tranquillity of head without which no man can work. I will, however, do my best and hope for the best.
“Of course you must not suffer it to escape you that this idea of a profession originates with me. It must be, as it were, your suggestion; and while you promise to write and consult me upon it, you could recommend him to go down and stay at Ardnucker, where I am sure they would kindly have him until I write you again.
“I hope I have already expressed all I mean, but my head is sorely troubled while I write.”
Young Lever did not relish the idea of visiting a father whose purse and whose patience he had taxed so severely. He preferred to retire upon his uncle at Ardnucker, and later to quarter himself upon the Rev. Mortimer O’Sullivan at Tanderagee.
‘The Fortunes of Glencore’ was out of hand early in 1857. It was published in three volumes by Chapman & Hall—the first work (bearing the author’s name on the title-page) by Lever which was issued in three-volume form. Of Glencore’ he says: “I am unwilling to suffer this tale to leave my hands without a word of explanation.... If I have always had before me the fact that to movement and action, to the stir of incident, and to a certain light-heartedness and gaiety of temperament (more easy to impart to others than to repress in one’s self), I have owned much, if not all, of whatever popularity I enjoyed, I have felt (or fancied I felt) that it would be in the delineation of very different scenes, and in the portraiture of very different emotions, that I should reap what I would reckon as a real success. This conviction—or impression, if you will—has become stronger with years and with fuller knowledge of life; and time has confirmed me in the notion that any skill I possess lies in the detection of character and in the unravelment of that tangled skein which makes up human motives.” Opportunities of beholding the game played by Society (he further declares), as well as his inclination to study the game, helped him to give a picture of the manners, and to describe the modes and moods, of the age he lived in. If he had often grinned because of the narrow fortune which had prevented him from “cutting in,” he was able to console himself with the thought that he might have risen from the table a loser. He goes on to say that though the incidents which are noticeable in the world of the well-bred are fewer, because the friction is less than in classes where vicissitudes of fortune are more frequent, yet the play of passion, though shadowed by polished conventionalities, is often more highly developed.
To trace and to mark these developments was, he assures us, one of the great pleasures of his life. “Certain details, certain characteristics, I have of course borrowed—as he who would mould a human face must needs have copied an eye, a nose, a chin from some existent model,—but beyond this I have not gone; nor indeed have I ever found, in all my experiences of life, that fiction ever suggests what has not been implanted unconsciously by memory—originality in the delineation of character being little more than a new combination of old materials derived from that source.”
‘Glencore’ being disposed of, its author planned out a new tale, going again to Ireland for his scenery and his characters. He took for his hero, or leading villain, John Sadlier,* the once famous banker and politician, who put an end to his own career in 1856 by committing suicide on Hampstead Heath. Lever did not attempt to keep closely to the true story of Sadlier, or to depict the man as he had lived and moved: he merely used incidents in his career and traits in his character, and as he warmed to his work Davenport Dunn bore but a slight resemblance to John Sadlier. By this time the novelist had all but abandoned the portrayal of comic personages,—‘Glencore’ harboured Billy Traynor, but Billy was only a faint echo of Mickey Free or Darby the Blast,—and ‘Davenport Dunn,’ though it was full of spirit, bristled with character sketches, and was packed with adventure, was on the whole a much graver and possibly a stronger performance than anything which had preceded it. The story appeared in the monthly part form, Phiz’s illustrations embellishing it.
Lever paid another visit to London in the spring of 1857: it was chiefly a business visit He wished to discuss his forthcoming novel with Chapman & Hall and with Phiz. While he was in London he received some disturbing news of his son (who was still idling in Ireland), and he was half inclined to cross the Irish Sea, but he found he had lingered too long in London—a city in which he always managed to accomplish more card-playing than was good for his health or his pocket,—so he hurried back to Florence and ‘Davenport Dunn.’ Although there is no evidence to bear out the conjecture, it is most likely that he endeavoured during this visit to England to further his cause as a prospective diplomatist. On the whole, 1857 was a comparatively uneventful year.
Again—early in 1858—did the pressure of his financial affairs stir him to the exertion of “working double tides,” and, looking around him for a subject, it occurred to him that a highly romantic tale could be woven out of the adventures of a supposititious son and heir of Charles Edward Stuart, the offspring of a secret marriage with a daughter of the Geraldines. He found a sufficiently plausible groundwork for the theory of this marriage and its consequences in the letters of Sir Horace Mann.*
Poor M’Glashan died in 1858, and ‘The Dublin University’ passed into the hands of Mr Digby Starkey and Mr Cheyne Brady. They proposed to Lever that he should renew his relations with the Magazine, and he arranged with them to contribute to it the adventures of ‘Gerald Fitzgerald the Chevalier.’
To Mr Alexander Spencer.
“Casa Capponi, Florence, July 4, 1858
“After repeated promises of place from the present Government, I am put off with an offer so small and contemptible that I answered it by indignant refusal.
“The Yankees have come to something like—but not exactly—a definite offer. If it be put in a real, tangible, and unevasive way I shall accept, pitching my friends the Tories to the winds.
“Have you read ‘D. D.’ and ‘Fitzgerald’? If so, what do you say to them?”
To Mr Alexander Spencer.
“Spezzia, Aug. 10, 1858.
“I cannot tell you how gratified I was by what you say of ‘Cro-Martin.’ Independently of all a man’s natural misgivings about his own failing powers, it is unspeakably encouraging to be judged favourably by one’s oldest and best of friends, whose true-heartedness would not suffer him to flatter or say more than he felt. I know—I feel—that my old vein is worked out. I am as much aware of it as I am of scanty hair and the fifty other signs of age about me, but I don’t despair of finding other shafts to work, and of making my knowledge of life and mankind available,—even though I have lost the power to make my books droll or laughable.
“We have come down here for the bathing to the most beautiful spot on the Mediterranean, and are boating and swimming to our heart’s content,—everything but working, which really I cannot do in this most fascinating of all idling localities.”
To Mr Alexander Spencer.
“Casa Capponi, Florence, Nov. 1,1858.
“Yesterday I had a civil note from Lord Malmesbury stating that the regulation for consular appointments required that no candidate should be above fifty, and all should submit to a rigid examination. He saw no better means of introducing me into ‘the line’ than by creating for me a vice-consulate at a place I am much attached to—Spezzia. The rule as to age and examination did not apply to vice-consular appointments nor to their promotion, so that once a V.-C. I can be advanced, if opportunity serve, to something worth having. Spezzia will not be £300 a-year; but as I like the place, and there is nothing—actually nothing—to do, I have thought it best to accept it. In fact, to refuse would be to exclude myself totally from all hope of F. O. patronage, and this I did not deem wise to do. The whole negotiation is yet secret, and until I am gazetted I wish it to remain so. The consulship at Naples is what I look to, and what, if negotiations should open to a renewal of relations there, I might hope to obtain.
“I hope you like ‘D. Dunn.’ I have hardly courage to say the same for ‘Fitzgerald,’ though some say it is better than the other.
“I have been solicited to give Readings à la Dickens; but though pecuniarily a temptation, there is much I dislike in the exhibition....
“I ought to add that Sir J. Hudson, the Ambassador at Turin, strongly advised my acceptance of Spezzia, offered as it was.”
No sooner had he made up his mind to accept the Spezzia post than he was intently gazing at the Naples consulship, which he hoped would drop like a ripe plum into his mouth when he could muster up courage to take a step forward.
Another turn of Fortune’s wheel which cheered him in 1858 was the appointment of his son to the 2nd Dragoon Guards. The regiment was under the command of General Seymour, and was stationed in India.
In the spring of 1859 ‘Davenport Dunn’ had run its monthly course, and it was published in book form. The author’s official duties were extremely light, and did not tie him to Spezzia. He was able to visit his vice-consulate when it pleased him, and to indulge in his favourite pastimes of boating and bathing all through the summer months.
Young Lieutenant Lever was now winning some golden opinions in India, though there was a little dross to be found in the gold. One of his brother officers describes him as being “an exact facsimile of Charles O’Malley. He was the most accomplished young man I have ever heard of or read of,” says this witness, “not only in such gifts as would make him conspicuous in a regiment, but he was likewise an accomplished linguist, and possessed a vast knowledge of general literature.” “He was a warm-hearted, generous fellow,” declares another of his brother officers. “But,” he continues regretfully, “he was given too much to convivial and extravagant habits. Apparently he had set before himself, as an ideal of what a cavalry soldier should be, the bygone type of Jack Hinton.” By no means a bad type, one might add, if only the crack cavalry officer had sufficient means to live up to the ideal.
‘Gerald Fitzgerald’ came to the end of its irregular magazine course in 1859. For some reason which is not disclosed in Lever’s correspondence, this novel was not published in book form in this country during the author’s lifetime.* Amongst other graphic character-sketches, ‘Fitzgerald’ furnishes vivid studies of Alfieri and of Mirabeau. His next novel, ‘One of Them,’ was put in hand during the autumn: it was written wholly in the Villa Marola at Spezzia. It is said that the story was largely autobiographical. It gives an intimate description of life in an Ulster dispensary, and when the scene is shifted from Ireland the reader is taken to Florence. The most outstanding character in this book is the acute, good-humoured “Yankee.” Quackinboss.
While ‘One of Them’ was moving leisurely onwards in its monthly groove, Charles Dickens asked Lever for a serial for ‘All the Year Round.’ Once more did the Irish novelist adopt the dual system; while he was still in the throes of ‘One of Them’ he commenced to write ‘A Day’s Ride: A Life’s Romance.’ This story relates the adventures of a half-shrewd, half-foolish day-dreamer. Through it there runs a curious vein of irony which is quite different from the author’s early or later quality of humour. There is an insufficiency of movement in the tale; and it proved to be quite unsuited for serial publication in a magazine where the plot interest has to be kept alive from month to month. Dickens was bitterly disappointed: he complained that the circulation of his magazine was injuriously affected. Something perilously near a quarrel arose between the editor of ‘All the Year Round’ and the author of ‘A Day’s Ride.’ Lever did not hold a very high opinion of the novel, but he was justified in not regarding it as an absolutely worthless performance.
To Mr Alexander Spencer.
“Spezzia, Sept. 7, 1859.
“It was only because I found myself in a maze of troubles at the moment of what is ordinarily a pleasant family event that I had not a moment to write to you. Chapman & Hall, in whom for years back all my confidence has been unbounded, have behaved to me in a way to make me uneasy as to my right in my works, and I feel the very gravest anxiety for the future. This case yet hangs over me, and how it is to [? terminate] I cannot foresee. This is but a sorry [excuse] for suffering you to incur all the inconvenience I have occasioned; but when have I ceased to be a burthen to you?
“I wrote by this post to Chapman to forward the money for the insurance, and will immediately see to the other. Brady cannot affect any difficulty in settling with you: his only payment to myself personally was £100, somewhere in the present year. Therefore the number of sheets of my contributions, multiplied by the sum per sheet (£30 or £35, I forget which), will give the exact amount due.
“I am about to begin a new serial, which will at least provide for the present.
“The ‘Party,’ after [?immense] pledges and compliments, went out without giving me anything beyond this very humble sinecure; but sinecure it is, and therefore for once ‘The right man in the right place.’
“Charley was well, and fighting up in Oude, when last I heard from him; but all the pleasure of killing sepoys does not, it would appear, so entirely engross him that he cannot spend money, and he draws a bill with the same nonchalance that he draws his sword. Pussy’s husband is a Captain Bowes-Watson,—only twenty-two years of age, but a Crimean and Indian hero. He is of the veritable English type—blond, stiff, silent, and upstanding, and what Colonel Haggerstoue would call ‘a perfect gentleman,’ being utterly incapable by any effort of his own to provide for his own support. They are for the present poorly off, but at the death of a very old grandmother will have a fair competence,—about £1500 a year. I am sorely sorry to part with her, but the malheur is that we lose in age the solace of those whose society we always hoped to console us. We go through the years of training and teaching and educating to give them up when they have grown companionable. Very selfish regrets these, but they are my latest wounds, and they smart the most.
“Julia is ‘contracted,’ but the event is, and must be, somewhat distant. In other respects it is what is called a great match. And so only Baby (as Sydney is called) remains,—a marvellously clever little damsel of ten, whose humour and wit exceed that of all the grown folk I know.
“I hope to send you the first number of my new serial by the end of next month. Its title is ‘One of Them.’”
To Mr Alexander Spencer.
“Spezzia, Sept. 17, 1860
“I am doing my best at ‘One of Them.’ ‘The Ride’ I write as carelessly as a common letter, but I’d not be the least astonished to find the success in the inverse ratio to the trouble. At all events I am hard worked just now, and as ill-luck would have it, it is just the moment the F. O. should call upon me for details about Italy.
“The position of Sardinia is now one of immense difficulty. If she throws herself on France she must confront the [? Revolutionary] party at home, who are ready to seize upon Garibaldi and place him at the head of the movement. If she adopts Garibaldi and his plans, she offends France, and may be left to meet Austria alone and unaided. The old story—the beast that can’t live on sand and dies in the water. To be sure, our own newspapers assure her complacently that she has the ‘moral aid’ of England. But moral aid in these days of steel-plated frigates and Armstrong guns is rather out of date, not to say that at the best it is very like looking at a man drowning and assuring him all the while how sorry you are that he had not learned to swim when he was young. The crisis is most interesting, particularly so to me, as I know all the actors—Admirals, Generals, and Ministers—who are figuring en scène.
“One would have thought the withdrawal of the French Ambassador from Turin would have caused great discomfiture here, but with a native craft—not always right—the Italians think it a mere dodge, and that the Emperor’s policy is: ‘Go on. I’m not looking at you!”’
Small as the salary was, and insignificant as the position seemed to be, his vice-consulship was of considerable service to Lever: it gave him work to do when he was weary of weaving the web of fiction, and it prevented him from indulging too recklessly in the pleasures of Florentine society. The pity of it was that the office came to him so late, and that, when “the Party” thought fit to recognise his services, they should have recognised them so trivially. It must be borne in mind that Lever was no longer young: he was in his fifty-third year when the Spezzian post was offered to him; and his manner of living had been of such a free-and-easy character that anything in the shape of control chafed him, especially when the controller was a jack-in-office. In 1861 a good deal of time was spent in endeavouring to make a bargain with Chapman k Hall for the publication, in book form, of ‘A Day’s Ride,’ and to induce that firm to enter into an arrangement for the serial publication of a new novel, ‘The Barringtons.’ ‘The Dublin University’ being practically closed as a paying vehicle for serial stories, Lever sought to find a publishing firm which might take the place of M’Glashan. He regarded ‘Blackwood’s Magazine’ as the first of all periodical publications, but he feared that the Editor could not easily be induced to open his pages to the author of ‘Harry Lorrequer.’ However, he was fired with the desire to become a contributor to ‘Maga,’ and he enlisted the good offices of Lord Lytton. His brother novelist put the matter before Mr John Blackwood, who wrote, in May 1861, this kindly letter: “Admiring your genius cordially, as I do, I feel so doubtful as to whether what you would write would be suitable for the Magazine that I am unwilling to make a proposition, or to invite you to send MS. It would go sorely against my grain to decline anything from the friend of my youth, Harry Lorrequer.” This—though the reference to his first book afforded him a momentary flush of pleasure—was just the kind of letter which would cause much heart-burning. All his efforts to weed and to prune resulted only in Blackwood’s refusal to accept a posey from his garden! He wrote to Spencer in a melancholy tone; he was “out of health, out of work, out of spirits.” In addition to his literary troubles, the condition of his wife’s health had been the cause of much anxiety. He now feared that she was likely to become a confirmed invalid. Late in July his report to Spencer was that Mrs Lever was very ill, and that his money troubles were more acute than ever. His son was making no effort to lighten the burden: he was still in India, and was still drawing recklessly upon his father. Altogether, Lever’s heart was heavy during the greater part of 1861. Late in the year he made a vigorous effort to pull himself together, and to try to forget his troubles by sticking closely to his desk. He made good progress with ‘The Barringtons,’ and the first monthly part appeared in February 1862.
A visitor to the Levers in the summer of 1862 describes the novelist as being “all animation.” But Mrs Lever was an invalid, and could not move from her sofa. Though Lever had grown very corpulent, he had lost none of his cunning as a swimmer or as an oarsman. He spent a considerable portion of each day in the water, swimming with his daughters; and at night, “when the land breeze came through the orange-groves,” he would row himself and his daughters in their boat on the bay. On one occasion the head of the family and his eldest daughter had a very narrow escape from drowning. They were boating, and in endeavouring to rescue her dog, who seemed to be in difficulties, Miss Lever capsized the boat. Father and daughter kept themselves afloat partly with the aid of an oar,—they were a full mile from the shore when the accident happened. A younger daughter of the novelist witnessed from a window in the house the capsizing of the skiff. Without alarming her mother by informing her of the accident, she left the house and got a boat sent out to the assistance of the swimmers, who were brought ashore little the worse for a long immersion. This incident furnished the press with reports of Lever’s death,—“grossly exaggerated,” as Mark Twain would put it,—and when ‘The Barringtons’ was about to be published in book form, the author wrote to one of his journalistic friends saying that he believed the story was not bad,—at least, not worse than most stories of his which had found favour with the public. “As my critics,” he went on, “were wont to blackguard me for over-writing, let me have the (supposed) advantage to be derived from its being a full twelvemonth since the world has heard of me—except as having died at Spezzia.”
He finished the year well. He was anxious to show that his tiff with the editor of ‘All the Year Round’ was forgotten. The dedication prefixed to ‘The Barringtons,’ dated “26th December 1862,” is couched in these terms:—
“My dear Dickens,—Among the thousands who read and re-read your writings, you have not one who more warmly admires your genius than myself; and to say this in confidence to the world, I dedicate to you this story.”
XIII. FLORENCE AND SPEZZIA 1863
It seemed as if 1863 was about to prove a more enlivening year for Charles Lever than some of its predecessors had been. ‘Barrington’ was being applauded by his friends. Amongst these was Mr John Blackwood, for whose good opinion Lever sent his thanks in a letter dated January 30. To Lord Malmesbury he forwarded a copy of the novel, with the following letter:—
To The Earl of Malmesbury.
“Hôtel d’Odessa, Spezzia, Feb. 16, 1863.
“My dear Lord,—I am sincerely obliged by your lordship’s note in acknowledgment of ‘Barrington.’
“I am sure you are right in your estimate of Kinglake’s book.* Such diatribes are no more history than the Balaclava charge was war.... It was, however, his brief to make out the Crimean war a French intrigue, and he obeyed the old legal maxim in a different case—‘Abuse the plaintiff’s attorney.’
“Italy is something farther from union than a year ago. In dealing with the brigandage, Piedmont has contrived to insult the prejudices of the South by wholesale invectives against all things Neapolitan. French intrigues unquestionably help to keep up the uncertainty which all Italians feel as to the future, and the inadequacy of the men in power here contributes to the same. Indeed, what Kinglake says of the English Generals—questioning how the great Duke would have dealt with the matter before them—might be applied to Italian statesmen as regards Cavour. They have not a shadow of a policy, save in their guesses as to how he would have treated any question before them. To get ‘steerage-way’ on the nation, Cavour had to launch her into a revolution; but if these people try the same experiment they are likely to be shipwrecked.
“It would be both a pride and a pleasure to me to send your lordship tidings occasionally of events here, if you cared for it.”
After some half a dozen letters had passed between Lever and John Blackwood concerning Magazine papers, Lever took courage and again asked the question which he had asked in 1861. This time his way of putting it was: “I have a half-novel, half-romance, of an Irish Garibaldian in my head—only the opening chapters written. What would you say to it?” To this Blackwood replied: “It is a serious business to start a long serial, and I would not like to decide without seeing the bulk of the work. I do not know how you have been in the habit of writing, whether from month to month, or getting a good way ahead before publication is commenced. If the latter is your usual plan, I have no hesitation in asking you to send me a good mass of the MS., and I will let you know as speedily as possible what I think and can propose.”
From this point onward—from 1863 to 1872*—the story of Charles Lever’s literary life is told mainly in his letters to the House of Blackwood: the current of his correspondence, which at one time had streamed into Ireland, was now diverted, and Lever ingenuously revealed himself and his methods of work and play to Mr John Blackwood.