MR. BANIM'S NEW NOVEL. AFTER all, we suspect that Mr. Banim, of all Irish authors of fiction, paints most truly the state of society in his unhappy country. Miss Edgeworth has favoured us with individual portraits, which equal the best of his in accuracy, and far excel them as works of art. Her good old Baron, and Larry, the chaise-driver in the Absentee, the nurse, and the noble changeling in Ennui; and above all, easy Simon Gray, are unrivalled. But the harsh and discordant feelings, the ill-omened leaven with which the whole of Irish society has been leavened, either eluded her observation, or exceeded her powers, or jarred with her well balanced tone of mind. There are no traces of them to be found in her writ ings. Lady Morgan, again, who at times hits off an Irish peasant to the life, has breathed a thin gossamery haze of false sentiment over all her works. Her heroes and heroines are not of common clay. They clip Rousseauisms, palpitate before fine paintings, and evaporate in music, making most swan-like ends. Mrs. Hall, and a long list of others, might be enumerated, all of whom have furnished us with invaluable traits of Irish character; but it is to Banim that we must look for the exact form and impress of Irish society. This is owing more to the peculiar conformation of his mind than to a conscious effort. He possesses, it is true, a capacious and acute sense of the beautiful, the amiable, the ludicrous, the energetic, the wild, startling, and mysterious. He has, besides, strength and graphic power. But it is less to these virtues than to his very weakness that we attribute his peculiar power of placing the social state of Ireland forcibly before us. His colours are not laid on with what a painter would call a full brush. There is a harshness and meagreness about them. Nor do they blend and fade into each other, but are mingled with violent and startling contrast. This is partly the consequence of a deficient sense of quiet and unobtrusive beauty, partly the consequence of a violent craving for excitement. Banim is incapable of the strong, easy majesty of Scott; of that unaffected simplicity, which expresses, without effort, majestic, yet harmonious forms; of that magic power of mirroring human nature, as the blue lake does "the mountains looking on," with the most perfect fidelity, yet more soft and gentle. He is half conscious of this; he feels distrustful of the effect of his creations, and he seeks to rouse himself, as the lion stimulates his fury by lashing himself with his own tail, to more vivacious efforts. He strives to make himself a Her cules by substituting exaggerated gesture for gigantic muscular develop ment. We more than half suspect that we are falling into Mr. Banim's error, in our attempt to describe him, by bringing the unquestionable beauties of his imagination into a startling contrast with its defects. Hazlitt, with his delicate and unerring tact, would have at once detected their common source, and expressed it (if in one of his amiable moods) in his own flexible and beautiful English, presenting the reader with a picture at once graceful, satisfactory, and complete. We, less able to see clearly the point of union of these seeming contradictions, are obliged to have recourse to the more inartificial and unsatisfactory mode of presenting. each in unsoftened sharpness, then hinting that there is, nevertheless, a connecting link between them, to leave every man to find it out for himself. This is a digression: we return to Mr. Banim and Ireland. It is to his weakness, almost as much as to his strength, that he owes his power of delineating the tone of Irish society. We cannot so much say that he pourtrays the character of his country, as that it speaks out, though without his consciousness. Were we to guess at Mr. Banim's habits of life, we should conjecture that he was recluse, and somewhat of a hypochondriac. We can trace in his modes of thought, amid much that is manly and beautiful, a sickly habit of recurring to one favourite train of thought, analogous to the repetition of an awkward gesture, to which a well-built man with one weak limb is apt to accustom himself, if not particularly mindful of the lore of the dancing master. The tendency of such a mind to brood over its own weaknesses, till it engenders disease, is powerfully exemplified in his story of the "Fetch." That narrative is not an imaginative fiction, but the harrowing diagnosis of a disease. It is as if a painter should present us with the picture of a cancer, and insist upon our admiring the rich and varied colouring of the proud flesh. It is this inequality, exaggerated by morbid reflection, that iden tifies Mr. Banim's love of feeling with that of his native land. He knows as little of repose as she does. Like her, he starts at once from the light-hearted laugh into fierce or hysterical passion. Even in the loveliest cadences of his muse we are apt to be jarred by the jangling of a string out of tune. His is the weather-beaten harp from the halls of Tara, amid whose rich and sweet notes there ever and anon interposes an inadequate or a harsh one, reminding us of the injuries of time, and the sky's inclemency, adding to the pathos of the lament which wails over the blighted destinies of Erin. We would not, however, willingly lead our readers into the egregious error of supposing that we admire Banim merely as a sort of interesting natural curiosity, as a piquant original, whom we feel inclined to recommend patronizingly to the attention of the admirers of rarities. He is a man of no ordinary abilities, and can command respect for himself. He has looked with a sharp eye on the peculiarities of humble life less hand. He has not sought to throw a dazzling veil of romance over in Ireland, and has transferred them to his pages with a bold and fearviolence and atrocity; but he has done justice to the relentings of human feeling, which thrill through the breast of the most degraded, and he has done ample justice to the perverted and perverting mockery of law and justice, and to the petty tyrants engendered by it, which has withered, or turned into a wrong channel, the fervid impulses of the sons of the Green Isle. His Croppies, Rapparees, and Ribbonmen, are no sentimental, pure, and angelic ruffians, like those of the Minerva press. They are men, some of them naturally of fierce and malevolent passions, some of them natu rally of good inclinations, but all with Erin's boiling blood in their veins, driven astray from the straight path by a juvenile indiscretion, or by the talized by the custom of violence and deceit. These are characters which vindictive tyranny of paltry oppressors, and more or less seared and bru. the unholy laws of Ireland have made rife in her history, and nothing is more wonderful in Banim's works than the delicate and discriminating tact, with which he knows how to vary the motives and feelings of persons cast in one common mould of affliction, so as to give each an individual and independent character. There are the Baron of Crana and Sir William alone blunted; the latter, with his entire moral sense Judkin, of aristocratic descent? The former, with his finer feelings, Then there is Sir William's creature and murderer, the native dogged, utterly perverted. inborn ruffian; the Whisperer, whose very title indicates his noiseless knavery; the gay, dashing, vulgar, depraved Ned Shea; and a thousand others, all belonging to the same class, but all marked with the most obvious specific varieties. Where characters of this kind form one of the staples of the story, it is evident that the tale will be one of mystery and intrigue. And here lies Banim's forte. There is not one of our multitudinous novel writers who can come within a hundred miles of him for a complicated plot, and its happy and natural solution. Indeed, latterly, he seems to have become so conscious of his power in this respect, as to dally with his strength, and render his narrative more perplexed and bewildering, solely for the purpose of shewing his dexterity in unravelling it. You do not glide smoothly along the current of his story, for it is one continuous succession of jolts. In its blended impetuosity and per plexity, it resembles a mountain torrent, dashing with headlong impetuosity from steep to steep, and changing its foaming course at every shoot. The intense passion of the author carries you full butt against every obstruction that his ingenuity throws in the way of the premature development of his story. He shifts his scene as often as Ariosto; but instead of wafting you gently away, like the Italian, he effects his transition with a wrench which threatens to dislocate every limb. The reader is borne up by the intense interest the author excites and sustains, till the close of the narrative; and it is only then that, worn out and jaded, he becomes conscious of the tear and wear he has undergone. If Banim's novels were composed exclusively of such stimulating ingredients, we should be little inclined to burden our memory with them. A dram is a dram; but it does not supply the place of food, as Hogarth's "Gin Street" and other moralities are alive, like the bricks of the chimney built by Jack Cade's father, at this day, to testify. But these works abound with passages of the most perfect repose. We can conceive nothing more beautiful than the homely scene of domestic happiness and comfort introduced in "Crohoore of the Bill-hook," immediately previous to the murder of the old farmer. The blithe human beings chirrup as light-heartedly as crickets in the ruddy gleams of the turffire. Every whit as cherishing to the heart is the opening scene of "The Ghost-hunter." Such scenes are the true sun-bursts of Ireland's history; and, would to God there were more of them! They shew what a nation it might have been with fair play; but that was never yet afforded to poor Pat. They would make us curse those who have goaded him to madness; but that we would fain hope, seared as their hearts were, they acted as much in ignorance as in wickedness. We lay more stress upon Banim's pictures of Irish comfort than upon Miss Edgeworth's. That talented lady was, after all, sadly bitten with the mania of drilling people into happiness and goodness. She had too little confidence in the medicative powers of nature. She thought of the Irish as the link-boy did of Pope, when he first heard the poet's oath," So God mend me!" "God mend you!" said the urchin, "it would be easier to make a new man at once." She wanted the more philosophical mind of a greater, who has come after her, Harriet Martineau, and could not see that much, which to her was coarse and repulsive, was familiar to others, and had, therefore, ceased to be matter of annoyance; while it was quite compatible with the existence of much which she wished to inculcate. Poor Banim did not go abroad in the buckram dignity of a schoolmaster; and revelations of beauty, unnoticed by others, were made to his humble NO. XI. VOL. II. 2 U and observant spirit. Like Wordsworth, he asked not for the stars which were beyond his grasp, and, like him, was rewarded with a more delicate perception of the beauties of the daisy and celandine. He indeed revels at times in those quaintnesses of human character which teach us at once to laugh at, and to love mankind. The loves (true, however uncouth) of a blear-eyed maid and a shambling stripling, are a very cordial to his heart. He doats on a shanachus with an old crone; and he takes his place among the boccochs, and chatters and jabbers with them, as much at home as Burns in " Poosie Nansie's." He even manages to give a touch of human feeling to that most unamiable of all persecutors, the tithe-proctor. We see the rascal strutting before us, his bandana round his neck, and his hat with the nap brushed the wrong way, to show it was a beaver, on his head; and we own a kindred soul in the thing which can cherish this faint spark of vanity. He has really something in common with his kind. We have dwelt longest upon these low-life pictures of Banim, because we consider, that in them chiefly he shews his power. Like many of our best British writers, he is greatest when animating an humble and homely frame with the warm glow of affectionate feelings, with the dignity of right principle, and with the fierce burst of passionate emotion. Our insular character is, indeed, a bundle of contradictions, and revels in the forcible conjunction of extremes. With all our morgue aristocratique, there is blended a strong relish for democracy. We would all be gentlemen ourselves, but at the same time pretend to laugh at the distinction, and undervalue it in others. We are fondest of the broadest humour. The torpidity of country clowns, the wayward humours of sailors, the slang of low life in cities; nay, the ruffianism of the ring and the highway, are not too strong for the cravings of our palate. We are enraptured with the mere contemplation of the coarse and ludicrous, and even the most generous emotions seem to be enhanced in our estimation when seen struggling for expression with the stupidity or depravity of those affected by them. We like a mixture of flavours, salt and pepper to our melon, or vinegar and sugar to our lettuce. This characteristic feature is broadly displayed in our literature from Shakspeare to Fielding. To satisfy us, the ludicrous and the horrible, the ideal of beauty, and the filth of Spenser's Duessa must stand together in startling contrast. This may not be the best taste, but it indicates power, and power is of all mental attributes the Briton's freedom we have attained, and all that lies in Hope's long prospective before us. With this characteristic of his countrymen, Banim was deep ly tinged. We should, however, be doing him injustice did we pause here. His sense of beauty is delicate and intuitive. His landscapes are not unfrequently tinged with all the glowing yet mellow beauty of a summer sunset over his own green isle. Even intellectual beauty, that rarest ornament of the novelist's page, has been at times revealed to his eye; and for a spirit-stirring picture of powerful minds, perverted by false the Catholic and Presbyterian priests in his Battle of the Boyne. principle, we need not seek further than the dark contrasting figures of If ever he fails, it is when he wanders into the artificial domain of He is not acquainted with high life; he knows not its features, and thinks to supply the deficiency with refined or fasFond man! he knows not that within that gallant form, there beats no human heart. External elegance is its sole recom.. conventional manners. tidious sentiment. asked at fra as rewarded. and cekatze "Of mendation. Warmth of feeling is banished thence, as sternly as from the study of the mathematician or the cabinet of the statesman. outward shew elaborate, of inward less exact ;" every grace there apparent is the result of artificial combination, as ill qualified to supply the want of an acquaintance with nature to the novelist, as his layfigure the absence of a breathing and blooming model to the painter. Of the last volume which we have received from the pen of Mr. Ba- [Since writing the above, we have received the painful intelligence |
