Irish race who will be to Carleton what Burns was to Ferguson, and
then Ireland will have what it lacks; moreover, in the light of his
achievement we shall see better what the pioneer accomplished. Every
gift that Carleton had--and pathos and humour, things complementary to
each other, he possessed in profusion--every gift is obscured by faulty
technique. Nearly every trait is overcharged; for instance, in his story
of the _Midnight Mass_ he rings the changes interminably upon the old
business of the wonderful medicine in the vagrants' blessed horn that
had a strong odour of whisky; but what an admirably humorous figure is
this same Darby O'More! Out of the _Poor Scholar_ alone, that inchoate
masterpiece, you could illustrate a dozen phases of Carleton's mirth,
beginning with the famous sermon where the priest so artfully wheedles
and coaxes his congregation into generosity towards the boy who is going
out on the world, and all the while unconsciously displays his own
laughable and lovable weaknesses. There you have the double vision, that
helps to laugh with the priest, and to laugh at him in the same breath,
as unmistakably as in the strange scene of the famine days where the
party of mowers find Jimmy sick of the fever by the wayside and "schame
a day" from their employer to build him a rough shelter. That whole
chapter, describing the indefatigable industry with which they labour
on the voluntary task, their glee in the truantry from the labour for
which they are paid, their casuistry over the theft of milk for the
pious purpose of keeping the poor lad alive, the odd blending of
cowardice and magnanimity in their terror of the sickness and in their
constant care that some one should at least be always in earshot of the
boy, ready to pass in to him on a long-handed shovel what food they
could scrape up, their supple ingenuity in deceiving the pompous
landlord who comes to oversee their work,--all that is the completest
study in existence of Irish character as it came to be under the system
of absolute dependence. There is nothing so just as true humour, for by
the law of its being it sees inevitably two sides; and this strange
compound of vices and virtues, so rich in all the softer qualities, so
lacking in all the harder ones, stands there in Carleton's pages,
neither condemned nor justified, but seen and understood with a kindly
insight. Carleton is the document of documents for Ireland in the years
before the famine