Part 4

The pistol was handed to Eisendaller with directions to fire before the lapse of a minute. He immediately levelled it, and remained in the attitude of covering his antagonist for some seconds; but at length, finding his hand becoming unsteady, he deliberately lowered his arm to his side, stiffening and stretching it to its utmost length, and remaining thus for an instant, he appeared to be summoning resolution for his deadly purpose. It was a moment of awful suspense. I felt my heart sicken at the bloodthirsty coolness of the whole proceeding, and had to turn away my head in disgust. When I again looked round he had raised his pistol, and was taking a long and steady aim. At length he fired. The ball whizzed through Hanstel’s hair, and, as it grazed his cheek, he wheeled half round by an involuntary motion and raised his hand to feel if there was blood. I was looking anxiously at Eisendaller, but he still stood firm and motionless as a statue. I thought at one moment I saw his lip curl, and a half scowl, as if of disappointment and impatience, cross his features, but in an instant it passed away, and he was as calm and passionless as before.

It was now Hanstel’s turn. He lost no time in presenting his weapon. There was a small red spot burning on his cheek that had been grazed which seemed to bespeak the fiery rage that had taken possession of his soul, for he felt that his antagonist had done his best to take away his life. I shuddered to think that I was looking on my friend for the last time, for from the position in which I stood I could distinctly see that his heart was covered, and the moment Hanstell pulled the trigger would be his last.

Maddened with an agonising thrill of horror, I felt an almost irresistible impulse to rush forward and arrest the arm that was about to deprive Eisendaller of his life; but while a sense of what was due to the established customs of society on such occasions restrained me, I stood breathless with expectation of the fatal flash, Hanstell, to my amazement, suddenly raising his pistol to a vertical position, fired straight over his head, flung his weapon into the air, and rushing forward, threw his arms round Eisendaller, and bursting into tears, exclaimed, “Mein Brader!”

We were wholly unprepared for such a scene, and although not easily unmanned, the overwrought feelings of all sought vent in a passion of tears. We soon left the ground, and, mounting our horses, returned to Gôttingen.

On our way homeward there was little said. It happened that once, and only once, I found myself at the side of Hanstell. He conversed with me for a short time in an undertone, and on my asking him how he had felt at the moment of his adversary’s missing him, he answered me that it was then his determined purpose to shoot him, and up to the last moment this determination remained unaltered, but at the instant of placing his fingers on the trigger he thought he saw an expression about his face that reminded him of careless and happier days when they had studied and played together and had but one heart. “And I felt,” said he, “as if I were about to become the murderer of my brother. I could have then more easily turned the pistol against my own breast.” *

I was not long a resident in Gottingen ere I became considerably enamoured of many of the Burschen institutions. I had already begun to think that students were a very superior order of people,** that duelling was an agreeable after-dinner amusement, and that nothing could be more becoming or appropriate than a black frock-coat braided with a fur collar even in the month of July.

* Lever introduces the story of this duel into “The Loiterings of Arthur Cleary.”--E. D.

** One of Lever’s intimates at Gottingen was a young German count Later the Irish student discovered that his college chum--he calls him “Fattorini” in one of his letters, and he referred to him in conversation (according to Dr Fitzpatrick) as “Morony”--was no other than Louis Napoleon, the future Emperor of the French.--E. D.

Having made this avowal, you will perhaps readily believe that I was soon a favourite among my fellow-students; and a circumstance which at that time added not a little to their goodwill and applause was the fact of my translating the English song, “The King, God bless him!” into German verse for a dinner to celebrate the anniversary of Waterloo.

My life now, although somewhat monotonous, was by no means an uninteresting or tiresome one. The mornings were usually occupied at lectures, and then I dined, as do all students, at one, after which we generally adjourned in parties to one another’s lodgings, where we drank coffee and smoked till about three o’clock. After this we again heard lectures till we met together at Blumenbach’s in the Botanical Gardens in the evening, when we listened to the venerable professor explaining the mysteries of calyx and corolla, some half-dozen young ladies by far the most attentive of his pupils. The evening was usually concluded by a drive to Geismar or some other little village five or six miles from Gottingen, when, having supped on sour milk thickened with brown bread and brown sugar (a beverage which, notwithstanding my Burschen prejudices, I must confess neither cheers nor inebriates), we returned home about eleven. And although I wished much that university restrictions had not forbade our having a theatre in the town, and also that professors were relieved from their dread of the students misbehaving, and would permit us to associate with their daughters (for I was as completely secluded from the society of ladies as ever St Kevin was), yet I was happy and content withal.

Such was the even tenor of my way when the news reached us that a rebellion had broken out among the students of Heidelberg, in consequence, it was said, of some act of oppression on the part of the professors. Nothing could exceed the interest excited in Gottingen when the information arrived. There was but one subject of conversation: lecture-rooms were deserted, the streets were crowded with groups of students conversing in conclave on the one subject of paramount interest; and at last it was unanimously resolved to show the Heidelbergers our high sense of their praiseworthy firmness by inviting them to Göttingen, when news arrived that they had already put the University of Heidelberg in _verschiess_--that is, “in Coventry,”--and were actually at the moment on their way to us.

III. WANDERINGS, 1829-1830

The Log-Book of a Rambler concludes with an account of a quarrel between the students and the professors at Heidelberg. To this university Lever transferred himself in the autumn of 1828, and after a short sojourn he proceeded to Vienna. In November his father, apologising for being unable to assist a relative in distress, declares that his rents were “being badly paid,” and that his son Charles was “no small charge” upon him. In the same letter James Lever says that Charles intended to pass the winter at Vienna, and then to proceed to Paris, and that he was expected to arrive at home in April or May. “He writes in good spirits,” says his father, “enjoys good health, and if I can supply him with money he does not wish to return soon.”

From Vienna the young student proceeded, early in 1829, to Weimar, and at the Academy he made the acquaintance of Goethe. He describes Goethe’s talk as being marked by touches of picturesque and inimitable description; he had the gift of holding his audience spell-bound by some magic which it was impossible to describe.

From Weimar Lever travelled through Bavaria. To a friend he once stated that not only had he “walked the hospitals” of Germany, but that he had “walked Germany itself, exploring everything.” Possibly this was an exaggerated account of his peregrinations through the Fatherland, but there can be no question that he saw at this time a great deal of Germany and of German life, and that his experiences impressed him and remained with him, vivid and pleasant memories.

In the beginning of March the wanderer found himself in Paris. From this city he wrote to his lifelong friend in Dublin, Alexander Spencer:--

“Paris, _Friday, March_ 13,1829.

“I am perfectly ashamed of the rapid succession in which my letters of late have inundated the family, yet in my present state of doubt, &c., I think it better to write at once to prevent any further mischief. I yesterday received a letter from Connor (Joe), informing me that he had forwarded to me in Paris from Vienna a Dublin letter of the 28th of last month. Now none such has arrived, and I have received already letters from Vienna bearing date 2nd March. This delay has rendered me very unhappy about the ultimate fate of my letter, and as Connor has already left Vienna, I have no means of ascertaining anything about it there. I have written to him at [MS. undecipherable], where he is at present, but cannot receive his answer before five days, so that I think it better in the interval to stop payment of the bill, at all events until I can learn something about it. I have myself seen all the letters lately arrived in Paris from Vienna, so that its delay is in no wise attributable to the irregularity of the post in Paris.

“If this letter had arrived before, I should be now on my road homeward, but I am here in durance vile for want of it. But away with blue devils!

“Paris would be a delightful place had a man only ‘gilt’ enough: there are so many gay little varieties and vaudevilles, that you have never time to spare. The Palais Royal is a world in itself of all that is splendid and seducing, but with all these things a poor man has but a sorry time of it. Of the Italian Opera and of Verge I dare only read the _carte_, and content myself with a chop at Richard’s and the Opéra Comique. Is it not (I ask you in all calmness) a thought that might lead to insanity to see these lucky ones of fortune sent out on their travels with fat purses, enjoying all the advantage of seeing and hearing what they neither relish nor comprehend, while many a poor fellow might reap advantage and improvement, but is debarred from the narrowness of his circumstances?

“I am now very anxious to see my family and find myself at home, although I believe I am now spending the last few days of a period I shall always call the happiest of my life. I look back on my time in Germany with one feeling of unmixed pleasure; if there be the least tinge of regret, it is only because the time can never return, and that my happiest days are already spent.

“As Don Juan says, I make a resolution every spring of reformation ere the year runs out, but I certainly have more confidence in myself now than I ever before had. I will go home, free myself from all fetters of every species of acquaintanceship that can only consume time and give nothing in return, put my shoulder to the wheel, and in one year I shall find if I am ever to turn out well or not.

“Like every man who has lost time and let good opportunities escape him without an effort to profit by them, I employ my leisure hours in wishes that I had to begin the world again.”

He speaks in a postscript of an English family who were stopping at his hotel:--

“I am going to convey one of the daughters, who is certainly pretty, to the Louvre to-day. She is to have £10,000, and that might not be a bad spec, but I should rather make my fortune by any other means....

“The old padrone had the impudence to half propose my going to Italy as tutor to his young cub, but I answered him very brusquely. He was certainly very spirited in his offer of compensation, but my prospects have not come to that as yet. Remember me most affectionately to father, mother, John, and Anne....

“I wrote to you a few lines on the selvage of my note to my father. As the tenor of them may not have been very intelligible, allow me to repeat. If any letter from Vienna should arrive in Talbot Street, secure it for me. My mother might open it, and although she does not comprehend German, yet there might be more of it understood than I should like. I know your reflections very well at this moment, but you are in the wrong. As the song says,

‘It’s a bit of a thing to keep.’

But wait a week and you shall hear it all orally.”

Spencer evidently came promptly to the aid of the traveller, for the same month of March found him once more in his native land.

It is stated by Dr Fitzpatrick in the later editions of his ‘Life of Charles Lever’ that the novelist obtained in 1824 an appointment as medical officer in charge of an emigrant ship bound from New Boss to Quebec. In 1824 Lever would have been only in his eighteenth year, and he would not have been in possession of any medical degree, nor would his brief experience as a student of the healing art have entitled him to undertake the medical charge of a passenger ship. Moreover, in a letter quoted by Dr Fitzpatrick, Lever speaks of spending the summer of 1829 in Canada, and there is no suggestion that he made two voyages to America. It may be safely asserted that the date of the American voyage was not 1824; and in all probability 1829 was the year of the Hegira.*

* I discussed these points with Dr Fitzpatrick during his last visit to London, shortly before his death, and he stuck to his theory that 1824 was the date. He declared (as he declares in his book) that in the early years of the last century there was no Board of Emigration or other authority to interfere with the engagement of an unqualified or inexperienced man as ship’s doctor, and that 1824 fitted in with his own opinions about Lever’s various movements more easily than 1829; and that Lever speaks in his Log-Book of having heard the sound of Niagara. But the Log-Book was not completed until 1830. Subsequently I found in one of James Lever’s letters, dated 1824, a statement that his son Charles was then studying medicine and surgery, and was “still in college.” In 1901 the novelist’s only surviving daughther, Mrs Bowes-Watson, writes: “Yes; my father went to the United States and Canada when he was a very young man. It must have been in 1829 or 1830.”--E. D.

Lever appears to have embarked from New Ross in a vessel belonging to Messrs Pope of Waterford. A cousin of Lever, Mr Harry Innes, declares that it was through his good offices the young medical student succeeded in obtaining “the appointment, such as it was.” Lever abandoned the ship upon her arrival in the St Lawrence. He does not speak of this voyage in any of his autobiographical writings, except that he tells us in a preface to ‘Con Cregan’--a novel in which certain quarters of Quebec are intimately and graphically described--that once upon a time he “endured a small shipwreck” on the island of Anticosti. To his friend Canon Hayman he wrote (in June 1843) that the Canadian incidents in ‘Arthur O’Leary’ were largely personal experiences. He narrated to the canon an account of his landing in the New World, and of his rapid passage from civilised districts to the haunts of the red man. He was eager to taste the wild freedom of life with an Indian tribe. Lever, according to himself, found no difficulty in being admitted to Red-Indian fellowship, and for a time the unrestrained life of the prairie was a delightful and exhilarating experience. The nights in the open air, the days spent in the pine-forests or on the banks of some majestic river, were transcendently happy. He was endowed by the sachem with “tribal privileges,” and he identified himself as far as possible with his newly-made friends. Ere long, however, he grew weary of the latitudinarianism and of the ingloriousness of barbaric life, and he began to sigh for the flesh-pots of the city. He contrived to hide his feelings from the noble red man, but a noble red woman shrewdly guessed that the pale-face was weary, discontented, home-sick. This woman warned the young “medicine man” that if he made any overt attempt to seek his own people he would be followed, and one of his tribal privileges would be to suffer death by the tomahawk. Lever dissembled, and (somewhat after the manner of the as yet uncreated Mrs Micawber) he asseverated that he would never desert the clan.

But his moodiness grew apace and his health gave way. The perspicacious squaw, knowing the origin of his malady, feared that the pale-face would die from natural causes. Moved by compassion, she planned, at the risk of her own life and reputation, the escape of the interesting young stranger. An Indian named Tahata--a kind of half-savage commercial traveller--visited the tribe at long intervals, bearing with him supplies of such necessaries as rum and tobacco. Swayed by the promise of a good round sum, Tahata agreed to do his best to smuggle Charles Lever back to the paths of civilisation. The pair, after many vicissitudes, reached Quebec one bright frosty morning in December. “I walked through the streets,” said Harry Lorrequer to Canon Hayman, “in moccasins and with head-feathers.” In Quebec he found a timber merchant with whom his father had business transactions, and this hospitable man recompensed the trusty Tahata, and made Lever his guest; and when the ex-Indian was newly “rigged out” the merchant paid his passage back to the old country.

Lever averred that his description in ‘Arthur O’Leary’ of the escape of Con O’Kelly was a faithful account of his own adventures “deep in Canadian woods.”

IV. DUBLIN--CLAKE--PORT STEWART. 1830-1837

During the year 1830 Lever busied himself in Dublin with the cult of medicine. Possibly his rough experiences in America had chastened him and had induced him to settle down to work. He attended diligently the Medico-Chirurgical--a school now extinct--and Sir Patrick Dunn’s Hospital. He was also the life and soul of a medical debating society which met in a house in Grafton Street. One of his fellow-students describes him as being in the habit of speaking with such extraordinary volubility and energy, that it was suspected he was indulging in exhilarating drugs. Walking home one night with a friend from a supper-party, at which he had displayed astonishing merriment, Lever fell into a taciturn condition. On being rallied by his friend he apologised for his stupidity, or moroseness, by stating that, in order to tune himself up to concert pitch, he had that evening taken sixty grains of opium, and now that the excitement was over he was drowned in depression.

This curious fluctuation of spirits was a marked characteristic: even when he had abandoned the use of opium, he was to be found in the same hour overflowing with gaiety and sunk in the deepest dejection.

Though he worked hard and steadily at his studies in 1830, he did not fail to find sources of amusement. He railed against the sameness and the dulness of social life in Dublin. He complained of stupid dinner-parties where men of law and men of physic talked an unintelligible and irritating jargon. Dublin, he declared, was too professedly sociable to patronise the theatre; too sociable to form clubs,--too sociable, in fact, to go into society. He sighed for Gottingen and Heidelberg and for the more spacious life of German cities. Then a happy thought occurred to him. Why should he not establish in the Irish capital a Burschenschaft? He consulted Samuel Lover,--painter, song-writer, musician, novelist,--and joining forces with him, a club on the most approved German model was formed. Lever was elected “Grand Llama,” and was entitled to be addressed as “Most Noble Grand.” This club bore a strong resemblance to Curran’s “Monks of the Screw,” * but it was a less aristocratic, and probably a less bibacious, society. The members wore scarlet vests with gilt buttons, and a red skull-cap adorned with white tassels. They met in a room in Commercial Buildings, afterwards used as the Stock Exchange. Suppers, songs, and conversational jousts formed the staple of the entertainment. Lever, as president, occupied a chair placed upon a dais covered with baize, with a representation, in brass-headed nails, of a sword and tobacco-pipe crossed. Writing thirty-five years later about the club and its functions, he described it as “very fine fooling,” and he goes on to say that no wittier, no pleasanter, and no more _spirituel_ set of fellows ever sat around a punch-bowl.

* “The Order of St Patrick,” to give this club its proper title, was founded by Barry Yelverton, afterwards Lord Avonmore. Curran was its leading spirit: he wrote its charter song, the famous “Monks of the Screw,” quoted by Lever in ‘Jack Hinton.’ The Convent of “The Order of St Patrick” was in Kevin’s Street, Dublin, and the club had another meeting-place in the country, at Curran’a residence, “The Priory,” in Rathfarnam. Amongst the distinguished brothers of the order were the Marquis of Townshend (the Viceroy), Lord Mornington, Grattan, Flood, Lord Kilwarden, and the Earl of Arran. The club ceased to exist in 1795, but Lever, scorning anachronisms, introduced ‘Jack Hinton’ to the “Monks” at a later date.--E. D.

Lever’s fellow-student, Francis Dwyer (who afterwards rose to rank in the service of Austria), provides a pleasant description of the Dublin Burschenschaft. He avers that it gave its members a relish for intellectual enjoyment. “The most noble grand” conducted the proceedings with tact and delicacy, never permitting any lapse into indecorousness.

“That he himself was a gainer,” Dwyer insists. “He learned how to lead, and he also acquired a juster estimate of his own powers, and greater confidence in himself. No one, indeed, suspected what was really in the man, and some even shook their heads as to what good could ever come out of his unprofessional pre-eminence.” He was learning in joyousness what he expounded in story.

Lever made his first appearance in print in ‘Bolster’s Cork Quarterly Magazine.’ to which he contributed a paper entitled “Recollections of Dreamland.” This essay concerned itself mainly with the writer’s real or imaginary experiences of opium-eating and opium visions. In ‘Bolster’s’ also appeared his first crude attempt at a story, “A Tale of Old Trinity.” These were anonymous contributions, and their author never acknowledged them, and did not care to have any reference made to them. In January 1830 “a weekly chronicle of criticism, belles lettres, and fine arts” was started in Dublin under the title of ‘The Dublin Literary Gazette.’ In the third number of the ‘Gazette’ Lever commenced “The Log-Book of a Rambler.” There are some other contributions of his, not of much value, to be found in the ‘Gazette.’ The periodical lived for only six months, and from its ashes arose ‘The National Magazine,’ a monthly publication which started in July 1831 and died during the following year. To ‘The National’ Lever contributed some papers--of no higher value than his miscellaneous contributions to the ‘Gazette.’

In 1831 he would seem to have abandoned, temporarily, literary work, and to have toiled at his medical studies. In the summer of this year he obtained, at Trinity College, the degree of Bachelor of Medicine.* His father’s town address was now 74 Talbot Street, and here Lever set up a practice; but business did not flow into Talbot Street, and the young physician soon began to display symptoms of restiveness.

* Dr Fitzpatrick states that he received at the same period a diploma as M.D. of Louvain _in absentia_, but Lever did not obtain the Louvain degree until he was established as a physician at Brussels.--E. D.