The poet, somewhere between the Celtic Twilight and the Indian Twilight and the twilight of the nineteenth century, found in Carleton's longer novels "a clay-cold melancholy" that made their author kin with the animals in Milton's Paradise: "half-emerged only from the earth and its brooding".
And looking back from our own days, Shane Leslie compared Carleton with every man or woman who had attempted to dip a pen in "Irish gall or gaiety". And always the comparison was in favour of Carleton and his "rich, torrential canvas".
"He caught his types", wrote Sir Shane, "before Ireland made the greatest plunge in her history and the Famine had cleaned her to the bone. For the hardiest of the race rose up and went away into the West, of which their story-tellers had been telling them for a thousand years."

Poor Fardorougha takes his place on that rich, torrential canvas. Poor? Well, the truth is that we pity Fardorougha as we could never wish, or dare, to pity that other notable miser, Balzac's Pere Grandet. Carleton, as the text herewith shows, said that the man on whom he modelled Fardorougha was a native of Tyrone. And God be with the days when you could even have hinted at such a matter without ending up in the law-courts and the tabloids. And the "respectable son" of the original, a man by the name of Maguire, said when he read the book: "Well, well, but that Carleton has a great head." So that the decent country people did not think there was much harm in being a miser in a poverty-stricken land where to be able to accumulate a few pounds could easily be esteemed a sort of glory. Fardorougha's great problem is that he is torn between a genuine love for his son, his only child, and his fear that a strange, shadowy world may devour all his resources and leave himself, and all belonging to him, on the homeless roads. He was not the first in all human history to feel that way. Nor, I feel, will he be the last. Was Carleton right, I wonder, about what he described as an undeniable fact that one suit of clothes would last a miser as long as half-a-dozen suits would last another man - not a miser, that is? Then he draws that woeful picture of the miser, the dry, sapless devil, cold in constitution, slow in motion and covered rather with natural parchment than with skin. My worry is that I have known men as fat and sweaty as Falstaff who would not give twopence to God or his Son or a beggar on the streets. And thin men I have known who were thin because they had given it all away. Ah well!
Take a look for a moment at Balzac's Grandet and his gold, all in Saumur on the rich land of Touraine:

There was no one in Saumur who did not fully believe the report which told how, in a secret hiding-place M. Grandet had a hoard of louis, and how every night he went to look at it and gave himself up to the inexpressible delight of gazing at the huge heap of gold. He was not the only money-lover in Saumur. Sympathetic observers looked at his eyes and felt that the story was true, for they seemed to have the yellow metallic glitter of the coin over which it was said they had brooded. Nor was this the only sign. Certain small indefinable habits, furtive movements, slight mysterious promptings of greed did not escape the keen observation of worshippers. There is something vulpine about the eyes of a man who lends money at an exorbitant rate of interest. They gradually and surely contract like those of the gambler, the sensualist or the courtier. And there is, so to speak, a sort of freemasonry among the passions, a written language of hieroglyphs and signs for those who can read them.
So that all men may be, in one way or another, misers. Or was it simply that Balzac could, at times, have a mean mind?
Fardorougha's few hoarded ha'pence came from a poor and hungry land. And the deepest tragedy of the story is that his miserable heart set going events that lead into the land of the Ribbonmen and the red furies of Wildgoose Lodge. A lot of which may have some sad relevance to the land in which we now live - and die.

Note: No comment on Carleton could today be complete without reference to the great work done on him by the late Dr Barbara Hayley of Maynooth in her (1) Carleton's Traits and Stories and the 19th-Century Anglo-lrish Tradition (Colin Smythe, 1983) and (2) A Bibliography of the Writings of William Carleton (Colin Smythe, 1985). Dr Hayley's tragic death in a road accident was an irreparable loss to kish scholarship and to her friends.

Benedict Kiely

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