in the parlor, as they call it, or best room of every irish farmhouse, one may come upon a certain number of books that are never read, laid there in lonely repose upon the big square table on the middle of the floor. a novel entitled "knocknagow" is almost always certain to be amongst them, yet scarcely as the result of selection, although its constant occurrence cannot be considered purely accidental. there must lurk an explanation somewhere about these quiet irish houses connecting the very atmosphere with "knocknagow". a stranger, thinking of some of the great books of the world, would almost feel inclined to believe that this story of the quiet homesteads of ireland must be one of them, a book full of inspiration and truth and beauty, a story sprung from the bleeding realities which were before the present comfort of these homes. yet for all the expectations which might be raised up in one by this most popular, this typical irish novel, it is most certainly the book with which the new irish novelist would endeavor to contrast his own. for he would be writing of life, as the modern novelist's art is essentially a realistic one, and not of the queer, distant, half pleasing, half saddening thing which could make one irish farmer's daughter say to another at any time within the past forty years:
"and you'd often see things happening nearly in real life like in 'knocknagow.' now wouldn't you?"
nearer by a long way than charles joseph kickham[pg x] to what the irish novelist should have been was william carleton in his great, gloomy, melodramatic stories of the land. he was prevented by the agrarian obsession of his time from having the clear vision and wide pity, in keeping with his vehemence, which might have made him the irish balzac.
even in ireland lever and lover have become unpopular. they are read only by englishmen who still try to perpetuate their comic convention when they write newspaper articles about ireland.
as with kickham, largely in his treatment of the irish peasant, gerald griffin in "the collegians" did not succeed in giving his irish middle or "strong farmer" class characters the spiritual energy so necessary to the literary subject.
here are five writers then, who included in their work such exact opposites as saints and sinners, heroes and omadhanns, earnest passionate men and broths of bhoys. and somehow between them, between those who wrote to degrade us and those who have idealized us, the real irishman did not come to be set down. from its fiction, reality was absent, as from most other aspects of irish life.
to a certain extent the realistic method has been employed by the dramatists of the irish literary movement, but necessarily limited by the scope and conventions of the stage and by the narrower appeal of the spoken word in the mouth of an actor. the stage, too, has a way of developing cults and conventions and of its very nature must display a certain amount of artificiality, even in the handling of realistic material. thus comes a sudden stagnation, a sudden completion always[pg xi] of a literary movement developed mostly upon the dramatic side, as has come upon the work of the abbey theater.
it appears rather accidental, but perhaps on the whole to its benefit, that the dramatic form should have been adopted by j. m. synge and not the epical form of the novel. synge fell with a lash of surprise upon the ireland of his time, for the irish play had been as fully degraded as the irish novel. furthermore the shock of his genius created an opportunity which made possible the realistic irish novelist. at the abbey theater they performed plays dealing with subjects which no irish novelist, thinking of a public, would have dreamt of handling. somehow their plays have come to be known and accepted throughout ireland. thus a reading public for this realistic irish novel has been slowly created and the urge to write like this has come to many storytellers.
of necessity, as part of the reaction from the work of the feeble masters we have known, the first examples of the new irish novel were bound to be a little savage and pitiless. in former pictures of irish life there was heavy labor always to give us the shade at the expense of the light, in fact at the expense of the truth which is life itself. in ireland the protest of the realist is not so much against romanticism as against an attempt made to place before us a pseudo-realism. according as the irish people resign themselves to the fact that this is not a thing which should not be done, the work of the irish realist will approximate more nearly to the quality of the russian novelists, in which there are neither exaggerations of light nor of shade, but a picture of life all[pg xii] gray and quiet, and brightened only by the beauty of tragic reality.
it leaves room for interesting speculation, that at a time of political chaos, at a time when in ireland there is a great coming and going of politicians of all brands, dreamers, sages and mystics, the decline of the irish literary movement on its dramatic side should have given the realistic irish novelist his opportunity to appear. the urgent necessity of reality in irish life at the moment fills one with the thought that a school of irish realists might have brought finer things to the heart of ireland than the hy brazil of the politicians.
the function of the irish novelist to evoke reality has been proved in the case of "the valley of the squinting windows." upon its appearance the people of that part of ireland with whom i deal in my writings became highly incensed. they burned my book after the best medieval fashion and resorted to acts of healthy violence. the romantic period seemed to have been cut out of their lives and they were full of life again. the story of my story became widely exaggerated through gradually increasing venom and my book, which had been well received by the official irish press,—whose reviewers generally read the books they write about—was supposed by some of my own people to contain the most frightful things. to the peasant mind, fed so long upon unreal tales of itself, the thing i had done became identified after the most incongruous fashion and very curiously with an aspect of the very literary association from which i had sprung. language out of synge's "playboy of the western world" came to my ears from every side during the days in which i was made to suffer for[pg xiii] having written "the valley of the squinting windows."
"and saving your presence, sir, are you the man that killed your father?"
"i am, god help me!"
"well then, my thousand blessings to you!"
the country as a whole did not dislike my picture of irish life or say it was untrue. it was only the particular section of life which was pictured that still asserted its right to the consolation of romantic treatment, but in its very attempt to retain romance in theory it became realistic in practise. it did exactly what it should have done a great many years ago with the kind of books from which it drew a certain poisonous comfort towards its own intellectual and political enslavement. the rest of ireland was amused by the performance of those who did not think, with mr. yeats, that romantic ireland was dead and gone. the realist had begun to evoke reality and no longer did a great screech sound through the land that this kind of thing should not be done. a change had come, by miraculous coincidence, upon the soul of ireland. it was not afraid of realism now,—for it had faced the tragic reality of the travail which comes before a healthy national consciousness can be born. no longer would the realist be described in his own country as merely a morbid scoundrel or an enemy of the irish people. they would not need again the solace of the sentimental novelist for all the offenses of the caricaturists in irish fiction, because, with the wider and clearer vision of their own souls fully realized, had they already begun to look out upon the world.
brinsley macnamara.
dublin, march 1st, 1919.
