Irish Literature Vol V Author:Justin Mccarthy IRISH NOVELS - THE new movement which is expressing itself in Irish literature to-day is not akin to that movement which influenced the Irish novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the first place and this is one of its chief values in many eyes it is not a movement of reaction. In the second, it is not purely social. There is ... more »not an Irish novelist worthy to be mentioned in this paper whose work can be judged by an exclusively literary or artistic standard. The most noted of them all, William Carleton, was a novelist because he put character, alive and palpitating, on paper and fixed it there for all time, preserving the varying shades of life. He likewise gave the atmosphere of certain conditions of his time so accurately that his novels, whatever may be the literary judgment of the future, must have an enormous sociological influence on the work of the future historian of Ireland. The influences that have touched on such diverse personalities as Miss Edgeworth and Miss Laffan, Samuel Lover and Charles Kjckham, Gerald Griffin, Lady illorgan, Maturin, and Charles Lever, are not the influences that move Lady Gregory, Rlr. William Butler Yeats, Dr. Douglas Hyde, or Katherine Tynan-Hinkson when she does not write novels. Canon Sheehan belongs also to the oldest sociological school, while Dr. Barry, at least in one novel, has shown that he is willing to be receptive to the influences lately developed and recognized. In the new movement art counts for much,-and there is the old yearning for the mysticism of the past. In the older movement mysticism counted for little and conscious art for less. All the Irish novelists, except Miss Laffan and Mrs. Tynan-Hinkson, whose importance, after all, does not lie in her novels, seem to regard the laws of literary proportion,-in another phrase, the art of construction,-as if they had no relation to the gift of story-telling. There is another very distinct difference between the writers in the new Irish movement and the older novelists........« less