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 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.