Mr. John Stevenson, otherwise Pat Carty, whose Rhymes have been so charmingly set to music by Sir Charles Stanford, and so delightfully sung by Mr. Plunket-Greene, possesses a whimsical gift, both in prose and verse, which gives fresh evidence of the awakening of an Ulster school of humorists. His “Boy in the Country” is descriptive of a child’s companionship in the country with farmers and their wives and servants, his falling under the spell of a beautiful lady whose romance he assists like a true young cavalier, and his association with that formidable open-air imp, Jim, a little dare-devil poacher and hard swearer, who sailed his boats with strips cut from his shirt tails and could give a canting minister as good as he got, instead of cowering under his preachment. The manners and customs of the farming class in the “Nine Glens of Antrim” could not be more simply and humorously told, and when the author divagates into such sketches as “The Wise Woman and the Wise Man,” and breaks into occasional verse faithfully descriptive of his natural surroundings, he is equally delightful.
Of course, he is not as old a craftsman as Mr. Shan Bullock, whose dry drollery has given the readers of his novels and stories so much pleasure, and whose serious purpose and close observation of Northern Irish character are so well recognised by all serious students of Irish life. He is represented in the volume by “The Wee Tea-Table,” a life-like sketch taken from his “Irish Pastorals.”
Mr. Frank Mathew, whose first literary work was his biography of his illustrious grand-uncle Father Mathew, has also written some admirable stories of Irish life, which appeared in “The Idler,” and have been collected in a volume called “At the Rising of the Moon.” “The Last Race,” by which he is represented in this volume, will give our readers a good taste of his graphic quality.
Mr. Padric Colum will speak for himself on Irish fiction in his introduction to an edition of Gerald Griffin’s “Collegians,” which is to form part of this series of Irish volumes. His finely distinctive literary style and intimate knowledge of Irish peasant life so clearly exhibited in his poems, plays and stories, is shown in these pages by that remarkable sketch of “Maelshaughlinn at the Fair,” written with the elemental abandon of Synge himself.
Finally, in absolute contrast with Mr. Colum’s idealistic work, comes the humorous realism of Lynn Doyle’s pictures of the Ulster Peasantry. But their efforts to over-reach one another, their love of poaching, and their marriage operations, afford the author of “Ballygullion” a congenial field for the display of his observation, his high spirits, and his genuine sense of the ridiculous. His comedy of “The Ballygullion Creamery Society” which fitly concludes this volume, is good, hearty, wholesome fun, and we only trust, in Ireland’s best interests, that its official stamp, a wreath of shamrocks and orange lilies—is not merely an unlikely if amiable suggestion, but is yet to have its counterpart in reality.
Preface.
The fiction of which this volume consists is in part fabulous in character, in part descriptive of actual Irish life upon its lighter side.
The Heroic stories and Folk-tales are, on chronological grounds, printed early in the book and are then followed by extracts from the writings of the Irish novelists of the first half and third quarter of the 19th Century—Maginn, Lever, Lover, and LeFanu.
Then come the writers who have made their mark in recent times, such as Miss Jane Barlow, the authors of “Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.,” and Canon Hannay, and lastly those of a new school amongst whom may be named Mr. Padraic Colum, “Lynn Doyle,” and Miss K. Purdon.