The Spirit
of the Nation_, that admirable collection of stirring poems, are
journalists working in verse; and Carleton, falling under their
influence, became a journalist working in fiction. In his pages, even
when the debater ceases to argue and harangue, the style is still
journalistic, except in those passages where his dramatic instinct puts
living speech into the mouths of men and women. Politics so monopolise
the minds of Irishmen, newspapers so make up their whole reading, that
the class to which Carleton and the poet Mangan belonged have never
fully entered upon the heritage of English literature. If an English
peasant knows nothing else, he knows the Bible and very likely Bunyan;
but a Roman Catholic population has little commerce with that pure
fountain of style. Genius cannot dispense with models, and Carleton and
Mangan had the worst possible. Yet when it has been said that Carleton
was a half-educated peasant, writing in a language whose best literature
he had not sufficiently assimilated to feel the true value of words, it
remains to be said that he was a great novelist. He cannot be fairly
illustrated by quotation; but read any of his stories and see if he does
not bring up vividly before you Ireland as it was before the famine;
Ireland still swarming with beggars who marched about in families
subsisting chiefly on the charity of the poor; Ireland of which the
hedge-school was plainly to him the most characteristic institution.

Carleton does not stand by himself; he is the head and representative of
a whole class of Irish novelists, among whom John Banim is the best
known name. All of them were peasants who aimed at depicting scenes of
peasant life from their own experience. What one may call the
melodramatic Irish story, in which Lever was so brilliantly successful,
has its first famous example in _The Collegians_ of Gerald Griffin. The
novel has no concern with college life, and is far better described by
its stage-title, _The Colleen Bawn_. Here at least is a man with a story
to tell and no object but to tell it. Griffin belonged to the lay order
of Christian Brothers: his book deals principally with a society no more
familiar to him than was the household of Mr. Rochester to Charlotte
Bronte; and his method recalls the Brontes by its strenuous imagination
and its vehement painting of passion. The tale was suggested by a murder
which excited all Ireland. A young southern squire carried off a girl
with