Of novelists, both men and women, the Irish Revival can, in the words of “Father O’Flynn”, offer a charming variety, and among their novels and short stories are some books of high quality and not a few in a high degree interesting and entertaining.  To Standish O’Grady we turn for tales, with a kind of bardic afflatus about them, of the hero age of legendary Ireland—­tales which drew attention to the romantic Celtic past of myth and saga, and must have been an inspiration to more than one writer of the younger generation.  In contrast to the broad epic sweep and remote romantic backgrounds of O’Grady, are the stories of Jane Barlow, whose genre pictures of peasant life in the west of Ireland, like her poems mentioned above, show how sympathetically she understands the ways of thinking, feeling, and acting of her humble compatriots.  A like minute and faithful knowledge is evident in the work of two story-tellers of the north, Seumas MacManus and Shan Bullock.  The former’s outlook is humorous and pathetic.  He tells fairy and folk tales well, and is a past master of the dialect and idiom that combine to give his old-wives’ yarns an honest smack of the soil.  Let him who doubts it read Through the Turf Smoke or Donegal Fairy Stories.  If Shan Bullock walks the same fields as Seumas MacManus, he does so with a different air and with a more definite purpose.  Sometimes he turns to the squireens, small farmers, or small country gentry, and lays bare the hardness and narrowness that are a part of their life.  Or, again, in pictures whose sadness and gloom are lightened, to be sure, with humor or warmed with love, he studies the necessitous life of the poor. The Squireen, The Barrys, and Irish Pastorals are some of his representative books.

In the novel as in poetry the ladies have worked side by side with their literary brethren.  Miss Hermione Templeton, in her Darby O’Gill, and elsewhere, has written pleasantly and gracefully of the fairies.  In a very different vein are the novels of the collaborators, Miss Somerville and “Martin Ross” (Miss Violet Martin), over which English and American readers have laughed as heartily as their own fellow countrymen. The Experiences of an Irish R.M.remains, perhaps, their best book.  The work of these ladies, be it said by the way, is in the line of descent from that group of older Irish novelists who wrote in the spirit of the devil-may-care gentry, the novelists from Maxwell to Lover and Lever, who were ever questing “divilment and divarshion,” and who in their moods of boisterous fun forgot the real Irishman, and presented in his place a caricature—­him of the Celtic screech and the exhilarating whack of the shillelagh, the famous stage Irishman who has made occasional appearances in English literature from the time of Shakespeare’s Henry V., on through the works of Fielding and the plays of Sheridan, to the present moment of writing.