The Irish novel, written in English, begins, as I keep saying, in Ned McKeown's cottage at the crossroads of Kilrudden in the Clogher Valley in South Tyrone. There is today a cottage, which I and others have actually entered, on the exact site. Not so much with Maria Edgeworth in that great house in the midlands did the Irish novel begin. But I know well there is matter here for controversy. Yet I still hold that the Irish novel, written in English, begins with William Carleton in that crossroads cottage in South Tyrone.

Ned McKeown's house stood exactly in an angle formed by the cross roads of Kilrudden. It was a long whitewashed building, well thatched and furnished with the usual appurtenances of yard and offices. Like most Irish houses of the better sort it had two doors, one opening into a garden . . .

And the other, we may assume, opening into the world, beginning with the Clogher Valley and "from the eminence upon which the house stood, a sweep of the most fertile meadowland stretched away to the foot of a series of intermingled hills and vales which bounded the extensive carpet towards the North..."
At which point beginneth the almost 2,000 pages of my 1836 edition of the Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry. At which point, also, it may be now objected to me that we are talking, if we are talking, about the novel. Not about a long series of stories, sketches, novellae. It has been argued that Carleton did not make much of a success of the novel. But I find it hard to see how such an argument could be upheld against the weight of Fardorougha the Miser, The Black Prophet, Valentine McClutchy and The Emigrants of Ahadarra. The Traits and Stories I can accept as one long irregular novel in which the author has done what few Irish novelists have done: given us a vast Balzacian world and brought us into it by way of Ned McKeown's crossroads cottage.
Over the years, or the best part of two centuries, the voices that were raised in his praise still resound most impressively. Charles Gavan Duffy saw Carleton rising like a mountain above the men of his time. The mountain mentioned was Slieve Donard, the highest mountain in the province of Ulster in which both Carleton and Duffy were born.
Thomas Davis was one of the best men Carleton spoke with as a friend, and Davis, reading Carleton's stories, saw "the moory upland and the corn slopes, the glen where the rock juts through mantling heather and bright brooks gurgle amid the scented bank of wild herbs, the shivering cabin and the rudely lighted farmhouse". For Davis all these things were as plain as if Carleton had used canvas and colours, as Wilson did, or Poussin or Teniers or Wilkie.
Thomas Carlyle from Ecclefechan via Chelsea and the French Revolution and growling his way around Ireland, influencing and annoying John Mitchel, still convinced in his Scottish soul that Oliver Cromwell had been Ireland's greatest friend, saw Carleton as a "genuine bit" of the old Ireland that Cromwell had befriended.
Dr Murray of Maynooth College wrote about him in The Edinburgh Review and, in spite of much that a Maynooth man might have taken offence at, found him not only Irish, but "thoroughly Irish, intensely Irish, exclusively Irish". He would in future times turn to his pages, and only to his pages, for the clearest picture of men and their manners in Ireland before and during that withering visitation - the Famine - of men who long before would "have passed away from that troubled land, from the records of history and from the memory of man for ever".
T. P. O'Connor, a politician, a journalist and a character, saw Carleton as a man who had "enriched the literary world forever with unsurpassed pathos - with laughter as spontaneous and as human as that of Cervantes". O'Connor saw Carleton as a man who had given the world a truer key to the heart of Ireland than any writer who had ever lived.
Lady Wilde, a poetess and the mother of a most unfortunate poet, consoled Carleton in his later years, in his half-real, half-imagined miseries, and put something of what she thought about him into verse:

He struck the keynote of a people's heart And all the nation answered to his touch.

The young Mr Yeats heard a great deal about Carleton from Lady Wilde and called him "our greatest humourist" and noticed how near his laughter was to tears. The history of a nation was, said the young, and very wise, Mr Yeats, "not in parliaments and battlefields but in what the people say to each other on fair days and high days, and in how they farm and quarrel and go on pilgrimage". Carleton had done Ireland and the people of Ireland forever the great service of recording these things. He was "the great novelist of Ireland by right of the most Celtic eyes that ever gazed from under the brow of storyteller".

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