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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/19028-8.txt b/19028-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4dcdeb9 --- /dev/null +++ b/19028-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,9837 @@ +Project Gutenberg's Irish Plays and Playwrights, by Cornelius Weygandt + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Irish Plays and Playwrights + +Author: Cornelius Weygandt + +Release Date: August 11, 2006 [EBook #19028] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IRISH PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS *** + + + + +Produced by Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net + + + + + + + +IRISH PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS + +BY + +CORNELIUS WEYGANDT + +WITH ILLUSTRATIONS + + +[Illustration] + + +BOSTON AND NEW YORK +HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY +The Riverside Press Cambridge + +COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY CORNELIUS WEYGANDT +ALL RIGHTS RESERVED + +_Published February 1913_ + + +[Illustration] + + + + +PREFACE + + +There are so many who have helped me with this book that I cannot begin +to thank them one by one. If I name any, however, there are four I would +name together. There is my old friend, long since dead, Lawrence Kelly, +of County Wexford, who first told me Irish folk-stories, adding to the +wonderment of my boyhood with his tales of Finn McCool, Dean Swift, and +"The Red-haired Man." There is Dr. Robert Ellis Thompson, of +Philadelphia, who quickened, by his enthusiasm, over "twenty golden +years ago," my interest in all things Irish. There is Dr. Clarence +Griffin Child, my colleague, who recognized the power of these men I +write of in "Irish Plays and Playwrights" when there were fewer to +recognize their power than there are to-day. There is Mr. John Quinn, of +New York, without whose aid ten years ago the current Irish dramatic +movement would not have progressed as it has. He has lent for +reproduction here the sketches by Mr. J.B. Yeats of Synge, Mr. George +Moore, and Mr. Padraic Colum. All but all of the writers I mention +particularly in these chapters have put me under obligation by cheerful +response to many letters full of questions as to their work. Mr. James +H. Cousins and Mr. S. Lennox Robinson have taken especial trouble in my +behalf, and Lady Gregory, Mr. W.B. Yeats, and Mr. George W. Russell have +put themselves out in many ways that I might learn of Irish Letters. + +UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, December 28, 1912. + + + + +CONTENTS + + + I. THE CELTIC RENAISSANCE 1 + + II. THE PLAYERS AND THEIR PLAYS, + THEIR AUDIENCE AND THEIR ART 13 + + III. MR. WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 37 + + IV. MR. EDWARD MARTYN AND MR. GEORGE MOORE 72 + + V. MR. GEORGE W. RUSSELL ("A.E.") 114 + + VI. LADY GREGORY 138 + + VII. JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE 160 + +VIII. THE YOUNGER DRAMATISTS--MR. PADRAIC COLUM; + MR. WILLIAM BOYLE; MR. T.C. MURRAY; + MR. S. LENNOX ROBINSON; MR. RUTHERFORD MAYNE; + "NORREYS CONNELL"; MR. ST. JOHN G. ERVINE; + MR. JOSEPH CAMPBELL 198 + + IX. WILLIAM SHARP ("FIONA MACLEOD") 251 + +APPENDIX 297 + PLAYS PRODUCED, IN DUBLIN, + BY THE ABBEY THEATRE COMPANY + +INDEX 305 + + + + +ILLUSTRATIONS + +W.B. YEATS _Frontispiece_ + _From a photograph by Alice Boughton_. + +DOUGLAS HYDE 10 + _From a photograph by Alice Boughton_. + +SARA ALLGOOD 24 + _From a photograph by Alice Boughton_. + +SCENE FROM "CATHLEEN NI HOULIHAN" 50 + +GEORGE MOORE 72 + _Reproduced by courtesy of John Quinn, Esq._ + +GEORGE W. RUSSELL 114 + +LADY GREGORY 138 + +JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE 160 + _Reproduced by courtesy of John Quinn, Esq._ + +PADRAIC COLUM 198 + _Reproduced by courtesy of John Quinn, Esq._ + +T.C. MURRAY 216 + +LENNOX ROBINSON 222 + _From a photograph by Alice Boughton_. + +WILLIAM SHARP 250 + + + + +IRISH PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS + + + + +CHAPTER I + +THE CELTIC RENAISSANCE + + +To the general reader the Celtic Renaissance was a surprise, and even to +Irish writers deeply interested in their country the phenomenon or +movement, call it which you will, was not appreciated as of much +significance at its beginning. Writing in 1892, Miss Jane Barlow was not +hopeful for the immediate future of English literature in Ireland;--it +seemed to her "difficult to point out any quarter of the horizon as a +probable source of rising light." Yet Mr. Yeats had published his +"Wanderings of Oisin" three years before; Mr. Russell had already +gathered about him a group of eager young writers; and Dr. Hyde was +organizing the Gaelic League, to give back to Ireland her language and +civilization, and translating from the Gaelic "The Love Songs of +Connacht" (1894) into an English of so new and masterful a rhythm, that +it was to dominate the style of many of the writers of the movement, as +the burden of the verse was to confirm them in the feelings and +attitudes of mind, centuries old and of to-day, that are basic to the +Irish Gael. Even in 1894, when Mrs. Katherine Tynan Hinkson wrote the +article that for the first time brought before America so many of the +younger English poets, all that she said of the Renaissance was, "A very +large proportion of the Bodley Head poets are Celts,--Irish, Welsh, +Cornish." She had scarcely so spoken when there appeared the little +volume, "The Revival of Irish Literature," whose chapters, reprinted +addresses delivered before she had spoken by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy and +Dr. George Sigerson and; Dr. Douglas Hyde, turned the attention of the +younger men to literature, the fall of Parnell and the ensuing decline +of political agitation having given them a chance to think of something +else than politics. In 1895 all the English-speaking world that heeds +letters was talking of the Celtic Renaissance, so quickly did news of it +find its way to men, when it was once more than whispered of abroad. It +was as frequently referred to then as "The Irish Renaissance," because +Ireland contributed most to it and because it was in Ireland that it +acquired its most definite purpose. This purpose was to retell in +English the old Irish legends and the still current Irish folk-songs, +and to catch and preserve the moods of Irish men and women of to-day, +especially those moods which came to them out of their brooding over +Ireland, its history, its landscape, the temper of its people. It would +be absurd, of course, to regard all of the writing of the movement as a +result of a definite literary propaganda, but the very fact that we +instinctively speak of the Celtic Renaissance as a movement rather than +as a phenomenon proves that it was that in part. But even that part of +it that was a result of propaganda came not from an intention to realize +the tenets of the propaganda, but from the kindling of Irish hearts by +thoughts that came of the propaganda, thoughts of the great past of +Ireland, of its romance of yesterday and to-day, of its spirituality. + +It is not so easy to account for the less quickening of the other Celtic +countries by the forces that brought about the Renaissance. Renan, in +his "Poetry of the Celtic Races" (1859), and Arnold, in his "On the +Study of Celtic Literature" (1867), had roused all the Celtic countries +to an interest in their old literature, an interest that extended much +further than discussion of the authenticity of Macpherson's "Ossian" or +of the proper treatment of Arthurian stories, until then the Ultima +Thule of talk on things Celtic. Frenchman and Englishman both had spoken +to Wales and Brittany, the Highlands of Scotland and the Isle of Man, as +well as to Ireland, and it does not altogether explain to say that +Ireland listened best because in Ireland there was a greater sense of +nationality than in these other lands. Ireland did listen, it is true, +and, listening, developed popularizers of the old tales such as Mr. +Standish James O'Grady and Dr. P.W. Joyce, to pass knowledge of them +along to the men of letters. It is hardly true, indeed, to say that +Ireland had a greater sense of nationality than Brittany or Wales. +Brittany, of course, since her tongue other than her native Breton was +French, gave what was given to the movement in other than Breton in +French. Cornwall may hardly be called a Celtic country, but if it may it +is easy to account for its slight interest in the movement by the little +that was preserved of its old literature and by the little it had of +distinctive oral tradition to draw upon. And yet, I think, had Sir +Arthur T. Quiller-Couch been born ten years later Cornwall had not +wanted a shanachie. Wales, too, gave little to English literature as the +result of the Renaissance, because, perhaps, her chiefest literary +energy is in her native language. Wales was proud of George Meredith, +whose Welsh ancestry is more evident in his work than is his Irish +ancestry, but not only is his writing representative of Great Britain +rather than of any one part of Great Britain, but his say had been said +before the movement began. The writing of Mr. Ernest Rhys underwent a +change because of his interest in the Celtic Renaissance, but Wales has +little writing outside of his to point to as a result of the awakening. +In Scotland, William Sharp, whose "Lyra Celtica" (1896) was a prominent +agent in bringing the Renaissance before the world, was transformed into +another writer by it. His work as "Fiona Macleod," both prose and verse, +was very different from his earlier work in prose and verse. Mr. Neil +Munro, too, was affected by the Renaissance, and in the tales of "The +Lost Pibroch" (1896) and in the novels of "John Splendid" (1898) and +"Gillian the Dreamer" (1899) and "The Children of Tempest" (1903) he +reveals an intimacy with Highland life such as informs the writing of no +other novelist of our day. Of recent years Mr. Munro has wandered +farther afield than his native Argyll, and, I feel, to the lessening of +the beauty of his writing. In the Isle of Man, T.E. Brown had been +striving for years to put into his stories in verse the fast-decaying +Celtic life of his country, but even with his example and with all that +has been done since the Renaissance began, in the preservation of Manx +folk-lore and in the recording of vanishing Manx customs, no writer of +Brown's power has been developed, or in fact any writer of powers equal +to those of the best men of the younger generation in the other Celtic +lands. It is with the Celtic Renaissance as it appears in Ireland, then, +that I have to deal chiefly in this book, as it is only in Ireland, of +the countries that retain a Celtic culture, that the movement is the +dominating influence in writing in English; and it is with the drama +only that I have now to deal, though when a playwright is a poet or a +story-teller, too, I have written of his attainment in verse and tale +also. Had I been writing five years ago, I should have said that it was +in poetry that the Celtic Renaissance had attained most nobly, but since +then the drama has had more recruits of power than has poetry, and it is +a question as to which of the two is greater as art. There is no doubt, +however, but that the drama has made a stronger and wider appeal, +whatever its excellence, than has the verse, and it is therefore of +greater significance for its time than is the poetry, whatever the +ultimate appraisement will be. Of the men I have written of here, Mr. +Yeats and Mr. Russell are to me poets before they are dramatists, and +Lionel Johnson, whose only direct connection with the dramatic movement +was his beautiful prologue in verse to the first performances of "The +Irish Literary Theatre" in 1899, is to me a poet of a power as great as +theirs. + +One wonders, at first thought, that Ireland had never until our day +given to English literature a novelist of first rank. The Irishman is +famous the world over as a story-teller, but neither in romance nor in +the story of character had he reached first power, reached a position +where he might be put alongside of other Europeans as a novelist. No +Irishman from the time of Scott on, until Mr. George Moore wrote "Esther +Waters" (1894), had written a story that might stand the inevitable +comparison with the work of Thackeray and Dickens, Meredith and Mr. +Hardy. Of Mr. George Moore I have written in detail below. + +Miss Edgeworth may have taught Scott his manner of delineating peasant +character, but her comparatively little power is revealed when you put +her beside Miss Austen, and so it is all the way down the list to our +own day. There are many contemporary story-tellers who have managed well +the tale, but what Irish novelist of to-day other than Mr. Moore bulks +big, can be compared to even lesser men, like Scotland's Mr. Neil Munro +or Dartmoor's Mr. Phillpotts? + +Lady Gilbert (Rosa Mulholland) has written many, pleasant stories of +Irish life, and Mrs. Katherine Tynan Hinkson has followed worthily in +her footsteps. Equally pleasant, but lighter and more superficial, is +the writing of the two ladies who subscribe their names "E.OE. +Somerville and Martin Ross." Their "Some Experiences of an Irish R.M." +(1899) and their "All on the Irish Shore" (1903) are like so much of the +Irish writing of a generation ago,--Irish stories by Irish people for +English people to laugh at. + +The Hon. Emily Lawless has written many kinds of stories about the West +Coast, reaching almost to greatness in her "Grania" (1892). In the short +story, Miss Jane Barlow, accused of superficiality by many Irish critics +and as eagerly declared to get the very quality of Connemara peasant +life by others, has sure power and a charm all her own. No one who reads +"Irish Idylls" (1892) will stop at that collection. Mr. Seumas MacManus +is as truly a shanachie as the old story-tellers that yet tell the old +tales about peat fires in Donegal. "Through the Turf Smoke" (1899) and +"In Chimney Corners" (1899) and "Donegal Fairy Stories" (1900) are alike +in having the accent of the spoken story, but when the last word is said +you cannot admit their author to be more than a clever entertainer. The +Rev. Dr. Sheehan, although you will find him writing about the effect of +the Irish Renaissance in remote parishes in the South, has not +subscribed to its ideals, but continues the fashion of story-writing of +an earlier generation. "Luke Delmege" (1900) is, however, an interesting +character study, and "My New Curate" (1899) very illuminative of the +conservatism of the peasantry. + +Mr. Shan Bullock, writing of the farmers and farm laborers of the North, +has not unwisely gone to Mr. Hardy to learn his art. "Irish Pastorals" +(1901) is racy of Fermanagh as "Tess" is of Wessex. "The Squireen" +(1903) is a strong and gloomy story. From "By Thrasna River" (1895) to +"Dan the Dollar" (1905), Mr. Bullock did no story without power in it. +Ireland still looks to him as it looked to Mr. William Buckley, ten +years ago, for better work. "Croppies Lie Down" brought Mr. Buckley +before the public in 1903, but his writing since then has fallen far +short of this his best book. Now, however, the young man with a future, +in the estimation of many is Mr. James Stephens. There is more hope in +him, in his twenties, than there is now in "George A. Birmingham" (Rev. +J.O. Hannay), another man who ten years ago was like Mr. Buckley, a +young man of promise. "The Seething Pot" (1904) was a serious study of +conditions in Ireland but since its author conceived of the character of +the Rev. Joseph John Meldon, he has found it more discreet to continue +the adventures of that clergyman than to write seriously out of his own +varied experience of West-Country Irish life. + +[Illustration] + +It is perhaps because the energy that in many countries goes into the +writing of the essay is absorbed in controversy in Ireland that in the +past Ireland has produced few essayists. In the battles of the dramatic +movement with the patriotic societies and with the official class, Mr. +Yeats and Mr. Moore have dealt good blows, and Mr. Russell and "John +Eglinton" (Mr. W.K. Magee) have led the disputants out of their +confusion. Among these men, "John Eglinton" is the one who has thrown +his greatest energy into the essay, almost all his energy, and in it, in +the chapters of "Two Essays on the Remnant" (1896), "Pebbles from a +Brook" (1901), and "Bards and Saints" (1906), he has written with +subtlety and illumination. + +In the collection and clarification and retelling of folk-literature +William Larminie and Lady Gregory and Dr. Hyde stand out as the leading +workers. Mr. Larminie's "West Irish Folk-Tales" (1895) are model work +of their kind as are Lady Gregory's several books, of which I speak in +detail later. The work of Dr. Hyde is the most important work of this +sort, however, and it is not too much to say, as I intimated at the +outset, that, without his translation of "The Love Songs of Connacht" +(1894) and "The Religious Songs of Connacht" (1906), the prose of the +movement would never have attained that distinction of rhythm which +reveals English almost as a new language. I would gladly have written at +length of Dr. Hyde, but he has chosen to write his plays in Irish as +well as most of his verses. Yet so winning are the plays as translated +by Lady Gregory, and so greatly have they influenced the folk-plays in +English of the Abbey Theatre, that there is almost warrant for including +him. I cannot, of course, but I must at least bear testimony to the many +powers of these plays. Dr. Hyde can be trenchant, when satire is his +object, as in "The Bursting of the Bubble" (1903); or alive with +merriment when merriment is his desire, as in "The Poorhouse" (1903); or +full of quiet beauty when he writes of holy things, as in the "Lost +Saint" (1902). There are many other playwrights in Irish than Dr. Hyde, +but as no other plays in Irish than his have reacted to any extent on +the plays in English of the movement, I do not consider them, my object +in this book being to consider the dramatic writing in English of the +Celtic Renaissance, with relation to its value as a contribution to the +art of English letters. That there is a great deal else in the Celtic +Renaissance than its drama, I would, however, emphasize, though it is +true that every man of first literary power in the movement, except +Lionel Johnson and "John Eglinton," has tried his hand on at least one +Irish play. That Johnson would have come to write drama I firmly +believe, for in drama he could have reconciled two of the four loves +that were his life. He could not have put his love of Winchester, his +school, or his love of the classics into plays, but his love of Ireland +and his love of the Catholic Church would have blended, I believe, into +plays, still with the cloistered life of the seventh century, that would +have rivaled "The Hour-Glass," and plays about "Ninety-Eight" that would +have rivaled "Cathleen Houlihan." + +There are many other poets, though, of the Celtic Renaissance that are +of powers only short of greatness, Nora Hopper Chesson chief among them. +Only Mr. W.B. Yeats of them all has more "natural falterings" in his +verse than she. Mrs. Hinkson, too, whose name has come inevitably into +these pages from time to time, is a poet with as sure a place in English +literature to-day as has Mrs. Meynell. Beginning, like Mr. Yeats, as an +imitator of the Pre-Raphaelites, Mrs. Hinkson found herself in little +poems on moods of her own and moods of landscape She writes also of her +love of God, of St. Francis, and of Ireland. "Moira O'Neill" (Mrs. +Skrine), too, has a sure place, her verses crying out her homesickness +for Ireland, and redolent, every line of them, of the countryside. "The +Passing of the Gael" is known wherever there are Irish emigrants, but +there are other verses of "Ethna Carberry" (Mrs. Anna Johnstone +MacManus) that are as fine as this. Mrs. Dora Sigerson Shorter is a +balladist of stark power, and Miss Eva Gore-Booth a lyric poet whose +natural lilt no preoccupation with mysticism can for more than a moment +obscure. + +Mr. Herbert Trench has of recent years surrendered to theatrical +management, but there is to his credit a substantial accomplishment of +lyrical verse that George Meredith would have approved. Mr. Colum's +verse I have spoken of below, incidentally, in considering his plays. A +distinct talent, too, is Mr. Seumas O'Sullivan's, whose "Twilight +People" (1905) indicates by its title the quality of his verse. + +I have mentioned all these writers, some known in America, but others +utterly unknown, not only to indicate the relation of the drama to the +other literary forms of the Renaissance, but to account, perhaps in some +measure, for the literary quality of the plays themselves. They are +written, as plays in English during the past century have too seldom +been written, by writers who have read widely in all forms of literature +and to whom words are, if not "the only good," at least a chief good. +Mr. Russell and Mr. Yeats have sent all the younger men who would write +to the masterpieces of the world, telling them to get what they need of +the technique of the centre, to know the best in the world, but to write +of the ground under their feet. The plays are, as I have said, written, +many of them, by men who are widely read, and by men whose friends are +writers of some other form of literature, by men who wish their work in +drama to be of as high intention as the work of their friends who are +poets or essayists or writers of stories. All the other writing the +Renaissance has, then, contributed to make of the drama what it is, and +one must, if one would see the drama in relation to the Ireland of our +day, know what is the accomplishment of the other sorts of writing of +the Renaissance. + + + + +CHAPTER II + +THE PLAYERS AND THEIR PLAYS, THEIR AUDIENCE AND THEIR ART + + +The drama of the Celtic Renaissance is of an ancestry as mixed as is +that of the people of Ireland themselves. There is less in it perhaps of +the Gael than in them, for Gaelic literature, until to-day, never +approached nearer to the drama than the dialogue, the racy give-and-take +of two characters, alike of lively imagination, whether gentle or +simple. But even had the colloquies of St. Patrick and Oisin, of Dean +Swift and his man Jack, of the Lout and his Mother, been developed, by +1890, to a drama as finished as that of Congreve or Goldsmith, Sheridan +or Wilde, those who would have their plays abreast of our time would +have gone, just as, with the conditions as they are, the dramatists of +the Renaissance did go, to Ibsen and M. Maeterlinck, like all the rest +of the world. It is a matter of reproach, in the estimation of many +patriotic Irishmen, that Mr. Martyn learned his art of Ibsen, and Mr. +Yeats a part of his of M. Maeterlinck, but that attitude is as +unreasonable as that which would reproach the Irish Industries +Organization Society for studying Danish dairy farms or Belgian +chickeries. It is only the technique of the foreigners, modern or +ancient, Scandinavian or Greek, that the Abbey dramatists have acquired +or have adapted to Irish usage. Stories are world-wide, of course, the +folk-tale told by the Derry hearthside being told also in the tent in +Turkestan--Cuchulain kills his son as Rustum does, and the Queen of +Fairy lures Bran oversea as Venus lures Tannhäuser to the Hörselberg. It +is in character, in ideals, in atmosphere, in color, that drama must be +native, and in color and in atmosphere, in ideals and in character the +Abbey Theatre drama is Irish. Reading of life and style are personal +qualities, qualities of the artist himself, though they, too, may take +tone and color from national life, and in the drama of many of the Abbey +dramatists they do. These dramatists have been more resolutely native, +in fact, many of them, than the national dramatists of other countries +have been, of France and Germany to-day, of the Spain or the England of +the Renaissance. It would seem idle to be saying this were not the +contention being raised all the time by certain patriotic groups of +Irishmen in America as well as in Ireland that the new drama is not a +native drama. It is, as a matter of fact, no less natively Irish than +the Elizabethan drama is natively English; it is really more native, for +no part of it of moment veils its nationality under even so slight a +disguise as "the Italian convention" of that drama. The new Irish drama +is more native in its stories than is the Elizabethan drama, as these +stories, even when they are stories found in variant forms in other +countries, are given the tones of Irish life. The structural forms and +the symbolic presentation of ideas of which the Abbey dramatists have +availed themselves have no more denationalized their plays than has the +Church, a Church from oversea, to which most of them belong, +denationalized the Irish people. + +Synge, the master dramatist of the new movement, while he does not +reproduce the average Irishman, is just as natively Irish in his +extravagance and irony as the old folk-tale of the "Two Hags"; Lady +Gregory in her farces is in a similar way representative of the riot of +West-Country imagination; and Mr. Yeats, if further removed from the +Irishmen of to-day, is very like, in many of his moods, to the riddling +bards of long ago. The later men, many of them, are altogether Irish, +representative of the folk of one or another section of the country, Mr. +Murray and Mr. Robinson of Cork, Mr. Mayne and Mr. Ervine of Down, Mr. +Colum and Mr. Boyle of the Midlands. + +One need not say that the Irishman is a born actor; all the Celts are +famed for "the beautiful speaking"; for eloquence; for powers of +impersonation; for quick changes of mood; for ease in running the gamut +of the emotions. Of these things come art of the stage, and these things +are the Irishman's in fullest measure. The Abbey Players have, however, +gone abroad for some elements of their art, perhaps for their repose of +manner, a quietude that is not the quietude of moodiness, a condition +not unusual in the Irishman; and in addition to this repose of manner, +which is fundamental and common to their presentation of realistic +modern plays and of poetic plays of legendary times, for a slowness and +dignity of gesture in the plays of legend, which is perhaps a borrowing +from the classic stage. Their repose of manner may come from modern +France; at least so held Mr. Yeats, pointing to such a source in +"Samhain" of 1902. + + The other day [he writes] I saw Sara Bernhardt and DeMax in + "Phèdre," and understood where Mr. Fay, who stage-manages the + National Theatrical Company, had gone for his model. For long + periods the performers would merely stand and pose, and I once + counted twenty-seven quite slowly before anybody on a fairly + well-filled stage moved, as it seemed, so much as an eyelash. The + periods of stillness were generally shorter, but I frequently + counted seventeen, eighteen, or twenty before there was a movement. + I noticed, too, that the gestures had a rhythmic progression. Sara + Bernhardt would keep her hands clasped over, let us say, her right + breast for some time, and then move them to the other side, + perhaps, lowering her chin till it touched her hands, and then, + after another long stillness, she would unclasp them and hold one + out, and so on, not lowering them till she had exhausted all the + gestures of uplifted hands. Through one long scene DeMax, who was + quite as fine, never lifted his hand above his elbow, and it was + only when the emotion came to its climax that he raised it to his + breast. Beyond them stood a crowd of white-robed men who never + moved at all, and the whole scene had the nobility of Greek + sculpture, and an extraordinary reality and intensity. It was the + most beautiful thing I had ever seen upon the stage, and made me + understand, in a new way, that saying of Goethe's which is + understood everywhere but in England, "Art is art because it is not + nature." Of course, our amateurs were poor and crude beside those + great actors, perhaps the greatest in Europe, but they followed + them as well as they could, and got an audience of artisans, for + the most part, to admire them for doing it. + +With these words of Mr. Yeats, written ten years ago, in my memory, it +was arresting to hear ten years later a somewhat similar comparison of +the acting of the Irish Players to the acting of yesterday on the French +stage. A man who in the late eighties and early nineties had spent +seven years as an art student in Paris saw the Abbey Players in Boston. +In Paris he had gone frequently to the Théâtre Français, and only there, +he said, before he saw the Irish Players, had he seen acting so full of +dignity, but never at all before acting so natural. + +There is possible, too, however, a native origin for this repose of +manner, or perhaps it would be truest to say that it is a blending, like +the dramas themselves, of native and foreign elements. Speaking of +"Cathleen ni Houlihan" in the notes to his "Collected Works" of 1908, +Mr. Yeats says, "I cannot imagine this play, or any folk-play of our +school, acted by players with no knowledge of the peasant, and of the +awkwardness and stillness of bodies that have followed the plow, or too +lacking in humility to copy these things without convention or +caricature." Here, too, he refers to the "quiet movement and careful +speech which has given our players some little fame" as "arising partly +out of deliberate opinion and partly out of the ignorance of the +players." + +Undoubtedly Mr. Fay knew the still ways of the peasant, and I do not +doubt that he was influenced by such knowledge and did in some degree +train his actors to bring their movements on the stage in accord with +the "awkwardness and stillness of bodies that have followed the plow." +But since there are ways of the peasant that are far from still, it is +likely, too, that he was led to select such movements, instead of the +vehement gesture and lively facial expression that are just as +characteristic of the peasant, by a memory of the restrained acting of +the French stage. It is likely, too, that the very inexperience and +lack of knowledge of artifice to which Mr. Yeats refers was an element +in making the art of the company what it became. But it is not +altogether impossible that certain traditions of the English stage--of +the statuesque acting of the Kembles, for instance--had come down into +the time of Mr. Fay's stage experience, to those days before he became +stage manager of the performances of "The Daughters of Erin" in 1900, +and that these traditions influenced his training of the company that +was to attain to a new art of the stage. + +Before this there had been two series of performances in Dublin, each of +a week's duration, by "The Irish Literary Theatre," one in 1899, and the +other in 1900, with English actors gathered together in London by Mr. +George Moore; and another week's series followed in 1901 by the Benson +Company and some amateurs of the Gaelic League under the leadership of +Dr. Douglas Hyde. It was the performances of "The Countess Cathleen" of +Mr. Yeats and of "The Heather Field" of Mr. Martyn at the Antient +Concert Rooms in Dublin, respectively May 8 and 9, 1899, by "The Irish +Literary Theatre," that inaugurated the drama of the Celtic Renaissance, +fully a year before there came into being the group of amateurs that +were to bring that drama home to Ireland as no players who inherited the +standards and conventions of the English stage could possibly have +brought it home. + +It is Mr. Fay's distinction to have been, as I have intimated, the +leader who started these players on the long way to their new art. Such +leadership his record hardly augered. It was in the very lowest forms +of vaudeville, in what is the analogue abroad of our negro minstrelsy, +that Mr. Fay had his stage experience, a stage experience that had made +him well enough known in burlesque rôles to make it difficult for him to +assume with success serious rôles in the early years of the National +Dramatic Company. Because of this old association, Dublin audiences +insisted in 1902 in seeing humor in his Peter Gillane in "Cathleen ni +Houlihan." For all this past, however, Mr. Fay was intent on serious +drama, and, with the precept and example of Mr. Russell and Mr. Yeats +always present to him in the early days of the National Theatre Company, +and with what he had gathered from the experimental performance of Irish +plays by "The Irish Literary Theatre," he advanced surely in his art +until his withdrawal from the company in January, 1908. His loss was +compensated for only by the results of his training of other actors, +such as Miss Sara Allgood and Mr. Arthur Sinclair, who on certain roads +have outrun their master. When I saw Mr. Fay in 1902, in the little hall +in Camden Street, Dublin, with no knowledge of what his stage experience +had been, I accepted him at once for what he was, a finished "character" +actor of poise and confidence, a dignified figure for all his stature +and his predilection for comedy, and the possessor of a speaking voice +whose natural pleasantness he had made into something higher than +pleasantness by his art in the use of it, if it never attained the +resonance and nobility of phrasing of that of his brother, Mr. Frank J. +Fay. It was a memorable experience to me, that of that August evening in +1902 on which I was taken to Camden Street to a rehearsal of the Irish +National Dramatic Company. Our guide was Mr. James H. Cousins, whose +"Racing Lug" and "Connla" were among the plays produced in the following +autumn and which that night were in rehearsal. He piloted us to an +entranceway by the side of a produce shop. We knocked on the door and +waited, and waited. We knocked again, and at last heard steps coming +nearer and nearer. The door opened and revealed a young man in +work-a-day black suit and derby, with a candle in one hand and a +property spear in the other. He conducted us down a narrow, drafty +hallway, into a hall in which were wooden benches as rude as those in +the bandstand of a backwoods country fair in the States, and a slightly +raised platform at the farther end. We were soon in eager conversation +with young store clerks and typists and artisans who were about to set +to work at that in which their hearts lay, the interpreting of plays out +of Ireland's heart. It was good talk we listened to from those young men +and women, boys and girls all of them in their fervor and zest and high +aim. Their enthusiasm carried through "Connla," "The Racing Lug," and +"Deirdre" with real impressiveness. Of Mr. Cousins's two plays one was +realistic of the north of Ireland shore life of to-day, and the other, +"Connla," like Mr. Russell's "Deirdre," made out of Ireland's heroic +age. + +Of the actors we met that night, but Miss Walker (Maire ni Shiubhlaigh) +was with the Irish Players on their American tour of 1911-12, and even +she has not been continuously with them since 1902. The amateurs had +then but begun, under the direction of Mr. Fay, on the slow fashioning +of themselves into the finished folk-actors they proved themselves in +America. But even this acting, so little removed from that of amateurs +at these rehearsals, had distinction, the distinction of fidelity to +life in "The Racing Lug," the distinction of possession by dream in +"Deirdre"; and let it be remembered, too, that it was a rehearsal +without costume, and that one had to be carried away from the +conventional dress of the Dublin streets, and had to be made to feel +that the characters in "The Racing Lug" were primitive fishermen, and +the people of "Connla" and "Deirdre" the people of Ireland's Homeric +age. + +Miss Maire T. Quinn, Mr. T. Dudley Digges, Mr. P.J. Kelly, with Miss +Walker and the brothers Fay,--Mr. W.G. Fay and Mr. Frank J. Fay,--were +then the leading actors of the company. The playwrights, too, took part +in their own or their fellows' plays in the lesser rôles, Mr. Russell +sometimes playing the druid in his "Deirdre" and Mr. Colum carrying a +spear or wearing a pea-jacket as need was. One circumstance or another, +politics or need, gradually lost the company every one of these actors +that took part in its first performances in 1902. There were +comparatively few changes, though, until 1904, the year in which Miss +Horniman, "a generous English friend," took for them the old Mechanic +Institute Theatre and, rebuilding it in part, turned it over to the +Irish National Dramatic Company for six years. Up to this time the +actors had received no pay, giving their services for love of country +and of art, but with the more frequent performances and their attendant +rehearsals it became necessary to take a large part of the time of the +leading men and women, and then, of course, they had to be paid. Before +the opening of the Abbey Theatre, three of the chief actors, Miss Quinn +and Mr. Digges and Mr. Kelly, came to this country to appear in Irish +plays in the Irish Section of the St. Louis Fair. The public that +gathered in St. Louis was not prepared for the new drama, being more +used to the musical play of the type Mr. Olcott has made familiar in +America, or to the Bowery Irishman of the Harrigan plays, or to the +gross caricatures, Galwayed and ape-accoutred, of the before-curtain +interlude of the variety show. As a result the former National Players +protested against the policy of the Irish Section and returned to New +York. Miss Walker was the principal actress of the company after Miss +Quinn's departure to America, and upon Miss Walker's withdrawal in 1905 +the burden of the chief women's rôles fell upon Miss Allgood. + +Mr. W.G. Fay and Mr. Frank J. Fay were still the leading men of the +company, creating the principal characters of all the plays of Synge and +of those of Mr. Yeats and Lady Gregory that were produced before 1908. +Early in this year, as I have said, Mr. and Mrs. W.G. Fay and Mr. F.J. +Fay left the company, and, coming to America in the spring, played "The +Rising of the Moon" and "A Pot of Broth" in New York. They made, +unfortunately, no great success in their appearances, as their plays +were not presented in bills devoted solely to Irish plays, but as +curtain-raisers to the usual conventional farce. Almost all the actors +whom I have mentioned as leaving the National Players eventually found +their way into the conventional plays, but almost none of them made +successes there comparable in any degree to their successes in +folk-drama or in plays out of old Irish legend. Nor can it be said that +actors trained in the dominant forms of present-day English drama, even +when so skilled as Mrs. Patrick Campbell, were wholly satisfying in +their assumption of rôles in the plays of the Renaissance. It was Miss +Allgood, chief musician in the London performances of Mr. Yeats's +"Deirdre" in 1908, who won the greatest approval from the London +critics, and not Mrs. Campbell as Deirdre herself. + +[Illustration] + +Miss Allgood had played principal parts with the Abbey Company from 1904 +on. In 1906, her sister, who plays under the name of Miss Maire O'Neill, +came into the company, assuming the more romantic rôles with a success +as great as that of Miss Allgood in character parts and comedy. From +1906 they have shared the principal women's rôles, but, owing to Miss +O'Neill's inability to come to America in the fall of 1911, Miss McGee +fell heir to many of her rôles. After the departure of the Messrs. Fay, +Mr. Sinclair, Mr. O'Donovan, and Mr. Kerrigan became the leading men. It +is not altogether accurate, however, to speak of any actor or actress of +the company as leading man or leading woman, for not only is one "a +leading lady" one night, as was Miss McGee as Pegeen Mike in "The +Playboy of the Western World" on the American tour, and one of the +village girls in "The Well of the Saints" the next night, but the men +and women alternate in the same parts on different nights, as, for +instance, on the American tour Cathleen ni Houlihan was played now by +Miss Allgood and now by Miss Walker. + +The fact that few of the actors who have learned their art with the +Irish National Dramatic Society have achieved greatly in other drama is +perhaps a proof that their powers are limited to the folk-drama and the +legendary drama that comprises almost the entire repertoire of the +company. Miss Allgood was, it is true, lent to Mr. Poel for the +performances of "Measure for Measure" in the spring of 1908, and won an +unquestioned success as Isabella, but actors so skilled as the Messrs. +Fay have attained no notable success in other than Irish plays. During +the American tour of 1911-12 both Mr. Sinclair and Miss Allgood were +much importuned by the managers to accept American engagements, and it +is hardly to be doubted but that both could win success in conventional +comedy. And yet one feels it was the part of wisdom as well as of +loyalty for them to withstand the lure. + +The distinguishing characteristic of the art of the Abbey Players is +naturalness. It is not that their personalities happen to coincide with +certain types of Irish character, but that they know so well the types +of the folk-plays, and even the characters who are not types that appear +in the folk-plays, that they are able to portray them to the life. The +Abbey Players have discarded most of the tricks of the stage, or perhaps +it would be truer to say they do not inherit the tricks of the stage or +any traditional characterizations of parts. They are taught to allow +their demeanor and gesture and expression to rise out of the situation, +to "get up" their parts from their own ideas; and these ideas are +interfered with only if they run definitely counter to the ideas of +stage-manager or author. The smallness of the Abbey Theatre has saved +them from the necessity of heightening effects that they may carry to +the farthest corners of a large house, a necessity that leads so often +to over-emphasis by our own actors. There are less than six hundred +seats in the Abbey theatre (five hundred and sixty-two by actual count), +and it is so arranged that the words uttered on the stage carry easily +without emphasis all over the house. + +It is an old saying that the English of Dublin is the most beautiful +English in the world. However that may be, there can be no doubt +whatsoever but that the English that is spoken in Dublin falls on the +ear with a mellowness of sound that is a joy to all who cherish proper +speech. In the earlier years of the company Mr. Yeats was very desirous +of having his dramatic verse spoken with "the half chant men spoke it +[poetry] with in old times." It was in some such way that Mr. Yeats had +tried to have his lines in "The Land of Heart's Desire" spoken when it +was put on at the Avenue Theatre, London, in 1894; and thirteen years +later Miss Florence Farr, whom he believes to speak English more +beautifully than anybody in the world, spoke his dramatic verses in a +"half chant," and his lyrical verses, many of them, to a definite +musical notation, on her American tour of 1907. It was noticeable, +however, when she played one of the musicians in his "Deirdre" on its +later presentations, that he method of intoning the verses differed a +great deal from their delivery by the regular members of the company. +If Mr. Yeats has not changed his views somewhat in regard to the +speaking of dramatic verse, he no longer insists on the half chant as it +was practiced by Miss Farr, but is content if the actors reproduce its +rhythm in "the beautiful speaking" that is characteristic of their art. +The most beautiful English that I have ever listened to is the English +of Synge as spoken by Mr. O'Donovan in Christy's "romancin'" to Pegeen +Mike in the third act of "The Playboy of the Western World." His voice, +full and mellow by nature, and in perfect control, responds to all the +many changes of emotion that the part demands, the unmatched rhythm of +the prose rendered as he renders it carrying one clean out of one's self +as one listens. It is only when one comes to one's self on the +curtain-fall that one finds one's self wondering, Can this be prose? +Surely, never before was prose, English prose, as beautiful to the ear +as English verse. + +As Miss O'Neill did not come with the Abbey Players to America, we did +not have a chance to hear Pegeen Mike's lines spoken with a beauty +comparable to Christy's. The part is not one to which Miss Allgood is +physically adapted, and Miss McGee is as yet too new to the stage to +speak with the confident abandon the lines demand. We did, however, have +a chance to hear Miss Allgood's very beautiful musical utterance of the +verses given to Cathleen ni Houlihan in this first of the movement's +folk-plays, and her equally beautiful speaking of the prose lines of the +play. This part of Cathleen ni Houlihan is sufficiently removed from the +other parts of the play, folk-parts, and from the parts of the other +folk-plays, to give us an insight into the versatility of Miss Allgood; +and we saw enough of Mr. Sinclair and Mr. O'Donovan and Mr. Kerrigan to +realize that they, too, could worthily bear parts in heroic romance. + +The rendering of the songs in the plays--it is chiefly in the plays of +Mr. Yeats that they appear--is a distinguishing characteristic of their +production. Mr. Yeats will not have them rendered by what, in the +ordinary sense, is singing. Writing in the notes to volume III of his +"Collected Works"[1] he says:-- + + No vowel must ever be prolonged unnaturally, no word of mine must + ever change into a mere musical note, no singer of my words must + ever cease to be a man and become an instrument. + + The degree of approach to ordinary singing depends on the context, + for one desires a greater or lesser amount of contrast between the + lyrics and the dialogue according to situation and emotion and the + qualities of players. The words of Cathleen ni Houlihan about the + "white-scarfed riders" must be little more than regulated + declamation; the little song of Leagerie when he seizes the "Golden + Helmet" should in its opening words be indistinguishable from the + dialogue itself. Upon the other hand Cathleen's verses by the fire, + and those of the pupils in "The Hour-Glass," and those of the + beggars in "The Unicorn," are sung as the country people understand + song. Modern singing would spoil them for dramatic purposes by + taking the keenness and the salt out of the words. The songs in + "Deirdre," in Miss Fair's and in Miss Allgood's setting, need fine + speakers of verse more than good singers: and in these, and still + more in the song of the Three Women in "Baile's Strand," the + singers must remember the natural speed of words. If the lyric in + "Baile's Strand" is sung slowly it is like church-singing, but if + sung quickly and with the right expression it becomes an + incantation so old that nobody can quite understand it. That it may + give this sense of something half-forgotten, it must be sung with a + certain lack of minute feeling for the meaning of the words, which, + however, must always remain words. The songs in "Deirdre," + especially the last dirge, which is supposed to be the creation of + the moment, must upon the other hand, at any rate when Miss Farr's + or Miss Allgood's music is used, be sung or spoken with minute + passionate understanding. I have rehearsed the part of the Angel in + "The Hour-Glass" with recorded notes throughout, and believe this + is the right way; but in practice, owing to the difficulty of + finding a player who did not sing too much the moment the notes + were written down, have left it to the player's own unrecorded + inspiration, except at the "exit," where it is well for the player + to go nearer to ordinary song. + +At times Irish actresses who have not come to the stage through the +Abbey Company, as has every one of its regular actresses, and every one +of its men save Mr. W.G. Fay, have lent it their assistance, as in the +instance of Mrs. Patrick Campbell referred to above, and as Miss Darragh +did in productions of "The Shadowy Waters" and of "Deirdre" in 1906. It +was four years earlier than this, however, that an Irishwoman, better +known in her country than either Miss Darragh or Mrs. Patrick Campbell, +lent her art to the performance of Cathleen ni Houlihan. "Miss Maud +Gonne played very finely," writes Mr. Yeats in recording the incident, +"and her great height made Cathleen seem a divine being fallen into our +mortal infirmity." With these three exceptions, so far as I have been +able to find out, no actors or actresses outside of the company have, +since 1902, essayed any other than a subordinate part. Yet such is the +versatility of the company, men and women both, within the range of +plays the company feels called upon to present,--folk-drama of to-day +and of yesterday in Ireland, folk-history plays, morality plays, and +plays in verse out of old legends,--that though there have never been as +many as twenty actors in the company there has very seldom been much +difficulty in casting a part. Molly Byrne in "The Well of the Saints" +and the Wandering Friar of the same play have given the most trouble to +the stage directors. + +From the very beginning of the Irish National Dramatic Company, Mr. +Yeats has been an advocate of scenery that is background chiefly, and in +no way divertive of attention from the play itself, its thought, its +words, its acting. He would have it, in a way, decorative, but subdued +and in harmony with the subject of the play. A very few simple sets +suffice for the plays of peasant life, a cottage interior, a village +street, a crossroads in a gap of the hills, all to serve the action and +the words as background, and to be no more obtrusive than the background +of a portrait. It may be that this attitude of Mr. Yeats is in a measure +due to his talks with Mr. Gordon Craig, but it is equally true, I think, +that some of Mr. Gordon Craig's ideas are due in part to his talks with +Mr. Yeats. Equally simple, though of another sort of simplicity, would +Mr. Yeats have the scenery for plays out of old legend. "I would like to +see," writes Mr. Yeats in "Samhain" of 1902, "poetic drama, which tries +to keep at a distance from daily life, that it may keep its emotion +untroubled, staged with but two or three colors." Old reds, misty +blues, imperial purples, greens that have about them the dimness of +haunted woods, and dulled golds have been among the colors used in the +legendary plays of Mr. Yeats and in the folk-histories of Lady Gregory, +the color schemes being generally either those of Mr. Yeats or of Mr. +Robert Gregory, Lady Gregory's son. Scenery and costumes alike are +simple. No audience at the Abbey has ever marveled at cycloramic +landscape, and no audience and no actress has ever been able to take the +joy of the dressmaker and the dressed, of the milliner and the +millinered, in gown or hat. + +The National Theatre Society, Limited, which is the legal name of the +organization that controls the Abbey Theatre Company, may not play what +plays it will at the Abbey; the two leading theatres of commerce in +Dublin, the Gaiety and the Theatre Royal, having, as Mr. Yeats records, +"vigorously opposed" the Abbey being given "a patent as little +restricted" as their own. "The Solicitor-General," Mr. Yeats continues, +"to meet them halfway, has restricted our patent to plays written by +Irishmen or on Irish subjects or to foreign masterpieces, provided these +masterpieces are not English." This restriction has not interfered with +any feature of the work of the Abbey Theatre, Mr. Yeats believes, save +in the building-up of an audience, some people remaining away, perhaps, +who might have been attracted had "such bodies as the Elizabethan Stage +Society, which brought 'Everyman' to Dublin some years ago, been able to +hire the theatre." + +No phase of the dramatic movement has been more interesting and none +has been more important than this building-up of an audience to +appreciate the plays. Whether with the poetic plays of Mr. Yeats and the +ironic extravaganzas of Synge alone, such an audience as has been built +up--an audience estimated by Mr. Yeats in 1906 to consist of four +thousand young men and women--could have been won is problematical; that +is, it may be doubted that the very best the movement has produced would +have attracted a sufficient audience to enable the company to keep +together after the expiration in 1910 of Miss Horniman's guarantee. +Certain it is, however, that Lady Gregory's farces were a great help, +both in building up and in holding the Abbey audience. It was for the +purpose of affording comic relief to the plays of Mr. Yeats and to the +first plays of Synge that Lady Gregory started to create them. They +attracted all who loved laughter and merriness and a loving caricature +of country-folk,--and who do not?--and one of them, "The Rising of the +Moon" (1907), had a distinct patriotic appeal, as had Mr. Yeats's +"Cathleen ni Houlihan," which brought some who would not otherwise have +come to the Abbey Theatre. The third most definitely "national" play of +the movement, "The Piper" (1908) of Mr. O'Riordan, may have also drawn +some who would not otherwise have come to the theatre, but if it did so +it brought them there, as did "The Playboy of the Western World" (1907), +to object. + +The first appeal of the Irish Players, in April, 1902, was trough the +"Deirdre" of "A.E.," a play out of old legend, national legend, and +"Cathleen ni Houlihan," a symbolic national play of '98. Then followed +Mr. Cousins's two little plays above referred to; "The Laying of the +Foundations," by Mr. Frederick Ryan,--a realistic satire of Dublin life; +and Mr. Yeats's incursion into farce, "A Pot of Broth." The appeal of +the repertoire was widened in 1903 by the inclusion of plays by Lady +Gregory, Mr. Colum, and Synge. "Twenty-five" could give offense to none +in its story of self-sacrificing love, and Mr. Colum's "Broken Soil," +coming as it did after "In the Shadow of the Glen," would have escaped +hostile criticism in such a situation even had it been much more severe +in its portrayal of peasant life in the Midlands than it was. + +From the time of "The Countess Cathleen" (1899) to the time of "In the +Shadow of the Glen" (1903), no one of the plays in the movement had +seriously offended any large section of the public, and the younger +generation of all classes was contributing largely of its intellectual +members to the audience of the National Dramatic Company. The West +Britons, the Dublin Castle set, the Trinity College group, were not much +interested, and, indeed, that portion of the theatrical audience that +fills the stalls in the average theatre the English-speaking world over +has never taken very much interest in the plays of the movement, save to +protest against "The Rising of the Moon" as disloyal to England, and to +approve, misunderstanding its purpose, "The Playboy of the Western +World" as a savage satire of the Irish Irishman. The audience that the +movement has built up is an audience of free intelligences, largely from +the poorer elements of the public, an audience that fills the cheaper +places in the house. "The Pit" of the Abbey Theatre is the envy of all +the theatrical managers of Dublin. It is a pit of people young in years +or young in heart and mind, who are interested in intellectual things, a +group of people largely self-taught, or taught by the Celtic +Renaissance, to appreciate fine things. With these has come that element +of the intellectuals among the Trinity College set that is interested +above all things in Ireland, but this element is not large. + +This play and that have attracted, either for purposes of approval or +for purposes of disapproval, groups of people outside of the faithful +pit that is interested in every sincere portrayal of Irish life. Such a +group, from the patriotic societies, prevented the rest of the house +from hearing "The Playboy of the Western World," after its first +performance on January 26, 1907, for four performances more; and such a +group similarly protested against "The Piper," a little more than a year +later, because it seemed to the members of the group to be an +unpatriotic revelation of the lack of cohesion among Irish political and +patriotic factions. + +Despite opposition, however, and with new dramatists one by one gaining +a place in the repertoire of the company, Mr. Boyle in 1905 and Mr. +Robinson in 1908, Mr. Murray in 1910 and Mr. Ervine in 1911, more and +more people continued to become interested in the new drama, and by the +time Miss Horniman's support, promised in 1904 for six years, was +withdrawn at the expiration of that period, the Abbey Theatre was +apparently a fixture in the artistic life of Ireland. + +It has been the custom, of recent years, for the Abbey Theatre to begin +its Dublin season In October and to continue it on until May, when the +company goes to London for a month. In the earlier years, before the +company had a home at the Abbey, and even for a year or two after that, +performances were not so continuous. Nor are they now given every week +or always on every night of a week, the theatre being turned over to the +Theatre of Ireland or some other dramatic organization occasionally, and +being let, now and then, for lectures or concerts or the like. The +London season in May is followed, or preceded sometimes, by visits to +other English cities, Manchester and Leeds, Oxford and Cambridge among +them; and at home in Ireland, in the intervals between weeks at the +Abbey, the company goes to Cork or Belfast for a few performances. + +In this country the audiences that attended the performances of the +plays of the Abbey Theatre Players were of a very different composition. +At their average they included a certain proportion of the younger +intellectuals among the Irish-Americans, but very many of these were +kept away from the performances, as many, indeed, in Ireland and in +England, too, are kept away from the performances, by the opposition in +the patriotic societies. In America, as in London and in Manchester, and +in the English university towns, it has been largely from among those +who are seriously interested in a literary drama that the audiences have +been drawn. It was such people as do not habitually go to the theatre, +but that are to be found at revivals of old English comedy and Ibsen +plays and symphony concerts, that made up the audiences of the Irish +Players in America, whether in Boston or in Philadelphia or Chicago. +These audiences approximated to the Dublin audiences only in the fact +that they were constant in attendance at all the plays of the +repertoire. There were, of course, some who came out of curiosity and +the love of ruction, but these after all were few. The plays appealed on +their merits and won the success that they did win because of their art +and their reading of life, and not because of the sensational incidents +that had occurred at some of the productions of the company. + +The Abbey Theatre has been able to maintain itself successfully in the +years that have elapsed since the arrangement between Miss Horniman and +the National Theatre Society came to an end. It has begotten many other +companies, the Ulster Literary Theatre, best of them all; the Theatre of +Ireland; the National Players; the Cork Dramatic Society. It has brought +into being a kind of folk-drama that, despite its avowed and evident +Scandinavian origin, is a new folk-drama, and it has brought into being, +too, a school of dramatists. It has done much more than Mr. Yeats +claimed it had done in 1908 when he wrote, "We know that we have already +created a taste for sincere and original drama and for sincere, quiet, +simple acting. Ireland possesses something which has come out of its own +life, and the many failures of dramatic societies which have imitated +our work, without our discipline and our independence, show that it +could not have been made in any other way." But even were this all it +had done, it had done much. What it has done I have attempted to put +down in some detail, and to put values upon, in the following pages. +Here I wish further to say but this: that I think the dramatic movement +the most significant part of the Celtic Renaissance, a movement to me +the most original movement in letters the world has known since that +movement in Norway which so definitely stimulated it, a movement that +gave Björnson and Ibsen to the world. + +FOOTNOTES: + +[1] Shakespeare Head Press, Stratford-on-Avon, 1908. + + + + +CHAPTER III + +MR. WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS + + +There has never been a poet who used better the gifts his country gave +him than Mr. Yeats. The heroic legends of Ireland are in his poetry, +Irish folk-lore is there, and the look of the country; and a man moulded +as only Irish conditions, of old time and of to-day, could mould him, +Irish conditions spiritual, intellectual, and physical; a man with eyes +on a bare countryside in the gray of twilight, thinking of the stories +the peasants tell and of the old legends whose setting this is before +him. At this hour, with such surroundings, and in such thought, the +Other World is as near to all men as their natures will let it come, and +to Mr. Yeats it is very near. Waking dreams come to him at such hours, +and he puts them into his verse, waking dreams of his country's +legendary past and of its fairy present, and waking dreams born of books +of old magic he has read indoors. Now it will be one sort of dream is +present, now the other, and now the third, and often two or even all +three sorts of dream are intermingled. His volume of prose sketches, +"The Celtic Twilight" (1893), gives the title some of his countrymen +have fastened on his verse, and the verse of others that take his +attitude and use like material, "The Twilight School of Poetry." It is +not inapt as giving the quality of most of his writing; but some of his +verses have warm sunlight in them, which, strangely, since it is +sunlight as it visits Irish shore and mountain, he has deplored. The +explanation may be that Mr. Yeats is of those who do not live intensely +until the oncoming of night, and so holds out of harmony with his genius +the coloring of its moments of lesser energy. + +Legends and folk-tales and landscapes and books of mysticism and magic +not only give Mr. Yeats the material of his poetry, but suggest its +images, its color, and in part its rhythms; but before he found the +"faint and nervous" rhythms best fitted to his poetry, and put in it the +gray-greens and browns and soft purples and bright whites of Irish +landscape, and the symbols from fairy-lore and mythology, he had paid +patient heed to certain of the great poets of his language, to Spenser +and Blake, to Shelley and William Morris. And in learning the art of +drama, which he began to study very carefully after his early plays were +tested in "The Irish Literary Theatre," Mr. Yeats has very evidently +pondered a good deal on the English morality and taken into account the +effects of Greek tragedy as he had before explored M. Maeterlinck and +the earlier Ibsen. + +As a boy Mr. Yeats wrote in the "Dublin University Review" that the +"greatest of the earth" often owned but two aims, "two linked and +ardorous thoughts--fatherland and song." Twenty-six years have gone +since then and Mr. Yeats is still devoted to poetry and to his country, +for all that the Nationalists deplore that his greater interest is now +in his art. His art, indeed, he cherishes with an ardor that is akin to +the ardor of patriotism; to him, as to Spenser, the master of his +youth, poetry is a divine enthusiasm. At first eager to paint, as did +and does his father, Mr. J.B. Yeats, he studied in Dublin Arts Schools, +but as Nature "wanted a few verses" from him, she sent him "into a +library to read bad translations from the Irish, and at last down into +Connaught to sit by turf fires." He read, too, Sir Samuel Ferguson, the +poet who had done most with Irish legend, and Allingham, who wrote of +Irish fairies, and the patriotic poets of the young Ireland group, Davis +chief among them. His father, an admirer of Whitman, preached to him the +doctrine embodied in the text-- + + + "Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last, + In things best known to you finding the best." + + +Many influences thus conspired to make Mr. Yeats find his inspiration +in Ireland, overcoming, for the time, the denationalizing influences +that the art of the centre must always exert. Not only were the +national legends and folk-lore constantly with him in these years, but +the interest in magic and all things that are hidden. He was one of +the Hermetic Society, of which Mr. George W. Russell was the high +priest, as early as 1886, but this interest, which has dominated so +often in his later poetry, is not to the forefront in "The Wanderings +of Oisin" of 1889. The material of the title poem of this volume Mr. +Yeats found in the libraries. It recounts the Fenian poet's three +hundred years of "dalliance with a demon thing" oversea in three +wondrous lands, where were severally pleasure and fighting and +forgetfulness, and in each of which Oisin spent a century. It has a +half-dramatic framework of question and answer between St. Patrick, +who appears as upbraider, and the poet, who laments joys gone and the +Christian present of Ireland and his own feeble age. Although it is a +story Mr. Yeats is telling, the beauties of the poems are lyrical +beauties. In exuberance and richness of color it is Mr. Yeats's most +typically Irish poem based on legend, and nowhere do his lines go with +more lilt, or fall oftener into inevitability of phrase, or more fully +diffuse a glamour of otherworldliness. "The Wanderings of Oisin" +revealed poetry as unmistakably new to his day as was Poe's to the +earliest Victorian days. Beside the title poem another from legend had +this new quality, "The Madness of King Goll," with its refrain that +will not out of memory, "They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter +round me, the beech leaves old." "Down by the Salley Gardens" and "The +Meditation of the Old Fisherman" bear witness to talks before turf +fires, or in herring boats off Knocknarea, and other developments of +folk-song or tale have the place-names of his home county of Sligo; +but this distinctive quality is theirs in less measure, and few others +in the little volume have it at all. + +In the years just before "The Wanderings of Oisin," Mr. Yeats had been +eager to unite the young writers of Ireland in a movement to give the +country a national literature in English. This project developed side +by side with Dr. Hyde's to give Ireland its own language again and a +modern literature in it. Neither leader was the first to advance +either idea, but each was the first to establish the movement in which +he was most interested; Mr. Yeats's "Wanderings of Oisin" (1889) is +the starting-point of the Celtic Renaissance, and Dr. Hyde's "Leabhar +Sgeuluigheachta" (1889), the starting-point of the Gaelic League, +though this was not organized until 1893. From that day to this these +two men and Mr. George W. Russell ("A.E.") have been the great forces +in the literature of the Renaissance. Mr. Yeats was busy in those +early days with editing fairy and folk-tales and short stories from +the Irish novelists, and in reading these it was but natural that he +should be led to write stories. First came "John Sherman" and "Dhoya" +in 1891, the one a condensed novel with the slightest of plots about a +slow-pulsed young man's troubles with love and laziness in Sligo and +London, and the other a sketch of Irish faery in old time. Some of the +sketches of "The Celtic Twilight" (1893) approach the tale, but such +narrations are not told for their own sake, but as illustrations of +fairy-lore, or they have too little body to win for themselves the +title of tale. In "The Secret Rose" (1897) there are true tales, some +out of Ireland's legendary past, some out of her fairy present, and, +akin to both, the Hanrahan series. These last Mr. Yeats so rewrote in +1904 as to be "nearer to the mind of the country places where Hanrahan +and his like wandered and are remembered." As they stand now they are +his best prose, rid almost entirely of preciousness, and simple and +full of mystery as the countryside they reflect. In "The Secret Rose" +are two "alchemical" tales and in "The Tables of the Law" (1904), two +others of like subject. To me, for all the qualities they share with +poetry of his of similar inspiration, they do not seem to be mastered +by him. Alone among his writings they are incomplete. + +Mr. Yeats was unable until the last few years to give himself up to +the writing nearest his heart, drama. He continued to edit Irish +literature, to write on literature and fairy-lore for the magazines. +The articles about fairies he has published, and a great mass of +belief collected but as yet unprinted, he will gather some day into a +great book. Known now in the Irish countryside as a man with a power +to exorcise spirits, he will then no doubt attain a reputation that +will put him well above that of the Irish-American archbishop who was +his only rival in that practice in the belief of many Irish peasants. +Other of his magazine writing Mr. Yeats has gathered into "The Celtic +Twilight" and more of it into the later edition (1900) of this book. +Still other of these articles are to be found in "Ideas of Good and +Evil" (1903), some of them stating his philosophy, never too +definitely formulated. These two collections are very interesting in +themselves, but both, like his "Discoveries" (1907), are more +interesting as commentary on his powers. Mr. Yeats has used many notes +to explain obscure allusions in his poems, though the most obscure he, +perhaps with premeditation, fails to explain. Yet the reader +unacquainted with his use of symbols will find much interpretation in +these essays, especially those in "Ideas of Good and Evil." + +Up to 1899, when Mr. Yeats's serious efforts to build up an Irish +national drama began with "The Irish Literary Theatre," he devoted his +happiest moments to lyric poetry, though the play of "The Countess +Cathleen" made half of his second volume of verse, and the third was +wholly given to the little play, "The Land of Heart's Desire." Since +1899, in which year "The Wind among the Reeds" appeared, Mr. Yeats has +published, of other than dramatic verse, only the little volume of "In +the Seven Woods," the little series on Flamel, and a few snatches, in +all about a thousand lines. Some of this verse Mr. Yeats wrote for the +psaltery, and in 1902 he was determined to write all his shorter poems +for recitation to this instrument and "all his longer poems for the +stage." + +Mr. Yeats was thirty-four when he practically gave up lyrical poetry for +dramatic poetry. From the beginning he had written plays, but they were +lyrical plays, dramatic only in form, and they were, as soon as he had +mastered the technique of verse, great lyrical poems. In the plays he +has written since he has striven at that hardest of literary tasks, to +make true dramatic speech high poetry, he has written nothing more +beautiful than "The Countess Cathleen" and "The Land of Heart's Desire." +He has rewritten and rewritten these later plays, and in almost every +rewriting made them more dramatic, but sometimes the later versions have +lost as poetry, not in the mere decorative features and "lyrical +interbreathings," but in the accent of the play and in the sheer +poetical qualities. To me it seems a pity, inevitable though it be, that +the poet who has struck the most distinctly new note of all the English +poets since Swinburne should, at thirty-four, have changed from an art +he knew to an art he did not know. That is a ripe age for a poet to +begin to learn to write in a form barely essayed before. Unlike so many +of the English poets, who as public school boys were bred up to write +verse, Mr. Yeats had to teach himself to write verse. Overcoming +triumphantly this handicap, though losing by it years usually fullest of +impulse to write, Mr. Yeats greatly attained, and for the ten years from +1889 to 1899 devoted himself to the writing of lyrics. For the past +thirteen years he has been busiest with dramas, in none of which has he +more than approximated to a dramatic quality that is as great as the +quality of his lyrics. He has owned himself one reason of such +shortcoming, in the notes to "Deirdre."[2] "The principal difficulty +with the form of dramatic literature I have adopted is that, unlike the +loose Elizabethan form, it continually forces one by its rigour of logic +away from one's capacities, experiences, and desires, until, if one have +not patience to wait for the mood, or to rewrite again and again till it +comes, there is rhetoric and logic and dry circumstance where there +should be life." + +It may be that Mr. Yeats will one day overcome the difficulties that he +alludes to here, but he is now forty-seven, and I, for one, doubt if, at +his age, he can overcome them. As they are, his plays are beautiful in +ideas and words, and striking in a lyric and decorative way, if not all +of them in a dramatic way, though in some he has in vain sacrificed +poetry to attain true dramatic speech attaining instead only "rhetoric +and logic and dry circumstance." One values the plays of Mr. Yeats +highest when one thinks of them as a new kind of drama, as a +redevelopment of epic and lyric poetry into drama, an epic and lyric +poetry illustrated by tableaux against backgrounds out of faery. Let us +not forget that there is one effect which is of "The Tempest," and +another effect which is of "Lear," and that it is after all something of +a convention to call the latter a success of drama and the former a +success of something other than drama. Yet it is just as necessary to +remember that drama does mean a definite sort of literature, and the +success of a new sort of drama, whether it be a "static" drama, as M. +Maeterlinck has called his early drama, or whether it be the kind of +drama that Mr. Yeats has created, is the success of something other than +what we conventionally term drama. It is curious that no matter how +great may be the success of an author in a form he has invented, he will +almost invariably attempt also the accepted form from which he has +diverged. Impelled by a desire to see his wife in a drama of his own but +of the old dramatic sort, M. Maeterlinck made "Monna Vanna" in accord +with the usual rules of the theatre, but to find it fall far short of +the strange new beauty of his earlier plays. As yet Mr. Yeats has not +compromised with the current taste in drama, but it may be that a desire +to see some such actress as Mrs. Patrick Campbell in a part of his may +lead to such compromise, as the thought of her acting his Deirdre +inspired him to rewrite that part for Mrs. Campbell. + +Mr. Yeats has not yet passed beyond the danger of falling between two +stools. If it prove that he has really attained in a drama in which the +verse is true dramatic speech and not lyric ecstasy or decoration, the +success of such drama will be worth the sacrifice of the lyric poetry +that he has not written because of the absorption of all of his energy +in his dramatic writing. If it prove he has not so attained, we shall +have no adequate compensation for the lost lyrics that he is now too old +to write. I say no "adequate compensation," for compensation there is in +the lyrical passages that no play of his is without, lyrical passages +that arrest us as do his poems of the nineties; but, after all, these are +but passages, not poems with unity and finality of form. + +Another question altogether, a question outside of the question of the +value as art of the writing of Mr. Yeats which is what I am considering, +is the question as to whether there would have been a dramatic movement +at all comparable to what has been, if Mr. Yeats had not devoted so +large a portion of his time to drama. I believe there would have been a +dramatic movement, but I am sure, from what I know of the other dramatic +organizations in Dublin, that they would not have amounted to much +unless some other great writer as loyal to art as Mr. Yeats had played +for them the beneficent tyrant. And other such great writers, as loyal +to art, and as devoted to drama, are far to seek in Ireland as in other +countries. It is not in Mr. Russell's nature so to act; it is not in Dr. +Hyde's plan of life to foster in others other than propagandist +literature; it is more than likely that had Mr. Martyn attempted it it +had come to the end to which he has come as playwright. Without Mr. +Yeats as moving power, Synge had not been, without Mr. Yeats to +interest her in the movement, Lady Gregory had not written her farces +and folk-histories; and without the Abbey Theatre's plays as standard, +the younger playwrights of Cork and Belfast would have written plays +very other than those they have written. + +No wonder Mr. Yeats wants to see his dreams take on bodily reality upon +the stage, and to hear beautifully spoken the words in which he has +caught them. There can be no greater pleasures than these to a writer +when he is past the imaginative intensity of youth. In youth his +imaginings are so real to him he needs no objective embodiment to see +them, and the roll and sing of their lines are always sounding to his +inner ear, but as he passes "out of a red flare of dreams," such as is +youth's, "into a common light of common hours" in middle age, his +imaginative life grows less intense and needs the satisfaction of seeing +itself concretely represented. + +Mr. Yeats leaves out of his collected poems the plays of his boyhood, +"The Island of Statues" (1885) and "Mosada" (1886). They were not of +Ireland, but the Arcady of the one and the mediæval Spain of the other +he could easily have paralleled in Irish legend, where anything +wonderful and tragic is possible. Nor is "The Countess Cathleen" +(1892-99), in its presentation of the drama of a woman that sells her +soul that the souls of her tenantry may be saved, essentially Irish. It +is curious that among English poets of Mr. Yeats's generation it should +be Mr. Kipling that has happened upon the same legend, which he adapts +to his ends in "The Sacrifice of Er-Heb." The background of "The +Countess Cathleen" in the earlier versions was not more essentially +Irish than the story. "The great castle in malevolent woods" and the +country about it is very like the part of fairyland that M. Maeterlinck +refound by following the charts of early discoverers in Arthurian +legend. In its later versions "The Countess Cathleen" is more Irish and +perhaps more dramatic, though its greatnesses, after that of atmosphere, +the great lines we may no more forget than those about "the angel +Israfel" + + + "Whose heart-strings are a lute"; + + +or about + + + "magic casements, opening on the foam + Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn"; + + +or about + + + "old, unhappy, far-off things + And battles long ago"; + + +or about hearing + + + "the far-off curfew sound + Over some wide-watered shore + Swinging slow with sullen roar," + + +were most of them in the earlier versions. There were those lines of +Maire's denouncement of the two demons and her prophecy to them:-- + + + "You shall at last dry like dry leaves, and hang + Nailed like dead vermin to the doors of God"; + + +and those wonderful lines of Cathleen dying:-- + + + "Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel: + I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes + Upon the nest under the eave, before + He wander the loud waters"; + + +and those last lines of all, great as only the greatest lines are +great,-- + + + "The years like great black oxen tread the world, + And God the herdsman goads them on behind, + And I am broken by their passing feet." + + +It was about this time, too, that Mr. Yeats wrote that most startling of +all his lines,-- + + + "And God stands winding his lonely horn", + + +and "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," that so charmed Stevenson that he had +to write its author, and say it cast over him a spell like that of his +first reading of the "Poems and Ballads" of Swinburne and the "Love in +the Valley" of Meredith. + +There is no greater lyric poetry anywhere in the writing of Mr. Yeats +than in "The Land of Heart's Desire" (1894), that little folk-play whose +constant boding and final tragedy cannot overcome, either while it is +playing or as you remember it, the sing and lilt that are in the lines. +It tells of the luring away by a fairy child of the soul of a newly +married bride on May-Eve, and of her death when her soul has passed to +the "Land of Heart's Desire"-- + + + "Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, + Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, + Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue, + And where kind tongues bring no captivity." + + +It is a story out of folk-lore, and so far back in time, and so far away +from the life that we know is it, that all that happens seems not only +possible but inevitable. + +"The Land of Heart's Desire" was the first play of Mr. Yeats to be put +on the stage, being presented at the Avenue Theatre in London in 1894; +and it was also the first play of Mr. Yeats to be put on in America, +being presented with Miss Mabel Taliaferro in the fairy's rôle as the +curtain-raiser to Mrs. Le Moyne's production of "In a Balcony," in the +spring of 1901. Fragile as is its charm, it crossed the footlights and +made itself felt as a new beauty of the theatre. It was the lyrical +interbreathings that appealed most to me, but the strife of priest and +fairy for Maire Bruin's soul was very real drama. It was the fairy's +song, however, that haunted me after I left the theatre, as it could not +but be. It haunts me still, coming into my mind whenever I think of Mr. +Yeats, as inevitably as the last lines of "The Countess Cathleen," or as +"The Lake Isle of Innisfree," or "The Valley of the Black Pig," or "The +Rose of the World," or the ecstasies of Forgael and Dectora, or the song +in "Deirdre." "The lonely of heart is withered away" is its burden, a +burden that will not out of mind. + +"The Land of Heart's Desire" has probably been most often played, +counting American performances as well as performances in Ireland and +England, being played as frequently by amateurs as by professionals in +this country, but the prose play "Cathleen ni Houlihan," because of its +national theme, has had more playings in Ireland. Its effect upon the +stage is very different from its effect in the study. Read, it seems +allegory too obvious to impress. The old woman, Cathleen ni Houlihan, +with "too many strangers in the house" and with her "four beautiful +green fields" taken from her, is so patently Ireland possessed by +England, all four provinces, that one fails to feel the deep humanity of +the sacrifices of Michael Gillane for her, his country, even though that +sacrifice be on his wedding eve. Seen and listened to, "Cathleen ni +Houlihan" brings tears to the eyes and chokes the throat with sobs, so +intimately physical is the appeal of its pathos. He is, indeed, dull of +understanding or hard of heart who can witness a performance of this +play and not feel that something noble has come his way. It seizes hold +of the Irishmen of the patriotic societies as does "The Wearing of the +Green," and even the outlander, little sympathetic to the cause of +Ireland and holding patriotism a provincial thing, is moved in some +strange way he does not understand. Performance brings out its +homeliness, its touches of humor, its wistfulness, its nobility. It is +with this thought of its nobility that every thought of "Cathleen ni +Houlihan" ends, that is every thought of it on the stage. Off the stage +it is, except to him to whom the cause is all, something that falls +short of nobility, to many little more than eloquent allegory. In the +autumn of 1904 Miss Margaret Wycherly played "The Land of Heart's +Desire" and "Cathleen ni Houlihan" a few times in America, and "The +Countess Cathleen"; and "The Hour-Glass" (1903) and "A Pot of Broth" +(1902), both plays in prose. "The Hour-Glass," a morality, was written +after "Everyman" had won Mr. Yeats, and "A Pot of Broth" was written, +perhaps, to prove that its author could do farce. + +[Illustration] + +"The Hour-Glass" is based on a story that Mr. Yeats found in Lady +Wilde's "Ancient Legends of Ireland" (1887), the story of a wise man +who is saved from eternal damnation by the faith of a child. Mr. Yeats +leaves the wise man the great scholar that he was in the old tale, a +scholar whose teaching had taken away the faith of a countryside, but he +changes the child who saved the scholar into Teig the Fool, and infuses +into the record of the frantic hour, in which the wise man knows his +life ebbing away as the sand falls, a spirit that is as reverent as the +spirit of the old religious drama. + +"A Pot of Broth" is a variant of a widely spread folk-tale in which a +beggarman tricks a provident housewife out of a meal. He pretends a +stone that he has, and which he gives her after his meal, makes good +broth, but it is her chicken that has made the broth. It is a trifle, +amusing enough, but remarkable chiefly for its difference from other +work of Mr. Yeats. There is little doubt, I take it, in the mind of any +one that it is not chiefly Lady Gregory's, as it surely is in its +wording, and in its intimacy with the details of cottage life. + +Prose also is "Diarmid and Grania," written in collaboration with Mr. +George Moore and played at the last year's performance (1901) of "The +Irish Literary Theatre." As this play as performed was in tone more like +the writings of Mr. Moore than of Mr. Yeats, I have considered it among +his plays rather than among the plays of Mr. Yeats. + +His other prose play, "Where there is Nothing" (1903), is a statement of +revolt against "the despotism of fact" that is perhaps as characteristic +of the artist as of the Celt. The world would say that its hero, Paul +Ruttledge, was mad, but no one that reads can deny him a large share of +sympathy. This play was produced by the Stage Society in London in 1904. +Lady Gregory having had a share in its creation, Mr. Yeats has since +relinquished the theme to her; and now rewritten by her alone as "The +Unicorn from the Stars," it would hardly be recognized as the same play. + +His Paul Ruttledge, gentleman, becomes her Martin Hearne, coach-builder. +Both are alike at the outset of their frenzy, in that they would be +destroyers of Church and Law, both use tinkers as their agents of +destruction, and both die despised of men. Both are "plunged in trance," +but their trances differ. That of Lady Gregory's hero is cataleptic and +directly productive of his revolt, from a revelation, as he thinks it +is, that comes to him while he is "away." Paul Ruttledge, on the other +hand, deliberately gives up his conventional life, and that as largely +because of boredom as because of belief in its wrongness. One cannot, as +one reads "Where there is Nothing," fail to see in its hero much of Mr. +Yeats himself. He is not the professional agitator, literary or social, +as was Oscar Wilde and as is Mr. Shaw, but he here delights in turning +things topsy-turvy, just as they do, in a fashion that has been +distinctive of the Irishman for many generations. Mr. Yeats is himself, +often, like his hero, "plunged in trance," if one may call trance his +"possessed dream," such as that in which "Cap and Bells" or "Cathleen ni +Houlihan" came to him. The lyric came to him, he says, as a "vision," +and so, too, the play. It is in the dedication to volumes I and II of +"Plays for an Irish Theatre," volumes containing "Where there is +Nothing," "The Hour-Glass," "Cathleen ni Houlihan," and "A Pot of +Broth," that he tells us of the latter vision, and of the beginnings of +that collaboration with Lady Gregory that taught her her art, and so +profoundly influenced his. So informing is it that I quote it in full. + + MY DEAR LADY GREGORY:-- + + I dedicate to you two volumes of plays that are in part your own. + + When I was a boy I used to wander about at Rosses Point and + Ballisodare listening to old songs and stories. I wrote down what I + heard and made poems out of the stories or put them into the little + chapters of the first edition of the "Celtic Twilight," and that is + how I began to write in the Irish way. + + Then I went to London to make my living, and though I spent a part + of every year in Ireland and tried to keep the old life in my + memory by reading every country tale I could find in books or old + newspapers, I began to forget the true countenance of country life. + The old tales were still alive for me, indeed, but with a new, + strange, half-unreal life, as if in a wizard's glass until at last, + when I had finished "The Secret Rose," and was halfway through "The + Wind among the Reeds," a wise woman in her trance told me that my + inspiration was from the moon and that I should always live close + to water, for my work was getting too full of those little jewelled + thoughts that come from the sun and have no nation. I have no need + to turn to my books of astrology to know that the common people are + under the moon, or to Porphyry to remember the image-making power + of the waters. Nor did I doubt the entire truth of what she said to + me, for my head was full of fables that I had no longer the + knowledge and emotion to write. Then you brought me with you to see + your friends in the cottages, and to talk to old wise men on Slieve + Echtge, and we gathered together, or you gathered for me, a great + number of stories and traditional beliefs. You taught me to + understand again, and much more perfectly than before, the true + countenance of country life. + + One night I had a dream, almost as distinct as a vision, of a + cottage where there was well-being and firelight and talk of a + marriage, and into the midst of that cottage there came an old + woman in a cloak. She was Ireland herself, that Cathleen ni + Houlihan for whom so many songs have been sung and about whom so + many stories have been told and for whose sake so many have gone to + their death. I thought if I could write this out as a little play I + could make others see my dream as I had seen it but I could not get + down out of that high window of dramatic verse, and in spite of all + you had done for me I had not the country speech. One has to live + among the people, like you, of whom an old man said in my hearing, + "She has been a serving-maid among us," before one can think the + thoughts of the people and speak with their tongue. We turned my + dream into the little play, "Cathleen ni Houlihan," and when we + gave it to the little theatre in Dublin and found that the + working-people liked it, you helped me to put my other dramatic + fables into speech. Some of these have already been acted, but some + may not be acted for a long time; but all seem to me, though they + were but part of a summer's work, to have more of that countenance + of country life than anything I have done since I was a boy. + +I should like also to quote in full Mr. Yeats's account of how "Where +there is Nothing" passed into "The Unicorn from the Stars," as that +account throws much light on the methods of collaboration that have +added so greatly to the success of the dramatic movement, and that are +especially valuable to beginners, whose plays, without reshaping in +collaboration, might never win their way to the boards. But I have not +the space for it all, and I must content myself with that portion of it +in which Mr. Yeats confesses that belief of his in the _rapprochement_ +of scholar and tinker that one notes so often in Irish life. Speaking +of Lady Gregory's rewriting of "Where there is Nothing" into "The +Unicorn from the Stars," he says:-- + + Her greatest difficulty was that I had given her for chief + character a man so plunged in trance that he could not be otherwise + than all but still and silent, though perhaps with the stillness + and the silence of a lamp; and the movement of the play as a whole, + if we were to listen to hear him, had to be without hurry or + violence. The strange characters, her handiwork, on whom he sheds + his light, delight me. She has enabled me to carry out an old + thought for which my own knowledge is insufficient and to commingle + the ancient phantasies of poetry with the rough, vivid, + ever-contemporaneous tumult of the roadside; to create for a moment + a form that otherwise I could but dream of, though I do that + always, an art that prophesies though with worn and failing voice + of the day when Quixote and Sancho Panza long estranged may once + again go out gaily into the bleak air. Ever since I began to write + I have awaited with impatience a linking, all Europe over, of the + hereditary knowledge of the countryside, now becoming known to us + through the work of wanderers and men of learning, with our old + lyricism so full of ancient frenzies and hereditary wisdom, a + yoking of antiquities, a marriage of Heaven and Hell. + +Interesting, however, as these plays in prose are, and significant of +their author's desire to do work in a medium that was perhaps more +immediately acceptable to the audience of the National Dramatic Society +in its then culture, there is no doubt at all that the plays in verse +are nearer his heart. They are himself, and in all of the prose plays +there is a good deal of Lady Gregory. All this time that he was +collaborating in these prose plays he was still dreaming over "The +Shadowy Waters," retouching it, rearranging it, until it became in +detail a very different play from the play that was published under that +name in 1900. Its hero and heroine, Forgael and Dectora, are much as +they were then, their fateful meeting in misty northern seas remains the +central incident, and the climax is still their choice to be left alone +in the Viking ship at the world's end; but more than half the lines are +changed. "The Shadowy Waters" was staged in 1904, and with telling +weirdness, but like many another author's best-loved and most elaborated +work, it has not made the appeal of plays less favorite to him. Mr. +Yeats has written that he has been brooding over "The Shadowy Waters" +ever since he was a boy, and he told me, when I asked him once which +writing of his he cared most for, "That I was last working at, and then +'The Shadowy Waters.'" It is too much to say that it expresses the dream +of his life, but it is not too much to say that a dream that has haunted +all his life is told here, or half told, for dream such as this eludes +complete expression. "The Shadowy Waters" is a poem so long considered, +so often returned to, so loved and elaborated and worked over, so often +dreamed and redreamed, that one would expect to find in it its author's +_credo_, if its author is one who could hold to one confession of faith. +Few authors can, few authors should, and Mr. Yeats is not one of them +that can or should. He wrote once that he would be accounted + + + "True brother of that company + That sang to lighten Ireland's wrong, + Ballad and story, rann and song,"-- + + +and Nationalist though he still is he has grown more and more +preoccupied with art. There was a time when a love of the occult +threatened his art, but from that the theatre has saved him, if it has +taken him from the writing lyrics, in which his powers are at their +highest. To old Irish legend, Mr. Yeats has, however, been true from the +start, and from the start, too, there has never been a time the two he +has not been preoccupied with dream. And if the two loves to which he +has been constant cannot be said with exactitude to be in the story of +Forgael and Dectora, because that story is not a reshaping of any one +legend out of old Irish legend, it is of the very spirit of the journeys +oversea in which that legend abounds, and it is steeped in dream. It +would be here, then, that one would look for an expression as like a +_credo_ as is possible to Mr. Yeats, and here we do find it on the lips +of Forgael, his hero, who, can we doubt? speaks also for the poet +himself:-- + + + "All would be well + Could we but give us wholly to the dreams, + And get into their world that to the sense + Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly + Among substantial things; for it is dreams + That lift us to the flowing changing world + That the heart longs for. What is love itself, + Even though it be the lightest of light love, + But dreams that hurry from beyond the world, + To make low laughter more than meat and drink, + Though it but set us sighing?" + + +"On Baile's Strand" (1903) follows very closely the story of Cuchulain's +slaying of his own son as retold Lady Gregory in her "Cuchulain of +Muirthemne" (1902). Like Rustum he does not know who is the youth he is +fighting until he has given him his death wound. Its high tragedy rends +the more by the ironic setting of Blind Man and Fool, two wastrels, one +of whom might have prevented the tragedy, but would not because the +fight would give him and his fellow a chance to rob the larders in +houses whose owners were watching it. No one can doubt the high +intention of "On Baile's Strand," no one can deny that its story is +essentially dramatic, no one can pass by certain passages without +realization that here is great verse, blank verse that is true dramatic +speech. Men remember Cuchulain's description of Aoife as men remember +Maud Gonne. + + + "Ah! Conchubar, had you seen her + With that high, laughing, turbulent head of hers + Thrown backward, and the bowstring at her ear, + Or sitting at the fire with those grave eyes + Full of good counsel as it were with wine, + Or when love ran through all the lineaments + Of her wild body." + + +One remembers these things, but if one has not seen the play on the +stage, he does not bear with him memories of beauty such as one bears +always with him from even the reading of "The Countess Cathleen" or of +"The Land of Heart's Desire." Nor is one moved by "On Baile's Strand" as +one is moved by other tellings of the same world story, as one is moved +by the epic telling of it by Matthew Arnold in "Sohrab and Rustum," or +even by such a casual telling of it as is Mr. Neil Munro's in "Black +Murdo." If it were not for "Deirdre," in fact, one would have to say +that the verse plays of Mr. Yeats after "The Shadowy Waters" grow, play +by play, less in poetic beauty, and that their gain in dramatic +effectiveness does not compensate for such a loss. + +"The King's Threshold" (1904) is as near a play with a purpose as Mr. +Yeats has written. It vindicates the right of the poet in Ireland's +Heroic Age to sit at the highest table of the King, and as it was +written and played in 1903, when its author was being accused of caring +more for his art than for his country, it looks very like a defense. +Seanchan, the poet, removed from his high seat at the request of +"Bishops, Soldiers, and Makers of the Law," takes his stand on the +King's threshold, with the intention of starving himself to death there, +as there is, as the King says,-- + + + "a custom, + An old and foolish custom, that if a man + Be wronged, or think that he is wronged and starve + Upon another's threshold till he die, + The common people, for all time to come, + Will raise a heavy cry against that threshold, + Even though it be the King's." + + +It was at this time that the clamor against "In the Shadow of the Glen" +had stirred up a great deal of feeling against Mr. Yeats and the other +managers of the Irish National Theatre Society. And Mr. Yeats, it may +be, wrote the play not only to symbolize his contention that the poet is +as important to society as is the man of action, but also to assert that +poetry cultivated for its own sake, the sake of art, is as necessary to +a nation, to Ireland, as what Ireland calls patriotism. By the way, he +illustrated the fact that that kind of patriotism that assumes the King +can do no wrong,--that is, that the Irish people can do no wrong,--and +that whoever exposes their wrongdoing is no patriot, is a mistaken sort +of patriotism. + +Late in 1906 his "Deirdre" was successfully produced at the Abbey +Theatre, Dublin. It presents only the last chapter of this, the saddest +tale of the three heart-burdening tales that are known as "The Three +Sorrows of Story-Telling," but it presents it so poignantly and with so +keen an emphasis on the quick-passing of all things sweet, that it takes +place, for all its slightness, with the world's greatest tragedies that +are tragedies because of the overthrow therein of "queens ... young and +fair." There are few Irish writers whose concern is with things Irish +who have not retold this, the greatest love story of Ireland, but none +of them, from Sir Samuel Ferguson down to our own day, have retold it so +nobly as Mr. Yeats, save only Synge, and his restatement of it, of the +whole story from Deirdre's girlhood to her death, has about it a +grandeur and triumphing beauty that make further retellings not to be +tolerated. + +It is not lines, "purple patches," one remembers from "Deirdre," but the +whole play, its every situation, its setting. That setting so +quintessentializes, in the words Mr. Yeats used to describe it, the +romance of the old haunted woods where any adventure is possible, that I +must quote it in full:-- + + A Guest-house in a wood. It is a rough house of timber; through the + doors and some of the windows one can see the great spaces of the + wood, the sky dimming, night closing in. But a window to the left + shows the thick leaves of a coppice; the landscape suggests + silence and loneliness. There is a door to right and left, and + through the side windows one can see anybody who approaches either + door, a moment before he enters. In the centre, a part of the house + is curtained off; the curtains are drawn. There are unlighted + torches in brackets on the walls There is, at one side, a small + table with a chessboard and chessmen upon it, and a wine flagon and + loaf of bread. At the other side of the room there is a brazier + with a fire; two women, with musical instruments beside them, + crouch about the brazier: they are comely women of about forty. + Another woman, who carries a stringed instrument, enters hurriedly; + she speaks, at first standing in the doorway. + +But if one does not carry in memory so many lines of "Deirdre" as one +does of the earlier less dramatic plays, there are passages in plenty +that arrest and exalt. One such is those lines of Fergus that so well +describe one phase of the imagination of Mr. Yeats-- + + + "wild thought + Fed on extravagant poetry, and lit + By such a dazzle of old fabulous tales + That common things are lost, and all that's strange + Is true because 't were pity if it were not." + + +Another such is the song of the musicians, of Queen Edain's tower, "When +the Winds are Calling There"; and another such, the crying of a woman's +heart in Deirdre's offer to go with Conchubar that Naisi may be saved:-- + + + "It's better to go with him. + Why should you die when one can bear it all? + My life is over; it's better to obey. + Why should you die? I will not live long, Naisi. + I'd not have you believe I'd long stay living; + Oh, no, no, no! You will go far away. + + "You will forget me. Speak, speak, Naisi, speak, + And say that it is better that I go. + I will not ask it. Do not speak a word, + For I will take it all upon myself. + Conchubar, I will go." + + +This is true dramatic speech, this has the accent of high tragedy, and +weakly human as it is it does not take away at all from the queenliness +of Deirdre. There are other passages that have such a tendency, however, +true though they may be to the life they depict and to human nature of +all time when in such a frenzy of fear and sorrow. Longer even than this +heart's cry, however, I think I shall remember that line so near the +opening of the play-- + + + "She put on womanhood and he lost peace." + + +Lines greater than that are far to seek in English drama. + +"The Green Helmet" (1910), a rewriting in a form of verse alien to the +stage of the earlier prose "Golden Helmet" (1908), is hardly done out of +any high intention, and although it is not wanting in a kind of strange +and grotesque fascination, it is in result no higher than it was in +intention. In fact the past five years, years much of whose time has +been spent in forwarding the work of the Abbey Theatre, have not +inspired Mr. Yeats to much work of importance. Mr. Yeats promises us +more plays, but one cannot help wishing, if he must do verses other than +lyric, he would put his hand now to a great epic. His "Wanderings of +Oisin" is nearest this, near enough, for all the preponderance of lyric +in it, to show that he could do it, were we without such lines of "large +accent" as I have quoted from "The Countess Cathleen" to prove that +beyond doubt. There is no better material for epic as yet unused than +Irish legends, but there is none the old bard developed into epic +proportions. There would be here the largest scope for the shaping power +of the poet. Mr. Yeats must, of course, have thought of epic, but +preferred drama as more in harmony with our time. Lionel Johnson said +that Mr. Yeats took to drama because he liked to hear his lines finely +spoken, but, surely, if that were his greatest delight, he could invent +some way in which to bring story in verse to listeners. It were surely a +lesser task than that of stimulating Mr. Dolmetsch to make a psaltery to +which his lyrics may be musically spoken. + +From the beginning, the verse of Mr. Yeats has had vocal quality, a +quality that is unfortunately often rarer in good poetry than in verse +that is good rhetoric. I cannot see that his interest in the psaltery, +that developed after 1900, has brought about any change in the quality +of his verse. There have been constant to it since "The Wanderings of +Oisin" all the qualities that distinguish it to-day,--its eloquence, its +symbols that open up unending vistas through mysteries, its eeriness as +of the bewildering light of late sunset over gray-green Irish bog and +lake and mountain, its lonely figures as great in their simplicity as +those of Homer, its plain statement of high passion that breaks free of +all that is occult and surprises with its clarity where so much is dim +with dream. First one and then another of these qualities has most +interested him. He has written in explanation of patriotic verse, of +folk-verse, of verse based on the old court romances, of symbolism, of +Rosicrucianism, of essences, of speaking to the psaltery, of dramatic +art; and all the time he has practiced poetry, the interest of the time +resulting in now the greater emphasis on one quality in the poetry, and +now on another quality. It would be superfluous to do more than point +out most of these qualities, but a word on his use of symbols may help +to a fuller understanding of his poetry. I am very sure that I read +wrong meanings from many of these symbols, as one who has not the +password must. They require definite knowledge of magical tradition, and +of the poet's interpretation of Celtic tradition, for a full +understanding. As the years go by, I think their exact meaning will +escape more and more readers until they will have no more significance +than Spenser's allegories have to us. Only to the student deeply read in +Elizabethan politics do these mean to-day what must have been patent to +the inner circle at Elizabeth's court. Those symbols of Mr. Yeats that +we may understand intuitively, as we may "The white owl in the belfry +sits," other generations also may understand, but hardly those that have +meanings known only to a coterie. But we may read Spenser with enjoyment +even if all the inner allegories are missed, and so, too, many read Mr. +Yeats to-day, neglectful of the images of a formal symbolism. + +I do not know that I get more enjoyment from the poetry of the verses +entitled "The Valley of the Black Pig" because Mr. Yeats's note tells us +that it is the scene of Ireland's _Götterdämmerung_, though it is an +unquestionable gratification to the puzzle interest I have with my +kind, and I would at times be more comfortable were I sure that the +"Master of the Still Stars and of the Flaming Door" was he who keeps the +gates of the Other World, the real world we shall enter when death sets +us free of that dream men call life. Mr. Yeats is not so kind to the men +"in the highway" as the old Irish bards. When they wrote enigmas they +were apt to explain them fully, as does the poet of "The Wooing of Emer" +when he tell what was meant by the cryptic questions and answers +exchanged between that princess and Cuchulain. When the symbolism is of +the kind found in "Death's Summons" of Thomas Nash, which of all poems +Mr. Yeats quotes oftenest, all cultivated men may understand-- + + + "Brightness falls from the air; + Queens have died young and fair; + Dust hath closed Helen's eye." + + +The difference between the symbol Helen and each one of the several +symbols Mr. Yeats employs in "The Valley of the Black Pig" is the +difference between a symbol universally recognized throughout the world +and a symbol recognized by one people; but there is the further +difference that one is intimately associated with the thing symbolized, +is the name of a woman the context tells us is a queen and beautiful, +and the other is only the scene of a battle that symbolizes the ending +of the world. It is more natural to use a beautiful woman as a symbol of +all beauty than to use a black boar that shall root up all the light and +life of the world as a symbol of the ending of the world. But neither of +these is a symbol that would be understood intuitively, as the rose +used as a symbol of beauty or the wind as a symbol of instability. +Sometimes Mr. Yeats's symbols are very remote, but perhaps they were +remote in the old stories in which he found them. The details in + + + "the phantom hound + All pearly white, save one red ear," + + +and "the hornless deer" which it chases, seem arbitrary. The hound, it +is true, is known of all men as the pursuer, and the deer as the +pursued; but does this knowledge suggest immediately "the desire of the +man which is for the woman, and the desire of the woman which is for the +desire of the man"? Mr. Yeats does not, as I take it, expect all his +symbols to be understood so definitely as this hound and deer, which, of +course, are not only symbols, but figures from the tapestry of +fairyland. It is often enough, perhaps, that we understand emotionally, +as in "Kubla Khan" or "The Owl." From some of his writing it would +appear he believed many symbols to be of very definite meaning and to be +understood by generation upon generation. In the note to "The Valley of +the Black Pig" he writes, "Once a symbol has possessed the imagination +of large numbers of men, it becomes, as I believe, an embodiment of +disembodied powers, and repeats itself in dreams and visions, age after +age." + +This is but another phase of Mr. Yeats's belief that when a poem stirs +us as by magic, it is a real magic has been at work. The words have +loosened the seals that the flesh has fastened upon the universal memory +which is subconscious in all of us, until that memory possesses us and +we are one with all that has been since the beginning of time, and may +in such moments live over all that has been lived. He thinks that in +such moments the poet's magic brings before us the past and the unseen +as the past and the unseen were brought before our pagan ancestors by +the magical rites of their priests. + +In his younger years Mr. Yeats held that poetry is "the words that have +gathered up the heart's desire of the world." His heart's desire was +simpler in those days than his heart's desire of after years. Then he +had a child's wistfulness for little things and put lines in his poems +of Blake-like innocence and freshness. "The brown mice" that + + + "bob + Round and round the oatmeal chest" + + +are out of memories of childhood, and many other of the similes of these +early poems are out of the ways of wild little things that appeal so to +children, perhaps because they are wild little things themselves. A +later mood of Mr. Yeats is to hold of less account the things of +out-of-doors, but still he uses as similes the ways of birds, as did the +old Irish bards whose stories have so informed his. He never did +describe nature for its own sake, but natural things gave him more +figures than they do now, although always there have been in his lines +many out of mythology. Summer days between Slieve Echtge and the western +sea are, however, bringing the plovers and curlews and peewits back to +his poetry. In the country of the Countess Cathleen, as everywhere in +Ireland, you may hear "wind cry and water cry and curlew cry," and +there, as all the world over,-- + + + "Ill bodings are as native unto our hearts + As are their spots unto the woodpeckers." + + +It is from such knowledge of country things come the fine lines about + + + "The dark folk, who live in souls + Of passionate men like bats in the dead trees";-- + + +and such lines are coming again into his verse, even into the blank +verse of his plays. The poems in which "the strong human call" is heard +are more than the many who read Mr. Yeats hurriedly will think, and to +those who know his story they reveal again and again a great and common +sorrow. Whole poems and plays are often symbols of the poet's life. So +may "The Countess Cathleen" be taken as well as "The King's Threshold." +"Ephemera," "The Dedication to a Book of Stories," "In the Seven Woods," +"The Old Age of Queen Maeve," "The Folly of Being Comforted," "Old +Memory," "Adam's Curse," as well as the folk-poems of the first volumes, +are but little "dream-burdened," and passages elsewhere have the human +call. The feeling of Oisin nearing the coast of Ireland is, for +instance, the common joy on nearing the shore of the homeland at the end +of exile:-- + + + "Remembrance, lifting her leanness, keened in the gates of my heart. + Till, fattening the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hay + Came, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down; + later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a shore far away, + From the great grass-barnacle calling, and later the shore-weeds brown." + + +It is true, though, that the dream-drenched poems are those most +characteristic of the author, those that give a note entirely new to +English poetry. It is impossible to pick out one as more representative +than another where so many are representative and where all are of +highest achievement. Nowhere is his own individual note better +sustained, however, than in the Michael Robartes poems or in "The Rose +of Battle" or "Into the Twilight"; and the hold that dream has of him +and the hold that human things have, chief among them love of country, +are told with utmost distinction and inevitability of phrase in "To +Ireland in the Coming Times" and in "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time." + +I sometimes wonder, is the reason for the poet's holding so devotedly to +spiritual things of his kind not the very same holding of his peasant +countryman to the folk-tales that take him to a world as rich and +gorgeous-hued as the Ireland about him is bare and gray, and to a church +that prepares him for a better world after death? A large part of all +poetry is the realization of the brevity of all beautiful things,--of +bloom, of youth, of life; but no poet has more often lamented "Fate and +Time and Change" than Mr. Yeats. It is, he says, "our narrow rooms, our +short lives, our soon ended passions and emotions put us out of conceit +with sooty and feeble reality." So the poet seeks refuge in his own +dream and in contemplation of the life from which he came and to which +he will return, and--one almost dare say--in communication with which he +now knows such joy. The poet's life is little because he has found out +the littleness of earthly things; the peasant holds life little because +his share of it has been so poor. If the peasant acquires riches by +chance or by emigration, he sees as the poet that all he can have is as +nothing, so short is the time he may hold it. Irish writers of the past +have made this peasant only the jarvey wit; but if you read the old +romances, or listen to the folk-tales still alive, you will learn that +Mr. Yeats is at one with his countryman in this basic likeness. + +There is a side of Irish life, the side the world knows best, that Mr. +Yeats does not present, but that which he does present is true, though +the poet's personality is so dominant that we get more of this than of +Ireland in his poetry. So it should be, so it is with every artist. All +the world can ask of him is his interpretation of what he knows. Yet so +native is Mr. Yeats that the atmosphere of his poetry is the very +atmosphere of Ireland. The artist and the setting of his art are in an +unwonted harmony. No reader of Mr. Yeats who knows the brooding +landscape of West Ireland can escape that realization, but only he who +has met the poet amid the scenes that inspired his verse may know how +complete is their accord. Such a meeting was mine one lowering August +day, in whose late afternoon we walked in the Woods of Coole. Then I +knew at last what Mr. Yeats meant by "druid charm" and "druid light." I +felt the "druid charm" that was potent in gray skies over gray water and +gray rock and gray-green woods; the bewildering "druid light" flashed +out as the sun followed westward the trail to Hy Brasil, leaving in the +Atlantic skies wild after-glow of winter yellow. + +FOOTNOTES: + +[2] _Collected Works_. Stratford-on-Avon, 1908, vol. II, p. 251. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +MR. EDWARD MARTYN AND MR. GEORGE MOORE + + +The announcement of Mr. Edward Martyn as playwright of "The Irish +Literary Theatre" was, outside of the narrow circle of his friends, a +great surprise to all interested in letters in Ireland. But the almost +simultaneous announcement that Mr. George Moore was lending his aid to +the adventure was an even greater surprise. Mr. Moore had, of course, +written more than once of Ireland, and there were many who had not +forgotten the unpleasantnesses of "A Drama in Muslin" (1886), and Mr. +Martyn, though the author of "Morgante the Lesser" (1890), was not known +as its author, as he had published it anonymously, and as it had not +made enough of a stir for its anonymity to be disclosed. Yet for the +landlord-author, who had turned his back on Ireland, to return to his +country with a greater interest in its life and its writers than he had +ever betrayed, was more remarkable than for another landlord of the same +family connection, comparatively a stay-at-home landlord, to turn from +sport and religion to the stage. Mr. Martyn had lived in London and his +love of music had taken him to the Continent, but he had been something +of a Nationalist, whereas Mr. Moore had lost few opportunities to scoff +at the country his father had striven so unselfishly to aid. What of Mr. +Moore that was not French in 1899 was confessedly English. + +[Illustration] + +Now that those interested have read "Ave," the first volume of the three +of "Hail and Farewell," in which Mr. Moore is confessing the reasons of +his return to Ireland and of his second departure from Ireland, they +know that he had been mildly interested in Ireland as material for art +as far back as 1894, and that it was Mr. Martyn who had interested him +in the things of home. Mr. Moore tells us all about it more than +explicitly in the "Overture" to his trilogy. In the first chapter he +tells us that the interest faded away gradually, to be reawakened in +1899 by a visit paid him in London by Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats, who came +to ask his help in founding a "Literary Theatre in Dublin." Then Mr. +Moore learned the story of that theatre's inception, a story to him +"disappointingly short and simple. When Yeats had said that he had spent +the summer at Coole with Lady Gregory, I saw it all. Coole is but three +miles from Tillyra [Mr. Martyn's estate in Galway]; Edward is often at +Coole; Lady Gregory and Yeats are often at Tillyra; Yeats and Edward had +written plays--the drama brings strange fowls to roost." + +It takes Mr. Moore many pages to tell why it was he joined the three in +their project, and many more pages to tell of their collaboration during +the first two years of the three years that were the life of "The Irish +Literary Theatre." The four are, indeed, the principal characters of Mr. +Moore's "Ave"--I had almost said his novel "Ave"--himself, Mr. Martyn, +Mr. Yeats, and Lady Gregory, to mention them in the order of prominence +that Mr. Moore gives them. + +Lady Gregory and Mr. Yeats have learned their art, the highest and most +difficult of all forms of literary art, so that each is sure in the +shaping of fable and emotion to the stage, though neither is to drama +native-born as was Synge. Mr. Martyn and Mr. Moore have neither of them, +however, learned the art of the playwright. Mr. Martyn has the root of +the matter in him, but he remains the amateur. Mr. Moore was once the +amateur, even in the novel, in "A Modern Lover" (1883), for instance, +true as that story is to the London art life and aristocratic life it is +intended to reflect, but he has since then won his way, book by book, to +the position, now that Mr. Hardy has given up the novel, of first +novelist of the English-speaking peoples. Had he studied the play as +painfully and as long as he has studied the novel, it may be that Mr. +Moore had conquered it, too, though I doubt it, for the concentration +necessary to drama is alien to his method as a novelist. As it is, his +best plays are but the good journeyman work of one who is a skilled +literary craftsman. Mr. Martyn has more originality of theme, more +intimacy with Irish character, a surer instinct for effective situation, +and more nobility of intention, though Mr. Moore's greater power over +words gives his plays a dignity as art that the plays of Mr. Martyn do +not attain. + +Alone of the quartette that founded "The Irish Literary Theatre," Mr. +Martyn is possessed of none of the instincts of the publicist. Lady +Gregory has edited articles about ideals in Ireland at home, and on the +lecture platform she has stoutly fought the battles of "The Playboy of +the Western World" in America; Mr. Yeats has ever delighted in writing +letters to the newspapers and he has preached the evangel of the +Renaissance from Edinburgh to San Francisco; and Mr. George Moore is a +controversialist pamphleteer even before he is a novelist. In the few +articles about the movement that Mr. Martyn has written, brief articles +all of them, there is, however, clear indication of the spirit in which +he wrote his plays, if comparatively little discussion of his art. In +the second number of "Beltaine" (February, 1900), in an article entitled +"A Comparison between Irish and English Theatrical Audiences," Mr. +Martyn declares that he sees in Ireland, instead of the "vast +cosmopolitanism and vulgarity" of England, "an idealism founded upon the +ancient genius of the land." It is wholly in accord with the spirit of +this declaration that Mr. Martyn has written his more important plays, +all of them, in fact, but the satires on weaklings and officials he +calls "A Tale of a Town" (1902) and "The Place Hunters" (1905). He +writes little of the peasants, being less interested in them than are +Mr. Yeats and Lady Gregory, and therefore less acquainted with them. If +one may judge from his writings the intimates of Mr. Martyn have been +among his own landlord class, the priests, and the politicians. It is +the landlords and middle-class people that occupy the foreground of his +plays, Peg Inerny in "Maeve" (1899) being the only important character a +peasant, unless Mrs. Font in "The Enchanted Sea" (1902) can be called a +member of a class that she was born to, but from which her marriage +removed her. + +This question of the class the plays should present was one of those +that led to the withdrawal of Mr. Martyn from the dramatic movement. A +more definite cause, perhaps, was the unanimous determination of Lady +Gregory, Mr. Yeats, and Mr. Moore that his "A Tale of a Town" could not +be presented by "The Irish Literary Theatre" as he wrote it if the +standards of that theatre were to be preserved. Its author's magnanimity +in turning it over to Mr. Moore to be rewritten,--as it was, being +presented as "The Bending of the Bough" (1900),--was revealed by Mr. +Moore in "Samhain" (October, 1901), and very much more fully, if less +kindly, in "Ave" (1911). + +In its way their refusal to play Mr. Martyn's "A Tale of a Town" was as +creditable to the other powers in the theatre as was his magnanimity in +giving them the play to do with as they would. They knew their refusal +to play it might lead him to withdraw his support of the theatre and, in +the end, it was a factor in bringing about that result. After their +rejection of "A Tale of a Town," however, he still gave "The Irish +Literary Theatre" his support, allowing it to put on his "Maeve," and in +1901 contributing to "Samhain" (October), "A Plea for a National Theatre +in Ireland." Such a theatre Mr. Martyn had the power to give Ireland, +but he did not give it, when it was thought he might, and in 1902 all +hope of his giving his money for such a purpose was destroyed by his +transference of a fund of fifty thousand dollars to the Catholic +Pro-Cathedral in Dublin "for the purpose of founding and supporting a +Palestrina choir." + +That Mr. Martyn was still a force to be reckoned with is revealed by the +trouble Mr. Yeats went to, in "Samhain" of October, 1902, to explain why +it was that the plays of the Irish National Dramatic Company were either +folk-drama or drama whose life was the "life of poetry" Mr. Martyn had +argued in "The United Irishmen," which up to the time of the +presentation of "In the Shadow of the Glen" was a stanch supporter of +the dramatic policies of Mr. Yeats, that the actors of the company +should be trained to the drama of modern society. "The acting of plays +like 'Deirdre,' and of 'Cathleen ni Houlihan,'" writes Mr. Yeats, "with +its speech of the country people, did not seem to him a preparation. It +is not, but that is as it should be. Our movement is a return to the +people, like the Russian movement of the early seventies, and the drama +of society could but magnify a condition of life which the countryman +and the artisan could but copy to their hurt. The play that is to give +them a quite natural pleasure should either tell them of their own life +or of that life of poetry where every man can see his own image, because +there alone does human nature escape from arbitrary conditions. Plays +about drawing-rooms are written for the middle classes of great cities, +for the classes who live in drawing-rooms, but if you would uplift the +man of the roads you must write about the roads, or about the people of +romance, or about great historical people." + +Neither "Maeve" nor "The Enchanted Sea" can be called a drawing-room +play, though both introduce us to "drawing-room people," but "The +Heather Field" (1899), Mr. Martyn's first play, and his greatest success +is a drawing-room play, as in a minor way are "A Tale of a Town" and +"The Place Hunters." These last two plays are failures; but they are not +failures, I think because they are drawing-room plays, but because Mr. +Martyn is less effective with a full stage than with two couples or so +and, principally, because he is less successful with social and +political questions than with those that concern the individual. + +Whatever value one puts upon "The Heather Field" it cannot be denied +that it was a popular success and that it was praised by critics whose +judgment is discerning. It is perhaps because it is a variant of the old +theme of the war between man the idealist and woman the materialist that +it so appealed to young men, troubled themselves as to whether to follow +their star or to accept the chains that; wife and children impose. It +was enough for the audience that witnessed its first performances in the +Antient Concert Rooms, Dublin, May 9, 10, 13, 1899, that it showed a man +at war with the despotism of fact, as Ireland, preeminently the Celtic +Land, has so long been. It was not remarkably acted, by an +insufficiently rehearsed and not very understanding scratch company, and +yet it impressed its audiences more favorably than "The Countess +Cathleen" (1892), an unequivocally great poetic drama; and these +audiences were the most cultivated Dublin can boast. + +"The Heather Field" is the story of the going-mad of Carden Tyrrell, a +landlord of the west of Ireland. From the first he is represented to us +as a man to whom as to so many of his countrymen dream is reality and +reality dream. His wife, to whom the realities are very instant, urges +him to do as others do, to entertain, to hunt, at least to do something +practical. For her he has abandoned the ideal world he had built up for +himself from his books and his dreams and is trying farming. Yet his +temperament is such that he must idealize even this. When the curtain +rises he is still busy with the project, long since undertaken, of +reclaiming a wind-swept heather field fronting the Atlantic and of +making it into the best of pasture land. That reclamation and +transformation has become a passion with him, and soon we feel that it +is the symbol of that quality in him that is untamed, incurably "ideal." +To free that field of rocks and to drain its bogs he has mortgaged his +estate, and, in the play, before the success or failure of his +undertaking is proved, he mortgages almost all that remains to him to +improve the land below, which the draining of the heather field has +turned into a swamp. His wife, to prevent this last folly, strives to +have control of his property taken away from him, but his friend, Barry +Ussher, believing that restraint would make Tyrrell mad indeed, so +intimidates a hesitating physician that Mrs. Tyrrell fails in her most +natural plan to save herself and her child from ruin by having her +husband declared incompetent, and, if necessary, restrained. With his +friend's assistance Tyrrell has won his fight against his wife. +Obstinacy in the treatment of some tenants that his debts have driven +him to evict rouses such hatred against Tyrrell, until then a loved +landlord, that the police hold it necessary to follow him with an escort +that he may not be shot by his people. To avoid being so followed, +Tyrrell keeps within doors and so intensifies his malady. The +catastrophe comes when, on his boy's first spring search for wild +flowers, the child brings him a handful of heather buds from the heather +field. Their message is that the mountain will revert to waste again. +Even in his "ideal domain" reality has asserted itself. His ideal world +crumbles for the instant, and his reason with it, and forever. But after +a moment's agony ideality triumphantly reasserts itself, and in mad +ecstasy Tyrrell, his years fallen from him, passes from sight crying out +at the beauty of a world that is to him now forever a world of mornings +in which, as he says, "the rain across a saffron sun trembles like gold +harpstrings through the purple Irish spring.... The voices--I hear them +now triumphant in a silver glory of song!" Such is the play, "aching and +lofty in its loveliness." + +Is this ending, or is it not, sadder than the catastrophe of "Ghosts"? +Certainly to "Ghosts" it owes something, and to "The Wild Duck" more +than something. A quality as of Ibsen pervades the play, and it has, +too, back of it a background of nature and of thought that is beautiful +in the way the background of nature and of thought is beautiful and +compensating in the plays of Ibsen. + +In his introduction to "The Heather Field," which was published before +its presentation, Mr. Moore writes, "Although all right and good sense +are on the wife's side, the sympathy is always with Carden." So it was +on the presentation of the play in Dublin, Mr. Yeats writing in "The +Dome," "Our Irish playgoers sympathized with this man so perfectly that +they hissed the doctors who found that he was mad." Such an attitude is +characteristically Irish; and equally characteristically English was the +reception of this play when Mr. Thomas Kingston presented it at a +matinee at the Strand Theatre in London. Mr. Yeats is again the +authority: "The London playgoers ... sympathized with the doctors, and +held the divine vision a dream." Mr. Moore praises "The Heather Field" +more forthrightly in "Samhain" of October, 1901, holding that "'The +Heather Field' has been admitted to be the most thoughtful of modern +prose plays written in English, the best constructed, the most endurable +to a thoughtful audience." Patriotism or kinship, love of paradox or +desire to assuage feelings hurt by the rough treatment of "A Tale of a +Town," may any or all of them be called upon to explain so sweeping a +statement. But none of such motives could account for its praise by Mr. +Beerbohm in the London "Saturday Review." "Max" is often paradoxical, +but he is not paradoxical here: "Not long ago this play was published as +a book, with a preface by Mr. George Moore, and it was more or less +vehemently disparaged by the critics. Knowing that it was to be produced +later in Dublin, and knowing how hard it is to dogmatize about a play +until one has seen it acted, I confined myself to a very mild +disparagement of it. Now that I have seen it acted, I am sorry that I +disparaged it at all. It turns out to be a very powerful play indeed." I +have quoted Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore and Mr. Beerbohm, not only because +I have not seen the play on the stage but because, on reading it, its +effect is one that puts my judgment at sea. Years ago as I read it it +gripped me hard, but when I read it now and think it over now, I am at a +loss to see why, done as it is done, I should have been so moved by it. +Now I am moved greatly by but two situations. Both of these are in the +last act. One of them is Tyrrell's revulsion against the bad news that +his brother Miles brings from Dublin of the mortgagee's refusal to +extend. His wife tells their friends that she is ruined, that "pretty +nearly all" their property is mortgaged, but Tyrrell cries out, "All, do +you say? No--not all. This vulture cannot touch the heather field! My +hope,--it is my only hope, and it will save me in the end. Ha, ha! These +wise ones! They did not think the barren mountain of those days worth +naming in their deed. But now that mountain is a great green field worth +more than all they can seize, (_with a strange intensity_) and it is +mine--all mine!" + +The other situation that moves me greatly is that at the very close of +the play, that from which I quoted a while back, in which Tyrrell's +madness becomes evident in his belief that he is a youth again, with all +the world before him to do with as he will. + +The characters in "The Heather Field" are less rigid than those in the +later plays, but even in this play you feel about them, as you feel so +often about the characters of Hawthorne, that they are characters chosen +to interpret an idea rather than children of the imagination or +portraits done from observation of life. + +As one recalls the motive and situations and background and symbolism +of "The Heather Field," not having read the play for some time, it seems +far finer than when one returns to it. Fine, too, it must seem to any +one reading a scenario of it and not offended, as one reading it +constantly is by the inability of its dialogue to represent more of the +person speaking than his point of view. The dialogue of Mr. Martyn is +almost never true dramatic speech, and not only not true dramatic +speech, but despite the very clear differentiation of the characters, +with little of their personality or temperament in it. + +"Maeve" has always seemed to me a lesser play than "The Heather Field," +and it now leaves me even colder than of old. Nor, though I can see how +fine in conception was the character of Mrs. Font in "The Enchanted +Sea," does that one character seem to me, now, to redeem the undeveloped +possibilities of the situations of the play, the incomplete characters +of Guy and Mask and the failure of the dialogue assigned to the +characters to approach true dramatic speech. "Maeve" is the better play +of the two. With all its shortcomings it has about it an unearthliness +of atmosphere, a quiet coldness of beauty that has come of the thought +Mr. Martyn had, as he wrote it, of the moonlight on the Burren Hills in +his home country. In this one respect Mr. Martyn has done what he would, +for he holds that "the greatest beauty like the old Greek sculptures is +always cold." + +Mr. Martyn calls "Maeve" "a psychological drama in two acts." It relates +the story of the last day and night in the life of a visionary girl, the +hereditary princess of Burren in Clare, in the west of Ireland. On the +eve of her marriage to Hugh Fitz Walter, a rich young Englishman, whom +she will wed only for her father's sake to reestablish him in his +position as "The O'Heynes" among the neighboring gentry, she wanders off +into the Burren Hills with her old nurse Peg Inerny. Peg has fascinated +Maeve O'Heynes with tales of "the other people," convincing Maeve, as +she is convinced herself, that she changes from the old vagrant peasant +whom the countryside half fears into Queen Maeve, the great Amazon of +the Cuchulain legends. Maeve O'Heynes in her own dreams has seen great +heroes and heroines of Ireland's legendary past, and she believes that +they still live among the fairies as many a peasant to-day beside Peg +Inerny believes. So Maeve follows Peg to the mountains, though it is her +wedding-eve, to see these great people of old time and to meet a lover +she has seen in vision, the ideal man of her dreams. She finds her way +home several hours later through the white moonlight of the bitter March +night. Then, in a sort of trance, looking out of her window in the +half-ruined castle to the ruined abbey, the mysterious round tower, the +stony mountains, she beholds the vision of Queen Maeve, with an +attendant troupe of harpers and pages, rise from the cairn and approach +the castle. As the troupe returns from castle to cairn Maeve's spirit +passes with it under the Northern lights into the land of the ever-young +of Tir-nan-Ogue. When her sister goes to call her to make ready for her +wedding, she finds Maeve sitting still and cold at the open casement. +Maeve has found the supernatural lover, once human, of "boyish face +closehooded with short gold hair," and again only "a symbol of ideal +beauty," to be truly a "Prince of the hoar dew," for he is death. Maeve +has renounced life and sought "perfection in what unfolds as death." + +Mr. Yeats explains the play ("Beltaine," February, 1900) to "symbolize +Ireland's choice between English materialism and her own natural +idealism, as well as the choice of every individual soul." Does it +follow that the lesson of "Maeve" is that it were better for Ireland to +be depopulated in her pursuit of national individuality, of ideal +beauty, than to drift along to complete Anglicanization, even though +that bring riches, peace, and content? An austere policy, surely, if I +read rightly the meaning of Mr. Yeats. + +"Maeve" was not so well played at its production during the second +season's performances of "The Irish Literary Theatre" in February, 1900, +as "The Heather Field" had been performed in 1899, but it was almost as +enthusiastically received. It has not won for itself, however, +reproduction outside of Dublin, as did Mr. Martyn's first play, which +was played in New York, at the Carnegie Lyceum, in April, 1900, and +which was revived in London in 1903. + +If objection be made to "The Enchanted Sea" as a reflection of "The Lady +from the Sea," it can be replied that the call of the sea that may not +be resisted is as old as the heart of man. Sea fairies, mermaids and +mermen, and the voice of the waters tugging as irresistibly on the tired +spirit as the undertow on the body tired with long swimming, are in +Gaelic literature from the beginning, and before Mr. Martyn had written +of the sea enchantment it had lent its charm to many of the stories of +"Fiona Macleod." It was two years after its publication in 1902 that, on +April 18 and 19, 1904, "The Enchanted Sea" was put on at the Antient +Concert Rooms, Dublin by "The Players' Club." It was not well played, +but according to Mr. Standish James O'Grady it was much better, seen and +listened to, than read. Writing, in his "All Ireland Review," of its +production, he puts it on record "I never saw an audience so attentive +and at the same time so undemonstrative. It was like being in church." +The audience probably felt the dignity of conception back of the +insufficiency of execution in the play and its ineffectiveness of +presentation. The story that Mr. Martyn dreamed to carry over the +footlights is of Mrs. Font, a peasant woman who has sent her husband, a +gentleman, to his grave a broken-spirited man because of her sacrifice +of his honor to advance their material position. When the curtain rises, +Mrs. Font has been thwarted, by the death of her son, in her lifelong +dream of obtaining possession of the Font estates. The estates have +reverted to her nephew, Guy Font, a strange boy, who has been brought up +by the peasantry of the west coast and so has come to share many of +their beliefs. He is fascinated by the sea by which he lives, and his +family's friend, Lord Mask, has been drawn to him, although there is +such disparity in their years, by this love of the sea which he and the +boy have in common. Mrs. Font wishes her daughter to marry Mask, but the +young people are but half in love with each other. Agnes Font cannot +share his visionariness, as her other lover, Commander Lyle, plainly +sees. So the North of Ireland man never gives up hope of winning her. +Mrs. Font vulgarly throws Mask and Agnes together, in her determination +that they shall make a match of it, and as vulgarly tells Lyle the girl +is not for him. Mask cannot but marry Agnes, Mrs. Font thinks, if Agnes +has a large fortune. To secure the fortune and the lord for her +daughter, Mrs. Font determines to get Guy Font out of the way. Her +purpose coincides with her peasant belief that he is a "changeling," and +is really of the sea people. So she goes with him to a sea cave he is +fond of visiting, and only she comes from the cave. She is suspected, +but before the officers come for her, she learns that her crime has +defeated its own end. Mask is driven mad by the loss of his friend and, +seeking to join him by the sea, is overwhelmed and drawn out by the +undertow. As the officers come to arrest her, Mrs. Font hangs herself +from the landing of the great staircase of Font Hill with the rope Guy +used there as a swing. + +"The Enchanted Sea" is cruder, colder, more amateurish than the two +other plays of its class, full of the sort of talk that falls from the +lips of a boy of seventeen just awakened to ideals. Its characters act +as openly and as petulantly as children. Mrs. Font, really fine in +conception, is in realization only a typical villain of the cheap +melodrama; and Commander Lyle, of the Royal Navy, a man of thirty, is as +childish in love as a schoolboy whose beloved takes an ice from his +rival at a church festival. + +What Mr. Martyn could have done with "A Tale of a Town," had he been +willing to learn when opportunity was his with Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore +and Lady Gregory, is partially shown in the rewriting of the play by Mr. +Moore into "The Bending of the Bough." The motives remain as they were, +and, in essentials, the action is the same, the first act being little +different in the two plays The four other acts, however, Mr. Moore has +almost entirely rewritten, and though everywhere the fundamental +brainwork is Mr. Martyn's, the last acts are finer in the revised +version. Mr. Moore makes far more plausible the girl, Millicent Fell, +for love of whom, and a life of ease, the political leader Jasper Dean +gives up a leadership through which he could largely right his country's +wrongs. Not only does Mr. Moore make believable the action of the play, +but he puts words on it, which, if not true dramatic speech, reveal, +after the manner of the novelist, just what are the thought and emotion +of the characters, and the words are in themselves beautiful. + +In "A Tale of a Town" the political situation from which evolves the +action of the play is the unification by Jasper Dean of the corporation +of a town, unnamed, on the west coast of Ireland, to prosecute a lawsuit +against an English town, Anglebury, which owes the Irish town a large +indemnity, promised the Irish town when it gave up a line of steamers in +the interest of the Anglebury line of steamers. After uniting all the +various elements save the place hunter Alderman Lawrence against +Anglebury, Dean gives up the leadership because his fiancée, whose uncle +is the mayor of the English town, turns against him because he is +opposed to the interests of her set. To hold her he betrays his town. + +"A Tale of a Town" is so crude, so naked, so obvious, so uninspired, +one wonders why it can be taken seriously at all. But the reason is not +far to seek. The play is true, in the main, to the life it depicts, and +there is vehement feeling back of its satire; and truth and intensity of +feeling cannot be denied effect on the stage any more than on the +rostrum. Where it falls short of reality is in the dialogue of the +aldermen. No politicians, even when egged by their envious womankind, +would ever give themselves away as do these of "A Tale of a Town." They +are as frankly self-revelatory as if they were characters in a morality +play. + +It would, perhaps, be inexact to call Mr. Martyn a misogynist, but he +has that attitude toward women of some priests his countrymen, as of +many priests of all creeds, that there is something belittling if not +degrading in absorbing association with women. His feeling is not at all +the commoner feeling of men that leads them all to cry, "The woman +tempted me." Women tempt Mr. Martyn no more than they did Ruskin, but he +seems to feel that the majority of them are nuisances if not baggages. +So strong is this feeling in "A Tale of a Town" that it leads him to +make Millicent behave in a way no Jasper Dean in real life would ever +stand, for Jasper Dean is not a man pronouncedly uxorious until his +abject surrender at the end of Act IV. + +There are almost as many indictments of women as there are of England in +the plays of Mr. Martyn: Mrs. Tyrrell in "The Heather Field" and Mrs. +Font in "The Enchanted Sea," as well as all of the women in "A Tale of +a Town" save Miss Arabella Dean. In "Maeve," the heroine and Finola are +sympathetically presented, and there is a kind of attraction as well as +decided repulsion in Peg Inerny. But such sympathy as Mr. Martyn does +express here seems to be expressed not because the women are fellow +human beings, but because Maeve and Peg Inerny symbolize Ireland's +resistance to English ways and because Finola is filled with +loving-kindness for Maeve. Agnes Font in "The Enchanted Sea" escapes the +pillory rather inexplicably, for she is poor, weak girlhood unable to +understand the other-worldly idealism of her cousin and Lord Mask. But +since Mrs. Font was altogether repulsive and the men either too dreamy +for "common nature's daily food" or too hard in the way of the Black +North, Mr. Martyn felt, I suppose, that his hearers would be utterly +alienated were there not some one in the play sympathetic in the +ordinary way of human nature. + +"A Tale of a Town" was put on for the first time at Molesworth Hall, +Dublin, late in October of 1905, by Cumann nan Gaedheal, not very +notably, but it was hailed by the Irish Ireland newspapers as admirable +propagandist material, "The United Irishmen" declaring that "an Irish +play which brings home to us, as this does, the secret of the endurance +of foreign government in this country, is a national asset." + +Mr. Martyn has not cared enough for "The Place Hunters" (1905) to +publish it in book form, contenting himself with its printing in a +little periodical. It is, as its title indicates, a fellow of "A Tale of +a Town," but it has not back of it intensity of feeling enough to lift +itself out of farce. + +Between "The Place Hunters" and "Grangecolman" is an interval of seven +years, but it is the Mr. Martyn of earlier plays, still faithful to +Ibsen and still of a dialogue more formal than that of life, that we +find in this play of his middle age. As you read "Grangecolman" you +think of "Rosmersholm," as you thought of "The Wild Duck" when you read +"The Heather Field." "Grangecolman" is the story of a daughter's +frustration of her elderly father's intention to marry his young +amanuensis, by playing the rôle of the family ghost, long fabled but +never seen, and being shot by the girl she feels is driving her out of +her home. Katherine Devlin is another creature of her maker's misogyny. +She is a bitter, barren woman of suffragette type, whose marriage and +career as a doctor have been alike failures, and who has alienated +herself from all, even her mild father, by her selfishness and +discontent. It is she who has brought Miss Clare Farquhar into her +father's home to render him those services in his pursuit of heraldry +and genealogy that were irksome to her, and so she herself is +responsible for his dependence on his secretary, which, when once the +daughter recognizes it, threatens annihilation of what little pleasure +she has in her life. Her husband is a dreamy sort of man, slack-fibred +and pottering, who goes about waving the banner of the ideal and +refusing to work. The fifth character of the play is the butler, Horan. +All are clearly characterized, but if the dialogue is less stiff than +that of the earlier plays, it is little more distinctive of the people +who speak it, and in the latter part of the play labored and stodgy. +"Grangecolman" is a picture of life as we all know it, and there is in +it a fidelity of purpose that gives it a kind of effectiveness. There is +not in it, however, any keenness of vision, any deep reading of life, +any great underlying emotion, to relieve its abject sordidness. There is +no gusto, no beauty, no intensity of bitterness even, to make its +sordidness interesting in any other than a pathological way. + +As one reads "Hail and Farewell," one might readily come to believe that +Mr. Martyn is only an eccentric character, "gotten up" by Mr. Moore for +a novel. Mr. Martyn is, in reality, a very vital force working for the +nationalization of Irish art, if not an artist himself. The pity is that +he is not wholly an artist, for he might have been. He knows and is +interested in classes of Irish society that the dramatists of the Abbey +Theatre have not tried to depict, and had he realized twelve years ago +what a chance was his to learn the art of the stage, with the help and +collaboration of Mr. Moore, Mr. Yeats, and Lady Gregory, he might now be +what he seemed to be after the triumphant production of "The Heather +Field," the Irish playwright who had adapted the modes of Ibsen to the +presentation of the life of Irish landlords and bourgeois politicians. + +But Mr. Martyn would not realize that ideas--and he is rich in +ideas--constitute the larger part of originality; he thought technique +in drama must come from the man himself, too. Such technique, of course, +comes most often from the study of other drama. Certainly it was an +original possession of none of the dramatists of the Celtic Renaissance, +and Mr. Martyn might have been content to be a fellow learner, along +with the rest of them, from one another, and from all the great +dramatists of the world. It may be that Mr. Martyn never would have +attained style, but he could, I think, have learned to make his +characters express themselves in a way nearer to true dramatic speech +than the lifeless dialogue of his that only just manages to give you +their thought, with none of their mood of the moment or of their +personality. + +In every one of Mr. Martyn's plays the plot is interesting, save in "The +Place Hunters"; in every other play it is significant; and in all it is +come largely of his individual experience of life. Back of all the plays +but these two political satires there is brooding that is deep if not +passionate. In all the characters are natural, though some of them are +unusual in the way of the unusual characters of Ibsen. And all the plays +are marred, "The Heather Field" less than any other, by the fumbling +touch of the amateur. Ironically, Mr. Martyn is strong where most +Irishmen are weak--in his plot construction: even Mr. Yeats, who never +praises with his tongue in his cheek, owning to "the triumphant +construction of the 'The Heather Field'"; and weak, where most Irishmen +are strong, in the dialogue. It would not have aided Mr. Martyn, for the +kind of play he prefers, to have listened to the speech of the peasant +as Lady Gregory has listened to it, but he might have learned, with such +compeers, how to select and to condense from actual upper-class speech a +speech that would represent the thoughts and emotions and personalities +of his characters. It is far more difficult, of course, to write +dialogue for upper-class people, save humorous dialogue, since, as many +from Wordsworth's day on have pointed out, upper-class people do not +express their thoughts and emotions as frankly as do the folk. As Mr. +Yeats puts it, they look into the fire instead. + +Amateur as he is, however, Mr. Martyn has one play to his credit that he +who has read will remember, "The Heather Field." It is often thus with +the amateur. We need go no further than Mr. Martyn's countryman who gave +us "The Burial of Sir John Moore" for witness. Mr. Martyn has, too, like +other amateurs, given suggestions to others that they have realized as +fine art. It is more than likely, for instance, that Mr. Yeats had in +his mind some memory of Peg Inerny when he created Cathleen ni Houlihan. +There is, too, about the best plays of Mr. Martyn, a quality of a +certain kind. They have the distinctness of objects seen under the +bright hard light of late winter, when the sun grows strong, but when +the winds are still keen from the northwest and there are no leaves as +yet on the trees. + +There are many characterizations of Mr. Martyn in his kinsman's "Ave." +He is now "a fellow ... with an original streak of genius in him, and +very little literary tact"; but he is more generally characterized in +some such fashion as this, which Mr. Moore makes a deliverance of his +own: "A good fellow--an excellent one, and a man who would have written +well if his mother hadn't put it into his head that he had a soul. The +soul is a veritable pitfall." However that may be, it was the discovery, +or at least suppositious discovery, that he had a soul, a soul in +harmony with the melancholy soul of Ireland, that drove Mr. Moore back +to Dublin, and, for moments, even farther west to the home country of +his family about Lough Gara in Mayo. This discovery was foreshadowed in +"Evelyn Innes" (1898), in which Mr. Moore grows curious about the belief +in ancestral memory and other esoteric beliefs of Mr. Yeats; it is +latent in the introductions to "The Heather Field" and "The Bending of +the Bough"; and it is made manifest in the parts of the latter play that +are Mr. Moore's. Who most helped him to the discovery it is not easy to +say, but an interest in his country entered into and possessed him as +Kirwan's ideas entered into and possessed Dean. No doubt Mr. Yeats +helped him to find his soul, and Mr. Russell, but it must be it was Mr. +Martyn through whose agency the first glimmerings of such a recognition +began to break upon his mind. Is it only dramatically that Mr. Moore +wrote when he put upon Kirwan's lips in 1900 the words, "Life is the +enemy--we should fly from life"? But whether this is only a dramatic +repetition of what he might have heard any time from "A.E." had he +chosen to listen, there is no doubt that Mr. Moore did discover a new +quality in himself in the late nineties after he became intimately +associated with the new Irish movement. There is a wistfulness of +feeling and a beauty of thought in his writing, from "Evelyn Innes" on, +that there was not in it before "Evelyn Innes." + +There are those who think the greatest excellence of Mr. Moore is as an +art critic, and that "Modern Painting" (1893) is his great book. Mr. +Moore himself says that "Esther Waters" (1894) is his only book that he +can read with admiration and content; and those particularly interested +in the Renaissance will hold out for "Evelyn Innes" or "The Lake" +(1905). To me "A Drama in Muslin" (1886) is the best story of Mr. Moore +in his earlier realistic manner and "The Lake" in his later manner, a +manner that is now wistful and now mellow, as in "A Drama in Muslin" his +manner is uniformly as hard as winter sunshine. + +Mr. Moore is, as I said at the outset, a hard-working amateur in "A +Modern Lover"; three years later, in "A Drama in Muslin," he writes with +authority and insight; as he does, too, in "Parnell and his Island" +(1887), though here with scant sympathy; but it is not until "Evelyn +Innes" that he becomes deeply concerned with beauty of subject or beauty +of background, or, except at haphazard, possessed of any mastery of +style. "Evelyn Innes" is very well written,--in spots,--but "The Lake" +is of a wholeness of good tissue that is attainable only through an art +that has labored long and earnestly to achieve beauty. Had Mr. Moore +never recaptured his ancestral tradition, had he remained the writer +that Paris and London had made him, he had never written so finely as he +writes in "The Lake." An infancy and boyhood in Ireland; a youth in +London; the ten years from twenty-one to thirty-one in Paris; eleven +years of hard writing in London, years comparatively lean after those of +luxury that anteceded them, brought Mr. Moore at forty-two to a +knowledge of what was beautiful and significant in his home country. He +and Mr. Martyn were not many years apart when they began to write about +Ireland, but Mr. Moore had back of him not only ten years of writing, +but back of that ten years of living life as an art in Paris and his +attempts in the art of painting and his years of discussion of art in +the studios. Mr. Martyn, at home, had been more concerned with religion +and nationality and politics, and a shift to art as the principal career +of life after forty--"Morgante the Lesser" was no more than an incursion +into art, about as much of his life as a trip to Bayreuth--is only in +rare instances productive of results interesting to others than the +"artist." The difference in the achievements of the two men is not so +much the result of the difference of the powers with which both were +gifted as the result of the difference of time at which the will began +to work to realize those powers. Had Mr. Martyn begun soon enough and +had he been enough interested in his writing he might have made drama as +full of insight and beauty and as true to human nature as are the novels +of his kinsman. It is another irony of Mr. Martyn's life that it was he +who should have led Mr. Moore to the subject on which Mr. Moore was to +do his most harmonious and beautiful work, though it is possible, +judging from "Parnell and his Island," that Mr. Moore might in the end +have found his own way back. + +After his wont Mr. Moore puts his intimates into books made out of Irish +life. In "Evelyn Innes" Ulick Dean, fashioned in the first version of +the novel after Mr. Yeats, is the only wholly Irish character. Evelyn is +not Irish at all, and her Scotch father is given the musical interests +of Mr. Dolmetsch, a Bohemian, I believe. But Sir Owen Asher has in him +much of Mr. Moore himself, though most of Mr. Moore that is there is the +English Mr. Moore. There is something of Mr. Martyn in Monsignor Mostyn, +though an actual and not a potential ecclesiastic is drawn upon for the +basic characteristics of the character In the second version of "Evelyn +Innes" there is more of Mr. Russell than of Mr. Yeats in Ulick Dean, at +least in his appearance and sayings, though Mr. Moore could not divest +his composer of the personality of Mr. Yeats. There is less of Ireland +in "Sister Theresa" (1901) than in "Evelyn Innes," but "The Untilled +Field," short stories written after the removal of Mr. Moore to Dublin +and gathered together in 1903, are wholly concerned with Ireland. As Mr. +Moore makes Jasper say to Millicent in "The Bending of the Bough": "It +is the land underfoot that makes the Celt. Soon you will feel the +fascination of this dim, remote land steal over you." It was when this +æsthetic homesickness overtook Mr. Moore that he grew to feel lonely in +England, at least momentarily, and to believe that "we are lonely in a +foreign land because we are deprived of our past life; but the past is +about us here [he is speaking through the mouth of Dean and in Ireland]; +we see it at evening glimmering among the hollows of the hills." + +In "Memoirs of my Dead Self" (1906) there are chapters which tell of the +return of his thought to his boyhood in the west and that record his +wish to be buried with his father by Lough Gara; and all three volumes +of "Hail and Farewell," the first of which was published in 1911 as +"Ave," and the second in 1912 as "Salve," are the fruit of his ten +years' partial residence in Ireland, 1901-11. + +Our concern with Mr. Moore here, however, is with Mr. Moore the +dramatist, so I shall not dwell on the short stories and the novels save +to say that they, more than any writing of his, reveal his inherent +dramatic power. By dramatic power I mean not his power of situation and +evolution of dramatic technique, but his power to change his point of +view with the character he is creating A sensual exquisite himself whose +predominant thought is of woman, and of woman from a standpoint closely +akin to an epicure's toward an ideal meal, Mr. Moore can identify +himself with people in whom there is none of himself but the essential +humanity common to mankind. Most wonderful of many wonderful +realizations of viewpoint so different from what is his personally is +his realization of the attitude of Father MacTurnan, an old priest, +celibate by nature, who put aside his books, as ministering to the pride +of the intellect, and sat, night after night, with them by his side in +the study, but always unopened, while he was knitting socks for the poor +of his parish. Better known, of course, than this character of Father +MacTurnan is that of Father Gogarty in "The Lake," but for all his +sympathetic elaboration of this bemused and distraught cleric the +character is never wholly opposed to that of Mr. Moore himself as is the +character of Father MacTurnan. + +It is this power of Mr. Moore that makes him the great novelist that he +is, this power of identifying himself with the personality and this +looking out on life from the viewpoint of Esther Waters or Lewis +Seymour, or Edward Dempsey or Rose Leicester, of Kate Lennox or Mr. +Innes. Such a power is akin to one of the greatest powers of the Gael, +his quick sympathy with what appeals to him in others, his momentary +absorption in their interests and his passing possession by their +purpose. It is this habit of his nature that makes the Gael tell people +what they wish to hear, it is this that makes him so courteous, it is +this that makes him so good an actor. And the power that makes one man a +good actor, a real actor,--not one who happens to fit a part, but one +who can change his personality from part to part,--is but another +manifestation of the power that enables a man to identify himself +wholly, now with this character, now with that, in a story which he is +writing. If a man can express such identification in dialogue, he can, +if he master dramatic construction, make himself into a dramatist; if he +express it in subtle analytic writing about the character, it gives him +one of the great powers of the novelist, a power which, if it is united +with the power of story-telling, makes him a great novelist, and, +oftentimes, even if he be but a fair story-teller, a great novelist. The +English novel has been famously deficient in story-telling ability since +Scott's day, and Mr. Moore is no exception to the rule. As, however, the +emphasis of all his stories is on character, his deficiency in narrative +power matters hardly at all. + +Mr. Moore is, then, Ireland's greatest novelist because he has in +greatest measure--in full measure--this greatest gift of the Gael, the +gift of dramatic impersonation of all manner of men in all their +changing moods. A personality as intense as was that of Meredith, as is +that of Mr. Hardy, Mr. Moore has not always one attitude, as have both +Welshman and Saxon of the Saxons, however completely they write from the +standpoint of each character they create. By the side of the characters +of Meredith is always Meredith, high-hearted and confident, and by the +side of the characters of Mr. Hardy is always Mr. Hardy, lamenting what +woe fate has brought them, but by the side of Ned Carmady or Oliver +Gogarty, the Mummer or Montgomery, Sir Owen Asher or Ulick, there is +seldom Mr. Moore. He almost never plays chorus to his characters, either +through a commenting character or by direct interposition in the manner +of Thackeray, though, of course, the characters again and again express +his views. So in "The Wild Goose," in which Ned Carmady represents one +year's outlook of Mr. Moore, there is only one choric observation. + +When one considers how alien to Ireland were all the interests of Mr. +Moore for years, his rendering of the Irish characters of "The Untilled +Field" and "The Lake" is realized to be all the more remarkable. It is +not easy to pick up threads that one has dropped in a period of one's +life that is dead and done, but Mr. Moore has picked them up more than +once. From time to time he had, of course, made visits home, writing "A +Mummer's Wife" in Galway in 1884 and finding there then, no doubt, the +material for "A Drama in Muslin" and the sketches of "Parnell and his +Island"; but these visits were none of them of long duration until his +"return" in 1901. + +It is far easier to paint in the background of landscape remembered +from childhood than it is again to get into touch with people parted +from in childhood. The landscape changes little in far-off, lonely +places, but people nowhere are what they were when the past years +sufficient to bring up beside the old folks a new generation with ideals +changed. Ireland, for all the agitation of the Land League, was landlord +Ireland when Mr. Moore got "A Drama in Muslin" from Ireland; Ireland was +passing to the peasant proprietor when Mr. Moore returned to it to write +"The Untilled Field" and "The Lake." Social and economic questions, +however, interest Mr. Moore only as they concern the individual, but the +changing conditions in Ireland cannot be prevented from finding their +way here and there into his writing through the changes they have +brought about in the people of whom he writes, though many of those he +writes of are survivals from an older generation. + +There are glimpses in his writing of many phases of Irish life, his +characters varying all the way from such old-timers as his Cousin Dan, +who, as he himself intimates, might have come out of the pages of Lever +or Lover, to the very modern Father Gogarty, whose outlook is on an +Ireland that "perhaps, more than any other country, had understood the +supremacy of spirit over matter, and had striven to escape through +mortifications from the prison of the flesh." One wonders, at times, if +Mr. Moore, who joined the cause of Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats, +self-confessedly, to have his finger in a new literary pie, really felt +the landscape as he says he does in his books, or whether he just +momentarily caught the power of seeing it through their eyes. Can one +who was once so resolute a realist really appreciate "faint Celtic haze; +a vision of silver mist and distant mountain and moor"? Perhaps he can, +as a good actor appreciates a part alien to his sympathy, that he is +playing. But whether or not Mr. Moore learned to love the lonely +landscape for a while, he eventually tired of it, as his Father Gogarty +tired of it. Surely Mr. Moore is speaking personally as well as +dramatically when he writes, "This lake was beautiful, but he was tired +of its low gray shores; he was tired of those mountains, melancholy as +Irish melodies, and as beautiful." + +Almost any novelist, sooner or later in his career, dabbles in drama, +and Mr. Moore no doubt would have attempted drama in the natural course +of things, even if he had not been interested in "The Independent +Theatre" and thus led to a situation in which consistency demanded that +he write a play. It was his articles on the drama, gathered into +"Impressions and Opinions" (1891), that provoked Mr. G.R. Sims to taunt +him into "The Strike at Arlingford" (1893). In "Our Dramatists and their +Literature," one of these papers, Mr. Moore, in hitting all the heads of +all the contemporaneous dramatists, so stung Mr. Sims that he said he +would give a hundred pounds for a stall from which to witness a +performance of "an unconventional play" written by Mr. Moore. Mr. Moore +accepted the challenge, and "The Strike at Arlingford," as I have said, +was the result, Mr. Sims having agreed to withdraw the word +"unconventional" on Mr. Moore's objection that he would be at the mercy +of Mr. Sims' judgment if the word was retained. "The Independent +Theatre" played the play and Mr. Sims paid the money. It was perhaps +just as well for Mr. Moore that the adjective was withdrawn, for the +play was little less conventional than "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray" or +"Sowing the Wind," to mention two successes of that year by play-makers +that took their art a little more seriously than Mr. Sims. In a way, +too, "The Strike at Arlingford" is unoriginal. Lady Ann Travers is only +a more fortunate Hedda Gabler who in the end accepts the protection of +her Chancellor Brack, the capitalist Baron Steinbach, after her Lövberg +turned labor agitator, John Reid has, like his prototype, made a wreck +of his life. "The Strike at Arlingford" has its excellences: its plot is +logically unfolded; it is believable; it is true to human nature; it has +moments of intensity. Had Mr. Moore power of dialogue it might have been +a fine play, for the characterization is what one would expect from so +conscientious a depicter of life as Mr. Moore, and the problem, a man's +choice between his love and his duty, one that has never failed to +appeal to men. Mr. Moore is careful to tell us that, in his own +conception of the play, "the labor dispute is an externality to which I +attach little importance." + +Its performance and publication, though neither event was of very much +more than journalistic importance, served to give Mr. Moore something of +a position as an authority on the drama, coming as they did after his +association, since 1891, with "The Independent Theatre." So it is that +we find him collaborating with Mrs. Craigie in "Journeys End in Lovers +Meeting" (1894), which served for a year or so as one of the little +plays that characterized the repertoire of the Irving-Terry Company. +Just what was Mr. Moore's share in this play I do not know, but that, +slight as it is, it served as apprentice work in the art of +collaboration there can be no doubt, or that it added to his familiarity +with the stage. + +It is certain that Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats were glad of the assistance +of Mr. Moore in founding "The Irish Literary Theatre," not only for the +prominence of his name as novelist and as Moore of Moore Hall, and for +his known provocativeness in pamphleteering and his capacity for drawing +the fire of opponents, but for what knowledge he had of playwriting and +for what experience he had in getting together and training actors for +special performances such as those of "The Independent Theatre." + +I have already spoken of what Mr. Moore did to "A Tale of a Town" to +make it "The Bending of the Bough." From the beginning of Act II on to +the end, he rewrote almost all of it, retaining only now and then an +eloquent or a biting line from Mr. Martyn's play. Mr. Moore changes the +scene of the play from Ireland to Scotland, that its allegory may not be +so obvious; he develops Kirwan's character until he becomes not only a +sort of composite spiritual portrait of the leaders of the Renaissance +but a believable leader of men; and he makes Millicent's moulding of +Dean to her will human, as I have said, and--Dean being the weakling +that he was--inevitable. Mr. Moore cuts the play down where it is +stodgy, he expands it where expansion realizes for you more of +character and motives of his people, he infuses into it more of the +spirit of the movement, and he makes its patriotism wider in its appeal, +a bigger and a better thing at once more concrete and more concerned +with the things of the spirit. + +"Diarmid and Grania" (1901), the prose play written in collaboration by +Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore, I write of here rather than in the chapter +devoted to Mr. Yeats because, as the legend is shaped in the play, it +has more of Mr. Moore than of Mr. Yeats in it. As neither of the +collaborators was satisfied with the play as produced, and as neither +has been willing to give it up to the other to rewrite, "Diarmid and +Grania" has never been published. The notices of its production, on +October 21, 1901, at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, are so full, however, +and the legend on which it is based so familiar, that it is possible to +say as I have said, when one knows well the work of both authors, whose +influence is dominant in it. It seems, from the notices, to have been +finely played by the Benson Company, which was brought over from England +especially to produce it. The results of "the scratch company" of the +second year's performances, even though these were transferred from the +Antient Concert Rooms to the better stage of the Gaiety Theatre, were +not very satisfactory artistically, but the third year's experiment was +in every way more successful. "The Daily Express" of Dublin, in those +days very much interested in Irish Ireland, thus records, on October 22, +1901, the impressions of the first night. "The 'house' was not merely +crowded but representative. We counted among the audience the heads of +all the great professions in Dublin, a considerable number of literary +critics, and an extremely large representation of 'le monde où l'on +s'amuse.' The Gaelic League, which flooded the gallery, was very +friendly to Mr. Moore and Mr. Yeats, and became enthusiastic over Dr. +Douglas Hyde ['The Twisting of the Rope,' by Dr. Hyde, was played by him +and company of amateurs, in Irish]. Between the acts of 'Diarmid and +Grania' several members of the 'gods' sang number of Gaelic songs with +great gusto and a good deal of musical ability." + +There are several versions of the old legend, some of them cynical, +leaving Grania in the end lighter even than Helen of Troy; others +closing with Diarmid slain by the boar as Adonis is slain, and Grania +weeping his death. In all it is Grania who tempts Diarmid to take her +away from Finn on the eve of her wedding to the old king. In some he +goes willingly, in love with her, in others unwillingly, ashamed of his +disloyalty to Finn, but under _giesa_ not to refuse a woman's request. +In the play of Mr. Moore and Mr. Yeats Diarmid and Grania "do not live," +says the "Daily Express," "the exciting life of flight from cromlech to +cromlech. They settle down very comfortably in the monotony of a +prosperous farm. Diarmid busies himself with his sheep. Grania ... +begins to pine for the society from which she has wilfully cut herself +off, and to think more and more of the grim old warrior Finn. Then Finn +comes upon the scene, patches up a sort of truce with Diarmid, and +becomes more friendly with Grania, his lost sweetheart, than Diarmid is +able to tolerate. Mutual recriminations ensue between Diarmid and +Grania, and finally Diarmid goes forth to his portended death, with the +taunts of Grania and the rude jeers of the Fianna ringing in his ears. +As the play closes, the Fianna bear away the body of Diarmid, Finn +comforts the weeping Grania, and we remember the words of the legend +that 'some say she was married to Finn.' The curtain falls--a happy +touch of purely modern cynicism--upon the solitary figure of Conan, the +Thersites of the play, the prophet of evil chances, the scorner of high +things, the prompter of foul suggestions." + +As the play was being written a good deal of discussion about it found +its way into the newspapers. It was rumored that it would be translated +into Irish, and then back again, by Lady Gregory, into English, but no +such fantastic scheme as that Mr. Moore tells us of in "Ave" was +suggested in any of the paragraphs that came my way. Because they could +not agree on the kind of diction they were to use in the play, Mr. +Yeats, who wanted a peasant Grania, agreed, writes Mr. Moore, to his +suggestion that he write the play in French. Mr. Moore gives these as +the words of Mr. Yeats: "Lady Gregory will translate your text into +English. Taidgh O'Donoghue will translate the English text into Irish, +and Lady Gregory will translate the Irish text back into English." "And +then," Mr. Moore makes himself reply to Mr. Yeats, "you'll put style +upon it." + +More remarkable than the scheme was the actual attempt of Mr. Moore to +realize it. On leaving Galway, where he and Mr. Yeats had been +collaborating at Coole, Mr. Moore began the second act in French. He +gives us enough of the dialogue (pages 370 to 376 of "Ave") to show us +his high pride in his French, the tolerance of his humor, and his idea +of the kind of style the play should have. + +If Mr. Moore had given the subject to Mr. Yeats and to Lady Gregory, as +he had some thought of doing, it would only have been a return of a +subject already theirs by right of their long discussion of it together. +Lady Gregory was not yet working upon it for "Gods and Fighting Men" +(1904); but it was she who had reduced it to the proportions of a +scenario for them to work upon. This scenario was published in "Samhain" +of October, 1901, that all of the audiences of the play might be in +possession of the story as a Grecian audience was in possession of the +story of Elektra. And did not Mr. Moore say in his speech at the dinner +given to the supporters of "The Irish Literary Theatre" in February, +1900, in speaking of his collaboration with Mr. Yeats in "Diarmid and +Grania": "It would be difficult to name any poet that Ireland has yet +produced more truly elected by his individual and racial genius to +interpret the old legend than the distinguished poet whose contemporary +and _collaborateur_ I have the honor to be"? + +The story, of course, had been retold only less often than the story of +Deirdre by Irish writers, in one form or another, but there had been no +memorable play made out of it. Mr. Yeats had met it in "The Death of +Dermid," which Sir Samuel Ferguson included in "The Lays of the Western +Gael" (1864), as well as in the direct translations of such scholars as +Mr. Standish Hayes O'Grady and in the versions of such popularizers as +Dr. Joyce. One cannot, not having read the play, declare it is not what +Mr. Moore would have it, "that dramatic telling of the story which +Ireland has been waiting for these many years," but it does not seem so +to have impressed those who saw it and heard it at the performances in +the Gaiety Theatre. + +Now that Lady Gregory has done her "Grania" (1912), it is hardly likely +that Mr. Yeats will return to the story, and with the waning of Mr. +Moore's interest in old Irish legend it is very unlikely that he will +wish to rewrite the play. It would seem we have lost it, whatever its +value, until the "literary remains" of Mr. Moore are given to the +public. + +The quarrel with Mr. Yeats over "Diarmid and Grania," coming as it did +at the end of the three years' venture of "The Irish Literary Theatre," +explains why Mr. Moore wrote no plays for the Irish National Dramatic +Company and its successors on through the Abbey Theatre Players. He was +still interested, however, in the "cause" as far as it was possible for +one of his temperament and taste, and he was conspicuous on first nights +at the Abbey Theatre down to the time of his departure from Dublin in +1911. + +Since "Diarmid and Grania" (1901) Mr. Moore has published the two books +of his that since "A Drama in Muslin" (1886) reveal his deepest +knowledge of Irish life, the volume of stories of varying length to +which he gives that title, so symbolic, "The Untilled Field" (1903), +and "The Lake" (1905), but there are few incidents in either that he is +likely to develop into plays. "The Lake" could not be dramatized, but if +it could be dramatized, it would be as little likely to be presented in +Ireland as "The Tinker's Wedding." Mr. Moore, for all that he was born a +Catholic, would not hesitate any more than did the son of the Protestant +minister to put a priest into a realistic modern play, and that, of +course, would be a mild audacity for Mr. Moore now that he has published +the scenario of "The Apostle" (1911). His Paul, in "The Apostle," a +"thick-set man, of rugged appearance, hairy in the face and with a +belly," is wonderfully alive, and his Jesus is a distinct and realizable +personality, if not the Jesus of Christian dream. It is a curious +illustration of Mr. Moore's almost disciple-like attitude toward Mr. +G.W. Russell that he should make his Christ talk like "A.E." It seemed +to me, as I read the words that Mr. Moore puts first on the lips of +Jesus, that they were phrases that I had heard on the lips of Mr. +Russell. They are of the very quality of his speech and writing: "How +beautiful is the evening light as it dies, revealing every crest; the +outline of the hills is evident now, evident as the will of God." And +now each time, as I re-read them, they sound in my ears to the +remembered rhythm of Mr. Russell's voice. Should Mr. Moore ever evolve a +play from this scenario, and the play be played--and why should it not, +now that the way is so plainly blazed by the score and more of miracle +plays of the past decade?--it will have to be chanted as "A.E." chants +his verse, as one would wish mass to be chanted. + +Only a year ago Mr. Moore made his last adventure of the theatre. With +the help of Mr. Lennox Robinson he dramatized "Esther Waters," but later +he threw out the latter's work, feeling, no doubt, about it as Mr. +Martyn felt about Mr. Moore's rewriting of his "A Tale of a Town"; and +when it was put on, in the early winter of 1911-12 by the Stage Society, +"Esther Waters" the play was like "Esther Waters" the novel, solely the +work of Mr. Moore. The critics seem agreed that it was long drawn out +and undramatic, but that it was well written and well acted. I suppose +that the preoccupation with "Esther Waters" that this dramatization +reveals is because "Esther Waters" was written in that period of his +life when Mr. Moore was most himself. After ten years in London he had +escaped considerably from the French influence of his young manhood, and +his genius had not been warped out of its true plane, as he would +doubtless now say, by Irish mists. Mr. Moore must have felt that there +was something not wholly himself in much of "The Untilled Field" and in +much of "The Lake," that the minds of Mr. Yeats and Mr. Russell had in a +way dominated his mind, and that not even the hardly tolerated Mr. +Martyn had been without influence upon him. + +Such a realization is not the professed motive for the return of Mr. +Moore to England, but I have no doubt at all that it is somewhere in the +back of his mind, where he would like it to be hidden and forgot. At any +rate, by the time of his return to England, Mr. Moore had come to see +clearly that the Celtic episode of his maturity was closed. + +It is not, I think, particularly difficult for one who understands the +old-fashioned camp-meeting "getting of religion" to understand this +"Celtic episode." Mr. Moore got Celtomania; a sort of "spiritual +consumption," he calls his possession in one place, as a certain other +type of sinner "got religion" in the old shouting days. That is, Mr. +Moore wrought himself up partly in the spirit of the Playboy, and was +wrought up to some degree willy-nilly until he could write his speech of +February, 1900, on "Literature and the Irish Language," and, finally, a +little later, could return happily to the country that until then he +could endure only now and again. + +But as a matter of fact the motive that led Mr. Moore back to Ireland +matters not at all to literature. What beauty of writing that return led +to matters a great deal. Had he not returned to Ireland, we should not +have had a good deal that adds to the joy we win from satiric laughter, +we should not have had "Hail and Farewell"; had he not returned we +should not have had a book that adds to the treasure of beautiful +feeling and beautiful writing there is in English literature, a treasure +that there is no chance of ever having too large; we should not have had +"The Lake," which is Ireland, West Ireland, Catholic Ireland, a land +under gray skies that the priests its masters would, too many of them, +make a land of gray lives. + + + + +CHAPTER V + +MR. GEORGE W. RUSSELL ("A.E.") + + +Synge is the one instinctive dramatist of the earlier group of writers +of the Celtic Renaissance, the one to whom drama was the inevitable +medium for the expression of the best that was in him. Yet even Synge +came to write plays only through an external stimulus, the urging of Mr. +Yeats on their meeting in Paris. It was fortunate for the Irish drama, +this meeting, and fortunate for Synge. If he had not been brought to the +theatre of his own country, he would probably never have written +anything of first importance. Mr. Yeats himself, of course, had been +interested in verse plays from boyhood, but he, for all the energy he +has expended in learning his own particular art of the stage, speaks +more beautifully through his lyrics and the lyrical passages of his +plays than through their passages that are dramatic speech, and not only +more beautifully but with more of dignity and power. Nor is Lady +Gregory, any more than Mr. Yeats, essentially a dramatist. Her great +power is the power of dialogue, and dialogue, of course, is as often +employed in the service of the story as in the service of the play. Yet +it is not difficult to understand how in Lady Gregory the dialogue and +in Mr. Yeats the love of the spoken word led, when opportunity was made, +to writing for the stage, and for success on the stage. But in the case +of "A.E." it is as difficult to find a foreshadowing of the playwright +in the mystical poet as it would be to see in all but all of the essays +of "The Treasure of the Humble," any proof that their author was a +playwright. To those who knew Mr. Russell only through his verses, and +were unaware of the versatility of the man, his turning dramatist was as +surprising as Emerson turned dramatist would have been to the America of +anti-slavery days. + +[Illustration] + +It was not, of course, because of an impulse from within that Mr. +Russell attempted drama in "Deirdre" (1902), but because the young +enthusiasts of Ireland's national literary movement wanted plays that +should be at once native in quality and the work of writers of standing. +It did not seem a strange request to Cumann nan Gaedheal to ask Mr. +Russell for a play. What if he had never written a play? He was hardly +in their estimation more of an amateur than Mr. Yeats or Mr. Moore or +Mr. Martyn, who had written plays for "The Irish Literary Theatre" that +had achieved success of a kind, and he was surely as ardent a +Nationalist as any of these. So he was asked for a play to be played at +the Spring Festival of 1902 by the Irish National Dramatic Company that +was forming, and he did what he was asked to do, blocking it all out in +six hours, and finishing it sufficiently in three days for it to be put +in rehearsal. It was in the summer following its first presentation that +I saw it again in rehearsal in a little hall back of a produce shop in +Dublin, and got to know Mr. Russell as playwright before I read his +play. One of the actors, himself maker of verses and plays, gave me his +copy of "Deirdre," with cues marked. I had seen notices of its first +performance in the Irish papers and I had written Mr. Russell to see if +I could get a copy, but he had not yet published it. Then he wrote me of +young poets I met this night in Dublin, and the names on the lips of the +enthusiasts we talked to, and their names were names Mr. Russell had +written me of four months before. Here were they introducing me to his +work as he had thus introduced me to theirs: "There are many poets here +who write beautiful lyrics who are quite unknown out of Ireland because +they never collected them from the pages of obscure magazines.... I have +seen many verses signed 'I.O,' 'Alice Milligan,' 'Ethna Carberry,' +'Oghma,' 'Paul Gregan,' which I enviously wish I could claim as my +own.... I think myself many of these unknown poets and poetesses write +verses which no living English writer could surpass." The best of the +verses of some of these and of others among his following Mr. Russell +collected in "New Songs" (1904), which bore out much that he claimed for +them. + +It was to six of these young poets he dedicated his last volume of +verse, "The Divine Vision" (1904), as he had dedicated his two earlier +volumes to poet-mystics, "Homeward" (1894) to Mr. Charles Weekes and +"The Earth Breath" (1898) to Mr. Yeats. The young writers (for they were +almost all writers as well as actors) we met this Saturday night in +Dublin, one and all, looked to "A.E." as leader, and some of them looked +to him as high priest of their cult, as seer of that ancient type that +combined as its functions the deliverance of religious dicta, prophecy, +and song. My thoughts went back to our Concord of half a century ago, +yet I wondered was Emerson's fascination as compelling as this. + +It was in a commonplace-looking editorial sanctum that I found "A.E." on +the following morning, at 22, Lincoln Place, to which he had descended +from his office in the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, to edit +"The Homestead" in its editor's absence. I was to see him, in the hour I +was to spend with him there, in many rôles. First was that of one of the +beginners of the Irish Literary Revival. He has himself given the credit +to Mr. Standish James O'Grady for furnishing the initial stimulus to the +movement, in his "Heroic Period" and "Cuchulain and his Contemporaries" +of 1878 and 1880; but to "A.E." and Mr. Yeats and Dr. Hyde also is due +much of the credit. Mr. Russell said that when he came up to Dublin, a +boy from Lurgan, there was no independent thought in Dublin, but now he +thought there was a good deal, and he and his fellows of the Hermetic +Society, he took mild pride in believing, had had something to do with +the change. Even then, as a boy, he could not read most English +literature, and so he took to reading the literature of the East, the +Bhagavad-Gîta and the Sufis. From his reading of these, with other young +men that somehow found each other out, came the Hermetic Society, at +whose meetings everything mystic from the Upanishads to Thomas Taylor +was discussed. From the study of the universal, he said, they came at +last to the national, to the study of the ancient folk-lore and stories +of their people, which, had it not been for the Danes and Normans, would +have been shaped into literary form long before now, when, he said, +they were only being so shaped. + +His disciples had told me the night before that "A.E." had helped them +much in the National Dramatic Company, painting scenery for them, +designing costumes, and aiding in a hundred other ways. He was silent +about these matters and not very proud of the play. "Of course," he said, +"I was very familiar with the story of Deirdre, and I had thought of its +dramatic effectiveness, but I knew nothing of the stage and I was very +much surprised it went so well." That it went well, I, who had seen it +but the night before, could testify, though that rehearsal could give +but a suggestion of the beautiful stage pictures it presents when played +in the costume of the Heroic Age. Despite its intensely dramatic +situations, it is, however, essentially a decorative rather than a +dramatic play, and its exalted prose is seldom true dramatic speech. But +you carry from it the memory of beautiful pictures, and a feeling that +something noble has passed your way, to enter into and become a part of +you. + +As we were talking of the "movement," in came a young Roscommon +landlord, and with him another of its phases and my discovery of Mr. +Russell, man of business, organizer of the Irish Agricultural +Organization Society. The talk was now of the erection of a hall, and +Mr. Russell seemed as familiar with stone and lime and sand as with +mysticism and poetry, which we had discussed, and with painting, which +we were considering in a few minutes, when Mr. J.B. Yeats, Jr., arrived, +to talk over an exhibition of his pictures to be held in Dublin the +following week. A few days later I was reading Mr. Russell's review of +Mr. Yeats's pictures, but before I left 22, Lincoln Place, I had a +mental picture of "art critic" added to the already long list of titles +after "A.E.'s" name, and I had still another evidence of his +impressiveness. Mr. J.B. Yeats, Sr., his son said, would be around to +have Mr. Russell sit for him next morning, in order to get on with the +two orders he had of portraits of the mystic, one of them from an +admirer in America. It was pleasant on leaving him to go away with his +laugh ringing in my ears as a surety that the high seriousness of his +purpose, and the higher seriousness with which some of his admirers take +him, had not dulled his sense of humor. + +Eight o'clock the next evening saw us in the eminently Philistine +suburban street where was the little house of conventional exterior that +sheltered the high dreams of "the Irish Emerson." Once entered, his +embodied visions attract you from all four walls of the study. Piles of +them in corners make you wonder is Mrs. Russell a saint. The pictures +are of Irish landscape; of "the Other People"; of heroes and heroines of +Ireland's prehistoric days; of souls that have yet to be born; of souls +that have passed through incarnation after incarnation, never to rise +above an animal existence; of souls whose every rebirth has taken them +to higher spirituality, and that now wait to pass along the "path of +liberation" into that immortality from which they shall never be born +again. These visions have come to him, as the visions whose presence he +records in his poetry, in all places--as he left the office and looked +down the sun-gilded streets at close of day; as he wandered in the +mountains under the stars with peasants who had "second sight"; as he +talked with fellow Hermetists in meeting-rooms in back streets whose +shabby interiors grew rosy gloom as the talk turned on mysteries. + +To us Mr. Russell talked much, talked kindly of all men, talked well of +many things, said startling things of society and art and poetry so +gently that you did not think until afterwards that in another you would +hold them gages of combat. I can hear him yet, as I sat and tried at the +same time to listen to him and to look at his flaming-hearted spirits +with luminous angel wings and flashing halos enveloped in an atmosphere +in which "the peacock twilight rays aloft its plumes and blooms of +shadowy fire"--I can hear him saying, "You can't read Shakespeare, can +you?" As I thought over this question later, I understood. Then I was +too far rapt by the pictures to wonder at it greatly. Later came to mind +Emerson's declaration that Homer, Milton, and Shakespeare "do not fully +content us," that the "heavenly bread" is to be found in Zoroaster, +Plato, St. John, and Menu. Both Emerson and Mr. Russell fail to use art +as the standard. To the mystic, to whom this world is not reality, what +appeal may have its seeming truths and shows as compared to the certain +truth of the idealists and the beauties of the eternal life? The deep +human knowledge, the great pageants of Shakespeare's kings and queens, +are but "glories of our blood and state ... shadows, not substantial +things." + +Mr. Russell talked very simply of his pictures, of how their subjects +came to him, and of his enjoyment in thus recording them. He does not +consider himself a painter, but he thinks there was the making of a +painter in him had he had instruction in his earlier years. This +attitude towards his various powers, as well as the attitude towards him +of ardent young countrymen of his, came out in a story he told us of a +boy that he found waiting for him one night at a street corner near his +home. The boy timidly asked him was he not Mr. Russell, and then walked +silently by his side until the house was reached. They entered and the +boy mustered up courage to say he had waited for him two hours at the +head of the street. "A.E." had been waiting for the boy to say what +brought him, but he was obliged to encourage the boy before he would out +with it. Said "A.E.," "You came here to talk with me. You must be +interested in one of the three interests I have given much time to. Is +it economics?" "No," replied the boy, indignantly. "Is it mysticism?" +continued "A.E." "No," cried the boy, almost angry at such an interest +being attributed to him. "It must be literary art, then?" "Yes," said +the boy, with a sigh, his haven reached at last. "A.E." soon found the +boy an exquisite who thought the literary movement was becoming +vulgarized through so many people becoming interested in it. Finally the +boy turned questioner and found that "A.E." was seeking the Absolute. +Having found this out, he again sighed, this time regretfully, and said +decidedly that "A.E." could not be his Messiah, as he abhorred the +Absolute above everything else. He was infected with Pater's Relative, +said Mr. Russell, "which has fallen like a blight on all English +literature." So the boy--he was not yet twenty-one--went out into the +night with, I suppose, another of his idols fallen. + +As this boy came to "A.E.," so come scores of others, and most of those +that have real troubles go away comforted, to return for advice and +counsel and friendship, as their need is. This I knew before I met +"A.E.," and his kindness I felt and certain magnetism, but the qualities +that make him the leader of men, and hierophant to his personal +following, do not lie on the surface to be quickly distinguished by +every comer. Neither, we are told, did Emerson's, who was leader of men +and hierophant. I thought often of "A.E.'s" pictures as I looked at the +pictures of Watts in the Tate Gallery in London, and I have thought more +often of them since I have come to know haloed Rosicrucian drawings and +strange symbols in such books as our own Wissahickon mystics, Kelpius +and his brethren, brought with them to "The Woman in the Wilderness" +from Germany late in the seventeenth century. How notable the impression +of Mr. Russell's paintings and visions upon two Irish writers the +English-speaking world reads to-day may be learned from their +exploitation in Mr. Stephen Gwynn's "The Old Knowledge" (1901), whose +Owen Conroy owes being to "A.E." and his pictures, and from Mr. George +Moore's "Evelyn Innes" (revised edition, 1901), whose Ulick Dean has his +appearance and his power of seeing visions. + +As the evening wore on, Mr. Russell picked up a manuscript collection of +poems--that we were to have two years later as "The Divine Vision"--and +read us several. Most distinctly of these I remember "Reconciliation" +which he chanted most lovingly of all he read. It is a poem I do not +pretend to understand in detail, but I do feel its drift, and I can +never read out its stately music, or even read it silently, without +hearing his sonorous chanting. Many of his poems are like this poem in +that you must content yourself with their general drift and not insist +on understanding their every phrase. I suppose to the initiate mystic +they are more definite, but I doubt whether some of them are more than +presentations of emotions that need not be translated into terms of +thought for their desired effect. + +To Mr. Russell poetry is a high and holy thing; like his friend Mr. +Yeats he is at one with Spenser in believing it the fruit of a "certain +enthousiasmos and celestial inspiration"; it is his religion that Mr. +Russell is celebrating in his verses, many of which are in a sense hymns +to the Universal Spirit, and all of which are informed by such sincerity +that you do not wonder that his followers make them their gospel. In his +own words:-- + + The spirit in man is not a product of nature, but antecedes nature, + and is above it as sovereign, being of the very essence of that + spirit which breathed on the face of the waters, and whose song, + flowing from the silence as an incantation, summoned the stars into + being out of chaos. To regain that spiritual consciousness, with + its untrammelled ecstasy, is the hope of every mystic. That ecstasy + is the poetic passion.... The act which is inspired by the Holy + Breath must needs speak of things which have no sensuous existence, + of hopes all unearthly, and fires of which the colors of day are + only shadows. + +About a score of the less than tenscore poems of "A.E." are definitely +declarations of belief, but declarations so personal, so undogmatic, +that you would hardly write him down a didactic poet at first reading "A +New Theme" tells of his desertion of subjects "that win the easy +praise," of his venturing + + "in the untrodden woods + To carve the future ways." + +Here he acknowledges that the things he has to tell are "shadowy," that +his breath in "the magic horn" can make but feeble murmurs. In the +prologue to "The Divine Vision" he states the conditions of his +inspiration:-- + + "When twilight over the mountains fluttered + And night with its starry millions came, + I too had dreams: the songs I have uttered + Came from this heart that was touched by the flame";-- + +that is, the flame of his being that, "mad for the night and the deep +unknown," leaps back to the "unphenomenal" world whence his spirit came +and blends his spirit into one with the Universal Spirit. This same +union through the soul's flame "A.E." presents in his pictures, and in +his prologue to "The Divine Vision" he writes that he wishes to give his +reader + + "To see one elemental pain, + One light of everlasting joy." + +This elemental pain, as I take it, is the pain of the soul shut up in +its robe of clay in this physical, phenomenal world, and so shut off +from the spiritual world, the world of the unphenomenal or unknowable. +The "everlasting joy" I take to be the certainty of eventual union with +the Universal Spirit in the unphenomenal world, a union and a joy +anticipated in the occasional temporary absorptions of the soul into +the Universal Spirit in moments Emerson experienced as "revelation" and +Plotinus as ecstasy. + +"A.E.'s" friend, Mr. Charles Johnston, records the two young Irishmen's +joint attempts to attain ecstasy, when he writes of those days when "we +lay on our backs in the grass, and, looking up into the blue, tried to +think ourselves into that new world which we had suddenly discovered +ourselves to inhabit." Do not think this ecstasy too rare and wonderful +a thing. To Plotinus it meant an utter blotting-out of self, a rapture +of peace, and to Mr. Russell it frequently means that he is entirely +"heart-hidden from the outer things," but I suspect it means sometimes +mere lift of the heart through lungs full of fresh air, or through green +fields for tired eyes, or through mountain air for worn nerves, or +through skies thick-sown with stars for the vexed spirit. + +The typical poem of "A.E." is that in which the sight of beautiful +things of this phenomenal world in which we live lifts his soul to +participation in the Universal Spirit. It is most often through some +beauty of the sky at sunset, when + + "Withers once more the old blue flower of day," + + +as in "The Great Breath"; or at twilight, when + + "Dusk wraps the village in its dim caress," + +as in "Dusk"; or at night, when + + "The yellow constellations shine with pale and tender glory + In the lilac-scented stillness," + +as in "The Singing Silences"; or at sunrise, when there is + + "Fire on the altar of the hills," + + +as in "Dawn";--it is most often through some beauty of the sky at such +times that he becomes one with the Universal Spirit in "the rapture of +the fire," that he is "lost within the 'Mother's Being,'" he would say +that the soul returns to the Oversoul, Emerson would There are ways by +which the soul homes other than these--sometimes it is + + "By the hand of a child I am led to the throne of the King." + +but it is most often by way of beauties of the sky. Some reasons are not +far to seek. From sunset to sunrise the poet is free as he may be from +the treadmill of the "common daily ways," and the high moods he tries to +express are most easily symbolized by skyey images--massed clouds and +sweeping lights of diamond, sapphire, amethyst; the still blue black of +heaven thrilling with far stars; the purples of twilight horizons. In +his use of these splendid symbols he is but following Proclus, whom he +found quoted by Emerson as saying that "the mighty heaven exhibits, in +its transfiguration, clear images of the splendor of intellectual +perceptions, being moved in conjunction with the unapparent period of +intellectual natures." + +How important the symbol is to "A.E."--as important as it is to +Emerson--may be gathered from "Symbolism," which, read in the light of +what I have quoted, needs, I hope, no further interpretation. + + "Now when the giant in us wakes and broods, + Filled with home-yearnings, drowsily he flings + From his deep heart high dreams and mystic moods. + Mixed with the memory of the loved earth things: + Clothing the vast with a familiar face; + Reaching his right hand forth to greet the starry race. + + Wondrously near and clear the great warm fires + Stare from the blue; so shows the cottage light + To the field laborer whose heart desires + The old folk by the nook, the welcome bright + From the housewife long parted from at dawn-- + So the star villages in God's great depths withdrawn. + + "Nearer to Thee, not by delusion led, + Though there no house-fires burn nor bright eyes gaze: + We rise, but by the symbol charioted, + Through loved things rising up to Love's own ways: + By these the soul unto the vast has wings + And sets the seal celestial on all mortal things." + +In this poem is the proof of how intimately "A.E." could write of the +sweet things of earth did he so choose. But he does not so choose, +except rarely, and sometimes he leaves out the statement of beautiful +material things by which he customarily bids farewell to earth in his +aspiration to spiritual things, and writes only of unearthly things--as +of some girl that he, an Irishman living in the Dublin of to-day, loves +in the Babylon of three thousand years ago, to the annihilation of space +and time. This is written in the very spirit of Emerson's declaration +that "before the revelations of the soul, Time, Space, and Nature shrink +away." Need I quote further to show that "A.E.," like Emerson, holds +that the true poet is he who "gives men glimpses of the law of the +Universe; shows them the circumstance as illusion; shows that Nature is +only a language to express the laws, which are grand and beautiful; and +lets them, by his songs, into some of the realities"? Emerson yearns +that "the old forgotten splendors of the Universe should glow again for +us," and "A.E." believes that we at times attain "the high ancestral +Self"; his restless ploughman, "walking through the woodland's purple" +under "the diamond night" + + "Deep beneath his rustic habit finds himself a King" + +"A.E.'s" poems on death are little different from those in which he +celebrates the soul's absorption into the Universal Spirit, since death +means to him only a longer absorption into the Universal Spirit or +sometimes such absorption forever. In the event of this last, he in some +moods sees + + "Life and joy forever vanish as a tale is told. + Lost within the 'Mother's Being,'" + +or no sense of individuality in souls in heaven; in other moods he sees +individuality preserved after death among those "High souls," that,-- + + "Absolved from grief and sin, + Leaning from out ancestral spheres, + Beckon the wounded spirit in." + +So sustained is the habitual altitude of Mr. Russell's thought, so +preoccupied his mood with spiritual things, that the human reader must +feel lonely at times, must feel the regions of the poet's thought alien +to him. At such times it is a positive relief to find the poet yearning +for the concrete sweet things of earth. It is perhaps only in +"Weariness" that Mr. Russell's high mood does fail, but I rejoice when +that failure makes him acknowledge-- + + "Fade the heaven-assailing moods: + Slave to petty tasks I pine + For the quiet of the woods, + And the sunlight seems divine. + + "And I yearn to lay my head + Where the grass is green and sweet; + Mother, all the dreams are fled + From the tired child at thy feet." + +It is love, love of country, love of countryside, and love of woman that +he writes of when he does write of "loved earth things." "A Woman's +Voice" and "Forgiveness" are poems so simple that none may +misunderstand; they have the human call so rare in "A.E.," but it is not +a strong human call. Of such love songs he has written but few--poems +out of the peace and not out of the passion of love; of passion other +than spiritual ecstasy and rapt delight in nature there is none in his +verse. Although he has been given "a ruby-flaming heart," he has been +given also "a pure cold spirit." Only about a fourth of his poems have +the human note dominant, and even when it is so dominant, as when he +writes of his country, he is very seldom content to rest with a +description of the beauty of place or legend; the beautiful place must +be threshold to the Other World, as "The Gates of Dreamland," which he +finds at the end of "the lonely road through bogland to the lake at +Carrowmore," Carrowmore, the great cemetery of the great dead of +prehistoric Ireland under Knocknarea near Sligo; or the legend must be +symbol of some mystic belief--"Connla's well is a Celtic equivalent of +the First Fountain of mysticism." + +He can draw starkly, when he will, a picture of bare Irish landscape:-- + + "Still rests the heavy share on the dark soil: + Upon the black mould thick the dew-damp lies: + The horse waits patient: from his lowly toil + The ploughboy to the morning lifts his eyes. + + "The unbudding hedgerows dark against day's fires + Glitter with gold-lit crystals: on the rim + Over the unregarding city's spires + The lonely beauty shines alone for him." + +In "In Connemara" and "An Irish Face," poems with earthly titles, you +expect only things earthly, but in these too, he uses the picture of the +concrete only as the symbol of the universal. The reason Mr. Russell +must take you to the supernatural in these poems is because he sees +spirits everywhere he goes in Ireland. "Never a poet," he writes, "has +lain on our hillsides, but gentle, stately figures, with hearts shining +like the sun, move through his dreams, over radiant grasses, in an +enchanted world of their own." Start "The Memory of Earth" and you think +you are to read one of the many fine poems of twilight in our +literature, but the fourth line undeceives you:-- + + "In the wet dusk silver sweet, + Down the violet-scented ways, + As I moved with quiet feet + I was met by mighty days. + + "On the hedge the hanging dew + Glassed the eve and stars and skies; + While I gazed a madness grew + Into thundered battle-cries. + + "Where the hawthorn glimmered white, + Flashed the spear and fell the stroke-- + Ah, what faces pale and bright + Where the dazzling battle broke! + + "There a hero-hearted queen + With young beauty lit the van. + Gone! the darkness flowed between + All the ancient wars of man. + + "While I paced the valley's gloom + Where the rabbits pattered near, + Shone a temple and a tomb + With the legend carven clear. + + "Time put by a myriad fates + That her day might dawn in glory; + Death made wide a million gates + So to close her tragic story." + +And so it is in "A.E.'s" score and more poems that are suggested by +Irish places and Irish legends and Irish loves. Never an Irish exile but +will have a dear home place brought before him by such lines as + + "The Greyhound River windeth through a loneliness so deep + Scarce a wild fowl shakes the quiet that the purple boglands keep"; + +and a story of the home place brought before him by such lines as + + "Tarry thou yet, late lingerer in the twilight's glory; + Gay are the hills with song: earth's fairy children leave + More dim abodes to roam the primrose-hearted eve, + Opening their glimmering lips to breathe some wondrous story"; + +and a girl of the home place brought before him by such lines as + + "Dusk, a pearl-grey river, o'er + Hill and vale puts out the day-- + What do you wonder at, asthore, + What's away in yonder grey?" + +but all these poems, of which these lines are the fine onsets, lead past +"the dim stars" and "unto the Light of Lights." + +A man that believes that his spirit is one with the Universal Spirit +cannot but be an optimist if he believe that Spirit is the Spirit of +Good, and that a Platonist must believe. Yet "A.E." so longs to be rapt +into everlasting union with the Universal Spirit that he tires of the +earth, where that union is interrupted by the necessities of daily life. +The fairies call to him and he would away-- + + "'Come away,' the red lips whisper, 'all the world is weary now; + 'Tis the twilight of the ages and it's time to quit the plough. + Oh, the very sunlight's weary ere it lightens up the dew, + And its gold is changed and faded before it falls to you.'" + +But it is not always twilight to him, and there are many blither moods. +Over against these lines you may put, + + "I always dwell with morning in my heart," + +and + + "Oh, but life is sweet, is sweet." + +Earth is not an unhappy place, but he sighs sometimes for the happiness +unalloyed of heaven. + +When we come to consider the technique of Mr. Russell's art, we find him +anything but Emersonian. Mr. Russell has, in general, command of form, +melody, harmony, distinction. Who reads carefully will remember many +fine lines; who reads only once will be as one lost in sun-filled fog +like that of "A E.'s" own Irish mountains, but he should be patient, he +should wait and look again and again, and finally he will see, even if +earth be still dimmed with fogbanks, much of the heavens, free of fog, +and radiant with cold white light. + + "Forest glooms + Rumorous of old romance" + +and + + "But joy as an Arctic sun went down" + +the kind of lines rarest in his verse; more characteristic are, + + "Hearts like cloisters dim and grey," + + "the great star swings + Along the sapphire zone," + + "The Angel childhood of the earth," + + "Glint the bubble planets tossing in the dead black sea of night," + + "The old enchantment lingers in the honey heart of earth." + +There are comparatively few "purple patches" in Mr. Russell's poetry, +for the reasons that each poem depends for its chief appeal on one mood +or thought or dream immanent in it, rather than on any fine phrasing. +The effort to catch the meaning of the verse--seldom apparent at first +glance--prevents the noting of as many purple lines as there are. Nor +when noted are such lines readily memorable, since they are apt to lack +association with known and loved things to bring them home to the +reader. And again the poems are very short,--intimations, suggestions +rather than expressions,--and their intangible themes are often much +alike, and poem becomes confused with poem in the memory. + +It may be that to those to whom the Other World is very instant, as it +is to many Irishmen, or to those that go about daily preparing for the +world beyond the grave, as did our Puritan ancestors of the seventeenth +century, these poems of Mr. Russell's speak familiar language, as they +of a certainty do to the mystic, but to the many modern art lovers who +hold to Pater's "New Cyrenaicism,"--as Mr. Russell would say, "those +under the blight of the Relative,"--as well as to the man in the street +their language is new and difficult to understand. But the poems have +found their audience--there is no doubt about that--and they are +regarded as oracular by hundreds. This is the more curious in that there +is so little personality in them, surprisingly little when one knows how +strong is the personality of the man that made them But this lack of +personality follows naturally on the mystic's creed--he must put into +his writings chiefly his relation with God,--for all other relations are +as nothing to that,--and if he attain his desire he is rapt away from +himself and his fellows into oneness with God. + +Quality, a very definite quality, these verses of Mr. Russell's have, +but it is an almost unchanging sameness of quality; almost all his +verses, as I have said, have the same theme. So there is a monotony +about them, and their reader is apt to cry out that mysticism is +inimical to art. It may well be that this unswerving following of one +theme is of definite purpose; that Mr. Russell feels that he as Irishman +and mystic has a mission, as indeed Mr. Charles Johnston owns. Speaking +of Irishmen, in "Ireland" (1902), he says,-- + + We live in the invisible world. If I rightly understand our mission + and our destiny, it is this: To restore to other men the sense of + that invisible; that world of our immortality; as of old our race + went forth carrying the Galilean Evangel. We shall first learn and + then teach, that not with wealth can the soul of man be satisfied; + that our enduring interest is not here but there, in the unseen, + the hidden, the immortal, for whose purposes exist all the visible + beauties of the world. If this be our mission and our purpose, + well may our fair mysterious land deserve her name: Inis Fail, the + Isle of Destiny. + +Very like Emerson this, too, but very Irish. Let us not forget that +Berkeley and Scotus Erigena were Irishmen. + +I do not wish to overemphasize the influence of Emerson on "A.E.," and +indeed it is no greater than Emerson's influence over M. Maeterlinck. I +believe Emerson was as much guide as master, that he pointed "A.E." the +way to the mystics. I might dwell on the resemblance between thoughts +common to the two much more than I have--there are even lines of the +younger man's that show the influence of lines of the elder. But that is +not my object. I wish to point out that Puritanism in Ireland has +flowered up into the mystic poetry of "A.E.," into poetry of that +strange quality, cold ecstasy, as Puritanism in America has flowered up +into the mystic poetry of Emerson, poetry of cold ecstasy. In England, +so far as I know, Puritanism, that has given us so great a poet as +Milton, has never so flowered. Crashaw was born of a Puritan father, but +it was through the Old Faith his greatest inspiration came, and his +ecstasy, as that of his latter-day disciple, Francis Thompson, is warm +ecstasy, not cold like that of the two Puritan poets. Henry More, +Platonist and seer of visions, never attained ecstasy in his poetry. It +may be that it required transplantation of Englishmen into Ireland and +into America to bring about this phenomenon. Nor is it the only quality +these two earliest bodies of English colonists alike developed. But it +is more than dangerous to dogmatize where so many races went to the +making of a people as went to the making of Anglo-Irishmen and +Americans. + +How different are the types of Anglo-Irish I could not but ponder as we +left "A E.'s" home and went out into the chill rain of that August +night. To the right hand, as we walked with "A.E.'s" disciples, they +pointed to Maud Gonne's house. "Irish Joan of Arc" they call her, leader +of men whom men worship at first sight; most exciting of Ireland's mob +orators, all proclaim her, a very Pytho whose prophecies stir unrest and +tumult! And here next door the Quietist, the man of dreams and visions, +to whom all the war of the world is of as little moment as all other +unrealities, since here in this world he has begun already the real, the +spiritual life. Both are types that have been as long as Ireland has +been; both Pytho and priest were among the high order of druid and +druidess of old time; agitator and reconciler, by Mr. Russell's belief, +might well be reincarnations of the wise women and wise men of +prehistoric days. To the world Maud Gonne is more representative of +Ireland than Mr. Russell, but he is just as truly a symbol of Ireland as +she: to those who know Irish history the thought of her quiet +monasteries of the seventh century, whence she sent out teachers to all +of Europe, is as recurrent as her political agitation of the nineteenth, +and to those who know her countryside the memories of soft sunny rains +and moonlit evenings are as lingering as those of black angry days and +wild blind nights. Her very colors, her grays and greens and purples, +proclaim her peace. It is of this peace and of the greater peace of that +unphenomenal or spiritual world, that lies nearer to Ireland than to +any Western land, that Mr. Russell is interpreter. + +You may think of Mr. Russell as you will, as organizer of the Irish +Agricultural Organization Society, as stimulator of the Irish Literary +Revival, as economist, playwright, poet, painter, preacher, but always +as you put by his books you will think of him as mystic, as stargazer, +wandering, as he so often tells us in his poems, on the mountains by +night, with his eyes keener with wonder at the skies than ever +shepherd's under the Star of Bethlehem; you will see him, the human +atom, on the bare Dublin mountains, thrilling as he watches the sweep of +world beyond world; and yet, atom that he is, the possessor of it +all;--you will think of him as stargazer whose "spirit rolls into the +vast of God." + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +LADY GREGORY + + +When one stops to think how much of the blood of the Gael, Irish and +Scotch, there is in us in America, one realizes that we owe a debt of +gratitude to Lady Gregory second only to that owed her by "The Men of +Ireland and Alban" themselves. For it is Lady Gregory, in her "Cuchulain +of Muirthemne" (1902) and in her "Gods and Fighting Men" (1904) and in +her "Book of Saints and Wonders" (1908), who has done more than any +other writer of the Gaelic countries to bring home to us the wonders of +Gaelic romance. That they should have to be brought home to us is a +shame to us. With so much of Irish and Scotch blood in us the names of +the heroes of the Red Branch and Fenian Cycles should not be so foreign +in aspect and sound as they undoubtedly are, and their deeds should be +as familiar as those of Robin Hood. A hundred years ago our grandfathers +had, indeed, "Ossian" on their shelves, as we had in boyhood Dean +Church's stories of Greece and Rome, or, in some cases, the stories of +his doings in their memories, learned from their parents were they +old-country born, or of their nurses were it their privilege, as it was +that of many more Americans of the second half of the nineteenth +century, to have as foster mothers "kindly Irish of the Irish." + +[Illustration] + +To her own countrymen the work of Lady Gregory, valuable as it is, is +not the revelation it is to us. Those of them that have not been brought +up on the stories that she translates could read at least many of them +in the "Old Celtic Romances" (1879) of Dr. P.W. Joyce, or in the +versions of the Cuchulain and the Finn legends by Mr. Standish James +O'Grady (1878 and 1880), books that somehow or other never came to be +widely read in America. Mr. Yeats admits it was Mr. O'Grady that +"started us all," that is, the writers who began the Renaissance in the +late eighties. It may be, of course, that the added beauty and dignity +the stories take on in the versions of Lady Gregory will inspire to +nobler writing poets and dramatists and novelists that already owe much +to Mr. O'Grady or Dr. Joyce or to the scholars they were sent back to by +these popularizers. It is certain that the writers of the younger group, +the group of those that are only now nearing distinction, owe much to +Lady Gregory. After all is said, however, her work is to be judged not +for its value to others, but as in itself an art product, of a class +kindred to "The Wanderings of Oisin" of Mr. Yeats, although differing in +form. I am not forgetting, of course, that she is following faithfully, +or rather as faithfully as an artist may follow, the old legends. She +has, she owns, clarified them, condensed them, left out contradictory +episodes, woven now and then a Scotch version of an incident into a +cycle arranged in one complete whole from many Irish versions. When Lady +Gregory has owned this she has owned that she has added something more +of her own than a "connecting sentence." Although she has labored +carefully to keep herself out of the stories, and although, if you have +read only her versions of them, you may feel that she has succeeded in +keeping herself out of them, you will recognize, if you turn to her +originals in O'Curry or in Whitley Stokes or in Standish Hayes O'Grady, +that she has added that all-important thing, a personality. Some +scholars object to this as "too literary." And some literary men would +rather have the old stories, they say, "just as they are" There is the +crux. How can we get them, even in an exact translation, "just as they +are"? We cannot. This is not the place to discuss this most vexed +question of translation, but I must go into it so far as to point again +to the fact that we are more likely to have made upon us, by an +interpretative translation, an effect more nearly like that made upon +the listener contemporary to the time of the making of the story than if +the translation were literal. We are always forgetting the so obvious +fact that the kind of metaphor or descriptive epithet of this sort or +that, which would make a certain effect on the listener of the tenth +century, will make a very different effect on the reader of to-day. As +Lady Gregory points out, the description of the contortion of Cuchulain +in his fight with Ferdiad seems very unheroic to us, and is therefore +best left out of the translation, or, if retained, conveyed in terms +that will make an effect on us similar to the effect the detailed +description had on the audience of the old bards. Here again, however, +is trouble. How can we get that effect? We cannot surely, but an +imaginative translation by one who is scholar and _littérateur_ both +will take us nearest to it. We want, as a matter of fact, both kinds of +translations, the interpretative and artistic translation of Lady +Gregory and the literal translation of Mr. Standish Hayes O'Grady. The +one is needed to check the other. We would have a gauge by which to +measure how much such such a translator as Lady Gregory has taken from +and added to the old story. We would know how great is the freedom in +which we willingly acquiesce, remembering that the translations which we +treasure as great in literature are in greater or less measure "free." +So checking Lady Gregory's translations we find that they represent a +fair measure of freedom, as so checking the verses of FitzGerald's "Omar +Khayyám" we find in them the utmost measure of freedom, a freedom indeed +that, in certain verses, is virtually a re-creation. + +Many, both scholars and literary men, object to the kind of English into +which Lady Gregory translates the stories of Ireland's heroic age, her +"Kiltartan English," the English of the people of her home country on +the borders of Clare and Galway, the English made by a people who think +in Irish. This familiar language, they say, has lessened the dignity of +the old tales, bringing them all to one level by a diction and style +that is one, whether they are romance or folk-tale. This objection can +be taken, however, only to the Cuchulain stories, which were court +romance, and not to the Finn stories, which come out of the thatched +houses. This "Kiltartan English" seems to me in its more familiar +moments, less imposing than that in which I first heard stories of Finn +McCool told by our old gardener, Lawrence Kelly of County Wexford, but +it may be I remember less clearly the homeliness of his "discourse" +than its "grand speaking." It is, however, as peasant English, a fitting +medium for the telling of the stories of Brigit and St. Patrick in her +"Book of Saints and Wonders," for Brigit and Patrick are still household +words among all the children of the Gael. But by its very difference +from the English of all other artists in words save of a few of her own +country and generation, and from such conversational English as I know +well, this "Kiltartan English" brings me a foreign quality. I feel that +the art of these tale-tellers is an art of another race than the +English, just as I feel that the art of the teller of Beowulf is an art +of another race than the English. The literature in our ancestral +tongue is not to me English until it sloughs off the Germanic +sentence-structure of Anglo-Saxon. Here lies, I think, the greatest +difficulty in translating Old English literature. And it will not be +successfully translated, I think, without the use of the syntax of some +dialect that preserves an archaic sentence-structure. + +To me, then, it seems singularly fortunate for Lady Gregory to have her +"Kiltartan English" to fall back upon to give that foreign flavor that +we intuitively feel the need of in a translation. There may be a slight +loss of dignity through its use, but there is a great gain in folk +atmosphere. + +In quoting to show the style of Lady Gregory I should quote description +rather than narrative, as the description seems to me better as well as +briefer. The three famous tales of Old Irish literature, "The Three +Sorrows of Story-Telling," are "The Fate of the Children of Usnach," +comparable, in the great wars it led to, to the rape of Helen; "The Fate +of the Children of Lir," a story that has as its base the folk-tale that +underlies "Lohengrin," but which takes us back farther into the past in +its kinship to "Medea"; and "The Sons of Tuireann," which has been +called the Irish Odyssey. Of these the first is incomparably the finest +story, and Lady Gregory has told it nobly in "Cuchulain of Muirthemne," +but it alone of all the stories in her three books of translations has +enough of humanity in it to put it side by side with the story of Sigurd +and Brunhilde or the story of Paris and Helen. When one remembers that +Greek and Scandinavian literature may boast five stories each, at least, +but little short of these their greatest stories, and that Irish +literature has but "Diarmuid and Grania" to boast as in any way +comparable to the story of Deirdre, it must be admitted that early Irish +literature representing Ireland's heroic age is not so beautiful as the +literature that represents the heroic ages of Scandinavia and Greece. +"The Fate of the Children of Usnach" is rich in beautiful detail of +incident and of description of nature; it preserves for us much of the +inner life of old time; and it has dignity of proportion. It has not the +fundamental weakness, as great art, of most of these old Irish stories, +their characters' lack of interest because of their lack of body, their +lack of personality, their running to type rather than moulding into +individuals; yet the feats performed by Cuchulain are so wholly +superhuman, most of them, that they often put their doer beyond our +sympathy, and at their worst make him absurd. + +If these stories were simply extravagant folk-fancy, such as the Jack +the Giant Killer story, to delight children, we should not quarrel with +this quality in them, but there is so much in them of dignity that we +must take them seriously, as we take Homer. When their heroes are +definitely gods we can accept almost any of their deeds, so we can +delight in the earlier stories of "Gods and Fighting Men," the stories +of the Tuatha de Danaan, Lugh and Angus, Midhir and Etain, Bran and +Connla, as we cannot in those of Finn and Goll and Cuchulain and +Conchubar, who, because of their historical setting and more definite +characterization, have more of the appeal of humanity. We know +Cuchulain, in Lady Gregory's pages, as a small dark man, constant in +love in comparison with his fellows, faithful to his friends, loyal to +his king; and we know Finn as a fair old man of ruddy countenance, a +lover of women, somewhat pompous and somewhat quarrelsome; but neither +hero is a clear-cut personality like Sigurd or Ajax. If either Cuchulain +or Finn were surely a god we should accept his deeds as now we cannot +accept them, and were either brought home to us as wholly human and +divested of his supernatural powers, and given a personality, we should +be far more moved by his fortunes. + +It is in enchantments, visits to worlds oversea and under wave, and in +praises of the beauties of this world, its woods, its waters, its real +wonders, and in the celebration of sorrow and delight that "Gods and +Fighting Men" is at its best, not in the celebration of happy loves, or +of wild loves, or of great victories. So it is that Gabhra, where the +Fianna were broken, is finer than "The Battle of the White Strand," +where they won against great odds. + +Finer, however, than any narrative power possessed by the old Irish +bards is their power in the lyrical passages so freely interspersed +throughout the stories, and in the lyrics that come into them on the +lips of the poets and warriors and on the lips of the women who have +lost their lovers in fight. The farewell of Deirdre to Alban and her +lament over Naoise, the song of the woman from oversea to Bran, the poem +Finn made to prove his power of poetry, the sleepy song of Grania over +Diarmuid, the lament of Neargach's wife, the song of Tir-nan-Og that +Niave made to Oisin, and Oisin's own praise of the good times of the +Fianna--these are the passages in which the old tales reach their +highest poetry. Once read, these remain in memory, but certain episodes +and certain sayings remain also. Mr. Yeats has picked out one of the +sayings in his introduction to "Gods and Fighting Men" that will do for +sample. It is the answer of Osgar dying, to the man who asks him how he +is: "I am as you would have me be." Starker even, perhaps, is the +absolute simplicity of the description of that last fight in "The Battle +of the White Strand," in which Cael and Finnachta go, locked in each +other's arms, to their death under the waves without a word. + +Wild nature is always about these warriors. The storm in the trees, the +sorrow of the sea, the clatter of wild geese and the singing of swans +find echo in the poems that praise them. We see, too, at times, fields +heavy with harvest, and often the apple trees in bloom and the cuckoo +calling among them,--indeed, the sweet scent of apple gardens, like the +keenness of the winds of spring, beautiful as are the phrases that +present them, become almost stock phrases. Always, too, there are +wonders of the other world about the heroes; women from undersea and +underground come into their halls as naturally as the members of their +own clans, and the twilight mists unfolding from familiar hills will +reveal their marvelous duns, whitewalled with silver or marble, and +thatched with the wings of white birds. + +There has been frequent quarreling in certain quarters with Mr. Russell +and Mr. Johnston and Mr. Yeats for introducing mysticism and a definite +symbolism and the ways of Eastern thought into their versions of Irish +mythic tales and their records of Irish mood. There will be found some +justification for such practices in Lady Gregory's translations. +Manannan, the sea-god, is here presented doing tricks like those of the +East Indian fakirs; Finn is reincarnated in later great leaders of the +Gael; and in "The Hospitality of Cuanna's House" there is out-and-out +allegory, to say nothing of a possible symbolistic interpretation of +episodes in almost every other story. Even the willful obscurity of the +modern poetry can be paralleled by the riddling of Cuchulain and Emer. + +It is, perhaps, because Lady Gregory has found the old stories not only +in the dignity of their bardic presentation, but also in the happy +familiarity of their telling by the people of the thatched houses in her +own district, that she has been able to bring them so near to us. From +these same people, too, she has got some of her stories of St. Bride +and Columba and poems and stories of recent and contemporary +inspiration, poems and stories that have to do with humble life as well +as with the highly colored heroic life that those who live bare lives +themselves are so fond of imagining. In her "Poets and Dreamers" (1903) +are records of this collecting and of her study of local ways about +Coole and on the Connemara coast and in the Aran Isles. One of the most +interesting of her chapters is that on the poet Raftery, whose poems Dr. +Hyde has published. Blind and bitter, Raftery wandered about Connacht +until about 1840, when death took him, an old man, but still vigorous in +mind and spirit. Another chapter of "Poets and Dreamers" is "On the Edge +of the World." Each reading of this is to me like a return to West +Ireland, the very quality of whose life it gives. It should be the first +chapter of the book turned to by the reader, for it gives one the note +on which to read all. As Lady Gregory drives by the sea, people about +her on the roadside and in the cabins are singing in Irish. The little +experiences of the day are, for them, experiences to brood over; and for +her, too. And this thought is the last of her brooding: "The rising +again of Ireland, of her old speech, of her last leader [Parnell], +dreams all, as we are told. But here on the edge of the world, dreams +are real things, and every heart is watching for the opening of one or +another grave." + +There is creative writing in these essays of Lady Gregory's, for all +that she is playing middleman between her people and the reading public +of the English-speaking world in many of them; and, as I would emphasize +again, in her three books of translations. But, after all translation +will not content, and the essay that is not self-revelation will not +content, the writer who would have his writing a "reading of life." So +it is not surprising that Lady Gregory turned toward drama. And yet I do +not ever feel, after many readings of her plays, that Lady Gregory took +to drama because of any overmastering impulse toward this most difficult +of all literary forms. She has learned to handle some orders of drama +pleasantly, the farce more than pleasantly, and, very recently, the +folk-tragedy nobly; but had it not been that plays of other than +romantic tone were needed for the Abbey Theatre as a foil to those of +Mr. Yeats and of Synge, I doubt whether it is drama that Lady Gregory +would have chosen as the medium through which to express her reading of +life. I can just as well imagine her shrewd kindliness of judgment upon +the foibles and virtues of her countrymen in stories whose form is very +like that employed by Miss Barlow in her "Irish Idylls" (1892) as in +these so original little plays that she has wrought out without +precedent, under the tutelage of Mr. Yeats. + +It is more than likely, as I say, that had it not been that drama was +needed for the Abbey Theatre she would not have attempted drama. But +more than likely it is, too, that had she written plays not made to +order they had reached wider through Irish society and plumbed deeper +into Irish life. Lady Gregory knows Irish life, from bottom to top, as +few Irishwomen and few Irishmen of her day know it; she has large heart, +wide tolerance, and abounding charity; and yet she was long content to +limit her plays of modern Ireland to farce, at times of a serious enough +purpose, but because it is farce, not of the first seriousness. It may +be, of course, that Lady Gregory knows best of any one her own powers, +and it is true that in the plays she has written she is at her best when +they are at their merriest. I cannot, however, but feel that this is a +success of intention rather than a success of instinct. She would have +them the most successful in a quality as far removed as might be from +that quality of troubled dreaminess which is the best of the dramas of +Mr. Yeats. Synge, it must be remembered, did not begin as a writer of +comedy, and there is little of that ripe irony that has no precedent in +English literature in that first play that he wrote for the Abbey +Theatre, "Riders to the Sea" (1903). Is it a coincidence that later, as +he found his bent for that sort of writing that culminated in "The +Playboy," Lady Gregory turned at times to historical drama and a farce +that grew as serious as comedy? There is, of course, in all her plays +serious indictment of national weaknesses, sometimes obvious indictment, +as in "The Deliverer" (1911), which records, in terms of folk-biblical +allegory, his countrymen's desertion of Parnell; sometimes indictment +not so obvious, as in "The Canavans" (1906), which rebukes that +shoneenism in high places which has for generations been one of the +curses of Ireland. To him who knows only a little of Irish life it is +easy to see the meaning but superficially concealed by the farcical +bustle, the laughter, and the lamentations. But to him who looks but on +the surface there is merriness enough and wittiness enough and wisdom +enough to make his loss of the deeper meaning, for him, but a little +loss. + +There are enough characters presented, too, peasants generally and +townsfolk of the lower class, to make the farces a "reading of life." +What is wanting to him who looks for more than what farce may do is the +largeness of utterance that will make a "reading of life" memorable. +Take "the image" (1910), for instance, in which Lady Gregory is +attempting more than in "Spreading the News" (1904) or "Hyacinth Halvey" +(1906). This play, the longest that Lady Gregory has written, is what +the stage would call the character farce. She owns it a presentation of +dreams of old men and old women which crumble at the touch of reality, +but it is not only this, but a symbolizing of the proneness of all +Ireland to accept as certainties on the eve of realization what are +really only signs that point to possibilities in a far to-morrow. In the +play four old men of a little village on the west coast are debating +what they will do with their share of a windfall that has come to the +village in the shape of two whales that have drifted up on the beach. +When the priest determines that all the proceeds from the sale of the +oil from the whales be spent on something that will benefit the whole +community they plan a statue (one of them is a stone-cutter) to some +great celebrity. The motives that lead them to choose Hugh O'Lorrha are +telling satire not only of Irishmen, but of all men. It would hardly be, +however, in any other country than Ireland that the name of the one come +at by way of accident would, unidentified for some time by any, be +finally revealed as that of the hero of a folk-tale. Four days after the +whales had come ashore, days wasted in planning what the village will do +with the prize money, and unutilized in securing the blubber and +rendering out the oil, the quartette learned that "the Connemara lads +have the oil drawn from the one of them, and the other one was swept +away with the spring tide." + +Though "The Image" be farce, its characters are the characters of +comedy, and its purpose whole-heartedly serious. And even "Spreading the +News" has its lesson, of rumor's wild riot in Irish crowds. On the +slightest grounds the reciting of an errand of helpfulness is turned by +quick imagination into a story of a murder. Lightly sketched as are the +people here, from a caricature of a magistrate to the more serious +presentment of Mrs. Fallon's "nice quiet little man," they are very true +to Ireland. Slighter even are the butcher and the postmistress and the +model sub-sanitary inspector in "Hyacinth Halvey," though all are fully +understood and fully blocked out in their author's mind, if impossible +of complete realization within limits so narrow; but the farce itself is +not lifted into dignity by any noble underlying attitude. "The Jack Daw" +(1907) has rumor again as its motive, as had "Spreading the News," but +it is not the motive of the play or any of its incidents that is the +best thing about it, but the character of Michael Cooney, of the +"seventh generation of Cooneys who trusted nobody living or dead." He +is, of course, caricatured, but he has possibilities of personality, and +he could have been worked into the fullness of a universal character had +"The Jack Daw" been comedy, we will say, instead of farce. Of all her +characters, that of Hyacinth Halvey is most nearly rounded out, but +then Lady Gregory has taken two little plays in which to present his +portrait, "The Full Moon" (1911) recording some of his later experiences +in Cloon and his final departure from the town, his introduction to +which was recorded in the play bearing his name. + +"The Workhouse Ward" (1908), reaching from wild farce to sentimental +comedy, is hardly more than a dialogue, but it is given body by the +truth to Irish life out of which it is written, that quarreling is +better than loneliness. Lady Gregory has disowned "Twenty-five" (1902), +which is frankly melodrama, her only other experiment in which, in her +plays of modern Ireland, is "The Rising of the Moon" (1903). This play +relates the allowed escape from a police officer of a political prisoner +through that prisoner's persuading the officer that "patriotism" is +above his sworn duty to England. + +Of the plays that may be called historical, "The Canavans" (1906) is the +best, because it is of the peasantry, I suppose, who change so little +with the years, and whom Lady Gregory presents so amusingly and so truly +in her modern farce comedy. "Kincora" (1903) takes us all the way back +to the eleventh century, deriving its name from Brian's Seat on the +Shannon and ending with his death at Clontarf. It is undistinguished +melodrama. "The White Cockade" (1905) is better only in so far as it +involves farce, farce in the kitchen of an inn on the Wexford coast just +after the Battle of the Boyne. "Devorgilla" (1908) is of a time between +the times of the two other historical plays, of the time a generation +later than the coming of the Normans to Ireland. It is pitched to a +higher key than any other of her historic plays, and it is held better +to its key, but its tragedy is far less impressive than the tragedy of +"The Gaol Gate" (1906) which pictures the effects upon his wife and his +mother of the imprisonment of an Irish lad of to-day, and their learning +that "Denis Cahel died for his neighbor." This little play is out of the +life that Lady Gregory knows and can deal with; it is finely conceived +and finely executed, lingering in the mind as does the keen heard rising +from some bare graveyard fronting the Atlantic. + +Just why Lady Gregory, who has rendered in prose so well old legends, +should render old Irish historic life so much less well I cannot +explain. Sometimes I think it is because she has found less of that +history than of that legend among the people. Yet in "A Travelling Man" +(1907), her little miracle, somewhat in the manner of Dr. Hyde's, that +brings Christ into a modern peasant home, she has made a play of a +tender and reconciling beauty. With the success of "A Travelling Man" +and "The Gaol Gate" before me I cannot say it is because her genius is +for farce; and to say that it is because her genius is for the plays of +modern peasant life does not help to account for the fact. + +The idiom of all these plays is racy of the soil, and when it need be, +eloquent with the eloquence that is almost always in the English of the +Irish. It is full of wise saws and proverbs, quips and quirks of +expression, the picturesquenesses and homelinesses of speech that are +characteristic of a peasant to whom talk is the half of life. These +range from sayings like those of the clowns of Elizabethan drama, such +as "He had great wisdom I tell you, being silly-like, and blind," and +such country wisdom as "What would the cat's son do but kill mice," up +through the elaborate maledictions of the two old paupers in "The +Workhouse Ward" and such delightful asperities as that of Maelmora anent +his bitter sister Gormleith, "You were surely born on a Friday, and the +briars breaking through the green sod," to aphorisms that have an accent +of eternity, as, "It is the poor know all the troubles of the world," +and "The swift, unflinching, terrible judgment of the young." + +The characters, even when they are purposely almost caricatures, have in +them the possibility of complete portrayals. There is no flagging of the +invention in any of them, no slipshod or careless composition. Her +technique, too, at least in farce, is masterful, and in her plays of +modern life of other form adequate. That she could master historical +drama, as I have said, I must doubt, but that she need restrict herself +so largely to farce and farce comedy in her plays of modern life, I do +not for a moment believe. "The Gaol Gate," in fact, proved that she need +not so restrict herself, and "MacDaragh's Wife" (1911), written by Lady +Gregory at sea on her way to America, but perhaps for that all the +fuller of the wild old life of her native Connacht. It would almost seem +that with "Grania" (1912), a tragedy too, following "MacDaragh's Wife," +Lady Gregory is widening the scope of her work, as she well can, now +that there are other dramatists to provide comedies and farces for the +Abbey Theatre. It is a haunting story that "MacDaragh's Wife" tells, +and largely a true story, the story of a piper who, though a pauper, +draws all the countryside to the funeral of his wife, draws them, +through the wild lamenting of his pipes, from the fair where they are +sporting to follow, with a full fellowship, to the grave, her who died +all but alone. Lady Gregory tells us in a note just what of it she +gathered from old people about her girlhood's home at Roxborough, and +what about her home of to-day at Coole, how she has shaped it, and what +emotion is back of it, the "lasting pride of the artist of all ages." + +As Lady Gregory had restricted herself, until recently, in the forms of +modern life which she wrote of and in the kinds of people she selected +to write of, so, too, she had restricted herself, until recently, in the +motives she considered. It is true that the motive most recurrent in her +plays, that of fear of the opinion of the neighbor, an attitude probably +sprung of the clan system, is dominant in Irish life; and it is equally +true that the motive most notably absent, love, was until yesterday far +from a dominant motive in the Irish life that Lady Gregory presents: yet +there are many other motives that, in true comedy, and even in farcical +comedy, might well have place. That these motives are not there is, I +think, not only that Lady Gregory, self-effacingly, put into her plays +what was wanted to make them foils to the plays of Mr. Yeats and Synge, +but also because of the practice of one type of gentlewoman in +literature, of which Jane Austen is characteristic. And yet the mere +mention of Jane Austen increases the wonderment that Lady Gregory has +not written of people of every condition in her neighborhood, whether +that be London or Dublin or Gort, as Miss Austen did of people of every +condition in her neighborhood, whether that be Steventon or Bath or +Chawton. It can hardly be said, even, that "Grania" her last play, is a +play about love. In her note to the play, Lady Gregory declares, "Love +itself, with its shadow Jealousy, is the true protagonist!" And yet, I +think it is Jealousy only that is the true protagonist. There is much +talk about love, but it is not from love, but from jealousy that the +action of the play arises. Among all this talk about love, among many +eloquent sayings about love, true readings of love, there stands out +most clearly in my memory this part of a speech of Finn, a speech +uttered before Grania had turned from him to Diarmuid-- + + And as for youngsters, they do not know how to love because there + is always some to-morrow's love possible in the shadow of the love + of to-day. It is only the old it goes through and through entirely + because they know all the last honey of the summer-time has come to + its ferment in their cup, and there is no new summer coming to meet + them forever. + +This I remember not only for its thought but for its style, the rhythm +of its prose. It is Lady Gregory at her best, as "Grania" as a whole is +Lady Gregory at her best in tragedy. If "Grania" in every detail were as +inspired as its explanation of the queen's quick turn from Diarmuid to +Finn, it would be a great play, indeed. Grania is no light woman, and +yet she turns, in the old legend, from the man who sacrificed all but +all for her, on his death, to the High King who brought about his +death, with a suddenness inexplicable. Lady Gregory makes that sudden +turn plausible, for two reasons. One is that for seven years of +wandering all over Ireland, Diarmuid by his own will and because of +loyalty to Finn, had kept Grania a maid, making her his wife only after +he found her being carried off by the King of Foreign. The other reason +is that as Diarmuid lies dying, wounded to death by that King of Foreign +whom he has killed, his thoughts are all of his long-delayed disloyalty +to Finn, and not at all of Grania. Thus, she justifies herself, speaking +to Finn:-- + + _Grania_. He had no love for me at any time. It is easy to know it + now. I knew it all the while, but I would not give in to believe + it. His desire was all the time with you yourself and Almhuin. He + let on to be taken up with me, and it was but letting on. Why would + I fret after him that so soon forgot his wife, and left her in a + wretched way? + + _Finn_. You are not judging him right. You are distracted with the + weight of your loss. + + _Grania_. Does any man at all speak lies at the very brink of + death, or hold any secret in his heart? It was at that time he had + done with deceit, and he showed where his thought was, and had no + word at all for me that had left the whole world for his sake, and + that went wearing out my youth, pushing here and there as far as + the course of the stars of Heaven. And my thousand curses upon + death not to have taken him at daybreak, and I believing his words! + It is then I would have waked him well and would have cried my + seven generations after him! And I have lost all on this side of + the world, losing that trust and faith I had, and finding him to + think of me no more than of a flock of stars would cast their + shadow on his path. And I to die with this scald upon my heart; it + is hard thistles would spring up out of my grave. + +I have spoken of Lady Gregory as translator, as collector of folk-lore, +as essayist, and as dramatist; but there is another rôle in which she +has brought no less advantage to the Celtic Renaissance, though it is a +rôle that has not brought her, as have these other, the joys of +recapturing or of creating beautiful things. Always objective, though +never wholly able to subordinate personality, however near she may have +come to effacing it in her plays, Lady Gregory has in this rôle +considered herself solely as an agent in the service of Irish letters. +The Irishman is naturally a pamphleteer, and Mr. Yeats, poet of the +Other World though he be, can give as good blows in controversy as Mr. +George Moore. Almost all who have part in the Renaissance have skill in +the art of publicity. They have needed no publicists to fight their +battles as the Pre-Raphaelites needed Ruskin. Still, in some measure in +the way of publicity, and in large measure in other ways, Lady Gregory +has been to the Celtic Renaissance what Ruskin was to that last +renaissance of wonder. She has edited pamphlets on things national and +artistic in Ireland, she has helped Dr. Hyde and Mr. Yeats in their +collecting of folk-lore and to a deeper knowledge of the people; she has +been one of the forces that have made possible the Abbey Theatre, giving +to it her power of organization as well as plays and patronage. More +than this, she has welcomed to Coole Park many a worker in the movement, +who in the comfort of a holiday there has been refreshed by the gray and +green land so near the sea and reinspired by the contact with that Irish +Ireland so close to her doors. Like Ruskin, Lady Gregory is a great +patron of letters, but like Ruskin she is much more. Lady Gregory is an +artist in words who is to be valued as a presenter of Irish life, past +and present, with a beauty that was not in English literature before she +made it. + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE + + +It is Synge himself who puts the just phrase on what his life was to +him, and it is, as it could not else be, from the lips of his Deirdre +that it falls. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and +richest, if it's for a short space only." It is Deirdre alone of his men +and women that is introspective at all, Deirdre--and Naisi when he is +mastered by thoughts of home that will not down. Synge wrote the play of +her triumph over death as he himself was dying, and he wrote it with +high heart, and, what is higher, gladness, despite his foreknowledge of +his doom. It was to fulfill his dream of the most queenly girl of old +Irish legend that he wrote "Deirdre of the Sorrows," but he could not +keep out of his writing, had he wished to keep it out, his own love that +death was so soon to end, and the thoughts of what was the worth of +life. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and richest, if +it's for a short space only." It is not a new saying, but it is not to +be identified with the proverbial "a short life and a merry," with which +some confuse it, and of Synge it was a true saying. There are those who, +because of the irony of his writing, an irony that is new to literature, +and, maybe, to some cruel, or at least disillusionizing, may think there +was little joy for him; but the truth is there was never a writer in +whom there was more joy. This "strange still man" as he was even to +those who knew him best, gentle or simple, found all life that was +natural life, even of the barest and rudest, as thrilling as first love. +It is this man, his enemies at home the sated Parisian, who knew a gusto +in living greater than that of any English writer since Borrow. Let no +one forget those lines with which Christy Mahon cries defiance to the +Mayo folk who have known his greatness and his fall: "Ten thousand +blessings upon all that's here, for you've turned me a likely gaffer in +the end of all, the way I'll go romancing through a romping lifetime +from this hour to the dawning of the judgment day." I do not deny that +these words are in a sense wrung from the Playboy, but what I do hold is +that they prove how vital was the genius of the man who wrote them, who +saw the joy there was yet in life for this braggart wastrel just as he +saw that even such a miserable boyhood as Christy's knew a kind of +poacher's joy in running wild on the bogs. Even for poor Nora, turned +out on the roads with a tramp for companion, there is the joy of the +road once she learns to know it. The tramp knows it surely:-- + + You'll be hearing the herons crying out over the black lakes, and + you'll be hearing the grouse and the owls with them, and the larks + and the big thrushes when the days are warm: and it's not from the + like of them you'll be hearing a tale of getting old like Peggy + Cavanagh, and losing the hair off you and the light of your eyes, + but it's fine songs you'll be hearing when the sun goes up, and + there'll be no old fellow wheezing the like of a sick sheep, close + to your ear. + +Of like gusto, too, is the joy of Martin Doul and Mary Doul in their +blindness; and the joy of the three tinkers in the escape of themselves +and their half-sovereign from the priest and in the prospect of "A great +time drinking that bit with the trampers in the green of Clash." And +from such joys as these, wild and earthy and rallying, his exultations +range to the exalted serenity and sadness of Naisi and Deirdre as they +look back on their seven year of love in Glen Masain, of love almost too +perfect and too happy to be human. + +[Illustration] + +Yes, joy is as distinctive as irony and extravagance of the writing of +Synge, joy in mere living, in life even at the worst, and joy, too, in +life at the best. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and +richest, if it's for a short space only." It was for a short space of +years that Synge had "what is best and richest," hardly for the seven +years of his great lovers. He did not have it when his thought homed to +Ireland in 1899, as a result of a meeting with Mr. Yeats in Paris. His +writing, then, was of little moment, but it grew better when, at home +again, he realized what Irish life was to him, when once renewed contact +with the Irish peasant brought back the familiarity that had been his in +the nursery. It was the Wicklow glens, to which memories of his people +drew him, and the Aran Islands, where he went to study Irish--until then +little more than a book language to him--and to live a life perhaps +"more primitive than any in Europe," that enabled him to find himself. +Further 'prentice work, though of a new sort, followed his sojourns in +Wicklow and Aran, but by 1903 his art had matured to the ripe power of +"In the Shadow of the Glen" and "Riders to the Sea," which, after +adjustment to the stage, were put on respectively October 8, 1903, and +February 25, 1904, at Molesworth Hall, Dublin. "The Tinker's Wedding" +which has been played only once, and then in London, dates from about +the same time. "The Well of the Saints" was produced on February 4, +1905, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and "The Playboy of the Western +World" on January 26, 1907, at the same place, to the accompaniment of +an uproar that a certain element of Irishmen have considered it proper +to create ever since on its first appearance in all cities whatsoever, +whether in Great Britain or America. One wonders what they would have +done had he made it as biting as Ibsen made "Peer Gynt." "Deirdre of the +Sorrows," which Synge left unrevised, was first produced at the Abbey +Theatre on January 13, 1910, the last of the six plays of his maturity. +It was in the years from 1902 to 1909 that he had "what is best and +richest"--a full life, lived largely in the Ireland that he loved; the +artist's joy in making that life into a new beauty, a beauty that was +all compact of exaltation and extravagance and irony; and love for a +woman in whom his man's life and his artist's life were united, for her +who embodied his dream of Pegeen Mike and added her life and her art of +the stage to his dream of Deirdre, as day by day it emerged from his +mind. And so great was his joy in these good things that his precarious +health, and even his year--long last illness, could not, while he had +any strength, lessen the high spirit of his writing. There is none of +his plays more vital than "Deirdre of the Sorrows." + +And yet this joy that is basic in Synge, this exaltation, is no more +basic than emotions and attitudes of mind that are often, in other men, +at war with joy and exaltation--irony and grotesquerie, keen insight +into "the black thoughts of men," and insistent awareness of the quick +passing of all good things, _diablerie_ and mordancy. Strange, then, +should be his love passages and strange too, they are at times, ranging +from the bizarre delight of "In Kerry" to the triumphing nobility of +Deirdre's farewell to Alban. One thinks of Mr. Hardy and one thinks of +Donne as one reads "In Kerry":-- + + "We heard the thrushes by the shore and sea, + And saw the golden stars' nativity, + Then round we went the lane by Thomas Flynn, + Across the church where bones lie out and in; + And there I asked beneath a lonely cloud + Of strange delight, with one bird singing loud, + What change you'd wrought in graveyard, rock and sea, + This new wild paradise to wake for me ... + Yet knew no more than knew those merry sins + Had built this stack of thigh-bones, jaws and shins." + +One thinks of no other writer at all, however, when one reads Christy's +wooing of Pegeen, even when one puts down the book in the quiet that +always comes on one in the presence of something great; one thinks of no +other writer, of course, when one sees the lovers and listens to their +words, on the stage, for one is rapt out of one's self by the perfect +accord of drama and actors at one in the service of beauty:-- + + _Christy_ (_indignantly_). Starting from you, is it? (_He follows + her._) I will not, then, and when the airs is warming, in four + months or five, it's then yourself and me should be pacing Neifin + in the dews of night, the times sweet smells do be rising, and + you'll see a little, shiny new moon, maybe, sinking on the hills. + + _Pegeen_ (_looking at him playfully_). And it's that kind of a + poacher's love you'd make, Christy Mahon, on the sides of Neifin, + when the night is down? + + _Christy_. It's little you'll think if my love's a poacher's, or an + earl's itself, when you'll feel my two hands stretched around you, + and I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips, till I'd feel a kind + of pity for the Lord God is all ages sitting lonesome in His golden + chair. + + _Pegeen_. That'll be right fun, Christy Mahon, and any girl would + walk her heart out before she'd meet a young man was your like for + eloquence, or talk at all. + + _Christy_ (_encouraged_). Let you wait, to hear me talking, till + we're astray in Erris, when Good Friday's by, drinking a sup from a + well, and making mighty kisses with our wetted mouths, or gaming in + a gap of sunshine, with yourself stretched back unto your necklace, + in the flowers of the earth. + + _Pegeen_ (_in a low voice, moved by his tone_). I'd be nice, so, is + it? + + _Christy_ (_with rapture_). If the mitred bishops seen you that + time, they'd be the like of the holy prophets, I'm thinking, do be + straining the bars of Paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of + Troy, and she abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in + her golden shawl. + +Borrow, who comes to mind more often than any other writer as one reads +Synge, chose to avoid love scenes, and Borrow's follower, Mr. Hewlett, +for all his gusto, has no such exaltation as this. Had Harry Richmond +taken to the road with Kiomi we might have known something like it. A +chapter out of the early life of Juggling Jerry and his "Old Girl," done +in the manner of "Love in the Valley," would be still nearer to it. As +it is, this passage of the third act of "The Playboy of the Western +World" stands alone. I doubt if Synge had read Meredith, and even had +he, the life of the roads and their cottages that Synge knew so well was +his master, and no writer at all. In a way, of course, the Irish-English +of Dr. Hyde's translations of "The Love Songs of Connacht" was an +influence, and you will find many expressions common to them and Synge. +It is not important, however, whether these expressions have a common +source, or whether Synge took them from "The Love Songs" rather than +from his own note-book. Whatever their source it was Synge who made out +of them a great style, his peasant style. It is another and a severer +style that he uses in his "Deirdre of the Sorrows," the courtly subject +demanding dignity and restraint. This latter style has borrowed some of +the bare simplicity of the personal style of Synge, that style, I mean, +in which he records his own experience in the Aran Islands or in Wicklow +and Kerry. + +Romancing, which is the very atmosphere of "The Playboy of the Western +World," would be out of place in any telling of the greatest of old +Irish legends; so it is that Synge has found for "Deirdre of the +Sorrows," or rather for its great moments, an austere epic speech that +seems native to the story. The passionate words are nobly adequate to +the passionate resignation they have to tell, a resignation that has +come of the unwilling belief of the lovers that so great a love as +theirs cannot last longer "without fleck or flaw" than the seven years +it has lasted. Says Deirdre, when she has come to know it is fate that +they will return to Ireland, and death:-- + + The dawn and evening are a little while, the winter and the summer + pass quickly, and what way would you and I, Naisi, have joy + forever.... It's this hour we're between the daytime and a night + where there is sleep forever, and isn't it better thing to be + following on to a near death than to be bending the head down, and + dragging with the feet, and seeing one day a blight showing upon + love where it is sweet and tender? + + _Naisi_ (_his voice broken with distraction_). If a near death is + coming what will be my trouble losing the earth and the stars over + it, and you, Deirdre, are their flame and bright crown? Come away + into the safety of the woods. + + _Deirdre_ (_shaking her head slowly_). There are as many ways to + wither love as there are stars in a night of Samhain; but there is + no way to keep life, or love with it, a short space only.... It's + for that there's nothing lonesome like a love is watching out the + time most lovers do be sleeping.... It's for that we're setting out + for Emain Macha when the tide turns on the sand. + + _Naisi_ (_giving in_). You're right, maybe. It should be a poor + thing to see great lovers and they sleepy and old. + + _Deirdre_ (_with a more tender intensity_). We're seven years + without roughness or growing weary; seven years so sweet and + shining, the gods would be hard set to give us seven days the like + of them. It's for that we're going to Emain, where there'll be a + rest forever, or a place for forgetting, in great crowds and they + making a stir. + + _Naisi_ (_very softly_). We'll go, surely, in place of keeping a + watch on a love had no match and it wasting away. (_They cling to + each other, then Naisi looks up._) + +And this is from the unfinished second act, that Synge thought would +scarcely be worth preserving. I have quoted it rather than the great +keen over the body of Naisi that brings the play to a close, because +that must of necessity follow the old poem, and this is as Synge +imagined it. Each is "a thing will be a joy and triumph to the ends of +life and time." + +I have thrown what I have to say about the exaltation of Synge to the +forefront of what I have to say of him, that all may be read in the +memory of this emphasis and of the exaltation of what I quote, no matter +how fantastic or grotesque or disillusionizing or even ghoulish it may +be. Whatever other quality may be dominant at any moment in Synge there +is always, along with it, exaltation. + +It is the extravagance and grotesquerie, of both language and situation, +that is the most immediately arresting of the qualities of Synge. And +this extravagance and grotesquerie have marked his writing from the +start. The old husband playing dead, that he may catch his young wife +with her lover, of his first play, "In the Shadow of the Glen," is a +very old motive, and familiar in the meliorized form that made it known +to the theatre in "Conn the Shaughraun" (1875). Before that, Crofton +Croker had given it currency, in "The Corpse Watchers," among those +outside of the circles in which it was a familiar folk-story. It might, +indeed, be said of "In the Shadow of the Glen" that it begins in the +manner of Boucicault and ends in the manner of Ibsen, for Nora Burke is +in a way a peasant Hedda Gabler. Such a criticism would, of course, be +very superficial. The story is a folk-story of many countries and Synge +was told the version he worked from by the old shanachie of Inishmaan +whom he calls Pat Dirane in "The Aran Islands." At moments the play +approaches farce, as when the supposed corpse rises from the bed where +he is stretched and drinks whiskey with a tramp who has happened in +while Nora is gone to meet her young man. From such a situation it turns +to keen pathos, as Nora sits with tramp and lover and the old husband +she thinks dead, and listens to the wind and rain sweeping through the +high glens about the hut and thinks of "the young growing behind her," +and the old passing. Where else will you find cheek by jowl such +sardonic humor as this and such poignancy of lament for the passing of +youth? Nora speaks as she pours out whiskey for her young man:-- + + Why would I marry you, Mike Dara? You'll be getting old and I'll be + getting old, and in a little while, I'm telling you, you'll be + sitting up in your bed--the way himself was sitting--with a shake + in your face, and your teeth falling, and the white hair sticking + out round you like an old bush where sheep do be leaping a gap. + + (_Dan Burke sits up noiselessly from under the sheet, with his hand + to his face. His white hair is sticking out round his head. Nora + goes on slowly without hearing him._) + + It's a pitiful thing to be getting old, but it's a queer thing + surely. It's a queer thing to see an old man sitting up there in + his bed with no teeth in him, and a rough word in his mouth, and + his chin the way it would take the bark from the edge of an oak + board you'd have building a door.... God forgive me, Michael Dara, + we'll all be getting old, but it's a queer thing surely. + + _Michael_. It's too lonesome you are from living a long time with + an old man, Nora, and you're talking again like a herd that would + be coming down from the thick mist (_he puts his arm round her_), + but it's a fine life you'll have now with a young man--a fine life, + surely. + + (_Dan sneezes violently. Michael tries to get to the door, but + before he can do so Dan jumps out of the bed in queer white + clothes, with the stick in his hand, and goes over and puts his + back against it._) + + _Michael_. Son of God deliver us! + +Equal extravagance and equal grotesquerie, and irony biting beyond any +in any other of his plays, you will find in "The Well of the Saints." +This, too, is built up out of Synge's experience of life in Aran and +Wicklow. Old Mourteen, a "dark man," who taught him Gaelic on Aranmor, +suggested Martin Doul, the chief character of the play, and it was +Mourteen told him, too, the story of the well whose water would give +sight to blind eyes. A story told Synge on Inishere supplied the saint, +and a tramp in Wicklow the thoughts of Martin Doul and Mary Doul as to +the glory their hair would be to them in age. As you read his travel +sketches, in fact, you are always coming on passages that very evidently +are the suggestions for situations in this play or that, and sometimes +more than suggestions--stories and situations and very phrases that you +remember as on the lips of the peasants in his plays. In these travel +sketches, too, you find the background of the plays. There is but the +germ of "The Playboy of the Western World" in the story told Synge in +Inishmaan of the hiding there from the police of the man that killed his +father, but there is old Mourteen's comparison of an unmarried man to +"an old jackass straying in the rocks," which later we find transferred +to Michael James Flaherty almost as Synge heard it--"an old braying +jackass straying upon the rocks." + +It may be, too, that the famous Lynchehaun case confirmed Synge in +taking the Aran story of the man who killed his father as the basis of +"The Playboy," but it is little he got for his plays from his reading of +"the fearful crimes of Ireland," and little that he got for them from +any of his reading. There are situations in "The Tinker's Wedding"--the +tying-up of the priest in the bag, for instance--that suggest as source +"The Lout and his Mother," included by Dr. Hyde in his "Religious Songs +of Connacht," but Synge records, in "At a Wicklow Fair," that a herd +told him the story of the tinker couple that would be wed, as he and the +herd met the man in the case in Aughrim. + +No one who knows Ireland at all would hold that Synge's plays are +typical of the Irish peasant generally, but any one who knows Irish +literature at all, and the life of the roads in Ireland, will admit that +wildness and extravagance are to be found in that literature from the +beginning and in that life even at this day of supposed civilization. +You will find one kind of extravagance in the distortions of Cuchulain +in bardic literature, another kind of extravagance in "Little Red Mary +and the Goat with the Chime of Bells" that your gardener tells you in a +prosaic American suburban town; you will find the primitiveness of +prehistoric life in the burning of poor old Mrs. Cleary by her neighbors +in Tipperary (1895), to drive a demon out of her, and the savage that is +but under the skin of all men in the description of the Spinsters' Ball +at Ballinasloe in "A Drama in Muslin." Said an old shanachie to Synge on +Inishere, when Synge had told him of a stock exchange trick, "Isn't it +a great wonder to think that those men are as big rogues as ourselves?" +It is idle to pretend that it is not true that, in some moods, all men +the world over have sympathy for the rogue. Why do we read of Reynard +the Fox with delight, and Robin Hood, and Uncle Remus, and not only in +the days of our own infantile roguery, but as grown men and women? This +man or that may say it is because of the cleverness of Reynard, the +daring of Robin Hood or his wild-woods setting, and the resourcefulness +of Bre'r Rabbit; but the honest man will admit it is because of an +innate and deeply rooted human sympathy with roguery as well as our +natural human sympathy with the under dog and the man hunted by a +merciless or an alien law. Very often, if the roguery is very great, or +we are brought face to face with its effects and realize it is a real +thing in real life, we will be shocked out of our sympathy with it, and +realize, as did Pegeen Mike, the difference between a "gallous story and +a dirty deed." But sometimes, if we are a people living a primitive +life, we will no more awaken to the reality of the wrong of roguery than +we would as children have been able to sympathize with the farmer whose +pumpkin patch we raided on the eve of Hallowe'en. A sneaking sympathy +with roguery, however, is a very different thing from a delight in +extravagance. That, too, is a universal passion, but not so native to +the Teuton as to Celt or Finn or Oriental. Its absence is what most +differentiates Old Norse literature from Old Irish, with which it so +early came into contact. It is in travelers' tales and in the tales of +seamen and in the writing that was based on these, in rare moments of +religious or romantic ecstasy, or in borrowings from Celt or Oriental +that you will find the most of what extravagance there is in English +literature. In America you find extravagance in our humor, and this +humor, perhaps, owes as much of its extravagance to an Irish ancestry as +to an environment of new wonders that could not be well expressed save +in hyperbole. + +It is not only the extravagance of the change wrought in Christy by +unexpected hero-worship and an awakening of self-confidence through love +for the first time known and returned that we wonder at, and the +extravagance of that hero-worship, but the extravagance of the +imagination of his creator, and the beautiful extravagance of his +speech. The freshness and audacity of that imagination, and the +beautiful extravagance of that speech, a speech modulated to a rhythm +that Synge was the first to catch, are in themselves enough to give +distinction to almost any subject. There was granted Synge more than +this, however,--a keenness of vision into the pathetic humanity of ugly +things and a power to realize this with a beauty that was granted to no +one before, though to Swift it was granted to see the ugliness as a +bitter thing. Borrow had, indeed, a glimpse now and then of the pathetic +beauty there is in ugliness, as in the story of Isopel Berners and the +Flaming Tinman, and Whitman, too; but no man before Synge had the power +at once to see the ugly subject as beautiful from a new angle of vision, +humanize it, irradiate it with a new glow of imagination, reveal it +through a style that for the first time ennobles English prose drama as +blank verse has long ennobled English verse drama. + +Take "The Tinker's Wedding," for instance. The theme is the desire of a +tinker woman, youngish if not young, to wed the man who has long been +her mate; his mother's unstudied frustration of that scheme by stealing, +to swap for drink, the can they were to give to the priest along with a +half-sovereign for marrying them; and their joy, in the end, that they +have escaped matrimony and the wasting of good money. And yet this theme +is underlaid with an emotion so vital, the emotion of a wild free life, +and invested with a pathos so poignant of the quick passing of all good +things, that no understanding heart can but be profoundly moved by that +pathos and racily rejoiced at that wildness. + +It is thus, for instance, soliloquizes Mary Byrne, the rapscalliony old +tinker woman of outrageous behavior of "The Tinker's Wedding." She is +stealing the aforesaid can, in the absence of her son and his Sarah "to +get two of Tim Flaherty's hens": "Maybe the two of them have a good +right to be walking out the little short while they'd be young; but if +they have itself, they'll not keep Mary Byrne from her full pint when +the night's fine, and there's a dry moon in the sky." One thinks, as one +reads, of Villon's old woman and her lament for yesteryear, but there +are not many writers anywhere in the world, of old time or of to-day, +who have such power of blending pathos and ugliness into beauty, and no +other one that I know who can infuse humor into the blend, and make one +at the one time laugh ironically and be thrilled as with great poetry. + +There are those, of course, to whom this earthiness and wildness are +repulsive, to whom old Martin Doul's love pleading to Molly Byrne is +unendurable. A dirty "shabby stump of a man," a beggar, blind and +middle-aged, is asking a fine white girl, young, and as teasing as an +ox-eyed and ox-minded colleen may be, to go away with him. Not an +exalting situation, exactly, as you read of it or see it on the stage, +but once you see it on the stage, where its animality you would expect +would be heightened, you realize--and it is strange to you that you do +so realize--first of all its pathos, and again its pathos, and always, +the scene through, its pathos. Had Molly gone with old Martin it would +have revolted you, for it would have been unnatural, but since she did +not, and since she was not the sort to be easily insulted, you only +wonder at the power of passion and realize its pathos, and the irony of +it. + +There is, however, a situation ironical of love in "In the Shadow of the +Glen" that is more appalling to some than any irony of "The Well of the +Saints." I mean the scene at the end, where Nora, turned out by her +husband and forsaken by her lover, goes out into the rain with the +tramp, leaving husband and lover drinking together in utmost amity. The +pathos of this and the irony of it are of a part with the pathos of the +close of "Hedda Gabler." Hedda and Nora, selfish and willful both, if +you like, are yet fine women both, and human, as Zenobia and Eustacia +are human, and pathetic in their fates, with a pathos that even +Hawthorne and Mr. Hardy have seldom the power to make us feel. But the +fate of Nora was ironic as the fate of none of the others, for all +three of them escaped the ennui and misery of life, while Nora but +begins a new life, freer for the moment than her old life, but +promising, in the end, only the old dull round. + +The irony of it! "The irony of it" is always in Synge's writing even in +its most exalted moments. A seven years' love "without fleck or flaw" is +"surely a wonder," but it is just as surely ironical that it, like all +good things, shall so soon come to an end. That, of course, is but the +way of nature, and so we much question if, after all, the irony of Synge +is more insistent than the irony of nature. If it is it is because he +takes more care to uncover it, but basically his irony is but the irony +of nature. He is in reality less ironical than Mr. Hardy, the great +ironist of English literature of our day, and he is never bitter, for +bitterness comes seldom except to the writer who is interested in +morals, and morals interest Synge only in so far as they are natural. It +is life--not any conventional way of life, or any ideal of life--that +interests Synge, so he escapes ensnarement in any of the questions of +the day. So frankly does he accept life that there is in him no note of +protest whatsoever, which is again fortunate, for protest, too, will +lead a man to morals and leave on his work the taint of a passing system +of morality as it did even on Ibsen. + +If there is symbolism to be found in Synge, it is there only by +accident, never as the result of definite intent. He may have had, in +the back of his mind, as he wrote "The Playboy of the Western World," +the thought of chance making a man, of a man finding himself through +others believing in him who has no belief in himself but that there is +in the play any parable of young Ireland losing its allegiance to a +previous ideal of Ireland, I do not for a moment believe. There is, of +course, in "The Well of the Saints" the old and oft-uttered truth that +men prefer blindness in many things to correct vision of them, that +truth that drives Mr. Shaw to blind anger. Synge has no resentment +against that truth, only interest in it as a fact that is true of people +as he sees them. The play is an unforgettable symbol of that truth, but +to make it such was not why Synge wrote it. He wrote it with a purpose +akin to that which inspired Burns to write his "Jolly Beggars." He wrote +it to make something beautiful out of the life of the beggars of the +Wicklow mountains, and I have no doubt he had a wild joy in the idea of +it, in the irony of its truth, in the grotesquerie of the situations he +garnered from his memory to illustrate its beauty and truth. + +Many wonders are possible even to-day in the wild life of the roads and +of the sea-haunted islands that Synge knew, but he was wise to put "The +Well of the Saints" back a hundred years or more. Aran islanders told +him of rye that turned to oats in their fields and of phantom ships that +passed them at sea, but a miracle of healing such as that of "The Well +of the Saints" they were familiar with only in folk-song such as "Mary's +Well," and such a miracle, too, would hardly be attempted by a priest of +to-day. + +Synge had the great advantage of writing all his plays, after the +earliest, for the stage. He knew as he wrote that he could test that +writing's stage effect in rehearsal and change it if need be. So he did +change "The Playboy of the Western World," revealing the incident of the +supposed patricide as a bit of narrative addressed by Christy to the +admiring girls of the Mayo village, instead of, as he had intended, a +scene on the stage in "a windy corner of rich Munster land." Had he +written "Riders to the Sea" later, Synge would surely never have crowded +into it incidents that took far longer in the happening than in the +portrayal of that happening on the stage. It is this technical +shortcoming that for me takes away somewhat from the exceeding beauty of +this tragedy of Aran. The story of the finding of the clothes that tell +of the death at sea of the last but one of the five sons of Maurya, and +of the death on the very shore itself of the last son, is in its very +nature a dirge, and demands a slower movement than is possible with its +incidents arranged as he was content to leave them in the play as we +have it. "Riders to the Sea" is less representative of Synge, moreover, +than any other of his plays, for it is written on one note, the note of +the dirge, of the dirge of the tides that sound their menace of the sea +through Inishmaan. It is less representative of Synge because it has in +it no humor, no quick changes of mood, no revelation of tumult of soul. +It is less representative of Synge in that it is less original than any +other of his plays, reminiscent in fact in all but its style, now of +Ibsen, now of M. Maeterlinck, now even of Mr. Edward Martyn. And his +style itself is not what his style was in "In the Shadow of the Glen," +nor what it became again in "The Well of the Saints." + +One wonders where that speech came from, that speech that is, as he +would have it, "fully flavored as a nut or apple." Mr. Yeats and Lady +Gregory tell us that he did not have it until he had been made free, +through residence there, of the life of the Aran Islands. If one has +read, however, the English of the prose translations of Dr. Hyde's "Love +Songs of Connacht," one may see in their style the genesis of the style +of "Riders to the Sea," and if one has read the "Dialogue between Two +Old Women" of "The Religious Songs of Connacht," and "The Lout and his +Mother," one may come to believe that these turned Synge toward the even +more fully flavored and more rhythmic speech of the other plays. +Perhaps, too, there were memories of the rhythm and of the flavor of the +speech of him who made these words for Jasper Petulengro: "Life is +sweet, brother, ... there's night and day, brother, both sweet things; +sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind +on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die!" + +The speech of Connacht folk-song rendered into the English of Connacht +by Dr. Hyde, however, and the speech of Borrow were no more than the +start, if they were as much as the start, that put him on the right +road. If ever a man made his style himself, it was Synge. He made it out +of his memory and out of his imagination, using "one or two words only +that I have not heard," he said, "among the country people of Ireland, +or spoken in my own nursery before I could read the newspaper," but +evolving from that memory by his imagination a speech that is in +harmony with the imagination of the people an imagination that is, he +tells us, "fiery and magnificent and tender," though no such actual +speech would be possible of reproduction from any one of them. + +Synge is very definite in his statement of what he believes drama should +be, and what he would make his own drama of Irish life, expressing his +belief in the preface to "The Tinker's Wedding":-- + + The drama is made serious ... not by the degree in which it is + taken up with problems that are serious in themselves, but by the + degree in which it gives the nourishment, not very easy to define, + on which our imaginations live.... + + We should not go to the theatre as we go to a chemist's or a + dramshop, but as we go to a dinner where the food we need is taken + with pleasure and excitement.... + + The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything.... + + Of the things which nourish the imagination, humor is one of the + most needful and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it. Baudelaire + calls laughter the greatest sign of the Satanic element in man; and + where a country loses its humor, as some towns in Ireland are + doing, there will be a morbidity of mind, as Baudelaire's mind was + morbid. In the greater part of Ireland, however, the whole people, + from the tinkers to the clergy, have still a life, and view of + life, that are rich and genial and humorous. I do not think that + these country people, who have so much humor themselves, will mind + being laughed at without malice, as the people in every country + have been laughed at, in their own comedies. + +In the preface to "The Playboy of the Western World" is this paragraph, +completing his _credo_ as to drama:-- + + On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy; and that + is why the intellectual modern drama has failed, and people have + grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy, that has been + given them in place of the rich joy found only in what is superb + and wild in reality. + +Although there are only about forty characters, all told, in the six +plays of Synge, and ten of these are in "Deirdre of the Sorrows," which +for all its humanity is a play out of a life that is gone, there are men +and women a-plenty to give us this "rich joy found only in what is +superb and wild in reality." Nora is "superb and wild" in her longings, +and Maurya in her sorrow; and old Martin Doul "superb and wild" in his +dream of life in the South; Sarah Casey and Pegeen Mike "superb and +wild" in the most direct sense of the phrase; and these are all real, if +not representative of the poorer peasantry. And in the high way of +romance who has dreamed what is more superb and wilder than the lament +of Deirdre over Naisi! In the creation of character, as in style, and in +technique of drama, Synge has done what he would. In only one of his +plays, in "Riders to the Sea," are his leading characters representative +Irish peasants; and even Maurya and her children, not only because of +the isolation of their home in Aran, but because of the fate which has +marked her mankind for death at sea, are somewhat apart from the +fisher-people of the west coast. In all his four other plays of modern +life, Synge has chosen characters who are, in his own words, "variations +from the ordinary types of manhood,"--chosen them because of his +deep-seated love of the unconventional. In "In the Shadow of the Glen," +Michael Dara, the herd, is a common type, and Dan Burke, the old sheep +farmer, not an uncommon type, but the tramp and Nora, the one by his +wandering and the other by her brooding, are "variations," though very +human both. Of the cottager class, too, are Timmy the Smith, Molly +Byrne, and the "villagers" of "The Well of the Saints," as are, too, the +girls and men of "The Playboy of the Western World" other than the +Mahons and Michael James. Shawn Keogh, indeed, is a cut above cottagers, +being almost a strong farmer, and Michael James himself was, no doubt, +of a similar cottager respectability before he took to shebeen-keeping. +Almost all the other characters of these modern plays are, with the +exception of the priest of "The Tinker's Wedding" and the saint of "The +Well of the Saints," squatters, beggars, and tinkers. Among them, few as +they are all told, are very differing personalities--Christy the Playboy +and his father, "a dirty man, God forgive him, and he getting old and +crusty"; Martin Doul, a "shabby stump of a man," "of queer talk," +middle-aged and blind and a beggar; Michael Byrne, the hardy, thieving, +unimaginative tinker; and the romancing young tramp who gallants Nora +when her own husband turns her out on the road;--"variations" all, +perhaps, but human, and compelling, all of them, our interest, and +greater or less sympathy. And the women! Nora, whom we leave as +road-woman, I have likened to Hedda Gabler, and Sarah Casey in externals +to Isopel Berners, but I do not know to whom to compare the others save +Mary Byrne, as slightly suggestive of Villon's old woman. Mary Doul, +blind Martin's blind wife, has a general likeness to some old witch out +of a fairy tale, but she is far from being a witch; and Widow Quinn the +incomparable might be compared, were she not too high-hearted, to the +hag of "The Lout and Mother" in being + + "indecent-spoken, carneying, lying, + Plausible, full of poems and prophecies and sharp edged." + +Of the women of the cottager class, Nora, for all her wildness and +bitterness, is the most lovable, and Molly Byrne the least lovable; the +girls of "Riders to the Sea" are not fully enough individualized to make +us feel we know them; but Pegeen Mike, Synge has put before us in +appearance and temperament, character and personality. "A wild-looking +but fine girl," he describes her, "with a divil's own temper," "the +fright of seven town-lands"--as she says--"for my biting tongue," but +susceptible of softening toward a boy of good looks and coaxing ways +such as Christy. He gets around her with "his poet's talking" and his +popularity, his "mighty spirit" and "gamey heart" until she gives him +"words would put you thinking on the holy Brigid speaking to the infant +saints." + +There might be incongruity, if one were writing of any other than Synge, +in speaking of Deirdre in such a company. Incongruity, however, is of +the very texture of Synge's art, which has reconciled qualities, as I +have said, never before reconciled in English literature. It is on +Deirdre that Synge has lavished all the ideality that was in him, not +because he had a dream of woman he wished to fulfill, but because to him +Deirdre was all that was queenly. And yet even Deirdre is a "variation," +as nobility and beauty must ever be. So lofty is she that words even in +praise of her are almost impertinent. Just how lofty her words that I +quoted at the outset show, as does also, by way of contrast, the mention +of her here among these half-tragic, half-grotesque women of the +cottages and of the roads. There is scarcely a poet, of all that have +written of Ireland from the time of Ferguson to our time, that has not +written his dream of Deirdre as he finds her in the old legends of +Ireland, but to my mind no one of them has dreamed her so triumphantly +as has Synge. + +It is not, however, of such "variations" as Deirdre that the critics +fall foul, but of the "variations" he puts on Irish roads and in Irish +cottages when he presents the life of to-day. Why he replied to this +criticism when to most criticism he was, if not indifferent, at least +impervious, it is not easy to say. It is more than likely, however, that +it was rather to explain his ideas than to justify his characters that +he did answer. This criticism of the reality of his peasants began with +his "Shadow of the Glen" and is still to be heard in many places to-day. +It rose to its highest pitch of denunciation at the time of the +production of "The Playboy of the Western World" in Dublin, but it was +before that that he answered it fully, in the last paragraph of "The +Vagrants of Wicklow," a travel sketch he made out of his wanderings in +his native country. Here it is, as effective in its answer to subsequent +criticism as to that which it was definitely intended to answer:-- + + In all the circumstances of this tramp life there is a certain + wildness that gives it romance and a peculiar value for those who + look at life in Ireland with an eye that is aware of the arts + also. In all the healthy movements of art, variations from the + ordinary types of manhood are made interesting for the ordinary + man, and in this way only the higher arts are universal. Beside + this art, however, founded on the variations which are a condition + and effect of all vigorous life, there is another art--sometimes + confounded with it--founded on the freak of nature, in itself a + mere sign of atavism or disease. This latter art, which is occupied + with the antics of the freak, is of interest only to the variation + from ordinary minds, and, for this reason, is never universal. To + be quite plain, the tramp in real life, Hamlet and Faust, in the + arts, are variations; but the maniac in real life, and Des + Esseintes and all his ugly crew in the arts, are freaks only. + +It is well to consider all his characters in the light of this +statement, I think, and to re-read, keeping in mind a possible further +application of it, those phrases in the plays that so outrage many at +their hearing in the theatre, I would not for a moment seem to want to +soften the hardness of the life he pictures or to explain away his +delightfully sardonic humor as in reality a reconciling sort of humor, +but I do wish to say that the more I read him the less cruel and +sardonic that humor seems. The impersonality of the man as dramatist +grows on you as you read, you realize more and more his abstention from +playing chorus to his characters, and you come to know that the seeming +cruelty and sardonic joy are largely only the direct outcome of his +courage in allowing Nature to speak for herself. If you turn again to +the plays after learning of their background from his travel sketches, +you see many things in a new light. The irony, the grotesquerie, the +tonic earthiness never grow less, but one learns to discount somewhat +the effect of the hardness of speech on the recipients of that speech, +as through experience one learns--after one's second attendance at a +wake--to discount something of the too voluble sorrow of keening. + +That the candor of Synge, in allowing his people of hard nature or of +careless nature to say the ruthless things native to their minds and +temper, hurts many, there is proof every time one sees a play of his on +the stage. You will hear women about you gasp with mingled surprise and +disgust, their sensibilities wholly outraged, but unwilling laughter in +their minds when the Widow Quinn says to Christy, after his praise of +Pegeen, "There's poetry talk for a girl you'd see itching and +scratching, and she with a stale stink of poteen on her from selling in +the shop." Such gasps are nothing, however, to those they utter when +they hear Mary Doul tell Molly Byrne "when the skin shrinks on your +chin, Molly Byrne, there won't be the like of you for a shrunk hag in +the four quarters of Ireland." + +Very different is the kind of laughter aroused by the sly malice, native +to the rogue story from the days in which its characters masqueraded as +animals, that is revealed in the remark of Mary Byrne to the priest, +"It's destroyed you must be hearing the sins of the rural people in a +fine spring"; and different again the childish delight in the +extravagance at Christy's threat to send Shawn Keogh "coaching out +through Limbo with my father's ghost"; and still different the +breathless, delighted wonderment in the sense of moral values exhibited +by Michael James, when, fearing that Christy's threatened murder of +Shawn, if carried out, would give his secret trade away, he jumps up +with a shriek, exclaiming, "Murder is it? Is it mad you's are? Would you +go making murder in this place, and it piled with poteen for our drink +to-night?" Different too, is the laughter at the Rabelaisian touches and +at the farcical situations in which the plays abound. + +If ever there were characters that lived a life apart from their +author's, those characters are Synge's. It is in the verses and in the +travel sketches that we get the man himself, the man back of the +dramatist that gives to his characters a life independent of his own, a +life that he knows partly in reality and partly in imagination, but that +he himself has lived chiefly as an observer and imaginer. There is no +humor in these verses and travel sketches, not even when he is +describing a humorous scene such as that of the upsetting by pigs +running wild of the constabulary busy about evictions on Inishmaan. We +get the man himself, I say, in these verses and travel sketches, a man +exulting in primitiveness, in wildness, in beauty of woman and child, in +beauty of landscape; but exulting, more than in all else, in his own +moods aroused by these things that he loved. Even here, however, he is +at times almost impossibly impersonal, so that you feel in a certain +description that there is no man between you and the thing described, +but that, to adapt a phrase of Thoreau, it is the hills and the sea and +the atmosphere writing. This impersonality persists even in "The Aran +Islands," so large a part of which is very personal in that it is a +statement of his daily life on Inishmaan. It is not, however, from the +impersonal writing that I would quote,--though I would emphasize this +impersonality because it is part of the very nature of the man,--but +from the personal parts, because they reveal more of the positive part +of him. After a day of storm on Inishmaan, the middle island of the +three that make up the Aran group, Synge writes: "About the sunset the +clouds broke and the storm turned to a hurricane. Bars of purple cloud +stretched across the sound where immense waves were rolling from the +west, wreathed with snowy fantasies of spray. Then there was the bay +full of green delirium and the Twelve Pins touched with mauve and +scarlet in the east." That is the Connacht coast, and this the next +paragraph is Synge: "The suggestion from this world of inarticulate +power was immense, and now at midnight, when the wind is abating, I am +still trembling and flushed with exultation." And here is Synge again, +in another temper, which came to him on the seas about Inishmaan: "The +black curagh working slowly through this world of gray, and the soft +hissing of the rain, gave me one of the moods in which we realize with +immense distress the short moment we have left us to experience all the +wonder and beauty of the world." + +"The Aran Islands" is most memorable of his travel writings, because he +spent more time on these rocks at the world's end and came closest here +to the soul of Irish life. There are passages, however, in his +description of the Kerry coast, and even in his newspaper sketches of +the coast of Connemara, that tell not only of the places but of their +visitor. "I got on a long road running through a bog," he writes in "In +West Kerry," "with a smooth mountain on one side and the sea on the +other, and Brandon in front of me, partly covered with clouds. As far +as I could see there were little groups of people on their way to the +chapel at Ballyferriter, the men in homespun and the women wearing blue +cloaks, or, more often, black shawls twisted over their heads. This +procession along the olive bogs, between the mountains and the sea, on +this gray day of autumn, seemed to wring me with the pang of emotion one +meets everywhere in Ireland, an emotion that is partly local and +patriotic, and partly a share of the desolation that is mixed everywhere +with the supreme beauty of the world." + +The comment on Ireland, her ways and her place among the peoples, that +many a dramatist would have permitted himself to express through some +character chosen to play chorus to the action, Synge now and then +permits himself in the travel sketches. In "From Galway to Gorumna," +which he wrote for the "Manchester Guardian's" investigation of the +congested districts, is one of such rare avowals, an avowal to treasure +along with those of his all too short prefaces: "It is part of the +misfortune of Ireland that nearly all the characteristics which give +color and attractiveness to Irish life [he has been speaking of 'men +dressed in homespuns of the gray natural wool, and the women in deep +madder-dyed petticoats and bodices, with brown shawls over their heads'] +are bound up with a social condition that is near to penury, while in +countries like Brittany the best external features of the local +life--the rich embroidered dresses, for instance, or the carved +furniture--are connected with a decent and comfortable social +condition." + +It is this penury, perhaps, and its gray background that by way of +contrast emphasize so strongly the moments of splendor that Irish +landscape knows. One such moment Synge saw as he looked southward across +the bay from the Dingle peninsula toward Killarney: "The blueness of the +sea and the hills from Carrantuohill to the Skelligs, the singular +loneliness of the hillside I was on, with a few choughs and gulls in +sight only, had a splendor that was almost a grief in the mind." + +This splendor Synge found also in his own Wicklow, a lonelier country +than Aran, if loneliness comes from absence of human life. And if there +is not the loneliness of the sea in the inland glens that Synge knew so +well, there is in them the equal loneliness of the mountains. It is this +county of Wicklow that is the background of "In the Shadow of the Glen" +and of "The Well of the Saints" and of "The Tinker's Wedding." And +perhaps had not the Abbey Theatre grown to be a theatre for folk-drama +and for poetic drama of court romance alone, Synge would have made +Wicklow the background of dramas of a high life of yesterday. Certain it +is that in these passages he is thinking of it:-- + + Every one is used in Ireland to the tragedy that is bound up with + the lives of farmers and fishing-people; but in this garden one + seemed to feel the tragedy of the landlord class also, and of the + innumerable old families that are quickly dwindling away. These + owners of the land are not much pitied at the present day, or much + deserving of pity; and yet one cannot quite forget that they are + the descendants of what was at one time, in the eighteenth century, + a high-spirited and highly cultivated aristocracy. The broken + greenhouses and mouse-eaten libraries, that were designed and + collected by men who voted with Grattan, are perhaps as mournful in + the end as the four mud walls that are so often left in Wicklow as + the only remnants of a farmhouse. The desolation of this life is + often of a peculiarly local kind, and if a playwright chose to go + through the Irish country houses he would find material, it is + likely, for many gloomy plays that would turn on the dying away of + these old families, and on the lives of the one or two delicate + girls that are left so often to represent a dozen hearty men who + were alive a generation or two ago. + +I have dwelt on these travel sketches of Synge not alone for their own +sake, but because they are, as I have said, the background of the plays, +and because they contain what are in a sense the diary notes out of +which the plays grew. In a sense, too, they are a commentary on the +plays, and as I have also said a revelation of the playwright. All must +be read for a thorough understanding of the plays, though these alone +should be a delight to all, even if they know no more of Ireland than +that share of human nature which is axiomatically the same in all men of +all races. If you do not read the travel sketches, you may fail to see +how deeply sympathetic Synge is with the Irish peasant, and in no +patronizing way. In "The Aran Islands" he takes the greatest care to +disguise the identity of those he knew intimately lest they be pained by +anything he wrote of them. No one could write with higher courtesy of +those whose guest he had been than Synge. You, reading, are made one of +their home circle, but no family secrets are betrayed. You are made +aware of their weaknesses, but there is never any disloyalty; and always +in his records of them their virtues of courage and endurance, of +adaptiveness and simplicity, of family stanchness and communal +helpfulness, outweigh the drunkenness and roguery that one expects from +the primitive. Synge is, indeed, not only loyal, but full of respect and +liking for the Aran Islanders, and of admiration for their rich +humanity. + +It was out of his island life and out of his life of the roads, and out +of his mood, once he knew his doom, that he made the twenty-two poems of +his that are retained of a great deal that he had written, most of it in +his younger years. That Synge faced his fate with bravery the triumphant +tone of "Deirdre of the Sorrows" that I have instanced is proof, but +there could not but be moments when the thought of death was too instant +to be denied. It was in such mood he wrote, either toward the end, or in +earlier moments of anticipation of it, "Queens," "On an Anniversary," +"To the Oaks of Glencree," "A Question," and "I've Thirty Months." There +is in these verses a certain morbidity, an almost ghoulishness, that is +very seldom present elsewhere in his writing. And yet I may be wrong in +attributing it to his certainty of approaching death, for there is a +more intense preoccupation with death in the plays of M. Maeterlinck's +youth and a greater ghoulishness in the verse of Mr. Hardy's youth. It +is of Mr. Hardy's verses that one thinks oftenest as one reads these +verses of Synge, and not only because of certain likenesses in +subject-matter, but because of the imperfect mastery of both over the +verse forms and a certain epigrammatic gnomic quality common to both. +The verses of Synge are not relatively so important in comparison with +the rest of his writing as Mr. Hardy's verses are in comparison with the +rest of his writing, for they are not needed to explain a philosophy of +life as are Mr. Hardy's verses. Fortunately, Synge attempted no +philosophy, had the rare wisdom to rest content with observation. + +In regard to poetry, as to all his art, Synge had, however, definite +views, though his verse is almost too little in bulk to exemplify them. +It was the poetry of exaltation, as it was the drama of exaltation, as +it was the exaltation in living, of change and speed and danger and +love, that meant most to him. He held further that "in these days poetry +is usually a flower of evil or good; but it is the timber of poetry that +wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots +among the clay and worms." The verse of Synge, as all his art, was so +rooted, surely. "Even if we grant," he continues, "that exalted poetry +can be kept successful by itself, the strong things of life are needed +in poetry also, to show that what is exalted or tender is not made by +feeble blood. It may almost be said that before verse can be human again +it must learn to be brutal." + +It is sayings of this sort that bring to mind his kinship with Whitman, +to whom he is also bound by the freemasonry of the roads. Both men felt +the call of the road; both loved the changing landscape and the little +adventures of the caravansaries; both loved most of all the men and +women they met. Once only Synge seems to have forgotten humanity when he +took to the road, that time which he has recorded in "Prelude":-- + + "Still south I went and west and south again, + Through Wicklow from the morning till the night, + And far from cities, and the sights of men, + Lived with the sunshine, and the moon's delight. + + "I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds, + The gray and wintry sides of many glens, + And did but half remember human words, + In converse with the mountains, moors, and fens." + +It is to this, to the wandering wayside life of Synge that one's thought +of him always returns, and rightly, for it was the road that most +inspired him. It is the memory of the road that most kindles him; and so +it is always to the man of the road that he gives his most lyric +passages; or, perhaps, I should say it is the speech that the thought of +the man of the roads or of the woman of wild heart raises in his mind +that is his most beautiful speech, with the very wildness of the +wandering heart in it, and with the long swing that comes, with second +wind, when you have been a day abroad on the road. + +What if the words have now the clauber of the roads upon them, and even +the muck, and now the reek of the shebeen or of the tinker's fire in a +roadside ditch; they have, too, the bog smell, and the smell of the +whin, the smell of ploughed land and of the sea, and they fall into +cadences that are cadences of the wind and of the tides, of full rivers +and clucking streams that sudden rains have filled, as well as the +cadences of the voices of boy and girl and they love-making, and of the +voices of the wild folk of the roads coaxing or loudly quarreling, and +the voices of women and men, young and old, lamenting the hard way of +life and of the sorrow that waits for all in the end. Why quarrel with +Synge, in short, because his style is of the very essence of life, and +of nature, which is the background of life? + +To attain a style that is his very self, that is of the very color of +his life, and of the very color of the extravagant phases of the life of +his country, to attain a style that embodies all this, and that for the +first time sets English dramatic prose to a rhythm as noble as the +rhythm of blank verse, is surely in itself title to greatness. But Synge +has other titles, too. In the few characters that he has created, forty +in all, characters all natively Irish, he has attained universality, +because these Irish men and women, Nora and Martin Doul, Sarah Casey and +Christy Mahon, Maurya and Deirdre, are so human that they are prototypes +of men and women the world over. And of dialogue, where style and +characterization blend, he has sure control. Each character of the six +great characters that I have just mentioned speaks and acts just as such +a character would, and not only these, but every other character that +occupies the stage for more than a moment. Michael Dara and Timmy the +Smith, the Priest or Philly Cullen, Bartley and Owen, each one has an +individuality clearly defined. + +There is less that is great in the structure of his plays than in any +other component of them, but that structure always clearly reveals the +action which arises from the emotion and theme underlying each,--the +menacing sea in "Riders to the Sea"; the loneliness of the mountain +glens that drives men fey in "The Shadow of the Glen"; the blindness, +the blessed self-delusion of mankind, in "The Well of the Saints"; the +wildness of the life of the roads that law may not tame, in "The +Tinker's Wedding"; the boy's finding of himself through his having to +live up to a community's mistaken ideal of him, in "The Playboy of the +Western World"; and the benison of death that prevents a great love from +dying, in "Deirdre of the Sorrows." + +Always the joy of making something beautiful out of his experience and +dream of life is what inspires Synge to write, and though the intention +to read life truly is a passion with him, there is never a suggestion of +didacticism, or even of moralizing, though "The Well of the Saints" is +unquestionably, whether he wills it so or not, a symbol of man's +discontent with things as they are, his preference in some things of the +lie to the truth. I think that Synge did not will to make "The Well of +the Saints" a symbol, and that the play was to him but a reading of +life, as life is, in his characteristic, exalted, ironic, extravagant +way of writing, and that if he was aware of the symbolism, he was not +keenly aware of it or much interested in it. He gives us life untroubled +by the passing agitation of the day, and for that we should be thankful, +and thankful, too, that he has given in his plays "the nourishment, not +very easy to define, on which our imaginations live." His irony, as +desolating to some as the irony of Swift, gives pause to all, as insight +always will, but to me his extravagance is a joy unalloyed, and his +exaltation, so rare a thing in modern literature, should bring to all +men delight and refreshment of spirit. No reading, or seeing and +hearing, of his plays leaves me without a feeling of richness or +without wonder and large content. He gives back my youth to me, both in +the theatre and in my library, and, in the glow that is mine in such +recapture, I call him the greatest dramatist in English that our stage +has known in a century. That I know him to be on sober second thought, +second thought that has been concerned with his art, as I followed it +developing during the slow years from "Riders to the Sea" to "Deirdre of +the Sorrows." + + + + +CHAPTER VIII + +THE YOUNGER DRAMATISTS--MR. PADRAIC COLUM--MR. WILLIAM BOYLE--MR. T.C. +MURRAY--MR. S. LENNOX ROBINSON--MR. RUTHERFORD MAYNE--"NORREYS +CONNELL"--MR. ST. JOHN G. ERVINE--MR. JOSEPH CAMPBELL + + +One wonders whether it is not of himself Mr. Padraic Colum is writing as +"The dawn-man ... in the sunset." That phrase arrests one on the first +page of his little book of verse "Wild Earth" (1909), in the first poem, +"The Plougher." It refers, of course, to an elemental man of to-day, to +the peasant of the great central plain of Ireland, who is "brute-tamer, +plough-maker, earth-breaker," just as truly as it does to the breaker of +horses who drove furrows with a tree-knee through primordial mould; and +it carries us in imagination back to the man of the Stone Age by way of +many other ploughmen, by way of the last man we saw between +plough-handles who appealed to our imagination, a man limned against an +April sky from which the sun had passed to leave all the west that +gold-green that the greatest of Westmoreland dalesmen loved; by way of +that Dumfries peasant whose + + "conquering share + Upturned the fallow fields of truth anew"; + +by way of Wayland Smith, whose anvils dot the shores of Britain; by way +of Tubal Cain, "an artificer in brass and iron," of the seed of Cain, "a +tiller of the ground." + +[Illustration] + +One wonders is it not of himself that the poet writes, though what he +writes takes us far from him, carrying us in thought halfway round the +world and back through civilizations that have passed. But whether it is +of himself that Mr. Colum writes or not, he is certainly, in a sense, +"The dawn-man ... in the sunset." The "Glory of the Gael" that is +to-day, if it is "glory," is glory of sunset, of "purples and splendors" +that pass; there are those who hold that the race that "went forth to +battle," but "always fell," is already passed beyond the sunset, into +the twilight, that twilight that is the time of day so surely symbolical +of the writing of the many Irish poets that have followed after Mr. +Yeats. Mr. Colum, however, whether his race be in twilight or sunset, is +of the dawn. He is of the dawn not only because he is the youth, at +oldest the young man, in his writing, who sees the world freshly and +fresh, none the less fresh because he knows it old; but he is of the +dawn because it is chiefly those things that are fundamentals, that come +out of the beginnings of things, that interest him profoundly, that stir +him deeply. Subtleties and complexities, decadent things, are not for +him, but simplicities, primordial things, the love of wandering, and +what is only less old, the love of land; and love of woman. These three +things, and youth, and little else, concern him. Mr. Colum writes, +indeed, in the dedication to "Thomas Muskerry" (1910) that he has set +down "three characters that stood as first types in my human comedy, the +peasant, the artist, the official, Murtagh Cosgar, Conn Hourican, +Thomas Muskerry." It is not, however, the official that Mr. Colum +emphasizes in "Thomas Muskerry," but the man who longs for a quiet +little place where he may be free from the nagging of his daughter and +her children; and in Myles Gorman, in this same play, is sounded that +other call that is recurrent in his work, the call of the road. We see +more of wanderer than of artist, too, in Conn Hourican, though Mr. Colum +calls the play he made for him "The Fiddler's House"; and here, too, the +love of land is a motive--love of land and the wander-love battle in +"The Land" (1905), with love of woman the deciding factor in the +latter's victory. + +Mr. Colum would not be an Irishman if nationality and religion were not +also motives in his plays and poems, but it is only in his 'prentice +work that either appears as a leading motive. From a good deal of +writing, most of which appeared originally in "The United Irishmen," he +has republished only the three plays before mentioned, "The Land" +(1905), "The Fiddler's House" (1907), "Thomas Muskerry" (1910), his +miracle play, "The Miracle of the Corn," and two stories in "Studies" +(1907), and what he wishes to preserve of his verse in "Wild +Earth" (1909). + +It was through "The Daughters of Erin" that Mr. Colum came in touch with +the dramatic movement. Their plays and tableaux in the Antient Concert +Rooms in 1900 attracted his attention, and he wrote to the secretary, +inclosing with the note copies of two plays that he had written--the +dramatic achievements of his late 'teens. These plays were about the +"Children of Lir," that one of "The Three Sorrows of Story-Telling" +that is less poignant than the story of Deirdre only because it is less +human, and about Brian Boru, the high king that beat back the Danes at +Clontarf. Faery and mediæval history were not destined, however, to be +Mr. Colum's field, and Mr. Fay, then stage manager of the Association +productions, probably helped him on the way to his true field, the life +of the peasant of the Midlands, by declaring them rubbish. Two years +later Mr. Colum had learned enough about life and about the stage to +write a play against enlistment in the English army that held the +attention of audiences and was regarded as good propagandist "stuff." +"The Saxon Shillin'," produced May 15, 1903, Mr. Colum has not +republished, nor "The Kingdom of the Young" (1902), which like its +predecessor was published in "The United Irishmen." With this last play, +as its title indicates, Mr. Colum found his way to that subject of +youth, which, whatever other one of his dominant motives his plays may +involve, is always present. The hardness of youth is the theme of "The +Kingdom of the Young," the hardness that came into the heart of a +daughter, when driven into revolt by the older generation. She turns on +her father in the end, determined that she will not be cheated of the +joy of life as was he. + +In "The Foleys," another little play of the same year, 1902, a play that +for all its crudity and incompleteness is full of insight into Catholic +Ireland, youth is again the theme, or the intolerance and +self-righteousness of youth. "Eoghan's Wife" (1902) is only a monologue, +only the old story of the woman who finds her home lonely and +depressing because the wrong man is the man of the house. She looks out +over "brown bogs with black water," wondering what is the way of escape +from it all. + +"Broken Soil," put on at the Abbey Theatre on December 4, 1903, is the +first play of Mr. Colum with which, in after years, he was in any way +content, but he was not too content with it, rewriting it in 1907 as +"The Fiddler's House," and, I think, in the main improving it. + +Mr. Colum, a youth with an appetite for reading as insatiable as his +impulse to write, read not only his Ibsen but his M. Maeterlinck. Back +of "Broken Soil" is Ibsen, back of "The Miracle of the Corn" is M. +Maeterlinck. "The Miracle of the Corn" was put in rehearsal by the Irish +National Theatre Society in 1904, but so far as I know it was never +played by that organization, its first staging I have record of being by +"The Theatre of Ireland" at the Abbey Theatre on May 22, 1908. Here +again is youth a leading theme, the power youth has, if it be wistful +and tender and pleading, to soften the heart of age. It may seem to some +that the girl Aislinn is only a symbol, only the dream of his youth +returned to the farmer Fardorrougha, who has hardened his heart even in +famine time, but whether apparition, or child of the flesh and symbol, +too, Aislinn is the bringer-back to Fardorrougha of the soft heart of +youth. + +As the Irishman in America is preferably a city dweller, it may be a +little difficult for his fellow Americans of other ancestry to +understand why the Irishmen at home were so concerned with Mr. Colum's +next play, whose theme, as whose title, is "The Land." The cry for a +home and a bit of land, a cottage around a hearth and around the +cottage a few acres of your own, is a cry that has been heard in all +ages and among all people. It is a cry that we all have cried at times, +gypsy-hearted though we be; it is a cry that even the city-loving +eighteenth century raised in all the "Mine be a cot" poems, whether of +Pomfret or Pope or any other of the many who followed the same fashion, +and it is a cry that is especially loud in present-day America. But none +of us can feel the call of the land, none of us can desire it with more +intensity than the Irishman of to-day, city-dweller though we find his +kin in America; there is no one class of people anywhere in the world +who want the land as the Irish peasants of to-day want it. Their fathers +and grandfathers saw the fields that they had farmed turned into +pastures for cattle, as the Scotch crofters saw their holdings turned +into deer-parks; the two generations of Irishmen now respectively in old +age and middle age have known what it is to be taxed out of the places +their improvements as tenants made more valuable; and to-day those of +the old folk that are still alive and those of the middle years that are +still in Ireland are getting back to the land, along with the younger +generation that desires it almost as ardently, but were not born upon +it, profiting by legislation that compels landlords to sell to the +Government, which in turn sells to the small proprietors. + +The Irish peasant loves his bit of land far more than his language, and +even more, I think, in the bottom of his heart, than he loves his +church, although allegiance to his church is a duty that he puts before +any love. A boreen in bogland is not a lonely place to the Irish +peasant if he have neighbors of long standing. It is the big city that +to him at home seems the lonely place, despite the glamour of its +lights, and its shops, and its ceaseless excitements. + +The story of "The Land" is, as I have said, the story of the struggle +between love of land and the _Wanderlust_, with the love of woman as the +decisive factor in the latter's victory. Matt Cosgar is the son of a +peasant farmer, the last of many that the hardness of Murtagh has driven +to America, and he, too, goes in the end, after his father's will is +broken, because the girl of his choice is restless and will not be +content as a farmer's wife. Matt and Ellen, the fit and the strong, go +to America, Cornelius and Sally, the hair-brained and the drudge, +remain. Symbolic this is, of course, of the situation in Ireland to-day, +or at least yesterday, but the characters are strongly individualized +and show no tendency to harden into types. In "The Land" the +restlessness of youth, its call to wander, is the motive that clashes +with love of the home and of the home place. In "The Fiddler's House" +there is youth desiring peace, and youth afraid of love, in Annie and +Maire Hourican; and the call of the road to old Conn, the fiddler. +Sacrifice is rare in youth, and if it were not that Maire is afraid of +her love for Brian McConnell, and gives up her home and takes to the +road with her father partly because she fears her love for her lover, +fears her powerlessness with him, it would hardly be in the course of +nature that she would sacrifice so much for her sister. It was a sure +instinct that guided Mr. Colum so to make believable a sacrifice at +first view seemingly so great. Even in this play, which Mr. Colum +intends as a study of the artistic temperament, the land is a motive +second only to the call of the road. Maire cared somewhat for the land, +less than her sister cared, more than her father cared, though he too +loved it in so far as the artist's gypsy nature will permit. It is the +road and his music, however, that Conn cares for most, and in his +expression of such love he attains to an eloquence that is Mr. Colum at +his best: "I'm leaving the land behind me, too; but what's the land, +after all, against the music that comes from the far strange places, +when the night is on the ground, and the bird in the grass is quiet?" As +one reads, aloud, as one must, one thinks now of the Old Testament and +now of Synge. + +Although Mr. Colum determined to put aside thoughts of dramas of old +Ireland in 1900, he evidently could not keep the old legends out of his +mind. They intrude now and then into his verses for all his modernity, +and one of them, "The Destruction of the House of Da Derga," forced him +to turn it into a play. "The Destruction of the Hostel" has not been +published, but it seems to have pleased those who saw and heard it as +played by the boys of St. Enda's School on February 5, 1910. + +In the last play, too, of Mr. Colum, the ending is a parting, here the +parting that death brings. Telling the fortunes of poor old Thomas +Muskerry, who in the end dies a pauper in the workhouse where once he +was master, the play opens our eyes to that life of the small town, +deadliest of lives the world over, a life knowing neither the freedom of +the farm nor the freedom of the city, as such life is lived in Ireland. +In "Thomas Muskerry," in "The Land" and "The Fiddler's House," the +characterization is sure and true. One may take it that this is Ireland, +Ireland on the average, as one cannot take it that that we have in the +plays of Synge or Lady Gregory is Ireland on the average. Crofton +Crilly, the son-in-law of the master, soft and big and blond, is an +unsympathetic but memorable portrait. Unsympathetic and memorable, too, +are the portraits of his son Albert and his daughter Anna, the one +tricky and the other grasping, and the workhouse porter and the old +piper haunt my memory as strange men I have met haunt my memory, year in +and year out. + +All three of these plays are, as I have said, sprung of domestic +problems, sure proof that Mr. Colum is the peasant's son. The family, as +he has pointed out in an article in "The United Irishmen," is not only +what the family is, ordinarily, in northwestern Europe, but that plus +that which the Irish family has inherited of the clan spirit. It was +only yesterday in Ireland that the girl and boy were married to whom +their fathers would, by a process of barter in which their own wishes +were not for a moment considered. They submitted, or came to America. It +was a patriarchal system of society. + +It is not, then, difficult to see how it came about that Mr. Colum, who +began to write so young, came to write so much about youth and the +rebellion of youth, and to write about those other themes of his, themes +all of them made more intense by the youth that is concerned with +them--the land that obsesses the life of the man of the house all +Ireland over, and through him obsesses the lives of his family; and love +of woman. + +Mr. Colum does not intrude his own personality into his plays, but it is +felt, as it should be felt, in every one of lyrics. Reading them one has +a sense of a youth like the youth of some characters in his plays; a +youth more manly than Cornelius's, less restless than Ellen's; a youth +serious and troubled with thought; a youth in revolt against much in the +old order, but tolerant of the passing generation that fears it +"knocking at the door." It is a youth impassioned rather than +passionate, more pronouncedly a youth of mind than a youth of heart. +When I say youth of mind, I mean not immaturity of mind, but the outlook +of the young mind; not radicalism, but a fixed determination to think +things out afresh and not to accept them because of any convention. + +Eloquence one always looks for in the writing of an Irishman, and humor +and power over dialogue, but Mr. Colum is too serious with youth to care +much for humor, and, like Mr. Martyn, though not to the same extent, he +has trouble with his dialogue. The feeling for the situation, the +understanding of what is in the characters' minds, is in Mr. Colum, but +the dialogue does not always accommodate itself to situation and +thought. What Mr. Colum makes his characters say has in it the thought +and the sentiment of what they would say, but the words as often lack +life as have it. It is this difficulty with dialogue that has prevented +Mr. Colum, in his plays, true and finely planned as they are, from +reaching great achievement. As dramatist he is still more full of +promise than of achievement, and to be a dramatist of promise after ten +years of playwriting is to be at a standstill. In lyric poetry it is +otherwise with Mr. Colum. There he has attained. You will find his real +value in "Wild Earth" slight though the book may seem. Here is reading +of life, here is imagination, here is lyric cry. Read these little poems +once and they will be your familiars forever. + + +MR. WILLIAM BOYLE + +One wonders if justice has been done Mr. William Boyle. If it has not it +is because he is a playwright of one play, "The Building Fund" (1905). +He has written three other plays that count, "The Eloquent Dempsey" +(1906), "The Mineral Workers" (1906), and "Family Failings" (1912), but +"The Building Fund" is of a higher power than any of these. "Family +Failings," produced in the spring of 1912, I have not read, but +according to all accounts it does not mark any advance upon "The Mineral +Workers" or "The Eloquent Dempsey." "The Mineral Workers," essentially a +propagandist play, and "The Eloquent Dempsey," essentially a satire, are +hardly, even in intention, of the first order of seriousness in art. +There are characters in these two plays faithful to human nature, and +faithful to the ways of eastern Galway, where the scenes of all of the +plays of Mr. Boyle are laid. But there are so many other characters in +them that are either caricatures or "stock" that, funny as the plays +seem upon the stage, they do not impress the deliberate judgment as +real. The many characters of "The Mineral Workers" and its several +motives are too much for Mr. Boyle; he loses his grip and the play +falls to pieces. "The Eloquent Dempsey" suffers from the caricaturing of +its characters, and its action degenerates into unbelievable farce +almost on the curtain-rise. "The Building Fund," however, is serious and +true, and at the same time just as full of wit and just as biting in +satire and just as effective on the stage as "The Eloquent Dempsey." Its +characterization is recognized as distinctive and authentic even on +reading. Revealed through the almost perfect work of the players trusted +with its presentation by the Abbey Theatre on their American tour of +1911-12, it seemed even more than distinctive and authentic, it seemed +inspired by profound insight. + +"The Building Fund" tells the story of the outgeneraling of grasping son +and conniving daughter's daughter by a hard old woman of the strong +farmer class in the west of Ireland. Mrs. Grogan is approached as the +curtain rises by Michael O'Callaghan, an elderly farmer, and Dan +MacSweeney, a young farmer, in the rôle of collectors for the fund for +the new Catholic church. They are sent away by her and by her son Shan +without any contribution, but their visit suggests to her a way by which +she can disinherit her son and her granddaughter, wishful for her death, +she thinks, in their eagerness for her fortune. Shan is open in his +concern as to her disposal of her money; and although the girl hides her +purpose under pretended solicitude for her grandmother's health and is a +great help to the old woman, Mrs. Grogan believes her also to be +plotting for the fortune and is equally resentful toward both. So when +the collectors call again, Mrs. Grogan makes a will, in which we learn, +on her death shortly after, she has left all her fortune away from her +family to the church. For all their plotting, the audience feels that +the old woman is more malevolent than either son or granddaughter, and, +after all, the son had worked hard on the home place and the +granddaughter, slyboots as she was, undoubtedly was really kind. Both +are of her blood, and it is human to feel that parents should leave +their money to their children rather than to charity. There is some +amelioration of the condition of Shan and Sheila in the thought that +they may stay on, with Father Andrew's permission, as managers of the +old farm, henceforth the church farm. But sympathize with them though +you may, you feel it is only right that selfishness should over-reach +itself. + +The play is not any more complimentary to Catholic Galway than "The +Drone" of Mr. Mayne is complimentary to Protestant Down, but it is +seldom that comedy is complimentary to human nature, and "The Building +Fund" is comedy. That is, it is comedy as Ibsen sees drama, or character +farce as Coleridge defines it. It is, in the Greek sense, perhaps even +tragedy; certainly, it is tragedy from the standpoint of Shan and +Sheila, for circumstances certainly get the better of them. From Mrs. +Grogan's standpoint it is comedy, for she, through her will, even though +she is now dead, has got the better of circumstances as represented by +the plotting of her son and granddaughter. If we look at "The Building +Fund" from the standpoint of Shan and Sheila, but without sympathy for +them, it is only character farce, for although circumstances get the +better of them, we do not then care for them, and a play in which +characters are overwhelmed by fate, but in which our sympathy is not +with them, is, if we follow Coleridge, really farce. Whatever "The +Building Fund" is, its characterization is admirable. Some might say its +men and women approximate to types, that Mrs. Grogan is the avaricious +old woman, Shan the sanctimonious miser, Sheila the sly minx, Michael +the benevolent old man, and Dan the gay blade. Types or not, you will +find all of them in Ireland, and all of them wherever human nature is +human nature. If they are types, however, each has a personality, but +whether all of them would stand out with such individuality had one not +seen them so fully realized on the stage, I cannot say. The tottering, +bitter old woman of Miss Allgood and the miserly, fearful son of Mr. +Sinclair are more memorable than the other impersonations only in that +they are fatter parts than Sheila, Michael O'Callaghan, and Dan +MacSweeney, played respectively by Miss McGee, Mr. O'Rourke, and Mr. +O'Donovan. + +Mother and son are, I am sure, just as complete in the writing of Mr. +Boyle as in the acting of Miss Allgood and Mr. Sinclair. Both are, +indeed, as finely imagined and as faithfully realized as any characters +in modern English comedy. And you may have to go further afield than +modern English comedy to find such a minute study of resentful and +malevolent age as this portrait of Mrs. Grogan. We all know that +perversity that will not allow its possessor to be satisfied with any +effort to please. Here is an illustration of it as Mr. Boyle has seen +it:-- + + _Sheila_. Will I boil an egg for your breakfast, granny? + + _Mrs. Grogan_ (_sarcastically_). Oh, to be sure! More extravagance. + You know very well I couldn't eat it, and you'll have it for + yourself. Waste, waste; nothing but idleness and waste all round. + God help me! (_Coughs._) + + _Sheila pours out a cup of tea and hands it to Mrs. Grogan._ + + _Sheila_. Drink that drop of tea, granny--it's fresh made. + + _Mrs. Grogan_. What did you do with the bottom of the pot? Threw it + to the ducks, I suppose? + + _Sheila_ (_pointing to the table_). I have it here for myself, + granny. + + _Mrs. Grogan_ (_sipping tea_). When I was a girl I never got a sup + o' tea from year's end to year's end. + + _Sheila_. It was very dear, then; wasn't it? + + _Mrs. Grogan_. It's dear enough still with everybody using it all + day long. Did you feed the hens? + + _Sheila_. Long ago, and let the ducks out, too. + + _Mrs. Grogan_. I suppose it's in the oats they'll be by this time. + What about the calves? _Grogan goes out_. + + _Sheila_. I gave them their milk and put them in the bawn. + + _Mrs. Grogan_. With the linen on the hedge? Why, they'll chew it + into rags, and, maybe, choke themselves. + + _Sheila_. No, granny, dear; I spread the linen in the upper garden, + where the sun comes the earliest. + + _Mrs. Grogan_. I see it's stole ye want it. There's half a dozen + tinkers squatted in the quarry. + + _Sheila_ (_wearily._) They went a week ago. + + _Mrs. Grogan_. Ah, dear! There's what it is to be old! I never hear + anything that's going on now till it's all over. Is that egg + boiled? + + _Sheila_. Granny, dear, I thought you couldn't take one. + + _Mrs. Grogan_. It's the little bit I eat that's grudged me now, I + see. + +Though there is little of it in this passage that I quote, the +picturesque phrase that no Irish writer is without is Mr. Boyle's, as a +matter of course, but there is no particular individuality in his +handling of it. Style he has not, nor any background of romance, or +beauty of that sort that illumines the grayness of the comedies of +Ibsen, or of any other sort of beauty than that approach to beauty there +is in skilled craftsmanship. + +Admirably arranged, too, are the situations of "The Eloquent Dempsey," a +satire on the man who straddles all questions, as at one time, at any +rate, did so many Irish politicians. Dempsey might have continued his +career of straddling indefinitely had he not a mania for speech-making +that he could not control. In the end, however, he was undone by a +well-intentioned conspiracy, arranged by his wife, to get him out of +politics altogether and out of his liquor-selling and into farming far +from town. I cannot identify Dempsey with any one prominent Irish +statesman, but the lesser fry on both Nationalist and Unionist sides are +as easy to identify as the men that suggested the characters of "A Tale +of a Town." In "The Eloquent Dempsey" all the art of Mr. Boyle has been +lavished on the central figure, which, when all is said, remains a +caricature, and caricature uncompensated for by any great or noble +characteristic of the play, whose primal quality is but cleverness. +Effective as its satire is, and provocative of laughter as it always is +on the stage, it is altogether cheaper in its quality than "The Building +Fund." + +"The Mineral Workers," with its chief portrait that of a returned +Irish-American mining engineer, takes us to certain phases of society +not met among the publicans and politicians and peasants of Mr. Boyle's +earlier plays. Other than these are not only the hero, Stephen J. +O'Reilly, but the aristocrat, Sir Thomas Musgrove, and his sister, Mrs. +Walton, who is of the family connection of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's +Georgianna Tidman. Dan Fogarty, the holdback, unprogressive farmer, is +the sharpest-cut and truest to life of all the characters, so clear-cut +and true, in fact, that one thinks of him as almost a fellow of Shan +Grogan in "The Building Fund." Uncle Bartle is sentimentalized, and +Kitty Mulroy has no such personality as Sheila O'Dwyer. Contrast "The +Mineral Workers" with a novel of the returned American, "Dan the Dollar" +of Mr. Bullock, and the calibre of Mr. Boyle's play is quickly revealed. + +What Mr. Boyle had been had he come into touch with the movement ten +years earlier, it is of course beside the point to speculate. He was not +a young man when he first became acquainted with the art of the Abbey +Theatre in London and was impelled to write plays for it. He was, +though, able to adapt the experience he had had as a story-writer to the +stage in "The Building Fund." That being so, why is it that his later +plays, successful though they have been as vehicles for the purveying of +amusement on the stage, have not taken rank by their art or by their +reading of life with "The Building Fund "? It may be that it was the one +theme susceptible of dramatic presentation that he had brooded over long +enough to transmute into terms of drama, and that the later plays, full +of successful stage tricks though they are, did not come out of his +knowledge of Irish life. Knowledge of Ireland he ought to have, for he +is said to have lived for comparatively long periods in various places +in country as an excise officer. As such Mr. Boyle was himself one of +the principal types, that of the official, that exist in Ireland, and in +a position to learn much of many other types, surprisingly few of which +he has realized with any depth of insight in his plays. + +It would seem with his great success seven years back and his newer +plays less effective, that we cannot look to Mr. Boyle with great hope +for the future, as we can to Mr. Robinson or Mr. Murray. When we so say, +however, let us remember that Lady Gregory did not attempt plays until +she was close on fifty. + + +MR. T.C. MURRAY + +The North is generally held to be another country than the rest of +Ireland. Ulster is alien alike in race and religion and economic +conditions from Connacht and Leinster and Munster. It is Scotch Ireland, +Protestant Ireland, industrial Ireland. It is, moreover,--many of its +citizens say therefore,--prosperous Ireland. Certainly men would not +divide all Irishmen into "Irishmen" and "Scotch Irishmen" were there not +many grounds for such a distinction. All other of the immigrants into +Ireland have, as a people, disappeared. The Norman has left his mark on +the land in his castles and his names, but as a distinctive element of +the population he no longer exists, any more than does Welshman or +Englishman or Palatinate. Apart from distinctions of class the men of +Ireland are "Irishmen" and "Scotch Irishmen," and until yesterday, +therefore, Nationalists and Unionists. + +[Illustration] + +And yet, definite as are these distinctions, life in the various parts +of Ireland seems much alike, class for class, as it is represented by +the many contemporaneous playwrights, whether the scenes of their plays +are Down or Kerry, Galway or Wicklow. A tinker is a tinker wherever you +find him, a strong farmer a strong farmer, a landlord a landlord. The +same emotions dominate rival brothers in "The Turn of the Road" and in +"Birthright," though the Orangeman turned actor wrote the one and the +Cork schoolmaster the other. Mr. T.C. Murray is one of those to whom Mr. +Yeats has given the name "Cork Realists." His first play, "The Wheel o' +Fortune," was produced by the Cork Dramatic Society at the Dun, Cork, +December 2, 1909. It has not been published, so far as I know, and all +that I learn from the references to it in newspapers is that it is a +one-act ironic comedy about matchmaking. Mr. Murray brought his next +play, "Birthright," to the Abbey Theatre, where it was performed on +October 27, 1910. If "Maurice Harte" (1912) stands the test of time and +travel as has "Birthright," Mr. Murray has come to the Abbey Theatre to +take a place of prominence among its playwrights. Some of the appeal of +"Birthright" is in its story, the story of Cain and Abel, if you like, a +story that is as lasting in its appeal as is "The Eternal Triangle," but +there is as much appeal in the characterization, which you feel as you +read almost as intimately as you come to know it on the stage. There are +many plays that are altogether colorless in the reading unless you have +unusual power of visualization and can see them as you sit in your study +as if they were embodied before you on the stage. Such plays, +visualized or unvisualized in the study, are often real enough on the +stage. "Birthright," as I have said, is not one of these. It visualizes +itself for you, with no effort on your part, as you read it, though of +course, as every real play will, it moves you more in the playing. It +was admirably cast on its first production at the Abbey Theatre, and it +was just as admirably cast on the American tour of 1911-12, Miss +O'Doherty's Maura and Mr. Morgan's Bat Morrissey being wonderful +pictures of a doting mother and a stern father troubled by their +preferences, the one for the elder, the other for the younger son. The +rival sons were done to the life by Mr. O'Donovan and Mr. Kerrigan, and +the neighbor of Mr. O'Rourke was, too, a complete realization of the +Irish peasant of the valley of the Lee. It is a stern and patient +realism this of Mr. Murray in telling of how Hughie, the elder son, the +apple of his mother's eye, the idol of the parish for his hurly playing, +and his verse-making, and his free and pleasant ways, is disinherited +and condemned to seek his fortune in America by his father because his +younger son was the better man on the farm. There was back of Bat's +decision, too, his feeling that his eldest-born was more of his mother, +whose blood was part gentle, than of himself, the grubber of the earth. +Shane, like his father, was the peasant plowman, Hughie something of the +sporting gentleman. The end of it all is murder, the younger son killing +the elder with the hurly when he is accused by his brother of plotting +to grab the farm. Many who saw "Birthright" in America were moved by it +more than by any other play in the repertoire of the company, and I +have heard more than one whose supreme interest is the theatre say that +it was the best play new to America presented in America during the +winter of 1911-12. I do not so hold, for "The Well of the Saints" and +"In the Shadow of the Glen" were new to America in the winter of +1911-12, and "The Playboy of the Western World" was new to every city in +America save to Chicago, where Mr. Hart Conway presented it at his +dramatic school in the spring of 1909. I can, however, understand why +"Birthright" so appealed. It is because of the theme, because of the +beautiful character of Maura Morrissey, because of the absolute +faithfulness to life, as all the world knows it, of the play. I have +traveled the road to Macroom that these farmers traveled, and so I know +the externals of the life they lead: I have known intimately and I know +intimately just such people as these, Irish peasants, some of whom +spoiled their children, thinking the boy they loved must not be +"crossed," and some of whom preferred one child to another even to the +extent of reversing the custom of primogeniture that is as fixed a rule +among them as if their property was entailed, and so I can vouch for the +absolute fidelity of Mr. Murray's art. It is a realism little relieved +by humor; unrelieved either by any background of romance, but gaming a +dignity from its intensity of conception and its simplicity of unfolding +that makes you feel, as you read, or as you watch and listen, that you +are in the presence of nobility. Its style, maybe, is homespun, but it +is none the worse for that, and it never approaches at all to the cheap +or mean. + +The appeal of this realism is as poignant in "Maurice Harte" (1912) as +in "Birthright," though the story of the later play is not so universal +as is that of the play that brought Mr. Murray his share of fame. +"Maurice Harte" tells of the disaster that comes to a young divinity +student of Maynooth whose parents drive him back to college to seek +ordination even after he tells them that he has no vocation for the +priesthood. The curtain rises on Maurice, a youth of twenty-two, trying +to tell his mother, whose youngest he is, and the child of her middle +age that it would be sacrilege for him to take orders with no vocation. +His courage fails him, as it had on previous occasions on which he tried +to confess his agony because of his false position, and he finally begs +the Parish Priest to break the desolating news to the family. They are +only farmers in a small way, the Hartes: and the father and mother, the +son at home, Owen, and the three older brothers in Boston, have all made +sacrifices to give Maurice his education. When the priest tells of the +boy's decision not to return to Maynooth, mother and father and brother +all insist that he must stick to his earlier intention, vocation or no +vocation. + +They are in monetary difficulties because of him, and if the story went +out that he was not back at Maynooth his mother declares it "wouldn't be +east in Macroom when we'd have the bailiffs walking in that door." She +tells him, too, his being a spoiled priest will cost his brother his +bride and her fortune that would help them to pay off their debts. The +boy cannot withstand their pleading, and the first act ends with his +promise that he will go back to Maynooth, a promise wrung from him even +though he knows at the time of its making that his return may bring him +to madness in the end. + +Act II, nine months later, shows us again the kitchen of the farmhouse +of West Cork, with happiness in the hearts of all there, save some +slight apprehension on the father's part over his new clothes and the +terrors of a journey with Father Mangan to Maynooth. In this relaxing of +the tension of the play humor is not out of place, and its attainment +here by Mr. Murray shows that he could write comedy did he choose. We +hear that the marriage settlement between Bride Burke and Owen has been +made, and that Maurice is to marry them; and that he has bested all his +classmates in his final examinations. Upon the pride and happiness in a +son sure of a good match, and the glory of another son about to be +"priested" and to say mass in the local church, breaks in word that he +cannot be ordained because of illness. And close upon this bad news +comes Maurice himself, broken down mentally from the strain of driving +himself to do what he knows to be wrong, from the strain of committing, +as he believes, sacrilege. Father and mother and brother realize that it +is they who have driven him mad, but such is human nature that mother +and brother, at least, have thoughts of themselves even at this moment, +as well as thoughts for Maurice with "his mind that's gone." His brother +fears that Bride will not come into a house so disgraced, and his +mother, her years-long dream of her youngest a priest gone on the wind, +is struck dumb with horror at the thought of what her life will be from +this out. + +The full significance of the tragedy of Maurice's fate can be realized +only by those who know intimately the ambitions hugged close to heart by +the Irish Catholic mother. It is more to her to have her boy a priest +even than it was yesterday to the Scotch Presbyterian mother to have her +boy a minister of the Kirk. It is the greatest glory that can come to +such a peasant mother to give one of her sons to the priesthood. + +There is, I think, no propaganda in the play, and no intentional satire, +although in a way "Maurice Harte" affords a parallel to so definitely a +propagandist satire as Mr. Robinson's "Harvest." It is not education +that is the curse, however, in "Maurice Harte," but the belief that only +priesthood in the end can justify the sacrifices without which a college +education is almost impossible for an Irish peasant. Certain it is that +it is only for the pride of having their boy a priest that the typical +Irish Catholic peasant parents would make such sacrifices as the Hartes +have made, sacrifices involving them in debt to the extent of a thousand +dollars, to secure their son an education. + +In a sense "Maurice Harte" is far other than the provincial study I have +here outlined. Its theme is allied, unquestionably, to that theme so +much larger in its relations than that of the spoiled priest, the theme +of the rebellious son, the son who will live his own life no matter what +may be his parents' will. It is only allied to it, however, not to be +identified with it, because Maurice is too fearful of disappointing his +parents, and too shrinking and ineffectual, to go against his parents' +will. In Ireland, as I have said elsewhere, such parental will, by a +survival of authority from the days of the clan system, was law until +yesterday, and there will therefore be those, I have no doubt, who will +find in the play a conflict of the old order and the new, but I do not +believe such conflict was the author's intent. Indeed, the play is +wholly of the old order. No love of man and woman figures as motive in +it as none had figured in "Birthright." There is parental love, of +course, in both plays, though in the case of both parents in "Maurice +Harte" and in the father in "Birthright" parental pride is a stronger +motive than parental love. Very true to Irish life is this absence of +passion as a deciding factor in the fates of man and woman, this +insistence upon the importance of the family, this subordination of the +rights of the individual. Mr. Murray wished to write in "Maurice Harte" +a play of the very heart of Irish Catholic life, and such a play he has +written, a play that marks no decline, either in characterization or +situation, from "Birthright," and to say that is to give "Maurice Harte" +praise of the highest. + + +MR. S. LENNOX ROBINSON + +Mr. Lennox Robinson, like most of the Abbey Theatre dramatists, has +chosen to write about the ground under his feet. The son of a clergyman +whose charges have been in the southwest of Ireland, Mr. Robinson spent +his boyhood and youth in the Bandon Valley. He had been trying his hand +at writing from the time that he was ten years old, editing an amateur +magazine as he grew older, feeling about for the thing that he could do. +A visit of the Abbey Theatre Company to Cork was the awakening. He saw +a new acting, he saw a new art of the stage, and he knew as he saw that +it was in drama his work lay. It was not, however, for the Cork Dramatic +Society that he did his first play, but for the Abbey Theatre. "The +Clancy Name" was put on on October 8, 1908, when its author was but four +days past his twenty-second birthday. What this first version was like I +do not know, but Mr. Robinson has reprinted the second version, put on +with the full strength of the National Theatre Society at the Abbey +Theatre on September 30, 1909. As printed, it is an ironic little play, +recording the great day in the life of the Widow Clancy, the day on +which she pays off a five years' loan and stands without a debt of any +kind, her farm all her own, the Clancy name respected throughout her +world. But on this day of her triumph, when she would add to her +happiness by making a match for her son, John cannot rejoice with her, +and on her questioning him as to his moodiness he blurts out that he is +the man who killed James Power, a quiet man whose unexplained +disappearance is the mystery of the countryside. Worse yet, John insists +that he will give himself up to the authorities. It is terrible to know +one's son a murderer; it is intolerable to think of a Clancy being +hanged and of the glory of the name forever departed. She persuades him +finally not to tell, but he fears he will, so, when the chance comes, he +finds the only way out, the way of peace for his mother and peace for +himself. A car driven by a drunken neighbor is threatening the life of a +little child playing in the middle of the road. John Clancy pushes him +out of the way and allows himself to be driven down. They bring him to +his mother's house still alive and raving incoherently of the murder, +but he dies before he tells his secret and the Clancy name is saved. It +is not a very gripping theme, but the play brings to us an acute +character study of the typical managing woman of the small farmer class. +We feel her tireless energy, her drive, her high pride, assets of worth +in the fight to live. There is a little humor, natural and unforced, +some picturesqueness of phrase, a revelation of knowledge of life in one +corner of Ireland. There is nothing, however, in the play to make it +comparable with the three that followed it on the stage of the Abbey +Theatre, "The Crossroads" (1909); "Harvest" (1910); and "Patriots" +(1912). "The Lesson of Life," a little one-act comedy, presented at the +Dun Theatre, Cork, December 2, 1909, Mr. Robinson has disowned. Why I do +not know, though the fact that it was not produced at the Abbey may +indicate that even at the time of its production he felt that it was not +up to the level of his work. Mr. Robinson has not republished "The +Lesson of Life," but the reviews state that it was an amusing little +play, though in no way a serious reading of life. + +[Illustration] + +"The Clancy Name," "The Crossroads," "Harvest," and "Patriots" are all +on themes that hit home at Irish institutions, and yet it would be wrong +to say any one of them is basically either satirical or propagandist. +All are primarily readings of life. "The Crossroads" alone, perhaps, is +more than a reading of life. Certainly, after its needless prologue, it +is fine art through to the end. This scene, with its satire of Irish +debating societies, is now, wisely, dropped when the play is produced. +We can learn enough of Ellen in the play itself to understand why she +does as she does without this picture of her in Dublin. Her story is +that of a woman who hates the much talk of patriotism in Dublin and the +lack of doing anything tangible for Ireland. In Dublin she has worked +her way up from servant to assistant in a bookshop, but she goes back +happily to the country to give her sister a chance in town such as she +has had, thinking that perhaps she herself can lead her people into +better ways of farming and of ordering their lives generally through the +knowledge she has got in town. It is through such as Ellen that the +Irish Industries Organization Society in actual life accomplishes an +important part of its work. + +In the first act of "The Crossroads" we find Ellen at home, in her old +peasant dress, having made the hens lay so well in winter as to arouse +wonder in a neighbor as to whether, "Is it right for hens to be laying +that way so early in the year?" A match is being made for her by her +mother with a man that has a good farm. Ellen desires the match very +much, for this is just the farm on which to try the new methods that +shall bring prosperity to the people of the valley and so stem the +emigration to America. She does not love Tom Dempsey, this strong +farmer, and she does half-love Brian Connor, whom she had known in +Dublin, but now that he has come down to ask her to marry him she +chooses the farmer, brutal though she knows him, because as his wife she +can do the work for Ireland that she has imagined for herself. The +loveless marriage, so universal an institution all over Ireland, made it +nothing out of the way for Ellen to act as she did, even though at the +time of the action of the play a higher ideal of marriage than that of +the old matchmaking had come in. It is this institution that Mr. +Robinson, from one point of view, might be thought to be attacking in +the play; it is this institution, certainly, that is the theme of the +play. Is it a tribute to Irishmen and Irishwomen to acknowledge that +this loveless marriage has worked on the whole as well as the marriage +of sentiment, or as the marriage of sexual infatuation, or as the +marriage of comrade hearts that we believe we have in America? As a +matter of fact there were not as many loveless marriages as might seem +at first thought. The match made up between the father of the girl and +the father of the boy was the usual sort of marriage among the +stay-at-home Irish girls and boys up to 1880, but how many girls and +boys for the past one hundred and fifty years have come to America to +escape it? Look up your family traditions, you who have Irish ancestors, +and find is it not true that these ancestors, whether Reeds of Down or +Nolans of Meath, fled to America because they would wed the mate of +their choice. Even to-day boys and girls come here from the same motive, +though of course it would be preposterous to deny that to many it is +rather Eldorado than the land of freedom. + +Act II reveals poor Ellen seven years later. She has lost her two boys +by fever; she has failed in her work on her own farm, though she has +brought untold blessings of progressiveness to the other farms around +Ballygurteen; she has lost the appreciation of her husband. She whom we +loved for a personality as winning as that of an Emma or a Tess is now +a drudge, almost a slattern, gray-haired, hopeless, almost hated by a +brutal husband. The loveless marriage has proved a curse. Upon the woman +of his dreams so dethroned comes Brian Connor, now a successful +novelist, and, finding how things are, falls, for all his intended +restraint, into a fight with Tom, whom but for Ellen he would have +choked to death. Brian urges Ellen to go away with him, but, after a +moment's faltering, she refuses to go. This is the last scene. Tom, who +has heard Brian's proposal and his wife's rejection of it, comes slowly +down the room. + + _Tom_. Was it me you saved or was it the young man? When you + pulled him off me, did you save me, or was it him you saved + from being hung? Tell me that, Ellen McCarthy. + + [_Silence._ + + Ah! 't is aisy seen. + + [_Puts his hat on, and goes to the door, and takes the key out + of the lock_. + + _Ellen_ (_looking round_). What are you doing? (_Frightened._) + What are you doing? + + _Tom_. I'll tell you what I'm doing. I'm locking the door the + way you won't go after that young man; an' I'm going to step + down to the village now for a sup of drink. An' then--I'm + coming back; an', by God, I'll make you pay for this night's + work, Ellen McCarthy, till you'd wish you were dead--for the + black curse you brought on this farm, an' for the liking you + have to the young man. + + [_Goes out. Ellen remains sitting at the table, staring in + front of her with sad, hopeless eyes_. + +The turning of the key in the lock ends the play, leaving brutality +unimaginable as the fate of Ellen. + +It is a severe reading of the Irish peasant, this of Tom Dempsey. +Murder may come of his blackness of heart. He is a far worse man, of +course, than poor John Clancy, who killed a man in an unpremeditated +fight, sure murderer though Clancy be. Yet despite such heroes or at +least such characters in his plays, no one would say that in either "The +Clancy Name" or "The Crossroads" Mr. Robinson held a brief against the +Irish peasant. He most certainly does not. He likes the Irish peasant. +His plays are "stories of mine own people" faithfully told. He does not +spare the Cork farmer, but he does not distort him. Why however, his +"Harvest" was allowed to be played unmolested in New York, after the +"The Playboy of the Western World" met with organized opposition, can be +explained only by recognition of the fact that the Irishmen of the +patriotic societies are slaves of precedent. "The Playboy of the Western +World" had always met with opposition, so it should meet with opposition +in New York. "Harvest" escaped in New York because its uncomplimentary +personages were unheralded. Not that there is anything in "Harvest," any +more than in "The Playboy of the Western World," that any +self-respecting Irishman need object to. "Harvest" shows the disastrous +effects the wrong sort of primary education, as taught by the country +schoolmaster of the old type, the type that was prevalent before the +present type, brought about. The present-day schoolmaster is in sympathy +with system of education that will keep the children on the land or in +an industry near the home place; the older type would give them an +education that would send them to the cities to be priests and lawyers +and secretaries and typists and chemists and what-nots. Old William +Lordan, the schoolmaster, had, evidently, in the opinion of the +playwright, the sins of many on his shoulders, and yet one, knowing that +it is the system and not the man that is at fault, cannot help feeling +that Mr. Robinson is rather severe on what is in life a really lovable +though mistaken sort of man. + +"Harvest" shows that of the six children of Tim Hurley, but the three +that come into the play are loyal to their father: Maurice, who works +the home farm; Jack, the apothecary's clerk from Dublin, who tries to +help with the farmwork, but is too much of a weakling to be anything of +a help; and Mary, who from typist has turned mistress, now to this man, +now to that. Mary, come home to get away from her wrong life, is called +back to London by the excitement of its life, which has become a +necessity to her. Jack, the chemist, in the end deserts the home; and is +off at the end of the play, with his upper-class wife, for America or +the colonies. Only Maurice is more than half-entitled to our respect. +The son who is the priest is in America to collect for the Church at the +time of his family's need, and so is not helpful to his family; the +solicitor son is climbing socially, and, needing a motor-car to help him +to position, prefers to spend his money on himself rather than on the +home place that was robbed to pay for his education; and the secretary +son is so ashamed of "the ditch out of which he was digged" that he has +changed both his name and his religion. + +All five of the children who went out from the home educated, as the +schoolmaster wished them to go, have been educated at the expense of +those that remained on the farm, Maurice the hard-working farmer and old +Timothy the father. But the father, too, is far from what he should be, +as one must suspect, not believing that education alone can account for +so many gone wrong. Timothy burns down some unimportant farm buildings +for the insurance upon them. This practice is so common in all parts of +the world civilized sufficiently to have insurance that I wonder +insurance companies take risks on backwoods farms anywhere. An old man +with whom I have talked often in the mountains of northeastern +Pennsylvania answered me one day, when I asked him how it was his barn +caught fire, "The insurance got too hot." He was a German, a man in his +prime a good worker and not a bad representative of the mountaineer of +his state. One must not, then, fasten on old Timothy as a character +distinctively Irish, at least in this phase of his character. He surely +is universal, a representative of one type of disingenuous countryman. + +The characterization in "Harvest" falls short of that of "The +Crossroads," but perhaps it had to be if Mr. Robinson was to make his +point. As one realizes that perhaps these people are but pawns with +which to win the game that Mr. Robinson has set out, one remembers that +their creator spent some weeks with Mr. Shaw and Mr. Barker in London, +and one understands, too, many other of the failings of "Harvest." It is +but another of many illustrations of the blight that Mr. Shaw has +brought upon the modern English stage. + +It is a two-edged satire that Mr. Robinson employs in his "Patriots" +(1912), a satire that cuts into the sham agitation of some political +leagues, an agitation that is talk only, and at the same time cuts with +almost equal sharpness into the physical force party. It is true that it +is not the motives but the wisdom of these latter men that Mr. Robinson +satirizes in the failure of James Nugent, the returned political +prisoner, to stir his townsmen with the kind of talk that set them to +arming in 1893. That their propaganda is no longer possible, if it was +ever possible, is a corollary to the play, even if it could overcome the +inertia that has come to Irishmen with their greater prosperity since +the Land Purchase Act went into force. + +The revolt of the patriot who hates talk and is willing to sacrifice +personal happiness for country is recorded here as it was in "The +Crossroads," and the uselessness of the sacrifice made only too plain. +To one not an Irishman it would perhaps seem that the real drama there +is in the play is smothered by the political satire and that the +politics satirized are of too local an interest for it to have so +universal an appeal as "The Crossroads" or "Harvest." There is an +universal story in "Patriots" that is but slightly developed--the story +of the prisoner's wife, Ann; her love for her daughter, who is a cripple +because of her mother's being dragged here and there by James Nugent in +his campaigning just before her birth; Ann Nugent's turning against her +husband, on his liberation from an eighteen years' imprisonment for +political murder, because of the wrong done her so long ago and because +of the danger to Rose's health that campaigning with her father would +entail. The turning of Ann Nugent from her husband is the really +significant part of the play,--and in thoughts of that we pay scant heed +to the political satire and even to the pathos of the desertion of a +leader by almost all he expected to follow him, and the reduction of his +life, as he puts it bitterly, "to an anecdote--a thing to be told +stories about." And in the end that is the fate he will meet. Time and a +wife that he wronged have broken him. As he staggers off at the end of +the play, a stricken man and older than his forty-five years, this is +his cry:-- + + I've killed a man, I've crippled a child, I've got myself shut up + for eighteen years--God knows what good came of it + all--but--Peter--I meant--I tried ... I know I meant right--and in + prison my cell used to be filled with the sad faces of men like me + who had given everything for Ireland--they wouldn't have come to + me, would they? if I hadn't been of their company. They are here + now--I see them all around me--there is Wolfe Tone, and there is + ... oh, quiet watching faces, I have tried--tried as you tried--and + been broken.... + +With this ability of his to pick out a theme that is basic in Irish +life, and with the years bringing him an experience of life that will +dominate any propagandist purpose, Mr. Robinson should grow in +seriousness of intention and accomplishment. He hates sham, he has sane +and cleansing satire of pretension, he writes good dialogue, his +experience as stage manager of the Abbey Theatre is teaching him the +stage; he is only twenty-five. Do not these things augur a future? + + +MR. RUTHERFORD MAYNE + +It so happened that the last time I was reading the plays of Mr. +Rutherford Mayne, I was also reading the plays of Sir Arthur Wing +Pinero. All the world has heard of the one; only the little band +scattered here and there through the English-speaking countries to whom +letters are a real part of life has heard of the other. I laughed over +"Dandy Dick"; I thought of Miss Rehan playing Georgianna Tidman with all +that gush of spirits that was hers; I thought of Miss Nethersole in her +wonderful youth playing Paula Tanqueray; and as I thought of these two, +each in her way inimitable in her part, thoughts of past moments with +the characters of Mr. Mayne's plays, plays I have never seen on the +stage, came back to me. Had I seen them on the stage would my thoughts +of them have been thoughts of the theatre, as were all my thoughts of +Sir Arthur's plays? It may be, but I think not, I think the great +strength of Mr. Mayne is that he takes you to life; I think the great +weakness of the wide-heard author is that he takes you immediately, in +almost all of his plays, to the theatre, and only secondarily, if at +all, after the memory of his artificiality has died away, to life +itself. + +William John Granahan and John Smith the Tory,--will you forget them, or +Robbie John whom the fiddle called away, or Ebenezer McKie and Francey +Moore, Protestant and Catholic, who together lay in wait for the hated +landlord and shot him as he passed through the glen; or John Murray, +good man, and his bauchle of a brother? You will not forget them, for +they are from life; you have known them, all save Francey, if you have +known Scotchmen who are Lowlanders and Presbyterians, or such North of +Ireland men as are unalterably opposed to Home Rule. They are very like +the Orangemen of the novels of Mr. Shan Bullock, very like the peasants +the English-speaking world outside of Scotland first met in the verse of +Burns; harsher than the Baillie Nicol Jarvies and Dugald Dalgettys of +the kindly Sir Walter, but akin to them and to his Davie Deans and +Dumbiedikeses. + +We are in a more familiar world in the plays of Mr. Mayne than in those +of most of the other writers in the movement--that is, I mean most +American readers are--simply because of Burns and Scott. Had Ireland had +a peer of either in his generation as satirist or romancer the +Irish-Irish would to-day be as familiar to us as are the Scotch-Irish, +who are, of course, transplanted Scotch. The women of this world are +not, however, of types so well known to us as are the men, because the +chivalry of Sir Walter prevented him from giving us his peasant +Scotswomen in as full detail as he gave us his men; but it is not +difficult for us to appreciate Mrs. Granahan and her daughter; Mrs. +McKie, a "woman with a dead soul"; Mary Murray with her daftness over +the boys; and even Sarah McMinn, so true in her managing and meanness, +qualities necessary to the prosperity of her folk. Puritan America can +understand these women and men because they are Puritan, too, with the +ignoble that is in the Puritan as well as with the noble that is just as +surely there. + +It is in the first three plays of Mr. Mayne that we meet these people I +have named, County Down folk all of them, and all Protestant but Francey +Moore. They are the leading characters in "The Turn of the Road" (1906), +"The Drone" (1908), and "The Troth" (1908). The motive of Mr. Mayne's +first play is the old call to wander, the unrest of the vagrant heart, +here the heart of the musician. It is the story of Robbie John Granahan, +who, after burning his fiddle at the desire of a strong farmer whose +daughter he wished to marry, is driven out into the world to try his +fortune with another through her determination that her lover should +follow his star. There is more beauty in "The Turn of the Road" than in +either of the other plays of the North of Ireland, more beauty of theme, +more beauty of thought, more beauty of expression. Its themes are not +new, _Wanderlust_ and the Puritans' hatred of art; its thoughts are not +new, but they are beautiful, and the words themselves are freshly used. +Its phrases that hold in memory are given to Robbie John and to his +father and to his grandfather, most of them to the grandfather. This is +the grandfather's lament for the boy gone on the roads with his fiddle +and his father's curse:-- + + It's the wee things you think nothing of, but that make your home a + joy to come back till, after a hard day's work. And you've sent out + into the could and wet the one that was making your home something + more than the common. D'ye think them proud city folk will listen + to his poor ould ballads with the heart of the boy singing through + them? It's only us--it's only us. I say, as knows the long wild + nights, and the wet and the rain and the mist of nights on the + boglands--it's only us, I say, could listen him in the right way. + And ye knowed, right well ye knowed, that every string of his + fiddle was keyed to the crying of your own heart. + +There is no beauty at all in "The Drone." There is little beauty +possible to such a subject realistically treated as that of the exposure +of the utter sham that is the pretended inventor of a bellows, a man who +has for years fattened on a brother's tolerance and family pride. There +might have been beauty of construction, but dramatic construction is not +Mr. Mayne's strongest quality. Let that not be held too much against +him, for many an English dramatist, like almost every English novelist, +is weak in the architectonic qualities of his work. Yet such is the +hardness of the people that exposed Daniel Murray that you rejoice in +his duping of them at the end through his sale to them of his pretended +invention, especially as that frees his brother John, and John's +daughter, artful coax that she is, from Sarah McMinn, who is determined +to marry the one and manage the two. The ideals of the people of the +play and the grim humor of Mr. Mayne are well illustrated by this +declaration of John Murray, the best of them all, anent the suit for +breach of promise with which Sarah threatens him: "I would as soon do +without the marrying if I could. I don't want the woman at all, but I'll +marry her before she gets a ha'penny off me." + +The people here are the people of "The Squireen" of Mr. Bullock,--hard, +grasping, resentful, passionate, brutal even, but doers of the world's +work. All that differentiates them from the Fermanagh Protestants is the +different conditions of County Down and a slightly lower social +position. + +In "The Troth" the theme is the shooting of a landlord by two peasants +whom his agents are to evict on the morrow. To the cottage of the +Protestant McKie comes his Catholic neighbor, Francey Moore, whose wife +is dying. Here there is no turf for the fire, and no hope in the heart +of father or mother, for the child of the house has died, and, they +think, because of the landlord's hardness to them. The two men swear a +troth that they shall lie in wait for Colonel Fotheringham, and that if +but one escapes, as is likely, the one arrested shall hold his tongue as +to his companion. You do not see the murder on the stage, but you hear +the shot and see McKie return to his home, and you know it was he killed +the landlord. The tension of the last scene is almost unendurable. His +wife's providential lie for McKie, her agony in her knowledge of his +guilt when she sees his face on his return, the man's terror, are +handled with masterly firmness and sureness. To see this scene on the +stage in the hands of actors worthy of it must be to know real tragedy. +In this play, too, brief as is the glimpse we have into these four lives +of small farmer and his wife, his farmhand and his neighbor, a neighbor +of alien race and hated faith, you get to know them as if they were +friends of long standing. Character creation and character presentation +in pithy, tense dialogue are the great gifts of Mr. Mayne. Francey +Moore, the "dark man," with his sensibility, his eloquence, and his +flaming rage, is not of the characteristic men of Mr. Mayne. They are +men of slow ways all un-Celtic and with smouldering hearts like those +of the Northmen we read about in the tales of "Origines Islandicæ." + +In "Red Turf" (1911) Mr. Mayne turns away from County Down to the Galway +bogs, admirably symbolizing the hot land feud between neighbors in his +title. There are but five characters in the play, Martin Burke, farmer, +and his spitfire of a wife; and his neighbors the Flanagans, father and +son, who have won away from the Burkes, by the surveyor's decision, +their bank of stone turf that had come to Mary Burke from her father; +and an old fellow little better than a beggar. Mary taunts her husband +until he shoots the elder Flanagan as he is working away on the "great +stone bank." It was not his own gun Burke had, but, ironically, it was +one just brought to his house by the poor old man whom they had often +befriended, John Heffernan, brought that it might not be found in his +house by the gauger, and he unable to pay the license. It is not made +clear that there was malevolence in the leaving of the gun at the Burkes +by the old fellow, malevolent as are some of his remarks. Akin to him, +not in his malevolence but in that each is in a way a bit of a prophet, +is the grandfather in "The Turn of the Road," but more nearly akin to +old Granahan is Uncle Bartle of "The Mineral Workers" of Mr. Boyle. +Synge records old men of prophecy and tales in his travel sketches, but +he put none such who were gentle in his plays, or I would say that +Grandfather Granahan, like the old gaffer in Mr. Masefield's "Nan," was +a part of the influence of Synge that is felt by both Mr. Masefield and +Mr. Mayne. Their styles, respectively, in "Nan" and "Red Turf," have in +them more than echoes of the style of Synge. The "wambling" old men of +Mr. Hardy come also to mind as one thinks of these old men of Mr. +Masefield and Mr. Mayne and Mr. Boyle. All in a sense play "chorus" to +the action of the play, but there is no one of them that is in the story +or play in which he appears on such grounds only. There are, of course, +old men everywhere, in all life they are an integral part, and +everywhere they are commentators on life once they feel that their day +is done, spectators of a pageant from the forefront of which they have +dropped to watch the following troupe pass by. + +There is little mating in these plays of Mr. Mayne, and love of woman +worthy of the name of love only in "The Turn of the Road"; there is +parental love, too, but perhaps more of parental tyranny. Such parental +love as there is, however, actually expressed, makes one of the +memorable passages of Mr. Mayne. Mary Burke, after taunting her husband +to madness, tries to turn him from murder when she sees him, gun in +hand, by crying: "For the love of God, would you leave it down. Leave it +down and go in and look at the child sleeping. It would take the badness +from your mind the same as it did with me." + +Though Mr. Mayne is a writer for the Ulster Literary Theatre of Belfast, +his allegiance to the Abbey group is clearly indicated in "Red Turf," +which is the result of a study of Synge. I do not mean to say that Mr. +Mayne is not familiar with the speech of Connacht, but that it is Synge +who has taught him how to listen to it. There is little of the +influence of Synge in his three plays of the Black North, but when he +turns to Galway in "Red Turf," it is but natural that, writing of other +than his own people, he should write in a speech that has in it an echo +of that of him who has transmuted this speech into prose of the most +beautiful rhythm that English dramatic prose has known. The Bible is the +book of books in Ulster, and there is no page of Mr. Mayne's Ulster +plays but shows him acquainted with its great rhythms. Mr. Boyle, +skillful artificer of situation, and truthful depicter of character that +he is, and Mr. Colum, too, for all his closeness to the earth, are now +and then betrayed, Mr. Boyle more often than now and then, into the +English of the newspaper or of the public speaker; but the English of +Mr. Mayne is all but always an unworn English, an English used freshly, +or if with reminiscences in it, reminiscences of the seventeenth-century +English that has survived in the Bible or in the memory of the folk from +the time of King James. + +Mr. Mayne has, then, style, and his dialogue is living speech; he has +knowledge of the people of North Ireland, earnestness and sincerity; and +having these qualities, he has more that is precious to art than have +most of the dramatists his countrymen. There is no consistent reading of +life in his plays, no great power over the unrolling of plot, but +perhaps these will come with the years. An actor himself, he knows the +stage; and this knowledge has given him power over situation. Once he +learns to lead situation into situation, once he ripens into fuller +knowledge of life, Mr. Mayne will be a dramatist to reckon with, indeed. + + +"NORREYS CONNELL" + +There have been many other dramatists than these I have mentioned who +have had one or more plays produced at the Abbey Theatre. Some of these, +like Mr. Bernard Shaw, are Irishmen abroad that have gained the ear of +the world and do a play for Dublin out of a sense of duty It was thus +that "John Bull's Other Island" came into being, but that play, being +considered "beyond the scope" of the National Theatre Society, was not +produced at the Abbey, but at the Court Theatre, London, November 1, +1904. When "The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet" was "censored" in London, +however, the Abbey opened its doors to it, the "crude melodrama" +receiving its premier in late August, 1909. Little as "John Bull's Other +Island" was in the Abbey tradition, with moral purpose and unhumanity of +its very essence, it was at least a newspaper leader on an Irish +subject, but "The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet," a sort of +sentimentalized travesty of Bret Harte preaching the usual Shavian +evangel, has no more relation to Irish life than it has to literature. +It marred the repertoire the Abbey Company brought to America, as would +a camp-meeting hymn the music of the pipes. + +Out of the Abbey tradition, too, are the plays of "Norreys Connell" (Mr. +Conal O'Riordan), whose "Piper" had its day of lesser notoriety of +Playboy-like quality on its presentation on February 13, 1908. It is a +very obvious allegory, outlining under guise of an incident of '98 the +weaknesses of contemporaneous Ireland, its love of talk; its lack of +hold-together; its refusal to see things as they are; its incapacity in +practical matters; the reckless temper of this faction of its people, +the subjection to clerical influence of that, the suicidal patriotism of +a third; in short, the Celts' willful rebellion against the despotism of +fact. It was not pleasant listening to, or seeing, "The Piper," to many +groups of Irishmen, for it cut alike at the Parliamentary Nationalists, +the Sein Feiner, and the shoneen. Even though one admires the courage of +the Piper and Black Mike, one realizes the futility of both, and of +Larry the Talker, Tim the Trimmer, and Pat Dennehy, all typical of too +many men in Ireland to be endurable to the usual theatre audience. There +is a white heat of feeling, however, under the play that to some degree +makes one forget its rather indifferent writing, its failure to attain +true dramatic speech, its obviousness as of a morality play. + +Another little drama of Mr. O'Riordan, "Time," is almost a morality +play. It was produced shortly after its author became director of the +Abbey Theatre, succeeding Mr. Synge in the spring of 1909. Mr. O'Riordan +does not include "Time" among the plays of his volume of 1912, +"Shakespeare's End, and Other Irish Plays," but one cannot but feel +there was room for it there, if there was room for the play that gives +title to the volume. "Shakespeare's End," however, was doubtless +included because it gives its author's ideas as to the mission of +Ireland in the world. "An Imaginary Conversation," the second play of +the volume, was performed at the Abbey Theatre May 13, 1909, following +shortly after "Time"; a discussion of art and patriotism and love among +Tom Moore, and his sister Kate and Robert Emmet, with a little, a very +little, of the intensity that made "The Piper" something more than +second-rate. + + +MR. ST. JOHN G. ERVINE + +Mr. St. John G. Ervine I know through two plays, "Mixed Marriage," +produced at the Abbey Theatre on March 30, 1911, and "The Magnanimous +Lover," produced in the same playhouse on October 17, 1912. Like his +fellow from County Down, the master dramatist of the Ulster Literary +Theatre, Mr. Mayne, Mr. Ervine excels in characterization. You remember +his people, even after one reading of the plays, so clearly are they +distinguished, so definite are their personalities. With the five men +and women of "The Magnanimous Lover," you pass but a few minutes, as it +is only a one-act play, but you remember them as well as you do the six +of "Mixed Marriage," though you follow their fortunes through four acts. +All these characters are typical of the artisan class of the North of +Ireland, the five Protestants of "The Magnanimous Lover" and the four +Protestants and two Catholics of "Mixed Marriage." It is the troubles +that arise from the difference in religion of the Protestant Raineys, +mother, father, and the two young men; the Catholic betrothed, Nora, of +the elder son Hugh; and their common friend the Catholic labor agitator, +O'Hara, that are the motive forces of the latter play. Faintest etched +is Tom, the younger son, and most like a stock character. Nora and +O'Hara are well done, but one remembers both as stage parts rather than +as characterizations. Hugh is still better done, but the two absolute +creations are the father and mother. Tom Rainey, the Orangeman, forgets +his bitterness against "Cathliks" for a moment to help win the strike in +which his fellow workmen of Belfast, "Cathlik an' Prodesans," both are +fighting side by side. He is all the more bitter, however, when he +learns that his eldest son is going to marry out of his faith, and his +speeches, hitherto devoted to smoothing out the troubles between the men +of different faith, turn to bitter denunciations of the strike as "a +Popish Plot." In the end Tom Rainey is responsible for riots his wild +words have stirred up, the calling-out of the soldiery, and the death of +Nora, who is shot down by a volley as she runs out of the Rainey house +into the rioting street. On the stage, of course, Mrs. Rainey is the +more sympathetic character, her tolerance, her tact, her humor, her +infinite kindliness winning an audience as it is given to few characters +to win it. She is less like a type, too, than her husband, but for all, +I cannot but think he is better drawn. + +Mr. Ervine has not a style like Mr. Mayne, nor such a rhythm to his +prose, but he has more humor, and it is natural humor, a humor that +arises out of the situation and is not simply dragged in for the +purposes of comic relief. Mr. Ervine evidently knows the life he depicts +in and out. He ought to know it, for he was born to it, being the son of +a workingman in the shipyards of Belfast. And knowing it well he finds +it far from hopeless. It is a pleasure to come upon a play of the North +written in a spirit other than that of revolt against its Puritanism. +There are "kindly Irish of the Irish" in the Black North as well as in +the three other provinces, but most of the authors of the North are +content to picture its hardness, its hypocrisy, its bigotry, its love of +wife and child remorselessly concealed as a weakness of the flesh. + +It is to this darker picturing of the North, however, that Mr. Ervine +turns in "The Magnanimous Lover," which indicts the self-righteousness +of the Ulster Protestant with a severity such as is possible only to a +man bitter against a weakness of his own people. It is an old theme Mr. +Ervine has to handle, the refusal of the wronged woman to wed her +betrayer, when, after years of disloyalty, he is willing, by marrying +her, to make her again an "honest woman." To speak only of recent plays +of similar plot, there is "The Last of the De Mullens" of St. John +Hankin, and "A Woman of No Importance" of Wilde. Mr. Ervine, it is true, +handles the theme freshly, but the real power of the play is in his +creation of the heroine, Maggie Cather. The danger with such a character +is that it will be only a mouthpiece for woman's demand for a common +moral standard for men and women; but Maggie is not a mouthpiece but a +real woman, triumphantly alive, with hot anger in her heart at the +injustice of the world, and at the "unco guidness" of her old-time +lover, Henry Hinde. Ten years before the time of the action of the play +Henry Hinde had fled, just as her child was to be born, to Liverpool, +and there he has prospered, and so risen in the world that it is +possible for him to wed a minister's daughter. Fear of God's wrath has +now driven him home to make such amends as he can, but there is in him +no pity for the woman or love for his child. Maggie has faced it out +alone all these years in the seaside village of Down as Hester faced it +out in the seaside village of Massachusetts, while Henry forgot it all +until he was "saved" and "convicted of sin." If no more cowardly than +Dimmesdale, Henry is more heartless, utterly callous, indeed,--as he +confesses, in "the devil's grip." And yet Mr. Ervine is so true to the +life that he is depicting, a life at once passionate and prosaic, that +he makes anger for the past and fear of a nagged future with Henry as +effective agents in her rejection of him as are self-respect and right +feeling. It is a "big" part that Mr. Ervine has created for the leading +actress, and though the story is unequivocally "unpleasant" and may +prevent "The Magnanimous Lover" from being a favorite play, there can be +no two minds as to its success as drama. It is very real drama, of +elemental human emotion all unveiled. With such a play as this, and with +"Mixed Marriage" to his credit, I look forward eagerly to the promised +production and publication of "The Eviction." + + +MR. JOSEPH CAMPBELL + +Another dramatist from the North and of promise is Mr. Joseph Campbell. +His "Judgment" is of the northwest, however, the whole breadth of Ulster +between its Donegal mountains and the Belfast of "Mixed Marriage"; and +it is of the country, not of the city; and of an Ireland wholly +Catholic, not of an Ireland of Protestant and Catholic at war over +religion. There are moments of real drama in "Judgment," but no such +inevitable rise to climax as in "Mixed Marriage." Its undoubted power +is in the feeling underlying it, in its characterization, and in its +style. Mr. Campbell was already known when his play was put on at the +Abbey Theatre, April 15, 1912, as the author of "The Mountainy Singer" +(1909), a volume of freshly felt and singing verse; and of "Mearing +Stones" (1911), little prose records of things seen and of moods felt in +a corner of Donegal. Many a striking phrase of "Judgment," indeed, is +already written down in the paragraphs of "Mearing Stones" as actual +talk heard in the roads, and several of the situations of the plays are +workings-up of situations of which its author found himself a spectator +on the streets of Andara or on the highway between Slieve a-Tooey and +the sea. + +I first came upon his verses, if I remember rightly, in "The United +Irishmen," but I was first impressed by him as an illustrator, his name +being always signed in those days after the Irish fashion, Seosamh +MacCathmhaoil. A Dublin friend sent me at Christmas in 1907 a "Calendar +of the Saints," for which Mr. Campbell did the illustrations, +illustrations akin to those of Miss Althea Gyles, which so surely take +one back to Ireland's heroic age, instinct as they are with the +primitive aloofness of antiquity. + +It is not antiquity, however, that Mr. Campbell has chosen for his play. +Indeed, he rejects antiquity, deliberately "using peasants as ... +protagonists instead of kings--who, like Pharaoh, are 'but a cry in +Egypt,' outworn figures in these days with no beauty and no +significance." "Judgment" is made out of the story of the countryside +concerning "a tinker's woman," Peg Straw, and we may well believe Mr. +Campbell has changed it but little, as he says, for the purposes of his +play. It had been a better play, perhaps, had he changed more the facts +of the story. As it stands, the first act of the play is adequate +dramatically, and beautiful with that sort of wild and outworld beauty +Synge brought into English literature in Ireland; and the second act +beautiful with that beauty, and inadequate dramatically. + +Peg Straw is an old, worn woman of the roads whom the people hold little +better than a witch, even attributing to her the power fabled of the +witches in folk-tales of turning themselves into hares. Her nickname +"Straw" indicates the nature of the mild dementia that sets the children +and the idlers at her heels. She goes about picking up "straws" until +"she'd have a bunch in her hand ... every little stalk bit off as neat +as neat, and it like a scrubber or dandy brush you'd put to a horse." + +Peg speaks no word at all in the play, coming into sight in it only to +die, but always she is in the background. Talk of her comes up early in +the first act, and we learn that Nabla, the woman whose cabin is the +play's first scene, has turned Peg away from the door only that morning; +and from the moment we first hear of her most of the talk is of her, and +the action because of her. Toward this first act's end you hear her +cries as the tinkers beat her, and at its end she crawls into the cabin +to die, and in dying to shock the woman of the house so that her child +comes before its time. All the second act Peg lies in sight in the room +just off the stage with candles stuck around her, bringing the horror +and dignity of death into the wild scenes of her wake. These are wild +not because of drinking for no one is drunk and only one "had drink +taken," but because of the wildness of nature of these men of +westernmost Europe, and because of the wildness of the roads that a +"traveling man" brings with him out of the night. There is no action in +this second and last act save that sprung of this stranger's entrance +and quarrelsomeness, and his interruptions of an old, old man's story of +what he knows of Peg's life. The stranger listens while Parry Cam tells +of the cause of her madness, but when he repeats what for years has been +the gossip of the countryside about her supposed killing of her babe, +the "traveling man" interrupts and declares he is the son whom it was +rumored she had drowned. In the end he is turned out of the house, not +altogether unkindly, but as much for decency's sake as for his own. That +the son, for any motive at all, should be turned out of the house where +his mother lies dead, even though he had not stood by her living, is +hard enough in the estimation of any people, but in the estimation of +the Irish peasant it is intolerably tragic. If we realize this, the +ending of the play will be on a note deeper and more significant than if +we fail to realize it, but not even the utmost sympathy with the +intention of the author and a full realization of the significance to +Donegal peasants of the action can bring this act to an intensity +comparable to that of the end of Act I, where two mysteries confront one +another--"the passing of a life from this world, the coming of a life +into it." + +All the characters in "Judgment" are "created." The personality of each +colors his words and puts him before you distinct from every other. +Owen Ban the weaver, who takes in Peg when his wife Nabla, heavy with +her first child, and nervous because of her condition and fearful of the +birth, would keep out the outcast; old Parry Cam; John Gilla Carr; Colum +Johnston and Father John; Nabla herself; and Kate Kinsella the +midwife--each is himself or herself, each remains as distinct in your +mind the unforgettable scenes of the play. Somehow or other, too, the +country is suggested; you are aware that you are on a wild hillside +above a glen,--you are aware of this not because the author tells us at +the outset that the scene of the play is in the mountains of western +Donegal, south of Lochros Beg Bay, but through the dialogue of the play +itself. Both scenes of the play are indoors, and on dark nights of +midwinter, but so instinct with many phases of the life of the people is +it that its background of landscape rises before you only less +distinctly than the visualization of its characters. Atmosphere the play +has, and quality, both sprung of the sincerity of its feeling and +imagination. So true are these, and so keen the author's reading of +human nature, and so sure his character drawing, that for all his +weakness of construction we may speak of his play alongside of the best +Irish plays. The future promises finer things: meanwhile we are thankful +for what is, for "Judgment,"--especially for its far-offness, its +desolateness as of the world's end and the wind crying. + + + + +CHAPTER IX + +WILLIAM SHARP ("FIONA MACLEOD") + + +There were relations other than that of a common purpose between William +Sharp and the Irish writers of the Celtic Renaissance. He was a friend +of Mr. Yeats, a correspondent of Mr. Russell, and the chief commentator +in the English reviews on the work of the Irish group of its writers. At +one time, after 1897, the relationship promised to be very close, +indeed. William Sharp, experimenting in psychics with Mr. Yeats, found +occasion to interest him in "Fiona Macleod," and as a result of that +interest Mr. Yeats came to think the new writer might write Celtic plays +for performances he intended to arrange for Irish literary +organizations. Thus it is that Mrs. Sharp has to include in her memoir +of her husband a long letter to "Fiona Macleod" from Mr. Yeats, in which +he suggests: "The plays might be almost in some cases modern mystery +plays. Your 'Last Supper,' for instance, would make such a play." Mr. +Sharp, apparently, did not follow up this suggestion, but shortly after +the first performances of "The Irish Literary Theatre" in 1899 he wrote +the two plays that, together with "Vistas," comprise all the dramatic +writing that he has to his name. That "The Immortal Hour" and "The House +of Usna" were intended for "The Irish Literary Theatre," I think there +is little doubt, and it was only, I take it, when circumstances +dictated that only plays by Irish writers should be put on by that +theatre that Mr. Sharp looked elsewhere for their presentation. Only +"The House of Usna" was, however, placed,--in the spring performances in +London of The Stage Society, on April 29, 1900. Two months later "The +House of Usna" was published in the July number of "The National +Review." It pleased more, if we are to judge by the reviews, in the +pages of the magazine than on the stage, but I hardly know why. "The +House of Usna" is profoundly moving read in the study, surely, and if +acted in such simplicity and enthusiasm as is that of the Abbey Theatre +Players, I should think it would appeal as do the verse plays of Mr. +Yeats. No play I have read carries me further into antiquity than this, +none preserves more of what imagination tells us must have been the +wilder beauty of what still are places of wild beauty, of the savagery +of that old life of the hero tales of Ireland. Mr. Yeats's plays do not +so recapture the past, they take us rather to places out of time, where +all things are possible, because the world we know is put aside and all +but forgot. Even on the stage, however, the new beauty of "The House of +Usna" was recognized, a beauty as distinctive as that of the two plays +of M. Maeterlinck that were produced with it, "Interior" and "The Death +of Tintagiles," but it was adjudged not to be drama in the accepted +sense of the word. "The House of Usna" is written in a prose that has +many of the effects of verse, but that is less luxuriant than the prose +of "Vistas." "The Immortal Hour," published shortly afterwards in the +"Fortnightly Review" (1900), is written in blank verse that shows its +author has been carefully attentive to the rhythms of the blank verse of +Mr. Yeats, but it is neither so poetic nor so dramatic as "The House of +Usna." Both plays are written out of the old legends that are the common +property of Irish and Scottish Gael, and in both Sharp has treated his +material with his wonted freedom of adaptation, a freedom that is +generally justified by his results, his instinctive surety of +reconstruction of myths being such as to make one wonder, with Mr. +Russell, if Sharp is not, in some fashion, a reincarnation of a +shanachie that sang as contemporary in the wars of Gael and Gall. + +[Illustration] + +A common preoccupation with the plays of M. Maeterlinck is another bond +between the founder of the Abbey Theatre and Sharp, a preoccupation +passing rather quickly from Mr. Yeats, but long retaining its hold on +the changing selves of Sharp. For all his early interest in "spiritual +things," an interest very definitely expressed in "Romantic Ballads" +(1888), Sharp would not have come to "Vistas" (1894) without the +guidance of M. Maeterlinck, and he admits as much in his preface to +these "psychic episodes." "Vistas" he often referred to as heralding a +"great dramatic epoch," and he evidently regarded them as, in a way, +drama, but it is hardly likely that he dreamed of their enactment on the +stage. Many of them are essentially dramatic, but their method of +presentation is almost always lyric or narrative rather than dramatic, +even in the Maeterlinckian sense of the word. + +It is possible, however, that Sharp might have written other of his +projected plays, "The Enchanted Valleys," "The King of Ys," "Drosdan and +Yssul," and their many fellows he had projected by title, and others, +too, had not developments in Dublin, as I have said, carried Mr. Yeats +away from him during 1899 and 1900, and had Sharp himself not during +this drifting written that article "Celtic" which so aroused many in +Ireland on its appearance in "The Contemporary Review." In this essay, +basically a literary protest, "Fiona Macleod" declared "herself" against +Separatist politics and affirmed "her" belief, as "she" had in "The +House of Usna," that the future greatness of Ireland was to come, not +through independence, but through the rebirth of her ancient +spirituality in other nations to whom she had given her children. + + The Celtic element in our national life [wrote "Fiona Macleod"] has + a vital and great part to play. We have a most noble ideal if we + will but accept it. And that is, not to perpetuate feuds, not to + try to win back what is gone away upon the wind, not to repay + ignorance with scorn, or dullness with contempt, or past wrongs + with present hatred, but so to live, so to pray, so to hope, so to + work, so to achieve, that we, what is left of the Celtic races, of + the Celtic genius, may permeate the greater race of which we are a + vital part, so that, with this Celtic emotion, Celtic love of + beauty, and Celtic spirituality, a nation greater than any the + world has seen may issue, a nation refined and strengthened by the + wise relinquishings and steadfast ideals of Celt and Saxon, united + in a common fatherland, and in singleness of pride and faith. + +There was, however, if less intimacy with the Irish writers in these +later years, no less admiration of their art, an admiration that led not +only to praise of them in critical articles, but to a greater praise of +imitation of their art. So possessed, indeed, was Sharp by the verse of +the younger Irish poets as he read them to write of them, that when he +turned to verse as "Fiona Macleod," he fell into their rhythms and +reproduced the colors of their styles. Writing in prose as a critic of +Mr. Yeats, Sharp came to write in verse as Mr. Yeats wrote, as in "The +Dirge of the Four Cities": writing of "A.E." in prose as critic, Sharp +came to write in verse as "A.E." wrote, as in "Flame on the Wind": +writing of "Moira O'Neill," in prose as critic, Sharp came to write in +verse as "Moira O'Neill" wrote, as in "I--Brasil": writing in prose as +critic, of "Ethna Carberry," Sharp came to write in verse as "Ethna +Carberry" wrote, as in "The Exile." So it was, also, that, coming to +write of Celtic literature after study of Renan and Arnold, Sharp +attained to something of their large utterance. + +Sharp sees the Celtic Renaissance, however, always in relation to +English literature, and always, it should be added, with French +literature and Greek literature in the background. In this wide outlook, +in his freedom from political prejudice, in his sympathy with Celtic +literature and his knowledge of it, is his greatest strength as a critic +of the Celtic Renaissance. His greatest weakness is his willingness in +this writing, as elsewhere in his writing, to abide by first +impressions, to abide also by the first-come phrase or epithet, banes of +the ready writer. But read his essay "Celtic" after you have read the +great essays of Renan and Arnold, and read it alongside of what Mr. +Yeats has to say of that literature, and you will find it, as I said, +of the stature of these. You will at the same time find in this writing +the answer to the contention that there were really two personalities in +William Sharp. Even Mrs. Sharp, who writes so restrainedly about this +question of dual personality, believes the analytical faculty belonged +to William Sharp, the imaginative to "Fiona Macleod." But in this +criticism of the Celtic Renaissance which is signed "Fiona Macleod," +there is as much analysis as is to be found anywhere in his work as +William Sharp. So obviously was he identifying "F.M." with "W.S." in +this critical writing that Mrs. Janvier, of those in the secret, wrote +to him to take warning lest he betray himself. She pointed out to him +that such a display of learning as he was making in the later "Fiona +Macleod" work would surely lead to discovery. But he did not heed. The +truth probably was that he wrote about Celtic things as "Fiona Macleod" +because he perhaps felt about them, as "Fiona Macleod," as one who is +bilingual thinks about work he is doing, say in German, in German, and +about work he is doing in English, in English; but just as surely I +believe, because what "Fiona Macleod" wrote commanded more respect than +what William Sharp wrote, readier entrance into the magazines, and +better pay. If there are those to whom such an explanation seems +belittling to William Sharp, I can only say that they cannot have +realized that he was a driven man earning his living by his pen. I am +not, I confess, a sentimentalist in such matters, and while I do not +wholly like his procedure in maintaining the fiction of "Fiona Macleod," +it does not seem to me a very heinous sin. + +He who would write of the work of William Sharp, indeed, must be +resolute to remember that it is to be considered as an essay in the art +of letters. There are so many temptations toward writing of it as a +scientific problem,--for who is not interested in "dual +personality"?--or as a "psychic revelation," if one is bitten--and who +is not?--by curiosity about hidden "things"; or as an irritating hoax, +if one has been befooled--and who, for one moment or another has not +been?--into believing that this writing under the pseudonym of "Fiona +Macleod" was the confession of a woman. The romance of it remains, no +matter from what point of view you consider it, and, despite your +preoccupation with this or that phase of it, the beauty of literary art +of parts of it. Parts of it, I say, for to me no writer of our time was +more uneven in his work. My point of view, indicated perhaps brutally, +and with a firstly and secondly is:-- + +Firstly, that until he was nearly forty, William Sharp was no more than +a skillful literary practitioner, a higher sort of hack, who had done +some better writing of a tenuous kind of beauty but imitative in +substance and art, in "Sospiri di Roma" and "Vistas," and that after +forty, when he was developing one undeveloped side of himself as "Fiona +Macleod," he developed another undeveloped side of himself in "Silence +Farm." That he attained in a sort of writing, and greatly, that he had +not attained in before, in "Silence Farm," has not been acknowledged, so +easy has it been to those interested in his work to lose sight of all +else in their pursuit of the "Fiona Macleod" side of his nature. It is +true of "Silence Farm," as of almost all his other work done under the +name of William Sharp, that it is imitative; but it is equally true that +a large part of the "Fiona Macleod" work is imitative, too. "Silence +Farm" is done under the influence of the later work of Mr. Hardy, but +the material of "Silence Farm" is its author's own, and the color of the +writing is as distinctly of the Lowlands as the color of "Tess" is of +Wessex. That "Silence Farm" is better work in its kind, though that kind +is less original than some of his writing as "Fiona Macleod," I have +been forced against my prejudices to believe. If I did not so believe I +would not have spoken of it side by side with "Tess." + +Secondly, that as "Fiona Macleod," William Sharp did much good writing +in almost everything published under the pseudonym, achieving wholeness +of good tissue in certain sketches and tales and verses on rather +varying kinds of subjects, but that his work as "Fiona Macleod" that is +really distinguished is in stories of prehistoric Scotland and Ireland, +and of Scotland and Ireland in the earliest historic time. In these +tales of the Gaels of old time he for the first time breaks ground for +others. Before he wrote "Silk o' the Kine," and "The Harping of +Cravetheen," "The Annir Choile," and "Enya of the Dark Eyes," there were +no short tales of like temper and content and style in literature. + +To me little is significant in the early verse of "Fiona Macleod," as +little was significant in all the verse of William Sharp until the time +of "Sospiri di Roma." And for all the beauty of these pictures in words +of the Campagna it is but a transient beauty. It was not until he was +mastered by the new beauty that Mr. Yeats brought into English poetry +that the verse of William Sharp won to itself abiding beauty and glamour +and inevitable phrase. "The House of Usna" (1900) brought to me "Dim +face of beauty haunting all the world," and the 1901 edition of "From +the Hills of Dream," "The Enchanted Valleys,"; but it was not until +after his death that I came upon his best verse of all, the verse of his +last five years, which was gathered together posthumously in the 1907 +edition of "From the Hills of Dream," and included as "The House of +Beauty" in "The Poems and Dramas" of 1911. Who does not know these sets +of verses and "The Dirge of the Four Cities," does not know the ultimate +accomplishment of William Sharp in poetry. + +That the "'Fiona Macleod' mystery" ended with the death of William Sharp +is, then, my belief, as it is that it began before he conceived of +exploiting a feminine sub-self he had long been aware of in himself. The +beginnings of that sort of writing that made "Fiona Macleod" a +reputation are to be found very early in his writing, in "The Son of +Allan" of 1881, in the "Record" of 1884, in the preface to the "Romantic +Ballads" of 1888, in the "Vistas" of 1894. That these earlier +expressions of "spiritual" states and guesses at mysteries are not, +except for certain parts of "Vistas," so well written as the best +writing of similar kind by "Fiona Macleod," is true, and perhaps, at +first glance, a matter of wonder. It is, however, I think, not difficult +to find an explanation of the better quality of the later work, and that +explanation is afforded, firstly and most largely, by the Celtic +Renaissance. A man of thirty-five, to all who know him a very vital +force, a very original personality, who has all his life wanted to make +beautiful things in words out of his dream of life, has disappointed +himself and his friends. He is suddenly afforded the opportunity, by the +interest in Gaelic subjects that the Celtic Renaissance has awakened, to +gain a hearing for work of a kind he has long wanted to do. He had not +done such work previously, because he had to live by his pen and could +work consistently only at the sort of thing that would sell. He was well +known as a journeyman of letters, so well known for bookmaking, and the +ways of getting commissions from London editors and publishers, that his +knowledge of Highland life would be questioned. All in London knew him +as a Londoner. It would be useless for him to say that the Celtic +Renaissance had brought back his childhood to him, a childhood as +definitely dominated by a Highland nurse as Stevenson's was by the +Lowland Alison Cunningham. It would be useless to tell of his summers in +Argyllshire and among the inner isles, his intimacy with fishermen who +were as elemental as his own dreams of old time. It would have been cast +up to him that the editor of "The Canterbury Poets" could not be an +original writer, and the very nine days' wonder of "Vistas" would have +been pointed to to prove that he might now do well enough, as an +imitator, perhaps of Mr. Yeats, as he was in "Vistas;" successful as an +imitator of M. Maeterlinck, but that an original Highland writer could +not come out of Hampstead. There is no doubt in my mind that it was the +part of wisdom for Sharp to put out the new work under a pseudonym, +worldly wise if you will, but wise, too, with a higher wisdom. If he +could keep the side of him he had never yet exhausted through hackwork +apart from his other work, it would grow as it could not if it were a +part of his daily stint. + +Why Sharp chose a woman's name for his pseudonym has troubled many, but +this choice was, I think, as was the assumption of a pseudonym, the part +of wisdom. I do not believe, as he at times liked to believe, that he +attained a woman's standpoint. He had been complimented on all sides for +his composition of the wife's letters in "A Fellowe and his Wife" +(1892), in which Mrs. von Teuffel wrote the husband's. Sharp enjoyed +their writing as a _tour de force_ and he probably believed they were +very womanly. I should say that they showed insight into womanly ways of +looking at things rather than a dramatic identification of himself with +woman such as is George Meredith's. Sharp had already been experimenting +with pseudonyms, that of "H.P. Siwaarmill," an anagram on his own name, +being that he recurred to most often. He had written the whole of "The +Pagan Review" in 1892 under eight different pseudonyms, and though, in +the estimation of those to whom "Fiona Macleod" is all but a sacred +name, it be sacrilegious to say it, William Sharp loved all sorts of +fantastic tricks, hoaxes, mystifications, though in almost all his +writing save in "Wives in Exile" he was seriousness itself. But the +chiefest reason of all, in my estimation, for his assumption of a +woman's name as his pseudonym was that it afforded greater protection +against discovery. There are those who believe that he chose it because +he wanted a chance to express that womanly element of human nature there +is in all men, and there are others who believe that he was the +possessor of a real dual personality in which the "Fiona Macleod's self" +was a woman's consciousness; but he very infrequently, after "The +Mountain Lovers" (1895), kept in mind in the writings he published as +"Fiona Macleod's" that their author was supposed to be a woman, and it +is wonderful, indeed, that he was able to preserve the secret until the +end. In the earlier "Fiona Macleod" writing there is no revelation of +the wide acquaintance with literature that was Sharp's, but despite his +harassment by the constant identification of himself with "Fiona +Macleod," he gradually allowed to creep into that writing more and more +of what was known to be the knowledge of William Sharp, a knowledge +unlikely to be also that of a Highland lady who lived apart from the +world. His friends pointed out to him the danger he was running in +writing from what was obviously a man's standpoint, as in his tales of +the wars of Gael and Gall, and of revealing several sorts of interest +that were known to be his, but their warnings were in vain. He was +apparently unable to limit himself to the restrictions of the part of +himself he had essayed to restrict himself to. + +For my own part I was now sure the writing must be Sharp's and now sure +it could not be his. I did not know of his intimate concern with +questions of feminism until I read Mrs. Sharp's "Memoir," so that +outspoken chant, the "Prayer of Women" in "Pharais," "Fiona Macleod's" +first book, colored my outlook on all the writing that followed. I had +no doubt at all but that "Pharais" was written by a woman, but "The +Dan-nan-Ron" and "Silk o' the Kine" in "The Sin-Eater" (1895) seemed to +me hardly a woman's. "The Washer of the Ford" (1896) was written from +the man's point of view, too, but "Green Fire" (1896) seemed feminine +again. So I wobbled in my opinion until "The Divine Adventure" (1900) +and the critical writings of the volume that story gives title to, and +the critical writing in "The Winged Destiny" (1905), made me believe +again that "Fiona Macleod" was surely Sharp. I did not come upon the +articles that now make up "Where the Forest Murmurs" (1907) until after +the death of Sharp and the disclosure of the secret. Had his death not +divulged the secret of the identity of "Fiona Macleod," it seems to me +that collection must have disclosed it. Had Sharp lived after this there +would not have been possible for him much further work from the +seclusion his pseudonym gave him, and I doubt, once the secret was out, +it would have been possible for him to write of things Celtic with the +old gusto. + +After all has been said it must be confessed, I think, that Sharp did +not know the Highlander, either of the mainland or of the islands, very +intimately. He wrote much better of his dream of life on the west coast +in prehistoric times--out of his imagination of what that life must have +been, an imagination founded on the reading of the old legends and +modern collections of folk-lore, such as the "Carmina Gadelica" of Mr. +Carmichael--than he did out of his knowledge of Highland life of to-day. +The Achannas are in many of his tales of modern times, and wherever +they are there is unreality, if not melodrama. Unreality, too, there is, +in many phases, in the modern tales, and "highfalutinness" everywhere in +them. And both unreality and "highfalutinness" offend in these modern +tales as they would not in the tales of far times, though in these, as a +matter of fact, they are not so much in evidence. + +It would almost seem that the approach to reality drove Highland +atmosphere from the stories. In "The Sin-Eater," one of the best of his +writings that might be classed as a short story, the sin-eater and his +confidant are Highlanders, but the description of the scene of his +misfortune, the steading of the Blairs, might well have been that +nearest to "Silence Farm." It is faithfully described, the scenes about +the little home, whose owner lies dead, having the very smack of +realism. In the latter part of the story the scene shifts to the coast +and the tang of the story turns Gaelic and unreal. Was it thus, I +wonder, always to the imagination of William Sharp, Lowland life real, +Highland life mystical? + +Sharp was handicapped, of course, in coming to the subject material he +could best handle late in life, "Pharais" (1894) and "The Mountain +Lovers" (1895), the first books published as by "F.M.," being just as +definitely 'prenticework in their kind as was "Children of To-morrow" +(1890) in its kind. Of the long stories other than "Children of +To-morrow" published in his own name, "A Fellowe and his Wife" (1892) +and "Wives in Exile" (1896) have no very serious intention, though both +are well done after their kind, records of imaginings, respectively of +experiences of art life in Rome, and of yachting experiences in the +Irish Sea. It was not until "Silence Farm" (1899), as I have said, that, +as William Sharp, he found himself. + +"The Gypsy Christ" (1896), which might well have been developed into a +full-fledged romance, is less original than any of his longer writings. +It is, like "The Weird of Michael Scott" and "A Northern Night," closely +allied to essays of his other rôle, that of "F.M.," to catch and express +"the tempestuous loveliness of terror," such as the catastrophe of "The +Mountain Lovers," "The Barbaric Tales," and those short stories in which +Gloom Achanna is hero-villain. It is in such work that Sharp shows his +affinities to Poe, affinities which are not elsewhere as obvious as his +affinities to De Quincey. Narrative was not native to De Quincey any +more than it was to Sharp, though Sharp was led toward it by his +interest in character, an interest that was not in any large measure +given to De Quincey, who, when he turned to narrative other than that +which relates what had happened to him or what he had dreamed had +happened to him, makes the reader feel he did so as a concession to the +public. Another interest that was Sharp's, an interest amounting to a +passion,--out-of-doors,--De Quincey had not at all, for all his devotion +to Wordsworth and to Wordsworth's interests. Like De Quincey, on the +other hand, Sharp delights in "fine writing," in both senses of the +phrase, in the "highfalutin" that is objectionable, and in the ornately +beautiful that is one fitting expression of romantic thought. Both men +preferred the mouth-filling word to the simple one, the Latinical +adjective to the Saxon; both had rather see visions and dream dreams +than write about the "common light of common hours"; both goad their +imaginations until they run riot and so confuse their possessors, who +should control them, that they are unable to distinguish between what is +fact and what is fancy. You could carry the analogy further, to events +of their lives--the runnings-away in boyhood; the devoted friendships to +poets in youth; the incredible amount of hard work achieved in manhood +despite of often recurring illnesses. + +Of the long stories published as by "F.M.," Sharp repudiated "Flora +MacDonald" because it was too much in the way of "ordinary romance," and +"Green Fire" for the same reason and because it was largely about +Brittany, a country with which, by some strange chance, he did not make +himself familiar, though he had visited and learned to know well at +least parts of all the other Celtic countries. It is to my mind, +however, if not so definitely of a wholeness of texture as "Pharais" or +"The Mountain Lovers," or so singular, less monotonous than either. All +three of these stories disappoint my memory of them when I again read +them. This is, I believe, because all three of them--and for that matter +many of the short stories as well--are incompletely realized, or +because--in the case of two of them, "The Mountain Lovers" and "Green +Fire"--they are unevenly written. Their high intention and atmosphere +remain with you after you have put the books aside, and in the course of +time you forget their hurried writing, their inconsistencies, and their +qualities of the "Shilling Shocker," the result of their author's +failure to attain "the tempestuous loveliness of terror" that are in so +many of them, long or short. As aids to this effacement of the +cheapening elements are the very materials of the tales, their +characters, now elemental, now other-worldly, and their background of +mountains that uplift the spirit, and of menacing sea. + +That Sharp wrote less exactly of the present-day people of the Highlands +than of the background of their lives was largely because he had few +opportunities to learn to know them intimately. There was a basis for +such intimacy laid in his childhood, in the fact that his nurse was a +Highland woman; there was something built on this basis by his boyhood's +vacations in many parts of Argyllshire and voyages elsewhere along the +west coast. Youth spent in Arran and Skye would have counted for much +more, for the boy, once he is no longer child and before he has reached +his youth and is awakening man, is not much more interested in people in +real life for what they are than he is in minute description of their +characters in books. He likes men for the sportsmanlike and adventurous +things they can do, and he likes to read records of things sportsmanlike +and adventurous, but men as men, unless they are eccentric to +grotesqueness, do not arrest his attention. Even the dreamy boys, the +artistic boys, are not likely to learn much of others, so preoccupied +are they with themselves. + +It was thus, I think, that Sharp's childhood was not what he would in +later years have had it, not what in "The Laughter of Peterkin" he +alleges the childhood of "Fiona Macleod" to have been. For all the +influence of "Barabal," his nurse, it seems from his writing that her +stories remain with him more as suggestions to imagination than as +definite memories, and that the fisherman referred to in "Sheumas" left +with him little more than "Barabal." How fresh and wonderful to him was +actual contact with Highland life is almost pathetically revealed in a +letter he wrote to Mrs. Sharp from Kilcreggan in the summer of 1894. In +this letter he is all but exultant in the recording of the securing of +"Celtic" material from a "Celtic Islesman from Iona." Of the actual life +of the Islesmen and Glensmen he could have known but little, for long +living among them is necessary to their understanding,--they are, as he +wrote in this same letter, "passionately reticent." It was not the way +of Sharp to fall back, in this deficiency of experience, on old legends +and folk-tales collected in his own day, but to trust to his imagination +as that was quickened by what knowledge he had of life in the inner +isles and in Argyllshire, and by the very atmosphere of known places +there that seemed to demand, as Stevenson put it, to have stories +invented to fit them. + +It is said, too,--Mrs. Sharp gives her authority to the story,--that +friendship with the woman to whom he dedicated "Pharais," "E.W.R.," +stimulated him to the work. "Because of her beauty, her strong sense of +life, and of her joy of life," writes Mrs. Sharp in her memoir of her +husband, "because of her keen intuitions and mental alertness, her +personality stood for him as a symbol of the heroic women of Greek and +Celtic days, a symbol that, as he expressed it, unlocked new doors in +his mind and put him in touch with the ancestral memories of his race." +And Mrs. Sharp quotes him further as declaring "without her there would +have been no 'Fiona Macleod.'" Perhaps; but I doubt if, after the Celtic +Renaissance had won a hearing, anything could have prevented Sharp from +following what was, after all, a natural bent. I am not going to argue +the matter out, but he himself admitted that his development as "Fiona +Macleod" began "while I was still a child," and there is proof in almost +every volume he published, even before he knew Mrs. Rinder ("E.W.R.," +must of course be the author of "The Shadow of Arvor"), that his +tendency was toward what became characteristic of "Fiona Macleod." + +It was the love that Sharp had for all sorts of "psychic things," the +mysterious, the unaccountable, the hidden, that led him to believe that +"without her there would have been no 'Fiona Macleod.'" Sharp himself, +when his "other self," with sense of humor alert, was more than willing +to admit that it is easy to believe what one wishes to believe; and he +delighted to tell a story at the expense of Mr. Yeats illustrative of +the trite fact. Sharp went one day, in London, to call on Mr. Yeats. +When lunch-time came, they set about cooking eggs. Mr. Yeats held them +in a frying-pan over the little fire in the grate. As they slipped +about, Mr. Yeats, all the while looking back in the room away from the +fire as he talked to Sharp, allowed the pan to tip too far and the eggs +fell out into the fire. So absorbed was he in the topic of conversation, +most appropriately the disappearance of material things, that he did +not notice the catastrophe or the quick disappearance of the eggs among +the coals. When his perfervidness subsided for a moment, he turned to +see if they were done. "There, what did I tell you!" said he; "our talk +of these things has conjured up the powers and the eggs are gone." Sharp +did not tell him of the accident. And there were no more eggs in the +room to have for lunch. + +One of the reasons that led William Sharp to write "Silence Farm" (1899) +was to have something under his own name that might be very different +from the stories of "Fiona Macleod." And "Silence Farm" is very +different, a story without the distinguishing qualities of "Pharais" or +"The Divine Adventure," and suggesting kinship to the work of his other +self only through certain likenesses of domestic irregularity in the +family of Archibald Ruthven to other domestic irregularity in the family +of Torcall Cameron of "The Mountain Lovers." Though not of so original a +kind, perhaps, as the best of the "Fiona Macleod" work, "Silence Farm" +has to it a "wholeness of good tissue" that belongs to little work of +this most uneven writer. "Silence Farm," I would emphasize again as I +emphasized at the opening of this paper, is better written, both as +regards style and architectonic quality, and it is a truer reading of +life, than any of the Highland stories. Though it is a story of to-day, +and about a life much like that made familiar by the writers of the +Kailyard school, it is not to them, but to such kindred +unsentimentalized work as Mr. Shan Bullock's, that you instinctively +compare it. The people, indeed, are the same dour Presbyterians, though +the one writes of Scotland and the other of the North of Ireland. And as +you compare the material of "Silence Farm" with that of "The Squireen," +for instance, you note, too, that the art of both is the art of Mr. +Hardy. + +There is little modern writing with which to compare the Highland +stories of Sharp. It is not that the Highlands have not been much +written about, but that they have been written about intimately by but +few. No part of the world so out of the world as their outlying islands, +the Hebrides, has been so bewritten by travelers from Martin's time to +our own; but comparatively few have known either islands or mainland +well enough to dare novels of their life, and of those who have so dared +no one up to the time of Sharp had written a great realistic story of +the Highlands, and but one or two great romances. Now we have Mr. Neil +Munro, like Sharp a very uneven writer, whose "Children of Tempest"--to +take one of his best stories--now delights and now tortures you; and +yesterday we had William Black, famous for sunsets. Black knew the +Hebrides well, very well for a Lowlandman turned Londoner, and he +labored hard to make his books true and beautiful. Unfortunately it was +not in him to do fine work, not even the best sort of the second order +of novelists,--such work as Trollope's, for instance, which by dint of +faithfulness and humanity almost persuades you now and then that it is +of higher than second order. Black was faithful to what he saw and +broadly sympathetic, but his writing not only lacks distinction, but, +even at its best, as in "The Princess of Thule," home thrust to one's +interest. Yet, such as it is, it is all but all that we have which +attempts to put before us any broad view of Highland life. The one man +of the generation older than the generation of Mr. Sharp who might have +drawn Highland life greatly, Robert Buchanan, was diverted all his life, +as Sharp was in the twenties and thirties, from doing what he would to +what would boil the pot, but he left at least one story, a story of +Sutherland, "A Child of Nature," to prove to us what his reading of +Highland life might have been. Had Stevenson been born a Highlander, he +might have given us both novels of the Highlands of the order of "Weir +of Hermiston," and romances really Highland in quality, as "Kidnapped" +and "Catriona" are not. + +I suppose that, back of all the failure to deal realistically with +Highland life, this rare attainment of a romance of Highland life at all +faithful to it, is the making of the Highlander into a stage hero by +Scott. There are those to-day who fail to find any glamour in "Waverley" +or "Rob Roy" or "The Legend of Montrose," but it is still there to me, +investing the figures of Fergus MacIvor and the MacGregor and the +Children of the Mist as it did in childhood, when I was so fascinated +that I prized my Campbell plaided paper soldiers next to my Continentals +in blue and buff. In going through an old trunkful of school-books only +the other day, I came upon one of these bonneted fellows, still +wonderfully preserved, in an old atlas of the heavens, and then I knew +all of a flash why it was that the poor boy soldiers that I saw in +Highland accoutrement in the yard of Edinburgh Castle during the Boer +War so disappointed me by their appearance and bearing. They were not +half so brave as the piper who used to make the rounds of my boyhood's +town and bring tears to my eyes with his "Campbells are Comin'." I write +this that my quarrel with much of what Sharp has written of the +Highlands, that portion that seems to me sentimentalized or one-sided, +may not be put down to lack of appreciation of the romance, the +eeriness, and otherworldliness that there unquestionably are in that +life. + +It is their aloofness from the everyday story, their unusual use of the +supernatural that has given the longer stories written out of the "Fiona +mood," as Mr. Sharp once spoke of his possession, their appeal to most +readers, but there is here in America a class who put the highest +valuation on the shorter stories Mr. Sharp called "spiritual tales." To +those who hold this view "The Divine Adventure" is of the nature of +revelation. To me it is hardly this, but very interesting, not so much +for its putting of the relations of Body, Will, and Spirit to one +another in life and at death, as for its beautiful writing, and for its +definite betrayal, when its author is writing most intimately, of a +man's attitude, though he published the story as the work of "Fiona +Macleod." These "spiritual tales" do not belong, all of them, to his +"Fiona Macleod" period, for "Vistas" (1894) contains many of them, +though they are cast here in dialogue form, and there are others among +the work published under his own name. In fact, the writing under the +two names never becomes liker in quality and intention than when it is +"spiritual." The sketch from Part II of "The Dominion of Dreams" (1899), +entitled "The Book of the Opal," for instance, is written on the very +key of "Fragments of the Lost Journals of Piero di Cosimo" (1896), far +apart their subject material, and "The Hill-Wind" by "W.S." dedicated +as it is to "F.M.," might well be a rejected passage from "The Mountain +Lovers." There is the color of the Highlands and Islands about many of +these mystical stories, about "The Hill-Wind," by "W.S." and "The Wind, +the Shadow, and the Soul," the epilogue "F.M." wrote to the "Dominion of +Dreams"; but most of these shorter mystical tales have not the tang and +savor of farm-home on lonely moors, or fisher's hut on the lonelier +machar, that is characteristic of most of the tales long and short, that +deal with modern days. + +Nor are the meanings of these "spiritual tales" consistently indicated +in symbols taken from Scottish life, nor is their supernaturalism native +to it. Mrs. Spoer (Ada Goodrich-Freer), in her "Outer Isles" (1902), +tells us "The Celtic Gloom" amuses the Hebridean. If so, what effect +would such discussion as that of "The Lynn of Dreams" and "Maya" have +upon him? But if such essays are not written out of Highland life, they +are none the less interesting, and in the case of "Maya," with its +consideration of waking dream, beautiful as art, and valuable, too, as a +contribution to science. + +So far does Sharp go in his belief as to the apprehension of thought +through powers other than those of the senses, that in "The Winged +Destiny" he can look forward to a time "when the imagination shall lay +aside words and pigments and clay, as raiment needless during the +festivals of the spirit, and express itself in the thoughts which +inhabit words--as light inhabits water or as greenness inhabits grass." +Not only does he foresee such a time, but he foreshadows it, heralds it +in some of his sketches, "Aileen" for one, by attempting it. Perhaps he +has succeeded, perhaps not. To me the attempt is a failure, not, I +think, because he is writing for to-morrow, for that age when the +spiritual awakening he so often prophesied shall have come, but because +he is attempting what cannot be done in any age. If he were seeking only +suggestion, well and good. But he seeks more, and fails, I think, to +attain more. It seems to me impossible that the suggestions he creates +can ever be more than suggestions. They cannot become definite concepts +that will mean the same thing to all men. Suggestion, the opening-up of +vistas, is a high attribute of the art he follows; but he is not content +with suggestion, he would seek more definite expression of what, after +all, is not thought but mood. So it is that he is most successful when +conveying mood and less successful when conveying esoteric thought. As a +critic, of course, on a plane easier for the conveyance of thought, +Sharp is definite enough, completely successful in conveying the ideas +that he intends to convey. + +Often, I fear, when Sharp intends "spiritual history," either in a tale +wholly devoted to this purpose, as "The Divine Adventure," or as +explanatory to the incidents of some more tangible tale, he is really +only playing with words, beautiful words, words sometimes so beautiful +that we are apt to forget that words are to be used not alone for +beauty's sake. Often, again, I fear, he will introduce beautiful symbols +simply for their beauty and not because they have a real purpose, not +because they will more intimately convey, even to the initiated, the +intent of his writing. That these practices are the result of +carelessness, sometimes, as well as of his subservience to beauty, the +fascination that words merely as words or visions merely as visions +exert upon him, is, I think, true. It is but seldom, I believe, that the +underlying thought is incoherent. In almost all of his earlier writing, +however, even in the earlier "Fiona" writing, he is very careless. He +contradicts himself in his short stories as to facts, he gets his family +relationships tangled in a way that cannot be explained by any process +of nature, and so, too, I think, he gets his symbols mixed, or deludes +himself into the belief that something that was hastily written "came to +him" that way and so should be preserved in that exact expression, even +though to him at the second reading it meant nothing definite. He jumps +to conclusions again and again in what he writes about birds, where I +can follow him on a certain footing of knowledge. If he is so careless +about facts, if he can, even though it is a slip, confuse Mary Magdalene +and the Virgin Mary, if he can mention birds in a description of +Highland landscape that is characteristic of a certain time of year when +birds of that species would be in the Highlands only by accident at that +time of year, it is more than likely, slips though these may be, that +there will be similar slips in all he writes, no fewer, it is likely, in +his writings of psychic things than elsewhere. + +There is possible, of course, no hard-and-fast classification of his +writings. Class shades into class almost imperceptibly. It is +particularly difficult to draw the line between the several kinds of +stories and sketches he writes that involve supernaturalism of one kind +and another. There is possible, however, a rough-and-ready distinction +between those stories of his which are esoterically mystical and those +which, while concerned with the supernatural, are concerned with it in +the way familiar in old romance. Of this "usual supernatural" are those +in which "second sight" is the motive, second sight which is always to +be looked for as the commonest supernatural motive in the writing of all +Gaels, either Alban or Irish. Sharp introduced "second sight" into "The +Son of Allan" (1881); it is in "Pharais" (1894), the first of his "F.M." +work; it is developed at some length in "Iona" (1900), which is a +microcosm of all his writing. In "Iona," Sharp puts himself on record as +holding stoutly belief in the reality of the power:-- + + The faculty itself is so apt to the spiritual law that one wonders + why it is so set apart in doubt. It would, I think, be far stranger + if there were no such faculties. That I believe, it were needless + to say, were it not that these words may be read by many to whom + this quickened inward vision is a superstition, or a fantastic + glorification of insight. + +The Achannas, in the uncanny stories in which they are heroes and +villains, are all possessed by the power of the second sight, but second +sight is not the most remarkable of their supernatural powers. Hypnotic +suggestion Gloom uses as an everyday agent in his affairs. It is through +hypnotic suggestion that he puts madness upon Alasdair M'Ian, playing to +him the Pibroch of the Mad, Alasdair M'Ian, in telling whose story +"Fiona Macleod" revealed--I suppose, by chance--something of the +struggle of William Sharp to succeed in letters. Much more frequently, +however, he uses a supernatural power that is further removed from those +in which modern science is interested, such as the machination of +fairies that made Allison Achanna the "Anointed Man"--that, in plain +speech, had driven him fey; or such as the lure of the serpent goddess +that drove to his death the piper hero of "By the Yellow Moon Rock," or +the exchanging of human child for fairy child that is the burden of +"Faraghaol." + +It is much more likely that William Sharp would have made more of this +changeling motive had it not come so near to the question of dual +personality, which it would be dangerous to him to discuss, as would +that question so closely akin, the question of people who are +"away,"--that is, with the fairies,--a kindly explanation of insanity, +chronic or recurrent. As William Sharp he has touched on the question of +dual personality several times in his verses, and very definitely in "A +Fellowe and his Wife." In this last-named book he says, in a letter that +the Countess Ilse writes to her husband in Rügen: "This duality is so +bewildering. I to be myself, whom you know, and whom I know--and then +that other I, whom you do not know at all and whom I only catch glimpses +of as in a mirror, or hear whispering for a moment in the twilight." +That he could not take up the topic so definitely in his later writings +must have, indeed, been a cross to him, for there was hardly any other +question, unless perhaps that of "ancestral memory," which interested +him more deeply. It might be argued, I suppose, that he did discuss it +in "The Divine Adventure," in considering the relations of Spirit, Will, +and Body. Mrs. Sharp, I take it, so holds when she says in her "Memoir" +that the William Sharp work was that of the Will and the "Fiona Macleod" +work beyond the control of the Will. And it is true that these three, +the Spirit, Will, and Body, though each is given a distinctive +personality, each a memory distinct from the memory of the others, are +all but the component parts of one man. Mrs. Sharp does not, however, +anywhere avow directly a belief in the possession of a real dual +personality by her husband, and she definitely contradicts Mr. Yeats for +his expression of belief that "William Sharp could not remember what as +'Fiona Macleod' he had said to you in conversation." + +Very different from these short stories I have been discussing are three +of the four contained in the volume entitled "Madge o' the Pool" (1896), +published as by William Sharp. Of the one that is somewhat in the manner +of certain of the "F.M." stories, the "Gypsy Christ," I have spoken. +Two, "The Coward" and "The Lady in Hosea," are but "the usual thing." +"Madge o' the Pool" is the one really worth while. In this story, with +such river pirates as we have met, sentimentalized, in "Our Mutual +Friend," as material, Sharp writes as realistically as he does in +"Silence Farm," and with a sympathy and pathos that his objective method +cannot exclude. + +There are episodes or sketches, some of them what sharp calls "prose +imaginings," throughout his many books, that one may hardly call short +stories, or myths, or studies in folk-lore, or criticism, or any of the +other many kinds of writing that he essayed. Perhaps "memories" would be +the proper general term for writing of this kind. In almost every one of +these episodes or sketches there is a germ of a story, and some, I +suppose, regard them as but unrealized art. But I for one am glad Mr. +Sharp did not "work them up." In them are some of his best writing and +some of that most personal and intimate. I have spoken of "Aileen" and +"Barabal"; "Sheumas, a Memory," is another that is memorable, and +memorable too, are "The Sea Madness" and "The Triad." "The Triad" is +almost his _credo_, certainly a statement of the things he holds "most +excellent"--"primitive genius, primitive love, primitive memory." Here +Sharp recurs, as so often in his writing, to "ancestral memory," that +possession of men by which they are aware of what was in the world +before they were, through oneness with the universal memory into which +they are absorbed in dream or vision or of which they become aware by +what we call intuition. If such a power be restricted so that its +possessor recalls only certain parts of antiquity, he is virtually in +the state of him who believes he remembers what he remembers because of +previous incarnations. I have no personal opinion to express on the +subject, but if such memories exist in us because of our participation +in a universal memory or because of reincarnation, it is easy to explain +why Sharp is best in his writing of myths, his pictures of the wild +beauties of love and war and dream in barbaric Erin and Alba. It is +because he is the reincarnation of the shanachie of the Dark Ages. When +he thought of reincarnation, however, in relation to himself, he +thought, I have no doubt, of himself as the reincarnation of a druid, +one who had been aware of mysteries; but what he really was, in life, +with his magnificent enthusiasm and bravado,--picturesque raiment after +all and no more for the high-hearted and inherently ailing body of +him,--was this reincarnation of the shanachie, such an one as his own +Oran the Monk turned tale-teller. If you doubt that he was shanachie, +not druid, compare the two legends in "Beyond the Blue Septentrions." +The ordered beauty of the legend that tells of the derivation of the +name of Arthur from Arcturus falls familiarly on our ears. It is +evidently made under a lamp by one who has read many old legends. It is +no druidic revelation. The other, that which ends with the three great +hero-leaps of Fionn from the Arctic Floes to the Pole, from the Pole up +to Arcturus, from Arcturus to the Hill of Heaven itself, is fantastic, +bizarre, extravagant to grotesqueness, with the very flamboyance of old +Irish legend and modern Irish folk-tale. In other words, it is in the +very manner of the shanachie of the Dark Ages, whether his work was +recorded then as court poem or has been handed down by word of mouth +among the folk. Nor is there anything inconsistent in this wild +imagining with a very different power displayed in "moralities" like his +"Last Supper." I have heard stories as incongruous, one uproarious, +another of cloistral quiet and piety, from the old Irish gardener with +whom I spent a large part of my happier days, the days from seven to +seventeen. Lawrence lost his life doing a "retreat" morning after +morning on the cold stone floor of a Vincentian church, not in any +sudden repentance at fourscore and three for the sins of his youth for +they had been fewer than those of almost all I know, but in the usual +way of his austere life. Yet Lawrence was just as much himself when he +was telling me stories of Dean Swift that were full of malice and +brutality and orgiac ecstasy. + +The range of the shanachie is wide, and wide, too, the range of Sharp in +the rôle of shanachie of barbaric life on both sides of the Moyle. Among +such writings there are few tellings of the order of the folk-tale, more +of the order of the hero saga, many--perhaps the best of them--of an +order all his own that has developed, it is likely, from the old +"Saints' Lives," but to which he has given a ring of authenticity that +makes them seem descended from an antiquity as remote as that of +folk-tale or hero-tale. "The Flight of the Culdees" brings before you +with vividness what must have been the life of the Celtic missionaries +in the days when the men out of Lochlin began to seek the Summer Isles; +and "The Annir Choile" and "The Woman with the Net," what was the fate +they meted out to those among themselves who slipped back into the +pleasant old ways of paganism. These are written out of his own +revisualization of the past. More immediately sprung of the old legends +are "The Three Marvels of Hy," which tells of the inner life of Columba +and his brethren on Iona, and "Muime Chriosd," which utilizes folk-lore +as old or older than the legends collected by Mr. Alexander Carmichael +in his pursuit of the stories of St. Bride among the peasantry of the +Outer Isles. "The Song of the Sword" and "Mircath" have in them the +battle-madness of the Viking, whetted to its keenest intensity as he +meets the hard resistance of the Hebrideans; and "The Laughter of +Scathach" and "The Sad Queen," that more terrible fury of the Amazon who +ruled in Skye. Than this last-named story Sharp has done no starker +writing, but it is so evidently from a man's point of view that it +confirmed many in the belief that "Fiona Macleod" could not be a woman. + +"The Washer of the Ford" has its roots in folk-lore, but it is so +remoulded in the mind of the writer that it is rather a re-creation of +the old belief than a restoration of it. There are those who would +rather have had Sharp follow the tales as they are told by Campbell of +Islay, Cameron of Brodick, and Carmichael of South Uist, but to me, +unless the tale is one familiar to many readers, such a remoulding, if +done with power, is surely a prerogative of the artist. But when he +takes a well-known legendary character, as well known among the Gaels as +Achilles among English school-boys, and changes his hair from black to +golden and his stature from short to tall, utterly transforming not only +our picture of him, but the significance of his deeds, then I object, as +I would object if he had made the fair-haired and great-statured +Achilles into such "a little dark man" as the Red Branch legends record +Cuchullin to have been. Nor would I quarrel even with his changing of +the spirit of the old tales if he had always, as he has almost always, +substituted a new beauty for the old beauty of the legend in its bardic +or folk form. It is in the few instances in which his dream of the old +tale does not lift to so great a power in its way as the old tale +possessed in its way that I protest. Of such a nature are some of the +changes Sharp made in his retelling of the "Three Sorrows of +Story-Telling" in "The Laughter of Peterkin," which, it must be +remembered, however, was hurried work, almost hackwork. + +Sharp was particularly successful, I think, in his handling, in the +three tales--he calls them "legendary moralities"--in which he brings +Christ to the straths of Argyll. These three are "The Last Supper," "The +Fisher of Men," and "The Wayfarer." The last is the least successful of +the three, but significant in its attack on certain forms of +Presbyterianism for their attempts to kill out, as un-Christian, the old +ways of life among the Highlanders. This charge was made fifty years ago +by Campbell of Islay, and it had been repeated only yesterday by Mr. +Carmichael. William Black and Mr. Munro confirm it, too, in their +novels, and, in fact, it is only what one expects of Puritanism, whether +in its dominating of the Scotch Presbyterian minister or of the Irish +Catholic priest. The latter is to-day doing as much to kill the joy of +life in Connacht as did even the minister of the Free Kirk yesterday on +the Lews. It may have been partly to hide his identity that Sharp +assumed what some thought an anti-Presbyterian attitude in his "Fiona +Macleod" writing; it may have been the sympathy of the artist toward a +church that has conserved art that led him to what some thought a +pro-Catholic attitude; but scratch this gypsy artist and you find, +surprising as it may be, moral prejudice for Protestantism. Does he not +admire Torcall Cameron and Archibald Ruthven, stern Calvinists both? +"The Fisher of Men," and "The Last Supper" have in them the austere +beauty of the old morality plays, a beauty that is akin to the beauty of +the Puritan imagination of Bunyan, and a tenderness that we may in vain +look for there. They are written in all reverence and simplicity, and it +is no wonder we find Mr. Yeats suggesting that "Fiona Macleod" turn them +into plays for the Irish Theatre. + +I do not care so much for "The Birds of Emar," myths he has rewoven from +the "Mabinogion" into Gaelic texture, or the series that purport to be +collected among the Isles and are found to be very like certain +well-known Greek legends. These, too, seem to me reweavings, and the +"Treud-nan-Ron" and "The Woman at the Crossways"; and "The Man on the +Moor," though its origin is far from their origins, is also a reweaving. +In certain of his writing of this time Sharp passes over virtually into +criticism or comparative mythology, as in "Queens of Beauty" and +"Orpheus and Oisin," and in many of the papers of "Where the Forest +Murmurs." These all have interest; but some smell much of the lamp; and +none of them are to be compared to the best of his "Seanchas," to "The +Harping of Cravetheen," or "Enya of the Dark Eyes," or "Silk o' the +Kine," or "Ula and Urla"; or to his Plays "The House of Usna" and "The +Immortal Hour," in which, for all the savagery, there is nobility, the +nobility that was in the old legends themselves, that nobility that +withstood even the hand of Macpherson, that nobility that has been +reproduced most nobly of all in the "Deirdre" of Synge. + +I am not so sure that the tone of these old myths is always +distinctively Celtic, as it is undoubtedly in "The Annir Choile," and in +other "Seanchas" that reveal him at his best. There was viking blood in +Sharp, and it comes out, I think, in such tales as "The Song of the +Sword." How he came to write these barbaric tales I do not know, though +I have sometimes thought that the "Dhoya" (1891) of Mr. Yeats may have +suggested them, as the Hanrahan stories may have suggested certain of +the more modern tales. But whatever their genesis, the heroes and +heroines of the "Seanchas" seem to him like the heroes and heroines of +Homer and the Greek tragedians; and his friend whom he thought inspired +him to much of the "F.M." work stood, we must remember, as symbolical to +him of the women of Greek as well as of Celtic legend. + +There are many indications, in his last writing, not only in that +unpublished book on "Greek Backgrounds" and in his articles in the +magazines on Sicily, all by William Sharp, but in the "Fiona Macleod" +work, that he would have come to write of Greek antiquity with an +enthusiasm very like that with which he wrote of Gaelic antiquity. +"W.S." is speaking with the voice of "F.M." when he says in a letter to +Mrs. Sharp, dated Athens, January 29, 1904: "It is a marvelous +homecoming feeling I have here. And I know a strange stirring, a kind of +spiritual rebirth." + +One reason, perhaps, that the best work of Sharp has come out of his +consideration of the Celts of antiquity is that the stark stories he has +to tell of them restrain his style, a style too flamboyant when there +is in what he is writing a large opportunity for description of +landscape or exhibition of great emotion in his characters. Another +reason is, perhaps, that his tendency to introduce the supernatural is +more in harmony with the subject material got out of antiquity than of +the subject material got out of to-day. We can accept magic in these old +tales, even to the incantations of Bobaran the White that swayed the +waves of the sea so that Gaer, the son of Deirdre, was saved from the +men of Lochlin. That is as it should be in druidic times. It is +impossible, of course, that Bobaran had power over the waves, but in +such a story such an episode seems more probable than the possible +hypnotic suggestion of Gloom Achanna's pipe-playing that sent Manus +MacOdrum to his death among the fighting seals, because to-day we do not +often come upon such things. It is even less easy to accept the piping +to madness of Alasdair in "Alasdair the Proud." Hypnotic suggestion may +drive to death in the sea a man half fey because of sorrow long endured +and the superstition that he is descended from seals, but pipe-playing +cannot believably in modern tales drive a man insane, whatever it may do +in the famous old "Pied Piper of Hamelin" or other folk-tale. + +So, too, in the verse of Sharp, whether lyric or dramatic, it is the +Celt that inspires him to his best work. Nowhere does his verse win so +much of beauty and glamour as when his thought turns to the four cities +of Murias and Finias and Falias and Glorias, or when it breaks into a +chant on the lips of Etain, in "The Immortal Hour." + +Though there is less unevenness of technique, both in the style and in +the unfolding of the story, in these "Seanchas" than elsewhere in his +writing, the technique breaks down at times here, too, more usually +through sins of omission than through sins of commission. Sharp realized +the something wanting that so many find in much of his writing, even in +much that is most beautiful, realized it so keenly that he felt called +upon to explain. He explained not directly, it is true, as if in answer +to criticism, but none the less definitely in thus affirming his +attitude toward legends in the "Sunset of Old Tales": "We owe a debt, +indeed, to the few who are truly fit for the task [the collecting of +tales from oral tradition], but there are some minds which care very +little to hear about things when they can have the things themselves." +This statement explains in part why it is that the life of the people, +even that part of their life that fronts the past, has escaped him. He +prefers his dream, thinking that it is their dream, or the dream of +their ancestors. He has, indeed, the thing itself, the Highlander's +dream, and when it is given to him to impart that dream fully we forgive +him the proud words I have just quoted. The pity of it is he has not +always so succeeded through the way he has chosen, and then it is, of +course, that we condemn him for the lack of that humility the great +dramatic artist must have whereby he must forget himself and so +subordinate himself that tradition or life speaks through him. + +It is not to be wondered, then, that there is little direct record of +folk-lore of his own collecting in his writing, even when he is writing +of folk-topics. There are borrowings in plenty, especially in "Where the +Forest Murmurs," and even when the collecting seems his own, as it does +in "Earth, Fire, and Water," "Children of Water," and "Cuilidh Mhoire," +it is diamond dust, not diamonds, to which he gives so beautiful +setting. + +Just as appealing to Sharp as the old myths themselves are the +localities that tradition or the stories themselves assign as background +to them. He loves Iona not only for its gray and barren beauty, but +because it was here Columba wrought his wonders. "Iona," which fills the +major part of the volume "The Divine Adventure" gives title to, is the +finest in quality as well as the longest of his writings that may be +called, prosaically, topographical. They, in their varying ways, are +much more than merely topographical, whether done in the way of "F.M.," +as "Iona" is, and as "From the Hebrid Isles" is, and several papers from +"Where the Forest Murmurs"; or in the way of "W.S.," as "Literary +Geography" is. In this last-named book, Scott and Stevenson, among +others, are put against the background that inspired their work, as in +"Iona" certain stories are imagined so as to fit their surroundings and +certain legendary history narrated that is fitting to these surroundings +with an appropriateness almost too exact to be believable. In "Iona," +because he loved the island that inspired its writing beyond any other +of the places he loved greatly, is to be found some of his very best +work, and examples of all kinds of his writing, as I have said; and even +when this "topographical writing," as in some of his magazine articles, +is evidently of the sort initially intended to "float cuts," it is very +well done, done most often with distinction. At times, of course, it +suffers from over-emphasis, as do the descriptive portions of his long +stories, but generally he attunes his writing to the genius of the +place. This is as true of his letters as of what he wrote for the +public, especially true of that series on Algiers from which Mrs. Sharp +quotes in her "Memoir." Papers of this sort, papers giving the genius of +place, Sharp was happier in, I think, than in those which are more +definitely the out-of-door essay. Sharp knew much of birds and small +mammals, of trees and plants, with a knowledge that evidently began in +childhood, but, as with so much else in his life, this knowledge he +never had time to fill out and deepen through patient observation. You +must not, then, turn to "Where the Forest Murmurs" to find writing of a +kind with that in which Thoreau and Jefferies so finely attained, much +less that loving intimacy with the personal side of birds and animals +that so humanly tempers the scientific spirit in White of Selborne. Nor +is there in them the racy earthiness of Mr. Burroughs. Their greatest +asset is their enthusiasm over the beauty of the world they are written +to praise; the next greatest their power of catching in words the mood +of a landscape; their next greatest their distinction of style, though +there are several in which the style is wholly without distinction. Now +and then, too, they are valuable for their guesses at the whys and +wherefores of things. There are to-day many explanations of what is +commonly called "The Lure of the Wild." Is not this as revelatory as +any?-- + + Is this because, in the wilderness, we recover something of what we + have lost?... Because we newly find ourselves as though surprised + into an intimate relationship of which we have been unaware or have + indifferently ignored? What a long way the ancestral memory has to + go, seeking, like a pale sleuth-hound, among obscure dusks and + forgotten nocturnal silences, for the lost trails of the soul! It + is not we only, you and I, who look into the still waters of the + wilderness and lonely places, and are often dimly perplext, are + often troubled we know not how or why: some forgotten reminiscence + in us is aroused, some memory, not our own, but yet our heritage is + perturbed, footsteps that have immemorially sunk in ancient dusk + move furtively along obscure corridors in our brain, the ancestral + hunter or fisher awakes, the primitive hillman or woodlander + communicates again with old forgotten intimacies and the secret + oracular things of lost wisdoms. This is no fanciful challenge of + speculation. In the order of psychology it is as logical as in the + order of biology is the tracing of our upright posture or the deft + and illimitable use of our hands, from unrealizably remote periods + wherein the pioneers of man reach slowly forward to inconceivable + arrivals. + +The weakness of these essays that are like out-of-door essays, but are +not out-of-door essays, is their dearth of freshly observed fact. This +dearth would not matter so much if there were not so many of them, but a +book full of such essays with little original observation will pall, no +matter how well written, no matter how interesting the personality of +the writer. Thus it is that some of the essays of Jefferies pall, some +of those written in his last days, of Jefferies who had in his earlier +writing been so objective. In Thoreau there is a happy combination of +freshly observed fact with personal comment, and in Mr. Burroughs a +personal element greatly subdued, and presented in most of the essays +only through the selective art that has preserved the incidents he +relates out of many of a vast store of their kind. + +In these "nature studies" of Sharp, as in so much of his writing, there +is a great deal of generalization from phenomena superficially observed. +He is not so often inaccurate, but he is very often merely repetitive, +giving us in beautiful and oftentimes distinguished phrase what others +have given us before. Sharp wrote sometimes, I have no doubt, with the +thing he describes before him but oftener, it would seem, from notes, +and oftenest, I take it, from memory. Sometimes it is best to write thus +from memory. The unessential will fade out, the essential remain; but +with Sharp the trouble is that the first observation has often been +hurried. He was content with the beauty that he saw when he first +noticed the incident; he did not wait to observe what in the further +actions of the life observed would make that beautiful incident more +significant. It may, of course, be said that all he was after was the +impression that the passing incident made upon him. Perhaps so, and if +so, more is the pity, because, while, as I have said, one out-of-door +essay with little or even with nothing but the personality of the writer +may interest, or perhaps two such, or even ten, a book full will be +monotonous. At its best, however, his writing of "natural romance" is of +great beauty. "Still Waters," for one, is almost perfect, as perfect as +this sort of thing may be. It is wrought of his own experiences with +just enough of mythological data to give it the texture of old and +lasting things. + +"The Rainy Hyades," on the other hand, is largely a rehash of folk-lore +notes, second-hand work with very little added from experience and very +little finely imagined or recaptured by way of ancestral memory. At +times it would seem that, poor, tired man, he had to feed his flagging +invention from a dictionary of quotations. So, it appears, he has done +in his "Winter Stars" as well as in "The Rainy Hyades." As I think over +the unevenness of these essays, the beauty of "Still Waters," and the +obviousness of these others, I am brought back again to wondering what +Sharp would have done had all his time been his to do as he would with. +Such wonderment is, of course, idle, idle as that as to what Keats would +have done had he lived, for a man's art is judged by what it is, with no +tempering of the appraisement by what the man's life has been. +Fortunately there is inspiring work in plenty in Sharp, in this, as in +other phases of his work, to make readers turn to him when interest in +him as a phenomenon of current literature has passed away. It is hard to +think of the time when writing so beautiful as that of "Still Waters" +will not be sought by lovers of beauty in words and by lovers of beauty +in landscape, and when the opening of "The Coming of Dusk" will not be +turned to, as the opening of Emerson's "Nature" is turned to to-day. + +Were I to attempt to enumerate the critical writings of Sharp, from the +"Rossetti" of 1882 to "The Winged Destiny" of 1904, I should run up a +catalogue that would exceed any even of Walt Whitman's. For years Sharp +lived by criticism, as editor of "The Canterbury Poets" and as reviewer +for many of the London journals. To me none of this critical work is +significant until he came to write of the movement that carried him to +fame,--to fame, I say, because "Fiona Macleod" was famous for a decade, +and not only as a mystery, but as a revealer of a new beauty in words, +and as a widener of horizons. + +I have, I think, by this time made clear what to me is the great +strength of William Sharp--his power to revisualize the Celtic past of +Scotland and to imagine stories of that past that are as native to it as +those handed down in Bardic legend or folk-lore. I have emphasized my +belief that in other kinds of writing his attainment is less original, +though often beautiful in its imitativeness, and this imitativeness I +will explain as being due partly to that quality of the play-actor that +was in him as in so many of Celtic blood, partly to his lack of time to +hew out for himself a way of his own, and partly to his quick +responsiveness to any new beauty pointed out by work that he admired. It +was not altogether, however, lack of time that prevented his attainment +of a larger originality, an originality in other sorts of writing than +the "Seanchas." Sharp had an unfortunate disbelief in early life in the +value of technique. In the preface to the "Romantic Ballads" (1888), for +instance, he expressed the belief that "the supreme merit of a poem is +not perfection of art, but the quality of the imagination which is the +source of such real or approximate perfection." This, as I interpret it +means that a poem, when of perfect art, has back of that perfect art a +high imaginative quality; but by his own practice Sharp knows that he +thought the quality would suffice without the highest art in its +expression. It was this belief that made him leave his work incomplete; +he read his verses, no doubt, with the glow in which he wrote them +recalled to memory, and without the realization that he had not got down +on paper for others half of the creative force that was in him as he +wrote. + +I have found a reason for a lesser success than the early work of "Fiona +Macleod" promised to him in his imitativeness, but in some ways he was +handicapped, too, by lack of models to follow. Granted he could have +blazed other ways for himself than that of the "Seanchas," he lessened +the originality of his attainment by imitation, but if he could not have +so blazed other ways he just as surely could have gone further had he +had models, or rather good models, to follow, models, for instance, in +novels of Highland life. The very fact of there being great realistic +stories of Highland life might have made it possible for him to have +written a Highland "Silence Farm." + +But enough of what might have been: what is is good enough, good enough +at its best to treasure among those things that are a lasting part of +our lives. However great may be the reaction against his work because of +the nine days' wonder about the identity of its creator, certain parts +of it, certain tales and certain verses and a play, will hold their own +against the years. Through such tales as "The Sad Queen," and such +verses as "The Dirge of the Four Cities," and "The House of Usna" even +eyes of little vision may see "eternal beauty wandering on her way," +leaving about them a glamour as recurrent to the mind as sunset to the +skies. + +THE END + + + + +APPENDIX + + + + +APPENDIX + +PLAYS PRODUCED, IN DUBLIN, BY THE ABBEY THEATRE COMPANY AND ITS +PREDECESSORS, WITH DATES OF FIRST PERFORMANCES + + +IRISH LITERARY THEATRE AT ANTIENT CONCERT +ROOMS + +May 8, 1899. "The Countess Cathleen." W.B. Yeats. +May 9, 1899. "The Heather Field." Edward Martyn. + + +IRISH LITERARY THEATRE AT THE GAIETY THEATRE + +Feb. 19, 1900. "The Bending of the Bough." George Moore. +Feb. 19, 1900. "The Last Feast of the Fianna." Alice Milligan. +Feb. 20, 1900. "Maeve." Edward Martyn. +Oct. 21, 1901. "Diarmuid and Grania." W.B. Yeats and + George Moore. +Oct. 21, 1901. "The Twisting of the Rope." Douglas Hyde. + (The first Gaelic play produced in any theatre.) + + +MR. W.G. FAY'S IRISH NATIONAL DRAMATIC COMPANY AT ST. TERESA'S HALL, + CLARENDON STREET + +Apr. 2, 1902. "Deirdre." "A.E." +Apr. 2, 1902. "Kathleen ni Houlihan." W.B. Yeats. + + +IRISH NATIONAL DRAMATIC COMPANY AT ANTIENT CONCERT ROOMS + +Oct. 29, 1902. "The Sleep of the King." Seumas O'Cuisin. +Oct. 29, 1902. "The Laying of the Foundations." Fred Ryan. +Oct. 30, 1902. "A Pot of Broth." W.B. Yeats. +Oct. 31, 1902. "The Racing Lug." Seumas O'Cuisin. + +IRISH NATIONAL THEATRE SOCIETY, MOLESWORTH HALL + +Mar. 14, 1903. "The Hour-Glass." W.B. Yeats. +Mar. 14, 1903. "Twenty-Five." Lady Gregory. +Oct. 8, 1903. "The King's Threshold." W.B. Yeats. +Oct. 8, 1903. "In the Shadow of the Glen." J.M. Synge. +Dec. 3, 1903. "Broken Soil." Padraic Colum. +Jan. 14, 1904. "The Shadowy Waters." W.B. Yeats. +Jan. 14, 1904. "The Townland of Tamney." Seumas McManus. +Feb. 25, 1904. "Riders to the Sea." J.M. Synge. + +IRISH NATIONAL THEATRE SOCIETY AT THE ABBEY THEATRE + +Dec. 27, 1904. "On Baile's Strand." W.B. Yeats. +Dec. 27, 1904. "Spreading the News." Lady Gregory. +Feb. 4, 1905. "The Well of the Saints." J.M. Synge. +Mar. 25, 1905. "Kincora." Lady Gregory. +Apr. 25, 1905. "The Building Fund." William Boyle. +June 9, 1905. "The Land." Padraic Colum. + +NATIONAL THEATRE SOCIETY, LTD. (ABBEY COMPANY) + +Dec. 9, 1905. "The White Cockade." Lady Gregory. +Jan. 20, 1906. "The Eloquent Dempsey." William Boyle. +Feb. 19, 1906. "Hyacinth Halvey." Lady Gregory. +Oct. 20, 1906. "The Gaol Gate." Lady Gregory. +Oct. 20, 1906. "The Mineral Workers." William Boyle. +Nov. 24, 1906. "Deirdre." W.B. Yeats. +Dec. 8, 1906. "The Canavans." Lady Gregory. +Dec. 8, 1906. New Version of "The Shadowy W.B. Yeats. + Waters." +Jan. 26, 1907. "The Playboy of the Western J.M. Synge. + World." +Feb. 23, 1907. "The Jackdaw." Lady Gregory. +Mar. 9, 1907. "The Rising of the Moon." Lady Gregory. +Apr. 1, 1907. "The Eyes of the Blind." Miss W.M. Letts. +Apr. 3, 1907. "The Poorhouse." Douglas Hyde and + Lady Gregory. +Apr. 27, 1907. "Fand." Wilfred Scawen + Blunt. +Oct. 3, 1907. "The Country Dressmaker." George Fitzmaurice. +Oct. 31, 1907. "Devorgilla." Lady Gregory. +Nov. 21, 1907. "The Unicorn from the Stars." W.B. Yeats and + Lady Gregory. +Feb. 13, 1908. "The Man who missed the Tide." W.F. Casey. +Feb. 13, 1908. "The Piper." "Norreys Connell." +Mar. 10, 1908. "The Piedish." George Fitzmaurice. +Mar. 19, 1908. "The Golden Helmet." W.B. Yeats. +Apr. 20, 1908. "The Workhouse Ward." Lady Gregory. +Oct. 1, 1908. "The Suburban Groove." W.F. Casey. +Oct. 8, 1908. "The Clancy Name." Lennox Robinson. +Oct. 15, 1908. "When the Dawn is come." Thomas MacDonogh. +Oct. 21, 1908. New Version of "The Man who W.F. Casey. + missed the Tide." +Feb. 11, 1909. Revised Version of "Kincora." Lady Gregory. +Mar. 11, 1909. "Stephen Grey." D.L. Kelleher. +Apr. 1, 1909. "The Crossroads." Lennox Robinson. +Apr. 1, 1909. "Time." "Norreys Connell." +Apr. 29, 1909. "The Glittering Gate." Lord Dunsany. +May 27, 1909. "An Imaginary Conversation." "Norreys Connell." +Aug. 25, 1909. "The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet." Bernard Shaw. +Sept. 16, 1909. "The White Feather." R.J. Ray. +Oct. 14, 1909. "The Challenge." Miss W.M. Letts. +Nov. 11, 1909. "The Image." Lady Gregory. +Jan. 13, 1910. "Deirdre of the Sorrows." J.M. Synge. +Feb. 10, 1910. "The Green Helmet." W.B. Yeats. +Mar. 2, 1910. "The Travelling Man." Lady Gregory. +May 12, 1910. "Thomas Muskerry." Padraic Colum. +May 26, 1910. "Harvest." Lennox Robinson. +Sept. 28, 1910. "The Casting-out of Martin R.J. Ray. + Whelan." +Oct. 27, 1910. "Birthright." T.C. Murray. +Nov. 10, 1910. "The Full Moon." Lady Gregory. +Nov. 24, 1910. "The Shuiler's Child."[3] Seumas O'Kelly. +Dec. 1, 1910. "Coats." Lady Gregory +Jan. 12, 1911. "The Deliverer." Lady Gregory. +Jan. 26, 1911. "King Argimenes and the Lord Dunsany. + Unknown Warrior." +Feb. 16, 1911. "The Land of Heart's Desire."[4] W.B. Yeats. +Mar. 30, 1911. "Mixed Marriage." St. John G. Ervine. +Nov. 23, 1911. "The Interlude of Youth." Anon., first + printed 1554. +Nov. 23, 1911. "The Second Shepherds' Play." Anon., _circa_ + 1400. +Nov. 30, 1911. "The Marriage." Douglas Hyde. +Dec. 7, 1911. "Red Turf." Rutherford Mayne. +Dec. 16, 1911. Revival of "The Countess W.B. Yeats. + Cathleen." +Jan. 4, 1912. "The Annunciation." _circa_ 1400. +Jan. 4, 1912. "The Flight into Egypt." _circa_ 1400. +Jan. 11, 1912. "MacDarragh's Wife." Lady Gregory. +Feb. 1, 1912. Revival of "The Country George Fitzmaurice. + Dressmaker." +Feb. 16, 1912. "The Tinker and the Fairy." Douglas Hyde. + (Played in Gaelic.) +Feb. 29, 1912. "The Worlde and the Chylde." 15th century. +Mar. 28, 1912. "Family Failings." William Boyle. +Apr. 11, 1912. "Patriots." Lennox Robinson. +June 20, 1912. "Maurice Harte." T.C. Murray. +July 4, 1912. "The Bogie Men." Lady Gregory. +Oct. 17, 1912. "The Magnanimous Lover." St. John G. Ervine. +Nov. 21, 1912. "Damer's Gold." Lady Gregory. + +TRANSLATIONS OF THE FOLLOWING HAVE BEEN PRODUCED + +Apr. 16, 1906. "The Doctor in spite of Himself." (Molière.) Translated + by Lady Gregory. +Mar. 16, 1907. "Interior." (Maeterlinck.) +Mar. 19, 1908. "Teja." (Sudermann.) + Translated by Lady + Gregory. +Apr. 4, 1909. "The Rogueries of Scapin." (Molière.) + Translated by Lady + Gregory. +Jan. 21, 1909. "The Miser." (Molière.) + Translated by Lady + Gregory. +Feb. 24, 1910. "Mirandolina." (Goldini.) Translated + by Lady Gregory. +Jan. 5, 1911. "Nativity Play." (Douglas Hyde.) + Translated by Lady + Gregory. + + +FOOTNOTES: + +[3] First produced by an amateur company at the Molesworth Hall in 1909. + +[4] First produced at the Avenue Theatre, London, in 1894. + + + + +INDEX + + +Abbey Theatre, organization of company, 13-36. + +_All Ireland Review_, 86. + +_All on the Irish Shore_, 6. + +Allgood, Sara, 19, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 211. + +Allingham, William, 39. + +_Ancient Legends of Ireland_, 51. + +Antient Concert Rooms, the, 18, 78, 86, 106, 200. + +_Apostle, The_, 111. + +_Aran Islands, The_, 168, 187, 188, 191. + +Aran Islands, the, 147, 162, 166, 170, 171, 177, 178, 179, 181, 187, + 188, 190, 191, 192. + +Argyll, 4, 267, 268. + +Arnold, Matthew, 3, 59, 255. + +Arran, 267. + +Arthurian stories, 3, 48. + +Austen, Jane, 155, 156. + +_Ave_, 73, 76, 94, 99, 108, 109. + +Avenue Theatre, London, 25, 50. + + +_Bards and Saints_, 8. + +Barker, Granville, 230. + +Barlow, Jane, 1, 7, 148. + +Beerbohm, Max, 81. + +Belfast, 47. + +_Beltaine_, 75, 85. + +_Bending of the Bough, The_, 76, 88, 95, 98, 105. + +Benson, Sir Frank, 18. + +Benson Company, the, 106. + +Beowulf, 142. + +Berkeley, George, 135. + +Bernhardt, Sara, 16. + +Bhagavad-Gîta, 117. + +Birmingham, George A. (The Rev. Dr. James O. Hannay), 8. + +_Birthright_, 216, 217, 218, 219, 222. + +Björnson, Björnstjerne, 36. + +Black, William, 271, 284. + +Blake, William, 38. + +Bodley Head, the, 2. + _Book of Saints and Wonders_, 138, 142. + +Borrow, George, 161, 165, 173, 179. + +Boucicault, Dion, 168. + +Boyle, William, 15, 33, 208-215, 238, 239, 240. + _Building Fund, The_, 209-213; + _Eloquent Dempsey, The_, 208, 209, 213; + _Family Failings_, 208; + _Mineral Workers, The_, 208, 213-214, 238. + +Brigit, St., 142, 147, 282. + +Brittany, 3, 266. + _Broken Soil_, 32, 202. + +Brown, T.E., 4, 5. + +Browning, Robert, 50. + +Buchanan, Robert, 272. + +Buckley, William, 7, 8. + _Building Fund, The_, 208, 209-213, 214. + +Bullock, Shan, 7, 214, 234, 236, 270. + +Bunyan, John, 285. + +Burns, Robert, "Jolly Beggars," 177, 234. + +Burroughs, John, 290, 292. + _Bursting of the Bubble, The_, 9. + _By Thrasna River_, 7. + + +_Calendar of the Saints_, 247. + +Cameron, Dr., of Brodick, 283. + +Campbell, John F., of Islay, 283, 284. + +Campbell, Joseph (Seosamh MacCathmhaoil), 246-250. + _Judgment_, 247-250; + _Mearing Stones_, 247; + _The Mountainy Singer_, 247. + +Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, 23, 28, 45. + +_Canavans, The_, 149, 152. + +"Carberry, Ethna" (Anna Johnston MacManus), 10, 216, 255. + +Carmichael, Alexander, 263, 282, 283, 284. + +_Carmina Gadelica_, 263. + +Carnegie Lyceum, The, New York, 85. + +_Cathleen ni Houlihan_, 10, 17, 19, 31, 50-51, 53, 54, 55, 77. + +_Catriona_, 272. + +"Celtic Gloom, The," 274. + +_Celtic Literature, On the Study of_, 3. + +Celtic Renaissance, The, 1-12, 13, 18, 33, 36, 41, 93, 105, 114, 158, + 251, 256, 259, 260. + +_Celtic Twilight, The_, 37, 41, 42, 54. + +Chesson, Nora Hopper, 10. + +_Child of Nature, A_, 272. + +_Children of Lir_, 200. + +_Children of Tempest, The_, 4, 271. + +_Children of To-morrow_, 264. + +Church, Richard William, 138. + +_Clancy Name, The_, 223, 224, 228. + +Clare, 84, 141. + +Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 210, 211. + +Colum, Padraic, 11, 15, 21, 198-208, 240. + _Broken Soil_, 32, 202; + _Children of Lir_, 200; + _Eoghan's Wife_, 201; + _The Fiddler's House_, 200, 202, 204-205, 206; + _The Foleys_, 201; + _The Kingdom of the Young_, 201; + _The Land_, 200, 202, 204, 206; + _The Miracle of the Corn_, 200, 202; + _The Saxon Shillin'_, 201; + _Studies_, 200; + _Thomas Muskerry_, 199, 200, 206; + _Wild Earth_, 200, 208. + +Columba, 147, 282, 289. + +Congreve, William, 13. + +_Conn the Shaughraun_, 168. + +Connacht, 39, 154, 179, 188, 215, 239. + +"Connell, Norreys" (Conal O'Riordan), 31, 241-243. + _An Imaginary Conversation_, 242; + _Piper_, 31, 33, 242, 243; + _Shakespeare's End_, 242; + _Time_, 242. + +Connemara, 7, 147, 188. + +_Connla_, 20, 21. + +Conway, Hart, 218. + +Cork, 15, 47, 220, 222. + +Cork Dramatic Society, The, 35, 216, 223. + +_Cork Realists_, 216. + +Cornwall, 2, 3, 4. + +_Countess Cathleen, The_, 18, 32, 43, 47, 48-49, 50, 51, 59, 64, + 69, 78. + +Court Theatre, London, The, 241. + +Cousins, James H., 20, 32. + +Craig, Gordon, 29. + +Craigie, Pearl Teresa ("John Oliver Hobbes"), 104, 105. + +Crashaw, Richard, 135. + +Croker, Crofton, 168. + +_Croppies Lie Down_, 7. + +_Crossroads, The_, 224-228, 230, 231. + +_Cuchulain of Muirthemne_, 58, 138, 143. + +Cumann nan Gaedheal, 90, 115. + + +_Dan the Dollar_, 7, 214. + +_Dandy Dick_, 233. + +Darragh, Miss, 28. + +Dartmoor, 6. + +_Daughters of Erin, The_, 18, 200. + +Davis, Thomas, 39. + +_Death of Dermid, The_, 109. + +_Death of Tintagiles, The_, 252. + +_Deirdre_ (G.W. Russell), 20, 21, 31, 77, 115. + +_Deirdre_ (W.B. Yeats), 23, 27, 28, 44, 50, 61-63. + +_Deirdre of the Sorrows_, 160, 163, 166, 168, 181, 183, 192, 196, + 197, 285. + +_Deliverer, The_, 149. + +DeMax, 16. + +De Quincey, Thomas, 265. + +Derry, 14. + +_Destruction of the Hostel, The_, 205. + +_Devorgilla_, 152. + +_Dhoya_, 41, 286. + +_Diarmid and Grania_, 32, 106-110, 143. + +Dickens, Charles, 6. + +Digges, T. Dudley, 21, 22. + +_Discoveries_, 42. + +_Divine Adventure, The_, 263, 270, 273, 275, 279, 289. + +_Divine Vision, The_, 116, 122. + +Dolmetsch, Arnold, 64, 98. + +_Dome, The_, 81. + +_Dominion of Dreams, The_, 273, 274. + +Donegal, 7, 246, 247, 249, 250. + +_Donegal Fairy Stories_, 7. + +Donne, John, 164. + +Down, 15, 210, 216, 226, 235, 237, 238, 243. + +_Drama in Muslin, A_, 96, 101, 102, 110, 171. + +_Drone, The_, 210, 235, 236. + +_Drosdan and Yssul_, 254. + +Dual personality, 278. + +Dublin Castle, 32. + +_Dublin University Review_, 38. + +Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan, 2. + +Dun Theatre, the, Cork, 224. + + +_Earth Breath, The_, 116. + +Edgeworth, Maria, 6. + +"Eglinton, John." (_See_ Magee, W.K.) + +Elizabethan Stage Society, the, 30. + +_Eloquent Dempsey, The_, 208, 209, 213. + +Emerson, R.W., 115, 120, 122, 125, 126, 127, 135, 293. + +_Enchanted Sea, The_, 75, 77, 83, 85-87, 89, 90. + +_Enchanted Valleys, The_, 254. + +_Eoghan's Wife_, 201. + +Ervine, St. John G., 15, 33, 243-246. + _The Eviction_, 246; + _The Magnanimous Lover_, 243, 245, 246; + _Mixed Marriage_, 243, 246, 247. + +_Esther Waters_, 6, 96, 112. + +_Evelyn Innes_, 95, 96, 97, 98, 122. + +_Everyman_, 30, 51. + +_Eviction, The_, 246. + + +Fairies, 39, 41. + +_Family Failings_, 208. + +Farr, Florence, 25, 26, 27, 28. + +Fay, Frank J., 19, 21, 22, 23, 24. + +Fay, William G., 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 28, 201. + +_Fellowe and his Wife, A_, 261, 264, 278. + +Ferguson, Sir Samuel, 39, 61, 109, 184. + +Fermanagh, 7. + +_Fiddler's House, The_, 200, 202, 204-205, 206. + +FitzGerald, Edward, 141. + +Flamel, 43. + +_Flora MacDonald_, 266. + +_Foleys, The_, 201. + +Folk-plays, 17, 29, 35, 49. + +Folk-songs, 2, 40. + +Folk-tales, 283. + +_From the Hills of Dream_, 259. + +_Full Moon, The_, 152. + + +Gaelic League, the, 1, 18, 41, 107. + +Gaiety Theatre, the, Dublin, 30, 106, 110. + +Galway, 73, 101, 108, 141, 189, 208, 210, 216, 238, 240. + +_Gaol Gate, The_, 153, 154. + +_Ghosts_, 80. + +Gilbert, Lady (Rosa Mulholland), 6. + +_Gillian the Dreamer_, 4. + +_Gods and Fighting Men_, 109, 138, 141, 145. + +_Golden Helmet, The_, 27, 63. + +Goldsmith, Oliver, 13. + +Gonne, Maud, 27, 59, 136. + +Gore-Booth, Eva, 11. + +_Grangecolman_, 91-92. + +_Grania_ (Lady Gregory), 110, 154, 156-157. + +_Grania_ (The Hon. Emily Lawless), 7. + +_Greek Backgrounds_, 286. + +_Green Fire_, 263, 266. + +_Green Helmet, The_, 63. + +Gregory, Lady, 8, 9, 15, 22, 30, 31, 32, 47, 53, 54, 56, 58, 73, 74, + 75, 76, 88, 92, 93, 108, 109, 110, 114, 138-159, 179, 206, 215. + _Book of Saints and Wonders_, 138, 142; + _The Canavans_, 149, 152; + _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_, 58, 138, 143; + _The Deliverer_, 149; + _Devorgilla_, 152; + _The Full Moon_, 152; + _The Gaol Gate_, 153, 154; + _Gods and Fighting Men_, 109, 138, 141, 145; + _Grania_, 110, 154, 156-157; + _Hyacinth Halvey_, 150, 151; + _The Image_, 150, 151; + _The Jack Daw_, 151; + _Kincora_, 152; + _MacDaragh's Wife_, 154, 155; + _Poets and Dreamers_, 147; + _The Poorhouse_, 9; + _The Rising of the Moon_, 22, 31, 32, 152; + _Spreading the News_, 150, 151; + _A Travelling Man_, 153; + _Twenty-five_, 32, 152; + _The Unicorn from the Stars_, 27, 53-56; + _The White Cockade_, 152; + _The Workhouse Ward_, 152, 154. + +Gregory, Robert, 30. + +Grundy, Sydney, 104. + +Gwynn, Stephen, 122. + +Gyles, Althea, 247. + +_Gypsy Christ, The_, 265, 279. + + +_Hail and Farewell_, 73, 92, 98, 113. + +Hankin, St. John, 245. + +Hardy, Thomas, 6, 7, 101, 164, 175, 176, 192, 193, 239, 258, 271. + +Harrigan plays, the, 22. + +Harte, Bret, 241. + +_Harvest_, 221, 224, 228, 229, 230, 231. + +Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 82, 175. + +_Heather Field, The_, 18, 78-83, 85, 89, 91, 92, 93, 95. + +Hebrides, the, 271, 274, 283. + +_Hedda Gabler_, 104, 175. + +Hermetic Society, the, 39, 117, 120. + +Hewlett, Maurice, 165. + +Highlands of Scotland, the, 3, 4, 260, 263, 264, 267, 268, 270, 271, + 272, 274, 276, 284, 295. + +Hinkson, Katherine Tynan, 1, 6, 10. + +Homer, 64, 120, 144, 286. + +_Homestead, The_, 117. + +_Homeward_, 116. + +Horniman, Miss, 21, 31, 33, 35. + +_House of Usna, The_, 251, 252, 253, 254, 259, 285. + +_Hyacinth Halvey_, 150, 151. + +Hyde, Douglas, 1, 2, 8, 18, 40, 41, 46, 107, 147, 153, 158, 166, + 171, 179. + +Hypnotic suggestion, 278. + + +Ibsen, Henrik, 13, 34, 36, 38, 80, 93, 163, 168, 178, 213. + +_Ideas of Good and Evil_, 42. + +_Image, The_, 150, 151. + +_Imaginary Conversation, An_, 242. + +_Immortal Hour, The_, 251, 252, 285, 287. + +_Impressions and Opinions_, 103. + +_In a Balcony_, 50. + +_In Chimney Corners_, 7. + +Independent Theatre, The, London, 103, 104, 105. + +_Iona_, 277, 289. + +Iona, 282. + +"I.O.," 116. + +_Irish Idylls_, 7, 148. + +Irish Agricultural Organization Society, the, 13, 117, 118, 137, 225. + +Irish Literary Theatre, The, 5, 18, 19, 42, 52, 73, 74, 76, 85, 105, + 109, 110, 115, 251. + +_Irish Pastorals_, 7. + +Irving Terry Company, the, 105. + +_Island of Statues, The_, 47. + + +_Jack Daw, The_, 151. + +Janvier, Mrs. Thomas A., 256. + +Jefferies, Richard, 290, 291. + +_John Bull's Other Island_, 241. + +_John Sherman and Dhoya_, 41. + +_John Splendid_, 4. + +Johnson, Lionel, 5, 10, 64. + +Johnston, Charles, 125, 134, 146. + +_Journeys End in Lovers Meeting_, 105. + +Joyce, Dr. P.W., 3, 110, 139. + +_Judgment_, 246, 249, 250. + + +Kailyard School, the, 270. + +Keats, John, 48, 293. + +Kelley, P.J., 21, 22. + +Kelpius, 122. + +Kembles, the, 18. + +Kerrigan, J.M., 23, 27, 217. + +Kerry, 166, 188, 190, 216. + +_Kidnapped_, 272. + +Kiltartan English, 141, 142. + +_Kincora_, 152. + +_King of Ys, The_, 254. + +_Kingdom of the Young, The_, 201. + +_King's Threshold, The_, 60, 69. + +Kingston, Thomas, 81. + +Kipling, Rudyard, 47. + + +_Lady from the Sea, The_, 85. + +_Lake, The_, 96, 99, 101, 102, 111, 112, 113. + +_Land, The_, 200, 202, 204, 206. + +Land League, the, 102. + +_Land of Heart's Desire, The_, 25, 43, 49-50, 51, 59. + +Larminie, William, 8. + +_Last of the De Mullins, The_, 245. + +_Last Supper, The_, 251. + +_Laughter of Peterkin, The_, 267, 284. + +Lawless, The Hon. Emily, 6. + +_Laying of the Foundations, The_, 32. + +_Lays of the Western Gael, The_, 110. + +_Leabhar Sgeuluigheachta_, 41. + +_Lear_, 45. + +_Legend of Montrose, The_, 272. + +Leinster, 215. + +Le Moyne, Mrs., 50. + +_Lesson of Life, The_, 224. + +Lever, Charles James, 102. + +_Literary Geography_, 289. + +_Lost Pibroch, The_, 4. + +_Lost Saint, The_, 9. + +_Love in the Valley_, 49. + +_Love Songs of Connacht, The_, 1, 9, 166, 179. + +Lover, Samuel, 101. + +Lowlands of Scotland, the, 258, 260, 264. + +_Luke Delmege_, 7. + +Lynchehaun case, the, 171. + +_Lyra Celtica_, 4. + + +_Mabinogion_, 285. + +_MacDaragh's Wife_, 154, 155. + +McGee, Eithne, 23, 26, 211. + +"Macleod, Fiona." (_See_ Sharp, William.) + +MacManus, Anna Johnstone. (_See_ "Ethna Carberry.") + +MacManus, Seumas, 7. + +Macpherson, James, 3, 285. + +_Madge o' the Pool_, 279. + +Maeterlinck, Maurice, 13, 38, 45, 48, 113, 135, 178, 192, 202, 252, + 253, 260. + +Magee, W.K. ("John Eglinton"), 8, 10. + +Magic, 67. + +_Magnanimous Lover, The_, 243, 245, 246. + +Man, Isle of, 3, 4, 5. + +Martin, Martin, 271. + +Martyn, Edward, 13, 18, 46, 72, 73, 74-95, 97, 98, 102, 105, 112, 115, + 178, 207. + _The Enchanted Sea_, 75, 77, 83, 85-87, 89, 90; + _Grangecolman_, 91-92; + _The Heather Field_, 18, 78-83, 85, 89, 91, 92, 93, 95; + _Maeve_, 75, 76, 77, 83-85, 90; + _Morgante the Lesser_, 97; + _The Place Hunters_, 75, 78, 90, 93; + _A Tale of a Town_, 75, 76, 78, 81, 87-90, 105, 112, 213. + +Masefield, John, 238, 239. + +_Maurice Harte_, 216, 219-221, 222. + +Mayne, Rutherford, 15, 210, 233-240, 244. + _The Drone_, 210, 235, 236; + _Red Turf_, 238, 239, 240; + _The Troth_, 235, 237; + _The Turn of the Road_, 216, 235, 238, 239. + +Mayo, 95. + +_Mearing Stones_, 247. + +_Measure for Measure_, 24. + +Meath, 226. + +_Memoirs of My Dead Self_, 98. + +Meredith, George, 4, 11, 101, 165, 166, 261. + +Meynell, Alice, 10. + +Milligan, Alice, 116. + +Milton, John, 48, 120, 135. + +_Mineral Workers, The_, 208, 213, 214, 238. + +_Miracle of the Corn, The_, 200, 202. + +_Mixed Marriage_, 243, 246, 247. + +_Modern Lover, A_, 74, 96. + +_Modern Painting_, 95. + +Molesworth Hall, 163. + +_Monna Vanna_, 45. + +Moore, George, 6, 8, 18, 52, 72, 73, 74, 75, 80, 81, 88, 92, 94, + 95-113, 122, 158. + _The Apostle_, 111; + _The Bending of the Bough_, 76, 88, 95, 98, 105; + _Diarmid and Grania_, 32, 106-110, 143; + _A Drama in Muslin_, 96, 101, 102, 110, 111; + _Esther Waters_, 6, 96, 112; + _Evelyn Innes_, 95, 96, 97, 98, 122; + _Hail and Farewell_, 73, 92, 98, 113; + _Ave_ (vol. I), 73, 76, 94, 99, 108, 109; + _Salve_ (vol. II), 99; + _Impressions and Opinions_, 103; + _The Lake_, 96, 99, 101, 102, 111, 112, 113; + _Memoirs of My Dead Self_, 98; + _A Modern Lover_, 74, 96; + _Modern Painting_, 95; + _A Mummer's Wife_, 101; + _Parnell and his Island_, 96, 97, 101; + _Sister Teresa_, 98; + _The Strike at Arlingford_, 103, 104; + _The Untilled Field_, 101, 102, 111, 112; + _The Wild Goose_, 101. + +More, Henry, 135. + +Morgan, Sydney J., 217. + +_Morgante the Lesser_, 97. + +Morris, William, 38. + +_Mosada_, 47. + +_Mountain Lovers, The_, 262, 264, 265, 266, 270, 274. + +_Mountainy Singer, The_, 247. + +Mulholland, Rosa. (_See_ Lady Gilbert.) + +_Mummer's Wife, A_, 101. + +Munro, Neil, 4, 6, 59, 271, 284. + +Munster, 178, 215. + +Murray, T.C., 15, 215-222. + _Birthright_, 216, 217, 218, 219, 222; + _Maurice Harte_, 216, 219-221, 222; + _The Wheel o' Fortune_, 216. + +_My New Curate_, 7. + +Mysticism, 11, 123, 134, 135, 273, 274, 275. + + +_Nan_, 238, 239. + +Nash, Thomas, 66. + +National Dramatic Company, the 16, 19, 20, 21, 29, 32, 56, 77, 110, + 115, 118. + +National Players, the, 35. + +National Theatre Society, the Ltd., 30, 35, 60, 202, 223, 241. + +Nethersole, Olga, 233. + +_New Songs_, 116. + +Norway, 36. + + +O'Curry, Eugene, 140. + +O'Doherty, Eileen, 217. + +O'Donoghue, Taidgh, 108. + +O'Donovan, Fred, 23, 26, 27, 211, 217. + +"Oghma," 116. + +O'Grady, Standish Hayes, 110, 140, 141. + +O'Grady, Standish James, 3, 86, 117, 139. + +Oisin, 13, 40, 69. + +Olcott, Chauncey, 22. + +_Old Celtic Romances_, 139. + +_Old Knowledge, The_, 122. + +_Omar Khayyám_, 141. + +_On Baile's Strand_, 27, 28, 58, 59. + +O'Neill, Maire, 23, 26. + +"Moira O'Neill" (Mrs. Nesta Higginson Skrine), 10, 255. + +_Origines Islandicæ_, 238. + +O'Riordan, Conal. (_See_ "Norreys Connell.") + +O'Rourke, J.A., 211, 217. + +_Ossian_, 3, 138. + +O'Sullivan, Seumas, 11. + +_Our Dramatists and their Literature_, 103. + +_Our Mutual Friend_, 279. + +_Outer Isles, The_, 274. + + +_Pagan Review, The_, 261. + +Palestrina, 77. + +Parnell, Charles Stewart, 2, 147, 149. + +_Parnell and his Island_, 96, 97, 101. + +Pater, Walter, 121, 133. + +Patrick, St., 13, 40, 142. + +_Patriots_, 231-232. + +"Paul Gregan," 116. + +_Pebbles from a Brook_, 8. + +_Peer Gynt_, 163. + +_Pharais_, 262, 263, 264, 266, 270, 277. + +_Phèdre_, 16. + +Phillpotts, Eden, 6. + +Pinero, Sir Arthur Wing, 104, 214, 233. + +_Piper, The_, 31, 33, 242, 243. + +_Place Hunters, The_, 75, 78, 90, 93. + +_Playboy of the Western World, The_, 23, 26, 31, 32, 33, 75, 149, + 163, 164, 166, 170, 171, 176, 178, 180, 182, 184, 196, 218, 228. + +Players Club, The, 86. + +Plotinus, 125. + +Poe, Edgar Allan, 40, 48, 265. + +Poel, William, 24. + +_Poems and Ballads_, 49. + +_Poetry of the Celtic Races, The_, 3. + +_Poets and Dreamers_, 147. + +Pomfret, John, 203. + +_Poorhouse, The_, 9. + +Pope, Alexander, 203. + +Porphyry, 54. + +_Pot of Broth, A_, 22, 32, 51, 52, 54. + +Pre-Raphaelites, The, 10, 158. + +_Princess of Thule, The_, 271. + +Proclus, 126. + +Psaltery, 64. + +Puritanism, 135, 234, 235, 244, 285. + + +Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur, 3. + +Quinn, Maire T., 21, 22. + + +_Racing Lug, The_, 20, 21. + +Raftery, 147. + +_Red Turf_, 238, 239, 240. + +Rehan, Ada, 233. + +_Religious Songs of Connacht, The_, 9, 171, 179. + +Renan, Ernest, 3, 255. + +_Revival of Irish Literature, The_, 2. + +Rhys, Ernest, 4. + +_Riders to the Sea_, 149, 162, 178, 179, 181, 183, 195, 197. + +Rinder, Edith Wingate, 268, 269. + +_Rising of the Moon, The_, 22, 31, 32, 152. + +Robin Hood, 138. + +Robinson, S. Lennox, 15, 33, 112, 215, 221, 222-232. + _The Clancy Name_, 223-224, 228; + _The Crossroads_, 224-228, 230, 231; + _Harvest_, 221, 224, 228-230; + _Lesson of Life_, 224; + _Patriots_, 231-232. + +_Rob Roy_, 272. + +_Romantic Ballads_, 253, 259, 294. + +_Rosmersholm_, 91. + +Ross, Martin. (_See_ Somerville, E. Oe.) + +_Rossetti, Dante Gabriel_, 293. + +Ruskin, John, 89, 158, 159. + +Russell, G.W. ("A.E."), 1, 5, 8, 11, 19, 20, 21, 39, 41, 46, 95, 98, + 111, 112, 114-137, 146, 251, 253, 255. + _Deirdre_, 20, 21, 31, 77, 115; + _The Divine Vision_, 116, 122; + _The Earth Breath_, 116; + _Homeward_, 116; + "Symbolism," 126; + "Weariness," 128; + "Memory of Earth," 130. + +Ryan, Frederick, 32. + + +_Salve_, 99. + +_Samhain_, 16, 29, 76, 81, 109. + +_Saturday Review, The_, London, 81. + +_Saxon Shillin', The_, 201. + +Scotch Irish, the, 215, 234. + +Scott, Sir Walter, 6, 100, 234, 272, 289. + +Scotus Erigena, 135. + +_Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The_, 104. + +_Secret Rose, The_, 41, 54. + +_Seething Pot, The_, 8. + +_Seven Woods, In the_, 43. + +_Shadow of the Glen, In the_, 32, 60, 77, 162, 168, 169, 175, 178, + 181, 184, 190, 195, 218. + +_Shadowy Waters, The_, 28, 56-58, 60. + +Shakespeare, 120. + +_Shakespeare's End_, 242. + +Sharp, William ("Fiona Macleod"), 4, 86, 251-296. + _A Child of Nature_, 272; + _Children of To-morrow_, 264; + "The Dan-nan-Ron," 263, 287; + "The Dirge of the Four Cities," 255, 259, 287, 296; + "Dim face of beauty haunting all the world," 259; + _The Divine Adventure_, 263, 270, 273, 275, 279, 289; + _The Dominion of Dreams_, 273, 274; + _Drosdan and Yssul_, 254; + _The Enchanted Valleys_, 254; + _A Fellowe and his Wife_, 261, 264, 278; + _Flora MacDonald_, 266; + _From the Hills of Dream_, 259; + _Greek Backgrounds_, 286; + _Green Fire_, 263, 266; + _The Gypsy Christ_, 265, 279; + _The House of Usna_, 251, 252, 253, 254, 259, 285; + _The Immortal Hour_, 251, 252, 285, 287; + _Iona_, 277, 289; + _The King of Ys_, 254; + _The Last Supper_, 251; + _The Laughter of Peterkin_, 267, 284; + _Literary Geography_, 289; + _Lyra Celtica_, 4; + _Madge o' the Pool_, 279; + _The Mountain Lovers_, 262, 264, 265, 266, 270, 274; + _The Pagan Review_, 261; + _Pharais_, 262, 263, 264, 266, 270, 277; + _Romantic Ballads_, 253, 259, 294; + _Silence Farm_, 257, 258, 264, 265, 270, 271, 279, 295; + _The Sin-Eater_, 263; + _Sospiri di Roma_, 257, 258; + _Vistas_, 251, 252, 253, 259, 260, 273; + _The Washer of the Ford_, 263, 283; + _Where the Forest Murmurs_, 263, 285, 289, 290; + _The Winged Destiny_, 263, 274, 293; + _Wives in Exile_, 261, 264. + +Sharp, Mrs. William, 251, 256, 262, 268, 279, 286, 290. + +Shaw, George Bernard, 53, 177, 230, 241. + +Sheehan, Canon, 7. + +Shelley, P.B., 38. + +Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 13. + +Shorter, Dora Sigerson, 11. + +_Showing-up of Blanco Posnet, The_, 241. + +Sigerson, Dr. George, 2. + +_Silence Farm_, 257, 258, 264, 265, 270, 271, 279, 295. + +Sims, George Robert, 103, 104. + +Sinclair, Arthur, 19, 23, 24, 27, 211. + +_Sin-Eater, The_, 263. + +_Sister Teresa_, 98. + +Skrine, Nesta Higginson. (_See_ "Moira O'Neill.") + +Skye, 267, 283. + +Sligo, 40, 41. + +_Sohrab and Rustum_, 59. + +_Some Experiences of an Irish R.M._, 6. + +Somerville, E. Oe., and Martin Ross, 6. + +_Sospiri di Roma_, 257, 258. + +_Sowing the Wind_, 104. + +Spenser, Edmund, 38, 39, 123. + +Spoer, Ada Goodrich-Freer, 274. + +_Spreading the News_, 150, 151. + +_Squireen, The_, 7, 236, 271. + +Stage Society, the, London, 53, 112, 252. + +Stephens, James, 8. + +Stevenson, Robert Louis, 49, 260, 272, 289. + +Stokes, Whitley, 140. + +Strand Theatre, the, London, 81. + +_Strike at Arlingford, The_, 103, 104. + +_Studies_, 200. + +Sutherland, 272. + +Swift, Jonathan, 13, 173, 196, 282. + +Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 43, 49. + +Symbolism, 65-67, 126, 176. + +Synge, John Millington, 15, 22, 26, 31, 32, 47, 61, 114, 148, 149, 155, + 160-197, 205, 206, 238, 239, 240, 242, 285. + _Aran Islands_, 168, 187, 188, 191; + _Deirdre of the Sorrows_, 163, 166-168, 181, 183, 192, 196, 197, + 285; + "In Kerry," 164; + verse, 192-194; + "Preludes," 193; + _Playboy of the Western World_, 23, 26, 31, 32, 33, 75, 149, + 163, 164, 166, 170, 171, 176, 178, 180, 182, 184, 196, 218, 228; + _Riders to the Sea_, 149, 162, 178, 179, 181, 183, 195, 197; + _In the Shadow of the Glen_, 32, 60, 77, 162, 168, 169, 175, + 178, 181, 184, 190, 195, 218; + _The Tinker's Wedding_, 111, 163, 171, 174, 180, 182, 190, 196; + _Well of the Saints_, 23, 29, 164, 170, 175, 177, 178, 182, 190, + 196, 218. + + +_Tables of the Law, The_, 41. + +_Tale of a Town, A_, 75, 76, 78, 81, 87-90, 105, 112, 213. + +Taliaferro, Mabel, 50. + +Taylor, Thomas, 117. + +_Tempest, The_, 45. + +_Tess of the D'Urbervilles_, 7, 258. + +Thackeray, W.M., 6, 101. + +Théâtre Français, 17. + +Theatre of Ireland, the, 35, 202. + +Theatre Royal, Dublin, 30. + +_Thomas Muskerry_, 199, 200, 206. + +Thompson, Francis, 135. + +Thoreau, Henry David, 290, 291. + +_Through the Turf Smoke_, 7. + +_Time_, 242. + +_Tinker's Wedding, The_, 111, 163, 171, 174, 180, 182, 190, 196. + +Tipperary, 171. + +_Travelling Man, A_, 153. + +_Treasure of the Humble, The_, 115. + +Trench, Herbert, 11. + +Trinity College, 32, 33. + +Trollope, Anthony, 271. + +_Troth, The_, 235, 237. + +_Turn of the Road, The_, 216, 235, 238, 239. + +_Twenty-five_, 32, 152. + +_Twilight People, The_, 11. + +_Twisting of the Rope, The_, 107. + +_Two Essays on the Remnant_, 8. + + +Ulster, 215, 240, 245, 246. + +Ulster Literary Theatre, the, 35, 239, 243. + +_Unicorn from the Stars, The_, 27, 53-56. + +_Untilled Field, The_, 101, 102, 111, 112. + +Upanishads, 117. + + +Villon, François, 182. + +_Vistas_, 251, 252, 253, 259, 260, 273. + +Von Teuffel, Mrs., 261. + + +Wales, 2, 3, 4. + +Walker, Mary, 20, 21, 22. + +_Wanderings of Oisin, The_, 1, 39, 40, 41, 63, 64, 139. + +_Washer of the Ford, The_, 263, 283. + +Watts, George Frederic, 122. + +_Waverley_, 272. + +Weekes, Charles, 116. + +_Weir of Hermiston_, 272. + +_Well of the Saints, The_, 23, 29, 164, 170, 175, 177, 178, 182, + 190, 196, 218. + +Wessex, 7, 258. + +West Britons, 32. + +_West Irish Folk-Tales_, 9. + +Wexford, 141, 152. + +_Wheel o' Fortune, The_, 216. + +_Where the Forest Murmurs_, 263, 285, 289, 290. + +_Where there is Nothing_, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56. + +White, Gilbert, 290. + +_White Cockade, The_, 152. + +Whitman, Walt, 39, 173, 193, 294. + +Wicklow, 162, 166, 170, 177, 184, 190, 216. + +_Wild Duck, The_, 80, 91. + +_Wild Earth_, 200, 208. + +_Wild Goose, The_, 101. + +Wilde, Oscar, 13, 53, 245. + +Wilde, Lady, 51. + +_William Sharp: A Memoir_, 262, 279, 290. + +_Wind among the Reeds, The_, 43, 54. + +_Winged Destiny, The_, 263, 274, 293. + +_Wives in Exile_, 261, 264. + +Wolfe, Charles, 94. + +_Woman of no Importance, A_, 245. + +Wordsworth, 48, 94, 265. + +Workhouse Ward, The, 152, 154. + +Wycherly, Margaret, 51. + +Yeats, J.B., Sr., 38, 119. + +Yeats, J.B., Jr., 118, 119. + +Yeats, W.B., 1, 5, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 25, 26, + 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 36, 37-71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 81, 85, 88, + 92, 94, 95, 97, 98, 102, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 114, 115, + 116, 117, 123, 139, 145, 146, 148, 155, 158, 162, 179, 199, 251, 252, + 253, 255, 259, 269, 279, 285, 286. + _Cathleen ni Houlihan_, 10, 17, 19, 31, 50-51, 53, 54, 55, 77; + _Celtic Twilight_, 37, 41, 42, 54; + _Countess Cathleen_, 18, 32, 43, 47, 48-49, 50, 51, 59, 64, 69, + 78; + _Deirdre_, 23, 27, 28, 44, 56, 61-63; + _Dhoya_, 41, 286; + _Diarmid and Grania_, 32, 106-110, 143; + _Discoveries_, 42; + _The Golden Helmet_, 27, 63; + _The Green Helmet_, 63; + _The Hour-Glass_, 10, 27, 28, 51-52, 54; + _Ideas of Good and Evil_ 42; + _The Island of Statues_, 47; + _John Sherman and Dhoya_, 41; + _The King's Threshold_, 60, 69; + _The Land of Heart's Desire_, 25, 43, 49-50, 51, 59; + _Mosada_, 47; + _On Baile's Strand_, 27, 28, 58, 59; + _A Pot of Broth_, 22, 32, 51, 52, 54; + _The Secret Rose_, 41, 54; + _In the Seven Woods_, 43; + _The Shadowy Waters_, 28, 56-58, 60; + _The Tables of the Law_, 41; + "The Valley of the Black Pig," 50, 65, 66, 67; + _Wanderings of Oisin_, 1, 39, 40, 41, 63, 64, 139; + _Where there is Nothing_, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56; + _The Wind among the Reeds_, 43. + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's Irish Plays and Playwrights, by Cornelius Weygandt + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IRISH PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS *** + +***** This file should be named 19028-8.txt or 19028-8.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/1/9/0/2/19028/ + +Produced by Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Irish Plays and Playwrights + +Author: Cornelius Weygandt + +Release Date: August 11, 2006 [EBook #19028] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IRISH PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS *** + + + + +Produced by Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net + + + + + + +</pre> + + + +<div class="text"> +<div class="front"> +<div style="text-align: center;"> + +<h2>Irish Plays And Playwrights</h2> + +<p>by</p> + +<p>Cornelius Weygandt</p> + +<p>with illustrations</p> + +<p style="text-align: center"> +<img src="images/image13.jpg" alt=""></p> + +<p>BOSTON AND NEW YORK</p> + +<p>HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY<br> +The Riverside Press Cambridge</p> + +<p>COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY CORNELIUS WEYGANDT<br> +ALL RIGHTS RESERVED<br> +<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Published February 1913</span></p> + + + +</div> + +<div> +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a name="illo_1" id="illo_1"></a><img src="images/image01.jpg" alt="W.B. Yeats"></p> +<p style="text-align: center">W.B. Yeats</p> +</div> + +<hr class="page"> + +<div> +<a name="toc_1"></a> +<h2>Preface</h2> + + +<p>There are so many who have helped me with this book that I cannot begin +to thank them one by one. If I name any, however, there are four I would +name together. There is my old friend, long since dead, Lawrence Kelly, +of County Wexford, who first told me Irish folk-stories, adding to the +wonderment of my boyhood with his tales of Finn McCool, Dean Swift, and +"The Red-haired Man." There is Dr. Robert Ellis Thompson, of +Philadelphia, who quickened, by his enthusiasm, over "twenty golden +years ago," my interest in all things Irish. There is Dr. Clarence +Griffin Child, my colleague, who recognized the power of these men I +write of in "Irish Plays and Playwrights" when there were fewer to +recognize their power than there are to-day. There is Mr. John Quinn, of +New York, without whose aid ten years ago the current Irish dramatic +movement would not have progressed as it has. He has lent for +reproduction here the sketches by Mr. J.B. Yeats of Synge, Mr. George +Moore, and Mr. Padraic Colum. All but all of the writers I mention +particularly in these chapters have put me under obligation by cheerful +response to many letters full of questions as to their work. Mr. James +H. Cousins and Mr. S. Lennox Robinson have taken especial trouble in my +behalf, and Lady Gregory, Mr. W.B. Yeats, and Mr. George W. Russell have +put themselves out in many ways that I might learn of Irish Letters.</p> + +<p>UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, December 28, 1912.</p> +</div> + +<hr class="page"> + +<div class="div" id="toc"><a name="toc_2"></a><h2>Contents</h2><ul class="toc"> +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#toc_1">Preface</a></li> +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#toc_2">Contents</a></li> +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#toc_3">Chapter I—The Celtic Renaissance</a></li> + +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#toc_4">Chapter II—The Players And Their Plays, Their Audience And Their Art</a></li> +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#toc_5">Chapter III—Mr. William Butler Yeats</a></li> +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#toc_6">Chapter IV—Mr. Edward Martyn And Mr. George Moore</a></li> +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#toc_7">Chapter V—Mr. George W. Russell ("A.E")</a></li> +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#toc_8">Chapter VI—Lady Gregory</a></li> +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#toc_9">Chapter VII—John Millington Synge</a></li> + +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#toc_10">Chapter VIII—The Younger Dramatists—Mr. Padraic Colum—Mr. William Boyle—Mr. T.C. Murray—Mr. S. Lennox Robinson—Mr. Rutherford Mayne—"Norreys Connell"—Mr. St. John G. Ervine—Mr. Joseph Campbell</a></li> +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#toc_11">Chapter IX—William Sharp ("Fiona Macleod")</a></li> +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#toc_12">Appendix</a></li> +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#toc_13">Index</a></li> + +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#toc_14">Notes</a></li> +</ul></div> + +</div> + +<hr class="page"> + +<div class="div" id="illustrations"><a name="illustrationlist"></a><h2>Illustrations</h2><ul class="toc"> + + +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#illo_1">W.B. YEATS</a> <i>From a photograph by Alice Boughton</i>.</li> +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#illo_2">DOUGLAS HYDE</a> <i>From a photograph by Alice Boughton</i>.</li> + +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#illo_3">SARA ALLGOOD</a> <i>From a photograph by Alice Boughton</i>.</li> + +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#illo_4">SCENE FROM "CATHLEEN NI HOULIHAN"</a> </li> + +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#illo_5">GEORGE MOORE</a> <i>Reproduced by courtesy of John Quinn, Esq.</i></li> + +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#illo_6">GEORGE W. RUSSELL</a></li> + +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#illo_7">LADY GREGORY </a></li> + +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#illo_8">JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE</a> <i>Reproduced by courtesy of John Quinn, Esq.</i></li> + +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#illo_9">PADRAIC COLUM</a> <i>Reproduced by courtesy of John Quinn, Esq.</i></li> + +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#illo_10">T.C. MURRAY</a></li> + +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#illo_11">LENNOX ROBINSON</a> <i>From a photograph by Alice Boughton</i>.</li> + +<li style="margin: 0em 0em;"><a href="#illo_12">WILLIAM SHARP</a></li> +</ul></div> + +</div> + +<div class="body"> + +<hr class="page"> + +<div> +<h2>IRISH PLAY AND PLAYWRIGHTS</h2> +<p></p> +</div> + +<div> + +<a name="page1" id="page1"></a> +<a name="toc_3"></a> +<h2>Chapter I</h2> +<h2 class="sub">The Celtic Renaissance</h2> + + +<p>To the general reader the Celtic Renaissance was a surprise, and even to +Irish writers deeply interested in their country the phenomenon or +movement, call it which you will, was not appreciated as of much +significance at its beginning. Writing in 1892, Miss Jane Barlow was not +hopeful for the immediate future of English literature in Ireland;—it +seemed to her "difficult to point out any quarter of the horizon as a +probable source of rising light." Yet Mr. Yeats had published his +"Wanderings of Oisin" three years before; Mr. Russell had already +gathered about him a group of eager young writers; and Dr. Hyde was +organizing the Gaelic League, to give back to Ireland her language and +civilization, and translating from the Gaelic "The Love Songs of +Connacht" (1894) into an English of so new and masterful a rhythm, that +it was to dominate the style of many of the writers of the movement, as +the burden of the verse was to confirm them in the feelings and +attitudes of mind, centuries old and of to-day, that are basic to the +Irish Gael. Even in 1894, when Mrs. Katherine Tynan Hinkson wrote the + +<a name="page2" id="page2"></a> +article that for the first time brought before America so many of the +younger English poets, all that she said of the Renaissance was, "A very +large proportion of the Bodley Head poets are Celts,—Irish, Welsh, +Cornish." She had scarcely so spoken when there appeared the little +volume, "The Revival of Irish Literature," whose chapters, reprinted +addresses delivered before she had spoken by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy and +Dr. George Sigerson and; Dr. Douglas Hyde, turned the attention of the +younger men to literature, the fall of Parnell and the ensuing decline +of political agitation having given them a chance to think of something +else than politics. In 1895 all the English-speaking world that heeds +letters was talking of the Celtic Renaissance, so quickly did news of it +find its way to men, when it was once more than whispered of abroad. It +was as frequently referred to then as "The Irish Renaissance," because +Ireland contributed most to it and because it was in Ireland that it +acquired its most definite purpose. This purpose was to retell in +English the old Irish legends and the still current Irish folk-songs, +and to catch and preserve the moods of Irish men and women of to-day, +especially those moods which came to them out of their brooding over +Ireland, its history, its landscape, the temper of its people. It would +be absurd, of course, to regard all of the writing of the movement as a +result of a definite literary propaganda, but the very fact that we +instinctively speak of the Celtic Renaissance as a movement rather than +as a phenomenon proves that it was that in part. But even that part of +it that was a result of propaganda came not from an intention to realize +the + +<a name="page3" id="page3"></a> +tenets of the propaganda, but from the kindling of Irish hearts by +thoughts that came of the propaganda, thoughts of the great past of +Ireland, of its romance of yesterday and to-day, of its spirituality.</p> + +<p>It is not so easy to account for the less quickening of the other Celtic +countries by the forces that brought about the Renaissance. Renan, in +his "Poetry of the Celtic Races" (1859), and Arnold, in his "On the +Study of Celtic Literature" (1867), had roused all the Celtic countries +to an interest in their old literature, an interest that extended much +further than discussion of the authenticity of Macpherson's "Ossian" or +of the proper treatment of Arthurian stories, until then the Ultima +Thule of talk on things Celtic. Frenchman and Englishman both had spoken +to Wales and Brittany, the Highlands of Scotland and the Isle of Man, as +well as to Ireland, and it does not altogether explain to say that +Ireland listened best because in Ireland there was a greater sense of +nationality than in these other lands. Ireland did listen, it is true, +and, listening, developed popularizers of the old tales such as Mr. +Standish James O'Grady and Dr. P.W. Joyce, to pass knowledge of them +along to the men of letters. It is hardly true, indeed, to say that +Ireland had a greater sense of nationality than Brittany or Wales. +Brittany, of course, since her tongue other than her native Breton was +French, gave what was given to the movement in other than Breton in +French. Cornwall may hardly be called a Celtic country, but if it may it +is easy to account for its slight interest in the movement by the little +that was preserved of its old literature and by the + +<a name="page4" id="page4"></a> +little it had of +distinctive oral tradition to draw upon. And yet, I think, had Sir +Arthur T. Quiller-Couch been born ten years later Cornwall had not +wanted a shanachie. Wales, too, gave little to English literature as the +result of the Renaissance, because, perhaps, her chiefest literary +energy is in her native language. Wales was proud of George Meredith, +whose Welsh ancestry is more evident in his work than is his Irish +ancestry, but not only is his writing representative of Great Britain +rather than of any one part of Great Britain, but his say had been said +before the movement began. The writing of Mr. Ernest Rhys underwent a +change because of his interest in the Celtic Renaissance, but Wales has +little writing outside of his to point to as a result of the awakening. +In Scotland, William Sharp, whose "Lyra Celtica" (1896) was a prominent +agent in bringing the Renaissance before the world, was transformed into +another writer by it. His work as "Fiona Macleod," both prose and verse, +was very different from his earlier work in prose and verse. Mr. Neil +Munro, too, was affected by the Renaissance, and in the tales of "The +Lost Pibroch" (1896) and in the novels of "John Splendid" (1898) and +"Gillian the Dreamer" (1899) and "The Children of Tempest" (1903) he +reveals an intimacy with Highland life such as informs the writing of no +other novelist of our day. Of recent years Mr. Munro has wandered +farther afield than his native Argyll, and, I feel, to the lessening of +the beauty of his writing. In the Isle of Man, T.E. Brown had been +striving for years to put into his stories in verse the fast-decaying +Celtic life of his country, but even with his example + +<a name="page5" id="page5"></a> +and with all that +has been done since the Renaissance began, in the preservation of Manx +folk-lore and in the recording of vanishing Manx customs, no writer of +Brown's power has been developed, or in fact any writer of powers equal +to those of the best men of the younger generation in the other Celtic +lands. It is with the Celtic Renaissance as it appears in Ireland, then, +that I have to deal chiefly in this book, as it is only in Ireland, of +the countries that retain a Celtic culture, that the movement is the +dominating influence in writing in English; and it is with the drama +only that I have now to deal, though when a playwright is a poet or a +story-teller, too, I have written of his attainment in verse and tale +also. Had I been writing five years ago, I should have said that it was +in poetry that the Celtic Renaissance had attained most nobly, but since +then the drama has had more recruits of power than has poetry, and it is +a question as to which of the two is greater as art. There is no doubt, +however, but that the drama has made a stronger and wider appeal, +whatever its excellence, than has the verse, and it is therefore of +greater significance for its time than is the poetry, whatever the +ultimate appraisement will be. Of the men I have written of here, Mr. +Yeats and Mr. Russell are to me poets before they are dramatists, and +Lionel Johnson, whose only direct connection with the dramatic movement +was his beautiful prologue in verse to the first performances of "The +Irish Literary Theatre" in 1899, is to me a poet of a power as great as +theirs.</p> + +<p>One wonders, at first thought, that Ireland had never until our day +given to English literature a novelist of + +<a name="page6" id="page6"></a> +first rank. The Irishman is +famous the world over as a story-teller, but neither in romance nor in +the story of character had he reached first power, reached a position +where he might be put alongside of other Europeans as a novelist. No +Irishman from the time of Scott on, until Mr. George Moore wrote "Esther +Waters" (1894), had written a story that might stand the inevitable +comparison with the work of Thackeray and Dickens, Meredith and Mr. +Hardy. Of Mr. George Moore I have written in detail below.</p> + +<p>Miss Edgeworth may have taught Scott his manner of delineating peasant +character, but her comparatively little power is revealed when you put +her beside Miss Austen, and so it is all the way down the list to our +own day. There are many contemporary story-tellers who have managed well +the tale, but what Irish novelist of to-day other than Mr. Moore bulks +big, can be compared to even lesser men, like Scotland's Mr. Neil Munro +or Dartmoor's Mr. Phillpotts?</p> + +<p>Lady Gilbert (Rosa Mulholland) has written many, pleasant stories of +Irish life, and Mrs. Katherine Tynan Hinkson has followed worthily in +her footsteps. Equally pleasant, but lighter and more superficial, is +the writing of the two ladies who subscribe their names "E.OE. +Somerville and Martin Ross." Their "Some Experiences of an Irish R.M." +(1899) and their "All on the Irish Shore" (1903) are like so much of the +Irish writing of a generation ago,—Irish stories by Irish people for +English people to laugh at.</p> + +<p>The Hon. Emily Lawless has written many kinds of + +<a name="page7" id="page7"></a> +stories about the West +Coast, reaching almost to greatness in her "Grania" (1892). In the short +story, Miss Jane Barlow, accused of superficiality by many Irish critics +and as eagerly declared to get the very quality of Connemara peasant +life by others, has sure power and a charm all her own. No one who reads +"Irish Idylls" (1892) will stop at that collection. Mr. Seumas MacManus +is as truly a shanachie as the old story-tellers that yet tell the old +tales about peat fires in Donegal. "Through the Turf Smoke" (1899) and +"In Chimney Corners" (1899) and "Donegal Fairy Stories" (1900) are alike +in having the accent of the spoken story, but when the last word is said +you cannot admit their author to be more than a clever entertainer. The +Rev. Dr. Sheehan, although you will find him writing about the effect of +the Irish Renaissance in remote parishes in the South, has not +subscribed to its ideals, but continues the fashion of story-writing of +an earlier generation. "Luke Delmege" (1900) is, however, an interesting +character study, and "My New Curate" (1899) very illuminative of the +conservatism of the peasantry.</p> + +<p>Mr. Shan Bullock, writing of the farmers and farm laborers of the North, +has not unwisely gone to Mr. Hardy to learn his art. "Irish Pastorals" +(1901) is racy of Fermanagh as "Tess" is of Wessex. "The Squireen" +(1903) is a strong and gloomy story. From "By Thrasna River" (1895) to +"Dan the Dollar" (1905), Mr. Bullock did no story without power in it. +Ireland still looks to him as it looked to Mr. William Buckley, ten +years ago, for better work. "Croppies Lie Down" brought Mr. Buckley + +<a name="page8" id="page8"></a> +before the public in 1903, but his writing since then has fallen far +short of this his best book. Now, however, the young man with a future, +in the estimation of many is Mr. James Stephens. There is more hope in +him, in his twenties, than there is now in "George A. Birmingham" (Rev. +J.O. Hannay), another man who ten years ago was like Mr. Buckley, a +young man of promise. "The Seething Pot" (1904) was a serious study of +conditions in Ireland but since its author conceived of the character of +the Rev. Joseph John Meldon, he has found it more discreet to continue +the adventures of that clergyman than to write seriously out of his own +varied experience of West-Country Irish life.</p> + +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a name="illo_2" id="illo_2"></a><img src="images/image02.jpg" alt="Douglas Hyde"></p> + +<p style="text-align: center">Douglas Hyde</p> + +<p>It is perhaps because the energy that in many countries goes into the +writing of the essay is absorbed in controversy in Ireland that in the +past Ireland has produced few essayists. In the battles of the dramatic +movement with the patriotic societies and with the official class, Mr. +Yeats and Mr. Moore have dealt good blows, and Mr. Russell and "John +Eglinton" (Mr. W.K. Magee) have led the disputants out of their +confusion. Among these men, "John Eglinton" is the one who has thrown +his greatest energy into the essay, almost all his energy, and in it, in +the chapters of "Two Essays on the Remnant" (1896), "Pebbles from a +Brook" (1901), and "Bards and Saints" (1906), he has written with +subtlety and illumination.</p> + +<p>In the collection and clarification and retelling of folk-literature +William Larminie and Lady Gregory and Dr. Hyde stand out as the leading +workers. Mr. Larminie's + +<a name="page9" id="page9"></a> +"West Irish Folk-Tales" (1895) are model work +of their kind as are Lady Gregory's several books, of which I speak in +detail later. The work of Dr. Hyde is the most important work of this +sort, however, and it is not too much to say, as I intimated at the +outset, that, without his translation of "The Love Songs of Connacht" +(1894) and "The Religious Songs of Connacht" (1906), the prose of the +movement would never have attained that distinction of rhythm which +reveals English almost as a new language. I would gladly have written at +length of Dr. Hyde, but he has chosen to write his plays in Irish as +well as most of his verses. Yet so winning are the plays as translated +by Lady Gregory, and so greatly have they influenced the folk-plays in +English of the Abbey Theatre, that there is almost warrant for including +him. I cannot, of course, but I must at least bear testimony to the many +powers of these plays. Dr. Hyde can be trenchant, when satire is his +object, as in "The Bursting of the Bubble" (1903); or alive with +merriment when merriment is his desire, as in "The Poorhouse" (1903); or +full of quiet beauty when he writes of holy things, as in the "Lost +Saint" (1902). There are many other playwrights in Irish than Dr. Hyde, +but as no other plays in Irish than his have reacted to any extent on +the plays in English of the movement, I do not consider them, my object +in this book being to consider the dramatic writing in English of the +Celtic Renaissance, with relation to its value as a contribution to the +art of English letters. That there is a great deal else in the Celtic +Renaissance than its drama, I would, however, emphasize, though it is +true that + +<a name="page10" id="page10"></a> +every man of first literary power in the movement, except +Lionel Johnson and "John Eglinton," has tried his hand on at least one +Irish play. That Johnson would have come to write drama I firmly +believe, for in drama he could have reconciled two of the four loves +that were his life. He could not have put his love of Winchester, his +school, or his love of the classics into plays, but his love of Ireland +and his love of the Catholic Church would have blended, I believe, into +plays, still with the cloistered life of the seventh century, that would +have rivaled "The Hour-Glass," and plays about "Ninety-Eight" that would +have rivaled "Cathleen Houlihan."</p> + +<p>There are many other poets, though, of the Celtic Renaissance that are +of powers only short of greatness, Nora Hopper Chesson chief among them. +Only Mr. W.B. Yeats of them all has more "natural falterings" in his +verse than she. Mrs. Hinkson, too, whose name has come inevitably into +these pages from time to time, is a poet with as sure a place in English +literature to-day as has Mrs. Meynell. Beginning, like Mr. Yeats, as an +imitator of the Pre-Raphaelites, Mrs. Hinkson found herself in little +poems on moods of her own and moods of landscape She writes also of her +love of God, of St. Francis, and of Ireland. "Moira O'Neill" (Mrs. +Skrine), too, has a sure place, her verses crying out her homesickness +for Ireland, and redolent, every line of them, of the countryside. "The +Passing of the Gael" is known wherever there are Irish emigrants, but +there are other verses of "Ethna Carberry" (Mrs. Anna Johnstone +MacManus) that are + + +<a name="page11" id="page11"></a> +as fine as this. Mrs. Dora Sigerson Shorter is a +balladist of stark power, and Miss Eva Gore-Booth a lyric poet whose +natural lilt no preoccupation with mysticism can for more than a moment +obscure.</p> + +<p>Mr. Herbert Trench has of recent years surrendered to theatrical +management, but there is to his credit a substantial accomplishment of +lyrical verse that George Meredith would have approved. Mr. Colum's +verse I have spoken of below, incidentally, in considering his plays. A +distinct talent, too, is Mr. Seumas O'Sullivan's, whose "Twilight +People" (1905) indicates by its title the quality of his verse.</p> + +<p>I have mentioned all these writers, some known in America, but others +utterly unknown, not only to indicate the relation of the drama to the +other literary forms of the Renaissance, but to account, perhaps in some +measure, for the literary quality of the plays themselves. They are +written, as plays in English during the past century have too seldom +been written, by writers who have read widely in all forms of literature +and to whom words are, if not "the only good," at least a chief good. +Mr. Russell and Mr. Yeats have sent all the younger men who would write +to the masterpieces of the world, telling them to get what they need of +the technique of the centre, to know the best in the world, but to write +of the ground under their feet. The plays are, as I have said, written, +many of them, by men who are widely read, and by men whose friends are +writers of some other form of literature, by men who wish their work in +drama to be of as high intention as the work of their friends who are +poets or + +<a name="page12" id="page12"></a> +essayists or writers of stories. All the other writing the +Renaissance has, then, contributed to make of the drama what it is, and +one must, if one would see the drama in relation to the Ireland of our +day, know what is the accomplishment of the other sorts of writing of +the Renaissance.</p> +</div> + +<hr class="page"> + +<div> + +<a name="page13" id="page13"></a> +<a name="toc_4"></a> +<h2>Chapter II</h2> + +<h2 class="sub">The Players And Their Plays, Their Audience And Their Art</h2> + + +<p>The drama of the Celtic Renaissance is of an ancestry as mixed as is +that of the people of Ireland themselves. There is less in it perhaps of +the Gael than in them, for Gaelic literature, until to-day, never +approached nearer to the drama than the dialogue, the racy give-and-take +of two characters, alike of lively imagination, whether gentle or +simple. But even had the colloquies of St. Patrick and Oisin, of Dean +Swift and his man Jack, of the Lout and his Mother, been developed, by +1890, to a drama as finished as that of Congreve or Goldsmith, Sheridan +or Wilde, those who would have their plays abreast of our time would +have gone, just as, with the conditions as they are, the dramatists of +the Renaissance did go, to Ibsen and M. Maeterlinck, like all the rest +of the world. It is a matter of reproach, in the estimation of many +patriotic Irishmen, that Mr. Martyn learned his art of Ibsen, and Mr. +Yeats a part of his of M. Maeterlinck, but that attitude is as +unreasonable as that which would reproach the Irish Industries +Organization Society for studying Danish dairy farms or Belgian +chickeries. It is only the technique of the foreigners, modern or +ancient, Scandinavian or Greek, that the Abbey dramatists have acquired +or have adapted to Irish usage. Stories + +<a name="page14" id="page14"></a> +are world-wide, of course, the +folk-tale told by the Derry hearthside being told also in the tent in +Turkestan—Cuchulain kills his son as Rustum does, and the Queen of +Fairy lures Bran oversea as Venus lures Tannhäuser to the Hörselberg. It +is in character, in ideals, in atmosphere, in color, that drama must be +native, and in color and in atmosphere, in ideals and in character the +Abbey Theatre drama is Irish. Reading of life and style are personal +qualities, qualities of the artist himself, though they, too, may take +tone and color from national life, and in the drama of many of the Abbey +dramatists they do. These dramatists have been more resolutely native, +in fact, many of them, than the national dramatists of other countries +have been, of France and Germany to-day, of the Spain or the England of +the Renaissance. It would seem idle to be saying this were not the +contention being raised all the time by certain patriotic groups of +Irishmen in America as well as in Ireland that the new drama is not a +native drama. It is, as a matter of fact, no less natively Irish than +the Elizabethan drama is natively English; it is really more native, for +no part of it of moment veils its nationality under even so slight a +disguise as "the Italian convention" of that drama. The new Irish drama +is more native in its stories than is the Elizabethan drama, as these +stories, even when they are stories found in variant forms in other +countries, are given the tones of Irish life. The structural forms and +the symbolic presentation of ideas of which the Abbey dramatists have +availed themselves have no more denationalized their plays than has the +Church, a Church from oversea, to + +<a name="page15" id="page15"></a> + +which most of them belong, +denationalized the Irish people.</p> + +<p>Synge, the master dramatist of the new movement, while he does not +reproduce the average Irishman, is just as natively Irish in his +extravagance and irony as the old folk-tale of the "Two Hags"; Lady +Gregory in her farces is in a similar way representative of the riot of +West-Country imagination; and Mr. Yeats, if further removed from the +Irishmen of to-day, is very like, in many of his moods, to the riddling +bards of long ago. The later men, many of them, are altogether Irish, +representative of the folk of one or another section of the country, Mr. +Murray and Mr. Robinson of Cork, Mr. Mayne and Mr. Ervine of Down, Mr. +Colum and Mr. Boyle of the Midlands.</p> + +<p>One need not say that the Irishman is a born actor; all the Celts are +famed for "the beautiful speaking"; for eloquence; for powers of +impersonation; for quick changes of mood; for ease in running the gamut +of the emotions. Of these things come art of the stage, and these things +are the Irishman's in fullest measure. The Abbey Players have, however, +gone abroad for some elements of their art, perhaps for their repose of +manner, a quietude that is not the quietude of moodiness, a condition +not unusual in the Irishman; and in addition to this repose of manner, +which is fundamental and common to their presentation of realistic +modern plays and of poetic plays of legendary times, for a slowness and +dignity of gesture in the plays of legend, which is perhaps a borrowing +from the classic stage. Their repose of manner may come from modern + +<a name="page16" id="page16"></a> +France; at least so held Mr. Yeats, pointing to such a source in +"Samhain" of 1902.</p> + + <div class="display"><p> The other day [he writes] I saw Sara + Bernhardt and DeMax in "Phèdre," and understood where Mr. Fay, who + stage-manages the National Theatrical Company, had gone for his + model. For long periods the performers would merely stand and pose, + and I once counted twenty-seven quite slowly before anybody on a + fairly well-filled stage moved, as it seemed, so much as an eyelash. + The periods of stillness were generally shorter, but I frequently + counted seventeen, eighteen, or twenty before there was a movement. + I noticed, too, that the gestures had a rhythmic progression. Sara + Bernhardt would keep her hands clasped over, let us say, her right + breast for some time, and then move them to the other side, perhaps, + lowering her chin till it touched her hands, and then, after another + long stillness, she would unclasp them and hold one out, and so on, + not lowering them till she had exhausted all the gestures of + uplifted hands. Through one long scene DeMax, who was quite as fine, + never lifted his hand above his elbow, and it was only when the + emotion came to its climax that he raised it to his breast. Beyond + them stood a crowd of white-robed men who never moved at all, and + the whole scene had the nobility of Greek sculpture, and an + extraordinary reality and intensity. It was the most beautiful thing + I had ever seen upon the stage, and made me understand, in a new + way, that saying of Goethe's which is understood everywhere but in + England, "Art is art because it is not nature." Of course, our + amateurs were poor and crude beside those great actors, perhaps the + greatest in Europe, but they followed them as well as they could, + and got an audience of artisans, for the most part, to admire them + for doing it.</p> </div> + +<p>With these words of Mr. Yeats, written ten years ago, in my memory, it +was arresting to hear ten years later a somewhat similar comparison of +the acting of the Irish Players to the acting of yesterday on the French +stage. + +<a name="page17" id="page17"></a> +A man who in the late eighties and early nineties had spent +seven years as an art student in Paris saw the Abbey Players in Boston. +In Paris he had gone frequently to the Théâtre Français, and only there, +he said, before he saw the Irish Players, had he seen acting so full of +dignity, but never at all before acting so natural.</p> + +<p>There is possible, too, however, a native origin for this repose of +manner, or perhaps it would be truest to say that it is a blending, like +the dramas themselves, of native and foreign elements. Speaking of +"Cathleen ni Houlihan" in the notes to his "Collected Works" of 1908, +Mr. Yeats says, "I cannot imagine this play, or any folk-play of our +school, acted by players with no knowledge of the peasant, and of the +awkwardness and stillness of bodies that have followed the plow, or too +lacking in humility to copy these things without convention or +caricature." Here, too, he refers to the "quiet movement and careful +speech which has given our players some little fame" as "arising partly +out of deliberate opinion and partly out of the ignorance of the +players."</p> + +<p>Undoubtedly Mr. Fay knew the still ways of the peasant, and I do not +doubt that he was influenced by such knowledge and did in some degree +train his actors to bring their movements on the stage in accord with +the "awkwardness and stillness of bodies that have followed the plow." +But since there are ways of the peasant that are far from still, it is +likely, too, that he was led to select such movements, instead of the +vehement gesture and lively facial expression that are just as +characteristic of the peasant, by a memory of the restrained acting of +the + +<a name="page18" id="page18"></a> +French stage. It is likely, too, that the very inexperience and +lack of knowledge of artifice to which Mr. Yeats refers was an element +in making the art of the company what it became. But it is not +altogether impossible that certain traditions of the English stage—of +the statuesque acting of the Kembles, for instance—had come down into +the time of Mr. Fay's stage experience, to those days before he became +stage manager of the performances of "The Daughters of Erin" in 1900, +and that these traditions influenced his training of the company that +was to attain to a new art of the stage.</p> + +<p>Before this there had been two series of performances in Dublin, each of +a week's duration, by "The Irish Literary Theatre," one in 1899, and the +other in 1900, with English actors gathered together in London by Mr. +George Moore; and another week's series followed in 1901 by the Benson +Company and some amateurs of the Gaelic League under the leadership of +Dr. Douglas Hyde. It was the performances of "The Countess Cathleen" of +Mr. Yeats and of "The Heather Field" of Mr. Martyn at the Antient +Concert Rooms in Dublin, respectively May 8 and 9, 1899, by "The Irish +Literary Theatre," that inaugurated the drama of the Celtic Renaissance, +fully a year before there came into being the group of amateurs that +were to bring that drama home to Ireland as no players who inherited the +standards and conventions of the English stage could possibly have +brought it home.</p> + +<p>It is Mr. Fay's distinction to have been, as I have intimated, the +leader who started these players on the long way to their new art. Such +leadership his record hardly + +<a name="page19" id="page19"></a> +augered. It was in the very lowest forms +of vaudeville, in what is the analogue abroad of our negro minstrelsy, +that Mr. Fay had his stage experience, a stage experience that had made +him well enough known in burlesque rôles to make it difficult for him to +assume with success serious rôles in the early years of the National +Dramatic Company. Because of this old association, Dublin audiences +insisted in 1902 in seeing humor in his Peter Gillane in "Cathleen ni +Houlihan." For all this past, however, Mr. Fay was intent on serious +drama, and, with the precept and example of Mr. Russell and Mr. Yeats +always present to him in the early days of the National Theatre Company, +and with what he had gathered from the experimental performance of Irish +plays by "The Irish Literary Theatre," he advanced surely in his art +until his withdrawal from the company in January, 1908. His loss was +compensated for only by the results of his training of other actors, +such as Miss Sara Allgood and Mr. Arthur Sinclair, who on certain roads +have outrun their master. When I saw Mr. Fay in 1902, in the little hall +in Camden Street, Dublin, with no knowledge of what his stage experience +had been, I accepted him at once for what he was, a finished "character" +actor of poise and confidence, a dignified figure for all his stature +and his predilection for comedy, and the possessor of a speaking voice +whose natural pleasantness he had made into something higher than +pleasantness by his art in the use of it, if it never attained the +resonance and nobility of phrasing of that of his brother, Mr. Frank J. +Fay. It was a memorable experience to me, that of that August evening in +1902 on + +<a name="page20" id="page20"></a> +which I was taken to Camden Street to a rehearsal of the Irish +National Dramatic Company. Our guide was Mr. James H. Cousins, whose +"Racing Lug" and "Connla" were among the plays produced in the following +autumn and which that night were in rehearsal. He piloted us to an +entranceway by the side of a produce shop. We knocked on the door and +waited, and waited. We knocked again, and at last heard steps coming +nearer and nearer. The door opened and revealed a young man in +work-a-day black suit and derby, with a candle in one hand and a +property spear in the other. He conducted us down a narrow, drafty +hallway, into a hall in which were wooden benches as rude as those in +the bandstand of a backwoods country fair in the States, and a slightly +raised platform at the farther end. We were soon in eager conversation +with young store clerks and typists and artisans who were about to set +to work at that in which their hearts lay, the interpreting of plays out +of Ireland's heart. It was good talk we listened to from those young men +and women, boys and girls all of them in their fervor and zest and high +aim. Their enthusiasm carried through "Connla," "The Racing Lug," and +"Deirdre" with real impressiveness. Of Mr. Cousins's two plays one was +realistic of the north of Ireland shore life of to-day, and the other, +"Connla," like Mr. Russell's "Deirdre," made out of Ireland's heroic +age.</p> + +<p>Of the actors we met that night, but Miss Walker (Maire ni Shiubhlaigh) +was with the Irish Players on their American tour of 1911-12, and even +she has not been continuously with them since 1902. The amateurs had +then + +<a name="page21" id="page21"></a> +but begun, under the direction of Mr. Fay, on the slow fashioning +of themselves into the finished folk-actors they proved themselves in +America. But even this acting, so little removed from that of amateurs +at these rehearsals, had distinction, the distinction of fidelity to +life in "The Racing Lug," the distinction of possession by dream in +"Deirdre"; and let it be remembered, too, that it was a rehearsal +without costume, and that one had to be carried away from the +conventional dress of the Dublin streets, and had to be made to feel +that the characters in "The Racing Lug" were primitive fishermen, and +the people of "Connla" and "Deirdre" the people of Ireland's Homeric +age.</p> + +<p>Miss Maire T. Quinn, Mr. T. Dudley Digges, Mr. P.J. Kelly, with Miss +Walker and the brothers Fay,—Mr. W.G. Fay and Mr. Frank J. Fay,—were +then the leading actors of the company. The playwrights, too, took part +in their own or their fellows' plays in the lesser rôles, Mr. Russell +sometimes playing the druid in his "Deirdre" and Mr. Colum carrying a +spear or wearing a pea-jacket as need was. One circumstance or another, +politics or need, gradually lost the company every one of these actors +that took part in its first performances in 1902. There were +comparatively few changes, though, until 1904, the year in which Miss +Horniman, "a generous English friend," took for them the old Mechanic +Institute Theatre and, rebuilding it in part, turned it over to the +Irish National Dramatic Company for six years. Up to this time the +actors had received no pay, giving their services for love of country +and of art, but with the more + +<a name="page22" id="page22"></a> +frequent performances and their attendant +rehearsals it became necessary to take a large part of the time of the +leading men and women, and then, of course, they had to be paid. Before +the opening of the Abbey Theatre, three of the chief actors, Miss Quinn +and Mr. Digges and Mr. Kelly, came to this country to appear in Irish +plays in the Irish Section of the St. Louis Fair. The public that +gathered in St. Louis was not prepared for the new drama, being more +used to the musical play of the type Mr. Olcott has made familiar in +America, or to the Bowery Irishman of the Harrigan plays, or to the +gross caricatures, Galwayed and ape-accoutred, of the before-curtain +interlude of the variety show. As a result the former National Players +protested against the policy of the Irish Section and returned to New +York. Miss Walker was the principal actress of the company after Miss +Quinn's departure to America, and upon Miss Walker's withdrawal in 1905 +the burden of the chief women's rôles fell upon Miss Allgood.</p> + +<p>Mr. W.G. Fay and Mr. Frank J. Fay were still the leading men of the +company, creating the principal characters of all the plays of Synge and +of those of Mr. Yeats and Lady Gregory that were produced before 1908. +Early in this year, as I have said, Mr. and Mrs. W.G. Fay and Mr. F.J. +Fay left the company, and, coming to America in the spring, played "The +Rising of the Moon" and "A Pot of Broth" in New York. They made, +unfortunately, no great success in their appearances, as their plays +were not presented in bills devoted solely to Irish plays, but as +curtain-raisers to the usual conventional farce. Almost all the + +<a name="page23" id="page23"></a> +actors +whom I have mentioned as leaving the National Players eventually found +their way into the conventional plays, but almost none of them made +successes there comparable in any degree to their successes in +folk-drama or in plays out of old Irish legend. Nor can it be said that +actors trained in the dominant forms of present-day English drama, even +when so skilled as Mrs. Patrick Campbell, were wholly satisfying in +their assumption of rôles in the plays of the Renaissance. It was Miss +Allgood, chief musician in the London performances of Mr. Yeats's +"Deirdre" in 1908, who won the greatest approval from the London +critics, and not Mrs. Campbell as Deirdre herself.</p> + +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a name="illo_3" id="illo_3"></a><img src="images/image03.jpg" alt="Sara Allgood"></p> +<p style="text-align: center">Sara Allgood</p> + +<p>Miss Allgood had played principal parts with the Abbey Company from 1904 +on. In 1906, her sister, who plays under the name of Miss Maire O'Neill, +came into the company, assuming the more romantic rôles with a success +as great as that of Miss Allgood in character parts and comedy. From +1906 they have shared the principal women's rôles, but, owing to Miss +O'Neill's inability to come to America in the fall of 1911, Miss McGee +fell heir to many of her rôles. After the departure of the Messrs. Fay, +Mr. Sinclair, Mr. O'Donovan, and Mr. Kerrigan became the leading men. It +is not altogether accurate, however, to speak of any actor or actress of +the company as leading man or leading woman, for not only is one "a +leading lady" one night, as was Miss McGee as Pegeen Mike in "The +Playboy of the Western World" on the American tour, and one of the +village girls in "The Well of the Saints" the next night, but the men +and women + + +<a name="page24" id="page24"></a> +alternate in the same parts on different nights, as, for +instance, on the American tour Cathleen ni Houlihan was played now by +Miss Allgood and now by Miss Walker.</p> + +<p>The fact that few of the actors who have learned their art with the +Irish National Dramatic Society have achieved greatly in other drama is +perhaps a proof that their powers are limited to the folk-drama and the +legendary drama that comprises almost the entire repertoire of the +company. Miss Allgood was, it is true, lent to Mr. Poel for the +performances of "Measure for Measure" in the spring of 1908, and won an +unquestioned success as Isabella, but actors so skilled as the Messrs. +Fay have attained no notable success in other than Irish plays. During +the American tour of 1911-12 both Mr. Sinclair and Miss Allgood were +much importuned by the managers to accept American engagements, and it +is hardly to be doubted but that both could win success in conventional +comedy. And yet one feels it was the part of wisdom as well as of +loyalty for them to withstand the lure.</p> + +<p>The distinguishing characteristic of the art of the Abbey Players is +naturalness. It is not that their personalities happen to coincide with +certain types of Irish character, but that they know so well the types +of the folk-plays, and even the characters who are not types that appear +in the folk-plays, that they are able to portray them to the life. The +Abbey Players have discarded most of the tricks of the stage, or perhaps +it would be truer to say they do not inherit the tricks of the stage or +any traditional characterizations of parts. They are taught to allow +their demeanor and gesture and expression to rise + +<a name="page25" id="page25"></a> +out of the situation, +to "get up" their parts from their own ideas; and these ideas are +interfered with only if they run definitely counter to the ideas of +stage-manager or author. The smallness of the Abbey Theatre has saved +them from the necessity of heightening effects that they may carry to +the farthest corners of a large house, a necessity that leads so often +to over-emphasis by our own actors. There are less than six hundred +seats in the Abbey theatre (five hundred and sixty-two by actual count), +and it is so arranged that the words uttered on the stage carry easily +without emphasis all over the house.</p> + +<p>It is an old saying that the English of Dublin is the most beautiful +English in the world. However that may be, there can be no doubt +whatsoever but that the English that is spoken in Dublin falls on the +ear with a mellowness of sound that is a joy to all who cherish proper +speech. In the earlier years of the company Mr. Yeats was very desirous +of having his dramatic verse spoken with "the half chant men spoke it +[poetry] with in old times." It was in some such way that Mr. Yeats had +tried to have his lines in "The Land of Heart's Desire" spoken when it +was put on at the Avenue Theatre, London, in 1894; and thirteen years +later Miss Florence Farr, whom he believes to speak English more +beautifully than anybody in the world, spoke his dramatic verses in a +"half chant," and his lyrical verses, many of them, to a definite +musical notation, on her American tour of 1907. It was noticeable, +however, when she played one of the musicians in his "Deirdre" on its +later presentations, that he method of intoning the verses differed a +great deal from + +<a name="page26" id="page26"></a> +their delivery by the regular members of the company. +If Mr. Yeats has not changed his views somewhat in regard to the +speaking of dramatic verse, he no longer insists on the half chant as it +was practiced by Miss Farr, but is content if the actors reproduce its +rhythm in "the beautiful speaking" that is characteristic of their art. +The most beautiful English that I have ever listened to is the English +of Synge as spoken by Mr. O'Donovan in Christy's "romancin'" to Pegeen +Mike in the third act of "The Playboy of the Western World." His voice, +full and mellow by nature, and in perfect control, responds to all the +many changes of emotion that the part demands, the unmatched rhythm of +the prose rendered as he renders it carrying one clean out of one's self +as one listens. It is only when one comes to one's self on the +curtain-fall that one finds one's self wondering, Can this be prose? +Surely, never before was prose, English prose, as beautiful to the ear +as English verse.</p> + +<p>As Miss O'Neill did not come with the Abbey Players to America, we did +not have a chance to hear Pegeen Mike's lines spoken with a beauty +comparable to Christy's. The part is not one to which Miss Allgood is +physically adapted, and Miss McGee is as yet too new to the stage to +speak with the confident abandon the lines demand. We did, however, have +a chance to hear Miss Allgood's very beautiful musical utterance of the +verses given to Cathleen ni Houlihan in this first of the movement's +folk-plays, and her equally beautiful speaking of the prose lines of the +play. This part of Cathleen ni Houlihan is sufficiently removed from the +other parts of the play, + +<a name="page27" id="page27"></a> +folk-parts, and from the parts of the other +folk-plays, to give us an insight into the versatility of Miss Allgood; +and we saw enough of Mr. Sinclair and Mr. O'Donovan and Mr. Kerrigan to +realize that they, too, could worthily bear parts in heroic romance.</p> + +<p>The rendering of the songs in the plays—it is chiefly in the plays of +Mr. Yeats that they appear—is a distinguishing characteristic of their +production. Mr. Yeats will not have them rendered by what, in the +ordinary sense, is singing. Writing in the notes to volume III of his +"Collected Works"<a href="#note_1"><span class="footnoteref">1</span></a> he says:—</p> + + <div class="display"> <p>No vowel must ever be prolonged unnaturally, + no word of mine must ever change into a mere musical note, no singer + of my words must ever cease to be a man and become an + instrument.</p> + + <p> The degree of approach to ordinary singing depends on the + context, for one desires a greater or lesser amount of contrast + between the lyrics and the dialogue according to situation and + emotion and the qualities of players. The words of Cathleen ni + Houlihan about the "white-scarfed riders" must be little more than + regulated declamation; the little song of Leagerie when he seizes + the "Golden Helmet" should in its opening words be indistinguishable + from the dialogue itself. Upon the other hand Cathleen's verses by + the fire, and those of the pupils in "The Hour-Glass," and those of + the beggars in "The Unicorn," are sung as the country people + understand song. Modern singing would spoil them for dramatic + purposes by taking the keenness and the salt out of the words. The + songs in "Deirdre," in Miss Fair's and in Miss Allgood's setting, + need fine speakers of verse more than good singers: and in these, + and still more in the song of the Three Women in "Baile's Strand," + the singers must remember the natural speed of words. If the lyric + in "Baile's + +<a name="page28" id="page28"></a> + Strand" is sung slowly it is like church-singing, but if + sung quickly and with the right expression it becomes an incantation + so old that nobody can quite understand it. That it may give this + sense of something half-forgotten, it must be sung with a certain + lack of minute feeling for the meaning of the words, which, however, + must always remain words. The songs in "Deirdre," especially the + last dirge, which is supposed to be the creation of the moment, must + upon the other hand, at any rate when Miss Farr's or Miss Allgood's + music is used, be sung or spoken with minute passionate + understanding. I have rehearsed the part of the Angel in "The + Hour-Glass" with recorded notes throughout, and believe this is the + right way; but in practice, owing to the difficulty of finding a + player who did not sing too much the moment the notes were written + down, have left it to the player's own unrecorded inspiration, + except at the "exit," where it is well for the player to go nearer + to ordinary song.</p> </div> + +<p>At times Irish actresses who have not come to the stage through the +Abbey Company, as has every one of its regular actresses, and every one +of its men save Mr. W.G. Fay, have lent it their assistance, as in the +instance of Mrs. Patrick Campbell referred to above, and as Miss Darragh +did in productions of "The Shadowy Waters" and of "Deirdre" in 1906. It +was four years earlier than this, however, that an Irishwoman, better +known in her country than either Miss Darragh or Mrs. Patrick Campbell, +lent her art to the performance of Cathleen ni Houlihan. "Miss Maud +Gonne played very finely," writes Mr. Yeats in recording the incident, +"and her great height made Cathleen seem a divine being fallen into our +mortal infirmity." With these three exceptions, so far as I have been +able to find out, no actors or actresses + +<a name="page29" id="page29"></a> +outside of the company have, +since 1902, essayed any other than a subordinate part. Yet such is the +versatility of the company, men and women both, within the range of +plays the company feels called upon to present,—folk-drama of to-day +and of yesterday in Ireland, folk-history plays, morality plays, and +plays in verse out of old legends,—that though there have never been as +many as twenty actors in the company there has very seldom been much +difficulty in casting a part. Molly Byrne in "The Well of the Saints" +and the Wandering Friar of the same play have given the most trouble to +the stage directors.</p> + +<p>From the very beginning of the Irish National Dramatic Company, Mr. +Yeats has been an advocate of scenery that is background chiefly, and in +no way divertive of attention from the play itself, its thought, its +words, its acting. He would have it, in a way, decorative, but subdued +and in harmony with the subject of the play. A very few simple sets +suffice for the plays of peasant life, a cottage interior, a village +street, a crossroads in a gap of the hills, all to serve the action and +the words as background, and to be no more obtrusive than the background +of a portrait. It may be that this attitude of Mr. Yeats is in a measure +due to his talks with Mr. Gordon Craig, but it is equally true, I think, +that some of Mr. Gordon Craig's ideas are due in part to his talks with +Mr. Yeats. Equally simple, though of another sort of simplicity, would +Mr. Yeats have the scenery for plays out of old legend. "I would like to +see," writes Mr. Yeats in "Samhain" of 1902, "poetic drama, which tries +to keep at a distance from daily life, that it may keep its emotion +untroubled, + +<a name="page30" id="page30"></a> +staged with but two or three colors." Old reds, misty +blues, imperial purples, greens that have about them the dimness of +haunted woods, and dulled golds have been among the colors used in the +legendary plays of Mr. Yeats and in the folk-histories of Lady Gregory, +the color schemes being generally either those of Mr. Yeats or of Mr. +Robert Gregory, Lady Gregory's son. Scenery and costumes alike are +simple. No audience at the Abbey has ever marveled at cycloramic +landscape, and no audience and no actress has ever been able to take the +joy of the dressmaker and the dressed, of the milliner and the +millinered, in gown or hat.</p> + +<p>The National Theatre Society, Limited, which is the legal name of the +organization that controls the Abbey Theatre Company, may not play what +plays it will at the Abbey; the two leading theatres of commerce in +Dublin, the Gaiety and the Theatre Royal, having, as Mr. Yeats records, +"vigorously opposed" the Abbey being given "a patent as little +restricted" as their own. "The Solicitor-General," Mr. Yeats continues, +"to meet them halfway, has restricted our patent to plays written by +Irishmen or on Irish subjects or to foreign masterpieces, provided these +masterpieces are not English." This restriction has not interfered with +any feature of the work of the Abbey Theatre, Mr. Yeats believes, save +in the building-up of an audience, some people remaining away, perhaps, +who might have been attracted had "such bodies as the Elizabethan Stage +Society, which brought 'Everyman' to Dublin some years ago, been able to +hire the theatre."</p> + +<p>No phase of the dramatic movement has been more + +<a name="page31" id="page31"></a> +interesting and none +has been more important than this building-up of an audience to +appreciate the plays. Whether with the poetic plays of Mr. Yeats and the +ironic extravaganzas of Synge alone, such an audience as has been built +up—an audience estimated by Mr. Yeats in 1906 to consist of four +thousand young men and women—could have been won is problematical; that +is, it may be doubted that the very best the movement has produced would +have attracted a sufficient audience to enable the company to keep +together after the expiration in 1910 of Miss Horniman's guarantee. +Certain it is, however, that Lady Gregory's farces were a great help, +both in building up and in holding the Abbey audience. It was for the +purpose of affording comic relief to the plays of Mr. Yeats and to the +first plays of Synge that Lady Gregory started to create them. They +attracted all who loved laughter and merriness and a loving caricature +of country-folk,—and who do not?—and one of them, "The Rising of the +Moon" (1907), had a distinct patriotic appeal, as had Mr. Yeats's +"Cathleen ni Houlihan," which brought some who would not otherwise have +come to the Abbey Theatre. The third most definitely "national" play of +the movement, "The Piper" (1908) of Mr. O'Riordan, may have also drawn +some who would not otherwise have come to the theatre, but if it did so +it brought them there, as did "The Playboy of the Western World" (1907), +to object.</p> + +<p>The first appeal of the Irish Players, in April, 1902, was trough the +"Deirdre" of "A.E.," a play out of old legend, national legend, and +"Cathleen ni Houlihan," a + +<a name="page32" id="page32"></a> +symbolic national play of '98. Then followed +Mr. Cousins's two little plays above referred to; "The Laying of the +Foundations," by Mr. Frederick Ryan,—a realistic satire of Dublin life; +and Mr. Yeats's incursion into farce, "A Pot of Broth." The appeal of +the repertoire was widened in 1903 by the inclusion of plays by Lady +Gregory, Mr. Colum, and Synge. "Twenty-five" could give offense to none +in its story of self-sacrificing love, and Mr. Colum's "Broken Soil," +coming as it did after "In the Shadow of the Glen," would have escaped +hostile criticism in such a situation even had it been much more severe +in its portrayal of peasant life in the Midlands than it was.</p> + +<p>From the time of "The Countess Cathleen" (1899) to the time of "In the +Shadow of the Glen" (1903), no one of the plays in the movement had +seriously offended any large section of the public, and the younger +generation of all classes was contributing largely of its intellectual +members to the audience of the National Dramatic Company. The West +Britons, the Dublin Castle set, the Trinity College group, were not much +interested, and, indeed, that portion of the theatrical audience that +fills the stalls in the average theatre the English-speaking world over +has never taken very much interest in the plays of the movement, save to +protest against "The Rising of the Moon" as disloyal to England, and to +approve, misunderstanding its purpose, "The Playboy of the Western +World" as a savage satire of the Irish Irishman. The audience that the +movement has built up is an audience of free intelligences, largely from +the poorer elements of the public, an audience that fills the cheaper +places in the house. "The + +<a name="page33" id="page33"></a> +Pit" of the Abbey Theatre is the envy of all +the theatrical managers of Dublin. It is a pit of people young in years +or young in heart and mind, who are interested in intellectual things, a +group of people largely self-taught, or taught by the Celtic +Renaissance, to appreciate fine things. With these has come that element +of the intellectuals among the Trinity College set that is interested +above all things in Ireland, but this element is not large.</p> + +<p>This play and that have attracted, either for purposes of approval or +for purposes of disapproval, groups of people outside of the faithful +pit that is interested in every sincere portrayal of Irish life. Such a +group, from the patriotic societies, prevented the rest of the house +from hearing "The Playboy of the Western World," after its first +performance on January 26, 1907, for four performances more; and such a +group similarly protested against "The Piper," a little more than a year +later, because it seemed to the members of the group to be an +unpatriotic revelation of the lack of cohesion among Irish political and +patriotic factions.</p> + +<p>Despite opposition, however, and with new dramatists one by one gaining +a place in the repertoire of the company, Mr. Boyle in 1905 and Mr. +Robinson in 1908, Mr. Murray in 1910 and Mr. Ervine in 1911, more and +more people continued to become interested in the new drama, and by the +time Miss Horniman's support, promised in 1904 for six years, was +withdrawn at the expiration of that period, the Abbey Theatre was +apparently a fixture in the artistic life of Ireland.</p> + +<p>It has been the custom, of recent years, for the Abbey + +<a name="page34" id="page34"></a> +Theatre to begin +its Dublin season In October and to continue it on until May, when the +company goes to London for a month. In the earlier years, before the +company had a home at the Abbey, and even for a year or two after that, +performances were not so continuous. Nor are they now given every week +or always on every night of a week, the theatre being turned over to the +Theatre of Ireland or some other dramatic organization occasionally, and +being let, now and then, for lectures or concerts or the like. The +London season in May is followed, or preceded sometimes, by visits to +other English cities, Manchester and Leeds, Oxford and Cambridge among +them; and at home in Ireland, in the intervals between weeks at the +Abbey, the company goes to Cork or Belfast for a few performances.</p> + +<p>In this country the audiences that attended the performances of the +plays of the Abbey Theatre Players were of a very different composition. +At their average they included a certain proportion of the younger +intellectuals among the Irish-Americans, but very many of these were +kept away from the performances, as many, indeed, in Ireland and in +England, too, are kept away from the performances, by the opposition in +the patriotic societies. In America, as in London and in Manchester, and +in the English university towns, it has been largely from among those +who are seriously interested in a literary drama that the audiences have +been drawn. It was such people as do not habitually go to the theatre, +but that are to be found at revivals of old English comedy and Ibsen +plays and symphony concerts, that made up the audiences + +<a name="page35" id="page35"></a> +of the Irish +Players in America, whether in Boston or in Philadelphia or Chicago. +These audiences approximated to the Dublin audiences only in the fact +that they were constant in attendance at all the plays of the +repertoire. There were, of course, some who came out of curiosity and +the love of ruction, but these after all were few. The plays appealed on +their merits and won the success that they did win because of their art +and their reading of life, and not because of the sensational incidents +that had occurred at some of the productions of the company.</p> + +<p>The Abbey Theatre has been able to maintain itself successfully in the +years that have elapsed since the arrangement between Miss Horniman and +the National Theatre Society came to an end. It has begotten many other +companies, the Ulster Literary Theatre, best of them all; the Theatre of +Ireland; the National Players; the Cork Dramatic Society. It has brought +into being a kind of folk-drama that, despite its avowed and evident +Scandinavian origin, is a new folk-drama, and it has brought into being, +too, a school of dramatists. It has done much more than Mr. Yeats +claimed it had done in 1908 when he wrote, "We know that we have already +created a taste for sincere and original drama and for sincere, quiet, +simple acting. Ireland possesses something which has come out of its own +life, and the many failures of dramatic societies which have imitated +our work, without our discipline and our independence, show that it +could not have been made in any other way." But even were this all it +had done, it had done much. What it has done I have attempted to put +down in some detail, and to put values + +<a name="page36" id="page36"></a> +upon, in the following pages. +Here I wish further to say but this: that I think the dramatic movement +the most significant part of the Celtic Renaissance, a movement to me +the most original movement in letters the world has known since that +movement in Norway which so definitely stimulated it, a movement that +gave Björnson and Ibsen to the world.</p> +</div> + +<hr class="page"> + +<div> + +<a name="page37" id="page37"></a> +<a name="toc_5"></a> +<h2>Chapter III</h2> + +<h2 class="sub">Mr. William Butler Yeats</h2> + + +<p>There has never been a poet who used better the gifts his country gave +him than Mr. Yeats. The heroic legends of Ireland are in his poetry, +Irish folk-lore is there, and the look of the country; and a man moulded +as only Irish conditions, of old time and of to-day, could mould him, +Irish conditions spiritual, intellectual, and physical; a man with eyes +on a bare countryside in the gray of twilight, thinking of the stories +the peasants tell and of the old legends whose setting this is before +him. At this hour, with such surroundings, and in such thought, the +Other World is as near to all men as their natures will let it come, and +to Mr. Yeats it is very near. Waking dreams come to him at such hours, +and he puts them into his verse, waking dreams of his country's +legendary past and of its fairy present, and waking dreams born of books +of old magic he has read indoors. Now it will be one sort of dream is +present, now the other, and now the third, and often two or even all +three sorts of dream are intermingled. His volume of prose sketches, +"The Celtic Twilight" (1893), gives the title some of his countrymen +have fastened on his verse, and the verse of others that take his +attitude and use like material, "The Twilight School of Poetry." It is +not inapt as giving the quality of most of his writing; but some of his +verses have warm + +<a name="page38" id="page38"></a> +sunlight in them, which, strangely, since it is +sunlight as it visits Irish shore and mountain, he has deplored. The +explanation may be that Mr. Yeats is of those who do not live intensely +until the oncoming of night, and so holds out of harmony with his genius +the coloring of its moments of lesser energy.</p> + +<p>Legends and folk-tales and landscapes and books of mysticism and magic +not only give Mr. Yeats the material of his poetry, but suggest its +images, its color, and in part its rhythms; but before he found the +"faint and nervous" rhythms best fitted to his poetry, and put in it the +gray-greens and browns and soft purples and bright whites of Irish +landscape, and the symbols from fairy-lore and mythology, he had paid +patient heed to certain of the great poets of his language, to Spenser +and Blake, to Shelley and William Morris. And in learning the art of +drama, which he began to study very carefully after his early plays were +tested in "The Irish Literary Theatre," Mr. Yeats has very evidently +pondered a good deal on the English morality and taken into account the +effects of Greek tragedy as he had before explored M. Maeterlinck and +the earlier Ibsen.</p> + +<p>As a boy Mr. Yeats wrote in the "Dublin University Review" that the +"greatest of the earth" often owned but two aims, "two linked and +ardorous thoughts—fatherland and song." Twenty-six years have gone +since then and Mr. Yeats is still devoted to poetry and to his country, +for all that the Nationalists deplore that his greater interest is now +in his art. His art, indeed, he cherishes with an ardor that is akin to +the ardor of patriotism; + +<a name="page39" id="page39"></a> +to him, as to Spenser, the master of his +youth, poetry is a divine enthusiasm. At first eager to paint, as did +and does his father, Mr. J.B. Yeats, he studied in Dublin Arts Schools, +but as Nature "wanted a few verses" from him, she sent him "into a +library to read bad translations from the Irish, and at last down into +Connaught to sit by turf fires." He read, too, Sir Samuel Ferguson, the +poet who had done most with Irish legend, and Allingham, who wrote of +Irish fairies, and the patriotic poets of the young Ireland group, Davis +chief among them. His father, an admirer of Whitman, preached to him the +doctrine embodied in the text—</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last,</p> +<p class="l">In things best known to you finding the best."</p> +</div> + +<p>Many influences thus conspired to make Mr. Yeats find his inspiration in +Ireland, overcoming, for the time, the denationalizing influences that +the art of the centre must always exert. Not only were the national +legends and folk-lore constantly with him in these years, but the +interest in magic and all things that are hidden. He was one of the +Hermetic Society, of which Mr. George W. Russell was the high priest, as +early as 1886, but this interest, which has dominated so often in his +later poetry, is not to the forefront in "The Wanderings of Oisin" of +1889. The material of the title poem of this volume Mr. Yeats found in +the libraries. It recounts the Fenian poet's three hundred years of +"dalliance with a demon thing" oversea in three wondrous lands, where +were severally pleasure and fighting and forgetfulness, and in each of +which Oisin spent a century. It has a half-dramatic framework of + +<a name="page41a" id="page41a"></a> + +question and answer between St. Patrick, who appears as upbraider, and +the poet, who laments joys gone and the Christian present of Ireland +and his own feeble age. Although it is a story Mr. Yeats is telling, +the beauties of the poems are lyrical beauties. In exuberance and +richness of color it is Mr. Yeats's most typically Irish poem based on +legend, and nowhere do his lines go with more lilt, or fall oftener +into inevitability of phrase, or more fully diffuse a glamour of +otherworldliness. "The Wanderings of Oisin" revealed poetry as +unmistakably new to his day as was Poe's to the earliest Victorian +days. Beside the title poem another from legend had this new quality, +"The Madness of King Goll," with its refrain that will not out of +memory, "They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech +leaves old." "Down by the Salley Gardens" and "The Meditation of the +Old Fisherman" bear witness to talks before turf fires, or in herring +boats off Knocknarea, and other developments of folk-song or tale have +the place-names of his home county of Sligo; but this distinctive +quality is theirs in less measure, and few others in the little volume +have it at all.</p> + +<p>In the years just before "The Wanderings of Oisin," Mr. Yeats had been +eager to unite the young writers of Ireland in a movement to give the +country a national literature in English. This project developed side +by side with Dr. Hyde's to give Ireland its own language again and a +modern literature in it. Neither leader was the first to advance +either idea, but each was the first to estab + +<a name="page41b" id="page41b"></a> + +lish the movement in +which he was most interested; Mr. Yeats's "Wanderings of Oisin" (1889) +is the starting-point of the Celtic Renaissance, and Dr. Hyde's +"Leabhar Sgeuluigheachta" (1889), the starting-point of the Gaelic +League, though this was not organized until 1893. From that day to +this these two men and Mr. George W. Russell ("A.E.") have been the +great forces in the literature of the Renaissance. Mr. Yeats was busy +in those early days with editing fairy and folk-tales and short +stories from the Irish novelists, and in reading these it was but +natural that he should be led to write stories. First came "John +Sherman" and "Dhoya" in 1891, the one a condensed novel with the +slightest of plots about a slow-pulsed young man's troubles with love +and laziness in Sligo and London, and the other a sketch of Irish +faery in old time. Some of the sketches of "The Celtic Twilight" +(1893) approach the tale, but such narrations are not told for their +own sake, but as illustrations of fairy-lore, or they have too little +body to win for themselves the title of tale. In "The Secret Rose" +(1897) there are true tales, some out of Ireland's legendary past, +some out of her fairy present, and, akin to both, the Hanrahan series. +These last Mr. Yeats so rewrote in 1904 as to be "nearer to the mind +of the country places where Hanrahan and his like wandered and are +remembered." As they stand now they are his best prose, rid almost +entirely of preciousness, and simple and full of mystery as the +countryside they reflect. In "The Secret Rose" are two "alchemical" +tales and in "The Tables of the Law" (1904), two others of like +subject. To me, for all the qualities +<a name="page42" id="page42"></a> + +they share with poetry of his of similar inspiration, they do not seem +to be mastered by him. Alone among his writings they are incomplete.</p> + +<p>Mr. Yeats was unable until the last few years to give himself up to the +writing nearest his heart, drama. He continued to edit Irish literature, +to write on literature and fairy-lore for the magazines. The articles +about fairies he has published, and a great mass of belief collected but +as yet unprinted, he will gather some day into a great book. Known now +in the Irish countryside as a man with a power to exorcise spirits, he +will then no doubt attain a reputation that will put him well above that +of the Irish-American archbishop who was his only rival in that practice +in the belief of many Irish peasants. Other of his magazine writing Mr. +Yeats has gathered into "The Celtic Twilight" and more of it into the +later edition (1900) of this book. Still other of these articles are to +be found in "Ideas of Good and Evil" (1903), some of them stating his +philosophy, never too definitely formulated. These two collections are +very interesting in themselves, but both, like his "Discoveries" (1907), +are more interesting as commentary on his powers. Mr. Yeats has used +many notes to explain obscure allusions in his poems, though the most +obscure he, perhaps with premeditation, fails to explain. Yet the reader +unacquainted with his use of symbols will find much interpretation in +these essays, especially those in "Ideas of Good and Evil."</p> + +<p>Up to 1899, when Mr. Yeats's serious efforts to build up an Irish +national drama began with "The Irish Literary Theatre," he devoted his +happiest moments to lyric + +<a name="page43" id="page43"></a> +poetry, though the play of "The Countess +Cathleen" made half of his second volume of verse, and the third was +wholly given to the little play, "The Land of Heart's Desire." Since +1899, in which year "The Wind among the Reeds" appeared, Mr. Yeats has +published, of other than dramatic verse, only the little volume of "In +the Seven Woods," the little series on Flamel, and a few snatches, in +all about a thousand lines. Some of this verse Mr. Yeats wrote for the +psaltery, and in 1902 he was determined to write all his shorter poems +for recitation to this instrument and "all his longer poems for the +stage."</p> + +<p>Mr. Yeats was thirty-four when he practically gave up lyrical poetry for +dramatic poetry. From the beginning he had written plays, but they were +lyrical plays, dramatic only in form, and they were, as soon as he had +mastered the technique of verse, great lyrical poems. In the plays he +has written since he has striven at that hardest of literary tasks, to +make true dramatic speech high poetry, he has written nothing more +beautiful than "The Countess Cathleen" and "The Land of Heart's Desire." +He has rewritten and rewritten these later plays, and in almost every +rewriting made them more dramatic, but sometimes the later versions have +lost as poetry, not in the mere decorative features and "lyrical +interbreathings," but in the accent of the play and in the sheer +poetical qualities. To me it seems a pity, inevitable though it be, that +the poet who has struck the most distinctly new note of all the English +poets since Swinburne should, at thirty-four, have changed from an art +he knew to an art he did not know. That is a ripe age + +<a name="page44" id="page44"></a> +for a poet to +begin to learn to write in a form barely essayed before. Unlike so many +of the English poets, who as public school boys were bred up to write +verse, Mr. Yeats had to teach himself to write verse. Overcoming +triumphantly this handicap, though losing by it years usually fullest of +impulse to write, Mr. Yeats greatly attained, and for the ten years from +1889 to 1899 devoted himself to the writing of lyrics. For the past +thirteen years he has been busiest with dramas, in none of which has he +more than approximated to a dramatic quality that is as great as the +quality of his lyrics. He has owned himself one reason of such +shortcoming, in the notes to "Deirdre." + +<a href="#note_2"><span class="footnoteref">2</span></a> +"The principal difficulty +with the form of dramatic literature I have adopted is that, unlike the +loose Elizabethan form, it continually forces one by its rigour of logic +away from one's capacities, experiences, and desires, until, if one have +not patience to wait for the mood, or to rewrite again and again till it +comes, there is rhetoric and logic and dry circumstance where there +should be life."</p> + +<p>It may be that Mr. Yeats will one day overcome the difficulties that he +alludes to here, but he is now forty-seven, and I, for one, doubt if, at +his age, he can overcome them. As they are, his plays are beautiful in +ideas and words, and striking in a lyric and decorative way, if not all +of them in a dramatic way, though in some he has in vain sacrificed +poetry to attain true dramatic speech attaining instead only "rhetoric +and logic and dry circumstance." One values the plays of Mr. Yeats +highest + +<a name="page45" id="page45"></a> +when one thinks of them as a new kind of drama, as a +redevelopment of epic and lyric poetry into drama, an epic and lyric +poetry illustrated by tableaux against backgrounds out of faery. Let us +not forget that there is one effect which is of "The Tempest," and +another effect which is of "Lear," and that it is after all something of +a convention to call the latter a success of drama and the former a +success of something other than drama. Yet it is just as necessary to +remember that drama does mean a definite sort of literature, and the +success of a new sort of drama, whether it be a "static" drama, as M. +Maeterlinck has called his early drama, or whether it be the kind of +drama that Mr. Yeats has created, is the success of something other than +what we conventionally term drama. It is curious that no matter how +great may be the success of an author in a form he has invented, he will +almost invariably attempt also the accepted form from which he has +diverged. Impelled by a desire to see his wife in a drama of his own but +of the old dramatic sort, M. Maeterlinck made "Monna Vanna" in accord +with the usual rules of the theatre, but to find it fall far short of +the strange new beauty of his earlier plays. As yet Mr. Yeats has not +compromised with the current taste in drama, but it may be that a desire +to see some such actress as Mrs. Patrick Campbell in a part of his may +lead to such compromise, as the thought of her acting his Deirdre +inspired him to rewrite that part for Mrs. Campbell.</p> + +<p>Mr. Yeats has not yet passed beyond the danger of falling between two +stools. If it prove that he has really + +<a name="page46" id="page46"></a> +attained in a drama in which the +verse is true dramatic speech and not lyric ecstasy or decoration, the +success of such drama will be worth the sacrifice of the lyric poetry +that he has not written because of the absorption of all of his energy +in his dramatic writing. If it prove he has not so attained, we shall +have no adequate compensation for the lost lyrics that he is now too old +to write. I say no "adequate compensation," for compensation there is in +the lyrical passages that no play of his is without, lyrical passages +that arrest us as do his poems of the nineties; but, after all, these are +but passages, not poems with unity and finality of form.</p> + +<p>Another question altogether, a question outside of the question of the +value as art of the writing of Mr. Yeats which is what I am considering, +is the question as to whether there would have been a dramatic movement +at all comparable to what has been, if Mr. Yeats had not devoted so +large a portion of his time to drama. I believe there would have been a +dramatic movement, but I am sure, from what I know of the other dramatic +organizations in Dublin, that they would not have amounted to much +unless some other great writer as loyal to art as Mr. Yeats had played +for them the beneficent tyrant. And other such great writers, as loyal +to art, and as devoted to drama, are far to seek in Ireland as in other +countries. It is not in Mr. Russell's nature so to act; it is not in Dr. +Hyde's plan of life to foster in others other than propagandist +literature; it is more than likely that had Mr. Martyn attempted it it +had come to the end to which he has come as playwright. Without Mr. +Yeats as moving + + +<a name="page47" id="page47"></a> +power, Synge had not been, without Mr. Yeats to +interest her in the movement, Lady Gregory had not written her farces +and folk-histories; and without the Abbey Theatre's plays as standard, +the younger playwrights of Cork and Belfast would have written plays +very other than those they have written.</p> + +<p>No wonder Mr. Yeats wants to see his dreams take on bodily reality upon +the stage, and to hear beautifully spoken the words in which he has +caught them. There can be no greater pleasures than these to a writer +when he is past the imaginative intensity of youth. In youth his +imaginings are so real to him he needs no objective embodiment to see +them, and the roll and sing of their lines are always sounding to his +inner ear, but as he passes "out of a red flare of dreams," such as is +youth's, "into a common light of common hours" in middle age, his +imaginative life grows less intense and needs the satisfaction of seeing +itself concretely represented.</p> + +<p>Mr. Yeats leaves out of his collected poems the plays of his boyhood, +"The Island of Statues" (1885) and "Mosada" (1886). They were not of +Ireland, but the Arcady of the one and the mediæval Spain of the other +he could easily have paralleled in Irish legend, where anything +wonderful and tragic is possible. Nor is "The Countess Cathleen" +(1892-99), in its presentation of the drama of a woman that sells her +soul that the souls of her tenantry may be saved, essentially Irish. It +is curious that among English poets of Mr. Yeats's generation it should +be Mr. Kipling that has happened upon the same legend, which he adapts +to his ends in "The Sacrifice of Er-Heb." The + +<a name="page48" id="page48"></a> +background of "The +Countess Cathleen" in the earlier versions was not more essentially +Irish than the story. "The great castle in malevolent woods" and the +country about it is very like the part of fairyland that M. Maeterlinck +refound by following the charts of early discoverers in Arthurian +legend. In its later versions "The Countess Cathleen" is more Irish and +perhaps more dramatic, though its greatnesses, after that of atmosphere, +the great lines we may no more forget than those about "the angel +Israfel"</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Whose heart-strings are a lute";</p> + +</div> + +<p>or about</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l"> "magic casements, opening on the foam</p> +<p class="l">Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn";</p> +</div> + +<p>or about</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l"> "old, unhappy, far-off things</p> + +<p class="l">And battles long ago";</p> +</div> + +<p>or about hearing</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l"> "the far-off curfew sound</p> +<p class="l">Over some wide-watered shore</p> +<p class="l">Swinging slow with sullen roar,"</p> +</div> + +<p>were most of them in the earlier versions. There were those lines of +Maire's denouncement of the two demons and her prophecy to them:—</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"You shall at last dry like dry leaves, and hang</p> +<p class="l">Nailed like dead vermin to the doors of God";</p> +</div> + +<p>and those wonderful lines of Cathleen dying:—</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel:</p> +<p class="l">I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes</p> +<p class="l">Upon the nest under the eave, before</p> + +<p class="l">He wander the loud waters";</p> +</div> + + +<a name="page49" id="page49"></a> + +<p>and those last lines of all, great as only the greatest lines are +great,—</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"The years like great black oxen tread the world,</p> +<p class="l">And God the herdsman goads them on behind,</p> +<p class="l">And I am broken by their passing feet."</p> + +</div> + +<p>It was about this time, too, that Mr. Yeats wrote that most startling of +all his lines,—</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"And God stands winding his lonely horn",</p> +</div> + +<p>and "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," that so charmed Stevenson that he had +to write its author, and say it cast over him a spell like that of his +first reading of the "Poems and Ballads" of Swinburne and the "Love in +the Valley" of Meredith.</p> + +<p>There is no greater lyric poetry anywhere in the writing of Mr. Yeats +than in "The Land of Heart's Desire" (1894), that little folk-play whose +constant boding and final tragedy cannot overcome, either while it is +playing or as you remember it, the sing and lilt that are in the lines. +It tells of the luring away by a fairy child of the soul of a newly +married bride on May-Eve, and of her death when her soul has passed to +the "Land of Heart's Desire"—</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,</p> +<p class="l">Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,</p> +<p class="l">Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue,</p> +<p class="l">And where kind tongues bring no captivity."</p> +</div> + +<p>It is a story out of folk-lore, and so far back in time, and so far away +from the life that we know is it, that all that happens seems not only +possible but inevitable.</p> + +<p>"The Land of Heart's Desire" was the first play of + + +<a name="page50" id="page50"></a> +Mr. Yeats to be put +on the stage, being presented at the Avenue Theatre in London in 1894; +and it was also the first play of Mr. Yeats to be put on in America, +being presented with Miss Mabel Taliaferro in the fairy's rôle as the +curtain-raiser to Mrs. Le Moyne's production of "In a Balcony," in the +spring of 1901. Fragile as is its charm, it crossed the footlights and +made itself felt as a new beauty of the theatre. It was the lyrical +interbreathings that appealed most to me, but the strife of priest and +fairy for Maire Bruin's soul was very real drama. It was the fairy's +song, however, that haunted me after I left the theatre, as it could not +but be. It haunts me still, coming into my mind whenever I think of Mr. +Yeats, as inevitably as the last lines of "The Countess Cathleen," or as +"The Lake Isle of Innisfree," or "The Valley of the Black Pig," or "The +Rose of the World," or the ecstasies of Forgael and Dectora, or the song +in "Deirdre." "The lonely of heart is withered away" is its burden, a +burden that will not out of mind.</p> + +<p>"The Land of Heart's Desire" has probably been most often played, +counting American performances as well as performances in Ireland and +England, being played as frequently by amateurs as by professionals in +this country, but the prose play "Cathleen ni Houlihan," because of its +national theme, has had more playings in Ireland. Its effect upon the +stage is very different from its effect in the study. Read, it seems +allegory too obvious to impress. The old woman, Cathleen ni Houlihan, +with "too many strangers in the house" and with her "four beautiful +green fields" taken from her, is so patently Ireland + +<a name="page51" id="page51"></a> +possessed by +England, all four provinces, that one fails to feel the deep humanity of +the sacrifices of Michael Gillane for her, his country, even though that +sacrifice be on his wedding eve. Seen and listened to, "Cathleen ni +Houlihan" brings tears to the eyes and chokes the throat with sobs, so +intimately physical is the appeal of its pathos. He is, indeed, dull of +understanding or hard of heart who can witness a performance of this +play and not feel that something noble has come his way. It seizes hold +of the Irishmen of the patriotic societies as does "The Wearing of the +Green," and even the outlander, little sympathetic to the cause of +Ireland and holding patriotism a provincial thing, is moved in some +strange way he does not understand. Performance brings out its +homeliness, its touches of humor, its wistfulness, its nobility. It is +with this thought of its nobility that every thought of "Cathleen ni +Houlihan" ends, that is every thought of it on the stage. Off the stage +it is, except to him to whom the cause is all, something that falls +short of nobility, to many little more than eloquent allegory. In the +autumn of 1904 Miss Margaret Wycherly played "The Land of Heart's +Desire" and "Cathleen ni Houlihan" a few times in America, and "The +Countess Cathleen"; and "The Hour-Glass" (1903) and "A Pot of Broth" +(1902), both plays in prose. "The Hour-Glass," a morality, was written +after "Everyman" had won Mr. Yeats, and "A Pot of Broth" was written, +perhaps, to prove that its author could do farce.</p> + +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a name="illo_4" id="illo_4"></a><img src="images/image04.jpg" alt='Scene From Cathleen Ni Houlihan'></p> + +<p style="text-align: center">Scene From "Cathleen Ni Houlihan"</p> + +<p>"The Hour-Glass" is based on a story that Mr. Yeats found in Lady +Wilde's "Ancient Legends of Ireland" + +<a name="page52" id="page52"></a> +(1887), the story of a wise man +who is saved from eternal damnation by the faith of a child. Mr. Yeats +leaves the wise man the great scholar that he was in the old tale, a +scholar whose teaching had taken away the faith of a countryside, but he +changes the child who saved the scholar into Teig the Fool, and infuses +into the record of the frantic hour, in which the wise man knows his +life ebbing away as the sand falls, a spirit that is as reverent as the +spirit of the old religious drama.</p> + +<p>"A Pot of Broth" is a variant of a widely spread folk-tale in which a +beggarman tricks a provident housewife out of a meal. He pretends a +stone that he has, and which he gives her after his meal, makes good +broth, but it is her chicken that has made the broth. It is a trifle, +amusing enough, but remarkable chiefly for its difference from other +work of Mr. Yeats. There is little doubt, I take it, in the mind of any +one that it is not chiefly Lady Gregory's, as it surely is in its +wording, and in its intimacy with the details of cottage life.</p> + +<p>Prose also is "Diarmid and Grania," written in collaboration with Mr. +George Moore and played at the last year's performance (1901) of "The +Irish Literary Theatre." As this play as performed was in tone more like +the writings of Mr. Moore than of Mr. Yeats, I have considered it among +his plays rather than among the plays of Mr. Yeats.</p> + +<p>His other prose play, "Where there is Nothing" (1903), is a statement of +revolt against "the despotism of fact" that is perhaps as characteristic +of the artist as of the Celt. The world would say that its hero, Paul +Ruttledge, + +<a name="page53" id="page53"></a> +was mad, but no one that reads can deny him a large share of +sympathy. This play was produced by the Stage Society in London in 1904. +Lady Gregory having had a share in its creation, Mr. Yeats has since +relinquished the theme to her; and now rewritten by her alone as "The +Unicorn from the Stars," it would hardly be recognized as the same play.</p> + +<p>His Paul Ruttledge, gentleman, becomes her Martin Hearne, coach-builder. +Both are alike at the outset of their frenzy, in that they would be +destroyers of Church and Law, both use tinkers as their agents of +destruction, and both die despised of men. Both are "plunged in trance," +but their trances differ. That of Lady Gregory's hero is cataleptic and +directly productive of his revolt, from a revelation, as he thinks it +is, that comes to him while he is "away." Paul Ruttledge, on the other +hand, deliberately gives up his conventional life, and that as largely +because of boredom as because of belief in its wrongness. One cannot, as +one reads "Where there is Nothing," fail to see in its hero much of Mr. +Yeats himself. He is not the professional agitator, literary or social, +as was Oscar Wilde and as is Mr. Shaw, but he here delights in turning +things topsy-turvy, just as they do, in a fashion that has been +distinctive of the Irishman for many generations. Mr. Yeats is himself, +often, like his hero, "plunged in trance," if one may call trance his +"possessed dream," such as that in which "Cap and Bells" or "Cathleen ni +Houlihan" came to him. The lyric came to him, he says, as a "vision," +and so, too, the play. It is in the dedication to volumes I and II of +"Plays for an Irish + +<a name="page54" id="page54"></a> +Theatre," volumes containing "Where there is +Nothing," "The Hour-Glass," "Cathleen ni Houlihan," and "A Pot of +Broth," that he tells us of the latter vision, and of the beginnings of +that collaboration with Lady Gregory that taught her her art, and so +profoundly influenced his. So informing is it that I quote it in full.</p> + + <div class="display"> <p>MY DEAR LADY GREGORY:—</p> + + <p> I dedicate to you two volumes of plays that are in part your + own.</p> + + <p> When I was a boy I used to wander about at Rosses Point and + Ballisodare listening to old songs and stories. I wrote down what I + heard and made poems out of the stories or put them into the little + chapters of the first edition of the "Celtic Twilight," and that is + how I began to write in the Irish way.</p> + + <p> Then I went to London to make my living, and though I spent a + part of every year in Ireland and tried to keep the old life in my + memory by reading every country tale I could find in books or old + newspapers, I began to forget the true countenance of country life. + The old tales were still alive for me, indeed, but with a new, + strange, half-unreal life, as if in a wizard's glass until at last, + when I had finished "The Secret Rose," and was halfway through "The + Wind among the Reeds," a wise woman in her trance told me that my + inspiration was from the moon and that I should always live close to + water, for my work was getting too full of those little jewelled + thoughts that come from the sun and have no nation. I have no need + to turn to my books of astrology to know that the common people are + under the moon, or to Porphyry to remember the image-making power of + the waters. Nor did I doubt the entire truth of what she said to me, + for my head was full of fables that I had no longer the knowledge + and emotion to write. Then you brought me with you to see your + friends in the cottages, and to talk to old wise men on Slieve + Echtge, and we gathered together, or you gathered for me, a great + number of stories and traditional beliefs. + +<a name="page55" id="page55"></a> + You taught me to + understand again, and much more perfectly than before, the true + countenance of country life.</p> + + <p> One night I had a dream, almost as distinct as a vision, of a + cottage where there was well-being and firelight and talk of a + marriage, and into the midst of that cottage there came an old woman + in a cloak. She was Ireland herself, that Cathleen ni Houlihan for + whom so many songs have been sung and about whom so many stories + have been told and for whose sake so many have gone to their death. + I thought if I could write this out as a little play I could make + others see my dream as I had seen it but I could not get down out of + that high window of dramatic verse, and in spite of all you had done + for me I had not the country speech. One has to live among the + people, like you, of whom an old man said in my hearing, "She has + been a serving-maid among us," before one can think the thoughts of + the people and speak with their tongue. We turned my dream into the + little play, "Cathleen ni Houlihan," and when we gave it to the + little theatre in Dublin and found that the working-people liked it, + you helped me to put my other dramatic fables into speech. Some of + these have already been acted, but some may not be acted for a long + time; but all seem to me, though they were but part of a summer's + work, to have more of that countenance of country life than anything + I have done since I was a boy.</p> </div> + +<p>I should like also to quote in full Mr. Yeats's account of how "Where +there is Nothing" passed into "The Unicorn from the Stars," as that +account throws much light on the methods of collaboration that have +added so greatly to the success of the dramatic movement, and that are +especially valuable to beginners, whose plays, without reshaping in +collaboration, might never win their way to the boards. But I have not +the space for it all, and I must content myself with that portion of it +in which Mr. Yeats confesses that belief of his in the <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">rapprochement</span> +of scholar and tinker that one notes so often in Irish life. Speaking +of + +<a name="page56" id="page56"></a> +Lady Gregory's rewriting of "Where there is Nothing" into "The +Unicorn from the Stars," he says:—</p> + + <div class="display"> <p>Her greatest difficulty was that I had given + her for chief character a man so plunged in trance that he could not + be otherwise than all but still and silent, though perhaps with the + stillness and the silence of a lamp; and the movement of the play as + a whole, if we were to listen to hear him, had to be without hurry + or violence. The strange characters, her handiwork, on whom he sheds + his light, delight me. She has enabled me to carry out an old + thought for which my own knowledge is insufficient and to commingle + the ancient phantasies of poetry with the rough, vivid, + ever-contemporaneous tumult of the roadside; to create for a moment + a form that otherwise I could but dream of, though I do that always, + an art that prophesies though with worn and failing voice of the day + when Quixote and Sancho Panza long estranged may once again go out + gaily into the bleak air. Ever since I began to write I have awaited + with impatience a linking, all Europe over, of the hereditary + knowledge of the countryside, now becoming known to us through the + work of wanderers and men of learning, with our old lyricism so full + of ancient frenzies and hereditary wisdom, a yoking of antiquities, + a marriage of Heaven and Hell.</p> </div> + +<p>Interesting, however, as these plays in prose are, and significant of +their author's desire to do work in a medium that was perhaps more +immediately acceptable to the audience of the National Dramatic Society +in its then culture, there is no doubt at all that the plays in verse +are nearer his heart. They are himself, and in all of the prose plays +there is a good deal of Lady Gregory. All this time that he was +collaborating in these prose plays he was still dreaming over "The +Shadowy Waters," retouching it, + +<a name="page57" id="page57"></a> +rearranging it, until it became in +detail a very different play from the play that was published under that +name in 1900. Its hero and heroine, Forgael and Dectora, are much as +they were then, their fateful meeting in misty northern seas remains the +central incident, and the climax is still their choice to be left alone +in the Viking ship at the world's end; but more than half the lines are +changed. "The Shadowy Waters" was staged in 1904, and with telling +weirdness, but like many another author's best-loved and most elaborated +work, it has not made the appeal of plays less favorite to him. Mr. +Yeats has written that he has been brooding over "The Shadowy Waters" +ever since he was a boy, and he told me, when I asked him once which +writing of his he cared most for, "That I was last working at, and then +'The Shadowy Waters.'" It is too much to say that it expresses the dream +of his life, but it is not too much to say that a dream that has haunted +all his life is told here, or half told, for dream such as this eludes +complete expression. "The Shadowy Waters" is a poem so long considered, +so often returned to, so loved and elaborated and worked over, so often +dreamed and redreamed, that one would expect to find in it its author's +<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">credo</span>, if its author is one who could hold to one confession of faith. +Few authors can, few authors should, and Mr. Yeats is not one of them +that can or should. He wrote once that he would be accounted</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"True brother of that company</p> +<p class="l">That sang to lighten Ireland's wrong,</p> + +<p class="l">Ballad and story, rann and song,"—</p> +</div> + + +<a name="page58" id="page58"></a> + +<p>and Nationalist though he still is he has grown more and more +preoccupied with art. There was a time when a love of the occult +threatened his art, but from that the theatre has saved him, if it has +taken him from the writing lyrics, in which his powers are at their +highest. To old Irish legend, Mr. Yeats has, however, been true from the +start, and from the start, too, there has never been a time the two he +has not been preoccupied with dream. And if the two loves to which he +has been constant cannot be said with exactitude to be in the story of +Forgael and Dectora, because that story is not a reshaping of any one +legend out of old Irish legend, it is of the very spirit of the journeys +oversea in which that legend abounds, and it is steeped in dream. It +would be here, then, that one would look for an expression as like a +<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">credo</span> as is possible to Mr. Yeats, and here we do find it on the lips +of Forgael, his hero, who, can we doubt? speaks also for the poet +himself:—</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l"> "All would be well</p> +<p class="l">Could we but give us wholly to the dreams,</p> + +<p class="l">And get into their world that to the sense</p> +<p class="l">Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly</p> +<p class="l">Among substantial things; for it is dreams</p> +<p class="l">That lift us to the flowing changing world</p> +<p class="l">That the heart longs for. What is love itself,</p> +<p class="l">Even though it be the lightest of light love,</p> +<p class="l">But dreams that hurry from beyond the world,</p> +<p class="l">To make low laughter more than meat and drink,</p> +<p class="l">Though it but set us sighing?"</p> + +</div> + +<p>"On Baile's Strand" (1903) follows very closely the story of Cuchulain's +slaying of his own son as retold Lady Gregory in her "Cuchulain of +Muirthemne" (1902). + +<a name="page59" id="page59"></a> +Like Rustum he does not know who is the youth he is +fighting until he has given him his death wound. Its high tragedy rends +the more by the ironic setting of Blind Man and Fool, two wastrels, one +of whom might have prevented the tragedy, but would not because the +fight would give him and his fellow a chance to rob the larders in +houses whose owners were watching it. No one can doubt the high +intention of "On Baile's Strand," no one can deny that its story is +essentially dramatic, no one can pass by certain passages without +realization that here is great verse, blank verse that is true dramatic +speech. Men remember Cuchulain's description of Aoife as men remember +Maud Gonne.</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l"> "Ah! Conchubar, had you seen her</p> +<p class="l">With that high, laughing, turbulent head of hers</p> +<p class="l">Thrown backward, and the bowstring at her ear.</p> + +<p class="l">Or sitting at the fire with those grave eyes</p> +<p class="l">Full of good counsel as it were with wine,</p> +<p class="l">Or when love ran through all the lineaments</p> +<p class="l">Of her wild body."</p> +</div> + +<p>One remembers these things, but if one has not seen the play on the +stage, he does not bear with him memories of beauty such as one bears +always with him from even the reading of "The Countess Cathleen" or of +"The Land of Heart's Desire." Nor is one moved by "On Baile's Strand" as +one is moved by other tellings of the same world story, as one is moved +by the epic telling of it by Matthew Arnold in "Sohrab and Rustum," or +even by such a casual telling of it as is Mr. Neil Munro's in "Black +Murdo." If it were not for "Deirdre," in fact, one would have to say +that the verse plays of + +<a name="page60" id="page60"></a> +Mr. Yeats after "The Shadowy Waters" grow, play +by play, less in poetic beauty, and that their gain in dramatic +effectiveness does not compensate for such a loss.</p> + +<p>"The King's Threshold" (1904) is as near a play with a purpose as Mr. +Yeats has written. It vindicates the right of the poet in Ireland's +Heroic Age to sit at the highest table of the King, and as it was +written and played in 1903, when its author was being accused of caring +more for his art than for his country, it looks very like a defense. +Seanchan, the poet, removed from his high seat at the request of +"Bishops, Soldiers, and Makers of the Law," takes his stand on the +King's threshold, with the intention of starving himself to death there, +as there is, as the King says,—</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l"> "a custom,</p> +<p class="l">An old and foolish custom, that if a man</p> +<p class="l">Be wronged, or think that he is wronged and starve</p> +<p class="l">Upon another's threshold till he die,</p> + +<p class="l">The common people, for all time to come,</p> +<p class="l">Will raise a heavy cry against that threshold,</p> +<p class="l">Even though it be the King's."</p> +</div> + +<p>It was at this time that the clamor against "In the Shadow of the Glen" +had stirred up a great deal of feeling against Mr. Yeats and the other +managers of the Irish National Theatre Society. And Mr. Yeats, it may +be, wrote the play not only to symbolize his contention that the poet is +as important to society as is the man of action, but also to assert that +poetry cultivated for its own sake, the sake of art, is as necessary to +a nation, to Ireland, as what Ireland calls patriotism. By the way, he +illustrated the fact that that kind of patriotism that assumes + +<a name="page61" id="page61"></a> +the King +can do no wrong,—that is, that the Irish people can do no wrong,—and +that whoever exposes their wrongdoing is no patriot, is a mistaken sort +of patriotism.</p> + +<p>Late in 1906 his "Deirdre" was successfully produced at the Abbey +Theatre, Dublin. It presents only the last chapter of this, the saddest +tale of the three heart-burdening tales that are known as "The Three +Sorrows of Story-Telling," but it presents it so poignantly and with so +keen an emphasis on the quick-passing of all things sweet, that it takes +place, for all its slightness, with the world's greatest tragedies that +are tragedies because of the overthrow therein of "queens ... young and +fair." There are few Irish writers whose concern is with things Irish +who have not retold this, the greatest love story of Ireland, but none +of them, from Sir Samuel Ferguson down to our own day, have retold it so +nobly as Mr. Yeats, save only Synge, and his restatement of it, of the +whole story from Deirdre's girlhood to her death, has about it a +grandeur and triumphing beauty that make further retellings not to be +tolerated.</p> + +<p>It is not lines, "purple patches," one remembers from "Deirdre," but the +whole play, its every situation, its setting. That setting so +quintessentializes, in the words Mr. Yeats used to describe it, the +romance of the old haunted woods where any adventure is possible, that I +must quote it in full:—</p> + + <div class="display"><p> A Guest-house in a wood. It is a rough house + of timber; through the doors and some of the windows one can see the + great spaces of the wood, the sky dimming, night closing in. But a + window to the left shows the thick leaves of a coppice; the + landscape + +<a name="page62" id="page62"></a> + suggests silence and loneliness. There is a door to right + and left, and through the side windows one can see anybody who + approaches either door, a moment before he enters. In the centre, a + part of the house is curtained off; the curtains are drawn. There + are unlighted torches in brackets on the walls There is, at one + side, a small table with a chessboard and chessmen upon it, and a + wine flagon and loaf of bread. At the other side of the room there + is a brazier with a fire; two women, with musical instruments beside + them, crouch about the brazier: they are comely women of about + forty. Another woman, who carries a stringed instrument, enters + hurriedly; she speaks, at first standing in the doorway.</p> </div> + +<p>But if one does not carry in memory so many lines of "Deirdre" as one +does of the earlier less dramatic plays, there are passages in plenty +that arrest and exalt. One such is those lines of Fergus that so well +describe one phase of the imagination of Mr. Yeats—</p> + +<div class="lg"> + +<p class="l"> "wild thought</p> +<p class="l">Fed on extravagant poetry, and lit</p> +<p class="l">By such a dazzle of old fabulous tales</p> +<p class="l">That common things are lost, and all that's strange</p> +<p class="l">Is true because 't were pity if it were not."</p> +</div> + +<p>Another such is the song of the musicians, of Queen Edain's tower, "When +the Winds are Calling There"; and another such, the crying of a woman's +heart in Deirdre's offer to go with Conchubar that Naisi may be saved:—</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l"> "It's better to go with him.</p> +<p class="l">Why should you die when one can bear it all?</p> +<p class="l">My life is over; it's better to obey.</p> +<p class="l">Why should you die? I will not live long, Naisi.</p> +<p class="l">I'd not have you believe I'd long stay living;</p> +<p class="l">Oh, no, no, no! You will go far away.</p> + +</div> + + +<a name="page63" id="page63"></a> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"You will forget me. Speak, speak, Naisi, speak,</p> +<p class="l">And say that it is better that I go.</p> +<p class="l">I will not ask it. Do not speak a word,</p> +<p class="l">For I will take it all upon myself.</p> +<p class="l">Conchubar, I will go."</p> +</div> + +<p>This is true dramatic speech, this has the accent of high tragedy, and +weakly human as it is it does not take away at all from the queenliness +of Deirdre. There are other passages that have such a tendency, however, +true though they may be to the life they depict and to human nature of +all time when in such a frenzy of fear and sorrow. Longer even than this +heart's cry, however, I think I shall remember that line so near the +opening of the play—</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"She put on womanhood and he lost peace."</p> +</div> + +<p>Lines greater than that are far to seek in English drama.</p> + +<p>"The Green Helmet" (1910), a rewriting in a form of verse alien to the +stage of the earlier prose "Golden Helmet" (1908), is hardly done out of +any high intention, and although it is not wanting in a kind of strange +and grotesque fascination, it is in result no higher than it was in +intention. In fact the past five years, years much of whose time has +been spent in forwarding the work of the Abbey Theatre, have not +inspired Mr. Yeats to much work of importance. Mr. Yeats promises us +more plays, but one cannot help wishing, if he must do verses other than +lyric, he would put his hand now to a great epic. His "Wanderings of +Oisin" is nearest this, near enough, for all the preponderance of lyric +in it, to show that he could do it, were we without such lines of "large +accent" as I have quoted + +<a name="page64" id="page64"></a> +from "The Countess Cathleen" to prove that +beyond doubt. There is no better material for epic as yet unused than +Irish legends, but there is none the old bard developed into epic +proportions. There would be here the largest scope for the shaping power +of the poet. Mr. Yeats must, of course, have thought of epic, but +preferred drama as more in harmony with our time. Lionel Johnson said +that Mr. Yeats took to drama because he liked to hear his lines finely +spoken, but, surely, if that were his greatest delight, he could invent +some way in which to bring story in verse to listeners. It were surely a +lesser task than that of stimulating Mr. Dolmetsch to make a psaltery to +which his lyrics may be musically spoken.</p> + +<p>From the beginning, the verse of Mr. Yeats has had vocal quality, a +quality that is unfortunately often rarer in good poetry than in verse +that is good rhetoric. I cannot see that his interest in the psaltery, +that developed after 1900, has brought about any change in the quality +of his verse. There have been constant to it since "The Wanderings of +Oisin" all the qualities that distinguish it to-day,—its eloquence, its +symbols that open up unending vistas through mysteries, its eeriness as +of the bewildering light of late sunset over gray-green Irish bog and +lake and mountain, its lonely figures as great in their simplicity as +those of Homer, its plain statement of high passion that breaks free of +all that is occult and surprises with its clarity where so much is dim +with dream. First one and then another of these qualities has most +interested him. He has written in explanation of patriotic + +<a name="page65" id="page65"></a> +verse, of +folk-verse, of verse based on the old court romances, of symbolism, of +Rosicrucianism, of essences, of speaking to the psaltery, of dramatic +art; and all the time he has practiced poetry, the interest of the time +resulting in now the greater emphasis on one quality in the poetry, and +now on another quality. It would be superfluous to do more than point +out most of these qualities, but a word on his use of symbols may help +to a fuller understanding of his poetry. I am very sure that I read +wrong meanings from many of these symbols, as one who has not the +password must. They require definite knowledge of magical tradition, and +of the poet's interpretation of Celtic tradition, for a full +understanding. As the years go by, I think their exact meaning will +escape more and more readers until they will have no more significance +than Spenser's allegories have to us. Only to the student deeply read in +Elizabethan politics do these mean to-day what must have been patent to +the inner circle at Elizabeth's court. Those symbols of Mr. Yeats that +we may understand intuitively, as we may "The white owl in the belfry +sits," other generations also may understand, but hardly those that have +meanings known only to a coterie. But we may read Spenser with enjoyment +even if all the inner allegories are missed, and so, too, many read Mr. +Yeats to-day, neglectful of the images of a formal symbolism.</p> + +<p>I do not know that I get more enjoyment from the poetry of the verses +entitled "The Valley of the Black Pig" because Mr. Yeats's note tells us +that it is the scene of Ireland's <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Götterdämmerung</span>, though it is an +unquestionable + +<a name="page66" id="page66"></a> +gratification to the puzzle interest I have with my +kind, and I would at times be more comfortable were I sure that the +"Master of the Still Stars and of the Flaming Door" was he who keeps the +gates of the Other World, the real world we shall enter when death sets +us free of that dream men call life. Mr. Yeats is not so kind to the men +"in the highway" as the old Irish bards. When they wrote enigmas they +were apt to explain them fully, as does the poet of "The Wooing of Emer" +when he tell what was meant by the cryptic questions and answers +exchanged between that princess and Cuchulain. When the symbolism is of +the kind found in "Death's Summons" of Thomas Nash, which of all poems +Mr. Yeats quotes oftenest, all cultivated men may understand—</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Brightness falls from the air;</p> +<p class="l">Queens have died young and fair;</p> +<p class="l">Dust hath closed Helen's eye."</p> +</div> + +<p>The difference between the symbol Helen and each one of the several +symbols Mr. Yeats employs in "The Valley of the Black Pig" is the +difference between a symbol universally recognized throughout the world +and a symbol recognized by one people; but there is the further +difference that one is intimately associated with the thing symbolized, +is the name of a woman the context tells us is a queen and beautiful, +and the other is only the scene of a battle that symbolizes the ending +of the world. It is more natural to use a beautiful woman as a symbol of +all beauty than to use a black boar that shall root up all the light and +life of the world as a symbol of the ending of the world. But neither of +these is a symbol that would be understood + +<a name="page67" id="page67"></a> +intuitively, as the rose +used as a symbol of beauty or the wind as a symbol of instability. +Sometimes Mr. Yeats's symbols are very remote, but perhaps they were +remote in the old stories in which he found them. The details in</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l"> "the phantom hound</p> +<p class="l">All pearly white, save one red ear,"</p> +</div> + +<p>and "the hornless deer" which it chases, seem arbitrary. The hound, it +is true, is known of all men as the pursuer, and the deer as the +pursued; but does this knowledge suggest immediately "the desire of the +man which is for the woman, and the desire of the woman which is for the +desire of the man"? Mr. Yeats does not, as I take it, expect all his +symbols to be understood so definitely as this hound and deer, which, of +course, are not only symbols, but figures from the tapestry of +fairyland. It is often enough, perhaps, that we understand emotionally, +as in "Kubla Khan" or "The Owl." From some of his writing it would +appear he believed many symbols to be of very definite meaning and to be +understood by generation upon generation. In the note to "The Valley of +the Black Pig" he writes, "Once a symbol has possessed the imagination +of large numbers of men, it becomes, as I believe, an embodiment of +disembodied powers, and repeats itself in dreams and visions, age after +age."</p> + +<p>This is but another phase of Mr. Yeats's belief that when a poem stirs +us as by magic, it is a real magic has been at work. The words have +loosened the seals that the flesh has fastened upon the universal memory +which is subconscious in all of us, until that memory possesses us and +we are one with all that has been since the beginning + +<a name="page68" id="page68"></a> +of time, and may +in such moments live over all that has been lived. He thinks that in +such moments the poet's magic brings before us the past and the unseen +as the past and the unseen were brought before our pagan ancestors by +the magical rites of their priests.</p> + +<p>In his younger years Mr. Yeats held that poetry is "the words that have +gathered up the heart's desire of the world." His heart's desire was +simpler in those days than his heart's desire of after years. Then he +had a child's wistfulness for little things and put lines in his poems +of Blake-like innocence and freshness. "The brown mice" that</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l"> "bob</p> +<p class="l">Round and round the oatmeal chest"</p> +</div> + +<p>are out of memories of childhood, and many other of the similes of these +early poems are out of the ways of wild little things that appeal so to +children, perhaps because they are wild little things themselves. A +later mood of Mr. Yeats is to hold of less account the things of +out-of-doors, but still he uses as similes the ways of birds, as did the +old Irish bards whose stories have so informed his. He never did +describe nature for its own sake, but natural things gave him more +figures than they do now, although always there have been in his lines +many out of mythology. Summer days between Slieve Echtge and the western +sea are, however, bringing the plovers and curlews and peewits back to +his poetry. In the country of the Countess Cathleen, as everywhere in +Ireland, you may hear "wind cry and water cry and curlew cry," and +there, as all the world over,—</p> + +<a name="page69" id="page69"></a> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Ill bodings are as native unto our hearts</p> +<p class="l">As are their spots unto the woodpeckers."</p> +</div> + +<p>It is from such knowledge of country things come the fine lines about</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"The dark folk, who live in souls</p> +<p class="l">Of passionate men like bats in the dead trees";—</p> + +</div> + +<p>and such lines are coming again into his verse, even into the blank +verse of his plays. The poems in which "the strong human call" is heard +are more than the many who read Mr. Yeats hurriedly will think, and to +those who know his story they reveal again and again a great and common +sorrow. Whole poems and plays are often symbols of the poet's life. So +may "The Countess Cathleen" be taken as well as "The King's Threshold." +"Ephemera," "The Dedication to a Book of Stories," "In the Seven Woods," +"The Old Age of Queen Maeve," "The Folly of Being Comforted," "Old +Memory," "Adam's Curse," as well as the folk-poems of the first volumes, +are but little "dream-burdened," and passages elsewhere have the human +call. The feeling of Oisin nearing the coast of Ireland is, for +instance, the common joy on nearing the shore of the homeland at the end +of exile:—</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Remembrance, lifting her leanness, keened in the gates of my heart.</p> +<p class="l">Till, fattening the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hay</p> +<p class="l">Came, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down;</p> +<p class="l">later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a shore far away,</p> + +<p class="l">From the great grass-barnacle calling, and later the shore-weeds brown."</p> +</div> + +<p>It is true, though, that the dream-drenched poems are those most +characteristic of the author, those that give a note entirely new to +English poetry. It is impossible + +<a name="page70" id="page70"></a> + to pick out one as more representative +than another where so many are representative and where all are of +highest achievement. Nowhere is his own individual note better +sustained, however, than in the Michael Robartes poems or in "The Rose +of Battle" or "Into the Twilight"; and the hold that dream has of him +and the hold that human things have, chief among them love of country, +are told with utmost distinction and inevitability of phrase in "To +Ireland in the Coming Times" and in "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time."</p> + +<p>I sometimes wonder, is the reason for the poet's holding so devotedly to +spiritual things of his kind not the very same holding of his peasant +countryman to the folk-tales that take him to a world as rich and +gorgeous-hued as the Ireland about him is bare and gray, and to a church +that prepares him for a better world after death? A large part of all +poetry is the realization of the brevity of all beautiful things,—of +bloom, of youth, of life; but no poet has more often lamented "Fate and +Time and Change" than Mr. Yeats. It is, he says, "our narrow rooms, our +short lives, our soon ended passions and emotions put us out of conceit +with sooty and feeble reality." So the poet seeks refuge in his own +dream and in contemplation of the life from which he came and to which +he will return, and—one almost dare say—in communication with which he +now knows such joy. The poet's life is little because he has found out +the littleness of earthly things; the peasant holds life little because +his share of it has been so poor. If the peasant acquires riches by +chance or by emigration, he sees as the poet that all he can have is as +nothing, so + +<a name="page71" id="page71"></a> + +short is the time he may hold it. Irish writers of the past +have made this peasant only the jarvey wit; but if you read the old +romances, or listen to the folk-tales still alive, you will learn that +Mr. Yeats is at one with his countryman in this basic likeness.</p> + +<p>There is a side of Irish life, the side the world knows best, that Mr. +Yeats does not present, but that which he does present is true, though +the poet's personality is so dominant that we get more of this than of +Ireland in his poetry. So it should be, so it is with every artist. All +the world can ask of him is his interpretation of what he knows. Yet so +native is Mr. Yeats that the atmosphere of his poetry is the very +atmosphere of Ireland. The artist and the setting of his art are in an +unwonted harmony. No reader of Mr. Yeats who knows the brooding +landscape of West Ireland can escape that realization, but only he who +has met the poet amid the scenes that inspired his verse may know how +complete is their accord. Such a meeting was mine one lowering August +day, in whose late afternoon we walked in the Woods of Coole. Then I +knew at last what Mr. Yeats meant by "druid charm" and "druid light." I +felt the "druid charm" that was potent in gray skies over gray water and +gray rock and gray-green woods; the bewildering "druid light" flashed +out as the sun followed westward the trail to Hy Brasil, leaving in the +Atlantic skies wild after-glow of winter yellow.</p> +</div> + +<hr class="page"> + +<div> + +<a name="page72" id="page72"></a> +<a name="toc_6"></a> + +<h2>Chapter IV</h2> + +<h2 class="sub">Mr. Edward Martyn And Mr. George Moore</h2> + + +<p>The announcement of Mr. Edward Martyn as playwright of "The Irish +Literary Theatre" was, outside of the narrow circle of his friends, a +great surprise to all interested in letters in Ireland. But the almost +simultaneous announcement that Mr. George Moore was lending his aid to +the adventure was an even greater surprise. Mr. Moore had, of course, +written more than once of Ireland, and there were many who had not +forgotten the unpleasantnesses of "A Drama in Muslin" (1886), and Mr. +Martyn, though the author of "Morgante the Lesser" (1890), was not known +as its author, as he had published it anonymously, and as it had not +made enough of a stir for its anonymity to be disclosed. Yet for the +landlord-author, who had turned his back on Ireland, to return to his +country with a greater interest in its life and its writers than he had +ever betrayed, was more remarkable than for another landlord of the same +family connection, comparatively a stay-at-home landlord, to turn from +sport and religion to the stage. Mr. Martyn had lived in London and his +love of music had taken him to the Continent, but he had been something +of a Nationalist, whereas Mr. Moore had lost few opportunities to scoff +at the country his father had striven so unselfishly to aid. What of Mr. + +<a name="page73" id="page73"></a> +Moore that was not French in 1899 was confessedly English.</p> + +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a name="illo_5" id="illo_5"></a><img src="images/image05.jpg" alt="George Moore"></p> +<p style="text-align: center">George Moore</p> + +<p>Now that those interested have read "Ave," the first volume of the three +of "Hail and Farewell," in which Mr. Moore is confessing the reasons of +his return to Ireland and of his second departure from Ireland, they +know that he had been mildly interested in Ireland as material for art +as far back as 1894, and that it was Mr. Martyn who had interested him +in the things of home. Mr. Moore tells us all about it more than +explicitly in the "Overture" to his trilogy. In the first chapter he +tells us that the interest faded away gradually, to be reawakened in +1899 by a visit paid him in London by Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats, who came +to ask his help in founding a "Literary Theatre in Dublin." Then Mr. +Moore learned the story of that theatre's inception, a story to him +"disappointingly short and simple. When Yeats had said that he had spent +the summer at Coole with Lady Gregory, I saw it all. Coole is but three +miles from Tillyra [Mr. Martyn's estate in Galway]; Edward is often at +Coole; Lady Gregory and Yeats are often at Tillyra; Yeats and Edward had +written plays—the drama brings strange fowls to roost."</p> + +<p>It takes Mr. Moore many pages to tell why it was he joined the three in +their project, and many more pages to tell of their collaboration during +the first two years of the three years that were the life of "The Irish +Literary Theatre." The four are, indeed, the principal characters of Mr. +Moore's "Ave"—I had almost said his novel "Ave"—himself, Mr. Martyn, +Mr. Yeats, and Lady + +<a name="page74" id="page74"></a> +Gregory, to mention them in the order of prominence +that Mr. Moore gives them.</p> + +<p>Lady Gregory and Mr. Yeats have learned their art, the highest and most +difficult of all forms of literary art, so that each is sure in the +shaping of fable and emotion to the stage, though neither is to drama +native-born as was Synge. Mr. Martyn and Mr. Moore have neither of them, +however, learned the art of the playwright. Mr. Martyn has the root of +the matter in him, but he remains the amateur. Mr. Moore was once the +amateur, even in the novel, in "A Modern Lover" (1883), for instance, +true as that story is to the London art life and aristocratic life it is +intended to reflect, but he has since then won his way, book by book, to +the position, now that Mr. Hardy has given up the novel, of first +novelist of the English-speaking peoples. Had he studied the play as +painfully and as long as he has studied the novel, it may be that Mr. +Moore had conquered it, too, though I doubt it, for the concentration +necessary to drama is alien to his method as a novelist. As it is, his +best plays are but the good journeyman work of one who is a skilled +literary craftsman. Mr. Martyn has more originality of theme, more +intimacy with Irish character, a surer instinct for effective situation, +and more nobility of intention, though Mr. Moore's greater power over +words gives his plays a dignity as art that the plays of Mr. Martyn do +not attain.</p> + +<p>Alone of the quartette that founded "The Irish Literary Theatre," Mr. +Martyn is possessed of none of the instincts of the publicist. Lady +Gregory has edited articles + +<a name="page75" id="page75"></a> +about ideals in Ireland at home, and on the +lecture platform she has stoutly fought the battles of "The Playboy of +the Western World" in America; Mr. Yeats has ever delighted in writing +letters to the newspapers and he has preached the evangel of the +Renaissance from Edinburgh to San Francisco; and Mr. George Moore is a +controversialist pamphleteer even before he is a novelist. In the few +articles about the movement that Mr. Martyn has written, brief articles +all of them, there is, however, clear indication of the spirit in which +he wrote his plays, if comparatively little discussion of his art. In +the second number of "Beltaine" (February, 1900), in an article entitled +"A Comparison between Irish and English Theatrical Audiences," Mr. +Martyn declares that he sees in Ireland, instead of the "vast +cosmopolitanism and vulgarity" of England, "an idealism founded upon the +ancient genius of the land." It is wholly in accord with the spirit of +this declaration that Mr. Martyn has written his more important plays, +all of them, in fact, but the satires on weaklings and officials he +calls "A Tale of a Town" (1902) and "The Place Hunters" (1905). He +writes little of the peasants, being less interested in them than are +Mr. Yeats and Lady Gregory, and therefore less acquainted with them. If +one may judge from his writings the intimates of Mr. Martyn have been +among his own landlord class, the priests, and the politicians. It is +the landlords and middle-class people that occupy the foreground of his +plays, Peg Inerny in "Maeve" (1899) being the only important character a +peasant, unless Mrs. Font in "The Enchanted Sea" (1902) can be called a +member of a class + +<a name="page76" id="page76"></a> + +that she was born to, but from which her marriage +removed her.</p> + +<p>This question of the class the plays should present was one of those +that led to the withdrawal of Mr. Martyn from the dramatic movement. A +more definite cause, perhaps, was the unanimous determination of Lady +Gregory, Mr. Yeats, and Mr. Moore that his "A Tale of a Town" could not +be presented by "The Irish Literary Theatre" as he wrote it if the +standards of that theatre were to be preserved. Its author's magnanimity +in turning it over to Mr. Moore to be rewritten,—as it was, being +presented as "The Bending of the Bough" (1900),—was revealed by Mr. +Moore in "Samhain" (October, 1901), and very much more fully, if less +kindly, in "Ave" (1911).</p> + +<p>In its way their refusal to play Mr. Martyn's "A Tale of a Town" was as +creditable to the other powers in the theatre as was his magnanimity in +giving them the play to do with as they would. They knew their refusal +to play it might lead him to withdraw his support of the theatre and, in +the end, it was a factor in bringing about that result. After their +rejection of "A Tale of a Town," however, he still gave "The Irish +Literary Theatre" his support, allowing it to put on his "Maeve," and in +1901 contributing to "Samhain" (October), "A Plea for a National Theatre +in Ireland." Such a theatre Mr. Martyn had the power to give Ireland, +but he did not give it, when it was thought he might, and in 1902 all +hope of his giving his money for such a purpose was destroyed by his +transference of a fund of fifty thousand dollars to the Catholic + +<a name="page77" id="page77"></a> +Pro-Cathedral in Dublin "for the purpose of founding and supporting a +Palestrina choir."</p> + +<p>That Mr. Martyn was still a force to be reckoned with is revealed by the +trouble Mr. Yeats went to, in "Samhain" of October, 1902, to explain why +it was that the plays of the Irish National Dramatic Company were either +folk-drama or drama whose life was the "life of poetry" Mr. Martyn had +argued in "The United Irishmen," which up to the time of the +presentation of "In the Shadow of the Glen" was a stanch supporter of +the dramatic policies of Mr. Yeats, that the actors of the company +should be trained to the drama of modern society. "The acting of plays +like 'Deirdre,' and of 'Cathleen ni Houlihan,'" writes Mr. Yeats, "with +its speech of the country people, did not seem to him a preparation. It +is not, but that is as it should be. Our movement is a return to the +people, like the Russian movement of the early seventies, and the drama +of society could but magnify a condition of life which the countryman +and the artisan could but copy to their hurt. The play that is to give +them a quite natural pleasure should either tell them of their own life +or of that life of poetry where every man can see his own image, because +there alone does human nature escape from arbitrary conditions. Plays +about drawing-rooms are written for the middle classes of great cities, +for the classes who live in drawing-rooms, but if you would uplift the +man of the roads you must write about the roads, or about the people of +romance, or about great historical people."</p> + +<p>Neither "Maeve" nor "The Enchanted Sea" can be + +<a name="page78" id="page78"></a> +called a drawing-room +play, though both introduce us to "drawing-room people," but "The +Heather Field" (1899), Mr. Martyn's first play, and his greatest success +is a drawing-room play, as in a minor way are "A Tale of a Town" and +"The Place Hunters." These last two plays are failures; but they are not +failures, I think because they are drawing-room plays, but because Mr. +Martyn is less effective with a full stage than with two couples or so +and, principally, because he is less successful with social and +political questions than with those that concern the individual.</p> + +<p>Whatever value one puts upon "The Heather Field" it cannot be denied +that it was a popular success and that it was praised by critics whose +judgment is discerning. It is perhaps because it is a variant of the old +theme of the war between man the idealist and woman the materialist that +it so appealed to young men, troubled themselves as to whether to follow +their star or to accept the chains that; wife and children impose. It +was enough for the audience that witnessed its first performances in the +Antient Concert Rooms, Dublin, May 9, 10, 13, 1899, that it showed a man +at war with the despotism of fact, as Ireland, preeminently the Celtic +Land, has so long been. It was not remarkably acted, by an +insufficiently rehearsed and not very understanding scratch company, and +yet it impressed its audiences more favorably than "The Countess +Cathleen" (1892), an unequivocally great poetic drama; and these +audiences were the most cultivated Dublin can boast.</p> + +<p>"The Heather Field" is the story of the going-mad of + +<a name="page79" id="page79"></a> +Carden Tyrrell, a +landlord of the west of Ireland. From the first he is represented to us +as a man to whom as to so many of his countrymen dream is reality and +reality dream. His wife, to whom the realities are very instant, urges +him to do as others do, to entertain, to hunt, at least to do something +practical. For her he has abandoned the ideal world he had built up for +himself from his books and his dreams and is trying farming. Yet his +temperament is such that he must idealize even this. When the curtain +rises he is still busy with the project, long since undertaken, of +reclaiming a wind-swept heather field fronting the Atlantic and of +making it into the best of pasture land. That reclamation and +transformation has become a passion with him, and soon we feel that it +is the symbol of that quality in him that is untamed, incurably "ideal." +To free that field of rocks and to drain its bogs he has mortgaged his +estate, and, in the play, before the success or failure of his +undertaking is proved, he mortgages almost all that remains to him to +improve the land below, which the draining of the heather field has +turned into a swamp. His wife, to prevent this last folly, strives to +have control of his property taken away from him, but his friend, Barry +Ussher, believing that restraint would make Tyrrell mad indeed, so +intimidates a hesitating physician that Mrs. Tyrrell fails in her most +natural plan to save herself and her child from ruin by having her +husband declared incompetent, and, if necessary, restrained. With his +friend's assistance Tyrrell has won his fight against his wife. +Obstinacy in the treatment of some tenants that his debts have driven +him to evict + +<a name="page80" id="page80"></a> +rouses such hatred against Tyrrell, until then a loved +landlord, that the police hold it necessary to follow him with an escort +that he may not be shot by his people. To avoid being so followed, +Tyrrell keeps within doors and so intensifies his malady. The +catastrophe comes when, on his boy's first spring search for wild +flowers, the child brings him a handful of heather buds from the heather +field. Their message is that the mountain will revert to waste again. +Even in his "ideal domain" reality has asserted itself. His ideal world +crumbles for the instant, and his reason with it, and forever. But after +a moment's agony ideality triumphantly reasserts itself, and in mad +ecstasy Tyrrell, his years fallen from him, passes from sight crying out +at the beauty of a world that is to him now forever a world of mornings +in which, as he says, "the rain across a saffron sun trembles like gold +harpstrings through the purple Irish spring.... The voices—I hear them +now triumphant in a silver glory of song!" Such is the play, "aching and +lofty in its loveliness."</p> + +<p>Is this ending, or is it not, sadder than the catastrophe of "Ghosts"? +Certainly to "Ghosts" it owes something, and to "The Wild Duck" more +than something. A quality as of Ibsen pervades the play, and it has, +too, back of it a background of nature and of thought that is beautiful +in the way the background of nature and of thought is beautiful and +compensating in the plays of Ibsen.</p> + +<p>In his introduction to "The Heather Field," which was published before +its presentation, Mr. Moore writes, "Although all right and good sense +are on the wife's side, the sympathy is always with Carden." So it was +on the + +<a name="page81" id="page81"></a> +presentation of the play in Dublin, Mr. Yeats writing in "The +Dome," "Our Irish playgoers sympathized with this man so perfectly that +they hissed the doctors who found that he was mad." Such an attitude is +characteristically Irish; and equally characteristically English was the +reception of this play when Mr. Thomas Kingston presented it at a +matinee at the Strand Theatre in London. Mr. Yeats is again the +authority: "The London playgoers ... sympathized with the doctors, and +held the divine vision a dream." Mr. Moore praises "The Heather Field" +more forthrightly in "Samhain" of October, 1901, holding that "'The +Heather Field' has been admitted to be the most thoughtful of modern +prose plays written in English, the best constructed, the most endurable +to a thoughtful audience." Patriotism or kinship, love of paradox or +desire to assuage feelings hurt by the rough treatment of "A Tale of a +Town," may any or all of them be called upon to explain so sweeping a +statement. But none of such motives could account for its praise by Mr. +Beerbohm in the London "Saturday Review." "Max" is often paradoxical, +but he is not paradoxical here: "Not long ago this play was published as +a book, with a preface by Mr. George Moore, and it was more or less +vehemently disparaged by the critics. Knowing that it was to be produced +later in Dublin, and knowing how hard it is to dogmatize about a play +until one has seen it acted, I confined myself to a very mild +disparagement of it. Now that I have seen it acted, I am sorry that I +disparaged it at all. It turns out to be a very powerful play indeed." I +have quoted Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore and Mr. Beerbohm, + +<a name="page82" id="page82"></a> +not only because +I have not seen the play on the stage but because, on reading it, its +effect is one that puts my judgment at sea. Years ago as I read it it +gripped me hard, but when I read it now and think it over now, I am at a +loss to see why, done as it is done, I should have been so moved by it. +Now I am moved greatly by but two situations. Both of these are in the +last act. One of them is Tyrrell's revulsion against the bad news that +his brother Miles brings from Dublin of the mortgagee's refusal to +extend. His wife tells their friends that she is ruined, that "pretty +nearly all" their property is mortgaged, but Tyrrell cries out, "All, do +you say? No—not all. This vulture cannot touch the heather field! My +hope,—it is my only hope, and it will save me in the end. Ha, ha! These +wise ones! They did not think the barren mountain of those days worth +naming in their deed. But now that mountain is a great green field worth +more than all they can seize, (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">with a strange intensity</span>) and it is +mine—all mine!"</p> + +<p>The other situation that moves me greatly is that at the very close of +the play, that from which I quoted a while back, in which Tyrrell's +madness becomes evident in his belief that he is a youth again, with all +the world before him to do with as he will.</p> + +<p>The characters in "The Heather Field" are less rigid than those in the +later plays, but even in this play you feel about them, as you feel so +often about the characters of Hawthorne, that they are characters chosen +to interpret an idea rather than children of the imagination or +portraits done from observation of life.</p> + + +<a name="page83" id="page83"></a> + +<p>As one recalls the motive and situations and background and symbolism +of "The Heather Field," not having read the play for some time, it seems +far finer than when one returns to it. Fine, too, it must seem to any +one reading a scenario of it and not offended, as one reading it +constantly is by the inability of its dialogue to represent more of the +person speaking than his point of view. The dialogue of Mr. Martyn is +almost never true dramatic speech, and not only not true dramatic +speech, but despite the very clear differentiation of the characters, +with little of their personality or temperament in it.</p> + +<p>"Maeve" has always seemed to me a lesser play than "The Heather Field," +and it now leaves me even colder than of old. Nor, though I can see how +fine in conception was the character of Mrs. Font in "The Enchanted +Sea," does that one character seem to me, now, to redeem the undeveloped +possibilities of the situations of the play, the incomplete characters +of Guy and Mask and the failure of the dialogue assigned to the +characters to approach true dramatic speech. "Maeve" is the better play +of the two. With all its shortcomings it has about it an unearthliness +of atmosphere, a quiet coldness of beauty that has come of the thought +Mr. Martyn had, as he wrote it, of the moonlight on the Burren Hills in +his home country. In this one respect Mr. Martyn has done what he would, +for he holds that "the greatest beauty like the old Greek sculptures is +always cold."</p> + +<p>Mr. Martyn calls "Maeve" "a psychological drama in two acts." It relates +the story of the last day and night in the life of a visionary girl, the +hereditary princess + +<a name="page84" id="page84"></a> +of Burren in Clare, in the west of Ireland. On the +eve of her marriage to Hugh Fitz Walter, a rich young Englishman, whom +she will wed only for her father's sake to reestablish him in his +position as "The O'Heynes" among the neighboring gentry, she wanders off +into the Burren Hills with her old nurse Peg Inerny. Peg has fascinated +Maeve O'Heynes with tales of "the other people," convincing Maeve, as +she is convinced herself, that she changes from the old vagrant peasant +whom the countryside half fears into Queen Maeve, the great Amazon of +the Cuchulain legends. Maeve O'Heynes in her own dreams has seen great +heroes and heroines of Ireland's legendary past, and she believes that +they still live among the fairies as many a peasant to-day beside Peg +Inerny believes. So Maeve follows Peg to the mountains, though it is her +wedding-eve, to see these great people of old time and to meet a lover +she has seen in vision, the ideal man of her dreams. She finds her way +home several hours later through the white moonlight of the bitter March +night. Then, in a sort of trance, looking out of her window in the +half-ruined castle to the ruined abbey, the mysterious round tower, the +stony mountains, she beholds the vision of Queen Maeve, with an +attendant troupe of harpers and pages, rise from the cairn and approach +the castle. As the troupe returns from castle to cairn Maeve's spirit +passes with it under the Northern lights into the land of the ever-young +of Tir-nan-Ogue. When her sister goes to call her to make ready for her +wedding, she finds Maeve sitting still and cold at the open casement. +Maeve has found the supernatural lover, once human, of "boyish + +<a name="page85" id="page85"></a> +face +closehooded with short gold hair," and again only "a symbol of ideal +beauty," to be truly a "Prince of the hoar dew," for he is death. Maeve +has renounced life and sought "perfection in what unfolds as death."</p> + +<p>Mr. Yeats explains the play ("Beltaine," February, 1900) to "symbolize +Ireland's choice between English materialism and her own natural +idealism, as well as the choice of every individual soul." Does it +follow that the lesson of "Maeve" is that it were better for Ireland to +be depopulated in her pursuit of national individuality, of ideal +beauty, than to drift along to complete Anglicanization, even though +that bring riches, peace, and content? An austere policy, surely, if I +read rightly the meaning of Mr. Yeats.</p> + +<p>"Maeve" was not so well played at its production during the second +season's performances of "The Irish Literary Theatre" in February, 1900, +as "The Heather Field" had been performed in 1899, but it was almost as +enthusiastically received. It has not won for itself, however, +reproduction outside of Dublin, as did Mr. Martyn's first play, which +was played in New York, at the Carnegie Lyceum, in April, 1900, and +which was revived in London in 1903.</p> + +<p>If objection be made to "The Enchanted Sea" as a reflection of "The Lady +from the Sea," it can be replied that the call of the sea that may not +be resisted is as old as the heart of man. Sea fairies, mermaids and +mermen, and the voice of the waters tugging as irresistibly on the tired +spirit as the undertow on the body tired with long swimming, are in +Gaelic literature from the beginning, and + +<a name="page86" id="page86"></a> +before Mr. Martyn had written +of the sea enchantment it had lent its charm to many of the stories of +"Fiona Macleod." It was two years after its publication in 1902 that, on +April 18 and 19, 1904, "The Enchanted Sea" was put on at the Antient +Concert Rooms, Dublin by "The Players' Club." It was not well played, +but according to Mr. Standish James O'Grady it was much better, seen and +listened to, than read. Writing, in his "All Ireland Review," of its +production, he puts it on record "I never saw an audience so attentive +and at the same time so undemonstrative. It was like being in church." +The audience probably felt the dignity of conception back of the +insufficiency of execution in the play and its ineffectiveness of +presentation. The story that Mr. Martyn dreamed to carry over the +footlights is of Mrs. Font, a peasant woman who has sent her husband, a +gentleman, to his grave a broken-spirited man because of her sacrifice +of his honor to advance their material position. When the curtain rises, +Mrs. Font has been thwarted, by the death of her son, in her lifelong +dream of obtaining possession of the Font estates. The estates have +reverted to her nephew, Guy Font, a strange boy, who has been brought up +by the peasantry of the west coast and so has come to share many of +their beliefs. He is fascinated by the sea by which he lives, and his +family's friend, Lord Mask, has been drawn to him, although there is +such disparity in their years, by this love of the sea which he and the +boy have in common. Mrs. Font wishes her daughter to marry Mask, but the +young people are but half in love with each other. Agnes Font cannot +share his visionariness, as her other + +<a name="page87" id="page87"></a> +lover, Commander Lyle, plainly +sees. So the North of Ireland man never gives up hope of winning her. +Mrs. Font vulgarly throws Mask and Agnes together, in her determination +that they shall make a match of it, and as vulgarly tells Lyle the girl +is not for him. Mask cannot but marry Agnes, Mrs. Font thinks, if Agnes +has a large fortune. To secure the fortune and the lord for her +daughter, Mrs. Font determines to get Guy Font out of the way. Her +purpose coincides with her peasant belief that he is a "changeling," and +is really of the sea people. So she goes with him to a sea cave he is +fond of visiting, and only she comes from the cave. She is suspected, +but before the officers come for her, she learns that her crime has +defeated its own end. Mask is driven mad by the loss of his friend and, +seeking to join him by the sea, is overwhelmed and drawn out by the +undertow. As the officers come to arrest her, Mrs. Font hangs herself +from the landing of the great staircase of Font Hill with the rope Guy +used there as a swing.</p> + +<p>"The Enchanted Sea" is cruder, colder, more amateurish than the two +other plays of its class, full of the sort of talk that falls from the +lips of a boy of seventeen just awakened to ideals. Its characters act +as openly and as petulantly as children. Mrs. Font, really fine in +conception, is in realization only a typical villain of the cheap +melodrama; and Commander Lyle, of the Royal Navy, a man of thirty, is as +childish in love as a schoolboy whose beloved takes an ice from his +rival at a church festival.</p> + +<p>What Mr. Martyn could have done with "A Tale of a Town," had he been +willing to learn when opportunity + +<a name="page88" id="page88"></a> +was his with Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore +and Lady Gregory, is partially shown in the rewriting of the play by Mr. +Moore into "The Bending of the Bough." The motives remain as they were, +and, in essentials, the action is the same, the first act being little +different in the two plays The four other acts, however, Mr. Moore has +almost entirely rewritten, and though everywhere the fundamental +brainwork is Mr. Martyn's, the last acts are finer in the revised +version. Mr. Moore makes far more plausible the girl, Millicent Fell, +for love of whom, and a life of ease, the political leader Jasper Dean +gives up a leadership through which he could largely right his country's +wrongs. Not only does Mr. Moore make believable the action of the play, +but he puts words on it, which, if not true dramatic speech, reveal, +after the manner of the novelist, just what are the thought and emotion +of the characters, and the words are in themselves beautiful.</p> + +<p>In "A Tale of a Town" the political situation from which evolves the +action of the play is the unification by Jasper Dean of the corporation +of a town, unnamed, on the west coast of Ireland, to prosecute a lawsuit +against an English town, Anglebury, which owes the Irish town a large +indemnity, promised the Irish town when it gave up a line of steamers in +the interest of the Anglebury line of steamers. After uniting all the +various elements save the place hunter Alderman Lawrence against +Anglebury, Dean gives up the leadership because his fiancée, whose uncle +is the mayor of the English town, turns against him because he is +opposed to the interests of her set. To hold her he betrays his town.</p> + + +<a name="page89" id="page89"></a> + +<p>"A Tale of a Town" is so crude, so naked, so obvious, so uninspired, +one wonders why it can be taken seriously at all. But the reason is not +far to seek. The play is true, in the main, to the life it depicts, and +there is vehement feeling back of its satire; and truth and intensity of +feeling cannot be denied effect on the stage any more than on the +rostrum. Where it falls short of reality is in the dialogue of the +aldermen. No politicians, even when egged by their envious womankind, +would ever give themselves away as do these of "A Tale of a Town." They +are as frankly self-revelatory as if they were characters in a morality +play.</p> + +<p>It would, perhaps, be inexact to call Mr. Martyn a misogynist, but he +has that attitude toward women of some priests his countrymen, as of +many priests of all creeds, that there is something belittling if not +degrading in absorbing association with women. His feeling is not at all +the commoner feeling of men that leads them all to cry, "The woman +tempted me." Women tempt Mr. Martyn no more than they did Ruskin, but he +seems to feel that the majority of them are nuisances if not baggages. +So strong is this feeling in "A Tale of a Town" that it leads him to +make Millicent behave in a way no Jasper Dean in real life would ever +stand, for Jasper Dean is not a man pronouncedly uxorious until his +abject surrender at the end of Act IV.</p> + +<p>There are almost as many indictments of women as there are of England in +the plays of Mr. Martyn: Mrs. Tyrrell in "The Heather Field" and Mrs. +Font in "The Enchanted Sea," as well as all of the women in "A Tale + +<a name="page90" id="page90"></a> +of +a Town" save Miss Arabella Dean. In "Maeve," the heroine and Finola are +sympathetically presented, and there is a kind of attraction as well as +decided repulsion in Peg Inerny. But such sympathy as Mr. Martyn does +express here seems to be expressed not because the women are fellow +human beings, but because Maeve and Peg Inerny symbolize Ireland's +resistance to English ways and because Finola is filled with +loving-kindness for Maeve. Agnes Font in "The Enchanted Sea" escapes the +pillory rather inexplicably, for she is poor, weak girlhood unable to +understand the other-worldly idealism of her cousin and Lord Mask. But +since Mrs. Font was altogether repulsive and the men either too dreamy +for "common nature's daily food" or too hard in the way of the Black +North, Mr. Martyn felt, I suppose, that his hearers would be utterly +alienated were there not some one in the play sympathetic in the +ordinary way of human nature.</p> + +<p>"A Tale of a Town" was put on for the first time at Molesworth Hall, +Dublin, late in October of 1905, by Cumann nan Gaedheal, not very +notably, but it was hailed by the Irish Ireland newspapers as admirable +propagandist material, "The United Irishmen" declaring that "an Irish +play which brings home to us, as this does, the secret of the endurance +of foreign government in this country, is a national asset."</p> + +<p>Mr. Martyn has not cared enough for "The Place Hunters" (1905) to +publish it in book form, contenting himself with its printing in a +little periodical. It is, as its title indicates, a fellow of "A Tale of +a Town," but it has + +<a name="page91" id="page91"></a> +not back of it intensity of feeling enough to lift +itself out of farce.</p> + +<p>Between "The Place Hunters" and "Grangecolman" is an interval of seven +years, but it is the Mr. Martyn of earlier plays, still faithful to +Ibsen and still of a dialogue more formal than that of life, that we +find in this play of his middle age. As you read "Grangecolman" you +think of "Rosmersholm," as you thought of "The Wild Duck" when you read +"The Heather Field." "Grangecolman" is the story of a daughter's +frustration of her elderly father's intention to marry his young +amanuensis, by playing the rôle of the family ghost, long fabled but +never seen, and being shot by the girl she feels is driving her out of +her home. Katherine Devlin is another creature of her maker's misogyny. +She is a bitter, barren woman of suffragette type, whose marriage and +career as a doctor have been alike failures, and who has alienated +herself from all, even her mild father, by her selfishness and +discontent. It is she who has brought Miss Clare Farquhar into her +father's home to render him those services in his pursuit of heraldry +and genealogy that were irksome to her, and so she herself is +responsible for his dependence on his secretary, which, when once the +daughter recognizes it, threatens annihilation of what little pleasure +she has in her life. Her husband is a dreamy sort of man, slack-fibred +and pottering, who goes about waving the banner of the ideal and +refusing to work. The fifth character of the play is the butler, Horan. +All are clearly characterized, but if the dialogue is less stiff than +that of the earlier plays, it is little more distinctive of the + +<a name="page92" id="page92"></a> +people +who speak it, and in the latter part of the play labored and stodgy. +"Grangecolman" is a picture of life as we all know it, and there is in +it a fidelity of purpose that gives it a kind of effectiveness. There is +not in it, however, any keenness of vision, any deep reading of life, +any great underlying emotion, to relieve its abject sordidness. There is +no gusto, no beauty, no intensity of bitterness even, to make its +sordidness interesting in any other than a pathological way.</p> + +<p>As one reads "Hail and Farewell," one might readily come to believe that +Mr. Martyn is only an eccentric character, "gotten up" by Mr. Moore for +a novel. Mr. Martyn is, in reality, a very vital force working for the +nationalization of Irish art, if not an artist himself. The pity is that +he is not wholly an artist, for he might have been. He knows and is +interested in classes of Irish society that the dramatists of the Abbey +Theatre have not tried to depict, and had he realized twelve years ago +what a chance was his to learn the art of the stage, with the help and +collaboration of Mr. Moore, Mr. Yeats, and Lady Gregory, he might now be +what he seemed to be after the triumphant production of "The Heather +Field," the Irish playwright who had adapted the modes of Ibsen to the +presentation of the life of Irish landlords and bourgeois politicians.</p> + +<p>But Mr. Martyn would not realize that ideas—and he is rich in +ideas—constitute the larger part of originality; he thought technique +in drama must come from the man himself, too. Such technique, of course, +comes most often from the study of other drama. Certainly it + +<a name="page93" id="page93"></a> + +was an +original possession of none of the dramatists of the Celtic Renaissance, +and Mr. Martyn might have been content to be a fellow learner, along +with the rest of them, from one another, and from all the great +dramatists of the world. It may be that Mr. Martyn never would have +attained style, but he could, I think, have learned to make his +characters express themselves in a way nearer to true dramatic speech +than the lifeless dialogue of his that only just manages to give you +their thought, with none of their mood of the moment or of their +personality.</p> + +<p>In every one of Mr. Martyn's plays the plot is interesting, save in "The +Place Hunters"; in every other play it is significant; and in all it is +come largely of his individual experience of life. Back of all the plays +but these two political satires there is brooding that is deep if not +passionate. In all the characters are natural, though some of them are +unusual in the way of the unusual characters of Ibsen. And all the plays +are marred, "The Heather Field" less than any other, by the fumbling +touch of the amateur. Ironically, Mr. Martyn is strong where most +Irishmen are weak—in his plot construction: even Mr. Yeats, who never +praises with his tongue in his cheek, owning to "the triumphant +construction of the 'The Heather Field'"; and weak, where most Irishmen +are strong, in the dialogue. It would not have aided Mr. Martyn, for the +kind of play he prefers, to have listened to the speech of the peasant +as Lady Gregory has listened to it, but he might have learned, with such +compeers, how to select and to condense from actual upper-class speech a +speech that would represent the thoughts and emotions + +<a name="page94" id="page94"></a> +and personalities +of his characters. It is far more difficult, of course, to write +dialogue for upper-class people, save humorous dialogue, since, as many +from Wordsworth's day on have pointed out, upper-class people do not +express their thoughts and emotions as frankly as do the folk. As Mr. +Yeats puts it, they look into the fire instead.</p> + +<p>Amateur as he is, however, Mr. Martyn has one play to his credit that he +who has read will remember, "The Heather Field." It is often thus with +the amateur. We need go no further than Mr. Martyn's countryman who gave +us "The Burial of Sir John Moore" for witness. Mr. Martyn has, too, like +other amateurs, given suggestions to others that they have realized as +fine art. It is more than likely, for instance, that Mr. Yeats had in +his mind some memory of Peg Inerny when he created Cathleen ni Houlihan. +There is, too, about the best plays of Mr. Martyn, a quality of a +certain kind. They have the distinctness of objects seen under the +bright hard light of late winter, when the sun grows strong, but when +the winds are still keen from the northwest and there are no leaves as +yet on the trees.</p> + +<p>There are many characterizations of Mr. Martyn in his kinsman's "Ave." +He is now "a fellow ... with an original streak of genius in him, and +very little literary tact"; but he is more generally characterized in +some such fashion as this, which Mr. Moore makes a deliverance of his +own: "A good fellow—an excellent one, and a man who would have written +well if his mother hadn't put it into his head that he had a soul. The +soul is a veritable pitfall." However that may be, it was the discovery, +or + +<a name="page95" id="page95"></a> +at least suppositious discovery, that he had a soul, a soul in +harmony with the melancholy soul of Ireland, that drove Mr. Moore back +to Dublin, and, for moments, even farther west to the home country of +his family about Lough Gara in Mayo. This discovery was foreshadowed in +"Evelyn Innes" (1898), in which Mr. Moore grows curious about the belief +in ancestral memory and other esoteric beliefs of Mr. Yeats; it is +latent in the introductions to "The Heather Field" and "The Bending of +the Bough"; and it is made manifest in the parts of the latter play that +are Mr. Moore's. Who most helped him to the discovery it is not easy to +say, but an interest in his country entered into and possessed him as +Kirwan's ideas entered into and possessed Dean. No doubt Mr. Yeats +helped him to find his soul, and Mr. Russell, but it must be it was Mr. +Martyn through whose agency the first glimmerings of such a recognition +began to break upon his mind. Is it only dramatically that Mr. Moore +wrote when he put upon Kirwan's lips in 1900 the words, "Life is the +enemy—we should fly from life"? But whether this is only a dramatic +repetition of what he might have heard any time from "A.E." had he +chosen to listen, there is no doubt that Mr. Moore did discover a new +quality in himself in the late nineties after he became intimately +associated with the new Irish movement. There is a wistfulness of +feeling and a beauty of thought in his writing, from "Evelyn Innes" on, +that there was not in it before "Evelyn Innes."</p> + +<p>There are those who think the greatest excellence of Mr. Moore is as an +art critic, and that "Modern Painting" + +<a name="page96" id="page96"></a> +(1893) is his great book. Mr. +Moore himself says that "Esther Waters" (1894) is his only book that he +can read with admiration and content; and those particularly interested +in the Renaissance will hold out for "Evelyn Innes" or "The Lake" +(1905). To me "A Drama in Muslin" (1886) is the best story of Mr. Moore +in his earlier realistic manner and "The Lake" in his later manner, a +manner that is now wistful and now mellow, as in "A Drama in Muslin" his +manner is uniformly as hard as winter sunshine.</p> + +<p>Mr. Moore is, as I said at the outset, a hard-working amateur in "A +Modern Lover"; three years later, in "A Drama in Muslin," he writes with +authority and insight; as he does, too, in "Parnell and his Island" +(1887), though here with scant sympathy; but it is not until "Evelyn +Innes" that he becomes deeply concerned with beauty of subject or beauty +of background, or, except at haphazard, possessed of any mastery of +style. "Evelyn Innes" is very well written,—in spots,—but "The Lake" +is of a wholeness of good tissue that is attainable only through an art +that has labored long and earnestly to achieve beauty. Had Mr. Moore +never recaptured his ancestral tradition, had he remained the writer +that Paris and London had made him, he had never written so finely as he +writes in "The Lake." An infancy and boyhood in Ireland; a youth in +London; the ten years from twenty-one to thirty-one in Paris; eleven +years of hard writing in London, years comparatively lean after those of +luxury that anteceded them, brought Mr. Moore at forty-two to a +knowledge of what was beautiful and significant in his + +<a name="page97" id="page97"></a> +home country. He +and Mr. Martyn were not many years apart when they began to write about +Ireland, but Mr. Moore had back of him not only ten years of writing, +but back of that ten years of living life as an art in Paris and his +attempts in the art of painting and his years of discussion of art in +the studios. Mr. Martyn, at home, had been more concerned with religion +and nationality and politics, and a shift to art as the principal career +of life after forty—"Morgante the Lesser" was no more than an incursion +into art, about as much of his life as a trip to Bayreuth—is only in +rare instances productive of results interesting to others than the +"artist." The difference in the achievements of the two men is not so +much the result of the difference of the powers with which both were +gifted as the result of the difference of time at which the will began +to work to realize those powers. Had Mr. Martyn begun soon enough and +had he been enough interested in his writing he might have made drama as +full of insight and beauty and as true to human nature as are the novels +of his kinsman. It is another irony of Mr. Martyn's life that it was he +who should have led Mr. Moore to the subject on which Mr. Moore was to +do his most harmonious and beautiful work, though it is possible, +judging from "Parnell and his Island," that Mr. Moore might in the end +have found his own way back.</p> + +<p>After his wont Mr. Moore puts his intimates into books made out of Irish +life. In "Evelyn Innes" Ulick Dean, fashioned in the first version of +the novel after Mr. Yeats, is the only wholly Irish character. Evelyn is +not Irish at + +<a name="page98" id="page98"></a> +all, and her Scotch father is given the musical interests +of Mr. Dolmetsch, a Bohemian, I believe. But Sir Owen Asher has in him +much of Mr. Moore himself, though most of Mr. Moore that is there is the +English Mr. Moore. There is something of Mr. Martyn in Monsignor Mostyn, +though an actual and not a potential ecclesiastic is drawn upon for the +basic characteristics of the character In the second version of "Evelyn +Innes" there is more of Mr. Russell than of Mr. Yeats in Ulick Dean, at +least in his appearance and sayings, though Mr. Moore could not divest +his composer of the personality of Mr. Yeats. There is less of Ireland +in "Sister Theresa" (1901) than in "Evelyn Innes," but "The Untilled +Field," short stories written after the removal of Mr. Moore to Dublin +and gathered together in 1903, are wholly concerned with Ireland. As Mr. +Moore makes Jasper say to Millicent in "The Bending of the Bough": "It +is the land underfoot that makes the Celt. Soon you will feel the +fascination of this dim, remote land steal over you." It was when this +æsthetic homesickness overtook Mr. Moore that he grew to feel lonely in +England, at least momentarily, and to believe that "we are lonely in a +foreign land because we are deprived of our past life; but the past is +about us here [he is speaking through the mouth of Dean and in Ireland]; +we see it at evening glimmering among the hollows of the hills."</p> + +<p>In "Memoirs of my Dead Self" (1906) there are chapters which tell of the +return of his thought to his boyhood in the west and that record his +wish to be buried with his father by Lough Gara; and all three volumes +of "Hail and + +<a name="page99" id="page99"></a> + +Farewell," the first of which was published in 1911 as +"Ave," and the second in 1912 as "Salve," are the fruit of his ten +years' partial residence in Ireland, 1901-11.</p> + +<p>Our concern with Mr. Moore here, however, is with Mr. Moore the +dramatist, so I shall not dwell on the short stories and the novels save +to say that they, more than any writing of his, reveal his inherent +dramatic power. By dramatic power I mean not his power of situation and +evolution of dramatic technique, but his power to change his point of +view with the character he is creating A sensual exquisite himself whose +predominant thought is of woman, and of woman from a standpoint closely +akin to an epicure's toward an ideal meal, Mr. Moore can identify +himself with people in whom there is none of himself but the essential +humanity common to mankind. Most wonderful of many wonderful +realizations of viewpoint so different from what is his personally is +his realization of the attitude of Father MacTurnan, an old priest, +celibate by nature, who put aside his books, as ministering to the pride +of the intellect, and sat, night after night, with them by his side in +the study, but always unopened, while he was knitting socks for the poor +of his parish. Better known, of course, than this character of Father +MacTurnan is that of Father Gogarty in "The Lake," but for all his +sympathetic elaboration of this bemused and distraught cleric the +character is never wholly opposed to that of Mr. Moore himself as is the +character of Father MacTurnan.</p> + +<p>It is this power of Mr. Moore that makes him the great novelist that he +is, this power of identifying himself with + +<a name="page100" id="page100"></a> +the personality and this +looking out on life from the viewpoint of Esther Waters or Lewis +Seymour, or Edward Dempsey or Rose Leicester, of Kate Lennox or Mr. +Innes. Such a power is akin to one of the greatest powers of the Gael, +his quick sympathy with what appeals to him in others, his momentary +absorption in their interests and his passing possession by their +purpose. It is this habit of his nature that makes the Gael tell people +what they wish to hear, it is this that makes him so courteous, it is +this that makes him so good an actor. And the power that makes one man a +good actor, a real actor,—not one who happens to fit a part, but one +who can change his personality from part to part,—is but another +manifestation of the power that enables a man to identify himself +wholly, now with this character, now with that, in a story which he is +writing. If a man can express such identification in dialogue, he can, +if he master dramatic construction, make himself into a dramatist; if he +express it in subtle analytic writing about the character, it gives him +one of the great powers of the novelist, a power which, if it is united +with the power of story-telling, makes him a great novelist, and, +oftentimes, even if he be but a fair story-teller, a great novelist. The +English novel has been famously deficient in story-telling ability since +Scott's day, and Mr. Moore is no exception to the rule. As, however, the +emphasis of all his stories is on character, his deficiency in narrative +power matters hardly at all.</p> + +<p>Mr. Moore is, then, Ireland's greatest novelist because he has in +greatest measure—in full measure—this greatest gift of the Gael, the +gift of dramatic impersonation + +<a name="page101" id="page101"></a> +of all manner of men in all their +changing moods. A personality as intense as was that of Meredith, as is +that of Mr. Hardy, Mr. Moore has not always one attitude, as have both +Welshman and Saxon of the Saxons, however completely they write from the +standpoint of each character they create. By the side of the characters +of Meredith is always Meredith, high-hearted and confident, and by the +side of the characters of Mr. Hardy is always Mr. Hardy, lamenting what +woe fate has brought them, but by the side of Ned Carmady or Oliver +Gogarty, the Mummer or Montgomery, Sir Owen Asher or Ulick, there is +seldom Mr. Moore. He almost never plays chorus to his characters, either +through a commenting character or by direct interposition in the manner +of Thackeray, though, of course, the characters again and again express +his views. So in "The Wild Goose," in which Ned Carmady represents one +year's outlook of Mr. Moore, there is only one choric observation.</p> + +<p>When one considers how alien to Ireland were all the interests of Mr. +Moore for years, his rendering of the Irish characters of "The Untilled +Field" and "The Lake" is realized to be all the more remarkable. It is +not easy to pick up threads that one has dropped in a period of one's +life that is dead and done, but Mr. Moore has picked them up more than +once. From time to time he had, of course, made visits home, writing "A +Mummer's Wife" in Galway in 1884 and finding there then, no doubt, the +material for "A Drama in Muslin" and the sketches of "Parnell and his +Island"; but these visits were none of them of long duration until his +"return" in 1901.</p> + + +<a name="page102" id="page102"></a> + +<p>It is far easier to paint in the background of landscape remembered +from childhood than it is again to get into touch with people parted +from in childhood. The landscape changes little in far-off, lonely +places, but people nowhere are what they were when the past years +sufficient to bring up beside the old folks a new generation with ideals +changed. Ireland, for all the agitation of the Land League, was landlord +Ireland when Mr. Moore got "A Drama in Muslin" from Ireland; Ireland was +passing to the peasant proprietor when Mr. Moore returned to it to write +"The Untilled Field" and "The Lake." Social and economic questions, +however, interest Mr. Moore only as they concern the individual, but the +changing conditions in Ireland cannot be prevented from finding their +way here and there into his writing through the changes they have +brought about in the people of whom he writes, though many of those he +writes of are survivals from an older generation.</p> + +<p>There are glimpses in his writing of many phases of Irish life, his +characters varying all the way from such old-timers as his Cousin Dan, +who, as he himself intimates, might have come out of the pages of Lever +or Lover, to the very modern Father Gogarty, whose outlook is on an +Ireland that "perhaps, more than any other country, had understood the +supremacy of spirit over matter, and had striven to escape through +mortifications from the prison of the flesh." One wonders, at times, if +Mr. Moore, who joined the cause of Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats, +self-confessedly, to have his finger in a new literary pie, really felt +the landscape as he says he + +<a name="page103" id="page103"></a> +does in his books, or whether he just +momentarily caught the power of seeing it through their eyes. Can one +who was once so resolute a realist really appreciate "faint Celtic haze; +a vision of silver mist and distant mountain and moor"? Perhaps he can, +as a good actor appreciates a part alien to his sympathy, that he is +playing. But whether or not Mr. Moore learned to love the lonely +landscape for a while, he eventually tired of it, as his Father Gogarty +tired of it. Surely Mr. Moore is speaking personally as well as +dramatically when he writes, "This lake was beautiful, but he was tired +of its low gray shores; he was tired of those mountains, melancholy as +Irish melodies, and as beautiful."</p> + +<p>Almost any novelist, sooner or later in his career, dabbles in drama, +and Mr. Moore no doubt would have attempted drama in the natural course +of things, even if he had not been interested in "The Independent +Theatre" and thus led to a situation in which consistency demanded that +he write a play. It was his articles on the drama, gathered into +"Impressions and Opinions" (1891), that provoked Mr. G.R. Sims to taunt +him into "The Strike at Arlingford" (1893). In "Our Dramatists and their +Literature," one of these papers, Mr. Moore, in hitting all the heads of +all the contemporaneous dramatists, so stung Mr. Sims that he said he +would give a hundred pounds for a stall from which to witness a +performance of "an unconventional play" written by Mr. Moore. Mr. Moore +accepted the challenge, and "The Strike at Arlingford," as I have said, +was the result, Mr. Sims having agreed to withdraw the word +"unconventional" on Mr. + +<a name="page104" id="page104"></a> +Moore's objection that he would be at the mercy +of Mr. Sims' judgment if the word was retained. "The Independent +Theatre" played the play and Mr. Sims paid the money. It was perhaps +just as well for Mr. Moore that the adjective was withdrawn, for the +play was little less conventional than "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray" or +"Sowing the Wind," to mention two successes of that year by play-makers +that took their art a little more seriously than Mr. Sims. In a way, +too, "The Strike at Arlingford" is unoriginal. Lady Ann Travers is only +a more fortunate Hedda Gabler who in the end accepts the protection of +her Chancellor Brack, the capitalist Baron Steinbach, after her Lövberg +turned labor agitator, John Reid has, like his prototype, made a wreck +of his life. "The Strike at Arlingford" has its excellences: its plot is +logically unfolded; it is believable; it is true to human nature; it has +moments of intensity. Had Mr. Moore power of dialogue it might have been +a fine play, for the characterization is what one would expect from so +conscientious a depicter of life as Mr. Moore, and the problem, a man's +choice between his love and his duty, one that has never failed to +appeal to men. Mr. Moore is careful to tell us that, in his own +conception of the play, "the labor dispute is an externality to which I +attach little importance."</p> + +<p>Its performance and publication, though neither event was of very much +more than journalistic importance, served to give Mr. Moore something of +a position as an authority on the drama, coming as they did after his +association, since 1891, with "The Independent Theatre." So it is that +we find him collaborating with Mrs. Craigie + +<a name="page105" id="page105"></a> +in "Journeys End in Lovers +Meeting" (1894), which served for a year or so as one of the little +plays that characterized the repertoire of the Irving-Terry Company. +Just what was Mr. Moore's share in this play I do not know, but that, +slight as it is, it served as apprentice work in the art of +collaboration there can be no doubt, or that it added to his familiarity +with the stage.</p> + +<p>It is certain that Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats were glad of the assistance +of Mr. Moore in founding "The Irish Literary Theatre," not only for the +prominence of his name as novelist and as Moore of Moore Hall, and for +his known provocativeness in pamphleteering and his capacity for drawing +the fire of opponents, but for what knowledge he had of playwriting and +for what experience he had in getting together and training actors for +special performances such as those of "The Independent Theatre."</p> + +<p>I have already spoken of what Mr. Moore did to "A Tale of a Town" to +make it "The Bending of the Bough." From the beginning of Act II on to +the end, he rewrote almost all of it, retaining only now and then an +eloquent or a biting line from Mr. Martyn's play. Mr. Moore changes the +scene of the play from Ireland to Scotland, that its allegory may not be +so obvious; he develops Kirwan's character until he becomes not only a +sort of composite spiritual portrait of the leaders of the Renaissance +but a believable leader of men; and he makes Millicent's moulding of +Dean to her will human, as I have said, and—Dean being the weakling +that he was—inevitable. Mr. Moore cuts the play down where it is +stodgy, he expands + +<a name="page106" id="page106"></a> +it where expansion realizes for you more of +character and motives of his people, he infuses into it more of the +spirit of the movement, and he makes its patriotism wider in its appeal, +a bigger and a better thing at once more concrete and more concerned +with the things of the spirit.</p> + +<p>"Diarmid and Grania" (1901), the prose play written in collaboration by +Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore, I write of here rather than in the chapter +devoted to Mr. Yeats because, as the legend is shaped in the play, it +has more of Mr. Moore than of Mr. Yeats in it. As neither of the +collaborators was satisfied with the play as produced, and as neither +has been willing to give it up to the other to rewrite, "Diarmid and +Grania" has never been published. The notices of its production, on +October 21, 1901, at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, are so full, however, +and the legend on which it is based so familiar, that it is possible to +say as I have said, when one knows well the work of both authors, whose +influence is dominant in it. It seems, from the notices, to have been +finely played by the Benson Company, which was brought over from England +especially to produce it. The results of "the scratch company" of the +second year's performances, even though these were transferred from the +Antient Concert Rooms to the better stage of the Gaiety Theatre, were +not very satisfactory artistically, but the third year's experiment was +in every way more successful. "The Daily Express" of Dublin, in those +days very much interested in Irish Ireland, thus records, on October 22, +1901, the impressions of the first night. "The 'house' was not merely + +<a name="page107" id="page107"></a> +crowded but representative. We counted among the audience the heads of +all the great professions in Dublin, a considerable number of literary +critics, and an extremely large representation of 'le monde où l'on +s'amuse.' The Gaelic League, which flooded the gallery, was very +friendly to Mr. Moore and Mr. Yeats, and became enthusiastic over Dr. +Douglas Hyde ['The Twisting of the Rope,' by Dr. Hyde, was played by him +and company of amateurs, in Irish]. Between the acts of 'Diarmid and +Grania' several members of the 'gods' sang number of Gaelic songs with +great gusto and a good deal of musical ability."</p> + +<p>There are several versions of the old legend, some of them cynical, +leaving Grania in the end lighter even than Helen of Troy; others +closing with Diarmid slain by the boar as Adonis is slain, and Grania +weeping his death. In all it is Grania who tempts Diarmid to take her +away from Finn on the eve of her wedding to the old king. In some he +goes willingly, in love with her, in others unwillingly, ashamed of his +disloyalty to Finn, but under <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">giesa</span> not to refuse a woman's request. +In the play of Mr. Moore and Mr. Yeats Diarmid and Grania "do not live," +says the "Daily Express," "the exciting life of flight from cromlech to +cromlech. They settle down very comfortably in the monotony of a +prosperous farm. Diarmid busies himself with his sheep. Grania ... +begins to pine for the society from which she has wilfully cut herself +off, and to think more and more of the grim old warrior Finn. Then Finn +comes upon the scene, patches up a sort of truce with Diarmid, and +becomes more friendly with + +<a name="page108" id="page108"></a> +Grania, his lost sweetheart, than Diarmid is +able to tolerate. Mutual recriminations ensue between Diarmid and +Grania, and finally Diarmid goes forth to his portended death, with the +taunts of Grania and the rude jeers of the Fianna ringing in his ears. +As the play closes, the Fianna bear away the body of Diarmid, Finn +comforts the weeping Grania, and we remember the words of the legend +that 'some say she was married to Finn.' The curtain falls—a happy +touch of purely modern cynicism—upon the solitary figure of Conan, the +Thersites of the play, the prophet of evil chances, the scorner of high +things, the prompter of foul suggestions."</p> + +<p>As the play was being written a good deal of discussion about it found +its way into the newspapers. It was rumored that it would be translated +into Irish, and then back again, by Lady Gregory, into English, but no +such fantastic scheme as that Mr. Moore tells us of in "Ave" was +suggested in any of the paragraphs that came my way. Because they could +not agree on the kind of diction they were to use in the play, Mr. +Yeats, who wanted a peasant Grania, agreed, writes Mr. Moore, to his +suggestion that he write the play in French. Mr. Moore gives these as +the words of Mr. Yeats: "Lady Gregory will translate your text into +English. Taidgh O'Donoghue will translate the English text into Irish, +and Lady Gregory will translate the Irish text back into English." "And +then," Mr. Moore makes himself reply to Mr. Yeats, "you'll put style +upon it."</p> + +<p>More remarkable than the scheme was the actual attempt of Mr. Moore to +realize it. On leaving Galway, + +<a name="page109" id="page109"></a> +where he and Mr. Yeats had been +collaborating at Coole, Mr. Moore began the second act in French. He +gives us enough of the dialogue (pages 370 to 376 of "Ave") to show us +his high pride in his French, the tolerance of his humor, and his idea +of the kind of style the play should have.</p> + +<p>If Mr. Moore had given the subject to Mr. Yeats and to Lady Gregory, as +he had some thought of doing, it would only have been a return of a +subject already theirs by right of their long discussion of it together. +Lady Gregory was not yet working upon it for "Gods and Fighting Men" +(1904); but it was she who had reduced it to the proportions of a +scenario for them to work upon. This scenario was published in "Samhain" +of October, 1901, that all of the audiences of the play might be in +possession of the story as a Grecian audience was in possession of the +story of Elektra. And did not Mr. Moore say in his speech at the dinner +given to the supporters of "The Irish Literary Theatre" in February, +1900, in speaking of his collaboration with Mr. Yeats in "Diarmid and +Grania": "It would be difficult to name any poet that Ireland has yet +produced more truly elected by his individual and racial genius to +interpret the old legend than the distinguished poet whose contemporary +and <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">collaborateur</span> I have the honor to be"?</p> + +<p>The story, of course, had been retold only less often than the story of +Deirdre by Irish writers, in one form or another, but there had been no +memorable play made out of it. Mr. Yeats had met it in "The Death of +Dermid," which Sir Samuel Ferguson included in "The Lays of the + +<a name="page110" id="page110"></a> +Western +Gael" (1864), as well as in the direct translations of such scholars as +Mr. Standish Hayes O'Grady and in the versions of such popularizers as +Dr. Joyce. One cannot, not having read the play, declare it is not what +Mr. Moore would have it, "that dramatic telling of the story which +Ireland has been waiting for these many years," but it does not seem so +to have impressed those who saw it and heard it at the performances in +the Gaiety Theatre.</p> + +<p>Now that Lady Gregory has done her "Grania" (1912), it is hardly likely +that Mr. Yeats will return to the story, and with the waning of Mr. +Moore's interest in old Irish legend it is very unlikely that he will +wish to rewrite the play. It would seem we have lost it, whatever its +value, until the "literary remains" of Mr. Moore are given to the +public.</p> + +<p>The quarrel with Mr. Yeats over "Diarmid and Grania," coming as it did +at the end of the three years' venture of "The Irish Literary Theatre," +explains why Mr. Moore wrote no plays for the Irish National Dramatic +Company and its successors on through the Abbey Theatre Players. He was +still interested, however, in the "cause" as far as it was possible for +one of his temperament and taste, and he was conspicuous on first nights +at the Abbey Theatre down to the time of his departure from Dublin in +1911.</p> + +<p>Since "Diarmid and Grania" (1901) Mr. Moore has published the two books +of his that since "A Drama in Muslin" (1886) reveal his deepest +knowledge of Irish life, the volume of stories of varying length to +which he gives + +<a name="page111" id="page111"></a> +that title, so symbolic, "The Untilled Field" (1903), +and "The Lake" (1905), but there are few incidents in either that he is +likely to develop into plays. "The Lake" could not be dramatized, but if +it could be dramatized, it would be as little likely to be presented in +Ireland as "The Tinker's Wedding." Mr. Moore, for all that he was born a +Catholic, would not hesitate any more than did the son of the Protestant +minister to put a priest into a realistic modern play, and that, of +course, would be a mild audacity for Mr. Moore now that he has published +the scenario of "The Apostle" (1911). His Paul, in "The Apostle," a +"thick-set man, of rugged appearance, hairy in the face and with a +belly," is wonderfully alive, and his Jesus is a distinct and realizable +personality, if not the Jesus of Christian dream. It is a curious +illustration of Mr. Moore's almost disciple-like attitude toward Mr. +G.W. Russell that he should make his Christ talk like "A.E." It seemed +to me, as I read the words that Mr. Moore puts first on the lips of +Jesus, that they were phrases that I had heard on the lips of Mr. +Russell. They are of the very quality of his speech and writing: "How +beautiful is the evening light as it dies, revealing every crest; the +outline of the hills is evident now, evident as the will of God." And +now each time, as I re-read them, they sound in my ears to the +remembered rhythm of Mr. Russell's voice. Should Mr. Moore ever evolve a +play from this scenario, and the play be played—and why should it not, +now that the way is so plainly blazed by the score and more of miracle +plays of the past decade?—it will have to be chanted as + + +<a name="page112" id="page112"></a> +"A.E." chants +his verse, as one would wish mass to be chanted.</p> + +<p>Only a year ago Mr. Moore made his last adventure of the theatre. With +the help of Mr. Lennox Robinson he dramatized "Esther Waters," but later +he threw out the latter's work, feeling, no doubt, about it as Mr. +Martyn felt about Mr. Moore's rewriting of his "A Tale of a Town"; and +when it was put on, in the early winter of 1911-12 by the Stage Society, +"Esther Waters" the play was like "Esther Waters" the novel, solely the +work of Mr. Moore. The critics seem agreed that it was long drawn out +and undramatic, but that it was well written and well acted. I suppose +that the preoccupation with "Esther Waters" that this dramatization +reveals is because "Esther Waters" was written in that period of his +life when Mr. Moore was most himself. After ten years in London he had +escaped considerably from the French influence of his young manhood, and +his genius had not been warped out of its true plane, as he would +doubtless now say, by Irish mists. Mr. Moore must have felt that there +was something not wholly himself in much of "The Untilled Field" and in +much of "The Lake," that the minds of Mr. Yeats and Mr. Russell had in a +way dominated his mind, and that not even the hardly tolerated Mr. +Martyn had been without influence upon him.</p> + +<p>Such a realization is not the professed motive for the return of Mr. +Moore to England, but I have no doubt at all that it is somewhere in the +back of his mind, where he would like it to be hidden and forgot. At any +rate, by the time of his return to England, Mr. Moore had come + +<a name="page113" id="page113"></a> +to see +clearly that the Celtic episode of his maturity was closed.</p> + +<p>It is not, I think, particularly difficult for one who understands the +old-fashioned camp-meeting "getting of religion" to understand this +"Celtic episode." Mr. Moore got Celtomania; a sort of "spiritual +consumption," he calls his possession in one place, as a certain other +type of sinner "got religion" in the old shouting days. That is, Mr. +Moore wrought himself up partly in the spirit of the Playboy, and was +wrought up to some degree willy-nilly until he could write his speech of +February, 1900, on "Literature and the Irish Language," and, finally, a +little later, could return happily to the country that until then he +could endure only now and again.</p> + +<p>But as a matter of fact the motive that led Mr. Moore back to Ireland +matters not at all to literature. What beauty of writing that return led +to matters a great deal. Had he not returned to Ireland, we should not +have had a good deal that adds to the joy we win from satiric laughter, +we should not have had "Hail and Farewell"; had he not returned we +should not have had a book that adds to the treasure of beautiful +feeling and beautiful writing there is in English literature, a treasure +that there is no chance of ever having too large; we should not have had +"The Lake," which is Ireland, West Ireland, Catholic Ireland, a land +under gray skies that the priests its masters would, too many of them, +make a land of gray lives.</p> +</div> + +<hr class="page"> + +<div> + +<a name="page114" id="page114"></a> +<a name="toc_7"></a> +<h2>Chapter V</h2> + +<h2 class="sub">Mr. George W. Russell ("A.E.")</h2> + + +<p>Synge is the one instinctive dramatist of the earlier group of writers +of the Celtic Renaissance, the one to whom drama was the inevitable +medium for the expression of the best that was in him. Yet even Synge +came to write plays only through an external stimulus, the urging of Mr. +Yeats on their meeting in Paris. It was fortunate for the Irish drama, +this meeting, and fortunate for Synge. If he had not been brought to the +theatre of his own country, he would probably never have written +anything of first importance. Mr. Yeats himself, of course, had been +interested in verse plays from boyhood, but he, for all the energy he +has expended in learning his own particular art of the stage, speaks +more beautifully through his lyrics and the lyrical passages of his +plays than through their passages that are dramatic speech, and not only +more beautifully but with more of dignity and power. Nor is Lady +Gregory, any more than Mr. Yeats, essentially a dramatist. Her great +power is the power of dialogue, and dialogue, of course, is as often +employed in the service of the story as in the service of the play. Yet +it is not difficult to understand how in Lady Gregory the dialogue and +in Mr. Yeats the love of the spoken word led, when opportunity was made, +to writing for the stage, and for success on the stage. But in the case +of "A.E." it is as difficult + +<a name="page115" id="page115"></a> +to find a foreshadowing of the playwright +in the mystical poet as it would be to see in all but all of the essays +of "The Treasure of the Humble," any proof that their author was a +playwright. To those who knew Mr. Russell only through his verses, and +were unaware of the versatility of the man, his turning dramatist was as +surprising as Emerson turned dramatist would have been to the America of +anti-slavery days.</p> + +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a name="illo_6" id="illo_6"></a><img src="images/image06.jpg" alt="George W. Russell"></p> +<p style="text-align: center">George W. Russell</p> + +<p>It was not, of course, because of an impulse from within that Mr. +Russell attempted drama in "Deirdre" (1902), but because the young +enthusiasts of Ireland's national literary movement wanted plays that +should be at once native in quality and the work of writers of standing. +It did not seem a strange request to Cumann nan Gaedheal to ask Mr. +Russell for a play. What if he had never written a play? He was hardly +in their estimation more of an amateur than Mr. Yeats or Mr. Moore or +Mr. Martyn, who had written plays for "The Irish Literary Theatre" that +had achieved success of a kind, and he was surely as ardent a +Nationalist as any of these. So he was asked for a play to be played at +the Spring Festival of 1902 by the Irish National Dramatic Company that +was forming, and he did what he was asked to do, blocking it all out in +six hours, and finishing it sufficiently in three days for it to be put +in rehearsal. It was in the summer following its first presentation that +I saw it again in rehearsal in a little hall back of a produce shop in +Dublin, and got to know Mr. Russell as playwright before I read his +play. One of the actors, himself maker of verses and plays, gave me his +copy of "Deirdre," with cues marked. I had seen + +<a name="page116" id="page116"></a> +notices of its first +performance in the Irish papers and I had written Mr. Russell to see if +I could get a copy, but he had not yet published it. Then he wrote me of +young poets I met this night in Dublin, and the names on the lips of the +enthusiasts we talked to, and their names were names Mr. Russell had +written me of four months before. Here were they introducing me to his +work as he had thus introduced me to theirs: "There are many poets here +who write beautiful lyrics who are quite unknown out of Ireland because +they never collected them from the pages of obscure magazines.... I have +seen many verses signed 'I.O,' 'Alice Milligan,' 'Ethna Carberry,' + +'Oghma,' 'Paul Gregan,' which I enviously wish I could claim as my +own.... I think myself many of these unknown poets and poetesses write +verses which no living English writer could surpass." The best of the +verses of some of these and of others among his following Mr. Russell +collected in "New Songs" (1904), which bore out much that he claimed for +them.</p> + +<p>It was to six of these young poets he dedicated his last volume of +verse, "The Divine Vision" (1904), as he had dedicated his two earlier +volumes to poet-mystics, "Homeward" (1894) to Mr. Charles Weekes and +"The Earth Breath" (1898) to Mr. Yeats. The young writers (for they were +almost all writers as well as actors) we met this Saturday night in +Dublin, one and all, looked to "A.E." as leader, and some of them looked +to him as high priest of their cult, as seer of that ancient type that +combined as its functions the deliverance of religious dicta, prophecy, +and song. My thoughts went back to + +<a name="page117" id="page117"></a> +our Concord of half a century ago, +yet I wondered was Emerson's fascination as compelling as this.</p> + +<p>It was in a commonplace-looking editorial sanctum that I found "A.E." on +the following morning, at 22, Lincoln Place, to which he had descended +from his office in the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, to edit +"The Homestead" in its editor's absence. I was to see him, in the hour I +was to spend with him there, in many rôles. First was that of one of the +beginners of the Irish Literary Revival. He has himself given the credit +to Mr. Standish James O'Grady for furnishing the initial stimulus to the +movement, in his "Heroic Period" and "Cuchulain and his Contemporaries" +of 1878 and 1880; but to "A.E." and Mr. Yeats and Dr. Hyde also is due +much of the credit. Mr. Russell said that when he came up to Dublin, a +boy from Lurgan, there was no independent thought in Dublin, but now he +thought there was a good deal, and he and his fellows of the Hermetic +Society, he took mild pride in believing, had had something to do with +the change. Even then, as a boy, he could not read most English +literature, and so he took to reading the literature of the East, the +Bhagavad-Gîta and the Sufis. From his reading of these, with other young +men that somehow found each other out, came the Hermetic Society, at +whose meetings everything mystic from the Upanishads to Thomas Taylor +was discussed. From the study of the universal, he said, they came at +last to the national, to the study of the ancient folk-lore and stories +of their people, which, had it not been for the Danes and Normans, would +have been shaped into literary form + +<a name="page118" id="page118"></a> + +long before now, when, he said, +they were only being so shaped.</p> + +<p>His disciples had told me the night before that "A.E." had helped them +much in the National Dramatic Company, painting scenery for them, +designing costumes, and aiding in a hundred other ways. He was silent +about these matters and not very proud of the play. "Of course," he said, +"I was very familiar with the story of Deirdre, and I had thought of its +dramatic effectiveness, but I knew nothing of the stage and I was very +much surprised it went so well." That it went well, I, who had seen it +but the night before, could testify, though that rehearsal could give +but a suggestion of the beautiful stage pictures it presents when played +in the costume of the Heroic Age. Despite its intensely dramatic +situations, it is, however, essentially a decorative rather than a +dramatic play, and its exalted prose is seldom true dramatic speech. But +you carry from it the memory of beautiful pictures, and a feeling that +something noble has passed your way, to enter into and become a part of +you.</p> + +<p>As we were talking of the "movement," in came a young Roscommon +landlord, and with him another of its phases and my discovery of Mr. +Russell, man of business, organizer of the Irish Agricultural +Organization Society. The talk was now of the erection of a hall, and +Mr. Russell seemed as familiar with stone and lime and sand as with +mysticism and poetry, which we had discussed, and with painting, which +we were considering in a few minutes, when Mr. J.B. Yeats, Jr., arrived, +to talk over an exhibition of his pictures to be held in Dublin the +following + +<a name="page119" id="page119"></a> +week. A few days later I was reading Mr. Russell's review of +Mr. Yeats's pictures, but before I left 22, Lincoln Place, I had a +mental picture of "art critic" added to the already long list of titles +after "A.E.'s" name, and I had still another evidence of his +impressiveness. Mr. J.B. Yeats, Sr., his son said, would be around to +have Mr. Russell sit for him next morning, in order to get on with the +two orders he had of portraits of the mystic, one of them from an +admirer in America. It was pleasant on leaving him to go away with his +laugh ringing in my ears as a surety that the high seriousness of his +purpose, and the higher seriousness with which some of his admirers take +him, had not dulled his sense of humor.</p> + +<p>Eight o'clock the next evening saw us in the eminently Philistine +suburban street where was the little house of conventional exterior that +sheltered the high dreams of "the Irish Emerson." Once entered, his +embodied visions attract you from all four walls of the study. Piles of +them in corners make you wonder is Mrs. Russell a saint. The pictures +are of Irish landscape; of "the Other People"; of heroes and heroines of +Ireland's prehistoric days; of souls that have yet to be born; of souls +that have passed through incarnation after incarnation, never to rise +above an animal existence; of souls whose every rebirth has taken them +to higher spirituality, and that now wait to pass along the "path of +liberation" into that immortality from which they shall never be born +again. These visions have come to him, as the visions whose presence he +records in his poetry, in all places—as he left the office and looked +down the sun-gilded streets at close of day; as he + + +<a name="page120" id="page120"></a> +wandered in the +mountains under the stars with peasants who had "second sight"; as he +talked with fellow Hermetists in meeting-rooms in back streets whose +shabby interiors grew rosy gloom as the talk turned on mysteries.</p> + +<p>To us Mr. Russell talked much, talked kindly of all men, talked well of +many things, said startling things of society and art and poetry so +gently that you did not think until afterwards that in another you would +hold them gages of combat. I can hear him yet, as I sat and tried at the +same time to listen to him and to look at his flaming-hearted spirits +with luminous angel wings and flashing halos enveloped in an atmosphere +in which "the peacock twilight rays aloft its plumes and blooms of +shadowy fire"—I can hear him saying, "You can't read Shakespeare, can +you?" As I thought over this question later, I understood. Then I was +too far rapt by the pictures to wonder at it greatly. Later came to mind +Emerson's declaration that Homer, Milton, and Shakespeare "do not fully +content us," that the "heavenly bread" is to be found in Zoroaster, +Plato, St. John, and Menu. Both Emerson and Mr. Russell fail to use art +as the standard. To the mystic, to whom this world is not reality, what +appeal may have its seeming truths and shows as compared to the certain +truth of the idealists and the beauties of the eternal life? The deep +human knowledge, the great pageants of Shakespeare's kings and queens, +are but "glories of our blood and state ... shadows, not substantial +things."</p> + +<p>Mr. Russell talked very simply of his pictures, of how their subjects +came to him, and of his enjoyment in thus + +<a name="page121" id="page121"></a> +recording them. He does not +consider himself a painter, but he thinks there was the making of a +painter in him had he had instruction in his earlier years. This +attitude towards his various powers, as well as the attitude towards him +of ardent young countrymen of his, came out in a story he told us of a +boy that he found waiting for him one night at a street corner near his +home. The boy timidly asked him was he not Mr. Russell, and then walked +silently by his side until the house was reached. They entered and the +boy mustered up courage to say he had waited for him two hours at the +head of the street. "A.E." had been waiting for the boy to say what +brought him, but he was obliged to encourage the boy before he would out +with it. Said "A.E.," "You came here to talk with me. You must be +interested in one of the three interests I have given much time to. Is +it economics?" "No," replied the boy, indignantly. "Is it mysticism?" +continued "A.E." "No," cried the boy, almost angry at such an interest +being attributed to him. "It must be literary art, then?" "Yes," said +the boy, with a sigh, his haven reached at last. "A.E." soon found the +boy an exquisite who thought the literary movement was becoming +vulgarized through so many people becoming interested in it. Finally the +boy turned questioner and found that "A.E." was seeking the Absolute. +Having found this out, he again sighed, this time regretfully, and said +decidedly that "A.E." could not be his Messiah, as he abhorred the +Absolute above everything else. He was infected with Pater's Relative, +said Mr. Russell, "which has fallen like a blight on all English +literature." So the + +<a name="page122" id="page122"></a> +boy—he was not yet twenty-one—went out into the +night with, I suppose, another of his idols fallen.</p> + +<p>As this boy came to "A.E.," so come scores of others, and most of those +that have real troubles go away comforted, to return for advice and +counsel and friendship, as their need is. This I knew before I met +"A.E.," and his kindness I felt and certain magnetism, but the qualities +that make him the leader of men, and hierophant to his personal +following, do not lie on the surface to be quickly distinguished by +every comer. Neither, we are told, did Emerson's, who was leader of men +and hierophant. I thought often of "A.E.'s" pictures as I looked at the +pictures of Watts in the Tate Gallery in London, and I have thought more +often of them since I have come to know haloed Rosicrucian drawings and +strange symbols in such books as our own Wissahickon mystics, Kelpius +and his brethren, brought with them to "The Woman in the Wilderness" +from Germany late in the seventeenth century. How notable the impression +of Mr. Russell's paintings and visions upon two Irish writers the +English-speaking world reads to-day may be learned from their +exploitation in Mr. Stephen Gwynn's "The Old Knowledge" (1901), whose +Owen Conroy owes being to "A.E." and his pictures, and from Mr. George +Moore's "Evelyn Innes" (revised edition, 1901), whose Ulick Dean has his +appearance and his power of seeing visions.</p> + +<p>As the evening wore on, Mr. Russell picked up a manuscript collection of +poems—that we were to have two years later as "The Divine Vision"—and +read us several. Most distinctly of these I remember "Reconciliation" + +<a name="page123" id="page123"></a> +which he chanted most lovingly of all he read. It is a poem I do not +pretend to understand in detail, but I do feel its drift, and I can +never read out its stately music, or even read it silently, without +hearing his sonorous chanting. Many of his poems are like this poem in +that you must content yourself with their general drift and not insist +on understanding their every phrase. I suppose to the initiate mystic +they are more definite, but I doubt whether some of them are more than +presentations of emotions that need not be translated into terms of +thought for their desired effect.</p> + +<p>To Mr. Russell poetry is a high and holy thing; like his friend Mr. +Yeats he is at one with Spenser in believing it the fruit of a "certain +enthousiasmos and celestial inspiration"; it is his religion that Mr. +Russell is celebrating in his verses, many of which are in a sense hymns +to the Universal Spirit, and all of which are informed by such sincerity +that you do not wonder that his followers make them their gospel. In his +own words:—</p> + + <div class="display"><p> The spirit in man is not a product of + nature, but antecedes nature, and is above it as sovereign, being of + the very essence of that spirit which breathed on the face of the + waters, and whose song, flowing from the silence as an incantation, + summoned the stars into being out of chaos. To regain that spiritual + consciousness, with its untrammelled ecstasy, is the hope of every + mystic. That ecstasy is the poetic passion.... The act which is + inspired by the Holy Breath must needs speak of things which have no + sensuous existence, of hopes all unearthly, and fires of which the + colors of day are only shadows.</p> </div> + +<p>About a score of the less than tenscore poems of "A.E." are definitely +declarations of belief, but declarations + +<a name="page124" id="page124"></a> +so personal, so undogmatic, +that you would hardly write him down a didactic poet at first reading "A +New Theme" tells of his desertion of subjects "that win the easy +praise," of his venturing</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l"> "in the untrodden woods</p> +<p class="l">To carve the future ways."</p> + +</div> + +<p>Here he acknowledges that the things he has to tell are "shadowy," that +his breath in "the magic horn" can make but feeble murmurs. In the +prologue to "The Divine Vision" he states the conditions of his +inspiration:—</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"When twilight over the mountains fluttered</p> +<p class="l">And night with its starry millions came,</p> +<p class="l">I too had dreams: the songs I have uttered</p> +<p class="l">Came from this heart that was touched by the flame";—</p> +</div> + +<p>that is, the flame of his being that, "mad for the night and the deep +unknown," leaps back to the "unphenomenal" world whence his spirit came +and blends his spirit into one with the Universal Spirit. This same +union through the soul's flame "A.E." presents in his pictures, and in +his prologue to "The Divine Vision" he writes that he wishes to give his +reader</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"To see one elemental pain,</p> +<p class="l">One light of everlasting joy."</p> +</div> + +<p>This elemental pain, as I take it, is the pain of the soul shut up in +its robe of clay in this physical, phenomenal world, and so shut off +from the spiritual world, the world of the unphenomenal or unknowable. +The "everlasting joy" I take to be the certainty of eventual union with +the Universal Spirit in the unphenomenal world, a union and a joy +anticipated in the occasional temporary absorptions + +<a name="page125" id="page125"></a> +of the soul into +the Universal Spirit in moments Emerson experienced as "revelation" and +Plotinus as ecstasy.</p> + +<p>"A.E.'s" friend, Mr. Charles Johnston, records the two young Irishmen's +joint attempts to attain ecstasy, when he writes of those days when "we +lay on our backs in the grass, and, looking up into the blue, tried to +think ourselves into that new world which we had suddenly discovered +ourselves to inhabit." Do not think this ecstasy too rare and wonderful +a thing. To Plotinus it meant an utter blotting-out of self, a rapture +of peace, and to Mr. Russell it frequently means that he is entirely +"heart-hidden from the outer things," but I suspect it means sometimes +mere lift of the heart through lungs full of fresh air, or through green +fields for tired eyes, or through mountain air for worn nerves, or +through skies thick-sown with stars for the vexed spirit.</p> + +<p>The typical poem of "A.E." is that in which the sight of beautiful +things of this phenomenal world in which we live lifts his soul to +participation in the Universal Spirit. It is most often through some +beauty of the sky at sunset, when</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Withers once more the old blue flower of day,"</p> +</div> + +<p>as in "The Great Breath"; or at twilight, when</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Dusk wraps the village in its dim caress,"</p> +</div> + +<p>as in "Dusk"; or at night, when</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"The yellow constellations shine with pale and tender glory</p> +<p class="l">In the lilac-scented stillness,"</p> +</div> + +<p>as in "The Singing Silences"; or at sunrise, when there is</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Fire on the altar of the hills,"</p> +</div> + + +<a name="page126" id="page126"></a> + +<p>as in "Dawn";—it is most often through some beauty of the sky at such +times that he becomes one with the Universal Spirit in "the rapture of +the fire," that he is "lost within the 'Mother's Being,'" he would say +that the soul returns to the Oversoul, Emerson would There are ways by +which the soul homes other than these—sometimes it is</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"By the hand of a child I am led to the throne of the King."</p> +</div> + +<p>but it is most often by way of beauties of the sky. Some reasons are not +far to seek. From sunset to sunrise the poet is free as he may be from +the treadmill of the "common daily ways," and the high moods he tries to +express are most easily symbolized by skyey images—massed clouds and +sweeping lights of diamond, sapphire, amethyst; the still blue black of +heaven thrilling with far stars; the purples of twilight horizons. In +his use of these splendid symbols he is but following Proclus, whom he +found quoted by Emerson as saying that "the mighty heaven exhibits, in +its transfiguration, clear images of the splendor of intellectual +perceptions, being moved in conjunction with the unapparent period of +intellectual natures."</p> + +<p>How important the symbol is to "A.E."—as important as it is to +Emerson—may be gathered from "Symbolism," which, read in the light of +what I have quoted, needs, I hope, no further interpretation.</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Now when the giant in us wakes and broods,</p> +<p class="l">Filled with home-yearnings, drowsily he flings</p> +<p class="l">From his deep heart high dreams and mystic moods.</p> +<p class="l">Mixed with the memory of the loved earth things:</p> + +<p class="l">Clothing the vast with a familiar face;</p> +<p class="l">Reaching his right hand forth to greet the starry race.</p> +</div> + + +<a name="page127" id="page127"></a> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Wondrously near and clear the great warm fires</p> +<p class="l">Stare from the blue; so shows the cottage light</p> +<p class="l">To the field laborer whose heart desires</p> +<p class="l">The old folk by the nook, the welcome bright</p> + +<p class="l">From the housewife long parted from at dawn—</p> +<p class="l">So the star villages in God's great depths withdrawn.</p> +</div> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Nearer to Thee, not by delusion led,</p> +<p class="l">Though there no house-fires burn nor bright eyes gaze:</p> +<p class="l">We rise, but by the symbol charioted,</p> +<p class="l">Through loved things rising up to Love's own ways:</p> + +<p class="l">By these the soul unto the vast has wings</p> +<p class="l">And sets the seal celestial on all mortal things."</p> +</div> + +<p>In this poem is the proof of how intimately "A.E." could write of the +sweet things of earth did he so choose. But he does not so choose, +except rarely, and sometimes he leaves out the statement of beautiful +material things by which he customarily bids farewell to earth in his +aspiration to spiritual things, and writes only of unearthly things—as +of some girl that he, an Irishman living in the Dublin of to-day, loves +in the Babylon of three thousand years ago, to the annihilation of space +and time. This is written in the very spirit of Emerson's declaration +that "before the revelations of the soul, Time, Space, and Nature shrink +away." Need I quote further to show that "A.E.," like Emerson, holds +that the true poet is he who "gives men glimpses of the law of the +Universe; shows them the circumstance as illusion; shows that Nature is +only a language to express the laws, which are grand and beautiful; and +lets them, by his songs, into some of the realities"? Emerson yearns +that "the old forgotten splendors of the Universe should glow again for +us," and "A.E." believes that we at times attain "the high + +<a name="page128" id="page128"></a> +ancestral +Self"; his restless ploughman, "walking through the woodland's purple" +under "the diamond night"</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Deep beneath his rustic habit finds himself a King"</p> + +</div> + +<p>"A.E.'s" poems on death are little different from those in which he +celebrates the soul's absorption into the Universal Spirit, since death +means to him only a longer absorption into the Universal Spirit or +sometimes such absorption forever. In the event of this last, he in some +moods sees</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Life and joy forever vanish as a tale is told.</p> +<p class="l">Lost within the 'Mother's Being,'"</p> +</div> + +<p>or no sense of individuality in souls in heaven; in other moods he sees +individuality preserved after death among those "High souls," that,—</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Absolved from grief and sin,</p> +<p class="l">Leaning from out ancestral spheres,</p> +<p class="l">Beckon the wounded spirit in."</p> +</div> + +<p>So sustained is the habitual altitude of Mr. Russell's thought, so +preoccupied his mood with spiritual things, that the human reader must +feel lonely at times, must feel the regions of the poet's thought alien +to him. At such times it is a positive relief to find the poet yearning +for the concrete sweet things of earth. It is perhaps only in +"Weariness" that Mr. Russell's high mood does fail, but I rejoice when +that failure makes him acknowledge—</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Fade the heaven-assailing moods:</p> +<p class="l">Slave to petty tasks I pine</p> +<p class="l">For the quiet of the woods,</p> +<p class="l">And the sunlight seems divine.</p> +</div> + + +<a name="page129" id="page129"></a> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"And I yearn to lay my head</p> + +<p class="l">Where the grass is green and sweet;</p> +<p class="l">Mother, all the dreams are fled</p> +<p class="l">From the tired child at thy feet."</p> +</div> + +<p>It is love, love of country, love of countryside, and love of woman that +he writes of when he does write of "loved earth things." "A Woman's +Voice" and "Forgiveness" are poems so simple that none may +misunderstand; they have the human call so rare in "A.E.," but it is not +a strong human call. Of such love songs he has written but few—poems +out of the peace and not out of the passion of love; of passion other +than spiritual ecstasy and rapt delight in nature there is none in his +verse. Although he has been given "a ruby-flaming heart," he has been +given also "a pure cold spirit." Only about a fourth of his poems have +the human note dominant, and even when it is so dominant, as when he +writes of his country, he is very seldom content to rest with a +description of the beauty of place or legend; the beautiful place must +be threshold to the Other World, as "The Gates of Dreamland," which he +finds at the end of "the lonely road through bogland to the lake at +Carrowmore," Carrowmore, the great cemetery of the great dead of +prehistoric Ireland under Knocknarea near Sligo; or the legend must be +symbol of some mystic belief—"Connla's well is a Celtic equivalent of +the First Fountain of mysticism."</p> + +<p>He can draw starkly, when he will, a picture of bare Irish landscape:—</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Still rests the heavy share on the dark soil:</p> +<p class="l">Upon the black mould thick the dew-damp lies:</p> +<p class="l">The horse waits patient: from his lowly toil</p> +<p class="l">The ploughboy to the morning lifts his eyes.</p> +</div> + + +<a name="page130" id="page130"></a> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">The unbudding hedgerows dark against day's fires</p> + +<p class="l">Glitter with gold-lit crystals: on the rim</p> +<p class="l">Over the unregarding city's spires</p> +<p class="l">The lonely beauty shines alone for him."</p> +</div> + +<p>In "In Connemara" and "An Irish Face," poems with earthly titles, you +expect only things earthly, but in these too, he uses the picture of the +concrete only as the symbol of the universal. The reason Mr. Russell +must take you to the supernatural in these poems is because he sees +spirits everywhere he goes in Ireland. "Never a poet," he writes, "has +lain on our hillsides, but gentle, stately figures, with hearts shining +like the sun, move through his dreams, over radiant grasses, in an +enchanted world of their own." Start "The Memory of Earth" and you think +you are to read one of the many fine poems of twilight in our +literature, but the fourth line undeceives you:—</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"In the wet dusk silver sweet,</p> +<p class="l">Down the violet-scented ways,</p> + +<p class="l">As I moved with quiet feet</p> +<p class="l">I was met by mighty days.</p> +</div> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"On the hedge the hanging dew</p> +<p class="l">Glassed the eve and stars and skies;</p> +<p class="l">While I gazed a madness grew</p> +<p class="l">Into thundered battle-cries.</p> +</div> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Where the hawthorn glimmered white,</p> +<p class="l">Flashed the spear and fell the stroke—</p> +<p class="l">Ah, what faces pale and bright</p> +<p class="l">Where the dazzling battle broke!</p> +</div> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"There a hero-hearted queen</p> +<p class="l">With young beauty lit the van.</p> +<p class="l">Gone! the darkness flowed between</p> + +<p class="l">All the ancient wars of man.</p> +</div> + + +<a name="page131" id="page131"></a> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"While I paced the valley's gloom</p> +<p class="l">Where the rabbits pattered near,</p> +<p class="l">Shone a temple and a tomb</p> +<p class="l">With the legend carven clear.</p> + +</div> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Time put by a myriad fates</p> +<p class="l">That her day might dawn in glory;</p> +<p class="l">Death made wide a million gates</p> +<p class="l">So to close her tragic story."</p> +</div> + +<p>And so it is in "A.E.'s" score and more poems that are suggested by +Irish places and Irish legends and Irish loves. Never an Irish exile but +will have a dear home place brought before him by such lines as</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"The Greyhound River windeth through a loneliness so deep</p> +<p class="l">Scarce a wild fowl shakes the quiet that the purple boglands keep";</p> +</div> + +<p>and a story of the home place brought before him by such lines as</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Tarry thou yet, late lingerer in the twilight's glory;</p> +<p class="l">Gay are the hills with song: earth's fairy children leave</p> + +<p class="l">More dim abodes to roam the primrose-hearted eve,</p> +<p class="l">Opening their glimmering lips to breathe some wondrous story";</p> +</div> + +<p>and a girl of the home place brought before him by such lines as</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Dusk, a pearl-grey river, o'er</p> +<p class="l">Hill and vale puts out the day—</p> +<p class="l">What do you wonder at, asthore,</p> + +<p class="l">What's away in yonder grey?"</p> +</div> + +<p>but all these poems, of which these lines are the fine onsets, lead past +"the dim stars" and "unto the Light of Lights."</p> + +<p>A man that believes that his spirit is one with the Universal Spirit +cannot but be an optimist if he believe that Spirit is the Spirit of +Good, and that a Platonist must + +<a name="page132" id="page132"></a> +believe. Yet "A.E." so longs to be rapt +into everlasting union with the Universal Spirit that he tires of the +earth, where that union is interrupted by the necessities of daily life. +The fairies call to him and he would away—</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"'Come away,' the red lips whisper, 'all the world is weary now;</p> + +<p class="l">'Tis the twilight of the ages and it's time to quit the plough.</p> +<p class="l">Oh, the very sunlight's weary ere it lightens up the dew,</p> +<p class="l">And its gold is changed and faded before it falls to you.'"</p> +</div> + +<p>But it is not always twilight to him, and there are many blither moods. +Over against these lines you may put,</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"I always dwell with morning in my heart,"</p> + +</div> + +<p>and</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Oh, but life is sweet, is sweet."</p> +</div> + +<p>Earth is not an unhappy place, but he sighs sometimes for the happiness +unalloyed of heaven.</p> + +<p>When we come to consider the technique of Mr. Russell's art, we find him +anything but Emersonian. Mr. Russell has, in general, command of form, +melody, harmony, distinction. Who reads carefully will remember many +fine lines; who reads only once will be as one lost in sun-filled fog +like that of "A E.'s" own Irish mountains, but he should be patient, he +should wait and look again and again, and finally he will see, even if +earth be still dimmed with fogbanks, much of the heavens, free of fog, +and radiant with cold white light.</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l"> "Forest glooms</p> +<p class="l">Rumorous of old romance"</p> +</div> + +<p>and</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"But joy as an Arctic sun went down"</p> +</div> + +<a name="page133" id="page133"></a> + +<p>the kind of lines rarest in his verse; more characteristic are,</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Hearts like cloisters dim and grey,"</p> +</div> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l"> "the great star swings</p> +<p class="l">Along the sapphire zone,"</p> + +</div> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"The Angel childhood of the earth,"</p> +</div> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Glint the bubble planets tossing in the dead black sea of night,"</p> +</div> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"The old enchantment lingers in the honey heart of earth."</p> +</div> + +<p>There are comparatively few "purple patches" in Mr. Russell's poetry, +for the reasons that each poem depends for its chief appeal on one mood +or thought or dream immanent in it, rather than on any fine phrasing. +The effort to catch the meaning of the verse—seldom apparent at first +glance—prevents the noting of as many purple lines as there are. Nor +when noted are such lines readily memorable, since they are apt to lack +association with known and loved things to bring them home to the +reader. And again the poems are very short,—intimations, suggestions +rather than expressions,—and their intangible themes are often much +alike, and poem becomes confused with poem in the memory.</p> + +<p>It may be that to those to whom the Other World is very instant, as it +is to many Irishmen, or to those that go about daily preparing for the +world beyond the grave, as did our Puritan ancestors of the seventeenth +century, these poems of Mr. Russell's speak familiar language, as they +of a certainty do to the mystic, but to the many modern art lovers who +hold to Pater's "New Cyrenaicism,"—as + +<a name="page134" id="page134"></a> +Mr. Russell would say, "those +under the blight of the Relative,"—as well as to the man in the street +their language is new and difficult to understand. But the poems have +found their audience—there is no doubt about that—and they are +regarded as oracular by hundreds. This is the more curious in that there +is so little personality in them, surprisingly little when one knows how +strong is the personality of the man that made them But this lack of +personality follows naturally on the mystic's creed—he must put into +his writings chiefly his relation with God,—for all other relations are +as nothing to that,—and if he attain his desire he is rapt away from +himself and his fellows into oneness with God.</p> + +<p>Quality, a very definite quality, these verses of Mr. Russell's have, +but it is an almost unchanging sameness of quality; almost all his +verses, as I have said, have the same theme. So there is a monotony +about them, and their reader is apt to cry out that mysticism is +inimical to art. It may well be that this unswerving following of one +theme is of definite purpose; that Mr. Russell feels that he as Irishman +and mystic has a mission, as indeed Mr. Charles Johnston owns. Speaking +of Irishmen, in "Ireland" (1902), he says,—</p> + + <div class="display"><p> We live in the invisible world. If I rightly + understand our mission and our destiny, it is this: To restore to + other men the sense of that invisible; that world of our + immortality; as of old our race went forth carrying the Galilean + Evangel. We shall first learn and then teach, that not with wealth + can the soul of man be satisfied; that our enduring interest is not + here but there, in the unseen, the hidden, the immortal, for whose + purposes exist all the visible beauties of the world. If this + +<a name="page135" id="page135"></a> + be our + mission and our purpose, well may our fair mysterious land deserve + her name: Inis Fail, the Isle of Destiny.</p> </div> + +<p>Very like Emerson this, too, but very Irish. Let us not forget that +Berkeley and Scotus Erigena were Irishmen.</p> + +<p>I do not wish to overemphasize the influence of Emerson on "A.E.," and +indeed it is no greater than Emerson's influence over M. Maeterlinck. I +believe Emerson was as much guide as master, that he pointed "A.E." the +way to the mystics. I might dwell on the resemblance between thoughts +common to the two much more than I have—there are even lines of the +younger man's that show the influence of lines of the elder. But that is +not my object. I wish to point out that Puritanism in Ireland has +flowered up into the mystic poetry of "A.E.," into poetry of that +strange quality, cold ecstasy, as Puritanism in America has flowered up +into the mystic poetry of Emerson, poetry of cold ecstasy. In England, +so far as I know, Puritanism, that has given us so great a poet as +Milton, has never so flowered. Crashaw was born of a Puritan father, but +it was through the Old Faith his greatest inspiration came, and his +ecstasy, as that of his latter-day disciple, Francis Thompson, is warm +ecstasy, not cold like that of the two Puritan poets. Henry More, +Platonist and seer of visions, never attained ecstasy in his poetry. It +may be that it required transplantation of Englishmen into Ireland and +into America to bring about this phenomenon. Nor is it the only quality +these two earliest bodies of English colonists alike developed. But it +is more than dangerous to dogmatize where so many races went + +<a name="page136" id="page136"></a> +to the +making of a people as went to the making of Anglo-Irishmen and +Americans.</p> + +<p>How different are the types of Anglo-Irish I could not but ponder as we +left "A E.'s" home and went out into the chill rain of that August +night. To the right hand, as we walked with "A.E.'s" disciples, they +pointed to Maud Gonne's house. "Irish Joan of Arc" they call her, leader +of men whom men worship at first sight; most exciting of Ireland's mob +orators, all proclaim her, a very Pytho whose prophecies stir unrest and +tumult! And here next door the Quietist, the man of dreams and visions, +to whom all the war of the world is of as little moment as all other +unrealities, since here in this world he has begun already the real, the +spiritual life. Both are types that have been as long as Ireland has +been; both Pytho and priest were among the high order of druid and +druidess of old time; agitator and reconciler, by Mr. Russell's belief, +might well be reincarnations of the wise women and wise men of +prehistoric days. To the world Maud Gonne is more representative of +Ireland than Mr. Russell, but he is just as truly a symbol of Ireland as +she: to those who know Irish history the thought of her quiet +monasteries of the seventh century, whence she sent out teachers to all +of Europe, is as recurrent as her political agitation of the nineteenth, +and to those who know her countryside the memories of soft sunny rains +and moonlit evenings are as lingering as those of black angry days and +wild blind nights. Her very colors, her grays and greens and purples, +proclaim her peace. It is of this peace and of the greater peace of that +unphenomenal or spiritual world, + +<a name="page137" id="page137"></a> +that lies nearer to Ireland than to +any Western land, that Mr. Russell is interpreter.</p> + +<p>You may think of Mr. Russell as you will, as organizer of the Irish +Agricultural Organization Society, as stimulator of the Irish Literary +Revival, as economist, playwright, poet, painter, preacher, but always +as you put by his books you will think of him as mystic, as stargazer, +wandering, as he so often tells us in his poems, on the mountains by +night, with his eyes keener with wonder at the skies than ever +shepherd's under the Star of Bethlehem; you will see him, the human +atom, on the bare Dublin mountains, thrilling as he watches the sweep of +world beyond world; and yet, atom that he is, the possessor of it +all;—you will think of him as stargazer whose "spirit rolls into the +vast of God."</p> +</div> + +<hr class="page"> + +<div> + +<a name="page138" id="page138"></a> +<a name="toc_8"></a> +<h2>Chapter VI</h2> + +<h2 class="sub">Lady Gregory</h2> + + +<p>When one stops to think how much of the blood of the Gael, Irish and +Scotch, there is in us in America, one realizes that we owe a debt of +gratitude to Lady Gregory second only to that owed her by "The Men of +Ireland and Alban" themselves. For it is Lady Gregory, in her "Cuchulain +of Muirthemne" (1902) and in her "Gods and Fighting Men" (1904) and in +her "Book of Saints and Wonders" (1908), who has done more than any +other writer of the Gaelic countries to bring home to us the wonders of +Gaelic romance. That they should have to be brought home to us is a +shame to us. With so much of Irish and Scotch blood in us the names of +the heroes of the Red Branch and Fenian Cycles should not be so foreign +in aspect and sound as they undoubtedly are, and their deeds should be +as familiar as those of Robin Hood. A hundred years ago our grandfathers +had, indeed, "Ossian" on their shelves, as we had in boyhood Dean +Church's stories of Greece and Rome, or, in some cases, the stories of +his doings in their memories, learned from their parents were they +old-country born, or of their nurses were it their privilege, as it was +that of many more Americans of the second half of the nineteenth +century, to have as foster mothers "kindly Irish of the Irish."</p> + + +<a name="page139" id="page139"></a> + +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a name="illo_7" id="illo_7"></a><img src="images/image07.jpg" alt="Lady Gregory"></p> +<p style="text-align: center">Lady Gregory</p> + +<p>To her own countrymen the work of Lady Gregory, valuable as it is, is +not the revelation it is to us. Those of them that have not been brought +up on the stories that she translates could read at least many of them +in the "Old Celtic Romances" (1879) of Dr. P.W. Joyce, or in the +versions of the Cuchulain and the Finn legends by Mr. Standish James +O'Grady (1878 and 1880), books that somehow or other never came to be +widely read in America. Mr. Yeats admits it was Mr. O'Grady that +"started us all," that is, the writers who began the Renaissance in the +late eighties. It may be, of course, that the added beauty and dignity +the stories take on in the versions of Lady Gregory will inspire to +nobler writing poets and dramatists and novelists that already owe much +to Mr. O'Grady or Dr. Joyce or to the scholars they were sent back to by +these popularizers. It is certain that the writers of the younger group, +the group of those that are only now nearing distinction, owe much to +Lady Gregory. After all is said, however, her work is to be judged not +for its value to others, but as in itself an art product, of a class +kindred to "The Wanderings of Oisin" of Mr. Yeats, although differing in +form. I am not forgetting, of course, that she is following faithfully, +or rather as faithfully as an artist may follow, the old legends. She +has, she owns, clarified them, condensed them, left out contradictory +episodes, woven now and then a Scotch version of an incident into a +cycle arranged in one complete whole from many Irish versions. When Lady +Gregory has owned this she has owned that she has added something more +of her own than a "connecting sentence." + + +<a name="page140" id="page140"></a> +Although she has labored +carefully to keep herself out of the stories, and although, if you have +read only her versions of them, you may feel that she has succeeded in +keeping herself out of them, you will recognize, if you turn to her +originals in O'Curry or in Whitley Stokes or in Standish Hayes O'Grady, +that she has added that all-important thing, a personality. Some +scholars object to this as "too literary." And some literary men would +rather have the old stories, they say, "just as they are" There is the +crux. How can we get them, even in an exact translation, "just as they +are"? We cannot. This is not the place to discuss this most vexed +question of translation, but I must go into it so far as to point again +to the fact that we are more likely to have made upon us, by an +interpretative translation, an effect more nearly like that made upon +the listener contemporary to the time of the making of the story than if +the translation were literal. We are always forgetting the so obvious +fact that the kind of metaphor or descriptive epithet of this sort or +that, which would make a certain effect on the listener of the tenth +century, will make a very different effect on the reader of to-day. As +Lady Gregory points out, the description of the contortion of Cuchulain +in his fight with Ferdiad seems very unheroic to us, and is therefore +best left out of the translation, or, if retained, conveyed in terms +that will make an effect on us similar to the effect the detailed +description had on the audience of the old bards. Here again, however, +is trouble. How can we get that effect? We cannot surely, but an +imaginative translation by one who is scholar and <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">littérateur</span> both +will + +<a name="page141" id="page141"></a> +take us nearest to it. We want, as a matter of fact, both kinds of +translations, the interpretative and artistic translation of Lady +Gregory and the literal translation of Mr. Standish Hayes O'Grady. The +one is needed to check the other. We would have a gauge by which to +measure how much such such a translator as Lady Gregory has taken from +and added to the old story. We would know how great is the freedom in +which we willingly acquiesce, remembering that the translations which we +treasure as great in literature are in greater or less measure "free." +So checking Lady Gregory's translations we find that they represent a +fair measure of freedom, as so checking the verses of FitzGerald's "Omar +Khayyám" we find in them the utmost measure of freedom, a freedom indeed +that, in certain verses, is virtually a re-creation.</p> + +<p>Many, both scholars and literary men, object to the kind of English into +which Lady Gregory translates the stories of Ireland's heroic age, her +"Kiltartan English," the English of the people of her home country on +the borders of Clare and Galway, the English made by a people who think +in Irish. This familiar language, they say, has lessened the dignity of +the old tales, bringing them all to one level by a diction and style +that is one, whether they are romance or folk-tale. This objection can +be taken, however, only to the Cuchulain stories, which were court +romance, and not to the Finn stories, which come out of the thatched +houses. This "Kiltartan English" seems to me in its more familiar +moments, less imposing than that in which I first heard stories of Finn +McCool told by our old gardener, Lawrence Kelly of County Wexford, but +it + +<a name="page142" id="page142"></a> + +may be I remember less clearly the homeliness of his "discourse" +than its "grand speaking." It is, however, as peasant English, a fitting +medium for the telling of the stories of Brigit and St. Patrick in her +"Book of Saints and Wonders," for Brigit and Patrick are still household +words among all the children of the Gael. But by its very difference +from the English of all other artists in words save of a few of her own +country and generation, and from such conversational English as I know +well, this "Kiltartan English" brings me a foreign quality. I feel that +the art of these tale-tellers is an art of another race than the +English, just as I feel that the art of the teller of Beowulf is an art +of another race than the English. The literature in our ancestral tongue +is not to me English until it sloughs off the Germanic +sentence-structure of Anglo-Saxon. Here lies, I think, the greatest +difficulty in translating Old English literature. And it will not be +successfully translated, I think, without the use of the syntax of some +dialect that preserves an archaic sentence-structure.</p> + +<p>To me, then, it seems singularly fortunate for Lady Gregory to have her +"Kiltartan English" to fall back upon to give that foreign flavor that +we intuitively feel the need of in a translation. There may be a slight +loss of dignity through its use, but there is a great gain in folk +atmosphere.</p> + +<p>In quoting to show the style of Lady Gregory I should quote description +rather than narrative, as the description seems to me better as well as +briefer. The three famous tales of Old Irish literature, "The Three +Sorrows of Story-Telling," are "The Fate of the Children + +<a name="page143" id="page143"></a> +of Usnach," +comparable, in the great wars it led to, to the rape of Helen; "The Fate +of the Children of Lir," a story that has as its base the folk-tale that +underlies "Lohengrin," but which takes us back farther into the past in +its kinship to "Medea"; and "The Sons of Tuireann," which has been +called the Irish Odyssey. Of these the first is incomparably the finest +story, and Lady Gregory has told it nobly in "Cuchulain of Muirthemne," +but it alone of all the stories in her three books of translations has +enough of humanity in it to put it side by side with the story of Sigurd +and Brunhilde or the story of Paris and Helen. When one remembers that +Greek and Scandinavian literature may boast five stories each, at least, +but little short of these their greatest stories, and that Irish +literature has but "Diarmuid and Grania" to boast as in any way +comparable to the story of Deirdre, it must be admitted that early Irish +literature representing Ireland's heroic age is not so beautiful as the +literature that represents the heroic ages of Scandinavia and Greece. +"The Fate of the Children of Usnach" is rich in beautiful detail of +incident and of description of nature; it preserves for us much of the +inner life of old time; and it has dignity of proportion. It has not the +fundamental weakness, as great art, of most of these old Irish stories, +their characters' lack of interest because of their lack of body, their +lack of personality, their running to type rather than moulding into +individuals; yet the feats performed by Cuchulain are so wholly +superhuman, most of them, that they often put their doer beyond our +sympathy, and at their worst make him absurd.</p> + + +<a name="page144" id="page144"></a> + +<p>If these stories were simply extravagant folk-fancy, such as the Jack +the Giant Killer story, to delight children, we should not quarrel with +this quality in them, but there is so much in them of dignity that we +must take them seriously, as we take Homer. When their heroes are +definitely gods we can accept almost any of their deeds, so we can +delight in the earlier stories of "Gods and Fighting Men," the stories +of the Tuatha de Danaan, Lugh and Angus, Midhir and Etain, Bran and +Connla, as we cannot in those of Finn and Goll and Cuchulain and +Conchubar, who, because of their historical setting and more definite +characterization, have more of the appeal of humanity. We know +Cuchulain, in Lady Gregory's pages, as a small dark man, constant in +love in comparison with his fellows, faithful to his friends, loyal to +his king; and we know Finn as a fair old man of ruddy countenance, a +lover of women, somewhat pompous and somewhat quarrelsome; but neither +hero is a clear-cut personality like Sigurd or Ajax. If either Cuchulain +or Finn were surely a god we should accept his deeds as now we cannot +accept them, and were either brought home to us as wholly human and +divested of his supernatural powers, and given a personality, we should +be far more moved by his fortunes.</p> + +<p>It is in enchantments, visits to worlds oversea and under wave, and in +praises of the beauties of this world, its woods, its waters, its real +wonders, and in the celebration of sorrow and delight that "Gods and +Fighting Men" is at its best, not in the celebration of happy loves, or +of wild loves, or of great victories. So it is that + +<a name="page145" id="page145"></a> +Gabhra, where the +Fianna were broken, is finer than "The Battle of the White Strand," +where they won against great odds.</p> + +<p>Finer, however, than any narrative power possessed by the old Irish +bards is their power in the lyrical passages so freely interspersed +throughout the stories, and in the lyrics that come into them on the +lips of the poets and warriors and on the lips of the women who have +lost their lovers in fight. The farewell of Deirdre to Alban and her +lament over Naoise, the song of the woman from oversea to Bran, the poem +Finn made to prove his power of poetry, the sleepy song of Grania over +Diarmuid, the lament of Neargach's wife, the song of Tir-nan-Og that +Niave made to Oisin, and Oisin's own praise of the good times of the +Fianna—these are the passages in which the old tales reach their +highest poetry. Once read, these remain in memory, but certain episodes +and certain sayings remain also. Mr. Yeats has picked out one of the +sayings in his introduction to "Gods and Fighting Men" that will do for +sample. It is the answer of Osgar dying, to the man who asks him how he +is: "I am as you would have me be." Starker even, perhaps, is the +absolute simplicity of the description of that last fight in "The Battle +of the White Strand," in which Cael and Finnachta go, locked in each +other's arms, to their death under the waves without a word.</p> + +<p>Wild nature is always about these warriors. The storm in the trees, the +sorrow of the sea, the clatter of wild geese and the singing of swans +find echo in the poems that praise them. We see, too, at times, fields +heavy with harvest, + + +<a name="page146" id="page146"></a> +and often the apple trees in bloom and the cuckoo +calling among them,—indeed, the sweet scent of apple gardens, like the +keenness of the winds of spring, beautiful as are the phrases that +present them, become almost stock phrases. Always, too, there are +wonders of the other world about the heroes; women from undersea and +underground come into their halls as naturally as the members of their +own clans, and the twilight mists unfolding from familiar hills will +reveal their marvelous duns, whitewalled with silver or marble, and +thatched with the wings of white birds.</p> + +<p>There has been frequent quarreling in certain quarters with Mr. Russell +and Mr. Johnston and Mr. Yeats for introducing mysticism and a definite +symbolism and the ways of Eastern thought into their versions of Irish +mythic tales and their records of Irish mood. There will be found some +justification for such practices in Lady Gregory's translations. +Manannan, the sea-god, is here presented doing tricks like those of the +East Indian fakirs; Finn is reincarnated in later great leaders of the +Gael; and in "The Hospitality of Cuanna's House" there is out-and-out +allegory, to say nothing of a possible symbolistic interpretation of +episodes in almost every other story. Even the willful obscurity of the +modern poetry can be paralleled by the riddling of Cuchulain and Emer.</p> + +<p>It is, perhaps, because Lady Gregory has found the old stories not only +in the dignity of their bardic presentation, but also in the happy +familiarity of their telling by the people of the thatched houses in her +own district, that she has been able to bring them so near to us. From +these + +<a name="page147" id="page147"></a> +same people, too, she has got some of her stories of St. Bride +and Columba and poems and stories of recent and contemporary +inspiration, poems and stories that have to do with humble life as well +as with the highly colored heroic life that those who live bare lives +themselves are so fond of imagining. In her "Poets and Dreamers" (1903) +are records of this collecting and of her study of local ways about +Coole and on the Connemara coast and in the Aran Isles. One of the most +interesting of her chapters is that on the poet Raftery, whose poems Dr. +Hyde has published. Blind and bitter, Raftery wandered about Connacht +until about 1840, when death took him, an old man, but still vigorous in +mind and spirit. Another chapter of "Poets and Dreamers" is "On the Edge +of the World." Each reading of this is to me like a return to West +Ireland, the very quality of whose life it gives. It should be the first +chapter of the book turned to by the reader, for it gives one the note +on which to read all. As Lady Gregory drives by the sea, people about +her on the roadside and in the cabins are singing in Irish. The little +experiences of the day are, for them, experiences to brood over; and for +her, too. And this thought is the last of her brooding: "The rising +again of Ireland, of her old speech, of her last leader [Parnell], +dreams all, as we are told. But here on the edge of the world, dreams +are real things, and every heart is watching for the opening of one or +another grave."</p> + +<p>There is creative writing in these essays of Lady Gregory's, for all +that she is playing middleman between her people and the reading public +of the English-speaking world in many of them; and, as I would emphasize +again, + + +<a name="page148" id="page148"></a> +in her three books of translations. But, after all translation +will not content, and the essay that is not self-revelation will not +content, the writer who would have his writing a "reading of life." So +it is not surprising that Lady Gregory turned toward drama. And yet I do +not ever feel, after many readings of her plays, that Lady Gregory took +to drama because of any overmastering impulse toward this most difficult +of all literary forms. She has learned to handle some orders of drama +pleasantly, the farce more than pleasantly, and, very recently, the +folk-tragedy nobly; but had it not been that plays of other than +romantic tone were needed for the Abbey Theatre as a foil to those of +Mr. Yeats and of Synge, I doubt whether it is drama that Lady Gregory +would have chosen as the medium through which to express her reading of +life. I can just as well imagine her shrewd kindliness of judgment upon +the foibles and virtues of her countrymen in stories whose form is very +like that employed by Miss Barlow in her "Irish Idylls" (1892) as in +these so original little plays that she has wrought out without +precedent, under the tutelage of Mr. Yeats.</p> + +<p>It is more than likely, as I say, that had it not been that drama was +needed for the Abbey Theatre she would not have attempted drama. But +more than likely it is, too, that had she written plays not made to +order they had reached wider through Irish society and plumbed deeper +into Irish life. Lady Gregory knows Irish life, from bottom to top, as +few Irishwomen and few Irishmen of her day know it; she has large heart, +wide tolerance, and abounding charity; and yet she was long content + +<a name="page149" id="page149"></a> +to +limit her plays of modern Ireland to farce, at times of a serious enough +purpose, but because it is farce, not of the first seriousness. It may +be, of course, that Lady Gregory knows best of any one her own powers, +and it is true that in the plays she has written she is at her best when +they are at their merriest. I cannot, however, but feel that this is a +success of intention rather than a success of instinct. She would have +them the most successful in a quality as far removed as might be from +that quality of troubled dreaminess which is the best of the dramas of +Mr. Yeats. Synge, it must be remembered, did not begin as a writer of +comedy, and there is little of that ripe irony that has no precedent in +English literature in that first play that he wrote for the Abbey +Theatre, "Riders to the Sea" (1903). Is it a coincidence that later, as +he found his bent for that sort of writing that culminated in "The +Playboy," Lady Gregory turned at times to historical drama and a farce +that grew as serious as comedy? There is, of course, in all her plays +serious indictment of national weaknesses, sometimes obvious indictment, +as in "The Deliverer" (1911), which records, in terms of folk-biblical +allegory, his countrymen's desertion of Parnell; sometimes indictment +not so obvious, as in "The Canavans" (1906), which rebukes that +shoneenism in high places which has for generations been one of the +curses of Ireland. To him who knows only a little of Irish life it is +easy to see the meaning but superficially concealed by the farcical +bustle, the laughter, and the lamentations. But to him who looks but on +the surface there is merriness enough and wittiness enough and wisdom +enough + +<a name="page150" id="page150"></a> +to make his loss of the deeper meaning, for him, but a little +loss.</p> + +<p>There are enough characters presented, too, peasants generally and +townsfolk of the lower class, to make the farces a "reading of life." +What is wanting to him who looks for more than what farce may do is the +largeness of utterance that will make a "reading of life" memorable. +Take "the image" (1910), for instance, in which Lady Gregory is +attempting more than in "Spreading the News" (1904) or "Hyacinth Halvey" +(1906). This play, the longest that Lady Gregory has written, is what +the stage would call the character farce. She owns it a presentation of +dreams of old men and old women which crumble at the touch of reality, +but it is not only this, but a symbolizing of the proneness of all +ireland to accept as certainties on the eve of realization what are +really only signs that point to possibilities in a far to-morrow. In the +play four old men of a little village on the west coast are debating +what they will do with their share of a windfall that has come to the +village in the shape of two whales that have drifted up on the beach. +When the priest determines that all the proceeds from the sale of the +oil from the whales be spent on something that will benefit the whole +community they plan a statue (one of them is a stone-cutter) to some +great celebrity. The motives that lead them to choose Hugh O'Lorrha are +telling satire not only of Irishmen, but of all men. It would hardly be, +however, in any other country than ireland that the name of the one come +at by way of accident would, unidentified for some time by any, be +finally revealed as that of the hero of + +<a name="page151" id="page151"></a> +a folk-tale. Four days after the +whales had come ashore, days wasted in planning what the village will do +with the prize money, and unutilized in securing the blubber and +rendering out the oil, the quartette learned that "the Connemara lads +have the oil drawn from the one of them, and the other one was swept +away with the spring tide."</p> + +<p>Though "The Image" be farce, its characters are the characters of +comedy, and its purpose whole-heartedly serious. And even "Spreading the +News" has its lesson, of rumor's wild riot in Irish crowds. On the +slightest grounds the reciting of an errand of helpfulness is turned by +quick imagination into a story of a murder. Lightly sketched as are the +people here, from a caricature of a magistrate to the more serious +presentment of Mrs. Fallon's "nice quiet little man," they are very true +to Ireland. Slighter even are the butcher and the postmistress and the +model sub-sanitary inspector in "Hyacinth Halvey," though all are fully +understood and fully blocked out in their author's mind, if impossible +of complete realization within limits so narrow; but the farce itself is +not lifted into dignity by any noble underlying attitude. "The Jack Daw" +(1907) has rumor again as its motive, as had "Spreading the News," but +it is not the motive of the play or any of its incidents that is the +best thing about it, but the character of Michael Cooney, of the +"seventh generation of Cooneys who trusted nobody living or dead." He +is, of course, caricatured, but he has possibilities of personality, and +he could have been worked into the fullness of a universal character had +"The Jack Daw" been comedy, we will say, instead of farce. Of all her +characters, that of + +<a name="page152" id="page152"></a> +Hyacinth Halvey is most nearly rounded out, but +then Lady Gregory has taken two little plays in which to present his +portrait, "The Full Moon" (1911) recording some of his later experiences +in Cloon and his final departure from the town, his introduction to +which was recorded in the play bearing his name.</p> + +<p>"The Workhouse Ward" (1908), reaching from wild farce to sentimental +comedy, is hardly more than a dialogue, but it is given body by the +truth to Irish life out of which it is written, that quarreling is +better than loneliness. Lady Gregory has disowned "Twenty-five" (1902), +which is frankly melodrama, her only other experiment in which, in her +plays of modern Ireland, is "The Rising of the Moon" (1903). This play +relates the allowed escape from a police officer of a political prisoner +through that prisoner's persuading the officer that "patriotism" is +above his sworn duty to England.</p> + +<p>Of the plays that may be called historical, "The Canavans" (1906) is the +best, because it is of the peasantry, I suppose, who change so little +with the years, and whom Lady Gregory presents so amusingly and so truly +in her modern farce comedy. "Kincora" (1903) takes us all the way back +to the eleventh century, deriving its name from Brian's Seat on the +Shannon and ending with his death at Clontarf. It is undistinguished +melodrama. "The White Cockade" (1905) is better only in so far as it +involves farce, farce in the kitchen of an inn on the Wexford coast just +after the Battle of the Boyne. "Devorgilla" (1908) is of a time between +the times of the two other historical plays, of the time a generation +later than + +<a name="page153" id="page153"></a> +the coming of the Normans to Ireland. It is pitched to a +higher key than any other of her historic plays, and it is held better +to its key, but its tragedy is far less impressive than the tragedy of +"The Gaol Gate" (1906) which pictures the effects upon his wife and his +mother of the imprisonment of an Irish lad of to-day, and their learning +that "Denis Cahel died for his neighbor." This little play is out of the +life that Lady Gregory knows and can deal with; it is finely conceived +and finely executed, lingering in the mind as does the keen heard rising +from some bare graveyard fronting the Atlantic.</p> + +<p>Just why Lady Gregory, who has rendered in prose so well old legends, +should render old Irish historic life so much less well I cannot +explain. Sometimes I think it is because she has found less of that +history than of that legend among the people. Yet in "A Travelling Man" +(1907), her little miracle, somewhat in the manner of Dr. Hyde's, that +brings Christ into a modern peasant home, she has made a play of a +tender and reconciling beauty. With the success of "A Travelling Man" +and "The Gaol Gate" before me I cannot say it is because her genius is +for farce; and to say that it is because her genius is for the plays of +modern peasant life does not help to account for the fact.</p> + +<p>The idiom of all these plays is racy of the soil, and when it need be, +eloquent with the eloquence that is almost always in the English of the +Irish. It is full of wise saws and proverbs, quips and quirks of +expression, the picturesquenesses and homelinesses of speech that are +characteristic of a peasant to whom talk is the half of life. These +range from sayings like those of the clowns of + +<a name="page154" id="page154"></a> +Elizabethan drama, such +as "He had great wisdom I tell you, being silly-like, and blind," and +such country wisdom as "What would the cat's son do but kill mice," up +through the elaborate maledictions of the two old paupers in "The +Workhouse Ward" and such delightful asperities as that of Maelmora anent +his bitter sister Gormleith, "You were surely born on a Friday, and the +briars breaking through the green sod," to aphorisms that have an accent +of eternity, as, "It is the poor know all the troubles of the world," +and "The swift, unflinching, terrible judgment of the young."</p> + +<p>The characters, even when they are purposely almost caricatures, have in +them the possibility of complete portrayals. There is no flagging of the +invention in any of them, no slipshod or careless composition. Her +technique, too, at least in farce, is masterful, and in her plays of +modern life of other form adequate. That she could master historical +drama, as I have said, I must doubt, but that she need restrict herself +so largely to farce and farce comedy in her plays of modern life, I do +not for a moment believe. "The Gaol Gate," in fact, proved that she need +not so restrict herself, and "MacDaragh's Wife" (1911), written by Lady +Gregory at sea on her way to America, but perhaps for that all the +fuller of the wild old life of her native Connacht. It would almost seem +that with "Grania" (1912), a tragedy too, following "MacDaragh's Wife," +Lady Gregory is widening the scope of her work, as she well can, now +that there are other dramatists to provide comedies and farces for the +Abbey Theatre. It is a haunting story that "MacDaragh's + +<a name="page155" id="page155"></a> +Wife" tells, +and largely a true story, the story of a piper who, though a pauper, +draws all the countryside to the funeral of his wife, draws them, +through the wild lamenting of his pipes, from the fair where they are +sporting to follow, with a full fellowship, to the grave, her who died +all but alone. Lady Gregory tells us in a note just what of it she +gathered from old people about her girlhood's home at Roxborough, and +what about her home of to-day at Coole, how she has shaped it, and what +emotion is back of it, the "lasting pride of the artist of all ages."</p> + +<p>As Lady Gregory had restricted herself, until recently, in the forms of +modern life which she wrote of and in the kinds of people she selected +to write of, so, too, she had restricted herself, until recently, in the +motives she considered. It is true that the motive most recurrent in her +plays, that of fear of the opinion of the neighbor, an attitude probably +sprung of the clan system, is dominant in Irish life; and it is equally +true that the motive most notably absent, love, was until yesterday far +from a dominant motive in the Irish life that Lady Gregory presents: yet +there are many other motives that, in true comedy, and even in farcical +comedy, might well have place. That these motives are not there is, I +think, not only that Lady Gregory, self-effacingly, put into her plays +what was wanted to make them foils to the plays of Mr. Yeats and Synge, +but also because of the practice of one type of gentlewoman in +literature, of which Jane Austen is characteristic. And yet the mere +mention of Jane Austen increases the wonderment that Lady Gregory + +<a name="page156" id="page156"></a> +has +not written of people of every condition in her neighborhood, whether +that be London or Dublin or Gort, as Miss Austen did of people of every +condition in her neighborhood, whether that be Steventon or Bath or +Chawton. It can hardly be said, even, that "Grania" her last play, is a +play about love. In her note to the play, Lady Gregory declares, "Love +itself, with its shadow Jealousy, is the true protagonist!" And yet, I +think it is Jealousy only that is the true protagonist. There is much +talk about love, but it is not from love, but from jealousy that the +action of the play arises. Among all this talk about love, among many +eloquent sayings about love, true readings of love, there stands out +most clearly in my memory this part of a speech of Finn, a speech +uttered before Grania had turned from him to Diarmuid—</p> + + <div class="display"> <p>And as for youngsters, they do not know how + to love because there is always some to-morrow's love possible in + the shadow of the love of to-day. It is only the old it goes through + and through entirely because they know all the last honey of the + summer-time has come to its ferment in their cup, and there is no + new summer coming to meet them forever.</p> </div> + +<p>This I remember not only for its thought but for its style, the rhythm +of its prose. It is Lady Gregory at her best, as "Grania" as a whole is +Lady Gregory at her best in tragedy. If "Grania" in every detail were as +inspired as its explanation of the queen's quick turn from Diarmuid to +Finn, it would be a great play, indeed. Grania is no light woman, and +yet she turns, in the old legend, from the man who sacrificed all but +all for her, on his death, + +<a name="page157" id="page157"></a> +to the High King who brought about his +death, with a suddenness inexplicable. Lady Gregory makes that sudden +turn plausible, for two reasons. One is that for seven years of +wandering all over Ireland, Diarmuid by his own will and because of +loyalty to Finn, had kept Grania a maid, making her his wife only after +he found her being carried off by the King of Foreign. The other reason +is that as Diarmuid lies dying, wounded to death by that King of Foreign +whom he has killed, his thoughts are all of his long-delayed disloyalty +to Finn, and not at all of Grania. Thus, she justifies herself, speaking +to Finn:—</p> + + <div class="display"> <p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Grania</span>. He had no love for me at any time. + It is easy to know it now. I knew it all the while, but I would not + give in to believe it. His desire was all the time with you yourself + and Almhuin. He let on to be taken up with me, and it was but + letting on. Why would I fret after him that so soon forgot his wife, + and left her in a wretched way?</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Finn</span>. You are not judging him right. You are distracted with + the weight of your loss.</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Grania</span>. Does any man at all speak lies at the very brink of + death, or hold any secret in his heart? It was at that time he had + done with deceit, and he showed where his thought was, and had no + word at all for me that had left the whole world for his sake, and + that went wearing out my youth, pushing here and there as far as the + course of the stars of Heaven. And my thousand curses upon death not + to have taken him at daybreak, and I believing his words! It is then + I would have waked him well and would have cried my seven + generations after him! And I have lost all on this side of the + world, losing that trust and faith I had, and finding him to think + of me no more than of a flock of stars would cast their shadow on + his path. And I to die with this scald upon my heart; it is hard + thistles would spring up out of my grave.</p> </div> + + +<a name="page158" id="page158"></a> + +<p>I have spoken of Lady Gregory as translator, as collector of folk-lore, +as essayist, and as dramatist; but there is another rôle in which she +has brought no less advantage to the Celtic Renaissance, though it is a +rôle that has not brought her, as have these other, the joys of +recapturing or of creating beautiful things. Always objective, though +never wholly able to subordinate personality, however near she may have +come to effacing it in her plays, Lady Gregory has in this rôle +considered herself solely as an agent in the service of Irish letters. +The Irishman is naturally a pamphleteer, and Mr. Yeats, poet of the +Other World though he be, can give as good blows in controversy as Mr. +George Moore. Almost all who have part in the Renaissance have skill in +the art of publicity. They have needed no publicists to fight their +battles as the Pre-Raphaelites needed Ruskin. Still, in some measure in +the way of publicity, and in large measure in other ways, Lady Gregory +has been to the Celtic Renaissance what Ruskin was to that last +renaissance of wonder. She has edited pamphlets on things national and +artistic in Ireland, she has helped Dr. Hyde and Mr. Yeats in their +collecting of folk-lore and to a deeper knowledge of the people; she has +been one of the forces that have made possible the Abbey Theatre, giving +to it her power of organization as well as plays and patronage. More +than this, she has welcomed to Coole Park many a worker in the movement, +who in the comfort of a holiday there has been refreshed by the gray and +green land so near the sea and reinspired by the contact with that Irish +Ireland so close to her doors. Like Ruskin, Lady Gregory is a great + +<a name="page159" id="page159"></a> +patron of letters, but like Ruskin she is much more. Lady Gregory is an +artist in words who is to be valued as a presenter of Irish life, past +and present, with a beauty that was not in English literature before she +made it.</p> +</div> + +<hr class="page"> + +<div> + +<a name="page160" id="page160"></a> +<a name="toc_9"></a> +<h2>Chapter VII</h2> + +<h2 class="sub">John Millington Synge</h2> + + +<p>It is Synge himself who puts the just phrase on what his life was to +him, and it is, as it could not else be, from the lips of his Deirdre +that it falls. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and +richest, if it's for a short space only." It is Deirdre alone of his men +and women that is introspective at all, Deirdre—and Naisi when he is +mastered by thoughts of home that will not down. Synge wrote the play of +her triumph over death as he himself was dying, and he wrote it with +high heart, and, what is higher, gladness, despite his foreknowledge of +his doom. It was to fulfill his dream of the most queenly girl of old +Irish legend that he wrote "Deirdre of the Sorrows," but he could not +keep out of his writing, had he wished to keep it out, his own love that +death was so soon to end, and the thoughts of what was the worth of +life. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and richest, if +it's for a short space only." It is not a new saying, but it is not to +be identified with the proverbial "a short life and a merry," with which +some confuse it, and of Synge it was a true saying. There are those who, +because of the irony of his writing, an irony that is new to literature, +and, maybe, to some cruel, or at least disillusionizing, may think there +was little joy for him; but the truth is there was never a writer in +whom there was more joy. This "strange still + +<a name="page161" id="page161"></a> +man" as he was even to +those who knew him best, gentle or simple, found all life that was +natural life, even of the barest and rudest, as thrilling as first love. +It is this man, his enemies at home the sated Parisian, who knew a gusto +in living greater than that of any English writer since Borrow. Let no +one forget those lines with which Christy Mahon cries defiance to the +Mayo folk who have known his greatness and his fall: "Ten thousand +blessings upon all that's here, for you've turned me a likely gaffer in +the end of all, the way I'll go romancing through a romping lifetime +from this hour to the dawning of the judgment day." I do not deny that +these words are in a sense wrung from the Playboy, but what I do hold is +that they prove how vital was the genius of the man who wrote them, who +saw the joy there was yet in life for this braggart wastrel just as he +saw that even such a miserable boyhood as Christy's knew a kind of +poacher's joy in running wild on the bogs. Even for poor Nora, turned +out on the roads with a tramp for companion, there is the joy of the +road once she learns to know it. The tramp knows it surely:—</p> + + <div class="display"> <p>You'll be hearing the herons crying out over + the black lakes, and you'll be hearing the grouse and the owls with + them, and the larks and the big thrushes when the days are warm: and + it's not from the like of them you'll be hearing a tale of getting + old like Peggy Cavanagh, and losing the hair off you and the light + of your eyes, but it's fine songs you'll be hearing when the sun + goes up, and there'll be no old fellow wheezing the like of a sick + sheep, close to your ear.</p> </div> + +<p>Of like gusto, too, is the joy of Martin Doul and Mary Doul in their +blindness; and the joy of the three tinkers in + +<a name="page162" id="page162"></a> +the escape of themselves +and their half-sovereign from the priest and in the prospect of "A great +time drinking that bit with the trampers in the green of Clash." And +from such joys as these, wild and earthy and rallying, his exultations +range to the exalted serenity and sadness of Naisi and Deirdre as they +look back on their seven year of love in Glen Masain, of love almost too +perfect and too happy to be human.</p> + +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a name="illo_8" id="illo_8"></a><img src="images/image08.jpg" alt="John Millington Synge"></p> +<p style="text-align: center">John Millington Synge</p> + +<p>Yes, joy is as distinctive as irony and extravagance of the writing of +Synge, joy in mere living, in life even at the worst, and joy, too, in +life at the best. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and +richest, if it's for a short space only." It was for a short space of +years that Synge had "what is best and richest," hardly for the seven +years of his great lovers. He did not have it when his thought homed to +Ireland in 1899, as a result of a meeting with Mr. Yeats in Paris. His +writing, then, was of little moment, but it grew better when, at home +again, he realized what Irish life was to him, when once renewed contact +with the Irish peasant brought back the familiarity that had been his in +the nursery. It was the Wicklow glens, to which memories of his people +drew him, and the Aran Islands, where he went to study Irish—until then +little more than a book language to him—and to live a life perhaps +"more primitive than any in Europe," that enabled him to find himself. +Further 'prentice work, though of a new sort, followed his sojourns in +Wicklow and Aran, but by 1903 his art had matured to the ripe power of +"In the Shadow of the Glen" and "Riders to the Sea," which, after +adjustment to the stage, were + +<a name="page163" id="page163"></a> +put on respectively October 8, 1903, and +February 25, 1904, at Molesworth Hall, Dublin. "The Tinker's Wedding" +which has been played only once, and then in London, dates from about +the same time. "The Well of the Saints" was produced on February 4, +1905, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and "The Playboy of the Western +World" on January 26, 1907, at the same place, to the accompaniment of +an uproar that a certain element of Irishmen have considered it proper +to create ever since on its first appearance in all cities whatsoever, +whether in Great Britain or America. One wonders what they would have +done had he made it as biting as Ibsen made "Peer Gynt." "Deirdre of the +Sorrows," which Synge left unrevised, was first produced at the Abbey +Theatre on January 13, 1910, the last of the six plays of his maturity. +It was in the years from 1902 to 1909 that he had "what is best and +richest"—a full life, lived largely in the Ireland that he loved; the +artist's joy in making that life into a new beauty, a beauty that was +all compact of exaltation and extravagance and irony; and love for a +woman in whom his man's life and his artist's life were united, for her +who embodied his dream of Pegeen Mike and added her life and her art of +the stage to his dream of Deirdre, as day by day it emerged from his +mind. And so great was his joy in these good things that his precarious +health, and even his year—long last illness, could not, while he had +any strength, lessen the high spirit of his writing. There is none of +his plays more vital than "Deirdre of the Sorrows."</p> + +<p>And yet this joy that is basic in Synge, this exaltation, + +<a name="page164" id="page164"></a> +is no more +basic than emotions and attitudes of mind that are often, in other men, +at war with joy and exaltation—irony and grotesquerie, keen insight +into "the black thoughts of men," and insistent awareness of the quick +passing of all good things, <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">diablerie</span> and mordancy. Strange, then, +should be his love passages and strange too, they are at times, ranging +from the bizarre delight of "In Kerry" to the triumphing nobility of +Deirdre's farewell to Alban. One thinks of Mr. Hardy and one thinks of +Donne as one reads "In Kerry":—</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"We heard the thrushes by the shore and sea,</p> +<p class="l">And saw the golden stars' nativity,</p> + +<p class="l">Then round we went the lane by Thomas Flynn,</p> +<p class="l">Across the church where bones lie out and in;</p> +<p class="l">And there I asked beneath a lonely cloud</p> +<p class="l">Of strange delight, with one bird singing loud,</p> +<p class="l">What change you'd wrought in graveyard, rock and sea,</p> +<p class="l">This new wild paradise to wake for me ...</p> +<p class="l">Yet knew no more than knew those merry sins</p> +<p class="l">Had built this stack of thigh-bones, jaws and shins."</p> + +</div> + +<p>One thinks of no other writer at all, however, when one reads Christy's +wooing of Pegeen, even when one puts down the book in the quiet that +always comes on one in the presence of something great; one thinks of no +other writer, of course, when one sees the lovers and listens to their +words, on the stage, for one is rapt out of one's self by the perfect +accord of drama and actors at one in the service of beauty:—</p> + + <div class="display"> <p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Christy</span> (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">indignantly</span>). Starting from + you, is it? (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">He follows her.</span>) I will not, then, and when the airs + is warming, in four months or five, it's then yourself and me should + be pacing + + +<a name="page165" id="page165"></a> + Neifin in the dews of night, the times sweet smells do be + rising, and you'll see a little, shiny new moon, maybe, sinking on + the hills.</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Pegeen</span> (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">looking at him playfully</span>). And it's that kind of a + poacher's love you'd make, Christy Mahon, on the sides of Neifin, + when the night is down?</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Christy</span>. It's little you'll think if my love's a poacher's, or + an earl's itself, when you'll feel my two hands stretched around + you, and I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips, till I'd feel a + kind of pity for the Lord God is all ages sitting lonesome in His + golden chair.</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Pegeen</span>. That'll be right fun, Christy Mahon, and any girl + would walk her heart out before she'd meet a young man was your like + for eloquence, or talk at all.</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Christy</span> (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">encouraged</span>). Let you wait, to hear me talking, till + we're astray in Erris, when Good Friday's by, drinking a sup from a + well, and making mighty kisses with our wetted mouths, or gaming in + a gap of sunshine, with yourself stretched back unto your necklace, + in the flowers of the earth.</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Pegeen</span> (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">in a low voice, moved by his tone</span>). I'd be nice, so, + is it?</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Christy</span> (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">with rapture</span>). If the mitred bishops seen you that + time, they'd be the like of the holy prophets, I'm thinking, do be + straining the bars of Paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of + Troy, and she abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in her + golden shawl.</p> </div> + +<p>Borrow, who comes to mind more often than any other writer as one reads +Synge, chose to avoid love scenes, and Borrow's follower, Mr. Hewlett, +for all his gusto, has no such exaltation as this. Had Harry Richmond +taken to the road with Kiomi we might have known something like it. A +chapter out of the early life of Juggling Jerry and his "Old Girl," done +in the manner of "Love in the Valley," would be still nearer to it. As +it is, this passage + +<a name="page166" id="page166"></a> +of the third act of "The Playboy of the Western +World" stands alone. I doubt if Synge had read Meredith, and even had +he, the life of the roads and their cottages that Synge knew so well was +his master, and no writer at all. In a way, of course, the Irish-English +of Dr. Hyde's translations of "The Love Songs of Connacht" was an +influence, and you will find many expressions common to them and Synge. +It is not important, however, whether these expressions have a common +source, or whether Synge took them from "The Love Songs" rather than +from his own note-book. Whatever their source it was Synge who made out +of them a great style, his peasant style. It is another and a severer +style that he uses in his "Deirdre of the Sorrows," the courtly subject +demanding dignity and restraint. This latter style has borrowed some of +the bare simplicity of the personal style of Synge, that style, I mean, +in which he records his own experience in the Aran Islands or in Wicklow +and Kerry.</p> + +<p>Romancing, which is the very atmosphere of "The Playboy of the Western +World," would be out of place in any telling of the greatest of old +Irish legends; so it is that Synge has found for "Deirdre of the +Sorrows," or rather for its great moments, an austere epic speech that +seems native to the story. The passionate words are nobly adequate to +the passionate resignation they have to tell, a resignation that has +come of the unwilling belief of the lovers that so great a love as +theirs cannot last longer "without fleck or flaw" than the seven years +it has lasted. Says Deirdre, when she has come to know it is fate that +they will return to Ireland, and death:—</p> + + +<a name="page167" id="page167"></a> + + <div class="display"> <p>The dawn and evening are a little while, the + winter and the summer pass quickly, and what way would you and I, + Naisi, have joy forever.... It's this hour we're between the daytime + and a night where there is sleep forever, and isn't it better thing + to be following on to a near death than to be bending the head down, + and dragging with the feet, and seeing one day a blight showing upon + love where it is sweet and tender?</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Naisi</span> (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">his voice broken with distraction</span>). If a near death + is coming what will be my trouble losing the earth and the stars + over it, and you, Deirdre, are their flame and bright crown? Come + away into the safety of the woods.</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Deirdre</span> (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">shaking her head slowly</span>). There are as many ways to + wither love as there are stars in a night of Samhain; but there is + no way to keep life, or love with it, a short space only.... It's + for that there's nothing lonesome like a love is watching out the + time most lovers do be sleeping.... It's for that we're setting out + for Emain Macha when the tide turns on the sand.</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Naisi</span> (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">giving in</span>). You're right, maybe. It should be a poor + thing to see great lovers and they sleepy and old.</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Deirdre</span> (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">with a more tender intensity</span>). We're seven years + without roughness or growing weary; seven years so sweet and + shining, the gods would be hard set to give us seven days the like + of them. It's for that we're going to Emain, where there'll be a + rest forever, or a place for forgetting, in great crowds and they + making a stir.</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Naisi</span> (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">very softly</span>). We'll go, surely, in place of keeping a + watch on a love had no match and it wasting away. (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">They cling to + each other, then Naisi looks up.</span>)</p> </div> + +<p>And this is from the unfinished second act, that Synge thought would +scarcely be worth preserving. I have quoted it rather than the great +keen over the body of Naisi that brings the play to a close, because +that must of necessity follow the old poem, and this is as Synge + +<a name="page168" id="page168"></a> +imagined it. Each is "a thing will be a joy and triumph to the ends of +life and time."</p> + +<p>I have thrown what I have to say about the exaltation of Synge to the +forefront of what I have to say of him, that all may be read in the +memory of this emphasis and of the exaltation of what I quote, no matter +how fantastic or grotesque or disillusionizing or even ghoulish it may +be. Whatever other quality may be dominant at any moment in Synge there +is always, along with it, exaltation.</p> + +<p>It is the extravagance and grotesquerie, of both language and situation, +that is the most immediately arresting of the qualities of Synge. And +this extravagance and grotesquerie have marked his writing from the +start. The old husband playing dead, that he may catch his young wife +with her lover, of his first play, "In the Shadow of the Glen," is a +very old motive, and familiar in the meliorized form that made it known +to the theatre in "Conn the Shaughraun" (1875). Before that, Crofton +Croker had given it currency, in "The Corpse Watchers," among those +outside of the circles in which it was a familiar folk-story. It might, +indeed, be said of "In the Shadow of the Glen" that it begins in the +manner of Boucicault and ends in the manner of Ibsen, for Nora Burke is +in a way a peasant Hedda Gabler. Such a criticism would, of course, be +very superficial. The story is a folk-story of many countries and Synge +was told the version he worked from by the old shanachie of Inishmaan +whom he calls Pat Dirane in "The Aran Islands." At moments the play +approaches farce, as when the supposed corpse rises + +<a name="page169" id="page169"></a> +from the bed where +he is stretched and drinks whiskey with a tramp who has happened in +while Nora is gone to meet her young man. From such a situation it turns +to keen pathos, as Nora sits with tramp and lover and the old husband +she thinks dead, and listens to the wind and rain sweeping through the +high glens about the hut and thinks of "the young growing behind her," +and the old passing. Where else will you find cheek by jowl such +sardonic humor as this and such poignancy of lament for the passing of +youth? Nora speaks as she pours out whiskey for her young man:—</p> + + <div class="display"> <p>Why would I marry you, Mike Dara? You'll be + getting old and I'll be getting old, and in a little while, I'm + telling you, you'll be sitting up in your bed—the way himself + was sitting—with a shake in your face, and your teeth falling, + and the white hair sticking out round you like an old bush where + sheep do be leaping a gap.</p> + + <p> (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Dan Burke sits up noiselessly from under the sheet, with his + hand to his face. His white hair is sticking out round his head. + Nora goes on slowly without hearing him.</span>)</p> + + <p> It's a pitiful thing to be getting old, but it's a queer thing + surely. It's a queer thing to see an old man sitting up there in his + bed with no teeth in him, and a rough word in his mouth, and his + chin the way it would take the bark from the edge of an oak board + you'd have building a door.... God forgive me, Michael Dara, we'll + all be getting old, but it's a queer thing surely.</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Michael.</span> It's too lonesome you are from living a long time + with an old man, Nora, and you're talking again like a herd that + would be coming down from the thick mist (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">he puts his arm round + her</span>), but it's a fine life you'll have now with a young man—a + fine life, surely.</p> + + <p> (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Dan sneezes violently. Michael tries to get to the door, but + before + + +<a name="page170" id="page170"></a> + he can do so Dan jumps out of the bed in queer white clothes, + with the stick in his hand, and goes over and puts his back + against it.</span>)</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Michael.</span> Son of God deliver us!</p> </div> + +<p>Equal extravagance and equal grotesquerie, and irony biting beyond any +in any other of his plays, you will find in "The Well of the Saints." +This, too, is built up out of Synge's experience of life in Aran and +Wicklow. Old Mourteen, a "dark man," who taught him Gaelic on Aranmor, +suggested Martin Doul, the chief character of the play, and it was +Mourteen told him, too, the story of the well whose water would give +sight to blind eyes. A story told Synge on Inishere supplied the saint, +and a tramp in Wicklow the thoughts of Martin Doul and Mary Doul as to +the glory their hair would be to them in age. As you read his travel +sketches, in fact, you are always coming on passages that very evidently +are the suggestions for situations in this play or that, and sometimes +more than suggestions—stories and situations and very phrases that you +remember as on the lips of the peasants in his plays. In these travel +sketches, too, you find the background of the plays. There is but the +germ of "The Playboy of the Western World" in the story told Synge in +Inishmaan of the hiding there from the police of the man that killed his +father, but there is old Mourteen's comparison of an unmarried man to +"an old jackass straying in the rocks," which later we find transferred +to Michael James Flaherty almost as Synge heard it—"an old braying +jackass straying upon the rocks."</p> + + +<a name="page171" id="page171"></a> + +<p>It may be, too, that the famous Lynchehaun case confirmed Synge in +taking the Aran story of the man who killed his father as the basis of +"The Playboy," but it is little he got for his plays from his reading of +"the fearful crimes of Ireland," and little that he got for them from +any of his reading. There are situations in "The Tinker's Wedding"—the +tying-up of the priest in the bag, for instance—that suggest as source +"The Lout and his Mother," included by Dr. Hyde in his "Religious Songs +of Connacht," but Synge records, in "At a Wicklow Fair," that a herd +told him the story of the tinker couple that would be wed, as he and the +herd met the man in the case in Aughrim.</p> + +<p>No one who knows Ireland at all would hold that Synge's plays are +typical of the Irish peasant generally, but any one who knows Irish +literature at all, and the life of the roads in Ireland, will admit that +wildness and extravagance are to be found in that literature from the +beginning and in that life even at this day of supposed civilization. +You will find one kind of extravagance in the distortions of Cuchulain +in bardic literature, another kind of extravagance in "Little Red Mary +and the Goat with the Chime of Bells" that your gardener tells you in a +prosaic American suburban town; you will find the primitiveness of +prehistoric life in the burning of poor old Mrs. Cleary by her neighbors +in Tipperary (1895), to drive a demon out of her, and the savage that is +but under the skin of all men in the description of the Spinsters' Ball +at Ballinasloe in "A Drama in Muslin." Said an old shanachie to Synge on +Inishere, when Synge had told him of a + +<a name="page172" id="page172"></a> +stock exchange trick, "Isn't it +a great wonder to think that those men are as big rogues as ourselves?" +It is idle to pretend that it is not true that, in some moods, all men +the world over have sympathy for the rogue. Why do we read of Reynard +the Fox with delight, and Robin Hood, and Uncle Remus, and not only in +the days of our own infantile roguery, but as grown men and women? This +man or that may say it is because of the cleverness of Reynard, the +daring of Robin Hood or his wild-woods setting, and the resourcefulness +of Bre'r Rabbit; but the honest man will admit it is because of an +innate and deeply rooted human sympathy with roguery as well as our +natural human sympathy with the under dog and the man hunted by a +merciless or an alien law. Very often, if the roguery is very great, or +we are brought face to face with its effects and realize it is a real +thing in real life, we will be shocked out of our sympathy with it, and +realize, as did Pegeen Mike, the difference between a "gallous story and +a dirty deed." But sometimes, if we are a people living a primitive +life, we will no more awaken to the reality of the wrong of roguery than +we would as children have been able to sympathize with the farmer whose +pumpkin patch we raided on the eve of Hallowe'en. A sneaking sympathy +with roguery, however, is a very different thing from a delight in +extravagance. That, too, is a universal passion, but not so native to +the Teuton as to Celt or Finn or Oriental. Its absence is what most +differentiates Old Norse literature from Old Irish, with which it so +early came into contact. It is in travelers' tales and in the tales of +seamen and in the writing that + + +<a name="page173" id="page173"></a> +was based on these, in rare moments of +religious or romantic ecstasy, or in borrowings from Celt or Oriental +that you will find the most of what extravagance there is in English +literature. In America you find extravagance in our humor, and this +humor, perhaps, owes as much of its extravagance to an Irish ancestry as +to an environment of new wonders that could not be well expressed save +in hyperbole.</p> + +<p>It is not only the extravagance of the change wrought in Christy by +unexpected hero-worship and an awakening of self-confidence through love +for the first time known and returned that we wonder at, and the +extravagance of that hero-worship, but the extravagance of the +imagination of his creator, and the beautiful extravagance of his +speech. The freshness and audacity of that imagination, and the +beautiful extravagance of that speech, a speech modulated to a rhythm +that Synge was the first to catch, are in themselves enough to give +distinction to almost any subject. There was granted Synge more than +this, however,—a keenness of vision into the pathetic humanity of ugly +things and a power to realize this with a beauty that was granted to no +one before, though to Swift it was granted to see the ugliness as a +bitter thing. Borrow had, indeed, a glimpse now and then of the pathetic +beauty there is in ugliness, as in the story of Isopel Berners and the +Flaming Tinman, and Whitman, too; but no man before Synge had the power +at once to see the ugly subject as beautiful from a new angle of vision, +humanize it, irradiate it with a new glow of imagination, reveal it +through a style that for the first time ennobles English + +<a name="page174" id="page174"></a> +prose drama as +blank verse has long ennobled English verse drama.</p> + +<p>Take "The Tinker's Wedding," for instance. The theme is the desire of a +tinker woman, youngish if not young, to wed the man who has long been +her mate; his mother's unstudied frustration of that scheme by stealing, +to swap for drink, the can they were to give to the priest along with a +half-sovereign for marrying them; and their joy, in the end, that they +have escaped matrimony and the wasting of good money. And yet this theme +is underlaid with an emotion so vital, the emotion of a wild free life, +and invested with a pathos so poignant of the quick passing of all good +things, that no understanding heart can but be profoundly moved by that +pathos and racily rejoiced at that wildness.</p> + +<p>It is thus, for instance, soliloquizes Mary Byrne, the rapscalliony old +tinker woman of outrageous behavior of "The Tinker's Wedding." She is +stealing the aforesaid can, in the absence of her son and his Sarah "to +get two of Tim Flaherty's hens": "Maybe the two of them have a good +right to be walking out the little short while they'd be young; but if +they have itself, they'll not keep Mary Byrne from her full pint when +the night's fine, and there's a dry moon in the sky." One thinks, as one +reads, of Villon's old woman and her lament for yesteryear, but there +are not many writers anywhere in the world, of old time or of to-day, +who have such power of blending pathos and ugliness into beauty, and no +other one that I know who can infuse humor into the blend, and make one +at the one time laugh ironically and be thrilled as with great poetry.</p> + + +<a name="page175" id="page175"></a> + +<p>There are those, of course, to whom this earthiness and wildness are +repulsive, to whom old Martin Doul's love pleading to Molly Byrne is +unendurable. A dirty "shabby stump of a man," a beggar, blind and +middle-aged, is asking a fine white girl, young, and as teasing as an +ox-eyed and ox-minded colleen may be, to go away with him. Not an +exalting situation, exactly, as you read of it or see it on the stage, +but once you see it on the stage, where its animality you would expect +would be heightened, you realize—and it is strange to you that you do +so realize—first of all its pathos, and again its pathos, and always, +the scene through, its pathos. Had Molly gone with old Martin it would +have revolted you, for it would have been unnatural, but since she did +not, and since she was not the sort to be easily insulted, you only +wonder at the power of passion and realize its pathos, and the irony of +it.</p> + +<p>There is, however, a situation ironical of love in "In the Shadow of the +Glen" that is more appalling to some than any irony of "The Well of the +Saints." I mean the scene at the end, where Nora, turned out by her +husband and forsaken by her lover, goes out into the rain with the +tramp, leaving husband and lover drinking together in utmost amity. The +pathos of this and the irony of it are of a part with the pathos of the +close of "Hedda Gabler." Hedda and Nora, selfish and willful both, if +you like, are yet fine women both, and human, as Zenobia and Eustacia +are human, and pathetic in their fates, with a pathos that even +Hawthorne and Mr. Hardy have seldom the power to make us feel. But the +fate of Nora was ironic as the fate of none of the others, for all + +<a name="page176" id="page176"></a> +three of them escaped the ennui and misery of life, while Nora but +begins a new life, freer for the moment than her old life, but +promising, in the end, only the old dull round.</p> + +<p>The irony of it! "The irony of it" is always in Synge's writing even in +its most exalted moments. A seven years' love "without fleck or flaw" is +"surely a wonder," but it is just as surely ironical that it, like all +good things, shall so soon come to an end. That, of course, is but the +way of nature, and so we much question if, after all, the irony of Synge +is more insistent than the irony of nature. If it is it is because he +takes more care to uncover it, but basically his irony is but the irony +of nature. He is in reality less ironical than Mr. Hardy, the great +ironist of English literature of our day, and he is never bitter, for +bitterness comes seldom except to the writer who is interested in +morals, and morals interest Synge only in so far as they are natural. It +is life—not any conventional way of life, or any ideal of life—that +interests Synge, so he escapes ensnarement in any of the questions of +the day. So frankly does he accept life that there is in him no note of +protest whatsoever, which is again fortunate, for protest, too, will +lead a man to morals and leave on his work the taint of a passing system +of morality as it did even on Ibsen.</p> + +<p>If there is symbolism to be found in Synge, it is there only by +accident, never as the result of definite intent. He may have had, in +the back of his mind, as he wrote "The Playboy of the Western World," +the thought of chance making a man, of a man finding himself through + +<a name="page177" id="page177"></a> +others believing in him who has no belief in himself but that there is +in the play any parable of young Ireland losing its allegiance to a +previous ideal of Ireland, I do not for a moment believe. There is, of +course, in "The Well of the Saints" the old and oft-uttered truth that +men prefer blindness in many things to correct vision of them, that +truth that drives Mr. Shaw to blind anger. Synge has no resentment +against that truth, only interest in it as a fact that is true of people +as he sees them. The play is an unforgettable symbol of that truth, but +to make it such was not why Synge wrote it. He wrote it with a purpose +akin to that which inspired Burns to write his "Jolly Beggars." He wrote +it to make something beautiful out of the life of the beggars of the +Wicklow mountains, and I have no doubt he had a wild joy in the idea of +it, in the irony of its truth, in the grotesquerie of the situations he +garnered from his memory to illustrate its beauty and truth.</p> + +<p>Many wonders are possible even to-day in the wild life of the roads and +of the sea-haunted islands that Synge knew, but he was wise to put "The +Well of the Saints" back a hundred years or more. Aran islanders told +him of rye that turned to oats in their fields and of phantom ships that +passed them at sea, but a miracle of healing such as that of "The Well +of the Saints" they were familiar with only in folk-song such as "Mary's +Well," and such a miracle, too, would hardly be attempted by a priest of +to-day.</p> + +<p>Synge had the great advantage of writing all his plays, after the +earliest, for the stage. He knew as he wrote that + +<a name="page178" id="page178"></a> +he could test that +writing's stage effect in rehearsal and change it if need be. So he did +change "The Playboy of the Western World," revealing the incident of the +supposed patricide as a bit of narrative addressed by Christy to the +admiring girls of the Mayo village, instead of, as he had intended, a +scene on the stage in "a windy corner of rich Munster land." Had he +written "Riders to the Sea" later, Synge would surely never have crowded +into it incidents that took far longer in the happening than in the +portrayal of that happening on the stage. It is this technical +shortcoming that for me takes away somewhat from the exceeding beauty of +this tragedy of Aran. The story of the finding of the clothes that tell +of the death at sea of the last but one of the five sons of Maurya, and +of the death on the very shore itself of the last son, is in its very +nature a dirge, and demands a slower movement than is possible with its +incidents arranged as he was content to leave them in the play as we +have it. "Riders to the Sea" is less representative of Synge, moreover, +than any other of his plays, for it is written on one note, the note of +the dirge, of the dirge of the tides that sound their menace of the sea +through Inishmaan. It is less representative of Synge because it has in +it no humor, no quick changes of mood, no revelation of tumult of soul. +It is less representative of Synge in that it is less original than any +other of his plays, reminiscent in fact in all but its style, now of +Ibsen, now of M. Maeterlinck, now even of Mr. Edward Martyn. And his +style itself is not what his style was in "In the Shadow of the Glen," +nor what it became again in "The Well of the Saints."</p> + + +<a name="page179" id="page179"></a> + +<p>One wonders where that speech came from, that speech that is, as he +would have it, "fully flavored as a nut or apple." Mr. Yeats and Lady +Gregory tell us that he did not have it until he had been made free, +through residence there, of the life of the Aran Islands. If one has +read, however, the English of the prose translations of Dr. Hyde's "Love +Songs of Connacht," one may see in their style the genesis of the style +of "Riders to the Sea," and if one has read the "Dialogue between Two +Old Women" of "The Religious Songs of Connacht," and "The Lout and his +Mother," one may come to believe that these turned Synge toward the even +more fully flavored and more rhythmic speech of the other plays. +Perhaps, too, there were memories of the rhythm and of the flavor of the +speech of him who made these words for Jasper Petulengro: "Life is +sweet, brother, ... there's night and day, brother, both sweet things; +sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind +on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die!"</p> + +<p>The speech of Connacht folk-song rendered into the English of Connacht +by Dr. Hyde, however, and the speech of Borrow were no more than the +start, if they were as much as the start, that put him on the right +road. If ever a man made his style himself, it was Synge. He made it out +of his memory and out of his imagination, using "one or two words only +that I have not heard," he said, "among the country people of Ireland, +or spoken in my own nursery before I could read the newspaper," but +evolving from that memory by his imagination a speech + +<a name="page180" id="page180"></a> +that is in +harmony with the imagination of the people an imagination that is, he +tells us, "fiery and magnificent and tender," though no such actual +speech would be possible of reproduction from any one of them.</p> + +<p>Synge is very definite in his statement of what he believes drama should +be, and what he would make his own drama of Irish life, expressing his +belief in the preface to "The Tinker's Wedding":—</p> + + <div class="display"> <p>The drama is made serious ... not by the + degree in which it is taken up with problems that are serious in + themselves, but by the degree in which it gives the nourishment, not + very easy to define, on which our imaginations live....</p> + + <p> We should not go to the theatre as we go to a chemist's or a + dramshop, but as we go to a dinner where the food we need is taken + with pleasure and excitement....</p> + + <p> The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove + anything....</p> + + <p> Of the things which nourish the imagination, humor is one of the + most needful and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it. Baudelaire + calls laughter the greatest sign of the Satanic element in man; and + where a country loses its humor, as some towns in Ireland are doing, + there will be a morbidity of mind, as Baudelaire's mind was morbid. + In the greater part of Ireland, however, the whole people, from the + tinkers to the clergy, have still a life, and view of life, that are + rich and genial and humorous. I do not think that these country + people, who have so much humor themselves, will mind being laughed + at without malice, as the people in every country have been laughed + at, in their own comedies.</p> </div> + +<p>In the preface to "The Playboy of the Western World" is this paragraph, +completing his <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">credo</span> as to drama:—</p> + + <div class="display"> <p>On the stage one must have reality, and one + must have joy; and that is why the intellectual modern drama has + failed, and + +<a name="page181" id="page181"></a> + people have grown sick of the false joy of the musical + comedy, that has been given them in place of the rich joy found only + in what is superb and wild in reality.</p> </div> + +<p>Although there are only about forty characters, all told, in the six +plays of Synge, and ten of these are in "Deirdre of the Sorrows," which +for all its humanity is a play out of a life that is gone, there are men +and women a-plenty to give us this "rich joy found only in what is +superb and wild in reality." Nora is "superb and wild" in her longings, +and Maurya in her sorrow; and old Martin Doul "superb and wild" in his +dream of life in the South; Sarah Casey and Pegeen Mike "superb and +wild" in the most direct sense of the phrase; and these are all real, if +not representative of the poorer peasantry. And in the high way of +romance who has dreamed what is more superb and wilder than the lament +of Deirdre over Naisi! In the creation of character, as in style, and in +technique of drama, Synge has done what he would. In only one of his +plays, in "Riders to the Sea," are his leading characters representative +Irish peasants; and even Maurya and her children, not only because of +the isolation of their home in Aran, but because of the fate which has +marked her mankind for death at sea, are somewhat apart from the +fisher-people of the west coast. In all his four other plays of modern +life, Synge has chosen characters who are, in his own words, "variations +from the ordinary types of manhood,"—chosen them because of his +deep-seated love of the unconventional. In "In the Shadow of the Glen," +Michael Dara, the herd, is a common type, and Dan Burke, the old sheep +farmer, not an uncommon type, + + +<a name="page182" id="page182"></a> +but the tramp and Nora, the one by his +wandering and the other by her brooding, are "variations," though very +human both. Of the cottager class, too, are Timmy the Smith, Molly +Byrne, and the "villagers" of "The Well of the Saints," as are, too, the +girls and men of "The Playboy of the Western World" other than the +Mahons and Michael James. Shawn Keogh, indeed, is a cut above cottagers, +being almost a strong farmer, and Michael James himself was, no doubt, +of a similar cottager respectability before he took to shebeen-keeping. +Almost all the other characters of these modern plays are, with the +exception of the priest of "The Tinker's Wedding" and the saint of "The +Well of the Saints," squatters, beggars, and tinkers. Among them, few as +they are all told, are very differing personalities—Christy the Playboy +and his father, "a dirty man, God forgive him, and he getting old and +crusty"; Martin Doul, a "shabby stump of a man," "of queer talk," +middle-aged and blind and a beggar; Michael Byrne, the hardy, thieving, +unimaginative tinker; and the romancing young tramp who gallants Nora +when her own husband turns her out on the road;—"variations" all, +perhaps, but human, and compelling, all of them, our interest, and +greater or less sympathy. And the women! Nora, whom we leave as +road-woman, I have likened to Hedda Gabler, and Sarah Casey in externals +to Isopel Berners, but I do not know to whom to compare the others save +Mary Byrne, as slightly suggestive of Villon's old woman. Mary Doul, +blind Martin's blind wife, has a general likeness to some old witch out +of a fairy tale, but she is far from being a witch; and + +<a name="page183" id="page183"></a> +Widow Quinn the +incomparable might be compared, were she not too high-hearted, to the +hag of "The Lout and Mother" in being</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l"> "indecent-spoken, carneying, lying,</p> +<p class="l">Plausible, full of poems and prophecies and sharp edged."</p> +</div> + +<p>Of the women of the cottager class, Nora, for all her wildness and +bitterness, is the most lovable, and Molly Byrne the least lovable; the +girls of "Riders to the Sea" are not fully enough individualized to make +us feel we know them; but Pegeen Mike, Synge has put before us in +appearance and temperament, character and personality. "A wild-looking +but fine girl," he describes her, "with a divil's own temper," "the +fright of seven town-lands"—as she says—"for my biting tongue," but +susceptible of softening toward a boy of good looks and coaxing ways +such as Christy. He gets around her with "his poet's talking" and his +popularity, his "mighty spirit" and "gamey heart" until she gives him +"words would put you thinking on the holy Brigid speaking to the infant +saints."</p> + +<p>There might be incongruity, if one were writing of any other than Synge, +in speaking of Deirdre in such a company. Incongruity, however, is of +the very texture of Synge's art, which has reconciled qualities, as I +have said, never before reconciled in English literature. It is on +Deirdre that Synge has lavished all the ideality that was in him, not +because he had a dream of woman he wished to fulfill, but because to him +Deirdre was all that was queenly. And yet even Deirdre is a "variation," +as nobility and beauty must ever be. So lofty is she that + +<a name="page184" id="page184"></a> +words even in +praise of her are almost impertinent. Just how lofty her words that I +quoted at the outset show, as does also, by way of contrast, the mention +of her here among these half-tragic, half-grotesque women of the +cottages and of the roads. There is scarcely a poet, of all that have +written of Ireland from the time of Ferguson to our time, that has not +written his dream of Deirdre as he finds her in the old legends of +Ireland, but to my mind no one of them has dreamed her so triumphantly +as has Synge.</p> + +<p>It is not, however, of such "variations" as Deirdre that the critics +fall foul, but of the "variations" he puts on Irish roads and in Irish +cottages when he presents the life of to-day. Why he replied to this +criticism when to most criticism he was, if not indifferent, at least +impervious, it is not easy to say. It is more than likely, however, that +it was rather to explain his ideas than to justify his characters that +he did answer. This criticism of the reality of his peasants began with +his "Shadow of the Glen" and is still to be heard in many places to-day. +It rose to its highest pitch of denunciation at the time of the +production of "The Playboy of the Western World" in Dublin, but it was +before that that he answered it fully, in the last paragraph of "The +Vagrants of Wicklow," a travel sketch he made out of his wanderings in +his native country. Here it is, as effective in its answer to subsequent +criticism as to that which it was definitely intended to answer:—</p> + + <div class="display"> <p>In all the circumstances of this tramp life + there is a certain wildness that gives it romance and a peculiar + value for those who look at life in Ireland with an eye that is + aware of the arts + +<a name="page185" id="page185"></a> + also. In all the healthy movements of art, + variations from the ordinary types of manhood are made interesting + for the ordinary man, and in this way only the higher arts are + universal. Beside this art, however, founded on the variations which + are a condition and effect of all vigorous life, there is another + art—sometimes confounded with it—founded on the freak of + nature, in itself a mere sign of atavism or disease. This latter + art, which is occupied with the antics of the freak, is of interest + only to the variation from ordinary minds, and, for this reason, is + never universal. To be quite plain, the tramp in real life, Hamlet + and Faust, in the arts, are variations; but the maniac in real life, + and Des Esseintes and all his ugly crew in the arts, are freaks + only.</p> </div> + +<p>It is well to consider all his characters in the light of this +statement, I think, and to re-read, keeping in mind a possible further +application of it, those phrases in the plays that so outrage many at +their hearing in the theatre, I would not for a moment seem to want to +soften the hardness of the life he pictures or to explain away his +delightfully sardonic humor as in reality a reconciling sort of humor, +but I do wish to say that the more I read him the less cruel and +sardonic that humor seems. The impersonality of the man as dramatist +grows on you as you read, you realize more and more his abstention from +playing chorus to his characters, and you come to know that the seeming +cruelty and sardonic joy are largely only the direct outcome of his +courage in allowing Nature to speak for herself. If you turn again to +the plays after learning of their background from his travel sketches, +you see many things in a new light. The irony, the grotesquerie, the +tonic earthiness never grow less, but one learns to discount somewhat +the effect of the hardness of speech on + +<a name="page186" id="page186"></a> +the recipients of that speech, +as through experience one learns—after one's second attendance at a +wake—to discount something of the too voluble sorrow of keening.</p> + +<p>That the candor of Synge, in allowing his people of hard nature or of +careless nature to say the ruthless things native to their minds and +temper, hurts many, there is proof every time one sees a play of his on +the stage. You will hear women about you gasp with mingled surprise and +disgust, their sensibilities wholly outraged, but unwilling laughter in +their minds when the Widow Quinn says to Christy, after his praise of +Pegeen, "There's poetry talk for a girl you'd see itching and +scratching, and she with a stale stink of poteen on her from selling in +the shop." Such gasps are nothing, however, to those they utter when +they hear Mary Doul tell Molly Byrne "when the skin shrinks on your +chin, Molly Byrne, there won't be the like of you for a shrunk hag in +the four quarters of Ireland."</p> + +<p>Very different is the kind of laughter aroused by the sly malice, native +to the rogue story from the days in which its characters masqueraded as +animals, that is revealed in the remark of Mary Byrne to the priest, +"It's destroyed you must be hearing the sins of the rural people in a +fine spring"; and different again the childish delight in the +extravagance at Christy's threat to send Shawn Keogh "coaching out +through Limbo with my father's ghost"; and still different the +breathless, delighted wonderment in the sense of moral values exhibited +by Michael James, when, fearing that Christy's threatened murder of +Shawn, if carried out, would give his secret trade away, he jumps + +<a name="page187" id="page187"></a> +up +with a shriek, exclaiming, "Murder is it? Is it mad you's are? Would you +go making murder in this place, and it piled with poteen for our drink +to-night?" Different too, is the laughter at the Rabelaisian touches and +at the farcical situations in which the plays abound.</p> + +<p>If ever there were characters that lived a life apart from their +author's, those characters are Synge's. It is in the verses and in the +travel sketches that we get the man himself, the man back of the +dramatist that gives to his characters a life independent of his own, a +life that he knows partly in reality and partly in imagination, but that +he himself has lived chiefly as an observer and imaginer. There is no +humor in these verses and travel sketches, not even when he is +describing a humorous scene such as that of the upsetting by pigs +running wild of the constabulary busy about evictions on Inishmaan. We +get the man himself, I say, in these verses and travel sketches, a man +exulting in primitiveness, in wildness, in beauty of woman and child, in +beauty of landscape; but exulting, more than in all else, in his own +moods aroused by these things that he loved. Even here, however, he is +at times almost impossibly impersonal, so that you feel in a certain +description that there is no man between you and the thing described, +but that, to adapt a phrase of Thoreau, it is the hills and the sea and +the atmosphere writing. This impersonality persists even in "The Aran +Islands," so large a part of which is very personal in that it is a +statement of his daily life on Inishmaan. It is not, however, from the +impersonal writing that I would quote,—though I would emphasize this +impersonality because it + +<a name="page188" id="page188"></a> +is part of the very nature of the man,—but +from the personal parts, because they reveal more of the positive part +of him. After a day of storm on Inishmaan, the middle island of the +three that make up the Aran group, Synge writes: "About the sunset the +clouds broke and the storm turned to a hurricane. Bars of purple cloud +stretched across the sound where immense waves were rolling from the +west, wreathed with snowy fantasies of spray. Then there was the bay +full of green delirium and the Twelve Pins touched with mauve and +scarlet in the east." That is the Connacht coast, and this the next +paragraph is Synge: "The suggestion from this world of inarticulate +power was immense, and now at midnight, when the wind is abating, I am +still trembling and flushed with exultation." And here is Synge again, +in another temper, which came to him on the seas about Inishmaan: "The +black curagh working slowly through this world of gray, and the soft +hissing of the rain, gave me one of the moods in which we realize with +immense distress the short moment we have left us to experience all the +wonder and beauty of the world."</p> + +<p>"The Aran Islands" is most memorable of his travel writings, because he +spent more time on these rocks at the world's end and came closest here +to the soul of Irish life. There are passages, however, in his +description of the Kerry coast, and even in his newspaper sketches of +the coast of Connemara, that tell not only of the places but of their +visitor. "I got on a long road running through a bog," he writes in "In +West Kerry," "with a smooth mountain on one side and the sea on the +other, and Brandon + +<a name="page189" id="page189"></a> +in front of me, partly covered with clouds. As far +as I could see there were little groups of people on their way to the +chapel at Ballyferriter, the men in homespun and the women wearing blue +cloaks, or, more often, black shawls twisted over their heads. This +procession along the olive bogs, between the mountains and the sea, on +this gray day of autumn, seemed to wring me with the pang of emotion one +meets everywhere in Ireland, an emotion that is partly local and +patriotic, and partly a share of the desolation that is mixed everywhere +with the supreme beauty of the world."</p> + +<p>The comment on Ireland, her ways and her place among the peoples, that +many a dramatist would have permitted himself to express through some +character chosen to play chorus to the action, Synge now and then +permits himself in the travel sketches. In "From Galway to Gorumna," +which he wrote for the "Manchester Guardian's" investigation of the +congested districts, is one of such rare avowals, an avowal to treasure +along with those of his all too short prefaces: "It is part of the +misfortune of Ireland that nearly all the characteristics which give +color and attractiveness to Irish life [he has been speaking of 'men +dressed in homespuns of the gray natural wool, and the women in deep +madder-dyed petticoats and bodices, with brown shawls over their heads'] +are bound up with a social condition that is near to penury, while in +countries like Brittany the best external features of the local +life—the rich embroidered dresses, for instance, or the carved +furniture—are connected with a decent and comfortable social +condition."</p> + + +<a name="page190" id="page190"></a> + +<p>It is this penury, perhaps, and its gray background that by way of +contrast emphasize so strongly the moments of splendor that Irish +landscape knows. One such moment Synge saw as he looked southward across +the bay from the Dingle peninsula toward Killarney: "The blueness of the +sea and the hills from Carrantuohill to the Skelligs, the singular +loneliness of the hillside I was on, with a few choughs and gulls in +sight only, had a splendor that was almost a grief in the mind."</p> + +<p>This splendor Synge found also in his own Wicklow, a lonelier country +than Aran, if loneliness comes from absence of human life. And if there +is not the loneliness of the sea in the inland glens that Synge knew so +well, there is in them the equal loneliness of the mountains. It is this +county of Wicklow that is the background of "In the Shadow of the Glen" +and of "The Well of the Saints" and of "The Tinker's Wedding." And +perhaps had not the Abbey Theatre grown to be a theatre for folk-drama +and for poetic drama of court romance alone, Synge would have made +Wicklow the background of dramas of a high life of yesterday. Certain it +is that in these passages he is thinking of it:—</p> + + <div class="display"> <p>Every one is used in Ireland to the tragedy + that is bound up with the lives of farmers and fishing-people; but + in this garden one seemed to feel the tragedy of the landlord class + also, and of the innumerable old families that are quickly dwindling + away. These owners of the land are not much pitied at the present + day, or much deserving of pity; and yet one cannot quite forget that + they are the descendants of what was at one time, in the eighteenth + century, a high-spirited and highly cultivated aristocracy. The + broken greenhouses and mouse-eaten + +<a name="page191" id="page191"></a> + libraries, that were designed and + collected by men who voted with Grattan, are perhaps as mournful in + the end as the four mud walls that are so often left in Wicklow as + the only remnants of a farmhouse. The desolation of this life is + often of a peculiarly local kind, and if a playwright chose to go + through the Irish country houses he would find material, it is + likely, for many gloomy plays that would turn on the dying away of + these old families, and on the lives of the one or two delicate + girls that are left so often to represent a dozen hearty men who + were alive a generation or two ago.</p> </div> + +<p>I have dwelt on these travel sketches of Synge not alone for their own +sake, but because they are, as I have said, the background of the plays, +and because they contain what are in a sense the diary notes out of +which the plays grew. In a sense, too, they are a commentary on the +plays, and as I have also said a revelation of the playwright. All must +be read for a thorough understanding of the plays, though these alone +should be a delight to all, even if they know no more of Ireland than +that share of human nature which is axiomatically the same in all men of +all races. If you do not read the travel sketches, you may fail to see +how deeply sympathetic Synge is with the Irish peasant, and in no +patronizing way. In "The Aran Islands" he takes the greatest care to +disguise the identity of those he knew intimately lest they be pained by +anything he wrote of them. No one could write with higher courtesy of +those whose guest he had been than Synge. You, reading, are made one of +their home circle, but no family secrets are betrayed. You are made +aware of their weaknesses, but there is never any disloyalty; and always +in his records of them their virtues of courage and endurance, + +<a name="page192" id="page192"></a> +of +adaptiveness and simplicity, of family stanchness and communal +helpfulness, outweigh the drunkenness and roguery that one expects from +the primitive. Synge is, indeed, not only loyal, but full of respect and +liking for the Aran Islanders, and of admiration for their rich +humanity.</p> + +<p>It was out of his island life and out of his life of the roads, and out +of his mood, once he knew his doom, that he made the twenty-two poems of +his that are retained of a great deal that he had written, most of it in +his younger years. That Synge faced his fate with bravery the triumphant +tone of "Deirdre of the Sorrows" that I have instanced is proof, but +there could not but be moments when the thought of death was too instant +to be denied. It was in such mood he wrote, either toward the end, or in +earlier moments of anticipation of it, "Queens," "On an Anniversary," +"To the Oaks of Glencree," "A Question," and "I've Thirty Months." There +is in these verses a certain morbidity, an almost ghoulishness, that is +very seldom present elsewhere in his writing. And yet I may be wrong in +attributing it to his certainty of approaching death, for there is a +more intense preoccupation with death in the plays of M. Maeterlinck's +youth and a greater ghoulishness in the verse of Mr. Hardy's youth. It +is of Mr. Hardy's verses that one thinks oftenest as one reads these +verses of Synge, and not only because of certain likenesses in +subject-matter, but because of the imperfect mastery of both over the +verse forms and a certain epigrammatic gnomic quality common to both. +The verses of Synge are not relatively so important in comparison + +<a name="page193" id="page193"></a> +with +the rest of his writing as Mr. Hardy's verses are in comparison with the +rest of his writing, for they are not needed to explain a philosophy of +life as are Mr. Hardy's verses. Fortunately, Synge attempted no +philosophy, had the rare wisdom to rest content with observation.</p> + +<p>In regard to poetry, as to all his art, Synge had, however, definite +views, though his verse is almost too little in bulk to exemplify them. +It was the poetry of exaltation, as it was the drama of exaltation, as +it was the exaltation in living, of change and speed and danger and +love, that meant most to him. He held further that "in these days poetry +is usually a flower of evil or good; but it is the timber of poetry that +wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots +among the clay and worms." The verse of Synge, as all his art, was so +rooted, surely. "Even if we grant," he continues, "that exalted poetry +can be kept successful by itself, the strong things of life are needed +in poetry also, to show that what is exalted or tender is not made by +feeble blood. It may almost be said that before verse can be human again +it must learn to be brutal."</p> + +<p>It is sayings of this sort that bring to mind his kinship with Whitman, +to whom he is also bound by the freemasonry of the roads. Both men felt +the call of the road; both loved the changing landscape and the little +adventures of the caravansaries; both loved most of all the men and +women they met. Once only Synge seems to have forgotten humanity when he +took to the road, that time which he has recorded in "Prelude":—</p> + + +<a name="page194" id="page194"></a> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"Still south I went and west and south again,</p> +<p class="l">Through Wicklow from the morning till the night,</p> +<p class="l">And far from cities, and the sights of men,</p> +<p class="l">Lived with the sunshine, and the moon's delight.</p> + +</div> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l">"I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds,</p> +<p class="l">The gray and wintry sides of many glens,</p> +<p class="l">And did but half remember human words,</p> +<p class="l">In converse with the mountains, moors, and fens."</p> +</div> + +<p>It is to this, to the wandering wayside life of Synge that one's thought +of him always returns, and rightly, for it was the road that most +inspired him. It is the memory of the road that most kindles him; and so +it is always to the man of the road that he gives his most lyric +passages; or, perhaps, I should say it is the speech that the thought of +the man of the roads or of the woman of wild heart raises in his mind +that is his most beautiful speech, with the very wildness of the +wandering heart in it, and with the long swing that comes, with second +wind, when you have been a day abroad on the road.</p> + +<p>What if the words have now the clauber of the roads upon them, and even +the muck, and now the reek of the shebeen or of the tinker's fire in a +roadside ditch; they have, too, the bog smell, and the smell of the +whin, the smell of ploughed land and of the sea, and they fall into +cadences that are cadences of the wind and of the tides, of full rivers +and clucking streams that sudden rains have filled, as well as the +cadences of the voices of boy and girl and they love-making, and of the +voices of the wild folk of the roads coaxing or loudly quarreling, and +the voices of women and men, young and old, lamenting the hard way of +life and of the sorrow that waits for all in the end. + +<a name="page195" id="page195"></a> +Why quarrel with +Synge, in short, because his style is of the very essence of life, and +of nature, which is the background of life?</p> + +<p>To attain a style that is his very self, that is of the very color of +his life, and of the very color of the extravagant phases of the life of +his country, to attain a style that embodies all this, and that for the +first time sets English dramatic prose to a rhythm as noble as the +rhythm of blank verse, is surely in itself title to greatness. But Synge +has other titles, too. In the few characters that he has created, forty +in all, characters all natively Irish, he has attained universality, +because these Irish men and women, Nora and Martin Doul, Sarah Casey and +Christy Mahon, Maurya and Deirdre, are so human that they are prototypes +of men and women the world over. And of dialogue, where style and +characterization blend, he has sure control. Each character of the six +great characters that I have just mentioned speaks and acts just as such +a character would, and not only these, but every other character that +occupies the stage for more than a moment. Michael Dara and Timmy the +Smith, the Priest or Philly Cullen, Bartley and Owen, each one has an +individuality clearly defined.</p> + +<p>There is less that is great in the structure of his plays than in any +other component of them, but that structure always clearly reveals the +action which arises from the emotion and theme underlying each,—the +menacing sea in "Riders to the Sea"; the loneliness of the mountain +glens that drives men fey in "The Shadow of the Glen"; the blindness, +the blessed self-delusion of mankind, in + +<a name="page196" id="page196"></a> +"The Well of the Saints"; the +wildness of the life of the roads that law may not tame, in "The +Tinker's Wedding"; the boy's finding of himself through his having to +live up to a community's mistaken ideal of him, in "The Playboy of the +Western World"; and the benison of death that prevents a great love from +dying, in "Deirdre of the Sorrows."</p> + +<p>Always the joy of making something beautiful out of his experience and +dream of life is what inspires Synge to write, and though the intention +to read life truly is a passion with him, there is never a suggestion of +didacticism, or even of moralizing, though "The Well of the Saints" is +unquestionably, whether he wills it so or not, a symbol of man's +discontent with things as they are, his preference in some things of the +lie to the truth. I think that Synge did not will to make "The Well of +the Saints" a symbol, and that the play was to him but a reading of +life, as life is, in his characteristic, exalted, ironic, extravagant +way of writing, and that if he was aware of the symbolism, he was not +keenly aware of it or much interested in it. He gives us life untroubled +by the passing agitation of the day, and for that we should be thankful, +and thankful, too, that he has given in his plays "the nourishment, not +very easy to define, on which our imaginations live." His irony, as +desolating to some as the irony of Swift, gives pause to all, as insight +always will, but to me his extravagance is a joy unalloyed, and his +exaltation, so rare a thing in modern literature, should bring to all +men delight and refreshment of spirit. No reading, or seeing and +hearing, of his plays leaves me without + +<a name="page197" id="page197"></a> +a feeling of richness or +without wonder and large content. He gives back my youth to me, both in +the theatre and in my library, and, in the glow that is mine in such +recapture, I call him the greatest dramatist in English that our stage +has known in a century. That I know him to be on sober second thought, +second thought that has been concerned with his art, as I followed it +developing during the slow years from "Riders to the Sea" to "Deirdre of +the Sorrows."</p> +</div> + +<hr class="page"> + +<div> + +<a name="page198" id="page198"></a> +<a name="toc_10"></a> +<h2>Chapter VIII</h2> + +<h2 class="sub">The Younger Dramatists—Mr. Padraic Colum—Mr. William Boyle—Mr. T.c. +Murray—Mr. S. Lennox Robinson—Mr. Rutherford Mayne—"Norreys +Connell"—Mr. St. John G. Ervine—Mr. Joseph Campbell</h2> + + +<p>One wonders whether it is not of himself Mr. Padraic Colum is writing as +"The dawn-man ... in the sunset." That phrase arrests one on the first +page of his little book of verse "Wild Earth" (1909), in the first poem, +"The Plougher." It refers, of course, to an elemental man of to-day, to +the peasant of the great central plain of Ireland, who is "brute-tamer, +plough-maker, earth-breaker," just as truly as it does to the breaker of +horses who drove furrows with a tree-knee through primordial mould; and +it carries us in imagination back to the man of the Stone Age by way of +many other ploughmen, by way of the last man we saw between +plough-handles who appealed to our imagination, a man limned against an +April sky from which the sun had passed to leave all the west that +gold-green that the greatest of Westmoreland dalesmen loved; by way of +that Dumfries peasant whose</p> + +<div class="lg"> +<p class="l"> "conquering share</p> + +<p class="l">Upturned the fallow fields of truth anew";</p> +</div> + +<p>by way of Wayland Smith, whose anvils dot the shores + +<a name="page199" id="page199"></a> +of Britain; by way +of Tubal Cain, "an artificer in brass and iron," of the seed of Cain, "a +tiller of the ground."</p> + +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a name="illo_9" id="illo_9"></a><img src="images/image09.jpg" alt="Padraic Colum"></p> +<p style="text-align: center">Padraic Colum</p> + +<p>One wonders is it not of himself that the poet writes, though what he +writes takes us far from him, carrying us in thought halfway round the +world and back through civilizations that have passed. But whether it is +of himself that Mr. Colum writes or not, he is certainly, in a sense, +"The dawn-man ... in the sunset." The "Glory of the Gael" that is +to-day, if it is "glory," is glory of sunset, of "purples and splendors" +that pass; there are those who hold that the race that "went forth to +battle," but "always fell," is already passed beyond the sunset, into +the twilight, that twilight that is the time of day so surely symbolical +of the writing of the many Irish poets that have followed after Mr. +Yeats. Mr. Colum, however, whether his race be in twilight or sunset, is +of the dawn. He is of the dawn not only because he is the youth, at +oldest the young man, in his writing, who sees the world freshly and +fresh, none the less fresh because he knows it old; but he is of the +dawn because it is chiefly those things that are fundamentals, that come +out of the beginnings of things, that interest him profoundly, that stir +him deeply. Subtleties and complexities, decadent things, are not for +him, but simplicities, primordial things, the love of wandering, and +what is only less old, the love of land; and love of woman. These three +things, and youth, and little else, concern him. Mr. Colum writes, +indeed, in the dedication to "Thomas Muskerry" (1910) that he has set +down "three characters that stood as first types in my human comedy, the +peasant, the artist, the official, Murtagh + +<a name="page200" id="page200"></a> +Cosgar, Conn Hourican, +Thomas Muskerry." It is not, however, the official that Mr. Colum +emphasizes in "Thomas Muskerry," but the man who longs for a quiet +little place where he may be free from the nagging of his daughter and +her children; and in Myles Gorman, in this same play, is sounded that +other call that is recurrent in his work, the call of the road. We see +more of wanderer than of artist, too, in Conn Hourican, though Mr. Colum +calls the play he made for him "The Fiddler's House"; and here, too, the +love of land is a motive—love of land and the wander-love battle in +"The Land" (1905), with love of woman the deciding factor in the +latter's victory.</p> + +<p>Mr. Colum would not be an Irishman if nationality and religion were not +also motives in his plays and poems, but it is only in his 'prentice +work that either appears as a leading motive. From a good deal of +writing, most of which appeared originally in "The United Irishmen," he +has republished only the three plays before mentioned, "The Land" +(1905), "The Fiddler's House" (1907), "Thomas Muskerry" (1910), his +miracle play, "The Miracle of the Corn," and two stories in "Studies" +(1907), and what he wishes to preserve of his verse in "Wild +Earth" (1909).</p> + +<p>It was through "The Daughters of Erin" that Mr. Colum came in touch with +the dramatic movement. Their plays and tableaux in the Antient Concert +Rooms in 1900 attracted his attention, and he wrote to the secretary, +inclosing with the note copies of two plays that he had written—the +dramatic achievements of his late 'teens. These plays were about the +"Children of Lir," that one + +<a name="page201" id="page201"></a> +of "The Three Sorrows of Story-Telling" +that is less poignant than the story of Deirdre only because it is less +human, and about Brian Boru, the high king that beat back the Danes at +Clontarf. Faery and mediæval history were not destined, however, to be +Mr. Colum's field, and Mr. Fay, then stage manager of the Association +productions, probably helped him on the way to his true field, the life +of the peasant of the Midlands, by declaring them rubbish. Two years +later Mr. Colum had learned enough about life and about the stage to +write a play against enlistment in the English army that held the +attention of audiences and was regarded as good propagandist "stuff." +"The Saxon Shillin'," produced May 15, 1903, Mr. Colum has not +republished, nor "The Kingdom of the Young" (1902), which like its +predecessor was published in "The United Irishmen." With this last play, +as its title indicates, Mr. Colum found his way to that subject of +youth, which, whatever other one of his dominant motives his plays may +involve, is always present. The hardness of youth is the theme of "The +Kingdom of the Young," the hardness that came into the heart of a +daughter, when driven into revolt by the older generation. She turns on +her father in the end, determined that she will not be cheated of the +joy of life as was he.</p> + +<p>In "The Foleys," another little play of the same year, 1902, a play that +for all its crudity and incompleteness is full of insight into Catholic +Ireland, youth is again the theme, or the intolerance and +self-righteousness of youth. "Eoghan's Wife" (1902) is only a monologue, +only the old story of the woman who finds her home lonely and + + +<a name="page202" id="page202"></a> +depressing because the wrong man is the man of the house. She looks out +over "brown bogs with black water," wondering what is the way of escape +from it all.</p> + +<p>"Broken Soil," put on at the Abbey Theatre on December 4, 1903, is the +first play of Mr. Colum with which, in after years, he was in any way +content, but he was not too content with it, rewriting it in 1907 as +"The Fiddler's House," and, I think, in the main improving it.</p> + +<p>Mr. Colum, a youth with an appetite for reading as insatiable as his +impulse to write, read not only his Ibsen but his M. Maeterlinck. Back +of "Broken Soil" is Ibsen, back of "The Miracle of the Corn" is M. +Maeterlinck. "The Miracle of the Corn" was put in rehearsal by the Irish +National Theatre Society in 1904, but so far as I know it was never +played by that organization, its first staging I have record of being by +"The Theatre of Ireland" at the Abbey Theatre on May 22, 1908. Here +again is youth a leading theme, the power youth has, if it be wistful +and tender and pleading, to soften the heart of age. It may seem to some +that the girl Aislinn is only a symbol, only the dream of his youth +returned to the farmer Fardorrougha, who has hardened his heart even in +famine time, but whether apparition, or child of the flesh and symbol, +too, Aislinn is the bringer-back to Fardorrougha of the soft heart of +youth.</p> + +<p>As the Irishman in America is preferably a city dweller, it may be a +little difficult for his fellow Americans of other ancestry to +understand why the Irishmen at home were so concerned with Mr. Colum's +next play, whose theme, as whose title, is "The Land." The cry for a +home and a bit + +<a name="page203" id="page203"></a> +of land, a cottage around a hearth and around the +cottage a few acres of your own, is a cry that has been heard in all +ages and among all people. It is a cry that we all have cried at times, +gypsy-hearted though we be; it is a cry that even the city-loving +eighteenth century raised in all the "Mine be a cot" poems, whether of +Pomfret or Pope or any other of the many who followed the same fashion, +and it is a cry that is especially loud in present-day America. But none +of us can feel the call of the land, none of us can desire it with more +intensity than the Irishman of to-day, city-dweller though we find his +kin in America; there is no one class of people anywhere in the world +who want the land as the Irish peasants of to-day want it. Their fathers +and grandfathers saw the fields that they had farmed turned into +pastures for cattle, as the Scotch crofters saw their holdings turned +into deer-parks; the two generations of Irishmen now respectively in old +age and middle age have known what it is to be taxed out of the places +their improvements as tenants made more valuable; and to-day those of +the old folk that are still alive and those of the middle years that are +still in Ireland are getting back to the land, along with the younger +generation that desires it almost as ardently, but were not born upon +it, profiting by legislation that compels landlords to sell to the +Government, which in turn sells to the small proprietors.</p> + +<p>The Irish peasant loves his bit of land far more than his language, and +even more, I think, in the bottom of his heart, than he loves his +church, although allegiance to his church is a duty that he puts before +any love. A boreen + +<a name="page204" id="page204"></a> +in bogland is not a lonely place to the Irish +peasant if he have neighbors of long standing. It is the big city that +to him at home seems the lonely place, despite the glamour of its +lights, and its shops, and its ceaseless excitements.</p> + +<p>The story of "The Land" is, as I have said, the story of the struggle +between love of land and the <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Wanderlust</span>, with the love of woman as the +decisive factor in the latter's victory. Matt Cosgar is the son of a +peasant farmer, the last of many that the hardness of Murtagh has driven +to America, and he, too, goes in the end, after his father's will is +broken, because the girl of his choice is restless and will not be +content as a farmer's wife. Matt and Ellen, the fit and the strong, go +to America, Cornelius and Sally, the hair-brained and the drudge, +remain. Symbolic this is, of course, of the situation in Ireland to-day, +or at least yesterday, but the characters are strongly individualized +and show no tendency to harden into types. In "The Land" the +restlessness of youth, its call to wander, is the motive that clashes +with love of the home and of the home place. In "The Fiddler's House" +there is youth desiring peace, and youth afraid of love, in Annie and +Maire Hourican; and the call of the road to old Conn, the fiddler. +Sacrifice is rare in youth, and if it were not that Maire is afraid of +her love for Brian McConnell, and gives up her home and takes to the +road with her father partly because she fears her love for her lover, +fears her powerlessness with him, it would hardly be in the course of +nature that she would sacrifice so much for her sister. It was a sure +instinct that guided Mr. Colum so to make believable a sacrifice at +first view seemingly so + +<a name="page205" id="page205"></a> +great. Even in this play, which Mr. Colum +intends as a study of the artistic temperament, the land is a motive +second only to the call of the road. Maire cared somewhat for the land, +less than her sister cared, more than her father cared, though he too +loved it in so far as the artist's gypsy nature will permit. It is the +road and his music, however, that Conn cares for most, and in his +expression of such love he attains to an eloquence that is Mr. Colum at +his best: "I'm leaving the land behind me, too; but what's the land, +after all, against the music that comes from the far strange places, +when the night is on the ground, and the bird in the grass is quiet?" As +one reads, aloud, as one must, one thinks now of the Old Testament and +now of Synge.</p> + +<p>Although Mr. Colum determined to put aside thoughts of dramas of old +Ireland in 1900, he evidently could not keep the old legends out of his +mind. They intrude now and then into his verses for all his modernity, +and one of them, "The Destruction of the House of Da Derga," forced him +to turn it into a play. "The Destruction of the Hostel" has not been +published, but it seems to have pleased those who saw and heard it as +played by the boys of St. Enda's School on February 5, 1910.</p> + +<p>In the last play, too, of Mr. Colum, the ending is a parting, here the +parting that death brings. Telling the fortunes of poor old Thomas +Muskerry, who in the end dies a pauper in the workhouse where once he +was master, the play opens our eyes to that life of the small town, +deadliest of lives the world over, a life knowing neither the freedom of +the farm nor the freedom of the city, as + +<a name="page206" id="page206"></a> +such life is lived in Ireland. +In "Thomas Muskerry," in "The Land" and "The Fiddler's House," the +characterization is sure and true. One may take it that this is Ireland, +Ireland on the average, as one cannot take it that that we have in the +plays of Synge or Lady Gregory is Ireland on the average. Crofton +Crilly, the son-in-law of the master, soft and big and blond, is an +unsympathetic but memorable portrait. Unsympathetic and memorable, too, +are the portraits of his son Albert and his daughter Anna, the one +tricky and the other grasping, and the workhouse porter and the old +piper haunt my memory as strange men I have met haunt my memory, year in +and year out.</p> + +<p>All three of these plays are, as I have said, sprung of domestic +problems, sure proof that Mr. Colum is the peasant's son. The family, as +he has pointed out in an article in "The United Irishmen," is not only +what the family is, ordinarily, in northwestern Europe, but that plus +that which the Irish family has inherited of the clan spirit. It was +only yesterday in Ireland that the girl and boy were married to whom +their fathers would, by a process of barter in which their own wishes +were not for a moment considered. They submitted, or came to America. It +was a patriarchal system of society.</p> + +<p>It is not, then, difficult to see how it came about that Mr. Colum, who +began to write so young, came to write so much about youth and the +rebellion of youth, and to write about those other themes of his, themes +all of them made more intense by the youth that is concerned with +them—the land that obsesses the life of the man of the + + +<a name="page207" id="page207"></a> +house all +Ireland over, and through him obsesses the lives of his family; and love +of woman.</p> + +<p>Mr. Colum does not intrude his own personality into his plays, but it is +felt, as it should be felt, in every one of lyrics. Reading them one has +a sense of a youth like the youth of some characters in his plays; a +youth more manly than Cornelius's, less restless than Ellen's; a youth +serious and troubled with thought; a youth in revolt against much in the +old order, but tolerant of the passing generation that fears it +"knocking at the door." It is a youth impassioned rather than +passionate, more pronouncedly a youth of mind than a youth of heart. +When I say youth of mind, I mean not immaturity of mind, but the outlook +of the young mind; not radicalism, but a fixed determination to think +things out afresh and not to accept them because of any convention.</p> + +<p>Eloquence one always looks for in the writing of an Irishman, and humor +and power over dialogue, but Mr. Colum is too serious with youth to care +much for humor, and, like Mr. Martyn, though not to the same extent, he +has trouble with his dialogue. The feeling for the situation, the +understanding of what is in the characters' minds, is in Mr. Colum, but +the dialogue does not always accommodate itself to situation and +thought. What Mr. Colum makes his characters say has in it the thought +and the sentiment of what they would say, but the words as often lack +life as have it. It is this difficulty with dialogue that has prevented +Mr. Colum, in his plays, true and finely planned as they are, from +reaching great achievement. As dramatist he is still more full of +promise than + +<a name="page208" id="page208"></a> +of achievement, and to be a dramatist of promise after ten +years of playwriting is to be at a standstill. In lyric poetry it is +otherwise with Mr. Colum. There he has attained. You will find his real +value in "Wild Earth" slight though the book may seem. Here is reading +of life, here is imagination, here is lyric cry. Read these little poems +once and they will be your familiars forever.</p> + + +<p>MR. WILLIAM BOYLE</p> + +<p>One wonders if justice has been done Mr. William Boyle. If it has not it +is because he is a playwright of one play, "The Building Fund" (1905). +He has written three other plays that count, "The Eloquent Dempsey" +(1906), "The Mineral Workers" (1906), and "Family Failings" (1912), but +"The Building Fund" is of a higher power than any of these. "Family +Failings," produced in the spring of 1912, I have not read, but +according to all accounts it does not mark any advance upon "The Mineral +Workers" or "The Eloquent Dempsey." "The Mineral Workers," essentially a +propagandist play, and "The Eloquent Dempsey," essentially a satire, are +hardly, even in intention, of the first order of seriousness in art. +There are characters in these two plays faithful to human nature, and +faithful to the ways of eastern Galway, where the scenes of all of the +plays of Mr. Boyle are laid. But there are so many other characters in +them that are either caricatures or "stock" that, funny as the plays +seem upon the stage, they do not impress the deliberate judgment as +real. The many characters of "The Mineral Workers" and its several +motives are too much for Mr. Boyle; he + +<a name="page209" id="page209"></a> +loses his grip and the play +falls to pieces. "The Eloquent Dempsey" suffers from the caricaturing of +its characters, and its action degenerates into unbelievable farce +almost on the curtain-rise. "The Building Fund," however, is serious and +true, and at the same time just as full of wit and just as biting in +satire and just as effective on the stage as "The Eloquent Dempsey." Its +characterization is recognized as distinctive and authentic even on +reading. Revealed through the almost perfect work of the players trusted +with its presentation by the Abbey Theatre on their American tour of +1911-12, it seemed even more than distinctive and authentic, it seemed +inspired by profound insight.</p> + +<p>"The Building Fund" tells the story of the outgeneraling of grasping son +and conniving daughter's daughter by a hard old woman of the strong +farmer class in the west of Ireland. Mrs. Grogan is approached as the +curtain rises by Michael O'Callaghan, an elderly farmer, and Dan +MacSweeney, a young farmer, in the rôle of collectors for the fund for +the new Catholic church. They are sent away by her and by her son Shan +without any contribution, but their visit suggests to her a way by which +she can disinherit her son and her granddaughter, wishful for her death, +she thinks, in their eagerness for her fortune. Shan is open in his +concern as to her disposal of her money; and although the girl hides her +purpose under pretended solicitude for her grandmother's health and is a +great help to the old woman, Mrs. Grogan believes her also to be +plotting for the fortune and is equally resentful toward both. So when +the collectors call again, Mrs. Grogan + +<a name="page210" id="page210"></a> +makes a will, in which we learn, +on her death shortly after, she has left all her fortune away from her +family to the church. For all their plotting, the audience feels that +the old woman is more malevolent than either son or granddaughter, and, +after all, the son had worked hard on the home place and the +granddaughter, slyboots as she was, undoubtedly was really kind. Both +are of her blood, and it is human to feel that parents should leave +their money to their children rather than to charity. There is some +amelioration of the condition of Shan and Sheila in the thought that +they may stay on, with Father Andrew's permission, as managers of the +old farm, henceforth the church farm. But sympathize with them though +you may, you feel it is only right that selfishness should over-reach +itself.</p> + +<p>The play is not any more complimentary to Catholic Galway than "The +Drone" of Mr. Mayne is complimentary to Protestant Down, but it is +seldom that comedy is complimentary to human nature, and "The Building +Fund" is comedy. That is, it is comedy as Ibsen sees drama, or character +farce as Coleridge defines it. It is, in the Greek sense, perhaps even +tragedy; certainly, it is tragedy from the standpoint of Shan and +Sheila, for circumstances certainly get the better of them. From Mrs. +Grogan's standpoint it is comedy, for she, through her will, even though +she is now dead, has got the better of circumstances as represented by +the plotting of her son and granddaughter. If we look at "The Building +Fund" from the standpoint of Shan and Sheila, but without sympathy for +them, it is only character farce, for although + +<a name="page211" id="page211"></a> +circumstances get the +better of them, we do not then care for them, and a play in which +characters are overwhelmed by fate, but in which our sympathy is not +with them, is, if we follow Coleridge, really farce. Whatever "The +Building Fund" is, its characterization is admirable. Some might say its +men and women approximate to types, that Mrs. Grogan is the avaricious +old woman, Shan the sanctimonious miser, Sheila the sly minx, Michael +the benevolent old man, and Dan the gay blade. Types or not, you will +find all of them in Ireland, and all of them wherever human nature is +human nature. If they are types, however, each has a personality, but +whether all of them would stand out with such individuality had one not +seen them so fully realized on the stage, I cannot say. The tottering, +bitter old woman of Miss Allgood and the miserly, fearful son of Mr. +Sinclair are more memorable than the other impersonations only in that +they are fatter parts than Sheila, Michael O'Callaghan, and Dan +MacSweeney, played respectively by Miss McGee, Mr. O'Rourke, and Mr. +O'Donovan.</p> + +<p>Mother and son are, I am sure, just as complete in the writing of Mr. +Boyle as in the acting of Miss Allgood and Mr. Sinclair. Both are, +indeed, as finely imagined and as faithfully realized as any characters +in modern English comedy. And you may have to go further afield than +modern English comedy to find such a minute study of resentful and +malevolent age as this portrait of Mrs. Grogan. We all know that +perversity that will not allow its possessor to be satisfied with any +effort to please. Here is an illustration of it as Mr. Boyle has seen +it:—</p> + + +<a name="page212" id="page212"></a> + + <div class="display"> <p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Sheila</span>. Will I boil an egg for your + breakfast, granny?</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Mrs. Grogan</span> (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">sarcastically</span>). Oh, to be sure! More + extravagance. You know very well I couldn't eat it, and you'll have + it for yourself. Waste, waste; nothing but idleness and waste all + round. God help me! (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Coughs.</span>)</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Sheila pours out a cup of tea and hands it to Mrs. Grogan.</span></p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Sheila</span>. Drink that drop of tea, granny—it's fresh + made.</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Mrs. Grogan</span>. What did you do with the bottom of the pot? Threw + it to the ducks, I suppose?</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Sheila</span> (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">pointing to the table</span>). I have it here for myself, + granny.</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Mrs. Grogan</span> (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">sipping tea</span>). When I was a girl I never got a + sup o' tea from year's end to year's end.</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Sheila</span>. It was very dear, then; wasn't it?</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Mrs. Grogan</span>. It's dear enough still with everybody using it + all day long. Did you feed the hens?</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Sheila</span>. Long ago, and let the ducks out, too.</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Mrs. Grogan</span>. I suppose it's in the oats they'll be by this + time. What about the calves? <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Grogan goes out</span>.</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Sheila</span>. I gave them their milk and put them in the bawn.</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Mrs. Grogan</span>. With the linen on the hedge? Why, they'll chew it + into rags, and, maybe, choke themselves.</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Sheila</span>. No, granny, dear; I spread the linen in the upper + garden, where the sun comes the earliest.</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Mrs. Grogan</span>. I see it's stole ye want it. There's half a dozen + tinkers squatted in the quarry.</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Sheila</span> (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">wearily.</span>) They went a week ago.</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Mrs. Grogan</span>. Ah, dear! There's what it is to be old! I never + hear anything that's going on now till it's all over. Is that egg + boiled?</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Sheila</span>. Granny, dear, I thought you couldn't take one.</p> + + <p> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Mrs. Grogan</span>. It's the little bit I eat that's grudged me now, + I see.</p> </div> + +<p>Though there is little of it in this passage that I quote, the +picturesque phrase that no Irish writer is without is Mr. Boyle's, as a +matter of course, but there is no particular + +<a name="page213" id="page213"></a> +individuality in his +handling of it. Style he has not, nor any background of romance, or +beauty of that sort that illumines the grayness of the comedies of +Ibsen, or of any other sort of beauty than that approach to beauty there +is in skilled craftsmanship.</p> + +<p>Admirably arranged, too, are the situations of "The Eloquent Dempsey," a +satire on the man who straddles all questions, as at one time, at any +rate, did so many Irish politicians. Dempsey might have continued his +career of straddling indefinitely had he not a mania for speech-making +that he could not control. In the end, however, he was undone by a +well-intentioned conspiracy, arranged by his wife, to get him out of +politics altogether and out of his liquor-selling and into farming far +from town. I cannot identify Dempsey with any one prominent Irish +statesman, but the lesser fry on both Nationalist and Unionist sides are +as easy to identify as the men that suggested the characters of "A Tale +of a Town." In "The Eloquent Dempsey" all the art of Mr. Boyle has been +lavished on the central figure, which, when all is said, remains a +caricature, and caricature uncompensated for by any great or noble +characteristic of the play, whose primal quality is but cleverness. +Effective as its satire is, and provocative of laughter as it always is +on the stage, it is altogether cheaper in its quality than "The Building +Fund."</p> + +<p>"The Mineral Workers," with its chief portrait that of a returned +Irish-American mining engineer, takes us to certain phases of society +not met among the publicans and politicians and peasants of Mr. Boyle's +earlier plays. + +<a name="page214" id="page214"></a> +Other than these are not only the hero, Stephen J. +O'Reilly, but the aristocrat, Sir Thomas Musgrove, and his sister, Mrs. +Walton, who is of the family connection of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's +Georgianna Tidman. Dan Fogarty, the holdback, unprogressive farmer, is +the sharpest-cut and truest to life of all the characters, so clear-cut +and true, in fact, that one thinks of him as almost a fellow of Shan +Grogan in "The Building Fund." Uncle Bartle is sentimentalized, and +Kitty Mulroy has no such personality as Sheila O'Dwyer. Contrast "The +Mineral Workers" with a novel of the returned American, "Dan the Dollar" +of Mr. Bullock, and the calibre of Mr. Boyle's play is quickly revealed.</p> + +<p>What Mr. Boyle had been had he come into touch with the movement ten +years earlier, it is of course beside the point to speculate. He was not +a young man when he first became acquainted with the art of the Abbey +Theatre in London and was impelled to write plays for it. He was, +though, able to adapt the experience he had had as a story-writer to the +stage in "The Building Fund." That being so, why is it that his later +plays, successful though they have been as vehicles for the purveying of +amusement on the stage, have not taken rank by their art or by their +reading of life with "The Building Fund "? It may be that it was the one +theme susceptible of dramatic presentation that he had brooded over long +enough to transmute into terms of drama, and that the later plays, full +of successful stage tricks though they are, did not come out of his +knowledge of Irish life. Knowledge of Ireland he ought to have, for he +is said to have + +<a name="page215" id="page215"></a> +lived for comparatively long periods in various places +in country as an excise officer. As such Mr. Boyle was himself one of +the principal types, that of the official, that exist in Ireland, and in +a position to learn much of many other types, surprisingly few of which +he has realized with any depth of insight in his plays.</p> + +<p>It would seem with his great success seven years back and his newer +plays less effective, that we cannot look to Mr. Boyle with great hope +for the future, as we can to Mr. Robinson or Mr. Murray. When we so say, +however, let us remember that Lady Gregory did not attempt plays until +she was close on fifty.</p> + + +<p>MR. T.C. MURRAY</p> + +<p>The North is generally held to be another country than the rest of +Ireland. Ulster is alien alike in race and religion and economic +conditions from Connacht and Leinster and Munster. It is Scotch Ireland, +Protestant Ireland, industrial Ireland. It is, moreover,—many of its +citizens say therefore,—prosperous Ireland. Certainly men would not +divide all Irishmen into "Irishmen" and "Scotch Irishmen" were there not +many grounds for such a distinction. All other of the immigrants into +Ireland have, as a people, disappeared. The Norman has left his mark on +the land in his castles and his names, but as a distinctive element of +the population he no longer exists, any more than does Welshman or +Englishman or Palatinate. Apart from distinctions of class the men of +Ireland are "Irishmen" and "Scotch Irishmen," and until yesterday, +therefore, Nationalists and Unionists.</p> + + +<a name="page216" id="page216"></a> + +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a name="illo_10" id="illo_10"></a><img src="images/image10.jpg" alt="T.C. Murray"></p> +<p style="text-align: center">T.C. Murray</p> + +<p>And yet, definite as are these distinctions, life in the various parts +of Ireland seems much alike, class for class, as it is represented by +the many contemporaneous playwrights, whether the scenes of their plays +are Down or Kerry, Galway or Wicklow. A tinker is a tinker wherever you +find him, a strong farmer a strong farmer, a landlord a landlord. The +same emotions dominate rival brothers in "The Turn of the Road" and in +"Birthright," though the Orangeman turned actor wrote the one and the +Cork schoolmaster the other. Mr. T.C. Murray is one of those to whom Mr. +Yeats has given the name "Cork Realists." His first play, "The Wheel o' +Fortune," was produced by the Cork Dramatic Society at the Dun, Cork, +December 2, 1909. It has not been published, so far as I know, and all +that I learn from the references to it in newspapers is that it is a +one-act ironic comedy about matchmaking. Mr. Murray brought his next +play, "Birthright," to the Abbey Theatre, where it was performed on +October 27, 1910. If "Maurice Harte" (1912) stands the test of time and +travel as has "Birthright," Mr. Murray has come to the Abbey Theatre to +take a place of prominence among its playwrights. Some of the appeal of +"Birthright" is in its story, the story of Cain and Abel, if you like, a +story that is as lasting in its appeal as is "The Eternal Triangle," but +there is as much appeal in the characterization, which you feel as you +read almost as intimately as you come to know it on the stage. There are +many plays that are altogether colorless in the reading unless you have +unusual power of visualization and can see them as you sit in your study +as if they were embodied before you + +<a name="page217" id="page217"></a> +on the stage. Such plays, +visualized or unvisualized in the study, are often real enough on the +stage. "Birthright," as I have said, is not one of these. It visualizes +itself for you, with no effort on your part, as you read it, though of +course, as every real play will, it moves you more in the playing. It +was admirably cast on its first production at the Abbey Theatre, and it +was just as admirably cast on the American tour of 1911-12, Miss +O'Doherty's Maura and Mr. Morgan's Bat Morrissey being wonderful +pictures of a doting mother and a stern father troubled by their +preferences, the one for the elder, the other for the younger son. The +rival sons were done to the life by Mr. O'Donovan and Mr. Kerrigan, and +the neighbor of Mr. O'Rourke was, too, a complete realization of the +Irish peasant of the valley of the Lee. It is a stern and patient +realism this of Mr. Murray in telling of how Hughie, the elder son, the +apple of his mother's eye, the idol of the parish for his hurly playing, +and his verse-making, and his free and pleasant ways, is disinherited +and condemned to seek his fortune in America by his father because his +younger son was the better man on the farm. There was back of Bat's +decision, too, his feeling that his eldest-born was more of his mother, +whose blood was part gentle, than of himself, the grubber of the earth. +Shane, like his father, was the peasant plowman, Hughie something of the +sporting gentleman. The end of it all is murder, the younger son killing +the elder with the hurly when he is accused by his brother of plotting +to grab the farm. Many who saw "Birthright" in America were moved by it +more than by any other play in the repertoire + +<a name="page218" id="page218"></a> +of the company, and I +have heard more than one whose supreme interest is the theatre say that +it was the best play new to America presented in America during the +winter of 1911-12. I do not so hold, for "The Well of the Saints" and +"In the Shadow of the Glen" were new to America in the winter of +1911-12, and "The Playboy of the Western World" was new to every city in +America save to Chicago, where Mr. Hart Conway presented it at his +dramatic school in the spring of 1909. I can, however, understand why +"Birthright" so appealed. It is because of the theme, because of the +beautiful character of Maura Morrissey, because of the absolute +faithfulness to life, as all the world knows it, of the play. I have +traveled the road to Macroom that these farmers traveled, and so I know +the externals of the life they lead: I have known intimately and I know +intimately just such people as these, Irish peasants, some of whom +spoiled their children, thinking the boy they loved must not be +"crossed," and some of whom preferred one child to another even to the +extent of reversing the custom of primogeniture that is as fixed a rule +among them as if their property was entailed, and so I can vouch for the +absolute fidelity of Mr. Murray's art. It is a realism little relieved +by humor; unrelieved either by any background of romance, but gaming a +dignity from its intensity of conception and its simplicity of unfolding +that makes you feel, as you read, or as you watch and listen, that you +are in the presence of nobility. Its style, maybe, is homespun, but it +is none the worse for that, and it never approaches at all to the cheap +or mean.</p> + + +<a name="page219" id="page219"></a> + +<p>The appeal of this realism is as poignant in "Maurice Harte" (1912) as +in "Birthright," though the story of the later play is not so universal +as is that of the play that brought Mr. Murray his share of fame. +"Maurice Harte" tells of the disaster that comes to a young divinity +student of Maynooth whose parents drive him back to college to seek +ordination even after he tells them that he has no vocation for the +priesthood. The curtain rises on Maurice, a youth of twenty-two, trying +to tell his mother, whose youngest he is, and the child of her middle +age that it would be sacrilege for him to take orders with no vocation. +His courage fails him, as it had on previous occasions on which he tried +to confess his agony because of his false position, and he finally begs +the Parish Priest to break the desolating news to the family. They are +only farmers in a small way, the Hartes: and the father and mother, the +son at home, Owen, and the three older brothers in Boston, have all made +sacrifices to give Maurice his education. When the priest tells of the +boy's decision not to return to Maynooth, mother and father and brother +all insist that he must stick to his earlier intention, vocation or no +vocation.</p> + +<p>They are in monetary difficulties because of him, and if the story went +out that he was not back at Maynooth his mother declares it "wouldn't be +east in Macroom when we'd have the bailiffs walking in that door." She +tells him, too, his being a spoiled priest will cost his brother his +bride and her fortune that would help them to pay off their debts. The +boy cannot withstand their pleading, and the first act ends with his +promise that he + +<a name="page220" id="page220"></a> +will go back to Maynooth, a promise wrung from him even +though he knows at the time of its making that his return may bring him +to madness in the end.</p> + +<p>Act II, nine months later, shows us again the kitchen of the farmhouse +of West Cork, with happiness in the hearts of all there, save some +slight apprehension on the father's part over his new clothes and the +terrors of a journey with Father Mangan to Maynooth. In this relaxing of +the tension of the play humor is not out of place, and its attainment +here by Mr. Murray shows that he could write comedy did he choose. We +hear that the marriage settlement between Bride Burke and Owen has been +made, and that Maurice is to marry them; and that he has bested all his +classmates in his final examinations. Upon the pride and happiness in a +son sure of a good match, and the glory of another son about to be +"priested" and to say mass in the local church, breaks in word that he +cannot be ordained because of illness. And close upon this bad news +comes Maurice himself, broken down mentally from the strain of driving +himself to do what he knows to be wrong, from the strain of committing, +as he believes, sacrilege. Father and mother and brother realize that it +is they who have driven him mad, but such is human nature that mother +and brother, at least, have thoughts of themselves even at this moment, +as well as thoughts for Maurice with "his mind that's gone." His brother +fears that Bride will not come into a house so disgraced, and his +mother, her years-long dream of her youngest a priest gone on the wind, +is struck dumb with horror at the thought of what her life will be from +this out.</p> + + +<a name="page221" id="page221"></a> + +<p>The full significance of the tragedy of Maurice's fate can be realized +only by those who know intimately the ambitions hugged close to heart by +the Irish Catholic mother. It is more to her to have her boy a priest +even than it was yesterday to the Scotch Presbyterian mother to have her +boy a minister of the Kirk. It is the greatest glory that can come to +such a peasant mother to give one of her sons to the priesthood.</p> + +<p>There is, I think, no propaganda in the play, and no intentional satire, +although in a way "Maurice Harte" affords a parallel to so definitely a +propagandist satire as Mr. Robinson's "Harvest." It is not education +that is the curse, however, in "Maurice Harte," but the belief that only +priesthood in the end can justify the sacrifices without which a college +education is almost impossible for an Irish peasant. Certain it is that +it is only for the pride of having their boy a priest that the typical +Irish Catholic peasant parents would make such sacrifices as the Hartes +have made, sacrifices involving them in debt to the extent of a thousand +dollars, to secure their son an education.</p> + +<p>In a sense "Maurice Harte" is far other than the provincial study I have +here outlined. Its theme is allied, unquestionably, to that theme so +much larger in its relations than that of the spoiled priest, the theme +of the rebellious son, the son who will live his own life no matter what +may be his parents' will. It is only allied to it, however, not to be +identified with it, because Maurice is too fearful of disappointing his +parents, and too shrinking and ineffectual, to go against his parents' +will. In Ireland, as I have said elsewhere, such parental will, by a +survival + + +<a name="page222" id="page222"></a> +of authority from the days of the clan system, was law until +yesterday, and there will therefore be those, I have no doubt, who will +find in the play a conflict of the old order and the new, but I do not +believe such conflict was the author's intent. Indeed, the play is +wholly of the old order. No love of man and woman figures as motive in +it as none had figured in "Birthright." There is parental love, of +course, in both plays, though in the case of both parents in "Maurice +Harte" and in the father in "Birthright" parental pride is a stronger +motive than parental love. Very true to Irish life is this absence of +passion as a deciding factor in the fates of man and woman, this +insistence upon the importance of the family, this subordination of the +rights of the individual. Mr. Murray wished to write in "Maurice Harte" +a play of the very heart of Irish Catholic life, and such a play he has +written, a play that marks no decline, either in characterization or +situation, from "Birthright," and to say that is to give "Maurice Harte" +praise of the highest.</p> + + +<p>MR. S. LENNOX ROBINSON</p> + +<p>Mr. Lennox Robinson, like most of the Abbey Theatre dramatists, has +chosen to write about the ground under his feet. The son of a clergyman +whose charges have been in the southwest of Ireland, Mr. Robinson spent +his boyhood and youth in the Bandon Valley. He had been trying his hand +at writing from the time that he was ten years old, editing an amateur +magazine as he grew older, feeling about for the thing that he could do. +A visit of the Abbey Theatre Company to Cork was the awakening. He + +<a name="page223" id="page223"></a> +saw +a new acting, he saw a new art of the stage, and he knew as he saw that +it was in drama his work lay. It was not, however, for the Cork Dramatic +Society that he did his first play, but for the Abbey Theatre. "The +Clancy Name" was put on on October 8, 1908, when its author was but four +days past his twenty-second birthday. What this first version was like I +do not know, but Mr. Robinson has reprinted the second version, put on +with the full strength of the National Theatre Society at the Abbey +Theatre on September 30, 1909. As printed, it is an ironic little play, +recording the great day in the life of the Widow Clancy, the day on +which she pays off a five years' loan and stands without a debt of any +kind, her farm all her own, the Clancy name respected throughout her +world. But on this day of her triumph, when she would add to her +happiness by making a match for her son, John cannot rejoice with her, +and on her questioning him as to his moodiness he blurts out that he is +the man who killed James Power, a quiet man whose unexplained +disappearance is the mystery of the countryside. Worse yet, John insists +that he will give himself up to the authorities. It is terrible to know +one's son a murderer; it is intolerable to think of a Clancy being +hanged and of the glory of the name forever departed. She persuades him +finally not to tell, but he fears he will, so, when the chance comes, he +finds the only way out, the way of peace for his mother and peace for +himself. A car driven by a drunken neighbor is threatening the life of a +little child playing in the middle of the road. John Clancy pushes him +out of the way and allows himself to be driven down. They + +<a name="page224" id="page224"></a> +bring him to +his mother's house still alive and raving incoherently of the murder, +but he dies before he tells his secret and the Clancy name is saved. It +is not a very gripping theme, but the play brings to us an acute +character study of the typical managing woman of the small farmer class. +We feel her tireless energy, her drive, her high pride, assets of worth +in the fight to live. There is a little humor, natural and unforced, +some picturesqueness of phrase, a revelation of knowledge of life in one +corner of Ireland. There is nothing, however, in the play to make it +comparable with the three that followed it on the stage of the Abbey +Theatre, "The Crossroads" (1909); "Harvest" (1910); and "Patriots" +(1912). "The Lesson of Life," a little one-act comedy, presented at the +Dun Theatre, Cork, December 2, 1909, Mr. Robinson has disowned. Why I do +not know, though the fact that it was not produced at the Abbey may +indicate that even at the time of its production he felt that it was not +up to the level of his work. Mr. Robinson has not republished "The +Lesson of Life," but the reviews state that it was an amusing little +play, though in no way a serious reading of life.</p> + +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a name="illo_11" id="illo_11"></a><img src="images/image11.jpg" alt="Lennox Robinson"></p> +<p style="text-align: center">Lennox Robinson</p> + +<p>"The Clancy Name," "The Crossroads," "Harvest," and "Patriots" are all +on themes that hit home at Irish institutions, and yet it would be wrong +to say any one of them is basically either satirical or propagandist. +All are primarily readings of life. "The Crossroads" alone, perhaps, is +more than a reading of life. Certainly, after its needless prologue, it +is fine art through to the end. This scene, with its satire of Irish +debating societies, is now, wisely, dropped when the play is produced. +We can + +<a name="page225" id="page225"></a> +learn enough of Ellen in the play itself to understand why she +does as she does without this picture of her in Dublin. Her story is +that of a woman who hates the much talk of patriotism in Dublin and the +lack of doing anything tangible for Ireland. In Dublin she has worked +her way up from servant to assistant in a bookshop, but she goes back +happily to the country to give her sister a chance in town such as she +has had, thinking that perhaps she herself can lead her people into +better ways of farming and of ordering their lives generally through the +knowledge she has got in town. It is through such as Ellen that the +Irish Industries Organization Society in actual life accomplishes an +important part of its work.</p> + +<p>In the first act of "The Crossroads" we find Ellen at home, in her old +peasant dress, having made the hens lay so well in winter as to arouse +wonder in a neighbor as to whether, "Is it right for hens to be laying +that way so early in the year?" A match is being made for her by her +mother with a man that has a good farm. Ellen desires the match very +much, for this is just the farm on which to try the new methods that +shall bring prosperity to the people of the valley and so stem the +emigration to America. She does not love Tom Dempsey, this strong +farmer, and she does half-love Brian Connor, whom she had known in +Dublin, but now that he has come down to ask her to marry him she +chooses the farmer, brutal though she knows him, because as his wife she +can do the work for Ireland that she has imagined for herself. The +loveless marriage, so universal an institution all over Ireland, made it +nothing out of the way for Ellen to act as she did, + +<a name="page226" id="page226"></a> +even though at the +time of the action of the play a higher ideal of marriage than that of +the old matchmaking had come in. It is this institution that Mr. +Robinson, from one point of view, might be thought to be attacking in +the play; it is this institution, certainly, that is the theme of the +play. Is it a tribute to Irishmen and Irishwomen to acknowledge that +this loveless marriage has worked on the whole as well as the marriage +of sentiment, or as the marriage of sexual infatuation, or as the +marriage of comrade hearts that we believe we have in America? As a +matter of fact there were not as many loveless marriages as might seem +at first thought. The match made up between the father of the girl and +the father of the boy was the usual sort of marriage among the +stay-at-home Irish girls and boys up to 1880, but how many girls and +boys for the past one hundred and fifty years have come to America to +escape it? Look up your family traditions, you who have Irish ancestors, +and find is it not true that these ancestors, whether Reeds of Down or +Nolans of Meath, fled to America because they would wed the mate of +their choice. Even to-day boys and girls come here from the same motive, +though of course it would be preposterous to deny that to many it is +rather Eldorado than the land of freedom.</p> + +<p>Act II reveals poor Ellen seven years later. She has lost her two boys +by fever; she has failed in her work on her own farm, though she has +brought untold blessings of progressiveness to the other farms around +Ballygurteen; she has lost the appreciation of her husband. She whom we +loved for a personality as winning as that of an Emma + + +<a name="page227" id="page227"></a> +or a Tess is now +a drudge, almost a slattern, gray-haired, hopeless, almost hated by a +brutal husband. The loveless marriage has proved a curse. Upon the woman +of his dreams so dethroned comes Brian Connor, now a successful +novelist, and, finding how things are, falls, for all his intended +restraint, into a fight with Tom, whom but for Ellen he would have +choked to death. Brian urges Ellen to go away with him, but, after a +moment's faltering, she refuses to go. This is the last scene. Tom, who +has heard Brian's proposal and his wife's rejection of it, comes slowly +down the room.</p> + + <div class="display"> <p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Tom</span>. Was it me you saved or was it the + young man? When you pulled him off me, did you save me, or was it + him you saved from being hung? Tell me that, Ellen McCarthy.</p> + + <p>[<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Silence.</span></p> + + <p>Ah! 't is aisy seen.</p> + + <p>[<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Puts his hat on, and goes to the door, and takes + the key out of the lock</span>.</p> + + <p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Ellen</span> (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">looking round</span>). What are you doing? (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Frightened.</span>) + What are you doing?</p> + + <p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Tom</span>. I'll tell you what I'm doing. I'm locking the door the way + you won't go after that young man; an' I'm going to step down to the + village now for a sup of drink. An' then—I'm coming back; an', + by God, I'll make you pay for this night's work, Ellen McCarthy, + till you'd wish you were dead—for the black curse you brought + on this farm, an' for the liking you have to the young man.</p> + + <p>[<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Goes out. Ellen remains sitting at the table, + staring in front of her with sad, hopeless eyes</span>.</p> </div> + +<p>The turning of the key in the lock ends the play, leaving brutality +unimaginable as the fate of Ellen.</p> + +<p>It is a severe reading of the Irish peasant, this of Tom + +<a name="page228" id="page228"></a> +Dempsey. +Murder may come of his blackness of heart. He is a far worse man, of +course, than poor John Clancy, who killed a man in an unpremeditated +fight, sure murderer though Clancy be. Yet despite such heroes or at +least such characters in his plays, no one would say that in either "The +Clancy Name" or "The Crossroads" Mr. Robinson held a brief against the +Irish peasant. He most certainly does not. He likes the Irish peasant. +His plays are "stories of mine own people" faithfully told. He does not +spare the Cork farmer, but he does not distort him. Why however, his +"Harvest" was allowed to be played unmolested in New York, after the +"The Playboy of the Western World" met with organized opposition, can be +explained only by recognition of the fact that the Irishmen of the +patriotic societies are slaves of precedent. "The Playboy of the Western +World" had always met with opposition, so it should meet with opposition +in New York. "Harvest" escaped in New York because its uncomplimentary +personages were unheralded. Not that there is anything in "Harvest," any +more than in "The Playboy of the Western World," that any +self-respecting Irishman need object to. "Harvest" shows the disastrous +effects the wrong sort of primary education, as taught by the country +schoolmaster of the old type, the type that was prevalent before the +present type, brought about. The present-day schoolmaster is in sympathy +with system of education that will keep the children on the land or in +an industry near the home place; the older type would give them an +education that would send them to the cities to be priests and lawyers +and secretaries + +<a name="page229" id="page229"></a> +and typists and chemists and what-nots. Old William +Lordan, the schoolmaster, had, evidently, in the opinion of the +playwright, the sins of many on his shoulders, and yet one, knowing that +it is the system and not the man that is at fault, cannot help feeling +that Mr. Robinson is rather severe on what is in life a really lovable +though mistaken sort of man.</p> + +<p>"Harvest" shows that of the six children of Tim Hurley, but the three +that come into the play are loyal to their father: Maurice, who works +the home farm; Jack, the apothecary's clerk from Dublin, who tries to +help with the farmwork, but is too much of a weakling to be anything of +a help; and Mary, who from typist has turned mistress, now to this man, +now to that. Mary, come home to get away from her wrong life, is called +back to London by the excitement of its life, which has become a +necessity to her. Jack, the chemist, in the end deserts the home; and is +off at the end of the play, with his upper-class wife, for America or +the colonies. Only Maurice is more than half-entitled to our respect. +The son who is the priest is in America to collect for the Church at the +time of his family's need, and so is not helpful to his family; the +solicitor son is climbing socially, and, needing a motor-car to help him +to position, prefers to spend his money on himself rather than on the +home place that was robbed to pay for his education; and the secretary +son is so ashamed of "the ditch out of which he was digged" that he has +changed both his name and his religion.</p> + +<p>All five of the children who went out from the home educated, as the +schoolmaster wished them to go, have + +<a name="page230" id="page230"></a> +been educated at the expense of +those that remained on the farm, Maurice the hard-working farmer and old +Timothy the father. But the father, too, is far from what he should be, +as one must suspect, not believing that education alone can account for +so many gone wrong. Timothy burns down some unimportant farm buildings +for the insurance upon them. This practice is so common in all parts of +the world civilized sufficiently to have insurance that I wonder +insurance companies take risks on backwoods farms anywhere. An old man +with whom I have talked often in the mountains of northeastern +Pennsylvania answered me one day, when I asked him how it was his barn +caught fire, "The insurance got too hot." He was a German, a man in his +prime a good worker and not a bad representative of the mountaineer of +his state. One must not, then, fasten on old Timothy as a character +distinctively Irish, at least in this phase of his character. He surely +is universal, a representative of one type of disingenuous countryman.</p> + +<p>The characterization in "Harvest" falls short of that of "The +Crossroads," but perhaps it had to be if Mr. Robinson was to make his +point. As one realizes that perhaps these people are but pawns with +which to win the game that Mr. Robinson has set out, one remembers that +their creator spent some weeks with Mr. Shaw and Mr. Barker in London, +and one understands, too, many other of the failings of "Harvest." It is +but another of many illustrations of the blight that Mr. Shaw has +brought upon the modern English stage.</p> + +<p>It is a two-edged satire that Mr. Robinson employs in + +<a name="page231" id="page231"></a> +his "Patriots" +(1912), a satire that cuts into the sham agitation of some political +leagues, an agitation that is talk only, and at the same time cuts with +almost equal sharpness into the physical force party. It is true that it +is not the motives but the wisdom of these latter men that Mr. Robinson +satirizes in the failure of James Nugent, the returned political +prisoner, to stir his townsmen with the kind of talk that set them to +arming in 1893. That their propaganda is no longer possible, if it was +ever possible, is a corollary to the play, even if it could overcome the +inertia that has come to Irishmen with their greater prosperity since +the Land Purchase Act went into force.</p> + +<p>The revolt of the patriot who hates talk and is willing to sacrifice +personal happiness for country is recorded here as it was in "The +Crossroads," and the uselessness of the sacrifice made only too plain. +To one not an Irishman it would perhaps seem that the real drama there +is in the play is smothered by the political satire and that the +politics satirized are of too local an interest for it to have so +universal an appeal as "The Crossroads" or "Harvest." There is an +universal story in "Patriots" that is but slightly developed—the story +of the prisoner's wife, Ann; her love for her daughter, who is a cripple +because of her mother's being dragged here and there by James Nugent in +his campaigning just before her birth; Ann Nugent's turning against her +husband, on his liberation from an eighteen years' imprisonment for +political murder, because of the wrong done her so long ago and because +of the danger to Rose's health that campaigning + +<a name="page232" id="page232"></a> +with her father would +entail. The turning of Ann Nugent from her husband is the really +significant part of the play,—and in thoughts of that we pay scant heed +to the political satire and even to the pathos of the desertion of a +leader by almost all he expected to follow him, and the reduction of his +life, as he puts it bitterly, "to an anecdote—a thing to be told +stories about." And in the end that is the fate he will meet. Time and a +wife that he wronged have broken him. As he staggers off at the end of +the play, a stricken man and older than his forty-five years, this is +his cry:—</p> + + <div class="display"> <p>I've killed a man, I've crippled a child, + I've got myself shut up for eighteen years—God knows what good + came of it all—but—Peter—I meant—I tried ... + I know I meant right—and in prison my cell used to be filled + with the sad faces of men like me who had given everything for + Ireland—they wouldn't have come to me, would they? if I hadn't + been of their company. They are here now—I see them all around + me—there is Wolfe Tone, and there is ... oh, quiet watching + faces, I have tried—tried as you tried—and been + broken....</p> </div> + +<p>With this ability of his to pick out a theme that is basic in Irish +life, and with the years bringing him an experience of life that will +dominate any propagandist purpose, Mr. Robinson should grow in +seriousness of intention and accomplishment. He hates sham, he has sane +and cleansing satire of pretension, he writes good dialogue, his +experience as stage manager of the Abbey Theatre is teaching him the +stage; he is only twenty-five. Do not these things augur a future?</p> + + +<a name="page233" id="page233"></a> + +<p>MR. RUTHERFORD MAYNE</p> + +<p>It so happened that the last time I was reading the plays of Mr. +Rutherford Mayne, I was also reading the plays of Sir Arthur Wing +Pinero. All the world has heard of the one; only the little band +scattered here and there through the English-speaking countries to whom +letters are a real part of life has heard of the other. I laughed over +"Dandy Dick"; I thought of Miss Rehan playing Georgianna Tidman with all +that gush of spirits that was hers; I thought of Miss Nethersole in her +wonderful youth playing Paula Tanqueray; and as I thought of these two, +each in her way inimitable in her part, thoughts of past moments with +the characters of Mr. Mayne's plays, plays I have never seen on the +stage, came back to me. Had I seen them on the stage would my thoughts +of them have been thoughts of the theatre, as were all my thoughts of +Sir Arthur's plays? It may be, but I think not, I think the great +strength of Mr. Mayne is that he takes you to life; I think the great +weakness of the wide-heard author is that he takes you immediately, in +almost all of his plays, to the theatre, and only secondarily, if at +all, after the memory of his artificiality has died away, to life +itself.</p> + +<p>William John Granahan and John Smith the Tory,—will you forget them, or +Robbie John whom the fiddle called away, or Ebenezer McKie and Francey +Moore, Protestant and Catholic, who together lay in wait for the hated +landlord and shot him as he passed through the glen; or John Murray, +good man, and his bauchle of a brother? + + +<a name="page234" id="page234"></a> +You will not forget them, for +they are from life; you have known them, all save Francey, if you have +known Scotchmen who are Lowlanders and Presbyterians, or such North of +Ireland men as are unalterably opposed to Home Rule. They are very like +the Orangemen of the novels of Mr. Shan Bullock, very like the peasants +the English-speaking world outside of Scotland first met in the verse of +Burns; harsher than the Baillie Nicol Jarvies and Dugald Dalgettys of +the kindly Sir Walter, but akin to them and to his Davie Deans and +Dumbiedikeses.</p> + +<p>We are in a more familiar world in the plays of Mr. Mayne than in those +of most of the other writers in the movement—that is, I mean most +American readers are—simply because of Burns and Scott. Had Ireland had +a peer of either in his generation as satirist or romancer the +Irish-Irish would to-day be as familiar to us as are the Scotch-Irish, +who are, of course, transplanted Scotch. The women of this world are +not, however, of types so well known to us as are the men, because the +chivalry of Sir Walter prevented him from giving us his peasant +Scotswomen in as full detail as he gave us his men; but it is not +difficult for us to appreciate Mrs. Granahan and her daughter; Mrs. +McKie, a "woman with a dead soul"; Mary Murray with her daftness over +the boys; and even Sarah McMinn, so true in her managing and meanness, +qualities necessary to the prosperity of her folk. Puritan America can +understand these women and men because they are Puritan, too, with the +ignoble that is in the Puritan as well as with the noble that is just as +surely there.</p> + + +<a name="page235" id="page235"></a> + +<p>It is in the first three plays of Mr. Mayne that we meet these people I +have named, County Down folk all of them, and all Protestant but Francey +Moore. They are the leading characters in "The Turn of the Road" (1906), +"The Drone" (1908), and "The Troth" (1908). The motive of Mr. Mayne's +first play is the old call to wander, the unrest of the vagrant heart, +here the heart of the musician. It is the story of Robbie John Granahan, +who, after burning his fiddle at the desire of a strong farmer whose +daughter he wished to marry, is driven out into the world to try his +fortune with another through her determination that her lover should +follow his star. There is more beauty in "The Turn of the Road" than in +either of the other plays of the North of Ireland, more beauty of theme, +more beauty of thought, more beauty of expression. Its themes are not +new, <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Wanderlust</span> and the Puritans' hatred of art; its thoughts are not +new, but they are beautiful, and the words themselves are freshly used. +Its phrases that hold in memory are given to Robbie John and to his +father and to his grandfather, most of them to the grandfather. This is +the grandfather's lament for the boy gone on the roads with his fiddle +and his father's curse:—</p> + + <div class="display"> <p>It's the wee things you think nothing of, + but that make your home a joy to come back till, after a hard day's + work. And you've sent out into the could and wet the one that was + making your home something more than the common. D'ye think them + proud city folk will listen to his poor ould ballads with the heart + of the boy singing through them? It's only us—it's only us. I + say, as knows the long wild nights, and the wet and the rain and the + mist of nights on the boglands—it's only us, I say, + +<a name="page236" id="page236"></a> + could + listen him in the right way. And ye knowed, right well ye knowed, + that every string of his fiddle was keyed to the crying of your own + heart.</p> </div> + +<p>There is no beauty at all in "The Drone." There is little beauty +possible to such a subject realistically treated as that of the exposure +of the utter sham that is the pretended inventor of a bellows, a man who +has for years fattened on a brother's tolerance and family pride. There +might have been beauty of construction, but dramatic construction is not +Mr. Mayne's strongest quality. Let that not be held too much against +him, for many an English dramatist, like almost every English novelist, +is weak in the architectonic qualities of his work. Yet such is the +hardness of the people that exposed Daniel Murray that you rejoice in +his duping of them at the end through his sale to them of his pretended +invention, especially as that frees his brother John, and John's +daughter, artful coax that she is, from Sarah McMinn, who is determined +to marry the one and manage the two. The ideals of the people of the +play and the grim humor of Mr. Mayne are well illustrated by this +declaration of John Murray, the best of them all, anent the suit for +breach of promise with which Sarah threatens him: "I would as soon do +without the marrying if I could. I don't want the woman at all, but I'll +marry her before she gets a ha'penny off me."</p> + +<p>The people here are the people of "The Squireen" of Mr. Bullock,—hard, +grasping, resentful, passionate, brutal even, but doers of the world's +work. All that differentiates them from the Fermanagh Protestants is the + +<a name="page237" id="page237"></a> +different conditions of County Down and a slightly lower social +position.</p> + +<p>In "The Troth" the theme is the shooting of a landlord by two peasants +whom his agents are to evict on the morrow. To the cottage of the +Protestant McKie comes his Catholic neighbor, Francey Moore, whose wife +is dying. Here there is no turf for the fire, and no hope in the heart +of father or mother, for the child of the house has died, and, they +think, because of the landlord's hardness to them. The two men swear a +troth that they shall lie in wait for Colonel Fotheringham, and that if +but one escapes, as is likely, the one arrested shall hold his tongue as +to his companion. You do not see the murder on the stage, but you hear +the shot and see McKie return to his home, and you know it was he killed +the landlord. The tension of the last scene is almost unendurable. His +wife's providential lie for McKie, her agony in her knowledge of his +guilt when she sees his face on his return, the man's terror, are +handled with masterly firmness and sureness. To see this scene on the +stage in the hands of actors worthy of it must be to know real tragedy. +In this play, too, brief as is the glimpse we have into these four lives +of small farmer and his wife, his farmhand and his neighbor, a neighbor +of alien race and hated faith, you get to know them as if they were +friends of long standing. Character creation and character presentation +in pithy, tense dialogue are the great gifts of Mr. Mayne. Francey +Moore, the "dark man," with his sensibility, his eloquence, and his +flaming rage, is not of the characteristic men of Mr. Mayne. They are +men of slow ways all + +<a name="page238" id="page238"></a> +un-Celtic and with smouldering hearts like those +of the Northmen we read about in the tales of "Origines Islandicæ."</p> + +<p>In "Red Turf" (1911) Mr. Mayne turns away from County Down to the Galway +bogs, admirably symbolizing the hot land feud between neighbors in his +title. There are but five characters in the play, Martin Burke, farmer, +and his spitfire of a wife; and his neighbors the Flanagans, father and +son, who have won away from the Burkes, by the surveyor's decision, +their bank of stone turf that had come to Mary Burke from her father; +and an old fellow little better than a beggar. Mary taunts her husband +until he shoots the elder Flanagan as he is working away on the "great +stone bank." It was not his own gun Burke had, but, ironically, it was +one just brought to his house by the poor old man whom they had often +befriended, John Heffernan, brought that it might not be found in his +house by the gauger, and he unable to pay the license. It is not made +clear that there was malevolence in the leaving of the gun at the Burkes +by the old fellow, malevolent as are some of his remarks. Akin to him, +not in his malevolence but in that each is in a way a bit of a prophet, +is the grandfather in "The Turn of the Road," but more nearly akin to +old Granahan is Uncle Bartle of "The Mineral Workers" of Mr. Boyle. +Synge records old men of prophecy and tales in his travel sketches, but +he put none such who were gentle in his plays, or I would say that +Grandfather Granahan, like the old gaffer in Mr. Masefield's "Nan," was +a part of the influence of Synge that is felt by both Mr. Masefield and + +<a name="page239" id="page239"></a> +Mr. Mayne. Their styles, respectively, in "Nan" and "Red Turf," have in +them more than echoes of the style of Synge. The "wambling" old men of +Mr. Hardy come also to mind as one thinks of these old men of Mr. +Masefield and Mr. Mayne and Mr. Boyle. All in a sense play "chorus" to +the action of the play, but there is no one of them that is in the story +or play in which he appears on such grounds only. There are, of course, +old men everywhere, in all life they are an integral part, and +everywhere they are commentators on life once they feel that their day +is done, spectators of a pageant from the forefront of which they have +dropped to watch the following troupe pass by.</p> + +<p>There is little mating in these plays of Mr. Mayne, and love of woman +worthy of the name of love only in "The Turn of the Road"; there is +parental love, too, but perhaps more of parental tyranny. Such parental +love as there is, however, actually expressed, makes one of the +memorable passages of Mr. Mayne. Mary Burke, after taunting her husband +to madness, tries to turn him from murder when she sees him, gun in +hand, by crying: "For the love of God, would you leave it down. Leave it +down and go in and look at the child sleeping. It would take the badness +from your mind the same as it did with me."</p> + +<p>Though Mr. Mayne is a writer for the Ulster Literary Theatre of Belfast, +his allegiance to the Abbey group is clearly indicated in "Red Turf," +which is the result of a study of Synge. I do not mean to say that Mr. +Mayne is not familiar with the speech of Connacht, but that it is Synge +who has taught him how to listen to it. There is + +<a name="page240" id="page240"></a> +little of the +influence of Synge in his three plays of the Black North, but when he +turns to Galway in "Red Turf," it is but natural that, writing of other +than his own people, he should write in a speech that has in it an echo +of that of him who has transmuted this speech into prose of the most +beautiful rhythm that English dramatic prose has known. The Bible is the +book of books in Ulster, and there is no page of Mr. Mayne's Ulster +plays but shows him acquainted with its great rhythms. Mr. Boyle, +skillful artificer of situation, and truthful depicter of character that +he is, and Mr. Colum, too, for all his closeness to the earth, are now +and then betrayed, Mr. Boyle more often than now and then, into the +English of the newspaper or of the public speaker; but the English of +Mr. Mayne is all but always an unworn English, an English used freshly, +or if with reminiscences in it, reminiscences of the seventeenth-century +English that has survived in the Bible or in the memory of the folk from +the time of King James.</p> + +<p>Mr. Mayne has, then, style, and his dialogue is living speech; he has +knowledge of the people of North Ireland, earnestness and sincerity; and +having these qualities, he has more that is precious to art than have +most of the dramatists his countrymen. There is no consistent reading of +life in his plays, no great power over the unrolling of plot, but +perhaps these will come with the years. An actor himself, he knows the +stage; and this knowledge has given him power over situation. Once he +learns to lead situation into situation, once he ripens into fuller +knowledge of life, Mr. Mayne will be a dramatist to reckon with, indeed.</p> + + +<a name="page241" id="page241"></a> + +<p>"NORREYS CONNELL"</p> + +<p>There have been many other dramatists than these I have mentioned who +have had one or more plays produced at the Abbey Theatre. Some of these, +like Mr. Bernard Shaw, are Irishmen abroad that have gained the ear of +the world and do a play for Dublin out of a sense of duty It was thus +that "John Bull's Other Island" came into being, but that play, being +considered "beyond the scope" of the National Theatre Society, was not +produced at the Abbey, but at the Court Theatre, London, November 1, +1904. When "The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet" was "censored" in London, +however, the Abbey opened its doors to it, the "crude melodrama" +receiving its premier in late August, 1909. Little as "John Bull's Other +Island" was in the Abbey tradition, with moral purpose and unhumanity of +its very essence, it was at least a newspaper leader on an Irish +subject, but "The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet," a sort of +sentimentalized travesty of Bret Harte preaching the usual Shavian +evangel, has no more relation to Irish life than it has to literature. +It marred the repertoire the Abbey Company brought to America, as would +a camp-meeting hymn the music of the pipes.</p> + +<p>Out of the Abbey tradition, too, are the plays of "Norreys Connell" (Mr. +Conal O'Riordan), whose "Piper" had its day of lesser notoriety of +Playboy-like quality on its presentation on February 13, 1908. It is a +very obvious allegory, outlining under guise of an incident of '98 the +weaknesses of contemporaneous Ireland, its love of talk; its lack of +hold-together; its refusal to see things as + +<a name="page242" id="page242"></a> +they are; its incapacity in +practical matters; the reckless temper of this faction of its people, +the subjection to clerical influence of that, the suicidal patriotism of +a third; in short, the Celts' willful rebellion against the despotism of +fact. It was not pleasant listening to, or seeing, "The Piper," to many +groups of Irishmen, for it cut alike at the Parliamentary Nationalists, +the Sein Feiner, and the shoneen. Even though one admires the courage of +the Piper and Black Mike, one realizes the futility of both, and of +Larry the Talker, Tim the Trimmer, and Pat Dennehy, all typical of too +many men in Ireland to be endurable to the usual theatre audience. There +is a white heat of feeling, however, under the play that to some degree +makes one forget its rather indifferent writing, its failure to attain +true dramatic speech, its obviousness as of a morality play.</p> + +<p>Another little drama of Mr. O'Riordan, "Time," is almost a morality +play. It was produced shortly after its author became director of the +Abbey Theatre, succeeding Mr. Synge in the spring of 1909. Mr. O'Riordan +does not include "Time" among the plays of his volume of 1912, +"Shakespeare's End, and Other Irish Plays," but one cannot but feel +there was room for it there, if there was room for the play that gives +title to the volume. "Shakespeare's End," however, was doubtless +included because it gives its author's ideas as to the mission of +Ireland in the world. "An Imaginary Conversation," the second play of +the volume, was performed at the Abbey Theatre May 13, 1909, following +shortly after "Time"; a discussion of art and patriotism and love among +Tom + +<a name="page243" id="page243"></a> + +Moore, and his sister Kate and Robert Emmet, with a little, a very +little, of the intensity that made "The Piper" something more than +second-rate.</p> + + +<p>MR. ST. JOHN G. ERVINE</p> + +<p>Mr. St. John G. Ervine I know through two plays, "Mixed Marriage," +produced at the Abbey Theatre on March 30, 1911, and "The Magnanimous +Lover," produced in the same playhouse on October 17, 1912. Like his +fellow from County Down, the master dramatist of the Ulster Literary +Theatre, Mr. Mayne, Mr. Ervine excels in characterization. You remember +his people, even after one reading of the plays, so clearly are they +distinguished, so definite are their personalities. With the five men +and women of "The Magnanimous Lover," you pass but a few minutes, as it +is only a one-act play, but you remember them as well as you do the six +of "Mixed Marriage," though you follow their fortunes through four acts. +All these characters are typical of the artisan class of the North of +Ireland, the five Protestants of "The Magnanimous Lover" and the four +Protestants and two Catholics of "Mixed Marriage." It is the troubles +that arise from the difference in religion of the Protestant Raineys, +mother, father, and the two young men; the Catholic betrothed, Nora, of +the elder son Hugh; and their common friend the Catholic labor agitator, +O'Hara, that are the motive forces of the latter play. Faintest etched +is Tom, the younger son, and most like a stock character. Nora and +O'Hara are well done, but one + +<a name="page244" id="page244"></a> +remembers both as stage parts rather than +as characterizations. Hugh is still better done, but the two absolute +creations are the father and mother. Tom Rainey, the Orangeman, forgets +his bitterness against "Cathliks" for a moment to help win the strike in +which his fellow workmen of Belfast, "Cathlik an' Prodesans," both are +fighting side by side. He is all the more bitter, however, when he +learns that his eldest son is going to marry out of his faith, and his +speeches, hitherto devoted to smoothing out the troubles between the men +of different faith, turn to bitter denunciations of the strike as "a +Popish Plot." In the end Tom Rainey is responsible for riots his wild +words have stirred up, the calling-out of the soldiery, and the death of +Nora, who is shot down by a volley as she runs out of the Rainey house +into the rioting street. On the stage, of course, Mrs. Rainey is the +more sympathetic character, her tolerance, her tact, her humor, her +infinite kindliness winning an audience as it is given to few characters +to win it. She is less like a type, too, than her husband, but for all, +I cannot but think he is better drawn.</p> + +<p>Mr. Ervine has not a style like Mr. Mayne, nor such a rhythm to his +prose, but he has more humor, and it is natural humor, a humor that +arises out of the situation and is not simply dragged in for the +purposes of comic relief. Mr. Ervine evidently knows the life he depicts +in and out. He ought to know it, for he was born to it, being the son of +a workingman in the shipyards of Belfast. And knowing it well he finds +it far from hopeless. It is a pleasure to come upon a play of the North +written in a spirit other than that of revolt against its Puritanism. +There + + +<a name="page245" id="page245"></a> +are "kindly Irish of the Irish" in the Black North as well as in +the three other provinces, but most of the authors of the North are +content to picture its hardness, its hypocrisy, its bigotry, its love of +wife and child remorselessly concealed as a weakness of the flesh.</p> + +<p>It is to this darker picturing of the North, however, that Mr. Ervine +turns in "The Magnanimous Lover," which indicts the self-righteousness +of the Ulster Protestant with a severity such as is possible only to a +man bitter against a weakness of his own people. It is an old theme Mr. +Ervine has to handle, the refusal of the wronged woman to wed her +betrayer, when, after years of disloyalty, he is willing, by marrying +her, to make her again an "honest woman." To speak only of recent plays +of similar plot, there is "The Last of the De Mullens" of St. John +Hankin, and "A Woman of No Importance" of Wilde. Mr. Ervine, it is true, +handles the theme freshly, but the real power of the play is in his +creation of the heroine, Maggie Cather. The danger with such a character +is that it will be only a mouthpiece for woman's demand for a common +moral standard for men and women; but Maggie is not a mouthpiece but a +real woman, triumphantly alive, with hot anger in her heart at the +injustice of the world, and at the "unco guidness" of her old-time +lover, Henry Hinde. Ten years before the time of the action of the play +Henry Hinde had fled, just as her child was to be born, to Liverpool, +and there he has prospered, and so risen in the world that it is +possible for him to wed a minister's daughter. Fear of God's wrath has +now driven him home to make such amends as he can, + +<a name="page246" id="page246"></a> +but there is in him +no pity for the woman or love for his child. Maggie has faced it out +alone all these years in the seaside village of Down as Hester faced it +out in the seaside village of Massachusetts, while Henry forgot it all +until he was "saved" and "convicted of sin." If no more cowardly than +Dimmesdale, Henry is more heartless, utterly callous, indeed,—as he +confesses, in "the devil's grip." And yet Mr. Ervine is so true to the +life that he is depicting, a life at once passionate and prosaic, that +he makes anger for the past and fear of a nagged future with Henry as +effective agents in her rejection of him as are self-respect and right +feeling. It is a "big" part that Mr. Ervine has created for the leading +actress, and though the story is unequivocally "unpleasant" and may +prevent "The Magnanimous Lover" from being a favorite play, there can be +no two minds as to its success as drama. It is very real drama, of +elemental human emotion all unveiled. With such a play as this, and with +"Mixed Marriage" to his credit, I look forward eagerly to the promised +production and publication of "The Eviction."</p> + + +<p>MR. JOSEPH CAMPBELL</p> + +<p>Another dramatist from the North and of promise is Mr. Joseph Campbell. +His "Judgment" is of the northwest, however, the whole breadth of Ulster +between its Donegal mountains and the Belfast of "Mixed Marriage"; and +it is of the country, not of the city; and of an Ireland wholly +Catholic, not of an Ireland of Protestant and Catholic at war over +religion. There are moments of real drama in "Judgment," but no such +inevitable rise + +<a name="page247" id="page247"></a> +to climax as in "Mixed Marriage." Its undoubted power +is in the feeling underlying it, in its characterization, and in its +style. Mr. Campbell was already known when his play was put on at the +Abbey Theatre, April 15, 1912, as the author of "The Mountainy Singer" +(1909), a volume of freshly felt and singing verse; and of "Mearing +Stones" (1911), little prose records of things seen and of moods felt in +a corner of Donegal. Many a striking phrase of "Judgment," indeed, is +already written down in the paragraphs of "Mearing Stones" as actual +talk heard in the roads, and several of the situations of the plays are +workings-up of situations of which its author found himself a spectator +on the streets of Andara or on the highway between Slieve a-Tooey and +the sea.</p> + +<p>I first came upon his verses, if I remember rightly, in "The United +Irishmen," but I was first impressed by him as an illustrator, his name +being always signed in those days after the Irish fashion, Seosamh +MacCathmhaoil. A Dublin friend sent me at Christmas in 1907 a "Calendar +of the Saints," for which Mr. Campbell did the illustrations, +illustrations akin to those of Miss Althea Gyles, which so surely take +one back to Ireland's heroic age, instinct as they are with the +primitive aloofness of antiquity.</p> + +<p>It is not antiquity, however, that Mr. Campbell has chosen for his play. +Indeed, he rejects antiquity, deliberately "using peasants as ... +protagonists instead of kings—who, like Pharaoh, are 'but a cry in +Egypt,' outworn figures in these days with no beauty and no +significance." "Judgment" is made out of the story of the countryside +concerning "a tinker's woman," Peg Straw, + +<a name="page248" id="page248"></a> + +and we may well believe Mr. +Campbell has changed it but little, as he says, for the purposes of his +play. It had been a better play, perhaps, had he changed more the facts +of the story. As it stands, the first act of the play is adequate +dramatically, and beautiful with that sort of wild and outworld beauty +Synge brought into English literature in Ireland; and the second act +beautiful with that beauty, and inadequate dramatically.</p> + +<p>Peg Straw is an old, worn woman of the roads whom the people hold little +better than a witch, even attributing to her the power fabled of the +witches in folk-tales of turning themselves into hares. Her nickname +"Straw" indicates the nature of the mild dementia that sets the children +and the idlers at her heels. She goes about picking up "straws" until +"she'd have a bunch in her hand ... every little stalk bit off as neat +as neat, and it like a scrubber or dandy brush you'd put to a horse."</p> + +<p>Peg speaks no word at all in the play, coming into sight in it only to +die, but always she is in the background. Talk of her comes up early in +the first act, and we learn that Nabla, the woman whose cabin is the +play's first scene, has turned Peg away from the door only that morning; +and from the moment we first hear of her most of the talk is of her, and +the action because of her. Toward this first act's end you hear her +cries as the tinkers beat her, and at its end she crawls into the cabin +to die, and in dying to shock the woman of the house so that her child +comes before its time. All the second act Peg lies in sight in the room +just off the stage with candles stuck around her, bringing the horror +and dignity of death into the wild + +<a name="page249" id="page249"></a> +scenes of her wake. These are wild +not because of drinking for no one is drunk and only one "had drink +taken," but because of the wildness of nature of these men of +westernmost Europe, and because of the wildness of the roads that a +"traveling man" brings with him out of the night. There is no action in +this second and last act save that sprung of this stranger's entrance +and quarrelsomeness, and his interruptions of an old, old man's story of +what he knows of Peg's life. The stranger listens while Parry Cam tells +of the cause of her madness, but when he repeats what for years has been +the gossip of the countryside about her supposed killing of her babe, +the "traveling man" interrupts and declares he is the son whom it was +rumored she had drowned. In the end he is turned out of the house, not +altogether unkindly, but as much for decency's sake as for his own. That +the son, for any motive at all, should be turned out of the house where +his mother lies dead, even though he had not stood by her living, is +hard enough in the estimation of any people, but in the estimation of +the Irish peasant it is intolerably tragic. If we realize this, the +ending of the play will be on a note deeper and more significant than if +we fail to realize it, but not even the utmost sympathy with the +intention of the author and a full realization of the significance to +Donegal peasants of the action can bring this act to an intensity +comparable to that of the end of Act I, where two mysteries confront one +another—"the passing of a life from this world, the coming of a life +into it."</p> + +<p>All the characters in "Judgment" are "created." The personality of each +colors his words and puts him before + +<a name="page250" id="page250"></a> +you distinct from every other. +Owen Ban the weaver, who takes in Peg when his wife Nabla, heavy with +her first child, and nervous because of her condition and fearful of the +birth, would keep out the outcast; old Parry Cam; John Gilla Carr; Colum +Johnston and Father John; Nabla herself; and Kate Kinsella the +midwife—each is himself or herself, each remains as distinct in your +mind the unforgettable scenes of the play. Somehow or other, too, the +country is suggested; you are aware that you are on a wild hillside +above a glen,—you are aware of this not because the author tells us at +the outset that the scene of the play is in the mountains of western +Donegal, south of Lochros Beg Bay, but through the dialogue of the play +itself. Both scenes of the play are indoors, and on dark nights of +midwinter, but so instinct with many phases of the life of the people is +it that its background of landscape rises before you only less +distinctly than the visualization of its characters. Atmosphere the play +has, and quality, both sprung of the sincerity of its feeling and +imagination. So true are these, and so keen the author's reading of +human nature, and so sure his character drawing, that for all his +weakness of construction we may speak of his play alongside of the best +Irish plays. The future promises finer things: meanwhile we are thankful +for what is, for "Judgment,"—especially for its far-offness, its +desolateness as of the world's end and the wind crying.</p> +</div> + +<hr class="page"> + +<div> + +<a name="page251" id="page251"></a> + +<a name="toc_11"></a> +<h2>Chapter IX</h2> + +<h2 class="sub">William Sharp ("Fiona Macleod")</h2> + + +<p>There were relations other than that of a common purpose between William +Sharp and the Irish writers of the Celtic Renaissance. He was a friend +of Mr. Yeats, a correspondent of Mr. Russell, and the chief commentator +in the English reviews on the work of the Irish group of its writers. At +one time, after 1897, the relationship promised to be very close, +indeed. William Sharp, experimenting in psychics with Mr. Yeats, found +occasion to interest him in "Fiona Macleod," and as a result of that +interest Mr. Yeats came to think the new writer might write Celtic plays +for performances he intended to arrange for Irish literary +organizations. Thus it is that Mrs. Sharp has to include in her memoir +of her husband a long letter to "Fiona Macleod" from Mr. Yeats, in which +he suggests: "The plays might be almost in some cases modern mystery +plays. Your 'Last Supper,' for instance, would make such a play." Mr. +Sharp, apparently, did not follow up this suggestion, but shortly after +the first performances of "The Irish Literary Theatre" in 1899 he wrote +the two plays that, together with "Vistas," comprise all the dramatic +writing that he has to his name. That "The Immortal Hour" and "The House +of Usna" were intended for "The Irish Literary Theatre," I think there +is little doubt, and it was only, I take it, when circumstances +dictated + +<a name="page252" id="page252"></a> +that only plays by Irish writers should be put on by that +theatre that Mr. Sharp looked elsewhere for their presentation. Only +"The House of Usna" was, however, placed,—in the spring performances in +London of The Stage Society, on April 29, 1900. Two months later "The +House of Usna" was published in the July number of "The National +Review." It pleased more, if we are to judge by the reviews, in the +pages of the magazine than on the stage, but I hardly know why. "The +House of Usna" is profoundly moving read in the study, surely, and if +acted in such simplicity and enthusiasm as is that of the Abbey Theatre +Players, I should think it would appeal as do the verse plays of Mr. +Yeats. No play I have read carries me further into antiquity than this, +none preserves more of what imagination tells us must have been the +wilder beauty of what still are places of wild beauty, of the savagery +of that old life of the hero tales of Ireland. Mr. Yeats's plays do not +so recapture the past, they take us rather to places out of time, where +all things are possible, because the world we know is put aside and all +but forgot. Even on the stage, however, the new beauty of "The House of +Usna" was recognized, a beauty as distinctive as that of the two plays +of M. Maeterlinck that were produced with it, "Interior" and "The Death +of Tintagiles," but it was adjudged not to be drama in the accepted +sense of the word. "The House of Usna" is written in a prose that has +many of the effects of verse, but that is less luxuriant than the prose +of "Vistas." "The Immortal Hour," published shortly afterwards in the +"Fortnightly Review" (1900), is written in blank verse + +<a name="page253" id="page253"></a> + +that shows its +author has been carefully attentive to the rhythms of the blank verse of +Mr. Yeats, but it is neither so poetic nor so dramatic as "The House of +Usna." Both plays are written out of the old legends that are the common +property of Irish and Scottish Gael, and in both Sharp has treated his +material with his wonted freedom of adaptation, a freedom that is +generally justified by his results, his instinctive surety of +reconstruction of myths being such as to make one wonder, with Mr. +Russell, if Sharp is not, in some fashion, a reincarnation of a +shanachie that sang as contemporary in the wars of Gael and Gall.</p> + +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a name="illo_12" id="illo_12"></a><img src="images/image12.jpg" alt="William Sharp"></p> +<p style="text-align: center">William Sharp</p> + +<p>A common preoccupation with the plays of M. Maeterlinck is another bond +between the founder of the Abbey Theatre and Sharp, a preoccupation +passing rather quickly from Mr. Yeats, but long retaining its hold on +the changing selves of Sharp. For all his early interest in "spiritual +things," an interest very definitely expressed in "Romantic Ballads" +(1888), Sharp would not have come to "Vistas" (1894) without the +guidance of M. Maeterlinck, and he admits as much in his preface to +these "psychic episodes." "Vistas" he often referred to as heralding a +"great dramatic epoch," and he evidently regarded them as, in a way, +drama, but it is hardly likely that he dreamed of their enactment on the +stage. Many of them are essentially dramatic, but their method of +presentation is almost always lyric or narrative rather than dramatic, +even in the Maeterlinckian sense of the word.</p> + +<p>It is possible, however, that Sharp might have written + +<a name="page254" id="page254"></a> +other of his +projected plays, "The Enchanted Valleys," "The King of Ys," "Drosdan and +Yssul," and their many fellows he had projected by title, and others, +too, had not developments in Dublin, as I have said, carried Mr. Yeats +away from him during 1899 and 1900, and had Sharp himself not during +this drifting written that article "Celtic" which so aroused many in +Ireland on its appearance in "The Contemporary Review." In this essay, +basically a literary protest, "Fiona Macleod" declared "herself" against +Separatist politics and affirmed "her" belief, as "she" had in "The +House of Usna," that the future greatness of Ireland was to come, not +through independence, but through the rebirth of her ancient +spirituality in other nations to whom she had given her children.</p> + + <div class="display"> <p>The Celtic element in our national life + [wrote "Fiona Macleod"] has a vital and great part to play. We have + a most noble ideal if we will but accept it. And that is, not to + perpetuate feuds, not to try to win back what is gone away upon the + wind, not to repay ignorance with scorn, or dullness with contempt, + or past wrongs with present hatred, but so to live, so to pray, so + to hope, so to work, so to achieve, that we, what is left of the + Celtic races, of the Celtic genius, may permeate the greater race of + which we are a vital part, so that, with this Celtic emotion, Celtic + love of beauty, and Celtic spirituality, a nation greater than any + the world has seen may issue, a nation refined and strengthened by + the wise relinquishings and steadfast ideals of Celt and Saxon, + united in a common fatherland, and in singleness of pride and + faith.</p> </div> + +<p>There was, however, if less intimacy with the Irish writers in these +later years, no less admiration of their art, an admiration that led not +only to praise of them in critical + +<a name="page255" id="page255"></a> +articles, but to a greater praise of +imitation of their art. So possessed, indeed, was Sharp by the verse of +the younger Irish poets as he read them to write of them, that when he +turned to verse as "Fiona Macleod," he fell into their rhythms and +reproduced the colors of their styles. Writing in prose as a critic of +Mr. Yeats, Sharp came to write in verse as Mr. Yeats wrote, as in "The +Dirge of the Four Cities": writing of "A.E." in prose as critic, Sharp +came to write in verse as "A.E." wrote, as in "Flame on the Wind": +writing of "Moira O'Neill," in prose as critic, Sharp came to write in +verse as "Moira O'Neill" wrote, as in "I—Brasil": writing in prose as +critic, of "Ethna Carberry," Sharp came to write in verse as "Ethna +Carberry" wrote, as in "The Exile." So it was, also, that, coming to +write of Celtic literature after study of Renan and Arnold, Sharp +attained to something of their large utterance.</p> + +<p>Sharp sees the Celtic Renaissance, however, always in relation to +English literature, and always, it should be added, with French +literature and Greek literature in the background. In this wide outlook, +in his freedom from political prejudice, in his sympathy with Celtic +literature and his knowledge of it, is his greatest strength as a critic +of the Celtic Renaissance. His greatest weakness is his willingness in +this writing, as elsewhere in his writing, to abide by first +impressions, to abide also by the first-come phrase or epithet, banes of +the ready writer. But read his essay "Celtic" after you have read the +great essays of Renan and Arnold, and read it alongside of what Mr. +Yeats has to say of that literature, and you will find it, as + +<a name="page256" id="page256"></a> +I said, +of the stature of these. You will at the same time find in this writing +the answer to the contention that there were really two personalities in +William Sharp. Even Mrs. Sharp, who writes so restrainedly about this +question of dual personality, believes the analytical faculty belonged +to William Sharp, the imaginative to "Fiona Macleod." But in this +criticism of the Celtic Renaissance which is signed "Fiona Macleod," +there is as much analysis as is to be found anywhere in his work as +William Sharp. So obviously was he identifying "F.M." with "W.S." in +this critical writing that Mrs. Janvier, of those in the secret, wrote +to him to take warning lest he betray himself. She pointed out to him +that such a display of learning as he was making in the later "Fiona +Macleod" work would surely lead to discovery. But he did not heed. The +truth probably was that he wrote about Celtic things as "Fiona Macleod" +because he perhaps felt about them, as "Fiona Macleod," as one who is +bilingual thinks about work he is doing, say in German, in German, and +about work he is doing in English, in English; but just as surely I +believe, because what "Fiona Macleod" wrote commanded more respect than +what William Sharp wrote, readier entrance into the magazines, and +better pay. If there are those to whom such an explanation seems +belittling to William Sharp, I can only say that they cannot have +realized that he was a driven man earning his living by his pen. I am +not, I confess, a sentimentalist in such matters, and while I do not +wholly like his procedure in maintaining the fiction of "Fiona Macleod," +it does not seem to me a very heinous sin.</p> + + +<a name="page257" id="page257"></a> + +<p>He who would write of the work of William Sharp, indeed, must be +resolute to remember that it is to be considered as an essay in the art +of letters. There are so many temptations toward writing of it as a +scientific problem,—for who is not interested in "dual +personality"?—or as a "psychic revelation," if one is bitten—and who +is not?—by curiosity about hidden "things"; or as an irritating hoax, +if one has been befooled—and who, for one moment or another has not +been?—into believing that this writing under the pseudonym of "Fiona +Macleod" was the confession of a woman. The romance of it remains, no +matter from what point of view you consider it, and, despite your +preoccupation with this or that phase of it, the beauty of literary art +of parts of it. Parts of it, I say, for to me no writer of our time was +more uneven in his work. My point of view, indicated perhaps brutally, +and with a firstly and secondly is:—</p> + +<p>Firstly, that until he was nearly forty, William Sharp was no more than +a skillful literary practitioner, a higher sort of hack, who had done +some better writing of a tenuous kind of beauty but imitative in +substance and art, in "Sospiri di Roma" and "Vistas," and that after +forty, when he was developing one undeveloped side of himself as "Fiona +Macleod," he developed another undeveloped side of himself in "Silence +Farm." That he attained in a sort of writing, and greatly, that he had +not attained in before, in "Silence Farm," + +<a name="page258" id="page258"></a> +has not been acknowledged, so +easy has it been to those interested in his work to lose sight of all +else in their pursuit of the "Fiona Macleod" side of his nature. It is +true of "Silence Farm," as of almost all his other work done under the +name of William Sharp, that it is imitative; but it is equally true that +a large part of the "Fiona Macleod" work is imitative, too. "Silence +Farm" is done under the influence of the later work of Mr. Hardy, but +the material of "Silence Farm" is its author's own, and the color of the +writing is as distinctly of the Lowlands as the color of "Tess" is of +Wessex. That "Silence Farm" is better work in its kind, though that kind +is less original than some of his writing as "Fiona Macleod," I have +been forced against my prejudices to believe. If I did not so believe I +would not have spoken of it side by side with "Tess."</p> + +<p>Secondly, that as "Fiona Macleod," William Sharp did much good writing +in almost everything published under the pseudonym, achieving wholeness +of good tissue in certain sketches and tales and verses on rather +varying kinds of subjects, but that his work as "Fiona Macleod" that is +really distinguished is in stories of prehistoric Scotland and Ireland, +and of Scotland and Ireland in the earliest historic time. In these +tales of the Gaels of old time he for the first time breaks ground for +others. Before he wrote "Silk o' the Kine," and "The Harping of +Cravetheen," "The Annir Choile," and "Enya of the Dark Eyes," there were +no short tales of like temper and content and style in literature.</p> + +<p>To me little is significant in the early verse of "Fiona Macleod," as +little was significant in all the verse of William Sharp until the time +of "Sospiri di Roma." And for all the beauty of these pictures in words +of the Campagna it is but a transient beauty. It was not until he was +mastered + +<a name="page259" id="page259"></a> +by the new beauty that Mr. Yeats brought into English poetry +that the verse of William Sharp won to itself abiding beauty and glamour +and inevitable phrase. "The House of Usna" (1900) brought to me "Dim +face of beauty haunting all the world," and the 1901 edition of "From +the Hills of Dream," "The Enchanted Valleys,"; but it was not until +after his death that I came upon his best verse of all, the verse of his +last five years, which was gathered together posthumously in the 1907 +edition of "From the Hills of Dream," and included as "The House of +Beauty" in "The Poems and Dramas" of 1911. Who does not know these sets +of verses and "The Dirge of the Four Cities," does not know the ultimate +accomplishment of William Sharp in poetry.</p> + +<p>That the "'Fiona Macleod' mystery" ended with the death of William Sharp +is, then, my belief, as it is that it began before he conceived of +exploiting a feminine sub-self he had long been aware of in himself. The +beginnings of that sort of writing that made "Fiona Macleod" a +reputation are to be found very early in his writing, in "The Son of +Allan" of 1881, in the "Record" of 1884, in the preface to the "Romantic +Ballads" of 1888, in the "Vistas" of 1894. That these earlier +expressions of "spiritual" states and guesses at mysteries are not, +except for certain parts of "Vistas," so well written as the best +writing of similar kind by "Fiona Macleod," is true, and perhaps, at +first glance, a matter of wonder. It is, however, I think, not difficult +to find an explanation of the better quality of the later work, and that +explanation is afforded, firstly and most largely, by the Celtic +Renaissance. + +<a name="page260" id="page260"></a> +A man of thirty-five, to all who know him a very vital +force, a very original personality, who has all his life wanted to make +beautiful things in words out of his dream of life, has disappointed +himself and his friends. He is suddenly afforded the opportunity, by the +interest in Gaelic subjects that the Celtic Renaissance has awakened, to +gain a hearing for work of a kind he has long wanted to do. He had not +done such work previously, because he had to live by his pen and could +work consistently only at the sort of thing that would sell. He was well +known as a journeyman of letters, so well known for bookmaking, and the +ways of getting commissions from London editors and publishers, that his +knowledge of Highland life would be questioned. All in London knew him +as a Londoner. It would be useless for him to say that the Celtic +Renaissance had brought back his childhood to him, a childhood as +definitely dominated by a Highland nurse as Stevenson's was by the +Lowland Alison Cunningham. It would be useless to tell of his summers in +Argyllshire and among the inner isles, his intimacy with fishermen who +were as elemental as his own dreams of old time. It would have been cast +up to him that the editor of "The Canterbury Poets" could not be an +original writer, and the very nine days' wonder of "Vistas" would have +been pointed to to prove that he might now do well enough, as an +imitator, perhaps of Mr. Yeats, as he was in "Vistas;" successful as an +imitator of M. Maeterlinck, but that an original Highland writer could +not come out of Hampstead. There is no doubt in my mind that it was the +part of wisdom for Sharp to put out the new work under a + +<a name="page261" id="page261"></a> +pseudonym, +worldly wise if you will, but wise, too, with a higher wisdom. If he +could keep the side of him he had never yet exhausted through hackwork +apart from his other work, it would grow as it could not if it were a +part of his daily stint.</p> + +<p>Why Sharp chose a woman's name for his pseudonym has troubled many, but +this choice was, I think, as was the assumption of a pseudonym, the part +of wisdom. I do not believe, as he at times liked to believe, that he +attained a woman's standpoint. He had been complimented on all sides for +his composition of the wife's letters in "A Fellowe and his Wife" +(1892), in which Mrs. von Teuffel wrote the husband's. Sharp enjoyed +their writing as a <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">tour de force</span> and he probably believed they were +very womanly. I should say that they showed insight into womanly ways of +looking at things rather than a dramatic identification of himself with +woman such as is George Meredith's. Sharp had already been experimenting +with pseudonyms, that of "H.P. Siwaarmill," an anagram on his own name, +being that he recurred to most often. He had written the whole of "The +Pagan Review" in 1892 under eight different pseudonyms, and though, in +the estimation of those to whom "Fiona Macleod" is all but a sacred +name, it be sacrilegious to say it, William Sharp loved all sorts of +fantastic tricks, hoaxes, mystifications, though in almost all his +writing save in "Wives in Exile" he was seriousness itself. But the +chiefest reason of all, in my estimation, for his assumption of a +woman's name as his pseudonym was that it afforded greater protection +against discovery. There are those who + +<a name="page262" id="page262"></a> +believe that he chose it because +he wanted a chance to express that womanly element of human nature there +is in all men, and there are others who believe that he was the +possessor of a real dual personality in which the "Fiona Macleod's self" +was a woman's consciousness; but he very infrequently, after "The +Mountain Lovers" (1895), kept in mind in the writings he published as +"Fiona Macleod's" that their author was supposed to be a woman, and it +is wonderful, indeed, that he was able to preserve the secret until the +end. In the earlier "Fiona Macleod" writing there is no revelation of +the wide acquaintance with literature that was Sharp's, but despite his +harassment by the constant identification of himself with "Fiona +Macleod," he gradually allowed to creep into that writing more and more +of what was known to be the knowledge of William Sharp, a knowledge +unlikely to be also that of a Highland lady who lived apart from the +world. His friends pointed out to him the danger he was running in +writing from what was obviously a man's standpoint, as in his tales of +the wars of Gael and Gall, and of revealing several sorts of interest +that were known to be his, but their warnings were in vain. He was +apparently unable to limit himself to the restrictions of the part of +himself he had essayed to restrict himself to.</p> + +<p>For my own part I was now sure the writing must be Sharp's and now sure +it could not be his. I did not know of his intimate concern with +questions of feminism until I read Mrs. Sharp's "Memoir," so that +outspoken chant, the "Prayer of Women" in "Pharais," "Fiona Macleod's" +first book, colored my outlook on all the writing that followed. + +<a name="page263" id="page263"></a> +I had +no doubt at all but that "Pharais" was written by a woman, but "The +Dan-nan-Ron" and "Silk o' the Kine" in "The Sin-Eater" (1895) seemed to +me hardly a woman's. "The Washer of the Ford" (1896) was written from +the man's point of view, too, but "Green Fire" (1896) seemed feminine +again. So I wobbled in my opinion until "The Divine Adventure" (1900) +and the critical writings of the volume that story gives title to, and +the critical writing in "The Winged Destiny" (1905), made me believe +again that "Fiona Macleod" was surely Sharp. I did not come upon the +articles that now make up "Where the Forest Murmurs" (1907) until after +the death of Sharp and the disclosure of the secret. Had his death not +divulged the secret of the identity of "Fiona Macleod," it seems to me +that collection must have disclosed it. Had Sharp lived after this there +would not have been possible for him much further work from the +seclusion his pseudonym gave him, and I doubt, once the secret was out, +it would have been possible for him to write of things Celtic with the +old gusto.</p> + +<p>After all has been said it must be confessed, I think, that Sharp did +not know the Highlander, either of the mainland or of the islands, very +intimately. He wrote much better of his dream of life on the west coast +in prehistoric times—out of his imagination of what that life must have +been, an imagination founded on the reading of the old legends and +modern collections of folk-lore, such as the "Carmina Gadelica" of Mr. +Carmichael—than he did out of his knowledge of Highland life of to-day. +The Achannas are in many of his tales of modern + +<a name="page264" id="page264"></a> + +times, and wherever +they are there is unreality, if not melodrama. Unreality, too, there is, +in many phases, in the modern tales, and "highfalutinness" everywhere in +them. And both unreality and "highfalutinness" offend in these modern +tales as they would not in the tales of far times, though in these, as a +matter of fact, they are not so much in evidence.</p> + +<p>It would almost seem that the approach to reality drove Highland +atmosphere from the stories. In "The Sin-Eater," one of the best of his +writings that might be classed as a short story, the sin-eater and his +confidant are Highlanders, but the description of the scene of his +misfortune, the steading of the Blairs, might well have been that +nearest to "Silence Farm." It is faithfully described, the scenes about +the little home, whose owner lies dead, having the very smack of +realism. In the latter part of the story the scene shifts to the coast +and the tang of the story turns Gaelic and unreal. Was it thus, I +wonder, always to the imagination of William Sharp, Lowland life real, +Highland life mystical?</p> + +<p>Sharp was handicapped, of course, in coming to the subject material he +could best handle late in life, "Pharais" (1894) and "The Mountain +Lovers" (1895), the first books published as by "F.M.," being just as +definitely 'prenticework in their kind as was "Children of To-morrow" +(1890) in its kind. Of the long stories other than "Children of +To-morrow" published in his own name, "A Fellowe and his Wife" (1892) +and "Wives in Exile" (1896) have no very serious intention, though both +are well done after their kind, records of imaginings, respectively + +<a name="page265" id="page265"></a> +of +experiences of art life in Rome, and of yachting experiences in the +Irish Sea. It was not until "Silence Farm" (1899), as I have said, that, +as William Sharp, he found himself.</p> + +<p>"The Gypsy Christ" (1896), which might well have been developed into a +full-fledged romance, is less original than any of his longer writings. +It is, like "The Weird of Michael Scott" and "A Northern Night," closely +allied to essays of his other rôle, that of "F.M.," to catch and express +"the tempestuous loveliness of terror," such as the catastrophe of "The +Mountain Lovers," "The Barbaric Tales," and those short stories in which +Gloom Achanna is hero-villain. It is in such work that Sharp shows his +affinities to Poe, affinities which are not elsewhere as obvious as his +affinities to De Quincey. Narrative was not native to De Quincey any +more than it was to Sharp, though Sharp was led toward it by his +interest in character, an interest that was not in any large measure +given to De Quincey, who, when he turned to narrative other than that +which relates what had happened to him or what he had dreamed had +happened to him, makes the reader feel he did so as a concession to the +public. Another interest that was Sharp's, an interest amounting to a +passion,—out-of-doors,—De Quincey had not at all, for all his devotion +to Wordsworth and to Wordsworth's interests. Like De Quincey, on the +other hand, Sharp delights in "fine writing," in both senses of the +phrase, in the "highfalutin" that is objectionable, and in the ornately +beautiful that is one fitting expression of romantic thought. Both men +preferred the mouth-filling + + +<a name="page266" id="page266"></a> +word to the simple one, the Latinical +adjective to the Saxon; both had rather see visions and dream dreams +than write about the "common light of common hours"; both goad their +imaginations until they run riot and so confuse their possessors, who +should control them, that they are unable to distinguish between what is +fact and what is fancy. You could carry the analogy further, to events +of their lives—the runnings-away in boyhood; the devoted friendships to +poets in youth; the incredible amount of hard work achieved in manhood +despite of often recurring illnesses.</p> + +<p>Of the long stories published as by "F.M.," Sharp repudiated "Flora +MacDonald" because it was too much in the way of "ordinary romance," and +"Green Fire" for the same reason and because it was largely about +Brittany, a country with which, by some strange chance, he did not make +himself familiar, though he had visited and learned to know well at +least parts of all the other Celtic countries. It is to my mind, +however, if not so definitely of a wholeness of texture as "Pharais" or +"The Mountain Lovers," or so singular, less monotonous than either. All +three of these stories disappoint my memory of them when I again read +them. This is, I believe, because all three of them—and for that matter +many of the short stories as well—are incompletely realized, or +because—in the case of two of them, "The Mountain Lovers" and "Green +Fire"—they are unevenly written. Their high intention and atmosphere +remain with you after you have put the books aside, and in the course of +time you forget their hurried writing, their inconsistencies, and + +<a name="page267" id="page267"></a> +their +qualities of the "Shilling Shocker," the result of their author's +failure to attain "the tempestuous loveliness of terror" that are in so +many of them, long or short. As aids to this effacement of the +cheapening elements are the very materials of the tales, their +characters, now elemental, now other-worldly, and their background of +mountains that uplift the spirit, and of menacing sea.</p> + +<p>That Sharp wrote less exactly of the present-day people of the Highlands +than of the background of their lives was largely because he had few +opportunities to learn to know them intimately. There was a basis for +such intimacy laid in his childhood, in the fact that his nurse was a +Highland woman; there was something built on this basis by his boyhood's +vacations in many parts of Argyllshire and voyages elsewhere along the +west coast. Youth spent in Arran and Skye would have counted for much +more, for the boy, once he is no longer child and before he has reached +his youth and is awakening man, is not much more interested in people in +real life for what they are than he is in minute description of their +characters in books. He likes men for the sportsmanlike and adventurous +things they can do, and he likes to read records of things sportsmanlike +and adventurous, but men as men, unless they are eccentric to +grotesqueness, do not arrest his attention. Even the dreamy boys, the +artistic boys, are not likely to learn much of others, so preoccupied +are they with themselves.</p> + +<p>It was thus, I think, that Sharp's childhood was not what he would in +later years have had it, not what in "The Laughter of Peterkin" he +alleges the childhood of + +<a name="page268" id="page268"></a> +"Fiona Macleod" to have been. For all the +influence of "Barabal," his nurse, it seems from his writing that her +stories remain with him more as suggestions to imagination than as +definite memories, and that the fisherman referred to in "Sheumas" left +with him little more than "Barabal." How fresh and wonderful to him was +actual contact with Highland life is almost pathetically revealed in a +letter he wrote to Mrs. Sharp from Kilcreggan in the summer of 1894. In +this letter he is all but exultant in the recording of the securing of +"Celtic" material from a "Celtic Islesman from Iona." Of the actual life +of the Islesmen and Glensmen he could have known but little, for long +living among them is necessary to their understanding,—they are, as he +wrote in this same letter, "passionately reticent." It was not the way +of Sharp to fall back, in this deficiency of experience, on old legends +and folk-tales collected in his own day, but to trust to his imagination +as that was quickened by what knowledge he had of life in the inner +isles and in Argyllshire, and by the very atmosphere of known places +there that seemed to demand, as Stevenson put it, to have stories +invented to fit them.</p> + +<p>It is said, too,—Mrs. Sharp gives her authority to the story,—that +friendship with the woman to whom he dedicated "Pharais," "E.W.R.," +stimulated him to the work. "Because of her beauty, her strong sense of +life, and of her joy of life," writes Mrs. Sharp in her memoir of her +husband, "because of her keen intuitions and mental alertness, her +personality stood for him as a symbol of the heroic women of Greek and +Celtic days, a symbol that, + +<a name="page269" id="page269"></a> +as he expressed it, unlocked new doors in +his mind and put him in touch with the ancestral memories of his race." +And Mrs. Sharp quotes him further as declaring "without her there would +have been no 'Fiona Macleod.'" Perhaps; but I doubt if, after the Celtic +Renaissance had won a hearing, anything could have prevented Sharp from +following what was, after all, a natural bent. I am not going to argue +the matter out, but he himself admitted that his development as "Fiona +Macleod" began "while I was still a child," and there is proof in almost +every volume he published, even before he knew Mrs. Rinder ("E.W.R.," +must of course be the author of "The Shadow of Arvor"), that his +tendency was toward what became characteristic of "Fiona Macleod."</p> + +<p>It was the love that Sharp had for all sorts of "psychic things," the +mysterious, the unaccountable, the hidden, that led him to believe that +"without her there would have been no 'Fiona Macleod.'" Sharp himself, +when his "other self," with sense of humor alert, was more than willing +to admit that it is easy to believe what one wishes to believe; and he +delighted to tell a story at the expense of Mr. Yeats illustrative of +the trite fact. Sharp went one day, in London, to call on Mr. Yeats. +When lunch-time came, they set about cooking eggs. Mr. Yeats held them +in a frying-pan over the little fire in the grate. As they slipped +about, Mr. Yeats, all the while looking back in the room away from the +fire as he talked to Sharp, allowed the pan to tip too far and the eggs +fell out into the fire. So absorbed was he in the topic of conversation, +most appropriately the disappearance of material things, + +<a name="page270" id="page270"></a> +that he did +not notice the catastrophe or the quick disappearance of the eggs among +the coals. When his perfervidness subsided for a moment, he turned to +see if they were done. "There, what did I tell you!" said he; "our talk +of these things has conjured up the powers and the eggs are gone." Sharp +did not tell him of the accident. And there were no more eggs in the +room to have for lunch.</p> + +<p>One of the reasons that led William Sharp to write "Silence Farm" (1899) +was to have something under his own name that might be very different +from the stories of "Fiona Macleod." And "Silence Farm" is very +different, a story without the distinguishing qualities of "Pharais" or +"The Divine Adventure," and suggesting kinship to the work of his other +self only through certain likenesses of domestic irregularity in the +family of Archibald Ruthven to other domestic irregularity in the family +of Torcall Cameron of "The Mountain Lovers." Though not of so original a +kind, perhaps, as the best of the "Fiona Macleod" work, "Silence Farm" +has to it a "wholeness of good tissue" that belongs to little work of +this most uneven writer. "Silence Farm," I would emphasize again as I +emphasized at the opening of this paper, is better written, both as +regards style and architectonic quality, and it is a truer reading of +life, than any of the Highland stories. Though it is a story of to-day, +and about a life much like that made familiar by the writers of the +Kailyard school, it is not to them, but to such kindred +unsentimentalized work as Mr. Shan Bullock's, that you instinctively +compare it. The people, indeed, are the same + +<a name="page271" id="page271"></a> +dour Presbyterians, though +the one writes of Scotland and the other of the North of Ireland. And as +you compare the material of "Silence Farm" with that of "The Squireen," +for instance, you note, too, that the art of both is the art of Mr. +Hardy.</p> + +<p>There is little modern writing with which to compare the Highland +stories of Sharp. It is not that the Highlands have not been much +written about, but that they have been written about intimately by but +few. No part of the world so out of the world as their outlying islands, +the Hebrides, has been so bewritten by travelers from Martin's time to +our own; but comparatively few have known either islands or mainland +well enough to dare novels of their life, and of those who have so dared +no one up to the time of Sharp had written a great realistic story of +the Highlands, and but one or two great romances. Now we have Mr. Neil +Munro, like Sharp a very uneven writer, whose "Children of Tempest"—to +take one of his best stories—now delights and now tortures you; and +yesterday we had William Black, famous for sunsets. Black knew the +Hebrides well, very well for a Lowlandman turned Londoner, and he +labored hard to make his books true and beautiful. Unfortunately it was +not in him to do fine work, not even the best sort of the second order +of novelists,—such work as Trollope's, for instance, which by dint of +faithfulness and humanity almost persuades you now and then that it is +of higher than second order. Black was faithful to what he saw and +broadly sympathetic, but his writing not only lacks distinction, but, +even at its best, as in "The Princess of Thule," home thrust to one's + + +<a name="page272" id="page272"></a> +interest. Yet, such as it is, it is all but all that we have which +attempts to put before us any broad view of Highland life. The one man +of the generation older than the generation of Mr. Sharp who might have +drawn Highland life greatly, Robert Buchanan, was diverted all his life, +as Sharp was in the twenties and thirties, from doing what he would to +what would boil the pot, but he left at least one story, a story of +Sutherland, "A Child of Nature," to prove to us what his reading of +Highland life might have been. Had Stevenson been born a Highlander, he +might have given us both novels of the Highlands of the order of "Weir +of Hermiston," and romances really Highland in quality, as "Kidnapped" +and "Catriona" are not.</p> + +<p>I suppose that, back of all the failure to deal realistically with +Highland life, this rare attainment of a romance of Highland life at all +faithful to it, is the making of the Highlander into a stage hero by +Scott. There are those to-day who fail to find any glamour in "Waverley" +or "Rob Roy" or "The Legend of Montrose," but it is still there to me, +investing the figures of Fergus MacIvor and the MacGregor and the +Children of the Mist as it did in childhood, when I was so fascinated +that I prized my Campbell plaided paper soldiers next to my Continentals +in blue and buff. In going through an old trunkful of school-books only +the other day, I came upon one of these bonneted fellows, still +wonderfully preserved, in an old atlas of the heavens, and then I knew +all of a flash why it was that the poor boy soldiers that I saw in +Highland accoutrement in the yard of Edinburgh Castle during the Boer +War so disappointed me by their appearance and + +<a name="page273" id="page273"></a> +bearing. They were not +half so brave as the piper who used to make the rounds of my boyhood's +town and bring tears to my eyes with his "Campbells are Comin'." I write +this that my quarrel with much of what Sharp has written of the +Highlands, that portion that seems to me sentimentalized or one-sided, +may not be put down to lack of appreciation of the romance, the +eeriness, and otherworldliness that there unquestionably are in that +life.</p> + +<p>It is their aloofness from the everyday story, their unusual use of the +supernatural that has given the longer stories written out of the "Fiona +mood," as Mr. Sharp once spoke of his possession, their appeal to most +readers, but there is here in America a class who put the highest +valuation on the shorter stories Mr. Sharp called "spiritual tales." To +those who hold this view "The Divine Adventure" is of the nature of +revelation. To me it is hardly this, but very interesting, not so much +for its putting of the relations of Body, Will, and Spirit to one +another in life and at death, as for its beautiful writing, and for its +definite betrayal, when its author is writing most intimately, of a +man's attitude, though he published the story as the work of "Fiona +Macleod." These "spiritual tales" do not belong, all of them, to his +"Fiona Macleod" period, for "Vistas" (1894) contains many of them, +though they are cast here in dialogue form, and there are others among +the work published under his own name. In fact, the writing under the +two names never becomes liker in quality and intention than when it is +"spiritual." The sketch from Part II of "The Dominion of Dreams" (1899), +entitled "The Book of the Opal," for + +<a name="page274" id="page274"></a> +instance, is written on the very +key of "Fragments of the Lost Journals of Piero di Cosimo" (1896), far +apart their subject material, and "The Hill-Wind" by "W.S." dedicated +as it is to "F.M.," might well be a rejected passage from "The Mountain +Lovers." There is the color of the Highlands and Islands about many of +these mystical stories, about "The Hill-Wind," by "W.S." and "The Wind, +the Shadow, and the Soul," the epilogue "F.M." wrote to the "Dominion of +Dreams"; but most of these shorter mystical tales have not the tang and +savor of farm-home on lonely moors, or fisher's hut on the lonelier +machar, that is characteristic of most of the tales long and short, that +deal with modern days.</p> + +<p>Nor are the meanings of these "spiritual tales" consistently indicated +in symbols taken from Scottish life, nor is their supernaturalism native +to it. Mrs. Spoer (Ada Goodrich-Freer), in her "Outer Isles" (1902), +tells us "The Celtic Gloom" amuses the Hebridean. If so, what effect +would such discussion as that of "The Lynn of Dreams" and "Maya" have +upon him? But if such essays are not written out of Highland life, they +are none the less interesting, and in the case of "Maya," with its +consideration of waking dream, beautiful as art, and valuable, too, as a +contribution to science.</p> + +<p>So far does Sharp go in his belief as to the apprehension of thought +through powers other than those of the senses, that in "The Winged +Destiny" he can look forward to a time "when the imagination shall lay +aside words and pigments and clay, as raiment needless during the +festivals of the spirit, and express itself in the thoughts which + +<a name="page275" id="page275"></a> +inhabit words—as light inhabits water or as greenness inhabits grass." +Not only does he foresee such a time, but he foreshadows it, heralds it +in some of his sketches, "Aileen" for one, by attempting it. Perhaps he +has succeeded, perhaps not. To me the attempt is a failure, not, I +think, because he is writing for to-morrow, for that age when the +spiritual awakening he so often prophesied shall have come, but because +he is attempting what cannot be done in any age. If he were seeking only +suggestion, well and good. But he seeks more, and fails, I think, to +attain more. It seems to me impossible that the suggestions he creates +can ever be more than suggestions. They cannot become definite concepts +that will mean the same thing to all men. Suggestion, the opening-up of +vistas, is a high attribute of the art he follows; but he is not content +with suggestion, he would seek more definite expression of what, after +all, is not thought but mood. So it is that he is most successful when +conveying mood and less successful when conveying esoteric thought. As a +critic, of course, on a plane easier for the conveyance of thought, +Sharp is definite enough, completely successful in conveying the ideas +that he intends to convey.</p> + +<p>Often, I fear, when Sharp intends "spiritual history," either in a tale +wholly devoted to this purpose, as "The Divine Adventure," or as +explanatory to the incidents of some more tangible tale, he is really +only playing with words, beautiful words, words sometimes so beautiful +that we are apt to forget that words are to be used not alone for +beauty's sake. Often, again, I fear, he will introduce beautiful symbols +simply for their beauty and not because + +<a name="page276" id="page276"></a> +they have a real purpose, not +because they will more intimately convey, even to the initiated, the +intent of his writing. That these practices are the result of +carelessness, sometimes, as well as of his subservience to beauty, the +fascination that words merely as words or visions merely as visions +exert upon him, is, I think, true. It is but seldom, I believe, that the +underlying thought is incoherent. In almost all of his earlier writing, +however, even in the earlier "Fiona" writing, he is very careless. He +contradicts himself in his short stories as to facts, he gets his family +relationships tangled in a way that cannot be explained by any process +of nature, and so, too, I think, he gets his symbols mixed, or deludes +himself into the belief that something that was hastily written "came to +him" that way and so should be preserved in that exact expression, even +though to him at the second reading it meant nothing definite. He jumps +to conclusions again and again in what he writes about birds, where I +can follow him on a certain footing of knowledge. If he is so careless +about facts, if he can, even though it is a slip, confuse Mary Magdalene +and the Virgin Mary, if he can mention birds in a description of +Highland landscape that is characteristic of a certain time of year when +birds of that species would be in the Highlands only by accident at that +time of year, it is more than likely, slips though these may be, that +there will be similar slips in all he writes, no fewer, it is likely, in +his writings of psychic things than elsewhere.</p> + +<p>There is possible, of course, no hard-and-fast classification of his +writings. Class shades into class almost imperceptibly. + + +<a name="page277" id="page277"></a> +It is +particularly difficult to draw the line between the several kinds of +stories and sketches he writes that involve supernaturalism of one kind +and another. There is possible, however, a rough-and-ready distinction +between those stories of his which are esoterically mystical and those +which, while concerned with the supernatural, are concerned with it in +the way familiar in old romance. Of this "usual supernatural" are those +in which "second sight" is the motive, second sight which is always to +be looked for as the commonest supernatural motive in the writing of all +Gaels, either Alban or Irish. Sharp introduced "second sight" into "The +Son of Allan" (1881); it is in "Pharais" (1894), the first of his "F.M." +work; it is developed at some length in "Iona" (1900), which is a +microcosm of all his writing. In "Iona," Sharp puts himself on record as +holding stoutly belief in the reality of the power:—</p> + + <div class="display"> <p>The faculty itself is so apt to the + spiritual law that one wonders why it is so set apart in doubt. It + would, I think, be far stranger if there were no such faculties. + That I believe, it were needless to say, were it not that these + words may be read by many to whom this quickened inward vision is a + superstition, or a fantastic glorification of insight.</p> </div> + +<p>The Achannas, in the uncanny stories in which they are heroes and +villains, are all possessed by the power of the second sight, but second +sight is not the most remarkable of their supernatural powers. Hypnotic +suggestion Gloom uses as an everyday agent in his affairs. It is through +hypnotic suggestion that he puts madness upon Alasdair M'Ian, playing to +him the Pibroch of the Mad, + +<a name="page278" id="page278"></a> +Alasdair M'Ian, in telling whose story +"Fiona Macleod" revealed—I suppose, by chance—something of the +struggle of William Sharp to succeed in letters. Much more frequently, +however, he uses a supernatural power that is further removed from those +in which modern science is interested, such as the machination of +fairies that made Allison Achanna the "Anointed Man"—that, in plain +speech, had driven him fey; or such as the lure of the serpent goddess +that drove to his death the piper hero of "By the Yellow Moon Rock," or +the exchanging of human child for fairy child that is the burden of +"Faraghaol."</p> + +<p>It is much more likely that William Sharp would have made more of this +changeling motive had it not come so near to the question of dual +personality, which it would be dangerous to him to discuss, as would +that question so closely akin, the question of people who are +"away,"—that is, with the fairies,—a kindly explanation of insanity, +chronic or recurrent. As William Sharp he has touched on the question of +dual personality several times in his verses, and very definitely in "A +Fellowe and his Wife." In this last-named book he says, in a letter that +the Countess Ilse writes to her husband in Rügen: "This duality is so +bewildering. I to be myself, whom you know, and whom I know—and then +that other I, whom you do not know at all and whom I only catch glimpses +of as in a mirror, or hear whispering for a moment in the twilight." +That he could not take up the topic so definitely in his later writings +must have, indeed, been a cross to him, for there was hardly any other +question, unless perhaps that of "ancestral memory," which interested + +<a name="page279" id="page279"></a> +him more deeply. It might be argued, I suppose, that he did discuss it +in "The Divine Adventure," in considering the relations of Spirit, Will, +and Body. Mrs. Sharp, I take it, so holds when she says in her "Memoir" +that the William Sharp work was that of the Will and the "Fiona Macleod" +work beyond the control of the Will. And it is true that these three, +the Spirit, Will, and Body, though each is given a distinctive +personality, each a memory distinct from the memory of the others, are +all but the component parts of one man. Mrs. Sharp does not, however, +anywhere avow directly a belief in the possession of a real dual +personality by her husband, and she definitely contradicts Mr. Yeats for +his expression of belief that "William Sharp could not remember what as +'Fiona Macleod' he had said to you in conversation."</p> + +<p>Very different from these short stories I have been discussing are three +of the four contained in the volume entitled "Madge o' the Pool" (1896), +published as by William Sharp. Of the one that is somewhat in the manner +of certain of the "F.M." stories, the "Gypsy Christ," I have spoken. +Two, "The Coward" and "The Lady in Hosea," are but "the usual thing." +"Madge o' the Pool" is the one really worth while. In this story, with +such river pirates as we have met, sentimentalized, in "Our Mutual +Friend," as material, Sharp writes as realistically as he does in +"Silence Farm," and with a sympathy and pathos that his objective method +cannot exclude.</p> + +<p>There are episodes or sketches, some of them what sharp calls "prose +imaginings," throughout his many books, that one may hardly call short +stories, or myths, + +<a name="page280" id="page280"></a> +or studies in folk-lore, or criticism, or any of the +other many kinds of writing that he essayed. Perhaps "memories" would be +the proper general term for writing of this kind. In almost every one of +these episodes or sketches there is a germ of a story, and some, I +suppose, regard them as but unrealized art. But I for one am glad Mr. +Sharp did not "work them up." In them are some of his best writing and +some of that most personal and intimate. I have spoken of "Aileen" and +"Barabal"; "Sheumas, a Memory," is another that is memorable, and +memorable too, are "The Sea Madness" and "The Triad." "The Triad" is +almost his <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">credo</span>, certainly a statement of the things he holds "most +excellent"—"primitive genius, primitive love, primitive memory." Here +Sharp recurs, as so often in his writing, to "ancestral memory," that +possession of men by which they are aware of what was in the world +before they were, through oneness with the universal memory into which +they are absorbed in dream or vision or of which they become aware by +what we call intuition. If such a power be restricted so that its +possessor recalls only certain parts of antiquity, he is virtually in +the state of him who believes he remembers what he remembers because of +previous incarnations. I have no personal opinion to express on the +subject, but if such memories exist in us because of our participation +in a universal memory or because of reincarnation, it is easy to explain +why Sharp is best in his writing of myths, his pictures of the wild +beauties of love and war and dream in barbaric Erin and Alba. It is +because he is the reincarnation of the shanachie of the Dark Ages. When +he thought of reincarnation, + +<a name="page281" id="page281"></a> +however, in relation to himself, he +thought, I have no doubt, of himself as the reincarnation of a druid, +one who had been aware of mysteries; but what he really was, in life, +with his magnificent enthusiasm and bravado,—picturesque raiment after +all and no more for the high-hearted and inherently ailing body of +him,—was this reincarnation of the shanachie, such an one as his own +Oran the Monk turned tale-teller. If you doubt that he was shanachie, +not druid, compare the two legends in "Beyond the Blue Septentrions." +The ordered beauty of the legend that tells of the derivation of the +name of Arthur from Arcturus falls familiarly on our ears. It is +evidently made under a lamp by one who has read many old legends. It is +no druidic revelation. The other, that which ends with the three great +hero-leaps of Fionn from the Arctic Floes to the Pole, from the Pole up +to Arcturus, from Arcturus to the Hill of Heaven itself, is fantastic, +bizarre, extravagant to grotesqueness, with the very flamboyance of old +Irish legend and modern Irish folk-tale. In other words, it is in the +very manner of the shanachie of the Dark Ages, whether his work was +recorded then as court poem or has been handed down by word of mouth +among the folk. Nor is there anything inconsistent in this wild +imagining with a very different power displayed in "moralities" like his +"Last Supper." I have heard stories as incongruous, one uproarious, +another of cloistral quiet and piety, from the old Irish gardener with +whom I spent a large part of my happier days, the days from seven to +seventeen. Lawrence lost his life doing a "retreat" morning after +morning on the cold + +<a name="page282" id="page282"></a> +stone floor of a Vincentian church, not in any +sudden repentance at fourscore and three for the sins of his youth for +they had been fewer than those of almost all I know, but in the usual +way of his austere life. Yet Lawrence was just as much himself when he +was telling me stories of Dean Swift that were full of malice and +brutality and orgiac ecstasy.</p> + +<p>The range of the shanachie is wide, and wide, too, the range of Sharp in +the rôle of shanachie of barbaric life on both sides of the Moyle. Among +such writings there are few tellings of the order of the folk-tale, more +of the order of the hero saga, many—perhaps the best of them—of an +order all his own that has developed, it is likely, from the old +"Saints' Lives," but to which he has given a ring of authenticity that +makes them seem descended from an antiquity as remote as that of +folk-tale or hero-tale. "The Flight of the Culdees" brings before you +with vividness what must have been the life of the Celtic missionaries +in the days when the men out of Lochlin began to seek the Summer Isles; +and "The Annir Choile" and "The Woman with the Net," what was the fate +they meted out to those among themselves who slipped back into the +pleasant old ways of paganism. These are written out of his own +revisualization of the past. More immediately sprung of the old legends +are "The Three Marvels of Hy," which tells of the inner life of Columba +and his brethren on Iona, and "Muime Chriosd," which utilizes folk-lore +as old or older than the legends collected by Mr. Alexander Carmichael +in his pursuit of the stories of St. Bride among the peasantry of the +Outer Isles. "The Song of + + +<a name="page283" id="page283"></a> +the Sword" and "Mircath" have in them the +battle-madness of the Viking, whetted to its keenest intensity as he +meets the hard resistance of the Hebrideans; and "The Laughter of +Scathach" and "The Sad Queen," that more terrible fury of the Amazon who +ruled in Skye. Than this last-named story Sharp has done no starker +writing, but it is so evidently from a man's point of view that it +confirmed many in the belief that "Fiona Macleod" could not be a woman.</p> + +<p>"The Washer of the Ford" has its roots in folk-lore, but it is so +remoulded in the mind of the writer that it is rather a re-creation of +the old belief than a restoration of it. There are those who would +rather have had Sharp follow the tales as they are told by Campbell of +Islay, Cameron of Brodick, and Carmichael of South Uist, but to me, +unless the tale is one familiar to many readers, such a remoulding, if +done with power, is surely a prerogative of the artist. But when he +takes a well-known legendary character, as well known among the Gaels as +Achilles among English school-boys, and changes his hair from black to +golden and his stature from short to tall, utterly transforming not only +our picture of him, but the significance of his deeds, then I object, as +I would object if he had made the fair-haired and great-statured +Achilles into such "a little dark man" as the Red Branch legends record +Cuchullin to have been. Nor would I quarrel even with his changing of +the spirit of the old tales if he had always, as he has almost always, +substituted a new beauty for the old beauty of the legend in its bardic +or folk form. It is in the few instances in which his dream of + +<a name="page284" id="page284"></a> +the old +tale does not lift to so great a power in its way as the old tale +possessed in its way that I protest. Of such a nature are some of the +changes Sharp made in his retelling of the "Three Sorrows of +Story-Telling" in "The Laughter of Peterkin," which, it must be +remembered, however, was hurried work, almost hackwork.</p> + +<p>Sharp was particularly successful, I think, in his handling, in the +three tales—he calls them "legendary moralities"—in which he brings +Christ to the straths of Argyll. These three are "The Last Supper," "The +Fisher of Men," and "The Wayfarer." The last is the least successful of +the three, but significant in its attack on certain forms of +Presbyterianism for their attempts to kill out, as un-Christian, the old +ways of life among the Highlanders. This charge was made fifty years ago +by Campbell of Islay, and it had been repeated only yesterday by Mr. +Carmichael. William Black and Mr. Munro confirm it, too, in their +novels, and, in fact, it is only what one expects of Puritanism, whether +in its dominating of the Scotch Presbyterian minister or of the Irish +Catholic priest. The latter is to-day doing as much to kill the joy of +life in Connacht as did even the minister of the Free Kirk yesterday on +the Lews. It may have been partly to hide his identity that Sharp +assumed what some thought an anti-Presbyterian attitude in his "Fiona +Macleod" writing; it may have been the sympathy of the artist toward a +church that has conserved art that led him to what some thought a +pro-Catholic attitude; but scratch this gypsy artist and you find, +surprising as it may be, moral prejudice for Protestantism. Does he not +admire + +<a name="page285" id="page285"></a> +Torcall Cameron and Archibald Ruthven, stern Calvinists both? +"The Fisher of Men," and "The Last Supper" have in them the austere +beauty of the old morality plays, a beauty that is akin to the beauty of +the Puritan imagination of Bunyan, and a tenderness that we may in vain +look for there. They are written in all reverence and simplicity, and it +is no wonder we find Mr. Yeats suggesting that "Fiona Macleod" turn them +into plays for the Irish Theatre.</p> + +<p>I do not care so much for "The Birds of Emar," myths he has rewoven from +the "Mabinogion" into Gaelic texture, or the series that purport to be +collected among the Isles and are found to be very like certain +well-known Greek legends. These, too, seem to me reweavings, and the +"Treud-nan-Ron" and "The Woman at the Crossways"; and "The Man on the +Moor," though its origin is far from their origins, is also a reweaving. +In certain of his writing of this time Sharp passes over virtually into +criticism or comparative mythology, as in "Queens of Beauty" and +"Orpheus and Oisin," and in many of the papers of "Where the Forest +Murmurs." These all have interest; but some smell much of the lamp; and +none of them are to be compared to the best of his "Seanchas," to "The +Harping of Cravetheen," or "Enya of the Dark Eyes," or "Silk o' the +Kine," or "Ula and Urla"; or to his Plays "The House of Usna" and "The +Immortal Hour," in which, for all the savagery, there is nobility, the +nobility that was in the old legends themselves, that nobility that +withstood even the hand of Macpherson, that nobility that has been +reproduced most nobly of all in the "Deirdre" of Synge.</p> + + +<a name="page286" id="page286"></a> + +<p>I am not so sure that the tone of these old myths is always +distinctively Celtic, as it is undoubtedly in "The Annir Choile," and in +other "Seanchas" that reveal him at his best. There was viking blood in +Sharp, and it comes out, I think, in such tales as "The Song of the +Sword." How he came to write these barbaric tales I do not know, though +I have sometimes thought that the "Dhoya" (1891) of Mr. Yeats may have +suggested them, as the Hanrahan stories may have suggested certain of +the more modern tales. But whatever their genesis, the heroes and +heroines of the "Seanchas" seem to him like the heroes and heroines of +Homer and the Greek tragedians; and his friend whom he thought inspired +him to much of the "F.M." work stood, we must remember, as symbolical to +him of the women of Greek as well as of Celtic legend.</p> + +<p>There are many indications, in his last writing, not only in that +unpublished book on "Greek Backgrounds" and in his articles in the +magazines on Sicily, all by William Sharp, but in the "Fiona Macleod" +work, that he would have come to write of Greek antiquity with an +enthusiasm very like that with which he wrote of Gaelic antiquity. +"W.S." is speaking with the voice of "F.M." when he says in a letter to +Mrs. Sharp, dated Athens, January 29, 1904: "It is a marvelous +homecoming feeling I have here. And I know a strange stirring, a kind of +spiritual rebirth."</p> + +<p>One reason, perhaps, that the best work of Sharp has come out of his +consideration of the Celts of antiquity is that the stark stories he has +to tell of them restrain + +<a name="page287" id="page287"></a> +his style, a style too flamboyant when there +is in what he is writing a large opportunity for description of +landscape or exhibition of great emotion in his characters. Another +reason is, perhaps, that his tendency to introduce the supernatural is +more in harmony with the subject material got out of antiquity than of +the subject material got out of to-day. We can accept magic in these old +tales, even to the incantations of Bobaran the White that swayed the +waves of the sea so that Gaer, the son of Deirdre, was saved from the +men of Lochlin. That is as it should be in druidic times. It is +impossible, of course, that Bobaran had power over the waves, but in +such a story such an episode seems more probable than the possible +hypnotic suggestion of Gloom Achanna's pipe-playing that sent Manus +MacOdrum to his death among the fighting seals, because to-day we do not +often come upon such things. It is even less easy to accept the piping +to madness of Alasdair in "Alasdair the Proud." Hypnotic suggestion may +drive to death in the sea a man half fey because of sorrow long endured +and the superstition that he is descended from seals, but pipe-playing +cannot believably in modern tales drive a man insane, whatever it may do +in the famous old "Pied Piper of Hamelin" or other folk-tale.</p> + +<p>So, too, in the verse of Sharp, whether lyric or dramatic, it is the +Celt that inspires him to his best work. Nowhere does his verse win so +much of beauty and glamour as when his thought turns to the four cities +of Murias and Finias and Falias and Glorias, or when it breaks into a +chant on the lips of Etain, in "The Immortal Hour."</p> + + +<a name="page288" id="page288"></a> + +<p>Though there is less unevenness of technique, both in the style and in +the unfolding of the story, in these "Seanchas" than elsewhere in his +writing, the technique breaks down at times here, too, more usually +through sins of omission than through sins of commission. Sharp realized +the something wanting that so many find in much of his writing, even in +much that is most beautiful, realized it so keenly that he felt called +upon to explain. He explained not directly, it is true, as if in answer +to criticism, but none the less definitely in thus affirming his +attitude toward legends in the "Sunset of Old Tales": "We owe a debt, +indeed, to the few who are truly fit for the task [the collecting of +tales from oral tradition], but there are some minds which care very +little to hear about things when they can have the things themselves." +This statement explains in part why it is that the life of the people, +even that part of their life that fronts the past, has escaped him. He +prefers his dream, thinking that it is their dream, or the dream of +their ancestors. He has, indeed, the thing itself, the Highlander's +dream, and when it is given to him to impart that dream fully we forgive +him the proud words I have just quoted. The pity of it is he has not +always so succeeded through the way he has chosen, and then it is, of +course, that we condemn him for the lack of that humility the great +dramatic artist must have whereby he must forget himself and so +subordinate himself that tradition or life speaks through him.</p> + +<p>It is not to be wondered, then, that there is little direct record of +folk-lore of his own collecting in his writing, + +<a name="page289" id="page289"></a> +even when he is writing +of folk-topics. There are borrowings in plenty, especially in "Where the +Forest Murmurs," and even when the collecting seems his own, as it does +in "Earth, Fire, and Water," "Children of Water," and "Cuilidh Mhoire," +it is diamond dust, not diamonds, to which he gives so beautiful +setting.</p> + +<p>Just as appealing to Sharp as the old myths themselves are the +localities that tradition or the stories themselves assign as background +to them. He loves Iona not only for its gray and barren beauty, but +because it was here Columba wrought his wonders. "Iona," which fills the +major part of the volume "The Divine Adventure" gives title to, is the +finest in quality as well as the longest of his writings that may be +called, prosaically, topographical. They, in their varying ways, are +much more than merely topographical, whether done in the way of "F.M.," +as "Iona" is, and as "From the Hebrid Isles" is, and several papers from +"Where the Forest Murmurs"; or in the way of "W.S.," as "Literary +Geography" is. In this last-named book, Scott and Stevenson, among +others, are put against the background that inspired their work, as in +"Iona" certain stories are imagined so as to fit their surroundings and +certain legendary history narrated that is fitting to these surroundings +with an appropriateness almost too exact to be believable. In "Iona," +because he loved the island that inspired its writing beyond any other +of the places he loved greatly, is to be found some of his very best +work, and examples of all kinds of his writing, as I have said; and even +when this "topographical writing," as in some of his magazine articles, +is evidently + + +<a name="page290" id="page290"></a> +of the sort initially intended to "float cuts," it is very +well done, done most often with distinction. At times, of course, it +suffers from over-emphasis, as do the descriptive portions of his long +stories, but generally he attunes his writing to the genius of the +place. This is as true of his letters as of what he wrote for the +public, especially true of that series on Algiers from which Mrs. Sharp +quotes in her "Memoir." Papers of this sort, papers giving the genius of +place, Sharp was happier in, I think, than in those which are more +definitely the out-of-door essay. Sharp knew much of birds and small +mammals, of trees and plants, with a knowledge that evidently began in +childhood, but, as with so much else in his life, this knowledge he +never had time to fill out and deepen through patient observation. You +must not, then, turn to "Where the Forest Murmurs" to find writing of a +kind with that in which Thoreau and Jefferies so finely attained, much +less that loving intimacy with the personal side of birds and animals +that so humanly tempers the scientific spirit in White of Selborne. Nor +is there in them the racy earthiness of Mr. Burroughs. Their greatest +asset is their enthusiasm over the beauty of the world they are written +to praise; the next greatest their power of catching in words the mood +of a landscape; their next greatest their distinction of style, though +there are several in which the style is wholly without distinction. Now +and then, too, they are valuable for their guesses at the whys and +wherefores of things. There are to-day many explanations of what is +commonly called "The Lure of the Wild." Is not this as revelatory as +any?—</p> + + +<a name="page291" id="page291"></a> + + <div class="display"> <p>Is this because, in the wilderness, we + recover something of what we have lost?... Because we newly find + ourselves as though surprised into an intimate relationship of which + we have been unaware or have indifferently ignored? What a long way + the ancestral memory has to go, seeking, like a pale sleuth-hound, + among obscure dusks and forgotten nocturnal silences, for the lost + trails of the soul! It is not we only, you and I, who look into the + still waters of the wilderness and lonely places, and are often + dimly perplext, are often troubled we know not how or why: some + forgotten reminiscence in us is aroused, some memory, not our own, + but yet our heritage is perturbed, footsteps that have immemorially + sunk in ancient dusk move furtively along obscure corridors in our + brain, the ancestral hunter or fisher awakes, the primitive hillman + or woodlander communicates again with old forgotten intimacies and + the secret oracular things of lost wisdoms. This is no fanciful + challenge of speculation. In the order of psychology it is as + logical as in the order of biology is the tracing of our upright + posture or the deft and illimitable use of our hands, from + unrealizably remote periods wherein the pioneers of man reach slowly + forward to inconceivable arrivals.</p> </div> + +<p>The weakness of these essays that are like out-of-door essays, but are +not out-of-door essays, is their dearth of freshly observed fact. This +dearth would not matter so much if there were not so many of them, but a +book full of such essays with little original observation will pall, no +matter how well written, no matter how interesting the personality of +the writer. Thus it is that some of the essays of Jefferies pall, some +of those written in his last days, of Jefferies who had in his earlier +writing been so objective. In Thoreau there is a happy combination of +freshly observed fact with personal comment, and in Mr. + +<a name="page292" id="page292"></a> +Burroughs a +personal element greatly subdued, and presented in most of the essays +only through the selective art that has preserved the incidents he +relates out of many of a vast store of their kind.</p> + +<p>In these "nature studies" of Sharp, as in so much of his writing, there +is a great deal of generalization from phenomena superficially observed. +He is not so often inaccurate, but he is very often merely repetitive, +giving us in beautiful and oftentimes distinguished phrase what others +have given us before. Sharp wrote sometimes, I have no doubt, with the +thing he describes before him but oftener, it would seem, from notes, +and oftenest, I take it, from memory. Sometimes it is best to write thus +from memory. The unessential will fade out, the essential remain; but +with Sharp the trouble is that the first observation has often been +hurried. He was content with the beauty that he saw when he first +noticed the incident; he did not wait to observe what in the further +actions of the life observed would make that beautiful incident more +significant. It may, of course, be said that all he was after was the +impression that the passing incident made upon him. Perhaps so, and if +so, more is the pity, because, while, as I have said, one out-of-door +essay with little or even with nothing but the personality of the writer +may interest, or perhaps two such, or even ten, a book full will be +monotonous. At its best, however, his writing of "natural romance" is of +great beauty. "Still Waters," for one, is almost perfect, as perfect as +this sort of thing may be. It is wrought of his own experiences + +<a name="page293" id="page293"></a> +with +just enough of mythological data to give it the texture of old and +lasting things.</p> + +<p>"The Rainy Hyades," on the other hand, is largely a rehash of folk-lore +notes, second-hand work with very little added from experience and very +little finely imagined or recaptured by way of ancestral memory. At +times it would seem that, poor, tired man, he had to feed his flagging +invention from a dictionary of quotations. So, it appears, he has done +in his "Winter Stars" as well as in "The Rainy Hyades." As I think over +the unevenness of these essays, the beauty of "Still Waters," and the +obviousness of these others, I am brought back again to wondering what +Sharp would have done had all his time been his to do as he would with. +Such wonderment is, of course, idle, idle as that as to what Keats would +have done had he lived, for a man's art is judged by what it is, with no +tempering of the appraisement by what the man's life has been. +Fortunately there is inspiring work in plenty in Sharp, in this, as in +other phases of his work, to make readers turn to him when interest in +him as a phenomenon of current literature has passed away. It is hard to +think of the time when writing so beautiful as that of "Still Waters" +will not be sought by lovers of beauty in words and by lovers of beauty +in landscape, and when the opening of "The Coming of Dusk" will not be +turned to, as the opening of Emerson's "Nature" is turned to to-day.</p> + +<p>Were I to attempt to enumerate the critical writings of Sharp, from the +"Rossetti" of 1882 to "The Winged Destiny" of 1904, I should run up a +catalogue that would + +<a name="page294" id="page294"></a> +exceed any even of Walt Whitman's. For years Sharp +lived by criticism, as editor of "The Canterbury Poets" and as reviewer +for many of the London journals. To me none of this critical work is +significant until he came to write of the movement that carried him to +fame,—to fame, I say, because "Fiona Macleod" was famous for a decade, +and not only as a mystery, but as a revealer of a new beauty in words, +and as a widener of horizons.</p> + +<p>I have, I think, by this time made clear what to me is the great +strength of William Sharp—his power to revisualize the Celtic past of +Scotland and to imagine stories of that past that are as native to it as +those handed down in Bardic legend or folk-lore. I have emphasized my +belief that in other kinds of writing his attainment is less original, +though often beautiful in its imitativeness, and this imitativeness I +will explain as being due partly to that quality of the play-actor that +was in him as in so many of Celtic blood, partly to his lack of time to +hew out for himself a way of his own, and partly to his quick +responsiveness to any new beauty pointed out by work that he admired. It +was not altogether, however, lack of time that prevented his attainment +of a larger originality, an originality in other sorts of writing than +the "Seanchas." Sharp had an unfortunate disbelief in early life in the +value of technique. In the preface to the "Romantic Ballads" (1888), for +instance, he expressed the belief that "the supreme merit of a poem is +not perfection of art, but the quality of the imagination which is the +source of such real or approximate perfection." This, as I interpret + +<a name="page295" id="page295"></a> +it +means that a poem, when of perfect art, has back of that perfect art a +high imaginative quality; but by his own practice Sharp knows that he +thought the quality would suffice without the highest art in its +expression. It was this belief that made him leave his work incomplete; +he read his verses, no doubt, with the glow in which he wrote them +recalled to memory, and without the realization that he had not got down +on paper for others half of the creative force that was in him as he +wrote.</p> + +<p>I have found a reason for a lesser success than the early work of "Fiona +Macleod" promised to him in his imitativeness, but in some ways he was +handicapped, too, by lack of models to follow. Granted he could have +blazed other ways for himself than that of the "Seanchas," he lessened +the originality of his attainment by imitation, but if he could not have +so blazed other ways he just as surely could have gone further had he +had models, or rather good models, to follow, models, for instance, in +novels of Highland life. The very fact of there being great realistic +stories of Highland life might have made it possible for him to have +written a Highland "Silence Farm."</p> + +<p>But enough of what might have been: what is is good enough, good enough +at its best to treasure among those things that are a lasting part of +our lives. However great may be the reaction against his work because of +the nine days' wonder about the identity of its creator, certain parts +of it, certain tales and certain verses and a play, will hold their own +against the years. Through such tales + +<a name="page296" id="page296"></a> +as "The Sad Queen," and such +verses as "The Dirge of the Four Cities," and "The House of Usna" even +eyes of little vision may see "eternal beauty wandering on her way," +leaving about them a glamour as recurrent to the mind as sunset to the +skies.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-weight: bold;">THE END</span></p> +</div> + +<hr class="page"> + +<div> +<a name="toc_12"></a> +<h2>Appendix</h2> + +<p>PLAYS PRODUCED, IN DUBLIN, BY THE ABBEY THEATRE COMPANY AND ITS +PREDECESSORS, WITH DATES OF FIRST PERFORMANCES</p> + +<p> +</p><table summary=""><tbody> +<tr> + +<td>IRISH LITERARY THEATRE AT ANTIENT CONCERT ROOMS</td> +</tr> +</tbody></table><p> +</p> + +<p> +</p><table summary=""><tbody> +<tr> +<td>May 8, 1899.</td><td>"The Countess Cathleen."</td><td> W.B. Yeats.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>May 9, 1899.</td><td>"The Heather Field."</td><td> Edward Martyn.</td> + +</tr> +</tbody></table><p> +</p> + + + +<p> +</p><table summary=""><tbody> +<tr> +<td>IRISH LITERARY THEATRE AT THE GAIETY THEATRE</td> +</tr> +</tbody></table><p> +</p> + +<p> +</p><table summary=""><tbody> + +<tr> +<td>Feb. 19, 1900.</td><td>"The Bending of the Bough."</td><td> George Moore.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Feb. 19, 1900.</td><td>"The Last Feast of the Fianna."</td><td>Alice Milligan.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Feb. 20, 1900.</td><td>"Maeve."</td><td> Edward Martyn.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Oct. 21, 1901.</td><td>"Diarmuid and Grania."</td><td>W.B. Yeats and George Moore.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Oct. 21, 1901.</td><td>"The Twisting of the Rope."</td><td> Douglas Hyde. (The first Gaelic play produced in any theatre.)</td> +</tr> +</tbody></table><p> +</p> + + +<p> +</p><table summary=""><tbody> +<tr> +<td>MR. W.G. FAY'S IRISH NATIONAL DRAMATIC COMPANY AT ST. TERESA'S HALL, CLARENDON STREET</td> +</tr> +</tbody></table><p> +</p> + +<p> +</p><table summary=""><tbody> +<tr> +<td>Apr. 2, 1902.</td><td>"Deirdre."</td><td> "A.E."</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Apr. 2, 1902.</td><td>"Kathleen ni Houlihan."</td><td> W.B. Yeats.</td> +</tr> +</tbody></table><p> +</p> + + + +<p> +</p><table summary=""><tbody> +<tr> +<td>IRISH NATIONAL DRAMATIC COMPANY AT ANTIENT CONCERT ROOMS</td> + +</tr> +</tbody></table><p> +</p> + +<p> +</p><table summary=""><tbody> +<tr> +<td>Oct. 29, 1902.</td><td>"The Sleep of the King."</td><td> Seumas O'Cuisin.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Oct. 29, 1902.</td><td>"The Laying of the Foundations."</td><td> Fred Ryan.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Oct. 30, 1902.</td><td>"A Pot of Broth."</td><td> W.B. Yeats.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Oct. 31, 1902.</td><td>"The Racing Lug."</td><td> Seumas O'Cuisin.</td> +</tr> +</tbody></table><p> + +</p> + +<p> +</p><table summary=""><tbody> +<tr> +<td>IRISH NATIONAL THEATRE SOCIETY, MOLESWORTH HALL</td> +</tr> +</tbody></table><p> +</p> + +<p> +</p><table summary=""><tbody> +<tr> +<td>Mar. 14, 1903.</td><td>"The Hour-Glass."</td><td> W.B. Yeats.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Mar. 14, 1903.</td><td>"Twenty-Five."</td><td> Lady Gregory.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Oct. 8, 1903.</td><td>"The King's Threshold."</td><td> W.B. Yeats.</td> +</tr> +<tr> + +<td>Oct. 8, 1903.</td><td>"In the Shadow of the Glen."</td><td>J.M. Synge.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Dec. 3, 1903.</td><td>"Broken Soil."</td><td> Padraic Colum.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Jan. 14, 1904.</td><td>"The Shadowy Waters."</td><td> W.B. Yeats.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Jan. 14, 1904.</td><td>"The Townland of Tamney."</td><td>Seumas McManus.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Feb. 25, 1904.</td><td>"Riders to the Sea."</td><td> J.M. Synge.</td> +</tr> +</tbody></table><p> +</p> + +<p> +</p><table summary=""><tbody> +<tr> +<td>IRISH NATIONAL THEATRE SOCIETY AT THE ABBEY THEATRE</td> +</tr> +</tbody></table><p> +</p> + +<p> +</p><table summary=""><tbody> +<tr> +<td>Dec. 27, 1904.</td><td>"On Baile's Strand."</td><td> W.B. Yeats.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Dec. 27, 1904.</td><td>"Spreading the News."</td><td> Lady Gregory.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Feb. 4, 1905.</td><td>"The Well of the Saints."</td><td>J.M. Synge.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Mar. 25, 1905.</td><td>"Kincora."</td><td> Lady Gregory.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Apr. 25, 1905.</td><td>"The Building Fund."</td><td> William Boyle.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>June 9, 1905.</td><td>"The Land."</td><td> Padraic Colum.</td> +</tr> +</tbody></table><p> +</p> + +<p> +</p><table summary=""><tbody> +<tr> +<td>NATIONAL THEATRE SOCIETY, LTD. (ABBEY COMPANY)</td> +</tr> +</tbody></table><p> +</p> + +<p> +</p><table summary=""><tbody> +<tr> +<td>Dec. 9, 1905.</td><td>"The White Cockade."</td><td> Lady Gregory.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Jan. 20, 1906.</td><td>"The Eloquent Dempsey."</td><td> William Boyle.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Feb. 19, 1906.</td><td>"Hyacinth Halvey."</td><td> Lady Gregory.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Oct. 20, 1906.</td><td>"The Gaol Gate."</td><td> Lady Gregory.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Oct. 20, 1906.</td><td>"The Mineral Workers."</td><td>William Boyle.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Nov. 24, 1906.</td><td>"Deirdre."</td><td> W.B. Yeats.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Dec. 8, 1906.</td><td>"The Canavans."</td><td> Lady Gregory.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Dec. 8, 1906.</td><td>New Version of "The Shadowy W.B. Yeats. Waters."</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Jan. 26, 1907.</td><td>"The Playboy of the Western J.M. Synge. World."</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Feb. 23, 1907.</td><td>"The Jackdaw."</td><td> Lady Gregory.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Mar. 9, 1907.</td><td>"The Rising of the Moon."</td><td>Lady Gregory.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Apr. 1, 1907.</td><td>"The Eyes of the Blind."</td><td> Miss W.M. Letts.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Apr. 3, 1907.</td><td>"The Poorhouse."</td><td> Douglas Hyde and Lady Gregory.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Apr. 27, 1907.</td><td>"Fand."</td><td> Wilfred Scawen Blunt.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Oct. 3, 1907.</td><td>"The Country Dressmaker."</td><td>George Fitzmaurice.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Oct. 31, 1907.</td><td>"Devorgilla."</td><td> Lady Gregory.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Nov. 21, 1907.</td><td>"The Unicorn from the Stars."</td><td> W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Feb. 13, 1908.</td><td>"The Man who missed the Tide."</td><td> W.F. Casey.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Feb. 13, 1908.</td><td>"The Piper."</td><td> "Norreys Connell."</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Mar. 10, 1908.</td><td>"The Piedish."</td><td> George Fitzmaurice.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Mar. 19, 1908.</td><td>"The Golden Helmet."</td><td> W.B. Yeats.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Apr. 20, 1908.</td><td>"The Workhouse Ward."</td><td> Lady Gregory.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Oct. 1, 1908.</td><td>"The Suburban Groove."</td><td>W.F. Casey.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Oct. 8, 1908.</td><td>"The Clancy Name."</td><td> Lennox Robinson.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Oct. 15, 1908.</td><td>"When the Dawn is come."</td><td> Thomas MacDonogh.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Oct. 21, 1908.</td><td>New Version of "The Man who W.F. Casey. missed the Tide."</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Feb. 11, 1909.</td><td>Revised Version of "Kincora."</td><td> Lady Gregory.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Mar. 11, 1909.</td><td>"Stephen Grey."</td><td> D.L. Kelleher.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Apr. 1, 1909.</td><td>"The Crossroads."</td><td> Lennox Robinson.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Apr. 1, 1909.</td><td>"Time."</td><td> "Norreys Connell."</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Apr. 29, 1909.</td><td>"The Glittering Gate."</td><td>Lord Dunsany.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>May 27, 1909.</td><td>"An Imaginary Conversation."</td><td>"Norreys Connell."</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Aug. 25, 1909.</td><td>"The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet." Bernard Shaw.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Sept. 16, 1909.</td><td>"The White Feather."</td><td> R.J. Ray.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Oct. 14, 1909.</td><td>"The Challenge."</td><td> Miss W.M. Letts.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Nov. 11, 1909.</td><td>"The Image."</td><td> Lady Gregory.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Jan. 13, 1910.</td><td>"Deirdre of the Sorrows."</td><td>J.M. Synge.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Feb. 10, 1910.</td><td>"The Green Helmet."</td><td> W.B. Yeats.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Mar. 2, 1910.</td><td>"The Travelling Man."</td><td> Lady Gregory.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>May 12, 1910.</td><td>"Thomas Muskerry."</td><td> Padraic Colum.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>May 26, 1910.</td><td>"Harvest."</td><td> Lennox Robinson.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Sept. 28, 1910.</td><td>"The Casting-out of Martin R.J. Ray. Whelan."</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Oct. 27, 1910.</td><td>"Birthright."</td><td> T.C. Murray.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Nov. 10, 1910.</td><td>"The Full Moon."</td><td> Lady Gregory.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Nov. 24, 1910.</td><td>"The Shuiler's Child."<a href="#note_3"><span class="footnoteref">3</span></a></td><td>Seumas O'Kelly.</td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td>Dec. 1, 1910.</td><td>"Coats."</td><td> Lady Gregory</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Jan. 12, 1911.</td><td>"The Deliverer."</td><td> Lady Gregory.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Jan. 26, 1911.</td><td>"King Argimenes and the Lord Dunsany. Unknown Warrior."</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Feb. 16, 1911.</td><td>"The Land of Heart's Desire."<a href="#note_4"><span class="footnoteref">4</span></a></td><td> W.B. Yeats.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Mar. 30, 1911.</td><td>"Mixed Marriage."</td><td> St. John G. Ervine.</td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td>Nov. 23, 1911.</td><td>"The Interlude of Youth."</td><td>Anon., first printed 1554.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Nov. 23, 1911.</td><td>"The Second Shepherds' Play."</td><td> Anon., <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">circa</span> 1400.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Nov. 30, 1911.</td><td>"The Marriage."</td><td> Douglas Hyde.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Dec. 7, 1911.</td><td>"Red Turf."</td><td> Rutherford Mayne.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Dec. 16, 1911.</td><td>Revival of "The Countess W.B. Yeats. Cathleen."</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Jan. 4, 1912.</td><td>"The Annunciation."</td><td> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">circa</span> 1400.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Jan. 4, 1912.</td><td>"The Flight into Egypt."</td><td> <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">circa</span> 1400.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Jan. 11, 1912.</td><td>"MacDarragh's Wife."</td><td> Lady Gregory.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Feb. 1, 1912.</td><td>Revival of "The Country George Fitzmaurice. Dressmaker."</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Feb. 16, 1912.</td><td>"The Tinker and the Fairy."</td><td> Douglas Hyde. (Played in Gaelic.)</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Feb. 29, 1912.</td><td>"The Worlde and the Chylde."</td><td>15th century.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Mar. 28, 1912.</td><td>"Family Failings."</td><td> William Boyle.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Apr. 11, 1912.</td><td>"Patriots."</td><td> Lennox Robinson.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>June 20, 1912.</td><td>"Maurice Harte."</td><td> T.C. Murray.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>July 4, 1912.</td><td>"The Bogie Men."</td><td> Lady Gregory.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Oct. 17, 1912.</td><td>"The Magnanimous Lover."</td><td> St. John G. Ervine.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Nov. 21, 1912.</td><td>"Damer's Gold."</td><td> Lady Gregory.</td> +</tr> +</tbody></table><p> +</p> + +<p> +</p><table summary=""><tbody> +<tr> +<td>TRANSLATIONS OF THE FOLLOWING HAVE BEEN PRODUCED</td> + +</tr> +</tbody></table><p> +</p> + +<p> +</p><table summary=""><tbody> +<tr> +<td>Apr. 16, 1906.</td><td>"The Doctor in spite of Himself."</td><td>(Molière.) Translated by Lady Gregory.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Mar. 16, 1907.</td><td>"Interior."</td><td> (Maeterlinck.)</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Mar. 19, 1908.</td><td>"Teja."</td><td> (Sudermann.) Translated by Lady Gregory.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Apr. 4, 1909.</td><td>"The Rogueries of Scapin."</td><td> (Molière.) Translated by Lady Gregory.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Jan. 21, 1909.</td><td>"The Miser."</td><td> (Molière.) Translated by Lady Gregory.</td> + +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Feb. 24, 1910.</td><td>"Mirandolina."</td><td> (Goldini.) Translated by Lady Gregory.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td>Jan. 5, 1911.</td><td>"Nativity Play."</td><td> (Douglas Hyde.) Translated by Lady Gregory.</td> +</tr> +</tbody></table><p> +</p> + +</div> + +<hr class="page"> + +<div> + +<a name="toc_13"></a> + +<h2>Index</h2> + +<p>Abbey Theatre, organization of company, <a href="#page13"><span class="ref">13</span></a>-36.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">All Ireland Review</span>, <a href="#page86"><span class="ref">86</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">All on the Irish Shore</span>, <a href="#page6"><span class="ref">6</span></a>.</p> +<p>Allgood, Sara, <a href="#page19"><span class="ref">19</span></a>, <a href="#page22"><span class="ref">22</span></a>, <a href="#page23"><span class="ref">23</span></a>, <a href="#page24"><span class="ref">24</span></a>, <a href="#page26"><span class="ref">26</span></a>, <a href="#page27"><span class="ref">27</span></a>, <a href="#page28"><span class="ref">28</span></a>, <a href="#page211"><span class="ref">211</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Allingham, William, <a href="#page39"><span class="ref">39</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Ancient Legends of Ireland</span>, <a href="#page51"><span class="ref">51</span></a>.</p> +<p>Antient Concert Rooms, the, <a href="#page18"><span class="ref">18</span></a>, <a href="#page78"><span class="ref">78</span></a>, <a href="#page86"><span class="ref">86</span></a>, <a href="#page106"><span class="ref">106</span></a>, <a href="#page200"><span class="ref">200</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Apostle, The</span>, <a href="#page111"><span class="ref">111</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Aran Islands, The</span>, <a href="#page168"><span class="ref">168</span></a>, <a href="#page187"><span class="ref">187</span></a>, <a href="#page188"><span class="ref">188</span></a>, <a href="#page191"><span class="ref">191</span></a>.</p> +<p>Aran Islands, the, <a href="#page147"><span class="ref">147</span></a>, <a href="#page162"><span class="ref">162</span></a>, <a href="#page166"><span class="ref">166</span></a>, <a href="#page170"><span class="ref">170</span></a>, <a href="#page171"><span class="ref">171</span></a>, <a href="#page177"><span class="ref">177</span></a>, <a href="#page178"><span class="ref">178</span></a>, <a href="#page179"><span class="ref">179</span></a>, <a href="#page181"><span class="ref">181</span></a>, <a href="#page187"><span class="ref">187</span></a>, <a href="#page188"><span class="ref">188</span></a>, <a href="#page190"><span class="ref">190</span></a>, <a href="#page191"><span class="ref">191</span></a>, <a href="#page192"><span class="ref">192</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Argyll, <a href="#page4"><span class="ref">4</span></a>, <a href="#page267"><span class="ref">267</span></a>, <a href="#page268"><span class="ref">268</span></a>.</p> +<p>Arnold, Matthew, <a href="#page3"><span class="ref">3</span></a>, <a href="#page59"><span class="ref">59</span></a>, <a href="#page255"><span class="ref">255</span></a>.</p> +<p>Arran, <a href="#page267"><span class="ref">267</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Arthurian stories, <a href="#page3"><span class="ref">3</span></a>, <a href="#page48"><span class="ref">48</span></a>.</p> +<p>Austen, Jane, <a href="#page155"><span class="ref">155</span></a>, <a href="#page156"><span class="ref">156</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Ave</span>, <a href="#page73"><span class="ref">73</span></a>, <a href="#page76"><span class="ref">76</span></a>, <a href="#page94"><span class="ref">94</span></a>, <a href="#page99"><span class="ref">99</span></a>, <a href="#page108"><span class="ref">108</span></a>, <a href="#page109"><span class="ref">109</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Avenue Theatre, London, <a href="#page25"><span class="ref">25</span></a>, <a href="#page50"><span class="ref">50</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Bards and Saints</span>, <a href="#page8"><span class="ref">8</span></a>.</p> +<p>Barker, Granville, <a href="#page230"><span class="ref">230</span></a>.</p> +<p>Barlow, Jane, <a href="#page1"><span class="ref">1</span></a>, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>, <a href="#page148"><span class="ref">148</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Beerbohm, Max, <a href="#page81"><span class="ref">81</span></a>.</p> +<p>Belfast, <a href="#page47"><span class="ref">47</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Beltaine</span>, <a href="#page75"><span class="ref">75</span></a>, <a href="#page85"><span class="ref">85</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Bending of the Bough, The</span>, <a href="#page76"><span class="ref">76</span></a>, <a href="#page88"><span class="ref">88</span></a>, <a href="#page95"><span class="ref">95</span></a>, <a href="#page98"><span class="ref">98</span></a>, <a href="#page105"><span class="ref">105</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Benson, Sir Frank, <a href="#page18"><span class="ref">18</span></a>.</p> +<p>Benson Company, the, <a href="#page106"><span class="ref">106</span></a>.</p> +<p>Beowulf, <a href="#page142"><span class="ref">142</span></a>.</p> +<p>Berkeley, George, <a href="#page135"><span class="ref">135</span></a>.</p> +<p>Bernhardt, Sara, <a href="#page16"><span class="ref">16</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Bhagavad-Gîta, <a href="#page117"><span class="ref">117</span></a>.</p> +<p>Birmingham, George A. (The Rev. Dr. James O. Hannay), <a href="#page8"><span class="ref">8</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Birthright</span>, <a href="#page216"><span class="ref">216</span></a>, <a href="#page217"><span class="ref">217</span></a>, <a href="#page218"><span class="ref">218</span></a>, <a href="#page219"><span class="ref">219</span></a>, <a href="#page222"><span class="ref">222</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Björnson, Björnstjerne, <a href="#page36"><span class="ref">36</span></a>.</p> +<p>Black, William, <a href="#page271"><span class="ref">271</span></a>, <a href="#page284"><span class="ref">284</span></a>.</p> +<p>Blake, William, <a href="#page38"><span class="ref">38</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Bodley Head, the, <a href="#page2"><span class="ref">2</span></a>.<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Book of Saints and Wonders</span>, <a href="#page138"><span class="ref">138</span></a>, <a href="#page142"><span class="ref">142</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Borrow, George, <a href="#page161"><span class="ref">161</span></a>, <a href="#page165"><span class="ref">165</span></a>, <a href="#page173"><span class="ref">173</span></a>, <a href="#page179"><span class="ref">179</span></a>.</p> +<p>Boucicault, Dion, <a href="#page168"><span class="ref">168</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Boyle, William, <a href="#page15"><span class="ref">15</span></a>, <a href="#page33"><span class="ref">33</span></a>, <a href="#page208"><span class="ref">208</span></a>-215, <a href="#page238"><span class="ref">238</span></a>, <a href="#page239"><span class="ref">239</span></a>, <a href="#page240"><span class="ref">240</span></a>.<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Building Fund, The</span>, <a href="#page209"><span class="ref">209</span></a>-213;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Eloquent Dempsey, The</span>, <a href="#page208"><span class="ref">208</span></a>, <a href="#page209"><span class="ref">209</span></a>, <a href="#page213"><span class="ref">213</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Family Failings</span>, <a href="#page208"><span class="ref">208</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Mineral Workers, The</span>, <a href="#page208"><span class="ref">208</span></a>, <a href="#page213"><span class="ref">213</span></a>-214, <a href="#page238"><span class="ref">238</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Brigit, St., <a href="#page142"><span class="ref">142</span></a>, <a href="#page147"><span class="ref">147</span></a>, <a href="#page282"><span class="ref">282</span></a>.</p> +<p>Brittany, <a href="#page3"><span class="ref">3</span></a>, <a href="#page266"><span class="ref">266</span></a>. <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Broken Soil</span>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page202"><span class="ref">202</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Brown, T.E., <a href="#page4"><span class="ref">4</span></a>, <a href="#page5"><span class="ref">5</span></a>.</p> +<p>Browning, Robert, <a href="#page50"><span class="ref">50</span></a>.</p> +<p>Buchanan, Robert, <a href="#page272"><span class="ref">272</span></a>.</p> +<p>Buckley, William, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>, <a href="#page8"><span class="ref">8</span></a>. <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Building Fund, The</span>, <a href="#page208"><span class="ref">208</span></a>, <a href="#page209"><span class="ref">209</span></a>-213, <a href="#page214"><span class="ref">214</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Bullock, Shan, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>, <a href="#page214"><span class="ref">214</span></a>, <a href="#page234"><span class="ref">234</span></a>, <a href="#page236"><span class="ref">236</span></a>, <a href="#page270"><span class="ref">270</span></a>.</p> +<p>Bunyan, John, <a href="#page285"><span class="ref">285</span></a>.</p> +<p>Burns, Robert, "Jolly Beggars," <a href="#page177"><span class="ref">177</span></a>, <a href="#page234"><span class="ref">234</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Burroughs, John, <a href="#page290"><span class="ref">290</span></a>, <a href="#page292"><span class="ref">292</span></a>.<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Bursting of the Bubble, The</span>, <a href="#page9"><span class="ref">9</span></a>.<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">By Thrasna River</span>, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Calendar of the Saints</span>, <a href="#page247"><span class="ref">247</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Cameron, Dr., of Brodick, <a href="#page283"><span class="ref">283</span></a>.</p> +<p>Campbell, John F., of Islay, <a href="#page283"><span class="ref">283</span></a>, <a href="#page284"><span class="ref">284</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Campbell, Joseph (Seosamh MacCathmhaoil), <a href="#page246"><span class="ref">246</span></a>-250.<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Judgment</span>, <a href="#page247"><span class="ref">247</span></a>-250;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Mearing Stones</span>, <a href="#page247"><span class="ref">247</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Mountainy Singer</span>, <a href="#page247"><span class="ref">247</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, <a href="#page23"><span class="ref">23</span></a>, <a href="#page28"><span class="ref">28</span></a>, <a href="#page45"><span class="ref">45</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Canavans, The</span>, <a href="#page149"><span class="ref">149</span></a>, <a href="#page152"><span class="ref">152</span></a>.</p> +<p>"Carberry, Ethna" (Anna Johnston MacManus), <a href="#page10"><span class="ref">10</span></a>, <a href="#page216"><span class="ref">216</span></a>, <a href="#page255"><span class="ref">255</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Carmichael, Alexander, <a href="#page263"><span class="ref">263</span></a>, <a href="#page282"><span class="ref">282</span></a>, <a href="#page283"><span class="ref">283</span></a>, <a href="#page284"><span class="ref">284</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Carmina Gadelica</span>, <a href="#page263"><span class="ref">263</span></a>.</p> +<p>Carnegie Lyceum, The, New York, <a href="#page85"><span class="ref">85</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Cathleen ni Houlihan</span>, <a href="#page10"><span class="ref">10</span></a>, <a href="#page17"><span class="ref">17</span></a>, <a href="#page19"><span class="ref">19</span></a>, <a href="#page31"><span class="ref">31</span></a>, <a href="#page50"><span class="ref">50</span></a>-51, <a href="#page53"><span class="ref">53</span></a>, <a href="#page54"><span class="ref">54</span></a>, <a href="#page55"><span class="ref">55</span></a>, <a href="#page77"><span class="ref">77</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Catriona</span>, <a href="#page272"><span class="ref">272</span></a>.</p> +<p>"Celtic Gloom, The," <a href="#page274"><span class="ref">274</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Celtic Literature, On the Study of</span>, <a href="#page3"><span class="ref">3</span></a>.</p> +<p>Celtic Renaissance, The, <a href="#page1"><span class="ref">1</span></a>-12, <a href="#page13"><span class="ref">13</span></a>, <a href="#page18"><span class="ref">18</span></a>, <a href="#page33"><span class="ref">33</span></a>, <a href="#page36"><span class="ref">36</span></a>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">41</span></a>, <a href="#page93"><span class="ref">93</span></a>, <a href="#page105"><span class="ref">105</span></a>, <a href="#page114"><span class="ref">114</span></a>, <a href="#page158"><span class="ref">158</span></a>, <a href="#page251"><span class="ref">251</span></a>, <a href="#page256"><span class="ref">256</span></a>, <a href="#page259"><span class="ref">259</span></a>, <a href="#page260"><span class="ref">260</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Celtic Twilight, The</span>, <a href="#page37"><span class="ref">37</span></a>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">41</span></a>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">42</span></a>, <a href="#page54"><span class="ref">54</span></a>.</p> +<p>Chesson, Nora Hopper, <a href="#page10"><span class="ref">10</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Child of Nature, A</span>, <a href="#page272"><span class="ref">272</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Children of Lir</span>, <a href="#page200"><span class="ref">200</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Children of Tempest, The</span>, <a href="#page4"><span class="ref">4</span></a>, <a href="#page271"><span class="ref">271</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Children of To-morrow</span>, <a href="#page264"><span class="ref">264</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Church, Richard William, <a href="#page138"><span class="ref">138</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Clancy Name, The</span>, <a href="#page223"><span class="ref">223</span></a>, <a href="#page224"><span class="ref">224</span></a>, <a href="#page228"><span class="ref">228</span></a>.</p> +<p>Clare, <a href="#page84"><span class="ref">84</span></a>, <a href="#page141"><span class="ref">141</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, <a href="#page210"><span class="ref">210</span></a>, <a href="#page211"><span class="ref">211</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Colum, Padraic, <a href="#page11"><span class="ref">11</span></a>, <a href="#page15"><span class="ref">15</span></a>, <a href="#page21"><span class="ref">21</span></a>, <a href="#page198"><span class="ref">198</span></a>-208, <a href="#page240"><span class="ref">240</span></a>.<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Broken Soil</span>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page202"><span class="ref">202</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Children of Lir</span>, <a href="#page200"><span class="ref">200</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Eoghan's Wife</span>, <a href="#page201"><span class="ref">201</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Fiddler's House</span>, <a href="#page200"><span class="ref">200</span></a>, <a href="#page202"><span class="ref">202</span></a>, <a href="#page204"><span class="ref">204</span></a>-205, <a href="#page206"><span class="ref">206</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Foleys</span>, <a href="#page201"><span class="ref">201</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Kingdom of the Young</span>, <a href="#page201"><span class="ref">201</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Land</span>, <a href="#page200"><span class="ref">200</span></a>, <a href="#page202"><span class="ref">202</span></a>, <a href="#page204"><span class="ref">204</span></a>, <a href="#page206"><span class="ref">206</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Miracle of the Corn</span>, <a href="#page200"><span class="ref">200</span></a>, <a href="#page202"><span class="ref">202</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Saxon Shillin'</span>, <a href="#page201"><span class="ref">201</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Studies</span>, <a href="#page200"><span class="ref">200</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Thomas Muskerry</span>, <a href="#page199"><span class="ref">199</span></a>, <a href="#page200"><span class="ref">200</span></a>, <a href="#page206"><span class="ref">206</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Wild Earth</span>, <a href="#page200"><span class="ref">200</span></a>, <a href="#page208"><span class="ref">208</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Columba, <a href="#page147"><span class="ref">147</span></a>, <a href="#page282"><span class="ref">282</span></a>, <a href="#page289"><span class="ref">289</span></a>.</p> +<p>Congreve, William, <a href="#page13"><span class="ref">13</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Conn the Shaughraun</span>, <a href="#page168"><span class="ref">168</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Connacht, <a href="#page39"><span class="ref">39</span></a>, <a href="#page154"><span class="ref">154</span></a>, <a href="#page179"><span class="ref">179</span></a>, <a href="#page188"><span class="ref">188</span></a>, <a href="#page215"><span class="ref">215</span></a>, <a href="#page239"><span class="ref">239</span></a>.</p> + +<p>"Connell, Norreys" (Conal O'Riordan), <a href="#page31"><span class="ref">31</span></a>, <a href="#page241"><span class="ref">241</span></a>-243.<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">An Imaginary Conversation</span>, <a href="#page242"><span class="ref">242</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Piper</span>, <a href="#page31"><span class="ref">31</span></a>, <a href="#page33"><span class="ref">33</span></a>, <a href="#page242"><span class="ref">242</span></a>, <a href="#page243"><span class="ref">243</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Shakespeare's End</span>, <a href="#page242"><span class="ref">242</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Time</span>, <a href="#page242"><span class="ref">242</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Connemara, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>, <a href="#page147"><span class="ref">147</span></a>, <a href="#page188"><span class="ref">188</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Connla</span>, <a href="#page20"><span class="ref">20</span></a>, <a href="#page21"><span class="ref">21</span></a>.</p> +<p>Conway, Hart, <a href="#page218"><span class="ref">218</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Cork, <a href="#page15"><span class="ref">15</span></a>, <a href="#page47"><span class="ref">47</span></a>, <a href="#page220"><span class="ref">220</span></a>, <a href="#page222"><span class="ref">222</span></a>.</p> +<p>Cork Dramatic Society, The, <a href="#page35"><span class="ref">35</span></a>, <a href="#page216"><span class="ref">216</span></a>, <a href="#page223"><span class="ref">223</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Cork Realists</span>, <a href="#page216"><span class="ref">216</span></a>.</p> +<p>Cornwall, <a href="#page2"><span class="ref">2</span></a>, <a href="#page3"><span class="ref">3</span></a>, <a href="#page4"><span class="ref">4</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Countess Cathleen, The</span>, <a href="#page18"><span class="ref">18</span></a>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page43"><span class="ref">43</span></a>, <a href="#page47"><span class="ref">47</span></a>, <a href="#page48"><span class="ref">48</span></a>-49, <a href="#page50"><span class="ref">50</span></a>, <a href="#page51"><span class="ref">51</span></a>, <a href="#page59"><span class="ref">59</span></a>, <a href="#page64"><span class="ref">64</span></a>, <a href="#page69"><span class="ref">69</span></a>, <a href="#page78"><span class="ref">78</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Court Theatre, London, The, <a href="#page241"><span class="ref">241</span></a>.</p> +<p>Cousins, James H., <a href="#page20"><span class="ref">20</span></a>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>.</p> +<p>Craig, Gordon, <a href="#page29"><span class="ref">29</span></a>.</p> +<p>Craigie, Pearl Teresa ("John Oliver Hobbes"), <a href="#page104"><span class="ref">104</span></a>, <a href="#page105"><span class="ref">105</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Crashaw, Richard, <a href="#page135"><span class="ref">135</span></a>.</p> +<p>Croker, Crofton, <a href="#page168"><span class="ref">168</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Croppies Lie Down</span>, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Crossroads, The</span>, <a href="#page224"><span class="ref">224</span></a>-228, <a href="#page230"><span class="ref">230</span></a>, <a href="#page231"><span class="ref">231</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Cuchulain of Muirthemne</span>, <a href="#page58"><span class="ref">58</span></a>, <a href="#page138"><span class="ref">138</span></a>, <a href="#page143"><span class="ref">143</span></a>.</p> +<p>Cumann nan Gaedheal, <a href="#page90"><span class="ref">90</span></a>, <a href="#page115"><span class="ref">115</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Dan the Dollar</span>, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>, <a href="#page214"><span class="ref">214</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Dandy Dick</span>, <a href="#page233"><span class="ref">233</span></a>.</p> +<p>Darragh, Miss, <a href="#page28"><span class="ref">28</span></a>.</p> +<p>Dartmoor, <a href="#page6"><span class="ref">6</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Daughters of Erin, The</span>, <a href="#page18"><span class="ref">18</span></a>, <a href="#page200"><span class="ref">200</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Davis, Thomas, <a href="#page39"><span class="ref">39</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Death of Dermid, The</span>, <a href="#page109"><span class="ref">109</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Death of Tintagiles, The</span>, <a href="#page252"><span class="ref">252</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Deirdre</span> (G.W. Russell), <a href="#page20"><span class="ref">20</span></a>, <a href="#page21"><span class="ref">21</span></a>, <a href="#page31"><span class="ref">31</span></a>, <a href="#page77"><span class="ref">77</span></a>, <a href="#page115"><span class="ref">115</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Deirdre</span> (W.B. Yeats), <a href="#page23"><span class="ref">23</span></a>, <a href="#page27"><span class="ref">27</span></a>, <a href="#page28"><span class="ref">28</span></a>, <a href="#page44"><span class="ref">44</span></a>, <a href="#page50"><span class="ref">50</span></a>, <a href="#page61"><span class="ref">61</span></a>-63.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Deirdre of the Sorrows</span>, <a href="#page160"><span class="ref">160</span></a>, <a href="#page163"><span class="ref">163</span></a>, <a href="#page166"><span class="ref">166</span></a>, <a href="#page168"><span class="ref">168</span></a>, <a href="#page181"><span class="ref">181</span></a>, <a href="#page183"><span class="ref">183</span></a>, <a href="#page192"><span class="ref">192</span></a>, <a href="#page196"><span class="ref">196</span></a>, <a href="#page197"><span class="ref">197</span></a>, <a href="#page285"><span class="ref">285</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Deliverer, The</span>, <a href="#page149"><span class="ref">149</span></a>.</p> +<p>DeMax, <a href="#page16"><span class="ref">16</span></a>.</p> +<p>De Quincey, Thomas, <a href="#page265"><span class="ref">265</span></a>.</p> +<p>Derry, <a href="#page14"><span class="ref">14</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Destruction of the Hostel, The</span>, <a href="#page205"><span class="ref">205</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Devorgilla</span>, <a href="#page152"><span class="ref">152</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Dhoya</span>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">41</span></a>, <a href="#page286"><span class="ref">286</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Diarmid and Grania</span>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page106"><span class="ref">106</span></a>-110, <a href="#page143"><span class="ref">143</span></a>.</p> +<p>Dickens, Charles, <a href="#page6"><span class="ref">6</span></a>.</p> +<p>Digges, T. Dudley, <a href="#page21"><span class="ref">21</span></a>, <a href="#page22"><span class="ref">22</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Discoveries</span>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">42</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Divine Adventure, The</span>, <a href="#page263"><span class="ref">263</span></a>, <a href="#page270"><span class="ref">270</span></a>, <a href="#page273"><span class="ref">273</span></a>, <a href="#page275"><span class="ref">275</span></a>, <a href="#page279"><span class="ref">279</span></a>, <a href="#page289"><span class="ref">289</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Divine Vision, The</span>, <a href="#page116"><span class="ref">116</span></a>, <a href="#page122"><span class="ref">122</span></a>.</p> +<p>Dolmetsch, Arnold, <a href="#page64"><span class="ref">64</span></a>, <a href="#page98"><span class="ref">98</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Dome, The</span>, <a href="#page81"><span class="ref">81</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Dominion of Dreams, The</span>, <a href="#page273"><span class="ref">273</span></a>, <a href="#page274"><span class="ref">274</span></a>.</p> +<p>Donegal, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>, <a href="#page246"><span class="ref">246</span></a>, <a href="#page247"><span class="ref">247</span></a>, <a href="#page249"><span class="ref">249</span></a>, <a href="#page250"><span class="ref">250</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Donegal Fairy Stories</span>, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>.</p> +<p>Donne, John, <a href="#page164"><span class="ref">164</span></a>.</p> +<p>Down, <a href="#page15"><span class="ref">15</span></a>, <a href="#page210"><span class="ref">210</span></a>, <a href="#page216"><span class="ref">216</span></a>, <a href="#page226"><span class="ref">226</span></a>, <a href="#page235"><span class="ref">235</span></a>, <a href="#page237"><span class="ref">237</span></a>, <a href="#page238"><span class="ref">238</span></a>, <a href="#page243"><span class="ref">243</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Drama in Muslin, A</span>, <a href="#page96"><span class="ref">96</span></a>, <a href="#page101"><span class="ref">101</span></a>, <a href="#page102"><span class="ref">102</span></a>, <a href="#page110"><span class="ref">110</span></a>, <a href="#page171"><span class="ref">171</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Drone, The</span>, <a href="#page210"><span class="ref">210</span></a>, <a href="#page235"><span class="ref">235</span></a>, <a href="#page236"><span class="ref">236</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Drosdan and Yssul</span>, <a href="#page254"><span class="ref">254</span></a>.</p> +<p>Dual personality, <a href="#page278"><span class="ref">278</span></a>.</p> +<p>Dublin Castle, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Dublin University Review</span>, <a href="#page38"><span class="ref">38</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan, <a href="#page2"><span class="ref">2</span></a>.</p> +<p>Dun Theatre, the, Cork, <a href="#page224"><span class="ref">224</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Earth Breath, The</span>, <a href="#page116"><span class="ref">116</span></a>.</p> +<p>Edgeworth, Maria, <a href="#page6"><span class="ref">6</span></a>.</p> + +<p>"Eglinton, John." (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">See</span> Magee, W.K.)</p> +<p>Elizabethan Stage Society, the, <a href="#page30"><span class="ref">30</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Eloquent Dempsey, The</span>, <a href="#page208"><span class="ref">208</span></a>, <a href="#page209"><span class="ref">209</span></a>, <a href="#page213"><span class="ref">213</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Emerson, R.W., <a href="#page115"><span class="ref">115</span></a>, <a href="#page120"><span class="ref">120</span></a>, <a href="#page122"><span class="ref">122</span></a>, <a href="#page125"><span class="ref">125</span></a>, <a href="#page126"><span class="ref">126</span></a>, <a href="#page127"><span class="ref">127</span></a>, <a href="#page135"><span class="ref">135</span></a>, <a href="#page293"><span class="ref">293</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Enchanted Sea, The</span>, <a href="#page75"><span class="ref">75</span></a>, <a href="#page77"><span class="ref">77</span></a>, <a href="#page83"><span class="ref">83</span></a>, <a href="#page85"><span class="ref">85</span></a>-87, <a href="#page89"><span class="ref">89</span></a>, <a href="#page90"><span class="ref">90</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Enchanted Valleys, The</span>, <a href="#page254"><span class="ref">254</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Eoghan's Wife</span>, <a href="#page201"><span class="ref">201</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Ervine, St. John G., <a href="#page15"><span class="ref">15</span></a>, <a href="#page33"><span class="ref">33</span></a>, <a href="#page243"><span class="ref">243</span></a>-246.<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Eviction</span>, <a href="#page246"><span class="ref">246</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Magnanimous Lover</span>, <a href="#page243"><span class="ref">243</span></a>, <a href="#page245"><span class="ref">245</span></a>, <a href="#page246"><span class="ref">246</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Mixed Marriage</span>, <a href="#page243"><span class="ref">243</span></a>, <a href="#page246"><span class="ref">246</span></a>, <a href="#page247"><span class="ref">247</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Esther Waters</span>, <a href="#page6"><span class="ref">6</span></a>, <a href="#page96"><span class="ref">96</span></a>, <a href="#page112"><span class="ref">112</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Evelyn Innes</span>, <a href="#page95"><span class="ref">95</span></a>, <a href="#page96"><span class="ref">96</span></a>, <a href="#page97"><span class="ref">97</span></a>, <a href="#page98"><span class="ref">98</span></a>, <a href="#page122"><span class="ref">122</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Everyman</span>, <a href="#page30"><span class="ref">30</span></a>, <a href="#page51"><span class="ref">51</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Eviction, The</span>, <a href="#page246"><span class="ref">246</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Fairies, <a href="#page39"><span class="ref">39</span></a>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">41</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Family Failings</span>, <a href="#page208"><span class="ref">208</span></a>.</p> +<p>Farr, Florence, <a href="#page25"><span class="ref">25</span></a>, <a href="#page26"><span class="ref">26</span></a>, <a href="#page27"><span class="ref">27</span></a>, <a href="#page28"><span class="ref">28</span></a>.</p> +<p>Fay, Frank J., <a href="#page19"><span class="ref">19</span></a>, <a href="#page21"><span class="ref">21</span></a>, <a href="#page22"><span class="ref">22</span></a>, <a href="#page23"><span class="ref">23</span></a>, <a href="#page24"><span class="ref">24</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Fay, William G., <a href="#page16"><span class="ref">16</span></a>, <a href="#page17"><span class="ref">17</span></a>, <a href="#page18"><span class="ref">18</span></a>, <a href="#page19"><span class="ref">19</span></a>, <a href="#page20"><span class="ref">20</span></a>, <a href="#page21"><span class="ref">21</span></a>, <a href="#page22"><span class="ref">22</span></a>, <a href="#page23"><span class="ref">23</span></a>, <a href="#page24"><span class="ref">24</span></a>, <a href="#page28"><span class="ref">28</span></a>, <a href="#page201"><span class="ref">201</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Fellowe and his Wife, A</span>, <a href="#page261"><span class="ref">261</span></a>, <a href="#page264"><span class="ref">264</span></a>, <a href="#page278"><span class="ref">278</span></a>.</p> +<p>Ferguson, Sir Samuel, <a href="#page39"><span class="ref">39</span></a>, <a href="#page61"><span class="ref">61</span></a>, <a href="#page109"><span class="ref">109</span></a>, <a href="#page184"><span class="ref">184</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Fermanagh, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Fiddler's House, The</span>, <a href="#page200"><span class="ref">200</span></a>, <a href="#page202"><span class="ref">202</span></a>, <a href="#page204"><span class="ref">204</span></a>-205, <a href="#page206"><span class="ref">206</span></a>.</p> +<p>FitzGerald, Edward, <a href="#page141"><span class="ref">141</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Flamel, <a href="#page43"><span class="ref">43</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Flora MacDonald</span>, <a href="#page266"><span class="ref">266</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Foleys, The</span>, <a href="#page201"><span class="ref">201</span></a>.</p> +<p>Folk-plays, <a href="#page17"><span class="ref">17</span></a>, <a href="#page29"><span class="ref">29</span></a>, <a href="#page35"><span class="ref">35</span></a>, <a href="#page49"><span class="ref">49</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Folk-songs, <a href="#page2"><span class="ref">2</span></a>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">40</span></a>.</p> +<p>Folk-tales, <a href="#page283"><span class="ref">283</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">From the Hills of Dream</span>, <a href="#page259"><span class="ref">259</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Full Moon, The</span>, <a href="#page152"><span class="ref">152</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Gaelic League, the, <a href="#page1"><span class="ref">1</span></a>, <a href="#page18"><span class="ref">18</span></a>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">41</span></a>, <a href="#page107"><span class="ref">107</span></a>.</p> +<p>Gaiety Theatre, the, Dublin, <a href="#page30"><span class="ref">30</span></a>, <a href="#page106"><span class="ref">106</span></a>, <a href="#page110"><span class="ref">110</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Galway, <a href="#page73"><span class="ref">73</span></a>, <a href="#page101"><span class="ref">101</span></a>, <a href="#page108"><span class="ref">108</span></a>, <a href="#page141"><span class="ref">141</span></a>, <a href="#page189"><span class="ref">189</span></a>, <a href="#page208"><span class="ref">208</span></a>, <a href="#page210"><span class="ref">210</span></a>, <a href="#page216"><span class="ref">216</span></a>, <a href="#page238"><span class="ref">238</span></a>, <a href="#page240"><span class="ref">240</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Gaol Gate, The</span>, <a href="#page153"><span class="ref">153</span></a>, <a href="#page154"><span class="ref">154</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Ghosts</span>, <a href="#page80"><span class="ref">80</span></a>.</p> +<p>Gilbert, Lady (Rosa Mulholland), <a href="#page6"><span class="ref">6</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Gillian the Dreamer</span>, <a href="#page4"><span class="ref">4</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Gods and Fighting Men</span>, <a href="#page109"><span class="ref">109</span></a>, <a href="#page138"><span class="ref">138</span></a>, <a href="#page141"><span class="ref">141</span></a>, <a href="#page145"><span class="ref">145</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Golden Helmet, The</span>, <a href="#page27"><span class="ref">27</span></a>, <a href="#page63"><span class="ref">63</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Goldsmith, Oliver, <a href="#page13"><span class="ref">13</span></a>.</p> +<p>Gonne, Maud, <a href="#page27"><span class="ref">27</span></a>, <a href="#page59"><span class="ref">59</span></a>, <a href="#page136"><span class="ref">136</span></a>.</p> +<p>Gore-Booth, Eva, <a href="#page11"><span class="ref">11</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Grangecolman</span>, <a href="#page91"><span class="ref">91</span></a>-92.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Grania</span> (Lady Gregory), <a href="#page110"><span class="ref">110</span></a>, <a href="#page154"><span class="ref">154</span></a>, <a href="#page156"><span class="ref">156</span></a>-157.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Grania</span> (The Hon. Emily Lawless), <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Greek Backgrounds</span>, <a href="#page286"><span class="ref">286</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Green Fire</span>, <a href="#page263"><span class="ref">263</span></a>, <a href="#page266"><span class="ref">266</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Green Helmet, The</span>, <a href="#page63"><span class="ref">63</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Gregory, Lady, <a href="#page8"><span class="ref">8</span></a>, <a href="#page9"><span class="ref">9</span></a>, <a href="#page15"><span class="ref">15</span></a>, <a href="#page22"><span class="ref">22</span></a>, <a href="#page30"><span class="ref">30</span></a>, <a href="#page31"><span class="ref">31</span></a>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page47"><span class="ref">47</span></a>, <a href="#page53"><span class="ref">53</span></a>, <a href="#page54"><span class="ref">54</span></a>, <a href="#page56"><span class="ref">56</span></a>, <a href="#page58"><span class="ref">58</span></a>, <a href="#page73"><span class="ref">73</span></a>, <a href="#page74"><span class="ref">74</span></a>, <a href="#page75"><span class="ref">75</span></a>, <a href="#page76"><span class="ref">76</span></a>, <a href="#page88"><span class="ref">88</span></a>, <a href="#page92"><span class="ref">92</span></a>, <a href="#page93"><span class="ref">93</span></a>, <a href="#page108"><span class="ref">108</span></a>, <a href="#page109"><span class="ref">109</span></a>, <a href="#page110"><span class="ref">110</span></a>, <a href="#page114"><span class="ref">114</span></a>, <a href="#page138"><span class="ref">138</span></a>-159, <a href="#page179"><span class="ref">179</span></a>, <a href="#page206"><span class="ref">206</span></a>, <a href="#page215"><span class="ref">215</span></a>.<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Book of Saints and Wonders</span>, <a href="#page138"><span class="ref">138</span></a>, <a href="#page142"><span class="ref">142</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Canavans</span>, <a href="#page149"><span class="ref">149</span></a>, <a href="#page152"><span class="ref">152</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Cuchulain of Muirthemne</span>, <a href="#page58"><span class="ref">58</span></a>, <a href="#page138"><span class="ref">138</span></a>, <a href="#page143"><span class="ref">143</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Deliverer</span>, <a href="#page149"><span class="ref">149</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Devorgilla</span>, <a href="#page152"><span class="ref">152</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Full Moon</span>, <a href="#page152"><span class="ref">152</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Gaol Gate</span>, <a href="#page153"><span class="ref">153</span></a>, <a href="#page154"><span class="ref">154</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Gods and Fighting Men</span>, <a href="#page109"><span class="ref">109</span></a>, <a href="#page138"><span class="ref">138</span></a>, <a href="#page141"><span class="ref">141</span></a>, <a href="#page145"><span class="ref">145</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Grania</span>, <a href="#page110"><span class="ref">110</span></a>, <a href="#page154"><span class="ref">154</span></a>, <a href="#page156"><span class="ref">156</span></a>-157;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Hyacinth Halvey</span>, <a href="#page150"><span class="ref">150</span></a>, <a href="#page151"><span class="ref">151</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Image</span>, <a href="#page150"><span class="ref">150</span></a>, <a href="#page151"><span class="ref">151</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Jack Daw</span>, <a href="#page151"><span class="ref">151</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Kincora</span>, <a href="#page152"><span class="ref">152</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">MacDaragh's Wife</span>, <a href="#page154"><span class="ref">154</span></a>, <a href="#page155"><span class="ref">155</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Poets and Dreamers</span>, <a href="#page147"><span class="ref">147</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Poorhouse</span>, <a href="#page9"><span class="ref">9</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Rising of the Moon</span>, <a href="#page22"><span class="ref">22</span></a>, <a href="#page31"><span class="ref">31</span></a>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page152"><span class="ref">152</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Spreading the News</span>, <a href="#page150"><span class="ref">150</span></a>, <a href="#page151"><span class="ref">151</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">A Travelling Man</span>, <a href="#page153"><span class="ref">153</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Twenty-five</span>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page152"><span class="ref">152</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Unicorn from the Stars</span>, <a href="#page27"><span class="ref">27</span></a>, <a href="#page53"><span class="ref">53</span></a>-56;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The White Cockade</span>, <a href="#page152"><span class="ref">152</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Workhouse Ward</span>, <a href="#page152"><span class="ref">152</span></a>, <a href="#page154"><span class="ref">154</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Gregory, Robert, <a href="#page30"><span class="ref">30</span></a>.</p> +<p>Grundy, Sydney, <a href="#page104"><span class="ref">104</span></a>.</p> +<p>Gwynn, Stephen, <a href="#page122"><span class="ref">122</span></a>.</p> +<p>Gyles, Althea, <a href="#page247"><span class="ref">247</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Gypsy Christ, The</span>, <a href="#page265"><span class="ref">265</span></a>, <a href="#page279"><span class="ref">279</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Hail and Farewell</span>, <a href="#page73"><span class="ref">73</span></a>, <a href="#page92"><span class="ref">92</span></a>, <a href="#page98"><span class="ref">98</span></a>, <a href="#page113"><span class="ref">113</span></a>.</p> +<p>Hankin, St. John, <a href="#page245"><span class="ref">245</span></a>.</p> +<p>Hardy, Thomas, <a href="#page6"><span class="ref">6</span></a>, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>, <a href="#page101"><span class="ref">101</span></a>, <a href="#page164"><span class="ref">164</span></a>, <a href="#page175"><span class="ref">175</span></a>, <a href="#page176"><span class="ref">176</span></a>, <a href="#page192"><span class="ref">192</span></a>, <a href="#page193"><span class="ref">193</span></a>, <a href="#page239"><span class="ref">239</span></a>, <a href="#page258"><span class="ref">258</span></a>, <a href="#page271"><span class="ref">271</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Harrigan plays, the, <a href="#page22"><span class="ref">22</span></a>.</p> +<p>Harte, Bret, <a href="#page241"><span class="ref">241</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Harvest</span>, <a href="#page221"><span class="ref">221</span></a>, <a href="#page224"><span class="ref">224</span></a>, <a href="#page228"><span class="ref">228</span></a>, <a href="#page229"><span class="ref">229</span></a>, <a href="#page230"><span class="ref">230</span></a>, <a href="#page231"><span class="ref">231</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Hawthorne, Nathaniel, <a href="#page82"><span class="ref">82</span></a>, <a href="#page175"><span class="ref">175</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Heather Field, The</span>, <a href="#page18"><span class="ref">18</span></a>, <a href="#page78"><span class="ref">78</span></a>-83, <a href="#page85"><span class="ref">85</span></a>, <a href="#page89"><span class="ref">89</span></a>, <a href="#page91"><span class="ref">91</span></a>, <a href="#page92"><span class="ref">92</span></a>, <a href="#page93"><span class="ref">93</span></a>, <a href="#page95"><span class="ref">95</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Hebrides, the, <a href="#page271"><span class="ref">271</span></a>, <a href="#page274"><span class="ref">274</span></a>, <a href="#page283"><span class="ref">283</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Hedda Gabler</span>, <a href="#page104"><span class="ref">104</span></a>, <a href="#page175"><span class="ref">175</span></a>.</p> +<p>Hermetic Society, the, <a href="#page39"><span class="ref">39</span></a>, <a href="#page117"><span class="ref">117</span></a>, <a href="#page120"><span class="ref">120</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Hewlett, Maurice, <a href="#page165"><span class="ref">165</span></a>.</p> +<p>Highlands of Scotland, the, <a href="#page3"><span class="ref">3</span></a>, <a href="#page4"><span class="ref">4</span></a>, <a href="#page260"><span class="ref">260</span></a>, <a href="#page263"><span class="ref">263</span></a>, <a href="#page264"><span class="ref">264</span></a>, <a href="#page267"><span class="ref">267</span></a>, <a href="#page268"><span class="ref">268</span></a>, <a href="#page270"><span class="ref">270</span></a>, <a href="#page271"><span class="ref">271</span></a>, <a href="#page272"><span class="ref">272</span></a>, <a href="#page274"><span class="ref">274</span></a>, <a href="#page276"><span class="ref">276</span></a>, <a href="#page284"><span class="ref">284</span></a>, <a href="#page295"><span class="ref">295</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Hinkson, Katherine Tynan, <a href="#page1"><span class="ref">1</span></a>, <a href="#page6"><span class="ref">6</span></a>, <a href="#page10"><span class="ref">10</span></a>.</p> +<p>Homer, <a href="#page64"><span class="ref">64</span></a>, <a href="#page120"><span class="ref">120</span></a>, <a href="#page144"><span class="ref">144</span></a>, <a href="#page286"><span class="ref">286</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Homestead, The</span>, <a href="#page117"><span class="ref">117</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Homeward</span>, <a href="#page116"><span class="ref">116</span></a>.</p> +<p>Horniman, Miss, <a href="#page21"><span class="ref">21</span></a>, <a href="#page31"><span class="ref">31</span></a>, <a href="#page33"><span class="ref">33</span></a>, <a href="#page35"><span class="ref">35</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">House of Usna, The</span>, <a href="#page251"><span class="ref">251</span></a>, <a href="#page252"><span class="ref">252</span></a>, <a href="#page253"><span class="ref">253</span></a>, <a href="#page254"><span class="ref">254</span></a>, <a href="#page259"><span class="ref">259</span></a>, <a href="#page285"><span class="ref">285</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Hyacinth Halvey</span>, <a href="#page150"><span class="ref">150</span></a>, <a href="#page151"><span class="ref">151</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Hyde, Douglas, <a href="#page1"><span class="ref">1</span></a>, <a href="#page2"><span class="ref">2</span></a>, <a href="#page8"><span class="ref">8</span></a>, <a href="#page18"><span class="ref">18</span></a>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">40</span></a>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">41</span></a>, <a href="#page46"><span class="ref">46</span></a>, <a href="#page107"><span class="ref">107</span></a>, <a href="#page147"><span class="ref">147</span></a>, <a href="#page153"><span class="ref">153</span></a>, <a href="#page158"><span class="ref">158</span></a>, <a href="#page166"><span class="ref">166</span></a>, <a href="#page171"><span class="ref">171</span></a>, <a href="#page179"><span class="ref">179</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Hypnotic suggestion, <a href="#page278"><span class="ref">278</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Ibsen, Henrik, <a href="#page13"><span class="ref">13</span></a>, <a href="#page34"><span class="ref">34</span></a>, <a href="#page36"><span class="ref">36</span></a>, <a href="#page38"><span class="ref">38</span></a>, <a href="#page80"><span class="ref">80</span></a>, <a href="#page93"><span class="ref">93</span></a>, <a href="#page163"><span class="ref">163</span></a>, <a href="#page168"><span class="ref">168</span></a>, <a href="#page178"><span class="ref">178</span></a>, <a href="#page213"><span class="ref">213</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Ideas of Good and Evil</span>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">42</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Image, The</span>, <a href="#page150"><span class="ref">150</span></a>, <a href="#page151"><span class="ref">151</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Imaginary Conversation, An</span>, <a href="#page242"><span class="ref">242</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Immortal Hour, The</span>, <a href="#page251"><span class="ref">251</span></a>, <a href="#page252"><span class="ref">252</span></a>, <a href="#page285"><span class="ref">285</span></a>, <a href="#page287"><span class="ref">287</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Impressions and Opinions</span>, <a href="#page103"><span class="ref">103</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">In a Balcony</span>, <a href="#page50"><span class="ref">50</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">In Chimney Corners</span>, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>.</p> +<p>Independent Theatre, The, London, <a href="#page103"><span class="ref">103</span></a>, <a href="#page104"><span class="ref">104</span></a>, <a href="#page105"><span class="ref">105</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Iona</span>, <a href="#page277"><span class="ref">277</span></a>, <a href="#page289"><span class="ref">289</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Iona, <a href="#page282"><span class="ref">282</span></a>.</p> +<p>"I.O.," <a href="#page116"><span class="ref">116</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Irish Idylls</span>, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>, <a href="#page148"><span class="ref">148</span></a>.</p> +<p>Irish Agricultural Organization Society, the, <a href="#page13"><span class="ref">13</span></a>, <a href="#page117"><span class="ref">117</span></a>, <a href="#page118"><span class="ref">118</span></a>, <a href="#page137"><span class="ref">137</span></a>, <a href="#page225"><span class="ref">225</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Irish Literary Theatre, The, <a href="#page5"><span class="ref">5</span></a>, <a href="#page18"><span class="ref">18</span></a>, <a href="#page19"><span class="ref">19</span></a>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">42</span></a>, <a href="#page52"><span class="ref">52</span></a>, <a href="#page73"><span class="ref">73</span></a>, <a href="#page74"><span class="ref">74</span></a>, <a href="#page76"><span class="ref">76</span></a>, <a href="#page85"><span class="ref">85</span></a>, <a href="#page105"><span class="ref">105</span></a>, <a href="#page109"><span class="ref">109</span></a>, <a href="#page110"><span class="ref">110</span></a>, <a href="#page115"><span class="ref">115</span></a>, <a href="#page251"><span class="ref">251</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Irish Pastorals</span>, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>.</p> +<p>Irving Terry Company, the, <a href="#page105"><span class="ref">105</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Island of Statues, The</span>, <a href="#page47"><span class="ref">47</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Jack Daw, The</span>, <a href="#page151"><span class="ref">151</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Janvier, Mrs. Thomas A., <a href="#page256"><span class="ref">256</span></a>.</p> +<p>Jefferies, Richard, <a href="#page290"><span class="ref">290</span></a>, <a href="#page291"><span class="ref">291</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">John Bull's Other Island</span>, <a href="#page241"><span class="ref">241</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">John Sherman and Dhoya</span>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">41</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">John Splendid</span>, <a href="#page4"><span class="ref">4</span></a>.</p> +<p>Johnson, Lionel, <a href="#page5"><span class="ref">5</span></a>, <a href="#page10"><span class="ref">10</span></a>, <a href="#page64"><span class="ref">64</span></a>.</p> +<p>Johnston, Charles, <a href="#page125"><span class="ref">125</span></a>, <a href="#page134"><span class="ref">134</span></a>, <a href="#page146"><span class="ref">146</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Journeys End in Lovers Meeting</span>, <a href="#page105"><span class="ref">105</span></a>.</p> +<p>Joyce, Dr. P.W., <a href="#page3"><span class="ref">3</span></a>, <a href="#page110"><span class="ref">110</span></a>, <a href="#page139"><span class="ref">139</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Judgment</span>, <a href="#page246"><span class="ref">246</span></a>, <a href="#page249"><span class="ref">249</span></a>, <a href="#page250"><span class="ref">250</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Kailyard School, the, <a href="#page270"><span class="ref">270</span></a>.</p> +<p>Keats, John, <a href="#page48"><span class="ref">48</span></a>, <a href="#page293"><span class="ref">293</span></a>.</p> +<p>Kelley, P.J., <a href="#page21"><span class="ref">21</span></a>, <a href="#page22"><span class="ref">22</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Kelpius, <a href="#page122"><span class="ref">122</span></a>.</p> +<p>Kembles, the, <a href="#page18"><span class="ref">18</span></a>.</p> +<p>Kerrigan, J.M., <a href="#page23"><span class="ref">23</span></a>, <a href="#page27"><span class="ref">27</span></a>, <a href="#page217"><span class="ref">217</span></a>.</p> +<p>Kerry, <a href="#page166"><span class="ref">166</span></a>, <a href="#page188"><span class="ref">188</span></a>, <a href="#page190"><span class="ref">190</span></a>, <a href="#page216"><span class="ref">216</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Kidnapped</span>, <a href="#page272"><span class="ref">272</span></a>.</p> +<p>Kiltartan English, <a href="#page141"><span class="ref">141</span></a>, <a href="#page142"><span class="ref">142</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Kincora</span>, <a href="#page152"><span class="ref">152</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">King of Ys, The</span>, <a href="#page254"><span class="ref">254</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Kingdom of the Young, The</span>, <a href="#page201"><span class="ref">201</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">King's Threshold, The</span>, <a href="#page60"><span class="ref">60</span></a>, <a href="#page69"><span class="ref">69</span></a>.</p> +<p>Kingston, Thomas, <a href="#page81"><span class="ref">81</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Kipling, Rudyard, <a href="#page47"><span class="ref">47</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Lady from the Sea, The</span>, <a href="#page85"><span class="ref">85</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Lake, The</span>, <a href="#page96"><span class="ref">96</span></a>, <a href="#page99"><span class="ref">99</span></a>, <a href="#page101"><span class="ref">101</span></a>, <a href="#page102"><span class="ref">102</span></a>, <a href="#page111"><span class="ref">111</span></a>, <a href="#page112"><span class="ref">112</span></a>, <a href="#page113"><span class="ref">113</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Land, The</span>, <a href="#page200"><span class="ref">200</span></a>, <a href="#page202"><span class="ref">202</span></a>, <a href="#page204"><span class="ref">204</span></a>, <a href="#page206"><span class="ref">206</span></a>.</p> +<p>Land League, the, <a href="#page102"><span class="ref">102</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Land of Heart's Desire, The</span>, <a href="#page25"><span class="ref">25</span></a>, <a href="#page43"><span class="ref">43</span></a>, <a href="#page49"><span class="ref">49</span></a>-50, <a href="#page51"><span class="ref">51</span></a>, <a href="#page59"><span class="ref">59</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Larminie, William, <a href="#page8"><span class="ref">8</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Last of the De Mullins, The</span>, <a href="#page245"><span class="ref">245</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Last Supper, The</span>, <a href="#page251"><span class="ref">251</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Laughter of Peterkin, The</span>, <a href="#page267"><span class="ref">267</span></a>, <a href="#page284"><span class="ref">284</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Lawless, The Hon. Emily, <a href="#page6"><span class="ref">6</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Laying of the Foundations, The</span>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Lays of the Western Gael, The</span>, <a href="#page110"><span class="ref">110</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Leabhar Sgeuluigheachta</span>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">41</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Lear</span>, <a href="#page45"><span class="ref">45</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Legend of Montrose, The</span>, <a href="#page272"><span class="ref">272</span></a>.</p> +<p>Leinster, <a href="#page215"><span class="ref">215</span></a>.</p> +<p>Le Moyne, Mrs., <a href="#page50"><span class="ref">50</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Lesson of Life, The</span>, <a href="#page224"><span class="ref">224</span></a>.</p> +<p>Lever, Charles James, <a href="#page102"><span class="ref">102</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Literary Geography</span>, <a href="#page289"><span class="ref">289</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Lost Pibroch, The</span>, <a href="#page4"><span class="ref">4</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Lost Saint, The</span>, <a href="#page9"><span class="ref">9</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Love in the Valley</span>, <a href="#page49"><span class="ref">49</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Love Songs of Connacht, The</span>, <a href="#page1"><span class="ref">1</span></a>, <a href="#page9"><span class="ref">9</span></a>, <a href="#page166"><span class="ref">166</span></a>, <a href="#page179"><span class="ref">179</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Lover, Samuel, <a href="#page101"><span class="ref">101</span></a>.</p> +<p>Lowlands of Scotland, the, <a href="#page258"><span class="ref">258</span></a>, <a href="#page260"><span class="ref">260</span></a>, <a href="#page264"><span class="ref">264</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Luke Delmege</span>, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Lynchehaun case, the, <a href="#page171"><span class="ref">171</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Lyra Celtica</span>, <a href="#page4"><span class="ref">4</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Mabinogion</span>, <a href="#page285"><span class="ref">285</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">MacDaragh's Wife</span>, <a href="#page154"><span class="ref">154</span></a>, <a href="#page155"><span class="ref">155</span></a>.</p> + +<p>McGee, Eithne, <a href="#page23"><span class="ref">23</span></a>, <a href="#page26"><span class="ref">26</span></a>, <a href="#page211"><span class="ref">211</span></a>.</p> +<p>"Macleod, Fiona." (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">See</span> Sharp, William.)</p> +<p>MacManus, Anna Johnstone. (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">See</span> "Ethna Carberry.")</p> + +<p>MacManus, Seumas, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>.</p> +<p>Macpherson, James, <a href="#page3"><span class="ref">3</span></a>, <a href="#page285"><span class="ref">285</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Madge o' the Pool</span>, <a href="#page279"><span class="ref">279</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Maeterlinck, Maurice, <a href="#page13"><span class="ref">13</span></a>, <a href="#page38"><span class="ref">38</span></a>, <a href="#page45"><span class="ref">45</span></a>, <a href="#page48"><span class="ref">48</span></a>, <a href="#page113"><span class="ref">113</span></a>, <a href="#page135"><span class="ref">135</span></a>, <a href="#page178"><span class="ref">178</span></a>, <a href="#page192"><span class="ref">192</span></a>, <a href="#page202"><span class="ref">202</span></a>, <a href="#page252"><span class="ref">252</span></a>, <a href="#page253"><span class="ref">253</span></a>, <a href="#page260"><span class="ref">260</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Magee, W.K. ("John Eglinton"), <a href="#page8"><span class="ref">8</span></a>, <a href="#page10"><span class="ref">10</span></a>.</p> +<p>Magic, <a href="#page67"><span class="ref">67</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Magnanimous Lover, The</span>, <a href="#page243"><span class="ref">243</span></a>, <a href="#page245"><span class="ref">245</span></a>, <a href="#page246"><span class="ref">246</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Man, Isle of, <a href="#page3"><span class="ref">3</span></a>, <a href="#page4"><span class="ref">4</span></a>, <a href="#page5"><span class="ref">5</span></a>.</p> +<p>Martin, Martin, <a href="#page271"><span class="ref">271</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Martyn, Edward, <a href="#page13"><span class="ref">13</span></a>, <a href="#page18"><span class="ref">18</span></a>, <a href="#page46"><span class="ref">46</span></a>, <a href="#page72"><span class="ref">72</span></a>, <a href="#page73"><span class="ref">73</span></a>, <a href="#page74"><span class="ref">74</span></a>-95, <a href="#page97"><span class="ref">97</span></a>, <a href="#page98"><span class="ref">98</span></a>, <a href="#page102"><span class="ref">102</span></a>, <a href="#page105"><span class="ref">105</span></a>, <a href="#page112"><span class="ref">112</span></a>, <a href="#page115"><span class="ref">115</span></a>, <a href="#page178"><span class="ref">178</span></a>, <a href="#page207"><span class="ref">207</span></a>.<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Enchanted Sea</span>, <a href="#page75"><span class="ref">75</span></a>, <a href="#page77"><span class="ref">77</span></a>, <a href="#page83"><span class="ref">83</span></a>, <a href="#page85"><span class="ref">85</span></a>-87, <a href="#page89"><span class="ref">89</span></a>, <a href="#page90"><span class="ref">90</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Grangecolman</span>, <a href="#page91"><span class="ref">91</span></a>-92;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Heather Field</span>, <a href="#page18"><span class="ref">18</span></a>, <a href="#page78"><span class="ref">78</span></a>-83, <a href="#page85"><span class="ref">85</span></a>, <a href="#page89"><span class="ref">89</span></a>, <a href="#page91"><span class="ref">91</span></a>, <a href="#page92"><span class="ref">92</span></a>, <a href="#page93"><span class="ref">93</span></a>, <a href="#page95"><span class="ref">95</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Maeve</span>, <a href="#page75"><span class="ref">75</span></a>, <a href="#page76"><span class="ref">76</span></a>, <a href="#page77"><span class="ref">77</span></a>, <a href="#page83"><span class="ref">83</span></a>-85, <a href="#page90"><span class="ref">90</span></a>; <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Morgante the Lesser</span>, <a href="#page97"><span class="ref">97</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Place Hunters</span>, <a href="#page75"><span class="ref">75</span></a>, <a href="#page78"><span class="ref">78</span></a>, <a href="#page90"><span class="ref">90</span></a>, <a href="#page93"><span class="ref">93</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">A Tale of a Town</span>, <a href="#page75"><span class="ref">75</span></a>, <a href="#page76"><span class="ref">76</span></a>, <a href="#page78"><span class="ref">78</span></a>, <a href="#page81"><span class="ref">81</span></a>, <a href="#page87"><span class="ref">87</span></a>-90, <a href="#page105"><span class="ref">105</span></a>, <a href="#page112"><span class="ref">112</span></a>, <a href="#page213"><span class="ref">213</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Masefield, John, <a href="#page238"><span class="ref">238</span></a>, <a href="#page239"><span class="ref">239</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Maurice Harte</span>, <a href="#page216"><span class="ref">216</span></a>, <a href="#page219"><span class="ref">219</span></a>-221, <a href="#page222"><span class="ref">222</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Mayne, Rutherford, <a href="#page15"><span class="ref">15</span></a>, <a href="#page210"><span class="ref">210</span></a>, <a href="#page233"><span class="ref">233</span></a>-240, <a href="#page244"><span class="ref">244</span></a>.<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Drone</span>, <a href="#page210"><span class="ref">210</span></a>, <a href="#page235"><span class="ref">235</span></a>, <a href="#page236"><span class="ref">236</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Red Turf</span>, <a href="#page238"><span class="ref">238</span></a>, <a href="#page239"><span class="ref">239</span></a>, <a href="#page240"><span class="ref">240</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Troth</span>, <a href="#page235"><span class="ref">235</span></a>, <a href="#page237"><span class="ref">237</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Turn of the Road</span>, <a href="#page216"><span class="ref">216</span></a>, <a href="#page235"><span class="ref">235</span></a>, <a href="#page238"><span class="ref">238</span></a>, <a href="#page239"><span class="ref">239</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Mayo, <a href="#page95"><span class="ref">95</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Mearing Stones</span>, <a href="#page247"><span class="ref">247</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Measure for Measure</span>, <a href="#page24"><span class="ref">24</span></a>.</p> +<p>Meath, <a href="#page226"><span class="ref">226</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Memoirs of My Dead Self</span>, <a href="#page98"><span class="ref">98</span></a>.</p> +<p>Meredith, George, <a href="#page4"><span class="ref">4</span></a>, <a href="#page11"><span class="ref">11</span></a>, <a href="#page101"><span class="ref">101</span></a>, <a href="#page165"><span class="ref">165</span></a>, <a href="#page166"><span class="ref">166</span></a>, <a href="#page261"><span class="ref">261</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Meynell, Alice, <a href="#page10"><span class="ref">10</span></a>.</p> +<p>Milligan, Alice, <a href="#page116"><span class="ref">116</span></a>.</p> +<p>Milton, John, <a href="#page48"><span class="ref">48</span></a>, <a href="#page120"><span class="ref">120</span></a>, <a href="#page135"><span class="ref">135</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Mineral Workers, The</span>, <a href="#page208"><span class="ref">208</span></a>, <a href="#page213"><span class="ref">213</span></a>, <a href="#page214"><span class="ref">214</span></a>, <a href="#page238"><span class="ref">238</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Miracle of the Corn, The</span>, <a href="#page200"><span class="ref">200</span></a>, <a href="#page202"><span class="ref">202</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Mixed Marriage</span>, <a href="#page243"><span class="ref">243</span></a>, <a href="#page246"><span class="ref">246</span></a>, <a href="#page247"><span class="ref">247</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Modern Lover, A</span>, <a href="#page74"><span class="ref">74</span></a>, <a href="#page96"><span class="ref">96</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Modern Painting</span>, <a href="#page95"><span class="ref">95</span></a>.</p> +<p>Molesworth Hall, <a href="#page163"><span class="ref">163</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Monna Vanna</span>, <a href="#page45"><span class="ref">45</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Moore, George, <a href="#page6"><span class="ref">6</span></a>, <a href="#page8"><span class="ref">8</span></a>, <a href="#page18"><span class="ref">18</span></a>, <a href="#page52"><span class="ref">52</span></a>, <a href="#page72"><span class="ref">72</span></a>, <a href="#page73"><span class="ref">73</span></a>, <a href="#page74"><span class="ref">74</span></a>, <a href="#page75"><span class="ref">75</span></a>, <a href="#page80"><span class="ref">80</span></a>, <a href="#page81"><span class="ref">81</span></a>, <a href="#page88"><span class="ref">88</span></a>, <a href="#page92"><span class="ref">92</span></a>, <a href="#page94"><span class="ref">94</span></a>, <a href="#page95"><span class="ref">95</span></a>-113, <a href="#page122"><span class="ref">122</span></a>, <a href="#page158"><span class="ref">158</span></a>.<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Apostle</span>, <a href="#page111"><span class="ref">111</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Bending of the Bough</span>, <a href="#page76"><span class="ref">76</span></a>, <a href="#page88"><span class="ref">88</span></a>, <a href="#page95"><span class="ref">95</span></a>, <a href="#page98"><span class="ref">98</span></a>, <a href="#page105"><span class="ref">105</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Diarmid and Grania</span>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page106"><span class="ref">106</span></a>-110, <a href="#page143"><span class="ref">143</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">A Drama in Muslin</span>, <a href="#page96"><span class="ref">96</span></a>, <a href="#page101"><span class="ref">101</span></a>, <a href="#page102"><span class="ref">102</span></a>, <a href="#page110"><span class="ref">110</span></a>, <a href="#page111"><span class="ref">111</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Esther Waters</span>, <a href="#page6"><span class="ref">6</span></a>, <a href="#page96"><span class="ref">96</span></a>, <a href="#page112"><span class="ref">112</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Evelyn Innes</span>, <a href="#page95"><span class="ref">95</span></a>, <a href="#page96"><span class="ref">96</span></a>, <a href="#page97"><span class="ref">97</span></a>, <a href="#page98"><span class="ref">98</span></a>, <a href="#page122"><span class="ref">122</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Hail and Farewell</span>, <a href="#page73"><span class="ref">73</span></a>, <a href="#page92"><span class="ref">92</span></a>, <a href="#page98"><span class="ref">98</span></a>, <a href="#page113"><span class="ref">113</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Ave</span> (vol. I), <a href="#page73"><span class="ref">73</span></a>, <a href="#page76"><span class="ref">76</span></a>, <a href="#page94"><span class="ref">94</span></a>, <a href="#page99"><span class="ref">99</span></a>, <a href="#page108"><span class="ref">108</span></a>, <a href="#page109"><span class="ref">109</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Salve</span> (vol. II), <a href="#page99"><span class="ref">99</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Impressions and Opinions</span>, <a href="#page103"><span class="ref">103</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Lake</span>, <a href="#page96"><span class="ref">96</span></a>, <a href="#page99"><span class="ref">99</span></a>, <a href="#page101"><span class="ref">101</span></a>, <a href="#page102"><span class="ref">102</span></a>, <a href="#page111"><span class="ref">111</span></a>, <a href="#page112"><span class="ref">112</span></a>, <a href="#page113"><span class="ref">113</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Memoirs of My Dead Self</span>, <a href="#page98"><span class="ref">98</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">A Modern Lover</span>, <a href="#page74"><span class="ref">74</span></a>, <a href="#page96"><span class="ref">96</span></a>; <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Modern Painting</span>, <a href="#page95"><span class="ref">95</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">A Mummer's Wife</span>, <a href="#page101"><span class="ref">101</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Parnell and his Island</span>, <a href="#page96"><span class="ref">96</span></a>, <a href="#page97"><span class="ref">97</span></a>, <a href="#page101"><span class="ref">101</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Sister Teresa</span>, <a href="#page98"><span class="ref">98</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Strike at Arlingford</span>, <a href="#page103"><span class="ref">103</span></a>, <a href="#page104"><span class="ref">104</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Untilled Field</span>, <a href="#page101"><span class="ref">101</span></a>, <a href="#page102"><span class="ref">102</span></a>, <a href="#page111"><span class="ref">111</span></a>, <a href="#page112"><span class="ref">112</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Wild Goose</span>, <a href="#page101"><span class="ref">101</span></a>.</p> + +<p>More, Henry, <a href="#page135"><span class="ref">135</span></a>.</p> +<p>Morgan, Sydney J., <a href="#page217"><span class="ref">217</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Morgante the Lesser</span>, <a href="#page97"><span class="ref">97</span></a>.</p> +<p>Morris, William, <a href="#page38"><span class="ref">38</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Mosada</span>, <a href="#page47"><span class="ref">47</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Mountain Lovers, The</span>, <a href="#page262"><span class="ref">262</span></a>, <a href="#page264"><span class="ref">264</span></a>, <a href="#page265"><span class="ref">265</span></a>, <a href="#page266"><span class="ref">266</span></a>, <a href="#page270"><span class="ref">270</span></a>, <a href="#page274"><span class="ref">274</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Mountainy Singer, The</span>, <a href="#page247"><span class="ref">247</span></a>.</p> +<p>Mulholland, Rosa. (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">See</span> Lady Gilbert.)</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Mummer's Wife, A</span>, <a href="#page101"><span class="ref">101</span></a>.</p> +<p>Munro, Neil, <a href="#page4"><span class="ref">4</span></a>, <a href="#page6"><span class="ref">6</span></a>, <a href="#page59"><span class="ref">59</span></a>, <a href="#page271"><span class="ref">271</span></a>, <a href="#page284"><span class="ref">284</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Munster, <a href="#page178"><span class="ref">178</span></a>, <a href="#page215"><span class="ref">215</span></a>.</p> +<p>Murray, T.C., <a href="#page15"><span class="ref">15</span></a>, <a href="#page215"><span class="ref">215</span></a>-222.<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Birthright</span>, <a href="#page216"><span class="ref">216</span></a>, <a href="#page217"><span class="ref">217</span></a>, <a href="#page218"><span class="ref">218</span></a>, <a href="#page219"><span class="ref">219</span></a>, <a href="#page222"><span class="ref">222</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Maurice Harte</span>, <a href="#page216"><span class="ref">216</span></a>, <a href="#page219"><span class="ref">219</span></a>-221, <a href="#page222"><span class="ref">222</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Wheel o' Fortune</span>, <a href="#page216"><span class="ref">216</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">My New Curate</span>, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>.</p> +<p>Mysticism, <a href="#page11"><span class="ref">11</span></a>, <a href="#page123"><span class="ref">123</span></a>, <a href="#page134"><span class="ref">134</span></a>, <a href="#page135"><span class="ref">135</span></a>, <a href="#page273"><span class="ref">273</span></a>, <a href="#page274"><span class="ref">274</span></a>, <a href="#page275"><span class="ref">275</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Nan</span>, <a href="#page238"><span class="ref">238</span></a>, <a href="#page239"><span class="ref">239</span></a>.</p> +<p>Nash, Thomas, <a href="#page66"><span class="ref">66</span></a>.</p> +<p>National Dramatic Company, the <a href="#page16"><span class="ref">16</span></a>, <a href="#page19"><span class="ref">19</span></a>, <a href="#page20"><span class="ref">20</span></a>, <a href="#page21"><span class="ref">21</span></a>, <a href="#page29"><span class="ref">29</span></a>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page56"><span class="ref">56</span></a>, <a href="#page77"><span class="ref">77</span></a>, <a href="#page110"><span class="ref">110</span></a>, <a href="#page115"><span class="ref">115</span></a>, <a href="#page118"><span class="ref">118</span></a>.</p> + +<p>National Players, the, <a href="#page35"><span class="ref">35</span></a>.</p> +<p>National Theatre Society, the Ltd., <a href="#page30"><span class="ref">30</span></a>, <a href="#page35"><span class="ref">35</span></a>, <a href="#page60"><span class="ref">60</span></a>, <a href="#page202"><span class="ref">202</span></a>, <a href="#page223"><span class="ref">223</span></a>, <a href="#page241"><span class="ref">241</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Nethersole, Olga, <a href="#page233"><span class="ref">233</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">New Songs</span>, <a href="#page116"><span class="ref">116</span></a>.</p> +<p>Norway, <a href="#page36"><span class="ref">36</span></a>.</p> + +<p>O'Curry, Eugene, <a href="#page140"><span class="ref">140</span></a>.</p> + +<p>O'Doherty, Eileen, <a href="#page217"><span class="ref">217</span></a>.</p> +<p>O'Donoghue, Taidgh, <a href="#page108"><span class="ref">108</span></a>.</p> +<p>O'Donovan, Fred, <a href="#page23"><span class="ref">23</span></a>, <a href="#page26"><span class="ref">26</span></a>, <a href="#page27"><span class="ref">27</span></a>, <a href="#page211"><span class="ref">211</span></a>, <a href="#page217"><span class="ref">217</span></a>.</p> + +<p>"Oghma," <a href="#page116"><span class="ref">116</span></a>.</p> +<p>O'Grady, Standish Hayes, <a href="#page110"><span class="ref">110</span></a>, <a href="#page140"><span class="ref">140</span></a>, <a href="#page141"><span class="ref">141</span></a>.</p> +<p>O'Grady, Standish James, <a href="#page3"><span class="ref">3</span></a>, <a href="#page86"><span class="ref">86</span></a>, <a href="#page117"><span class="ref">117</span></a>, <a href="#page139"><span class="ref">139</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Oisin, <a href="#page13"><span class="ref">13</span></a>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">40</span></a>, <a href="#page69"><span class="ref">69</span></a>.</p> +<p>Olcott, Chauncey, <a href="#page22"><span class="ref">22</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Old Celtic Romances</span>, <a href="#page139"><span class="ref">139</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Old Knowledge, The</span>, <a href="#page122"><span class="ref">122</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Omar Khayyám</span>, <a href="#page141"><span class="ref">141</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">On Baile's Strand</span>, <a href="#page27"><span class="ref">27</span></a>, <a href="#page28"><span class="ref">28</span></a>, <a href="#page58"><span class="ref">58</span></a>, <a href="#page59"><span class="ref">59</span></a>.</p> + +<p>O'Neill, Maire, <a href="#page23"><span class="ref">23</span></a>, <a href="#page26"><span class="ref">26</span></a>.</p> +<p>"Moira O'Neill" (Mrs. Nesta Higginson Skrine), <a href="#page10"><span class="ref">10</span></a>, <a href="#page255"><span class="ref">255</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Origines Islandicæ</span>, <a href="#page238"><span class="ref">238</span></a>.</p> + +<p>O'Riordan, Conal. (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">See</span> "Norreys Connell.")</p> +<p>O'Rourke, J.A., <a href="#page211"><span class="ref">211</span></a>, <a href="#page217"><span class="ref">217</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Ossian</span>, <a href="#page3"><span class="ref">3</span></a>, <a href="#page138"><span class="ref">138</span></a>.</p> + +<p>O'Sullivan, Seumas, <a href="#page11"><span class="ref">11</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Our Dramatists and their Literature</span>, <a href="#page103"><span class="ref">103</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Our Mutual Friend</span>, <a href="#page279"><span class="ref">279</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Outer Isles, The</span>, <a href="#page274"><span class="ref">274</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Pagan Review, The</span>, <a href="#page261"><span class="ref">261</span></a>.</p> +<p>Palestrina, <a href="#page77"><span class="ref">77</span></a>.</p> +<p>Parnell, Charles Stewart, <a href="#page2"><span class="ref">2</span></a>, <a href="#page147"><span class="ref">147</span></a>, <a href="#page149"><span class="ref">149</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Parnell and his Island</span>, <a href="#page96"><span class="ref">96</span></a>, <a href="#page97"><span class="ref">97</span></a>, <a href="#page101"><span class="ref">101</span></a>.</p> +<p>Pater, Walter, <a href="#page121"><span class="ref">121</span></a>, <a href="#page133"><span class="ref">133</span></a>.</p> +<p>Patrick, St., <a href="#page13"><span class="ref">13</span></a>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">40</span></a>, <a href="#page142"><span class="ref">142</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Patriots</span>, <a href="#page231"><span class="ref">231</span></a>-232.</p> +<p>"Paul Gregan," <a href="#page116"><span class="ref">116</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Pebbles from a Brook</span>, <a href="#page8"><span class="ref">8</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Peer Gynt</span>, <a href="#page163"><span class="ref">163</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Pharais</span>, <a href="#page262"><span class="ref">262</span></a>, <a href="#page263"><span class="ref">263</span></a>, <a href="#page264"><span class="ref">264</span></a>, <a href="#page266"><span class="ref">266</span></a>, <a href="#page270"><span class="ref">270</span></a>, <a href="#page277"><span class="ref">277</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Phèdre</span>, <a href="#page16"><span class="ref">16</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Phillpotts, Eden, <a href="#page6"><span class="ref">6</span></a>.</p> +<p>Pinero, Sir Arthur Wing, <a href="#page104"><span class="ref">104</span></a>, <a href="#page214"><span class="ref">214</span></a>, <a href="#page233"><span class="ref">233</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Piper, The</span>, <a href="#page31"><span class="ref">31</span></a>, <a href="#page33"><span class="ref">33</span></a>, <a href="#page242"><span class="ref">242</span></a>, <a href="#page243"><span class="ref">243</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Place Hunters, The</span>, <a href="#page75"><span class="ref">75</span></a>, <a href="#page78"><span class="ref">78</span></a>, <a href="#page90"><span class="ref">90</span></a>, <a href="#page93"><span class="ref">93</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Playboy of the Western World, The</span>, <a href="#page23"><span class="ref">23</span></a>, <a href="#page26"><span class="ref">26</span></a>, <a href="#page31"><span class="ref">31</span></a>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page33"><span class="ref">33</span></a>, <a href="#page75"><span class="ref">75</span></a>, <a href="#page149"><span class="ref">149</span></a>, <a href="#page163"><span class="ref">163</span></a>, <a href="#page164"><span class="ref">164</span></a>, <a href="#page166"><span class="ref">166</span></a>, <a href="#page170"><span class="ref">170</span></a>, <a href="#page171"><span class="ref">171</span></a>, <a href="#page176"><span class="ref">176</span></a>, <a href="#page178"><span class="ref">178</span></a>, <a href="#page180"><span class="ref">180</span></a>, <a href="#page182"><span class="ref">182</span></a>, <a href="#page184"><span class="ref">184</span></a>, <a href="#page196"><span class="ref">196</span></a>, <a href="#page218"><span class="ref">218</span></a>, <a href="#page228"><span class="ref">228</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Players Club, The, <a href="#page86"><span class="ref">86</span></a>.</p> +<p>Plotinus, <a href="#page125"><span class="ref">125</span></a>.</p> +<p>Poe, Edgar Allan, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">40</span></a>, <a href="#page48"><span class="ref">48</span></a>, <a href="#page265"><span class="ref">265</span></a>.</p> +<p>Poel, William, <a href="#page24"><span class="ref">24</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Poems and Ballads</span>, <a href="#page49"><span class="ref">49</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Poetry of the Celtic Races, The</span>, <a href="#page3"><span class="ref">3</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Poets and Dreamers</span>, <a href="#page147"><span class="ref">147</span></a>.</p> +<p>Pomfret, John, <a href="#page203"><span class="ref">203</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Poorhouse, The</span>, <a href="#page9"><span class="ref">9</span></a>.</p> +<p>Pope, Alexander, <a href="#page203"><span class="ref">203</span></a>.</p> +<p>Porphyry, <a href="#page54"><span class="ref">54</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Pot of Broth, A</span>, <a href="#page22"><span class="ref">22</span></a>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page51"><span class="ref">51</span></a>, <a href="#page52"><span class="ref">52</span></a>, <a href="#page54"><span class="ref">54</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Pre-Raphaelites, The, <a href="#page10"><span class="ref">10</span></a>, <a href="#page158"><span class="ref">158</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Princess of Thule, The</span>, <a href="#page271"><span class="ref">271</span></a>.</p> +<p>Proclus, <a href="#page126"><span class="ref">126</span></a>.</p> +<p>Psaltery, <a href="#page64"><span class="ref">64</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Puritanism, <a href="#page135"><span class="ref">135</span></a>, <a href="#page234"><span class="ref">234</span></a>, <a href="#page235"><span class="ref">235</span></a>, <a href="#page244"><span class="ref">244</span></a>, <a href="#page285"><span class="ref">285</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur, <a href="#page3"><span class="ref">3</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Quinn, Maire T., <a href="#page21"><span class="ref">21</span></a>, <a href="#page22"><span class="ref">22</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Racing Lug, The</span>, <a href="#page20"><span class="ref">20</span></a>, <a href="#page21"><span class="ref">21</span></a>.</p> +<p>Raftery, <a href="#page147"><span class="ref">147</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Red Turf</span>, <a href="#page238"><span class="ref">238</span></a>, <a href="#page239"><span class="ref">239</span></a>, <a href="#page240"><span class="ref">240</span></a>.</p> +<p>Rehan, Ada, <a href="#page233"><span class="ref">233</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Religious Songs of Connacht, The</span>, <a href="#page9"><span class="ref">9</span></a>, <a href="#page171"><span class="ref">171</span></a>, <a href="#page179"><span class="ref">179</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Renan, Ernest, <a href="#page3"><span class="ref">3</span></a>, <a href="#page255"><span class="ref">255</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Revival of Irish Literature, The</span>, <a href="#page2"><span class="ref">2</span></a>.</p> +<p>Rhys, Ernest, <a href="#page4"><span class="ref">4</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Riders to the Sea</span>, <a href="#page149"><span class="ref">149</span></a>, <a href="#page162"><span class="ref">162</span></a>, <a href="#page178"><span class="ref">178</span></a>, <a href="#page179"><span class="ref">179</span></a>, <a href="#page181"><span class="ref">181</span></a>, <a href="#page183"><span class="ref">183</span></a>, <a href="#page195"><span class="ref">195</span></a>, <a href="#page197"><span class="ref">197</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Rinder, Edith Wingate, <a href="#page268"><span class="ref">268</span></a>, <a href="#page269"><span class="ref">269</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Rising of the Moon, The</span>, <a href="#page22"><span class="ref">22</span></a>, <a href="#page31"><span class="ref">31</span></a>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page152"><span class="ref">152</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Robin Hood, <a href="#page138"><span class="ref">138</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Robinson, S. Lennox, <a href="#page15"><span class="ref">15</span></a>, <a href="#page33"><span class="ref">33</span></a>, <a href="#page112"><span class="ref">112</span></a>, <a href="#page215"><span class="ref">215</span></a>, <a href="#page221"><span class="ref">221</span></a>, <a href="#page222"><span class="ref">222</span></a>-232.<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Clancy Name</span>, <a href="#page223"><span class="ref">223</span></a>-224, <a href="#page228"><span class="ref">228</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Crossroads</span>, <a href="#page224"><span class="ref">224</span></a>-228, <a href="#page230"><span class="ref">230</span></a>, <a href="#page231"><span class="ref">231</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Harvest</span>, <a href="#page221"><span class="ref">221</span></a>, <a href="#page224"><span class="ref">224</span></a>, <a href="#page228"><span class="ref">228</span></a>-230;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Lesson of Life</span>, <a href="#page224"><span class="ref">224</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Patriots</span>, <a href="#page231"><span class="ref">231</span></a>-232.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Rob Roy</span>, <a href="#page272"><span class="ref">272</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Romantic Ballads</span>, <a href="#page253"><span class="ref">253</span></a>, <a href="#page259"><span class="ref">259</span></a>, <a href="#page294"><span class="ref">294</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Rosmersholm</span>, <a href="#page91"><span class="ref">91</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Ross, Martin. (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">See</span> Somerville, E. Oe.)</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Rossetti, Dante Gabriel</span>, <a href="#page293"><span class="ref">293</span></a>.</p> +<p>Ruskin, John, <a href="#page89"><span class="ref">89</span></a>, <a href="#page158"><span class="ref">158</span></a>, <a href="#page159"><span class="ref">159</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Russell, G.W. ("A.E."), <a href="#page1"><span class="ref">1</span></a>, <a href="#page5"><span class="ref">5</span></a>, <a href="#page8"><span class="ref">8</span></a>, <a href="#page11"><span class="ref">11</span></a>, <a href="#page19"><span class="ref">19</span></a>, <a href="#page20"><span class="ref">20</span></a>, <a href="#page21"><span class="ref">21</span></a>, <a href="#page39"><span class="ref">39</span></a>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">41</span></a>, <a href="#page46"><span class="ref">46</span></a>, <a href="#page95"><span class="ref">95</span></a>, <a href="#page98"><span class="ref">98</span></a>, <a href="#page111"><span class="ref">111</span></a>, <a href="#page112"><span class="ref">112</span></a>, <a href="#page114"><span class="ref">114</span></a>-137, <a href="#page146"><span class="ref">146</span></a>, <a href="#page251"><span class="ref">251</span></a>, <a href="#page253"><span class="ref">253</span></a>, <a href="#page255"><span class="ref">255</span></a>.<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Deirdre</span>, <a href="#page20"><span class="ref">20</span></a>, <a href="#page21"><span class="ref">21</span></a>, <a href="#page31"><span class="ref">31</span></a>, <a href="#page77"><span class="ref">77</span></a>, <a href="#page115"><span class="ref">115</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Divine Vision</span>, <a href="#page116"><span class="ref">116</span></a>, <a href="#page122"><span class="ref">122</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Earth Breath</span>, <a href="#page116"><span class="ref">116</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Homeward</span>, <a href="#page116"><span class="ref">116</span></a>;<br> + "Symbolism," <a href="#page126"><span class="ref">126</span></a>;<br> + "Weariness," <a href="#page128"><span class="ref">128</span></a>;<br> + "Memory of Earth," <a href="#page130"><span class="ref">130</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Ryan, Frederick, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Salve</span>, <a href="#page99"><span class="ref">99</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Samhain</span>, <a href="#page16"><span class="ref">16</span></a>, <a href="#page29"><span class="ref">29</span></a>, <a href="#page76"><span class="ref">76</span></a>, <a href="#page81"><span class="ref">81</span></a>, <a href="#page109"><span class="ref">109</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Saturday Review, The</span>, London, <a href="#page81"><span class="ref">81</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Saxon Shillin', The</span>, <a href="#page201"><span class="ref">201</span></a>.</p> +<p>Scotch Irish, the, <a href="#page215"><span class="ref">215</span></a>, <a href="#page234"><span class="ref">234</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Scott, Sir Walter, <a href="#page6"><span class="ref">6</span></a>, <a href="#page100"><span class="ref">100</span></a>, <a href="#page234"><span class="ref">234</span></a>, <a href="#page272"><span class="ref">272</span></a>, <a href="#page289"><span class="ref">289</span></a>.</p> +<p>Scotus Erigena, <a href="#page135"><span class="ref">135</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The</span>, <a href="#page104"><span class="ref">104</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Secret Rose, The</span>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">41</span></a>, <a href="#page54"><span class="ref">54</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Seething Pot, The</span>, <a href="#page8"><span class="ref">8</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Seven Woods, In the</span>, <a href="#page43"><span class="ref">43</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Shadow of the Glen, In the</span>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page60"><span class="ref">60</span></a>, <a href="#page77"><span class="ref">77</span></a>, <a href="#page162"><span class="ref">162</span></a>, <a href="#page168"><span class="ref">168</span></a>, <a href="#page169"><span class="ref">169</span></a>, <a href="#page175"><span class="ref">175</span></a>, <a href="#page178"><span class="ref">178</span></a>, <a href="#page181"><span class="ref">181</span></a>, <a href="#page184"><span class="ref">184</span></a>, <a href="#page190"><span class="ref">190</span></a>, <a href="#page195"><span class="ref">195</span></a>, <a href="#page218"><span class="ref">218</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Shadowy Waters, The</span>, <a href="#page28"><span class="ref">28</span></a>, <a href="#page56"><span class="ref">56</span></a>-58, <a href="#page60"><span class="ref">60</span></a>.</p> +<p>Shakespeare, <a href="#page120"><span class="ref">120</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Shakespeare's End</span>, <a href="#page242"><span class="ref">242</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Sharp, William ("Fiona Macleod"), <a href="#page4"><span class="ref">4</span></a>, <a href="#page86"><span class="ref">86</span></a>, <a href="#page251"><span class="ref">251</span></a>-296.<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">A Child of Nature</span>, <a href="#page272"><span class="ref">272</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Children of To-morrow</span>, <a href="#page264"><span class="ref">264</span></a>;<br> + "The Dan-nan-Ron," <a href="#page263"><span class="ref">263</span></a>, <a href="#page287"><span class="ref">287</span></a>;<br> + "The Dirge of the Four Cities," <a href="#page255"><span class="ref">255</span></a>, <a href="#page259"><span class="ref">259</span></a>, <a href="#page287"><span class="ref">287</span></a>, <a href="#page296"><span class="ref">296</span></a>;<br> + "Dim face of beauty haunting all the world," <a href="#page259"><span class="ref">259</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Divine Adventure</span>, <a href="#page263"><span class="ref">263</span></a>, <a href="#page270"><span class="ref">270</span></a>, <a href="#page273"><span class="ref">273</span></a>, <a href="#page275"><span class="ref">275</span></a>, <a href="#page279"><span class="ref">279</span></a>, <a href="#page289"><span class="ref">289</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Dominion of Dreams</span>, <a href="#page273"><span class="ref">273</span></a>, <a href="#page274"><span class="ref">274</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Drosdan and Yssul</span>, <a href="#page254"><span class="ref">254</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Enchanted Valleys</span>, <a href="#page254"><span class="ref">254</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">A Fellowe and his Wife</span>, <a href="#page261"><span class="ref">261</span></a>, <a href="#page264"><span class="ref">264</span></a>, <a href="#page278"><span class="ref">278</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Flora MacDonald</span>, <a href="#page266"><span class="ref">266</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">From the Hills of Dream</span>, <a href="#page259"><span class="ref">259</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Greek Backgrounds</span>, <a href="#page286"><span class="ref">286</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Green Fire</span>, <a href="#page263"><span class="ref">263</span></a>, <a href="#page266"><span class="ref">266</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Gypsy Christ</span>, <a href="#page265"><span class="ref">265</span></a>, <a href="#page279"><span class="ref">279</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The House of Usna</span>, <a href="#page251"><span class="ref">251</span></a>, <a href="#page252"><span class="ref">252</span></a>, <a href="#page253"><span class="ref">253</span></a>, <a href="#page254"><span class="ref">254</span></a>, <a href="#page259"><span class="ref">259</span></a>, <a href="#page285"><span class="ref">285</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Immortal Hour</span>, <a href="#page251"><span class="ref">251</span></a>, <a href="#page252"><span class="ref">252</span></a>, <a href="#page285"><span class="ref">285</span></a>, <a href="#page287"><span class="ref">287</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Iona</span>, <a href="#page277"><span class="ref">277</span></a>, <a href="#page289"><span class="ref">289</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The King of Ys</span>, <a href="#page254"><span class="ref">254</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Last Supper</span>, <a href="#page251"><span class="ref">251</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Laughter of Peterkin</span>, <a href="#page267"><span class="ref">267</span></a>, <a href="#page284"><span class="ref">284</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Literary Geography</span>, <a href="#page289"><span class="ref">289</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Lyra Celtica</span>, <a href="#page4"><span class="ref">4</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Madge o' the Pool</span>, <a href="#page279"><span class="ref">279</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Mountain Lovers</span>, <a href="#page262"><span class="ref">262</span></a>, <a href="#page264"><span class="ref">264</span></a>, <a href="#page265"><span class="ref">265</span></a>, <a href="#page266"><span class="ref">266</span></a>, <a href="#page270"><span class="ref">270</span></a>, <a href="#page274"><span class="ref">274</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Pagan Review</span>, <a href="#page261"><span class="ref">261</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Pharais</span>, <a href="#page262"><span class="ref">262</span></a>, <a href="#page263"><span class="ref">263</span></a>, <a href="#page264"><span class="ref">264</span></a>, <a href="#page266"><span class="ref">266</span></a>, <a href="#page270"><span class="ref">270</span></a>, <a href="#page277"><span class="ref">277</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Romantic Ballads</span>, <a href="#page253"><span class="ref">253</span></a>, <a href="#page259"><span class="ref">259</span></a>, <a href="#page294"><span class="ref">294</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Silence Farm</span>, <a href="#page257"><span class="ref">257</span></a>, <a href="#page258"><span class="ref">258</span></a>, <a href="#page264"><span class="ref">264</span></a>, <a href="#page265"><span class="ref">265</span></a>, <a href="#page270"><span class="ref">270</span></a>, <a href="#page271"><span class="ref">271</span></a>, <a href="#page279"><span class="ref">279</span></a>, <a href="#page295"><span class="ref">295</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Sin-Eater</span>, <a href="#page263"><span class="ref">263</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Sospiri di Roma</span>, <a href="#page257"><span class="ref">257</span></a>, <a href="#page258"><span class="ref">258</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Vistas</span>, <a href="#page251"><span class="ref">251</span></a>, <a href="#page252"><span class="ref">252</span></a>, <a href="#page253"><span class="ref">253</span></a>, <a href="#page259"><span class="ref">259</span></a>, <a href="#page260"><span class="ref">260</span></a>, <a href="#page273"><span class="ref">273</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Washer of the Ford</span>, <a href="#page263"><span class="ref">263</span></a>, <a href="#page283"><span class="ref">283</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Where the Forest Murmurs</span>, <a href="#page263"><span class="ref">263</span></a>, <a href="#page285"><span class="ref">285</span></a>, <a href="#page289"><span class="ref">289</span></a>, <a href="#page290"><span class="ref">290</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Winged Destiny</span>, <a href="#page263"><span class="ref">263</span></a>, <a href="#page274"><span class="ref">274</span></a>, <a href="#page293"><span class="ref">293</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Wives in Exile</span>, <a href="#page261"><span class="ref">261</span></a>, <a href="#page264"><span class="ref">264</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Sharp, Mrs. William, <a href="#page251"><span class="ref">251</span></a>, <a href="#page256"><span class="ref">256</span></a>, <a href="#page262"><span class="ref">262</span></a>, <a href="#page268"><span class="ref">268</span></a>, <a href="#page279"><span class="ref">279</span></a>, <a href="#page286"><span class="ref">286</span></a>, <a href="#page290"><span class="ref">290</span></a>.</p> +<p>Shaw, George Bernard, <a href="#page53"><span class="ref">53</span></a>, <a href="#page177"><span class="ref">177</span></a>, <a href="#page230"><span class="ref">230</span></a>, <a href="#page241"><span class="ref">241</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Sheehan, Canon, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>.</p> +<p>Shelley, P.B., <a href="#page38"><span class="ref">38</span></a>.</p> +<p>Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, <a href="#page13"><span class="ref">13</span></a>.</p> +<p>Shorter, Dora Sigerson, <a href="#page11"><span class="ref">11</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Showing-up of Blanco Posnet, The</span>, <a href="#page241"><span class="ref">241</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Sigerson, Dr. George, <a href="#page2"><span class="ref">2</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Silence Farm</span>, <a href="#page257"><span class="ref">257</span></a>, <a href="#page258"><span class="ref">258</span></a>, <a href="#page264"><span class="ref">264</span></a>, <a href="#page265"><span class="ref">265</span></a>, <a href="#page270"><span class="ref">270</span></a>, <a href="#page271"><span class="ref">271</span></a>, <a href="#page279"><span class="ref">279</span></a>, <a href="#page295"><span class="ref">295</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Sims, George Robert, <a href="#page103"><span class="ref">103</span></a>, <a href="#page104"><span class="ref">104</span></a>.</p> +<p>Sinclair, Arthur, <a href="#page19"><span class="ref">19</span></a>, <a href="#page23"><span class="ref">23</span></a>, <a href="#page24"><span class="ref">24</span></a>, <a href="#page27"><span class="ref">27</span></a>, <a href="#page211"><span class="ref">211</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Sin-Eater, The</span>, <a href="#page263"><span class="ref">263</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Sister Teresa</span>, <a href="#page98"><span class="ref">98</span></a>.</p> +<p>Skrine, Nesta Higginson. (<span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">See</span> "Moira O'Neill.")</p> +<p>Skye, <a href="#page267"><span class="ref">267</span></a>, <a href="#page283"><span class="ref">283</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Sligo, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">40</span></a>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">41</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Sohrab and Rustum</span>, <a href="#page59"><span class="ref">59</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.</span>, <a href="#page6"><span class="ref">6</span></a>.</p> +<p>Somerville, E. Oe., and Martin Ross, <a href="#page6"><span class="ref">6</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Sospiri di Roma</span>, <a href="#page257"><span class="ref">257</span></a>, <a href="#page258"><span class="ref">258</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Sowing the Wind</span>, <a href="#page104"><span class="ref">104</span></a>.</p> +<p>Spenser, Edmund, <a href="#page38"><span class="ref">38</span></a>, <a href="#page39"><span class="ref">39</span></a>, <a href="#page123"><span class="ref">123</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Spoer, Ada Goodrich-Freer, <a href="#page274"><span class="ref">274</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Spreading the News</span>, <a href="#page150"><span class="ref">150</span></a>, <a href="#page151"><span class="ref">151</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Squireen, The</span>, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>, <a href="#page236"><span class="ref">236</span></a>, <a href="#page271"><span class="ref">271</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Stage Society, the, London, <a href="#page53"><span class="ref">53</span></a>, <a href="#page112"><span class="ref">112</span></a>, <a href="#page252"><span class="ref">252</span></a>.</p> +<p>Stephens, James, <a href="#page8"><span class="ref">8</span></a>.</p> +<p>Stevenson, Robert Louis, <a href="#page49"><span class="ref">49</span></a>, <a href="#page260"><span class="ref">260</span></a>, <a href="#page272"><span class="ref">272</span></a>, <a href="#page289"><span class="ref">289</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Stokes, Whitley, <a href="#page140"><span class="ref">140</span></a>.</p> +<p>Strand Theatre, the, London, <a href="#page81"><span class="ref">81</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Strike at Arlingford, The</span>, <a href="#page103"><span class="ref">103</span></a>, <a href="#page104"><span class="ref">104</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Studies</span>, <a href="#page200"><span class="ref">200</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Sutherland, <a href="#page272"><span class="ref">272</span></a>.</p> +<p>Swift, Jonathan, <a href="#page13"><span class="ref">13</span></a>, <a href="#page173"><span class="ref">173</span></a>, <a href="#page196"><span class="ref">196</span></a>, <a href="#page282"><span class="ref">282</span></a>.</p> +<p>Swinburne, Algernon Charles, <a href="#page43"><span class="ref">43</span></a>, <a href="#page49"><span class="ref">49</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Symbolism, <a href="#page65"><span class="ref">65</span></a>-67, <a href="#page126"><span class="ref">126</span></a>, <a href="#page176"><span class="ref">176</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Synge, John Millington, <a href="#page15"><span class="ref">15</span></a>, <a href="#page22"><span class="ref">22</span></a>, <a href="#page26"><span class="ref">26</span></a>, <a href="#page31"><span class="ref">31</span></a>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page47"><span class="ref">47</span></a>, <a href="#page61"><span class="ref">61</span></a>, <a href="#page114"><span class="ref">114</span></a>, <a href="#page148"><span class="ref">148</span></a>, <a href="#page149"><span class="ref">149</span></a>, <a href="#page155"><span class="ref">155</span></a>, + <a href="#page160"><span class="ref">160</span></a>-197, <a href="#page205"><span class="ref">205</span></a>, <a href="#page206"><span class="ref">206</span></a>, <a href="#page238"><span class="ref">238</span></a>, <a href="#page239"><span class="ref">239</span></a>, <a href="#page240"><span class="ref">240</span></a>, <a href="#page242"><span class="ref">242</span></a>, <a href="#page285"><span class="ref">285</span></a>.<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Aran Islands</span>, <a href="#page168"><span class="ref">168</span></a>, <a href="#page187"><span class="ref">187</span></a>, <a href="#page188"><span class="ref">188</span></a>, <a href="#page191"><span class="ref">191</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Deirdre of the Sorrows</span>, <a href="#page163"><span class="ref">163</span></a>, <a href="#page166"><span class="ref">166</span></a>-168, <a href="#page181"><span class="ref">181</span></a>, <a href="#page183"><span class="ref">183</span></a>, <a href="#page192"><span class="ref">192</span></a>, <a href="#page196"><span class="ref">196</span></a>, <a href="#page197"><span class="ref">197</span></a>, <a href="#page285"><span class="ref">285</span></a>;<br> + "In Kerry," <a href="#page164"><span class="ref">164</span></a>; verse, <a href="#page192"><span class="ref">192</span></a>-194;<br> + "Preludes," <a href="#page193"><span class="ref">193</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Playboy of the Western World</span>, <a href="#page23"><span class="ref">23</span></a>, <a href="#page26"><span class="ref">26</span></a>, <a href="#page31"><span class="ref">31</span></a>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page33"><span class="ref">33</span></a>, <a href="#page75"><span class="ref">75</span></a>, <a href="#page149"><span class="ref">149</span></a>, <a href="#page163"><span class="ref">163</span></a>, <a href="#page164"><span class="ref">164</span></a>, <a href="#page166"><span class="ref">166</span></a>, <a href="#page170"><span class="ref">170</span></a>, <a href="#page171"><span class="ref">171</span></a>, + <a href="#page176"><span class="ref">176</span></a>, <a href="#page178"><span class="ref">178</span></a>, <a href="#page180"><span class="ref">180</span></a>, <a href="#page182"><span class="ref">182</span></a>, <a href="#page184"><span class="ref">184</span></a>, <a href="#page196"><span class="ref">196</span></a>, <a href="#page218"><span class="ref">218</span></a>, <a href="#page228"><span class="ref">228</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Riders to the Sea</span>, <a href="#page149"><span class="ref">149</span></a>, <a href="#page162"><span class="ref">162</span></a>, <a href="#page178"><span class="ref">178</span></a>, <a href="#page179"><span class="ref">179</span></a>, <a href="#page181"><span class="ref">181</span></a>, <a href="#page183"><span class="ref">183</span></a>, <a href="#page195"><span class="ref">195</span></a>, <a href="#page197"><span class="ref">197</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">In the Shadow of the Glen</span>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page60"><span class="ref">60</span></a>, <a href="#page77"><span class="ref">77</span></a>, <a href="#page162"><span class="ref">162</span></a>, <a href="#page168"><span class="ref">168</span></a>, <a href="#page169"><span class="ref">169</span></a>, <a href="#page175"><span class="ref">175</span></a>, <a href="#page178"><span class="ref">178</span></a>, <a href="#page181"><span class="ref">181</span></a>, <a href="#page184"><span class="ref">184</span></a>, <a href="#page190"><span class="ref">190</span></a>, <a href="#page195"><span class="ref">195</span></a>, <a href="#page218"><span class="ref">218</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Tinker's Wedding</span>, <a href="#page111"><span class="ref">111</span></a>, <a href="#page163"><span class="ref">163</span></a>, <a href="#page171"><span class="ref">171</span></a>, <a href="#page174"><span class="ref">174</span></a>, <a href="#page180"><span class="ref">180</span></a>, <a href="#page182"><span class="ref">182</span></a>, <a href="#page190"><span class="ref">190</span></a>, <a href="#page196"><span class="ref">196</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Well of the Saints</span>, <a href="#page23"><span class="ref">23</span></a>, <a href="#page29"><span class="ref">29</span></a>, <a href="#page164"><span class="ref">164</span></a>, <a href="#page170"><span class="ref">170</span></a>, <a href="#page175"><span class="ref">175</span></a>, <a href="#page177"><span class="ref">177</span></a>, <a href="#page178"><span class="ref">178</span></a>, <a href="#page182"><span class="ref">182</span></a>, <a href="#page190"><span class="ref">190</span></a>, <a href="#page196"><span class="ref">196</span></a>, <a href="#page218"><span class="ref">218</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Tables of the Law, The</span>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">41</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Tale of a Town, A</span>, <a href="#page75"><span class="ref">75</span></a>, <a href="#page76"><span class="ref">76</span></a>, <a href="#page78"><span class="ref">78</span></a>, <a href="#page81"><span class="ref">81</span></a>, <a href="#page87"><span class="ref">87</span></a>-90, <a href="#page105"><span class="ref">105</span></a>, <a href="#page112"><span class="ref">112</span></a>, <a href="#page213"><span class="ref">213</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Taliaferro, Mabel, <a href="#page50"><span class="ref">50</span></a>.</p> +<p>Taylor, Thomas, <a href="#page117"><span class="ref">117</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Tempest, The</span>, <a href="#page45"><span class="ref">45</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Tess of the D'Urbervilles</span>, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>, <a href="#page258"><span class="ref">258</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Thackeray, W.M., <a href="#page6"><span class="ref">6</span></a>, <a href="#page101"><span class="ref">101</span></a>.</p> +<p>Théâtre Français, <a href="#page17"><span class="ref">17</span></a>.</p> +<p>Theatre of Ireland, the, <a href="#page35"><span class="ref">35</span></a>, <a href="#page202"><span class="ref">202</span></a>.</p> +<p>Theatre Royal, Dublin, <a href="#page30"><span class="ref">30</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Thomas Muskerry</span>, <a href="#page199"><span class="ref">199</span></a>, <a href="#page200"><span class="ref">200</span></a>, <a href="#page206"><span class="ref">206</span></a>.</p> +<p>Thompson, Francis, <a href="#page135"><span class="ref">135</span></a>.</p> +<p>Thoreau, Henry David, <a href="#page290"><span class="ref">290</span></a>, <a href="#page291"><span class="ref">291</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Through the Turf Smoke</span>, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Time</span>, <a href="#page242"><span class="ref">242</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Tinker's Wedding, The</span>, <a href="#page111"><span class="ref">111</span></a>, <a href="#page163"><span class="ref">163</span></a>, <a href="#page171"><span class="ref">171</span></a>, <a href="#page174"><span class="ref">174</span></a>, <a href="#page180"><span class="ref">180</span></a>, <a href="#page182"><span class="ref">182</span></a>, <a href="#page190"><span class="ref">190</span></a>, <a href="#page196"><span class="ref">196</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Tipperary, <a href="#page171"><span class="ref">171</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Travelling Man, A</span>, <a href="#page153"><span class="ref">153</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Treasure of the Humble, The</span>, <a href="#page115"><span class="ref">115</span></a>.</p> +<p>Trench, Herbert, <a href="#page11"><span class="ref">11</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Trinity College, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page33"><span class="ref">33</span></a>.</p> +<p>Trollope, Anthony, <a href="#page271"><span class="ref">271</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Troth, The</span>, <a href="#page235"><span class="ref">235</span></a>, <a href="#page237"><span class="ref">237</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Turn of the Road, The</span>, <a href="#page216"><span class="ref">216</span></a>, <a href="#page235"><span class="ref">235</span></a>, <a href="#page238"><span class="ref">238</span></a>, <a href="#page239"><span class="ref">239</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Twenty-five</span>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page152"><span class="ref">152</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Twilight People, The</span>, <a href="#page11"><span class="ref">11</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Twisting of the Rope, The</span>, <a href="#page107"><span class="ref">107</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Two Essays on the Remnant</span>, <a href="#page8"><span class="ref">8</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Ulster, <a href="#page215"><span class="ref">215</span></a>, <a href="#page240"><span class="ref">240</span></a>, <a href="#page245"><span class="ref">245</span></a>, <a href="#page246"><span class="ref">246</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Ulster Literary Theatre, the, <a href="#page35"><span class="ref">35</span></a>, <a href="#page239"><span class="ref">239</span></a>, <a href="#page243"><span class="ref">243</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Unicorn from the Stars, The</span>, <a href="#page27"><span class="ref">27</span></a>, <a href="#page53"><span class="ref">53</span></a>-56.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Untilled Field, The</span>, <a href="#page101"><span class="ref">101</span></a>, <a href="#page102"><span class="ref">102</span></a>, <a href="#page111"><span class="ref">111</span></a>, <a href="#page112"><span class="ref">112</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Upanishads, <a href="#page117"><span class="ref">117</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Villon, François, <a href="#page182"><span class="ref">182</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Vistas</span>, <a href="#page251"><span class="ref">251</span></a>, <a href="#page252"><span class="ref">252</span></a>, <a href="#page253"><span class="ref">253</span></a>, <a href="#page259"><span class="ref">259</span></a>, <a href="#page260"><span class="ref">260</span></a>, <a href="#page273"><span class="ref">273</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Von Teuffel, Mrs., <a href="#page261"><span class="ref">261</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Wales, <a href="#page2"><span class="ref">2</span></a>, <a href="#page3"><span class="ref">3</span></a>, <a href="#page4"><span class="ref">4</span></a>.</p> +<p>Walker, Mary, <a href="#page20"><span class="ref">20</span></a>, <a href="#page21"><span class="ref">21</span></a>, <a href="#page22"><span class="ref">22</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Wanderings of Oisin, The</span>, <a href="#page1"><span class="ref">1</span></a>, <a href="#page39"><span class="ref">39</span></a>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">40</span></a>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">41</span></a>, <a href="#page63"><span class="ref">63</span></a>, <a href="#page64"><span class="ref">64</span></a>, <a href="#page139"><span class="ref">139</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Washer of the Ford, The</span>, <a href="#page263"><span class="ref">263</span></a>, <a href="#page283"><span class="ref">283</span></a>.</p> +<p>Watts, George Frederic, <a href="#page122"><span class="ref">122</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Waverley</span>, <a href="#page272"><span class="ref">272</span></a>.</p> +<p>Weekes, Charles, <a href="#page116"><span class="ref">116</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Weir of Hermiston</span>, <a href="#page272"><span class="ref">272</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Well of the Saints, The</span>, <a href="#page23"><span class="ref">23</span></a>, <a href="#page29"><span class="ref">29</span></a>, <a href="#page164"><span class="ref">164</span></a>, <a href="#page170"><span class="ref">170</span></a>, <a href="#page175"><span class="ref">175</span></a>, <a href="#page177"><span class="ref">177</span></a>, <a href="#page178"><span class="ref">178</span></a>, <a href="#page182"><span class="ref">182</span></a>, <a href="#page190"><span class="ref">190</span></a>, <a href="#page196"><span class="ref">196</span></a>, <a href="#page218"><span class="ref">218</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Wessex, <a href="#page7"><span class="ref">7</span></a>, <a href="#page258"><span class="ref">258</span></a>.</p> +<p>West Britons, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">West Irish Folk-Tales</span>, <a href="#page9"><span class="ref">9</span></a>.</p> +<p>Wexford, <a href="#page141"><span class="ref">141</span></a>, <a href="#page152"><span class="ref">152</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Wheel o' Fortune, The</span>, <a href="#page216"><span class="ref">216</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Where the Forest Murmurs</span>, <a href="#page263"><span class="ref">263</span></a>, <a href="#page285"><span class="ref">285</span></a>, <a href="#page289"><span class="ref">289</span></a>, <a href="#page290"><span class="ref">290</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Where there is Nothing</span>, <a href="#page52"><span class="ref">52</span></a>, <a href="#page53"><span class="ref">53</span></a>, <a href="#page54"><span class="ref">54</span></a>, <a href="#page55"><span class="ref">55</span></a>, <a href="#page56"><span class="ref">56</span></a>.</p> +<p>White, Gilbert, <a href="#page290"><span class="ref">290</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">White Cockade, The</span>, <a href="#page152"><span class="ref">152</span></a>.</p> +<p>Whitman, Walt, <a href="#page39"><span class="ref">39</span></a>, <a href="#page173"><span class="ref">173</span></a>, <a href="#page193"><span class="ref">193</span></a>, <a href="#page294"><span class="ref">294</span></a>.</p> +<p>Wicklow, <a href="#page162"><span class="ref">162</span></a>, <a href="#page166"><span class="ref">166</span></a>, <a href="#page170"><span class="ref">170</span></a>, <a href="#page177"><span class="ref">177</span></a>, <a href="#page184"><span class="ref">184</span></a>, <a href="#page190"><span class="ref">190</span></a>, <a href="#page216"><span class="ref">216</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Wild Duck, The</span>, <a href="#page80"><span class="ref">80</span></a>, <a href="#page91"><span class="ref">91</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Wild Earth</span>, <a href="#page200"><span class="ref">200</span></a>, <a href="#page208"><span class="ref">208</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Wild Goose, The</span>, <a href="#page101"><span class="ref">101</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Wilde, Oscar, <a href="#page13"><span class="ref">13</span></a>, <a href="#page53"><span class="ref">53</span></a>, <a href="#page245"><span class="ref">245</span></a>.</p> +<p>Wilde, Lady, <a href="#page51"><span class="ref">51</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">William Sharp: A Memoir</span>, <a href="#page262"><span class="ref">262</span></a>, <a href="#page279"><span class="ref">279</span></a>, <a href="#page290"><span class="ref">290</span></a>.</p> + +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Wind among the Reeds, The</span>, <a href="#page43"><span class="ref">43</span></a>, <a href="#page54"><span class="ref">54</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Winged Destiny, The</span>, <a href="#page263"><span class="ref">263</span></a>, <a href="#page274"><span class="ref">274</span></a>, <a href="#page293"><span class="ref">293</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Wives in Exile</span>, <a href="#page261"><span class="ref">261</span></a>, <a href="#page264"><span class="ref">264</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Wolfe, Charles, <a href="#page94"><span class="ref">94</span></a>.</p> +<p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Woman of no Importance, A</span>, <a href="#page245"><span class="ref">245</span></a>.</p> +<p>Wordsworth, <a href="#page48"><span class="ref">48</span></a>, <a href="#page94"><span class="ref">94</span></a>, <a href="#page265"><span class="ref">265</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Workhouse Ward, The, <a href="#page152"><span class="ref">152</span></a>, <a href="#page154"><span class="ref">154</span></a>.</p> +<p>Wycherly, Margaret, <a href="#page51"><span class="ref">51</span></a>.</p> +<p>Yeats, J.B., Sr., <a href="#page38"><span class="ref">38</span></a>, <a href="#page119"><span class="ref">119</span></a>.</p> +<p>Yeats, J.B., Jr., <a href="#page118"><span class="ref">118</span></a>, <a href="#page119"><span class="ref">119</span></a>.</p> + +<p>Yeats, W.B., <a href="#page1"><span class="ref">1</span></a>, <a href="#page5"><span class="ref">5</span></a>, <a href="#page8"><span class="ref">8</span></a>, <a href="#page10"><span class="ref">10</span></a>, <a href="#page11"><span class="ref">11</span></a>, <a href="#page13"><span class="ref">13</span></a>, <a href="#page15"><span class="ref">15</span></a>, <a href="#page16"><span class="ref">16</span></a>, <a href="#page17"><span class="ref">17</span></a>, <a href="#page18"><span class="ref">18</span></a>, <a href="#page19"><span class="ref">19</span></a>, <a href="#page22"><span class="ref">22</span></a>, <a href="#page23"><span class="ref">23</span></a>, <a href="#page25"><span class="ref">25</span></a>, <a href="#page26"><span class="ref">26</span></a>, <a href="#page27"><span class="ref">27</span></a>, <a href="#page28"><span class="ref">28</span></a>, <a href="#page29"><span class="ref">29</span></a>, <a href="#page30"><span class="ref">30</span></a>, +<a href="#page31"><span class="ref">31</span></a>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page36"><span class="ref">36</span></a>, <a href="#page37"><span class="ref">37</span></a>-71, <a href="#page73"><span class="ref">73</span></a>, <a href="#page74"><span class="ref">74</span></a>, <a href="#page75"><span class="ref">75</span></a>, <a href="#page76"><span class="ref">76</span></a>, <a href="#page77"><span class="ref">77</span></a>, +<a href="#page81"><span class="ref">81</span></a>, <a href="#page85"><span class="ref">85</span></a>, <a href="#page88"><span class="ref">88</span></a>, <a href="#page92"><span class="ref">92</span></a>, <a href="#page94"><span class="ref">94</span></a>, <a href="#page95"><span class="ref">95</span></a>, <a href="#page97"><span class="ref">97</span></a>, <a href="#page98"><span class="ref">98</span></a>, <a href="#page102"><span class="ref">102</span></a>, <a href="#page105"><span class="ref">105</span></a>, <a href="#page106"><span class="ref">106</span></a>, <a href="#page107"><span class="ref">107</span></a>, <a href="#page108"><span class="ref">108</span></a>, <a href="#page109"><span class="ref">109</span></a>, <a href="#page110"><span class="ref">110</span></a>, <a href="#page112"><span class="ref">112</span></a>, <a href="#page114"><span class="ref">114</span></a>, <a href="#page115"><span class="ref">115</span></a>, <a href="#page116"><span class="ref">116</span></a>, +<a href="#page117"><span class="ref">117</span></a>, <a href="#page123"><span class="ref">123</span></a>, <a href="#page139"><span class="ref">139</span></a>, <a href="#page145"><span class="ref">145</span></a>, <a href="#page146"><span class="ref">146</span></a>, <a href="#page148"><span class="ref">148</span></a>, <a href="#page155"><span class="ref">155</span></a>, <a href="#page158"><span class="ref">158</span></a>, <a href="#page162"><span class="ref">162</span></a>, <a href="#page179"><span class="ref">179</span></a>, <a href="#page199"><span class="ref">199</span></a>, <a href="#page251"><span class="ref">251</span></a>, +<a href="#page252"><span class="ref">252</span></a>, <a href="#page253"><span class="ref">253</span></a>, <a href="#page255"><span class="ref">255</span></a>, <a href="#page259"><span class="ref">259</span></a>, <a href="#page269"><span class="ref">269</span></a>, <a href="#page279"><span class="ref">279</span></a>, <a href="#page285"><span class="ref">285</span></a>, <a href="#page286"><span class="ref">286</span></a>.<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Cathleen ni Houlihan</span>, <a href="#page10"><span class="ref">10</span></a>, <a href="#page17"><span class="ref">17</span></a>, <a href="#page19"><span class="ref">19</span></a>, <a href="#page31"><span class="ref">31</span></a>, <a href="#page50"><span class="ref">50</span></a>-51, <a href="#page53"><span class="ref">53</span></a>, <a href="#page54"><span class="ref">54</span></a>, <a href="#page55"><span class="ref">55</span></a>, <a href="#page77"><span class="ref">77</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Celtic Twilight</span>, <a href="#page37"><span class="ref">37</span></a>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">41</span></a>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">42</span></a>, <a href="#page54"><span class="ref">54</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Countess Cathleen</span>, <a href="#page18"><span class="ref">18</span></a>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page43"><span class="ref">43</span></a>, <a href="#page47"><span class="ref">47</span></a>, <a href="#page48"><span class="ref">48</span></a>-49, <a href="#page50"><span class="ref">50</span></a>, <a href="#page51"><span class="ref">51</span></a>, <a href="#page59"><span class="ref">59</span></a>, <a href="#page64"><span class="ref">64</span></a>, <a href="#page69"><span class="ref">69</span></a>, <a href="#page78"><span class="ref">78</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Deirdre</span>, <a href="#page23"><span class="ref">23</span></a>, <a href="#page27"><span class="ref">27</span></a>, <a href="#page28"><span class="ref">28</span></a>, <a href="#page44"><span class="ref">44</span></a>, <a href="#page56"><span class="ref">56</span></a>, <a href="#page61"><span class="ref">61</span></a>-63;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Dhoya</span>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">41</span></a>, <a href="#page286"><span class="ref">286</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Diarmid and Grania</span>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page106"><span class="ref">106</span></a>-110, <a href="#page143"><span class="ref">143</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Discoveries</span>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">42</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Golden Helmet</span>, <a href="#page27"><span class="ref">27</span></a>, <a href="#page63"><span class="ref">63</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Green Helmet</span>, <a href="#page63"><span class="ref">63</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Hour-Glass</span>, <a href="#page10"><span class="ref">10</span></a>, <a href="#page27"><span class="ref">27</span></a>, <a href="#page28"><span class="ref">28</span></a>, <a href="#page51"><span class="ref">51</span></a>-52, <a href="#page54"><span class="ref">54</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Ideas of Good and Evil</span> <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">42</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Island of Statues</span>, <a href="#page47"><span class="ref">47</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">John Sherman and Dhoya</span>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">41</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The King's Threshold</span>, <a href="#page60"><span class="ref">60</span></a>, <a href="#page69"><span class="ref">69</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Land of Heart's Desire</span>, <a href="#page25"><span class="ref">25</span></a>, <a href="#page43"><span class="ref">43</span></a>, <a href="#page49"><span class="ref">49</span></a>-50, <a href="#page51"><span class="ref">51</span></a>, <a href="#page59"><span class="ref">59</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Mosada</span>, <a href="#page47"><span class="ref">47</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">On Baile's Strand</span>, <a href="#page27"><span class="ref">27</span></a>, <a href="#page28"><span class="ref">28</span></a>, <a href="#page58"><span class="ref">58</span></a>, <a href="#page59"><span class="ref">59</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">A Pot of Broth</span>, <a href="#page22"><span class="ref">22</span></a>, <a href="#page32"><span class="ref">32</span></a>, <a href="#page51"><span class="ref">51</span></a>, <a href="#page52"><span class="ref">52</span></a>, <a href="#page54"><span class="ref">54</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Secret Rose</span>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">41</span></a>, <a href="#page54"><span class="ref">54</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">In the Seven Woods</span>, <a href="#page43"><span class="ref">43</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Shadowy Waters</span>, <a href="#page28"><span class="ref">28</span></a>, <a href="#page56"><span class="ref">56</span></a>-58, <a href="#page60"><span class="ref">60</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Tables of the Law</span>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">41</span></a>;<br> + "The Valley of the Black Pig," <a href="#page50"><span class="ref">50</span></a>, <a href="#page65"><span class="ref">65</span></a>, <a href="#page66"><span class="ref">66</span></a>, <a href="#page67"><span class="ref">67</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Wanderings of Oisin</span>, <a href="#page1"><span class="ref">1</span></a>, <a href="#page39"><span class="ref">39</span></a>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">40</span></a>, <a href="#page42"><span class="ref">41</span></a>, <a href="#page63"><span class="ref">63</span></a>, <a href="#page64"><span class="ref">64</span></a>, <a href="#page139"><span class="ref">139</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Where there is Nothing</span>, <a href="#page52"><span class="ref">52</span></a>, <a href="#page53"><span class="ref">53</span></a>, <a href="#page54"><span class="ref">54</span></a>, <a href="#page55"><span class="ref">55</span></a>, <a href="#page56"><span class="ref">56</span></a>;<br> + <span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">The Wind among the Reeds</span>, <a href="#page43"><span class="ref">43</span></a>.</p> + +</div> + + +</div> + <hr class="doublepage"> + +<div class="back"> + <div class="div" id="footnotes"><a name="toc_14"></a><h2>Notes</h2><dl class="footnote"> +<dt><a name="note_1">1.</a></dt><dd><p>Shakespeare Head Press, Stratford-on-Avon, 1908.</p></dd><dt><a name="note_2">2.</a></dt><dd><p><span class="hi" style="font-style: italic;">Collected Works</span>. Stratford-on-Avon, 1908, vol. II, p. 251.</p></dd><dt><a name="note_3">3.</a></dt><dd><p>First produced by an amateur company at the Molesworth Hall in 1909.</p></dd><dt><a name="note_4">4.</a></dt><dd><p>First produced at the Avenue Theatre, London, in 1894.</p></dd></dl></div> + + </div> + + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's Irish Plays and Playwrights, by Cornelius Weygandt + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IRISH PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS *** + +***** This file should be named 19028-h.htm or 19028-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/1/9/0/2/19028/ + +Produced by Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Irish Plays and Playwrights + +Author: Cornelius Weygandt + +Release Date: August 11, 2006 [EBook #19028] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IRISH PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS *** + + + + +Produced by Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net + + + + + + + +IRISH PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS + +BY + +CORNELIUS WEYGANDT + +WITH ILLUSTRATIONS + + +[Illustration] + + +BOSTON AND NEW YORK +HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY +The Riverside Press Cambridge + +COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY CORNELIUS WEYGANDT +ALL RIGHTS RESERVED + +_Published February 1913_ + + +[Illustration] + + + + +PREFACE + + +There are so many who have helped me with this book that I cannot begin +to thank them one by one. If I name any, however, there are four I would +name together. There is my old friend, long since dead, Lawrence Kelly, +of County Wexford, who first told me Irish folk-stories, adding to the +wonderment of my boyhood with his tales of Finn McCool, Dean Swift, and +"The Red-haired Man." There is Dr. Robert Ellis Thompson, of +Philadelphia, who quickened, by his enthusiasm, over "twenty golden +years ago," my interest in all things Irish. There is Dr. Clarence +Griffin Child, my colleague, who recognized the power of these men I +write of in "Irish Plays and Playwrights" when there were fewer to +recognize their power than there are to-day. There is Mr. John Quinn, of +New York, without whose aid ten years ago the current Irish dramatic +movement would not have progressed as it has. He has lent for +reproduction here the sketches by Mr. J.B. Yeats of Synge, Mr. George +Moore, and Mr. Padraic Colum. All but all of the writers I mention +particularly in these chapters have put me under obligation by cheerful +response to many letters full of questions as to their work. Mr. James +H. Cousins and Mr. S. Lennox Robinson have taken especial trouble in my +behalf, and Lady Gregory, Mr. W.B. Yeats, and Mr. George W. Russell have +put themselves out in many ways that I might learn of Irish Letters. + +UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, December 28, 1912. + + + + +CONTENTS + + + I. THE CELTIC RENAISSANCE 1 + + II. THE PLAYERS AND THEIR PLAYS, + THEIR AUDIENCE AND THEIR ART 13 + + III. MR. WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 37 + + IV. MR. EDWARD MARTYN AND MR. GEORGE MOORE 72 + + V. MR. GEORGE W. RUSSELL ("A.E.") 114 + + VI. LADY GREGORY 138 + + VII. JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE 160 + +VIII. THE YOUNGER DRAMATISTS--MR. PADRAIC COLUM; + MR. WILLIAM BOYLE; MR. T.C. MURRAY; + MR. S. LENNOX ROBINSON; MR. RUTHERFORD MAYNE; + "NORREYS CONNELL"; MR. ST. JOHN G. ERVINE; + MR. JOSEPH CAMPBELL 198 + + IX. WILLIAM SHARP ("FIONA MACLEOD") 251 + +APPENDIX 297 + PLAYS PRODUCED, IN DUBLIN, + BY THE ABBEY THEATRE COMPANY + +INDEX 305 + + + + +ILLUSTRATIONS + +W.B. YEATS _Frontispiece_ + _From a photograph by Alice Boughton_. + +DOUGLAS HYDE 10 + _From a photograph by Alice Boughton_. + +SARA ALLGOOD 24 + _From a photograph by Alice Boughton_. + +SCENE FROM "CATHLEEN NI HOULIHAN" 50 + +GEORGE MOORE 72 + _Reproduced by courtesy of John Quinn, Esq._ + +GEORGE W. RUSSELL 114 + +LADY GREGORY 138 + +JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE 160 + _Reproduced by courtesy of John Quinn, Esq._ + +PADRAIC COLUM 198 + _Reproduced by courtesy of John Quinn, Esq._ + +T.C. MURRAY 216 + +LENNOX ROBINSON 222 + _From a photograph by Alice Boughton_. + +WILLIAM SHARP 250 + + + + +IRISH PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS + + + + +CHAPTER I + +THE CELTIC RENAISSANCE + + +To the general reader the Celtic Renaissance was a surprise, and even to +Irish writers deeply interested in their country the phenomenon or +movement, call it which you will, was not appreciated as of much +significance at its beginning. Writing in 1892, Miss Jane Barlow was not +hopeful for the immediate future of English literature in Ireland;--it +seemed to her "difficult to point out any quarter of the horizon as a +probable source of rising light." Yet Mr. Yeats had published his +"Wanderings of Oisin" three years before; Mr. Russell had already +gathered about him a group of eager young writers; and Dr. Hyde was +organizing the Gaelic League, to give back to Ireland her language and +civilization, and translating from the Gaelic "The Love Songs of +Connacht" (1894) into an English of so new and masterful a rhythm, that +it was to dominate the style of many of the writers of the movement, as +the burden of the verse was to confirm them in the feelings and +attitudes of mind, centuries old and of to-day, that are basic to the +Irish Gael. Even in 1894, when Mrs. Katherine Tynan Hinkson wrote the +article that for the first time brought before America so many of the +younger English poets, all that she said of the Renaissance was, "A very +large proportion of the Bodley Head poets are Celts,--Irish, Welsh, +Cornish." She had scarcely so spoken when there appeared the little +volume, "The Revival of Irish Literature," whose chapters, reprinted +addresses delivered before she had spoken by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy and +Dr. George Sigerson and; Dr. Douglas Hyde, turned the attention of the +younger men to literature, the fall of Parnell and the ensuing decline +of political agitation having given them a chance to think of something +else than politics. In 1895 all the English-speaking world that heeds +letters was talking of the Celtic Renaissance, so quickly did news of it +find its way to men, when it was once more than whispered of abroad. It +was as frequently referred to then as "The Irish Renaissance," because +Ireland contributed most to it and because it was in Ireland that it +acquired its most definite purpose. This purpose was to retell in +English the old Irish legends and the still current Irish folk-songs, +and to catch and preserve the moods of Irish men and women of to-day, +especially those moods which came to them out of their brooding over +Ireland, its history, its landscape, the temper of its people. It would +be absurd, of course, to regard all of the writing of the movement as a +result of a definite literary propaganda, but the very fact that we +instinctively speak of the Celtic Renaissance as a movement rather than +as a phenomenon proves that it was that in part. But even that part of +it that was a result of propaganda came not from an intention to realize +the tenets of the propaganda, but from the kindling of Irish hearts by +thoughts that came of the propaganda, thoughts of the great past of +Ireland, of its romance of yesterday and to-day, of its spirituality. + +It is not so easy to account for the less quickening of the other Celtic +countries by the forces that brought about the Renaissance. Renan, in +his "Poetry of the Celtic Races" (1859), and Arnold, in his "On the +Study of Celtic Literature" (1867), had roused all the Celtic countries +to an interest in their old literature, an interest that extended much +further than discussion of the authenticity of Macpherson's "Ossian" or +of the proper treatment of Arthurian stories, until then the Ultima +Thule of talk on things Celtic. Frenchman and Englishman both had spoken +to Wales and Brittany, the Highlands of Scotland and the Isle of Man, as +well as to Ireland, and it does not altogether explain to say that +Ireland listened best because in Ireland there was a greater sense of +nationality than in these other lands. Ireland did listen, it is true, +and, listening, developed popularizers of the old tales such as Mr. +Standish James O'Grady and Dr. P.W. Joyce, to pass knowledge of them +along to the men of letters. It is hardly true, indeed, to say that +Ireland had a greater sense of nationality than Brittany or Wales. +Brittany, of course, since her tongue other than her native Breton was +French, gave what was given to the movement in other than Breton in +French. Cornwall may hardly be called a Celtic country, but if it may it +is easy to account for its slight interest in the movement by the little +that was preserved of its old literature and by the little it had of +distinctive oral tradition to draw upon. And yet, I think, had Sir +Arthur T. Quiller-Couch been born ten years later Cornwall had not +wanted a shanachie. Wales, too, gave little to English literature as the +result of the Renaissance, because, perhaps, her chiefest literary +energy is in her native language. Wales was proud of George Meredith, +whose Welsh ancestry is more evident in his work than is his Irish +ancestry, but not only is his writing representative of Great Britain +rather than of any one part of Great Britain, but his say had been said +before the movement began. The writing of Mr. Ernest Rhys underwent a +change because of his interest in the Celtic Renaissance, but Wales has +little writing outside of his to point to as a result of the awakening. +In Scotland, William Sharp, whose "Lyra Celtica" (1896) was a prominent +agent in bringing the Renaissance before the world, was transformed into +another writer by it. His work as "Fiona Macleod," both prose and verse, +was very different from his earlier work in prose and verse. Mr. Neil +Munro, too, was affected by the Renaissance, and in the tales of "The +Lost Pibroch" (1896) and in the novels of "John Splendid" (1898) and +"Gillian the Dreamer" (1899) and "The Children of Tempest" (1903) he +reveals an intimacy with Highland life such as informs the writing of no +other novelist of our day. Of recent years Mr. Munro has wandered +farther afield than his native Argyll, and, I feel, to the lessening of +the beauty of his writing. In the Isle of Man, T.E. Brown had been +striving for years to put into his stories in verse the fast-decaying +Celtic life of his country, but even with his example and with all that +has been done since the Renaissance began, in the preservation of Manx +folk-lore and in the recording of vanishing Manx customs, no writer of +Brown's power has been developed, or in fact any writer of powers equal +to those of the best men of the younger generation in the other Celtic +lands. It is with the Celtic Renaissance as it appears in Ireland, then, +that I have to deal chiefly in this book, as it is only in Ireland, of +the countries that retain a Celtic culture, that the movement is the +dominating influence in writing in English; and it is with the drama +only that I have now to deal, though when a playwright is a poet or a +story-teller, too, I have written of his attainment in verse and tale +also. Had I been writing five years ago, I should have said that it was +in poetry that the Celtic Renaissance had attained most nobly, but since +then the drama has had more recruits of power than has poetry, and it is +a question as to which of the two is greater as art. There is no doubt, +however, but that the drama has made a stronger and wider appeal, +whatever its excellence, than has the verse, and it is therefore of +greater significance for its time than is the poetry, whatever the +ultimate appraisement will be. Of the men I have written of here, Mr. +Yeats and Mr. Russell are to me poets before they are dramatists, and +Lionel Johnson, whose only direct connection with the dramatic movement +was his beautiful prologue in verse to the first performances of "The +Irish Literary Theatre" in 1899, is to me a poet of a power as great as +theirs. + +One wonders, at first thought, that Ireland had never until our day +given to English literature a novelist of first rank. The Irishman is +famous the world over as a story-teller, but neither in romance nor in +the story of character had he reached first power, reached a position +where he might be put alongside of other Europeans as a novelist. No +Irishman from the time of Scott on, until Mr. George Moore wrote "Esther +Waters" (1894), had written a story that might stand the inevitable +comparison with the work of Thackeray and Dickens, Meredith and Mr. +Hardy. Of Mr. George Moore I have written in detail below. + +Miss Edgeworth may have taught Scott his manner of delineating peasant +character, but her comparatively little power is revealed when you put +her beside Miss Austen, and so it is all the way down the list to our +own day. There are many contemporary story-tellers who have managed well +the tale, but what Irish novelist of to-day other than Mr. Moore bulks +big, can be compared to even lesser men, like Scotland's Mr. Neil Munro +or Dartmoor's Mr. Phillpotts? + +Lady Gilbert (Rosa Mulholland) has written many, pleasant stories of +Irish life, and Mrs. Katherine Tynan Hinkson has followed worthily in +her footsteps. Equally pleasant, but lighter and more superficial, is +the writing of the two ladies who subscribe their names "E.OE. +Somerville and Martin Ross." Their "Some Experiences of an Irish R.M." +(1899) and their "All on the Irish Shore" (1903) are like so much of the +Irish writing of a generation ago,--Irish stories by Irish people for +English people to laugh at. + +The Hon. Emily Lawless has written many kinds of stories about the West +Coast, reaching almost to greatness in her "Grania" (1892). In the short +story, Miss Jane Barlow, accused of superficiality by many Irish critics +and as eagerly declared to get the very quality of Connemara peasant +life by others, has sure power and a charm all her own. No one who reads +"Irish Idylls" (1892) will stop at that collection. Mr. Seumas MacManus +is as truly a shanachie as the old story-tellers that yet tell the old +tales about peat fires in Donegal. "Through the Turf Smoke" (1899) and +"In Chimney Corners" (1899) and "Donegal Fairy Stories" (1900) are alike +in having the accent of the spoken story, but when the last word is said +you cannot admit their author to be more than a clever entertainer. The +Rev. Dr. Sheehan, although you will find him writing about the effect of +the Irish Renaissance in remote parishes in the South, has not +subscribed to its ideals, but continues the fashion of story-writing of +an earlier generation. "Luke Delmege" (1900) is, however, an interesting +character study, and "My New Curate" (1899) very illuminative of the +conservatism of the peasantry. + +Mr. Shan Bullock, writing of the farmers and farm laborers of the North, +has not unwisely gone to Mr. Hardy to learn his art. "Irish Pastorals" +(1901) is racy of Fermanagh as "Tess" is of Wessex. "The Squireen" +(1903) is a strong and gloomy story. From "By Thrasna River" (1895) to +"Dan the Dollar" (1905), Mr. Bullock did no story without power in it. +Ireland still looks to him as it looked to Mr. William Buckley, ten +years ago, for better work. "Croppies Lie Down" brought Mr. Buckley +before the public in 1903, but his writing since then has fallen far +short of this his best book. Now, however, the young man with a future, +in the estimation of many is Mr. James Stephens. There is more hope in +him, in his twenties, than there is now in "George A. Birmingham" (Rev. +J.O. Hannay), another man who ten years ago was like Mr. Buckley, a +young man of promise. "The Seething Pot" (1904) was a serious study of +conditions in Ireland but since its author conceived of the character of +the Rev. Joseph John Meldon, he has found it more discreet to continue +the adventures of that clergyman than to write seriously out of his own +varied experience of West-Country Irish life. + +[Illustration] + +It is perhaps because the energy that in many countries goes into the +writing of the essay is absorbed in controversy in Ireland that in the +past Ireland has produced few essayists. In the battles of the dramatic +movement with the patriotic societies and with the official class, Mr. +Yeats and Mr. Moore have dealt good blows, and Mr. Russell and "John +Eglinton" (Mr. W.K. Magee) have led the disputants out of their +confusion. Among these men, "John Eglinton" is the one who has thrown +his greatest energy into the essay, almost all his energy, and in it, in +the chapters of "Two Essays on the Remnant" (1896), "Pebbles from a +Brook" (1901), and "Bards and Saints" (1906), he has written with +subtlety and illumination. + +In the collection and clarification and retelling of folk-literature +William Larminie and Lady Gregory and Dr. Hyde stand out as the leading +workers. Mr. Larminie's "West Irish Folk-Tales" (1895) are model work +of their kind as are Lady Gregory's several books, of which I speak in +detail later. The work of Dr. Hyde is the most important work of this +sort, however, and it is not too much to say, as I intimated at the +outset, that, without his translation of "The Love Songs of Connacht" +(1894) and "The Religious Songs of Connacht" (1906), the prose of the +movement would never have attained that distinction of rhythm which +reveals English almost as a new language. I would gladly have written at +length of Dr. Hyde, but he has chosen to write his plays in Irish as +well as most of his verses. Yet so winning are the plays as translated +by Lady Gregory, and so greatly have they influenced the folk-plays in +English of the Abbey Theatre, that there is almost warrant for including +him. I cannot, of course, but I must at least bear testimony to the many +powers of these plays. Dr. Hyde can be trenchant, when satire is his +object, as in "The Bursting of the Bubble" (1903); or alive with +merriment when merriment is his desire, as in "The Poorhouse" (1903); or +full of quiet beauty when he writes of holy things, as in the "Lost +Saint" (1902). There are many other playwrights in Irish than Dr. Hyde, +but as no other plays in Irish than his have reacted to any extent on +the plays in English of the movement, I do not consider them, my object +in this book being to consider the dramatic writing in English of the +Celtic Renaissance, with relation to its value as a contribution to the +art of English letters. That there is a great deal else in the Celtic +Renaissance than its drama, I would, however, emphasize, though it is +true that every man of first literary power in the movement, except +Lionel Johnson and "John Eglinton," has tried his hand on at least one +Irish play. That Johnson would have come to write drama I firmly +believe, for in drama he could have reconciled two of the four loves +that were his life. He could not have put his love of Winchester, his +school, or his love of the classics into plays, but his love of Ireland +and his love of the Catholic Church would have blended, I believe, into +plays, still with the cloistered life of the seventh century, that would +have rivaled "The Hour-Glass," and plays about "Ninety-Eight" that would +have rivaled "Cathleen Houlihan." + +There are many other poets, though, of the Celtic Renaissance that are +of powers only short of greatness, Nora Hopper Chesson chief among them. +Only Mr. W.B. Yeats of them all has more "natural falterings" in his +verse than she. Mrs. Hinkson, too, whose name has come inevitably into +these pages from time to time, is a poet with as sure a place in English +literature to-day as has Mrs. Meynell. Beginning, like Mr. Yeats, as an +imitator of the Pre-Raphaelites, Mrs. Hinkson found herself in little +poems on moods of her own and moods of landscape She writes also of her +love of God, of St. Francis, and of Ireland. "Moira O'Neill" (Mrs. +Skrine), too, has a sure place, her verses crying out her homesickness +for Ireland, and redolent, every line of them, of the countryside. "The +Passing of the Gael" is known wherever there are Irish emigrants, but +there are other verses of "Ethna Carberry" (Mrs. Anna Johnstone +MacManus) that are as fine as this. Mrs. Dora Sigerson Shorter is a +balladist of stark power, and Miss Eva Gore-Booth a lyric poet whose +natural lilt no preoccupation with mysticism can for more than a moment +obscure. + +Mr. Herbert Trench has of recent years surrendered to theatrical +management, but there is to his credit a substantial accomplishment of +lyrical verse that George Meredith would have approved. Mr. Colum's +verse I have spoken of below, incidentally, in considering his plays. A +distinct talent, too, is Mr. Seumas O'Sullivan's, whose "Twilight +People" (1905) indicates by its title the quality of his verse. + +I have mentioned all these writers, some known in America, but others +utterly unknown, not only to indicate the relation of the drama to the +other literary forms of the Renaissance, but to account, perhaps in some +measure, for the literary quality of the plays themselves. They are +written, as plays in English during the past century have too seldom +been written, by writers who have read widely in all forms of literature +and to whom words are, if not "the only good," at least a chief good. +Mr. Russell and Mr. Yeats have sent all the younger men who would write +to the masterpieces of the world, telling them to get what they need of +the technique of the centre, to know the best in the world, but to write +of the ground under their feet. The plays are, as I have said, written, +many of them, by men who are widely read, and by men whose friends are +writers of some other form of literature, by men who wish their work in +drama to be of as high intention as the work of their friends who are +poets or essayists or writers of stories. All the other writing the +Renaissance has, then, contributed to make of the drama what it is, and +one must, if one would see the drama in relation to the Ireland of our +day, know what is the accomplishment of the other sorts of writing of +the Renaissance. + + + + +CHAPTER II + +THE PLAYERS AND THEIR PLAYS, THEIR AUDIENCE AND THEIR ART + + +The drama of the Celtic Renaissance is of an ancestry as mixed as is +that of the people of Ireland themselves. There is less in it perhaps of +the Gael than in them, for Gaelic literature, until to-day, never +approached nearer to the drama than the dialogue, the racy give-and-take +of two characters, alike of lively imagination, whether gentle or +simple. But even had the colloquies of St. Patrick and Oisin, of Dean +Swift and his man Jack, of the Lout and his Mother, been developed, by +1890, to a drama as finished as that of Congreve or Goldsmith, Sheridan +or Wilde, those who would have their plays abreast of our time would +have gone, just as, with the conditions as they are, the dramatists of +the Renaissance did go, to Ibsen and M. Maeterlinck, like all the rest +of the world. It is a matter of reproach, in the estimation of many +patriotic Irishmen, that Mr. Martyn learned his art of Ibsen, and Mr. +Yeats a part of his of M. Maeterlinck, but that attitude is as +unreasonable as that which would reproach the Irish Industries +Organization Society for studying Danish dairy farms or Belgian +chickeries. It is only the technique of the foreigners, modern or +ancient, Scandinavian or Greek, that the Abbey dramatists have acquired +or have adapted to Irish usage. Stories are world-wide, of course, the +folk-tale told by the Derry hearthside being told also in the tent in +Turkestan--Cuchulain kills his son as Rustum does, and the Queen of +Fairy lures Bran oversea as Venus lures Tannhaeuser to the Hoerselberg. It +is in character, in ideals, in atmosphere, in color, that drama must be +native, and in color and in atmosphere, in ideals and in character the +Abbey Theatre drama is Irish. Reading of life and style are personal +qualities, qualities of the artist himself, though they, too, may take +tone and color from national life, and in the drama of many of the Abbey +dramatists they do. These dramatists have been more resolutely native, +in fact, many of them, than the national dramatists of other countries +have been, of France and Germany to-day, of the Spain or the England of +the Renaissance. It would seem idle to be saying this were not the +contention being raised all the time by certain patriotic groups of +Irishmen in America as well as in Ireland that the new drama is not a +native drama. It is, as a matter of fact, no less natively Irish than +the Elizabethan drama is natively English; it is really more native, for +no part of it of moment veils its nationality under even so slight a +disguise as "the Italian convention" of that drama. The new Irish drama +is more native in its stories than is the Elizabethan drama, as these +stories, even when they are stories found in variant forms in other +countries, are given the tones of Irish life. The structural forms and +the symbolic presentation of ideas of which the Abbey dramatists have +availed themselves have no more denationalized their plays than has the +Church, a Church from oversea, to which most of them belong, +denationalized the Irish people. + +Synge, the master dramatist of the new movement, while he does not +reproduce the average Irishman, is just as natively Irish in his +extravagance and irony as the old folk-tale of the "Two Hags"; Lady +Gregory in her farces is in a similar way representative of the riot of +West-Country imagination; and Mr. Yeats, if further removed from the +Irishmen of to-day, is very like, in many of his moods, to the riddling +bards of long ago. The later men, many of them, are altogether Irish, +representative of the folk of one or another section of the country, Mr. +Murray and Mr. Robinson of Cork, Mr. Mayne and Mr. Ervine of Down, Mr. +Colum and Mr. Boyle of the Midlands. + +One need not say that the Irishman is a born actor; all the Celts are +famed for "the beautiful speaking"; for eloquence; for powers of +impersonation; for quick changes of mood; for ease in running the gamut +of the emotions. Of these things come art of the stage, and these things +are the Irishman's in fullest measure. The Abbey Players have, however, +gone abroad for some elements of their art, perhaps for their repose of +manner, a quietude that is not the quietude of moodiness, a condition +not unusual in the Irishman; and in addition to this repose of manner, +which is fundamental and common to their presentation of realistic +modern plays and of poetic plays of legendary times, for a slowness and +dignity of gesture in the plays of legend, which is perhaps a borrowing +from the classic stage. Their repose of manner may come from modern +France; at least so held Mr. Yeats, pointing to such a source in +"Samhain" of 1902. + + The other day [he writes] I saw Sara Bernhardt and DeMax in + "Phedre," and understood where Mr. Fay, who stage-manages the + National Theatrical Company, had gone for his model. For long + periods the performers would merely stand and pose, and I once + counted twenty-seven quite slowly before anybody on a fairly + well-filled stage moved, as it seemed, so much as an eyelash. The + periods of stillness were generally shorter, but I frequently + counted seventeen, eighteen, or twenty before there was a movement. + I noticed, too, that the gestures had a rhythmic progression. Sara + Bernhardt would keep her hands clasped over, let us say, her right + breast for some time, and then move them to the other side, + perhaps, lowering her chin till it touched her hands, and then, + after another long stillness, she would unclasp them and hold one + out, and so on, not lowering them till she had exhausted all the + gestures of uplifted hands. Through one long scene DeMax, who was + quite as fine, never lifted his hand above his elbow, and it was + only when the emotion came to its climax that he raised it to his + breast. Beyond them stood a crowd of white-robed men who never + moved at all, and the whole scene had the nobility of Greek + sculpture, and an extraordinary reality and intensity. It was the + most beautiful thing I had ever seen upon the stage, and made me + understand, in a new way, that saying of Goethe's which is + understood everywhere but in England, "Art is art because it is not + nature." Of course, our amateurs were poor and crude beside those + great actors, perhaps the greatest in Europe, but they followed + them as well as they could, and got an audience of artisans, for + the most part, to admire them for doing it. + +With these words of Mr. Yeats, written ten years ago, in my memory, it +was arresting to hear ten years later a somewhat similar comparison of +the acting of the Irish Players to the acting of yesterday on the French +stage. A man who in the late eighties and early nineties had spent +seven years as an art student in Paris saw the Abbey Players in Boston. +In Paris he had gone frequently to the Theatre Francais, and only there, +he said, before he saw the Irish Players, had he seen acting so full of +dignity, but never at all before acting so natural. + +There is possible, too, however, a native origin for this repose of +manner, or perhaps it would be truest to say that it is a blending, like +the dramas themselves, of native and foreign elements. Speaking of +"Cathleen ni Houlihan" in the notes to his "Collected Works" of 1908, +Mr. Yeats says, "I cannot imagine this play, or any folk-play of our +school, acted by players with no knowledge of the peasant, and of the +awkwardness and stillness of bodies that have followed the plow, or too +lacking in humility to copy these things without convention or +caricature." Here, too, he refers to the "quiet movement and careful +speech which has given our players some little fame" as "arising partly +out of deliberate opinion and partly out of the ignorance of the +players." + +Undoubtedly Mr. Fay knew the still ways of the peasant, and I do not +doubt that he was influenced by such knowledge and did in some degree +train his actors to bring their movements on the stage in accord with +the "awkwardness and stillness of bodies that have followed the plow." +But since there are ways of the peasant that are far from still, it is +likely, too, that he was led to select such movements, instead of the +vehement gesture and lively facial expression that are just as +characteristic of the peasant, by a memory of the restrained acting of +the French stage. It is likely, too, that the very inexperience and +lack of knowledge of artifice to which Mr. Yeats refers was an element +in making the art of the company what it became. But it is not +altogether impossible that certain traditions of the English stage--of +the statuesque acting of the Kembles, for instance--had come down into +the time of Mr. Fay's stage experience, to those days before he became +stage manager of the performances of "The Daughters of Erin" in 1900, +and that these traditions influenced his training of the company that +was to attain to a new art of the stage. + +Before this there had been two series of performances in Dublin, each of +a week's duration, by "The Irish Literary Theatre," one in 1899, and the +other in 1900, with English actors gathered together in London by Mr. +George Moore; and another week's series followed in 1901 by the Benson +Company and some amateurs of the Gaelic League under the leadership of +Dr. Douglas Hyde. It was the performances of "The Countess Cathleen" of +Mr. Yeats and of "The Heather Field" of Mr. Martyn at the Antient +Concert Rooms in Dublin, respectively May 8 and 9, 1899, by "The Irish +Literary Theatre," that inaugurated the drama of the Celtic Renaissance, +fully a year before there came into being the group of amateurs that +were to bring that drama home to Ireland as no players who inherited the +standards and conventions of the English stage could possibly have +brought it home. + +It is Mr. Fay's distinction to have been, as I have intimated, the +leader who started these players on the long way to their new art. Such +leadership his record hardly augered. It was in the very lowest forms +of vaudeville, in what is the analogue abroad of our negro minstrelsy, +that Mr. Fay had his stage experience, a stage experience that had made +him well enough known in burlesque roles to make it difficult for him to +assume with success serious roles in the early years of the National +Dramatic Company. Because of this old association, Dublin audiences +insisted in 1902 in seeing humor in his Peter Gillane in "Cathleen ni +Houlihan." For all this past, however, Mr. Fay was intent on serious +drama, and, with the precept and example of Mr. Russell and Mr. Yeats +always present to him in the early days of the National Theatre Company, +and with what he had gathered from the experimental performance of Irish +plays by "The Irish Literary Theatre," he advanced surely in his art +until his withdrawal from the company in January, 1908. His loss was +compensated for only by the results of his training of other actors, +such as Miss Sara Allgood and Mr. Arthur Sinclair, who on certain roads +have outrun their master. When I saw Mr. Fay in 1902, in the little hall +in Camden Street, Dublin, with no knowledge of what his stage experience +had been, I accepted him at once for what he was, a finished "character" +actor of poise and confidence, a dignified figure for all his stature +and his predilection for comedy, and the possessor of a speaking voice +whose natural pleasantness he had made into something higher than +pleasantness by his art in the use of it, if it never attained the +resonance and nobility of phrasing of that of his brother, Mr. Frank J. +Fay. It was a memorable experience to me, that of that August evening in +1902 on which I was taken to Camden Street to a rehearsal of the Irish +National Dramatic Company. Our guide was Mr. James H. Cousins, whose +"Racing Lug" and "Connla" were among the plays produced in the following +autumn and which that night were in rehearsal. He piloted us to an +entranceway by the side of a produce shop. We knocked on the door and +waited, and waited. We knocked again, and at last heard steps coming +nearer and nearer. The door opened and revealed a young man in +work-a-day black suit and derby, with a candle in one hand and a +property spear in the other. He conducted us down a narrow, drafty +hallway, into a hall in which were wooden benches as rude as those in +the bandstand of a backwoods country fair in the States, and a slightly +raised platform at the farther end. We were soon in eager conversation +with young store clerks and typists and artisans who were about to set +to work at that in which their hearts lay, the interpreting of plays out +of Ireland's heart. It was good talk we listened to from those young men +and women, boys and girls all of them in their fervor and zest and high +aim. Their enthusiasm carried through "Connla," "The Racing Lug," and +"Deirdre" with real impressiveness. Of Mr. Cousins's two plays one was +realistic of the north of Ireland shore life of to-day, and the other, +"Connla," like Mr. Russell's "Deirdre," made out of Ireland's heroic +age. + +Of the actors we met that night, but Miss Walker (Maire ni Shiubhlaigh) +was with the Irish Players on their American tour of 1911-12, and even +she has not been continuously with them since 1902. The amateurs had +then but begun, under the direction of Mr. Fay, on the slow fashioning +of themselves into the finished folk-actors they proved themselves in +America. But even this acting, so little removed from that of amateurs +at these rehearsals, had distinction, the distinction of fidelity to +life in "The Racing Lug," the distinction of possession by dream in +"Deirdre"; and let it be remembered, too, that it was a rehearsal +without costume, and that one had to be carried away from the +conventional dress of the Dublin streets, and had to be made to feel +that the characters in "The Racing Lug" were primitive fishermen, and +the people of "Connla" and "Deirdre" the people of Ireland's Homeric +age. + +Miss Maire T. Quinn, Mr. T. Dudley Digges, Mr. P.J. Kelly, with Miss +Walker and the brothers Fay,--Mr. W.G. Fay and Mr. Frank J. Fay,--were +then the leading actors of the company. The playwrights, too, took part +in their own or their fellows' plays in the lesser roles, Mr. Russell +sometimes playing the druid in his "Deirdre" and Mr. Colum carrying a +spear or wearing a pea-jacket as need was. One circumstance or another, +politics or need, gradually lost the company every one of these actors +that took part in its first performances in 1902. There were +comparatively few changes, though, until 1904, the year in which Miss +Horniman, "a generous English friend," took for them the old Mechanic +Institute Theatre and, rebuilding it in part, turned it over to the +Irish National Dramatic Company for six years. Up to this time the +actors had received no pay, giving their services for love of country +and of art, but with the more frequent performances and their attendant +rehearsals it became necessary to take a large part of the time of the +leading men and women, and then, of course, they had to be paid. Before +the opening of the Abbey Theatre, three of the chief actors, Miss Quinn +and Mr. Digges and Mr. Kelly, came to this country to appear in Irish +plays in the Irish Section of the St. Louis Fair. The public that +gathered in St. Louis was not prepared for the new drama, being more +used to the musical play of the type Mr. Olcott has made familiar in +America, or to the Bowery Irishman of the Harrigan plays, or to the +gross caricatures, Galwayed and ape-accoutred, of the before-curtain +interlude of the variety show. As a result the former National Players +protested against the policy of the Irish Section and returned to New +York. Miss Walker was the principal actress of the company after Miss +Quinn's departure to America, and upon Miss Walker's withdrawal in 1905 +the burden of the chief women's roles fell upon Miss Allgood. + +Mr. W.G. Fay and Mr. Frank J. Fay were still the leading men of the +company, creating the principal characters of all the plays of Synge and +of those of Mr. Yeats and Lady Gregory that were produced before 1908. +Early in this year, as I have said, Mr. and Mrs. W.G. Fay and Mr. F.J. +Fay left the company, and, coming to America in the spring, played "The +Rising of the Moon" and "A Pot of Broth" in New York. They made, +unfortunately, no great success in their appearances, as their plays +were not presented in bills devoted solely to Irish plays, but as +curtain-raisers to the usual conventional farce. Almost all the actors +whom I have mentioned as leaving the National Players eventually found +their way into the conventional plays, but almost none of them made +successes there comparable in any degree to their successes in +folk-drama or in plays out of old Irish legend. Nor can it be said that +actors trained in the dominant forms of present-day English drama, even +when so skilled as Mrs. Patrick Campbell, were wholly satisfying in +their assumption of roles in the plays of the Renaissance. It was Miss +Allgood, chief musician in the London performances of Mr. Yeats's +"Deirdre" in 1908, who won the greatest approval from the London +critics, and not Mrs. Campbell as Deirdre herself. + +[Illustration] + +Miss Allgood had played principal parts with the Abbey Company from 1904 +on. In 1906, her sister, who plays under the name of Miss Maire O'Neill, +came into the company, assuming the more romantic roles with a success +as great as that of Miss Allgood in character parts and comedy. From +1906 they have shared the principal women's roles, but, owing to Miss +O'Neill's inability to come to America in the fall of 1911, Miss McGee +fell heir to many of her roles. After the departure of the Messrs. Fay, +Mr. Sinclair, Mr. O'Donovan, and Mr. Kerrigan became the leading men. It +is not altogether accurate, however, to speak of any actor or actress of +the company as leading man or leading woman, for not only is one "a +leading lady" one night, as was Miss McGee as Pegeen Mike in "The +Playboy of the Western World" on the American tour, and one of the +village girls in "The Well of the Saints" the next night, but the men +and women alternate in the same parts on different nights, as, for +instance, on the American tour Cathleen ni Houlihan was played now by +Miss Allgood and now by Miss Walker. + +The fact that few of the actors who have learned their art with the +Irish National Dramatic Society have achieved greatly in other drama is +perhaps a proof that their powers are limited to the folk-drama and the +legendary drama that comprises almost the entire repertoire of the +company. Miss Allgood was, it is true, lent to Mr. Poel for the +performances of "Measure for Measure" in the spring of 1908, and won an +unquestioned success as Isabella, but actors so skilled as the Messrs. +Fay have attained no notable success in other than Irish plays. During +the American tour of 1911-12 both Mr. Sinclair and Miss Allgood were +much importuned by the managers to accept American engagements, and it +is hardly to be doubted but that both could win success in conventional +comedy. And yet one feels it was the part of wisdom as well as of +loyalty for them to withstand the lure. + +The distinguishing characteristic of the art of the Abbey Players is +naturalness. It is not that their personalities happen to coincide with +certain types of Irish character, but that they know so well the types +of the folk-plays, and even the characters who are not types that appear +in the folk-plays, that they are able to portray them to the life. The +Abbey Players have discarded most of the tricks of the stage, or perhaps +it would be truer to say they do not inherit the tricks of the stage or +any traditional characterizations of parts. They are taught to allow +their demeanor and gesture and expression to rise out of the situation, +to "get up" their parts from their own ideas; and these ideas are +interfered with only if they run definitely counter to the ideas of +stage-manager or author. The smallness of the Abbey Theatre has saved +them from the necessity of heightening effects that they may carry to +the farthest corners of a large house, a necessity that leads so often +to over-emphasis by our own actors. There are less than six hundred +seats in the Abbey theatre (five hundred and sixty-two by actual count), +and it is so arranged that the words uttered on the stage carry easily +without emphasis all over the house. + +It is an old saying that the English of Dublin is the most beautiful +English in the world. However that may be, there can be no doubt +whatsoever but that the English that is spoken in Dublin falls on the +ear with a mellowness of sound that is a joy to all who cherish proper +speech. In the earlier years of the company Mr. Yeats was very desirous +of having his dramatic verse spoken with "the half chant men spoke it +[poetry] with in old times." It was in some such way that Mr. Yeats had +tried to have his lines in "The Land of Heart's Desire" spoken when it +was put on at the Avenue Theatre, London, in 1894; and thirteen years +later Miss Florence Farr, whom he believes to speak English more +beautifully than anybody in the world, spoke his dramatic verses in a +"half chant," and his lyrical verses, many of them, to a definite +musical notation, on her American tour of 1907. It was noticeable, +however, when she played one of the musicians in his "Deirdre" on its +later presentations, that he method of intoning the verses differed a +great deal from their delivery by the regular members of the company. +If Mr. Yeats has not changed his views somewhat in regard to the +speaking of dramatic verse, he no longer insists on the half chant as it +was practiced by Miss Farr, but is content if the actors reproduce its +rhythm in "the beautiful speaking" that is characteristic of their art. +The most beautiful English that I have ever listened to is the English +of Synge as spoken by Mr. O'Donovan in Christy's "romancin'" to Pegeen +Mike in the third act of "The Playboy of the Western World." His voice, +full and mellow by nature, and in perfect control, responds to all the +many changes of emotion that the part demands, the unmatched rhythm of +the prose rendered as he renders it carrying one clean out of one's self +as one listens. It is only when one comes to one's self on the +curtain-fall that one finds one's self wondering, Can this be prose? +Surely, never before was prose, English prose, as beautiful to the ear +as English verse. + +As Miss O'Neill did not come with the Abbey Players to America, we did +not have a chance to hear Pegeen Mike's lines spoken with a beauty +comparable to Christy's. The part is not one to which Miss Allgood is +physically adapted, and Miss McGee is as yet too new to the stage to +speak with the confident abandon the lines demand. We did, however, have +a chance to hear Miss Allgood's very beautiful musical utterance of the +verses given to Cathleen ni Houlihan in this first of the movement's +folk-plays, and her equally beautiful speaking of the prose lines of the +play. This part of Cathleen ni Houlihan is sufficiently removed from the +other parts of the play, folk-parts, and from the parts of the other +folk-plays, to give us an insight into the versatility of Miss Allgood; +and we saw enough of Mr. Sinclair and Mr. O'Donovan and Mr. Kerrigan to +realize that they, too, could worthily bear parts in heroic romance. + +The rendering of the songs in the plays--it is chiefly in the plays of +Mr. Yeats that they appear--is a distinguishing characteristic of their +production. Mr. Yeats will not have them rendered by what, in the +ordinary sense, is singing. Writing in the notes to volume III of his +"Collected Works"[1] he says:-- + + No vowel must ever be prolonged unnaturally, no word of mine must + ever change into a mere musical note, no singer of my words must + ever cease to be a man and become an instrument. + + The degree of approach to ordinary singing depends on the context, + for one desires a greater or lesser amount of contrast between the + lyrics and the dialogue according to situation and emotion and the + qualities of players. The words of Cathleen ni Houlihan about the + "white-scarfed riders" must be little more than regulated + declamation; the little song of Leagerie when he seizes the "Golden + Helmet" should in its opening words be indistinguishable from the + dialogue itself. Upon the other hand Cathleen's verses by the fire, + and those of the pupils in "The Hour-Glass," and those of the + beggars in "The Unicorn," are sung as the country people understand + song. Modern singing would spoil them for dramatic purposes by + taking the keenness and the salt out of the words. The songs in + "Deirdre," in Miss Fair's and in Miss Allgood's setting, need fine + speakers of verse more than good singers: and in these, and still + more in the song of the Three Women in "Baile's Strand," the + singers must remember the natural speed of words. If the lyric in + "Baile's Strand" is sung slowly it is like church-singing, but if + sung quickly and with the right expression it becomes an + incantation so old that nobody can quite understand it. That it may + give this sense of something half-forgotten, it must be sung with a + certain lack of minute feeling for the meaning of the words, which, + however, must always remain words. The songs in "Deirdre," + especially the last dirge, which is supposed to be the creation of + the moment, must upon the other hand, at any rate when Miss Farr's + or Miss Allgood's music is used, be sung or spoken with minute + passionate understanding. I have rehearsed the part of the Angel in + "The Hour-Glass" with recorded notes throughout, and believe this + is the right way; but in practice, owing to the difficulty of + finding a player who did not sing too much the moment the notes + were written down, have left it to the player's own unrecorded + inspiration, except at the "exit," where it is well for the player + to go nearer to ordinary song. + +At times Irish actresses who have not come to the stage through the +Abbey Company, as has every one of its regular actresses, and every one +of its men save Mr. W.G. Fay, have lent it their assistance, as in the +instance of Mrs. Patrick Campbell referred to above, and as Miss Darragh +did in productions of "The Shadowy Waters" and of "Deirdre" in 1906. It +was four years earlier than this, however, that an Irishwoman, better +known in her country than either Miss Darragh or Mrs. Patrick Campbell, +lent her art to the performance of Cathleen ni Houlihan. "Miss Maud +Gonne played very finely," writes Mr. Yeats in recording the incident, +"and her great height made Cathleen seem a divine being fallen into our +mortal infirmity." With these three exceptions, so far as I have been +able to find out, no actors or actresses outside of the company have, +since 1902, essayed any other than a subordinate part. Yet such is the +versatility of the company, men and women both, within the range of +plays the company feels called upon to present,--folk-drama of to-day +and of yesterday in Ireland, folk-history plays, morality plays, and +plays in verse out of old legends,--that though there have never been as +many as twenty actors in the company there has very seldom been much +difficulty in casting a part. Molly Byrne in "The Well of the Saints" +and the Wandering Friar of the same play have given the most trouble to +the stage directors. + +From the very beginning of the Irish National Dramatic Company, Mr. +Yeats has been an advocate of scenery that is background chiefly, and in +no way divertive of attention from the play itself, its thought, its +words, its acting. He would have it, in a way, decorative, but subdued +and in harmony with the subject of the play. A very few simple sets +suffice for the plays of peasant life, a cottage interior, a village +street, a crossroads in a gap of the hills, all to serve the action and +the words as background, and to be no more obtrusive than the background +of a portrait. It may be that this attitude of Mr. Yeats is in a measure +due to his talks with Mr. Gordon Craig, but it is equally true, I think, +that some of Mr. Gordon Craig's ideas are due in part to his talks with +Mr. Yeats. Equally simple, though of another sort of simplicity, would +Mr. Yeats have the scenery for plays out of old legend. "I would like to +see," writes Mr. Yeats in "Samhain" of 1902, "poetic drama, which tries +to keep at a distance from daily life, that it may keep its emotion +untroubled, staged with but two or three colors." Old reds, misty +blues, imperial purples, greens that have about them the dimness of +haunted woods, and dulled golds have been among the colors used in the +legendary plays of Mr. Yeats and in the folk-histories of Lady Gregory, +the color schemes being generally either those of Mr. Yeats or of Mr. +Robert Gregory, Lady Gregory's son. Scenery and costumes alike are +simple. No audience at the Abbey has ever marveled at cycloramic +landscape, and no audience and no actress has ever been able to take the +joy of the dressmaker and the dressed, of the milliner and the +millinered, in gown or hat. + +The National Theatre Society, Limited, which is the legal name of the +organization that controls the Abbey Theatre Company, may not play what +plays it will at the Abbey; the two leading theatres of commerce in +Dublin, the Gaiety and the Theatre Royal, having, as Mr. Yeats records, +"vigorously opposed" the Abbey being given "a patent as little +restricted" as their own. "The Solicitor-General," Mr. Yeats continues, +"to meet them halfway, has restricted our patent to plays written by +Irishmen or on Irish subjects or to foreign masterpieces, provided these +masterpieces are not English." This restriction has not interfered with +any feature of the work of the Abbey Theatre, Mr. Yeats believes, save +in the building-up of an audience, some people remaining away, perhaps, +who might have been attracted had "such bodies as the Elizabethan Stage +Society, which brought 'Everyman' to Dublin some years ago, been able to +hire the theatre." + +No phase of the dramatic movement has been more interesting and none +has been more important than this building-up of an audience to +appreciate the plays. Whether with the poetic plays of Mr. Yeats and the +ironic extravaganzas of Synge alone, such an audience as has been built +up--an audience estimated by Mr. Yeats in 1906 to consist of four +thousand young men and women--could have been won is problematical; that +is, it may be doubted that the very best the movement has produced would +have attracted a sufficient audience to enable the company to keep +together after the expiration in 1910 of Miss Horniman's guarantee. +Certain it is, however, that Lady Gregory's farces were a great help, +both in building up and in holding the Abbey audience. It was for the +purpose of affording comic relief to the plays of Mr. Yeats and to the +first plays of Synge that Lady Gregory started to create them. They +attracted all who loved laughter and merriness and a loving caricature +of country-folk,--and who do not?--and one of them, "The Rising of the +Moon" (1907), had a distinct patriotic appeal, as had Mr. Yeats's +"Cathleen ni Houlihan," which brought some who would not otherwise have +come to the Abbey Theatre. The third most definitely "national" play of +the movement, "The Piper" (1908) of Mr. O'Riordan, may have also drawn +some who would not otherwise have come to the theatre, but if it did so +it brought them there, as did "The Playboy of the Western World" (1907), +to object. + +The first appeal of the Irish Players, in April, 1902, was trough the +"Deirdre" of "A.E.," a play out of old legend, national legend, and +"Cathleen ni Houlihan," a symbolic national play of '98. Then followed +Mr. Cousins's two little plays above referred to; "The Laying of the +Foundations," by Mr. Frederick Ryan,--a realistic satire of Dublin life; +and Mr. Yeats's incursion into farce, "A Pot of Broth." The appeal of +the repertoire was widened in 1903 by the inclusion of plays by Lady +Gregory, Mr. Colum, and Synge. "Twenty-five" could give offense to none +in its story of self-sacrificing love, and Mr. Colum's "Broken Soil," +coming as it did after "In the Shadow of the Glen," would have escaped +hostile criticism in such a situation even had it been much more severe +in its portrayal of peasant life in the Midlands than it was. + +From the time of "The Countess Cathleen" (1899) to the time of "In the +Shadow of the Glen" (1903), no one of the plays in the movement had +seriously offended any large section of the public, and the younger +generation of all classes was contributing largely of its intellectual +members to the audience of the National Dramatic Company. The West +Britons, the Dublin Castle set, the Trinity College group, were not much +interested, and, indeed, that portion of the theatrical audience that +fills the stalls in the average theatre the English-speaking world over +has never taken very much interest in the plays of the movement, save to +protest against "The Rising of the Moon" as disloyal to England, and to +approve, misunderstanding its purpose, "The Playboy of the Western +World" as a savage satire of the Irish Irishman. The audience that the +movement has built up is an audience of free intelligences, largely from +the poorer elements of the public, an audience that fills the cheaper +places in the house. "The Pit" of the Abbey Theatre is the envy of all +the theatrical managers of Dublin. It is a pit of people young in years +or young in heart and mind, who are interested in intellectual things, a +group of people largely self-taught, or taught by the Celtic +Renaissance, to appreciate fine things. With these has come that element +of the intellectuals among the Trinity College set that is interested +above all things in Ireland, but this element is not large. + +This play and that have attracted, either for purposes of approval or +for purposes of disapproval, groups of people outside of the faithful +pit that is interested in every sincere portrayal of Irish life. Such a +group, from the patriotic societies, prevented the rest of the house +from hearing "The Playboy of the Western World," after its first +performance on January 26, 1907, for four performances more; and such a +group similarly protested against "The Piper," a little more than a year +later, because it seemed to the members of the group to be an +unpatriotic revelation of the lack of cohesion among Irish political and +patriotic factions. + +Despite opposition, however, and with new dramatists one by one gaining +a place in the repertoire of the company, Mr. Boyle in 1905 and Mr. +Robinson in 1908, Mr. Murray in 1910 and Mr. Ervine in 1911, more and +more people continued to become interested in the new drama, and by the +time Miss Horniman's support, promised in 1904 for six years, was +withdrawn at the expiration of that period, the Abbey Theatre was +apparently a fixture in the artistic life of Ireland. + +It has been the custom, of recent years, for the Abbey Theatre to begin +its Dublin season In October and to continue it on until May, when the +company goes to London for a month. In the earlier years, before the +company had a home at the Abbey, and even for a year or two after that, +performances were not so continuous. Nor are they now given every week +or always on every night of a week, the theatre being turned over to the +Theatre of Ireland or some other dramatic organization occasionally, and +being let, now and then, for lectures or concerts or the like. The +London season in May is followed, or preceded sometimes, by visits to +other English cities, Manchester and Leeds, Oxford and Cambridge among +them; and at home in Ireland, in the intervals between weeks at the +Abbey, the company goes to Cork or Belfast for a few performances. + +In this country the audiences that attended the performances of the +plays of the Abbey Theatre Players were of a very different composition. +At their average they included a certain proportion of the younger +intellectuals among the Irish-Americans, but very many of these were +kept away from the performances, as many, indeed, in Ireland and in +England, too, are kept away from the performances, by the opposition in +the patriotic societies. In America, as in London and in Manchester, and +in the English university towns, it has been largely from among those +who are seriously interested in a literary drama that the audiences have +been drawn. It was such people as do not habitually go to the theatre, +but that are to be found at revivals of old English comedy and Ibsen +plays and symphony concerts, that made up the audiences of the Irish +Players in America, whether in Boston or in Philadelphia or Chicago. +These audiences approximated to the Dublin audiences only in the fact +that they were constant in attendance at all the plays of the +repertoire. There were, of course, some who came out of curiosity and +the love of ruction, but these after all were few. The plays appealed on +their merits and won the success that they did win because of their art +and their reading of life, and not because of the sensational incidents +that had occurred at some of the productions of the company. + +The Abbey Theatre has been able to maintain itself successfully in the +years that have elapsed since the arrangement between Miss Horniman and +the National Theatre Society came to an end. It has begotten many other +companies, the Ulster Literary Theatre, best of them all; the Theatre of +Ireland; the National Players; the Cork Dramatic Society. It has brought +into being a kind of folk-drama that, despite its avowed and evident +Scandinavian origin, is a new folk-drama, and it has brought into being, +too, a school of dramatists. It has done much more than Mr. Yeats +claimed it had done in 1908 when he wrote, "We know that we have already +created a taste for sincere and original drama and for sincere, quiet, +simple acting. Ireland possesses something which has come out of its own +life, and the many failures of dramatic societies which have imitated +our work, without our discipline and our independence, show that it +could not have been made in any other way." But even were this all it +had done, it had done much. What it has done I have attempted to put +down in some detail, and to put values upon, in the following pages. +Here I wish further to say but this: that I think the dramatic movement +the most significant part of the Celtic Renaissance, a movement to me +the most original movement in letters the world has known since that +movement in Norway which so definitely stimulated it, a movement that +gave Bjoernson and Ibsen to the world. + +FOOTNOTES: + +[1] Shakespeare Head Press, Stratford-on-Avon, 1908. + + + + +CHAPTER III + +MR. WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS + + +There has never been a poet who used better the gifts his country gave +him than Mr. Yeats. The heroic legends of Ireland are in his poetry, +Irish folk-lore is there, and the look of the country; and a man moulded +as only Irish conditions, of old time and of to-day, could mould him, +Irish conditions spiritual, intellectual, and physical; a man with eyes +on a bare countryside in the gray of twilight, thinking of the stories +the peasants tell and of the old legends whose setting this is before +him. At this hour, with such surroundings, and in such thought, the +Other World is as near to all men as their natures will let it come, and +to Mr. Yeats it is very near. Waking dreams come to him at such hours, +and he puts them into his verse, waking dreams of his country's +legendary past and of its fairy present, and waking dreams born of books +of old magic he has read indoors. Now it will be one sort of dream is +present, now the other, and now the third, and often two or even all +three sorts of dream are intermingled. His volume of prose sketches, +"The Celtic Twilight" (1893), gives the title some of his countrymen +have fastened on his verse, and the verse of others that take his +attitude and use like material, "The Twilight School of Poetry." It is +not inapt as giving the quality of most of his writing; but some of his +verses have warm sunlight in them, which, strangely, since it is +sunlight as it visits Irish shore and mountain, he has deplored. The +explanation may be that Mr. Yeats is of those who do not live intensely +until the oncoming of night, and so holds out of harmony with his genius +the coloring of its moments of lesser energy. + +Legends and folk-tales and landscapes and books of mysticism and magic +not only give Mr. Yeats the material of his poetry, but suggest its +images, its color, and in part its rhythms; but before he found the +"faint and nervous" rhythms best fitted to his poetry, and put in it the +gray-greens and browns and soft purples and bright whites of Irish +landscape, and the symbols from fairy-lore and mythology, he had paid +patient heed to certain of the great poets of his language, to Spenser +and Blake, to Shelley and William Morris. And in learning the art of +drama, which he began to study very carefully after his early plays were +tested in "The Irish Literary Theatre," Mr. Yeats has very evidently +pondered a good deal on the English morality and taken into account the +effects of Greek tragedy as he had before explored M. Maeterlinck and +the earlier Ibsen. + +As a boy Mr. Yeats wrote in the "Dublin University Review" that the +"greatest of the earth" often owned but two aims, "two linked and +ardorous thoughts--fatherland and song." Twenty-six years have gone +since then and Mr. Yeats is still devoted to poetry and to his country, +for all that the Nationalists deplore that his greater interest is now +in his art. His art, indeed, he cherishes with an ardor that is akin to +the ardor of patriotism; to him, as to Spenser, the master of his +youth, poetry is a divine enthusiasm. At first eager to paint, as did +and does his father, Mr. J.B. Yeats, he studied in Dublin Arts Schools, +but as Nature "wanted a few verses" from him, she sent him "into a +library to read bad translations from the Irish, and at last down into +Connaught to sit by turf fires." He read, too, Sir Samuel Ferguson, the +poet who had done most with Irish legend, and Allingham, who wrote of +Irish fairies, and the patriotic poets of the young Ireland group, Davis +chief among them. His father, an admirer of Whitman, preached to him the +doctrine embodied in the text-- + + + "Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last, + In things best known to you finding the best." + + +Many influences thus conspired to make Mr. Yeats find his inspiration +in Ireland, overcoming, for the time, the denationalizing influences +that the art of the centre must always exert. Not only were the +national legends and folk-lore constantly with him in these years, but +the interest in magic and all things that are hidden. He was one of +the Hermetic Society, of which Mr. George W. Russell was the high +priest, as early as 1886, but this interest, which has dominated so +often in his later poetry, is not to the forefront in "The Wanderings +of Oisin" of 1889. The material of the title poem of this volume Mr. +Yeats found in the libraries. It recounts the Fenian poet's three +hundred years of "dalliance with a demon thing" oversea in three +wondrous lands, where were severally pleasure and fighting and +forgetfulness, and in each of which Oisin spent a century. It has a +half-dramatic framework of question and answer between St. Patrick, +who appears as upbraider, and the poet, who laments joys gone and the +Christian present of Ireland and his own feeble age. Although it is a +story Mr. Yeats is telling, the beauties of the poems are lyrical +beauties. In exuberance and richness of color it is Mr. Yeats's most +typically Irish poem based on legend, and nowhere do his lines go with +more lilt, or fall oftener into inevitability of phrase, or more fully +diffuse a glamour of otherworldliness. "The Wanderings of Oisin" +revealed poetry as unmistakably new to his day as was Poe's to the +earliest Victorian days. Beside the title poem another from legend had +this new quality, "The Madness of King Goll," with its refrain that +will not out of memory, "They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter +round me, the beech leaves old." "Down by the Salley Gardens" and "The +Meditation of the Old Fisherman" bear witness to talks before turf +fires, or in herring boats off Knocknarea, and other developments of +folk-song or tale have the place-names of his home county of Sligo; +but this distinctive quality is theirs in less measure, and few others +in the little volume have it at all. + +In the years just before "The Wanderings of Oisin," Mr. Yeats had been +eager to unite the young writers of Ireland in a movement to give the +country a national literature in English. This project developed side +by side with Dr. Hyde's to give Ireland its own language again and a +modern literature in it. Neither leader was the first to advance +either idea, but each was the first to establish the movement in which +he was most interested; Mr. Yeats's "Wanderings of Oisin" (1889) is +the starting-point of the Celtic Renaissance, and Dr. Hyde's "Leabhar +Sgeuluigheachta" (1889), the starting-point of the Gaelic League, +though this was not organized until 1893. From that day to this these +two men and Mr. George W. Russell ("A.E.") have been the great forces +in the literature of the Renaissance. Mr. Yeats was busy in those +early days with editing fairy and folk-tales and short stories from +the Irish novelists, and in reading these it was but natural that he +should be led to write stories. First came "John Sherman" and "Dhoya" +in 1891, the one a condensed novel with the slightest of plots about a +slow-pulsed young man's troubles with love and laziness in Sligo and +London, and the other a sketch of Irish faery in old time. Some of the +sketches of "The Celtic Twilight" (1893) approach the tale, but such +narrations are not told for their own sake, but as illustrations of +fairy-lore, or they have too little body to win for themselves the +title of tale. In "The Secret Rose" (1897) there are true tales, some +out of Ireland's legendary past, some out of her fairy present, and, +akin to both, the Hanrahan series. These last Mr. Yeats so rewrote in +1904 as to be "nearer to the mind of the country places where Hanrahan +and his like wandered and are remembered." As they stand now they are +his best prose, rid almost entirely of preciousness, and simple and +full of mystery as the countryside they reflect. In "The Secret Rose" +are two "alchemical" tales and in "The Tables of the Law" (1904), two +others of like subject. To me, for all the qualities they share with +poetry of his of similar inspiration, they do not seem to be mastered +by him. Alone among his writings they are incomplete. + +Mr. Yeats was unable until the last few years to give himself up to +the writing nearest his heart, drama. He continued to edit Irish +literature, to write on literature and fairy-lore for the magazines. +The articles about fairies he has published, and a great mass of +belief collected but as yet unprinted, he will gather some day into a +great book. Known now in the Irish countryside as a man with a power +to exorcise spirits, he will then no doubt attain a reputation that +will put him well above that of the Irish-American archbishop who was +his only rival in that practice in the belief of many Irish peasants. +Other of his magazine writing Mr. Yeats has gathered into "The Celtic +Twilight" and more of it into the later edition (1900) of this book. +Still other of these articles are to be found in "Ideas of Good and +Evil" (1903), some of them stating his philosophy, never too +definitely formulated. These two collections are very interesting in +themselves, but both, like his "Discoveries" (1907), are more +interesting as commentary on his powers. Mr. Yeats has used many notes +to explain obscure allusions in his poems, though the most obscure he, +perhaps with premeditation, fails to explain. Yet the reader +unacquainted with his use of symbols will find much interpretation in +these essays, especially those in "Ideas of Good and Evil." + +Up to 1899, when Mr. Yeats's serious efforts to build up an Irish +national drama began with "The Irish Literary Theatre," he devoted his +happiest moments to lyric poetry, though the play of "The Countess +Cathleen" made half of his second volume of verse, and the third was +wholly given to the little play, "The Land of Heart's Desire." Since +1899, in which year "The Wind among the Reeds" appeared, Mr. Yeats has +published, of other than dramatic verse, only the little volume of "In +the Seven Woods," the little series on Flamel, and a few snatches, in +all about a thousand lines. Some of this verse Mr. Yeats wrote for the +psaltery, and in 1902 he was determined to write all his shorter poems +for recitation to this instrument and "all his longer poems for the +stage." + +Mr. Yeats was thirty-four when he practically gave up lyrical poetry for +dramatic poetry. From the beginning he had written plays, but they were +lyrical plays, dramatic only in form, and they were, as soon as he had +mastered the technique of verse, great lyrical poems. In the plays he +has written since he has striven at that hardest of literary tasks, to +make true dramatic speech high poetry, he has written nothing more +beautiful than "The Countess Cathleen" and "The Land of Heart's Desire." +He has rewritten and rewritten these later plays, and in almost every +rewriting made them more dramatic, but sometimes the later versions have +lost as poetry, not in the mere decorative features and "lyrical +interbreathings," but in the accent of the play and in the sheer +poetical qualities. To me it seems a pity, inevitable though it be, that +the poet who has struck the most distinctly new note of all the English +poets since Swinburne should, at thirty-four, have changed from an art +he knew to an art he did not know. That is a ripe age for a poet to +begin to learn to write in a form barely essayed before. Unlike so many +of the English poets, who as public school boys were bred up to write +verse, Mr. Yeats had to teach himself to write verse. Overcoming +triumphantly this handicap, though losing by it years usually fullest of +impulse to write, Mr. Yeats greatly attained, and for the ten years from +1889 to 1899 devoted himself to the writing of lyrics. For the past +thirteen years he has been busiest with dramas, in none of which has he +more than approximated to a dramatic quality that is as great as the +quality of his lyrics. He has owned himself one reason of such +shortcoming, in the notes to "Deirdre."[2] "The principal difficulty +with the form of dramatic literature I have adopted is that, unlike the +loose Elizabethan form, it continually forces one by its rigour of logic +away from one's capacities, experiences, and desires, until, if one have +not patience to wait for the mood, or to rewrite again and again till it +comes, there is rhetoric and logic and dry circumstance where there +should be life." + +It may be that Mr. Yeats will one day overcome the difficulties that he +alludes to here, but he is now forty-seven, and I, for one, doubt if, at +his age, he can overcome them. As they are, his plays are beautiful in +ideas and words, and striking in a lyric and decorative way, if not all +of them in a dramatic way, though in some he has in vain sacrificed +poetry to attain true dramatic speech attaining instead only "rhetoric +and logic and dry circumstance." One values the plays of Mr. Yeats +highest when one thinks of them as a new kind of drama, as a +redevelopment of epic and lyric poetry into drama, an epic and lyric +poetry illustrated by tableaux against backgrounds out of faery. Let us +not forget that there is one effect which is of "The Tempest," and +another effect which is of "Lear," and that it is after all something of +a convention to call the latter a success of drama and the former a +success of something other than drama. Yet it is just as necessary to +remember that drama does mean a definite sort of literature, and the +success of a new sort of drama, whether it be a "static" drama, as M. +Maeterlinck has called his early drama, or whether it be the kind of +drama that Mr. Yeats has created, is the success of something other than +what we conventionally term drama. It is curious that no matter how +great may be the success of an author in a form he has invented, he will +almost invariably attempt also the accepted form from which he has +diverged. Impelled by a desire to see his wife in a drama of his own but +of the old dramatic sort, M. Maeterlinck made "Monna Vanna" in accord +with the usual rules of the theatre, but to find it fall far short of +the strange new beauty of his earlier plays. As yet Mr. Yeats has not +compromised with the current taste in drama, but it may be that a desire +to see some such actress as Mrs. Patrick Campbell in a part of his may +lead to such compromise, as the thought of her acting his Deirdre +inspired him to rewrite that part for Mrs. Campbell. + +Mr. Yeats has not yet passed beyond the danger of falling between two +stools. If it prove that he has really attained in a drama in which the +verse is true dramatic speech and not lyric ecstasy or decoration, the +success of such drama will be worth the sacrifice of the lyric poetry +that he has not written because of the absorption of all of his energy +in his dramatic writing. If it prove he has not so attained, we shall +have no adequate compensation for the lost lyrics that he is now too old +to write. I say no "adequate compensation," for compensation there is in +the lyrical passages that no play of his is without, lyrical passages +that arrest us as do his poems of the nineties; but, after all, these are +but passages, not poems with unity and finality of form. + +Another question altogether, a question outside of the question of the +value as art of the writing of Mr. Yeats which is what I am considering, +is the question as to whether there would have been a dramatic movement +at all comparable to what has been, if Mr. Yeats had not devoted so +large a portion of his time to drama. I believe there would have been a +dramatic movement, but I am sure, from what I know of the other dramatic +organizations in Dublin, that they would not have amounted to much +unless some other great writer as loyal to art as Mr. Yeats had played +for them the beneficent tyrant. And other such great writers, as loyal +to art, and as devoted to drama, are far to seek in Ireland as in other +countries. It is not in Mr. Russell's nature so to act; it is not in Dr. +Hyde's plan of life to foster in others other than propagandist +literature; it is more than likely that had Mr. Martyn attempted it it +had come to the end to which he has come as playwright. Without Mr. +Yeats as moving power, Synge had not been, without Mr. Yeats to +interest her in the movement, Lady Gregory had not written her farces +and folk-histories; and without the Abbey Theatre's plays as standard, +the younger playwrights of Cork and Belfast would have written plays +very other than those they have written. + +No wonder Mr. Yeats wants to see his dreams take on bodily reality upon +the stage, and to hear beautifully spoken the words in which he has +caught them. There can be no greater pleasures than these to a writer +when he is past the imaginative intensity of youth. In youth his +imaginings are so real to him he needs no objective embodiment to see +them, and the roll and sing of their lines are always sounding to his +inner ear, but as he passes "out of a red flare of dreams," such as is +youth's, "into a common light of common hours" in middle age, his +imaginative life grows less intense and needs the satisfaction of seeing +itself concretely represented. + +Mr. Yeats leaves out of his collected poems the plays of his boyhood, +"The Island of Statues" (1885) and "Mosada" (1886). They were not of +Ireland, but the Arcady of the one and the mediaeval Spain of the other +he could easily have paralleled in Irish legend, where anything +wonderful and tragic is possible. Nor is "The Countess Cathleen" +(1892-99), in its presentation of the drama of a woman that sells her +soul that the souls of her tenantry may be saved, essentially Irish. It +is curious that among English poets of Mr. Yeats's generation it should +be Mr. Kipling that has happened upon the same legend, which he adapts +to his ends in "The Sacrifice of Er-Heb." The background of "The +Countess Cathleen" in the earlier versions was not more essentially +Irish than the story. "The great castle in malevolent woods" and the +country about it is very like the part of fairyland that M. Maeterlinck +refound by following the charts of early discoverers in Arthurian +legend. In its later versions "The Countess Cathleen" is more Irish and +perhaps more dramatic, though its greatnesses, after that of atmosphere, +the great lines we may no more forget than those about "the angel +Israfel" + + + "Whose heart-strings are a lute"; + + +or about + + + "magic casements, opening on the foam + Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn"; + + +or about + + + "old, unhappy, far-off things + And battles long ago"; + + +or about hearing + + + "the far-off curfew sound + Over some wide-watered shore + Swinging slow with sullen roar," + + +were most of them in the earlier versions. There were those lines of +Maire's denouncement of the two demons and her prophecy to them:-- + + + "You shall at last dry like dry leaves, and hang + Nailed like dead vermin to the doors of God"; + + +and those wonderful lines of Cathleen dying:-- + + + "Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel: + I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes + Upon the nest under the eave, before + He wander the loud waters"; + + +and those last lines of all, great as only the greatest lines are +great,-- + + + "The years like great black oxen tread the world, + And God the herdsman goads them on behind, + And I am broken by their passing feet." + + +It was about this time, too, that Mr. Yeats wrote that most startling of +all his lines,-- + + + "And God stands winding his lonely horn", + + +and "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," that so charmed Stevenson that he had +to write its author, and say it cast over him a spell like that of his +first reading of the "Poems and Ballads" of Swinburne and the "Love in +the Valley" of Meredith. + +There is no greater lyric poetry anywhere in the writing of Mr. Yeats +than in "The Land of Heart's Desire" (1894), that little folk-play whose +constant boding and final tragedy cannot overcome, either while it is +playing or as you remember it, the sing and lilt that are in the lines. +It tells of the luring away by a fairy child of the soul of a newly +married bride on May-Eve, and of her death when her soul has passed to +the "Land of Heart's Desire"-- + + + "Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, + Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, + Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue, + And where kind tongues bring no captivity." + + +It is a story out of folk-lore, and so far back in time, and so far away +from the life that we know is it, that all that happens seems not only +possible but inevitable. + +"The Land of Heart's Desire" was the first play of Mr. Yeats to be put +on the stage, being presented at the Avenue Theatre in London in 1894; +and it was also the first play of Mr. Yeats to be put on in America, +being presented with Miss Mabel Taliaferro in the fairy's role as the +curtain-raiser to Mrs. Le Moyne's production of "In a Balcony," in the +spring of 1901. Fragile as is its charm, it crossed the footlights and +made itself felt as a new beauty of the theatre. It was the lyrical +interbreathings that appealed most to me, but the strife of priest and +fairy for Maire Bruin's soul was very real drama. It was the fairy's +song, however, that haunted me after I left the theatre, as it could not +but be. It haunts me still, coming into my mind whenever I think of Mr. +Yeats, as inevitably as the last lines of "The Countess Cathleen," or as +"The Lake Isle of Innisfree," or "The Valley of the Black Pig," or "The +Rose of the World," or the ecstasies of Forgael and Dectora, or the song +in "Deirdre." "The lonely of heart is withered away" is its burden, a +burden that will not out of mind. + +"The Land of Heart's Desire" has probably been most often played, +counting American performances as well as performances in Ireland and +England, being played as frequently by amateurs as by professionals in +this country, but the prose play "Cathleen ni Houlihan," because of its +national theme, has had more playings in Ireland. Its effect upon the +stage is very different from its effect in the study. Read, it seems +allegory too obvious to impress. The old woman, Cathleen ni Houlihan, +with "too many strangers in the house" and with her "four beautiful +green fields" taken from her, is so patently Ireland possessed by +England, all four provinces, that one fails to feel the deep humanity of +the sacrifices of Michael Gillane for her, his country, even though that +sacrifice be on his wedding eve. Seen and listened to, "Cathleen ni +Houlihan" brings tears to the eyes and chokes the throat with sobs, so +intimately physical is the appeal of its pathos. He is, indeed, dull of +understanding or hard of heart who can witness a performance of this +play and not feel that something noble has come his way. It seizes hold +of the Irishmen of the patriotic societies as does "The Wearing of the +Green," and even the outlander, little sympathetic to the cause of +Ireland and holding patriotism a provincial thing, is moved in some +strange way he does not understand. Performance brings out its +homeliness, its touches of humor, its wistfulness, its nobility. It is +with this thought of its nobility that every thought of "Cathleen ni +Houlihan" ends, that is every thought of it on the stage. Off the stage +it is, except to him to whom the cause is all, something that falls +short of nobility, to many little more than eloquent allegory. In the +autumn of 1904 Miss Margaret Wycherly played "The Land of Heart's +Desire" and "Cathleen ni Houlihan" a few times in America, and "The +Countess Cathleen"; and "The Hour-Glass" (1903) and "A Pot of Broth" +(1902), both plays in prose. "The Hour-Glass," a morality, was written +after "Everyman" had won Mr. Yeats, and "A Pot of Broth" was written, +perhaps, to prove that its author could do farce. + +[Illustration] + +"The Hour-Glass" is based on a story that Mr. Yeats found in Lady +Wilde's "Ancient Legends of Ireland" (1887), the story of a wise man +who is saved from eternal damnation by the faith of a child. Mr. Yeats +leaves the wise man the great scholar that he was in the old tale, a +scholar whose teaching had taken away the faith of a countryside, but he +changes the child who saved the scholar into Teig the Fool, and infuses +into the record of the frantic hour, in which the wise man knows his +life ebbing away as the sand falls, a spirit that is as reverent as the +spirit of the old religious drama. + +"A Pot of Broth" is a variant of a widely spread folk-tale in which a +beggarman tricks a provident housewife out of a meal. He pretends a +stone that he has, and which he gives her after his meal, makes good +broth, but it is her chicken that has made the broth. It is a trifle, +amusing enough, but remarkable chiefly for its difference from other +work of Mr. Yeats. There is little doubt, I take it, in the mind of any +one that it is not chiefly Lady Gregory's, as it surely is in its +wording, and in its intimacy with the details of cottage life. + +Prose also is "Diarmid and Grania," written in collaboration with Mr. +George Moore and played at the last year's performance (1901) of "The +Irish Literary Theatre." As this play as performed was in tone more like +the writings of Mr. Moore than of Mr. Yeats, I have considered it among +his plays rather than among the plays of Mr. Yeats. + +His other prose play, "Where there is Nothing" (1903), is a statement of +revolt against "the despotism of fact" that is perhaps as characteristic +of the artist as of the Celt. The world would say that its hero, Paul +Ruttledge, was mad, but no one that reads can deny him a large share of +sympathy. This play was produced by the Stage Society in London in 1904. +Lady Gregory having had a share in its creation, Mr. Yeats has since +relinquished the theme to her; and now rewritten by her alone as "The +Unicorn from the Stars," it would hardly be recognized as the same play. + +His Paul Ruttledge, gentleman, becomes her Martin Hearne, coach-builder. +Both are alike at the outset of their frenzy, in that they would be +destroyers of Church and Law, both use tinkers as their agents of +destruction, and both die despised of men. Both are "plunged in trance," +but their trances differ. That of Lady Gregory's hero is cataleptic and +directly productive of his revolt, from a revelation, as he thinks it +is, that comes to him while he is "away." Paul Ruttledge, on the other +hand, deliberately gives up his conventional life, and that as largely +because of boredom as because of belief in its wrongness. One cannot, as +one reads "Where there is Nothing," fail to see in its hero much of Mr. +Yeats himself. He is not the professional agitator, literary or social, +as was Oscar Wilde and as is Mr. Shaw, but he here delights in turning +things topsy-turvy, just as they do, in a fashion that has been +distinctive of the Irishman for many generations. Mr. Yeats is himself, +often, like his hero, "plunged in trance," if one may call trance his +"possessed dream," such as that in which "Cap and Bells" or "Cathleen ni +Houlihan" came to him. The lyric came to him, he says, as a "vision," +and so, too, the play. It is in the dedication to volumes I and II of +"Plays for an Irish Theatre," volumes containing "Where there is +Nothing," "The Hour-Glass," "Cathleen ni Houlihan," and "A Pot of +Broth," that he tells us of the latter vision, and of the beginnings of +that collaboration with Lady Gregory that taught her her art, and so +profoundly influenced his. So informing is it that I quote it in full. + + MY DEAR LADY GREGORY:-- + + I dedicate to you two volumes of plays that are in part your own. + + When I was a boy I used to wander about at Rosses Point and + Ballisodare listening to old songs and stories. I wrote down what I + heard and made poems out of the stories or put them into the little + chapters of the first edition of the "Celtic Twilight," and that is + how I began to write in the Irish way. + + Then I went to London to make my living, and though I spent a part + of every year in Ireland and tried to keep the old life in my + memory by reading every country tale I could find in books or old + newspapers, I began to forget the true countenance of country life. + The old tales were still alive for me, indeed, but with a new, + strange, half-unreal life, as if in a wizard's glass until at last, + when I had finished "The Secret Rose," and was halfway through "The + Wind among the Reeds," a wise woman in her trance told me that my + inspiration was from the moon and that I should always live close + to water, for my work was getting too full of those little jewelled + thoughts that come from the sun and have no nation. I have no need + to turn to my books of astrology to know that the common people are + under the moon, or to Porphyry to remember the image-making power + of the waters. Nor did I doubt the entire truth of what she said to + me, for my head was full of fables that I had no longer the + knowledge and emotion to write. Then you brought me with you to see + your friends in the cottages, and to talk to old wise men on Slieve + Echtge, and we gathered together, or you gathered for me, a great + number of stories and traditional beliefs. You taught me to + understand again, and much more perfectly than before, the true + countenance of country life. + + One night I had a dream, almost as distinct as a vision, of a + cottage where there was well-being and firelight and talk of a + marriage, and into the midst of that cottage there came an old + woman in a cloak. She was Ireland herself, that Cathleen ni + Houlihan for whom so many songs have been sung and about whom so + many stories have been told and for whose sake so many have gone to + their death. I thought if I could write this out as a little play I + could make others see my dream as I had seen it but I could not get + down out of that high window of dramatic verse, and in spite of all + you had done for me I had not the country speech. One has to live + among the people, like you, of whom an old man said in my hearing, + "She has been a serving-maid among us," before one can think the + thoughts of the people and speak with their tongue. We turned my + dream into the little play, "Cathleen ni Houlihan," and when we + gave it to the little theatre in Dublin and found that the + working-people liked it, you helped me to put my other dramatic + fables into speech. Some of these have already been acted, but some + may not be acted for a long time; but all seem to me, though they + were but part of a summer's work, to have more of that countenance + of country life than anything I have done since I was a boy. + +I should like also to quote in full Mr. Yeats's account of how "Where +there is Nothing" passed into "The Unicorn from the Stars," as that +account throws much light on the methods of collaboration that have +added so greatly to the success of the dramatic movement, and that are +especially valuable to beginners, whose plays, without reshaping in +collaboration, might never win their way to the boards. But I have not +the space for it all, and I must content myself with that portion of it +in which Mr. Yeats confesses that belief of his in the _rapprochement_ +of scholar and tinker that one notes so often in Irish life. Speaking +of Lady Gregory's rewriting of "Where there is Nothing" into "The +Unicorn from the Stars," he says:-- + + Her greatest difficulty was that I had given her for chief + character a man so plunged in trance that he could not be otherwise + than all but still and silent, though perhaps with the stillness + and the silence of a lamp; and the movement of the play as a whole, + if we were to listen to hear him, had to be without hurry or + violence. The strange characters, her handiwork, on whom he sheds + his light, delight me. She has enabled me to carry out an old + thought for which my own knowledge is insufficient and to commingle + the ancient phantasies of poetry with the rough, vivid, + ever-contemporaneous tumult of the roadside; to create for a moment + a form that otherwise I could but dream of, though I do that + always, an art that prophesies though with worn and failing voice + of the day when Quixote and Sancho Panza long estranged may once + again go out gaily into the bleak air. Ever since I began to write + I have awaited with impatience a linking, all Europe over, of the + hereditary knowledge of the countryside, now becoming known to us + through the work of wanderers and men of learning, with our old + lyricism so full of ancient frenzies and hereditary wisdom, a + yoking of antiquities, a marriage of Heaven and Hell. + +Interesting, however, as these plays in prose are, and significant of +their author's desire to do work in a medium that was perhaps more +immediately acceptable to the audience of the National Dramatic Society +in its then culture, there is no doubt at all that the plays in verse +are nearer his heart. They are himself, and in all of the prose plays +there is a good deal of Lady Gregory. All this time that he was +collaborating in these prose plays he was still dreaming over "The +Shadowy Waters," retouching it, rearranging it, until it became in +detail a very different play from the play that was published under that +name in 1900. Its hero and heroine, Forgael and Dectora, are much as +they were then, their fateful meeting in misty northern seas remains the +central incident, and the climax is still their choice to be left alone +in the Viking ship at the world's end; but more than half the lines are +changed. "The Shadowy Waters" was staged in 1904, and with telling +weirdness, but like many another author's best-loved and most elaborated +work, it has not made the appeal of plays less favorite to him. Mr. +Yeats has written that he has been brooding over "The Shadowy Waters" +ever since he was a boy, and he told me, when I asked him once which +writing of his he cared most for, "That I was last working at, and then +'The Shadowy Waters.'" It is too much to say that it expresses the dream +of his life, but it is not too much to say that a dream that has haunted +all his life is told here, or half told, for dream such as this eludes +complete expression. "The Shadowy Waters" is a poem so long considered, +so often returned to, so loved and elaborated and worked over, so often +dreamed and redreamed, that one would expect to find in it its author's +_credo_, if its author is one who could hold to one confession of faith. +Few authors can, few authors should, and Mr. Yeats is not one of them +that can or should. He wrote once that he would be accounted + + + "True brother of that company + That sang to lighten Ireland's wrong, + Ballad and story, rann and song,"-- + + +and Nationalist though he still is he has grown more and more +preoccupied with art. There was a time when a love of the occult +threatened his art, but from that the theatre has saved him, if it has +taken him from the writing lyrics, in which his powers are at their +highest. To old Irish legend, Mr. Yeats has, however, been true from the +start, and from the start, too, there has never been a time the two he +has not been preoccupied with dream. And if the two loves to which he +has been constant cannot be said with exactitude to be in the story of +Forgael and Dectora, because that story is not a reshaping of any one +legend out of old Irish legend, it is of the very spirit of the journeys +oversea in which that legend abounds, and it is steeped in dream. It +would be here, then, that one would look for an expression as like a +_credo_ as is possible to Mr. Yeats, and here we do find it on the lips +of Forgael, his hero, who, can we doubt? speaks also for the poet +himself:-- + + + "All would be well + Could we but give us wholly to the dreams, + And get into their world that to the sense + Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly + Among substantial things; for it is dreams + That lift us to the flowing changing world + That the heart longs for. What is love itself, + Even though it be the lightest of light love, + But dreams that hurry from beyond the world, + To make low laughter more than meat and drink, + Though it but set us sighing?" + + +"On Baile's Strand" (1903) follows very closely the story of Cuchulain's +slaying of his own son as retold Lady Gregory in her "Cuchulain of +Muirthemne" (1902). Like Rustum he does not know who is the youth he is +fighting until he has given him his death wound. Its high tragedy rends +the more by the ironic setting of Blind Man and Fool, two wastrels, one +of whom might have prevented the tragedy, but would not because the +fight would give him and his fellow a chance to rob the larders in +houses whose owners were watching it. No one can doubt the high +intention of "On Baile's Strand," no one can deny that its story is +essentially dramatic, no one can pass by certain passages without +realization that here is great verse, blank verse that is true dramatic +speech. Men remember Cuchulain's description of Aoife as men remember +Maud Gonne. + + + "Ah! Conchubar, had you seen her + With that high, laughing, turbulent head of hers + Thrown backward, and the bowstring at her ear, + Or sitting at the fire with those grave eyes + Full of good counsel as it were with wine, + Or when love ran through all the lineaments + Of her wild body." + + +One remembers these things, but if one has not seen the play on the +stage, he does not bear with him memories of beauty such as one bears +always with him from even the reading of "The Countess Cathleen" or of +"The Land of Heart's Desire." Nor is one moved by "On Baile's Strand" as +one is moved by other tellings of the same world story, as one is moved +by the epic telling of it by Matthew Arnold in "Sohrab and Rustum," or +even by such a casual telling of it as is Mr. Neil Munro's in "Black +Murdo." If it were not for "Deirdre," in fact, one would have to say +that the verse plays of Mr. Yeats after "The Shadowy Waters" grow, play +by play, less in poetic beauty, and that their gain in dramatic +effectiveness does not compensate for such a loss. + +"The King's Threshold" (1904) is as near a play with a purpose as Mr. +Yeats has written. It vindicates the right of the poet in Ireland's +Heroic Age to sit at the highest table of the King, and as it was +written and played in 1903, when its author was being accused of caring +more for his art than for his country, it looks very like a defense. +Seanchan, the poet, removed from his high seat at the request of +"Bishops, Soldiers, and Makers of the Law," takes his stand on the +King's threshold, with the intention of starving himself to death there, +as there is, as the King says,-- + + + "a custom, + An old and foolish custom, that if a man + Be wronged, or think that he is wronged and starve + Upon another's threshold till he die, + The common people, for all time to come, + Will raise a heavy cry against that threshold, + Even though it be the King's." + + +It was at this time that the clamor against "In the Shadow of the Glen" +had stirred up a great deal of feeling against Mr. Yeats and the other +managers of the Irish National Theatre Society. And Mr. Yeats, it may +be, wrote the play not only to symbolize his contention that the poet is +as important to society as is the man of action, but also to assert that +poetry cultivated for its own sake, the sake of art, is as necessary to +a nation, to Ireland, as what Ireland calls patriotism. By the way, he +illustrated the fact that that kind of patriotism that assumes the King +can do no wrong,--that is, that the Irish people can do no wrong,--and +that whoever exposes their wrongdoing is no patriot, is a mistaken sort +of patriotism. + +Late in 1906 his "Deirdre" was successfully produced at the Abbey +Theatre, Dublin. It presents only the last chapter of this, the saddest +tale of the three heart-burdening tales that are known as "The Three +Sorrows of Story-Telling," but it presents it so poignantly and with so +keen an emphasis on the quick-passing of all things sweet, that it takes +place, for all its slightness, with the world's greatest tragedies that +are tragedies because of the overthrow therein of "queens ... young and +fair." There are few Irish writers whose concern is with things Irish +who have not retold this, the greatest love story of Ireland, but none +of them, from Sir Samuel Ferguson down to our own day, have retold it so +nobly as Mr. Yeats, save only Synge, and his restatement of it, of the +whole story from Deirdre's girlhood to her death, has about it a +grandeur and triumphing beauty that make further retellings not to be +tolerated. + +It is not lines, "purple patches," one remembers from "Deirdre," but the +whole play, its every situation, its setting. That setting so +quintessentializes, in the words Mr. Yeats used to describe it, the +romance of the old haunted woods where any adventure is possible, that I +must quote it in full:-- + + A Guest-house in a wood. It is a rough house of timber; through the + doors and some of the windows one can see the great spaces of the + wood, the sky dimming, night closing in. But a window to the left + shows the thick leaves of a coppice; the landscape suggests + silence and loneliness. There is a door to right and left, and + through the side windows one can see anybody who approaches either + door, a moment before he enters. In the centre, a part of the house + is curtained off; the curtains are drawn. There are unlighted + torches in brackets on the walls There is, at one side, a small + table with a chessboard and chessmen upon it, and a wine flagon and + loaf of bread. At the other side of the room there is a brazier + with a fire; two women, with musical instruments beside them, + crouch about the brazier: they are comely women of about forty. + Another woman, who carries a stringed instrument, enters hurriedly; + she speaks, at first standing in the doorway. + +But if one does not carry in memory so many lines of "Deirdre" as one +does of the earlier less dramatic plays, there are passages in plenty +that arrest and exalt. One such is those lines of Fergus that so well +describe one phase of the imagination of Mr. Yeats-- + + + "wild thought + Fed on extravagant poetry, and lit + By such a dazzle of old fabulous tales + That common things are lost, and all that's strange + Is true because 't were pity if it were not." + + +Another such is the song of the musicians, of Queen Edain's tower, "When +the Winds are Calling There"; and another such, the crying of a woman's +heart in Deirdre's offer to go with Conchubar that Naisi may be saved:-- + + + "It's better to go with him. + Why should you die when one can bear it all? + My life is over; it's better to obey. + Why should you die? I will not live long, Naisi. + I'd not have you believe I'd long stay living; + Oh, no, no, no! You will go far away. + + "You will forget me. Speak, speak, Naisi, speak, + And say that it is better that I go. + I will not ask it. Do not speak a word, + For I will take it all upon myself. + Conchubar, I will go." + + +This is true dramatic speech, this has the accent of high tragedy, and +weakly human as it is it does not take away at all from the queenliness +of Deirdre. There are other passages that have such a tendency, however, +true though they may be to the life they depict and to human nature of +all time when in such a frenzy of fear and sorrow. Longer even than this +heart's cry, however, I think I shall remember that line so near the +opening of the play-- + + + "She put on womanhood and he lost peace." + + +Lines greater than that are far to seek in English drama. + +"The Green Helmet" (1910), a rewriting in a form of verse alien to the +stage of the earlier prose "Golden Helmet" (1908), is hardly done out of +any high intention, and although it is not wanting in a kind of strange +and grotesque fascination, it is in result no higher than it was in +intention. In fact the past five years, years much of whose time has +been spent in forwarding the work of the Abbey Theatre, have not +inspired Mr. Yeats to much work of importance. Mr. Yeats promises us +more plays, but one cannot help wishing, if he must do verses other than +lyric, he would put his hand now to a great epic. His "Wanderings of +Oisin" is nearest this, near enough, for all the preponderance of lyric +in it, to show that he could do it, were we without such lines of "large +accent" as I have quoted from "The Countess Cathleen" to prove that +beyond doubt. There is no better material for epic as yet unused than +Irish legends, but there is none the old bard developed into epic +proportions. There would be here the largest scope for the shaping power +of the poet. Mr. Yeats must, of course, have thought of epic, but +preferred drama as more in harmony with our time. Lionel Johnson said +that Mr. Yeats took to drama because he liked to hear his lines finely +spoken, but, surely, if that were his greatest delight, he could invent +some way in which to bring story in verse to listeners. It were surely a +lesser task than that of stimulating Mr. Dolmetsch to make a psaltery to +which his lyrics may be musically spoken. + +From the beginning, the verse of Mr. Yeats has had vocal quality, a +quality that is unfortunately often rarer in good poetry than in verse +that is good rhetoric. I cannot see that his interest in the psaltery, +that developed after 1900, has brought about any change in the quality +of his verse. There have been constant to it since "The Wanderings of +Oisin" all the qualities that distinguish it to-day,--its eloquence, its +symbols that open up unending vistas through mysteries, its eeriness as +of the bewildering light of late sunset over gray-green Irish bog and +lake and mountain, its lonely figures as great in their simplicity as +those of Homer, its plain statement of high passion that breaks free of +all that is occult and surprises with its clarity where so much is dim +with dream. First one and then another of these qualities has most +interested him. He has written in explanation of patriotic verse, of +folk-verse, of verse based on the old court romances, of symbolism, of +Rosicrucianism, of essences, of speaking to the psaltery, of dramatic +art; and all the time he has practiced poetry, the interest of the time +resulting in now the greater emphasis on one quality in the poetry, and +now on another quality. It would be superfluous to do more than point +out most of these qualities, but a word on his use of symbols may help +to a fuller understanding of his poetry. I am very sure that I read +wrong meanings from many of these symbols, as one who has not the +password must. They require definite knowledge of magical tradition, and +of the poet's interpretation of Celtic tradition, for a full +understanding. As the years go by, I think their exact meaning will +escape more and more readers until they will have no more significance +than Spenser's allegories have to us. Only to the student deeply read in +Elizabethan politics do these mean to-day what must have been patent to +the inner circle at Elizabeth's court. Those symbols of Mr. Yeats that +we may understand intuitively, as we may "The white owl in the belfry +sits," other generations also may understand, but hardly those that have +meanings known only to a coterie. But we may read Spenser with enjoyment +even if all the inner allegories are missed, and so, too, many read Mr. +Yeats to-day, neglectful of the images of a formal symbolism. + +I do not know that I get more enjoyment from the poetry of the verses +entitled "The Valley of the Black Pig" because Mr. Yeats's note tells us +that it is the scene of Ireland's _Goetterdaemmerung_, though it is an +unquestionable gratification to the puzzle interest I have with my +kind, and I would at times be more comfortable were I sure that the +"Master of the Still Stars and of the Flaming Door" was he who keeps the +gates of the Other World, the real world we shall enter when death sets +us free of that dream men call life. Mr. Yeats is not so kind to the men +"in the highway" as the old Irish bards. When they wrote enigmas they +were apt to explain them fully, as does the poet of "The Wooing of Emer" +when he tell what was meant by the cryptic questions and answers +exchanged between that princess and Cuchulain. When the symbolism is of +the kind found in "Death's Summons" of Thomas Nash, which of all poems +Mr. Yeats quotes oftenest, all cultivated men may understand-- + + + "Brightness falls from the air; + Queens have died young and fair; + Dust hath closed Helen's eye." + + +The difference between the symbol Helen and each one of the several +symbols Mr. Yeats employs in "The Valley of the Black Pig" is the +difference between a symbol universally recognized throughout the world +and a symbol recognized by one people; but there is the further +difference that one is intimately associated with the thing symbolized, +is the name of a woman the context tells us is a queen and beautiful, +and the other is only the scene of a battle that symbolizes the ending +of the world. It is more natural to use a beautiful woman as a symbol of +all beauty than to use a black boar that shall root up all the light and +life of the world as a symbol of the ending of the world. But neither of +these is a symbol that would be understood intuitively, as the rose +used as a symbol of beauty or the wind as a symbol of instability. +Sometimes Mr. Yeats's symbols are very remote, but perhaps they were +remote in the old stories in which he found them. The details in + + + "the phantom hound + All pearly white, save one red ear," + + +and "the hornless deer" which it chases, seem arbitrary. The hound, it +is true, is known of all men as the pursuer, and the deer as the +pursued; but does this knowledge suggest immediately "the desire of the +man which is for the woman, and the desire of the woman which is for the +desire of the man"? Mr. Yeats does not, as I take it, expect all his +symbols to be understood so definitely as this hound and deer, which, of +course, are not only symbols, but figures from the tapestry of +fairyland. It is often enough, perhaps, that we understand emotionally, +as in "Kubla Khan" or "The Owl." From some of his writing it would +appear he believed many symbols to be of very definite meaning and to be +understood by generation upon generation. In the note to "The Valley of +the Black Pig" he writes, "Once a symbol has possessed the imagination +of large numbers of men, it becomes, as I believe, an embodiment of +disembodied powers, and repeats itself in dreams and visions, age after +age." + +This is but another phase of Mr. Yeats's belief that when a poem stirs +us as by magic, it is a real magic has been at work. The words have +loosened the seals that the flesh has fastened upon the universal memory +which is subconscious in all of us, until that memory possesses us and +we are one with all that has been since the beginning of time, and may +in such moments live over all that has been lived. He thinks that in +such moments the poet's magic brings before us the past and the unseen +as the past and the unseen were brought before our pagan ancestors by +the magical rites of their priests. + +In his younger years Mr. Yeats held that poetry is "the words that have +gathered up the heart's desire of the world." His heart's desire was +simpler in those days than his heart's desire of after years. Then he +had a child's wistfulness for little things and put lines in his poems +of Blake-like innocence and freshness. "The brown mice" that + + + "bob + Round and round the oatmeal chest" + + +are out of memories of childhood, and many other of the similes of these +early poems are out of the ways of wild little things that appeal so to +children, perhaps because they are wild little things themselves. A +later mood of Mr. Yeats is to hold of less account the things of +out-of-doors, but still he uses as similes the ways of birds, as did the +old Irish bards whose stories have so informed his. He never did +describe nature for its own sake, but natural things gave him more +figures than they do now, although always there have been in his lines +many out of mythology. Summer days between Slieve Echtge and the western +sea are, however, bringing the plovers and curlews and peewits back to +his poetry. In the country of the Countess Cathleen, as everywhere in +Ireland, you may hear "wind cry and water cry and curlew cry," and +there, as all the world over,-- + + + "Ill bodings are as native unto our hearts + As are their spots unto the woodpeckers." + + +It is from such knowledge of country things come the fine lines about + + + "The dark folk, who live in souls + Of passionate men like bats in the dead trees";-- + + +and such lines are coming again into his verse, even into the blank +verse of his plays. The poems in which "the strong human call" is heard +are more than the many who read Mr. Yeats hurriedly will think, and to +those who know his story they reveal again and again a great and common +sorrow. Whole poems and plays are often symbols of the poet's life. So +may "The Countess Cathleen" be taken as well as "The King's Threshold." +"Ephemera," "The Dedication to a Book of Stories," "In the Seven Woods," +"The Old Age of Queen Maeve," "The Folly of Being Comforted," "Old +Memory," "Adam's Curse," as well as the folk-poems of the first volumes, +are but little "dream-burdened," and passages elsewhere have the human +call. The feeling of Oisin nearing the coast of Ireland is, for +instance, the common joy on nearing the shore of the homeland at the end +of exile:-- + + + "Remembrance, lifting her leanness, keened in the gates of my heart. + Till, fattening the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hay + Came, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down; + later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a shore far away, + From the great grass-barnacle calling, and later the shore-weeds brown." + + +It is true, though, that the dream-drenched poems are those most +characteristic of the author, those that give a note entirely new to +English poetry. It is impossible to pick out one as more representative +than another where so many are representative and where all are of +highest achievement. Nowhere is his own individual note better +sustained, however, than in the Michael Robartes poems or in "The Rose +of Battle" or "Into the Twilight"; and the hold that dream has of him +and the hold that human things have, chief among them love of country, +are told with utmost distinction and inevitability of phrase in "To +Ireland in the Coming Times" and in "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time." + +I sometimes wonder, is the reason for the poet's holding so devotedly to +spiritual things of his kind not the very same holding of his peasant +countryman to the folk-tales that take him to a world as rich and +gorgeous-hued as the Ireland about him is bare and gray, and to a church +that prepares him for a better world after death? A large part of all +poetry is the realization of the brevity of all beautiful things,--of +bloom, of youth, of life; but no poet has more often lamented "Fate and +Time and Change" than Mr. Yeats. It is, he says, "our narrow rooms, our +short lives, our soon ended passions and emotions put us out of conceit +with sooty and feeble reality." So the poet seeks refuge in his own +dream and in contemplation of the life from which he came and to which +he will return, and--one almost dare say--in communication with which he +now knows such joy. The poet's life is little because he has found out +the littleness of earthly things; the peasant holds life little because +his share of it has been so poor. If the peasant acquires riches by +chance or by emigration, he sees as the poet that all he can have is as +nothing, so short is the time he may hold it. Irish writers of the past +have made this peasant only the jarvey wit; but if you read the old +romances, or listen to the folk-tales still alive, you will learn that +Mr. Yeats is at one with his countryman in this basic likeness. + +There is a side of Irish life, the side the world knows best, that Mr. +Yeats does not present, but that which he does present is true, though +the poet's personality is so dominant that we get more of this than of +Ireland in his poetry. So it should be, so it is with every artist. All +the world can ask of him is his interpretation of what he knows. Yet so +native is Mr. Yeats that the atmosphere of his poetry is the very +atmosphere of Ireland. The artist and the setting of his art are in an +unwonted harmony. No reader of Mr. Yeats who knows the brooding +landscape of West Ireland can escape that realization, but only he who +has met the poet amid the scenes that inspired his verse may know how +complete is their accord. Such a meeting was mine one lowering August +day, in whose late afternoon we walked in the Woods of Coole. Then I +knew at last what Mr. Yeats meant by "druid charm" and "druid light." I +felt the "druid charm" that was potent in gray skies over gray water and +gray rock and gray-green woods; the bewildering "druid light" flashed +out as the sun followed westward the trail to Hy Brasil, leaving in the +Atlantic skies wild after-glow of winter yellow. + +FOOTNOTES: + +[2] _Collected Works_. Stratford-on-Avon, 1908, vol. II, p. 251. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +MR. EDWARD MARTYN AND MR. GEORGE MOORE + + +The announcement of Mr. Edward Martyn as playwright of "The Irish +Literary Theatre" was, outside of the narrow circle of his friends, a +great surprise to all interested in letters in Ireland. But the almost +simultaneous announcement that Mr. George Moore was lending his aid to +the adventure was an even greater surprise. Mr. Moore had, of course, +written more than once of Ireland, and there were many who had not +forgotten the unpleasantnesses of "A Drama in Muslin" (1886), and Mr. +Martyn, though the author of "Morgante the Lesser" (1890), was not known +as its author, as he had published it anonymously, and as it had not +made enough of a stir for its anonymity to be disclosed. Yet for the +landlord-author, who had turned his back on Ireland, to return to his +country with a greater interest in its life and its writers than he had +ever betrayed, was more remarkable than for another landlord of the same +family connection, comparatively a stay-at-home landlord, to turn from +sport and religion to the stage. Mr. Martyn had lived in London and his +love of music had taken him to the Continent, but he had been something +of a Nationalist, whereas Mr. Moore had lost few opportunities to scoff +at the country his father had striven so unselfishly to aid. What of Mr. +Moore that was not French in 1899 was confessedly English. + +[Illustration] + +Now that those interested have read "Ave," the first volume of the three +of "Hail and Farewell," in which Mr. Moore is confessing the reasons of +his return to Ireland and of his second departure from Ireland, they +know that he had been mildly interested in Ireland as material for art +as far back as 1894, and that it was Mr. Martyn who had interested him +in the things of home. Mr. Moore tells us all about it more than +explicitly in the "Overture" to his trilogy. In the first chapter he +tells us that the interest faded away gradually, to be reawakened in +1899 by a visit paid him in London by Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats, who came +to ask his help in founding a "Literary Theatre in Dublin." Then Mr. +Moore learned the story of that theatre's inception, a story to him +"disappointingly short and simple. When Yeats had said that he had spent +the summer at Coole with Lady Gregory, I saw it all. Coole is but three +miles from Tillyra [Mr. Martyn's estate in Galway]; Edward is often at +Coole; Lady Gregory and Yeats are often at Tillyra; Yeats and Edward had +written plays--the drama brings strange fowls to roost." + +It takes Mr. Moore many pages to tell why it was he joined the three in +their project, and many more pages to tell of their collaboration during +the first two years of the three years that were the life of "The Irish +Literary Theatre." The four are, indeed, the principal characters of Mr. +Moore's "Ave"--I had almost said his novel "Ave"--himself, Mr. Martyn, +Mr. Yeats, and Lady Gregory, to mention them in the order of prominence +that Mr. Moore gives them. + +Lady Gregory and Mr. Yeats have learned their art, the highest and most +difficult of all forms of literary art, so that each is sure in the +shaping of fable and emotion to the stage, though neither is to drama +native-born as was Synge. Mr. Martyn and Mr. Moore have neither of them, +however, learned the art of the playwright. Mr. Martyn has the root of +the matter in him, but he remains the amateur. Mr. Moore was once the +amateur, even in the novel, in "A Modern Lover" (1883), for instance, +true as that story is to the London art life and aristocratic life it is +intended to reflect, but he has since then won his way, book by book, to +the position, now that Mr. Hardy has given up the novel, of first +novelist of the English-speaking peoples. Had he studied the play as +painfully and as long as he has studied the novel, it may be that Mr. +Moore had conquered it, too, though I doubt it, for the concentration +necessary to drama is alien to his method as a novelist. As it is, his +best plays are but the good journeyman work of one who is a skilled +literary craftsman. Mr. Martyn has more originality of theme, more +intimacy with Irish character, a surer instinct for effective situation, +and more nobility of intention, though Mr. Moore's greater power over +words gives his plays a dignity as art that the plays of Mr. Martyn do +not attain. + +Alone of the quartette that founded "The Irish Literary Theatre," Mr. +Martyn is possessed of none of the instincts of the publicist. Lady +Gregory has edited articles about ideals in Ireland at home, and on the +lecture platform she has stoutly fought the battles of "The Playboy of +the Western World" in America; Mr. Yeats has ever delighted in writing +letters to the newspapers and he has preached the evangel of the +Renaissance from Edinburgh to San Francisco; and Mr. George Moore is a +controversialist pamphleteer even before he is a novelist. In the few +articles about the movement that Mr. Martyn has written, brief articles +all of them, there is, however, clear indication of the spirit in which +he wrote his plays, if comparatively little discussion of his art. In +the second number of "Beltaine" (February, 1900), in an article entitled +"A Comparison between Irish and English Theatrical Audiences," Mr. +Martyn declares that he sees in Ireland, instead of the "vast +cosmopolitanism and vulgarity" of England, "an idealism founded upon the +ancient genius of the land." It is wholly in accord with the spirit of +this declaration that Mr. Martyn has written his more important plays, +all of them, in fact, but the satires on weaklings and officials he +calls "A Tale of a Town" (1902) and "The Place Hunters" (1905). He +writes little of the peasants, being less interested in them than are +Mr. Yeats and Lady Gregory, and therefore less acquainted with them. If +one may judge from his writings the intimates of Mr. Martyn have been +among his own landlord class, the priests, and the politicians. It is +the landlords and middle-class people that occupy the foreground of his +plays, Peg Inerny in "Maeve" (1899) being the only important character a +peasant, unless Mrs. Font in "The Enchanted Sea" (1902) can be called a +member of a class that she was born to, but from which her marriage +removed her. + +This question of the class the plays should present was one of those +that led to the withdrawal of Mr. Martyn from the dramatic movement. A +more definite cause, perhaps, was the unanimous determination of Lady +Gregory, Mr. Yeats, and Mr. Moore that his "A Tale of a Town" could not +be presented by "The Irish Literary Theatre" as he wrote it if the +standards of that theatre were to be preserved. Its author's magnanimity +in turning it over to Mr. Moore to be rewritten,--as it was, being +presented as "The Bending of the Bough" (1900),--was revealed by Mr. +Moore in "Samhain" (October, 1901), and very much more fully, if less +kindly, in "Ave" (1911). + +In its way their refusal to play Mr. Martyn's "A Tale of a Town" was as +creditable to the other powers in the theatre as was his magnanimity in +giving them the play to do with as they would. They knew their refusal +to play it might lead him to withdraw his support of the theatre and, in +the end, it was a factor in bringing about that result. After their +rejection of "A Tale of a Town," however, he still gave "The Irish +Literary Theatre" his support, allowing it to put on his "Maeve," and in +1901 contributing to "Samhain" (October), "A Plea for a National Theatre +in Ireland." Such a theatre Mr. Martyn had the power to give Ireland, +but he did not give it, when it was thought he might, and in 1902 all +hope of his giving his money for such a purpose was destroyed by his +transference of a fund of fifty thousand dollars to the Catholic +Pro-Cathedral in Dublin "for the purpose of founding and supporting a +Palestrina choir." + +That Mr. Martyn was still a force to be reckoned with is revealed by the +trouble Mr. Yeats went to, in "Samhain" of October, 1902, to explain why +it was that the plays of the Irish National Dramatic Company were either +folk-drama or drama whose life was the "life of poetry" Mr. Martyn had +argued in "The United Irishmen," which up to the time of the +presentation of "In the Shadow of the Glen" was a stanch supporter of +the dramatic policies of Mr. Yeats, that the actors of the company +should be trained to the drama of modern society. "The acting of plays +like 'Deirdre,' and of 'Cathleen ni Houlihan,'" writes Mr. Yeats, "with +its speech of the country people, did not seem to him a preparation. It +is not, but that is as it should be. Our movement is a return to the +people, like the Russian movement of the early seventies, and the drama +of society could but magnify a condition of life which the countryman +and the artisan could but copy to their hurt. The play that is to give +them a quite natural pleasure should either tell them of their own life +or of that life of poetry where every man can see his own image, because +there alone does human nature escape from arbitrary conditions. Plays +about drawing-rooms are written for the middle classes of great cities, +for the classes who live in drawing-rooms, but if you would uplift the +man of the roads you must write about the roads, or about the people of +romance, or about great historical people." + +Neither "Maeve" nor "The Enchanted Sea" can be called a drawing-room +play, though both introduce us to "drawing-room people," but "The +Heather Field" (1899), Mr. Martyn's first play, and his greatest success +is a drawing-room play, as in a minor way are "A Tale of a Town" and +"The Place Hunters." These last two plays are failures; but they are not +failures, I think because they are drawing-room plays, but because Mr. +Martyn is less effective with a full stage than with two couples or so +and, principally, because he is less successful with social and +political questions than with those that concern the individual. + +Whatever value one puts upon "The Heather Field" it cannot be denied +that it was a popular success and that it was praised by critics whose +judgment is discerning. It is perhaps because it is a variant of the old +theme of the war between man the idealist and woman the materialist that +it so appealed to young men, troubled themselves as to whether to follow +their star or to accept the chains that; wife and children impose. It +was enough for the audience that witnessed its first performances in the +Antient Concert Rooms, Dublin, May 9, 10, 13, 1899, that it showed a man +at war with the despotism of fact, as Ireland, preeminently the Celtic +Land, has so long been. It was not remarkably acted, by an +insufficiently rehearsed and not very understanding scratch company, and +yet it impressed its audiences more favorably than "The Countess +Cathleen" (1892), an unequivocally great poetic drama; and these +audiences were the most cultivated Dublin can boast. + +"The Heather Field" is the story of the going-mad of Carden Tyrrell, a +landlord of the west of Ireland. From the first he is represented to us +as a man to whom as to so many of his countrymen dream is reality and +reality dream. His wife, to whom the realities are very instant, urges +him to do as others do, to entertain, to hunt, at least to do something +practical. For her he has abandoned the ideal world he had built up for +himself from his books and his dreams and is trying farming. Yet his +temperament is such that he must idealize even this. When the curtain +rises he is still busy with the project, long since undertaken, of +reclaiming a wind-swept heather field fronting the Atlantic and of +making it into the best of pasture land. That reclamation and +transformation has become a passion with him, and soon we feel that it +is the symbol of that quality in him that is untamed, incurably "ideal." +To free that field of rocks and to drain its bogs he has mortgaged his +estate, and, in the play, before the success or failure of his +undertaking is proved, he mortgages almost all that remains to him to +improve the land below, which the draining of the heather field has +turned into a swamp. His wife, to prevent this last folly, strives to +have control of his property taken away from him, but his friend, Barry +Ussher, believing that restraint would make Tyrrell mad indeed, so +intimidates a hesitating physician that Mrs. Tyrrell fails in her most +natural plan to save herself and her child from ruin by having her +husband declared incompetent, and, if necessary, restrained. With his +friend's assistance Tyrrell has won his fight against his wife. +Obstinacy in the treatment of some tenants that his debts have driven +him to evict rouses such hatred against Tyrrell, until then a loved +landlord, that the police hold it necessary to follow him with an escort +that he may not be shot by his people. To avoid being so followed, +Tyrrell keeps within doors and so intensifies his malady. The +catastrophe comes when, on his boy's first spring search for wild +flowers, the child brings him a handful of heather buds from the heather +field. Their message is that the mountain will revert to waste again. +Even in his "ideal domain" reality has asserted itself. His ideal world +crumbles for the instant, and his reason with it, and forever. But after +a moment's agony ideality triumphantly reasserts itself, and in mad +ecstasy Tyrrell, his years fallen from him, passes from sight crying out +at the beauty of a world that is to him now forever a world of mornings +in which, as he says, "the rain across a saffron sun trembles like gold +harpstrings through the purple Irish spring.... The voices--I hear them +now triumphant in a silver glory of song!" Such is the play, "aching and +lofty in its loveliness." + +Is this ending, or is it not, sadder than the catastrophe of "Ghosts"? +Certainly to "Ghosts" it owes something, and to "The Wild Duck" more +than something. A quality as of Ibsen pervades the play, and it has, +too, back of it a background of nature and of thought that is beautiful +in the way the background of nature and of thought is beautiful and +compensating in the plays of Ibsen. + +In his introduction to "The Heather Field," which was published before +its presentation, Mr. Moore writes, "Although all right and good sense +are on the wife's side, the sympathy is always with Carden." So it was +on the presentation of the play in Dublin, Mr. Yeats writing in "The +Dome," "Our Irish playgoers sympathized with this man so perfectly that +they hissed the doctors who found that he was mad." Such an attitude is +characteristically Irish; and equally characteristically English was the +reception of this play when Mr. Thomas Kingston presented it at a +matinee at the Strand Theatre in London. Mr. Yeats is again the +authority: "The London playgoers ... sympathized with the doctors, and +held the divine vision a dream." Mr. Moore praises "The Heather Field" +more forthrightly in "Samhain" of October, 1901, holding that "'The +Heather Field' has been admitted to be the most thoughtful of modern +prose plays written in English, the best constructed, the most endurable +to a thoughtful audience." Patriotism or kinship, love of paradox or +desire to assuage feelings hurt by the rough treatment of "A Tale of a +Town," may any or all of them be called upon to explain so sweeping a +statement. But none of such motives could account for its praise by Mr. +Beerbohm in the London "Saturday Review." "Max" is often paradoxical, +but he is not paradoxical here: "Not long ago this play was published as +a book, with a preface by Mr. George Moore, and it was more or less +vehemently disparaged by the critics. Knowing that it was to be produced +later in Dublin, and knowing how hard it is to dogmatize about a play +until one has seen it acted, I confined myself to a very mild +disparagement of it. Now that I have seen it acted, I am sorry that I +disparaged it at all. It turns out to be a very powerful play indeed." I +have quoted Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore and Mr. Beerbohm, not only because +I have not seen the play on the stage but because, on reading it, its +effect is one that puts my judgment at sea. Years ago as I read it it +gripped me hard, but when I read it now and think it over now, I am at a +loss to see why, done as it is done, I should have been so moved by it. +Now I am moved greatly by but two situations. Both of these are in the +last act. One of them is Tyrrell's revulsion against the bad news that +his brother Miles brings from Dublin of the mortgagee's refusal to +extend. His wife tells their friends that she is ruined, that "pretty +nearly all" their property is mortgaged, but Tyrrell cries out, "All, do +you say? No--not all. This vulture cannot touch the heather field! My +hope,--it is my only hope, and it will save me in the end. Ha, ha! These +wise ones! They did not think the barren mountain of those days worth +naming in their deed. But now that mountain is a great green field worth +more than all they can seize, (_with a strange intensity_) and it is +mine--all mine!" + +The other situation that moves me greatly is that at the very close of +the play, that from which I quoted a while back, in which Tyrrell's +madness becomes evident in his belief that he is a youth again, with all +the world before him to do with as he will. + +The characters in "The Heather Field" are less rigid than those in the +later plays, but even in this play you feel about them, as you feel so +often about the characters of Hawthorne, that they are characters chosen +to interpret an idea rather than children of the imagination or +portraits done from observation of life. + +As one recalls the motive and situations and background and symbolism +of "The Heather Field," not having read the play for some time, it seems +far finer than when one returns to it. Fine, too, it must seem to any +one reading a scenario of it and not offended, as one reading it +constantly is by the inability of its dialogue to represent more of the +person speaking than his point of view. The dialogue of Mr. Martyn is +almost never true dramatic speech, and not only not true dramatic +speech, but despite the very clear differentiation of the characters, +with little of their personality or temperament in it. + +"Maeve" has always seemed to me a lesser play than "The Heather Field," +and it now leaves me even colder than of old. Nor, though I can see how +fine in conception was the character of Mrs. Font in "The Enchanted +Sea," does that one character seem to me, now, to redeem the undeveloped +possibilities of the situations of the play, the incomplete characters +of Guy and Mask and the failure of the dialogue assigned to the +characters to approach true dramatic speech. "Maeve" is the better play +of the two. With all its shortcomings it has about it an unearthliness +of atmosphere, a quiet coldness of beauty that has come of the thought +Mr. Martyn had, as he wrote it, of the moonlight on the Burren Hills in +his home country. In this one respect Mr. Martyn has done what he would, +for he holds that "the greatest beauty like the old Greek sculptures is +always cold." + +Mr. Martyn calls "Maeve" "a psychological drama in two acts." It relates +the story of the last day and night in the life of a visionary girl, the +hereditary princess of Burren in Clare, in the west of Ireland. On the +eve of her marriage to Hugh Fitz Walter, a rich young Englishman, whom +she will wed only for her father's sake to reestablish him in his +position as "The O'Heynes" among the neighboring gentry, she wanders off +into the Burren Hills with her old nurse Peg Inerny. Peg has fascinated +Maeve O'Heynes with tales of "the other people," convincing Maeve, as +she is convinced herself, that she changes from the old vagrant peasant +whom the countryside half fears into Queen Maeve, the great Amazon of +the Cuchulain legends. Maeve O'Heynes in her own dreams has seen great +heroes and heroines of Ireland's legendary past, and she believes that +they still live among the fairies as many a peasant to-day beside Peg +Inerny believes. So Maeve follows Peg to the mountains, though it is her +wedding-eve, to see these great people of old time and to meet a lover +she has seen in vision, the ideal man of her dreams. She finds her way +home several hours later through the white moonlight of the bitter March +night. Then, in a sort of trance, looking out of her window in the +half-ruined castle to the ruined abbey, the mysterious round tower, the +stony mountains, she beholds the vision of Queen Maeve, with an +attendant troupe of harpers and pages, rise from the cairn and approach +the castle. As the troupe returns from castle to cairn Maeve's spirit +passes with it under the Northern lights into the land of the ever-young +of Tir-nan-Ogue. When her sister goes to call her to make ready for her +wedding, she finds Maeve sitting still and cold at the open casement. +Maeve has found the supernatural lover, once human, of "boyish face +closehooded with short gold hair," and again only "a symbol of ideal +beauty," to be truly a "Prince of the hoar dew," for he is death. Maeve +has renounced life and sought "perfection in what unfolds as death." + +Mr. Yeats explains the play ("Beltaine," February, 1900) to "symbolize +Ireland's choice between English materialism and her own natural +idealism, as well as the choice of every individual soul." Does it +follow that the lesson of "Maeve" is that it were better for Ireland to +be depopulated in her pursuit of national individuality, of ideal +beauty, than to drift along to complete Anglicanization, even though +that bring riches, peace, and content? An austere policy, surely, if I +read rightly the meaning of Mr. Yeats. + +"Maeve" was not so well played at its production during the second +season's performances of "The Irish Literary Theatre" in February, 1900, +as "The Heather Field" had been performed in 1899, but it was almost as +enthusiastically received. It has not won for itself, however, +reproduction outside of Dublin, as did Mr. Martyn's first play, which +was played in New York, at the Carnegie Lyceum, in April, 1900, and +which was revived in London in 1903. + +If objection be made to "The Enchanted Sea" as a reflection of "The Lady +from the Sea," it can be replied that the call of the sea that may not +be resisted is as old as the heart of man. Sea fairies, mermaids and +mermen, and the voice of the waters tugging as irresistibly on the tired +spirit as the undertow on the body tired with long swimming, are in +Gaelic literature from the beginning, and before Mr. Martyn had written +of the sea enchantment it had lent its charm to many of the stories of +"Fiona Macleod." It was two years after its publication in 1902 that, on +April 18 and 19, 1904, "The Enchanted Sea" was put on at the Antient +Concert Rooms, Dublin by "The Players' Club." It was not well played, +but according to Mr. Standish James O'Grady it was much better, seen and +listened to, than read. Writing, in his "All Ireland Review," of its +production, he puts it on record "I never saw an audience so attentive +and at the same time so undemonstrative. It was like being in church." +The audience probably felt the dignity of conception back of the +insufficiency of execution in the play and its ineffectiveness of +presentation. The story that Mr. Martyn dreamed to carry over the +footlights is of Mrs. Font, a peasant woman who has sent her husband, a +gentleman, to his grave a broken-spirited man because of her sacrifice +of his honor to advance their material position. When the curtain rises, +Mrs. Font has been thwarted, by the death of her son, in her lifelong +dream of obtaining possession of the Font estates. The estates have +reverted to her nephew, Guy Font, a strange boy, who has been brought up +by the peasantry of the west coast and so has come to share many of +their beliefs. He is fascinated by the sea by which he lives, and his +family's friend, Lord Mask, has been drawn to him, although there is +such disparity in their years, by this love of the sea which he and the +boy have in common. Mrs. Font wishes her daughter to marry Mask, but the +young people are but half in love with each other. Agnes Font cannot +share his visionariness, as her other lover, Commander Lyle, plainly +sees. So the North of Ireland man never gives up hope of winning her. +Mrs. Font vulgarly throws Mask and Agnes together, in her determination +that they shall make a match of it, and as vulgarly tells Lyle the girl +is not for him. Mask cannot but marry Agnes, Mrs. Font thinks, if Agnes +has a large fortune. To secure the fortune and the lord for her +daughter, Mrs. Font determines to get Guy Font out of the way. Her +purpose coincides with her peasant belief that he is a "changeling," and +is really of the sea people. So she goes with him to a sea cave he is +fond of visiting, and only she comes from the cave. She is suspected, +but before the officers come for her, she learns that her crime has +defeated its own end. Mask is driven mad by the loss of his friend and, +seeking to join him by the sea, is overwhelmed and drawn out by the +undertow. As the officers come to arrest her, Mrs. Font hangs herself +from the landing of the great staircase of Font Hill with the rope Guy +used there as a swing. + +"The Enchanted Sea" is cruder, colder, more amateurish than the two +other plays of its class, full of the sort of talk that falls from the +lips of a boy of seventeen just awakened to ideals. Its characters act +as openly and as petulantly as children. Mrs. Font, really fine in +conception, is in realization only a typical villain of the cheap +melodrama; and Commander Lyle, of the Royal Navy, a man of thirty, is as +childish in love as a schoolboy whose beloved takes an ice from his +rival at a church festival. + +What Mr. Martyn could have done with "A Tale of a Town," had he been +willing to learn when opportunity was his with Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore +and Lady Gregory, is partially shown in the rewriting of the play by Mr. +Moore into "The Bending of the Bough." The motives remain as they were, +and, in essentials, the action is the same, the first act being little +different in the two plays The four other acts, however, Mr. Moore has +almost entirely rewritten, and though everywhere the fundamental +brainwork is Mr. Martyn's, the last acts are finer in the revised +version. Mr. Moore makes far more plausible the girl, Millicent Fell, +for love of whom, and a life of ease, the political leader Jasper Dean +gives up a leadership through which he could largely right his country's +wrongs. Not only does Mr. Moore make believable the action of the play, +but he puts words on it, which, if not true dramatic speech, reveal, +after the manner of the novelist, just what are the thought and emotion +of the characters, and the words are in themselves beautiful. + +In "A Tale of a Town" the political situation from which evolves the +action of the play is the unification by Jasper Dean of the corporation +of a town, unnamed, on the west coast of Ireland, to prosecute a lawsuit +against an English town, Anglebury, which owes the Irish town a large +indemnity, promised the Irish town when it gave up a line of steamers in +the interest of the Anglebury line of steamers. After uniting all the +various elements save the place hunter Alderman Lawrence against +Anglebury, Dean gives up the leadership because his fiancee, whose uncle +is the mayor of the English town, turns against him because he is +opposed to the interests of her set. To hold her he betrays his town. + +"A Tale of a Town" is so crude, so naked, so obvious, so uninspired, +one wonders why it can be taken seriously at all. But the reason is not +far to seek. The play is true, in the main, to the life it depicts, and +there is vehement feeling back of its satire; and truth and intensity of +feeling cannot be denied effect on the stage any more than on the +rostrum. Where it falls short of reality is in the dialogue of the +aldermen. No politicians, even when egged by their envious womankind, +would ever give themselves away as do these of "A Tale of a Town." They +are as frankly self-revelatory as if they were characters in a morality +play. + +It would, perhaps, be inexact to call Mr. Martyn a misogynist, but he +has that attitude toward women of some priests his countrymen, as of +many priests of all creeds, that there is something belittling if not +degrading in absorbing association with women. His feeling is not at all +the commoner feeling of men that leads them all to cry, "The woman +tempted me." Women tempt Mr. Martyn no more than they did Ruskin, but he +seems to feel that the majority of them are nuisances if not baggages. +So strong is this feeling in "A Tale of a Town" that it leads him to +make Millicent behave in a way no Jasper Dean in real life would ever +stand, for Jasper Dean is not a man pronouncedly uxorious until his +abject surrender at the end of Act IV. + +There are almost as many indictments of women as there are of England in +the plays of Mr. Martyn: Mrs. Tyrrell in "The Heather Field" and Mrs. +Font in "The Enchanted Sea," as well as all of the women in "A Tale of +a Town" save Miss Arabella Dean. In "Maeve," the heroine and Finola are +sympathetically presented, and there is a kind of attraction as well as +decided repulsion in Peg Inerny. But such sympathy as Mr. Martyn does +express here seems to be expressed not because the women are fellow +human beings, but because Maeve and Peg Inerny symbolize Ireland's +resistance to English ways and because Finola is filled with +loving-kindness for Maeve. Agnes Font in "The Enchanted Sea" escapes the +pillory rather inexplicably, for she is poor, weak girlhood unable to +understand the other-worldly idealism of her cousin and Lord Mask. But +since Mrs. Font was altogether repulsive and the men either too dreamy +for "common nature's daily food" or too hard in the way of the Black +North, Mr. Martyn felt, I suppose, that his hearers would be utterly +alienated were there not some one in the play sympathetic in the +ordinary way of human nature. + +"A Tale of a Town" was put on for the first time at Molesworth Hall, +Dublin, late in October of 1905, by Cumann nan Gaedheal, not very +notably, but it was hailed by the Irish Ireland newspapers as admirable +propagandist material, "The United Irishmen" declaring that "an Irish +play which brings home to us, as this does, the secret of the endurance +of foreign government in this country, is a national asset." + +Mr. Martyn has not cared enough for "The Place Hunters" (1905) to +publish it in book form, contenting himself with its printing in a +little periodical. It is, as its title indicates, a fellow of "A Tale of +a Town," but it has not back of it intensity of feeling enough to lift +itself out of farce. + +Between "The Place Hunters" and "Grangecolman" is an interval of seven +years, but it is the Mr. Martyn of earlier plays, still faithful to +Ibsen and still of a dialogue more formal than that of life, that we +find in this play of his middle age. As you read "Grangecolman" you +think of "Rosmersholm," as you thought of "The Wild Duck" when you read +"The Heather Field." "Grangecolman" is the story of a daughter's +frustration of her elderly father's intention to marry his young +amanuensis, by playing the role of the family ghost, long fabled but +never seen, and being shot by the girl she feels is driving her out of +her home. Katherine Devlin is another creature of her maker's misogyny. +She is a bitter, barren woman of suffragette type, whose marriage and +career as a doctor have been alike failures, and who has alienated +herself from all, even her mild father, by her selfishness and +discontent. It is she who has brought Miss Clare Farquhar into her +father's home to render him those services in his pursuit of heraldry +and genealogy that were irksome to her, and so she herself is +responsible for his dependence on his secretary, which, when once the +daughter recognizes it, threatens annihilation of what little pleasure +she has in her life. Her husband is a dreamy sort of man, slack-fibred +and pottering, who goes about waving the banner of the ideal and +refusing to work. The fifth character of the play is the butler, Horan. +All are clearly characterized, but if the dialogue is less stiff than +that of the earlier plays, it is little more distinctive of the people +who speak it, and in the latter part of the play labored and stodgy. +"Grangecolman" is a picture of life as we all know it, and there is in +it a fidelity of purpose that gives it a kind of effectiveness. There is +not in it, however, any keenness of vision, any deep reading of life, +any great underlying emotion, to relieve its abject sordidness. There is +no gusto, no beauty, no intensity of bitterness even, to make its +sordidness interesting in any other than a pathological way. + +As one reads "Hail and Farewell," one might readily come to believe that +Mr. Martyn is only an eccentric character, "gotten up" by Mr. Moore for +a novel. Mr. Martyn is, in reality, a very vital force working for the +nationalization of Irish art, if not an artist himself. The pity is that +he is not wholly an artist, for he might have been. He knows and is +interested in classes of Irish society that the dramatists of the Abbey +Theatre have not tried to depict, and had he realized twelve years ago +what a chance was his to learn the art of the stage, with the help and +collaboration of Mr. Moore, Mr. Yeats, and Lady Gregory, he might now be +what he seemed to be after the triumphant production of "The Heather +Field," the Irish playwright who had adapted the modes of Ibsen to the +presentation of the life of Irish landlords and bourgeois politicians. + +But Mr. Martyn would not realize that ideas--and he is rich in +ideas--constitute the larger part of originality; he thought technique +in drama must come from the man himself, too. Such technique, of course, +comes most often from the study of other drama. Certainly it was an +original possession of none of the dramatists of the Celtic Renaissance, +and Mr. Martyn might have been content to be a fellow learner, along +with the rest of them, from one another, and from all the great +dramatists of the world. It may be that Mr. Martyn never would have +attained style, but he could, I think, have learned to make his +characters express themselves in a way nearer to true dramatic speech +than the lifeless dialogue of his that only just manages to give you +their thought, with none of their mood of the moment or of their +personality. + +In every one of Mr. Martyn's plays the plot is interesting, save in "The +Place Hunters"; in every other play it is significant; and in all it is +come largely of his individual experience of life. Back of all the plays +but these two political satires there is brooding that is deep if not +passionate. In all the characters are natural, though some of them are +unusual in the way of the unusual characters of Ibsen. And all the plays +are marred, "The Heather Field" less than any other, by the fumbling +touch of the amateur. Ironically, Mr. Martyn is strong where most +Irishmen are weak--in his plot construction: even Mr. Yeats, who never +praises with his tongue in his cheek, owning to "the triumphant +construction of the 'The Heather Field'"; and weak, where most Irishmen +are strong, in the dialogue. It would not have aided Mr. Martyn, for the +kind of play he prefers, to have listened to the speech of the peasant +as Lady Gregory has listened to it, but he might have learned, with such +compeers, how to select and to condense from actual upper-class speech a +speech that would represent the thoughts and emotions and personalities +of his characters. It is far more difficult, of course, to write +dialogue for upper-class people, save humorous dialogue, since, as many +from Wordsworth's day on have pointed out, upper-class people do not +express their thoughts and emotions as frankly as do the folk. As Mr. +Yeats puts it, they look into the fire instead. + +Amateur as he is, however, Mr. Martyn has one play to his credit that he +who has read will remember, "The Heather Field." It is often thus with +the amateur. We need go no further than Mr. Martyn's countryman who gave +us "The Burial of Sir John Moore" for witness. Mr. Martyn has, too, like +other amateurs, given suggestions to others that they have realized as +fine art. It is more than likely, for instance, that Mr. Yeats had in +his mind some memory of Peg Inerny when he created Cathleen ni Houlihan. +There is, too, about the best plays of Mr. Martyn, a quality of a +certain kind. They have the distinctness of objects seen under the +bright hard light of late winter, when the sun grows strong, but when +the winds are still keen from the northwest and there are no leaves as +yet on the trees. + +There are many characterizations of Mr. Martyn in his kinsman's "Ave." +He is now "a fellow ... with an original streak of genius in him, and +very little literary tact"; but he is more generally characterized in +some such fashion as this, which Mr. Moore makes a deliverance of his +own: "A good fellow--an excellent one, and a man who would have written +well if his mother hadn't put it into his head that he had a soul. The +soul is a veritable pitfall." However that may be, it was the discovery, +or at least suppositious discovery, that he had a soul, a soul in +harmony with the melancholy soul of Ireland, that drove Mr. Moore back +to Dublin, and, for moments, even farther west to the home country of +his family about Lough Gara in Mayo. This discovery was foreshadowed in +"Evelyn Innes" (1898), in which Mr. Moore grows curious about the belief +in ancestral memory and other esoteric beliefs of Mr. Yeats; it is +latent in the introductions to "The Heather Field" and "The Bending of +the Bough"; and it is made manifest in the parts of the latter play that +are Mr. Moore's. Who most helped him to the discovery it is not easy to +say, but an interest in his country entered into and possessed him as +Kirwan's ideas entered into and possessed Dean. No doubt Mr. Yeats +helped him to find his soul, and Mr. Russell, but it must be it was Mr. +Martyn through whose agency the first glimmerings of such a recognition +began to break upon his mind. Is it only dramatically that Mr. Moore +wrote when he put upon Kirwan's lips in 1900 the words, "Life is the +enemy--we should fly from life"? But whether this is only a dramatic +repetition of what he might have heard any time from "A.E." had he +chosen to listen, there is no doubt that Mr. Moore did discover a new +quality in himself in the late nineties after he became intimately +associated with the new Irish movement. There is a wistfulness of +feeling and a beauty of thought in his writing, from "Evelyn Innes" on, +that there was not in it before "Evelyn Innes." + +There are those who think the greatest excellence of Mr. Moore is as an +art critic, and that "Modern Painting" (1893) is his great book. Mr. +Moore himself says that "Esther Waters" (1894) is his only book that he +can read with admiration and content; and those particularly interested +in the Renaissance will hold out for "Evelyn Innes" or "The Lake" +(1905). To me "A Drama in Muslin" (1886) is the best story of Mr. Moore +in his earlier realistic manner and "The Lake" in his later manner, a +manner that is now wistful and now mellow, as in "A Drama in Muslin" his +manner is uniformly as hard as winter sunshine. + +Mr. Moore is, as I said at the outset, a hard-working amateur in "A +Modern Lover"; three years later, in "A Drama in Muslin," he writes with +authority and insight; as he does, too, in "Parnell and his Island" +(1887), though here with scant sympathy; but it is not until "Evelyn +Innes" that he becomes deeply concerned with beauty of subject or beauty +of background, or, except at haphazard, possessed of any mastery of +style. "Evelyn Innes" is very well written,--in spots,--but "The Lake" +is of a wholeness of good tissue that is attainable only through an art +that has labored long and earnestly to achieve beauty. Had Mr. Moore +never recaptured his ancestral tradition, had he remained the writer +that Paris and London had made him, he had never written so finely as he +writes in "The Lake." An infancy and boyhood in Ireland; a youth in +London; the ten years from twenty-one to thirty-one in Paris; eleven +years of hard writing in London, years comparatively lean after those of +luxury that anteceded them, brought Mr. Moore at forty-two to a +knowledge of what was beautiful and significant in his home country. He +and Mr. Martyn were not many years apart when they began to write about +Ireland, but Mr. Moore had back of him not only ten years of writing, +but back of that ten years of living life as an art in Paris and his +attempts in the art of painting and his years of discussion of art in +the studios. Mr. Martyn, at home, had been more concerned with religion +and nationality and politics, and a shift to art as the principal career +of life after forty--"Morgante the Lesser" was no more than an incursion +into art, about as much of his life as a trip to Bayreuth--is only in +rare instances productive of results interesting to others than the +"artist." The difference in the achievements of the two men is not so +much the result of the difference of the powers with which both were +gifted as the result of the difference of time at which the will began +to work to realize those powers. Had Mr. Martyn begun soon enough and +had he been enough interested in his writing he might have made drama as +full of insight and beauty and as true to human nature as are the novels +of his kinsman. It is another irony of Mr. Martyn's life that it was he +who should have led Mr. Moore to the subject on which Mr. Moore was to +do his most harmonious and beautiful work, though it is possible, +judging from "Parnell and his Island," that Mr. Moore might in the end +have found his own way back. + +After his wont Mr. Moore puts his intimates into books made out of Irish +life. In "Evelyn Innes" Ulick Dean, fashioned in the first version of +the novel after Mr. Yeats, is the only wholly Irish character. Evelyn is +not Irish at all, and her Scotch father is given the musical interests +of Mr. Dolmetsch, a Bohemian, I believe. But Sir Owen Asher has in him +much of Mr. Moore himself, though most of Mr. Moore that is there is the +English Mr. Moore. There is something of Mr. Martyn in Monsignor Mostyn, +though an actual and not a potential ecclesiastic is drawn upon for the +basic characteristics of the character In the second version of "Evelyn +Innes" there is more of Mr. Russell than of Mr. Yeats in Ulick Dean, at +least in his appearance and sayings, though Mr. Moore could not divest +his composer of the personality of Mr. Yeats. There is less of Ireland +in "Sister Theresa" (1901) than in "Evelyn Innes," but "The Untilled +Field," short stories written after the removal of Mr. Moore to Dublin +and gathered together in 1903, are wholly concerned with Ireland. As Mr. +Moore makes Jasper say to Millicent in "The Bending of the Bough": "It +is the land underfoot that makes the Celt. Soon you will feel the +fascination of this dim, remote land steal over you." It was when this +aesthetic homesickness overtook Mr. Moore that he grew to feel lonely in +England, at least momentarily, and to believe that "we are lonely in a +foreign land because we are deprived of our past life; but the past is +about us here [he is speaking through the mouth of Dean and in Ireland]; +we see it at evening glimmering among the hollows of the hills." + +In "Memoirs of my Dead Self" (1906) there are chapters which tell of the +return of his thought to his boyhood in the west and that record his +wish to be buried with his father by Lough Gara; and all three volumes +of "Hail and Farewell," the first of which was published in 1911 as +"Ave," and the second in 1912 as "Salve," are the fruit of his ten +years' partial residence in Ireland, 1901-11. + +Our concern with Mr. Moore here, however, is with Mr. Moore the +dramatist, so I shall not dwell on the short stories and the novels save +to say that they, more than any writing of his, reveal his inherent +dramatic power. By dramatic power I mean not his power of situation and +evolution of dramatic technique, but his power to change his point of +view with the character he is creating A sensual exquisite himself whose +predominant thought is of woman, and of woman from a standpoint closely +akin to an epicure's toward an ideal meal, Mr. Moore can identify +himself with people in whom there is none of himself but the essential +humanity common to mankind. Most wonderful of many wonderful +realizations of viewpoint so different from what is his personally is +his realization of the attitude of Father MacTurnan, an old priest, +celibate by nature, who put aside his books, as ministering to the pride +of the intellect, and sat, night after night, with them by his side in +the study, but always unopened, while he was knitting socks for the poor +of his parish. Better known, of course, than this character of Father +MacTurnan is that of Father Gogarty in "The Lake," but for all his +sympathetic elaboration of this bemused and distraught cleric the +character is never wholly opposed to that of Mr. Moore himself as is the +character of Father MacTurnan. + +It is this power of Mr. Moore that makes him the great novelist that he +is, this power of identifying himself with the personality and this +looking out on life from the viewpoint of Esther Waters or Lewis +Seymour, or Edward Dempsey or Rose Leicester, of Kate Lennox or Mr. +Innes. Such a power is akin to one of the greatest powers of the Gael, +his quick sympathy with what appeals to him in others, his momentary +absorption in their interests and his passing possession by their +purpose. It is this habit of his nature that makes the Gael tell people +what they wish to hear, it is this that makes him so courteous, it is +this that makes him so good an actor. And the power that makes one man a +good actor, a real actor,--not one who happens to fit a part, but one +who can change his personality from part to part,--is but another +manifestation of the power that enables a man to identify himself +wholly, now with this character, now with that, in a story which he is +writing. If a man can express such identification in dialogue, he can, +if he master dramatic construction, make himself into a dramatist; if he +express it in subtle analytic writing about the character, it gives him +one of the great powers of the novelist, a power which, if it is united +with the power of story-telling, makes him a great novelist, and, +oftentimes, even if he be but a fair story-teller, a great novelist. The +English novel has been famously deficient in story-telling ability since +Scott's day, and Mr. Moore is no exception to the rule. As, however, the +emphasis of all his stories is on character, his deficiency in narrative +power matters hardly at all. + +Mr. Moore is, then, Ireland's greatest novelist because he has in +greatest measure--in full measure--this greatest gift of the Gael, the +gift of dramatic impersonation of all manner of men in all their +changing moods. A personality as intense as was that of Meredith, as is +that of Mr. Hardy, Mr. Moore has not always one attitude, as have both +Welshman and Saxon of the Saxons, however completely they write from the +standpoint of each character they create. By the side of the characters +of Meredith is always Meredith, high-hearted and confident, and by the +side of the characters of Mr. Hardy is always Mr. Hardy, lamenting what +woe fate has brought them, but by the side of Ned Carmady or Oliver +Gogarty, the Mummer or Montgomery, Sir Owen Asher or Ulick, there is +seldom Mr. Moore. He almost never plays chorus to his characters, either +through a commenting character or by direct interposition in the manner +of Thackeray, though, of course, the characters again and again express +his views. So in "The Wild Goose," in which Ned Carmady represents one +year's outlook of Mr. Moore, there is only one choric observation. + +When one considers how alien to Ireland were all the interests of Mr. +Moore for years, his rendering of the Irish characters of "The Untilled +Field" and "The Lake" is realized to be all the more remarkable. It is +not easy to pick up threads that one has dropped in a period of one's +life that is dead and done, but Mr. Moore has picked them up more than +once. From time to time he had, of course, made visits home, writing "A +Mummer's Wife" in Galway in 1884 and finding there then, no doubt, the +material for "A Drama in Muslin" and the sketches of "Parnell and his +Island"; but these visits were none of them of long duration until his +"return" in 1901. + +It is far easier to paint in the background of landscape remembered +from childhood than it is again to get into touch with people parted +from in childhood. The landscape changes little in far-off, lonely +places, but people nowhere are what they were when the past years +sufficient to bring up beside the old folks a new generation with ideals +changed. Ireland, for all the agitation of the Land League, was landlord +Ireland when Mr. Moore got "A Drama in Muslin" from Ireland; Ireland was +passing to the peasant proprietor when Mr. Moore returned to it to write +"The Untilled Field" and "The Lake." Social and economic questions, +however, interest Mr. Moore only as they concern the individual, but the +changing conditions in Ireland cannot be prevented from finding their +way here and there into his writing through the changes they have +brought about in the people of whom he writes, though many of those he +writes of are survivals from an older generation. + +There are glimpses in his writing of many phases of Irish life, his +characters varying all the way from such old-timers as his Cousin Dan, +who, as he himself intimates, might have come out of the pages of Lever +or Lover, to the very modern Father Gogarty, whose outlook is on an +Ireland that "perhaps, more than any other country, had understood the +supremacy of spirit over matter, and had striven to escape through +mortifications from the prison of the flesh." One wonders, at times, if +Mr. Moore, who joined the cause of Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats, +self-confessedly, to have his finger in a new literary pie, really felt +the landscape as he says he does in his books, or whether he just +momentarily caught the power of seeing it through their eyes. Can one +who was once so resolute a realist really appreciate "faint Celtic haze; +a vision of silver mist and distant mountain and moor"? Perhaps he can, +as a good actor appreciates a part alien to his sympathy, that he is +playing. But whether or not Mr. Moore learned to love the lonely +landscape for a while, he eventually tired of it, as his Father Gogarty +tired of it. Surely Mr. Moore is speaking personally as well as +dramatically when he writes, "This lake was beautiful, but he was tired +of its low gray shores; he was tired of those mountains, melancholy as +Irish melodies, and as beautiful." + +Almost any novelist, sooner or later in his career, dabbles in drama, +and Mr. Moore no doubt would have attempted drama in the natural course +of things, even if he had not been interested in "The Independent +Theatre" and thus led to a situation in which consistency demanded that +he write a play. It was his articles on the drama, gathered into +"Impressions and Opinions" (1891), that provoked Mr. G.R. Sims to taunt +him into "The Strike at Arlingford" (1893). In "Our Dramatists and their +Literature," one of these papers, Mr. Moore, in hitting all the heads of +all the contemporaneous dramatists, so stung Mr. Sims that he said he +would give a hundred pounds for a stall from which to witness a +performance of "an unconventional play" written by Mr. Moore. Mr. Moore +accepted the challenge, and "The Strike at Arlingford," as I have said, +was the result, Mr. Sims having agreed to withdraw the word +"unconventional" on Mr. Moore's objection that he would be at the mercy +of Mr. Sims' judgment if the word was retained. "The Independent +Theatre" played the play and Mr. Sims paid the money. It was perhaps +just as well for Mr. Moore that the adjective was withdrawn, for the +play was little less conventional than "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray" or +"Sowing the Wind," to mention two successes of that year by play-makers +that took their art a little more seriously than Mr. Sims. In a way, +too, "The Strike at Arlingford" is unoriginal. Lady Ann Travers is only +a more fortunate Hedda Gabler who in the end accepts the protection of +her Chancellor Brack, the capitalist Baron Steinbach, after her Loevberg +turned labor agitator, John Reid has, like his prototype, made a wreck +of his life. "The Strike at Arlingford" has its excellences: its plot is +logically unfolded; it is believable; it is true to human nature; it has +moments of intensity. Had Mr. Moore power of dialogue it might have been +a fine play, for the characterization is what one would expect from so +conscientious a depicter of life as Mr. Moore, and the problem, a man's +choice between his love and his duty, one that has never failed to +appeal to men. Mr. Moore is careful to tell us that, in his own +conception of the play, "the labor dispute is an externality to which I +attach little importance." + +Its performance and publication, though neither event was of very much +more than journalistic importance, served to give Mr. Moore something of +a position as an authority on the drama, coming as they did after his +association, since 1891, with "The Independent Theatre." So it is that +we find him collaborating with Mrs. Craigie in "Journeys End in Lovers +Meeting" (1894), which served for a year or so as one of the little +plays that characterized the repertoire of the Irving-Terry Company. +Just what was Mr. Moore's share in this play I do not know, but that, +slight as it is, it served as apprentice work in the art of +collaboration there can be no doubt, or that it added to his familiarity +with the stage. + +It is certain that Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats were glad of the assistance +of Mr. Moore in founding "The Irish Literary Theatre," not only for the +prominence of his name as novelist and as Moore of Moore Hall, and for +his known provocativeness in pamphleteering and his capacity for drawing +the fire of opponents, but for what knowledge he had of playwriting and +for what experience he had in getting together and training actors for +special performances such as those of "The Independent Theatre." + +I have already spoken of what Mr. Moore did to "A Tale of a Town" to +make it "The Bending of the Bough." From the beginning of Act II on to +the end, he rewrote almost all of it, retaining only now and then an +eloquent or a biting line from Mr. Martyn's play. Mr. Moore changes the +scene of the play from Ireland to Scotland, that its allegory may not be +so obvious; he develops Kirwan's character until he becomes not only a +sort of composite spiritual portrait of the leaders of the Renaissance +but a believable leader of men; and he makes Millicent's moulding of +Dean to her will human, as I have said, and--Dean being the weakling +that he was--inevitable. Mr. Moore cuts the play down where it is +stodgy, he expands it where expansion realizes for you more of +character and motives of his people, he infuses into it more of the +spirit of the movement, and he makes its patriotism wider in its appeal, +a bigger and a better thing at once more concrete and more concerned +with the things of the spirit. + +"Diarmid and Grania" (1901), the prose play written in collaboration by +Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore, I write of here rather than in the chapter +devoted to Mr. Yeats because, as the legend is shaped in the play, it +has more of Mr. Moore than of Mr. Yeats in it. As neither of the +collaborators was satisfied with the play as produced, and as neither +has been willing to give it up to the other to rewrite, "Diarmid and +Grania" has never been published. The notices of its production, on +October 21, 1901, at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, are so full, however, +and the legend on which it is based so familiar, that it is possible to +say as I have said, when one knows well the work of both authors, whose +influence is dominant in it. It seems, from the notices, to have been +finely played by the Benson Company, which was brought over from England +especially to produce it. The results of "the scratch company" of the +second year's performances, even though these were transferred from the +Antient Concert Rooms to the better stage of the Gaiety Theatre, were +not very satisfactory artistically, but the third year's experiment was +in every way more successful. "The Daily Express" of Dublin, in those +days very much interested in Irish Ireland, thus records, on October 22, +1901, the impressions of the first night. "The 'house' was not merely +crowded but representative. We counted among the audience the heads of +all the great professions in Dublin, a considerable number of literary +critics, and an extremely large representation of 'le monde ou l'on +s'amuse.' The Gaelic League, which flooded the gallery, was very +friendly to Mr. Moore and Mr. Yeats, and became enthusiastic over Dr. +Douglas Hyde ['The Twisting of the Rope,' by Dr. Hyde, was played by him +and company of amateurs, in Irish]. Between the acts of 'Diarmid and +Grania' several members of the 'gods' sang number of Gaelic songs with +great gusto and a good deal of musical ability." + +There are several versions of the old legend, some of them cynical, +leaving Grania in the end lighter even than Helen of Troy; others +closing with Diarmid slain by the boar as Adonis is slain, and Grania +weeping his death. In all it is Grania who tempts Diarmid to take her +away from Finn on the eve of her wedding to the old king. In some he +goes willingly, in love with her, in others unwillingly, ashamed of his +disloyalty to Finn, but under _giesa_ not to refuse a woman's request. +In the play of Mr. Moore and Mr. Yeats Diarmid and Grania "do not live," +says the "Daily Express," "the exciting life of flight from cromlech to +cromlech. They settle down very comfortably in the monotony of a +prosperous farm. Diarmid busies himself with his sheep. Grania ... +begins to pine for the society from which she has wilfully cut herself +off, and to think more and more of the grim old warrior Finn. Then Finn +comes upon the scene, patches up a sort of truce with Diarmid, and +becomes more friendly with Grania, his lost sweetheart, than Diarmid is +able to tolerate. Mutual recriminations ensue between Diarmid and +Grania, and finally Diarmid goes forth to his portended death, with the +taunts of Grania and the rude jeers of the Fianna ringing in his ears. +As the play closes, the Fianna bear away the body of Diarmid, Finn +comforts the weeping Grania, and we remember the words of the legend +that 'some say she was married to Finn.' The curtain falls--a happy +touch of purely modern cynicism--upon the solitary figure of Conan, the +Thersites of the play, the prophet of evil chances, the scorner of high +things, the prompter of foul suggestions." + +As the play was being written a good deal of discussion about it found +its way into the newspapers. It was rumored that it would be translated +into Irish, and then back again, by Lady Gregory, into English, but no +such fantastic scheme as that Mr. Moore tells us of in "Ave" was +suggested in any of the paragraphs that came my way. Because they could +not agree on the kind of diction they were to use in the play, Mr. +Yeats, who wanted a peasant Grania, agreed, writes Mr. Moore, to his +suggestion that he write the play in French. Mr. Moore gives these as +the words of Mr. Yeats: "Lady Gregory will translate your text into +English. Taidgh O'Donoghue will translate the English text into Irish, +and Lady Gregory will translate the Irish text back into English." "And +then," Mr. Moore makes himself reply to Mr. Yeats, "you'll put style +upon it." + +More remarkable than the scheme was the actual attempt of Mr. Moore to +realize it. On leaving Galway, where he and Mr. Yeats had been +collaborating at Coole, Mr. Moore began the second act in French. He +gives us enough of the dialogue (pages 370 to 376 of "Ave") to show us +his high pride in his French, the tolerance of his humor, and his idea +of the kind of style the play should have. + +If Mr. Moore had given the subject to Mr. Yeats and to Lady Gregory, as +he had some thought of doing, it would only have been a return of a +subject already theirs by right of their long discussion of it together. +Lady Gregory was not yet working upon it for "Gods and Fighting Men" +(1904); but it was she who had reduced it to the proportions of a +scenario for them to work upon. This scenario was published in "Samhain" +of October, 1901, that all of the audiences of the play might be in +possession of the story as a Grecian audience was in possession of the +story of Elektra. And did not Mr. Moore say in his speech at the dinner +given to the supporters of "The Irish Literary Theatre" in February, +1900, in speaking of his collaboration with Mr. Yeats in "Diarmid and +Grania": "It would be difficult to name any poet that Ireland has yet +produced more truly elected by his individual and racial genius to +interpret the old legend than the distinguished poet whose contemporary +and _collaborateur_ I have the honor to be"? + +The story, of course, had been retold only less often than the story of +Deirdre by Irish writers, in one form or another, but there had been no +memorable play made out of it. Mr. Yeats had met it in "The Death of +Dermid," which Sir Samuel Ferguson included in "The Lays of the Western +Gael" (1864), as well as in the direct translations of such scholars as +Mr. Standish Hayes O'Grady and in the versions of such popularizers as +Dr. Joyce. One cannot, not having read the play, declare it is not what +Mr. Moore would have it, "that dramatic telling of the story which +Ireland has been waiting for these many years," but it does not seem so +to have impressed those who saw it and heard it at the performances in +the Gaiety Theatre. + +Now that Lady Gregory has done her "Grania" (1912), it is hardly likely +that Mr. Yeats will return to the story, and with the waning of Mr. +Moore's interest in old Irish legend it is very unlikely that he will +wish to rewrite the play. It would seem we have lost it, whatever its +value, until the "literary remains" of Mr. Moore are given to the +public. + +The quarrel with Mr. Yeats over "Diarmid and Grania," coming as it did +at the end of the three years' venture of "The Irish Literary Theatre," +explains why Mr. Moore wrote no plays for the Irish National Dramatic +Company and its successors on through the Abbey Theatre Players. He was +still interested, however, in the "cause" as far as it was possible for +one of his temperament and taste, and he was conspicuous on first nights +at the Abbey Theatre down to the time of his departure from Dublin in +1911. + +Since "Diarmid and Grania" (1901) Mr. Moore has published the two books +of his that since "A Drama in Muslin" (1886) reveal his deepest +knowledge of Irish life, the volume of stories of varying length to +which he gives that title, so symbolic, "The Untilled Field" (1903), +and "The Lake" (1905), but there are few incidents in either that he is +likely to develop into plays. "The Lake" could not be dramatized, but if +it could be dramatized, it would be as little likely to be presented in +Ireland as "The Tinker's Wedding." Mr. Moore, for all that he was born a +Catholic, would not hesitate any more than did the son of the Protestant +minister to put a priest into a realistic modern play, and that, of +course, would be a mild audacity for Mr. Moore now that he has published +the scenario of "The Apostle" (1911). His Paul, in "The Apostle," a +"thick-set man, of rugged appearance, hairy in the face and with a +belly," is wonderfully alive, and his Jesus is a distinct and realizable +personality, if not the Jesus of Christian dream. It is a curious +illustration of Mr. Moore's almost disciple-like attitude toward Mr. +G.W. Russell that he should make his Christ talk like "A.E." It seemed +to me, as I read the words that Mr. Moore puts first on the lips of +Jesus, that they were phrases that I had heard on the lips of Mr. +Russell. They are of the very quality of his speech and writing: "How +beautiful is the evening light as it dies, revealing every crest; the +outline of the hills is evident now, evident as the will of God." And +now each time, as I re-read them, they sound in my ears to the +remembered rhythm of Mr. Russell's voice. Should Mr. Moore ever evolve a +play from this scenario, and the play be played--and why should it not, +now that the way is so plainly blazed by the score and more of miracle +plays of the past decade?--it will have to be chanted as "A.E." chants +his verse, as one would wish mass to be chanted. + +Only a year ago Mr. Moore made his last adventure of the theatre. With +the help of Mr. Lennox Robinson he dramatized "Esther Waters," but later +he threw out the latter's work, feeling, no doubt, about it as Mr. +Martyn felt about Mr. Moore's rewriting of his "A Tale of a Town"; and +when it was put on, in the early winter of 1911-12 by the Stage Society, +"Esther Waters" the play was like "Esther Waters" the novel, solely the +work of Mr. Moore. The critics seem agreed that it was long drawn out +and undramatic, but that it was well written and well acted. I suppose +that the preoccupation with "Esther Waters" that this dramatization +reveals is because "Esther Waters" was written in that period of his +life when Mr. Moore was most himself. After ten years in London he had +escaped considerably from the French influence of his young manhood, and +his genius had not been warped out of its true plane, as he would +doubtless now say, by Irish mists. Mr. Moore must have felt that there +was something not wholly himself in much of "The Untilled Field" and in +much of "The Lake," that the minds of Mr. Yeats and Mr. Russell had in a +way dominated his mind, and that not even the hardly tolerated Mr. +Martyn had been without influence upon him. + +Such a realization is not the professed motive for the return of Mr. +Moore to England, but I have no doubt at all that it is somewhere in the +back of his mind, where he would like it to be hidden and forgot. At any +rate, by the time of his return to England, Mr. Moore had come to see +clearly that the Celtic episode of his maturity was closed. + +It is not, I think, particularly difficult for one who understands the +old-fashioned camp-meeting "getting of religion" to understand this +"Celtic episode." Mr. Moore got Celtomania; a sort of "spiritual +consumption," he calls his possession in one place, as a certain other +type of sinner "got religion" in the old shouting days. That is, Mr. +Moore wrought himself up partly in the spirit of the Playboy, and was +wrought up to some degree willy-nilly until he could write his speech of +February, 1900, on "Literature and the Irish Language," and, finally, a +little later, could return happily to the country that until then he +could endure only now and again. + +But as a matter of fact the motive that led Mr. Moore back to Ireland +matters not at all to literature. What beauty of writing that return led +to matters a great deal. Had he not returned to Ireland, we should not +have had a good deal that adds to the joy we win from satiric laughter, +we should not have had "Hail and Farewell"; had he not returned we +should not have had a book that adds to the treasure of beautiful +feeling and beautiful writing there is in English literature, a treasure +that there is no chance of ever having too large; we should not have had +"The Lake," which is Ireland, West Ireland, Catholic Ireland, a land +under gray skies that the priests its masters would, too many of them, +make a land of gray lives. + + + + +CHAPTER V + +MR. GEORGE W. RUSSELL ("A.E.") + + +Synge is the one instinctive dramatist of the earlier group of writers +of the Celtic Renaissance, the one to whom drama was the inevitable +medium for the expression of the best that was in him. Yet even Synge +came to write plays only through an external stimulus, the urging of Mr. +Yeats on their meeting in Paris. It was fortunate for the Irish drama, +this meeting, and fortunate for Synge. If he had not been brought to the +theatre of his own country, he would probably never have written +anything of first importance. Mr. Yeats himself, of course, had been +interested in verse plays from boyhood, but he, for all the energy he +has expended in learning his own particular art of the stage, speaks +more beautifully through his lyrics and the lyrical passages of his +plays than through their passages that are dramatic speech, and not only +more beautifully but with more of dignity and power. Nor is Lady +Gregory, any more than Mr. Yeats, essentially a dramatist. Her great +power is the power of dialogue, and dialogue, of course, is as often +employed in the service of the story as in the service of the play. Yet +it is not difficult to understand how in Lady Gregory the dialogue and +in Mr. Yeats the love of the spoken word led, when opportunity was made, +to writing for the stage, and for success on the stage. But in the case +of "A.E." it is as difficult to find a foreshadowing of the playwright +in the mystical poet as it would be to see in all but all of the essays +of "The Treasure of the Humble," any proof that their author was a +playwright. To those who knew Mr. Russell only through his verses, and +were unaware of the versatility of the man, his turning dramatist was as +surprising as Emerson turned dramatist would have been to the America of +anti-slavery days. + +[Illustration] + +It was not, of course, because of an impulse from within that Mr. +Russell attempted drama in "Deirdre" (1902), but because the young +enthusiasts of Ireland's national literary movement wanted plays that +should be at once native in quality and the work of writers of standing. +It did not seem a strange request to Cumann nan Gaedheal to ask Mr. +Russell for a play. What if he had never written a play? He was hardly +in their estimation more of an amateur than Mr. Yeats or Mr. Moore or +Mr. Martyn, who had written plays for "The Irish Literary Theatre" that +had achieved success of a kind, and he was surely as ardent a +Nationalist as any of these. So he was asked for a play to be played at +the Spring Festival of 1902 by the Irish National Dramatic Company that +was forming, and he did what he was asked to do, blocking it all out in +six hours, and finishing it sufficiently in three days for it to be put +in rehearsal. It was in the summer following its first presentation that +I saw it again in rehearsal in a little hall back of a produce shop in +Dublin, and got to know Mr. Russell as playwright before I read his +play. One of the actors, himself maker of verses and plays, gave me his +copy of "Deirdre," with cues marked. I had seen notices of its first +performance in the Irish papers and I had written Mr. Russell to see if +I could get a copy, but he had not yet published it. Then he wrote me of +young poets I met this night in Dublin, and the names on the lips of the +enthusiasts we talked to, and their names were names Mr. Russell had +written me of four months before. Here were they introducing me to his +work as he had thus introduced me to theirs: "There are many poets here +who write beautiful lyrics who are quite unknown out of Ireland because +they never collected them from the pages of obscure magazines.... I have +seen many verses signed 'I.O,' 'Alice Milligan,' 'Ethna Carberry,' +'Oghma,' 'Paul Gregan,' which I enviously wish I could claim as my +own.... I think myself many of these unknown poets and poetesses write +verses which no living English writer could surpass." The best of the +verses of some of these and of others among his following Mr. Russell +collected in "New Songs" (1904), which bore out much that he claimed for +them. + +It was to six of these young poets he dedicated his last volume of +verse, "The Divine Vision" (1904), as he had dedicated his two earlier +volumes to poet-mystics, "Homeward" (1894) to Mr. Charles Weekes and +"The Earth Breath" (1898) to Mr. Yeats. The young writers (for they were +almost all writers as well as actors) we met this Saturday night in +Dublin, one and all, looked to "A.E." as leader, and some of them looked +to him as high priest of their cult, as seer of that ancient type that +combined as its functions the deliverance of religious dicta, prophecy, +and song. My thoughts went back to our Concord of half a century ago, +yet I wondered was Emerson's fascination as compelling as this. + +It was in a commonplace-looking editorial sanctum that I found "A.E." on +the following morning, at 22, Lincoln Place, to which he had descended +from his office in the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, to edit +"The Homestead" in its editor's absence. I was to see him, in the hour I +was to spend with him there, in many roles. First was that of one of the +beginners of the Irish Literary Revival. He has himself given the credit +to Mr. Standish James O'Grady for furnishing the initial stimulus to the +movement, in his "Heroic Period" and "Cuchulain and his Contemporaries" +of 1878 and 1880; but to "A.E." and Mr. Yeats and Dr. Hyde also is due +much of the credit. Mr. Russell said that when he came up to Dublin, a +boy from Lurgan, there was no independent thought in Dublin, but now he +thought there was a good deal, and he and his fellows of the Hermetic +Society, he took mild pride in believing, had had something to do with +the change. Even then, as a boy, he could not read most English +literature, and so he took to reading the literature of the East, the +Bhagavad-Gita and the Sufis. From his reading of these, with other young +men that somehow found each other out, came the Hermetic Society, at +whose meetings everything mystic from the Upanishads to Thomas Taylor +was discussed. From the study of the universal, he said, they came at +last to the national, to the study of the ancient folk-lore and stories +of their people, which, had it not been for the Danes and Normans, would +have been shaped into literary form long before now, when, he said, +they were only being so shaped. + +His disciples had told me the night before that "A.E." had helped them +much in the National Dramatic Company, painting scenery for them, +designing costumes, and aiding in a hundred other ways. He was silent +about these matters and not very proud of the play. "Of course," he said, +"I was very familiar with the story of Deirdre, and I had thought of its +dramatic effectiveness, but I knew nothing of the stage and I was very +much surprised it went so well." That it went well, I, who had seen it +but the night before, could testify, though that rehearsal could give +but a suggestion of the beautiful stage pictures it presents when played +in the costume of the Heroic Age. Despite its intensely dramatic +situations, it is, however, essentially a decorative rather than a +dramatic play, and its exalted prose is seldom true dramatic speech. But +you carry from it the memory of beautiful pictures, and a feeling that +something noble has passed your way, to enter into and become a part of +you. + +As we were talking of the "movement," in came a young Roscommon +landlord, and with him another of its phases and my discovery of Mr. +Russell, man of business, organizer of the Irish Agricultural +Organization Society. The talk was now of the erection of a hall, and +Mr. Russell seemed as familiar with stone and lime and sand as with +mysticism and poetry, which we had discussed, and with painting, which +we were considering in a few minutes, when Mr. J.B. Yeats, Jr., arrived, +to talk over an exhibition of his pictures to be held in Dublin the +following week. A few days later I was reading Mr. Russell's review of +Mr. Yeats's pictures, but before I left 22, Lincoln Place, I had a +mental picture of "art critic" added to the already long list of titles +after "A.E.'s" name, and I had still another evidence of his +impressiveness. Mr. J.B. Yeats, Sr., his son said, would be around to +have Mr. Russell sit for him next morning, in order to get on with the +two orders he had of portraits of the mystic, one of them from an +admirer in America. It was pleasant on leaving him to go away with his +laugh ringing in my ears as a surety that the high seriousness of his +purpose, and the higher seriousness with which some of his admirers take +him, had not dulled his sense of humor. + +Eight o'clock the next evening saw us in the eminently Philistine +suburban street where was the little house of conventional exterior that +sheltered the high dreams of "the Irish Emerson." Once entered, his +embodied visions attract you from all four walls of the study. Piles of +them in corners make you wonder is Mrs. Russell a saint. The pictures +are of Irish landscape; of "the Other People"; of heroes and heroines of +Ireland's prehistoric days; of souls that have yet to be born; of souls +that have passed through incarnation after incarnation, never to rise +above an animal existence; of souls whose every rebirth has taken them +to higher spirituality, and that now wait to pass along the "path of +liberation" into that immortality from which they shall never be born +again. These visions have come to him, as the visions whose presence he +records in his poetry, in all places--as he left the office and looked +down the sun-gilded streets at close of day; as he wandered in the +mountains under the stars with peasants who had "second sight"; as he +talked with fellow Hermetists in meeting-rooms in back streets whose +shabby interiors grew rosy gloom as the talk turned on mysteries. + +To us Mr. Russell talked much, talked kindly of all men, talked well of +many things, said startling things of society and art and poetry so +gently that you did not think until afterwards that in another you would +hold them gages of combat. I can hear him yet, as I sat and tried at the +same time to listen to him and to look at his flaming-hearted spirits +with luminous angel wings and flashing halos enveloped in an atmosphere +in which "the peacock twilight rays aloft its plumes and blooms of +shadowy fire"--I can hear him saying, "You can't read Shakespeare, can +you?" As I thought over this question later, I understood. Then I was +too far rapt by the pictures to wonder at it greatly. Later came to mind +Emerson's declaration that Homer, Milton, and Shakespeare "do not fully +content us," that the "heavenly bread" is to be found in Zoroaster, +Plato, St. John, and Menu. Both Emerson and Mr. Russell fail to use art +as the standard. To the mystic, to whom this world is not reality, what +appeal may have its seeming truths and shows as compared to the certain +truth of the idealists and the beauties of the eternal life? The deep +human knowledge, the great pageants of Shakespeare's kings and queens, +are but "glories of our blood and state ... shadows, not substantial +things." + +Mr. Russell talked very simply of his pictures, of how their subjects +came to him, and of his enjoyment in thus recording them. He does not +consider himself a painter, but he thinks there was the making of a +painter in him had he had instruction in his earlier years. This +attitude towards his various powers, as well as the attitude towards him +of ardent young countrymen of his, came out in a story he told us of a +boy that he found waiting for him one night at a street corner near his +home. The boy timidly asked him was he not Mr. Russell, and then walked +silently by his side until the house was reached. They entered and the +boy mustered up courage to say he had waited for him two hours at the +head of the street. "A.E." had been waiting for the boy to say what +brought him, but he was obliged to encourage the boy before he would out +with it. Said "A.E.," "You came here to talk with me. You must be +interested in one of the three interests I have given much time to. Is +it economics?" "No," replied the boy, indignantly. "Is it mysticism?" +continued "A.E." "No," cried the boy, almost angry at such an interest +being attributed to him. "It must be literary art, then?" "Yes," said +the boy, with a sigh, his haven reached at last. "A.E." soon found the +boy an exquisite who thought the literary movement was becoming +vulgarized through so many people becoming interested in it. Finally the +boy turned questioner and found that "A.E." was seeking the Absolute. +Having found this out, he again sighed, this time regretfully, and said +decidedly that "A.E." could not be his Messiah, as he abhorred the +Absolute above everything else. He was infected with Pater's Relative, +said Mr. Russell, "which has fallen like a blight on all English +literature." So the boy--he was not yet twenty-one--went out into the +night with, I suppose, another of his idols fallen. + +As this boy came to "A.E.," so come scores of others, and most of those +that have real troubles go away comforted, to return for advice and +counsel and friendship, as their need is. This I knew before I met +"A.E.," and his kindness I felt and certain magnetism, but the qualities +that make him the leader of men, and hierophant to his personal +following, do not lie on the surface to be quickly distinguished by +every comer. Neither, we are told, did Emerson's, who was leader of men +and hierophant. I thought often of "A.E.'s" pictures as I looked at the +pictures of Watts in the Tate Gallery in London, and I have thought more +often of them since I have come to know haloed Rosicrucian drawings and +strange symbols in such books as our own Wissahickon mystics, Kelpius +and his brethren, brought with them to "The Woman in the Wilderness" +from Germany late in the seventeenth century. How notable the impression +of Mr. Russell's paintings and visions upon two Irish writers the +English-speaking world reads to-day may be learned from their +exploitation in Mr. Stephen Gwynn's "The Old Knowledge" (1901), whose +Owen Conroy owes being to "A.E." and his pictures, and from Mr. George +Moore's "Evelyn Innes" (revised edition, 1901), whose Ulick Dean has his +appearance and his power of seeing visions. + +As the evening wore on, Mr. Russell picked up a manuscript collection of +poems--that we were to have two years later as "The Divine Vision"--and +read us several. Most distinctly of these I remember "Reconciliation" +which he chanted most lovingly of all he read. It is a poem I do not +pretend to understand in detail, but I do feel its drift, and I can +never read out its stately music, or even read it silently, without +hearing his sonorous chanting. Many of his poems are like this poem in +that you must content yourself with their general drift and not insist +on understanding their every phrase. I suppose to the initiate mystic +they are more definite, but I doubt whether some of them are more than +presentations of emotions that need not be translated into terms of +thought for their desired effect. + +To Mr. Russell poetry is a high and holy thing; like his friend Mr. +Yeats he is at one with Spenser in believing it the fruit of a "certain +enthousiasmos and celestial inspiration"; it is his religion that Mr. +Russell is celebrating in his verses, many of which are in a sense hymns +to the Universal Spirit, and all of which are informed by such sincerity +that you do not wonder that his followers make them their gospel. In his +own words:-- + + The spirit in man is not a product of nature, but antecedes nature, + and is above it as sovereign, being of the very essence of that + spirit which breathed on the face of the waters, and whose song, + flowing from the silence as an incantation, summoned the stars into + being out of chaos. To regain that spiritual consciousness, with + its untrammelled ecstasy, is the hope of every mystic. That ecstasy + is the poetic passion.... The act which is inspired by the Holy + Breath must needs speak of things which have no sensuous existence, + of hopes all unearthly, and fires of which the colors of day are + only shadows. + +About a score of the less than tenscore poems of "A.E." are definitely +declarations of belief, but declarations so personal, so undogmatic, +that you would hardly write him down a didactic poet at first reading "A +New Theme" tells of his desertion of subjects "that win the easy +praise," of his venturing + + "in the untrodden woods + To carve the future ways." + +Here he acknowledges that the things he has to tell are "shadowy," that +his breath in "the magic horn" can make but feeble murmurs. In the +prologue to "The Divine Vision" he states the conditions of his +inspiration:-- + + "When twilight over the mountains fluttered + And night with its starry millions came, + I too had dreams: the songs I have uttered + Came from this heart that was touched by the flame";-- + +that is, the flame of his being that, "mad for the night and the deep +unknown," leaps back to the "unphenomenal" world whence his spirit came +and blends his spirit into one with the Universal Spirit. This same +union through the soul's flame "A.E." presents in his pictures, and in +his prologue to "The Divine Vision" he writes that he wishes to give his +reader + + "To see one elemental pain, + One light of everlasting joy." + +This elemental pain, as I take it, is the pain of the soul shut up in +its robe of clay in this physical, phenomenal world, and so shut off +from the spiritual world, the world of the unphenomenal or unknowable. +The "everlasting joy" I take to be the certainty of eventual union with +the Universal Spirit in the unphenomenal world, a union and a joy +anticipated in the occasional temporary absorptions of the soul into +the Universal Spirit in moments Emerson experienced as "revelation" and +Plotinus as ecstasy. + +"A.E.'s" friend, Mr. Charles Johnston, records the two young Irishmen's +joint attempts to attain ecstasy, when he writes of those days when "we +lay on our backs in the grass, and, looking up into the blue, tried to +think ourselves into that new world which we had suddenly discovered +ourselves to inhabit." Do not think this ecstasy too rare and wonderful +a thing. To Plotinus it meant an utter blotting-out of self, a rapture +of peace, and to Mr. Russell it frequently means that he is entirely +"heart-hidden from the outer things," but I suspect it means sometimes +mere lift of the heart through lungs full of fresh air, or through green +fields for tired eyes, or through mountain air for worn nerves, or +through skies thick-sown with stars for the vexed spirit. + +The typical poem of "A.E." is that in which the sight of beautiful +things of this phenomenal world in which we live lifts his soul to +participation in the Universal Spirit. It is most often through some +beauty of the sky at sunset, when + + "Withers once more the old blue flower of day," + + +as in "The Great Breath"; or at twilight, when + + "Dusk wraps the village in its dim caress," + +as in "Dusk"; or at night, when + + "The yellow constellations shine with pale and tender glory + In the lilac-scented stillness," + +as in "The Singing Silences"; or at sunrise, when there is + + "Fire on the altar of the hills," + + +as in "Dawn";--it is most often through some beauty of the sky at such +times that he becomes one with the Universal Spirit in "the rapture of +the fire," that he is "lost within the 'Mother's Being,'" he would say +that the soul returns to the Oversoul, Emerson would There are ways by +which the soul homes other than these--sometimes it is + + "By the hand of a child I am led to the throne of the King." + +but it is most often by way of beauties of the sky. Some reasons are not +far to seek. From sunset to sunrise the poet is free as he may be from +the treadmill of the "common daily ways," and the high moods he tries to +express are most easily symbolized by skyey images--massed clouds and +sweeping lights of diamond, sapphire, amethyst; the still blue black of +heaven thrilling with far stars; the purples of twilight horizons. In +his use of these splendid symbols he is but following Proclus, whom he +found quoted by Emerson as saying that "the mighty heaven exhibits, in +its transfiguration, clear images of the splendor of intellectual +perceptions, being moved in conjunction with the unapparent period of +intellectual natures." + +How important the symbol is to "A.E."--as important as it is to +Emerson--may be gathered from "Symbolism," which, read in the light of +what I have quoted, needs, I hope, no further interpretation. + + "Now when the giant in us wakes and broods, + Filled with home-yearnings, drowsily he flings + From his deep heart high dreams and mystic moods. + Mixed with the memory of the loved earth things: + Clothing the vast with a familiar face; + Reaching his right hand forth to greet the starry race. + + Wondrously near and clear the great warm fires + Stare from the blue; so shows the cottage light + To the field laborer whose heart desires + The old folk by the nook, the welcome bright + From the housewife long parted from at dawn-- + So the star villages in God's great depths withdrawn. + + "Nearer to Thee, not by delusion led, + Though there no house-fires burn nor bright eyes gaze: + We rise, but by the symbol charioted, + Through loved things rising up to Love's own ways: + By these the soul unto the vast has wings + And sets the seal celestial on all mortal things." + +In this poem is the proof of how intimately "A.E." could write of the +sweet things of earth did he so choose. But he does not so choose, +except rarely, and sometimes he leaves out the statement of beautiful +material things by which he customarily bids farewell to earth in his +aspiration to spiritual things, and writes only of unearthly things--as +of some girl that he, an Irishman living in the Dublin of to-day, loves +in the Babylon of three thousand years ago, to the annihilation of space +and time. This is written in the very spirit of Emerson's declaration +that "before the revelations of the soul, Time, Space, and Nature shrink +away." Need I quote further to show that "A.E.," like Emerson, holds +that the true poet is he who "gives men glimpses of the law of the +Universe; shows them the circumstance as illusion; shows that Nature is +only a language to express the laws, which are grand and beautiful; and +lets them, by his songs, into some of the realities"? Emerson yearns +that "the old forgotten splendors of the Universe should glow again for +us," and "A.E." believes that we at times attain "the high ancestral +Self"; his restless ploughman, "walking through the woodland's purple" +under "the diamond night" + + "Deep beneath his rustic habit finds himself a King" + +"A.E.'s" poems on death are little different from those in which he +celebrates the soul's absorption into the Universal Spirit, since death +means to him only a longer absorption into the Universal Spirit or +sometimes such absorption forever. In the event of this last, he in some +moods sees + + "Life and joy forever vanish as a tale is told. + Lost within the 'Mother's Being,'" + +or no sense of individuality in souls in heaven; in other moods he sees +individuality preserved after death among those "High souls," that,-- + + "Absolved from grief and sin, + Leaning from out ancestral spheres, + Beckon the wounded spirit in." + +So sustained is the habitual altitude of Mr. Russell's thought, so +preoccupied his mood with spiritual things, that the human reader must +feel lonely at times, must feel the regions of the poet's thought alien +to him. At such times it is a positive relief to find the poet yearning +for the concrete sweet things of earth. It is perhaps only in +"Weariness" that Mr. Russell's high mood does fail, but I rejoice when +that failure makes him acknowledge-- + + "Fade the heaven-assailing moods: + Slave to petty tasks I pine + For the quiet of the woods, + And the sunlight seems divine. + + "And I yearn to lay my head + Where the grass is green and sweet; + Mother, all the dreams are fled + From the tired child at thy feet." + +It is love, love of country, love of countryside, and love of woman that +he writes of when he does write of "loved earth things." "A Woman's +Voice" and "Forgiveness" are poems so simple that none may +misunderstand; they have the human call so rare in "A.E.," but it is not +a strong human call. Of such love songs he has written but few--poems +out of the peace and not out of the passion of love; of passion other +than spiritual ecstasy and rapt delight in nature there is none in his +verse. Although he has been given "a ruby-flaming heart," he has been +given also "a pure cold spirit." Only about a fourth of his poems have +the human note dominant, and even when it is so dominant, as when he +writes of his country, he is very seldom content to rest with a +description of the beauty of place or legend; the beautiful place must +be threshold to the Other World, as "The Gates of Dreamland," which he +finds at the end of "the lonely road through bogland to the lake at +Carrowmore," Carrowmore, the great cemetery of the great dead of +prehistoric Ireland under Knocknarea near Sligo; or the legend must be +symbol of some mystic belief--"Connla's well is a Celtic equivalent of +the First Fountain of mysticism." + +He can draw starkly, when he will, a picture of bare Irish landscape:-- + + "Still rests the heavy share on the dark soil: + Upon the black mould thick the dew-damp lies: + The horse waits patient: from his lowly toil + The ploughboy to the morning lifts his eyes. + + "The unbudding hedgerows dark against day's fires + Glitter with gold-lit crystals: on the rim + Over the unregarding city's spires + The lonely beauty shines alone for him." + +In "In Connemara" and "An Irish Face," poems with earthly titles, you +expect only things earthly, but in these too, he uses the picture of the +concrete only as the symbol of the universal. The reason Mr. Russell +must take you to the supernatural in these poems is because he sees +spirits everywhere he goes in Ireland. "Never a poet," he writes, "has +lain on our hillsides, but gentle, stately figures, with hearts shining +like the sun, move through his dreams, over radiant grasses, in an +enchanted world of their own." Start "The Memory of Earth" and you think +you are to read one of the many fine poems of twilight in our +literature, but the fourth line undeceives you:-- + + "In the wet dusk silver sweet, + Down the violet-scented ways, + As I moved with quiet feet + I was met by mighty days. + + "On the hedge the hanging dew + Glassed the eve and stars and skies; + While I gazed a madness grew + Into thundered battle-cries. + + "Where the hawthorn glimmered white, + Flashed the spear and fell the stroke-- + Ah, what faces pale and bright + Where the dazzling battle broke! + + "There a hero-hearted queen + With young beauty lit the van. + Gone! the darkness flowed between + All the ancient wars of man. + + "While I paced the valley's gloom + Where the rabbits pattered near, + Shone a temple and a tomb + With the legend carven clear. + + "Time put by a myriad fates + That her day might dawn in glory; + Death made wide a million gates + So to close her tragic story." + +And so it is in "A.E.'s" score and more poems that are suggested by +Irish places and Irish legends and Irish loves. Never an Irish exile but +will have a dear home place brought before him by such lines as + + "The Greyhound River windeth through a loneliness so deep + Scarce a wild fowl shakes the quiet that the purple boglands keep"; + +and a story of the home place brought before him by such lines as + + "Tarry thou yet, late lingerer in the twilight's glory; + Gay are the hills with song: earth's fairy children leave + More dim abodes to roam the primrose-hearted eve, + Opening their glimmering lips to breathe some wondrous story"; + +and a girl of the home place brought before him by such lines as + + "Dusk, a pearl-grey river, o'er + Hill and vale puts out the day-- + What do you wonder at, asthore, + What's away in yonder grey?" + +but all these poems, of which these lines are the fine onsets, lead past +"the dim stars" and "unto the Light of Lights." + +A man that believes that his spirit is one with the Universal Spirit +cannot but be an optimist if he believe that Spirit is the Spirit of +Good, and that a Platonist must believe. Yet "A.E." so longs to be rapt +into everlasting union with the Universal Spirit that he tires of the +earth, where that union is interrupted by the necessities of daily life. +The fairies call to him and he would away-- + + "'Come away,' the red lips whisper, 'all the world is weary now; + 'Tis the twilight of the ages and it's time to quit the plough. + Oh, the very sunlight's weary ere it lightens up the dew, + And its gold is changed and faded before it falls to you.'" + +But it is not always twilight to him, and there are many blither moods. +Over against these lines you may put, + + "I always dwell with morning in my heart," + +and + + "Oh, but life is sweet, is sweet." + +Earth is not an unhappy place, but he sighs sometimes for the happiness +unalloyed of heaven. + +When we come to consider the technique of Mr. Russell's art, we find him +anything but Emersonian. Mr. Russell has, in general, command of form, +melody, harmony, distinction. Who reads carefully will remember many +fine lines; who reads only once will be as one lost in sun-filled fog +like that of "A E.'s" own Irish mountains, but he should be patient, he +should wait and look again and again, and finally he will see, even if +earth be still dimmed with fogbanks, much of the heavens, free of fog, +and radiant with cold white light. + + "Forest glooms + Rumorous of old romance" + +and + + "But joy as an Arctic sun went down" + +the kind of lines rarest in his verse; more characteristic are, + + "Hearts like cloisters dim and grey," + + "the great star swings + Along the sapphire zone," + + "The Angel childhood of the earth," + + "Glint the bubble planets tossing in the dead black sea of night," + + "The old enchantment lingers in the honey heart of earth." + +There are comparatively few "purple patches" in Mr. Russell's poetry, +for the reasons that each poem depends for its chief appeal on one mood +or thought or dream immanent in it, rather than on any fine phrasing. +The effort to catch the meaning of the verse--seldom apparent at first +glance--prevents the noting of as many purple lines as there are. Nor +when noted are such lines readily memorable, since they are apt to lack +association with known and loved things to bring them home to the +reader. And again the poems are very short,--intimations, suggestions +rather than expressions,--and their intangible themes are often much +alike, and poem becomes confused with poem in the memory. + +It may be that to those to whom the Other World is very instant, as it +is to many Irishmen, or to those that go about daily preparing for the +world beyond the grave, as did our Puritan ancestors of the seventeenth +century, these poems of Mr. Russell's speak familiar language, as they +of a certainty do to the mystic, but to the many modern art lovers who +hold to Pater's "New Cyrenaicism,"--as Mr. Russell would say, "those +under the blight of the Relative,"--as well as to the man in the street +their language is new and difficult to understand. But the poems have +found their audience--there is no doubt about that--and they are +regarded as oracular by hundreds. This is the more curious in that there +is so little personality in them, surprisingly little when one knows how +strong is the personality of the man that made them But this lack of +personality follows naturally on the mystic's creed--he must put into +his writings chiefly his relation with God,--for all other relations are +as nothing to that,--and if he attain his desire he is rapt away from +himself and his fellows into oneness with God. + +Quality, a very definite quality, these verses of Mr. Russell's have, +but it is an almost unchanging sameness of quality; almost all his +verses, as I have said, have the same theme. So there is a monotony +about them, and their reader is apt to cry out that mysticism is +inimical to art. It may well be that this unswerving following of one +theme is of definite purpose; that Mr. Russell feels that he as Irishman +and mystic has a mission, as indeed Mr. Charles Johnston owns. Speaking +of Irishmen, in "Ireland" (1902), he says,-- + + We live in the invisible world. If I rightly understand our mission + and our destiny, it is this: To restore to other men the sense of + that invisible; that world of our immortality; as of old our race + went forth carrying the Galilean Evangel. We shall first learn and + then teach, that not with wealth can the soul of man be satisfied; + that our enduring interest is not here but there, in the unseen, + the hidden, the immortal, for whose purposes exist all the visible + beauties of the world. If this be our mission and our purpose, + well may our fair mysterious land deserve her name: Inis Fail, the + Isle of Destiny. + +Very like Emerson this, too, but very Irish. Let us not forget that +Berkeley and Scotus Erigena were Irishmen. + +I do not wish to overemphasize the influence of Emerson on "A.E.," and +indeed it is no greater than Emerson's influence over M. Maeterlinck. I +believe Emerson was as much guide as master, that he pointed "A.E." the +way to the mystics. I might dwell on the resemblance between thoughts +common to the two much more than I have--there are even lines of the +younger man's that show the influence of lines of the elder. But that is +not my object. I wish to point out that Puritanism in Ireland has +flowered up into the mystic poetry of "A.E.," into poetry of that +strange quality, cold ecstasy, as Puritanism in America has flowered up +into the mystic poetry of Emerson, poetry of cold ecstasy. In England, +so far as I know, Puritanism, that has given us so great a poet as +Milton, has never so flowered. Crashaw was born of a Puritan father, but +it was through the Old Faith his greatest inspiration came, and his +ecstasy, as that of his latter-day disciple, Francis Thompson, is warm +ecstasy, not cold like that of the two Puritan poets. Henry More, +Platonist and seer of visions, never attained ecstasy in his poetry. It +may be that it required transplantation of Englishmen into Ireland and +into America to bring about this phenomenon. Nor is it the only quality +these two earliest bodies of English colonists alike developed. But it +is more than dangerous to dogmatize where so many races went to the +making of a people as went to the making of Anglo-Irishmen and +Americans. + +How different are the types of Anglo-Irish I could not but ponder as we +left "A E.'s" home and went out into the chill rain of that August +night. To the right hand, as we walked with "A.E.'s" disciples, they +pointed to Maud Gonne's house. "Irish Joan of Arc" they call her, leader +of men whom men worship at first sight; most exciting of Ireland's mob +orators, all proclaim her, a very Pytho whose prophecies stir unrest and +tumult! And here next door the Quietist, the man of dreams and visions, +to whom all the war of the world is of as little moment as all other +unrealities, since here in this world he has begun already the real, the +spiritual life. Both are types that have been as long as Ireland has +been; both Pytho and priest were among the high order of druid and +druidess of old time; agitator and reconciler, by Mr. Russell's belief, +might well be reincarnations of the wise women and wise men of +prehistoric days. To the world Maud Gonne is more representative of +Ireland than Mr. Russell, but he is just as truly a symbol of Ireland as +she: to those who know Irish history the thought of her quiet +monasteries of the seventh century, whence she sent out teachers to all +of Europe, is as recurrent as her political agitation of the nineteenth, +and to those who know her countryside the memories of soft sunny rains +and moonlit evenings are as lingering as those of black angry days and +wild blind nights. Her very colors, her grays and greens and purples, +proclaim her peace. It is of this peace and of the greater peace of that +unphenomenal or spiritual world, that lies nearer to Ireland than to +any Western land, that Mr. Russell is interpreter. + +You may think of Mr. Russell as you will, as organizer of the Irish +Agricultural Organization Society, as stimulator of the Irish Literary +Revival, as economist, playwright, poet, painter, preacher, but always +as you put by his books you will think of him as mystic, as stargazer, +wandering, as he so often tells us in his poems, on the mountains by +night, with his eyes keener with wonder at the skies than ever +shepherd's under the Star of Bethlehem; you will see him, the human +atom, on the bare Dublin mountains, thrilling as he watches the sweep of +world beyond world; and yet, atom that he is, the possessor of it +all;--you will think of him as stargazer whose "spirit rolls into the +vast of God." + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +LADY GREGORY + + +When one stops to think how much of the blood of the Gael, Irish and +Scotch, there is in us in America, one realizes that we owe a debt of +gratitude to Lady Gregory second only to that owed her by "The Men of +Ireland and Alban" themselves. For it is Lady Gregory, in her "Cuchulain +of Muirthemne" (1902) and in her "Gods and Fighting Men" (1904) and in +her "Book of Saints and Wonders" (1908), who has done more than any +other writer of the Gaelic countries to bring home to us the wonders of +Gaelic romance. That they should have to be brought home to us is a +shame to us. With so much of Irish and Scotch blood in us the names of +the heroes of the Red Branch and Fenian Cycles should not be so foreign +in aspect and sound as they undoubtedly are, and their deeds should be +as familiar as those of Robin Hood. A hundred years ago our grandfathers +had, indeed, "Ossian" on their shelves, as we had in boyhood Dean +Church's stories of Greece and Rome, or, in some cases, the stories of +his doings in their memories, learned from their parents were they +old-country born, or of their nurses were it their privilege, as it was +that of many more Americans of the second half of the nineteenth +century, to have as foster mothers "kindly Irish of the Irish." + +[Illustration] + +To her own countrymen the work of Lady Gregory, valuable as it is, is +not the revelation it is to us. Those of them that have not been brought +up on the stories that she translates could read at least many of them +in the "Old Celtic Romances" (1879) of Dr. P.W. Joyce, or in the +versions of the Cuchulain and the Finn legends by Mr. Standish James +O'Grady (1878 and 1880), books that somehow or other never came to be +widely read in America. Mr. Yeats admits it was Mr. O'Grady that +"started us all," that is, the writers who began the Renaissance in the +late eighties. It may be, of course, that the added beauty and dignity +the stories take on in the versions of Lady Gregory will inspire to +nobler writing poets and dramatists and novelists that already owe much +to Mr. O'Grady or Dr. Joyce or to the scholars they were sent back to by +these popularizers. It is certain that the writers of the younger group, +the group of those that are only now nearing distinction, owe much to +Lady Gregory. After all is said, however, her work is to be judged not +for its value to others, but as in itself an art product, of a class +kindred to "The Wanderings of Oisin" of Mr. Yeats, although differing in +form. I am not forgetting, of course, that she is following faithfully, +or rather as faithfully as an artist may follow, the old legends. She +has, she owns, clarified them, condensed them, left out contradictory +episodes, woven now and then a Scotch version of an incident into a +cycle arranged in one complete whole from many Irish versions. When Lady +Gregory has owned this she has owned that she has added something more +of her own than a "connecting sentence." Although she has labored +carefully to keep herself out of the stories, and although, if you have +read only her versions of them, you may feel that she has succeeded in +keeping herself out of them, you will recognize, if you turn to her +originals in O'Curry or in Whitley Stokes or in Standish Hayes O'Grady, +that she has added that all-important thing, a personality. Some +scholars object to this as "too literary." And some literary men would +rather have the old stories, they say, "just as they are" There is the +crux. How can we get them, even in an exact translation, "just as they +are"? We cannot. This is not the place to discuss this most vexed +question of translation, but I must go into it so far as to point again +to the fact that we are more likely to have made upon us, by an +interpretative translation, an effect more nearly like that made upon +the listener contemporary to the time of the making of the story than if +the translation were literal. We are always forgetting the so obvious +fact that the kind of metaphor or descriptive epithet of this sort or +that, which would make a certain effect on the listener of the tenth +century, will make a very different effect on the reader of to-day. As +Lady Gregory points out, the description of the contortion of Cuchulain +in his fight with Ferdiad seems very unheroic to us, and is therefore +best left out of the translation, or, if retained, conveyed in terms +that will make an effect on us similar to the effect the detailed +description had on the audience of the old bards. Here again, however, +is trouble. How can we get that effect? We cannot surely, but an +imaginative translation by one who is scholar and _litterateur_ both +will take us nearest to it. We want, as a matter of fact, both kinds of +translations, the interpretative and artistic translation of Lady +Gregory and the literal translation of Mr. Standish Hayes O'Grady. The +one is needed to check the other. We would have a gauge by which to +measure how much such such a translator as Lady Gregory has taken from +and added to the old story. We would know how great is the freedom in +which we willingly acquiesce, remembering that the translations which we +treasure as great in literature are in greater or less measure "free." +So checking Lady Gregory's translations we find that they represent a +fair measure of freedom, as so checking the verses of FitzGerald's "Omar +Khayyam" we find in them the utmost measure of freedom, a freedom indeed +that, in certain verses, is virtually a re-creation. + +Many, both scholars and literary men, object to the kind of English into +which Lady Gregory translates the stories of Ireland's heroic age, her +"Kiltartan English," the English of the people of her home country on +the borders of Clare and Galway, the English made by a people who think +in Irish. This familiar language, they say, has lessened the dignity of +the old tales, bringing them all to one level by a diction and style +that is one, whether they are romance or folk-tale. This objection can +be taken, however, only to the Cuchulain stories, which were court +romance, and not to the Finn stories, which come out of the thatched +houses. This "Kiltartan English" seems to me in its more familiar +moments, less imposing than that in which I first heard stories of Finn +McCool told by our old gardener, Lawrence Kelly of County Wexford, but +it may be I remember less clearly the homeliness of his "discourse" +than its "grand speaking." It is, however, as peasant English, a fitting +medium for the telling of the stories of Brigit and St. Patrick in her +"Book of Saints and Wonders," for Brigit and Patrick are still household +words among all the children of the Gael. But by its very difference +from the English of all other artists in words save of a few of her own +country and generation, and from such conversational English as I know +well, this "Kiltartan English" brings me a foreign quality. I feel that +the art of these tale-tellers is an art of another race than the +English, just as I feel that the art of the teller of Beowulf is an art +of another race than the English. The literature in our ancestral +tongue is not to me English until it sloughs off the Germanic +sentence-structure of Anglo-Saxon. Here lies, I think, the greatest +difficulty in translating Old English literature. And it will not be +successfully translated, I think, without the use of the syntax of some +dialect that preserves an archaic sentence-structure. + +To me, then, it seems singularly fortunate for Lady Gregory to have her +"Kiltartan English" to fall back upon to give that foreign flavor that +we intuitively feel the need of in a translation. There may be a slight +loss of dignity through its use, but there is a great gain in folk +atmosphere. + +In quoting to show the style of Lady Gregory I should quote description +rather than narrative, as the description seems to me better as well as +briefer. The three famous tales of Old Irish literature, "The Three +Sorrows of Story-Telling," are "The Fate of the Children of Usnach," +comparable, in the great wars it led to, to the rape of Helen; "The Fate +of the Children of Lir," a story that has as its base the folk-tale that +underlies "Lohengrin," but which takes us back farther into the past in +its kinship to "Medea"; and "The Sons of Tuireann," which has been +called the Irish Odyssey. Of these the first is incomparably the finest +story, and Lady Gregory has told it nobly in "Cuchulain of Muirthemne," +but it alone of all the stories in her three books of translations has +enough of humanity in it to put it side by side with the story of Sigurd +and Brunhilde or the story of Paris and Helen. When one remembers that +Greek and Scandinavian literature may boast five stories each, at least, +but little short of these their greatest stories, and that Irish +literature has but "Diarmuid and Grania" to boast as in any way +comparable to the story of Deirdre, it must be admitted that early Irish +literature representing Ireland's heroic age is not so beautiful as the +literature that represents the heroic ages of Scandinavia and Greece. +"The Fate of the Children of Usnach" is rich in beautiful detail of +incident and of description of nature; it preserves for us much of the +inner life of old time; and it has dignity of proportion. It has not the +fundamental weakness, as great art, of most of these old Irish stories, +their characters' lack of interest because of their lack of body, their +lack of personality, their running to type rather than moulding into +individuals; yet the feats performed by Cuchulain are so wholly +superhuman, most of them, that they often put their doer beyond our +sympathy, and at their worst make him absurd. + +If these stories were simply extravagant folk-fancy, such as the Jack +the Giant Killer story, to delight children, we should not quarrel with +this quality in them, but there is so much in them of dignity that we +must take them seriously, as we take Homer. When their heroes are +definitely gods we can accept almost any of their deeds, so we can +delight in the earlier stories of "Gods and Fighting Men," the stories +of the Tuatha de Danaan, Lugh and Angus, Midhir and Etain, Bran and +Connla, as we cannot in those of Finn and Goll and Cuchulain and +Conchubar, who, because of their historical setting and more definite +characterization, have more of the appeal of humanity. We know +Cuchulain, in Lady Gregory's pages, as a small dark man, constant in +love in comparison with his fellows, faithful to his friends, loyal to +his king; and we know Finn as a fair old man of ruddy countenance, a +lover of women, somewhat pompous and somewhat quarrelsome; but neither +hero is a clear-cut personality like Sigurd or Ajax. If either Cuchulain +or Finn were surely a god we should accept his deeds as now we cannot +accept them, and were either brought home to us as wholly human and +divested of his supernatural powers, and given a personality, we should +be far more moved by his fortunes. + +It is in enchantments, visits to worlds oversea and under wave, and in +praises of the beauties of this world, its woods, its waters, its real +wonders, and in the celebration of sorrow and delight that "Gods and +Fighting Men" is at its best, not in the celebration of happy loves, or +of wild loves, or of great victories. So it is that Gabhra, where the +Fianna were broken, is finer than "The Battle of the White Strand," +where they won against great odds. + +Finer, however, than any narrative power possessed by the old Irish +bards is their power in the lyrical passages so freely interspersed +throughout the stories, and in the lyrics that come into them on the +lips of the poets and warriors and on the lips of the women who have +lost their lovers in fight. The farewell of Deirdre to Alban and her +lament over Naoise, the song of the woman from oversea to Bran, the poem +Finn made to prove his power of poetry, the sleepy song of Grania over +Diarmuid, the lament of Neargach's wife, the song of Tir-nan-Og that +Niave made to Oisin, and Oisin's own praise of the good times of the +Fianna--these are the passages in which the old tales reach their +highest poetry. Once read, these remain in memory, but certain episodes +and certain sayings remain also. Mr. Yeats has picked out one of the +sayings in his introduction to "Gods and Fighting Men" that will do for +sample. It is the answer of Osgar dying, to the man who asks him how he +is: "I am as you would have me be." Starker even, perhaps, is the +absolute simplicity of the description of that last fight in "The Battle +of the White Strand," in which Cael and Finnachta go, locked in each +other's arms, to their death under the waves without a word. + +Wild nature is always about these warriors. The storm in the trees, the +sorrow of the sea, the clatter of wild geese and the singing of swans +find echo in the poems that praise them. We see, too, at times, fields +heavy with harvest, and often the apple trees in bloom and the cuckoo +calling among them,--indeed, the sweet scent of apple gardens, like the +keenness of the winds of spring, beautiful as are the phrases that +present them, become almost stock phrases. Always, too, there are +wonders of the other world about the heroes; women from undersea and +underground come into their halls as naturally as the members of their +own clans, and the twilight mists unfolding from familiar hills will +reveal their marvelous duns, whitewalled with silver or marble, and +thatched with the wings of white birds. + +There has been frequent quarreling in certain quarters with Mr. Russell +and Mr. Johnston and Mr. Yeats for introducing mysticism and a definite +symbolism and the ways of Eastern thought into their versions of Irish +mythic tales and their records of Irish mood. There will be found some +justification for such practices in Lady Gregory's translations. +Manannan, the sea-god, is here presented doing tricks like those of the +East Indian fakirs; Finn is reincarnated in later great leaders of the +Gael; and in "The Hospitality of Cuanna's House" there is out-and-out +allegory, to say nothing of a possible symbolistic interpretation of +episodes in almost every other story. Even the willful obscurity of the +modern poetry can be paralleled by the riddling of Cuchulain and Emer. + +It is, perhaps, because Lady Gregory has found the old stories not only +in the dignity of their bardic presentation, but also in the happy +familiarity of their telling by the people of the thatched houses in her +own district, that she has been able to bring them so near to us. From +these same people, too, she has got some of her stories of St. Bride +and Columba and poems and stories of recent and contemporary +inspiration, poems and stories that have to do with humble life as well +as with the highly colored heroic life that those who live bare lives +themselves are so fond of imagining. In her "Poets and Dreamers" (1903) +are records of this collecting and of her study of local ways about +Coole and on the Connemara coast and in the Aran Isles. One of the most +interesting of her chapters is that on the poet Raftery, whose poems Dr. +Hyde has published. Blind and bitter, Raftery wandered about Connacht +until about 1840, when death took him, an old man, but still vigorous in +mind and spirit. Another chapter of "Poets and Dreamers" is "On the Edge +of the World." Each reading of this is to me like a return to West +Ireland, the very quality of whose life it gives. It should be the first +chapter of the book turned to by the reader, for it gives one the note +on which to read all. As Lady Gregory drives by the sea, people about +her on the roadside and in the cabins are singing in Irish. The little +experiences of the day are, for them, experiences to brood over; and for +her, too. And this thought is the last of her brooding: "The rising +again of Ireland, of her old speech, of her last leader [Parnell], +dreams all, as we are told. But here on the edge of the world, dreams +are real things, and every heart is watching for the opening of one or +another grave." + +There is creative writing in these essays of Lady Gregory's, for all +that she is playing middleman between her people and the reading public +of the English-speaking world in many of them; and, as I would emphasize +again, in her three books of translations. But, after all translation +will not content, and the essay that is not self-revelation will not +content, the writer who would have his writing a "reading of life." So +it is not surprising that Lady Gregory turned toward drama. And yet I do +not ever feel, after many readings of her plays, that Lady Gregory took +to drama because of any overmastering impulse toward this most difficult +of all literary forms. She has learned to handle some orders of drama +pleasantly, the farce more than pleasantly, and, very recently, the +folk-tragedy nobly; but had it not been that plays of other than +romantic tone were needed for the Abbey Theatre as a foil to those of +Mr. Yeats and of Synge, I doubt whether it is drama that Lady Gregory +would have chosen as the medium through which to express her reading of +life. I can just as well imagine her shrewd kindliness of judgment upon +the foibles and virtues of her countrymen in stories whose form is very +like that employed by Miss Barlow in her "Irish Idylls" (1892) as in +these so original little plays that she has wrought out without +precedent, under the tutelage of Mr. Yeats. + +It is more than likely, as I say, that had it not been that drama was +needed for the Abbey Theatre she would not have attempted drama. But +more than likely it is, too, that had she written plays not made to +order they had reached wider through Irish society and plumbed deeper +into Irish life. Lady Gregory knows Irish life, from bottom to top, as +few Irishwomen and few Irishmen of her day know it; she has large heart, +wide tolerance, and abounding charity; and yet she was long content to +limit her plays of modern Ireland to farce, at times of a serious enough +purpose, but because it is farce, not of the first seriousness. It may +be, of course, that Lady Gregory knows best of any one her own powers, +and it is true that in the plays she has written she is at her best when +they are at their merriest. I cannot, however, but feel that this is a +success of intention rather than a success of instinct. She would have +them the most successful in a quality as far removed as might be from +that quality of troubled dreaminess which is the best of the dramas of +Mr. Yeats. Synge, it must be remembered, did not begin as a writer of +comedy, and there is little of that ripe irony that has no precedent in +English literature in that first play that he wrote for the Abbey +Theatre, "Riders to the Sea" (1903). Is it a coincidence that later, as +he found his bent for that sort of writing that culminated in "The +Playboy," Lady Gregory turned at times to historical drama and a farce +that grew as serious as comedy? There is, of course, in all her plays +serious indictment of national weaknesses, sometimes obvious indictment, +as in "The Deliverer" (1911), which records, in terms of folk-biblical +allegory, his countrymen's desertion of Parnell; sometimes indictment +not so obvious, as in "The Canavans" (1906), which rebukes that +shoneenism in high places which has for generations been one of the +curses of Ireland. To him who knows only a little of Irish life it is +easy to see the meaning but superficially concealed by the farcical +bustle, the laughter, and the lamentations. But to him who looks but on +the surface there is merriness enough and wittiness enough and wisdom +enough to make his loss of the deeper meaning, for him, but a little +loss. + +There are enough characters presented, too, peasants generally and +townsfolk of the lower class, to make the farces a "reading of life." +What is wanting to him who looks for more than what farce may do is the +largeness of utterance that will make a "reading of life" memorable. +Take "the image" (1910), for instance, in which Lady Gregory is +attempting more than in "Spreading the News" (1904) or "Hyacinth Halvey" +(1906). This play, the longest that Lady Gregory has written, is what +the stage would call the character farce. She owns it a presentation of +dreams of old men and old women which crumble at the touch of reality, +but it is not only this, but a symbolizing of the proneness of all +Ireland to accept as certainties on the eve of realization what are +really only signs that point to possibilities in a far to-morrow. In the +play four old men of a little village on the west coast are debating +what they will do with their share of a windfall that has come to the +village in the shape of two whales that have drifted up on the beach. +When the priest determines that all the proceeds from the sale of the +oil from the whales be spent on something that will benefit the whole +community they plan a statue (one of them is a stone-cutter) to some +great celebrity. The motives that lead them to choose Hugh O'Lorrha are +telling satire not only of Irishmen, but of all men. It would hardly be, +however, in any other country than Ireland that the name of the one come +at by way of accident would, unidentified for some time by any, be +finally revealed as that of the hero of a folk-tale. Four days after the +whales had come ashore, days wasted in planning what the village will do +with the prize money, and unutilized in securing the blubber and +rendering out the oil, the quartette learned that "the Connemara lads +have the oil drawn from the one of them, and the other one was swept +away with the spring tide." + +Though "The Image" be farce, its characters are the characters of +comedy, and its purpose whole-heartedly serious. And even "Spreading the +News" has its lesson, of rumor's wild riot in Irish crowds. On the +slightest grounds the reciting of an errand of helpfulness is turned by +quick imagination into a story of a murder. Lightly sketched as are the +people here, from a caricature of a magistrate to the more serious +presentment of Mrs. Fallon's "nice quiet little man," they are very true +to Ireland. Slighter even are the butcher and the postmistress and the +model sub-sanitary inspector in "Hyacinth Halvey," though all are fully +understood and fully blocked out in their author's mind, if impossible +of complete realization within limits so narrow; but the farce itself is +not lifted into dignity by any noble underlying attitude. "The Jack Daw" +(1907) has rumor again as its motive, as had "Spreading the News," but +it is not the motive of the play or any of its incidents that is the +best thing about it, but the character of Michael Cooney, of the +"seventh generation of Cooneys who trusted nobody living or dead." He +is, of course, caricatured, but he has possibilities of personality, and +he could have been worked into the fullness of a universal character had +"The Jack Daw" been comedy, we will say, instead of farce. Of all her +characters, that of Hyacinth Halvey is most nearly rounded out, but +then Lady Gregory has taken two little plays in which to present his +portrait, "The Full Moon" (1911) recording some of his later experiences +in Cloon and his final departure from the town, his introduction to +which was recorded in the play bearing his name. + +"The Workhouse Ward" (1908), reaching from wild farce to sentimental +comedy, is hardly more than a dialogue, but it is given body by the +truth to Irish life out of which it is written, that quarreling is +better than loneliness. Lady Gregory has disowned "Twenty-five" (1902), +which is frankly melodrama, her only other experiment in which, in her +plays of modern Ireland, is "The Rising of the Moon" (1903). This play +relates the allowed escape from a police officer of a political prisoner +through that prisoner's persuading the officer that "patriotism" is +above his sworn duty to England. + +Of the plays that may be called historical, "The Canavans" (1906) is the +best, because it is of the peasantry, I suppose, who change so little +with the years, and whom Lady Gregory presents so amusingly and so truly +in her modern farce comedy. "Kincora" (1903) takes us all the way back +to the eleventh century, deriving its name from Brian's Seat on the +Shannon and ending with his death at Clontarf. It is undistinguished +melodrama. "The White Cockade" (1905) is better only in so far as it +involves farce, farce in the kitchen of an inn on the Wexford coast just +after the Battle of the Boyne. "Devorgilla" (1908) is of a time between +the times of the two other historical plays, of the time a generation +later than the coming of the Normans to Ireland. It is pitched to a +higher key than any other of her historic plays, and it is held better +to its key, but its tragedy is far less impressive than the tragedy of +"The Gaol Gate" (1906) which pictures the effects upon his wife and his +mother of the imprisonment of an Irish lad of to-day, and their learning +that "Denis Cahel died for his neighbor." This little play is out of the +life that Lady Gregory knows and can deal with; it is finely conceived +and finely executed, lingering in the mind as does the keen heard rising +from some bare graveyard fronting the Atlantic. + +Just why Lady Gregory, who has rendered in prose so well old legends, +should render old Irish historic life so much less well I cannot +explain. Sometimes I think it is because she has found less of that +history than of that legend among the people. Yet in "A Travelling Man" +(1907), her little miracle, somewhat in the manner of Dr. Hyde's, that +brings Christ into a modern peasant home, she has made a play of a +tender and reconciling beauty. With the success of "A Travelling Man" +and "The Gaol Gate" before me I cannot say it is because her genius is +for farce; and to say that it is because her genius is for the plays of +modern peasant life does not help to account for the fact. + +The idiom of all these plays is racy of the soil, and when it need be, +eloquent with the eloquence that is almost always in the English of the +Irish. It is full of wise saws and proverbs, quips and quirks of +expression, the picturesquenesses and homelinesses of speech that are +characteristic of a peasant to whom talk is the half of life. These +range from sayings like those of the clowns of Elizabethan drama, such +as "He had great wisdom I tell you, being silly-like, and blind," and +such country wisdom as "What would the cat's son do but kill mice," up +through the elaborate maledictions of the two old paupers in "The +Workhouse Ward" and such delightful asperities as that of Maelmora anent +his bitter sister Gormleith, "You were surely born on a Friday, and the +briars breaking through the green sod," to aphorisms that have an accent +of eternity, as, "It is the poor know all the troubles of the world," +and "The swift, unflinching, terrible judgment of the young." + +The characters, even when they are purposely almost caricatures, have in +them the possibility of complete portrayals. There is no flagging of the +invention in any of them, no slipshod or careless composition. Her +technique, too, at least in farce, is masterful, and in her plays of +modern life of other form adequate. That she could master historical +drama, as I have said, I must doubt, but that she need restrict herself +so largely to farce and farce comedy in her plays of modern life, I do +not for a moment believe. "The Gaol Gate," in fact, proved that she need +not so restrict herself, and "MacDaragh's Wife" (1911), written by Lady +Gregory at sea on her way to America, but perhaps for that all the +fuller of the wild old life of her native Connacht. It would almost seem +that with "Grania" (1912), a tragedy too, following "MacDaragh's Wife," +Lady Gregory is widening the scope of her work, as she well can, now +that there are other dramatists to provide comedies and farces for the +Abbey Theatre. It is a haunting story that "MacDaragh's Wife" tells, +and largely a true story, the story of a piper who, though a pauper, +draws all the countryside to the funeral of his wife, draws them, +through the wild lamenting of his pipes, from the fair where they are +sporting to follow, with a full fellowship, to the grave, her who died +all but alone. Lady Gregory tells us in a note just what of it she +gathered from old people about her girlhood's home at Roxborough, and +what about her home of to-day at Coole, how she has shaped it, and what +emotion is back of it, the "lasting pride of the artist of all ages." + +As Lady Gregory had restricted herself, until recently, in the forms of +modern life which she wrote of and in the kinds of people she selected +to write of, so, too, she had restricted herself, until recently, in the +motives she considered. It is true that the motive most recurrent in her +plays, that of fear of the opinion of the neighbor, an attitude probably +sprung of the clan system, is dominant in Irish life; and it is equally +true that the motive most notably absent, love, was until yesterday far +from a dominant motive in the Irish life that Lady Gregory presents: yet +there are many other motives that, in true comedy, and even in farcical +comedy, might well have place. That these motives are not there is, I +think, not only that Lady Gregory, self-effacingly, put into her plays +what was wanted to make them foils to the plays of Mr. Yeats and Synge, +but also because of the practice of one type of gentlewoman in +literature, of which Jane Austen is characteristic. And yet the mere +mention of Jane Austen increases the wonderment that Lady Gregory has +not written of people of every condition in her neighborhood, whether +that be London or Dublin or Gort, as Miss Austen did of people of every +condition in her neighborhood, whether that be Steventon or Bath or +Chawton. It can hardly be said, even, that "Grania" her last play, is a +play about love. In her note to the play, Lady Gregory declares, "Love +itself, with its shadow Jealousy, is the true protagonist!" And yet, I +think it is Jealousy only that is the true protagonist. There is much +talk about love, but it is not from love, but from jealousy that the +action of the play arises. Among all this talk about love, among many +eloquent sayings about love, true readings of love, there stands out +most clearly in my memory this part of a speech of Finn, a speech +uttered before Grania had turned from him to Diarmuid-- + + And as for youngsters, they do not know how to love because there + is always some to-morrow's love possible in the shadow of the love + of to-day. It is only the old it goes through and through entirely + because they know all the last honey of the summer-time has come to + its ferment in their cup, and there is no new summer coming to meet + them forever. + +This I remember not only for its thought but for its style, the rhythm +of its prose. It is Lady Gregory at her best, as "Grania" as a whole is +Lady Gregory at her best in tragedy. If "Grania" in every detail were as +inspired as its explanation of the queen's quick turn from Diarmuid to +Finn, it would be a great play, indeed. Grania is no light woman, and +yet she turns, in the old legend, from the man who sacrificed all but +all for her, on his death, to the High King who brought about his +death, with a suddenness inexplicable. Lady Gregory makes that sudden +turn plausible, for two reasons. One is that for seven years of +wandering all over Ireland, Diarmuid by his own will and because of +loyalty to Finn, had kept Grania a maid, making her his wife only after +he found her being carried off by the King of Foreign. The other reason +is that as Diarmuid lies dying, wounded to death by that King of Foreign +whom he has killed, his thoughts are all of his long-delayed disloyalty +to Finn, and not at all of Grania. Thus, she justifies herself, speaking +to Finn:-- + + _Grania_. He had no love for me at any time. It is easy to know it + now. I knew it all the while, but I would not give in to believe + it. His desire was all the time with you yourself and Almhuin. He + let on to be taken up with me, and it was but letting on. Why would + I fret after him that so soon forgot his wife, and left her in a + wretched way? + + _Finn_. You are not judging him right. You are distracted with the + weight of your loss. + + _Grania_. Does any man at all speak lies at the very brink of + death, or hold any secret in his heart? It was at that time he had + done with deceit, and he showed where his thought was, and had no + word at all for me that had left the whole world for his sake, and + that went wearing out my youth, pushing here and there as far as + the course of the stars of Heaven. And my thousand curses upon + death not to have taken him at daybreak, and I believing his words! + It is then I would have waked him well and would have cried my + seven generations after him! And I have lost all on this side of + the world, losing that trust and faith I had, and finding him to + think of me no more than of a flock of stars would cast their + shadow on his path. And I to die with this scald upon my heart; it + is hard thistles would spring up out of my grave. + +I have spoken of Lady Gregory as translator, as collector of folk-lore, +as essayist, and as dramatist; but there is another role in which she +has brought no less advantage to the Celtic Renaissance, though it is a +role that has not brought her, as have these other, the joys of +recapturing or of creating beautiful things. Always objective, though +never wholly able to subordinate personality, however near she may have +come to effacing it in her plays, Lady Gregory has in this role +considered herself solely as an agent in the service of Irish letters. +The Irishman is naturally a pamphleteer, and Mr. Yeats, poet of the +Other World though he be, can give as good blows in controversy as Mr. +George Moore. Almost all who have part in the Renaissance have skill in +the art of publicity. They have needed no publicists to fight their +battles as the Pre-Raphaelites needed Ruskin. Still, in some measure in +the way of publicity, and in large measure in other ways, Lady Gregory +has been to the Celtic Renaissance what Ruskin was to that last +renaissance of wonder. She has edited pamphlets on things national and +artistic in Ireland, she has helped Dr. Hyde and Mr. Yeats in their +collecting of folk-lore and to a deeper knowledge of the people; she has +been one of the forces that have made possible the Abbey Theatre, giving +to it her power of organization as well as plays and patronage. More +than this, she has welcomed to Coole Park many a worker in the movement, +who in the comfort of a holiday there has been refreshed by the gray and +green land so near the sea and reinspired by the contact with that Irish +Ireland so close to her doors. Like Ruskin, Lady Gregory is a great +patron of letters, but like Ruskin she is much more. Lady Gregory is an +artist in words who is to be valued as a presenter of Irish life, past +and present, with a beauty that was not in English literature before she +made it. + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE + + +It is Synge himself who puts the just phrase on what his life was to +him, and it is, as it could not else be, from the lips of his Deirdre +that it falls. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and +richest, if it's for a short space only." It is Deirdre alone of his men +and women that is introspective at all, Deirdre--and Naisi when he is +mastered by thoughts of home that will not down. Synge wrote the play of +her triumph over death as he himself was dying, and he wrote it with +high heart, and, what is higher, gladness, despite his foreknowledge of +his doom. It was to fulfill his dream of the most queenly girl of old +Irish legend that he wrote "Deirdre of the Sorrows," but he could not +keep out of his writing, had he wished to keep it out, his own love that +death was so soon to end, and the thoughts of what was the worth of +life. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and richest, if +it's for a short space only." It is not a new saying, but it is not to +be identified with the proverbial "a short life and a merry," with which +some confuse it, and of Synge it was a true saying. There are those who, +because of the irony of his writing, an irony that is new to literature, +and, maybe, to some cruel, or at least disillusionizing, may think there +was little joy for him; but the truth is there was never a writer in +whom there was more joy. This "strange still man" as he was even to +those who knew him best, gentle or simple, found all life that was +natural life, even of the barest and rudest, as thrilling as first love. +It is this man, his enemies at home the sated Parisian, who knew a gusto +in living greater than that of any English writer since Borrow. Let no +one forget those lines with which Christy Mahon cries defiance to the +Mayo folk who have known his greatness and his fall: "Ten thousand +blessings upon all that's here, for you've turned me a likely gaffer in +the end of all, the way I'll go romancing through a romping lifetime +from this hour to the dawning of the judgment day." I do not deny that +these words are in a sense wrung from the Playboy, but what I do hold is +that they prove how vital was the genius of the man who wrote them, who +saw the joy there was yet in life for this braggart wastrel just as he +saw that even such a miserable boyhood as Christy's knew a kind of +poacher's joy in running wild on the bogs. Even for poor Nora, turned +out on the roads with a tramp for companion, there is the joy of the +road once she learns to know it. The tramp knows it surely:-- + + You'll be hearing the herons crying out over the black lakes, and + you'll be hearing the grouse and the owls with them, and the larks + and the big thrushes when the days are warm: and it's not from the + like of them you'll be hearing a tale of getting old like Peggy + Cavanagh, and losing the hair off you and the light of your eyes, + but it's fine songs you'll be hearing when the sun goes up, and + there'll be no old fellow wheezing the like of a sick sheep, close + to your ear. + +Of like gusto, too, is the joy of Martin Doul and Mary Doul in their +blindness; and the joy of the three tinkers in the escape of themselves +and their half-sovereign from the priest and in the prospect of "A great +time drinking that bit with the trampers in the green of Clash." And +from such joys as these, wild and earthy and rallying, his exultations +range to the exalted serenity and sadness of Naisi and Deirdre as they +look back on their seven year of love in Glen Masain, of love almost too +perfect and too happy to be human. + +[Illustration] + +Yes, joy is as distinctive as irony and extravagance of the writing of +Synge, joy in mere living, in life even at the worst, and joy, too, in +life at the best. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and +richest, if it's for a short space only." It was for a short space of +years that Synge had "what is best and richest," hardly for the seven +years of his great lovers. He did not have it when his thought homed to +Ireland in 1899, as a result of a meeting with Mr. Yeats in Paris. His +writing, then, was of little moment, but it grew better when, at home +again, he realized what Irish life was to him, when once renewed contact +with the Irish peasant brought back the familiarity that had been his in +the nursery. It was the Wicklow glens, to which memories of his people +drew him, and the Aran Islands, where he went to study Irish--until then +little more than a book language to him--and to live a life perhaps +"more primitive than any in Europe," that enabled him to find himself. +Further 'prentice work, though of a new sort, followed his sojourns in +Wicklow and Aran, but by 1903 his art had matured to the ripe power of +"In the Shadow of the Glen" and "Riders to the Sea," which, after +adjustment to the stage, were put on respectively October 8, 1903, and +February 25, 1904, at Molesworth Hall, Dublin. "The Tinker's Wedding" +which has been played only once, and then in London, dates from about +the same time. "The Well of the Saints" was produced on February 4, +1905, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and "The Playboy of the Western +World" on January 26, 1907, at the same place, to the accompaniment of +an uproar that a certain element of Irishmen have considered it proper +to create ever since on its first appearance in all cities whatsoever, +whether in Great Britain or America. One wonders what they would have +done had he made it as biting as Ibsen made "Peer Gynt." "Deirdre of the +Sorrows," which Synge left unrevised, was first produced at the Abbey +Theatre on January 13, 1910, the last of the six plays of his maturity. +It was in the years from 1902 to 1909 that he had "what is best and +richest"--a full life, lived largely in the Ireland that he loved; the +artist's joy in making that life into a new beauty, a beauty that was +all compact of exaltation and extravagance and irony; and love for a +woman in whom his man's life and his artist's life were united, for her +who embodied his dream of Pegeen Mike and added her life and her art of +the stage to his dream of Deirdre, as day by day it emerged from his +mind. And so great was his joy in these good things that his precarious +health, and even his year--long last illness, could not, while he had +any strength, lessen the high spirit of his writing. There is none of +his plays more vital than "Deirdre of the Sorrows." + +And yet this joy that is basic in Synge, this exaltation, is no more +basic than emotions and attitudes of mind that are often, in other men, +at war with joy and exaltation--irony and grotesquerie, keen insight +into "the black thoughts of men," and insistent awareness of the quick +passing of all good things, _diablerie_ and mordancy. Strange, then, +should be his love passages and strange too, they are at times, ranging +from the bizarre delight of "In Kerry" to the triumphing nobility of +Deirdre's farewell to Alban. One thinks of Mr. Hardy and one thinks of +Donne as one reads "In Kerry":-- + + "We heard the thrushes by the shore and sea, + And saw the golden stars' nativity, + Then round we went the lane by Thomas Flynn, + Across the church where bones lie out and in; + And there I asked beneath a lonely cloud + Of strange delight, with one bird singing loud, + What change you'd wrought in graveyard, rock and sea, + This new wild paradise to wake for me ... + Yet knew no more than knew those merry sins + Had built this stack of thigh-bones, jaws and shins." + +One thinks of no other writer at all, however, when one reads Christy's +wooing of Pegeen, even when one puts down the book in the quiet that +always comes on one in the presence of something great; one thinks of no +other writer, of course, when one sees the lovers and listens to their +words, on the stage, for one is rapt out of one's self by the perfect +accord of drama and actors at one in the service of beauty:-- + + _Christy_ (_indignantly_). Starting from you, is it? (_He follows + her._) I will not, then, and when the airs is warming, in four + months or five, it's then yourself and me should be pacing Neifin + in the dews of night, the times sweet smells do be rising, and + you'll see a little, shiny new moon, maybe, sinking on the hills. + + _Pegeen_ (_looking at him playfully_). And it's that kind of a + poacher's love you'd make, Christy Mahon, on the sides of Neifin, + when the night is down? + + _Christy_. It's little you'll think if my love's a poacher's, or an + earl's itself, when you'll feel my two hands stretched around you, + and I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips, till I'd feel a kind + of pity for the Lord God is all ages sitting lonesome in His golden + chair. + + _Pegeen_. That'll be right fun, Christy Mahon, and any girl would + walk her heart out before she'd meet a young man was your like for + eloquence, or talk at all. + + _Christy_ (_encouraged_). Let you wait, to hear me talking, till + we're astray in Erris, when Good Friday's by, drinking a sup from a + well, and making mighty kisses with our wetted mouths, or gaming in + a gap of sunshine, with yourself stretched back unto your necklace, + in the flowers of the earth. + + _Pegeen_ (_in a low voice, moved by his tone_). I'd be nice, so, is + it? + + _Christy_ (_with rapture_). If the mitred bishops seen you that + time, they'd be the like of the holy prophets, I'm thinking, do be + straining the bars of Paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of + Troy, and she abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in + her golden shawl. + +Borrow, who comes to mind more often than any other writer as one reads +Synge, chose to avoid love scenes, and Borrow's follower, Mr. Hewlett, +for all his gusto, has no such exaltation as this. Had Harry Richmond +taken to the road with Kiomi we might have known something like it. A +chapter out of the early life of Juggling Jerry and his "Old Girl," done +in the manner of "Love in the Valley," would be still nearer to it. As +it is, this passage of the third act of "The Playboy of the Western +World" stands alone. I doubt if Synge had read Meredith, and even had +he, the life of the roads and their cottages that Synge knew so well was +his master, and no writer at all. In a way, of course, the Irish-English +of Dr. Hyde's translations of "The Love Songs of Connacht" was an +influence, and you will find many expressions common to them and Synge. +It is not important, however, whether these expressions have a common +source, or whether Synge took them from "The Love Songs" rather than +from his own note-book. Whatever their source it was Synge who made out +of them a great style, his peasant style. It is another and a severer +style that he uses in his "Deirdre of the Sorrows," the courtly subject +demanding dignity and restraint. This latter style has borrowed some of +the bare simplicity of the personal style of Synge, that style, I mean, +in which he records his own experience in the Aran Islands or in Wicklow +and Kerry. + +Romancing, which is the very atmosphere of "The Playboy of the Western +World," would be out of place in any telling of the greatest of old +Irish legends; so it is that Synge has found for "Deirdre of the +Sorrows," or rather for its great moments, an austere epic speech that +seems native to the story. The passionate words are nobly adequate to +the passionate resignation they have to tell, a resignation that has +come of the unwilling belief of the lovers that so great a love as +theirs cannot last longer "without fleck or flaw" than the seven years +it has lasted. Says Deirdre, when she has come to know it is fate that +they will return to Ireland, and death:-- + + The dawn and evening are a little while, the winter and the summer + pass quickly, and what way would you and I, Naisi, have joy + forever.... It's this hour we're between the daytime and a night + where there is sleep forever, and isn't it better thing to be + following on to a near death than to be bending the head down, and + dragging with the feet, and seeing one day a blight showing upon + love where it is sweet and tender? + + _Naisi_ (_his voice broken with distraction_). If a near death is + coming what will be my trouble losing the earth and the stars over + it, and you, Deirdre, are their flame and bright crown? Come away + into the safety of the woods. + + _Deirdre_ (_shaking her head slowly_). There are as many ways to + wither love as there are stars in a night of Samhain; but there is + no way to keep life, or love with it, a short space only.... It's + for that there's nothing lonesome like a love is watching out the + time most lovers do be sleeping.... It's for that we're setting out + for Emain Macha when the tide turns on the sand. + + _Naisi_ (_giving in_). You're right, maybe. It should be a poor + thing to see great lovers and they sleepy and old. + + _Deirdre_ (_with a more tender intensity_). We're seven years + without roughness or growing weary; seven years so sweet and + shining, the gods would be hard set to give us seven days the like + of them. It's for that we're going to Emain, where there'll be a + rest forever, or a place for forgetting, in great crowds and they + making a stir. + + _Naisi_ (_very softly_). We'll go, surely, in place of keeping a + watch on a love had no match and it wasting away. (_They cling to + each other, then Naisi looks up._) + +And this is from the unfinished second act, that Synge thought would +scarcely be worth preserving. I have quoted it rather than the great +keen over the body of Naisi that brings the play to a close, because +that must of necessity follow the old poem, and this is as Synge +imagined it. Each is "a thing will be a joy and triumph to the ends of +life and time." + +I have thrown what I have to say about the exaltation of Synge to the +forefront of what I have to say of him, that all may be read in the +memory of this emphasis and of the exaltation of what I quote, no matter +how fantastic or grotesque or disillusionizing or even ghoulish it may +be. Whatever other quality may be dominant at any moment in Synge there +is always, along with it, exaltation. + +It is the extravagance and grotesquerie, of both language and situation, +that is the most immediately arresting of the qualities of Synge. And +this extravagance and grotesquerie have marked his writing from the +start. The old husband playing dead, that he may catch his young wife +with her lover, of his first play, "In the Shadow of the Glen," is a +very old motive, and familiar in the meliorized form that made it known +to the theatre in "Conn the Shaughraun" (1875). Before that, Crofton +Croker had given it currency, in "The Corpse Watchers," among those +outside of the circles in which it was a familiar folk-story. It might, +indeed, be said of "In the Shadow of the Glen" that it begins in the +manner of Boucicault and ends in the manner of Ibsen, for Nora Burke is +in a way a peasant Hedda Gabler. Such a criticism would, of course, be +very superficial. The story is a folk-story of many countries and Synge +was told the version he worked from by the old shanachie of Inishmaan +whom he calls Pat Dirane in "The Aran Islands." At moments the play +approaches farce, as when the supposed corpse rises from the bed where +he is stretched and drinks whiskey with a tramp who has happened in +while Nora is gone to meet her young man. From such a situation it turns +to keen pathos, as Nora sits with tramp and lover and the old husband +she thinks dead, and listens to the wind and rain sweeping through the +high glens about the hut and thinks of "the young growing behind her," +and the old passing. Where else will you find cheek by jowl such +sardonic humor as this and such poignancy of lament for the passing of +youth? Nora speaks as she pours out whiskey for her young man:-- + + Why would I marry you, Mike Dara? You'll be getting old and I'll be + getting old, and in a little while, I'm telling you, you'll be + sitting up in your bed--the way himself was sitting--with a shake + in your face, and your teeth falling, and the white hair sticking + out round you like an old bush where sheep do be leaping a gap. + + (_Dan Burke sits up noiselessly from under the sheet, with his hand + to his face. His white hair is sticking out round his head. Nora + goes on slowly without hearing him._) + + It's a pitiful thing to be getting old, but it's a queer thing + surely. It's a queer thing to see an old man sitting up there in + his bed with no teeth in him, and a rough word in his mouth, and + his chin the way it would take the bark from the edge of an oak + board you'd have building a door.... God forgive me, Michael Dara, + we'll all be getting old, but it's a queer thing surely. + + _Michael_. It's too lonesome you are from living a long time with + an old man, Nora, and you're talking again like a herd that would + be coming down from the thick mist (_he puts his arm round her_), + but it's a fine life you'll have now with a young man--a fine life, + surely. + + (_Dan sneezes violently. Michael tries to get to the door, but + before he can do so Dan jumps out of the bed in queer white + clothes, with the stick in his hand, and goes over and puts his + back against it._) + + _Michael_. Son of God deliver us! + +Equal extravagance and equal grotesquerie, and irony biting beyond any +in any other of his plays, you will find in "The Well of the Saints." +This, too, is built up out of Synge's experience of life in Aran and +Wicklow. Old Mourteen, a "dark man," who taught him Gaelic on Aranmor, +suggested Martin Doul, the chief character of the play, and it was +Mourteen told him, too, the story of the well whose water would give +sight to blind eyes. A story told Synge on Inishere supplied the saint, +and a tramp in Wicklow the thoughts of Martin Doul and Mary Doul as to +the glory their hair would be to them in age. As you read his travel +sketches, in fact, you are always coming on passages that very evidently +are the suggestions for situations in this play or that, and sometimes +more than suggestions--stories and situations and very phrases that you +remember as on the lips of the peasants in his plays. In these travel +sketches, too, you find the background of the plays. There is but the +germ of "The Playboy of the Western World" in the story told Synge in +Inishmaan of the hiding there from the police of the man that killed his +father, but there is old Mourteen's comparison of an unmarried man to +"an old jackass straying in the rocks," which later we find transferred +to Michael James Flaherty almost as Synge heard it--"an old braying +jackass straying upon the rocks." + +It may be, too, that the famous Lynchehaun case confirmed Synge in +taking the Aran story of the man who killed his father as the basis of +"The Playboy," but it is little he got for his plays from his reading of +"the fearful crimes of Ireland," and little that he got for them from +any of his reading. There are situations in "The Tinker's Wedding"--the +tying-up of the priest in the bag, for instance--that suggest as source +"The Lout and his Mother," included by Dr. Hyde in his "Religious Songs +of Connacht," but Synge records, in "At a Wicklow Fair," that a herd +told him the story of the tinker couple that would be wed, as he and the +herd met the man in the case in Aughrim. + +No one who knows Ireland at all would hold that Synge's plays are +typical of the Irish peasant generally, but any one who knows Irish +literature at all, and the life of the roads in Ireland, will admit that +wildness and extravagance are to be found in that literature from the +beginning and in that life even at this day of supposed civilization. +You will find one kind of extravagance in the distortions of Cuchulain +in bardic literature, another kind of extravagance in "Little Red Mary +and the Goat with the Chime of Bells" that your gardener tells you in a +prosaic American suburban town; you will find the primitiveness of +prehistoric life in the burning of poor old Mrs. Cleary by her neighbors +in Tipperary (1895), to drive a demon out of her, and the savage that is +but under the skin of all men in the description of the Spinsters' Ball +at Ballinasloe in "A Drama in Muslin." Said an old shanachie to Synge on +Inishere, when Synge had told him of a stock exchange trick, "Isn't it +a great wonder to think that those men are as big rogues as ourselves?" +It is idle to pretend that it is not true that, in some moods, all men +the world over have sympathy for the rogue. Why do we read of Reynard +the Fox with delight, and Robin Hood, and Uncle Remus, and not only in +the days of our own infantile roguery, but as grown men and women? This +man or that may say it is because of the cleverness of Reynard, the +daring of Robin Hood or his wild-woods setting, and the resourcefulness +of Bre'r Rabbit; but the honest man will admit it is because of an +innate and deeply rooted human sympathy with roguery as well as our +natural human sympathy with the under dog and the man hunted by a +merciless or an alien law. Very often, if the roguery is very great, or +we are brought face to face with its effects and realize it is a real +thing in real life, we will be shocked out of our sympathy with it, and +realize, as did Pegeen Mike, the difference between a "gallous story and +a dirty deed." But sometimes, if we are a people living a primitive +life, we will no more awaken to the reality of the wrong of roguery than +we would as children have been able to sympathize with the farmer whose +pumpkin patch we raided on the eve of Hallowe'en. A sneaking sympathy +with roguery, however, is a very different thing from a delight in +extravagance. That, too, is a universal passion, but not so native to +the Teuton as to Celt or Finn or Oriental. Its absence is what most +differentiates Old Norse literature from Old Irish, with which it so +early came into contact. It is in travelers' tales and in the tales of +seamen and in the writing that was based on these, in rare moments of +religious or romantic ecstasy, or in borrowings from Celt or Oriental +that you will find the most of what extravagance there is in English +literature. In America you find extravagance in our humor, and this +humor, perhaps, owes as much of its extravagance to an Irish ancestry as +to an environment of new wonders that could not be well expressed save +in hyperbole. + +It is not only the extravagance of the change wrought in Christy by +unexpected hero-worship and an awakening of self-confidence through love +for the first time known and returned that we wonder at, and the +extravagance of that hero-worship, but the extravagance of the +imagination of his creator, and the beautiful extravagance of his +speech. The freshness and audacity of that imagination, and the +beautiful extravagance of that speech, a speech modulated to a rhythm +that Synge was the first to catch, are in themselves enough to give +distinction to almost any subject. There was granted Synge more than +this, however,--a keenness of vision into the pathetic humanity of ugly +things and a power to realize this with a beauty that was granted to no +one before, though to Swift it was granted to see the ugliness as a +bitter thing. Borrow had, indeed, a glimpse now and then of the pathetic +beauty there is in ugliness, as in the story of Isopel Berners and the +Flaming Tinman, and Whitman, too; but no man before Synge had the power +at once to see the ugly subject as beautiful from a new angle of vision, +humanize it, irradiate it with a new glow of imagination, reveal it +through a style that for the first time ennobles English prose drama as +blank verse has long ennobled English verse drama. + +Take "The Tinker's Wedding," for instance. The theme is the desire of a +tinker woman, youngish if not young, to wed the man who has long been +her mate; his mother's unstudied frustration of that scheme by stealing, +to swap for drink, the can they were to give to the priest along with a +half-sovereign for marrying them; and their joy, in the end, that they +have escaped matrimony and the wasting of good money. And yet this theme +is underlaid with an emotion so vital, the emotion of a wild free life, +and invested with a pathos so poignant of the quick passing of all good +things, that no understanding heart can but be profoundly moved by that +pathos and racily rejoiced at that wildness. + +It is thus, for instance, soliloquizes Mary Byrne, the rapscalliony old +tinker woman of outrageous behavior of "The Tinker's Wedding." She is +stealing the aforesaid can, in the absence of her son and his Sarah "to +get two of Tim Flaherty's hens": "Maybe the two of them have a good +right to be walking out the little short while they'd be young; but if +they have itself, they'll not keep Mary Byrne from her full pint when +the night's fine, and there's a dry moon in the sky." One thinks, as one +reads, of Villon's old woman and her lament for yesteryear, but there +are not many writers anywhere in the world, of old time or of to-day, +who have such power of blending pathos and ugliness into beauty, and no +other one that I know who can infuse humor into the blend, and make one +at the one time laugh ironically and be thrilled as with great poetry. + +There are those, of course, to whom this earthiness and wildness are +repulsive, to whom old Martin Doul's love pleading to Molly Byrne is +unendurable. A dirty "shabby stump of a man," a beggar, blind and +middle-aged, is asking a fine white girl, young, and as teasing as an +ox-eyed and ox-minded colleen may be, to go away with him. Not an +exalting situation, exactly, as you read of it or see it on the stage, +but once you see it on the stage, where its animality you would expect +would be heightened, you realize--and it is strange to you that you do +so realize--first of all its pathos, and again its pathos, and always, +the scene through, its pathos. Had Molly gone with old Martin it would +have revolted you, for it would have been unnatural, but since she did +not, and since she was not the sort to be easily insulted, you only +wonder at the power of passion and realize its pathos, and the irony of +it. + +There is, however, a situation ironical of love in "In the Shadow of the +Glen" that is more appalling to some than any irony of "The Well of the +Saints." I mean the scene at the end, where Nora, turned out by her +husband and forsaken by her lover, goes out into the rain with the +tramp, leaving husband and lover drinking together in utmost amity. The +pathos of this and the irony of it are of a part with the pathos of the +close of "Hedda Gabler." Hedda and Nora, selfish and willful both, if +you like, are yet fine women both, and human, as Zenobia and Eustacia +are human, and pathetic in their fates, with a pathos that even +Hawthorne and Mr. Hardy have seldom the power to make us feel. But the +fate of Nora was ironic as the fate of none of the others, for all +three of them escaped the ennui and misery of life, while Nora but +begins a new life, freer for the moment than her old life, but +promising, in the end, only the old dull round. + +The irony of it! "The irony of it" is always in Synge's writing even in +its most exalted moments. A seven years' love "without fleck or flaw" is +"surely a wonder," but it is just as surely ironical that it, like all +good things, shall so soon come to an end. That, of course, is but the +way of nature, and so we much question if, after all, the irony of Synge +is more insistent than the irony of nature. If it is it is because he +takes more care to uncover it, but basically his irony is but the irony +of nature. He is in reality less ironical than Mr. Hardy, the great +ironist of English literature of our day, and he is never bitter, for +bitterness comes seldom except to the writer who is interested in +morals, and morals interest Synge only in so far as they are natural. It +is life--not any conventional way of life, or any ideal of life--that +interests Synge, so he escapes ensnarement in any of the questions of +the day. So frankly does he accept life that there is in him no note of +protest whatsoever, which is again fortunate, for protest, too, will +lead a man to morals and leave on his work the taint of a passing system +of morality as it did even on Ibsen. + +If there is symbolism to be found in Synge, it is there only by +accident, never as the result of definite intent. He may have had, in +the back of his mind, as he wrote "The Playboy of the Western World," +the thought of chance making a man, of a man finding himself through +others believing in him who has no belief in himself but that there is +in the play any parable of young Ireland losing its allegiance to a +previous ideal of Ireland, I do not for a moment believe. There is, of +course, in "The Well of the Saints" the old and oft-uttered truth that +men prefer blindness in many things to correct vision of them, that +truth that drives Mr. Shaw to blind anger. Synge has no resentment +against that truth, only interest in it as a fact that is true of people +as he sees them. The play is an unforgettable symbol of that truth, but +to make it such was not why Synge wrote it. He wrote it with a purpose +akin to that which inspired Burns to write his "Jolly Beggars." He wrote +it to make something beautiful out of the life of the beggars of the +Wicklow mountains, and I have no doubt he had a wild joy in the idea of +it, in the irony of its truth, in the grotesquerie of the situations he +garnered from his memory to illustrate its beauty and truth. + +Many wonders are possible even to-day in the wild life of the roads and +of the sea-haunted islands that Synge knew, but he was wise to put "The +Well of the Saints" back a hundred years or more. Aran islanders told +him of rye that turned to oats in their fields and of phantom ships that +passed them at sea, but a miracle of healing such as that of "The Well +of the Saints" they were familiar with only in folk-song such as "Mary's +Well," and such a miracle, too, would hardly be attempted by a priest of +to-day. + +Synge had the great advantage of writing all his plays, after the +earliest, for the stage. He knew as he wrote that he could test that +writing's stage effect in rehearsal and change it if need be. So he did +change "The Playboy of the Western World," revealing the incident of the +supposed patricide as a bit of narrative addressed by Christy to the +admiring girls of the Mayo village, instead of, as he had intended, a +scene on the stage in "a windy corner of rich Munster land." Had he +written "Riders to the Sea" later, Synge would surely never have crowded +into it incidents that took far longer in the happening than in the +portrayal of that happening on the stage. It is this technical +shortcoming that for me takes away somewhat from the exceeding beauty of +this tragedy of Aran. The story of the finding of the clothes that tell +of the death at sea of the last but one of the five sons of Maurya, and +of the death on the very shore itself of the last son, is in its very +nature a dirge, and demands a slower movement than is possible with its +incidents arranged as he was content to leave them in the play as we +have it. "Riders to the Sea" is less representative of Synge, moreover, +than any other of his plays, for it is written on one note, the note of +the dirge, of the dirge of the tides that sound their menace of the sea +through Inishmaan. It is less representative of Synge because it has in +it no humor, no quick changes of mood, no revelation of tumult of soul. +It is less representative of Synge in that it is less original than any +other of his plays, reminiscent in fact in all but its style, now of +Ibsen, now of M. Maeterlinck, now even of Mr. Edward Martyn. And his +style itself is not what his style was in "In the Shadow of the Glen," +nor what it became again in "The Well of the Saints." + +One wonders where that speech came from, that speech that is, as he +would have it, "fully flavored as a nut or apple." Mr. Yeats and Lady +Gregory tell us that he did not have it until he had been made free, +through residence there, of the life of the Aran Islands. If one has +read, however, the English of the prose translations of Dr. Hyde's "Love +Songs of Connacht," one may see in their style the genesis of the style +of "Riders to the Sea," and if one has read the "Dialogue between Two +Old Women" of "The Religious Songs of Connacht," and "The Lout and his +Mother," one may come to believe that these turned Synge toward the even +more fully flavored and more rhythmic speech of the other plays. +Perhaps, too, there were memories of the rhythm and of the flavor of the +speech of him who made these words for Jasper Petulengro: "Life is +sweet, brother, ... there's night and day, brother, both sweet things; +sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind +on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die!" + +The speech of Connacht folk-song rendered into the English of Connacht +by Dr. Hyde, however, and the speech of Borrow were no more than the +start, if they were as much as the start, that put him on the right +road. If ever a man made his style himself, it was Synge. He made it out +of his memory and out of his imagination, using "one or two words only +that I have not heard," he said, "among the country people of Ireland, +or spoken in my own nursery before I could read the newspaper," but +evolving from that memory by his imagination a speech that is in +harmony with the imagination of the people an imagination that is, he +tells us, "fiery and magnificent and tender," though no such actual +speech would be possible of reproduction from any one of them. + +Synge is very definite in his statement of what he believes drama should +be, and what he would make his own drama of Irish life, expressing his +belief in the preface to "The Tinker's Wedding":-- + + The drama is made serious ... not by the degree in which it is + taken up with problems that are serious in themselves, but by the + degree in which it gives the nourishment, not very easy to define, + on which our imaginations live.... + + We should not go to the theatre as we go to a chemist's or a + dramshop, but as we go to a dinner where the food we need is taken + with pleasure and excitement.... + + The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything.... + + Of the things which nourish the imagination, humor is one of the + most needful and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it. Baudelaire + calls laughter the greatest sign of the Satanic element in man; and + where a country loses its humor, as some towns in Ireland are + doing, there will be a morbidity of mind, as Baudelaire's mind was + morbid. In the greater part of Ireland, however, the whole people, + from the tinkers to the clergy, have still a life, and view of + life, that are rich and genial and humorous. I do not think that + these country people, who have so much humor themselves, will mind + being laughed at without malice, as the people in every country + have been laughed at, in their own comedies. + +In the preface to "The Playboy of the Western World" is this paragraph, +completing his _credo_ as to drama:-- + + On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy; and that + is why the intellectual modern drama has failed, and people have + grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy, that has been + given them in place of the rich joy found only in what is superb + and wild in reality. + +Although there are only about forty characters, all told, in the six +plays of Synge, and ten of these are in "Deirdre of the Sorrows," which +for all its humanity is a play out of a life that is gone, there are men +and women a-plenty to give us this "rich joy found only in what is +superb and wild in reality." Nora is "superb and wild" in her longings, +and Maurya in her sorrow; and old Martin Doul "superb and wild" in his +dream of life in the South; Sarah Casey and Pegeen Mike "superb and +wild" in the most direct sense of the phrase; and these are all real, if +not representative of the poorer peasantry. And in the high way of +romance who has dreamed what is more superb and wilder than the lament +of Deirdre over Naisi! In the creation of character, as in style, and in +technique of drama, Synge has done what he would. In only one of his +plays, in "Riders to the Sea," are his leading characters representative +Irish peasants; and even Maurya and her children, not only because of +the isolation of their home in Aran, but because of the fate which has +marked her mankind for death at sea, are somewhat apart from the +fisher-people of the west coast. In all his four other plays of modern +life, Synge has chosen characters who are, in his own words, "variations +from the ordinary types of manhood,"--chosen them because of his +deep-seated love of the unconventional. In "In the Shadow of the Glen," +Michael Dara, the herd, is a common type, and Dan Burke, the old sheep +farmer, not an uncommon type, but the tramp and Nora, the one by his +wandering and the other by her brooding, are "variations," though very +human both. Of the cottager class, too, are Timmy the Smith, Molly +Byrne, and the "villagers" of "The Well of the Saints," as are, too, the +girls and men of "The Playboy of the Western World" other than the +Mahons and Michael James. Shawn Keogh, indeed, is a cut above cottagers, +being almost a strong farmer, and Michael James himself was, no doubt, +of a similar cottager respectability before he took to shebeen-keeping. +Almost all the other characters of these modern plays are, with the +exception of the priest of "The Tinker's Wedding" and the saint of "The +Well of the Saints," squatters, beggars, and tinkers. Among them, few as +they are all told, are very differing personalities--Christy the Playboy +and his father, "a dirty man, God forgive him, and he getting old and +crusty"; Martin Doul, a "shabby stump of a man," "of queer talk," +middle-aged and blind and a beggar; Michael Byrne, the hardy, thieving, +unimaginative tinker; and the romancing young tramp who gallants Nora +when her own husband turns her out on the road;--"variations" all, +perhaps, but human, and compelling, all of them, our interest, and +greater or less sympathy. And the women! Nora, whom we leave as +road-woman, I have likened to Hedda Gabler, and Sarah Casey in externals +to Isopel Berners, but I do not know to whom to compare the others save +Mary Byrne, as slightly suggestive of Villon's old woman. Mary Doul, +blind Martin's blind wife, has a general likeness to some old witch out +of a fairy tale, but she is far from being a witch; and Widow Quinn the +incomparable might be compared, were she not too high-hearted, to the +hag of "The Lout and Mother" in being + + "indecent-spoken, carneying, lying, + Plausible, full of poems and prophecies and sharp edged." + +Of the women of the cottager class, Nora, for all her wildness and +bitterness, is the most lovable, and Molly Byrne the least lovable; the +girls of "Riders to the Sea" are not fully enough individualized to make +us feel we know them; but Pegeen Mike, Synge has put before us in +appearance and temperament, character and personality. "A wild-looking +but fine girl," he describes her, "with a divil's own temper," "the +fright of seven town-lands"--as she says--"for my biting tongue," but +susceptible of softening toward a boy of good looks and coaxing ways +such as Christy. He gets around her with "his poet's talking" and his +popularity, his "mighty spirit" and "gamey heart" until she gives him +"words would put you thinking on the holy Brigid speaking to the infant +saints." + +There might be incongruity, if one were writing of any other than Synge, +in speaking of Deirdre in such a company. Incongruity, however, is of +the very texture of Synge's art, which has reconciled qualities, as I +have said, never before reconciled in English literature. It is on +Deirdre that Synge has lavished all the ideality that was in him, not +because he had a dream of woman he wished to fulfill, but because to him +Deirdre was all that was queenly. And yet even Deirdre is a "variation," +as nobility and beauty must ever be. So lofty is she that words even in +praise of her are almost impertinent. Just how lofty her words that I +quoted at the outset show, as does also, by way of contrast, the mention +of her here among these half-tragic, half-grotesque women of the +cottages and of the roads. There is scarcely a poet, of all that have +written of Ireland from the time of Ferguson to our time, that has not +written his dream of Deirdre as he finds her in the old legends of +Ireland, but to my mind no one of them has dreamed her so triumphantly +as has Synge. + +It is not, however, of such "variations" as Deirdre that the critics +fall foul, but of the "variations" he puts on Irish roads and in Irish +cottages when he presents the life of to-day. Why he replied to this +criticism when to most criticism he was, if not indifferent, at least +impervious, it is not easy to say. It is more than likely, however, that +it was rather to explain his ideas than to justify his characters that +he did answer. This criticism of the reality of his peasants began with +his "Shadow of the Glen" and is still to be heard in many places to-day. +It rose to its highest pitch of denunciation at the time of the +production of "The Playboy of the Western World" in Dublin, but it was +before that that he answered it fully, in the last paragraph of "The +Vagrants of Wicklow," a travel sketch he made out of his wanderings in +his native country. Here it is, as effective in its answer to subsequent +criticism as to that which it was definitely intended to answer:-- + + In all the circumstances of this tramp life there is a certain + wildness that gives it romance and a peculiar value for those who + look at life in Ireland with an eye that is aware of the arts + also. In all the healthy movements of art, variations from the + ordinary types of manhood are made interesting for the ordinary + man, and in this way only the higher arts are universal. Beside + this art, however, founded on the variations which are a condition + and effect of all vigorous life, there is another art--sometimes + confounded with it--founded on the freak of nature, in itself a + mere sign of atavism or disease. This latter art, which is occupied + with the antics of the freak, is of interest only to the variation + from ordinary minds, and, for this reason, is never universal. To + be quite plain, the tramp in real life, Hamlet and Faust, in the + arts, are variations; but the maniac in real life, and Des + Esseintes and all his ugly crew in the arts, are freaks only. + +It is well to consider all his characters in the light of this +statement, I think, and to re-read, keeping in mind a possible further +application of it, those phrases in the plays that so outrage many at +their hearing in the theatre, I would not for a moment seem to want to +soften the hardness of the life he pictures or to explain away his +delightfully sardonic humor as in reality a reconciling sort of humor, +but I do wish to say that the more I read him the less cruel and +sardonic that humor seems. The impersonality of the man as dramatist +grows on you as you read, you realize more and more his abstention from +playing chorus to his characters, and you come to know that the seeming +cruelty and sardonic joy are largely only the direct outcome of his +courage in allowing Nature to speak for herself. If you turn again to +the plays after learning of their background from his travel sketches, +you see many things in a new light. The irony, the grotesquerie, the +tonic earthiness never grow less, but one learns to discount somewhat +the effect of the hardness of speech on the recipients of that speech, +as through experience one learns--after one's second attendance at a +wake--to discount something of the too voluble sorrow of keening. + +That the candor of Synge, in allowing his people of hard nature or of +careless nature to say the ruthless things native to their minds and +temper, hurts many, there is proof every time one sees a play of his on +the stage. You will hear women about you gasp with mingled surprise and +disgust, their sensibilities wholly outraged, but unwilling laughter in +their minds when the Widow Quinn says to Christy, after his praise of +Pegeen, "There's poetry talk for a girl you'd see itching and +scratching, and she with a stale stink of poteen on her from selling in +the shop." Such gasps are nothing, however, to those they utter when +they hear Mary Doul tell Molly Byrne "when the skin shrinks on your +chin, Molly Byrne, there won't be the like of you for a shrunk hag in +the four quarters of Ireland." + +Very different is the kind of laughter aroused by the sly malice, native +to the rogue story from the days in which its characters masqueraded as +animals, that is revealed in the remark of Mary Byrne to the priest, +"It's destroyed you must be hearing the sins of the rural people in a +fine spring"; and different again the childish delight in the +extravagance at Christy's threat to send Shawn Keogh "coaching out +through Limbo with my father's ghost"; and still different the +breathless, delighted wonderment in the sense of moral values exhibited +by Michael James, when, fearing that Christy's threatened murder of +Shawn, if carried out, would give his secret trade away, he jumps up +with a shriek, exclaiming, "Murder is it? Is it mad you's are? Would you +go making murder in this place, and it piled with poteen for our drink +to-night?" Different too, is the laughter at the Rabelaisian touches and +at the farcical situations in which the plays abound. + +If ever there were characters that lived a life apart from their +author's, those characters are Synge's. It is in the verses and in the +travel sketches that we get the man himself, the man back of the +dramatist that gives to his characters a life independent of his own, a +life that he knows partly in reality and partly in imagination, but that +he himself has lived chiefly as an observer and imaginer. There is no +humor in these verses and travel sketches, not even when he is +describing a humorous scene such as that of the upsetting by pigs +running wild of the constabulary busy about evictions on Inishmaan. We +get the man himself, I say, in these verses and travel sketches, a man +exulting in primitiveness, in wildness, in beauty of woman and child, in +beauty of landscape; but exulting, more than in all else, in his own +moods aroused by these things that he loved. Even here, however, he is +at times almost impossibly impersonal, so that you feel in a certain +description that there is no man between you and the thing described, +but that, to adapt a phrase of Thoreau, it is the hills and the sea and +the atmosphere writing. This impersonality persists even in "The Aran +Islands," so large a part of which is very personal in that it is a +statement of his daily life on Inishmaan. It is not, however, from the +impersonal writing that I would quote,--though I would emphasize this +impersonality because it is part of the very nature of the man,--but +from the personal parts, because they reveal more of the positive part +of him. After a day of storm on Inishmaan, the middle island of the +three that make up the Aran group, Synge writes: "About the sunset the +clouds broke and the storm turned to a hurricane. Bars of purple cloud +stretched across the sound where immense waves were rolling from the +west, wreathed with snowy fantasies of spray. Then there was the bay +full of green delirium and the Twelve Pins touched with mauve and +scarlet in the east." That is the Connacht coast, and this the next +paragraph is Synge: "The suggestion from this world of inarticulate +power was immense, and now at midnight, when the wind is abating, I am +still trembling and flushed with exultation." And here is Synge again, +in another temper, which came to him on the seas about Inishmaan: "The +black curagh working slowly through this world of gray, and the soft +hissing of the rain, gave me one of the moods in which we realize with +immense distress the short moment we have left us to experience all the +wonder and beauty of the world." + +"The Aran Islands" is most memorable of his travel writings, because he +spent more time on these rocks at the world's end and came closest here +to the soul of Irish life. There are passages, however, in his +description of the Kerry coast, and even in his newspaper sketches of +the coast of Connemara, that tell not only of the places but of their +visitor. "I got on a long road running through a bog," he writes in "In +West Kerry," "with a smooth mountain on one side and the sea on the +other, and Brandon in front of me, partly covered with clouds. As far +as I could see there were little groups of people on their way to the +chapel at Ballyferriter, the men in homespun and the women wearing blue +cloaks, or, more often, black shawls twisted over their heads. This +procession along the olive bogs, between the mountains and the sea, on +this gray day of autumn, seemed to wring me with the pang of emotion one +meets everywhere in Ireland, an emotion that is partly local and +patriotic, and partly a share of the desolation that is mixed everywhere +with the supreme beauty of the world." + +The comment on Ireland, her ways and her place among the peoples, that +many a dramatist would have permitted himself to express through some +character chosen to play chorus to the action, Synge now and then +permits himself in the travel sketches. In "From Galway to Gorumna," +which he wrote for the "Manchester Guardian's" investigation of the +congested districts, is one of such rare avowals, an avowal to treasure +along with those of his all too short prefaces: "It is part of the +misfortune of Ireland that nearly all the characteristics which give +color and attractiveness to Irish life [he has been speaking of 'men +dressed in homespuns of the gray natural wool, and the women in deep +madder-dyed petticoats and bodices, with brown shawls over their heads'] +are bound up with a social condition that is near to penury, while in +countries like Brittany the best external features of the local +life--the rich embroidered dresses, for instance, or the carved +furniture--are connected with a decent and comfortable social +condition." + +It is this penury, perhaps, and its gray background that by way of +contrast emphasize so strongly the moments of splendor that Irish +landscape knows. One such moment Synge saw as he looked southward across +the bay from the Dingle peninsula toward Killarney: "The blueness of the +sea and the hills from Carrantuohill to the Skelligs, the singular +loneliness of the hillside I was on, with a few choughs and gulls in +sight only, had a splendor that was almost a grief in the mind." + +This splendor Synge found also in his own Wicklow, a lonelier country +than Aran, if loneliness comes from absence of human life. And if there +is not the loneliness of the sea in the inland glens that Synge knew so +well, there is in them the equal loneliness of the mountains. It is this +county of Wicklow that is the background of "In the Shadow of the Glen" +and of "The Well of the Saints" and of "The Tinker's Wedding." And +perhaps had not the Abbey Theatre grown to be a theatre for folk-drama +and for poetic drama of court romance alone, Synge would have made +Wicklow the background of dramas of a high life of yesterday. Certain it +is that in these passages he is thinking of it:-- + + Every one is used in Ireland to the tragedy that is bound up with + the lives of farmers and fishing-people; but in this garden one + seemed to feel the tragedy of the landlord class also, and of the + innumerable old families that are quickly dwindling away. These + owners of the land are not much pitied at the present day, or much + deserving of pity; and yet one cannot quite forget that they are + the descendants of what was at one time, in the eighteenth century, + a high-spirited and highly cultivated aristocracy. The broken + greenhouses and mouse-eaten libraries, that were designed and + collected by men who voted with Grattan, are perhaps as mournful in + the end as the four mud walls that are so often left in Wicklow as + the only remnants of a farmhouse. The desolation of this life is + often of a peculiarly local kind, and if a playwright chose to go + through the Irish country houses he would find material, it is + likely, for many gloomy plays that would turn on the dying away of + these old families, and on the lives of the one or two delicate + girls that are left so often to represent a dozen hearty men who + were alive a generation or two ago. + +I have dwelt on these travel sketches of Synge not alone for their own +sake, but because they are, as I have said, the background of the plays, +and because they contain what are in a sense the diary notes out of +which the plays grew. In a sense, too, they are a commentary on the +plays, and as I have also said a revelation of the playwright. All must +be read for a thorough understanding of the plays, though these alone +should be a delight to all, even if they know no more of Ireland than +that share of human nature which is axiomatically the same in all men of +all races. If you do not read the travel sketches, you may fail to see +how deeply sympathetic Synge is with the Irish peasant, and in no +patronizing way. In "The Aran Islands" he takes the greatest care to +disguise the identity of those he knew intimately lest they be pained by +anything he wrote of them. No one could write with higher courtesy of +those whose guest he had been than Synge. You, reading, are made one of +their home circle, but no family secrets are betrayed. You are made +aware of their weaknesses, but there is never any disloyalty; and always +in his records of them their virtues of courage and endurance, of +adaptiveness and simplicity, of family stanchness and communal +helpfulness, outweigh the drunkenness and roguery that one expects from +the primitive. Synge is, indeed, not only loyal, but full of respect and +liking for the Aran Islanders, and of admiration for their rich +humanity. + +It was out of his island life and out of his life of the roads, and out +of his mood, once he knew his doom, that he made the twenty-two poems of +his that are retained of a great deal that he had written, most of it in +his younger years. That Synge faced his fate with bravery the triumphant +tone of "Deirdre of the Sorrows" that I have instanced is proof, but +there could not but be moments when the thought of death was too instant +to be denied. It was in such mood he wrote, either toward the end, or in +earlier moments of anticipation of it, "Queens," "On an Anniversary," +"To the Oaks of Glencree," "A Question," and "I've Thirty Months." There +is in these verses a certain morbidity, an almost ghoulishness, that is +very seldom present elsewhere in his writing. And yet I may be wrong in +attributing it to his certainty of approaching death, for there is a +more intense preoccupation with death in the plays of M. Maeterlinck's +youth and a greater ghoulishness in the verse of Mr. Hardy's youth. It +is of Mr. Hardy's verses that one thinks oftenest as one reads these +verses of Synge, and not only because of certain likenesses in +subject-matter, but because of the imperfect mastery of both over the +verse forms and a certain epigrammatic gnomic quality common to both. +The verses of Synge are not relatively so important in comparison with +the rest of his writing as Mr. Hardy's verses are in comparison with the +rest of his writing, for they are not needed to explain a philosophy of +life as are Mr. Hardy's verses. Fortunately, Synge attempted no +philosophy, had the rare wisdom to rest content with observation. + +In regard to poetry, as to all his art, Synge had, however, definite +views, though his verse is almost too little in bulk to exemplify them. +It was the poetry of exaltation, as it was the drama of exaltation, as +it was the exaltation in living, of change and speed and danger and +love, that meant most to him. He held further that "in these days poetry +is usually a flower of evil or good; but it is the timber of poetry that +wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots +among the clay and worms." The verse of Synge, as all his art, was so +rooted, surely. "Even if we grant," he continues, "that exalted poetry +can be kept successful by itself, the strong things of life are needed +in poetry also, to show that what is exalted or tender is not made by +feeble blood. It may almost be said that before verse can be human again +it must learn to be brutal." + +It is sayings of this sort that bring to mind his kinship with Whitman, +to whom he is also bound by the freemasonry of the roads. Both men felt +the call of the road; both loved the changing landscape and the little +adventures of the caravansaries; both loved most of all the men and +women they met. Once only Synge seems to have forgotten humanity when he +took to the road, that time which he has recorded in "Prelude":-- + + "Still south I went and west and south again, + Through Wicklow from the morning till the night, + And far from cities, and the sights of men, + Lived with the sunshine, and the moon's delight. + + "I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds, + The gray and wintry sides of many glens, + And did but half remember human words, + In converse with the mountains, moors, and fens." + +It is to this, to the wandering wayside life of Synge that one's thought +of him always returns, and rightly, for it was the road that most +inspired him. It is the memory of the road that most kindles him; and so +it is always to the man of the road that he gives his most lyric +passages; or, perhaps, I should say it is the speech that the thought of +the man of the roads or of the woman of wild heart raises in his mind +that is his most beautiful speech, with the very wildness of the +wandering heart in it, and with the long swing that comes, with second +wind, when you have been a day abroad on the road. + +What if the words have now the clauber of the roads upon them, and even +the muck, and now the reek of the shebeen or of the tinker's fire in a +roadside ditch; they have, too, the bog smell, and the smell of the +whin, the smell of ploughed land and of the sea, and they fall into +cadences that are cadences of the wind and of the tides, of full rivers +and clucking streams that sudden rains have filled, as well as the +cadences of the voices of boy and girl and they love-making, and of the +voices of the wild folk of the roads coaxing or loudly quarreling, and +the voices of women and men, young and old, lamenting the hard way of +life and of the sorrow that waits for all in the end. Why quarrel with +Synge, in short, because his style is of the very essence of life, and +of nature, which is the background of life? + +To attain a style that is his very self, that is of the very color of +his life, and of the very color of the extravagant phases of the life of +his country, to attain a style that embodies all this, and that for the +first time sets English dramatic prose to a rhythm as noble as the +rhythm of blank verse, is surely in itself title to greatness. But Synge +has other titles, too. In the few characters that he has created, forty +in all, characters all natively Irish, he has attained universality, +because these Irish men and women, Nora and Martin Doul, Sarah Casey and +Christy Mahon, Maurya and Deirdre, are so human that they are prototypes +of men and women the world over. And of dialogue, where style and +characterization blend, he has sure control. Each character of the six +great characters that I have just mentioned speaks and acts just as such +a character would, and not only these, but every other character that +occupies the stage for more than a moment. Michael Dara and Timmy the +Smith, the Priest or Philly Cullen, Bartley and Owen, each one has an +individuality clearly defined. + +There is less that is great in the structure of his plays than in any +other component of them, but that structure always clearly reveals the +action which arises from the emotion and theme underlying each,--the +menacing sea in "Riders to the Sea"; the loneliness of the mountain +glens that drives men fey in "The Shadow of the Glen"; the blindness, +the blessed self-delusion of mankind, in "The Well of the Saints"; the +wildness of the life of the roads that law may not tame, in "The +Tinker's Wedding"; the boy's finding of himself through his having to +live up to a community's mistaken ideal of him, in "The Playboy of the +Western World"; and the benison of death that prevents a great love from +dying, in "Deirdre of the Sorrows." + +Always the joy of making something beautiful out of his experience and +dream of life is what inspires Synge to write, and though the intention +to read life truly is a passion with him, there is never a suggestion of +didacticism, or even of moralizing, though "The Well of the Saints" is +unquestionably, whether he wills it so or not, a symbol of man's +discontent with things as they are, his preference in some things of the +lie to the truth. I think that Synge did not will to make "The Well of +the Saints" a symbol, and that the play was to him but a reading of +life, as life is, in his characteristic, exalted, ironic, extravagant +way of writing, and that if he was aware of the symbolism, he was not +keenly aware of it or much interested in it. He gives us life untroubled +by the passing agitation of the day, and for that we should be thankful, +and thankful, too, that he has given in his plays "the nourishment, not +very easy to define, on which our imaginations live." His irony, as +desolating to some as the irony of Swift, gives pause to all, as insight +always will, but to me his extravagance is a joy unalloyed, and his +exaltation, so rare a thing in modern literature, should bring to all +men delight and refreshment of spirit. No reading, or seeing and +hearing, of his plays leaves me without a feeling of richness or +without wonder and large content. He gives back my youth to me, both in +the theatre and in my library, and, in the glow that is mine in such +recapture, I call him the greatest dramatist in English that our stage +has known in a century. That I know him to be on sober second thought, +second thought that has been concerned with his art, as I followed it +developing during the slow years from "Riders to the Sea" to "Deirdre of +the Sorrows." + + + + +CHAPTER VIII + +THE YOUNGER DRAMATISTS--MR. PADRAIC COLUM--MR. WILLIAM BOYLE--MR. T.C. +MURRAY--MR. S. LENNOX ROBINSON--MR. RUTHERFORD MAYNE--"NORREYS +CONNELL"--MR. ST. JOHN G. ERVINE--MR. JOSEPH CAMPBELL + + +One wonders whether it is not of himself Mr. Padraic Colum is writing as +"The dawn-man ... in the sunset." That phrase arrests one on the first +page of his little book of verse "Wild Earth" (1909), in the first poem, +"The Plougher." It refers, of course, to an elemental man of to-day, to +the peasant of the great central plain of Ireland, who is "brute-tamer, +plough-maker, earth-breaker," just as truly as it does to the breaker of +horses who drove furrows with a tree-knee through primordial mould; and +it carries us in imagination back to the man of the Stone Age by way of +many other ploughmen, by way of the last man we saw between +plough-handles who appealed to our imagination, a man limned against an +April sky from which the sun had passed to leave all the west that +gold-green that the greatest of Westmoreland dalesmen loved; by way of +that Dumfries peasant whose + + "conquering share + Upturned the fallow fields of truth anew"; + +by way of Wayland Smith, whose anvils dot the shores of Britain; by way +of Tubal Cain, "an artificer in brass and iron," of the seed of Cain, "a +tiller of the ground." + +[Illustration] + +One wonders is it not of himself that the poet writes, though what he +writes takes us far from him, carrying us in thought halfway round the +world and back through civilizations that have passed. But whether it is +of himself that Mr. Colum writes or not, he is certainly, in a sense, +"The dawn-man ... in the sunset." The "Glory of the Gael" that is +to-day, if it is "glory," is glory of sunset, of "purples and splendors" +that pass; there are those who hold that the race that "went forth to +battle," but "always fell," is already passed beyond the sunset, into +the twilight, that twilight that is the time of day so surely symbolical +of the writing of the many Irish poets that have followed after Mr. +Yeats. Mr. Colum, however, whether his race be in twilight or sunset, is +of the dawn. He is of the dawn not only because he is the youth, at +oldest the young man, in his writing, who sees the world freshly and +fresh, none the less fresh because he knows it old; but he is of the +dawn because it is chiefly those things that are fundamentals, that come +out of the beginnings of things, that interest him profoundly, that stir +him deeply. Subtleties and complexities, decadent things, are not for +him, but simplicities, primordial things, the love of wandering, and +what is only less old, the love of land; and love of woman. These three +things, and youth, and little else, concern him. Mr. Colum writes, +indeed, in the dedication to "Thomas Muskerry" (1910) that he has set +down "three characters that stood as first types in my human comedy, the +peasant, the artist, the official, Murtagh Cosgar, Conn Hourican, +Thomas Muskerry." It is not, however, the official that Mr. Colum +emphasizes in "Thomas Muskerry," but the man who longs for a quiet +little place where he may be free from the nagging of his daughter and +her children; and in Myles Gorman, in this same play, is sounded that +other call that is recurrent in his work, the call of the road. We see +more of wanderer than of artist, too, in Conn Hourican, though Mr. Colum +calls the play he made for him "The Fiddler's House"; and here, too, the +love of land is a motive--love of land and the wander-love battle in +"The Land" (1905), with love of woman the deciding factor in the +latter's victory. + +Mr. Colum would not be an Irishman if nationality and religion were not +also motives in his plays and poems, but it is only in his 'prentice +work that either appears as a leading motive. From a good deal of +writing, most of which appeared originally in "The United Irishmen," he +has republished only the three plays before mentioned, "The Land" +(1905), "The Fiddler's House" (1907), "Thomas Muskerry" (1910), his +miracle play, "The Miracle of the Corn," and two stories in "Studies" +(1907), and what he wishes to preserve of his verse in "Wild +Earth" (1909). + +It was through "The Daughters of Erin" that Mr. Colum came in touch with +the dramatic movement. Their plays and tableaux in the Antient Concert +Rooms in 1900 attracted his attention, and he wrote to the secretary, +inclosing with the note copies of two plays that he had written--the +dramatic achievements of his late 'teens. These plays were about the +"Children of Lir," that one of "The Three Sorrows of Story-Telling" +that is less poignant than the story of Deirdre only because it is less +human, and about Brian Boru, the high king that beat back the Danes at +Clontarf. Faery and mediaeval history were not destined, however, to be +Mr. Colum's field, and Mr. Fay, then stage manager of the Association +productions, probably helped him on the way to his true field, the life +of the peasant of the Midlands, by declaring them rubbish. Two years +later Mr. Colum had learned enough about life and about the stage to +write a play against enlistment in the English army that held the +attention of audiences and was regarded as good propagandist "stuff." +"The Saxon Shillin'," produced May 15, 1903, Mr. Colum has not +republished, nor "The Kingdom of the Young" (1902), which like its +predecessor was published in "The United Irishmen." With this last play, +as its title indicates, Mr. Colum found his way to that subject of +youth, which, whatever other one of his dominant motives his plays may +involve, is always present. The hardness of youth is the theme of "The +Kingdom of the Young," the hardness that came into the heart of a +daughter, when driven into revolt by the older generation. She turns on +her father in the end, determined that she will not be cheated of the +joy of life as was he. + +In "The Foleys," another little play of the same year, 1902, a play that +for all its crudity and incompleteness is full of insight into Catholic +Ireland, youth is again the theme, or the intolerance and +self-righteousness of youth. "Eoghan's Wife" (1902) is only a monologue, +only the old story of the woman who finds her home lonely and +depressing because the wrong man is the man of the house. She looks out +over "brown bogs with black water," wondering what is the way of escape +from it all. + +"Broken Soil," put on at the Abbey Theatre on December 4, 1903, is the +first play of Mr. Colum with which, in after years, he was in any way +content, but he was not too content with it, rewriting it in 1907 as +"The Fiddler's House," and, I think, in the main improving it. + +Mr. Colum, a youth with an appetite for reading as insatiable as his +impulse to write, read not only his Ibsen but his M. Maeterlinck. Back +of "Broken Soil" is Ibsen, back of "The Miracle of the Corn" is M. +Maeterlinck. "The Miracle of the Corn" was put in rehearsal by the Irish +National Theatre Society in 1904, but so far as I know it was never +played by that organization, its first staging I have record of being by +"The Theatre of Ireland" at the Abbey Theatre on May 22, 1908. Here +again is youth a leading theme, the power youth has, if it be wistful +and tender and pleading, to soften the heart of age. It may seem to some +that the girl Aislinn is only a symbol, only the dream of his youth +returned to the farmer Fardorrougha, who has hardened his heart even in +famine time, but whether apparition, or child of the flesh and symbol, +too, Aislinn is the bringer-back to Fardorrougha of the soft heart of +youth. + +As the Irishman in America is preferably a city dweller, it may be a +little difficult for his fellow Americans of other ancestry to +understand why the Irishmen at home were so concerned with Mr. Colum's +next play, whose theme, as whose title, is "The Land." The cry for a +home and a bit of land, a cottage around a hearth and around the +cottage a few acres of your own, is a cry that has been heard in all +ages and among all people. It is a cry that we all have cried at times, +gypsy-hearted though we be; it is a cry that even the city-loving +eighteenth century raised in all the "Mine be a cot" poems, whether of +Pomfret or Pope or any other of the many who followed the same fashion, +and it is a cry that is especially loud in present-day America. But none +of us can feel the call of the land, none of us can desire it with more +intensity than the Irishman of to-day, city-dweller though we find his +kin in America; there is no one class of people anywhere in the world +who want the land as the Irish peasants of to-day want it. Their fathers +and grandfathers saw the fields that they had farmed turned into +pastures for cattle, as the Scotch crofters saw their holdings turned +into deer-parks; the two generations of Irishmen now respectively in old +age and middle age have known what it is to be taxed out of the places +their improvements as tenants made more valuable; and to-day those of +the old folk that are still alive and those of the middle years that are +still in Ireland are getting back to the land, along with the younger +generation that desires it almost as ardently, but were not born upon +it, profiting by legislation that compels landlords to sell to the +Government, which in turn sells to the small proprietors. + +The Irish peasant loves his bit of land far more than his language, and +even more, I think, in the bottom of his heart, than he loves his +church, although allegiance to his church is a duty that he puts before +any love. A boreen in bogland is not a lonely place to the Irish +peasant if he have neighbors of long standing. It is the big city that +to him at home seems the lonely place, despite the glamour of its +lights, and its shops, and its ceaseless excitements. + +The story of "The Land" is, as I have said, the story of the struggle +between love of land and the _Wanderlust_, with the love of woman as the +decisive factor in the latter's victory. Matt Cosgar is the son of a +peasant farmer, the last of many that the hardness of Murtagh has driven +to America, and he, too, goes in the end, after his father's will is +broken, because the girl of his choice is restless and will not be +content as a farmer's wife. Matt and Ellen, the fit and the strong, go +to America, Cornelius and Sally, the hair-brained and the drudge, +remain. Symbolic this is, of course, of the situation in Ireland to-day, +or at least yesterday, but the characters are strongly individualized +and show no tendency to harden into types. In "The Land" the +restlessness of youth, its call to wander, is the motive that clashes +with love of the home and of the home place. In "The Fiddler's House" +there is youth desiring peace, and youth afraid of love, in Annie and +Maire Hourican; and the call of the road to old Conn, the fiddler. +Sacrifice is rare in youth, and if it were not that Maire is afraid of +her love for Brian McConnell, and gives up her home and takes to the +road with her father partly because she fears her love for her lover, +fears her powerlessness with him, it would hardly be in the course of +nature that she would sacrifice so much for her sister. It was a sure +instinct that guided Mr. Colum so to make believable a sacrifice at +first view seemingly so great. Even in this play, which Mr. Colum +intends as a study of the artistic temperament, the land is a motive +second only to the call of the road. Maire cared somewhat for the land, +less than her sister cared, more than her father cared, though he too +loved it in so far as the artist's gypsy nature will permit. It is the +road and his music, however, that Conn cares for most, and in his +expression of such love he attains to an eloquence that is Mr. Colum at +his best: "I'm leaving the land behind me, too; but what's the land, +after all, against the music that comes from the far strange places, +when the night is on the ground, and the bird in the grass is quiet?" As +one reads, aloud, as one must, one thinks now of the Old Testament and +now of Synge. + +Although Mr. Colum determined to put aside thoughts of dramas of old +Ireland in 1900, he evidently could not keep the old legends out of his +mind. They intrude now and then into his verses for all his modernity, +and one of them, "The Destruction of the House of Da Derga," forced him +to turn it into a play. "The Destruction of the Hostel" has not been +published, but it seems to have pleased those who saw and heard it as +played by the boys of St. Enda's School on February 5, 1910. + +In the last play, too, of Mr. Colum, the ending is a parting, here the +parting that death brings. Telling the fortunes of poor old Thomas +Muskerry, who in the end dies a pauper in the workhouse where once he +was master, the play opens our eyes to that life of the small town, +deadliest of lives the world over, a life knowing neither the freedom of +the farm nor the freedom of the city, as such life is lived in Ireland. +In "Thomas Muskerry," in "The Land" and "The Fiddler's House," the +characterization is sure and true. One may take it that this is Ireland, +Ireland on the average, as one cannot take it that that we have in the +plays of Synge or Lady Gregory is Ireland on the average. Crofton +Crilly, the son-in-law of the master, soft and big and blond, is an +unsympathetic but memorable portrait. Unsympathetic and memorable, too, +are the portraits of his son Albert and his daughter Anna, the one +tricky and the other grasping, and the workhouse porter and the old +piper haunt my memory as strange men I have met haunt my memory, year in +and year out. + +All three of these plays are, as I have said, sprung of domestic +problems, sure proof that Mr. Colum is the peasant's son. The family, as +he has pointed out in an article in "The United Irishmen," is not only +what the family is, ordinarily, in northwestern Europe, but that plus +that which the Irish family has inherited of the clan spirit. It was +only yesterday in Ireland that the girl and boy were married to whom +their fathers would, by a process of barter in which their own wishes +were not for a moment considered. They submitted, or came to America. It +was a patriarchal system of society. + +It is not, then, difficult to see how it came about that Mr. Colum, who +began to write so young, came to write so much about youth and the +rebellion of youth, and to write about those other themes of his, themes +all of them made more intense by the youth that is concerned with +them--the land that obsesses the life of the man of the house all +Ireland over, and through him obsesses the lives of his family; and love +of woman. + +Mr. Colum does not intrude his own personality into his plays, but it is +felt, as it should be felt, in every one of lyrics. Reading them one has +a sense of a youth like the youth of some characters in his plays; a +youth more manly than Cornelius's, less restless than Ellen's; a youth +serious and troubled with thought; a youth in revolt against much in the +old order, but tolerant of the passing generation that fears it +"knocking at the door." It is a youth impassioned rather than +passionate, more pronouncedly a youth of mind than a youth of heart. +When I say youth of mind, I mean not immaturity of mind, but the outlook +of the young mind; not radicalism, but a fixed determination to think +things out afresh and not to accept them because of any convention. + +Eloquence one always looks for in the writing of an Irishman, and humor +and power over dialogue, but Mr. Colum is too serious with youth to care +much for humor, and, like Mr. Martyn, though not to the same extent, he +has trouble with his dialogue. The feeling for the situation, the +understanding of what is in the characters' minds, is in Mr. Colum, but +the dialogue does not always accommodate itself to situation and +thought. What Mr. Colum makes his characters say has in it the thought +and the sentiment of what they would say, but the words as often lack +life as have it. It is this difficulty with dialogue that has prevented +Mr. Colum, in his plays, true and finely planned as they are, from +reaching great achievement. As dramatist he is still more full of +promise than of achievement, and to be a dramatist of promise after ten +years of playwriting is to be at a standstill. In lyric poetry it is +otherwise with Mr. Colum. There he has attained. You will find his real +value in "Wild Earth" slight though the book may seem. Here is reading +of life, here is imagination, here is lyric cry. Read these little poems +once and they will be your familiars forever. + + +MR. WILLIAM BOYLE + +One wonders if justice has been done Mr. William Boyle. If it has not it +is because he is a playwright of one play, "The Building Fund" (1905). +He has written three other plays that count, "The Eloquent Dempsey" +(1906), "The Mineral Workers" (1906), and "Family Failings" (1912), but +"The Building Fund" is of a higher power than any of these. "Family +Failings," produced in the spring of 1912, I have not read, but +according to all accounts it does not mark any advance upon "The Mineral +Workers" or "The Eloquent Dempsey." "The Mineral Workers," essentially a +propagandist play, and "The Eloquent Dempsey," essentially a satire, are +hardly, even in intention, of the first order of seriousness in art. +There are characters in these two plays faithful to human nature, and +faithful to the ways of eastern Galway, where the scenes of all of the +plays of Mr. Boyle are laid. But there are so many other characters in +them that are either caricatures or "stock" that, funny as the plays +seem upon the stage, they do not impress the deliberate judgment as +real. The many characters of "The Mineral Workers" and its several +motives are too much for Mr. Boyle; he loses his grip and the play +falls to pieces. "The Eloquent Dempsey" suffers from the caricaturing of +its characters, and its action degenerates into unbelievable farce +almost on the curtain-rise. "The Building Fund," however, is serious and +true, and at the same time just as full of wit and just as biting in +satire and just as effective on the stage as "The Eloquent Dempsey." Its +characterization is recognized as distinctive and authentic even on +reading. Revealed through the almost perfect work of the players trusted +with its presentation by the Abbey Theatre on their American tour of +1911-12, it seemed even more than distinctive and authentic, it seemed +inspired by profound insight. + +"The Building Fund" tells the story of the outgeneraling of grasping son +and conniving daughter's daughter by a hard old woman of the strong +farmer class in the west of Ireland. Mrs. Grogan is approached as the +curtain rises by Michael O'Callaghan, an elderly farmer, and Dan +MacSweeney, a young farmer, in the role of collectors for the fund for +the new Catholic church. They are sent away by her and by her son Shan +without any contribution, but their visit suggests to her a way by which +she can disinherit her son and her granddaughter, wishful for her death, +she thinks, in their eagerness for her fortune. Shan is open in his +concern as to her disposal of her money; and although the girl hides her +purpose under pretended solicitude for her grandmother's health and is a +great help to the old woman, Mrs. Grogan believes her also to be +plotting for the fortune and is equally resentful toward both. So when +the collectors call again, Mrs. Grogan makes a will, in which we learn, +on her death shortly after, she has left all her fortune away from her +family to the church. For all their plotting, the audience feels that +the old woman is more malevolent than either son or granddaughter, and, +after all, the son had worked hard on the home place and the +granddaughter, slyboots as she was, undoubtedly was really kind. Both +are of her blood, and it is human to feel that parents should leave +their money to their children rather than to charity. There is some +amelioration of the condition of Shan and Sheila in the thought that +they may stay on, with Father Andrew's permission, as managers of the +old farm, henceforth the church farm. But sympathize with them though +you may, you feel it is only right that selfishness should over-reach +itself. + +The play is not any more complimentary to Catholic Galway than "The +Drone" of Mr. Mayne is complimentary to Protestant Down, but it is +seldom that comedy is complimentary to human nature, and "The Building +Fund" is comedy. That is, it is comedy as Ibsen sees drama, or character +farce as Coleridge defines it. It is, in the Greek sense, perhaps even +tragedy; certainly, it is tragedy from the standpoint of Shan and +Sheila, for circumstances certainly get the better of them. From Mrs. +Grogan's standpoint it is comedy, for she, through her will, even though +she is now dead, has got the better of circumstances as represented by +the plotting of her son and granddaughter. If we look at "The Building +Fund" from the standpoint of Shan and Sheila, but without sympathy for +them, it is only character farce, for although circumstances get the +better of them, we do not then care for them, and a play in which +characters are overwhelmed by fate, but in which our sympathy is not +with them, is, if we follow Coleridge, really farce. Whatever "The +Building Fund" is, its characterization is admirable. Some might say its +men and women approximate to types, that Mrs. Grogan is the avaricious +old woman, Shan the sanctimonious miser, Sheila the sly minx, Michael +the benevolent old man, and Dan the gay blade. Types or not, you will +find all of them in Ireland, and all of them wherever human nature is +human nature. If they are types, however, each has a personality, but +whether all of them would stand out with such individuality had one not +seen them so fully realized on the stage, I cannot say. The tottering, +bitter old woman of Miss Allgood and the miserly, fearful son of Mr. +Sinclair are more memorable than the other impersonations only in that +they are fatter parts than Sheila, Michael O'Callaghan, and Dan +MacSweeney, played respectively by Miss McGee, Mr. O'Rourke, and Mr. +O'Donovan. + +Mother and son are, I am sure, just as complete in the writing of Mr. +Boyle as in the acting of Miss Allgood and Mr. Sinclair. Both are, +indeed, as finely imagined and as faithfully realized as any characters +in modern English comedy. And you may have to go further afield than +modern English comedy to find such a minute study of resentful and +malevolent age as this portrait of Mrs. Grogan. We all know that +perversity that will not allow its possessor to be satisfied with any +effort to please. Here is an illustration of it as Mr. Boyle has seen +it:-- + + _Sheila_. Will I boil an egg for your breakfast, granny? + + _Mrs. Grogan_ (_sarcastically_). Oh, to be sure! More extravagance. + You know very well I couldn't eat it, and you'll have it for + yourself. Waste, waste; nothing but idleness and waste all round. + God help me! (_Coughs._) + + _Sheila pours out a cup of tea and hands it to Mrs. Grogan._ + + _Sheila_. Drink that drop of tea, granny--it's fresh made. + + _Mrs. Grogan_. What did you do with the bottom of the pot? Threw it + to the ducks, I suppose? + + _Sheila_ (_pointing to the table_). I have it here for myself, + granny. + + _Mrs. Grogan_ (_sipping tea_). When I was a girl I never got a sup + o' tea from year's end to year's end. + + _Sheila_. It was very dear, then; wasn't it? + + _Mrs. Grogan_. It's dear enough still with everybody using it all + day long. Did you feed the hens? + + _Sheila_. Long ago, and let the ducks out, too. + + _Mrs. Grogan_. I suppose it's in the oats they'll be by this time. + What about the calves? _Grogan goes out_. + + _Sheila_. I gave them their milk and put them in the bawn. + + _Mrs. Grogan_. With the linen on the hedge? Why, they'll chew it + into rags, and, maybe, choke themselves. + + _Sheila_. No, granny, dear; I spread the linen in the upper garden, + where the sun comes the earliest. + + _Mrs. Grogan_. I see it's stole ye want it. There's half a dozen + tinkers squatted in the quarry. + + _Sheila_ (_wearily._) They went a week ago. + + _Mrs. Grogan_. Ah, dear! There's what it is to be old! I never hear + anything that's going on now till it's all over. Is that egg + boiled? + + _Sheila_. Granny, dear, I thought you couldn't take one. + + _Mrs. Grogan_. It's the little bit I eat that's grudged me now, I + see. + +Though there is little of it in this passage that I quote, the +picturesque phrase that no Irish writer is without is Mr. Boyle's, as a +matter of course, but there is no particular individuality in his +handling of it. Style he has not, nor any background of romance, or +beauty of that sort that illumines the grayness of the comedies of +Ibsen, or of any other sort of beauty than that approach to beauty there +is in skilled craftsmanship. + +Admirably arranged, too, are the situations of "The Eloquent Dempsey," a +satire on the man who straddles all questions, as at one time, at any +rate, did so many Irish politicians. Dempsey might have continued his +career of straddling indefinitely had he not a mania for speech-making +that he could not control. In the end, however, he was undone by a +well-intentioned conspiracy, arranged by his wife, to get him out of +politics altogether and out of his liquor-selling and into farming far +from town. I cannot identify Dempsey with any one prominent Irish +statesman, but the lesser fry on both Nationalist and Unionist sides are +as easy to identify as the men that suggested the characters of "A Tale +of a Town." In "The Eloquent Dempsey" all the art of Mr. Boyle has been +lavished on the central figure, which, when all is said, remains a +caricature, and caricature uncompensated for by any great or noble +characteristic of the play, whose primal quality is but cleverness. +Effective as its satire is, and provocative of laughter as it always is +on the stage, it is altogether cheaper in its quality than "The Building +Fund." + +"The Mineral Workers," with its chief portrait that of a returned +Irish-American mining engineer, takes us to certain phases of society +not met among the publicans and politicians and peasants of Mr. Boyle's +earlier plays. Other than these are not only the hero, Stephen J. +O'Reilly, but the aristocrat, Sir Thomas Musgrove, and his sister, Mrs. +Walton, who is of the family connection of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's +Georgianna Tidman. Dan Fogarty, the holdback, unprogressive farmer, is +the sharpest-cut and truest to life of all the characters, so clear-cut +and true, in fact, that one thinks of him as almost a fellow of Shan +Grogan in "The Building Fund." Uncle Bartle is sentimentalized, and +Kitty Mulroy has no such personality as Sheila O'Dwyer. Contrast "The +Mineral Workers" with a novel of the returned American, "Dan the Dollar" +of Mr. Bullock, and the calibre of Mr. Boyle's play is quickly revealed. + +What Mr. Boyle had been had he come into touch with the movement ten +years earlier, it is of course beside the point to speculate. He was not +a young man when he first became acquainted with the art of the Abbey +Theatre in London and was impelled to write plays for it. He was, +though, able to adapt the experience he had had as a story-writer to the +stage in "The Building Fund." That being so, why is it that his later +plays, successful though they have been as vehicles for the purveying of +amusement on the stage, have not taken rank by their art or by their +reading of life with "The Building Fund "? It may be that it was the one +theme susceptible of dramatic presentation that he had brooded over long +enough to transmute into terms of drama, and that the later plays, full +of successful stage tricks though they are, did not come out of his +knowledge of Irish life. Knowledge of Ireland he ought to have, for he +is said to have lived for comparatively long periods in various places +in country as an excise officer. As such Mr. Boyle was himself one of +the principal types, that of the official, that exist in Ireland, and in +a position to learn much of many other types, surprisingly few of which +he has realized with any depth of insight in his plays. + +It would seem with his great success seven years back and his newer +plays less effective, that we cannot look to Mr. Boyle with great hope +for the future, as we can to Mr. Robinson or Mr. Murray. When we so say, +however, let us remember that Lady Gregory did not attempt plays until +she was close on fifty. + + +MR. T.C. MURRAY + +The North is generally held to be another country than the rest of +Ireland. Ulster is alien alike in race and religion and economic +conditions from Connacht and Leinster and Munster. It is Scotch Ireland, +Protestant Ireland, industrial Ireland. It is, moreover,--many of its +citizens say therefore,--prosperous Ireland. Certainly men would not +divide all Irishmen into "Irishmen" and "Scotch Irishmen" were there not +many grounds for such a distinction. All other of the immigrants into +Ireland have, as a people, disappeared. The Norman has left his mark on +the land in his castles and his names, but as a distinctive element of +the population he no longer exists, any more than does Welshman or +Englishman or Palatinate. Apart from distinctions of class the men of +Ireland are "Irishmen" and "Scotch Irishmen," and until yesterday, +therefore, Nationalists and Unionists. + +[Illustration] + +And yet, definite as are these distinctions, life in the various parts +of Ireland seems much alike, class for class, as it is represented by +the many contemporaneous playwrights, whether the scenes of their plays +are Down or Kerry, Galway or Wicklow. A tinker is a tinker wherever you +find him, a strong farmer a strong farmer, a landlord a landlord. The +same emotions dominate rival brothers in "The Turn of the Road" and in +"Birthright," though the Orangeman turned actor wrote the one and the +Cork schoolmaster the other. Mr. T.C. Murray is one of those to whom Mr. +Yeats has given the name "Cork Realists." His first play, "The Wheel o' +Fortune," was produced by the Cork Dramatic Society at the Dun, Cork, +December 2, 1909. It has not been published, so far as I know, and all +that I learn from the references to it in newspapers is that it is a +one-act ironic comedy about matchmaking. Mr. Murray brought his next +play, "Birthright," to the Abbey Theatre, where it was performed on +October 27, 1910. If "Maurice Harte" (1912) stands the test of time and +travel as has "Birthright," Mr. Murray has come to the Abbey Theatre to +take a place of prominence among its playwrights. Some of the appeal of +"Birthright" is in its story, the story of Cain and Abel, if you like, a +story that is as lasting in its appeal as is "The Eternal Triangle," but +there is as much appeal in the characterization, which you feel as you +read almost as intimately as you come to know it on the stage. There are +many plays that are altogether colorless in the reading unless you have +unusual power of visualization and can see them as you sit in your study +as if they were embodied before you on the stage. Such plays, +visualized or unvisualized in the study, are often real enough on the +stage. "Birthright," as I have said, is not one of these. It visualizes +itself for you, with no effort on your part, as you read it, though of +course, as every real play will, it moves you more in the playing. It +was admirably cast on its first production at the Abbey Theatre, and it +was just as admirably cast on the American tour of 1911-12, Miss +O'Doherty's Maura and Mr. Morgan's Bat Morrissey being wonderful +pictures of a doting mother and a stern father troubled by their +preferences, the one for the elder, the other for the younger son. The +rival sons were done to the life by Mr. O'Donovan and Mr. Kerrigan, and +the neighbor of Mr. O'Rourke was, too, a complete realization of the +Irish peasant of the valley of the Lee. It is a stern and patient +realism this of Mr. Murray in telling of how Hughie, the elder son, the +apple of his mother's eye, the idol of the parish for his hurly playing, +and his verse-making, and his free and pleasant ways, is disinherited +and condemned to seek his fortune in America by his father because his +younger son was the better man on the farm. There was back of Bat's +decision, too, his feeling that his eldest-born was more of his mother, +whose blood was part gentle, than of himself, the grubber of the earth. +Shane, like his father, was the peasant plowman, Hughie something of the +sporting gentleman. The end of it all is murder, the younger son killing +the elder with the hurly when he is accused by his brother of plotting +to grab the farm. Many who saw "Birthright" in America were moved by it +more than by any other play in the repertoire of the company, and I +have heard more than one whose supreme interest is the theatre say that +it was the best play new to America presented in America during the +winter of 1911-12. I do not so hold, for "The Well of the Saints" and +"In the Shadow of the Glen" were new to America in the winter of +1911-12, and "The Playboy of the Western World" was new to every city in +America save to Chicago, where Mr. Hart Conway presented it at his +dramatic school in the spring of 1909. I can, however, understand why +"Birthright" so appealed. It is because of the theme, because of the +beautiful character of Maura Morrissey, because of the absolute +faithfulness to life, as all the world knows it, of the play. I have +traveled the road to Macroom that these farmers traveled, and so I know +the externals of the life they lead: I have known intimately and I know +intimately just such people as these, Irish peasants, some of whom +spoiled their children, thinking the boy they loved must not be +"crossed," and some of whom preferred one child to another even to the +extent of reversing the custom of primogeniture that is as fixed a rule +among them as if their property was entailed, and so I can vouch for the +absolute fidelity of Mr. Murray's art. It is a realism little relieved +by humor; unrelieved either by any background of romance, but gaming a +dignity from its intensity of conception and its simplicity of unfolding +that makes you feel, as you read, or as you watch and listen, that you +are in the presence of nobility. Its style, maybe, is homespun, but it +is none the worse for that, and it never approaches at all to the cheap +or mean. + +The appeal of this realism is as poignant in "Maurice Harte" (1912) as +in "Birthright," though the story of the later play is not so universal +as is that of the play that brought Mr. Murray his share of fame. +"Maurice Harte" tells of the disaster that comes to a young divinity +student of Maynooth whose parents drive him back to college to seek +ordination even after he tells them that he has no vocation for the +priesthood. The curtain rises on Maurice, a youth of twenty-two, trying +to tell his mother, whose youngest he is, and the child of her middle +age that it would be sacrilege for him to take orders with no vocation. +His courage fails him, as it had on previous occasions on which he tried +to confess his agony because of his false position, and he finally begs +the Parish Priest to break the desolating news to the family. They are +only farmers in a small way, the Hartes: and the father and mother, the +son at home, Owen, and the three older brothers in Boston, have all made +sacrifices to give Maurice his education. When the priest tells of the +boy's decision not to return to Maynooth, mother and father and brother +all insist that he must stick to his earlier intention, vocation or no +vocation. + +They are in monetary difficulties because of him, and if the story went +out that he was not back at Maynooth his mother declares it "wouldn't be +east in Macroom when we'd have the bailiffs walking in that door." She +tells him, too, his being a spoiled priest will cost his brother his +bride and her fortune that would help them to pay off their debts. The +boy cannot withstand their pleading, and the first act ends with his +promise that he will go back to Maynooth, a promise wrung from him even +though he knows at the time of its making that his return may bring him +to madness in the end. + +Act II, nine months later, shows us again the kitchen of the farmhouse +of West Cork, with happiness in the hearts of all there, save some +slight apprehension on the father's part over his new clothes and the +terrors of a journey with Father Mangan to Maynooth. In this relaxing of +the tension of the play humor is not out of place, and its attainment +here by Mr. Murray shows that he could write comedy did he choose. We +hear that the marriage settlement between Bride Burke and Owen has been +made, and that Maurice is to marry them; and that he has bested all his +classmates in his final examinations. Upon the pride and happiness in a +son sure of a good match, and the glory of another son about to be +"priested" and to say mass in the local church, breaks in word that he +cannot be ordained because of illness. And close upon this bad news +comes Maurice himself, broken down mentally from the strain of driving +himself to do what he knows to be wrong, from the strain of committing, +as he believes, sacrilege. Father and mother and brother realize that it +is they who have driven him mad, but such is human nature that mother +and brother, at least, have thoughts of themselves even at this moment, +as well as thoughts for Maurice with "his mind that's gone." His brother +fears that Bride will not come into a house so disgraced, and his +mother, her years-long dream of her youngest a priest gone on the wind, +is struck dumb with horror at the thought of what her life will be from +this out. + +The full significance of the tragedy of Maurice's fate can be realized +only by those who know intimately the ambitions hugged close to heart by +the Irish Catholic mother. It is more to her to have her boy a priest +even than it was yesterday to the Scotch Presbyterian mother to have her +boy a minister of the Kirk. It is the greatest glory that can come to +such a peasant mother to give one of her sons to the priesthood. + +There is, I think, no propaganda in the play, and no intentional satire, +although in a way "Maurice Harte" affords a parallel to so definitely a +propagandist satire as Mr. Robinson's "Harvest." It is not education +that is the curse, however, in "Maurice Harte," but the belief that only +priesthood in the end can justify the sacrifices without which a college +education is almost impossible for an Irish peasant. Certain it is that +it is only for the pride of having their boy a priest that the typical +Irish Catholic peasant parents would make such sacrifices as the Hartes +have made, sacrifices involving them in debt to the extent of a thousand +dollars, to secure their son an education. + +In a sense "Maurice Harte" is far other than the provincial study I have +here outlined. Its theme is allied, unquestionably, to that theme so +much larger in its relations than that of the spoiled priest, the theme +of the rebellious son, the son who will live his own life no matter what +may be his parents' will. It is only allied to it, however, not to be +identified with it, because Maurice is too fearful of disappointing his +parents, and too shrinking and ineffectual, to go against his parents' +will. In Ireland, as I have said elsewhere, such parental will, by a +survival of authority from the days of the clan system, was law until +yesterday, and there will therefore be those, I have no doubt, who will +find in the play a conflict of the old order and the new, but I do not +believe such conflict was the author's intent. Indeed, the play is +wholly of the old order. No love of man and woman figures as motive in +it as none had figured in "Birthright." There is parental love, of +course, in both plays, though in the case of both parents in "Maurice +Harte" and in the father in "Birthright" parental pride is a stronger +motive than parental love. Very true to Irish life is this absence of +passion as a deciding factor in the fates of man and woman, this +insistence upon the importance of the family, this subordination of the +rights of the individual. Mr. Murray wished to write in "Maurice Harte" +a play of the very heart of Irish Catholic life, and such a play he has +written, a play that marks no decline, either in characterization or +situation, from "Birthright," and to say that is to give "Maurice Harte" +praise of the highest. + + +MR. S. LENNOX ROBINSON + +Mr. Lennox Robinson, like most of the Abbey Theatre dramatists, has +chosen to write about the ground under his feet. The son of a clergyman +whose charges have been in the southwest of Ireland, Mr. Robinson spent +his boyhood and youth in the Bandon Valley. He had been trying his hand +at writing from the time that he was ten years old, editing an amateur +magazine as he grew older, feeling about for the thing that he could do. +A visit of the Abbey Theatre Company to Cork was the awakening. He saw +a new acting, he saw a new art of the stage, and he knew as he saw that +it was in drama his work lay. It was not, however, for the Cork Dramatic +Society that he did his first play, but for the Abbey Theatre. "The +Clancy Name" was put on on October 8, 1908, when its author was but four +days past his twenty-second birthday. What this first version was like I +do not know, but Mr. Robinson has reprinted the second version, put on +with the full strength of the National Theatre Society at the Abbey +Theatre on September 30, 1909. As printed, it is an ironic little play, +recording the great day in the life of the Widow Clancy, the day on +which she pays off a five years' loan and stands without a debt of any +kind, her farm all her own, the Clancy name respected throughout her +world. But on this day of her triumph, when she would add to her +happiness by making a match for her son, John cannot rejoice with her, +and on her questioning him as to his moodiness he blurts out that he is +the man who killed James Power, a quiet man whose unexplained +disappearance is the mystery of the countryside. Worse yet, John insists +that he will give himself up to the authorities. It is terrible to know +one's son a murderer; it is intolerable to think of a Clancy being +hanged and of the glory of the name forever departed. She persuades him +finally not to tell, but he fears he will, so, when the chance comes, he +finds the only way out, the way of peace for his mother and peace for +himself. A car driven by a drunken neighbor is threatening the life of a +little child playing in the middle of the road. John Clancy pushes him +out of the way and allows himself to be driven down. They bring him to +his mother's house still alive and raving incoherently of the murder, +but he dies before he tells his secret and the Clancy name is saved. It +is not a very gripping theme, but the play brings to us an acute +character study of the typical managing woman of the small farmer class. +We feel her tireless energy, her drive, her high pride, assets of worth +in the fight to live. There is a little humor, natural and unforced, +some picturesqueness of phrase, a revelation of knowledge of life in one +corner of Ireland. There is nothing, however, in the play to make it +comparable with the three that followed it on the stage of the Abbey +Theatre, "The Crossroads" (1909); "Harvest" (1910); and "Patriots" +(1912). "The Lesson of Life," a little one-act comedy, presented at the +Dun Theatre, Cork, December 2, 1909, Mr. Robinson has disowned. Why I do +not know, though the fact that it was not produced at the Abbey may +indicate that even at the time of its production he felt that it was not +up to the level of his work. Mr. Robinson has not republished "The +Lesson of Life," but the reviews state that it was an amusing little +play, though in no way a serious reading of life. + +[Illustration] + +"The Clancy Name," "The Crossroads," "Harvest," and "Patriots" are all +on themes that hit home at Irish institutions, and yet it would be wrong +to say any one of them is basically either satirical or propagandist. +All are primarily readings of life. "The Crossroads" alone, perhaps, is +more than a reading of life. Certainly, after its needless prologue, it +is fine art through to the end. This scene, with its satire of Irish +debating societies, is now, wisely, dropped when the play is produced. +We can learn enough of Ellen in the play itself to understand why she +does as she does without this picture of her in Dublin. Her story is +that of a woman who hates the much talk of patriotism in Dublin and the +lack of doing anything tangible for Ireland. In Dublin she has worked +her way up from servant to assistant in a bookshop, but she goes back +happily to the country to give her sister a chance in town such as she +has had, thinking that perhaps she herself can lead her people into +better ways of farming and of ordering their lives generally through the +knowledge she has got in town. It is through such as Ellen that the +Irish Industries Organization Society in actual life accomplishes an +important part of its work. + +In the first act of "The Crossroads" we find Ellen at home, in her old +peasant dress, having made the hens lay so well in winter as to arouse +wonder in a neighbor as to whether, "Is it right for hens to be laying +that way so early in the year?" A match is being made for her by her +mother with a man that has a good farm. Ellen desires the match very +much, for this is just the farm on which to try the new methods that +shall bring prosperity to the people of the valley and so stem the +emigration to America. She does not love Tom Dempsey, this strong +farmer, and she does half-love Brian Connor, whom she had known in +Dublin, but now that he has come down to ask her to marry him she +chooses the farmer, brutal though she knows him, because as his wife she +can do the work for Ireland that she has imagined for herself. The +loveless marriage, so universal an institution all over Ireland, made it +nothing out of the way for Ellen to act as she did, even though at the +time of the action of the play a higher ideal of marriage than that of +the old matchmaking had come in. It is this institution that Mr. +Robinson, from one point of view, might be thought to be attacking in +the play; it is this institution, certainly, that is the theme of the +play. Is it a tribute to Irishmen and Irishwomen to acknowledge that +this loveless marriage has worked on the whole as well as the marriage +of sentiment, or as the marriage of sexual infatuation, or as the +marriage of comrade hearts that we believe we have in America? As a +matter of fact there were not as many loveless marriages as might seem +at first thought. The match made up between the father of the girl and +the father of the boy was the usual sort of marriage among the +stay-at-home Irish girls and boys up to 1880, but how many girls and +boys for the past one hundred and fifty years have come to America to +escape it? Look up your family traditions, you who have Irish ancestors, +and find is it not true that these ancestors, whether Reeds of Down or +Nolans of Meath, fled to America because they would wed the mate of +their choice. Even to-day boys and girls come here from the same motive, +though of course it would be preposterous to deny that to many it is +rather Eldorado than the land of freedom. + +Act II reveals poor Ellen seven years later. She has lost her two boys +by fever; she has failed in her work on her own farm, though she has +brought untold blessings of progressiveness to the other farms around +Ballygurteen; she has lost the appreciation of her husband. She whom we +loved for a personality as winning as that of an Emma or a Tess is now +a drudge, almost a slattern, gray-haired, hopeless, almost hated by a +brutal husband. The loveless marriage has proved a curse. Upon the woman +of his dreams so dethroned comes Brian Connor, now a successful +novelist, and, finding how things are, falls, for all his intended +restraint, into a fight with Tom, whom but for Ellen he would have +choked to death. Brian urges Ellen to go away with him, but, after a +moment's faltering, she refuses to go. This is the last scene. Tom, who +has heard Brian's proposal and his wife's rejection of it, comes slowly +down the room. + + _Tom_. Was it me you saved or was it the young man? When you + pulled him off me, did you save me, or was it him you saved + from being hung? Tell me that, Ellen McCarthy. + + [_Silence._ + + Ah! 't is aisy seen. + + [_Puts his hat on, and goes to the door, and takes the key out + of the lock_. + + _Ellen_ (_looking round_). What are you doing? (_Frightened._) + What are you doing? + + _Tom_. I'll tell you what I'm doing. I'm locking the door the + way you won't go after that young man; an' I'm going to step + down to the village now for a sup of drink. An' then--I'm + coming back; an', by God, I'll make you pay for this night's + work, Ellen McCarthy, till you'd wish you were dead--for the + black curse you brought on this farm, an' for the liking you + have to the young man. + + [_Goes out. Ellen remains sitting at the table, staring in + front of her with sad, hopeless eyes_. + +The turning of the key in the lock ends the play, leaving brutality +unimaginable as the fate of Ellen. + +It is a severe reading of the Irish peasant, this of Tom Dempsey. +Murder may come of his blackness of heart. He is a far worse man, of +course, than poor John Clancy, who killed a man in an unpremeditated +fight, sure murderer though Clancy be. Yet despite such heroes or at +least such characters in his plays, no one would say that in either "The +Clancy Name" or "The Crossroads" Mr. Robinson held a brief against the +Irish peasant. He most certainly does not. He likes the Irish peasant. +His plays are "stories of mine own people" faithfully told. He does not +spare the Cork farmer, but he does not distort him. Why however, his +"Harvest" was allowed to be played unmolested in New York, after the +"The Playboy of the Western World" met with organized opposition, can be +explained only by recognition of the fact that the Irishmen of the +patriotic societies are slaves of precedent. "The Playboy of the Western +World" had always met with opposition, so it should meet with opposition +in New York. "Harvest" escaped in New York because its uncomplimentary +personages were unheralded. Not that there is anything in "Harvest," any +more than in "The Playboy of the Western World," that any +self-respecting Irishman need object to. "Harvest" shows the disastrous +effects the wrong sort of primary education, as taught by the country +schoolmaster of the old type, the type that was prevalent before the +present type, brought about. The present-day schoolmaster is in sympathy +with system of education that will keep the children on the land or in +an industry near the home place; the older type would give them an +education that would send them to the cities to be priests and lawyers +and secretaries and typists and chemists and what-nots. Old William +Lordan, the schoolmaster, had, evidently, in the opinion of the +playwright, the sins of many on his shoulders, and yet one, knowing that +it is the system and not the man that is at fault, cannot help feeling +that Mr. Robinson is rather severe on what is in life a really lovable +though mistaken sort of man. + +"Harvest" shows that of the six children of Tim Hurley, but the three +that come into the play are loyal to their father: Maurice, who works +the home farm; Jack, the apothecary's clerk from Dublin, who tries to +help with the farmwork, but is too much of a weakling to be anything of +a help; and Mary, who from typist has turned mistress, now to this man, +now to that. Mary, come home to get away from her wrong life, is called +back to London by the excitement of its life, which has become a +necessity to her. Jack, the chemist, in the end deserts the home; and is +off at the end of the play, with his upper-class wife, for America or +the colonies. Only Maurice is more than half-entitled to our respect. +The son who is the priest is in America to collect for the Church at the +time of his family's need, and so is not helpful to his family; the +solicitor son is climbing socially, and, needing a motor-car to help him +to position, prefers to spend his money on himself rather than on the +home place that was robbed to pay for his education; and the secretary +son is so ashamed of "the ditch out of which he was digged" that he has +changed both his name and his religion. + +All five of the children who went out from the home educated, as the +schoolmaster wished them to go, have been educated at the expense of +those that remained on the farm, Maurice the hard-working farmer and old +Timothy the father. But the father, too, is far from what he should be, +as one must suspect, not believing that education alone can account for +so many gone wrong. Timothy burns down some unimportant farm buildings +for the insurance upon them. This practice is so common in all parts of +the world civilized sufficiently to have insurance that I wonder +insurance companies take risks on backwoods farms anywhere. An old man +with whom I have talked often in the mountains of northeastern +Pennsylvania answered me one day, when I asked him how it was his barn +caught fire, "The insurance got too hot." He was a German, a man in his +prime a good worker and not a bad representative of the mountaineer of +his state. One must not, then, fasten on old Timothy as a character +distinctively Irish, at least in this phase of his character. He surely +is universal, a representative of one type of disingenuous countryman. + +The characterization in "Harvest" falls short of that of "The +Crossroads," but perhaps it had to be if Mr. Robinson was to make his +point. As one realizes that perhaps these people are but pawns with +which to win the game that Mr. Robinson has set out, one remembers that +their creator spent some weeks with Mr. Shaw and Mr. Barker in London, +and one understands, too, many other of the failings of "Harvest." It is +but another of many illustrations of the blight that Mr. Shaw has +brought upon the modern English stage. + +It is a two-edged satire that Mr. Robinson employs in his "Patriots" +(1912), a satire that cuts into the sham agitation of some political +leagues, an agitation that is talk only, and at the same time cuts with +almost equal sharpness into the physical force party. It is true that it +is not the motives but the wisdom of these latter men that Mr. Robinson +satirizes in the failure of James Nugent, the returned political +prisoner, to stir his townsmen with the kind of talk that set them to +arming in 1893. That their propaganda is no longer possible, if it was +ever possible, is a corollary to the play, even if it could overcome the +inertia that has come to Irishmen with their greater prosperity since +the Land Purchase Act went into force. + +The revolt of the patriot who hates talk and is willing to sacrifice +personal happiness for country is recorded here as it was in "The +Crossroads," and the uselessness of the sacrifice made only too plain. +To one not an Irishman it would perhaps seem that the real drama there +is in the play is smothered by the political satire and that the +politics satirized are of too local an interest for it to have so +universal an appeal as "The Crossroads" or "Harvest." There is an +universal story in "Patriots" that is but slightly developed--the story +of the prisoner's wife, Ann; her love for her daughter, who is a cripple +because of her mother's being dragged here and there by James Nugent in +his campaigning just before her birth; Ann Nugent's turning against her +husband, on his liberation from an eighteen years' imprisonment for +political murder, because of the wrong done her so long ago and because +of the danger to Rose's health that campaigning with her father would +entail. The turning of Ann Nugent from her husband is the really +significant part of the play,--and in thoughts of that we pay scant heed +to the political satire and even to the pathos of the desertion of a +leader by almost all he expected to follow him, and the reduction of his +life, as he puts it bitterly, "to an anecdote--a thing to be told +stories about." And in the end that is the fate he will meet. Time and a +wife that he wronged have broken him. As he staggers off at the end of +the play, a stricken man and older than his forty-five years, this is +his cry:-- + + I've killed a man, I've crippled a child, I've got myself shut up + for eighteen years--God knows what good came of it + all--but--Peter--I meant--I tried ... I know I meant right--and in + prison my cell used to be filled with the sad faces of men like me + who had given everything for Ireland--they wouldn't have come to + me, would they? if I hadn't been of their company. They are here + now--I see them all around me--there is Wolfe Tone, and there is + ... oh, quiet watching faces, I have tried--tried as you tried--and + been broken.... + +With this ability of his to pick out a theme that is basic in Irish +life, and with the years bringing him an experience of life that will +dominate any propagandist purpose, Mr. Robinson should grow in +seriousness of intention and accomplishment. He hates sham, he has sane +and cleansing satire of pretension, he writes good dialogue, his +experience as stage manager of the Abbey Theatre is teaching him the +stage; he is only twenty-five. Do not these things augur a future? + + +MR. RUTHERFORD MAYNE + +It so happened that the last time I was reading the plays of Mr. +Rutherford Mayne, I was also reading the plays of Sir Arthur Wing +Pinero. All the world has heard of the one; only the little band +scattered here and there through the English-speaking countries to whom +letters are a real part of life has heard of the other. I laughed over +"Dandy Dick"; I thought of Miss Rehan playing Georgianna Tidman with all +that gush of spirits that was hers; I thought of Miss Nethersole in her +wonderful youth playing Paula Tanqueray; and as I thought of these two, +each in her way inimitable in her part, thoughts of past moments with +the characters of Mr. Mayne's plays, plays I have never seen on the +stage, came back to me. Had I seen them on the stage would my thoughts +of them have been thoughts of the theatre, as were all my thoughts of +Sir Arthur's plays? It may be, but I think not, I think the great +strength of Mr. Mayne is that he takes you to life; I think the great +weakness of the wide-heard author is that he takes you immediately, in +almost all of his plays, to the theatre, and only secondarily, if at +all, after the memory of his artificiality has died away, to life +itself. + +William John Granahan and John Smith the Tory,--will you forget them, or +Robbie John whom the fiddle called away, or Ebenezer McKie and Francey +Moore, Protestant and Catholic, who together lay in wait for the hated +landlord and shot him as he passed through the glen; or John Murray, +good man, and his bauchle of a brother? You will not forget them, for +they are from life; you have known them, all save Francey, if you have +known Scotchmen who are Lowlanders and Presbyterians, or such North of +Ireland men as are unalterably opposed to Home Rule. They are very like +the Orangemen of the novels of Mr. Shan Bullock, very like the peasants +the English-speaking world outside of Scotland first met in the verse of +Burns; harsher than the Baillie Nicol Jarvies and Dugald Dalgettys of +the kindly Sir Walter, but akin to them and to his Davie Deans and +Dumbiedikeses. + +We are in a more familiar world in the plays of Mr. Mayne than in those +of most of the other writers in the movement--that is, I mean most +American readers are--simply because of Burns and Scott. Had Ireland had +a peer of either in his generation as satirist or romancer the +Irish-Irish would to-day be as familiar to us as are the Scotch-Irish, +who are, of course, transplanted Scotch. The women of this world are +not, however, of types so well known to us as are the men, because the +chivalry of Sir Walter prevented him from giving us his peasant +Scotswomen in as full detail as he gave us his men; but it is not +difficult for us to appreciate Mrs. Granahan and her daughter; Mrs. +McKie, a "woman with a dead soul"; Mary Murray with her daftness over +the boys; and even Sarah McMinn, so true in her managing and meanness, +qualities necessary to the prosperity of her folk. Puritan America can +understand these women and men because they are Puritan, too, with the +ignoble that is in the Puritan as well as with the noble that is just as +surely there. + +It is in the first three plays of Mr. Mayne that we meet these people I +have named, County Down folk all of them, and all Protestant but Francey +Moore. They are the leading characters in "The Turn of the Road" (1906), +"The Drone" (1908), and "The Troth" (1908). The motive of Mr. Mayne's +first play is the old call to wander, the unrest of the vagrant heart, +here the heart of the musician. It is the story of Robbie John Granahan, +who, after burning his fiddle at the desire of a strong farmer whose +daughter he wished to marry, is driven out into the world to try his +fortune with another through her determination that her lover should +follow his star. There is more beauty in "The Turn of the Road" than in +either of the other plays of the North of Ireland, more beauty of theme, +more beauty of thought, more beauty of expression. Its themes are not +new, _Wanderlust_ and the Puritans' hatred of art; its thoughts are not +new, but they are beautiful, and the words themselves are freshly used. +Its phrases that hold in memory are given to Robbie John and to his +father and to his grandfather, most of them to the grandfather. This is +the grandfather's lament for the boy gone on the roads with his fiddle +and his father's curse:-- + + It's the wee things you think nothing of, but that make your home a + joy to come back till, after a hard day's work. And you've sent out + into the could and wet the one that was making your home something + more than the common. D'ye think them proud city folk will listen + to his poor ould ballads with the heart of the boy singing through + them? It's only us--it's only us. I say, as knows the long wild + nights, and the wet and the rain and the mist of nights on the + boglands--it's only us, I say, could listen him in the right way. + And ye knowed, right well ye knowed, that every string of his + fiddle was keyed to the crying of your own heart. + +There is no beauty at all in "The Drone." There is little beauty +possible to such a subject realistically treated as that of the exposure +of the utter sham that is the pretended inventor of a bellows, a man who +has for years fattened on a brother's tolerance and family pride. There +might have been beauty of construction, but dramatic construction is not +Mr. Mayne's strongest quality. Let that not be held too much against +him, for many an English dramatist, like almost every English novelist, +is weak in the architectonic qualities of his work. Yet such is the +hardness of the people that exposed Daniel Murray that you rejoice in +his duping of them at the end through his sale to them of his pretended +invention, especially as that frees his brother John, and John's +daughter, artful coax that she is, from Sarah McMinn, who is determined +to marry the one and manage the two. The ideals of the people of the +play and the grim humor of Mr. Mayne are well illustrated by this +declaration of John Murray, the best of them all, anent the suit for +breach of promise with which Sarah threatens him: "I would as soon do +without the marrying if I could. I don't want the woman at all, but I'll +marry her before she gets a ha'penny off me." + +The people here are the people of "The Squireen" of Mr. Bullock,--hard, +grasping, resentful, passionate, brutal even, but doers of the world's +work. All that differentiates them from the Fermanagh Protestants is the +different conditions of County Down and a slightly lower social +position. + +In "The Troth" the theme is the shooting of a landlord by two peasants +whom his agents are to evict on the morrow. To the cottage of the +Protestant McKie comes his Catholic neighbor, Francey Moore, whose wife +is dying. Here there is no turf for the fire, and no hope in the heart +of father or mother, for the child of the house has died, and, they +think, because of the landlord's hardness to them. The two men swear a +troth that they shall lie in wait for Colonel Fotheringham, and that if +but one escapes, as is likely, the one arrested shall hold his tongue as +to his companion. You do not see the murder on the stage, but you hear +the shot and see McKie return to his home, and you know it was he killed +the landlord. The tension of the last scene is almost unendurable. His +wife's providential lie for McKie, her agony in her knowledge of his +guilt when she sees his face on his return, the man's terror, are +handled with masterly firmness and sureness. To see this scene on the +stage in the hands of actors worthy of it must be to know real tragedy. +In this play, too, brief as is the glimpse we have into these four lives +of small farmer and his wife, his farmhand and his neighbor, a neighbor +of alien race and hated faith, you get to know them as if they were +friends of long standing. Character creation and character presentation +in pithy, tense dialogue are the great gifts of Mr. Mayne. Francey +Moore, the "dark man," with his sensibility, his eloquence, and his +flaming rage, is not of the characteristic men of Mr. Mayne. They are +men of slow ways all un-Celtic and with smouldering hearts like those +of the Northmen we read about in the tales of "Origines Islandicae." + +In "Red Turf" (1911) Mr. Mayne turns away from County Down to the Galway +bogs, admirably symbolizing the hot land feud between neighbors in his +title. There are but five characters in the play, Martin Burke, farmer, +and his spitfire of a wife; and his neighbors the Flanagans, father and +son, who have won away from the Burkes, by the surveyor's decision, +their bank of stone turf that had come to Mary Burke from her father; +and an old fellow little better than a beggar. Mary taunts her husband +until he shoots the elder Flanagan as he is working away on the "great +stone bank." It was not his own gun Burke had, but, ironically, it was +one just brought to his house by the poor old man whom they had often +befriended, John Heffernan, brought that it might not be found in his +house by the gauger, and he unable to pay the license. It is not made +clear that there was malevolence in the leaving of the gun at the Burkes +by the old fellow, malevolent as are some of his remarks. Akin to him, +not in his malevolence but in that each is in a way a bit of a prophet, +is the grandfather in "The Turn of the Road," but more nearly akin to +old Granahan is Uncle Bartle of "The Mineral Workers" of Mr. Boyle. +Synge records old men of prophecy and tales in his travel sketches, but +he put none such who were gentle in his plays, or I would say that +Grandfather Granahan, like the old gaffer in Mr. Masefield's "Nan," was +a part of the influence of Synge that is felt by both Mr. Masefield and +Mr. Mayne. Their styles, respectively, in "Nan" and "Red Turf," have in +them more than echoes of the style of Synge. The "wambling" old men of +Mr. Hardy come also to mind as one thinks of these old men of Mr. +Masefield and Mr. Mayne and Mr. Boyle. All in a sense play "chorus" to +the action of the play, but there is no one of them that is in the story +or play in which he appears on such grounds only. There are, of course, +old men everywhere, in all life they are an integral part, and +everywhere they are commentators on life once they feel that their day +is done, spectators of a pageant from the forefront of which they have +dropped to watch the following troupe pass by. + +There is little mating in these plays of Mr. Mayne, and love of woman +worthy of the name of love only in "The Turn of the Road"; there is +parental love, too, but perhaps more of parental tyranny. Such parental +love as there is, however, actually expressed, makes one of the +memorable passages of Mr. Mayne. Mary Burke, after taunting her husband +to madness, tries to turn him from murder when she sees him, gun in +hand, by crying: "For the love of God, would you leave it down. Leave it +down and go in and look at the child sleeping. It would take the badness +from your mind the same as it did with me." + +Though Mr. Mayne is a writer for the Ulster Literary Theatre of Belfast, +his allegiance to the Abbey group is clearly indicated in "Red Turf," +which is the result of a study of Synge. I do not mean to say that Mr. +Mayne is not familiar with the speech of Connacht, but that it is Synge +who has taught him how to listen to it. There is little of the +influence of Synge in his three plays of the Black North, but when he +turns to Galway in "Red Turf," it is but natural that, writing of other +than his own people, he should write in a speech that has in it an echo +of that of him who has transmuted this speech into prose of the most +beautiful rhythm that English dramatic prose has known. The Bible is the +book of books in Ulster, and there is no page of Mr. Mayne's Ulster +plays but shows him acquainted with its great rhythms. Mr. Boyle, +skillful artificer of situation, and truthful depicter of character that +he is, and Mr. Colum, too, for all his closeness to the earth, are now +and then betrayed, Mr. Boyle more often than now and then, into the +English of the newspaper or of the public speaker; but the English of +Mr. Mayne is all but always an unworn English, an English used freshly, +or if with reminiscences in it, reminiscences of the seventeenth-century +English that has survived in the Bible or in the memory of the folk from +the time of King James. + +Mr. Mayne has, then, style, and his dialogue is living speech; he has +knowledge of the people of North Ireland, earnestness and sincerity; and +having these qualities, he has more that is precious to art than have +most of the dramatists his countrymen. There is no consistent reading of +life in his plays, no great power over the unrolling of plot, but +perhaps these will come with the years. An actor himself, he knows the +stage; and this knowledge has given him power over situation. Once he +learns to lead situation into situation, once he ripens into fuller +knowledge of life, Mr. Mayne will be a dramatist to reckon with, indeed. + + +"NORREYS CONNELL" + +There have been many other dramatists than these I have mentioned who +have had one or more plays produced at the Abbey Theatre. Some of these, +like Mr. Bernard Shaw, are Irishmen abroad that have gained the ear of +the world and do a play for Dublin out of a sense of duty It was thus +that "John Bull's Other Island" came into being, but that play, being +considered "beyond the scope" of the National Theatre Society, was not +produced at the Abbey, but at the Court Theatre, London, November 1, +1904. When "The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet" was "censored" in London, +however, the Abbey opened its doors to it, the "crude melodrama" +receiving its premier in late August, 1909. Little as "John Bull's Other +Island" was in the Abbey tradition, with moral purpose and unhumanity of +its very essence, it was at least a newspaper leader on an Irish +subject, but "The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet," a sort of +sentimentalized travesty of Bret Harte preaching the usual Shavian +evangel, has no more relation to Irish life than it has to literature. +It marred the repertoire the Abbey Company brought to America, as would +a camp-meeting hymn the music of the pipes. + +Out of the Abbey tradition, too, are the plays of "Norreys Connell" (Mr. +Conal O'Riordan), whose "Piper" had its day of lesser notoriety of +Playboy-like quality on its presentation on February 13, 1908. It is a +very obvious allegory, outlining under guise of an incident of '98 the +weaknesses of contemporaneous Ireland, its love of talk; its lack of +hold-together; its refusal to see things as they are; its incapacity in +practical matters; the reckless temper of this faction of its people, +the subjection to clerical influence of that, the suicidal patriotism of +a third; in short, the Celts' willful rebellion against the despotism of +fact. It was not pleasant listening to, or seeing, "The Piper," to many +groups of Irishmen, for it cut alike at the Parliamentary Nationalists, +the Sein Feiner, and the shoneen. Even though one admires the courage of +the Piper and Black Mike, one realizes the futility of both, and of +Larry the Talker, Tim the Trimmer, and Pat Dennehy, all typical of too +many men in Ireland to be endurable to the usual theatre audience. There +is a white heat of feeling, however, under the play that to some degree +makes one forget its rather indifferent writing, its failure to attain +true dramatic speech, its obviousness as of a morality play. + +Another little drama of Mr. O'Riordan, "Time," is almost a morality +play. It was produced shortly after its author became director of the +Abbey Theatre, succeeding Mr. Synge in the spring of 1909. Mr. O'Riordan +does not include "Time" among the plays of his volume of 1912, +"Shakespeare's End, and Other Irish Plays," but one cannot but feel +there was room for it there, if there was room for the play that gives +title to the volume. "Shakespeare's End," however, was doubtless +included because it gives its author's ideas as to the mission of +Ireland in the world. "An Imaginary Conversation," the second play of +the volume, was performed at the Abbey Theatre May 13, 1909, following +shortly after "Time"; a discussion of art and patriotism and love among +Tom Moore, and his sister Kate and Robert Emmet, with a little, a very +little, of the intensity that made "The Piper" something more than +second-rate. + + +MR. ST. JOHN G. ERVINE + +Mr. St. John G. Ervine I know through two plays, "Mixed Marriage," +produced at the Abbey Theatre on March 30, 1911, and "The Magnanimous +Lover," produced in the same playhouse on October 17, 1912. Like his +fellow from County Down, the master dramatist of the Ulster Literary +Theatre, Mr. Mayne, Mr. Ervine excels in characterization. You remember +his people, even after one reading of the plays, so clearly are they +distinguished, so definite are their personalities. With the five men +and women of "The Magnanimous Lover," you pass but a few minutes, as it +is only a one-act play, but you remember them as well as you do the six +of "Mixed Marriage," though you follow their fortunes through four acts. +All these characters are typical of the artisan class of the North of +Ireland, the five Protestants of "The Magnanimous Lover" and the four +Protestants and two Catholics of "Mixed Marriage." It is the troubles +that arise from the difference in religion of the Protestant Raineys, +mother, father, and the two young men; the Catholic betrothed, Nora, of +the elder son Hugh; and their common friend the Catholic labor agitator, +O'Hara, that are the motive forces of the latter play. Faintest etched +is Tom, the younger son, and most like a stock character. Nora and +O'Hara are well done, but one remembers both as stage parts rather than +as characterizations. Hugh is still better done, but the two absolute +creations are the father and mother. Tom Rainey, the Orangeman, forgets +his bitterness against "Cathliks" for a moment to help win the strike in +which his fellow workmen of Belfast, "Cathlik an' Prodesans," both are +fighting side by side. He is all the more bitter, however, when he +learns that his eldest son is going to marry out of his faith, and his +speeches, hitherto devoted to smoothing out the troubles between the men +of different faith, turn to bitter denunciations of the strike as "a +Popish Plot." In the end Tom Rainey is responsible for riots his wild +words have stirred up, the calling-out of the soldiery, and the death of +Nora, who is shot down by a volley as she runs out of the Rainey house +into the rioting street. On the stage, of course, Mrs. Rainey is the +more sympathetic character, her tolerance, her tact, her humor, her +infinite kindliness winning an audience as it is given to few characters +to win it. She is less like a type, too, than her husband, but for all, +I cannot but think he is better drawn. + +Mr. Ervine has not a style like Mr. Mayne, nor such a rhythm to his +prose, but he has more humor, and it is natural humor, a humor that +arises out of the situation and is not simply dragged in for the +purposes of comic relief. Mr. Ervine evidently knows the life he depicts +in and out. He ought to know it, for he was born to it, being the son of +a workingman in the shipyards of Belfast. And knowing it well he finds +it far from hopeless. It is a pleasure to come upon a play of the North +written in a spirit other than that of revolt against its Puritanism. +There are "kindly Irish of the Irish" in the Black North as well as in +the three other provinces, but most of the authors of the North are +content to picture its hardness, its hypocrisy, its bigotry, its love of +wife and child remorselessly concealed as a weakness of the flesh. + +It is to this darker picturing of the North, however, that Mr. Ervine +turns in "The Magnanimous Lover," which indicts the self-righteousness +of the Ulster Protestant with a severity such as is possible only to a +man bitter against a weakness of his own people. It is an old theme Mr. +Ervine has to handle, the refusal of the wronged woman to wed her +betrayer, when, after years of disloyalty, he is willing, by marrying +her, to make her again an "honest woman." To speak only of recent plays +of similar plot, there is "The Last of the De Mullens" of St. John +Hankin, and "A Woman of No Importance" of Wilde. Mr. Ervine, it is true, +handles the theme freshly, but the real power of the play is in his +creation of the heroine, Maggie Cather. The danger with such a character +is that it will be only a mouthpiece for woman's demand for a common +moral standard for men and women; but Maggie is not a mouthpiece but a +real woman, triumphantly alive, with hot anger in her heart at the +injustice of the world, and at the "unco guidness" of her old-time +lover, Henry Hinde. Ten years before the time of the action of the play +Henry Hinde had fled, just as her child was to be born, to Liverpool, +and there he has prospered, and so risen in the world that it is +possible for him to wed a minister's daughter. Fear of God's wrath has +now driven him home to make such amends as he can, but there is in him +no pity for the woman or love for his child. Maggie has faced it out +alone all these years in the seaside village of Down as Hester faced it +out in the seaside village of Massachusetts, while Henry forgot it all +until he was "saved" and "convicted of sin." If no more cowardly than +Dimmesdale, Henry is more heartless, utterly callous, indeed,--as he +confesses, in "the devil's grip." And yet Mr. Ervine is so true to the +life that he is depicting, a life at once passionate and prosaic, that +he makes anger for the past and fear of a nagged future with Henry as +effective agents in her rejection of him as are self-respect and right +feeling. It is a "big" part that Mr. Ervine has created for the leading +actress, and though the story is unequivocally "unpleasant" and may +prevent "The Magnanimous Lover" from being a favorite play, there can be +no two minds as to its success as drama. It is very real drama, of +elemental human emotion all unveiled. With such a play as this, and with +"Mixed Marriage" to his credit, I look forward eagerly to the promised +production and publication of "The Eviction." + + +MR. JOSEPH CAMPBELL + +Another dramatist from the North and of promise is Mr. Joseph Campbell. +His "Judgment" is of the northwest, however, the whole breadth of Ulster +between its Donegal mountains and the Belfast of "Mixed Marriage"; and +it is of the country, not of the city; and of an Ireland wholly +Catholic, not of an Ireland of Protestant and Catholic at war over +religion. There are moments of real drama in "Judgment," but no such +inevitable rise to climax as in "Mixed Marriage." Its undoubted power +is in the feeling underlying it, in its characterization, and in its +style. Mr. Campbell was already known when his play was put on at the +Abbey Theatre, April 15, 1912, as the author of "The Mountainy Singer" +(1909), a volume of freshly felt and singing verse; and of "Mearing +Stones" (1911), little prose records of things seen and of moods felt in +a corner of Donegal. Many a striking phrase of "Judgment," indeed, is +already written down in the paragraphs of "Mearing Stones" as actual +talk heard in the roads, and several of the situations of the plays are +workings-up of situations of which its author found himself a spectator +on the streets of Andara or on the highway between Slieve a-Tooey and +the sea. + +I first came upon his verses, if I remember rightly, in "The United +Irishmen," but I was first impressed by him as an illustrator, his name +being always signed in those days after the Irish fashion, Seosamh +MacCathmhaoil. A Dublin friend sent me at Christmas in 1907 a "Calendar +of the Saints," for which Mr. Campbell did the illustrations, +illustrations akin to those of Miss Althea Gyles, which so surely take +one back to Ireland's heroic age, instinct as they are with the +primitive aloofness of antiquity. + +It is not antiquity, however, that Mr. Campbell has chosen for his play. +Indeed, he rejects antiquity, deliberately "using peasants as ... +protagonists instead of kings--who, like Pharaoh, are 'but a cry in +Egypt,' outworn figures in these days with no beauty and no +significance." "Judgment" is made out of the story of the countryside +concerning "a tinker's woman," Peg Straw, and we may well believe Mr. +Campbell has changed it but little, as he says, for the purposes of his +play. It had been a better play, perhaps, had he changed more the facts +of the story. As it stands, the first act of the play is adequate +dramatically, and beautiful with that sort of wild and outworld beauty +Synge brought into English literature in Ireland; and the second act +beautiful with that beauty, and inadequate dramatically. + +Peg Straw is an old, worn woman of the roads whom the people hold little +better than a witch, even attributing to her the power fabled of the +witches in folk-tales of turning themselves into hares. Her nickname +"Straw" indicates the nature of the mild dementia that sets the children +and the idlers at her heels. She goes about picking up "straws" until +"she'd have a bunch in her hand ... every little stalk bit off as neat +as neat, and it like a scrubber or dandy brush you'd put to a horse." + +Peg speaks no word at all in the play, coming into sight in it only to +die, but always she is in the background. Talk of her comes up early in +the first act, and we learn that Nabla, the woman whose cabin is the +play's first scene, has turned Peg away from the door only that morning; +and from the moment we first hear of her most of the talk is of her, and +the action because of her. Toward this first act's end you hear her +cries as the tinkers beat her, and at its end she crawls into the cabin +to die, and in dying to shock the woman of the house so that her child +comes before its time. All the second act Peg lies in sight in the room +just off the stage with candles stuck around her, bringing the horror +and dignity of death into the wild scenes of her wake. These are wild +not because of drinking for no one is drunk and only one "had drink +taken," but because of the wildness of nature of these men of +westernmost Europe, and because of the wildness of the roads that a +"traveling man" brings with him out of the night. There is no action in +this second and last act save that sprung of this stranger's entrance +and quarrelsomeness, and his interruptions of an old, old man's story of +what he knows of Peg's life. The stranger listens while Parry Cam tells +of the cause of her madness, but when he repeats what for years has been +the gossip of the countryside about her supposed killing of her babe, +the "traveling man" interrupts and declares he is the son whom it was +rumored she had drowned. In the end he is turned out of the house, not +altogether unkindly, but as much for decency's sake as for his own. That +the son, for any motive at all, should be turned out of the house where +his mother lies dead, even though he had not stood by her living, is +hard enough in the estimation of any people, but in the estimation of +the Irish peasant it is intolerably tragic. If we realize this, the +ending of the play will be on a note deeper and more significant than if +we fail to realize it, but not even the utmost sympathy with the +intention of the author and a full realization of the significance to +Donegal peasants of the action can bring this act to an intensity +comparable to that of the end of Act I, where two mysteries confront one +another--"the passing of a life from this world, the coming of a life +into it." + +All the characters in "Judgment" are "created." The personality of each +colors his words and puts him before you distinct from every other. +Owen Ban the weaver, who takes in Peg when his wife Nabla, heavy with +her first child, and nervous because of her condition and fearful of the +birth, would keep out the outcast; old Parry Cam; John Gilla Carr; Colum +Johnston and Father John; Nabla herself; and Kate Kinsella the +midwife--each is himself or herself, each remains as distinct in your +mind the unforgettable scenes of the play. Somehow or other, too, the +country is suggested; you are aware that you are on a wild hillside +above a glen,--you are aware of this not because the author tells us at +the outset that the scene of the play is in the mountains of western +Donegal, south of Lochros Beg Bay, but through the dialogue of the play +itself. Both scenes of the play are indoors, and on dark nights of +midwinter, but so instinct with many phases of the life of the people is +it that its background of landscape rises before you only less +distinctly than the visualization of its characters. Atmosphere the play +has, and quality, both sprung of the sincerity of its feeling and +imagination. So true are these, and so keen the author's reading of +human nature, and so sure his character drawing, that for all his +weakness of construction we may speak of his play alongside of the best +Irish plays. The future promises finer things: meanwhile we are thankful +for what is, for "Judgment,"--especially for its far-offness, its +desolateness as of the world's end and the wind crying. + + + + +CHAPTER IX + +WILLIAM SHARP ("FIONA MACLEOD") + + +There were relations other than that of a common purpose between William +Sharp and the Irish writers of the Celtic Renaissance. He was a friend +of Mr. Yeats, a correspondent of Mr. Russell, and the chief commentator +in the English reviews on the work of the Irish group of its writers. At +one time, after 1897, the relationship promised to be very close, +indeed. William Sharp, experimenting in psychics with Mr. Yeats, found +occasion to interest him in "Fiona Macleod," and as a result of that +interest Mr. Yeats came to think the new writer might write Celtic plays +for performances he intended to arrange for Irish literary +organizations. Thus it is that Mrs. Sharp has to include in her memoir +of her husband a long letter to "Fiona Macleod" from Mr. Yeats, in which +he suggests: "The plays might be almost in some cases modern mystery +plays. Your 'Last Supper,' for instance, would make such a play." Mr. +Sharp, apparently, did not follow up this suggestion, but shortly after +the first performances of "The Irish Literary Theatre" in 1899 he wrote +the two plays that, together with "Vistas," comprise all the dramatic +writing that he has to his name. That "The Immortal Hour" and "The House +of Usna" were intended for "The Irish Literary Theatre," I think there +is little doubt, and it was only, I take it, when circumstances +dictated that only plays by Irish writers should be put on by that +theatre that Mr. Sharp looked elsewhere for their presentation. Only +"The House of Usna" was, however, placed,--in the spring performances in +London of The Stage Society, on April 29, 1900. Two months later "The +House of Usna" was published in the July number of "The National +Review." It pleased more, if we are to judge by the reviews, in the +pages of the magazine than on the stage, but I hardly know why. "The +House of Usna" is profoundly moving read in the study, surely, and if +acted in such simplicity and enthusiasm as is that of the Abbey Theatre +Players, I should think it would appeal as do the verse plays of Mr. +Yeats. No play I have read carries me further into antiquity than this, +none preserves more of what imagination tells us must have been the +wilder beauty of what still are places of wild beauty, of the savagery +of that old life of the hero tales of Ireland. Mr. Yeats's plays do not +so recapture the past, they take us rather to places out of time, where +all things are possible, because the world we know is put aside and all +but forgot. Even on the stage, however, the new beauty of "The House of +Usna" was recognized, a beauty as distinctive as that of the two plays +of M. Maeterlinck that were produced with it, "Interior" and "The Death +of Tintagiles," but it was adjudged not to be drama in the accepted +sense of the word. "The House of Usna" is written in a prose that has +many of the effects of verse, but that is less luxuriant than the prose +of "Vistas." "The Immortal Hour," published shortly afterwards in the +"Fortnightly Review" (1900), is written in blank verse that shows its +author has been carefully attentive to the rhythms of the blank verse of +Mr. Yeats, but it is neither so poetic nor so dramatic as "The House of +Usna." Both plays are written out of the old legends that are the common +property of Irish and Scottish Gael, and in both Sharp has treated his +material with his wonted freedom of adaptation, a freedom that is +generally justified by his results, his instinctive surety of +reconstruction of myths being such as to make one wonder, with Mr. +Russell, if Sharp is not, in some fashion, a reincarnation of a +shanachie that sang as contemporary in the wars of Gael and Gall. + +[Illustration] + +A common preoccupation with the plays of M. Maeterlinck is another bond +between the founder of the Abbey Theatre and Sharp, a preoccupation +passing rather quickly from Mr. Yeats, but long retaining its hold on +the changing selves of Sharp. For all his early interest in "spiritual +things," an interest very definitely expressed in "Romantic Ballads" +(1888), Sharp would not have come to "Vistas" (1894) without the +guidance of M. Maeterlinck, and he admits as much in his preface to +these "psychic episodes." "Vistas" he often referred to as heralding a +"great dramatic epoch," and he evidently regarded them as, in a way, +drama, but it is hardly likely that he dreamed of their enactment on the +stage. Many of them are essentially dramatic, but their method of +presentation is almost always lyric or narrative rather than dramatic, +even in the Maeterlinckian sense of the word. + +It is possible, however, that Sharp might have written other of his +projected plays, "The Enchanted Valleys," "The King of Ys," "Drosdan and +Yssul," and their many fellows he had projected by title, and others, +too, had not developments in Dublin, as I have said, carried Mr. Yeats +away from him during 1899 and 1900, and had Sharp himself not during +this drifting written that article "Celtic" which so aroused many in +Ireland on its appearance in "The Contemporary Review." In this essay, +basically a literary protest, "Fiona Macleod" declared "herself" against +Separatist politics and affirmed "her" belief, as "she" had in "The +House of Usna," that the future greatness of Ireland was to come, not +through independence, but through the rebirth of her ancient +spirituality in other nations to whom she had given her children. + + The Celtic element in our national life [wrote "Fiona Macleod"] has + a vital and great part to play. We have a most noble ideal if we + will but accept it. And that is, not to perpetuate feuds, not to + try to win back what is gone away upon the wind, not to repay + ignorance with scorn, or dullness with contempt, or past wrongs + with present hatred, but so to live, so to pray, so to hope, so to + work, so to achieve, that we, what is left of the Celtic races, of + the Celtic genius, may permeate the greater race of which we are a + vital part, so that, with this Celtic emotion, Celtic love of + beauty, and Celtic spirituality, a nation greater than any the + world has seen may issue, a nation refined and strengthened by the + wise relinquishings and steadfast ideals of Celt and Saxon, united + in a common fatherland, and in singleness of pride and faith. + +There was, however, if less intimacy with the Irish writers in these +later years, no less admiration of their art, an admiration that led not +only to praise of them in critical articles, but to a greater praise of +imitation of their art. So possessed, indeed, was Sharp by the verse of +the younger Irish poets as he read them to write of them, that when he +turned to verse as "Fiona Macleod," he fell into their rhythms and +reproduced the colors of their styles. Writing in prose as a critic of +Mr. Yeats, Sharp came to write in verse as Mr. Yeats wrote, as in "The +Dirge of the Four Cities": writing of "A.E." in prose as critic, Sharp +came to write in verse as "A.E." wrote, as in "Flame on the Wind": +writing of "Moira O'Neill," in prose as critic, Sharp came to write in +verse as "Moira O'Neill" wrote, as in "I--Brasil": writing in prose as +critic, of "Ethna Carberry," Sharp came to write in verse as "Ethna +Carberry" wrote, as in "The Exile." So it was, also, that, coming to +write of Celtic literature after study of Renan and Arnold, Sharp +attained to something of their large utterance. + +Sharp sees the Celtic Renaissance, however, always in relation to +English literature, and always, it should be added, with French +literature and Greek literature in the background. In this wide outlook, +in his freedom from political prejudice, in his sympathy with Celtic +literature and his knowledge of it, is his greatest strength as a critic +of the Celtic Renaissance. His greatest weakness is his willingness in +this writing, as elsewhere in his writing, to abide by first +impressions, to abide also by the first-come phrase or epithet, banes of +the ready writer. But read his essay "Celtic" after you have read the +great essays of Renan and Arnold, and read it alongside of what Mr. +Yeats has to say of that literature, and you will find it, as I said, +of the stature of these. You will at the same time find in this writing +the answer to the contention that there were really two personalities in +William Sharp. Even Mrs. Sharp, who writes so restrainedly about this +question of dual personality, believes the analytical faculty belonged +to William Sharp, the imaginative to "Fiona Macleod." But in this +criticism of the Celtic Renaissance which is signed "Fiona Macleod," +there is as much analysis as is to be found anywhere in his work as +William Sharp. So obviously was he identifying "F.M." with "W.S." in +this critical writing that Mrs. Janvier, of those in the secret, wrote +to him to take warning lest he betray himself. She pointed out to him +that such a display of learning as he was making in the later "Fiona +Macleod" work would surely lead to discovery. But he did not heed. The +truth probably was that he wrote about Celtic things as "Fiona Macleod" +because he perhaps felt about them, as "Fiona Macleod," as one who is +bilingual thinks about work he is doing, say in German, in German, and +about work he is doing in English, in English; but just as surely I +believe, because what "Fiona Macleod" wrote commanded more respect than +what William Sharp wrote, readier entrance into the magazines, and +better pay. If there are those to whom such an explanation seems +belittling to William Sharp, I can only say that they cannot have +realized that he was a driven man earning his living by his pen. I am +not, I confess, a sentimentalist in such matters, and while I do not +wholly like his procedure in maintaining the fiction of "Fiona Macleod," +it does not seem to me a very heinous sin. + +He who would write of the work of William Sharp, indeed, must be +resolute to remember that it is to be considered as an essay in the art +of letters. There are so many temptations toward writing of it as a +scientific problem,--for who is not interested in "dual +personality"?--or as a "psychic revelation," if one is bitten--and who +is not?--by curiosity about hidden "things"; or as an irritating hoax, +if one has been befooled--and who, for one moment or another has not +been?--into believing that this writing under the pseudonym of "Fiona +Macleod" was the confession of a woman. The romance of it remains, no +matter from what point of view you consider it, and, despite your +preoccupation with this or that phase of it, the beauty of literary art +of parts of it. Parts of it, I say, for to me no writer of our time was +more uneven in his work. My point of view, indicated perhaps brutally, +and with a firstly and secondly is:-- + +Firstly, that until he was nearly forty, William Sharp was no more than +a skillful literary practitioner, a higher sort of hack, who had done +some better writing of a tenuous kind of beauty but imitative in +substance and art, in "Sospiri di Roma" and "Vistas," and that after +forty, when he was developing one undeveloped side of himself as "Fiona +Macleod," he developed another undeveloped side of himself in "Silence +Farm." That he attained in a sort of writing, and greatly, that he had +not attained in before, in "Silence Farm," has not been acknowledged, so +easy has it been to those interested in his work to lose sight of all +else in their pursuit of the "Fiona Macleod" side of his nature. It is +true of "Silence Farm," as of almost all his other work done under the +name of William Sharp, that it is imitative; but it is equally true that +a large part of the "Fiona Macleod" work is imitative, too. "Silence +Farm" is done under the influence of the later work of Mr. Hardy, but +the material of "Silence Farm" is its author's own, and the color of the +writing is as distinctly of the Lowlands as the color of "Tess" is of +Wessex. That "Silence Farm" is better work in its kind, though that kind +is less original than some of his writing as "Fiona Macleod," I have +been forced against my prejudices to believe. If I did not so believe I +would not have spoken of it side by side with "Tess." + +Secondly, that as "Fiona Macleod," William Sharp did much good writing +in almost everything published under the pseudonym, achieving wholeness +of good tissue in certain sketches and tales and verses on rather +varying kinds of subjects, but that his work as "Fiona Macleod" that is +really distinguished is in stories of prehistoric Scotland and Ireland, +and of Scotland and Ireland in the earliest historic time. In these +tales of the Gaels of old time he for the first time breaks ground for +others. Before he wrote "Silk o' the Kine," and "The Harping of +Cravetheen," "The Annir Choile," and "Enya of the Dark Eyes," there were +no short tales of like temper and content and style in literature. + +To me little is significant in the early verse of "Fiona Macleod," as +little was significant in all the verse of William Sharp until the time +of "Sospiri di Roma." And for all the beauty of these pictures in words +of the Campagna it is but a transient beauty. It was not until he was +mastered by the new beauty that Mr. Yeats brought into English poetry +that the verse of William Sharp won to itself abiding beauty and glamour +and inevitable phrase. "The House of Usna" (1900) brought to me "Dim +face of beauty haunting all the world," and the 1901 edition of "From +the Hills of Dream," "The Enchanted Valleys,"; but it was not until +after his death that I came upon his best verse of all, the verse of his +last five years, which was gathered together posthumously in the 1907 +edition of "From the Hills of Dream," and included as "The House of +Beauty" in "The Poems and Dramas" of 1911. Who does not know these sets +of verses and "The Dirge of the Four Cities," does not know the ultimate +accomplishment of William Sharp in poetry. + +That the "'Fiona Macleod' mystery" ended with the death of William Sharp +is, then, my belief, as it is that it began before he conceived of +exploiting a feminine sub-self he had long been aware of in himself. The +beginnings of that sort of writing that made "Fiona Macleod" a +reputation are to be found very early in his writing, in "The Son of +Allan" of 1881, in the "Record" of 1884, in the preface to the "Romantic +Ballads" of 1888, in the "Vistas" of 1894. That these earlier +expressions of "spiritual" states and guesses at mysteries are not, +except for certain parts of "Vistas," so well written as the best +writing of similar kind by "Fiona Macleod," is true, and perhaps, at +first glance, a matter of wonder. It is, however, I think, not difficult +to find an explanation of the better quality of the later work, and that +explanation is afforded, firstly and most largely, by the Celtic +Renaissance. A man of thirty-five, to all who know him a very vital +force, a very original personality, who has all his life wanted to make +beautiful things in words out of his dream of life, has disappointed +himself and his friends. He is suddenly afforded the opportunity, by the +interest in Gaelic subjects that the Celtic Renaissance has awakened, to +gain a hearing for work of a kind he has long wanted to do. He had not +done such work previously, because he had to live by his pen and could +work consistently only at the sort of thing that would sell. He was well +known as a journeyman of letters, so well known for bookmaking, and the +ways of getting commissions from London editors and publishers, that his +knowledge of Highland life would be questioned. All in London knew him +as a Londoner. It would be useless for him to say that the Celtic +Renaissance had brought back his childhood to him, a childhood as +definitely dominated by a Highland nurse as Stevenson's was by the +Lowland Alison Cunningham. It would be useless to tell of his summers in +Argyllshire and among the inner isles, his intimacy with fishermen who +were as elemental as his own dreams of old time. It would have been cast +up to him that the editor of "The Canterbury Poets" could not be an +original writer, and the very nine days' wonder of "Vistas" would have +been pointed to to prove that he might now do well enough, as an +imitator, perhaps of Mr. Yeats, as he was in "Vistas;" successful as an +imitator of M. Maeterlinck, but that an original Highland writer could +not come out of Hampstead. There is no doubt in my mind that it was the +part of wisdom for Sharp to put out the new work under a pseudonym, +worldly wise if you will, but wise, too, with a higher wisdom. If he +could keep the side of him he had never yet exhausted through hackwork +apart from his other work, it would grow as it could not if it were a +part of his daily stint. + +Why Sharp chose a woman's name for his pseudonym has troubled many, but +this choice was, I think, as was the assumption of a pseudonym, the part +of wisdom. I do not believe, as he at times liked to believe, that he +attained a woman's standpoint. He had been complimented on all sides for +his composition of the wife's letters in "A Fellowe and his Wife" +(1892), in which Mrs. von Teuffel wrote the husband's. Sharp enjoyed +their writing as a _tour de force_ and he probably believed they were +very womanly. I should say that they showed insight into womanly ways of +looking at things rather than a dramatic identification of himself with +woman such as is George Meredith's. Sharp had already been experimenting +with pseudonyms, that of "H.P. Siwaarmill," an anagram on his own name, +being that he recurred to most often. He had written the whole of "The +Pagan Review" in 1892 under eight different pseudonyms, and though, in +the estimation of those to whom "Fiona Macleod" is all but a sacred +name, it be sacrilegious to say it, William Sharp loved all sorts of +fantastic tricks, hoaxes, mystifications, though in almost all his +writing save in "Wives in Exile" he was seriousness itself. But the +chiefest reason of all, in my estimation, for his assumption of a +woman's name as his pseudonym was that it afforded greater protection +against discovery. There are those who believe that he chose it because +he wanted a chance to express that womanly element of human nature there +is in all men, and there are others who believe that he was the +possessor of a real dual personality in which the "Fiona Macleod's self" +was a woman's consciousness; but he very infrequently, after "The +Mountain Lovers" (1895), kept in mind in the writings he published as +"Fiona Macleod's" that their author was supposed to be a woman, and it +is wonderful, indeed, that he was able to preserve the secret until the +end. In the earlier "Fiona Macleod" writing there is no revelation of +the wide acquaintance with literature that was Sharp's, but despite his +harassment by the constant identification of himself with "Fiona +Macleod," he gradually allowed to creep into that writing more and more +of what was known to be the knowledge of William Sharp, a knowledge +unlikely to be also that of a Highland lady who lived apart from the +world. His friends pointed out to him the danger he was running in +writing from what was obviously a man's standpoint, as in his tales of +the wars of Gael and Gall, and of revealing several sorts of interest +that were known to be his, but their warnings were in vain. He was +apparently unable to limit himself to the restrictions of the part of +himself he had essayed to restrict himself to. + +For my own part I was now sure the writing must be Sharp's and now sure +it could not be his. I did not know of his intimate concern with +questions of feminism until I read Mrs. Sharp's "Memoir," so that +outspoken chant, the "Prayer of Women" in "Pharais," "Fiona Macleod's" +first book, colored my outlook on all the writing that followed. I had +no doubt at all but that "Pharais" was written by a woman, but "The +Dan-nan-Ron" and "Silk o' the Kine" in "The Sin-Eater" (1895) seemed to +me hardly a woman's. "The Washer of the Ford" (1896) was written from +the man's point of view, too, but "Green Fire" (1896) seemed feminine +again. So I wobbled in my opinion until "The Divine Adventure" (1900) +and the critical writings of the volume that story gives title to, and +the critical writing in "The Winged Destiny" (1905), made me believe +again that "Fiona Macleod" was surely Sharp. I did not come upon the +articles that now make up "Where the Forest Murmurs" (1907) until after +the death of Sharp and the disclosure of the secret. Had his death not +divulged the secret of the identity of "Fiona Macleod," it seems to me +that collection must have disclosed it. Had Sharp lived after this there +would not have been possible for him much further work from the +seclusion his pseudonym gave him, and I doubt, once the secret was out, +it would have been possible for him to write of things Celtic with the +old gusto. + +After all has been said it must be confessed, I think, that Sharp did +not know the Highlander, either of the mainland or of the islands, very +intimately. He wrote much better of his dream of life on the west coast +in prehistoric times--out of his imagination of what that life must have +been, an imagination founded on the reading of the old legends and +modern collections of folk-lore, such as the "Carmina Gadelica" of Mr. +Carmichael--than he did out of his knowledge of Highland life of to-day. +The Achannas are in many of his tales of modern times, and wherever +they are there is unreality, if not melodrama. Unreality, too, there is, +in many phases, in the modern tales, and "highfalutinness" everywhere in +them. And both unreality and "highfalutinness" offend in these modern +tales as they would not in the tales of far times, though in these, as a +matter of fact, they are not so much in evidence. + +It would almost seem that the approach to reality drove Highland +atmosphere from the stories. In "The Sin-Eater," one of the best of his +writings that might be classed as a short story, the sin-eater and his +confidant are Highlanders, but the description of the scene of his +misfortune, the steading of the Blairs, might well have been that +nearest to "Silence Farm." It is faithfully described, the scenes about +the little home, whose owner lies dead, having the very smack of +realism. In the latter part of the story the scene shifts to the coast +and the tang of the story turns Gaelic and unreal. Was it thus, I +wonder, always to the imagination of William Sharp, Lowland life real, +Highland life mystical? + +Sharp was handicapped, of course, in coming to the subject material he +could best handle late in life, "Pharais" (1894) and "The Mountain +Lovers" (1895), the first books published as by "F.M.," being just as +definitely 'prenticework in their kind as was "Children of To-morrow" +(1890) in its kind. Of the long stories other than "Children of +To-morrow" published in his own name, "A Fellowe and his Wife" (1892) +and "Wives in Exile" (1896) have no very serious intention, though both +are well done after their kind, records of imaginings, respectively of +experiences of art life in Rome, and of yachting experiences in the +Irish Sea. It was not until "Silence Farm" (1899), as I have said, that, +as William Sharp, he found himself. + +"The Gypsy Christ" (1896), which might well have been developed into a +full-fledged romance, is less original than any of his longer writings. +It is, like "The Weird of Michael Scott" and "A Northern Night," closely +allied to essays of his other role, that of "F.M.," to catch and express +"the tempestuous loveliness of terror," such as the catastrophe of "The +Mountain Lovers," "The Barbaric Tales," and those short stories in which +Gloom Achanna is hero-villain. It is in such work that Sharp shows his +affinities to Poe, affinities which are not elsewhere as obvious as his +affinities to De Quincey. Narrative was not native to De Quincey any +more than it was to Sharp, though Sharp was led toward it by his +interest in character, an interest that was not in any large measure +given to De Quincey, who, when he turned to narrative other than that +which relates what had happened to him or what he had dreamed had +happened to him, makes the reader feel he did so as a concession to the +public. Another interest that was Sharp's, an interest amounting to a +passion,--out-of-doors,--De Quincey had not at all, for all his devotion +to Wordsworth and to Wordsworth's interests. Like De Quincey, on the +other hand, Sharp delights in "fine writing," in both senses of the +phrase, in the "highfalutin" that is objectionable, and in the ornately +beautiful that is one fitting expression of romantic thought. Both men +preferred the mouth-filling word to the simple one, the Latinical +adjective to the Saxon; both had rather see visions and dream dreams +than write about the "common light of common hours"; both goad their +imaginations until they run riot and so confuse their possessors, who +should control them, that they are unable to distinguish between what is +fact and what is fancy. You could carry the analogy further, to events +of their lives--the runnings-away in boyhood; the devoted friendships to +poets in youth; the incredible amount of hard work achieved in manhood +despite of often recurring illnesses. + +Of the long stories published as by "F.M.," Sharp repudiated "Flora +MacDonald" because it was too much in the way of "ordinary romance," and +"Green Fire" for the same reason and because it was largely about +Brittany, a country with which, by some strange chance, he did not make +himself familiar, though he had visited and learned to know well at +least parts of all the other Celtic countries. It is to my mind, +however, if not so definitely of a wholeness of texture as "Pharais" or +"The Mountain Lovers," or so singular, less monotonous than either. All +three of these stories disappoint my memory of them when I again read +them. This is, I believe, because all three of them--and for that matter +many of the short stories as well--are incompletely realized, or +because--in the case of two of them, "The Mountain Lovers" and "Green +Fire"--they are unevenly written. Their high intention and atmosphere +remain with you after you have put the books aside, and in the course of +time you forget their hurried writing, their inconsistencies, and their +qualities of the "Shilling Shocker," the result of their author's +failure to attain "the tempestuous loveliness of terror" that are in so +many of them, long or short. As aids to this effacement of the +cheapening elements are the very materials of the tales, their +characters, now elemental, now other-worldly, and their background of +mountains that uplift the spirit, and of menacing sea. + +That Sharp wrote less exactly of the present-day people of the Highlands +than of the background of their lives was largely because he had few +opportunities to learn to know them intimately. There was a basis for +such intimacy laid in his childhood, in the fact that his nurse was a +Highland woman; there was something built on this basis by his boyhood's +vacations in many parts of Argyllshire and voyages elsewhere along the +west coast. Youth spent in Arran and Skye would have counted for much +more, for the boy, once he is no longer child and before he has reached +his youth and is awakening man, is not much more interested in people in +real life for what they are than he is in minute description of their +characters in books. He likes men for the sportsmanlike and adventurous +things they can do, and he likes to read records of things sportsmanlike +and adventurous, but men as men, unless they are eccentric to +grotesqueness, do not arrest his attention. Even the dreamy boys, the +artistic boys, are not likely to learn much of others, so preoccupied +are they with themselves. + +It was thus, I think, that Sharp's childhood was not what he would in +later years have had it, not what in "The Laughter of Peterkin" he +alleges the childhood of "Fiona Macleod" to have been. For all the +influence of "Barabal," his nurse, it seems from his writing that her +stories remain with him more as suggestions to imagination than as +definite memories, and that the fisherman referred to in "Sheumas" left +with him little more than "Barabal." How fresh and wonderful to him was +actual contact with Highland life is almost pathetically revealed in a +letter he wrote to Mrs. Sharp from Kilcreggan in the summer of 1894. In +this letter he is all but exultant in the recording of the securing of +"Celtic" material from a "Celtic Islesman from Iona." Of the actual life +of the Islesmen and Glensmen he could have known but little, for long +living among them is necessary to their understanding,--they are, as he +wrote in this same letter, "passionately reticent." It was not the way +of Sharp to fall back, in this deficiency of experience, on old legends +and folk-tales collected in his own day, but to trust to his imagination +as that was quickened by what knowledge he had of life in the inner +isles and in Argyllshire, and by the very atmosphere of known places +there that seemed to demand, as Stevenson put it, to have stories +invented to fit them. + +It is said, too,--Mrs. Sharp gives her authority to the story,--that +friendship with the woman to whom he dedicated "Pharais," "E.W.R.," +stimulated him to the work. "Because of her beauty, her strong sense of +life, and of her joy of life," writes Mrs. Sharp in her memoir of her +husband, "because of her keen intuitions and mental alertness, her +personality stood for him as a symbol of the heroic women of Greek and +Celtic days, a symbol that, as he expressed it, unlocked new doors in +his mind and put him in touch with the ancestral memories of his race." +And Mrs. Sharp quotes him further as declaring "without her there would +have been no 'Fiona Macleod.'" Perhaps; but I doubt if, after the Celtic +Renaissance had won a hearing, anything could have prevented Sharp from +following what was, after all, a natural bent. I am not going to argue +the matter out, but he himself admitted that his development as "Fiona +Macleod" began "while I was still a child," and there is proof in almost +every volume he published, even before he knew Mrs. Rinder ("E.W.R.," +must of course be the author of "The Shadow of Arvor"), that his +tendency was toward what became characteristic of "Fiona Macleod." + +It was the love that Sharp had for all sorts of "psychic things," the +mysterious, the unaccountable, the hidden, that led him to believe that +"without her there would have been no 'Fiona Macleod.'" Sharp himself, +when his "other self," with sense of humor alert, was more than willing +to admit that it is easy to believe what one wishes to believe; and he +delighted to tell a story at the expense of Mr. Yeats illustrative of +the trite fact. Sharp went one day, in London, to call on Mr. Yeats. +When lunch-time came, they set about cooking eggs. Mr. Yeats held them +in a frying-pan over the little fire in the grate. As they slipped +about, Mr. Yeats, all the while looking back in the room away from the +fire as he talked to Sharp, allowed the pan to tip too far and the eggs +fell out into the fire. So absorbed was he in the topic of conversation, +most appropriately the disappearance of material things, that he did +not notice the catastrophe or the quick disappearance of the eggs among +the coals. When his perfervidness subsided for a moment, he turned to +see if they were done. "There, what did I tell you!" said he; "our talk +of these things has conjured up the powers and the eggs are gone." Sharp +did not tell him of the accident. And there were no more eggs in the +room to have for lunch. + +One of the reasons that led William Sharp to write "Silence Farm" (1899) +was to have something under his own name that might be very different +from the stories of "Fiona Macleod." And "Silence Farm" is very +different, a story without the distinguishing qualities of "Pharais" or +"The Divine Adventure," and suggesting kinship to the work of his other +self only through certain likenesses of domestic irregularity in the +family of Archibald Ruthven to other domestic irregularity in the family +of Torcall Cameron of "The Mountain Lovers." Though not of so original a +kind, perhaps, as the best of the "Fiona Macleod" work, "Silence Farm" +has to it a "wholeness of good tissue" that belongs to little work of +this most uneven writer. "Silence Farm," I would emphasize again as I +emphasized at the opening of this paper, is better written, both as +regards style and architectonic quality, and it is a truer reading of +life, than any of the Highland stories. Though it is a story of to-day, +and about a life much like that made familiar by the writers of the +Kailyard school, it is not to them, but to such kindred +unsentimentalized work as Mr. Shan Bullock's, that you instinctively +compare it. The people, indeed, are the same dour Presbyterians, though +the one writes of Scotland and the other of the North of Ireland. And as +you compare the material of "Silence Farm" with that of "The Squireen," +for instance, you note, too, that the art of both is the art of Mr. +Hardy. + +There is little modern writing with which to compare the Highland +stories of Sharp. It is not that the Highlands have not been much +written about, but that they have been written about intimately by but +few. No part of the world so out of the world as their outlying islands, +the Hebrides, has been so bewritten by travelers from Martin's time to +our own; but comparatively few have known either islands or mainland +well enough to dare novels of their life, and of those who have so dared +no one up to the time of Sharp had written a great realistic story of +the Highlands, and but one or two great romances. Now we have Mr. Neil +Munro, like Sharp a very uneven writer, whose "Children of Tempest"--to +take one of his best stories--now delights and now tortures you; and +yesterday we had William Black, famous for sunsets. Black knew the +Hebrides well, very well for a Lowlandman turned Londoner, and he +labored hard to make his books true and beautiful. Unfortunately it was +not in him to do fine work, not even the best sort of the second order +of novelists,--such work as Trollope's, for instance, which by dint of +faithfulness and humanity almost persuades you now and then that it is +of higher than second order. Black was faithful to what he saw and +broadly sympathetic, but his writing not only lacks distinction, but, +even at its best, as in "The Princess of Thule," home thrust to one's +interest. Yet, such as it is, it is all but all that we have which +attempts to put before us any broad view of Highland life. The one man +of the generation older than the generation of Mr. Sharp who might have +drawn Highland life greatly, Robert Buchanan, was diverted all his life, +as Sharp was in the twenties and thirties, from doing what he would to +what would boil the pot, but he left at least one story, a story of +Sutherland, "A Child of Nature," to prove to us what his reading of +Highland life might have been. Had Stevenson been born a Highlander, he +might have given us both novels of the Highlands of the order of "Weir +of Hermiston," and romances really Highland in quality, as "Kidnapped" +and "Catriona" are not. + +I suppose that, back of all the failure to deal realistically with +Highland life, this rare attainment of a romance of Highland life at all +faithful to it, is the making of the Highlander into a stage hero by +Scott. There are those to-day who fail to find any glamour in "Waverley" +or "Rob Roy" or "The Legend of Montrose," but it is still there to me, +investing the figures of Fergus MacIvor and the MacGregor and the +Children of the Mist as it did in childhood, when I was so fascinated +that I prized my Campbell plaided paper soldiers next to my Continentals +in blue and buff. In going through an old trunkful of school-books only +the other day, I came upon one of these bonneted fellows, still +wonderfully preserved, in an old atlas of the heavens, and then I knew +all of a flash why it was that the poor boy soldiers that I saw in +Highland accoutrement in the yard of Edinburgh Castle during the Boer +War so disappointed me by their appearance and bearing. They were not +half so brave as the piper who used to make the rounds of my boyhood's +town and bring tears to my eyes with his "Campbells are Comin'." I write +this that my quarrel with much of what Sharp has written of the +Highlands, that portion that seems to me sentimentalized or one-sided, +may not be put down to lack of appreciation of the romance, the +eeriness, and otherworldliness that there unquestionably are in that +life. + +It is their aloofness from the everyday story, their unusual use of the +supernatural that has given the longer stories written out of the "Fiona +mood," as Mr. Sharp once spoke of his possession, their appeal to most +readers, but there is here in America a class who put the highest +valuation on the shorter stories Mr. Sharp called "spiritual tales." To +those who hold this view "The Divine Adventure" is of the nature of +revelation. To me it is hardly this, but very interesting, not so much +for its putting of the relations of Body, Will, and Spirit to one +another in life and at death, as for its beautiful writing, and for its +definite betrayal, when its author is writing most intimately, of a +man's attitude, though he published the story as the work of "Fiona +Macleod." These "spiritual tales" do not belong, all of them, to his +"Fiona Macleod" period, for "Vistas" (1894) contains many of them, +though they are cast here in dialogue form, and there are others among +the work published under his own name. In fact, the writing under the +two names never becomes liker in quality and intention than when it is +"spiritual." The sketch from Part II of "The Dominion of Dreams" (1899), +entitled "The Book of the Opal," for instance, is written on the very +key of "Fragments of the Lost Journals of Piero di Cosimo" (1896), far +apart their subject material, and "The Hill-Wind" by "W.S." dedicated +as it is to "F.M.," might well be a rejected passage from "The Mountain +Lovers." There is the color of the Highlands and Islands about many of +these mystical stories, about "The Hill-Wind," by "W.S." and "The Wind, +the Shadow, and the Soul," the epilogue "F.M." wrote to the "Dominion of +Dreams"; but most of these shorter mystical tales have not the tang and +savor of farm-home on lonely moors, or fisher's hut on the lonelier +machar, that is characteristic of most of the tales long and short, that +deal with modern days. + +Nor are the meanings of these "spiritual tales" consistently indicated +in symbols taken from Scottish life, nor is their supernaturalism native +to it. Mrs. Spoer (Ada Goodrich-Freer), in her "Outer Isles" (1902), +tells us "The Celtic Gloom" amuses the Hebridean. If so, what effect +would such discussion as that of "The Lynn of Dreams" and "Maya" have +upon him? But if such essays are not written out of Highland life, they +are none the less interesting, and in the case of "Maya," with its +consideration of waking dream, beautiful as art, and valuable, too, as a +contribution to science. + +So far does Sharp go in his belief as to the apprehension of thought +through powers other than those of the senses, that in "The Winged +Destiny" he can look forward to a time "when the imagination shall lay +aside words and pigments and clay, as raiment needless during the +festivals of the spirit, and express itself in the thoughts which +inhabit words--as light inhabits water or as greenness inhabits grass." +Not only does he foresee such a time, but he foreshadows it, heralds it +in some of his sketches, "Aileen" for one, by attempting it. Perhaps he +has succeeded, perhaps not. To me the attempt is a failure, not, I +think, because he is writing for to-morrow, for that age when the +spiritual awakening he so often prophesied shall have come, but because +he is attempting what cannot be done in any age. If he were seeking only +suggestion, well and good. But he seeks more, and fails, I think, to +attain more. It seems to me impossible that the suggestions he creates +can ever be more than suggestions. They cannot become definite concepts +that will mean the same thing to all men. Suggestion, the opening-up of +vistas, is a high attribute of the art he follows; but he is not content +with suggestion, he would seek more definite expression of what, after +all, is not thought but mood. So it is that he is most successful when +conveying mood and less successful when conveying esoteric thought. As a +critic, of course, on a plane easier for the conveyance of thought, +Sharp is definite enough, completely successful in conveying the ideas +that he intends to convey. + +Often, I fear, when Sharp intends "spiritual history," either in a tale +wholly devoted to this purpose, as "The Divine Adventure," or as +explanatory to the incidents of some more tangible tale, he is really +only playing with words, beautiful words, words sometimes so beautiful +that we are apt to forget that words are to be used not alone for +beauty's sake. Often, again, I fear, he will introduce beautiful symbols +simply for their beauty and not because they have a real purpose, not +because they will more intimately convey, even to the initiated, the +intent of his writing. That these practices are the result of +carelessness, sometimes, as well as of his subservience to beauty, the +fascination that words merely as words or visions merely as visions +exert upon him, is, I think, true. It is but seldom, I believe, that the +underlying thought is incoherent. In almost all of his earlier writing, +however, even in the earlier "Fiona" writing, he is very careless. He +contradicts himself in his short stories as to facts, he gets his family +relationships tangled in a way that cannot be explained by any process +of nature, and so, too, I think, he gets his symbols mixed, or deludes +himself into the belief that something that was hastily written "came to +him" that way and so should be preserved in that exact expression, even +though to him at the second reading it meant nothing definite. He jumps +to conclusions again and again in what he writes about birds, where I +can follow him on a certain footing of knowledge. If he is so careless +about facts, if he can, even though it is a slip, confuse Mary Magdalene +and the Virgin Mary, if he can mention birds in a description of +Highland landscape that is characteristic of a certain time of year when +birds of that species would be in the Highlands only by accident at that +time of year, it is more than likely, slips though these may be, that +there will be similar slips in all he writes, no fewer, it is likely, in +his writings of psychic things than elsewhere. + +There is possible, of course, no hard-and-fast classification of his +writings. Class shades into class almost imperceptibly. It is +particularly difficult to draw the line between the several kinds of +stories and sketches he writes that involve supernaturalism of one kind +and another. There is possible, however, a rough-and-ready distinction +between those stories of his which are esoterically mystical and those +which, while concerned with the supernatural, are concerned with it in +the way familiar in old romance. Of this "usual supernatural" are those +in which "second sight" is the motive, second sight which is always to +be looked for as the commonest supernatural motive in the writing of all +Gaels, either Alban or Irish. Sharp introduced "second sight" into "The +Son of Allan" (1881); it is in "Pharais" (1894), the first of his "F.M." +work; it is developed at some length in "Iona" (1900), which is a +microcosm of all his writing. In "Iona," Sharp puts himself on record as +holding stoutly belief in the reality of the power:-- + + The faculty itself is so apt to the spiritual law that one wonders + why it is so set apart in doubt. It would, I think, be far stranger + if there were no such faculties. That I believe, it were needless + to say, were it not that these words may be read by many to whom + this quickened inward vision is a superstition, or a fantastic + glorification of insight. + +The Achannas, in the uncanny stories in which they are heroes and +villains, are all possessed by the power of the second sight, but second +sight is not the most remarkable of their supernatural powers. Hypnotic +suggestion Gloom uses as an everyday agent in his affairs. It is through +hypnotic suggestion that he puts madness upon Alasdair M'Ian, playing to +him the Pibroch of the Mad, Alasdair M'Ian, in telling whose story +"Fiona Macleod" revealed--I suppose, by chance--something of the +struggle of William Sharp to succeed in letters. Much more frequently, +however, he uses a supernatural power that is further removed from those +in which modern science is interested, such as the machination of +fairies that made Allison Achanna the "Anointed Man"--that, in plain +speech, had driven him fey; or such as the lure of the serpent goddess +that drove to his death the piper hero of "By the Yellow Moon Rock," or +the exchanging of human child for fairy child that is the burden of +"Faraghaol." + +It is much more likely that William Sharp would have made more of this +changeling motive had it not come so near to the question of dual +personality, which it would be dangerous to him to discuss, as would +that question so closely akin, the question of people who are +"away,"--that is, with the fairies,--a kindly explanation of insanity, +chronic or recurrent. As William Sharp he has touched on the question of +dual personality several times in his verses, and very definitely in "A +Fellowe and his Wife." In this last-named book he says, in a letter that +the Countess Ilse writes to her husband in Ruegen: "This duality is so +bewildering. I to be myself, whom you know, and whom I know--and then +that other I, whom you do not know at all and whom I only catch glimpses +of as in a mirror, or hear whispering for a moment in the twilight." +That he could not take up the topic so definitely in his later writings +must have, indeed, been a cross to him, for there was hardly any other +question, unless perhaps that of "ancestral memory," which interested +him more deeply. It might be argued, I suppose, that he did discuss it +in "The Divine Adventure," in considering the relations of Spirit, Will, +and Body. Mrs. Sharp, I take it, so holds when she says in her "Memoir" +that the William Sharp work was that of the Will and the "Fiona Macleod" +work beyond the control of the Will. And it is true that these three, +the Spirit, Will, and Body, though each is given a distinctive +personality, each a memory distinct from the memory of the others, are +all but the component parts of one man. Mrs. Sharp does not, however, +anywhere avow directly a belief in the possession of a real dual +personality by her husband, and she definitely contradicts Mr. Yeats for +his expression of belief that "William Sharp could not remember what as +'Fiona Macleod' he had said to you in conversation." + +Very different from these short stories I have been discussing are three +of the four contained in the volume entitled "Madge o' the Pool" (1896), +published as by William Sharp. Of the one that is somewhat in the manner +of certain of the "F.M." stories, the "Gypsy Christ," I have spoken. +Two, "The Coward" and "The Lady in Hosea," are but "the usual thing." +"Madge o' the Pool" is the one really worth while. In this story, with +such river pirates as we have met, sentimentalized, in "Our Mutual +Friend," as material, Sharp writes as realistically as he does in +"Silence Farm," and with a sympathy and pathos that his objective method +cannot exclude. + +There are episodes or sketches, some of them what sharp calls "prose +imaginings," throughout his many books, that one may hardly call short +stories, or myths, or studies in folk-lore, or criticism, or any of the +other many kinds of writing that he essayed. Perhaps "memories" would be +the proper general term for writing of this kind. In almost every one of +these episodes or sketches there is a germ of a story, and some, I +suppose, regard them as but unrealized art. But I for one am glad Mr. +Sharp did not "work them up." In them are some of his best writing and +some of that most personal and intimate. I have spoken of "Aileen" and +"Barabal"; "Sheumas, a Memory," is another that is memorable, and +memorable too, are "The Sea Madness" and "The Triad." "The Triad" is +almost his _credo_, certainly a statement of the things he holds "most +excellent"--"primitive genius, primitive love, primitive memory." Here +Sharp recurs, as so often in his writing, to "ancestral memory," that +possession of men by which they are aware of what was in the world +before they were, through oneness with the universal memory into which +they are absorbed in dream or vision or of which they become aware by +what we call intuition. If such a power be restricted so that its +possessor recalls only certain parts of antiquity, he is virtually in +the state of him who believes he remembers what he remembers because of +previous incarnations. I have no personal opinion to express on the +subject, but if such memories exist in us because of our participation +in a universal memory or because of reincarnation, it is easy to explain +why Sharp is best in his writing of myths, his pictures of the wild +beauties of love and war and dream in barbaric Erin and Alba. It is +because he is the reincarnation of the shanachie of the Dark Ages. When +he thought of reincarnation, however, in relation to himself, he +thought, I have no doubt, of himself as the reincarnation of a druid, +one who had been aware of mysteries; but what he really was, in life, +with his magnificent enthusiasm and bravado,--picturesque raiment after +all and no more for the high-hearted and inherently ailing body of +him,--was this reincarnation of the shanachie, such an one as his own +Oran the Monk turned tale-teller. If you doubt that he was shanachie, +not druid, compare the two legends in "Beyond the Blue Septentrions." +The ordered beauty of the legend that tells of the derivation of the +name of Arthur from Arcturus falls familiarly on our ears. It is +evidently made under a lamp by one who has read many old legends. It is +no druidic revelation. The other, that which ends with the three great +hero-leaps of Fionn from the Arctic Floes to the Pole, from the Pole up +to Arcturus, from Arcturus to the Hill of Heaven itself, is fantastic, +bizarre, extravagant to grotesqueness, with the very flamboyance of old +Irish legend and modern Irish folk-tale. In other words, it is in the +very manner of the shanachie of the Dark Ages, whether his work was +recorded then as court poem or has been handed down by word of mouth +among the folk. Nor is there anything inconsistent in this wild +imagining with a very different power displayed in "moralities" like his +"Last Supper." I have heard stories as incongruous, one uproarious, +another of cloistral quiet and piety, from the old Irish gardener with +whom I spent a large part of my happier days, the days from seven to +seventeen. Lawrence lost his life doing a "retreat" morning after +morning on the cold stone floor of a Vincentian church, not in any +sudden repentance at fourscore and three for the sins of his youth for +they had been fewer than those of almost all I know, but in the usual +way of his austere life. Yet Lawrence was just as much himself when he +was telling me stories of Dean Swift that were full of malice and +brutality and orgiac ecstasy. + +The range of the shanachie is wide, and wide, too, the range of Sharp in +the role of shanachie of barbaric life on both sides of the Moyle. Among +such writings there are few tellings of the order of the folk-tale, more +of the order of the hero saga, many--perhaps the best of them--of an +order all his own that has developed, it is likely, from the old +"Saints' Lives," but to which he has given a ring of authenticity that +makes them seem descended from an antiquity as remote as that of +folk-tale or hero-tale. "The Flight of the Culdees" brings before you +with vividness what must have been the life of the Celtic missionaries +in the days when the men out of Lochlin began to seek the Summer Isles; +and "The Annir Choile" and "The Woman with the Net," what was the fate +they meted out to those among themselves who slipped back into the +pleasant old ways of paganism. These are written out of his own +revisualization of the past. More immediately sprung of the old legends +are "The Three Marvels of Hy," which tells of the inner life of Columba +and his brethren on Iona, and "Muime Chriosd," which utilizes folk-lore +as old or older than the legends collected by Mr. Alexander Carmichael +in his pursuit of the stories of St. Bride among the peasantry of the +Outer Isles. "The Song of the Sword" and "Mircath" have in them the +battle-madness of the Viking, whetted to its keenest intensity as he +meets the hard resistance of the Hebrideans; and "The Laughter of +Scathach" and "The Sad Queen," that more terrible fury of the Amazon who +ruled in Skye. Than this last-named story Sharp has done no starker +writing, but it is so evidently from a man's point of view that it +confirmed many in the belief that "Fiona Macleod" could not be a woman. + +"The Washer of the Ford" has its roots in folk-lore, but it is so +remoulded in the mind of the writer that it is rather a re-creation of +the old belief than a restoration of it. There are those who would +rather have had Sharp follow the tales as they are told by Campbell of +Islay, Cameron of Brodick, and Carmichael of South Uist, but to me, +unless the tale is one familiar to many readers, such a remoulding, if +done with power, is surely a prerogative of the artist. But when he +takes a well-known legendary character, as well known among the Gaels as +Achilles among English school-boys, and changes his hair from black to +golden and his stature from short to tall, utterly transforming not only +our picture of him, but the significance of his deeds, then I object, as +I would object if he had made the fair-haired and great-statured +Achilles into such "a little dark man" as the Red Branch legends record +Cuchullin to have been. Nor would I quarrel even with his changing of +the spirit of the old tales if he had always, as he has almost always, +substituted a new beauty for the old beauty of the legend in its bardic +or folk form. It is in the few instances in which his dream of the old +tale does not lift to so great a power in its way as the old tale +possessed in its way that I protest. Of such a nature are some of the +changes Sharp made in his retelling of the "Three Sorrows of +Story-Telling" in "The Laughter of Peterkin," which, it must be +remembered, however, was hurried work, almost hackwork. + +Sharp was particularly successful, I think, in his handling, in the +three tales--he calls them "legendary moralities"--in which he brings +Christ to the straths of Argyll. These three are "The Last Supper," "The +Fisher of Men," and "The Wayfarer." The last is the least successful of +the three, but significant in its attack on certain forms of +Presbyterianism for their attempts to kill out, as un-Christian, the old +ways of life among the Highlanders. This charge was made fifty years ago +by Campbell of Islay, and it had been repeated only yesterday by Mr. +Carmichael. William Black and Mr. Munro confirm it, too, in their +novels, and, in fact, it is only what one expects of Puritanism, whether +in its dominating of the Scotch Presbyterian minister or of the Irish +Catholic priest. The latter is to-day doing as much to kill the joy of +life in Connacht as did even the minister of the Free Kirk yesterday on +the Lews. It may have been partly to hide his identity that Sharp +assumed what some thought an anti-Presbyterian attitude in his "Fiona +Macleod" writing; it may have been the sympathy of the artist toward a +church that has conserved art that led him to what some thought a +pro-Catholic attitude; but scratch this gypsy artist and you find, +surprising as it may be, moral prejudice for Protestantism. Does he not +admire Torcall Cameron and Archibald Ruthven, stern Calvinists both? +"The Fisher of Men," and "The Last Supper" have in them the austere +beauty of the old morality plays, a beauty that is akin to the beauty of +the Puritan imagination of Bunyan, and a tenderness that we may in vain +look for there. They are written in all reverence and simplicity, and it +is no wonder we find Mr. Yeats suggesting that "Fiona Macleod" turn them +into plays for the Irish Theatre. + +I do not care so much for "The Birds of Emar," myths he has rewoven from +the "Mabinogion" into Gaelic texture, or the series that purport to be +collected among the Isles and are found to be very like certain +well-known Greek legends. These, too, seem to me reweavings, and the +"Treud-nan-Ron" and "The Woman at the Crossways"; and "The Man on the +Moor," though its origin is far from their origins, is also a reweaving. +In certain of his writing of this time Sharp passes over virtually into +criticism or comparative mythology, as in "Queens of Beauty" and +"Orpheus and Oisin," and in many of the papers of "Where the Forest +Murmurs." These all have interest; but some smell much of the lamp; and +none of them are to be compared to the best of his "Seanchas," to "The +Harping of Cravetheen," or "Enya of the Dark Eyes," or "Silk o' the +Kine," or "Ula and Urla"; or to his Plays "The House of Usna" and "The +Immortal Hour," in which, for all the savagery, there is nobility, the +nobility that was in the old legends themselves, that nobility that +withstood even the hand of Macpherson, that nobility that has been +reproduced most nobly of all in the "Deirdre" of Synge. + +I am not so sure that the tone of these old myths is always +distinctively Celtic, as it is undoubtedly in "The Annir Choile," and in +other "Seanchas" that reveal him at his best. There was viking blood in +Sharp, and it comes out, I think, in such tales as "The Song of the +Sword." How he came to write these barbaric tales I do not know, though +I have sometimes thought that the "Dhoya" (1891) of Mr. Yeats may have +suggested them, as the Hanrahan stories may have suggested certain of +the more modern tales. But whatever their genesis, the heroes and +heroines of the "Seanchas" seem to him like the heroes and heroines of +Homer and the Greek tragedians; and his friend whom he thought inspired +him to much of the "F.M." work stood, we must remember, as symbolical to +him of the women of Greek as well as of Celtic legend. + +There are many indications, in his last writing, not only in that +unpublished book on "Greek Backgrounds" and in his articles in the +magazines on Sicily, all by William Sharp, but in the "Fiona Macleod" +work, that he would have come to write of Greek antiquity with an +enthusiasm very like that with which he wrote of Gaelic antiquity. +"W.S." is speaking with the voice of "F.M." when he says in a letter to +Mrs. Sharp, dated Athens, January 29, 1904: "It is a marvelous +homecoming feeling I have here. And I know a strange stirring, a kind of +spiritual rebirth." + +One reason, perhaps, that the best work of Sharp has come out of his +consideration of the Celts of antiquity is that the stark stories he has +to tell of them restrain his style, a style too flamboyant when there +is in what he is writing a large opportunity for description of +landscape or exhibition of great emotion in his characters. Another +reason is, perhaps, that his tendency to introduce the supernatural is +more in harmony with the subject material got out of antiquity than of +the subject material got out of to-day. We can accept magic in these old +tales, even to the incantations of Bobaran the White that swayed the +waves of the sea so that Gaer, the son of Deirdre, was saved from the +men of Lochlin. That is as it should be in druidic times. It is +impossible, of course, that Bobaran had power over the waves, but in +such a story such an episode seems more probable than the possible +hypnotic suggestion of Gloom Achanna's pipe-playing that sent Manus +MacOdrum to his death among the fighting seals, because to-day we do not +often come upon such things. It is even less easy to accept the piping +to madness of Alasdair in "Alasdair the Proud." Hypnotic suggestion may +drive to death in the sea a man half fey because of sorrow long endured +and the superstition that he is descended from seals, but pipe-playing +cannot believably in modern tales drive a man insane, whatever it may do +in the famous old "Pied Piper of Hamelin" or other folk-tale. + +So, too, in the verse of Sharp, whether lyric or dramatic, it is the +Celt that inspires him to his best work. Nowhere does his verse win so +much of beauty and glamour as when his thought turns to the four cities +of Murias and Finias and Falias and Glorias, or when it breaks into a +chant on the lips of Etain, in "The Immortal Hour." + +Though there is less unevenness of technique, both in the style and in +the unfolding of the story, in these "Seanchas" than elsewhere in his +writing, the technique breaks down at times here, too, more usually +through sins of omission than through sins of commission. Sharp realized +the something wanting that so many find in much of his writing, even in +much that is most beautiful, realized it so keenly that he felt called +upon to explain. He explained not directly, it is true, as if in answer +to criticism, but none the less definitely in thus affirming his +attitude toward legends in the "Sunset of Old Tales": "We owe a debt, +indeed, to the few who are truly fit for the task [the collecting of +tales from oral tradition], but there are some minds which care very +little to hear about things when they can have the things themselves." +This statement explains in part why it is that the life of the people, +even that part of their life that fronts the past, has escaped him. He +prefers his dream, thinking that it is their dream, or the dream of +their ancestors. He has, indeed, the thing itself, the Highlander's +dream, and when it is given to him to impart that dream fully we forgive +him the proud words I have just quoted. The pity of it is he has not +always so succeeded through the way he has chosen, and then it is, of +course, that we condemn him for the lack of that humility the great +dramatic artist must have whereby he must forget himself and so +subordinate himself that tradition or life speaks through him. + +It is not to be wondered, then, that there is little direct record of +folk-lore of his own collecting in his writing, even when he is writing +of folk-topics. There are borrowings in plenty, especially in "Where the +Forest Murmurs," and even when the collecting seems his own, as it does +in "Earth, Fire, and Water," "Children of Water," and "Cuilidh Mhoire," +it is diamond dust, not diamonds, to which he gives so beautiful +setting. + +Just as appealing to Sharp as the old myths themselves are the +localities that tradition or the stories themselves assign as background +to them. He loves Iona not only for its gray and barren beauty, but +because it was here Columba wrought his wonders. "Iona," which fills the +major part of the volume "The Divine Adventure" gives title to, is the +finest in quality as well as the longest of his writings that may be +called, prosaically, topographical. They, in their varying ways, are +much more than merely topographical, whether done in the way of "F.M.," +as "Iona" is, and as "From the Hebrid Isles" is, and several papers from +"Where the Forest Murmurs"; or in the way of "W.S.," as "Literary +Geography" is. In this last-named book, Scott and Stevenson, among +others, are put against the background that inspired their work, as in +"Iona" certain stories are imagined so as to fit their surroundings and +certain legendary history narrated that is fitting to these surroundings +with an appropriateness almost too exact to be believable. In "Iona," +because he loved the island that inspired its writing beyond any other +of the places he loved greatly, is to be found some of his very best +work, and examples of all kinds of his writing, as I have said; and even +when this "topographical writing," as in some of his magazine articles, +is evidently of the sort initially intended to "float cuts," it is very +well done, done most often with distinction. At times, of course, it +suffers from over-emphasis, as do the descriptive portions of his long +stories, but generally he attunes his writing to the genius of the +place. This is as true of his letters as of what he wrote for the +public, especially true of that series on Algiers from which Mrs. Sharp +quotes in her "Memoir." Papers of this sort, papers giving the genius of +place, Sharp was happier in, I think, than in those which are more +definitely the out-of-door essay. Sharp knew much of birds and small +mammals, of trees and plants, with a knowledge that evidently began in +childhood, but, as with so much else in his life, this knowledge he +never had time to fill out and deepen through patient observation. You +must not, then, turn to "Where the Forest Murmurs" to find writing of a +kind with that in which Thoreau and Jefferies so finely attained, much +less that loving intimacy with the personal side of birds and animals +that so humanly tempers the scientific spirit in White of Selborne. Nor +is there in them the racy earthiness of Mr. Burroughs. Their greatest +asset is their enthusiasm over the beauty of the world they are written +to praise; the next greatest their power of catching in words the mood +of a landscape; their next greatest their distinction of style, though +there are several in which the style is wholly without distinction. Now +and then, too, they are valuable for their guesses at the whys and +wherefores of things. There are to-day many explanations of what is +commonly called "The Lure of the Wild." Is not this as revelatory as +any?-- + + Is this because, in the wilderness, we recover something of what we + have lost?... Because we newly find ourselves as though surprised + into an intimate relationship of which we have been unaware or have + indifferently ignored? What a long way the ancestral memory has to + go, seeking, like a pale sleuth-hound, among obscure dusks and + forgotten nocturnal silences, for the lost trails of the soul! It + is not we only, you and I, who look into the still waters of the + wilderness and lonely places, and are often dimly perplext, are + often troubled we know not how or why: some forgotten reminiscence + in us is aroused, some memory, not our own, but yet our heritage is + perturbed, footsteps that have immemorially sunk in ancient dusk + move furtively along obscure corridors in our brain, the ancestral + hunter or fisher awakes, the primitive hillman or woodlander + communicates again with old forgotten intimacies and the secret + oracular things of lost wisdoms. This is no fanciful challenge of + speculation. In the order of psychology it is as logical as in the + order of biology is the tracing of our upright posture or the deft + and illimitable use of our hands, from unrealizably remote periods + wherein the pioneers of man reach slowly forward to inconceivable + arrivals. + +The weakness of these essays that are like out-of-door essays, but are +not out-of-door essays, is their dearth of freshly observed fact. This +dearth would not matter so much if there were not so many of them, but a +book full of such essays with little original observation will pall, no +matter how well written, no matter how interesting the personality of +the writer. Thus it is that some of the essays of Jefferies pall, some +of those written in his last days, of Jefferies who had in his earlier +writing been so objective. In Thoreau there is a happy combination of +freshly observed fact with personal comment, and in Mr. Burroughs a +personal element greatly subdued, and presented in most of the essays +only through the selective art that has preserved the incidents he +relates out of many of a vast store of their kind. + +In these "nature studies" of Sharp, as in so much of his writing, there +is a great deal of generalization from phenomena superficially observed. +He is not so often inaccurate, but he is very often merely repetitive, +giving us in beautiful and oftentimes distinguished phrase what others +have given us before. Sharp wrote sometimes, I have no doubt, with the +thing he describes before him but oftener, it would seem, from notes, +and oftenest, I take it, from memory. Sometimes it is best to write thus +from memory. The unessential will fade out, the essential remain; but +with Sharp the trouble is that the first observation has often been +hurried. He was content with the beauty that he saw when he first +noticed the incident; he did not wait to observe what in the further +actions of the life observed would make that beautiful incident more +significant. It may, of course, be said that all he was after was the +impression that the passing incident made upon him. Perhaps so, and if +so, more is the pity, because, while, as I have said, one out-of-door +essay with little or even with nothing but the personality of the writer +may interest, or perhaps two such, or even ten, a book full will be +monotonous. At its best, however, his writing of "natural romance" is of +great beauty. "Still Waters," for one, is almost perfect, as perfect as +this sort of thing may be. It is wrought of his own experiences with +just enough of mythological data to give it the texture of old and +lasting things. + +"The Rainy Hyades," on the other hand, is largely a rehash of folk-lore +notes, second-hand work with very little added from experience and very +little finely imagined or recaptured by way of ancestral memory. At +times it would seem that, poor, tired man, he had to feed his flagging +invention from a dictionary of quotations. So, it appears, he has done +in his "Winter Stars" as well as in "The Rainy Hyades." As I think over +the unevenness of these essays, the beauty of "Still Waters," and the +obviousness of these others, I am brought back again to wondering what +Sharp would have done had all his time been his to do as he would with. +Such wonderment is, of course, idle, idle as that as to what Keats would +have done had he lived, for a man's art is judged by what it is, with no +tempering of the appraisement by what the man's life has been. +Fortunately there is inspiring work in plenty in Sharp, in this, as in +other phases of his work, to make readers turn to him when interest in +him as a phenomenon of current literature has passed away. It is hard to +think of the time when writing so beautiful as that of "Still Waters" +will not be sought by lovers of beauty in words and by lovers of beauty +in landscape, and when the opening of "The Coming of Dusk" will not be +turned to, as the opening of Emerson's "Nature" is turned to to-day. + +Were I to attempt to enumerate the critical writings of Sharp, from the +"Rossetti" of 1882 to "The Winged Destiny" of 1904, I should run up a +catalogue that would exceed any even of Walt Whitman's. For years Sharp +lived by criticism, as editor of "The Canterbury Poets" and as reviewer +for many of the London journals. To me none of this critical work is +significant until he came to write of the movement that carried him to +fame,--to fame, I say, because "Fiona Macleod" was famous for a decade, +and not only as a mystery, but as a revealer of a new beauty in words, +and as a widener of horizons. + +I have, I think, by this time made clear what to me is the great +strength of William Sharp--his power to revisualize the Celtic past of +Scotland and to imagine stories of that past that are as native to it as +those handed down in Bardic legend or folk-lore. I have emphasized my +belief that in other kinds of writing his attainment is less original, +though often beautiful in its imitativeness, and this imitativeness I +will explain as being due partly to that quality of the play-actor that +was in him as in so many of Celtic blood, partly to his lack of time to +hew out for himself a way of his own, and partly to his quick +responsiveness to any new beauty pointed out by work that he admired. It +was not altogether, however, lack of time that prevented his attainment +of a larger originality, an originality in other sorts of writing than +the "Seanchas." Sharp had an unfortunate disbelief in early life in the +value of technique. In the preface to the "Romantic Ballads" (1888), for +instance, he expressed the belief that "the supreme merit of a poem is +not perfection of art, but the quality of the imagination which is the +source of such real or approximate perfection." This, as I interpret it +means that a poem, when of perfect art, has back of that perfect art a +high imaginative quality; but by his own practice Sharp knows that he +thought the quality would suffice without the highest art in its +expression. It was this belief that made him leave his work incomplete; +he read his verses, no doubt, with the glow in which he wrote them +recalled to memory, and without the realization that he had not got down +on paper for others half of the creative force that was in him as he +wrote. + +I have found a reason for a lesser success than the early work of "Fiona +Macleod" promised to him in his imitativeness, but in some ways he was +handicapped, too, by lack of models to follow. Granted he could have +blazed other ways for himself than that of the "Seanchas," he lessened +the originality of his attainment by imitation, but if he could not have +so blazed other ways he just as surely could have gone further had he +had models, or rather good models, to follow, models, for instance, in +novels of Highland life. The very fact of there being great realistic +stories of Highland life might have made it possible for him to have +written a Highland "Silence Farm." + +But enough of what might have been: what is is good enough, good enough +at its best to treasure among those things that are a lasting part of +our lives. However great may be the reaction against his work because of +the nine days' wonder about the identity of its creator, certain parts +of it, certain tales and certain verses and a play, will hold their own +against the years. Through such tales as "The Sad Queen," and such +verses as "The Dirge of the Four Cities," and "The House of Usna" even +eyes of little vision may see "eternal beauty wandering on her way," +leaving about them a glamour as recurrent to the mind as sunset to the +skies. + +THE END + + + + +APPENDIX + + + + +APPENDIX + +PLAYS PRODUCED, IN DUBLIN, BY THE ABBEY THEATRE COMPANY AND ITS +PREDECESSORS, WITH DATES OF FIRST PERFORMANCES + + +IRISH LITERARY THEATRE AT ANTIENT CONCERT +ROOMS + +May 8, 1899. "The Countess Cathleen." W.B. Yeats. +May 9, 1899. "The Heather Field." Edward Martyn. + + +IRISH LITERARY THEATRE AT THE GAIETY THEATRE + +Feb. 19, 1900. "The Bending of the Bough." George Moore. +Feb. 19, 1900. "The Last Feast of the Fianna." Alice Milligan. +Feb. 20, 1900. "Maeve." Edward Martyn. +Oct. 21, 1901. "Diarmuid and Grania." W.B. Yeats and + George Moore. +Oct. 21, 1901. "The Twisting of the Rope." Douglas Hyde. + (The first Gaelic play produced in any theatre.) + + +MR. W.G. FAY'S IRISH NATIONAL DRAMATIC COMPANY AT ST. TERESA'S HALL, + CLARENDON STREET + +Apr. 2, 1902. "Deirdre." "A.E." +Apr. 2, 1902. "Kathleen ni Houlihan." W.B. Yeats. + + +IRISH NATIONAL DRAMATIC COMPANY AT ANTIENT CONCERT ROOMS + +Oct. 29, 1902. "The Sleep of the King." Seumas O'Cuisin. +Oct. 29, 1902. "The Laying of the Foundations." Fred Ryan. +Oct. 30, 1902. "A Pot of Broth." W.B. Yeats. +Oct. 31, 1902. "The Racing Lug." Seumas O'Cuisin. + +IRISH NATIONAL THEATRE SOCIETY, MOLESWORTH HALL + +Mar. 14, 1903. "The Hour-Glass." W.B. Yeats. +Mar. 14, 1903. "Twenty-Five." Lady Gregory. +Oct. 8, 1903. "The King's Threshold." W.B. Yeats. +Oct. 8, 1903. "In the Shadow of the Glen." J.M. Synge. +Dec. 3, 1903. "Broken Soil." Padraic Colum. +Jan. 14, 1904. "The Shadowy Waters." W.B. Yeats. +Jan. 14, 1904. "The Townland of Tamney." Seumas McManus. +Feb. 25, 1904. "Riders to the Sea." J.M. Synge. + +IRISH NATIONAL THEATRE SOCIETY AT THE ABBEY THEATRE + +Dec. 27, 1904. "On Baile's Strand." W.B. Yeats. +Dec. 27, 1904. "Spreading the News." Lady Gregory. +Feb. 4, 1905. "The Well of the Saints." J.M. Synge. +Mar. 25, 1905. "Kincora." Lady Gregory. +Apr. 25, 1905. "The Building Fund." William Boyle. +June 9, 1905. "The Land." Padraic Colum. + +NATIONAL THEATRE SOCIETY, LTD. (ABBEY COMPANY) + +Dec. 9, 1905. "The White Cockade." Lady Gregory. +Jan. 20, 1906. "The Eloquent Dempsey." William Boyle. +Feb. 19, 1906. "Hyacinth Halvey." Lady Gregory. +Oct. 20, 1906. "The Gaol Gate." Lady Gregory. +Oct. 20, 1906. "The Mineral Workers." William Boyle. +Nov. 24, 1906. "Deirdre." W.B. Yeats. +Dec. 8, 1906. "The Canavans." Lady Gregory. +Dec. 8, 1906. New Version of "The Shadowy W.B. Yeats. + Waters." +Jan. 26, 1907. "The Playboy of the Western J.M. Synge. + World." +Feb. 23, 1907. "The Jackdaw." Lady Gregory. +Mar. 9, 1907. "The Rising of the Moon." Lady Gregory. +Apr. 1, 1907. "The Eyes of the Blind." Miss W.M. Letts. +Apr. 3, 1907. "The Poorhouse." Douglas Hyde and + Lady Gregory. +Apr. 27, 1907. "Fand." Wilfred Scawen + Blunt. +Oct. 3, 1907. "The Country Dressmaker." George Fitzmaurice. +Oct. 31, 1907. "Devorgilla." Lady Gregory. +Nov. 21, 1907. "The Unicorn from the Stars." W.B. Yeats and + Lady Gregory. +Feb. 13, 1908. "The Man who missed the Tide." W.F. Casey. +Feb. 13, 1908. "The Piper." "Norreys Connell." +Mar. 10, 1908. "The Piedish." George Fitzmaurice. +Mar. 19, 1908. "The Golden Helmet." W.B. Yeats. +Apr. 20, 1908. "The Workhouse Ward." Lady Gregory. +Oct. 1, 1908. "The Suburban Groove." W.F. Casey. +Oct. 8, 1908. "The Clancy Name." Lennox Robinson. +Oct. 15, 1908. "When the Dawn is come." Thomas MacDonogh. +Oct. 21, 1908. New Version of "The Man who W.F. Casey. + missed the Tide." +Feb. 11, 1909. Revised Version of "Kincora." Lady Gregory. +Mar. 11, 1909. "Stephen Grey." D.L. Kelleher. +Apr. 1, 1909. "The Crossroads." Lennox Robinson. +Apr. 1, 1909. "Time." "Norreys Connell." +Apr. 29, 1909. "The Glittering Gate." Lord Dunsany. +May 27, 1909. "An Imaginary Conversation." "Norreys Connell." +Aug. 25, 1909. "The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet." Bernard Shaw. +Sept. 16, 1909. "The White Feather." R.J. Ray. +Oct. 14, 1909. "The Challenge." Miss W.M. Letts. +Nov. 11, 1909. "The Image." Lady Gregory. +Jan. 13, 1910. "Deirdre of the Sorrows." J.M. Synge. +Feb. 10, 1910. "The Green Helmet." W.B. Yeats. +Mar. 2, 1910. "The Travelling Man." Lady Gregory. +May 12, 1910. "Thomas Muskerry." Padraic Colum. +May 26, 1910. "Harvest." Lennox Robinson. +Sept. 28, 1910. "The Casting-out of Martin R.J. Ray. + Whelan." +Oct. 27, 1910. "Birthright." T.C. Murray. +Nov. 10, 1910. "The Full Moon." Lady Gregory. +Nov. 24, 1910. "The Shuiler's Child."[3] Seumas O'Kelly. +Dec. 1, 1910. "Coats." Lady Gregory +Jan. 12, 1911. "The Deliverer." Lady Gregory. +Jan. 26, 1911. "King Argimenes and the Lord Dunsany. + Unknown Warrior." +Feb. 16, 1911. "The Land of Heart's Desire."[4] W.B. Yeats. +Mar. 30, 1911. "Mixed Marriage." St. John G. Ervine. +Nov. 23, 1911. "The Interlude of Youth." Anon., first + printed 1554. +Nov. 23, 1911. "The Second Shepherds' Play." Anon., _circa_ + 1400. +Nov. 30, 1911. "The Marriage." Douglas Hyde. +Dec. 7, 1911. "Red Turf." Rutherford Mayne. +Dec. 16, 1911. Revival of "The Countess W.B. Yeats. + Cathleen." +Jan. 4, 1912. "The Annunciation." _circa_ 1400. +Jan. 4, 1912. "The Flight into Egypt." _circa_ 1400. +Jan. 11, 1912. "MacDarragh's Wife." Lady Gregory. +Feb. 1, 1912. Revival of "The Country George Fitzmaurice. + Dressmaker." +Feb. 16, 1912. "The Tinker and the Fairy." Douglas Hyde. + (Played in Gaelic.) +Feb. 29, 1912. "The Worlde and the Chylde." 15th century. +Mar. 28, 1912. "Family Failings." William Boyle. +Apr. 11, 1912. "Patriots." Lennox Robinson. +June 20, 1912. "Maurice Harte." T.C. Murray. +July 4, 1912. "The Bogie Men." Lady Gregory. +Oct. 17, 1912. "The Magnanimous Lover." St. John G. Ervine. +Nov. 21, 1912. "Damer's Gold." Lady Gregory. + +TRANSLATIONS OF THE FOLLOWING HAVE BEEN PRODUCED + +Apr. 16, 1906. "The Doctor in spite of Himself." (Moliere.) Translated + by Lady Gregory. +Mar. 16, 1907. "Interior." (Maeterlinck.) +Mar. 19, 1908. "Teja." (Sudermann.) + Translated by Lady + Gregory. +Apr. 4, 1909. "The Rogueries of Scapin." (Moliere.) + Translated by Lady + Gregory. +Jan. 21, 1909. "The Miser." (Moliere.) + Translated by Lady + Gregory. +Feb. 24, 1910. "Mirandolina." (Goldini.) Translated + by Lady Gregory. +Jan. 5, 1911. "Nativity Play." (Douglas Hyde.) + Translated by Lady + Gregory. + + +FOOTNOTES: + +[3] First produced by an amateur company at the Molesworth Hall in 1909. + +[4] First produced at the Avenue Theatre, London, in 1894. + + + + +INDEX + + +Abbey Theatre, organization of company, 13-36. + +_All Ireland Review_, 86. + +_All on the Irish Shore_, 6. + +Allgood, Sara, 19, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 211. + +Allingham, William, 39. + +_Ancient Legends of Ireland_, 51. + +Antient Concert Rooms, the, 18, 78, 86, 106, 200. + +_Apostle, The_, 111. + +_Aran Islands, The_, 168, 187, 188, 191. + +Aran Islands, the, 147, 162, 166, 170, 171, 177, 178, 179, 181, 187, + 188, 190, 191, 192. + +Argyll, 4, 267, 268. + +Arnold, Matthew, 3, 59, 255. + +Arran, 267. + +Arthurian stories, 3, 48. + +Austen, Jane, 155, 156. + +_Ave_, 73, 76, 94, 99, 108, 109. + +Avenue Theatre, London, 25, 50. + + +_Bards and Saints_, 8. + +Barker, Granville, 230. + +Barlow, Jane, 1, 7, 148. + +Beerbohm, Max, 81. + +Belfast, 47. + +_Beltaine_, 75, 85. + +_Bending of the Bough, The_, 76, 88, 95, 98, 105. + +Benson, Sir Frank, 18. + +Benson Company, the, 106. + +Beowulf, 142. + +Berkeley, George, 135. + +Bernhardt, Sara, 16. + +Bhagavad-Gita, 117. + +Birmingham, George A. (The Rev. Dr. James O. Hannay), 8. + +_Birthright_, 216, 217, 218, 219, 222. + +Bjoernson, Bjoernstjerne, 36. + +Black, William, 271, 284. + +Blake, William, 38. + +Bodley Head, the, 2. + _Book of Saints and Wonders_, 138, 142. + +Borrow, George, 161, 165, 173, 179. + +Boucicault, Dion, 168. + +Boyle, William, 15, 33, 208-215, 238, 239, 240. + _Building Fund, The_, 209-213; + _Eloquent Dempsey, The_, 208, 209, 213; + _Family Failings_, 208; + _Mineral Workers, The_, 208, 213-214, 238. + +Brigit, St., 142, 147, 282. + +Brittany, 3, 266. + _Broken Soil_, 32, 202. + +Brown, T.E., 4, 5. + +Browning, Robert, 50. + +Buchanan, Robert, 272. + +Buckley, William, 7, 8. + _Building Fund, The_, 208, 209-213, 214. + +Bullock, Shan, 7, 214, 234, 236, 270. + +Bunyan, John, 285. + +Burns, Robert, "Jolly Beggars," 177, 234. + +Burroughs, John, 290, 292. + _Bursting of the Bubble, The_, 9. + _By Thrasna River_, 7. + + +_Calendar of the Saints_, 247. + +Cameron, Dr., of Brodick, 283. + +Campbell, John F., of Islay, 283, 284. + +Campbell, Joseph (Seosamh MacCathmhaoil), 246-250. + _Judgment_, 247-250; + _Mearing Stones_, 247; + _The Mountainy Singer_, 247. + +Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, 23, 28, 45. + +_Canavans, The_, 149, 152. + +"Carberry, Ethna" (Anna Johnston MacManus), 10, 216, 255. + +Carmichael, Alexander, 263, 282, 283, 284. + +_Carmina Gadelica_, 263. + +Carnegie Lyceum, The, New York, 85. + +_Cathleen ni Houlihan_, 10, 17, 19, 31, 50-51, 53, 54, 55, 77. + +_Catriona_, 272. + +"Celtic Gloom, The," 274. + +_Celtic Literature, On the Study of_, 3. + +Celtic Renaissance, The, 1-12, 13, 18, 33, 36, 41, 93, 105, 114, 158, + 251, 256, 259, 260. + +_Celtic Twilight, The_, 37, 41, 42, 54. + +Chesson, Nora Hopper, 10. + +_Child of Nature, A_, 272. + +_Children of Lir_, 200. + +_Children of Tempest, The_, 4, 271. + +_Children of To-morrow_, 264. + +Church, Richard William, 138. + +_Clancy Name, The_, 223, 224, 228. + +Clare, 84, 141. + +Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 210, 211. + +Colum, Padraic, 11, 15, 21, 198-208, 240. + _Broken Soil_, 32, 202; + _Children of Lir_, 200; + _Eoghan's Wife_, 201; + _The Fiddler's House_, 200, 202, 204-205, 206; + _The Foleys_, 201; + _The Kingdom of the Young_, 201; + _The Land_, 200, 202, 204, 206; + _The Miracle of the Corn_, 200, 202; + _The Saxon Shillin'_, 201; + _Studies_, 200; + _Thomas Muskerry_, 199, 200, 206; + _Wild Earth_, 200, 208. + +Columba, 147, 282, 289. + +Congreve, William, 13. + +_Conn the Shaughraun_, 168. + +Connacht, 39, 154, 179, 188, 215, 239. + +"Connell, Norreys" (Conal O'Riordan), 31, 241-243. + _An Imaginary Conversation_, 242; + _Piper_, 31, 33, 242, 243; + _Shakespeare's End_, 242; + _Time_, 242. + +Connemara, 7, 147, 188. + +_Connla_, 20, 21. + +Conway, Hart, 218. + +Cork, 15, 47, 220, 222. + +Cork Dramatic Society, The, 35, 216, 223. + +_Cork Realists_, 216. + +Cornwall, 2, 3, 4. + +_Countess Cathleen, The_, 18, 32, 43, 47, 48-49, 50, 51, 59, 64, + 69, 78. + +Court Theatre, London, The, 241. + +Cousins, James H., 20, 32. + +Craig, Gordon, 29. + +Craigie, Pearl Teresa ("John Oliver Hobbes"), 104, 105. + +Crashaw, Richard, 135. + +Croker, Crofton, 168. + +_Croppies Lie Down_, 7. + +_Crossroads, The_, 224-228, 230, 231. + +_Cuchulain of Muirthemne_, 58, 138, 143. + +Cumann nan Gaedheal, 90, 115. + + +_Dan the Dollar_, 7, 214. + +_Dandy Dick_, 233. + +Darragh, Miss, 28. + +Dartmoor, 6. + +_Daughters of Erin, The_, 18, 200. + +Davis, Thomas, 39. + +_Death of Dermid, The_, 109. + +_Death of Tintagiles, The_, 252. + +_Deirdre_ (G.W. Russell), 20, 21, 31, 77, 115. + +_Deirdre_ (W.B. Yeats), 23, 27, 28, 44, 50, 61-63. + +_Deirdre of the Sorrows_, 160, 163, 166, 168, 181, 183, 192, 196, + 197, 285. + +_Deliverer, The_, 149. + +DeMax, 16. + +De Quincey, Thomas, 265. + +Derry, 14. + +_Destruction of the Hostel, The_, 205. + +_Devorgilla_, 152. + +_Dhoya_, 41, 286. + +_Diarmid and Grania_, 32, 106-110, 143. + +Dickens, Charles, 6. + +Digges, T. Dudley, 21, 22. + +_Discoveries_, 42. + +_Divine Adventure, The_, 263, 270, 273, 275, 279, 289. + +_Divine Vision, The_, 116, 122. + +Dolmetsch, Arnold, 64, 98. + +_Dome, The_, 81. + +_Dominion of Dreams, The_, 273, 274. + +Donegal, 7, 246, 247, 249, 250. + +_Donegal Fairy Stories_, 7. + +Donne, John, 164. + +Down, 15, 210, 216, 226, 235, 237, 238, 243. + +_Drama in Muslin, A_, 96, 101, 102, 110, 171. + +_Drone, The_, 210, 235, 236. + +_Drosdan and Yssul_, 254. + +Dual personality, 278. + +Dublin Castle, 32. + +_Dublin University Review_, 38. + +Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan, 2. + +Dun Theatre, the, Cork, 224. + + +_Earth Breath, The_, 116. + +Edgeworth, Maria, 6. + +"Eglinton, John." (_See_ Magee, W.K.) + +Elizabethan Stage Society, the, 30. + +_Eloquent Dempsey, The_, 208, 209, 213. + +Emerson, R.W., 115, 120, 122, 125, 126, 127, 135, 293. + +_Enchanted Sea, The_, 75, 77, 83, 85-87, 89, 90. + +_Enchanted Valleys, The_, 254. + +_Eoghan's Wife_, 201. + +Ervine, St. John G., 15, 33, 243-246. + _The Eviction_, 246; + _The Magnanimous Lover_, 243, 245, 246; + _Mixed Marriage_, 243, 246, 247. + +_Esther Waters_, 6, 96, 112. + +_Evelyn Innes_, 95, 96, 97, 98, 122. + +_Everyman_, 30, 51. + +_Eviction, The_, 246. + + +Fairies, 39, 41. + +_Family Failings_, 208. + +Farr, Florence, 25, 26, 27, 28. + +Fay, Frank J., 19, 21, 22, 23, 24. + +Fay, William G., 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 28, 201. + +_Fellowe and his Wife, A_, 261, 264, 278. + +Ferguson, Sir Samuel, 39, 61, 109, 184. + +Fermanagh, 7. + +_Fiddler's House, The_, 200, 202, 204-205, 206. + +FitzGerald, Edward, 141. + +Flamel, 43. + +_Flora MacDonald_, 266. + +_Foleys, The_, 201. + +Folk-plays, 17, 29, 35, 49. + +Folk-songs, 2, 40. + +Folk-tales, 283. + +_From the Hills of Dream_, 259. + +_Full Moon, The_, 152. + + +Gaelic League, the, 1, 18, 41, 107. + +Gaiety Theatre, the, Dublin, 30, 106, 110. + +Galway, 73, 101, 108, 141, 189, 208, 210, 216, 238, 240. + +_Gaol Gate, The_, 153, 154. + +_Ghosts_, 80. + +Gilbert, Lady (Rosa Mulholland), 6. + +_Gillian the Dreamer_, 4. + +_Gods and Fighting Men_, 109, 138, 141, 145. + +_Golden Helmet, The_, 27, 63. + +Goldsmith, Oliver, 13. + +Gonne, Maud, 27, 59, 136. + +Gore-Booth, Eva, 11. + +_Grangecolman_, 91-92. + +_Grania_ (Lady Gregory), 110, 154, 156-157. + +_Grania_ (The Hon. Emily Lawless), 7. + +_Greek Backgrounds_, 286. + +_Green Fire_, 263, 266. + +_Green Helmet, The_, 63. + +Gregory, Lady, 8, 9, 15, 22, 30, 31, 32, 47, 53, 54, 56, 58, 73, 74, + 75, 76, 88, 92, 93, 108, 109, 110, 114, 138-159, 179, 206, 215. + _Book of Saints and Wonders_, 138, 142; + _The Canavans_, 149, 152; + _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_, 58, 138, 143; + _The Deliverer_, 149; + _Devorgilla_, 152; + _The Full Moon_, 152; + _The Gaol Gate_, 153, 154; + _Gods and Fighting Men_, 109, 138, 141, 145; + _Grania_, 110, 154, 156-157; + _Hyacinth Halvey_, 150, 151; + _The Image_, 150, 151; + _The Jack Daw_, 151; + _Kincora_, 152; + _MacDaragh's Wife_, 154, 155; + _Poets and Dreamers_, 147; + _The Poorhouse_, 9; + _The Rising of the Moon_, 22, 31, 32, 152; + _Spreading the News_, 150, 151; + _A Travelling Man_, 153; + _Twenty-five_, 32, 152; + _The Unicorn from the Stars_, 27, 53-56; + _The White Cockade_, 152; + _The Workhouse Ward_, 152, 154. + +Gregory, Robert, 30. + +Grundy, Sydney, 104. + +Gwynn, Stephen, 122. + +Gyles, Althea, 247. + +_Gypsy Christ, The_, 265, 279. + + +_Hail and Farewell_, 73, 92, 98, 113. + +Hankin, St. John, 245. + +Hardy, Thomas, 6, 7, 101, 164, 175, 176, 192, 193, 239, 258, 271. + +Harrigan plays, the, 22. + +Harte, Bret, 241. + +_Harvest_, 221, 224, 228, 229, 230, 231. + +Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 82, 175. + +_Heather Field, The_, 18, 78-83, 85, 89, 91, 92, 93, 95. + +Hebrides, the, 271, 274, 283. + +_Hedda Gabler_, 104, 175. + +Hermetic Society, the, 39, 117, 120. + +Hewlett, Maurice, 165. + +Highlands of Scotland, the, 3, 4, 260, 263, 264, 267, 268, 270, 271, + 272, 274, 276, 284, 295. + +Hinkson, Katherine Tynan, 1, 6, 10. + +Homer, 64, 120, 144, 286. + +_Homestead, The_, 117. + +_Homeward_, 116. + +Horniman, Miss, 21, 31, 33, 35. + +_House of Usna, The_, 251, 252, 253, 254, 259, 285. + +_Hyacinth Halvey_, 150, 151. + +Hyde, Douglas, 1, 2, 8, 18, 40, 41, 46, 107, 147, 153, 158, 166, + 171, 179. + +Hypnotic suggestion, 278. + + +Ibsen, Henrik, 13, 34, 36, 38, 80, 93, 163, 168, 178, 213. + +_Ideas of Good and Evil_, 42. + +_Image, The_, 150, 151. + +_Imaginary Conversation, An_, 242. + +_Immortal Hour, The_, 251, 252, 285, 287. + +_Impressions and Opinions_, 103. + +_In a Balcony_, 50. + +_In Chimney Corners_, 7. + +Independent Theatre, The, London, 103, 104, 105. + +_Iona_, 277, 289. + +Iona, 282. + +"I.O.," 116. + +_Irish Idylls_, 7, 148. + +Irish Agricultural Organization Society, the, 13, 117, 118, 137, 225. + +Irish Literary Theatre, The, 5, 18, 19, 42, 52, 73, 74, 76, 85, 105, + 109, 110, 115, 251. + +_Irish Pastorals_, 7. + +Irving Terry Company, the, 105. + +_Island of Statues, The_, 47. + + +_Jack Daw, The_, 151. + +Janvier, Mrs. Thomas A., 256. + +Jefferies, Richard, 290, 291. + +_John Bull's Other Island_, 241. + +_John Sherman and Dhoya_, 41. + +_John Splendid_, 4. + +Johnson, Lionel, 5, 10, 64. + +Johnston, Charles, 125, 134, 146. + +_Journeys End in Lovers Meeting_, 105. + +Joyce, Dr. P.W., 3, 110, 139. + +_Judgment_, 246, 249, 250. + + +Kailyard School, the, 270. + +Keats, John, 48, 293. + +Kelley, P.J., 21, 22. + +Kelpius, 122. + +Kembles, the, 18. + +Kerrigan, J.M., 23, 27, 217. + +Kerry, 166, 188, 190, 216. + +_Kidnapped_, 272. + +Kiltartan English, 141, 142. + +_Kincora_, 152. + +_King of Ys, The_, 254. + +_Kingdom of the Young, The_, 201. + +_King's Threshold, The_, 60, 69. + +Kingston, Thomas, 81. + +Kipling, Rudyard, 47. + + +_Lady from the Sea, The_, 85. + +_Lake, The_, 96, 99, 101, 102, 111, 112, 113. + +_Land, The_, 200, 202, 204, 206. + +Land League, the, 102. + +_Land of Heart's Desire, The_, 25, 43, 49-50, 51, 59. + +Larminie, William, 8. + +_Last of the De Mullins, The_, 245. + +_Last Supper, The_, 251. + +_Laughter of Peterkin, The_, 267, 284. + +Lawless, The Hon. Emily, 6. + +_Laying of the Foundations, The_, 32. + +_Lays of the Western Gael, The_, 110. + +_Leabhar Sgeuluigheachta_, 41. + +_Lear_, 45. + +_Legend of Montrose, The_, 272. + +Leinster, 215. + +Le Moyne, Mrs., 50. + +_Lesson of Life, The_, 224. + +Lever, Charles James, 102. + +_Literary Geography_, 289. + +_Lost Pibroch, The_, 4. + +_Lost Saint, The_, 9. + +_Love in the Valley_, 49. + +_Love Songs of Connacht, The_, 1, 9, 166, 179. + +Lover, Samuel, 101. + +Lowlands of Scotland, the, 258, 260, 264. + +_Luke Delmege_, 7. + +Lynchehaun case, the, 171. + +_Lyra Celtica_, 4. + + +_Mabinogion_, 285. + +_MacDaragh's Wife_, 154, 155. + +McGee, Eithne, 23, 26, 211. + +"Macleod, Fiona." (_See_ Sharp, William.) + +MacManus, Anna Johnstone. (_See_ "Ethna Carberry.") + +MacManus, Seumas, 7. + +Macpherson, James, 3, 285. + +_Madge o' the Pool_, 279. + +Maeterlinck, Maurice, 13, 38, 45, 48, 113, 135, 178, 192, 202, 252, + 253, 260. + +Magee, W.K. ("John Eglinton"), 8, 10. + +Magic, 67. + +_Magnanimous Lover, The_, 243, 245, 246. + +Man, Isle of, 3, 4, 5. + +Martin, Martin, 271. + +Martyn, Edward, 13, 18, 46, 72, 73, 74-95, 97, 98, 102, 105, 112, 115, + 178, 207. + _The Enchanted Sea_, 75, 77, 83, 85-87, 89, 90; + _Grangecolman_, 91-92; + _The Heather Field_, 18, 78-83, 85, 89, 91, 92, 93, 95; + _Maeve_, 75, 76, 77, 83-85, 90; + _Morgante the Lesser_, 97; + _The Place Hunters_, 75, 78, 90, 93; + _A Tale of a Town_, 75, 76, 78, 81, 87-90, 105, 112, 213. + +Masefield, John, 238, 239. + +_Maurice Harte_, 216, 219-221, 222. + +Mayne, Rutherford, 15, 210, 233-240, 244. + _The Drone_, 210, 235, 236; + _Red Turf_, 238, 239, 240; + _The Troth_, 235, 237; + _The Turn of the Road_, 216, 235, 238, 239. + +Mayo, 95. + +_Mearing Stones_, 247. + +_Measure for Measure_, 24. + +Meath, 226. + +_Memoirs of My Dead Self_, 98. + +Meredith, George, 4, 11, 101, 165, 166, 261. + +Meynell, Alice, 10. + +Milligan, Alice, 116. + +Milton, John, 48, 120, 135. + +_Mineral Workers, The_, 208, 213, 214, 238. + +_Miracle of the Corn, The_, 200, 202. + +_Mixed Marriage_, 243, 246, 247. + +_Modern Lover, A_, 74, 96. + +_Modern Painting_, 95. + +Molesworth Hall, 163. + +_Monna Vanna_, 45. + +Moore, George, 6, 8, 18, 52, 72, 73, 74, 75, 80, 81, 88, 92, 94, + 95-113, 122, 158. + _The Apostle_, 111; + _The Bending of the Bough_, 76, 88, 95, 98, 105; + _Diarmid and Grania_, 32, 106-110, 143; + _A Drama in Muslin_, 96, 101, 102, 110, 111; + _Esther Waters_, 6, 96, 112; + _Evelyn Innes_, 95, 96, 97, 98, 122; + _Hail and Farewell_, 73, 92, 98, 113; + _Ave_ (vol. I), 73, 76, 94, 99, 108, 109; + _Salve_ (vol. II), 99; + _Impressions and Opinions_, 103; + _The Lake_, 96, 99, 101, 102, 111, 112, 113; + _Memoirs of My Dead Self_, 98; + _A Modern Lover_, 74, 96; + _Modern Painting_, 95; + _A Mummer's Wife_, 101; + _Parnell and his Island_, 96, 97, 101; + _Sister Teresa_, 98; + _The Strike at Arlingford_, 103, 104; + _The Untilled Field_, 101, 102, 111, 112; + _The Wild Goose_, 101. + +More, Henry, 135. + +Morgan, Sydney J., 217. + +_Morgante the Lesser_, 97. + +Morris, William, 38. + +_Mosada_, 47. + +_Mountain Lovers, The_, 262, 264, 265, 266, 270, 274. + +_Mountainy Singer, The_, 247. + +Mulholland, Rosa. (_See_ Lady Gilbert.) + +_Mummer's Wife, A_, 101. + +Munro, Neil, 4, 6, 59, 271, 284. + +Munster, 178, 215. + +Murray, T.C., 15, 215-222. + _Birthright_, 216, 217, 218, 219, 222; + _Maurice Harte_, 216, 219-221, 222; + _The Wheel o' Fortune_, 216. + +_My New Curate_, 7. + +Mysticism, 11, 123, 134, 135, 273, 274, 275. + + +_Nan_, 238, 239. + +Nash, Thomas, 66. + +National Dramatic Company, the 16, 19, 20, 21, 29, 32, 56, 77, 110, + 115, 118. + +National Players, the, 35. + +National Theatre Society, the Ltd., 30, 35, 60, 202, 223, 241. + +Nethersole, Olga, 233. + +_New Songs_, 116. + +Norway, 36. + + +O'Curry, Eugene, 140. + +O'Doherty, Eileen, 217. + +O'Donoghue, Taidgh, 108. + +O'Donovan, Fred, 23, 26, 27, 211, 217. + +"Oghma," 116. + +O'Grady, Standish Hayes, 110, 140, 141. + +O'Grady, Standish James, 3, 86, 117, 139. + +Oisin, 13, 40, 69. + +Olcott, Chauncey, 22. + +_Old Celtic Romances_, 139. + +_Old Knowledge, The_, 122. + +_Omar Khayyam_, 141. + +_On Baile's Strand_, 27, 28, 58, 59. + +O'Neill, Maire, 23, 26. + +"Moira O'Neill" (Mrs. Nesta Higginson Skrine), 10, 255. + +_Origines Islandicae_, 238. + +O'Riordan, Conal. (_See_ "Norreys Connell.") + +O'Rourke, J.A., 211, 217. + +_Ossian_, 3, 138. + +O'Sullivan, Seumas, 11. + +_Our Dramatists and their Literature_, 103. + +_Our Mutual Friend_, 279. + +_Outer Isles, The_, 274. + + +_Pagan Review, The_, 261. + +Palestrina, 77. + +Parnell, Charles Stewart, 2, 147, 149. + +_Parnell and his Island_, 96, 97, 101. + +Pater, Walter, 121, 133. + +Patrick, St., 13, 40, 142. + +_Patriots_, 231-232. + +"Paul Gregan," 116. + +_Pebbles from a Brook_, 8. + +_Peer Gynt_, 163. + +_Pharais_, 262, 263, 264, 266, 270, 277. + +_Phedre_, 16. + +Phillpotts, Eden, 6. + +Pinero, Sir Arthur Wing, 104, 214, 233. + +_Piper, The_, 31, 33, 242, 243. + +_Place Hunters, The_, 75, 78, 90, 93. + +_Playboy of the Western World, The_, 23, 26, 31, 32, 33, 75, 149, + 163, 164, 166, 170, 171, 176, 178, 180, 182, 184, 196, 218, 228. + +Players Club, The, 86. + +Plotinus, 125. + +Poe, Edgar Allan, 40, 48, 265. + +Poel, William, 24. + +_Poems and Ballads_, 49. + +_Poetry of the Celtic Races, The_, 3. + +_Poets and Dreamers_, 147. + +Pomfret, John, 203. + +_Poorhouse, The_, 9. + +Pope, Alexander, 203. + +Porphyry, 54. + +_Pot of Broth, A_, 22, 32, 51, 52, 54. + +Pre-Raphaelites, The, 10, 158. + +_Princess of Thule, The_, 271. + +Proclus, 126. + +Psaltery, 64. + +Puritanism, 135, 234, 235, 244, 285. + + +Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur, 3. + +Quinn, Maire T., 21, 22. + + +_Racing Lug, The_, 20, 21. + +Raftery, 147. + +_Red Turf_, 238, 239, 240. + +Rehan, Ada, 233. + +_Religious Songs of Connacht, The_, 9, 171, 179. + +Renan, Ernest, 3, 255. + +_Revival of Irish Literature, The_, 2. + +Rhys, Ernest, 4. + +_Riders to the Sea_, 149, 162, 178, 179, 181, 183, 195, 197. + +Rinder, Edith Wingate, 268, 269. + +_Rising of the Moon, The_, 22, 31, 32, 152. + +Robin Hood, 138. + +Robinson, S. Lennox, 15, 33, 112, 215, 221, 222-232. + _The Clancy Name_, 223-224, 228; + _The Crossroads_, 224-228, 230, 231; + _Harvest_, 221, 224, 228-230; + _Lesson of Life_, 224; + _Patriots_, 231-232. + +_Rob Roy_, 272. + +_Romantic Ballads_, 253, 259, 294. + +_Rosmersholm_, 91. + +Ross, Martin. (_See_ Somerville, E. Oe.) + +_Rossetti, Dante Gabriel_, 293. + +Ruskin, John, 89, 158, 159. + +Russell, G.W. ("A.E."), 1, 5, 8, 11, 19, 20, 21, 39, 41, 46, 95, 98, + 111, 112, 114-137, 146, 251, 253, 255. + _Deirdre_, 20, 21, 31, 77, 115; + _The Divine Vision_, 116, 122; + _The Earth Breath_, 116; + _Homeward_, 116; + "Symbolism," 126; + "Weariness," 128; + "Memory of Earth," 130. + +Ryan, Frederick, 32. + + +_Salve_, 99. + +_Samhain_, 16, 29, 76, 81, 109. + +_Saturday Review, The_, London, 81. + +_Saxon Shillin', The_, 201. + +Scotch Irish, the, 215, 234. + +Scott, Sir Walter, 6, 100, 234, 272, 289. + +Scotus Erigena, 135. + +_Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The_, 104. + +_Secret Rose, The_, 41, 54. + +_Seething Pot, The_, 8. + +_Seven Woods, In the_, 43. + +_Shadow of the Glen, In the_, 32, 60, 77, 162, 168, 169, 175, 178, + 181, 184, 190, 195, 218. + +_Shadowy Waters, The_, 28, 56-58, 60. + +Shakespeare, 120. + +_Shakespeare's End_, 242. + +Sharp, William ("Fiona Macleod"), 4, 86, 251-296. + _A Child of Nature_, 272; + _Children of To-morrow_, 264; + "The Dan-nan-Ron," 263, 287; + "The Dirge of the Four Cities," 255, 259, 287, 296; + "Dim face of beauty haunting all the world," 259; + _The Divine Adventure_, 263, 270, 273, 275, 279, 289; + _The Dominion of Dreams_, 273, 274; + _Drosdan and Yssul_, 254; + _The Enchanted Valleys_, 254; + _A Fellowe and his Wife_, 261, 264, 278; + _Flora MacDonald_, 266; + _From the Hills of Dream_, 259; + _Greek Backgrounds_, 286; + _Green Fire_, 263, 266; + _The Gypsy Christ_, 265, 279; + _The House of Usna_, 251, 252, 253, 254, 259, 285; + _The Immortal Hour_, 251, 252, 285, 287; + _Iona_, 277, 289; + _The King of Ys_, 254; + _The Last Supper_, 251; + _The Laughter of Peterkin_, 267, 284; + _Literary Geography_, 289; + _Lyra Celtica_, 4; + _Madge o' the Pool_, 279; + _The Mountain Lovers_, 262, 264, 265, 266, 270, 274; + _The Pagan Review_, 261; + _Pharais_, 262, 263, 264, 266, 270, 277; + _Romantic Ballads_, 253, 259, 294; + _Silence Farm_, 257, 258, 264, 265, 270, 271, 279, 295; + _The Sin-Eater_, 263; + _Sospiri di Roma_, 257, 258; + _Vistas_, 251, 252, 253, 259, 260, 273; + _The Washer of the Ford_, 263, 283; + _Where the Forest Murmurs_, 263, 285, 289, 290; + _The Winged Destiny_, 263, 274, 293; + _Wives in Exile_, 261, 264. + +Sharp, Mrs. William, 251, 256, 262, 268, 279, 286, 290. + +Shaw, George Bernard, 53, 177, 230, 241. + +Sheehan, Canon, 7. + +Shelley, P.B., 38. + +Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 13. + +Shorter, Dora Sigerson, 11. + +_Showing-up of Blanco Posnet, The_, 241. + +Sigerson, Dr. George, 2. + +_Silence Farm_, 257, 258, 264, 265, 270, 271, 279, 295. + +Sims, George Robert, 103, 104. + +Sinclair, Arthur, 19, 23, 24, 27, 211. + +_Sin-Eater, The_, 263. + +_Sister Teresa_, 98. + +Skrine, Nesta Higginson. (_See_ "Moira O'Neill.") + +Skye, 267, 283. + +Sligo, 40, 41. + +_Sohrab and Rustum_, 59. + +_Some Experiences of an Irish R.M._, 6. + +Somerville, E. Oe., and Martin Ross, 6. + +_Sospiri di Roma_, 257, 258. + +_Sowing the Wind_, 104. + +Spenser, Edmund, 38, 39, 123. + +Spoer, Ada Goodrich-Freer, 274. + +_Spreading the News_, 150, 151. + +_Squireen, The_, 7, 236, 271. + +Stage Society, the, London, 53, 112, 252. + +Stephens, James, 8. + +Stevenson, Robert Louis, 49, 260, 272, 289. + +Stokes, Whitley, 140. + +Strand Theatre, the, London, 81. + +_Strike at Arlingford, The_, 103, 104. + +_Studies_, 200. + +Sutherland, 272. + +Swift, Jonathan, 13, 173, 196, 282. + +Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 43, 49. + +Symbolism, 65-67, 126, 176. + +Synge, John Millington, 15, 22, 26, 31, 32, 47, 61, 114, 148, 149, 155, + 160-197, 205, 206, 238, 239, 240, 242, 285. + _Aran Islands_, 168, 187, 188, 191; + _Deirdre of the Sorrows_, 163, 166-168, 181, 183, 192, 196, 197, + 285; + "In Kerry," 164; + verse, 192-194; + "Preludes," 193; + _Playboy of the Western World_, 23, 26, 31, 32, 33, 75, 149, + 163, 164, 166, 170, 171, 176, 178, 180, 182, 184, 196, 218, 228; + _Riders to the Sea_, 149, 162, 178, 179, 181, 183, 195, 197; + _In the Shadow of the Glen_, 32, 60, 77, 162, 168, 169, 175, + 178, 181, 184, 190, 195, 218; + _The Tinker's Wedding_, 111, 163, 171, 174, 180, 182, 190, 196; + _Well of the Saints_, 23, 29, 164, 170, 175, 177, 178, 182, 190, + 196, 218. + + +_Tables of the Law, The_, 41. + +_Tale of a Town, A_, 75, 76, 78, 81, 87-90, 105, 112, 213. + +Taliaferro, Mabel, 50. + +Taylor, Thomas, 117. + +_Tempest, The_, 45. + +_Tess of the D'Urbervilles_, 7, 258. + +Thackeray, W.M., 6, 101. + +Theatre Francais, 17. + +Theatre of Ireland, the, 35, 202. + +Theatre Royal, Dublin, 30. + +_Thomas Muskerry_, 199, 200, 206. + +Thompson, Francis, 135. + +Thoreau, Henry David, 290, 291. + +_Through the Turf Smoke_, 7. + +_Time_, 242. + +_Tinker's Wedding, The_, 111, 163, 171, 174, 180, 182, 190, 196. + +Tipperary, 171. + +_Travelling Man, A_, 153. + +_Treasure of the Humble, The_, 115. + +Trench, Herbert, 11. + +Trinity College, 32, 33. + +Trollope, Anthony, 271. + +_Troth, The_, 235, 237. + +_Turn of the Road, The_, 216, 235, 238, 239. + +_Twenty-five_, 32, 152. + +_Twilight People, The_, 11. + +_Twisting of the Rope, The_, 107. + +_Two Essays on the Remnant_, 8. + + +Ulster, 215, 240, 245, 246. + +Ulster Literary Theatre, the, 35, 239, 243. + +_Unicorn from the Stars, The_, 27, 53-56. + +_Untilled Field, The_, 101, 102, 111, 112. + +Upanishads, 117. + + +Villon, Francois, 182. + +_Vistas_, 251, 252, 253, 259, 260, 273. + +Von Teuffel, Mrs., 261. + + +Wales, 2, 3, 4. + +Walker, Mary, 20, 21, 22. + +_Wanderings of Oisin, The_, 1, 39, 40, 41, 63, 64, 139. + +_Washer of the Ford, The_, 263, 283. + +Watts, George Frederic, 122. + +_Waverley_, 272. + +Weekes, Charles, 116. + +_Weir of Hermiston_, 272. + +_Well of the Saints, The_, 23, 29, 164, 170, 175, 177, 178, 182, + 190, 196, 218. + +Wessex, 7, 258. + +West Britons, 32. + +_West Irish Folk-Tales_, 9. + +Wexford, 141, 152. + +_Wheel o' Fortune, The_, 216. + +_Where the Forest Murmurs_, 263, 285, 289, 290. + +_Where there is Nothing_, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56. + +White, Gilbert, 290. + +_White Cockade, The_, 152. + +Whitman, Walt, 39, 173, 193, 294. + +Wicklow, 162, 166, 170, 177, 184, 190, 216. + +_Wild Duck, The_, 80, 91. + +_Wild Earth_, 200, 208. + +_Wild Goose, The_, 101. + +Wilde, Oscar, 13, 53, 245. + +Wilde, Lady, 51. + +_William Sharp: A Memoir_, 262, 279, 290. + +_Wind among the Reeds, The_, 43, 54. + +_Winged Destiny, The_, 263, 274, 293. + +_Wives in Exile_, 261, 264. + +Wolfe, Charles, 94. + +_Woman of no Importance, A_, 245. + +Wordsworth, 48, 94, 265. + +Workhouse Ward, The, 152, 154. + +Wycherly, Margaret, 51. + +Yeats, J.B., Sr., 38, 119. + +Yeats, J.B., Jr., 118, 119. + +Yeats, W.B., 1, 5, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 25, 26, + 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 36, 37-71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 81, 85, 88, + 92, 94, 95, 97, 98, 102, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 114, 115, + 116, 117, 123, 139, 145, 146, 148, 155, 158, 162, 179, 199, 251, 252, + 253, 255, 259, 269, 279, 285, 286. + _Cathleen ni Houlihan_, 10, 17, 19, 31, 50-51, 53, 54, 55, 77; + _Celtic Twilight_, 37, 41, 42, 54; + _Countess Cathleen_, 18, 32, 43, 47, 48-49, 50, 51, 59, 64, 69, + 78; + _Deirdre_, 23, 27, 28, 44, 56, 61-63; + _Dhoya_, 41, 286; + _Diarmid and Grania_, 32, 106-110, 143; + _Discoveries_, 42; + _The Golden Helmet_, 27, 63; + _The Green Helmet_, 63; + _The Hour-Glass_, 10, 27, 28, 51-52, 54; + _Ideas of Good and Evil_ 42; + _The Island of Statues_, 47; + _John Sherman and Dhoya_, 41; + _The King's Threshold_, 60, 69; + _The Land of Heart's Desire_, 25, 43, 49-50, 51, 59; + _Mosada_, 47; + _On Baile's Strand_, 27, 28, 58, 59; + _A Pot of Broth_, 22, 32, 51, 52, 54; + _The Secret Rose_, 41, 54; + _In the Seven Woods_, 43; + _The Shadowy Waters_, 28, 56-58, 60; + _The Tables of the Law_, 41; + "The Valley of the Black Pig," 50, 65, 66, 67; + _Wanderings of Oisin_, 1, 39, 40, 41, 63, 64, 139; + _Where there is Nothing_, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56; + _The Wind among the Reeds_, 43. + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's Irish Plays and Playwrights, by Cornelius Weygandt + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IRISH PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS *** + +***** This file should be named 19028.txt or 19028.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/1/9/0/2/19028/ + +Produced by Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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