IRISH PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS

BY

CORNELIUS WEYGANDT

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

[Illustration]

BOSTON AND NEW YORKHOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANYThe Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY CORNELIUS WEYGANDTALL RIGHTS RESERVED

_Published February 1913_

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PREFACE

There are so many who have helped me with this book that I cannot beginto thank them one by one. If I name any, however, there are four I wouldname together. There is my old friend, long since dead, Lawrence Kelly, of County Wexford, who first told me Irish folk-stories, adding to thewonderment of my boyhood with his tales of Finn McCool, Dean Swift, and"The Red-haired Man. " There is Dr. Robert Ellis Thompson, ofPhiladelphia, who quickened, by his enthusiasm, over "twenty goldenyears ago, " my interest in all things Irish. There is Dr. ClarenceGriffin Child, my colleague, who recognized the power of these men Iwrite of in "Irish Plays and Playwrights" when there were fewer torecognize their power than there are to-day. There is Mr. John Quinn, ofNew York, without whose aid ten years ago the current Irish dramaticmovement would not have progressed as it has. He has lent forreproduction here the sketches by Mr. J. B. Yeats of Synge, Mr. GeorgeMoore, and Mr. Padraic Colum. All but all of the writers I mentionparticularly in these chapters have put me under obligation by cheerfulresponse to many letters full of questions as to their work. Mr. JamesH. Cousins and Mr. S. Lennox Robinson have taken especial trouble in mybehalf, and Lady Gregory, Mr. W. B. Yeats, and Mr. George W. Russell haveput 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 toIrish writers deeply interested in their country the phenomenon ormovement, call it which you will, was not appreciated as of muchsignificance at its beginning. Writing in 1892, Miss Jane Barlow was nothopeful for the immediate future of English literature in Ireland;--itseemed to her "difficult to point out any quarter of the horizon as aprobable source of rising light. " Yet Mr. Yeats had published his"Wanderings of Oisin" three years before; Mr. Russell had alreadygathered about him a group of eager young writers; and Dr. Hyde wasorganizing the Gaelic League, to give back to Ireland her language andcivilization, and translating from the Gaelic "The Love Songs ofConnacht" (1894) into an English of so new and masterful a rhythm, thatit was to dominate the style of many of the writers of the movement, asthe burden of the verse was to confirm them in the feelings andattitudes of mind, centuries old and of to-day, that are basic to theIrish Gael. Even in 1894, when Mrs. Katherine Tynan Hinkson wrote thearticle that for the first time brought before America so many of theyounger English poets, all that she said of the Renaissance was, "A verylarge proportion of the Bodley Head poets are Celts, --Irish, Welsh, Cornish. " She had scarcely so spoken when there appeared the littlevolume, "The Revival of Irish Literature, " whose chapters, reprintedaddresses delivered before she had spoken by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy andDr. George Sigerson and; Dr. Douglas Hyde, turned the attention of theyounger men to literature, the fall of Parnell and the ensuing declineof political agitation having given them a chance to think of somethingelse than politics. In 1895 all the English-speaking world that heedsletters was talking of the Celtic Renaissance, so quickly did news of itfind its way to men, when it was once more than whispered of abroad. Itwas as frequently referred to then as "The Irish Renaissance, " becauseIreland contributed most to it and because it was in Ireland that itacquired its most definite purpose. This purpose was to retell inEnglish 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 overIreland, its history, its landscape, the temper of its people. It wouldbe absurd, of course, to regard all of the writing of the movement as aresult of a definite literary propaganda, but the very fact that weinstinctively speak of the Celtic Renaissance as a movement rather thanas a phenomenon proves that it was that in part. But even that part ofit that was a result of propaganda came not from an intention to realizethe tenets of the propaganda, but from the kindling of Irish hearts bythoughts that came of the propaganda, thoughts of the great past ofIreland, 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 Celticcountries by the forces that brought about the Renaissance. Renan, inhis "Poetry of the Celtic Races" (1859), and Arnold, in his "On theStudy of Celtic Literature" (1867), had roused all the Celtic countriesto an interest in their old literature, an interest that extended muchfurther than discussion of the authenticity of Macpherson's "Ossian" orof the proper treatment of Arthurian stories, until then the UltimaThule of talk on things Celtic. Frenchman and Englishman both had spokento Wales and Brittany, the Highlands of Scotland and the Isle of Man, aswell as to Ireland, and it does not altogether explain to say thatIreland listened best because in Ireland there was a greater sense ofnationality 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 themalong to the men of letters. It is hardly true, indeed, to say thatIreland had a greater sense of nationality than Brittany or Wales. Brittany, of course, since her tongue other than her native Breton wasFrench, gave what was given to the movement in other than Breton inFrench. Cornwall may hardly be called a Celtic country, but if it may itis easy to account for its slight interest in the movement by the littlethat was preserved of its old literature and by the little it had ofdistinctive oral tradition to draw upon. And yet, I think, had SirArthur T. Quiller-Couch been born ten years later Cornwall had notwanted a shanachie. Wales, too, gave little to English literature as theresult of the Renaissance, because, perhaps, her chiefest literaryenergy is in her native language. Wales was proud of George Meredith, whose Welsh ancestry is more evident in his work than is his Irishancestry, but not only is his writing representative of Great Britainrather than of any one part of Great Britain, but his say had been saidbefore the movement began. The writing of Mr. Ernest Rhys underwent achange because of his interest in the Celtic Renaissance, but Wales haslittle writing outside of his to point to as a result of the awakening. In Scotland, William Sharp, whose "Lyra Celtica" (1896) was a prominentagent in bringing the Renaissance before the world, was transformed intoanother writer by it. His work as "Fiona Macleod, " both prose and verse, was very different from his earlier work in prose and verse. Mr. NeilMunro, too, was affected by the Renaissance, and in the tales of "TheLost Pibroch" (1896) and in the novels of "John Splendid" (1898) and"Gillian the Dreamer" (1899) and "The Children of Tempest" (1903) hereveals an intimacy with Highland life such as informs the writing of noother novelist of our day. Of recent years Mr. Munro has wanderedfarther afield than his native Argyll, and, I feel, to the lessening ofthe beauty of his writing. In the Isle of Man, T. E. Brown had beenstriving for years to put into his stories in verse the fast-decayingCeltic life of his country, but even with his example and with all thathas been done since the Renaissance began, in the preservation of Manxfolk-lore and in the recording of vanishing Manx customs, no writer ofBrown's power has been developed, or in fact any writer of powers equalto those of the best men of the younger generation in the other Celticlands. 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, ofthe countries that retain a Celtic culture, that the movement is thedominating influence in writing in English; and it is with the dramaonly that I have now to deal, though when a playwright is a poet or astory-teller, too, I have written of his attainment in verse and talealso. Had I been writing five years ago, I should have said that it wasin poetry that the Celtic Renaissance had attained most nobly, but sincethen the drama has had more recruits of power than has poetry, and it isa 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 ofgreater significance for its time than is the poetry, whatever theultimate appraisement will be. Of the men I have written of here, Mr. Yeats and Mr. Russell are to me poets before they are dramatists, andLionel Johnson, whose only direct connection with the dramatic movementwas his beautiful prologue in verse to the first performances of "TheIrish Literary Theatre" in 1899, is to me a poet of a power as great astheirs. 

One wonders, at first thought, that Ireland had never until our daygiven to English literature a novelist of first rank. The Irishman isfamous the world over as a story-teller, but neither in romance nor inthe story of character had he reached first power, reached a positionwhere he might be put alongside of other Europeans as a novelist. NoIrishman from the time of Scott on, until Mr. George Moore wrote "EstherWaters" (1894), had written a story that might stand the inevitablecomparison 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 peasantcharacter, but her comparatively little power is revealed when you puther beside Miss Austen, and so it is all the way down the list to ourown day. There are many contemporary story-tellers who have managed wellthe tale, but what Irish novelist of to-day other than Mr. Moore bulksbig, can be compared to even lesser men, like Scotland's Mr. Neil Munroor Dartmoor's Mr. Phillpotts?

Lady Gilbert (Rosa Mulholland) has written many, pleasant stories ofIrish life, and Mrs. Katherine Tynan Hinkson has followed worthily inher footsteps. Equally pleasant, but lighter and more superficial, isthe 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 theIrish writing of a generation ago, --Irish stories by Irish people forEnglish people to laugh at. 

The Hon. Emily Lawless has written many kinds of stories about the WestCoast, reaching almost to greatness in her "Grania" (1892). In the shortstory, Miss Jane Barlow, accused of superficiality by many Irish criticsand as eagerly declared to get the very quality of Connemara peasantlife 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 MacManusis as truly a shanachie as the old story-tellers that yet tell the oldtales about peat fires in Donegal. "Through the Turf Smoke" (1899) and"In Chimney Corners" (1899) and "Donegal Fairy Stories" (1900) are alikein having the accent of the spoken story, but when the last word is saidyou cannot admit their author to be more than a clever entertainer. TheRev. Dr. Sheehan, although you will find him writing about the effect ofthe Irish Renaissance in remote parishes in the South, has notsubscribed to its ideals, but continues the fashion of story-writing ofan earlier generation. "Luke Delmege" (1900) is, however, an interestingcharacter study, and "My New Curate" (1899) very illuminative of theconservatism 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, tenyears ago, for better work. "Croppies Lie Down" brought Mr. Buckleybefore the public in 1903, but his writing since then has fallen farshort 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 inhim, 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, ayoung man of promise. "The Seething Pot" (1904) was a serious study ofconditions in Ireland but since its author conceived of the character ofthe Rev. Joseph John Meldon, he has found it more discreet to continuethe adventures of that clergyman than to write seriously out of his ownvaried experience of West-Country Irish life. 

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It is perhaps because the energy that in many countries goes into thewriting of the essay is absorbed in controversy in Ireland that in thepast Ireland has produced few essayists. In the battles of the dramaticmovement with the patriotic societies and with the official class, Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore have dealt good blows, and Mr. Russell and "JohnEglinton" (Mr. W. K. Magee) have led the disputants out of theirconfusion. Among these men, "John Eglinton" is the one who has thrownhis greatest energy into the essay, almost all his energy, and in it, inthe chapters of "Two Essays on the Remnant" (1896), "Pebbles from aBrook" (1901), and "Bards and Saints" (1906), he has written withsubtlety and illumination. 

In the collection and clarification and retelling of folk-literatureWilliam Larminie and Lady Gregory and Dr. Hyde stand out as the leadingworkers. Mr. Larminie's "West Irish Folk-Tales" (1895) are model workof their kind as are Lady Gregory's several books, of which I speak indetail later. The work of Dr. Hyde is the most important work of thissort, however, and it is not too much to say, as I intimated at theoutset, that, without his translation of "The Love Songs of Connacht"(1894) and "The Religious Songs of Connacht" (1906), the prose of themovement would never have attained that distinction of rhythm whichreveals English almost as a new language. I would gladly have written atlength of Dr. Hyde, but he has chosen to write his plays in Irish aswell as most of his verses. Yet so winning are the plays as translatedby Lady Gregory, and so greatly have they influenced the folk-plays inEnglish of the Abbey Theatre, that there is almost warrant for includinghim. I cannot, of course, but I must at least bear testimony to the manypowers of these plays. Dr. Hyde can be trenchant, when satire is hisobject, as in "The Bursting of the Bubble" (1903); or alive withmerriment when merriment is his desire, as in "The Poorhouse" (1903); orfull of quiet beauty when he writes of holy things, as in the "LostSaint" (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 onthe plays in English of the movement, I do not consider them, my objectin this book being to consider the dramatic writing in English of theCeltic Renaissance, with relation to its value as a contribution to theart of English letters. That there is a great deal else in the CelticRenaissance than its drama, I would, however, emphasize, though it istrue that every man of first literary power in the movement, exceptLionel Johnson and "John Eglinton, " has tried his hand on at least oneIrish play. That Johnson would have come to write drama I firmlybelieve, for in drama he could have reconciled two of the four lovesthat were his life. He could not have put his love of Winchester, hisschool, or his love of the classics into plays, but his love of Irelandand his love of the Catholic Church would have blended, I believe, intoplays, still with the cloistered life of the seventh century, that wouldhave rivaled "The Hour-Glass, " and plays about "Ninety-Eight" that wouldhave rivaled "Cathleen Houlihan. "

There are many other poets, though, of the Celtic Renaissance that areof powers only short of greatness, Nora Hopper Chesson chief among them. Only Mr. W. B. Yeats of them all has more "natural falterings" in hisverse than she. Mrs. Hinkson, too, whose name has come inevitably intothese pages from time to time, is a poet with as sure a place in Englishliterature to-day as has Mrs. Meynell. Beginning, like Mr. Yeats, as animitator of the Pre-Raphaelites, Mrs. Hinkson found herself in littlepoems on moods of her own and moods of landscape She writes also of herlove of God, of St. Francis, and of Ireland. "Moira O'Neill" (Mrs. Skrine), too, has a sure place, her verses crying out her homesicknessfor Ireland, and redolent, every line of them, of the countryside. "ThePassing of the Gael" is known wherever there are Irish emigrants, butthere are other verses of "Ethna Carberry" (Mrs. Anna JohnstoneMacManus) that are as fine as this. Mrs. Dora Sigerson Shorter is aballadist of stark power, and Miss Eva Gore-Booth a lyric poet whosenatural lilt no preoccupation with mysticism can for more than a momentobscure. 

Mr. Herbert Trench has of recent years surrendered to theatricalmanagement, but there is to his credit a substantial accomplishment oflyrical verse that George Meredith would have approved. Mr. Colum'sverse I have spoken of below, incidentally, in considering his plays. Adistinct talent, too, is Mr. Seumas O'Sullivan's, whose "TwilightPeople" (1905) indicates by its title the quality of his verse. 

I have mentioned all these writers, some known in America, but othersutterly unknown, not only to indicate the relation of the drama to theother literary forms of the Renaissance, but to account, perhaps in somemeasure, for the literary quality of the plays themselves. They arewritten, as plays in English during the past century have too seldombeen written, by writers who have read widely in all forms of literatureand 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 writeto the masterpieces of the world, telling them to get what they need ofthe technique of the centre, to know the best in the world, but to writeof 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 arewriters of some other form of literature, by men who wish their work indrama to be of as high intention as the work of their friends who arepoets or essayists or writers of stories. All the other writing theRenaissance has, then, contributed to make of the drama what it is, andone must, if one would see the drama in relation to the Ireland of ourday, know what is the accomplishment of the other sorts of writing ofthe 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 isthat of the people of Ireland themselves. There is less in it perhaps ofthe Gael than in them, for Gaelic literature, until to-day, neverapproached nearer to the drama than the dialogue, the racy give-and-takeof two characters, alike of lively imagination, whether gentle orsimple. But even had the colloquies of St. Patrick and Oisin, of DeanSwift and his man Jack, of the Lout and his Mother, been developed, by1890, to a drama as finished as that of Congreve or Goldsmith, Sheridanor Wilde, those who would have their plays abreast of our time wouldhave gone, just as, with the conditions as they are, the dramatists ofthe Renaissance did go, to Ibsen and M. Maeterlinck, like all the restof the world. It is a matter of reproach, in the estimation of manypatriotic Irishmen, that Mr. Martyn learned his art of Ibsen, and Mr. Yeats a part of his of M. Maeterlinck, but that attitude is asunreasonable as that which would reproach the Irish IndustriesOrganization Society for studying Danish dairy farms or Belgianchickeries. It is only the technique of the foreigners, modern orancient, Scandinavian or Greek, that the Abbey dramatists have acquiredor have adapted to Irish usage. Stories are world-wide, of course, thefolk-tale told by the Derry hearthside being told also in the tent inTurkestan--Cuchulain kills his son as Rustum does, and the Queen ofFairy lures Bran oversea as Venus lures Tannhäuser to the Hörselberg. Itis in character, in ideals, in atmosphere, in color, that drama must benative, and in color and in atmosphere, in ideals and in character theAbbey Theatre drama is Irish. Reading of life and style are personalqualities, qualities of the artist himself, though they, too, may taketone and color from national life, and in the drama of many of the Abbeydramatists they do. These dramatists have been more resolutely native, in fact, many of them, than the national dramatists of other countrieshave been, of France and Germany to-day, of the Spain or the England ofthe Renaissance. It would seem idle to be saying this were not thecontention being raised all the time by certain patriotic groups ofIrishmen in America as well as in Ireland that the new drama is not anative drama. It is, as a matter of fact, no less natively Irish thanthe Elizabethan drama is natively English; it is really more native, forno part of it of moment veils its nationality under even so slight adisguise as "the Italian convention" of that drama. The new Irish dramais more native in its stories than is the Elizabethan drama, as thesestories, even when they are stories found in variant forms in othercountries, are given the tones of Irish life. The structural forms andthe symbolic presentation of ideas of which the Abbey dramatists haveavailed themselves have no more denationalized their plays than has theChurch, 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 notreproduce the average Irishman, is just as natively Irish in hisextravagance and irony as the old folk-tale of the "Two Hags"; LadyGregory in her farces is in a similar way representative of the riot ofWest-Country imagination; and Mr. Yeats, if further removed from theIrishmen of to-day, is very like, in many of his moods, to the riddlingbards 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 arefamed for "the beautiful speaking"; for eloquence; for powers ofimpersonation; for quick changes of mood; for ease in running the gamutof the emotions. Of these things come art of the stage, and these thingsare the Irishman's in fullest measure. The Abbey Players have, however, gone abroad for some elements of their art, perhaps for their repose ofmanner, a quietude that is not the quietude of moodiness, a conditionnot unusual in the Irishman; and in addition to this repose of manner, which is fundamental and common to their presentation of realisticmodern plays and of poetic plays of legendary times, for a slowness anddignity of gesture in the plays of legend, which is perhaps a borrowingfrom the classic stage. Their repose of manner may come from modernFrance; 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, itwas arresting to hear ten years later a somewhat similar comparison ofthe acting of the Irish Players to the acting of yesterday on the Frenchstage. A man who in the late eighties and early nineties had spentseven 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 ofdignity, but never at all before acting so natural. 

There is possible, too, however, a native origin for this repose ofmanner, or perhaps it would be truest to say that it is a blending, likethe 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 ourschool, acted by players with no knowledge of the peasant, and of theawkwardness and stillness of bodies that have followed the plow, or toolacking in humility to copy these things without convention orcaricature. " Here, too, he refers to the "quiet movement and carefulspeech which has given our players some little fame" as "arising partlyout of deliberate opinion and partly out of the ignorance of theplayers. "

Undoubtedly Mr. Fay knew the still ways of the peasant, and I do notdoubt that he was influenced by such knowledge and did in some degreetrain his actors to bring their movements on the stage in accord withthe "awkwardness and stillness of bodies that have followed the plow. "But since there are ways of the peasant that are far from still, it islikely, too, that he was led to select such movements, instead of thevehement gesture and lively facial expression that are just ascharacteristic of the peasant, by a memory of the restrained acting ofthe French stage. It is likely, too, that the very inexperience andlack of knowledge of artifice to which Mr. Yeats refers was an elementin making the art of the company what it became. But it is notaltogether impossible that certain traditions of the English stage--ofthe statuesque acting of the Kembles, for instance--had come down intothe time of Mr. Fay's stage experience, to those days before he becamestage manager of the performances of "The Daughters of Erin" in 1900, and that these traditions influenced his training of the company thatwas to attain to a new art of the stage. 

Before this there had been two series of performances in Dublin, each ofa week's duration, by "The Irish Literary Theatre, " one in 1899, and theother in 1900, with English actors gathered together in London by Mr. George Moore; and another week's series followed in 1901 by the BensonCompany and some amateurs of the Gaelic League under the leadership ofDr. Douglas Hyde. It was the performances of "The Countess Cathleen" ofMr. Yeats and of "The Heather Field" of Mr. Martyn at the AntientConcert Rooms in Dublin, respectively May 8 and 9, 1899, by "The IrishLiterary Theatre, " that inaugurated the drama of the Celtic Renaissance, fully a year before there came into being the group of amateurs thatwere to bring that drama home to Ireland as no players who inherited thestandards and conventions of the English stage could possibly havebrought it home. 

It is Mr. Fay's distinction to have been, as I have intimated, theleader who started these players on the long way to their new art. Suchleadership his record hardly augered. It was in the very lowest formsof vaudeville, in what is the analogue abroad of our negro minstrelsy, that Mr. Fay had his stage experience, a stage experience that had madehim well enough known in burlesque rôles to make it difficult for him toassume with success serious rôles in the early years of the NationalDramatic Company. Because of this old association, Dublin audiencesinsisted in 1902 in seeing humor in his Peter Gillane in "Cathleen niHoulihan. " For all this past, however, Mr. Fay was intent on seriousdrama, and, with the precept and example of Mr. Russell and Mr. Yeatsalways present to him in the early days of the National Theatre Company, and with what he had gathered from the experimental performance of Irishplays by "The Irish Literary Theatre, " he advanced surely in his artuntil his withdrawal from the company in January, 1908. His loss wascompensated for only by the results of his training of other actors, such as Miss Sara Allgood and Mr. Arthur Sinclair, who on certain roadshave outrun their master. When I saw Mr. Fay in 1902, in the little hallin Camden Street, Dublin, with no knowledge of what his stage experiencehad been, I accepted him at once for what he was, a finished "character"actor of poise and confidence, a dignified figure for all his statureand his predilection for comedy, and the possessor of a speaking voicewhose natural pleasantness he had made into something higher thanpleasantness by his art in the use of it, if it never attained theresonance 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 in1902 on which I was taken to Camden Street to a rehearsal of the IrishNational Dramatic Company. Our guide was Mr. James H. Cousins, whose"Racing Lug" and "Connla" were among the plays produced in the followingautumn and which that night were in rehearsal. He piloted us to anentranceway by the side of a produce shop. We knocked on the door andwaited, and waited. We knocked again, and at last heard steps comingnearer and nearer. The door opened and revealed a young man inwork-a-day black suit and derby, with a candle in one hand and aproperty spear in the other. He conducted us down a narrow, draftyhallway, into a hall in which were wooden benches as rude as those inthe bandstand of a backwoods country fair in the States, and a slightlyraised platform at the farther end. We were soon in eager conversationwith young store clerks and typists and artisans who were about to setto work at that in which their hearts lay, the interpreting of plays outof Ireland's heart. It was good talk we listened to from those young menand women, boys and girls all of them in their fervor and zest and highaim. Their enthusiasm carried through "Connla, " "The Racing Lug, " and"Deirdre" with real impressiveness. Of Mr. Cousins's two plays one wasrealistic of the north of Ireland shore life of to-day, and the other, "Connla, " like Mr. Russell's "Deirdre, " made out of Ireland's heroicage. 

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 evenshe has not been continuously with them since 1902. The amateurs hadthen but begun, under the direction of Mr. Fay, on the slow fashioningof themselves into the finished folk-actors they proved themselves inAmerica. But even this acting, so little removed from that of amateursat these rehearsals, had distinction, the distinction of fidelity tolife in "The Racing Lug, " the distinction of possession by dream in"Deirdre"; and let it be remembered, too, that it was a rehearsalwithout costume, and that one had to be carried away from theconventional dress of the Dublin streets, and had to be made to feelthat the characters in "The Racing Lug" were primitive fishermen, andthe people of "Connla" and "Deirdre" the people of Ireland's Homericage. 

Miss Maire T. Quinn, Mr. T. Dudley Digges, Mr. P. J. Kelly, with MissWalker and the brothers Fay, --Mr. W. G. Fay and Mr. Frank J. Fay, --werethen the leading actors of the company. The playwrights, too, took partin their own or their fellows' plays in the lesser rôles, Mr. Russellsometimes playing the druid in his "Deirdre" and Mr. Colum carrying aspear or wearing a pea-jacket as need was. One circumstance or another, politics or need, gradually lost the company every one of these actorsthat took part in its first performances in 1902. There werecomparatively few changes, though, until 1904, the year in which MissHorniman, "a generous English friend, " took for them the old MechanicInstitute Theatre and, rebuilding it in part, turned it over to theIrish National Dramatic Company for six years. Up to this time theactors had received no pay, giving their services for love of countryand of art, but with the more frequent performances and their attendantrehearsals it became necessary to take a large part of the time of theleading men and women, and then, of course, they had to be paid. Beforethe opening of the Abbey Theatre, three of the chief actors, Miss Quinnand Mr. Digges and Mr. Kelly, came to this country to appear in Irishplays in the Irish Section of the St. Louis Fair. The public thatgathered in St. Louis was not prepared for the new drama, being moreused to the musical play of the type Mr. Olcott has made familiar inAmerica, or to the Bowery Irishman of the Harrigan plays, or to thegross caricatures, Galwayed and ape-accoutred, of the before-curtaininterlude of the variety show. As a result the former National Playersprotested against the policy of the Irish Section and returned to NewYork. Miss Walker was the principal actress of the company after MissQuinn's departure to America, and upon Miss Walker's withdrawal in 1905the 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 thecompany, creating the principal characters of all the plays of Synge andof 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 "TheRising of the Moon" and "A Pot of Broth" in New York. They made, unfortunately, no great success in their appearances, as their playswere not presented in bills devoted solely to Irish plays, but ascurtain-raisers to the usual conventional farce. Almost all the actorswhom I have mentioned as leaving the National Players eventually foundtheir way into the conventional plays, but almost none of them madesuccesses there comparable in any degree to their successes infolk-drama or in plays out of old Irish legend. Nor can it be said thatactors trained in the dominant forms of present-day English drama, evenwhen so skilled as Mrs. Patrick Campbell, were wholly satisfying intheir assumption of rôles in the plays of the Renaissance. It was MissAllgood, chief musician in the London performances of Mr. Yeats's"Deirdre" in 1908, who won the greatest approval from the Londoncritics, and not Mrs. Campbell as Deirdre herself. 

[Illustration]

Miss Allgood had played principal parts with the Abbey Company from 1904on. 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 successas great as that of Miss Allgood in character parts and comedy. From1906 they have shared the principal women's rôles, but, owing to MissO'Neill's inability to come to America in the fall of 1911, Miss McGeefell 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. Itis not altogether accurate, however, to speak of any actor or actress ofthe company as leading man or leading woman, for not only is one "aleading lady" one night, as was Miss McGee as Pegeen Mike in "ThePlayboy of the Western World" on the American tour, and one of thevillage girls in "The Well of the Saints" the next night, but the menand women alternate in the same parts on different nights, as, forinstance, on the American tour Cathleen ni Houlihan was played now byMiss Allgood and now by Miss Walker. 

The fact that few of the actors who have learned their art with theIrish National Dramatic Society have achieved greatly in other drama isperhaps a proof that their powers are limited to the folk-drama and thelegendary drama that comprises almost the entire repertoire of thecompany. Miss Allgood was, it is true, lent to Mr. Poel for theperformances of "Measure for Measure" in the spring of 1908, and won anunquestioned success as Isabella, but actors so skilled as the Messrs. Fay have attained no notable success in other than Irish plays. Duringthe American tour of 1911-12 both Mr. Sinclair and Miss Allgood weremuch importuned by the managers to accept American engagements, and itis hardly to be doubted but that both could win success in conventionalcomedy. And yet one feels it was the part of wisdom as well as ofloyalty for them to withstand the lure. 

The distinguishing characteristic of the art of the Abbey Players isnaturalness. It is not that their personalities happen to coincide withcertain types of Irish character, but that they know so well the typesof the folk-plays, and even the characters who are not types that appearin the folk-plays, that they are able to portray them to the life. TheAbbey Players have discarded most of the tricks of the stage, or perhapsit would be truer to say they do not inherit the tricks of the stage orany traditional characterizations of parts. They are taught to allowtheir demeanor and gesture and expression to rise out of the situation, to "get up" their parts from their own ideas; and these ideas areinterfered with only if they run definitely counter to the ideas ofstage-manager or author. The smallness of the Abbey Theatre has savedthem from the necessity of heightening effects that they may carry tothe farthest corners of a large house, a necessity that leads so oftento over-emphasis by our own actors. There are less than six hundredseats 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 easilywithout emphasis all over the house. 

It is an old saying that the English of Dublin is the most beautifulEnglish in the world. However that may be, there can be no doubtwhatsoever but that the English that is spoken in Dublin falls on theear with a mellowness of sound that is a joy to all who cherish properspeech. In the earlier years of the company Mr. Yeats was very desirousof 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 hadtried to have his lines in "The Land of Heart's Desire" spoken when itwas put on at the Avenue Theatre, London, in 1894; and thirteen yearslater Miss Florence Farr, whom he believes to speak English morebeautifully than anybody in the world, spoke his dramatic verses in a"half chant, " and his lyrical verses, many of them, to a definitemusical notation, on her American tour of 1907. It was noticeable, however, when she played one of the musicians in his "Deirdre" on itslater presentations, that he method of intoning the verses differed agreat deal from their delivery by the regular members of the company. If Mr. Yeats has not changed his views somewhat in regard to thespeaking of dramatic verse, he no longer insists on the half chant as itwas practiced by Miss Farr, but is content if the actors reproduce itsrhythm in "the beautiful speaking" that is characteristic of their art. The most beautiful English that I have ever listened to is the Englishof Synge as spoken by Mr. O'Donovan in Christy's "romancin'" to PegeenMike 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 themany changes of emotion that the part demands, the unmatched rhythm ofthe prose rendered as he renders it carrying one clean out of one's selfas one listens. It is only when one comes to one's self on thecurtain-fall that one finds one's self wondering, Can this be prose?Surely, never before was prose, English prose, as beautiful to the earas English verse. 

As Miss O'Neill did not come with the Abbey Players to America, we didnot have a chance to hear Pegeen Mike's lines spoken with a beautycomparable to Christy's. The part is not one to which Miss Allgood isphysically adapted, and Miss McGee is as yet too new to the stage tospeak with the confident abandon the lines demand. We did, however, havea chance to hear Miss Allgood's very beautiful musical utterance of theverses given to Cathleen ni Houlihan in this first of the movement'sfolk-plays, and her equally beautiful speaking of the prose lines of theplay. This part of Cathleen ni Houlihan is sufficiently removed from theother parts of the play, folk-parts, and from the parts of the otherfolk-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 torealize that they, too, could worthily bear parts in heroic romance. 

The rendering of the songs in the plays--it is chiefly in the plays ofMr. Yeats that they appear--is a distinguishing characteristic of theirproduction. Mr. Yeats will not have them rendered by what, in theordinary 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 theAbbey Company, as has every one of its regular actresses, and every oneof its men save Mr. W. G. Fay, have lent it their assistance, as in theinstance of Mrs. Patrick Campbell referred to above, and as Miss Darraghdid in productions of "The Shadowy Waters" and of "Deirdre" in 1906. Itwas four years earlier than this, however, that an Irishwoman, betterknown in her country than either Miss Darragh or Mrs. Patrick Campbell, lent her art to the performance of Cathleen ni Houlihan. "Miss MaudGonne played very finely, " writes Mr. Yeats in recording the incident, "and her great height made Cathleen seem a divine being fallen into ourmortal infirmity. " With these three exceptions, so far as I have beenable to find out, no actors or actresses outside of the company have, since 1902, essayed any other than a subordinate part. Yet such is theversatility of the company, men and women both, within the range ofplays the company feels called upon to present, --folk-drama of to-dayand of yesterday in Ireland, folk-history plays, morality plays, andplays in verse out of old legends, --that though there have never been asmany as twenty actors in the company there has very seldom been muchdifficulty 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 tothe 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 inno way divertive of attention from the play itself, its thought, itswords, its acting. He would have it, in a way, decorative, but subduedand in harmony with the subject of the play. A very few simple setssuffice for the plays of peasant life, a cottage interior, a villagestreet, a crossroads in a gap of the hills, all to serve the action andthe words as background, and to be no more obtrusive than the backgroundof a portrait. It may be that this attitude of Mr. Yeats is in a measuredue 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 withMr. Yeats. Equally simple, though of another sort of simplicity, wouldMr. Yeats have the scenery for plays out of old legend. "I would like tosee, " writes Mr. Yeats in "Samhain" of 1902, "poetic drama, which triesto keep at a distance from daily life, that it may keep its emotionuntroubled, staged with but two or three colors. " Old reds, mistyblues, imperial purples, greens that have about them the dimness ofhaunted woods, and dulled golds have been among the colors used in thelegendary 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 aresimple. No audience at the Abbey has ever marveled at cycloramiclandscape, and no audience and no actress has ever been able to take thejoy of the dressmaker and the dressed, of the milliner and themillinered, in gown or hat. 

The National Theatre Society, Limited, which is the legal name of theorganization that controls the Abbey Theatre Company, may not play whatplays it will at the Abbey; the two leading theatres of commerce inDublin, the Gaiety and the Theatre Royal, having, as Mr. Yeats records, "vigorously opposed" the Abbey being given "a patent as littlerestricted" as their own. "The Solicitor-General, " Mr. Yeats continues, "to meet them halfway, has restricted our patent to plays written byIrishmen or on Irish subjects or to foreign masterpieces, provided thesemasterpieces are not English. " This restriction has not interfered withany feature of the work of the Abbey Theatre, Mr. Yeats believes, savein the building-up of an audience, some people remaining away, perhaps, who might have been attracted had "such bodies as the Elizabethan StageSociety, which brought 'Everyman' to Dublin some years ago, been able tohire the theatre. "

No phase of the dramatic movement has been more interesting and nonehas been more important than this building-up of an audience toappreciate the plays. Whether with the poetic plays of Mr. Yeats and theironic extravaganzas of Synge alone, such an audience as has been builtup--an audience estimated by Mr. Yeats in 1906 to consist of fourthousand young men and women--could have been won is problematical; thatis, it may be doubted that the very best the movement has produced wouldhave attracted a sufficient audience to enable the company to keeptogether 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 thepurpose of affording comic relief to the plays of Mr. Yeats and to thefirst plays of Synge that Lady Gregory started to create them. Theyattracted all who loved laughter and merriness and a loving caricatureof country-folk, --and who do not?--and one of them, "The Rising of theMoon" (1907), had a distinct patriotic appeal, as had Mr. Yeats's"Cathleen ni Houlihan, " which brought some who would not otherwise havecome to the Abbey Theatre. The third most definitely "national" play ofthe movement, "The Piper" (1908) of Mr. O'Riordan, may have also drawnsome who would not otherwise have come to the theatre, but if it did soit 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 followedMr. Cousins's two little plays above referred to; "The Laying of theFoundations, " by Mr. Frederick Ryan, --a realistic satire of Dublin life;and Mr. Yeats's incursion into farce, "A Pot of Broth. " The appeal ofthe repertoire was widened in 1903 by the inclusion of plays by LadyGregory, Mr. Colum, and Synge. "Twenty-five" could give offense to nonein 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 escapedhostile criticism in such a situation even had it been much more severein its portrayal of peasant life in the Midlands than it was. 

From the time of "The Countess Cathleen" (1899) to the time of "In theShadow of the Glen" (1903), no one of the plays in the movement hadseriously offended any large section of the public, and the youngergeneration of all classes was contributing largely of its intellectualmembers to the audience of the National Dramatic Company. The WestBritons, the Dublin Castle set, the Trinity College group, were not muchinterested, and, indeed, that portion of the theatrical audience thatfills the stalls in the average theatre the English-speaking world overhas never taken very much interest in the plays of the movement, save toprotest against "The Rising of the Moon" as disloyal to England, and toapprove, misunderstanding its purpose, "The Playboy of the WesternWorld" as a savage satire of the Irish Irishman. The audience that themovement has built up is an audience of free intelligences, largely fromthe poorer elements of the public, an audience that fills the cheaperplaces in the house. "The Pit" of the Abbey Theatre is the envy of allthe theatrical managers of Dublin. It is a pit of people young in yearsor young in heart and mind, who are interested in intellectual things, agroup of people largely self-taught, or taught by the CelticRenaissance, to appreciate fine things. With these has come that elementof the intellectuals among the Trinity College set that is interestedabove all things in Ireland, but this element is not large. 

This play and that have attracted, either for purposes of approval orfor purposes of disapproval, groups of people outside of the faithfulpit that is interested in every sincere portrayal of Irish life. Such agroup, from the patriotic societies, prevented the rest of the housefrom hearing "The Playboy of the Western World, " after its firstperformance on January 26, 1907, for four performances more; and such agroup similarly protested against "The Piper, " a little more than a yearlater, because it seemed to the members of the group to be anunpatriotic revelation of the lack of cohesion among Irish political andpatriotic factions. 

Despite opposition, however, and with new dramatists one by one gaininga 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 andmore people continued to become interested in the new drama, and by thetime Miss Horniman's support, promised in 1904 for six years, waswithdrawn at the expiration of that period, the Abbey Theatre wasapparently a fixture in the artistic life of Ireland. 

It has been the custom, of recent years, for the Abbey Theatre to beginits Dublin season In October and to continue it on until May, when thecompany goes to London for a month. In the earlier years, before thecompany 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 weekor always on every night of a week, the theatre being turned over to theTheatre of Ireland or some other dramatic organization occasionally, andbeing let, now and then, for lectures or concerts or the like. TheLondon season in May is followed, or preceded sometimes, by visits toother English cities, Manchester and Leeds, Oxford and Cambridge amongthem; and at home in Ireland, in the intervals between weeks at theAbbey, the company goes to Cork or Belfast for a few performances. 

In this country the audiences that attended the performances of theplays of the Abbey Theatre Players were of a very different composition. At their average they included a certain proportion of the youngerintellectuals among the Irish-Americans, but very many of these werekept away from the performances, as many, indeed, in Ireland and inEngland, too, are kept away from the performances, by the opposition inthe patriotic societies. In America, as in London and in Manchester, andin the English university towns, it has been largely from among thosewho are seriously interested in a literary drama that the audiences havebeen 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 Ibsenplays and symphony concerts, that made up the audiences of the IrishPlayers in America, whether in Boston or in Philadelphia or Chicago. These audiences approximated to the Dublin audiences only in the factthat they were constant in attendance at all the plays of therepertoire. There were, of course, some who came out of curiosity andthe love of ruction, but these after all were few. The plays appealed ontheir merits and won the success that they did win because of their artand their reading of life, and not because of the sensational incidentsthat had occurred at some of the productions of the company. 

The Abbey Theatre has been able to maintain itself successfully in theyears that have elapsed since the arrangement between Miss Horniman andthe National Theatre Society came to an end. It has begotten many othercompanies, the Ulster Literary Theatre, best of them all; the Theatre ofIreland; the National Players; the Cork Dramatic Society. It has broughtinto being a kind of folk-drama that, despite its avowed and evidentScandinavian origin, is a new folk-drama, and it has brought into being, too, a school of dramatists. It has done much more than Mr. Yeatsclaimed it had done in 1908 when he wrote, "We know that we have alreadycreated a taste for sincere and original drama and for sincere, quiet, simple acting. Ireland possesses something which has come out of its ownlife, and the many failures of dramatic societies which have imitatedour work, without our discipline and our independence, show that itcould not have been made in any other way. " But even were this all ithad done, it had done much. What it has done I have attempted to putdown 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 movementthe most significant part of the Celtic Renaissance, a movement to methe most original movement in letters the world has known since thatmovement in Norway which so definitely stimulated it, a movement thatgave 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 gavehim 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 mouldedas only Irish conditions, of old time and of to-day, could mould him, Irish conditions spiritual, intellectual, and physical; a man with eyeson a bare countryside in the gray of twilight, thinking of the storiesthe peasants tell and of the old legends whose setting this is beforehim. At this hour, with such surroundings, and in such thought, theOther World is as near to all men as their natures will let it come, andto 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'slegendary past and of its fairy present, and waking dreams born of booksof old magic he has read indoors. Now it will be one sort of dream ispresent, now the other, and now the third, and often two or even allthree sorts of dream are intermingled. His volume of prose sketches, "The Celtic Twilight" (1893), gives the title some of his countrymenhave fastened on his verse, and the verse of others that take hisattitude and use like material, "The Twilight School of Poetry. " It isnot inapt as giving the quality of most of his writing; but some of hisverses have warm sunlight in them, which, strangely, since it issunlight as it visits Irish shore and mountain, he has deplored. Theexplanation may be that Mr. Yeats is of those who do not live intenselyuntil the oncoming of night, and so holds out of harmony with his geniusthe coloring of its moments of lesser energy. 

Legends and folk-tales and landscapes and books of mysticism and magicnot only give Mr. Yeats the material of his poetry, but suggest itsimages, 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 thegray-greens and browns and soft purples and bright whites of Irishlandscape, and the symbols from fairy-lore and mythology, he had paidpatient heed to certain of the great poets of his language, to Spenserand Blake, to Shelley and William Morris. And in learning the art ofdrama, which he began to study very carefully after his early plays weretested in "The Irish Literary Theatre, " Mr. Yeats has very evidentlypondered a good deal on the English morality and taken into account theeffects of Greek tragedy as he had before explored M. Maeterlinck andthe 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 andardorous thoughts--fatherland and song. " Twenty-six years have gonesince then and Mr. Yeats is still devoted to poetry and to his country, for all that the Nationalists deplore that his greater interest is nowin his art. His art, indeed, he cherishes with an ardor that is akin tothe ardor of patriotism; to him, as to Spenser, the master of hisyouth, poetry is a divine enthusiasm. At first eager to paint, as didand 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 alibrary to read bad translations from the Irish, and at last down intoConnaught to sit by turf fires. " He read, too, Sir Samuel Ferguson, thepoet who had done most with Irish legend, and Allingham, who wrote ofIrish fairies, and the patriotic poets of the young Ireland group, Davischief among them. His father, an admirer of Whitman, preached to him thedoctrine 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 inspirationin Ireland, overcoming, for the time, the denationalizing influencesthat the art of the centre must always exert. Not only were thenational legends and folk-lore constantly with him in these years, butthe interest in magic and all things that are hidden. He was one ofthe Hermetic Society, of which Mr. George W. Russell was the highpriest, as early as 1886, but this interest, which has dominated sooften in his later poetry, is not to the forefront in "The Wanderingsof Oisin" of 1889. The material of the title poem of this volume Mr. Yeats found in the libraries. It recounts the Fenian poet's threehundred years of "dalliance with a demon thing" oversea in threewondrous lands, where were severally pleasure and fighting andforgetfulness, and in each of which Oisin spent a century. It has ahalf-dramatic framework of question and answer between St. Patrick, who appears as upbraider, and the poet, who laments joys gone and theChristian present of Ireland and his own feeble age. Although it is astory Mr. Yeats is telling, the beauties of the poems are lyricalbeauties. In exuberance and richness of color it is Mr. Yeats's mosttypically Irish poem based on legend, and nowhere do his lines go withmore lilt, or fall oftener into inevitability of phrase, or more fullydiffuse a glamour of otherworldliness. "The Wanderings of Oisin"revealed poetry as unmistakably new to his day as was Poe's to theearliest Victorian days. Beside the title poem another from legend hadthis new quality, "The Madness of King Goll, " with its refrain thatwill not out of memory, "They will not hush, the leaves a-flutterround me, the beech leaves old. " "Down by the Salley Gardens" and "TheMeditation of the Old Fisherman" bear witness to talks before turffires, or in herring boats off Knocknarea, and other developments offolk-song or tale have the place-names of his home county of Sligo;but this distinctive quality is theirs in less measure, and few othersin the little volume have it at all. 

In the years just before "The Wanderings of Oisin, " Mr. Yeats had beeneager to unite the young writers of Ireland in a movement to give thecountry a national literature in English. This project developed sideby side with Dr. Hyde's to give Ireland its own language again and amodern literature in it. Neither leader was the first to advanceeither idea, but each was the first to establish the movement in whichhe was most interested; Mr. Yeats's "Wanderings of Oisin" (1889) isthe starting-point of the Celtic Renaissance, and Dr. Hyde's "LeabharSgeuluigheachta" (1889), the starting-point of the Gaelic League, though this was not organized until 1893. From that day to this thesetwo men and Mr. George W. Russell ("A. E. ") have been the great forcesin the literature of the Renaissance. Mr. Yeats was busy in thoseearly days with editing fairy and folk-tales and short stories fromthe Irish novelists, and in reading these it was but natural that heshould be led to write stories. First came "John Sherman" and "Dhoya"in 1891, the one a condensed novel with the slightest of plots about aslow-pulsed young man's troubles with love and laziness in Sligo andLondon, and the other a sketch of Irish faery in old time. Some of thesketches of "The Celtic Twilight" (1893) approach the tale, but suchnarrations are not told for their own sake, but as illustrations offairy-lore, or they have too little body to win for themselves thetitle of tale. In "The Secret Rose" (1897) there are true tales, someout of Ireland's legendary past, some out of her fairy present, and, akin to both, the Hanrahan series. These last Mr. Yeats so rewrote in1904 as to be "nearer to the mind of the country places where Hanrahanand his like wandered and are remembered. " As they stand now they arehis best prose, rid almost entirely of preciousness, and simple andfull of mystery as the countryside they reflect. In "The Secret Rose"are two "alchemical" tales and in "The Tables of the Law" (1904), twoothers of like subject. To me, for all the qualities they share withpoetry of his of similar inspiration, they do not seem to be masteredby him. Alone among his writings they are incomplete. 

Mr. Yeats was unable until the last few years to give himself up tothe writing nearest his heart, drama. He continued to edit Irishliterature, to write on literature and fairy-lore for the magazines. The articles about fairies he has published, and a great mass ofbelief collected but as yet unprinted, he will gather some day into agreat book. Known now in the Irish countryside as a man with a powerto exorcise spirits, he will then no doubt attain a reputation thatwill put him well above that of the Irish-American archbishop who washis only rival in that practice in the belief of many Irish peasants. Other of his magazine writing Mr. Yeats has gathered into "The CelticTwilight" 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 andEvil" (1903), some of them stating his philosophy, never toodefinitely formulated. These two collections are very interesting inthemselves, but both, like his "Discoveries" (1907), are moreinteresting as commentary on his powers. Mr. Yeats has used many notesto explain obscure allusions in his poems, though the most obscure he, perhaps with premeditation, fails to explain. Yet the readerunacquainted with his use of symbols will find much interpretation inthese essays, especially those in "Ideas of Good and Evil. "

Up to 1899, when Mr. Yeats's serious efforts to build up an Irishnational drama began with "The Irish Literary Theatre, " he devoted hishappiest moments to lyric poetry, though the play of "The CountessCathleen" made half of his second volume of verse, and the third waswholly given to the little play, "The Land of Heart's Desire. " Since1899, in which year "The Wind among the Reeds" appeared, Mr. Yeats haspublished, of other than dramatic verse, only the little volume of "Inthe Seven Woods, " the little series on Flamel, and a few snatches, inall about a thousand lines. Some of this verse Mr. Yeats wrote for thepsaltery, and in 1902 he was determined to write all his shorter poemsfor recitation to this instrument and "all his longer poems for thestage. "

Mr. Yeats was thirty-four when he practically gave up lyrical poetry fordramatic poetry. From the beginning he had written plays, but they werelyrical plays, dramatic only in form, and they were, as soon as he hadmastered the technique of verse, great lyrical poems. In the plays hehas written since he has striven at that hardest of literary tasks, tomake true dramatic speech high poetry, he has written nothing morebeautiful than "The Countess Cathleen" and "The Land of Heart's Desire. "He has rewritten and rewritten these later plays, and in almost everyrewriting made them more dramatic, but sometimes the later versions havelost as poetry, not in the mere decorative features and "lyricalinterbreathings, " but in the accent of the play and in the sheerpoetical qualities. To me it seems a pity, inevitable though it be, thatthe poet who has struck the most distinctly new note of all the Englishpoets since Swinburne should, at thirty-four, have changed from an arthe knew to an art he did not know. That is a ripe age for a poet tobegin to learn to write in a form barely essayed before. Unlike so manyof the English poets, who as public school boys were bred up to writeverse, Mr. Yeats had to teach himself to write verse. Overcomingtriumphantly this handicap, though losing by it years usually fullest ofimpulse to write, Mr. Yeats greatly attained, and for the ten years from1889 to 1899 devoted himself to the writing of lyrics. For the pastthirteen years he has been busiest with dramas, in none of which has hemore than approximated to a dramatic quality that is as great as thequality of his lyrics. He has owned himself one reason of suchshortcoming, in the notes to "Deirdre. "[2] "The principal difficultywith the form of dramatic literature I have adopted is that, unlike theloose Elizabethan form, it continually forces one by its rigour of logicaway from one's capacities, experiences, and desires, until, if one havenot patience to wait for the mood, or to rewrite again and again till itcomes, there is rhetoric and logic and dry circumstance where thereshould be life. "

It may be that Mr. Yeats will one day overcome the difficulties that healludes to here, but he is now forty-seven, and I, for one, doubt if, athis age, he can overcome them. As they are, his plays are beautiful inideas and words, and striking in a lyric and decorative way, if not allof them in a dramatic way, though in some he has in vain sacrificedpoetry to attain true dramatic speech attaining instead only "rhetoricand logic and dry circumstance. " One values the plays of Mr. Yeatshighest when one thinks of them as a new kind of drama, as aredevelopment of epic and lyric poetry into drama, an epic and lyricpoetry illustrated by tableaux against backgrounds out of faery. Let usnot forget that there is one effect which is of "The Tempest, " andanother effect which is of "Lear, " and that it is after all something ofa convention to call the latter a success of drama and the former asuccess of something other than drama. Yet it is just as necessary toremember that drama does mean a definite sort of literature, and thesuccess 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 ofdrama that Mr. Yeats has created, is the success of something other thanwhat we conventionally term drama. It is curious that no matter howgreat may be the success of an author in a form he has invented, he willalmost invariably attempt also the accepted form from which he hasdiverged. Impelled by a desire to see his wife in a drama of his own butof the old dramatic sort, M. Maeterlinck made "Monna Vanna" in accordwith the usual rules of the theatre, but to find it fall far short ofthe strange new beauty of his earlier plays. As yet Mr. Yeats has notcompromised with the current taste in drama, but it may be that a desireto see some such actress as Mrs. Patrick Campbell in a part of his maylead to such compromise, as the thought of her acting his Deirdreinspired him to rewrite that part for Mrs. Campbell. 

Mr. Yeats has not yet passed beyond the danger of falling between twostools. If it prove that he has really attained in a drama in which theverse is true dramatic speech and not lyric ecstasy or decoration, thesuccess of such drama will be worth the sacrifice of the lyric poetrythat he has not written because of the absorption of all of his energyin his dramatic writing. If it prove he has not so attained, we shallhave no adequate compensation for the lost lyrics that he is now too oldto write. I say no "adequate compensation, " for compensation there is inthe lyrical passages that no play of his is without, lyrical passagesthat arrest us as do his poems of the nineties; but, after all, these arebut passages, not poems with unity and finality of form. 

Another question altogether, a question outside of the question of thevalue 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 movementat all comparable to what has been, if Mr. Yeats had not devoted solarge a portion of his time to drama. I believe there would have been adramatic movement, but I am sure, from what I know of the other dramaticorganizations in Dublin, that they would not have amounted to muchunless some other great writer as loyal to art as Mr. Yeats had playedfor them the beneficent tyrant. And other such great writers, as loyalto art, and as devoted to drama, are far to seek in Ireland as in othercountries. 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 propagandistliterature; it is more than likely that had Mr. Martyn attempted it ithad come to the end to which he has come as playwright. Without Mr. Yeats as moving power, Synge had not been, without Mr. Yeats tointerest her in the movement, Lady Gregory had not written her farcesand folk-histories; and without the Abbey Theatre's plays as standard, the younger playwrights of Cork and Belfast would have written playsvery other than those they have written. 

No wonder Mr. Yeats wants to see his dreams take on bodily reality uponthe stage, and to hear beautifully spoken the words in which he hascaught them. There can be no greater pleasures than these to a writerwhen he is past the imaginative intensity of youth. In youth hisimaginings are so real to him he needs no objective embodiment to seethem, and the roll and sing of their lines are always sounding to hisinner ear, but as he passes "out of a red flare of dreams, " such as isyouth's, "into a common light of common hours" in middle age, hisimaginative life grows less intense and needs the satisfaction of seeingitself 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 ofIreland, but the Arcady of the one and the mediæval Spain of the otherhe could easily have paralleled in Irish legend, where anythingwonderful and tragic is possible. Nor is "The Countess Cathleen"(1892-99), in its presentation of the drama of a woman that sells hersoul that the souls of her tenantry may be saved, essentially Irish. Itis curious that among English poets of Mr. Yeats's generation it shouldbe Mr. Kipling that has happened upon the same legend, which he adaptsto his ends in "The Sacrifice of Er-Heb. " The background of "TheCountess Cathleen" in the earlier versions was not more essentiallyIrish than the story. "The great castle in malevolent woods" and thecountry about it is very like the part of fairyland that M. Maeterlinckrefound by following the charts of early discoverers in Arthurianlegend. In its later versions "The Countess Cathleen" is more Irish andperhaps more dramatic, though its greatnesses, after that of atmosphere, the great lines we may no more forget than those about "the angelIsrafel"

 "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 ofMaire'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 aregreat, --

 "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 ofall his lines, --

 "And God stands winding his lonely horn", and "The Lake Isle of Innisfree, " that so charmed Stevenson that he hadto write its author, and say it cast over him a spell like that of hisfirst reading of the "Poems and Ballads" of Swinburne and the "Love inthe Valley" of Meredith. 

There is no greater lyric poetry anywhere in the writing of Mr. Yeatsthan in "The Land of Heart's Desire" (1894), that little folk-play whoseconstant boding and final tragedy cannot overcome, either while it isplaying 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 newlymarried bride on May-Eve, and of her death when her soul has passed tothe "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 awayfrom the life that we know is it, that all that happens seems not onlypossible but inevitable. 

"The Land of Heart's Desire" was the first play of Mr. Yeats to be puton 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 thecurtain-raiser to Mrs. Le Moyne's production of "In a Balcony, " in thespring of 1901. Fragile as is its charm, it crossed the footlights andmade itself felt as a new beauty of the theatre. It was the lyricalinterbreathings that appealed most to me, but the strife of priest andfairy for Maire Bruin's soul was very real drama. It was the fairy'ssong, however, that haunted me after I left the theatre, as it could notbut 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 "TheRose of the World, " or the ecstasies of Forgael and Dectora, or the songin "Deirdre. " "The lonely of heart is withered away" is its burden, aburden 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 andEngland, being played as frequently by amateurs as by professionals inthis country, but the prose play "Cathleen ni Houlihan, " because of itsnational theme, has had more playings in Ireland. Its effect upon thestage is very different from its effect in the study. Read, it seemsallegory too obvious to impress. The old woman, Cathleen ni Houlihan, with "too many strangers in the house" and with her "four beautifulgreen fields" taken from her, is so patently Ireland possessed byEngland, all four provinces, that one fails to feel the deep humanity ofthe sacrifices of Michael Gillane for her, his country, even though thatsacrifice be on his wedding eve. Seen and listened to, "Cathleen niHoulihan" brings tears to the eyes and chokes the throat with sobs, sointimately physical is the appeal of its pathos. He is, indeed, dull ofunderstanding or hard of heart who can witness a performance of thisplay and not feel that something noble has come his way. It seizes holdof the Irishmen of the patriotic societies as does "The Wearing of theGreen, " and even the outlander, little sympathetic to the cause ofIreland and holding patriotism a provincial thing, is moved in somestrange way he does not understand. Performance brings out itshomeliness, its touches of humor, its wistfulness, its nobility. It iswith this thought of its nobility that every thought of "Cathleen niHoulihan" ends, that is every thought of it on the stage. Off the stageit is, except to him to whom the cause is all, something that fallsshort of nobility, to many little more than eloquent allegory. In theautumn of 1904 Miss Margaret Wycherly played "The Land of Heart'sDesire" and "Cathleen ni Houlihan" a few times in America, and "TheCountess Cathleen"; and "The Hour-Glass" (1903) and "A Pot of Broth"(1902), both plays in prose. "The Hour-Glass, " a morality, was writtenafter "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 LadyWilde's "Ancient Legends of Ireland" (1887), the story of a wise manwho is saved from eternal damnation by the faith of a child. Mr. Yeatsleaves the wise man the great scholar that he was in the old tale, ascholar whose teaching had taken away the faith of a countryside, but hechanges the child who saved the scholar into Teig the Fool, and infusesinto the record of the frantic hour, in which the wise man knows hislife ebbing away as the sand falls, a spirit that is as reverent as thespirit of the old religious drama. 

"A Pot of Broth" is a variant of a widely spread folk-tale in which abeggarman tricks a provident housewife out of a meal. He pretends astone that he has, and which he gives her after his meal, makes goodbroth, but it is her chicken that has made the broth. It is a trifle, amusing enough, but remarkable chiefly for its difference from otherwork of Mr. Yeats. There is little doubt, I take it, in the mind of anyone that it is not chiefly Lady Gregory's, as it surely is in itswording, 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 "TheIrish Literary Theatre. " As this play as performed was in tone more likethe writings of Mr. Moore than of Mr. Yeats, I have considered it amonghis plays rather than among the plays of Mr. Yeats. 

His other prose play, "Where there is Nothing" (1903), is a statement ofrevolt against "the despotism of fact" that is perhaps as characteristicof the artist as of the Celt. The world would say that its hero, PaulRuttledge, was mad, but no one that reads can deny him a large share ofsympathy. This play was produced by the Stage Society in London in 1904. Lady Gregory having had a share in its creation, Mr. Yeats has sincerelinquished the theme to her; and now rewritten by her alone as "TheUnicorn 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 bedestroyers of Church and Law, both use tinkers as their agents ofdestruction, and both die despised of men. Both are "plunged in trance, "but their trances differ. That of Lady Gregory's hero is cataleptic anddirectly productive of his revolt, from a revelation, as he thinks itis, that comes to him while he is "away. " Paul Ruttledge, on the otherhand, deliberately gives up his conventional life, and that as largelybecause of boredom as because of belief in its wrongness. One cannot, asone 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 turningthings topsy-turvy, just as they do, in a fashion that has beendistinctive 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 niHoulihan" 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 isNothing, " "The Hour-Glass, " "Cathleen ni Houlihan, " and "A Pot ofBroth, " that he tells us of the latter vision, and of the beginnings ofthat collaboration with Lady Gregory that taught her her art, and soprofoundly 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 "Wherethere is Nothing" passed into "The Unicorn from the Stars, " as thataccount throws much light on the methods of collaboration that haveadded so greatly to the success of the dramatic movement, and that areespecially valuable to beginners, whose plays, without reshaping incollaboration, might never win their way to the boards. But I have notthe space for it all, and I must content myself with that portion of itin which Mr. Yeats confesses that belief of his in the _rapprochement_of scholar and tinker that one notes so often in Irish life. Speakingof Lady Gregory's rewriting of "Where there is Nothing" into "TheUnicorn 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 oftheir author's desire to do work in a medium that was perhaps moreimmediately acceptable to the audience of the National Dramatic Societyin its then culture, there is no doubt at all that the plays in verseare nearer his heart. They are himself, and in all of the prose playsthere is a good deal of Lady Gregory. All this time that he wascollaborating in these prose plays he was still dreaming over "TheShadowy Waters, " retouching it, rearranging it, until it became indetail a very different play from the play that was published under thatname in 1900. Its hero and heroine, Forgael and Dectora, are much asthey were then, their fateful meeting in misty northern seas remains thecentral incident, and the climax is still their choice to be left alonein the Viking ship at the world's end; but more than half the lines arechanged. "The Shadowy Waters" was staged in 1904, and with tellingweirdness, but like many another author's best-loved and most elaboratedwork, 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 whichwriting 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 dreamof his life, but it is not too much to say that a dream that has hauntedall his life is told here, or half told, for dream such as this eludescomplete expression. "The Shadowy Waters" is a poem so long considered, so often returned to, so loved and elaborated and worked over, so oftendreamed 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 themthat 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 morepreoccupied with art. There was a time when a love of the occultthreatened his art, but from that the theatre has saved him, if it hastaken him from the writing lyrics, in which his powers are at theirhighest. To old Irish legend, Mr. Yeats has, however, been true from thestart, and from the start, too, there has never been a time the two hehas not been preoccupied with dream. And if the two loves to which hehas been constant cannot be said with exactitude to be in the story ofForgael and Dectora, because that story is not a reshaping of any onelegend out of old Irish legend, it is of the very spirit of the journeysoversea in which that legend abounds, and it is steeped in dream. Itwould 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 lipsof Forgael, his hero, who, can we doubt? speaks also for the poethimself:--

 "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'sslaying of his own son as retold Lady Gregory in her "Cuchulain ofMuirthemne" (1902). Like Rustum he does not know who is the youth he isfighting until he has given him his death wound. Its high tragedy rendsthe more by the ironic setting of Blind Man and Fool, two wastrels, oneof whom might have prevented the tragedy, but would not because thefight would give him and his fellow a chance to rob the larders inhouses whose owners were watching it. No one can doubt the highintention of "On Baile's Strand, " no one can deny that its story isessentially dramatic, no one can pass by certain passages withoutrealization that here is great verse, blank verse that is true dramaticspeech. Men remember Cuchulain's description of Aoife as men rememberMaud 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 thestage, he does not bear with him memories of beauty such as one bearsalways 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" asone is moved by other tellings of the same world story, as one is movedby the epic telling of it by Matthew Arnold in "Sohrab and Rustum, " oreven by such a casual telling of it as is Mr. Neil Munro's in "BlackMurdo. " If it were not for "Deirdre, " in fact, one would have to saythat the verse plays of Mr. Yeats after "The Shadowy Waters" grow, playby play, less in poetic beauty, and that their gain in dramaticeffectiveness 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'sHeroic Age to sit at the highest table of the King, and as it waswritten and played in 1903, when its author was being accused of caringmore 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 theKing'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 othermanagers of the Irish National Theatre Society. And Mr. Yeats, it maybe, wrote the play not only to symbolize his contention that the poet isas important to society as is the man of action, but also to assert thatpoetry cultivated for its own sake, the sake of art, is as necessary toa nation, to Ireland, as what Ireland calls patriotism. By the way, heillustrated the fact that that kind of patriotism that assumes the Kingcan do no wrong, --that is, that the Irish people can do no wrong, --andthat whoever exposes their wrongdoing is no patriot, is a mistaken sortof patriotism. 

Late in 1906 his "Deirdre" was successfully produced at the AbbeyTheatre, Dublin. It presents only the last chapter of this, the saddesttale of the three heart-burdening tales that are known as "The ThreeSorrows of Story-Telling, " but it presents it so poignantly and with sokeen an emphasis on the quick-passing of all things sweet, that it takesplace, for all its slightness, with the world's greatest tragedies thatare tragedies because of the overthrow therein of "queens ... Young andfair. " There are few Irish writers whose concern is with things Irishwho have not retold this, the greatest love story of Ireland, but noneof them, from Sir Samuel Ferguson down to our own day, have retold it sonobly as Mr. Yeats, save only Synge, and his restatement of it, of thewhole story from Deirdre's girlhood to her death, has about it agrandeur and triumphing beauty that make further retellings not to betolerated. 

It is not lines, "purple patches, " one remembers from "Deirdre, " but thewhole play, its every situation, its setting. That setting soquintessentializes, in the words Mr. Yeats used to describe it, theromance of the old haunted woods where any adventure is possible, that Imust 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 onedoes of the earlier less dramatic plays, there are passages in plentythat arrest and exalt. One such is those lines of Fergus that so welldescribe 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, "Whenthe Winds are Calling There"; and another such, the crying of a woman'sheart 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, andweakly human as it is it does not take away at all from the queenlinessof 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 ofall time when in such a frenzy of fear and sorrow. Longer even than thisheart's cry, however, I think I shall remember that line so near theopening 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 thestage of the earlier prose "Golden Helmet" (1908), is hardly done out ofany high intention, and although it is not wanting in a kind of strangeand grotesque fascination, it is in result no higher than it was inintention. In fact the past five years, years much of whose time hasbeen spent in forwarding the work of the Abbey Theatre, have notinspired Mr. Yeats to much work of importance. Mr. Yeats promises usmore plays, but one cannot help wishing, if he must do verses other thanlyric, he would put his hand now to a great epic. His "Wanderings ofOisin" is nearest this, near enough, for all the preponderance of lyricin it, to show that he could do it, were we without such lines of "largeaccent" as I have quoted from "The Countess Cathleen" to prove thatbeyond doubt. There is no better material for epic as yet unused thanIrish legends, but there is none the old bard developed into epicproportions. There would be here the largest scope for the shaping powerof the poet. Mr. Yeats must, of course, have thought of epic, butpreferred drama as more in harmony with our time. Lionel Johnson saidthat Mr. Yeats took to drama because he liked to hear his lines finelyspoken, but, surely, if that were his greatest delight, he could inventsome way in which to bring story in verse to listeners. It were surely alesser task than that of stimulating Mr. Dolmetsch to make a psaltery towhich his lyrics may be musically spoken. 

From the beginning, the verse of Mr. Yeats has had vocal quality, aquality that is unfortunately often rarer in good poetry than in versethat is good rhetoric. I cannot see that his interest in the psaltery, that developed after 1900, has brought about any change in the qualityof his verse. There have been constant to it since "The Wanderings ofOisin" all the qualities that distinguish it to-day, --its eloquence, itssymbols that open up unending vistas through mysteries, its eeriness asof the bewildering light of late sunset over gray-green Irish bog andlake and mountain, its lonely figures as great in their simplicity asthose of Homer, its plain statement of high passion that breaks free ofall that is occult and surprises with its clarity where so much is dimwith dream. First one and then another of these qualities has mostinterested him. He has written in explanation of patriotic verse, offolk-verse, of verse based on the old court romances, of symbolism, ofRosicrucianism, of essences, of speaking to the psaltery, of dramaticart; and all the time he has practiced poetry, the interest of the timeresulting in now the greater emphasis on one quality in the poetry, andnow on another quality. It would be superfluous to do more than pointout most of these qualities, but a word on his use of symbols may helpto a fuller understanding of his poetry. I am very sure that I readwrong meanings from many of these symbols, as one who has not thepassword must. They require definite knowledge of magical tradition, andof the poet's interpretation of Celtic tradition, for a fullunderstanding. As the years go by, I think their exact meaning willescape more and more readers until they will have no more significancethan Spenser's allegories have to us. Only to the student deeply read inElizabethan politics do these mean to-day what must have been patent tothe inner circle at Elizabeth's court. Those symbols of Mr. Yeats thatwe may understand intuitively, as we may "The white owl in the belfrysits, " other generations also may understand, but hardly those that havemeanings known only to a coterie. But we may read Spenser with enjoymenteven 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 versesentitled "The Valley of the Black Pig" because Mr. Yeats's note tells usthat it is the scene of Ireland's _Götterdämmerung_, though it is anunquestionable gratification to the puzzle interest I have with mykind, 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 thegates of the Other World, the real world we shall enter when death setsus 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 theywere 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 answersexchanged between that princess and Cuchulain. When the symbolism is ofthe kind found in "Death's Summons" of Thomas Nash, which of all poemsMr. 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 severalsymbols Mr. Yeats employs in "The Valley of the Black Pig" is thedifference between a symbol universally recognized throughout the worldand a symbol recognized by one people; but there is the furtherdifference 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 endingof the world. It is more natural to use a beautiful woman as a symbol ofall beauty than to use a black boar that shall root up all the light andlife of the world as a symbol of the ending of the world. But neither ofthese is a symbol that would be understood intuitively, as the roseused as a symbol of beauty or the wind as a symbol of instability. Sometimes Mr. Yeats's symbols are very remote, but perhaps they wereremote 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, itis true, is known of all men as the pursuer, and the deer as thepursued; but does this knowledge suggest immediately "the desire of theman which is for the woman, and the desire of the woman which is for thedesire of the man"? Mr. Yeats does not, as I take it, expect all hissymbols to be understood so definitely as this hound and deer, which, ofcourse, are not only symbols, but figures from the tapestry offairyland. It is often enough, perhaps, that we understand emotionally, as in "Kubla Khan" or "The Owl. " From some of his writing it wouldappear he believed many symbols to be of very definite meaning and to beunderstood by generation upon generation. In the note to "The Valley ofthe Black Pig" he writes, "Once a symbol has possessed the imaginationof large numbers of men, it becomes, as I believe, an embodiment ofdisembodied powers, and repeats itself in dreams and visions, age afterage. "

This is but another phase of Mr. Yeats's belief that when a poem stirsus as by magic, it is a real magic has been at work. The words haveloosened the seals that the flesh has fastened upon the universal memorywhich is subconscious in all of us, until that memory possesses us andwe are one with all that has been since the beginning of time, and mayin such moments live over all that has been lived. He thinks that insuch moments the poet's magic brings before us the past and the unseenas the past and the unseen were brought before our pagan ancestors bythe magical rites of their priests. 

In his younger years Mr. Yeats held that poetry is "the words that havegathered up the heart's desire of the world. " His heart's desire wassimpler in those days than his heart's desire of after years. Then hehad a child's wistfulness for little things and put lines in his poemsof 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 theseearly poems are out of the ways of wild little things that appeal so tochildren, perhaps because they are wild little things themselves. Alater mood of Mr. Yeats is to hold of less account the things ofout-of-doors, but still he uses as similes the ways of birds, as did theold Irish bards whose stories have so informed his. He never diddescribe nature for its own sake, but natural things gave him morefigures than they do now, although always there have been in his linesmany out of mythology. Summer days between Slieve Echtge and the westernsea are, however, bringing the plovers and curlews and peewits back tohis poetry. In the country of the Countess Cathleen, as everywhere inIreland, you may hear "wind cry and water cry and curlew cry, " andthere, 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 blankverse of his plays. The poems in which "the strong human call" is heardare more than the many who read Mr. Yeats hurriedly will think, and tothose who know his story they reveal again and again a great and commonsorrow. Whole poems and plays are often symbols of the poet's life. Somay "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, " "OldMemory, " "Adam's Curse, " as well as the folk-poems of the first volumes, are but little "dream-burdened, " and passages elsewhere have the humancall. The feeling of Oisin nearing the coast of Ireland is, forinstance, the common joy on nearing the shore of the homeland at the endof 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 mostcharacteristic of the author, those that give a note entirely new toEnglish poetry. It is impossible to pick out one as more representativethan another where so many are representative and where all are ofhighest achievement. Nowhere is his own individual note bettersustained, however, than in the Michael Robartes poems or in "The Roseof Battle" or "Into the Twilight"; and the hold that dream has of himand the hold that human things have, chief among them love of country, are told with utmost distinction and inevitability of phrase in "ToIreland 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 tospiritual things of his kind not the very same holding of his peasantcountryman to the folk-tales that take him to a world as rich andgorgeous-hued as the Ireland about him is bare and gray, and to a churchthat prepares him for a better world after death? A large part of allpoetry is the realization of the brevity of all beautiful things, --ofbloom, of youth, of life; but no poet has more often lamented "Fate andTime and Change" than Mr. Yeats. It is, he says, "our narrow rooms, ourshort lives, our soon ended passions and emotions put us out of conceitwith sooty and feeble reality. " So the poet seeks refuge in his owndream and in contemplation of the life from which he came and to whichhe will return, and--one almost dare say--in communication with which henow knows such joy. The poet's life is little because he has found outthe littleness of earthly things; the peasant holds life little becausehis share of it has been so poor. If the peasant acquires riches bychance or by emigration, he sees as the poet that all he can have is asnothing, so short is the time he may hold it. Irish writers of the pasthave made this peasant only the jarvey wit; but if you read the oldromances, or listen to the folk-tales still alive, you will learn thatMr. 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, thoughthe poet's personality is so dominant that we get more of this than ofIreland in his poetry. So it should be, so it is with every artist. Allthe world can ask of him is his interpretation of what he knows. Yet sonative is Mr. Yeats that the atmosphere of his poetry is the veryatmosphere of Ireland. The artist and the setting of his art are in anunwonted harmony. No reader of Mr. Yeats who knows the broodinglandscape of West Ireland can escape that realization, but only he whohas met the poet amid the scenes that inspired his verse may know howcomplete is their accord. Such a meeting was mine one lowering Augustday, in whose late afternoon we walked in the Woods of Coole. Then Iknew at last what Mr. Yeats meant by "druid charm" and "druid light. " Ifelt the "druid charm" that was potent in gray skies over gray water andgray rock and gray-green woods; the bewildering "druid light" flashedout as the sun followed westward the trail to Hy Brasil, leaving in theAtlantic 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 IrishLiterary Theatre" was, outside of the narrow circle of his friends, agreat surprise to all interested in letters in Ireland. But the almostsimultaneous announcement that Mr. George Moore was lending his aid tothe adventure was an even greater surprise. Mr. Moore had, of course, written more than once of Ireland, and there were many who had notforgotten the unpleasantnesses of "A Drama in Muslin" (1886), and Mr. Martyn, though the author of "Morgante the Lesser" (1890), was not knownas its author, as he had published it anonymously, and as it had notmade enough of a stir for its anonymity to be disclosed. Yet for thelandlord-author, who had turned his back on Ireland, to return to hiscountry with a greater interest in its life and its writers than he hadever betrayed, was more remarkable than for another landlord of the samefamily connection, comparatively a stay-at-home landlord, to turn fromsport and religion to the stage. Mr. Martyn had lived in London and hislove of music had taken him to the Continent, but he had been somethingof a Nationalist, whereas Mr. Moore had lost few opportunities to scoffat 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 threeof "Hail and Farewell, " in which Mr. Moore is confessing the reasons ofhis return to Ireland and of his second departure from Ireland, theyknow that he had been mildly interested in Ireland as material for artas far back as 1894, and that it was Mr. Martyn who had interested himin the things of home. Mr. Moore tells us all about it more thanexplicitly in the "Overture" to his trilogy. In the first chapter hetells us that the interest faded away gradually, to be reawakened in1899 by a visit paid him in London by Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats, who cameto 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 spentthe summer at Coole with Lady Gregory, I saw it all. Coole is but threemiles from Tillyra [Mr. Martyn's estate in Galway]; Edward is often atCoole; Lady Gregory and Yeats are often at Tillyra; Yeats and Edward hadwritten plays--the drama brings strange fowls to roost. "

It takes Mr. Moore many pages to tell why it was he joined the three intheir project, and many more pages to tell of their collaboration duringthe first two years of the three years that were the life of "The IrishLiterary 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 prominencethat Mr. Moore gives them. 

Lady Gregory and Mr. Yeats have learned their art, the highest and mostdifficult of all forms of literary art, so that each is sure in theshaping of fable and emotion to the stage, though neither is to dramanative-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 ofthe matter in him, but he remains the amateur. Mr. Moore was once theamateur, 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 isintended to reflect, but he has since then won his way, book by book, tothe position, now that Mr. Hardy has given up the novel, of firstnovelist of the English-speaking peoples. Had he studied the play aspainfully 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 concentrationnecessary to drama is alien to his method as a novelist. As it is, hisbest plays are but the good journeyman work of one who is a skilledliterary craftsman. Mr. Martyn has more originality of theme, moreintimacy with Irish character, a surer instinct for effective situation, and more nobility of intention, though Mr. Moore's greater power overwords gives his plays a dignity as art that the plays of Mr. Martyn donot attain. 

Alone of the quartette that founded "The Irish Literary Theatre, " Mr. Martyn is possessed of none of the instincts of the publicist. LadyGregory has edited articles about ideals in Ireland at home, and on thelecture platform she has stoutly fought the battles of "The Playboy ofthe Western World" in America; Mr. Yeats has ever delighted in writingletters to the newspapers and he has preached the evangel of theRenaissance from Edinburgh to San Francisco; and Mr. George Moore is acontroversialist pamphleteer even before he is a novelist. In the fewarticles about the movement that Mr. Martyn has written, brief articlesall of them, there is, however, clear indication of the spirit in whichhe wrote his plays, if comparatively little discussion of his art. Inthe 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 "vastcosmopolitanism and vulgarity" of England, "an idealism founded upon theancient genius of the land. " It is wholly in accord with the spirit ofthis declaration that Mr. Martyn has written his more important plays, all of them, in fact, but the satires on weaklings and officials hecalls "A Tale of a Town" (1902) and "The Place Hunters" (1905). Hewrites little of the peasants, being less interested in them than areMr. Yeats and Lady Gregory, and therefore less acquainted with them. Ifone may judge from his writings the intimates of Mr. Martyn have beenamong his own landlord class, the priests, and the politicians. It isthe landlords and middle-class people that occupy the foreground of hisplays, Peg Inerny in "Maeve" (1899) being the only important character apeasant, unless Mrs. Font in "The Enchanted Sea" (1902) can be called amember of a class that she was born to, but from which her marriageremoved her. 

This question of the class the plays should present was one of thosethat led to the withdrawal of Mr. Martyn from the dramatic movement. Amore definite cause, perhaps, was the unanimous determination of LadyGregory, Mr. Yeats, and Mr. Moore that his "A Tale of a Town" could notbe presented by "The Irish Literary Theatre" as he wrote it if thestandards of that theatre were to be preserved. Its author's magnanimityin turning it over to Mr. Moore to be rewritten, --as it was, beingpresented as "The Bending of the Bough" (1900), --was revealed by Mr. Moore in "Samhain" (October, 1901), and very much more fully, if lesskindly, in "Ave" (1911). 

In its way their refusal to play Mr. Martyn's "A Tale of a Town" was ascreditable to the other powers in the theatre as was his magnanimity ingiving them the play to do with as they would. They knew their refusalto play it might lead him to withdraw his support of the theatre and, inthe end, it was a factor in bringing about that result. After theirrejection of "A Tale of a Town, " however, he still gave "The IrishLiterary Theatre" his support, allowing it to put on his "Maeve, " and in1901 contributing to "Samhain" (October), "A Plea for a National Theatrein 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 allhope of his giving his money for such a purpose was destroyed by histransference of a fund of fifty thousand dollars to the CatholicPro-Cathedral in Dublin "for the purpose of founding and supporting aPalestrina choir. "

That Mr. Martyn was still a force to be reckoned with is revealed by thetrouble Mr. Yeats went to, in "Samhain" of October, 1902, to explain whyit was that the plays of the Irish National Dramatic Company were eitherfolk-drama or drama whose life was the "life of poetry" Mr. Martyn hadargued in "The United Irishmen, " which up to the time of thepresentation of "In the Shadow of the Glen" was a stanch supporter ofthe dramatic policies of Mr. Yeats, that the actors of the companyshould be trained to the drama of modern society. "The acting of playslike 'Deirdre, ' and of 'Cathleen ni Houlihan, '" writes Mr. Yeats, "withits speech of the country people, did not seem to him a preparation. Itis not, but that is as it should be. Our movement is a return to thepeople, like the Russian movement of the early seventies, and the dramaof society could but magnify a condition of life which the countrymanand the artisan could but copy to their hurt. The play that is to givethem a quite natural pleasure should either tell them of their own lifeor of that life of poetry where every man can see his own image, becausethere alone does human nature escape from arbitrary conditions. Playsabout drawing-rooms are written for the middle classes of great cities, for the classes who live in drawing-rooms, but if you would uplift theman of the roads you must write about the roads, or about the people ofromance, or about great historical people. "

Neither "Maeve" nor "The Enchanted Sea" can be called a drawing-roomplay, though both introduce us to "drawing-room people, " but "TheHeather Field" (1899), Mr. Martyn's first play, and his greatest successis 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 notfailures, I think because they are drawing-room plays, but because Mr. Martyn is less effective with a full stage than with two couples or soand, principally, because he is less successful with social andpolitical questions than with those that concern the individual. 

Whatever value one puts upon "The Heather Field" it cannot be deniedthat it was a popular success and that it was praised by critics whosejudgment is discerning. It is perhaps because it is a variant of the oldtheme of the war between man the idealist and woman the materialist thatit so appealed to young men, troubled themselves as to whether to followtheir star or to accept the chains that; wife and children impose. Itwas enough for the audience that witnessed its first performances in theAntient Concert Rooms, Dublin, May 9, 10, 13, 1899, that it showed a manat war with the despotism of fact, as Ireland, preeminently the CelticLand, has so long been. It was not remarkably acted, by aninsufficiently rehearsed and not very understanding scratch company, andyet it impressed its audiences more favorably than "The CountessCathleen" (1892), an unequivocally great poetic drama; and theseaudiences were the most cultivated Dublin can boast. 

"The Heather Field" is the story of the going-mad of Carden Tyrrell, alandlord of the west of Ireland. From the first he is represented to usas a man to whom as to so many of his countrymen dream is reality andreality dream. His wife, to whom the realities are very instant, urgeshim to do as others do, to entertain, to hunt, at least to do somethingpractical. For her he has abandoned the ideal world he had built up forhimself from his books and his dreams and is trying farming. Yet histemperament is such that he must idealize even this. When the curtainrises he is still busy with the project, long since undertaken, ofreclaiming a wind-swept heather field fronting the Atlantic and ofmaking it into the best of pasture land. That reclamation andtransformation has become a passion with him, and soon we feel that itis 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 hisestate, and, in the play, before the success or failure of hisundertaking is proved, he mortgages almost all that remains to him toimprove the land below, which the draining of the heather field hasturned into a swamp. His wife, to prevent this last folly, strives tohave control of his property taken away from him, but his friend, BarryUssher, believing that restraint would make Tyrrell mad indeed, sointimidates a hesitating physician that Mrs. Tyrrell fails in her mostnatural plan to save herself and her child from ruin by having herhusband declared incompetent, and, if necessary, restrained. With hisfriend's assistance Tyrrell has won his fight against his wife. Obstinacy in the treatment of some tenants that his debts have drivenhim to evict rouses such hatred against Tyrrell, until then a lovedlandlord, that the police hold it necessary to follow him with an escortthat he may not be shot by his people. To avoid being so followed, Tyrrell keeps within doors and so intensifies his malady. Thecatastrophe comes when, on his boy's first spring search for wildflowers, the child brings him a handful of heather buds from the heatherfield. Their message is that the mountain will revert to waste again. Even in his "ideal domain" reality has asserted itself. His ideal worldcrumbles for the instant, and his reason with it, and forever. But aftera moment's agony ideality triumphantly reasserts itself, and in madecstasy Tyrrell, his years fallen from him, passes from sight crying outat the beauty of a world that is to him now forever a world of morningsin which, as he says, "the rain across a saffron sun trembles like goldharpstrings through the purple Irish spring.... The voices--I hear themnow triumphant in a silver glory of song!" Such is the play, "aching andlofty 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" morethan 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 beautifulin the way the background of nature and of thought is beautiful andcompensating in the plays of Ibsen. 

In his introduction to "The Heather Field, " which was published beforeits presentation, Mr. Moore writes, "Although all right and good senseare on the wife's side, the sympathy is always with Carden. " So it wason the presentation of the play in Dublin, Mr. Yeats writing in "TheDome, " "Our Irish playgoers sympathized with this man so perfectly thatthey hissed the doctors who found that he was mad. " Such an attitude ischaracteristically Irish; and equally characteristically English was thereception of this play when Mr. Thomas Kingston presented it at amatinee at the Strand Theatre in London. Mr. Yeats is again theauthority: "The London playgoers ... Sympathized with the doctors, andheld the divine vision a dream. " Mr. Moore praises "The Heather Field"more forthrightly in "Samhain" of October, 1901, holding that "'TheHeather Field' has been admitted to be the most thoughtful of modernprose plays written in English, the best constructed, the most endurableto a thoughtful audience. " Patriotism or kinship, love of paradox ordesire to assuage feelings hurt by the rough treatment of "A Tale of aTown, " may any or all of them be called upon to explain so sweeping astatement. 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 asa book, with a preface by Mr. George Moore, and it was more or lessvehemently disparaged by the critics. Knowing that it was to be producedlater in Dublin, and knowing how hard it is to dogmatize about a playuntil one has seen it acted, I confined myself to a very milddisparagement of it. Now that I have seen it acted, I am sorry that Idisparaged it at all. It turns out to be a very powerful play indeed. " Ihave quoted Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore and Mr. Beerbohm, not only becauseI have not seen the play on the stage but because, on reading it, itseffect is one that puts my judgment at sea. Years ago as I read it itgripped me hard, but when I read it now and think it over now, I am at aloss 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 thelast act. One of them is Tyrrell's revulsion against the bad news thathis brother Miles brings from Dublin of the mortgagee's refusal toextend. His wife tells their friends that she is ruined, that "prettynearly all" their property is mortgaged, but Tyrrell cries out, "All, doyou say? No--not all. This vulture cannot touch the heather field! Myhope, --it is my only hope, and it will save me in the end. Ha, ha! Thesewise ones! They did not think the barren mountain of those days worthnaming in their deed. But now that mountain is a great green field worthmore than all they can seize, (_with a strange intensity_) and it ismine--all mine!"

The other situation that moves me greatly is that at the very close ofthe play, that from which I quoted a while back, in which Tyrrell'smadness becomes evident in his belief that he is a youth again, with allthe world before him to do with as he will. 

The characters in "The Heather Field" are less rigid than those in thelater plays, but even in this play you feel about them, as you feel sooften about the characters of Hawthorne, that they are characters chosento interpret an idea rather than children of the imagination orportraits done from observation of life. 

As one recalls the motive and situations and background and symbolismof "The Heather Field, " not having read the play for some time, it seemsfar finer than when one returns to it. Fine, too, it must seem to anyone reading a scenario of it and not offended, as one reading itconstantly is by the inability of its dialogue to represent more of theperson speaking than his point of view. The dialogue of Mr. Martyn isalmost never true dramatic speech, and not only not true dramaticspeech, 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 howfine in conception was the character of Mrs. Font in "The EnchantedSea, " does that one character seem to me, now, to redeem the undevelopedpossibilities of the situations of the play, the incomplete charactersof Guy and Mask and the failure of the dialogue assigned to thecharacters to approach true dramatic speech. "Maeve" is the better playof the two. With all its shortcomings it has about it an unearthlinessof atmosphere, a quiet coldness of beauty that has come of the thoughtMr. Martyn had, as he wrote it, of the moonlight on the Burren Hills inhis 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 isalways cold. "

Mr. Martyn calls "Maeve" "a psychological drama in two acts. " It relatesthe story of the last day and night in the life of a visionary girl, thehereditary princess of Burren in Clare, in the west of Ireland. On theeve of her marriage to Hugh Fitz Walter, a rich young Englishman, whomshe will wed only for her father's sake to reestablish him in hisposition as "The O'Heynes" among the neighboring gentry, she wanders offinto the Burren Hills with her old nurse Peg Inerny. Peg has fascinatedMaeve O'Heynes with tales of "the other people, " convincing Maeve, asshe is convinced herself, that she changes from the old vagrant peasantwhom the countryside half fears into Queen Maeve, the great Amazon ofthe Cuchulain legends. Maeve O'Heynes in her own dreams has seen greatheroes and heroines of Ireland's legendary past, and she believes thatthey still live among the fairies as many a peasant to-day beside PegInerny believes. So Maeve follows Peg to the mountains, though it is herwedding-eve, to see these great people of old time and to meet a lovershe has seen in vision, the ideal man of her dreams. She finds her wayhome several hours later through the white moonlight of the bitter Marchnight. Then, in a sort of trance, looking out of her window in thehalf-ruined castle to the ruined abbey, the mysterious round tower, thestony mountains, she beholds the vision of Queen Maeve, with anattendant troupe of harpers and pages, rise from the cairn and approachthe castle. As the troupe returns from castle to cairn Maeve's spiritpasses with it under the Northern lights into the land of the ever-youngof Tir-nan-Ogue. When her sister goes to call her to make ready for herwedding, she finds Maeve sitting still and cold at the open casement. Maeve has found the supernatural lover, once human, of "boyish faceclosehooded with short gold hair, " and again only "a symbol of idealbeauty, " to be truly a "Prince of the hoar dew, " for he is death. Maevehas renounced life and sought "perfection in what unfolds as death. "

Mr. Yeats explains the play ("Beltaine, " February, 1900) to "symbolizeIreland's choice between English materialism and her own naturalidealism, as well as the choice of every individual soul. " Does itfollow that the lesson of "Maeve" is that it were better for Ireland tobe depopulated in her pursuit of national individuality, of idealbeauty, than to drift along to complete Anglicanization, even thoughthat bring riches, peace, and content? An austere policy, surely, if Iread rightly the meaning of Mr. Yeats. 

"Maeve" was not so well played at its production during the secondseason's performances of "The Irish Literary Theatre" in February, 1900, as "The Heather Field" had been performed in 1899, but it was almost asenthusiastically received. It has not won for itself, however, reproduction outside of Dublin, as did Mr. Martyn's first play, whichwas played in New York, at the Carnegie Lyceum, in April, 1900, andwhich was revived in London in 1903. 

If objection be made to "The Enchanted Sea" as a reflection of "The Ladyfrom the Sea, " it can be replied that the call of the sea that may notbe resisted is as old as the heart of man. Sea fairies, mermaids andmermen, and the voice of the waters tugging as irresistibly on the tiredspirit as the undertow on the body tired with long swimming, are inGaelic literature from the beginning, and before Mr. Martyn had writtenof 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, onApril 18 and 19, 1904, "The Enchanted Sea" was put on at the AntientConcert Rooms, Dublin by "The Players' Club. " It was not well played, but according to Mr. Standish James O'Grady it was much better, seen andlistened to, than read. Writing, in his "All Ireland Review, " of itsproduction, he puts it on record "I never saw an audience so attentiveand at the same time so undemonstrative. It was like being in church. "The audience probably felt the dignity of conception back of theinsufficiency of execution in the play and its ineffectiveness ofpresentation. The story that Mr. Martyn dreamed to carry over thefootlights is of Mrs. Font, a peasant woman who has sent her husband, agentleman, to his grave a broken-spirited man because of her sacrificeof his honor to advance their material position. When the curtain rises, Mrs. Font has been thwarted, by the death of her son, in her lifelongdream of obtaining possession of the Font estates. The estates havereverted to her nephew, Guy Font, a strange boy, who has been brought upby the peasantry of the west coast and so has come to share many oftheir beliefs. He is fascinated by the sea by which he lives, and hisfamily's friend, Lord Mask, has been drawn to him, although there issuch disparity in their years, by this love of the sea which he and theboy have in common. Mrs. Font wishes her daughter to marry Mask, but theyoung people are but half in love with each other. Agnes Font cannotshare his visionariness, as her other lover, Commander Lyle, plainlysees. So the North of Ireland man never gives up hope of winning her. Mrs. Font vulgarly throws Mask and Agnes together, in her determinationthat they shall make a match of it, and as vulgarly tells Lyle the girlis not for him. Mask cannot but marry Agnes, Mrs. Font thinks, if Agneshas a large fortune. To secure the fortune and the lord for herdaughter, Mrs. Font determines to get Guy Font out of the way. Herpurpose coincides with her peasant belief that he is a "changeling, " andis really of the sea people. So she goes with him to a sea cave he isfond of visiting, and only she comes from the cave. She is suspected, but before the officers come for her, she learns that her crime hasdefeated 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 theundertow. As the officers come to arrest her, Mrs. Font hangs herselffrom the landing of the great staircase of Font Hill with the rope Guyused there as a swing. 

"The Enchanted Sea" is cruder, colder, more amateurish than the twoother plays of its class, full of the sort of talk that falls from thelips of a boy of seventeen just awakened to ideals. Its characters actas openly and as petulantly as children. Mrs. Font, really fine inconception, is in realization only a typical villain of the cheapmelodrama; and Commander Lyle, of the Royal Navy, a man of thirty, is aschildish in love as a schoolboy whose beloved takes an ice from hisrival at a church festival. 

What Mr. Martyn could have done with "A Tale of a Town, " had he beenwilling to learn when opportunity was his with Mr. Yeats and Mr. Mooreand 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 littledifferent in the two plays The four other acts, however, Mr. Moore hasalmost entirely rewritten, and though everywhere the fundamentalbrainwork is Mr. Martyn's, the last acts are finer in the revisedversion. Mr. Moore makes far more plausible the girl, Millicent Fell, for love of whom, and a life of ease, the political leader Jasper Deangives up a leadership through which he could largely right his country'swrongs. 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 emotionof the characters, and the words are in themselves beautiful. 

In "A Tale of a Town" the political situation from which evolves theaction of the play is the unification by Jasper Dean of the corporationof a town, unnamed, on the west coast of Ireland, to prosecute a lawsuitagainst an English town, Anglebury, which owes the Irish town a largeindemnity, promised the Irish town when it gave up a line of steamers inthe interest of the Anglebury line of steamers. After uniting all thevarious elements save the place hunter Alderman Lawrence againstAnglebury, Dean gives up the leadership because his fiancée, whose uncleis the mayor of the English town, turns against him because he isopposed 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 notfar to seek. The play is true, in the main, to the life it depicts, andthere is vehement feeling back of its satire; and truth and intensity offeeling cannot be denied effect on the stage any more than on therostrum. Where it falls short of reality is in the dialogue of thealdermen. No politicians, even when egged by their envious womankind, would ever give themselves away as do these of "A Tale of a Town. " Theyare as frankly self-revelatory as if they were characters in a moralityplay. 

It would, perhaps, be inexact to call Mr. Martyn a misogynist, but hehas that attitude toward women of some priests his countrymen, as ofmany priests of all creeds, that there is something belittling if notdegrading in absorbing association with women. His feeling is not at allthe commoner feeling of men that leads them all to cry, "The womantempted me. " Women tempt Mr. Martyn no more than they did Ruskin, but heseems 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 tomake Millicent behave in a way no Jasper Dean in real life would everstand, for Jasper Dean is not a man pronouncedly uxorious until hisabject surrender at the end of Act IV. 

There are almost as many indictments of women as there are of England inthe 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 ofa Town" save Miss Arabella Dean. In "Maeve, " the heroine and Finola aresympathetically presented, and there is a kind of attraction as well asdecided repulsion in Peg Inerny. But such sympathy as Mr. Martyn doesexpress here seems to be expressed not because the women are fellowhuman beings, but because Maeve and Peg Inerny symbolize Ireland'sresistance to English ways and because Finola is filled withloving-kindness for Maeve. Agnes Font in "The Enchanted Sea" escapes thepillory rather inexplicably, for she is poor, weak girlhood unable tounderstand the other-worldly idealism of her cousin and Lord Mask. Butsince Mrs. Font was altogether repulsive and the men either too dreamyfor "common nature's daily food" or too hard in the way of the BlackNorth, Mr. Martyn felt, I suppose, that his hearers would be utterlyalienated were there not some one in the play sympathetic in theordinary 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 verynotably, but it was hailed by the Irish Ireland newspapers as admirablepropagandist material, "The United Irishmen" declaring that "an Irishplay which brings home to us, as this does, the secret of the enduranceof foreign government in this country, is a national asset. "

Mr. Martyn has not cared enough for "The Place Hunters" (1905) topublish it in book form, contenting himself with its printing in alittle periodical. It is, as its title indicates, a fellow of "A Tale ofa Town, " but it has not back of it intensity of feeling enough to liftitself out of farce. 

Between "The Place Hunters" and "Grangecolman" is an interval of sevenyears, but it is the Mr. Martyn of earlier plays, still faithful toIbsen and still of a dialogue more formal than that of life, that wefind in this play of his middle age. As you read "Grangecolman" youthink of "Rosmersholm, " as you thought of "The Wild Duck" when you read"The Heather Field. " "Grangecolman" is the story of a daughter'sfrustration of her elderly father's intention to marry his youngamanuensis, by playing the rôle of the family ghost, long fabled butnever seen, and being shot by the girl she feels is driving her out ofher home. Katherine Devlin is another creature of her maker's misogyny. She is a bitter, barren woman of suffragette type, whose marriage andcareer as a doctor have been alike failures, and who has alienatedherself from all, even her mild father, by her selfishness anddiscontent. It is she who has brought Miss Clare Farquhar into herfather's home to render him those services in his pursuit of heraldryand genealogy that were irksome to her, and so she herself isresponsible for his dependence on his secretary, which, when once thedaughter recognizes it, threatens annihilation of what little pleasureshe has in her life. Her husband is a dreamy sort of man, slack-fibredand pottering, who goes about waving the banner of the ideal andrefusing to work. The fifth character of the play is the butler, Horan. All are clearly characterized, but if the dialogue is less stiff thanthat of the earlier plays, it is little more distinctive of the peoplewho 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 init a fidelity of purpose that gives it a kind of effectiveness. There isnot in it, however, any keenness of vision, any deep reading of life, any great underlying emotion, to relieve its abject sordidness. There isno gusto, no beauty, no intensity of bitterness even, to make itssordidness interesting in any other than a pathological way. 

As one reads "Hail and Farewell, " one might readily come to believe thatMr. Martyn is only an eccentric character, "gotten up" by Mr. Moore fora novel. Mr. Martyn is, in reality, a very vital force working for thenationalization of Irish art, if not an artist himself. The pity is thathe is not wholly an artist, for he might have been. He knows and isinterested in classes of Irish society that the dramatists of the AbbeyTheatre have not tried to depict, and had he realized twelve years agowhat a chance was his to learn the art of the stage, with the help andcollaboration of Mr. Moore, Mr. Yeats, and Lady Gregory, he might now bewhat he seemed to be after the triumphant production of "The HeatherField, " the Irish playwright who had adapted the modes of Ibsen to thepresentation of the life of Irish landlords and bourgeois politicians. 

But Mr. Martyn would not realize that ideas--and he is rich inideas--constitute the larger part of originality; he thought techniquein drama must come from the man himself, too. Such technique, of course, comes most often from the study of other drama. Certainly it was anoriginal possession of none of the dramatists of the Celtic Renaissance, and Mr. Martyn might have been content to be a fellow learner, alongwith the rest of them, from one another, and from all the greatdramatists of the world. It may be that Mr. Martyn never would haveattained style, but he could, I think, have learned to make hischaracters express themselves in a way nearer to true dramatic speechthan the lifeless dialogue of his that only just manages to give youtheir thought, with none of their mood of the moment or of theirpersonality. 

In every one of Mr. Martyn's plays the plot is interesting, save in "ThePlace Hunters"; in every other play it is significant; and in all it iscome largely of his individual experience of life. Back of all the playsbut these two political satires there is brooding that is deep if notpassionate. In all the characters are natural, though some of them areunusual in the way of the unusual characters of Ibsen. And all the playsare marred, "The Heather Field" less than any other, by the fumblingtouch of the amateur. Ironically, Mr. Martyn is strong where mostIrishmen are weak--in his plot construction: even Mr. Yeats, who neverpraises with his tongue in his cheek, owning to "the triumphantconstruction of the 'The Heather Field'"; and weak, where most Irishmenare strong, in the dialogue. It would not have aided Mr. Martyn, for thekind of play he prefers, to have listened to the speech of the peasantas Lady Gregory has listened to it, but he might have learned, with suchcompeers, how to select and to condense from actual upper-class speech aspeech that would represent the thoughts and emotions and personalitiesof his characters. It is far more difficult, of course, to writedialogue for upper-class people, save humorous dialogue, since, as manyfrom Wordsworth's day on have pointed out, upper-class people do notexpress 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 hewho has read will remember, "The Heather Field. " It is often thus withthe amateur. We need go no further than Mr. Martyn's countryman who gaveus "The Burial of Sir John Moore" for witness. Mr. Martyn has, too, likeother amateurs, given suggestions to others that they have realized asfine art. It is more than likely, for instance, that Mr. Yeats had inhis 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 acertain kind. They have the distinctness of objects seen under thebright hard light of late winter, when the sun grows strong, but whenthe winds are still keen from the northwest and there are no leaves asyet 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, andvery little literary tact"; but he is more generally characterized insome such fashion as this, which Mr. Moore makes a deliverance of hisown: "A good fellow--an excellent one, and a man who would have writtenwell if his mother hadn't put it into his head that he had a soul. Thesoul is a veritable pitfall. " However that may be, it was the discovery, or at least suppositious discovery, that he had a soul, a soul inharmony with the melancholy soul of Ireland, that drove Mr. Moore backto Dublin, and, for moments, even farther west to the home country ofhis family about Lough Gara in Mayo. This discovery was foreshadowed in"Evelyn Innes" (1898), in which Mr. Moore grows curious about the beliefin ancestral memory and other esoteric beliefs of Mr. Yeats; it islatent in the introductions to "The Heather Field" and "The Bending ofthe Bough"; and it is made manifest in the parts of the latter play thatare Mr. Moore's. Who most helped him to the discovery it is not easy tosay, but an interest in his country entered into and possessed him asKirwan's ideas entered into and possessed Dean. No doubt Mr. Yeatshelped 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 recognitionbegan to break upon his mind. Is it only dramatically that Mr. Moorewrote when he put upon Kirwan's lips in 1900 the words, "Life is theenemy--we should fly from life"? But whether this is only a dramaticrepetition of what he might have heard any time from "A. E. " had hechosen to listen, there is no doubt that Mr. Moore did discover a newquality in himself in the late nineties after he became intimatelyassociated with the new Irish movement. There is a wistfulness offeeling 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 anart critic, and that "Modern Painting" (1893) is his great book. Mr. Moore himself says that "Esther Waters" (1894) is his only book that hecan read with admiration and content; and those particularly interestedin 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. Moorein his earlier realistic manner and "The Lake" in his later manner, amanner that is now wistful and now mellow, as in "A Drama in Muslin" hismanner is uniformly as hard as winter sunshine. 

Mr. Moore is, as I said at the outset, a hard-working amateur in "AModern Lover"; three years later, in "A Drama in Muslin, " he writes withauthority and insight; as he does, too, in "Parnell and his Island"(1887), though here with scant sympathy; but it is not until "EvelynInnes" that he becomes deeply concerned with beauty of subject or beautyof background, or, except at haphazard, possessed of any mastery ofstyle. "Evelyn Innes" is very well written, --in spots, --but "The Lake"is of a wholeness of good tissue that is attainable only through an artthat has labored long and earnestly to achieve beauty. Had Mr. Moorenever recaptured his ancestral tradition, had he remained the writerthat Paris and London had made him, he had never written so finely as hewrites in "The Lake. " An infancy and boyhood in Ireland; a youth inLondon; the ten years from twenty-one to thirty-one in Paris; elevenyears of hard writing in London, years comparatively lean after those ofluxury that anteceded them, brought Mr. Moore at forty-two to aknowledge of what was beautiful and significant in his home country. Heand Mr. Martyn were not many years apart when they began to write aboutIreland, 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 hisattempts in the art of painting and his years of discussion of art inthe studios. Mr. Martyn, at home, had been more concerned with religionand nationality and politics, and a shift to art as the principal careerof life after forty--"Morgante the Lesser" was no more than an incursioninto art, about as much of his life as a trip to Bayreuth--is only inrare instances productive of results interesting to others than the"artist. " The difference in the achievements of the two men is not somuch the result of the difference of the powers with which both weregifted as the result of the difference of time at which the will beganto work to realize those powers. Had Mr. Martyn begun soon enough andhad he been enough interested in his writing he might have made drama asfull of insight and beauty and as true to human nature as are the novelsof his kinsman. It is another irony of Mr. Martyn's life that it was hewho should have led Mr. Moore to the subject on which Mr. Moore was todo his most harmonious and beautiful work, though it is possible, judging from "Parnell and his Island, " that Mr. Moore might in the endhave found his own way back. 

After his wont Mr. Moore puts his intimates into books made out of Irishlife. In "Evelyn Innes" Ulick Dean, fashioned in the first version ofthe novel after Mr. Yeats, is the only wholly Irish character. Evelyn isnot Irish at all, and her Scotch father is given the musical interestsof Mr. Dolmetsch, a Bohemian, I believe. But Sir Owen Asher has in himmuch of Mr. Moore himself, though most of Mr. Moore that is there is theEnglish Mr. Moore. There is something of Mr. Martyn in Monsignor Mostyn, though an actual and not a potential ecclesiastic is drawn upon for thebasic characteristics of the character In the second version of "EvelynInnes" there is more of Mr. Russell than of Mr. Yeats in Ulick Dean, atleast in his appearance and sayings, though Mr. Moore could not divesthis composer of the personality of Mr. Yeats. There is less of Irelandin "Sister Theresa" (1901) than in "Evelyn Innes, " but "The UntilledField, " short stories written after the removal of Mr. Moore to Dublinand gathered together in 1903, are wholly concerned with Ireland. As Mr. Moore makes Jasper say to Millicent in "The Bending of the Bough": "Itis the land underfoot that makes the Celt. Soon you will feel thefascination of this dim, remote land steal over you. " It was when thisæsthetic homesickness overtook Mr. Moore that he grew to feel lonely inEngland, at least momentarily, and to believe that "we are lonely in aforeign land because we are deprived of our past life; but the past isabout 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 thereturn of his thought to his boyhood in the west and that record hiswish to be buried with his father by Lough Gara; and all three volumesof "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 tenyears' partial residence in Ireland, 1901-11. 

Our concern with Mr. Moore here, however, is with Mr. Moore thedramatist, so I shall not dwell on the short stories and the novels saveto say that they, more than any writing of his, reveal his inherentdramatic power. By dramatic power I mean not his power of situation andevolution of dramatic technique, but his power to change his point ofview with the character he is creating A sensual exquisite himself whosepredominant thought is of woman, and of woman from a standpoint closelyakin to an epicure's toward an ideal meal, Mr. Moore can identifyhimself with people in whom there is none of himself but the essentialhumanity common to mankind. Most wonderful of many wonderfulrealizations of viewpoint so different from what is his personally ishis realization of the attitude of Father MacTurnan, an old priest, celibate by nature, who put aside his books, as ministering to the prideof the intellect, and sat, night after night, with them by his side inthe study, but always unopened, while he was knitting socks for the poorof his parish. Better known, of course, than this character of FatherMacTurnan is that of Father Gogarty in "The Lake, " but for all hissympathetic elaboration of this bemused and distraught cleric thecharacter is never wholly opposed to that of Mr. Moore himself as is thecharacter of Father MacTurnan. 

It is this power of Mr. Moore that makes him the great novelist that heis, this power of identifying himself with the personality and thislooking out on life from the viewpoint of Esther Waters or LewisSeymour, 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 momentaryabsorption in their interests and his passing possession by theirpurpose. It is this habit of his nature that makes the Gael tell peoplewhat they wish to hear, it is this that makes him so courteous, it isthis that makes him so good an actor. And the power that makes one man agood actor, a real actor, --not one who happens to fit a part, but onewho can change his personality from part to part, --is but anothermanifestation of the power that enables a man to identify himselfwholly, now with this character, now with that, in a story which he iswriting. If a man can express such identification in dialogue, he can, if he master dramatic construction, make himself into a dramatist; if heexpress it in subtle analytic writing about the character, it gives himone of the great powers of the novelist, a power which, if it is unitedwith the power of story-telling, makes him a great novelist, and, oftentimes, even if he be but a fair story-teller, a great novelist. TheEnglish novel has been famously deficient in story-telling ability sinceScott's day, and Mr. Moore is no exception to the rule. As, however, theemphasis of all his stories is on character, his deficiency in narrativepower matters hardly at all. 

Mr. Moore is, then, Ireland's greatest novelist because he has ingreatest measure--in full measure--this greatest gift of the Gael, thegift of dramatic impersonation of all manner of men in all theirchanging moods. A personality as intense as was that of Meredith, as isthat of Mr. Hardy, Mr. Moore has not always one attitude, as have bothWelshman and Saxon of the Saxons, however completely they write from thestandpoint of each character they create. By the side of the charactersof Meredith is always Meredith, high-hearted and confident, and by theside of the characters of Mr. Hardy is always Mr. Hardy, lamenting whatwoe fate has brought them, but by the side of Ned Carmady or OliverGogarty, the Mummer or Montgomery, Sir Owen Asher or Ulick, there isseldom Mr. Moore. He almost never plays chorus to his characters, eitherthrough a commenting character or by direct interposition in the mannerof Thackeray, though, of course, the characters again and again expresshis views. So in "The Wild Goose, " in which Ned Carmady represents oneyear'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 UntilledField" and "The Lake" is realized to be all the more remarkable. It isnot easy to pick up threads that one has dropped in a period of one'slife that is dead and done, but Mr. Moore has picked them up more thanonce. From time to time he had, of course, made visits home, writing "AMummer's Wife" in Galway in 1884 and finding there then, no doubt, thematerial for "A Drama in Muslin" and the sketches of "Parnell and hisIsland"; 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 rememberedfrom childhood than it is again to get into touch with people partedfrom in childhood. The landscape changes little in far-off, lonelyplaces, but people nowhere are what they were when the past yearssufficient to bring up beside the old folks a new generation with idealschanged. Ireland, for all the agitation of the Land League, was landlordIreland when Mr. Moore got "A Drama in Muslin" from Ireland; Ireland waspassing 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 thechanging conditions in Ireland cannot be prevented from finding theirway here and there into his writing through the changes they havebrought about in the people of whom he writes, though many of those hewrites of are survivals from an older generation. 

There are glimpses in his writing of many phases of Irish life, hischaracters 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 Leveror Lover, to the very modern Father Gogarty, whose outlook is on anIreland that "perhaps, more than any other country, had understood thesupremacy of spirit over matter, and had striven to escape throughmortifications from the prison of the flesh. " One wonders, at times, ifMr. Moore, who joined the cause of Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats, self-confessedly, to have his finger in a new literary pie, really feltthe landscape as he says he does in his books, or whether he justmomentarily caught the power of seeing it through their eyes. Can onewho 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 isplaying. But whether or not Mr. Moore learned to love the lonelylandscape for a while, he eventually tired of it, as his Father Gogartytired of it. Surely Mr. Moore is speaking personally as well asdramatically when he writes, "This lake was beautiful, but he was tiredof its low gray shores; he was tired of those mountains, melancholy asIrish 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 courseof things, even if he had not been interested in "The IndependentTheatre" and thus led to a situation in which consistency demanded thathe write a play. It was his articles on the drama, gathered into"Impressions and Opinions" (1891), that provoked Mr. G. R. Sims to taunthim into "The Strike at Arlingford" (1893). In "Our Dramatists and theirLiterature, " one of these papers, Mr. Moore, in hitting all the heads ofall the contemporaneous dramatists, so stung Mr. Sims that he said hewould give a hundred pounds for a stall from which to witness aperformance of "an unconventional play" written by Mr. Moore. Mr. Mooreaccepted 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 mercyof Mr. Sims' judgment if the word was retained. "The IndependentTheatre" played the play and Mr. Sims paid the money. It was perhapsjust as well for Mr. Moore that the adjective was withdrawn, for theplay was little less conventional than "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray" or"Sowing the Wind, " to mention two successes of that year by play-makersthat took their art a little more seriously than Mr. Sims. In a way, too, "The Strike at Arlingford" is unoriginal. Lady Ann Travers is onlya more fortunate Hedda Gabler who in the end accepts the protection ofher Chancellor Brack, the capitalist Baron Steinbach, after her Lövbergturned labor agitator, John Reid has, like his prototype, made a wreckof his life. "The Strike at Arlingford" has its excellences: its plot islogically unfolded; it is believable; it is true to human nature; it hasmoments of intensity. Had Mr. Moore power of dialogue it might have beena fine play, for the characterization is what one would expect from soconscientious a depicter of life as Mr. Moore, and the problem, a man'schoice between his love and his duty, one that has never failed toappeal to men. Mr. Moore is careful to tell us that, in his ownconception of the play, "the labor dispute is an externality to which Iattach little importance. "

Its performance and publication, though neither event was of very muchmore than journalistic importance, served to give Mr. Moore something ofa position as an authority on the drama, coming as they did after hisassociation, since 1891, with "The Independent Theatre. " So it is thatwe find him collaborating with Mrs. Craigie in "Journeys End in LoversMeeting" (1894), which served for a year or so as one of the littleplays 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 ofcollaboration there can be no doubt, or that it added to his familiaritywith the stage. 

It is certain that Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats were glad of the assistanceof Mr. Moore in founding "The Irish Literary Theatre, " not only for theprominence of his name as novelist and as Moore of Moore Hall, and forhis known provocativeness in pamphleteering and his capacity for drawingthe fire of opponents, but for what knowledge he had of playwriting andfor what experience he had in getting together and training actors forspecial performances such as those of "The Independent Theatre. "

I have already spoken of what Mr. Moore did to "A Tale of a Town" tomake it "The Bending of the Bough. " From the beginning of Act II on tothe end, he rewrote almost all of it, retaining only now and then aneloquent or a biting line from Mr. Martyn's play. Mr. Moore changes thescene of the play from Ireland to Scotland, that its allegory may not beso obvious; he develops Kirwan's character until he becomes not only asort of composite spiritual portrait of the leaders of the Renaissancebut a believable leader of men; and he makes Millicent's moulding ofDean to her will human, as I have said, and--Dean being the weaklingthat he was--inevitable. Mr. Moore cuts the play down where it isstodgy, he expands it where expansion realizes for you more ofcharacter and motives of his people, he infuses into it more of thespirit of the movement, and he makes its patriotism wider in its appeal, a bigger and a better thing at once more concrete and more concernedwith the things of the spirit. 

"Diarmid and Grania" (1901), the prose play written in collaboration byMr. Yeats and Mr. Moore, I write of here rather than in the chapterdevoted to Mr. Yeats because, as the legend is shaped in the play, ithas more of Mr. Moore than of Mr. Yeats in it. As neither of thecollaborators was satisfied with the play as produced, and as neitherhas been willing to give it up to the other to rewrite, "Diarmid andGrania" has never been published. The notices of its production, onOctober 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 tosay as I have said, when one knows well the work of both authors, whoseinfluence is dominant in it. It seems, from the notices, to have beenfinely played by the Benson Company, which was brought over from Englandespecially to produce it. The results of "the scratch company" of thesecond year's performances, even though these were transferred from theAntient Concert Rooms to the better stage of the Gaiety Theatre, werenot very satisfactory artistically, but the third year's experiment wasin every way more successful. "The Daily Express" of Dublin, in thosedays very much interested in Irish Ireland, thus records, on October 22, 1901, the impressions of the first night. "The 'house' was not merelycrowded but representative. We counted among the audience the heads ofall the great professions in Dublin, a considerable number of literarycritics, and an extremely large representation of 'le monde où l'ons'amuse. ' The Gaelic League, which flooded the gallery, was veryfriendly to Mr. Moore and Mr. Yeats, and became enthusiastic over Dr. Douglas Hyde ['The Twisting of the Rope, ' by Dr. Hyde, was played by himand company of amateurs, in Irish]. Between the acts of 'Diarmid andGrania' several members of the 'gods' sang number of Gaelic songs withgreat 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; othersclosing with Diarmid slain by the boar as Adonis is slain, and Graniaweeping his death. In all it is Grania who tempts Diarmid to take heraway from Finn on the eve of her wedding to the old king. In some hegoes willingly, in love with her, in others unwillingly, ashamed of hisdisloyalty 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 tocromlech. They settle down very comfortably in the monotony of aprosperous farm. Diarmid busies himself with his sheep. Grania ... Begins to pine for the society from which she has wilfully cut herselfoff, and to think more and more of the grim old warrior Finn. Then Finncomes upon the scene, patches up a sort of truce with Diarmid, andbecomes more friendly with Grania, his lost sweetheart, than Diarmid isable to tolerate. Mutual recriminations ensue between Diarmid andGrania, and finally Diarmid goes forth to his portended death, with thetaunts 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, Finncomforts the weeping Grania, and we remember the words of the legendthat 'some say she was married to Finn. ' The curtain falls--a happytouch of purely modern cynicism--upon the solitary figure of Conan, theThersites of the play, the prophet of evil chances, the scorner of highthings, the prompter of foul suggestions. "

As the play was being written a good deal of discussion about it foundits way into the newspapers. It was rumored that it would be translatedinto Irish, and then back again, by Lady Gregory, into English, but nosuch fantastic scheme as that Mr. Moore tells us of in "Ave" wassuggested in any of the paragraphs that came my way. Because they couldnot 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 hissuggestion that he write the play in French. Mr. Moore gives these asthe words of Mr. Yeats: "Lady Gregory will translate your text intoEnglish. Taidgh O'Donoghue will translate the English text into Irish, and Lady Gregory will translate the Irish text back into English. " "Andthen, " Mr. Moore makes himself reply to Mr. Yeats, "you'll put styleupon it. "

More remarkable than the scheme was the actual attempt of Mr. Moore torealize it. On leaving Galway, where he and Mr. Yeats had beencollaborating at Coole, Mr. Moore began the second act in French. Hegives us enough of the dialogue (pages 370 to 376 of "Ave") to show ushis high pride in his French, the tolerance of his humor, and his ideaof the kind of style the play should have. 

If Mr. Moore had given the subject to Mr. Yeats and to Lady Gregory, ashe had some thought of doing, it would only have been a return of asubject 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 ascenario for them to work upon. This scenario was published in "Samhain"of October, 1901, that all of the audiences of the play might be inpossession of the story as a Grecian audience was in possession of thestory of Elektra. And did not Mr. Moore say in his speech at the dinnergiven to the supporters of "The Irish Literary Theatre" in February, 1900, in speaking of his collaboration with Mr. Yeats in "Diarmid andGrania": "It would be difficult to name any poet that Ireland has yetproduced more truly elected by his individual and racial genius tointerpret the old legend than the distinguished poet whose contemporaryand _collaborateur_ I have the honor to be"?

The story, of course, had been retold only less often than the story ofDeirdre by Irish writers, in one form or another, but there had been nomemorable play made out of it. Mr. Yeats had met it in "The Death ofDermid, " which Sir Samuel Ferguson included in "The Lays of the WesternGael" (1864), as well as in the direct translations of such scholars asMr. Standish Hayes O'Grady and in the versions of such popularizers asDr. Joyce. One cannot, not having read the play, declare it is not whatMr. Moore would have it, "that dramatic telling of the story whichIreland has been waiting for these many years, " but it does not seem soto have impressed those who saw it and heard it at the performances inthe Gaiety Theatre. 

Now that Lady Gregory has done her "Grania" (1912), it is hardly likelythat 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 willwish to rewrite the play. It would seem we have lost it, whatever itsvalue, until the "literary remains" of Mr. Moore are given to thepublic. 

The quarrel with Mr. Yeats over "Diarmid and Grania, " coming as it didat the end of the three years' venture of "The Irish Literary Theatre, "explains why Mr. Moore wrote no plays for the Irish National DramaticCompany and its successors on through the Abbey Theatre Players. He wasstill interested, however, in the "cause" as far as it was possible forone of his temperament and taste, and he was conspicuous on first nightsat the Abbey Theatre down to the time of his departure from Dublin in1911. 

Since "Diarmid and Grania" (1901) Mr. Moore has published the two booksof his that since "A Drama in Muslin" (1886) reveal his deepestknowledge of Irish life, the volume of stories of varying length towhich he gives that title, so symbolic, "The Untilled Field" (1903), and "The Lake" (1905), but there are few incidents in either that he islikely to develop into plays. "The Lake" could not be dramatized, but ifit could be dramatized, it would be as little likely to be presented inIreland as "The Tinker's Wedding. " Mr. Moore, for all that he was born aCatholic, would not hesitate any more than did the son of the Protestantminister to put a priest into a realistic modern play, and that, ofcourse, would be a mild audacity for Mr. Moore now that he has publishedthe scenario of "The Apostle" (1911). His Paul, in "The Apostle, " a"thick-set man, of rugged appearance, hairy in the face and with abelly, " is wonderfully alive, and his Jesus is a distinct and realizablepersonality, if not the Jesus of Christian dream. It is a curiousillustration of Mr. Moore's almost disciple-like attitude toward Mr. G. W. Russell that he should make his Christ talk like "A. E. " It seemedto me, as I read the words that Mr. Moore puts first on the lips ofJesus, 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: "Howbeautiful is the evening light as it dies, revealing every crest; theoutline of the hills is evident now, evident as the will of God. " Andnow each time, as I re-read them, they sound in my ears to theremembered rhythm of Mr. Russell's voice. Should Mr. Moore ever evolve aplay 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 miracleplays of the past decade?--it will have to be chanted as "A. E. " chantshis verse, as one would wish mass to be chanted. 

Only a year ago Mr. Moore made his last adventure of the theatre. Withthe help of Mr. Lennox Robinson he dramatized "Esther Waters, " but laterhe 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"; andwhen 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 thework of Mr. Moore. The critics seem agreed that it was long drawn outand undramatic, but that it was well written and well acted. I supposethat the preoccupation with "Esther Waters" that this dramatizationreveals is because "Esther Waters" was written in that period of hislife when Mr. Moore was most himself. After ten years in London he hadescaped considerably from the French influence of his young manhood, andhis genius had not been warped out of its true plane, as he woulddoubtless now say, by Irish mists. Mr. Moore must have felt that therewas something not wholly himself in much of "The Untilled Field" and inmuch of "The Lake, " that the minds of Mr. Yeats and Mr. Russell had in away 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 theback of his mind, where he would like it to be hidden and forgot. At anyrate, by the time of his return to England, Mr. Moore had come to seeclearly that the Celtic episode of his maturity was closed. 

It is not, I think, particularly difficult for one who understands theold-fashioned camp-meeting "getting of religion" to understand this"Celtic episode. " Mr. Moore got Celtomania; a sort of "spiritualconsumption, " he calls his possession in one place, as a certain othertype of sinner "got religion" in the old shouting days. That is, Mr. Moore wrought himself up partly in the spirit of the Playboy, and waswrought up to some degree willy-nilly until he could write his speech ofFebruary, 1900, on "Literature and the Irish Language, " and, finally, alittle later, could return happily to the country that until then hecould endure only now and again. 

But as a matter of fact the motive that led Mr. Moore back to Irelandmatters not at all to literature. What beauty of writing that return ledto matters a great deal. Had he not returned to Ireland, we should nothave 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 weshould not have had a book that adds to the treasure of beautifulfeeling and beautiful writing there is in English literature, a treasurethat there is no chance of ever having too large; we should not have had"The Lake, " which is Ireland, West Ireland, Catholic Ireland, a landunder 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 writersof the Celtic Renaissance, the one to whom drama was the inevitablemedium for the expression of the best that was in him. Yet even Syngecame 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 thetheatre of his own country, he would probably never have writtenanything of first importance. Mr. Yeats himself, of course, had beeninterested in verse plays from boyhood, but he, for all the energy hehas expended in learning his own particular art of the stage, speaksmore beautifully through his lyrics and the lyrical passages of hisplays than through their passages that are dramatic speech, and not onlymore beautifully but with more of dignity and power. Nor is LadyGregory, any more than Mr. Yeats, essentially a dramatist. Her greatpower is the power of dialogue, and dialogue, of course, is as oftenemployed in the service of the story as in the service of the play. Yetit is not difficult to understand how in Lady Gregory the dialogue andin 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 caseof "A. E. " it is as difficult to find a foreshadowing of the playwrightin the mystical poet as it would be to see in all but all of the essaysof "The Treasure of the Humble, " any proof that their author was aplaywright. To those who knew Mr. Russell only through his verses, andwere unaware of the versatility of the man, his turning dramatist was assurprising as Emerson turned dramatist would have been to the America ofanti-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 youngenthusiasts of Ireland's national literary movement wanted plays thatshould 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 hardlyin their estimation more of an amateur than Mr. Yeats or Mr. Moore orMr. Martyn, who had written plays for "The Irish Literary Theatre" thathad achieved success of a kind, and he was surely as ardent aNationalist as any of these. So he was asked for a play to be played atthe Spring Festival of 1902 by the Irish National Dramatic Company thatwas forming, and he did what he was asked to do, blocking it all out insix hours, and finishing it sufficiently in three days for it to be putin rehearsal. It was in the summer following its first presentation thatI saw it again in rehearsal in a little hall back of a produce shop inDublin, and got to know Mr. Russell as playwright before I read hisplay. One of the actors, himself maker of verses and plays, gave me hiscopy of "Deirdre, " with cues marked. I had seen notices of its firstperformance in the Irish papers and I had written Mr. Russell to see ifI could get a copy, but he had not yet published it. Then he wrote me ofyoung poets I met this night in Dublin, and the names on the lips of theenthusiasts we talked to, and their names were names Mr. Russell hadwritten me of four months before. Here were they introducing me to hiswork as he had thus introduced me to theirs: "There are many poets herewho write beautiful lyrics who are quite unknown out of Ireland becausethey never collected them from the pages of obscure magazines.... I haveseen many verses signed 'I. O, ' 'Alice Milligan, ' 'Ethna Carberry, ''Oghma, ' 'Paul Gregan, ' which I enviously wish I could claim as myown.... I think myself many of these unknown poets and poetesses writeverses which no living English writer could surpass. " The best of theverses of some of these and of others among his following Mr. Russellcollected in "New Songs" (1904), which bore out much that he claimed forthem. 

It was to six of these young poets he dedicated his last volume ofverse, "The Divine Vision" (1904), as he had dedicated his two earliervolumes to poet-mystics, "Homeward" (1894) to Mr. Charles Weekes and"The Earth Breath" (1898) to Mr. Yeats. The young writers (for they werealmost all writers as well as actors) we met this Saturday night inDublin, one and all, looked to "A. E. " as leader, and some of them lookedto him as high priest of their cult, as seer of that ancient type thatcombined 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. " onthe following morning, at 22, Lincoln Place, to which he had descendedfrom 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 Iwas to spend with him there, in many rôles. First was that of one of thebeginners of the Irish Literary Revival. He has himself given the creditto Mr. Standish James O'Grady for furnishing the initial stimulus to themovement, 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 duemuch of the credit. Mr. Russell said that when he came up to Dublin, aboy from Lurgan, there was no independent thought in Dublin, but now hethought there was a good deal, and he and his fellows of the HermeticSociety, he took mild pride in believing, had had something to do withthe change. Even then, as a boy, he could not read most Englishliterature, and so he took to reading the literature of the East, theBhagavad-Gîta and the Sufis. From his reading of these, with other youngmen that somehow found each other out, came the Hermetic Society, atwhose meetings everything mystic from the Upanishads to Thomas Taylorwas discussed. From the study of the universal, he said, they came atlast to the national, to the study of the ancient folk-lore and storiesof their people, which, had it not been for the Danes and Normans, wouldhave 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 themmuch in the National Dramatic Company, painting scenery for them, designing costumes, and aiding in a hundred other ways. He was silentabout 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 itsdramatic effectiveness, but I knew nothing of the stage and I was verymuch surprised it went so well. " That it went well, I, who had seen itbut the night before, could testify, though that rehearsal could givebut a suggestion of the beautiful stage pictures it presents when playedin the costume of the Heroic Age. Despite its intensely dramaticsituations, it is, however, essentially a decorative rather than adramatic play, and its exalted prose is seldom true dramatic speech. Butyou carry from it the memory of beautiful pictures, and a feeling thatsomething noble has passed your way, to enter into and become a part ofyou. 

As we were talking of the "movement, " in came a young Roscommonlandlord, and with him another of its phases and my discovery of Mr. Russell, man of business, organizer of the Irish AgriculturalOrganization Society. The talk was now of the erection of a hall, andMr. Russell seemed as familiar with stone and lime and sand as withmysticism and poetry, which we had discussed, and with painting, whichwe 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 thefollowing week. A few days later I was reading Mr. Russell's review ofMr. Yeats's pictures, but before I left 22, Lincoln Place, I had amental picture of "art critic" added to the already long list of titlesafter "A. E. 's" name, and I had still another evidence of hisimpressiveness. Mr. J. B. Yeats, Sr. , his son said, would be around tohave Mr. Russell sit for him next morning, in order to get on with thetwo orders he had of portraits of the mystic, one of them from anadmirer in America. It was pleasant on leaving him to go away with hislaugh ringing in my ears as a surety that the high seriousness of hispurpose, and the higher seriousness with which some of his admirers takehim, had not dulled his sense of humor. 

Eight o'clock the next evening saw us in the eminently Philistinesuburban street where was the little house of conventional exterior thatsheltered the high dreams of "the Irish Emerson. " Once entered, hisembodied visions attract you from all four walls of the study. Piles ofthem in corners make you wonder is Mrs. Russell a saint. The picturesare of Irish landscape; of "the Other People"; of heroes and heroines ofIreland's prehistoric days; of souls that have yet to be born; of soulsthat have passed through incarnation after incarnation, never to riseabove an animal existence; of souls whose every rebirth has taken themto higher spirituality, and that now wait to pass along the "path ofliberation" into that immortality from which they shall never be bornagain. These visions have come to him, as the visions whose presence herecords in his poetry, in all places--as he left the office and lookeddown the sun-gilded streets at close of day; as he wandered in themountains under the stars with peasants who had "second sight"; as hetalked with fellow Hermetists in meeting-rooms in back streets whoseshabby interiors grew rosy gloom as the talk turned on mysteries. 

To us Mr. Russell talked much, talked kindly of all men, talked well ofmany things, said startling things of society and art and poetry sogently that you did not think until afterwards that in another you wouldhold them gages of combat. I can hear him yet, as I sat and tried at thesame time to listen to him and to look at his flaming-hearted spiritswith luminous angel wings and flashing halos enveloped in an atmospherein which "the peacock twilight rays aloft its plumes and blooms ofshadowy fire"--I can hear him saying, "You can't read Shakespeare, canyou?" As I thought over this question later, I understood. Then I wastoo far rapt by the pictures to wonder at it greatly. Later came to mindEmerson's declaration that Homer, Milton, and Shakespeare "do not fullycontent us, " that the "heavenly bread" is to be found in Zoroaster, Plato, St. John, and Menu. Both Emerson and Mr. Russell fail to use artas the standard. To the mystic, to whom this world is not reality, whatappeal may have its seeming truths and shows as compared to the certaintruth of the idealists and the beauties of the eternal life? The deephuman knowledge, the great pageants of Shakespeare's kings and queens, are but "glories of our blood and state ... Shadows, not substantialthings. "

Mr. Russell talked very simply of his pictures, of how their subjectscame to him, and of his enjoyment in thus recording them. He does notconsider himself a painter, but he thinks there was the making of apainter in him had he had instruction in his earlier years. Thisattitude towards his various powers, as well as the attitude towards himof ardent young countrymen of his, came out in a story he told us of aboy that he found waiting for him one night at a street corner near hishome. The boy timidly asked him was he not Mr. Russell, and then walkedsilently by his side until the house was reached. They entered and theboy mustered up courage to say he had waited for him two hours at thehead of the street. "A. E. " had been waiting for the boy to say whatbrought him, but he was obliged to encourage the boy before he would outwith it. Said "A. E. , " "You came here to talk with me. You must beinterested in one of the three interests I have given much time to. Isit economics?" "No, " replied the boy, indignantly. "Is it mysticism?"continued "A. E. " "No, " cried the boy, almost angry at such an interestbeing attributed to him. "It must be literary art, then?" "Yes, " saidthe boy, with a sigh, his haven reached at last. "A. E. " soon found theboy an exquisite who thought the literary movement was becomingvulgarized through so many people becoming interested in it. Finally theboy turned questioner and found that "A. E. " was seeking the Absolute. Having found this out, he again sighed, this time regretfully, and saiddecidedly that "A. E. " could not be his Messiah, as he abhorred theAbsolute above everything else. He was infected with Pater's Relative, said Mr. Russell, "which has fallen like a blight on all Englishliterature. " So the boy--he was not yet twenty-one--went out into thenight with, I suppose, another of his idols fallen. 

As this boy came to "A. E. , " so come scores of others, and most of thosethat have real troubles go away comforted, to return for advice andcounsel and friendship, as their need is. This I knew before I met"A. E. , " and his kindness I felt and certain magnetism, but the qualitiesthat make him the leader of men, and hierophant to his personalfollowing, do not lie on the surface to be quickly distinguished byevery comer. Neither, we are told, did Emerson's, who was leader of menand hierophant. I thought often of "A. E. 's" pictures as I looked at thepictures of Watts in the Tate Gallery in London, and I have thought moreoften of them since I have come to know haloed Rosicrucian drawings andstrange symbols in such books as our own Wissahickon mystics, Kelpiusand his brethren, brought with them to "The Woman in the Wilderness"from Germany late in the seventeenth century. How notable the impressionof Mr. Russell's paintings and visions upon two Irish writers theEnglish-speaking world reads to-day may be learned from theirexploitation in Mr. Stephen Gwynn's "The Old Knowledge" (1901), whoseOwen Conroy owes being to "A. E. " and his pictures, and from Mr. GeorgeMoore's "Evelyn Innes" (revised edition, 1901), whose Ulick Dean has hisappearance and his power of seeing visions. 

As the evening wore on, Mr. Russell picked up a manuscript collection ofpoems--that we were to have two years later as "The Divine Vision"--andread us several. Most distinctly of these I remember "Reconciliation"which he chanted most lovingly of all he read. It is a poem I do notpretend to understand in detail, but I do feel its drift, and I cannever read out its stately music, or even read it silently, withouthearing his sonorous chanting. Many of his poems are like this poem inthat you must content yourself with their general drift and not insiston understanding their every phrase. I suppose to the initiate mysticthey are more definite, but I doubt whether some of them are more thanpresentations of emotions that need not be translated into terms ofthought 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 "certainenthousiasmos and celestial inspiration"; it is his religion that Mr. Russell is celebrating in his verses, many of which are in a sense hymnsto the Universal Spirit, and all of which are informed by such sinceritythat you do not wonder that his followers make them their gospel. In hisown 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 definitelydeclarations of belief, but declarations so personal, so undogmatic, that you would hardly write him down a didactic poet at first reading "ANew Theme" tells of his desertion of subjects "that win the easypraise, " of his venturing

 "in the untrodden woods To carve the future ways. "

Here he acknowledges that the things he has to tell are "shadowy, " thathis breath in "the magic horn" can make but feeble murmurs. In theprologue to "The Divine Vision" he states the conditions of hisinspiration:--

 "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 deepunknown, " leaps back to the "unphenomenal" world whence his spirit cameand blends his spirit into one with the Universal Spirit. This sameunion through the soul's flame "A. E. " presents in his pictures, and inhis prologue to "The Divine Vision" he writes that he wishes to give hisreader

 "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 inits robe of clay in this physical, phenomenal world, and so shut offfrom the spiritual world, the world of the unphenomenal or unknowable. The "everlasting joy" I take to be the certainty of eventual union withthe Universal Spirit in the unphenomenal world, a union and a joyanticipated in the occasional temporary absorptions of the soul intothe Universal Spirit in moments Emerson experienced as "revelation" andPlotinus as ecstasy. 

"A. E. 's" friend, Mr. Charles Johnston, records the two young Irishmen'sjoint attempts to attain ecstasy, when he writes of those days when "welay on our backs in the grass, and, looking up into the blue, tried tothink ourselves into that new world which we had suddenly discoveredourselves to inhabit. " Do not think this ecstasy too rare and wonderfula thing. To Plotinus it meant an utter blotting-out of self, a raptureof peace, and to Mr. Russell it frequently means that he is entirely"heart-hidden from the outer things, " but I suspect it means sometimesmere lift of the heart through lungs full of fresh air, or through greenfields for tired eyes, or through mountain air for worn nerves, orthrough skies thick-sown with stars for the vexed spirit. 

The typical poem of "A. E. " is that in which the sight of beautifulthings of this phenomenal world in which we live lifts his soul toparticipation in the Universal Spirit. It is most often through somebeauty 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 suchtimes that he becomes one with the Universal Spirit in "the rapture ofthe fire, " that he is "lost within the 'Mother's Being, '" he would saythat the soul returns to the Oversoul, Emerson would There are ways bywhich 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 notfar to seek. From sunset to sunrise the poet is free as he may be fromthe treadmill of the "common daily ways, " and the high moods he tries toexpress are most easily symbolized by skyey images--massed clouds andsweeping lights of diamond, sapphire, amethyst; the still blue black ofheaven thrilling with far stars; the purples of twilight horizons. Inhis use of these splendid symbols he is but following Proclus, whom hefound quoted by Emerson as saying that "the mighty heaven exhibits, inits transfiguration, clear images of the splendor of intellectualperceptions, being moved in conjunction with the unapparent period ofintellectual natures. "

How important the symbol is to "A. E. "--as important as it is toEmerson--may be gathered from "Symbolism, " which, read in the light ofwhat 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 thesweet things of earth did he so choose. But he does not so choose, except rarely, and sometimes he leaves out the statement of beautifulmaterial things by which he customarily bids farewell to earth in hisaspiration to spiritual things, and writes only of unearthly things--asof some girl that he, an Irishman living in the Dublin of to-day, lovesin the Babylon of three thousand years ago, to the annihilation of spaceand time. This is written in the very spirit of Emerson's declarationthat "before the revelations of the soul, Time, Space, and Nature shrinkaway. " Need I quote further to show that "A. E. , " like Emerson, holdsthat the true poet is he who "gives men glimpses of the law of theUniverse; shows them the circumstance as illusion; shows that Nature isonly a language to express the laws, which are grand and beautiful; andlets them, by his songs, into some of the realities"? Emerson yearnsthat "the old forgotten splendors of the Universe should glow again forus, " and "A. E. " believes that we at times attain "the high ancestralSelf"; 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 hecelebrates the soul's absorption into the Universal Spirit, since deathmeans to him only a longer absorption into the Universal Spirit orsometimes such absorption forever. In the event of this last, he in somemoods 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 seesindividuality 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, sopreoccupied his mood with spiritual things, that the human reader mustfeel lonely at times, must feel the regions of the poet's thought aliento him. At such times it is a positive relief to find the poet yearningfor the concrete sweet things of earth. It is perhaps only in"Weariness" that Mr. Russell's high mood does fail, but I rejoice whenthat 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 thathe writes of when he does write of "loved earth things. " "A Woman'sVoice" and "Forgiveness" are poems so simple that none maymisunderstand; they have the human call so rare in "A. E. , " but it is nota strong human call. Of such love songs he has written but few--poemsout of the peace and not out of the passion of love; of passion otherthan spiritual ecstasy and rapt delight in nature there is none in hisverse. Although he has been given "a ruby-flaming heart, " he has beengiven also "a pure cold spirit. " Only about a fourth of his poems havethe human note dominant, and even when it is so dominant, as when hewrites of his country, he is very seldom content to rest with adescription of the beauty of place or legend; the beautiful place mustbe threshold to the Other World, as "The Gates of Dreamland, " which hefinds at the end of "the lonely road through bogland to the lake atCarrowmore, " Carrowmore, the great cemetery of the great dead ofprehistoric Ireland under Knocknarea near Sligo; or the legend must besymbol of some mystic belief--"Connla's well is a Celtic equivalent ofthe 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, youexpect only things earthly, but in these too, he uses the picture of theconcrete only as the symbol of the universal. The reason Mr. Russellmust take you to the supernatural in these poems is because he seesspirits everywhere he goes in Ireland. "Never a poet, " he writes, "haslain on our hillsides, but gentle, stately figures, with hearts shininglike the sun, move through his dreams, over radiant grasses, in anenchanted world of their own. " Start "The Memory of Earth" and you thinkyou are to read one of the many fine poems of twilight in ourliterature, 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 byIrish places and Irish legends and Irish loves. Never an Irish exile butwill 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 Spiritcannot but be an optimist if he believe that Spirit is the Spirit ofGood, and that a Platonist must believe. Yet "A. E. " so longs to be raptinto everlasting union with the Universal Spirit that he tires of theearth, 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 happinessunalloyed of heaven. 

When we come to consider the technique of Mr. Russell's art, we find himanything but Emersonian. Mr. Russell has, in general, command of form, melody, harmony, distinction. Who reads carefully will remember manyfine lines; who reads only once will be as one lost in sun-filled foglike that of "A E. 's" own Irish mountains, but he should be patient, heshould wait and look again and again, and finally he will see, even ifearth 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 moodor thought or dream immanent in it, rather than on any fine phrasing. The effort to catch the meaning of the verse--seldom apparent at firstglance--prevents the noting of as many purple lines as there are. Norwhen noted are such lines readily memorable, since they are apt to lackassociation with known and loved things to bring them home to thereader. And again the poems are very short, --intimations, suggestionsrather than expressions, --and their intangible themes are often muchalike, and poem becomes confused with poem in the memory. 

It may be that to those to whom the Other World is very instant, as itis to many Irishmen, or to those that go about daily preparing for theworld beyond the grave, as did our Puritan ancestors of the seventeenthcentury, these poems of Mr. Russell's speak familiar language, as theyof a certainty do to the mystic, but to the many modern art lovers whohold to Pater's "New Cyrenaicism, "--as Mr. Russell would say, "thoseunder the blight of the Relative, "--as well as to the man in the streettheir language is new and difficult to understand. But the poems havefound their audience--there is no doubt about that--and they areregarded as oracular by hundreds. This is the more curious in that thereis so little personality in them, surprisingly little when one knows howstrong is the personality of the man that made them But this lack ofpersonality follows naturally on the mystic's creed--he must put intohis writings chiefly his relation with God, --for all other relations areas nothing to that, --and if he attain his desire he is rapt away fromhimself 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 hisverses, as I have said, have the same theme. So there is a monotonyabout them, and their reader is apt to cry out that mysticism isinimical to art. It may well be that this unswerving following of onetheme is of definite purpose; that Mr. Russell feels that he as Irishmanand mystic has a mission, as indeed Mr. Charles Johnston owns. Speakingof 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 thatBerkeley and Scotus Erigena were Irishmen. 

I do not wish to overemphasize the influence of Emerson on "A. E. , " andindeed it is no greater than Emerson's influence over M. Maeterlinck. Ibelieve Emerson was as much guide as master, that he pointed "A. E. " theway to the mystics. I might dwell on the resemblance between thoughtscommon to the two much more than I have--there are even lines of theyounger man's that show the influence of lines of the elder. But that isnot my object. I wish to point out that Puritanism in Ireland hasflowered up into the mystic poetry of "A. E. , " into poetry of thatstrange quality, cold ecstasy, as Puritanism in America has flowered upinto 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 asMilton, has never so flowered. Crashaw was born of a Puritan father, butit was through the Old Faith his greatest inspiration came, and hisecstasy, as that of his latter-day disciple, Francis Thompson, is warmecstasy, not cold like that of the two Puritan poets. Henry More, Platonist and seer of visions, never attained ecstasy in his poetry. Itmay be that it required transplantation of Englishmen into Ireland andinto America to bring about this phenomenon. Nor is it the only qualitythese two earliest bodies of English colonists alike developed. But itis more than dangerous to dogmatize where so many races went to themaking of a people as went to the making of Anglo-Irishmen andAmericans. 

How different are the types of Anglo-Irish I could not but ponder as weleft "A E. 's" home and went out into the chill rain of that Augustnight. To the right hand, as we walked with "A. E. 's" disciples, theypointed to Maud Gonne's house. "Irish Joan of Arc" they call her, leaderof men whom men worship at first sight; most exciting of Ireland's moborators, all proclaim her, a very Pytho whose prophecies stir unrest andtumult! 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 otherunrealities, since here in this world he has begun already the real, thespiritual life. Both are types that have been as long as Ireland hasbeen; both Pytho and priest were among the high order of druid anddruidess of old time; agitator and reconciler, by Mr. Russell's belief, might well be reincarnations of the wise women and wise men ofprehistoric days. To the world Maud Gonne is more representative ofIreland than Mr. Russell, but he is just as truly a symbol of Ireland asshe: to those who know Irish history the thought of her quietmonasteries of the seventh century, whence she sent out teachers to allof Europe, is as recurrent as her political agitation of the nineteenth, and to those who know her countryside the memories of soft sunny rainsand moonlit evenings are as lingering as those of black angry days andwild 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 thatunphenomenal or spiritual world, that lies nearer to Ireland than toany Western land, that Mr. Russell is interpreter. 

You may think of Mr. Russell as you will, as organizer of the IrishAgricultural Organization Society, as stimulator of the Irish LiteraryRevival, as economist, playwright, poet, painter, preacher, but alwaysas 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 bynight, with his eyes keener with wonder at the skies than evershepherd's under the Star of Bethlehem; you will see him, the humanatom, on the bare Dublin mountains, thrilling as he watches the sweep ofworld beyond world; and yet, atom that he is, the possessor of itall;--you will think of him as stargazer whose "spirit rolls into thevast of God. "

CHAPTER VI

LADY GREGORY

When one stops to think how much of the blood of the Gael, Irish andScotch, there is in us in America, one realizes that we owe a debt ofgratitude to Lady Gregory second only to that owed her by "The Men ofIreland and Alban" themselves. For it is Lady Gregory, in her "Cuchulainof Muirthemne" (1902) and in her "Gods and Fighting Men" (1904) and inher "Book of Saints and Wonders" (1908), who has done more than anyother writer of the Gaelic countries to bring home to us the wonders ofGaelic romance. That they should have to be brought home to us is ashame to us. With so much of Irish and Scotch blood in us the names ofthe heroes of the Red Branch and Fenian Cycles should not be so foreignin aspect and sound as they undoubtedly are, and their deeds should beas familiar as those of Robin Hood. A hundred years ago our grandfathershad, indeed, "Ossian" on their shelves, as we had in boyhood DeanChurch's stories of Greece and Rome, or, in some cases, the stories ofhis doings in their memories, learned from their parents were theyold-country born, or of their nurses were it their privilege, as it wasthat of many more Americans of the second half of the nineteenthcentury, to have as foster mothers "kindly Irish of the Irish. "

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To her own countrymen the work of Lady Gregory, valuable as it is, isnot the revelation it is to us. Those of them that have not been broughtup on the stories that she translates could read at least many of themin the "Old Celtic Romances" (1879) of Dr. P. W. Joyce, or in theversions of the Cuchulain and the Finn legends by Mr. Standish JamesO'Grady (1878 and 1880), books that somehow or other never came to bewidely read in America. Mr. Yeats admits it was Mr. O'Grady that"started us all, " that is, the writers who began the Renaissance in thelate eighties. It may be, of course, that the added beauty and dignitythe stories take on in the versions of Lady Gregory will inspire tonobler writing poets and dramatists and novelists that already owe muchto Mr. O'Grady or Dr. Joyce or to the scholars they were sent back to bythese popularizers. It is certain that the writers of the younger group, the group of those that are only now nearing distinction, owe much toLady Gregory. After all is said, however, her work is to be judged notfor its value to others, but as in itself an art product, of a classkindred to "The Wanderings of Oisin" of Mr. Yeats, although differing inform. I am not forgetting, of course, that she is following faithfully, or rather as faithfully as an artist may follow, the old legends. Shehas, she owns, clarified them, condensed them, left out contradictoryepisodes, woven now and then a Scotch version of an incident into acycle arranged in one complete whole from many Irish versions. When LadyGregory has owned this she has owned that she has added something moreof her own than a "connecting sentence. " Although she has laboredcarefully to keep herself out of the stories, and although, if you haveread only her versions of them, you may feel that she has succeeded inkeeping herself out of them, you will recognize, if you turn to heroriginals in O'Curry or in Whitley Stokes or in Standish Hayes O'Grady, that she has added that all-important thing, a personality. Somescholars object to this as "too literary. " And some literary men wouldrather have the old stories, they say, "just as they are" There is thecrux. How can we get them, even in an exact translation, "just as theyare"? We cannot. This is not the place to discuss this most vexedquestion of translation, but I must go into it so far as to point againto the fact that we are more likely to have made upon us, by aninterpretative translation, an effect more nearly like that made uponthe listener contemporary to the time of the making of the story than ifthe translation were literal. We are always forgetting the so obviousfact that the kind of metaphor or descriptive epithet of this sort orthat, which would make a certain effect on the listener of the tenthcentury, will make a very different effect on the reader of to-day. AsLady Gregory points out, the description of the contortion of Cuchulainin his fight with Ferdiad seems very unheroic to us, and is thereforebest left out of the translation, or, if retained, conveyed in termsthat will make an effect on us similar to the effect the detaileddescription had on the audience of the old bards. Here again, however, is trouble. How can we get that effect? We cannot surely, but animaginative translation by one who is scholar and _littérateur_ bothwill take us nearest to it. We want, as a matter of fact, both kinds oftranslations, the interpretative and artistic translation of LadyGregory and the literal translation of Mr. Standish Hayes O'Grady. Theone is needed to check the other. We would have a gauge by which tomeasure how much such such a translator as Lady Gregory has taken fromand added to the old story. We would know how great is the freedom inwhich we willingly acquiesce, remembering that the translations which wetreasure as great in literature are in greater or less measure "free. "So checking Lady Gregory's translations we find that they represent afair measure of freedom, as so checking the verses of FitzGerald's "OmarKhayyám" we find in them the utmost measure of freedom, a freedom indeedthat, in certain verses, is virtually a re-creation. 

Many, both scholars and literary men, object to the kind of English intowhich Lady Gregory translates the stories of Ireland's heroic age, her"Kiltartan English, " the English of the people of her home country onthe borders of Clare and Galway, the English made by a people who thinkin Irish. This familiar language, they say, has lessened the dignity ofthe old tales, bringing them all to one level by a diction and stylethat is one, whether they are romance or folk-tale. This objection canbe taken, however, only to the Cuchulain stories, which were courtromance, and not to the Finn stories, which come out of the thatchedhouses. This "Kiltartan English" seems to me in its more familiarmoments, less imposing than that in which I first heard stories of FinnMcCool told by our old gardener, Lawrence Kelly of County Wexford, butit may be I remember less clearly the homeliness of his "discourse"than its "grand speaking. " It is, however, as peasant English, a fittingmedium for the telling of the stories of Brigit and St. Patrick in her"Book of Saints and Wonders, " for Brigit and Patrick are still householdwords among all the children of the Gael. But by its very differencefrom the English of all other artists in words save of a few of her owncountry and generation, and from such conversational English as I knowwell, this "Kiltartan English" brings me a foreign quality. I feel thatthe art of these tale-tellers is an art of another race than theEnglish, just as I feel that the art of the teller of Beowulf is an artof another race than the English. The literature in our ancestraltongue is not to me English until it sloughs off the Germanicsentence-structure of Anglo-Saxon. Here lies, I think, the greatestdifficulty in translating Old English literature. And it will not besuccessfully translated, I think, without the use of the syntax of somedialect 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 thatwe intuitively feel the need of in a translation. There may be a slightloss of dignity through its use, but there is a great gain in folkatmosphere. 

In quoting to show the style of Lady Gregory I should quote descriptionrather than narrative, as the description seems to me better as well asbriefer. The three famous tales of Old Irish literature, "The ThreeSorrows 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 Fateof the Children of Lir, " a story that has as its base the folk-tale thatunderlies "Lohengrin, " but which takes us back farther into the past inits kinship to "Medea"; and "The Sons of Tuireann, " which has beencalled the Irish Odyssey. Of these the first is incomparably the fineststory, and Lady Gregory has told it nobly in "Cuchulain of Muirthemne, "but it alone of all the stories in her three books of translations hasenough of humanity in it to put it side by side with the story of Sigurdand Brunhilde or the story of Paris and Helen. When one remembers thatGreek and Scandinavian literature may boast five stories each, at least, but little short of these their greatest stories, and that Irishliterature has but "Diarmuid and Grania" to boast as in any waycomparable to the story of Deirdre, it must be admitted that early Irishliterature representing Ireland's heroic age is not so beautiful as theliterature that represents the heroic ages of Scandinavia and Greece. "The Fate of the Children of Usnach" is rich in beautiful detail ofincident and of description of nature; it preserves for us much of theinner life of old time; and it has dignity of proportion. It has not thefundamental weakness, as great art, of most of these old Irish stories, their characters' lack of interest because of their lack of body, theirlack of personality, their running to type rather than moulding intoindividuals; yet the feats performed by Cuchulain are so whollysuperhuman, most of them, that they often put their doer beyond oursympathy, and at their worst make him absurd. 

If these stories were simply extravagant folk-fancy, such as the Jackthe Giant Killer story, to delight children, we should not quarrel withthis quality in them, but there is so much in them of dignity that wemust take them seriously, as we take Homer. When their heroes aredefinitely gods we can accept almost any of their deeds, so we candelight in the earlier stories of "Gods and Fighting Men, " the storiesof the Tuatha de Danaan, Lugh and Angus, Midhir and Etain, Bran andConnla, as we cannot in those of Finn and Goll and Cuchulain andConchubar, who, because of their historical setting and more definitecharacterization, have more of the appeal of humanity. We knowCuchulain, in Lady Gregory's pages, as a small dark man, constant inlove in comparison with his fellows, faithful to his friends, loyal tohis king; and we know Finn as a fair old man of ruddy countenance, alover of women, somewhat pompous and somewhat quarrelsome; but neitherhero is a clear-cut personality like Sigurd or Ajax. If either Cuchulainor Finn were surely a god we should accept his deeds as now we cannotaccept them, and were either brought home to us as wholly human anddivested of his supernatural powers, and given a personality, we shouldbe far more moved by his fortunes. 

It is in enchantments, visits to worlds oversea and under wave, and inpraises of the beauties of this world, its woods, its waters, its realwonders, and in the celebration of sorrow and delight that "Gods andFighting Men" is at its best, not in the celebration of happy loves, orof wild loves, or of great victories. So it is that Gabhra, where theFianna 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 Irishbards is their power in the lyrical passages so freely interspersedthroughout the stories, and in the lyrics that come into them on thelips of the poets and warriors and on the lips of the women who havelost their lovers in fight. The farewell of Deirdre to Alban and herlament over Naoise, the song of the woman from oversea to Bran, the poemFinn made to prove his power of poetry, the sleepy song of Grania overDiarmuid, the lament of Neargach's wife, the song of Tir-nan-Og thatNiave made to Oisin, and Oisin's own praise of the good times of theFianna--these are the passages in which the old tales reach theirhighest poetry. Once read, these remain in memory, but certain episodesand certain sayings remain also. Mr. Yeats has picked out one of thesayings in his introduction to "Gods and Fighting Men" that will do forsample. It is the answer of Osgar dying, to the man who asks him how heis: "I am as you would have me be. " Starker even, perhaps, is theabsolute simplicity of the description of that last fight in "The Battleof the White Strand, " in which Cael and Finnachta go, locked in eachother's arms, to their death under the waves without a word. 

Wild nature is always about these warriors. The storm in the trees, thesorrow of the sea, the clatter of wild geese and the singing of swansfind echo in the poems that praise them. We see, too, at times, fieldsheavy with harvest, and often the apple trees in bloom and the cuckoocalling among them, --indeed, the sweet scent of apple gardens, like thekeenness of the winds of spring, beautiful as are the phrases thatpresent them, become almost stock phrases. Always, too, there arewonders of the other world about the heroes; women from undersea andunderground come into their halls as naturally as the members of theirown clans, and the twilight mists unfolding from familiar hills willreveal their marvelous duns, whitewalled with silver or marble, andthatched with the wings of white birds. 

There has been frequent quarreling in certain quarters with Mr. Russelland Mr. Johnston and Mr. Yeats for introducing mysticism and a definitesymbolism and the ways of Eastern thought into their versions of Irishmythic tales and their records of Irish mood. There will be found somejustification for such practices in Lady Gregory's translations. Manannan, the sea-god, is here presented doing tricks like those of theEast Indian fakirs; Finn is reincarnated in later great leaders of theGael; and in "The Hospitality of Cuanna's House" there is out-and-outallegory, to say nothing of a possible symbolistic interpretation ofepisodes in almost every other story. Even the willful obscurity of themodern poetry can be paralleled by the riddling of Cuchulain and Emer. 

It is, perhaps, because Lady Gregory has found the old stories not onlyin the dignity of their bardic presentation, but also in the happyfamiliarity of their telling by the people of the thatched houses in herown district, that she has been able to bring them so near to us. Fromthese same people, too, she has got some of her stories of St. Brideand Columba and poems and stories of recent and contemporaryinspiration, poems and stories that have to do with humble life as wellas with the highly colored heroic life that those who live bare livesthemselves are so fond of imagining. In her "Poets and Dreamers" (1903)are records of this collecting and of her study of local ways aboutCoole and on the Connemara coast and in the Aran Isles. One of the mostinteresting of her chapters is that on the poet Raftery, whose poems Dr. Hyde has published. Blind and bitter, Raftery wandered about Connachtuntil about 1840, when death took him, an old man, but still vigorous inmind and spirit. Another chapter of "Poets and Dreamers" is "On the Edgeof the World. " Each reading of this is to me like a return to WestIreland, the very quality of whose life it gives. It should be the firstchapter of the book turned to by the reader, for it gives one the noteon which to read all. As Lady Gregory drives by the sea, people abouther on the roadside and in the cabins are singing in Irish. The littleexperiences of the day are, for them, experiences to brood over; and forher, too. And this thought is the last of her brooding: "The risingagain 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, dreamsare real things, and every heart is watching for the opening of one oranother grave. "

There is creative writing in these essays of Lady Gregory's, for allthat she is playing middleman between her people and the reading publicof the English-speaking world in many of them; and, as I would emphasizeagain, in her three books of translations. But, after all translationwill not content, and the essay that is not self-revelation will notcontent, the writer who would have his writing a "reading of life. " Soit is not surprising that Lady Gregory turned toward drama. And yet I donot ever feel, after many readings of her plays, that Lady Gregory tookto drama because of any overmastering impulse toward this most difficultof all literary forms. She has learned to handle some orders of dramapleasantly, the farce more than pleasantly, and, very recently, thefolk-tragedy nobly; but had it not been that plays of other thanromantic tone were needed for the Abbey Theatre as a foil to those ofMr. Yeats and of Synge, I doubt whether it is drama that Lady Gregorywould have chosen as the medium through which to express her reading oflife. I can just as well imagine her shrewd kindliness of judgment uponthe foibles and virtues of her countrymen in stories whose form is verylike that employed by Miss Barlow in her "Irish Idylls" (1892) as inthese so original little plays that she has wrought out withoutprecedent, under the tutelage of Mr. Yeats. 

It is more than likely, as I say, that had it not been that drama wasneeded for the Abbey Theatre she would not have attempted drama. Butmore than likely it is, too, that had she written plays not made toorder they had reached wider through Irish society and plumbed deeperinto Irish life. Lady Gregory knows Irish life, from bottom to top, asfew Irishwomen and few Irishmen of her day know it; she has large heart, wide tolerance, and abounding charity; and yet she was long content tolimit her plays of modern Ireland to farce, at times of a serious enoughpurpose, but because it is farce, not of the first seriousness. It maybe, 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 whenthey are at their merriest. I cannot, however, but feel that this is asuccess of intention rather than a success of instinct. She would havethem the most successful in a quality as far removed as might be fromthat quality of troubled dreaminess which is the best of the dramas ofMr. Yeats. Synge, it must be remembered, did not begin as a writer ofcomedy, and there is little of that ripe irony that has no precedent inEnglish literature in that first play that he wrote for the AbbeyTheatre, "Riders to the Sea" (1903). Is it a coincidence that later, ashe found his bent for that sort of writing that culminated in "ThePlayboy, " Lady Gregory turned at times to historical drama and a farcethat grew as serious as comedy? There is, of course, in all her playsserious indictment of national weaknesses, sometimes obvious indictment, as in "The Deliverer" (1911), which records, in terms of folk-biblicalallegory, his countrymen's desertion of Parnell; sometimes indictmentnot so obvious, as in "The Canavans" (1906), which rebukes thatshoneenism in high places which has for generations been one of thecurses of Ireland. To him who knows only a little of Irish life it iseasy to see the meaning but superficially concealed by the farcicalbustle, the laughter, and the lamentations. But to him who looks but onthe surface there is merriness enough and wittiness enough and wisdomenough to make his loss of the deeper meaning, for him, but a littleloss. 

There are enough characters presented, too, peasants generally andtownsfolk 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 thelargeness of utterance that will make a "reading of life" memorable. Take "the image" (1910), for instance, in which Lady Gregory isattempting more than in "Spreading the News" (1904) or "Hyacinth Halvey"(1906). This play, the longest that Lady Gregory has written, is whatthe stage would call the character farce. She owns it a presentation ofdreams 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 allIreland to accept as certainties on the eve of realization what arereally only signs that point to possibilities in a far to-morrow. In theplay four old men of a little village on the west coast are debatingwhat they will do with their share of a windfall that has come to thevillage 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 theoil from the whales be spent on something that will benefit the wholecommunity they plan a statue (one of them is a stone-cutter) to somegreat celebrity. The motives that lead them to choose Hugh O'Lorrha aretelling 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 comeat by way of accident would, unidentified for some time by any, befinally revealed as that of the hero of a folk-tale. Four days after thewhales had come ashore, days wasted in planning what the village will dowith the prize money, and unutilized in securing the blubber andrendering out the oil, the quartette learned that "the Connemara ladshave the oil drawn from the one of them, and the other one was sweptaway with the spring tide. "

Though "The Image" be farce, its characters are the characters ofcomedy, and its purpose whole-heartedly serious. And even "Spreading theNews" has its lesson, of rumor's wild riot in Irish crowds. On theslightest grounds the reciting of an errand of helpfulness is turned byquick imagination into a story of a murder. Lightly sketched as are thepeople here, from a caricature of a magistrate to the more seriouspresentment of Mrs. Fallon's "nice quiet little man, " they are very trueto Ireland. Slighter even are the butcher and the postmistress and themodel sub-sanitary inspector in "Hyacinth Halvey, " though all are fullyunderstood and fully blocked out in their author's mind, if impossibleof complete realization within limits so narrow; but the farce itself isnot lifted into dignity by any noble underlying attitude. "The Jack Daw"(1907) has rumor again as its motive, as had "Spreading the News, " butit is not the motive of the play or any of its incidents that is thebest thing about it, but the character of Michael Cooney, of the"seventh generation of Cooneys who trusted nobody living or dead. " Heis, of course, caricatured, but he has possibilities of personality, andhe 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 hercharacters, that of Hyacinth Halvey is most nearly rounded out, butthen Lady Gregory has taken two little plays in which to present hisportrait, "The Full Moon" (1911) recording some of his later experiencesin Cloon and his final departure from the town, his introduction towhich was recorded in the play bearing his name. 

"The Workhouse Ward" (1908), reaching from wild farce to sentimentalcomedy, is hardly more than a dialogue, but it is given body by thetruth to Irish life out of which it is written, that quarreling isbetter than loneliness. Lady Gregory has disowned "Twenty-five" (1902), which is frankly melodrama, her only other experiment in which, in herplays of modern Ireland, is "The Rising of the Moon" (1903). This playrelates the allowed escape from a police officer of a political prisonerthrough that prisoner's persuading the officer that "patriotism" isabove his sworn duty to England. 

Of the plays that may be called historical, "The Canavans" (1906) is thebest, because it is of the peasantry, I suppose, who change so littlewith the years, and whom Lady Gregory presents so amusingly and so trulyin her modern farce comedy. "Kincora" (1903) takes us all the way backto the eleventh century, deriving its name from Brian's Seat on theShannon and ending with his death at Clontarf. It is undistinguishedmelodrama. "The White Cockade" (1905) is better only in so far as itinvolves farce, farce in the kitchen of an inn on the Wexford coast justafter the Battle of the Boyne. "Devorgilla" (1908) is of a time betweenthe times of the two other historical plays, of the time a generationlater than the coming of the Normans to Ireland. It is pitched to ahigher key than any other of her historic plays, and it is held betterto 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 hismother of the imprisonment of an Irish lad of to-day, and their learningthat "Denis Cahel died for his neighbor. " This little play is out of thelife that Lady Gregory knows and can deal with; it is finely conceivedand finely executed, lingering in the mind as does the keen heard risingfrom 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 cannotexplain. Sometimes I think it is because she has found less of thathistory than of that legend among the people. Yet in "A Travelling Man"(1907), her little miracle, somewhat in the manner of Dr. Hyde's, thatbrings Christ into a modern peasant home, she has made a play of atender and reconciling beauty. With the success of "A Travelling Man"and "The Gaol Gate" before me I cannot say it is because her genius isfor farce; and to say that it is because her genius is for the plays ofmodern 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 theIrish. It is full of wise saws and proverbs, quips and quirks ofexpression, the picturesquenesses and homelinesses of speech that arecharacteristic of a peasant to whom talk is the half of life. Theserange from sayings like those of the clowns of Elizabethan drama, suchas "He had great wisdom I tell you, being silly-like, and blind, " andsuch country wisdom as "What would the cat's son do but kill mice, " upthrough the elaborate maledictions of the two old paupers in "TheWorkhouse Ward" and such delightful asperities as that of Maelmora anenthis bitter sister Gormleith, "You were surely born on a Friday, and thebriars breaking through the green sod, " to aphorisms that have an accentof 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 inthem the possibility of complete portrayals. There is no flagging of theinvention in any of them, no slipshod or careless composition. Hertechnique, too, at least in farce, is masterful, and in her plays ofmodern life of other form adequate. That she could master historicaldrama, as I have said, I must doubt, but that she need restrict herselfso largely to farce and farce comedy in her plays of modern life, I donot for a moment believe. "The Gaol Gate, " in fact, proved that she neednot so restrict herself, and "MacDaragh's Wife" (1911), written by LadyGregory at sea on her way to America, but perhaps for that all thefuller of the wild old life of her native Connacht. It would almost seemthat with "Grania" (1912), a tragedy too, following "MacDaragh's Wife, "Lady Gregory is widening the scope of her work, as she well can, nowthat there are other dramatists to provide comedies and farces for theAbbey 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 aresporting to follow, with a full fellowship, to the grave, her who diedall but alone. Lady Gregory tells us in a note just what of it shegathered from old people about her girlhood's home at Roxborough, andwhat about her home of to-day at Coole, how she has shaped it, and whatemotion is back of it, the "lasting pride of the artist of all ages. "

As Lady Gregory had restricted herself, until recently, in the forms ofmodern life which she wrote of and in the kinds of people she selectedto write of, so, too, she had restricted herself, until recently, in themotives she considered. It is true that the motive most recurrent in herplays, that of fear of the opinion of the neighbor, an attitude probablysprung of the clan system, is dominant in Irish life; and it is equallytrue that the motive most notably absent, love, was until yesterday farfrom a dominant motive in the Irish life that Lady Gregory presents: yetthere are many other motives that, in true comedy, and even in farcicalcomedy, might well have place. That these motives are not there is, Ithink, not only that Lady Gregory, self-effacingly, put into her playswhat 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 inliterature, of which Jane Austen is characteristic. And yet the meremention of Jane Austen increases the wonderment that Lady Gregory hasnot written of people of every condition in her neighborhood, whetherthat be London or Dublin or Gort, as Miss Austen did of people of everycondition in her neighborhood, whether that be Steventon or Bath orChawton. It can hardly be said, even, that "Grania" her last play, is aplay about love. In her note to the play, Lady Gregory declares, "Loveitself, with its shadow Jealousy, is the true protagonist!" And yet, Ithink it is Jealousy only that is the true protagonist. There is muchtalk about love, but it is not from love, but from jealousy that theaction of the play arises. Among all this talk about love, among manyeloquent sayings about love, true readings of love, there stands outmost clearly in my memory this part of a speech of Finn, a speechuttered 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 rhythmof its prose. It is Lady Gregory at her best, as "Grania" as a whole isLady Gregory at her best in tragedy. If "Grania" in every detail were asinspired as its explanation of the queen's quick turn from Diarmuid toFinn, it would be a great play, indeed. Grania is no light woman, andyet she turns, in the old legend, from the man who sacrificed all butall for her, on his death, to the High King who brought about hisdeath, with a suddenness inexplicable. Lady Gregory makes that suddenturn plausible, for two reasons. One is that for seven years ofwandering all over Ireland, Diarmuid by his own will and because ofloyalty to Finn, had kept Grania a maid, making her his wife only afterhe found her being carried off by the King of Foreign. The other reasonis that as Diarmuid lies dying, wounded to death by that King of Foreignwhom he has killed, his thoughts are all of his long-delayed disloyaltyto Finn, and not at all of Grania. Thus, she justifies herself, speakingto 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 shehas brought no less advantage to the Celtic Renaissance, though it is arôle that has not brought her, as have these other, the joys ofrecapturing or of creating beautiful things. Always objective, thoughnever wholly able to subordinate personality, however near she may havecome to effacing it in her plays, Lady Gregory has in this rôleconsidered herself solely as an agent in the service of Irish letters. The Irishman is naturally a pamphleteer, and Mr. Yeats, poet of theOther 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 inthe art of publicity. They have needed no publicists to fight theirbattles as the Pre-Raphaelites needed Ruskin. Still, in some measure inthe way of publicity, and in large measure in other ways, Lady Gregoryhas been to the Celtic Renaissance what Ruskin was to that lastrenaissance of wonder. She has edited pamphlets on things national andartistic in Ireland, she has helped Dr. Hyde and Mr. Yeats in theircollecting of folk-lore and to a deeper knowledge of the people; she hasbeen one of the forces that have made possible the Abbey Theatre, givingto it her power of organization as well as plays and patronage. Morethan 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 andgreen land so near the sea and reinspired by the contact with that IrishIreland so close to her doors. Like Ruskin, Lady Gregory is a greatpatron of letters, but like Ruskin she is much more. Lady Gregory is anartist in words who is to be valued as a presenter of Irish life, pastand present, with a beauty that was not in English literature before shemade it. 

CHAPTER VII

JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE

It is Synge himself who puts the just phrase on what his life was tohim, and it is, as it could not else be, from the lips of his Deirdrethat it falls. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best andrichest, if it's for a short space only. " It is Deirdre alone of his menand women that is introspective at all, Deirdre--and Naisi when he ismastered by thoughts of home that will not down. Synge wrote the play ofher triumph over death as he himself was dying, and he wrote it withhigh heart, and, what is higher, gladness, despite his foreknowledge ofhis doom. It was to fulfill his dream of the most queenly girl of oldIrish legend that he wrote "Deirdre of the Sorrows, " but he could notkeep out of his writing, had he wished to keep it out, his own love thatdeath was so soon to end, and the thoughts of what was the worth oflife. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and richest, ifit's for a short space only. " It is not a new saying, but it is not tobe identified with the proverbial "a short life and a merry, " with whichsome 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 therewas little joy for him; but the truth is there was never a writer inwhom there was more joy. This "strange still man" as he was even tothose who knew him best, gentle or simple, found all life that wasnatural 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 gustoin living greater than that of any English writer since Borrow. Let noone forget those lines with which Christy Mahon cries defiance to theMayo folk who have known his greatness and his fall: "Ten thousandblessings upon all that's here, for you've turned me a likely gaffer inthe end of all, the way I'll go romancing through a romping lifetimefrom this hour to the dawning of the judgment day. " I do not deny thatthese words are in a sense wrung from the Playboy, but what I do hold isthat they prove how vital was the genius of the man who wrote them, whosaw the joy there was yet in life for this braggart wastrel just as hesaw that even such a miserable boyhood as Christy's knew a kind ofpoacher's joy in running wild on the bogs. Even for poor Nora, turnedout on the roads with a tramp for companion, there is the joy of theroad 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 theirblindness; and the joy of the three tinkers in the escape of themselvesand their half-sovereign from the priest and in the prospect of "A greattime drinking that bit with the trampers in the green of Clash. " Andfrom such joys as these, wild and earthy and rallying, his exultationsrange to the exalted serenity and sadness of Naisi and Deirdre as theylook back on their seven year of love in Glen Masain, of love almost tooperfect and too happy to be human. 

[Illustration]

Yes, joy is as distinctive as irony and extravagance of the writing ofSynge, joy in mere living, in life even at the worst, and joy, too, inlife at the best. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best andrichest, if it's for a short space only. " It was for a short space ofyears that Synge had "what is best and richest, " hardly for the sevenyears of his great lovers. He did not have it when his thought homed toIreland in 1899, as a result of a meeting with Mr. Yeats in Paris. Hiswriting, then, was of little moment, but it grew better when, at homeagain, he realized what Irish life was to him, when once renewed contactwith the Irish peasant brought back the familiarity that had been his inthe nursery. It was the Wicklow glens, to which memories of his peopledrew him, and the Aran Islands, where he went to study Irish--until thenlittle 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 inWicklow 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, afteradjustment to the stage, were put on respectively October 8, 1903, andFebruary 25, 1904, at Molesworth Hall, Dublin. "The Tinker's Wedding"which has been played only once, and then in London, dates from aboutthe same time. "The Well of the Saints" was produced on February 4, 1905, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and "The Playboy of the WesternWorld" on January 26, 1907, at the same place, to the accompaniment ofan uproar that a certain element of Irishmen have considered it properto create ever since on its first appearance in all cities whatsoever, whether in Great Britain or America. One wonders what they would havedone had he made it as biting as Ibsen made "Peer Gynt. " "Deirdre of theSorrows, " which Synge left unrevised, was first produced at the AbbeyTheatre 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 andrichest"--a full life, lived largely in the Ireland that he loved; theartist's joy in making that life into a new beauty, a beauty that wasall compact of exaltation and extravagance and irony; and love for awoman in whom his man's life and his artist's life were united, for herwho embodied his dream of Pegeen Mike and added her life and her art ofthe stage to his dream of Deirdre, as day by day it emerged from hismind. And so great was his joy in these good things that his precarioushealth, and even his year--long last illness, could not, while he hadany strength, lessen the high spirit of his writing. There is none ofhis plays more vital than "Deirdre of the Sorrows. "

And yet this joy that is basic in Synge, this exaltation, is no morebasic than emotions and attitudes of mind that are often, in other men, at war with joy and exaltation--irony and grotesquerie, keen insightinto "the black thoughts of men, " and insistent awareness of the quickpassing of all good things, _diablerie_ and mordancy. Strange, then, should be his love passages and strange too, they are at times, rangingfrom the bizarre delight of "In Kerry" to the triumphing nobility ofDeirdre's farewell to Alban. One thinks of Mr. Hardy and one thinks ofDonne 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'swooing of Pegeen, even when one puts down the book in the quiet thatalways comes on one in the presence of something great; one thinks of noother writer, of course, when one sees the lovers and listens to theirwords, on the stage, for one is rapt out of one's self by the perfectaccord 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 readsSynge, chose to avoid love scenes, and Borrow's follower, Mr. Hewlett, for all his gusto, has no such exaltation as this. Had Harry Richmondtaken to the road with Kiomi we might have known something like it. Achapter out of the early life of Juggling Jerry and his "Old Girl, " donein the manner of "Love in the Valley, " would be still nearer to it. Asit is, this passage of the third act of "The Playboy of the WesternWorld" stands alone. I doubt if Synge had read Meredith, and even hadhe, the life of the roads and their cottages that Synge knew so well washis master, and no writer at all. In a way, of course, the Irish-Englishof Dr. Hyde's translations of "The Love Songs of Connacht" was aninfluence, and you will find many expressions common to them and Synge. It is not important, however, whether these expressions have a commonsource, or whether Synge took them from "The Love Songs" rather thanfrom his own note-book. Whatever their source it was Synge who made outof them a great style, his peasant style. It is another and a severerstyle that he uses in his "Deirdre of the Sorrows, " the courtly subjectdemanding dignity and restraint. This latter style has borrowed some ofthe 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 Wicklowand Kerry. 

Romancing, which is the very atmosphere of "The Playboy of the WesternWorld, " would be out of place in any telling of the greatest of oldIrish legends; so it is that Synge has found for "Deirdre of theSorrows, " or rather for its great moments, an austere epic speech thatseems native to the story. The passionate words are nobly adequate tothe passionate resignation they have to tell, a resignation that hascome of the unwilling belief of the lovers that so great a love astheirs cannot last longer "without fleck or flaw" than the seven yearsit has lasted. Says Deirdre, when she has come to know it is fate thatthey 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 wouldscarcely be worth preserving. I have quoted it rather than the greatkeen over the body of Naisi that brings the play to a close, becausethat must of necessity follow the old poem, and this is as Syngeimagined it. Each is "a thing will be a joy and triumph to the ends oflife and time. "

I have thrown what I have to say about the exaltation of Synge to theforefront of what I have to say of him, that all may be read in thememory of this emphasis and of the exaltation of what I quote, no matterhow fantastic or grotesque or disillusionizing or even ghoulish it maybe. Whatever other quality may be dominant at any moment in Synge thereis 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. Andthis extravagance and grotesquerie have marked his writing from thestart. The old husband playing dead, that he may catch his young wifewith her lover, of his first play, "In the Shadow of the Glen, " is avery old motive, and familiar in the meliorized form that made it knownto the theatre in "Conn the Shaughraun" (1875). Before that, CroftonCroker had given it currency, in "The Corpse Watchers, " among thoseoutside 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 themanner of Boucicault and ends in the manner of Ibsen, for Nora Burke isin a way a peasant Hedda Gabler. Such a criticism would, of course, bevery superficial. The story is a folk-story of many countries and Syngewas told the version he worked from by the old shanachie of Inishmaanwhom he calls Pat Dirane in "The Aran Islands. " At moments the playapproaches farce, as when the supposed corpse rises from the bed wherehe is stretched and drinks whiskey with a tramp who has happened inwhile Nora is gone to meet her young man. From such a situation it turnsto keen pathos, as Nora sits with tramp and lover and the old husbandshe thinks dead, and listens to the wind and rain sweeping through thehigh glens about the hut and thinks of "the young growing behind her, "and the old passing. Where else will you find cheek by jowl suchsardonic humor as this and such poignancy of lament for the passing ofyouth? 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 anyin 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 andWicklow. Old Mourteen, a "dark man, " who taught him Gaelic on Aranmor, suggested Martin Doul, the chief character of the play, and it wasMourteen told him, too, the story of the well whose water would givesight 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 tothe glory their hair would be to them in age. As you read his travelsketches, in fact, you are always coming on passages that very evidentlyare the suggestions for situations in this play or that, and sometimesmore than suggestions--stories and situations and very phrases that youremember as on the lips of the peasants in his plays. In these travelsketches, too, you find the background of the plays. There is but thegerm of "The Playboy of the Western World" in the story told Synge inInishmaan of the hiding there from the police of the man that killed hisfather, but there is old Mourteen's comparison of an unmarried man to"an old jackass straying in the rocks, " which later we find transferredto Michael James Flaherty almost as Synge heard it--"an old brayingjackass straying upon the rocks. "

It may be, too, that the famous Lynchehaun case confirmed Synge intaking 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 fromany of his reading. There are situations in "The Tinker's Wedding"--thetying-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 Songsof Connacht, " but Synge records, in "At a Wicklow Fair, " that a herdtold him the story of the tinker couple that would be wed, as he and theherd met the man in the case in Aughrim. 

No one who knows Ireland at all would hold that Synge's plays aretypical of the Irish peasant generally, but any one who knows Irishliterature at all, and the life of the roads in Ireland, will admit thatwildness and extravagance are to be found in that literature from thebeginning and in that life even at this day of supposed civilization. You will find one kind of extravagance in the distortions of Cuchulainin bardic literature, another kind of extravagance in "Little Red Maryand the Goat with the Chime of Bells" that your gardener tells you in aprosaic American suburban town; you will find the primitiveness ofprehistoric life in the burning of poor old Mrs. Cleary by her neighborsin Tipperary (1895), to drive a demon out of her, and the savage that isbut under the skin of all men in the description of the Spinsters' Ballat Ballinasloe in "A Drama in Muslin. " Said an old shanachie to Synge onInishere, when Synge had told him of a stock exchange trick, "Isn't ita 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 menthe world over have sympathy for the rogue. Why do we read of Reynardthe Fox with delight, and Robin Hood, and Uncle Remus, and not only inthe days of our own infantile roguery, but as grown men and women? Thisman or that may say it is because of the cleverness of Reynard, thedaring of Robin Hood or his wild-woods setting, and the resourcefulnessof Bre'r Rabbit; but the honest man will admit it is because of aninnate and deeply rooted human sympathy with roguery as well as ournatural human sympathy with the under dog and the man hunted by amerciless or an alien law. Very often, if the roguery is very great, orwe are brought face to face with its effects and realize it is a realthing in real life, we will be shocked out of our sympathy with it, andrealize, as did Pegeen Mike, the difference between a "gallous story anda dirty deed. " But sometimes, if we are a people living a primitivelife, we will no more awaken to the reality of the wrong of roguery thanwe would as children have been able to sympathize with the farmer whosepumpkin patch we raided on the eve of Hallowe'en. A sneaking sympathywith roguery, however, is a very different thing from a delight inextravagance. That, too, is a universal passion, but not so native tothe Teuton as to Celt or Finn or Oriental. Its absence is what mostdifferentiates Old Norse literature from Old Irish, with which it soearly came into contact. It is in travelers' tales and in the tales ofseamen and in the writing that was based on these, in rare moments ofreligious or romantic ecstasy, or in borrowings from Celt or Orientalthat you will find the most of what extravagance there is in Englishliterature. In America you find extravagance in our humor, and thishumor, perhaps, owes as much of its extravagance to an Irish ancestry asto an environment of new wonders that could not be well expressed savein hyperbole. 

It is not only the extravagance of the change wrought in Christy byunexpected hero-worship and an awakening of self-confidence through lovefor the first time known and returned that we wonder at, and theextravagance of that hero-worship, but the extravagance of theimagination of his creator, and the beautiful extravagance of hisspeech. The freshness and audacity of that imagination, and thebeautiful extravagance of that speech, a speech modulated to a rhythmthat Synge was the first to catch, are in themselves enough to givedistinction to almost any subject. There was granted Synge more thanthis, however, --a keenness of vision into the pathetic humanity of uglythings and a power to realize this with a beauty that was granted to noone before, though to Swift it was granted to see the ugliness as abitter thing. Borrow had, indeed, a glimpse now and then of the patheticbeauty there is in ugliness, as in the story of Isopel Berners and theFlaming Tinman, and Whitman, too; but no man before Synge had the powerat 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 itthrough a style that for the first time ennobles English prose drama asblank verse has long ennobled English verse drama. 

Take "The Tinker's Wedding, " for instance. The theme is the desire of atinker woman, youngish if not young, to wed the man who has long beenher 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 ahalf-sovereign for marrying them; and their joy, in the end, that theyhave escaped matrimony and the wasting of good money. And yet this themeis 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 goodthings, that no understanding heart can but be profoundly moved by thatpathos and racily rejoiced at that wildness. 

It is thus, for instance, soliloquizes Mary Byrne, the rapscalliony oldtinker woman of outrageous behavior of "The Tinker's Wedding. " She isstealing the aforesaid can, in the absence of her son and his Sarah "toget two of Tim Flaherty's hens": "Maybe the two of them have a goodright to be walking out the little short while they'd be young; but ifthey have itself, they'll not keep Mary Byrne from her full pint whenthe night's fine, and there's a dry moon in the sky. " One thinks, as onereads, of Villon's old woman and her lament for yesteryear, but thereare 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 noother one that I know who can infuse humor into the blend, and make oneat the one time laugh ironically and be thrilled as with great poetry. 

There are those, of course, to whom this earthiness and wildness arerepulsive, to whom old Martin Doul's love pleading to Molly Byrne isunendurable. A dirty "shabby stump of a man, " a beggar, blind andmiddle-aged, is asking a fine white girl, young, and as teasing as anox-eyed and ox-minded colleen may be, to go away with him. Not anexalting 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 expectwould be heightened, you realize--and it is strange to you that you doso realize--first of all its pathos, and again its pathos, and always, the scene through, its pathos. Had Molly gone with old Martin it wouldhave revolted you, for it would have been unnatural, but since she didnot, and since she was not the sort to be easily insulted, you onlywonder at the power of passion and realize its pathos, and the irony ofit. 

There is, however, a situation ironical of love in "In the Shadow of theGlen" that is more appalling to some than any irony of "The Well of theSaints. " I mean the scene at the end, where Nora, turned out by herhusband and forsaken by her lover, goes out into the rain with thetramp, leaving husband and lover drinking together in utmost amity. Thepathos of this and the irony of it are of a part with the pathos of theclose of "Hedda Gabler. " Hedda and Nora, selfish and willful both, ifyou like, are yet fine women both, and human, as Zenobia and Eustaciaare human, and pathetic in their fates, with a pathos that evenHawthorne and Mr. Hardy have seldom the power to make us feel. But thefate of Nora was ironic as the fate of none of the others, for allthree of them escaped the ennui and misery of life, while Nora butbegins a new life, freer for the moment than her old life, butpromising, in the end, only the old dull round. 

The irony of it! "The irony of it" is always in Synge's writing even inits 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 allgood things, shall so soon come to an end. That, of course, is but theway of nature, and so we much question if, after all, the irony of Syngeis more insistent than the irony of nature. If it is it is because hetakes more care to uncover it, but basically his irony is but the ironyof nature. He is in reality less ironical than Mr. Hardy, the greatironist of English literature of our day, and he is never bitter, forbitterness comes seldom except to the writer who is interested inmorals, and morals interest Synge only in so far as they are natural. Itis life--not any conventional way of life, or any ideal of life--thatinterests Synge, so he escapes ensnarement in any of the questions ofthe day. So frankly does he accept life that there is in him no note ofprotest whatsoever, which is again fortunate, for protest, too, willlead a man to morals and leave on his work the taint of a passing systemof morality as it did even on Ibsen. 

If there is symbolism to be found in Synge, it is there only byaccident, never as the result of definite intent. He may have had, inthe 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 throughothers believing in him who has no belief in himself but that there isin the play any parable of young Ireland losing its allegiance to aprevious ideal of Ireland, I do not for a moment believe. There is, ofcourse, in "The Well of the Saints" the old and oft-uttered truth thatmen prefer blindness in many things to correct vision of them, thattruth that drives Mr. Shaw to blind anger. Synge has no resentmentagainst that truth, only interest in it as a fact that is true of peopleas he sees them. The play is an unforgettable symbol of that truth, butto make it such was not why Synge wrote it. He wrote it with a purposeakin to that which inspired Burns to write his "Jolly Beggars. " He wroteit to make something beautiful out of the life of the beggars of theWicklow mountains, and I have no doubt he had a wild joy in the idea ofit, in the irony of its truth, in the grotesquerie of the situations hegarnered from his memory to illustrate its beauty and truth. 

Many wonders are possible even to-day in the wild life of the roads andof the sea-haunted islands that Synge knew, but he was wise to put "TheWell of the Saints" back a hundred years or more. Aran islanders toldhim of rye that turned to oats in their fields and of phantom ships thatpassed them at sea, but a miracle of healing such as that of "The Wellof the Saints" they were familiar with only in folk-song such as "Mary'sWell, " and such a miracle, too, would hardly be attempted by a priest ofto-day. 

Synge had the great advantage of writing all his plays, after theearliest, for the stage. He knew as he wrote that he could test thatwriting's stage effect in rehearsal and change it if need be. So he didchange "The Playboy of the Western World, " revealing the incident of thesupposed patricide as a bit of narrative addressed by Christy to theadmiring girls of the Mayo village, instead of, as he had intended, ascene on the stage in "a windy corner of rich Munster land. " Had hewritten "Riders to the Sea" later, Synge would surely never have crowdedinto it incidents that took far longer in the happening than in theportrayal of that happening on the stage. It is this technicalshortcoming that for me takes away somewhat from the exceeding beauty ofthis tragedy of Aran. The story of the finding of the clothes that tellof the death at sea of the last but one of the five sons of Maurya, andof the death on the very shore itself of the last son, is in its verynature a dirge, and demands a slower movement than is possible with itsincidents arranged as he was content to leave them in the play as wehave 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 ofthe dirge, of the dirge of the tides that sound their menace of the seathrough Inishmaan. It is less representative of Synge because it has init 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 anyother of his plays, reminiscent in fact in all but its style, now ofIbsen, now of M. Maeterlinck, now even of Mr. Edward Martyn. And hisstyle 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 hewould have it, "fully flavored as a nut or apple. " Mr. Yeats and LadyGregory 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 hasread, however, the English of the prose translations of Dr. Hyde's "LoveSongs of Connacht, " one may see in their style the genesis of the styleof "Riders to the Sea, " and if one has read the "Dialogue between TwoOld Women" of "The Religious Songs of Connacht, " and "The Lout and hisMother, " one may come to believe that these turned Synge toward the evenmore fully flavored and more rhythmic speech of the other plays. Perhaps, too, there were memories of the rhythm and of the flavor of thespeech of him who made these words for Jasper Petulengro: "Life issweet, brother, ... There's night and day, brother, both sweet things;sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a windon the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die!"

The speech of Connacht folk-song rendered into the English of Connachtby Dr. Hyde, however, and the speech of Borrow were no more than thestart, if they were as much as the start, that put him on the rightroad. If ever a man made his style himself, it was Synge. He made it outof his memory and out of his imagination, using "one or two words onlythat I have not heard, " he said, "among the country people of Ireland, or spoken in my own nursery before I could read the newspaper, " butevolving from that memory by his imagination a speech that is inharmony with the imagination of the people an imagination that is, hetells us, "fiery and magnificent and tender, " though no such actualspeech would be possible of reproduction from any one of them. 

Synge is very definite in his statement of what he believes drama shouldbe, and what he would make his own drama of Irish life, expressing hisbelief 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 sixplays of Synge, and ten of these are in "Deirdre of the Sorrows, " whichfor all its humanity is a play out of a life that is gone, there are menand women a-plenty to give us this "rich joy found only in what issuperb 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 hisdream of life in the South; Sarah Casey and Pegeen Mike "superb andwild" in the most direct sense of the phrase; and these are all real, ifnot representative of the poorer peasantry. And in the high way ofromance who has dreamed what is more superb and wilder than the lamentof Deirdre over Naisi! In the creation of character, as in style, and intechnique of drama, Synge has done what he would. In only one of hisplays, in "Riders to the Sea, " are his leading characters representativeIrish peasants; and even Maurya and her children, not only because ofthe isolation of their home in Aran, but because of the fate which hasmarked her mankind for death at sea, are somewhat apart from thefisher-people of the west coast. In all his four other plays of modernlife, Synge has chosen characters who are, in his own words, "variationsfrom the ordinary types of manhood, "--chosen them because of hisdeep-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 sheepfarmer, not an uncommon type, but the tramp and Nora, the one by hiswandering and the other by her brooding, are "variations, " though veryhuman both. Of the cottager class, too, are Timmy the Smith, MollyByrne, and the "villagers" of "The Well of the Saints, " as are, too, thegirls and men of "The Playboy of the Western World" other than theMahons 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 theexception of the priest of "The Tinker's Wedding" and the saint of "TheWell of the Saints, " squatters, beggars, and tinkers. Among them, few asthey are all told, are very differing personalities--Christy the Playboyand his father, "a dirty man, God forgive him, and he getting old andcrusty"; 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 Norawhen her own husband turns her out on the road;--"variations" all, perhaps, but human, and compelling, all of them, our interest, andgreater or less sympathy. And the women! Nora, whom we leave asroad-woman, I have likened to Hedda Gabler, and Sarah Casey in externalsto Isopel Berners, but I do not know to whom to compare the others saveMary Byrne, as slightly suggestive of Villon's old woman. Mary Doul, blind Martin's blind wife, has a general likeness to some old witch outof a fairy tale, but she is far from being a witch; and Widow Quinn theincomparable might be compared, were she not too high-hearted, to thehag 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 andbitterness, is the most lovable, and Molly Byrne the least lovable; thegirls of "Riders to the Sea" are not fully enough individualized to makeus feel we know them; but Pegeen Mike, Synge has put before us inappearance and temperament, character and personality. "A wild-lookingbut fine girl, " he describes her, "with a divil's own temper, " "thefright of seven town-lands"--as she says--"for my biting tongue, " butsusceptible of softening toward a boy of good looks and coaxing wayssuch as Christy. He gets around her with "his poet's talking" and hispopularity, his "mighty spirit" and "gamey heart" until she gives him"words would put you thinking on the holy Brigid speaking to the infantsaints. "

There might be incongruity, if one were writing of any other than Synge, in speaking of Deirdre in such a company. Incongruity, however, is ofthe very texture of Synge's art, which has reconciled qualities, as Ihave said, never before reconciled in English literature. It is onDeirdre that Synge has lavished all the ideality that was in him, notbecause he had a dream of woman he wished to fulfill, but because to himDeirdre 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 inpraise of her are almost impertinent. Just how lofty her words that Iquoted at the outset show, as does also, by way of contrast, the mentionof her here among these half-tragic, half-grotesque women of thecottages and of the roads. There is scarcely a poet, of all that havewritten of Ireland from the time of Ferguson to our time, that has notwritten his dream of Deirdre as he finds her in the old legends ofIreland, but to my mind no one of them has dreamed her so triumphantlyas has Synge. 

It is not, however, of such "variations" as Deirdre that the criticsfall foul, but of the "variations" he puts on Irish roads and in Irishcottages when he presents the life of to-day. Why he replied to thiscriticism when to most criticism he was, if not indifferent, at leastimpervious, it is not easy to say. It is more than likely, however, thatit was rather to explain his ideas than to justify his characters thathe did answer. This criticism of the reality of his peasants began withhis "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 theproduction of "The Playboy of the Western World" in Dublin, but it wasbefore that that he answered it fully, in the last paragraph of "TheVagrants of Wicklow, " a travel sketch he made out of his wanderings inhis native country. Here it is, as effective in its answer to subsequentcriticism 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 thisstatement, I think, and to re-read, keeping in mind a possible furtherapplication of it, those phrases in the plays that so outrage many attheir hearing in the theatre, I would not for a moment seem to want tosoften the hardness of the life he pictures or to explain away hisdelightfully 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 andsardonic that humor seems. The impersonality of the man as dramatistgrows on you as you read, you realize more and more his abstention fromplaying chorus to his characters, and you come to know that the seemingcruelty and sardonic joy are largely only the direct outcome of hiscourage in allowing Nature to speak for herself. If you turn again tothe plays after learning of their background from his travel sketches, you see many things in a new light. The irony, the grotesquerie, thetonic earthiness never grow less, but one learns to discount somewhatthe effect of the hardness of speech on the recipients of that speech, as through experience one learns--after one's second attendance at awake--to discount something of the too voluble sorrow of keening. 

That the candor of Synge, in allowing his people of hard nature or ofcareless nature to say the ruthless things native to their minds andtemper, hurts many, there is proof every time one sees a play of his onthe stage. You will hear women about you gasp with mingled surprise anddisgust, their sensibilities wholly outraged, but unwilling laughter intheir minds when the Widow Quinn says to Christy, after his praise ofPegeen, "There's poetry talk for a girl you'd see itching andscratching, and she with a stale stink of poteen on her from selling inthe shop. " Such gasps are nothing, however, to those they utter whenthey hear Mary Doul tell Molly Byrne "when the skin shrinks on yourchin, Molly Byrne, there won't be the like of you for a shrunk hag inthe four quarters of Ireland. "

Very different is the kind of laughter aroused by the sly malice, nativeto the rogue story from the days in which its characters masqueraded asanimals, 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 afine spring"; and different again the childish delight in theextravagance at Christy's threat to send Shawn Keogh "coaching outthrough Limbo with my father's ghost"; and still different thebreathless, delighted wonderment in the sense of moral values exhibitedby Michael James, when, fearing that Christy's threatened murder ofShawn, if carried out, would give his secret trade away, he jumps upwith a shriek, exclaiming, "Murder is it? Is it mad you's are? Would yougo making murder in this place, and it piled with poteen for our drinkto-night?" Different too, is the laughter at the Rabelaisian touches andat the farcical situations in which the plays abound. 

If ever there were characters that lived a life apart from theirauthor's, those characters are Synge's. It is in the verses and in thetravel sketches that we get the man himself, the man back of thedramatist that gives to his characters a life independent of his own, alife that he knows partly in reality and partly in imagination, but thathe himself has lived chiefly as an observer and imaginer. There is nohumor in these verses and travel sketches, not even when he isdescribing a humorous scene such as that of the upsetting by pigsrunning wild of the constabulary busy about evictions on Inishmaan. Weget the man himself, I say, in these verses and travel sketches, a manexulting in primitiveness, in wildness, in beauty of woman and child, inbeauty of landscape; but exulting, more than in all else, in his ownmoods aroused by these things that he loved. Even here, however, he isat times almost impossibly impersonal, so that you feel in a certaindescription 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 andthe atmosphere writing. This impersonality persists even in "The AranIslands, " so large a part of which is very personal in that it is astatement of his daily life on Inishmaan. It is not, however, from theimpersonal writing that I would quote, --though I would emphasize thisimpersonality because it is part of the very nature of the man, --butfrom the personal parts, because they reveal more of the positive partof him. After a day of storm on Inishmaan, the middle island of thethree that make up the Aran group, Synge writes: "About the sunset theclouds broke and the storm turned to a hurricane. Bars of purple cloudstretched across the sound where immense waves were rolling from thewest, wreathed with snowy fantasies of spray. Then there was the bayfull of green delirium and the Twelve Pins touched with mauve andscarlet in the east. " That is the Connacht coast, and this the nextparagraph is Synge: "The suggestion from this world of inarticulatepower was immense, and now at midnight, when the wind is abating, I amstill trembling and flushed with exultation. " And here is Synge again, in another temper, which came to him on the seas about Inishmaan: "Theblack curagh working slowly through this world of gray, and the softhissing of the rain, gave me one of the moods in which we realize withimmense distress the short moment we have left us to experience all thewonder and beauty of the world. "

"The Aran Islands" is most memorable of his travel writings, because hespent more time on these rocks at the world's end and came closest hereto the soul of Irish life. There are passages, however, in hisdescription of the Kerry coast, and even in his newspaper sketches ofthe coast of Connemara, that tell not only of the places but of theirvisitor. "I got on a long road running through a bog, " he writes in "InWest Kerry, " "with a smooth mountain on one side and the sea on theother, and Brandon in front of me, partly covered with clouds. As faras I could see there were little groups of people on their way to thechapel at Ballyferriter, the men in homespun and the women wearing bluecloaks, or, more often, black shawls twisted over their heads. Thisprocession along the olive bogs, between the mountains and the sea, onthis gray day of autumn, seemed to wring me with the pang of emotion onemeets everywhere in Ireland, an emotion that is partly local andpatriotic, and partly a share of the desolation that is mixed everywherewith the supreme beauty of the world. "

The comment on Ireland, her ways and her place among the peoples, thatmany a dramatist would have permitted himself to express through somecharacter chosen to play chorus to the action, Synge now and thenpermits himself in the travel sketches. In "From Galway to Gorumna, "which he wrote for the "Manchester Guardian's" investigation of thecongested districts, is one of such rare avowals, an avowal to treasurealong with those of his all too short prefaces: "It is part of themisfortune of Ireland that nearly all the characteristics which givecolor and attractiveness to Irish life [he has been speaking of 'mendressed in homespuns of the gray natural wool, and the women in deepmadder-dyed petticoats and bodices, with brown shawls over their heads']are bound up with a social condition that is near to penury, while incountries like Brittany the best external features of the locallife--the rich embroidered dresses, for instance, or the carvedfurniture--are connected with a decent and comfortable socialcondition. "

It is this penury, perhaps, and its gray background that by way ofcontrast emphasize so strongly the moments of splendor that Irishlandscape knows. One such moment Synge saw as he looked southward acrossthe bay from the Dingle peninsula toward Killarney: "The blueness of thesea and the hills from Carrantuohill to the Skelligs, the singularloneliness of the hillside I was on, with a few choughs and gulls insight only, had a splendor that was almost a grief in the mind. "

This splendor Synge found also in his own Wicklow, a lonelier countrythan Aran, if loneliness comes from absence of human life. And if thereis not the loneliness of the sea in the inland glens that Synge knew sowell, there is in them the equal loneliness of the mountains. It is thiscounty 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. " Andperhaps had not the Abbey Theatre grown to be a theatre for folk-dramaand for poetic drama of court romance alone, Synge would have madeWicklow the background of dramas of a high life of yesterday. Certain itis 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 ownsake, 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 ofwhich the plays grew. In a sense, too, they are a commentary on theplays, and as I have also said a revelation of the playwright. All mustbe read for a thorough understanding of the plays, though these aloneshould be a delight to all, even if they know no more of Ireland thanthat share of human nature which is axiomatically the same in all men ofall races. If you do not read the travel sketches, you may fail to seehow deeply sympathetic Synge is with the Irish peasant, and in nopatronizing way. In "The Aran Islands" he takes the greatest care todisguise the identity of those he knew intimately lest they be pained byanything he wrote of them. No one could write with higher courtesy ofthose whose guest he had been than Synge. You, reading, are made one oftheir home circle, but no family secrets are betrayed. You are madeaware of their weaknesses, but there is never any disloyalty; and alwaysin his records of them their virtues of courage and endurance, ofadaptiveness and simplicity, of family stanchness and communalhelpfulness, outweigh the drunkenness and roguery that one expects fromthe primitive. Synge is, indeed, not only loyal, but full of respect andliking for the Aran Islanders, and of admiration for their richhumanity. 

It was out of his island life and out of his life of the roads, and outof his mood, once he knew his doom, that he made the twenty-two poems ofhis that are retained of a great deal that he had written, most of it inhis younger years. That Synge faced his fate with bravery the triumphanttone of "Deirdre of the Sorrows" that I have instanced is proof, butthere could not but be moments when the thought of death was too instantto be denied. It was in such mood he wrote, either toward the end, or inearlier moments of anticipation of it, "Queens, " "On an Anniversary, ""To the Oaks of Glencree, " "A Question, " and "I've Thirty Months. " Thereis in these verses a certain morbidity, an almost ghoulishness, that isvery seldom present elsewhere in his writing. And yet I may be wrong inattributing it to his certainty of approaching death, for there is amore intense preoccupation with death in the plays of M. Maeterlinck'syouth and a greater ghoulishness in the verse of Mr. Hardy's youth. Itis of Mr. Hardy's verses that one thinks oftenest as one reads theseverses of Synge, and not only because of certain likenesses insubject-matter, but because of the imperfect mastery of both over theverse forms and a certain epigrammatic gnomic quality common to both. The verses of Synge are not relatively so important in comparison withthe rest of his writing as Mr. Hardy's verses are in comparison with therest of his writing, for they are not needed to explain a philosophy oflife as are Mr. Hardy's verses. Fortunately, Synge attempted nophilosophy, had the rare wisdom to rest content with observation. 

In regard to poetry, as to all his art, Synge had, however, definiteviews, 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, asit was the exaltation in living, of change and speed and danger andlove, that meant most to him. He held further that "in these days poetryis usually a flower of evil or good; but it is the timber of poetry thatwears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong rootsamong the clay and worms. " The verse of Synge, as all his art, was sorooted, surely. "Even if we grant, " he continues, "that exalted poetrycan be kept successful by itself, the strong things of life are neededin poetry also, to show that what is exalted or tender is not made byfeeble blood. It may almost be said that before verse can be human againit 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 feltthe call of the road; both loved the changing landscape and the littleadventures of the caravansaries; both loved most of all the men andwomen they met. Once only Synge seems to have forgotten humanity when hetook 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 thoughtof him always returns, and rightly, for it was the road that mostinspired him. It is the memory of the road that most kindles him; and soit is always to the man of the road that he gives his most lyricpassages; or, perhaps, I should say it is the speech that the thought ofthe man of the roads or of the woman of wild heart raises in his mindthat is his most beautiful speech, with the very wildness of thewandering heart in it, and with the long swing that comes, with secondwind, when you have been a day abroad on the road. 

What if the words have now the clauber of the roads upon them, and eventhe muck, and now the reek of the shebeen or of the tinker's fire in aroadside ditch; they have, too, the bog smell, and the smell of thewhin, the smell of ploughed land and of the sea, and they fall intocadences that are cadences of the wind and of the tides, of full riversand clucking streams that sudden rains have filled, as well as thecadences of the voices of boy and girl and they love-making, and of thevoices of the wild folk of the roads coaxing or loudly quarreling, andthe voices of women and men, young and old, lamenting the hard way oflife and of the sorrow that waits for all in the end. Why quarrel withSynge, in short, because his style is of the very essence of life, andof nature, which is the background of life?

To attain a style that is his very self, that is of the very color ofhis life, and of the very color of the extravagant phases of the life ofhis country, to attain a style that embodies all this, and that for thefirst time sets English dramatic prose to a rhythm as noble as therhythm of blank verse, is surely in itself title to greatness. But Syngehas other titles, too. In the few characters that he has created, fortyin all, characters all natively Irish, he has attained universality, because these Irish men and women, Nora and Martin Doul, Sarah Casey andChristy Mahon, Maurya and Deirdre, are so human that they are prototypesof men and women the world over. And of dialogue, where style andcharacterization blend, he has sure control. Each character of the sixgreat characters that I have just mentioned speaks and acts just as sucha character would, and not only these, but every other character thatoccupies the stage for more than a moment. Michael Dara and Timmy theSmith, the Priest or Philly Cullen, Bartley and Owen, each one has anindividuality clearly defined. 

There is less that is great in the structure of his plays than in anyother component of them, but that structure always clearly reveals theaction which arises from the emotion and theme underlying each, --themenacing sea in "Riders to the Sea"; the loneliness of the mountainglens that drives men fey in "The Shadow of the Glen"; the blindness, the blessed self-delusion of mankind, in "The Well of the Saints"; thewildness of the life of the roads that law may not tame, in "TheTinker's Wedding"; the boy's finding of himself through his having tolive up to a community's mistaken ideal of him, in "The Playboy of theWestern World"; and the benison of death that prevents a great love fromdying, in "Deirdre of the Sorrows. "

Always the joy of making something beautiful out of his experience anddream of life is what inspires Synge to write, and though the intentionto read life truly is a passion with him, there is never a suggestion ofdidacticism, or even of moralizing, though "The Well of the Saints" isunquestionably, whether he wills it so or not, a symbol of man'sdiscontent with things as they are, his preference in some things of thelie to the truth. I think that Synge did not will to make "The Well ofthe Saints" a symbol, and that the play was to him but a reading oflife, as life is, in his characteristic, exalted, ironic, extravagantway of writing, and that if he was aware of the symbolism, he was notkeenly aware of it or much interested in it. He gives us life untroubledby 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, notvery easy to define, on which our imaginations live. " His irony, asdesolating to some as the irony of Swift, gives pause to all, as insightalways will, but to me his extravagance is a joy unalloyed, and hisexaltation, so rare a thing in modern literature, should bring to allmen delight and refreshment of spirit. No reading, or seeing andhearing, of his plays leaves me without a feeling of richness orwithout wonder and large content. He gives back my youth to me, both inthe theatre and in my library, and, in the glow that is mine in suchrecapture, I call him the greatest dramatist in English that our stagehas 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 itdeveloping during the slow years from "Riders to the Sea" to "Deirdre ofthe Sorrows. "

CHAPTER VIII

THE YOUNGER DRAMATISTS--MR. PADRAIC COLUM--MR. WILLIAM BOYLE--MR. T. C. MURRAY--MR. S. LENNOX ROBINSON--MR. RUTHERFORD MAYNE--"NORREYSCONNELL"--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 firstpage 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, tothe 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 ofhorses who drove furrows with a tree-knee through primordial mould; andit carries us in imagination back to the man of the Stone Age by way ofmany other ploughmen, by way of the last man we saw betweenplough-handles who appealed to our imagination, a man limned against anApril sky from which the sun had passed to leave all the west thatgold-green that the greatest of Westmoreland dalesmen loved; by way ofthat 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 wayof Tubal Cain, "an artificer in brass and iron, " of the seed of Cain, "atiller of the ground. "

[Illustration]

One wonders is it not of himself that the poet writes, though what hewrites takes us far from him, carrying us in thought halfway round theworld and back through civilizations that have passed. But whether it isof 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 isto-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 tobattle, " but "always fell, " is already passed beyond the sunset, intothe twilight, that twilight that is the time of day so surely symbolicalof the writing of the many Irish poets that have followed after Mr. Yeats. Mr. Colum, however, whether his race be in twilight or sunset, isof the dawn. He is of the dawn not only because he is the youth, atoldest the young man, in his writing, who sees the world freshly andfresh, none the less fresh because he knows it old; but he is of thedawn because it is chiefly those things that are fundamentals, that comeout of the beginnings of things, that interest him profoundly, that stirhim deeply. Subtleties and complexities, decadent things, are not forhim, but simplicities, primordial things, the love of wandering, andwhat is only less old, the love of land; and love of woman. These threethings, and youth, and little else, concern him. Mr. Colum writes, indeed, in the dedication to "Thomas Muskerry" (1910) that he has setdown "three characters that stood as first types in my human comedy, thepeasant, the artist, the official, Murtagh Cosgar, Conn Hourican, Thomas Muskerry. " It is not, however, the official that Mr. Columemphasizes in "Thomas Muskerry, " but the man who longs for a quietlittle place where he may be free from the nagging of his daughter andher children; and in Myles Gorman, in this same play, is sounded thatother call that is recurrent in his work, the call of the road. We seemore of wanderer than of artist, too, in Conn Hourican, though Mr. Columcalls the play he made for him "The Fiddler's House"; and here, too, thelove 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 thelatter's victory. 

Mr. Colum would not be an Irishman if nationality and religion were notalso motives in his plays and poems, but it is only in his 'prenticework that either appears as a leading motive. From a good deal ofwriting, most of which appeared originally in "The United Irishmen, " hehas republished only the three plays before mentioned, "The Land"(1905), "The Fiddler's House" (1907), "Thomas Muskerry" (1910), hismiracle play, "The Miracle of the Corn, " and two stories in "Studies"(1907), and what he wishes to preserve of his verse in "WildEarth" (1909). 

It was through "The Daughters of Erin" that Mr. Colum came in touch withthe dramatic movement. Their plays and tableaux in the Antient ConcertRooms in 1900 attracted his attention, and he wrote to the secretary, inclosing with the note copies of two plays that he had written--thedramatic 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 lesshuman, and about Brian Boru, the high king that beat back the Danes atClontarf. Faery and mediæval history were not destined, however, to beMr. Colum's field, and Mr. Fay, then stage manager of the Associationproductions, probably helped him on the way to his true field, the lifeof the peasant of the Midlands, by declaring them rubbish. Two yearslater Mr. Colum had learned enough about life and about the stage towrite a play against enlistment in the English army that held theattention of audiences and was regarded as good propagandist "stuff. ""The Saxon Shillin', " produced May 15, 1903, Mr. Colum has notrepublished, nor "The Kingdom of the Young" (1902), which like itspredecessor was published in "The United Irishmen. " With this last play, as its title indicates, Mr. Colum found his way to that subject ofyouth, which, whatever other one of his dominant motives his plays mayinvolve, is always present. The hardness of youth is the theme of "TheKingdom of the Young, " the hardness that came into the heart of adaughter, when driven into revolt by the older generation. She turns onher father in the end, determined that she will not be cheated of thejoy of life as was he. 

In "The Foleys, " another little play of the same year, 1902, a play thatfor all its crudity and incompleteness is full of insight into CatholicIreland, youth is again the theme, or the intolerance andself-righteousness of youth. "Eoghan's Wife" (1902) is only a monologue, only the old story of the woman who finds her home lonely anddepressing because the wrong man is the man of the house. She looks outover "brown bogs with black water, " wondering what is the way of escapefrom it all. 

"Broken Soil, " put on at the Abbey Theatre on December 4, 1903, is thefirst play of Mr. Colum with which, in after years, he was in any waycontent, 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 hisimpulse to write, read not only his Ibsen but his M. Maeterlinck. Backof "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 IrishNational Theatre Society in 1904, but so far as I know it was neverplayed by that organization, its first staging I have record of being by"The Theatre of Ireland" at the Abbey Theatre on May 22, 1908. Hereagain is youth a leading theme, the power youth has, if it be wistfuland tender and pleading, to soften the heart of age. It may seem to somethat the girl Aislinn is only a symbol, only the dream of his youthreturned to the farmer Fardorrougha, who has hardened his heart even infamine time, but whether apparition, or child of the flesh and symbol, too, Aislinn is the bringer-back to Fardorrougha of the soft heart ofyouth. 

As the Irishman in America is preferably a city dweller, it may be alittle difficult for his fellow Americans of other ancestry tounderstand why the Irishmen at home were so concerned with Mr. Colum'snext play, whose theme, as whose title, is "The Land. " The cry for ahome and a bit of land, a cottage around a hearth and around thecottage a few acres of your own, is a cry that has been heard in allages 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-lovingeighteenth century raised in all the "Mine be a cot" poems, whether ofPomfret 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 noneof us can feel the call of the land, none of us can desire it with moreintensity than the Irishman of to-day, city-dweller though we find hiskin in America; there is no one class of people anywhere in the worldwho want the land as the Irish peasants of to-day want it. Their fathersand grandfathers saw the fields that they had farmed turned intopastures for cattle, as the Scotch crofters saw their holdings turnedinto deer-parks; the two generations of Irishmen now respectively in oldage and middle age have known what it is to be taxed out of the placestheir improvements as tenants made more valuable; and to-day those ofthe old folk that are still alive and those of the middle years that arestill in Ireland are getting back to the land, along with the youngergeneration that desires it almost as ardently, but were not born uponit, profiting by legislation that compels landlords to sell to theGovernment, which in turn sells to the small proprietors. 

The Irish peasant loves his bit of land far more than his language, andeven more, I think, in the bottom of his heart, than he loves hischurch, although allegiance to his church is a duty that he puts beforeany love. A boreen in bogland is not a lonely place to the Irishpeasant if he have neighbors of long standing. It is the big city thatto him at home seems the lonely place, despite the glamour of itslights, and its shops, and its ceaseless excitements. 

The story of "The Land" is, as I have said, the story of the strugglebetween love of land and the _Wanderlust_, with the love of woman as thedecisive factor in the latter's victory. Matt Cosgar is the son of apeasant farmer, the last of many that the hardness of Murtagh has drivento America, and he, too, goes in the end, after his father's will isbroken, because the girl of his choice is restless and will not becontent as a farmer's wife. Matt and Ellen, the fit and the strong, goto 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 individualizedand show no tendency to harden into types. In "The Land" therestlessness of youth, its call to wander, is the motive that clasheswith 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 andMaire 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 ofher love for Brian McConnell, and gives up her home and takes to theroad with her father partly because she fears her love for her lover, fears her powerlessness with him, it would hardly be in the course ofnature that she would sacrifice so much for her sister. It was a sureinstinct that guided Mr. Colum so to make believable a sacrifice atfirst view seemingly so great. Even in this play, which Mr. Columintends as a study of the artistic temperament, the land is a motivesecond 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 tooloved it in so far as the artist's gypsy nature will permit. It is theroad and his music, however, that Conn cares for most, and in hisexpression of such love he attains to an eloquence that is Mr. Colum athis 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?" Asone reads, aloud, as one must, one thinks now of the Old Testament andnow of Synge. 

Although Mr. Colum determined to put aside thoughts of dramas of oldIreland in 1900, he evidently could not keep the old legends out of hismind. 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 himto turn it into a play. "The Destruction of the Hostel" has not beenpublished, but it seems to have pleased those who saw and heard it asplayed 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 theparting that death brings. Telling the fortunes of poor old ThomasMuskerry, who in the end dies a pauper in the workhouse where once hewas 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 ofthe 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, " thecharacterization 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 theplays of Synge or Lady Gregory is Ireland on the average. CroftonCrilly, the son-in-law of the master, soft and big and blond, is anunsympathetic but memorable portrait. Unsympathetic and memorable, too, are the portraits of his son Albert and his daughter Anna, the onetricky and the other grasping, and the workhouse porter and the oldpiper haunt my memory as strange men I have met haunt my memory, year inand year out. 

All three of these plays are, as I have said, sprung of domesticproblems, sure proof that Mr. Colum is the peasant's son. The family, ashe has pointed out in an article in "The United Irishmen, " is not onlywhat the family is, ordinarily, in northwestern Europe, but that plusthat which the Irish family has inherited of the clan spirit. It wasonly yesterday in Ireland that the girl and boy were married to whomtheir fathers would, by a process of barter in which their own wisheswere not for a moment considered. They submitted, or came to America. Itwas a patriarchal system of society. 

It is not, then, difficult to see how it came about that Mr. Colum, whobegan to write so young, came to write so much about youth and therebellion of youth, and to write about those other themes of his, themesall of them made more intense by the youth that is concerned withthem--the land that obsesses the life of the man of the house allIreland over, and through him obsesses the lives of his family; and loveof woman. 

Mr. Colum does not intrude his own personality into his plays, but it isfelt, as it should be felt, in every one of lyrics. Reading them one hasa sense of a youth like the youth of some characters in his plays; ayouth more manly than Cornelius's, less restless than Ellen's; a youthserious and troubled with thought; a youth in revolt against much in theold order, but tolerant of the passing generation that fears it"knocking at the door. " It is a youth impassioned rather thanpassionate, 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 outlookof the young mind; not radicalism, but a fixed determination to thinkthings out afresh and not to accept them because of any convention. 

Eloquence one always looks for in the writing of an Irishman, and humorand power over dialogue, but Mr. Colum is too serious with youth to caremuch for humor, and, like Mr. Martyn, though not to the same extent, hehas trouble with his dialogue. The feeling for the situation, theunderstanding of what is in the characters' minds, is in Mr. Colum, butthe dialogue does not always accommodate itself to situation andthought. What Mr. Colum makes his characters say has in it the thoughtand the sentiment of what they would say, but the words as often lacklife as have it. It is this difficulty with dialogue that has preventedMr. Colum, in his plays, true and finely planned as they are, fromreaching great achievement. As dramatist he is still more full ofpromise than of achievement, and to be a dramatist of promise after tenyears of playwriting is to be at a standstill. In lyric poetry it isotherwise with Mr. Colum. There he has attained. You will find his realvalue in "Wild Earth" slight though the book may seem. Here is readingof life, here is imagination, here is lyric cry. Read these little poemsonce and they will be your familiars forever. 

MR. WILLIAM BOYLE

One wonders if justice has been done Mr. William Boyle. If it has not itis 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. "FamilyFailings, " produced in the spring of 1912, I have not read, butaccording to all accounts it does not mark any advance upon "The MineralWorkers" or "The Eloquent Dempsey. " "The Mineral Workers, " essentially apropagandist play, and "The Eloquent Dempsey, " essentially a satire, arehardly, even in intention, of the first order of seriousness in art. There are characters in these two plays faithful to human nature, andfaithful to the ways of eastern Galway, where the scenes of all of theplays of Mr. Boyle are laid. But there are so many other characters inthem that are either caricatures or "stock" that, funny as the playsseem upon the stage, they do not impress the deliberate judgment asreal. The many characters of "The Mineral Workers" and its severalmotives are too much for Mr. Boyle; he loses his grip and the playfalls to pieces. "The Eloquent Dempsey" suffers from the caricaturing ofits characters, and its action degenerates into unbelievable farcealmost on the curtain-rise. "The Building Fund, " however, is serious andtrue, and at the same time just as full of wit and just as biting insatire and just as effective on the stage as "The Eloquent Dempsey. " Itscharacterization is recognized as distinctive and authentic even onreading. Revealed through the almost perfect work of the players trustedwith its presentation by the Abbey Theatre on their American tour of1911-12, it seemed even more than distinctive and authentic, it seemedinspired by profound insight. 

"The Building Fund" tells the story of the outgeneraling of grasping sonand conniving daughter's daughter by a hard old woman of the strongfarmer class in the west of Ireland. Mrs. Grogan is approached as thecurtain rises by Michael O'Callaghan, an elderly farmer, and DanMacSweeney, a young farmer, in the rôle of collectors for the fund forthe new Catholic church. They are sent away by her and by her son Shanwithout any contribution, but their visit suggests to her a way by whichshe can disinherit her son and her granddaughter, wishful for her death, she thinks, in their eagerness for her fortune. Shan is open in hisconcern as to her disposal of her money; and although the girl hides herpurpose under pretended solicitude for her grandmother's health and is agreat help to the old woman, Mrs. Grogan believes her also to beplotting for the fortune and is equally resentful toward both. So whenthe 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 herfamily to the church. For all their plotting, the audience feels thatthe old woman is more malevolent than either son or granddaughter, and, after all, the son had worked hard on the home place and thegranddaughter, slyboots as she was, undoubtedly was really kind. Bothare of her blood, and it is human to feel that parents should leavetheir money to their children rather than to charity. There is someamelioration of the condition of Shan and Sheila in the thought thatthey may stay on, with Father Andrew's permission, as managers of theold farm, henceforth the church farm. But sympathize with them thoughyou may, you feel it is only right that selfishness should over-reachitself. 

The play is not any more complimentary to Catholic Galway than "TheDrone" of Mr. Mayne is complimentary to Protestant Down, but it isseldom that comedy is complimentary to human nature, and "The BuildingFund" is comedy. That is, it is comedy as Ibsen sees drama, or characterfarce as Coleridge defines it. It is, in the Greek sense, perhaps eventragedy; certainly, it is tragedy from the standpoint of Shan andSheila, for circumstances certainly get the better of them. From Mrs. Grogan's standpoint it is comedy, for she, through her will, even thoughshe is now dead, has got the better of circumstances as represented bythe plotting of her son and granddaughter. If we look at "The BuildingFund" from the standpoint of Shan and Sheila, but without sympathy forthem, it is only character farce, for although circumstances get thebetter of them, we do not then care for them, and a play in whichcharacters are overwhelmed by fate, but in which our sympathy is notwith them, is, if we follow Coleridge, really farce. Whatever "TheBuilding Fund" is, its characterization is admirable. Some might say itsmen and women approximate to types, that Mrs. Grogan is the avariciousold woman, Shan the sanctimonious miser, Sheila the sly minx, Michaelthe benevolent old man, and Dan the gay blade. Types or not, you willfind all of them in Ireland, and all of them wherever human nature ishuman nature. If they are types, however, each has a personality, butwhether all of them would stand out with such individuality had one notseen 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 thatthey are fatter parts than Sheila, Michael O'Callaghan, and DanMacSweeney, 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 charactersin modern English comedy. And you may have to go further afield thanmodern English comedy to find such a minute study of resentful andmalevolent age as this portrait of Mrs. Grogan. We all know thatperversity that will not allow its possessor to be satisfied with anyeffort to please. Here is an illustration of it as Mr. Boyle has seenit:--

 _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, thepicturesque phrase that no Irish writer is without is Mr. Boyle's, as amatter of course, but there is no particular individuality in hishandling of it. Style he has not, nor any background of romance, orbeauty of that sort that illumines the grayness of the comedies ofIbsen, or of any other sort of beauty than that approach to beauty thereis in skilled craftsmanship. 

Admirably arranged, too, are the situations of "The Eloquent Dempsey, " asatire on the man who straddles all questions, as at one time, at anyrate, did so many Irish politicians. Dempsey might have continued hiscareer of straddling indefinitely had he not a mania for speech-makingthat he could not control. In the end, however, he was undone by awell-intentioned conspiracy, arranged by his wife, to get him out ofpolitics altogether and out of his liquor-selling and into farming farfrom town. I cannot identify Dempsey with any one prominent Irishstatesman, but the lesser fry on both Nationalist and Unionist sides areas easy to identify as the men that suggested the characters of "A Taleof a Town. " In "The Eloquent Dempsey" all the art of Mr. Boyle has beenlavished on the central figure, which, when all is said, remains acaricature, and caricature uncompensated for by any great or noblecharacteristic of the play, whose primal quality is but cleverness. Effective as its satire is, and provocative of laughter as it always ison the stage, it is altogether cheaper in its quality than "The BuildingFund. "

"The Mineral Workers, " with its chief portrait that of a returnedIrish-American mining engineer, takes us to certain phases of societynot met among the publicans and politicians and peasants of Mr. Boyle'searlier 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'sGeorgianna Tidman. Dan Fogarty, the holdback, unprogressive farmer, isthe sharpest-cut and truest to life of all the characters, so clear-cutand true, in fact, that one thinks of him as almost a fellow of ShanGrogan in "The Building Fund. " Uncle Bartle is sentimentalized, andKitty Mulroy has no such personality as Sheila O'Dwyer. Contrast "TheMineral 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 tenyears earlier, it is of course beside the point to speculate. He was nota young man when he first became acquainted with the art of the AbbeyTheatre 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 thestage in "The Building Fund. " That being so, why is it that his laterplays, successful though they have been as vehicles for the purveying ofamusement on the stage, have not taken rank by their art or by theirreading of life with "The Building Fund "? It may be that it was the onetheme susceptible of dramatic presentation that he had brooded over longenough to transmute into terms of drama, and that the later plays, fullof successful stage tricks though they are, did not come out of hisknowledge of Irish life. Knowledge of Ireland he ought to have, for heis said to have lived for comparatively long periods in various placesin country as an excise officer. As such Mr. Boyle was himself one ofthe principal types, that of the official, that exist in Ireland, and ina position to learn much of many other types, surprisingly few of whichhe has realized with any depth of insight in his plays. 

It would seem with his great success seven years back and his newerplays less effective, that we cannot look to Mr. Boyle with great hopefor 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 untilshe was close on fifty. 

MR. T. C. MURRAY

The North is generally held to be another country than the rest ofIreland. Ulster is alien alike in race and religion and economicconditions from Connacht and Leinster and Munster. It is Scotch Ireland, Protestant Ireland, industrial Ireland. It is, moreover, --many of itscitizens say therefore, --prosperous Ireland. Certainly men would notdivide all Irishmen into "Irishmen" and "Scotch Irishmen" were there notmany grounds for such a distinction. All other of the immigrants intoIreland have, as a people, disappeared. The Norman has left his mark onthe land in his castles and his names, but as a distinctive element ofthe population he no longer exists, any more than does Welshman orEnglishman or Palatinate. Apart from distinctions of class the men ofIreland are "Irishmen" and "Scotch Irishmen, " and until yesterday, therefore, Nationalists and Unionists. 

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And yet, definite as are these distinctions, life in the various partsof Ireland seems much alike, class for class, as it is represented bythe many contemporaneous playwrights, whether the scenes of their playsare Down or Kerry, Galway or Wicklow. A tinker is a tinker wherever youfind him, a strong farmer a strong farmer, a landlord a landlord. Thesame emotions dominate rival brothers in "The Turn of the Road" and in"Birthright, " though the Orangeman turned actor wrote the one and theCork 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 allthat I learn from the references to it in newspapers is that it is aone-act ironic comedy about matchmaking. Mr. Murray brought his nextplay, "Birthright, " to the Abbey Theatre, where it was performed onOctober 27, 1910. If "Maurice Harte" (1912) stands the test of time andtravel as has "Birthright, " Mr. Murray has come to the Abbey Theatre totake 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, astory that is as lasting in its appeal as is "The Eternal Triangle, " butthere is as much appeal in the characterization, which you feel as youread almost as intimately as you come to know it on the stage. There aremany plays that are altogether colorless in the reading unless you haveunusual power of visualization and can see them as you sit in your studyas if they were embodied before you on the stage. Such plays, visualized or unvisualized in the study, are often real enough on thestage. "Birthright, " as I have said, is not one of these. It visualizesitself for you, with no effort on your part, as you read it, though ofcourse, as every real play will, it moves you more in the playing. Itwas admirably cast on its first production at the Abbey Theatre, and itwas just as admirably cast on the American tour of 1911-12, MissO'Doherty's Maura and Mr. Morgan's Bat Morrissey being wonderfulpictures of a doting mother and a stern father troubled by theirpreferences, the one for the elder, the other for the younger son. Therival sons were done to the life by Mr. O'Donovan and Mr. Kerrigan, andthe neighbor of Mr. O'Rourke was, too, a complete realization of theIrish peasant of the valley of the Lee. It is a stern and patientrealism this of Mr. Murray in telling of how Hughie, the elder son, theapple 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 disinheritedand condemned to seek his fortune in America by his father because hisyounger son was the better man on the farm. There was back of Bat'sdecision, 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 thesporting gentleman. The end of it all is murder, the younger son killingthe elder with the hurly when he is accused by his brother of plottingto grab the farm. Many who saw "Birthright" in America were moved by itmore than by any other play in the repertoire of the company, and Ihave heard more than one whose supreme interest is the theatre say thatit was the best play new to America presented in America during thewinter 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 of1911-12, and "The Playboy of the Western World" was new to every city inAmerica save to Chicago, where Mr. Hart Conway presented it at hisdramatic school in the spring of 1909. I can, however, understand why"Birthright" so appealed. It is because of the theme, because of thebeautiful character of Maura Morrissey, because of the absolutefaithfulness to life, as all the world knows it, of the play. I havetraveled the road to Macroom that these farmers traveled, and so I knowthe externals of the life they lead: I have known intimately and I knowintimately just such people as these, Irish peasants, some of whomspoiled their children, thinking the boy they loved must not be"crossed, " and some of whom preferred one child to another even to theextent of reversing the custom of primogeniture that is as fixed a ruleamong them as if their property was entailed, and so I can vouch for theabsolute fidelity of Mr. Murray's art. It is a realism little relievedby humor; unrelieved either by any background of romance, but gaming adignity from its intensity of conception and its simplicity of unfoldingthat makes you feel, as you read, or as you watch and listen, that youare in the presence of nobility. Its style, maybe, is homespun, but itis none the worse for that, and it never approaches at all to the cheapor mean. 

The appeal of this realism is as poignant in "Maurice Harte" (1912) asin "Birthright, " though the story of the later play is not so universalas is that of the play that brought Mr. Murray his share of fame. "Maurice Harte" tells of the disaster that comes to a young divinitystudent of Maynooth whose parents drive him back to college to seekordination even after he tells them that he has no vocation for thepriesthood. The curtain rises on Maurice, a youth of twenty-two, tryingto tell his mother, whose youngest he is, and the child of her middleage 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 triedto confess his agony because of his false position, and he finally begsthe Parish Priest to break the desolating news to the family. They areonly farmers in a small way, the Hartes: and the father and mother, theson at home, Owen, and the three older brothers in Boston, have all madesacrifices to give Maurice his education. When the priest tells of theboy's decision not to return to Maynooth, mother and father and brotherall insist that he must stick to his earlier intention, vocation or novocation. 

They are in monetary difficulties because of him, and if the story wentout that he was not back at Maynooth his mother declares it "wouldn't beeast in Macroom when we'd have the bailiffs walking in that door. " Shetells him, too, his being a spoiled priest will cost his brother hisbride and her fortune that would help them to pay off their debts. Theboy cannot withstand their pleading, and the first act ends with hispromise that he will go back to Maynooth, a promise wrung from him eventhough he knows at the time of its making that his return may bring himto madness in the end. 

Act II, nine months later, shows us again the kitchen of the farmhouseof West Cork, with happiness in the hearts of all there, save someslight apprehension on the father's part over his new clothes and theterrors of a journey with Father Mangan to Maynooth. In this relaxing ofthe tension of the play humor is not out of place, and its attainmenthere by Mr. Murray shows that he could write comedy did he choose. Wehear that the marriage settlement between Bride Burke and Owen has beenmade, and that Maurice is to marry them; and that he has bested all hisclassmates in his final examinations. Upon the pride and happiness in ason 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 hecannot be ordained because of illness. And close upon this bad newscomes Maurice himself, broken down mentally from the strain of drivinghimself to do what he knows to be wrong, from the strain of committing, as he believes, sacrilege. Father and mother and brother realize that itis they who have driven him mad, but such is human nature that motherand brother, at least, have thoughts of themselves even at this moment, as well as thoughts for Maurice with "his mind that's gone. " His brotherfears that Bride will not come into a house so disgraced, and hismother, 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 fromthis out. 

The full significance of the tragedy of Maurice's fate can be realizedonly by those who know intimately the ambitions hugged close to heart bythe Irish Catholic mother. It is more to her to have her boy a priesteven than it was yesterday to the Scotch Presbyterian mother to have herboy a minister of the Kirk. It is the greatest glory that can come tosuch 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 apropagandist satire as Mr. Robinson's "Harvest. " It is not educationthat is the curse, however, in "Maurice Harte, " but the belief that onlypriesthood in the end can justify the sacrifices without which a collegeeducation is almost impossible for an Irish peasant. Certain it is thatit is only for the pride of having their boy a priest that the typicalIrish Catholic peasant parents would make such sacrifices as the Harteshave made, sacrifices involving them in debt to the extent of a thousanddollars, to secure their son an education. 

In a sense "Maurice Harte" is far other than the provincial study I havehere outlined. Its theme is allied, unquestionably, to that theme somuch larger in its relations than that of the spoiled priest, the themeof the rebellious son, the son who will live his own life no matter whatmay be his parents' will. It is only allied to it, however, not to beidentified with it, because Maurice is too fearful of disappointing hisparents, and too shrinking and ineffectual, to go against his parents'will. In Ireland, as I have said elsewhere, such parental will, by asurvival of authority from the days of the clan system, was law untilyesterday, and there will therefore be those, I have no doubt, who willfind in the play a conflict of the old order and the new, but I do notbelieve such conflict was the author's intent. Indeed, the play iswholly of the old order. No love of man and woman figures as motive init as none had figured in "Birthright. " There is parental love, ofcourse, in both plays, though in the case of both parents in "MauriceHarte" and in the father in "Birthright" parental pride is a strongermotive than parental love. Very true to Irish life is this absence ofpassion as a deciding factor in the fates of man and woman, thisinsistence upon the importance of the family, this subordination of therights 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 haswritten, a play that marks no decline, either in characterization orsituation, 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, haschosen to write about the ground under his feet. The son of a clergymanwhose charges have been in the southwest of Ireland, Mr. Robinson spenthis boyhood and youth in the Bandon Valley. He had been trying his handat writing from the time that he was ten years old, editing an amateurmagazine 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 sawa new acting, he saw a new art of the stage, and he knew as he saw thatit was in drama his work lay. It was not, however, for the Cork DramaticSociety that he did his first play, but for the Abbey Theatre. "TheClancy Name" was put on on October 8, 1908, when its author was but fourdays past his twenty-second birthday. What this first version was like Ido not know, but Mr. Robinson has reprinted the second version, put onwith the full strength of the National Theatre Society at the AbbeyTheatre 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 onwhich she pays off a five years' loan and stands without a debt of anykind, her farm all her own, the Clancy name respected throughout herworld. But on this day of her triumph, when she would add to herhappiness 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 isthe man who killed James Power, a quiet man whose unexplaineddisappearance is the mystery of the countryside. Worse yet, John insiststhat he will give himself up to the authorities. It is terrible to knowone's son a murderer; it is intolerable to think of a Clancy beinghanged and of the glory of the name forever departed. She persuades himfinally not to tell, but he fears he will, so, when the chance comes, hefinds the only way out, the way of peace for his mother and peace forhimself. A car driven by a drunken neighbor is threatening the life of alittle child playing in the middle of the road. John Clancy pushes himout of the way and allows himself to be driven down. They bring him tohis 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. Itis not a very gripping theme, but the play brings to us an acutecharacter study of the typical managing woman of the small farmer class. We feel her tireless energy, her drive, her high pride, assets of worthin the fight to live. There is a little humor, natural and unforced, some picturesqueness of phrase, a revelation of knowledge of life in onecorner of Ireland. There is nothing, however, in the play to make itcomparable with the three that followed it on the stage of the AbbeyTheatre, "The Crossroads" (1909); "Harvest" (1910); and "Patriots"(1912). "The Lesson of Life, " a little one-act comedy, presented at theDun Theatre, Cork, December 2, 1909, Mr. Robinson has disowned. Why I donot know, though the fact that it was not produced at the Abbey mayindicate that even at the time of its production he felt that it was notup to the level of his work. Mr. Robinson has not republished "TheLesson of Life, " but the reviews state that it was an amusing littleplay, though in no way a serious reading of life. 

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"The Clancy Name, " "The Crossroads, " "Harvest, " and "Patriots" are allon themes that hit home at Irish institutions, and yet it would be wrongto say any one of them is basically either satirical or propagandist. All are primarily readings of life. "The Crossroads" alone, perhaps, ismore than a reading of life. Certainly, after its needless prologue, itis fine art through to the end. This scene, with its satire of Irishdebating societies, is now, wisely, dropped when the play is produced. We can learn enough of Ellen in the play itself to understand why shedoes as she does without this picture of her in Dublin. Her story isthat of a woman who hates the much talk of patriotism in Dublin and thelack of doing anything tangible for Ireland. In Dublin she has workedher way up from servant to assistant in a bookshop, but she goes backhappily to the country to give her sister a chance in town such as shehas had, thinking that perhaps she herself can lead her people intobetter ways of farming and of ordering their lives generally through theknowledge she has got in town. It is through such as Ellen that theIrish Industries Organization Society in actual life accomplishes animportant part of its work. 

In the first act of "The Crossroads" we find Ellen at home, in her oldpeasant dress, having made the hens lay so well in winter as to arousewonder in a neighbor as to whether, "Is it right for hens to be layingthat way so early in the year?" A match is being made for her by hermother with a man that has a good farm. Ellen desires the match verymuch, for this is just the farm on which to try the new methods thatshall bring prosperity to the people of the valley and so stem theemigration to America. She does not love Tom Dempsey, this strongfarmer, and she does half-love Brian Connor, whom she had known inDublin, but now that he has come down to ask her to marry him shechooses the farmer, brutal though she knows him, because as his wife shecan do the work for Ireland that she has imagined for herself. Theloveless marriage, so universal an institution all over Ireland, made itnothing out of the way for Ellen to act as she did, even though at thetime of the action of the play a higher ideal of marriage than that ofthe old matchmaking had come in. It is this institution that Mr. Robinson, from one point of view, might be thought to be attacking inthe play; it is this institution, certainly, that is the theme of theplay. Is it a tribute to Irishmen and Irishwomen to acknowledge thatthis loveless marriage has worked on the whole as well as the marriageof sentiment, or as the marriage of sexual infatuation, or as themarriage of comrade hearts that we believe we have in America? As amatter of fact there were not as many loveless marriages as might seemat first thought. The match made up between the father of the girl andthe father of the boy was the usual sort of marriage among thestay-at-home Irish girls and boys up to 1880, but how many girls andboys for the past one hundred and fifty years have come to America toescape it? Look up your family traditions, you who have Irish ancestors, and find is it not true that these ancestors, whether Reeds of Down orNolans of Meath, fled to America because they would wed the mate oftheir 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 israther Eldorado than the land of freedom. 

Act II reveals poor Ellen seven years later. She has lost her two boysby fever; she has failed in her work on her own farm, though she hasbrought untold blessings of progressiveness to the other farms aroundBallygurteen; she has lost the appreciation of her husband. She whom weloved for a personality as winning as that of an Emma or a Tess is nowa drudge, almost a slattern, gray-haired, hopeless, almost hated by abrutal husband. The loveless marriage has proved a curse. Upon the womanof his dreams so dethroned comes Brian Connor, now a successfulnovelist, and, finding how things are, falls, for all his intendedrestraint, into a fight with Tom, whom but for Ellen he would havechoked to death. Brian urges Ellen to go away with him, but, after amoment's faltering, she refuses to go. This is the last scene. Tom, whohas heard Brian's proposal and his wife's rejection of it, comes slowlydown 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 brutalityunimaginable 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, ofcourse, than poor John Clancy, who killed a man in an unpremeditatedfight, sure murderer though Clancy be. Yet despite such heroes or atleast such characters in his plays, no one would say that in either "TheClancy Name" or "The Crossroads" Mr. Robinson held a brief against theIrish peasant. He most certainly does not. He likes the Irish peasant. His plays are "stories of mine own people" faithfully told. He does notspare 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 beexplained only by recognition of the fact that the Irishmen of thepatriotic societies are slaves of precedent. "The Playboy of the WesternWorld" had always met with opposition, so it should meet with oppositionin New York. "Harvest" escaped in New York because its uncomplimentarypersonages were unheralded. Not that there is anything in "Harvest, " anymore than in "The Playboy of the Western World, " that anyself-respecting Irishman need object to. "Harvest" shows the disastrouseffects the wrong sort of primary education, as taught by the countryschoolmaster of the old type, the type that was prevalent before thepresent type, brought about. The present-day schoolmaster is in sympathywith system of education that will keep the children on the land or inan industry near the home place; the older type would give them aneducation that would send them to the cities to be priests and lawyersand secretaries and typists and chemists and what-nots. Old WilliamLordan, the schoolmaster, had, evidently, in the opinion of theplaywright, the sins of many on his shoulders, and yet one, knowing thatit is the system and not the man that is at fault, cannot help feelingthat Mr. Robinson is rather severe on what is in life a really lovablethough mistaken sort of man. 

"Harvest" shows that of the six children of Tim Hurley, but the threethat come into the play are loyal to their father: Maurice, who worksthe home farm; Jack, the apothecary's clerk from Dublin, who tries tohelp with the farmwork, but is too much of a weakling to be anything ofa 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 calledback to London by the excitement of its life, which has become anecessity to her. Jack, the chemist, in the end deserts the home; and isoff at the end of the play, with his upper-class wife, for America orthe 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 thetime of his family's need, and so is not helpful to his family; thesolicitor son is climbing socially, and, needing a motor-car to help himto position, prefers to spend his money on himself rather than on thehome place that was robbed to pay for his education; and the secretaryson is so ashamed of "the ditch out of which he was digged" that he haschanged both his name and his religion. 

All five of the children who went out from the home educated, as theschoolmaster wished them to go, have been educated at the expense ofthose that remained on the farm, Maurice the hard-working farmer and oldTimothy the father. But the father, too, is far from what he should be, as one must suspect, not believing that education alone can account forso many gone wrong. Timothy burns down some unimportant farm buildingsfor the insurance upon them. This practice is so common in all parts ofthe world civilized sufficiently to have insurance that I wonderinsurance companies take risks on backwoods farms anywhere. An old manwith whom I have talked often in the mountains of northeasternPennsylvania answered me one day, when I asked him how it was his barncaught fire, "The insurance got too hot. " He was a German, a man in hisprime a good worker and not a bad representative of the mountaineer ofhis state. One must not, then, fasten on old Timothy as a characterdistinctively Irish, at least in this phase of his character. He surelyis universal, a representative of one type of disingenuous countryman. 

The characterization in "Harvest" falls short of that of "TheCrossroads, " but perhaps it had to be if Mr. Robinson was to make hispoint. As one realizes that perhaps these people are but pawns withwhich to win the game that Mr. Robinson has set out, one remembers thattheir creator spent some weeks with Mr. Shaw and Mr. Barker in London, and one understands, too, many other of the failings of "Harvest. " It isbut another of many illustrations of the blight that Mr. Shaw hasbrought 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 politicalleagues, an agitation that is talk only, and at the same time cuts withalmost equal sharpness into the physical force party. It is true that itis not the motives but the wisdom of these latter men that Mr. Robinsonsatirizes in the failure of James Nugent, the returned politicalprisoner, to stir his townsmen with the kind of talk that set them toarming in 1893. That their propaganda is no longer possible, if it wasever possible, is a corollary to the play, even if it could overcome theinertia that has come to Irishmen with their greater prosperity sincethe Land Purchase Act went into force. 

The revolt of the patriot who hates talk and is willing to sacrificepersonal happiness for country is recorded here as it was in "TheCrossroads, " and the uselessness of the sacrifice made only too plain. To one not an Irishman it would perhaps seem that the real drama thereis in the play is smothered by the political satire and that thepolitics satirized are of too local an interest for it to have souniversal an appeal as "The Crossroads" or "Harvest. " There is anuniversal story in "Patriots" that is but slightly developed--the storyof the prisoner's wife, Ann; her love for her daughter, who is a cripplebecause of her mother's being dragged here and there by James Nugent inhis campaigning just before her birth; Ann Nugent's turning against herhusband, on his liberation from an eighteen years' imprisonment forpolitical murder, because of the wrong done her so long ago and becauseof the danger to Rose's health that campaigning with her father wouldentail. The turning of Ann Nugent from her husband is the reallysignificant part of the play, --and in thoughts of that we pay scant heedto the political satire and even to the pathos of the desertion of aleader by almost all he expected to follow him, and the reduction of hislife, as he puts it bitterly, "to an anecdote--a thing to be toldstories about. " And in the end that is the fate he will meet. Time and awife that he wronged have broken him. As he staggers off at the end ofthe play, a stricken man and older than his forty-five years, this ishis 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 Irishlife, and with the years bringing him an experience of life that willdominate any propagandist purpose, Mr. Robinson should grow inseriousness of intention and accomplishment. He hates sham, he has saneand cleansing satire of pretension, he writes good dialogue, hisexperience as stage manager of the Abbey Theatre is teaching him thestage; 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 WingPinero. All the world has heard of the one; only the little bandscattered here and there through the English-speaking countries to whomletters 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 allthat gush of spirits that was hers; I thought of Miss Nethersole in herwonderful youth playing Paula Tanqueray; and as I thought of these two, each in her way inimitable in her part, thoughts of past moments withthe characters of Mr. Mayne's plays, plays I have never seen on thestage, came back to me. Had I seen them on the stage would my thoughtsof them have been thoughts of the theatre, as were all my thoughts ofSir Arthur's plays? It may be, but I think not, I think the greatstrength of Mr. Mayne is that he takes you to life; I think the greatweakness of the wide-heard author is that he takes you immediately, inalmost all of his plays, to the theatre, and only secondarily, if atall, after the memory of his artificiality has died away, to lifeitself. 

William John Granahan and John Smith the Tory, --will you forget them, orRobbie John whom the fiddle called away, or Ebenezer McKie and FranceyMoore, Protestant and Catholic, who together lay in wait for the hatedlandlord 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, forthey are from life; you have known them, all save Francey, if you haveknown Scotchmen who are Lowlanders and Presbyterians, or such North ofIreland men as are unalterably opposed to Home Rule. They are very likethe Orangemen of the novels of Mr. Shan Bullock, very like the peasantsthe English-speaking world outside of Scotland first met in the verse ofBurns; harsher than the Baillie Nicol Jarvies and Dugald Dalgettys ofthe kindly Sir Walter, but akin to them and to his Davie Deans andDumbiedikeses. 

We are in a more familiar world in the plays of Mr. Mayne than in thoseof most of the other writers in the movement--that is, I mean mostAmerican readers are--simply because of Burns and Scott. Had Ireland hada peer of either in his generation as satirist or romancer theIrish-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 arenot, however, of types so well known to us as are the men, because thechivalry of Sir Walter prevented him from giving us his peasantScotswomen in as full detail as he gave us his men; but it is notdifficult for us to appreciate Mrs. Granahan and her daughter; Mrs. McKie, a "woman with a dead soul"; Mary Murray with her daftness overthe boys; and even Sarah McMinn, so true in her managing and meanness, qualities necessary to the prosperity of her folk. Puritan America canunderstand these women and men because they are Puritan, too, with theignoble that is in the Puritan as well as with the noble that is just assurely there. 

It is in the first three plays of Mr. Mayne that we meet these people Ihave named, County Down folk all of them, and all Protestant but FranceyMoore. They are the leading characters in "The Turn of the Road" (1906), "The Drone" (1908), and "The Troth" (1908). The motive of Mr. Mayne'sfirst 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 whosedaughter he wished to marry, is driven out into the world to try hisfortune with another through her determination that her lover shouldfollow his star. There is more beauty in "The Turn of the Road" than ineither of the other plays of the North of Ireland, more beauty of theme, more beauty of thought, more beauty of expression. Its themes are notnew, _Wanderlust_ and the Puritans' hatred of art; its thoughts are notnew, but they are beautiful, and the words themselves are freshly used. Its phrases that hold in memory are given to Robbie John and to hisfather and to his grandfather, most of them to the grandfather. This isthe grandfather's lament for the boy gone on the roads with his fiddleand 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 beautypossible to such a subject realistically treated as that of the exposureof the utter sham that is the pretended inventor of a bellows, a man whohas for years fattened on a brother's tolerance and family pride. Theremight have been beauty of construction, but dramatic construction is notMr. Mayne's strongest quality. Let that not be held too much againsthim, for many an English dramatist, like almost every English novelist, is weak in the architectonic qualities of his work. Yet such is thehardness of the people that exposed Daniel Murray that you rejoice inhis duping of them at the end through his sale to them of his pretendedinvention, especially as that frees his brother John, and John'sdaughter, artful coax that she is, from Sarah McMinn, who is determinedto marry the one and manage the two. The ideals of the people of theplay and the grim humor of Mr. Mayne are well illustrated by thisdeclaration of John Murray, the best of them all, anent the suit forbreach of promise with which Sarah threatens him: "I would as soon dowithout the marrying if I could. I don't want the woman at all, but I'llmarry 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'swork. All that differentiates them from the Fermanagh Protestants is thedifferent conditions of County Down and a slightly lower socialposition. 

In "The Troth" the theme is the shooting of a landlord by two peasantswhom his agents are to evict on the morrow. To the cottage of theProtestant McKie comes his Catholic neighbor, Francey Moore, whose wifeis dying. Here there is no turf for the fire, and no hope in the heartof father or mother, for the child of the house has died, and, theythink, because of the landlord's hardness to them. The two men swear atroth that they shall lie in wait for Colonel Fotheringham, and that ifbut one escapes, as is likely, the one arrested shall hold his tongue asto his companion. You do not see the murder on the stage, but you hearthe shot and see McKie return to his home, and you know it was he killedthe landlord. The tension of the last scene is almost unendurable. Hiswife's providential lie for McKie, her agony in her knowledge of hisguilt when she sees his face on his return, the man's terror, arehandled with masterly firmness and sureness. To see this scene on thestage 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 livesof small farmer and his wife, his farmhand and his neighbor, a neighborof alien race and hated faith, you get to know them as if they werefriends of long standing. Character creation and character presentationin pithy, tense dialogue are the great gifts of Mr. Mayne. FranceyMoore, the "dark man, " with his sensibility, his eloquence, and hisflaming rage, is not of the characteristic men of Mr. Mayne. They aremen of slow ways all un-Celtic and with smouldering hearts like thoseof the Northmen we read about in the tales of "Origines Islandicæ. "

In "Red Turf" (1911) Mr. Mayne turns away from County Down to the Galwaybogs, admirably symbolizing the hot land feud between neighbors in histitle. There are but five characters in the play, Martin Burke, farmer, and his spitfire of a wife; and his neighbors the Flanagans, father andson, 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 husbanduntil he shoots the elder Flanagan as he is working away on the "greatstone bank. " It was not his own gun Burke had, but, ironically, it wasone just brought to his house by the poor old man whom they had oftenbefriended, John Heffernan, brought that it might not be found in hishouse by the gauger, and he unable to pay the license. It is not madeclear that there was malevolence in the leaving of the gun at the Burkesby 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 toold Granahan is Uncle Bartle of "The Mineral Workers" of Mr. Boyle. Synge records old men of prophecy and tales in his travel sketches, buthe put none such who were gentle in his plays, or I would say thatGrandfather Granahan, like the old gaffer in Mr. Masefield's "Nan, " wasa part of the influence of Synge that is felt by both Mr. Masefield andMr. Mayne. Their styles, respectively, in "Nan" and "Red Turf, " have inthem more than echoes of the style of Synge. The "wambling" old men ofMr. 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" tothe action of the play, but there is no one of them that is in the storyor play in which he appears on such grounds only. There are, of course, old men everywhere, in all life they are an integral part, andeverywhere they are commentators on life once they feel that their dayis done, spectators of a pageant from the forefront of which they havedropped to watch the following troupe pass by. 

There is little mating in these plays of Mr. Mayne, and love of womanworthy of the name of love only in "The Turn of the Road"; there isparental love, too, but perhaps more of parental tyranny. Such parentallove as there is, however, actually expressed, makes one of thememorable passages of Mr. Mayne. Mary Burke, after taunting her husbandto madness, tries to turn him from murder when she sees him, gun inhand, by crying: "For the love of God, would you leave it down. Leave itdown and go in and look at the child sleeping. It would take the badnessfrom 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 Syngewho has taught him how to listen to it. There is little of theinfluence of Synge in his three plays of the Black North, but when heturns to Galway in "Red Turf, " it is but natural that, writing of otherthan his own people, he should write in a speech that has in it an echoof that of him who has transmuted this speech into prose of the mostbeautiful rhythm that English dramatic prose has known. The Bible is thebook of books in Ulster, and there is no page of Mr. Mayne's Ulsterplays but shows him acquainted with its great rhythms. Mr. Boyle, skillful artificer of situation, and truthful depicter of character thathe is, and Mr. Colum, too, for all his closeness to the earth, are nowand then betrayed, Mr. Boyle more often than now and then, into theEnglish of the newspaper or of the public speaker; but the English ofMr. Mayne is all but always an unworn English, an English used freshly, or if with reminiscences in it, reminiscences of the seventeenth-centuryEnglish that has survived in the Bible or in the memory of the folk fromthe time of King James. 

Mr. Mayne has, then, style, and his dialogue is living speech; he hasknowledge of the people of North Ireland, earnestness and sincerity; andhaving these qualities, he has more that is precious to art than havemost of the dramatists his countrymen. There is no consistent reading oflife in his plays, no great power over the unrolling of plot, butperhaps these will come with the years. An actor himself, he knows thestage; and this knowledge has given him power over situation. Once helearns to lead situation into situation, once he ripens into fullerknowledge 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 whohave 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 ofthe world and do a play for Dublin out of a sense of duty It was thusthat "John Bull's Other Island" came into being, but that play, beingconsidered "beyond the scope" of the National Theatre Society, was notproduced 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 OtherIsland" was in the Abbey tradition, with moral purpose and unhumanity ofits very essence, it was at least a newspaper leader on an Irishsubject, but "The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet, " a sort ofsentimentalized travesty of Bret Harte preaching the usual Shavianevangel, has no more relation to Irish life than it has to literature. It marred the repertoire the Abbey Company brought to America, as woulda 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 ofPlayboy-like quality on its presentation on February 13, 1908. It is avery obvious allegory, outlining under guise of an incident of '98 theweaknesses of contemporaneous Ireland, its love of talk; its lack ofhold-together; its refusal to see things as they are; its incapacity inpractical matters; the reckless temper of this faction of its people, the subjection to clerical influence of that, the suicidal patriotism ofa third; in short, the Celts' willful rebellion against the despotism offact. It was not pleasant listening to, or seeing, "The Piper, " to manygroups of Irishmen, for it cut alike at the Parliamentary Nationalists, the Sein Feiner, and the shoneen. Even though one admires the courage ofthe Piper and Black Mike, one realizes the futility of both, and ofLarry the Talker, Tim the Trimmer, and Pat Dennehy, all typical of toomany men in Ireland to be endurable to the usual theatre audience. Thereis a white heat of feeling, however, under the play that to some degreemakes one forget its rather indifferent writing, its failure to attaintrue dramatic speech, its obviousness as of a morality play. 

Another little drama of Mr. O'Riordan, "Time, " is almost a moralityplay. It was produced shortly after its author became director of theAbbey Theatre, succeeding Mr. Synge in the spring of 1909. Mr. O'Riordandoes not include "Time" among the plays of his volume of 1912, "Shakespeare's End, and Other Irish Plays, " but one cannot but feelthere was room for it there, if there was room for the play that givestitle to the volume. "Shakespeare's End, " however, was doubtlessincluded because it gives its author's ideas as to the mission ofIreland in the world. "An Imaginary Conversation, " the second play ofthe volume, was performed at the Abbey Theatre May 13, 1909, followingshortly after "Time"; a discussion of art and patriotism and love amongTom Moore, and his sister Kate and Robert Emmet, with a little, a verylittle, of the intensity that made "The Piper" something more thansecond-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 MagnanimousLover, " produced in the same playhouse on October 17, 1912. Like hisfellow from County Down, the master dramatist of the Ulster LiteraryTheatre, Mr. Mayne, Mr. Ervine excels in characterization. You rememberhis people, even after one reading of the plays, so clearly are theydistinguished, so definite are their personalities. With the five menand women of "The Magnanimous Lover, " you pass but a few minutes, as itis only a one-act play, but you remember them as well as you do the sixof "Mixed Marriage, " though you follow their fortunes through four acts. All these characters are typical of the artisan class of the North ofIreland, the five Protestants of "The Magnanimous Lover" and the fourProtestants and two Catholics of "Mixed Marriage. " It is the troublesthat arise from the difference in religion of the Protestant Raineys, mother, father, and the two young men; the Catholic betrothed, Nora, ofthe elder son Hugh; and their common friend the Catholic labor agitator, O'Hara, that are the motive forces of the latter play. Faintest etchedis Tom, the younger son, and most like a stock character. Nora andO'Hara are well done, but one remembers both as stage parts rather thanas characterizations. Hugh is still better done, but the two absolutecreations are the father and mother. Tom Rainey, the Orangeman, forgetshis bitterness against "Cathliks" for a moment to help win the strike inwhich his fellow workmen of Belfast, "Cathlik an' Prodesans, " both arefighting side by side. He is all the more bitter, however, when helearns that his eldest son is going to marry out of his faith, and hisspeeches, hitherto devoted to smoothing out the troubles between the menof different faith, turn to bitter denunciations of the strike as "aPopish Plot. " In the end Tom Rainey is responsible for riots his wildwords have stirred up, the calling-out of the soldiery, and the death ofNora, who is shot down by a volley as she runs out of the Rainey houseinto the rioting street. On the stage, of course, Mrs. Rainey is themore sympathetic character, her tolerance, her tact, her humor, herinfinite kindliness winning an audience as it is given to few charactersto 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 hisprose, but he has more humor, and it is natural humor, a humor thatarises out of the situation and is not simply dragged in for thepurposes of comic relief. Mr. Ervine evidently knows the life he depictsin and out. He ought to know it, for he was born to it, being the son ofa workingman in the shipyards of Belfast. And knowing it well he findsit far from hopeless. It is a pleasure to come upon a play of the Northwritten 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 inthe three other provinces, but most of the authors of the North arecontent to picture its hardness, its hypocrisy, its bigotry, its love ofwife and child remorselessly concealed as a weakness of the flesh. 

It is to this darker picturing of the North, however, that Mr. Ervineturns in "The Magnanimous Lover, " which indicts the self-righteousnessof the Ulster Protestant with a severity such as is possible only to aman 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 herbetrayer, when, after years of disloyalty, he is willing, by marryingher, to make her again an "honest woman. " To speak only of recent playsof similar plot, there is "The Last of the De Mullens" of St. JohnHankin, 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 hiscreation of the heroine, Maggie Cather. The danger with such a characteris that it will be only a mouthpiece for woman's demand for a commonmoral standard for men and women; but Maggie is not a mouthpiece but areal woman, triumphantly alive, with hot anger in her heart at theinjustice of the world, and at the "unco guidness" of her old-timelover, Henry Hinde. Ten years before the time of the action of the playHenry 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 ispossible for him to wed a minister's daughter. Fear of God's wrath hasnow driven him home to make such amends as he can, but there is in himno pity for the woman or love for his child. Maggie has faced it outalone all these years in the seaside village of Down as Hester faced itout in the seaside village of Massachusetts, while Henry forgot it alluntil he was "saved" and "convicted of sin. " If no more cowardly thanDimmesdale, Henry is more heartless, utterly callous, indeed, --as heconfesses, in "the devil's grip. " And yet Mr. Ervine is so true to thelife that he is depicting, a life at once passionate and prosaic, thathe makes anger for the past and fear of a nagged future with Henry aseffective agents in her rejection of him as are self-respect and rightfeeling. It is a "big" part that Mr. Ervine has created for the leadingactress, and though the story is unequivocally "unpleasant" and mayprevent "The Magnanimous Lover" from being a favorite play, there can beno two minds as to its success as drama. It is very real drama, ofelemental human emotion all unveiled. With such a play as this, and with"Mixed Marriage" to his credit, I look forward eagerly to the promisedproduction 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 Ulsterbetween its Donegal mountains and the Belfast of "Mixed Marriage"; andit is of the country, not of the city; and of an Ireland whollyCatholic, not of an Ireland of Protestant and Catholic at war overreligion. There are moments of real drama in "Judgment, " but no suchinevitable rise to climax as in "Mixed Marriage. " Its undoubted poweris in the feeling underlying it, in its characterization, and in itsstyle. Mr. Campbell was already known when his play was put on at theAbbey Theatre, April 15, 1912, as the author of "The Mountainy Singer"(1909), a volume of freshly felt and singing verse; and of "MearingStones" (1911), little prose records of things seen and of moods felt ina corner of Donegal. Many a striking phrase of "Judgment, " indeed, isalready written down in the paragraphs of "Mearing Stones" as actualtalk heard in the roads, and several of the situations of the plays areworkings-up of situations of which its author found himself a spectatoron the streets of Andara or on the highway between Slieve a-Tooey andthe sea. 

I first came upon his verses, if I remember rightly, in "The UnitedIrishmen, " but I was first impressed by him as an illustrator, his namebeing always signed in those days after the Irish fashion, SeosamhMacCathmhaoil. A Dublin friend sent me at Christmas in 1907 a "Calendarof the Saints, " for which Mr. Campbell did the illustrations, illustrations akin to those of Miss Althea Gyles, which so surely takeone back to Ireland's heroic age, instinct as they are with theprimitive 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 inEgypt, ' outworn figures in these days with no beauty and nosignificance. " "Judgment" is made out of the story of the countrysideconcerning "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 hisplay. It had been a better play, perhaps, had he changed more the factsof the story. As it stands, the first act of the play is adequatedramatically, and beautiful with that sort of wild and outworld beautySynge brought into English literature in Ireland; and the second actbeautiful with that beauty, and inadequate dramatically. 

Peg Straw is an old, worn woman of the roads whom the people hold littlebetter than a witch, even attributing to her the power fabled of thewitches in folk-tales of turning themselves into hares. Her nickname"Straw" indicates the nature of the mild dementia that sets the childrenand 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 neatas 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 todie, but always she is in the background. Talk of her comes up early inthe first act, and we learn that Nabla, the woman whose cabin is theplay'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, andthe action because of her. Toward this first act's end you hear hercries as the tinkers beat her, and at its end she crawls into the cabinto die, and in dying to shock the woman of the house so that her childcomes before its time. All the second act Peg lies in sight in the roomjust off the stage with candles stuck around her, bringing the horrorand dignity of death into the wild scenes of her wake. These are wildnot because of drinking for no one is drunk and only one "had drinktaken, " but because of the wildness of nature of these men ofwesternmost Europe, and because of the wildness of the roads that a"traveling man" brings with him out of the night. There is no action inthis second and last act save that sprung of this stranger's entranceand quarrelsomeness, and his interruptions of an old, old man's story ofwhat he knows of Peg's life. The stranger listens while Parry Cam tellsof the cause of her madness, but when he repeats what for years has beenthe gossip of the countryside about her supposed killing of her babe, the "traveling man" interrupts and declares he is the son whom it wasrumored she had drowned. In the end he is turned out of the house, notaltogether unkindly, but as much for decency's sake as for his own. Thatthe son, for any motive at all, should be turned out of the house wherehis mother lies dead, even though he had not stood by her living, ishard enough in the estimation of any people, but in the estimation ofthe Irish peasant it is intolerably tragic. If we realize this, theending of the play will be on a note deeper and more significant than ifwe fail to realize it, but not even the utmost sympathy with theintention of the author and a full realization of the significance toDonegal peasants of the action can bring this act to an intensitycomparable to that of the end of Act I, where two mysteries confront oneanother--"the passing of a life from this world, the coming of a lifeinto it. "

All the characters in "Judgment" are "created. " The personality of eachcolors his words and puts him before you distinct from every other. Owen Ban the weaver, who takes in Peg when his wife Nabla, heavy withher first child, and nervous because of her condition and fearful of thebirth, would keep out the outcast; old Parry Cam; John Gilla Carr; ColumJohnston and Father John; Nabla herself; and Kate Kinsella themidwife--each is himself or herself, each remains as distinct in yourmind the unforgettable scenes of the play. Somehow or other, too, thecountry is suggested; you are aware that you are on a wild hillsideabove a glen, --you are aware of this not because the author tells us atthe outset that the scene of the play is in the mountains of westernDonegal, south of Lochros Beg Bay, but through the dialogue of the playitself. Both scenes of the play are indoors, and on dark nights ofmidwinter, but so instinct with many phases of the life of the people isit that its background of landscape rises before you only lessdistinctly than the visualization of its characters. Atmosphere the playhas, and quality, both sprung of the sincerity of its feeling andimagination. So true are these, and so keen the author's reading ofhuman nature, and so sure his character drawing, that for all hisweakness of construction we may speak of his play alongside of the bestIrish plays. The future promises finer things: meanwhile we are thankfulfor what is, for "Judgment, "--especially for its far-offness, itsdesolateness 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 WilliamSharp and the Irish writers of the Celtic Renaissance. He was a friendof Mr. Yeats, a correspondent of Mr. Russell, and the chief commentatorin the English reviews on the work of the Irish group of its writers. Atone time, after 1897, the relationship promised to be very close, indeed. William Sharp, experimenting in psychics with Mr. Yeats, foundoccasion to interest him in "Fiona Macleod, " and as a result of thatinterest Mr. Yeats came to think the new writer might write Celtic playsfor performances he intended to arrange for Irish literaryorganizations. Thus it is that Mrs. Sharp has to include in her memoirof her husband a long letter to "Fiona Macleod" from Mr. Yeats, in whichhe suggests: "The plays might be almost in some cases modern mysteryplays. Your 'Last Supper, ' for instance, would make such a play. " Mr. Sharp, apparently, did not follow up this suggestion, but shortly afterthe first performances of "The Irish Literary Theatre" in 1899 he wrotethe two plays that, together with "Vistas, " comprise all the dramaticwriting that he has to his name. That "The Immortal Hour" and "The Houseof Usna" were intended for "The Irish Literary Theatre, " I think thereis little doubt, and it was only, I take it, when circumstancesdictated that only plays by Irish writers should be put on by thattheatre that Mr. Sharp looked elsewhere for their presentation. Only"The House of Usna" was, however, placed, --in the spring performances inLondon of The Stage Society, on April 29, 1900. Two months later "TheHouse of Usna" was published in the July number of "The NationalReview. " It pleased more, if we are to judge by the reviews, in thepages of the magazine than on the stage, but I hardly know why. "TheHouse of Usna" is profoundly moving read in the study, surely, and ifacted in such simplicity and enthusiasm as is that of the Abbey TheatrePlayers, 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 thewilder beauty of what still are places of wild beauty, of the savageryof that old life of the hero tales of Ireland. Mr. Yeats's plays do notso recapture the past, they take us rather to places out of time, whereall things are possible, because the world we know is put aside and allbut forgot. Even on the stage, however, the new beauty of "The House ofUsna" was recognized, a beauty as distinctive as that of the two playsof M. Maeterlinck that were produced with it, "Interior" and "The Deathof Tintagiles, " but it was adjudged not to be drama in the acceptedsense of the word. "The House of Usna" is written in a prose that hasmany of the effects of verse, but that is less luxuriant than the proseof "Vistas. " "The Immortal Hour, " published shortly afterwards in the"Fortnightly Review" (1900), is written in blank verse that shows itsauthor has been carefully attentive to the rhythms of the blank verse ofMr. Yeats, but it is neither so poetic nor so dramatic as "The House ofUsna. " Both plays are written out of the old legends that are the commonproperty of Irish and Scottish Gael, and in both Sharp has treated hismaterial with his wonted freedom of adaptation, a freedom that isgenerally justified by his results, his instinctive surety ofreconstruction of myths being such as to make one wonder, with Mr. Russell, if Sharp is not, in some fashion, a reincarnation of ashanachie that sang as contemporary in the wars of Gael and Gall. 

[Illustration]

A common preoccupation with the plays of M. Maeterlinck is another bondbetween the founder of the Abbey Theatre and Sharp, a preoccupationpassing rather quickly from Mr. Yeats, but long retaining its hold onthe changing selves of Sharp. For all his early interest in "spiritualthings, " an interest very definitely expressed in "Romantic Ballads"(1888), Sharp would not have come to "Vistas" (1894) without theguidance of M. Maeterlinck, and he admits as much in his preface tothese "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 thestage. Many of them are essentially dramatic, but their method ofpresentation 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 hisprojected plays, "The Enchanted Valleys, " "The King of Ys, " "Drosdan andYssul, " and their many fellows he had projected by title, and others, too, had not developments in Dublin, as I have said, carried Mr. Yeatsaway from him during 1899 and 1900, and had Sharp himself not duringthis drifting written that article "Celtic" which so aroused many inIreland on its appearance in "The Contemporary Review. " In this essay, basically a literary protest, "Fiona Macleod" declared "herself" againstSeparatist politics and affirmed "her" belief, as "she" had in "TheHouse of Usna, " that the future greatness of Ireland was to come, notthrough independence, but through the rebirth of her ancientspirituality 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 theselater years, no less admiration of their art, an admiration that led notonly to praise of them in critical articles, but to a greater praise ofimitation of their art. So possessed, indeed, was Sharp by the verse ofthe younger Irish poets as he read them to write of them, that when heturned to verse as "Fiona Macleod, " he fell into their rhythms andreproduced the colors of their styles. Writing in prose as a critic ofMr. Yeats, Sharp came to write in verse as Mr. Yeats wrote, as in "TheDirge of the Four Cities": writing of "A. E. " in prose as critic, Sharpcame 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 inverse as "Moira O'Neill" wrote, as in "I--Brasil": writing in prose ascritic, of "Ethna Carberry, " Sharp came to write in verse as "EthnaCarberry" wrote, as in "The Exile. " So it was, also, that, coming towrite of Celtic literature after study of Renan and Arnold, Sharpattained to something of their large utterance. 

Sharp sees the Celtic Renaissance, however, always in relation toEnglish literature, and always, it should be added, with Frenchliterature and Greek literature in the background. In this wide outlook, in his freedom from political prejudice, in his sympathy with Celticliterature and his knowledge of it, is his greatest strength as a criticof the Celtic Renaissance. His greatest weakness is his willingness inthis writing, as elsewhere in his writing, to abide by firstimpressions, to abide also by the first-come phrase or epithet, banes ofthe ready writer. But read his essay "Celtic" after you have read thegreat 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 writingthe answer to the contention that there were really two personalities inWilliam Sharp. Even Mrs. Sharp, who writes so restrainedly about thisquestion of dual personality, believes the analytical faculty belongedto William Sharp, the imaginative to "Fiona Macleod. " But in thiscriticism of the Celtic Renaissance which is signed "Fiona Macleod, "there is as much analysis as is to be found anywhere in his work asWilliam Sharp. So obviously was he identifying "F. M. " with "W. S. " inthis critical writing that Mrs. Janvier, of those in the secret, wroteto him to take warning lest he betray himself. She pointed out to himthat such a display of learning as he was making in the later "FionaMacleod" work would surely lead to discovery. But he did not heed. Thetruth probably was that he wrote about Celtic things as "Fiona Macleod"because he perhaps felt about them, as "Fiona Macleod, " as one who isbilingual thinks about work he is doing, say in German, in German, andabout work he is doing in English, in English; but just as surely Ibelieve, because what "Fiona Macleod" wrote commanded more respect thanwhat William Sharp wrote, readier entrance into the magazines, andbetter pay. If there are those to whom such an explanation seemsbelittling to William Sharp, I can only say that they cannot haverealized that he was a driven man earning his living by his pen. I amnot, I confess, a sentimentalist in such matters, and while I do notwholly 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 beresolute to remember that it is to be considered as an essay in the artof letters. There are so many temptations toward writing of it as ascientific problem, --for who is not interested in "dualpersonality"?--or as a "psychic revelation, " if one is bitten--and whois not?--by curiosity about hidden "things"; or as an irritating hoax, if one has been befooled--and who, for one moment or another has notbeen?--into believing that this writing under the pseudonym of "FionaMacleod" was the confession of a woman. The romance of it remains, nomatter from what point of view you consider it, and, despite yourpreoccupation with this or that phase of it, the beauty of literary artof parts of it. Parts of it, I say, for to me no writer of our time wasmore 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 thana skillful literary practitioner, a higher sort of hack, who had donesome better writing of a tenuous kind of beauty but imitative insubstance and art, in "Sospiri di Roma" and "Vistas, " and that afterforty, when he was developing one undeveloped side of himself as "FionaMacleod, " he developed another undeveloped side of himself in "SilenceFarm. " That he attained in a sort of writing, and greatly, that he hadnot attained in before, in "Silence Farm, " has not been acknowledged, soeasy has it been to those interested in his work to lose sight of allelse in their pursuit of the "Fiona Macleod" side of his nature. It istrue of "Silence Farm, " as of almost all his other work done under thename of William Sharp, that it is imitative; but it is equally true thata large part of the "Fiona Macleod" work is imitative, too. "SilenceFarm" is done under the influence of the later work of Mr. Hardy, butthe material of "Silence Farm" is its author's own, and the color of thewriting is as distinctly of the Lowlands as the color of "Tess" is ofWessex. That "Silence Farm" is better work in its kind, though that kindis less original than some of his writing as "Fiona Macleod, " I havebeen forced against my prejudices to believe. If I did not so believe Iwould not have spoken of it side by side with "Tess. "

Secondly, that as "Fiona Macleod, " William Sharp did much good writingin almost everything published under the pseudonym, achieving wholenessof good tissue in certain sketches and tales and verses on rathervarying kinds of subjects, but that his work as "Fiona Macleod" that isreally distinguished is in stories of prehistoric Scotland and Ireland, and of Scotland and Ireland in the earliest historic time. In thesetales of the Gaels of old time he for the first time breaks ground forothers. Before he wrote "Silk o' the Kine, " and "The Harping ofCravetheen, " "The Annir Choile, " and "Enya of the Dark Eyes, " there wereno short tales of like temper and content and style in literature. 

To me little is significant in the early verse of "Fiona Macleod, " aslittle was significant in all the verse of William Sharp until the timeof "Sospiri di Roma. " And for all the beauty of these pictures in wordsof the Campagna it is but a transient beauty. It was not until he wasmastered by the new beauty that Mr. Yeats brought into English poetrythat the verse of William Sharp won to itself abiding beauty and glamourand inevitable phrase. "The House of Usna" (1900) brought to me "Dimface of beauty haunting all the world, " and the 1901 edition of "Fromthe Hills of Dream, " "The Enchanted Valleys, "; but it was not untilafter his death that I came upon his best verse of all, the verse of hislast five years, which was gathered together posthumously in the 1907edition of "From the Hills of Dream, " and included as "The House ofBeauty" in "The Poems and Dramas" of 1911. Who does not know these setsof verses and "The Dirge of the Four Cities, " does not know the ultimateaccomplishment of William Sharp in poetry. 

That the "'Fiona Macleod' mystery" ended with the death of William Sharpis, then, my belief, as it is that it began before he conceived ofexploiting a feminine sub-self he had long been aware of in himself. Thebeginnings of that sort of writing that made "Fiona Macleod" areputation are to be found very early in his writing, in "The Son ofAllan" of 1881, in the "Record" of 1884, in the preface to the "RomanticBallads" of 1888, in the "Vistas" of 1894. That these earlierexpressions of "spiritual" states and guesses at mysteries are not, except for certain parts of "Vistas, " so well written as the bestwriting of similar kind by "Fiona Macleod, " is true, and perhaps, atfirst glance, a matter of wonder. It is, however, I think, not difficultto find an explanation of the better quality of the later work, and thatexplanation is afforded, firstly and most largely, by the CelticRenaissance. A man of thirty-five, to all who know him a very vitalforce, a very original personality, who has all his life wanted to makebeautiful things in words out of his dream of life, has disappointedhimself and his friends. He is suddenly afforded the opportunity, by theinterest in Gaelic subjects that the Celtic Renaissance has awakened, togain a hearing for work of a kind he has long wanted to do. He had notdone such work previously, because he had to live by his pen and couldwork consistently only at the sort of thing that would sell. He was wellknown as a journeyman of letters, so well known for bookmaking, and theways of getting commissions from London editors and publishers, that hisknowledge of Highland life would be questioned. All in London knew himas a Londoner. It would be useless for him to say that the CelticRenaissance had brought back his childhood to him, a childhood asdefinitely dominated by a Highland nurse as Stevenson's was by theLowland Alison Cunningham. It would be useless to tell of his summers inArgyllshire and among the inner isles, his intimacy with fishermen whowere as elemental as his own dreams of old time. It would have been castup to him that the editor of "The Canterbury Poets" could not be anoriginal writer, and the very nine days' wonder of "Vistas" would havebeen pointed to to prove that he might now do well enough, as animitator, perhaps of Mr. Yeats, as he was in "Vistas;" successful as animitator of M. Maeterlinck, but that an original Highland writer couldnot come out of Hampstead. There is no doubt in my mind that it was thepart 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 hecould keep the side of him he had never yet exhausted through hackworkapart from his other work, it would grow as it could not if it were apart of his daily stint. 

Why Sharp chose a woman's name for his pseudonym has troubled many, butthis choice was, I think, as was the assumption of a pseudonym, the partof wisdom. I do not believe, as he at times liked to believe, that heattained a woman's standpoint. He had been complimented on all sides forhis composition of the wife's letters in "A Fellowe and his Wife"(1892), in which Mrs. Von Teuffel wrote the husband's. Sharp enjoyedtheir writing as a _tour de force_ and he probably believed they werevery womanly. I should say that they showed insight into womanly ways oflooking at things rather than a dramatic identification of himself withwoman such as is George Meredith's. Sharp had already been experimentingwith 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 "ThePagan Review" in 1892 under eight different pseudonyms, and though, inthe estimation of those to whom "Fiona Macleod" is all but a sacredname, it be sacrilegious to say it, William Sharp loved all sorts offantastic tricks, hoaxes, mystifications, though in almost all hiswriting save in "Wives in Exile" he was seriousness itself. But thechiefest reason of all, in my estimation, for his assumption of awoman's name as his pseudonym was that it afforded greater protectionagainst discovery. There are those who believe that he chose it becausehe wanted a chance to express that womanly element of human nature thereis in all men, and there are others who believe that he was thepossessor of a real dual personality in which the "Fiona Macleod's self"was a woman's consciousness; but he very infrequently, after "TheMountain Lovers" (1895), kept in mind in the writings he published as"Fiona Macleod's" that their author was supposed to be a woman, and itis wonderful, indeed, that he was able to preserve the secret until theend. In the earlier "Fiona Macleod" writing there is no revelation ofthe wide acquaintance with literature that was Sharp's, but despite hisharassment by the constant identification of himself with "FionaMacleod, " he gradually allowed to creep into that writing more and moreof what was known to be the knowledge of William Sharp, a knowledgeunlikely to be also that of a Highland lady who lived apart from theworld. His friends pointed out to him the danger he was running inwriting from what was obviously a man's standpoint, as in his tales ofthe wars of Gael and Gall, and of revealing several sorts of interestthat were known to be his, but their warnings were in vain. He wasapparently unable to limit himself to the restrictions of the part ofhimself he had essayed to restrict himself to. 

For my own part I was now sure the writing must be Sharp's and now sureit could not be his. I did not know of his intimate concern withquestions of feminism until I read Mrs. Sharp's "Memoir, " so thatoutspoken chant, the "Prayer of Women" in "Pharais, " "Fiona Macleod's"first book, colored my outlook on all the writing that followed. I hadno doubt at all but that "Pharais" was written by a woman, but "TheDan-nan-Ron" and "Silk o' the Kine" in "The Sin-Eater" (1895) seemed tome hardly a woman's. "The Washer of the Ford" (1896) was written fromthe man's point of view, too, but "Green Fire" (1896) seemed feminineagain. So I wobbled in my opinion until "The Divine Adventure" (1900)and the critical writings of the volume that story gives title to, andthe critical writing in "The Winged Destiny" (1905), made me believeagain that "Fiona Macleod" was surely Sharp. I did not come upon thearticles that now make up "Where the Forest Murmurs" (1907) until afterthe death of Sharp and the disclosure of the secret. Had his death notdivulged the secret of the identity of "Fiona Macleod, " it seems to methat collection must have disclosed it. Had Sharp lived after this therewould not have been possible for him much further work from theseclusion 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 theold gusto. 

After all has been said it must be confessed, I think, that Sharp didnot know the Highlander, either of the mainland or of the islands, veryintimately. He wrote much better of his dream of life on the west coastin prehistoric times--out of his imagination of what that life must havebeen, an imagination founded on the reading of the old legends andmodern 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 whereverthey are there is unreality, if not melodrama. Unreality, too, there is, in many phases, in the modern tales, and "highfalutinness" everywhere inthem. And both unreality and "highfalutinness" offend in these moderntales as they would not in the tales of far times, though in these, as amatter of fact, they are not so much in evidence. 

It would almost seem that the approach to reality drove Highlandatmosphere from the stories. In "The Sin-Eater, " one of the best of hiswritings that might be classed as a short story, the sin-eater and hisconfidant are Highlanders, but the description of the scene of hismisfortune, the steading of the Blairs, might well have been thatnearest to "Silence Farm. " It is faithfully described, the scenes aboutthe little home, whose owner lies dead, having the very smack ofrealism. In the latter part of the story the scene shifts to the coastand the tang of the story turns Gaelic and unreal. Was it thus, Iwonder, always to the imagination of William Sharp, Lowland life real, Highland life mystical?

Sharp was handicapped, of course, in coming to the subject material hecould best handle late in life, "Pharais" (1894) and "The MountainLovers" (1895), the first books published as by "F. M. , " being just asdefinitely 'prenticework in their kind as was "Children of To-morrow"(1890) in its kind. Of the long stories other than "Children ofTo-morrow" published in his own name, "A Fellowe and his Wife" (1892)and "Wives in Exile" (1896) have no very serious intention, though bothare well done after their kind, records of imaginings, respectively ofexperiences of art life in Rome, and of yachting experiences in theIrish 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 afull-fledged romance, is less original than any of his longer writings. It is, like "The Weird of Michael Scott" and "A Northern Night, " closelyallied to essays of his other rôle, that of "F. M. , " to catch and express"the tempestuous loveliness of terror, " such as the catastrophe of "TheMountain Lovers, " "The Barbaric Tales, " and those short stories in whichGloom Achanna is hero-villain. It is in such work that Sharp shows hisaffinities to Poe, affinities which are not elsewhere as obvious as hisaffinities to De Quincey. Narrative was not native to De Quincey anymore than it was to Sharp, though Sharp was led toward it by hisinterest in character, an interest that was not in any large measuregiven to De Quincey, who, when he turned to narrative other than thatwhich relates what had happened to him or what he had dreamed hadhappened to him, makes the reader feel he did so as a concession to thepublic. Another interest that was Sharp's, an interest amounting to apassion, --out-of-doors, --De Quincey had not at all, for all his devotionto Wordsworth and to Wordsworth's interests. Like De Quincey, on theother hand, Sharp delights in "fine writing, " in both senses of thephrase, in the "highfalutin" that is objectionable, and in the ornatelybeautiful that is one fitting expression of romantic thought. Both menpreferred the mouth-filling word to the simple one, the Latinicaladjective to the Saxon; both had rather see visions and dream dreamsthan write about the "common light of common hours"; both goad theirimaginations until they run riot and so confuse their possessors, whoshould control them, that they are unable to distinguish between what isfact and what is fancy. You could carry the analogy further, to eventsof their lives--the runnings-away in boyhood; the devoted friendships topoets in youth; the incredible amount of hard work achieved in manhooddespite of often recurring illnesses. 

Of the long stories published as by "F. M. , " Sharp repudiated "FloraMacDonald" because it was too much in the way of "ordinary romance, " and"Green Fire" for the same reason and because it was largely aboutBrittany, a country with which, by some strange chance, he did not makehimself familiar, though he had visited and learned to know well atleast 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. Allthree of these stories disappoint my memory of them when I again readthem. This is, I believe, because all three of them--and for that mattermany of the short stories as well--are incompletely realized, orbecause--in the case of two of them, "The Mountain Lovers" and "GreenFire"--they are unevenly written. Their high intention and atmosphereremain with you after you have put the books aside, and in the course oftime you forget their hurried writing, their inconsistencies, and theirqualities of the "Shilling Shocker, " the result of their author'sfailure to attain "the tempestuous loveliness of terror" that are in somany of them, long or short. As aids to this effacement of thecheapening elements are the very materials of the tales, theircharacters, now elemental, now other-worldly, and their background ofmountains that uplift the spirit, and of menacing sea. 

That Sharp wrote less exactly of the present-day people of the Highlandsthan of the background of their lives was largely because he had fewopportunities to learn to know them intimately. There was a basis forsuch intimacy laid in his childhood, in the fact that his nurse was aHighland woman; there was something built on this basis by his boyhood'svacations in many parts of Argyllshire and voyages elsewhere along thewest coast. Youth spent in Arran and Skye would have counted for muchmore, for the boy, once he is no longer child and before he has reachedhis youth and is awakening man, is not much more interested in people inreal life for what they are than he is in minute description of theircharacters in books. He likes men for the sportsmanlike and adventurousthings they can do, and he likes to read records of things sportsmanlikeand adventurous, but men as men, unless they are eccentric togrotesqueness, do not arrest his attention. Even the dreamy boys, theartistic boys, are not likely to learn much of others, so preoccupiedare they with themselves. 

It was thus, I think, that Sharp's childhood was not what he would inlater years have had it, not what in "The Laughter of Peterkin" healleges the childhood of "Fiona Macleod" to have been. For all theinfluence of "Barabal, " his nurse, it seems from his writing that herstories remain with him more as suggestions to imagination than asdefinite memories, and that the fisherman referred to in "Sheumas" leftwith him little more than "Barabal. " How fresh and wonderful to him wasactual contact with Highland life is almost pathetically revealed in aletter he wrote to Mrs. Sharp from Kilcreggan in the summer of 1894. Inthis letter he is all but exultant in the recording of the securing of"Celtic" material from a "Celtic Islesman from Iona. " Of the actual lifeof the Islesmen and Glensmen he could have known but little, for longliving among them is necessary to their understanding, --they are, as hewrote in this same letter, "passionately reticent. " It was not the wayof Sharp to fall back, in this deficiency of experience, on old legendsand folk-tales collected in his own day, but to trust to his imaginationas that was quickened by what knowledge he had of life in the innerisles and in Argyllshire, and by the very atmosphere of known placesthere that seemed to demand, as Stevenson put it, to have storiesinvented to fit them. 

It is said, too, --Mrs. Sharp gives her authority to the story, --thatfriendship with the woman to whom he dedicated "Pharais, " "E. W. R. , "stimulated him to the work. "Because of her beauty, her strong sense oflife, and of her joy of life, " writes Mrs. Sharp in her memoir of herhusband, "because of her keen intuitions and mental alertness, herpersonality stood for him as a symbol of the heroic women of Greek andCeltic days, a symbol that, as he expressed it, unlocked new doors inhis mind and put him in touch with the ancestral memories of his race. "And Mrs. Sharp quotes him further as declaring "without her there wouldhave been no 'Fiona Macleod. '" Perhaps; but I doubt if, after the CelticRenaissance had won a hearing, anything could have prevented Sharp fromfollowing what was, after all, a natural bent. I am not going to arguethe matter out, but he himself admitted that his development as "FionaMacleod" began "while I was still a child, " and there is proof in almostevery volume he published, even before he knew Mrs. Rinder ("E. W. R. , "must of course be the author of "The Shadow of Arvor"), that histendency was toward what became characteristic of "Fiona Macleod. "

It was the love that Sharp had for all sorts of "psychic things, " themysterious, 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 willingto admit that it is easy to believe what one wishes to believe; and hedelighted to tell a story at the expense of Mr. Yeats illustrative ofthe 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 themin a frying-pan over the little fire in the grate. As they slippedabout, Mr. Yeats, all the while looking back in the room away from thefire as he talked to Sharp, allowed the pan to tip too far and the eggsfell out into the fire. So absorbed was he in the topic of conversation, most appropriately the disappearance of material things, that he didnot notice the catastrophe or the quick disappearance of the eggs amongthe coals. When his perfervidness subsided for a moment, he turned tosee if they were done. "There, what did I tell you!" said he; "our talkof these things has conjured up the powers and the eggs are gone. " Sharpdid not tell him of the accident. And there were no more eggs in theroom 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 differentfrom the stories of "Fiona Macleod. " And "Silence Farm" is verydifferent, a story without the distinguishing qualities of "Pharais" or"The Divine Adventure, " and suggesting kinship to the work of his otherself only through certain likenesses of domestic irregularity in thefamily of Archibald Ruthven to other domestic irregularity in the familyof Torcall Cameron of "The Mountain Lovers. " Though not of so original akind, perhaps, as the best of the "Fiona Macleod" work, "Silence Farm"has to it a "wholeness of good tissue" that belongs to little work ofthis most uneven writer. "Silence Farm, " I would emphasize again as Iemphasized at the opening of this paper, is better written, both asregards style and architectonic quality, and it is a truer reading oflife, 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 theKailyard school, it is not to them, but to such kindredunsentimentalized work as Mr. Shan Bullock's, that you instinctivelycompare it. The people, indeed, are the same dour Presbyterians, thoughthe one writes of Scotland and the other of the North of Ireland. And asyou 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 Highlandstories of Sharp. It is not that the Highlands have not been muchwritten about, but that they have been written about intimately by butfew. 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 toour own; but comparatively few have known either islands or mainlandwell enough to dare novels of their life, and of those who have so daredno one up to the time of Sharp had written a great realistic story ofthe Highlands, and but one or two great romances. Now we have Mr. NeilMunro, like Sharp a very uneven writer, whose "Children of Tempest"--totake one of his best stories--now delights and now tortures you; andyesterday we had William Black, famous for sunsets. Black knew theHebrides well, very well for a Lowlandman turned Londoner, and helabored hard to make his books true and beautiful. Unfortunately it wasnot in him to do fine work, not even the best sort of the second orderof novelists, --such work as Trollope's, for instance, which by dint offaithfulness and humanity almost persuades you now and then that it isof higher than second order. Black was faithful to what he saw andbroadly sympathetic, but his writing not only lacks distinction, but, even at its best, as in "The Princess of Thule, " home thrust to one'sinterest. Yet, such as it is, it is all but all that we have whichattempts to put before us any broad view of Highland life. The one manof the generation older than the generation of Mr. Sharp who might havedrawn Highland life greatly, Robert Buchanan, was diverted all his life, as Sharp was in the twenties and thirties, from doing what he would towhat would boil the pot, but he left at least one story, a story ofSutherland, "A Child of Nature, " to prove to us what his reading ofHighland life might have been. Had Stevenson been born a Highlander, hemight have given us both novels of the Highlands of the order of "Weirof Hermiston, " and romances really Highland in quality, as "Kidnapped"and "Catriona" are not. 

I suppose that, back of all the failure to deal realistically withHighland life, this rare attainment of a romance of Highland life at allfaithful to it, is the making of the Highlander into a stage hero byScott. 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 theChildren of the Mist as it did in childhood, when I was so fascinatedthat I prized my Campbell plaided paper soldiers next to my Continentalsin blue and buff. In going through an old trunkful of school-books onlythe other day, I came upon one of these bonneted fellows, stillwonderfully preserved, in an old atlas of the heavens, and then I knewall of a flash why it was that the poor boy soldiers that I saw inHighland accoutrement in the yard of Edinburgh Castle during the BoerWar so disappointed me by their appearance and bearing. They were nothalf so brave as the piper who used to make the rounds of my boyhood'stown and bring tears to my eyes with his "Campbells are Comin'. " I writethis that my quarrel with much of what Sharp has written of theHighlands, that portion that seems to me sentimentalized or one-sided, may not be put down to lack of appreciation of the romance, theeeriness, and otherworldliness that there unquestionably are in thatlife. 

It is their aloofness from the everyday story, their unusual use of thesupernatural that has given the longer stories written out of the "Fionamood, " as Mr. Sharp once spoke of his possession, their appeal to mostreaders, but there is here in America a class who put the highestvaluation on the shorter stories Mr. Sharp called "spiritual tales. " Tothose who hold this view "The Divine Adventure" is of the nature ofrevelation. To me it is hardly this, but very interesting, not so muchfor its putting of the relations of Body, Will, and Spirit to oneanother in life and at death, as for its beautiful writing, and for itsdefinite betrayal, when its author is writing most intimately, of aman's attitude, though he published the story as the work of "FionaMacleod. " 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 amongthe work published under his own name. In fact, the writing under thetwo 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 verykey of "Fragments of the Lost Journals of Piero di Cosimo" (1896), farapart their subject material, and "The Hill-Wind" by "W. S. " dedicatedas it is to "F. M. , " might well be a rejected passage from "The MountainLovers. " There is the color of the Highlands and Islands about many ofthese 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 ofDreams"; but most of these shorter mystical tales have not the tang andsavor of farm-home on lonely moors, or fisher's hut on the loneliermachar, that is characteristic of most of the tales long and short, thatdeal with modern days. 

Nor are the meanings of these "spiritual tales" consistently indicatedin symbols taken from Scottish life, nor is their supernaturalism nativeto it. Mrs. Spoer (Ada Goodrich-Freer), in her "Outer Isles" (1902), tells us "The Celtic Gloom" amuses the Hebridean. If so, what effectwould such discussion as that of "The Lynn of Dreams" and "Maya" haveupon him? But if such essays are not written out of Highland life, theyare none the less interesting, and in the case of "Maya, " with itsconsideration of waking dream, beautiful as art, and valuable, too, as acontribution to science. 

So far does Sharp go in his belief as to the apprehension of thoughtthrough powers other than those of the senses, that in "The WingedDestiny" he can look forward to a time "when the imagination shall layaside words and pigments and clay, as raiment needless during thefestivals of the spirit, and express itself in the thoughts whichinhabit words--as light inhabits water or as greenness inhabits grass. "Not only does he foresee such a time, but he foreshadows it, heralds itin some of his sketches, "Aileen" for one, by attempting it. Perhaps hehas succeeded, perhaps not. To me the attempt is a failure, not, Ithink, because he is writing for to-morrow, for that age when thespiritual awakening he so often prophesied shall have come, but becausehe is attempting what cannot be done in any age. If he were seeking onlysuggestion, well and good. But he seeks more, and fails, I think, toattain more. It seems to me impossible that the suggestions he createscan ever be more than suggestions. They cannot become definite conceptsthat will mean the same thing to all men. Suggestion, the opening-up ofvistas, is a high attribute of the art he follows; but he is not contentwith suggestion, he would seek more definite expression of what, afterall, is not thought but mood. So it is that he is most successful whenconveying mood and less successful when conveying esoteric thought. As acritic, of course, on a plane easier for the conveyance of thought, Sharp is definite enough, completely successful in conveying the ideasthat he intends to convey. 

Often, I fear, when Sharp intends "spiritual history, " either in a talewholly devoted to this purpose, as "The Divine Adventure, " or asexplanatory to the incidents of some more tangible tale, he is reallyonly playing with words, beautiful words, words sometimes so beautifulthat we are apt to forget that words are to be used not alone forbeauty's sake. Often, again, I fear, he will introduce beautiful symbolssimply for their beauty and not because they have a real purpose, notbecause they will more intimately convey, even to the initiated, theintent of his writing. That these practices are the result ofcarelessness, sometimes, as well as of his subservience to beauty, thefascination that words merely as words or visions merely as visionsexert upon him, is, I think, true. It is but seldom, I believe, that theunderlying thought is incoherent. In almost all of his earlier writing, however, even in the earlier "Fiona" writing, he is very careless. Hecontradicts himself in his short stories as to facts, he gets his familyrelationships tangled in a way that cannot be explained by any processof nature, and so, too, I think, he gets his symbols mixed, or deludeshimself into the belief that something that was hastily written "came tohim" that way and so should be preserved in that exact expression, eventhough to him at the second reading it meant nothing definite. He jumpsto conclusions again and again in what he writes about birds, where Ican follow him on a certain footing of knowledge. If he is so carelessabout facts, if he can, even though it is a slip, confuse Mary Magdaleneand the Virgin Mary, if he can mention birds in a description ofHighland landscape that is characteristic of a certain time of year whenbirds of that species would be in the Highlands only by accident at thattime of year, it is more than likely, slips though these may be, thatthere will be similar slips in all he writes, no fewer, it is likely, inhis writings of psychic things than elsewhere. 

There is possible, of course, no hard-and-fast classification of hiswritings. Class shades into class almost imperceptibly. It isparticularly difficult to draw the line between the several kinds ofstories and sketches he writes that involve supernaturalism of one kindand another. There is possible, however, a rough-and-ready distinctionbetween those stories of his which are esoterically mystical and thosewhich, while concerned with the supernatural, are concerned with it inthe way familiar in old romance. Of this "usual supernatural" are thosein which "second sight" is the motive, second sight which is always tobe looked for as the commonest supernatural motive in the writing of allGaels, either Alban or Irish. Sharp introduced "second sight" into "TheSon 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 amicrocosm of all his writing. In "Iona, " Sharp puts himself on record asholding 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 andvillains, are all possessed by the power of the second sight, but secondsight is not the most remarkable of their supernatural powers. Hypnoticsuggestion Gloom uses as an everyday agent in his affairs. It is throughhypnotic suggestion that he puts madness upon Alasdair M'Ian, playing tohim the Pibroch of the Mad, Alasdair M'Ian, in telling whose story"Fiona Macleod" revealed--I suppose, by chance--something of thestruggle of William Sharp to succeed in letters. Much more frequently, however, he uses a supernatural power that is further removed from thosein which modern science is interested, such as the machination offairies that made Allison Achanna the "Anointed Man"--that, in plainspeech, had driven him fey; or such as the lure of the serpent goddessthat drove to his death the piper hero of "By the Yellow Moon Rock, " orthe 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 thischangeling motive had it not come so near to the question of dualpersonality, which it would be dangerous to him to discuss, as wouldthat 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 ofdual personality several times in his verses, and very definitely in "AFellowe and his Wife. " In this last-named book he says, in a letter thatthe Countess Ilse writes to her husband in Rügen: "This duality is sobewildering. I to be myself, whom you know, and whom I know--and thenthat other I, whom you do not know at all and whom I only catch glimpsesof 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 writingsmust have, indeed, been a cross to him, for there was hardly any otherquestion, unless perhaps that of "ancestral memory, " which interestedhim more deeply. It might be argued, I suppose, that he did discuss itin "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 distinctivepersonality, each a memory distinct from the memory of the others, areall but the component parts of one man. Mrs. Sharp does not, however, anywhere avow directly a belief in the possession of a real dualpersonality by her husband, and she definitely contradicts Mr. Yeats forhis 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 threeof 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 mannerof 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, withsuch river pirates as we have met, sentimentalized, in "Our MutualFriend, " as material, Sharp writes as realistically as he does in"Silence Farm, " and with a sympathy and pathos that his objective methodcannot exclude. 

There are episodes or sketches, some of them what sharp calls "proseimaginings, " throughout his many books, that one may hardly call shortstories, or myths, or studies in folk-lore, or criticism, or any of theother many kinds of writing that he essayed. Perhaps "memories" would bethe proper general term for writing of this kind. In almost every one ofthese episodes or sketches there is a germ of a story, and some, Isuppose, 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 andsome of that most personal and intimate. I have spoken of "Aileen" and"Barabal"; "Sheumas, a Memory, " is another that is memorable, andmemorable too, are "The Sea Madness" and "The Triad. " "The Triad" isalmost his _credo_, certainly a statement of the things he holds "mostexcellent"--"primitive genius, primitive love, primitive memory. " HereSharp recurs, as so often in his writing, to "ancestral memory, " thatpossession of men by which they are aware of what was in the worldbefore they were, through oneness with the universal memory into whichthey are absorbed in dream or vision or of which they become aware bywhat we call intuition. If such a power be restricted so that itspossessor recalls only certain parts of antiquity, he is virtually inthe state of him who believes he remembers what he remembers because ofprevious incarnations. I have no personal opinion to express on thesubject, but if such memories exist in us because of our participationin a universal memory or because of reincarnation, it is easy to explainwhy Sharp is best in his writing of myths, his pictures of the wildbeauties of love and war and dream in barbaric Erin and Alba. It isbecause he is the reincarnation of the shanachie of the Dark Ages. Whenhe thought of reincarnation, however, in relation to himself, hethought, 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 afterall and no more for the high-hearted and inherently ailing body ofhim, --was this reincarnation of the shanachie, such an one as his ownOran 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 thename of Arthur from Arcturus falls familiarly on our ears. It isevidently made under a lamp by one who has read many old legends. It isno druidic revelation. The other, that which ends with the three greathero-leaps of Fionn from the Arctic Floes to the Pole, from the Pole upto Arcturus, from Arcturus to the Hill of Heaven itself, is fantastic, bizarre, extravagant to grotesqueness, with the very flamboyance of oldIrish legend and modern Irish folk-tale. In other words, it is in thevery manner of the shanachie of the Dark Ages, whether his work wasrecorded then as court poem or has been handed down by word of mouthamong the folk. Nor is there anything inconsistent in this wildimagining 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 withwhom I spent a large part of my happier days, the days from seven toseventeen. Lawrence lost his life doing a "retreat" morning aftermorning on the cold stone floor of a Vincentian church, not in anysudden repentance at fourscore and three for the sins of his youth forthey had been fewer than those of almost all I know, but in the usualway of his austere life. Yet Lawrence was just as much himself when hewas telling me stories of Dean Swift that were full of malice andbrutality and orgiac ecstasy. 

The range of the shanachie is wide, and wide, too, the range of Sharp inthe rôle of shanachie of barbaric life on both sides of the Moyle. Amongsuch writings there are few tellings of the order of the folk-tale, moreof the order of the hero saga, many--perhaps the best of them--of anorder all his own that has developed, it is likely, from the old"Saints' Lives, " but to which he has given a ring of authenticity thatmakes them seem descended from an antiquity as remote as that offolk-tale or hero-tale. "The Flight of the Culdees" brings before youwith vividness what must have been the life of the Celtic missionariesin 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 fatethey meted out to those among themselves who slipped back into thepleasant old ways of paganism. These are written out of his ownrevisualization of the past. More immediately sprung of the old legendsare "The Three Marvels of Hy, " which tells of the inner life of Columbaand his brethren on Iona, and "Muime Chriosd, " which utilizes folk-loreas old or older than the legends collected by Mr. Alexander Carmichaelin his pursuit of the stories of St. Bride among the peasantry of theOuter Isles. "The Song of the Sword" and "Mircath" have in them thebattle-madness of the Viking, whetted to its keenest intensity as hemeets the hard resistance of the Hebrideans; and "The Laughter ofScathach" and "The Sad Queen, " that more terrible fury of the Amazon whoruled in Skye. Than this last-named story Sharp has done no starkerwriting, but it is so evidently from a man's point of view that itconfirmed 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 soremoulded in the mind of the writer that it is rather a re-creation ofthe old belief than a restoration of it. There are those who wouldrather have had Sharp follow the tales as they are told by Campbell ofIslay, Cameron of Brodick, and Carmichael of South Uist, but to me, unless the tale is one familiar to many readers, such a remoulding, ifdone with power, is surely a prerogative of the artist. But when hetakes a well-known legendary character, as well known among the Gaels asAchilles among English school-boys, and changes his hair from black togolden and his stature from short to tall, utterly transforming not onlyour picture of him, but the significance of his deeds, then I object, asI would object if he had made the fair-haired and great-staturedAchilles into such "a little dark man" as the Red Branch legends recordCuchullin to have been. Nor would I quarrel even with his changing ofthe 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 bardicor folk form. It is in the few instances in which his dream of the oldtale does not lift to so great a power in its way as the old talepossessed in its way that I protest. Of such a nature are some of thechanges Sharp made in his retelling of the "Three Sorrows ofStory-Telling" in "The Laughter of Peterkin, " which, it must beremembered, however, was hurried work, almost hackwork. 

Sharp was particularly successful, I think, in his handling, in thethree tales--he calls them "legendary moralities"--in which he bringsChrist to the straths of Argyll. These three are "The Last Supper, " "TheFisher of Men, " and "The Wayfarer. " The last is the least successful ofthe three, but significant in its attack on certain forms ofPresbyterianism for their attempts to kill out, as un-Christian, the oldways of life among the Highlanders. This charge was made fifty years agoby Campbell of Islay, and it had been repeated only yesterday by Mr. Carmichael. William Black and Mr. Munro confirm it, too, in theirnovels, and, in fact, it is only what one expects of Puritanism, whetherin its dominating of the Scotch Presbyterian minister or of the IrishCatholic priest. The latter is to-day doing as much to kill the joy oflife in Connacht as did even the minister of the Free Kirk yesterday onthe Lews. It may have been partly to hide his identity that Sharpassumed what some thought an anti-Presbyterian attitude in his "FionaMacleod" writing; it may have been the sympathy of the artist toward achurch that has conserved art that led him to what some thought apro-Catholic attitude; but scratch this gypsy artist and you find, surprising as it may be, moral prejudice for Protestantism. Does he notadmire Torcall Cameron and Archibald Ruthven, stern Calvinists both?"The Fisher of Men, " and "The Last Supper" have in them the austerebeauty of the old morality plays, a beauty that is akin to the beauty ofthe Puritan imagination of Bunyan, and a tenderness that we may in vainlook for there. They are written in all reverence and simplicity, and itis no wonder we find Mr. Yeats suggesting that "Fiona Macleod" turn theminto plays for the Irish Theatre. 

I do not care so much for "The Birds of Emar, " myths he has rewoven fromthe "Mabinogion" into Gaelic texture, or the series that purport to becollected among the Isles and are found to be very like certainwell-known Greek legends. These, too, seem to me reweavings, and the"Treud-nan-Ron" and "The Woman at the Crossways"; and "The Man on theMoor, " though its origin is far from their origins, is also a reweaving. In certain of his writing of this time Sharp passes over virtually intocriticism or comparative mythology, as in "Queens of Beauty" and"Orpheus and Oisin, " and in many of the papers of "Where the ForestMurmurs. " These all have interest; but some smell much of the lamp; andnone of them are to be compared to the best of his "Seanchas, " to "TheHarping of Cravetheen, " or "Enya of the Dark Eyes, " or "Silk o' theKine, " or "Ula and Urla"; or to his Plays "The House of Usna" and "TheImmortal Hour, " in which, for all the savagery, there is nobility, thenobility that was in the old legends themselves, that nobility thatwithstood even the hand of Macpherson, that nobility that has beenreproduced most nobly of all in the "Deirdre" of Synge. 

I am not so sure that the tone of these old myths is alwaysdistinctively Celtic, as it is undoubtedly in "The Annir Choile, " and inother "Seanchas" that reveal him at his best. There was viking blood inSharp, and it comes out, I think, in such tales as "The Song of theSword. " How he came to write these barbaric tales I do not know, thoughI have sometimes thought that the "Dhoya" (1891) of Mr. Yeats may havesuggested them, as the Hanrahan stories may have suggested certain ofthe more modern tales. But whatever their genesis, the heroes andheroines of the "Seanchas" seem to him like the heroes and heroines ofHomer and the Greek tragedians; and his friend whom he thought inspiredhim to much of the "F. M. " work stood, we must remember, as symbolical tohim of the women of Greek as well as of Celtic legend. 

There are many indications, in his last writing, not only in thatunpublished book on "Greek Backgrounds" and in his articles in themagazines on Sicily, all by William Sharp, but in the "Fiona Macleod"work, that he would have come to write of Greek antiquity with anenthusiasm 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 toMrs. Sharp, dated Athens, January 29, 1904: "It is a marveloushomecoming feeling I have here. And I know a strange stirring, a kind ofspiritual rebirth. "

One reason, perhaps, that the best work of Sharp has come out of hisconsideration of the Celts of antiquity is that the stark stories he hasto tell of them restrain his style, a style too flamboyant when thereis in what he is writing a large opportunity for description oflandscape or exhibition of great emotion in his characters. Anotherreason is, perhaps, that his tendency to introduce the supernatural ismore in harmony with the subject material got out of antiquity than ofthe subject material got out of to-day. We can accept magic in these oldtales, even to the incantations of Bobaran the White that swayed thewaves of the sea so that Gaer, the son of Deirdre, was saved from themen of Lochlin. That is as it should be in druidic times. It isimpossible, of course, that Bobaran had power over the waves, but insuch a story such an episode seems more probable than the possiblehypnotic suggestion of Gloom Achanna's pipe-playing that sent ManusMacOdrum to his death among the fighting seals, because to-day we do notoften come upon such things. It is even less easy to accept the pipingto madness of Alasdair in "Alasdair the Proud. " Hypnotic suggestion maydrive to death in the sea a man half fey because of sorrow long enduredand the superstition that he is descended from seals, but pipe-playingcannot believably in modern tales drive a man insane, whatever it may doin the famous old "Pied Piper of Hamelin" or other folk-tale. 

So, too, in the verse of Sharp, whether lyric or dramatic, it is theCelt that inspires him to his best work. Nowhere does his verse win somuch of beauty and glamour as when his thought turns to the four citiesof Murias and Finias and Falias and Glorias, or when it breaks into achant on the lips of Etain, in "The Immortal Hour. "

Though there is less unevenness of technique, both in the style and inthe unfolding of the story, in these "Seanchas" than elsewhere in hiswriting, the technique breaks down at times here, too, more usuallythrough sins of omission than through sins of commission. Sharp realizedthe something wanting that so many find in much of his writing, even inmuch that is most beautiful, realized it so keenly that he felt calledupon to explain. He explained not directly, it is true, as if in answerto criticism, but none the less definitely in thus affirming hisattitude 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 oftales from oral tradition], but there are some minds which care verylittle 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. Heprefers his dream, thinking that it is their dream, or the dream oftheir ancestors. He has, indeed, the thing itself, the Highlander'sdream, and when it is given to him to impart that dream fully we forgivehim the proud words I have just quoted. The pity of it is he has notalways so succeeded through the way he has chosen, and then it is, ofcourse, that we condemn him for the lack of that humility the greatdramatic artist must have whereby he must forget himself and sosubordinate himself that tradition or life speaks through him. 

It is not to be wondered, then, that there is little direct record offolk-lore of his own collecting in his writing, even when he is writingof folk-topics. There are borrowings in plenty, especially in "Where theForest Murmurs, " and even when the collecting seems his own, as it doesin "Earth, Fire, and Water, " "Children of Water, " and "Cuilidh Mhoire, "it is diamond dust, not diamonds, to which he gives so beautifulsetting. 

Just as appealing to Sharp as the old myths themselves are thelocalities that tradition or the stories themselves assign as backgroundto them. He loves Iona not only for its gray and barren beauty, butbecause it was here Columba wrought his wonders. "Iona, " which fills themajor part of the volume "The Divine Adventure" gives title to, is thefinest in quality as well as the longest of his writings that may becalled, prosaically, topographical. They, in their varying ways, aremuch 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 "LiteraryGeography" is. In this last-named book, Scott and Stevenson, amongothers, are put against the background that inspired their work, as in"Iona" certain stories are imagined so as to fit their surroundings andcertain legendary history narrated that is fitting to these surroundingswith an appropriateness almost too exact to be believable. In "Iona, "because he loved the island that inspired its writing beyond any otherof the places he loved greatly, is to be found some of his very bestwork, and examples of all kinds of his writing, as I have said; and evenwhen this "topographical writing, " as in some of his magazine articles, is evidently of the sort initially intended to "float cuts, " it is verywell done, done most often with distinction. At times, of course, itsuffers from over-emphasis, as do the descriptive portions of his longstories, but generally he attunes his writing to the genius of theplace. This is as true of his letters as of what he wrote for thepublic, especially true of that series on Algiers from which Mrs. Sharpquotes in her "Memoir. " Papers of this sort, papers giving the genius ofplace, Sharp was happier in, I think, than in those which are moredefinitely the out-of-door essay. Sharp knew much of birds and smallmammals, of trees and plants, with a knowledge that evidently began inchildhood, but, as with so much else in his life, this knowledge henever had time to fill out and deepen through patient observation. Youmust not, then, turn to "Where the Forest Murmurs" to find writing of akind with that in which Thoreau and Jefferies so finely attained, muchless that loving intimacy with the personal side of birds and animalsthat so humanly tempers the scientific spirit in White of Selborne. Noris there in them the racy earthiness of Mr. Burroughs. Their greatestasset is their enthusiasm over the beauty of the world they are writtento praise; the next greatest their power of catching in words the moodof a landscape; their next greatest their distinction of style, thoughthere are several in which the style is wholly without distinction. Nowand then, too, they are valuable for their guesses at the whys andwherefores of things. There are to-day many explanations of what iscommonly called "The Lure of the Wild. " Is not this as revelatory asany?--

 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 arenot out-of-door essays, is their dearth of freshly observed fact. Thisdearth would not matter so much if there were not so many of them, but abook full of such essays with little original observation will pall, nomatter how well written, no matter how interesting the personality ofthe writer. Thus it is that some of the essays of Jefferies pall, someof those written in his last days, of Jefferies who had in his earlierwriting been so objective. In Thoreau there is a happy combination offreshly observed fact with personal comment, and in Mr. Burroughs apersonal element greatly subdued, and presented in most of the essaysonly through the selective art that has preserved the incidents herelates out of many of a vast store of their kind. 

In these "nature studies" of Sharp, as in so much of his writing, thereis 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 othershave given us before. Sharp wrote sometimes, I have no doubt, with thething he describes before him but oftener, it would seem, from notes, and oftenest, I take it, from memory. Sometimes it is best to write thusfrom memory. The unessential will fade out, the essential remain; butwith Sharp the trouble is that the first observation has often beenhurried. He was content with the beauty that he saw when he firstnoticed the incident; he did not wait to observe what in the furtheractions of the life observed would make that beautiful incident moresignificant. It may, of course, be said that all he was after was theimpression that the passing incident made upon him. Perhaps so, and ifso, more is the pity, because, while, as I have said, one out-of-dooressay with little or even with nothing but the personality of the writermay interest, or perhaps two such, or even ten, a book full will bemonotonous. At its best, however, his writing of "natural romance" is ofgreat beauty. "Still Waters, " for one, is almost perfect, as perfect asthis sort of thing may be. It is wrought of his own experiences withjust enough of mythological data to give it the texture of old andlasting things. 

"The Rainy Hyades, " on the other hand, is largely a rehash of folk-lorenotes, second-hand work with very little added from experience and verylittle finely imagined or recaptured by way of ancestral memory. Attimes it would seem that, poor, tired man, he had to feed his flagginginvention from a dictionary of quotations. So, it appears, he has donein his "Winter Stars" as well as in "The Rainy Hyades. " As I think overthe unevenness of these essays, the beauty of "Still Waters, " and theobviousness of these others, I am brought back again to wondering whatSharp 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 wouldhave done had he lived, for a man's art is judged by what it is, with notempering of the appraisement by what the man's life has been. Fortunately there is inspiring work in plenty in Sharp, in this, as inother phases of his work, to make readers turn to him when interest inhim as a phenomenon of current literature has passed away. It is hard tothink 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 beautyin landscape, and when the opening of "The Coming of Dusk" will not beturned 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 acatalogue that would exceed any even of Walt Whitman's. For years Sharplived by criticism, as editor of "The Canterbury Poets" and as reviewerfor many of the London journals. To me none of this critical work issignificant until he came to write of the movement that carried him tofame, --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 greatstrength of William Sharp--his power to revisualize the Celtic past ofScotland and to imagine stories of that past that are as native to it asthose handed down in Bardic legend or folk-lore. I have emphasized mybelief that in other kinds of writing his attainment is less original, though often beautiful in its imitativeness, and this imitativeness Iwill explain as being due partly to that quality of the play-actor thatwas in him as in so many of Celtic blood, partly to his lack of time tohew out for himself a way of his own, and partly to his quickresponsiveness to any new beauty pointed out by work that he admired. Itwas not altogether, however, lack of time that prevented his attainmentof a larger originality, an originality in other sorts of writing thanthe "Seanchas. " Sharp had an unfortunate disbelief in early life in thevalue of technique. In the preface to the "Romantic Ballads" (1888), forinstance, he expressed the belief that "the supreme merit of a poem isnot perfection of art, but the quality of the imagination which is thesource of such real or approximate perfection. " This, as I interpret itmeans that a poem, when of perfect art, has back of that perfect art ahigh imaginative quality; but by his own practice Sharp knows that hethought the quality would suffice without the highest art in itsexpression. It was this belief that made him leave his work incomplete;he read his verses, no doubt, with the glow in which he wrote themrecalled to memory, and without the realization that he had not got downon paper for others half of the creative force that was in him as hewrote. 

I have found a reason for a lesser success than the early work of "FionaMacleod" promised to him in his imitativeness, but in some ways he washandicapped, too, by lack of models to follow. Granted he could haveblazed other ways for himself than that of the "Seanchas, " he lessenedthe originality of his attainment by imitation, but if he could not haveso blazed other ways he just as surely could have gone further had hehad models, or rather good models, to follow, models, for instance, innovels of Highland life. The very fact of there being great realisticstories of Highland life might have made it possible for him to havewritten a Highland "Silence Farm. "

But enough of what might have been: what is is good enough, good enoughat its best to treasure among those things that are a lasting part ofour lives. However great may be the reaction against his work because ofthe nine days' wonder about the identity of its creator, certain partsof it, certain tales and certain verses and a play, will hold their ownagainst the years. Through such tales as "The Sad Queen, " and suchverses as "The Dirge of the Four Cities, " and "The House of Usna" eveneyes of little vision may see "eternal beauty wandering on her way, "leaving about them a glamour as recurrent to the mind as sunset to theskies. 

THE END

APPENDIX

APPENDIX

PLAYS PRODUCED, IN DUBLIN, BY THE ABBEY THEATRE COMPANY AND ITSPREDECESSORS, WITH DATES OF FIRST PERFORMANCES

IRISH LITERARY THEATRE AT ANTIENT CONCERTROOMS

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 GregoryJan. 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.