Irish Plays and Playwrights Part 13

_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 G.o.d, I'll make you pay for this night's work, Ellen McCarthy, till you'd wish you were dead--for the black curse you brought on this farm, an' for the liking you have to the young man.

[_Goes out. Ellen remains sitting at the table, staring in front of her with sad, hopeless eyes_.

The turning of the key in the lock ends the play, leaving brutality unimaginable as the fate of Ellen.

It is a severe reading of the Irish peasant, this of Tom Dempsey.

Murder may come of his blackness of heart. He is a far worse man, of course, than poor John Clancy, who killed a man in an unpremeditated fight, sure murderer though Clancy be. Yet despite such heroes or at least such characters in his plays, no one would say that in either "The Clancy Name" or "The Crossroads" Mr. Robinson held a brief against the Irish peasant. He most certainly does not. He likes the Irish peasant.

His plays are "stories of mine own people" faithfully told. He does not spare the Cork farmer, but he does not distort him. Why however, his "Harvest" was allowed to be played unmolested in New York, after the "The Playboy of the Western World" met with organized opposition, can be explained only by recognition of the fact that the Irishmen of the patriotic societies are slaves of precedent. "The Playboy of the Western World" had always met with opposition, so it should meet with opposition in New York. "Harvest" escaped in New York because its uncomplimentary personages were unheralded. Not that there is anything in "Harvest," any more than in "The Playboy of the Western World," that any self-respecting Irishman need object to. "Harvest" shows the disastrous effects the wrong sort of primary education, as taught by the country schoolmaster of the old type, the type that was prevalent before the present type, brought about. The present-day schoolmaster is in sympathy with system of education that will keep the children on the land or in an industry near the home place; the older type would give them an education that would send them to the cities to be priests and lawyers and secretaries and typists and chemists and what-nots. Old William Lordan, the schoolmaster, had, evidently, in the opinion of the playwright, the sins of many on his shoulders, and yet one, knowing that it is the system and not the man that is at fault, cannot help feeling that Mr. Robinson is rather severe on what is in life a really lovable though mistaken sort of man.

"Harvest" shows that of the six children of Tim Hurley, but the three that come into the play are loyal to their father: Maurice, who works the home farm; Jack, the apothecary's clerk from Dublin, who tries to help with the farmwork, but is too much of a weakling to be anything of a help; and Mary, who from typist has turned mistress, now to this man, now to that. Mary, come home to get away from her wrong life, is called back to London by the excitement of its life, which has become a necessity to her. Jack, the chemist, in the end deserts the home; and is off at the end of the play, with his upper-cla.s.s wife, for America or the colonies. Only Maurice is more than half-ent.i.tled to our respect.

The son who is the priest is in America to collect for the Church at the time of his family's need, and so is not helpful to his family; the solicitor son is climbing socially, and, needing a motor-car to help him to position, prefers to spend his money on himself rather than on the home place that was robbed to pay for his education; and the secretary son is so ashamed of "the ditch out of which he was digged" that he has changed both his name and his religion.

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

The characterization in "Harvest" falls short of that of "The Crossroads," but perhaps it had to be if Mr. Robinson was to make his point. As one realizes that perhaps these people are but p.a.w.ns with which to win the game that Mr. Robinson has set out, one remembers that their creator spent some weeks with Mr. Shaw and Mr. Barker in London, and one understands, too, many other of the failings of "Harvest." It is but another of many ill.u.s.trations of the blight that Mr. Shaw has brought upon the modern English stage.

It is a two-edged satire that Mr. Robinson employs in his "Patriots"

(1912), a satire that cuts into the sham agitation of some political leagues, an agitation that is talk only, and at the same time cuts with almost equal sharpness into the physical force party. It is true that it is not the motives but the wisdom of these latter men that Mr. Robinson satirizes in the failure of James Nugent, the returned political prisoner, to stir his townsmen with the kind of talk that set them to arming in 1893. That their propaganda is no longer possible, if it was ever possible, is a corollary to the play, even if it could overcome the inertia that has come to Irishmen with their greater prosperity since the Land Purchase Act went into force.

The revolt of the patriot who hates talk and is willing to sacrifice personal happiness for country is recorded here as it was in "The Crossroads," and the uselessness of the sacrifice made only too plain.

To one not an Irishman it would perhaps seem that the real drama there is in the play is smothered by the political satire and that the politics satirized are of too local an interest for it to have so universal an appeal as "The Crossroads" or "Harvest." There is an universal story in "Patriots" that is but slightly developed--the story of the prisoner's wife, Ann; her love for her daughter, who is a cripple because of her mother's being dragged here and there by James Nugent in his campaigning just before her birth; Ann Nugent's turning against her husband, on his liberation from an eighteen years' imprisonment for political murder, because of the wrong done her so long ago and because of the danger to Rose's health that campaigning with her father would entail. The turning of Ann Nugent from her husband is the really significant part of the play,--and in thoughts of that we pay scant heed to the political satire and even to the pathos of the desertion of a leader by almost all he expected to follow him, and the reduction of his life, as he puts it bitterly, "to an anecdote--a thing to be told stories about." And in the end that is the fate he will meet. Time and a wife that he wronged have broken him. As he staggers off at the end of the play, a stricken man and older than his forty-five years, this is his cry:--

I've killed a man, I've crippled a child, I've got myself shut up for eighteen years--G.o.d knows what good came of it all--but--Peter--I meant--I tried ... I know I meant right--and in prison my cell used to be filled with the sad faces of men like me who had given everything for Ireland--they wouldn't have come to me, would they? if I hadn't been of their company. They are here now--I see them all around me--there is Wolfe Tone, and there is ... oh, quiet watching faces, I have tried--tried as you tried--and been broken....

With this ability of his to pick out a theme that is basic in Irish life, and with the years bringing him an experience of life that will dominate any propagandist purpose, Mr. Robinson should grow in seriousness of intention and accomplishment. He hates sham, he has sane and cleansing satire of pretension, he writes good dialogue, his experience as stage manager of the Abbey Theatre is teaching him the stage; he is only twenty-five. Do not these things augur a future?

MR. RUTHERFORD MAYNE

It so happened that the last time I was reading the plays of Mr.

Rutherford Mayne, I was also reading the plays of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero. All the world has heard of the one; only the little band scattered here and there through the English-speaking countries to whom letters are a real part of life has heard of the other. I laughed over "Dandy d.i.c.k"; I thought of Miss Rehan playing Georgianna Tidman with all that gush of spirits that was hers; I thought of Miss Nethersole in her wonderful youth playing Paula Tanqueray; and as I thought of these two, each in her way inimitable in her part, thoughts of past moments with the characters of Mr. Mayne's plays, plays I have never seen on the stage, came back to me. Had I seen them on the stage would my thoughts of them have been thoughts of the theatre, as were all my thoughts of Sir Arthur's plays? It may be, but I think not, I think the great strength of Mr. Mayne is that he takes you to life; I think the great weakness of the wide-heard author is that he takes you immediately, in almost all of his plays, to the theatre, and only secondarily, if at all, after the memory of his artificiality has died away, to life itself.

William John Granahan and John Smith the Tory,--will you forget them, or Robbie John whom the fiddle called away, or Ebenezer McKie and Francey Moore, Protestant and Catholic, who together lay in wait for the hated landlord and shot him as he pa.s.sed through the glen; or John Murray, good man, and his bauchle of a brother? You will not forget them, for they are from life; you have known them, all save Francey, if you have known Scotchmen who are Lowlanders and Presbyterians, or such North of Ireland men as are unalterably opposed to Home Rule. They are very like the Orangemen of the novels of Mr. Shan Bullock, very like the peasants the English-speaking world outside of Scotland first met in the verse of Burns; harsher than the Baillie Nicol Jarvies and Dugald Dalgettys of the kindly Sir Walter, but akin to them and to his Davie Deans and Dumbiedikeses.

We are in a more familiar world in the plays of Mr. Mayne than in those of most of the other writers in the movement--that is, I mean most American readers are--simply because of Burns and Scott. Had Ireland had a peer of either in his generation as satirist or romancer the Irish-Irish would to-day be as familiar to us as are the Scotch-Irish, who are, of course, transplanted Scotch. The women of this world are not, however, of types so well known to us as are the men, because the chivalry of Sir Walter prevented him from giving us his peasant Scotswomen in as full detail as he gave us his men; but it is not difficult for us to appreciate Mrs. Granahan and her daughter; Mrs.

McKie, a "woman with a dead soul"; Mary Murray with her daftness over the boys; and even Sarah McMinn, so true in her managing and meanness, qualities necessary to the prosperity of her folk. Puritan America can understand these women and men because they are Puritan, too, with the ign.o.ble that is in the Puritan as well as with the n.o.ble that is just as surely there.

It is in the first three plays of Mr. Mayne that we meet these people I have named, County Down folk all of them, and all Protestant but Francey Moore. They are the leading characters in "The Turn of the Road" (1906), "The Drone" (1908), and "The Troth" (1908). The motive of Mr. Mayne's first play is the old call to wander, the unrest of the vagrant heart, here the heart of the musician. It is the story of Robbie John Granahan, who, after burning his fiddle at the desire of a strong farmer whose daughter he wished to marry, is driven out into the world to try his fortune with another through her determination that her lover should follow his star. There is more beauty in "The Turn of the Road" than in either of the other plays of the North of Ireland, more beauty of theme, more beauty of thought, more beauty of expression. Its themes are not new, _Wanderl.u.s.t_ and the Puritans' hatred of art; its thoughts are not new, but they are beautiful, and the words themselves are freshly used.

Its phrases that hold in memory are given to Robbie John and to his father and to his grandfather, most of them to the grandfather. This is the grandfather's lament for the boy gone on the roads with his fiddle and his father's curse:--

It's the wee things you think nothing of, but that make your home a joy to come back till, after a hard day's work. And you've sent out into the could and wet the one that was making your home something more than the common. D'ye think them proud city folk will listen to his poor ould ballads with the heart of the boy singing through them? It's only us--it's only us. I say, as knows the long wild nights, and the wet and the rain and the mist of nights on the boglands--it's only us, I say, could listen him in the right way.

And ye knowed, right well ye knowed, that every string of his fiddle was keyed to the crying of your own heart.

There is no beauty at all in "The Drone." There is little beauty possible to such a subject realistically treated as that of the exposure of the utter sham that is the pretended inventor of a bellows, a man who has for years fattened on a brother's tolerance and family pride. There might have been beauty of construction, but dramatic construction is not Mr. Mayne's strongest quality. Let that not be held too much against him, for many an English dramatist, like almost every English novelist, is weak in the architectonic qualities of his work. Yet such is the hardness of the people that exposed Daniel Murray that you rejoice in his duping of them at the end through his sale to them of his pretended invention, especially as that frees his brother John, and John's daughter, artful coax that she is, from Sarah McMinn, who is determined to marry the one and manage the two. The ideals of the people of the play and the grim humor of Mr. Mayne are well ill.u.s.trated by this declaration of John Murray, the best of them all, anent the suit for breach of promise with which Sarah threatens him: "I would as soon do without the marrying if I could. I don't want the woman at all, but I'll marry her before she gets a ha'penny off me."

The people here are the people of "The Squireen" of Mr. Bullock,--hard, grasping, resentful, pa.s.sionate, brutal even, but doers of the world's work. All that differentiates them from the Fermanagh Protestants is the different conditions of County Down and a slightly lower social position.

In "The Troth" the theme is the shooting of a landlord by two peasants whom his agents are to evict on the morrow. To the cottage of the Protestant McKie comes his Catholic neighbor, Francey Moore, whose wife is dying. Here there is no turf for the fire, and no hope in the heart of father or mother, for the child of the house has died, and, they think, because of the landlord's hardness to them. The two men swear a troth that they shall lie in wait for Colonel Fotheringham, and that if but one escapes, as is likely, the one arrested shall hold his tongue as to his companion. You do not see the murder on the stage, but you hear the shot and see McKie return to his home, and you know it was he killed the landlord. The tension of the last scene is almost unendurable. His wife's providential lie for McKie, her agony in her knowledge of his guilt when she sees his face on his return, the man's terror, are handled with masterly firmness and sureness. To see this scene on the stage in the hands of actors worthy of it must be to know real tragedy.

In this play, too, brief as is the glimpse we have into these four lives of small farmer and his wife, his farmhand and his neighbor, a neighbor of alien race and hated faith, you get to know them as if they were friends of long standing. Character creation and character presentation in pithy, tense dialogue are the great gifts of Mr. Mayne. Francey Moore, the "dark man," with his sensibility, his eloquence, and his flaming rage, is not of the characteristic men of Mr. Mayne. They are men of slow ways all un-Celtic and with smouldering hearts like those of the Northmen we read about in the tales of "Origines Islandicae."

In "Red Turf" (1911) Mr. Mayne turns away from County Down to the Galway bogs, admirably symbolizing the hot land feud between neighbors in his t.i.tle. There are but five characters in the play, Martin Burke, farmer, and his spitfire of a wife; and his neighbors the Flanagans, father and son, who have won away from the Burkes, by the surveyor's decision, their bank of stone turf that had come to Mary Burke from her father; and an old fellow little better than a beggar. Mary taunts her husband until he shoots the elder Flanagan as he is working away on the "great stone bank." It was not his own gun Burke had, but, ironically, it was one just brought to his house by the poor old man whom they had often befriended, John Heffernan, brought that it might not be found in his house by the gauger, and he unable to pay the license. It is not made clear that there was malevolence in the leaving of the gun at the Burkes by the old fellow, malevolent as are some of his remarks. Akin to him, not in his malevolence but in that each is in a way a bit of a prophet, is the grandfather in "The Turn of the Road," but more nearly akin to old Granahan is Uncle Bartle of "The Mineral Workers" of Mr. Boyle.

Synge records old men of prophecy and tales in his travel sketches, but he put none such who were gentle in his plays, or I would say that Grandfather Granahan, like the old gaffer in Mr. Masefield's "Nan," was a part of the influence of Synge that is felt by both Mr. Masefield and Mr. Mayne. Their styles, respectively, in "Nan" and "Red Turf," have in them more than echoes of the style of Synge. The "wambling" old men of Mr. Hardy come also to mind as one thinks of these old men of Mr.

Masefield and Mr. Mayne and Mr. Boyle. All in a sense play "chorus" to the action of the play, but there is no one of them that is in the story or play in which he appears on such grounds only. There are, of course, old men everywhere, in all life they are an integral part, and everywhere they are commentators on life once they feel that their day is done, spectators of a pageant from the forefront of which they have dropped to watch the following troupe pa.s.s by.

There is little mating in these plays of Mr. Mayne, and love of woman worthy of the name of love only in "The Turn of the Road"; there is parental love, too, but perhaps more of parental tyranny. Such parental love as there is, however, actually expressed, makes one of the memorable pa.s.sages of Mr. Mayne. Mary Burke, after taunting her husband to madness, tries to turn him from murder when she sees him, gun in hand, by crying: "For the love of G.o.d, would you leave it down. Leave it down and go in and look at the child sleeping. It would take the badness from your mind the same as it did with me."

Though Mr. Mayne is a writer for the Ulster Literary Theatre of Belfast, his allegiance to the Abbey group is clearly indicated in "Red Turf,"

which is the result of a study of Synge. I do not mean to say that Mr.

Mayne is not familiar with the speech of Connacht, but that it is Synge who has taught him how to listen to it. There is little of the influence of Synge in his three plays of the Black North, but when he turns to Galway in "Red Turf," it is but natural that, writing of other than his own people, he should write in a speech that has in it an echo of that of him who has trans.m.u.ted this speech into prose of the most beautiful rhythm that English dramatic prose has known. The Bible is the book of books in Ulster, and there is no page of Mr. Mayne's Ulster plays but shows him acquainted with its great rhythms. Mr. Boyle, skillful artificer of situation, and truthful depicter of character that he is, and Mr. Colum, too, for all his closeness to the earth, are now and then betrayed, Mr. Boyle more often than now and then, into the English of the newspaper or of the public speaker; but the English of Mr. Mayne is all but always an unworn English, an English used freshly, or if with reminiscences in it, reminiscences of the seventeenth-century English that has survived in the Bible or in the memory of the folk from the time of King James.

Mr. Mayne has, then, style, and his dialogue is living speech; he has knowledge of the people of North Ireland, earnestness and sincerity; and having these qualities, he has more that is precious to art than have most of the dramatists his countrymen. There is no consistent reading of life in his plays, no great power over the unrolling of plot, but perhaps these will come with the years. An actor himself, he knows the stage; and this knowledge has given him power over situation. Once he learns to lead situation into situation, once he ripens into fuller knowledge of life, Mr. Mayne will be a dramatist to reckon with, indeed.

"NORREYS CONNELL"

There have been many other dramatists than these I have mentioned who have had one or more plays produced at the Abbey Theatre. Some of these, like Mr. Bernard Shaw, are Irishmen abroad that have gained the ear of the world and do a play for Dublin out of a sense of duty It was thus that "John Bull's Other Island" came into being, but that play, being considered "beyond the scope" of the National Theatre Society, was not produced at the Abbey, but at the Court Theatre, London, November 1, 1904. When "The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet" was "censored" in London, however, the Abbey opened its doors to it, the "crude melodrama"

receiving its premier in late August, 1909. Little as "John Bull's Other Island" was in the Abbey tradition, with moral purpose and unhumanity of its very essence, it was at least a newspaper leader on an Irish subject, but "The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet," a sort of sentimentalized travesty of Bret Harte preaching the usual Shavian evangel, has no more relation to Irish life than it has to literature.

It marred the repertoire the Abbey Company brought to America, as would a camp-meeting hymn the music of the pipes.

Out of the Abbey tradition, too, are the plays of "Norreys Connell" (Mr.

Conal O'Riordan), whose "Piper" had its day of lesser notoriety of Playboy-like quality on its presentation on February 13, 1908. It is a very obvious allegory, outlining under guise of an incident of '98 the weaknesses of contemporaneous Ireland, its love of talk; its lack of hold-together; its refusal to see things as they are; its incapacity in practical matters; the reckless temper of this faction of its people, the subjection to clerical influence of that, the suicidal patriotism of a third; in short, the Celts' willful rebellion against the despotism of fact. It was not pleasant listening to, or seeing, "The Piper," to many groups of Irishmen, for it cut alike at the Parliamentary Nationalists, the Sein Feiner, and the shoneen. Even though one admires the courage of the Piper and Black Mike, one realizes the futility of both, and of Larry the Talker, Tim the Trimmer, and Pat Dennehy, all typical of too many men in Ireland to be endurable to the usual theatre audience. There is a white heat of feeling, however, under the play that to some degree makes one forget its rather indifferent writing, its failure to attain true dramatic speech, its obviousness as of a morality play.

Another little drama of Mr. O'Riordan, "Time," is almost a morality play. It was produced shortly after its author became director of the Abbey Theatre, succeeding Mr. Synge in the spring of 1909. Mr. O'Riordan does not include "Time" among the plays of his volume of 1912, "Shakespeare's End, and Other Irish Plays," but one cannot but feel there was room for it there, if there was room for the play that gives t.i.tle to the volume. "Shakespeare's End," however, was doubtless included because it gives its author's ideas as to the mission of Ireland in the world. "An Imaginary Conversation," the second play of the volume, was performed at the Abbey Theatre May 13, 1909, following shortly after "Time"; a discussion of art and patriotism and love among Tom Moore, and his sister Kate and Robert Emmet, with a little, a very little, of the intensity that made "The Piper" something more than second-rate.

MR. ST. JOHN G. ERVINE

Mr. St. John G. Ervine I know through two plays, "Mixed Marriage,"

produced at the Abbey Theatre on March 30, 1911, and "The Magnanimous Lover," produced in the same playhouse on October 17, 1912. Like his fellow from County Down, the master dramatist of the Ulster Literary Theatre, Mr. Mayne, Mr. Ervine excels in characterization. You remember his people, even after one reading of the plays, so clearly are they distinguished, so definite are their personalities. With the five men and women of "The Magnanimous Lover," you pa.s.s but a few minutes, as it is only a one-act play, but you remember them as well as you do the six of "Mixed Marriage," though you follow their fortunes through four acts.

All these characters are typical of the artisan cla.s.s of the North of Ireland, the five Protestants of "The Magnanimous Lover" and the four Protestants and two Catholics of "Mixed Marriage." It is the troubles that arise from the difference in religion of the Protestant Raineys, mother, father, and the two young men; the Catholic betrothed, Nora, of the elder son Hugh; and their common friend the Catholic labor agitator, O'Hara, that are the motive forces of the latter play. Faintest etched is Tom, the younger son, and most like a stock character. Nora and O'Hara are well done, but one remembers both as stage parts rather than as characterizations. Hugh is still better done, but the two absolute creations are the father and mother. Tom Rainey, the Orangeman, forgets his bitterness against "Cathliks" for a moment to help win the strike in which his fellow workmen of Belfast, "Cathlik an' Prodesans," both are fighting side by side. He is all the more bitter, however, when he learns that his eldest son is going to marry out of his faith, and his speeches, hitherto devoted to smoothing out the troubles between the men of different faith, turn to bitter denunciations of the strike as "a Popish Plot." In the end Tom Rainey is responsible for riots his wild words have stirred up, the calling-out of the soldiery, and the death of Nora, who is shot down by a volley as she runs out of the Rainey house into the rioting street. On the stage, of course, Mrs. Rainey is the more sympathetic character, her tolerance, her tact, her humor, her infinite kindliness winning an audience as it is given to few characters to win it. She is less like a type, too, than her husband, but for all, I cannot but think he is better drawn.

Mr. Ervine has not a style like Mr. Mayne, nor such a rhythm to his prose, but he has more humor, and it is natural humor, a humor that arises out of the situation and is not simply dragged in for the purposes of comic relief. Mr. Ervine evidently knows the life he depicts in and out. He ought to know it, for he was born to it, being the son of a workingman in the s.h.i.+pyards of Belfast. And knowing it well he finds it far from hopeless. It is a pleasure to come upon a play of the North written in a spirit other than that of revolt against its Puritanism.

There are "kindly Irish of the Irish" in the Black North as well as in the three other provinces, but most of the authors of the North are content to picture its hardness, its hypocrisy, its bigotry, its love of wife and child remorselessly concealed as a weakness of the flesh.

It is to this darker picturing of the North, however, that Mr. Ervine turns in "The Magnanimous Lover," which indicts the self-righteousness of the Ulster Protestant with a severity such as is possible only to a man bitter against a weakness of his own people. It is an old theme Mr.

Ervine has to handle, the refusal of the wronged woman to wed her betrayer, when, after years of disloyalty, he is willing, by marrying her, to make her again an "honest woman." To speak only of recent plays of similar plot, there is "The Last of the De Mullens" of St. John Hankin, and "A Woman of No Importance" of Wilde. Mr. Ervine, it is true, handles the theme freshly, but the real power of the play is in his creation of the heroine, Maggie Cather. The danger with such a character is that it will be only a mouthpiece for woman's demand for a common moral standard for men and women; but Maggie is not a mouthpiece but a real woman, triumphantly alive, with hot anger in her heart at the injustice of the world, and at the "unco guidness" of her old-time lover, Henry Hinde. Ten years before the time of the action of the play Henry Hinde had fled, just as her child was to be born, to Liverpool, and there he has prospered, and so risen in the world that it is possible for him to wed a minister's daughter. Fear of G.o.d's wrath has now driven him home to make such amends as he can, but there is in him no pity for the woman or love for his child. Maggie has faced it out alone all these years in the seaside village of Down as Hester faced it out in the seaside village of Ma.s.sachusetts, while Henry forgot it all until he was "saved" and "convicted of sin." If no more cowardly than Dimmesdale, Henry is more heartless, utterly callous, indeed,--as he confesses, in "the devil's grip." And yet Mr. Ervine is so true to the life that he is depicting, a life at once pa.s.sionate and prosaic, that he makes anger for the past and fear of a nagged future with Henry as effective agents in her rejection of him as are self-respect and right feeling. It is a "big" part that Mr. Ervine has created for the leading actress, and though the story is unequivocally "unpleasant" and may prevent "The Magnanimous Lover" from being a favorite play, there can be no two minds as to its success as drama. It is very real drama, of elemental human emotion all unveiled. With such a play as this, and with "Mixed Marriage" to his credit, I look forward eagerly to the promised production and publication of "The Eviction."

MR. JOSEPH CAMPBELL

Another dramatist from the North and of promise is Mr. Joseph Campbell.

His "Judgment" is of the northwest, however, the whole breadth of Ulster between its Donegal mountains and the Belfast of "Mixed Marriage"; and it is of the country, not of the city; and of an Ireland wholly Catholic, not of an Ireland of Protestant and Catholic at war over religion. There are moments of real drama in "Judgment," but no such inevitable rise to climax as in "Mixed Marriage." Its undoubted power is in the feeling underlying it, in its characterization, and in its style. Mr. Campbell was already known when his play was put on at the Abbey Theatre, April 15, 1912, as the author of "The Mountainy Singer"

(1909), a volume of freshly felt and singing verse; and of "Mearing Stones" (1911), little prose records of things seen and of moods felt in a corner of Donegal. Many a striking phrase of "Judgment," indeed, is already written down in the paragraphs of "Mearing Stones" as actual talk heard in the roads, and several of the situations of the plays are workings-up of situations of which its author found himself a spectator on the streets of Andara or on the highway between Slieve a-Tooey and the sea.

I first came upon his verses, if I remember rightly, in "The United Irishmen," but I was first impressed by him as an ill.u.s.trator, his name being always signed in those days after the Irish fas.h.i.+on, Seosamh MacCathmhaoil. A Dublin friend sent me at Christmas in 1907 a "Calendar of the Saints," for which Mr. Campbell did the ill.u.s.trations, ill.u.s.trations akin to those of Miss Althea Gyles, which so surely take one back to Ireland's heroic age, instinct as they are with the primitive aloofness of antiquity.

It is not antiquity, however, that Mr. Campbell has chosen for his play.

Indeed, he rejects antiquity, deliberately "using peasants as ...