Irish Plays and Playwrights Part 8

When we come to consider the technique of Mr. Russell's art, we find him anything but Emersonian. Mr. Russell has, in general, command of form, melody, harmony, distinction. Who reads carefully will remember many fine lines; who reads only once will be as one lost in sun-filled fog like that of "A E.'s" own Irish mountains, but he should be patient, he should wait and look again and again, and finally he will see, even if earth be still dimmed with fogbanks, much of the heavens, free of fog, and radiant with cold white light.

"Forest glooms Rumorous of old romance"

and

"But joy as an Arctic sun went down"

the kind of lines rarest in his verse; more characteristic are,

"Hearts like cloisters dim and grey,"

"the great star swings Along the sapphire zone,"

"The Angel childhood of the earth,"

"Glint the bubble planets tossing in the dead black sea of night,"

"The old enchantment lingers in the honey heart of earth."

There are comparatively few "purple patches" in Mr. Russell's poetry, for the reasons that each poem depends for its chief appeal on one mood or thought or dream immanent in it, rather than on any fine phrasing.

The effort to catch the meaning of the verse--seldom apparent at first glance--prevents the noting of as many purple lines as there are. Nor when noted are such lines readily memorable, since they are apt to lack a.s.sociation with known and loved things to bring them home to the reader. And again the poems are very short,--intimations, suggestions rather than expressions,--and their intangible themes are often much alike, and poem becomes confused with poem in the memory.

It may be that to those to whom the Other World is very instant, as it is to many Irishmen, or to those that go about daily preparing for the world beyond the grave, as did our Puritan ancestors of the seventeenth century, these poems of Mr. Russell's speak familiar language, as they of a certainty do to the mystic, but to the many modern art lovers who hold to Pater's "New Cyrenaicism,"--as Mr. Russell would say, "those under the blight of the Relative,"--as well as to the man in the street their language is new and difficult to understand. But the poems have found their audience--there is no doubt about that--and they are regarded as oracular by hundreds. This is the more curious in that there is so little personality in them, surprisingly little when one knows how strong is the personality of the man that made them But this lack of personality follows naturally on the mystic's creed--he must put into his writings chiefly his relation with G.o.d,--for all other relations are as nothing to that,--and if he attain his desire he is rapt away from himself and his fellows into oneness with G.o.d.

Quality, a very definite quality, these verses of Mr. Russell's have, but it is an almost unchanging sameness of quality; almost all his verses, as I have said, have the same theme. So there is a monotony about them, and their reader is apt to cry out that mysticism is inimical to art. It may well be that this unswerving following of one theme is of definite purpose; that Mr. Russell feels that he as Irishman and mystic has a mission, as indeed Mr. Charles Johnston owns. Speaking of Irishmen, in "Ireland" (1902), he says,--

We live in the invisible world. If I rightly understand our mission and our destiny, it is this: To restore to other men the sense of that invisible; that world of our immortality; as of old our race went forth carrying the Galilean Evangel. We shall first learn and then teach, that not with wealth can the soul of man be satisfied; that our enduring interest is not here but there, in the unseen, the hidden, the immortal, for whose purposes exist all the visible beauties of the world. If this be our mission and our purpose, well may our fair mysterious land deserve her name: Inis Fail, the Isle of Destiny.

Very like Emerson this, too, but very Irish. Let us not forget that Berkeley and Scotus Erigena were Irishmen.

I do not wish to overemphasize the influence of Emerson on "A.E.," and indeed it is no greater than Emerson's influence over M. Maeterlinck. I believe Emerson was as much guide as master, that he pointed "A.E." the way to the mystics. I might dwell on the resemblance between thoughts common to the two much more than I have--there are even lines of the younger man's that show the influence of lines of the elder. But that is not my object. I wish to point out that Puritanism in Ireland has flowered up into the mystic poetry of "A.E.," into poetry of that strange quality, cold ecstasy, as Puritanism in America has flowered up into the mystic poetry of Emerson, poetry of cold ecstasy. In England, so far as I know, Puritanism, that has given us so great a poet as Milton, has never so flowered. Crashaw was born of a Puritan father, but it was through the Old Faith his greatest inspiration came, and his ecstasy, as that of his latter-day disciple, Francis Thompson, is warm ecstasy, not cold like that of the two Puritan poets. Henry More, Platonist and seer of visions, never attained ecstasy in his poetry. It may be that it required transplantation of Englishmen into Ireland and into America to bring about this phenomenon. Nor is it the only quality these two earliest bodies of English colonists alike developed. But it is more than dangerous to dogmatize where so many races went to the making of a people as went to the making of Anglo-Irishmen and Americans.

How different are the types of Anglo-Irish I could not but ponder as we left "A E.'s" home and went out into the chill rain of that August night. To the right hand, as we walked with "A.E.'s" disciples, they pointed to Maud Gonne's house. "Irish Joan of Arc" they call her, leader of men whom men wors.h.i.+p at first sight; most exciting of Ireland's mob orators, all proclaim her, a very Pytho whose prophecies stir unrest and tumult! And here next door the Quietist, the man of dreams and visions, to whom all the war of the world is of as little moment as all other unrealities, since here in this world he has begun already the real, the spiritual life. Both are types that have been as long as Ireland has been; both Pytho and priest were among the high order of druid and druidess of old time; agitator and reconciler, by Mr. Russell's belief, might well be reincarnations of the wise women and wise men of prehistoric days. To the world Maud Gonne is more representative of Ireland than Mr. Russell, but he is just as truly a symbol of Ireland as she: to those who know Irish history the thought of her quiet monasteries of the seventh century, whence she sent out teachers to all of Europe, is as recurrent as her political agitation of the nineteenth, and to those who know her countryside the memories of soft sunny rains and moonlit evenings are as lingering as those of black angry days and wild blind nights. Her very colors, her grays and greens and purples, proclaim her peace. It is of this peace and of the greater peace of that unphenomenal or spiritual world, that lies nearer to Ireland than to any Western land, that Mr. Russell is interpreter.

You may think of Mr. Russell as you will, as organizer of the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, as stimulator of the Irish Literary Revival, as economist, playwright, poet, painter, preacher, but always as you put by his books you will think of him as mystic, as stargazer, wandering, as he so often tells us in his poems, on the mountains by night, with his eyes keener with wonder at the skies than ever shepherd's under the Star of Bethlehem; you will see him, the human atom, on the bare Dublin mountains, thrilling as he watches the sweep of world beyond world; and yet, atom that he is, the possessor of it all;--you will think of him as stargazer whose "spirit rolls into the vast of G.o.d."

CHAPTER VI

LADY GREGORY

When one stops to think how much of the blood of the Gael, Irish and Scotch, there is in us in America, one realizes that we owe a debt of grat.i.tude to Lady Gregory second only to that owed her by "The Men of Ireland and Alban" themselves. For it is Lady Gregory, in her "Cuchulain of Muirthemne" (1902) and in her "G.o.ds and Fighting Men" (1904) and in her "Book of Saints and Wonders" (1908), who has done more than any other writer of the Gaelic countries to bring home to us the wonders of Gaelic romance. That they should have to be brought home to us is a shame to us. With so much of Irish and Scotch blood in us the names of the heroes of the Red Branch and Fenian Cycles should not be so foreign in aspect and sound as they undoubtedly are, and their deeds should be as familiar as those of Robin Hood. A hundred years ago our grandfathers had, indeed, "Ossian" on their shelves, as we had in boyhood Dean Church's stories of Greece and Rome, or, in some cases, the stories of his doings in their memories, learned from their parents were they old-country born, or of their nurses were it their privilege, as it was that of many more Americans of the second half of the nineteenth century, to have as foster mothers "kindly Irish of the Irish."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

To her own countrymen the work of Lady Gregory, valuable as it is, is not the revelation it is to us. Those of them that have not been brought up on the stories that she translates could read at least many of them in the "Old Celtic Romances" (1879) of Dr. P.W. Joyce, or in the versions of the Cuchulain and the Finn legends by Mr. Standish James O'Grady (1878 and 1880), books that somehow or other never came to be widely read in America. Mr. Yeats admits it was Mr. O'Grady that "started us all," that is, the writers who began the Renaissance in the late eighties. It may be, of course, that the added beauty and dignity the stories take on in the versions of Lady Gregory will inspire to n.o.bler writing poets and dramatists and novelists that already owe much to Mr. O'Grady or Dr. Joyce or to the scholars they were sent back to by these popularizers. It is certain that the writers of the younger group, the group of those that are only now nearing distinction, owe much to Lady Gregory. After all is said, however, her work is to be judged not for its value to others, but as in itself an art product, of a cla.s.s kindred to "The Wanderings of Oisin" of Mr. Yeats, although differing in form. I am not forgetting, of course, that she is following faithfully, or rather as faithfully as an artist may follow, the old legends. She has, she owns, clarified them, condensed them, left out contradictory episodes, woven now and then a Scotch version of an incident into a cycle arranged in one complete whole from many Irish versions. When Lady Gregory has owned this she has owned that she has added something more of her own than a "connecting sentence." Although she has labored carefully to keep herself out of the stories, and although, if you have read only her versions of them, you may feel that she has succeeded in keeping herself out of them, you will recognize, if you turn to her originals in O'Curry or in Whitley Stokes or in Standish Hayes O'Grady, that she has added that all-important thing, a personality. Some scholars object to this as "too literary." And some literary men would rather have the old stories, they say, "just as they are" There is the crux. How can we get them, even in an exact translation, "just as they are"? We cannot. This is not the place to discuss this most vexed question of translation, but I must go into it so far as to point again to the fact that we are more likely to have made upon us, by an interpretative translation, an effect more nearly like that made upon the listener contemporary to the time of the making of the story than if the translation were literal. We are always forgetting the so obvious fact that the kind of metaphor or descriptive epithet of this sort or that, which would make a certain effect on the listener of the tenth century, will make a very different effect on the reader of to-day. As Lady Gregory points out, the description of the contortion of Cuchulain in his fight with Ferdiad seems very unheroic to us, and is therefore best left out of the translation, or, if retained, conveyed in terms that will make an effect on us similar to the effect the detailed description had on the audience of the old bards. Here again, however, is trouble. How can we get that effect? We cannot surely, but an imaginative translation by one who is scholar and _litterateur_ both will take us nearest to it. We want, as a matter of fact, both kinds of translations, the interpretative and artistic translation of Lady Gregory and the literal translation of Mr. Standish Hayes O'Grady. The one is needed to check the other. We would have a gauge by which to measure how much such such a translator as Lady Gregory has taken from and added to the old story. We would know how great is the freedom in which we willingly acquiesce, remembering that the translations which we treasure as great in literature are in greater or less measure "free."

So checking Lady Gregory's translations we find that they represent a fair measure of freedom, as so checking the verses of FitzGerald's "Omar Khayyam" we find in them the utmost measure of freedom, a freedom indeed that, in certain verses, is virtually a re-creation.

Many, both scholars and literary men, object to the kind of English into which Lady Gregory translates the stories of Ireland's heroic age, her "Kiltartan English," the English of the people of her home country on the borders of Clare and Galway, the English made by a people who think in Irish. This familiar language, they say, has lessened the dignity of the old tales, bringing them all to one level by a diction and style that is one, whether they are romance or folk-tale. This objection can be taken, however, only to the Cuchulain stories, which were court romance, and not to the Finn stories, which come out of the thatched houses. This "Kiltartan English" seems to me in its more familiar moments, less imposing than that in which I first heard stories of Finn McCool told by our old gardener, Lawrence Kelly of County Wexford, but it may be I remember less clearly the homeliness of his "discourse"

than its "grand speaking." It is, however, as peasant English, a fitting medium for the telling of the stories of Brigit and St. Patrick in her "Book of Saints and Wonders," for Brigit and Patrick are still household words among all the children of the Gael. But by its very difference from the English of all other artists in words save of a few of her own country and generation, and from such conversational English as I know well, this "Kiltartan English" brings me a foreign quality. I feel that the art of these tale-tellers is an art of another race than the English, just as I feel that the art of the teller of Beowulf is an art of another race than the English. The literature in our ancestral tongue is not to me English until it sloughs off the Germanic sentence-structure of Anglo-Saxon. Here lies, I think, the greatest difficulty in translating Old English literature. And it will not be successfully translated, I think, without the use of the syntax of some dialect that preserves an archaic sentence-structure.

To me, then, it seems singularly fortunate for Lady Gregory to have her "Kiltartan English" to fall back upon to give that foreign flavor that we intuitively feel the need of in a translation. There may be a slight loss of dignity through its use, but there is a great gain in folk atmosphere.

In quoting to show the style of Lady Gregory I should quote description rather than narrative, as the description seems to me better as well as briefer. The three famous tales of Old Irish literature, "The Three Sorrows of Story-Telling," are "The Fate of the Children of Usnach,"

comparable, in the great wars it led to, to the rape of Helen; "The Fate of the Children of Lir," a story that has as its base the folk-tale that underlies "Lohengrin," but which takes us back farther into the past in its kins.h.i.+p to "Medea"; and "The Sons of Tuireann," which has been called the Irish Odyssey. Of these the first is incomparably the finest story, and Lady Gregory has told it n.o.bly in "Cuchulain of Muirthemne,"

but it alone of all the stories in her three books of translations has enough of humanity in it to put it side by side with the story of Sigurd and Brunhilde or the story of Paris and Helen. When one remembers that Greek and Scandinavian literature may boast five stories each, at least, but little short of these their greatest stories, and that Irish literature has but "Diarmuid and Grania" to boast as in any way comparable to the story of Deirdre, it must be admitted that early Irish literature representing Ireland's heroic age is not so beautiful as the literature that represents the heroic ages of Scandinavia and Greece.

"The Fate of the Children of Usnach" is rich in beautiful detail of incident and of description of nature; it preserves for us much of the inner life of old time; and it has dignity of proportion. It has not the fundamental weakness, as great art, of most of these old Irish stories, their characters' lack of interest because of their lack of body, their lack of personality, their running to type rather than moulding into individuals; yet the feats performed by Cuchulain are so wholly superhuman, most of them, that they often put their doer beyond our sympathy, and at their worst make him absurd.

If these stories were simply extravagant folk-fancy, such as the Jack the Giant Killer story, to delight children, we should not quarrel with this quality in them, but there is so much in them of dignity that we must take them seriously, as we take Homer. When their heroes are definitely G.o.ds we can accept almost any of their deeds, so we can delight in the earlier stories of "G.o.ds and Fighting Men," the stories of the Tuatha de Danaan, Lugh and Angus, Midhir and Etain, Bran and Connla, as we cannot in those of Finn and Goll and Cuchulain and Conchubar, who, because of their historical setting and more definite characterization, have more of the appeal of humanity. We know Cuchulain, in Lady Gregory's pages, as a small dark man, constant in love in comparison with his fellows, faithful to his friends, loyal to his king; and we know Finn as a fair old man of ruddy countenance, a lover of women, somewhat pompous and somewhat quarrelsome; but neither hero is a clear-cut personality like Sigurd or Ajax. If either Cuchulain or Finn were surely a G.o.d we should accept his deeds as now we cannot accept them, and were either brought home to us as wholly human and divested of his supernatural powers, and given a personality, we should be far more moved by his fortunes.

It is in enchantments, visits to worlds oversea and under wave, and in praises of the beauties of this world, its woods, its waters, its real wonders, and in the celebration of sorrow and delight that "G.o.ds and Fighting Men" is at its best, not in the celebration of happy loves, or of wild loves, or of great victories. So it is that Gabhra, where the Fianna were broken, is finer than "The Battle of the White Strand,"

where they won against great odds.

Finer, however, than any narrative power possessed by the old Irish bards is their power in the lyrical pa.s.sages so freely interspersed throughout the stories, and in the lyrics that come into them on the lips of the poets and warriors and on the lips of the women who have lost their lovers in fight. The farewell of Deirdre to Alban and her lament over Naoise, the song of the woman from oversea to Bran, the poem Finn made to prove his power of poetry, the sleepy song of Grania over Diarmuid, the lament of Neargach's wife, the song of Tir-nan-Og that Niave made to Oisin, and Oisin's own praise of the good times of the Fianna--these are the pa.s.sages in which the old tales reach their highest poetry. Once read, these remain in memory, but certain episodes and certain sayings remain also. Mr. Yeats has picked out one of the sayings in his introduction to "G.o.ds and Fighting Men" that will do for sample. It is the answer of Osgar dying, to the man who asks him how he is: "I am as you would have me be." Starker even, perhaps, is the absolute simplicity of the description of that last fight in "The Battle of the White Strand," in which Cael and Finnachta go, locked in each other's arms, to their death under the waves without a word.

Wild nature is always about these warriors. The storm in the trees, the sorrow of the sea, the clatter of wild geese and the singing of swans find echo in the poems that praise them. We see, too, at times, fields heavy with harvest, and often the apple trees in bloom and the cuckoo calling among them,--indeed, the sweet scent of apple gardens, like the keenness of the winds of spring, beautiful as are the phrases that present them, become almost stock phrases. Always, too, there are wonders of the other world about the heroes; women from undersea and underground come into their halls as naturally as the members of their own clans, and the twilight mists unfolding from familiar hills will reveal their marvelous duns, whitewalled with silver or marble, and thatched with the wings of white birds.

There has been frequent quarreling in certain quarters with Mr. Russell and Mr. Johnston and Mr. Yeats for introducing mysticism and a definite symbolism and the ways of Eastern thought into their versions of Irish mythic tales and their records of Irish mood. There will be found some justification for such practices in Lady Gregory's translations.

Manannan, the sea-G.o.d, is here presented doing tricks like those of the East Indian fakirs; Finn is reincarnated in later great leaders of the Gael; and in "The Hospitality of Cuanna's House" there is out-and-out allegory, to say nothing of a possible symbolistic interpretation of episodes in almost every other story. Even the willful obscurity of the modern poetry can be paralleled by the riddling of Cuchulain and Emer.

It is, perhaps, because Lady Gregory has found the old stories not only in the dignity of their bardic presentation, but also in the happy familiarity of their telling by the people of the thatched houses in her own district, that she has been able to bring them so near to us. From these same people, too, she has got some of her stories of St. Bride and Columba and poems and stories of recent and contemporary inspiration, poems and stories that have to do with humble life as well as with the highly colored heroic life that those who live bare lives themselves are so fond of imagining. In her "Poets and Dreamers" (1903) are records of this collecting and of her study of local ways about Coole and on the Connemara coast and in the Aran Isles. One of the most interesting of her chapters is that on the poet Raftery, whose poems Dr.

Hyde has published. Blind and bitter, Raftery wandered about Connacht until about 1840, when death took him, an old man, but still vigorous in mind and spirit. Another chapter of "Poets and Dreamers" is "On the Edge of the World." Each reading of this is to me like a return to West Ireland, the very quality of whose life it gives. It should be the first chapter of the book turned to by the reader, for it gives one the note on which to read all. As Lady Gregory drives by the sea, people about her on the roadside and in the cabins are singing in Irish. The little experiences of the day are, for them, experiences to brood over; and for her, too. And this thought is the last of her brooding: "The rising again of Ireland, of her old speech, of her last leader [Parnell], dreams all, as we are told. But here on the edge of the world, dreams are real things, and every heart is watching for the opening of one or another grave."

There is creative writing in these essays of Lady Gregory's, for all that she is playing middleman between her people and the reading public of the English-speaking world in many of them; and, as I would emphasize again, in her three books of translations. But, after all translation will not content, and the essay that is not self-revelation will not content, the writer who would have his writing a "reading of life." So it is not surprising that Lady Gregory turned toward drama. And yet I do not ever feel, after many readings of her plays, that Lady Gregory took to drama because of any overmastering impulse toward this most difficult of all literary forms. She has learned to handle some orders of drama pleasantly, the farce more than pleasantly, and, very recently, the folk-tragedy n.o.bly; but had it not been that plays of other than romantic tone were needed for the Abbey Theatre as a foil to those of Mr. Yeats and of Synge, I doubt whether it is drama that Lady Gregory would have chosen as the medium through which to express her reading of life. I can just as well imagine her shrewd kindliness of judgment upon the foibles and virtues of her countrymen in stories whose form is very like that employed by Miss Barlow in her "Irish Idylls" (1892) as in these so original little plays that she has wrought out without precedent, under the tutelage of Mr. Yeats.

It is more than likely, as I say, that had it not been that drama was needed for the Abbey Theatre she would not have attempted drama. But more than likely it is, too, that had she written plays not made to order they had reached wider through Irish society and plumbed deeper into Irish life. Lady Gregory knows Irish life, from bottom to top, as few Irishwomen and few Irishmen of her day know it; she has large heart, wide tolerance, and abounding charity; and yet she was long content to limit her plays of modern Ireland to farce, at times of a serious enough purpose, but because it is farce, not of the first seriousness. It may be, of course, that Lady Gregory knows best of any one her own powers, and it is true that in the plays she has written she is at her best when they are at their merriest. I cannot, however, but feel that this is a success of intention rather than a success of instinct. She would have them the most successful in a quality as far removed as might be from that quality of troubled dreaminess which is the best of the dramas of Mr. Yeats. Synge, it must be remembered, did not begin as a writer of comedy, and there is little of that ripe irony that has no precedent in English literature in that first play that he wrote for the Abbey Theatre, "Riders to the Sea" (1903). Is it a coincidence that later, as he found his bent for that sort of writing that culminated in "The Playboy," Lady Gregory turned at times to historical drama and a farce that grew as serious as comedy? There is, of course, in all her plays serious indictment of national weaknesses, sometimes obvious indictment, as in "The Deliverer" (1911), which records, in terms of folk-biblical allegory, his countrymen's desertion of Parnell; sometimes indictment not so obvious, as in "The Canavans" (1906), which rebukes that shoneenism in high places which has for generations been one of the curses of Ireland. To him who knows only a little of Irish life it is easy to see the meaning but superficially concealed by the farcical bustle, the laughter, and the lamentations. But to him who looks but on the surface there is merriness enough and wittiness enough and wisdom enough to make his loss of the deeper meaning, for him, but a little loss.

There are enough characters presented, too, peasants generally and townsfolk of the lower cla.s.s, to make the farces a "reading of life."

What is wanting to him who looks for more than what farce may do is the largeness of utterance that will make a "reading of life" memorable.

Take "the image" (1910), for instance, in which Lady Gregory is attempting more than in "Spreading the News" (1904) or "Hyacinth Halvey"

(1906). This play, the longest that Lady Gregory has written, is what the stage would call the character farce. She owns it a presentation of dreams of old men and old women which crumble at the touch of reality, but it is not only this, but a symbolizing of the p.r.o.neness of all Ireland to accept as certainties on the eve of realization what are really only signs that point to possibilities in a far to-morrow. In the play four old men of a little village on the west coast are debating what they will do with their share of a windfall that has come to the village in the shape of two whales that have drifted up on the beach.

When the priest determines that all the proceeds from the sale of the oil from the whales be spent on something that will benefit the whole community they plan a statue (one of them is a stone-cutter) to some great celebrity. The motives that lead them to choose Hugh O'Lorrha are telling satire not only of Irishmen, but of all men. It would hardly be, however, in any other country than Ireland that the name of the one come at by way of accident would, unidentified for some time by any, be finally revealed as that of the hero of a folk-tale. Four days after the whales had come ash.o.r.e, days wasted in planning what the village will do with the prize money, and unutilized in securing the blubber and rendering out the oil, the quartette learned that "the Connemara lads have the oil drawn from the one of them, and the other one was swept away with the spring tide."

Though "The Image" be farce, its characters are the characters of comedy, and its purpose whole-heartedly serious. And even "Spreading the News" has its lesson, of rumor's wild riot in Irish crowds. On the slightest grounds the reciting of an errand of helpfulness is turned by quick imagination into a story of a murder. Lightly sketched as are the people here, from a caricature of a magistrate to the more serious presentment of Mrs. Fallon's "nice quiet little man," they are very true to Ireland. Slighter even are the butcher and the postmistress and the model sub-sanitary inspector in "Hyacinth Halvey," though all are fully understood and fully blocked out in their author's mind, if impossible of complete realization within limits so narrow; but the farce itself is not lifted into dignity by any n.o.ble underlying att.i.tude. "The Jack Daw"

(1907) has rumor again as its motive, as had "Spreading the News," but it is not the motive of the play or any of its incidents that is the best thing about it, but the character of Michael c.o.o.ney, of the "seventh generation of c.o.o.neys who trusted n.o.body living or dead." He is, of course, caricatured, but he has possibilities of personality, and he could have been worked into the fullness of a universal character had "The Jack Daw" been comedy, we will say, instead of farce. Of all her characters, that of Hyacinth Halvey is most nearly rounded out, but then Lady Gregory has taken two little plays in which to present his portrait, "The Full Moon" (1911) recording some of his later experiences in Cloon and his final departure from the town, his introduction to which was recorded in the play bearing his name.

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

Of the plays that may be called historical, "The Canavans" (1906) is the best, because it is of the peasantry, I suppose, who change so little with the years, and whom Lady Gregory presents so amusingly and so truly in her modern farce comedy. "Kincora" (1903) takes us all the way back to the eleventh century, deriving its name from Brian's Seat on the Shannon and ending with his death at Clontarf. It is undistinguished melodrama. "The White c.o.c.kade" (1905) is better only in so far as it involves farce, farce in the kitchen of an inn on the Wexford coast just after the Battle of the Boyne. "Devorgilla" (1908) is of a time between the times of the two other historical plays, of the time a generation later than the coming of the Normans to Ireland. It is pitched to a higher key than any other of her historic plays, and it is held better to its key, but its tragedy is far less impressive than the tragedy of "The Gaol Gate" (1906) which pictures the effects upon his wife and his mother of the imprisonment of an Irish lad of to-day, and their learning that "Denis Cahel died for his neighbor." This little play is out of the life that Lady Gregory knows and can deal with; it is finely conceived and finely executed, lingering in the mind as does the keen heard rising from some bare graveyard fronting the Atlantic.

Just why Lady Gregory, who has rendered in prose so well old legends, should render old Irish historic life so much less well I cannot explain. Sometimes I think it is because she has found less of that history than of that legend among the people. Yet in "A Travelling Man"

(1907), her little miracle, somewhat in the manner of Dr. Hyde's, that brings Christ into a modern peasant home, she has made a play of a tender and reconciling beauty. With the success of "A Travelling Man"

and "The Gaol Gate" before me I cannot say it is because her genius is for farce; and to say that it is because her genius is for the plays of modern peasant life does not help to account for the fact.

The idiom of all these plays is racy of the soil, and when it need be, eloquent with the eloquence that is almost always in the English of the Irish. It is full of wise saws and proverbs, quips and quirks of expression, the picturesquenesses and homelinesses of speech that are characteristic of a peasant to whom talk is the half of life. These range from sayings like those of the clowns of Elizabethan drama, such as "He had great wisdom I tell you, being silly-like, and blind," and such country wisdom as "What would the cat's son do but kill mice," up through the elaborate maledictions of the two old paupers in "The Workhouse Ward" and such delightful asperities as that of Maelmora anent his bitter sister Gormleith, "You were surely born on a Friday, and the briars breaking through the green sod," to aphorisms that have an accent of eternity, as, "It is the poor know all the troubles of the world,"

and "The swift, unflinching, terrible judgment of the young."