_Harold Chapin_: THE PHILOSOPHER OF BUTTERBIGGENS
Harold Chapin, as we learn from _Soldier and Dramatist_ (Lane,
1917), was an American both by ancestry and nativity. But he
lived the greater part of his life in England, and died for
England at Loos in April, 1915. His activity was always
associated with the stage. When he was but seven years old he
played the little Marcius to his mother's Volumnia at the
Shakespeare Festival, at Stratford-on-Avon in 1893. In 1911 he
produced Mr. Harold Brighouse's _Lonesome-Like_ and several of
his own short plays at the Glasgow Repertory Theatre. For several
years before the war he was Mr. Granville Barker's stage manager,
and helped him to produce the beautiful Shakespearean plays at
the Savoy Theatre in London.
Of Chapin's own dramas, _The New Morality_ and _Art and
Opportunity_ have been given recently in New York and in London,
and several of the one-act plays at a memorial performance in
London in 1916, in matinée at the Punch and Judy Theatre, and
before the Drama League in New York in March and April, 1921. Of
the shorter plays, mentioned in the bibliographies following
these notes, _It's the Poor that 'elps the Poor, The Dumb and
the Blind, and The Philosopher of Butterbiggens_ have been
given the highest praise by such critics as Mr. William Archer,
who wrote, "No English-speaking man of more unquestionable genius
has been lost to the world in this world-frenzy." These true and
honest dramas represent the English Repertory theatres at their
best in this brief form, and give promise of the great and
permanently interesting "human comedy" which Chapin might have
completed had his life not been sacrificed. In spite of the
simplicity and lightness of the little play here given, there is
more shrewd philosophy in old David Pirnie, and more real
humanity in his family, than is to be found portrayed in many
pretentious social dramas and difficult psychological novels. It
is admirable on the stage, as was shown by the Provincetown
Players last winter. In the memorial performance for Harold
Chapin in London, the author's little son appeared in the part of
wee Alexander.
"Butterbiggens," Mrs. Alice Chapin, the dramatist's mother,
replied to an inquiry as to "what Butterbiggens is or are," "is,
are, and always will be a suburb of Glasgow."
There is little difficulty with the modified Scots dialect in
this play if one remembers that _ae_ generally takes the place of
such sounds as _e_ in _tea_, _o_ in _so_, _a_ in _have_, and so
on, and that _a'_ means _all_. A _wean_ is a small _bairn_,
_yinst_ is _once_, _ava_ is _at all_, and _thrang_ is "thick" or
intimate.
_Distempered_ means calcimined, or painted in water-dissolved
color on the plaster.
_Lady Gregory_: SPREADING THE NEWS
In her notes on the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which she was most
influential in building up, Lady Augusta Gregory says that it was
the desire of the players and writers who worked there to
establish an Irish drama which should have a "firm base in
reality and an apex of beauty." This phrase, which admirably
expresses the best in the play-making going on to-day, finds most
adequate illustration in the work of Synge, of Yeats, and of Lady
Gregory herself. The basis in reality of such jolly and robust
comedies as her _Seven Irish Plays_ and _New Irish Comedies_ is
clearly discernible. They are in the tradition of the best early
English comedy, from the miracle plays onward; of Hans Sachs's
_Shrovetide Plays_, and of Molière's dramatizations of medieaval
_fabliaux_, as in _The Physician in Spite of Himself_. Lady
Gregory describes in her notes on _Spreading the News_ how the
play grew out of an idea of picturing tragic consequences from
idle rumor and defamation of character. It is certainly not to be
regretted that she allowed "laughter to have its way with the
little play," and gave Bartley Fallon a share of glory from the
woeful day to illuminate dull, older years.
The inhabitants of this same village of Cloon appear as old
friends in other of Lady Gregory's plays, with, as usual, nothing
to do but mind one another's business. In _The Jackdaw_ another
absurd rumor is fanned into full blaze by greed; upon _Hyacinth
Halvey_ works the potent and embarrassing influence of too good a
reputation. Still other plays attain a notable height of
beauty--notably _The Rising of the Moon_ and _The Traveling Man_.
_The Gaol Gate_ tells a story similar to that of _Campbell of
Kilmhor_, with genuinely tragic effect. She has written, besides,
two volumes of Irish folk-history, _Gods and Fighting Men_ and
_Cuchulain of Muirthemne_, which Mr. Yeats calls masterpieces of
prose which one "can weigh with Malory and feel no discontent at
the tally."[1] A writer who has produced such range and beauty of
works, from very human, characteristic comedy and farce to fine,
poignant tragedy, besides writing excellent stories and
contributing largely to an important experimental theatre, is
secure of her share of fame.
The "Removable Magistrate" is apparently one appointed by British
officialdom; this one, having just come from the Bay of Bengal,
is going to fit upon the natives of Cloon methods which may have
worked in a rather different district.
The song "with a skin on it," which Bartley sings, is given in
Lady Gregory's _Seven Short Plays_ (Putnam, 1909).
[Footnote 1: Appendix to _The Poetical Works of William B.
Yeats_, volume II, (Macmillan, 1912).]
_Winthrop Parkhurst_: THE BEGGAR AND THE KING
_The Beggar and the King_ looks at first like a pleasant
absurdity; it is in reality valuable as a short history of the
ostrich method of dealing with realities. The beggar, of course,
continues to cry aloud after his tongue, and even his head, have
been removed, because there are so many millions of him. Again
and again, in the course of history, he has gathered desperate
courage to defy authority that is blind and evil. Always at last,
as in the French and the Russian revolutions and in the more
recent European revolts, he succeeds in wresting the power from
those in autocratic authority. And yet, just as of old, not only
kings, but all others who attempt dictatorship and the playing of
providence, try the simple tactics of the ostrich; they close the
window, or their eyes and ears, as a sufficient answer to
rebellion. Appreciating the futility of these methods, we have no
difficulty in continuing the drama ourselves beyond the fall of
the curtain.
Mr. Winthrop Parkhurst, by birth a New Yorker, according to a
family tradition is a descendant on his mother's side of John
Huss, the Bohemian reformer and martyr, and on his father's of
the executioner of Charles I of England. His writings include
_Maracca_, a Biblical one-act play, and several short satirical
sketches.
_George Middleton_: TIDES
Mr. George Middleton generally pictures in his dramas problems
which are not easy to solve. And he does not try to give
ready-made solutions. He merely shows us how various people have
tried to work these problems; and his dramas are like real life
because the attempts at solutions fail as often as they succeed.
Certain of the problems Mr. Middleton presents are such as
high-school students meet and can well consider; several of these
plays appear in the lists following. _Tides_ is about a man who
has supported an unpopular theory. Nothing is said about whether
his ideal is right or wrong, but it is clear that he has held to
it in perfect sincerity of belief and has been quite unmoved by
the bitterest persecution. But when he is offered honor and
flattering respect, though he does not really change his belief
and adherence, he compromises and partially surrenders his ideal.
The fable is similar to that of Ibsen's _The League of Youth_,
but the telling here is straighter and clearer. William White's
self-deception is made evident to him and to us by his honest and
courageous wife, who tells him frankly of it. "Haven't you
sometimes noticed that is what bitterness to another means: a
failure within oneself?" she comments wisely. An effective
contrast is furnished by the son, who has altogether and honestly
abandoned his father's theories in the face of new realities as
he sees them.
_Eugene O'Neill_: ILE
Eugene O'Neill, American seaman, laborer, newspaperman, and
dramatist, has been associated for several years with the
Provincetown Players. This group, including Mrs. Glaspell and
other playwrights of importance, gather in Provincetown, on Cape
Cod, during the summer, and in winter present significant foreign
and native plays in a converted stable on Macdougall Street in
New York, where may be seen the ring to which Pegasus was once
tethered! In 1919 Mr. O'Neill received the Pulitzer Prize for the
most important American play of the year.
Mr. O'Neill has had experience of the sea, like the great
Englishmen, Mr. Masefield and Mr. Joseph Conrad. He knows the
interminable whaling voyages, as described in Melville's _Moby_
_Dick_ and the first chapter of _Typee_--best of all in Bullen's
_Cruise of the Cachalot_. Out of this experience of hard life and
harder men he has written many poignant and terrible dramas--perhaps
the greatest this story of the skipper's wife who insisted on
making the voyage with her husband and is worn to the edge of
insanity by months of ice-bound solitude. The motive of Captain
Keeney is like that which caused Skipper Ireson to leave his
fellow townsmen to sink in Chaleur Bay. Against his iron
determination his wife's piteous pleading and evident suffering
are more potent than the mutinying hands; whether she can avail
to turn him home "with a measly four hundred barrel of ile" is
the problem of the play.
_J.A. Ferguson_: CAMPBELL OF KILMHOR
This tragic story of the war and hatred in Scotland belongs in
the series of attempts made by Charles Edward Stuart and his
father to regain the throne lost by James II in 1688. "The Young
Pretender's" vigorous campaign in 1745, carried far into England,
might easily have succeeded but for the quarrels and disaffection
of the Highland chiefs who supported him. His failure was
completed at the bloody battle of Culloden, or Drumossie Moor, in
1746, celebrated in Scottish story and song of lamentation.
Scott's hero Waverley went into the highland country shortly
after these uprisings, and David Balfour, in _Kidnapped_, had
numerous adventures in crossing it with Allan Breck Stewart, who
was in the service of his kinsmen, the exiled Stuarts. The hatred
of Campbells and Stuarts, of Lowlander and Highlander, Loyalist
and Jacobite, is intense throughout the record of those days.
The young Scot and his stanch and proudly tearless mother are, of
course, the heroic characters in the play. We have a hint that
Charles Edward Stuart himself is with the band whom the young man
protects so loyally. It may seem strange that the drama is named,
not for him, but for the crafty and pitiless executioner of the
king's justice. But he is after all the most interesting
character in the piece, with his Biblical references in broad
Lowland Scots (we may suppose that the Stewarts speak Gaelic
among themselves), his superstition, his remorseless cruelty. We
should like to see how he takes the discovery that, perhaps for
the first time, he has been baffled in his career of unscrupulous
and bloody deeds!
This play represents the most successful work of the Glasgow
Repertory Theatre in 1914. The author has written no others which
have been published, though he is credited with a good story or
two. It may be hoped that he will write other dramas as excellent
as this one. He has put into very brief and effective form here
the spirit and idea of a most intense period of merciless
conflict.
A _kebbuck_ is a cheese; _keek_ means peek; _toom_, empty; a
_besom_, a broom; and _soop_, sweep.
_John Galsworthy_: THE SUN
According to Professor Lewisohn and other critics Mr. Galsworthy
is without question the foremost English dramatist to-day.
Without arguing or attempting to offer solutions, he gives the
most searching presentation of problems which we have to face and
somehow settle. In _Strife_, after a furious contest and bitter
hardships, the strike is settled by a compromise which the
leaders of both sides count as failure. Things are much as they
were at the start; the difficulty is no nearer solution. In
_Justice_, "society stamps out a human life not without its fair
possibilities--for eighty-one pounds," because obviously clear
and guilty infraction of law cannot go unavenged. Justice is not
condemned by the facts shown in this play, nor is its working
extolled. In _The Mob_, the patrioteering element destroys a man
who proclaims the injustice of a small and greedy war of
conquest. In _The Pigeon_, brilliant debate is held, but no
conclusion reached, as to what we should do with derelict and
wasted lives, with men who do not fit into the scheme of success
and society.
In his sketches and stories Mr. Galsworthy presents these same
problems, and again without attempted conclusions. _The
Freelands_ particularly is a most dramatic novel of conditions
and results similar to those in some of the dramas mentioned
above. Many of his sketches and essays also--for example, "My
Distant Relative" in _The Inn of Tranquillity_ and "Comfort" in
_A Commentary_--are of biting and almost cynical irony in viewing
proposed and present solutions of problems; but none suggest
panaceas. They merely make us think soberly of the size of our
problems and their immense complexity, move us to go out to look
for more information and to examine carefully our most solid
institutions as well as suggested alterations in them.
A large part of Mr. Galsworthy's time and thought, both during
the war and since, has been given to the problem of some measure
of justice to soldiers, and particularly to wounded and broken
soldiers. In _A Sheaf_ and _Another Sheaf_ appear various papers
presenting sharply the conditions of suffering and neglect that
actually exist. _The Sun_ is a brief sketch of after-war
days,--this time of a wounded man who has gained an advantage
over one who escaped injury,--and of joy in deliverance from the
hell of war--a joy so profound and luminous that the released
soldier cannot let a sharp mischance and disappointment mar his
happiness. The whole piece is in the key of Captain Bassoon's
verses after the Armistice:--
"Every one suddenly burst out singing."
The other two think the happy soldier mad. We are left wondering
what the reaction will be from this height of joyful release to
the harsh and sombre conditions of workingmen's life after the
peace.
The _silver badge_ represents a discharge for wounds. _Crumps_
are, of course, shells.
_Louise Sounders_: THE KNAVE OF HEARTS
_The Knave of Hearts_ is one of the happy tradition of
puppet-plays, which come down in unbroken line from the most
ancient history, through the illustrious Dr. Faustus and Mr.
Punch, to new and even greater favor and fame to-day. For just as
the ancient puppet-shows of Italy and England seemed to be losing
ground before the moving-picture invasion, they have been
heroically rescued by Mr. Tony Sarg,--whose performance of
Thackeray's _The Rose and the Ring_ is perfectly absurd and
captivating,--and by other excellent artists.
Puppet-shows are delightful because they are easily made and
quite convincing. Very good ones have been improvised even by
tiny children, with a pasteboard suit-box opening to the front, a
slit at the top to let down paper-doll actors on a thread, a bit
of scenery, outdoors or in, drawn as background, and a showman to
talk for all the characters. Still better puppets are doll heads
and arms of various sorts, dressed in flowing robes and provided
with holes for two fingers and a thumb of the operator, who moves
them from below. They can be made to dance and antic as you like
on a stage above the showman's head, as Punch and Judy have
always done. The more elaborate marionettes are worked with
strings from above, so that they can open and close their mouths
and otherwise act most realistically; these are, of course, more
difficult, but quite possible to make. In such simple theatres,
Goethe and Robert Louis Stevenson and many other famous people
played themselves endless stories. If you want to pursue this
idea further, a list of references below gives you opportunity
for all the information you like about marionettes and puppets.
_The Knave of Hearts_ is charming, either as a puppet-play or, as
a class in junior high school gave it recently, a "legitimate
drama." The remarks of the manager are all the funnier when
applied to real characters. The play explains clearly the reasons
for the strange behavior of a respectable nursery character. It
is to be published soon in a book of its own with illustrations
by Mr. Maxfield Parrish (Scribner's). The author has written
other plays and stories, some of which you may have seen in _St.
Nicholas_, and also a pleasant operetta, with music by Alice
Terhune--_The Woodland_ _Princess_, listed in the bibliography
following. She is also an actress with the New York Comedy Club,
an excellent amateur organization.
Pompdebile's coat of arms, with a heart rampant (i.e., standing
on its hind legs, however that may be accomplished), reminds one
of the arms suggested for the old clergyman-scholar, Mr.
Casaubon, in George Eliot's _Middlemarch_--"three cuttlefish
sable and a commentator rampant."
_Lord Dunsany_: FAME AND THE POET
Lord Dunsany (Edward Moreton Max Plunkett), the eighteenth baron
of his name, is the author of a number of stories and plays unique
in their type of clever imaginativeness. Besides the inimitable
Five Plays and other dramas listed in the bibliography, his best
writings are to be found in _Fifty-One Tales_, which includes "The
Hen," "Death and Odysseus," "The True Story of the Hare and the
Tortoise," and other highly entertaining matters. _Fame and the
Poet_, originally published in the _Atlantic_, has been recently
produced with good effect by the Harvard Dramatic Club. Fame's
startling revelation to her faithful worshiper of her real nature
and attributes is naturally most distressing--even more so,
perhaps, than the rendezvous which this same goddess appointed
another poet, in the _Fifty-One Tales_: "In the cemetery back of
the workhouse, after a hundred years."
Lord Dunsany was a captain in the First Royal Iniskilling
Fusileers--a regiment mentioned in Sheridan's _Saint Patrick's
Day_--and saw service in Syria and the Near East as well as on
the western front. He was wounded on April 25, 1916, in Flanders.
Since the war he has visited the United States and seen a
performance of his _Tents of the Arabs_ at the Neighborhood
Playhouse, New York City.
_Beulah Marie Dix_: THE CAPTAIN OF THE GATE
Miss Dix is author of several plays--in addition to those from
_Allison's Lad_ included in the play-list, of _Across the
Border_, and, with the late Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland, of the
frequently acted _Rose of Plymouth Town_. She has also written
several favorite historical stories, including _Merrylips. The
Captain of the Gate_ is a tragedy of Cromwell's ruthless
devastation of Ireland. The determined and heroic captain
surrenders, to face an ignominious death, to keep his word and
ensure delaying the advance of the enemy upon an unprepared
countryside, and his courage inspires exhausted and failing men
to like heroism. This is an effective piece of dramatic
presentation.
_Percy Mackaye_: GETTYSBURG
Mr. Percy Mackaye has been most active in the movement for a
community theatre in the United States and for the revival of
pageantry. He contends rightly that this development might be one
of the strongest possible influences for true Americanism, and
his dramatic work has all been directed toward such a theatre.
Most notable are his pageants and masques, particularly _Caliban
by the Yellow Sands_, for the Shakespeare Tercentenary; his play
_The Scarecrow_, a lively dramatization of Hawthorne's
_Feathertop_; his opera _Rip van Winkle_, for which Reginald De
Koven composed music; and _The Canterbury Pilgrims_, in which the
Wife of Bath is the heroine of further robustious adventures. Mr.
Mackaye is also translator, with Professor Tablock, of the
_Modern Reader's Chaucer_. The little sketch presented here is
taken from a volume of _Yankee Fantasies_, in which various
observations of past and present New England life are recorded.
Stephen Crane's _The Red Badge of Courage_, a powerful story of
the Civil War, is a most excellent help to realizing what the boy
Lige really endured in those days of battle.
Mr. Mackaye has adopted here a regularly rhythmic verse without
the conventional capital letters at the beginnings of lines
--perhaps to typify the simple homeliness of the talk.
_Harold Brighouse_: LONESOME-LIKE
Mr. Brighouse has been best represented in this country by an
excellent comedy, _Hobson's Choice_, which was widely played and
was printed in the Drama League series of plays (1906). His other
best-known work here is the present play, and _The Price of Coal_
(1909), a picturing of the hard life of miners' wives and their
Spartan firmness in expectation of fatal accidents. He has
produced and published a number of other plays, among them those
listed in the bibliography. Mr. Brighouse represents in this
volume the work of the English Repertory theatres, which parallel
the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, the Glasgow Repertory Theatre, and
various European stage-societies. That at Manchester, with which
he has been associated, is directed by Miss Isabel Horniman, has
seen beautiful stage-settings designed by Mr. Robert Burne-Jones,
and counts among its dramatists such well-known men as Messrs.
Allan Monkhouse, author of _Mary Broome_, a sombre and powerful
tragedy; Stanley Houghton, and Gilbert Cannan. The Liverpool
Theatre has become even more famous through the dramatic work of
Mr. John Drinkwater. The Little Theatre movement in this country,
our Drama League, and the various dramatic societies in our
colleges and cities are our nearest parallel to these repertory
theatres.
_Lonesome-Like_, Mr. Brighouse's most effective short play, is
written in a modified Lancashire dialect, the speech of the
village weavers and spinners. Many of the words are English of
Elizabethan days and earlier, derived mostly from Anglo-Saxon.
_Gradely_ (graithly) means willingly, meekly or decently; _clem_
means starve; _sithee_ is see you or look you; _clogs_ are shoes
with wooden soles and leather uppers, and _dungarees_, garments
of coarse cotton cloth rather like overalls. _A_ is used
throughout for _I_.
As in many English stories, an extreme and painful dread of the
_workus_, or poorhouse, provides a strong motive force.
_John Millington Synge_: RIDERS TO THE SEA
The work of the Irish Renaissance in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin
reached its most powerful and tragic height in this tragedy,
which Mr. Yeats compared to the Antigone and (Edipus of
Sophocles). Synge at first wandered about Europe, poetizing; it
was Yeats who brought him back to study and embody in genuine
literature the poetry of life among his own people. On the bleak
Arran Islands he lived in a fisherman's cottage, and through the
floor of his room heard the dialect which he presents in simple
and poignant beauty in this drama of hopeless struggle. The
"second sight"--called "the gift" in _Campbell of Kilmhor_, and
an incident also in _The Riding to Lithend_--was a sort of
prophetic vision altogether credited among Celtic peoples, as
among those of Scott's _Lady of the Lake_. When the mother sees
the "riders to the sea,"--her drowned son and her living son
riding together,--she feels convinced that he must soon die. The
sharp cries of her grief and, above all, the peace of her
resignation at the end, after all hope is gone, make this, as a
writer in the _Manchester Guardian_ is quoted as calling it, "the
tragic masterpiece of our language in our time; wherever it has
been in Europe, from Galway to Prague, it has made the word
tragedy mean something more profoundly stirring and cleansing to
the spirit than it did."
The speech of the people is not difficult to understand when you
master a few of its peculiarities. One is the omission of words
we generally include, as in, "Isn't it a hard and cruel man (who)
won't hear...." Another is the common form "It was crying I was."
A few phrases, like _what way_ for how, _the way_ for so that,
_in it_ for here or near, and _itself_ for even, or with no
particular meaning, as "Where is he itself?" The meanings of
other words will be easily untangled.
_William Butler Yeats_: THE LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE
Mr. Yeats's best poetic dramas, and particularly this one,
represent beyond question that "apex of beauty" to which Lady
Gregory spoke of the Abbey Theatre dramatists as aspiring. This
play is not founded on any particular Irish folk-tale. It is
filled with the half-dread, half-envy with which the tellers of
Irish legends seem to regard the fate of mortals bewitched by the
Leprechaun or Good People. It is rich, too, with the music of
beautiful words, without which, Mr. Yeats contends no play can be
"of a great kind." He says too, "There is no poem so great that a
fine speaker cannot make it greater, or that a bad ear cannot
make it nothing."
Mr. Yeats has written broad comedy like Synge's _Shadow of the
Glen_ and Lady Gregory's _Irish Comedies_; his _Pot of Broth_ is
a most clever retelling of an old, comical tale. But it is by his
mystical and poetical plays that he would be judged as playwright
and poet--particularly _Deirdre_, which should be compared with
Synge's _Deirdre of the Sorrows_; _The Unicorn of the Stars_,
written in collaboration with Lady Gregory; _Cathleen Ni
Hoolihan_, a dramatization of the spirit of Ireland; _The King's
Threshold_, a high glorification of the poet's art, with a fable,
based on an ancient Celtic rite, of the hunger strike; and _The
Land of Heart's Desire_, most beautifully perfect of all.
_Gordon Bottomley_: THE RIDING TO LITHEND
"_The Riding to Lithend_ is an Icelandic play taken out of the
noblest of the Sagas," wrote Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie in his
review of the published drama in 1909. "[It] is a fight, one of
the greatest fights in legend.... The subject is stirring, and
Mr. Bottomley takes it into a very high region of poetry, giving
it a purport beyond that of the original teller of the tale....
[The play] is not a representation of life; it is a symbol of
life. In it life is entirely fermented into rhythm, by which we
mean not only rhythm of words, but rhythm of outline also; the
beauty and impressiveness of the play do not depend only on the
subject, the diction, and the metre, but on the fact that it has
distinct and most evident form, in the musician's sense of the
word. It is one of those plays that reach the artist's ideal
condition of music, in fact."
This is high praise; but who, after studying the play, will doubt
that it is deserved? The powerfully moving events of the story
indeed lead up to the climax in a forthright and exciting manner.
The terror of the house-women and the thrall, the fearful love of
Gunnar's mother Rannveig, and the caution of Kolskegg his
brother, who "sailed long ago and far away from us" in obedience
to the doom or sentence of the Thing--all these bring out sharply
the quite reckless daring of Gunnar himself, who braves the
decree. A mysterious and epic touch is added by the three ancient
hags-evidently of these minor Norns who watch over individual
destinies and announce the irrevocable doom of the gods. It was
Hallgerd who broke their thread, representing, of course,
Gunnar's span of life.
The centre of interest, as well as the spring of the action, is
clearly Hallgerd, descendant of Sigurd Fafnirsbane and of
Brynhild--
... a hazardous desirable thing,
A warm unsounded peril, a flashing mischief,
A divine malice, a disquieting voice.
She, and not any superstitious belief in "second-sight" and death
decreed, is the cause of Gunnar's remaining outlawed. She
wrangles about the headdress, not because she particularly wants
it, but to send her husband on a perilous mission to secure it.
She says openly that she has "set men at him to show forth his
might ... planned thefts and breakings of his word" to stir him
to battle. Mr. Abercrombie believes that "She loves her husband
Gunnar, but she refuses to give him any help in his last fight,
in order that she may see him fight better and fiercer." We
should, then, have to suppose that her amazing speech at his
death--
O clear sweet laughter of my heart, flow out!
It is so mighty and beautiful and blithe
To watch a man dying--to hover and watch--
is not for the blow Gunnar had given her when she "planned thefts
and breakings of his word," but is rather, as the lines
powerfully indicate, the exultation of a descendant of the
Valkyrie watching above the battlefields.
Really poetical plays--plays which are both poetic and strongly
dramatic--are indeed exceedingly rare. Mr. Bottomley is one of
the few who have produced such drama in English. For many years
he printed his work privately, in beautiful editions for his
friends; but of late several of the plays have been made
available--_King Lear's Wife in Georgian Poetry_, 1913-15, and in
a volume of the same title, including _Midsummer Eve_ and _The
Riding to Lithend_, published in London last year.
Those who want more stories of this sort will find them in
_Thorgils_ and other Icelandic stories modernized by Mr. Hewlett;
in the _Burnt Njal_, translated by Sir George Dasent, from which
this story itself springs; and in the translations by Eirikr
Magnusson and William Morris, the _Saga Library_--particularly
the stories of the Volsungs and Nibelungs, and of Grettir the
Strong.
_louvre_--a smoke-hole in the roof
_thrall_--a captive or serf
_bill_--a battle-ax
_second sight_--prophetic vision, as in _Riders to the Sea_ and
_Campbell of Kilmhor_
_fetch_--one's double; seeing it is supposed to be a sign that
one is _fey_ or fated to die
_wimpled_--"clouted up," as Hallgerd expresses it, in a headdress
rather like a nun's. A widow, apparently, might wear her hair
uncovered
_byre_--cow-barn
_midden_--manure
_quean_--in Middle-English, a jade; in Scotch, a healthy lass;
the history of this word and of _queen_, which come from the same
root, is strange and interesting
_ambry_--press
_Romeborg_--Rome; _Mickligarth_--Constantinople (Viking names)
_Athcliath_--evidently an Irish port
_mumpers_--beggars
_Markfleet_--a _fleet_ in an inlet of the sea
_mote or gemote_--a formal assembly for making laws
_thing_--assembly for judgment, or parliament; this is an early
Icelandic meaning of the word _thing_