It was Mr. Bernard Shaw who, in commenting on the rowdy reception of the
Irish players in some American theatres, spoke of Lady Gregory as "the
greatest living Irishwoman." She is certainly a remarkable enough writer
to put a generous critic a little off his balance. Equal mistress in
comedy and tragedy, essayist, gatherer of the humours of folk-lore,
imaginative translator of heroic literature, venturesome translator of
Molière, she has contributed a greater variety of grotesque and
beautiful things to Anglo-Irish literature than any of her
contemporaries.
She owes her chief fame, perhaps, to the way in which, along with Mr.
G.A. Birmingham and the authors of _Some Experiences of an Irish R.M._,
she has kept alive the tradition of Ireland as a country in which
Laughter has frequent occasion to hold both his sides. She surpasses the
others in the quality of her comedy, however. Not that she is more
comic, but that she is more comprehensively true to life. Mr. Birmingham
has given us farce with a salt of reality; Miss Somerville and Miss
Ross, practical jokers of literature, turned to reality as upper-class
patrons of the comic; but Lady Gregory has gone to reality as to a cave
of treasure. She is one of the discoverers of Ireland. Her genius, like
Synge's, opened its eyes one day and saw spread below it the immense sea
of Irish common speech, with its colour, its laughter, and its music. It
is a sort of second birth which many Irish men and women of the last
generation or so have experienced. The beggar on the road, the piper at
the door, the old people in the workhouse, are henceforth accepted as a
sort of aristocracy in exile.
Lady Gregory obviously sought out their company as the heirs to a great
inheritance--an inheritance of imaginative and humorous speech. Not that
she plundered them of their fantastic tropes so greedily as Synge did.
She studied rather their common turn of phrase, its heights and its
hollows, its exquisite illogic, its passionate underflow of poetry. Has
she not herself told us how she could not get on with the character of
Bartley Fallon in _Spreading the News_, till one day she met a
melancholy man by the sea at Duras, who, after describing the crosses he
endured at home, said: "But I'm thinking if I went to America, it's long
ago I'd be dead. And it's a great expense for a poor man to be buried in
America." Out of sentences like these--sentences seized upon with the
genius of the note-book--she has made much of what is most delightful in
her plays. Her sentences are steeped and dyed in life, even when her
situations are as mad as hatters.
Some one has said that every great writer invents a new language. Lady
Gregory, whom it would be unfair to praise as a great writer, has at
least qualified as one by inventing a new language out of her knowledge
of Irish peasant speech. This, perhaps, is her chief literary peril.
Having discovered the beautiful dialect of the Kiltartan peasantry, she
was not content to leave it a peasant dialect--as we find it in her best
dramatic work, _Seven Short Plays_; but she set about transforming it
into a tongue into which all literature and emotion might apparently be
translated. Thus, she gave us Molière in Kiltartan--a ridiculously
successful piece of work--and she gave us Finn and Cuchullain in
modified Kiltartan, and this, too, was successful, sometimes very
beautifully so. Here, however, she had masterpieces to begin with. In
_Irish Folk-History Plays_, on the other hand, we find her embarking,
not upon translation, but upon original heroic drama, in the Kiltartan
language. The result is unreality as unreal as if Meredith had made a
farm-labourer talk like Diana of the Crossways. Take, for instance, the
first of the plays, _Grania_, which is founded on the story of the
pursuit of Diarmuid and Grania by Finn MacCool, to whom Grania had been
betrothed. When Finn, disguised as a blind beggar, visits the lovers in
their tent, Grania, who does not recognize him, bids him give Finn this
message from her:--
Give heed to what I say now. If you have one eye is blind, let it
be turned to the place where we are, and that he might ask news of.
And if you have one seeing eye, cast it upon me, and tell Finn you
saw a woman no way sad or afraid, but as airy and high-minded as a
mountain-filly would be challenging the winds of March!
I flatly refuse to take the high-minded mountain filly seriously as a
tragic heroine, and I confess I hold Finn equally suspect, disguised as
a beggar though he is, when he speaks of himself to Grania as a hard
man--"as hard as a barren step-mother's slap, or a highway gander's
gob." After all, in heroic literature, we must have the illusion of the
heroic. If we can get the peasant statement of the heroic, that is
excellent; its sincerity brings its illusion. But a mere imitation of
the peasant statement of the heroic, such as Lady Gregory seems to aim
at giving us in these sentences, is as pinchbeck and unreal as
Macpherson's _Ossian_. It reaches a grotesque absurdity when at the
close of Act II Finn comes back to the door of the tent and, in order to
stir up Diarmuid's jealousy, says:--
It is what they were saying a while ago, the King of Foreign is
grunting and sighing, grunting and sighing, around and about the
big red sally tree beside the stream!
To write like that is to use not a style but a jargon.
If you want a standard of reality with which to compare these passages
of Abbey-Theatre rhetoric, you have only to turn to Lady Gregory's own
notes at the end of _Irish Folk-History Plays_, where she records a
number of peasant utterances on Irish history. Here, and not in the
plays--in the tragic plays, at any rate--is the real "folk-history" of
her book to be found. One may take, as an example, the note on
_Kincora_, where some one tells of the Battle of Clontarf, in which
Brian Boru defeated the Danes:--
Clontarf was on the head of a game of chess. The generals of the
Danes were beaten at it, and they were vexed. It was Broder, that
the Brodericks are descended from, that put a dagger through
Brian's heart, and he attending to his prayers. What the Danes left
in Ireland were hens and weasels. And when the cock crows in the
morning the country people will always say: "It is for Denmark they
are crowing; crowing they are to be back in Denmark."
Lady Gregory reveals more of life--leaping, imaginative life--in that
little note than in all the three acts about Grania and the three about
Brian. It is because the characters in the comic plays in the book are
nearer the peasantry in stature and in outlook that she is so much more
successful with them than with the heroes and heroines of the tragedies.
She describes the former plays as "tragic comedies"; but in the first
and best of them, _The Canavans_, it is difficult to see where the
tragedy comes in. _The Canavans_ is really a farce of the days of
Elizabeth. The principal character is a cowardly miller, who ensues
nothing but his own safety in the war of loyalties and disloyalties
which is destroying Ireland. He is equally afraid of the wrath of the
neighbours on the one hand, and the wrath of the Government on the
other. Consequently, he is at his wits' end when his brother Antony
comes seeking shelter in his house, after deserting from the English
Army. When the soldiers come looking for Antony, so helpless with terror
is the miller, that he flies into hiding among his sacks, and his
brother has to impersonate him in the interview with the officer who
carries out the search. The situation obviously lends itself to comic
elaborations, and Lady Gregory misses none of her opportunities. She
flies off from every semblance of reality at a tangent, however, in a
later scene, where Antony disguises himself as Queen Elizabeth, supposed
to have come on a secret visit of inspection to Ireland, and takes in
both his brother and the officer (who is himself a Canavan, anglicized
under the name of Headley). This is a sheer invention of the theatre; it
turns the play from living speech into machinery. _The Canavans_,
however, has enough of present-day reality to make us forgive its
occasional stage-Elizabethanism. On the whole, its humours gain nothing
from their historical setting.
_The White Cockade_, the second of the tragic comedies, is a play about
the flight of King James II after the Battle of the Boyne, and it, too,
is lifeless and mechanical in so far as it is historical. King James
himself is a good comic figure of a conventional sort, as he is
discovered hiding in the barrel; but Sarsfield, who is meant to be
heroic, is all joints and sawdust; and the mad Jacobite lady is a puppet
who might have been invented by any writer of plays. "When my _White
Cockade_ was produced," Lady Gregory tells us, "I was pleased to hear
that Mr. Synge had said my method had made the writing of historical
drama again possible." But surely, granted the possession of the
dramatic gift, the historical imagination is the only thing that makes
the writing of historical drama possible. Lady Gregory does not seem to
me to possess the historical imagination. Not that I believe in
archaeology in the theatre; but, apart from her peasant characters, she
cannot give us the illusion of reality about the figures in these
historical plays. If we want the illusion of reality, we shall have to
turn from _The White Cockade_ to the impossible scene outside the
post-office and the butcher's shop in _Hyacinth Halvey_. As for the
third of the tragic comedies, _The Deliverer_, it is a most interesting
curiosity. In it we have an allegory of the fate of Parnell in a setting
of the Egypt of the time of Moses. Moses himself--or the King's
nursling, as he is called--is Parnell; and he and the other characters
talk Kiltartan as to the manner born. _The Deliverer_ is grotesque and,
in its way, impressive, though the conclusion, in which the King's
nursling is thrown to the King's cats by his rebellious followers,
invites parody. The second volume of the _Irish Folk-History Plays_,
even if it reveals only Lady Gregory's talent rather than her genius, is
full of odd and entertaining things, and the notes at the end of both
of these volumes, short though they are, do give us the franchise of a
wonderful world of folk-history.