MR. EDWARD MARTYN AND MR. GEORGE MOORE
The announcement of Mr. Edward Martyn as playwright of "The Irish
Literary Theatre" was, outside of the narrow circle of his friends, a
great surprise to all interested in letters in Ireland. But the almost
simultaneous announcement that Mr. George Moore was lending his aid to
the adventure was an even greater surprise. Mr. Moore had, of course,
written more than once of Ireland, and there were many who had not
forgotten the unpleasantnesses of "A Drama in Muslin" (1886), and Mr.
Martyn, though the author of "Morgante the Lesser" (1890), was not known
as its author, as he had published it anonymously, and as it had not
made enough of a stir for its anonymity to be disclosed. Yet for the
landlord-author, who had turned his back on Ireland, to return to his
country with a greater interest in its life and its writers than he had
ever betrayed, was more remarkable than for another landlord of the same
family connection, comparatively a stay-at-home landlord, to turn from
sport and religion to the stage. Mr. Martyn had lived in London and his
love of music had taken him to the Continent, but he had been something
of a Nationalist, whereas Mr. Moore had lost few opportunities to scoff
at the country his father had striven so unselfishly to aid. What of Mr.
Moore that was not French in 1899 was confessedly English.
[Illustration]
Now that those interested have read "Ave," the first volume of the three
of "Hail and Farewell," in which Mr. Moore is confessing the reasons of
his return to Ireland and of his second departure from Ireland, they
know that he had been mildly interested in Ireland as material for art
as far back as 1894, and that it was Mr. Martyn who had interested him
in the things of home. Mr. Moore tells us all about it more than
explicitly in the "Overture" to his trilogy. In the first chapter he
tells us that the interest faded away gradually, to be reawakened in
1899 by a visit paid him in London by Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats, who came
to ask his help in founding a "Literary Theatre in Dublin." Then Mr.
Moore learned the story of that theatre's inception, a story to him
"disappointingly short and simple. When Yeats had said that he had spent
the summer at Coole with Lady Gregory, I saw it all. Coole is but three
miles from Tillyra [Mr. Martyn's estate in Galway]; Edward is often at
Coole; Lady Gregory and Yeats are often at Tillyra; Yeats and Edward had
written plays--the drama brings strange fowls to roost."
It takes Mr. Moore many pages to tell why it was he joined the three in
their project, and many more pages to tell of their collaboration during
the first two years of the three years that were the life of "The Irish
Literary Theatre." The four are, indeed, the principal characters of Mr.
Moore's "Ave"--I had almost said his novel "Ave"--himself, Mr. Martyn,
Mr. Yeats, and Lady Gregory, to mention them in the order of prominence
that Mr. Moore gives them.
Lady Gregory and Mr. Yeats have learned their art, the highest and most
difficult of all forms of literary art, so that each is sure in the
shaping of fable and emotion to the stage, though neither is to drama
native-born as was Synge. Mr. Martyn and Mr. Moore have neither of them,
however, learned the art of the playwright. Mr. Martyn has the root of
the matter in him, but he remains the amateur. Mr. Moore was once the
amateur, even in the novel, in "A Modern Lover" (1883), for instance,
true as that story is to the London art life and aristocratic life it is
intended to reflect, but he has since then won his way, book by book, to
the position, now that Mr. Hardy has given up the novel, of first
novelist of the English-speaking peoples. Had he studied the play as
painfully and as long as he has studied the novel, it may be that Mr.
Moore had conquered it, too, though I doubt it, for the concentration
necessary to drama is alien to his method as a novelist. As it is, his
best plays are but the good journeyman work of one who is a skilled
literary craftsman. Mr. Martyn has more originality of theme, more
intimacy with Irish character, a surer instinct for effective situation,
and more nobility of intention, though Mr. Moore's greater power over
words gives his plays a dignity as art that the plays of Mr. Martyn do
not attain.
Alone of the quartette that founded "The Irish Literary Theatre," Mr.
Martyn is possessed of none of the instincts of the publicist. Lady
Gregory has edited articles about ideals in Ireland at home, and on the
lecture platform she has stoutly fought the battles of "The Playboy of
the Western World" in America; Mr. Yeats has ever delighted in writing
letters to the newspapers and he has preached the evangel of the
Renaissance from Edinburgh to San Francisco; and Mr. George Moore is a
controversialist pamphleteer even before he is a novelist. In the few
articles about the movement that Mr. Martyn has written, brief articles
all of them, there is, however, clear indication of the spirit in which
he wrote his plays, if comparatively little discussion of his art. In
the second number of "Beltaine" (February, 1900), in an article entitled
"A Comparison between Irish and English Theatrical Audiences," Mr.
Martyn declares that he sees in Ireland, instead of the "vast
cosmopolitanism and vulgarity" of England, "an idealism founded upon the
ancient genius of the land." It is wholly in accord with the spirit of
this declaration that Mr. Martyn has written his more important plays,
all of them, in fact, but the satires on weaklings and officials he
calls "A Tale of a Town" (1902) and "The Place Hunters" (1905). He
writes little of the peasants, being less interested in them than are
Mr. Yeats and Lady Gregory, and therefore less acquainted with them. If
one may judge from his writings the intimates of Mr. Martyn have been
among his own landlord class, the priests, and the politicians. It is
the landlords and middle-class people that occupy the foreground of his
plays, Peg Inerny in "Maeve" (1899) being the only important character a
peasant, unless Mrs. Font in "The Enchanted Sea" (1902) can be called a
member of a class that she was born to, but from which her marriage
removed her.
This question of the class the plays should present was one of those
that led to the withdrawal of Mr. Martyn from the dramatic movement. A
more definite cause, perhaps, was the unanimous determination of Lady
Gregory, Mr. Yeats, and Mr. Moore that his "A Tale of a Town" could not
be presented by "The Irish Literary Theatre" as he wrote it if the
standards of that theatre were to be preserved. Its author's magnanimity
in turning it over to Mr. Moore to be rewritten,--as it was, being
presented as "The Bending of the Bough" (1900),--was revealed by Mr.
Moore in "Samhain" (October, 1901), and very much more fully, if less
kindly, in "Ave" (1911).
In its way their refusal to play Mr. Martyn's "A Tale of a Town" was as
creditable to the other powers in the theatre as was his magnanimity in
giving them the play to do with as they would. They knew their refusal
to play it might lead him to withdraw his support of the theatre and, in
the end, it was a factor in bringing about that result. After their
rejection of "A Tale of a Town," however, he still gave "The Irish
Literary Theatre" his support, allowing it to put on his "Maeve," and in
1901 contributing to "Samhain" (October), "A Plea for a National Theatre
in Ireland." Such a theatre Mr. Martyn had the power to give Ireland,
but he did not give it, when it was thought he might, and in 1902 all
hope of his giving his money for such a purpose was destroyed by his
transference of a fund of fifty thousand dollars to the Catholic
Pro-Cathedral in Dublin "for the purpose of founding and supporting a
Palestrina choir."
That Mr. Martyn was still a force to be reckoned with is revealed by the
trouble Mr. Yeats went to, in "Samhain" of October, 1902, to explain why
it was that the plays of the Irish National Dramatic Company were either
folk-drama or drama whose life was the "life of poetry" Mr. Martyn had
argued in "The United Irishmen," which up to the time of the
presentation of "In the Shadow of the Glen" was a stanch supporter of
the dramatic policies of Mr. Yeats, that the actors of the company
should be trained to the drama of modern society. "The acting of plays
like 'Deirdre,' and of 'Cathleen ni Houlihan,'" writes Mr. Yeats, "with
its speech of the country people, did not seem to him a preparation. It
is not, but that is as it should be. Our movement is a return to the
people, like the Russian movement of the early seventies, and the drama
of society could but magnify a condition of life which the countryman
and the artisan could but copy to their hurt. The play that is to give
them a quite natural pleasure should either tell them of their own life
or of that life of poetry where every man can see his own image, because
there alone does human nature escape from arbitrary conditions. Plays
about drawing-rooms are written for the middle classes of great cities,
for the classes who live in drawing-rooms, but if you would uplift the
man of the roads you must write about the roads, or about the people of
romance, or about great historical people."
Neither "Maeve" nor "The Enchanted Sea" can be called a drawing-room
play, though both introduce us to "drawing-room people," but "The
Heather Field" (1899), Mr. Martyn's first play, and his greatest success
is a drawing-room play, as in a minor way are "A Tale of a Town" and
"The Place Hunters." These last two plays are failures; but they are not
failures, I think because they are drawing-room plays, but because Mr.
Martyn is less effective with a full stage than with two couples or so
and, principally, because he is less successful with social and
political questions than with those that concern the individual.
Whatever value one puts upon "The Heather Field" it cannot be denied
that it was a popular success and that it was praised by critics whose
judgment is discerning. It is perhaps because it is a variant of the old
theme of the war between man the idealist and woman the materialist that
it so appealed to young men, troubled themselves as to whether to follow
their star or to accept the chains that; wife and children impose. It
was enough for the audience that witnessed its first performances in the
Antient Concert Rooms, Dublin, May 9, 10, 13, 1899, that it showed a man
at war with the despotism of fact, as Ireland, preeminently the Celtic
Land, has so long been. It was not remarkably acted, by an
insufficiently rehearsed and not very understanding scratch company, and
yet it impressed its audiences more favorably than "The Countess
Cathleen" (1892), an unequivocally great poetic drama; and these
audiences were the most cultivated Dublin can boast.
"The Heather Field" is the story of the going-mad of Carden Tyrrell, a
landlord of the west of Ireland. From the first he is represented to us
as a man to whom as to so many of his countrymen dream is reality and
reality dream. His wife, to whom the realities are very instant, urges
him to do as others do, to entertain, to hunt, at least to do something
practical. For her he has abandoned the ideal world he had built up for
himself from his books and his dreams and is trying farming. Yet his
temperament is such that he must idealize even this. When the curtain
rises he is still busy with the project, long since undertaken, of
reclaiming a wind-swept heather field fronting the Atlantic and of
making it into the best of pasture land. That reclamation and
transformation has become a passion with him, and soon we feel that it
is the symbol of that quality in him that is untamed, incurably "ideal."
To free that field of rocks and to drain its bogs he has mortgaged his
estate, and, in the play, before the success or failure of his
undertaking is proved, he mortgages almost all that remains to him to
improve the land below, which the draining of the heather field has
turned into a swamp. His wife, to prevent this last folly, strives to
have control of his property taken away from him, but his friend, Barry
Ussher, believing that restraint would make Tyrrell mad indeed, so
intimidates a hesitating physician that Mrs. Tyrrell fails in her most
natural plan to save herself and her child from ruin by having her
husband declared incompetent, and, if necessary, restrained. With his
friend's assistance Tyrrell has won his fight against his wife.
Obstinacy in the treatment of some tenants that his debts have driven
him to evict rouses such hatred against Tyrrell, until then a loved
landlord, that the police hold it necessary to follow him with an escort
that he may not be shot by his people. To avoid being so followed,
Tyrrell keeps within doors and so intensifies his malady. The
catastrophe comes when, on his boy's first spring search for wild
flowers, the child brings him a handful of heather buds from the heather
field. Their message is that the mountain will revert to waste again.
Even in his "ideal domain" reality has asserted itself. His ideal world
crumbles for the instant, and his reason with it, and forever. But after
a moment's agony ideality triumphantly reasserts itself, and in mad
ecstasy Tyrrell, his years fallen from him, passes from sight crying out
at the beauty of a world that is to him now forever a world of mornings
in which, as he says, "the rain across a saffron sun trembles like gold
harpstrings through the purple Irish spring.... The voices--I hear them
now triumphant in a silver glory of song!" Such is the play, "aching and
lofty in its loveliness."
Is this ending, or is it not, sadder than the catastrophe of "Ghosts"?
Certainly to "Ghosts" it owes something, and to "The Wild Duck" more
than something. A quality as of Ibsen pervades the play, and it has,
too, back of it a background of nature and of thought that is beautiful
in the way the background of nature and of thought is beautiful and
compensating in the plays of Ibsen.
In his introduction to "The Heather Field," which was published before
its presentation, Mr. Moore writes, "Although all right and good sense
are on the wife's side, the sympathy is always with Carden." So it was
on the presentation of the play in Dublin, Mr. Yeats writing in "The
Dome," "Our Irish playgoers sympathized with this man so perfectly that
they hissed the doctors who found that he was mad." Such an attitude is
characteristically Irish; and equally characteristically English was the
reception of this play when Mr. Thomas Kingston presented it at a
matinee at the Strand Theatre in London. Mr. Yeats is again the
authority: "The London playgoers ... sympathized with the doctors, and
held the divine vision a dream." Mr. Moore praises "The Heather Field"
more forthrightly in "Samhain" of October, 1901, holding that "'The
Heather Field' has been admitted to be the most thoughtful of modern
prose plays written in English, the best constructed, the most endurable
to a thoughtful audience." Patriotism or kinship, love of paradox or
desire to assuage feelings hurt by the rough treatment of "A Tale of a
Town," may any or all of them be called upon to explain so sweeping a
statement. But none of such motives could account for its praise by Mr.
Beerbohm in the London "Saturday Review." "Max" is often paradoxical,
but he is not paradoxical here: "Not long ago this play was published as
a book, with a preface by Mr. George Moore, and it was more or less
vehemently disparaged by the critics. Knowing that it was to be produced
later in Dublin, and knowing how hard it is to dogmatize about a play
until one has seen it acted, I confined myself to a very mild
disparagement of it. Now that I have seen it acted, I am sorry that I
disparaged it at all. It turns out to be a very powerful play indeed." I
have quoted Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore and Mr. Beerbohm, not only because
I have not seen the play on the stage but because, on reading it, its
effect is one that puts my judgment at sea. Years ago as I read it it
gripped me hard, but when I read it now and think it over now, I am at a
loss to see why, done as it is done, I should have been so moved by it.
Now I am moved greatly by but two situations. Both of these are in the
last act. One of them is Tyrrell's revulsion against the bad news that
his brother Miles brings from Dublin of the mortgagee's refusal to
extend. His wife tells their friends that she is ruined, that "pretty
nearly all" their property is mortgaged, but Tyrrell cries out, "All, do
you say? No--not all. This vulture cannot touch the heather field! My
hope,--it is my only hope, and it will save me in the end. Ha, ha! These
wise ones! They did not think the barren mountain of those days worth
naming in their deed. But now that mountain is a great green field worth
more than all they can seize, (_with a strange intensity_) and it is
mine--all mine!"
The other situation that moves me greatly is that at the very close of
the play, that from which I quoted a while back, in which Tyrrell's
madness becomes evident in his belief that he is a youth again, with all
the world before him to do with as he will.
The characters in "The Heather Field" are less rigid than those in the
later plays, but even in this play you feel about them, as you feel so
often about the characters of Hawthorne, that they are characters chosen
to interpret an idea rather than children of the imagination or
portraits done from observation of life.
As one recalls the motive and situations and background and symbolism
of "The Heather Field," not having read the play for some time, it seems
far finer than when one returns to it. Fine, too, it must seem to any
one reading a scenario of it and not offended, as one reading it
constantly is by the inability of its dialogue to represent more of the
person speaking than his point of view. The dialogue of Mr. Martyn is
almost never true dramatic speech, and not only not true dramatic
speech, but despite the very clear differentiation of the characters,
with little of their personality or temperament in it.
"Maeve" has always seemed to me a lesser play than "The Heather Field,"
and it now leaves me even colder than of old. Nor, though I can see how
fine in conception was the character of Mrs. Font in "The Enchanted
Sea," does that one character seem to me, now, to redeem the undeveloped
possibilities of the situations of the play, the incomplete characters
of Guy and Mask and the failure of the dialogue assigned to the
characters to approach true dramatic speech. "Maeve" is the better play
of the two. With all its shortcomings it has about it an unearthliness
of atmosphere, a quiet coldness of beauty that has come of the thought
Mr. Martyn had, as he wrote it, of the moonlight on the Burren Hills in
his home country. In this one respect Mr. Martyn has done what he would,
for he holds that "the greatest beauty like the old Greek sculptures is
always cold."
Mr. Martyn calls "Maeve" "a psychological drama in two acts." It relates
the story of the last day and night in the life of a visionary girl, the
hereditary princess of Burren in Clare, in the west of Ireland. On the
eve of her marriage to Hugh Fitz Walter, a rich young Englishman, whom
she will wed only for her father's sake to reestablish him in his
position as "The O'Heynes" among the neighboring gentry, she wanders off
into the Burren Hills with her old nurse Peg Inerny. Peg has fascinated
Maeve O'Heynes with tales of "the other people," convincing Maeve, as
she is convinced herself, that she changes from the old vagrant peasant
whom the countryside half fears into Queen Maeve, the great Amazon of
the Cuchulain legends. Maeve O'Heynes in her own dreams has seen great
heroes and heroines of Ireland's legendary past, and she believes that
they still live among the fairies as many a peasant to-day beside Peg
Inerny believes. So Maeve follows Peg to the mountains, though it is her
wedding-eve, to see these great people of old time and to meet a lover
she has seen in vision, the ideal man of her dreams. She finds her way
home several hours later through the white moonlight of the bitter March
night. Then, in a sort of trance, looking out of her window in the
half-ruined castle to the ruined abbey, the mysterious round tower, the
stony mountains, she beholds the vision of Queen Maeve, with an
attendant troupe of harpers and pages, rise from the cairn and approach
the castle. As the troupe returns from castle to cairn Maeve's spirit
passes with it under the Northern lights into the land of the ever-young
of Tir-nan-Ogue. When her sister goes to call her to make ready for her
wedding, she finds Maeve sitting still and cold at the open casement.
Maeve has found the supernatural lover, once human, of "boyish face
closehooded with short gold hair," and again only "a symbol of ideal
beauty," to be truly a "Prince of the hoar dew," for he is death. Maeve
has renounced life and sought "perfection in what unfolds as death."
Mr. Yeats explains the play ("Beltaine," February, 1900) to "symbolize
Ireland's choice between English materialism and her own natural
idealism, as well as the choice of every individual soul." Does it
follow that the lesson of "Maeve" is that it were better for Ireland to
be depopulated in her pursuit of national individuality, of ideal
beauty, than to drift along to complete Anglicanization, even though
that bring riches, peace, and content? An austere policy, surely, if I
read rightly the meaning of Mr. Yeats.
"Maeve" was not so well played at its production during the second
season's performances of "The Irish Literary Theatre" in February, 1900,
as "The Heather Field" had been performed in 1899, but it was almost as
enthusiastically received. It has not won for itself, however,
reproduction outside of Dublin, as did Mr. Martyn's first play, which
was played in New York, at the Carnegie Lyceum, in April, 1900, and
which was revived in London in 1903.
If objection be made to "The Enchanted Sea" as a reflection of "The Lady
from the Sea," it can be replied that the call of the sea that may not
be resisted is as old as the heart of man. Sea fairies, mermaids and
mermen, and the voice of the waters tugging as irresistibly on the tired
spirit as the undertow on the body tired with long swimming, are in
Gaelic literature from the beginning, and before Mr. Martyn had written
of the sea enchantment it had lent its charm to many of the stories of
"Fiona Macleod." It was two years after its publication in 1902 that, on
April 18 and 19, 1904, "The Enchanted Sea" was put on at the Antient
Concert Rooms, Dublin by "The Players' Club." It was not well played,
but according to Mr. Standish James O'Grady it was much better, seen and
listened to, than read. Writing, in his "All Ireland Review," of its
production, he puts it on record "I never saw an audience so attentive
and at the same time so undemonstrative. It was like being in church."
The audience probably felt the dignity of conception back of the
insufficiency of execution in the play and its ineffectiveness of
presentation. The story that Mr. Martyn dreamed to carry over the
footlights is of Mrs. Font, a peasant woman who has sent her husband, a
gentleman, to his grave a broken-spirited man because of her sacrifice
of his honor to advance their material position. When the curtain rises,
Mrs. Font has been thwarted, by the death of her son, in her lifelong
dream of obtaining possession of the Font estates. The estates have
reverted to her nephew, Guy Font, a strange boy, who has been brought up
by the peasantry of the west coast and so has come to share many of
their beliefs. He is fascinated by the sea by which he lives, and his
family's friend, Lord Mask, has been drawn to him, although there is
such disparity in their years, by this love of the sea which he and the
boy have in common. Mrs. Font wishes her daughter to marry Mask, but the
young people are but half in love with each other. Agnes Font cannot
share his visionariness, as her other lover, Commander Lyle, plainly
sees. So the North of Ireland man never gives up hope of winning her.
Mrs. Font vulgarly throws Mask and Agnes together, in her determination
that they shall make a match of it, and as vulgarly tells Lyle the girl
is not for him. Mask cannot but marry Agnes, Mrs. Font thinks, if Agnes
has a large fortune. To secure the fortune and the lord for her
daughter, Mrs. Font determines to get Guy Font out of the way. Her
purpose coincides with her peasant belief that he is a "changeling," and
is really of the sea people. So she goes with him to a sea cave he is
fond of visiting, and only she comes from the cave. She is suspected,
but before the officers come for her, she learns that her crime has
defeated its own end. Mask is driven mad by the loss of his friend and,
seeking to join him by the sea, is overwhelmed and drawn out by the
undertow. As the officers come to arrest her, Mrs. Font hangs herself
from the landing of the great staircase of Font Hill with the rope Guy
used there as a swing.
"The Enchanted Sea" is cruder, colder, more amateurish than the two
other plays of its class, full of the sort of talk that falls from the
lips of a boy of seventeen just awakened to ideals. Its characters act
as openly and as petulantly as children. Mrs. Font, really fine in
conception, is in realization only a typical villain of the cheap
melodrama; and Commander Lyle, of the Royal Navy, a man of thirty, is as
childish in love as a schoolboy whose beloved takes an ice from his
rival at a church festival.
What Mr. Martyn could have done with "A Tale of a Town," had he been
willing to learn when opportunity was his with Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore
and Lady Gregory, is partially shown in the rewriting of the play by Mr.
Moore into "The Bending of the Bough." The motives remain as they were,
and, in essentials, the action is the same, the first act being little
different in the two plays The four other acts, however, Mr. Moore has
almost entirely rewritten, and though everywhere the fundamental
brainwork is Mr. Martyn's, the last acts are finer in the revised
version. Mr. Moore makes far more plausible the girl, Millicent Fell,
for love of whom, and a life of ease, the political leader Jasper Dean
gives up a leadership through which he could largely right his country's
wrongs. Not only does Mr. Moore make believable the action of the play,
but he puts words on it, which, if not true dramatic speech, reveal,
after the manner of the novelist, just what are the thought and emotion
of the characters, and the words are in themselves beautiful.
In "A Tale of a Town" the political situation from which evolves the
action of the play is the unification by Jasper Dean of the corporation
of a town, unnamed, on the west coast of Ireland, to prosecute a lawsuit
against an English town, Anglebury, which owes the Irish town a large
indemnity, promised the Irish town when it gave up a line of steamers in
the interest of the Anglebury line of steamers. After uniting all the
various elements save the place hunter Alderman Lawrence against
Anglebury, Dean gives up the leadership because his fiancée, whose uncle
is the mayor of the English town, turns against him because he is
opposed to the interests of her set. To hold her he betrays his town.
"A Tale of a Town" is so crude, so naked, so obvious, so uninspired,
one wonders why it can be taken seriously at all. But the reason is not
far to seek. The play is true, in the main, to the life it depicts, and
there is vehement feeling back of its satire; and truth and intensity of
feeling cannot be denied effect on the stage any more than on the
rostrum. Where it falls short of reality is in the dialogue of the
aldermen. No politicians, even when egged by their envious womankind,
would ever give themselves away as do these of "A Tale of a Town." They
are as frankly self-revelatory as if they were characters in a morality
play.
It would, perhaps, be inexact to call Mr. Martyn a misogynist, but he
has that attitude toward women of some priests his countrymen, as of
many priests of all creeds, that there is something belittling if not
degrading in absorbing association with women. His feeling is not at all
the commoner feeling of men that leads them all to cry, "The woman
tempted me." Women tempt Mr. Martyn no more than they did Ruskin, but he
seems to feel that the majority of them are nuisances if not baggages.
So strong is this feeling in "A Tale of a Town" that it leads him to
make Millicent behave in a way no Jasper Dean in real life would ever
stand, for Jasper Dean is not a man pronouncedly uxorious until his
abject surrender at the end of Act IV.
There are almost as many indictments of women as there are of England in
the plays of Mr. Martyn: Mrs. Tyrrell in "The Heather Field" and Mrs.
Font in "The Enchanted Sea," as well as all of the women in "A Tale of
a Town" save Miss Arabella Dean. In "Maeve," the heroine and Finola are
sympathetically presented, and there is a kind of attraction as well as
decided repulsion in Peg Inerny. But such sympathy as Mr. Martyn does
express here seems to be expressed not because the women are fellow
human beings, but because Maeve and Peg Inerny symbolize Ireland's
resistance to English ways and because Finola is filled with
loving-kindness for Maeve. Agnes Font in "The Enchanted Sea" escapes the
pillory rather inexplicably, for she is poor, weak girlhood unable to
understand the other-worldly idealism of her cousin and Lord Mask. But
since Mrs. Font was altogether repulsive and the men either too dreamy
for "common nature's daily food" or too hard in the way of the Black
North, Mr. Martyn felt, I suppose, that his hearers would be utterly
alienated were there not some one in the play sympathetic in the
ordinary way of human nature.
"A Tale of a Town" was put on for the first time at Molesworth Hall,
Dublin, late in October of 1905, by Cumann nan Gaedheal, not very
notably, but it was hailed by the Irish Ireland newspapers as admirable
propagandist material, "The United Irishmen" declaring that "an Irish
play which brings home to us, as this does, the secret of the endurance
of foreign government in this country, is a national asset."
Mr. Martyn has not cared enough for "The Place Hunters" (1905) to
publish it in book form, contenting himself with its printing in a
little periodical. It is, as its title indicates, a fellow of "A Tale of
a Town," but it has not back of it intensity of feeling enough to lift
itself out of farce.
Between "The Place Hunters" and "Grangecolman" is an interval of seven
years, but it is the Mr. Martyn of earlier plays, still faithful to
Ibsen and still of a dialogue more formal than that of life, that we
find in this play of his middle age. As you read "Grangecolman" you
think of "Rosmersholm," as you thought of "The Wild Duck" when you read
"The Heather Field." "Grangecolman" is the story of a daughter's
frustration of her elderly father's intention to marry his young
amanuensis, by playing the rôle of the family ghost, long fabled but
never seen, and being shot by the girl she feels is driving her out of
her home. Katherine Devlin is another creature of her maker's misogyny.
She is a bitter, barren woman of suffragette type, whose marriage and
career as a doctor have been alike failures, and who has alienated
herself from all, even her mild father, by her selfishness and
discontent. It is she who has brought Miss Clare Farquhar into her
father's home to render him those services in his pursuit of heraldry
and genealogy that were irksome to her, and so she herself is
responsible for his dependence on his secretary, which, when once the
daughter recognizes it, threatens annihilation of what little pleasure
she has in her life. Her husband is a dreamy sort of man, slack-fibred
and pottering, who goes about waving the banner of the ideal and
refusing to work. The fifth character of the play is the butler, Horan.
All are clearly characterized, but if the dialogue is less stiff than
that of the earlier plays, it is little more distinctive of the people
who speak it, and in the latter part of the play labored and stodgy.
"Grangecolman" is a picture of life as we all know it, and there is in
it a fidelity of purpose that gives it a kind of effectiveness. There is
not in it, however, any keenness of vision, any deep reading of life,
any great underlying emotion, to relieve its abject sordidness. There is
no gusto, no beauty, no intensity of bitterness even, to make its
sordidness interesting in any other than a pathological way.
As one reads "Hail and Farewell," one might readily come to believe that
Mr. Martyn is only an eccentric character, "gotten up" by Mr. Moore for
a novel. Mr. Martyn is, in reality, a very vital force working for the
nationalization of Irish art, if not an artist himself. The pity is that
he is not wholly an artist, for he might have been. He knows and is
interested in classes of Irish society that the dramatists of the Abbey
Theatre have not tried to depict, and had he realized twelve years ago
what a chance was his to learn the art of the stage, with the help and
collaboration of Mr. Moore, Mr. Yeats, and Lady Gregory, he might now be
what he seemed to be after the triumphant production of "The Heather
Field," the Irish playwright who had adapted the modes of Ibsen to the
presentation of the life of Irish landlords and bourgeois politicians.
But Mr. Martyn would not realize that ideas--and he is rich in
ideas--constitute the larger part of originality; he thought technique
in drama must come from the man himself, too. Such technique, of course,
comes most often from the study of other drama. Certainly it was an
original possession of none of the dramatists of the Celtic Renaissance,
and Mr. Martyn might have been content to be a fellow learner, along
with the rest of them, from one another, and from all the great
dramatists of the world. It may be that Mr. Martyn never would have
attained style, but he could, I think, have learned to make his
characters express themselves in a way nearer to true dramatic speech
than the lifeless dialogue of his that only just manages to give you
their thought, with none of their mood of the moment or of their
personality.
In every one of Mr. Martyn's plays the plot is interesting, save in "The
Place Hunters"; in every other play it is significant; and in all it is
come largely of his individual experience of life. Back of all the plays
but these two political satires there is brooding that is deep if not
passionate. In all the characters are natural, though some of them are
unusual in the way of the unusual characters of Ibsen. And all the plays
are marred, "The Heather Field" less than any other, by the fumbling
touch of the amateur. Ironically, Mr. Martyn is strong where most
Irishmen are weak--in his plot construction: even Mr. Yeats, who never
praises with his tongue in his cheek, owning to "the triumphant
construction of the 'The Heather Field'"; and weak, where most Irishmen
are strong, in the dialogue. It would not have aided Mr. Martyn, for the
kind of play he prefers, to have listened to the speech of the peasant
as Lady Gregory has listened to it, but he might have learned, with such
compeers, how to select and to condense from actual upper-class speech a
speech that would represent the thoughts and emotions and personalities
of his characters. It is far more difficult, of course, to write
dialogue for upper-class people, save humorous dialogue, since, as many
from Wordsworth's day on have pointed out, upper-class people do not
express their thoughts and emotions as frankly as do the folk. As Mr.
Yeats puts it, they look into the fire instead.
Amateur as he is, however, Mr. Martyn has one play to his credit that he
who has read will remember, "The Heather Field." It is often thus with
the amateur. We need go no further than Mr. Martyn's countryman who gave
us "The Burial of Sir John Moore" for witness. Mr. Martyn has, too, like
other amateurs, given suggestions to others that they have realized as
fine art. It is more than likely, for instance, that Mr. Yeats had in
his mind some memory of Peg Inerny when he created Cathleen ni Houlihan.
There is, too, about the best plays of Mr. Martyn, a quality of a
certain kind. They have the distinctness of objects seen under the
bright hard light of late winter, when the sun grows strong, but when
the winds are still keen from the northwest and there are no leaves as
yet on the trees.
There are many characterizations of Mr. Martyn in his kinsman's "Ave."
He is now "a fellow ... with an original streak of genius in him, and
very little literary tact"; but he is more generally characterized in
some such fashion as this, which Mr. Moore makes a deliverance of his
own: "A good fellow--an excellent one, and a man who would have written
well if his mother hadn't put it into his head that he had a soul. The
soul is a veritable pitfall." However that may be, it was the discovery,
or at least suppositious discovery, that he had a soul, a soul in
harmony with the melancholy soul of Ireland, that drove Mr. Moore back
to Dublin, and, for moments, even farther west to the home country of
his family about Lough Gara in Mayo. This discovery was foreshadowed in
"Evelyn Innes" (1898), in which Mr. Moore grows curious about the belief
in ancestral memory and other esoteric beliefs of Mr. Yeats; it is
latent in the introductions to "The Heather Field" and "The Bending of
the Bough"; and it is made manifest in the parts of the latter play that
are Mr. Moore's. Who most helped him to the discovery it is not easy to
say, but an interest in his country entered into and possessed him as
Kirwan's ideas entered into and possessed Dean. No doubt Mr. Yeats
helped him to find his soul, and Mr. Russell, but it must be it was Mr.
Martyn through whose agency the first glimmerings of such a recognition
began to break upon his mind. Is it only dramatically that Mr. Moore
wrote when he put upon Kirwan's lips in 1900 the words, "Life is the
enemy--we should fly from life"? But whether this is only a dramatic
repetition of what he might have heard any time from "A.E." had he
chosen to listen, there is no doubt that Mr. Moore did discover a new
quality in himself in the late nineties after he became intimately
associated with the new Irish movement. There is a wistfulness of
feeling and a beauty of thought in his writing, from "Evelyn Innes" on,
that there was not in it before "Evelyn Innes."
There are those who think the greatest excellence of Mr. Moore is as an
art critic, and that "Modern Painting" (1893) is his great book. Mr.
Moore himself says that "Esther Waters" (1894) is his only book that he
can read with admiration and content; and those particularly interested
in the Renaissance will hold out for "Evelyn Innes" or "The Lake"
(1905). To me "A Drama in Muslin" (1886) is the best story of Mr. Moore
in his earlier realistic manner and "The Lake" in his later manner, a
manner that is now wistful and now mellow, as in "A Drama in Muslin" his
manner is uniformly as hard as winter sunshine.
Mr. Moore is, as I said at the outset, a hard-working amateur in "A
Modern Lover"; three years later, in "A Drama in Muslin," he writes with
authority and insight; as he does, too, in "Parnell and his Island"
(1887), though here with scant sympathy; but it is not until "Evelyn
Innes" that he becomes deeply concerned with beauty of subject or beauty
of background, or, except at haphazard, possessed of any mastery of
style. "Evelyn Innes" is very well written,--in spots,--but "The Lake"
is of a wholeness of good tissue that is attainable only through an art
that has labored long and earnestly to achieve beauty. Had Mr. Moore
never recaptured his ancestral tradition, had he remained the writer
that Paris and London had made him, he had never written so finely as he
writes in "The Lake." An infancy and boyhood in Ireland; a youth in
London; the ten years from twenty-one to thirty-one in Paris; eleven
years of hard writing in London, years comparatively lean after those of
luxury that anteceded them, brought Mr. Moore at forty-two to a
knowledge of what was beautiful and significant in his home country. He
and Mr. Martyn were not many years apart when they began to write about
Ireland, but Mr. Moore had back of him not only ten years of writing,
but back of that ten years of living life as an art in Paris and his
attempts in the art of painting and his years of discussion of art in
the studios. Mr. Martyn, at home, had been more concerned with religion
and nationality and politics, and a shift to art as the principal career
of life after forty--"Morgante the Lesser" was no more than an incursion
into art, about as much of his life as a trip to Bayreuth--is only in
rare instances productive of results interesting to others than the
"artist." The difference in the achievements of the two men is not so
much the result of the difference of the powers with which both were
gifted as the result of the difference of time at which the will began
to work to realize those powers. Had Mr. Martyn begun soon enough and
had he been enough interested in his writing he might have made drama as
full of insight and beauty and as true to human nature as are the novels
of his kinsman. It is another irony of Mr. Martyn's life that it was he
who should have led Mr. Moore to the subject on which Mr. Moore was to
do his most harmonious and beautiful work, though it is possible,
judging from "Parnell and his Island," that Mr. Moore might in the end
have found his own way back.
After his wont Mr. Moore puts his intimates into books made out of Irish
life. In "Evelyn Innes" Ulick Dean, fashioned in the first version of
the novel after Mr. Yeats, is the only wholly Irish character. Evelyn is
not Irish at all, and her Scotch father is given the musical interests
of Mr. Dolmetsch, a Bohemian, I believe. But Sir Owen Asher has in him
much of Mr. Moore himself, though most of Mr. Moore that is there is the
English Mr. Moore. There is something of Mr. Martyn in Monsignor Mostyn,
though an actual and not a potential ecclesiastic is drawn upon for the
basic characteristics of the character In the second version of "Evelyn
Innes" there is more of Mr. Russell than of Mr. Yeats in Ulick Dean, at
least in his appearance and sayings, though Mr. Moore could not divest
his composer of the personality of Mr. Yeats. There is less of Ireland
in "Sister Theresa" (1901) than in "Evelyn Innes," but "The Untilled
Field," short stories written after the removal of Mr. Moore to Dublin
and gathered together in 1903, are wholly concerned with Ireland. As Mr.
Moore makes Jasper say to Millicent in "The Bending of the Bough": "It
is the land underfoot that makes the Celt. Soon you will feel the
fascination of this dim, remote land steal over you." It was when this
æsthetic homesickness overtook Mr. Moore that he grew to feel lonely in
England, at least momentarily, and to believe that "we are lonely in a
foreign land because we are deprived of our past life; but the past is
about us here [he is speaking through the mouth of Dean and in Ireland];
we see it at evening glimmering among the hollows of the hills."
In "Memoirs of my Dead Self" (1906) there are chapters which tell of the
return of his thought to his boyhood in the west and that record his
wish to be buried with his father by Lough Gara; and all three volumes
of "Hail and Farewell," the first of which was published in 1911 as
"Ave," and the second in 1912 as "Salve," are the fruit of his ten
years' partial residence in Ireland, 1901-11.
Our concern with Mr. Moore here, however, is with Mr. Moore the
dramatist, so I shall not dwell on the short stories and the novels save
to say that they, more than any writing of his, reveal his inherent
dramatic power. By dramatic power I mean not his power of situation and
evolution of dramatic technique, but his power to change his point of
view with the character he is creating A sensual exquisite himself whose
predominant thought is of woman, and of woman from a standpoint closely
akin to an epicure's toward an ideal meal, Mr. Moore can identify
himself with people in whom there is none of himself but the essential
humanity common to mankind. Most wonderful of many wonderful
realizations of viewpoint so different from what is his personally is
his realization of the attitude of Father MacTurnan, an old priest,
celibate by nature, who put aside his books, as ministering to the pride
of the intellect, and sat, night after night, with them by his side in
the study, but always unopened, while he was knitting socks for the poor
of his parish. Better known, of course, than this character of Father
MacTurnan is that of Father Gogarty in "The Lake," but for all his
sympathetic elaboration of this bemused and distraught cleric the
character is never wholly opposed to that of Mr. Moore himself as is the
character of Father MacTurnan.
It is this power of Mr. Moore that makes him the great novelist that he
is, this power of identifying himself with the personality and this
looking out on life from the viewpoint of Esther Waters or Lewis
Seymour, or Edward Dempsey or Rose Leicester, of Kate Lennox or Mr.
Innes. Such a power is akin to one of the greatest powers of the Gael,
his quick sympathy with what appeals to him in others, his momentary
absorption in their interests and his passing possession by their
purpose. It is this habit of his nature that makes the Gael tell people
what they wish to hear, it is this that makes him so courteous, it is
this that makes him so good an actor. And the power that makes one man a
good actor, a real actor,--not one who happens to fit a part, but one
who can change his personality from part to part,--is but another
manifestation of the power that enables a man to identify himself
wholly, now with this character, now with that, in a story which he is
writing. If a man can express such identification in dialogue, he can,
if he master dramatic construction, make himself into a dramatist; if he
express it in subtle analytic writing about the character, it gives him
one of the great powers of the novelist, a power which, if it is united
with the power of story-telling, makes him a great novelist, and,
oftentimes, even if he be but a fair story-teller, a great novelist. The
English novel has been famously deficient in story-telling ability since
Scott's day, and Mr. Moore is no exception to the rule. As, however, the
emphasis of all his stories is on character, his deficiency in narrative
power matters hardly at all.
Mr. Moore is, then, Ireland's greatest novelist because he has in
greatest measure--in full measure--this greatest gift of the Gael, the
gift of dramatic impersonation of all manner of men in all their
changing moods. A personality as intense as was that of Meredith, as is
that of Mr. Hardy, Mr. Moore has not always one attitude, as have both
Welshman and Saxon of the Saxons, however completely they write from the
standpoint of each character they create. By the side of the characters
of Meredith is always Meredith, high-hearted and confident, and by the
side of the characters of Mr. Hardy is always Mr. Hardy, lamenting what
woe fate has brought them, but by the side of Ned Carmady or Oliver
Gogarty, the Mummer or Montgomery, Sir Owen Asher or Ulick, there is
seldom Mr. Moore. He almost never plays chorus to his characters, either
through a commenting character or by direct interposition in the manner
of Thackeray, though, of course, the characters again and again express
his views. So in "The Wild Goose," in which Ned Carmady represents one
year's outlook of Mr. Moore, there is only one choric observation.
When one considers how alien to Ireland were all the interests of Mr.
Moore for years, his rendering of the Irish characters of "The Untilled
Field" and "The Lake" is realized to be all the more remarkable. It is
not easy to pick up threads that one has dropped in a period of one's
life that is dead and done, but Mr. Moore has picked them up more than
once. From time to time he had, of course, made visits home, writing "A
Mummer's Wife" in Galway in 1884 and finding there then, no doubt, the
material for "A Drama in Muslin" and the sketches of "Parnell and his
Island"; but these visits were none of them of long duration until his
"return" in 1901.
It is far easier to paint in the background of landscape remembered
from childhood than it is again to get into touch with people parted
from in childhood. The landscape changes little in far-off, lonely
places, but people nowhere are what they were when the past years
sufficient to bring up beside the old folks a new generation with ideals
changed. Ireland, for all the agitation of the Land League, was landlord
Ireland when Mr. Moore got "A Drama in Muslin" from Ireland; Ireland was
passing to the peasant proprietor when Mr. Moore returned to it to write
"The Untilled Field" and "The Lake." Social and economic questions,
however, interest Mr. Moore only as they concern the individual, but the
changing conditions in Ireland cannot be prevented from finding their
way here and there into his writing through the changes they have
brought about in the people of whom he writes, though many of those he
writes of are survivals from an older generation.
There are glimpses in his writing of many phases of Irish life, his
characters varying all the way from such old-timers as his Cousin Dan,
who, as he himself intimates, might have come out of the pages of Lever
or Lover, to the very modern Father Gogarty, whose outlook is on an
Ireland that "perhaps, more than any other country, had understood the
supremacy of spirit over matter, and had striven to escape through
mortifications from the prison of the flesh." One wonders, at times, if
Mr. Moore, who joined the cause of Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats,
self-confessedly, to have his finger in a new literary pie, really felt
the landscape as he says he does in his books, or whether he just
momentarily caught the power of seeing it through their eyes. Can one
who was once so resolute a realist really appreciate "faint Celtic haze;
a vision of silver mist and distant mountain and moor"? Perhaps he can,
as a good actor appreciates a part alien to his sympathy, that he is
playing. But whether or not Mr. Moore learned to love the lonely
landscape for a while, he eventually tired of it, as his Father Gogarty
tired of it. Surely Mr. Moore is speaking personally as well as
dramatically when he writes, "This lake was beautiful, but he was tired
of its low gray shores; he was tired of those mountains, melancholy as
Irish melodies, and as beautiful."
Almost any novelist, sooner or later in his career, dabbles in drama,
and Mr. Moore no doubt would have attempted drama in the natural course
of things, even if he had not been interested in "The Independent
Theatre" and thus led to a situation in which consistency demanded that
he write a play. It was his articles on the drama, gathered into
"Impressions and Opinions" (1891), that provoked Mr. G.R. Sims to taunt
him into "The Strike at Arlingford" (1893). In "Our Dramatists and their
Literature," one of these papers, Mr. Moore, in hitting all the heads of
all the contemporaneous dramatists, so stung Mr. Sims that he said he
would give a hundred pounds for a stall from which to witness a
performance of "an unconventional play" written by Mr. Moore. Mr. Moore
accepted the challenge, and "The Strike at Arlingford," as I have said,
was the result, Mr. Sims having agreed to withdraw the word
"unconventional" on Mr. Moore's objection that he would be at the mercy
of Mr. Sims' judgment if the word was retained. "The Independent
Theatre" played the play and Mr. Sims paid the money. It was perhaps
just as well for Mr. Moore that the adjective was withdrawn, for the
play was little less conventional than "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray" or
"Sowing the Wind," to mention two successes of that year by play-makers
that took their art a little more seriously than Mr. Sims. In a way,
too, "The Strike at Arlingford" is unoriginal. Lady Ann Travers is only
a more fortunate Hedda Gabler who in the end accepts the protection of
her Chancellor Brack, the capitalist Baron Steinbach, after her Lövberg
turned labor agitator, John Reid has, like his prototype, made a wreck
of his life. "The Strike at Arlingford" has its excellences: its plot is
logically unfolded; it is believable; it is true to human nature; it has
moments of intensity. Had Mr. Moore power of dialogue it might have been
a fine play, for the characterization is what one would expect from so
conscientious a depicter of life as Mr. Moore, and the problem, a man's
choice between his love and his duty, one that has never failed to
appeal to men. Mr. Moore is careful to tell us that, in his own
conception of the play, "the labor dispute is an externality to which I
attach little importance."
Its performance and publication, though neither event was of very much
more than journalistic importance, served to give Mr. Moore something of
a position as an authority on the drama, coming as they did after his
association, since 1891, with "The Independent Theatre." So it is that
we find him collaborating with Mrs. Craigie in "Journeys End in Lovers
Meeting" (1894), which served for a year or so as one of the little
plays that characterized the repertoire of the Irving-Terry Company.
Just what was Mr. Moore's share in this play I do not know, but that,
slight as it is, it served as apprentice work in the art of
collaboration there can be no doubt, or that it added to his familiarity
with the stage.
It is certain that Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats were glad of the assistance
of Mr. Moore in founding "The Irish Literary Theatre," not only for the
prominence of his name as novelist and as Moore of Moore Hall, and for
his known provocativeness in pamphleteering and his capacity for drawing
the fire of opponents, but for what knowledge he had of playwriting and
for what experience he had in getting together and training actors for
special performances such as those of "The Independent Theatre."
I have already spoken of what Mr. Moore did to "A Tale of a Town" to
make it "The Bending of the Bough." From the beginning of Act II on to
the end, he rewrote almost all of it, retaining only now and then an
eloquent or a biting line from Mr. Martyn's play. Mr. Moore changes the
scene of the play from Ireland to Scotland, that its allegory may not be
so obvious; he develops Kirwan's character until he becomes not only a
sort of composite spiritual portrait of the leaders of the Renaissance
but a believable leader of men; and he makes Millicent's moulding of
Dean to her will human, as I have said, and--Dean being the weakling
that he was--inevitable. Mr. Moore cuts the play down where it is
stodgy, he expands it where expansion realizes for you more of
character and motives of his people, he infuses into it more of the
spirit of the movement, and he makes its patriotism wider in its appeal,
a bigger and a better thing at once more concrete and more concerned
with the things of the spirit.
"Diarmid and Grania" (1901), the prose play written in collaboration by
Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore, I write of here rather than in the chapter
devoted to Mr. Yeats because, as the legend is shaped in the play, it
has more of Mr. Moore than of Mr. Yeats in it. As neither of the
collaborators was satisfied with the play as produced, and as neither
has been willing to give it up to the other to rewrite, "Diarmid and
Grania" has never been published. The notices of its production, on
October 21, 1901, at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, are so full, however,
and the legend on which it is based so familiar, that it is possible to
say as I have said, when one knows well the work of both authors, whose
influence is dominant in it. It seems, from the notices, to have been
finely played by the Benson Company, which was brought over from England
especially to produce it. The results of "the scratch company" of the
second year's performances, even though these were transferred from the
Antient Concert Rooms to the better stage of the Gaiety Theatre, were
not very satisfactory artistically, but the third year's experiment was
in every way more successful. "The Daily Express" of Dublin, in those
days very much interested in Irish Ireland, thus records, on October 22,
1901, the impressions of the first night. "The 'house' was not merely
crowded but representative. We counted among the audience the heads of
all the great professions in Dublin, a considerable number of literary
critics, and an extremely large representation of 'le monde où l'on
s'amuse.' The Gaelic League, which flooded the gallery, was very
friendly to Mr. Moore and Mr. Yeats, and became enthusiastic over Dr.
Douglas Hyde ['The Twisting of the Rope,' by Dr. Hyde, was played by him
and company of amateurs, in Irish]. Between the acts of 'Diarmid and
Grania' several members of the 'gods' sang number of Gaelic songs with
great gusto and a good deal of musical ability."
There are several versions of the old legend, some of them cynical,
leaving Grania in the end lighter even than Helen of Troy; others
closing with Diarmid slain by the boar as Adonis is slain, and Grania
weeping his death. In all it is Grania who tempts Diarmid to take her
away from Finn on the eve of her wedding to the old king. In some he
goes willingly, in love with her, in others unwillingly, ashamed of his
disloyalty to Finn, but under _giesa_ not to refuse a woman's request.
In the play of Mr. Moore and Mr. Yeats Diarmid and Grania "do not live,"
says the "Daily Express," "the exciting life of flight from cromlech to
cromlech. They settle down very comfortably in the monotony of a
prosperous farm. Diarmid busies himself with his sheep. Grania ...
begins to pine for the society from which she has wilfully cut herself
off, and to think more and more of the grim old warrior Finn. Then Finn
comes upon the scene, patches up a sort of truce with Diarmid, and
becomes more friendly with Grania, his lost sweetheart, than Diarmid is
able to tolerate. Mutual recriminations ensue between Diarmid and
Grania, and finally Diarmid goes forth to his portended death, with the
taunts of Grania and the rude jeers of the Fianna ringing in his ears.
As the play closes, the Fianna bear away the body of Diarmid, Finn
comforts the weeping Grania, and we remember the words of the legend
that 'some say she was married to Finn.' The curtain falls--a happy
touch of purely modern cynicism--upon the solitary figure of Conan, the
Thersites of the play, the prophet of evil chances, the scorner of high
things, the prompter of foul suggestions."
As the play was being written a good deal of discussion about it found
its way into the newspapers. It was rumored that it would be translated
into Irish, and then back again, by Lady Gregory, into English, but no
such fantastic scheme as that Mr. Moore tells us of in "Ave" was
suggested in any of the paragraphs that came my way. Because they could
not agree on the kind of diction they were to use in the play, Mr.
Yeats, who wanted a peasant Grania, agreed, writes Mr. Moore, to his
suggestion that he write the play in French. Mr. Moore gives these as
the words of Mr. Yeats: "Lady Gregory will translate your text into
English. Taidgh O'Donoghue will translate the English text into Irish,
and Lady Gregory will translate the Irish text back into English." "And
then," Mr. Moore makes himself reply to Mr. Yeats, "you'll put style
upon it."
More remarkable than the scheme was the actual attempt of Mr. Moore to
realize it. On leaving Galway, where he and Mr. Yeats had been
collaborating at Coole, Mr. Moore began the second act in French. He
gives us enough of the dialogue (pages 370 to 376 of "Ave") to show us
his high pride in his French, the tolerance of his humor, and his idea
of the kind of style the play should have.
If Mr. Moore had given the subject to Mr. Yeats and to Lady Gregory, as
he had some thought of doing, it would only have been a return of a
subject already theirs by right of their long discussion of it together.
Lady Gregory was not yet working upon it for "Gods and Fighting Men"
(1904); but it was she who had reduced it to the proportions of a
scenario for them to work upon. This scenario was published in "Samhain"
of October, 1901, that all of the audiences of the play might be in
possession of the story as a Grecian audience was in possession of the
story of Elektra. And did not Mr. Moore say in his speech at the dinner
given to the supporters of "The Irish Literary Theatre" in February,
1900, in speaking of his collaboration with Mr. Yeats in "Diarmid and
Grania": "It would be difficult to name any poet that Ireland has yet
produced more truly elected by his individual and racial genius to
interpret the old legend than the distinguished poet whose contemporary
and _collaborateur_ I have the honor to be"?
The story, of course, had been retold only less often than the story of
Deirdre by Irish writers, in one form or another, but there had been no
memorable play made out of it. Mr. Yeats had met it in "The Death of
Dermid," which Sir Samuel Ferguson included in "The Lays of the Western
Gael" (1864), as well as in the direct translations of such scholars as
Mr. Standish Hayes O'Grady and in the versions of such popularizers as
Dr. Joyce. One cannot, not having read the play, declare it is not what
Mr. Moore would have it, "that dramatic telling of the story which
Ireland has been waiting for these many years," but it does not seem so
to have impressed those who saw it and heard it at the performances in
the Gaiety Theatre.
Now that Lady Gregory has done her "Grania" (1912), it is hardly likely
that Mr. Yeats will return to the story, and with the waning of Mr.
Moore's interest in old Irish legend it is very unlikely that he will
wish to rewrite the play. It would seem we have lost it, whatever its
value, until the "literary remains" of Mr. Moore are given to the
public.
The quarrel with Mr. Yeats over "Diarmid and Grania," coming as it did
at the end of the three years' venture of "The Irish Literary Theatre,"
explains why Mr. Moore wrote no plays for the Irish National Dramatic
Company and its successors on through the Abbey Theatre Players. He was
still interested, however, in the "cause" as far as it was possible for
one of his temperament and taste, and he was conspicuous on first nights
at the Abbey Theatre down to the time of his departure from Dublin in
1911.
Since "Diarmid and Grania" (1901) Mr. Moore has published the two books
of his that since "A Drama in Muslin" (1886) reveal his deepest
knowledge of Irish life, the volume of stories of varying length to
which he gives that title, so symbolic, "The Untilled Field" (1903),
and "The Lake" (1905), but there are few incidents in either that he is
likely to develop into plays. "The Lake" could not be dramatized, but if
it could be dramatized, it would be as little likely to be presented in
Ireland as "The Tinker's Wedding." Mr. Moore, for all that he was born a
Catholic, would not hesitate any more than did the son of the Protestant
minister to put a priest into a realistic modern play, and that, of
course, would be a mild audacity for Mr. Moore now that he has published
the scenario of "The Apostle" (1911). His Paul, in "The Apostle," a
"thick-set man, of rugged appearance, hairy in the face and with a
belly," is wonderfully alive, and his Jesus is a distinct and realizable
personality, if not the Jesus of Christian dream. It is a curious
illustration of Mr. Moore's almost disciple-like attitude toward Mr.
G.W. Russell that he should make his Christ talk like "A.E." It seemed
to me, as I read the words that Mr. Moore puts first on the lips of
Jesus, that they were phrases that I had heard on the lips of Mr.
Russell. They are of the very quality of his speech and writing: "How
beautiful is the evening light as it dies, revealing every crest; the
outline of the hills is evident now, evident as the will of God." And
now each time, as I re-read them, they sound in my ears to the
remembered rhythm of Mr. Russell's voice. Should Mr. Moore ever evolve a
play from this scenario, and the play be played--and why should it not,
now that the way is so plainly blazed by the score and more of miracle
plays of the past decade?--it will have to be chanted as "A.E." chants
his verse, as one would wish mass to be chanted.
Only a year ago Mr. Moore made his last adventure of the theatre. With
the help of Mr. Lennox Robinson he dramatized "Esther Waters," but later
he threw out the latter's work, feeling, no doubt, about it as Mr.
Martyn felt about Mr. Moore's rewriting of his "A Tale of a Town"; and
when it was put on, in the early winter of 1911-12 by the Stage Society,
"Esther Waters" the play was like "Esther Waters" the novel, solely the
work of Mr. Moore. The critics seem agreed that it was long drawn out
and undramatic, but that it was well written and well acted. I suppose
that the preoccupation with "Esther Waters" that this dramatization
reveals is because "Esther Waters" was written in that period of his
life when Mr. Moore was most himself. After ten years in London he had
escaped considerably from the French influence of his young manhood, and
his genius had not been warped out of its true plane, as he would
doubtless now say, by Irish mists. Mr. Moore must have felt that there
was something not wholly himself in much of "The Untilled Field" and in
much of "The Lake," that the minds of Mr. Yeats and Mr. Russell had in a
way dominated his mind, and that not even the hardly tolerated Mr.
Martyn had been without influence upon him.
Such a realization is not the professed motive for the return of Mr.
Moore to England, but I have no doubt at all that it is somewhere in the
back of his mind, where he would like it to be hidden and forgot. At any
rate, by the time of his return to England, Mr. Moore had come to see
clearly that the Celtic episode of his maturity was closed.
It is not, I think, particularly difficult for one who understands the
old-fashioned camp-meeting "getting of religion" to understand this
"Celtic episode." Mr. Moore got Celtomania; a sort of "spiritual
consumption," he calls his possession in one place, as a certain other
type of sinner "got religion" in the old shouting days. That is, Mr.
Moore wrought himself up partly in the spirit of the Playboy, and was
wrought up to some degree willy-nilly until he could write his speech of
February, 1900, on "Literature and the Irish Language," and, finally, a
little later, could return happily to the country that until then he
could endure only now and again.
But as a matter of fact the motive that led Mr. Moore back to Ireland
matters not at all to literature. What beauty of writing that return led
to matters a great deal. Had he not returned to Ireland, we should not
have had a good deal that adds to the joy we win from satiric laughter,
we should not have had "Hail and Farewell"; had he not returned we
should not have had a book that adds to the treasure of beautiful
feeling and beautiful writing there is in English literature, a treasure
that there is no chance of ever having too large; we should not have had
"The Lake," which is Ireland, West Ireland, Catholic Ireland, a land
under gray skies that the priests its masters would, too many of them,
make a land of gray lives.