LADY GREGORY
When one stops to think how much of the blood of the Gael, Irish and
Scotch, there is in us in America, one realizes that we owe a debt of
gratitude to Lady Gregory second only to that owed her by "The Men of
Ireland and Alban" themselves. For it is Lady Gregory, in her "Cuchulain
of Muirthemne" (1902) and in her "Gods and Fighting Men" (1904) and in
her "Book of Saints and Wonders" (1908), who has done more than any
other writer of the Gaelic countries to bring home to us the wonders of
Gaelic romance. That they should have to be brought home to us is a
shame to us. With so much of Irish and Scotch blood in us the names of
the heroes of the Red Branch and Fenian Cycles should not be so foreign
in aspect and sound as they undoubtedly are, and their deeds should be
as familiar as those of Robin Hood. A hundred years ago our grandfathers
had, indeed, "Ossian" on their shelves, as we had in boyhood Dean
Church's stories of Greece and Rome, or, in some cases, the stories of
his doings in their memories, learned from their parents were they
old-country born, or of their nurses were it their privilege, as it was
that of many more Americans of the second half of the nineteenth
century, to have as foster mothers "kindly Irish of the Irish."
[Illustration]
To her own countrymen the work of Lady Gregory, valuable as it is, is
not the revelation it is to us. Those of them that have not been brought
up on the stories that she translates could read at least many of them
in the "Old Celtic Romances" (1879) of Dr. P.W. Joyce, or in the
versions of the Cuchulain and the Finn legends by Mr. Standish James
O'Grady (1878 and 1880), books that somehow or other never came to be
widely read in America. Mr. Yeats admits it was Mr. O'Grady that
"started us all," that is, the writers who began the Renaissance in the
late eighties. It may be, of course, that the added beauty and dignity
the stories take on in the versions of Lady Gregory will inspire to
nobler writing poets and dramatists and novelists that already owe much
to Mr. O'Grady or Dr. Joyce or to the scholars they were sent back to by
these popularizers. It is certain that the writers of the younger group,
the group of those that are only now nearing distinction, owe much to
Lady Gregory. After all is said, however, her work is to be judged not
for its value to others, but as in itself an art product, of a class
kindred to "The Wanderings of Oisin" of Mr. Yeats, although differing in
form. I am not forgetting, of course, that she is following faithfully,
or rather as faithfully as an artist may follow, the old legends. She
has, she owns, clarified them, condensed them, left out contradictory
episodes, woven now and then a Scotch version of an incident into a
cycle arranged in one complete whole from many Irish versions. When Lady
Gregory has owned this she has owned that she has added something more
of her own than a "connecting sentence." Although she has labored
carefully to keep herself out of the stories, and although, if you have
read only her versions of them, you may feel that she has succeeded in
keeping herself out of them, you will recognize, if you turn to her
originals in O'Curry or in Whitley Stokes or in Standish Hayes O'Grady,
that she has added that all-important thing, a personality. Some
scholars object to this as "too literary." And some literary men would
rather have the old stories, they say, "just as they are" There is the
crux. How can we get them, even in an exact translation, "just as they
are"? We cannot. This is not the place to discuss this most vexed
question of translation, but I must go into it so far as to point again
to the fact that we are more likely to have made upon us, by an
interpretative translation, an effect more nearly like that made upon
the listener contemporary to the time of the making of the story than if
the translation were literal. We are always forgetting the so obvious
fact that the kind of metaphor or descriptive epithet of this sort or
that, which would make a certain effect on the listener of the tenth
century, will make a very different effect on the reader of to-day. As
Lady Gregory points out, the description of the contortion of Cuchulain
in his fight with Ferdiad seems very unheroic to us, and is therefore
best left out of the translation, or, if retained, conveyed in terms
that will make an effect on us similar to the effect the detailed
description had on the audience of the old bards. Here again, however,
is trouble. How can we get that effect? We cannot surely, but an
imaginative translation by one who is scholar and _littérateur_ both
will take us nearest to it. We want, as a matter of fact, both kinds of
translations, the interpretative and artistic translation of Lady
Gregory and the literal translation of Mr. Standish Hayes O'Grady. The
one is needed to check the other. We would have a gauge by which to
measure how much such such a translator as Lady Gregory has taken from
and added to the old story. We would know how great is the freedom in
which we willingly acquiesce, remembering that the translations which we
treasure as great in literature are in greater or less measure "free."
So checking Lady Gregory's translations we find that they represent a
fair measure of freedom, as so checking the verses of FitzGerald's "Omar
Khayyám" we find in them the utmost measure of freedom, a freedom indeed
that, in certain verses, is virtually a re-creation.
Many, both scholars and literary men, object to the kind of English into
which Lady Gregory translates the stories of Ireland's heroic age, her
"Kiltartan English," the English of the people of her home country on
the borders of Clare and Galway, the English made by a people who think
in Irish. This familiar language, they say, has lessened the dignity of
the old tales, bringing them all to one level by a diction and style
that is one, whether they are romance or folk-tale. This objection can
be taken, however, only to the Cuchulain stories, which were court
romance, and not to the Finn stories, which come out of the thatched
houses. This "Kiltartan English" seems to me in its more familiar
moments, less imposing than that in which I first heard stories of Finn
McCool told by our old gardener, Lawrence Kelly of County Wexford, but
it may be I remember less clearly the homeliness of his "discourse"
than its "grand speaking." It is, however, as peasant English, a fitting
medium for the telling of the stories of Brigit and St. Patrick in her
"Book of Saints and Wonders," for Brigit and Patrick are still household
words among all the children of the Gael. But by its very difference
from the English of all other artists in words save of a few of her own
country and generation, and from such conversational English as I know
well, this "Kiltartan English" brings me a foreign quality. I feel that
the art of these tale-tellers is an art of another race than the
English, just as I feel that the art of the teller of Beowulf is an art
of another race than the English. The literature in our ancestral
tongue is not to me English until it sloughs off the Germanic
sentence-structure of Anglo-Saxon. Here lies, I think, the greatest
difficulty in translating Old English literature. And it will not be
successfully translated, I think, without the use of the syntax of some
dialect that preserves an archaic sentence-structure.
To me, then, it seems singularly fortunate for Lady Gregory to have her
"Kiltartan English" to fall back upon to give that foreign flavor that
we intuitively feel the need of in a translation. There may be a slight
loss of dignity through its use, but there is a great gain in folk
atmosphere.
In quoting to show the style of Lady Gregory I should quote description
rather than narrative, as the description seems to me better as well as
briefer. The three famous tales of Old Irish literature, "The Three
Sorrows of Story-Telling," are "The Fate of the Children of Usnach,"
comparable, in the great wars it led to, to the rape of Helen; "The Fate
of the Children of Lir," a story that has as its base the folk-tale that
underlies "Lohengrin," but which takes us back farther into the past in
its kinship to "Medea"; and "The Sons of Tuireann," which has been
called the Irish Odyssey. Of these the first is incomparably the finest
story, and Lady Gregory has told it nobly in "Cuchulain of Muirthemne,"
but it alone of all the stories in her three books of translations has
enough of humanity in it to put it side by side with the story of Sigurd
and Brunhilde or the story of Paris and Helen. When one remembers that
Greek and Scandinavian literature may boast five stories each, at least,
but little short of these their greatest stories, and that Irish
literature has but "Diarmuid and Grania" to boast as in any way
comparable to the story of Deirdre, it must be admitted that early Irish
literature representing Ireland's heroic age is not so beautiful as the
literature that represents the heroic ages of Scandinavia and Greece.
"The Fate of the Children of Usnach" is rich in beautiful detail of
incident and of description of nature; it preserves for us much of the
inner life of old time; and it has dignity of proportion. It has not the
fundamental weakness, as great art, of most of these old Irish stories,
their characters' lack of interest because of their lack of body, their
lack of personality, their running to type rather than moulding into
individuals; yet the feats performed by Cuchulain are so wholly
superhuman, most of them, that they often put their doer beyond our
sympathy, and at their worst make him absurd.
If these stories were simply extravagant folk-fancy, such as the Jack
the Giant Killer story, to delight children, we should not quarrel with
this quality in them, but there is so much in them of dignity that we
must take them seriously, as we take Homer. When their heroes are
definitely gods we can accept almost any of their deeds, so we can
delight in the earlier stories of "Gods and Fighting Men," the stories
of the Tuatha de Danaan, Lugh and Angus, Midhir and Etain, Bran and
Connla, as we cannot in those of Finn and Goll and Cuchulain and
Conchubar, who, because of their historical setting and more definite
characterization, have more of the appeal of humanity. We know
Cuchulain, in Lady Gregory's pages, as a small dark man, constant in
love in comparison with his fellows, faithful to his friends, loyal to
his king; and we know Finn as a fair old man of ruddy countenance, a
lover of women, somewhat pompous and somewhat quarrelsome; but neither
hero is a clear-cut personality like Sigurd or Ajax. If either Cuchulain
or Finn were surely a god we should accept his deeds as now we cannot
accept them, and were either brought home to us as wholly human and
divested of his supernatural powers, and given a personality, we should
be far more moved by his fortunes.
It is in enchantments, visits to worlds oversea and under wave, and in
praises of the beauties of this world, its woods, its waters, its real
wonders, and in the celebration of sorrow and delight that "Gods and
Fighting Men" is at its best, not in the celebration of happy loves, or
of wild loves, or of great victories. So it is that Gabhra, where the
Fianna were broken, is finer than "The Battle of the White Strand,"
where they won against great odds.
Finer, however, than any narrative power possessed by the old Irish
bards is their power in the lyrical passages so freely interspersed
throughout the stories, and in the lyrics that come into them on the
lips of the poets and warriors and on the lips of the women who have
lost their lovers in fight. The farewell of Deirdre to Alban and her
lament over Naoise, the song of the woman from oversea to Bran, the poem
Finn made to prove his power of poetry, the sleepy song of Grania over
Diarmuid, the lament of Neargach's wife, the song of Tir-nan-Og that
Niave made to Oisin, and Oisin's own praise of the good times of the
Fianna--these are the passages in which the old tales reach their
highest poetry. Once read, these remain in memory, but certain episodes
and certain sayings remain also. Mr. Yeats has picked out one of the
sayings in his introduction to "Gods and Fighting Men" that will do for
sample. It is the answer of Osgar dying, to the man who asks him how he
is: "I am as you would have me be." Starker even, perhaps, is the
absolute simplicity of the description of that last fight in "The Battle
of the White Strand," in which Cael and Finnachta go, locked in each
other's arms, to their death under the waves without a word.
Wild nature is always about these warriors. The storm in the trees, the
sorrow of the sea, the clatter of wild geese and the singing of swans
find echo in the poems that praise them. We see, too, at times, fields
heavy with harvest, and often the apple trees in bloom and the cuckoo
calling among them,--indeed, the sweet scent of apple gardens, like the
keenness of the winds of spring, beautiful as are the phrases that
present them, become almost stock phrases. Always, too, there are
wonders of the other world about the heroes; women from undersea and
underground come into their halls as naturally as the members of their
own clans, and the twilight mists unfolding from familiar hills will
reveal their marvelous duns, whitewalled with silver or marble, and
thatched with the wings of white birds.
There has been frequent quarreling in certain quarters with Mr. Russell
and Mr. Johnston and Mr. Yeats for introducing mysticism and a definite
symbolism and the ways of Eastern thought into their versions of Irish
mythic tales and their records of Irish mood. There will be found some
justification for such practices in Lady Gregory's translations.
Manannan, the sea-god, is here presented doing tricks like those of the
East Indian fakirs; Finn is reincarnated in later great leaders of the
Gael; and in "The Hospitality of Cuanna's House" there is out-and-out
allegory, to say nothing of a possible symbolistic interpretation of
episodes in almost every other story. Even the willful obscurity of the
modern poetry can be paralleled by the riddling of Cuchulain and Emer.
It is, perhaps, because Lady Gregory has found the old stories not only
in the dignity of their bardic presentation, but also in the happy
familiarity of their telling by the people of the thatched houses in her
own district, that she has been able to bring them so near to us. From
these same people, too, she has got some of her stories of St. Bride
and Columba and poems and stories of recent and contemporary
inspiration, poems and stories that have to do with humble life as well
as with the highly colored heroic life that those who live bare lives
themselves are so fond of imagining. In her "Poets and Dreamers" (1903)
are records of this collecting and of her study of local ways about
Coole and on the Connemara coast and in the Aran Isles. One of the most
interesting of her chapters is that on the poet Raftery, whose poems Dr.
Hyde has published. Blind and bitter, Raftery wandered about Connacht
until about 1840, when death took him, an old man, but still vigorous in
mind and spirit. Another chapter of "Poets and Dreamers" is "On the Edge
of the World." Each reading of this is to me like a return to West
Ireland, the very quality of whose life it gives. It should be the first
chapter of the book turned to by the reader, for it gives one the note
on which to read all. As Lady Gregory drives by the sea, people about
her on the roadside and in the cabins are singing in Irish. The little
experiences of the day are, for them, experiences to brood over; and for
her, too. And this thought is the last of her brooding: "The rising
again of Ireland, of her old speech, of her last leader [Parnell],
dreams all, as we are told. But here on the edge of the world, dreams
are real things, and every heart is watching for the opening of one or
another grave."
There is creative writing in these essays of Lady Gregory's, for all
that she is playing middleman between her people and the reading public
of the English-speaking world in many of them; and, as I would emphasize
again, in her three books of translations. But, after all translation
will not content, and the essay that is not self-revelation will not
content, the writer who would have his writing a "reading of life." So
it is not surprising that Lady Gregory turned toward drama. And yet I do
not ever feel, after many readings of her plays, that Lady Gregory took
to drama because of any overmastering impulse toward this most difficult
of all literary forms. She has learned to handle some orders of drama
pleasantly, the farce more than pleasantly, and, very recently, the
folk-tragedy nobly; but had it not been that plays of other than
romantic tone were needed for the Abbey Theatre as a foil to those of
Mr. Yeats and of Synge, I doubt whether it is drama that Lady Gregory
would have chosen as the medium through which to express her reading of
life. I can just as well imagine her shrewd kindliness of judgment upon
the foibles and virtues of her countrymen in stories whose form is very
like that employed by Miss Barlow in her "Irish Idylls" (1892) as in
these so original little plays that she has wrought out without
precedent, under the tutelage of Mr. Yeats.
It is more than likely, as I say, that had it not been that drama was
needed for the Abbey Theatre she would not have attempted drama. But
more than likely it is, too, that had she written plays not made to
order they had reached wider through Irish society and plumbed deeper
into Irish life. Lady Gregory knows Irish life, from bottom to top, as
few Irishwomen and few Irishmen of her day know it; she has large heart,
wide tolerance, and abounding charity; and yet she was long content to
limit her plays of modern Ireland to farce, at times of a serious enough
purpose, but because it is farce, not of the first seriousness. It may
be, of course, that Lady Gregory knows best of any one her own powers,
and it is true that in the plays she has written she is at her best when
they are at their merriest. I cannot, however, but feel that this is a
success of intention rather than a success of instinct. She would have
them the most successful in a quality as far removed as might be from
that quality of troubled dreaminess which is the best of the dramas of
Mr. Yeats. Synge, it must be remembered, did not begin as a writer of
comedy, and there is little of that ripe irony that has no precedent in
English literature in that first play that he wrote for the Abbey
Theatre, "Riders to the Sea" (1903). Is it a coincidence that later, as
he found his bent for that sort of writing that culminated in "The
Playboy," Lady Gregory turned at times to historical drama and a farce
that grew as serious as comedy? There is, of course, in all her plays
serious indictment of national weaknesses, sometimes obvious indictment,
as in "The Deliverer" (1911), which records, in terms of folk-biblical
allegory, his countrymen's desertion of Parnell; sometimes indictment
not so obvious, as in "The Canavans" (1906), which rebukes that
shoneenism in high places which has for generations been one of the
curses of Ireland. To him who knows only a little of Irish life it is
easy to see the meaning but superficially concealed by the farcical
bustle, the laughter, and the lamentations. But to him who looks but on
the surface there is merriness enough and wittiness enough and wisdom
enough to make his loss of the deeper meaning, for him, but a little
loss.
There are enough characters presented, too, peasants generally and
townsfolk of the lower class, to make the farces a "reading of life."
What is wanting to him who looks for more than what farce may do is the
largeness of utterance that will make a "reading of life" memorable.
Take "the image" (1910), for instance, in which Lady Gregory is
attempting more than in "Spreading the News" (1904) or "Hyacinth Halvey"
(1906). This play, the longest that Lady Gregory has written, is what
the stage would call the character farce. She owns it a presentation of
dreams of old men and old women which crumble at the touch of reality,
but it is not only this, but a symbolizing of the proneness of all
Ireland to accept as certainties on the eve of realization what are
really only signs that point to possibilities in a far to-morrow. In the
play four old men of a little village on the west coast are debating
what they will do with their share of a windfall that has come to the
village in the shape of two whales that have drifted up on the beach.
When the priest determines that all the proceeds from the sale of the
oil from the whales be spent on something that will benefit the whole
community they plan a statue (one of them is a stone-cutter) to some
great celebrity. The motives that lead them to choose Hugh O'Lorrha are
telling satire not only of Irishmen, but of all men. It would hardly be,
however, in any other country than Ireland that the name of the one come
at by way of accident would, unidentified for some time by any, be
finally revealed as that of the hero of a folk-tale. Four days after the
whales had come ashore, days wasted in planning what the village will do
with the prize money, and unutilized in securing the blubber and
rendering out the oil, the quartette learned that "the Connemara lads
have the oil drawn from the one of them, and the other one was swept
away with the spring tide."
Though "The Image" be farce, its characters are the characters of
comedy, and its purpose whole-heartedly serious. And even "Spreading the
News" has its lesson, of rumor's wild riot in Irish crowds. On the
slightest grounds the reciting of an errand of helpfulness is turned by
quick imagination into a story of a murder. Lightly sketched as are the
people here, from a caricature of a magistrate to the more serious
presentment of Mrs. Fallon's "nice quiet little man," they are very true
to Ireland. Slighter even are the butcher and the postmistress and the
model sub-sanitary inspector in "Hyacinth Halvey," though all are fully
understood and fully blocked out in their author's mind, if impossible
of complete realization within limits so narrow; but the farce itself is
not lifted into dignity by any noble underlying attitude. "The Jack Daw"
(1907) has rumor again as its motive, as had "Spreading the News," but
it is not the motive of the play or any of its incidents that is the
best thing about it, but the character of Michael Cooney, of the
"seventh generation of Cooneys who trusted nobody living or dead." He
is, of course, caricatured, but he has possibilities of personality, and
he could have been worked into the fullness of a universal character had
"The Jack Daw" been comedy, we will say, instead of farce. Of all her
characters, that of Hyacinth Halvey is most nearly rounded out, but
then Lady Gregory has taken two little plays in which to present his
portrait, "The Full Moon" (1911) recording some of his later experiences
in Cloon and his final departure from the town, his introduction to
which was recorded in the play bearing his name.
"The Workhouse Ward" (1908), reaching from wild farce to sentimental
comedy, is hardly more than a dialogue, but it is given body by the
truth to Irish life out of which it is written, that quarreling is
better than loneliness. Lady Gregory has disowned "Twenty-five" (1902),
which is frankly melodrama, her only other experiment in which, in her
plays of modern Ireland, is "The Rising of the Moon" (1903). This play
relates the allowed escape from a police officer of a political prisoner
through that prisoner's persuading the officer that "patriotism" is
above his sworn duty to England.
Of the plays that may be called historical, "The Canavans" (1906) is the
best, because it is of the peasantry, I suppose, who change so little
with the years, and whom Lady Gregory presents so amusingly and so truly
in her modern farce comedy. "Kincora" (1903) takes us all the way back
to the eleventh century, deriving its name from Brian's Seat on the
Shannon and ending with his death at Clontarf. It is undistinguished
melodrama. "The White Cockade" (1905) is better only in so far as it
involves farce, farce in the kitchen of an inn on the Wexford coast just
after the Battle of the Boyne. "Devorgilla" (1908) is of a time between
the times of the two other historical plays, of the time a generation
later than the coming of the Normans to Ireland. It is pitched to a
higher key than any other of her historic plays, and it is held better
to its key, but its tragedy is far less impressive than the tragedy of
"The Gaol Gate" (1906) which pictures the effects upon his wife and his
mother of the imprisonment of an Irish lad of to-day, and their learning
that "Denis Cahel died for his neighbor." This little play is out of the
life that Lady Gregory knows and can deal with; it is finely conceived
and finely executed, lingering in the mind as does the keen heard rising
from some bare graveyard fronting the Atlantic.
Just why Lady Gregory, who has rendered in prose so well old legends,
should render old Irish historic life so much less well I cannot
explain. Sometimes I think it is because she has found less of that
history than of that legend among the people. Yet in "A Travelling Man"
(1907), her little miracle, somewhat in the manner of Dr. Hyde's, that
brings Christ into a modern peasant home, she has made a play of a
tender and reconciling beauty. With the success of "A Travelling Man"
and "The Gaol Gate" before me I cannot say it is because her genius is
for farce; and to say that it is because her genius is for the plays of
modern peasant life does not help to account for the fact.
The idiom of all these plays is racy of the soil, and when it need be,
eloquent with the eloquence that is almost always in the English of the
Irish. It is full of wise saws and proverbs, quips and quirks of
expression, the picturesquenesses and homelinesses of speech that are
characteristic of a peasant to whom talk is the half of life. These
range from sayings like those of the clowns of Elizabethan drama, such
as "He had great wisdom I tell you, being silly-like, and blind," and
such country wisdom as "What would the cat's son do but kill mice," up
through the elaborate maledictions of the two old paupers in "The
Workhouse Ward" and such delightful asperities as that of Maelmora anent
his bitter sister Gormleith, "You were surely born on a Friday, and the
briars breaking through the green sod," to aphorisms that have an accent
of eternity, as, "It is the poor know all the troubles of the world,"
and "The swift, unflinching, terrible judgment of the young."
The characters, even when they are purposely almost caricatures, have in
them the possibility of complete portrayals. There is no flagging of the
invention in any of them, no slipshod or careless composition. Her
technique, too, at least in farce, is masterful, and in her plays of
modern life of other form adequate. That she could master historical
drama, as I have said, I must doubt, but that she need restrict herself
so largely to farce and farce comedy in her plays of modern life, I do
not for a moment believe. "The Gaol Gate," in fact, proved that she need
not so restrict herself, and "MacDaragh's Wife" (1911), written by Lady
Gregory at sea on her way to America, but perhaps for that all the
fuller of the wild old life of her native Connacht. It would almost seem
that with "Grania" (1912), a tragedy too, following "MacDaragh's Wife,"
Lady Gregory is widening the scope of her work, as she well can, now
that there are other dramatists to provide comedies and farces for the
Abbey Theatre. It is a haunting story that "MacDaragh's Wife" tells,
and largely a true story, the story of a piper who, though a pauper,
draws all the countryside to the funeral of his wife, draws them,
through the wild lamenting of his pipes, from the fair where they are
sporting to follow, with a full fellowship, to the grave, her who died
all but alone. Lady Gregory tells us in a note just what of it she
gathered from old people about her girlhood's home at Roxborough, and
what about her home of to-day at Coole, how she has shaped it, and what
emotion is back of it, the "lasting pride of the artist of all ages."
As Lady Gregory had restricted herself, until recently, in the forms of
modern life which she wrote of and in the kinds of people she selected
to write of, so, too, she had restricted herself, until recently, in the
motives she considered. It is true that the motive most recurrent in her
plays, that of fear of the opinion of the neighbor, an attitude probably
sprung of the clan system, is dominant in Irish life; and it is equally
true that the motive most notably absent, love, was until yesterday far
from a dominant motive in the Irish life that Lady Gregory presents: yet
there are many other motives that, in true comedy, and even in farcical
comedy, might well have place. That these motives are not there is, I
think, not only that Lady Gregory, self-effacingly, put into her plays
what was wanted to make them foils to the plays of Mr. Yeats and Synge,
but also because of the practice of one type of gentlewoman in
literature, of which Jane Austen is characteristic. And yet the mere
mention of Jane Austen increases the wonderment that Lady Gregory has
not written of people of every condition in her neighborhood, whether
that be London or Dublin or Gort, as Miss Austen did of people of every
condition in her neighborhood, whether that be Steventon or Bath or
Chawton. It can hardly be said, even, that "Grania" her last play, is a
play about love. In her note to the play, Lady Gregory declares, "Love
itself, with its shadow Jealousy, is the true protagonist!" And yet, I
think it is Jealousy only that is the true protagonist. There is much
talk about love, but it is not from love, but from jealousy that the
action of the play arises. Among all this talk about love, among many
eloquent sayings about love, true readings of love, there stands out
most clearly in my memory this part of a speech of Finn, a speech
uttered before Grania had turned from him to Diarmuid--
And as for youngsters, they do not know how to love because there
is always some to-morrow's love possible in the shadow of the love
of to-day. It is only the old it goes through and through entirely
because they know all the last honey of the summer-time has come to
its ferment in their cup, and there is no new summer coming to meet
them forever.
This I remember not only for its thought but for its style, the rhythm
of its prose. It is Lady Gregory at her best, as "Grania" as a whole is
Lady Gregory at her best in tragedy. If "Grania" in every detail were as
inspired as its explanation of the queen's quick turn from Diarmuid to
Finn, it would be a great play, indeed. Grania is no light woman, and
yet she turns, in the old legend, from the man who sacrificed all but
all for her, on his death, to the High King who brought about his
death, with a suddenness inexplicable. Lady Gregory makes that sudden
turn plausible, for two reasons. One is that for seven years of
wandering all over Ireland, Diarmuid by his own will and because of
loyalty to Finn, had kept Grania a maid, making her his wife only after
he found her being carried off by the King of Foreign. The other reason
is that as Diarmuid lies dying, wounded to death by that King of Foreign
whom he has killed, his thoughts are all of his long-delayed disloyalty
to Finn, and not at all of Grania. Thus, she justifies herself, speaking
to Finn:--
_Grania_. He had no love for me at any time. It is easy to know it
now. I knew it all the while, but I would not give in to believe
it. His desire was all the time with you yourself and Almhuin. He
let on to be taken up with me, and it was but letting on. Why would
I fret after him that so soon forgot his wife, and left her in a
wretched way?
_Finn_. You are not judging him right. You are distracted with the
weight of your loss.
_Grania_. Does any man at all speak lies at the very brink of
death, or hold any secret in his heart? It was at that time he had
done with deceit, and he showed where his thought was, and had no
word at all for me that had left the whole world for his sake, and
that went wearing out my youth, pushing here and there as far as
the course of the stars of Heaven. And my thousand curses upon
death not to have taken him at daybreak, and I believing his words!
It is then I would have waked him well and would have cried my
seven generations after him! And I have lost all on this side of
the world, losing that trust and faith I had, and finding him to
think of me no more than of a flock of stars would cast their
shadow on his path. And I to die with this scald upon my heart; it
is hard thistles would spring up out of my grave.
I have spoken of Lady Gregory as translator, as collector of folk-lore,
as essayist, and as dramatist; but there is another rôle in which she
has brought no less advantage to the Celtic Renaissance, though it is a
rôle that has not brought her, as have these other, the joys of
recapturing or of creating beautiful things. Always objective, though
never wholly able to subordinate personality, however near she may have
come to effacing it in her plays, Lady Gregory has in this rôle
considered herself solely as an agent in the service of Irish letters.
The Irishman is naturally a pamphleteer, and Mr. Yeats, poet of the
Other World though he be, can give as good blows in controversy as Mr.
George Moore. Almost all who have part in the Renaissance have skill in
the art of publicity. They have needed no publicists to fight their
battles as the Pre-Raphaelites needed Ruskin. Still, in some measure in
the way of publicity, and in large measure in other ways, Lady Gregory
has been to the Celtic Renaissance what Ruskin was to that last
renaissance of wonder. She has edited pamphlets on things national and
artistic in Ireland, she has helped Dr. Hyde and Mr. Yeats in their
collecting of folk-lore and to a deeper knowledge of the people; she has
been one of the forces that have made possible the Abbey Theatre, giving
to it her power of organization as well as plays and patronage. More
than this, she has welcomed to Coole Park many a worker in the movement,
who in the comfort of a holiday there has been refreshed by the gray and
green land so near the sea and reinspired by the contact with that Irish
Ireland so close to her doors. Like Ruskin, Lady Gregory is a great
patron of letters, but like Ruskin she is much more. Lady Gregory is an
artist in words who is to be valued as a presenter of Irish life, past
and present, with a beauty that was not in English literature before she
made it.