THE YOUNGER DRAMATISTS--MR. PADRAIC COLUM--MR. WILLIAM BOYLE--MR. T.C.
MURRAY--MR. S. LENNOX ROBINSON--MR. RUTHERFORD MAYNE--"NORREYS
CONNELL"--MR. ST. JOHN G. ERVINE--MR. JOSEPH CAMPBELL
One wonders whether it is not of himself Mr. Padraic Colum is writing as
"The dawn-man ... in the sunset." That phrase arrests one on the first
page of his little book of verse "Wild Earth" (1909), in the first poem,
"The Plougher." It refers, of course, to an elemental man of to-day, to
the peasant of the great central plain of Ireland, who is "brute-tamer,
plough-maker, earth-breaker," just as truly as it does to the breaker of
horses who drove furrows with a tree-knee through primordial mould; and
it carries us in imagination back to the man of the Stone Age by way of
many other ploughmen, by way of the last man we saw between
plough-handles who appealed to our imagination, a man limned against an
April sky from which the sun had passed to leave all the west that
gold-green that the greatest of Westmoreland dalesmen loved; by way of
that Dumfries peasant whose
"conquering share
Upturned the fallow fields of truth anew";
by way of Wayland Smith, whose anvils dot the shores of Britain; by way
of Tubal Cain, "an artificer in brass and iron," of the seed of Cain, "a
tiller of the ground."
[Illustration]
One wonders is it not of himself that the poet writes, though what he
writes takes us far from him, carrying us in thought halfway round the
world and back through civilizations that have passed. But whether it is
of himself that Mr. Colum writes or not, he is certainly, in a sense,
"The dawn-man ... in the sunset." The "Glory of the Gael" that is
to-day, if it is "glory," is glory of sunset, of "purples and splendors"
that pass; there are those who hold that the race that "went forth to
battle," but "always fell," is already passed beyond the sunset, into
the twilight, that twilight that is the time of day so surely symbolical
of the writing of the many Irish poets that have followed after Mr.
Yeats. Mr. Colum, however, whether his race be in twilight or sunset, is
of the dawn. He is of the dawn not only because he is the youth, at
oldest the young man, in his writing, who sees the world freshly and
fresh, none the less fresh because he knows it old; but he is of the
dawn because it is chiefly those things that are fundamentals, that come
out of the beginnings of things, that interest him profoundly, that stir
him deeply. Subtleties and complexities, decadent things, are not for
him, but simplicities, primordial things, the love of wandering, and
what is only less old, the love of land; and love of woman. These three
things, and youth, and little else, concern him. Mr. Colum writes,
indeed, in the dedication to "Thomas Muskerry" (1910) that he has set
down "three characters that stood as first types in my human comedy, the
peasant, the artist, the official, Murtagh Cosgar, Conn Hourican,
Thomas Muskerry." It is not, however, the official that Mr. Colum
emphasizes in "Thomas Muskerry," but the man who longs for a quiet
little place where he may be free from the nagging of his daughter and
her children; and in Myles Gorman, in this same play, is sounded that
other call that is recurrent in his work, the call of the road. We see
more of wanderer than of artist, too, in Conn Hourican, though Mr. Colum
calls the play he made for him "The Fiddler's House"; and here, too, the
love of land is a motive--love of land and the wander-love battle in
"The Land" (1905), with love of woman the deciding factor in the
latter's victory.
Mr. Colum would not be an Irishman if nationality and religion were not
also motives in his plays and poems, but it is only in his 'prentice
work that either appears as a leading motive. From a good deal of
writing, most of which appeared originally in "The United Irishmen," he
has republished only the three plays before mentioned, "The Land"
(1905), "The Fiddler's House" (1907), "Thomas Muskerry" (1910), his
miracle play, "The Miracle of the Corn," and two stories in "Studies"
(1907), and what he wishes to preserve of his verse in "Wild
Earth" (1909).
It was through "The Daughters of Erin" that Mr. Colum came in touch with
the dramatic movement. Their plays and tableaux in the Antient Concert
Rooms in 1900 attracted his attention, and he wrote to the secretary,
inclosing with the note copies of two plays that he had written--the
dramatic achievements of his late 'teens. These plays were about the
"Children of Lir," that one of "The Three Sorrows of Story-Telling"
that is less poignant than the story of Deirdre only because it is less
human, and about Brian Boru, the high king that beat back the Danes at
Clontarf. Faery and mediæval history were not destined, however, to be
Mr. Colum's field, and Mr. Fay, then stage manager of the Association
productions, probably helped him on the way to his true field, the life
of the peasant of the Midlands, by declaring them rubbish. Two years
later Mr. Colum had learned enough about life and about the stage to
write a play against enlistment in the English army that held the
attention of audiences and was regarded as good propagandist "stuff."
"The Saxon Shillin'," produced May 15, 1903, Mr. Colum has not
republished, nor "The Kingdom of the Young" (1902), which like its
predecessor was published in "The United Irishmen." With this last play,
as its title indicates, Mr. Colum found his way to that subject of
youth, which, whatever other one of his dominant motives his plays may
involve, is always present. The hardness of youth is the theme of "The
Kingdom of the Young," the hardness that came into the heart of a
daughter, when driven into revolt by the older generation. She turns on
her father in the end, determined that she will not be cheated of the
joy of life as was he.
In "The Foleys," another little play of the same year, 1902, a play that
for all its crudity and incompleteness is full of insight into Catholic
Ireland, youth is again the theme, or the intolerance and
self-righteousness of youth. "Eoghan's Wife" (1902) is only a monologue,
only the old story of the woman who finds her home lonely and
depressing because the wrong man is the man of the house. She looks out
over "brown bogs with black water," wondering what is the way of escape
from it all.
"Broken Soil," put on at the Abbey Theatre on December 4, 1903, is the
first play of Mr. Colum with which, in after years, he was in any way
content, but he was not too content with it, rewriting it in 1907 as
"The Fiddler's House," and, I think, in the main improving it.
Mr. Colum, a youth with an appetite for reading as insatiable as his
impulse to write, read not only his Ibsen but his M. Maeterlinck. Back
of "Broken Soil" is Ibsen, back of "The Miracle of the Corn" is M.
Maeterlinck. "The Miracle of the Corn" was put in rehearsal by the Irish
National Theatre Society in 1904, but so far as I know it was never
played by that organization, its first staging I have record of being by
"The Theatre of Ireland" at the Abbey Theatre on May 22, 1908. Here
again is youth a leading theme, the power youth has, if it be wistful
and tender and pleading, to soften the heart of age. It may seem to some
that the girl Aislinn is only a symbol, only the dream of his youth
returned to the farmer Fardorrougha, who has hardened his heart even in
famine time, but whether apparition, or child of the flesh and symbol,
too, Aislinn is the bringer-back to Fardorrougha of the soft heart of
youth.
As the Irishman in America is preferably a city dweller, it may be a
little difficult for his fellow Americans of other ancestry to
understand why the Irishmen at home were so concerned with Mr. Colum's
next play, whose theme, as whose title, is "The Land." The cry for a
home and a bit of land, a cottage around a hearth and around the
cottage a few acres of your own, is a cry that has been heard in all
ages and among all people. It is a cry that we all have cried at times,
gypsy-hearted though we be; it is a cry that even the city-loving
eighteenth century raised in all the "Mine be a cot" poems, whether of
Pomfret or Pope or any other of the many who followed the same fashion,
and it is a cry that is especially loud in present-day America. But none
of us can feel the call of the land, none of us can desire it with more
intensity than the Irishman of to-day, city-dweller though we find his
kin in America; there is no one class of people anywhere in the world
who want the land as the Irish peasants of to-day want it. Their fathers
and grandfathers saw the fields that they had farmed turned into
pastures for cattle, as the Scotch crofters saw their holdings turned
into deer-parks; the two generations of Irishmen now respectively in old
age and middle age have known what it is to be taxed out of the places
their improvements as tenants made more valuable; and to-day those of
the old folk that are still alive and those of the middle years that are
still in Ireland are getting back to the land, along with the younger
generation that desires it almost as ardently, but were not born upon
it, profiting by legislation that compels landlords to sell to the
Government, which in turn sells to the small proprietors.
The Irish peasant loves his bit of land far more than his language, and
even more, I think, in the bottom of his heart, than he loves his
church, although allegiance to his church is a duty that he puts before
any love. A boreen in bogland is not a lonely place to the Irish
peasant if he have neighbors of long standing. It is the big city that
to him at home seems the lonely place, despite the glamour of its
lights, and its shops, and its ceaseless excitements.
The story of "The Land" is, as I have said, the story of the struggle
between love of land and the _Wanderlust_, with the love of woman as the
decisive factor in the latter's victory. Matt Cosgar is the son of a
peasant farmer, the last of many that the hardness of Murtagh has driven
to America, and he, too, goes in the end, after his father's will is
broken, because the girl of his choice is restless and will not be
content as a farmer's wife. Matt and Ellen, the fit and the strong, go
to America, Cornelius and Sally, the hair-brained and the drudge,
remain. Symbolic this is, of course, of the situation in Ireland to-day,
or at least yesterday, but the characters are strongly individualized
and show no tendency to harden into types. In "The Land" the
restlessness of youth, its call to wander, is the motive that clashes
with love of the home and of the home place. In "The Fiddler's House"
there is youth desiring peace, and youth afraid of love, in Annie and
Maire Hourican; and the call of the road to old Conn, the fiddler.
Sacrifice is rare in youth, and if it were not that Maire is afraid of
her love for Brian McConnell, and gives up her home and takes to the
road with her father partly because she fears her love for her lover,
fears her powerlessness with him, it would hardly be in the course of
nature that she would sacrifice so much for her sister. It was a sure
instinct that guided Mr. Colum so to make believable a sacrifice at
first view seemingly so great. Even in this play, which Mr. Colum
intends as a study of the artistic temperament, the land is a motive
second only to the call of the road. Maire cared somewhat for the land,
less than her sister cared, more than her father cared, though he too
loved it in so far as the artist's gypsy nature will permit. It is the
road and his music, however, that Conn cares for most, and in his
expression of such love he attains to an eloquence that is Mr. Colum at
his best: "I'm leaving the land behind me, too; but what's the land,
after all, against the music that comes from the far strange places,
when the night is on the ground, and the bird in the grass is quiet?" As
one reads, aloud, as one must, one thinks now of the Old Testament and
now of Synge.
Although Mr. Colum determined to put aside thoughts of dramas of old
Ireland in 1900, he evidently could not keep the old legends out of his
mind. They intrude now and then into his verses for all his modernity,
and one of them, "The Destruction of the House of Da Derga," forced him
to turn it into a play. "The Destruction of the Hostel" has not been
published, but it seems to have pleased those who saw and heard it as
played by the boys of St. Enda's School on February 5, 1910.
In the last play, too, of Mr. Colum, the ending is a parting, here the
parting that death brings. Telling the fortunes of poor old Thomas
Muskerry, who in the end dies a pauper in the workhouse where once he
was master, the play opens our eyes to that life of the small town,
deadliest of lives the world over, a life knowing neither the freedom of
the farm nor the freedom of the city, as such life is lived in Ireland.
In "Thomas Muskerry," in "The Land" and "The Fiddler's House," the
characterization is sure and true. One may take it that this is Ireland,
Ireland on the average, as one cannot take it that that we have in the
plays of Synge or Lady Gregory is Ireland on the average. Crofton
Crilly, the son-in-law of the master, soft and big and blond, is an
unsympathetic but memorable portrait. Unsympathetic and memorable, too,
are the portraits of his son Albert and his daughter Anna, the one
tricky and the other grasping, and the workhouse porter and the old
piper haunt my memory as strange men I have met haunt my memory, year in
and year out.
All three of these plays are, as I have said, sprung of domestic
problems, sure proof that Mr. Colum is the peasant's son. The family, as
he has pointed out in an article in "The United Irishmen," is not only
what the family is, ordinarily, in northwestern Europe, but that plus
that which the Irish family has inherited of the clan spirit. It was
only yesterday in Ireland that the girl and boy were married to whom
their fathers would, by a process of barter in which their own wishes
were not for a moment considered. They submitted, or came to America. It
was a patriarchal system of society.
It is not, then, difficult to see how it came about that Mr. Colum, who
began to write so young, came to write so much about youth and the
rebellion of youth, and to write about those other themes of his, themes
all of them made more intense by the youth that is concerned with
them--the land that obsesses the life of the man of the house all
Ireland over, and through him obsesses the lives of his family; and love
of woman.
Mr. Colum does not intrude his own personality into his plays, but it is
felt, as it should be felt, in every one of lyrics. Reading them one has
a sense of a youth like the youth of some characters in his plays; a
youth more manly than Cornelius's, less restless than Ellen's; a youth
serious and troubled with thought; a youth in revolt against much in the
old order, but tolerant of the passing generation that fears it
"knocking at the door." It is a youth impassioned rather than
passionate, more pronouncedly a youth of mind than a youth of heart.
When I say youth of mind, I mean not immaturity of mind, but the outlook
of the young mind; not radicalism, but a fixed determination to think
things out afresh and not to accept them because of any convention.
Eloquence one always looks for in the writing of an Irishman, and humor
and power over dialogue, but Mr. Colum is too serious with youth to care
much for humor, and, like Mr. Martyn, though not to the same extent, he
has trouble with his dialogue. The feeling for the situation, the
understanding of what is in the characters' minds, is in Mr. Colum, but
the dialogue does not always accommodate itself to situation and
thought. What Mr. Colum makes his characters say has in it the thought
and the sentiment of what they would say, but the words as often lack
life as have it. It is this difficulty with dialogue that has prevented
Mr. Colum, in his plays, true and finely planned as they are, from
reaching great achievement. As dramatist he is still more full of
promise than of achievement, and to be a dramatist of promise after ten
years of playwriting is to be at a standstill. In lyric poetry it is
otherwise with Mr. Colum. There he has attained. You will find his real
value in "Wild Earth" slight though the book may seem. Here is reading
of life, here is imagination, here is lyric cry. Read these little poems
once and they will be your familiars forever.
MR. WILLIAM BOYLE
One wonders if justice has been done Mr. William Boyle. If it has not it
is because he is a playwright of one play, "The Building Fund" (1905).
He has written three other plays that count, "The Eloquent Dempsey"
(1906), "The Mineral Workers" (1906), and "Family Failings" (1912), but
"The Building Fund" is of a higher power than any of these. "Family
Failings," produced in the spring of 1912, I have not read, but
according to all accounts it does not mark any advance upon "The Mineral
Workers" or "The Eloquent Dempsey." "The Mineral Workers," essentially a
propagandist play, and "The Eloquent Dempsey," essentially a satire, are
hardly, even in intention, of the first order of seriousness in art.
There are characters in these two plays faithful to human nature, and
faithful to the ways of eastern Galway, where the scenes of all of the
plays of Mr. Boyle are laid. But there are so many other characters in
them that are either caricatures or "stock" that, funny as the plays
seem upon the stage, they do not impress the deliberate judgment as
real. The many characters of "The Mineral Workers" and its several
motives are too much for Mr. Boyle; he loses his grip and the play
falls to pieces. "The Eloquent Dempsey" suffers from the caricaturing of
its characters, and its action degenerates into unbelievable farce
almost on the curtain-rise. "The Building Fund," however, is serious and
true, and at the same time just as full of wit and just as biting in
satire and just as effective on the stage as "The Eloquent Dempsey." Its
characterization is recognized as distinctive and authentic even on
reading. Revealed through the almost perfect work of the players trusted
with its presentation by the Abbey Theatre on their American tour of
1911-12, it seemed even more than distinctive and authentic, it seemed
inspired by profound insight.
"The Building Fund" tells the story of the outgeneraling of grasping son
and conniving daughter's daughter by a hard old woman of the strong
farmer class in the west of Ireland. Mrs. Grogan is approached as the
curtain rises by Michael O'Callaghan, an elderly farmer, and Dan
MacSweeney, a young farmer, in the rôle of collectors for the fund for
the new Catholic church. They are sent away by her and by her son Shan
without any contribution, but their visit suggests to her a way by which
she can disinherit her son and her granddaughter, wishful for her death,
she thinks, in their eagerness for her fortune. Shan is open in his
concern as to her disposal of her money; and although the girl hides her
purpose under pretended solicitude for her grandmother's health and is a
great help to the old woman, Mrs. Grogan believes her also to be
plotting for the fortune and is equally resentful toward both. So when
the collectors call again, Mrs. Grogan makes a will, in which we learn,
on her death shortly after, she has left all her fortune away from her
family to the church. For all their plotting, the audience feels that
the old woman is more malevolent than either son or granddaughter, and,
after all, the son had worked hard on the home place and the
granddaughter, slyboots as she was, undoubtedly was really kind. Both
are of her blood, and it is human to feel that parents should leave
their money to their children rather than to charity. There is some
amelioration of the condition of Shan and Sheila in the thought that
they may stay on, with Father Andrew's permission, as managers of the
old farm, henceforth the church farm. But sympathize with them though
you may, you feel it is only right that selfishness should over-reach
itself.
The play is not any more complimentary to Catholic Galway than "The
Drone" of Mr. Mayne is complimentary to Protestant Down, but it is
seldom that comedy is complimentary to human nature, and "The Building
Fund" is comedy. That is, it is comedy as Ibsen sees drama, or character
farce as Coleridge defines it. It is, in the Greek sense, perhaps even
tragedy; certainly, it is tragedy from the standpoint of Shan and
Sheila, for circumstances certainly get the better of them. From Mrs.
Grogan's standpoint it is comedy, for she, through her will, even though
she is now dead, has got the better of circumstances as represented by
the plotting of her son and granddaughter. If we look at "The Building
Fund" from the standpoint of Shan and Sheila, but without sympathy for
them, it is only character farce, for although circumstances get the
better of them, we do not then care for them, and a play in which
characters are overwhelmed by fate, but in which our sympathy is not
with them, is, if we follow Coleridge, really farce. Whatever "The
Building Fund" is, its characterization is admirable. Some might say its
men and women approximate to types, that Mrs. Grogan is the avaricious
old woman, Shan the sanctimonious miser, Sheila the sly minx, Michael
the benevolent old man, and Dan the gay blade. Types or not, you will
find all of them in Ireland, and all of them wherever human nature is
human nature. If they are types, however, each has a personality, but
whether all of them would stand out with such individuality had one not
seen them so fully realized on the stage, I cannot say. The tottering,
bitter old woman of Miss Allgood and the miserly, fearful son of Mr.
Sinclair are more memorable than the other impersonations only in that
they are fatter parts than Sheila, Michael O'Callaghan, and Dan
MacSweeney, played respectively by Miss McGee, Mr. O'Rourke, and Mr.
O'Donovan.
Mother and son are, I am sure, just as complete in the writing of Mr.
Boyle as in the acting of Miss Allgood and Mr. Sinclair. Both are,
indeed, as finely imagined and as faithfully realized as any characters
in modern English comedy. And you may have to go further afield than
modern English comedy to find such a minute study of resentful and
malevolent age as this portrait of Mrs. Grogan. We all know that
perversity that will not allow its possessor to be satisfied with any
effort to please. Here is an illustration of it as Mr. Boyle has seen
it:--
_Sheila_. Will I boil an egg for your breakfast, granny?
_Mrs. Grogan_ (_sarcastically_). Oh, to be sure! More extravagance.
You know very well I couldn't eat it, and you'll have it for
yourself. Waste, waste; nothing but idleness and waste all round.
God help me! (_Coughs._)
_Sheila pours out a cup of tea and hands it to Mrs. Grogan._
_Sheila_. Drink that drop of tea, granny--it's fresh made.
_Mrs. Grogan_. What did you do with the bottom of the pot? Threw it
to the ducks, I suppose?
_Sheila_ (_pointing to the table_). I have it here for myself,
granny.
_Mrs. Grogan_ (_sipping tea_). When I was a girl I never got a sup
o' tea from year's end to year's end.
_Sheila_. It was very dear, then; wasn't it?
_Mrs. Grogan_. It's dear enough still with everybody using it all
day long. Did you feed the hens?
_Sheila_. Long ago, and let the ducks out, too.
_Mrs. Grogan_. I suppose it's in the oats they'll be by this time.
What about the calves? _Grogan goes out_.
_Sheila_. I gave them their milk and put them in the bawn.
_Mrs. Grogan_. With the linen on the hedge? Why, they'll chew it
into rags, and, maybe, choke themselves.
_Sheila_. No, granny, dear; I spread the linen in the upper garden,
where the sun comes the earliest.
_Mrs. Grogan_. I see it's stole ye want it. There's half a dozen
tinkers squatted in the quarry.
_Sheila_ (_wearily._) They went a week ago.
_Mrs. Grogan_. Ah, dear! There's what it is to be old! I never hear
anything that's going on now till it's all over. Is that egg
boiled?
_Sheila_. Granny, dear, I thought you couldn't take one.
_Mrs. Grogan_. It's the little bit I eat that's grudged me now, I
see.
Though there is little of it in this passage that I quote, the
picturesque phrase that no Irish writer is without is Mr. Boyle's, as a
matter of course, but there is no particular individuality in his
handling of it. Style he has not, nor any background of romance, or
beauty of that sort that illumines the grayness of the comedies of
Ibsen, or of any other sort of beauty than that approach to beauty there
is in skilled craftsmanship.
Admirably arranged, too, are the situations of "The Eloquent Dempsey," a
satire on the man who straddles all questions, as at one time, at any
rate, did so many Irish politicians. Dempsey might have continued his
career of straddling indefinitely had he not a mania for speech-making
that he could not control. In the end, however, he was undone by a
well-intentioned conspiracy, arranged by his wife, to get him out of
politics altogether and out of his liquor-selling and into farming far
from town. I cannot identify Dempsey with any one prominent Irish
statesman, but the lesser fry on both Nationalist and Unionist sides are
as easy to identify as the men that suggested the characters of "A Tale
of a Town." In "The Eloquent Dempsey" all the art of Mr. Boyle has been
lavished on the central figure, which, when all is said, remains a
caricature, and caricature uncompensated for by any great or noble
characteristic of the play, whose primal quality is but cleverness.
Effective as its satire is, and provocative of laughter as it always is
on the stage, it is altogether cheaper in its quality than "The Building
Fund."
"The Mineral Workers," with its chief portrait that of a returned
Irish-American mining engineer, takes us to certain phases of society
not met among the publicans and politicians and peasants of Mr. Boyle's
earlier plays. Other than these are not only the hero, Stephen J.
O'Reilly, but the aristocrat, Sir Thomas Musgrove, and his sister, Mrs.
Walton, who is of the family connection of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's
Georgianna Tidman. Dan Fogarty, the holdback, unprogressive farmer, is
the sharpest-cut and truest to life of all the characters, so clear-cut
and true, in fact, that one thinks of him as almost a fellow of Shan
Grogan in "The Building Fund." Uncle Bartle is sentimentalized, and
Kitty Mulroy has no such personality as Sheila O'Dwyer. Contrast "The
Mineral Workers" with a novel of the returned American, "Dan the Dollar"
of Mr. Bullock, and the calibre of Mr. Boyle's play is quickly revealed.
What Mr. Boyle had been had he come into touch with the movement ten
years earlier, it is of course beside the point to speculate. He was not
a young man when he first became acquainted with the art of the Abbey
Theatre in London and was impelled to write plays for it. He was,
though, able to adapt the experience he had had as a story-writer to the
stage in "The Building Fund." That being so, why is it that his later
plays, successful though they have been as vehicles for the purveying of
amusement on the stage, have not taken rank by their art or by their
reading of life with "The Building Fund "? It may be that it was the one
theme susceptible of dramatic presentation that he had brooded over long
enough to transmute into terms of drama, and that the later plays, full
of successful stage tricks though they are, did not come out of his
knowledge of Irish life. Knowledge of Ireland he ought to have, for he
is said to have lived for comparatively long periods in various places
in country as an excise officer. As such Mr. Boyle was himself one of
the principal types, that of the official, that exist in Ireland, and in
a position to learn much of many other types, surprisingly few of which
he has realized with any depth of insight in his plays.
It would seem with his great success seven years back and his newer
plays less effective, that we cannot look to Mr. Boyle with great hope
for the future, as we can to Mr. Robinson or Mr. Murray. When we so say,
however, let us remember that Lady Gregory did not attempt plays until
she was close on fifty.
MR. T.C. MURRAY
The North is generally held to be another country than the rest of
Ireland. Ulster is alien alike in race and religion and economic
conditions from Connacht and Leinster and Munster. It is Scotch Ireland,
Protestant Ireland, industrial Ireland. It is, moreover,--many of its
citizens say therefore,--prosperous Ireland. Certainly men would not
divide all Irishmen into "Irishmen" and "Scotch Irishmen" were there not
many grounds for such a distinction. All other of the immigrants into
Ireland have, as a people, disappeared. The Norman has left his mark on
the land in his castles and his names, but as a distinctive element of
the population he no longer exists, any more than does Welshman or
Englishman or Palatinate. Apart from distinctions of class the men of
Ireland are "Irishmen" and "Scotch Irishmen," and until yesterday,
therefore, Nationalists and Unionists.
[Illustration]
And yet, definite as are these distinctions, life in the various parts
of Ireland seems much alike, class for class, as it is represented by
the many contemporaneous playwrights, whether the scenes of their plays
are Down or Kerry, Galway or Wicklow. A tinker is a tinker wherever you
find him, a strong farmer a strong farmer, a landlord a landlord. The
same emotions dominate rival brothers in "The Turn of the Road" and in
"Birthright," though the Orangeman turned actor wrote the one and the
Cork schoolmaster the other. Mr. T.C. Murray is one of those to whom Mr.
Yeats has given the name "Cork Realists." His first play, "The Wheel o'
Fortune," was produced by the Cork Dramatic Society at the Dun, Cork,
December 2, 1909. It has not been published, so far as I know, and all
that I learn from the references to it in newspapers is that it is a
one-act ironic comedy about matchmaking. Mr. Murray brought his next
play, "Birthright," to the Abbey Theatre, where it was performed on
October 27, 1910. If "Maurice Harte" (1912) stands the test of time and
travel as has "Birthright," Mr. Murray has come to the Abbey Theatre to
take a place of prominence among its playwrights. Some of the appeal of
"Birthright" is in its story, the story of Cain and Abel, if you like, a
story that is as lasting in its appeal as is "The Eternal Triangle," but
there is as much appeal in the characterization, which you feel as you
read almost as intimately as you come to know it on the stage. There are
many plays that are altogether colorless in the reading unless you have
unusual power of visualization and can see them as you sit in your study
as if they were embodied before you on the stage. Such plays,
visualized or unvisualized in the study, are often real enough on the
stage. "Birthright," as I have said, is not one of these. It visualizes
itself for you, with no effort on your part, as you read it, though of
course, as every real play will, it moves you more in the playing. It
was admirably cast on its first production at the Abbey Theatre, and it
was just as admirably cast on the American tour of 1911-12, Miss
O'Doherty's Maura and Mr. Morgan's Bat Morrissey being wonderful
pictures of a doting mother and a stern father troubled by their
preferences, the one for the elder, the other for the younger son. The
rival sons were done to the life by Mr. O'Donovan and Mr. Kerrigan, and
the neighbor of Mr. O'Rourke was, too, a complete realization of the
Irish peasant of the valley of the Lee. It is a stern and patient
realism this of Mr. Murray in telling of how Hughie, the elder son, the
apple of his mother's eye, the idol of the parish for his hurly playing,
and his verse-making, and his free and pleasant ways, is disinherited
and condemned to seek his fortune in America by his father because his
younger son was the better man on the farm. There was back of Bat's
decision, too, his feeling that his eldest-born was more of his mother,
whose blood was part gentle, than of himself, the grubber of the earth.
Shane, like his father, was the peasant plowman, Hughie something of the
sporting gentleman. The end of it all is murder, the younger son killing
the elder with the hurly when he is accused by his brother of plotting
to grab the farm. Many who saw "Birthright" in America were moved by it
more than by any other play in the repertoire of the company, and I
have heard more than one whose supreme interest is the theatre say that
it was the best play new to America presented in America during the
winter of 1911-12. I do not so hold, for "The Well of the Saints" and
"In the Shadow of the Glen" were new to America in the winter of
1911-12, and "The Playboy of the Western World" was new to every city in
America save to Chicago, where Mr. Hart Conway presented it at his
dramatic school in the spring of 1909. I can, however, understand why
"Birthright" so appealed. It is because of the theme, because of the
beautiful character of Maura Morrissey, because of the absolute
faithfulness to life, as all the world knows it, of the play. I have
traveled the road to Macroom that these farmers traveled, and so I know
the externals of the life they lead: I have known intimately and I know
intimately just such people as these, Irish peasants, some of whom
spoiled their children, thinking the boy they loved must not be
"crossed," and some of whom preferred one child to another even to the
extent of reversing the custom of primogeniture that is as fixed a rule
among them as if their property was entailed, and so I can vouch for the
absolute fidelity of Mr. Murray's art. It is a realism little relieved
by humor; unrelieved either by any background of romance, but gaming a
dignity from its intensity of conception and its simplicity of unfolding
that makes you feel, as you read, or as you watch and listen, that you
are in the presence of nobility. Its style, maybe, is homespun, but it
is none the worse for that, and it never approaches at all to the cheap
or mean.
The appeal of this realism is as poignant in "Maurice Harte" (1912) as
in "Birthright," though the story of the later play is not so universal
as is that of the play that brought Mr. Murray his share of fame.
"Maurice Harte" tells of the disaster that comes to a young divinity
student of Maynooth whose parents drive him back to college to seek
ordination even after he tells them that he has no vocation for the
priesthood. The curtain rises on Maurice, a youth of twenty-two, trying
to tell his mother, whose youngest he is, and the child of her middle
age that it would be sacrilege for him to take orders with no vocation.
His courage fails him, as it had on previous occasions on which he tried
to confess his agony because of his false position, and he finally begs
the Parish Priest to break the desolating news to the family. They are
only farmers in a small way, the Hartes: and the father and mother, the
son at home, Owen, and the three older brothers in Boston, have all made
sacrifices to give Maurice his education. When the priest tells of the
boy's decision not to return to Maynooth, mother and father and brother
all insist that he must stick to his earlier intention, vocation or no
vocation.
They are in monetary difficulties because of him, and if the story went
out that he was not back at Maynooth his mother declares it "wouldn't be
east in Macroom when we'd have the bailiffs walking in that door." She
tells him, too, his being a spoiled priest will cost his brother his
bride and her fortune that would help them to pay off their debts. The
boy cannot withstand their pleading, and the first act ends with his
promise that he will go back to Maynooth, a promise wrung from him even
though he knows at the time of its making that his return may bring him
to madness in the end.
Act II, nine months later, shows us again the kitchen of the farmhouse
of West Cork, with happiness in the hearts of all there, save some
slight apprehension on the father's part over his new clothes and the
terrors of a journey with Father Mangan to Maynooth. In this relaxing of
the tension of the play humor is not out of place, and its attainment
here by Mr. Murray shows that he could write comedy did he choose. We
hear that the marriage settlement between Bride Burke and Owen has been
made, and that Maurice is to marry them; and that he has bested all his
classmates in his final examinations. Upon the pride and happiness in a
son sure of a good match, and the glory of another son about to be
"priested" and to say mass in the local church, breaks in word that he
cannot be ordained because of illness. And close upon this bad news
comes Maurice himself, broken down mentally from the strain of driving
himself to do what he knows to be wrong, from the strain of committing,
as he believes, sacrilege. Father and mother and brother realize that it
is they who have driven him mad, but such is human nature that mother
and brother, at least, have thoughts of themselves even at this moment,
as well as thoughts for Maurice with "his mind that's gone." His brother
fears that Bride will not come into a house so disgraced, and his
mother, her years-long dream of her youngest a priest gone on the wind,
is struck dumb with horror at the thought of what her life will be from
this out.
The full significance of the tragedy of Maurice's fate can be realized
only by those who know intimately the ambitions hugged close to heart by
the Irish Catholic mother. It is more to her to have her boy a priest
even than it was yesterday to the Scotch Presbyterian mother to have her
boy a minister of the Kirk. It is the greatest glory that can come to
such a peasant mother to give one of her sons to the priesthood.
There is, I think, no propaganda in the play, and no intentional satire,
although in a way "Maurice Harte" affords a parallel to so definitely a
propagandist satire as Mr. Robinson's "Harvest." It is not education
that is the curse, however, in "Maurice Harte," but the belief that only
priesthood in the end can justify the sacrifices without which a college
education is almost impossible for an Irish peasant. Certain it is that
it is only for the pride of having their boy a priest that the typical
Irish Catholic peasant parents would make such sacrifices as the Hartes
have made, sacrifices involving them in debt to the extent of a thousand
dollars, to secure their son an education.
In a sense "Maurice Harte" is far other than the provincial study I have
here outlined. Its theme is allied, unquestionably, to that theme so
much larger in its relations than that of the spoiled priest, the theme
of the rebellious son, the son who will live his own life no matter what
may be his parents' will. It is only allied to it, however, not to be
identified with it, because Maurice is too fearful of disappointing his
parents, and too shrinking and ineffectual, to go against his parents'
will. In Ireland, as I have said elsewhere, such parental will, by a
survival of authority from the days of the clan system, was law until
yesterday, and there will therefore be those, I have no doubt, who will
find in the play a conflict of the old order and the new, but I do not
believe such conflict was the author's intent. Indeed, the play is
wholly of the old order. No love of man and woman figures as motive in
it as none had figured in "Birthright." There is parental love, of
course, in both plays, though in the case of both parents in "Maurice
Harte" and in the father in "Birthright" parental pride is a stronger
motive than parental love. Very true to Irish life is this absence of
passion as a deciding factor in the fates of man and woman, this
insistence upon the importance of the family, this subordination of the
rights of the individual. Mr. Murray wished to write in "Maurice Harte"
a play of the very heart of Irish Catholic life, and such a play he has
written, a play that marks no decline, either in characterization or
situation, from "Birthright," and to say that is to give "Maurice Harte"
praise of the highest.
MR. S. LENNOX ROBINSON
Mr. Lennox Robinson, like most of the Abbey Theatre dramatists, has
chosen to write about the ground under his feet. The son of a clergyman
whose charges have been in the southwest of Ireland, Mr. Robinson spent
his boyhood and youth in the Bandon Valley. He had been trying his hand
at writing from the time that he was ten years old, editing an amateur
magazine as he grew older, feeling about for the thing that he could do.
A visit of the Abbey Theatre Company to Cork was the awakening. He saw
a new acting, he saw a new art of the stage, and he knew as he saw that
it was in drama his work lay. It was not, however, for the Cork Dramatic
Society that he did his first play, but for the Abbey Theatre. "The
Clancy Name" was put on on October 8, 1908, when its author was but four
days past his twenty-second birthday. What this first version was like I
do not know, but Mr. Robinson has reprinted the second version, put on
with the full strength of the National Theatre Society at the Abbey
Theatre on September 30, 1909. As printed, it is an ironic little play,
recording the great day in the life of the Widow Clancy, the day on
which she pays off a five years' loan and stands without a debt of any
kind, her farm all her own, the Clancy name respected throughout her
world. But on this day of her triumph, when she would add to her
happiness by making a match for her son, John cannot rejoice with her,
and on her questioning him as to his moodiness he blurts out that he is
the man who killed James Power, a quiet man whose unexplained
disappearance is the mystery of the countryside. Worse yet, John insists
that he will give himself up to the authorities. It is terrible to know
one's son a murderer; it is intolerable to think of a Clancy being
hanged and of the glory of the name forever departed. She persuades him
finally not to tell, but he fears he will, so, when the chance comes, he
finds the only way out, the way of peace for his mother and peace for
himself. A car driven by a drunken neighbor is threatening the life of a
little child playing in the middle of the road. John Clancy pushes him
out of the way and allows himself to be driven down. They bring him to
his mother's house still alive and raving incoherently of the murder,
but he dies before he tells his secret and the Clancy name is saved. It
is not a very gripping theme, but the play brings to us an acute
character study of the typical managing woman of the small farmer class.
We feel her tireless energy, her drive, her high pride, assets of worth
in the fight to live. There is a little humor, natural and unforced,
some picturesqueness of phrase, a revelation of knowledge of life in one
corner of Ireland. There is nothing, however, in the play to make it
comparable with the three that followed it on the stage of the Abbey
Theatre, "The Crossroads" (1909); "Harvest" (1910); and "Patriots"
(1912). "The Lesson of Life," a little one-act comedy, presented at the
Dun Theatre, Cork, December 2, 1909, Mr. Robinson has disowned. Why I do
not know, though the fact that it was not produced at the Abbey may
indicate that even at the time of its production he felt that it was not
up to the level of his work. Mr. Robinson has not republished "The
Lesson of Life," but the reviews state that it was an amusing little
play, though in no way a serious reading of life.
[Illustration]
"The Clancy Name," "The Crossroads," "Harvest," and "Patriots" are all
on themes that hit home at Irish institutions, and yet it would be wrong
to say any one of them is basically either satirical or propagandist.
All are primarily readings of life. "The Crossroads" alone, perhaps, is
more than a reading of life. Certainly, after its needless prologue, it
is fine art through to the end. This scene, with its satire of Irish
debating societies, is now, wisely, dropped when the play is produced.
We can learn enough of Ellen in the play itself to understand why she
does as she does without this picture of her in Dublin. Her story is
that of a woman who hates the much talk of patriotism in Dublin and the
lack of doing anything tangible for Ireland. In Dublin she has worked
her way up from servant to assistant in a bookshop, but she goes back
happily to the country to give her sister a chance in town such as she
has had, thinking that perhaps she herself can lead her people into
better ways of farming and of ordering their lives generally through the
knowledge she has got in town. It is through such as Ellen that the
Irish Industries Organization Society in actual life accomplishes an
important part of its work.
In the first act of "The Crossroads" we find Ellen at home, in her old
peasant dress, having made the hens lay so well in winter as to arouse
wonder in a neighbor as to whether, "Is it right for hens to be laying
that way so early in the year?" A match is being made for her by her
mother with a man that has a good farm. Ellen desires the match very
much, for this is just the farm on which to try the new methods that
shall bring prosperity to the people of the valley and so stem the
emigration to America. She does not love Tom Dempsey, this strong
farmer, and she does half-love Brian Connor, whom she had known in
Dublin, but now that he has come down to ask her to marry him she
chooses the farmer, brutal though she knows him, because as his wife she
can do the work for Ireland that she has imagined for herself. The
loveless marriage, so universal an institution all over Ireland, made it
nothing out of the way for Ellen to act as she did, even though at the
time of the action of the play a higher ideal of marriage than that of
the old matchmaking had come in. It is this institution that Mr.
Robinson, from one point of view, might be thought to be attacking in
the play; it is this institution, certainly, that is the theme of the
play. Is it a tribute to Irishmen and Irishwomen to acknowledge that
this loveless marriage has worked on the whole as well as the marriage
of sentiment, or as the marriage of sexual infatuation, or as the
marriage of comrade hearts that we believe we have in America? As a
matter of fact there were not as many loveless marriages as might seem
at first thought. The match made up between the father of the girl and
the father of the boy was the usual sort of marriage among the
stay-at-home Irish girls and boys up to 1880, but how many girls and
boys for the past one hundred and fifty years have come to America to
escape it? Look up your family traditions, you who have Irish ancestors,
and find is it not true that these ancestors, whether Reeds of Down or
Nolans of Meath, fled to America because they would wed the mate of
their choice. Even to-day boys and girls come here from the same motive,
though of course it would be preposterous to deny that to many it is
rather Eldorado than the land of freedom.
Act II reveals poor Ellen seven years later. She has lost her two boys
by fever; she has failed in her work on her own farm, though she has
brought untold blessings of progressiveness to the other farms around
Ballygurteen; she has lost the appreciation of her husband. She whom we
loved for a personality as winning as that of an Emma or a Tess is now
a drudge, almost a slattern, gray-haired, hopeless, almost hated by a
brutal husband. The loveless marriage has proved a curse. Upon the woman
of his dreams so dethroned comes Brian Connor, now a successful
novelist, and, finding how things are, falls, for all his intended
restraint, into a fight with Tom, whom but for Ellen he would have
choked to death. Brian urges Ellen to go away with him, but, after a
moment's faltering, she refuses to go. This is the last scene. Tom, who
has heard Brian's proposal and his wife's rejection of it, comes slowly
down the room.
_Tom_. Was it me you saved or was it the young man? When you
pulled him off me, did you save me, or was it him you saved
from being hung? Tell me that, Ellen McCarthy.
[_Silence._
Ah! 't is aisy seen.
[_Puts his hat on, and goes to the door, and takes the key out
of the lock_.
_Ellen_ (_looking round_). What are you doing? (_Frightened._)
What are you doing?
_Tom_. I'll tell you what I'm doing. I'm locking the door the
way you won't go after that young man; an' I'm going to step
down to the village now for a sup of drink. An' then--I'm
coming back; an', by God, I'll make you pay for this night's
work, Ellen McCarthy, till you'd wish you were dead--for the
black curse you brought on this farm, an' for the liking you
have to the young man.
[_Goes out. Ellen remains sitting at the table, staring in
front of her with sad, hopeless eyes_.
The turning of the key in the lock ends the play, leaving brutality
unimaginable as the fate of Ellen.
It is a severe reading of the Irish peasant, this of Tom Dempsey.
Murder may come of his blackness of heart. He is a far worse man, of
course, than poor John Clancy, who killed a man in an unpremeditated
fight, sure murderer though Clancy be. Yet despite such heroes or at
least such characters in his plays, no one would say that in either "The
Clancy Name" or "The Crossroads" Mr. Robinson held a brief against the
Irish peasant. He most certainly does not. He likes the Irish peasant.
His plays are "stories of mine own people" faithfully told. He does not
spare the Cork farmer, but he does not distort him. Why however, his
"Harvest" was allowed to be played unmolested in New York, after the
"The Playboy of the Western World" met with organized opposition, can be
explained only by recognition of the fact that the Irishmen of the
patriotic societies are slaves of precedent. "The Playboy of the Western
World" had always met with opposition, so it should meet with opposition
in New York. "Harvest" escaped in New York because its uncomplimentary
personages were unheralded. Not that there is anything in "Harvest," any
more than in "The Playboy of the Western World," that any
self-respecting Irishman need object to. "Harvest" shows the disastrous
effects the wrong sort of primary education, as taught by the country
schoolmaster of the old type, the type that was prevalent before the
present type, brought about. The present-day schoolmaster is in sympathy
with system of education that will keep the children on the land or in
an industry near the home place; the older type would give them an
education that would send them to the cities to be priests and lawyers
and secretaries and typists and chemists and what-nots. Old William
Lordan, the schoolmaster, had, evidently, in the opinion of the
playwright, the sins of many on his shoulders, and yet one, knowing that
it is the system and not the man that is at fault, cannot help feeling
that Mr. Robinson is rather severe on what is in life a really lovable
though mistaken sort of man.
"Harvest" shows that of the six children of Tim Hurley, but the three
that come into the play are loyal to their father: Maurice, who works
the home farm; Jack, the apothecary's clerk from Dublin, who tries to
help with the farmwork, but is too much of a weakling to be anything of
a help; and Mary, who from typist has turned mistress, now to this man,
now to that. Mary, come home to get away from her wrong life, is called
back to London by the excitement of its life, which has become a
necessity to her. Jack, the chemist, in the end deserts the home; and is
off at the end of the play, with his upper-class wife, for America or
the colonies. Only Maurice is more than half-entitled to our respect.
The son who is the priest is in America to collect for the Church at the
time of his family's need, and so is not helpful to his family; the
solicitor son is climbing socially, and, needing a motor-car to help him
to position, prefers to spend his money on himself rather than on the
home place that was robbed to pay for his education; and the secretary
son is so ashamed of "the ditch out of which he was digged" that he has
changed both his name and his religion.
All five of the children who went out from the home educated, as the
schoolmaster wished them to go, have been educated at the expense of
those that remained on the farm, Maurice the hard-working farmer and old
Timothy the father. But the father, too, is far from what he should be,
as one must suspect, not believing that education alone can account for
so many gone wrong. Timothy burns down some unimportant farm buildings
for the insurance upon them. This practice is so common in all parts of
the world civilized sufficiently to have insurance that I wonder
insurance companies take risks on backwoods farms anywhere. An old man
with whom I have talked often in the mountains of northeastern
Pennsylvania answered me one day, when I asked him how it was his barn
caught fire, "The insurance got too hot." He was a German, a man in his
prime a good worker and not a bad representative of the mountaineer of
his state. One must not, then, fasten on old Timothy as a character
distinctively Irish, at least in this phase of his character. He surely
is universal, a representative of one type of disingenuous countryman.
The characterization in "Harvest" falls short of that of "The
Crossroads," but perhaps it had to be if Mr. Robinson was to make his
point. As one realizes that perhaps these people are but pawns with
which to win the game that Mr. Robinson has set out, one remembers that
their creator spent some weeks with Mr. Shaw and Mr. Barker in London,
and one understands, too, many other of the failings of "Harvest." It is
but another of many illustrations of the blight that Mr. Shaw has
brought upon the modern English stage.
It is a two-edged satire that Mr. Robinson employs in his "Patriots"
(1912), a satire that cuts into the sham agitation of some political
leagues, an agitation that is talk only, and at the same time cuts with
almost equal sharpness into the physical force party. It is true that it
is not the motives but the wisdom of these latter men that Mr. Robinson
satirizes in the failure of James Nugent, the returned political
prisoner, to stir his townsmen with the kind of talk that set them to
arming in 1893. That their propaganda is no longer possible, if it was
ever possible, is a corollary to the play, even if it could overcome the
inertia that has come to Irishmen with their greater prosperity since
the Land Purchase Act went into force.
The revolt of the patriot who hates talk and is willing to sacrifice
personal happiness for country is recorded here as it was in "The
Crossroads," and the uselessness of the sacrifice made only too plain.
To one not an Irishman it would perhaps seem that the real drama there
is in the play is smothered by the political satire and that the
politics satirized are of too local an interest for it to have so
universal an appeal as "The Crossroads" or "Harvest." There is an
universal story in "Patriots" that is but slightly developed--the story
of the prisoner's wife, Ann; her love for her daughter, who is a cripple
because of her mother's being dragged here and there by James Nugent in
his campaigning just before her birth; Ann Nugent's turning against her
husband, on his liberation from an eighteen years' imprisonment for
political murder, because of the wrong done her so long ago and because
of the danger to Rose's health that campaigning with her father would
entail. The turning of Ann Nugent from her husband is the really
significant part of the play,--and in thoughts of that we pay scant heed
to the political satire and even to the pathos of the desertion of a
leader by almost all he expected to follow him, and the reduction of his
life, as he puts it bitterly, "to an anecdote--a thing to be told
stories about." And in the end that is the fate he will meet. Time and a
wife that he wronged have broken him. As he staggers off at the end of
the play, a stricken man and older than his forty-five years, this is
his cry:--
I've killed a man, I've crippled a child, I've got myself shut up
for eighteen years--God knows what good came of it
all--but--Peter--I meant--I tried ... I know I meant right--and in
prison my cell used to be filled with the sad faces of men like me
who had given everything for Ireland--they wouldn't have come to
me, would they? if I hadn't been of their company. They are here
now--I see them all around me--there is Wolfe Tone, and there is
... oh, quiet watching faces, I have tried--tried as you tried--and
been broken....
With this ability of his to pick out a theme that is basic in Irish
life, and with the years bringing him an experience of life that will
dominate any propagandist purpose, Mr. Robinson should grow in
seriousness of intention and accomplishment. He hates sham, he has sane
and cleansing satire of pretension, he writes good dialogue, his
experience as stage manager of the Abbey Theatre is teaching him the
stage; he is only twenty-five. Do not these things augur a future?
MR. RUTHERFORD MAYNE
It so happened that the last time I was reading the plays of Mr.
Rutherford Mayne, I was also reading the plays of Sir Arthur Wing
Pinero. All the world has heard of the one; only the little band
scattered here and there through the English-speaking countries to whom
letters are a real part of life has heard of the other. I laughed over
"Dandy Dick"; I thought of Miss Rehan playing Georgianna Tidman with all
that gush of spirits that was hers; I thought of Miss Nethersole in her
wonderful youth playing Paula Tanqueray; and as I thought of these two,
each in her way inimitable in her part, thoughts of past moments with
the characters of Mr. Mayne's plays, plays I have never seen on the
stage, came back to me. Had I seen them on the stage would my thoughts
of them have been thoughts of the theatre, as were all my thoughts of
Sir Arthur's plays? It may be, but I think not, I think the great
strength of Mr. Mayne is that he takes you to life; I think the great
weakness of the wide-heard author is that he takes you immediately, in
almost all of his plays, to the theatre, and only secondarily, if at
all, after the memory of his artificiality has died away, to life
itself.
William John Granahan and John Smith the Tory,--will you forget them, or
Robbie John whom the fiddle called away, or Ebenezer McKie and Francey
Moore, Protestant and Catholic, who together lay in wait for the hated
landlord and shot him as he passed through the glen; or John Murray,
good man, and his bauchle of a brother? You will not forget them, for
they are from life; you have known them, all save Francey, if you have
known Scotchmen who are Lowlanders and Presbyterians, or such North of
Ireland men as are unalterably opposed to Home Rule. They are very like
the Orangemen of the novels of Mr. Shan Bullock, very like the peasants
the English-speaking world outside of Scotland first met in the verse of
Burns; harsher than the Baillie Nicol Jarvies and Dugald Dalgettys of
the kindly Sir Walter, but akin to them and to his Davie Deans and
Dumbiedikeses.
We are in a more familiar world in the plays of Mr. Mayne than in those
of most of the other writers in the movement--that is, I mean most
American readers are--simply because of Burns and Scott. Had Ireland had
a peer of either in his generation as satirist or romancer the
Irish-Irish would to-day be as familiar to us as are the Scotch-Irish,
who are, of course, transplanted Scotch. The women of this world are
not, however, of types so well known to us as are the men, because the
chivalry of Sir Walter prevented him from giving us his peasant
Scotswomen in as full detail as he gave us his men; but it is not
difficult for us to appreciate Mrs. Granahan and her daughter; Mrs.
McKie, a "woman with a dead soul"; Mary Murray with her daftness over
the boys; and even Sarah McMinn, so true in her managing and meanness,
qualities necessary to the prosperity of her folk. Puritan America can
understand these women and men because they are Puritan, too, with the
ignoble that is in the Puritan as well as with the noble that is just as
surely there.
It is in the first three plays of Mr. Mayne that we meet these people I
have named, County Down folk all of them, and all Protestant but Francey
Moore. They are the leading characters in "The Turn of the Road" (1906),
"The Drone" (1908), and "The Troth" (1908). The motive of Mr. Mayne's
first play is the old call to wander, the unrest of the vagrant heart,
here the heart of the musician. It is the story of Robbie John Granahan,
who, after burning his fiddle at the desire of a strong farmer whose
daughter he wished to marry, is driven out into the world to try his
fortune with another through her determination that her lover should
follow his star. There is more beauty in "The Turn of the Road" than in
either of the other plays of the North of Ireland, more beauty of theme,
more beauty of thought, more beauty of expression. Its themes are not
new, _Wanderlust_ and the Puritans' hatred of art; its thoughts are not
new, but they are beautiful, and the words themselves are freshly used.
Its phrases that hold in memory are given to Robbie John and to his
father and to his grandfather, most of them to the grandfather. This is
the grandfather's lament for the boy gone on the roads with his fiddle
and his father's curse:--
It's the wee things you think nothing of, but that make your home a
joy to come back till, after a hard day's work. And you've sent out
into the could and wet the one that was making your home something
more than the common. D'ye think them proud city folk will listen
to his poor ould ballads with the heart of the boy singing through
them? It's only us--it's only us. I say, as knows the long wild
nights, and the wet and the rain and the mist of nights on the
boglands--it's only us, I say, could listen him in the right way.
And ye knowed, right well ye knowed, that every string of his
fiddle was keyed to the crying of your own heart.
There is no beauty at all in "The Drone." There is little beauty
possible to such a subject realistically treated as that of the exposure
of the utter sham that is the pretended inventor of a bellows, a man who
has for years fattened on a brother's tolerance and family pride. There
might have been beauty of construction, but dramatic construction is not
Mr. Mayne's strongest quality. Let that not be held too much against
him, for many an English dramatist, like almost every English novelist,
is weak in the architectonic qualities of his work. Yet such is the
hardness of the people that exposed Daniel Murray that you rejoice in
his duping of them at the end through his sale to them of his pretended
invention, especially as that frees his brother John, and John's
daughter, artful coax that she is, from Sarah McMinn, who is determined
to marry the one and manage the two. The ideals of the people of the
play and the grim humor of Mr. Mayne are well illustrated by this
declaration of John Murray, the best of them all, anent the suit for
breach of promise with which Sarah threatens him: "I would as soon do
without the marrying if I could. I don't want the woman at all, but I'll
marry her before she gets a ha'penny off me."
The people here are the people of "The Squireen" of Mr. Bullock,--hard,
grasping, resentful, passionate, brutal even, but doers of the world's
work. All that differentiates them from the Fermanagh Protestants is the
different conditions of County Down and a slightly lower social
position.
In "The Troth" the theme is the shooting of a landlord by two peasants
whom his agents are to evict on the morrow. To the cottage of the
Protestant McKie comes his Catholic neighbor, Francey Moore, whose wife
is dying. Here there is no turf for the fire, and no hope in the heart
of father or mother, for the child of the house has died, and, they
think, because of the landlord's hardness to them. The two men swear a
troth that they shall lie in wait for Colonel Fotheringham, and that if
but one escapes, as is likely, the one arrested shall hold his tongue as
to his companion. You do not see the murder on the stage, but you hear
the shot and see McKie return to his home, and you know it was he killed
the landlord. The tension of the last scene is almost unendurable. His
wife's providential lie for McKie, her agony in her knowledge of his
guilt when she sees his face on his return, the man's terror, are
handled with masterly firmness and sureness. To see this scene on the
stage in the hands of actors worthy of it must be to know real tragedy.
In this play, too, brief as is the glimpse we have into these four lives
of small farmer and his wife, his farmhand and his neighbor, a neighbor
of alien race and hated faith, you get to know them as if they were
friends of long standing. Character creation and character presentation
in pithy, tense dialogue are the great gifts of Mr. Mayne. Francey
Moore, the "dark man," with his sensibility, his eloquence, and his
flaming rage, is not of the characteristic men of Mr. Mayne. They are
men of slow ways all un-Celtic and with smouldering hearts like those
of the Northmen we read about in the tales of "Origines Islandicæ."
In "Red Turf" (1911) Mr. Mayne turns away from County Down to the Galway
bogs, admirably symbolizing the hot land feud between neighbors in his
title. There are but five characters in the play, Martin Burke, farmer,
and his spitfire of a wife; and his neighbors the Flanagans, father and
son, who have won away from the Burkes, by the surveyor's decision,
their bank of stone turf that had come to Mary Burke from her father;
and an old fellow little better than a beggar. Mary taunts her husband
until he shoots the elder Flanagan as he is working away on the "great
stone bank." It was not his own gun Burke had, but, ironically, it was
one just brought to his house by the poor old man whom they had often
befriended, John Heffernan, brought that it might not be found in his
house by the gauger, and he unable to pay the license. It is not made
clear that there was malevolence in the leaving of the gun at the Burkes
by the old fellow, malevolent as are some of his remarks. Akin to him,
not in his malevolence but in that each is in a way a bit of a prophet,
is the grandfather in "The Turn of the Road," but more nearly akin to
old Granahan is Uncle Bartle of "The Mineral Workers" of Mr. Boyle.
Synge records old men of prophecy and tales in his travel sketches, but
he put none such who were gentle in his plays, or I would say that
Grandfather Granahan, like the old gaffer in Mr. Masefield's "Nan," was
a part of the influence of Synge that is felt by both Mr. Masefield and
Mr. Mayne. Their styles, respectively, in "Nan" and "Red Turf," have in
them more than echoes of the style of Synge. The "wambling" old men of
Mr. Hardy come also to mind as one thinks of these old men of Mr.
Masefield and Mr. Mayne and Mr. Boyle. All in a sense play "chorus" to
the action of the play, but there is no one of them that is in the story
or play in which he appears on such grounds only. There are, of course,
old men everywhere, in all life they are an integral part, and
everywhere they are commentators on life once they feel that their day
is done, spectators of a pageant from the forefront of which they have
dropped to watch the following troupe pass by.
There is little mating in these plays of Mr. Mayne, and love of woman
worthy of the name of love only in "The Turn of the Road"; there is
parental love, too, but perhaps more of parental tyranny. Such parental
love as there is, however, actually expressed, makes one of the
memorable passages of Mr. Mayne. Mary Burke, after taunting her husband
to madness, tries to turn him from murder when she sees him, gun in
hand, by crying: "For the love of God, would you leave it down. Leave it
down and go in and look at the child sleeping. It would take the badness
from your mind the same as it did with me."
Though Mr. Mayne is a writer for the Ulster Literary Theatre of Belfast,
his allegiance to the Abbey group is clearly indicated in "Red Turf,"
which is the result of a study of Synge. I do not mean to say that Mr.
Mayne is not familiar with the speech of Connacht, but that it is Synge
who has taught him how to listen to it. There is little of the
influence of Synge in his three plays of the Black North, but when he
turns to Galway in "Red Turf," it is but natural that, writing of other
than his own people, he should write in a speech that has in it an echo
of that of him who has transmuted this speech into prose of the most
beautiful rhythm that English dramatic prose has known. The Bible is the
book of books in Ulster, and there is no page of Mr. Mayne's Ulster
plays but shows him acquainted with its great rhythms. Mr. Boyle,
skillful artificer of situation, and truthful depicter of character that
he is, and Mr. Colum, too, for all his closeness to the earth, are now
and then betrayed, Mr. Boyle more often than now and then, into the
English of the newspaper or of the public speaker; but the English of
Mr. Mayne is all but always an unworn English, an English used freshly,
or if with reminiscences in it, reminiscences of the seventeenth-century
English that has survived in the Bible or in the memory of the folk from
the time of King James.
Mr. Mayne has, then, style, and his dialogue is living speech; he has
knowledge of the people of North Ireland, earnestness and sincerity; and
having these qualities, he has more that is precious to art than have
most of the dramatists his countrymen. There is no consistent reading of
life in his plays, no great power over the unrolling of plot, but
perhaps these will come with the years. An actor himself, he knows the
stage; and this knowledge has given him power over situation. Once he
learns to lead situation into situation, once he ripens into fuller
knowledge of life, Mr. Mayne will be a dramatist to reckon with, indeed.
"NORREYS CONNELL"
There have been many other dramatists than these I have mentioned who
have had one or more plays produced at the Abbey Theatre. Some of these,
like Mr. Bernard Shaw, are Irishmen abroad that have gained the ear of
the world and do a play for Dublin out of a sense of duty It was thus
that "John Bull's Other Island" came into being, but that play, being
considered "beyond the scope" of the National Theatre Society, was not
produced at the Abbey, but at the Court Theatre, London, November 1,
1904. When "The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet" was "censored" in London,
however, the Abbey opened its doors to it, the "crude melodrama"
receiving its premier in late August, 1909. Little as "John Bull's Other
Island" was in the Abbey tradition, with moral purpose and unhumanity of
its very essence, it was at least a newspaper leader on an Irish
subject, but "The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet," a sort of
sentimentalized travesty of Bret Harte preaching the usual Shavian
evangel, has no more relation to Irish life than it has to literature.
It marred the repertoire the Abbey Company brought to America, as would
a camp-meeting hymn the music of the pipes.
Out of the Abbey tradition, too, are the plays of "Norreys Connell" (Mr.
Conal O'Riordan), whose "Piper" had its day of lesser notoriety of
Playboy-like quality on its presentation on February 13, 1908. It is a
very obvious allegory, outlining under guise of an incident of '98 the
weaknesses of contemporaneous Ireland, its love of talk; its lack of
hold-together; its refusal to see things as they are; its incapacity in
practical matters; the reckless temper of this faction of its people,
the subjection to clerical influence of that, the suicidal patriotism of
a third; in short, the Celts' willful rebellion against the despotism of
fact. It was not pleasant listening to, or seeing, "The Piper," to many
groups of Irishmen, for it cut alike at the Parliamentary Nationalists,
the Sein Feiner, and the shoneen. Even though one admires the courage of
the Piper and Black Mike, one realizes the futility of both, and of
Larry the Talker, Tim the Trimmer, and Pat Dennehy, all typical of too
many men in Ireland to be endurable to the usual theatre audience. There
is a white heat of feeling, however, under the play that to some degree
makes one forget its rather indifferent writing, its failure to attain
true dramatic speech, its obviousness as of a morality play.
Another little drama of Mr. O'Riordan, "Time," is almost a morality
play. It was produced shortly after its author became director of the
Abbey Theatre, succeeding Mr. Synge in the spring of 1909. Mr. O'Riordan
does not include "Time" among the plays of his volume of 1912,
"Shakespeare's End, and Other Irish Plays," but one cannot but feel
there was room for it there, if there was room for the play that gives
title to the volume. "Shakespeare's End," however, was doubtless
included because it gives its author's ideas as to the mission of
Ireland in the world. "An Imaginary Conversation," the second play of
the volume, was performed at the Abbey Theatre May 13, 1909, following
shortly after "Time"; a discussion of art and patriotism and love among
Tom Moore, and his sister Kate and Robert Emmet, with a little, a very
little, of the intensity that made "The Piper" something more than
second-rate.
MR. ST. JOHN G. ERVINE
Mr. St. John G. Ervine I know through two plays, "Mixed Marriage,"
produced at the Abbey Theatre on March 30, 1911, and "The Magnanimous
Lover," produced in the same playhouse on October 17, 1912. Like his
fellow from County Down, the master dramatist of the Ulster Literary
Theatre, Mr. Mayne, Mr. Ervine excels in characterization. You remember
his people, even after one reading of the plays, so clearly are they
distinguished, so definite are their personalities. With the five men
and women of "The Magnanimous Lover," you pass but a few minutes, as it
is only a one-act play, but you remember them as well as you do the six
of "Mixed Marriage," though you follow their fortunes through four acts.
All these characters are typical of the artisan class of the North of
Ireland, the five Protestants of "The Magnanimous Lover" and the four
Protestants and two Catholics of "Mixed Marriage." It is the troubles
that arise from the difference in religion of the Protestant Raineys,
mother, father, and the two young men; the Catholic betrothed, Nora, of
the elder son Hugh; and their common friend the Catholic labor agitator,
O'Hara, that are the motive forces of the latter play. Faintest etched
is Tom, the younger son, and most like a stock character. Nora and
O'Hara are well done, but one remembers both as stage parts rather than
as characterizations. Hugh is still better done, but the two absolute
creations are the father and mother. Tom Rainey, the Orangeman, forgets
his bitterness against "Cathliks" for a moment to help win the strike in
which his fellow workmen of Belfast, "Cathlik an' Prodesans," both are
fighting side by side. He is all the more bitter, however, when he
learns that his eldest son is going to marry out of his faith, and his
speeches, hitherto devoted to smoothing out the troubles between the men
of different faith, turn to bitter denunciations of the strike as "a
Popish Plot." In the end Tom Rainey is responsible for riots his wild
words have stirred up, the calling-out of the soldiery, and the death of
Nora, who is shot down by a volley as she runs out of the Rainey house
into the rioting street. On the stage, of course, Mrs. Rainey is the
more sympathetic character, her tolerance, her tact, her humor, her
infinite kindliness winning an audience as it is given to few characters
to win it. She is less like a type, too, than her husband, but for all,
I cannot but think he is better drawn.
Mr. Ervine has not a style like Mr. Mayne, nor such a rhythm to his
prose, but he has more humor, and it is natural humor, a humor that
arises out of the situation and is not simply dragged in for the
purposes of comic relief. Mr. Ervine evidently knows the life he depicts
in and out. He ought to know it, for he was born to it, being the son of
a workingman in the shipyards of Belfast. And knowing it well he finds
it far from hopeless. It is a pleasure to come upon a play of the North
written in a spirit other than that of revolt against its Puritanism.
There are "kindly Irish of the Irish" in the Black North as well as in
the three other provinces, but most of the authors of the North are
content to picture its hardness, its hypocrisy, its bigotry, its love of
wife and child remorselessly concealed as a weakness of the flesh.
It is to this darker picturing of the North, however, that Mr. Ervine
turns in "The Magnanimous Lover," which indicts the self-righteousness
of the Ulster Protestant with a severity such as is possible only to a
man bitter against a weakness of his own people. It is an old theme Mr.
Ervine has to handle, the refusal of the wronged woman to wed her
betrayer, when, after years of disloyalty, he is willing, by marrying
her, to make her again an "honest woman." To speak only of recent plays
of similar plot, there is "The Last of the De Mullens" of St. John
Hankin, and "A Woman of No Importance" of Wilde. Mr. Ervine, it is true,
handles the theme freshly, but the real power of the play is in his
creation of the heroine, Maggie Cather. The danger with such a character
is that it will be only a mouthpiece for woman's demand for a common
moral standard for men and women; but Maggie is not a mouthpiece but a
real woman, triumphantly alive, with hot anger in her heart at the
injustice of the world, and at the "unco guidness" of her old-time
lover, Henry Hinde. Ten years before the time of the action of the play
Henry Hinde had fled, just as her child was to be born, to Liverpool,
and there he has prospered, and so risen in the world that it is
possible for him to wed a minister's daughter. Fear of God's wrath has
now driven him home to make such amends as he can, but there is in him
no pity for the woman or love for his child. Maggie has faced it out
alone all these years in the seaside village of Down as Hester faced it
out in the seaside village of Massachusetts, while Henry forgot it all
until he was "saved" and "convicted of sin." If no more cowardly than
Dimmesdale, Henry is more heartless, utterly callous, indeed,--as he
confesses, in "the devil's grip." And yet Mr. Ervine is so true to the
life that he is depicting, a life at once passionate and prosaic, that
he makes anger for the past and fear of a nagged future with Henry as
effective agents in her rejection of him as are self-respect and right
feeling. It is a "big" part that Mr. Ervine has created for the leading
actress, and though the story is unequivocally "unpleasant" and may
prevent "The Magnanimous Lover" from being a favorite play, there can be
no two minds as to its success as drama. It is very real drama, of
elemental human emotion all unveiled. With such a play as this, and with
"Mixed Marriage" to his credit, I look forward eagerly to the promised
production and publication of "The Eviction."
MR. JOSEPH CAMPBELL
Another dramatist from the North and of promise is Mr. Joseph Campbell.
His "Judgment" is of the northwest, however, the whole breadth of Ulster
between its Donegal mountains and the Belfast of "Mixed Marriage"; and
it is of the country, not of the city; and of an Ireland wholly
Catholic, not of an Ireland of Protestant and Catholic at war over
religion. There are moments of real drama in "Judgment," but no such
inevitable rise to climax as in "Mixed Marriage." Its undoubted power
is in the feeling underlying it, in its characterization, and in its
style. Mr. Campbell was already known when his play was put on at the
Abbey Theatre, April 15, 1912, as the author of "The Mountainy Singer"
(1909), a volume of freshly felt and singing verse; and of "Mearing
Stones" (1911), little prose records of things seen and of moods felt in
a corner of Donegal. Many a striking phrase of "Judgment," indeed, is
already written down in the paragraphs of "Mearing Stones" as actual
talk heard in the roads, and several of the situations of the plays are
workings-up of situations of which its author found himself a spectator
on the streets of Andara or on the highway between Slieve a-Tooey and
the sea.
I first came upon his verses, if I remember rightly, in "The United
Irishmen," but I was first impressed by him as an illustrator, his name
being always signed in those days after the Irish fashion, Seosamh
MacCathmhaoil. A Dublin friend sent me at Christmas in 1907 a "Calendar
of the Saints," for which Mr. Campbell did the illustrations,
illustrations akin to those of Miss Althea Gyles, which so surely take
one back to Ireland's heroic age, instinct as they are with the
primitive aloofness of antiquity.
It is not antiquity, however, that Mr. Campbell has chosen for his play.
Indeed, he rejects antiquity, deliberately "using peasants as ...
protagonists instead of kings--who, like Pharaoh, are 'but a cry in
Egypt,' outworn figures in these days with no beauty and no
significance." "Judgment" is made out of the story of the countryside
concerning "a tinker's woman," Peg Straw, and we may well believe Mr.
Campbell has changed it but little, as he says, for the purposes of his
play. It had been a better play, perhaps, had he changed more the facts
of the story. As it stands, the first act of the play is adequate
dramatically, and beautiful with that sort of wild and outworld beauty
Synge brought into English literature in Ireland; and the second act
beautiful with that beauty, and inadequate dramatically.
Peg Straw is an old, worn woman of the roads whom the people hold little
better than a witch, even attributing to her the power fabled of the
witches in folk-tales of turning themselves into hares. Her nickname
"Straw" indicates the nature of the mild dementia that sets the children
and the idlers at her heels. She goes about picking up "straws" until
"she'd have a bunch in her hand ... every little stalk bit off as neat
as neat, and it like a scrubber or dandy brush you'd put to a horse."
Peg speaks no word at all in the play, coming into sight in it only to
die, but always she is in the background. Talk of her comes up early in
the first act, and we learn that Nabla, the woman whose cabin is the
play's first scene, has turned Peg away from the door only that morning;
and from the moment we first hear of her most of the talk is of her, and
the action because of her. Toward this first act's end you hear her
cries as the tinkers beat her, and at its end she crawls into the cabin
to die, and in dying to shock the woman of the house so that her child
comes before its time. All the second act Peg lies in sight in the room
just off the stage with candles stuck around her, bringing the horror
and dignity of death into the wild scenes of her wake. These are wild
not because of drinking for no one is drunk and only one "had drink
taken," but because of the wildness of nature of these men of
westernmost Europe, and because of the wildness of the roads that a
"traveling man" brings with him out of the night. There is no action in
this second and last act save that sprung of this stranger's entrance
and quarrelsomeness, and his interruptions of an old, old man's story of
what he knows of Peg's life. The stranger listens while Parry Cam tells
of the cause of her madness, but when he repeats what for years has been
the gossip of the countryside about her supposed killing of her babe,
the "traveling man" interrupts and declares he is the son whom it was
rumored she had drowned. In the end he is turned out of the house, not
altogether unkindly, but as much for decency's sake as for his own. That
the son, for any motive at all, should be turned out of the house where
his mother lies dead, even though he had not stood by her living, is
hard enough in the estimation of any people, but in the estimation of
the Irish peasant it is intolerably tragic. If we realize this, the
ending of the play will be on a note deeper and more significant than if
we fail to realize it, but not even the utmost sympathy with the
intention of the author and a full realization of the significance to
Donegal peasants of the action can bring this act to an intensity
comparable to that of the end of Act I, where two mysteries confront one
another--"the passing of a life from this world, the coming of a life
into it."
All the characters in "Judgment" are "created." The personality of each
colors his words and puts him before you distinct from every other.
Owen Ban the weaver, who takes in Peg when his wife Nabla, heavy with
her first child, and nervous because of her condition and fearful of the
birth, would keep out the outcast; old Parry Cam; John Gilla Carr; Colum
Johnston and Father John; Nabla herself; and Kate Kinsella the
midwife--each is himself or herself, each remains as distinct in your
mind the unforgettable scenes of the play. Somehow or other, too, the
country is suggested; you are aware that you are on a wild hillside
above a glen,--you are aware of this not because the author tells us at
the outset that the scene of the play is in the mountains of western
Donegal, south of Lochros Beg Bay, but through the dialogue of the play
itself. Both scenes of the play are indoors, and on dark nights of
midwinter, but so instinct with many phases of the life of the people is
it that its background of landscape rises before you only less
distinctly than the visualization of its characters. Atmosphere the play
has, and quality, both sprung of the sincerity of its feeling and
imagination. So true are these, and so keen the author's reading of
human nature, and so sure his character drawing, that for all his
weakness of construction we may speak of his play alongside of the best
Irish plays. The future promises finer things: meanwhile we are thankful
for what is, for "Judgment,"--especially for its far-offness, its
desolateness as of the world's end and the wind crying.
CHAPTER IX
WILLIAM SHARP ("FIONA MACLEOD")
There were relations other than that of a common purpose between William
Sharp and the Irish writers of the Celtic Renaissance. He was a friend
of Mr. Yeats, a correspondent of Mr. Russell, and the chief commentator
in the English reviews on the work of the Irish group of its writers. At
one time, after 1897, the relationship promised to be very close,
indeed. William Sharp, experimenting in psychics with Mr. Yeats, found
occasion to interest him in "Fiona Macleod," and as a result of that
interest Mr. Yeats came to think the new writer might write Celtic plays
for performances he intended to arrange for Irish literary
organizations. Thus it is that Mrs. Sharp has to include in her memoir
of her husband a long letter to "Fiona Macleod" from Mr. Yeats, in which
he suggests: "The plays might be almost in some cases modern mystery
plays. Your 'Last Supper,' for instance, would make such a play." Mr.
Sharp, apparently, did not follow up this suggestion, but shortly after
the first performances of "The Irish Literary Theatre" in 1899 he wrote
the two plays that, together with "Vistas," comprise all the dramatic
writing that he has to his name. That "The Immortal Hour" and "The House
of Usna" were intended for "The Irish Literary Theatre," I think there
is little doubt, and it was only, I take it, when circumstances
dictated that only plays by Irish writers should be put on by that
theatre that Mr. Sharp looked elsewhere for their presentation. Only
"The House of Usna" was, however, placed,--in the spring performances in
London of The Stage Society, on April 29, 1900. Two months later "The
House of Usna" was published in the July number of "The National
Review." It pleased more, if we are to judge by the reviews, in the
pages of the magazine than on the stage, but I hardly know why. "The
House of Usna" is profoundly moving read in the study, surely, and if
acted in such simplicity and enthusiasm as is that of the Abbey Theatre
Players, I should think it would appeal as do the verse plays of Mr.
Yeats. No play I have read carries me further into antiquity than this,
none preserves more of what imagination tells us must have been the
wilder beauty of what still are places of wild beauty, of the savagery
of that old life of the hero tales of Ireland. Mr. Yeats's plays do not
so recapture the past, they take us rather to places out of time, where
all things are possible, because the world we know is put aside and all
but forgot. Even on the stage, however, the new beauty of "The House of
Usna" was recognized, a beauty as distinctive as that of the two plays
of M. Maeterlinck that were produced with it, "Interior" and "The Death
of Tintagiles," but it was adjudged not to be drama in the accepted
sense of the word. "The House of Usna" is written in a prose that has
many of the effects of verse, but that is less luxuriant than the prose
of "Vistas." "The Immortal Hour," published shortly afterwards in the
"Fortnightly Review" (1900), is written in blank verse that shows its
author has been carefully attentive to the rhythms of the blank verse of
Mr. Yeats, but it is neither so poetic nor so dramatic as "The House of
Usna." Both plays are written out of the old legends that are the common
property of Irish and Scottish Gael, and in both Sharp has treated his
material with his wonted freedom of adaptation, a freedom that is
generally justified by his results, his instinctive surety of
reconstruction of myths being such as to make one wonder, with Mr.
Russell, if Sharp is not, in some fashion, a reincarnation of a
shanachie that sang as contemporary in the wars of Gael and Gall.
[Illustration]
A common preoccupation with the plays of M. Maeterlinck is another bond
between the founder of the Abbey Theatre and Sharp, a preoccupation
passing rather quickly from Mr. Yeats, but long retaining its hold on
the changing selves of Sharp. For all his early interest in "spiritual
things," an interest very definitely expressed in "Romantic Ballads"
(1888), Sharp would not have come to "Vistas" (1894) without the
guidance of M. Maeterlinck, and he admits as much in his preface to
these "psychic episodes." "Vistas" he often referred to as heralding a
"great dramatic epoch," and he evidently regarded them as, in a way,
drama, but it is hardly likely that he dreamed of their enactment on the
stage. Many of them are essentially dramatic, but their method of
presentation is almost always lyric or narrative rather than dramatic,
even in the Maeterlinckian sense of the word.
It is possible, however, that Sharp might have written other of his
projected plays, "The Enchanted Valleys," "The King of Ys," "Drosdan and
Yssul," and their many fellows he had projected by title, and others,
too, had not developments in Dublin, as I have said, carried Mr. Yeats
away from him during 1899 and 1900, and had Sharp himself not during
this drifting written that article "Celtic" which so aroused many in
Ireland on its appearance in "The Contemporary Review." In this essay,
basically a literary protest, "Fiona Macleod" declared "herself" against
Separatist politics and affirmed "her" belief, as "she" had in "The
House of Usna," that the future greatness of Ireland was to come, not
through independence, but through the rebirth of her ancient
spirituality in other nations to whom she had given her children.
The Celtic element in our national life [wrote "Fiona Macleod"] has
a vital and great part to play. We have a most noble ideal if we
will but accept it. And that is, not to perpetuate feuds, not to
try to win back what is gone away upon the wind, not to repay
ignorance with scorn, or dullness with contempt, or past wrongs
with present hatred, but so to live, so to pray, so to hope, so to
work, so to achieve, that we, what is left of the Celtic races, of
the Celtic genius, may permeate the greater race of which we are a
vital part, so that, with this Celtic emotion, Celtic love of
beauty, and Celtic spirituality, a nation greater than any the
world has seen may issue, a nation refined and strengthened by the
wise relinquishings and steadfast ideals of Celt and Saxon, united
in a common fatherland, and in singleness of pride and faith.
There was, however, if less intimacy with the Irish writers in these
later years, no less admiration of their art, an admiration that led not
only to praise of them in critical articles, but to a greater praise of
imitation of their art. So possessed, indeed, was Sharp by the verse of
the younger Irish poets as he read them to write of them, that when he
turned to verse as "Fiona Macleod," he fell into their rhythms and
reproduced the colors of their styles. Writing in prose as a critic of
Mr. Yeats, Sharp came to write in verse as Mr. Yeats wrote, as in "The
Dirge of the Four Cities": writing of "A.E." in prose as critic, Sharp
came to write in verse as "A.E." wrote, as in "Flame on the Wind":
writing of "Moira O'Neill," in prose as critic, Sharp came to write in
verse as "Moira O'Neill" wrote, as in "I--Brasil": writing in prose as
critic, of "Ethna Carberry," Sharp came to write in verse as "Ethna
Carberry" wrote, as in "The Exile." So it was, also, that, coming to
write of Celtic literature after study of Renan and Arnold, Sharp
attained to something of their large utterance.
Sharp sees the Celtic Renaissance, however, always in relation to
English literature, and always, it should be added, with French
literature and Greek literature in the background. In this wide outlook,
in his freedom from political prejudice, in his sympathy with Celtic
literature and his knowledge of it, is his greatest strength as a critic
of the Celtic Renaissance. His greatest weakness is his willingness in
this writing, as elsewhere in his writing, to abide by first
impressions, to abide also by the first-come phrase or epithet, banes of
the ready writer. But read his essay "Celtic" after you have read the
great essays of Renan and Arnold, and read it alongside of what Mr.
Yeats has to say of that literature, and you will find it, as I said,
of the stature of these. You will at the same time find in this writing
the answer to the contention that there were really two personalities in
William Sharp. Even Mrs. Sharp, who writes so restrainedly about this
question of dual personality, believes the analytical faculty belonged
to William Sharp, the imaginative to "Fiona Macleod." But in this
criticism of the Celtic Renaissance which is signed "Fiona Macleod,"
there is as much analysis as is to be found anywhere in his work as
William Sharp. So obviously was he identifying "F.M." with "W.S." in
this critical writing that Mrs. Janvier, of those in the secret, wrote
to him to take warning lest he betray himself. She pointed out to him
that such a display of learning as he was making in the later "Fiona
Macleod" work would surely lead to discovery. But he did not heed. The
truth probably was that he wrote about Celtic things as "Fiona Macleod"
because he perhaps felt about them, as "Fiona Macleod," as one who is
bilingual thinks about work he is doing, say in German, in German, and
about work he is doing in English, in English; but just as surely I
believe, because what "Fiona Macleod" wrote commanded more respect than
what William Sharp wrote, readier entrance into the magazines, and
better pay. If there are those to whom such an explanation seems
belittling to William Sharp, I can only say that they cannot have
realized that he was a driven man earning his living by his pen. I am
not, I confess, a sentimentalist in such matters, and while I do not
wholly like his procedure in maintaining the fiction of "Fiona Macleod,"
it does not seem to me a very heinous sin.
He who would write of the work of William Sharp, indeed, must be
resolute to remember that it is to be considered as an essay in the art
of letters. There are so many temptations toward writing of it as a
scientific problem,--for who is not interested in "dual
personality"?--or as a "psychic revelation," if one is bitten--and who
is not?--by curiosity about hidden "things"; or as an irritating hoax,
if one has been befooled--and who, for one moment or another has not
been?--into believing that this writing under the pseudonym of "Fiona
Macleod" was the confession of a woman. The romance of it remains, no
matter from what point of view you consider it, and, despite your
preoccupation with this or that phase of it, the beauty of literary art
of parts of it. Parts of it, I say, for to me no writer of our time was
more uneven in his work. My point of view, indicated perhaps brutally,
and with a firstly and secondly is:--
Firstly, that until he was nearly forty, William Sharp was no more than
a skillful literary practitioner, a higher sort of hack, who had done
some better writing of a tenuous kind of beauty but imitative in
substance and art, in "Sospiri di Roma" and "Vistas," and that after
forty, when he was developing one undeveloped side of himself as "Fiona
Macleod," he developed another undeveloped side of himself in "Silence
Farm." That he attained in a sort of writing, and greatly, that he had
not attained in before, in "Silence Farm," has not been acknowledged, so
easy has it been to those interested in his work to lose sight of all
else in their pursuit of the "Fiona Macleod" side of his nature. It is
true of "Silence Farm," as of almost all his other work done under the
name of William Sharp, that it is imitative; but it is equally true that
a large part of the "Fiona Macleod" work is imitative, too. "Silence
Farm" is done under the influence of the later work of Mr. Hardy, but
the material of "Silence Farm" is its author's own, and the color of the
writing is as distinctly of the Lowlands as the color of "Tess" is of
Wessex. That "Silence Farm" is better work in its kind, though that kind
is less original than some of his writing as "Fiona Macleod," I have
been forced against my prejudices to believe. If I did not so believe I
would not have spoken of it side by side with "Tess."
Secondly, that as "Fiona Macleod," William Sharp did much good writing
in almost everything published under the pseudonym, achieving wholeness
of good tissue in certain sketches and tales and verses on rather
varying kinds of subjects, but that his work as "Fiona Macleod" that is
really distinguished is in stories of prehistoric Scotland and Ireland,
and of Scotland and Ireland in the earliest historic time. In these
tales of the Gaels of old time he for the first time breaks ground for
others. Before he wrote "Silk o' the Kine," and "The Harping of
Cravetheen," "The Annir Choile," and "Enya of the Dark Eyes," there were
no short tales of like temper and content and style in literature.
To me little is significant in the early verse of "Fiona Macleod," as
little was significant in all the verse of William Sharp until the time
of "Sospiri di Roma." And for all the beauty of these pictures in words
of the Campagna it is but a transient beauty. It was not until he was
mastered by the new beauty that Mr. Yeats brought into English poetry
that the verse of William Sharp won to itself abiding beauty and glamour
and inevitable phrase. "The House of Usna" (1900) brought to me "Dim
face of beauty haunting all the world," and the 1901 edition of "From
the Hills of Dream," "The Enchanted Valleys,"; but it was not until
after his death that I came upon his best verse of all, the verse of his
last five years, which was gathered together posthumously in the 1907
edition of "From the Hills of Dream," and included as "The House of
Beauty" in "The Poems and Dramas" of 1911. Who does not know these sets
of verses and "The Dirge of the Four Cities," does not know the ultimate
accomplishment of William Sharp in poetry.
That the "'Fiona Macleod' mystery" ended with the death of William Sharp
is, then, my belief, as it is that it began before he conceived of
exploiting a feminine sub-self he had long been aware of in himself. The
beginnings of that sort of writing that made "Fiona Macleod" a
reputation are to be found very early in his writing, in "The Son of
Allan" of 1881, in the "Record" of 1884, in the preface to the "Romantic
Ballads" of 1888, in the "Vistas" of 1894. That these earlier
expressions of "spiritual" states and guesses at mysteries are not,
except for certain parts of "Vistas," so well written as the best
writing of similar kind by "Fiona Macleod," is true, and perhaps, at
first glance, a matter of wonder. It is, however, I think, not difficult
to find an explanation of the better quality of the later work, and that
explanation is afforded, firstly and most largely, by the Celtic
Renaissance. A man of thirty-five, to all who know him a very vital
force, a very original personality, who has all his life wanted to make
beautiful things in words out of his dream of life, has disappointed
himself and his friends. He is suddenly afforded the opportunity, by the
interest in Gaelic subjects that the Celtic Renaissance has awakened, to
gain a hearing for work of a kind he has long wanted to do. He had not
done such work previously, because he had to live by his pen and could
work consistently only at the sort of thing that would sell. He was well
known as a journeyman of letters, so well known for bookmaking, and the
ways of getting commissions from London editors and publishers, that his
knowledge of Highland life would be questioned. All in London knew him
as a Londoner. It would be useless for him to say that the Celtic
Renaissance had brought back his childhood to him, a childhood as
definitely dominated by a Highland nurse as Stevenson's was by the
Lowland Alison Cunningham. It would be useless to tell of his summers in
Argyllshire and among the inner isles, his intimacy with fishermen who
were as elemental as his own dreams of old time. It would have been cast
up to him that the editor of "The Canterbury Poets" could not be an
original writer, and the very nine days' wonder of "Vistas" would have
been pointed to to prove that he might now do well enough, as an
imitator, perhaps of Mr. Yeats, as he was in "Vistas;" successful as an
imitator of M. Maeterlinck, but that an original Highland writer could
not come out of Hampstead. There is no doubt in my mind that it was the
part of wisdom for Sharp to put out the new work under a pseudonym,
worldly wise if you will, but wise, too, with a higher wisdom. If he
could keep the side of him he had never yet exhausted through hackwork
apart from his other work, it would grow as it could not if it were a
part of his daily stint.
Why Sharp chose a woman's name for his pseudonym has troubled many, but
this choice was, I think, as was the assumption of a pseudonym, the part
of wisdom. I do not believe, as he at times liked to believe, that he
attained a woman's standpoint. He had been complimented on all sides for
his composition of the wife's letters in "A Fellowe and his Wife"
(1892), in which Mrs. von Teuffel wrote the husband's. Sharp enjoyed
their writing as a _tour de force_ and he probably believed they were
very womanly. I should say that they showed insight into womanly ways of
looking at things rather than a dramatic identification of himself with
woman such as is George Meredith's. Sharp had already been experimenting
with pseudonyms, that of "H.P. Siwaarmill," an anagram on his own name,
being that he recurred to most often. He had written the whole of "The
Pagan Review" in 1892 under eight different pseudonyms, and though, in
the estimation of those to whom "Fiona Macleod" is all but a sacred
name, it be sacrilegious to say it, William Sharp loved all sorts of
fantastic tricks, hoaxes, mystifications, though in almost all his
writing save in "Wives in Exile" he was seriousness itself. But the
chiefest reason of all, in my estimation, for his assumption of a
woman's name as his pseudonym was that it afforded greater protection
against discovery. There are those who believe that he chose it because
he wanted a chance to express that womanly element of human nature there
is in all men, and there are others who believe that he was the
possessor of a real dual personality in which the "Fiona Macleod's self"
was a woman's consciousness; but he very infrequently, after "The
Mountain Lovers" (1895), kept in mind in the writings he published as
"Fiona Macleod's" that their author was supposed to be a woman, and it
is wonderful, indeed, that he was able to preserve the secret until the
end. In the earlier "Fiona Macleod" writing there is no revelation of
the wide acquaintance with literature that was Sharp's, but despite his
harassment by the constant identification of himself with "Fiona
Macleod," he gradually allowed to creep into that writing more and more
of what was known to be the knowledge of William Sharp, a knowledge
unlikely to be also that of a Highland lady who lived apart from the
world. His friends pointed out to him the danger he was running in
writing from what was obviously a man's standpoint, as in his tales of
the wars of Gael and Gall, and of revealing several sorts of interest
that were known to be his, but their warnings were in vain. He was
apparently unable to limit himself to the restrictions of the part of
himself he had essayed to restrict himself to.
For my own part I was now sure the writing must be Sharp's and now sure
it could not be his. I did not know of his intimate concern with
questions of feminism until I read Mrs. Sharp's "Memoir," so that
outspoken chant, the "Prayer of Women" in "Pharais," "Fiona Macleod's"
first book, colored my outlook on all the writing that followed. I had
no doubt at all but that "Pharais" was written by a woman, but "The
Dan-nan-Ron" and "Silk o' the Kine" in "The Sin-Eater" (1895) seemed to
me hardly a woman's. "The Washer of the Ford" (1896) was written from
the man's point of view, too, but "Green Fire" (1896) seemed feminine
again. So I wobbled in my opinion until "The Divine Adventure" (1900)
and the critical writings of the volume that story gives title to, and
the critical writing in "The Winged Destiny" (1905), made me believe
again that "Fiona Macleod" was surely Sharp. I did not come upon the
articles that now make up "Where the Forest Murmurs" (1907) until after
the death of Sharp and the disclosure of the secret. Had his death not
divulged the secret of the identity of "Fiona Macleod," it seems to me
that collection must have disclosed it. Had Sharp lived after this there
would not have been possible for him much further work from the
seclusion his pseudonym gave him, and I doubt, once the secret was out,
it would have been possible for him to write of things Celtic with the
old gusto.
After all has been said it must be confessed, I think, that Sharp did
not know the Highlander, either of the mainland or of the islands, very
intimately. He wrote much better of his dream of life on the west coast
in prehistoric times--out of his imagination of what that life must have
been, an imagination founded on the reading of the old legends and
modern collections of folk-lore, such as the "Carmina Gadelica" of Mr.
Carmichael--than he did out of his knowledge of Highland life of to-day.
The Achannas are in many of his tales of modern times, and wherever
they are there is unreality, if not melodrama. Unreality, too, there is,
in many phases, in the modern tales, and "highfalutinness" everywhere in
them. And both unreality and "highfalutinness" offend in these modern
tales as they would not in the tales of far times, though in these, as a
matter of fact, they are not so much in evidence.
It would almost seem that the approach to reality drove Highland
atmosphere from the stories. In "The Sin-Eater," one of the best of his
writings that might be classed as a short story, the sin-eater and his
confidant are Highlanders, but the description of the scene of his
misfortune, the steading of the Blairs, might well have been that
nearest to "Silence Farm." It is faithfully described, the scenes about
the little home, whose owner lies dead, having the very smack of
realism. In the latter part of the story the scene shifts to the coast
and the tang of the story turns Gaelic and unreal. Was it thus, I
wonder, always to the imagination of William Sharp, Lowland life real,
Highland life mystical?
Sharp was handicapped, of course, in coming to the subject material he
could best handle late in life, "Pharais" (1894) and "The Mountain
Lovers" (1895), the first books published as by "F.M.," being just as
definitely 'prenticework in their kind as was "Children of To-morrow"
(1890) in its kind. Of the long stories other than "Children of
To-morrow" published in his own name, "A Fellowe and his Wife" (1892)
and "Wives in Exile" (1896) have no very serious intention, though both
are well done after their kind, records of imaginings, respectively of
experiences of art life in Rome, and of yachting experiences in the
Irish Sea. It was not until "Silence Farm" (1899), as I have said, that,
as William Sharp, he found himself.
"The Gypsy Christ" (1896), which might well have been developed into a
full-fledged romance, is less original than any of his longer writings.
It is, like "The Weird of Michael Scott" and "A Northern Night," closely
allied to essays of his other rôle, that of "F.M.," to catch and express
"the tempestuous loveliness of terror," such as the catastrophe of "The
Mountain Lovers," "The Barbaric Tales," and those short stories in which
Gloom Achanna is hero-villain. It is in such work that Sharp shows his
affinities to Poe, affinities which are not elsewhere as obvious as his
affinities to De Quincey. Narrative was not native to De Quincey any
more than it was to Sharp, though Sharp was led toward it by his
interest in character, an interest that was not in any large measure
given to De Quincey, who, when he turned to narrative other than that
which relates what had happened to him or what he had dreamed had
happened to him, makes the reader feel he did so as a concession to the
public. Another interest that was Sharp's, an interest amounting to a
passion,--out-of-doors,--De Quincey had not at all, for all his devotion
to Wordsworth and to Wordsworth's interests. Like De Quincey, on the
other hand, Sharp delights in "fine writing," in both senses of the
phrase, in the "highfalutin" that is objectionable, and in the ornately
beautiful that is one fitting expression of romantic thought. Both men
preferred the mouth-filling word to the simple one, the Latinical
adjective to the Saxon; both had rather see visions and dream dreams
than write about the "common light of common hours"; both goad their
imaginations until they run riot and so confuse their possessors, who
should control them, that they are unable to distinguish between what is
fact and what is fancy. You could carry the analogy further, to events
of their lives--the runnings-away in boyhood; the devoted friendships to
poets in youth; the incredible amount of hard work achieved in manhood
despite of often recurring illnesses.
Of the long stories published as by "F.M.," Sharp repudiated "Flora
MacDonald" because it was too much in the way of "ordinary romance," and
"Green Fire" for the same reason and because it was largely about
Brittany, a country with which, by some strange chance, he did not make
himself familiar, though he had visited and learned to know well at
least parts of all the other Celtic countries. It is to my mind,
however, if not so definitely of a wholeness of texture as "Pharais" or
"The Mountain Lovers," or so singular, less monotonous than either. All
three of these stories disappoint my memory of them when I again read
them. This is, I believe, because all three of them--and for that matter
many of the short stories as well--are incompletely realized, or
because--in the case of two of them, "The Mountain Lovers" and "Green
Fire"--they are unevenly written. Their high intention and atmosphere
remain with you after you have put the books aside, and in the course of
time you forget their hurried writing, their inconsistencies, and their
qualities of the "Shilling Shocker," the result of their author's
failure to attain "the tempestuous loveliness of terror" that are in so
many of them, long or short. As aids to this effacement of the
cheapening elements are the very materials of the tales, their
characters, now elemental, now other-worldly, and their background of
mountains that uplift the spirit, and of menacing sea.
That Sharp wrote less exactly of the present-day people of the Highlands
than of the background of their lives was largely because he had few
opportunities to learn to know them intimately. There was a basis for
such intimacy laid in his childhood, in the fact that his nurse was a
Highland woman; there was something built on this basis by his boyhood's
vacations in many parts of Argyllshire and voyages elsewhere along the
west coast. Youth spent in Arran and Skye would have counted for much
more, for the boy, once he is no longer child and before he has reached
his youth and is awakening man, is not much more interested in people in
real life for what they are than he is in minute description of their
characters in books. He likes men for the sportsmanlike and adventurous
things they can do, and he likes to read records of things sportsmanlike
and adventurous, but men as men, unless they are eccentric to
grotesqueness, do not arrest his attention. Even the dreamy boys, the
artistic boys, are not likely to learn much of others, so preoccupied
are they with themselves.
It was thus, I think, that Sharp's childhood was not what he would in
later years have had it, not what in "The Laughter of Peterkin" he
alleges the childhood of "Fiona Macleod" to have been. For all the
influence of "Barabal," his nurse, it seems from his writing that her
stories remain with him more as suggestions to imagination than as
definite memories, and that the fisherman referred to in "Sheumas" left
with him little more than "Barabal." How fresh and wonderful to him was
actual contact with Highland life is almost pathetically revealed in a
letter he wrote to Mrs. Sharp from Kilcreggan in the summer of 1894. In
this letter he is all but exultant in the recording of the securing of
"Celtic" material from a "Celtic Islesman from Iona." Of the actual life
of the Islesmen and Glensmen he could have known but little, for long
living among them is necessary to their understanding,--they are, as he
wrote in this same letter, "passionately reticent." It was not the way
of Sharp to fall back, in this deficiency of experience, on old legends
and folk-tales collected in his own day, but to trust to his imagination
as that was quickened by what knowledge he had of life in the inner
isles and in Argyllshire, and by the very atmosphere of known places
there that seemed to demand, as Stevenson put it, to have stories
invented to fit them.
It is said, too,--Mrs. Sharp gives her authority to the story,--that
friendship with the woman to whom he dedicated "Pharais," "E.W.R.,"
stimulated him to the work. "Because of her beauty, her strong sense of
life, and of her joy of life," writes Mrs. Sharp in her memoir of her
husband, "because of her keen intuitions and mental alertness, her
personality stood for him as a symbol of the heroic women of Greek and
Celtic days, a symbol that, as he expressed it, unlocked new doors in
his mind and put him in touch with the ancestral memories of his race."
And Mrs. Sharp quotes him further as declaring "without her there would
have been no 'Fiona Macleod.'" Perhaps; but I doubt if, after the Celtic
Renaissance had won a hearing, anything could have prevented Sharp from
following what was, after all, a natural bent. I am not going to argue
the matter out, but he himself admitted that his development as "Fiona
Macleod" began "while I was still a child," and there is proof in almost
every volume he published, even before he knew Mrs. Rinder ("E.W.R.,"
must of course be the author of "The Shadow of Arvor"), that his
tendency was toward what became characteristic of "Fiona Macleod."
It was the love that Sharp had for all sorts of "psychic things," the
mysterious, the unaccountable, the hidden, that led him to believe that
"without her there would have been no 'Fiona Macleod.'" Sharp himself,
when his "other self," with sense of humor alert, was more than willing
to admit that it is easy to believe what one wishes to believe; and he
delighted to tell a story at the expense of Mr. Yeats illustrative of
the trite fact. Sharp went one day, in London, to call on Mr. Yeats.
When lunch-time came, they set about cooking eggs. Mr. Yeats held them
in a frying-pan over the little fire in the grate. As they slipped
about, Mr. Yeats, all the while looking back in the room away from the
fire as he talked to Sharp, allowed the pan to tip too far and the eggs
fell out into the fire. So absorbed was he in the topic of conversation,
most appropriately the disappearance of material things, that he did
not notice the catastrophe or the quick disappearance of the eggs among
the coals. When his perfervidness subsided for a moment, he turned to
see if they were done. "There, what did I tell you!" said he; "our talk
of these things has conjured up the powers and the eggs are gone." Sharp
did not tell him of the accident. And there were no more eggs in the
room to have for lunch.
One of the reasons that led William Sharp to write "Silence Farm" (1899)
was to have something under his own name that might be very different
from the stories of "Fiona Macleod." And "Silence Farm" is very
different, a story without the distinguishing qualities of "Pharais" or
"The Divine Adventure," and suggesting kinship to the work of his other
self only through certain likenesses of domestic irregularity in the
family of Archibald Ruthven to other domestic irregularity in the family
of Torcall Cameron of "The Mountain Lovers." Though not of so original a
kind, perhaps, as the best of the "Fiona Macleod" work, "Silence Farm"
has to it a "wholeness of good tissue" that belongs to little work of
this most uneven writer. "Silence Farm," I would emphasize again as I
emphasized at the opening of this paper, is better written, both as
regards style and architectonic quality, and it is a truer reading of
life, than any of the Highland stories. Though it is a story of to-day,
and about a life much like that made familiar by the writers of the
Kailyard school, it is not to them, but to such kindred
unsentimentalized work as Mr. Shan Bullock's, that you instinctively
compare it. The people, indeed, are the same dour Presbyterians, though
the one writes of Scotland and the other of the North of Ireland. And as
you compare the material of "Silence Farm" with that of "The Squireen,"
for instance, you note, too, that the art of both is the art of Mr.
Hardy.
There is little modern writing with which to compare the Highland
stories of Sharp. It is not that the Highlands have not been much
written about, but that they have been written about intimately by but
few. No part of the world so out of the world as their outlying islands,
the Hebrides, has been so bewritten by travelers from Martin's time to
our own; but comparatively few have known either islands or mainland
well enough to dare novels of their life, and of those who have so dared
no one up to the time of Sharp had written a great realistic story of
the Highlands, and but one or two great romances. Now we have Mr. Neil
Munro, like Sharp a very uneven writer, whose "Children of Tempest"--to
take one of his best stories--now delights and now tortures you; and
yesterday we had William Black, famous for sunsets. Black knew the
Hebrides well, very well for a Lowlandman turned Londoner, and he
labored hard to make his books true and beautiful. Unfortunately it was
not in him to do fine work, not even the best sort of the second order
of novelists,--such work as Trollope's, for instance, which by dint of
faithfulness and humanity almost persuades you now and then that it is
of higher than second order. Black was faithful to what he saw and
broadly sympathetic, but his writing not only lacks distinction, but,
even at its best, as in "The Princess of Thule," home thrust to one's
interest. Yet, such as it is, it is all but all that we have which
attempts to put before us any broad view of Highland life. The one man
of the generation older than the generation of Mr. Sharp who might have
drawn Highland life greatly, Robert Buchanan, was diverted all his life,
as Sharp was in the twenties and thirties, from doing what he would to
what would boil the pot, but he left at least one story, a story of
Sutherland, "A Child of Nature," to prove to us what his reading of
Highland life might have been. Had Stevenson been born a Highlander, he
might have given us both novels of the Highlands of the order of "Weir
of Hermiston," and romances really Highland in quality, as "Kidnapped"
and "Catriona" are not.
I suppose that, back of all the failure to deal realistically with
Highland life, this rare attainment of a romance of Highland life at all
faithful to it, is the making of the Highlander into a stage hero by
Scott. There are those to-day who fail to find any glamour in "Waverley"
or "Rob Roy" or "The Legend of Montrose," but it is still there to me,
investing the figures of Fergus MacIvor and the MacGregor and the
Children of the Mist as it did in childhood, when I was so fascinated
that I prized my Campbell plaided paper soldiers next to my Continentals
in blue and buff. In going through an old trunkful of school-books only
the other day, I came upon one of these bonneted fellows, still
wonderfully preserved, in an old atlas of the heavens, and then I knew
all of a flash why it was that the poor boy soldiers that I saw in
Highland accoutrement in the yard of Edinburgh Castle during the Boer
War so disappointed me by their appearance and bearing. They were not
half so brave as the piper who used to make the rounds of my boyhood's
town and bring tears to my eyes with his "Campbells are Comin'." I write
this that my quarrel with much of what Sharp has written of the
Highlands, that portion that seems to me sentimentalized or one-sided,
may not be put down to lack of appreciation of the romance, the
eeriness, and otherworldliness that there unquestionably are in that
life.
It is their aloofness from the everyday story, their unusual use of the
supernatural that has given the longer stories written out of the "Fiona
mood," as Mr. Sharp once spoke of his possession, their appeal to most
readers, but there is here in America a class who put the highest
valuation on the shorter stories Mr. Sharp called "spiritual tales." To
those who hold this view "The Divine Adventure" is of the nature of
revelation. To me it is hardly this, but very interesting, not so much
for its putting of the relations of Body, Will, and Spirit to one
another in life and at death, as for its beautiful writing, and for its
definite betrayal, when its author is writing most intimately, of a
man's attitude, though he published the story as the work of "Fiona
Macleod." These "spiritual tales" do not belong, all of them, to his
"Fiona Macleod" period, for "Vistas" (1894) contains many of them,
though they are cast here in dialogue form, and there are others among
the work published under his own name. In fact, the writing under the
two names never becomes liker in quality and intention than when it is
"spiritual." The sketch from Part II of "The Dominion of Dreams" (1899),
entitled "The Book of the Opal," for instance, is written on the very
key of "Fragments of the Lost Journals of Piero di Cosimo" (1896), far
apart their subject material, and "The Hill-Wind" by "W.S." dedicated
as it is to "F.M.," might well be a rejected passage from "The Mountain
Lovers." There is the color of the Highlands and Islands about many of
these mystical stories, about "The Hill-Wind," by "W.S." and "The Wind,
the Shadow, and the Soul," the epilogue "F.M." wrote to the "Dominion of
Dreams"; but most of these shorter mystical tales have not the tang and
savor of farm-home on lonely moors, or fisher's hut on the lonelier
machar, that is characteristic of most of the tales long and short, that
deal with modern days.
Nor are the meanings of these "spiritual tales" consistently indicated
in symbols taken from Scottish life, nor is their supernaturalism native
to it. Mrs. Spoer (Ada Goodrich-Freer), in her "Outer Isles" (1902),
tells us "The Celtic Gloom" amuses the Hebridean. If so, what effect
would such discussion as that of "The Lynn of Dreams" and "Maya" have
upon him? But if such essays are not written out of Highland life, they
are none the less interesting, and in the case of "Maya," with its
consideration of waking dream, beautiful as art, and valuable, too, as a
contribution to science.