Irish Plays and Playwrights Part 12

_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 pa.s.sage 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 craftsmans.h.i.+p.

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 n.o.ble 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 trans.m.u.te 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 princ.i.p.al 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 cla.s.s the men of Ireland are "Irishmen" and "Scotch Irishmen," and until yesterday, therefore, Nationalists and Unionists.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

And yet, definite as are these distinctions, life in the various parts of Ireland seems much alike, cla.s.s for cla.s.s, 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 n.o.bility. 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 cla.s.smates 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sion 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 cla.s.s.

We feel her tireless energy, her drive, her high pride, a.s.sets 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"The Clancy Name," "The Crossroads," "Harvest," and "Patriots" are all on themes that hit home at Irish inst.i.tutions, 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 a.s.sistant 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 inst.i.tution 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 inst.i.tution that Mr.

Robinson, from one point of view, might be thought to be attacking in the play; it is this inst.i.tution, 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 s.e.xual 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?