Irish Plays and Playwrights Part 4

In his younger years Mr. Yeats held that poetry is "the words that have gathered up the heart's desire of the world." His heart's desire was simpler in those days than his heart's desire of after years. Then he had a child's wistfulness for little things and put lines in his poems of Blake-like innocence and freshness. "The brown mice" that

"bob Round and round the oatmeal chest"

are out of memories of childhood, and many other of the similes of these early poems are out of the ways of wild little things that appeal so to children, perhaps because they are wild little things themselves. A later mood of Mr. Yeats is to hold of less account the things of out-of-doors, but still he uses as similes the ways of birds, as did the old Irish bards whose stories have so informed his. He never did describe nature for its own sake, but natural things gave him more figures than they do now, although always there have been in his lines many out of mythology. Summer days between Slieve Echtge and the western sea are, however, bringing the plovers and curlews and peewits back to his poetry. In the country of the Countess Cathleen, as everywhere in Ireland, you may hear "wind cry and water cry and curlew cry," and there, as all the world over,--

"Ill bodings are as native unto our hearts As are their spots unto the woodp.e.c.k.e.rs."

It is from such knowledge of country things come the fine lines about

"The dark folk, who live in souls Of pa.s.sionate men like bats in the dead trees";--

and such lines are coming again into his verse, even into the blank verse of his plays. The poems in which "the strong human call" is heard are more than the many who read Mr. Yeats hurriedly will think, and to those who know his story they reveal again and again a great and common sorrow. Whole poems and plays are often symbols of the poet's life. So may "The Countess Cathleen" be taken as well as "The King's Threshold."

"Ephemera," "The Dedication to a Book of Stories," "In the Seven Woods,"

"The Old Age of Queen Maeve," "The Folly of Being Comforted," "Old Memory," "Adam's Curse," as well as the folk-poems of the first volumes, are but little "dream-burdened," and pa.s.sages elsewhere have the human call. The feeling of Oisin nearing the coast of Ireland is, for instance, the common joy on nearing the sh.o.r.e of the homeland at the end of exile:--

"Remembrance, lifting her leanness, keened in the gates of my heart.

Till, fattening the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hay Came, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down; later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a sh.o.r.e far away, From the great gra.s.s-barnacle calling, and later the sh.o.r.e-weeds brown."

It is true, though, that the dream-drenched poems are those most characteristic of the author, those that give a note entirely new to English poetry. It is impossible to pick out one as more representative than another where so many are representative and where all are of highest achievement. Nowhere is his own individual note better sustained, however, than in the Michael Robartes poems or in "The Rose of Battle" or "Into the Twilight"; and the hold that dream has of him and the hold that human things have, chief among them love of country, are told with utmost distinction and inevitability of phrase in "To Ireland in the Coming Times" and in "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time."

I sometimes wonder, is the reason for the poet's holding so devotedly to spiritual things of his kind not the very same holding of his peasant countryman to the folk-tales that take him to a world as rich and gorgeous-hued as the Ireland about him is bare and gray, and to a church that prepares him for a better world after death? A large part of all poetry is the realization of the brevity of all beautiful things,--of bloom, of youth, of life; but no poet has more often lamented "Fate and Time and Change" than Mr. Yeats. It is, he says, "our narrow rooms, our short lives, our soon ended pa.s.sions and emotions put us out of conceit with sooty and feeble reality." So the poet seeks refuge in his own dream and in contemplation of the life from which he came and to which he will return, and--one almost dare say--in communication with which he now knows such joy. The poet's life is little because he has found out the littleness of earthly things; the peasant holds life little because his share of it has been so poor. If the peasant acquires riches by chance or by emigration, he sees as the poet that all he can have is as nothing, so short is the time he may hold it. Irish writers of the past have made this peasant only the jarvey wit; but if you read the old romances, or listen to the folk-tales still alive, you will learn that Mr. Yeats is at one with his countryman in this basic likeness.

There is a side of Irish life, the side the world knows best, that Mr.

Yeats does not present, but that which he does present is true, though the poet's personality is so dominant that we get more of this than of Ireland in his poetry. So it should be, so it is with every artist. All the world can ask of him is his interpretation of what he knows. Yet so native is Mr. Yeats that the atmosphere of his poetry is the very atmosphere of Ireland. The artist and the setting of his art are in an unwonted harmony. No reader of Mr. Yeats who knows the brooding landscape of West Ireland can escape that realization, but only he who has met the poet amid the scenes that inspired his verse may know how complete is their accord. Such a meeting was mine one lowering August day, in whose late afternoon we walked in the Woods of Coole. Then I knew at last what Mr. Yeats meant by "druid charm" and "druid light." I felt the "druid charm" that was potent in gray skies over gray water and gray rock and gray-green woods; the bewildering "druid light" flashed out as the sun followed westward the trail to Hy Brasil, leaving in the Atlantic skies wild after-glow of winter yellow.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] _Collected Works_. Stratford-on-Avon, 1908, vol. II, p. 251.

CHAPTER IV

MR. EDWARD MARTYN AND MR. GEORGE MOORE

The announcement of Mr. Edward Martyn as playwright of "The Irish Literary Theatre" was, outside of the narrow circle of his friends, a great surprise to all interested in letters in Ireland. But the almost simultaneous announcement that Mr. George Moore was lending his aid to the adventure was an even greater surprise. Mr. Moore had, of course, written more than once of Ireland, and there were many who had not forgotten the unpleasantnesses of "A Drama in Muslin" (1886), and Mr.

Martyn, though the author of "Morgante the Lesser" (1890), was not known as its author, as he had published it anonymously, and as it had not made enough of a stir for its anonymity to be disclosed. Yet for the landlord-author, who had turned his back on Ireland, to return to his country with a greater interest in its life and its writers than he had ever betrayed, was more remarkable than for another landlord of the same family connection, comparatively a stay-at-home landlord, to turn from sport and religion to the stage. Mr. Martyn had lived in London and his love of music had taken him to the Continent, but he had been something of a Nationalist, whereas Mr. Moore had lost few opportunities to scoff at the country his father had striven so unselfishly to aid. What of Mr.

Moore that was not French in 1899 was confessedly English.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Now that those interested have read "Ave," the first volume of the three of "Hail and Farewell," in which Mr. Moore is confessing the reasons of his return to Ireland and of his second departure from Ireland, they know that he had been mildly interested in Ireland as material for art as far back as 1894, and that it was Mr. Martyn who had interested him in the things of home. Mr. Moore tells us all about it more than explicitly in the "Overture" to his trilogy. In the first chapter he tells us that the interest faded away gradually, to be reawakened in 1899 by a visit paid him in London by Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats, who came to ask his help in founding a "Literary Theatre in Dublin." Then Mr.

Moore learned the story of that theatre's inception, a story to him "disappointingly short and simple. When Yeats had said that he had spent the summer at Coole with Lady Gregory, I saw it all. Coole is but three miles from Tillyra [Mr. Martyn's estate in Galway]; Edward is often at Coole; Lady Gregory and Yeats are often at Tillyra; Yeats and Edward had written plays--the drama brings strange fowls to roost."

It takes Mr. Moore many pages to tell why it was he joined the three in their project, and many more pages to tell of their collaboration during the first two years of the three years that were the life of "The Irish Literary Theatre." The four are, indeed, the princ.i.p.al characters of Mr.

Moore's "Ave"--I had almost said his novel "Ave"--himself, Mr. Martyn, Mr. Yeats, and Lady Gregory, to mention them in the order of prominence that Mr. Moore gives them.

Lady Gregory and Mr. Yeats have learned their art, the highest and most difficult of all forms of literary art, so that each is sure in the shaping of fable and emotion to the stage, though neither is to drama native-born as was Synge. Mr. Martyn and Mr. Moore have neither of them, however, learned the art of the playwright. Mr. Martyn has the root of the matter in him, but he remains the amateur. Mr. Moore was once the amateur, even in the novel, in "A Modern Lover" (1883), for instance, true as that story is to the London art life and aristocratic life it is intended to reflect, but he has since then won his way, book by book, to the position, now that Mr. Hardy has given up the novel, of first novelist of the English-speaking peoples. Had he studied the play as painfully and as long as he has studied the novel, it may be that Mr.

Moore had conquered it, too, though I doubt it, for the concentration necessary to drama is alien to his method as a novelist. As it is, his best plays are but the good journeyman work of one who is a skilled literary craftsman. Mr. Martyn has more originality of theme, more intimacy with Irish character, a surer instinct for effective situation, and more n.o.bility of intention, though Mr. Moore's greater power over words gives his plays a dignity as art that the plays of Mr. Martyn do not attain.

Alone of the quartette that founded "The Irish Literary Theatre," Mr.

Martyn is possessed of none of the instincts of the publicist. Lady Gregory has edited articles about ideals in Ireland at home, and on the lecture platform she has stoutly fought the battles of "The Playboy of the Western World" in America; Mr. Yeats has ever delighted in writing letters to the newspapers and he has preached the evangel of the Renaissance from Edinburgh to San Francisco; and Mr. George Moore is a controversialist pamphleteer even before he is a novelist. In the few articles about the movement that Mr. Martyn has written, brief articles all of them, there is, however, clear indication of the spirit in which he wrote his plays, if comparatively little discussion of his art. In the second number of "Beltaine" (February, 1900), in an article ent.i.tled "A Comparison between Irish and English Theatrical Audiences," Mr.

Martyn declares that he sees in Ireland, instead of the "vast cosmopolitanism and vulgarity" of England, "an idealism founded upon the ancient genius of the land." It is wholly in accord with the spirit of this declaration that Mr. Martyn has written his more important plays, all of them, in fact, but the satires on weaklings and officials he calls "A Tale of a Town" (1902) and "The Place Hunters" (1905). He writes little of the peasants, being less interested in them than are Mr. Yeats and Lady Gregory, and therefore less acquainted with them. If one may judge from his writings the intimates of Mr. Martyn have been among his own landlord cla.s.s, the priests, and the politicians. It is the landlords and middle-cla.s.s people that occupy the foreground of his plays, Peg Inerny in "Maeve" (1899) being the only important character a peasant, unless Mrs. Font in "The Enchanted Sea" (1902) can be called a member of a cla.s.s that she was born to, but from which her marriage removed her.

This question of the cla.s.s the plays should present was one of those that led to the withdrawal of Mr. Martyn from the dramatic movement. A more definite cause, perhaps, was the unanimous determination of Lady Gregory, Mr. Yeats, and Mr. Moore that his "A Tale of a Town" could not be presented by "The Irish Literary Theatre" as he wrote it if the standards of that theatre were to be preserved. Its author's magnanimity in turning it over to Mr. Moore to be rewritten,--as it was, being presented as "The Bending of the Bough" (1900),--was revealed by Mr.

Moore in "Samhain" (October, 1901), and very much more fully, if less kindly, in "Ave" (1911).

In its way their refusal to play Mr. Martyn's "A Tale of a Town" was as creditable to the other powers in the theatre as was his magnanimity in giving them the play to do with as they would. They knew their refusal to play it might lead him to withdraw his support of the theatre and, in the end, it was a factor in bringing about that result. After their rejection of "A Tale of a Town," however, he still gave "The Irish Literary Theatre" his support, allowing it to put on his "Maeve," and in 1901 contributing to "Samhain" (October), "A Plea for a National Theatre in Ireland." Such a theatre Mr. Martyn had the power to give Ireland, but he did not give it, when it was thought he might, and in 1902 all hope of his giving his money for such a purpose was destroyed by his transference of a fund of fifty thousand dollars to the Catholic Pro-Cathedral in Dublin "for the purpose of founding and supporting a Palestrina choir."

That Mr. Martyn was still a force to be reckoned with is revealed by the trouble Mr. Yeats went to, in "Samhain" of October, 1902, to explain why it was that the plays of the Irish National Dramatic Company were either folk-drama or drama whose life was the "life of poetry" Mr. Martyn had argued in "The United Irishmen," which up to the time of the presentation of "In the Shadow of the Glen" was a stanch supporter of the dramatic policies of Mr. Yeats, that the actors of the company should be trained to the drama of modern society. "The acting of plays like 'Deirdre,' and of 'Cathleen ni Houlihan,'" writes Mr. Yeats, "with its speech of the country people, did not seem to him a preparation. It is not, but that is as it should be. Our movement is a return to the people, like the Russian movement of the early seventies, and the drama of society could but magnify a condition of life which the countryman and the artisan could but copy to their hurt. The play that is to give them a quite natural pleasure should either tell them of their own life or of that life of poetry where every man can see his own image, because there alone does human nature escape from arbitrary conditions. Plays about drawing-rooms are written for the middle cla.s.ses of great cities, for the cla.s.ses who live in drawing-rooms, but if you would uplift the man of the roads you must write about the roads, or about the people of romance, or about great historical people."

Neither "Maeve" nor "The Enchanted Sea" can be called a drawing-room play, though both introduce us to "drawing-room people," but "The Heather Field" (1899), Mr. Martyn's first play, and his greatest success is a drawing-room play, as in a minor way are "A Tale of a Town" and "The Place Hunters." These last two plays are failures; but they are not failures, I think because they are drawing-room plays, but because Mr.

Martyn is less effective with a full stage than with two couples or so and, princ.i.p.ally, because he is less successful with social and political questions than with those that concern the individual.

Whatever value one puts upon "The Heather Field" it cannot be denied that it was a popular success and that it was praised by critics whose judgment is discerning. It is perhaps because it is a variant of the old theme of the war between man the idealist and woman the materialist that it so appealed to young men, troubled themselves as to whether to follow their star or to accept the chains that; wife and children impose. It was enough for the audience that witnessed its first performances in the Antient Concert Rooms, Dublin, May 9, 10, 13, 1899, that it showed a man at war with the despotism of fact, as Ireland, preeminently the Celtic Land, has so long been. It was not remarkably acted, by an insufficiently rehea.r.s.ed and not very understanding scratch company, and yet it impressed its audiences more favorably than "The Countess Cathleen" (1892), an unequivocally great poetic drama; and these audiences were the most cultivated Dublin can boast.

"The Heather Field" is the story of the going-mad of Carden Tyrrell, a landlord of the west of Ireland. From the first he is represented to us as a man to whom as to so many of his countrymen dream is reality and reality dream. His wife, to whom the realities are very instant, urges him to do as others do, to entertain, to hunt, at least to do something practical. For her he has abandoned the ideal world he had built up for himself from his books and his dreams and is trying farming. Yet his temperament is such that he must idealize even this. When the curtain rises he is still busy with the project, long since undertaken, of reclaiming a wind-swept heather field fronting the Atlantic and of making it into the best of pasture land. That reclamation and transformation has become a pa.s.sion with him, and soon we feel that it is the symbol of that quality in him that is untamed, incurably "ideal."

To free that field of rocks and to drain its bogs he has mortgaged his estate, and, in the play, before the success or failure of his undertaking is proved, he mortgages almost all that remains to him to improve the land below, which the draining of the heather field has turned into a swamp. His wife, to prevent this last folly, strives to have control of his property taken away from him, but his friend, Barry Ussher, believing that restraint would make Tyrrell mad indeed, so intimidates a hesitating physician that Mrs. Tyrrell fails in her most natural plan to save herself and her child from ruin by having her husband declared incompetent, and, if necessary, restrained. With his friend's a.s.sistance Tyrrell has won his fight against his wife.

Obstinacy in the treatment of some tenants that his debts have driven him to evict rouses such hatred against Tyrrell, until then a loved landlord, that the police hold it necessary to follow him with an escort that he may not be shot by his people. To avoid being so followed, Tyrrell keeps within doors and so intensifies his malady. The catastrophe comes when, on his boy's first spring search for wild flowers, the child brings him a handful of heather buds from the heather field. Their message is that the mountain will revert to waste again.

Even in his "ideal domain" reality has a.s.serted itself. His ideal world crumbles for the instant, and his reason with it, and forever. But after a moment's agony ideality triumphantly rea.s.serts itself, and in mad ecstasy Tyrrell, his years fallen from him, pa.s.ses from sight crying out at the beauty of a world that is to him now forever a world of mornings in which, as he says, "the rain across a saffron sun trembles like gold harpstrings through the purple Irish spring.... The voices--I hear them now triumphant in a silver glory of song!" Such is the play, "aching and lofty in its loveliness."

Is this ending, or is it not, sadder than the catastrophe of "Ghosts"?

Certainly to "Ghosts" it owes something, and to "The Wild Duck" more than something. A quality as of Ibsen pervades the play, and it has, too, back of it a background of nature and of thought that is beautiful in the way the background of nature and of thought is beautiful and compensating in the plays of Ibsen.

In his introduction to "The Heather Field," which was published before its presentation, Mr. Moore writes, "Although all right and good sense are on the wife's side, the sympathy is always with Carden." So it was on the presentation of the play in Dublin, Mr. Yeats writing in "The Dome," "Our Irish playgoers sympathized with this man so perfectly that they hissed the doctors who found that he was mad." Such an att.i.tude is characteristically Irish; and equally characteristically English was the reception of this play when Mr. Thomas Kingston presented it at a matinee at the Strand Theatre in London. Mr. Yeats is again the authority: "The London playgoers ... sympathized with the doctors, and held the divine vision a dream." Mr. Moore praises "The Heather Field"

more forthrightly in "Samhain" of October, 1901, holding that "'The Heather Field' has been admitted to be the most thoughtful of modern prose plays written in English, the best constructed, the most endurable to a thoughtful audience." Patriotism or kins.h.i.+p, love of paradox or desire to a.s.suage feelings hurt by the rough treatment of "A Tale of a Town," may any or all of them be called upon to explain so sweeping a statement. But none of such motives could account for its praise by Mr.

Beerbohm in the London "Sat.u.r.day Review." "Max" is often paradoxical, but he is not paradoxical here: "Not long ago this play was published as a book, with a preface by Mr. George Moore, and it was more or less vehemently disparaged by the critics. Knowing that it was to be produced later in Dublin, and knowing how hard it is to dogmatize about a play until one has seen it acted, I confined myself to a very mild disparagement of it. Now that I have seen it acted, I am sorry that I disparaged it at all. It turns out to be a very powerful play indeed." I have quoted Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore and Mr. Beerbohm, not only because I have not seen the play on the stage but because, on reading it, its effect is one that puts my judgment at sea. Years ago as I read it it gripped me hard, but when I read it now and think it over now, I am at a loss to see why, done as it is done, I should have been so moved by it.

Now I am moved greatly by but two situations. Both of these are in the last act. One of them is Tyrrell's revulsion against the bad news that his brother Miles brings from Dublin of the mortgagee's refusal to extend. His wife tells their friends that she is ruined, that "pretty nearly all" their property is mortgaged, but Tyrrell cries out, "All, do you say? No--not all. This vulture cannot touch the heather field! My hope,--it is my only hope, and it will save me in the end. Ha, ha! These wise ones! They did not think the barren mountain of those days worth naming in their deed. But now that mountain is a great green field worth more than all they can seize, (_with a strange intensity_) and it is mine--all mine!"

The other situation that moves me greatly is that at the very close of the play, that from which I quoted a while back, in which Tyrrell's madness becomes evident in his belief that he is a youth again, with all the world before him to do with as he will.

The characters in "The Heather Field" are less rigid than those in the later plays, but even in this play you feel about them, as you feel so often about the characters of Hawthorne, that they are characters chosen to interpret an idea rather than children of the imagination or portraits done from observation of life.

As one recalls the motive and situations and background and symbolism of "The Heather Field," not having read the play for some time, it seems far finer than when one returns to it. Fine, too, it must seem to any one reading a scenario of it and not offended, as one reading it constantly is by the inability of its dialogue to represent more of the person speaking than his point of view. The dialogue of Mr. Martyn is almost never true dramatic speech, and not only not true dramatic speech, but despite the very clear differentiation of the characters, with little of their personality or temperament in it.

"Maeve" has always seemed to me a lesser play than "The Heather Field,"

and it now leaves me even colder than of old. Nor, though I can see how fine in conception was the character of Mrs. Font in "The Enchanted Sea," does that one character seem to me, now, to redeem the undeveloped possibilities of the situations of the play, the incomplete characters of Guy and Mask and the failure of the dialogue a.s.signed to the characters to approach true dramatic speech. "Maeve" is the better play of the two. With all its shortcomings it has about it an unearthliness of atmosphere, a quiet coldness of beauty that has come of the thought Mr. Martyn had, as he wrote it, of the moonlight on the Burren Hills in his home country. In this one respect Mr. Martyn has done what he would, for he holds that "the greatest beauty like the old Greek sculptures is always cold."

Mr. Martyn calls "Maeve" "a psychological drama in two acts." It relates the story of the last day and night in the life of a visionary girl, the hereditary princess of Burren in Clare, in the west of Ireland. On the eve of her marriage to Hugh Fitz Walter, a rich young Englishman, whom she will wed only for her father's sake to reestablish him in his position as "The O'Heynes" among the neighboring gentry, she wanders off into the Burren Hills with her old nurse Peg Inerny. Peg has fascinated Maeve O'Heynes with tales of "the other people," convincing Maeve, as she is convinced herself, that she changes from the old vagrant peasant whom the countryside half fears into Queen Maeve, the great Amazon of the Cuchulain legends. Maeve O'Heynes in her own dreams has seen great heroes and heroines of Ireland's legendary past, and she believes that they still live among the fairies as many a peasant to-day beside Peg Inerny believes. So Maeve follows Peg to the mountains, though it is her wedding-eve, to see these great people of old time and to meet a lover she has seen in vision, the ideal man of her dreams. She finds her way home several hours later through the white moonlight of the bitter March night. Then, in a sort of trance, looking out of her window in the half-ruined castle to the ruined abbey, the mysterious round tower, the stony mountains, she beholds the vision of Queen Maeve, with an attendant troupe of harpers and pages, rise from the cairn and approach the castle. As the troupe returns from castle to cairn Maeve's spirit pa.s.ses with it under the Northern lights into the land of the ever-young of Tir-nan-Ogue. When her sister goes to call her to make ready for her wedding, she finds Maeve sitting still and cold at the open cas.e.m.e.nt.