Chapter 8
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."
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.
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.