Chapter 19

Miss Dix is author of several plays--in addition to those from _Allison's Lad_ included in the play-list, of _Across the Border_, and, with the late Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland, of the frequently acted _Rose of Plymouth Town_. She has also written several favorite historical stories, including _Merrylips. The Captain of the Gate_ is a tragedy of Cromwell's ruthless devastation of Ireland. The determined and heroic captain surrenders, to face an ignominious death, to keep his word and ensure delaying the advance of the enemy upon an unprepared countryside, and his courage inspires exhausted and failing men to like heroism. This is an effective piece of dramatic presentation.

_Percy Mackaye_: GETTYSBURG

Mr. Percy Mackaye has been most active in the movement for a community theatre in the United States and for the revival of pageantry. He contends rightly that this development might be one of the strongest possible influences for true Americanism, and his dramatic work has all been directed toward such a theatre. Most notable are his pageants and masques, particularly _Caliban by the Yellow Sands_, for the Shakespeare Tercentenary; his play _The Scarecrow_, a lively dramatization of Hawthorne's _Feathertop_; his opera _Rip van Winkle_, for which Reginald De Koven composed music; and _The Canterbury Pilgrims_, in which the Wife of Bath is the heroine of further robustious adventures. Mr. Mackaye is also translator, with Professor Tablock, of the _Modern Reader's Chaucer_. The little sketch presented here is taken from a volume of _Yankee Fantasies_, in which various observations of past and present New England life are recorded. Stephen Crane's _The Red Badge of Courage_, a powerful story of the Civil War, is a most excellent help to realizing what the boy Lige really endured in those days of battle.

Mr. Mackaye has adopted here a regularly rhythmic verse without the conventional capital letters at the beginnings of lines --perhaps to typify the simple homeliness of the talk.

_Harold Brighouse_: LONESOME-LIKE

Mr. Brighouse has been best represented in this country by an excellent comedy, _Hobson's Choice_, which was widely played and was printed in the Drama League series of plays (1906). His other best-known work here is the present play, and _The Price of Coal_ (1909), a picturing of the hard life of miners' wives and their Spartan firmness in expectation of fatal accidents. He has produced and published a number of other plays, among them those listed in the bibliography. Mr. Brighouse represents in this volume the work of the English Repertory theatres, which parallel the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, the Glasgow Repertory Theatre, and various European stage-societies. That at Manchester, with which he has been associated, is directed by Miss Isabel Horniman, has seen beautiful stage-settings designed by Mr. Robert Burne-Jones, and counts among its dramatists such well-known men as Messrs. Allan Monkhouse, author of _Mary Broome_, a sombre and powerful tragedy; Stanley Houghton, and Gilbert Cannan. The Liverpool Theatre has become even more famous through the dramatic work of Mr. John Drinkwater. The Little Theatre movement in this country, our Drama League, and the various dramatic societies in our colleges and cities are our nearest parallel to these repertory theatres.

_Lonesome-Like_, Mr. Brighouse's most effective short play, is written in a modified Lancashire dialect, the speech of the village weavers and spinners. Many of the words are English of Elizabethan days and earlier, derived mostly from Anglo-Saxon.

_Gradely_ (graithly) means willingly, meekly or decently; _clem_ means starve; _sithee_ is see you or look you; _clogs_ are shoes with wooden soles and leather uppers, and _dungarees_, garments of coarse cotton cloth rather like overalls. _A_ is used throughout for _I_.

As in many English stories, an extreme and painful dread of the _workus_, or poorhouse, provides a strong motive force.

_John Millington Synge_: RIDERS TO THE SEA

The work of the Irish Renaissance in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin reached its most powerful and tragic height in this tragedy, which Mr. Yeats compared to the Antigone and (Edipus of Sophocles). Synge at first wandered about Europe, poetizing; it was Yeats who brought him back to study and embody in genuine literature the poetry of life among his own people. On the bleak Arran Islands he lived in a fisherman's cottage, and through the floor of his room heard the dialect which he presents in simple and poignant beauty in this drama of hopeless struggle. The "second sight"--called "the gift" in _Campbell of Kilmhor_, and an incident also in _The Riding to Lithend_--was a sort of prophetic vision altogether credited among Celtic peoples, as among those of Scott's _Lady of the Lake_. When the mother sees the "riders to the sea,"--her drowned son and her living son riding together,--she feels convinced that he must soon die. The sharp cries of her grief and, above all, the peace of her resignation at the end, after all hope is gone, make this, as a writer in the _Manchester Guardian_ is quoted as calling it, "the tragic masterpiece of our language in our time; wherever it has been in Europe, from Galway to Prague, it has made the word tragedy mean something more profoundly stirring and cleansing to the spirit than it did."

The speech of the people is not difficult to understand when you master a few of its peculiarities. One is the omission of words we generally include, as in, "Isn't it a hard and cruel man (who) won't hear...." Another is the common form "It was crying I was." A few phrases, like _what way_ for how, _the way_ for so that, _in it_ for here or near, and _itself_ for even, or with no particular meaning, as "Where is he itself?" The meanings of other words will be easily untangled.

_William Butler Yeats_: THE LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE

Mr. Yeats's best poetic dramas, and particularly this one, represent beyond question that "apex of beauty" to which Lady Gregory spoke of the Abbey Theatre dramatists as aspiring. This play is not founded on any particular Irish folk-tale. It is filled with the half-dread, half-envy with which the tellers of Irish legends seem to regard the fate of mortals bewitched by the Leprechaun or Good People. It is rich, too, with the music of beautiful words, without which, Mr. Yeats contends no play can be "of a great kind." He says too, "There is no poem so great that a fine speaker cannot make it greater, or that a bad ear cannot make it nothing."

Mr. Yeats has written broad comedy like Synge's _Shadow of the Glen_ and Lady Gregory's _Irish Comedies_; his _Pot of Broth_ is a most clever retelling of an old, comical tale. But it is by his mystical and poetical plays that he would be judged as playwright and poet--particularly _Deirdre_, which should be compared with Synge's _Deirdre of the Sorrows_; _The Unicorn of the Stars_, written in collaboration with Lady Gregory; _Cathleen Ni Hoolihan_, a dramatization of the spirit of Ireland; _The King's Threshold_, a high glorification of the poet's art, with a fable, based on an ancient Celtic rite, of the hunger strike; and _The Land of Heart's Desire_, most beautifully perfect of all.

_Gordon Bottomley_: THE RIDING TO LITHEND

"_The Riding to Lithend_ is an Icelandic play taken out of the noblest of the Sagas," wrote Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie in his review of the published drama in 1909. "[It] is a fight, one of the greatest fights in legend.... The subject is stirring, and Mr. Bottomley takes it into a very high region of poetry, giving it a purport beyond that of the original teller of the tale.... [The play] is not a representation of life; it is a symbol of life. In it life is entirely fermented into rhythm, by which we mean not only rhythm of words, but rhythm of outline also; the beauty and impressiveness of the play do not depend only on the subject, the diction, and the metre, but on the fact that it has distinct and most evident form, in the musician's sense of the word. It is one of those plays that reach the artist's ideal condition of music, in fact."

This is high praise; but who, after studying the play, will doubt that it is deserved? The powerfully moving events of the story indeed lead up to the climax in a forthright and exciting manner. The terror of the house-women and the thrall, the fearful love of Gunnar's mother Rannveig, and the caution of Kolskegg his brother, who "sailed long ago and far away from us" in obedience to the doom or sentence of the Thing--all these bring out sharply the quite reckless daring of Gunnar himself, who braves the decree. A mysterious and epic touch is added by the three ancient hags-evidently of these minor Norns who watch over individual destinies and announce the irrevocable doom of the gods. It was Hallgerd who broke their thread, representing, of course, Gunnar's span of life.

The centre of interest, as well as the spring of the action, is clearly Hallgerd, descendant of Sigurd Fafnirsbane and of Brynhild--

... a hazardous desirable thing, A warm unsounded peril, a flashing mischief, A divine malice, a disquieting voice.

She, and not any superstitious belief in "second-sight" and death decreed, is the cause of Gunnar's remaining outlawed. She wrangles about the headdress, not because she particularly wants it, but to send her husband on a perilous mission to secure it. She says openly that she has "set men at him to show forth his might ... planned thefts and breakings of his word" to stir him to battle. Mr. Abercrombie believes that "She loves her husband Gunnar, but she refuses to give him any help in his last fight, in order that she may see him fight better and fiercer." We should, then, have to suppose that her amazing speech at his death--

O clear sweet laughter of my heart, flow out! It is so mighty and beautiful and blithe To watch a man dying--to hover and watch--

is not for the blow Gunnar had given her when she "planned thefts and breakings of his word," but is rather, as the lines powerfully indicate, the exultation of a descendant of the Valkyrie watching above the battlefields.

Really poetical plays--plays which are both poetic and strongly dramatic--are indeed exceedingly rare. Mr. Bottomley is one of the few who have produced such drama in English. For many years he printed his work privately, in beautiful editions for his friends; but of late several of the plays have been made available--_King Lear's Wife in Georgian Poetry_, 1913-15, and in a volume of the same title, including _Midsummer Eve_ and _The Riding to Lithend_, published in London last year.

Those who want more stories of this sort will find them in _Thorgils_ and other Icelandic stories modernized by Mr. Hewlett; in the _Burnt Njal_, translated by Sir George Dasent, from which this story itself springs; and in the translations by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris, the _Saga Library_--particularly the stories of the Volsungs and Nibelungs, and of Grettir the Strong.

_louvre_--a smoke-hole in the roof

_thrall_--a captive or serf

_bill_--a battle-ax

_second sight_--prophetic vision, as in _Riders to the Sea_ and _Campbell of Kilmhor_

_fetch_--one's double; seeing it is supposed to be a sign that one is _fey_ or fated to die

_wimpled_--"clouted up," as Hallgerd expresses it, in a headdress rather like a nun's. A widow, apparently, might wear her hair uncovered

_byre_--cow-barn

_midden_--manure

_quean_--in Middle-English, a jade; in Scotch, a healthy lass; the history of this word and of _queen_, which come from the same root, is strange and interesting

_ambry_--press

_Romeborg_--Rome; _Mickligarth_--Constantinople (Viking names)

_Athcliath_--evidently an Irish port

_mumpers_--beggars

_Markfleet_--a _fleet_ in an inlet of the sea

_mote or gemote_--a formal assembly for making laws

_thing_--assembly for judgment, or parliament; this is an early Icelandic meaning of the word _thing_

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PLAYS FOR READING IN HIGH SCHOOLS

+Thomas Bailey Aldrich+

MERCEDES: A tragic story of the inextinguishable hatreds and reprisals of the French invasion of Spain in 1810, and of a woman's terrible heroism.

In _Collected Works_, Houghton Mifflin.

PAULINE PAVLOVNA: Cleverly executed, slight plot in dialogue, wherein the character of the hero is sharply revealed; reminiscent of Browning's _In a Balcony_, though with a quite different scheme.

_Ibid._

+Mary Austin+

THE ARROW-MAKER: The tragedy of a noble medicine-woman of a tribe of California Indians, and of a weak and selfish chief.

Duffield.

+Granville Barker+

Rococo: In which we discover a clergyman and his relatives in physical altercation over a rococo vase, and follow their dispute to a determinative conclusion.

Sidgwick and Jackson, London.

VOTE BY BALLOT: A drama of English elections and the forces involved.

Sidgwick and Jackson.

THE VOYSEY INHERITANCE: The inheritance is a dishonored name and a dishonest business.

In _Three Plays_, Sidgwick and Jackson.

+Granville Barker and Dion Calthorpe+

HARLEQUINADE: Its development from the days of Persephone, Momus, and Charon is displayed and explained by Alice and her uncle.

Sidgwick and Jackson.

+James Barrie+

THE ADMIRABLE CRICHTON: In the struggle for existence on a desert island, the family butler provides the brains and safety for an English family; the party is then rescued, and returns to the impeccable conventions of London.

Scribner's, New York; Hodder and Stoughton, London.

ALICE SIT-BY-THE FIRE: A mother with keen insight and a delightful sense of humor has to deal with a serious attack of romantic imagination in her very young daughter, who feels responsible for the conduct of the family.

Scribner's; Hodder and Stoughton.

THE OLD LADY SHOWS HER MEDALS: Mrs. Dowie, a charwoman who has resorted to desperate remedies in order to have some part in the war, goes through an agonizing crisis of exposure, into real joy and sharp sorrow. The rich humor of the characters makes this quite unique among plays of its type.

In _Echoes of the War_, Scribner's.

THE WELL-REMEMBERED VOICE.

_Ibid._

PETER PAN: A charming fairy drama of the baby from the Never-Never Land and of his make-believe play with his friends in the nursery.

Scribner's.

THE TWELVE-POUND LOOK: On the eve of achieving knighthood the hero suffers a startling disclosure which leads him to look suspiciously for the "twelve-pound look" in his lady's eyes.

In _Half-Hours_, Scribner's.

WHAT EVERY WOMAN KNOWS: As we behold the creation of John Shand's career by Maggie his wife, who lacks charm, and particularly as we observe her campaign against a woman fully possessed of charm, we want to learn "what every woman knows." The secret is enlightening.

Scribner's.

+Lewis Beach+

BROTHERS, A SARDONIC COMEDY: Two "poor whites" quarrel violently over a worthless inheritance, and then combine in arson to prevent their mother from getting it: a disquieting and searching study of depths of shiftlessness and passionate meanness.

In _Fifty Contemporary One-Act Plays_, edited by Frank Shay and Pierre S. Loving. Frank Shay.

THE CLOD: A powerful drama of the flare-up of a stolid and apparently unfeeling nature in the flame of the pity and horror of war.

In _Washington Square Plays_, Doubleday.

+Jacinto Benavente+

HIS WIDOW'S HUSBAND: An absurd comedy of the small gossip and rigid conventions in a Spanish provincial capital. (Translated by John Garrett Underhill.)

In Plays, _First Series_, Scribner's.

+Arnold Bennett+

A GOOD WOMAN: A farcical triangular plot with particularly good comic characters.

In _Polite Farces_, Doran.

THE STEPMOTHER: Satirical presentment of a lady novelist, her efficient secretary, and her stepson, not to mention the doctor downstairs; amusing studies in character.

_Ibid._

THE GREAT ADVENTURE: Good dramatization of the astounding adventures of Priam Farll (from _Buried Alive_), who attends his own funeral in Westminster Abbey, marries a young and suitable widow with whom his late valet has corresponded through a matrimonial bureau, and meets other amazing situations.

Doran.

THE TITLE: A delightful comedy in which several people who have denounced the disgraceful awarding of English titles have a bad time of it with Mrs. Culver, who does not propose to let slip the opportunity of being called "My Lady." You can probably guess which side wins in the end.

Doran.

+Gordon Bottomley+

KING LEAR'S WIFE: An episode in King Lear's earlier years, which throws much imaginative light on Goneril's and Cordelia's later treatment of their father. Lear's wife herself, as we might have guessed, is a pathetic figure.

Constable, London; also in _Georgian Poetry_, 1913-15.

MIDSUMMER EVE: Several farm maidservants meet to see their future lovers' spirits on Midsummer Eve, but see only the "fetch" or double of one of them, foretelling her death.

In _King Lear's Wife and Other Plays_, Constable.

+Anna Hempstead Branch+

ROSE OF THE WIND: A fairy play of the dancing and allurement of bewitched slippers, and of other wonders.

Houghton Mifflin.

+Harold Brighouse+

THE DOORWAY: A sharp and cruel picture of unsheltered people on a freezing night in London.

Joseph Williams, London.

THE GAME: A cocksure and triumphant girl meets more than her match in an old peasant woman, the mother of the man she wants to marry.

In Three Lancashire Plays, Samuel French.

HOBSON'S CHOICE: In which the eldest daughter at Hobson's plays a winning game against her tyrannous father and superior-feeling sisters, using a quite excellent but disregarded piece.

Constable, London; Doubleday, New York.

MAID OF FRANCE: An effective play in which Joan of Arc lays aside her old hate for the English soldiers, whom she discovers on French soil again.

Gowans and Gray, Glasgow.

THE OAK SETTLE

Gowans and Gray.

THE PRICE OF COAL: Picturing the stoical and terrible resignation to peril of death of old women in the coal regions--and presenting an unexpected ending.

Gowans and Gray.

+Harold Brock+

THE BANK ACCOUNT: A small but poignant tragedy of the savings-account which a clerk has counted upon to free him after many years of drudgery, and which he has entrusted to his stupid and vulgar and cheaply frivolous wife.

In Harvard Dramatic Club Plays, First Series, Brentano's.

+Alice Brown+

JOINT OWNERS IN SPAIN: The two most refractory inmates of an Old Ladies' Home have to face and solve the problem of living in the same room.

Walter H. Baker.

+Witter Bynner+

THE LITTLE KING: A delineation of the cruel suffering and the dauntless courage of the small Louis XVII; he refuses to be cowed by the bullying of his keeper or to let a poor boy assume his fate.

Kennerley.

+George Calderon+ idealized him meanwhile that her realization of the altered situation brings an astounding reaction.

Sidgwick and Jackson.

+Margaret Cameron+

THE TEETH OF THE GIFT HORSE: A pleasant farce built about two huge and hideous hand-painted vases and a charming little old lady who perpetrated them.

French.

+Gilbert Cannan+

EVERYBODY'S HUSBAND: Three generations of ladies discuss the individual characteristics of their husbands, but find them, after all, indistinguishable men.

Seeker, London.

JAMES AND JOHN: They are faced with their invalid mother's request that they crown many years of tedious sacrifice and atonement for their father's weak crime by taking him into their lives again.

In _Four Plays_, Sidgwick and Jackson.

MARY'S WEDDING: Bill's mother tries in vain to dissuade Mary from the certain and inescapable misery of marrying her drunkard son. Bill himself settles the problem.

_Ibid._

A SHORT WAY WITH AUTHORS: An entertaining farce showing how a great actor-manager goes about encouraging serious dramatic composition.

_Ibid._

+Harold Chapin+

AUGUSTUS IN SEARCH OF A FATHER: He returns from abroad and discusses with a night-watchman the problem of his search for his father.

THE LITTLE STONE HOUSE: A mother has denied herself everything to build a small mausoleum to her dead son, and so Gowans and Gray.

THE AUTOCRAT OF THE COFFEE STALLS: A strange character with an astonishing history is shown us in the night-light from a refreshment wagon in London streets.

Gowans and Gray.

THE DUMB AND THE BLIND: A study of a bargeman's family in London tenements. Mr. William Archer calls this "a veritable masterpiece in its way--a thing Dickens would have delighted in.... We feel that the dumb has spoken and the blind has seen."

Gowans and Gray; forthcoming, French, New York.

IT'S THE POOR THAT 'ELPS THE POOR: Of the simple kindliness of London costermongers and their neighborly help and sympathy.

French.

MUDDLE ANNIE: Of course, it is "Muddle Annie" who helps their friend the policeman save the more suave and self-satisfied members of her family from a precious rogue.

Gowans and Gray.

THE THRESHOLD: Tells of a Welsh girl about to elope with a specious rascal, and of the intervention of her old father, who is killed in a mine accident.

Gowans and Gray; forthcoming, French.

COMEDIES.

Chatto and Windus, London.

+Colin Clements and John M. Saunders, translators+

LOVE IN A FRENCH KITCHEN: A comical medieaval French farce. Jacquinot endures a miserable compound tyranny of petticoats until matters are brought to a head by cumulative injustice and the intervention of accident.

In _Poet Lore_ (1917), 28:722.

+Padraic Colum+

MOGU THE WANDERER: Pageantesque and dramatic story of the rise of a beggar to be the king's vizier, and of as sudden and entire reversal of fortunes.

Little, Brown.

THOMAS MUSKERRY: The tragic story of a poorhouse-keeper who repeats Lear's error of letting go his cherished power, and who suffers as keenly a more humble tragedy.

Maunsell, Dublin.

+Rachel Crothers+

HE AND SHE: A woman's designs win over those of her husband, who has the greater reputation, a large competitive award for a piece of sculpture; but she declines the commission in face of nearer and higher responsibilities.

In Quinn's _Representative American Plays_, Century.

+Windsor P. Daggett and Winifred Smith+

LELIO AND ISABELLA: A COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE: The story of Romeo and Juliet, as the foremost players of the Italian Comedy of Masks may have given it in seventeenth-century Paris--with an ending of their choice. An interesting study in the type.

In manuscript: N.L. Swartout, Summit, N.J.

+H.H. Davies+

THE MOLLUSC: Clever study of a woman who is a mollusc--not merely lazy, since she is capable of huge exertions to avoid being disturbed; she finds plenty of opposition to show forth her powers upon.

Baker.

+Thomas H. Dickinson+

IN HOSPITAL: A poignant small dialogue of a husband and wife who meet courageously the threatened shipwreck of their happiness.

In _Wisconsin Plays, First Series_, B.W. Huebsch.

+Beulah M. Dix+

ALLISON'S LAD: A Cavalier lad, about to be shot as a spy, is seized by terror, but dies bravely, "as if strong arms were around him."

In _Allison's Lad and Other Martial Interludes_, Holt.

THE DARK OF THE DAWN: Colonel Basil Tollocho spares a boy he has sworn to destroy in revenge of a great wrong, and is made glad of his clemency.

_Ibid._

THE HUNDREDTH TRICK: Con of the Hundred Tricks takes fearfully stern measures against possible betrayal of his cause.

_Ibid._

+Beulah Marie Dix and Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland+

ROSE O'PLYMOUTH TOWN: A pleasant play of Puritans and their neighbors.

Dramatic Publishing Company.

+Oliphant Down+

THE MAKER OF DREAMS: Poetical small play in which love appears with a new make-up but in the old role.

Gowans and Gray.

+Ernest Dowson+

THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE: A quite charming tale of Pierrot and the Moon-Maiden.

In his _Collected Poems_, Lane.

+John Drinkwater+

ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A dramatic presentation of episodes in Lincoln's life, from his nomination to the presidency to his death.

Sidgwick and Jackson; Houghton Mifflin.