Chapter 29

With the production of W.B. Yeats's poetic one-act play, _The Land of Heart's Desire_, at the Avenue Theatre, London, on March 29, 1894, began the modern Irish dramatic movement. When the poet had tasted the joys of the footlights, he longed to see an Irish Literary Theatre realized in Ireland. Five years later, in the Antient Concert Rooms, Dublin, on May 9, 1899, his play, _The Countess Cathleen_, was produced, and his desire gratified. The experiment was tried for three years and then dropped; plays by Yeats, Edward Martyn, George Moore, and Alice Milligan were staged with English-trained actors in the casts; and a Gaelic play--the first ever presented in a theatre in Ireland--was also given during the third season. It was _The Twisting of the Rope_, by Dr. Douglas Hyde, and was played at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, on October 21, 1901, by a Gaelic Amateur Dramatic Society coached by W.G. Fay. The author filled the principal part with distinction.

It was while rehearsing this play that the thought came to Fay: "Why not have my little company of Irish-born actors--the Ormond Dramatic Society--appear in plays by Irish writers instead of in the ones they have been giving for years?" And the thought soon ripened into realization. His brother, Frank, had dreamed of such a company since he read of the small beginnings out of which the Norwegian Theatre had grown; and just then, seeing some of "Æ's" (George Russell's) play, _Deirdre_, in the _All Ireland Review_, he asked the author if he would allow them to produce it, and, consent being given, the company put it into rehearsal at once. "Æ" got for them from Yeats _Kathleen-Ni-Houlihan_, to make up the programme. Thus it was that this company of amateurs and poets, now known as the Abbey Players, came into existence, and at St. Teresa's Hall, Clarendon Street, Dublin, gave their first performance on April 2, 1902.

Shortly afterwards they took a hall at the back of a shop in Camden Street, where they rehearsed and gave a few public performances. On "Æ" declining to be their president, Frank Fay suggested the name of W.B. Yeats, and he was elected, and in that way came again into the movement in which he has figured so largely ever since.

The company played occasionally in the Molesworth Hall, and produced there, among other pieces, Synge's _In the Shadow of the Glen_ (October 8, 1903) and _Riders to the Sea_ (February 25, 1904); Yeats's _The Hour Glass_ (March 14, 1903) and _The King's Threshold_ (October 8, 1903); Lady Gregory's _Twenty-five_ (March 14,1903); and Padraic Colum's _Broken Soil_ (December 3, 1903).

On March 26, 1904, the company paid a flying one-day visit to the Royalty, London, and Miss A.E.F. Horniman, who had given Shaw, Yeats, and Dr. John Todhunter their first real start as playwrights at the Avenue, London, in March-April, 1894 (Shaw had had his first play, _Widowers' Houses_, played by the Independent Theatre in 1892), saw the performance, and was so impressed that she thought she would like to find a suitable home for such talent in Dublin, and fixed upon the old Mechanics' Institute and its surrounding buildings, and there the Abbey Theatre soon afterwards--on December 27, 1904--came into existence.

In writing of this Irish dramatic movement, one must always bear in mind that it was Yeats who first conceived the idea of such a movement; the Fays who founded the school of Irish acting; and Miss Horniman who, like a fairy godmother, waved the wand, and gave it a habitation and a name--the Abbey Theatre--and endowed it for six years.

Play followed play with great rapidity, and dramatic societies sprang up all over the country, playing home-made productions in Gaelic and English. All Ireland seemed to be play-acting and play-writing; so much so that Frank Fay was heard to say that "he thought everyone had a play in his pocket, and that anyone in the street could be picked up and shaped into an actor or actress with a little training, Ireland was so teeming with talent!"

Dramatic Ireland had slumbered for a long while, and awoke with tremendous vigor for work. New dramatists sprang up in all parts of Ireland; The Ulster Literary Theatre started in Belfast; The Cork Dramatic Society, in Cork; The Theatre of Ireland, in Dublin; and others in Galway and Waterford soon followed. In Dublin at present more than half a dozen dramatic societies are continually producing new plays and discovering new acting talent. There are also two Gaelic dramatic societies. And nearly every town in Ireland now has its own dramatic class and its own dramatists. All this activity has come about within the last ten or twelve years, where, before, in many places, drama and acting were almost unknown.

Many Gaelic societies throughout the country put on Gaelic plays by Dr. Douglas Hyde, Pierce Beasley, Thomas Haynes, Canon Peter O'Leary, and others; and the _Oireachtas_ (the Gaelic musical and literary festival) held each year in Dublin usually presents several Irish plays and offers prizes for new ones at each festival.

Of all the Irish playwrights who have arisen in recent years, Lady Gregory has produced most and W.B. Yeats is the most poetic. He is more a lyric poet than a dramatist, and is never satisfied with his work for the stage, but keeps eternally chopping and changing it. His _Kathleen-Ni-Houlihan_, though a dream-play, always appeals to an audience of Irish people. Perhaps his one-act _Deirdre_ is the nearest approach to real drama he has done. Some of Lady Gregory's earlier one-act farces, such as _The Workhouse-Ward_, are very amusing; _The Rising of the Moon_ is a little dramatic gem, and _The Gaol Gate_ is touched with genuine tragedy. Synge wrote only one play--_Riders to the Sea_--that acts well. The others are admired by critics for the strangeness of their diction and the beauty of the nature-pictures scattered through them. His much-discussed _Playboy of the Western World_ has become famous for the rows it has created at home and abroad from its very first production on January 26, 1907. William Boyle, who gets to the heart of those he writes about, has produced the most popular play of the movement in _The Eloquent Dempsey_, and a perfectly constructed one in _The Building Fund_. W.F. Casey's two plays--_The Man Who Missed the Tide_ and _The Suburban Groove_--are both popular and actable. Padraic Colum's plays--_The Land_ and _Broken Soil_ (the latter rewritten and renamed _The Fiddler's House_)--are almost idyllic scenes of country life. Lennox Robinson's plays are harsh in tone, but dramatically effective, and T.C. Murray's _Birthright_ and _Maurice Harte_ are fine dramas, well constructed and full of true knowledge of the people he writes about. Seumas O'Kelly has written two strong dramas in _The Shuiler's Child_ and _The Bribe_, and Seumas O'Brien one of the funniest Irish farces ever staged in _Duty_. R.J. Ray's play, _The Casting Out of Martin Whelan_, is the best this dramatist has as yet given us, and George Fitzmaurice's _The Country Dressmaker_ has the elements of good drama in it. St. John G. Ervine has written a very human drama in _Mixed Marriage_. He hails from the north of Ireland; but Rutherford Mayne is the best of the Northern playwrights, and his plays, _The Drone_ and _The Turn of the Road_, are splendid homely county Down comedies.

Bernard Shaw's _John Bull's Other Island_, as Irish plays go, is a fine specimen; Canon Hannay has written two successful comedies, _Eleanor's Enterprise_ and _General John Regan_--the latter not wholly to the taste of the people of the west. James Stephens and Jane Barlow have also tried their hands at playwriting, with but moderate success. Perhaps the modern drama that made the most impression when first played was _The Heather Field_, by Edward Martyn. It gripped and remains a lasting memory with all who saw it in 1899. But I think I have written enough to show that the Irish Theatre of today is in a very alive condition, and that if the great National Dramatist has not yet arrived, he is sure to emerge. When that time comes, the actors are here ready to interpret such work to perfection.

An article, however brief, on the Irish Theatre, would be incomplete without mention of the world-famous tragedians, John Edward MacCullough, Lawrence Patrick Barrett, and Barry Sullivan; of genial comedians like Charles Sullivan and Hubert O'Grady; of sterling actors like Shiel Barry, John Brougham, Leonard Boyne, J.D. Beveridge, and Thomas Nerney; or of operatic artists like Denis O'Sullivan and Joseph O'Mara--many of whom have passed away, but some, fortunately, are with us still.

REFERENCES:

John Genest: Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration to 1830 (1832; vol. 10 is devoted to the Irish Stage); Chetwood: General History of the Stage, more particularly of the Irish Theatre (Dublin, 1749); Molloy: Romance of the Irish Stage; Baker: Biographia Dramatica (Dublin, 1782); Hitchcock: An Historical View of the Irish Stage from its Earliest Period down to the Season of 1788; Doran: Their Majesties' Servants, or Annals of the English Stage (London, 1865); Hughes: The Pre-Victorian Drama in Dublin; The History of the Theatre Royal, Dublin (Dublin, 1870); Levey and O'Rourke: Annals of the Theatre Royal (Dublin, 1880); O'Neill: Irish Theatrical History (Dublin, 1910); Brown: A Guide to Books on Ireland (Dublin, 1912); Lawrence: The Abbey Theatre (in the Weekly Freeman, Dublin, Dec., 1912), Origin of the Abbey Theatre (in Sinn Fein, Dublin, Feb. 14, 1914); Weygandt: Irish Plays and Playwrights (London, 1913); Lady Gregory: Our Irish Theatre (London, 1914); Bourgeois: John M. Synge and the Irish Theatre (London, 1913); Moore: Hail and Farewell, 3 vols. (London, 1911-1914); Esmore: The Ulster Literary Theatre (in the Lady of the House, Dublin, Nov. 15, 1913); the Reviews, Beltaine (1899-1900) and Samhain (1901-1903).

IRISH JOURNALISTS

By MICHAEL MACDONAGH.

The most splendid testimony to the Irish genius in journalism is afforded by the London press of the opening decades of the twentieth century. One of the greatest newspaper organizers of modern times is Lord Northcliffe. As the principal proprietor and guiding mind of both the _Times_ and the _Daily Mail_, he directly influences public opinion, from the steps of the Throne and the door of the Cabinet, to the errand boy and the servant maid. T.P. O'Connor, M.P., is the most popular writer on current social and political topics, and so amazing is his versatility that every subject he touches is illumined by those fine qualities, vision and sincerity. The most renowned of political writers is J.L. Garvin of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and the _Observer_. By his leading articles he has done as much as the late Joseph Chamberlain by his speeches to democratize and humanize the old Tory party of England. The authoritative special correspondent, studying at first hand all the problems which divide the nations of Europe, and knowing personally most of its rulers and statesmen, is E.J. Dillon of the _Daily Telegraph_. And when the quarrels of nations are transferred from the chancelleries to the stricken field there is no one among the war correspondents more enterprising and intrepid in his methods, or more picturesque and vivid with his pen, than M.H. Donohoe of the _Daily Chronicle_. All these men are Irish. Could there be more striking proof of the natural bent and aptitude of the Irish mind for journalism?

Dean Swift was the mightiest journalist that ever stirred the sluggish soul of humanity. Were he alive today and had he at his command the enormous circulation of a great daily newspaper, he would keep millions in a perpetual mental ferment, such was the ferocious indignation into which he was aroused by wrong and injustice and his gift of savage ironical expression. Swift, as a young student in Trinity College, Dublin, saw the birth of the first offspring of the Irish mind in journalism. The _Dublin News Letter_ made its appearance in June, 1685, and was published every three or four days for the circulation of news and advertisements. Only one copy of the first issue of this, the earliest of Irish newspapers, is extant. It is included in the Thorpe collection of tracts in the Royal Dublin Society. Dated August 26, 1685, it consists of a single leaf of paper printed on both sides, and contains just one item of news, a letter brought by the English packet from London, and two local advertisements. As I reverently handled it, I was thrilled by the thought that from this insignificant little seed sprang the great national organ, the _Freeman's Journal_; the _Press_ of the United Irishmen; the _Nation_ of the Young Irelanders; the _United Ireland_ of the Land League; the _Irish World_ and the _Boston Pilot_ of the American Irish; and the _Irish Independent_, the first half-penny Dublin morning paper, and the most widely circulated of Irish journals. If Swift did not write for the _Dublin News Letter_, he certainly wrote for the _Examiner_, a weekly miscellany published in the Irish capital from 1710 to 1713, and the first journal that endeavored to create public opinion in Ireland. It was at Swift's instigation that this paper was started, and he was doubtless encouraged to suggest it by the success that attended his articles in the contemporary London publication of the same name, the Tory _Examiner_, in which his journalistic genius was fully revealed. As it has been expressively put, he wrote his friends, Harley and St. John, into a firm grip of power, and thus, as in other ways, contributed his share to the inauguration and maintenance of that policy which in the last four years of Queen Anne so materially recast the whole European situation. About the same time there appeared in London the earliest forms of the periodical essay in the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_, which exhibit the comprehensiveness of the Irish temperament in writing by affording a contrast between the Irish force and vehemence of Swift and the Irish play of kindly wit and tender pathos in the deft and dainty periods of Richard Steele.

Dr. Charles Lucas was, even more than Swift perhaps, the precursor of that type of Irish publicist and journalist, of which there have been many splendid examples since then in Ireland, England, and America. Lucas first started the _Censor_, a weekly journal, in 1748. Within two years his paper was suppressed for exciting discontent with the government, and to avoid a prosecution he fled to England. In 1763 the _Freeman's Journal_ was established by three Dublin merchants. Lucas, who had returned from a long exile and was a member of the Irish parliament, contributed to it, sometimes anonymously but generally over the signature of "A Citizen" or "Civis." The editor was Henry Brooks, novelist, poet, and playwright. His novel, _The Fool of Quality_, is still read. His tragedy, _The Earl of Essex_, was, wrongly, supposed to contain a precept, "Who rules o'er freemen should himself be free," which led to the more famous parody of Dr. Samuel Johnson, "Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat." The object of Lucas and Brooke, as journalists, was to awaken national sentiment, by teaching that Ireland had an individuality of her own independently of England. But they were more concerned with the assertion of the constitutional rights of the parliament of the Protestant colony as against the domination of England. Therefore, the first organ of Irish Nationality, representative of all creeds and classes, was the _Press_, the newspaper of the United Irishmen, which was started in Dublin in 1797, by Arthur O'Connor, the son of a rich merchant who had made his money in London. Its editor was Peter Finnerty, born of humble parentage at Loughrea, afterwards a famous parliamentary reporter for the London _Morning Chronicle_, and its most famous contributor was Dr. William Drennan, the poet, who first called Ireland "the Emerald Isle."

Irishmen did not become prominently associated with American journalism until after the Famine and the collapse of the Young Ireland movement in 1848. The journalist whom I regard as having exercised the most fateful influence on the destinies of Ireland was Charles Gavan Duffy, the founder and first editor of the _Nation_, a newspaper of which it was truly and finely said that it brought a new soul into Erin. Among its contributors, who afterwards added lustre to the journalism of the United States, was John Mitchel. In the _Southern Citizen_ and the _Richmond Enquirer_ he supported the South against the North in the Civil War. The Rev. Abram Joseph Ryan, who was associated with journalism in New Orleans, not only acted as a Catholic chaplain with the Confederate army, but sang of its hopes and aspirations in tuneful verse. Serving in the army of the North was Charles G. Halpine, whose songs signed "Private Miles O'Reilly" were very popular in those days of national convulsion in the United States. Halpine's father had edited the Tory newspaper, the Dublin _Evening Mail_; and Halpine himself, after the war, edited the _Citizen_ of New York, famous for its advocacy of reforms in civic administration. Perhaps the two most renowned men in Irish-American journalism were John Boyle O'Reilly of the _Boston Pilot_ and Patrick Ford of the _Irish World_. O'Reilly was a troop-sergeant in the 10th Hussars (Prince of Wales's Own), and during the Fenian troubles of 1866 had eighty of his men ready armed and mounted to take out of Island Bridge Barracks, Dublin, at a given signal, to aid the projected insurrection. Detected, he was brought to trial, summarily convicted, and sentenced to be shot. This sentence was commuted to twenty-five years' penal servitude; but O'Reilly survived it all to become a brilliant man of letters and make the _Boston Pilot_ one of the most influential Irish and Catholic newspapers in the United States. Ford, who had served his apprenticeship as a compositor in the office of William Lloyd Garrison at Boston, founded the _Irish World_ in 1870. This newspaper gave powerful aid to the Land League. A special issue of 1,650,000 copies of the _Irish World_ was printed on January 11, 1879, for circulation in Ireland; and money to the amount of $600,000 altogether was sent by Ford to the headquarters of the agitation in Dublin. A journalist of a totally different kind was Edwin Lawrence Godkin. Born in County Wicklow, the son of a Presbyterian clergyman, Godkin in 1865 established the _Nation_ in New York as an organ of independent thought; and for thirty-five years he filled a unique position, standing aside from all parties, sects, and bodies, and yet permeating them all with his sane and restraining philosophy.

In Canada, Thomas D'Arcy Magee won fame as a journalist on the _New Era_ before he became even more distinguished as a parliamentarian. When the history of Australian journalism is written it will contain two outstanding Irish names: Daniel Henry Deniehy, who died in 1865, was called by Bulwer Lytton "the Australian Macaulay" on account of his brilliant writings as critic and reviewer in the press of Victoria. Gerald Henry Supple, another Dublin man, is also remembered for his contributions to the _Age_ and the _Argus_ of Melbourne. In India one of the first--if not the first--English newspapers was founded by a Limerick man, named Charles Johnstone, who had previously attained fame as the author of _Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea_, and who died at Calcutta about 1800.

Stirring memories of battle and adventure leap to the mind at the names of those renowned war correspondents, William Howard Russell, Edmond O'Donovan, and James J. O'Kelly. Russell, a Dublin man, was the first newspaper representative to accompany an army into the field. He saw all the mighty engagements of the Crimea--Alma, Balaclava, Inkerman, Sebastopol--not from a distance of 60 or 80 miles, which is the nearest that correspondents are now allowed to approach the front, but at the closest quarters, riding through the lines on his mule, and seeing the engagements vividly, so that he was able to describe them in moving detail for readers of the _Times_. O'Donovan--son of Dr. John O'Donovan, the distinguished Irish scholar and archaeologist--was in the service of the London _Daily News_. That dashing campaigner--as his famous book, _The Merv Oasis_, shows him to have been--perished with Hicks Pasha's Army in the Sudan in November, 1883. At the same time James O'Kelly, also of the _Daily News_, was lost in the desert, trying to join the forces of the victorious Sudanese under the Madhi. Ten years before that he had accomplished, for the New York _Herald_, the equally daring and hazardous feat of joining the Cuban rebels in revolt against Spain. He escaped the perils of the Mambi Land and the Sudan, and survived to serve Ireland for many years as a Nationalist member in the British parliament. John Augustus O'Shea, better known, perhaps, as "The Irish Bohemian", also deserves remembrance for his quarter of a century's work as special correspondent in Europe--including Paris during the siege--for the London _Standard_.

Indeed, no matter to what side of journalism we turn, we find Irishmen filling the foremost and the highest places. John Thaddeus Delane, under whose editorship the _Times_ became for a time the most influential newspaper in the world, was of Irish parentage. The first editor of the _Illustrated London News_ (1842)--one of the pioneers in the elucidation of news by means of pictures--was an Irishman, Frederick Bayley. Among the projectors of _Punch_, and one of its earliest contributors, was a King's county man, Joseph Sterling Coyne. The founder of the _Liverpool Daily Post_ (1855), the first penny daily paper in Great Britain, was Michael Joseph Whitty, a Wexford man. His son, Edward M. Whitty, was the originator of that interesting feature of English and Irish journalism, the sketch of personalities and proceedings in parliament. Of the editors of the _Athenaeum_--for many years the leading English organ of literary criticism--one of the most famous was Dr. John Doran, who was of Irish parentage. "Dod" is a familiar household word in the British Parliament. It is the name of the recognized guide to the careers and political opinions of Lords and Commons. Its founder was an Irishman, Charles Roger Dod, who for twenty-three years was a parliamentary reporter for the _Times_. And what name sheds a brighter light on the annals of British journalism for intellectual and imaginative force than that of Justin MacCarthy, novelist and historian, as well as newspaper writer?

At home in Ireland the name of Gray is inseparably associated with the _Freeman's Journal_. Under the direction of Dr. John Gray this newspaper became in the sixties and seventies the most powerful organ of public opinion in Ireland; and in the eighties it was raised still higher in ability and influence by his son and successor, Edmund Dwyer Gray. In the south of Ireland the most influential daily newspaper is the _Cork Examiner_, which was founded in 1841 by John Francis Maguire, who wrote in 1868 _The Irish in America_. It is doubtful whether any country ever produced a more militant and able political journal than was _United Ireland_ in the stormy years during which it was edited by William O'Brien as the organ of the Land League.

The Irish mood is gregarious, expansive, glowing, and eager to keep in intimate touch with the movements and affairs of humanity. That, I think, is the secret of its success in journalism.

REFERENCES:

Madden: Irish Periodical Literature (1867); Andrews: English Journalism (1855); North: Newspaper and Periodical Press of the United States (1884); MacDonagh: The Reporter's Gallery (1913).

THE IRISH LITERARY REVIVAL

By HORATIO S. KRANS, Ph.D.