REALISM IN THE NEW IRISH DRAMA 
 
 BY 
 
 AVIS DUNGAN CARLSON 
 
 A. B. Southwestern College, 1917 
 
 THESIS 
 
 SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS 
 FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH 
 IN THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, 
 
 1922 
 
 URBANA, ILLINOIS 
 
 r 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2015 
 
 https://archive.org/details/realisminnewirisOOcarl 
 
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 
 
 THE GRADUATE SCHOOL 
 
 fo y... 3£ 
 
 -192&— 
 
 I HEREBY RECOMMEND THAT THE THESIS PREPARED UNDER MY 
 
 supervision by Avi a Sungari Carlson 
 
 ENTITLED Re alisn. in. l Yhe Hew Iri sh D r a ma 
 
 BE ACCEPTED AS FULFILLING THIS PART OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR 
 
 THE DEGREE OF. 
 
 IN st er of Arts 
 
 | v J T 1 *- • L 
 
 5 
 
 In Charge of Thesis 
 
 Head of Department 
 
 Recommendation concurred in* 
 
 Committee 
 
 on 
 
 Final Examination* 
 
 •Required for doctor’s degree but not for master’s 
 

 
 
 
 
 
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TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 Chapter Page 
 
 I. The Decline of Irish Nationalist 
 
 Drama 1 
 
 II. The Relation of the New Irish Drama 
 
 to Modern Dramatic Practice .... 20 
 
 III. The New Peasant Genre 46 
 
 IV. The Fallacy of Regional Realism.... 72 
 
 V . Lennox Robinson and St . John Ervine 96 
 
 VI. Conclusion 130 
 
 Bibliography . 
 

 1 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE DECLINE OF IRISH NATIONALIST DRAMA 
 
 In any attempt to survey modern Irish drama the 
 first name to be considered is that of the writer who is most 
 deoply related to and indeed responsible for the sudden dramatic 
 up-bursting which began obscurely enough in the opening of the 
 Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, but for the next fifteen years 
 was probably the phenomenon most talked of in the world of 
 letters. For all time the name of W. B. Yeats is associated 
 with Irish drama of the last twenty -five years; his brain con- 
 ceived both the artistic creed which underlies the national 
 school of drama and the practical means of carrying it out; 
 his enthusiasm and faith kindled the enthusiasm of those he 
 found to help him until the work of the group took on the char- 
 acter of a "movement”; even the younger playwrights with whom 
 this study is primarily concerned, although not in a large 
 sense disciples of Yeats, owe their dramatic impetus to him 
 and to the national drama which he fostered. Without the 
 standards of the Abbey theatre and the atmosphere of dramatic 
 activity which pervaded Ireland in, say, 1906 the young writers, 
 Ervine, Mayne, Robinson, Murray, Colum and Boyle, would hardly 
 have set themselves at the most difficult of literary forms. 
 

 
 
 
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 It is necessary, then, in studying the new Irish 
 drama to begin with a brief account of the National drama, its 
 rise, principal figures, and artistic principles, but chiefly 
 the underlying causes of its decline — causes which might ex- 
 plain its rejection by the young men who were just beginning 
 to learn their art when the national drama was at its height. 
 
 George Moore has said, "All the Irish movement rose 
 out of Yeats and returns to Yeats." 1 The irritating obscurity 
 of the last half of the statement does not prevent assent to 
 the first half, for the fact remains that had not Yeats played 
 the beneficent tyrant of art as he sees art, there would have 
 been no great school of modern Irish drama. He gave it its 
 impress, defined its bounds, reformed its theatre and in a 
 large measure invented its famous technique of acting, inter- 
 ested in it the two writers who besides himself make up the 
 school, and fought its battles as a propagandist. To realize 
 how thoroughly it springs from the artistic ideals of Yeats 
 one has to go back to the very beginnings of the movement . 
 
 When in 1899 he with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn 
 and George Moore founded the tiny Irish Literary Theatre, time 
 was not long in showing his differences from two of his co- 
 workers in opinion as to what the new theatre was to be and do. 
 Moore and Martyn had learned in London and on the continent 
 
 1 . Salve , p . 206 . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 a taste for Ib3en and the "drama of ideas". Martyn, especially, 
 stood for a theatre like The Independent Theatre which should 
 develop a drama only different from the continental and English 
 drama tracing its ancestry to Ibsen, as it would differ spring- 
 ing from "an idealism founded upon the ancient genius of the 
 land."^ He himself was more familiar with and therefore more 
 interested in landlord and middle classes than in the peasants 
 in whose life and speech Yeats was discovering a source for 
 Irish art. For these reasons Martyn argued in the United 
 Irishman that Irish actors should be trained to present the 
 drama of society. His own plays show the Norwegian influence, 
 although E. A. Boyd in Contemporary Drama of Ireland insists 
 that it was an Ibsenism more colored by the personality of 
 Martyn than was Shaw’s. "Instead of merely seizing upon the 
 facilities for propaganda afforded by the worn-out conventions, 
 he applied Ibsen’s method to the portrayal of national char- 
 acter and interpretation of Irish life."^ 
 
 Yeats, however, as every student of modern drama 
 knows, conceived of the function and materials of the new 
 drama very differently. "Our movement is a return to the 
 people, and the drama of society would but magnify a condition 
 of life which the countryman and the artisan could but copy 
 
 1 . Beltaine . February 1900 . 
 
 2 . Contemporary Drama of Ireland , p . 18 . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 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 where every man can see his own image, because there 
 alone does human nature escape from arbitrary conditions — 
 
 If we busy ourselves with poetry and the countryman, two things 
 which have ever mixed with one another in life as on the stage, 
 we may recover in the course of years a lost art. M ^ This 
 insistence that in the life of the peasant and his folk lore 
 is to be found poetry is the great distinguishing mark of the 
 national school of drama which Yeats founded. At the end of 
 the three tentative years planned for the Irish Literary Theatre 
 Martyn dropped out of the movement as Moore had already done. 
 Yeats's influence was now dominant. 
 
 Nevertheless, the tendency of the new school was al- 
 most at once to move away from the poetic drama in which Yeats 
 was primarily interested and to stress more and more the pea- 
 sant . The reason for this change is not far to seek: Yeats 
 
 is essentially a poet, not a dramatist, whereas Synge is es- 
 sentially a dramatist with a high degree of lyric impulse . 
 
 The heart of Yeats's artistic creed is in his statement: 
 
 "All the great masters have understood that there cannot be 
 great art without the little limited art of the fable— and 
 the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half -seen 
 
 1. Sam ha in, 1903; Collected Works of Yeats, Vol . IV., p. 103. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 world beyond it."'*' The same idea is in the words of Forgael: 
 
 "All would be well 
 
 Could we but give us wholly to the dream 
 And get into their world that to the sense 
 Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly 
 Among substantial things; for it is dreams 
 That lead us to the flowing, changing world 
 That the heart longs for. ”2 
 
 Such a temperament could hardly have any close con- 
 tact with or sympathy for human life in the rough, the one 
 thing which good drama must have. The result is, says Forrest 
 Reid, M we hardly ever get from Mr. Yeats' plays a pleasure 
 that comes through our emotional sympathy. We never really 
 care enough about Naisi and Deirdre to care what becomes of 
 them. We are moved by the beauty of the imagery, the beauty 
 of the verse, but that emotion of pity which such a story as 
 theirs should arouse is left untouched." In the same way 
 Weygandt characterizes the dramas of Yeats as "a development 
 of epic and lyric poetry illustrated by tableaux against back- 
 
 , 4 
 
 ground out of faery." Such a form of literature going back 
 in its sources to old legends, folk -tales, books of mysticism 
 
 1 • Ideas of Good and Evil , p . 341 . 
 
 3 . Shadowy Waters . 
 
 3. Forrest Reid: W. B. Yeats , p. 180. 
 
 4. Weygandt: Irish Plavs and Playwrights , p . 45 . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 and magic, faery -like landscape, the poems of Spenser, Blake, 
 Shelley and William Morris, and to the old English morality, 
 the effects of Greek tragedy and Maeterlinck's static drama, 
 could never result in a close feeling for human life of to-day, 
 even in a country as close to primitive races as Ireland is. 
 Yeats himself admitted in one of the earlier issues of Samhain 
 the possibility that "we may have to deal with passing issues 
 until we have re-created the imaginative tradition of Ireland 
 and filled the popular imagination again with saints and he- 
 roes." If he, who of the early group of Irish writers was 
 the one most thoroughly imbued with the artistic principle of 
 art for truth and beauty's sake; who unfalteringly fought to 
 keep his drama entirely apart from service to any cause; who 
 rejected entirely the drama of ideas as pallid and unfitted 
 for the theatre which should be a place for intellectual ex- 
 citement — if he could admit the possibility of "having to deal 
 with passing issues" even temporarily, it is no wonder that 
 friends, even those most immediate, developed away from his 
 artistic theories. What happened to Yeats himself as he 
 carried them to their logical development will be shown later. 
 
 Of his literary associates in the movement, Lady 
 Gregory is easily the closest, the one with whom there was 
 most of mutual influence. Their common interest in old folk 
 
 1. Yeats: .Collected Works . Vol . IV., p. 87. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 lore was fully as strong in her as in Yeats. Weygandt con- 
 siders that with her remarkable versions of the old stories in 
 Gods and Fighting Men and Cuchulain of Muirthemne she has done 
 more than any other writer of the Gaelic countries to bring 
 home to us the wonders of Gaelic romance.^ If Yeats inter- 
 ested her in the drama as the great art form for Ireland, she 
 in turn taught him to use the language of the Irish folk, to 
 reveal as he says "the true countenance of the folk". What- 
 ever she may have learned of idiomatic method from Douglas Hyde 
 in the course of their numerous collaborations and in her 
 translations of his Gaelic, it is certain that she greatly 
 enriched and broadened Hyde's idiom from her own observations 
 of the peasants of Xiltartan in Galway . She was heart and 
 life a part of the movement which Yeats sponsored; she backed 
 it with money, with the drudgery of managing its least artistic 
 phases; she wrote plays to its order when it needed comedy; 
 she lectured for it, lived for it. 
 
 How closely do the plays of Lady Gregory, who, because 
 she was most intimately associated with Yeats, might be expected 
 to carry out his theories most exactly, illustrate his artistic 
 canon of "the rich, far -wandering, many-imaged life of the 
 half -seen world," a canon which leaves no place for realism of 
 any sort? 
 
 1. Irish Plays and Playwrights , p. 138. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 It is true, of course, that the little farces of 
 peasant life which have been so immensely popular were written 
 because the new theatre needed such plays, but it is also true 
 that they, not the folk-history plays, are the individual, 
 living part of her dramatic output . She is remembered for 
 her Workhouse Ward and Spreading the News rather than for 
 Dervorgilla or Kincora . Hyacinth Halvey or even the butcher 
 is far more of a human reality than Diarmuid, Flann or Brian. 
 Even Grania, agreed upon by all critics as the best of the six 
 folk -history plays, is not a great play. According to Boyd 
 it "rises above the fairly commonplace level of its companion 
 plays precisely in proportion as it emulates the manner of 
 Synge. His rhythms are in such speeches as: 'But you and I 
 have changed the world entirely, and put a curb upon the spring- 
 time, and bound the seven elements with our strength.' After 
 quoting a number of such passages, he adds, "Yet one cannot 
 compare the eloquent beauty of Synge's poetic idiom with these 
 somewhat forced effects, without feeling that the latter are 
 echoes rather than the expression of an original sense of verbal 
 music." Lady Gregory's own feeling as to the comparative worth 
 of these plays going back to legendary old kings and old heroes 
 which were to Yeats the source of true national drama, is shown 
 in her apologetic, "Perhaps I ought to have written nothing 
 
 1. E. A. Boyd: Contemporary Drama of Ireland , p. 133. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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but these short comedies, but desire for experiment is like 
 fire in the blood.” 
 
 If then, these plays which most nearly approximate 
 Yeats's views of true Irish drama in source, material, and 
 spirit, are not the characteristic and valuable part of Lady 
 Gregory's plays, the question arises: in what relation do 
 the peasant farces stand to those theories? 
 
 That they have struck a sympathetic chord in the 
 Irish thought and feeling their popularity will attest. They 
 are performed at the Abbey theatre two or three times as often 
 as are the plays of any other playwright . In 1912 there were 
 sixteen performances of The Rising of the Moon as against three 
 of The Playboy of the Western World , while The Workhouse Ward 
 was performed more than twice as many times as Colum's study 
 of a workhouse, Thomas Muskerrv . In neither instance was 
 Lady Gregory's play comparable in real artistic breadth and 
 depth to the play which found so much less favor among Irish 
 people . Argument from popularity is always dangerous evi- 
 dence, but does not this long continued popular favor indicate 
 that Ireland thinks it sees itself portrayed in these plays; 
 portrayed as it likes to think it is? The poetical plays of 
 Yeats which openly professed to deal with far-away things never 
 attained anything like the popularity of these comedies purport- 
 ing to show the present-day peasant as he is. 
 
 In order to realize how far Lady Gregory does get 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 away from the poetical drama in which Yeats was primarily 
 interested, one has only to remember two parallel passages 
 from the two authors. In describing the contentions of Ireland 
 Yeats makes Cuchulain say: "Townland against townland, barony 
 against barony, kingdom against kingdom, province against 
 province, and if there be but two door-posts to a door the one 
 fighting against the other. In The Workhouse Ward when Mike 
 Mclnerney in response to his fellow's doleful, "To be lying 
 here and no conversible person near me would be the abomination 
 of misery!" begs his sister to take Michael Miskell also, she 
 replies, "Yourself and Mike that never left fighting and scold- 
 ing and attacking one another! Sparring at one another like 
 two young pups you were, and threatening one another after like 
 two grown dogs!" Cuchulain's speech is poetry; the peasants' 
 an idiomatic version of "It is better to be fighting than to 
 be lonesome." Cuchulain is a creature of fancy, as far re- 
 moved from a half -savage chieftain as can well be imagined. 
 
 The two old paupers are another sort of being— they are Galway 
 peasants of to-day touched with a rather tolerant imagination. 
 One feels in all the farce-comedies, that is, in all the really 
 characteristic work of Lady Gregory, this branching away from 
 Yeats, this half -approach to "the machine shop of the realists." 
 
 And yet Lady Gregory is not a realist in any strict 
 
 1. Golden Helmet , in Collected Works . Vol . V., p. 75. 
 

 
 
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 sense of the word and is certainly never a descendant of Ibsen 
 in having a reformer's motive back of her work. She would 
 protest as emphatically as Yeats against the opponents of the 
 new school "who are ever begging us to attack the priests or 
 the English, or wanting us to put our imaginations into hand- 
 cuffs so that we may be sure of never seeming to do one or 
 the other."'*’ Neither has she any intentions of reforming 
 her peasant or of arousing sympathy for him, motives which 
 animated many of the writers of continental peasant drama. 
 
 The picture she presents of him is never drawn in harsh lines. 
 He is an absurd creature who regulates his life by superstition 
 and wise old sawsj who has a picturesque and homely speech 
 which illustrates Yeats 's contention that beautiful language 
 nowadays exists only in the speech of the poet and of the very 
 poor. His very inconsistencies and illogicalities make him 
 a being without the pale of ordinary moral standards. His 
 relation to his creator is something like that of a child to 
 a grown-up who feels none of the responsibility of near kin 
 and therefore is free to enjoy his whimsicalities and laugh 
 at his incongruities. 
 
 This kindly treatment of the peasant as compared with the 
 treatment given him in the plays of the later Irish writers is 
 probably to be explained in Lady Gregory's consciousness of 
 
 1. Samhain , 1905, in Collected Works . Vol . IV., p. 204. 
 

 
 
 
 
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 superior position and intellect. She presents only a super- 
 ficial view of the peasant because from her detached position 
 she sees only his delightful picturesqueness and fails entirely 
 to see the sordidness and harshness which lurk under his genial 
 exterior. These qualities Lennox Robinson, Padraic Colum, 
 
 St. John Ervine and the others of the younger group, because 
 they are of the people, see and wish to remove. And in pro- 
 portion as Lady Gregory fails to give us "a whole man” she 
 is producing pleasing caricature, not character, and subordinat- 
 ing real drama to an interest in idiom. 
 
 In one other respect Lady Gregory fails to produce 
 reality: in the restriction of motives almost solely to fear 
 of a neighbor’s opinion. Love, hatred, altruism, patriotism 
 (except in The Rising of the Moon ) — most of the great emotions 
 which dominate life hardly enter into these peasant plays at 
 all. Herein, probably, is the cause of the absence of conflict 
 and passion . 
 
 In the light of these facts Lady Gregory’s position 
 in the general field of Irish drama can be seen. She is one 
 link by which the National drama outlined by Yeats gradually 
 became limited almost exclusively to the portrayal of the 
 peasant. She gets away from the poetic drama and by the pop- 
 ularity which her peasant plays gained gives impetus to the 
 young men just beginning to write, directing their attention 
 to the really great fact of Irish life, providing them with 
 precedent. But she is only semi-realistic — her peasant is 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 not the true worker of the land. 
 
 The works of J. M. Synge have been subjected to such 
 extensive and intensive criticism that his position in the 
 National school is well known. His prefaces are expansions 
 of Yeats's pleas for imaginative drama, for an "art of the the- 
 atre that shall be joyful, fantastic, extravagant, whimsical, 
 beautiful, resonant, and altogether reckless." 1 2 Synge ex- 
 presses the same idea in his famous words, "On the stage one 
 must have reality and one must have joy; and that is why the 
 intellectual modern drama has failed, and people have grown 
 sick of the false joy of the musical comedy that has been 
 given them in place of the rich joy found only in what is 
 superb and wild in reality."^ If their theories of art are 
 alike, Synge is far more able than Yeats to practice them 
 without losing dramatic excellence. Yeats's feeling that 
 beautiful language is to be found among the peasants reaches 
 its flower not in his own plays but in the "romancin'" of 
 Christy Mahon, the rich rhythm of which makes it rank among 
 the most beautiful passages of English prose. "Let you wait 
 to hear me talking, till we're astray in Erris, when Good 
 Friday's by, drinking a sup from a well, and making mighty 
 kisses with our wetted mouths, or gaming in a gap or sunshine. 
 
 1. Samhain, 1904, in Collected Works . Vol . IV., p. 173. 
 
 2. Preface to The Plavbov of the Western World . 1907. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
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 with yourself stretched back into your necklace in the flowers 
 of the eaTth." 
 
 In material as well as in ideas of art and dialogue 
 Synge agreed with Yeats . All of his plays except one deal 
 with folk imagination as it has been developed through the 
 long years of life along the west coast; that one exception 
 is of an ancient legend which Yeats himself used, the story of 
 Deirdre. And yet the difference between the two dramatists 
 can be no better illustrated than by comparing their versions 
 of the story. Yeats's Deirdre is a beautiful poem, sad in 
 spirit. Synge's Deirdre . unfinished as it is, is a poetic 
 tragedy of a high degree of power. One lacks reality; the 
 other is informed with it. Why the difference? Chiefly this 
 Yeats is naturally a poet, Synge a born dramatist. He has 
 breathed his own spirit into the old tale, and while using none 
 of the methods of realism has achieved reality. Character 
 and incident were to Synge no more than a means for the expres- 
 sion of his own vision of the glory of life and the splendour 
 of its sadness. 
 
 Placed beside Lady Gregory's peasants, those of Synge 
 show the same contrast of life and dimensions and passion which 
 his Deirdre does in comparison with the Deirdre of Yeats . 
 
 There is, to be sure, the same characteristic of un-morality. 
 
 1. Chas . Tennyson: Irish Plays and Playwrights : Quarterly 
 Review 210, p. 230. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 lack of what we are accustomed to think of as idealism; and 
 the idiom is basically the same. Yet Maurya is a far more 
 tragic figure than Mary Cahel in The Gaol Gate . Christy Mahon 
 moves and pulsates with life as Hyacinth Halvey never does, 
 although both are comic characters purporting to portray an 
 actual individual. The great difference arises from Synge's 
 patient selection and blending of characteristics into one 
 rich whole. Lady Gregory's plays are like gossip poured forth 
 in a broad stream rambling in every unimpeded direction. 
 
 Synge's are carefully and strictly guided. Although he got 
 the initial idea for his characters from living peasants in 
 whom he saw a mixture of the god and the beast, his finished 
 products are never typical peasants. He wrote of tinkers and 
 tramps because their life seemed richer in imaginative elements 
 than the life of ordinary people; but he added to even their 
 picturesqueness and emphasized even their duality. He in- 
 sisted that he used the language of peasants just as he heard 
 it spoken in the kitchen and fish markets, but to make this 
 speech "fully flavored as a nut or an apple" he carefully 
 pruned away its waste elements. In the same way the situations 
 of his plays, while originating in stories told by the peasants, 
 are really selected and embellished by a discriminating artist. 
 
 Yet paradoxically enough, Synge in spite of the in- 
 tense air of reality one finds in his peasants is not realistic, 
 or at best only semi-realistic . Thomas MacDonagh of University 
 
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 College, Dublin, contends that he is "often merely 'Celtic 1 
 in his phraseology though far more often rich and right . His 
 fault in the matter was that he crammed his language too full 
 of rich phrases .. .neglecting the common stuff of speech." 1 To 
 quote Charles Tennyson again, "His plays are no more repro- 
 ductions of material life than his language is a reproduction 
 of the beautiful speech of the West . Its strange cadence and 
 burning phrases represent not what the ear heard, but the music 
 
 o 
 
 which the hearing bred in the mind." The sum of the matter 
 is that by exaggerating the richness of his peasant life in 
 order to make drama which "nourishes the imagination" he has 
 produced a reality which is far from being the Irish peasant 
 of today . The facts that death found him at Deirdre instead 
 of a peasant play, and that he told Yeats that he was "sick 
 of the peasant on the stage" may be taken, perhaps, as an in- 
 dication of his own feeling that for his purpose the peasant 
 was not the best material. That point can never be settled; 
 but there can be no doubt that his drama of modern peasants 
 largely influenced the young realists, widely as they differed 
 from him in artistic methods and in the amount of genius they 
 brought to their work . 
 
 Today this Nationalist school is history rather than 
 
 1. MacDonagh: Literature in Ireland , p . 48 . 
 2- Quarterly Review . Vol . 210, p. 230. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 a present literary force. The premature death of Synge in 
 190S just when he was beginning to turn toward folk history 
 may be said to mark the climax of the movement . Since then 
 there has been almost nothing to break its rapid decline. 
 
 Lady Gregory’s New Comedies , published in 1913, are decidedly 
 inferior to the Seven Short Plays of 1909. Hyacinth Halvey 
 resurrected in the later volume is no longer particularly 
 humorous and has the same faults as in the play of 1909. Hack- 
 neyed farce elements continually appear throughout the plays; 
 of the group The Image is the only significant piece and even 
 it fails to be entirely convincing. According to Boyd this 
 inferiority to the early comedies results from the original 
 verve and zest having made way for a M certain mechanical effect 
 which must be attributed to excessive exploitation of the same 
 material . 1,1 
 
 As for Yeats himself, his last volume of plays Four 
 Flay s for Dane er s published in 1931 is so thoroughly exotic 
 that in spite of containing names as familiar as Cuchulain, 
 
 Emer, and Dervorgilla, they seem more Oriental than Irish. 
 
 The old Maeterl inckian theories which first prompted him to 
 simplify acting and stage effects now lead to the impressionism 
 calling for marionette-like acting and the extreme of substitut- 
 ing for curtains a black cloth adorned with a suggestive emblem. 
 
 !• Contemporary Drama of Ireland , p, 129. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 The cloth is to be folded and unfolded by the musicians who 
 appear in each of the plays. In a significant note on At 
 the Hawk * s Well Yeats says, "My blunder has been that I did 
 not discover in my youth that my theatre must be the ancient 
 theatre that can be made by unrolling a carpet or marking out 
 a place with a stick or setting up a screen against the wall." 
 The model for this stage he finds in the "Noh" stage of Japan. 
 Still another Oriental influence is to be found in the use cf 
 Japanese dancers and in masks for all the principal characters. 
 Arabian mysticism, of which Yeats has always been a student, 
 appears throughout these plays— in the dreams of Dervorgilla 
 and Dermot, in the use of birds as symbols for subjectivity in 
 Calvary . in the discussion of the source of woman's beauty in 
 The Only Jealousy of Emer . Of the plays Yeats says, "In 
 writing these little plays I knew I was creating something 
 which could only succeed in a civilization very unlike ours." 
 
 When the founder of Nationalist drama has carried 
 his cult of poetry and old legends so far that his output is 
 no longer more than slightly reflective of anything national 
 and when his associates are no longer writing, the school may 
 safely be said to be dead unless it is being re-inforced by 
 new writers . The playwrights of Ireland today are very far 
 from the nationalist tradition, for they are interested in 
 nothing but present day workers of the land or factory. 1 The 
 
 1. Lord Dunsany is clearly an exception to this statement. 
 

 
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 influence which dominated Martyn is apparently as strong upon 
 them as that of Yeats . They have combined the elements which 
 to them seem best in the art theories of the two founders of 
 the dramatic movement. While using the peasant which Martyn 
 rejected, they have reverted to the type of drama which he 
 advocated. The national school of drama at the distance of 
 but little more than a decade from the death of Synge seems 
 a mushroom growth of exceeding beauty, but short life because 
 its roots failed to catch deeply into the real life of the 
 Irish people . 
 
 But, although the poetic glamour of his plays would seem to 
 place him in the Yeats school, he is excluded from it by the 
 fact that he has never used Celtic myth and legend, preferring 
 to invent one of his own which he arbitrarily attaches to the 
 fabulous Orient. Except for the Celtic quality of imagina- 
 tion of Dunsany's plays, they can hardly be said to be Irish 
 
 at all . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE RELATION OF THE NEW IRISH DRAMA TO 
 MODERN DRAMATIC PRACTICE 
 
 In summarizing the modern drama which began in the 
 work of Ibsen, Archibald Henderson says, "The drama of to-day, 
 through the influences of modern science, of contemporary 
 democracy, of shifting moral values, of the critical rather 
 than the worshipful attitude towards life, of an irresistible 
 thrust towards increased naturalism and greater veracity, has 
 become bourgeois, dealing with the world of every day; unheroic, 
 suburban, and almost prosaic, yet intensely interesting by 
 reason of its sincerity and humanity; essentially critical in 
 tone, proving all things, holding fast that which is good.” 1 
 A little farther on he adds as almost his last sentence in 
 The Changing Drama . "The drama of to-day embodies the social 
 fervor of the epoch." 
 
 With the few striking exceptions of Yeats, Synge, 
 Maeterlinck, and Rostand, the best modern playwrights of every 
 nation have adopted with individual or national variations the 
 artistic form known as "the drama of ideas" which accepts a 
 
 1 • Changing Drama . Ch . X . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 problem or a generalization upon a familiar society as the 
 basis oi the play, without allowing this underlying criticism 
 to tyrannize over the characters . This drama of intellectual 
 content differs from the thesis play in assuming its truth or 
 criticism of life instead of setting out to prove it. 
 
 It has already been pointed out that Yeats and, under 
 his influence, the other members of the national school of Irish 
 drama rejected entirely the drama of ideas with its insistence 
 upon the realistic method and the inculcation of a truth which 
 the dramatist wishes to teach. The new writers in their turn 
 have rejected the poetic drama of Yeats and the half -realistic 
 portrayal of the peasant of Lady Gregory and Synge, for a con- 
 ception of the drama which in spirit and technique harks di- 
 rectly back to Ibsen. A comparative study of the entire group 
 of plays shows convincingly their relation to modern dramatic 
 art in their unified realistic atmosphere, in the type of 
 themes chosen and the handling of them, and in the artistic 
 purpose of their authors . 
 
 The dramatist of today may do as he likes in regard 
 to observing the pseudo-classical unities of time and place, 
 but to the unity of action he adds another hardly less in- 
 violable, that of impression. If the play is to be realistic 
 the atmosphere must be of real people and real events; if it 
 is tragic no speech can detract from the totality of tragic 
 effect; if mystical, no trace of false spirituality and no 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 32 - 
 
 note of actuality must creep into it; if it is comedy a senae 
 of foreboding tragedy must not oppress the reader. That the 
 older Irish dramatists did achieve a high degree of unity of 
 impression in their imaginative drama no one who has seen 
 Riders to the Sea and Cathleen Ni Houlihan can deny . But the 
 atmosphere of typical European drama is very different from 
 that of Synge's west coast plays and Yeats's poems of Gaelic 
 tradition. m?hat dramatic atmosphere do the young playwrights 
 choose and how successfully does each of them build it up into 
 one unified whole? 
 
 There is always difficulty in generalizing upon the 
 literary output of a group of writers because there is always 
 a tendency in individuals to vary from their norm, to give rein 
 to a human desire for experimentation. In the case of this 
 later group of writers, however, the general characteristic is 
 fairly clear. All of the plays with the exceptions of Ervine's 
 Jane Clegg and Colum's Mogu. the Wanderer , deal with Irish 
 people and Irish themes; all of the plays except Campbell's 
 Little Cowherd of Slainge and Purcell's The Pagan and the dram- 
 atic dialogues of Padraic Pearse and Daniel Corkery deal with 
 Irish themes through the medium of present day Irish people; 
 in only one play, Boyle's Mineral Workers , is nobility intro- 
 duced and then only as minor characters; in all but a very few 
 plays, notably Robinson's The Patriots and The White-headed Bov . 
 Ervine's Mixed Marriage and Colum's Thomas Musk errv . the char— 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 * 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 23 - 
 
 act ers are peasants, drawn with careful attention to the 
 realistic method. The plays last mentioned deal, respectively, 
 with small trades-people, day -laborers, and petty officials. 
 Considering how largely agricultural Ireland is, this preponder- 
 ance of peasant plays seems properly expressive of the national 
 life, while at the same time the few plays of middle-class 
 townspeople are necessary to complete the picture of Irish life. 
 Evidently, then, these later playwrights have attempted the 
 drama of actuality — to show Irish life as it seems to them 
 actually to be. 
 
 Tested in the light of this dramatic purpose, the 
 plays of the group do, on the whole, show as intense unity 
 of impression as the plays of Yeats and Synge, even though the 
 atmosphere is totally different . There are several contribut- 
 ing causes. For one thing, every one of these authors has 
 studied to good advantage, the one-act play, which like the 
 short-story dares admit no material which is not necessary 
 for building up a pre-conceived effect. There are few greater 
 one-act plays than Mayne's The Troth . Robinson's The Clancv 
 Name . and Ervine's The Magnanimous Lover , to mention the most 
 important of the group. Even the plays designed to fill a 
 whole evening are shorter and far simpler in construction than 
 the average play, or than The Playboy of the Western World . 
 Having limited themselves to a narrow canvas and few colors, 
 the Irish realists have no great temptation to mar their work 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 * 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
- 34 - 
 
 by diversifying the impression. 
 
 From Ibsen and his followers, they have learned the 
 value of preserving the unities of time and place where pos- 
 sible, not because of the "verisimilitude” early critics had 
 insisted upon, but because of the heightened effect lent by 
 unified place and time. In this entire group of plays, number- 
 ing almost thirty, there are only two, Boyle's Mineral Workers 
 and Robinson's The Cross-Roads , in which the unity of place is 
 not strictly observed. It is remarkable also that these two 
 plays which are the only plays covering any great extent of 
 time, are the two plays most faulty from the standpoint of 
 dramatic effect. By contrasting the effect of Boyle's comedy 
 with The White-headed Bov where the unity of time is preserved, 
 and The Cross-Roads with Murray's tragedy The Birthright , one 
 realizes the dramatic value of the much debated unity of time 
 as an aid in building up an over-powering single effect . 
 
 That the Irish realists were thoroughly aware of the 
 value of this compression of time is shown by the fact that 
 with the exception of the two plays just mentioned, the action 
 is always limited to a few weeks, usually not more than two. 
 Their compression, however, is not the artificial thing achieved 
 by the French classicists who insisted on the unity of time as 
 a dogma, but that of Ibsen who by "an expanded fifth act" opened 
 his plays relatively near the climax, skillfully sketching in 
 the antecedent action as the narrative proceeds . Nearly every 
 

 
 
 . 
 
 ' 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
- 25 - 
 
 one of the Irish realists uses this technical device over and 
 over again. In the popular Whit e-headed Bov all the history 
 of the Geoghegan family denials and sacrifices for Denis, the 
 smart one of them, is related hint by hint, and bit by bit 
 throughout the comedy, so that the unity of time is not arti- 
 ficial. Similarly in The Birthright a really great tragic 
 effect is largely attained by the skillful way in which the 
 years of slowly growing friction in the Morrissey home are ex- 
 plained during the course of the dialogue. Back of the action 
 of The Land are the years when Murtagh Cosgar's family has felt 
 his iron hand; back of The Harvest is a long story of mis-edu- 
 cation; John Ferguson and The Building Fund contain a great 
 deal of delayed exposition; The Fiddler's House depends largely 
 for totality of effect upon this compression of Conn Hourican's 
 past life into the space of two weeks. As a matter of fact 
 the synthetic method is used in no plays except The Cross-Roads 
 and The Mineral Workers , already noted as comparatively rare 
 instances where the general effect is not unified. 
 
 From this examination it is apparent that when these 
 recent Irish plays fail in artistic effect, it is not primarily 
 from lack of knowledge on the part of their authors of the 
 rules of dramatic art . Usually the failures may be traced to 
 the common fault of writers of less than the first rank, an 
 over-stressing of legitimate devices. It was in striving for 
 this unity which they know how to produce if one is to judge 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . . 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 26 - 
 
 by The Building Fund and The Patriots , that Boyle and Robinson 
 piled up details until the comedies of the former become farces 
 and the tragic The Cross-Roads of the other is little more than 
 a melodrama of decidedly lurid cast. It is this amateurish 
 uncertainty in handling their material which is the cause of 
 the few discordant notes which creep into the plays. That 
 the Irish playwrights know how to create good, high-spirited 
 fun is shown in Mayne's The Turn of the Road and The Drone 
 which show the humor and grace of homely life in North Ireland, 
 just as Robinson's The Whit e-headed Bov is from beginning to 
 end a good-natured, intensely funny comedy of County Cork. 
 
 The ability to produce real tragedy out of Irish life is shown 
 in John Ferguson . The Birthright . Maurice Harte . Thomas Muskerrv 
 and others; yet the authors of all these plays do at times 
 show amateurish exaggeration of the effect they are trying to 
 produce * 
 
 In all of the plays of this group except The Mineral 
 Workers the atmosphere is that of actual life on Irish farms or 
 in Irish towns. Most of the scenes are laid in the all-purpose 
 room of the Irish cottage, the kitchen with its bare furniture 
 and turf fire. The characters usually are homely individuals 
 of single motives and no great culture. Instead of the mystic 
 landscapes and heroic figures of Yeats's drama we have small 
 bits of land to which prosaic, hard-handed individuals must 
 give their lives. Instead of the wild imagination and reckless 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 * 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ■ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 27 - 
 
 gay ety of Synge's Galway peasants we have a heavy-footed 
 peasantry contented with a life with no imaginative flavor. 
 
 The atmosphere of these plays is not the thing of poetic 
 glamour and imaginative sparkle which to the national dramatists 
 was the aspect of Irish life worth portraying. 
 
 Many of the realists have used a thoroughly modern 
 device in giving this sense of actuality, of unified impression 
 to those who must depend upon the printed page for their know- 
 ledge of the plays: that is, in the use of stage directions 
 which are not mere theatrical manager's jargon. To take for 
 example a play by each of four different writers, Ervine, Murray 
 Mayne and Robinson. The opening descriptions on The Magnani - 
 mous Lover hint at the very essence of Ulster Protestant life 
 in the mention of the oleograph of King William the Third cross- 
 ing the Boyne and in the telling over of mottoes on the wall: 
 "What shall it Profit a Man though he Gain the Whole World, if 
 he Lose his own Soul;” "Blessed are the Humble and Weak;" 
 
 "God is Here;" "Thou God seest me." In The Birthright the 
 following stage direction is typical of the atmospheric heighten 
 -ing Murray habitually uses: "Bat's heavy step is heard again. 
 Maura throws a shawl around her and takes a candle off the 
 dresser. As the latch is lifted she draws the bolt and with 
 feverish haste hands out the candle. The kitchen is very 
 
 dimly lit by the glow of the fire." With a few words at the 
 
 opening of The Turn of the Road Mayne shows us the whole busy. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 ' 
 
 
 ' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 28 - 
 
 homely setting of the Granahan family: "Opposite there is a 
 fireplace with projecting breasts in which a turf fire is 
 glowing. Mrs. Granahan and Ellen are engaged at the table 
 washing and drying the plates after the supper. Thomas Gran- 
 ahan, the grandfather, is seated at the fireplace and has 
 evidently just finished his stirabout.” But still more remin- 
 iscent of the charming use of stage directions characteristic 
 of Barker and Barrie are these in The White-headed Boy . ”‘Tis 
 too high notions poor William always had — and his sister Ellen, 
 worse again than himself, craning after anything new she's be 
 like a cow through a fence— but indeed William’s notions didn't 
 stand too well to him, and when he died he left his family — 
 six of them — no less— in a poor enough way." In this play 
 the effect of jollity and high spirits is cleverly intensified 
 by the use of narrative exit directions as: "Kate's off to the 
 kitchen now. Amn't I after telling you she's a great help 
 to her mother?" and "Here's Kate back again with the toasting- 
 fork;" or "She's all in a flutter. Wisha, she's cracked 
 about Denis. Tien't so easy to stir George— he's read it 
 now . " 
 
 To realize how far removed such directions are from 
 those of Yeats who rejected the modern theory of detailed 
 and literary stage directions, one has only to compare them 
 with the following very typical direction: "Steps before the 
 Palace of King Guaire . A table in front of steps at one 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 ' 
 
 
 
 * 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 39 - 
 
 side with food on it, and a bench by table. Seanchan lying 
 on steps. Pupils before steps. King on the upper step 
 before a curtained door." 1 
 
 Critics have usually agreed that unity of impression 
 is more easily obtained in plays in which physical action is 
 not so important as psychological. Since the dramas of Ibsen 
 showed so conclusively the intense dramatic effects to be de- 
 rived from purely mental conflict, there has been a steadily 
 growing tendency on the part of most of the best dramatists 
 to stress that type of action. But Yeats with his pre-occupa- 
 tion with heroic legends would naturally depend largely upon 
 physical action; Lady Gregory’s farces naturally could not make 
 use of Ibsen's principle, and Synge's rejection of the drama 
 of ideas predisposed him against it . In the peasant plays 
 of both the latter there is a good deal of physical action. 
 
 The plays of the young realists are in this respect 
 as in so many others much influenced by continental standards. 
 The action of Murray's Maurice Harte is as purely psychological 
 as any of Ibsen's plays, in its stress on the clash of the in- 
 dividual and the group with the resulting spiritual tragedy 
 when the individual succumbs . Similarly in The Birthright , 
 except for the exchanging of Hugh's name on the trunk for 
 Shane's and for the last tragic moment when the mental conflict 
 
 1 . Kings Threshold. 
 

 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 * 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
- 30 - 
 
 finally flames into physical struggle there is little bodily 
 action. In John Ferguson there is almost no physical action 
 on the stage, though deep spiritual struggle in Hannah, Andrew, 
 Jimmy Caesar, and John Ferguson. Of Ervine's other plays 
 Mixed Marriage and The Orangeman show physical action only in 
 the last scenes, and The Magnanimous Lover is purely psycholog- 
 ical . In the last-mentioned play, at the end of the long con- 
 versation in which Maggie Cather has been probing into Henry's 
 motives, the following bit of dialogue sums up the whole 
 struggle : 
 
 Maggie: You want to marry me, Henry? 
 
 Henry: Because it's a debt I owe to God. If 
 I could save your soul I'd be paying 
 Him back . 
 
 Maggie: And if I don't marry you? 
 
 Henry: I shall have tried all the same. I 
 can do no more . 
 
 Maggie: Henry, you're worse nor I thought you. 
 
 You're not thinking of me nor the 
 wrong you did. It's yourself you're 
 thinking of. You're afraid of God, 
 and you want to use me to buy Him off . 
 
 You can well call yourself a God-fearing 
 man, Henry. I'm nothing to you. The 
 child you're father of is nothing to 
 you. You're just frightened out of 
 your wits for fear you'll go to hell 
 for all you're saved. I won't marry 
 you. I'm as good as you are for all 
 I'm not saved. I'm better nor you 
 are, for I'm not afraid of God. 
 
 One does not need to point out the fact that such a passage 
 
 would never occur in a play in which the action is to any 
 
 considerable extent in the physical plane. 
 

 
 
 
 4 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 31 - 
 
 In Colum's plays the emphasis is altogether upon the 
 inner struggle. In The Land there are two deep psychological 
 struggles. One of these is between Matt Cosgar and Ellen, 
 the mutual bond of their love balanced by his affection for 
 the land and by her desire "to be doing other work, and to be 
 meeting strange people. And instead of bare roads and market 
 towns, to be seeing streets, and crowds and theaters." The 
 other conflict is between Matt and his father, old Murtagh 
 Cosgar, who has driven away from home eight children in his 
 iron determination to rule his family body and soul. Through- 
 out this play there is little bustling or idle talk except in 
 the characters of Sally and Cornelius who are introduced for 
 purposes of contrast. 
 
 In Thomas Muskerrv . although there are no long search 
 ing dialogues and although the psychological action is broken 
 by entrances of other characters and by new development of in- 
 cident, still the real action is in the mind of the old master 
 of Garrisowen as he is driven by his scheming relatives, first 
 from the position he has held for thirty years, then into going 
 to his daughter's home instead of the little cottage where it 
 has been his cherished dream to live his last days to himself, 
 and finally into death in a pauper's bed because he would not 
 give up his dream. It is this losing struggle which in the 
 short space of two months turns him from a healthy, benevolent 
 elderly man to the shaken, thick -tongued wrack of a being who 
 
■ 
 
 * 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ■ 
 
 J 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 33 - 
 
 mutters with slack lips and cheeks, "It's — it’s— the pau— 
 pauper's bed they've given rne." 
 
 In The Fiddler's House the influence of Ibsen is 
 even more apparent. The narrow thread of plot is carefully 
 and fully developed by showing the inner struggles of each of 
 the characters . The most subtle example of this spiritual 
 conflict is in the conversation in which Maire makes her de- 
 cision to go on the roads with her father rather than to risk 
 her high-spirited life to her lover's hard strength. 
 
 Maire: Do you know where I saw you first, Brian? 
 
 Brian: Where was it, Maire? 
 
 Maire: In a field by the road. You were 
 breaking a horse. 
 
 Brian: I was always a good hand with a horse. 
 
 Maire: The poor beast was covered with foam and 
 sweat and at last you made it still . 
 
 I thought it was grand then. Are your 
 brothers with you, Brian? 
 
 Brian: (with somber passion) No. My brothers 
 are not with me. I quarreled with them 
 all, and I'm nearly heartbroken for 
 what I did . 
 
 Maire: Ah Brian MacConnell, I don't know what 
 to say to you at all . 
 
 When she refuses to give him her promise, he asks, "How was 
 I to know that you would take that quarrel to heart?" and she 
 replies: "I thought you were strong, but I see now that you 
 are only a man who forces himself to harsh behavior. I have 
 my own way to go; my father wants to go back to the roads, and 
 it's right that I should be with him, to watch over him." 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 • ' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 • 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ■ 
 
 
 
 
 1 
 
- 33 - 
 
 V/hen Brian asks despairingly what shelter she will have on the 
 road, she answers, "I’ll have the quiet of evening, and my own 
 thoughts, and I'll follow the music; I'll laugh and hold up 
 my head again.” There is a restraint about this choice which 
 recalls Nora Helmer’s last words to her husband. 
 
 Of Robinson's plays The Clancy Name and T he Patriots 
 contain the most searching internal conflict . In the former 
 play the entire struggle is developed in the dialogue of the 
 ka>lf-crazed boy who begs for the relief of confession and his 
 mother whose pride of family name will perish if it is known 
 that a Clancy was a murderer. Even to the last lines of the 
 play there is only quiet, tense conflict between mother and 
 son, although the stage is full of excited neighbors who do 
 not understand the significance of John's broken words fran- 
 tically hushed by Mrs. Clancy. In The Patriots the plot de- 
 velops almost completely in the dialogue which skillfully re- 
 lates the past events of James Nugent's agitator life, his 
 hoarding his strength during the eighteen years of prison life, 
 his flaming desire to serve his country in his own way, his 
 disillusionment as to the spirit of Ireland, and finally his 
 surrender to the commonplaceness about him when he realizes 
 how much misery his patriotic fervor has brought to his friends 
 and family . There is something of the spirit of Brand in 
 this old rebel who must give all to his country, and in the 
 tragic quality of his failure. Artistically, The Patriots 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 .. 
 
 * 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 34 - 
 
 ia the best of Robinson’s plays, although it is unfortunate 
 in having its thesis so soon disproved by the events of the 
 Easter uprising. Both The Cross-Roads and The Harvest fall 
 far short of the other two in the admission of the blustering 
 and brutal show of physical violence in the first and in the 
 lack of any deep reading of the thought lives of the Hurley fam- 
 ily in the latter. There is an attempt to do this in the 
 character of Mary but somehow she fails to ring true in her 
 insistence that she cannot live away from the alluring ex- 
 citements of London. 
 
 The White-headed Bov illustrates a peculiar char- 
 acteristic of the Irish realists that no matter how painstaking 
 they are in making their serious plays full of intellectual 
 content, when they come to write comedy, the work of their 
 countryman, Shaw, has no influence whatsoever upon them. All 
 the comedies of the entire group, The White-headed Bov . The 
 Turn of the Road . The Drone . The Mineral Workers , and The 
 Family Failing are full of stirring about, entrances and exits, 
 short, smart dialogues, showing little reflective depth. The 
 observations of Uncle Bartle and Grandfather Granahan are, per- 
 haps, the only philosophical elements in any of these comedies. 
 It would seem that Mayne and Boyle use these old men somewhat 
 as Maeterlinck uses them, as a substitute for the ancient Greek 
 chorus . At any rate the atmosphere of the comedies is always 
 that of hustling activity; it rarely seems slap-stick farce. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ' 
 
 * 
 
 * 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 35 - 
 
 though there are moments when it approaches this lowest type 
 of drama. It is interesting, however, to notice that in spite 
 of its poor technical structure (almost nothing happens in the 
 whole first act), Mayne's The Drone is perhaps the best comedy 
 in modern Irish literature, excepting only Synge’s plays. 
 
 In the case of the authors who have only single dramas 
 to their credit, there is a notable placing of the action in 
 mental struggle. MacDonagh's When the Dawn is Come , while 
 covering the space of time necessary for the battle in which 
 Thurlough is wounded and for the two councils to be held, is 
 really only a long exposition of the motives and mental make-up 
 of the hero who by his deep, almost super-human vision can see 
 farther than his companions and by his courage is willing to 
 risk more than they for what they are all fighting. He is 
 the true dreamer who must lose himself in proving the worth of 
 his dream. Joyce’s The Exiles , a recent ambitious attempt 
 at the drama of ideas, is as static from a physical standpoint 
 as Rosmersholm . Unbroken dialogues pages in length compose 
 the action, which is really only an exposition of how and why 
 certain extreme types of character react in a very ordinary 
 situation. Joseph Campbell's Judgment in spite of containing 
 a death scene and an Irish wake lacks any considerable amount 
 of action. In the first act there is talk of the demented 
 old tinker woman. Peg Straw, and one hears her cries as the 
 other tinkers beat her. At the end of the act she crawls to 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 36 - 
 
 the cabin to die. The second and third acts although dealing 
 with Peg's wake and full of the atmospheric wildness of Donegal 
 mountainsides contain no action other than that which results 
 from a stranger's quarrelsomeness. When the watching peasants 
 realize that the stranger is Peg's son he is turned out of 
 doors quietly and decently. 
 
 If in this treatment of action the young realists 
 have rejected the theories of Yeats they have still further 
 rejected his method of poetic symbolism. The rare instances 
 of symbolism found in their plays are always of a type entirely 
 different from that of Yeats. The "man-headed birds" in 
 Shadowy Waters and the fairy songs in Land of Heart's Desire 
 symbolizing imaginative longing for freedom are replaced in 
 the later drama by the beggar's fiddle which in The Turn of the 
 Road stands for Robbie John's restless longing to escape the 
 narrow restriction of his home and give himself to his art. 
 
 The fiery patriotism of James Nugent symbolizes the spirit of 
 his generation, but it is a very different sort of symbolism 
 from the gold helmet of Yeats's play upon patriotic motivation. 
 A symbol typical of the realists is the union of Hugh Rainey 
 and Nora O'Connor in Mixed Marriage as symbolic of the best 
 union of Protestants and Catholics . Mrs . Rainey expresses the 
 idea thus: "When ye're as ould as A am ye'll know that your 
 own need is the wurl's need. It's love that Nora an' Hugh 
 need an' it's love the wurl needs. Ye're wrong til be sug- 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 37 - 
 
 gestin' partin' til them. Can't ye 3ee, they're doin' the 
 very thing ye want Irelan' t' do? It's Cathlik an' Prodestan 
 joinin' hands thegither." In the same way the huge, heavy 
 drum which the McClurgs have always carried in the Orange 
 procession symbolizes Ulster bigotry in The Orangeman . Again, 
 taking to the old easy chair in The Family Failing represents 
 the family weakness of laziness. By comparing such homely 
 symbols as these with the poetic, fanciful symbolism of Yeats's 
 plays one realizes something of how consciously the young 
 playwrights must have chosen to follow continental realistic 
 standards . 
 
 Another aspect of this realism of theirs is in their 
 rigid exclusion of all elements which might seem accidental or 
 adventitious. In but few instances does one feel that there 
 is any improbability in the actions of the characters . The 
 most outstanding examples of insecure motivation are in The 
 Mineral Workers and The Cross-Roads . The former is full of 
 accidental coincidences which provide "laughs” but do not give 
 any illusion of reality . The plot of the latter play is based 
 upon a double improbability: first, that a girl of Ellen's 
 refinement and spirit could give herself to a man like Tom 
 Dempsey, who when he comes to her after their parents have 
 arranged the match, orders her to come out to him, shouting 
 angrily, "What the devil's keeping you, can't you come on out?" 
 But if one can, by a stretch of imagination, grant that Ellen 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 * 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 38 - 
 
 could marry this type of man, it is utterly impossible to 
 believe that the loveless marriage could put "a black curse 
 on the farm" so that the up-to-date agricultural methods ad- 
 vocated by Ellen make her neighbors rich, while at the same 
 time ruining the Dempsey farm, destroying the fertility of the 
 land, and causing the stock and even Ellen's own children to 
 die . 
 
 With the exception of these two plays, so often noted 
 as exceptions to so many different artistic practices, there 
 is little weak motivation. The tragic situation of fratricide 
 in The Birthright , one of the most difficult to work up to, 
 is rendered thoroughly probable by Shane's years of repressed 
 feeling against his mother's partiality and by Hugh's shock of 
 disappointment in being suddenly thrust out of what he had all 
 his life supposed to be his birthright. If anything more 
 were necessary to give probability, even inevitability to the 
 outcome, it is to be had in the fact that the action is in the 
 gloom and unreality which any poorly lighted room has in the 
 very early hours of morning . 
 
 Another situation difficult to motivate is in 
 Mixed Marriage when Nora runs out into the crowd of rioters to 
 meet her death. But this apparently mad action seems probable 
 when one understands her remorse as she begins to doubt her- 
 self and to feel that by refusing to give up Hugh she has been 
 the cause of this bloody disturbance. When one comprehends 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ■ 
 
 ' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ■- 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 39 - 
 
 the extreme nervousness which makes her start at Rainey's 
 shadow, and finally ask excitedly, "If A was t' die mebbe it 
 wild put things right?", one does not question her action. 
 
 The other of Ervine's plays where the situation is difficult 
 enough to require a fairly skilled dramatist to handle it 
 successfully is John Ferguson . The play is undoubtedly marred 
 by the introduction of "Clutie John" who finally goads Andrew 
 into avenging his sister's wrong. "Clutie John" belongs to 
 the long line of half-fools who have so fascinated dramatists, 
 and who invariably have flashes of deeper insight than have 
 the chief characters. Unquestionably "Clutie John" is more 
 than slightly improbable and stereotyped. But the really 
 great situation in the play, the resignation of John Ferguson 
 to the cruel fate which has overtaken him, is handled skill- 
 fully, in almost masterly fashion. The habits of all his 
 past life and the ideal of patient endurance which he has been 
 building through the years of smaller trouble are strong enough 
 to account for his submission to the final catastrophe that 
 his only son shall die on the gallows for a confessed crime. 
 
 As a rule the motivation of the shorter plays is as 
 careful as that of these long plays just discussed. Mrs. 
 Clancy's forcing John to die unshriven with the load of his 
 guilt on his mind is explicable by her natural hardness and by 
 her inordinate pride of family name. Maurice Harte's insanity 
 is the natural result of the unendurably high nervous tension 
 put upon his sensitive and extremely conscientious nature at 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ■ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-40- 
 
 a time when he is greatly overworked with pre-ordination study. 
 M&ggie Cather refuses Henry Hinde in The Magnanimous Lover 
 as much because she fears the hideous life she will have to 
 live with him as because of her old anger with him and her 
 present contempt for him. Maire Hourican refuses her lover 
 both because she is afraid of his masterful ways and because 
 she has some of her father's love for the adventure of the 
 life on the roads . The plays of Padraic Pearse, poetic and 
 slight in plot as they are, are still done with a good deal of 
 attention to the rules governing dramatic motivation. 
 
 In general it would seem that in this respect at 
 least the young writers have carefully heeded an admonition of 
 Yeats: "The moment we depart even a little from folk tradition 
 as we must in the drama, if we do not know the best that has 
 been said and written in the world, we do not know even our- 
 selves . It is no great labor to know the best dramatic liter- 
 ature for there is little of it. We Irish must know it all, 
 for we have, I think, far greater need of the severe discipline 
 of French and Scandinavian drama than of Shapespeare 's luxur— 
 
 iance Let us learn construction from the masters, and 
 
 dialogue from ourselves.”^ 
 
 It has been shown that in atmosphere and technical 
 methods the later Irish dramatists differ greatly from the 
 founders of the modern Irish dramatic renaissance; in the last 
 
 L- Samhyji^ 1901; in Collected Works . Vol . IV. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ■ 
 
 
 
 
 ♦ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-41- 
 
 analysis, however, the respect in which they depart farthest 
 from the National group is in dramatic purpose. Their work 
 shows little or no tendency to attempt with Yeats and Synge 
 "to re-discover an art of the theatre that shall be joyful, 
 fantastic, extravagant, whimsical, beautiful, resonant, and 
 altogether reckless". And they disagree entirely with Yeats's, 
 "We are, it may be, very stupid in thinking that the average 
 man is a fit subject at all for the finest art." 1 Much more 
 appealing to them is the dramatic art which is a means of im- 
 proving the social order of their day. If Henderson was 
 correct in his generalization upon the characteristic drama of 
 to-day as embodying the social fervor of the age, it is easy 
 to see, even with a cursory examination, that the Irish play- 
 wrights of to-day have accepted implicitly the standard of 
 their age. They, like the continental and English and American 
 dramatists mentioned by Henderson, strive to be "leaders, not 
 merely spokesmen of the ideas and feelings of the motley throng 
 assembled in the play-house." 
 
 These writers are interested neither in glorifying 
 and extracting beauty from Irish tradition as Yeats was, nor 
 in getting fun from the picturesqueness of the peasant as 
 Synge had done. The story drama has little attraction for 
 them. The most significant single statement of the dramatic 
 
 1. Ibid ., p. 72. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 * 
 
 
 
 
 ■ 
 
 _ 
 
 ■ 
 
 
 
 
 
 ' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-42- 
 
 purpose of these realists if that of St . John Ervine in The 
 Forum of August 1914: "The terrible danger of the Irish people 
 is that they may find plenty of food for their bellies, but 
 
 find none for their souls — The incredible wrangling 
 
 over the question of the Municipal Art Gallery in Dublin; the 
 brutal manner in which the employers conducted the lock-out 
 in 1913; the terrible record of the gombeen men in the little 
 lonely towns and parishes throughout the country; the dreadful 
 story of the Dublin slums and the sweated industries of Belfast; 
 the bestial bigotry in which Ulster is envelopedl all of these 
 things have become plain in the bright light of the prosperity 
 which has now risen in Ireland; and it is the plain duty of 
 the artist to tell these things as it is his plain duty to tell 
 of a proud spirit when the proud spirit is alive.” 
 
 That Ervine was expressing the belief of the whole 
 group of writers under discussion is clearly shown by an analy- 
 sis of the plays as to themes and method of treatment. In 
 at least half of the plays the hard, unimaginative, fairly 
 prosperous peasant figures. Murtagh Cosgar, Mike and Tom 
 Dempsey, Tumour in Thomas Muskerrv . Bat Morrissey in The 
 Birthright . William John and Samuel James Granahan in The Turn 
 of the Road , the McMinns and John Murray in The Drone , all of 
 the Grogans in The Building Fund . Dan Fogarty in The Mineral 
 Workers . and Tom Carragher in The Family Failing , are the most 
 striking examples of this present day reading of the Irish 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 * 
 
 
 
 - 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 43 - 
 
 peasant with his over-weening love of the land which leads 
 him into various undesirable modes of thought. As a discus- 
 sion of this new peasant genre is reserved for a later chapter, 
 it is sufficient to note here that in presenting the peasants 
 in this light the playwrights seem to be trying definitely and 
 consciously to bring Irishmen to a realization of the evils of 
 common life in their country. 
 
 In some of the plays the purpose of the author is so 
 clear that the theme becomes almost propagandists . Robinson's 
 Harvest . for instance, is a warm protest against the old edu- 
 cational system which trained Irish children away from the farm 
 and unfitted them for their natural duties, this system being 
 personified in William Lordan, the old school-master who prides 
 himself in having made his pupils dissatisfied with the coarse, 
 "narrow" life at Knockmalgoss . Another play dealing with a 
 similar theme is Maurice Harte . which, while not so directly 
 propagandistic as Harvest . is nevertheless a forceful argument 
 against a social system which limits the value of educational 
 training to the priesthood. The Cross-Roads is directed 
 against the Irish patriarchal marriage system which means love- 
 less marriages. The Patriots is a cry against the new re- 
 formist methods of compromise which Robinson believed to have 
 killed the Irish spirit. In one sense the play is an attempt 
 to arouse the whole fighting spirit which had temporarily 
 lulled. The tragic situation of Seumas O'Kelly's The Bribe 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 ■ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 44 - 
 
 springs from the corruption of Irish petty politics; and Boyle's 
 comedy The Eloquent Dempsey deals with the contemptible tactics 
 of the petty politician. The Mineral Workers attempts to show 
 the Irish their short-sightedness and narrowness in refusing 
 to allow their "bit of land" to be disturbed under any consider- 
 ation of commercial or national or industrial prosperity . 
 
 Ireland is personified by Dan Fogarty who prefers to wreck the 
 venture rather than give the right of way through his tiny 
 farm, and who brags of his financial acumen when he sells cab- 
 bages to the miners while his neighbors' land is being ruined. 
 
 In the end, of course, Fogarty is forced to surrender to modern- 
 ity symbolized by the mine . Still another play. Mixed Marriage 
 is a passionate plea to the people of Ireland, in this case the 
 plea being for more tolerance. A particular stress is laid 
 upon the fact that religious bigotry is especially disastrous 
 to the workers . 
 
 If the plays just mentioned are almost direct appeals 
 for certain social reforms, practically all the other plays of 
 the group contain, directly or indirectly, reproof for certain 
 phases of Irish character. The Drone and The Family Failing 
 show how the laziness and perpetual dreaming to which a certain 
 type of Irishman is given results in degeneration of moral 
 fibre. On the other hand, there is a protest against the 
 domineering peasant who attempts to force his children into 
 beaten paths in The Land . The Fiddler's House . The Clancy Name . 
 Maurice Harte . The Turn of the Road , and Mixed Marriage . 
 

 
 
 
 
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 , 
 
- 45 - 
 
 The intolerance and bigotry of Ulster is roundly satirized in 
 The Turn oi the Road . The Magnanimous Lover « Mixed Marriage 
 and. The Orangeman , in fact in most of the plays by the Ulster 
 dramatists . 
 
 Further detailed examination would show that with 
 the exceptions of Fitzmaurice ' s fantasies, Dandy Dolls and 
 Magic Glasses , there are no plays in the entire group which do 
 not exhibit in some measure an attempt to mould Irish thought 
 and the character of Irish peasantry. In general, one must 
 feel in surveying the New Irish Drama that in atmosphere, in 
 technical methods, in spirit, and in purpose, it resembles the 
 modern drama of ideas so closely as to indicate conscious 
 application of continental principles of dramatic art. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
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- 46 - 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE NEW PEASANT GENRE. 
 
 The first reaction of the new Irish drama upon readers 
 who have delighted in the peasant plays of Lady Gregory and 
 Synge is apt to be a certain bewildered and horrified doubt. 
 
 Such a reader with his mind full of Hyacinth Halvey, Christy 
 Mahon, Martin Doul, and the other famous folk characters, is 
 shocked by the treatment of peasant life found in the new plays. 
 It is safe to assume that the general reading public is ac- 
 customed to think of the Irish peasant as an altogether delight- 
 ful figure, something like nothing else human under the sun, 
 something entirely un-moral and irresponsible, something so 
 credulous as to believe every rumor and so childlike as to 
 enjoy a "gallons story" which shocks deeply when seen in real- 
 ity; a creature of fits and starts of passion, of imaginative- 
 ness beyond that of all but the most carefully nurtured in- 
 dividuals of other lands; a simple pastoral being dressed in 
 rags or the coarsest of homespun, but speaking a rich, lyrical 
 language with a rhythm which poets may envy. This peasant is 
 a man of no substance and with no desire for any — voluntarily 
 a wanderer, a beggar, tramp, or tinker living in the open, at 
 home anywhere, dependent for his next meal upon the favor of 
 God and his own wit; with Christy going "romancing through a 
 romping lifetime from this hour to the dawning of the judgment 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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- 47 - 
 
 day. n In hia highest moments he is superb and wild; in his 
 most commonplace aspects he is deliciously naive and picturesque 
 His philosophy of life is in the gusto of the tramp who says 
 to Nora Burke in The Shadow of the Glen . "You’ll be hearing 
 the herons crying out over the black lakes and you’ll be hearing 
 the grouse and the owls with them, and the larks and the big 
 thrushes when the days are warm: and it’s not from the like of 
 them you'll be hearing a tale of getting old like Peggy Cavan- 
 agh, and losing' the hair off you and the light of your eyes, 
 but it’s the fine songs you'll be hearing when the sun goes 
 up, and there'll be no old fellow wheezing the like of a sick 
 sheep close to your ear.” 
 
 In turning from this familiar figure to that which 
 has succeeded him, it is interesting to compare the literary 
 motives of the National writers as explained by Synge to those 
 of the present day writers as summed up by St . John Ervine . 
 
 Said Synge in discussing the use of the peasant as dramatic 
 material: "In countries where the imagination of the people, 
 and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible 
 for the writer to be rich and copious in his words, and at the 
 same time to give the reality, which is the root of all poetry 
 in a comprehensive and natural form.” 1 Or again: ”In Ireland 
 for a few years more, we have a popular imagination that is 
 
 1. Preface to Playboy of the Western World. 
 

 
 . ; 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-48- 
 
 fiery and magnificent and tender; so that those of us who wish 
 to write start with a chance that is not given to writers in 
 places where the spring time of the local life is forgotten, 
 and the harvest is a memory only." 1 2 The logical result of 
 such a view of the peasant is the drama of imagination of the 
 National writers. 
 
 Contrast with such a view the statement of Ervine: 
 
 "The Irish dramatist writes his plays around peasant character 
 because peasant life is the national life, because peasant 
 
 influence is the strongest influence in Ireland The 
 
 Irish peasant has remained national and local, but the Irish 
 - lord and middle-class man have become de-nat ionalized, aping 
 the English in thought and act and speech. The Irish dramatist 
 is compelled to make the peasant the protagonist of his plays, 
 for the peasant has national courage and meanness, cowardice 
 and nobility, humor and the lack of it, cruelty and gentleness, 
 high feeling and low feeling, wit and dullness, generosity and 
 greed all mingled in his nature; and these things are the stuff 
 of drama." The logical result of this artistic conception 
 is a realistic figure whose fancies are no wilder and whose 
 words are no more musical than those of the actual flesh and 
 blood, weather-beaten, gombeen haunted, unlettered peasant . 
 
 On the other hand one discovers soon after beginning 
 
 1 . Ibid . 
 
 2. The Irish Dramatist and the Irish Peop le: The Forum . 
 
 June, 1914. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 * 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-48- 
 
 to study the new treatment of rural character that if the Irish 
 peasant has had his wings clipped and his feet securely an- 
 chored to reality, he is not, except in rare instances like 
 Tom Dempsey in The Cross-Roads , the brutal, utterly debased 
 being described by Tolstoy, Hauptmann, and the other contin- 
 ental writers of naturalistic peasant drama. Unlike them he 
 does not reek of the barnyard until delicate sensibilities are 
 offended to nausea. His is rather the atmosphere of narrow 
 boundaries, of too much tea-drinking with cronies of no wider 
 outlook than his own, of too great pre-occupation with the 
 acres and cottage which are his— in short, of too little "food 
 i or his soul" as Ervine said. There are many evident traces 
 of naturalistic influence throughout these new Irish plays; 
 a little of the feeling expressed by Zola, "There is a tinge 
 of the human beast in all of us as there is a tinge of illness." 
 But there is never the extreme of Zola that "to make character 
 mortal, everything must be told."^ There is not even an ex- 
 treme carrying out of the basis of naturalism, man's utter 
 helplessness at the hands of Nature. To quote Zola again, 
 
 "Man is no longer an intellectual abstraction for them natur- 
 alistic dramatists ; he is a thinking beast, who forms part 
 of Nature and who is subject to the multiplicity of influences 
 of the soil on which he grows and where he lives." 2 
 
 1. Zola: The Experimental Novel . p. 127. 
 3. Ibid . . p. 151. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 50 - 
 
 How carefully these plays avoid the extreme of natur- 
 alism is to be seen in examination of the last speech of Tom 
 Dempsey in The Cross-Roads , which is, as has been said, the 
 only deeply naturalistic one of the plays. The lines are: 
 
 "I'll tell you what I'm doing. I'm locking the door the way 
 you won't go out after that young man; an' I'm going to step 
 down to the village now for a sup of drink. An' then — I 'm 
 coming back ; an' by God, I'll make you pay for this night's 
 work, Ellen McCarthy, till you'll wish you were dead — the black 
 curse you brought on this farm an' for the liking you have to 
 the young man.” Dark and hopeless as the situation is when 
 the key "turns in the lock with a sound of dreadful finality," 
 it is pale in comparison with some of the effects of The Powers 
 of Darkness . Before Sunrise , or even the last scene of Ghosts ♦ 
 But the significant fact is that the play was done in Robinson's 
 apprentice years and he has since never returned to any such 
 reading of the peasant as a "human beast". 
 
 Naturalism enters into the plays of the Irish realists 
 in much the same degree as it enters the plays of the realists 
 of other countries. It shows in the choice of subjects from 
 the life of the humble, in the lack of verbal or plot embellish- 
 ment, in the creation of characters neither idealized nor ex- 
 aggerated, in a view of life divested of its romantic aspects, 
 in a certain level of character which excludes at once both 
 heroes and villains, in the so-called pessimistic tendency to 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
call ugly things by their right names instead of glossing them 
 over, in the recognition of natural laws of temperamental, 
 biological and social determinism. With Irish realists as 
 with other contemporary realists there is not, however, any 
 indulgence in the extreme of naturalism which flowered in the 
 slice-of -lif e drama of the late nineteenth century. The new 
 Irish drama is an attempt to portray Irish life as it and every 
 other life is — sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly, often merely 
 ■prosaic . 
 
 If, then, the treatment of the peasant of recent 
 Irish plays is neither imaginative nor gossipy as was that of 
 the National drama, nor yet so darkly naturalistic as most of 
 the continental peasant plays, what is it? The answer to 
 this question is in the answer to a number of others . What 
 are the traits of character most emphasized by the realists? 
 
 What conditions, if any, are advanced as explaining the type 
 of characters depicted? Are the present day peasants distinct 
 enough from their literary forbears to justify the critic in 
 considering them as a new genre? How true are they to actual 
 Irish life? 
 
 One of the first differences one notices in these 
 later Irish peasants is that of their comparative prosperity . 
 They are men of small property, passionately attached to their 
 "bit of land" and very ill-disposed toward the beggar or tramp 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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- 52 - 
 
 or tinker of the earlier plays. Except for the half-wit Clutie 
 in the home of the Fergusons, who are represented as unusually 
 soft and gentle, and for the admission of dying Peg Straw to 
 the weaver's home against Nahla's will, there are only two 
 instances where tramps appear in these plays. Moll Woods, 
 the central figure of 0 'Kelly’s The Siuiler's Child, has been 
 made a vagrant by the unkindness of society, and unlike Synge's 
 tramps struggles against her lot. To her life in the open 
 is not a joyous listening to "fine songs when the sun goes up" 
 but a fearsome existence where the gray stone walls along the 
 moon-lit roads are "like the polished bones of dead men," and 
 the hedges "stretch out in front of me looking like two long 
 arms holding up winding sheets for all the Shuiler's of 
 Ireland." Until her final sacrifice of her child Moll meets 
 nowhere any of the cordiality traditionally accorded to wan- 
 derers by the Irish peasant . 
 
 The other admission of a tramp into the plot is the 
 case of the drunken fiddler in The Turn of the Road who is 
 picked up off the roads and brought home by William James 
 Granahan to serve as a "tarr'ble and awful warnin' to Robbie 
 John what this sort of occupation brings a man til." A 
 wholly modern attitude towards a tramp is suggested in Ellen's 
 refusal to feed the battered old musician who has once been 
 really great, and in Mrs. Granahan's firm: "Wind and string 
 fiddle sticks. Out you go. Out you will go. I want no 
 tramps in here upset tin' my house and makin' it the talk of 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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- 53 - 
 
 the neighbors. Out you go at once.” This might be an irate 
 American housewife speaking but never the National school 
 peasant welcoming a wanderer in off the road with eager inter- 
 est . Not every peasant family of the new plays is like the 
 Granahan family, but the attitude toward life is essentially 
 similar . The new Irish peasant is, as a rule, fairly prosper- 
 ous and, it must be admitted, fairly hard. 
 
 One trait which the entire group of dramatists have 
 emphasized in the new peasant is his cunning. Lady Gregory 
 admitted this quality but touched it up with whimsy until it 
 is no more repellent than an attractive child's schemes for 
 a coveted privilege; Yeats's tramp in A Pot of Broth earns his 
 supper by a bit of subterfuge which is thoroughly enjoyable. 
 Synge's characters often have the same cunning but described 
 with so much gayety and zest that one never thinks of censuring 
 it. The most notable example of this cunning used for comic 
 values is the case of the tinkers who wheedle a priest into 
 marrying them for a new gallon can, then gag him and throw him 
 into a ditch when he will not perform the ceremony until the 
 can is forthcoming. But peasant cunning with the realists 
 appears in a different light. It is not an entirely pleasant 
 picture when William James Granahan, a Sunday School teacher 
 and pillar in the community, boasts, "Nine and thirty year 
 ha'e I gone til market, and no man, woman, child, dog, or divil 
 ever got the better of me in a bargain yet, and right well you 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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- 54 - 
 
 know it. I sold the foal for thirty poun' and not a ha'penny 
 less — a baste I wouldn't buy myself for thirty shillings.” 
 
 His son, Samuel James, further describes the fair scenes in a 
 speech whose rhythm and humor do not entirely veil the author '3 
 attitude: ”Boys, but Da is the hard man to plaze. We stopped 
 at MacAlanan's on the way home and met William John McKillop 
 and he toul the ould man he was a fool to let a good horse go 
 at that price for he was lookin' all roads to give him forty 
 poun' . Sure I knowed the ould Yahoo hadn't the price of a 
 nanny-goat. But of course. Da tuk it all in for gospel. 
 
 And me sittin' listenin' to him tellin' ould McKillop what 
 a grand action the foal had and what shoulders the baste had 
 and the way it could draw thirty hundred up Kiltainey hill 
 without a pech.” 
 
 in a trade is stressed. The neighbors admiringly characterize 
 Mrs. Clancy as "a stiff one to drive a bargain with” or as 
 having "the divil's own luck" in her business transactions; 
 she herself says proudly, "You wouldn't find any one putting 
 bad coins on me." The picture of old Timothy Hurl eyJSfex^t tempt 
 to save his farm by setting fire to his barn is altogether 
 
 unpleasant . His cackling laughter as he boasts, "Forty pounds 
 for one timber match", is met by one son's, "Sure I didn't 
 think I had a Da with so much spirit;" the other son, however, 
 does protest hotly. 
 
 Similarly in The Clancy Name the peasant's cunning 
 

 ' 
 
 . 
 
 ■ 
 
 
- 55 - 
 
 Jack: I'm ashamed of you; how can you think 
 of such a thing? Why it's — it's 
 stealing & M 
 
 Timothy: Sure, who's to know I done it? Not 
 a one saw me and I lighting the match. 
 
 Jack: That has nothing to do with it. Didn't 
 you see how dishonest it was? 
 
 Timothy: Maybe I did, but I saw something more, 
 and that was that I was on the way to 
 being put out of the farm... and says I 
 to myself "'tis time for Timothy to 
 turn around and see what he can do." 
 
 Maurice: All the farm wants is a little money 
 
 and it's hard to see you grudge us getting 
 that . 
 
 Jack: I'll do more than grudge it— I'll give 
 information . 
 
 Timothy: (plaintively) Wisha, 'tis hard you'd 
 cross us now, and all you have to do is 
 to hold your tongue . I 'm sorry I ever 
 told you at all instead of keeping it to 
 myself but, sure, I thought you'd be 
 pleased the same as Mauriceen was 
 pleased . 
 
 This trait of peasant cunning runs through all the 
 plays of the group but is especially prominent in Boyle's 
 comedies . The incorrigibly lazy Dominic and Joe Donnelly 
 even go to the lengths of enduring a few days of strenuous 
 physical labor in their efforts to trick their supposedly 
 wealthy uncle into giving them money. In The Mineral Workers 
 this cunning is satirized by showing its weakness when opposed 
 to real business acumen. In the beginning Dan Fogarty brags, 
 "Oh, so you think you can butter me?" And when in the end 
 he is beaten at his own game, his first thought is, "Out-jock- 
 

 
 
 
 
 
-56- 
 
 eyed by a Yankee*. Oh Lord!" In The Building Fund an avari- 
 cious old woman comes to realize that her miserly son and 
 scheming grand-daughter are anxiously waiting the inheritance 
 which comes to them at her death. Her cunning in outwitting 
 them by willing the farm to the building fund for the new 
 church being built in the community seems so heartless and in- 
 human that one almost feels pity for the victims although they 
 certainly richly deserve punishment of some sort. In The 
 Eloquent Dempsey are described the schemes of a many-sided 
 saloon-keeper and politician to keep his popularity with all 
 factions. In fact it is probably this insistent harping upon 
 peasant trickery which as much as anything else calls forth 
 Weygandt's criticism of Boyle: "He has picturesque phrase 
 but no particular individuality in using it. Style he has not, 
 nor any background of romance or beauty of that sort which 
 illumines the grayness of the comedies of Ibsen, or of any 
 other sort of beauty than that approach to beauty there is in 
 skilled craf tmanship . 
 
 Another unpleasant trait of the Irish peasant em- 
 phasized by the realists is his love of petty power, especially 
 his clinging to the old patriarchal system which makes a man 
 absolute master of his house, his will on all questions to be 
 obeyed mutely, his disposition of his children's future un- 
 
 1 • Irish Plavs and Playwrights , p . 313 . 
 
! 
 
 , 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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- 57 - 
 
 questioned. In a number of plays, notably The Land . The 
 Birthright . The Turn of the Road . The Mineral Worker s , The 
 .Cl ancy Name » The Orangeman , and Mixed Marriage the action 
 hinges upon the rebellion against parental authority which 
 seems to be characteristic of this generation of Irish youth. 
 Usually this love of power expresses itself in one of two 
 ways, as the ordinary adult intolerance for the opinions of 
 youth, or in the more vicious propensity of parents to force 
 their children into grooves of thought and action in which they 
 themselves have lived. A rebellion against the first mentioned 
 characteristic of the Irish parent (and for that matter any 
 parent who does not govern his natural tendencies severely) is 
 found in the outburst of the hobble-hoy Tom Rainey in Mixed 
 Marriage . 
 
 Mrs. Rainey: Does it iver occur til ye, John, 
 that Tom's not a wee lad anny more? 
 
 He's a brave big fella, now. 
 
 Rainey : He has no wit . 
 
 Tom: Ah, I have. A lot more'n ye think, on'y 
 ye nivir let me git a word out o' me, 
 but ye near snap the head off me . 
 
 A'm gettin' quaren tired o't, A tell ye. 
 
 Rainey: Ay, you'll be lavin' me, too. That's 
 the way. Bring up your childher well, 
 an' spare them nothin' an' they'll turn 
 on ye in yer ould age. 
 
 Mrs. Rainey: Mebbe, if ye wur a bit more o' a 
 friend til them, an' a wee bit less o' 
 a father, they wuddent turn on ye so 
 readily. Ye're alwis wantin' til 
 make them do things acause ye're their 
 father, instead o' waitin' fur them 
 til do it o' their own free will. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 * 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 58 - 
 
 But more often, probably because a more dramatic 
 situation, the plays treat of the second tendency of the Irish 
 parent. This also is considered in Mixed Marriage . Hugh, 
 like his younger brother, breaks away from the dominion of 
 his father when he decrees that Hugh shall give up his Catholic 
 sweetheart because "it's not right t ' be raarryin' out o' yer 
 religion." One admires his spirit, as Ervine meant one to 
 do, when, ordered by his father to renounce Nora or leave home, 
 he replies: "A don’t care. It’ll be no grief til me til lave 
 the house. A’m a man, an’ not a chile, an' A 'll choose me 
 wife where A like, not where you like. A'm not afeard." 
 
 And then to Nora: "Don't be cryin' dear. Sure this is on'y 
 
 a bit o’ bother that'll not last fur ivir We'll be 
 
 married the quicker." 
 
 In The Land there is a similar situation in the re- 
 fusal of Matt Cosgar to turn from Ellen to obey his father's 
 command that he shall devote his life to the farm. Old 
 Murtagh Cosgar, like Tom Rainey, is hard and tenacious of 
 purpose, swayed by his love of authority. Lack of dowry and 
 qualities which will make a good farmer's wife are, however, 
 his objection to Ellen Douras . His obstinate disapproval 
 springs from his besetting sin, passion for property, just as 
 Rainey's has from his bigotry. "Boy, your father built this 
 house. He got these lands together. He has a right to see 
 that you and your generations are in the way of keeping them 
 

 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 59 - 
 
 together." Matt, too, loves the land, but he is young and 
 in love. Both qualities ill dispose him to submit his will 
 to his father’s, and he prepares to go with Ellen to New York, 
 leaving the farm to incompetent Sally and Cornelius. 
 
 It is not always, however, love which impels Irish 
 youth to throw off too-heavy parental dominion. Robbie John 
 Granahan in The Turn of the Road half-heartedly tries to obey 
 his parents by giving up his music because he wants to win his 
 sweetheart, Jenny Graeme. But when she encourages him to 
 devote himself to his violin, promising to wait till he comes 
 back rich and famous, he wastes no moments in defying his 
 parents; and marches blithely out of the house with his father's 
 curse upon his head, but his beloved fiddle under his arm. 
 
 In The Orangeman the revolt of youth is, as in Mixed 
 Marriage and Purcell’s The Enthusiast , against the bigotry which 
 its young eyes see in its parents. When old John McClurg, 
 who has carried the great drum at Orange processions for years, 
 is so ill that he cannot go, he decrees that ”a McClurg of some 
 sort shall be in the procession the morrow to show the Fenians 
 what the Protestants think of them.” Forthwith, he has the 
 orange sash tied to his son's waist and the blood-marked drum 
 put in his hands . But the boy will have none of it . Ordered 
 to think of the Battle of the Boyne, he declares he does not 
 want to think of it. Threatened with disinheritance if he 
 does not take his father's place, he responds stoutly: ”1 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 . 
 
 
 
 
 
- 60 - 
 
 wouldn't go near the field. I’m not an Orangeman, and I 
 never will be. If you think I'm going to bother my head about 
 your ould Orange lodges and your members of Parliament, talking 
 their damned rot, you're quaren mistaken. n When his father 
 tries to enforce his command with taunts and physical coercion, 
 the boy cried wildly, "I've bore a good deal from you, da, 
 because you are my da, but I'll bear no more. I'm sick of 
 you and your ould drum. Damn your drum." With these words 
 he thrusts his foot through the historic drum, thus destroying 
 what is the symbol for his family bigotry. As one reads 
 play after play dealing with paternal intolerance and hard- 
 headedness, one does not much wonder at Hugh Rainey's "It's 
 a quaren thing when a man begins to respect his da." 
 
 In both the plays of T. C. Murray this parental 
 tyranny is made the central theme, though in different aspects. 
 In Birthright Bat Morrissey, the typical hard, grubbing farmer 
 of the new plays, rails against even the priest who has en- 
 couraged young Hugh Morrissey in his hurly playing. "Destroy- 
 ing the parish he is since he came into it, taking people away 
 from their work and putting notions into their heads." Be- 
 cause he, like Murtagh Cosgar, Tom Carragher, Dan Fogarty, 
 
 Mrs. Grogan, and the other well-to-do peasants, loves his 
 land more than anything else, he decides to ship open faced 
 and open-hearted Hugh, popular for his hurly prowess and verse 
 making, off to America and leave the farm to Shane, the younger 
 son, who is careful and plodding, with no wider ambition than 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 * 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 61 - 
 
 healthy 3tock and plentiful crops. Thus is the old tragedy 
 of Cain precipitated, for according to all the customs the 
 birthright was Hugh's. 
 
 The situation is no less tragic in Maurice Harte . a 
 little two-act play which probably goes deeper into the life 
 of the Cork peasant than any of the National plays do; which, 
 although not so sparklingly clever as the earlier plays, has 
 a high degree of hearthside sublimity. The Hartes like many 
 another Irish family have sacrificed almost to the point of 
 bankruptcy in order that they may prepare Maurice for the 
 priesthood. Mrs. Harte speaks for all Irish Catholic mothers 
 when she says: "I'm a strong healthy woman, with a healthy 
 woman's appetite, and yet I could live for the rest of my days 
 on a bit o' bread and a sup o' sour milk for the wonderful 
 joy that comes rushing down on me night and day, and I thinking 
 of him a priest of God." Maurice Harte differs from the 
 plays already studied in that the Harte men are far more lovable 
 than the majority of peasant characters. Owen and Michael, 
 while "grubbing farmers" yet have more tolerance and are more 
 disposed to be easy upon Maurice than is his mother who cries 
 in the intensity of her disappointment: "And will you have no 
 pity at all on us and on 07/en here, that have slaved for you 
 all our lives? Will you be talking wild, frightening, foolish 
 talk about your conscience, and not think at all of them, nor 
 of us, and all we done for you?" Finally her will prevails 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 J 
 
 
 
 
 
- 62 - 
 
 and the wretched young man promises to keep on with his pre- 
 paration. In this as in most other modern plays where the 
 rights of an individual are sacrificed to a clannish family 
 system, the result is tragic for all concerned. It should be 
 mentioned in passing that from a standpoint of dialect Maurice 
 Hart e_ is almost as rich as some of the plays of the National 
 group. In the homely chatter of Mrs. O’Connor and Mrs. Harte 
 at the beginning of the play there is a good deal of Celtic 
 lyricism in spite of its grip on the things of ordinary life. 
 
 In only three other plays does the mother use her 
 influence to keep youth from doing what it feels it should do. 
 Mrs. Clancy, because she has always ruled her son, body and 
 soul, is able to stay him from the confession which is the 
 only relief possible to his over-wrought soul. She is a type 
 of the hard and grasping peasant who has so idolized name and 
 property that her first cry at the news of her son's crime is, 
 "May God pity me, what did I ever do to deserve this. My son 
 a murderer and the Clancy name disgraced. Oh, Holy Virgin, 
 have pity on me... I 'll never be able to look the neighbors in 
 the face again." 
 
 In two of Ervine's plays the mother weakens and at- 
 temps to interpose duty to the family against the child's 
 conception of duty to himself. In her extremity Mrs. Ferguson 
 pleads: "I don't want God's will'. I want my son! It's 
 
 nothing to me what he done— he's my son'. I don't care if he 
 
' 
 
 
 
 - 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 . 
 
 
 
 
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-63- 
 
 killed a hundred men — he's my son! I'll not let him go to 
 Jail — It's not right to be sending him away like that. He's 
 my only son, and I'm an old woman. You had no call to be 
 sending him away." In The Magnanimous Lover it is Maggie 
 Cather's mother, rather than her father, who tries to force 
 her into the marriage from which she recoils "with hot anger 
 in her heart at the injustice of the world and at the 'unco' 
 guidness ' of her old time lover, Henry Hinde."^ 
 
 Still another characteristic common to most of the 
 peasants of the new plays is the lack of the romantic element. 
 The attention which has been called to the loyal and sturdily 
 independent love of Hugh Rainey, Matt Cosgar, and Robbie John 
 Granahan must not give an incorrent impression of the attitude 
 of the Irish peasant toward romantic love. The characteristic 
 attitude of all the older people and most of the younger is in 
 the position of Rainey and Murtagh Cosgar and the Granahans . 
 Even the gentle Fergusons are willing to force Hannah to marry 
 the contemptible Jimmy Caesar in order to save the farm. And 
 the whole feeling of the typical peasant about romance is ex- 
 pressed, curiously enough, by Mrs . Ferguson, who herself 
 married for love. "She's a young slip of a girl with wayward 
 fancies in her head, mebbe, but Jimmy's as good and substantial 
 a man as she's likely to get, and he'll be a good husband to 
 her. It's a great thing for a girl to get a comfortable home 
 
 1 * Irish P lays and Playwrights , p . 245 . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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- 64 - 
 
 to go to when she leaves the one she was reared in. There's 
 plenty of young women does be running after this and running- 
 after that, but sure there's nothing in the end to beat a kind 
 man and a good home where the money is easy and regular." 
 
 This unromantic atmosphere permeate practically all 
 of the plays. Mrs. Clancy bargains as shrewdly for a wife 
 for her son as she would over the purchase of a new colt. 
 
 John Murray in The Drone proposes to shrewish and unattractive 
 Sarah McMinn simply because he feels it will be money in his 
 pocket to have a woman who will stop the waste in his home. 
 
 And when he is threatened with the breach of promise suit, he 
 says grimly, "I'd as soon do without the marrying if I could. 
 
 I don't want the woman at all, but I'll marry her before she 
 gets a ha'penny off me." Ellen McCarthy allows herself to be 
 plighted to Tom Dempsey in spite of her affection for her 
 Dublin lover, because as she says prudently, "Now that I've 
 the chance of being mistress of a big farm — -well, it’s a great 
 opportunity." Sentimental Julia Shea's life is made miserable 
 for her in The Country Dressmaker by relatives who nag her into 
 marriage as the best method of keeping her mother out of the 
 poor-house and giving her a decent burial. In The Mineral 
 Workers when all other schemes fail to win over coarse, bump- 
 tious old Dan Fogarty, the Mulroys come round him by offering 
 to him Kitty, the pretty daughter of the family. In general 
 it may safely be said that romance in any except very young 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 ■ 
 
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- 65 - 
 
 people is practically non-existent in these plays. 
 
 It is significant that, with the single exception of 
 The Magnanimous Lover , in every case where the play proceeds 
 along unromantic lines, the underlying cause is love of the 
 land and a blind belief in the land as the source of all pos- 
 sible happiness for Irish people. The past centuries of 
 landlord oppression, of bitter, unremitting struggle for the 
 possession of the land, of dumbly laborious efforts to build 
 up a prosperous farm, seem to have entered the soul of the 
 present day peasant to make the land hi3 guiding passion. 
 
 Shaw’s John Bull's Other Island hints at such a theme in the 
 scorn of the returned Irishman for the grubbing virtue of a 
 peasant who has given his life to reclaim an acre of waste land. 
 Colum more than hints at it in a meaningful passage in The Land . 
 
 Murtagh Cosgar: Ah but that's the sight to 
 
 fill one's heart. Lands ploughed 
 and spread. And all our own; 
 all our own . 
 
 Martin Douras : Ay. All our own. But we made 
 
 a hard fight for them. 
 
 Murtagh Cosgar: Them that come after us will never 
 
 see them as we are seeing them. 
 
 Them that come after us. Isn't 
 that a great thought, Martin Douras? 
 
 And isn't it a great thing that we're 
 able to pass this land on to them, 
 and it redeemed forever? Ay, and. 
 their manhood spared the shame that 
 our manhood knew . Standing in the 
 rain with our hats off to let a 
 landlord- — ay, or a landlord's dog-boy, 
 pass the way . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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- 66 - 
 
 The tragedy of life for this type of peasant is in 
 Martin Douras's reply, "Ay, but the young are going fast; the 
 young are going fast." In only two plays are there excep- 
 tions to his generalization. It is the daughters of Conn 
 Hourican in The Fiddler's House who wish to settle into their 
 own cottage and possess their own bit of land; in a very recent 
 play* Clan Falvev by Daniel Corkery, Sean O'Falvey sits by the 
 fireside reading old stories of the pride of his ancient name, 
 while his son Hugh is out struggling feverishly to save the 
 crop from destruction by a threatening flood. But these are 
 exceptional cases. If the realists are interpreting aright 
 the new Irish peasant, the striplings now in their youth will 
 never be able to say with old-fashioned Ned Mulroy: "I'm an 
 old man, brought up on the land — it's like a mother's face to 
 me. I never cared for anything but land, and when I thought 
 it was my own, I kissed it with the two lips of my heart . Oh 
 Cod in heaven, more than life I worshipped it." 
 
 It should be noticed that this very closeness to 
 primitive life which in the National school produced characters 
 of the highest imaginativeness is probably at the root of the 
 prosiness which the realists feel to be another characteristic 
 of the peasant. Such a basic difference in characterization 
 may be shown by contrasting parallel passages from plays of the 
 two schools, and by showing the difference both in degree of 
 lyric expression and in cause animating it, in the comparatively 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 67 - 
 
 rare moments when the peasant of the new genre rises from his 
 usual unheroic level. 
 
 In all the early scenes of John Ferguson Jimmy Caesar, 
 one sees if one stops to think about it, is not much less than 
 a prosaic Christy Mahon, always dreaming of the great deeds he 
 is going to do but at heart timid and cowardly. The contrast 
 between the old and the new peasant is strikingly noticeable 
 in the way these two men are handled. Christy is a delight- 
 ful, rich figure in spite of his cowardice and egoism, and in 
 the end discovers himself, but Jimmy remains "a collie” to the 
 end. He is, moreover, denied the rhythmic, imaginative speech 
 which would make him attractive as Christy is. He must all 
 his life mourn dully, ”I'm always imagining myself doing brave 
 things and seeing people clapping me and making speeches about 
 me, and printing things in the paper because of my greatness 
 and gallantry; but if a cow was to make a run at me in the 
 fields, I'd be near scared to death of it.” 
 
 Another contrast showing the prosiness of the modern 
 peasant may be seen by placing the love-making of Hugh Rainey 
 against that of Christy Mahon. Now, Hugh's and Nora's love 
 is as passionate as Christy's and Pegeen'3, and a great deal 
 deeper. But the language is no richer than an everyday 
 peasant under the stress of a powerful emotion might be expected 
 to use. "It's a quare fine thing t' be in love wi ' you, Nora. 
 
 Sometimes whin A'm think in' about it A can’t onder stand it. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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- 68 - 
 
 A'm just like a man wi 1 somethin' inside him that wants t' 
 come out, and can't fin' the way. Ye know what A mane, don't 
 ye? A want til tell ye, but A don't know how, an' a just 
 stan' still wi ' me tongue clackin' in me mouth like a dumb 
 man's. A want til tell iv'rybuddy A 'm in love wi' ye, an' 
 goin' t' marry ye. A feel prouder nor the King o' Eng lan ' 
 or the Mayor o' Belfast." There is a world of real emotion 
 in those lines, but emotion stammeringly, lamely, prosily 
 expressed, if one compares it to Christy's well-known: "It's 
 little you'll think if my love's a poacher's or an earl's it- 
 self, when you'll feel my two hands stretched around you and 
 I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips till I feel a kind of 
 pity for the Lord God in all ages sitting lonesome in his 
 golden chair." 
 
 Nora's love for Hugh is far more sincere than Pegeen's 
 but she can only say, "Aw my man, A cudden let ye go. A'd 
 houd on til ye if the wurl ' was til fall in anondher our feet 
 if A didden let go." Pegeen, "the fright of seven townlands 
 for her biting tongue," exclaims radiantly, "I'll be burning 
 candles from this out to the miracles of God that have brought 
 you from the south to-day, and I with my gowns bought ready, 
 the way I can wed you, and not wait at all." 
 
 Two other parallel passages may be mentioned as es- 
 pecially significant. Myles Gorman, in Thomas Muskerrv is a 
 blind old pauper who goes back to the wild free life of wander- 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 ■ 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 69 - 
 
 ing with the same relief as do Martin and Mary Doul in The 
 Well of the Saint . Myles and Martin have lived the same sort 
 of lives; Thomas Muskerry's description of Myles Gorman: 
 
 "You feel he has the life of a young colt and then you're bound 
 to think that in spite of the fact that he's blind and a wan- 
 derer, the man has not wasted his life" applies fully as well 
 to Martin and Mary. Gorman's speech is more lyrical than that 
 of most of the characters in the realistic plays, but is sober 
 and commonplace in comparison with Martin Doul's joy in "hearing 
 a soft wind turning around the little leaves of the spring and 
 feeling the sun, and we not tormenting our souls with the sight 
 of gray days, and the holy men, and the dirty feet is trampling 
 the world." Colum's blind old wanderer only longs "to be out 
 in the day and to feel the throng moving about, and to be talk- 
 ing to the men that do be on the road." 
 
 Even the peasants whose sensibilities are not dulled 
 by unceasing manual toil are prosaic. Denis Geoghegan, Daniel 
 Murray and the Donnelly men are certainly not open to the 
 charge of industry in any form; all of them have been "spoiled" 
 by indulgent relatives until whatever "grubbing morality" they 
 may have had is ocmpletely dissipated. Ne'er-do-wells to the 
 end, all of them, and yet, there is not a single poetic speech 
 from one of them. Uncle Daniel Murray in The Drone is toler- 
 able only because of the contrast he affords to his hard, 
 grasping environment, but he never kindles the imagination. 
 

 
 
 
 
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- 70 - 
 
 Dominic Donnelly is downright contemptible as he sits in his 
 easy chair, peacefully contemplating the sale of the family's 
 last half -starved cow: "The cow's a dreadful bother — wanting 
 something always. When she's not dry she's hungry — I wonder 
 how we put up with her so long. That's God's truth. Better 
 you'll be without her, and the worry of having to milk her." 
 
 Now this is essentially Martin Doul 's philosophy of life as he 
 rejects the hardships of normal life for the entrancing existence 
 which can involve no effort of disillusion. But what a dif- 
 ference in the reaction of the two characters upon the reader'. 
 Dominic Donnelly is a commonplace, worthless trifler — Martin 
 Doul is a human soul rejecting actuality for the life of the 
 imagination. The life of one is prose; of the other, poetry. 
 
 This prosiness, this lack of lyric impulse, this 
 failure to be exalted and powerfully moved by the beauties of 
 Nature is to the realists a central characteristic of the Irish 
 peasant , In the unusual moments when he is moved to expression 
 richer and more beautiful than is to be found in the ordinary 
 speech of any countryman, the cause is always some human re- 
 lation rather than the intense appreciation of Nature which 
 stirred the national school peasant . In all of this the new 
 
 dramatists are faithfully realistic. People of the soil are 
 
 comparatively matter-of-fact and unimaginative; years of purely 
 physical toil deaden the aesthetic sensibilities of any one. 
 Narrow vocabularies ordinarily mean narrow range of thought . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
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-71- 
 
 With its muscle-straining combat with the forces of hostile 
 Nature, primitive life, unfortunately, tends to repress human 
 imagination — in real life. But the basic, fundamental emotion 
 of life which stirs even the most prosaic men to some degree 
 of lyric expression is, as the Irish realists insist, human 
 relation— the wail of Grandfather Granahan when Robbie John 
 falls a victim to his father's hardness; the passion of Michael 
 O'Hara "to see the streets full o' happy men and weemen again, 
 their faces shinin' wi ' the glory o' the Lord God, an' the 
 childher runnin' about in the sun and none o' them sick wi ' 
 hunger;" the maternal sacrifice of Moll Woods, the Shuiler; 
 the emotional stress of Maurice Harte who is forced by his 
 family to what he considers sacrilege; the patriotic fervor 
 of James Nugent . 
 
 In conclusion, a statement of Yeats indicating the 
 tendency of the young realists, then in 1907 just beginning to 
 write, is arresting for its almost uncanny perception that a 
 new peasant genre was upon the horizon. "The people they 
 write of are not the true folk. They are the peasant as he 
 is being transformed by modern life, and for that very reason 
 the man of the towns may find it easier to understand them. 
 There is less surprise, less wonder in what he sees, but there 
 is more of himself there, more of his vision of the world and 
 of the problems that are troubling him."^ 
 
 1. Collected Work3. Vol . IV., p. 187. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 72 - 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE FALLACY OF "REGIONAL REALISM" . 
 
 It has been the tendency of most of the critics who 
 have studied the new Irish drama to insist that the realism 
 which is so pronounced in the recent plays is "regional”. By 
 the term they imply that each playwright is concerned only 
 with the life of the particular section of country in which 
 he lives, and hence that his reading of life is necessarily 
 different from that of the dramatists who write of other prov- 
 inces . Weygandt expresses the idea in an important intro- 
 ductory chapter of Irish Plays and Playwrights . "The new 
 Irish drama is more native in its stories than is the Elizabeth- 
 an drama, as these stories, even when they are stories found 
 in variant forms in other countries, are given the tone of 
 Irish life. Synge, the master dramatist of the new movement, 
 while he does not reproduce the average Irishman, is just as 
 natively Irish in his extravagance and irony as the old folk- 
 tale of the "Two Hags"; Lady Gregory in her farces is in a 
 similar way representative of the riot of West country imagina- 
 tion; and Mr. Yeats, if farther removed from the irishmen of 
 to-day, is very life, in many of his moods to the riddling 
 bards of long ago. The later men, many of them, are altogether 
 
 Irish, representative of the folk of one or another section 
 

 
 
 
 
 
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 f-tfo 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-73- 
 
 of the country, Mr. Murr ay and Mr. Robi n son of Cork t Mr . Mayne 
 and Mr . Ervine of Do wn, Mr. Colum and Mr. Boyle of the Mid - 
 lands . 
 
 Other critics almost invariably use the word or the 
 idea "regional" in speaking of individual playwrights. Charles 
 Tennyson, for instance, says: "Mr. Colum writes of central 
 Ireland; and the passion and richness of the west find no place 
 in his work. None the less it has a pronounced imaginative 
 flavor and a fineness of vision which give distinction to his 
 closely studied characters. The later realists have come 
 from the north, east and south — Colum the middle dramatist forms 
 a link with 'the naked sea-bitten provinces of the West where 
 life is still simple and speech harmonious.'" In the same 
 strain Lloyd Morris says of Lennox Robinson, "He, too, is a 
 regional playwright — it is of the southwest that he writes;" 
 and of Maur ice Harte . "It does for Catholic Ireland just what 
 the plays of 'Rutherford Mayne' and St. John Ervine do for 
 Protestant Ireland."^ 
 
 This stock criticism of "regional realism" has arisen 
 from a number of causes. One of the lesser reasons, no doubt, 
 is that in attributing reality and "Irish-ness" of any degree 
 
 1. P. 14. 
 
 2. Quarterly Review . Vol . 215, pp . 219-241. 
 
 3 . Celtic Dawn , p . 151 . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-74- 
 
 it is always necessary to emphasize their locale as the West 
 Coast and the bog-lands of County Wicklow where life is primi- 
 tive and isolated, and the peasant, comparatively untouched by 
 civilization, retains his Celtic extravagance and grotesquerie . 
 It is natural that the same method of criticism should be car- 
 ried over into discussion of later playwrights . 
 
 Another, and much more powerful cause, is in the 
 general feeling that the North is entirely apart from the rest 
 of Ireland. Ulster has for a long time seemed almost a foreign 
 country in her relations with Connacht, Leinster, and Munster. 
 The reason is not far to seek : the Scotch Presbyterian colonies 
 which were "planted" in Ulster in the seventeenth and succeed- 
 ing centuries have retained their racial and religious char- 
 acteristics as the foreigners who invaded other parts of Ireland 
 did not. Moreover, Ulster is an industrial province; her 
 factories and shops and trade-unions are in striking contrast 
 to the fields and dairies and peasant population of the south 
 and west. Naturally, critics reason, a drama which is true of 
 North Irish life will have little in common with that of the 
 rest of the country. 
 
 Another factor in producing this insistence upon the 
 unlikeness of the North Irish drama to that of the Abbey Theatre 
 tradition may very likely be the attitude of Uladh, the official 
 publication of the Ulster Literary Theatre which was established 
 in 1904 with the avowed purpose of fostering a drama which 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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-75- 
 
 should be native to Ulster. A typical editorial of this little 
 periodical is in the Samhain number, November 1904 1 "We recog- 
 nize at the outset that our art of the drama will be different 
 from that other Irish art of drama from the stage of the Irish 
 National Theatre in Dublin, where two men, W. B. Yeats and 
 Douglas Hyde, have set a model in Anglo-Irish and Gaelic plays 
 with a success that is surprising and exhilarating. Dreamer, 
 mystic, symbolist, Gaelic poet and propagandist have all spoken 
 on the Dublin stage, and a fairly defined local school has been 
 inaugurated. We in Belfast and Ulster also wish to set up a 
 school; but there will be a difference. At present we can 
 only say that our talent is more satiric than poetic . That 
 will probably remain the broad difference between the Ulster and 
 the Leinster schools.” In 1904 this statement was reasonable 
 enough. Even the semi-realistic peasant plays of Synge and 
 Lady Gregory were very new in Dublin, their significance as 
 turning points away from the poetic drama of legendary and folk 
 life only half realized by Yeats himself . Robinson, Murray, 
 Boyle, Seumas O'Kelly, and George Fitzmaurice had not yet begun 
 to write their biting studies of the contemporary peasant. 
 
 By 1915, however, as we have seen, the plays of the Abbey 
 dramatists were as deeply realistic and as satiric as those 
 of the Belfast group . Hence the critical dicta of those 
 early numbers of Uladh are to be viewed to-day with a good 
 deal of skepticism. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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- 76 - 
 
 Finally, the distinct difference in dialect in the 
 plays from different parts of the countries has helped to 
 lead observers to regard the drama of the North almost as form- 
 ing a separate school; has no doubt influenced writers like 
 E. A. Boyd to isolate the plays of North Ireland from those 
 of the other provinces. The language of the Ulster plays, 
 with the exception of Ervine's which by its intensification 
 and literal transcription seems something entirely new, has 
 a strong resemblance to the staple "Irish dialect" which budding 
 American story -writers put into the mouths of their Pats and 
 Mikes . The speech of the southern peasants is patterned 
 after Synge's Kiltartanese . To make the contrast clear pas- 
 sages may be cited from the two authors showing the most in- 
 dividual use of unlike dialects, Ervine and Fitzmaurice. 
 
 Here is a characteristic speech from Mixed Marriage : 
 Mrs. Rainey: "Me an' my me.n has had our ups and downs, an' he's 
 a bit domineerin', but A think A'd do it again if A had me 
 life over again. They don't ondherstan' weemen . . .but ye git 
 to ondherstan' them soon enough. Ye know, they're quare oul' 
 humbugs when ye know them. Och, dear, the 're jus' like big 
 childher . When Hughie wus a chile, he wus quare an' strong. 
 There wus times afore he cud walk whin A cud har'ly houl ' him, 
 he wud twist about in me arms that much... It was sore work 
 sometimes, an' his da nivir seemed to ondherstan' that A got 
 
 tired out . " 
 

 
 
 
 
 
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- 77 - 
 
 The two following short speeches quoted to show the 
 dialectal method of Fitzmaurice are from the last scene of 
 The Country Dressmaker : 
 
 Matt: It's a lonesome evening you will have of 
 
 it surely. But if I overtake the ruffian, 
 Clohesy, it's a welt for a welt I'll get 
 or call me a coward and a shame to my clan 
 for the rest of my days." 
 
 Norry : You have your will now. You have your 
 
 will . The dark house behind in Lyre will 
 be our doom. Tisn't the friends and 
 neighbors will be about us in our latter 
 end and we drawing the last breath, but 
 it's in a cold place we'll be among 
 strangers. A plain coffin they'll make 
 for us and there will be no thought of 
 us at all and we going to our long home . 
 
 You have your will now. 
 
 No nice discrimination is required to see the dif- 
 ference in the two uses of dialect just quoted. It is there 
 in too bald outlines to be missed by anyone . What is not so 
 easily noticed, however, is the very distinct differences be- 
 tween the dialects of plays dealing with the same part of the 
 country . Mayne, of whose plays Boyd says, "The speech, setting 
 and acting combine to impress upon the spectator the peculiar 
 character of the Ulsterman and his environment,""*" uses a di- 
 alect which is remarkably flexible . The outraged words of 
 Mrs. Granahan upon the bargaining of William John sound very 
 like Ervine: "Fine hunnert houn', and after me tellin' him 
 to keep til four hunnert. Wail til I git ahoult of him again. 
 
 1 • Contemporary Drama of Ireland , p . 1 78 . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 78 - 
 
 I 1 11 speak til him. Did he no hear me thumpin' four times 
 on the door til remind him?" 1 But the well-known last speech 
 of Grandfather Granahan in the same play is of another sort: 
 "D'ye think them proud city folk will listen to his poor ould 
 ballads with the heart of the boy singing through them? It's 
 only us — it's only us, I say, as knows the long wild nights 
 and the wet and the rain and the mists of nights on the bog- 
 lands — it’s only us, I say, could listen to him in the right 
 way . And ye knowed, right well ye knowed, that every string of 
 his fiddle was keyed to the crying of your own heart." This 
 might have been written by Fitzmaurice or Murray — or even by 
 Synge. If it expresses the North it is not far off the mark 
 of the South and the West . 
 
 A similar study of the dialect employed by Fitzmaurice 
 and Murray, who are in every way the masters of Leinster speech, 
 would reveal as striking differences. The passage from The 
 Country Dressmaker quoted in a recent paragraph is not so dif- 
 ferent from Murray, but the words and the tumbling rhythms of 
 many other typical speeches of Fitzmaurice are no more like 
 Murray and Robinson than Ervine . A speech selected almost 
 at random from The Pie-Dish illustrates the difference: "Isn't 
 that queer for you, black Mage, and you knowing our sow has 
 bonnives, a big straak of hay down on us and the servant girl 
 
 1 • The Turn of the Roa d . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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- 79 - 
 
 after hoisting her sails? Is there no credit due to me to 
 be endangering my life coming here this roasting day, and he 
 no loss in course, the poor old man, in comparison with me or 
 the likes of me, the mother of a huge family?” 
 
 Robinson’s language in The Clancy Name and The White - 
 headed Boy differs no more from Mayne’s than from that of his 
 fellow Dubliners. Indeed there is a notable dialectal dif- 
 ference in the two plays themselves. A passage typical of 
 Robinson’s early use of the peasant speech may be quoted from 
 The Clancy Nam e . 
 
 Eugene: I always say that the day James Clancy 
 died wasn't the worst day for his 
 widow . 
 
 Mrs. Spillane: You’re right, Eugene, though 
 
 it’s a hard thing to be saying in this 
 house . Poor James Clancy — God rest 
 his soul l — a kind man, and a good 
 man, but not much of a man on a farm. 
 
 Eugene: Not much indeed, but a nice little ball 
 of a man and a Clancy every inch of him. 
 
 Mrs. Spillane: Herself ’s more of a Clancy if 
 
 you ask me . What with pride and man- 
 agement , and good farming — 't isn't every 
 woman would battle it out the way she 
 did — and I'm thinking Eugene, if we’d 
 asked a bigger interest of her we'd 
 have got it . 
 
 Eugene: Ah well, well, you wouldn't be hard on 
 a neighbor in trouble; and she was a 
 stiff one to drive a bargain with. 
 
 Maybe you don't remember the day and 
 she dressed in black and her hands 
 trembling with the fear of the farm 
 being sold over her head, and for all 
 her fears, and for all her black, 
 divil a bit would she give us only 
 f ive per cent . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 - 9 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 80 - 
 
 Mrs . Spillane: Sure I remember. Well, indeed, 
 
 I don’t grudge it to her, her farm is 
 a credit to the parish. 
 
 The following passage from The White-headed Boy is 
 Robinson in another mood. One could never mistake the dialogue 
 here for Murray or Fitzmaurice. 
 
 George: I won’t have an easy minute till the 
 
 pair of them are married and gone . Oh 
 Donough, it's an awful thing to be head 
 of a family. Since the father died 
 I’ve not had a minute’s rest, pulled 
 this way and that way, this one wanting 
 to get married, another going into 
 business, Baby flying up to Dublin, 
 
 Denis doctoring — many a time I wished 
 I was born an orphan . 
 
 Aunt Ellen: God forgive you. 
 
 George: It's true. Aunt Ellen. Look at the life 
 I've led between you all, and no one ever 
 thinking maybe I'd want to get married, 
 or have a bit of fun, or spend a bit of 
 money. For two pins I'd throw the lot 
 of ye over to-morrow and sail away out 
 of this for ever. 
 
 Aunt Ellen: Yerra, talk sense, George; that's 
 no way to be behaving. 
 
 George: There's no escape for me. I'm caught 
 
 like an old cow with her head in a stall. 
 
 When one turns to the plays of the Midlands one finds 
 varying dialects again. Colum's and Boyle's use of peasant 
 speech are greatly unlike in both words and rhythms. Do not 
 the two following passages, the first from The Fiddler '3 House 
 and the second from The Family Failing , show a striking contrast 
 of language? 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 81 - 
 
 Conn: God help them that are depending on the 
 
 land and the weather for the bit they put 
 into their heads. It's no wonder that 
 the people here are the sort they are, 
 harassed, anxious people. 
 
 Anne: The people here mind their own business 
 and they're a friendly people besides. 
 
 Conn: People that would leave the best fiddler 
 at the fair to go look at a bullock. 
 
 Anne: He's not satisfied to have this shelter, 
 
 Brian . 
 
 Conn: (to Brian) It's small blame to the girl 
 
 here for thinking something of the place; 
 but I saw the time, Brian MacConnell, when 
 I could make more playing at one fair than 
 working a whole season in this bit of a 
 place . 
 
 Brian: Girls like the shelter. Conn. 
 
 Conn: Ay, but the road for the fiddler. I'm 
 
 five years settled here, and I come to be 
 as well known as the begging ass, and there 
 is as much thought about me. Fiddling, 
 let me tell you, isn't like a boy's 
 whistling. It can't be kept up on nothing. 
 
 The following is typical of Boyle's racing comedy: 
 
 Joe: There's something up'. They're running'. 
 
 What the dickens — 
 
 (Nelty runs in breathless.) 
 
 Nelty: The cowl Come quick', the whole of you'. 
 
 Maria: What's the matter, Nelty? 
 
 Nelty: The cow'. — in a bog-hole drownding. She 
 was craning, the starved creature, for a 
 mouthful, and the bank slipped in an -under 
 her. Drownded she'll be, no less, if 
 yous don't hurry. 
 
 Dominic: After all our effort — Maria, this is terrible 
 
 Nelty: Isn't the Old Sack going to stir himself: 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-82- 
 
 Look alive! The devil pull you. 
 
 (Drags Dominic by the arm.) Up! Out 
 of this, you turf stack! 
 
 The fact would seem to be that underneath all these 
 varying idioms and superficial dissimilarities there is after 
 all a great deal in common. The Irishman of to-day can per- 
 haps be understood only imperfectly from the work of any single 
 realist; he exists in his full proportions as he is drawn de- 
 tail by detail, trait by trait, dialect by dialect in all of 
 the plays. Even the great difference in dialect noted in the 
 Ulster and Kerry plays of Ervine and Fitzmaurice is no greater 
 than the difference in the speech of a Kentucky mountaineer 
 and an Illinois farmer who lives not a great many miles distant . 
 Yet we never think of calling either of these men un-American 
 or of insisting that they are fundamentally unlike. 
 
 So settled, however, is this feeling of the essential 
 uniqueness of Ulster drama that Boyd says emphatically: "The 
 regionalism of the Northern dramatists corresponds to a definite 
 
 condition of Irish geography The Ulster playwrights are 
 
 entitled to be considered apart from their Southern contempor- 
 aries, even when they have not been identified specifically 
 with the literary movement in Belfast. Satirical humor seems 
 to be the dominant characteristic of the Ulster group . n± 
 Throughout the chapter whenever he has praise for these northern 
 playwrights, it is for "preserving the atmosphere of Ulster." 
 
 1. Contemporary Drama of Ireland , p. 170. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 83 - 
 
 But is the atmosphere so different? There is pure comedy, and 
 satiric comedy in the South and Midlands as well. Excluding 
 The Building Fund , all of Boyle's plays are satiric comedies. 
 Robinson's popular The Tffhite -headed Bov is likewise in the 
 satiric vein; The Country Dressmaker and the fantasy Dandy Dolls 
 are full of humorous satire; of all the southern group only 
 Murray is entirely free from this trait which has so often been 
 ascribed as the outstanding characteristic of the Ulster play- 
 wrights. On the other hand, the Ulster dramatists are not 
 without their poetry. Brian Hobson's Brian of Banba . James 
 Cousin's Cathleen Ni Houlihan . Lewis Purcell's The Pagan , and 
 Joseph Campbell's The Little Cowherd of Slainge are by way of 
 exceptions to the general realistic work of the northern play- 
 wrights as Padraic Pearse's plays of early Ireland and Fitz- 
 maurice's fantasies Dandy Dolls and Magic Glass es are to the 
 realism of the Dublin writers. And in justice one must admit 
 that The Little Cowherd of Slainge is as truly in the Yeatsian 
 tradition as are Pearse's little dramatic dialogues which aim 
 to stir patriotic feeling — and a great deal more like Yeats 
 than are Dandy Dolls and Magic Glasses , which have a large 
 flavor of the grotesque because of their dealing with present 
 day peasants who act like the folk of ancient time. Yeats, 
 as we have seen, consistently refused to consider the modern 
 peasant as a fit subject for the folk drama of imagination. 
 Finally, as regards the spirit of the new Irish drama, tragedy 
 
- 84 - 
 
 is certainly limited to no regional group of writers. Mayne's 
 The Troth and Red Turf are full of the same violent feeling 
 for which The Birthright has been criticised; John Ferguson 
 and Mixed Marriage are as truly tragic as The Moonlighters , 
 Thomas Muskerrv . The Shuiler's Child, or any other of the best 
 tragedies of the new Irish drama. 
 
 But, say the critics, Ulster is Protestant and Union- 
 ist, the rest of Ireland Catholic and Nationalist. To be true 
 to the life of the different parts of the country the drama 
 should show this difference; the plays of the South should flame 
 with patriotic and nationalist feeling, while those of the 
 North should reflect an opposite spirit. To a certain extent 
 that is exactly the case. The dramatic dialogues of Padraic 
 Pearse are weighted with an agonized protest at the apathy of 
 the nation; in them gleams that clear love of country which was 
 to cost the author his life in the cause of Irish freedom. 
 
 The mention of Pearse always brings to mind Thomas MacDonagh, 
 who was killed in the Easter uprising. His single well-known 
 Play, .When the Dawn is Come , contrasts with Pearse* s in pleading 
 his cause against a dull nation by telling, not of past up- 
 risings, but of the successful one which is to come in the 
 future. Fitzmaurice 1 s Moonlighters is a dramatization of the 
 reaction of an old man who has been a staunch Fenian in '86 
 to the rebellious plans of the young men about him whom he 
 distrusts as blackguards because of their noisy talk about 
 
-85- 
 
 Nationalism. When he realizes that most of them are sincere, 
 he goes out to die with one of them. 
 
 Robinson has three plays dealing with this passion 
 of Irishmen for independence: The Dreamers and The Lost Leader , 
 studies of the national heroes, Emmet and Parnell, and The 
 Patriot » a play charged with a pessimistic feeling that Irish 
 blood no longer runs red, that Irish spirit is no longer heroic . 
 Its satire is double, one point directed toward the old style 
 rebels who brought misery to themselves and their families 
 without accomplishing their end, and the other toward the new 
 reformist methods which in 1912 seemed to have vitiated prosper- 
 ous modern Ireland. Thus Ann Nugent, who from a passionately 
 devoted bride has been hardened into an intensely practical 
 business woman during her husband's imprisonment, cries out: 
 
 "Oh don't talk to me of patriotism— I *m sick of it. It's made 
 Sullivan a bankrupt; it's made Brennan a drunkard; you a mur- 
 derer; it's destroyed my happiness; it's made Rose a cripple... 
 your mad patriotic selfishness." On the other hand there is 
 a warning against the men who have grown away from Nugent’s 
 Brand-like patriotism; who say with Father Kearney: "Give it 
 up, James. It was very good fun twenty years ago when we were 
 all young and felt that life was a desperately serious thing, 
 and that Ireland would sink under the 3 ea if we didn't cut her 
 free from England. But we are older now, and more sensible, 
 and we feel that things are gradually working right." 
 
- 86 - 
 
 When one turns to the plays of the northern group 
 which deal with political subjects, the contrast at first seems 
 overwhelmingly great . Here the satire is all directed towards 
 the fatal weakness of Ulster, the bigotry which is fed by 
 English politicians and by industrialist propaganda. The at- 
 titude of the typical Ulsterite is in the righteously indignant 
 explosion of Aunt Marget in Purcell's The Enthusiast : "What 
 else cud ye expect but a fight, bringin' Home Rulers an' 
 Catholics and Dippers an' tramps, an' a' the riff-raffs o' the 
 country into the same field. It's f lyin' in the face o' 
 Providence." It is this entire lack of feeling of national 
 solidarity which is satirized in the Ulster plays. Gerald 
 MacNamara gets a great deal of slightly bitter fun in deline- 
 ating Thompson, a typical North peasant whose stock of Irish 
 historical knowledge consists of the facts that King William 
 crossed the Boyne in 1690 and that King Henry VIII. was a 
 "Roman" till he was converted; who defines the enemies of the 
 country as "peelers", although he admits that they are to be 
 tolerated because "they're useful sometimes for putting down 
 them terrible atrocities in the South and West." 
 
 The themes of The Enthusiast . Mixed Marriage , and 
 T he Oran g eman have already been spoken of as being identical: 
 the revolt of youth against the bigotry of its environment . 
 Superf icially this theme has little in common with the fervently 
 patriotic plays of the South. And yet is not the underlying 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-8 7 - 
 
 motive for all of these plays practically the same as the motive 
 for the Abbey plays — the author's desire for a unified Ireland? 
 There is nationalism equal to any Dublin enthusiast's in Michael 
 O’Connor's passionate efforts to unite "Cathliks and Prodesan" 
 and in his feeling that personal happiness is to be sacrificed 
 to his cause. "It's Irelan ' agin you. Irelan''s a bigger 
 thing nor you an' Hugh an' me an' all o' us rowled thegither." 
 The patriotic spirit of the North is in these young men who 
 rebel against the hard intolerance and short-eightedness of 
 Ulster. One of the best expressions of this feeling is in 
 the words of James McKinstry (The Enthusiast ) who has tried to 
 persuade his neighbors to transcend their religious and politi- 
 cal differences by entering into a co-operative farming move- 
 ment . When he returns from the resulting fray, battered and 
 disillusioned, he says sadly, "And to think they are so blind 
 that they lose sight of their true interests and stone their 
 friends for the sake of a meaningless catch-word." The more 
 one studies these northern plays the more one is convinced that 
 after all their spirit is in fundamental harmony with that of 
 the other contemporary Irish plays . The thrust against Ulster 
 separatist disposition is too sharp and too universal to admit 
 of any interpretation but a love of country as deep and as 
 clear-eyed as that which animates the other Irish realists. 
 
 Both groups of writers struggle against the dull apathy or 
 hot wrong-headedness which they see about them. Only the 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 88 - 
 
 conditions causing these popular qualities differ. In Ulster 
 it is religious bigotry; in Leinster and Connacht, it is lack 
 of proper educational system and too great a pre-occupation 
 with the business of building prosperous farms. But the es- 
 sentials are not in such great contrast as at first appeared. 
 
 Again, if "regional realism" is so characteristic of 
 the recent plays as most critics have insisted and as one who 
 reads newspaper accounts of riots and civil war would naturally 
 suppose, differences in character-types should be so outstanding 
 as to be unmistakable. Surely here at least will be contrast- 
 ing human qualities which may explain the animosity of the 
 orange and green wearers . 
 
 If one had read the peasant plays of only Synge and 
 Lady C-regory and should then come to these stories of Ulster 
 Presbyterians, one would undoubtedly feel himself in a new 
 world. The Scotch-Irishman with his complacent consciousness 
 of being a pillar in the church and his canny ability to get on 
 by the simple formulae of watching the pennies and preserving 
 himself a respectable figure is widely removed from Synge's 
 tinkers and tramps and Lady Gregory's quaint villagers. But 
 if one attempts to compare this same Scotch-Irishman with char- 
 acters from other realistic plays striking parallels are im- 
 mediately evident. Enough has been said in preceding chapters 
 to prepare for the statement which might otherwise seem a bit 
 startling that there is scarcely a type of character in any 
 

 
 
 
 , 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 69 - 
 
 play which is not closely paralleled in the plays of another 
 section of the country . Some of the most interesting of these 
 recurring types may be discussed briefly. 
 
 Many of them have already been mentioned. For 
 instance the shiftless Irishman who gives himself up to idle 
 dreaming until he is utterly worthless except as ornamental 
 furnishing of life, as pictured in Uncle Daniel Murray, Dominic 
 Donnelly, and Denis Geoghegan, has been discussed for his 
 prosiness. But for the present point at issue the significant 
 thing about this trilogy is the fact that they hail from Ulster, 
 the Midlands, and County Cork respectively. There is nothing 
 about any of these triflers to prevent their being interchanged. 
 Denis, to be sure, is partly fcrgiveable for his youth and 
 personal charm, but give him fifteen years and the moral re- 
 sponsibility of someone dependent upon him and he will be as 
 despicable as Dominic Donnelly, unless his right-about-face 
 at the end of the play is more thorough-going than we are apt 
 to give him credit for. 
 
 Similarly in discussing the "hard farmer” considerable 
 time was spent upon William James Granahan, John Murray, Murtagh 
 Cosgar, Dan Fogarty, Maurice Hurley, and Bat Morrissey. Is 
 it necessary to point out the fact that these characters are 
 equally distributed among our "regional” groups? Blind love 
 of the land and of prosperity is the same powerful motive in 
 Catholic old Timothy Hurley as in Sunday-School teacher William 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 90 - 
 
 James Granahan . It inspires one to commit arson and the other 
 to cheat his neighbors and outrage his own paternal instincts. 
 Three other fathers, one from each broad division of Ireland, 
 are also guilty of parental tyranny of the grossest sort, John 
 Rainey, Murtagh Cosgar and Bat Morriesey. Each is equally 
 obstinate, equally blind to his own best interests, equally 
 violent, and in the end equally deserving of our pity. Change 
 Rainey's environment from the Belfast ship-yards to an Ulster 
 farm and his violent bigotry would shade off into a love of 
 the land which will be exactly the same force in his life as 
 that which motivates Cosgar and Morrissey. We know this be- 
 cause the Ulster farmers, the Granahan men except Robbie John, 
 the McKinstry father and son, John Murray and the Me Minns , and 
 Ebenezer McKie, are as deeply attached to the soil as any 
 Leinster peasant could possibly be. 
 
 If the fathers of Ireland seem curiously alike in 
 these plays there is a no less important resemblance in many 
 of the mothers. As examples of the women who spend untold 
 energy in smoothing off the roughnesses of their men folks and 
 in mediating in their quarrels compare Mrs. Rainey, Mrs. Mor- 
 rissey and Mrs . Crilly . Throughout the plays these women are 
 on a constant strain of trying to soothe their hot-tempered, 
 much-demanding men. Like Mrs. Rainey, they are all "patient 
 with the awful patience of a woman who has always submitted 
 to her husband's will, without ever respecting him." 
 
 But 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 - 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 91 - 
 
 even Mrs. Rainey grows tired of her life of perpetual peace- 
 making and exclaims: "Aw, there's times when a wumman's sick o' 
 men an' their folly. Can't ye go through the wurl ' without 
 hammerin' wan another like bastes o' the field?" Maura 
 Morrissey rushes between her sons to prevent their violence 
 and when the trouble is temporarily averted, pleads dis- 
 tractedly with first one then the other of them: "Whist, whist, 
 for God's sake'. Let us have no more words this blessed night. 
 Say your prayers and go to bed, the two of ye, in the name of 
 God. 'Tis very late. Won't you, Shane? Won't you, Hugh?" 
 Mrs. Crilly, Thomas Muskerry's daughter, almost seems to sum 
 up the feeling of a vast group of Irishwomen, whether from the 
 North or South, when she says, "I have to make bits of myself 
 to mind everything and be prepared for everything." 
 
 On the other hand a type of woman entirely different 
 from Mrs. Rainey and Mrs. Morrissey is found in the plays of 
 each "region". Is there any essential unlikeness in Sarah 
 McLinn, Mrs . Grogan, and Mrs . Clancy? Each is cunning, domin- 
 eering, and avaricious . One feels that they would be equally 
 unpleasant to live with. Other women who bear marked re- 
 semblance to each other are Mrs. Harte, Mrs. Cather, and Mrs. 
 Mulroy . They all use the old argument of the child's duty 
 toward the family to force him to do what his conscience dis- 
 approves of . Maurice Harte is tender enough to accede to his 
 mother's wishes; Kitty Mulroy submits without much protest to 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 93 - 
 
 her betrothal to a middle aged man whom she despises, but she 
 is relieved of her promise by circumstances; Maggie Cather, 
 whose nature has been toughened by her years of suffering, 
 stands out stoutly against Mrs. Gather. None of these mothers 
 are despicable. They are only weak — weak enough to bend moral- 
 ly when harassed too much. One feels that Ervine's character- 
 ization of Mrs. Ferguson is an apt description of all of them: 
 "She is not a very intelligent woman, and so her sympathies 
 are sometimes flattened by her lack of perception, but, within 
 her limitations, she is an excellent wife and mother. n 
 
 While Irish girlhood is not treated as intensively 
 as adult womanhood, even in the somewhat sketchy characteriza- 
 tions which are given, it is impossible not to note the re- 
 currence of types in plays of different provinces. Mary Murray 
 in The Drone , Mary Crilly in Thomas Muskerrv . Min Delane in 
 The Country Dressmaker . Sheila in The Building Fund , and Delia 
 Duffy, Denis Geoghegan's sweetheart, are all alike in being 
 alert, pretty, not too intelligent, scheming minxes with a 
 strong dash of the flirtatious in their natures. They will 
 develop, one feels, into wives and mothers "excellent, within 
 their limitations". Nora O'Connor in Mixed Marriage is, per- 
 haps, the outstanding example of a girl who puts her love 
 above everything else, but Anne Hourican, a Midland's girl, 
 and Julia, the sentimental dressmaker of Fitzmaurice 1 s comedy, 
 are not far behind her in their clinging to love in the face 
 
- 93 - 
 
 of obstacles. On the other hand Maire Hourican, Ellen Douras, 
 and Ellen McCarthy, also from different parts of the country, 
 place other aspirations above love. 
 
 The maternal passion of Mrs. Ferguson in the affect- 
 ing scene when Andrew declares he must confess is equalled by 
 the love of Moll Woods' in O'Kelly 's The Shuller's Child which 
 flames into the cry, "Where am I to turn... I could face 
 hardships unfearing with the child.... What does a child sig- 
 nify to a woman if it is not the grace of God?"; and in the 
 desperation of childless Nannie when the Shuiler's child is 
 taken from her. It is noteworthy here that the two women 
 vagabonds who appear in the new Irish drama, one, Peg Straw, 
 is from the extreme North in the Donegal mountain country, and 
 the other, Moll Woods, from the extreme south, Cork County. 
 
 There remain to be mentioned a few other analogies 
 of character which are surely very striking in plays whose 
 realism is only "regional". The three young men who are most 
 truly in love have already been discussed — Hugh Rainey, Matt 
 Cosgar, and Owen Morrissey — one from each part of the country. 
 The exceptional Irishman to whom art is more than comfort, more 
 than the land, more than life, is also, curiously enough, por- 
 trayed in three men from Ulster, the Midlands, and County Kerry. 
 Robbie John Granahan is a mere youngster, Conn Hourican in the 
 
 prime of his life, and Lem Donohue (in The Pie-Dish ) a very old 
 man. In spite of their varying years, they behave strangely 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 94 - 
 
 alike. Robbie John leaves home, love, and sure, comfortable 
 livelihood to develop the musical gift which is his. Conn 
 Hourican says thoughtfully as he bids farewell to an old age 
 of ease and comfort, "I'm leaving the land behind me; 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?" One cannot but think that 
 when life is over they, like Lem Donohue, will bargain salvation 
 
 9 
 
 for the opportunity to finish their artistic labor, if it is 
 not already completed. There is no essential difference in 
 these three men who are such unusual figures in the realistic 
 peasant drama. As a final reminder that recent playwrights 
 do not see Irish life as something which changes radically 
 with province boundaries, attention may be called to the three 
 old men of the new drama, Grandfather Granahan, Uncle Bartle 
 °i Tne Mineral Workers , and Lem Donohue, charming characters 
 all of them, with a singularly similar philosophy of the homely 
 wisdom that comes from long years of observation. 
 
 Parallels of this sort could be multiplied to far 
 greater length, but surely enough has been said to prove the 
 contention that the term "regional realism" as applied to new 
 Irish drama is only half true. No just critic could feel that 
 there are no differences in the plays of the different prov- 
 inces — it has been the purpose of this chapter to show, not 
 that there is no "regional realism", but that this phrase, 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-95- 
 
 which has so lightly passed from one critic to another, ex- 
 aggerates the differences which do undoubtedly exist . In 
 conclusion, it is but fair to Weygandt to quote a few sentences 
 in which he sums up the similarities, after stressing the dis- 
 similarities of Irish life. "And yet, definite as are these 
 distinctions, life in various parts of Ireland seems much alike, 
 class for class, as it is represented by 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 land- 
 lord." How true these words are we have seen. It is only 
 
 to be regretted that they are so carelessly thrown into a 
 chapter which otherwise insists throughout upon "regional 
 realism . " 
 
 1* Irish Plavs and Playwrights , p. 316. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 96 - 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 LENNOX ROBINSON AND ST. JOHN ERVINE. 
 
 In any study of a literary school there is always 
 danger of seeming to lump the group of writers into a level 
 mass with no figures of outstanding merit. In order to avoid 
 this risk of false perspective it seems, therefore, advisable, 
 if not absolutely necessary, to discuss at some length the 
 two playwrights whose work has received most wide-spread notice. 
 Anyone who has read the dramatic criticism of books, magazines, 
 and daily press during the last seven years knows at once what 
 names will be selected — Lennox Robinson and St. John Ervine . 
 Mayne’s two plays. The T u rn of the Road and The Drone are 
 among the best comedies in the whole field of modern drama. 
 Murray's two tragedies. The Birthright and Maurice Harte . par- 
 ticularly the latter, are as impressive in their simplicity 
 and dignified realism as anything that Robinson and Ervine 
 have done. But neither Mayne nor Murray have since the Great 
 War swept down upon Europe done anything to develop their art. 
 
 In the work of both Robinson and Ervine, however, there has 
 been a steady development, and they are writing constantly. 
 
 For Mayne and Murray playwriting has been only a passing avo- 
 cation; their real professions are, respectively, acting and 
 teaching. Robinson and Ervine are writers by profession, 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 « 
 
 . 
 
 
 ' -r 
 
 
 
 
 
-97- 
 
 and thus have to their credit many more significant plays than 
 the two each by which the other men are best known. Hence, 
 it is, on every account, proper to choose these men who by the 
 quantity and quality of their dramatic output and by their 
 managership of the Abbey Theatre are most significant among 
 the Irish realists. 
 
 Lennox Robinson was born in Cork, October 4, 1886. 
 
 His father was a clergyman whose charges were always in the 
 Southwest of Ireland, consequently Robinson understands the 
 life of County Cork as thoroughly as do Murray and the novelist 
 Daniel Corkery, whose Yellow Bittern has been so popular on 
 Irish stages. Writing seems to have fascinated him from 
 his boyhood, for while yet a mere youngster he edited an amateur 
 magazine. We have it on the authority of Weygandt that it 
 was a visit of the Abbey Theatre company to Cork which first 
 turned Robinson’s thought toward the drama, which was in those 
 days (1907 or 1908) the great literary activity of Ireland. 
 
 We know, however, that there was a Dramatic Society in Cork, and 
 it is probable that Robinson was interested in playwriting be- 
 fore he saw the famous group of Abbey actors. At any rate, 
 his first play The Clancy Name was presented in the Abbey when 
 he was barely twenty-two. 
 
 In the thirteen years since that time his life has 
 been full of literary work. Six plays, a novel which had to 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ' 
 
 
-98- 
 
 be rewritten because the original manuscript was burned during 
 the bombardment of Dublin in the Easter uprising, a volume of 
 short stories, and many articles for literary periodicals have 
 been published over his name. In addition to his work as an 
 author, Robinson has been busy with the task of building up 
 Irish rural libraries, and as director of the Abbey Theatre 
 has traveled and lectured extensively besides struggling hero- 
 ically to rebuild the company after the demoralization of the 
 war. Surely a busy thirteen years'. 
 
 Excluding The Whit e-headed Bov . Robinson plays fall 
 naturally into two groups, the earlier one comprising those 
 written before 1912 and having for a theme some social condition 
 in Ireland. In this list are The Clancy Name . The Cross-Roads . 
 ant ^ The Harvest , all three of which have been mentioned often 
 in former chapters . The other group began with The Patriots 
 in 1912 and deals with political themes — with Ireland as a 
 nation trying to discover its destiny. Besides The Patriot s 
 this groups includes The Dreamer s . first produced in 1915, just 
 a year before the Easter up-rising, and The Lost Leader in 
 1919. Robinson's single comedy. The Whit e-headed Bov , which, 
 because it is so unlike his other work, must be classed by 
 itself , had its premiere at the end of 1916, and has been on 
 the boards almost ever since. 
 
 The_ Q.la.ncy Name , although melodramatic and lacking 
 Robinson's later mastery of prolonged suspense, is really a 
 
 remarkable first play. The delineation of Mrs. Clancy's 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
character and the grasp on dialect are scarcely improved in 
 the j.ater plays; the compactness and singleness of tragic effect 
 are in every way admirable. Moreover, this first play struck 
 Robinson ' s characteristic vein: a keen sense of the irony of 
 human ambition. On the very day when Mrs. Clancy pays off 
 her mortgage and feels that at last the family name which she 
 idolizes is to be free from all stain of disrespect, she dis- 
 covers that her only son is a murderer. In this little one- 
 act piece there is real tragic effect, a notable achievement 
 for so young a writer as Robinson was at that time. One 
 probably still more unusual is the artistic compression which 
 could crowd into one speech so much of character, dialect, 
 past history, theme, and atmosphere as are in one which Mrs. 
 Clancy utters early in the play: "Well, I've got you here to-day 
 to pay you back the money I borrowed from you five years ago 
 when the Lisless bank broke and my husband lost all his money. 
 
 He was always sickly and the shock of losing his money and the 
 disgrace killed him altogether. So there was I, left without 
 a penny, and a whole bag of debts. There's many a woman would 
 have sold the farm and paid what she could and rested content 
 all her life, but I couldn't do that . 'T?/as never said before 
 that a Clancy couldn't pay his debts." 
 
 From the promising beginning of The Clancy Name 
 Robinson passed to more ambitious attempts in The Cross-Roads 
 and The_ , _ Ha r vest , three act plays which appeared in 1903 and 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 \, 
 
 ' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 100 - 
 
 1910. Neither of them, it must be admitted, lives up to the 
 expectation created by The Clancy Name . Both are melodramatic; 
 both are so obviously propagandist ic in tone that they remind 
 one of Brieux at his worst; and somehow both fail to be con- 
 vincing. Yet they have not lacked critics who praise them 
 
 highly. Thus Weygandt insists that "after the needless pro- 
 
 logue" of The Cross-Roads "it is fine art through to the end,"'*' 
 and that the reading of the Irish peasant in Tom Dempsey, severe 
 though it be, is not distorted. 
 
 Attention has been called in previous paragraphs to 
 most of the faults of The Cross-Roads : its melodramatic ex- 
 aggeration of Tom Dempsey's brutality; the incredible supposi- 
 tion that Ellen's loveless marriage has put a black curse not 
 only upon herself and her husband but upon the farm until the 
 stock dies of disease, the hens refuse to lay, and the land 
 loses its productivity; the lack of unified impression caused 
 by the glaring contrast of Ellen in the first and last scenes 
 might also have been emphasized. These things, which in read- 
 ing one dismisses as improbable, do not, however, so greatly 
 affect the spectators many of whom report that they were carried 
 away by the play, feeling it a poignant, human tragedy of a 
 soul which misunderstood values. This attitude of those who 
 have seen the play shows, as nothing else could, that no matter 
 what other artistic sense Robinson may lose momentarily, his 
 feeling for stage effect never slips. 
 
 1 • Irish P la ys and Pl a ywrights , p . 224 . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 101 - 
 
 Two other characteristics of Robinson are noticeable 
 in this early play. First, it is typical of his ability to 
 choose a theme which is fundamental in Irish life — a more im- 
 passioned protest has not been written against the loveless 
 marriage system of Ireland than this play contains. The theme 
 is so truly great, that one mourns any but perfect treatment. 
 
 The second characteristic is the irony which runs through all 
 of Robinson's work. In this play it appears in the failure 
 of Ellen to create happiness or even prosperity for herself 
 when the up-to-date methods she advocates are all the time en- 
 riching her neighbors and making her community known even in 
 Dublin as progressive. After all. The Cross-Roads does not 
 measure up so far below the apprentice plays of many a dramatist 
 whose mature work holds secure claim to greatness. 
 
 In The Harvest there is a notable improvement in 
 dramatic technique. Here the impression is thoroughly unified 
 and the action condensed into three weeks. While its peasant 
 figures lack the excessive brutality of Tom Dempsey, it is 
 in some respects the most naturalistic of Robinson's plays. 
 Environment and hereditary weakness and especially educational 
 training have made the Hurley young people what they are; no 
 particular guilt is attached to them in their failure to help 
 their father. If we grant the author's premise, we are in- 
 clined to condone even the crime of old Timothy, so indignant 
 are we at the educational system which has caused all the 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . j m m-, i 
 
 • r-j - I j I .1 ( . . ■ | 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 102 - 
 
 trouble . But we have a canny suspicion that Lennox Robinson 
 may be writing of life that he knows little of, for there is 
 weakness in The Harvest , a failure to convince which none of 
 the other plays has in like degree. After watching the father 
 of the Hurleys fire his property in order to defraud the in- 
 surance company, we do not believe that the educational system 
 is all that is affecting the young Hurleys; we fail to thrill 
 to Mary’s blase defiance; we doubt that a young peasant would 
 have been so soon weakened physically as Jack is; and our common 
 sense prompts us to think it highly improbable that in a family 
 ol six children not one would be able and willing to rescue 
 the old homestead— that of the lot who were felt to be so 
 promising, not one except Maurice who has stayed on the farm 
 is more than self-supporting. This feeling that the char- 
 acters are only pawns which Robinson has used to prove his 
 point causes Weygandt, recalling the fact that while writing 
 The Harvest Robinson spent some time in England with Shaw and 
 Barker, to exclaim, "It is but another of many illustrations of 
 the blight that Mr. Shaw has brought upon the modern English 
 stage . " 
 
 One must admit, however, that the play is readable. 
 There are interesting touches of characterization, flashes of 
 humor, and above all Robinson's own irony which go far toward 
 redeeming the play from utter triviality. One of the best 
 endings of any modern drama is in this one. The situation 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 ' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 m 
 
-103- 
 
 has resolved itself: Timothy is to draw his insurance money; 
 
 Jack has given up his idealistic struggle in disgust; Mary is 
 going back to her shameful life in London; Patrick has changed 
 his name and religion . But William Lordan, the old school 
 master who has mis-trained them all, knowing nothing of the 
 seamy side of the story of his former pupils, congratulates 
 himself upon what he ha3 done for them and plans similar careers 
 for bright pupils now in his school. ’’May God grant me a few 
 more years of health and strength till I do with them what I've 
 done with Mary and Patrick,” he prays complacently. 
 
 With the appearance of The Patriots in 1913, a new 
 epoch in Robinson's dramatic career began. As has been said, 
 it is the dramatization of the Irish political spirit which a 
 few years later found expression in the Sinn Fein movement . 
 
 In both technique and theme it set the form of all the later 
 plays except The White-headed Boy . It is difficult to speak 
 of this play in any but enthusiastic terms. The action is 
 closely knit; there is a constant tightening of interest and 
 a sense of inevitability; a balance and completeness which many 
 of the plays of the realists do not have; above all one finds a 
 mixture of pathos and humor which is masterly . The character- 
 ization is sure, even in the minor persons. The two fussy old 
 uncles, Ann's brothers, are clearly presented and stand out 
 delightfully against the stereotyped figures of Robinson's 
 earlier plays. The author's keenest satire finds expression 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 104 - 
 
 in the speech of Uncle Bob: "I'd have had the country in a flame 
 only for my wretched health. But I done what I could. I 
 done what I could. It'9 no joke being secretary to the League, 
 I can tell you. Why, getting up these winter lectures is a 
 big job in itself, and there are always resolutions to be framed, 
 and addresses, and — and people like Starkie to pacify — oh, it's 
 very wearing. I sometimes think if I had withdrawn from it 
 altogether I might have got back my health. But I'll never 
 withdraw. I've given my life willingly — for Ireland. Isn't 
 that cocoa ready?" 
 
 The political interest of the play is, however, only 
 half of it . The turning of Ann from an ardent bride to a 
 hardened business woman is real human drama. "You wooed me 
 passionately, you married me passionately and for five years 
 you dragged me after you round the country kindling my patriot- 
 ism at the flame of yours, speaking through me with your passion 
 I was never myself in all those years . I was only you. You 
 took my health, my strength, my beauty, my money, and you spent 
 them prodigally, and at twenty-six I found myself old and ugly 
 and grey and worn out— it's no use. You can't kindle me again. 
 I suppose I'm too old." 
 
 But the supreme character of the drama is, of course, 
 Nugent himself, the old fire-brand who has hoarded his strength 
 through his eighteen prison years that he may be of use to 
 "the cause", and now comes out to find that the cause is dead, 
 his former comrades occupied with lectures and luke-warm 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-105- 
 
 petitions, and his wife able to say dispassionately, "I think 
 I hate you, James." But the crowning feature of his tragedy 
 is his final realization that his consecration to Ireland has 
 been fruitless of anything but evil . Eighteen years in prison 
 could not break his spirit, but the disillusion of his first 
 days at home transform him into an old man, "a thing to be told 
 stories about." It is characteristic of Robinson to follow 
 Nugent's last broken speech with a remark from the relieved 
 janitor that now since the patriotic meeting is not to be held, 
 he can go to the pictures after all. 
 
 Hester Travers Smith, writing in The Drama for April 
 1S31, sums up the merits of The Patriots as "a masterpiece 
 from the technical point of view. It is far less the drama 
 of situation than the plays which followed it. It has fine 
 proportions, it has humor which never descends to farce, and it 
 has knowledge of human character." 
 
 The political feeling with which The Patriots is 
 pregnant finds expression in Robinson's next play also. Here 
 again the playwright takes no partisan stand and satirizes 
 the enthusiast almost as keenly as his leaden followers. The 
 Dreamers is a dramatization of the closing episodes of Robert 
 Emmet's life; the failure of the national hero is presented as 
 in large measure due to the futility and untrustworthiness of 
 his followers. The excitement and confusion of despair are 
 borne home to the spectator who sees the last tragic scenes 
 
. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 106 - 
 
 from the fringe of the crowd which gathers about Emmet . Emmet 
 himself is portrayed in a way which in no respect suggests a 
 portrait, if one is to accept the historical account of him as 
 true . 
 
 With the exception of the love-scenes, which are 
 clumsily enough done, the play is well-written throughout, and 
 shows Robinson's unusual ability to handle an exceedingly dif- 
 ficult dramatic situation. There is nothing amateurish about 
 the way the plot is built or in the method by which the central 
 figure is presented. 
 
 Chronologically, The White-headed Bov is the next of 
 Robinson's plays. Although he says we are to regard it as 
 having political significance, it is never considered in that 
 light . It is clever, high-spirited, entertaining comedy with 
 decidedly broad humor. The slightness of the plot is at least 
 partly compensated for by the carefulness with which it is 
 worked out, and by the clearness of the characterization. 
 
 Enough has been said of this very popular comedy in preceding 
 paragraphs so that it may now be passed over with the appre- 
 ciative comment of E. A. Boyd, who has been exceedingly chary 
 of praise for the whole group of Irish realists: "The strength 
 of this play undoubtedly lies in the perfect combination of 
 form and content, and the natural, unstrained drollery of 
 speech combined with a subject which develops realistically 
 and logically, yet whose humor is that of cumulative effect. 
 
- 107 - 
 
 There is not a deliberately manufactured phrase in it, not one 
 situation that is forced and stagey, for the whole comedy arises 
 out of the relations which inevitably establish themselves 
 between the characters." 1 But for all that, one has reason 
 to doubt that comedy is Robinson's real medium. His attitude 
 toward life is too serious and his temperament too gauntly that 
 of an artist who longs for better days to allow him to be satis- 
 fied with comedy of the type of T he Whit e-headed Bov . 
 
 Robinson's last play, The Lost Leader , was produced 
 in the same season as Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln and created 
 almost as much of public sensation and critical dissension. 
 
 It deals with the return of Ireland's "lost leader," dramatiz- 
 ing the legend that Parnell did not die, but merely retired 
 to peaceful seclusion to wait until his country should need 
 him again. The plot is briefly this: a psycho-analyst on a 
 vacation in a remote Irish village playfully experiments with 
 a London journalist, also on a vacation. A strange old pea- 
 sant, Lucius Lenihan, who is in the room, is hypnotized along 
 with the journalist, and the scientist, seeing in him a "subject 
 questions him— bringing back to him memories which had been 
 buried. When in the course of the questioning he is asked 
 his name he replies clearly and proudly, "Charles Stewart 
 Parnell." According to Rebecca West the pronunciation of 
 
 1. Introduction to The White-headed Bov . 
 
. 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 108 - 
 
 these words sent a thrill through London audiences such as they 
 had not felt in our generation of play -going. The lost leader, 
 now restored to his consciousness, prepares to deliver his 
 message to Ireland, but before he can get it out, he is killed 
 •by a hurly stick thrown by a singer at a sneering gombeen man. 
 When the men who have been called to identify the man as Parnell, 
 arrive, they cannot decide. "Is that Parnell? It might be — 
 
 I don't know" is as definite a3 they can be. 
 
 It is this failure of Robinson to say what he actually 
 believes about the peasant— Parnell which has caused most of 
 the contention among critics. Archer says emphatically: "To 
 the end — such is the author's delicate art, we do not know 
 which theory is the true one. In our hearts, however, under 
 the glamour of the scene, we have not the least doubt that 
 Lucius is the real Parnell." On the other hand Massingham 
 of the London Nation criticizes the play for its end: "In 
 shrinking from the full assumption on which the drama hangs, 
 Lenihan's identity with the lost leader, its author lets the 
 true problem — the psychological one--go and condemns his work 
 to unreality." To the other stock criticism of the play that 
 the views of the revived Parnell are not those which the real 
 man held, Lucius himself answers, "Do you expect me to speak 
 as I did twenty-five years ago — to forget nothing, to learn 
 nothing? Do you expect Ireland to change and me to stand 
 
 still?" 
 


 -109- 
 
 The play is, like Robinson's other play 3 , carefully 
 planned and executed. It illustrates, however, the great 
 
 4 
 
 weakness of Robinson as an artist — his predilection for politica 
 rather than universal human drama. He is a master of stage- 
 craft. That he knows how to do personal drama of a kind which 
 is rare, we must admit when we remember the personal phase of 
 all his dramas. He has keen and unfaltering sense of dramatic 
 situation. He is perfectly able to fit words and ideas to 
 distinctive characters; he has the artist's aloofness from life. 
 His only great dramatic fault i 3 too great an interest in 
 causes which necessarily makes his work transient and terri- 
 torial in their appeal . He is still young, and if he learns 
 to write "the still sad music of humanity" instead of the 
 romance of political issues, he will be a truly great dramatist. 
 
 St. John Greer Ervine was born in Belfast in 1883, 
 three years before Robinson's birth. Like most young writers 
 who have not yet been honored with a biography, the details 
 of his early life are shadowy. But even if he was not, as 
 Weygandt declares, the son of a shipyards workingman, it is 
 certain that as a lad he played about the yards, making a 
 child's shrewd observations and learning to know the spirit of 
 Belfast working classes . He early began to read omnivcrously 
 and, like Robinson, to experiment with writing while yet a 
 mer9 child. He was only seventeen when he went to London 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 . 
 
 
- 110 - 
 
 to take up journalism, where he seems to have gone through the 
 prescribed career for talented young Irishmen — even to having 
 his tongue loosened in a debating society . Since the first 
 years of his apprenticeship, he has been a frequent contributor 
 to The Daily News. Manchester Guardian , and the London Nat ion 
 and other publications, besides his regular work for the Royal 
 Exchange Assurance. 
 
 His dramatic career began in 1907 with the writing 
 of the one-act piece, The Magnanimous Lover , which, however, 
 was not presented until 1913 after Mixed Marriage had taken 
 ohe Abbey by storm and established the author's popularity a 3 
 a playwright. In 1913 Ervine gave up his position with the 
 Royal Exchange Assurance and threw his lot in with the literary 
 renaissance oi Ireland. Since then, besides serving for a 
 year as manager of the Abbey and acting for a time as dramatic 
 critic lor The Daily Citizen , he has written two slight one- 
 act plays, The Critics and The Orangeman : two long plays of 
 worth, Jane, . ..Cl egg and John Ferguson : a volume of short stories, 
 II^fa-Ht, OJ.clock and Other Studies : and four novels, Mrs. Martvn'a 
 Man, Alice and _a Family , Changing Winds , and Foolish Lovers . 
 Indeed, he seems for the present at least to have abandoned 
 the drama for the novel, and with James Stephens to be trying 
 to write the fiction which somehow Ireland has never produced. 
 But for our present purpose, it is only with Ervine a 3 a 
 dramatist that we are concerned. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 111 - 
 
 So many references have been made to The Magn animous 
 Lover and Mixed Marriage that no extended discussion of them 
 is necessary here. The former play is, as has been said, one 
 of the best constructed one-act plays in the language, a no 
 less remarkable "first attempt" than The Clancy Name from the 
 standpoint of craftsmanship. The theme is as old as the first 
 injured woman, but the characterization is fresh enough to pre- 
 vent the action from seeming hackneyed. In all his later work 
 which has received so much acclaim from the press, Ervine has 
 hardly drawn a better character than Maggie Cather, a humble 
 Magda who has fought her bitter way to respect even in a com- 
 munity pervaded by the self-righteousness of Ulster. In her 
 refusal to marry the coward who offers marriage in order "to 
 make a good woman of her” and to rid himself of his fear of 
 eternal punishment, Maggie is not a stereotyped mouthpiece of 
 Woman* 8 demands as she would have been in the hands of a clumsy 
 amateur. She is an individual, an angry scornful woman with 
 Scotch-Irish canniness which makes her reject the man who can 
 say callously that he will treat his child "just as if he were 
 a child of God instead of sin." 
 
 Mixed Marriage , the play which won Ervine *s popular- 
 ity, is in some respects the best of all his work. It is long 
 enough to make up an entire evening's program and as Boyd says, 
 "It compresses within four acts all the various ramifications 
 of. that religious bigotry which has served politicians more 
 

- 113 - 
 
 usefully than it has served Ulster." 1 Structurally the play 
 is typical of all of Ervine's work in its firmness, sense of 
 completeness, tensity of situation, and mastery of a distinctive 
 dialect. There are almost no loose threads in St. John Ervinefc 
 dramas. Mrs. Rainey is in many ways the most pleasing creation 
 in the realistic drama of Ireland. She is gentle and wise, 
 tolerant because she "belaves in lavin' people alone." Through 
 
 -out the play she expostulates with her masterful husband 
 
 "Sure ye'd go on talkin' a life time if A was to let ye;" 
 
 "We're get tin' ould, John; it dussen become the ould t' be head- 
 strong and onforgivin ' ." But in the end when the obstinacy 
 she has tried so hard to soften brings tragedy upon the family, 
 she comforts Rainey through her tears, "Aw, my poor man, my 
 poor man." 
 
 In this connection one is impelled to quote a bit of 
 criticism which appeared in the Dial a few years ago: "What 
 distinguishes Mr . Ervine irom most : of the other Irish dramatists 
 is his mastery of his craft and his firm grasp of character. 
 About most of the Irish plays — Mr. Colum's for instance--there 
 is a sort of amateurishness . Mr . Ervine has none of their 
 aimless talkativeness, their vagueness, their tendency to rest 
 content with second rate workmanship. With him every stroke 
 is firm and clear and every stroke tells. You will go far in 
 
 1 • Contemporary Drama of Ireland 1 p . 181 . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 ■ 
 
 .. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 I II I ■ m- m 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-113- 
 
 recent drama before you will find a better drawn character than 
 Mrs . Rainey or her husband. Few readers or theatre-goers 
 familiar with Ervine will question these words . 
 
 The two short plays which followed Mixed Marriage 
 appeared in 1913 at the Abbey, where all of Ervine' s plays ex- 
 cept J a ne .Clegg were first produced. The Critics is a witty 
 little satire upon the Irish press representatives who had 
 shrilly attacked The Magnanimous Lover for its use of the word 
 "bastard.’ 1 The scene is set in the entrance of a Dublin 
 theatre where a belated press critic gathers material for his 
 article upon the play being presented. Considerable fun is 
 obtained from the comments he absorbs upon the base immorality 
 of the play , which turns out to be Hamlet . But there is such 
 obvious exaggeration of even a newspaper critic's stupidity 
 (as when the would-be critics decide that Shakespeare must be 
 the Gaelic name of some upstart dramatist recently acquired by 
 the Abbey) that one wishes that Ervine had refrained from this 
 attempt to follow the example of Byron and George Bernard Shaw. 
 Naturally the play has never had any stage success, and even if 
 it is not the "intellectual offence" which Boyd charges, it is 
 in every way unworthy of Ervine, except in the point of struc- 
 ture. Like Robinson, he never slips there. 
 
 T ho Orangeman is the same vein as Mixed Marriage and 
 
 1. H. E. Woodbridge: A Group of Irish Plavs : Dial . Vol . 61, 
 p . 463 . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 • . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 ' 
 
 . 
 
 *T -I 
 
 ■ 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
- 114 - 
 
 Purcell 's The Enthusiast , a criticism of the bigotry which re- 
 fuses to see Ulster's own best interests. Here again the 
 characterization is clear. John M'Clurg is a less robust 
 bigot and bully than John Rainey , but is equally headstrong. 
 Here, too, Ervine pins his faith to the young generation, the 
 best of whom refuse to carry the "Ulster drum" or any other 
 symbol of North— Irish intolerance . The play is marred by a 
 lack of the humor which usually appears in Ervine' s work, and 
 which so enlivens Purcell's little comedy on the same theme . 
 
 Jane Clegg, the next play, has not been discussed at 
 any length because it is really outside the Irish movement, 
 dealing as it does with London life and character, and first 
 presented as it was at a London theatre. Choosing an English 
 locale for the play must have been an experiment with Ervine, 
 for the theme is one so inherent in human nature that there 
 seems no good reason why Irish characters might not have been 
 used as well as Cockney. But as Ervine has developed it, 
 it is English in spirit as well as in the superficial aspects 
 of dialect and scene . It is chiefly interesting to us in the 
 present study for its illustration of Ervine's preoccupation 
 with the working class and of his ability to put in motion a 
 set of characters out of whose natures the dramatic struggle 
 inevitably grows. The intellectual content of the play is 
 important but is never emphasized to the point of overshadowing 
 the emotional conflict. The drama progresses by the process 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 ' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ■ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-115- 
 
 of boring into the inmost selves of Jane and Henry Clegg. 
 
 When Jane, with the full extent of Henry's faithlessness before 
 her, says quietly, "You are an absolute rotter," Henry replies: 
 "I don't know. I'm not a bad chap really. I'm just weak. 
 
 I'd be all right if I had a lot of money and a wife that wasn't 
 better than I am — I ought to have married a woman like myself 
 or a bit worse -I always feel mean here. Yes, I am mean. 
 
 I know that; but it makes me meaner than I really am to be 
 living with you." There is art in the way the entire psychol- 
 ogical problem of moral difference in marriage is handled in 
 J§Jie__Cleg£ . One of the best criticisms of the play is Ludwig 
 Lewishohn's: " Jane _C legg is not a great play, even though we 
 measur e it in terms of depth and intensity rather than range. 
 But it belongs to a great kind . " 
 
 John Ferguson first appeared in 1915 when for some 
 reason it was practically a failure, although when staged a 
 year later in Jew York it had a high degree of success almost 
 at once. It is longer and more deeply tragic than any of the 
 other plays' — more affected by naturalism. Naturalistic in- 
 fluence shows in the helplessness of the Ferguson family in the 
 chain of catastrophes which come upon them; in Jimmy Caesar's 
 inability to transcend his cowardly nature even when goaded to 
 fury by events; in the irony which brings the money a week too 
 late to save the trouble. On the other hand, the character 
 of the protagonist, his sweetness, and his resignation which 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-116- 
 
 is a resignation coming from strength not weakness, these things 
 make the play stand out in beautiful contrast to the darkly 
 naturalistic plays of the continental school. At the end of 
 the play, with his farm taken from him, his daughter's life 
 ruined, and his only son doomed to the gallows, John Ferguson 
 finas comfort in his religion. The emotional up-fling upon 
 which Aristotle insisted for tragedy is felt in a play which 
 ends with the beautiful old words, "0 my son Absalom, my son, 
 my son Absalom 1 Would God I had died for them. 0 Absalom, 
 my son — my son'." It is not necessary, surely, to contrast 
 
 the emotional effect of such words with that of "The sun the 
 
 sun— give me the sun, mother," or with the last lines of 
 Strindberg's Father . 
 
 Except for the remarks of Jimmy Caesar and of "Clutie" 
 John, the neighborhood vagrant whose presence in the play seems 
 somewhat of an artistic, mis-step, John Ferguson is unrelieved 
 by the humor which is evident in most of Ervine's other liter- 
 ary work. And to a thoughtful reader Jimmy is essentially 
 pathetic because he realizes so keenly his lack of strength. 
 
 The sayings of the half-wit are so much in the minor key that 
 they add rather than detract from the general effect. 
 
 E. A. Boyd, Ervine's most savage critic, declares that 
 the characterization of John Ferguson is "crude", "melodramatic," 
 
 rt 
 
 and purely a mental conception of human types"; that Jimmy 
 
 n 
 
 Caesar is a monstrous caricature, who utters openly all the 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-117- 
 
 cravsn thoughts of the meanest— spirit ed creature conceivable 
 to the average man"; that John Ferguson himself "lacks real 
 life" Granting that Jimmy is exaggerated, and that Ferguson 
 may, perhaps, repeat too many Scriptural lines, one must still 
 object to such sweeping disapproval as Boyd's. If the talk 
 of the characters seems exaggerated, it is at least fully borne 
 out by their actions . Hever once does Jimmy act in any way 
 inharmonious with his craven utterances j John Ferguson trans- 
 cends his momentary human weakness after Andrew's confession 
 and behaves according to the exalted character and the simple 
 faith of a man who has grounded his life on the Bible. 
 
 Before leaving Ervine's work as a playwright some 
 attention must be given to the caustic criticism he has met at 
 the hands oi the writer of Contemporary Drama in Ireland . 
 
 Boyd certainly cannot be said to show a great deal of love for 
 any of the young playwrights, with the exceptions of Colum and 
 Mayne, whose work is structurally among the weakest in the 
 entire group of realists. But upon Ervine he empties the full 
 violence of his wrath. Charging the Belfast playwright with 
 total lack of the Irish spirit which is to him the touchstone 
 of excellence of Irish drama, he declares: "Whatever their re- 
 spective merits and demerits, all the writers heretofore men- 
 tioned have endeavored, with varying success, it is true, to 
 
 1 • Con temporary Drama of Ireland , p. 187. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-118- 
 
 drainatize tho3Q elements of our civilization which are funda- 
 mentally and specifically Irish. Some have felt the poetry 
 others the tragedy, some have seen only the humor, others the 
 super! icial drama o! Ireland — hut with negligible exceptions 
 none have written in a mood indifferent or alien, to the spirit 
 of the race . St . John Ervine must be counted amongst those 
 exceptions. He has not divined any vital situation arising 
 out of the character of the Irish people and the composition 
 of Irish society . His presentation of the political conflict 
 in Ulster, a relatively superficial and transitory condition, 
 is the only instance where he has given dramatic expression to 
 
 a genuine Irish problem In fine this dramatist is at 
 
 bottom a journalist, with an eye for the external peculiarities 
 of Irish life . 1,1 
 
 Even if this attack were in every way justified by 
 the facts, we could not allow the fault indicated to be the 
 serious thing which Boyd believes it. The spirit of it would 
 condemn the work of Ibsen himself, for few of his best dramas 
 try to dramatize the elements of civilizations which are 
 "fundamentally and specifically "Norwegian . But that doss 
 
 not make of him a ” journalist . ” Modern literary art shows a 
 growing tendency to portray the universal of human nature under 
 
 1 . Con temporary Drama of Ireland, p . 194 . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ' 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 119 - 
 
 the "external peculiarities" of region and dialect. A real- 
 ization oi this fact and a sense of the harm which ha 3 been 
 done in Ireland by isolating her from the common civilization 
 of other countries leads Joyce to make one of his characters 
 say in The Exile 8 j "If Ireland is to become a new Ireland , 
 she must first become Europeanized." Ervine is thoroughly 
 in tune with the artistic trend of his age when he attempts 
 to show universal nature in the Irish working people of whom 
 he writes. It is not necessary that art shall be the expres- 
 sion of a "profound or essential phase of national life and 
 being . " 
 
 Boyd’s last statement that Mixed Marriage and The 
 i Lr a n fleman are "presentation of the political conflict" is not 
 critically just. Political subjects are "relatively super- 
 ficial and transitory", it is true, and are never material for 
 the best art. But in the case of these plays the real theme 
 is bigoted intolerance and obstinacy. Surely those are not 
 superficial and transitory phases of human nature. Ervine' s 
 work has its blemishes and imperfections, but not those as- 
 cribed to it by Boyd. If only the poetry of Yeats's kings and 
 the naivete of Synge's peasants are Irish, Boyd is perhaps 
 right. But if humor and homely imaginativeness, hot tempers 
 and stiff wills are Irish, none of Ervine 's Ulster people can be 
 said to lack Celtic flavor. If he has definitely abandoned 
 the drama for the novel, contemporary dramatic art has lost a 
 promising writer. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
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 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 120 - 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 CONCLUSION . 
 
 In the course of this study we have traced the veering 
 of contemporary Irish drama away from the imaginative drama 
 inaugurated by Yeats and perfected by Synge; the influence of 
 the "drama of ideas" upon the men who began writing just when 
 Synge was leaving off ; the development of a new type of peasant 
 who is neither so clod-like and brutal as that of the natural- 
 istic writer of the continent nor so fanciful and extravagant 
 as that of the earlier Irish playwrights; the building up of 
 a conception of Irish life which is not strictly dependent upon 
 province boundaries; and finally, in very brief fashion em- 
 phasis has been laid upon the two writers whose work seems most 
 significant and most promising of better things to come. A 
 few words must suffice to round out this discussion of the 
 realistic new Irish drama. 
 
 It is true that none of the Irish playwrights of 
 to-day have exhibited the imaginative wealth and artistic skill 
 oi great dramatists, although at least two of the group have 
 written plays which if not among the very best of modern dramas 
 are immeasurably superior to the average stage plays. Ama- 
 teurish and tainted with melodrama though the new Irish drama 
 often is, it never descends to the level of the trash which so 
 often occupies the English and American stage. It is marked 
 

 
 
 
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 ' 
 
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- 121 - 
 
 by a simplicity and absence of theatricality which goes back 
 to the Irish "genius for common life”. It attempts a dig- 
 nified, homespun realism which shall show Irish life as.it and 
 every other rural lile is. It embodies a candid criticism 
 of national life which might play to empty seats in America 
 if made upon American life. It is entirely clean and whole- 
 some in spirit — there is not one suggestive speech in the entire 
 list of plays under discussion. 
 
 The criticism of Lloyd Morris seems entirely just and 
 apt. " ihe younger school refuses to find consolation and refuge 
 either in its dreams or in an heroic past. They are concerned 
 with the problems of to-day in an effort to influence the life 
 of tomorrow. They produce social criticism in order to en- 
 force the changes which they desire Ireland to undergo; if they 
 a.re extreme in their satire and pessimistic in their tragic 
 conception of life, it is because propaganda must necessarily 
 enforce its point by exaggerating and emphasizing conditions. 
 Their propaganda, however, is not one of art, but of actual 
 experience. What these new playwrights have done is to turn 
 irom art to life, and by doing so they have laid the foundations 
 of their art upon a firmer soil.” 1 
 
 In the trying years of the war dramatic activity in 
 Ireland, like every artistic activity in every land, came almost 
 
 1 • Celtic Daw n, p . 170 . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-123 
 
 to a standstill. For a time the Abbey Theatre was closed and 
 the old company of Irish actors was dissipated. From 1915 to 
 1920 almost no plays of distinction were written or produced 
 in troubled Ireland. But since Lennox Robinson has turned 
 his energies toward restoring the national theatre to its old 
 power, there is every reason to hope that play-writing and 
 play-acting will come back into their own in Ireland. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-124- 
 
 BIBLIOGR/ PHY 
 
 I. Contemporary Irish Dramatists. 
 
 Boyle, William. 
 
 The Building Fund. Dublin, 1905 
 The Eloquen t Demusey . Dublin, 1907. 
 
 The Mineral Workers . Dublin, 1907. 
 
 Fa mily Failin g. Dublin, 1913. 
 
 Campbell, Joseph. 
 
 -T h e Little Cowh erd of Slain , e. In Uladh. 
 November, 1904. 
 
 Judgment . Dublin, 1S12. 
 
 Colum, Pa.draic . 
 
 "he Land . Dublin, 1905. 
 
 Th§ Fiddler * s House . Dublin, 1907. 
 
 Thomas Muskerrv . Dublin, 1910. 
 
 Mogu, the Wanderer . Boston, 1917. 
 
 Corkery, Daniel. 
 
 Clan 0 1 Falvey 
 
 The King and the Hermit 
 
 The Yell ow Bittern 
 
 A11 in T hree Plays . Hew York, 1916. 
 
 Dunsany, Lord. 
 
 The Glittering Gate . 
 
 ^■ing Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior . 
 
 The Golden Do om . 
 
 The Lost Silk Hat. 
 
 All in Five Plays . London, 1914. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
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 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-125- 
 
 The Tents of the Arabs. In ^he Smart Set. 
 March, 1915. 
 
 A Night at an Inn . Dublin, 1916. 
 
 Ervine, St. .John G. 
 
 Mixed Marriage . Dublin, 1911. 
 
 The Magnanimous Lover . Dublin, 1912. 
 
 The Critics . 
 
 The Orangeman . 
 
 AH in Four Plays . Dublin, 1914 
 Jane Clegg . London, 1914. 
 
 J Ferguson . Dublin, 1915 
 Fitzmaurice, George. 
 
 The Country Dressmake r. 
 
 The Pie-dish . 
 
 The Magic Glasses . 
 
 T he Moonlighter . 
 
 The Dandy Dolls . 
 
 All in Five Plays . Dublin, 1914. 
 
 Gregory, Lady. 
 
 Spreading the News . 
 
 Hyacinth Halvey . 
 
 The Gaol Gate . 
 
 The Jackdaw . 
 
 The Rising of the Moon . 
 
 The Poorhouse. 
 
 All in Seven Short Plays . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
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 ■ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ■ 
 
-126- 
 
 Kincora . 
 
 T he White Cockade . 
 
 The Canavan s . 
 
 Devorgilla . 
 
 The Deliverer . 
 
 Grania . 
 
 All in Irish Folic - History Plays . London, 1912. 
 The Unicorn from the Stars (in collaboration with 
 W.B.Yeats). New York, 1908. 
 
 The Full Moon . 
 
 McDonough 1 s Wife . 
 
 The Bogie Man 
 Darner 1 s C-old. 
 
 All in New Comedies . New York, 1913 
 
 MacDonagh, Thomas. 
 
 When the Dawn is come. Dublin, 1908. 
 
 Mayne, Rutherford. 
 
 The Turn of the Road . Dublin, 1907. 
 
 The Drone . Dublin, 1909. 
 
 The T roth . Dublin, 1909. 
 
 Red Turf 
 
 “ ■‘■1 Drone and other Plays . Boston, 191 
 
 Murray, T. C. 
 
 Birthright . Dublin, 1911. 
 
 Maurice Harte . Dublin, 1912. 
 
 O’Kelly, Seumas. 
 
 The Matchmakers. Dublin, 1911 
 

 
 
 
 n 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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-127- 
 
 The Shuiler ' s Child , Dublin, 1909. 
 
 The Bribe . Dublin, 1914. 
 
 Pearse, Padraic. 
 
 The Singer . 
 
 The King. 
 
 The Master . 
 
 Iosagan . 
 
 In Collected Works. New York, 1917. 
 
 Purcell, Lewis. 
 
 The Enthusiast . In Uladh . May, 1907. 
 
 The Pagan. Dublin, 1907. 
 
 Robinson, Lennox. 
 
 The C lancy Name . in Two Plays . Dublin, 1911. 
 The Cross R oads . Dublin, 1911. 
 
 Harvest . I n Two Plays. 
 
 Patriots . Dublin, 1912. 
 
 The Dreamers . Dublin, 1915. 
 
 The Lost Leader . London,1917. 
 
 The White headed Boy . Hew York, 1921 
 Synge, John M. 
 
 In the Shadow of the Glen . London, 1905. 
 
 Riders to the Sea . London, 1905. 
 
 The Wel l _of the Saints . Dublin, London, 1905. 
 The Playboy of the Western World. Dublin, 1907. 
 The Tinker’s Wedding . Dublin, 1907. 
 
 D eirdre of the Sorrows . Dublin, 1907. 
 
 AH in Collected Works . Dublin, 1910. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
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 ■ 
 
 
 
 
 
- 128 - 
 
 Yeats, W. B. 
 
 The Land of Heart 1 s £esire. L 0 ndon, 1894. 
 
 The Countess Cathleen . London, 2892. 
 
 Diarmuid and Granla . 
 
 Cathleen ni Houlihan . London, 1902. 
 
 The Pot of Broth . London, 1904. 
 
 The Hour Glass. London, 1903. 
 
 The King* s Threshold . London, 1904. 
 
 The Shadowy Waters . London, 1900. 
 
 On Baile' s Strand . New York, 1903. 
 
 Wher e there is Nothing . London, 1903. 
 
 Deirdre . London, 1907. 
 
 The Golden Helmet . New York, 1908. 
 
 All in Collected Works in Verse and Prose . 
 Stratford-on-Avon, 1908. 
 
 At the Hawk* s Well . 
 
 The Only Jealousy of Bmer . 
 
 The Dreaming of the Bones . 
 
 Calvary. 
 
 All in E our Plays f or Dancers . 
 
 New York, 192 U 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 II. Books of Reference. 
 
 Andrews, Charlton. The Drama of To-dav . Philadelphia, 1913. 
 Bicxley, Francis. J.M . Synge and the Irish Dramatists . 
 
 London and Boston, 1912. 
 
 Bourgeois, Maurice. John Millington Synge and the Irish 
 Theatre . London, 1913. 
 
 Boyd, E. A. Contemporary Drama of Ireland . Boston, 1917. 
 
 Ireland 1 s Literary Renaissance . New York, 1916. 
 Brown, Stephen J; mes. A. Guide t o Books on Ireland; Part I. 
 Dublin, 1912. 
 
 chandler, Frank IV. Aspects of Modern Drama . New York, 1914. 
 Clark, B. H. British and American Dram a of To-day . 
 
 New York, 1914. 
 
 The Continental Drama of To-day . New York, 1914. 
 Gwynne, Stephen. To-day and To-morrow in Ireland . Dublin, 19 jj 
 Hackett, Francis. Ireland . New York, 1919. 
 
 Henderson, Archibald. The Changing Drama . New York, 1915. 
 Howe, P.P. J.M. Synge : A Critical Study . London, 1912. 
 
 Hull, Eleanor. A Text Book of Irish Literature . Dublin, 1906 
 Jameson, Storm. Modern Drama in Europe . New York, 1920 
 
 Lewisohn, Ludwig. The Modern Drama . New York, 1915. 
 
 Lynd, Pobert. Ireland a Nation. New York, 1920. 
 
 Masefield, John. John M. Synge : A Few Personal Recollections . 
 Dundrum and New York, 1905. 
 
 MacDonagh, Thomas. Literature in Ireland . London, 1916. 
 
-130- 
 
 Mo nahan, Micheal. Nova Hibernia . New York, 1914. 
 
 Morris, Lloyd ; R. The Celtic Dawn . New York, 1917. 
 
 Moore, George. Hail and F ar ewe 11 : 3 vols. London end 
 New York, 1911-1914. 
 
 Pendergast, M.H. The Peasant in Modern British Drama . 
 
 Master’s Thesis at the University of Illinois, 
 1920. 
 
 Reid, Forrest. WJ3. Yeats : A Critical Study . New York, 1911. 
 Weygandt, Cornelius. Irish Plays and Playwrights . Boston, 
 1913. 
 
 Yeats, W.B. The Irish Dramatic Movement . In Collected 
 Forks , Vol. IV. Stratf ord-on-j^von, 1908. 
 
 Zola, E. The Experimental Novel . Chapters on Naturalism 
 on the Stage , ^aris, 1876. 
 
 III. Periodicals. 
 
 /rcher, Filliam. Criticism of The White -headed Boy . Review, 
 December, 1915. 
 
 Birmingham, George. The Literary Movement in Ireland . 
 
 Fortnightly Review . December, 1907. 
 
 Collier’ s A Review of Mixed Marriage . January 15, 1921. 
 
 Vol. 67. p. 19. 
 
 Colum, Padraic. The Irish Literary Movement . Forum , June, 
 1914; Vol. 53. 
 
 Current Literature. Irish Home Rule in the Drama. January, 
 
 1911; Vol. 70. pp. 940-945. 
 

-131- 
 
 Current Opinion . Excerpts from The Lost Leader . January. 
 1920; Vol. 68 pp. 47-53. 
 
 The Versatile Genius of St. John Ervine. 
 
 June, 1915; Vol. 58. pp. 421-7. 
 
 Ervine, St. John G. The Irish dramatist and the Irish Peopl e. 
 Forum , June, 1914; Vol. 51. pp. 940-45. 
 
 “ Confessions of a Playwright on Play-makin g. 
 
 Current Opinion , February, 1921; Vol. 70. pp. 210-1 
 Hackett, Francis. Review of The White -headed Boy . New Republi 
 October 5, 1921; Vol. 28. p. 161. 
 
 Hoare, 3. I reland * s Nat i onal Drama , North American Review. 
 
 October, 1911; Vol. 194. pp. 566-75. 
 
 Myirig Age . Irish Theatre. January 11, 1919; Vol. 300 . 
 pp. 119-21 
 
 Matthews, Brander. Irish Plays and Playwrights . Scribner* s . 
 
 January, 1917; Vol. 61. pp. 85-90. 
 
 MacCarthy, Pesmond. Rev ew of The Lost Leader . Living Age . 
 Vol. 302. pp. 399-401. 
 
 Morris, Lloyd R. An Ulster Realist . (Ervine) Outlook . June 
 23, 1920; Vol. 125. pp. 388-9. 
 
 Me Quilland, H. St. J ohn Ervine and his Work. Living Age, 
 April 3, 1920; Vol. 125. pp. 45-50. 
 
 The Nation. Review of J ane £legg. March 20, 1920; Vol. 110. 
 pp. 376-377. 
 
 The New Statesman . On the Edge . June 15, 1921. Vol. 16. 
 
 pp. 447-448. 
 

-132- 
 
 Thje Qutlool-c. The Irish Play of To-day . November 4, 1911. 
 
 V ol . 99. pp. 561-3. 
 
 The ileviev/. Review of The Lost Leader . July 26, 1919; 
 
 Vol. I. pp. 238-9. 
 
 Ruhl, A. New Stage Irishmen . Collier 1 s . March 15, 1913. 
 
 Vol. 50. p.25. 
 
 Smith, Helen Travers. The Art of Lennox Robinson . Drama . 
 
 April 19, 1921; Vol 11. pp. 238-3. 
 
 Tennyson, Charles. Irish Plays and Playwrights . (Quarterly 
 Review, July, 1911; Vol. 213. pp. 219-43. 
 The Rise of the Irish Theatre. Con - 
 temporary Literature . August, 1911. Vol. 100. 
 Touchstone . The Writer of the Hour in Ireland . October, 1919; 
 Vol. 6. pp. 42-46. 
 
 Walbrook, H.M. Irish dramatists and Their Countrymen . 
 
 g iving Age, Vol. 279. pp. 189-93. 
 
 Woodbridge, H.E- A Group of Irish Plays . Dial . November, 30, 
 1916; Vol. 61. pp. 462-3. 
 
 Yeats, W.b. I rish Literature. Touchstone . November, 1920; 
 Vol. 8. pp. 81-5. 
 
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