Irish Plays and Playwrights

by Cornelius Weygandt

Synge is the one instinctive dramatist of the earlier group of writers of the Celtic Renaissance, the one to whom drama was the inevitable medium for the expression of the best that was in him. Yet even Synge came to write plays only through an external stimulus, the urging of Mr. Yeats on their meeting in Paris. It was fortunate for the Irish drama, this meeting, and fortunate for Synge. If he had not been brought to the theatre of his own country, he would probably never have written anything of first importance. Mr. Yeats himself, of course, had been interested in verse plays from boyhood, but he, for all the energy he has expended in learning his own particular art of the stage, speaks more beautifully through his lyrics and the lyrical passages of his plays than through their passages that are dramatic speech, and not only more beautifully but with more of dignity and power. Nor is Lady Gregory, any more than Mr. Yeats, essentially a dramatist. Her great power is the power of dialogue, and dialogue, of course, is as often employed in the service of the story as in the service of the play. Yet it is not difficult to understand how in Lady Gregory the dialogue and in Mr. Yeats the love of the spoken word led, when opportunity was made, to writing for the stage, and for success on the stage. But in the case of "A.E." it is as difficult to find a foreshadowing of the playwright in the mystical poet as it would be to see in all but all of the essays of "The Treasure of the Humble," any proof that their author was a playwright. To those who knew Mr. Russell only through his verses, and were unaware of the versatility of the man, his turning dramatist was as surprising as Emerson turned dramatist would have been to the America of anti-slavery days.

George W. Russell

It was not, of course, because of an impulse from within that Mr. Russell attempted drama in "Deirdre" (1902), but because the young enthusiasts of Ireland's national literary movement wanted plays that should be at once native in quality and the work of writers of standing. It did not seem a strange request to Cumann nan Gaedheal to ask Mr. Russell for a play. What if he had never written a play? He was hardly in their estimation more of an amateur than Mr. Yeats or Mr. Moore or Mr. Martyn, who had written plays for "The Irish Literary Theatre" that had achieved success of a kind, and he was surely as ardent a Nationalist as any of these. So he was asked for a play to be played at the Spring Festival of 1902 by the Irish National Dramatic Company that was forming, and he did what he was asked to do, blocking it all out in six hours, and finishing it sufficiently in three days for it to be put in rehearsal. It was in the summer following its first presentation that I saw it again in rehearsal in a little hall back of a produce shop in Dublin, and got to know Mr. Russell as playwright before I read his play. One of the actors, himself maker of verses and plays, gave me his copy of "Deirdre," with cues marked. I had seen notices of its first performance in the Irish papers and I had written Mr. Russell to see if I could get a copy, but he had not yet published it. Then he wrote me of young poets I met this night in Dublin, and the names on the lips of the enthusiasts we talked to, and their names were names Mr. Russell had written me of four months before. Here were they introducing me to his work as he had thus introduced me to theirs: "There are many poets here who write beautiful lyrics who are quite unknown out of Ireland because they never collected them from the pages of obscure magazines.... I have seen many verses signed 'I.O,' 'Alice Milligan,' 'Ethna Carberry,' 'Oghma,' 'Paul Gregan,' which I enviously wish I could claim as my own.... I think myself many of these unknown poets and poetesses write verses which no living English writer could surpass." The best of the verses of some of these and of others among his following Mr. Russell collected in "New Songs" (1904), which bore out much that he claimed for them.

It was to six of these young poets he dedicated his last volume of verse, "The Divine Vision" (1904), as he had dedicated his two earlier volumes to poet-mystics, "Homeward" (1894) to Mr. Charles Weekes and "The Earth Breath" (1898) to Mr. Yeats. The young writers (for they were almost all writers as well as actors) we met this Saturday night in Dublin, one and all, looked to "A.E." as leader, and some of them looked to him as high priest of their cult, as seer of that ancient type that combined as its functions the deliverance of religious dicta, prophecy, and song. My thoughts went back to our Concord of half a century ago, yet I wondered was Emerson's fascination as compelling as this.

It was in a commonplace-looking editorial sanctum that I found "A.E." on the following morning, at 22, Lincoln Place, to which he had descended from his office in the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, to edit "The Homestead" in its editor's absence. I was to see him, in the hour I was to spend with him there, in many rôles. First was that of one of the beginners of the Irish Literary Revival. He has himself given the credit to Mr. Standish James O'Grady for furnishing the initial stimulus to the movement, in his "Heroic Period" and "Cuchulain and his Contemporaries" of 1878 and 1880; but to "A.E." and Mr. Yeats and Dr. Hyde also is due much of the credit. Mr. Russell said that when he came up to Dublin, a boy from Lurgan, there was no independent thought in Dublin, but now he thought there was a good deal, and he and his fellows of the Hermetic Society, he took mild pride in believing, had had something to do with the change. Even then, as a boy, he could not read most English literature, and so he took to reading the literature of the East, the Bhagavad-Gîta and the Sufis. From his reading of these, with other young men that somehow found each other out, came the Hermetic Society, at whose meetings everything mystic from the Upanishads to Thomas Taylor was discussed. From the study of the universal, he said, they came at last to the national, to the study of the ancient folk-lore and stories of their people, which, had it not been for the Danes and Normans, would have been shaped into literary form long before now, when, he said, they were only being so shaped.

His disciples had told me the night before that "A.E." had helped them much in the National Dramatic Company, painting scenery for them, designing costumes, and aiding in a hundred other ways. He was silent about these matters and not very proud of the play. "Of course," he said, "I was very familiar with the story of Deirdre, and I had thought of its dramatic effectiveness, but I knew nothing of the stage and I was very much surprised it went so well." That it went well, I, who had seen it but the night before, could testify, though that rehearsal could give but a suggestion of the beautiful stage pictures it presents when played in the costume of the Heroic Age. Despite its intensely dramatic situations, it is, however, essentially a decorative rather than a dramatic play, and its exalted prose is seldom true dramatic speech. But you carry from it the memory of beautiful pictures, and a feeling that something noble has passed your way, to enter into and become a part of you.

As we were talking of the "movement," in came a young Roscommon landlord, and with him another of its phases and my discovery of Mr. Russell, man of business, organizer of the Irish Agricultural Organization Society. The talk was now of the erection of a hall, and Mr. Russell seemed as familiar with stone and lime and sand as with mysticism and poetry, which we had discussed, and with painting, which we were considering in a few minutes, when Mr. J.B. Yeats, Jr., arrived, to talk over an exhibition of his pictures to be held in Dublin the following week. A few days later I was reading Mr. Russell's review of Mr. Yeats's pictures, but before I left 22, Lincoln Place, I had a mental picture of "art critic" added to the already long list of titles after "A.E.'s" name, and I had still another evidence of his impressiveness. Mr. J.B. Yeats, Sr., his son said, would be around to have Mr. Russell sit for him next morning, in order to get on with the two orders he had of portraits of the mystic, one of them from an admirer in America. It was pleasant on leaving him to go away with his laugh ringing in my ears as a surety that the high seriousness of his purpose, and the higher seriousness with which some of his admirers take him, had not dulled his sense of humor.

Eight o'clock the next evening saw us in the eminently Philistine suburban street where was the little house of conventional exterior that sheltered the high dreams of "the Irish Emerson." Once entered, his embodied visions attract you from all four walls of the study. Piles of them in corners make you wonder is Mrs. Russell a saint. The pictures are of Irish landscape; of "the Other People"; of heroes and heroines of Ireland's prehistoric days; of souls that have yet to be born; of souls that have passed through incarnation after incarnation, never to rise above an animal existence; of souls whose every rebirth has taken them to higher spirituality, and that now wait to pass along the "path of liberation" into that immortality from which they shall never be born again. These visions have come to him, as the visions whose presence he records in his poetry, in all places—as he left the office and looked down the sun-gilded streets at close of day; as he wandered in the mountains under the stars with peasants who had "second sight"; as he talked with fellow Hermetists in meeting-rooms in back streets whose shabby interiors grew rosy gloom as the talk turned on mysteries.