Sheila. Granny, dear, I thought you couldn't take one.
Mrs. Grogan. It's the little bit I eat that's grudged me now, I see.
Though there is little of it in this passage that I quote, the picturesque phrase that no Irish writer is without is Mr. Boyle's, as a matter of course, but there is no particular individuality in his handling of it. Style he has not, nor any background of romance, or beauty of that sort that illumines the grayness of the comedies of Ibsen, or of any other sort of beauty than that approach to beauty there is in skilled craftsmanship.
Admirably arranged, too, are the situations of "The Eloquent Dempsey," a satire on the man who straddles all questions, as at one time, at any rate, did so many Irish politicians. Dempsey might have continued his career of straddling indefinitely had he not a mania for speech-making that he could not control. In the end, however, he was undone by a well-intentioned conspiracy, arranged by his wife, to get him out of politics altogether and out of his liquor-selling and into farming far from town. I cannot identify Dempsey with any one prominent Irish statesman, but the lesser fry on both Nationalist and Unionist sides are as easy to identify as the men that suggested the characters of "A Tale of a Town." In "The Eloquent Dempsey" all the art of Mr. Boyle has been lavished on the central figure, which, when all is said, remains a caricature, and caricature uncompensated for by any great or noble characteristic of the play, whose primal quality is but cleverness. Effective as its satire is, and provocative of laughter as it always is on the stage, it is altogether cheaper in its quality than "The Building Fund."
"The Mineral Workers," with its chief portrait that of a returned Irish-American mining engineer, takes us to certain phases of society not met among the publicans and politicians and peasants of Mr. Boyle's earlier plays. Other than these are not only the hero, Stephen J. O'Reilly, but the aristocrat, Sir Thomas Musgrove, and his sister, Mrs. Walton, who is of the family connection of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's Georgianna Tidman. Dan Fogarty, the holdback, unprogressive farmer, is the sharpest-cut and truest to life of all the characters, so clear-cut and true, in fact, that one thinks of him as almost a fellow of Shan Grogan in "The Building Fund." Uncle Bartle is sentimentalized, and Kitty Mulroy has no such personality as Sheila O'Dwyer. Contrast "The Mineral Workers" with a novel of the returned American, "Dan the Dollar" of Mr. Bullock, and the calibre of Mr. Boyle's play is quickly revealed.
What Mr. Boyle had been had he come into touch with the movement ten years earlier, it is of course beside the point to speculate. He was not a young man when he first became acquainted with the art of the Abbey Theatre in London and was impelled to write plays for it. He was, though, able to adapt the experience he had had as a story-writer to the stage in "The Building Fund." That being so, why is it that his later plays, successful though they have been as vehicles for the purveying of amusement on the stage, have not taken rank by their art or by their reading of life with "The Building Fund "? It may be that it was the one theme susceptible of dramatic presentation that he had brooded over long enough to transmute into terms of drama, and that the later plays, full of successful stage tricks though they are, did not come out of his knowledge of Irish life. Knowledge of Ireland he ought to have, for he is said to have lived for comparatively long periods in various places in country as an excise officer. As such Mr. Boyle was himself one of the principal types, that of the official, that exist in Ireland, and in a position to learn much of many other types, surprisingly few of which he has realized with any depth of insight in his plays.
It would seem with his great success seven years back and his newer plays less effective, that we cannot look to Mr. Boyle with great hope for the future, as we can to Mr. Robinson or Mr. Murray. When we so say, however, let us remember that Lady Gregory did not attempt plays until she was close on fifty.
MR. T.C. MURRAY
The North is generally held to be another country than the rest of Ireland. Ulster is alien alike in race and religion and economic conditions from Connacht and Leinster and Munster. It is Scotch Ireland, Protestant Ireland, industrial Ireland. It is, moreover,—many of its citizens say therefore,—prosperous Ireland. Certainly men would not divide all Irishmen into "Irishmen" and "Scotch Irishmen" were there not many grounds for such a distinction. All other of the immigrants into Ireland have, as a people, disappeared. The Norman has left his mark on the land in his castles and his names, but as a distinctive element of the population he no longer exists, any more than does Welshman or Englishman or Palatinate. Apart from distinctions of class the men of Ireland are "Irishmen" and "Scotch Irishmen," and until yesterday, therefore, Nationalists and Unionists.