Irish Plays and Playwrights

by Cornelius Weygandt

[Puts his hat on, and goes to the door, and takes the key out of the lock.

Ellen (looking round). What are you doing? (Frightened.) What are you doing?

Tom. I'll tell you what I'm doing. I'm locking the door the way you won't go 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'd wish you were dead—for the black curse you brought on this farm, an' for the liking you have to the young man.

[Goes out. Ellen remains sitting at the table, staring in front of her with sad, hopeless eyes.

The turning of the key in the lock ends the play, leaving brutality unimaginable as the fate of Ellen.

It is a severe reading of the Irish peasant, this of Tom Dempsey. Murder may come of his blackness of heart. He is a far worse man, of course, than poor John Clancy, who killed a man in an unpremeditated fight, sure murderer though Clancy be. Yet despite such heroes or at least such characters in his plays, no one would say that in either "The Clancy Name" or "The Crossroads" Mr. Robinson held a brief against the Irish peasant. He most certainly does not. He likes the Irish peasant. His plays are "stories of mine own people" faithfully told. He does not spare the Cork farmer, but he does not distort him. Why however, his "Harvest" was allowed to be played unmolested in New York, after the "The Playboy of the Western World" met with organized opposition, can be explained only by recognition of the fact that the Irishmen of the patriotic societies are slaves of precedent. "The Playboy of the Western World" had always met with opposition, so it should meet with opposition in New York. "Harvest" escaped in New York because its uncomplimentary personages were unheralded. Not that there is anything in "Harvest," any more than in "The Playboy of the Western World," that any self-respecting Irishman need object to. "Harvest" shows the disastrous effects the wrong sort of primary education, as taught by the country schoolmaster of the old type, the type that was prevalent before the present type, brought about. The present-day schoolmaster is in sympathy with system of education that will keep the children on the land or in an industry near the home place; the older type would give them an education that would send them to the cities to be priests and lawyers and secretaries and typists and chemists and what-nots. Old William Lordan, the schoolmaster, had, evidently, in the opinion of the playwright, the sins of many on his shoulders, and yet one, knowing that it is the system and not the man that is at fault, cannot help feeling that Mr. Robinson is rather severe on what is in life a really lovable though mistaken sort of man.

"Harvest" shows that of the six children of Tim Hurley, but the three that come into the play are loyal to their father: Maurice, who works the home farm; Jack, the apothecary's clerk from Dublin, who tries to help with the farmwork, but is too much of a weakling to be anything of a help; and Mary, who from typist has turned mistress, now to this man, now to that. Mary, come home to get away from her wrong life, is called back to London by the excitement of its life, which has become a necessity to her. Jack, the chemist, in the end deserts the home; and is off at the end of the play, with his upper-class wife, for America or the colonies. Only Maurice is more than half-entitled to our respect. The son who is the priest is in America to collect for the Church at the time of his family's need, and so is not helpful to his family; the solicitor son is climbing socially, and, needing a motor-car to help him to position, prefers to spend his money on himself rather than on the home place that was robbed to pay for his education; and the secretary son is so ashamed of "the ditch out of which he was digged" that he has changed both his name and his religion.

All five of the children who went out from the home educated, as the schoolmaster wished them to go, have been educated at the expense of those that remained on the farm, Maurice the hard-working farmer and old Timothy the father. But the father, too, is far from what he should be, as one must suspect, not believing that education alone can account for so many gone wrong. Timothy burns down some unimportant farm buildings for the insurance upon them. This practice is so common in all parts of the world civilized sufficiently to have insurance that I wonder insurance companies take risks on backwoods farms anywhere. An old man with whom I have talked often in the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania answered me one day, when I asked him how it was his barn caught fire, "The insurance got too hot." He was a German, a man in his prime a good worker and not a bad representative of the mountaineer of his state. One must not, then, fasten on old Timothy as a character distinctively Irish, at least in this phase of his character. He surely is universal, a representative of one type of disingenuous countryman.

The characterization in "Harvest" falls short of that of "The Crossroads," but perhaps it had to be if Mr. Robinson was to make his point. As one realizes that perhaps these people are but pawns with which to win the game that Mr. Robinson has set out, one remembers that their creator spent some weeks with Mr. Shaw and Mr. Barker in London, and one understands, too, many other of the failings of "Harvest." It is but another of many illustrations of the blight that Mr. Shaw has brought upon the modern English stage.

It is a two-edged satire that Mr. Robinson employs in his "Patriots" (1912), a satire that cuts into the sham agitation of some political leagues, an agitation that is talk only, and at the same time cuts with almost equal sharpness into the physical force party. It is true that it is not the motives but the wisdom of these latter men that Mr. Robinson satirizes in the failure of James Nugent, the returned political prisoner, to stir his townsmen with the kind of talk that set them to arming in 1893. That their propaganda is no longer possible, if it was ever possible, is a corollary to the play, even if it could overcome the inertia that has come to Irishmen with their greater prosperity since the Land Purchase Act went into force.