Irish Plays and Playwrights

by Cornelius Weygandt

The revolt of the patriot who hates talk and is willing to sacrifice personal happiness for country is recorded here as it was in "The Crossroads," and the uselessness of the sacrifice made only too plain. To one not an Irishman it would perhaps seem that the real drama there is in the play is smothered by the political satire and that the politics satirized are of too local an interest for it to have so universal an appeal as "The Crossroads" or "Harvest." There is an universal story in "Patriots" that is but slightly developed—the story of the prisoner's wife, Ann; her love for her daughter, who is a cripple because of her mother's being dragged here and there by James Nugent in his campaigning just before her birth; Ann Nugent's turning against her husband, on his liberation from an eighteen years' imprisonment for political murder, because of the wrong done her so long ago and because of the danger to Rose's health that campaigning with her father would entail. The turning of Ann Nugent from her husband is the really significant part of the play,—and in thoughts of that we pay scant heed to the political satire and even to the pathos of the desertion of a leader by almost all he expected to follow him, and the reduction of his life, as he puts it bitterly, "to an anecdote—a thing to be told stories about." And in the end that is the fate he will meet. Time and a wife that he wronged have broken him. As he staggers off at the end of the play, a stricken man and older than his forty-five years, this is his cry:—

I've killed a man, I've crippled a child, I've got myself shut up for eighteen years—God knows what good came of it all—but—Peter—I meant—I tried ... I know I meant right—and in prison my cell used to be filled with the sad faces of men like me who had given everything for Ireland—they wouldn't have come to me, would they? if I hadn't been of their company. They are here now—I see them all around me—there is Wolfe Tone, and there is ... oh, quiet watching faces, I have tried—tried as you tried—and been broken....

With this ability of his to pick out a theme that is basic in Irish life, and with the years bringing him an experience of life that will dominate any propagandist purpose, Mr. Robinson should grow in seriousness of intention and accomplishment. He hates sham, he has sane and cleansing satire of pretension, he writes good dialogue, his experience as stage manager of the Abbey Theatre is teaching him the stage; he is only twenty-five. Do not these things augur a future?

MR. RUTHERFORD MAYNE

It so happened that the last time I was reading the plays of Mr. Rutherford Mayne, I was also reading the plays of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero. All the world has heard of the one; only the little band scattered here and there through the English-speaking countries to whom letters are a real part of life has heard of the other. I laughed over "Dandy Dick"; I thought of Miss Rehan playing Georgianna Tidman with all that gush of spirits that was hers; I thought of Miss Nethersole in her wonderful youth playing Paula Tanqueray; and as I thought of these two, each in her way inimitable in her part, thoughts of past moments with the characters of Mr. Mayne's plays, plays I have never seen on the stage, came back to me. Had I seen them on the stage would my thoughts of them have been thoughts of the theatre, as were all my thoughts of Sir Arthur's plays? It may be, but I think not, I think the great strength of Mr. Mayne is that he takes you to life; I think the great weakness of the wide-heard author is that he takes you immediately, in almost all of his plays, to the theatre, and only secondarily, if at all, after the memory of his artificiality has died away, to life itself.

William John Granahan and John Smith the Tory,—will you forget them, or Robbie John whom the fiddle called away, or Ebenezer McKie and Francey Moore, Protestant and Catholic, who together lay in wait for the hated landlord and shot him as he passed through the glen; or John Murray, good man, and his bauchle of a brother? You will not forget them, for they are from life; you have known them, all save Francey, if you have known Scotchmen who are Lowlanders and Presbyterians, or such North of Ireland men as are unalterably opposed to Home Rule. They are very like the Orangemen of the novels of Mr. Shan Bullock, very like the peasants the English-speaking world outside of Scotland first met in the verse of Burns; harsher than the Baillie Nicol Jarvies and Dugald Dalgettys of the kindly Sir Walter, but akin to them and to his Davie Deans and Dumbiedikeses.

We are in a more familiar world in the plays of Mr. Mayne than in those of most of the other writers in the movement—that is, I mean most American readers are—simply because of Burns and Scott. Had Ireland had a peer of either in his generation as satirist or romancer the Irish-Irish would to-day be as familiar to us as are the Scotch-Irish, who are, of course, transplanted Scotch. The women of this world are not, however, of types so well known to us as are the men, because the chivalry of Sir Walter prevented him from giving us his peasant Scotswomen in as full detail as he gave us his men; but it is not difficult for us to appreciate Mrs. Granahan and her daughter; Mrs. McKie, a "woman with a dead soul"; Mary Murray with her daftness over the boys; and even Sarah McMinn, so true in her managing and meanness, qualities necessary to the prosperity of her folk. Puritan America can understand these women and men because they are Puritan, too, with the ignoble that is in the Puritan as well as with the noble that is just as surely there.

It is in the first three plays of Mr. Mayne that we meet these people I have named, County Down folk all of them, and all Protestant but Francey Moore. They are the leading characters in "The Turn of the Road" (1906), "The Drone" (1908), and "The Troth" (1908). The motive of Mr. Mayne's first play is the old call to wander, the unrest of the vagrant heart, here the heart of the musician. It is the story of Robbie John Granahan, who, after burning his fiddle at the desire of a strong farmer whose daughter he wished to marry, is driven out into the world to try his fortune with another through her determination that her lover should follow his star. There is more beauty in "The Turn of the Road" than in either of the other plays of the North of Ireland, more beauty of theme, more beauty of thought, more beauty of expression. Its themes are not new, Wanderlust and the Puritans' hatred of art; its thoughts are not new, but they are beautiful, and the words themselves are freshly used. Its phrases that hold in memory are given to Robbie John and to his father and to his grandfather, most of them to the grandfather. This is the grandfather's lament for the boy gone on the roads with his fiddle and his father's curse:—

It's the wee things you think nothing of, but that make your home a joy to come back till, after a hard day's work. And you've sent out into the could and wet the one that was making your home something more than the common. 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 mist of nights on the boglands—it's only us, I say, could listen 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.

There is no beauty at all in "The Drone." There is little beauty possible to such a subject realistically treated as that of the exposure of the utter sham that is the pretended inventor of a bellows, a man who has for years fattened on a brother's tolerance and family pride. There might have been beauty of construction, but dramatic construction is not Mr. Mayne's strongest quality. Let that not be held too much against him, for many an English dramatist, like almost every English novelist, is weak in the architectonic qualities of his work. Yet such is the hardness of the people that exposed Daniel Murray that you rejoice in his duping of them at the end through his sale to them of his pretended invention, especially as that frees his brother John, and John's daughter, artful coax that she is, from Sarah McMinn, who is determined to marry the one and manage the two. The ideals of the people of the play and the grim humor of Mr. Mayne are well illustrated by this declaration of John Murray, the best of them all, anent the suit for breach of promise with which Sarah threatens him: "I would 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."