All the characters in "Judgment" are "created." The personality of each colors his words and puts him before you distinct from every other. Owen Ban the weaver, who takes in Peg when his wife Nabla, heavy with her first child, and nervous because of her condition and fearful of the birth, would keep out the outcast; old Parry Cam; John Gilla Carr; Colum Johnston and Father John; Nabla herself; and Kate Kinsella the midwife—each is himself or herself, each remains as distinct in your mind the unforgettable scenes of the play. Somehow or other, too, the country is suggested; you are aware that you are on a wild hillside above a glen,—you are aware of this not because the author tells us at the outset that the scene of the play is in the mountains of western Donegal, south of Lochros Beg Bay, but through the dialogue of the play itself. Both scenes of the play are indoors, and on dark nights of midwinter, but so instinct with many phases of the life of the people is it that its background of landscape rises before you only less distinctly than the visualization of its characters. Atmosphere the play has, and quality, both sprung of the sincerity of its feeling and imagination. So true are these, and so keen the author's reading of human nature, and so sure his character drawing, that for all his weakness of construction we may speak of his play alongside of the best Irish plays. The future promises finer things: meanwhile we are thankful for what is, for "Judgment,"—especially for its far-offness, its desolateness as of the world's end and the wind crying.
Chapter IX
William Sharp ("Fiona Macleod")
There were relations other than that of a common purpose between William Sharp and the Irish writers of the Celtic Renaissance. He was a friend of Mr. Yeats, a correspondent of Mr. Russell, and the chief commentator in the English reviews on the work of the Irish group of its writers. At one time, after 1897, the relationship promised to be very close, indeed. William Sharp, experimenting in psychics with Mr. Yeats, found occasion to interest him in "Fiona Macleod," and as a result of that interest Mr. Yeats came to think the new writer might write Celtic plays for performances he intended to arrange for Irish literary organizations. Thus it is that Mrs. Sharp has to include in her memoir of her husband a long letter to "Fiona Macleod" from Mr. Yeats, in which he suggests: "The plays might be almost in some cases modern mystery plays. Your 'Last Supper,' for instance, would make such a play." Mr. Sharp, apparently, did not follow up this suggestion, but shortly after the first performances of "The Irish Literary Theatre" in 1899 he wrote the two plays that, together with "Vistas," comprise all the dramatic writing that he has to his name. That "The Immortal Hour" and "The House of Usna" were intended for "The Irish Literary Theatre," I think there is little doubt, and it was only, I take it, when circumstances dictated that only plays by Irish writers should be put on by that theatre that Mr. Sharp looked elsewhere for their presentation. Only "The House of Usna" was, however, placed,—in the spring performances in London of The Stage Society, on April 29, 1900. Two months later "The House of Usna" was published in the July number of "The National Review." It pleased more, if we are to judge by the reviews, in the pages of the magazine than on the stage, but I hardly know why. "The House of Usna" is profoundly moving read in the study, surely, and if acted in such simplicity and enthusiasm as is that of the Abbey Theatre Players, I should think it would appeal as do the verse plays of Mr. Yeats. No play I have read carries me further into antiquity than this, none preserves more of what imagination tells us must have been the wilder beauty of what still are places of wild beauty, of the savagery of that old life of the hero tales of Ireland. Mr. Yeats's plays do not so recapture the past, they take us rather to places out of time, where all things are possible, because the world we know is put aside and all but forgot. Even on the stage, however, the new beauty of "The House of Usna" was recognized, a beauty as distinctive as that of the two plays of M. Maeterlinck that were produced with it, "Interior" and "The Death of Tintagiles," but it was adjudged not to be drama in the accepted sense of the word. "The House of Usna" is written in a prose that has many of the effects of verse, but that is less luxuriant than the prose of "Vistas." "The Immortal Hour," published shortly afterwards in the "Fortnightly Review" (1900), is written in blank verse that shows its author has been carefully attentive to the rhythms of the blank verse of Mr. Yeats, but it is neither so poetic nor so dramatic as "The House of Usna." Both plays are written out of the old legends that are the common property of Irish and Scottish Gael, and in both Sharp has treated his material with his wonted freedom of adaptation, a freedom that is generally justified by his results, his instinctive surety of reconstruction of myths being such as to make one wonder, with Mr. Russell, if Sharp is not, in some fashion, a reincarnation of a shanachie that sang as contemporary in the wars of Gael and Gall.
William Sharp
A common preoccupation with the plays of M. Maeterlinck is another bond between the founder of the Abbey Theatre and Sharp, a preoccupation passing rather quickly from Mr. Yeats, but long retaining its hold on the changing selves of Sharp. For all his early interest in "spiritual things," an interest very definitely expressed in "Romantic Ballads" (1888), Sharp would not have come to "Vistas" (1894) without the guidance of M. Maeterlinck, and he admits as much in his preface to these "psychic episodes." "Vistas" he often referred to as heralding a "great dramatic epoch," and he evidently regarded them as, in a way, drama, but it is hardly likely that he dreamed of their enactment on the stage. Many of them are essentially dramatic, but their method of presentation is almost always lyric or narrative rather than dramatic, even in the Maeterlinckian sense of the word.