Maeve has found the supernatural lover, once human, of "boyish face closehooded with short gold hair," and again only "a symbol of ideal beauty," to be truly a "Prince of the h.o.a.r dew," for he is death. Maeve has renounced life and sought "perfection in what unfolds as death."
Mr. Yeats explains the play ("Beltaine," February, 1900) to "symbolize Ireland"s choice between English materialism and her own natural idealism, as well as the choice of every individual soul." Does it follow that the lesson of "Maeve" is that it were better for Ireland to be depopulated in her pursuit of national individuality, of ideal beauty, than to drift along to complete Anglicanization, even though that bring riches, peace, and content? An austere policy, surely, if I read rightly the meaning of Mr. Yeats.
"Maeve" was not so well played at its production during the second season"s performances of "The Irish Literary Theatre" in February, 1900, as "The Heather Field" had been performed in 1899, but it was almost as enthusiastically received. It has not won for itself, however, reproduction outside of Dublin, as did Mr. Martyn"s first play, which was played in New York, at the Carnegie Lyceum, in April, 1900, and which was revived in London in 1903.
If objection be made to "The Enchanted Sea" as a reflection of "The Lady from the Sea," it can be replied that the call of the sea that may not be resisted is as old as the heart of man. Sea fairies, mermaids and mermen, and the voice of the waters tugging as irresistibly on the tired spirit as the undertow on the body tired with long swimming, are in Gaelic literature from the beginning, and before Mr. Martyn had written of the sea enchantment it had lent its charm to many of the stories of "Fiona Macleod." It was two years after its publication in 1902 that, on April 18 and 19, 1904, "The Enchanted Sea" was put on at the Antient Concert Rooms, Dublin by "The Players" Club." It was not well played, but according to Mr. Standish James O"Grady it was much better, seen and listened to, than read. Writing, in his "All Ireland Review," of its production, he puts it on record "I never saw an audience so attentive and at the same time so undemonstrative. It was like being in church."
The audience probably felt the dignity of conception back of the insufficiency of execution in the play and its ineffectiveness of presentation. The story that Mr. Martyn dreamed to carry over the footlights is of Mrs. Font, a peasant woman who has sent her husband, a gentleman, to his grave a broken-spirited man because of her sacrifice of his honor to advance their material position. When the curtain rises, Mrs. Font has been thwarted, by the death of her son, in her lifelong dream of obtaining possession of the Font estates. The estates have reverted to her nephew, Guy Font, a strange boy, who has been brought up by the peasantry of the west coast and so has come to share many of their beliefs. He is fascinated by the sea by which he lives, and his family"s friend, Lord Mask, has been drawn to him, although there is such disparity in their years, by this love of the sea which he and the boy have in common. Mrs. Font wishes her daughter to marry Mask, but the young people are but half in love with each other. Agnes Font cannot share his visionariness, as her other lover, Commander Lyle, plainly sees. So the North of Ireland man never gives up hope of winning her.
Mrs. Font vulgarly throws Mask and Agnes together, in her determination that they shall make a match of it, and as vulgarly tells Lyle the girl is not for him. Mask cannot but marry Agnes, Mrs. Font thinks, if Agnes has a large fortune. To secure the fortune and the lord for her daughter, Mrs. Font determines to get Guy Font out of the way. Her purpose coincides with her peasant belief that he is a "changeling," and is really of the sea people. So she goes with him to a sea cave he is fond of visiting, and only she comes from the cave. She is suspected, but before the officers come for her, she learns that her crime has defeated its own end. Mask is driven mad by the loss of his friend and, seeking to join him by the sea, is overwhelmed and drawn out by the undertow. As the officers come to arrest her, Mrs. Font hangs herself from the landing of the great staircase of Font Hill with the rope Guy used there as a swing.
"The Enchanted Sea" is cruder, colder, more amateurish than the two other plays of its cla.s.s, full of the sort of talk that falls from the lips of a boy of seventeen just awakened to ideals. Its characters act as openly and as petulantly as children. Mrs. Font, really fine in conception, is in realization only a typical villain of the cheap melodrama; and Commander Lyle, of the Royal Navy, a man of thirty, is as childish in love as a schoolboy whose beloved takes an ice from his rival at a church festival.
What Mr. Martyn could have done with "A Tale of a Town," had he been willing to learn when opportunity was his with Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore and Lady Gregory, is partially shown in the rewriting of the play by Mr.
Moore into "The Bending of the Bough." The motives remain as they were, and, in essentials, the action is the same, the first act being little different in the two plays The four other acts, however, Mr. Moore has almost entirely rewritten, and though everywhere the fundamental brainwork is Mr. Martyn"s, the last acts are finer in the revised version. Mr. Moore makes far more plausible the girl, Millicent Fell, for love of whom, and a life of ease, the political leader Jasper Dean gives up a leadership through which he could largely right his country"s wrongs. Not only does Mr. Moore make believable the action of the play, but he puts words on it, which, if not true dramatic speech, reveal, after the manner of the novelist, just what are the thought and emotion of the characters, and the words are in themselves beautiful.
In "A Tale of a Town" the political situation from which evolves the action of the play is the unification by Jasper Dean of the corporation of a town, unnamed, on the west coast of Ireland, to prosecute a lawsuit against an English town, Anglebury, which owes the Irish town a large indemnity, promised the Irish town when it gave up a line of steamers in the interest of the Anglebury line of steamers. After uniting all the various elements save the place hunter Alderman Lawrence against Anglebury, Dean gives up the leadership because his fiancee, whose uncle is the mayor of the English town, turns against him because he is opposed to the interests of her set. To hold her he betrays his town.
"A Tale of a Town" is so crude, so naked, so obvious, so uninspired, one wonders why it can be taken seriously at all. But the reason is not far to seek. The play is true, in the main, to the life it depicts, and there is vehement feeling back of its satire; and truth and intensity of feeling cannot be denied effect on the stage any more than on the rostrum. Where it falls short of reality is in the dialogue of the aldermen. No politicians, even when egged by their envious womankind, would ever give themselves away as do these of "A Tale of a Town." They are as frankly self-revelatory as if they were characters in a morality play.
It would, perhaps, be inexact to call Mr. Martyn a misogynist, but he has that att.i.tude toward women of some priests his countrymen, as of many priests of all creeds, that there is something belittling if not degrading in absorbing a.s.sociation with women. His feeling is not at all the commoner feeling of men that leads them all to cry, "The woman tempted me." Women tempt Mr. Martyn no more than they did Ruskin, but he seems to feel that the majority of them are nuisances if not baggages.
So strong is this feeling in "A Tale of a Town" that it leads him to make Millicent behave in a way no Jasper Dean in real life would ever stand, for Jasper Dean is not a man p.r.o.nouncedly uxorious until his abject surrender at the end of Act IV.
There are almost as many indictments of women as there are of England in the plays of Mr. Martyn: Mrs. Tyrrell in "The Heather Field" and Mrs.
Font in "The Enchanted Sea," as well as all of the women in "A Tale of a Town" save Miss Arabella Dean. In "Maeve," the heroine and Finola are sympathetically presented, and there is a kind of attraction as well as decided repulsion in Peg Inerny. But such sympathy as Mr. Martyn does express here seems to be expressed not because the women are fellow human beings, but because Maeve and Peg Inerny symbolize Ireland"s resistance to English ways and because Finola is filled with loving-kindness for Maeve. Agnes Font in "The Enchanted Sea" escapes the pillory rather inexplicably, for she is poor, weak girlhood unable to understand the other-worldly idealism of her cousin and Lord Mask. But since Mrs. Font was altogether repulsive and the men either too dreamy for "common nature"s daily food" or too hard in the way of the Black North, Mr. Martyn felt, I suppose, that his hearers would be utterly alienated were there not some one in the play sympathetic in the ordinary way of human nature.
"A Tale of a Town" was put on for the first time at Molesworth Hall, Dublin, late in October of 1905, by c.u.mann nan Gaedheal, not very notably, but it was hailed by the Irish Ireland newspapers as admirable propagandist material, "The United Irishmen" declaring that "an Irish play which brings home to us, as this does, the secret of the endurance of foreign government in this country, is a national a.s.set."
Mr. Martyn has not cared enough for "The Place Hunters" (1905) to publish it in book form, contenting himself with its printing in a little periodical. It is, as its t.i.tle indicates, a fellow of "A Tale of a Town," but it has not back of it intensity of feeling enough to lift itself out of farce.
Between "The Place Hunters" and "Grangecolman" is an interval of seven years, but it is the Mr. Martyn of earlier plays, still faithful to Ibsen and still of a dialogue more formal than that of life, that we find in this play of his middle age. As you read "Grangecolman" you think of "Rosmersholm," as you thought of "The Wild Duck" when you read "The Heather Field." "Grangecolman" is the story of a daughter"s frustration of her elderly father"s intention to marry his young amanuensis, by playing the role of the family ghost, long fabled but never seen, and being shot by the girl she feels is driving her out of her home. Katherine Devlin is another creature of her maker"s misogyny.
She is a bitter, barren woman of suffragette type, whose marriage and career as a doctor have been alike failures, and who has alienated herself from all, even her mild father, by her selfishness and discontent. It is she who has brought Miss Clare Farquhar into her father"s home to render him those services in his pursuit of heraldry and genealogy that were irksome to her, and so she herself is responsible for his dependence on his secretary, which, when once the daughter recognizes it, threatens annihilation of what little pleasure she has in her life. Her husband is a dreamy sort of man, slack-fibred and pottering, who goes about waving the banner of the ideal and refusing to work. The fifth character of the play is the butler, Horan.
All are clearly characterized, but if the dialogue is less stiff than that of the earlier plays, it is little more distinctive of the people who speak it, and in the latter part of the play labored and stodgy.
"Grangecolman" is a picture of life as we all know it, and there is in it a fidelity of purpose that gives it a kind of effectiveness. There is not in it, however, any keenness of vision, any deep reading of life, any great underlying emotion, to relieve its abject sordidness. There is no gusto, no beauty, no intensity of bitterness even, to make its sordidness interesting in any other than a pathological way.
As one reads "Hail and Farewell," one might readily come to believe that Mr. Martyn is only an eccentric character, "gotten up" by Mr. Moore for a novel. Mr. Martyn is, in reality, a very vital force working for the nationalization of Irish art, if not an artist himself. The pity is that he is not wholly an artist, for he might have been. He knows and is interested in cla.s.ses of Irish society that the dramatists of the Abbey Theatre have not tried to depict, and had he realized twelve years ago what a chance was his to learn the art of the stage, with the help and collaboration of Mr. Moore, Mr. Yeats, and Lady Gregory, he might now be what he seemed to be after the triumphant production of "The Heather Field," the Irish playwright who had adapted the modes of Ibsen to the presentation of the life of Irish landlords and bourgeois politicians.
But Mr. Martyn would not realize that ideas--and he is rich in ideas--const.i.tute the larger part of originality; he thought technique in drama must come from the man himself, too. Such technique, of course, comes most often from the study of other drama. Certainly it was an original possession of none of the dramatists of the Celtic Renaissance, and Mr. Martyn might have been content to be a fellow learner, along with the rest of them, from one another, and from all the great dramatists of the world. It may be that Mr. Martyn never would have attained style, but he could, I think, have learned to make his characters express themselves in a way nearer to true dramatic speech than the lifeless dialogue of his that only just manages to give you their thought, with none of their mood of the moment or of their personality.
In every one of Mr. Martyn"s plays the plot is interesting, save in "The Place Hunters"; in every other play it is significant; and in all it is come largely of his individual experience of life. Back of all the plays but these two political satires there is brooding that is deep if not pa.s.sionate. In all the characters are natural, though some of them are unusual in the way of the unusual characters of Ibsen. And all the plays are marred, "The Heather Field" less than any other, by the fumbling touch of the amateur. Ironically, Mr. Martyn is strong where most Irishmen are weak--in his plot construction: even Mr. Yeats, who never praises with his tongue in his cheek, owning to "the triumphant construction of the "The Heather Field""; and weak, where most Irishmen are strong, in the dialogue. It would not have aided Mr. Martyn, for the kind of play he prefers, to have listened to the speech of the peasant as Lady Gregory has listened to it, but he might have learned, with such compeers, how to select and to condense from actual upper-cla.s.s speech a speech that would represent the thoughts and emotions and personalities of his characters. It is far more difficult, of course, to write dialogue for upper-cla.s.s people, save humorous dialogue, since, as many from Wordsworth"s day on have pointed out, upper-cla.s.s people do not express their thoughts and emotions as frankly as do the folk. As Mr.
Yeats puts it, they look into the fire instead.
Amateur as he is, however, Mr. Martyn has one play to his credit that he who has read will remember, "The Heather Field." It is often thus with the amateur. We need go no further than Mr. Martyn"s countryman who gave us "The Burial of Sir John Moore" for witness. Mr. Martyn has, too, like other amateurs, given suggestions to others that they have realized as fine art. It is more than likely, for instance, that Mr. Yeats had in his mind some memory of Peg Inerny when he created Cathleen ni Houlihan.
There is, too, about the best plays of Mr. Martyn, a quality of a certain kind. They have the distinctness of objects seen under the bright hard light of late winter, when the sun grows strong, but when the winds are still keen from the northwest and there are no leaves as yet on the trees.
There are many characterizations of Mr. Martyn in his kinsman"s "Ave."
He is now "a fellow ... with an original streak of genius in him, and very little literary tact"; but he is more generally characterized in some such fashion as this, which Mr. Moore makes a deliverance of his own: "A good fellow--an excellent one, and a man who would have written well if his mother hadn"t put it into his head that he had a soul. The soul is a veritable pitfall." However that may be, it was the discovery, or at least suppositious discovery, that he had a soul, a soul in harmony with the melancholy soul of Ireland, that drove Mr. Moore back to Dublin, and, for moments, even farther west to the home country of his family about Lough Gara in Mayo. This discovery was foreshadowed in "Evelyn Innes" (1898), in which Mr. Moore grows curious about the belief in ancestral memory and other esoteric beliefs of Mr. Yeats; it is latent in the introductions to "The Heather Field" and "The Bending of the Bough"; and it is made manifest in the parts of the latter play that are Mr. Moore"s. Who most helped him to the discovery it is not easy to say, but an interest in his country entered into and possessed him as Kirwan"s ideas entered into and possessed Dean. No doubt Mr. Yeats helped him to find his soul, and Mr. Russell, but it must be it was Mr.
Martyn through whose agency the first glimmerings of such a recognition began to break upon his mind. Is it only dramatically that Mr. Moore wrote when he put upon Kirwan"s lips in 1900 the words, "Life is the enemy--we should fly from life"? But whether this is only a dramatic repet.i.tion of what he might have heard any time from "A.E." had he chosen to listen, there is no doubt that Mr. Moore did discover a new quality in himself in the late nineties after he became intimately a.s.sociated with the new Irish movement. There is a wistfulness of feeling and a beauty of thought in his writing, from "Evelyn Innes" on, that there was not in it before "Evelyn Innes."
There are those who think the greatest excellence of Mr. Moore is as an art critic, and that "Modern Painting" (1893) is his great book. Mr.
Moore himself says that "Esther Waters" (1894) is his only book that he can read with admiration and content; and those particularly interested in the Renaissance will hold out for "Evelyn Innes" or "The Lake"
(1905). To me "A Drama in Muslin" (1886) is the best story of Mr. Moore in his earlier realistic manner and "The Lake" in his later manner, a manner that is now wistful and now mellow, as in "A Drama in Muslin" his manner is uniformly as hard as winter sunshine.
Mr. Moore is, as I said at the outset, a hard-working amateur in "A Modern Lover"; three years later, in "A Drama in Muslin," he writes with authority and insight; as he does, too, in "Parnell and his Island"
(1887), though here with scant sympathy; but it is not until "Evelyn Innes" that he becomes deeply concerned with beauty of subject or beauty of background, or, except at haphazard, possessed of any mastery of style. "Evelyn Innes" is very well written,--in spots,--but "The Lake"
is of a wholeness of good tissue that is attainable only through an art that has labored long and earnestly to achieve beauty. Had Mr. Moore never recaptured his ancestral tradition, had he remained the writer that Paris and London had made him, he had never written so finely as he writes in "The Lake." An infancy and boyhood in Ireland; a youth in London; the ten years from twenty-one to thirty-one in Paris; eleven years of hard writing in London, years comparatively lean after those of luxury that anteceded them, brought Mr. Moore at forty-two to a knowledge of what was beautiful and significant in his home country. He and Mr. Martyn were not many years apart when they began to write about Ireland, but Mr. Moore had back of him not only ten years of writing, but back of that ten years of living life as an art in Paris and his attempts in the art of painting and his years of discussion of art in the studios. Mr. Martyn, at home, had been more concerned with religion and nationality and politics, and a shift to art as the princ.i.p.al career of life after forty--"Morgante the Lesser" was no more than an incursion into art, about as much of his life as a trip to Bayreuth--is only in rare instances productive of results interesting to others than the "artist." The difference in the achievements of the two men is not so much the result of the difference of the powers with which both were gifted as the result of the difference of time at which the will began to work to realize those powers. Had Mr. Martyn begun soon enough and had he been enough interested in his writing he might have made drama as full of insight and beauty and as true to human nature as are the novels of his kinsman. It is another irony of Mr. Martyn"s life that it was he who should have led Mr. Moore to the subject on which Mr. Moore was to do his most harmonious and beautiful work, though it is possible, judging from "Parnell and his Island," that Mr. Moore might in the end have found his own way back.
After his wont Mr. Moore puts his intimates into books made out of Irish life. In "Evelyn Innes" Ulick Dean, fashioned in the first version of the novel after Mr. Yeats, is the only wholly Irish character. Evelyn is not Irish at all, and her Scotch father is given the musical interests of Mr. Dolmetsch, a Bohemian, I believe. But Sir Owen Asher has in him much of Mr. Moore himself, though most of Mr. Moore that is there is the English Mr. Moore. There is something of Mr. Martyn in Monsignor Mostyn, though an actual and not a potential ecclesiastic is drawn upon for the basic characteristics of the character In the second version of "Evelyn Innes" there is more of Mr. Russell than of Mr. Yeats in Ulick Dean, at least in his appearance and sayings, though Mr. Moore could not divest his composer of the personality of Mr. Yeats. There is less of Ireland in "Sister Theresa" (1901) than in "Evelyn Innes," but "The Untilled Field," short stories written after the removal of Mr. Moore to Dublin and gathered together in 1903, are wholly concerned with Ireland. As Mr.
Moore makes Jasper say to Millicent in "The Bending of the Bough": "It is the land underfoot that makes the Celt. Soon you will feel the fascination of this dim, remote land steal over you." It was when this aesthetic homesickness overtook Mr. Moore that he grew to feel lonely in England, at least momentarily, and to believe that "we are lonely in a foreign land because we are deprived of our past life; but the past is about us here [he is speaking through the mouth of Dean and in Ireland]; we see it at evening glimmering among the hollows of the hills."
In "Memoirs of my Dead Self" (1906) there are chapters which tell of the return of his thought to his boyhood in the west and that record his wish to be buried with his father by Lough Gara; and all three volumes of "Hail and Farewell," the first of which was published in 1911 as "Ave," and the second in 1912 as "Salve," are the fruit of his ten years" partial residence in Ireland, 1901-11.
Our concern with Mr. Moore here, however, is with Mr. Moore the dramatist, so I shall not dwell on the short stories and the novels save to say that they, more than any writing of his, reveal his inherent dramatic power. By dramatic power I mean not his power of situation and evolution of dramatic technique, but his power to change his point of view with the character he is creating A sensual exquisite himself whose predominant thought is of woman, and of woman from a standpoint closely akin to an epicure"s toward an ideal meal, Mr. Moore can identify himself with people in whom there is none of himself but the essential humanity common to mankind. Most wonderful of many wonderful realizations of viewpoint so different from what is his personally is his realization of the att.i.tude of Father MacTurnan, an old priest, celibate by nature, who put aside his books, as ministering to the pride of the intellect, and sat, night after night, with them by his side in the study, but always unopened, while he was knitting socks for the poor of his parish. Better known, of course, than this character of Father MacTurnan is that of Father Gogarty in "The Lake," but for all his sympathetic elaboration of this bemused and distraught cleric the character is never wholly opposed to that of Mr. Moore himself as is the character of Father MacTurnan.
It is this power of Mr. Moore that makes him the great novelist that he is, this power of identifying himself with the personality and this looking out on life from the viewpoint of Esther Waters or Lewis Seymour, or Edward Dempsey or Rose Leicester, of Kate Lennox or Mr.
Innes. Such a power is akin to one of the greatest powers of the Gael, his quick sympathy with what appeals to him in others, his momentary absorption in their interests and his pa.s.sing possession by their purpose. It is this habit of his nature that makes the Gael tell people what they wish to hear, it is this that makes him so courteous, it is this that makes him so good an actor. And the power that makes one man a good actor, a real actor,--not one who happens to fit a part, but one who can change his personality from part to part,--is but another manifestation of the power that enables a man to identify himself wholly, now with this character, now with that, in a story which he is writing. If a man can express such identification in dialogue, he can, if he master dramatic construction, make himself into a dramatist; if he express it in subtle a.n.a.lytic writing about the character, it gives him one of the great powers of the novelist, a power which, if it is united with the power of story-telling, makes him a great novelist, and, oftentimes, even if he be but a fair story-teller, a great novelist. The English novel has been famously deficient in story-telling ability since Scott"s day, and Mr. Moore is no exception to the rule. As, however, the emphasis of all his stories is on character, his deficiency in narrative power matters hardly at all.
Mr. Moore is, then, Ireland"s greatest novelist because he has in greatest measure--in full measure--this greatest gift of the Gael, the gift of dramatic impersonation of all manner of men in all their changing moods. A personality as intense as was that of Meredith, as is that of Mr. Hardy, Mr. Moore has not always one att.i.tude, as have both Welshman and Saxon of the Saxons, however completely they write from the standpoint of each character they create. By the side of the characters of Meredith is always Meredith, high-hearted and confident, and by the side of the characters of Mr. Hardy is always Mr. Hardy, lamenting what woe fate has brought them, but by the side of Ned Carmady or Oliver Gogarty, the Mummer or Montgomery, Sir Owen Asher or Ulick, there is seldom Mr. Moore. He almost never plays chorus to his characters, either through a commenting character or by direct interposition in the manner of Thackeray, though, of course, the characters again and again express his views. So in "The Wild Goose," in which Ned Carmady represents one year"s outlook of Mr. Moore, there is only one choric observation.
When one considers how alien to Ireland were all the interests of Mr.
Moore for years, his rendering of the Irish characters of "The Untilled Field" and "The Lake" is realized to be all the more remarkable. It is not easy to pick up threads that one has dropped in a period of one"s life that is dead and done, but Mr. Moore has picked them up more than once. From time to time he had, of course, made visits home, writing "A Mummer"s Wife" in Galway in 1884 and finding there then, no doubt, the material for "A Drama in Muslin" and the sketches of "Parnell and his Island"; but these visits were none of them of long duration until his "return" in 1901.
It is far easier to paint in the background of landscape remembered from childhood than it is again to get into touch with people parted from in childhood. The landscape changes little in far-off, lonely places, but people nowhere are what they were when the past years sufficient to bring up beside the old folks a new generation with ideals changed. Ireland, for all the agitation of the Land League, was landlord Ireland when Mr. Moore got "A Drama in Muslin" from Ireland; Ireland was pa.s.sing to the peasant proprietor when Mr. Moore returned to it to write "The Untilled Field" and "The Lake." Social and economic questions, however, interest Mr. Moore only as they concern the individual, but the changing conditions in Ireland cannot be prevented from finding their way here and there into his writing through the changes they have brought about in the people of whom he writes, though many of those he writes of are survivals from an older generation.
There are glimpses in his writing of many phases of Irish life, his characters varying all the way from such old-timers as his Cousin Dan, who, as he himself intimates, might have come out of the pages of Lever or Lover, to the very modern Father Gogarty, whose outlook is on an Ireland that "perhaps, more than any other country, had understood the supremacy of spirit over matter, and had striven to escape through mortifications from the prison of the flesh." One wonders, at times, if Mr. Moore, who joined the cause of Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats, self-confessedly, to have his finger in a new literary pie, really felt the landscape as he says he does in his books, or whether he just momentarily caught the power of seeing it through their eyes. Can one who was once so resolute a realist really appreciate "faint Celtic haze; a vision of silver mist and distant mountain and moor"? Perhaps he can, as a good actor appreciates a part alien to his sympathy, that he is playing. But whether or not Mr. Moore learned to love the lonely landscape for a while, he eventually tired of it, as his Father Gogarty tired of it. Surely Mr. Moore is speaking personally as well as dramatically when he writes, "This lake was beautiful, but he was tired of its low gray sh.o.r.es; he was tired of those mountains, melancholy as Irish melodies, and as beautiful."
Almost any novelist, sooner or later in his career, dabbles in drama, and Mr. Moore no doubt would have attempted drama in the natural course of things, even if he had not been interested in "The Independent Theatre" and thus led to a situation in which consistency demanded that he write a play. It was his articles on the drama, gathered into "Impressions and Opinions" (1891), that provoked Mr. G.R. Sims to taunt him into "The Strike at Arlingford" (1893). In "Our Dramatists and their Literature," one of these papers, Mr. Moore, in hitting all the heads of all the contemporaneous dramatists, so stung Mr. Sims that he said he would give a hundred pounds for a stall from which to witness a performance of "an unconventional play" written by Mr. Moore. Mr. Moore accepted the challenge, and "The Strike at Arlingford," as I have said, was the result, Mr. Sims having agreed to withdraw the word "unconventional" on Mr. Moore"s objection that he would be at the mercy of Mr. Sims" judgment if the word was retained. "The Independent Theatre" played the play and Mr. Sims paid the money. It was perhaps just as well for Mr. Moore that the adjective was withdrawn, for the play was little less conventional than "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray" or "Sowing the Wind," to mention two successes of that year by play-makers that took their art a little more seriously than Mr. Sims. In a way, too, "The Strike at Arlingford" is unoriginal. Lady Ann Travers is only a more fortunate Hedda Gabler who in the end accepts the protection of her Chancellor Brack, the capitalist Baron Steinbach, after her Lovberg turned labor agitator, John Reid has, like his prototype, made a wreck of his life. "The Strike at Arlingford" has its excellences: its plot is logically unfolded; it is believable; it is true to human nature; it has moments of intensity. Had Mr. Moore power of dialogue it might have been a fine play, for the characterization is what one would expect from so conscientious a depicter of life as Mr. Moore, and the problem, a man"s choice between his love and his duty, one that has never failed to appeal to men. Mr. Moore is careful to tell us that, in his own conception of the play, "the labor dispute is an externality to which I attach little importance."
Its performance and publication, though neither event was of very much more than journalistic importance, served to give Mr. Moore something of a position as an authority on the drama, coming as they did after his a.s.sociation, since 1891, with "The Independent Theatre." So it is that we find him collaborating with Mrs. Craigie in "Journeys End in Lovers Meeting" (1894), which served for a year or so as one of the little plays that characterized the repertoire of the Irving-Terry Company.
Just what was Mr. Moore"s share in this play I do not know, but that, slight as it is, it served as apprentice work in the art of collaboration there can be no doubt, or that it added to his familiarity with the stage.
It is certain that Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats were glad of the a.s.sistance of Mr. Moore in founding "The Irish Literary Theatre," not only for the prominence of his name as novelist and as Moore of Moore Hall, and for his known provocativeness in pamphleteering and his capacity for drawing the fire of opponents, but for what knowledge he had of playwriting and for what experience he had in getting together and training actors for special performances such as those of "The Independent Theatre."
I have already spoken of what Mr. Moore did to "A Tale of a Town" to make it "The Bending of the Bough." From the beginning of Act II on to the end, he rewrote almost all of it, retaining only now and then an eloquent or a biting line from Mr. Martyn"s play. Mr. Moore changes the scene of the play from Ireland to Scotland, that its allegory may not be so obvious; he develops Kirwan"s character until he becomes not only a sort of composite spiritual portrait of the leaders of the Renaissance but a believable leader of men; and he makes Millicent"s moulding of Dean to her will human, as I have said, and--Dean being the weakling that he was--inevitable. Mr. Moore cuts the play down where it is stodgy, he expands it where expansion realizes for you more of character and motives of his people, he infuses into it more of the spirit of the movement, and he makes its patriotism wider in its appeal, a bigger and a better thing at once more concrete and more concerned with the things of the spirit.
"Diarmid and Grania" (1901), the prose play written in collaboration by Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore, I write of here rather than in the chapter devoted to Mr. Yeats because, as the legend is shaped in the play, it has more of Mr. Moore than of Mr. Yeats in it. As neither of the collaborators was satisfied with the play as produced, and as neither has been willing to give it up to the other to rewrite, "Diarmid and Grania" has never been published. The notices of its production, on October 21, 1901, at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, are so full, however, and the legend on which it is based so familiar, that it is possible to say as I have said, when one knows well the work of both authors, whose influence is dominant in it. It seems, from the notices, to have been finely played by the Benson Company, which was brought over from England especially to produce it. The results of "the scratch company" of the second year"s performances, even though these were transferred from the Antient Concert Rooms to the better stage of the Gaiety Theatre, were not very satisfactory artistically, but the third year"s experiment was in every way more successful. "The Daily Express" of Dublin, in those days very much interested in Irish Ireland, thus records, on October 22, 1901, the impressions of the first night. "The "house" was not merely crowded but representative. We counted among the audience the heads of all the great professions in Dublin, a considerable number of literary critics, and an extremely large representation of "le monde ou l"on s"amuse." The Gaelic League, which flooded the gallery, was very friendly to Mr. Moore and Mr. Yeats, and became enthusiastic over Dr.
Douglas Hyde ["The Twisting of the Rope," by Dr. Hyde, was played by him and company of amateurs, in Irish]. Between the acts of "Diarmid and Grania" several members of the "G.o.ds" sang number of Gaelic songs with great gusto and a good deal of musical ability."
There are several versions of the old legend, some of them cynical, leaving Grania in the end lighter even than Helen of Troy; others closing with Diarmid slain by the boar as Adonis is slain, and Grania weeping his death. In all it is Grania who tempts Diarmid to take her away from Finn on the eve of her wedding to the old king. In some he goes willingly, in love with her, in others unwillingly, ashamed of his disloyalty to Finn, but under _giesa_ not to refuse a woman"s request.
In the play of Mr. Moore and Mr. Yeats Diarmid and Grania "do not live,"
says the "Daily Express," "the exciting life of flight from cromlech to cromlech. They settle down very comfortably in the monotony of a prosperous farm. Diarmid busies himself with his sheep. Grania ...
begins to pine for the society from which she has wilfully cut herself off, and to think more and more of the grim old warrior Finn. Then Finn comes upon the scene, patches up a sort of truce with Diarmid, and becomes more friendly with Grania, his lost sweetheart, than Diarmid is able to tolerate. Mutual recriminations ensue between Diarmid and Grania, and finally Diarmid goes forth to his portended death, with the taunts of Grania and the rude jeers of the Fianna ringing in his ears.
As the play closes, the Fianna bear away the body of Diarmid, Finn comforts the weeping Grania, and we remember the words of the legend that "some say she was married to Finn." The curtain falls--a happy touch of purely modern cynicism--upon the solitary figure of Conan, the Thersites of the play, the prophet of evil chances, the scorner of high things, the prompter of foul suggestions."
As the play was being written a good deal of discussion about it found its way into the newspapers. It was rumored that it would be translated into Irish, and then back again, by Lady Gregory, into English, but no such fantastic scheme as that Mr. Moore tells us of in "Ave" was suggested in any of the paragraphs that came my way. Because they could not agree on the kind of diction they were to use in the play, Mr.
Yeats, who wanted a peasant Grania, agreed, writes Mr. Moore, to his suggestion that he write the play in French. Mr. Moore gives these as the words of Mr. Yeats: "Lady Gregory will translate your text into English. Taidgh O"Donoghue will translate the English text into Irish, and Lady Gregory will translate the Irish text back into English." "And then," Mr. Moore makes himself reply to Mr. Yeats, "you"ll put style upon it."
More remarkable than the scheme was the actual attempt of Mr. Moore to realize it. On leaving Galway, where he and Mr. Yeats had been collaborating at Coole, Mr. Moore began the second act in French. He gives us enough of the dialogue (pages 370 to 376 of "Ave") to show us his high pride in his French, the tolerance of his humor, and his idea of the kind of style the play should have.
If Mr. Moore had given the subject to Mr. Yeats and to Lady Gregory, as he had some thought of doing, it would only have been a return of a subject already theirs by right of their long discussion of it together.
Lady Gregory was not yet working upon it for "G.o.ds and Fighting Men"