Irish Plays and Playwrights | Page 3

no other novelist of our
day. Of recent years Mr. Munro has wandered farther afield than his
native Argyll, and, I feel, to the lessening of the beauty of his writing.
In the Isle of Man, T.E. Brown had been striving for years to put into
his stories in verse the fast-decaying Celtic life of his country, but even
with his example and with all that has been done since the Renaissance
began, in the preservation of Manx folk-lore and in the recording of
vanishing Manx customs, no writer of Brown's power has been
developed, or in fact any writer of powers equal to those of the best
men of the younger generation in the other Celtic lands. It is with the
Celtic Renaissance as it appears in Ireland, then, that I have to deal
chiefly in this book, as it is only in Ireland, of the countries that retain a
Celtic culture, that the movement is the dominating influence in writing
in English; and it is with the drama only that I have now to deal, though
when a playwright is a poet or a story-teller, too, I have written of his
attainment in verse and tale also. Had I been writing five years ago, I
should have said that it was in poetry that the Celtic Renaissance had
attained most nobly, but since then the drama has had more recruits of
power than has poetry, and it is a question as to which of the two is
greater as art. There is no doubt, however, but that the drama has made
a stronger and wider appeal, whatever its excellence, than has the verse,
and it is therefore of greater significance for its time than is the poetry,
whatever the ultimate appraisement will be. Of the men I have written
of here, Mr. Yeats and Mr. Russell are to me poets before they are
dramatists, and Lionel Johnson, whose only direct connection with the
dramatic movement was his beautiful prologue in verse to the first
performances of "The Irish Literary Theatre" in 1899, is to me a poet of
a power as great as theirs.
One wonders, at first thought, that Ireland had never until our day given
to English literature a novelist of first rank. The Irishman is famous the
world over as a story-teller, but neither in romance nor in the story of
character had he reached first power, reached a position where he might

be put alongside of other Europeans as a novelist. No Irishman from
the time of Scott on, until Mr. George Moore wrote "Esther Waters"
(1894), had written a story that might stand the inevitable comparison
with the work of Thackeray and Dickens, Meredith and Mr. Hardy. Of
Mr. George Moore I have written in detail below.
Miss Edgeworth may have taught Scott his manner of delineating
peasant character, but her comparatively little power is revealed when
you put her beside Miss Austen, and so it is all the way down the list to
our own day. There are many contemporary story-tellers who have
managed well the tale, but what Irish novelist of to-day other than Mr.
Moore bulks big, can be compared to even lesser men, like Scotland's
Mr. Neil Munro or Dartmoor's Mr. Phillpotts?
Lady Gilbert (Rosa Mulholland) has written many, pleasant stories of
Irish life, and Mrs. Katherine Tynan Hinkson has followed worthily in
her footsteps. Equally pleasant, but lighter and more superficial, is the
writing of the two ladies who subscribe their names "E.OE. Somerville
and Martin Ross." Their "Some Experiences of an Irish R.M." (1899)
and their "All on the Irish Shore" (1903) are like so much of the Irish
writing of a generation ago,--Irish stories by Irish people for English
people to laugh at.
The Hon. Emily Lawless has written many kinds of stories about the
West Coast, reaching almost to greatness in her "Grania" (1892). In the
short story, Miss Jane Barlow, accused of superficiality by many Irish
critics and as eagerly declared to get the very quality of Connemara
peasant life by others, has sure power and a charm all her own. No one
who reads "Irish Idylls" (1892) will stop at that collection. Mr. Seumas
MacManus is as truly a shanachie as the old story-tellers that yet tell
the old tales about peat fires in Donegal. "Through the Turf Smoke"
(1899) and "In Chimney Corners" (1899) and "Donegal Fairy Stories"
(1900) are alike in having the accent of the spoken story, but when the
last word is said you cannot admit their author to be more than a clever
entertainer. The Rev. Dr. Sheehan, although you will find him writing
about the effect of the Irish Renaissance in remote parishes in the South,
has not subscribed to its ideals, but continues the fashion of

story-writing of