Irish Plays and Playwrights | Page 5

and plays about "Ninety-Eight" that
would have rivaled "Cathleen Houlihan."
There are many other poets, though, of the Celtic Renaissance that are

of powers only short of greatness, Nora Hopper Chesson chief among
them. Only Mr. W.B. Yeats of them all has more "natural falterings" in
his verse than she. Mrs. Hinkson, too, whose name has come inevitably
into these pages from time to time, is a poet with as sure a place in
English literature to-day as has Mrs. Meynell. Beginning, like Mr.
Yeats, as an imitator of the Pre-Raphaelites, Mrs. Hinkson found
herself in little poems on moods of her own and moods of landscape
She writes also of her love of God, of St. Francis, and of Ireland.
"Moira O'Neill" (Mrs. Skrine), too, has a sure place, her verses crying
out her homesickness for Ireland, and redolent, every line of them, of
the countryside. "The Passing of the Gael" is known wherever there are
Irish emigrants, but there are other verses of "Ethna Carberry" (Mrs.
Anna Johnstone MacManus) that are as fine as this. Mrs. Dora Sigerson
Shorter is a balladist of stark power, and Miss Eva Gore-Booth a lyric
poet whose natural lilt no preoccupation with mysticism can for more
than a moment obscure.
Mr. Herbert Trench has of recent years surrendered to theatrical
management, but there is to his credit a substantial accomplishment of
lyrical verse that George Meredith would have approved. Mr. Colum's
verse I have spoken of below, incidentally, in considering his plays. A
distinct talent, too, is Mr. Seumas O'Sullivan's, whose "Twilight
People" (1905) indicates by its title the quality of his verse.
I have mentioned all these writers, some known in America, but others
utterly unknown, not only to indicate the relation of the drama to the
other literary forms of the Renaissance, but to account, perhaps in some
measure, for the literary quality of the plays themselves. They are
written, as plays in English during the past century have too seldom
been written, by writers who have read widely in all forms of literature
and to whom words are, if not "the only good," at least a chief good.
Mr. Russell and Mr. Yeats have sent all the younger men who would
write to the masterpieces of the world, telling them to get what they
need of the technique of the centre, to know the best in the world, but
to write of the ground under their feet. The plays are, as I have said,
written, many of them, by men who are widely read, and by men whose
friends are writers of some other form of literature, by men who wish

their work in drama to be of as high intention as the work of their
friends who are poets or essayists or writers of stories. All the other
writing the Renaissance has, then, contributed to make of the drama
what it is, and one must, if one would see the drama in relation to the
Ireland of our day, know what is the accomplishment of the other sorts
of writing of the Renaissance.
CHAPTER II
THE PLAYERS AND THEIR PLAYS, THEIR AUDIENCE AND
THEIR ART
The drama of the Celtic Renaissance is of an ancestry as mixed as is
that of the people of Ireland themselves. There is less in it perhaps of
the Gael than in them, for Gaelic literature, until to-day, never
approached nearer to the drama than the dialogue, the racy
give-and-take of two characters, alike of lively imagination, whether
gentle or simple. But even had the colloquies of St. Patrick and Oisin,
of Dean Swift and his man Jack, of the Lout and his Mother, been
developed, by 1890, to a drama as finished as that of Congreve or
Goldsmith, Sheridan or Wilde, those who would have their plays
abreast of our time would have gone, just as, with the conditions as
they are, the dramatists of the Renaissance did go, to Ibsen and M.
Maeterlinck, like all the rest of the world. It is a matter of reproach, in
the estimation of many patriotic Irishmen, that Mr. Martyn learned his
art of Ibsen, and Mr. Yeats a part of his of M. Maeterlinck, but that
attitude is as unreasonable as that which would reproach the Irish
Industries Organization Society for studying Danish dairy farms or
Belgian chickeries. It is only the technique of the foreigners, modern or
ancient, Scandinavian or Greek, that the Abbey dramatists have
acquired or have adapted to Irish usage. Stories are world-wide, of
course, the folk-tale told by the Derry hearthside being told also in the
tent in Turkestan--Cuchulain kills his son as Rustum does, and the
Queen of Fairy lures Bran oversea as Venus lures Tannhäuser to the
Hörselberg. It is in character, in ideals, in atmosphere, in color, that