Halleck's New English Literature · Chapter 106Celtic Dramatists
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Strong national feeling, interest in the folklore and peasant life of Ireland, and ambition to establish a national theater, have led to a distinct and original Irish drama. In 1899, with a fund of two hundred and fifty dollars, Lady Gregory, William Butler Yeats, G.W. Russell, and other playwrights and patrons succeeded in establishing in Dublin the Irish Literary Theater now known as the Irish National Theater.
The object of this theater is twofold. In the first place, it aims to produce "literary" plays, not the vapid, panoramic kind that merely pass away the time. In the second place, the Irish plays present fabled and historical Irish heroes and the humble Irish peasant.
Patriotism inspired many writers to assist in this national movement. Some gathered stories from the lips of living Irish-speaking peasants; others collected and translated into English the old legends of heroes. Dr. Douglas Hyde's translations of The Five Songs of Connacht (1894) and The Religious Songs of Connacht (1906) are valuable works and have greatly influenced the Irish writers.
Lady Augusta Gregory.—Lady Gregory, born in 1852, in Roxborough, County Galway, has made some of the best of these translations in her works, Cuchulain of Muirthemma, and Gods and Fighting Men. "These two books have come to many as a first revelation of the treasures buried in Gaelic literature, and they are destined to do much for the floating of old Irish story upon the world. They aim to do for the great cycles of Irish romance what Malory did for the Arthurian stories."[16]
[Illustration: LADY GREGORY.]
Lady Gregory wrote also for the Irish Theater plays that have been acted successfully not only in Ireland but in England and in America. Among her best serious plays are The Gaol Gate (1906), a present-day play, the hero of which dies to save a neighbor, The Rising of the Moon (1907), and Grania (1912). McDonough's Wife (1913) is an excellent brief piece with an almost heroic note at the close. The great vagabond piper, McDonough, master of wonderful music, returns from wandering, to find his wife dead, and, because of his thriftlessness, about to be denied honorable burial. McDonough steps to the door, pipes his marvelous tunes, and immediately the village flocks to do homage to his wife.
Lady Gregory's farces have primarily made her fame. Spreading the News (1904), Hyacinth Halvey (1906), The Image (1910), and The Bogie Men (1913) are representative of her vigorous and well-constructed farces. They are varied in subject, the incidents are well developed, the characters are genuine Irish peasants and villagers, and the humor is infectious. It is interesting to note that Lady Gregory has continued to write farces because of the demand for them in the Irish National Theater, in order to offset the large number of tragedies by other authors.
William Butler Yeats.—In addition to delightful poetic fancy, Yeats possesses considerable dramatic ability and stagecraft. In The Countess Cathleen (rewritten in 1912), the poor peasants are driven by a famine to the verge of starvation. Many die; but some are fed by the Countess Cathleen, while others sell their souls for the price of food to demons disguised as merchants. When these demons steal Countess Cathleen's stores in order to stop her charities, with instant Irish quickness and generosity, she sells her soul for a great price to the demons, in order to save her people here and hereafter. Such a tremendous sacrifice, however, is not permitted. Because of the purity of her motive, armed angels save her soul in the last impressive act. Supernatural powers, both pagan and Christian, participate in the play. Spirits haunt the woods, enter the peasants' cottages, and cast spells on the inhabitants. The play is Irish in story, in symbolism, and in the fancifulness of the conception.
The Land of Heart's Desire is another drama that has sprung from the soil and folklore of Ireland. This play was one of the first Celtic dramas to be produced, and in its present revised form (1912) it is one of the most engaging of the Irish plays. Partly in prose and partly in verse, it is the story of a young bride who tires of her monotonous life and calls upon the fairies to release her. The old parents tell her that duty comes before love of the fairies.
The good priest begs her not to forsake her faithful young husband; but the fairy wins, and, leaving a dead bride in the cottage, bears away the living bride to a land where—
"The fairies dance in a place apart, Shaking their milk-white feet in a ring, Tossing their milk-white arms in the air; For they have heard the wind laugh and murmur and sing Of a land where even the old are fair, And even the wise are merry of tongue."[17]
Patriotic love for Ireland is the very breath of Cathleen ni Hoolihan (1902), a one-act prose play in which Cathleen symbolizes Ireland. The Shadowy Waters (1900) and Deirdre (1907) are more poetic than dramatic. The first of these with the mysterious harper, the far-sailing into unknown seas, the parting with everything but the loved one, shows Yeats in his deeply mystical mood. In Deirdre is dramatized part of a popular legend of the great queen by that name, who was too beautiful for happiness. She has seven long years of joy and then accepts her fate in the calm, triumphant way of the old heroic times.
Yeats's plays reflect the childlike superstitions and lively imagination of his country. He loves the fairies, the dreams of eternal youth, the symbolizing of things of the spirit by lovely things of earth. His plays are poetical, fanciful, and romantic.
John Millington Synge.—One of the most notable of the Irish writers, J.M. Synge, was born near Dublin in 1871 and died in that city in 1909. His brief span of life has yielded only scanty biographical data. He came of an old Wicklow family; he was graduated from Trinity College, Dublin; afterwards he wandered through much of Europe, finally settling in France.
[Illustration: JOHN SYNGE.]
In 1899, William Butler Yeats discovered him in Paris, a "man all folded up in brooding intellect," writing essays on French authors,—on Molière, for example, from whom he learned the trick of characterization; on Racine, who taught him concentration; on Rabelais, who infected him with love of deep laughter. Yeats, suspecting that Synge could be an original writer as well as an interpreter of others, persuaded him to go back to Ireland, to the Aran Islands, off Galway. Synge discovered there a lost kingdom of the imagination, a place where spontaneous feeling and primitive imagination had not been repressed by the outside world's customs and discipline, and where the constant voice of the ocean, the touch of the mysterious, all-embracing mist, and the gleam of the star through a rift in the clouds banished all sense of difference between the natural and the supernatural.
When Synge died in his thirty-eighth year, he had written only six short plays, all between 1903 and 1909. Two of these, In the Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea, contain only one act. The Tinker's Wedding has two acts, and the rest are three-act plays.
In the Shadow of the Glen, Riders to the Sea, and The Well of the Saints, produced respectively in 1903, 1904, and 1905, show that Synge came at once into full possession of his dramatic power. Even in his earliest written play, The Well of The Saints, we find a style stripped of superfluous verbiage and vibrant with emotion. In the Shadow of the Glen, his first staged play, consumes only a half hour. The scene is laid in a cabin far off in a lonely glen, and the four actors,—a woman oppressed by loneliness, an unfeeling husband who feigns death, and two visitors,—make a singularly well-knit impressive drama.
Riders to the Sea has been pronounced the greatest drama of the modern Celtic school. Some critics consider this the most significant tragedy produced in English since Shakespeare. Simple and impressive as a Greek tragedy, it has for its central figure an old mother whose husband and five sons have been lost at sea. The simple but poignant feeling of the drama focuses on the death of Maurya's sixth and last son, Bartley. This tragic episode, simply presented, touches the depths of human sympathy. In old Maurya, Synge created an impressive figure of what Macbeth calls "rooted sorrow."
The Playboy of the Western World, produced first in 1907, is a three-act play. It is as fantastically humorous as the Riders to the Sea is tragical. Dread of his father ties this peasant to his stupid toil. A fearful deed frees the youth and throws him into the company of the lovely maiden, Pegeen, and admiring friends. The latent poetry and wild joy of living awake in him, and, under the spur of praise, he performs great feats. He who had never before dared to face girls, makes such love to Pegeen that poesy itself seems to be talking. The Playboy is one of the wildest conceptions of character in modern drama. His very extravagance compels interest. Pegeen is a fitting sweetheart for him. Her father is a stalwart figure, possessing a shrewd philosophy and rare strength of speech, as "fully flavored as nut or apple." Some critics object to such a boisterous play, but they should remember that it is intended to be an extravagant peasant fantasia.
Deirdre of the Sorrows, another three-act play, produced first in 1910, tells the story of the beautiful princess Deirdre, of her isolated young life, and her seven years of perfect union with her lover Naisi. When her lover is slain, this true and tender queen of the North loosens the knot of life to accompany him.
Synge belongs in the first rank of modern dramatists. The forty Irish characters that he has created reveal the basal elements of universal human nature. His purpose is like Shakespeare's,—to reveal throbbing life, not to talk in his own person, nor to discuss problems. Synge has dramatized the primal hope, fear, sorrow, and loneliness of life. Although his plays are written in prose and have the distinctive flavor of his lowly characters, yet a recent critic justly says that Synge "for the first time sets English dramatic prose to a rhythm as noble as the rhythms of blank verse."