The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays Part 72

As in many English stories, an extreme and painful dread of the _workus_, or poorhouse, provides a strong motive force.

_John Millington Synge_: RIDERS TO THE SEA

The work of the Irish Renaissance in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin reached its most powerful and tragic height in this tragedy, which Mr. Yeats compared to the Antigone and (Edipus of Sophocles). Synge at first wandered about Europe, poetizing; it was Yeats who brought him back to study and embody in genuine literature the poetry of life among his own people. On the bleak Arran Islands he lived in a fisherman's cottage, and through the floor of his room heard the dialect which he presents in simple and poignant beauty in this drama of hopeless struggle. The "second sight"--called "the gift" in _Campbell of Kilmhor_, and an incident also in _The Riding to Lithend_--was a sort of prophetic vision altogether credited among Celtic peoples, as among those of Scott's _Lady of the Lake_. When the mother sees the "riders to the sea,"--her drowned son and her living son riding together,--she feels convinced that he must soon die. The sharp cries of her grief and, above all, the peace of her resignation at the end, after all hope is gone, make this, as a writer in the _Manchester Guardian_ is quoted as calling it, "the tragic masterpiece of our language in our time; wherever it has been in Europe, from Galway to Prague, it has made the word tragedy mean something more profoundly stirring and cleansing to the spirit than it did."

The speech of the people is not difficult to understand when you master a few of its peculiarities. One is the omission of words we generally include, as in, "Isn't it a hard and cruel man (who) won't hear...." Another is the common form "It was crying I was."

A few phrases, like _what way_ for how, _the way_ for so that, _in it_ for here or near, and _itself_ for even, or with no particular meaning, as "Where is he itself?" The meanings of other words will be easily untangled.

_William Butler Yeats_: THE LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE

Mr. Yeats's best poetic dramas, and particularly this one, represent beyond question that "apex of beauty" to which Lady Gregory spoke of the Abbey Theatre dramatists as aspiring. This play is not founded on any particular Irish folk-tale. It is filled with the half-dread, half-envy with which the tellers of Irish legends seem to regard the fate of mortals bewitched by the Leprechaun or Good People. It is rich, too, with the music of beautiful words, without which, Mr. Yeats contends no play can be "of a great kind." He says too, "There is no poem so great that a fine speaker cannot make it greater, or that a bad ear cannot make it nothing."

Mr. Yeats has written broad comedy like Synge's _Shadow of the Glen_ and Lady Gregory's _Irish Comedies_; his _Pot of Broth_ is a most clever retelling of an old, comical tale. But it is by his mystical and poetical plays that he would be judged as playwright and poet--particularly _Deirdre_, which should be compared with Synge's _Deirdre of the Sorrows_; _The Unicorn of the Stars_, written in collaboration with Lady Gregory; _Cathleen Ni Hoolihan_, a dramatization of the spirit of Ireland; _The King's Threshold_, a high glorification of the poet's art, with a fable, based on an ancient Celtic rite, of the hunger strike; and _The Land of Heart's Desire_, most beautifully perfect of all.

_Gordon Bottomley_: THE RIDING TO LITHEND

"_The Riding to Lithend_ is an Icelandic play taken out of the n.o.blest of the Sagas," wrote Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie in his review of the published drama in 1909. "[It] is a fight, one of the greatest fights in legend.... The subject is stirring, and Mr. Bottomley takes it into a very high region of poetry, giving it a purport beyond that of the original teller of the tale....

[The play] is not a representation of life; it is a symbol of life. In it life is entirely fermented into rhythm, by which we mean not only rhythm of words, but rhythm of outline also; the beauty and impressiveness of the play do not depend only on the subject, the diction, and the metre, but on the fact that it has distinct and most evident form, in the musician's sense of the word. It is one of those plays that reach the artist's ideal condition of music, in fact."

This is high praise; but who, after studying the play, will doubt that it is deserved? The powerfully moving events of the story indeed lead up to the climax in a forthright and exciting manner.

The terror of the house-women and the thrall, the fearful love of Gunnar's mother Rannveig, and the caution of Kolskegg his brother, who "sailed long ago and far away from us" in obedience to the doom or sentence of the Thing--all these bring out sharply the quite reckless daring of Gunnar himself, who braves the decree. A mysterious and epic touch is added by the three ancient hags-evidently of these minor Norns who watch over individual destinies and announce the irrevocable doom of the G.o.ds. It was Hallgerd who broke their thread, representing, of course, Gunnar's span of life.

The centre of interest, as well as the spring of the action, is clearly Hallgerd, descendant of Sigurd Fafnirsbane and of Brynhild--

... a hazardous desirable thing, A warm unsounded peril, a flashing mischief, A divine malice, a disquieting voice.

She, and not any superst.i.tious belief in "second-sight" and death decreed, is the cause of Gunnar's remaining outlawed. She wrangles about the headdress, not because she particularly wants it, but to send her husband on a perilous mission to secure it.

She says openly that she has "set men at him to show forth his might ... planned thefts and breakings of his word" to stir him to battle. Mr. Abercrombie believes that "She loves her husband Gunnar, but she refuses to give him any help in his last fight, in order that she may see him fight better and fiercer." We should, then, have to suppose that her amazing speech at his death--

O clear sweet laughter of my heart, flow out!

It is so mighty and beautiful and blithe To watch a man dying--to hover and watch--

is not for the blow Gunnar had given her when she "planned thefts and breakings of his word," but is rather, as the lines powerfully indicate, the exultation of a descendant of the Valkyrie watching above the battlefields.

Really poetical plays--plays which are both poetic and strongly dramatic--are indeed exceedingly rare. Mr. Bottomley is one of the few who have produced such drama in English. For many years he printed his work privately, in beautiful editions for his friends; but of late several of the plays have been made available--_King Lear's Wife in Georgian Poetry_, 1913-15, and in a volume of the same t.i.tle, including _Midsummer Eve_ and _The Riding to Lithend_, published in London last year.

Those who want more stories of this sort will find them in _Thorgils_ and other Icelandic stories modernized by Mr. Hewlett; in the _Burnt Njal_, translated by Sir George Dasent, from which this story itself springs; and in the translations by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris, the _Saga Library_--particularly the stories of the Volsungs and Nibelungs, and of Grettir the Strong.

_louvre_--a smoke-hole in the roof

_thrall_--a captive or serf

_bill_--a battle-ax

_second sight_--prophetic vision, as in _Riders to the Sea_ and _Campbell of Kilmhor_

_fetch_--one's double; seeing it is supposed to be a sign that one is _fey_ or fated to die

_wimpled_--"clouted up," as Hallgerd expresses it, in a headdress rather like a nun's. A widow, apparently, might wear her hair uncovered

_byre_--cow-barn

_midden_--manure

_quean_--in Middle-English, a jade; in Scotch, a healthy la.s.s; the history of this word and of _queen_, which come from the same root, is strange and interesting

_ambry_--press

_Romeborg_--Rome; _Mickligarth_--Constantinople (Viking names)

_Athcliath_--evidently an Irish port

_mumpers_--beggars

_Markfleet_--a _fleet_ in an inlet of the sea

_mote or gemote_--a formal a.s.sembly for making laws

_thing_--a.s.sembly for judgment, or parliament; this is an early Icelandic meaning of the word _thing_

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PLAYS FOR READING IN HIGH SCHOOLS

+Thomas Bailey Aldrich+

MERCEDES: A tragic story of the inextinguishable hatreds and reprisals of the French invasion of Spain in 1810, and of a woman's terrible heroism.

In _Collected Works_, Houghton Mifflin.

PAULINE PAVLOVNA: Cleverly executed, slight plot in dialogue, wherein the character of the hero is sharply revealed; reminiscent of Browning's _In a Balcony_, though with a quite different scheme.

_Ibid._

+Mary Austin+

THE ARROW-MAKER: The tragedy of a n.o.ble medicine-woman of a tribe of California Indians, and of a weak and selfish chief.

Duffield.

+Granville Barker+