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There is only one question which is raised by the two projects I have described on which I will give an opinion. It is of the first importance that those among us who want to write for the stage study the dramatic masterpieces of the world. If they can get them on the stage so much the better, but study them they must if Irish drama is to mean anything to Irish intellect. At the present moment, Shakespeare being the only great dramatist known to Irish writers has made them cast their work too much on the English model. Miss Milligans Red Hugh , which was successfully acted in Dublin the other day, had no business to be in two scenes; and Father OLearys Tadg Saor , despite its most vivid and picturesque, though far too rambling dialogue, shows in its half dozen changes of scene the influence of the same English convention which arose when there was no scene painting, and is often a difficulty where there is, and is always an absurdity in a farce of thirty minutes, breaking up the emotion and sending ones thoughts here and there. Mr. MacGinlays Elis agus an bhean deirce has not this defect, and though I had not Irish enough to follow it when I saw it played, and excellently played, by Mr. Fays company, I could see from the continual laughter of the audience that it held them with an unbroken emotion. The best Gaelic play after Dr. Hydes is, I think, Father Dineens Creideamh agus gorta , and though it changes the scene a little oftener than is desirable under modern conditions,
it does not remind me of an English model. It reminds me of Calderon by its treatment of a religious subject, and by something in Father Dineens sympathy with the people that is like his. But I think if Father Dineen had studied that great Catholic dramatist he would not have failed, as he has done once or twice, to remember some necessary detail of a situation. In the first scene he makes a servant ask his fellow-servants about things he must have known as well as they; and he loses a dramatic moment in his third scene by forgetting that Seagan Gorm has a pocket-full of money which he would certainly, being the man he was, have offered to the woman he was urging into temptation. The play towards the end changes from prose to verse, and the reverence and simplicity of the verse makes one think of a mediæval miracle play. The subject has been so much a part of Irish life that it was bound to be used by an Irish dramatist, though certainly I shall always prefer plays which attack a more eternal devil than the proselytiser. He has been defeated, and the arts are at their best when they are busy with battles that can never be won. It is possible, however, that we may have to deal with passing issues until we have re-created the imaginative tradition of Ireland, and filled the popular imagination again with saints and heroes. These short plays (though they would be better if their writers knew the masters of their craft) are very dramatic as they are, but there is no chance of our writers of Gaelic, or our writers of English, doing good plays of any length if they do not study the masters. If Irish dramatists had studied the romantic plays of Ibsen, the one great master the modern stage has produced, they would not have sent the Irish Literary Theatre imitations of Boucicault, who had no relation to literature, and Father OLeary would have put his gift for dialogue, a gift certainly greater than, let us say, Mr. Jones or Mr. Grundys, to better use than the writing of that long rambling dramatisation of the Tain bo Cuailgne , in which I hear in the midst of the exuberant Gaelic dialogue the worn-out conventions of English poetic drama. The moment we leave even a little the folk-tradition of the peasant, as we must in drama, if we do not know the best that has been said and written in the world, we do not even know ourselves. It is no great labour to know the best dramatic literature, for there is very little of it. We Irish must know it all, for we have, I think, far greater need of the severe discipline of French and Scandinavian drama than of Shakespeares luxuriance.
If the Diarmuid and Grania and the Casadh an t-Sugain are not well constructed, it is not because Mr. Moore and Dr. Hyde and myself do not understand the importance of construction, and Mr. Martyn has shown by the triumphant construction of The Heather Field how much thought he has given to the matter; but for the most part our Irish plays read as if they were made without a plan, without a scenario, as it is called. European drama began so, but the European drama had centuries for its growth, while our art must grow to perfection in a generation or two if it is not to be smothered before it is well above the earth by what is merely commercial in the art of England.
Let us learn construction from the masters, and dialogue from ourselves. A relation of mine has just written me a letter, in which he says: It is natural to an Irishman to write plays, he has an inborn love of dialogue and sound about him, of a dialogue as lively, gallant, and passionate as in the times of great Eliza. In these days an Englishmans dialogue is that of an amateur, that is to say, it is never spontaneous. I mean in real life . Compare it with an Irishmans, above all a poor Irishmans, reckless abandonment and naturalness, or compare it with the only fragment that has come down to us of Shakespeares own conversation. (He is remembering a passage in, I think, Ben Jonsons Underwoods .) Petty commerce and puritanism have brought to the front the wrong type of Englishman; the lively, joyous, yet tenacious man has transferred himself to Ireland. We have him and we will keep him unless the combined nonsense of and and succeed in suffocating him.