Cornelius Weygandt

“ Russell talked much, talked kindly of all men, talked well of many things, said startling things of society and art and poetry so gently that you did not think until afterwards that in another you would hold them gages of combat. I can hear him yet, as I sat and tried at the same time to listen to him and to look at his flaming-hearted spirits with luminous angel wings and flashing halos enveloped in an atmosphere in which "the peacock twilight rays aloft its plumes and blooms of shadowy fire"—I can hear him saying, "You can't read Shakespeare, can you?" ”

“ And from such joys as these, wild and earthy and rallying, his exultations range to the exalted serenity and sadness of Naisi and Deirdre as they look back on their seven year of love in Glen Masain, of love almost too perfect and too happy to be human.
Yes, joy is as distinctive as irony and extravagance of the writing of Synge, joy in mere living, in life even at the worst, and joy, too, in life at the best. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and richest, if it's for a short space only." ”

“ His voice, full and mellow by nature, and in perfect control, responds to all the many changes of emotion that the part demands, the unmatched rhythm of the prose rendered as he renders it carrying one clean out of one's self as one listens. It is only when one comes to one's self on the curtain-fall that one finds one's self wondering, Can this be prose? Surely, never before was prose, English prose, as beautiful to the ear as English verse. ”

“ It is Lady Gregory at her best, as "Grania" as a whole is Lady Gregory at her best in tragedy. If "Grania" in every detail were as inspired as its explanation of the queen's quick turn from Diarmuid to Finn, it would be a great play, indeed. Grania is no light woman, and yet she turns, in the old legend, from the man who sacrificed all but all for her, on his death, to the High King who brought about his death, with a suddenness inexplicable. Lady Gregory makes that sudden turn plausible, for two reasons. ”

“ Says Deirdre, when she has come to know it is fate that they will return to Ireland, and death:—
The dawn and evening are a little while, the winter and the summer pass quickly, and what way would you and I, Naisi, have joy forever.... It's this hour we're between the daytime and a night where there is sleep forever, and isn't it better thing to be following on to a near death than to be bending the head down, and dragging with the feet, and seeing one day a blight showing upon love where it is sweet and tender? ”

“ We get the man himself, I say, in these verses and travel sketches, a man exulting in primitiveness, in wildness, in beauty of woman and child, in beauty of landscape; but exulting, more than in all else, in his own moods aroused by these things that he loved. Even here, however, he is at times almost impossibly impersonal, so that you feel in a certain description that there is no man between you and the thing described, but that, to adapt a phrase of Thoreau, it is the hills and the sea and the atmosphere writing. ”

“ It is not we only, you and I, who look into the still waters of the wilderness and lonely places, and are often dimly perplext, are often troubled we know not how or why: some forgotten reminiscence in us is aroused, some memory, not our own, but yet our heritage is perturbed, footsteps that have immemorially sunk in ancient dusk move furtively along obscure corridors in our brain, the ancestral hunter or fisher awakes, the primitive hillman or woodlander communicates again with old forgotten intimacies and the secret oracular things of lost wisdoms. ”

“ There might be incongruity, if one were writing of any other than Synge, in speaking of Deirdre in such a company. Incongruity, however, is of the very texture of Synge's art, which has reconciled qualities, as I have said, never before reconciled in English literature. It is on Deirdre that Synge has lavished all the ideality that was in him, not because he had a dream of woman he wished to fulfill, but because to him Deirdre was all that was queenly. And yet even Deirdre is a "variation," as nobility and beauty must ever be. ”

“ Colum does not intrude his own personality into his plays, but it is felt, as it should be felt, in every one of lyrics. Reading them one has a sense of a youth like the youth of some characters in his plays; a youth more manly than Cornelius's, less restless than Ellen's; a youth serious and troubled with thought; a youth in revolt against much in the old order, but tolerant of the passing generation that fears it "knocking at the door." It is a youth impassioned rather than passionate, more pronouncedly a youth of mind than a youth of heart. ”

“ Eight o'clock the next evening saw us in the eminently Philistine suburban street where was the little house of conventional exterior that sheltered the high dreams of "the Irish Emerson." Once entered, his embodied visions attract you from all four walls of the study. Piles of them in corners make you wonder is Mrs. Russell a saint. The pictures are of Irish landscape; of "the Other People"; of heroes and heroines of Ireland's prehistoric days; of souls that have yet to be born; of souls that have passed through incarnation after incarnation, never to rise above an animal existence ”

“ Wild nature is always about these warriors. The storm in the trees, the sorrow of the sea, the clatter of wild geese and the singing of swans find echo in the poems that praise them. We see, too, at times, fields heavy with harvest, and often the apple trees in bloom and the cuckoo calling among them,—indeed, the sweet scent of apple gardens, like the keenness of the winds of spring, beautiful as are the phrases that present them, become almost stock phrases. Always, too, there are wonders of the other world about the heroes ”

“ So the poet seeks refuge in his own dream and in contemplation of the life from which he came and to which he will return, and—one almost dare say—in communication with which he now knows such joy. The poet's life is little because he has found out the littleness of earthly things; the peasant holds life little because his share of it has been so poor. If the peasant acquires riches by chance or by emigration, he sees as the poet that all he can have is as nothing, so short is the time he may hold it. ”

“ He gives us life untroubled by the passing agitation of the day, and for that we should be thankful, and thankful, too, that he has given in his plays "the nourishment, not very easy to define, on which our imaginations live." His irony, as desolating to some as the irony of Swift, gives pause to all, as insight always will, but to me his extravagance is a joy unalloyed, and his exaltation, so rare a thing in modern literature, should bring to all men delight and refreshment of spirit. ”

“ Through one long scene DeMax, who was quite as fine, never lifted his hand above his elbow, and it was only when the emotion came to its climax that he raised it to his breast. Beyond them stood a crowd of white-robed men who never moved at all, and the whole scene had the nobility of Greek sculpture, and an extraordinary reality and intensity. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen upon the stage, and made me understand, in a new way, that saying of Goethe's which is understood everywhere but in England, "Art is art because it is not nature." ”

“ The Irish peasant loves his bit of land far more than his language, and even more, I think, in the bottom of his heart, than he loves his church, although allegiance to his church is a duty that he puts before any love. A boreen in bogland is not a lonely place to the Irish peasant if he have neighbors of long standing. It is the big city that to him at home seems the lonely place, despite the glamour of its lights, and its shops, and its ceaseless excitements. ”

“ To attain a style that is his very self, that is of the very color of his life, and of the very color of the extravagant phases of the life of his country, to attain a style that embodies all this, and that for the first time sets English dramatic prose to a rhythm as noble as the rhythm of blank verse, is surely in itself title to greatness. ”

“ One thinks, as one reads, of Villon's old woman and her lament for yesteryear, but there are not many writers anywhere in the world, of old time or of to-day, who have such power of blending pathos and ugliness into beauty, and no other one that I know who can infuse humor into the blend, and make one at the one time laugh ironically and be thrilled as with great poetry. ”

“ She whom we loved for a personality as winning as that of an Emma or a Tess is now a drudge, almost a slattern, gray-haired, hopeless, almost hated by a brutal husband. The loveless marriage has proved a curse. Upon the woman of his dreams so dethroned comes Brian Connor, now a successful novelist, and, finding how things are, falls, for all his intended restraint, into a fight with Tom, whom but for Ellen he would have choked to death. Brian urges Ellen to go away with him, but, after a moment's faltering, she refuses to go. ”

“ Colum, however, whether his race be in twilight or sunset, is of the dawn. He is of the dawn not only because he is the youth, at oldest the young man, in his writing, who sees the world freshly and fresh, none the less fresh because he knows it old; but he is of the dawn because it is chiefly those things that are fundamentals, that come out of the beginnings of things, that interest him profoundly, that stir him deeply. ”

“ The motive of Mr. Mayne's first play is the old call to wander, the unrest of the vagrant heart, here the heart of the musician. It is the story of Robbie John Granahan, who, after burning his fiddle at the desire of a strong farmer whose daughter he wished to marry, is driven out into the world to try his fortune with another through her determination that her lover should follow his star. There is more beauty in "The Turn of the Road" than in either of the other plays of the North of Ireland, more beauty of theme, more beauty of thought, more beauty of expression. ”

“ Russell as you will, as organizer of the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, as stimulator of the Irish Literary Revival, as economist, playwright, poet, painter, preacher, but always as you put by his books you will think of him as mystic, as stargazer, wandering, as he so often tells us in his poems, on the mountains by night, with his eyes keener with wonder at the skies than ever shepherd's under the Star of Bethlehem; you will see him, the human atom, on the bare Dublin mountains, thrilling as he watches the sweep of world beyond world ”

“ It is terrible to know one's son a murderer; it is intolerable to think of a Clancy being hanged and of the glory of the name forever departed. She persuades him finally not to tell, but he fears he will, so, when the chance comes, he finds the only way out, the way of peace for his mother and peace for himself. A car driven by a drunken neighbor is threatening the life of a little child playing in the middle of the road. John Clancy pushes him out of the way and allows himself to be driven down. ”

“ I sometimes wonder, is the reason for the poet's holding so devotedly to spiritual things of his kind not the very same holding of his peasant countryman to the folk-tales that take him to a world as rich and gorgeous-hued as the Ireland about him is bare and gray, and to a church that prepares him for a better world after death? A large part of all poetry is the realization of the brevity of all beautiful things,—of bloom, of youth, of life; but no poet has more often lamented "Fate and Time and Change" than Mr. Yeats. ”

“ One thinks of no other writer at all, however, when one reads Christy's wooing of Pegeen, even when one puts down the book in the quiet that always comes on one in the presence of something great; one thinks of no other writer, of course, when one sees the lovers and listens to their words, on the stage, for one is rapt out of one's self by the perfect accord of drama and actors at one in the service of beauty ”

“ Romancing, which is the very atmosphere of "The Playboy of the Western World," would be out of place in any telling of the greatest of old Irish legends; so it is that Synge has found for "Deirdre of the Sorrows," or rather for its great moments, an austere epic speech that seems native to the story. The passionate words are nobly adequate to the passionate resignation they have to tell, a resignation that has come of the unwilling belief of the lovers that so great a love as theirs cannot last longer "without fleck or flaw" than the seven years it has lasted. ”