Excerpt from Samhain: An Occasional Review

One of our plays, The Well of the Saints, has been accepted for imme diate production by the Deutsches Theatre of Berlin; and another, The Shadow of the Glen, is to be played during the season at the National Bohemian Theatre at Prague; and my own Cathleen ui Houlihan has been translated into Irish and been played at the Oireachtas, before an audience of some thousands. We have now several dramatists who have taken to drama as their most serious business, and we claim that a school of Irish drama exists, and that it is founded upon sincere observation and experience.

As is natural in a country where the Gaelic League has created a preoccupation with the countryman, the greater number of our plays are founded on the comedy and tragedy of country life, and are written more or less in dialect. When the Norwegian National movement began, its writers chose for their maxim, To understand the saga by the peasant and the peasant by the saga. Ireland in our day has re-discovered the old heroic literature of Ireland and she has te-discovered the imagination of the folk. My own pre-occupation is more with the heroic legend than with the folk, but Lady Gregory in her Spreading the News, Mr. Synge in his Well of the Saints, Mr. Colum in The Land, Mr. Boyle, in The Building Fund, have been busy, much or little, with the folk and the folk imagination. Mr. Synge alone has written of the peasant as he is to all the ages of the folk imagination as it has been shaped by centuries of life among fields or on fishing grounds. His people talk a highly-coloured musical language, and one never hears from them a thought that is of to-day and not of yesterday. Lady Gregory has written of the pe0p1e of the markets and villages of the West, and their speech, though less full of peculiar idiom than that of Mr. Synge's people, is still always that vivid speech which has been shaped through some generations of English speaking by those who still think in Gaelic. Mr. Colum and Mr. Boyle, on the other hand, write of the country man or villager of the East or centre of Ireland, who thinks in English, and the speech of their people shows the influence of the newspaper and the National Schools. The people they write of, too, are not the true folk. They are the peasant as he is being transformed by modern life, and for that very reason the man of the towns may find it easier to understand them. There is less surprise, less wonder in what he sees, but there is more of himself there, more of his vision of the world and of the problems that are troubling him.

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