LADY GREGORY

Evening Star, Issue 21138, 25 June 1932, Page 2

LADY GREGORY

A MOTHER IN CELTIA [Written by Jessie Mackay, for the ‘ Evening Stai - ’.] It takes all manner of people to effect a . revolution, literary, dynastic, or other. Certainly the Celtic-Renaissance,, covering all the years of this culture, has been one of the great literary revolutions of modern times, and certainly that revolution would not have taken full shape without the gallant and gracious personality of Lady Gregory, whoso death has been recently announced. There is always one type of woman to whom the masculine adjective of “gallant" is fitly ascribed, a type that never knows when it is beaten, and consequently never is beaten, a type that takes a situation by storm without fury, by persistence, not arrogance, a type that bolds its gains with a conquering smile, not a mailed list. All this speaks out of Lady Gregory’s portrait as beholden in a fine volume of her plenteous output, ‘ Seven Short Plays.’ Gracious, handsome, selfassured, and royally gowned; a lady of commanding presence, as a colonial Governor’s wife well might be expected to look; and yet the Irish laugh in her eyes betrays some deep, primitive foreknowledge out of which she drew not only the words and semblance of the Irish tinkers, cabin folk, apple women, and policemen, the staple of her invention, but the strange, quirky, snarly, tender souls within them. Read the dedication on the next leaf, and another side of this penetrating personality appears; for who knew the dreamy poet soul of the man lost in Fairyland, stumbling blindly amid the material impediments of a world he never knew, the man we call William Butler Yeats, like the woman who was guide, nurse, and mother to him? Thus it runs:— To you, William Butler. Yeats, good praisor, wholesome dispfaiser, hoavynanded judge, helper of ns all, 1 offer ii play of my plays for every/night in the Week, because you like them, and because you have taught me my trade.' AUGUSTA A. GREGORY. But, good reader, if you have a working knowledge of Yeats’s own twilight world of gods and heroes, of Synge’s queer, astringent, moon-mad-dened booth-folk, and a floating idea of the new realism now enthroned in Ireland’s national play-house, you will guess with me. that no man or woman either taught Augusta Gregory her trade. She-picked it up herself at the Back o’ Beyond, the other name of which might be Galway. For of a Galway family .she came before she started roaming the world with her colonial viceroy, a Galway family credited with an English origin. And why not, seeing that Ireland’s most burning patriots have uniformly come of the dominant race, won, and conquered as only Ireland knows how to win and conquer her conquerors? This grand dame, Augusta Gregory, was well and truly conquered; . witness the explosively funny picture she gives in the opening play, ‘ Spreading the News,’ of the inflexible justice of the new magistrate, promoted to Connaught after nu administrative spell at the Andaman Islands. With an acumen sharpened by long contact with diminutive Oriental law-breakers, ever on the watch to evade the salt tax, lie orders the local policeman to investigate the village apple woman’s bootli for contraband goods. After obediently nosing under the baskets, the satellite reports:— “ I don’t get the smell o’ whisky here, sir, nor yet o’ salt.”

Later in the day, however, the newlyarrived Daniel surpasses himself. The booth is the village centre for news, and amid a series of ingenious interludes contingent on the imaginative applelady’s deafness, a startling tale of illicit love, the murder of a husband, and the intended elopement of the guilty pair takes shape. First, however, the murderer strays in, a poor creature of a bog farmer, whose shrewd and rather shrewish wife appropriately defends him as a man “ as innocent as any dumb baste.” Then the murdered man jauntily steps in, causing a certain scatteration of the nerve-wrought newsmongers. At this psychological moment the magistrate returns to unravel the mystery. Since the bog farmer can prove some kind of alibi the magisterial acumen must seek another clue, and the curtain goes down on the defunct man being put in irons on the charge of murdering himself. It was doubtful oven then whether the accused was as eager to lay out the magistrate as he had previously been to lay out the man ‘‘ who would dare to show him Ids own dead body!”

“ Burlesque gone mad,” sa.v you? Welt, is it any madder than the way Irish love is loved and Irish life is lived in “ The Playboy of the Western World?” And every critic who is called a critic goes down in the dust to kiss the hem of Synge’s garment.

Personally I do not care for the nippiness of Synge’s wit. I prefer the mellow evenness of Lady Gregory’s pyrotechnics. Her people ramble on in unforced epigram because, being Irish, they think and live in epigram. A village woman, loftily asked what is this town’s chief business, replies innocently;— Business, is it? What business would the people here have but to be minding one another’s business? I mean about trade? Not a trade. No trade at all but to bo talking. And that brings us back to the question bow Lady Gregory learned her trade. To begin with, in her industrious girlhood she had made a collee-

tion of Galway folk songs and folk lore. Then she went away to become a colonial vicereine. An observant woman picks up something under these circumstances; see what Lady Drummond Hay learned during her husband’s consular wanderings. Lady Drummond Hay put her observations to use as an international feminist. Lady Gregory little knew where Fate was leading her when her husband returned to permanent office in London as a governor of the National Gallery. ... There one day she met dreamy Willie Yeats, and the most spectacular link of the Irish Renaissance was forged in consequence. Settled again in Connaught, just on the end of last century, her long-delayed life work began in that sunburst of Irish cultural genius following the nadir of national despair after the Parnell debacle.

Memory resurrects lor tho writer one cycloramio day in Paris when its chief actors in person outlined that drama of rebirth for Ireland. Dr Douglas Hyde, Celtic poet, translator, and scholar, told of the Gaelic League to revive tho national language. Professor Eoin M‘Neill told ot the revival of tho study of Irisji history. Yeats told of the double revival of folk poetry and national drama. None, wo learned, would ever name the rise of the Abbey Theatre without naming Lady Gregory, whose generosity, first financed the modest scheme for a little Irish playhouse, and whose . unfolding genius there spent itself ungrudgingly to provide now folk drama for its repertory. “ Lady Gregory put Connaught on the stage,” declared Yeats, going on to describe her celebrated playlet, ‘ The Rising of the Moon,’ as an Irish classic. And, truly, without rancour, this simple but vital study cuts through the old, evil, political crust of centuries of downfall and division, right down to the warm oneness of humanity that will risk all things for the river of pity within. Pure comedy again runs riot in ‘ The Jackdaw,’ where a kind friend, trying to save the face of a bankrupt widow', arranged an amazing deal for a pet bird. Consequently high, and low in the village devoted themselves to birdnesting and jackdaw drives to fill the supposed yearning void in America. The .situation loses nothing in narration, and the impecunious widow' pities herself to the echo before she finds she has drawn so rosy a stake in tho jackdaw lottery; “Haven’t I the mean, begruding creditors now that would put me into the court?” she asks. “ Sure, it’s a terrible place to go in it and to be bound to speak nothing but the truth.” And, again, a true child of wavebeaten Galway Sagely moralises thus; —

“ There’s many a thing in tho sea that’s not decent, but cockles is fit to put before the Lord.”

Lady Gregory’s _ output, not begun till she was well into the forties, was large. Thirty-one plays stood to her credit, of which the first was played in the Abbey Theatre as far back as 1904, early days indeed, while ‘ The Rising of the Moon,’ post-Fenian or protoSinn Fein, as one chooses to take it, was played in 1907. Her father’s mansion was stormed by white boys in her childhood,. and she touched Ireland’s wounds again when she met John O’Leary, a once noted Fenian leader. But her true affinities were with such yoke-fellows as - Douglas Hyde, with his indefinable air of the old ‘•'noblesse” of Ireland both iu dress and bearing, and his heart burning with hatred of an alien culture which taught the subject race, as' lie bitterly said in Paris, “ that its father was a thief and its mother was a gypsy—and the child lived down to their levels!” As to Willie Yeats, the dreamy lad was her nursling, and but for this alone, counting him as the first Irish giant of the Renaissance, first and matchless, silo deserved to be lauded as a mother in Celtia.

But this Abbey Theatre, in which the writer spent one retrospective evening in 1922, was a mother of the new nationalism of the Gall, not ono iota akin to those “ blind hysterics of the Colt ” which plunged Ireland into debt and dool ten years ago by reason of being fed on that worst of spiritual food, the smell of gunpowder. ■ Such hysterics were far from Lady Gregory’s wholesome fun-doctoring of a sad, sick ago. She never, it seems to me, was given her right place in the gallery of Ireland’s new-born genius a generation ago. One knows not her success in other fields, for she ventured into sober prose both as a biographer and a folklorist. In no case was the honour of Galway and the Celtic twilight other than safe in her hands. It will be well if Ireland’s newer playwrights can show as white a page after thirty years’ proof. In the plays hero cited she deliberately, indeed, restricted herself. Knowing perhaps, like Jane Austen, the safety of homogeneity, she appears to eschew romance other than such romance as binds one old man to another in an almshouse, the one refusing to leave his old friend for the proffered home of a new-found sister, the other hurling maledictions on him for so refusing, and both cheerfully hurling more solid tokens of argument at each other as soon as the visitor laid departed. But somehow Lady Gregory lias for all time taken the edge off that terrible Cromwellian sentence “ To hell or Connaught!” Perhaps her witty, gossipy, warm-hearted Connaught will outlive the mordant idiosyncrasies of its other exponent, J. i\l. Synge.