r friends who are
poets or essayists or writers of stories. All the other writing the
Renaissance has, then, contributed to make of the drama what it is, and
one must, if one would see the drama in relation to the Ireland of our
day, know what is the accomplishment of the other sorts of writing of
the Renaissance.

CHAPTER II

THE PLAYERS AND THEIR PLAYS, THEIR AUDIENCE AND THEIR ART

The drama of the Celtic Renaissance is of an ancestry as mixed as is
that of the people of Ireland themselves. There is less in it perhaps of
the Gael than in them, for Gaelic literature, until to-day, never
approached nearer to the drama than the dialogue, the racy give-and-take
of two characters, alike of lively imagination, whether gentle or
simple. But even had the colloquies of St. Patrick and Oisin, of Dean
Swift and his man Jack, of the Lout and his Mother, been developed, by
1890, to a drama as finished as that of Congreve or Goldsmith, Sheridan
or Wilde, those who would have their plays abreast of our time would
have gone, just as, with the conditions as they are, the dramatists of
the Renaissance did go, to Ibsen and M. Maeterlinck, like all the rest
of the world. It is a matter of reproach, in the estimation of many
patriotic Irishmen, that Mr. Martyn learned his art of Ibsen, and Mr.
Yeats a part of his of M. Maeterlinck, but that attitude is as
unreasonable as that which would reproach the Irish Industries
Organization Society for studying Danish dairy farms or Belgian
chickeries. It is only the technique of the foreigners, modern or
ancient, Scandinavian or Greek, that the Abbey dramatists have acquired
or have adapted to Irish usage. Stories are world-wide, of course, the
folk-tale told by the Derry hearthside being told also in the tent in
Turkestan--Cuchulain kills his son as Rustum does, and the Queen of
Fairy lures Bran oversea as Venus lures Tannhaeuser to the Hoerselberg. It
is in character, in ideals, in atmosphere, in color, that drama must be
native, and in color and in atmosphere, in ideals and in character the
Abbey Theatre drama is Irish. Reading of life and style are personal
qualities, qualities of the artist himself, though they, too, may take
tone and color from national life, and in the drama of many of the Abbey
dramatists they do. These dramatists have been more resolutely native,
in fact, many of them, than the national dramatists of other countries
have been, of France and Germany to-day, of t