more than what farce may do is the
largeness of utterance that will make a "reading of life" memorable.
Take "the image" (1910), for instance, in which Lady Gregory is
attempting more than in "Spreading the News" (1904) or "Hyacinth Halvey"
(1906). This play, the longest that Lady Gregory has written, is what
the stage would call the character farce. She owns it a presentation of
dreams of old men and old women which crumble at the touch of reality,
but it is not only this, but a symbolizing of the proneness of all
Ireland to accept as certainties on the eve of realization what are
really only signs that point to possibilities in a far to-morrow. In the
play four old men of a little village on the west coast are debating
what they will do with their share of a windfall that has come to the
village in the shape of two whales that have drifted up on the beach.
When the priest determines that all the proceeds from the sale of the
oil from the whales be spent on something that will benefit the whole
community they plan a statue (one of them is a stone-cutter) to some
great celebrity. The motives that lead them to choose Hugh O'Lorrha are
telling satire not only of Irishmen, but of all men. It would hardly be,
however, in any other country than Ireland that the name of the one come
at by way of accident would, unidentified for some time by any, be
finally revealed as that of the hero of a folk-tale. Four days after the
whales had come ashore, days wasted in planning what the village will do
with the prize money, and unutilized in securing the blubber and
rendering out the oil, the quartette learned that "the Connemara lads
have the oil drawn from the one of them, and the other one was swept
away with the spring tide."

Though "The Image" be farce, its characters are the characters of
comedy, and its purpose whole-heartedly serious. And even "Spreading the
News" has its lesson, of rumor's wild riot in Irish crowds. On the
slightest grounds the reciting of an errand of helpfulness is turned by
quick imagination into a story of a murder. Lightly sketched as are the
people here, from a caricature of a magistrate to the more serious
presentment of Mrs. Fallon's "nice quiet little man," they are very true
to Ireland. Slighter even are the butcher and the postmistress and the
model sub-sanitary inspector in "Hyacinth Halvey," though all are fully
understood and fully blocked out in their author's mind, if impossible
of complete rea