that she need restrict herself
so largely to farce and farce comedy in her plays of modern life, I do
not for a moment believe. "The Gaol Gate," in fact, proved that she need
not so restrict herself, and "MacDaragh's Wife" (1911), written by Lady
Gregory at sea on her way to America, but perhaps for that all the
fuller of the wild old life of her native Connacht. It would almost seem
that with "Grania" (1912), a tragedy too, following "MacDaragh's Wife,"
Lady Gregory is widening the scope of her work, as she well can, now
that there are other dramatists to provide comedies and farces for the
Abbey Theatre. It is a haunting story that "MacDaragh's Wife" tells,
and largely a true story, the story of a piper who, though a pauper,
draws all the countryside to the funeral of his wife, draws them,
through the wild lamenting of his pipes, from the fair where they are
sporting to follow, with a full fellowship, to the grave, her who died
all but alone. Lady Gregory tells us in a note just what of it she
gathered from old people about her girlhood's home at Roxborough, and
what about her home of to-day at Coole, how she has shaped it, and what
emotion is back of it, the "lasting pride of the artist of all ages."

As Lady Gregory had restricted herself, until recently, in the forms of
modern life which she wrote of and in the kinds of people she selected
to write of, so, too, she had restricted herself, until recently, in the
motives she considered. It is true that the motive most recurrent in her
plays, that of fear of the opinion of the neighbor, an attitude probably
sprung of the clan system, is dominant in Irish life; and it is equally
true that the motive most notably absent, love, was until yesterday far
from a dominant motive in the Irish life that Lady Gregory presents: yet
there are many other motives that, in true comedy, and even in farcical
comedy, might well have place. That these motives are not there is, I
think, not only that Lady Gregory, self-effacingly, put into her plays
what was wanted to make them foils to the plays of Mr. Yeats and Synge,
but also because of the practice of one type of gentlewoman in
literature, of which Jane Austen is characteristic. And yet the mere
mention of Jane Austen increases the wonderment that Lady Gregory has
not written of people of every condition in her neighborhood, whether
that be London or Dublin or Gort, as Miss Austen did of people of every
condition in her neighborhood,