iddler's House," the
characterization is sure and true. One may take it that this is Ireland,
Ireland on the average, as one cannot take it that that we have in the
plays of Synge or Lady Gregory is Ireland on the average. Crofton
Crilly, the son-in-law of the master, soft and big and blond, is an
unsympathetic but memorable portrait. Unsympathetic and memorable, too,
are the portraits of his son Albert and his daughter Anna, the one
tricky and the other grasping, and the workhouse porter and the old
piper haunt my memory as strange men I have met haunt my memory, year in
and year out.

All three of these plays are, as I have said, sprung of domestic
problems, sure proof that Mr. Colum is the peasant's son. The family, as
he has pointed out in an article in "The United Irishmen," is not only
what the family is, ordinarily, in northwestern Europe, but that plus
that which the Irish family has inherited of the clan spirit. It was
only yesterday in Ireland that the girl and boy were married to whom
their fathers would, by a process of barter in which their own wishes
were not for a moment considered. They submitted, or came to America. It
was a patriarchal system of society.

It is not, then, difficult to see how it came about that Mr. Colum, who
began to write so young, came to write so much about youth and the
rebellion of youth, and to write about those other themes of his, themes
all of them made more intense by the youth that is concerned with
them--the land that obsesses the life of the man of the house all
Ireland over, and through him obsesses the lives of his family; and love
of woman.

Mr. Colum does not intrude his own personality into his plays, but it is
felt, as it should be felt, in every one of lyrics. Reading them one has
a sense of a youth like the youth of some characters in his plays; a
youth more manly than Cornelius's, less restless than Ellen's; a youth
serious and troubled with thought; a youth in revolt against much in the
old order, but tolerant of the passing generation that fears it
"knocking at the door." It is a youth impassioned rather than
passionate, more pronouncedly a youth of mind than a youth of heart.
When I say youth of mind, I mean not immaturity of mind, but the outlook
of the young mind; not radicalism, but a fixed determination to think
things out afresh and not to accept them because of any convention.

Eloquence one always looks for in the writing of an Irishman, and humor