to grab the farm. Many who saw "Birthright" in America were moved by it
more than by any other play in the repertoire of the company, and I
have heard more than one whose supreme interest is the theatre say that
it was the best play new to America presented in America during the
winter of 1911-12. I do not so hold, for "The Well of the Saints" and
"In the Shadow of the Glen" were new to America in the winter of
1911-12, and "The Playboy of the Western World" was new to every city in
America save to Chicago, where Mr. Hart Conway presented it at his
dramatic school in the spring of 1909. I can, however, understand why
"Birthright" so appealed. It is because of the theme, because of the
beautiful character of Maura Morrissey, because of the absolute
faithfulness to life, as all the world knows it, of the play. I have
traveled the road to Macroom that these farmers traveled, and so I know
the externals of the life they lead: I have known intimately and I know
intimately just such people as these, Irish peasants, some of whom
spoiled their children, thinking the boy they loved must not be
"crossed," and some of whom preferred one child to another even to the
extent of reversing the custom of primogeniture that is as fixed a rule
among them as if their property was entailed, and so I can vouch for the
absolute fidelity of Mr. Murray's art. It is a realism little relieved
by humor; unrelieved either by any background of romance, but gaming a
dignity from its intensity of conception and its simplicity of unfolding
that makes you feel, as you read, or as you watch and listen, that you
are in the presence of nobility. Its style, maybe, is homespun, but it
is none the worse for that, and it never approaches at all to the cheap
or mean.

The appeal of this realism is as poignant in "Maurice Harte" (1912) as
in "Birthright," though the story of the later play is not so universal
as is that of the play that brought Mr. Murray his share of fame.
"Maurice Harte" tells of the disaster that comes to a young divinity
student of Maynooth whose parents drive him back to college to seek
ordination even after he tells them that he has no vocation for the
priesthood. The curtain rises on Maurice, a youth of twenty-two, trying
to tell his mother, whose youngest he is, and the child of her middle
age that it would be sacrilege for him to take orders with no vocation.
His courage fails him, as it had on previous occasions on which he tried
to co