nken neighbor is threatening the life of a
little child playing in the middle of the road. John Clancy pushes him
out of the way and allows himself to be driven down. They bring him to
his mother's house still alive and raving incoherently of the murder,
but he dies before he tells his secret and the Clancy name is saved. It
is not a very gripping theme, but the play brings to us an acute
character study of the typical managing woman of the small farmer class.
We feel her tireless energy, her drive, her high pride, assets of worth
in the fight to live. There is a little humor, natural and unforced,
some picturesqueness of phrase, a revelation of knowledge of life in one
corner of Ireland. There is nothing, however, in the play to make it
comparable with the three that followed it on the stage of the Abbey
Theatre, "The Crossroads" (1909); "Harvest" (1910); and "Patriots"
(1912). "The Lesson of Life," a little one-act comedy, presented at the
Dun Theatre, Cork, December 2, 1909, Mr. Robinson has disowned. Why I do
not know, though the fact that it was not produced at the Abbey may
indicate that even at the time of its production he felt that it was not
up to the level of his work. Mr. Robinson has not republished "The
Lesson of Life," but the reviews state that it was an amusing little
play, though in no way a serious reading of life.

[Illustration]

"The Clancy Name," "The Crossroads," "Harvest," and "Patriots" are all
on themes that hit home at Irish institutions, and yet it would be wrong
to say any one of them is basically either satirical or propagandist.
All are primarily readings of life. "The Crossroads" alone, perhaps, is
more than a reading of life. Certainly, after its needless prologue, it
is fine art through to the end. This scene, with its satire of Irish
debating societies, is now, wisely, dropped when the play is produced.
We can learn enough of Ellen in the play itself to understand why she
does as she does without this picture of her in Dublin. Her story is
that of a woman who hates the much talk of patriotism in Dublin and the
lack of doing anything tangible for Ireland. In Dublin she has worked
her way up from servant to assistant in a bookshop, but she goes back
happily to the country to give her sister a chance in town such as she
has had, thinking that perhaps she herself can lead her people into
better ways of farming and of ordering their lives generally through the
knowledge she has got in tow