new beauty of "The House of
Usna" was recognized, a beauty as distinctive as that of the two plays
of M. Maeterlinck that were produced with it, "Interior" and "The Death
of Tintagiles," but it was adjudged not to be drama in the accepted
sense of the word. "The House of Usna" is written in a prose that has
many of the effects of verse, but that is less luxuriant than the prose
of "Vistas." "The Immortal Hour," published shortly afterwards in the
"Fortnightly Review" (1900), is written in blank verse that shows its
author has been carefully attentive to the rhythms of the blank verse of
Mr. Yeats, but it is neither so poetic nor so dramatic as "The House of
Usna." Both plays are written out of the old legends that are the common
property of Irish and Scottish Gael, and in both Sharp has treated his
material with his wonted freedom of adaptation, a freedom that is
generally justified by his results, his instinctive surety of
reconstruction of myths being such as to make one wonder, with Mr.
Russell, if Sharp is not, in some fashion, a reincarnation of a
shanachie that sang as contemporary in the wars of Gael and Gall.

[Illustration]

A common preoccupation with the plays of M. Maeterlinck is another bond
between the founder of the Abbey Theatre and Sharp, a preoccupation
passing rather quickly from Mr. Yeats, but long retaining its hold on
the changing selves of Sharp. For all his early interest in "spiritual
things," an interest very definitely expressed in "Romantic Ballads"
(1888), Sharp would not have come to "Vistas" (1894) without the
guidance of M. Maeterlinck, and he admits as much in his preface to
these "psychic episodes." "Vistas" he often referred to as heralding a
"great dramatic epoch," and he evidently regarded them as, in a way,
drama, but it is hardly likely that he dreamed of their enactment on the
stage. Many of them are essentially dramatic, but their method of
presentation is almost always lyric or narrative rather than dramatic,
even in the Maeterlinckian sense of the word.

It is possible, however, that Sharp might have written other of his
projected plays, "The Enchanted Valleys," "The King of Ys," "Drosdan and
Yssul," and their many fellows he had projected by title, and others,
too, had not developments in Dublin, as I have said, carried Mr. Yeats
away from him during 1899 and 1900, and had Sharp himself not during
this drifting written that article "Celtic" which so aroused many in
Ireland