ells us, "I was pleased to hear
that Mr. Synge had said my method had made the writing of historical
drama again possible." But surely, granted the possession of the
dramatic gift, the historical imagination is the only thing that makes
the writing of historical drama possible. Lady Gregory does not seem to
me to possess the historical imagination. Not that I believe in
archaeology in the theatre; but, apart from her peasant characters, she
cannot give us the illusion of reality about the figures in these
historical plays. If we want the illusion of reality, we shall have to
turn from _The White Cockade_ to the impossible scene outside the
post-office and the butcher's shop in _Hyacinth Halvey_. As for the
third of the tragic comedies, _The Deliverer_, it is a most interesting
curiosity. In it we have an allegory of the fate of Parnell in a setting
of the Egypt of the time of Moses. Moses himself--or the King's
nursling, as he is called--is Parnell; and he and the other characters
talk Kiltartan as to the manner born. _The Deliverer_ is grotesque and,
in its way, impressive, though the conclusion, in which the King's
nursling is thrown to the King's cats by his rebellious followers,
invites parody. The second volume of the _Irish Folk-History Plays_,
even if it reveals only Lady Gregory's talent rather than her genius, is
full of odd and entertaining things, and the notes at the end of both
of these volumes, short though they are, do give us the franchise of a
wonderful world of folk-history.

XXI

MR. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM

Mr. Cunninghame Graham is a grandee of contemporary literature. He is
also a grandee of revolutionary politics. Both in literature and in
politics he is a figure of challenge for the love of challenge more than
any other man now writing. Other men challenge us with Utopias, with
moral laws and so forth. But Mr. Graham has little of the prophet or the
moralist about him. He expresses himself better in terms of his
hostilities than in terms of visionary cities and moralities such as
Plato and Shelley and Mazzini have built for us out of light and fire.
It is a temperament, indeed, not a vision or a logic, that Mr. Graham
has brought to literature. He blows his fantastic trumpet outside the
walls of a score of Jerichos:--Jerichos of empire, of cruelty, of
self-righteousness, of standardized civilization--and he seems to do so
for the sheer soldierly joy of the thing. One feels that if all the