Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/124

102 It is far easier to paint in the background of landscape remembered from childhood than it is again to get into touch with people parted from in childhood. The landscape changes little in far-off, lonely places, but people nowhere are what they were when the past years sufficient to bring up beside the old folks a new generation with ideals changed. Ireland, for all the agitation of the Land League, was landlord Ireland when Mr. Moore got "A Drama in Muslin" from Ireland; Ireland was passing to the peasant proprietor when Mr. Moore returned to it to write "The Untilled Field" and "The Lake." Social and economic questions, however, interest Mr. Moore only as they concern the individual, but the changing conditions in Ireland cannot be prevented from finding their way here and there into his writing through the changes they have brought about in the people of whom he writes, though many of those he writes of are survivals from an older generation.

There are glimpses in his writing of many phases of Irish life, his characters varying all the way from such old-timers as his Cousin Dan, who, as he himself intimates, might have come out of the pages of Lever or Lover, to the very modern Father Gogarty, whose outlook is on an Ireland that "perhaps, more than any other country, had understood the supremacy of spirit over matter, and had striven to escape through mortifications from the prison of the flesh." One wonders, at times, if Mr. Moore, who joined the cause of Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats, self-confessedly, to have his finger in a new literary pie, really felt the landscape as he says he