Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/174

 148 in her three books of translations. But, after all translation will not content, and the essay that is not self-revelation will not content, the writer who would have his writing a "reading of life." So it is not surprising that Lady Gregory turned toward drama. And yet I do not ever feel, after many readings of her plays, that Lady Gregory took to drama because of any overmastering impulse toward this most difficult of all literary forms. She has learned to handle some orders of drama pleasantly, the farce more than pleasantly, and, very recently, the folk-tragedy nobly; but had it not been that plays of other than romantic tone were needed for the Abbey Theatre as a foil to those of Mr. Yeats and of Synge, I doubt whether it is drama that Lady Gregory would have chosen as the medium through which to express her reading of life. I can just as well imagine her shrewd kindliness of judgment upon the foibles and virtues of her countrymen in stories whose form is very like that employed by Miss Barlow in her "Irish Idylls" (1892) as in these so original little plays that she has wrought out without precedent, under the tutelage of Mr. Yeats.

It is more than likely, as I say, that had it not been that drama was needed for the Abbey Theatre she would not have attempted drama. But more than likely it is, too, that had she written plays not made to order they had reached wider through Irish society and plumbed deeper into Irish life. Lady Gregory knows Irish life, from bottom to top, as few Irishwomen and few Irishmen of her day know it; she has large heart, wide tolerance, and abounding charity; and yet she was long