Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/236

 206 such life is lived in Ireland. In "Thomas Muskerry," in "The Land" and "The Fiddler's House," the characterization is sure and true. One may take it that this is Ireland, Ireland on the average, as one cannot take it that that we have in the plays of Synge or Lady Gregory is Ireland on the average. Crofton Crilly, the son-in-law of the master, soft and big and blond, is an unsympathetic but memorable portrait. Unsympathetic and memorable, too, are the portraits of his son Albert and his daughter Anna, the one tricky and the other grasping, and the workhouse porter and the old piper haunt my memory as strange men I have met haunt my memory, year in and year out.

All three of these plays are, as I have said, sprung of domestic problems, sure proof that Mr. Colum is the peasant's son. The family, as he has pointed out in an article in "The United Irishmen," is not only what the family is, ordinarily, in northwestern Europe, but that plus that which the Irish family has inherited of the clan spirit. It was only yesterday in Ireland that the girl and boy were married to whom their fathers would, by a process of barter in which their own wishes were not for a moment considered. They submitted, or came to America. It was a patriarchal system of society.

It is not, then, difficult to see how it came about that Mr. Colum, who began to write so young, came to write so much about youth and the rebellion of youth, and to write about those other themes of his, themes all of them made more intense by the youth that is concerned with them—the land that obsesses the life of the man of the