Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/99

 Rh Pro-Cathedral in Dublin "for the purpose of founding and supporting a Palestrina choir."

That Mr. Martyn was still a force to be reckoned with is revealed by the trouble Mr. Yeats went to, in "Samhain" of October, 1902, to explain why it was that the plays of the Irish National Dramatic Company were either folk-drama or drama whose life was the "life of poetry" Mr. Martyn had argued in "The United Irishmen," which up to the time of the presentation of "In the Shadow of the Glen" was a stanch supporter of the dramatic policies of Mr. Yeats, that the actors of the company should be trained to the drama of modern society. "The acting of plays like 'Deirdre,' and of 'Cathleen ni Houlihan,'" writes Mr. Yeats, "with its speech of the country people, did not seem to him a preparation. It is not, but that is as it should be. Our movement is a return to the people, like the Russian movement of the early seventies, and the drama of society could but magnify a condition of life which the countryman and the artisan could but copy to their hurt. The play that is to give them a quite natural pleasure should either tell them of their own life or of that life of poetry where every man can see his own image, because there alone does human nature escape from arbitrary conditions. Plays about drawing-rooms are written for the middle classes of great cities, for the classes who live in drawing-rooms, but if you would uplift the man of the roads you must write about the roads, or about the people of romance, or about great historical people."

Neither "Maeve" nor "The Enchanted Sea" can be