The Gaol Gate" (1906) which pictures the effects upon his wife and his
mother of the imprisonment of an Irish lad of to-day, and their learning
that "Denis Cahel died for his neighbor." This little play is out of the
life that Lady Gregory knows and can deal with; it is finely conceived
and finely executed, lingering in the mind as does the keen heard rising
from some bare graveyard fronting the Atlantic.

Just why Lady Gregory, who has rendered in prose so well old legends,
should render old Irish historic life so much less well I cannot
explain. Sometimes I think it is because she has found less of that
history than of that legend among the people. Yet in "A Travelling Man"
(1907), her little miracle, somewhat in the manner of Dr. Hyde's, that
brings Christ into a modern peasant home, she has made a play of a
tender and reconciling beauty. With the success of "A Travelling Man"
and "The Gaol Gate" before me I cannot say it is because her genius is
for farce; and to say that it is because her genius is for the plays of
modern peasant life does not help to account for the fact.

The idiom of all these plays is racy of the soil, and when it need be,
eloquent with the eloquence that is almost always in the English of the
Irish. It is full of wise saws and proverbs, quips and quirks of
expression, the picturesquenesses and homelinesses of speech that are
characteristic of a peasant to whom talk is the half of life. These
range from sayings like those of the clowns of Elizabethan drama, such
as "He had great wisdom I tell you, being silly-like, and blind," and
such country wisdom as "What would the cat's son do but kill mice," up
through the elaborate maledictions of the two old paupers in "The
Workhouse Ward" and such delightful asperities as that of Maelmora anent
his bitter sister Gormleith, "You were surely born on a Friday, and the
briars breaking through the green sod," to aphorisms that have an accent
of eternity, as, "It is the poor know all the troubles of the world,"
and "The swift, unflinching, terrible judgment of the young."

The characters, even when they are purposely almost caricatures, have in
them the possibility of complete portrayals. There is no flagging of the
invention in any of them, no slipshod or careless composition. Her
technique, too, at least in farce, is masterful, and in her plays of
modern life of other form adequate. That she could master historical
drama, as I have said, I must doubt, but