and power over dialogue, but Mr. Colum is too serious with youth to care
much for humor, and, like Mr. Martyn, though not to the same extent, he
has trouble with his dialogue. The feeling for the situation, the
understanding of what is in the characters' minds, is in Mr. Colum, but
the dialogue does not always accommodate itself to situation and
thought. What Mr. Colum makes his characters say has in it the thought
and the sentiment of what they would say, but the words as often lack
life as have it. It is this difficulty with dialogue that has prevented
Mr. Colum, in his plays, true and finely planned as they are, from
reaching great achievement. As dramatist he is still more full of
promise than of achievement, and to be a dramatist of promise after ten
years of playwriting is to be at a standstill. In lyric poetry it is
otherwise with Mr. Colum. There he has attained. You will find his real
value in "Wild Earth" slight though the book may seem. Here is reading
of life, here is imagination, here is lyric cry. Read these little poems
once and they will be your familiars forever.

MR. WILLIAM BOYLE

One wonders if justice has been done Mr. William Boyle. If it has not it
is because he is a playwright of one play, "The Building Fund" (1905).
He has written three other plays that count, "The Eloquent Dempsey"
(1906), "The Mineral Workers" (1906), and "Family Failings" (1912), but
"The Building Fund" is of a higher power than any of these. "Family
Failings," produced in the spring of 1912, I have not read, but
according to all accounts it does not mark any advance upon "The Mineral
Workers" or "The Eloquent Dempsey." "The Mineral Workers," essentially a
propagandist play, and "The Eloquent Dempsey," essentially a satire, are
hardly, even in intention, of the first order of seriousness in art.
There are characters in these two plays faithful to human nature, and
faithful to the ways of eastern Galway, where the scenes of all of the
plays of Mr. Boyle are laid. But there are so many other characters in
them that are either caricatures or "stock" that, funny as the plays
seem upon the stage, they do not impress the deliberate judgment as
real. The many characters of "The Mineral Workers" and its several
motives are too much for Mr. Boyle; he loses his grip and the play
falls to pieces. "The Eloquent Dempsey" suffers from the caricaturing of
its characters, and its action degenerates into unbelievable farce
almost on the cu