uld grow in
seriousness of intention and accomplishment. He hates sham, he has sane
and cleansing satire of pretension, he writes good dialogue, his
experience as stage manager of the Abbey Theatre is teaching him the
stage; he is only twenty-five. Do not these things augur a future?

MR. RUTHERFORD MAYNE

It so happened that the last time I was reading the plays of Mr.
Rutherford Mayne, I was also reading the plays of Sir Arthur Wing
Pinero. All the world has heard of the one; only the little band
scattered here and there through the English-speaking countries to whom
letters are a real part of life has heard of the other. I laughed over
"Dandy Dick"; I thought of Miss Rehan playing Georgianna Tidman with all
that gush of spirits that was hers; I thought of Miss Nethersole in her
wonderful youth playing Paula Tanqueray; and as I thought of these two,
each in her way inimitable in her part, thoughts of past moments with
the characters of Mr. Mayne's plays, plays I have never seen on the
stage, came back to me. Had I seen them on the stage would my thoughts
of them have been thoughts of the theatre, as were all my thoughts of
Sir Arthur's plays? It may be, but I think not, I think the great
strength of Mr. Mayne is that he takes you to life; I think the great
weakness of the wide-heard author is that he takes you immediately, in
almost all of his plays, to the theatre, and only secondarily, if at
all, after the memory of his artificiality has died away, to life
itself.

William John Granahan and John Smith the Tory,--will you forget them, or
Robbie John whom the fiddle called away, or Ebenezer McKie and Francey
Moore, Protestant and Catholic, who together lay in wait for the hated
landlord and shot him as he passed through the glen; or John Murray,
good man, and his bauchle of a brother? You will not forget them, for
they are from life; you have known them, all save Francey, if you have
known Scotchmen who are Lowlanders and Presbyterians, or such North of
Ireland men as are unalterably opposed to Home Rule. They are very like
the Orangemen of the novels of Mr. Shan Bullock, very like the peasants
the English-speaking world outside of Scotland first met in the verse of
Burns; harsher than the Baillie Nicol Jarvies and Dugald Dalgettys of
the kindly Sir Walter, but akin to them and to his Davie Deans and
Dumbiedikeses.

We are in a more familiar world in the plays of Mr. Mayne than in those
of most of the other wri