now
and then betrayed, Mr. Boyle more often than now and then, into the
English of the newspaper or of the public speaker; but the English of
Mr. Mayne is all but always an unworn English, an English used freshly,
or if with reminiscences in it, reminiscences of the seventeenth-century
English that has survived in the Bible or in the memory of the folk from
the time of King James.

Mr. Mayne has, then, style, and his dialogue is living speech; he has
knowledge of the people of North Ireland, earnestness and sincerity; and
having these qualities, he has more that is precious to art than have
most of the dramatists his countrymen. There is no consistent reading of
life in his plays, no great power over the unrolling of plot, but
perhaps these will come with the years. An actor himself, he knows the
stage; and this knowledge has given him power over situation. Once he
learns to lead situation into situation, once he ripens into fuller
knowledge of life, Mr. Mayne will be a dramatist to reckon with, indeed.

"NORREYS CONNELL"

There have been many other dramatists than these I have mentioned who
have had one or more plays produced at the Abbey Theatre. Some of these,
like Mr. Bernard Shaw, are Irishmen abroad that have gained the ear of
the world and do a play for Dublin out of a sense of duty It was thus
that "John Bull's Other Island" came into being, but that play, being
considered "beyond the scope" of the National Theatre Society, was not
produced at the Abbey, but at the Court Theatre, London, November 1,
1904. When "The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet" was "censored" in London,
however, the Abbey opened its doors to it, the "crude melodrama"
receiving its premier in late August, 1909. Little as "John Bull's Other
Island" was in the Abbey tradition, with moral purpose and unhumanity of
its very essence, it was at least a newspaper leader on an Irish
subject, but "The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet," a sort of
sentimentalized travesty of Bret Harte preaching the usual Shavian
evangel, has no more relation to Irish life than it has to literature.
It marred the repertoire the Abbey Company brought to America, as would
a camp-meeting hymn the music of the pipes.

Out of the Abbey tradition, too, are the plays of "Norreys Connell" (Mr.
Conal O'Riordan), whose "Piper" had its day of lesser notoriety of
Playboy-like quality on its presentation on February 13, 1908. It is a
very obvious allegory, outlining under guise of an i