Lover," you pass but a few minutes, as it
is only a one-act play, but you remember them as well as you do the six
of "Mixed Marriage," though you follow their fortunes through four acts.
All these characters are typical of the artisan class of the North of
Ireland, the five Protestants of "The Magnanimous Lover" and the four
Protestants and two Catholics of "Mixed Marriage." It is the troubles
that arise from the difference in religion of the Protestant Raineys,
mother, father, and the two young men; the Catholic betrothed, Nora, of
the elder son Hugh; and their common friend the Catholic labor agitator,
O'Hara, that are the motive forces of the latter play. Faintest etched
is Tom, the younger son, and most like a stock character. Nora and
O'Hara are well done, but one remembers both as stage parts rather than
as characterizations. Hugh is still better done, but the two absolute
creations are the father and mother. Tom Rainey, the Orangeman, forgets
his bitterness against "Cathliks" for a moment to help win the strike in
which his fellow workmen of Belfast, "Cathlik an' Prodesans," both are
fighting side by side. He is all the more bitter, however, when he
learns that his eldest son is going to marry out of his faith, and his
speeches, hitherto devoted to smoothing out the troubles between the men
of different faith, turn to bitter denunciations of the strike as "a
Popish Plot." In the end Tom Rainey is responsible for riots his wild
words have stirred up, the calling-out of the soldiery, and the death of
Nora, who is shot down by a volley as she runs out of the Rainey house
into the rioting street. On the stage, of course, Mrs. Rainey is the
more sympathetic character, her tolerance, her tact, her humor, her
infinite kindliness winning an audience as it is given to few characters
to win it. She is less like a type, too, than her husband, but for all,
I cannot but think he is better drawn.

Mr. Ervine has not a style like Mr. Mayne, nor such a rhythm to his
prose, but he has more humor, and it is natural humor, a humor that
arises out of the situation and is not simply dragged in for the
purposes of comic relief. Mr. Ervine evidently knows the life he depicts
in and out. He ought to know it, for he was born to it, being the son of
a workingman in the shipyards of Belfast. And knowing it well he finds
it far from hopeless. It is a pleasure to come upon a play of the North
written in a spirit other than that of revolt aga