A Dramatist of New-born Ireland (1927)

Abstract

In literature and drama, English people have always been peculiarly susceptible to newness, strangeness, picturesqueness, and apt to fancy they are encountering genius when they are only experiencing astonishment. The classic example of this is Synge’s Playboy, the wild, riotous extravagance of which so carried English critics away that they hailed it as genius, ignoring the fact that they had already seen, with cold eyes, Synge’s two masterpieces, Riders to the Sea and The Well of the Saints. Much the same thing has happened, in a minor degree, to other Irish writers and dramatists who brought to the English mind something fresh and, so to put it, queer, something enshrining an attitude of mind completely un-English, or giving glimpses of a civilisation which they would feel as ‘quaint’. On the other hand, we in Ireland have suffered from the opposite fault, in that we have been suspicious of any impulse to hail anybody as a genius. We throw brickbats readily, and compliments with difficulty, and I am not sure that it is not, when all is said, better for men of talent or genius to get more than a fair share of brickbats at first — we invariably recall them eventually — than to get more than a fair share of compliments. To that general rule, Sean O’Casey is an exception, and he is in other respects a sufficient phenomenon in Irish drama to merit consideration.