ABSTRACT
THE Countess Cathleen is a play in four acts, and the date of its story is the later part of the sixteenth century: its heroine is the Countess, a lady who is lord over many followers and tenants. A famine is in the land: such a famine as that described by Spenser, a famine of so agonising an intensity that men and women go mad with suffering, lose their sense of natural and religious obligation, are ready to do and to dare all things to escape their torments. Two evil spirits, in the guise of rich merchants, come to buy the souls of the despairing people: the dread traffic goes briskly forward. The efforts of the Countess to stay the famine and save the people are frustrated by the demons: one hope remains. She will sell her pure soul—very precious in God's sight, and therefore in the devil's—in exchange for the souls of her people already bought, and for money enough to buy them food. It is done: she makes, like Iphigenia, but in a loftier way, the sacrifice of herself. The souls of her people are redeemed from eternal death, their bodies relieved from the pangs of starvation. She dies, the saint self-doomed, with broken heart: angels descend from God to take her soul to the Heaven, which is her reward for so supreme a loving sacrifice. The four acts are simple: the play moves with a plain impulse. There is no complexity, whether of facts or motives; it is, in truth, a narrative in dramatic form and a lyrical setting. We are not shown, but left to imagine, Cathleen's spiritual struggle: we are but shown her passionate, pitying love for her people. They, in the irresponsible frenzy of suffering, are bartering their immortal souls for relief from temporal agony: she has an heroic love so strong that she accepts, in the sight of God, the loss of her own soul, as a simple, sad act of self-sacrifice. The spiritual entanglement, the estimation of motives, the casuistry, unemphasised in the play itself, are present, as it were, in the minds of God, His saints and angels. It is the quite obvious, simple facts, that the play sets before us: how this was done, and that. Yet we never lose sight of the spiritual side of things: the dark, gross vapours of the rotting woods and marshes, poisonous and pestilent, are as the fumes and clouds of evil and sin: the purity and sincerity of Cathleen are as the spiritual brightness of faith and grace themselves. The play, with all its romantic strangeness, is finely and firmly upon the side of the higher life: the story of one who would lay down her life, not temporal but eternal, for her friends, by a divine excess of charity. It is full of imagination, humour, technical beauty; but the deepest impression upon the mind is this, that it tells a triumph of innocence, ready to endure all things, over the malicious cunning of evil.
