ABSTRACT
OUR plays this year have a half deliberate unity. Mr. Martyn's Maive, which I understand to symbolise Ireland's choice between English materialism and her own natural idealism, as well as the choice of every individual soul, will be followed, as Greek tragedies were followed by satires and Elizabethan masques by anti-masques, by Mr. George Moore's The Bending of the Bough,which tells of a like choice and of a contrary decision. Mr. Moore's play, which is, in its external form, the history of two Scottish cities, the one Celtic in the main and the other Saxon in the main, is a microcosm of the last ten years of public life in Ireland. I know, however, that he wishes it to be understood that he has in no instance consciously . satirised individual men, for he wars, as Blake claimed to do, with states of mind and not with individual men. If any person upon the stage resembles any living person it will be because he is himself a representative of the type. Mr. Moore uses for a symbol of any cause, that seeks the welfare of the nation as a whole, that movement for financial equity which has won the support of all our parties. If the play touches the imagination at all, it should make every man see beyond the symbol the cause nearest his heart, and its struggle against the common failings of humanity and those peculiar to Ireland. I do not think the followers of any Nationalist leader, on the one hand, or of Mr. Lecky or Mr. Plunkett, on the other, can object to its teaching, for it is aimed against none but those persons and parties who would put private or English interests before Irish interests. As Allingham wrote long since,— ‘We are one at heart if you be Ireland's friend, Though leagues asunder our opinions tend: There are but two great parties in the end ! ’
