Epresentative British Dramas

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1918 Excerpt: ... It was a year and three months after the War began that Lady Augusta Gregory paid her first visit to America since the tour of the Irish Players through the United States. I emphasize this date because, in the interim between the two American trips, a change had come over Lady Gregory, with whom I had had the pleasure of many conversations. This change, it might be inferred, was due to the influence of many minds upon the Irish temperament during its successful tour of the United States when, on all sides, the Irish Theatre was criticized for its narrow parochialism and for its too insistent self-interest. I am quoting some of the opinions expressed to me by Lady Gregory, in 1915, because they will emphasize certain facts regarding the Irish Theatre, and will call attention to certain spiritual changes in the Irish playwrights which may have a very profound effect upon the Celtic renaissance after the War is over. It would seem that in the five years between January 1, 1911, and November, 1915, Lady Gregory has grown much sounder in her nationalism, building in her own imagination a larger destiny for Ireland than one would infer to be the destiny in the minds of most of the members of the Irish Theatre on their visit to America in 1911. Take, for instance, her notions regarding the influence of art on the Irish nation. She said: Sir Hugh Lane, my nephew, lost his life on the Lusitania. He was a director, at that time, of the National Gallery of Ireland, and he made the National Gallery his heir. Some of his finest pictures, the Titian of Baldassari, the great Rembrandt Portrait of a Woman, and a wonderful Goya, were turned over immediately to the nation. While it is popularly thought that he took away from the collection many modern French pictures, and b...