Mrs. Gallichan's book is not constructive in effect. But it is so excellently analytical, as far as it goes, that it can scarcely fail to provoke a great deal of thought.
There is coming soon, to the Fine Arts Theatre--that charming Chicago home of the Irish Players and of "the new note" in drama--a play with an interesting title. It is called _Change_. It is to be given by the Welsh Players--which fact alone has a thrill in it. But the theme is even more compelling.
Two old God-fearing Welsh people have denied themselves of comforts and pleasures to give their sons an education. Then, when they expect to reap the benefits of the sacrifice, three unexpected and awful things happen: the student son has so fallen under the influence of modern skepticism as to be forced to abandon his father's Calvinistic creed. The second one has become soaked with socialism and syndicalism. The third, a chronic invalid, is a Christian and a comfort; but he is killed, quite unnecessarily, in a labor conflict instigated by his brother. Then--the two old people again, alone. What can a playwright do with such a situation? Nothing, certainly, to attract a "capacity house." But we shall be among the first of that small minority who likes thinking in the theatre to hear what Mr. Francis has to say. His theme is tremendous.
Not least among the stirring events of our present poetical renaissance are the publication of the collected editions of the works of Alice Meynell and Francis Thompson (Scribner). Spiritually akin, mutually influencing one another in material as in more subtle ways, their poetry stands in vivid contrast to the muse of our younger singers, the makers of what English critics hail as a new Georgian Age. That this difference gives them an added significance, and not as some critics have said, a lessened one, is the burden of the present appreciation of the poems of Alice Meynell. For there is a tendency for the reader who is intoxicated with poetic modernity to reason somewhat after this fashion. Here, he will say,--as indeed Mr. Austin Harrison has said of Francis Thompson--is a "reed pipe of neo-mediaevalism ... a poet of the gargoyle," not of this modern world, and so neither in sympathy of thought or melody with us of the twentieth century, its free life and _vers libre_. All this, of course, because, Francis Thompson was--as is Mrs. Meynell--a child of the Catholic Church. Our supposititious reader will continue to the effect that there is no spiritual profit to be had in reading these poets when the modern attitude is to be found in such writers as W. W. Gibson, Masefield, and Hardy. But in so arguing, our reader will be entirely wrong as to the facts, and mistaken in his whole manner of approach to the realm of poetic values.