Other than these are not only the hero, Stephen J. O'Reilly, but the aristocrat, Sir Thomas Musgrove, and his sister, Mrs. Walton, who is of the family connection of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's Georgianna Tidman. Dan Fogarty, the holdback, unprogressive farmer, is the sharpest-cut and truest to life of all the characters, so clear-cut and true, in fact, that one thinks of him as almost a fellow of Shan Grogan in "The Building Fund." Uncle Bartle is sentimentalized, and Kitty Mulroy has no such personality as Sheila O'Dwyer. Contrast "The Mineral Workers" with a novel of the returned American, "Dan the Dollar" of Mr. Bullock, and the calibre of Mr. Boyle's play is quickly revealed.
What Mr. Boyle had been had he come into touch with the movement ten years earlier, it is of course beside the point to speculate. He was not a young man when he first became acquainted with the art of the Abbey Theatre in London and was impelled to write plays for it. He was, though, able to adapt the experience he had had as a story-writer to the stage in "The Building Fund." That being so, why is it that his later plays, successful though they have been as vehicles for the purveying of amusement on the stage, have not taken rank by their art or by their reading of life with "The Building Fund"? It may be that it was the one theme susceptible of dramatic presentation that he had brooded over long enough to transmute into terms of drama, and that the later plays, full of successful stage tricks though they are, did not come out of his knowledge of Irish life. Knowledge of Ireland he ought to have, for he is said to have
