OLIVE TILFORD DARGAN

Mrs. Olive Tilford Dargan, poet and dramatist, was born at Tilfordsville, near Leitchfield, Kentucky, in 1870. She attended the public schools, in which her parents were teachers, until she was ten years of age, when they left Kentucky and established a school at Donophan, Missouri. Three years later she was ready for college, but her mother's health broke, and the family settled in the Ozark Mountains, near Warm Springs, Arkansas, where another school was conducted, this time with the daughter as her father's assistant. For the following five years she taught the young idea of backwoods Arkansas how to shoot; and during these years she herself was always hoping and planning for a college education, which hopes and plans seemed to crumble beneath her feet when her mother died, in 1888, and she returned to Kentucky with her invalid father. She had purposed in her heart, however, and finally obtained a Peabody scholarship, which took her to the University of Nashville, Tennessee, from which institution she was graduated two years later. Miss Tilford then accepted a position to teach in Missouri, but the climate so affected her health that she was forced to resign and repair to Houston, Texas, to recuperate. She shortly afterwards took a course in a business college and, for a brief period, held a position in a bank. Teaching again called her and for two years she taught in the schools of San Antonio, Texas. In 1894 Miss Tilford did work in English and philosophy at Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and a year later she turned again to teaching, holding a position in Acadia Seminary, Wolfville, Nova Scotia. This was followed by a year spent in reading in the libraries of Boston, in which city she also worked as a stenographer. Several of her articles were accepted by the magazines about this time, which decided her to settle upon literature as her life work. She worked too hard at the outset, however, her health gave way, and she spent some months in the mountains of Georgia in order to regain her strength. Miss Tilford was married, in 1898, to Mr. Pegram Dargan, of Darlington, South Carolina, a Harvard man, whom she had met while at Radcliffe. Not long after she went to New York, and there resumed her literary labors with a high and serious purpose. Mrs. Dargan's first volume of dramas, Semiramis and Other Plays, was published by Brentano's in 1904, and taken over by the Scribner's in 1909. Besides the title-play, Semiramis, founded on the life of the famous Persian queen, this book contained Carlotta, a drama of Mexico in the days of Maximilian, and The Poet, which is Edgar Allan Poe's life dramatized. Mrs. Dargan's second volume of plays bore the attractive title of Lords and Lovers and Other Dramas (New York, 1906), the second edition of which appeared in 1908. This also contains three plays, the second being The Shepherd, with the setting in Russia, and the third, The Siege, a Sicilian play, the scene of which is laid in Syracuse, three hundred and fifty-six years before Christ. Mrs. Dargan's Lords and Lovers, set against an English background, is generally regarded as the best work she has done hitherto. Mr. Hamilton Wright Mabie has praised this play highly, placing the author beside Percy MacKaye and Josephine Preston Peabody Marks. Mrs. Dargan is Kentucky's foremost poetic dramatist, and the work she has so far accomplished may be considered but an earnest of what she will ultimately produce. Her beautiful masque, The Woods of Ida, appeared in The Century Magazine for August, 1907, and it has taken its place with the finest English work in that branch of the drama. She has had lyrics in Scribner's, McClure's, The Century, and The Atlantic Monthly, her most recent poem, "In the Blue Ridge," having appeared in Scribner's for May, 1911. Mrs. Dargan's home is in Boston, but for the last three years she has traveled abroad, spending much time in England, the background of her greatest work. Her third and latest volume contains three dramas, entitled The Mortal Gods and Other Plays (New York, 1912). This was awaited with impatience by her admirers on both sides of the Atlantic and read with delight by them.

"Mrs. Dargan has so recently achieved fame that it may seem premature to pronounce a critical judgment on her work," wrote Dr. George A. Wauchope, professor of English in the University of South Carolina, in claiming her for his State. "It is certain, however," he continued, "that it marks the high tide of dramatic poetry in this country, and is, indeed, not unworthy of comparison with all but the greatest in English literature. One is equally impressed by the creative inspiration and the mastery of technique displayed by the author. Each of her plays reveals a dramatic power and a poetic beauty of thought and diction that are surprising. The numerous songs, also, with which her plays are interspersed, yield a rich and haunting melody that is redolent of the charming Elizabethan lyrics. The dramas as a whole are audacious in plot and vigorous in characterization. In the handling of the blank verse, in the witty scenes of the sub-plots, in the splendor of the phrasing, in the strong undercurrent of reflection, and, above all, in their spiritual uplift and noble emotion, these dramas give evidence of a remarkably gifted playwright who not only possesses a deep feeling for art at its highest and best, but who also has command of all the varied resources of dramatic expression."

It would be difficult for a critic to say more in praise of an author, would it not?

Bibliography. The University of Virginia Magazine (January, 1909), containing Wm. Kavanaugh Doty's review of Mrs. Dargan's The Poet; Library of Southern Literature (Atlanta, 1909, v. iii); The Writers of South Carolina, by G. A. Wauchope (Columbia, S. C., 1910).

NEAR THE COTTAGE IN GREENOT WOODS[65]

[From Lords and Lovers (New York, 1906)]

Act IV, Scene I. Henry, with lute, singing.

[Enter Glaia. The king kneels as she approaches.]