Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography by Lady Augusta Persse Gregory (1852-1932). New York And London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1913.

[Page]

[Page]

By Lady Gregory

Irish Folk-History Plays
  First Series: The Tragedies
    Grania. Kincoura. Dervorgilla.
  Second Series: The Tragic Comedies
    The Canavans. The White Cockade. The Deliverer.

New Comedies
  The Bogie Men. The Full Moon. Coats. Damer's Gold. McDonough's Wife.

Our Irish Theatre
  A Chapter of Autobiography

[Page]

[Frontispiece]

[Title Page]

Our Irish Theatre

A Chapter of Autobiography

By

Lady Gregory

Illustrated

G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1913

[Page]

COPYRIGHT, 1913
BY
LADY GREGORY

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

[Page iii]

CONTENTS

APPENDICES

[Page iv]

[Page v]

ILLUSTRATIONS

[Page 1] 

Our Irish Theatre

CHAPTER I

THE THEATRE IN THE MAKING

To Richard Gregory.–Little Grandson: When I go into the garden in the morning to find you a nectarine or tell you the names of flowers, Catalpa, Love-lies-bleeding, Balsam, Phlox, you ask me why I cannot stay but must go back to the house, and when I say it is to write letters, you ask, "What for?" And when winter comes, you will ask me why I must go away over the sea instead of waiting for your Christmas stocking and your tree.

The other day I was sitting outside the door, where the sweet-peas grow, with an old man, and when you came and called me he got up to go away, and as he wished me good-bye, he said: "They were telling me you are going to America, and says I, 'Whatever the Lady does, I am certain she is doing nothing but  [Page 2]  what she thinks to be right.' And that the Lord may keep you safe and protect you from the power of your enemy."

Some day when I am not here to answer, you will maybe ask, "What were they for, the writing, the journeys, and why did she have an enemy?" So I will put down the story now, that you may know all about it bye and bye.

Fourteen or fifteen years ago I still wrote from time to time in a diary I used to keep till the sand in the hour-glass on my table began to run so fast that I had to lay by the book as well as embroidery, and archaeology, and drying lavender, and visits to the houses of friends.

I was in London in the beginning of 1898, and I find written, "Yeats and Sir Alfred Lyall to tea, Yeats stayed on. He is very full of playwriting. . . . He with the aid of Miss Florence Farr, an actress who thinks more of a romantic than of a paying play, is very keen about taking or building a little theatre somewhere in the suburbs to produce romantic drama, his own plays, Edward Martyn's, one of Bridges', and he is trying to stir up Standish O'Grady and Fiona Macleod to [Page 3]  write some. He believes there will be a reaction after the realism of Ibsen, and romance will have its turn. He has put a 'great deal of himself' into his own play The Shadowy Waters and rather startled me by saying about half his characters have eagles' faces."

Later in the year I was staying for a few days with old Count de Basterot, at Duras, that is beyond Kinvara and beside the sea. He had been my husband's warm friend, and always in the summer time we used to go and spend at least one long day with him,–we two at first, and then later I went with my son and the boy and girl friends of his childhood. They liked to go out in a hooker and see the seals showing their heads, or to paddle delicately among the jellyfish on the beach. It was a pleasant place to pass an idle day. The garden was full of flowers. Lavender and carnations grew best, and there were roses also and apple trees, and many plums ripened on the walls. This seemed strange, because outside the sheltered garden there were only stone-strewn fields and rocks and bare rock-built hills in sight, and the bay of Galway, over which fierce storms blow from the Atlantic. The Count remembered [Page 4]  when on Garlic Sunday men used to ride races, naked, on unsaddled horses out into the sea; but that wild custom had long been done away with by decree of the priests. Later still, when Harrow and Oxford took my son away and I had long spaces of time alone, I would sometimes go to Duras to spend a few days.

I always liked to talk and to listen to the Count. He could tell me about French books and French and Italian history and politics, for he lived but for the summer months in Ireland and for the rest of the year in Paris or in Rome. Mr. Arthur Symons has written of him and his talks of race,–to which he attributed all good or bad habits and politics–as they took long drives on the Campagna. M. Paul Bourget came more than once to stay in this Burren district, upon which he bestowed a witty name, "Le Royaume de Pierre." It was to M. Bourget that on his way to the modest little house and small estate, the Count's old steward and servant introduced the Atlantic, when on the road from the railway station at Gort its waters first come in sight: Voila la mer qui baigne l'Amérique et les terres de Monsieur le Comte. For he–the steward–had been taken by his master [Page 5]  on visits to kinsmen in France and Italy–their names are recorded in that sad, pompous, black-bordered document I received one day signed by those who have l'honneur de vous faire part de la perte douloureuse qu'ils viennent d'éprouver en la personne de Florimond Alfred Jacques, Comte de Basterot, Chevalier de l'ordre du Saint Sépulcre, leur cousin germain et cousin [who died at Duras (Irlande) September 15, 1904]; la Marquise de la Tour Maubourg, le Vicomte et la Vicomtesse de Bussy, la Baronne d'Acker de Montgaston, le Marquis et la Marquise de Courcival, le Comte et la Comtesse Gromis de Trana, la Countesse Irène d'Entreves, and so on, and so on. I do not know whether the bearers of these high-sounding names keep him in their memory–it may well be that they do, for he was a friend not easily forgotten–but I know there is many a prayer still said on the roads between Kinvara and Burren and Curranroe and Ballinderreen for him who "never was without a bag of money to give in charity, and always had a heart for the poor."

On one of those days at Duras in 1898, Mr. Edward Martyn, my neighbour, came to see the Count, bringing with him Mr. Yeats, whom I did [Page 6]  not then know very well, though I cared for his work very much and had already, through his directions, been gathering folk-lore. They had lunch with us, but it was a wet day, and we could not go out. After a while I thought the Count wanted to talk to Mr. Martyn alone; so I took Mr. Yeats to the office where the steward used to come to talk,–less about business I think than of the Land War or the state of the country, or the last year's deaths and marriages from Kinvara to the headland of Aughanish. We sat there through that wet afternoon, and though I had never been at all interested in theatres, our talk turned on plays. Mr. Martyn had written two, The Heather Field and Maeve. They had been offered to London managers, and now he thought of trying to have them produced in Germany where there seemed to be more room for new drama than in England. I said it was a pity we had no Irish theatre where such plays could be given. Mr. Yeats said that had always been a dream of his, but he had of late thought it an impossible one, for it could not at first pay its way, and there was no money to be found for such a thing in Ireland.

We went on talking about it, and things seemed [Page 7]  to grow possible as we talked, and before the end of the afternoon we had made our plan. We said we would collect money, or rather ask to have a certain sum of money guaranteed. We would then take a Dublin theatre and give a performance of Mr. Martyn's Heather Field and one of Mr. Yeats's own plays, The Countess Cathleen. I offered the first guarantee of £25.

A few days after that I was back at Coole, and Mr. Yeats came over from Mr. Martyn's home, Tillyra, and we wrote a formal letter to send out. We neither of us write a very clear hand, but a friend had just given me a Remington typewriter and I was learning to use it, and I wrote out the letter with its help. That typewriter has done a great deal of work since that day, making it easy for the printers to read my plays and translations, and Mr. Yeats's plays and essays, and sometimes his poems. I have used it also for the many, many hundreds of letters that have had to be written about theatre business in each of these last fifteen years. It has gone with me very often up and down to Dublin and back again, and it went with me even to America last year that I might write my letters home. And while I am [Page 8]  writing the leaves are falling, and since I have written those last words on its keys, she who had given it to me has gone. She gave me also the great gift of her friendship through more than half my lifetime, Enid, Lady Layard, Ambassadress at Constantinople and Madrid, helper of the miserable and the wounded in the Turkish-Russian war; helper of the sick in the hospital she founded at Venice, friend and hostess and guest of queens in England and Germany and Rome. She was her husband's good helpmate while he lived–is not the Cyprus treaty set down in that clear handwriting I shall never see coming here again? And widowed, she kept his name in honour, living after him for fifteen years, and herself leaving a noble memory in all places where she had stayed, and in Venice where her home was and where she died.

Our statement–it seems now a little pompous–began:

"We propose to have performed in Dublin, in the spring of every year certain Celtic and Irish plays, which whatever be their degree of excellence will be written with a high ambition, and so to build up a Celtic and Irish school of [Page 9]  dramatic literature. We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted and imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory, and believe that our desire to bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland will ensure for us a tolerant welcome, and that freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres of England, and without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed. We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism. We are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside all the political questions that divide us."

I think the word "Celtic" was put in for the sake of Fiona Macleod whose plays however we never acted, though we used to amuse ourselves by thinking of the call for "author" that might follow one, and the possible appearance of William Sharp in place of the beautiful woman he had given her out to be, for even then we had little doubt they were one and the same person. I myself never quite understood the meaning of the "Celtic Movement," which we were said to belong to. [Page 10]  When I was asked about it, I used to say it was a movement meant to persuade the Scotch to begin buying our books, while we continued not to buy theirs.

We asked for a guarantee fund of £300 to make the experiment, which we hoped to carry on during three years. The first person I wrote to was the old poet, Aubrey de Vere. He answered very kindly, saying, "Whatever develops the genius of Ireland, must in the most effectual way benefit her; and in Ireland's genius I have long been a strong believer. Circumstances of very various sorts have hitherto tended much to retard the development of that genius; but it cannot fail to make itself recognised before very long, and Ireland will have cause for gratitude to all those who have hastened the coming of that day."

I am glad we had this letter, carrying as it were the blessing of the generation passing away to that which was taking its place. He was the first poet I had ever met and spoken with; he had come in my girlhood to a neighbour's house. He was so gentle, so fragile, he seemed to have been wafted in by that "wind from the plains of Ath- [Page 11]  enry" of which he wrote in one of his most charming little poems. He was of the Lake School, and talked of Wordsworth, and I think it was as a sort of courtesy or deference to him that I determined to finish reading The Excursion, which though a reader of poetry it had failed me, as we say, to get through. At last one morning I climbed up to a wide wood, Grobawn, on one of the hillsides of Slieve Echtge, determined not to come down again until I had honestly read every line. I think I saw the sun set behind the far-off Connemara hills before I came home, exhausted but triumphant! I have a charming picture of Aubrey de Vere in my mind as I last saw him, at a garden party in London. He was walking about, having on his arm, in the old-world style, the beautiful Lady Somers, lovely to the last as in Thackeray's day, and as I had heard of her from many of that time, and as she had been painted by Watts.

Some gave us their promise with enthusiasm but some from good will only, without much faith that an Irish Theatre would ever come to success. One friend, a writer of historical romance, wrote: "October 15th. I enclose a cheque for £1, but confess it is more as a proof of regard for you than of [Page 12]  belief in the drama, for I cannot with the best wish in the world to do so, feel hopeful on that subject. My experience has been that any attempt at treating Irish history is a fatal handicap, not to say absolute bar, to anything in the shape of popularity, and I cannot see how any drama can flourish which is not to some degree supported by the public, as it is even more dependent on it than literature is. There are popular Irish dramatists, of course, and very popular ones, but then unhappily they did not treat of Irish subjects, and The School for Scandal and She Stoops to Conquer would hardly come under your category. You will think me very discouraging, but I cannot help it, and I am also afraid that putting plays experimentally on the boards is a very costly entertainment. Where will they be acted in the first instance? And has any stage manager undertaken to produce them? Forgive my tiresomeness; it does not come from want of sympathy, only from a little want of hope, the result of experience."

"October 19th. I seize the opportunity of writing again as I am afraid you will have thought I wrote such an unsympathetic letter. It is not, [Page 13]  believe me, that I would not give anything to see Irish literature and Irish drama taking a good place, as it ought to do, and several of the authors you name I admire extremely. It is only from the practical and paying point of view that I feel it to be rather rash. Plays cost more, I take it, to produce than novels, and one would feel rather rash if one brought out a novel at one's own risk."

I think the only actual refusals I had were from three members of the Upper House. I may give their words as types of the discouragement we have often met with from friends: "I need not, I am sure, tell you how gladly I would take part in anything for the honour of Old Ireland and especially anything of the kind in which you feel an interest; but I must tell you frankly that I do not much believe in the movement about which you have written to me. I have no sympathy, you will be horrified to hear, with the 'London Independent Theatre,' and I am sure that if Ibsen and Co. could know what is in my mind, they would regard me as a 'Philistine' of the coarsest class! Alas! so far from wishing to see the Irish characters of Charles Lever supplanted by more refined types, they have [Page 14]  always been the delight of my heart, and there is no author in whose healthy, rollicking company, even nowadays, I spend a spare hour with more thorough enjoyment. I am very sorry that I cannot agree with you in these matters, and I am irreclaimable; but all the same I remain with many pleasant remembrances and good wishes for you and yours, Yours very truly–"

Another, the late Lord Ashbourne, wrote: "I know too little of the matter or the practicability of the idea to be able to give my name to your list, but I shall watch the experiment with interest and be glad to attend. The idea is novel and curious, and how far it is capable of realisation I am not at all in a position to judge. Some of the names you mention are well known in literature but not as dramatists or playwriters, and therefore the public will be one to be worked up by enthusiasm and love of country. The existing class of actors will not, of course, be available, and the existing playgoers are satisfied with their present attractions. Whether 'houses' can be got to attend the new plays, founded on new ideas and played by new actors, no one can foretell." [Page 15] 

One, who curiously has since then become an almost too zealous supporter of our theatre, says: "I fear I am not sanguine about the success in a pecuniary way of a 'Celtic Theatre,' nor am I familiar with the works, dramatic or otherwise, of Mr. Yeats or of Mr. Martyn. Therefore, at the risk of branding myself in your estimation as a hopeless Saxon and Philistine, I regret I cannot see my way to giving my name to the enterprise or joining in the guarantee." On the other hand, Professor Mahaffy says, rather unexpectedly, writing from Trinity College: "I am ready to risk £5 for your scheme and hope they may yet play their drama in Irish. It will be as intelligible to the nation as Italian, which we so often hear upon our stage."

And many joined who had seemed too far apart to join in any scheme. Mr. William Harpole Lecky sent a promise of £5 instead of the £1 I had asked. Lord Dufferin, Viceroy of India and Canada, Ambassador at Paris, Constantinople, St. Petersburg, and Rome, not only promised but sent his guarantee in advance. I returned it later, for the sums guaranteed were never called for, Mr. Martyn very generously making up all [Page 16]  loss. Miss Jane Barlow, Miss Emily Lawless, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland ("Peter the Packer "as he was called by Nationalists), John O'Leary, Mr. T. M. Healy, Lord and Lady Ardilaun, the Duchess of St. Albans, Doctor Douglas Hyde, the Rt. Hon. Horace Plunkett, Mr. John Dillon, M. P., all joined. Mr. John Redmond supported us, and afterwards wrote me a letter of commendation with leave to use it. Mr. William O'Brien was another supporter. I did not know him personally but I remember one day long ago going to tea at the Speaker's house, after I had heard him in a debate, and saying I thought him the most stirring speaker of all the Irish party; and I was amused when my gentle and dignified hostess, Mrs. Peel, said, "I quite agree with you. When I hear William O'Brien make a speech, I feel that if I were an Irishwoman, I should like to go and break windows."

Then Mr. Yeats and Mr. Martyn went to Dublin to make preparations, but the way was unexpectedly blocked by the impossibility of getting a theatre. The only Dublin theatres, the Gaiety, the Royal, and the Queen's, were engaged far ahead, and in any case we could not [Page 17]  have given them their price. Then we thought of taking a hall or a concert room, but there again we met with disappointment. We found there was an old Act in existence, passed just before the Union, putting a fine of £300 upon any one who should give a performance for money in any unlicensed building. As the three large theatres were the only buildings licensed, a claim for a special license would have to be argued by lawyers, charging lawyers' fees, before the Privy Council. We found that even amateurs who acted for charities were forced to take one of the licensed theatres, so leaving but little profit for the charity. There were suggestions made of forming a society like the Stage Society in London, to give performances to its members only, but this would not have been a fit beginning for the National Theatre of our dreams. I wrote in a letter at that time: "I am all for having the Act repealed or a Bill brought in, empowering the Municipality to license halls when desirable." And although this was looked on as a counsel of perfection, it was actually done within the year. I wrote to Mr. Lecky for advice and help, and he told me there was a Bill actually going through the House [Page 18]  of Commons, the Local Government (Ireland) Bill, in which he thought it possible a Clause might be inserted that would meet our case. Mr. John Redmond and Mr. Dillon promised their help; so did Mr. T. M. Healy, who wrote to Mr. Yeats: "I am acquainted with the state of the law in Dublin which I should gladly assist to alter as proposed. Whether the Government are equally well disposed may be doubted, as the subject is a little outside their Bill, and no adequate time exists for discussing it and many other important questions. They will come up about midnight or later and will be yawned out of hearing by our masters."

A Clause was drawn up by a Nationalist member, Mr. Clancy, but in July, 1898, Mr. Lecky writes from the House of Commons: "I have not been forgetting the Celtic Theatre and I think the enclosed Clause, which the Government have brought forward, will practically meet its requirements. The Attorney-General objected to Mr. Clancy's Clause as too wide and as interfering with existing patent rights, but promised a Clause authorising amateur acting. I wrote to him, however, stating the Celtic case, and urging that [Page 19]  writers should be able, like those who got up the Ibsen plays in London, to get regular actors to play for them, and I think this Clause will allow it. . . . After Clause 59 insert the following Clause: (1) Notwithstanding anything in the Act of Parliament of Ireland of the twenty-sixth year of King George the Third, Chapter fifty-seven, intituled an Act for regulating the stage in the city and county of Dublin, the Lord Lieutenant may on the application of the council for the county of Dublin or the county borough of Dublin grant an occasional license for the performance of any stage play or other dramatic entertainment in any theatre, room, or building where the profits arising therefrom are to be applied for charitable purpose or in aid of the funds of any society instituted for the purpose of science, literature, or the fine arts exclusively. (2) The license may contain such conditions and regulations as appear fit to the Lord Lieutenant, and may be revoked by him."

This Clause was passed but we are independent now of it,–the Abbey Theatre holds its own Patent. But the many amateur societies which play so often here and there in Dublin may well [Page 20]  call for a blessing sometimes on the names of those by whom their charter was won.

We announced our first performance for May 8, 1899, nearly a year after that talk on the Galway coast, at the Ancient Concert Rooms. Mr. Yeats' Countess Cathleen and Mr. Martyn's Heather Field were the plays chosen, as we had planned at the first. Mr. George Moore gave excellent help in finding actors, and the plays were rehearsed in London. But then something unexpected happened. A writer who had a political quarrel with Mr. Yeats sent out a pamphlet in which he attacked The Countess Cathleen, on the ground of religious unorthodoxy. The plot of the play, taken from an old legend, is this: during a famine in Ireland some starving country people, having been tempted by demons dressed as merchants to sell their souls for money that their bodies may be saved from perishing, the Countess Cathleen sells her own soul to redeem theirs, and dies. The accusation made was that it was a libel on the people of Ireland to say they could under any circumstances consent to sell their souls and that it was a libel on the demons that they counted the soul of a countess of more worth than those [Page 21]  of the poor. At Cathleen's death the play tells us, "God looks on the intention, not the deed," and so she is forgiven at the last and taken into Heaven; and this it was said is against the teaching of the Church.

Mr. Martyn is an orthodox Catholic, and to quiet his mind, the play was submitted to two good Churchmen. Neither found heresy enough in it to call for its withdrawal. One of them, the Rev. Dr. Barry, the author of The New Antigone, wrote:

"BRIDGE HOUSE, WALLINGFORD,
"March 26, 1899."

"DEAR MR. YEATS,

"I read your Countess Cathleen as soon as possible after seeing you. It is beautiful and touching. I hope you will not be kept back from giving it by foolish talk. Obviously, from the literal point of view theologians, Catholic or other, would object that no one is free to sell his soul in order to buy bread even for the starving. But St. Paul says, 'I wish to be anathema for my brethren'; which is another way of expressing what you have put into a story. I would give the play first and explanations afterwards. [Page 22] 

"Sometime perhaps you will come and spend a night here and I shall be charmed. But don't take a superfluous journey now. It is an awkward place to get at. I could only tell you, as I am doing, that if people will not read or look at a play of this kind in the spirit which dictated it, no change you might make would satisfy them. You have given us what is really an Auto, in the manner of Calderon, with the old Irish folk-lore as a perceptive; and to measure it by the iron rule of experts and schoolmen would be most unfair to it. Some one else will say that you have learned from the Jesuits to make the end justify the means–and much that man will know of you or the Jesuits. With many kind wishes for your success, and fraternal greetings in the name of Ireland,

"Ever yours,
"WILLIAM BARRY."

So our preparations went on. Mr. Yeats wrote a little time before the first performance: "Everybody tells me we are going to have good audiences. My play, too, in acting goes wonderfully well. The actors are all pretty sound. [Page 23]  The first Demon is a little over-violent and restless but he will improve. Lionel Johnson has done a prologue which I enclose."

That prologue, written by so Catholic and orthodox a poet, was spoken before the plays at the Ancient Concert Rooms on May 8, 1899:

The May fire once on every dreaming hill
All the fair land with burning bloom would fill;
All the fair land, at visionary night,
Gave loving glory to the Lord of Light.
Have we no leaping flames of Beltaine praise
To kindle in the joyous ancient ways;
No fire of song, of vision, of white dream,
Fit for the Master of the Heavenly Gleam;
For him who first made Ireland move in chime,
Musical from the misty dawn of time?

Ah, yes; for sacrifice this night we bring
The passion of a lost soul's triumphing;
All rich with faery airs that, wandering long,
Uncaught, here gather into Irish song;
Sweet as the old remembering winds that wail,
From hill to hill of gracious Inisfail;
Sad as the unforgetting winds that pass
Over her children in her holy grass
At home, and sleeping well upon her breast,
Where snowy Deirdre and her sorrows rest.

Come, then, and keep with us an Irish feast,
Wherein the Lord of Light and Song is priest;
Now, at this opening of the gentle May,
Watch warring passions at their storm and play;
Wrought with the flaming ecstasy of art,
Sprung from the dreaming of an Irish heart.

But alas! His call to "watch warring passions at their storm and play," was no vain one. The pamphlet, Souls for Gold, had been sent about, and sentences spoken by the demons in the play and given detached from it were quoted as Mr. Yeats' own unholy beliefs. A Cardinal who confessed he had read none of the play outside these sentences condemned it. Young men from the Catholic University were roused to come and make a protest against this "insult to their faith." There was hooting and booing in the gallery. In the end the gallery was lined with police, for an attack on the actors was feared. They, being English and ignorant of Ireland, found it hard to understand the excitement, but they went through their parts very well. There was enthusiasm for both plays, and after the first night London critics were sent over, Mr. Max Beerbohm among them, and gave a good report. Yet it was a stormy [Page 25]  beginning for our enterprise, and a rough reception for a poetic play. The only moment, I think, at which I saw Mr. Yeats really angry was at the last performance. I was sitting next him, and the play had reached the point where the stage direction says, "The Second Merchant goes out through the door and returns with the hen strangled. He flings it on the floor." The merchant came in indeed, but without the strangled hen. Mr. Yeats got up, filled with suspicions that it also might have been objected to on some unknown ground, and went round to the back of the stage. But he was given a simple explanation. The chief Demon said he had been given charge of the hen, and had hung it out of a window every night, "And this morning," he said, "when I pulled up the string, there was nothing on it at all."

But that battle was not a very real one. We have put on Countess Cathleen a good many times of late with no one speaking against it at all. And some of those young men who hissed it then are our good supporters now.

The next year English actors were again brought over to play, this time in the Gaiety Theatre. A [Page 26]  little play by Miss Milligan, The Last Feast of the Fianna was given, and Mr. Martyn's Maeve, and on alternate nights The Bending of the Bough, founded by Mr. George Moore on Mr. Martyn's Tale of a Town. They were produced on the evening of February 20, 1900. "On the evening before the production," I wrote, "Mr. Yeats gave a little address on the play, Maeve, in which he said there is a wonderful literary invention, that of Peg Inerny, the old woman in rags in the daytime, but living another and second life, a queen in the ideal world, a symbol of Ireland. The financial question touched in The Bending of the Bough was chosen, because on it all parties are united, but it means really the cause nearest to each of our hearts. The materialism of England and its vulgarity are surging up about us. It is not Shakespeare England sends us, but musical farces, not Keats and Shelley, but Titbits. A mystic friend of his had a dream in which he saw a candle whose flame was in danger of being extinguished by a rolling sea. The waves sometimes seemed to go over it and quench it, and he knew it to be his own soul and that if it was quenched, he would have lost his soul. And now our ideal [Page 27]  life is in danger from the sea of commonness about us."

The Bending of the Bough was the first play dealing with a vital Irish question that had appeared in Ireland. There was a great deal of excitement over it. My diary says: "M. is in great enthusiasm over it, says it will cause a revolution. H. says no young man can see that play and leave the house as he came into it. . . . The Gaelic League in great force sang Fainne Geal an Lae between the acts, and The Wearing of the Green in Irish! And when 'author' could not appear, there were cries of 'An Craoibhin,' and cheers were given for Hyde. The actors say they never played to so appreciative an audience, but were a little puzzled at the applause, not understanding the political allusions. The play hits so impartially all round that no one is really offended, certainly not the Nationalists and we have not heard that Unionists are either. Curiously, Maeve, which we did n't think a Nationalist play at all, has turned out to be one, the audience understanding and applauding the allegory. There is such applause at 'I am only an old woman, but I tell you that Erin will never be subdued' that [Page 28]  Lady –, who was at a performance, reported to the Castle that they had better boycott it, which they have done. G. M. is, I think, a little puzzled by his present political position, but I tell him and E. Martyn we are not working for Home Rule; we are preparing for it."

In our third year, 1901, Mr. F. R. Benson took our burden on his shoulders and gave a fine performance of Diarmuid and Grania, an heroic play by Mr. George Moore and Mr. Yeats. I wrote: "I am so glad to hear of Benson's appreciation. Anyhow, he can hardly be supposed to be on the side of incendiarism; he is so very respectable. Trinity College won't know whether to go or to stay away." Mr. Yeats wrote: "Yesterday we were rehearsing at the Gaiety. The kid Benson is to carry in his arms was wandering in and out among the stage properties. I was saying to myself, 'Here are we, a lot of intelligent people who might have been doing some sort of decent work that leaves the soul free; yet here we are, going through all sorts of trouble and annoyance for a mob that knows neither literature nor art. I might have been away, away in the country, in Italy perhaps, writing poems for my equals and my [Page 29]  betters. That kid is the only sensible creature on the stage. He knows his business and keeps to it.' At that very moment one of the actors called out, 'Look at the kid, eating the property ivy!'"

This time also we produced Casad-an-Sugan, (The Twisting of the Rope ) by the founder of the Gaelic League, Dr. Douglas Hyde. He himself acted the chief part in it and even to those who had no Irish, the performance was a delight, it was played with so much gaiety, ease, and charm. It was the first time a play written in Irish had ever been see in a Dublin theatre.

Our three years' experiment had ended, and we hesitated what to do next. But a breaking and rebuilding is often for the best, and so it was now. We had up to this time, as I have said, played only once a year, and had engaged actors from London, some of them Irish certainly, but all London-trained. The time had come to play oftener and to train actors of our own. For Mr. Yeats had never ceased attacking the methods of the ordinary theatre, in gesture, in staging, and in the speaking of verse. It happened there were two brothers living in Dublin, William and Frank Fay, who [Page 30]  had been in the habit of playing little farces in coffee palaces and such like in their spare time. William had a genius for comedy, Frank's ambitions were for the production of verse. They, or one of them, had thought of looking for work in America, but had seen our performances, and thought something might be done in the way of creating a school of acting in Ireland. They came to us at this time and talked matters over. They had work to do in the daytime and could only rehearse at night. The result was that Mr. Yeats gave his Kathleen ni Houlihan to be produced by Mr. Fay at the same time as a play by Mr. George Russell (A.E.), in St. Theresa's Hall, Clarendon Street. I had written to Mr. Yeats: "If all breaks up, we must try and settle something with Fay, possibly a week of the little plays he has been doing through the spring. I have a sketch in my head that might do for Hyde to work on. I will see if it is too slight when I have noted it down, and if not, will send it to you."

Early, in 1902, Mr. Russell wrote to me: "I have finished Deirdre at last. Heaven be praised! in the intervals of railway journeys, and the Fays are going to do their best with it. I hope I shall [Page 31]  not suffer too much in the process, but I prefer them to English actors as they are in love with their story." A little hall in Camden Street was hired for rehearsal, Mr. Russell writing in the same year: "I will hand cheque to Fay. I know it will be a great assistance to them as the little hall will require alterations and fittings and as none of the Company are in possession of more than artisan's wages. They have elected W. B. Y. as president of the Irish National Dramatic Society, and A. E. as vice-president, and we are the gilding at the prow of the vessel. They have begun work already and are reading and rehearsing drama for the autumn."

Mr. Fay was very hopeful and full of courage. He wrote in December, 1902: "I have received your letter and parcel. I am not doing this show on a large scale as I am leaving The Hour-glass off till the middle of January. . . . I am just giving a show of The Pot of Broth, The Foundations, and Elis and the Beggarman, and I 'm not making a fuss about it, as I want to try how many people the hall will hold, and what prices suit best, so it is more or less an experimental show and then, about the middle of January, I will do the first [Page 32]  real show with The Hour-glass as principal feature. The hall took a great deal of work to get right, and as we had to do all the work ourselves, we had very little time to rehearse." And he says later: "I received your kind note, also enclosures, for which we are very much obliged. We are indeed getting into very flourishing conditions, and if things only continue in the present state, I have no doubt we shall be able to show a fairly good balance at the end of the year. I have all but concluded an arrangement with a branch of the Gaelic League to take our hall for three nights a week, and that will leave us under very small rental if it comes off. About the performance and how it worked out. I spent twenty-five shillings on printing, etc., and we took altogether about four pounds fifteen shillings, so I see no reason to complain financially. But I find the stage very small, and the want of dressing-rooms makes it very difficult to manage about the scenery, as all your actors have to stand against the walls while it is being changed. I think, however, we can struggle through if we don't attempt very large pieces. The hall was rather cold, but I think I can manage a stove and get over that." [Page 33] 

That show of The Hour-glass went well, and in that year–1903–two of Mr. Yeats's verse plays were produced, The King's Threshold and Shadowy Waters. In that year also, new names came in, my own with Twenty-five, Mr. Padraic Colum's with Broken Soil, and that of J. M. Synge with The Shadow of the Glen. I wrote to Mr. Yeats, who was then in America: "After Shadow of the Glen your sisters and Synge came in and had some supper with me. Your sister had asked one of her work girls how she liked Synge's comedy, and she said, 'Oh, very well. I had been thinking of writing a story on that subject myself.' They asked quite a little girl if she thought the girl in Colum's play ought to have stayed with her lover or gone with her father. 'She was right to go with her father.' 'Why?' 'Because her young man had such a big beard.' 'But he might have cut it off.' 'That would be no good. He was so dark he would look blue if he did that.' Saturday night brought a larger audience and all went well. The few I knew, Harvey, etc., were quite astonished at the beauty of Shadowy Waters, and some giggling young men behind were hushed almost at once, and I heard them saying afterwards how [Page 34]  beautiful it was. I should like to hear it once a week through the whole year. The only vexing part was Aibric's helmet, which has immense horns. A black shadow of these was thrown down, and when Aibric moved, one got the impression there was a he-goat going to butt at him over the side of the ship." And again from Coole: "Synge wrote asking me if I could provide four red petticoats, Aran men's caps, a spinning-wheel, and some Connacht person in Dublin who will teach the players to keen. The last item is the most difficult. All the actors want pampooties (the cowskin shoes worn by the Aran people), though I warned them the smell is rather overpowering. Tell Mr. Quinn what a great comfort his money is for such things as these, upon which the company might think they ought not to spend their little capital, and Synge would have been unhappy without." Through the nuns at Gort I heard of a spinning-wheel in a cottage some way off, which, though it had been in her family over a hundred years, the owner wanted to sell. A cart was sent for this, and we have had it in the theatre ever since. As to the keening I found a Galway woman near Dublin who promised to [Page 35]  teach the actors. But when they arrived at her house, she found herself unable to raise the keen in her living room. They had all to go upstairs, and the secretary of the company had to lie under a sheet as the corpse. The lessons were very successful, and at the first performance in London of Riders to the Sea, the pit went away keening down the street.

Mr. Yeats said of Mr. Fay and his little company, "They did what amateurs seldom do, worked desperately." This was the beginning of a native school of acting, an Irish dramatic company.

I remember, in 1897, hearing Mr. Bernard Shaw make a speech before the Irish Literary Society in London, following a lecture on "Irish Actors of the Nineteenth Century." He very wittily extinguished the lecturer, who, he said, truly enough had enumerated the best actors and actresses and then had gone on to say they were not Irish. "As to what an Irishman is," he said, "is a complex question, for wherever he may have been born, if he has been brought up in Ireland, that is quite sufficient to make him an Irishman. It is a mistake to think an Irishman has not common [Page 36]  sense. It is the Englishman who is devoid of common sense or at least has so small a portion of it that he can only apply it to the work immediately before him. That is why he is obliged to fill the rest of his horizon with the humbugs and hypocrisy that fill so large a part of English life. The Irishman has a better grasp of facts and sees them more clearly; only he fails in putting them into practice, and has a great objection to doing anything that will lead to any practical result. It is a mistake to think the Irishman has feeling; he has not; but the Englishman is full of feeling. What the Irishman has is imagination; he can imagine himself in the situation of others." Then as if afraid of making the Irish members of his audience too well pleased with themselves, he gave his summing up: "But the Irish language is an effete language and the nation is effete, and as to saying there are good Irish actors, there are not, and there won't be until the conditions in Ireland are favourable for the production of drama, and when that day comes, I hope I may be dead."

I am glad we have shown Mr. Shaw that he can be in the wrong, and I am glad he is not dead, for he has been a good friend to us. But our players [Page 37]  have proved that even the wise may be deceived. They have won much praise for themselves and have raised the dignity of Ireland, and I for one owe them very grateful thanks for the way they have made the characters in my comedies laugh and live.

In May, 1903, the Irish National Theatre Society went for the first time to London. It was hard for the actors to get away. They had their own work to do. But they asked their employers for a whole Saturday holiday. They left Dublin on Friday night, arrived in London on the Saturday morning, played in the afternoon, and again in the evening at the Queen's Gate Hall, and were back at work in Dublin on Monday morning. The plays taken were: Mr. Fred Ryan's Laying the Foundations, Mr. Yeats's Hour-glass, Pot of Broth, and Kathleen in Houlihan, and my own Twenty-five. I was not able to go but Mr. Yeats wrote to me: "London, May 4, '03. The plays were a great success. I never saw a more enthusiastic audience. I send you some papers, all that I have found notices in. When I remember the notices I have seen of literary adventures on the stage, I think them better than we could [Page 38]  have hoped. . . . I have noticed that the young men, the men of my own generation or younger, are the people who like us. It was a very distinguished audience. Blunt was there, but went after your play as he is just recovering from influenza and seems to be really ill. I thought your play went very well. Fay was charming as Christy. The game of cards is still the weak place, but with all defects, the little play has a real charm. If we could amend the cards it would be a strong play too. Lady Aberdeen, Henry James, Michael Field–who has sent me an enthusiastic letter about the acting–Mrs. Wyndham–the Chief Secretary's mother–Lord Monteagle, Mrs. Thackeray Ritchie, and I don't know how many other notables were there, and all I think were moved. The evening audience was the more Irish and Kathleen and The Pot of Broth got a great reception. The Foundations went well, indeed everything went well."

This was but the first of several London visits, and the good audience and good notices were a great encouragement. And this visit led also to the generous help given us by Miss Horniman. She took what had been the old Mechanics' Insti- [Page 39]  tute in Abbey Street, Dublin, adding to it a part of the site of the old Morgue, and by rebuilding and reconstructing turned it into what has since been known as the Abbey Theatre, giving us the free use of it together with an annual subsidy for a term of years.

Miss Horniman did all this, as she says in a former letter to Mr. Yeats, because of her "great sympathy with the artistic and dramatic aims of the Irish National Theatre Company as publicly explained by you on various occasions." She also states in that letter: "I can only afford to make a very little theatre, and it must be quite simple. You all must do the rest to make a powerful and prosperous theatre with a high artistic ideal." We have kept through many attacks and misunderstandings the high artistic ideal we set out with. Our prosperity enabled us to take over the Abbey Theatre two years ago when our Patent and subsidy came to an end. I feel sure Miss Horniman is well pleased that we have been able to show our gratitude by thus proving ourselves worthy of her great and generous gift.

But in Dublin a new theatre cannot be opened except under a Patent from the Crown. This [Page 40]  costs money even when not opposed, and if it is opposed, the question has to be argued by counsel, and witnesses have to be called in and examined as if some dangerous conspiracy were being plotted. When our Patent was applied for, the other theatres took fright and believed we might interfere with their gains, and they opposed our application, and there was delay after delay. But at last the enquiry was held before the Privy Council, and Mr. Yeats wrote on its eve: "3d August, 1904. The really important things first. This day is so hot that I have been filled with alarm lest the lake may begin to fall again and the boat be stranded high up on the bank and I be unable to try my new bait. I brought the boat up to a very shallow place the day I left. I have been running about all over the place collecting witnesses and have now quite a number. I will wire tomorrow if there is anything definite about decision. In any case I will write full particulars."

"August 4th. Final decision is postponed until Monday but the battle is won to all intents and purposes. There appears to be no difficulty about our getting a Patent for the plays of the Society. I sent you a paper with the report of

[Facing Page] 

The Abbey Theatre, Dublin
From a photograph by Keogh Bros., Ireland

[Page 41]  proceedings, – and –, did well for us; but I must say I was rather amused at their anxiety to show that they supported us not out of love for the arts but because of our use as anti-emigration agents and the like. I think I was a bad witness. Counsel did not examine me but asked me to make a statement. The result was, having expected questions and feeling myself left to wander through an immense subject, I said very little. I was disappointed at being hardly cross-examined at all. By that time I had got excited and was thirsting for everybody's blood. One barrister in cross-examining T. P. Gill, who came after me, tried to prove that Ibsen and Maeterlinck were immoral writers. He asked was it not true that a play by Maeterlinck called The Intruder had raised an immense outcry in London because of its immorality. Quite involuntarily I cried out, 'My God!' and Edward Martyn burst into a loud fit of laughter. I suppose he must have meant Monna Vanna. He also asked if the Irish National Theatre Society had not produced a play which was an attack on marriage. Somebody asked him what was the name of the play. He said it did n't matter and [Page 42]  dropped the subject. He had evidently heard some vague rumour about The Shadow of the Glen. I forgot to say that William Fay gave his evidence very well, as one would expect. He had the worst task of us all, for O'Shaughnessy, a brow-beating cross-examiner of the usual kind, fastened on to him. Fay, however, had his answer for everything."

The Patent was granted to me, "Dame Augusta Gregory," as Patentee, and in it I was amongst other things "Enjoined and commanded to gather, entertain, govern, privilege, and keep such and so many players," and not to put on the stage any "exhibition of wild beasts or dangerous performances or to allow women or children to be hung from the flies or fixed in positions from which they cannot release themselves." "It being our Royal will and pleasure that for the future our said theatre may be instrumental to the promotion of virtue and instruction of human life."

The building was not ready for us until the end of the year. Mr. Yeats wrote in August: "I have just been down to see the work on the Abbey Theatre. It is all going very quickly and the company should be able to rehearse there in a [Page 43]  month. The other day, while digging up some old rubbish in the Morgue, which is being used for dressing-rooms, they found human bones. The workmen thought they had lit on a murder, but the caretaker said, 'Oh, I remember, we lost a body about seven years ago. When the time for the inquest came, it could n't be found.'"

I remembered this when Mr. Yeats wrote to me lately from the Abbey: "The other day at a performance of Countess Cathleen one of the players stopped in the midst of his speech and it was a moment or two before he could go on. He told me afterwards his shoulder had suddenly been grasped by an invisible hand."

When the time for the opening came, I was ill and could not leave home, but had reports from him through the days before the opening. "December 24, 1904. The Company are very disappointed that you will not be up for the first night. Fay says they would all act better if you were here."

"December 20, 1904. I hear from Robert that you may get up for a little to-day. I hope you will take a long rest. I shall see about the awning for the old woman's stall to-night. Synge has a photograph, which will give us a picturesque form. [Page 44]  We changed all the lighting on Saturday, and the costumes look much better now. In any case everything looks so much better on the new stage. G. came in last night with a Boer, who went to Trinity, because, so far as I could make out, he thought he would find himself among sympathetic surroundings. He and some other young Boers, including one who is said to have killed more Englishmen at Spion Kop than anybody else, had to go to a university in Europe and chose Ireland. Finding the sort of place it is, they look at the situation with amusement and are trying to get out more men of their own sort to form a rebellious coterie. . . . I mention G., in order to say that he wants to try his hand at translating Oedipus the King for us. To-night we go on experimenting in lighting and after that will come the great problem of keeping the bottom of the trews from standing out like frilled paper at the end of a ham bone."

And finally on the very day of the opening: "December 27, '04. I am confident of a fairly good start with the plays,–the stars are quiet and fairly favourable."

Then after the first night, December 27th, [Page 45]  I had good telegrams and then a letter: "A great success in every way. The audience seemed 'heavy' through the opening dialogue–Fool and Blind man–and then it woke up, applauding for a long time after the exit of the kings. There was great enthusiasm at the end. Kathleen seemed more rebellious than I ever heard it, and – solemnly begged me to withdraw it for fear it would stir up a conspiracy and get us all into trouble. Then came your play–a success from the first. One could hardly hear for the applause. Fay was magnificent as the melancholy man. The whole play was well played all through. I don't think I really like the stone wall wings. However, I was very near and will know better to-night. I got a beautiful light effect in Baile's Strand, and the audience applauded the scene even before the play began. The cottage, too, with the misty blue outside its door is lovely. We never had such an audience or such enthusiasm. The pit clapped when I came in. Our success could not have been greater. Even – admits that your comedy [Spreading the News ], 'is undoubtedly going to be very popular.'"

We worked for several years with Mr. W. Fay [Page 46]  as producer, as manager, as chief actor. In 1903, when all his time was needed for the enterprise, we paid him enough to set him free from other work, a part coming from the earnings of the Company, a part from Mr. Yeats, and a part from myself, for we had little capital at that time, outside £50 given by our good friend Mr. John Quinn, Attorney and Counsellor in New York. But even large sums of money would have been poor payment not only for William Fay's genius and his brother's beautiful speaking of verse, but for their devotion to the aim and work of the theatre, its practical and its artistic side. But they left us early in 1908 at a time of disagreement with other members, and of discouragement. I am very sorry that they, who more than almost any others had laid the foundation of the Irish Theatre, did not wait with us for its success.

But building up an audience is a slow business when there is anything unusual in the methods or the work. Often near midnight, after the theatre had closed, I have gone round to the newspaper offices, asking as a favour that notices might be put in, for we could pay for but few advertisements and it was not always thought worth while to send [Page 47]  a critic to our plays. Often I have gone out by the stage door when the curtain was up, and come round into the auditorium by the front hall, hoping that in the dimness I might pass for a new arrival and so encourage the few scattered people in the stalls. One night there were so few in any part of the house that the players were for dismissing them and giving no performance at all. But we played after all and just after the play began, three or four priests from the country came in. A friend of theirs and of the Abbey had gone beyond the truth in telling them it was not a real theatre. They came round afterwards and told us how good they thought the work and asked the Company to come down and play in the West. Very often in the green room I have quoted the homely proverb, heard I know not where, "Grip is a good dog, but Hold Fast a better"! For there is some French blood in me that keeps my spirit up, so that I see in a letter to Mr. Yeats I am indignant at some attributions of melancholy: "I who at church last Sunday, when I heard in the Psalms 'Thou hast anointed me with the joy of gladness above my fellows', thought it must apply to me, and that some oil of the sort must have [Page 48]  kept me watertight among seas of trouble." And Mr. Yeats in his turn wrote to encourage me in some time of attacks: "Any fool can fight a winning battle, but it needs character to fight a losing one, and that should inspire us; which reminds me that I dreamed the other night that I was being hanged, but was the life and soul of the party."

For there was not always peace inside the theatre, and there came from time to time that breaking and rebuilding that is in the course of nature, and one must think all for good in the end. And so I answered some one at a time of discord, "I am myself a lover of peace so long as it is not the peace of a dead body." And to Mr. Yeats I wrote: "I am much more angry really than you are with those who have wasted so much of your time. I look on it as child-murder. Deirdre might be in existence now but for this." And to one who left us but has since returned: "I want you to sit down and read Mr. Yeats's notes in the last two numbers of Samhain and to ask yourself if the work he is doing is best worth helping or hindering. Remember, he has been for the last eight years working with his whole heart and soul for the creation, the furtherance, the perfecting, of what [Page 49]  he believes will be a great dramatic movement in Ireland. I have helped him all through, but we have lost many helpers by the way. Mr. Lecky, who had served us well in getting the law passed that made these dramatic experiments possible, publicly repudiated us because of Mr. Yeats's letter on the Queen's visit. . . . Others were lost for different reasons –, –, all of whom had been helpful in their time. Now others are dropping off. It is always sad to lose fellow-workers, but the work must go on all the same. 'No man putting his hand to the plough and drawing back is fit for the kingdom of God.' He is going on with it. I am going on with it as long as life and strength are left to me. . . . It is hard to hold one's own against those one is living amongst, I have found that; and I have found that peace comes, not from trying to please one's neighbours but in making up one's own mind what is the right path and in then keeping to it. And so God save Ireland, and believe me your sincere friend."

This now, according to my memory, is how I came to work for a National Theatre in Ireland and how that Theatre began.

[Page 50] 

CHAPTER II

THE BLESSING OF THE GENERATIONS

On the walls of the landing outside your nursery door there are pictures hanging, painted as you paint your own with water-colours, but without any blot or blur. Some are of blue hills and of streams running through brown bogs, but many of them are of young girls and of women, barefooted and wearing home-dyed clothes, knitting or carrying sheaves; or of fishermen dressed in white. All, girls and women and men alike, have gentle faces. There is no sign of the turf-smoke that dries the skin to leather. There are no lines or wrinkles to be seen. It may be faces were like that before the great famine came that changed soft bodies to skin and bone and turned villages to grazing for goats. Your great-grandfather fed his people at that time and took their sickness and died. But perhaps if that painter were living now, he would draw likenesses in the same way, [Page 51]  with the furrows and ridges left out. For he could only see gentleness like his own in whatever he had a mind to paint.

A little lower on the staircase there are pictures you do not look at now, likenesses of men not very young, who had done something that made others like to meet them and who dined together at the Grillon Club. Your grandfather is there with many of his friends; some of them became friends of mine. Here is one that wrote books, you will maybe read them bye and bye, about good men that once lived in Ireland, and how Europe learned manners, and about witches that were thrown into ponds.

Near the library door there is a drawing of an old man. He looks very tired and sad. He was shut up in prison for more years than you have lived. He could not see the lime trees blooming out or the chestnuts breaking from their husks.

That is a younger man on the other wall. There is something like a laugh in his eyes. He will live and work a long time, I hope, for the work he has done is very good. He gave you a blessing in Irish one time when I brought him to see you in your cot. [Page 52] 

Among the names on my first list of guarantors is that of Sir Frederic Burton, painter, and for many years Director of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. And this name, like that of Aubrey de Vere, brings together movements divided by half a century; for Frederic Burton had, through personal friendship with Thomas Davis, come so near to that side of the National movement of 1848 which expressed itself in writing, that he had drawn the design for the title-page of the Spirit of the Nation, that book of rebel songs and ballads. And he had known others of that time whose names have been remembered, Ferguson and Stokes and O'Curry. It would make my heart give a quicker beat to hear him say: "When I was in Aran with Petrie," or "my model for the Blind Girl at the Holy Well was Doctor Petrie's daughter," or "Davis was such a dear fellow I could refuse him nothing," or, as an apology for not having read Mitchell's wonderful Gaol Journal, "I did not like his appearance when I saw him. Davis took me to see him somewhere. He was a regular Northern and did not make a good impression on me. His skin was blotched and he had ginger-coloured hair." Though he [Page 53]  resented the rising fame of Clarence Mangan, because, as he thought, it was at the expense of Thomas Moore, "who had–though no one would class him among the great poets–mellifluous versification, exquisite choice of language, and was endowed at least with a delicate fancy approaching to imagination," the only authentic portrait of Mangan, not taken indeed from life, but after death in an hospital, was drawn by him.

He had wandered and painted in Germany and in the west of Ireland, in Connemara and in his own county of Clare, till his work at the National Gallery forced him to give up his art. But in his last days he would often speak of his early days in the West, and of country people he remembered, a girl near Maam who was a great singer, and a piper, Paddy Conneely, who was the best judge of sheep and cattle in the whole country.

He was during the Land War when I first knew him, a very strong Unionist, for his sensitive nature shrank from its harsh and violent methods, and for a while he felt that he had no longer a country to take pride in. In 1899 he wrote: ". . . I look forward with some uneasiness to the advent of Patriots from beyond sea, now American [Page 54]  citizens under the Stars and Stripes. With this outlook before it, the Government is reducing the Irish Constabulary, a most extraordinary proceeding and a quite unaccountable one except indeed on the theory that every administration is doomed to fatuity where Irish affairs have to be dealt with. For the police are the appointed guardians of civil order, and however abused or resisted, are recognised as such. But if the military have to be called out, what a handle is given to vapourers on both sides of the Irish sea! And what about the dismissed Constables? Will they not be thrown into the ranks of the Patriots?"

And in 1895 he had written, refusing an invitation to dine with me–I cannot remember who I said was coming, but he expressed this regret: "Especially as I enjoy meeting Sir A. and Lady Clay, and should have liked to see a bird so rare as an honest Nationalist." Yet he kept a spirit of independence that was akin to rebellion, even through those years of official position and pleasant London dinners, and friendships, and the Athenæum Club.

During the years after the death in 1892 of my husband, who had been a trustee of the National [Page 55]  Gallery, and Sir Frederic's death in 1900, our friendship became a close one. Our talk turned very often from pictures and Italy to Ireland. In 1897 I published Mr. Gregory's Letter-box, a political history of the years between 1812 and 1830, taken from letters to and by my husband's grandfather, then Under-Secretary for Ireland. Sir Frederic was much pleased with the book. He came to see me when he had read it and said: "I am glad you have come down on the real culprit, George III.," and quoted one or two people who had said his obstinacy was the cause of so many of Ireland's troubles. But after a little he said very gravely: "I see a tendency to Home Rule on your own part." I said, "I defy any one to study Irish History without getting a dislike and distrust of England." He was silent for a time and then said, "That is my feeling," and told me how patriotic he had been as a boy though disliking "O'Connell and his gang." Later he accused me of having become "A red hot Nationalist," and said I had no Irish blood, but I convinced him I had, both Irish and French.

He was as angry at the time of the Boer War as any Mayo ballad-singer or Connacht Ranger's [Page 56]  wife. "According to the doctor I am better, but really this war is killing me. It is the worst affair I recollect. It is utterly inglorious. . . . I grieve particularly for our brave Irishmen whose lives have been squandered to no purpose." He was to the end a Unionist, so far as his political doctrine went, but I think his rooted passion for Ireland increased, and made, as such strong passions are used to do, all politics seem but accidental, transitory, a business that is outside the heart of life.

The language movement, of which I was able to bring him news, began to excite him. One day I found him "excited and incredulous at Atkinson's evidence against the Irish language, in which he says all Irish books are filthy and all folk-lore is at bottom abominable." And then he got, "on your recommendation and Doctor Hyde's reputation as a scholar" the History of Irish Literature and wrote: "I am reading Dr. Hyde's Literary History with the greatest interest. It is a high pleasure to find the matter he deals with treated by a true scholar and in a reasonable and philosophic spirit. But indeed the advance in this respect since my earlier days is marvellous. At [Page 57]  that time the comparative method was hardly, if at all, thought of. Rabid Irishmen, who often did n't know their own language but at second hand, and knew no other tongue at all, spouted the rankest absurdities. Now true light has been let in and Irish history, archæology, literature, and poetry are the gainers. Let us not grudge to the Germans their meed of honour in having led the way." And again: "I should be exceedingly sorry if the Irish language died out of men's mouths altogether. I look upon the loss of a language or even a dialect as equivalent to the extirpation of a species in natural history. . . . " Then, in 1899: "Those addresses of Dr. Hyde and Mr. Yeats are very interesting and, I would fain hope, may find a response in the hearts of the people who heard them. The subject is one full of sadness. Self-respect, a decaying language, a dying music, how shall they be resuscitated! I could weep when I recollect how full Munster, Connacht, and even Ulster were in my earlier days of exquisite native music–when in fact among the peasantry and the Irish of the towns you heard no other; when the man at the plough-tail had his peculiar 'whistle,' strange, wild, and [Page 58]  full of melody and rhythm. All this must now have passed away irrevocably. May the language have a better chance! I cannot tell you how much Doctor Hyde's book has moved me. Principally it is a manful effort."

When I was again in London, he showed me the Literary History close at hand and asked me a little nervously what was Douglas Hyde's age. My answer, or surmise, pleased him, and he said: "Then he will be able to work for a long time." Once or twice, when we went on to talk of other things, he came back to this and said, "I am so glad he is a young man."

He was jealous for the honour of Ireland even in lesser things. He was very much interested in the beginning of our theatre. In 1899 he writes: "I am happy to sign the guarantee form for the coming year, and enclose it. You are a dreamy lot in Erin. As you say, I think the quality comes from the atmosphere. Here there is more of the opposite than suits me, but I dream still, as I have done all my lifetime. I trust there will be no shindy at the performance of Countess Cathleen. But if not, our compatriots will have been for once untrue to themselves!" [Page 59]  And later: "I am sincerely glad the experiment was on the whole successful and that those who intended mischief after all made but a poor effort to inflict it. . . . Altogether it appears as if the old palmy days of Dublin independent appreciation of the drama were about to be revived in our altered times. I congratulate Mr. Yeats on the success of the drama as an acting piece, and in everything except – –'s beautiful Irish hyperbole. I recollect an account of a concert given at Clonmel several years ago, in which the eloquent local journalist said of one of the amateur lady singers, after the loftiest eulogy, 'but it was in her last song that Miss – – gave the coup de grace to her performance. '"

He cared very much for Mr. Yeats's work, but I could never persuade him to come and meet him. He always made some excuse. At last he made a promise for one afternoon, but, in place of coming, he wrote, saying he was half ashamed to confess to so much enthusiasm, but he was so much under the spell of the poems that he was afraid that, in meeting the writer, the spell might be broken. He told me when next I saw him that of the poets he had known the [Page 60]  only ones that did not disappoint him were William Morris and Rossetti. "Swinburne was excitable; Tennyson was grumpy and posing; Browning was charming as a friend, but not fulfilling my idea of what a poet should be." But I did bring them together in the end, and he thanked me later and confessed my faith had been justified.

In 1900, during his last illness, I was often with him. I had been away in Dublin for our plays and I find a note written after my return to London: "Went to see Sir F. He is in bed, and I fear, or indeed must hope, the end is very near. . . . I went up to see him. He was clear but drowsy, at first a little inarticulate, but when I got up to go, he held my hand a long time, speaking with great kindness . . . asked for Robert, and how the plays had gone. I told him of them, and of the Times notice of Maeve, saying its idealism had been so well received by an Irish audience, and of the notice on the same page telling that Tess in London had been jeered at by an audience who found it too serious. He said: 'That is just what one would expect.' He asked if Robert had been abroad yet, and I said no, he was so fond of Ireland he had not cared [Page 61]  to go until now, and that I myself found every year an increased delight and happiness in Ireland. He said, 'It is so with me. My best joys have been connected with Ireland.' Then he spoke of Celtic influence in English literature and said, 'There will some day be a great Pan-Celtic Empire.' And so we parted."

I am glad that he who had been even a little moved by that stir in the mind, that rush of revolutionary energy that moved the poets and patriots and rebels of '48, should after half a hundred years have been stirred by the intellectual energy that came with a new generation, as its imagination turned for a while from the Parliament where all was to have been set right, after the break in the Irish party and after Parnell's death.

"I enclose you a guarantee paper filled up for such a sum as I can afford (or perhaps more) to lose, but I hope there will be no loss for anybody in the matter, while there will certainly be some gain to Ireland! I 'd have answered sooner but that I am suffering from a horrible form of dyspepsia, with exceptional langour." It is no wonder if the old man who sent with this his promise for [Page 62]  twenty shillings was somewhat broken in health. He was the last of the Fenian triumvirate,–Kickham, Luby, O'Leary,–and he had come back to Dublin after fifteen year of banishment and five of penal servitude at Portland. John O'Leary had been turning over books on the stalls by the Seine in Paris, when one day somebody had come to him and asked him to come back to Ireland where a rising was being planned, and he had come.

A part of the romance of my early days had been the whispered rumours of servants, and the overheard talk of my elders, of the threatened rising of the Fenians:

"An army of Papists grim
"With a green flag o'er them.
"Red coats and black police
"Flying before them."

The house of Roxborough, my old home, had once been attacked by Whiteboys. My father had defended it, firing from the windows, and it was not hard to believe that another attack might be made. It seemed a good occasion for being allowed to learn to shoot with my brothers, but that was in those days not thought fitting, even in self-defence, for a girl, and my gun was [Page 63]  never loaded with anything more weighty than a coppercap. So when this new business of the theatre brought me to meet, amongst many others till then unknown, John O'Leary, I remembered those old days and the excitement of a Fenian's escape–might he not be in hiding in our own woods or hay-lofts? And I wondered to find that not only Nationalists admired and respected so wild and dangerous a rebel. So I asked Mr. Yeats to tell me the reason, for he had known him well and had even shared a lodging with him for a while; so that his friends would say: "You have the advantage over us. O'Leary takes so long to convert to any new thing, and you can begin with him at breakfast." And he wrote to me: "When John O'Leary returned from exile, he found himself in the midst of a movement which inherited the methods of O'Connell and a measure of his success. Journalists and politicians were alike in his eyes untruthful men, thinking that any means that brought the end were justified, and for that reason certain, as he thought, to miss the end desired. The root of all was, though I doubt if he put the thought into words, that journalists and politicians looked for [Page 64]  their judges among their inferiors, and assumed those opinions and passions that moved the largest number of men. Their school is still dominant, and John O'Leary had seen through half his life, as we have seen, men coarsening their thought and their manners, and exaggerating their emotions in a daily and weekly press that was like the reverie of an hysterical woman. He was not of O'Connell's household. His master had been Davis, and he was quick to discover and condemn the man who sought for judgment not among his equals or in himself. He saw, as no one else in modern Ireland has seen, that men who make this choice are long unpopular, all through their lives it may be, but grow in sense and courage with their years, and have the most gazers even in the end.

"Yet he was not unjust to those who went the other way. He imputed to them no bad motives, for I have heard him say of a man that he distrusted, 'He would not sacrifice himself but he would risk himself,' and of a man who seemed to him to appeal always to low motives, the chief mischief-maker of his kind, 'He would sacrifice himself.' Yet, what he himself commended with [Page 65]  his favourite word 'morale ' was the opposite of that sudden emotional self-sacrifice, the spurious heroism of popular movements, being life-long hardness and serenity, a choice made every day anew. He thought but little of opinions, even those he had sacrificed so much for, and I have heard him say, 'There was never cause so bad that it has not been defended by good men for good reasons.' And of Samuel Ferguson, poet and antiquarian, who was not of his party or any Nationalist party, 'He has been a better patriot than I.' He knew that in the end, whatever else had temporary use, it was simple things that mattered, the things a child can understand, a man's courage and his generosity.

"I do not doubt that his prison life had been hard enough, but he would not complain, having been in 'the hands of his enemies'; and he would often tell one of that life, but not of its hardships. A famous popular leader of that time, who made a great noise because he was in prison as a common felon for a political offence, made him very angry. I said 'It is well known that he has done this, not because he shrinks from hardship but because there is a danger in a popular movement that the [Page 66]  obscure men who can alone carry it to success, may say, "our leaders are treated differently."' He answered, 'There are things a man must not do, even to save a nation.' And when I asked 'What things?' he said, 'He must not weep in public.' He knew that a doctrine expediency cries out on would have but few to follow, and he would say, 'Michael Davitt wants his converts by the thousand. I shall be satisfied with half a dozen.' Most complained of his impracticability, and there was a saying that an angel could not find a course of action he would not discover a moral flaw in, and it is probable that his long imprisonment and exile, while heightening his sense of ideal law, had deprived him of initiative by taking away its opportunities. He would often complain that the young men would not follow him, and I once said, 'Your power is that they do not. We can do nothing till we have converted you; you are our conscience.' Yet he lived long enough to see the young men grow to middle life and assume like their fathers before them that a good Irishman is he who agreed with the people. Yet we, when we withstand the people, owe it to him that we can feel we have [Page 67]  behind us an Irish tradition. 'My religion,' he would say, 'is the old Persian one, "To pull the bow and speak the truth. " '

"I do not know whether he would have liked our unpopular plays, but I cannot imagine him growing excited because he thought them slanders upon Ireland. O'Connell had called the Irish peasantry the finest peasantry upon earth, and his heirs found it impossible to separate patriotism and flattery. Again and again John O'Leary would return to this, and I have heard him say, 'I think it probable that the English national character is finer than ours, but that does not make me want to be an Englishman.' I have often heard him defend Ireland against one charge or another, and he was full of knowledge, but the patriotism he had sacrificed so much for marred neither his justice nor his scholarship.

"He disapproved of much of Parnell's policy, but Parnell was the only man in Irish public life of his day who had his sympathy, and I remember hearing some one say in those days before the split that are growing vague to me, that Parnell never came to Dublin without seeing him. They were perhaps alike in some hidden root of character [Page 68]  though the one had lived a life of power and excitement, while the other had been driven into contemplation by circumstance and as I think by nature. Certainly they were both proud men."

He was, when I knew him, living in a little room, books all around him and books in heaps upon the floor. I would send him sometimes snipe or golden plover from Kiltartan bog or woodcock from the hazel woods at Coole, hoping to tempt him with something that might better nourish the worn body than the little custard pudding that was used to serve him for his two days' dinner, because of that "horrible dyspepsia" that often makes those who have been long in prison live starving after their release, mocked with the sight of food.

It was through reading Davis's poems he had become a Nationalist, and his own influence had helped to shape this other poet in the same fashion, for from the time of Yeats's boyhood there had been a close friendship between them, the old man admiring the young man's genius, and taking his side in the quarrels that arose about patriotism in poetry and the like. I remember their both dining with me one evening in London and coming [Page 69]  on to see a very poor play, very badly acted by some Irish society. At its end Yeats was asked to say some words of gratitude for the performance, during which we had all felt impatient and vexed. He did speak at some length, and held his audience, and without telling any untruth left them feeling that all had gone well. John O'Leary turned to me and said fervently, "I don't think there is anything on God's earth that Willie Yeats could not make a speech about!"

There is a bust of John O'Leary in the Municipal Gallery. The grand lines of the massive head, the eyes full of smouldering fire, might be those of some ancient prophet understanding his people's doom.

There is nothing of storm or unrest about that other Dublin monument, that bronze figure sitting tranquilly within the gates of Trinity College and within its quadrangle. Lecky was the reasoner, the philosopher, the looker-on, writing his histories, even of Ireland, through the uproar of the Land War with the same detachment as did the Four Masters, writing their older history amongst the wars and burnings of the [Page 70]  seventeenth century that were so terrible in Ireland.

He had been a debater while an undergraduate of Trinity, and it was fitting that he should have represented it in Parliament during his last years.

Trinity, where Wolfe Tone had been an undergraduate a hundred years earlier had changed in that hundred years. I was in Paris in 1900 and went to see an old acquaintance, that most imaginative archæologist, Salomon Reinach. He told me he had been lately to Ireland and he had been astonished by two things, the ignorance of the Irish language–it was not known even by the head of the Dublin Museum or the head of its archæological side–and by the hostility of Trinity College to all things Irish. "It is an English fort, nothing else." "Its garrison," the students, had gone out and broken the windows of a newspaper office while he was there, and he had spent an evening with Doctor Mahaffy, who was "much astonished that I was no longer taken up with Greek things, and that I found Irish antiquity so much more interesting."

I have already told of Lecky's help to our theatre. He had a real affection for his country, [Page 71]  but was not prone to join societies or leagues. He had given us his name as one of our first guarantors, offering £5 instead of the £1 I had asked. But he publicly withdrew his name later, without his usual reasonableness, because of letters written by Mr. Yeats and Mr. George Moore at the time of Queen Victoria's visit to Dublin. This had been announced as a private visit, and Nationalists had promised a welcome. Then it was turned into a public one, and there was a good deal of angry feeling, and it seemed as if the theatre–although quite outside politics–would suffer for a while. Though Mr. Yeats, wrote: "I don't think you need be anxious about next year's theatre. Clever Unionists will take us on our merits, and the rest would never like us at any time. I have found a greatly increased friendliness on the part of some of the younger men here. In a battle like Ireland's, which is one of poverty against wealth, one must prove one's sincerity by making oneself unpopular to wealth. One must accept the baptism of the gutter. Have not all teachers done the like?" I answered that I preferred the baptism of clean water. I was troubled by the misunderstanding of friends. [Page 72] 

Trinity College is not keeping aloof now, and as to Mr. Lecky himself, the House of Commons took away some prejudices. He spoke to me of Mr. John Redmond and his leadership with great admiration and esteem. I find a note written after a pleasant dinner with him and Mrs. Lecky in Onslow Gardens: "He grieved over the exaggerated statements of the financial reformers. I pressed Land Purchase as the solution of our trouble, but he says what is true, 'It means changing every hundred pounds into seventy.' Talking of Robert's future, he said, 'It is a great thing to have a competence behind one.' He said he had been brought up for the Church, but found he could not enter it, and went abroad and drifted, never thinking he would marry, and leading a solitary life, and so took to letters and succeeded. He thinks Parliament lessens one's interest in political questions,–so much connected with them is of no value, and there is so much empty noise."

I often heard of his speaking well and even boasting of our Theatre and its work, but though he often came to see me, he would not quite give up fault-finding. "Dined at Lecky's; he rather cross. [Page 73]  He took me down to dinner and said first thing, 'What silly speeches your Celtic people have been making.' 'Moore?' I asked. 'Yes, and Yeats. Oh, very silly!' He is in bad humour because Blackrock, which he has known, and known to speak English all his life, has sent him a copy of resolutions in favour of the revival of Irish. In revenge I told him how a Deputy Lieutenant (Edward Martyn) was proclaiming himself a convert to Nationalism through reading his Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland. But that book, he used to say, had been a long time in influencing anybody, for of its first edition only thirty copies had been sold."

He forgave us all after a while, used to come and ask for news whenever I had come to London from home, and told me quite proudly after a visit to Oxford that the undergraduates there accepted no living poet but Yeats. But to the last he would say to me plaintively on parting, "Do not do anything incendiary when you go back to Ireland."

My first meeting with Douglas Hyde had been when he came in one day with a broken bicycle during lunch at my neighbour Mr. Martyn's house [Page 74]  where I was staying. He had been coming by train, but had got out at a village, Craughwell (as I myself did a good while afterwards on the same errand), in search of memories of Raftery, the Connacht poet. I had my own pony carriage with me, and that afternoon I drove to the Round Tower and the seven churches of Kilmacduagh, taking with me Douglas Hyde and Mr. William Sharp, whom I even then suspected of being "Fiona Macleod." Mr. Sharp–not by my invitation–took the place beside me, and left the back seat for the poet-dramatist, the founder of the Gaelic League of Ireland.

He often came to stay with me and my son at Coole after that. The first time was in winter, for a shooting party. Some old ladies–our neighbours–asked our keeper who our party was, and on hearing that one was a gentleman who spoke to the beaters in Irish, they said, "he can not be a gentleman if he speaks Irish." With all his culture and learning, his delight was in talking with the people and hearing their poems and fragments of the legends. I remember one day, he went into a thatched cottage to change his boots after shooting snipe on Kilmacduagh bog, [Page 75]  and talked with an old woman who had not much English and who welcomed him when he spoke in her own tongue. But when she heard he was from Mayo, looked down on by dwellers in Galway, she laughed very much and repeated a line of a song in Irish which runs:

"There'll be boots on me yet, says the man from the county Mayo!"

Near Kilmacduagh also he was told a long story, having Aristotle for its hero. Sometimes he was less lucky. I brought an old man to see him, I was sure could give him stories. But he only told one of a beggar who went to Castle –, a neighbouring house, the master of which had given him a half-penny, saying, "that is for my father's and mother's soul." "And the beggar added another half-penny to it, and laid it down on the step, and, 'There's a half-penny for my father's soul and a half-penny for my mother's, and I would n't go to the meanness of putting them both in one.'"

He has done his work by methods of peace, by keeping quarrels out of his life, with all but entire success. I find in a letter to Mr. Yeats: "I will send you Claideam that you may see some [Page 76]  of the attacks by recalcitrant Gaelic Leaguers on the Craoibhin. Well, I am sorry, but if he can't keep from making enemies, what chance is there for the like of us?"

He was one of the vice-presidents of our Society for a while and we are always grateful to him for that Twisting of the Rope in which he played with so much gaiety, ease, and charm. But in founding the Gaelic League, he had done far more than that for our work. It was a movement for keeping the Irish language a spoken one, with, as a chief end, the preserving of our own nationality. That does not sound like the beginning of a revolution, yet it was one. It was the discovery, the disclosure of the folk-learning, the folk-poetry, the folk-tradition. Our Theatre was caught into that current, and it is that current, as I believe, that has brought it on its triumphant way. It is chiefly known now as a folk-theatre. It has not only the great mass of primitive material and legend to draw on, but it has been made a living thing by the excitement of that discovery. All our writers, Mr. Yeats himself, were influenced by it. Mr. Synge found what he had lacked before–fable, emotion, style. Writing of him I have [Page 77]  said "He tells what he owes to that collaboration with the people, and for all the attacks, he has given back to them what they will one day thank him for. . . . The return to the people, the reunion after separation, the taking and giving, is it not the perfect circle, the way of nature, the eternal wedding-ring?"

[Page 78] 

CHAPTER III

PLAY-WRITING

WHEN we first planned our Theatre, there were very few plays to choose from, but our faith had no bounds and as the Irish proverb says, "When the time comes, the child comes."

The plays that I have cared for most all through, and for love of which I took up this work, are those verse ones by Mr. Yeats The Countess Cathleen with which we began, The Shadowy Waters, The King's Threshold, and the rest. They have sometimes seemed to go out of sight because the prose plays are easier to put on and to take from place to place; yet they will always be, if I have my way, a part of our year's work. I feel verse is more than any prose can be, the apex of the flame, the point of the diamond. The well-to-do people in our stalls sometimes say, "We have had enough of verse plays, give us comedy." But the people in the sixpenny places do not say they get too much of [Page 79]  them, and the players themselves work in them with delight. I wrote to Mr. Yeats when On Baile's Strand was being rehearsed: "Just back from rehearsal, and cheered up on the whole. The Molière goes very well, and will be quite safe when the two servants have been given a little business. Synge says it was quite different tonight. They all waked up in honour of me. As to Baile's Strand, it will be splendid. . . . The only real blot at present is the song, and it is very bad. The three women repeat it together. Their voices don't go together. One gets nervous listening for the separate ones. No one knows how you wish it done. Every one thinks the words ought to be heard. I got Miss Allgood to speak it alone, and that was beautiful, and we thought if it did n't delay the action too long, she might speak it, and at the end she and the others might sing or hum some lines of it to a definite tune. If you can quite decide what should be done, you can send directions, but if you are doubtful, I almost think you must come over. You must n't risk spoiling the piece. It is quite beautiful. W. Fay most enthusiastic, says you are a wonderful man, and keeps repeating lines. He says, [Page 80]  'There is nothing like that being written in London.'"

But the listeners, and this especially when they are lovers of verse, have to give so close an attention to the lines, even when given their proper value and rhythm as by our players, that ear and mind crave ease and unbending, and so comedies were needed to give this rest. That is why I began writing them, and it is still my pride when one is thought worthy to be given in the one evening with the poetic work.

I began by writing bits of dialogue, when wanted. Mr. Yeats used to dictate parts of Diarmuid and Grania to me, and I would suggest a sentence here and there. Then I, as well as another, helped to fill spaces in Where There is Nothing. Mr. Yeats says in dedicating it to me: "I offer you a book which is in part your own. Some months ago, when our Irish dramatic movement took its present form, I saw that somebody must write a number of plays in prose if it was to have a good start. I did not know what to do, although I had my dramatic fables ready and a pretty full sketch of one play, for my eyes were troubling me, and I thought I could do nothing but verse, which one can carry

[Facing Page] 

Miss Sara Allgood
From a drawing by Robert Gregory

[Page 81]  about in one's head for a long time, and write down, as De Musset put it, with a burnt match. You said I might dictate to you, and we worked in the mornings at Coole, and I never did anything that went so easily and quickly; for when I hesitated you had the right thought ready and it was almost always you who gave the right turn to the phrase and gave it the ring of daily life. We finished several plays, of which this is the longest, in so few weeks that if I were to say how few, I do not think anybody would believe me."

Where There is Nothing was given by the Stage Society in London, but Mr. Yeats was not satisfied with it, and we have since re-written it as The Unicorn from the Stars. Yet it went well and was vital. It led to an unexpected result: "I hear that some man of a fairly respectable class was taken up with a lot of tinkers somewhere in Munster, and that the Magistrate compared him to 'Paul Ruttledge.' The next night one of the tinkers seems to have said something to the others about their being in a book. The others resented this in some way, and there was a fight, which brought them all into Court again. I am trying to get the papers." [Page 82] 

Later in the year we wrote together Kathleen ni Houlihan and to that he wrote an introductory letter addressed to me: "One night I had a dream almost as distinct as a vision, of a cottage where there was well-being and firelight and talk of a marriage, and into the midst of that cottage there came an old woman in a long cloak. She was Ireland herself, that Kathleen ni Houlihan for whom so many songs have been sung and for whose sake so many have gone to their death. I thought if I could write this out as a little play, I could make others see my dream as I had seen it, but I could not get down from that high window of dramatic verse, and in spite of all you had done for me, I had not the country speech. One has to live among the people, like you, of whom an old man said in my hearing, 'She has been a serving maid among us,' before one can think the thoughts of the people and speak with their tongue. We turned my dream into the little play, Kathleen ni Houlihan, and when we gave it to the little theatre in Dublin and found that the working people liked it, you helped me to put my other dramatic fables into speech."

For The Pot of Broth also I wrote dialogue and [Page 83]  I worked as well at the plot and the construction of some of the poetic plays, especially The King's Threshold and Deirdre; for I had learned by this time a good deal about play-writing to which I had never given thought before. I had never cared much for the stage, although when living a good deal in London, my husband and I went, as others do, to see some of each season's plays. I find, in looking over an old diary, that many of these have quite passed from my mind, although books I read ever so long ago, novels and the like, have left at least some faint trace by which I may recognise them.

We thought at our first start it would make the whole movement more living and bring it closer to the people if the Gaelic League would put on some plays written in Irish. Dr. Hyde thought well of the idea, and while staying here at Coole, as he did from time to time, he wrote The Twisting of the Rope, based on one of Mr. Yeats's Hanrahan stories; The Lost Saint on a legend given its shape by Mr. Yeats, and The Nativity on a scenario we wrote together for him. Afterwards he wrote The Marriage and The Poorhouse, upon in each case a scenario written by me. I betray no [Page 84]  secret in telling this, for Dr. Hyde has made none of the collaboration, giving perhaps too generous acknowledgment, as in Galway, where he said, when called before the curtain after The Marriage, that the play was not his but that Lady Gregory had written it and brought it to him, saying "Cur Gaedilge air," "Put Irish on it." I find in a letter of mine to Mr. Yeats: "Thanks for sending back Raftery. I haven't sent it to Hyde yet. The real story was that Raftery by chance went into a house where such a wedding was taking place 'that was only a marriage and not a wedding' and where there was 'nothing but a herring for the dinner,' and he made a song about it and about all the imaginary grand doings at it that has been remembered ever since. But it didn't bring any practical good to the young people, for Raftery himself 'had to go to bed in the end without as much as a drop to drink, but he did n't mind that, where they had n't it to give. '"

But it went through some changes after that: "I have a letter from the Craoibhin. He has lost his Trinity College play and must re-write it from my translation. He is not quite satisfied with [Page 85]  Raftery (The Marriage ). 'I don't think Maire's uncertainty if it be a ghost or not is effective on the stage. I would rather have the ghost "out and out" as early as possible, and make it clear to the audience.' I rather agree with him. I think I will restore the voice at the door in my published version."

And again I wrote from Galway: "I came here yesterday for a few days' change, but the journey, or the little extra trouble at leaving, set my head aching, and I had to spend all yesterday in a dark room. In the evening, when the pain began to go, I began to think of the Raftery play, and I want to know if this end would do. After the miser goes out, Raftery stands up and says, 'I won't be the only one in the house to give no present to the woman of the house, ' and hands her the plate of money, telling them to count it. While they are all gathered round counting it, he slips quietly from the door. As he goes out, wheels or horse steps are heard, and a farmer comes in and says, 'What is going on? All the carts of the country gathered at the door, and Seaghan, the Miser, going swearing down the road?' They say it is a wedding party called in by Raftery. But where [Page 86]  is Raftery? Is he gone? They ask the farmer if he met him outside the poet Raftery–and he says, 'I did not, but I stood by his grave at Killeenin yesterday.' Do you think that better? It gets rid of the good-byes and the storm, and I don't think any amount of hints convey the ghostly idea strongly enough. Let me know at once; just a word will do."

As to The Poorhouse, the idea came from a visit to Gort Workhouse one day when I heard that the wife of an old man, who had been long there, maimed by something, a knife I think, that she had thrown at him in a quarrel, had herself now been brought in to the hospital. I wondered how they would meet, as enemies or as friends, and I thought it likely they would be glad to end their days together for old sake's sake. This is how I wrote down my fable: "Scene, ward of a workhouse; two beds containing the old men; they are quarrelling. Occupants of other invisible beds are heard saying, 'There they are at it again; they are always quarrelling.' They say the matron will be coming to call for order, but another says the matron has been sent for to see somebody who wants to remove one of the paupers. [Page 87]  Both old men wish they could be removed from each other and have the whole ridge of the world between them. The fight goes on. One old man tells the other that he remembers the time he used to be stealing ducks, and he a boy at school. The other old man remembers the time his neighbour was suspected of going to Souper's school, etc., etc. They remember the crimes of each other's lives. They fight like two young whelps that go on fighting till they are two old dogs. At last they take their pillows and throw them at each other. Other paupers (invisible) cheer and applaud. Then they take their porringers, pipes, prayer-books, or whatever is in reach, to hurl at each other. They lament the hard fate that has put them in the same ward for five years and in beds next each other for the last three months, and they after being enemies the whole of their lives. Suddenly a cry that the matron is coming. They settle themselves hurriedly. Each puts his enemy's pillow under his head and lies down. The matron comes in with a countrywoman comfortably dressed. She embraces one old man. She is his sister. Her husband died from her lately and she is lonesome and does n't like to think of her [Page 88]  brother being in the workhouse. If he is bedridden itself, he would be company for her. He is delighted, asks what sort of house she has. She says, a good one, a nice kitchen, and he can be doing little jobs for her. He can be sitting in a chair beside the fire and stirring the stirabout for her and throwing a bit of food to the chickens when she is out in the field. He asks when he can go. She says she has the chance of a lift for him on a neighbour's cart. He can come at once. He says he will make no delay. A loud sob from the old man in the other bed. He says, 'Is it going away you are, you that I knew through all my lifetime, and leaving me among strangers?' The first old man asks his sister if she will bring him too. She is indignant, says she won't. First old man says maybe he 'd be foolish to go at all. How does he know if he 'd like it. She says, he is to please himself; if he does n't come, she can easily get a husband, having, as she has, a nice way of living, and three lambs going to the next market. The first man says, well, he won't go; if she would bring the other old man, he would go. She turns her back angrily. Paupers in other beds call out she'll find a good husband amongst [Page 89]  them. She pulls on her shawl scornfully to go away. She gives her brother one more chance; he says he won't go. She says good-bye and bad luck to him. She leaves. He says that man beyond would be lonesome with no one to contradict him. The other man says he would not. The first man says, 'You want some one to be arguing with you always.' The second man, 'I do not.' The first man says, 'You are at your lies again.' The second takes up his pillow to heave at him again. Curtain falls on two men arming themselves with pillows."

I intended to write the full dialogue myself, but Mr. Yeats thought a new Gaelic play more useful for the moment, and rather sadly I laid that part of the work upon Dr. Hyde. It was all for the best in the end, for the little play, when we put it on at the Abbey, did not go very well. It seemed to ravel out into loose ends, and we did not repeat it; nor did the Gaelic players like it as well as The Marriage and The Lost Saint. After a while, when the Fays had left us, I wanted a play that would be useful to them, and with Dr. Hyde's full leave I re-wrote the Poorhouse as The Workhouse Ward. I had more skill by that [Page 90]  time, and it was a complete re-writing, for the two old men in the first play had been talking at an imaginary audience of other old men in the ward. When this was done away with the dialogue became of necessity more closely knit, more direct and personal, to the great advantage of the play, although it was rejected as "too local" by the players for whom I had written it. The success of this set me to cutting down the number of parts in later plays until I wrote Grania with only three persons in it, and The Bogie Men with only two. I may have gone too far, and have, I think, given up an intention I at one time had of writing a play for a man and a scarecrow only, but one has to go on with experiment or interest in creation fades, at least so it is with me.

In 1902, my Twenty-five was staged; a rather sentimental comedy, not very amusing. It was useful at the time when we had so few, but it was weak, ending, as did for the most part the Gaelic plays that began to be written, in a piper and a dance. I tried to get rid of it afterwards by writing The Jackdaw on the same idea, but in which I make humour lay the ghost of sentiment. But Twenty-five may yet be re- [Page 91]  written and come to a little life of its own. Spreading the News was played at the opening of the Abbey Theatre, December 27, 1904. I heard it attacked at that time on the ground that Irish people never were gossips to such an extent, but it has held its own, and our audiences have had their education as well as writers and players, and know now that a play is a selection not a photograph and that the much misquoted "mirror to nature" was not used by its author or any good play-writer at all.

Perhaps I ought to have written nothing but these short comedies, but desire for experiment is like fire in the blood, and I had had from the beginning a vision of historical plays being sent by us through all the counties of Ireland. For to have a real success and to come into the life of the country, one must touch a real and eternal emotion, and history comes only next to religion in our country. And although the realism of our young writers is taking the place of fantasy and romance in the cities, I still hope to see a little season given up every year to plays on history and in sequence at the Abbey, and I think schools and colleges may ask to have them sent and played [Page 92]  in their halls, as a part of the day's lesson. I began with the daring and lightheartedness of a schoolboy to write a tragedy in three acts upon a great personality, Brian the High King. I made many bad beginnings, and if I had listened to Mr. Yeats's advice I should have given it up, but I began again and again till it was at last moulded in at least a possible shape. It went well with our audience. There was some enthusiasm for it, being the first historical play we had produced. An old farmer came up all the way from Kincora, the present Killaloe, to see it, and I heard he went away sad at the tragic ending. He said, "Brian ought not to have married that woman. He should have been content with a nice, quiet girl from his own district." For stormy treacherous Gormleith of many husbands had stirred up the battle that brought him to his death. Dervorgilla I wrote at a time when circumstances had forced us to accept an English stage-manager for the Abbey. I was very strongly against this. I felt as if I should be spoken of some day as one who had betrayed her country's trust. I wrote so vehemently and sadly to Mr. Yeats about it that he might have been moved from [Page 93]  the path of expediency, which I now think was the wise one, had the letter reached him in time, but it lay with others in the Kiltartan letter-box during a couple of weeks, Christmas time or the wintry weather giving an excuse to the mail-car driver whose duty it is to clear the box as he nightly passed it by. So he wrote: "I think we should take Vedrenne's recommendation unless we have some strong reason to the contrary. If the man is not Irish, we cannot help it. If the choice is between filling our country's stomach or enlarging its brains by importing precise knowledge, I am for scorning its stomach for the present. . . . I should have said that I told Vedrenne that good temper is essential, and he said the man he has recommended is a vegetarian and that Bernard Shaw says that vegetables are wonderful for the temper."

Mr. Synge had something of my feeling about alien management. He wrote later: "The first show of – was deplorable. It came out as a bastard literary pantomime, put on with many of the worst tricks of the English stage. That is the end of all the Samhain principles and this new tradition that we were to lay down! I felt [Page 94]  inclined to walk out of the Abbey and go back no more. The second Saturday was much less offensive. – is doing his best obviously and he may perhaps in time come to understand our methods."

To come back to play-writing, I find in a letter to Mr. Yeats. "You will be amused to hear that although, or perhaps because, I had evolved out of myself 'Mr. Quirke' as a conscious philanthropist, an old man from the workhouse told me two days ago that he had been a butcher of Quirke's sort and was quite vainglorious about it, telling me how many staggery sheep and the like he had killed, that would, if left to die, have been useless or harmful. 'But I often stuck a beast and it kicking yet and life in it, so that it could do no harm to a Christian or a dog or an animal.'" And later: "Yet another 'Mr. Quirke' has been to see me. He says there are no sick pigs now, because they are all sent off to . . . no, I must n't give the address. Has not a purgatory been imagined where writers find themselves surrounded by the characters they have created?"

The Canavans, as I say in a note to it, was [Page 95]  "written I think less by logical plan than in one of those moments of lightheartedness that, as I think, is an inheritance from my great-grandmother Frances Algoin, a moment of that 'sudden Glory, the Passion which maketh those Grimaces called Laughter.' Some call it farce, some like it the best of my comedies. This very day, October 16th, I have been sent a leaf from the examination papers of the new University, in which the passage chosen from literature to 'put Irish on' is that speech of Peter Canavan's beginning. 'Would any one now think it a thing to hang a man for, that he had striven to keep himself safe?'"

But we never realise our dreams. I think it was The Full Moon that was in the making when I wrote: "I am really getting to work on a little comedy, of which I think at present that if its feet are of clay, its high head will be of rubbed gold, and that people will stop and dance when they hear it and not know for a while the piping was from beyond the world! But no doubt if it ever gets acted, it will be 'what Lady Gregory calls a comedy and everybody else, a farce!'"

The Deliverer is a crystallising of the story, as the people tell it, of Parnell's betrayal. Only [Page 96]  yesterday some beggar from Crow Lane, the approach to Gort, told me he heard one who had been Parnell's friend speak against him at the time of the split: "He brought down O'Shea's wife on him and said he was not fit to be left at large. The people did n't like that and they hooted him and he was vexed and said he could buy up the whole of them for half a glass of porter!" I may look on The Rising of the Moon as an historical play, as my history goes, for the scene is laid in the historical time of the rising of the Fenians in the sixties. But the real fight in the play goes on in the sergeant's own mind, and so its human side makes it go as well in Oxford or London or Chicago as in Ireland itself. But Dublin Castle finds in it some smell of rebellion and has put us under punishment for its sins. When we came back from America last March, we had promised to give a performance on our first day in Dublin and The Rising of the Moon was one of the plays announced. But the stage costumes had not yet arrived, and we sent out to hire some from a depot from which the cast uniforms of the Constabulary may be lent out to the companies performing at the theatres–the Royal, the Gaiety, and the Queens. [Page 97]  But our messenger came back empty-handed. An order had been issued by the authorities that "no clothes were to be lent to the Abbey because The Rising of the Moon was derogatory to His Majesty's forces." So we changed the bill and put on the Workhouse Ward, in which happily a quilt and blanket cover any deficiency of clothes.

We wanted to put on some of Molière's plays. They seemed akin to our own. But when one translation after another was tried, it did not seem to carry, to "go across the footlights." So I tried putting one into our own Kiltartan dialect, The Doctor in Spite of Himself, and it went very well. I went on, therefore, and translated Scapin and The Miser. Our players give them with great spirit; the chief parts–Scapin, Harpagon, and Frosine–could hardly be bettered in any theatre. I confess their genius does not suit so well the sentimental and artificial young lovers.

Mr. Yeats wrote from Paris: "Dec. 19, '08, I saw two days ago a performance of Scapin at the Odeon. I really like our own better. It seemed to me that a representation so traditional in its type as that at the Odeon has got too far from life, as we see it, to give the full natural [Page 98]  pleasure of comedy. It was much more farcical than anything we have ever done. I have recorded several pieces of new business and noted costumes which were sometimes amusing. The acting was amazingly skilful and everything was expressive in the extreme. I noticed one difference between this production and ours which almost shocked me, so used am I to our own ways. There were cries of pain and real tears. Scapin cried when his master threatened him in the first act, and the old man, beaten by the supposed bully, was obviously very sore. I have always noticed that with our people there is never real suffering even in tragedy. One felt in the French comedians an undercurrent of passion–passion which our people never have. I think we give in comedy a kind of fancifulness and purity."

It is the existence of the Theatre that has created play-writing among us. Mr. Boyle had written stories, and only turned to plays when he had seen our performances in London. Mr. Colum claimed to have turned to drama for our sake, and Mr. Fitzmaurice, Mr. Ray, and Mr. Murray–a National schoolmaster–would certainly not have written but for that chance of having their [Page 99]  work acted. A. E. wrote to me: "I think the Celtic Theatre will emerge all right, for if it is not a manifest intention of the gods that there should be such a thing, why the mania for writing drama which is furiously absorbing our Irish writers?" And again almost sadly: "Would it be inconvenient for me to go to Coole on Monday next . . . ? I am laying in a stock of colours and boards for painting and hope the weather will keep up. I hear Synge is at Coole, and as an astronomer of human nature, calculating the probable effect of one heavenly body on another which is invisible, I suppose W. B. Y. is at drama again and that the summer of verse is given over."

I asked Mr. Lennox Robinson how he had begun, and he said he had seen our players in Cork, and had gone away thinking of nothing else than to write a play for us to produce. He wrote and sent us The Clancy Name. We knew nothing of him, but saw there was good stuff in the play, and sent it back with suggestions for strengthening it and getting rid of some unnecessary characters. He altered it and we put it on. Then he wrote a three-act play The Cross Roads, but after he had seen it played he took away the first act, making it [Page 100]  a far better play, for it is by seeing one's work on the stage that one learns best. Then he wrote Harvest with three strong acts, and this year Patriots, which has gone best of all.

One of our heaviest tasks had been reading the plays sent in. For some years Mr. Yeats and I read every one of these; but now a committee reports on them first and sends back those that are quite impossible with a short printed notice:

"The Reading Committee of the National Theatre Society regret to say that the enclosed play, which you kindly submitted to them, is, for various reasons, not suitable for production by the Abbey Company."

If a play is not good enough to produce, but yet shows some skill in construction or dialogue we send another printed form written by Mr. Yeats:

"ADVICE TO PLAYWRIGHTS WHO ARE SENDING PLAYS TO THE ABBEY, DUBLIN

The Abbey Theatre is a subsidised theatre with an educationaI object. It will, therefore, be useless as a rule to send it plays intended as [Page 101]  popular entertainments and that alone, or originally written for performance by some popular actor at the popular theatres. A play to be suitable for performance at the Abbey should contain some criticism of life, founded on the experience or personal observation of the writer, or some vision of life, of Irish life by preference, important from its beauty or from some excellence of style; and this intellectual quality is not more necessary to tragedy than to the gayest comedy.

"We do not desire propagandist plays, nor plays written mainly to serve some obvious moral purpose; for art seldom concerns itself with those interests or opinions that can be defended by argument, but with realities of emotion and character that become self-evident when made vivid to the imagination.

"The dramatist should also banish from his mind the thought that there are some ingredients, the love-making of the popular stage for instance, especially fitted to give dramatic pleasure; for any knot of events, where there is passionate emotion and clash of will, can be made the subject matter of a play, and the less like a play it is at the first sight the better play may come of it in [Page 102]  the end. Young writers should remember that they must get all their effects from the logical expression of their subject, and not by the addition of extraneous incidents; and that a work of art can have but one subject. A work of art, though it must have the effect of nature, is art because it is not nature, as Goethe said: and it must possess a unity unlike the accidental profusion of nature.

"The Abbey Theatre is continually sent plays which show that their writers have not understood that the attainment of this unity by what is usually a long shaping and reshaping of the plot, is the principal labour of the dramatist, and not the writing of the dialogue.

"Before sending plays of any length, writers would often save themselves some trouble by sending a 'Scenario,' or scheme of the plot, together with one completely written act and getting the opinion of the Reading Committee as to its suitability before writing the whole play.

I find a note from Mr. Yeats: "Some writer offers us a play which 'unlike those at the Abbey,' he says, is so constructed as to admit any topic [Page 103]  or a scene laid in any country. It will under the circumstances, he says, 'do good to all.' I am sending him 'Advice to Playwrights.'"

The advice was not always gratefully received. I wrote to Mr. Yeats: "Such an absurd letter in the Cork Sportsman, suggesting that you make all other dramatists rewrite their plays to hide your own idiosyncrasy!"

If a play shows real promise and a mind behind it, we write personally to the author, making criticisms and suggestions. We were accused for a while of smothering the work of young writers in order that we might produce our own, but time has done away with that libel, and we are very proud of the school of drama that has come into being through the creation of our Theatre. We were advised also to put on more popular work, work that would draw an audience for the moment from being topical, or because the author had friends in some league. But we went on giving what we thought good until it became popular. I wrote once, thinking we had yielded over much: "I am sorry –'s play has been so coldly received (a play that has since become a favourite one), but I think it is partly our own fault. It [Page 104]  would have got a better welcome a year ago. We have been humouring our audience instead of educating it, which is the work we ought to do. It is not only giving so much – and –, it is the want of good work pressed on, and I believe the want of verse, which they respect anyhow. . . . I think the pressing on of Synge's two plays the best thing we can do for this season. We have a great backing now in his reputation. In the last battle, when we cried up his genius, we were supposed to do it for our own interest. . . . I only read Gerothwohl's speech after you left, and thought that sentence most excellent about the theatre he was connected with being intended 'for art and a thinking Democracy.' It is just what we set out to do, and now we are giving in to stupidity in a