NOTE TO ARISTOTLE'S BELLOWS
I had begun to put down some notes for this play when in the autumn of 1919 I was suddenly obliged (through the illness and death of the writer who had undertaken it) to take in hand the writing of the "Life and Achievement" of my nephew Hugh Lane, and this filled my mind and kept me hard at work for a year.
When the proofs were out of my hands I turned with but a vague recollection to these notes, and was surprised to find them fuller than they had appeared in my memory, so that the idea was rekindled and the writing was soon begun. And I found a certain rest and ease of mind in having turned from a long struggle (in which, alas, I had been too often worsted) for exactitude in dates and names and in the setting down of facts, to the escape into a world of fantasy where I could create my own. And so before the winter was over the play was put in rehearsal at the Abbey Theatre, and its first performance was on St. Patrick's Day, 1921.
I have been looking at its first scenario, made according to my habit in rough pen and ink sketches, coloured with a pencil blue and red, and the changes from that early idea do not seem to have been very great, except that in the scene where Conan now hears the secret of the hiding-place of the Spell from the talk of the cats, the Bellows had been at that time left beside him by a dwarf from the rath, in his sleep. The cats work better, and I owe their success to the genius of our Stage Carpenter, Mr. Sean Barlow, whose head of the Dragon from my play of that name had been such a masterpiece that I longed to see these other enchanted heads from his hand.
The name of the play in that first scenario was "The Fault-Finder," but my cranky Conan broke from that narrowness. If the play has a moral it is given in the words of the Mother, "It's best make changes little by little, the same as you'd put clothes upon a growing child." The restlessness of the time may have found its way into Conan's mind, or as some critic wrote, "He thinks of the Bellows as Mr. Wilson thought of the League of Nations," and so his disappointment comes. As A.E. writes in "The National Being," "I am sympathetic with idealists in a hurry, but I do not think the world can be changed suddenly by some heavenly alchemy, as St. Paul was smitten by a light from the overworld. Though the heart in us cries out continually, 'Oh, hurry, hurry to the Golden Age,' though we think of revolutions, we know that the patient marshalling of human forces is wisdom.... Not by revolutions can humanity be perfected. I might quote from an old oracle, 'The gods are never so turned away from man as when he ascends to them by disorderly methods.' Our spirits may live in the Golden Age but our bodily life moves on slow feet, and needs the lantern on the path and the staff struck carefully into the darkness before us to see that the path beyond is not a morass, and the light not a will o' the wisp." (But this may not refer to our own Revolution, seeing that has been making a step now and again towards what many judged to be a will o' the wisp through over seven hundred years.)
As to the machinery of the play, the spell was first to have been worked by a harp hung up by some wandering magician, and that was to work its change according to the wind, as it blew from north or south, east or west. But that would have been troublesome in practice, and the Bellows having once entered my mind, brought there I think by some scribbling of the pencil that showed Conan protecting himself with an umbrella, seemed to have every necessary quality, economy, efficiency, convenience.
As to Aristotle, his name is a part of our folklore. The old wife of one of our labourers told me one day, as a bee buzzed through the open door: "Aristotle of the Books was very wise but the bees got the better of him in the end. He wanted to know how did they pack the comb, and he wasted the best part of a fortnight watching them, and he could not see them doing it. Then he made a hive with a glass cover on it and put it over them, and he thought to watch them. But when he went to put his eye to the glass, they had it all covered with wax so that it was as black as the pot, and he was as blind as before. He said he was never rightly killed till then. The bees had him beat that time surely." And Douglas Hyde brought home one day a story from Kilmacduagh bog, in which Aristotle took the place of Solomon, the Wise Man in our tales as well as in those of the East. And he said that as the story grew and the teller became more familiar, the name of Aristotle was shortened to that of Harry.
As to the songs they are all sung to the old Irish airs I give at the end.
A. GREGORY.
August 18, 1921.