Prose also is "Diarmid and Grania," written in collaboration with Mr. George Moore and played at the last year's performance (1901) of "The Irish Literary Theatre." As this play as performed was in tone more like the writings of Mr. Moore than of Mr. Yeats, I have considered it among his plays rather than among the plays of Mr. Yeats.
His other prose play, "Where there is Nothing" (1903), is a statement of revolt against "the despotism of fact" that is perhaps as characteristic of the artist as of the Celt. The world would say that its hero, Paul Ruttledge, was mad, but no one that reads can deny him a large share of sympathy. This play was produced by the Stage Society in London in 1904. Lady Gregory having had a share in its creation, Mr. Yeats has since relinquished the theme to her; and now rewritten by her alone as "The Unicorn from the Stars," it would hardly be recognized as the same play.
His Paul Ruttledge, gentleman, becomes her Martin Hearne, coach-builder. Both are alike at the outset of their frenzy, in that they would be destroyers of Church and Law, both use tinkers as their agents of destruction, and both die despised of men. Both are "plunged in trance," but their trances differ. That of Lady Gregory's hero is cataleptic and directly productive of his revolt, from a revelation, as he thinks it is, that comes to him while he is "away." Paul Ruttledge, on the other hand, deliberately gives up his conventional life, and that as largely because of boredom as because of belief in its wrongness. One cannot, as one reads "Where there is Nothing," fail to see in its hero much of Mr. Yeats himself. He is not the professional agitator, literary or social, as was Oscar Wilde and as is Mr. Shaw, but he here delights in turning things topsy-turvy, just as they do, in a fashion that has been distinctive of the Irishman for many generations. Mr. Yeats is himself, often, like his hero, "plunged in trance," if one may call trance his "possessed dream," such as that in which "Cap and Bells" or "Cathleen ni Houlihan" came to him. The lyric came to him, he says, as a "vision," and so, too, the play. It is in the dedication to volumes I and II of "Plays for an Irish Theatre," volumes containing "Where there is Nothing," "The Hour-Glass," "Cathleen ni Houlihan," and "A Pot of Broth," that he tells us of the latter vision, and of the beginnings of that collaboration with Lady Gregory that taught her her art, and so profoundly influenced his. So informing is it that I quote it in full.
MY DEAR LADY GREGORY:—
I dedicate to you two volumes of plays that are in part your own.
When I was a boy I used to wander about at Rosses Point and Ballisodare listening to old songs and stories. I wrote down what I heard and made poems out of the stories or put them into the little chapters of the first edition of the "Celtic Twilight," and that is how I began to write in the Irish way.
Then I went to London to make my living, and though I spent a part of every year in Ireland and tried to keep the old life in my memory by reading every country tale I could find in books or old newspapers, I began to forget the true countenance of country life. The old tales were still alive for me, indeed, but with a new, strange, half-unreal life, as if in a wizard's glass until at last, when I had finished "The Secret Rose," and was halfway through "The Wind among the Reeds," a wise woman in her trance told me that my inspiration was from the moon and that I should always live close to water, for my work was getting too full of those little jewelled thoughts that come from the sun and have no nation. I have no need to turn to my books of astrology to know that the common people are under the moon, or to Porphyry to remember the image-making power of the waters. Nor did I doubt the entire truth of what she said to me, for my head was full of fables that I had no longer the knowledge and emotion to write. Then you brought me with you to see your friends in the cottages, and to talk to old wise men on Slieve Echtge, and we gathered together, or you gathered for me, a great number of stories and traditional beliefs. You taught me to understand again, and much more perfectly than before, the true countenance of country life.
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 cloak. She was Ireland herself, that Cathleen ni Houlihan for whom so many songs have been sung and about whom so many stories have been told 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 out of 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, "Cathleen 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. Some of these have already been acted, but some may not be acted for a long time; but all seem to me, though they were but part of a summer's work, to have more of that countenance of country life than anything I have done since I was a boy.
I should like also to quote in full Mr. Yeats's account of how "Where there is Nothing" passed into "The Unicorn from the Stars," as that account throws much light on the methods of collaboration that have added so greatly to the success of the dramatic movement, and that are especially valuable to beginners, whose plays, without reshaping in collaboration, might never win their way to the boards. But I have not the space for it all, and I must content myself with that portion of it in which Mr. Yeats confesses that belief of his in the rapprochement of scholar and tinker that one notes so often in Irish life. Speaking of Lady Gregory's rewriting of "Where there is Nothing" into "The Unicorn from the Stars," he says:—
Her greatest difficulty was that I had given her for chief character a man so plunged in trance that he could not be otherwise than all but still and silent, though perhaps with the stillness and the silence of a lamp; and the movement of the play as a whole, if we were to listen to hear him, had to be without hurry or violence. The strange characters, her handiwork, on whom he sheds his light, delight me. She has enabled me to carry out an old thought for which my own knowledge is insufficient and to commingle the ancient phantasies of poetry with the rough, vivid, ever-contemporaneous tumult of the roadside; to create for a moment a form that otherwise I could but dream of, though I do that always, an art that prophesies though with worn and failing voice of the day when Quixote and Sancho Panza long estranged may once again go out gaily into the bleak air. Ever since I began to write I have awaited with impatience a linking, all Europe over, of the hereditary knowledge of the countryside, now becoming known to us through the work of wanderers and men of learning, with our old lyricism so full of ancient frenzies and hereditary wisdom, a yoking of antiquities, a marriage of Heaven and Hell.