New Comedies

by Lady Gregory

I had been meditating for a long time past on the mass of advice that is given one by friends and well-wishers and relations, advice that would be excellent if the giver were not ignorant so often of the one essential in the case, the one thing that matters. But there is usually something out of sight, of which the adviser is unaware, it may be something half mischievously hidden from him, it may be that "secret of the heart with God" that is called religion. In the whole course of our work at the theatre we have been I may say drenched with advice by friendly people who for years gave us the reasons why we did not succeed…. All their advice, or at least some of it, might have been good if we had wanted to make money, to make a common place of amusement. Our advisers did not see that what we wanted was to create for Ireland a theatre with a base of realism, with an apex of beauty. Well, last summer I made a fable for this meditation, this emotion, at the back of my mind to drive.

I pictured to myself, for I usually first see a play as a picture, a young man, a mere lad, very sleepy in the daytime. He was surrounded by people kind and wise, who lamented over his rags and idleness and assured him that if he didn't get up early and do his work in the daytime he would never know the feel of money in his hand. He listens to all their advice, but he does not take it, because he knows what they do not know, that it is in the night time precisely he is filling his pocket, in the night when, as I think, we receive gifts from the unseen. I placed him in the house of a miser, an old man who had saved a store of gold. I called the old man Damer, from a folk-story of a chandler who had bought for a song the kegs of gold the Danes had covered with tallow as a disguise when they were driven out of Ireland, and who had been rich and a miser ever after. I did not mean this old man, Damer, to appear at all. He was to be as invisible as that Heaven of which we are told the violent take it by force. My intention at first was that he should be robbed, but then I saw robbery would take too much sympathy from my young lad, and I decided the money should be won by the lesser sin of cardplaying, but still behind the scenes. Then I thought it would have a good stage effect if old Damer could just walk once across the stage in the background. His relations might have come into the house to try and make themselves agreeable to him, and he would appear and they would vanish. … Damer comes in, and contrary to my intention, he begins to find a tongue of his own. He has made his start in the world, and has more than a word to say. How that play will work out I cannot be sure, or if it will ever be finished at all. But if ever it is I am quite sure it will go as Damer wants, not as I want.

That is what I said last winter, and now in harvest time the play is all but out of my hands. But as I foretold, Damer has taken possession of it, turning it to be as simple as a folk-tale, where the innocent of the world confound the wisdom of the wise. The idea with which I set out has not indeed quite vanished, but is as if "extinct and pale; not darkness, but light that has become dead."

As to Damer's changes of mood, it happened a little time ago, when the play was roughly written, but on its present lines, that I took up a volume of Montaigne, and found in it his justification by high examples:

"Verilie it is not want but rather plentie that causeth avarice. I will speake of mine owne experience concerning this subject. I have lived in three kinds of condition since I came out of my infancie. The first time, which continued well nigh twentie yeares, I have past it over as one who had no other means but casual without any certaine maintenance or regular prescription. My expenses were so much the more carelessly laid out and lavishly employed, by how much more they wholly depended on fortunes rashnesse and exhibition. I never lived so well at ease…. My second manner of life hath been to have monie: which when I had once fingred, according to my condition I sought to hoorde up some against a rainy day…. My minde was ever on my halfe-penny; my thoughts ever that way. Of commoditie I had little or nothing…. And after you are once accustomed, and have fixed your thoughts upon a heape of monie, it is no longer at your service; you dare not diminish it; it is a building which if you touch or take any part from it, you will think it will all fall. And I should sooner pawne my clothes or sell a horse, with lesse care and compulsion than make a breach into that beloved purse which I kept in store…. I was some yeares of the same humour: I wot not what good Demon did most profitably remove me from it, like to the Siracusan, and made me to neglect my sparing…. I live from hand to mouth, from day to day, and have I but to supplie my present and ordinarie needs I am satisfied…. And I singularly gratifie myself this correction came upon me in an age naturally inclined to covetousnesse, and that I am free from that folly so common and peculiar to old men, and the most ridiculous of all humane follies. Feraulez who had passed through both fortunes and found that encrease of goods was no encrease of appetite to eat, to sleepe or to embrace his wife; and who on the other side felt heavily on his shoulders the importunitie of ordering and directing his Oeconomicall affairs as it doth on mine, determined with himselfe to content a poore young man, his faithfull friend, greedily gaping after riches, and frankly made him a present donation of all his great and excessive riches, always provided hee should undertake to entertaine and find him, honestly and in good sort, as his guest and friend. In which estate they lived afterwards most happily and mutually content with the change of their condition."

And so I hope it may come to pass with the remaining years of Simon and of Damer.

McDONOUGH'S WIFE

In my childhood there was every year at my old home, Roxborough, or, as it is called in Irish, Cregroostha, a great sheep-shearing that lasted many days. On the last evening there was always a dance for the shearers and their helpers, and two pipers used to sit on chairs placed on a corn-bin to make music for the dance. One of them was always McDonough. He was the best of all the wandering pipers who went about from house to house. When, at my marriage, I moved from the barony of Dunkellin to the neighbouring barony of Kiltartan, he came and played at the dance given to the tenants in my honour, and he came and played also at my son's coming of age. Not long after that he died. The last time I saw him he came to ask for a loan of money to take the train to Ennis, where there was some fair or gathering of people going on, and I would not lend to so old a friend, but gave him a half-sovereign, and we parted with kindly words. He was so great a piper that in the few years since his death myths have already begun to gather around him. I have been told that his father was taken into a hill of the Danes, the Tuatha de Danaan, the ancient invisible race, and they had taught him all their tunes and so bewitched his pipes that they would play of themselves if he threw them up on the rafters. McDonough's pipes, they say, had not that gift, but he himself could play those inspired tunes. Lately I was told the story I have used in this play about his taking away fifty sovereigns from the shearing at Cregroostha and spending them at a village near. "I said to him," said the old man who told me this, "that it would be better for him to have bought a good kitchen of bacon; but he said, 'Ah, when I want more, I have but to squeeze the pipes.'" The story of his wife's death and burial as I give it has been told to me here and there. That is my fable, and the emotion disclosed by the story is, I think, the lasting pride of the artist of all ages:

"We are the music makers
And we are the dreamers of dreams….
We in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth."

I wrote the little play while crossing the Atlantic in the Cymric last September. Since it was written I have been told at Kinvara that "McDonough was a proud man; he never would go to a wedding unasked, and he never would play through a town," So he had laid down pride for pride's sake, at that time of the burying of his wife.