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 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 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?”
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 them, and the players themselves work in them with delight. I wrote to Mr. Yeats when On Bath’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 to-night. 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 didn’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 mustn’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, ‘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 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.”
Miss Sara Allgood
From a drawing by Robert Gregory