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 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 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 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 mustn’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 “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 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 didn’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. 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 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 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.”