I find a note from Mr. Yeats: “Some writer offers us a play which ‘unlike those at the Abbey,’ he says, is so constructed as to admit any topic or a scene laid in any country. It will under the circumstances, he says, ‘do good to all.’ I am sending him ‘Advice to Playwrights.’”
The advice was not always gratefully received. I wrote to Mr. Yeats: “Such an absurd letter in the Cork Sportsman, suggesting that you make all other dramatists rewrite their plays to hide your own idiosyncrasy!”
If a play shows real promise and a mind behind it, we write personally to the author, making criticisms and suggestions. We were accused for a while of smothering the work of young writers in order that we might produce our own, but time has done away with that libel, and we are very proud of the school of drama that has come into being through the creation of our Theatre. We were advised also to put on more popular work, work that would draw an audience for the moment from being topical, or because the author had friends in some league. But we went on giving what we thought good until it became popular. I wrote once, thinking we had yielded over much: “I am sorry ——’s play has been so coldly received (a play that has since become a favourite one), but I think it is partly our own fault. It would have got a better welcome a year ago. We have been humouring our audience instead of educating it, which is the work we ought to do. It is not only giving so much —— and ——, it is the want of good work pressed on, and I believe the want of verse, which they respect anyhow.... I think the pressing on of Synge’s two plays the best thing we can do for this season. We have a great backing now in his reputation. In the last battle, when we cried up his genius, we were supposed to do it for our own interest.... I only read Gerothwohl’s speech after you left, and thought that sentence most excellent about the theatre he was connected with being intended ‘for art and a thinking Democracy.’ It is just what we set out to do, and now we are giving in to stupidity in a Democracy. I think the sentence should be used when we can.”
One at least of the many gloomy prophecies written to Mr. Yeats at some time of trouble has not come true: “I am giving you the situation as it appears to me. Remember there is —— and —— and ——. An amalgamation of all the dissentients with a Gaelic dramatic society would leave Synge, Lady Gregory, and Boyle with yourself, and none of these have drawing power in Dublin.... You who initiated the theatre movement in Ireland, will be out of it.”
Neither Mr. Yeats nor I take the writing of our plays lightly. We work hard to get clearly both fable and idea. The Travelling Man was first my idea and then we wrote it together. Then Mr. Yeats wrote a variant of it as a Pagan play, The Black Horse, and to this we owe the song, “There’s many a strong farmer whose heart would break in two.” It did not please him however, and then I worked it out in my own way. I wrote to him: “I am not sure about your idea, for if the Stranger wanted the child to be content with the things near him, why did he make the image of the Garden of Paradise and ride to it? I am more inclined to think the idea is the soul having once seen the Christ, the Divine Essence, must always turn back to it again. One feels sure the child will though all its life. And the mother, with all her comforts, has never been quite satisfied, because she wants to see the Christ again. But the earthly side of her built up the dresser, and the child will build up other earthly veils; yet never be quite satisfied. What do you think?”
And again: “I am trying so hard to get to work on a play and first excuses came—Thursday headache; now I feel myself longing to take over the saw-mill, which has stopped with the head sawyer’s departure and only wants a steady superintendent; or to translate L’Avare or the Irish fairy tales, or anything rather than creative work! You feel just the same with the Theatre; anything that is more or less external administration is so easy! Why were we not born to be curators of museums?”
At another time he writes: “Every day up to this I have worked at my play in the greatest gloom and this morning half the time was the worst yet—all done against the grain. I had half decided to throw it aside, till I had got back my belief in myself with some sheer poetry. When I began, I got some philosophy and my mind became abundant and therefore cheerful. If I can make it obey my own definition of tragedy, passion defined by motives, I shall be all right. I was trying for too much character. If, as I think you said, farce is comedy with character left out, melodrama is, I believe, tragedy with passion left out.”
As to our staging of plays, in 1903, the costumes for The Hour-Glass were designed by my son, and from that time a great deal of the work was done by him. The Hour-Glass dresses were purple played against a green curtain. It was our first attempt at the decorative staging long demanded by Mr. Yeats. Mr. Yeats says, in Samhain, 1905, “Our staging of Kincora, the work of Mr. Robert Gregory, was beautiful, with a high grave dignity and that strangeness which Ben Jonson thought to be a part of all excellent beauty.”