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By Lady Gregory

Irish Folk-History Plays
First Series: The Tragedies
Grania. Kincora. Dervorgilla
Second Series: The Tragic Comedies
The Canavans. The White Cockade. The Deliverer

New Comedies
The Bogie Men. The Full Moon. Coats. Damer’s Gold.
McDonough’s Wife

Our Irish Theatre
A Chapter of Autobiography

Augusta Gregory (signature)

Our Irish Theatre

A Chapter of Autobiography

By

Lady Gregory

Illustrated

G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1914

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

Our Irish Theatre

CHAPTER I
THE THEATRE IN THE MAKING

To Richard Gregory.—Little Grandson: When I go into the garden in the morning to find you a nectarine or tell you the names of flowers, Catalpa, Lovelies-bleeding, Balsam, Phlox, you ask me why I cannot stay but must go back to the house, and when I say it is to write letters, you ask, “What for?” And when winter comes, you will ask me why I must go away over the sea instead of waiting for your Christmas stocking and your tree.

The other day I was sitting outside the door, where the sweet-peas grow, with an old man, and when you came and called me he got up to go away, and as he wished me good-bye, he said: “They were telling me you are going to America, and says I, ‘Whatever the Lady does, I am certain she is doing nothing but what she thinks to be right.’ And that the Lord may keep you safe and protect you from the power of your enemy.”

Some day when I am not here to answer, you will maybe ask, “What were they for, the writing, the journeys, and why did she have an enemy?” So I will put down the story now, that you may know all about it bye and bye.

Fourteen or fifteen years ago I still wrote from time to time in a diary I used to keep till the sand in the hour-glass on my table began to run so fast that I had to lay by the book as well as embroidery, and archæology, and drying lavender, and visits to the houses of friends.

I was in London in the beginning of 1898, and I find written, “Yeats and Sir Alfred Lyall to tea, Yeats stayed on. He is very full of play-writing.... He with the aid of Miss Florence Farr, an actress who thinks more of a romantic than of a paying play, is very keen about taking or building a little theatre somewhere in the suburbs to produce romantic drama, his own plays, Edward Martyn’s, one of Bridges’, and he is trying to stir up Standish O’Grady and Fiona Macleod to write some. He believes there will be a reaction after the realism of Ibsen, and romance will have its turn. He has put a ‘great deal of himself’ into his own play The Shadowy Waters and rather startled me by saying about half his characters have eagles’ faces.”

Later in the year I was staying for a few days with old Count de Basterot, at Duras, that is beyond Kinvara and beside the sea. He had been my husband’s warm friend, and always in the summer time we used to go and spend at least one long day with him,—we two at first, and then later I went with my son and the boy and girl friends of his childhood. They liked to go out in a hooker and see the seals showing their heads, or to paddle delicately among the jellyfish on the beach. It was a pleasant place to pass an idle day. The garden was full of flowers. Lavender and carnations grew best, and there were roses also and apple trees, and many plums ripened on the walls. This seemed strange, because outside the sheltered garden there were only stone-strewn fields and rocks and bare rock-built hills in sight, and the bay of Galway, over which fierce storms blow from the Atlantic. The Count remembered when on Garlic Sunday men used to ride races, naked, on unsaddled horses out into the sea; but that wild custom had long been done away with by decree of the priests. Later still, when Harrow and Oxford took my son away and I had long spaces of time alone, I would sometimes go to Duras to spend a few days.

I always liked to talk and to listen to the Count. He could tell me about French books and French and Italian history and politics, for he lived but for the summer months in Ireland and for the rest of the year in Paris or in Rome. Mr. Arthur Symons has written of him and his talks of race,—to which he attributed all good or bad habits and politics—as they took long drives on the Campagna. M. Paul Bourget came more than once to stay in this Burren district, upon which he bestowed a witty name, “Le Royaume de Pierre.” It was to M. Bourget that on his way to the modest little house and small estate, the Count’s old steward and servant introduced the Atlantic, when on the road from the railway station at Gort its waters first come in sight: Voila la mer qui baigne L’Amérique et les terres de Monsieur le Comte. For he—the steward—had been taken by his master on visits to kinsmen in France and Italy—their names are recorded in that sad, pompous, black-bordered document I received one day signed by those who have l’honneur de vous faire part de la perte douloureuse qu’ils viennent d’éprouver en la personne de Florimond Alfred Jacques, Comte de Basterot, Chevalier de l’ordre du Saint Sépulcre, leur cousin germain et cousin [who died at Duras (Irlande) September 15, 1904]; la Marquise de la Tour Maubourg, le Vicomte et la Vicomtesse de Bussy, la Baronne d’Acker de Montgaston, le Marquis et la Marquise de Courcival, le Comte et la Comtesse Gromis de Trana, la Comtesse Irène d’Entreves, and so on, and so on. I do not know whether the bearers of these high-sounding names keep him in their memory—it may well be that they do, for he was a friend not easily forgotten—but I know there is many a prayer still said on the roads between Kinvara and Burren and Curranroe and Ballinderreen for him who “never was without a bag of money to give in charity, and always had a heart for the poor.”

On one of those days at Duras in 1898, Mr. Edward Martyn, my neighbour, came to see the Count, bringing with him Mr. Yeats, whom I did not then know very well, though I cared for his work very much and had already, through his directions, been gathering folk-lore. They had lunch with us, but it was a wet day, and we could not go out. After a while I thought the Count wanted to talk to Mr. Martyn alone; so I took Mr. Yeats to the office where the steward used to come to talk,—less about business I think than of the Land War or the state of the country, or the last year’s deaths and marriages from Kinvara to the headland of Aughanish. We sat there through that wet afternoon, and though I had never been at all interested in theatres, our talk turned on plays. Mr. Martyn had written two, The Heather Field and Maeve. They had been offered to London managers, and now he thought of trying to have them produced in Germany where there seemed to be more room for new drama than in England. I said it was a pity we had no Irish theatre where such plays could be given. Mr. Yeats said that had always been a dream of his, but he had of late thought it an impossible one, for it could not at first pay its way, and there was no money to be found for such a thing in Ireland.

We went on talking about it, and things seemed to grow possible as we talked, and before the end of the afternoon we had made our plan. We said we would collect money, or rather ask to have a certain sum of money guaranteed. We would then take a Dublin theatre and give a performance of Mr. Martyn’s Heather Field and one of Mr. Yeats’s own plays, The Countess Cathleen. I offered the first guarantee of £25.

A few days after that I was back at Coole, and Mr. Yeats came over from Mr. Martyn’s home, Tillyra, and we wrote a formal letter to send out. We neither of us write a very clear hand, but a friend had just given me a Remington typewriter and I was learning to use it, and I wrote out the letter with its help. That typewriter has done a great deal of work since that day, making it easy for the printers to read my plays and translations, and Mr. Yeats’s plays and essays, and sometimes his poems. I have used it also for the many, many hundreds of letters that have had to be written about theatre business in each of these last fifteen years. It has gone with me very often up and down to Dublin and back again, and it went with me even to America last year that I might write my letters home. And while I am writing the leaves are falling, and since I have written those last words on its keys, she who had given it to me has gone. She gave me also the great gift of her friendship through more than half my lifetime, Enid, Lady Layard, Ambassadress at Constantinople and Madrid, helper of the miserable and the wounded in the Turkish-Russian war; helper of the sick in the hospital she founded at Venice, friend and hostess and guest of queens in England and Germany and Rome. She was her husband’s good helpmate while he lived—is not the Cyprus treaty set down in that clear handwriting I shall never see coming here again? And widowed, she kept his name in honour, living after him for fifteen years, and herself leaving a noble memory in all places where she had stayed, and in Venice where her home was and where she died.

Our statement—it seems now a little pompous—began:

“We propose to have performed in Dublin, in the spring of every year certain Celtic and Irish plays, which whatever be their degree of excellence will be written with a high ambition, and so to build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature. We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted and imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory, and believe that our desire to bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland will ensure for us a tolerant welcome, and that freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres of England, and without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed. We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism. We are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside all the political questions that divide us.”

I think the word “Celtic” was put in for the sake of Fiona Macleod whose plays however we never acted, though we used to amuse ourselves by thinking of the call for “author” that might follow one, and the possible appearance of William Sharp in place of the beautiful woman he had given her out to be, for even then we had little doubt they were one and the same person. I myself never quite understood the meaning of the “Celtic Movement,” which we were said to belong to. When I was asked about it, I used to say it was a movement meant to persuade the Scotch to begin buying our books, while we continued not to buy theirs.

We asked for a guarantee fund of £300 to make the experiment, which we hoped to carry on during three years. The first person I wrote to was the old poet, Aubrey de Vere. He answered very kindly, saying, “Whatever develops the genius of Ireland, must in the most effectual way benefit her; and in Ireland’s genius I have long been a strong believer. Circumstances of very various sorts have hitherto tended much to retard the development of that genius; but it cannot fail to make itself recognised before very long, and Ireland will have cause for gratitude to all those who have hastened the coming of that day.”

I am glad we had this letter, carrying as it were the blessing of the generation passing away to that which was taking its place. He was the first poet I had ever met and spoken with; he had come in my girlhood to a neighbour’s house. He was so gentle, so fragile, he seemed to have been wafted in by that “wind from the plains of Athenry” of which he wrote in one of his most charming little poems. He was of the Lake School, and talked of Wordsworth, and I think it was as a sort of courtesy or deference to him that I determined to finish reading The Excursion, which though a reader of poetry it had failed me, as we say, to get through. At last one morning I climbed up to a wide wood, Grobawn, on one of the hillsides of Slieve Echtge, determined not to come down again until I had honestly read every line. I think I saw the sun set behind the far-off Connemara hills before I came home, exhausted but triumphant! I have a charming picture of Aubrey de Vere in my mind as I last saw him, at a garden party in London. He was walking about, having on his arm, in the old-world style, the beautiful Lady Somers, lovely to the last as in Thackeray’s day, and as I had heard of her from many of that time, and as she had been painted by Watts.

Some gave us their promise with enthusiasm but some from good will only, without much faith that an Irish Theatre would ever come to success. One friend, a writer of historical romance, wrote: “October 15th. I enclose a cheque for £1, but confess it is more as a proof of regard for you than of belief in the drama, for I cannot with the best wish in the world to do so, feel hopeful on that subject. My experience has been that any attempt at treating Irish history is a fatal handicap, not to say absolute bar, to anything in the shape of popularity, and I cannot see how any drama can flourish which is not to some degree supported by the public, as it is even more dependent on it than literature is. There are popular Irish dramatists, of course, and very popular ones, but then unhappily they did not treat of Irish subjects, and The School for Scandal and She Stoops to Conquer would hardly come under your category. You will think me very discouraging, but I cannot help it, and I am also afraid that putting plays experimentally on the boards is a very costly entertainment. Where will they be acted in the first instance? And has any stage manager undertaken to produce them? Forgive my tiresomeness; it does not come from want of sympathy, only from a little want of hope, the result of experience.”

“October 19th. I seize the opportunity of writing again as I am afraid you will have thought I wrote such an unsympathetic letter. It is not, believe me, that I would not give anything to see Irish literature and Irish drama taking a good place, as it ought to do, and several of the authors you name I admire extremely. It is only from the practical and paying point of view that I feel it to be rather rash. Plays cost more, I take it, to produce than novels, and one would feel rather rash if one brought out a novel at one’s own risk.”

I think the only actual refusals I had were from three members of the Upper House. I may give their words as types of the discouragement we have often met with from friends: “I need not, I am sure, tell you how gladly I would take part in anything for the honour of Old Ireland and especially anything of the kind in which you feel an interest; but I must tell you frankly that I do not much believe in the movement about which you have written to me. I have no sympathy, you will be horrified to hear, with the ‘London Independent Theatre,’ and I am sure that if Ibsen and Co. could know what is in my mind, they would regard me as a ‘Philistine’ of the coarsest class! Alas! so far from wishing to see the Irish characters of Charles Lever supplanted by more refined types, they have always been the delight of my heart, and there is no author in whose healthy, rollicking company, even nowadays, I spend a spare hour with more thorough enjoyment. I am very sorry that I cannot agree with you in these matters, and I am irreclaimable; but all the same I remain with many pleasant remembrances and good wishes for you and yours, Yours very truly——”

Another, the late Lord Ashbourne, wrote: “I know too little of the matter or the practicability of the idea to be able to give my name to your list, but I shall watch the experiment with interest and be glad to attend. The idea is novel and curious, and how far it is capable of realisation I am not at all in a position to judge. Some of the names you mention are well known in literature but not as dramatists or play-writers, and therefore the public will be one to be worked up by enthusiasm and love of country. The existing class of actors will not, of course, be available, and the existing playgoers are satisfied with their present attractions. Whether ‘houses’ can be got to attend the new plays, founded on new ideas and played by new actors, no one can foretell.”

One, who curiously has since then become an almost too zealous supporter of our theatre, says: “I fear I am not sanguine about the success in a pecuniary way of a ‘Celtic Theatre,’ nor am I familiar with the works, dramatic or otherwise, of Mr. Yeats or of Mr. Martyn. Therefore, at the risk of branding myself in your estimation as a hopeless Saxon and Philistine, I regret I cannot see my way to giving my name to the enterprise or joining in the guarantee.” On the other hand, Professor Mahaffy says, rather unexpectedly, writing from Trinity College: “I am ready to risk £5 for your scheme and hope they may yet play their drama in Irish. It will be as intelligible to the nation as Italian, which we so often hear upon our stage.”

And many joined who had seemed too far apart to join in any scheme. Mr. William Harpole Lecky sent a promise of £5 instead of the £1 I had asked. Lord Dufferin, Viceroy of India and Canada, Ambassador at Paris, Constantinople, St. Petersburg, and Rome, not only promised but sent his guarantee in advance. I returned it later, for the sums guaranteed were never called for, Mr. Martyn very generously making up all loss. Miss Jane Barlow, Miss Emily Lawless, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland (“Peter the Packer” as he was called by Nationalists), John O’Leary, Mr. T. M. Healy, Lord and Lady Ardilaun, the Duchess of St. Albans, Doctor Douglas Hyde, the Rt. Hon. Horace Plunkett, Mr. John Dillon, M.P., all joined. Mr. John Redmond supported us, and afterwards wrote me a letter of commendation with leave to use it. Mr. William O’Brien was another supporter. I did not know him personally but I remember one day long ago going to tea at the Speaker’s house, after I had heard him in a debate, and saying I thought him the most stirring speaker of all the Irish party; and I was amused when my gentle and dignified hostess, Mrs. Peel, said, “I quite agree with you. When I hear William O’Brien make a speech, I feel that if I were an Irishwoman, I should like to go and break windows.”

Then Mr. Yeats and Mr. Martyn went to Dublin to make preparations, but the way was unexpectedly blocked by the impossibility of getting a theatre. The only Dublin theatres, the Gaiety, the Royal, and the Queen’s, were engaged far ahead, and in any case we could not have given them their price. Then we thought of taking a hall or a concert room, but there again we met with disappointment. We found there was an old Act in existence, passed just before the Union, putting a fine of £300 upon any one who should give a performance for money in any unlicensed building. As the three large theatres were the only buildings licensed, a claim for a special license would have to be argued by lawyers, charging lawyers’ fees, before the Privy Council. We found that even amateurs who acted for charities were forced to take one of the licensed theatres, so leaving but little profit for the charity. There were suggestions made of forming a society like the Stage Society in London, to give performances to its members only, but this would not have been a fit beginning for the National Theatre of our dreams. I wrote in a letter at that time: “I am all for having the Act repealed or a Bill brought in, empowering the Municipality to license halls when desirable.” And although this was looked on as a counsel of perfection, it was actually done within the year. I wrote to Mr. Lecky for advice and help, and he told me there was a Bill actually going through the House of Commons, the Local Government (Ireland) Bill, in which he thought it possible a Clause might be inserted that would meet our case. Mr. John Redmond and Mr. Dillon promised their help; so did Mr. T. M. Healy, who wrote to Mr. Yeats: “I am acquainted with the state of the law in Dublin which I should gladly assist to alter as proposed. Whether the Government are equally well disposed may be doubted, as the subject is a little outside their Bill, and no adequate time exists for discussing it and many other important questions. They will come up about midnight or later and will be yawned out of hearing by our masters.”

A Clause was drawn up by a Nationalist member, Mr. Clancy, but in July, 1898, Mr. Lecky writes from the House of Commons: “I have not been forgetting the Celtic Theatre and I think the enclosed Clause, which the Government have brought forward, will practically meet its requirements. The Attorney-General objected to Mr. Clancy’s Clause as too wide and as interfering with existing patent rights, but promised a Clause authorising amateur acting. I wrote to him, however, stating the Celtic case, and urging that writers should be able, like those who got up the Ibsen plays in London, to get regular actors to play for them, and I think this Clause will allow it.... After Clause 59 insert the following Clause: (1) Notwithstanding anything in the Act of Parliament of Ireland of the twenty-sixth year of King George the Third, Chapter fifty-seven, intituled an Act for regulating the stage in the city and county of Dublin, the Lord Lieutenant may on the application of the council for the county of Dublin or the county borough of Dublin grant an occasional license for the performance of any stage play or other dramatic entertainment in any theatre, room, or building where the profits arising therefrom are to be applied for charitable purpose or in aid of the funds of any society instituted for the purpose of science, literature, or the fine arts exclusively. (2) The license may contain such conditions and regulations as appear fit to the Lord Lieutenant, and may be revoked by him.”

This Clause was passed but we are independent now of it,—the Abbey Theatre holds its own Patent. But the many amateur societies which play so often here and there in Dublin may well call for a blessing sometimes on the names of those by whom their charter was won.

We announced our first performance for May 8, 1899, nearly a year after that talk on the Galway coast, at the Ancient Concert Rooms. Mr. Yeats’ Countess Cathleen and Mr. Martyn’s Heather Field were the plays chosen, as we had planned at the first. Mr. George Moore gave excellent help in finding actors, and the plays were rehearsed in London. But then something unexpected happened. A writer who had a political quarrel with Mr. Yeats sent out a pamphlet in which he attacked The Countess Cathleen, on the ground of religious unorthodoxy. The plot of the play, taken from an old legend, is this: during a famine in Ireland some starving country people, having been tempted by demons dressed as merchants to sell their souls for money that their bodies may be saved from perishing, the Countess Cathleen sells her own soul to redeem theirs, and dies. The accusation made was that it was a libel on the people of Ireland to say they could under any circumstances consent to sell their souls and that it was a libel on the demons that they counted the soul of a countess of more worth than those of the poor. At Cathleen’s death the play tells us, “God looks on the intention, not the deed,” and so she is forgiven at the last and taken into Heaven; and this it was said is against the teaching of the Church.

Mr. Martyn is an orthodox Catholic, and to quiet his mind, the play was submitted to two good Churchmen. Neither found heresy enough in it to call for its withdrawal. One of them, the Rev. Dr. Barry, the author of The New Antigone, wrote:

“Bridge House, Wallingford,
“March 26, 1899.

“Dear Mr. Yeats,

“I read your Countess Cathleen as soon as possible after seeing you. It is beautiful and touching. I hope you will not be kept back from giving it by foolish talk. Obviously, from the literal point of view theologians, Catholic or other, would object that no one is free to sell his soul in order to buy bread even for the starving. But St. Paul says, ‘I wish to be anathema for my brethren’; which is another way of expressing what you have put into a story. I would give the play first and explanations afterwards.

“Sometime perhaps you will come and spend a night here and I shall be charmed. But don’t take a superfluous journey now. It is an awkward place to get at. I could only tell you, as I am doing, that if people will not read or look at a play of this kind in the spirit which dictated it, no change you might make would satisfy them. You have given us what is really an Auto, in the manner of Calderon, with the old Irish folk-lore as a perceptive; and to measure it by the iron rule of experts and schoolmen would be most unfair to it. Some one else will say that you have learned from the Jesuits to make the end justify the means—and much that man will know of you or the Jesuits. With many kind wishes for your success, and fraternal greetings in the name of Ireland,

“Ever yours,
“William Barry.”

So our preparations went on. Mr. Yeats wrote a little time before the first performance: “Everybody tells me we are going to have good audiences. My play, too, in acting goes wonderfully well. The actors are all pretty sound. The first Demon is a little over-violent and restless but he will improve. Lionel Johnson has done a prologue which I enclose.”

That prologue, written by so Catholic and orthodox a poet, was spoken before the plays at the Ancient Concert Rooms on May 8, 1899:

The May fire once on every dreaming hill

All the fair land with burning bloom would fill;

All the fair land, at visionary night,

Gave loving glory to the Lord of Light.

Have we no leaping flames of Beltaine praise

To kindle in the joyous ancient ways;

No fire of song, of vision, of white dream,

Fit for the Master of the Heavenly Gleam;

For him who first made Ireland move in chime,

Musical from the misty dawn of time?

Ah, yes; for sacrifice this night we bring

The passion of a lost soul’s triumphing;

All rich with faery airs that, wandering long,

Uncaught, here gather into Irish song;

Sweet as the old remembering winds that wail,

From hill to hill of gracious Inisfail;

Sad as the unforgetting winds that pass

Over her children in her holy grass

At home, and sleeping well upon her breast,

Where snowy Deirdre and her sorrows rest.

Come, then, and keep with us an Irish feast,

Wherein the Lord of Light and Song is priest;

Now, at this opening of the gentle May,

Watch warring passions at their storm and play;

Wrought with the flaming ecstasy of art,

Sprung from the dreaming of an Irish heart.

But alas! His call to “watch warring passions at their storm and play,” was no vain one. The pamphlet, Souls for Gold, had been sent about, and sentences spoken by the demons in the play and given detached from it were quoted as Mr. Yeats’ own unholy beliefs. A Cardinal who confessed he had read none of the play outside these sentences condemned it. Young men from the Catholic University were roused to come and make a protest against this “insult to their faith.” There was hooting and booing in the gallery. In the end the gallery was lined with police, for an attack on the actors was feared. They, being English and ignorant of Ireland, found it hard to understand the excitement, but they went through their parts very well. There was enthusiasm for both plays, and after the first night London critics were sent over, Mr. Max Beerbohm among them, and gave a good report. Yet it was a stormy beginning for our enterprise, and a rough reception for a poetic play. The only moment, I think, at which I saw Mr. Yeats really angry was at the last performance. I was sitting next him, and the play had reached the point where the stage direction says, “The Second Merchant goes out through the door and returns with the hen strangled. He flings it on the floor.” The merchant came in indeed, but without the strangled hen. Mr. Yeats got up, filled with suspicions that it also might have been objected to on some unknown ground, and went round to the back of the stage. But he was given a simple explanation. The chief Demon said he had been given charge of the hen, and had hung it out of a window every night, “And this morning,” he said, “when I pulled up the string, there was nothing on it at all.”

But that battle was not a very real one. We have put on Countess Cathleen a good many times of late with no one speaking against it at all. And some of those young men who hissed it then are our good supporters now.

The next year English actors were again brought over to play, this time in the Gaiety Theatre. A little play by Miss Milligan, The Last Feast of the Fianna was given, and Mr. Martyn’s Maeve, and on alternate nights The Bending of the Bough, founded by Mr. George Moore on Mr. Martyn’s Tale of a Town. They were produced on the evening of February 20, 1900. “On the evening before the production,” I wrote, “Mr. Yeats gave a little address on the play, Maeve, in which he said there is a wonderful literary invention, that of Peg Inerny, the old woman in rags in the daytime, but living another and second life, a queen in the ideal world, a symbol of Ireland. The financial question touched in The Bending of the Bough was chosen, because on it all parties are united, but it means really the cause nearest to each of our hearts. The materialism of England and its vulgarity are surging up about us. It is not Shakespeare England sends us, but musical farces, not Keats and Shelley, but Titbits. A mystic friend of his had a dream in which he saw a candle whose flame was in danger of being extinguished by a rolling sea. The waves sometimes seemed to go over it and quench it, and he knew it to be his own soul and that if it was quenched, he would have lost his soul. And now our ideal life is in danger from the sea of commonness about us.”

The Bending of the Bough was the first play dealing with a vital Irish question that had appeared in Ireland. There was a great deal of excitement over it. My diary says: “M. is in great enthusiasm over it, says it will cause a revolution. H. says no young man can see that play and leave the house as he came into it.... The Gaelic League in great force sang Fainne Geal an Lae between the acts, and The Wearing of the Green in Irish! And when ‘author’ could not appear, there were cries of ‘An Craoibhin,’ and cheers were given for Hyde. The actors say they never played to so appreciative an audience, but were a little puzzled at the applause, not understanding the political allusions. The play hits so impartially all round that no one is really offended, certainly not the Nationalists and we have not heard that Unionists are either. Curiously, Maeve, which we didn’t think a Nationalist play at all, has turned out to be one, the audience understanding and applauding the allegory. There is such applause at ‘I am only an old woman, but I tell you that Erin will never be subdued’ that Lady ——, who was at a performance, reported to the Castle that they had better boycott it, which they have done. G. M. is, I think, a little puzzled by his present political position, but I tell him and E. Martyn we are not working for Home Rule; we are preparing for it.”

In our third year, 1901, Mr. F. R. Benson took our burden on his shoulders and gave a fine performance of Diarmuid and Grania, an heroic play by Mr. George Moore and Mr. Yeats. I wrote: “I am so glad to hear of Benson’s appreciation. Anyhow, he can hardly be supposed to be on the side of incendiarism; he is so very respectable. Trinity College won’t know whether to go or to stay away.” Mr. Yeats wrote: “Yesterday we were rehearsing at the Gaiety. The kid Benson is to carry in his arms was wandering in and out among the stage properties. I was saying to myself, ‘Here are we, a lot of intelligent people who might have been doing some sort of decent work that leaves the soul free; yet here we are, going through all sorts of trouble and annoyance for a mob that knows neither literature nor art. I might have been away, away in the country, in Italy perhaps, writing poems for my equals and my betters. That kid is the only sensible creature on the stage. He knows his business and keeps to it.’ At that very moment one of the actors called out, ‘Look at the kid, eating the property ivy!’”

This time also we produced Casad-an-Sugan, (The Twisting of the Rope) by the founder of the Gaelic League, Dr. Douglas Hyde. He himself acted the chief part in it and even to those who had no Irish, the performance was a delight, it was played with so much gaiety, ease, and charm. It was the first time a play written in Irish had ever been seen in a Dublin theatre.

Our three years’ experiment had ended, and we hesitated what to do next. But a breaking and rebuilding is often for the best, and so it was now. We had up to this time, as I have said, played only once a year, and had engaged actors from London, some of them Irish certainly, but all London-trained. The time had come to play oftener and to train actors of our own. For Mr. Yeats had never ceased attacking the methods of the ordinary theatre, in gesture, in staging, and in the speaking of verse. It happened there were two brothers living in Dublin, William and Frank Fay, who had been in the habit of playing little farces in coffee palaces and such like in their spare time. William had a genius for comedy, Frank’s ambitions were for the production of verse. They, or one of them, had thought of looking for work in America, but had seen our performances, and thought something might be done in the way of creating a school of acting in Ireland. They came to us at this time and talked matters over. They had work to do in the daytime and could only rehearse at night. The result was that Mr. Yeats gave his Kathleen ni Houlihan to be produced by Mr. Fay at the same time as a play by Mr. George Russell (A.E.), in St. Theresa’s Hall, Clarendon Street. I had written to Mr. Yeats: “If all breaks up, we must try and settle something with Fay, possibly a week of the little plays he has been doing through the spring. I have a sketch in my head that might do for Hyde to work on. I will see if it is too slight when I have noted it down, and if not, will send it to you.”

Early, in 1902, Mr. Russell wrote to me: “I have finished Deirdre at last. Heaven be praised! in the intervals of railway journeys, and the Fays are going to do their best with it. I hope I shall not suffer too much in the process, but I prefer them to English actors as they are in love with their story.” A little hall in Camden Street was hired for rehearsal, Mr. Russell writing in the same year: “I will hand cheque to Fay. I know it will be a great assistance to them as the little hall will require alterations and fittings and as none of the Company are in possession of more than artisan’s wages. They have elected W. B. Y. as president of the Irish National Dramatic Society, and A. E. as vice-president, and we are the gilding at the prow of the vessel. They have begun work already and are reading and rehearsing drama for the autumn.”

Mr. Fay was very hopeful and full of courage. He wrote in December, 1902: “I have received your letter and parcel. I am not doing this show on a large scale as I am leaving The Hour-glass off till the middle of January.... I am just giving a show of The Pot of Broth, The Foundations, and Elis and the Beggarman, and I’m not making a fuss about it, as I want to try how many people the hall will hold, and what prices suit best, so it is more or less an experimental show and then, about the middle of January, I will do the first real show with The Hour-glass as principal feature. The hall took a great deal of work to get right, and as we had to do all the work ourselves, we had very little time to rehearse.” And he says later: “I received your kind note, also enclosures, for which we are very much obliged. We are indeed getting into very flourishing conditions, and if things only continue in the present state, I have no doubt we shall be able to show a fairly good balance at the end of the year. I have all but concluded an arrangement with a branch of the Gaelic League to take our hall for three nights a week, and that will leave us under very small rental if it comes off. About the performance and how it worked out. I spent twenty-five shillings on printing, etc., and we took altogether about four pounds fifteen shillings, so I see no reason to complain financially. But I find the stage very small, and the want of dressing-rooms makes it very difficult to manage about the scenery, as all your actors have to stand against the walls while it is being changed. I think, however, we can struggle through if we don’t attempt very large pieces. The hall was rather cold, but I think I can manage a stove and get over that.”

That show of The Hour-glass went well, and in that year—1903—two of Mr. Yeats’s verse plays were produced, The King’s Threshold and Shadowy Waters. In that year also, new names came in, my own with Twenty-five, Mr. Padraic Colum’s with Broken Soil, and that of J. M. Synge with The Shadow of the Glen. I wrote to Mr. Yeats, who was then in America: “After Shadow of the Glen your sisters and Synge came in and had some supper with me. Your sister had asked one of her work girls how she liked Synge’s comedy, and she said, ‘Oh, very well. I had been thinking of writing a story on that subject myself.’ They asked quite a little girl if she thought the girl in Colum’s play ought to have stayed with her lover or gone with her father. ‘She was right to go with her father.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because her young man had such a big beard.’ ‘But he might have cut it off.’ ‘That would be no good. He was so dark he would look blue if he did that.’ Saturday night brought a larger audience and all went well. The few I knew, Harvey, etc., were quite astonished at the beauty of Shadowy Waters, and some giggling young men behind were hushed almost at once, and I heard them saying afterwards how beautiful it was. I should like to hear it once a week through the whole year. The only vexing part was Aibric’s helmet, which has immense horns. A black shadow of these was thrown down, and when Aibric moved, one got the impression there was a he-goat going to butt at him over the side of the ship.” And again from Coole: “Synge wrote asking me if I could provide four red petticoats, Aran men’s caps, a spinning-wheel, and some Connacht person in Dublin who will teach the players to keen. The last item is the most difficult. All the actors want pampooties (the cowskin shoes worn by the Aran people), though I warned them the smell is rather overpowering. Tell Mr. Quinn what a great comfort his money is for such things as these, upon which the company might think they ought not to spend their little capital, and Synge would have been unhappy without.” Through the nuns at Gort I heard of a spinning-wheel in a cottage some way off, which, though it had been in her family over a hundred years, the owner wanted to sell. A cart was sent for this, and we have had it in the theatre ever since. As to the keening I found a Galway woman near Dublin who promised to teach the actors. But when they arrived at her house, she found herself unable to raise the keen in her living room. They had all to go upstairs, and the secretary of the company had to lie under a sheet as the corpse. The lessons were very successful, and at the first performance in London of Riders to the Sea, the pit went away keening down the street.

Mr. Yeats said of Mr. Fay and his little company, “They did what amateurs seldom do, worked desperately.” This was the beginning of a native school of acting, an Irish dramatic company.

I remember, in 1897, hearing Mr. Bernard Shaw make a speech before the Irish Literary Society in London, following a lecture on “Irish Actors of the Nineteenth Century.” He very wittily extinguished the lecturer, who, he said, truly enough had enumerated the best actors and actresses and then had gone on to say they were not Irish. “As to what an Irishman is,” he said, “is a complex question, for wherever he may have been born, if he has been brought up in Ireland, that is quite sufficient to make him an Irishman. It is a mistake to think an Irishman has not common sense. It is the Englishman who is devoid of common sense or at least has so small a portion of it that he can only apply it to the work immediately before him. That is why he is obliged to fill the rest of his horizon with the humbugs and hypocrisy that fill so large a part of English life. The Irishman has a better grasp of facts and sees them more clearly; only he fails in putting them into practice, and has a great objection to doing anything that will lead to any practical result. It is a mistake to think the Irishman has feeling; he has not; but the Englishman is full of feeling. What the Irishman has is imagination; he can imagine himself in the situation of others.” Then as if afraid of making the Irish members of his audience too well pleased with themselves, he gave his summing up: “But the Irish language is an effete language and the nation is effete, and as to saying there are good Irish actors, there are not, and there won’t be until the conditions in Ireland are favourable for the production of drama, and when that day comes, I hope I may be dead.”

I am glad we have shown Mr. Shaw that he can be in the wrong, and I am glad he is not dead, for he has been a good friend to us. But our players have proved that even the wise may be deceived. They have won much praise for themselves and have raised the dignity of Ireland, and I for one owe them very grateful thanks for the way they have made the characters in my comedies laugh and live.

In May, 1903, the Irish National Theatre Society went for the first time to London. It was hard for the actors to get away. They had their own work to do. But they asked their employers for a whole Saturday holiday. They left Dublin on Friday night, arrived in London on the Saturday morning, played in the afternoon, and again in the evening at the Queen’s Gate Hall, and were back at work in Dublin on Monday morning. The plays taken were: Mr. Fred Ryan’s Laying the Foundations, Mr. Yeats’s Hour-glass, Pot of Broth, and Kathleen ni Houlihan, and my own Twenty-five. I was not able to go but Mr. Yeats wrote to me: “London, May 4, ’03. The plays were a great success. I never saw a more enthusiastic audience. I send you some papers, all that I have found notices in. When I remember the notices I have seen of literary adventures on the stage, I think them better than we could have hoped.... I have noticed that the young men, the men of my own generation or younger, are the people who like us. It was a very distinguished audience. Blunt was there, but went after your play as he is just recovering from influenza and seems to be really ill. I thought your play went very well. Fay was charming as Christy. The game of cards is still the weak place, but with all defects, the little play has a real charm. If we could amend the cards it would be a strong play too. Lady Aberdeen, Henry James, Michael Field—who has sent me an enthusiastic letter about the acting—Mrs. Wyndham—the Chief Secretary’s mother—Lord Monteagle, Mrs. Thackeray Ritchie, and I don’t know how many other notables were there, and all I think were moved. The evening audience was the more Irish and Kathleen and The Pot of Broth got a great reception. The Foundations went well, indeed everything went well.”

This was but the first of several London visits, and the good audience and good notices were a great encouragement. And this visit led also to the generous help given us by Miss Horniman. She took what had been the old Mechanics’ Institute in Abbey Street, Dublin, adding to it a part of the site of the old Morgue, and by rebuilding and reconstructing turned it into what has since been known as the Abbey Theatre, giving us the free use of it together with an annual subsidy for a term of years.

Miss Horniman did all this, as she says in a former letter to Mr. Yeats, because of her “great sympathy with the artistic and dramatic aims of the Irish National Theatre Company as publicly explained by you on various occasions.” She also states in that letter: “I can only afford to make a very little theatre, and it must be quite simple. You all must do the rest to make a powerful and prosperous theatre with a high artistic ideal.” We have kept through many attacks and misunderstandings the high artistic ideal we set out with. Our prosperity enabled us to take over the Abbey Theatre two years ago when our Patent and subsidy came to an end. I feel sure Miss Horniman is well pleased that we have been able to show our gratitude by thus proving ourselves worthy of her great and generous gift.

But in Dublin a new theatre cannot be opened except under a Patent from the Crown. This costs money even when not opposed, and if it is opposed, the question has to be argued by counsel, and witnesses have to be called in and examined as if some dangerous conspiracy were being plotted. When our Patent was applied for, the other theatres took fright and believed we might interfere with their gains, and they opposed our application, and there was delay after delay. But at last the enquiry was held before the Privy Council, and Mr. Yeats wrote on its eve: “3d August, 1904. The really important things first. This day is so hot that I have been filled with alarm lest the lake may begin to fall again and the boat be stranded high up on the bank and I be unable to try my new bait. I brought the boat up to a very shallow place the day I left. I have been running about all over the place collecting witnesses and have now quite a number. I will wire to-morrow if there is anything definite about decision. In any case I will write full particulars.”

The Abbey Theatre, Dublin
From a photograph by Keogh Bros., Ireland

“August 4th. Final decision is postponed until Monday but the battle is won to all intents and purposes. There appears to be no difficulty about our getting a Patent for the plays of the Society. I sent you a paper with the report of proceedings, —— and ——, did well for us; but I must say I was rather amused at their anxiety to show that they supported us not out of love for the arts but because of our use as anti-emigration agents and the like. I think I was a bad witness. Counsel did not examine me but asked me to make a statement. The result was, having expected questions and feeling myself left to wander through an immense subject, I said very little. I was disappointed at being hardly cross-examined at all. By that time I had got excited and was thirsting for everybody’s blood. One barrister in cross-examining T. P. Gill, who came after me, tried to prove that Ibsen and Maeterlinck were immoral writers. He asked was it not true that a play by Maeterlinck called The Intruder had raised an immense outcry in London because of its immorality. Quite involuntarily I cried out, ‘My God!’ and Edward Martyn burst into a loud fit of laughter. I suppose he must have meant Monna Vanna. He also asked if the Irish National Theatre Society had not produced a play which was an attack on marriage. Somebody asked him what was the name of the play. He said it didn’t matter and dropped the subject. He had evidently heard some vague rumour about The Shadow of the Glen. I forgot to say that William Fay gave his evidence very well, as one would expect. He had the worst task of us all, for O’Shaughnessy, a brow-beating cross-examiner of the usual kind, fastened on to him. Fay, however, had his answer for everything.”

The Patent was granted to me, “Dame Augusta Gregory,” as Patentee, and in it I was amongst other things “Enjoined and commanded to gather, entertain, govern, privilege, and keep such and so many players,” and not to put on the stage any “exhibition of wild beasts or dangerous performances or to allow women or children to be hung from the flies or fixed in positions from which they cannot release themselves.” “It being our Royal will and pleasure that for the future our said theatre may be instrumental to the promotion of virtue and instruction of human life.”

The building was not ready for us until the end of the year. Mr. Yeats wrote in August: “I have just been down to see the work on the Abbey Theatre. It is all going very quickly and the company should be able to rehearse there in a month. The other day, while digging up some old rubbish in the Morgue, which is being used for dressing-rooms, they found human bones. The workmen thought they had lit on a murder, but the caretaker said, ‘Oh, I remember, we lost a body about seven years ago. When the time for the inquest came, it couldn’t be found.’”

I remembered this when Mr. Yeats wrote to me lately from the Abbey: “The other day at a performance of Countess Cathleen one of the players stopped in the midst of his speech and it was a moment or two before he could go on. He told me afterwards his shoulder had suddenly been grasped by an invisible hand.”

When the time for the opening came, I was ill and could not leave home, but had reports from him through the days before the opening. “December 24, 1904. The Company are very disappointed that you will not be up for the first night. Fay says they would all act better if you were here.”

“December 20, 1904. I hear from Robert that you may get up for a little to-day. I hope you will take a long rest. I shall see about the awning for the old woman’s stall to-night. Synge has a photograph, which will give us a picturesque form. We changed all the lighting on Saturday, and the costumes look much better now. In any case everything looks so much better on the new stage. G. came in last night with a Boer, who went to Trinity, because, so far as I could make out, he thought he would find himself among sympathetic surroundings. He and some other young Boers, including one who is said to have killed more Englishmen at Spion Kop than anybody else, had to go to a university in Europe and chose Ireland. Finding the sort of place it is, they look at the situation with amusement and are trying to get out more men of their own sort to form a rebellious coterie.... I mention G., in order to say that he wants to try his hand at translating Œdipus the King for us. To-night we go on experimenting in lighting and after that will come the great problem of keeping the bottom of the trews from standing out like frilled paper at the end of a ham bone.”

And finally on the very day of the opening: “December 27, ’04. I am confident of a fairly good start with the plays,—the stars are quiet and fairly favourable.”

Then after the first night, December 27th, I had good telegrams and then a letter: “A great success in every way. The audience seemed ‘heavy’ through the opening dialogue—Fool and Blind man—and then it woke up, applauding for a long time after the exit of the kings. There was great enthusiasm at the end. Kathleen seemed more rebellious than I ever heard it, and —— solemnly begged me to withdraw it for fear it would stir up a conspiracy and get us all into trouble. Then came your play—a success from the first. One could hardly hear for the applause. Fay was magnificent as the melancholy man. The whole play was well played all through. I don’t think I really like the stone wall wings. However, I was very near and will know better to-night. I got a beautiful light effect in Baile’s Strand, and the audience applauded the scene even before the play began. The cottage, too, with the misty blue outside its door is lovely. We never had such an audience or such enthusiasm. The pit clapped when I came in. Our success could not have been greater. Even —— admits that your comedy [Spreading the News], ‘is undoubtedly going to be very popular.’”

We worked for several years with Mr. W. Fay as producer, as manager, as chief actor. In 1903, when all his time was needed for the enterprise, we paid him enough to set him free from other work, a part coming from the earnings of the Company, a part from Mr. Yeats, and a part from myself, for we had little capital at that time, outside £50 given by our good friend Mr. John Quinn, Attorney and Counsellor in New York. But even large sums of money would have been poor payment not only for William Fay’s genius and his brother’s beautiful speaking of verse, but for their devotion to the aim and work of the theatre, its practical and its artistic side. But they left us early in 1908 at a time of disagreement with other members, and of discouragement. I am very sorry that they, who more than almost any others had laid the foundation of the Irish Theatre, did not wait with us for its success.

But building up an audience is a slow business when there is anything unusual in the methods or the work. Often near midnight, after the theatre had closed, I have gone round to the newspaper offices, asking as a favour that notices might be put in, for we could pay for but few advertisements and it was not always thought worth while to send a critic to our plays. Often I have gone out by the stage door when the curtain was up, and come round into the auditorium by the front hall, hoping that in the dimness I might pass for a new arrival and so encourage the few scattered people in the stalls. One night there were so few in any part of the house that the players were for dismissing them and giving no performance at all. But we played after all and just after the play began, three or four priests from the country came in. A friend of theirs and of the Abbey had gone beyond the truth in telling them it was not a real theatre. They came round afterwards and told us how good they thought the work and asked the Company to come down and play in the West. Very often in the green room I have quoted the homely proverb, heard I know not where, “Grip is a good dog, but Hold Fast a better”! For there is some French blood in me that keeps my spirit up, so that I see in a letter to Mr. Yeats I am indignant at some attributions of melancholy: “I who at church last Sunday, when I heard in the Psalms ‘Thou hast anointed me with the joy of gladness above my fellows’, thought it must apply to me, and that some oil of the sort must have kept me watertight among seas of trouble.” And Mr. Yeats in his turn wrote to encourage me in some time of attacks: “Any fool can fight a winning battle, but it needs character to fight a losing one, and that should inspire us; which reminds me that I dreamed the other night that I was being hanged, but was the life and soul of the party.”

For there was not always peace inside the theatre, and there came from time to time that breaking and rebuilding that is in the course of nature, and one must think all for good in the end. And so I answered some one at a time of discord, “I am myself a lover of peace so long as it is not the peace of a dead body.” And to Mr. Yeats I wrote: “I am much more angry really than you are with those who have wasted so much of your time. I look on it as child-murder. Deirdre might be in existence now but for this.” And to one who left us but has since returned: “I want you to sit down and read Mr. Yeats’s notes in the last two numbers of Samhain and to ask yourself if the work he is doing is best worth helping or hindering. Remember, he has been for the last eight years working with his whole heart and soul for the creation, the furtherance, the perfecting, of what he believes will be a great dramatic movement in Ireland. I have helped him all through, but we have lost many helpers by the way. Mr. Lecky, who had served us well in getting the law passed that made these dramatic experiments possible, publicly repudiated us because of Mr. Yeats’s letter on the Queen’s visit.... Others were lost for different reasons ——, ——, all of whom had been helpful in their time. Now others are dropping off. It is always sad to lose fellow-workers, but the work must go on all the same. ‘No man putting his hand to the plough and drawing back is fit for the kingdom of God.’ He is going on with it. I am going on with it as long as life and strength are left to me.... It is hard to hold one’s own against those one is living amongst, I have found that; and I have found that peace comes, not from trying to please one’s neighbours but in making up one’s own mind what is the right path and in then keeping to it. And so God save Ireland, and believe me your sincere friend.”

This now, according to my memory, is how I came to work for a National Theatre in Ireland and how that Theatre began.

CHAPTER II
THE BLESSING OF THE GENERATIONS

On the walls of the landing outside your nursery door there are pictures hanging, painted as you paint your own with water-colours, but without any blot or blur. Some are of blue hills and of streams running through brown bogs, but many of them are of young girls and of women, barefooted and wearing home-dyed clothes, knitting or carrying sheaves; or of fishermen dressed in white. All, girls and women and men alike, have gentle faces. There is no sign of the turf-smoke that dries the skin to leather. There are no lines or wrinkles to be seen. It may be faces were like that before the great famine came that changed soft bodies to skin and bone and turned villages to grazing for goats. Your great-grandfather fed his people at that time and took their sickness and died. But perhaps if that painter were living now, he would draw likenesses in the same way, with the furrows and ridges left out. For he could only see gentleness like his own in whatever he had a mind to paint.

A little lower on the staircase there are pictures you do not look at now, likenesses of men not very young, who had done something that made others like to meet them and who dined together at the Grillon Club. Your grandfather is there with many of his friends; some of them became friends of mine. Here is one that wrote books, you will maybe read them bye and bye, about good men that once lived in Ireland, and how Europe learned manners, and about witches that were thrown into ponds.

Near the library door there is a drawing of an old man. He looks very tired and sad. He was shut up in prison for more years than you have lived. He could not see the lime trees blooming out or the chestnuts breaking from their husks.

That is a younger man on the other wall. There is something like a laugh in his eyes. He will live and work a long time, I hope, for the work he has done is very good. He gave you a blessing in Irish one time when I brought him to see you in your cot.

Among the names on my first list of guarantors is that of Sir Frederic Burton, painter, and for many years Director of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. And this name, like that of Aubrey de Vere, brings together movements divided by half a century; for Frederic Burton had, through personal friendship with Thomas Davis, come so near to that side of the National movement of 1848 which expressed itself in writing, that he had drawn the design for the title-page of the Spirit of the Nation, that book of rebel songs and ballads. And he had known others of that time whose names have been remembered, Ferguson and Stokes and O’Curry. It would make my heart give a quicker beat to hear him say: “When I was in Aran with Petrie,” or “my model for the Blind Girl at the Holy Well was Doctor Petrie’s daughter,” or “Davis was such a dear fellow I could refuse him nothing,” or, as an apology for not having read Mitchell’s wonderful Gaol Journal, “I did not like his appearance when I saw him. Davis took me to see him somewhere. He was a regular Northern and did not make a good impression on me. His skin was blotched and he had ginger-coloured hair.” Though he resented the rising fame of Clarence Mangan, because, as he thought, it was at the expense of Thomas Moore, “who had—though no one would class him among the great poets—mellifluous versification, exquisite choice of language, and was endowed at least with a delicate fancy approaching to imagination,” the only authentic portrait of Mangan, not taken indeed from life, but after death in an hospital, was drawn by him.

He had wandered and painted in Germany and in the west of Ireland, in Connemara and in his own county of Clare, till his work at the National Gallery forced him to give up his art. But in his last days he would often speak of his early days in the West, and of country people he remembered, a girl near Maam who was a great singer, and a piper, Paddy Conneely, who was the best judge of sheep and cattle in the whole country.

He was during the Land War when I first knew him, a very strong Unionist, for his sensitive nature shrank from its harsh and violent methods, and for a while he felt that he had no longer a country to take pride in. In 1899 he wrote: “ ... I look forward with some uneasiness to the advent of Patriots from beyond sea, now American citizens under the Stars and Stripes. With this outlook before it, the Government is reducing the Irish Constabulary, a most extraordinary proceeding and a quite unaccountable one except indeed on the theory that every administration is doomed to fatuity where Irish affairs have to be dealt with. For the police are the appointed guardians of civil order, and however abused or resisted, are recognised as such. But if the military have to be called out, what a handle is given to vapourers on both sides of the Irish sea! And what about the dismissed Constables? Will they not be thrown into the ranks of the Patriots?”

And in 1895 he had written, refusing an invitation to dine with me—I cannot remember who I said was coming, but he expressed this regret: “Especially as I enjoy meeting Sir A. and Lady Clay, and should have liked to see a bird so rare as an honest Nationalist.” Yet he kept a spirit of independence that was akin to rebellion, even through those years of official position and pleasant London dinners, and friendships, and the Athenæum Club.

During the years after the death in 1892 of my husband, who had been a trustee of the National Gallery, and Sir Frederic’s death in 1900, our friendship became a close one. Our talk turned very often from pictures and Italy to Ireland. In 1897 I published Mr. Gregory’s Letter-box, a political history of the years between 1812 and 1830, taken from letters to and by my husband’s grandfather, then Under-Secretary for Ireland. Sir Frederic was much pleased with the book. He came to see me when he had read it and said: “I am glad you have come down on the real culprit, George III.,” and quoted one or two people who had said his obstinacy was the cause of so many of Ireland’s troubles. But after a little he said very gravely: “I see a tendency to Home Rule on your own part.” I said, “I defy any one to study Irish History without getting a dislike and distrust of England.” He was silent for a time and then said, “That is my feeling,” and told me how patriotic he had been as a boy though disliking “O’Connell and his gang.” Later he accused me of having become “A red hot Nationalist,” and said I had no Irish blood, but I convinced him I had, both Irish and French.

He was as angry at the time of the Boer War as any Mayo ballad-singer or Connacht Ranger’s wife. “According to the doctor I am better, but really this war is killing me. It is the worst affair I recollect. It is utterly inglorious.... I grieve particularly for our brave Irishmen whose lives have been squandered to no purpose.” He was to the end a Unionist, so far as his political doctrine went, but I think his rooted passion for Ireland increased, and made, as such strong passions are used to do, all politics seem but accidental, transitory, a business that is outside the heart of life.

The language movement, of which I was able to bring him news, began to excite him. One day I found him “excited and incredulous at Atkinson’s evidence against the Irish language, in which he says all Irish books are filthy and all folk-lore is at bottom abominable.” And then he got, “on your recommendation and Doctor Hyde’s reputation as a scholar” the History of Irish Literature and wrote: “I am reading Dr. Hyde’s Literary History with the greatest interest. It is a high pleasure to find the matter he deals with treated by a true scholar and in a reasonable and philosophic spirit. But indeed the advance in this respect since my earlier days is marvellous. At that time the comparative method was hardly, if at all, thought of. Rabid Irishmen, who often didn’t know their own language but at second hand, and knew no other tongue at all, spouted the rankest absurdities. Now true light has been let in and Irish history, archæology, literature, and poetry are the gainers. Let us not grudge to the Germans their meed of honour in having led the way.” And again: “I should be exceedingly sorry if the Irish language died out of men’s mouths altogether. I look upon the loss of a language or even a dialect as equivalent to the extirpation of a species in natural history....” Then, in 1899: “Those addresses of Dr. Hyde and Mr. Yeats are very interesting and, I would fain hope, may find a response in the hearts of the people who heard them. The subject is one full of sadness. Self-respect, a decaying language, a dying music, how shall they be resuscitated! I could weep when I recollect how full Munster, Connacht, and even Ulster were in my earlier days of exquisite native music—when in fact among the peasantry and the Irish of the towns you heard no other; when the man at the plough-tail had his peculiar ‘whistle,’ strange, wild, and full of melody and rhythm. All this must now have passed away irrevocably. May the language have a better chance! I cannot tell you how much Doctor Hyde’s book has moved me. Principally it is a manful effort.”

When I was again in London, he showed me the Literary History close at hand and asked me a little nervously what was Douglas Hyde’s age. My answer, or surmise, pleased him, and he said: “Then he will be able to work for a long time.” Once or twice, when we went on to talk of other things, he came back to this and said, “I am so glad he is a young man.”

He was jealous for the honour of Ireland even in lesser things. He was very much interested in the beginning of our theatre. In 1899 he writes: “I am happy to sign the guarantee form for the coming year, and enclose it. You are a dreamy lot in Erin. As you say, I think the quality comes from the atmosphere. Here there is more of the opposite than suits me, but I dream still, as I have done all my lifetime. I trust there will be no shindy at the performance of Countess Cathleen. But if not, our compatriots will have been for once untrue to themselves!” And later: “I am sincerely glad the experiment was on the whole successful and that those who intended mischief after all made but a poor effort to inflict it.... Altogether it appears as if the old palmy days of Dublin independent appreciation of the drama were about to be revived in our altered times. I congratulate Mr. Yeats on the success of the drama as an acting piece, and in everything except —— ——’s beautiful Irish hyperbole. I recollect an account of a concert given at Clonmel several years ago, in which the eloquent local journalist said of one of the amateur lady singers, after the loftiest eulogy, ‘but it was in her last song that Miss —— —— gave the coup de grace to her performance.’”

He cared very much for Mr. Yeats’s work, but I could never persuade him to come and meet him. He always made some excuse. At last he made a promise for one afternoon, but, in place of coming, he wrote, saying he was half ashamed to confess to so much enthusiasm, but he was so much under the spell of the poems that he was afraid that, in meeting the writer, the spell might be broken. He told me when next I saw him that of the poets he had known the only ones that did not disappoint him were William Morris and Rossetti. “Swinburne was excitable; Tennyson was grumpy and posing; Browning was charming as a friend, but not fulfilling my idea of what a poet should be.” But I did bring them together in the end, and he thanked me later and confessed my faith had been justified.

In 1900, during his last illness, I was often with him. I had been away in Dublin for our plays and I find a note written after my return to London: “Went to see Sir F. He is in bed, and I fear, or indeed must hope, the end is very near.... I went up to see him. He was clear but drowsy, at first a little inarticulate, but when I got up to go, he held my hand a long time, speaking with great kindness ... asked for Robert, and how the plays had gone. I told him of them, and of the Times notice of Maeve, saying its idealism had been so well received by an Irish audience, and of the notice on the same page telling that Tess in London had been jeered at by an audience who found it too serious. He said: ‘That is just what one would expect.’ He asked if Robert had been abroad yet, and I said no, he was so fond of Ireland he had not cared to go until now, and that I myself found every year an increased delight and happiness in Ireland. He said, ‘It is so with me. My best joys have been connected with Ireland.’ Then he spoke of Celtic influence in English literature and said, ‘There will some day be a great Pan-Celtic Empire.’ And so we parted.”

I am glad that he who had been even a little moved by that stir in the mind, that rush of revolutionary energy that moved the poets and patriots and rebels of ’48, should after half a hundred years have been stirred by the intellectual energy that came with a new generation, as its imagination turned for a while from the Parliament where all was to have been set right, after the break in the Irish party and after Parnell’s death.

“I enclose you a guarantee paper filled up for such a sum as I can afford (or perhaps more) to lose, but I hope there will be no loss for anybody in the matter, while there will certainly be some gain to Ireland! I’d have answered sooner but that I am suffering from a horrible form of dyspepsia, with exceptional langour.” It is no wonder if the old man who sent with this his promise for twenty shillings was somewhat broken in health. He was the last of the Fenian triumvirate,—Kickham, Luby, O’Leary,—and he had come back to Dublin after fifteen years of banishment and five of penal servitude at Portland. John O’Leary had been turning over books on the stalls by the Seine in Paris, when one day somebody had come to him and asked him to come back to Ireland where a rising was being planned, and he had come.

A part of the romance of my early days had been the whispered rumours of servants, and the overheard talk of my elders, of the threatened rising of the Fenians:

“An army of Papists grim

With a green flag o’er them.

Red coats and black police

Flying before them.”

The house of Roxborough, my old home, had once been attacked by Whiteboys. My father had defended it, firing from the windows, and it was not hard to believe that another attack might be made. It seemed a good occasion for being allowed to learn to shoot with my brothers, but that was in those days not thought fitting, even in self-defence, for a girl, and my gun was never loaded with anything more weighty than a coppercap. So when this new business of the theatre brought me to meet, amongst many others till then unknown, John O’Leary, I remembered those old days and the excitement of a Fenian’s escape—might he not be in hiding in our own woods or hay-lofts? And I wondered to find that not only Nationalists admired and respected so wild and dangerous a rebel. So I asked Mr. Yeats to tell me the reason, for he had known him well and had even shared a lodging with him for a while; so that his friends would say: “You have the advantage over us. O’Leary takes so long to convert to any new thing, and you can begin with him at breakfast.” And he wrote to me: “When John O’Leary returned from exile, he found himself in the midst of a movement which inherited the methods of O’Connell and a measure of his success. Journalists and politicians were alike in his eyes untruthful men, thinking that any means that brought the end were justified, and for that reason certain, as he thought, to miss the end desired. The root of all was, though I doubt if he put the thought into words, that journalists and politicians looked for their judges among their inferiors, and assumed those opinions and passions that moved the largest number of men. Their school is still dominant, and John O’Leary had seen through half his life, as we have seen, men coarsening their thought and their manners, and exaggerating their emotions in a daily and weekly press that was like the reverie of an hysterical woman. He was not of O’Connell’s household. His master had been Davis, and he was quick to discover and condemn the man who sought for judgment not among his equals or in himself. He saw, as no one else in modern Ireland has seen, that men who make this choice are long unpopular, all through their lives it may be, but grow in sense and courage with their years, and have the most gazers even in the end.

“Yet he was not unjust to those who went the other way. He imputed to them no bad motives, for I have heard him say of a man that he distrusted, ‘He would not sacrifice himself but he would risk himself,’ and of a man who seemed to him to appeal always to low motives, the chief mischief-maker of his kind, ‘He would sacrifice himself.’ Yet, what he himself commended with his favourite word ‘morale’ was the opposite of that sudden emotional self-sacrifice, the spurious heroism of popular movements, being life-long hardness and serenity, a choice made every day anew. He thought but little of opinions, even those he had sacrificed so much for, and I have heard him say, ‘There was never cause so bad that it has not been defended by good men for good reasons.’ And of Samuel Ferguson, poet and antiquarian, who was not of his party or any Nationalist party, ‘He has been a better patriot than I.’ He knew that in the end, whatever else had temporary use, it was simple things that mattered, the things a child can understand, a man’s courage and his generosity.

“I do not doubt that his prison life had been hard enough, but he would not complain, having been in ‘the hands of his enemies’; and he would often tell one of that life, but not of its hardships. A famous popular leader of that time, who made a great noise because he was in prison as a common felon for a political offence, made him very angry. I said ‘It is well known that he has done this, not because he shrinks from hardship but because there is a danger in a popular movement that the obscure men who can alone carry it to success, may say, “our leaders are treated differently.”’ He answered, ‘There are things a man must not do, even to save a nation.’ And when I asked ‘What things?’ he said, ‘He must not weep in public.’ He knew that a doctrine expediency cries out on would have but few to follow, and he would say, ‘Michael Davitt wants his converts by the thousand. I shall be satisfied with half a dozen.’ Most complained of his impracticability, and there was a saying that an angel could not find a course of action he would not discover a moral flaw in, and it is probable that his long imprisonment and exile, while heightening his sense of ideal law, had deprived him of initiative by taking away its opportunities. He would often complain that the young men would not follow him, and I once said, ‘Your power is that they do not. We can do nothing till we have converted you; you are our conscience.’ Yet he lived long enough to see the young men grow to middle life and assume like their fathers before them that a good Irishman is he who agreed with the people. Yet we, when we withstand the people, owe it to him that we can feel we have behind us an Irish tradition. ‘My religion,’ he would say, ‘is the old Persian one, “To pull the bow and speak the truth.”’

“I do not know whether he would have liked our unpopular plays, but I cannot imagine him growing excited because he thought them slanders upon Ireland. O’Connell had called the Irish peasantry the finest peasantry upon earth, and his heirs found it impossible to separate patriotism and flattery. Again and again John O’Leary would return to this, and I have heard him say, ‘I think it probable that the English national character is finer than ours, but that does not make me want to be an Englishman.’ I have often heard him defend Ireland against one charge or another, and he was full of knowledge, but the patriotism he had sacrificed so much for marred neither his justice nor his scholarship.

“He disapproved of much of Parnell’s policy, but Parnell was the only man in Irish public life of his day who had his sympathy, and I remember hearing some one say in those days before the split that are growing vague to me, that Parnell never came to Dublin without seeing him. They were perhaps alike in some hidden root of character though the one had lived a life of power and excitement, while the other had been driven into contemplation by circumstance and as I think by nature. Certainly they were both proud men.”

He was, when I knew him, living in a little room, books all around him and books in heaps upon the floor. I would send him sometimes snipe or golden plover from Kiltartan bog or woodcock from the hazel woods at Coole, hoping to tempt him with something that might better nourish the worn body than the little custard pudding that was used to serve him for his two days’ dinner, because of that “horrible dyspepsia” that often makes those who have been long in prison live starving after their release, mocked with the sight of food.

It was through reading Davis’s poems he had become a Nationalist, and his own influence had helped to shape this other poet in the same fashion, for from the time of Yeats’s boyhood there had been a close friendship between them, the old man admiring the young man’s genius, and taking his side in the quarrels that arose about patriotism in poetry and the like. I remember their both dining with me one evening in London and coming on to see a very poor play, very badly acted by some Irish society. At its end Yeats was asked to say some words of gratitude for the performance, during which we had all felt impatient and vexed. He did speak at some length, and held his audience, and without telling any untruth left them feeling that all had gone well. John O’Leary turned to me and said fervently, “I don’t think there is anything on God’s earth that Willie Yeats could not make a speech about!”

There is a bust of John O’Leary in the Municipal Gallery. The grand lines of the massive head, the eyes full of smouldering fire, might be those of some ancient prophet understanding his people’s doom.

There is nothing of storm or unrest about that other Dublin monument, that bronze figure sitting tranquilly within the gates of Trinity College and within its quadrangle. Lecky was the reasoner, the philosopher, the looker-on, writing his histories, even of Ireland, through the uproar of the Land War with the same detachment as did the Four Masters, writing their older history amongst the wars and burnings of the seventeenth century that were so terrible in Ireland.

He had been a debater while an undergraduate of Trinity, and it was fitting that he should have represented it in Parliament during his last years.

Trinity, where Wolfe Tone had been an undergraduate a hundred years earlier had changed in that hundred years. I was in Paris in 1900 and went to see an old acquaintance, that most imaginative archæologist, Salomon Reinach. He told me he had been lately to Ireland and he had been astonished by two things, the ignorance of the Irish language—it was not known even by the head of the Dublin Museum or the head of its archæological side—and by the hostility of Trinity College to all things Irish. “It is an English fort, nothing else.” “Its garrison,” the students, had gone out and broken the windows of a newspaper office while he was there, and he had spent an evening with Doctor Mahaffy, who was “much astonished that I was no longer taken up with Greek things, and that I found Irish antiquity so much more interesting.”

I have already told of Lecky’s help to our theatre. He had a real affection for his country, but was not prone to join societies or leagues. He had given us his name as one of our first guarantors, offering £5 instead of the £1 I had asked. But he publicly withdrew his name later, without his usual reasonableness, because of letters written by Mr. Yeats and Mr. George Moore at the time of Queen Victoria’s visit to Dublin. This had been announced as a private visit, and Nationalists had promised a welcome. Then it was turned into a public one, and there was a good deal of angry feeling, and it seemed as if the theatre—although quite outside politics—would suffer for a while. Though Mr. Yeats, wrote: “I don’t think you need be anxious about next year’s theatre. Clever Unionists will take us on our merits, and the rest would never like us at any time. I have found a greatly increased friendliness on the part of some of the younger men here. In a battle like Ireland’s, which is one of poverty against wealth, one must prove one’s sincerity by making oneself unpopular to wealth. One must accept the baptism of the gutter. Have not all teachers done the like?” I answered that I preferred the baptism of clean water. I was troubled by the misunderstanding of friends.

Trinity College is not keeping aloof now, and as to Mr. Lecky himself, the House of Commons took away some prejudices. He spoke to me of Mr. John Redmond and his leadership with great admiration and esteem. I find a note written after a pleasant dinner with him and Mrs. Lecky in Onslow Gardens: “He grieved over the exaggerated statements of the financial reformers. I pressed Land Purchase as the solution of our trouble, but he says what is true, ‘It means changing every hundred pounds into seventy.’ Talking of Robert’s future, he said, ‘It is a great thing to have a competence behind one.’ He said he had been brought up for the Church, but found he could not enter it, and went abroad and drifted, never thinking he would marry, and leading a solitary life, and so took to letters and succeeded. He thinks Parliament lessens one’s interest in political questions,—so much connected with them is of no value, and there is so much empty noise.”

I often heard of his speaking well and even boasting of our Theatre and its work, but though he often came to see me, he would not quite give up fault-finding. “Dined at Lecky’s; he rather cross. He took me down to dinner and said first thing, ‘What silly speeches your Celtic people have been making.’ ‘Moore?’ I asked. ‘Yes, and Yeats. Oh, very silly!’ He is in bad humour because Blackrock, which he has known, and known to speak English all his life, has sent him a copy of resolutions in favour of the revival of Irish. In revenge I told him how a Deputy Lieutenant (Edward Martyn) was proclaiming himself a convert to Nationalism through reading his Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland. But that book, he used to say, had been a long time in influencing anybody, for of its first edition only thirty copies had been sold.”

He forgave us all after a while, used to come and ask for news whenever I had come to London from home, and told me quite proudly after a visit to Oxford that the undergraduates there accepted no living poet but Yeats. But to the last he would say to me plaintively on parting, “Do not do anything incendiary when you go back to Ireland.”

My first meeting with Douglas Hyde had been when he came in one day with a broken bicycle during lunch at my neighbour Mr. Martyn’s house where I was staying. He had been coming by train, but had got out at a village, Craughwell (as I myself did a good while afterwards on the same errand), in search of memories of Raftery, the Connacht poet. I had my own pony carriage with me, and that afternoon I drove to the Round Tower and the seven churches of Kilmacduagh, taking with me Douglas Hyde and Mr. William Sharp, whom I even then suspected of being “Fiona Macleod.” Mr. Sharp—not by my invitation—took the place beside me, and left the back seat for the poet-dramatist, the founder of the Gaelic League of Ireland.

He often came to stay with me and my son at Coole after that. The first time was in winter, for a shooting party. Some old ladies—our neighbours—asked our keeper who our party was, and on hearing that one was a gentleman who spoke to the beaters in Irish, they said, “he can not be a gentleman if he speaks Irish.” With all his culture and learning, his delight was in talking with the people and hearing their poems and fragments of the legends. I remember one day, he went into a thatched cottage to change his boots after shooting snipe on Kilmacduagh bog, and talked with an old woman who had not much English and who welcomed him when he spoke in her own tongue. But when she heard he was from Mayo, looked down on by dwellers in Galway, she laughed very much and repeated a line of a song in Irish which runs:

“There’ll be boots on me yet, says the man from the county Mayo!”

Near Kilmacduagh also he was told a long story, having Aristotle for its hero. Sometimes he was less lucky. I brought an old man to see him, I was sure could give him stories. But he only told one of a beggar who went to Castle ——, a neighbouring house, the master of which had given him a half-penny, saying, “that is for my father’s and mother’s soul.” “And the beggar added another half-penny to it, and laid it down on the step, and, ‘There’s a half-penny for my father’s soul and a half-penny for my mother’s, and I wouldn’t go to the meanness of putting them both in one.’”

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

Where There is Nothing was given by the Stage Society in London, but Mr. Yeats was not satisfied with it, and we have since re-written it as The Unicorn from the Stars. Yet it went well and was vital. It led to an unexpected result: “I hear that some man of a fairly respectable class was taken up with a lot of tinkers somewhere in Munster, and that the Magistrate compared him to ‘Paul Ruttledge.’ The next night one of the tinkers seems to have said something to the others about their being in a book. The others resented this in some way, and there was a fight, which brought them all into Court again. I am trying to get the papers.”

Later in the year we wrote together Kathleen ni Houlihan and to that he wrote an introductory letter addressed to me: “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 long cloak. She was Ireland herself, that Kathleen ni Houlihan for whom so many songs have been sung 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 from 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, Kathleen 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.”

For The Pot of Broth also I wrote dialogue and I worked as well at the plot and the construction of some of the poetic plays, especially The King’s Threshold and Deirdre; for I had learned by this time a good deal about play-writing to which I had never given thought before. I had never cared much for the stage, although when living a good deal in London, my husband and I went, as others do, to see some of each season’s plays. I find, in looking over an old diary, that many of these have quite passed from my mind, although books I read ever so long ago, novels and the like, have left at least some faint trace by which I may recognise them.

We thought at our first start it would make the whole movement more living and bring it closer to the people if the Gaelic League would put on some plays written in Irish. Dr. Hyde thought well of the idea, and while staying here at Coole, as he did from time to time, he wrote The Twisting of the Rope, based on one of Mr. Yeats’s Hanrahan stories; The Lost Saint on a legend given its shape by Mr. Yeats, and The Nativity on a scenario we wrote together for him. Afterwards he wrote The Marriage and The Poorhouse, upon in each case a scenario written by me. I betray no secret in telling this, for Dr. Hyde has made none of the collaboration, giving perhaps too generous acknowledgment, as in Galway, where he said, when called before the curtain after The Marriage, that the play was not his but that Lady Gregory had written it and brought it to him, saying “Cur Gaedilge air,” “Put Irish on it.” I find in a letter of mine to Mr. Yeats: “Thanks for sending back Raftery. I haven’t sent it to Hyde yet. The real story was that Raftery by chance went into a house where such a wedding was taking place ‘that was only a marriage and not a wedding’ and where there was ‘nothing but a herring for the dinner,’ and he made a song about it and about all the imaginary grand doings at it that has been remembered ever since. But it didn’t bring any practical good to the young people, for Raftery himself ‘had to go to bed in the end without as much as a drop to drink, but he didn’t mind that, where they hadn’t it to give.’”

But it went through some changes after that: “I have a letter from the Craoibhin. He has lost his Trinity College play and must re-write it from my translation. He is not quite satisfied with Raftery (The Marriage). ‘I don’t think Maire’s uncertainty if it be a ghost or not is effective on the stage. I would rather have the ghost “out and out” as early as possible, and make it clear to the audience.’ I rather agree with him. I think I will restore the voice at the door in my published version.”

And again I wrote from Galway: “I came here yesterday for a few days’ change, but the journey, or the little extra trouble at leaving, set my head aching, and I had to spend all yesterday in a dark room. In the evening, when the pain began to go, I began to think of the Raftery play, and I want to know if this end would do. After the miser goes out, Raftery stands up and says, ‘I won’t be the only one in the house to give no present to the woman of the house,’ and hands her the plate of money, telling them to count it. While they are all gathered round counting it, he slips quietly from the door. As he goes out, wheels or horse steps are heard, and a farmer comes in and says, ‘What is going on? All the carts of the country gathered at the door, and Seaghan, the Miser, going swearing down the road?’ They say it is a wedding party called in by Raftery. But where is Raftery? Is he gone? They ask the farmer if he met him outside—the poet Raftery—and he says, ‘I did not, but I stood by his grave at Killeenin yesterday.’ Do you think that better? It gets rid of the good-byes and the storm, and I don’t think any amount of hints convey the ghostly idea strongly enough. Let me know at once; just a word will do.”

As to The Poorhouse, the idea came from a visit to Gort Workhouse one day when I heard that the wife of an old man, who had been long there, maimed by something, a knife I think, that she had thrown at him in a quarrel, had herself now been brought in to the hospital. I wondered how they would meet, as enemies or as friends, and I thought it likely they would be glad to end their days together for old sake’s sake. This is how I wrote down my fable: “Scene, ward of a workhouse; two beds containing the old men; they are quarrelling. Occupants of other invisible beds are heard saying, ‘There they are at it again; they are always quarrelling.’ They say the matron will be coming to call for order, but another says the matron has been sent for to see somebody who wants to remove one of the paupers. Both old men wish they could be removed from each other and have the whole ridge of the world between them. The fight goes on. One old man tells the other that he remembers the time he used to be stealing ducks, and he a boy at school. The other old man remembers the time his neighbour was suspected of going to Souper’s school, etc., etc. They remember the crimes of each other’s lives. They fight like two young whelps that go on fighting till they are two old dogs. At last they take their pillows and throw them at each other. Other paupers (invisible) cheer and applaud. Then they take their porringers, pipes, prayer-books, or whatever is in reach, to hurl at each other. They lament the hard fate that has put them in the same ward for five years and in beds next each other for the last three months, and they after being enemies the whole of their lives. Suddenly a cry that the matron is coming. They settle themselves hurriedly. Each puts his enemy’s pillow under his head and lies down. The matron comes in with a countrywoman comfortably dressed. She embraces one old man. She is his sister. Her husband died from her lately and she is lonesome and doesn’t like to think of her brother being in the workhouse. If he is bedridden itself, he would be company for her. He is delighted, asks what sort of house she has. She says, a good one, a nice kitchen, and he can be doing little jobs for her. He can be sitting in a chair beside the fire and stirring the stirabout for her and throwing a bit of food to the chickens when she is out in the field. He asks when he can go. She says she has the chance of a lift for him on a neighbour’s cart. He can come at once. He says he will make no delay. A loud sob from the old man in the other bed. He says, ‘Is it going away you are, you that I knew through all my lifetime, and leaving me among strangers?’ The first old man asks his sister if she will bring him too. She is indignant, says she won’t. First old man says maybe he’d be foolish to go at all. How does he know if he’d like it. She says, he is to please himself; if he doesn’t come, she can easily get a husband, having, as she has, a nice way of living, and three lambs going to the next market. The first man says, well, he won’t go; if she would bring the other old man, he would go. She turns her back angrily. Paupers in other beds call out she’ll find a good husband amongst them. She pulls on her shawl scornfully to go away. She gives her brother one more chance; he says he won’t go. She says good-bye and bad luck to him. She leaves. He says that man beyond would be lonesome with no one to contradict him. The other man says he would not. The first man says, ‘You want some one to be arguing with you always.’ The second man, ‘I do not.’ The first man says, ‘You are at your lies again.’ The second takes up his pillow to heave at him again. Curtain falls on two men arming themselves with pillows.”

I intended to write the full dialogue myself, but Mr. Yeats thought a new Gaelic play more useful for the moment, and rather sadly I laid that part of the work upon Dr. Hyde. It was all for the best in the end, for the little play, when we put it on at the Abbey, did not go very well. It seemed to ravel out into loose ends, and we did not repeat it; nor did the Gaelic players like it as well as The Marriage and The Lost Saint. After a while, when the Fays had left us, I wanted a play that would be useful to them, and with Dr. Hyde’s full leave I re-wrote the Poorhouse as The Workhouse Ward. I had more skill by that time, and it was a complete re-writing, for the two old men in the first play had been talking at an imaginary audience of other old men in the ward. When this was done away with the dialogue became of necessity more closely knit, more direct and personal, to the great advantage of the play, although it was rejected as “too local” by the players for whom I had written it. The success of this set me to cutting down the number of parts in later plays until I wrote Grania with only three persons in it, and The Bogie Men with only two. I may have gone too far, and have, I think, given up an intention I at one time had of writing a play for a man and a scarecrow only, but one has to go on with experiment or interest in creation fades, at least so it is with me.

In 1902, my Twenty-five was staged; a rather sentimental comedy, not very amusing. It was useful at the time when we had so few, but it was weak, ending, as did for the most part the Gaelic plays that began to be written, in a piper and a dance. I tried to get rid of it afterwards by writing The Jackdaw on the same idea, but in which I make humour lay the ghost of sentiment. But Twenty-five may yet be re-written and come to a little life of its own. Spreading the News was played at the opening of the Abbey Theatre, December 27, 1904. I heard it attacked at that time on the ground that Irish people never were gossips to such an extent, but it has held its own, and our audiences have had their education as well as writers and players, and know now that a play is a selection not a photograph and that the much misquoted “mirror to nature” was not used by its author or any good play-writer at all.

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.”

I asked Mr. Lennox Robinson how he had begun, and he said he had seen our players in Cork, and had gone away thinking of nothing else than to write a play for us to produce. He wrote and sent us The Clancy Name. We knew nothing of him, but saw there was good stuff in the play, and sent it back with suggestions for strengthening it and getting rid of some unnecessary characters. He altered it and we put it on. Then he wrote a three-act play The Cross Roads, but after he had seen it played he took away the first act, making it a far better play, for it is by seeing one’s work on the stage that one learns best. Then he wrote Harvest with three strong acts, and this year Patriots, which has gone best of all.

One of our heaviest tasks had been reading the plays sent in. For some years Mr. Yeats and I read every one of these; but now a committee reports on them first and sends back those that are quite impossible with a short printed notice:

“The Reading Committee of the National Theatre Society regret to say that the enclosed play, which you kindly submitted to them, is, for various reasons, not suitable for production by the Abbey Company.”

If a play is not good enough to produce, but yet shows some skill in construction or dialogue, we send another printed form written by Mr. Yeats:

“ADVICE TO PLAYWRIGHTS WHO ARE SENDING PLAYS TO THE ABBEY, DUBLIN.

The Abbey Theatre is a subsidised theatre with an educational object. It will, therefore, be useless as a rule to send it plays intended as popular entertainments and that alone, or originally written for performance by some popular actor at the popular theatres. A play to be suitable for performance at the Abbey should contain some criticism of life, founded on the experience or personal observation of the writer, or some vision of life, of Irish life by preference, important from its beauty or from some excellence of style; and this intellectual quality is not more necessary to tragedy than to the gayest comedy.

“We do not desire propagandist plays, nor plays written mainly to serve some obvious moral purpose; for art seldom concerns itself with those interests or opinions that can be defended by argument, but with realities of emotion and character that become self-evident when made vivid to the imagination.

“The dramatist should also banish from his mind the thought that there are some ingredients, the love-making of the popular stage for instance, especially fitted to give dramatic pleasure; for any knot of events, where there is passionate emotion and clash of will, can be made the subject matter of a play, and the less like a play it is at the first sight the better play may come of it in the end. Young writers should remember that they must get all their effects from the logical expression of their subject, and not by the addition of extraneous incidents; and that a work of art can have but one subject. A work of art, though it must have the effect of nature, is art because it is not nature, as Goethe said: and it must possess a unity unlike the accidental profusion of nature.

“The Abbey Theatre is continually sent plays which show that their writers have not understood that the attainment of this unity by what is usually a long shaping and reshaping of the plot, is the principal labour of the dramatist, and not the writing of the dialogue.

“Before sending plays of any length, writers would often save themselves some trouble by sending a ‘Scenario,’ or scheme of the plot, together with one completely written act and getting the opinion of the Reading Committee as to its suitability before writing the whole play.”

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.”

The first acts of the play are laid in King Brian’s great hall at Kincora. It was hung with green curtains, there were shields embossed with designs in gold upon the walls, and heavy mouldings over the doors. The last act showed Brian’s tent at Clontarf; a great orange curtain filled the background, and it is hard to forget the effect at the end of three figures standing against it, in green, in red, in grey. For a front scene there was a curtain—we use it still in its dimness and age—with a pattern of tree stems interlaced and of leaves edged with gold. This was the most costly staging we had yet attempted: it came with costumes to £30. A great deal of unpaid labour went into it. Mr. Fay discovered a method of making papier mâché, a chief part of which seemed to be the boiling down of large quantities of our old programmes, for the mouldings and for the shields. I have often seen the designer himself on his knees by a great iron pot—one we use in cottage scenes—dying pieces of sacking, or up high on a ladder painting his forests or leaves. His staging of The Shadowy Waters was almost more beautiful; the whole stage is the sloping deck of a galley, blue and dim, the sails and dresses are green, the ornaments all of copper. He staged for us also, for love of his art and of the work, my own plays, The White Cockade, The Image, Dervorgilla, and Mr. Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand with the great bronze gates used in other plays as well, in Lord Dunsany’s Glittering Gate and in The Countess Cathleen. It was by him the scenery for Mr. Yeats’s Deirdre was designed and painted, and for Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows. I am proud to think how much “excellent beauty” he has brought to the help of our work.

CHAPTER IV
THE FIGHT OVER “THE PLAYBOY”

When Synge’s Shadow of the Glen was first played in the Molesworth Hall in 1903, some attacks were made on it by the Sinn Fein weekly newspaper. In the play the old husband pretends to be dead, the young wife listens to the offers of a young farmer, who asks her to marry him in the chapel of Rathvanna when “Himself will be quiet a while in the Seven Churches.” The old man jumps up, drives her out of the house, refusing to make peace, and she goes away with a tramp, a stranger from the roads. Synge was accused of having borrowed the story from another country, from “a decadent Roman source,” the story of the widow of Ephesus, and given it an Irish dress. He declared he had been told this story in the West of Ireland. It had already been given in Curtin’s tales. Yet the same cry has been made from time to time. But it happened last winter I was at Newhaven, Massachusetts, with the Company, and we were asked to tea at the house of a Yale professor. There were a good many people there, and I had a few words with each, and as they spoke of the interest taken in the plays, a lady said: “My old nurse has been reading The Shadow of the Glen, but she says it is but a hearth tale; she had heard it long ago in Ireland.” Then others came to talk to me, and next day I went on to speak at Smith College. It was not till later I remembered the refusal to take Synge’s word, and that now Shadow of the Glen had been called a “hearth tale.” I was sorry I had not asked for the old woman’s words to be put down, but I could not remember among so many strangers who it was that had told me of them. But a little later, in New York, one of the younger Yale professors came round during the plays to the little sitting-room at the side of the stage at the Maxine Elliott Theatre where I received friends. I asked him to find out what I wanted to know, and after a while I was sent the words of the old woman, who is a nurse in a well-known philanthropic family: “Indeed, Miss, I’ve heard that story many’s the time. It’s what in the old country we call a fireside story. In the evening the neighbours would be coming in and sitting about the big fire, in a great stone chimney like you know, and the big long hearthstone in front, and the men would be stretching out on their backs on the stones and telling stories just the like of that; how that an old man had a young wife, and he began to fear she wasn’t true to him, and he got himself into the bed and a big thorn stick with him, and made out to be dead, and when his wife was watching beside him in the night and thinking him safe dead, the other man came in and began talking to her to make her marry him; and himself jumped up out of the bed and gave them the great beating, just the same as in the book, Miss, only it reads more nice and refined like. Oh, there were many of those fireside stories they’d tell!”

But the grumbling against this play was only in the papers and in letters, and it soon died out, although I find in a letter from Mr. Yeats before the opening of the Abbey: “The Independent has waked up and attacked us again with a note and a letter of a threatening nature warning us not to perform Synge again.” The Well of the Saints was let pass without much comment, though we had very small audiences for it, for those were early days at the Abbey. It was another story when in 1907 The Playboy of the Western World was put on. There was a very large audience on the first night, a Saturday, January 26th. Synge was there, but Mr. Yeats was giving a lecture in Scotland. The first act got its applause and the second, though one felt the audience were a little puzzled, a little shocked at the wild language. Near the end of the third act there was some hissing. We had sent a telegram to Mr. Yeats after the first act—“Play great success”; but at the end we sent another—“Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift.” For that plain English word was one of those objected to, and even the papers, in commenting, followed the example of some lady from the country, who wrote saying “the word omitted but understood was one she would blush to use even when she was alone.”

On the Monday night Riders to the Sea, which was the first piece, went very well indeed. But in the interval after it, I noticed on one side of the pit a large group of men sitting together, not a woman among them. I told Synge I thought it a sign of some organised disturbance and he telephoned to have the police at hand. The first part of the first act went undisturbed. Then suddenly an uproar began. The group of men I had noticed booed, hooted, blew tin trumpets. The editor of one of the Dublin weekly papers was sitting next to me, and I asked him to count them. He did so and said there were forty making the disturbance. It was impossible to hear a word of the play. The curtain came down for a minute, but I went round and told the actors to go on playing to the end, even if not a word could be heard. The police, hearing the uproar, began to file in, but I thought the disturbers might tire themselves out if left alone, or be satisfied with having made their protest, and I asked them to go outside but stay within call in case of any attempt being made to injure the players or the stage. There were very few people in the stalls, but among them was Lord Walter Fitzgerald, grand-nephew of the patriot, the adored Lord Edward. He stood up and asked that he and others in the audience might be allowed to hear the play, but this leave was refused. The disturbance lasted to the end of the evening, not one word had been heard after the first ten minutes.

Next day Mr. Yeats arrived and took over the management of affairs. Meanwhile I had asked a nephew at Trinity College to come and bring a few fellow athletes, that we might be sure of some ablebodied helpers in case of an attack on the stage. But, alas! the very sight of them was as a match to the resin of the pit, and a roar of defiance was flung back,—townsman against gownsman, hereditary enemies challenging each other as they are used to do when party or political processions march before the railings on College Green. But no iron railings divided pit and stalls, some scuffles added to the excitement, and it was one of our defenders at the last who was carried out bodily by the big actor who was playing Christy Mahon’s slain father, and by Synge himself.

I had better help from another nephew. A caricature of the time shows him in evening dress with unruffled shirt cuffs, leading out disturbers of the peace. For Hugh Lane would never have worked the miracle of creating that wonderful gallery at sight of which Dublin is still rubbing its eyes, if he had not known that in matters of art the many count less than the few. I am not sure that in the building of our nation he may not have laid the most lasting stone; no fear of a charge of nepotism will scare me from “the noble pleasure of praising,” and so I claim a place for his name above the thirty, among the chief, of our own mighty men.

There was a battle of a week. Every night protestors with their trumpets came and raised a din. Every night the police carried some of them off to the police courts. Every afternoon the papers gave reports of the trial before a magistrate who had not heard or read the play and who insisted on being given details of its incidents by the accused and by the police.

We held on, as we had determined, for the week during which we had announced the play would be acted. It was a definite fight for freedom from mob censorship. A part of the new National movement had been, and rightly, an attack on the stage Irishman, the vulgar and unnatural butt given on the English stage. We had the destroying of that scarecrow in mind among other things in setting up our Theatre. But the societies were impatient. They began to dictate here and there what should or should not be played. Mr. Colum’s plays and Mr. Boyle’s were found too harsh in their presentment of life. I see in a letter about a tour we were arranging: “Limerick has not yet come to terms. They have asked for copies of proposed plays that they may ‘place same before the branch of the Gaelic League there.’”

At Liverpool a priest had arranged an entertainment. The audience did not like one of the plays and hooted. The priest thereupon appeared and apologised, saying he would take the play off. In Dublin, Mr. Martin Harvey, an old favourite, had been forced to take off after the first night a little play because its subject was Irish belief in witchcraft. The widow of a writer of Irish plays that had been fairly popular was picketed through Ireland with her company and was nearly ruined, no one being allowed to enter the doors. Finally, at, I think, Athlone, she was only allowed to produce a play after it had been cut and rearranged by a local committee, made up of the shopkeepers of the town. We would not submit Mr. Synge’s work or any of the work we put on to such a test, nor would we allow any part of our audience to make itself final judge through preventing others from hearing and judging for themselves. We have been justified, for Synge’s name has gone round the world, and we should have been ashamed for ever if we had not insisted on a hearing for his most important work. But, had it been a far inferior play and written by some young writer who had never been heard of, we should have had to do the same thing. If we had been obliged to give in to such organised dictation, we should of necessity have closed the Theatre. I respected the opinion of those among that group who were sincere. They, not used to works of imagination and wild fantasy, thought the play a libel on the Irish countryman, who has not put parricide upon his list of virtues; they thought the language too violent or it might be profane. The methods were another thing; when the tin trumpets were blown and brandished, we had to use the same loud methods and call in the police. We lost some of our audience by the fight; the pit was weak for a while, but one after another said, “There is no other theatre to go to,” and came back. The stalls, curiously, who appeared to approve of our stand, were shy of us for a long time. They got an idea we were fond of noise and quarrels. That was our second battle, and even at the end of the week, we had won it.

An organiser of agriculture, sent to County Clare, reported that the District Councils there were engaged in passing resolutions, “Against the French Government and The Playboy.” Mrs. Coppinger in The Image says, on some such occasion, “Believe me there is not a Board or a Board Room west of the Shannon but will have a comrade cry put out between this and the Feast of Pentecost.” And anyhow in our case some such thing happened.

But Synge’s fantasy is better understood now even by those “who have never walked in Apollo’s garden,” and The Playboy holds its place in the repertory of the Abbey from year to year.

CHAPTER V
SYNGE

It is October now and leaves have fallen from the branches of the big copper-beech in the garden; I saw the stars shining through them last night. You were asleep then, but in the daytime you can see the sky all blue through their bareness. And the dry red heaps under them are noisy when pheasants, looking for mast, hurry away as you come calling, running, down the hill. The smooth trunk of the tree that was in shadow all through the summer time shines out now like silver. You stop to look at letters cut in the bark. You can read most of them yourself. You came under the wide boughs a few weeks ago, when a soldier who has gone now to set in order all the British dominions over sea, carved that “Ian H.” far out of your reach, as high as his own high head. There is another name higher again, for the painter who cut that “A” and that “J” climbed up to write it again where we could not follow him, higher than the birds make their nests. There are letters of other names, “G. B. S.” and “W. B. Y.” Strangers know the names they stand for; they are easily known. But there to the north those letters, “J. M. S.,” stand for a name that was not known at all at the time it was cut there, a few years before you were born.

The days are getting short and in the evening, when you ask me for something to paint or to scribble on, I sometimes give you one from a bundle of old sheets of paper, with three names printed at the head of it, with the picture of a woman and a dog. The names are those of three friends who worked together for a while: Yeats’s name and my own and the name of John Millington Synge.

I first saw Synge in the north island of Aran. I was staying there, gathering folk-lore, talking to the people, and felt quite angry when I passed another outsider walking here and there, talking also to the people. I was jealous of not being alone on the island among the fishers and sea-weed gatherers. I did not speak to the stranger, nor was he inclined to speak to me. He also looked on me as an intruder. I heard only his name. But a little later in the summer Mr. Yeats, who was staying with us at Coole, had a note from Synge, saying he was in Aran. They had met in Paris. Yeats wrote of him from there: “He is really a most excellent man. He lives in a little room which he has furnished himself; he is his own servant. He works very hard and is learning Breton; he will be a very useful scholar.”

J. M. Synge
From a drawing by Robert Gregory in 1904

I asked him here and we became friends at once. I said of him in a letter: “One never has to rearrange one’s mind to talk to him.” He was quite direct, sincere, and simple, not only a good listener but too good a one, not speaking much in general society. His fellow guests at Coole always liked him, and he was pleasant and genial with them, though once, when he had come straight from life on a wild coast, he confessed that a somewhat warlike English lady in the house was “civilisation in its most violent form.” There could be a sharp edge to his wit, as when he said that a certain actress (not Mrs. Campbell), whose modern methods he disliked, had turned Yeats’ Deirdre into The Second Mrs. Conchubar. And once, when awakened from the anæsthetic after one of those hopeless operations, the first words that could be understood were, “Those damned English can’t even swear without vulgarity.”

He sent me later, when we had been long working at the Theatre, some reviews of his work from a German newspaper. “What gives me a sympathy with this new man is that he does not go off into sentimentality. Behind this legend I see a laughing face; then he raises his eyebrows in irony and laughs again. Herr Synge may not be a dramatist, he may not be a great poet, but he has something in him that I like, a thing that for many good Germans is a book with seven seals, that is, Humour.” He writes a note with this, “I’d like to quote about ‘Humour,’ but I don’t want to tell Dublin I’m maybe no dramatist; that wouldn’t do.”

Of his other side, Mr. J. B. Yeats wrote to me: “Coleridge said that all Shakespeare’s characters from Macbeth to Dogberry are ideal realities, his comedies are poetry as an unlimited jest, and his tragedies ‘poetry in deepest earnest.’ Had he seen Synge’s plays he would have called them, ‘Poetry in unlimited sadness.’”

While with us, he hardly looked at a newspaper. He seemed to look on politics and reforms with a sort of tolerant indifference, though he spoke once of something that had happened as “the greatest tragedy since Parnell’s death.” He told me that the people of the play he was writing often seemed the real people among whom he lived, and I think his dreamy look came from this. He spent a good deal of time wandering in our woods where many shy creatures still find their homes—marten cats and squirrels and otters and badgers,—and by the lake where wild swans come and go. He told Mr. Yeats he had given up wearing the black clothes he had worn for a while, when they were a fashion with writers, thinking they were not in harmony with nature, which is so sparing in the use of the harsh colour of the raven.

Simple things always pleased him. In his long illness in a Dublin hospital where I went to see him every day, he would ask for every detail of a search I was making for a couple of Irish terrier puppies to bring home, and laugh at my adventures again and again. And when I described to him the place where I had found the puppies at last, a little house in a suburb, with a long garden stretching into wide fields, with a view of the hills beyond, he was excited and said that it was just such a Dublin home as he wanted, and as he had been sure was somewhere to be found. He asked me at this time about a village on the Atlantic coast, where I had stayed for a while, over a post-office, and where he hoped he might go for his convalescence instead of to Germany, as had been arranged for him. I said, in talking, that I felt more and more the time wasted that was not spent in Ireland, and he said: “That is just my feeling.”

The rich, abundant speech of the people was a delight to him. When my Cuchulain of Muirthemme came out, he said to Mr. Yeats he had been amazed to find in it the dialect he had been trying to master. He wrote to me: “Your Cuchulain is a part of my daily bread.” I say this with a little pride, for I was the first to use the Irish idiom as it is spoken, with intention and with belief in it. Dr. Hyde indeed has used it with fine effect in his Love Songs of Connacht, but alas! gave it up afterwards, in deference to some Dublin editor. He wrote to me after his first visit: “I had a very prosperous journey up from Gort. At Athenry an old Irish-speaking wanderer made my acquaintance. He claimed to be the best singer in England, Ireland, and America. One night, he says, he sang a song at Moate, and a friend of his heard the words in Athenry. He was so much struck by the event, he had himself examined by one who knew, and found that his singing did not come out of his lungs but out of his heart, which is a ‘winged heart’!”

At the time of his first visit to Coole he had written some poems, not very good for the most part, and a play, which was not good at all. I read it again after his death when, according to his written wish, helping Mr. Yeats in sorting out the work to be published or set aside, and again it seemed but of slight merit. But a year later he brought us his two plays, The Shadow of the Glen, and the Riders to the Sea, both masterpieces, both perfect in their way. He had got emotion, the driving force he needed, from his life among the people, and it was the working in dialect that had set free his style.

He was anxious to publish his book on Aran and these two plays, and so have something to add to that “£40 a year and a new suit when I am too shabby,” he used with a laugh to put down as his income. He wrote to me from Paris in February, 1902: “I don’t know what part of Europe you may be in now, but I suppose this will reach you if I send it to Coole. I want to tell you the evil fate of my Aran book and ask your advice. It has been to two London publishers, one of whom was sympathetic, though he refused it, as he said it would not be a commercial success, and the other inclined to be scornful.

“Now that you have seen the book, do you think that there would be any chance of Mr. N—— taking it up? I am afraid he is my only chance, but I don’t know whether there is any possibility of getting him to bring out a book of the kind at his own expense, as after all there is very little folk-lore in it.”

I took the book to London and had it retyped, for Synge, as I myself do, typed his own manuscripts, and the present one was very faint and rubbed. Both Mr. Yeats and I took it to publishers, but they would not accept it. Synge writes in March, 1903:

“My play came back from the Fortnightly as not suitable for their purpose. I don’t think that Mr. J—— intends to bring out the Aran book. I saw him on my way home, but he seemed hopelessly undecided, saying one minute he liked it very much, and that it might be a great success, and that he wanted to be in touch with the Irish movement, and then going off in the other direction, and fearing that it might fall perfectly flat! Finally he asked me to let him consider it a little longer!”

I was no more successful. I wrote to Mr. Yeats, who was in America: “I went to Mr. B. about the music for your book ... I think I told you he had never opened the Synge MS., and said he would rather have nothing to do with it. Masefield has it now.”

Then I had a note: “Dear Lady Gregory, I saw Mr. N. yesterday and spoke to him about Synge’s new play [Riders to the Sea], which struck me as being in some ways better even than the other. He has promised to read it if it is sent to him, though he does not much care for plays. Will you post it to, the Editor, Monthly Review.... Yours very truly, Arthur Symons.”

Nothing came of that and in December Synge writes:

“I am delighted to find that there is a prospect of getting the book out at last, and equally grateful for the trouble you have taken with it. I am writing to Masefield to-day to thank him and ask him by all means to get Matthews to do as he proposes. Do you think if he brings out the book in the spring, I should add the Tinkers? I was getting on well with the blind people (in Well of the Saints), till about a month ago when I suddenly got ill with influenza and a nasty attack on my lung. I am getting better now, but I cannot work yet satisfactorily, so I hardly know when the play is likely to be finished. There is no use trying to hurry on with a thing of that sort when one is not in the mood.”

Yet, after all, the Aran book was not published till 1907, when Synge’s name had already gone up. The Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea were published by Mr. Elkin Matthews in 1905. Riders to the Sea had already been published in Samhain, the little annual of our Theatre, edited by Mr. Yeats. And in America a friend of ours and of the Theatre had printed some of the plays in a little edition of fifty copies, thus saving his copyright. It was of Synge and of others as well as myself I thought when, in dedicating a book to John Quinn during my first winter in America, I wrote, “best friend, best helper, these half score years on this side of the sea.”

When Synge had joined us in the management of the Theatre, he took his share of the work, and though we were all amateurs then, we got on somehow or other. He writes about a secretary we had sent for him to report on: “He seems very willing and I think he may do very well if he does not take fright at us. He still thinks it was a terrible thing for Yeats to suggest that Irish people should sell their souls and for you to put His Sacred Majesty James II. into a barrel. He should be very useful in working up an audience; an important part of our work that we have rather neglected. By the way, the annual meeting of our company must be held, I suppose, before the year is up. It would be well to have it before we pay off Ryan, as otherwise we shall all be sitting about, looking with curiosity and awe at the balance sheet.”

He went on bravely with his work, but always fighting against ill health. He writes: “Feb. 15, ’06. Many thanks for the MS. of Le Médecin. I think he is entirely admirable and is certain to go well. This is just a line to acknowledge the MS., as I suppose I shall see you in a day or two.

“My play has made practically no headway since, as I have been down for ten days with bronchitis. My lung is not touched, however, and I have got off well considering. I hope I shall be all right by next week.”

[About the same date.]: “I am pleased with the way my play is going, but I find it is quite impossible to rush through with it now, so I rather think I shall take it and the typewriter to some place in Kerry where I could work. By doing so, I will get some sort of holiday and still avoid dropping the play again, which is a rather dangerous process. If I do this, I will be beyond posts.... If I do not get a good summer, I generally pay for it in the winter in extra bouts of influenza and all its miseries.”

“August 12, ’06. I shall be very glad, thanks, to go down and read you my play (The Playboy), if it is finished in time, but there is still a great deal to do. I have had a very steady week’s work since last Sunday and have made good way, but my head is getting very tired. Working in hot weather takes a lot out of me.”

“November 25, ’06. I have had rather a worse attack than I expected when I wrote my last note, but I am much better now, and out as usual. One of my lungs, however, has been a little touched, so I shall have to be careful for a while. Would it be possible to put off The Playboy for a couple of weeks? I am afraid if I went to work at him again now, and then rehearsed all December, I would be very likely to knock up badly before I was done with him. My doctor says I may do so if it is necessary, but he advises me to take a couple of weeks’ rest if it can be managed. That cousin of mine who etches is over here now, and he wants me to stay with him for a fortnight in a sort of country house he has in Surrey; so if you think The Playboy can be put off, I will go across on Thursday or Friday and get back in time to see The Shadowy Waters and get The Playboy under way for January. What do you think? If so, I would like to read the third act of Playboy to you before I go, and then make final changes while I am away, as I shall have a quiet time.”

He worked very hard at The Playboy, altering it a good deal as he went on. He had first planned the opening act in the ploughed field, where the quarrel between Christy and his father took place. But when he thought of the actual stage, he could not see any possible side wings for that “wide, windy corner of high distant hills.” He had also thought that the scene of the return of the father should be at the very door of the chapel where Christy was to wed Pegeen. But in the end all took place within the one cottage room. We all tried at that time to write our plays so as to require as little scene-shifting as possible for the sake of economy of scenery and of stage hands.

In October, 1906, Synge wrote to Mr. Yeats: “My play, though in its last agony, is not finished, and I cannot promise it for any definite day. It is more than likely that when I read it to you and Fay, there will be little things to alter that have escaped me, and with my stuff it takes time to get even half a page of new dialogue fully into key with what goes before it. The play, I think, will be one of the longest we have done, and in places extremely difficult. If we said the 19th, I could only have six or seven full rehearsals, which would not, I am quite sure, be enough. I am very sorry, but what is to be done?”

Then he wrote to me in November: “May I read The Playboy to you and Yeats and Fay, some time to-morrow, Saturday, or Monday, according as it suits you all? A little verbal correction is still necessary, and one or two structural points may need—I fancy do need—revision, but I would like to have your opinions on it before I go any further.”

I remember his bringing the play to us in Dublin, but he was too hoarse to read it, and it was read by Mr. Fay. We were almost bewildered by its abundance and fantasy, but we felt, and Mr. Yeats said very plainly, that there was far too much “bad language.” There were too many violent oaths, and the play itself was marred by this. I did not think it was fit to be put on the stage without cutting. It was agreed that it should be cut in rehearsal. A fortnight before its production, Mr. Yeats, thinking I had seen a rehearsal, wrote: “I would like to know how you thought The Playboy acted.... Have they cleared many of the objectionable sentences out of it?” I did not, however, see a rehearsal and did not hear the play again until the night of its production, and then I told Synge that the cuts were not enough, that many more should be made. He gave me leave to do this, and, in consultation with the players, I took out many phrases which, though in the printed book, have never since that first production been spoken on our stage. I am sorry they were not taken out before it had been played at all, but that is just what happened.

On Saturday, January 26, 1907, I found a note from Synge on my arrival in Dublin: “I do not know how things will go to-night. The day company are all very steady but some of the outsiders in a most deplorable state of uncertainty.... I have a sort of second edition of influenza and I am looking gloomily at everything. Fay has worked very hard all through, and everything has gone smoothly.”

I think the week’s rioting helped to break down his health. He was always nervous at a first production and the unusual excitement attending this one upset him. He took a chill and was kept to his bed for a while. Yet he got away to wild places while he could. He wrote to me from the Kerry coast: “My journey went off all right, and though I had a terribly wet night in Tralee, I was able to ride on here next day. When I came up to the house, I found to my horror a large green tent pitched in the haggard and thought I had run my head into a Gaelic League settlement at last. However, it turned out to be only a band of sappers, who have since moved on.” And again: “The day after to-morrow I move on, bag and baggage, to the Great Blasket Island. It is probably even more primitive than Aran, and I am wild with joy at the prospect. I will tell you of my new abode. I am to go out in a curragh on Sunday, when the people are going back from Mass on the mainland, and I am to lodge with the King!”

It was only in the country places he was shy of the Gaelic League. In August, 1906, he says: “I went to the Oireactas on Thursday to see their plays. Their propagandist play, done by the Ballaghadereen company, was clever, with some excellent dialogue. The peasants who acted it were quite admirable. I felt really enthusiastic about the whole show, although the definitely propagandist fragments were, of course, very crude. The play was called, I think, an T-Atruighe mor (The big change). I think I have spelled it wrong. It would probably read badly.”

The last year was still a struggle against failing strength: “April, ’08. I have been waiting from day to day to write, so that I might say something definite about my ‘tin-tacks’ (an allusion to the old man in Workhouse Ward who had pains like tin-tacks in his inside) and possible plans. I was with the doctor again to-day, and he thinks I may have to go into hospital again and perhaps have an operation, but things are uncertain for a day or two.... I fear there is little possibility of my being able to go to the shows this week, so I do not know if you ought to come up, if you can without inconvenience. I am rather afraid of slovenly shows if there are poor houses and no one there to supervise. It is very trying having to drop my rehearsals of Well of the Saints. In fact, this unlooked for complication is a terrible upset everyway—I have so much to do.”

“August 28, ’08. I have just been with Sir C. Ball. He seems to think I am going on very well, and says I may ride and bicycle and do what I like! All the same I am not good for much yet. I get tired out very easily. I am half inclined to go to the British Association matinée on Friday. I would like to hear Yeats’ speech, and I don’t think it would do me any harm. In any case, I will go in and see you when you are up. I think of going away to Germany or somewhere before very long. I am not quite well enough for the West of Ireland in this broken weather, and I think the complete change would do me most good. I have old friends on the Rhine I could stay with, if I decide to go there. I hear great accounts of the Abbey this week. It almost looks as if Dublin was beginning to know we are there. I have been fiddling with my Deirdre a little. I think I’ll have to cut it down to two longish acts. The middle act in Scotland is impossible.... They have been playing The Well of the Saints in Munich. I have just got £3:10, royalties. It was a one-act version I have just heard this minute, compressed from my text!”

“January 3, ’09. I have done a great deal to Deirdre since I saw you, chiefly in the way of strengthening motives and recasting the general scenario; but there is still a good deal to be done with the dialogue and some scenes in the first act must be rewritten to make them fit in with the new parts I have added. I only work a little every day, and I suffer more than I like with indigestion and general uneasiness inside.... The doctors are vague and don’t say much that is definite....

“They are working at the Miser now and are all very pleased with it and with themselves, as I hear. I have not been in to see a rehearsal yet, as I keep out in the country as much as I can.”

But his strength did not last long enough to enable him to finish Deirdre of the Sorrows, his last play. After he was gone, we did our best to bring the versions together, and we produced it early in the next year, but it needed the writer’s hand. I did my best for it, working at its production through snowy days and into winter nights until rheumatism seized me with a grip I have never shaken off. I wrote to Mr. Yeats: “I still hope we can start with Deirdre. I will be in Dublin for rehearsals in Christmas week, though I still hope to get to Paris for Christmas with Robert, but it may not be worth while. I will spend all January at the Theatre, but I must be back on the first of February to do some planting that cannot be put off.” And again: “I am more hopeful of Deirdre now. I have got Conchubar and Fergus off at the last in Deirdre’s long speech and that makes an immense improvement. She looks lonely and pathetic with the other two women crouching and rocking themselves on the floor.”

For we have done our best for Synge’s work since we lost him, as we did while he was with us here.

He had written a poem which was in the Press at the time of his death:

“With Fifteen-ninety or Sixteen-sixteen

We end Cervantes, Marot, Nashe or Green;

Then Sixteen-thirteen till two score and nine

Is Crashaw’s niche, that honey-lipped divine.

And so when all my little work is done

They’ll say I came in Eighteen-seventy-one,

And died in Dublin. What year will they write

For my poor passage to the stall of Night?”

Early in 1909 he was sent again into a private hospital in Dublin. A letter came to me from Mr. Yeats, dated March 24th: “In the early morning Synge said to the nurse ‘It’s no use fighting death any longer,’ and turned over and died.”

CHAPTER VI
THE FIGHT WITH THE CASTLE

In the summer of 1909 I went one day from London to Ayot St. Lawrence, a Hertfordshire village, to consult Mr. Bernard Shaw on some matters connected with our Theatre. When I was leaving, he gave me a little book, The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet, which had just been printed, although not published. It had, however, been already rejected by the Censor, as all readers of the newspapers know; and from that quiet cottage the fiery challenge-giving answers had been sent out. I read the play as I went back in the train, and when at St. Pancras Mr. Yeats met me to talk over the business that had taken me away, I showed him the little book that had been given its black ball, and I said, “Hypocrites.”

A little time afterwards Mr. Shaw offered us the play for the Abbey, for the Censor has no jurisdiction in Ireland—an accidental freedom. We accepted it and put it in rehearsal that we might produce it in Horse Show week. We were without a regular stage manager at that time, and thought to have it produced by one of the members of the Company. But very soon the player who had taken it in charge found the work too heavy and troublesome, and withdrew from the stage management, though not from taking a part. I had a letter one morning telling me this, and I left by the next train for Dublin. As I left, I sent a wire to a London actor—a friend—asking if he could come over and help us out of this knot. Meanwhile, that evening, and before his answer came, I held a rehearsal, the first I had ever taken quite alone. I thought out positions during the night, and next morning, when I had another rehearsal, I began to find an extraordinary interest and excitement in the work. I saw that Blanco’s sermon, coming as it did after bustling action, was in danger of seeming monotonous. I broke it up by making him deliver the first part standing up on the Sheriff’s bench, then bringing him down to sit on the table and speak some of the words into the face of Elder Posnet. After that I sent him with a leap on to the table for the last phrases. I was very much pleased with the effect of this action, and by the time a telegram told me my London friend could come, I was confident enough to do without him. We were very proud and pleased when the whole production was taken to London later by the Stage Society. I have produced plays since then, my own and a few others. It is tiring work; one spends so much of one’s own vitality.

That is what took me away from home to Dublin in that summer time, when cities are out of season. Mr. Yeats had stayed on at Coole at his work, and my letters to him, and letters after that to my son and to Mr. Shaw, will tell what happened through those hot days, and of the battle with Dublin Castle, which had taken upon itself to make the writ of the London Censor run at the Abbey.

I received while in Dublin, the following letter from a permanent official in Dublin Castle:

“Dear Lady Gregory:

“I am directed by the Lord Lieutenant to state that His Excellency’s attention has been called to an announcement in the Public Press that a play entitled The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet is about to be performed in the Abbey Theatre.

“This play was written for production in a London theatre, and its performance was disallowed by the Authority which in England is charged with the Censorship of stage plays. The play does not deal with an Irish subject, and it is not an Irish play in any other sense than that its author was born in Ireland. It is now proposed to produce this play in the Abbey Theatre, which was founded for the express purpose of encouraging dramatic art in Ireland, and of fostering a dramatic school growing out of the life of the country.

“The play in question does not seem well adapted to promote these laudable objects or to belong to the class of plays originally intended to be performed in the Abbey Theatre, as described in the evidence on the hearing of the application for the Patent.

“However this may be, the fact of the proposed performance having been brought to the notice of the Lord Lieutenant, His Excellency cannot evade the responsibility cast upon him of considering whether the play conforms in other respects to the conditions of the Patent.