SAMHAIN

“The prose of the play is first-rate—never metrical, but rich in trailing and rippling melodies, genuine harmonies of prose, and delightfully suggestive of the sound of Irish country speech.”—Manchester Guardian.

“One of the most notable accessions to the drama that we have had.”—Pall Mall Gazette.

“We have read nothing for a long time so redolent of the green earth and of what Jasper Petulengro called ‘the wind on the heath, brother.’”—Times.

Other Books by W. B. Yeats:—

“Mr. Yeats’ book is well described by its title. It is a book of twilight thoughts and fancies, dreams, imaginations and chimeras, gathered in the fields and woods and villages of Ireland. We find it fascinating, full of suggestion and very pleasant reading.”—Spectator.

“There is hardly an idol of the mob or of the market-place from which it does not seek to turn worshippers aside; yet with how insidious a courtesy.”—Athenæum.

“Good literature, and much of it true, penetrating and essential criticism.”—St. James’ Gazette.

WILLIAM FAY.

I cannot describe the various dramatic adventures of the year with as much detail as I did last year, mainly because the movement has got beyond me. The most important event of the Gaelic Theatre has been the two series of plays produced in the Round Room of the Rotunda by the Gaelic League—Father Dineen’s Tobar Draoidheachta, and Dr. Hyde’s An Posadh, and a chronicle play about Hugh O’Neill, and, I think, some other plays, were seen by immense audiences. I was not in Ireland for these plays, but a friend tells me that he could only get standing room one night, and the Round Room must hold about 3,000 people. A performance of Tobar Draoidheachta, I saw there some months before, was bad, but I believe there was great improvement, and that the players who came up from somewhere in County Cork to play it at this second series of plays were admirable. The players, too, that brought Dr. Hyde’s An Posadh from Ballaghadereen, in County Mayo, where they had been showing it to their neighbours, were also, I am told, careful and natural. The play-writing, always good in dialogue, is still very poor in construction, and I still hear of plays in many scenes, with no scene lasting longer than four or six minutes, and few intervals shorter than nine or ten minutes which have to be filled up with songs. The Rotunda chronicle play seems to have been rather of this sort, and I suspect that when I get Father Peter O’Leary’s Meadhbh, a play in five acts produced at Cork, I shall find the masterful old man, in spite of his hatred of English thought, sticking to the Elizabethan form. I wish I could have seen it played last week, for the spread of the Gaelic Theatre in the country is more important than its spread in Dublin, and of all the performances of Gaelic plays in the country during the year I have seen but one—Dr. Hyde’s new play, Cleamhnas, at Galway Feis. I got there a day late for a play by the Master of Galway Workhouse, but heard that it was well played, and that his dialogue was as good as his construction was bad. There is no question, however, about the performance of Cleamhnas being the worst I ever saw. I do not blame the acting, which was pleasant and natural, in spite of insufficient rehearsal, but the stage management. The subject of the play was a match-making. The terms were in debate between two old men in an inner room. An old woman, according to the stage directions, should have listened at the door and reported what she heard to her daughter’s suitor, who is outside the window, and to her daughter. There was no window on the stage, and the young 4man stood close enough to the door to have listened for himself. The door, where she listened, opened now on the inner room, and now on the street, according to the necessities of the play, and the young men, who acted the fathers of grown-up children, when they came through the door were seen to have done nothing to disguise their twenty-five or twenty-six summers. There had been only two rehearsals, and the little boy who should have come in laughing at the end came in shouting, “Ho ho, ha ha,” evidently believing that these were Gaelic words he had never heard before. Playwrights will have to be careful who they permit to play their work if it is to be played after only two rehearsals, and without enough attention to the arrangement of the stage, to make the action plausible.

The only Gaelic performances I have seen during the year have been ill done, but I have seen them sufficiently well done in other years, to believe my friends when they tell me that there have been good performances. Inghinidhe na h-Eireann is always thorough, and one cannot doubt that the performance of Dr. Hyde’s An Naom ar Iarraid, by the children from its classes, was at least careful. A powerful little play in English against enlisting, by Mr. Colum, was played with it, and afterwards revived, and played with a play about the Royal Visit, also in English. I have no doubt that we shall see a good many of these political plays during the next two or three years, and it may be even the rise of a more or less permanent company of political players, for the revolutionary clubs will begin to think plays as necessary as the Gaelic League is already thinking them. Nobody can find the same patriotic songs and recitations sung and spoken by the same people, year in year out, anything but mouldy bread. It is possible that the players who are to produce plays in October, for the Samhain festival of Cumann na nGaedheal, may grow into such a company.

Though one welcomes every kind of vigorous life, I am, myself, most interested in “The Irish National Theatre Society,” which has no propaganda but that of good art. The little Camden Street Hall it had taken has been useful for rehearsal alone, for it proved to be too far away, and too lacking in dressing rooms for our short plays, which involve so many changes. Successful performances were given, however, at Rathmines, and in one or two country places.

Deirdre, by A. E., The Racing Lug, by Mr. Cousins, The Foundations, by Mr. Ryan, and my Pot of Broth, and Cathleen ni Houlihan, were repeated, but no new plays were produced until March 14th, when Lady 5Gregory’s Twenty Five, and my Hour Glass, drew a good audience. On May the 2nd the Hour Glass, Twenty Five, Cathleen ni Houlihan, Pot of Broth, and Foundations were performed before the Irish Literary Society in London, at the Queen’s Gate Hall, and plays and players were generously commended by the Press. I do not think I need apologise for reprinting some quotations from the article written by the Times critic. It is natural that we should be pleased with this praise, and that we should wish others to know of it, for is it not a chief pleasure of the artist to be commended in subtle and eloquent words? The critic of the Times has seen so many theatres that he is, perhaps, a little weary of them, but even in Ireland there are one or two critics, who are so much in love, or pretend to be so much in love with the theatre as it is that they complain when we perform on a stage two feet wider than Moliere’s, that it is scarce possible to be interested in anything that is played on so little a stage. We are to them foolish sectaries who have revolted against that orthodoxy of the commercial theatre, which is so much less pliant than the orthodoxy of the church, for there is nothing so passionate as a vested interest disguised as an intellectual conviction. If you enquire into its truth it becomes as angry as a begging letter writer, when you find some hole in that beautiful story about the five children and the broken mangle. In Ireland wherever the enthusiasts are shaping life, the critic who does the will of the commercial theatre can but stand against his lonely pillar defending his articles of belief among a wild people, and thinking mournfully of distant cities, where nobody puts a raw potato into his pocket when he is going to hear a musical comedy.

The Irish Literary Society of New York, which has been founded this year, produced The Land of Heart’s Desire, The Pot of Broth, and Cathleen ni Houlihan, on June 3rd and 4th very successfully, and propose to give Dr. Hyde’s Nativity Play, Drama Breithe Chriosta, and his Casadh an t-Sugain, ‘Posadh’ and Naom ar Iarraid next year, at the same time of year, playing them both in Irish and English. I heard too that his Nativity Play will be performed in New York this winter, but I know no particulars except that it will be done in connection with some religious societies. The National Theatre Society will, I hope, produce some new plays of his this winter, as well as new plays by Mr. Synge, Mr. Colum, Lady Gregory, myself, and others. They have taken the Molesworth Hall for three days in every month, beginning with the 8th, 9th, and 10th of October, when they will perform Mr. Synge’s Shadow of the Glen, a little country comedy, full of a humour that is at once harsh and beautiful; Cathleen ni Houlihan, and a longish one act play in verse of my own, called The King’s Threshold. This play is founded on the old story of Seanchan the poet, and King Guare of Gort, but I have seen the story from the poet’s point of view, and not like the old storytellers, from the 6King’s. Our repertory of plays is increasing steadily, and when the winter’s work is finished, a play Mr. Bernard Shaw has promised us may be ready to open the summer session. His play will, I imagine, unlike the plays we write for ourselves, be long enough to fill an evening, and it will, I know, deal with Irish public life and character. Mr. Shaw, more than anybody else, has the love of mischief that is so near the core of Irish intellect, and should have an immense popularity among us. I have seen a crowd of many thousands in possession of his spirit, and keeping the possession to the small hours.

This movement should be important even to those who are not especially interested in the Theatre, for it may be a morning cock-crow to that impartial meditation about character and destiny, we call the artistic life in a country where everybody, if we leave out the peasant who has his folk songs and his music, has thought the arts useless unless they have helped some kind of political action, and has, therefore, lacked the pure joy that only comes out of things that have never been indentured to any cause. The play which is mere propaganda shows its leanness more obviously than a propagandist poem or essay, for dramatic writing is so full of the stuff of daily life that a little falsehood, put in that the moral may come right in the end, contradicts our experience. If Father Dineen or Dr. Hyde were asked why they write their plays they would say they write them to help their propaganda; and yet when they begin to write the form constrains them, and they become artists—one of them a very considerable artist, indeed. Dr. Hyde’s early poems have even in translation a naivete and wildness that sets them, as I think, among the finest poetry of our time; but he had ceased to write any verses but those Oireactas odes, that are but ingenious rhetoric. It is hard to write without the sympathy of one’s friends, and though the country people sang his verses the readers of Irish read them but little, partly it may be because he had broken with that elaborate structure of later Irish poetry which seemed a necessary part of their propaganda. They read plenty of pamphlets and grammars, but they disliked—as do other people in Ireland—serious reading, reading that is an end and not a means, that gives us nothing but a beauty indifferent to our profuse purposes. But now Dr. Hyde with his cursing Hanrahan, his old saint at his prayers, is a poet again; and the Leaguers go to his plays in thousands—and applaud in the right places, too—and the League puts many sixpences into its pocket.

We who write in English have a more difficult work, for English has been the language in which the Irish cause has been debated; and we 7have to struggle with traditional phrases, and traditional points of view. Many would give us limitless freedom as to the choice of subject, understanding that it is precisely those subjects on which people feel most passionately, and, therefore, most dramatically, we would be forbidden to handle if we made any compromise with powers. But fewer know that we must encourage every writer to see life afresh, even though he sees it with strange eyes. Our National Theatre must be so tolerant, and, if this is not too wild a hope, find an audience so tolerant that the half dozen minds, who are likely to be the dramatic imagination of Ireland for this generation, may put their own thoughts and their own characters into their work; and for that reason no one who loves the arts, whether among Unionists or among the Patriotic Societies, should take offence if we refuse all but every kind of patronage. I do not say every kind, for if a mad king, a king so mad that he loved the arts and their freedom, should offer us unconditioned millions, I, at any rate, would give my voice for accepting them.

We will be able to find conscientious playwrights and players, for our young men have a power of work, when they are interested in their work, one does not look for outside a Latin nation, and if one were certain of being granted this freedom one would be certain that the work would grow to great importance. It is a supreme moment in the life of a nation when it is able to turn now and again from its pre-occupations, to delight in the capricious power of the artist as one delights in the movement of some wild animal, but nobody can tell with certainty when that moment is at hand.

The two plays in this year’s Samhain represent the two sides of the movement very well, and are both written out of a deep knowledge of the life of the people. It should be unnecessary to praise Dr. Hyde’s comedy, that comes up out of the foundation of human life, but Mr. Synge is a new writer and a creation of our movement. He has gone every summer for some years past to the Arran Islands, and lived there in the houses of the fishers, speaking their language and living their lives, and his play seems to me the finest piece of tragic work done in Ireland of late years. One finds in it, from first to last, the presence of the sea, and a sorrow that has majesty as in the work of some ancient poet.

A part of the essay which follows was printed in the United Irishman last spring. It is a summary, as far as I can remember, of a lecture I gave 8after the performance of The Hour Glass. It repeats a good deal that has been said before in Samhain or Beltaine, but only things that one must repeat over and over, not perhaps to convince those who do not believe us, but, as Blake said, to protect those who do.

I think that there must be some who will be glad of Mr. W. Fay’s Portrait. We owe our National Theatre Society to him and his brother, and we have always owed to his playing our chief successes.

I think the theatre must be reformed in its plays, its speaking, its acting, and its scenery. That is to say, I think there is nothing good about it at present.

1st. We have to write or find plays that will make the theatre a place of intellectual excitement—a place where the mind goes to be liberated as it was liberated by the theatres of Greece and England and France at certain great moments of their history, and as it is liberated in Scandinavia to-day. If we are to do this we must learn that beauty and truth are always justified of themselves, and that their creation is a greater service to our country than writing that compromises either in the seeming service of a cause. We will, doubtless, come more easily to truth and beauty because we love some cause with all but all our heart; but we must remember when truth and beauty open their mouths to speak, that all other mouths should be as silent as Finn bade the Son of Lugaidh be in the houses of the great. Truth and beauty judge and are above judgment. They justify and have no need of justification.

Such plays will require, both in writers and audiences, a stronger feeling for beautiful and appropriate language than one finds in the ordinary theatre. St. Beuve has said that there is nothing immortal in literature except style, and it is precisely this sense of style, once common among us, that is hardest for us to recover. I do not mean by style words with an air of literature about them, what is ordinarily called eloquent writing. The speeches of Falstaff are as perfect in their style as the soliloquies of Hamlet. One must be able to make a king of faery or an old countryman or a modern lover speak that language which is his and nobody else’s, and speak it with so much of emotional subtlety that the hearer may find it hard to know whether it is the thought or the word that has moved him, or whether these could be separated at all.

If one does not know how to construct, if one cannot arrange much complicated life into a single action, one’s work will not hold the attention or linger in the memory, but if one is not in love with words it will lack the delicate moment of living speech that is the chief garment of life; and because of this lack the great realists seem to the lovers of beautiful art to be wise in this generation, and for the next generation, perhaps, but not for all generations that are to come.

2nd. But if we are to restore words to their sovereignty we must make speech even more important than gesture upon the stage.

10I have been told that I desire a monotonous chant, but that is not true, for though a monotonous chant may be a safer beginning for an actor than the broken and prosaic speech of ordinary recitation, it puts one to sleep none the less. The sing-song in which a child says a verse is a right beginning, though the child grows out of it. An actor should understand how to so discriminate cadence from cadence, and to so cherish the musical lineaments of verse or prose that he delights the ear with a continually varied music. Certain passages of lyrical feeling, or where one wishes, as in the Angel’s part in The Hour Glass, to make a voice sound like the voice of an immortal, may be spoken upon pure notes which are carefully recorded and learned as if they were the notes of a song. Whatever method one adopts one must always be certain that the work of art, as a whole, is masculine and intellectual, in its sound as in its form.

3rd. We must simplify acting, especially in poetical drama, and in prose drama that is remote from real life like my Hour Glass. We must get rid of everything that is restless, everything that draws the attention away from the sound of the voice, or from the few moments of intense expression, whether that expression is through the voice or through the hands; we must from time to time substitute for the movements that the eye sees the nobler movements that the heart sees, the rhythmical movements that seem to flow up into the imagination from some deeper life than that of the individual soul.

4th. Just as it is necessary to simplify gesture that it may accompany speech without being its rival, it is necessary to simplify both the form and colour of scenery and costume. As a rule the background should be but a single colour, so that the persons in the play wherever they stand, may harmonize with it, and preoccupy our attention. In other words it should be thought out not as one thinks out a landscape, but as if it were the background of a portrait, and this is especially necessary on a small stage where the moment the stage is filled the painted forms of the background are broken up and lost. Even when one has to represent trees or hills they should be treated in most cases decoratively, they should be little more than an unobtrusive pattern. There must be nothing unnecessary, nothing that will distract the attention from speech and movement. An art is always at its greatest when it is most human. Greek acting was great because it did everything with the voice, and modern acting may be great when it does everything with voice and movement. But an art which smothers these things with bad painting, with innumerable garish colours, with continual restless mimicries of the surface of life, is an art of fading humanity, a decaying art.

A writer in The Leader has said that I told my audience after the performance of The Hour Glass that I did not care whether a play was 11moral or immoral. He said this without discourtesy, and as I have noticed that people are generally discourteous when they write about morals, I think that I owe him upon my part the courtesy of an explanation. I did not say that I did not care whether a play was moral or immoral, for I have always been of Verhaeren’s opinion that a masterpiece is a portion of the conscience of mankind. My objection was to the rough and ready conscience of the newspaper and the pulpit in a matter so delicate and so difficult as literature. Every generation of men of letters has been called immoral by the pulpit or the newspaper, and it has been precisely when that generation has been illuminating some obscure corner of the conscience that the cry against it has been more confident.

The plays of Shakespeare had to be performed on the south side of the Thames because the Corporation of London considered them immoral. Goethe was thought dangerous to faith and morals for two or three generations. Every educated man knows how great a portion of the conscience of mankind is in Flaubert and Balzac, and yet their books have been proscribed in the courts of law, and I found some time ago that our own National Library, though it had two books on the genius of Flaubert, had refused on moral grounds to have any books written by him. With these stupidities in one’s memory how can one, as many would have us, arouse the mob, and in this matter the pulpit and the newspaper are but voices of the mob, against the English theatre in Ireland upon moral grounds? If that theatre became conscientious as men of letters understand the conscience, many that now cry against it would think it even less moral, for it would be more daring, more logical, more freespoken. The English Theatre is demoralizing, not because it delights in the husband, the wife and the lover, a subject which has inspired great literature in most ages of the world, but because the illogical thinking and insincere feeling we call bad writing, make the mind timid, and the heart effeminate. I saw an English play in Dublin a few months ago called Mice and Men. It had run for five hundred nights in London, and been called by all the newspapers “a pure and innocent play,” “a welcome relief,” and so on. In it occurred this incident: The typical scapegrace hero of the stage, a young soldier, who is in love with the wife of another, goes away for a couple of years, and when he returns finds that he is in love with a marriageable girl. His mistress, who has awaited his return with what is represented as faithful love, sends him a letter of welcome, and because he has grown virtuous of a sudden he returns it unopened, and with so careless a scorn that the husband intercepts it; and the dramatist approves this manner of crying off with an old love, and rings down the curtain on his marriage bells. Men who would turn such a man out of a club bring their wives and daughters to look at him with admiration upon the stage, so demoralizing is a drama that has no intellectual tradition behind it. I could not endure it and went out into the street 12and waited there, until the end of the play, when I came in again to find the friends I had brought to hear it, but had I been accustomed to the commercial theatre I would not even have known that anything strange had happened upon the stage. If a man of intellect had written of such an incident he would have made his audience feel for the mistress that sympathy one feels for all that have suffered insult, and for that young man an ironical emotion that might have marred the marriage bells, and who knows what the cheesemonger and the curate would have said of him. Even Ireland would have cried out; Catholic Ireland that should remember the gracious tolerance of the Church when all nations were its children, and how Wolfram of Eisenbach sang from castle to castle of the courtesy of Parzival, the good husband, and of Gawain, the light lover, in that very Thuringia, where a generation later the lap of St. Elizabeth was filled with roses. A Connaught Bishop told his people a while since that they “should never read stories about the degrading passion of love,” and one can only suppose that being ignorant of a chief glory of his Church, he has never understood that this new puritanism is but an English cuckoo.

Stendhal said that the greatest pleasure he had ever got from the theatre was given him by the performance of some poor Italian strollers in a barn. The Queen’s Gate Hall, if not exactly a barn, can boast none of the glories of the ordinary playhouse; and it was here that, only a day or two ago, a little band of Irishmen and women, strangers to London and to Londoners, gave some of us, who for our sins are constant frequenters of the regular playhouses, a few moments of calm delight quite outside the range of anything which those houses have to offer. They were members of the Irish National Theatre Society, which consists, we understand, of amateurs, all engaged in daily work, who can devote only their leisure time to the stage. That was the case, it will be remembered, with the enthusiasts who helped Antoine to found his Théâtre Libre; but there is this difference, that, while the French enterprise was an artistic adventure and nothing else, the Irish Theatre is that and something more. It is part of a national movement, it is designed to express the spirit of the race, the “virtue” of it, in the medium of acted drama. That is an excellent design. If the peculiarities of Irish thought and feeling can be brought home to us through drama we shall all be the better for the knowledge; and the art of drama, too, cannot but gain by a change of air, a new outlook, a fresh current of ideas. But with these larger aspects of the matter we are not now concerned. Our present business is to record the keen pleasure which an afternoon with the Irish National Theatre has afforded us, and to do our best to analyse that pleasure.

First and foremost, there is the pleasure of the ear. This, of course, is an accidental pleasure; we mean that it has nothing to do with the æsthetic aims of the Society, nothing to do with the dramatic theories or poetic gifts of its President, Mr. W. B. Yeats, nothing to do with art at all; it results from the nature of things, from the simple fact that Irish speakers are addressing English listeners. It is none the less a very exquisite pleasure. We had never realized the musical possibilities of our language until we had heard these Irish people speak it. Most Englishmen, we fancy, get their notions of Irish pronunciation from Thackeray, and though, no doubt, Thackeray’s version was always good-natured enough, yet the talk of Costigan and the Mulligan and the O’Dowd tends to burlesque the truth. The association is always one of drollery, whereas the English of these Irish players gives us an impression, not of drollery at all, but of elegance. “Fool” is pronounced “fule,” (with the thin 35French “u”), “philosophy” is “philosophee,” “argument” is “argumént,” and the words look funny when so written; but they do not sound funny, they sound charming. The unexpected emphasis on the minor syllables has an air of not ungraceful pedantry or, better still, of an old-world courtliness. We are listening to English spoken with watchful care and slightly timorous hesitation, as though it were a learned language. That at once ennobles our mother-tongue, brings it into relief, gives it a daintiness and distinction of which, in our rough workaday use of it, we had never dreamed. But the charm does not stop there. The Irish people sing our language—and always in a minor key. It becomes in very fact “most musical, most melancholy.” Rarely, very rarely, the chant degenerates into a whine. But for the most part, the English ear is mildly surprised and entirely charmed. Talk of lingua Toscana in bocca Romana! The English tongue on Irish lips is every whit as melodious.

The next pleasure is for the eye. These Irish gentlemen and ladies are good to look at; the men are lithe, graceful, bright-eyed, and one at least of the maidens, with the stage name of Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh, is of a strange, wan, “disquieting” beauty: But we are not thinking so much of what Elia’s Scotch friend would call their “pairsonal pretensions” as of their postures and movements. As a rule they stand stock-still. The speaker of the moment is the only one who is allowed a little gesture—just as in the familiar convention of the Italian marionette theatre the figure supposed to be speaking is distinguished from the others by a slight vibration. The listeners do not distract one’s attention by fussy “stage business,” they just stay where they are and listen. When they do move it is without premeditation, at haphazard, even with a little natural clumsiness, as of people who are not conscious of being stared at in public. Hence a delightful effect of spontaneity. And in their demeanour generally they have the artless impulsiveness of children—the very thing which one found so enjoyable in another exotic affair, the performance of Sada Yacco and her Japanese company. Add that the scenery is of Elizabethan simplicity—sometimes no more than a mere backcloth—and you will begin to see why this performance is a sight good for sore eyes—eyes made sore by the perpetual movement and glitter of the ordinary stage.

But it is time to say something of the vital part of our pleasure, the pleasure of mind and mood. That, too, is largely a pleasure of rest—and resignation. The mind is steeped in seriousness; the mood is uniformly sad. For anything of the same kind one would have to go to some of Maeterlinck’s earlier plays or to that Grainquebille of Anatole France which they are now playing at the Renaissance. But these are imperfect comparisons; the Irish theatre is really of its own kind and of none other. Its sustained note of subdued gravity, with here and there faint harmonies of weird elfish freakishness (“harps in the air,” Hilda Wangel would have called them) is entirely Irish and entirely delightful. Take Mr. Yeats’ 36“morality,” The Hour Glass. An angel gives a man a few moments wherein to try and find means of salvation before he dies with the last running out of the sand. Imagine how the ordinary dramatist would treat this, how largely the hour-glass would bulk in the foreground, how the man would writhe and shriek in the frenzied horror of imminent death. Indeed, you need not imagine it; you have only to go to Drury Lane, where by an odd coincidence this very situation fills the final act of Sardou’s Dante. Tick, tick! goes the pendulum clock. Lo! the pendulum is the figure of death with his scythe. (Oh, symbolism! oh, Sardou!) Remark the practical actor conscientiously emptying out under the limelight the whole contents of the theatrical bag of tricks labelled “Death Scenes.” Then turn for a refreshing contrast to the behaviour of Mr. Yeats’ “Wise Man.” He is agitated, to be sure, but quietly agitated. He hardly so much as glances at the hour-glass. What you are asked to contemplate is the inner route of his mind…. The whole tone of the thing, as we have said, is grave and subdued, its whole texture such stuff as dreams are made of. A little thing, it may be, but it haunts the mind for days afterwards. We can still see the virginal face of the angel, who has stepped out of some Irish Book of Hours, and still hear the wheedling chant of Teigue the Fool—“Give me a pen-nee! Give me some pen-nees!”

Another play by Mr. Yeats, Kathleen Ni Houlihan, gives us a whiff—or rather a sigh—of ’98…. In this beautiful little piece we have the same dream-feeling as in the other; in this as in the other, the people move about silently, as fearing to break the dream, and speak with bated breath.

Yes, they are all from the outset to the end playing pianissimo, all hushed as in some sick-room, all grave and, as it were, careworn. No doubt there is a touch of affectation in their methods; they have something of the self-importance of children surpliced for service at the altar, or “dressed-up” for a grand domestic occasion. A style “deliberately adopted” is the harmless little boast of their prospectus. Well, that is a matter of course. All new movements in art are self-conscious, abound in little exaggerations and affectations. Is there not an Irish precept, “Be aisy; and if ye can’t be aisy, be as aisy as ye can”? We may commend that to the Irish National Theatre Society. And for ourselves we are quite “aisy”; for the “deliberate” methods of these enthusiasts will surely lose their stiffness in due course of time. Meanwhile we are sincerely grateful to them for an hour or two of real refreshment, a train of curious suggestions, a series of new “thrills.”—From the Times of May 8, 1903.

“In his interesting preface to Lady Gregory’s ‘Cuchulain of Muirthemne,’ Mr. W. B. Yeats expresses his opinion that it is the best book that has come from Ireland in recent years. In this we heartily concur. For the first time we have a thoroughly literary version of the ‘Tain’ and its cycle of tales, which may be compared, without the least misgiving, to Lady Charlotte Guest’s version of the ‘Mabinogion.’”—The Times.

“Lady Gregory’s altogether charming ‘Cuchulain of Muirthemne.’”—Pall Mall Gazette.

“In my judgment it would be hard to overpraise it.”—Mr. Stephen Gwynn in Macmillan’s Magazine.

“Lady Gregory has written the most charming book that has come out of Ireland for many a long day. It consists of original sketches and of translations from the Irish, and from beginning to end the atmosphere, which is delightful, is the same…. It has charm, and there is everywhere a felicity of simple phrase that is infinitely refreshing…. We are grateful to Lady Gregory for some hours that could not have been more pleasant if they had been spent in the country in actual converse with poets and dreamers.”—Morning Post.

“It is agreed upon all hands that this writer’s English version of the story of the Red Branch of Ulster is the best thing, in a literary way, that has come out of Ireland for some years. The present miscellany of translated poems and stories follows up the success of that work in a book no less attractive.”—Scotsman.

“Lady Gregory’s touch is an excellent one, and her fashion of interpreting and bringing before us the local talk is pleasant and individual in a high degree…. The chapters dealing with her own people and neighbours are all touched in with the same light, sure hand…. Her book is one to which all lovers of Ireland and Irish literature will turn with keen enjoyment, and that more than once.”—The Times.

“Few more uncompromising books have come out of Ireland lately than Lady Gregory’s volume of essays.”—Pall Mall Gazette.

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