When I wrote the essay on Edmund Spenser the company of Irish players
who have now their stage at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin had been
founded, but gave as yet few performances in a twelvemonth. I could let
my thought stray where it would, and even give a couple of summers to
_The Faerie Queene_; while for some ten years now I have written little
verse and no prose that did not arise out of some need of those players
or some thought suggested by their work, or was written in the defence
of some friend whose life has been a part of the movement of events
which is creating a new Ireland unintelligible to an old Ireland that
watches with anger or indifference. The detailed defence of plays and
players, published originally in _Samhain_, the occasional periodical of
the theatre, and now making some three hundred pages of Mr. Bullen's
collected edition of my writings, is not here, but for the most part an
exposition of principles, whether suggested by my own work or by the
death of friend or fellow-worker, that, intended for no great public,
has been printed and published from a Hand Press which my sisters manage
at Dundrum with the help of the village girls. I have been busy with a
single art, that of the theatre, of a small, unpopular theatre; and this
art may well seem to practical men, busy with some programme of
industrial or political regeneration, of no more account than the
shaping of an agate; and yet in the shaping of an agate, whether in the
cutting or the making of the design, one discovers, if one have a
speculative mind, thoughts that seem important and principles that may
be applied to life itself, and certainly if one does not believe so, one
is but a poor cutter of so hard a stone.