I
I was in Dublin on the day when the news of the Battle of Jutland was
announced in such abrupt terms that most people imagined the British
Fleet had been irretrievably defeated. The affairs of the Abbey
Theatre, of which I was then in control, had been brought to a pause
because of the military regulations imposed upon the city after the
Easter Rising, and Mr. Moore, new from London, asked me to employ
some of my leisure in making a reconciliation between Lady Gregory
and Mr. Yeats on the one hand and himself on the other. I foolishly
consented to see what could be done, chiefly because of the innocent
wonder which I detected in Mr. Moore at the fact that any one could
possibly take offence at anything he might say, however revelatory
of private affairs it might be; and I spent some time in the pursuit
of peace. Lady Gregory declared that she had no feeling against Mr.
Moore because of what he had said about her in his trilogy, "Hail and
Farewell," but that she could never forgive the insults it contained to
Mr. Yeats. Mr. Yeats, endeavouring to think deeply about the Rising,
declared that he had forgotten, if indeed he had ever remembered, the
insults to himself in the trilogy, but that he could not pardon those
offered to Lady Gregory. Moore had broken bread in her house, and then
had gone away and made fun of her! Worse than that, he had belittled
her work. He had said that her plays were not great plays and that her
"Kiltartan" dialect was not the dialect of the people of Ireland, but a
tortured, unrhythmic invention of her own!... I proposed to them that
they should pool their pardons and receive him into the fold again,
but my proposal was not accepted, and so I set off from Lady Gregory's
lodgings in Dublin to tell Mr. Moore, staying in the Shelbourne Hotel,
of the failure of my mission. On the way, I encountered newspaper
boys, carrying placards on which was printed the news of the Battle
of Jutland. When I got to the hotel and was shown into Mr. Moore's
private sitting-room, I found assembled there, Mr. Moore, white with
anger and dismay, "A. E.," "John Eglinton" (William Magee) and the
late W. F. Bailey, a Land Commissioner, a Privy Councillor and a
Trustee of the Abbey Theatre, who had the most extensive acquaintance
of any man I have ever known. Mr. Moore was seated in the middle of the
room, looking very like a portrait of himself, facing his friends, who
were huddled together on a sofa in the shadow as if they were three
misbehaving schoolboys receiving a severe rebuke from their master. I
could not tell Mr. Moore at that moment of the result of my mission,
and in the excitement of the subsequent argument I forgot to do so, but
I doubt whether he was then in a mood to care whether he was forgiven
or not.