One night, I was at his rooms when Mr. G. M. Trevelyan, the historian
and biographer of Garibaldi and John Bright, was present with his wife,
a daughter of Mrs. Humphry Ward. Mr. Yeats talked much and well, and I
remember his story of a dream he had had. He often told stories of his
dreams, but some of them smelt of the midnight oil. A friend of his, he
said, was contemplating submission to the Catholic Church. He had tried
to dissuade her from this, but she went away to another country in a
state of irresolution. One night, he dreamt that he saw her entering
a room full of beautiful people. She walked around the room, looking
at these beautiful people who smiled and smiled and smiled, but said
nothing. "And suddenly, in my dream," he said, "I realized that they
were all dead!" "I woke up," he proceeded, "and I said to myself, 'She
has joined the Catholic Church,' and she had." Mr. Trevelyan thought
that the description of the Catholic Church as a room full of beautiful
people, all smiling and all dead, was the most apt he had ever heard.
He chuckled with contented anti-clericalism. Another night, when I
was in his rooms, Miss Ellen Terry's son, Mr. Gordon Craig, came to
see him; and a model of the Abbey Theatre was brought down from his
bedroom to the candle-lit sitting room, where Mr. Craig experimented
with lighting effects. Mr. Craig is a man of genius, but he is a very
difficult and childish person, whose view of the theatre is nearly as
damnable as that of the most vain of the lost tribe of actor-managers
or their successors, the shop-keeper syndicates. Scenery and lighting
effects were of greater consequence to Mr. Craig than the play itself!
His designs for scenery were very beautiful, indeed, but they were
suitable only to romantic and poetical plays.
I remember that when he had manipulated Mr. Yeats's model theatre to
his liking, he stood back from the scene, and said, "What a good thing
it would be if we were to take all the seats out of the theatre so that
the audience could move about and see my shadows!" Mr. Yeats dryly
replied that this was hardly a practical proposal. I was irritated by
Mr. Craig's remark which was in keeping with his general theory of the
theatre. It seemed to me that he would, were he less difficult to work
with, be as great a nuisance and danger to drama as any actor-manager
in London. Sir Henry Irving and Sir Herbert Tree, turning the attention
of the audience away from the play to the player and the scenery,
were not any worse than Mr. Craig, anxious to turn the attention of
the audience to his shadows. I was glad when this remarkable man was
carried off by Mr. Albert Rutherston and Mr. Ernest Rhys to exhibit
himself somewhere else.
Mr. Yeats was bitten with Mr. Craig's theories about lighting and
scenery, and a large sum of money for so poor a theatre as the Abbey,
was spent on some of his "screens" for use in plays like "Deirdre."
They were never used for anything else. When I went to Dublin to
manage the Abbey, I was very anxious that we should employ a competent
scene-builder to make some good "sets" for us, but Mr. Yeats said that
scenery was of no consequence: the dirty hovel which we always employed
to represent an Irish cottage or farm house would do well enough. I
thought there was some oddness in this opinion when I remembered that
the theatre had been almost bankrupted in order to purchase "screens"
for occasional performances of his own one-act plays. He would spend
hours in rehearsing the lighting of a scene for one of them: this
"lime" was too strong and that "lime" was too weak or there was too
much colour or there was not enough or the mingling of colours was
not sufficiently delicate. One day, when he had worn out the patience
of every one in the theatre, with his fussing over the lighting, he
suddenly called out to the stage-manager, "That's it! That's it!
You've got it right now!" "Ah, sure the damned thing's on fire," the
stage-manager answered.