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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
[Illustration: 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
Page
Chapter I The Theatre in the Making 1
Chapter II The Blessing of the Generations 50
Chapter III Play-Writing 78
Chapter IV The Fight Over “The Playboy” 109
Chapter V Synge 119
Chapter VI The Fight with the Castle 140
Chapter VII “The Playboy” in America 169
The Binding 253
Appendix I Plays Produced by the Abbey Theatre Co. 261
Appendix II “The Nation” on “Blanco Posnet” 267
Appendix III “The Playboy” in America 280
Appendix IV In the Eyes of Our Enemies 306
Appendix V In the Eyes of Our Friends 314
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
LADY GREGORY _Frontispiece_
THE ABBEY THEATRE, DUBLIN 40
From a photograph by Keogh Bros., Ireland.
MISS SARA ALLGOOD 80
From a drawing by Robert Gregory.
J. M. SYNGE 120
From a drawing by Robert Gregory in 1904.
Threatening Letter 296
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.”
[Illustration: 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.