THE BLESSING OF THE GENERATIONS
_On the walls of the landing outside your nursery door there are
pictures hanging, painted as you paint your own with water-colours,
but without any blot or blur. Some are of blue hills and of streams
running through brown bogs, but many of them are of young girls
and of women, barefooted and wearing home-dyed clothes, knitting
or carrying sheaves; or of fishermen dressed in white. All, girls
and women and men alike, have gentle faces. There is no sign of
the turf-smoke that dries the skin to leather. There are no lines
or wrinkles to be seen. It may be faces were like that before the
great famine came that changed soft bodies to skin and bone and
turned villages to grazing for goats. Your great-grandfather fed his
people at that time and took their sickness and died. But perhaps if
that painter were living now, he would draw likenesses in the same
way, with the furrows and ridges left out. For he could only see
gentleness like his own in whatever he had a mind to paint._
_A little lower on the staircase there are pictures you do not look
at now, likenesses of men not very young, who had done something that
made others like to meet them and who dined together at the Grillon
Club. Your grandfather is there with many of his friends; some of
them became friends of mine. Here is one that wrote books, you will
maybe read them bye and bye, about good men that once lived in
Ireland, and how Europe learned manners, and about witches that were
thrown into ponds._
_Near the library door there is a drawing of an old man. He looks
very tired and sad. He was shut up in prison for more years than
you have lived. He could not see the lime trees blooming out or the
chestnuts breaking from their husks._
_That is a younger man on the other wall. There is something like a
laugh in his eyes. He will live and work a long time, I hope, for the
work he has done is very good. He gave you a blessing in Irish one
time when I brought him to see you in your cot._
* * * * *
Among the names on my first list of guarantors is that of Sir
Frederic Burton, painter, and for many years Director of the National
Gallery in Trafalgar Square. And this name, like that of Aubrey
de Vere, brings together movements divided by half a century; for
Frederic Burton had, through personal friendship with Thomas Davis,
come so near to that side of the National movement of 1848 which
expressed itself in writing, that he had drawn the design for the
title-page of the _Spirit of the Nation_, that book of rebel songs
and ballads. And he had known others of that time whose names have
been remembered, Ferguson and Stokes and O’Curry. It would make
my heart give a quicker beat to hear him say: “When I was in Aran
with Petrie,” or “my model for the Blind Girl at the Holy Well was
Doctor Petrie’s daughter,” or “Davis was such a dear fellow I could
refuse him nothing,” or, as an apology for not having read Mitchell’s
wonderful _Gaol Journal_, “I did not like his appearance when I saw
him. Davis took me to see him somewhere. He was a regular Northern
and did not make a good impression on me. His skin was blotched and
he had ginger-coloured hair.” Though he resented the rising fame
of Clarence Mangan, because, as he thought, it was at the expense
of Thomas Moore, “who had--though no one would class him among the
great poets--mellifluous versification, exquisite choice of language,
and was endowed at least with a delicate fancy approaching to
imagination,” the only authentic portrait of Mangan, not taken indeed
from life, but after death in an hospital, was drawn by him.
He had wandered and painted in Germany and in the west of Ireland,
in Connemara and in his own county of Clare, till his work at the
National Gallery forced him to give up his art. But in his last days
he would often speak of his early days in the West, and of country
people he remembered, a girl near Maam who was a great singer, and a
piper, Paddy Conneely, who was the best judge of sheep and cattle in
the whole country.
He was during the Land War when I first knew him, a very strong
Unionist, for his sensitive nature shrank from its harsh and violent
methods, and for a while he felt that he had no longer a country
to take pride in. In 1899 he wrote: “ ... I look forward with
some uneasiness to the advent of _Patriots_ from beyond sea, now
American citizens under the Stars and Stripes. With this outlook
before it, the Government is reducing the Irish Constabulary, a
most extraordinary proceeding and a quite unaccountable one except
indeed on the theory that every administration is doomed to fatuity
where Irish affairs have to be dealt with. For the police are the
appointed guardians of civil order, and however abused or resisted,
are recognised as such. But if the military have to be called out,
what a handle is given to vapourers on both sides of the Irish sea!
And what about the dismissed Constables? Will they not be thrown into
the ranks of the Patriots?”
And in 1895 he had written, refusing an invitation to dine with me--I
cannot remember who I said was coming, but he expressed this regret:
“Especially as I enjoy meeting Sir A. and Lady Clay, and should have
liked to see a bird so rare as an _honest_ Nationalist.” Yet he kept
a spirit of independence that was akin to rebellion, even through
those years of official position and pleasant London dinners, and
friendships, and the Athenæum Club.
During the years after the death in 1892 of my husband, who had
been a trustee of the National Gallery, and Sir Frederic’s death
in 1900, our friendship became a close one. Our talk turned very
often from pictures and Italy to Ireland. In 1897 I published _Mr.
Gregory’s Letter-box_, a political history of the years between 1812
and 1830, taken from letters to and by my husband’s grandfather,
then Under-Secretary for Ireland. Sir Frederic was much pleased with
the book. He came to see me when he had read it and said: “I am glad
you have come down on the real culprit, George III.,” and quoted one
or two people who had said his obstinacy was the cause of so many
of Ireland’s troubles. But after a little he said very gravely: “I
see a tendency to Home Rule on your own part.” I said, “I defy any
one to study Irish History without getting a dislike and distrust
of England.” He was silent for a time and then said, “That is my
feeling,” and told me how patriotic he had been as a boy though
disliking “O’Connell and his gang.” Later he accused me of having
become “A red hot Nationalist,” and said I had no Irish blood, but I
convinced him I had, both Irish and French.
He was as angry at the time of the Boer War as any Mayo ballad-singer
or Connacht Ranger’s wife. “According to the doctor I am better, but
really this war is killing me. It is the worst affair I recollect.
It is utterly inglorious.... I grieve particularly for our brave
Irishmen whose lives have been squandered to no purpose.” He was to
the end a Unionist, so far as his political doctrine went, but I
think his rooted passion for Ireland increased, and made, as such
strong passions are used to do, all politics seem but accidental,
transitory, a business that is outside the heart of life.
The language movement, of which I was able to bring him news, began
to excite him. One day I found him “excited and incredulous at
Atkinson’s evidence against the Irish language, in which he says all
Irish books are filthy and all folk-lore is at bottom abominable.”
And then he got, “on your recommendation and Doctor Hyde’s reputation
as a scholar” the History of Irish Literature and wrote: “I am
reading Dr. Hyde’s Literary History with the greatest interest. It
is a high pleasure to find the matter he deals with treated by a
true scholar and in a reasonable and philosophic spirit. But indeed
the advance in this respect since my earlier days is marvellous.
At that time the comparative method was hardly, if at all, thought
of. Rabid Irishmen, who often didn’t know their own language but at
second hand, and knew no other tongue at all, spouted the rankest
absurdities. Now true light has been let in and Irish history,
archæology, literature, and poetry are the gainers. Let us not
grudge to the Germans their meed of honour in having led the way.”
And again: “I should be exceedingly sorry if the Irish language died
out of men’s mouths altogether. I look upon the loss of a language
or even a dialect as equivalent to the extirpation of a species in
natural history....” Then, in 1899: “Those addresses of Dr. Hyde
and Mr. Yeats are very interesting and, I would fain hope, may find
a response in the hearts of the people who heard them. The subject
is one full of sadness. Self-respect, a decaying language, a dying
music, how shall they be resuscitated! I could weep when I recollect
how full Munster, Connacht, and even Ulster were in my earlier
days of exquisite native music--when in fact among the peasantry
and the Irish of the towns you heard no other; when the man at the
plough-tail had his peculiar ‘whistle,’ strange, wild, and full of
melody and rhythm. All this must now have passed away irrevocably.
May the language have a better chance! I cannot tell you how much
Doctor Hyde’s book has moved me. Principally it is a manful effort.”
When I was again in London, he showed me the Literary History close
at hand and asked me a little nervously what was Douglas Hyde’s age.
My answer, or surmise, pleased him, and he said: “Then he will be
able to work for a long time.” Once or twice, when we went on to talk
of other things, he came back to this and said, “I am so glad he is a
young man.”
He was jealous for the honour of Ireland even in lesser things. He
was very much interested in the beginning of our theatre. In 1899 he
writes: “I am happy to sign the guarantee form for the coming year,
and enclose it. You are a dreamy lot in Erin. As you say, I think the
quality comes from the atmosphere. Here there is more of the opposite
than suits me, but I dream still, as I have done all my lifetime.
I trust there will be no shindy at the performance of _Countess
Cathleen_. But if not, our compatriots will have been for once untrue
to themselves!” And later: “I am sincerely glad the experiment was
on the whole successful and that those who intended mischief after
all made but a poor effort to inflict it.... Altogether it appears
as if the old palmy days of Dublin independent appreciation of the
drama were about to be revived in our altered times. I congratulate
Mr. Yeats on the success of the drama as an acting piece, and in
everything except ---- ----’s beautiful Irish hyperbole. I recollect
an account of a concert given at Clonmel several years ago, in
which the eloquent local journalist said of one of the amateur lady
singers, after the loftiest eulogy, ‘but it was in her last song that
Miss ---- ---- gave the _coup de grace_ to her performance.’”
He cared very much for Mr. Yeats’s work, but I could never persuade
him to come and meet him. He always made some excuse. At last he
made a promise for one afternoon, but, in place of coming, he wrote,
saying he was half ashamed to confess to so much enthusiasm, but he
was so much under the spell of the poems that he was afraid that, in
meeting the writer, the spell might be broken. He told me when next
I saw him that of the poets he had known the only ones that did
not disappoint him were William Morris and Rossetti. “Swinburne was
excitable; Tennyson was grumpy and posing; Browning was charming as
a friend, but not fulfilling my idea of what a poet should be.” But
I did bring them together in the end, and he thanked me later and
confessed my faith had been justified.
In 1900, during his last illness, I was often with him. I had been
away in Dublin for our plays and I find a note written after my
return to London: “Went to see Sir F. He is in bed, and I fear, or
indeed must hope, the end is very near.... I went up to see him. He
was clear but drowsy, at first a little inarticulate, but when I got
up to go, he held my hand a long time, speaking with great kindness
... asked for Robert, and how the plays had gone. I told him of
them, and of the _Times_ notice of _Maeve_, saying its idealism had
been so well received by an Irish audience, and of the notice on the
same page telling that _Tess_ in London had been jeered at by an
audience who found it too serious. He said: ‘That is just what one
would expect.’ He asked if Robert had been abroad yet, and I said
no, he was so fond of Ireland he had not cared to go until now, and
that I myself found every year an increased delight and happiness
in Ireland. He said, ‘It is so with me. My best joys have been
connected with Ireland.’ Then he spoke of Celtic influence in English
literature and said, ‘There will some day be a great Pan-Celtic
Empire.’ And so we parted.”
I am glad that he who had been even a little moved by that stir in
the mind, that rush of revolutionary energy that moved the poets
and patriots and rebels of ’48, should after half a hundred years
have been stirred by the intellectual energy that came with a new
generation, as its imagination turned for a while from the Parliament
where all was to have been set right, after the break in the Irish
party and after Parnell’s death.
* * * * *
“I enclose you a guarantee paper filled up for such a sum as I can
afford (or perhaps more) to lose, but I hope there will be no loss
for anybody in the matter, while there will certainly be some gain
to Ireland! I’d have answered sooner but that I am suffering from
a horrible form of dyspepsia, with exceptional langour.” It is no
wonder if the old man who sent with this his promise for twenty
shillings was somewhat broken in health. He was the last of the
Fenian triumvirate,--Kickham, Luby, O’Leary,--and he had come back to
Dublin after fifteen years of banishment and five of penal servitude
at Portland. John O’Leary had been turning over books on the stalls
by the Seine in Paris, when one day somebody had come to him and
asked him to come back to Ireland where a rising was being planned,
and he had come.
A part of the romance of my early days had been the whispered rumours
of servants, and the overheard talk of my elders, of the threatened
rising of the Fenians:
“An army of Papists grim
With a green flag o’er them.
Red coats and black police
Flying before them.”
The house of Roxborough, my old home, had once been attacked by
Whiteboys. My father had defended it, firing from the windows, and
it was not hard to believe that another attack might be made. It
seemed a good occasion for being allowed to learn to shoot with my
brothers, but that was in those days not thought fitting, even in
self-defence, for a girl, and my gun was never loaded with anything
more weighty than a coppercap. So when this new business of the
theatre brought me to meet, amongst many others till then unknown,
John O’Leary, I remembered those old days and the excitement of
a Fenian’s escape--might he not be in hiding in our own woods or
hay-lofts? And I wondered to find that not only Nationalists admired
and respected so wild and dangerous a rebel. So I asked Mr. Yeats to
tell me the reason, for he had known him well and had even shared a
lodging with him for a while; so that his friends would say: “You
have the advantage over us. O’Leary takes so long to convert to any
new thing, and you can begin with him at breakfast.” And he wrote
to me: “When John O’Leary returned from exile, he found himself in
the midst of a movement which inherited the methods of O’Connell and
a measure of his success. Journalists and politicians were alike
in his eyes untruthful men, thinking that any means that brought
the end were justified, and for that reason certain, as he thought,
to miss the end desired. The root of all was, though I doubt if he
put the thought into words, that journalists and politicians looked
for their judges among their inferiors, and assumed those opinions
and passions that moved the largest number of men. Their school is
still dominant, and John O’Leary had seen through half his life, as
we have seen, men coarsening their thought and their manners, and
exaggerating their emotions in a daily and weekly press that was
like the reverie of an hysterical woman. He was not of O’Connell’s
household. His master had been Davis, and he was quick to discover
and condemn the man who sought for judgment not among his equals or
in himself. He saw, as no one else in modern Ireland has seen, that
men who make this choice are long unpopular, all through their lives
it may be, but grow in sense and courage with their years, and have
the most gazers even in the end.
“Yet he was not unjust to those who went the other way. He imputed
to them no bad motives, for I have heard him say of a man that
he distrusted, ‘He would not sacrifice himself but he would risk
himself,’ and of a man who seemed to him to appeal always to low
motives, the chief mischief-maker of his kind, ‘He would sacrifice
himself.’ Yet, what he himself commended with his favourite word
‘_morale_’ was the opposite of that sudden emotional self-sacrifice,
the spurious heroism of popular movements, being life-long hardness
and serenity, a choice made every day anew. He thought but little of
opinions, even those he had sacrificed so much for, and I have heard
him say, ‘There was never cause so bad that it has not been defended
by good men for good reasons.’ And of Samuel Ferguson, poet and
antiquarian, who was not of his party or any Nationalist party, ‘He
has been a better patriot than I.’ He knew that in the end, whatever
else had temporary use, it was simple things that mattered, the
things a child can understand, a man’s courage and his generosity.
“I do not doubt that his prison life had been hard enough, but he
would not complain, having been in ‘the hands of his enemies’; and he
would often tell one of that life, but not of its hardships. A famous
popular leader of that time, who made a great noise because he was
in prison as a common felon for a political offence, made him very
angry. I said ‘It is well known that he has done this, not because
he shrinks from hardship but because there is a danger in a popular
movement that the obscure men who can alone carry it to success, may
say, “our leaders are treated differently.”’ He answered, ‘There are
things a man must not do, even to save a nation.’ And when I asked
‘What things?’ he said, ‘He must not weep in public.’ He knew that a
doctrine expediency cries out on would have but few to follow, and
he would say, ‘Michael Davitt wants his converts by the thousand.
I shall be satisfied with half a dozen.’ Most complained of his
impracticability, and there was a saying that an angel could not find
a course of action he would not discover a moral flaw in, and it is
probable that his long imprisonment and exile, while heightening his
sense of ideal law, had deprived him of initiative by taking away its
opportunities. He would often complain that the young men would not
follow him, and I once said, ‘Your power is that they do not. We can
do nothing till we have converted you; you are our conscience.’ Yet
he lived long enough to see the young men grow to middle life and
assume like their fathers before them that a good Irishman is he who
agreed with the people. Yet we, when we withstand the people, owe it
to him that we can feel we have behind us an Irish tradition. ‘My
religion,’ he would say, ‘is the old Persian one, “To pull the bow
and speak the truth.”’
“I do not know whether he would have liked our unpopular plays, but I
cannot imagine him growing excited because he thought them slanders
upon Ireland. O’Connell had called the Irish peasantry the finest
peasantry upon earth, and his heirs found it impossible to separate
patriotism and flattery. Again and again John O’Leary would return
to this, and I have heard him say, ‘I think it probable that the
English national character is finer than ours, but that does not make
me want to be an Englishman.’ I have often heard him defend Ireland
against one charge or another, and he was full of knowledge, but the
patriotism he had sacrificed so much for marred neither his justice
nor his scholarship.
“He disapproved of much of Parnell’s policy, but Parnell was the
only man in Irish public life of his day who had his sympathy, and I
remember hearing some one say in those days before the split that are
growing vague to me, that Parnell never came to Dublin without seeing
him. They were perhaps alike in some hidden root of character though
the one had lived a life of power and excitement, while the other
had been driven into contemplation by circumstance and as I think by
nature. Certainly they were both proud men.”
He was, when I knew him, living in a little room, books all around
him and books in heaps upon the floor. I would send him sometimes
snipe or golden plover from Kiltartan bog or woodcock from the hazel
woods at Coole, hoping to tempt him with something that might better
nourish the worn body than the little custard pudding that was used
to serve him for his two days’ dinner, because of that “horrible
dyspepsia” that often makes those who have been long in prison live
starving after their release, mocked with the sight of food.
It was through reading Davis’s poems he had become a Nationalist, and
his own influence had helped to shape this other poet in the same
fashion, for from the time of Yeats’s boyhood there had been a close
friendship between them, the old man admiring the young man’s genius,
and taking his side in the quarrels that arose about patriotism in
poetry and the like. I remember their both dining with me one evening
in London and coming on to see a very poor play, very badly acted by
some Irish society. At its end Yeats was asked to say some words of
gratitude for the performance, during which we had all felt impatient
and vexed. He did speak at some length, and held his audience, and
without telling any untruth left them feeling that all had gone well.
John O’Leary turned to me and said fervently, “I don’t think there
is anything on God’s earth that Willie Yeats could not make a speech
about!”
There is a bust of John O’Leary in the Municipal Gallery. The grand
lines of the massive head, the eyes full of smouldering fire, might
be those of some ancient prophet understanding his people’s doom.
* * * * *
There is nothing of storm or unrest about that other Dublin monument,
that bronze figure sitting tranquilly within the gates of Trinity
College and within its quadrangle. Lecky was the reasoner, the
philosopher, the looker-on, writing his histories, even of Ireland,
through the uproar of the Land War with the same detachment as did
the Four Masters, writing their older history amongst the wars and
burnings of the seventeenth century that were so terrible in Ireland.
He had been a debater while an undergraduate of Trinity, and it was
fitting that he should have represented it in Parliament during his
last years.
Trinity, where Wolfe Tone had been an undergraduate a hundred years
earlier had changed in that hundred years. I was in Paris in 1900 and
went to see an old acquaintance, that most imaginative archæologist,
Salomon Reinach. He told me he had been lately to Ireland and he
had been astonished by two things, the ignorance of the Irish
language--it was not known even by the head of the Dublin Museum or
the head of its archæological side--and by the hostility of Trinity
College to all things Irish. “It is an English fort, nothing else.”
“Its garrison,” the students, had gone out and broken the windows of
a newspaper office while he was there, and he had spent an evening
with Doctor Mahaffy, who was “much astonished that I was no longer
taken up with Greek things, and that I found Irish antiquity so much
more interesting.”
I have already told of Lecky’s help to our theatre. He had a real
affection for his country, but was not prone to join societies or
leagues. He had given us his name as one of our first guarantors,
offering £5 instead of the £1 I had asked. But he publicly withdrew
his name later, without his usual reasonableness, because of letters
written by Mr. Yeats and Mr. George Moore at the time of Queen
Victoria’s visit to Dublin. This had been announced as a private
visit, and Nationalists had promised a welcome. Then it was turned
into a public one, and there was a good deal of angry feeling, and
it seemed as if the theatre--although quite outside politics--would
suffer for a while. Though Mr. Yeats, wrote: “I don’t think you need
be anxious about next year’s theatre. Clever Unionists will take us
on our merits, and the rest would never like us at any time. I have
found a greatly increased friendliness on the part of some of the
younger men here. In a battle like Ireland’s, which is one of poverty
against wealth, one must prove one’s sincerity by making oneself
unpopular to wealth. One must accept the baptism of the gutter. Have
not all teachers done the like?” I answered that I preferred the
baptism of clean water. I was troubled by the misunderstanding of
friends.
Trinity College is not keeping aloof now, and as to Mr. Lecky
himself, the House of Commons took away some prejudices. He spoke
to me of Mr. John Redmond and his leadership with great admiration
and esteem. I find a note written after a pleasant dinner with him
and Mrs. Lecky in Onslow Gardens: “He grieved over the exaggerated
statements of the financial reformers. I pressed Land Purchase as the
solution of our trouble, but he says what is true, ‘It means changing
every hundred pounds into seventy.’ Talking of Robert’s future, he
said, ‘It is a great thing to have a competence behind one.’ He said
he had been brought up for the Church, but found he could not enter
it, and went abroad and drifted, never thinking he would marry, and
leading a solitary life, and so took to letters and succeeded. He
thinks Parliament lessens one’s interest in political questions,--so
much connected with them is of no value, and there is so much empty
noise.”
I often heard of his speaking well and even boasting of our Theatre
and its work, but though he often came to see me, he would not quite
give up fault-finding. “Dined at Lecky’s; he rather cross. He took
me down to dinner and said first thing, ‘What silly speeches your
Celtic people have been making.’ ‘Moore?’ I asked. ‘Yes, and Yeats.
Oh, very silly!’ He is in bad humour because Blackrock, which he has
known, and known to speak English all his life, has sent him a copy
of resolutions in favour of the revival of Irish. In revenge I told
him how a Deputy Lieutenant (Edward Martyn) was proclaiming himself a
convert to Nationalism through reading his _Leaders of Public Opinion
in Ireland_. But that book, he used to say, had been a long time in
influencing anybody, for of its first edition only thirty copies had
been sold.”
He forgave us all after a while, used to come and ask for news
whenever I had come to London from home, and told me quite proudly
after a visit to Oxford that the undergraduates there accepted no
living poet but Yeats. But to the last he would say to me plaintively
on parting, “Do not do anything incendiary when you go back to
Ireland.”
* * * * *
My first meeting with Douglas Hyde had been when he came in one day
with a broken bicycle during lunch at my neighbour Mr. Martyn’s
house where I was staying. He had been coming by train, but had got
out at a village, Craughwell (as I myself did a good while afterwards
on the same errand), in search of memories of Raftery, the Connacht
poet. I had my own pony carriage with me, and that afternoon I drove
to the Round Tower and the seven churches of Kilmacduagh, taking with
me Douglas Hyde and Mr. William Sharp, whom I even then suspected
of being “Fiona Macleod.” Mr. Sharp--not by my invitation--took the
place beside me, and left the back seat for the poet-dramatist, the
founder of the Gaelic League of Ireland.
He often came to stay with me and my son at Coole after that. The
first time was in winter, for a shooting party. Some old ladies--our
neighbours--asked our keeper who our party was, and on hearing that
one was a gentleman who spoke to the beaters in Irish, they said,
“he can not be a gentleman if he speaks Irish.” With all his culture
and learning, his delight was in talking with the people and hearing
their poems and fragments of the legends. I remember one day, he
went into a thatched cottage to change his boots after shooting
snipe on Kilmacduagh bog, and talked with an old woman who had not
much English and who welcomed him when he spoke in her own tongue.
But when she heard he was from Mayo, looked down on by dwellers in
Galway, she laughed very much and repeated a line of a song in Irish
which runs:
“There’ll be boots on me yet, says the man from the county Mayo!”
Near Kilmacduagh also he was told a long story, having Aristotle for
its hero. Sometimes he was less lucky. I brought an old man to see
him, I was sure could give him stories. But he only told one of a
beggar who went to Castle ----, a neighbouring house, the master of
which had given him a half-penny, saying, “that is for my father’s
and mother’s soul.” “And the beggar added another half-penny to it,
and laid it down on the step, and, ‘There’s a half-penny for my
father’s soul and a half-penny for my mother’s, and I wouldn’t go to
the meanness of putting them both in one.’”
He has done his work by methods of peace, by keeping quarrels out
of his life, with all but entire success. I find in a letter to
Mr. Yeats: “I will send you Claideam that you may see some of the
attacks by recalcitrant Gaelic Leaguers on the Craoibhin. Well, I am
sorry, but if he can’t keep from making enemies, what chance is there
for the like of us?”
He was one of the vice-presidents of our Society for a while and we
are always grateful to him for that _Twisting of the Rope_ in which
he played with so much gaiety, ease, and charm. But in founding the
Gaelic League, he had done far more than that for our work. It was
a movement for keeping the Irish language a spoken one, with, as
a chief end, the preserving of our own nationality. That does not
sound like the beginning of a revolution, yet it was one. It was the
discovery, the disclosure of the folk-learning, the folk-poetry, the
folk-tradition. Our Theatre was caught into that current, and it is
that current, as I believe, that has brought it on its triumphant
way. It is chiefly known now as a folk-theatre. It has not only the
great mass of primitive material and legend to draw on, but it has
been made a living thing by the excitement of that discovery. All our
writers, Mr. Yeats himself, were influenced by it. Mr. Synge found
what he had lacked before--fable, emotion, style. Writing of him I
have said “He tells what he owes to that collaboration with the
people, and for all the attacks, he has given back to them what they
will one day thank him for.... The return to the people, the reunion
after separation, the taking and giving, is it not the perfect
circle, the way of nature, the eternal wedding-ring?”