As soon as the applause died away, Yeats who had lately returned to us from the States with a paunch, a huge stride, and an immense fur overcoat, rose to speak. We were surprised at the change in his appearance, and could hardly believe our ears when, instead of talking to us as he used to do about the old stories come down from generation to generation he began to thunder like Ben Tillett against the middle classes, stamping his feet, working himself into a great temper, and all because the middle classes did not dip their hands into their pockets and give Lane the money he wanted for his exhibition. When he spoke the words, the middle classes, one would have thought that he was speaking against a personal foe, and we looked round asking each other with our eyes where on earth our Willie Yeats had picked up the strange belief that none but titled and carriage-folk could appreciate pictures. And we asked ourselves why our Willie Yeats should feel himself called upon to denounce his own class; millers and shipowners on one side, and on the other a portrait-painter of distinction; and we laughed, remembering AE's story, that one day whilst Yeats was crooning over his fire Yeats had said that if he had his rights he would be Duke of Ormonde. AE's answer was: I am afraid, Willie, you are overlooking your father—a detestable remark to make to a poet in search of an ancestry; and the addition: We both belong to the lower-middle classes, was in equally bad taste. AE knew that there were spoons in the Yeats family bearing the Butler crest, just as there are portraits in my family of Sir Thomas More, and he should have remembered that certain passages in The Countess Cathleen are clearly derivative from the spoons. He should have remembered that all the romantic poets have sought illustrious ancestry, and rightly, since romantic poetry is concerned only with nobles and castles, gonfalons and oriflammes. Villiers de l'Isle Adam believed firmly in his descent, and appeared on all public occasions with the Order of Malta pinned upon his coat; and Victor Hugo, too, had inquired out his ancestry in all the archives of Spain and France before sitting down to write Hernani ... and with good reason, for with the disappearance of gonfalons and donjons it may be doubted if—My meditation was interrupted by Yeats's voice.

We have sacrificed our lives for Art; but you, what have you done?



I said, A line will take us hours maybe, Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. Better go down upon your marrow-bones And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones Like an old pauper in all kinds of weather; For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, schoolmasters and clergymen, The martyrs call the world.

The poet advanced a step or two nearer to the edge of the platform, and stamping his foot he asked again what the middle classes had done for Art, and in a towering rage (the phrase is no mere figure of speech, for he raised himself up to tremendous height) he called upon the ladies and gentlemen that had come to hear my lecture to put their hands in their pockets and give guineas to the stewards who were waiting at the doors to receive them, or, better still, to write large cheques. By virtue of our subscriptions we should cease to belong to the middle classes, and having held out this hope to us he retired to his chair and fell back overcome into the middle of the great fur coat, and remained silent until the end of the debate.

As soon as it was over criticism began, not of my lecture, but of Yeats's speech, and on Saturday night all my friends turned in to discuss his contention that the middle classes had never done anything for Art. AE pointed out that the aristocracy had given England no great poet except Byron, whom many people did not look upon as a poet at all, and though Shelley's poetry was unquestionable, he could hardly be considered as belonging to the aristocracy, his father being no more than a Sussex baronet. All the other poets, it was urged, came from the middle classes, not only the poets, but the painters, the musicians, and the sculptors. Yeats's attack upon the middle classes, somebody cried, is the most absurd that was ever made; the aristocracy have Byron, and the peasants have Burns, all the others belong to us. Somebody chimed in: Not even the landowners have produced a poet, and he was answered that Landor was a considerable landed proprietor. But he was the only one. Not a single painter came out of the aristocracy. Lord Carlyle's name was mentioned; everybody laughed, and I said that the distinction of the classes was purely an arbitrary one. It was agreed that if riches can poison inspiration, poverty is a stimulant, and then leaning out of his corner AE remarked that Willie Yeats's best poems were written when he was a poor boy in Sligo, a remark that fanned the flame of discussion, and the difficult question was broached why Yeats had ceased to write poetry. All his best poems, AE said, were written before he went to London. Apart from the genius which he brought into the world, it was Sligo that had given his poetry a turn of its own. Everybody knew some of his verses by heart, and we took pleasure in listening to them again. The calves basking on the hillside were mentioned, the colleen going to church. But, somebody cried out suddenly, he took his colleen to London and put paint upon her cheeks and dye upon her hair, and sent her up Piccadilly. Another critic added that the last time he saw her she was wearing a fine hat and feathers. Supplied by Arthur Symons, cried another. As sterile a little wanton as ever I set eyes upon, who lives in remembrance of her beauty, saying nothing, exclaimed still another critic. And the silences that Yeats's colleen had observed these many years were regretted, somewhat hypocritically I think, for, as AE says, a literary movement consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially. But, if we were not really sorry that Yeats's inspiration was declining, we were quite genuinely interested to discover the cause of it. AE was certain that he would have written volume after volume if he had never sought a style, if he had been content to write simply; and all his utterances on the subject of style were repeated.

He came this afternoon into the National Library, John Eglinton said, breaking silence, and he told me he was collecting his writings for a complete edition, a library edition in ten or twelve volumes.



He said his day was over, John Eglinton answered ... and in speaking of the style of his last essay, he said: Ah, that style! I made it myself. And then another, Longworth I think it was, said that he failed to understand how anybody could speak of a style apart from some definite work already written by him in that style. A style does not exist in one's head, it exists upon paper, and Yeats has no style, neither bad nor good, for he writes no more. AE thought that Yeats had discovered a style, and a very fine style indeed, and compared it to a suit of livery which a man buys before he engages a servant; the livery is made of the best cloth, the gold lace is the very finest, the cockade can be seen from one side of the street to the other, but when the footman comes he is always too tall or too thin or too fat, so the livery is never worn.

Excellent! cried Gogarty, and the livery hangs in a press upstairs, becoming gradually moth-eaten.

AE regretted the variants: he knew them all and preferred the earlier text in every case, and when literary criticism was over we turned to the poet's own life to discover why it was that he sang no more songs for us. We had often heard him say that his poems had arisen out of one great passion, and this interesting avowal raised the no less interesting question—which produces the finer fruit, the gratified or the ungratified passion. It was clearly my turn to speak, and I told how Wesendonck had built a pavilion at the end of his garden so that Wagner might compose the Valkyrie, and how at the end of every day when Wagner had finished his work, Mathilde's wont was to visit him, her visits inspiring by degrees a great passion, which, out of loyalty to Wesendonck, they resisted until the fatal day when he read her the poem of Tristan and Isolde. After the reading they had stood looking at each other, as Tristan and Isolde stand looking at each other in the opera. Later Minna, Wagner's wife, intercepted a letter which she took to Madame Wesendonck, and the interview between the two women was so violent that Wagner had to send his wife to Dresden. The first letter of the many that he wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck tells the miserable dawning of the day he withdrew from Switzerland to meditate on suicide and his setting of some verses of the well beloved. Regret nothing, he writes from Venice, I beseech you, regret nothing. Your kisses were the crown of my life, my recompense for many years of suffering. Regret nothing, I beseech you, regret nothing. Minna had no doubt as to Richard's guilt nor have we, but the translator of the letters, Mr Ashton Ellis, and others, have preferred to regard this passion as ungratified, and it is evident that they think that the truth is not worth seeking since the drama and the music and the letters cannot now be affected thereby. For better or worse you have the music, you have the drama, you have the correspondence. What can it matter whether an act purely physical happened, or failed to happen? Everything, I answer, for thereof I learn whether Wagner wrote out of a realised or an unrealised desire. As we sat round the fire I broke silence. Love, I said, that has not been born again in the flesh crumbles like peat ash. Yeats's love for Maud Gonne, said AE, has lasted for many years and will continue, and I know that it has always been a pure love.

A detestable phrase, AE, for it implies that every gratified love must be impure. And from that day onward I continued to meditate the main secret of Yeats's life, until one day we happened to meet at Broadstone Station. We were going to the West; we breakfasted together in the train, and after breakfast the conversation took many turns, and we talked of her whom he had loved always, the passionate ideal of his life, and why this ideal had never become a reality to him as Mathilde had become to Richard. Was it really so? was my pressing question, and he answered me:

I was very young at the time and was satisfied with.... My memory fails me, or perhaps the phrase was never finished. The words I supply the spirit of sense, are merely conjectural.

Yes, I understand, the common mistake of a boy; and I was sorry for Yeats and for his inspiration which did not seem to have survived his youth, because it had arisen out of an ungratified desire; and I fell to thinking that hyacinths grown in a vase only bloom for a season. But if it had been otherwise? On such questions one may meditate a long while, and it was not until the train ran into Westport that I remembered my prediction when Symons had shown me Rosa Alchemica. His inspiration, I had said, is at an end, for he talks about how he is going to write, and I told Symons that I had noticed all through my life that a man may tell the subject of his poem and write it, but if he tells how he is going to write his poem he will never write it. Mallarmé projected hundreds of poems, and, like Yeats, Mallarmé was always talking about style. The word style never came into Mallarmé's conversation, but, like Yeats, his belief was that the poet should have a language of his own. Every other art, I remember him saying, has a special language—sculpture, music, painting; why shouldn't the poet have his? He set himself to the task of inventing a language, but it was such a difficult one that it left him very little time for writing; and so we have but twenty sonnets and L'Après-midi d'un Faune written in it. Son oeuvre calls to mind a bibelot, a carven nick-nack, wrought ivory, or jade, or bronze, and like bronze it will acquire a patina. His phrases will never grow old, for they tell us nothing; the secret meaning is so deeply embedded that generations will try to puzzle through them; and in the volume entitled The Wind among the Reeds Yeats has written poems so difficult that even the adepts could not disentangle the sense; and since The Wind among the Reeds he has written a sonnet that clearly referred to a house. But to what house? AE inclined to the opinion that it referred to the House of Lords, but the poet, being written to from Ely Place, replied that the subject of his sonnet was Coole Park. Mallarmé could not be darker than this. But whereas to write a language apart was Mallarmé's sole aestheticism and one which he never abandoned after the publication of L'Après-midi d'un Faune, Yeats advocated two languages, one which he employs himself, another which he would use if he could, but being unable to use it he counsels its use to others, and has put up a sign-post: This way to Parnassus. It is amusing to think of Mallarmé and Yeats together; they would have got on famously until Yeats began to tell Mallarmé that the poet would learn the language he required in Le Berry. Mallarmé was a subtle mind, and he would have thought the idea ingenious that a language is like a spring which rises in the highlands, trickles into a rivulet and flows into a river, and needs no filter until the river has passed through a town; he would have listened to these theories with interest, but Yeats would not have been able to persuade him to set out for Le Berry, and the journey would have been useless if he had, for Mallarmé had no ear for folk, less than Yeats himself, who has only half an ear; an exquisite ear for the beauty of folk imagination, and very little for folk idiom. Are not the ways of Nature strange? for he loves folk idiom as none has ever loved it, and few have had better opportunities of learning it than he along his uncle's wharves in Sligo Town and among the slopes of Ben Bulben, whither he went daily, interested in birds and beasts and the stories that the folk tell. As pretty a nosegay as ever was gathered he tied on those slopes; there is no prettier book of literature than Celtic Twilight, and one of the tales, The Last Gleeman, must have put into Yeats's mind the idea that he has followed ever since, that the Irish people write very well when they are not trying to write that worn-out and defaced idiom which educated people speak and write, and which is known as English. And it is Yeats's belief that those among us who refuse to write it are forced back upon artificial speech which they create, and which is often very beautiful; the beauty of Pater's or Morris's cannot be denied, but their speech, Yeats would say, lacks naturalness; it is not living speech, that is how he would phrase it, and his thoughts would go back to Michael Moran, the last of the Gleemen, who, he thinks, was more fortunate than the two great writers mentioned, for Michael wrote (it would be more correct to say he composed, for it is doubtful if he knew how to write) living speech—i.e. a speech that has never been printed. Yeats' whole aestheticism is expressed in these words: A speech that has never been printed. Yeats's whole aestheticism is expressed in these words: A speech that has never been printed, and the peasant is the only one who can give us speech that has not appeared in print. But peasant speech limits the range of our ideas. A pure benefit, Yeats would say; we must purify ourselves in ignorance. But peasant speech is only adapted to dialogue. To this objection he might answer with Landor that Shakespeare and the best parts of Homer were written in dialogue, and it would be heartless to reply: But not the best part of your own works, Yeats. Your mind is as subtle as a Brahmin's, woven along and across with ideas, and you cannot catch the idiom as it flows off the lips. You are like Moses, who may not enter the Promised Land. He would not care to answer: Even if what you say be true, you must admit that I have led some others thither. I beg pardon, there; and he would fold himself up like a pelican and dream of his disciples. His dream was always of disciples; even when I met him in the Cheshire Cheese he was looking for disciples; he sought in vain till he met Lady Gregory. And a great day it was for Ireland when she came over to Tillyra, and met, whom do you think? Yeats, of course. Here I must break off my narrative to give a more explicit account of Lady Gregory than the reader will find in Ave.

Lady Gregory is a Persse, and the Persses are an ancient Galway family; the best-known branch is the Moyaude branch, for it was at Moyaude that Burton Persse bred and hunted the Galway Blazers for over thirty years ... till his death. Moyaude has passed away, but Roxborough continues, never having indulged in either horses or hounds, a worthy but undistinguished family in love, in war, or in politics, never having indulged in anything except a taste for Bible reading in the cottages. A staunch Protestant family, if nothing else, the Roxborough Persses certainly are. Mrs Persse and her two elder daughters were ardent soul-gatherers in the days gone by, but Lady Gregory did not join them in their missionary work, holding always to the belief that there was great danger in persuading any one to leave the religion learnt in childhood, for we could never be sure that another would find a place in the heart. In saying as much she wins our hearts, but our intelligence warns us against the seduction, and we remember that we may not acquiesce in what we believe to be error. The ignorant and numbed mind cannot be acceptable to God, so do we think, and take our stand with Mrs Persse and the elder sisters. We are glad, however, though we are not sure that our gladness on such a point is not a sign of weakness, still we are glad that Sir William chose Augusta rather than one of her elder sisters, either of whom would certainly have fired up in the carriage when Sir William, on his way to Coole, suggested to his bride that she should refrain from pointing out to his tenants what she believed to be a different teaching of the Bible from that which they received from the parish priest. He would probably say: You have made no converts—(we have forgotten Mrs Shaw Taylor's Christian name, but Agnes will serve our purpose as well as another)—you have made no converts, Agnes, but you have shaken the faith of thousands. The ground at Roxborough has been cleared for the sowing, but Kiltartan can wait. Which Path Should Agnes Have Followed? is clearly the title of a six-shilling novel which I pass on to my contemporaries; meanwhile I have pleasure in stating here, for my statement is implicated in an artistic movement, the Abbey Theatre, that the Gospels were never read by Lady Gregory round Kiltartan. I should like to fill in a page or two about her married life, but though we know our neighbours very well in one direction, in another there is nothing that we know less than our neighbours, and Lady Gregory has never been for me a very real person. I imagine her without a mother, or father, or sisters, or brothers, sans attache. It is difficult to believe, but it is nevertheless true, that fearing a too flagrant mistake, I had to ask a friend the other day if I were right in supposing that Mrs Shaw Taylor was Lady Gregory's sister, an absurd question truly, for Mrs Shaw Taylor's house (I have forgotten its name) is within a mile of Tillyra, and I must have been there many times. We may cultivate our memories in one direction, but by so doing we curtail them in another, and documentary evidence jars my style. I like to write of Lady Gregory from the evening that Edward drove me over to Coole, the night of the dinner-party. There is in the first part of this book a portrait of her as I saw her that night, a slim young woman of medium height and slight figure; her hair, parted in the middle, was brushed in wide bands about a brow which even at that time was intellectual. The phrase previously used, if my memory does not deceive me, was high and cultured; I think I said that she wore a high-school air, and the phrase expresses the idea she conveyed to me—an air of mixed timidity and restrained anxiety. On the whole it was pleasant to pass from her to Sir William, who was more at his ease, more natural. He spoke to me affably about a Velasquez in the National Gallery, which was not a Velasquez; it is now set down as a Zurbaran, but the last attribution does not convince me any more than the first. He wore the Lord Palmerston air; it was the air of that generation, but he did not wear it nearly so well as my father.

These two men were of the same generation and their interests were the same; both were travelled men; Sir William's travels were not so original as my father's, and the racehorses that he kept were not so fast, and his politics were not so definite; he was more of an opportunist than my father, more careful and cautious, and therefore less interesting. Galway has not produced so many interesting man as Mayo; its pastures are richer, but its men are thinner in intellect. But if we are considering Lady Gregory's rise in the world, we must admit that she owes a great deal to her husband. He took her to London, and she enjoyed at least one season in a tall house in the little enclosure known as St George's Place; and there met a number of eminent men whose books and conversation were in harmony with her conception of life, still somewhat formal. One afternoon Lecky the historian left her drawing-room as I entered it, and I remember the look of pleasure on her face when she mentioned the name of her visitor, and her pleasure did not end with Lecky, for a few minutes afterwards Edwin Arnold, the poet of The Light of Asia, was announced. She would have liked to have had him all to herself, and I think that she thought my conversation a little ill advised when I spoke to Sir Edwin of a book lately published on the subject of Buddhism, and asked him what book was the best to read on this subject. He did not answer my question directly, but very soon he was telling Lady Gregory that he had just received a letter from India from a distinguished Buddhist who had read The Light of Asia and could find no fault in it; the Buddhist doctrine as related by him had been related faultlessly. And with this little anecdote Sir Edwin thought my question sufficiently answered. The conversation turned on the coloured races, and I remember Sir Edwin's words. The world will not be perfect, he said, until we get the black notes into the gamut. A pretty bit of Telegraphese which pleased Lady Gregory; and when Sir Edwin rose to go she produced a fan and asked him to write his name upon one of the sticks. But she did not ask me to write my name, though at that time I had written not only A Modern Lover, but also A Mummer's Wife, and I left the house feeling for the first time that the world I lived in was not so profound as I had imagined it to be. If I remember the circumstances quite rightly, Sir William came into the room just as I was leaving it, and she showed him the fan; he looked a little distressed at her want of tact, and it was some years afterward that I heard, and not without surprise, that she had shown some literary ability in the editing of his Memoirs. The publication of these Memoirs was a great day for Roxborough, but not such a great day for Ireland as the day she drove over to Tillyra.

I was not present at the time, but from Edward's account of the meeting she seems to have recognised her need in Yeats at once, foreseeing dimly, of course, but foreseeing that he would help her out of conventions and prejudices, and give her wings to soar in the free air of ideas and instincts. She was manifestly captured by his genius, and seemed to dread that the inspiration the hills of Sligo had nourished might wither in the Temple where he used to spend long months with his friend Arthur Symons. He had finished all his best work at the time, the work whereby he will live; The Countess Cathleen had not long been written, and he was dreaming the poem of The Shadowy Waters, and where could he dream it more fortunately than by the lake at Coole? The wild swans gather there, and every summer he returned to Coole to write The Shadowy Waters, writing under her tutelage and she serving him as amanuensis, collecting the different versions, etc.

Thus much of the literary history of this time has already been written, but what has not been written, or only hinted at, is the interdependence of these two minds. It was he, no doubt, who suggested to her the writing of the Cuchulain legends. It must have been so, for he had long been dreaming an epic poem to be called Cuchulain; but feeling himself unable for so long a task he entrusted it to Lady Gregory, and led her from cabin to cabin in search of a style, and they returned to Coole ruminating the beautiful language of the peasants and the masterpiece quickening in it, Yeats a little sad, but by no means envious toward Lady Gregory, and sad, if at all, that his own stories in the volume entitled The Secret Rose were not written in living speech. It is pleasant to think that, as he opened the park gates for her to pass through, the thought glided into his mind that perhaps in some subsequent edition she might help him with the translation. But the moment was for the consideration of a difficulty that had arisen suddenly. The legends of Cuchulain are written in a very remote language, bearing little likeness to the modern Irish which Lady Gregory had learnt in common with everybody connected with the Irish Literary Movement, Yeats and myself excepted. A dictionary of the ancient language exists, and it is easy to look out a word; but a knowledge of Early or Middle Irish is only obtained gradually after years of study; Lady Gregory confesses herself in her preface to be no scholar, and that she pieced together her text from various French and German translations. This method recommends itself to Yeats, who says in his preface that by collating the various versions of the same tale and taking the best bits out of each the stories are now told perfectly for the first time, a singular view for a critic of Yeats's understanding to hold, a strange theory to advocate, the strangest, we do not hesitate to say, that has ever been put forward by so distinguished a poet and critic as Yeats. He was a severer critic the day that he threw out Edward's play with so much indignity in Tillyra. He was then a monk of literature, an inquisitor, a Torquemada, but in this preface he bows to Lady Gregory's taste as if she were the tale-teller that the world had been waiting for, one whose art exceeded that of Balzac or Turgenev, for neither would have claimed the right to refashion the old legends in accordance with his own taste or the taste of his neighbourhood. I left out a good deal, Lady Gregory writes in her preface, I thought you would not care about. The you refers to the people of Kiltartan, to whom Lady Gregory dedicates her book. It seems to me that Balzac and Turgenev would have taken a different view as to the duty of a modern writer to the old legends; both would have said: It is never justifiable to alter a legend; it has come down to us because it contains some precious message, and the message the legend carries will be lost or worsened if the story be altered or mutilated or deformed. And who am I, Balzac would have said, that I should alter a message that has come down from a far-off time, a message often enfolded in the tale so secretly that it is all things to all men? My province, he would have continued, is not to alter the story, but to interpret it, and we have not to listen very intently to hear him say: Not only I may, I must interpret. There can be little doubt that Yeats is often injudicious in his noble preface, and he exposes Lady Gregory to criticism when he depreciates the translation from which Lady Gregory said she worked. She might have written: Which I quote, for she follows Kuno Meyer's translation of The Wooing of Emer sentence by sentence, and it is our puzzle to discover how Kuno Meyer's English is worthless when he signs it and beautiful when Lady Gregory quotes it. A clear case of literary transubstantiation, I said, speaking of the miracle to a friend who happened to be a Roman Catholic, and she gave me the definition of the catechism: the substance is the same, but the accident is different. Or it may have been: the incident is the same and the substance is different; one cannot always be sure that one remembers theology correctly. A little examination, however, of Lady Gregory's text enabled us to dismiss the theological aspect as untenable. Here and there we find she has altered the words; Kuno Meyer's title is The Wooing of Emer; Lady Gregory has changed it to The Courting of Emer (she is writing living speech); and if Kuno Meyer wrote that Emer received Cuchulain in her bower, Lady Gregory, for the same reason, would certainly change it to: she asked him into her parlour. The word lawn in the sentence: and as the young girls were sitting together on their bench on the lawn they heard coming toward them a clattering of hooves, the creaking of a chariot, the grating of wheels, belongs to Lady Gregory; of that I am so sure that it would be needless for me to refer to Kuno Meyer's version of the legend.

No light diadem of praise Yeats sets on Lady Gregory's brow when he says that she has discovered a speech, beautiful as that of Morris, and a living speech into the bargain. He continues, that as she moved among her people she learnt to love the beautiful speech of those who think in Irish, and to understand that it is as true a dialect of English as the dialect that Burns wrote in. But when we look into the beautiful speech that Lady Gregory learnt as she moved among her people, we find that it consists of no more than a dozen turns of speech, dropped into pages of English so ordinary, that redeemed from these phrases it might appear in any newspaper without attracting attention. And she does not seem to have inquired if the phrases she uses are merely local or part of the English language; she writes again and again a phrase which we find in The Burial of Sir John Moore, evidently under the impression that she is writing something extremely Irish:

That the foe and the stranger should tread o'er his head, And we far away on the billow.

It would seem that in the opinion of many the line: And we far away on the billow, marks the poem as having been written by an Irishman, a careless criticism, for it is certain that the turn of speech referred to is to be found in Shakespeare, in Milton, in Morris, even in Dickens. It is heard in England in everyday speech, though not so often as it is heard in Ireland, but it is heard, and it was a mistake on Lady Gregory's part to accept it as characteristically Irish. And her mistake shows how very little thought she gave to the question of idiomatic speech. She writes: he, himself, instead of omitting the parasitical he as she might very well have done. The omission would have suggested Ireland without any violation to the English language; and her attitude toward the verb to be is quite unconsidered and commonplace. She does not seem to have realised that in Ireland the verb to be is used to imply continuous action; and it seems to me very important to have noticed that Irish English and Provincial English preserve a distinction that has disappeared from English as spoken in polite society and taught at Oxford and Cambridge. Everybody in Ireland and a great many among the English middle classes still say: I shall be seeing So-and-so tonight and will tell him, etc., and everybody in Ireland and a great number among the English middle classes still say: Will you be having your letters sent on, which is surely richer English than: Will you have your letters sent on? My parlourmaid always says: Will you be dressing for dinner tonight? and: Will you be wearing your silk hat tonight? thereby distinguishing between a simple and a continuous future action. It is our parlourmaids and their likes that carry on these subtleties of tense, a much more important point than the aspiration of the letter h. I have heard of something called Extension Lectures at Oxford and Cambridge, but, without having the least notion of what is meant by extension lectures, I would suggest that some of the yeomen of Oxfordshire should be sent for to teach the professors, learned, no doubt, in the Latin and Greek languages, but who have no English.

But the efforts of the uneducated to teach the educated would be made in vain; the English language is perishing and it is natural that it should perish with the race; race and grammatical sense go together. The English have striven—and done a great deal in the world; the English are a tired race, and their weariness betrays itself in the language, and the most decadent of all are the educated classes. We say in Ireland: I am just after feeding the birds, and this is a richer phrase, faintly different from: I have just fed the birds. All these delicate shades have dropped out of modern English; they still exist in the language, but they are no longer used, they are slightly archaic today, or provincial; and the source wherefrom the language is refreshed—rural English—is being destroyed by Board-schools. God help the writer who puts pen to paper in fifty years' time, for all that will be left of the language will be a dry shank-bone that has been lying a long while on the dust-heap of empire.

The difference between rural and urban speech should have been studied by Lady Gregory, but we fear she has not given a thought to it; she was just content to pepper her page with a few idiomatic turns of speech which she very often does not use correctly. It is what I think, said Ferogain, that it is the fire of Conaire, the High King, and I would be glad he not to be there tonight, for it would be a pity if harm would come on him or his life be shortened, for he is a branch in its blossom. To my ear—and I come from the same country as Lady Gregory—this is not living speech. What the Galway, and I may add the Mayo, peasant would say is: And it's glad I'd be if he wasn't there tonight. We read on and at the end of about ten lines we come upon: What use will it be I to speak to him? And then her pen fills up another page before she thinks it necessary to drop in: A welcome before you, a pretty phrase which may be idiom, though I have never heard it in either Mayo or Galway. We turn the leaves and catch sight of: And it's you have what all the men of Ulster are wanting in. If we continued a little further it is quite possible we should come upon: And they do be saying, and: It is what I think, but we should not meet anywhere in the book an attempt to make, to mould, or to fashion a language out of the idiom of the Galway peasant, and it is astonished I am altogether that Yeats could have brought himself to compare this patchwork to the beautiful speech of Morris or of Burns, and to speak of the manuscripts that were consulted, for Lady Gregory says herself in her preface that she cannot read the manuscripts, but has translated from the French and German versions of the stories. And it is mighty hard to know how he could have reconciled himself to the adaptation of barbaric tales to the drawing-room. He must have often said to himself: She wouldn't bowdlerise the Bible in the interests of the drawing-room. And the constant repetition of a phrase like: And it wasn't a chair they gave him but a stool, and it not in the corner, must have ended by boring him, for no one is so easily bored by the repetition of a phrase as Yeats; it must have been that phrase that drove him out of Coole and sent him off again in pursuit of the golden-haired Isolde, whom, perhaps, the poet missed or found in Brittany or in Passy.

And it was on one of those journeys that he discovered Synge, a man of such rough and uncultivated aspect that he looked as if he had come out of Derrinrush. He was not a peasant as Yeats first supposed, but came, like all great writers, from the middle classes; his mother had a house in Kingstown which he avoided as much as possible, and it was in the Rue d'Arras that Yeats found him, dans une chambre meublée on the fifth floor. He was on his way back to Ireland, and might stay at Kingstown for a while, till his next quarter's allowance came in (he had but sixty pounds a year), but as soon as he got it he would be away to the West, to the Arran Islands. Yeats gasped; and it was the romance of living half one's life in the Latin Quarter and the other half in the Arran Islands that captured Yeats's imagination. He must have lent a willing ear to Synge's tale of an unpublished manuscript, a book which he had written about the Arran Islands; but his interest in it doubtless flagged when Synge told him that it was not written in peasant speech. Synge must have answered: But peasant speech in Arran is Irish. Yeats remembered with regret that this was so, for he would have preferred Anglo-Irish; and he listened to Synge telling him that he had some colloquial knowledge of the Irish language. He had had to pick up a little Irish; life in Arran would be impossible without Irish, and Yeats awoke from his meditation.

This strange Irishman was a solitary, who only cared to talk with peasants, and was interested in things rather than ideas. In the Rue d'Arras it must have been Yeats that did all the admiration, and Synge must have been a little bored, but quite willing that Yeats should discover in him a man of genius, a strange experience for Synge, who, however convinced he was inly of his own genius, must have wondered how Yeats had divined it, for Yeats had not pretended to feel any interest in the articles on French writers that Synge had sent round to the English Press, adding thereby sometimes a few pounds to his income, but only sometimes, for these articles were so trite that they were seldom accepted; John Eglinton confesses once a year that he could not stomach the article that Synge sent to him for publication in Dana; and they were so incorrectly written that Best, who knew Synge in the Rue d'Arras, tells that he used to go over them, for Synge could not write correctly at that time. Only one out of three was accepted, and the one that came to Dana no doubt came with all the edges worn by continual transmission through the post. It is Best that should write about Synge, for he helped him to furnish his room in the Rue d'Arras; Synge was very helpless in the actual affairs of life; he could not go out and buy furniture; Best had to go with him, and they brought home a mattress and some chairs and a bed on a barrow, and then returned to fetch the rest. There was a fiddle hanging on the wall of the garret in the Rue d'Arras, but as Synge never played it, Best began to wonder if Synge could play, and as if suspecting Best of disbelief in his music, Synge took it down one evening and drew the bow across the strings in a way that convinced Best, who played the fiddle himself; and, as if satisfied, he returned the fiddle to its nail, saying that he only played it in the Arran Islands in the evenings when the peasants wanted to dance. They have no ear for music, he said, and do not recognise a melody. What! exclaimed Best. Only as they recognise the cry of a bird or animal, not as a musician. Only the beat of the jig enters their ears, Best replied in a voice tinged with melancholy.

In Yeats's imagination, playing the fiddle to the Arran Islanders, and reciting poems to them, are one and the same thing, and he recognised instantly in Synge the Gleeman that was in himself, but had remained, and would remain for ever, unrealised; and his imagination caught fire at the conjunction of the Rue d'Arras and the Arran Islands. And whosoever has followed this narrative so far can see Yeats leaning forward in Synge's chair, getting more and more interested in him at every moment, his literary passions rising till they carried him to his feet and set him walking about the dusty carpet from the window to the table at which Synge worked, crying: Come to Ireland and write folk-plays for me. A play about Arran.

But the play I've shown you—

Is of no account. The language will help you to know your own people.

And, better than any description, this dialogue represents the meeting of Yeats and Synge in the Rue d'Arras, Synge's large impassive face into which hardly any light of expression ever came, listening to Yeats with a look of perplexity moving over its immobility, and Yeats's passion, purely literary, steadily mounting. You must come back and perfect yourself in the language; you must live among the people again, he reports himself to have said. You must come to Ireland. A theatre is building in Dublin for the production of folk-plays, or soon will be building; and he told Synge how Miss Horniman, a lady of literary tastes and ample income, had decided to give to Dublin what no other city in an English-speaking country possessed—a subventioned theatre. Write me an Arran play. We will open the theatre with it; and he began to speak of Synge's immediate return to Arran. I should die, Synge is reported to have answered. Not before you have written the masterpiece, Yeats answered, and he continued day after day to subjugate Synge's mind, till one Saturday evening, after a talk lasting till long past midnight, Synge declared his adherence to the new creed of living speech.

When a man's mind is made up, his feet must set out on the way, Yeats replied. Synge acquiesced, and when he had received two little cheques which were due to him for articles, he folded his luggage according to promise, and a few days after presented himself at the Nassau Hotel, and was introduced to Lady Gregory, who encouraged him to confide in her; and he told her the story of his health, and she very kindly took his part against Yeats, who was all for Arran, not for the middle island, for there only Irish is spoken. And the dialect is what we want. That may be, Mr Yeats, but Mr Synge may not be able to stand the climate in the autumn. And she turned to Synge, who told her that the best time would be a little later, when the people would be out digging in their potato fields. Lady Gregory agreed that this was so, and after some demur Yeats yielded, as he always does to Lady Gregory, and the three were of one mind that the mild climate of Wicklow was suitable to Synge's health, and also to the study of living speech, for the tinkers met in Wicklow in the autumn, Yeats cried. You mustn't miss the gathering. And a few days later Synge wrote that he had been fortunate enough to fall in with a band of tinkers. He had heard a tall, lean man cry after a screaming girl: Black Hell to your sowl! you've followed me so far, you'll follow me to the end! And driving their shaggy ponies and lean horses up a hillside, the tinkers made for their annual assemblage, exchanging their wives and arranging the roads they were to take, the signs to be left at the cross roads, the fairs they were to attend, and the meeting-places for the following year. But this was not all the good news. Synge had gained the good-will of a certain tinker and his wife, and was learning their life and language as they strolled along the lanes, cadging and stealing as they went, squatting at eventide on the side of a dry ditch. Like a hare in a gap he listened, and when he had mastered every turn of their speech he left the tinker and turned into the hills, spending some weeks with a cottager, joining a little later another group of tinkers accompanied by a servant-girl who had suddenly wearied of scrubbing and mangling, boiling for pigs, cooking, and working dough, and making beds in the evening. It would be better, she had thought, to lie under the hedgerow; and in telling me of this girl, Synge seemed to be telling me his own story. He, too, disliked the regular life of his mother's house, and preferred to wander with the tinkers, and when tired of them to lie abed smoking with a peasant, and awake amid the smells of shag and potato-skins in the sieve in the corner of the room. In answer to an inquiry how the day passed in the cottage, he told me that after breakfast he scrambled over a low wall out of which grew a single hawthorn, and looked round for a place where he might loosen his strap, and when that job was done he kept on walking ahead thinking out the dialogue of his plays, modifying it at every stile after a gossip with some herdsman or pig-jobber, whomever he might meet, returning through the cold spring evening, when the stars shine brightly through the naked trees, licking his lips, appreciating the fine flavour of some drunkard's oath or blasphemy.

Yeats was at this time in the hands of the Fays and a Committee, and the performances of the National Theatre were given in different halls; and when Synge came up from the country to read Riders to the Sea to the company, Yeats, who did not wish to have any misunderstanding on the subject, cried: Sophocles! across the table, and, fearing that he was not impressive enough, he said: No, Aeschylus! And that same afternoon he said to me in Grafton Street: I would I were as sure of your future and of my own as I am of Synge's. Irishmen, he said, had written well before Synge, but they had written well by casting off Ireland; but Synge was the first man that Ireland had inspired; and I asked if he were going to find his fortune in Ireland, his literary fortune, for The Well of the Saints had very nearly emptied the Abbey Theatre. We were but twenty in the stalls: the Yeats family, Sarah Purser, William Bailey, John Eglinton, AE, Longworth, and dear Edward, who supported the Abbey Theatre, though he was averse from peasant plays. All this sneering at Catholic practices is utterly distasteful to me, he said to me. I can hear the whining voice of the proselytiser through it all. I never will go against my opinions, and when I hear the Sacred Name I assure you—You mean the name of God, Edward, don't you? I never like to mention it. The Sacred Name is enough. But if you are speaking French you say Mon Dieu at every sentence. If it isn't wrong in one language, how can it be wrong in another? A smile trickled across Edward's face, round and large and russet as a ripe pumpkin, and he muttered: Mon ami Moore, mon ami Moore.

He was in the Abbey the first night of the Playboy, and on my return from Paris he told me that though the noise was great, he had heard enough blasphemy to keep him out of the theatre thenceforth, and next morning he had read in the papers that Ireland had been exhibited in a shameful light as an immoral country. And oddly enough, the scene of the immorality is your own native town, George. He told me that the hooting had begun about the middle of the third act at the words: If all the women of Mayo were standing before me, and they in their—He shrank from completing the sentence, and muttered something about the evocation of a disgusting spectacle.

I agree with you, Edward, that shift evokes a picture of blay calico; but the delightful underwear of Madame—

Now, George.

And then, amused at his own folly, which he can no more overcome than anybody else, he began to laugh, shaking like a jelly, puffing solemnly all the while at his churchwarden.

The indignation was so great that I thought sometimes the pit was going to break in. Lower the bloody curtain, and give us something we bloody well want, a crowded pit kept on shouting. And looking at Edward I imagined I could see him in the stalls near the stage, turning round in terror, his face growing purpler and purpler. All the same, he said, though the pain that Synge's irreverent remarks caused me is very great, I disapprove altogether of interrupting a performance. But Yeats shouldn't have called in the police. A Nationalist should never call for the police.

But, Edward, supposing a housebreaker forces his way in here or into Tillyra?

He said that that was different, and after wasting some time in discussion regarding the liberty of speech and the rights of property, he asked me if I had read the play, and I told him that on reading about the tumult in the Abbey Theatre I had telegraphed from Paris for a copy, and that the first lines convinced me that Ireland had at last begotten a masterpiece—the first lines of Pegeen Mike's letter to Mr Michael O'Flaherty, general dealer, in Castlebar, for six yards of stuff for to make a yellow gown, a pair of boots with lengthy heels on them and brassy eyes, a hat as suited for a wedding day, a fine-tooth comb. Never was there such a picture of peasant life in a few lines; and at every sentence my admiration increased. At the end of the act I cried out: A masterpiece! a masterpiece! Of course, they felt insulted. The girls coming in with presents for the young stranger pleased me, but a cold wind of doubt seemed to blow over the pages when the father came on the stage, a bloody bandage about his head, and—Edward—you're asleep!

No, I'm listening.

So clearly did I see disaster in that bloody bandage that I could hardly read through the third act. But you see nothing in the play.

Yes, I do, only it's a little thing. Shawn Keogh is a very good character, and the Widow Quinn is not bad either.

But the language, Edward?

You have made up your mind that this play is a masterpiece, but I am not going to give in to you.

But the style, Edward?

It isn't English. I like the Irish language and the English language, but I don't like the mixture; and then puffing at his pipe for a few seconds he said: I like the intellectual drama.

The conversation turned upon Ibsen, and we talked pleasantly until one in the morning, and then bidding him good night I returned to Ely Place, delighted at my own perspicacity, for there could be no doubt that it was the bloody bandage that caused the row in the Abbey Theatre. The language is beautiful, but—I had admitted to Edward that I had only glanced through the third act, and Edward had answered: If you had read the whole of it you might be of my opinion. It wasn't likely that Edward and I should agree about the Playboy, but it might well be that I was judging it hurriedly, and it would have been wiser, I reflected, to have read the play through before attempting to explain why the humour of the audience had changed suddenly, and I resolved to read the play next morning. But my dislike of reading is so great that I overlooked it, and when Yeats came to see me, instead of the praise which he had come to hear, and which he was craving for, he heard some rather vain dissertations and only half-hearted praise. Again my impulsiveness was my ruin. The play would have been understood if it had been read carefully, and the evening would have been one of exaltation, whereas it went by mournfully, Yeats in the chimney-corner listening to suggestions that would preserve the comedy note. He went away depressed, saying, however, that it would be as well that I should write to Synge about his play, since I liked the greater part. But he did not think that Synge would make any alterations. And the letter I sent to Synge was superficial. I hope he destroyed it. He was glad that his play had pleased me, but he could not alter the third act. It had been written again and again—thirteen times. That is all I remember of his letter, interesting on account of the circumstances in which it was written and the rarity of Synge's correspondence. It is a pity his letter was destroyed and no copy kept; our letters would illuminate the page that I am now writing, exhibiting us both in our weakness and our strength—Synge in his strength, for if the play had been altered we should have all been disgraced, and it was Yeats's courage that saved us in Dublin. He did not argue, he piled affirmation upon affirmation, and he succeeded in the end ... but we will not anticipate.

But if Dublin would not listen to the Playboy, Dublin read the text; edition after edition was published, and we talked the Playboy round our firesides. How we talked! Week after week, month after month, the Abbey Theatre declining all the while, till at last the brothers Fay rose in revolt against Yeats's management, accusing him of hindering the dramatic movement by producing no plays except those written by his intimate friends. Yeats repelled the accusation by offering to submit those that he had rejected to the judgment of Professor Tyrrell, a quite unnecessary concession on the part of Yeats, for Willie Fay is but an amusing Irish comedian, and it was presumptuous for him and his brother to set themselves against a poet. They resigned, and one night Yeats came to me with the grave news that the Fays had seceded.



AE is the only man who can distribute courage, but Yeats and AE were no longer friends, and I was but a poor purveyor. It is true that I told him, and without hesitation, that the secession of the Fays was a blessing in disguise, and that now he was master in his own house the Abbey Theatre would begin to flourish, and it would have been well if I had confined myself to pleasant prophesying; but very few can resist the temptation to give good advice. One thing, Yeats, I have always had in mind, but never liked to tell you; it is that the way you come down the steps from the stage and stride up the stalls and alight by Lady Gregory irritates the audience, and if you will allow me to be perfectly frank, I will tell you that she is a little too imposing, too suggestive of Corinne or Madame de Staël. Corinne and Madame de Staël were one and the same person, weren't they? But you don't know, Yeats, do you? And so I went on pulling the cord, letting down volumes of water upon poor Yeats, who crouched and shivered. The water, always cold, was at times very icy, for instance when I said that his dreams of reviving Jonson's Volpone must be abandoned. If you aren't very careful, Yeats, the Academic idea will overgrow the folk.

And Yeats went away overwhelmed, and I saw no more of him for many months, not until it became known that Synge's persistent ill health had at last brought him to a private hospital, where he lay waiting an operation. He lives by the surgeon's knife. Yeats said to me, and I welcomed his advice to save myself from the anguish of going to see a man dying of cancer. And while Synge perished slowly, Gogarty recovered in the same hospital after an operation for appendicitis. One man's scale drops while another goes up. As I write this line I can see Synge, whom I shall never see again with my physical eyes, sitting thick and straight in my armchair, his large, uncouth head, and flat, ashen-coloured face with two brown eyes looking at me, not unsympathetically. A thick, stubbly growth of hair starts out of a strip of forehead like black twigs out of the head of a broom. I see a ragged moustache, and he sits bolt upright in my chair, his legs crossed, his great country shoe spreading over the carpet. The conversation about us is of literature, but he looks as bored as Jack Yeats does in the National Gallery.... Synge and Jack Yeats are like each other in this, neither takes the slightest interest in anything except life, and in their own deductions from life; educated men, both of them, but without aesthetics, and Yeats's stories that Synge read the classics and was a close student of Racine is a piece of Yeats's own academic mind. Synge did not read Racine oftener than Jack Yeats looks at Titian, and no conclusion should be drawn from the fact that among his scraps of verse are to be found translations from Villon and Marot; they are merely exercises in versification; he was curious to see if Anglo-Irish idiom could be used in poetry. Villon wrote largely in the slang of his time, therefore Villon was selected; and whosoever reads Villon dips into Marot and reads Une Ballade à Double Refrain. And that is all, for, despite his beautiful name, Marot is an insipid poet. I am sorry that Yeats fell into the mistake of attributing much reading to Synge; he has little love of character and could not keep himself from putting rouge on Synge's face and touching up his eyebrows. He showed greater discrimination when he said: You will never know as much about French poetry as Arthur Symons. Come to Ireland and write plays for me. And for his great instinct we must forgive him his little sins of reason. He very rightly speaks of Synge as a solitary, and it is interesting to speculate what made him a solitary. Was it the sense that death was lurking round the corner always, and the sense that he possessed no social gifts, that helped to drive him out into the Arran Islands where he knew nobody, and to the Latin Quarter behind the Luxembourg Gardens where nobody knew him? A man soon perceives if he is interested in others and if others are interested in him, and if he contribute nothing and gets nothing, he will slink away as Synge did.

It seemed a cruel fate that decreed that Synge must die before his play could be revived in Dublin, but his fate was cruel from the beginning. Yeats tells me that these lines were found among his papers: I am five-and-twenty today; I wonder will the five-and-twenty years before me be as unhappy as those I have passed through. He received Yeats's belief in his genius, and that was all he got from life. He wrote but little, but that little was his own: Mon verre n'est pas grand, mais je bois dans mon verre. His last strength he reserved for Deirdre, working at the play whenever he could, determined to finish it before he died. But he wrote slowly, and the disease moved quickly from cell to cell, and before the last writing was accomplished Synge laid aside the pen and resigned himself to death. It is curious that he should have met his old friend Best on his way to the hospital. Best tells these things significantly. He asked Synge if he were going in for an operation. Synge answered no; and when Best called to see him in the hospital, he found Synge clinging to a little hope, though he knew there was none, saying that people often get better when nobody expected them to get better; and he seemed to experience some disappointment when Best did not answer promptly that that was so.

He used to speak of Deirdre as his last disappointment; but another waited him. An hour before he died he asked the nurse to wheel his bed into a room whence he could see the Wicklow mountains, the hills where he used to go for long solitary walks, and he was wheeled into the room, but the mountains could not be seen from the windows; to see them it was necessary to stand up, and Synge could not stand or sit up in his bed, so his last wish remained ungratified, and he died with tears in his eyes.