Synge's death seems to have done him a great deal of good; he was not cold in his grave when his plays began to sell like hot cakes and a complete edition of his writings was contemplated, comprising the plays and his Wicklow Sketches and The Blasket Islands; the newspaper articles that he had written upon the French poets were sought for and discovered, and, what was still more important, Yeats decreed a revival of the Playboy at the Abbey. We were all agog and prayed that the play would be allowed to pass without protest; it seemed very likely that this would be permitted, for Synge's success had sobered Dublin, especially its journalists. A sad thing it is for a journalist to find the play that he has described as contemptible, as an insult to Ireland, accepted by all the world as a masterpiece, and the newspaper that smells like a musty sacristy held its peace, or only sent one poor little voice to utter a faint squeak in the gallery from time to time. The play was the same, the text was the same, the cast was the same with one exception. The part of the Playboy was entrusted to Fred O'Donovan, and thereby hangs a tale that I should like to tell.

Synge had written the play knowing that the part of Christy Mahon was going to be played by Willie Fay, a little man five feet three or four; allusions to his size had crept into the text, and Willie Fay, who is a true artist, had exhibited Christy Mahon in the conditions of a wayfarer who had been wandering for at least a fortnight, sleeping in a barn when he could find an open door, and a dry ditch when he could not find a barn, and if Willie Fay had been a broad-shouldered, stalwart, fine young fellow, he might have carried the illusion so far as to send some whiffs of Christy across the footlights. But his diminutive appearance, and the very qualities which made him so admirable an exponent of the part of Michael O'Dowd in The Well of the Saints were against him in the Playboy. An actor's stock-in-trade is his personality, and Fay's personality is of the crab-apple kind, and it was necessary that the story that Christy had to tell should be told with an engaging simplicity; the audience must sympathise with the son whom the father persecuted because he would not marry an old woman; the audience must see the father raise the scythe, and poor Christie the loy, to defend himself. The father is cloven by the loy, but that is an accident. I did not see Willie Fay in the part, but it is easy to imagine how his reading would alienate the sympathy of the audience. He might point to certain passages which would support his reading; no doubt he could; but these are not the passages that should be brought into light. It just comes to this, that no man living can play the two parts, the Playboy and the blind man in The Well of the Saints, any more than any man can play Hamlet and Othello satisfactorily. A different personality is required, and Fred O'Donovan is a well-favoured young man whom any girl would like for his appearance, and he told the story of how he had killed his father, simply, almost innocently, as an unfortunate accident that had happened to him, and Pegeen Mike pitied him. He was no doubt occasionally against the words, but that was unavoidable; the part cannot be played any other way. A few phrases were dropped out here and there; in the second act the bandage was no longer blood-stained, and in the third, when Christy went out to kill his father for the second time, the father came in on all fours; this kept the comedy note, which was in danger of being lost, for Pegeen Mike is very angry with Christy in the third act, believing him to be a mere braggart—the weak spot in the play, but it passes rapidly; and it was interesting to speak about it to Miss Maire O'Neill, who played Pegeen Mike out of a very clear vision of the character and with all the finish of a true artist.

However we look at it, I said, it is difficult to see how Pegeen Mike could have brought the peat from the fire to burn her lover's feet, and three minutes after rush to the door to watch him leaving her for ever; going away with his father back to their own countryside. Miss O'Neill said she didn't think she could speak the words so that the audience would understand that her anger against Christy was simulated. Well, imperfection is often a zest, I answered, and left the theatre thinking that Fate had allowed Synge to accomplish very little; two one-act plays, purely tentative, a three-act play upon an old theme, The Tinker's Wedding, and a dramatic version of the legend of Deirdre, which it would have been well for me to have read before writing this page, for the printed page alone is veracious; our ears, however quick, cannot take in the whole of a play. But the book is not on the table, nor in the house, nor at the bookseller's round the corner, and it is well that it isn't, for it is pleasant sometimes to believe that one's ears are trustworthy, and, amid my aural experiences, I have none more agreeable than the music of the dialogue about Naisi's grave, though memory recalls but one tiny phrase: Death is a poor untidy thing. The writing of Deirdre in peasant speech was Yeats's idea; and the text bears witness that when Synge had written an act he began to feel that peasant speech is unsuited to tragedy. Only the second and third acts are of much account, only these are finished, and to finish the first act Synge would have had to redeem it from peasant speech, ridiculous and out of place at the court of Kings, though the Kings be but shepherd Kings. There is less idiom in the second act than in the first, and none at all in the third; and when I mentioned these things to Yeats he told me that Synge had begun to weary of the limitations of peasant speech.... It is difficult to imagine Synge writing about the middle classes and their tea-parties, or the upper classes and their motor-cars, and we may exercise our wits trying to discover the turn his talent would have taken, but it is more practical to tell how Lady Gregory came to the rescue of the Abbey Theatre and saved it after the secession of the Fays.

She could write easily and well, and had shown aptitude for writing rural anecdotes in dialogue, and it is an open secret that she was Yeats's collaborator in the Pot of Broth and in Cathleen ni Houlihan; and feeling that the fate of the movement depended upon her, she undertook the great responsibility of keeping the theatre open with her pen, writing play after play, three or four a year, writing in the space of ten years something like thirty plays. And is there one among us who would undertake such a job of work and accomplish it as well as Lady Gregory? The plays that flowed from her pen so rapidly are not of equal merit, nor is there any one that compares with the Playboy, but all are meritorious, all are conceived and written in the same style. She is herself, in her little plays, a Galway woman telling rural anecdotes that amuse her woman's mind, and telling them gracefully, never trying to philosophise, to explain, but just content to pick her little flower, to place it in a vase for our amusement, and go on to another flower. The Rising of the Moon is a very pretty bit of artless dramatic writing, with a fine folk flavour, hardly written, told as the people would tell it by their firesides. Hyacinth Halvey has been played all over the world with success; and one must not look too scornfully at success; a certain measure is necessary in a theatre. Spreading the News is even more natural than The Rising of the Moon; it is just the gossip of a village thrown easily into dramatic form. Nobody could have done Lady Gregory's plays as well as she did them herself, and The Workhouse Ward must not be forgotten, a trifle somewhat sentimental, but just what was wanted to carry on the Abbey Theatre, which, for a moment, could do very well without the grim humours of Synge. We must get it into our heads that the Abbey Theatre would have come to naught but for Lady Gregory's talent for rolling up little anecdotes into one-act plays. She has written three-act plays, but her art and her humour and her strength rarely carry her beyond a one-act. The best of her three-act plays is probably The Image, in which she sets a whole village prattling; the characters go on talking about very little, yet always talking pleasantly, and we go away pleasantly amused and pleasantly weary. The telling of The Jackdaw is a little confused, but whosoever writes thirty plays in ten years will sometimes be sprightly, sometimes confused, sometimes languid, and will sometimes choose subjects that cannot very well be written. She has told that she wrote plays in the first instance because she believed it to be her duty to write for the Abbey Theatre, and afterwards, no doubt, took an interest in the writing for its own sake, and in this her story nowise differs from many another's, chance playing in our lives a greater part than we would care to admit. She never would have written a play if she had not met Yeats, nor would Synge, who is now looked upon as an artist as great as Donatello or Benvenuto Cellini, and perhaps I should not have gone to Ireland if I had not met Yeats; and if I had not gone to Ireland I should not have written The Lake or The Untilled Field, or the book I am now writing.

So all the Irish movement rose out of Yeats and returns to Yeats. He wrote beautiful lyrics and narrative poems from twenty till five-and-thirty, and then he began to feel that his mission was to give a literature to Ireland that should be neither Hebrew, nor Greek, nor French, nor German, nor English—a literature that should be like herself, that should wear her own face and speak with her own voice, and this he could do only in a theatre. We have all wanted repertory theatres and art theatres and literary theatres, but these words are vain words and mean nothing. Yeats knew exactly what he wanted; he wanted a folk theatre, for if Ireland were ever to produce any literature he knew that it would have to begin in folk, and he has his reward. Ireland speaks for the first time in literature in the Abbey Theatre.