"Our Irish Theatre," Lady Gregory

• Some day when I am not here to answer, you will maybe ask, "What were they for, the writing, the journeys, and why did she have an enemy?" So I will put down the story now, that you may know all about it bye and bye.
• We said we would collect money, or rather ask to have a certain sum of money guaranteed. We would then take a Dublin theatre and give a performance of Mr. Martyn's Heather Field and one of Mr. Yeats's own plays, The Countess Cathleen. I offered the first guarantee of £25.
• Our statement--it seems now a little pompous--began:
• "We propose to have performed in Dublin, in the spring of every year certain Celtic and Irish plays, which whatever be their degree of excellence will be written with a high ambition, and so to build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature.
• We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted and imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory, and believe that our desire to bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland will ensure for us a tolerant welcome, and that freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres of England, and without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed.
• We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism.
• We are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside all the political questions that divide us."
• One friend, a writer of historical romance, wrote:
• "October 15th. I enclose a cheque for £1, but confess it is more as a proof of regard for you than of belief in the drama, for I cannot with the best wish in the world to do so, feel hopeful on that subject.
• There are popular Irish dramatists, of course, and very popular ones, but then unhappily they do not treat of Irish subjects, and The School for Scandal and She Stoops to Conquer would hardly come under your category.
• A writer who had a political quarrel with Mr. Yeats sent out a pamphlet in which he attacked The Countess Cathleen, on the ground of religious unorthodoxy.
• One of them, the Rev. Dr. Barry, the author of The New Antigone, wrote:
• DEAR MR. YEATS,
• I read your Countess Cathleen as soon as possible after seeing you. It is beautiful and touching. I hope you will not be kept back from giving it by foolish talk.
• The Bending of the Bough was the first play dealing with a vital Irish question that had appeared in Ireland.
• The Gaelic League in great force sang Fainne Real an Lae between the acts, and The Wearing of the Green in Irish!
• The actors say they never played to so appreciative an audience, but were a little puzzled at the applause, not understanding the political allusions.
• Curiously, Maeve, which we didn't think a Nationalist play at all, has turned out to be one, the audience understanding and applauding the allegory.
• G.M. is, I think, a little puzzled by his present political position, but I tell him E. Martyn we are not working for Home Rule; we are preparing for it.
• The time had come to play oftener and to train actors of our own.
• For Mr. Yeats had never ceased attacking the methods of the ordinary theatre, in gesture, in staging, and in the speaking of verse.
• I remember, in 1897, hearing Mr. Bernard Shaw make a speech before the Irish Literary Society in London, following a lecture on "Irish Actors of the Nineteenth Century."
• "As to what an Irishman is," he said, "is a complex question, for wherever he may have been born, if he has been brought up in Ireland, that is quite sufficient to make him an Irishman.
• It is a mistake to think an Irishman has not common sense.
• It is the Englishman who is devoid of common sense or at least has so small a portion of it that he can only apply it to the work immediately before him.
• The Irishman has a better grasp of facts and sees them more clearly; only he fails in putting them into practice, and has a great objection to doing anything that will lead to any practical result.
• It is a mistake to think the Irishman has feeling; he has not; but the Englishman is full of feeling.
• What the Irishman has is imagination; he can imagine himself in the situation of others."
• I am very sorry that they, who more than almost any others had laid the foundation of the Irish Theatre, did not wait with us for its success.
• And Mr. Yeats in his turn wrote to encourage me in some time of attacks: "Any fool can fight a winning battle, but it needs character to fight a losing one, and that should inspire us; which reminds me that I dreamed the other night that I was being hanged, but was the life and soul of the party."
• Remember, he has been for the last eight years working with his whole heart and soul for the creation, the furtherance, the perfecting, of what he believes will be a great dramatic movement in Ireland.
• It is hard to hold one's own against those who is living amongst, I have found that; and I have found that peace comes, not from trying to please one's neighbours but in making up one's own mind what is the right path and in then keeping to it.
• This now, according to my memory, is how I came to work for a National Theatre in Ireland, and how that Theatre began.