theatre that began to
stir my imagination. I persuaded Todhunter to write a pastoral play and
have it performed there.

A couple of years before, while we were still in Dublin, he had given at
Hengler's Circus, remodelled as a Greek Theatre, a most expensive
performance of his _Helena of Troas_, an oratorical Swinburnian play which
I had thought as unactable as it was unreadable. Since I was seventeen I
had constantly tested my own ambition with Keats's praise of him who "left
great verses to a little clan," so it was but natural that I should spend
an evening persuading him that we had nothing to do with the great public,
that it should be a point of honour to be content with our own little
public, that he should write of shepherds and shepherdesses because people
would expect them to talk poetry and move without melodrama. He wrote his
_Sicilian Idyll_, which I have not looked at for thirty years, and never
rated very high as poetry, and had the one unmistakable success of his
life. The little theatre was full for twice the number of performances
intended, for artists, men of letters and students had come from all over
London.

I made through these performances a close friend and a discovery that was
to influence my life. Todhunter had engaged several professional actors
with a little reputation, but had given the chief woman's part to Florence
Farr, who had qualities no contemporary professional practice could have
increased, the chief man's part to an amateur, Heron Allen, solicitor,
fiddler and popular writer on palmistry. Heron Allen and Florence Farr
read poetry for their pleasure. While they were upon the stage no one else
could hold an eye or an ear. Their speech was music, the poetry acquired a
nobility, a passionate austerity that made it seem akin for certain
moments to the great poetry of the world. Heron Allen, who had never
spoken in public before except to lecture upon the violin, had the wisdom
to reduce his acting to a series of poses, to be the stately shepherd with
not more gesture than was needed to "twitch his mantle blue" and to let
his grace be foil to Florence Farr's more impassioned delivery. When they
closed their mouths, and some other player opened his, breaking up the
verse to make it conversational, jerking his body or his arms that he
might seem no austere poetical image but very man, I listened in raging
hatred. I kept my seat with difficulty, I searched my memory for insulting
phrases,