cause I had published Irish folk-lore in English
reviews to the discredit, as he thought, of the Irish peasantry, and
because, England within earshot, I found fault with the Young Ireland
prose and poetry. He would have hated _The Playboy of the Western World_,
and his death a little before its performance was fortunate for Synge and
myself. His articles are nothing, and his one historical work, a life of
Hugh O'Neill, is almost nothing, lacking the living voice; and now, though
a most formidable man, he is forgotten, but for the fading memory of a few
friends, and for what an enemy has written here and elsewhere. Did not
Leonardo da Vinci warn the imaginative man against pre-occupation with
arts that cannot survive his death?

VI

When Carleton was dying in 1870, he said there would be nothing more about
Irish Literature for twenty years, and his words were fulfilled, for the
land war had filled Ireland with its bitterness; but imagination had begun
to stir again. I had the same confidence in the future that Lady Gregory
and I had eight or nine years later, when we founded an Irish Theatre,
though there were neither, as it seemed, plays or players. There were
already a few known men to start my popular series, and to keep it popular
until the men, whose names I did not know, had learnt to express
themselves. I had met Dr. Douglas Hyde when I lived in Dublin, and he was
still an undergraduate. I have a memory of meeting in college rooms for
the first time a very dark young man, who filled me with surprise, partly
because he had pushed a snuffbox towards me, and partly because there was
something about his vague serious eyes, as in his high cheek bones, that
suggested a different civilization, a different race. I had set him down
as a peasant, and wondered what brought him to college, and to a
Protestant college, but somebody explained that he belonged to some branch
of the Hydes of Castle Hyde, and that he had a Protestant Rector for
father. He had much frequented the company of old countrymen, and had so
acquired the Irish language, and his taste for snuff, and for moderate
quantities of a detestable species of illegal whiskey distilled from the
potato by certain of his neighbours. He had already--though intellectual
Dublin knew nothing of it--considerable popularity as a Gaelic poet,
mowers and reapers singing his songs from Donegal to Kerry. Years
afterwards I was to stand at his side and listen to Galway mowers si