t of me, stood up and said to the
little boy at her side, "Tommy, if you promise to go home straight, we
will go now;" and at the end of the play, as I wandered through the
entrance hall, I heard an elderly critic murmur, "A series of
conversations terminated by an accident." I was divided in mind, I hated
the play; what was it but Carolus Durand, Bastien-Lepage, Huxley and
Tyndall, all over again; I resented being invited to admire dialogue so
close to modern educated speech that music and style were impossible.

"Art is art because it is not nature," I kept repeating to myself, but how
could I take the same side with critic and washerwoman? As time passed
Ibsen became in my eyes the chosen author of very clever young
journalists, who, condemned to their treadmill of abstraction, hated music
and style; and yet neither I nor my generation could escape him because,
though we and he had not the same friends, we had the same enemies. I
bought his collected works in Mr. Archer's translation out of my thirty
shillings a week and carried them to and fro upon my journeys to Ireland
and Sligo, and Florence Farr, who had but one great gift, the most perfect
poetical elocution, became prominent as an Ibsen actress and had almost a
success in _Rosmersholm_, where there is symbolism and a stale odour of
spoilt poetry. She and I and half our friends found ourselves involved in
a quarrel with the supporters of old fashioned melodrama, and conventional
romance, and in the support of the new dramatists who wrote in what the
Daily Press chose to consider the manner of Ibsen. In 1894 she became
manageress of the Avenue Theatre with a play of Dr. Todhunter's, called
_The Comedy of Sighs_, and Mr Bernard Shaw's _Arms and the Man_. She asked
me to write a one act play for her niece, Miss Dorothy Paget, a girl of
eight or nine, to make her first stage appearance in; and I, with my Irish
Theatre in mind, wrote _The Land of Heart's Desire_, in some discomfort
when the child was theme, as I knew nothing of children, but with an
abundant mind when Mary Bruin was for I knew an Irish woman whose unrest
troubled me and lay beyond my comprehension. When she opened her theatre
she had to meet a hostile audience, almost as violent as that Synge met in
January, 1907, and certainly more brutal, for the Abbey audience had no
hatred for the players, and I think but little for Synge himself. Nor had
she the certainty of final victory to give her courage, for