emours which the plays of commerce, like the
novels of commerce, have substituted for the purification that comes with
pity and terror to the imagination and intellect. He followed my advice in
part, and had a small but perfect success, filling his small theatre for
twice the number of performances he had announced; but instead of being
content with the praise of his equals, and waiting to win their praise
another year, he hired immediately a big London theatre, and put his
pastoral play and a new play before a meagre and unintelligent audience. I
still remember his pastoral play with delight, because, if not always of a
high excellence, it was always poetical; but I remember it at the small
theatre, where my pleasure was magnified by the pleasure of those about
me, and not at the big theatre, where it made me uncomfortable, as an
unwelcome guest always makes one uncomfortable.

Why should we thrust our works, which we have written with imaginative
sincerity and filled with spiritual desire, before those quite excellent
people who think that Rossetti's women are 'guys,' that Rodin's women are
'ugly,' and that Ibsen is 'immoral,' and who only want to be left at
peace to enjoy the works so many clever men have made especially to suit
them? We must make a theatre for ourselves and our friends, and for a few
simple people who understand from sheer simplicity what we understand from
scholarship and thought. We have planned the Irish Literary Theatre with
this hospitable emotion, and, that the right people may find out about us,
we hope to act a play or two in the spring of every year; and that the
right people may escape the stupefying memory of the theatre of commerce
which clings even to them, our plays will be for the most part remote,
spiritual, and ideal.

A common opinion is that the poetic drama has come to an end, because
modern poets have no dramatic power; and Mr. Binyon seems to accept this
opinion when he says: 'It has been too often assumed that it is the
manager who bars the way to poetic plays. But it is much more probable
that the poets have failed the managers. If poets mean to serve the
stage, their dramas must be dramatic.' I find it easier to believe that
audiences, who have learned, as I think, from the life of crowded cities
to live upon the surface of life, and actors and managers, who study to
please them, have changed, than that imagination, which is the voice of
what is eternal in man, has changed.