of my hands I turned with
but a vague recollection to these notes, and was surprised
to find them fuller than they had appeared in my memory,
so that the idea was rekindled and the writing was soon
begun. And I found a certain rest and ease of mind in
having turned from a long struggle (in which, alas, I had
been too often worsted) for exactitude in dates and names
and in the setting down of facts, to the escape into a world
of fantasy where I could create my own. And so before
the winter was over the play was put in rehearsal at the
Abbey Theatre, and its first performance was on St.
Patrick's Day, 1921.

I have been looking at its first scenario, made according
to my habit in rough pen and ink sketches, coloured with
a pencil blue and red, and the changes from that early
idea do not seem to have been very great, except that in
the scene where Conan now hears the secret of the hiding-place
of the Spell from the talk of the cats, the Bellows
had been at that time left beside him by a dwarf from the
rath, in his sleep. The cats work better, and I owe their
success to the genius of our Stage Carpenter, Mr. Sean
Barlow, whose head of the Dragon from my play of that
name had been such a masterpiece that I longed to see
these other enchanted heads from his hand.

The name of the play in that first scenario was "The
Fault-Finder," but my cranky Conan broke from that
narrowness. If the play has a moral it is given in the words
of the Mother, "It's best make changes little by little,
the same as you'd put clothes upon a growing child." The
restlessness of the time may have found its way into Conan's
mind, or as some critic wrote, "He thinks of the Bellows
as Mr. Wilson thought of the League of Nations," and so
his disappointment comes. As A.E. writes in "The National
Being," "I am sympathetic with idealists in a hurry, but
I do not think the world can be changed suddenly by
some heavenly alchemy, as St. Paul was smitten by a light
from the overworld. Though the heart in us cries out
continually, 'Oh, hurry, hurry to the Golden Age,' though
we think of revolutions, we know that the patient marshalling
of human forces is wisdom.... Not by revolutions
can humanity be perfected. I might quote from an old
oracle, 'The gods are never so turned away from man as
when he ascends to them by disorderly methods.' Our
spirits may live in the Golden Age but our bodily life
moves on slow feet, and needs the lantern on the path
and t