. If he had not been brought to the
theatre of his own country, he would probably never have written
anything of first importance. Mr. Yeats himself, of course, had been
interested in verse plays from boyhood, but he, for all the energy he
has expended in learning his own particular art of the stage, speaks
more beautifully through his lyrics and the lyrical passages of his
plays than through their passages that are dramatic speech, and not only
more beautifully but with more of dignity and power. Nor is Lady
Gregory, any more than Mr. Yeats, essentially a dramatist. Her great
power is the power of dialogue, and dialogue, of course, is as often
employed in the service of the story as in the service of the play. Yet
it is not difficult to understand how in Lady Gregory the dialogue and
in Mr. Yeats the love of the spoken word led, when opportunity was made,
to writing for the stage, and for success on the stage. But in the case
of "A.E." it is as difficult to find a foreshadowing of the playwright
in the mystical poet as it would be to see in all but all of the essays
of "The Treasure of the Humble," any proof that their author was a
playwright. To those who knew Mr. Russell only through his verses, and
were unaware of the versatility of the man, his turning dramatist was as
surprising as Emerson turned dramatist would have been to the America of
anti-slavery days.

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It was not, of course, because of an impulse from within that Mr.
Russell attempted drama in "Deirdre" (1902), but because the young
enthusiasts of Ireland's national literary movement wanted plays that
should be at once native in quality and the work of writers of standing.
It did not seem a strange request to Cumann nan Gaedheal to ask Mr.
Russell for a play. What if he had never written a play? He was hardly
in their estimation more of an amateur than Mr. Yeats or Mr. Moore or
Mr. Martyn, who had written plays for "The Irish Literary Theatre" that
had achieved success of a kind, and he was surely as ardent a
Nationalist as any of these. So he was asked for a play to be played at
the Spring Festival of 1902 by the Irish National Dramatic Company that
was forming, and he did what he was asked to do, blocking it all out in
six hours, and finishing it sufficiently in three days for it to be put
in rehearsal. It was in the summer following its first presentation that
I saw it again in rehearsal in a little hall back of a produce shop in
Dublin