all before acting so natural.

There is possible, too, however, a native origin for this repose of
manner, or perhaps it would be truest to say that it is a blending, like
the dramas themselves, of native and foreign elements. Speaking of
"Cathleen ni Houlihan" in the notes to his "Collected Works" of 1908,
Mr. Yeats says, "I cannot imagine this play, or any folk-play of our
school, acted by players with no knowledge of the peasant, and of the
awkwardness and stillness of bodies that have followed the plow, or too
lacking in humility to copy these things without convention or
caricature." Here, too, he refers to the "quiet movement and careful
speech which has given our players some little fame" as "arising partly
out of deliberate opinion and partly out of the ignorance of the
players."

Undoubtedly Mr. Fay knew the still ways of the peasant, and I do not
doubt that he was influenced by such knowledge and did in some degree
train his actors to bring their movements on the stage in accord with
the "awkwardness and stillness of bodies that have followed the plow."
But since there are ways of the peasant that are far from still, it is
likely, too, that he was led to select such movements, instead of the
vehement gesture and lively facial expression that are just as
characteristic of the peasant, by a memory of the restrained acting of
the French stage. It is likely, too, that the very inexperience and
lack of knowledge of artifice to which Mr. Yeats refers was an element
in making the art of the company what it became. But it is not
altogether impossible that certain traditions of the English stage--of
the statuesque acting of the Kembles, for instance--had come down into
the time of Mr. Fay's stage experience, to those days before he became
stage manager of the performances of "The Daughters of Erin" in 1900,
and that these traditions influenced his training of the company that
was to attain to a new art of the stage.

Before this there had been two series of performances in Dublin, each of
a week's duration, by "The Irish Literary Theatre," one in 1899, and the
other in 1900, with English actors gathered together in London by Mr.
George Moore; and another week's series followed in 1901 by the Benson
Company and some amateurs of the Gaelic League under the leadership of
Dr. Douglas Hyde. It was the performances of "The Countess Cathleen" of
Mr. Yeats and of "The Heather Field" of Mr. Martyn at the Antient
Concert Room