s in Dublin, respectively May 8 and 9, 1899, by "The Irish
Literary Theatre," that inaugurated the drama of the Celtic Renaissance,
fully a year before there came into being the group of amateurs that
were to bring that drama home to Ireland as no players who inherited the
standards and conventions of the English stage could possibly have
brought it home.

It is Mr. Fay's distinction to have been, as I have intimated, the
leader who started these players on the long way to their new art. Such
leadership his record hardly augered. It was in the very lowest forms
of vaudeville, in what is the analogue abroad of our negro minstrelsy,
that Mr. Fay had his stage experience, a stage experience that had made
him well enough known in burlesque roles to make it difficult for him to
assume with success serious roles in the early years of the National
Dramatic Company. Because of this old association, Dublin audiences
insisted in 1902 in seeing humor in his Peter Gillane in "Cathleen ni
Houlihan." For all this past, however, Mr. Fay was intent on serious
drama, and, with the precept and example of Mr. Russell and Mr. Yeats
always present to him in the early days of the National Theatre Company,
and with what he had gathered from the experimental performance of Irish
plays by "The Irish Literary Theatre," he advanced surely in his art
until his withdrawal from the company in January, 1908. His loss was
compensated for only by the results of his training of other actors,
such as Miss Sara Allgood and Mr. Arthur Sinclair, who on certain roads
have outrun their master. When I saw Mr. Fay in 1902, in the little hall
in Camden Street, Dublin, with no knowledge of what his stage experience
had been, I accepted him at once for what he was, a finished "character"
actor of poise and confidence, a dignified figure for all his stature
and his predilection for comedy, and the possessor of a speaking voice
whose natural pleasantness he had made into something higher than
pleasantness by his art in the use of it, if it never attained the
resonance and nobility of phrasing of that of his brother, Mr. Frank J.
Fay. It was a memorable experience to me, that of that August evening in
1902 on which I was taken to Camden Street to a rehearsal of the Irish
National Dramatic Company. Our guide was Mr. James H. Cousins, whose
"Racing Lug" and "Connla" were among the plays produced in the following
autumn and which that night were in rehearsal. He piloted