that is characteristic of their art.
The most beautiful English that I have ever listened to is the English
of Synge as spoken by Mr. O'Donovan in Christy's "romancin'" to Pegeen
Mike in the third act of "The Playboy of the Western World." His voice,
full and mellow by nature, and in perfect control, responds to all the
many changes of emotion that the part demands, the unmatched rhythm of
the prose rendered as he renders it carrying one clean out of one's self
as one listens. It is only when one comes to one's self on the
curtain-fall that one finds one's self wondering, Can this be prose?
Surely, never before was prose, English prose, as beautiful to the ear
as English verse.

As Miss O'Neill did not come with the Abbey Players to America, we did
not have a chance to hear Pegeen Mike's lines spoken with a beauty
comparable to Christy's. The part is not one to which Miss Allgood is
physically adapted, and Miss McGee is as yet too new to the stage to
speak with the confident abandon the lines demand. We did, however, have
a chance to hear Miss Allgood's very beautiful musical utterance of the
verses given to Cathleen ni Houlihan in this first of the movement's
folk-plays, and her equally beautiful speaking of the prose lines of the
play. This part of Cathleen ni Houlihan is sufficiently removed from the
other parts of the play, folk-parts, and from the parts of the other
folk-plays, to give us an insight into the versatility of Miss Allgood;
and we saw enough of Mr. Sinclair and Mr. O'Donovan and Mr. Kerrigan to
realize that they, too, could worthily bear parts in heroic romance.

The rendering of the songs in the plays--it is chiefly in the plays of
Mr. Yeats that they appear--is a distinguishing characteristic of their
production. Mr. Yeats will not have them rendered by what, in the
ordinary sense, is singing. Writing in the notes to volume III of his
"Collected Works"[1] he says:--

No vowel must ever be prolonged unnaturally, no word of mine must
ever change into a mere musical note, no singer of my words must
ever cease to be a man and become an instrument.

The degree of approach to ordinary singing depends on the context,
for one desires a greater or lesser amount of contrast between the
lyrics and the dialogue according to situation and emotion and the
qualities of players. The words of Cathleen ni Houlihan about the
"white-scarfed riders" must be little more than regu