s Mr. Yeats in recording the incident,
"and her great height made Cathleen seem a divine being fallen into our
mortal infirmity." With these three exceptions, so far as I have been
able to find out, no actors or actresses outside of the company have,
since 1902, essayed any other than a subordinate part. Yet such is the
versatility of the company, men and women both, within the range of
plays the company feels called upon to present,--folk-drama of to-day
and of yesterday in Ireland, folk-history plays, morality plays, and
plays in verse out of old legends,--that though there have never been as
many as twenty actors in the company there has very seldom been much
difficulty in casting a part. Molly Byrne in "The Well of the Saints"
and the Wandering Friar of the same play have given the most trouble to
the stage directors.

From the very beginning of the Irish National Dramatic Company, Mr.
Yeats has been an advocate of scenery that is background chiefly, and in
no way divertive of attention from the play itself, its thought, its
words, its acting. He would have it, in a way, decorative, but subdued
and in harmony with the subject of the play. A very few simple sets
suffice for the plays of peasant life, a cottage interior, a village
street, a crossroads in a gap of the hills, all to serve the action and
the words as background, and to be no more obtrusive than the background
of a portrait. It may be that this attitude of Mr. Yeats is in a measure
due to his talks with Mr. Gordon Craig, but it is equally true, I think,
that some of Mr. Gordon Craig's ideas are due in part to his talks with
Mr. Yeats. Equally simple, though of another sort of simplicity, would
Mr. Yeats have the scenery for plays out of old legend. "I would like to
see," writes Mr. Yeats in "Samhain" of 1902, "poetic drama, which tries
to keep at a distance from daily life, that it may keep its emotion
untroubled, staged with but two or three colors." Old reds, misty
blues, imperial purples, greens that have about them the dimness of
haunted woods, and dulled golds have been among the colors used in the
legendary plays of Mr. Yeats and in the folk-histories of Lady Gregory,
the color schemes being generally either those of Mr. Yeats or of Mr.
Robert Gregory, Lady Gregory's son. Scenery and costumes alike are
simple. No audience at the Abbey has ever marveled at cycloramic
landscape, and no audience and no actress has ever been able to take the
joy of the