the audiences have
been drawn. It was such people as do not habitually go to the theatre,
but that are to be found at revivals of old English comedy and Ibsen
plays and symphony concerts, that made up the audiences of the Irish
Players in America, whether in Boston or in Philadelphia or Chicago.
These audiences approximated to the Dublin audiences only in the fact
that they were constant in attendance at all the plays of the
repertoire. There were, of course, some who came out of curiosity and
the love of ruction, but these after all were few. The plays appealed on
their merits and won the success that they did win because of their art
and their reading of life, and not because of the sensational incidents
that had occurred at some of the productions of the company.

The Abbey Theatre has been able to maintain itself successfully in the
years that have elapsed since the arrangement between Miss Horniman and
the National Theatre Society came to an end. It has begotten many other
companies, the Ulster Literary Theatre, best of them all; the Theatre of
Ireland; the National Players; the Cork Dramatic Society. It has brought
into being a kind of folk-drama that, despite its avowed and evident
Scandinavian origin, is a new folk-drama, and it has brought into being,
too, a school of dramatists. It has done much more than Mr. Yeats
claimed it had done in 1908 when he wrote, "We know that we have already
created a taste for sincere and original drama and for sincere, quiet,
simple acting. Ireland possesses something which has come out of its own
life, and the many failures of dramatic societies which have imitated
our work, without our discipline and our independence, show that it
could not have been made in any other way." But even were this all it
had done, it had done much. What it has done I have attempted to put
down in some detail, and to put values upon, in the following pages.
Here I wish further to say but this: that I think the dramatic movement
the most significant part of the Celtic Renaissance, a movement to me
the most original movement in letters the world has known since that
movement in Norway which so definitely stimulated it, a movement that
gave Bjoernson and Ibsen to the world.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Shakespeare Head Press, Stratford-on-Avon, 1908.

CHAPTER III

MR. WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

There has never been a poet who used better the gifts his country gave
him than Mr. Yeats. The heroic legends of