ts
wording, and in its intimacy with the details of cottage life.

Prose also is "Diarmid and Grania," written in collaboration with Mr.
George Moore and played at the last year's performance (1901) of "The
Irish Literary Theatre." As this play as performed was in tone more like
the writings of Mr. Moore than of Mr. Yeats, I have considered it among
his plays rather than among the plays of Mr. Yeats.

His other prose play, "Where there is Nothing" (1903), is a statement of
revolt against "the despotism of fact" that is perhaps as characteristic
of the artist as of the Celt. The world would say that its hero, Paul
Ruttledge, was mad, but no one that reads can deny him a large share of
sympathy. This play was produced by the Stage Society in London in 1904.
Lady Gregory having had a share in its creation, Mr. Yeats has since
relinquished the theme to her; and now rewritten by her alone as "The
Unicorn from the Stars," it would hardly be recognized as the same play.

His Paul Ruttledge, gentleman, becomes her Martin Hearne, coach-builder.
Both are alike at the outset of their frenzy, in that they would be
destroyers of Church and Law, both use tinkers as their agents of
destruction, and both die despised of men. Both are "plunged in trance,"
but their trances differ. That of Lady Gregory's hero is cataleptic and
directly productive of his revolt, from a revelation, as he thinks it
is, that comes to him while he is "away." Paul Ruttledge, on the other
hand, deliberately gives up his conventional life, and that as largely
because of boredom as because of belief in its wrongness. One cannot, as
one reads "Where there is Nothing," fail to see in its hero much of Mr.
Yeats himself. He is not the professional agitator, literary or social,
as was Oscar Wilde and as is Mr. Shaw, but he here delights in turning
things topsy-turvy, just as they do, in a fashion that has been
distinctive of the Irishman for many generations. Mr. Yeats is himself,
often, like his hero, "plunged in trance," if one may call trance his
"possessed dream," such as that in which "Cap and Bells" or "Cathleen ni
Houlihan" came to him. The lyric came to him, he says, as a "vision,"
and so, too, the play. It is in the dedication to volumes I and II of
"Plays for an Irish Theatre," volumes containing "Where there is
Nothing," "The Hour-Glass," "Cathleen ni Houlihan," and "A Pot of
Broth," that he tells us of the latter vision, and of the beginnings of
that col