could write this out as a little play I
could make others see my dream as I had seen it but I could not get
down out of that high window of dramatic verse, and in spite of all
you had done for me I had not the country speech. One has to live
among the people, like you, of whom an old man said in my hearing,
"She has been a serving-maid among us," before one can think the
thoughts of the people and speak with their tongue. We turned my
dream into the little play, "Cathleen ni Houlihan," and when we
gave it to the little theatre in Dublin and found that the
working-people liked it, you helped me to put my other dramatic
fables into speech. Some of these have already been acted, but some
may not be acted for a long time; but all seem to me, though they
were but part of a summer's work, to have more of that countenance
of country life than anything I have done since I was a boy.

I should like also to quote in full Mr. Yeats's account of how "Where
there is Nothing" passed into "The Unicorn from the Stars," as that
account throws much light on the methods of collaboration that have
added so greatly to the success of the dramatic movement, and that are
especially valuable to beginners, whose plays, without reshaping in
collaboration, might never win their way to the boards. But I have not
the space for it all, and I must content myself with that portion of it
in which Mr. Yeats confesses that belief of his in the _rapprochement_
of scholar and tinker that one notes so often in Irish life. Speaking
of Lady Gregory's rewriting of "Where there is Nothing" into "The
Unicorn from the Stars," he says:--

Her greatest difficulty was that I had given her for chief
character a man so plunged in trance that he could not be otherwise
than all but still and silent, though perhaps with the stillness
and the silence of a lamp; and the movement of the play as a whole,
if we were to listen to hear him, had to be without hurry or
violence. The strange characters, her handiwork, on whom he sheds
his light, delight me. She has enabled me to carry out an old
thought for which my own knowledge is insufficient and to commingle
the ancient phantasies of poetry with the rough, vivid,
ever-contemporaneous tumult of the roadside; to create for a moment
a form that otherwise I could but dream of, though I do that
always, an ar