's interest in such things.

A good many of our audience, when the curtain went up in the old
ball-room, were drunk, but all were attentive, for they had a great deal
of respect for my friend, and there were other priests there. Presently
the man at the door opposite to the stage strayed off somewhere and I
took his place, and when boys came up offering two or three pence and
asking to be let into the sixpenny seats, I let them join the melancholy
crowd. The play professed to tell of the heroic life of ancient Ireland,
but was really full of sedentary refinement and the spirituality of
cities. Every emotion was made as dainty-footed and dainty-fingered as
might be, and a love and pathos where passion had faded into sentiment,
emotions of pensive and harmless people, drove shadowy young men through
the shadows of death and battle. I watched it with growing rage. It was
not my own work, but I have sometimes watched my own work with a rage
made all the more salt in the mouth from being half despair. Why should
we make so much noise about ourselves and yet have nothing to say that
was not better said in that workhouse dormitory, where a few flowers and
a few coloured counterpanes and the coloured walls had made a severe and
gracious beauty? Presently the play was changed and our comedian began
to act a little farce, and when I saw him struggle to wake into laughter
an audience out of whom the life had run as if it were water, I
rejoiced, as I had over that broken window-pane. Here was something
secular, abounding, even a little vulgar, for he was gagging horribly,
condescending to his audience, though not without contempt.

We had supper in the priest's house, and a government official who had
come down from Dublin, partly out of interest in this attempt 'to
educate the people,' and partly because it was his holiday and it was
necessary to go somewhere, entertained us with little jokes. Somebody,
not, I think, a priest, talked of the spiritual destiny of our race and
praised the night's work, for the play was refined and the people really
very attentive, and he could not understand my discontent; but presently
he was silenced by the patter of jokes.

I had my breakfast by myself the next morning, for the players had got
up in the middle of the night and driven some ten miles to catch an
early train to Dublin, and were already on their way to their shops and
offices. I had brought the visitors' book of the hotel, to turn ov