you see trying his strength at a
show.

In writing a little tragedy, _The Gaol Gate_, I made the scenario in
three lines, "He is an informer; he is dead; he is hanged." I wrote
that play very quickly. My two poor women were in the clutch of the
Woman in the Stars.... I knew what I was going to do and I was able
to keep within those three lines. But in comedy it is different.
Character comes in, and why it is so I cannot explain, but as soon
as one creates a character, he begins to put out little feet of his
own and take his own way.

I had been meditating for a long time past on the mass of advice
that is given one by friends and well-wishers and relations, advice
that would be excellent if the giver were not ignorant so often of
the one essential in the case, the one thing that matters. But there
is usually something out of sight, of which the adviser is unaware,
it may be something half mischievously hidden from him, it may be
that "secret of the heart with God" that is called religion. In the
whole course of our work at the theatre we have been I may say
drenched with advice by friendly people who for years gave us the
reasons why we did not succeed.... All their advice, or at least
some of it, might have been good if we had wanted to make money, to
make a common place of amusement. Our advisers did not see that what
we wanted was to create for Ireland a theatre with a base of realism,
with an apex of beauty. Well, last summer I made a fable for this
meditation, this emotion, at the back of my mind to drive.

I pictured to myself, for I usually first see a play as a picture, a
young man, a mere lad, very sleepy in the daytime. He was surrounded
by people kind and wise, who lamented over his rags and idleness and
assured him that if he didn't get up early and do his work in the
daytime he would never know the feel of money in his hand. He
listens to all their advice, but he does not take it, because he
knows what they do not know, that it is in the night time precisely
he is filling his pocket, in the night when, as I think, we receive
gifts from the unseen. I placed him in the house of a miser, an old
man who had saved a store of gold. I called the old man Damer, from
a folk-story of a chandler who had bought for a song the kegs of
gold the Danes had covered with tallow as a disguise when they were
driven out of Ireland, and who had been rich and a miser ever after.
I did not mean this old man, Damer, to appear