No More Learning

Nor did I doubt the
entire truth of what she said to me, for my head was full of fables
that I had no longer the knowledge and emotion to write. Then you
brought me with you to see your friends in the cottages, and to talk
to old wise men on Slieve Echtge, and we gathered together, or you
gathered for me, a great number of stories and traditional beliefs. You
taught me to understand again, and much more perfectly than before, the
true countenance of country life.

One night I had a dream almost as distinct as a vision, of a cottage
where there was well-being and firelight and talk of a marriage, and
into the midst of that cottage there came an old woman in a long cloak.
She was Ireland herself, that Cathleen ni Houlihan for whom so many
songs have been sung and about whom so many stories have been told and
for whose sake so many have gone to their death. I thought if I 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 a 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.

W. B. YEATS.

_Feb. , 1903. _

This play was first played on April 2, 1902, in St.
Teresa's Hall,
Dublin, with the following cast:--Cathleen, Miss Maude Gonne; Delia
Cahel, Miss Maire nic Sheublagh; Bridget Gillan, Miss M. T. Quinn;
Patrick Gillan, Mr. C. Caufield; Michael Gillan, Mr. T. Dudley Digges;
Peter Gillan, Mr. W. G. Fay.

Miss Maude Gonne played very finely, and her great height made Cathleen
seem a divine being fallen into our mortal infirmity. Since then
the part has been twice played in America by women who insisted on
keeping their young faces, and one of these when she came to the door
dropped her cloak, as I have been told, and showed a white satin
dress embroidered with shamrocks. Upon another,--or was it the same
occasion? --the player of Bridget wore a very becoming dress of the time
of Louis the Fourteenth. The most beautiful woman of her time, when
she played my Cathleen, 'made up' centuries old, and never should the
part be played but with a like sincerity. This was the first play of
our Irish School of folk-drama, and in it that way of quiet movement
and careful speech which has given our players some little fame first
showed itself, arising partly out of deliberate opinion and partly out
of the ignorance of the players.