No More Learning

We always play it in front of an olive-green curtain, and dress the
Wise Man and his Pupils in various shades of purple. Because in
all these decorative schemes one needs, as I think, a third colour
subordinate to the other two, we have partly dressed the Fool in
red-brown, which is repeated in the furniture. There is some green in
his dress and in that of the Wife of the Wise Man who is dressed mainly
in purple.

One sometimes has need of more lines of the little song, and I have put
into English rhyme three of the many verses of a Gaelic ballad:

I was going the road one day
(O the brown and the yellow beer! )
And I met with a man that was no right man
(O my dear, my dear).

'Give me your wife,' said he,
(O the brown and the yellow beer! )
'Till the sun goes down and an hour of the clock'
(O my dear, my dear).

'Good-bye, good-bye, my husband,'
(O the brown and the yellow beer! )
'For a year and a day by the clock of the sun'
(O my dear, my dear).




APPENDIX II


_CATHLEEN NI HOULIHAN. _

MY DEAR LADY GREGORY,--

When I was a boy I used to wander about at Rosses Point and Ballisodare
listening to old songs and stories. I wrote down what I heard and made
poems out of the stories or put them into the little chapters of the
first edition of _The Celtic Twilight_, and that is how I began to
write in the Irish way.

Then I went to London to make my living, and though I spent a part of
every year in Ireland and tried to keep the old life in my memory by
reading every country tale I could find in books or old newspapers, I
began to forget the true countenance of country life. The old tales
were still alive for me indeed, but with a new, strange, half-unreal
life, as if in a wizard's glass, until at last, when I had finished
_The Secret Rose_, and was half-way through _The Wind Among the Reeds_,
a wise woman in her trance told me that my inspiration was from the
moon, and that I should always live close to water, for my work was
getting too full of those little jewelled thoughts that come from the
sun and have no nation. I had no need to turn to my books of astrology
to know that the common people are under the moon, or to Porphyry to
remember the image-making power of the waters.
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.