To be too headstrong and too open, that is the
beginning
of trouble.
Yeats
The men uncover their heads.
_
PAUDEEN [_to BIDDY_].
It was you misled him with your foretelling that he was coming within
the best day of his life.
JOHNNY.
Madness on him or no madness, I will not leave that body to the law to
be buried with a dog's burial or brought away and maybe hanged upon a
tree. Lift him on the sacks, bring him away to the quarry; it is there
on the hillside the boys will give him a great burying, coming on
horses and bearing white rods in their hands.
[_NANNY lays the velvet cloak over him. _
_They lift him and carry the body away singing:_
Our hope and our darling, our heart dies with you,
You to have failed us, we are foals astray!
FATHER JOHN.
He is gone and we can never know where that vision came from. I cannot
know--the wise Bishops would have known.
THOMAS [_taking up banner_].
To be shaping a lad through his lifetime, and he to go his own way
at the last, and a queer way. It is very queer the world itself is,
whatever shape was put upon it at the first.
ANDREW.
To be too headstrong and too open, that is the beginning of trouble. To
keep to yourself the thing that you know, and to do in quiet the thing
you want to do. There would be no disturbance at all in the world, all
people to bear that in mind!
APPENDIX.
_THE COUNTESS CATHLEEN. _
PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION.
THE present version of _The Countess Cathleen_ is not quite the version
adopted by the Irish Literary Theatre a couple of years ago, for our
stage and scenery were capable of little; and it may differ still more
from any stage version I make in future, for it seems that my people
of the waters and my unhappy dead, in the third act, cannot keep their
supernatural essence, but must put on too much of our mortality, in
any ordinary theatre. I am told that I must abandon a meaning or two
and make my merchants carry away the treasure themselves. The act was
written long ago, when I had seen so few plays that I took pleasure
in stage effects. Indeed, I am not yet certain that a wealthy theatre
could not shape it to an impressive pageantry, or that a theatre
without any wealth could not lift it out of pageantry into the mind,
with a dim curtain, and some dimly robed actors, and the beautiful
voices that should be as important in poetical as in musical drama. The
Elizabethan stage was so little imprisoned in material circumstance
that the Elizabethan imagination was not strained by god or spirit, nor
even by Echo herself--no, not even when she answered, as in _The Duchess
of Malfi_, in clear, loud words which were not the words that had been
spoken to her. We have made a prison-house of paint and canvas, where
we have as little freedom as under our own roofs, for there is no
freedom in a house that has been made with hands. All art moves in the
cave of the Chimaera, or in the garden of the Hesperides, or in the more
silent house of the gods, and neither cave, nor garden, nor house can
show itself clearly but to the mind's eye.
Besides re-writing a lyric or two, I have much enlarged the note on
_The Countess Cathleen_, as there has been some discussion in Ireland
about the origin of the story, but the other notes[A] are as they have
always been. They are short enough, but I do not think that anybody who
knows modern poetry will find obscurities in this book. In any case, I
must leave my myths and symbols to explain themselves as the years go
by and one poem lights up another, and the stories that friends, and
one friend in particular, have gathered for me, or that I have gathered
myself in many cottages, find their way into the light.
PAUDEEN [_to BIDDY_].
It was you misled him with your foretelling that he was coming within
the best day of his life.
JOHNNY.
Madness on him or no madness, I will not leave that body to the law to
be buried with a dog's burial or brought away and maybe hanged upon a
tree. Lift him on the sacks, bring him away to the quarry; it is there
on the hillside the boys will give him a great burying, coming on
horses and bearing white rods in their hands.
[_NANNY lays the velvet cloak over him. _
_They lift him and carry the body away singing:_
Our hope and our darling, our heart dies with you,
You to have failed us, we are foals astray!
FATHER JOHN.
He is gone and we can never know where that vision came from. I cannot
know--the wise Bishops would have known.
THOMAS [_taking up banner_].
To be shaping a lad through his lifetime, and he to go his own way
at the last, and a queer way. It is very queer the world itself is,
whatever shape was put upon it at the first.
ANDREW.
To be too headstrong and too open, that is the beginning of trouble. To
keep to yourself the thing that you know, and to do in quiet the thing
you want to do. There would be no disturbance at all in the world, all
people to bear that in mind!
APPENDIX.
_THE COUNTESS CATHLEEN. _
PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION.
THE present version of _The Countess Cathleen_ is not quite the version
adopted by the Irish Literary Theatre a couple of years ago, for our
stage and scenery were capable of little; and it may differ still more
from any stage version I make in future, for it seems that my people
of the waters and my unhappy dead, in the third act, cannot keep their
supernatural essence, but must put on too much of our mortality, in
any ordinary theatre. I am told that I must abandon a meaning or two
and make my merchants carry away the treasure themselves. The act was
written long ago, when I had seen so few plays that I took pleasure
in stage effects. Indeed, I am not yet certain that a wealthy theatre
could not shape it to an impressive pageantry, or that a theatre
without any wealth could not lift it out of pageantry into the mind,
with a dim curtain, and some dimly robed actors, and the beautiful
voices that should be as important in poetical as in musical drama. The
Elizabethan stage was so little imprisoned in material circumstance
that the Elizabethan imagination was not strained by god or spirit, nor
even by Echo herself--no, not even when she answered, as in _The Duchess
of Malfi_, in clear, loud words which were not the words that had been
spoken to her. We have made a prison-house of paint and canvas, where
we have as little freedom as under our own roofs, for there is no
freedom in a house that has been made with hands. All art moves in the
cave of the Chimaera, or in the garden of the Hesperides, or in the more
silent house of the gods, and neither cave, nor garden, nor house can
show itself clearly but to the mind's eye.
Besides re-writing a lyric or two, I have much enlarged the note on
_The Countess Cathleen_, as there has been some discussion in Ireland
about the origin of the story, but the other notes[A] are as they have
always been. They are short enough, but I do not think that anybody who
knows modern poetry will find obscurities in this book. In any case, I
must leave my myths and symbols to explain themselves as the years go
by and one poem lights up another, and the stories that friends, and
one friend in particular, have gathered for me, or that I have gathered
myself in many cottages, find their way into the light.
