'THEY. HAVE WON much praise for themselves and raised the
dignity of Ireland.' It is not unfitting to begin this story with
Lady Gregory's comment on the work of the company known
through Europe and America as 'The Abbey Theatre'. The
words she uses would be a fitting epitaph not only for the
company but for the movement itself of which it was the out-
come and to which this book is in small degree a tribute.
Further, too, it is to those players that many of my readers,
like myself, will have owed their first introduction to the
modern Irish dramatists.

It was nearly thirty years ago that I first saw them in London
and though I know that I saw four plays in all (of which Riders
to the Sea must have been one), my deepest first impression was
not made by the tragic genius of Synge but by the passionate
nationalism of Yeats and Lady Gregory. It must have been
in part at least an audience of Englishmen or Anglo-Irishmen
that saw Cathleen ni Houlihan that day with Miss Sara Allgood
in the part of Cathleen. A play was a real thing to me in those
days as no play, alas, can ever be again, and I remember now
recoiling from the wildness and the violence, the Old Woman
with her boding, bringing her talk of war and death into the
midst of ordinary things (this being before the average English-
man had learnt to accommodate this kind of thought in his
mind). There was something as yet terrifying and savage
about people who talked familiarly about it in the every-day
setting of a homely cottage. The average Anglo-Irishman in
the audience, meeting the play as most did for the first time,
recoiled vigorously upon his English blood. Then came the
quickening all over the stage, the exultation that was the secret
of a people 'who believed so much in the soul and so little in
anything else that they were never entirely certain that the
earth was solid under the footsole':

-ix-