'They that have red checks will have pale checks for my sake,
and for all that, they will think they are well paid.
They shall be remembered for ever,
They shall be alive for ever,
They shall be speaking for ever,
The people shall hear them for ever.'

I think that then the Anglo-Irish part of the audience suffered
that strange experience, the penetration and irradiation of the
mind by something that appears to alter its constitution or its
orientation and is called conversion. I can remember as if it
were yesterday the swing over of sympathy, more sudden and
complete than in any other play I have seen, the releasing of
exultation and vision as the world of Edwardian London in
which we had till then been reared was, suddenly, no longer
'solid under the footsole '. The race for whom a short life
and a lonely death are outweighed by 'a story will be told for
ever' bad taken possession, and more than one half-hearted
Irishman must have become whole-hearted from that out.

Curiously enough it was from this same play that, more than
twenty years later, I learnt another lesson. This time it was in
the class-room, not the theatre. I had been lecturing on the
Irish drama, taking this play in its turn, off and on, for ten years,
to large classes of English students to whom I generally read it
aloud without shortening it. They were always deeply moved.
Only at the end of the ten years, though, did I discover, when a
small group of specialists plucked up courage to ask me to
explain the allusions, that none of the references, not even the
date ' l798', bad any meaning for them at all outside the play.
It took me the best part of an hour to explain all they wanted,
for a general outline of Irish history and literature had to be
supplied. I blamed myself at the time for not realizing that
Englishmen would have no associations, even with a name like
Granuaile and needed to have it all explained. Afterwards I
was not so sure. The play had been accepted for ten years on
its merits as an expression of the worship of liberty and its
own racial glory in a subject race and not of the nationalism
of any particular people. Now I agree with what Lady Gregory
says about The Rising of the Moon and again trust the play to
take care of itself without explaining it.

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