This book arises naturally out of the experience implied or
contained in those two episodes. It is an attempt to see the
great Irish Dramatic Movement of the beginning of this century
not as an Irishman sees it (that has been done beyond compare
by the leaders of the movement themselves and by later Irish
critics), but as an outsider sees it who comes to it reared in
another culture yet willing to bring to it an intelligence as
sympathetic as may be. For it is some such interpretation as
this that must be made of all national art sooner or later, as it
passes from the national to the international, from the exquisite
flowering of a generation to that which belongs to the ages.
Indeed, it is perhaps not untrue to say that the desire to talk
about it is the most valid tribute the stranger can bring; the
proof, if proof were needed, that this piece of art has passed
out of the keeping of its own race and has become the universal
possession of mankind. In the American and English theatre
and university world it has long been recognized that the work
of Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge and the group of men that
supported and followed them at the Abbey Theatre must take
its place in the world's drama, in that drama which contains
already Euripides, Shakespeare and Molière. 'They have won
much praise for themselves and have raised the dignity of
Ireland.'

It is the leaders themselves that have left us the 'source
books' of the movement; Lady Gregory, Moore, Yeats.
Widely as the books differ--as widely as the minds that pro-
duced them--they have one thing in common. They are all,
without exception, what one would most desire source-books
to be; autobiographic and immediate. Lady Gregory, in
addition, records a large number of verifiable facts. It is true
that, even under the firm benevolence of her instruction, one
is sometimes bewildered by the completely contradictory dates
or left suspended in a region of 'time out of mind'. '(When
can this have been; e; thought my Uncle Toby).' And his
modern descendant echoing his words finds nothing for it but
the playbills in the files of the Abbey Theatre, ¹ or reference to

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