From Seamus Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (1986), ch. 6, " Irish modernism: poetry and drama" The literature of early modern Ireland is, in essence, a heroic literature, in which pride of place goes to the new idea of Ireland itself as a force variously embodied by outstanding individuals. The most important of these, from a political as well as a literary point of view, was Charles Stewart Parnell, the great leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party in the House of Commons, the 'uncrowned king of Ireland', the reserved aristocrat who briefly forged a powerful alliance of constitutional and physical force elements in his campaign for Home Rule. Cited as co-respondent in a divorce case in 1890, Parnell was abandoned by Gladstone and the Liberals, attacked by the Catholic Church in Ireland and finally undermined by division within his own party and defeat at the hands of the Irish electorate. He died in Brighton in 1891. When the ship carrying his remains arrived at Kingstown, Yeats was there to meet it, not because it bore the corpse of Parnell but because it brought back to Ireland Maud Gonne, the beautiful woman who had elicited from him an unrequited but unappeasable love. Parnell's funeral was the biggest ever seen in Dublin, a notable claim in a city which could boast of considerable expertise in this ritual. Portents were seen as the coffin was lowered into the grave. A meteor crossed the heavens, claimed one; another saw a star fall. The legend of a tragic hero was quickly established and it is perfectly appropriate that Yeats, however unwittingly, should, with his beloved, be in attendance at one of the solemn moments of its consolidation. The defeat of Parnell had many far-reaching consequences. It led to a weakening of constitutional nationalism and a proportionate strengthening of the appeal of the physical force movement among Irish nationalists. It distanced the Irish Catholic clergy from the new centres of Irish political activity. For Yeats, it meant that the young generation in Ireland turned in disgust from politics and gave their energies to cultural revival. He helped found the Irish Literary Society of London in 1891, the National Literary Society in Dublin in 1892, the Irish Literary Theatre in 1897, the Irish National Theatre Society in 1902 and the Abbey Theatre in 1904. Little wonder he was celled 'The Great Founder'. The same decade also saw the foundation of The Gaelic League (1893), devoted to the revival of the Irish language and initially sponsored by Douglas Hyde and Eoin MacNeill, both of whom were to play important roles in the emergence of the new Ireland. An Irish Race Convention was held in Dublin in 1896 and in 1898, the centenary year of the Rising of 1798, James Connolly, Ireland's first Marxist thinker and, later, a leader of the Easter Rebellion in 1916, produced his newspaper The Worker's Republic. All of these organized groups had a common aim - the redefinition of the idea of Ireland and of the Irish community and its history. For the young Yeats, folklore was one of the sources for that redefinition. The researches of the century before him, especially those of Crofton Croker in 1825, were absorbed into his four anthologies Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), Stories from Carleton (1889),Representativelrish Tales (1891) and Irish Fairy Tales (1892). In the three years 1889-92, he reviewed numerous folklore collections and became something of an expert in this field. Out of these grew the more personal essays of The Celtic Twilight (1893,2nd ed.1902). At one time he intended to produce 'a big book about the commonwealth of faery' but abandoned the enterprise and left as its only testimony his footnotes to Lady Gregory's Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920).3 He repudiated the stage-Irish, tourist Ireland of some of the nineteenth-century collectors and emphasized in its stead the importance of folklore for the realization of both nationality and literature.'There is no great literature without nationality, no great nationality without literature'.4 From the beginning, therefore, there was an intimate connection between his political vision of Ireland and occultism. The 'kingdom of Faery' was, in his view, a natural part of the old civilization which English Puritanism and its Irish middle-class Catholic descendant had destroyed. The solitary and proud Parnell had appeared to offer to Ireland an image of her old self, which was in remarkable contrast to'the bragging rhetoric and gregarious humour of O'Connell's generation and school' ,5 and the bond between him and the Irish people seemed to Yeats analogous to the bond which linked the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and the Irish peasantry in a symbiotic imaginative relationship. The fact that Parnell had been destroyed by the English and Irish middle classes enhanced the hero's status as the true representative of nationality and nobility. In addition, Irish folk-tales and legends were local examples of the great world memory, in which the writings of Blake (which Yeats co-edited in 1893), Boehme and Swedenborg were prominent manifestations. Yeats founded the Dublin Hermetic Society in 1885. He became a member of Madam Blavatsky's Theosophical Society in 1887 and a member of the magical society known as the Order of the Golden Dawn in 1902. Yeats studied the key works of late nineteenth-century occultism with the same passion as he brought to Irish folklore. The two preoccupations were as one to him, despite the vast difference in literary quality between the respective bodies of material. Yet the figure of Parnell and the idea or ideal of Ireland which he represented remained a constant presence, modified in later years into other incarnations - Lady Gregory, Hugh Lane, Synge, Maud Gonne, Mussolini. At all times, Yeats was entranced by the possibility of history becoming legend before his eyes. The particularities of Irish history, intensely apprehended, could become the symbols of world history as they passed through the medium of art. In such a conception, Yeats would transcend the provincialism of mere nationalism and attain to the universality of art and legend. Three great Irish writers had achieved, or were on their way to achieving, dominant reputations in the London of the early 1890s. Yeats described them as teeing 'too conscious of intellectual power to belong to party, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, George Moore, the most complete individualists in the history of literature, abstract, isolated minds, without a memory or a landscape'. Wilde and Shaw had missed out on the Irish revival. Moore was to be recruited for it as he turned away from the jingoism of England at the outbreak of the Boer War and rediscovered Ireland and an aspect of his artistic growth in the brilliant decade of 1901-10. Yeats's description of these three is ambiguous. To call them 'abstract' was, in his terminology, no compliment; but to praise their independence of party was a tribute to their artistic integrity in the bitter factionalism of the decade after Parnell's death. Wilde, the successful playwright and the outrageous dandy, had become a tragic figure after his conviction in 1895 for homosexual offences. As in the case of Parnell, Wilde became for Yeats the exemplary figure of the artist destroyed by middle-class moralism. He was also, of course, another Irish victim of English rancour. As a martyr, as a dethroned king, and as an enemy of all that was common and l stereotyped in the English mind, Wilde attracted Yeats as a charac teristic Celtic figure in an Anglo-Saxon world, an inheritor of the Anglo-Irish dramatic tradition in the line of Goldsmith and Sheridan. Although, in the end, he was to lower his opinion of Wilde's art, he never forgot the brilliant image of his life. Nor did he ignore what Wilde taught in his critical essay Intentions (1891) and in The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1895) - the necessity for the liberation of the personality, the complex theory of the Mask and the notion that ' there is no essential incongruity between crime and culture'.' Wilde challenged but did not entirely extricate himself from convention. Yeats resituated Wilde's career in his own version of the Irish community, the crucial grouping from which Wilde, despite his unimpeachably nationalist origins, had separated himself. Once he had entered the magnetic field of Yeats's mythmaking energies, Wilde became, with Parnell, a harbinger and a type of the Irish hero, whose life had within it the potential for legend. The same could not be said of Shawl As Wilde was recruited, so Shaw was rejected. He too was iconoclastic and a dramatist in the rhetorical tradition of the eighteenth-century dramatists. In the preface to his play Mrs. Warren's Profession (1894, although the Lord Chamberlain refused to give it a licence for public performance), Shaw announced his 'determination to accept problem as the normal material of drama'. This was anathema to Yeats, who preferred mystery to problem and ritual to energetic discussion. But this 'perfect modern Socialist and Creative Evolutionist' had more in common with Yeats than either of them supposed. He believed, like Yeats, that 'power and culture were in separate compartments';9 he too devised a theory of historical destiny which yet gave room for the exercise of the heroic individual will; he too attacked British policy in Ireland on the ground that it failed to recognize the cultural differences between the two islands. Like Wilde, he played the Irishman in England, pleasing his audience by saying outrageous things about its most cherished convictions. But Shaw's mentors were Ibsen in drama and Marx and Darwin in political and social thought. He was far removed from the symbolists, pre-Raphaelites, aesthetes and folk-collectors, who provided Yeats with his intellectual background. Yeats, therefore, came to see him as a characteristic specimen of the modern rationalist mind, which sought in stage realism its appropriate form and in opinionated argument its appropriate rhetorical mode. Although the careers of the two men intertwined on occasion - Yeats's first play to be produced, The Land of Heart's Desire, was a curtain-raiser to Shaw's Arms and the Man in London in 1894; John Bull's Other Island (1904) was written for the Abbey, although not staged there until 1916; and Yeats defied British censorship by putting on Shaw's The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet at the Abbey in 1909 - Yeats, in effect, expelled Shaw from his heroic pantheon and, in doing so, partly distorted Shaw's achievement in the eyes of the Irish audience. Both men fought against the propaganda, hypocrisy and lies which issued from the English press on Irish affairs, most notably in the case of the executed Roger Casement. But these alliances were less important than the differences which drove them apart. Shaw's liberal humanism was very far removed from the heroic nationalism and the magic-fed obscurantism of Yeats. Although both men finally admired authoritarian leadership as a rescue from the mass idiocies of early twentieth-century democracy, this ominous convergence enhances rather than blurs the essential differences between them. George Moore, the last of this trio, was a different matter altogether. He had anticipated Yeats in his devotion to the ideal of making his own personality part of the subject matter of his writing and could be said to have outdone Yeats by making him the central character of Moore's own autobiographical masterpiece Hail and Farewell, published in 3 volumes, Ave (1911), Salve (1912), Vale (1913). As a novelist, Moore was a disciple of Zola, when he was at his best (in A Modern Lover (1883), A Mummer's Wife (1884, 1885), A Drama in Muslin (1886) and, above all, in Esther Waters (1894) ); at his weakest, he was influenced by the decadent school (A Mere Accident (1887), Spring Days (1888) and Mike Fletcher (1889) ). Moore had various missions in his writing life. At first, he saw himself as the man who would establish 'the aesthetic novel' in England, by introducing to George Eliot's London the Paris of Zola and the French symbolists and impressionists. Next he saw himself as a crusader against English moral and literary censorship, represented by the circulating libraries (which banned several of his novels) and the despotism of the three-volume novel. As he came increasingly under the influence of his Irish origins, he saw himself as the liberator of his native land from the thrall of priestcraft and Catholicism. Most of all, he was dedicated to charting the history of his 'soul', as he frequently called it. To that end, he produced a number of works of reminiscence and autobiography, which, taken together, form a remarkable account of the development of a mod ern consciousness. From Confessions of a Young Man (1888, revised editions in 1889, 1904, 1917, 1918), Memoirs of My Dead Life (1906), Avowals (1919, although first printed in 1904), Hail and Farewell, A Story-Teller's Holiday (1918), Conversations in Ebury Street (1924) and the unfinished A Communication to my Friends, which he was writing at the time of his death in 1933, Moore created in literature or as literature the history of the man who had been born at Moore Hall in County Mayo in 1852 and lived through the days of the Land League in Ireland, of the decadence in Paris and London and of the Irish revival in Dublin. Yeats never entirely recruited Moore but Moore certainly recruited Yeats and many others as contributors to the crystallization of his own personality. In him, as in Yeats, we see how history, refracted through literature, reappears as legendary fiction. Although Moore did help to introduce the thought and art of France to the England of the 1890s, the critic Arthur Symons, most especially with his chief work The Symbolist Mo vement in Literature (1899), can take the credit for introducing Yeats to the literature of the continent, including that of Villiers de l' Isle-Adam, Mallarme and Maeterlinck. It was Symons and Yeats and the landowner and playwright Edward Martyn (1859-1923) who invited Moore to join with them in founding a new Irish theatre. They met at Martyn's home, Tulira Castle in County Galway in 1896, visited the Aran Islands, and Yeats and Symons were invited to afternoon tea by Martyn's neighbour, Lady Gregory, who lived about four miles away at Coole Park. Thus was formed the nucleus of the Irish dramatic movement. Lady Gregory thenceforth became the most important of Yeats's mentors and collaborators. An Irish nationalist, a collector of folk-tales, a supporter of the movement to revive Irish and, eventually, a playwright (she wrote forty plays) and managing director of the Abbey Theatre, she became yet another of Yeats's heroic figures, although her practical aid and advice made her contribution a deal more specific than that of some of the other heroic shades to which Yeats paid his obeisance. A year later, Yeats met John Millington Synge in Paris and is alleged to have advised him to forsake the glittering city of the artistic decadence and to gO instead to the Aran Islands to 'express a life that has never found expression' Synge visited Aran in 1898. There the first phase of Yeats's dream came true. The Big House and the peasant folk of the West of Ireland had been conjoined, in art, to produce the new Ireland, even though the representation of this strange land of the imagination would have to be made first to the predominantly middle-class Dubliners in the capital's theatres. Yeats's second play The Countess Cathleen, performed in Dublin in 1899, inaugurated the modern Irish theatre's development with a premonitory row. The countess of the title sells her soul to the devil to save the Irish peasantry from famine. The Dublin public, induding those members of it who had not seen or read the play, was outraged and condemned it as being irreligious and anti-national. The dispute which followed in the newspapers and journals, later published in avolumeldeals in Ireland (1901), revealed how readily the theatre could become a focus for national debate in Ireland, rather than a place of casual entertainment. Yeats exploited this situation to such a degree that his next play, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, became a central political text for those determined to overthrow English rule in Ireland. The setting of the play is 1798 in County Mayo, at the moment of the arrival of a French revolutionary army to support the rebels. An old woman persuades a young man to forgo marriage and realize a greater destiny by fighting for his country. On leaving the house, she is reported to have been transformed from old hag to young queen, thereby revealing her identity as the spirit of Ireland rejuvenated by heroic sacrifice. Maud Gonne played the title role and the audience was deeply moved. In these two plays Yeats had scandalized the religious convictions and inflamed the political ambitions of the Irish nationalists. He had begun the creation of his theatrical audience. Although the Abbey Theatre, as such, would not have its first production until 1904, the audience for it had begun to emerge by 1902. By that date, Yeats was already a well known poet. The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) and The Countess Cathleen and Various Legends (1892), followed in 1899 by The Wind Among the Reeds, had already established the fact that a knowledge of Irish folklore and legend would be an aid to understanding these beautiful blurred poems. But the Irish materials were also bound up with occult references Yeats had proposed founding an Order of Celtic mysteries, partly in the hope of forging an understanding between himself and Maud Gonne. We see the combination of Celtic and occult references in a poem like 'The Secret Rose', where the Rosicrucian four-leaved rose enfolds Christian, pagan Celtic and William Morris figures: Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose, Enfold me in my hour of hours; where those Who sought thee in the Holy Sepulchre, Or in the wine-vat, dwell beyond the stir And tumult of defeated dreams; and deep Among pale eyelids, heavy with the sleep Men have named beauty. Thy great leaves enfold The ancient beards, the helms of ruby and gold Of the crowned Magi; and the king whose eyes Saw the Pierced Hands and Rood of elder rise In Druid vapour and make the torches dim; Till vain frenzy awoke and he died; and him Who met Fand walking among the flaming dew By a grey shore where the wind never blew, And lost the world and Emer for a kiss; . . . Yeats's knowledge of the legends of Cuchulain, Caoilte, Fand and Emer came from the translations of Sir Samuel Ferguson and Standish O' Grady. He knew no Irish and was thereby denied access to much that was vital in the Gaelic world. But his vision of that world was determined by his belief that the specifically Irish national i energies had been occluded by the dominant discourses of Christianity and Science. Therefore they had a natural affinity with the occult philosophy since both of them retained their faith in the deep truths of the world's ancient wisdom. The combination of the two is strange but increasingly powerful as Yeats labours to detach them from their sectarian eccentricities and claim for them the prestige of belonging to the universal world of the Great Memory. His fondness for organizing cultural and magical groups grew out of his desire to belong to a privileged company of men and women who would become the priesthood of a new spiritual revival: Know, that I would accounted be True brother of a company That sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong, Ballad and story, rann and song; Nor be I any less of them, Because the red-rose bordered hem Of her, whose history began Before God made the angelic clan, Trails all about the written page. Maud Gonne, however, refused to become part of this special company. She repeatedly refused to marry him and, by so doing, compelled him to develop his belief in love as a discipline which demanded a wisdom denied to her and bequeathed to him. Her beauty was in one sense natural. In another sense it was the product of high culture. She took it as being the first only. He saw it as both. The labour of culture to produce a beauty which appeared completely natural became one of his favourite and most important analogies for the production of poetry, first defined in the famous poem of 1902, 'Adam's Curse': I said, 'A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. In a further extension of this thought, Yeats imagined Maud Gonne's beauty as a symbol of an heroic age, which she, its possessor, misread and vulgarized by surrendering it to the passionate but petty squabbles of a dilapidated present. Her marriage, in 1903, to Major John MacBride, confirmed this opinion. His Helen had, in effect, eloped with a guerilla fighter from the squalid Boer War, not with a Paris and not into the world-drama of the Trojan War. All that had been potentially noble was debased in modern conditions. His fight for Ireland was a battle against that debasement and for the realization of that nobility. In turning to the theatre, he met the forces of debasement headon. The Irish Literary Theatre ended in debacle in 1901 with the production of Diarmuid and Grainne, a collaboration between Yeats and George Moore which merely demonstrated the impossibility of fusing the Celticism of the one with the literary Wagnerism of the other. But the same bill also contained Douglas Hyde's Casadh an tSugain (The Twisting of the Rope), the first play in the Irish language to be staged in a proper theatre. The director was W. G. Fay who, with his brother Frank Fay, was to bring a particular style of acting and a specific idea of a national theatre to the Abbey stage. Hyde's play in Irish indicated the future contribution the Abbey would make to world drama. It was to be a folk theatre. When Fay's company merged with the Irish Literary Theatre to form the Irish National Theatre Society, it produced the first of the great folk plays associated with the Irish revival - John Millington Synge's In the Shadow of the Glen. In the next year, an Englishwoman, Miss A. F. Horniman, presented the Theatre Society with the building known as the Abbey. Synge provided it with its first tragedy, Riders to the Sea. In 1907, with The Playboy of the Western World, Synge gave the Abbey his masterpiece and its most memorable row. The audience, which had begun to emerge in reaction to Yeats's The Countess Cathleen and Cathleen Ni Houlihan, now appeared in full force. The Abbey had become a national focus, not just another commercial theatre. Synge realized Yeats's idea of a theatre and Synge's audience made him alter it. The conflict between author and audience was construed (accurately enough) as yet another instance of the noble artist hounded by the motley crowd. Synge's death in 1909 confirmed the Parnellite theme. Thereafter, Synge was one of Yeats's heroic figures and his reaction to the poor response given Synge's last play, Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910), provoked him to write his great essay The Tragic Theatre (1910), in which Yeats distances himself from the theatre and audience he had done so much to create. The climax of Synge's play brings us, he claims, to that point 'where passion ... becomes wisdom'. Theatre usually admires individual character. But now he sees that tragedy must always be a drowning and breaking of the dykes that separate man from man, and that it is upon these dykes comedy keeps house. Yeats's conception of the tragic theatre, moulded by the work of Synge and the reception accorded to it, was never entirely at ease thereafter in the Abbey, where comedy and character predominated. Yet the theatre did remain a focus of the national life, even after the departure of the Fays in 1908, through the controversial American visit of 1911, and up to the next great row over Sean O' Casey' s The Plough and the Stars in 1926, by which time it was subsidized by the new Irish state. Yeats's theatre and the Abbey Theatre were never quite the same thing but neither could have come into existence without the other. It is difficult to extricate Synge from the subtle Yeatsian dialectic of heroism. He grew up in County Wicklow in a strict Protestant atmosphere and broke away from it slowly, though not entirely, by associating himself with the decadent movement in Paris and with the Irish emigres there, most of whom belonged to Maude Gonne's militant Irish League organization. But Synge retained, throughout his short life, the integrity of a solitude which no group or organization ever breached. He dedicated himself to Ireland in an almost religious spirit and pursued his destiny through scholarship, at Trinity College and at the Sorbonne, where he studied Irish, and finally through the immersion of himself in the civilization of the Aran Islands, off the west coast, where he found a way of life that was as stark, lonely and vital as his own sensibility. Although he was attracted to and influenced by many of the leading figures of the literary scene- Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Russell and Stephen McKenna- and although he suffered a great deal in his passionate attachments to his mother and the two women whom he loved at different stages of his life, he remained implacably apart, a man who fed on loneliness. It is no surprise to find that words like 'lonesome' and 'lonely' dominate his plays. In the highly orchestrated speech which he derived from the talk of the Irish peasantry, he blended the melancholy of the fin de siecle Paris he knew so well with the imaginative vitality of the peasantry whom he would have liked to know better. The measured antiphonal patterns of the speeches in his plays confer upon them a stateliness, which is almost but never quite overborne by the lyrical intensities and excitement of their idiom. No one before him had ever incorporated the Irish language into English with such intimate thoroughness. In him, the nineteenth-century attempts to translate Gaelic into English reach an unexpected apotheosis. English had never been so effectively de-Anglicized. Despite the melancholy atmosphere of his plays, they are all (with the exception of Riders to the Sea) subversively comic, because they manifest the triumph of the solitary imagination over the harsh actualities of social convention. His most typical hero is a sweettongued vagrant who talks himself and, sometimes, his female partner out of all sympathy with the world of common minds and into an acceptance of the supremacy of the adventure of self discovery. In The Shadow of the Glen the tramp who entices the young wife Norah from her old husband makes his appeal from a world of nature and eternity against the world of the house, marriage and the slow monotony of age: Come along with me now, lady of the house, and it's not my blather you'll be hearing only, but you'll be hearing the herons crying out over the black lakes, and you'll be hearing the grouse and the owls with them, and the larks and the big thrushes when the days are warm, and it's not from the like of them you'll be hearing a talk of getting old like Peggy Cavanagh, and losing the hair off you, and the light of your eyes, ! but it's fine songs you'll be hearing when the sun goes up, and there'll be no old fellow wheezing, the like of a sick sheep, close to your ear. Such speeches and such stories- taken by Synge from the folk tradition - were bound to cause upset. The Playboy brought feelings to a head. In the story of Christy Mahon's transformation from a stuttering lout into the playboy poet who is finally master of his da and of himself, Synge managed to cast a slur on the fair name of Irish womanhood by having the young girls of the district appear in their petticoats. In Old Mahon, Christy's father, he seemed to reintroduce the despised figure of the stage-Irishman. In making an Irish community glamorize a man who was reputed to have killed his father, he attacked that community's renowned capacity for moral scruple. In fact, after eight riotous nights at the Abbey, during which the theatre was lined with members of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, the DMP, whom Yeats led in on one occasion, the play had become 'an event in the history of the Irish stage', as Synge himself put it. The nationalists were enraged and rewrote Yeats's own lines for him: Know that I would accounted be True brother of the DMP ... Like Ibsen, Chekhov and Shaw - who caused a sensation in London in 1913 by his use of the word 'bloody' in Pygmalion - Synge had roused the ire of the middle classes. But in Ireland in 1907 the state of national feeling was such that all things Irish were idealized to such an absurd and sentimental degree that any breath of criticism and any outspokenness on the famous 'rational character' seemed treacherous. Synge's plays, although part of the revival, are in fact analyses of a dying culture, both in its Gaelic and in its Anglo-Irish forms. The richness of speech contrasts with the poverty of action. The gestures of freedom are made at the expense of the community, because they are not possible in and through it. Pegeen Mike loses the Playboy of the Western World, because he has achieved a fullness the society can neither contain nor any longer find entertaining. In The Well of the Saints (1905), the blind couple, who have their sight miraculously restored, prefer the blindness to which they succumb again, so squalid was the sight of the actuality of the village life they had glimpsed. Synge's comedies are able to establish the authority of the imagination with confidence only because no other form of authority- political, social or religious- is deemed worthy of respect. In more sombre plays, Riders to the Sea and Deirdre of the Sorrows, the final authority belongs to death. Riders is a study in fatalism. The old mother, Maurya, sees her six sons taken from her by the sea and at first confronts this tragic condition with all the resources of ritual, both pagan and Christian, characteristic of the island culture to which she belongs. But with the death of her last son, Bartley, she resigns her motherhood and accepts the emptiness death brings: They're all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me . . . I'll have no call now to be up crying and praying when the wind breaks from the south, and you can hear the surf is in the east, and the surf is in the west, making a great stir with the two noises, and they hitting one on the other. I'll have no call now to be going down and getting Holy Water in the dark nights after Samhain, and I won't care what way the sea is when the other women will be keening. In Deirdre, death is seized by the young queen as an opportunity to escape a loveless marriage with Conchbor, the old king who has betrayed her and slaughtered her lover Naisi and his brothers. In escaping this, she also escapee 'grey hairs and the loosening of the teeth', the humiliations of age which come so severely after the consuming brightness of love and youth. Deirdre is Synge's last Romantic. His vagrant men lack her final courage, because their encounter is with the society that stifles consciousness rather than with the death that extinguishes it. Synge's acrid comic vision of the fading Irish culture is closer to that of Joyce in Dubliners and in Portrait of the Artist than it is to Yeats. But even so, Yeats had the last memorializing word in his poem 'On Those That Hated "The Playboy of the Western Word" ': Once, when midnight smote the air, Eunuchs ran through Hell and met On every crowded street to stare Upon greet Juan riding by; Even like these to rail and sweat Staring upon his sinewy thigh. Synge had imitators but no true follower. His exploitation of the literary resources of the Hiberno-English dialect was magnificent but also rather freakish. Ireland's linguistic instability and internal political and social divisions made Yeats's notion of'Unity of Cul- ture' seem a desperate hope rather than a realizable idea. Like so many of the modern Irish writers, Synge created a language, which for all its power never quite escaped a tendency towards self- caricature. This is true also of Joyce, Flann O'Brien, O' Casey and Beckett. It is only slightly less true of Yeats's prose and George Moore's reminiscences. The wish to establish a high literature which would articulate the national consciousness was undermined, in part, by the recognition that there was, socially speaking, no stan- dard language which was the official voice of the nation at large Irish, Anglo-Irish, Hiberno-English, West Briton, Celtic, Gaelic, English, British were all epithets that could be variously applied to social, political and linguistic groupings, which had been culturally Balkanized in the nineteenth century and were now being asked to become unified in the twentieth. After all, a regional dialect of English or Irish owed its vitality to the particular circumstances- usually circumstances of isolation - in which it lived. The odd thing about Synge's plays is the penury of their circumstantial detail. They are dateless, dislodged from history. This increases their appeal in one respect, but it also demonstrates their pronouncedly literary character in another. These are'poetic', not ' realistic', plays. Their stories are parables that sometimes move rather uneasily in their folk costume. In his effort to create a national drama, Synge revealed the difficulty of avoiding the unease in relation to native culture, which is a feature of all colonial literature. This is equally evident in the reaction of the audience to his plays. The belief in that which was authentically Irish and therefore acceptable was the ground of the dispute between the author and the denizens of the pit. The assertiveness about authenticity was a symptom of the insecurity which surrounded the issue. At its best, Synge's language is not open to the charge of mere eccentricity or of provincialism. It achieves 'a style that remembers many masters that it may escape contemporary suggestion' .l3 Yeats, however, felt that the controversy over Synge and, soon afterwards, the fresh controversy over the failure of the Dublin Corporation to build a gallery for the gift of Hugh Lane's great collection of paintings, had finally measured the distance between the 'schoolboY thought' of uneducated Ireland and his own conception of art. He therefore turned, in his plays, to a more esoteric audience end 'en unpopular theatre'. Yet at the same time his poetry moved in the Opposite direction, becoming more hospitable to the actualities of daily life and speech. The publication of his Collected Works in 1908 (containing an almost valedictory essay on 'The Irish Dramatic Movement') marked the close of the first, long phase of his career. He was already the senior poet of the English speaking world and yet his greatest work still lay before him. The changes in style which mark The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910) and Respon- sibilities ( 1914) leave the reader with a strong sense of the bitterness and anger Yeats felt at the spectacle of his private and public life in middle age. He was now very much 'tine unfinished man', 'among his enemiesh In his bitter poem 'To A Shade' he advises Parnell to forsake the Dublin that has forsaken him: You had enough of sorrow before death - Away, away! You are safer in the romb. But his renewal of acquaintance with Ezra Pound in 1912 led to his discovery of the Japanese No drama and, with that, a definitive turn towards an experimental form of drama, which was to become the Irish theatre's next contribution to the European stage. Yeats com- bined what he learned of the No with what he already knew of symbolist drama and of the work of the great stage-designer Gordon Craig, to produce plays in which light, music, dance and words would combine on a stage redesigned to upset the expecta- tions of realism fostered by the picture-frame setting of conven- tional theatre, to allure the audience 'almost to the intensity of trance, Between 1915 and 1920 he wrote the Four Plays for Dancers (At The Hawk's Well, The Only Jealousy of Emer, The Dreaming of the Bones and Calvary), the first two of which re- introduce the key figure of the Irish saga hero, Cuchulain, the tragic maimed hero, in whom Yeats's changing conception of Ireland was embodied' both in these and in three other plays- the earlier On Baile~s Strand (1901-6), The Green Helmet (1910) and the final The Death of Cuchulain (1939). During these years Ireland was 'changed utterly'. The Easter Rising of 1916 and the subsequent executions' the electoral triumph of Sinn Fein over the Irish Par- ~amentary Party, the bitter War of Independence against the Brit- ~sh, were the chief public events against which Yeats's private life Sought comprehension and consolation. He married in 1917, bought a Norman tower in County Galway, close to Lady Gregory's estate, became father to two children, and began the construction of his systematic philosophy, which was to be published in 1925, and in revised form in 1937, asA vision. By that time, the Irish Civil War had been fought, the Irish Free State established, the island partitioned and the local versions of European Fascism had been briefly consolidated. To Yeats, Ireland seemed to be enacting in microcosm the tragedy of Europe during and after the First World War. His training in occult theory had taught him to expect apocalypse and modern history certainly justified the sense of crisis which dominated his work from 1910 onwards. Yet again, as his poetry entered more and more into a series of outspoken medita tions on history and violence, civilization and its discontents, his plays, preoccupied by the same themes, refused the dramatic confrontation between personality and event which vivified the poems and sought instead to render the themes in symbolic terms, seeking the appropriate emblems of adversity in arcane, mysteriously resonant, forms. Yeats made the distinction himself, although he was speaking of the difference between graphic art and poetry. It nevertheless applies also to the difference between his poetry and his plays. It is 'poetry which sings the crisis itself' but at times it seems as if his theatre 'were the celebration of waiting" - a remark which has obvious relevance to Beckett's plays also. The waiting is done in that strange 'architectonic" space of Gordon Craig's stage, by masked figures or legendary emblems, which represent the opposed principles. In the reconciliation of such an opposition they will achieve fullness of being, forgiveness, the paradise of perfect beauty. They never do. But in a closing dance the spectacle of such fullness is revealed while they fade back into their stylized immobility and suffering. To describe the plays thus is, of course, to make them much more abstract and geometric than they actually are in performance. But the geometry is there, as it is in Yeats's figure of the Great Wheel of Time in A vision and his obscure interpenetrating gyres or cones representing the dialectical nature of the historical process in the constant unravelling of the oppositions which characterize it. These oppositions have many names; we have primary as against antithetical, subjective and objective, darkness and radiance, violence and elegance, chaos and form. Yeats lived in an age given to apocalyptic philosophies of history. From Coleridge to Nietzsche to Spengler and, later, Toynbee, the interpretation of history was bound up with the conviction that the present was a moment of crisis in which the unfolding pattern of past, present and future became visible. Yeats's system is one among these and, although we may see through a glass darkly in readings vision and some of the plays, we can discern, in the figure of Cuchulain, the tragic emblem of Ireland's political strife and her dream of cultural unity. For Ireland, caught by the dream of integration, had enacted the process of disintegration. The country had found in actuality the perfect opposite to what it had conceived in its imagination. In Yeats's terms, it had found its Mask, or anti-self, something which he believed the individual, especially the artist, must also do, so that, in the tension thus generated, he can live in the energy of both. Of Bishop Berkeley, Ireland's foremost philosopher of the eighteenth century, he said, 'He that cannot live must dream' l~ Equally, he that cannot dream must live. Y eats wanted the living and the dreaming, no matter what the strain. For he would neither be any longer a Romantic nor an Empiricist: And why should 1, whose ancestors never accepted the anarchic subjectivity of the nineteenth century, accept its recoil; why should men's heads ache that never drank? Nevertheless, if history were a matter of such ravelling and unravelling of opposed energies, where was peace to be found? The answer, unsurprisingly, was that it was to be found in art. Still, the artist would remain time-bound. His creations would not. Hamlet belongs to the world's imagination, Shakespeare to its history. The tragedy of Ireland and of Cuchulainn was its failure to escape from history into that realm of the imagination: Cuchulainn should (and could) earn deliverance from the wheel of becoming by participation in the higher self, after which he should offer his spiritual history to the world; instead he condemns himself to a career of violent and meaningless action, and this is responsible for the developing tragedy of his life. In these words and in this figure, Yeats identifies the central problem of his nation's literature. To offer its spiritual history to the World it must transcend the limitations of its origins. In failing to do so, it becomes a maimed and tragic literature. The terms of his argument are difficult here, as in the poems and plays, but that does not at all reduce the intensity of the feeling which informs them 'Deep feeling', said Coleridge, 'has a tendency to combine with obscure ideas in preference to distinct and clear notions.' The Easter Rebellion of 1916 provoked Yeats to write to Lady Gregory: I had no idea that any public event could so deeply move me- and I am very despondent about the future. At the moment I feel that all the work of years has been overturned, all the bringing together of classes, all the freeing of Irish literature and criticism from politics. ~9 But the destructive consequences of the rebellion found their inevitable countering in the heroic impulse from which it arose and by which the mean society of the poem ' September 1913' had been transfigured. In 'Easter 1916' itself, a further opposition is introduced in the imagery of stream and stone, the first indicative of the flood of natural life, the other of fanaticism: Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream. (The 'terrible beauty' born in Easter week is, thus, transforming and disfiguring. Ireland has set an example to the world and, at the same time, thrown herself back into the factionalism of the bitter postParnellite days. So in all the great poems of the 1920s, we meet time and again magnificent rhetorical structures based upon antinomies - Ireland and Byzantium, youth and age, fecund life and stylized art, action and contemplation, love and war, violent energy and decadent civilization - which gain definition from one another without ever reaching, or seriously seeking, reconciliation. Dream and reverie (two of Yeats's favourite terms) were intensified by the discordant power of the surrounding violence. Yeats in his tower with its winding stair was a man living in a symbol. Itself the monument of a violent civilization, it surveyed another spasm of violence in which a new civilization was being born. By 1922, many Anglo-Irish Big Houses had been burnt by the anti-Treaty side, government executions and guerilla assassinations had brought six years of disturbance to a bloody climax and all that was humane and cultured seemed under threat. The modern apocalypse had come In his great volume of poems, The Tower (1928), Yeats sees European and Irish violence in the light of myth. Poems like 'Leda and the Swan' and 'The Second Coming' specify, in their opposed images of bird and beast, the ominous sense of subjectivity quenched, the dream of civilization translated into a formless nightmare. The First World War, the Russian Revolution and the Irish 'Troubles' all contribute to this charged vision, but the myth of the critical historical moment at which the bestial and the divine intersect is capacious enough to receive these without being filled by them. In the 1930s, Yeats became involved with the Irish Fascist movement, the Blueshirts, led by one General O'Duffy. By this time he was laden with honours. The Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, preceded the year before by his appointment to the Senate of the Irish Free State, honorary degrees and an awed reception for The Tower had all made him a figure of the most convincing respectability. Yet he again found his anti-self in poems and plays which displayed a renewed and bawdy preoccupation with sexual energies and in marching songs for his new-found political allies, which are as bumptious as they are bad. Yet again, in his last years, and most especially in The Death of Cuchulain, Cuchulain Comforted and The Statues, he seems finally to renew his faith in the idea of Ireland as the place of regeneration, the country which, having brought its great hero (Parnell/Cuchulain) down, reincarnates him once more: When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side What stalked through the Post Of fice? What intellect, What calculation, number, measurement, replied? We Irish, born into that ancient sect But thrown upon this filthy modern tide And by its formless spawning fury wrecked, Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace The lineaments of a plummet-measured face. Momentarily, the hero and the race are in accord with one another. In the poems on his own life and his great friends, Yeats had rewritten his account of modern Ireland as a place haunted by heroes. At the end of his life, he called for that heroism again, both from Irish writers and from the Irish people at large. Although he also saw that heroism was at a discount, that was merely in the øppositional nature of things. The murderers of Cuchulain, the convicted cowards, the representatives of the common mob, find their opposites too: They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds. Despite Yeats's reservations, the Abbey Theatre continued through all these years to produce (besides Yeats's own plays) its own peculiar blend of folk drama and basic Ibsen. Among the more memorable plays were those by Lady Gregory, written in the local dialect of her area, Kiltartan, between 1904 and 1910, including Spreading The News, The Rising of the Moon and The Workhouse Ward; Padraic Colum's Thomas Muskerry (1910); T. C. Murray's Maurice Harte (1912); George Fitzmaurice's The Country Dressmaker (1907), a play which Yeats believed at the time would lead to an even greater uproar than Synge's Playboy. Edward Martyn, after giving the theatre his own best play The Heather Field, broke away to found a new venture, the Irish Theatre, which survived from 1914 to 1920. Its first production, Martyn's The Dream Physician (1914), was a satire on Yeats and Moore and an act of kindly condescension to Lady Gregory. Otherwise, once that score had been paid, the theatre devoted itself to the production of contemporary continental drama, particularly Maeterlinck, Chekhov and Strindberg. Three of its chief personalities- Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Plunkett and William Pearse - were executed after Easter 1916. This, along with various financial troubles, led to its closure a few years later. Its commitment to continental drama and its resistance to the commercially successful Abbey folk-farce was renewed later by the Gate Theatre, founded in 1928. Nevertheless, the Abbey, for all its faults, remained the national theatre, under Lady Gregory's shrewd and determined management. In 1926, the Abbey had another famous uproar, comparable to that which had greeted Synge's Playboy nineteen years before. The occasion was the first production of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars.'I felt at the end of it', wrote Lady Gregory,' as if I should never care to look at another; all others seemed so shadowy to the mind after this'. The third great Abbey dramatist had arrived. In a famous moment, Yeats faced the outraged audience: . . . you have disgraced yourselves again. Is this going to be a recurring celebration of Irish genius; Synge first, then O'Casey! . . . Dublin has again rocked the cradle of a reputation. From such a theatre as this went forth the fame of Synge. Equally, the fame of O'Casey is born here tonight. This is his apotheosis. O'Casey, listening in the wings, must have been pleased, if a little puzzled, for he had to wait until he got home and looked up 'apotheosis' in the dictionary before he quite knew what Yeats had meant. O'Casey's plays highlight one of the characteristics and one of the problematic features of Irish drama in particular and of Irish writing in general. They are linguistically self-conscious works, which display an uneasy relationship between their chosen form and their verbal vitality. Both Synge and Yeats had faced this issue. Synge had solved it in his way by giving primacy to a language which was simultaneously vital in its idiom and liturgically formal in its cadences and repetitive patternings. Yeats, still struggling with it in the 1920s, attempted various strategies - the No drama, the realist drama exploded from within as in Words Upon the Window Pane, in which the ghost of Swift erupts as an orphic voice in the middle of a dreary seance, the drama of mask, music and dance in which the movements of the body were allowed their opportunity for eloquence in competition with the speaking or chanting voice. From the outset of his career, O' Casey faced this problem too. It is customary to say that he resolved it less satisfactorily than the others, most especially after he had completed the three famous 'Dublin plays' about recent Irish history - The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) set against the background of the War of Independence against the British, Juno and the Paycock (1924) against the backdrop of the Irish Civil War and The Plough and the Stars (1926), which took the Easter Rising of ten years before as its setting. It is true that O'Casey owed a good deal to the Victorian IrishAmerican melodramatist, Dion Boucicault, in whose work the stage-Irishman had come into his fulsome own. The debt, greater than that O' Casey owed even to Shaw, makes it startlingly clear that there was no other dramatic tradition to which O'Casey or any other Irish dramatist of that time could comfortably belong. Wilde and Shaw had learned from the eighteenth century how to make a parade of their verbal eloquence. By the 1920s, that particular Option was gone. When we hear in O'Casey's plays a strange mixture of music-hall voices, hell-fire preachers, phrases from Bunyan and the Authorised Version of the Bible, often deeply and naturally assimilated into colloquial speech, scraps of Shakespeare and Shelley, which remain unassimilated, and Shavian soliloquies masquerading as dialogue, we can appreciate just how dishevelled O'Casey's literary and cultural inheritance was. Nor was this so because he was a member of the working class and an autodidact. Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Synge and Moore were all writers of an anxiously eclectic spirit, who fashioned the most unlikely and anomalous materials into styles, poses and beliefs which are always more clear-cut at first sight than on closer examination. The idea of Ireland was a moulding element in the reading and writing of the Revival writers; it helped to bring their thoughts to the point where they could be hammered into unity, the unity of stylistic assurance. O' Casey, however, was disillusioned with the idea of Ireland so early and so traumatically that it became, for most of his career, a negative factor in his work, potent but embittering. As a Protestant member of the Dublin working class, he could hardly have been better placed to experience isolation and hardship. At the same time, he had a very different sense of who and what the Irish people, the possessors of the great communal voice, about which Yeats talked so much, really were. He sees history from their point of view. For the inhabitants of the Dublin tenement slums, the worst in Europe and among the worst in the world at that time, history is not part of an heroic destiny or a phase in an unfolding mythic drama. It is, above all things, chaotic, meaningless. But it is also a pageant which provides opportunities for posturing and talk. Clearly there are tragic and comic possibilities here and O'Casey realizes them to the full. But he seems unsure of what he finally wants to say. It is hardly enough to say that this revolutionary socialist who became a communist and stuck to his communist faith throughout the worst excesses of the Stalinist period in the 1930s was, at bottom, a pacifist. Yet such is the claim of many who have produced and commented upon the Dublin trilogy. There is a strict division in these early plays between irresponsible and comic men and responsible, tragic women. The men drink and talk too much, work too little and indulge in heroic posturings. The women remain sober, worn down by poverty and authoritatively practical. They have all the famous set speeches, like Juno's, after the death of her own and Mrs Tancred's: Take away our hearts o' stone, en' give us hearts o'flesh! Take away this murdherin' hate, an' give us Thine own eternal love! Yet the parasite Joxer and the useless husband and father Boyle have the last, winning malapropism: The whole worl's in a terrible state o' chassis. The humour and the morality never quite correspond with one another. O'Casey's condemnation of the male illusions which drive Dubliners to go to fight for an abstraction called Kathleen Ni Houlihan, while they are incapable of looking after the people in their own families and neighbourhoods, is so fierce that it betrays him into a condemnation of all political and ideological positions. The ignorance of the women would appear to be a safeguard against unfeelingness. These are highly stereotyped roles, taken straight from nineteenth-century melodrama and they are defeatingly strict for O'Casey's purposes. In Drums Under the Windows (1945), the third of his six volumes of Autobiographies, he tells of his reaction on reading Shaw's John Bull's Other Island: Two elements fought each other here, back to back: a dream without efficiency, and efficiency without a dream; but with this tense difference: that from the dream efficiency could grow, but from the efficiency no dream could ever come. And now . . . The dreadful dreaming was being hitched to a power and a will to face the facts. ZZ O'Casey wanted the dream and the efficiency- a visionary socialism. But the Irish Revolution of 1916-22 seemed to him to have given the dream only. The opportunity for a truly revolutionary outburst had been lost when James Connolly, the leader of the working-class and socialist Irish Citizen Army, had thrown in his lot with Padraig Pearse and the Irish Volunteers on that fatal Easter of 1916. O' Casey broke with the Citizen Army in 1914 because of the increasing rapprochement with the Volunteers and looked back on the Great Lockout of Dublin workers by the employers in 1913 as the truly significant moment in modern Irish history. His hero was James Larkin, the man who, in effect, organized Irish Labour against the employers. Once more, we see a writer fascinated by the spectacle of a hero betrayed, a noble cause sold, a glittering possibility denied. O' Casey's The Story of the Irish Citizen Army (1919) is the first of his threnodies on that theme. His Autobiographies (1939-54) is the last. The plays are a constant and anxious exploration of its complexities. O'Casey wanted to make it clear that abstraction, fanaticism and joylessness are especially dangerous when they make a sentimental appeal to the egoism and innocence of the individual. Politics, whether of the right or of the left, appears in his plays as nothing more than systematic oppression under the guise of some seductive illusion- one usually provided by religion. But this leads him, time and again, to identify joy, comic spirit and wit with an utterly amoral and apolitical stance of the sort we find in Captain Boyle and Joxer Daly in Juno. The uneasiness of this play is almost overcome in the great The Plough and the Stars (the title referring to the flag of the Citizen Army), but even there, when we see the final violation of the private, domestic world of the tenement by the British armed forces, we are left to wonder if violence as such has been condemned or whether only this kind of violence which does not lead to liberation for the mass of the people. In other words, the so-called pacifism of O'Casey's plays is bogus. He is opposed to useless violence but sees no escape from the futile illusions which promote it and the bibulous eloquence which seems to be its natural counterpart. The best talkers in O'Casey's early plays are the most useless people because talk has taken over entirely from action in a situation where no remedial action seems possible. The contrast with Synge is striking. Synge's people talk themselves out of inertia into action. O' Casey' s people talk themselves into inertia for fear of action. In each case, talking is the central activity. The subject of the talk is the death of a community. The mode of talking is full of vitality. The vitality intensifies as the community degenerates. As a result, we finally witness the emergence of a wonderful individual performance, a virtuoso display in the midst of dilapidation. That is one of the appropriate images for Irish writing between Wilde and Beckett. O' Casey recognized that the realism of the trilogy was insufficient for his purposes. When he turned from that towards a variety of expressionism, in The Silver Tassie, the Abbey (or, more precisely, Yeats) rejected it and O'Casey broke both with it and Ireland. He went to live in England and thereby, it is claimed, cut himself off from the roots which sustained him. After the Tassie, his plays become much more schematic. Colour symbolism abounds. Sexuality confronts Religion, Youth outfaces Age and, time and again, language runs out of control into false poeticism and absurd extravagance of a sort that would have made Boucicault blench. O'Casey seemed to be seeking for the form which would allow him to write a morality play about the liberation of humanity from institutional oppressions. But he could not find it. There was nothing in the eloquent Irish tradition which could supply him with the example or stimulus he needed. His degeneration as a writer had to do with the poverty of his inherited tradition quite as much as it had to do with his departure from Ireland. He was right to tell Yeats, in an angry response to Yeats's rejection of the Tassie, that because of, or in spite of, the lack of a dominating character, [it] is a greater work than The Plough and the Starsl. O'Casey, like Yeats himself, had learned to abandon realism and naturalism and the strong affection of these forms for outstanding characters. Instead he sought a drama of a new kind, in which music, light and dance - the Yeatsian ingredients- would be interfused within an expressionist frame with all the vigour and brio of the popular music hall. But O' Casey' s plays were poorly staged in England, with the exception of The Silver Tassie. Within The Gates (1934), Red Roses for Me (produced in Dublin in 1943), Purple Dust (1943), Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949), The Drums of Father Ned (1959) are the most important of his later works. They are all abortive attempts on O'Casey's part to find a theatrical form that would not be literary, that would give the body as well as the voice the chance to proclaim its liberation. His emblems- the Rose, the Cock, the Lily, the Flood - are trite rather than simple. O'Casey, we may say, when he had the language, in his early plays, had yet to find the form; when he came close to finding the form, he lost control of the language. The rejection of The Silver Tassie by the Abbey may have had a great deal to do with this. But it would appear that O' Casey, the most hostile of all Irish writers to the literary and pretentious, was most prone to the attractions of a language which deserved both those epithets. As in his struggle between the demands of moral obligation and the delights of irresponsibility, between political ideology and a contempt for politics, he remained irresolute, a victim of a situation too complex for his gifts. By mid-century, Ireland had passed through a series of political crises which had transformed it into a partitioned island containing an independent republic and a part of the United Kingdom. From the late 1920s to the mid-19SOs, there was an increasingly strong reaction against the heroic vision which had helped to bring about the new state and the new literature. Sometimes this was expressed as hostility towards the Anglo-Irish Protestants, who had dominated the cultural revival. Sometimes it emerged as hostility to the grandiose ideals and militant fervour of the nationalism which had created the notion of en ' Irish Ireland' - one which would give pride of place to Catholicism and to the Irish language. Despite these long decades of repudiation, the achievement of Yeats and his friends remains as one of the last flowerings of European romanticism and one of the first essays in what has been called International Modernism. Yeats's poetry clearly embraces both these elements But they are also evident in his plays and in those of Synge and O'Casey. All of their work has to be seen in the light of that of their great contemporary James Joyce and of the young man for whom Joyce became a model of the modern artist, Samuel Beckett. His allegiance to Irish drama was spelt out in characteristic style when he was asked for a contribution to a centenary programme on Shaw He replied: I wouldn't suggest that G. B. S. is not a great playwright, whatever that is when it's at home. What I would do is give the whole unupsettable apple-cart for a sup of the Hawk's Well, or the Saints', or a whiffofJuno, to go no further. 25 Although the community of the Irish nation and the community of the Irish artists were not at all identical, the relationship between them was carried on into the later part of the century- tense, disrespectful and inescapable.