in "Journeys End in Lovers Meeting" (1894), which served for a year or so as one of the little plays that characterized the repertoire of the Irving-Terry Company. Just what was Mr. Moore's share in this play I do not know, but that, slight as it is, it served as apprentice work in the art of collaboration there can be no doubt, or that it added to his familiarity with the stage.
It is certain that Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats were glad of the assistance of Mr. Moore in founding "The Irish Literary Theatre," not only for the prominence of his name as novelist and as Moore of Moore Hall, and for his known provocativeness in pamphleteering and his capacity for drawing the fire of opponents, but for what knowledge he had of playwriting and for what experience he had in getting together and training actors for special performances such as those of "The Independent Theatre."
I have already spoken of what Mr. Moore did to "A Tale of a Town" to make it "The Bending of the Bough." From the beginning of Act II on to the end, he rewrote almost all of it, retaining only now and then an eloquent or a biting line from Mr. Martyn's play. Mr. Moore changes the scene of the play from Ireland to Scotland, that its allegory may not be so obvious; he develops Kirwan's character until he becomes not only a sort of composite spiritual portrait of the leaders of the Renaissance but a believable leader of men; and he makes Millicent's moulding of Dean to her will human, as I have said, and—Dean being the weakling that he was—inevitable. Mr. Moore cuts the play down where it is stodgy, he expands
