me a seat for the gallery. In the middle of the first act, while the heroine was asking for macaroons, a middle aged washerwoman who sat in front of me, stood up and said to the little boy at her side "Tommy, if you promise to go home straight, we will go now"; and at the end of the play, as I wandered through the entrance hall, I heard an elderly critic murmur "A series of conversations terminated by an accident." I was divided in mind, I hated the play; what was it but Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage, Huxley, and Tyndall, all over again; I resented being invited to admire dialogue so close to modern educated speech that music and style were impossible.
"Art is art because it is not nature," I kept repeating to myself, but how could I take the same side with critic and washerwoman? As time passed Ibsen became in my eyes the chosen author of very clever young journalists, who, condemned to their treadmill of abstraction, hated music and style; and yet neither I nor my generation could escape him because, though we and he had not the same friends, we had the same enemies. I bought his collected works in Mr Archer's translation out of my thirty shillings a week and carried them to and fro upon my journeys to Ireland and Sligo, and Florence Farr, who had but one great gift, the most perfect poetical elocution, became prominent as an Ibsen actress and had almost a success in Rosmersholm where there is symbolism and a stale odour of spilt poetry. She and I and half our friends found ourselves involved in a quarrel with the supporters of old fashioned melodrama and conventional romance, and in the support of the new dramatists who wrote in what the Daily Press chose to consider the manner of Ibsen. In 1894 she became manageress of the Avenue Theatre with a play of Dr Todhunter's called The Comedy of Sighs, and Mr Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man. She asked me to write a one act play for her niece Miss Dorothy Paget, a girl of eight or nine, to make her first stage appearance in; and I with my Irish Theatre in mind wrote The Land of Heart's Desire, in some discomfort when the child was theme, as I knew nothing of children, but with an abundant mind when Mary Bruin was, for I knew an Irish woman whose unrest troubled me and lay beyond my comprehension.
To be continued
