played in their right order, with all the links that bind play to play
unbroken; and partly because of a spirit in the place, and partly because
of the way play supports play, the theatre has moved me as it has never
done before. That strange procession of kings and queens, of warring
nobles, of insurgent crowds, of courtiers, and of people of the gutter has
been to me almost too visible, too audible, too full of an unearthly
energy. I have felt as I have sometimes felt on grey days on the Galway
shore, when a faint mist has hung over the grey sea and the grey stones,
as if the world might suddenly vanish and leave nothing behind, not even a
little dust under one's feet. The people my mind's eye has seen have too
much of the extravagance of dreams, like all the inventions of art before
our crowded life had brought moderation and compromise, to seem more than
a dream, and yet all else has grown dim before them.

In London the first man one meets puts any high dream out of one's head,
for he will talk to one of something at once vapid and exciting, some one
of those many subjects of thought that build up our social unity. But here
he gives back one's dream like a mirror. If we do not talk of the plays,
we talk of the theatre, and how more people may be got to come, and our
isolation from common things makes the future become grandiose and
important. One man tells how the theatre and the library were at their
foundation but part of a scheme the future is to fulfil. To them will be
added a school where speech, and gesture, and fencing, and all else that
an actor needs will be taught, and the council, which will have enlarged
its Festivals to some six weeks, will engage all the chief players of
Shakespeare, and perhaps of other great dramatists in this and other
countries. These chief players will need to bring but few of their
supporters, for the school will be able to fill all the lesser parts with
players who are slowly recovering the lost tradition of musical speech.
Another man is certain that the Festival, even without the school, which
would require a new endowment, will grow in importance year by year, and
that it may become with favouring chance the supreme dramatic event of the
world; and when I suggest that it may help to break the evil prestige of
London he becomes enthusiastic.

Surely a bitter hatred of London is becoming a mark of those that love the
arts, and all that have this hatred should help anything th