. Martyn who had interested him
in the things of home. Mr. Moore tells us all about it more than
explicitly in the "Overture" to his trilogy. In the first chapter he
tells us that the interest faded away gradually, to be reawakened in
1899 by a visit paid him in London by Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats, who came
to ask his help in founding a "Literary Theatre in Dublin." Then Mr.
Moore learned the story of that theatre's inception, a story to him
"disappointingly short and simple. When Yeats had said that he had spent
the summer at Coole with Lady Gregory, I saw it all. Coole is but three
miles from Tillyra [Mr. Martyn's estate in Galway]; Edward is often at
Coole; Lady Gregory and Yeats are often at Tillyra; Yeats and Edward had
written plays--the drama brings strange fowls to roost."

It takes Mr. Moore many pages to tell why it was he joined the three in
their project, and many more pages to tell of their collaboration during
the first two years of the three years that were the life of "The Irish
Literary Theatre." The four are, indeed, the principal characters of Mr.
Moore's "Ave"--I had almost said his novel "Ave"--himself, Mr. Martyn,
Mr. Yeats, and Lady Gregory, to mention them in the order of prominence
that Mr. Moore gives them.

Lady Gregory and Mr. Yeats have learned their art, the highest and most
difficult of all forms of literary art, so that each is sure in the
shaping of fable and emotion to the stage, though neither is to drama
native-born as was Synge. Mr. Martyn and Mr. Moore have neither of them,
however, learned the art of the playwright. Mr. Martyn has the root of
the matter in him, but he remains the amateur. Mr. Moore was once the
amateur, even in the novel, in "A Modern Lover" (1883), for instance,
true as that story is to the London art life and aristocratic life it is
intended to reflect, but he has since then won his way, book by book, to
the position, now that Mr. Hardy has given up the novel, of first
novelist of the English-speaking peoples. Had he studied the play as
painfully and as long as he has studied the novel, it may be that Mr.
Moore had conquered it, too, though I doubt it, for the concentration
necessary to drama is alien to his method as a novelist. As it is, his
best plays are but the good journeyman work of one who is a skilled
literary craftsman. Mr. Martyn has more originality of theme, more
intimacy with Irish character, a surer instinct for effective situation,
and more nobili