assages
that arrest us as do his poems of the nineties; but, after all, these are
but passages, not poems with unity and finality of form.

Another question altogether, a question outside of the question of the
value as art of the writing of Mr. Yeats which is what I am considering,
is the question as to whether there would have been a dramatic movement
at all comparable to what has been, if Mr. Yeats had not devoted so
large a portion of his time to drama. I believe there would have been a
dramatic movement, but I am sure, from what I know of the other dramatic
organizations in Dublin, that they would not have amounted to much
unless some other great writer as loyal to art as Mr. Yeats had played
for them the beneficent tyrant. And other such great writers, as loyal
to art, and as devoted to drama, are far to seek in Ireland as in other
countries. It is not in Mr. Russell's nature so to act; it is not in Dr.
Hyde's plan of life to foster in others other than propagandist
literature; it is more than likely that had Mr. Martyn attempted it it
had come to the end to which he has come as playwright. Without Mr.
Yeats as moving power, Synge had not been, without Mr. Yeats to
interest her in the movement, Lady Gregory had not written her farces
and folk-histories; and without the Abbey Theatre's plays as standard,
the younger playwrights of Cork and Belfast would have written plays
very other than those they have written.

No wonder Mr. Yeats wants to see his dreams take on bodily reality upon
the stage, and to hear beautifully spoken the words in which he has
caught them. There can be no greater pleasures than these to a writer
when he is past the imaginative intensity of youth. In youth his
imaginings are so real to him he needs no objective embodiment to see
them, and the roll and sing of their lines are always sounding to his
inner ear, but as he passes "out of a red flare of dreams," such as is
youth's, "into a common light of common hours" in middle age, his
imaginative life grows less intense and needs the satisfaction of seeing
itself concretely represented.

Mr. Yeats leaves out of his collected poems the plays of his boyhood,
"The Island of Statues" (1885) and "Mosada" (1886). They were not of
Ireland, but the Arcady of the one and the mediaeval Spain of the other
he could easily have paralleled in Irish legend, where anything
wonderful and tragic is possible. Nor is "The Countess Cathleen"
(1892-99), in its pre