5—
Authors and Patron:
The Self-Expression of Capital

In the lobby of the Abbey Theatre hangs a portrait of Anne Elizabeth Fredericka Horniman by the poet's father John Butler Yeats. The sitter is not of the type that inspired the painter's most famous work; this is not a "friendship portrait" of a person with the soul of an artist.^[1] Miss Horniman had no such soul, and there is nothing in J. B. Yeats's letters to suggest he cherished her company; he found her, in fact, "fatiguing": she talked all the time of the sins of the Irish and threatened them with a sudden stoppage of funds.^[2] Insofar as he characterized the owner of the Abbey Theatre, JBY referred to her as "the Quaker Lady."^[3] Nonetheless, the Horniman portrait is a chronicle of her character, told with the "broad sympathy and human interest" of J. B. Yeats's best pictures.^[4] His society portraits of great men's wives often disappointed in their representation of clothes and jewels, but in this portrait the jewels, if not the best thing in the picture, do signify. Their mere size is a frank assertion of wealth; their outlandish design is Horniman's declaration of her freedom to do as she

[1] J. B. Yeats described himself as a painter of "friendship portraits" in a 15 December 1920 letter to John Quinn, quoted by Murphy (Prodigal Father: The Life of John Butler Yeats (1839–1922) [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978], 285).

[2] Lily Yeats to WBY, 2 February 1904; quoted in Murphy, Prodigal Father , 276.

[3] J. B. Yeats to WBY [25 May 1906]; quoted in Murphy, Prodigal Father , 300.

[4] Douglas Archibald, John Butler Yeats (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1974), 54.

likes. the painter's interpretation, however, is not in the jewels, clothes, or dark enclosure; it is in the face, about which there is something overstrained: the skin around the eyes, along the hairline, is pulled tight, almost as if in terror, so that the subject's reclining position does not suggest lassitude; it suggests a cat before it strikes.^[5] Most telling, however, is the mouth: this mouth, slightly pouting, slightly drawn, looks as if its lips are quivering. The painting does not show an especially likable person, but nonetheless it finally applies the portrait painter's "balm of sympathy and tenderness."^[6] The picture first gives the facts of the face, but then adds a comment, with the comment insinuated, not with underhanded irony, but with a most telling kind of understanding. Behind the terrifying person, it shows the terrified one; behind the imperious middle-aged would-be queen of an international art theatre, it shows a thin, desperate, and suffering woman.

J. B. Yeats's portrait brings before us as a person the "grey eminence in the background," the "dictator" behind the three "generals" who stood over the ranks of INTS, Ltd.^[7] In chapter 2, it was seen that the prospect of her money gave W. B. Yeats freedom of political maneuver at the time of Queen Victoria's visit to Ireland in 1900. In chapter 3, it was implied that her promise of a theatre in 1903 (broached in April 1903, privately offered in October 1903, and officially declared in April 1904)^[8] called from WBY his Samhain distinctions between literature and propaganda in the dispute over In the Shadow of the Glen. In chapter 4, finally, it was shown that her June 1905 offer to pay salaries to actors led to the split in the Irish National The-

[5] The feline image is perhaps appropriate to a woman nicknamed "Tabby," who purred when pleased and when angry stretched out her fingers like catclaws, while from her lips there issued a low-pitched hiss. See Ben Iden Payne, A Life in a Wooden O: Memoirs of the Theatre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 78.

[6] Dr. James White, John Butler Yeats and the Irish Literary Renaissance (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1972), 16.

[7] Murphy, Prodigal Father , 296.

[8] James W. Flannery, Miss Annie F. Horniman and the Abbey Theatre , Irish Theatre Series, no. 3 (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1970), 8; William G. Fay and Catherine Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre: An Autobiographical Record (London: Rich & Lovan; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), 152.

atre Society. In each of these cases, the "generous gift" of Miss Horniman did more than propel the development of Irish theatre; the motivation of the gift, its origin, and the conditions placed upon it determined the shape of the history of Irish theatre. The issue is not that the Irish dramatic movement was floated for many years upon the capital of an Englishwoman, or that the plays written were underwritten by Horniman; the key issue is the extent to which her capital made Irish drama her form of self-expression rather than the embodiment of national feeling. W. B. Yeats was not the only one to make the INTS the instrument of a secret agenda; another was Miss A. E. F. Horniman.

If Yeats thought Horniman was that sort of patron from whom (he claimed in 1903) the Irish National Theatre Society would accept him—"a mad king [queen would have been more to the point] who loved the arts and their freedom," offering "unconditioned millions"—then he could not have been more wrong. Horniman loved the arts well enough, but her thousands, not millions, were never given unconditionally.^[9] From the beginning, Horniman realized the political tendencies of the theatre society sufficiently to attach her formal offer to Yeats's public explanations in Samhain that a literary theatre precluded political engagement.^[10] The first sentence of

[9] WBY, Samhain: 1903; rpt. in Explorations , 105. I do not possess Horniman's bank records, but some idea of her fortune may be gained by her 7 December 1910 letter to W. A. Henderson: "You may as well be told that my income of £2400 made the £1000 a year (at best) to the Abbey a heavy burden" (ms. 1733, Henderson Collection, NLI; quoted in Flannery, Horniman and the Abbey Theatre , 35). Her capital was likely to be fifteen times her income, or £36,000. The death of her father in 1906 had brought her £25,000, in addition to monies inherited earlier from her grandparents, but she spent part of the capital in setting up the Manchester Gaiety Theatre. According to Rex Pogson's version of the "bare facts," Horniman spent a total of £13,000 on the Abbey and its company (Pogson, Miss Horniman and the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester [London: Rockcliff, 1952], 13).

[10] Although Marie nic Shiublaigh doubts that Horniman "fully realised the basis upon which the National Theatre Society had been established," Horniman claimed she had made it clear to all the members of the company when she offered them free use of the Abbey Theatre that she had no sympathy with their politics (Nic Shiublaigh, The Splendid Years [Dublin: James Duffy, 1955], 48; Horniman to Synge, 7 January 1906; Hogan and Kilroy, 3:58–59.

Horniman's April 1904 letter—published in the Dublin newspapers, and reprinted in the 1904 Samhain , along with a letter of acceptance signed by all members of the INTS—states that Horniman has "great sympathy with the artistic and dramatic aims of the Irish National Theatre as publicly explained by [WBY] on various occasions." Horniman's formal letter presents a condition in the legal sense of the term: if Yeats had not expressly stated that the INTS policy excluded Irish propaganda, and if the other members of the company had not signed a letter of acceptance binding them to his statement, Horniman's offer of the theatre would have been void. Horniman subsequently proved herself capable of prosecuting her claim according to the letter of the deed of gift: not content to offer a theatre in which the aims for which she had sympathy might be realized, she was determined that only these aims and no others should be pursued on the premises of the Abbey Theatre. What some might think an open-handed, generous gift—"a gambler's throw"—was in effect a closely worded contract of purchase.

"She regarded our group," Maire nic Shiublaigh reflected, "as yet another small company in which by her aid she would receive a governing interest."^[11] Lady Gregory hated to admit the power of Horniman's proprietary interests, complaining in 1921 that Horniman "made the building , not the theatre," but Lady Gregory earlier had occasion to reflect with dread that when the directors of the theatre fell out with its owner, Horniman was in a position of command. Lady Gregory pleaded with Yeats that in a showdown, Horniman "would have a very strong hand, theatre, renewal of patent, and money"; all the directors had was the plays and the players—and the players, she might have admitted, were only theirs by contract, their salaries being paid out of Horniman's subsidies. Horniman was never backward in her awareness of just how strong her hand was and what she had a right to expect. Indeed, Lady Gregory once conceded that Horniman possessed not only title to the building but power over what

[11] Nic Shiublaigh, Splendid Years , 48.

happened on the premises: when Horniman turned down the Theatre of Ireland's request for use of the Abbey, Lady Gregory remarked to Synge that while "a propagandist theatre would be very useful," "it is not what [Miss Horniman] spent her money for."^[12] In this case, the difference between giving and buying, between empowerment and disenfranchisement, is obvious: for all the talk of the rights of artists, Horniman had in mind consumer rights and the rights of property.

Yeats often thanked Horniman publicly for her complete generosity, and he even assured nationalists that she "never attempted to interfere with our policy in even the slightest things,"^[13] but the fact of the matter is that she harrowed the directors of the Abbey constantly, Yeats especially, with an escalation of daily letters that climbed from allegations to complaints, complaints to incitements, incitements to requests, requests to demands, demands to threats, and threats to ultimatums. If Horniman did not interfere in the affairs of the INTS, why did Yeats beg her to stop doing so? One such plea called from her the wounded, exaggerated, and fundamentally false reply, "I do not remember ever having wished to sacrifice your work or ambitions to any idea of my own." But Horniman throughout continued to assert that INTS affairs "concern[] my property and as such [are] my business and I ought [to be] considered."^[14] When Horniman decided to start a second front in the more hospitable environs of Manchester and employed Ben Iden Payne to manage the Gaiety Theatre there, the young director dropped by Yeats's rooms in Woburn Buildings. The poet offered him the benefit of his experience with Horniman in suggesting that Payne draw up an

[12] Lady Gregory to Synge, 20 February 1906; Hogan and Kilroy, 3:61.

[13] Nic Shiublaigh, Splendid Years , 48–49; Lady Gregory, Journals , ed. Daniel J. Murphy (1947; rpt., New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 247; quoted words are from WBY to D. O'Connell, n.d., Coole Park (taped in copy of WBY, Ideas of Good and Evil; ms. 1742, NLI).

[14] Horniman to WBY, 16 February 1910. Citations from the letters of Annie Horniman, when not otherwise noted, are drawn from the Horniman Papers at the National Library of Ireland, ms. 13068.

agreement with her very carefully: "He advised me that, when the subject came up, I should make the contract a tight one, laying down definite limits beyond which Miss Horniman should have no authority to interfere. 'You know ,' Yeats explained, 'she is a vulgarian .' This attitude surprised me greatly for the moment . . . [but] I took Yeats's advice, and learned to be grateful for it [emphasis added]."^[15] By the time of his discussion with Payne in the summer of 1907, Yeats had reason to believe that even if he had already gotten £7,000 out of Horniman (purchase of theatre, actor salaries, subsidies for tours of England), he had not driven a hard enough bargain: having to hand over the reins of the theatre movement to a rich vulgarian was more than he had counted upon.

Brief and conclusive evidence of the fact that Horniman laid down significant prohibitions upon both the directors and actors of the Irish National Theatre Society appears many years later, in 1909, in the joint understanding that Horniman's sale of the Abbey would release the theatre from a host of obligations. Horniman offered Yeats and Lady Gregory easy terms, sweetened by the prospect that once they had paid £428 down and a £1000 quittance, the new owners could rent the theatre to the Gaelic League, sell sixpenny seats, end their quarrel with the Theatre of Ireland, and reap the rewards of popularity that would follow from dissociation from Horniman herself.^[16] Horniman here provides a short list of her imperatives as owner of the Abbey: it could not be used to advance the Gaelic language, to proselytize for nationalism, to entertain the sixpenny public (that is, the mass of Dublin Irish), or to direct its destiny unhindered by the veto power of the English owner. The motives and consequences of these prohibitions remain to be addressed; at this point, suffice it to say that without Horniman the Abbey was free to be a popular, nationalist theatre led by the Fay brothers; with her it was forbidden to be so.

Not only were Horniman's thousands consigned upon a

[15] Payne, Life in a Wooden O , 80.

[16] Horniman to directors of the NTS, 9 September 1909.

"no politics" clause, and on her understanding that they implied rights of property in the theatre society, they were also "conditioned" by every quality of her character, certain powerfully independent proclivities, but mostly antipathies, which Yeats was later to describe as "stops of an organ":^[17] years after an offense had been given her, some accident would reawaken the memory, and groans of contempt, shrill denunciations, and scherzos of hatred would all voluminously sound forth, with strict warnings that if her voice were not heeded, she would soon stop all cheques and hang a For Sale sign on the door of the Abbey. In order to take a reading of her determinative role upon the history of Irish drama, it is first necessary to analyze in more detail the character of the frail woman in rich brocade painted by John Butler Yeats.

2

John Butler Yeats described Horniman as "the Quaker Lady"; indeed, her grandfather, John Horniman, the first man to put tea in bags for retail sale, was a Quaker, but her father converted to the Church of England as a faith more fitting to the conservative proprietor of what had become a major firm, Horniman Tea.^[18] The family nonetheless laid down principles of education derived from their former faith: they forbade their daughter to play cards or frequent the theatre. Showing the independence of a Quaker, if not the beliefs, the young Annie Horniman soon made theatre her private passion, and it was not many years before she was searching for her fate in a deck of Tarot cards.

Even as she became more Rosicrucian, Horniman kept the character of a Quaker: she was a plain speaker, hated subterfuge in others (and often tried to expose it), though the difference between right and wrong a clear one and hated the wrong, expected cleanliness in others, smoked cigarettes, be-

[17] WBY to Florence Farr [? July 1907]; Wade, 490.

[18] The information in this paragraph is taken from Pogson, Horniman and the Gaiety Theatre , 1–16.

lieved nothing was achieved by violence, thought the sexes equal, but did not approve of suffrage campaigns—they involved the illegitimate use of force. She was also proud of the mercantile virtues of Low Church petty capitalists. Hard work, work for "honest" money, prompt payment of accounts, neat bookkeeping, the building up of a name in the eyes of the public, the conduct of oneself according to what is required of one's position in life, determination to provide satisfaction to the paying public, the "right" to get value for money—these were all ideals of character for Horniman, and she was highly indignant when the Irish insinuated there might be something spiritually demeaning about these "commercial" characteristics.^[19] The "transcendental" Irish, she raged, were like feebleminded madmen at the Townsend Asylum, "better under care and guard"; if they were on a high plane, she preferred "rather a lower plane where a sense of Honor & Self-Respect find a home."^[20] Home, righteousness, honor, self-respect, solid success: this is the design embroidered in the Quaker's sampler.

It is to Horniman's credit that as an unmarried woman in turn-of-the-century English society, she refused to retire from life or offer any apology for being single; she was instead a proud, passionate spinster. Her belief in the equality of the sexes took many forms: she wore bloomers, rode a bicycle, and traveled unchaperoned around Europe and North Africa; she bravely played a part in public life. But her belief that she

[19] See for instance Horniman's letter to Florence Darragh of 18 August 1906, where she warns Darragh that "a lot of nonsense will be talked to you against 'commercial drama,'" by which Willie Fay simply means "the distinct intention to act, to work for a living honestly, to have ambition . . . to look and behave with knowledge as to what is required on stage." A few days earlier, she urged Yeats to accept as a definition of theatrical "Art" as "the commonplace professional idea of earning a living and getting a bigger salary," which is "at any rate, honest" (Horniman to WBY, 14 August 1906). In a later dispute over Abbey business matters, Horniman wrote Yeats that because she was a shopkeeper's daughter, and proud of it, she would not immediately stop the subsidy; and because she was a shopkeeper's daughter, she would stop it when the termination date of her promised support came due (Horniman to WBY [? April 1907]).

[20] Horniman to WBY, 4 August 1906.

could do anything she cared to do, just as a man might, did not imply any degree of sexual freedom. She regarded the sex life of humanity as one great scandal. Indeed, she generalized upon her own role as spinster and applied it to others, believing that in most cases no offer of sexual relationship could be decently accepted. When W. G. Fay fell in love with the young actress Brigid O'Dempsey, Horniman went on the warpath, even though Fay wanted to marry the girl and soon did marry her.^[21] When Yeats was meeting with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the famous London actress, concerning the title role of Deirdre , Horniman's reaction was again overstrained. She rather unnecessarily pointed out to Yeats that he was already too old for "Mrs. Pat"; the leading lady "might well go in for someone young."^[22] (In fact, Beatrice Campbell had been born in the same year as Yeats—1865—and five years after Horniman herself.) Perhaps this remark was meant as a joke among intimates, but if so the meagre covering of humor is a dress code to permit the introduction of naked panic about sexual relations.

Horniman's feelings about sex took the shape of disgust when John Synge fell in love with the young Abbey actress Molly Allgood. Synge accompanied the players on an English tour for which Horniman did the publicity, and she found the "spooning" almost more than she could bring herself to mention, but having brought herself to that point, she then could not stop making it a bone of perpetual contention. She frequently wrote to Yeats first to report Synge's misbehavior, and, after the tour, to seek out tidbits of gossip about its further progress: "As to Mr. Synge—he too has proved himself to be no good. Any holiday can be put off for a few days when necessary [to the business of the theatre]. Has he had the courage to take Mollie Allgood with him? Or has he gone to escape from her? Is the man content with what he has

[21] Horniman to WBY, 1 October 1906. Fay's romance was a matter of concern to the directors as well, because Brigid O'Dempsey was under age and her father was initially not in favor of the union (Saddlemyer, 148–50).

[22] Quoted in Flannery, Horniman and the Abbey Theatre , 13.

done already or does he think he can get along without the [help] of the theatre?"^[23] John Millington Synge's love for Molly Allgood—his queerly romantic, parsonical letters to her, his plays inspired by her, his marriage to her prevented by his Hodgkin's disease, his legacy to her, her starring performance after his death in Deirdre of the Sorrows —makes up one of the great popular "real life" love stories of the age, but Horniman could not countenance the possibilities that a director could fall for an actress, a Protestant Anglo-Irish gentleman for a Catholic working girl, or any man for a woman of lower social rank. The only reason could be passing lust, demeaning to both the man and his social peers; in her book, Synge was written down as a callow male of no morals, and time would show that "three months of one girl on his knee doubtless leads him to wish for a change."^[24] In these relationships—Fay/O'Dempsey, Yeats/Campbell, and Synge/Allgood—two features come to the fore: first, a threat of open sexual relations; second, a misalliance between the partners. Whenever it becomes possible that a man and a woman might have a sexual interest in each other, for Horniman there always appear overriding reasons—age, class, financial position, business interests—why such an imputation is unthinkable, much less something upon which the couple might like to act.

In light of her pattern of response, the sparsely documented ruckus in the Order of the Golden Dawn during 1896 takes on fuller significance. On that occasion, Horniman was apparently the subject of what she took to be a sexual overture from one of the Order's leading warlocks, Dr. Berridge.^[25] The meetings of secret societies like the Golden Dawn served for at least some of their members the function of an experience of heightened eroticism under the cloak of communication with the sublime. It is true that there was more robing than disrobing, but the meetings in darkened chambers of numbers of female adepts with a few powerful mages, where

[23] Horniman to WBY, 3 September 1906.

[24] Quoted in Flannery, Horniman and the Abbey Theatre , 22.

[25] Harper, 14.

participants underwent rites of passage from an outer temple to an inner temple, with considerable blindfolding of the women, while male mystagogues sometimes evoked images of fire and spear, cups and water, were an exquisite theatre of the erotic. Altogether, such secret societies offered the excuse, the occasion, and the crypto-language for late Victorian men and women to enter upon a subject for which they lacked other means of expression.^[26] It is not known how Horniman distinguished between the generalized eroticism of the Order's carryings-on and the particular advance of Berridge, but he must have made an attempt on her person for which no mystical rationale could be found. It my indicate the general character of sublimated license in the Order that other members took Miss Horniman's violent rejection of Berridge's offer, and her demand for action, to be a case of "intolerance, intermeddling, and self-conceit."^[27] Other members, it appears, refused to meddle in the private rituals of consenting adepts. Horniman forced so much undesirable attention upon the question of insidious impropriety in the society that its head, MacGregor Mathers, delivered an ultimatum to all members, but aimed at Horniman in particular, to submit themselves without question to his authority. Horniman refused, and in the ensuing ructions she cut off Mathers's annual subsidy; he promptly kicked her out of the Golden Dawn. From this early incident in Horniman's womanhood, a profile of her psychic economy begins to emerge. The Golden Dawn's "Soror Fortitor et Recte," our sister straight and strong, manfully perpendicular in her propriety, Horniman was a passion-

[26] The coincidence of the bodily and the disembodied is, in fact, never more frankly explicit than in the automatic script of George Yeats when she communed with daemons to find answers to the poet's questions about the ideal frequency of sexual intercourse and the connection between his sexual interest in Maud Gonne's daughter and the proliferation of his poetic impulses. If sex is an all but explicit agenda of the automatic script, it is implicitly one impulse gratified by meetings of the Golden Dawn as well. For information on Yeats's automatic script, see George Mills Harper's fascinating The Making of Yeats's A Vision (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), pp. 31ff. 88, 92, 101–2, and passim.

[27] Harper, 14.

ate puritan—passionate so long as passion was not named, and indomitably puritanical when it raised its head.

3

Miss Horniman was certainly drawn to Yeats by something more than approval of his poetic drama; she was, in fact, in love with him. There is an embarrassment of evidence for this attachment. She kept a lighted portrait of the poet in her rooms at H1, Montague Mansions, London; she was pleased to claim that she served as his secretary in the 1890s; she made him a present of the Abbey Theatre, which is an expensive sort of gift to make to a mere friend; she was watchful for rivals, and jealous of Maud Gonne, Lady Gregory, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and Florence Farr. Horniman's almost daily letters to Yeats are addressed to her "Dear Demon" or even her "Dear Demonical Director" and signed "Affectionately." She let herself into his London apartment when he was absent, and in a fussy wifely way, spoke of moths in the curtains, dust on the bookshelves, papers on the floor; she even looked into his wastepaper basket (on a search for a parcel wrapper, she said), which suggests the sort of surveillance even a wife might reconsider.^[28] All this evidence bespeaks, on her side, love in name and spirit.

Yeats, on his side, kept company with her, sometimes answered letters, and in general permitted her to devote herself to him. William M. Murphy and James Flannery are correct that there is no evidence that he "encouraged her suit" only if her suit is understood to have been for either a sexual relationship or a marriage proposal.^[29] For Horniman to believe her affections in some part not unwelcome, it may have been enough that a poet like Yeats comported himself a great deal like a man in love.^[30] He talked about his feelings, and few men

[28] Horniman to WBY, 7 July 1907.

[29] Murphy, Prodigal Father , 271.

[30] Edward Martyn spitefully attributed Yeats's theatrical success to his high-handed way with women: "The qualities by which Mr. Yeats has made the theatre are Napoleonic and consummate. A fine poet and subtle literarycritic, he has above all a weird appearance which is triumphant with middle-aged masculine women, and a dictatorial manner which is irresistible with the considerable bevy of female and male mediocrities interested in intellectual things" (Denis Gwynn, Edward Martyn and the Irish Literary Theatre [1930; New York: Lemma Press, 1974], 154). Admittedly, Yeats was dictatorial, but his real charm was his romantic, open-hearted, and intimate familiarity with women, which as friendship could be mistaken for love, and as love, for friendship.

not in love did such an "effeminate" thing; he wrote, and even recited, poems, a surefire sign in an ordinary man of an approaching proposal. Yeats's letters to women—especially those to Florence Farr and Olivia Shakespear—show him to have been a wonderfully chatty companion, an easy organ of confidential humor and private revelations. He was often ready to make a woman his cohort; for instance, he worked with Maud Gonne in politics, with Farr in cantillation, with Lady Gregory in playwriting, and of course with Horniman in the management of the Golden Dawn and the Abbey. This habit of respect for a woman's own powers was surely endearing. It would be wrong, however, to treat Yeats's relationships to all these women as equivalent. At one extreme, he desperately sought a sexual relationship with Maud Gonne; at the other extreme, he was oblivious to the possibility of a sexual interest on the part of Lady Gregory. His relations with Florence Farr offered him a relaxed combination of long friendship, professional collaboration, and sexual gratification. His relation to Horniman was like none of these.

The art of managing Annie Horniman involved a perfect balance between dismissing and introducing intimacy. The question was kept alive year after year, with immense assistance from Horniman. Most of Yeats's letters to his patron have not survived and those that have—addressed to "My dear Miss Horniman"—are generally the more public and least familiar of his communications. The type of relationship, however, can be inferred to some degree from Horniman's own letters, such as her 10 December 1906 missive following an incident at the Abbey Theatre. Maud Gonne had sued for divorce from Major MacBride early in the year, alleging bru-

tality and drunkenness; after a bitter trial during the summer, separation was granted. Throughout this painful episode, Yeats had supported his old love, and on 20 October 1906 he escorted her to the Abbey premier of Deirdre, The Gaol Gate , and The Mineral Workers . When the couple entered the theatre, with Maud Gonne dressed in black, members of the audience stood up to hiss the woman who had scorned an Irish hero and broken her Catholic vows of wedlock. Maud Gonne smiled, unperturbed, but Yeats "looked bewildered as the hissing went on," and afterwards he was in a fury of contempt for the village nastiness of Catholic nationalists.^[31]

Horniman's letter alludes to a conversation she had had with Yeats about Maud Gonne's reception at the Abbey:

When you get back [from Dublin] I must have a number of questions answered, I'll remove all reading matter from within reach & you will have to give me your full attention whether you are bored or no. You have been too much petted of late years until you have taken to use that crushed pained & distressed look of misery as a means of terrorising Lady Gregory and me whenever we object to anything.

You naturally made no remark when I said that Mrs. MacBride got what she deserved when she came to the theatre. In a case like that your silence is quite right—you know that it is true but of course you object to saying so. But you might remember that continual snubbings when kindly feelings are expressed may in time not only stop their expression but blunt their vitality or even at length destroy them. Yet, as I ought to know well, writing (& even speaking) makes no difference to you when you wish to abstract yourself from life, so I'm not at all cross & trying not be sad & I certainly will not worry you, for I have my own dignity to consider.^[32]

These are the words of a woman in love, in love with a man not in love with her, but dependent upon her. It can be inferred that Yeats did not answer her letters as often as she liked, but answered some; that he did not visit her until told

[31] Mary Colum, Life and the Dream (1958; rev. ed., Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1966), 124. See also Samuel Levenson, Maud Gonne (New York: Reader's Digest Press, 1976), 232–33.

[32] Horniman to WBY, 10 December 1906.

he must do so; that when he did visit her, he looked quickly for a book to entertain himself, went slightly deaf to inquiry, and finally forced to respond, put on his "crushed pained & distressed look of misery." He did not, in short, do much to sustain his relationship with Horniman, but he did just enough. In this letter, Horniman is in fact giving him instructions as to the degree of disregard she is willing to suffer: a certain number of snubs "blunt[s] the vitality" of her "kindly feelings"; a few more will destroy them altogether. The complicated mix of signals required can be deduced from a letter Florence Darragh (an actress friend of Horniman's) wrote to Yeats: Darragh counsels him on one hand that Horniman stood in need of "all those ridiculous little attentions which she values so much," on the other hand that she would "fling thousands in your lap if she saw you were becoming independent."^[33] The delicate art of management this required took its toll, especially when the patron expressed her "kindly feelings" by demanding that Yeats admit "Mrs. MacBride got what she deserved" when she was hissed and reviled at the Abbey. Horniman is bizarrely out of touch with Yeats's true feelings when she says he knows that this is true. On the contrary, Horniman's statement placed her among the group of petty, vicious puritans he loathed. Yeats kept his silence—and it must have been hard to do so—because to speak could only have been to blast Horniman's soul into a cinder, and with her, her money.^[34]

Yeats may have paid Horniman insufficient attention at times and ignored her altogether when she slanged Maud Gonne, but he was attentive enough about matters of money. In July 1906 Horniman wrote Yeats that she was ready to give up on Ireland and the Abbey; they had done their best, no one could do more, but it was time to admit defeat and try

[33] Florence Darragh to WBY, 22 September 1906; Finneran, Harper, and Murphy, 1:170–72.

[34] During December 1906 Yeats was deeply involved in creating a new scheme for the Abbey that would satisfy its owner and secure from her an additional £25,000 investment (WBY to Synge, 2 December 1906, especially the postscript marked "Private"; Saddlemyer, 175). These events are discussed below.

again at a new venue—namely, the Manchester Gaiety. Yeats, she suspected, would struggle onward for a while in Dublin, but when he tired, she welcomed him to join her in Manchester with his "little band of earnest, practised playwrights."^[35] In a gesture of extraordinary goodwill to him personally, she told him to "hold tight to the remembrance that [he could] always claim [her] help"; if he needed more cash, she would find a way to send it, adding "but this must not be known to anyone but you." Across the top of the letter, Yeats wrote and underscored the brief comment: "A letter offering to increase the £800 subsidy if necessary ." What is revealing here is the contrast between the sentiment of her private message and the strictly documentary, official attitude of his notation. She offers him a life in England and a gesture of her love; he takes it as a promissory note on her bank account.

It would be imprecise to say that Yeats hoodwinked Horniman; he had only to keep his temper while she hoodwinked herself. He also cannot be blamed for not taking the relation to a deeper stage of intimacy: he did not want to, and if Horniman did want a sexual relationship, she was not likely to admit to it. Her extraordinary aversion to the sexual motive—in herself as much as in Fay, Synge, and Dr. Berridge—was essential to her self-deception. It not only enabled Yeats to leave the relationship in a perpetual stall, it caused her to displace her desire in several ways, among them financial generosity. She hated Maud Gonne for "arousing the most animal passions": "the greatest artist on the stage" (by which she meant WBY) was "helpless compared to a beautiful woman screaming from a coal-cart," but it was just her own inability to arouse such passions, and to welcome them, that left a hole in her life, a deep hole into which she cast a great many bank-notes.^[36] She paid and paid, but what she paid for was never delivered. She aimed to buy the love of Yeats; lacking that, an Irish theatre society; lacking that, the Abbey Theatre building. In the end, she was relieved of title to the building, with

[35] Horniman to WBY, 13 July 1906.

[36] Horniman to Florence Darragh, 18 August 1906.

£1,500 remaining of a £13,000 investment, and of her relationship to Yeats.^[37] The poet did not hoodwink his patron; he exploited her, which is what patrons are for.

4

Four years after the purchase of the Abbey, Horniman told Yeats that she "never imagined for a moment" that he was "practically exploiting" her: "You were a great deal too stupid."^[38] It would have been cheaper, she reasoned, to hire a theatre in the London's West End for a week of matinees for Yeats's verse plays if the only purpose of her philanthropy was to build up his reputation as a dramatist. She had something in mind a great deal wider, and so, it may be said, did Yeats. "I felt that I was doing something in Ireland that could only be done by an outsider, by someone with no axe to grind," she told the press, but quite obviously she had an axe to grind, as Yeats had one, and everyone came with axes raised. In fact, this is a classic illustration of the phrase, which, according to Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable , derives from the story of a man who wanted to have his axe blade sharpened, but had no money to pay the blacksmith.^[39] So he praises the skill of the smith, suggests that his admiration would be splendidly gratified if he saw that skill practiced on his own axe, and, when it is ground, laughs at the blacksmith. Yeats's axe was his dramatic ambition, and Miss Horniman's money played the part of blacksmith to put an edge on it; Horniman's axe was her desire for self-expression. Horniman came to Dublin with a desire to participate in the production of arty, mystical plays by Yeats; she permitted the

[37] On 6 May 1937, meeting with Holloway at the Abbey, Yeats remarked that he had called on Miss Horniman in London "for the first time in thirty years"—an exaggeration of only a few years. Their visits diminished after the summer of 1907 upon Horniman's purchase of a theatre in Manchester; their correspondence ended with Horniman's 5 May 1911 telegram (see p. 238 below).

[38] Horniman to WBY, 27 February 1908.

[39] E. Cobham Brewer, A Dictionary of Phrase and Fable , Classic Edition (New York: Avenel Books, 1978), 78.

Irish to wax proud of their myths, dialect, and natural talent for acting; then having used these blandishments to see The King's Threshold, The Shadowy Waters , and other plays into performance, she scorned the workers, denied their desire for national expression, and claimed the credit for their art.

Later in her life, and after several bitter lessons, Horniman learned that she was, as she confessed to the Reverend James O. Hannay, "one of those people who cannot produce anything myself."^[40] But as a young woman, she had wanted to be an artist, so she attended the Slade School of Art in London. It was there that she met Moina Mathers, daughter of Bergson and wife of MacGregor Mathers; through Mathers she met Florence Farr and Yeats. She came into association, that is, with creative people of mystical inclination, but no money; she had the money, but the Slade School drawing masters discovered no particular creativity. Without husband or child, with nothing to show for herself, her frustrated desire for the satisfactions of creativity was a torment to her. When Yeats was bringing her into his plans for an Irish theatre, he held out the tempting offer that she would be given a chance to design all the costumes for his own plays. She still had not yet committed herself to buying a theatre when he went ahead and put her in charge of costumes for The King's Threshold . She did not exactly buy a business in order to get a job in it, but out of gratitude for getting a job, she bought the business.

Horniman's thankfulness for the opportunity put in her hands is painfully complete. After Yeats introduced her to the acting company in its shabby little quarters in Camden Street, she made a point of staying in Dublin after his departure to become acquainted with the actors and advise them wisely about stage matters.^[41] Exalted by the fellowship with artists, she wrote to Yeats that the stars in their courses blessed her new work: "I am so anxious to help as effectually as I may and it seems as if it were already ordained. I'll stay on here next week to see what I am to do. Do you realise that you

[40] Horniman to Hannay, 21 February 1907; ms. 2259, NLI.

[41] Nic Shiublaigh, Splendid Years , 48.

have now given me the right to call myself 'artist'? How I thank you!"^[42]

Never was a woman of fortune so happy to be a seamstress. Horniman took measurements of some, but not all, the chief actors, and, upon her return to London, she shopped for the richest possible materials, and she bought them in the greatest quantity, for the costumes of an eighth-century Irish king, bard, mayor, cripple, servant, priest, and so forth. With lectures from Yeats on the symbolic and aesthetic value of decorative staging to guide her, she set about cutting and stitching costumes for actors. Letters were dispatched from London to the company, requesting more information about the measurements, letters that went unanswered.^[43] When the costumes and players were brought together on stage, the effect was obviously, embarrassingly, unfortunate. In his review of the play, Tom Kettle, although coached by Yeats, took an arch tone: "The costumes of King Guaire and his Court were of a richness almost barbaric. The cut and colour of each garment was adjusted, I understand, to a scheme marvellous in its emotional and symbolic value, and beyond the capacity of any but a society journal to record."^[44] Kettle's "society journal" dig has the true stink of Dublin wit: an Anglo-Irish poet's play, dressed and overdressed by a wealthy Englishwoman, had become a clotheshorse, the dull center of a peripheral discussion of couture , etiquette, and the guest list.

Horniman's first attempt at cutting a figure as a theatrical artist was not a success; her second attempt—with the 14 January 1904 production of The Shadowy Waters —was no better. Fay was clearly concerned lest his work with the actors be lost in a high-camp fashion show, but Yeats stayed his course. He wrote Horniman "as delicately as [he] could that there ought not to be gorgeousness of costume,"^[45] but at the

[42] Horniman to WBY, n.d.; Fay, ms. 10952, NLI; Hogan and Kilroy, 3:72.

[43] Horniman to WBY, 22 September 1906.

[44] Thomas M. Kettle, "The Irish National Theatre Society," New Ireland , 17 October 1903; Hogan and Kilroy, 3:72.

[45] WBY to Lady Gregory [21 January 1904]; Wade, 427.

same time instructed Fay that Horniman was in the company for the duration: "Miss Horniman has to learn her work and must have freedom to experiment."^[46] It was his own fault, Yeats told Fay, that her work failed, because he had told her old stages permitted elaborate dress. Now he would correct her misapprehension by giving her Joyce's Social Ireland so that she could make her next costumes more suitable to the scene in which the play was laid.

By December 1904, with the Abbey Theatre in hand, Yeats was prepared to challenge Horniman's right to call herself an artist. He came on stage with Horniman during a rehearsal of On Baile's Strand , called all the actors on the stage, and with "an abundance of plain-speaking," spoke of Horniman's costumes as "grotesque," "eccentric," "like Father Christmas's," like "fire-extinguishers." Under this storm of ridicule, Horniman at first could only protest that she had gotten nothing but the best material. Nevertheless, Yeats ordered the actors to rip the fur off collar and edging, to dispense with the vast red cloaks on some, and then the green cloaks on others. But, Horniman interjected, to do so would ruin the archaeological accuracy with which she had reproduced Joyce's descriptions. "'Hang archaeology,' said the great W. B. Yeats. 'It's effect we want on stage.' And that settled it," remembers an astonished Joseph Holloway.^[47] The company had been given an object lesson, humiliating to Horniman, that no matter who paid the bills, Yeats ran the show.^[48]

This searing incident cauterized the flow of Horniman's creativity, such as it was, at one opening; she was left with another. She had been put in charge of promoting the Irish

[46] WBY to Frank Fay [?20 January 1904]; Wade, 425–26. Concerning Yeats's promise of freedom of experiment, William M. Murphy drily remarks: "That was before [Horniman] put her money on the table" (Prodigal Father , 296).

[47] Holloway, 47.

[48] Murphy rightly smells out Yeats's policy in "allow[ing] a disagreement between himself and Annie to arise in the presence of the company"—to "let her know clearly, before the first curtain went up, that no matter who was paying the piper, he was calling the tune" (Murphy, Prodigal Father , 278). I would simply add that Horniman did not learn the lesson.

National Theatre Society's performances in England, and, living in London, hoping for réclame with its literary high society, she threw herself into the job with energy and pertinence. For the March 1904 English tour, she wrote 300 letters in ten days, arranging for a theatre and personally inviting acquaintances to attend the performances of "her" traveling players in a work by "her dear friend" Yeats. As a result, on 26 March 1904 the West End's Royalty Theatre was packed with a well-disposed, hand-picked audience for The King's Threshold, In the Shadow of the Glen, The Pot of Broth, Riders to the Sea , and Broken Soil . The reviewers showered praise on the simplicity and naivete of the INTS style of acting.^[49] Perhaps more important still, English critics praised the heroic drama of Yeats and the comedy of Synge—the very plays that had caused a furor at Molesworth Hall in October 1903. A fashionable audience had vindicated what a nationalist audience had vilified, and Horniman's labors as promoter were fully rewarded.

The next English tour of the INTS, in November 1905, was also promoted by Horniman.^[50] She showed her pertinacity when Fay's attempts to book theatres in Oxford and Cambridge failed to impress theatre managers. Horniman took charge and hired the Corn Exchange Hall for 23 November in Oxford and the Assembly Rooms for 24 November in Cambridge.^[51] These were important dates for the company, because Synge's The Well of the Saints , the bleak philosophy of which had soured Irish audiences, won over the more intellectual playgoers of the university towns. The actors played to full houses, and the INTS left England with a sizable balance of ticket sales over expenses.

This tour, however, and Horniman's role as promoter, became the subject of criticism in the Dublin press. For the London performances, Horniman had hired St. George's Hall in

[49] C. E. Montague's review for the Manchester Guardian is quoted in Fay and Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre , 155.

[50] Gerard Fay, The Abbey Theatre: Cradle of Genius (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 103.

[51] Fay and Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre , 179.

Langham Place, a suburban location outside the theatre district. Furthermore, she had made the cheapest ticket two shillings and sixpence, a price that one disappointed London Irishman ("Padraig") said put the plays out the reach of most of his fellow-countrymen, forcing them to witness Irish drama "through English eyes."^[52] Releasing an arrow in Yeats's direction, Padraig concluded, "It will not do to say 'good art' does not draw the 'crowd,' especially when the Irish crowd here are in need of National plays and look to the Irish National Theatre Society to supply the need." Horniman, of course, had no particular desire to make provision for the nationalist appetites of Paddies in London, but she nonetheless attempted to handle the bad press by sending an explanation to the United Irishman . Her letter makes three points: first, St. George's Theatre had no gallery, only a balcony; second, the INTS was trying to make money in England for Irish tours; third, they could not therefore "afford to charge 1s. for a part of the hall which will fetch 2s 6d." The final sentence of her letter was a political faux pas—"I am entirely responsible for the arrangements of the English tour"—but her pride in her successful efforts would not let her keep silent.

Sarsfield—a self-appointed journalistic tribune of the people—rose up to face down the English patron and her poet. "The Abbey Street Theatre in London" picked Horniman's letter to pieces in the columns of the United Irishman .^[53] What was an Englishwoman doing in a supposedly Irish theatre? "Isn't it able to manage its own affairs?" What kind of reasoning was it that one "could not afford" to charge less than the most? Sarsfield reminded Yeats that once he had uttered the sentiment that the upper classes "put everything in a money-measure," but "the poor clerk or shopboy" "writes for the glory of God and country." But that was in the 1901 Samhain when the poet was trying to win friends among the nationalists; had Yeats joined the upper classes when he went into business with Horniman? Finally, Sarsfield zeroed in

[52] United Irishman 14, no. 351 (18 November 1905): 1; United Irishman 14, no. 352 (25 November 1905): 1.

[53] United Irishman 14, no. 355 (16 December 1905): 3.

on Horniman's particular aims as a promoter: the company, he said, would have had no trouble getting sufficient attendance to make a profit if the performances had been "advertised properly and widely" rather than "in a select fashion." "But," he declared, "it looks as if a fashionable audience were wanted, not an audience of the people."

The small scandal over prohibitive ticket prices did not drive Horniman out of her job, nor did it alter her aims as a promoter, but it was surely an embittering perplexity. She went ahead with the next tour in June 1906, and, while reporting to Yeats some painful steps to notify the Irish in England of the performances,^[54] she once again tried to select the audience from her own class: she canvassed the London Theosophical Society and secured the assistance of Lady Alice Egerton in reaching out to the haute culture public.^[55] For at least two spells in the fall and spring, she would make the players of the Abbey the theatre for her people, not the Irish. It would play for academics, mystics, and titled folk; Miss Horniman's theatre would be the talk of critics, and Dublin would learn it had no taste. On the 1906 tour, however, nothing went right for Horniman: the INTS lost £199 10s. 7d.; the critics, no longer taken with the "simplicity" of the INTS, remarked on shoddy sets and cheap wigs; and traveling in the company of the Irish players proved an unbearable social embarrassment for Horniman. She was finished with promoting such an operation; it was time to transform it.

5

If Horniman's attempts to achieve self-expression as costume designer and impresario ended in failure, there were other

[54] Horniman gave in, a little resentfully, to Sarsfield's pressure to advertise the theatre at least partly among the Irish in England. She went so far as to arrange to place an article in the Catholic Herald ; indeed, "to please your blessed countrymen," she says, "I'm managing for a portrait of Kathleen ni Houlihan to go into that paper." This, she concludes, "will 'fetch' the 1/- public." The sixpenny public, even the one shilling (1/-) people, were a very precise consumption community: the Catholic nationalist Irish. Raising prices was Horniman's way of getting rid of them. Horniman to WBY, 18 April 1906.

[55] Horniman to WBY, 18 April 1906.

avenues to take in trying to make her mark on Irish theatre. Her original decisions as owner of the Abbey had a permanent effect on the formation of its audience, and the attitude the audience assumed toward the works staged there. The reconstruction of the Mechanics' Institute under the supervision of Joseph Holloway, at a cost of £1,300, turned it from a common playhouse to a small, but glamorously appointed, theatre.^[56] On opening night, 31 December 1904, its ideal patrons would arrive by carriage on Marlborough Street, enter the separate entrance installed for those with expensive seats, shed their wraps at their private cloakroom, come up the stairs into the vestibule before the play, admire John Butler Yeats's portraits of the Fays, Maire nic Shiublaigh, and Horniman herself, take in the Celtic Art Deco of Sarah Purser's three-window, stained-glass design of a tree in leaf, and then pass down into their stalls for Yeats's verse-tragedy, On Baile's Strand .^[57] The more common visitor to the Abbey would take a tram to the O'Connell Street Terminus, walk down a block on Abbey Street to the entrance of the theatre, step in to stare in wonder at "the complete and beautiful arrangements" inside, nervously check out the pit, only to learn that no gate had been installed to set off sixpenny seats, would then inquire at the box office, and, if he could afford the price of a shilling ticket, would pass into the theatre to enjoy Lady Gregory's Spreading the News , the curtain-raiser, before sitting through the splendors of Yeats's blank verse. Because of the ways in which Horniman employed her money (with Holloway, J. B. Yeats, and Purser), the Abbey made the rich feel at home, and the poor—on a first visit—out of place. The Abbey was a lovely little theatre, built and decorated by Irish hands with Irish materials, but its appointments made clear it was intended as a house of gentility—with a door for aristocrats, another door for the middle class, and no seats for the poor. Quite obviously it was not erected to be a factory of revolution.

[56] Hugh Hunt, The Abbey: Ireland's National Theatre, 1904–1978 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 58–59.

[57] See John Masefield's review of the Abbey Theatre opening in the Manchester Guardian , and the very different review in the Irish Daily and Independent , quoted in part by Gerard Fay (Abbey Theatre , 92–93).

Horniman's rule against sixpenny seats—declared in her formal offer of the Abbey to the Irish National Theatre Society—caused "great and ever-growing indignation."^[58] Maud Gonne wrote a personal note to Yeats, saying he was "lost to nationalism," and in the United Irishman Arthur Griffith publicly called the price "undemocratic" and "unpatriotic." It would be wrong to treat the flare-up over ticket prices as mere nationalist hysteria, as if a sixpenny coin were nothing. The wages of workingmen in Dublin were miserable: investigatory commissions suggested that twenty-two shillings a week were required to maintain "merely physical efficiency," but general workers with regular employment made from twenty to twenty-five shillings, casual laborers made from twelve to fifteen, and, in the fall of 1905, some members of the INTS, Ltd. cast were offered only ten to fifteen shillings a week.^[59] Other economic conditions exacerbated the problem of low wages: infant mortality was the worst in the British Isles, 20 percent of the workers were unemployed, 30 percent of the population lived in slums and often could not keep up with the rents there.^[60] Yet these wage earners were the backbone of the Gaelic League, political clubs, and theatre groups. Effectively, the Abbey was asking of nationalists a half-day's wages for a night's entertainment, when a day's wages barely met, if at all, the needs of food and shelter. Furthermore, there was a national tradition, going back to Daniel O'Connell's "Catholic Rent," that made a small subscription the ticket to full participation in a political movement.^[61] Making the most off some was sacrificed to making a little from all, thereby achieving solidarity and popularity for movements. According to D. P. Moran of the Leader , Abbey prices placed "the Theatre outside the sphere of utility of the Gaelic League," a remark that

[58] WBY to Lady Gregory, 24 November 1904; Wade, 445.

[59] See Joseph V. O'Brien, "Dear, Dirty Dublin": A City in Distress, 1899–1916 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 199–240; esp. 203.

[60] F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine (1971; rev. ed., London: Fontana/Collins, 1973), 275–76.

[61] J. C. Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland, 1603–1923 (London: Faber & Faber, 1969; 1966), 299–300.

must have given ironic satisfaction to both Yeats and Horniman, since they had always resented the assumption that the dramatic movement was to be a branch office run out of nationalist headquarters. The political groups, Yeats observed, "had all got to look upon the Hall as their property," but now they would learn that Horniman's purchase of the Abbey disappropriated them; the new ticket prices were their notice of eviction.^[62]

So great was Horniman's desire to regulate the character of the audience at the Abbey that she not only doubled the normal price of a ticket for the pit, she wanted to give away free tickets for the stalls to "respectable" people. After the split in the acting company, Horniman proposed employing a Mrs. Higgenbottom or a Miss Taylor (representative citizens of English Ireland) to "paper the theatre." She wanted the "class of people" who found Irish nationalism abhorrent to "see for themselves" "that the shows are [not] overpolitical."^[63] Lady Gregory, who knew her Ireland, nixed the plan: not even complimentary tickets would draw the Castle crowd, and a desperate play for their favor would kill the theatre for its natural audience.^[64]

[62] In the fall of 1906, Lady Gregory, who "was always against a 1/- pit," prevailed upon Yeats and Horniman to permit the sale of sixpenny seats (announced in The Arrow , no. 1, 20 October 1906), although the theatre owner continued to worry that this would "cheapen the house" and lead to "untoward behavior" on the part of nationalists. She sent the bill for the installation of a gate dividing the pit into shilling & sixpenny sections to the directors. When Maud Gonne's Cumann na nGaedhal rented the Abbey and also sold sixpenny seats, Horniman found out and banned them from further use of the theatre, since tenants were ordered to abide by the old rule of a 1/- pit. The National Theatre Society might profit from the new prices (and it did), but she was not going to let an expressly political organization take advantage of them for popular patriotic entertainments. See Lady Gregory to Colum, enclosure in Lady Gregory to Synge, 9 January 1906; Horniman to Darragh, 18 August 1906; Horniman to WBY, 24 June 1906; and Horniman to Holloway, 28 February 1907.

[63] Horniman to WBY, 22 July 1906; Finneran, Harper, and Murphy, 1:163.

[64] In the long run, as Yeats noted in 1908, the Abbey had "nothing but the pit": "the stalls won't come near us, except when some titled person or other comes and brings guests. All the praise we have had from the mostintellectual critics cannot bring the Irish educated classes, and all the abuse we have had from the least intellectual cannot keep the less educated away" (WBY to Quinn, [October] 1908; Wade, 512).

6

On the spring and summer tour of England in 1906—the last promoted by the owner of the Abbey—something happened that galvanized Horniman to transform the Irish National Theatre Society, Ltd., for good—or so she thought. Before the tour the INTS, Ltd., placed popular plays on the boards in Boyle's Eloquent Dempsy and Lady Gregory's The Canavans ; after the tour, in October, Lady Gregory came back with the moving Gaol Gate and Boyle with The Mineral Workers . Yeats was at work on what would become in November his most successful tragedy, Deirdre . The audiences were the best ever for the November and December program. But Horniman had gone sour on the whole enterprise: "growing popularity in Dublin" was just "a snare."^[65] She and the directors should not fall into the trap of an Irish success. The situation, in her opinion, was dire, and called for drastic measures, beginning with the demotion of W. G. Fay from his position as stage manager. Through Yeats, she proposed that the directors hire a new stage manager, begin a star system, broaden the repertory to include foreign and classical drama, and altogether change its character from a national theatre ("an Irish toy ," she called it) to a dignified international "Art Institution."^[66]

It is difficult to get to the bottom of Horniman's fury over the state of the INTS that made her introduce this plan for transformation of the company. Her letters to Yeats over the summer of 1906 roved wildly from complaint to complaint. She was no doubt disappointed that Yeats's own plays had not made him the Wagner of the British Isles; that the Irishness of the affair would not somehow go away; that the tour of England had not been a great success; that the actors once put on salary became less, rather than more, dedicated to their

[65] WBY to Horniman, 22 July 1906; Finneran, Harper, and Murphy, 1:163.

[66] Horniman to Lady Gregory, 26 December 1906; Saddlemyer, 200.

work; that her efforts to play a creative role in the company had failed; that Yeats did not love her; that Lady Gregory was doing well as a playwright; that her position in the public eye was not all she hoped it might be. But the complaints of the summer of 1906 whirl around a common center: what Synge called a "regular craze against" W. G. Fay.^[67] He did not give her bills, she said, in time to pay them before they came due;^[68] he once paid actors money out of the account for the tour rather than the Abbey Theatre account;^[69] he failed to provide receipts for the expenditure of £5 she had given him for petty cash; he did not acknowledge by letter receipt of monies. More terrible still, when she sailed around to tell him that the day-bill for the Edinburgh performance contained a mistake, "I was told it did not matter, just as if I were an errand boy."^[70] She also complained that the performances were shabby: the actors did not make up properly, they did not use the same stage business in each performance, they did not remove their greasepaint with the proper solvent, and they did not know how to attach their wigs properly.^[71] Horniman had retained an English advance agent and an English road-manager, Messrs. Wareing and Bell, to assist her, and they agreed with her that the Irish players did not know their own business. Finally, Horniman brought Mr. Bell—"a profoundly self-satisfied and vulgar commercial man," Synge called him—to the greenroom just before a show to tell Fay that Bell would make up the company. Fay exploded at this intermeddling in his job, and Horniman's exit, Fay bragged, was like that of a "cat driven out of the kitchen with a broomstick."^[72]

[67] Synge to Lady Gregory [4 July 1906]; Saddlemyer, 130.

[68] Horniman to WBY, 19 June 1906, from Edinburgh.

[69] Horniman to WBY, 21 June 1906.

[70] Horniman to WBY, 23 June 1906; from Edinburgh.

[71] Flannery draws up a useful list of Horniman's complaints about makeup, wigs, diction, stage direction, and stage-management in Horniman and the Abbey Theatre , 20–21. Flannery notes that while many of Horniman's complaints amount to "minute and petty carping," others are "identical with those expressed by Yeats" in a December 1906 memorandum to the other directors on the future of the Abbey.

[72] Synge to Lady Gregory [9 June 1906], Saddlemyer, 128; Gerard Fay, Abbey Theatre , 105; Flannery, Horniman and the Abbey Theatre , 22.

Gerard Fay gives a brisk and accurate narrative of the maelstrom of Horniman's wrath, blown back across the Irish Sea, a positive tumult of yellow stationery, to the little post office in Gort, County Galway, near where Yeats summered out the storm with Lady Gregory. He is, however, hard put to find "the slightest reason why Miss Horniman should have any spite against either of the Fays," much less sufficient grounds for the malicious campaign she waged against the stage-manager's job.^[73] There are, of course, a superfluity of manifest explanations—by Horniman, by the Abbey directors, and by scholars—but the vehemence of her "craze" against Fay calls for another diagnosis.

Years earlier, in September 1904, the pooka of Irish literary life, George Moore, had pseudonymously written an article for the Dublin intellectual monthly Dana entitled "Stage Management in the Irish National Theatre."^[74] Moore may well have been, as Yeats thought, "laying pipe to get into" the Abbey, but if so he bungled the attempt badly by allowing a sentence in his article to imply that Horniman had fallen in love with W. G. Fay. Moore had been dispraising Fay's abilities, discounting the good London reviews as just the sort of condescension given to "any little bushman who came over to London with his boomerang," but he held up short of full criticism because Fay had struggled along on his own: "We were about to say he has received very little support, but that after all cannot be truly said of a man who has found an admirer to buy him a theatre " (emphasis added). Horniman may have been the only reader of the article to see a sexual innuendo in this phrase, but she soon notified the world that she had taken offense by asking the editors of Dana to print the following correction in the December issue: "The Abbey Theatre . . . has not been 'bought' for Mr. Fay or anyone else. It has been acquired by Miss Horniman, who has arranged to lend it on very generous conditions to the National Theatre Society for

[73] Fay, Abbey Theatre , 104.

[74] Paul Ruttledge, "Stage Management at the National Theatre," Dana , no. 5 (September 1904): 150–52. The correction appears in Dana , no. 9 (December 1904): 256.

their performances. But she retains herself entire proprietary interest in the Theatre."

This sanitization of Moore's language is so thoroughgoing that it alerts readers to threats of pollution from every phrase. Horniman's second step was to have Yeats dictate a letter, taken in her own hand, stating that "Moore's return to the theatre is out of the question."^[75] In February, after Moore praised Synge's Well of the Saints in the Irish Times , Horniman took a startling third step: Moore's "unbounded enthusiasm" made her so furious, she ordered Yeats not to associate with his "friend" (Horniman's quotation marks), and that if, by any further writings, Synge should appear to be Moore's "protégé," she expected those writings to be "publicly repudiated" or else she would "look upon it as a public insult to me by the whole Society publicly and collectively."^[76] Horniman's wealth freed her from the obligation to be rational and enslaved others to her whim: how the lessor chose to see things had to be accepted by the lessees as reality; if one raised questions about the accuracy of her perceptions, she elected to regard that as "doubting her word," and she "refused to hold communication" with someone who slighted her honesty.^[77] Horniman's prohibition of Moore as a writer for the Abbey was probably no real loss: though a strong talent, he could not work in harness with Yeats or Fay. However, it was damaging that Horniman's wrath against Moore, with the irrationality of bad weather, hung over Synge, and settled heavily on W. G. Fay.

It was loathsome enough that Moore might have been seen to hint that she was Fay's lover—what a violation of purdah, an English heiress and a dirty little Irish former electrician! But Horniman must have realized with humiliation that few would take this slander seriously; after all, they knew she was

[75] WBY to Frank Fay, 13 November 1904; Wade, 443.

[76] WBY to Quinn, 5 February 1905; Wade, 447; Horniman to WBY, 9 February 1905; Finneran, Harper, and Murphy, 1:147; see also Hogan and Kilroy, 3:55.

[77] Horniman to WBY, 9 July 1906; Synge had questioned Horniman's judgment that Abbey performances during the summer 1906 tour were very poor.

in love not with Fay but with Yeats; it was to him she had given the Abbey. It was horrible that so many people in Dublin would be able to make this correction and enjoy a good laugh at her expense and Moore's dottiness.^[78] Once the idea had come up, Horniman simply could not lay it to rest. Yeats somewhat mischievously reported to her a sally of Moore's at her expense that cut to the quick: "I cannot write what you told me last Winter what he said to you about me—you said it with a smile I must strive to forget."^[79] But forget she could not, because her secret was out and she could read it in the faces of all. She settled on putting Fay in his place, as she put it, bringing him to his senses, that he was just a paid actor, open to dismissal, nothing more than that, but Fay insisted on acting as though he was her equal, even in theatrical matters her superior. In the end, the only way to handle the problem was to get rid of Fay altogether.^[80]

Stirred in the witches' cauldron of Horniman's psyche, a snide phrase in a 1904 article on stage management became the "Dana Affair," and the casus belli of a full-blown assault in 1906 on Willie Fay and the Irishness of the Abbey Theatre.

7

Another cause of Horniman's attack on Fay and her plan for the wholesale transformation of the theatre society had nothing in particular to do with Fay; he was simply a scapegoat for

[78] Many years later, Arthur Sinclair, lead actor with the INTS, Ltd., was still gossiping with Holloway on how Horniman and Lady Gregory, both in love with Yeats, fought for their prize (Robert Hogan and Michael J. O'Neill, eds., Joseph Holloway's Irish Theatre , vol. 3, 1938–1944 [Dixon, Calif.: Proscenium Press, 1968], 60).

[79] Horniman to WBY, 22 September 1906; Finneran, Harper, and Murphy, 1:167.

[80] "The Dana Affair" remained a thorn in her flesh: on 19 September 1906, to take one instance, Horniman wrote Yeats that she was now pleased she did not have to go to Dublin and be insulted by the company of Moore and the surliness of Fay. As to Moore, by October 1908 she still remembered the Dana article against him, refusing to permit his play to be read on the Abbey stage for copyright purposes, or even to answer his letter, though she telegrammed the business manager, Henderson, to bar the door against Moore's arrival (Holloway, 27 October 1908; Hogan and Kilroy, 3:230).

the trial wrongs of the Irish. The fact is, the woman who loved one particular Irishman hated all the rest. During the Playboy riots of February 1907, the playwright William Boyle, after dining with Horniman, confided to Holloway that the policy of the theatre was shaped by her personal antipathy to the Irish:

It has surprised me that Miss Horniman's name has been kept out of the discussion. As a matter of fact, she is at the back of it. Her hatred of everything Irish amounts to lunacy. She wouldn't allow a word of patriotic sentiment to be brought out in what she calls her theatre! As I gathered this on several occasions at her own dinner table, I can't say it openly, but I know it and know Yeats has not a free hand as he pretends.^[81]

Horniman made no secret of her feelings to Yeats. She told him his countrymen were disloyal, slovenly, vulgar.^[82] They wanted to destroy everything good and refined. Their folk music was "common," "vulgar"; their country costumes—"clean boots and tidy aprons"—were mere "Gaelic League vanity": everyone knew the Irish were a dirty lot.^[83] In time, Horniman realized that her gibes at Irish manners, music, clothes, work habits, temperament, political culture, in fact, her "intense distaste for any manifestation of 'national feeling,'" as she called it, were repellent to Yeats.^[84] Indeed, they must often have caused him to put on his "crushed, pained, and distressed look of misery." She brought herself to "accept 'national feeling' as a part of [Yeats's] nature," but on his side, she complained, Yeats refused to return the favor and "accept as part of my nature what is personal to me": an equally ardent contempt for the Irish. If he gave her his help, she promised, "we will conquer your country, with the help of mine," hanging fire for one beat before the last well-aimed shot—"not for the first time."^[85]

The Irish would be all right, in their place, and that was

[81] Boyle to Holloway, 10 February 1907; Holloway, 90.

[82] Horniman to WBY, 4 August 1906.

[83] Horniman to WBY, 17 July 1906.

[84] Horniman to WBY, 22 September 1906.

[85] Horniman to WBY, 18 April 1906.

where she, the Londoner who "loved a bobby," meant to keep them. The following anecdote may serve to illustrate Horniman's essential master/servant relation to the Irish: as an employer, she was accustomed to a better quality of service than they provided. On her first visit to Dublin, Horniman came down for breakfast at the Temperance Hotel. A leg of her dining table being short, she spoke with the Irish waitress, who, most apologetically, said, "I'll soon put it to rights, ma'am." The waitress then went to the sideboard, cut a half slice of bread, slipped it under the short leg, remarking cheerfully, "There, that will steady it now!"^[86] Clearly, the Irish had to be taught to behave, to serve, to leave off with their damnable familiarity, to work for an honest wage, to play supporting roles, to be manageable, and to provide for the comfort and entertainment of the English. The nationalists were, as she said of D. P. Moran, not the sort of people "a gentleman could take to a club," but at least they could be taught to work in one.^[87]

Fay took responsibility for "what she call[ed] the discipline of the company."^[88] On the 1906 tour, Horniman drew up in quasi-legal form, witnessed, with dates and places, documents somewhere between a policeman's summons for minor infractions and a schoolmistress's list of demerits:

Cardiff. Sinclair at station. Music on journey during night.

Glasgow to Aberdeen, stop at Edinburgh, shouts in Gaelic, good advertisement.

Edinburgh to Hull . . . talked to crowd who were drunk. At Carlisle with hair down.

Seen by Mrs. Wareing & Miss Gilden.
Notes taken July 8th, 1906.

Nothing she names against the company is a dereliction of their jobs as actors, much less a misdemeanor in their legal duties as citizens. She simply describes in a punitive form the

[86] Fay and Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre , 143.

[87] Horniman to WBY, 2 December 1907.

[88] Synge to Mollie Allgood, 22 May 1907, in Letters to Molly: John Millington Synge to Maire O'Neill, 1906–1909 , ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1971), 139.

behavior of young people, young people from Ireland, on a trunk holiday in England: carefree, flirtatious, bibulous, full of song and backchat. But English employers had remarkable powers to demand an exhaustive discipline of employees; they could institute, to borrow Foucault's language, "a whole micro-penalty" "of time (latenesses, absences, interruptions of tasks), of activity (inattention, negligence, lack of zeal), of behavior (impoliteness, disobedience), of speech (idle chatter, insolence), of the body ('incorrect' attitudes, irregular gestures, lack of cleanliness), of sexuality (impurity, indecency)."^[89] Horniman's outraged eye detected in the Irish actors' conduct literally every item in Foucault's catalogue of minor misbehaviors.

Foucault's Discipline and Punish is a key to understanding why Irish ways were a scandal to Horniman, and what motivated her schemes for their improvement. Foucault explains that a rational system, developed in the Enlightenment, of timetables, exercises, penalties, and rewards, derived in part from medieval monastic practises and perfected in the training of students, soldiers, and workers, ultimately shaping the bodies of the population and the architecture of institutions, was fundamental to the establishment of the modern industrial state. The productive capacity of new technologies was, in other words, only half the story of the rise of the state; the other half was disciplining people to operate like automata. The entire mode of being of populations had to run like clock-work; they had to execute tasks in just one way, to accept the system of rank and file without question, to desist from the search for comfort and pleasure, to labor for wages alone. Without the compliant, trained bodies of workers, the modern industrial state would not function. Foucault's work is illuminating of the history of Germany, France, and especially England from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries; it does not, however, cover the case of Ireland, which

[89] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 178.

was not a modern industrial state. The people of Ireland were exposed to few of Foucault's disciplinary practises over the centuries: they had no armies of their own, an undeveloped educational system, and few factories.

It was observed by many outsiders—Florence Darragh, Ben Iden Payne, Yeats, and Lady Gregory—that the Irish players had a most "unbusinesslike" attitude to their work. When the young English director Ben Iden Payne took over management of the theatre society from Fay, their casual ways "astonished and infuriated" him.^[90] He discovered on his first day at the job that actors were allowed to arrive ten minutes after the hour for the start of rehearsal because the trams sometimes ran late. But some of the Abbey actors dawdled in at twenty past the hour, and then claimed their ten-minute allowance on top of the official grace period. They stopped after an hour of rehearsal for tea in the greenroom and stayed to chat for a long time over a sumptuous plate of cakes. Once the rehearsal was resumed, W. G. Fay quarreled with Frank Fay, striking him; the company then turned on W. G.—not for quarreling, but for taking advantage of the rake of the stage during the fisticuffs. Lady Gregory encountered the same inability on the part of the actors to separate personal life and social relations from the sphere of the workplace:

I came round before matinee. M. wanted to speak to me to "tender his resignation" in consequence of Miss N. having insulted him during "Cross Roads" last night, before the stage-hands, asked me what the devil he meant because he had missed his cue. . . . Also he was knocked down in "Cross Roads" by O. instead of being choked sitting in a chair, and this he seems to think was revenge, because he had at some previous time hit O. with the pipe he throws at him in "Work-house Ward." I spoke to Miss N. who accuses him of a variety of small offences connected with cues. . . . On my way back to the auditorium I met Miss Q. and asked her about the quarrel. She says M. is desperately in love with N. He has been much worse since Mr. Yeats did her horoscope saying she was to marry a fair man. He walked up and down saying, "I am that

[90] Payne, Life in a Wooden O , 71.

fair man." She went to him the other day and told him he was foolish and ought to put N. out of his head, but at the end he said, "I know very well that you are in love with me yourself!"^[91]

These relations—personal, touchy, inexplicable, and inefficient—were maddening to the English (Darragh, Payne, and especially Horniman); the Anglo-Irish regarded them with a mixture of tolerant humor and apparent concern. Yeats relates an episode during Miss Darragh's adventures with the company that shows the differences between English, Anglo-Irish, and Irish attitudes to social relations at work. Miss Darragh was not popular, Yeats explains, because "she says such things as, 'Why do you not get that castor screwed on to the table leg?' instead of making enquiries and finding out that the castor cannot be screwed on because the woman who washes the floors and the stage carpenter have quarrelled about it—and the stage carpenter would sooner die than screw it on. She is considered to lack tact and the finer feelings."^[92] Miss Darragh, accustomed to the arrangements of an English professional company, would scarcely have thought that tact was in order. She was a star, a friend of the owner, and an associate of the director. That gave her rank. The stage carpenter was simply a worker, a rung in the hierarchy of labor. His insubordination was for Darragh a cause, not of drollery, but of indignation: to her, they were "'nothing but amateurs,' 'the most ill bred lot she ever met'—'the worst manners,' 'the rudest,' etc., etc."^[93]

In the conduct of the acting company, Horniman was up against an alarming case of uneven development between the imperial and colonial economies. For several months following her explosion of antipathy to Fay, she introduced a scheme of disciplinary practices to bring the Irish up to date from a three-century lag. Since "discipline is an art of rank,"^[94]

[91] Lady Gregory, Seventy Years: Being the Autobiography of Lady Gregory , ed. Colin Smythe (Gerrards Cross, Bucks.: Colin Smythe, 1973), 416.

[92] WBY to Florence Farr [October 1906]; Wade, 481.

[93] Lady Gregory to Synge [6 December 1906]; Saddlemyer, 164.

[94] Foucault, Discipline and Punish , 145.

her first objective was to put W. G. Fay in his place: "Whatever we do," she wrote Yeats, "will be frittered away until Fay comes to the conclusion that the directors must direct. . . . Fay must be brought to his senses."^[95] For the rest of the company, there should be an exhaustive use of time, since time measured and paid for must be (in Foucault's expression) "time of good quality, throughout which the body is constantly applied to its exercise."^[96] Horniman proposed that during the weeks when they were neither performing nor rehearsing, the players should take dancing lessons and study "bits of impossible plays."^[97] There would be a double advantage to these exercises: the actors would not be paid for idle time, and by repetitive lessons, they might be trained out of their "natural ways," which Horniman considered to be an entirely inadequate basis for acting. She wanted them to execute each performance in exactly the same way, as if a role were a six-step procedure in a manual, like raising and shouldering a musket.^[98] The discipline of exercises would give them "backbone," "something to fall back upon." Such training, she said, was her "idea of Art": "the very commonplace professional idea of earning a living and making a bigger salary."^[99]

Finally, there should be a more thoroughgoing supervision of the players, both on stage and off, to ensure that the will of the executive was carried out. At present, working with the Irish was futile, Horniman complained to Florence Darragh, because they did not tell the truth, and either nothing she asked was done ("once your back is turned it will be 'forgotten'") or when what she asked was done, it was "done in a slovenly manner."^[100] Horniman's solution to these "upstairs/downstairs" exasperations was to keep the players under sur-

[95] Horniman to WBY, 21 June 1906.

[96] Foucault, Discipline and Punish , 151.

[97] Horniman to WBY, 3 September 1906.

[98] Flannery, Horniman and the Abbey Theatre , 19–20.

[99] Horniman to WBY, 14 August 1906; Finneran, Harper, and Murphy, 1:165.

[100] Horniman to Florence Darragh, 18 August 1906.

veillance. Darragh was sent into the Abbey both as a star actress and as a spy for Horniman, expected to report back to the head office on behavior in the shop.^[101] In addition to supervision on the job, Horniman also took an unusual interest in what the actors did on their own time: she reported to Yeats that Brigid O'Dempsey (W. G. Fay's young fiancée) had been seen by a Horniman acquaintance "going into a shop with a common-looking girl."^[102] The triviality of the information is an index to the totality of Horniman's surveillance: if she could not see the actors at all times, in a sort of penal panopticon, she wished them to understand that they might be observed at any time and interrogated about any activity. All these disciplinary practices—enforcement of rank, exhaustive use of time, repetitive exercises, and surveillance—may have been necessary if Horniman was to make the backward Irish into the efficient labor force for "the factory—the school—for an International Theatre"; however, it was a mere fantasy of domination for Horniman to think she could run an overseas theatrical empire and make no end of headway against history's figuration of the Irish heart. Still more drastic measures were in order if she were to enter into full possession of her property at the Abbey.

8

After the end of the Abbey's 1906 summer tour, Horniman left for the Continent, where she recuperated from her debacle with the Irish by enjoying the superior arrangements at the Wagner theatre in Bayreuth and at the Prague National Theatre, the high-society sort of affairs she had had in mind all along for Dublin. She realized that "Prague is not Dublin, luckily for Prague," but she nonetheless hatched plans to turn

[101] At the time of Miss Darragh's entrance to the acting company, Synge wrote Molly Allgood to be careful to be both "affable, and reserved at the same time," around Miss Darragh, "so that she will not know whether you like her or not." This counsel was necessary because "She is playing her own game," or, in fact, Horniman's (Synge to Molly Allgood [6 November 1906], in Letters to Molly , 48).

[102] Horniman to [WBY?], [19 September 1906?].

the Abbey into a continental municipal theatre. These matured through the late summer and fall in conversations with Yeats and Florence Darragh and were then presented to the other directors by Yeats in a 6 December 1906 memorandum.^[103]

The proposals affected nearly every major aspect of the enterprise—the name of the company, its director, actors, repertoire, and schedule. Apparently, Horniman wanted the theatre company to be called simply "The Abbey Theatre Company"; Yeats surrendered the word "Irish" from the title, leaving "The National Theatre Society, Ltd."^[104] In view of the further changes, it would indeed become impossible to continue to call the Abbey an Irish Theatre Society: professionals from the English stage were to be called in for starring roles at high salaries; the repertoire was to be enlarged by the addition of classics and foreign plays; and an English professional director would be placed in charge of the company and made a member of the board of directors. In presenting the plan, Horniman used both the carrot and the stick: the carrot was that she had £25,000 to spend on making the Abbey a "distinguished Art Institution"; the stick was that unless the INTS directors elected to make the change within thirty days,^[105] the

[103] The plan for conversion of the INTS to an International Art Institution should not be confused with an earlier plan, initiated before her European trip, for "Home Rule" at the Abbey. The terms of this earlier proposal were tentatively set forth in her letter to Yeats of 24 June 1906: she would pay a £500/annum subsidy quarterly in advance; the company would then receive the profits from concessions; the INTS gained the right to sell sixpenny seats, but tenants would not; and the directors would be in control of day-to-day operations. The real purpose of this liberal arrangement was to save Horniman the unbearable exasperation of personally writing daily cheques for activities she neither approved nor controlled; the "Home Rule" scheme did not in any way signal the end of her involvement in the theatre, only a change in the method of her involvement. For Darragh's role in the new scheme, see Saddlemyer, 164–65.

[104] Darragh to WBY, 22 September 1906: "Surely it would be better to call it 'The Abbey Theatre' . . . if Miss H. had only put her theatre in London even small as it is there would have been none of this silly worry about names & Leagues etc." (Finneran, Harper, and Murphy, 1:172).

[105] On 19 December 1906 Horniman issued her formal offer to hire a stage manager at £400–500 per annum to stage-manage all plays except those stage-managed by authors at their request and peasant plays by Fay. The directors had to vote on the offer before 21 January 1907, on which date it would be withdrawn.

offer would be retracted, no money would be provided for tours, and the subsidy would be stopped at the end of the patent period (1910).

There can be little doubt that Yeats was, on balance, in favor of Horniman's proposal; indeed, much of it was of his own making. He made suggestions to her that he knew would redress her grievances while at the same time strengthening his own position in the theatre. Neither Yeats nor Horniman was pleased that the theatre was "accomplished in the performance of Irish peasant comedy and in nothing else," particularly not in the verse-tragedies of Yeats, supposedly the raison d'être of Horniman's investment.^[106] Yeats was inclined to lay the blame for the slow growth of his reputation upon the abilities of the company. "Women of the class of Miss Garvey and Miss Walker"—Irish Catholic actresses—he once complained, "have not sensitive bodies," even though they had "high ideals" and "simplicity of feeling."^[107] They would not serve as vehicles of his vision of passionate womanhood so well as a Maud Gonne, a Florence Farr, or ultimately, a Miss Darragh.^[108] Trying to finish Deirdre , he could make little headway so long as he envisioned the plump, sweet Sara Allgood in the role, but once he began to think of Miss Darragh as the hot-blooded queen, bravura speeches rushed into his head. The idea of getting the famous Mrs. Patrick Campbell to draw attention to his play was even more exciting. After worrying with the issue in a letter to his father, in which he could not decide whether to "leap to the advertisement of Mrs. Pat, or keep to my own people," he wedded the alternatives by supporting a new policy of bringing guest celebrities into NTS shows. Yeats also wanted to try his hand at the translation of Sophocles, to stage Maeterlinck in Dublin,

[106] WBY to Synge, 2 December [1906]; dictated to Lady Gregory; Saddlemyer, 168.

[107] WBY to Synge, 21 August [1904]; Saddlemyer, 67.

[108] Yeats again declared the hopelessness of finding "a passionate woman actress in Catholic Ireland" when he presented the scheme for transformation of the company to Synge and Lady Gregory (WBY to Synge, 2 December [1906]; Saddlemyer, 174).

and, in general, to reestablish (or perhaps, invent) a tradition of high, spare, symbolist tragedy in which his own plays would take their proper place, so he saw personal advantages in the proposal to broaden the repertoire of the Abbey. Yeats therefore put forward the elements of the plan involving a star system and an international repertoire partly to satisfy Horniman's insistent desire to "raise the theatre to the dignity of an Art Institution" and partly to advance his own work. The proposal to demote Fay and bring in another director was Horniman's idea, but one that Yeats was not unwilling to second. Fay was essential to the work of Lady Gregory and Synge, but the tough, stunted, capering little man had none of the qualities that would make him useful to Yeats's own plays—"He is not a romantic actor, he is not a tragic actor," Yeats complained^[109] —and Fay's cantankerous temperament made him somewhat unmanageable. In the proposals for the transformation of the INTS, Horniman told Yeats, "I think of your advantage and your fame," especially his advantage over the other directors. Yeats not only went along with her, he was her co-conspirator against his fellow directors.

Synge and Lady Gregory were not at all taken with the proposals made to them by Yeats on Horniman's behalf (and by Horniman on Yeats's behalf) even in consideration of the big bribe of £25,000 for the theatre, and the bigger threat that without such a change in the NTS, they would lose the subsidy and the patent. Although they doubtless wanted to protect Fay because he was such an important actor in their own plays, their main concern was not for personal advantage. Lady Gregory, in fact, forthrightly conceded that "the right of first production of Yeats's work is our chief distinction,"^[110] a concession Synge's own literary judgment would not quite allow him to make, although even Synge was "ready to agree to almost any experiment that [Yeats] thinks desirable in order to ensure good performances" of his own plays.^[111] Lady

[109] WBY to Synge, 2 December [1906]; typescript dictated to Lady Gregory; Saddlemyer, 170.

[110] Lady Gregory to Synge [6 December 1906]; Saddlemyer, 168.

[111] Synge to Lady Gregory, 13 December 1906; Saddlemyer, 177.

Gregory and Synge objected instead on the grounds of the national character of the society. To Synge it was a "disastrous policy" to turn a national creative movement into "a highly organised executive undertaking where the interest lies in the more and more perfect interpretation of works already received as classics." The production of more foreign plays would not, as Yeats claimed, educate Irish audiences; it would confuse them. He objected that if Yeats and Horniman brought in foreign stars at high salaries, the Irish actors would have to be paid equally, making the total cost more than even Miss Horniman's £25,000 could cover. Most important, Synge did "not see a possibility of any working arrangement in which Miss Horniman would have control of some of the departments." In his judgment, it would be better for the NTS to pursue a more broadly national policy, in the hope of support from a Home Rule Irish government at the end of the patent period:

If we are to get a grant from the Government in Ireland—it will [be] a small one only, and we shall never get it if we become too English. I object to giving Miss Horniman any control over the company whatever. If she is given power it ceases to be an Irish movement worked by Irish people to carry out their ideas, so that if any such arrangement becomes necessary I shall withdraw.^[112]

Lady Gregory spoke of the changes in still more vehemently national terms, comparing them to great setbacks in the long history of the Irish struggle for independence from England: if foreign actors were imported, she said it would "be a case of calling the Normans into Ireland," so that the Anglo-Irish Board of Authors would be remembered in later days as traitors to their country.^[113] Lady Gregory seized upon another nationalist analogy—the famous split in the Parnellite party in Committee Room 15 on 1 December 1890—when speaking of

[112] Original draft of Synge's letter of 13 December 1906 to Lady Gregory; Saddlemyer, 178–79.

[113] Lady Gregory to Synge [19? December 1906]; Saddlemyer, 181.

the plan to oust Fay from control: if Fay refused to go along with the scheme, "we should all refuse—& not be like Dillon & Co, giving up Parnell to please an English howl."^[114] The Anglicization of the theatre was entirely inimical to Synge and Lady Gregory and irrelevant to Yeats's artistic needs.

In fact, while Yeats had conspired with Horniman in the scheme for transformation, his part had been to suggest that the company needed more professional actors, trainers, and directors; her part was to make sure that in each case these added workers would be English. Furthermore, Horniman insisted on distinctions of status being made between the English performers and the Irish regulars. When Yeats was enticed by the notion of Horniman's friend Miss Darragh playing his Deirdre , Horniman insisted that "she must be billed as a star and there must be extra advertising." The English would be in big letters, the Irish in small print. Furthermore, Horniman was not going to throw her stars in among the rabble; "some rearrangement of dressing rooms [was] implied." Holloway was instructed to go forward with building plans "for a leading lady to have a room to herself."^[115] Horniman also made a point of salary distinctions between the English and Irish stage managers. The directors were permitted to hire the man to run the Abbey, but they had to follow certain guidelines: he had to be English (another "Irish Fay" was out of the question),^[116] with professional experience of the English stage, someone "young, of good manners, and of such a temper as will make the position possible for him," and with a salary of £400–500 a year—vastly out of line with the Abbey scale, and much more than was necessary to obtain the services of Ben

[114] Lady Gregory to Synge [29 December 1906]; Saddlemyer, 191.

[115] These distinctions rankled with Synge. He respected the talents of Sara Allgood (bumped by Darragh from the roles of "Deirdre" and Dectora in The Shadowy Waters ); compared with Allgood, Darragh, for all her "West End sophistication," was "an ordinary if clever actress." So for the May 1907 tour of England, Synge insisted that if there was to be special notice given leading ladies, Allgood (in the Playboy ) should be billed equally with Darragh (in Deirdre ) (Synge to Lady Gregory and WBY, 7 May 1907; Saddlemyer, 220).

[116] Horniman to WBY, 13 January 1906.

Iden Payne, a twenty-three-year-old actor who in his experience with traveling companies had never starred in a play or taken over the complete management of a performance. The purpose of the salary was to declare in emphatic language Horniman's notion of the relative value of being English.

Horniman left Synge and Lady Gregory no room for doubt that she meant to put into effect a plan that would basically change the theatre from an Irish to an English venture, responsive to the interests of its owner. When she came to know of Synge's opposition to English control of the NTS, she was furious: "It carried this to my mind. . . . The lessee has no vote, she is bound by her Saxon sense of honor. It is 'absurd' that her views or desires should be regarded except when she admires or pushes Synge's plays. . . . Fay is necessary to Synge himself but neither are anything but extrinsic to my root idea [sic ]."^[117]

A few days later, she elaborated just what her "root idea" involved: "I understand that I am ex trinsic to the Irish idea, but that on the other hand, all that side is ex trinsic to my scheme itself."^[118] What was clearly intrinsic to the new regime at the NTS was not just that it should be more efficient, professional, or versatile, but that it should be English.

9

At this pass, Lady Gregory and Synge were ready to make a stand against Horniman. Indeed, the deal was all but scuttled on the 5th of January, when Lady Gregory telegraphed Yeats, "FAY REFUSES SYNGE RELIEVED MY INSTINCTS WITH THEM BUT MOST UNWILLING TO GO AGAINST YOU."^[119] However, only days later, in a last-ditch effort "to keep [Yeats] and his work for Ireland," Lady Gregory prepared two fallback proposals: the first agreed to accept a new manager provisionally for six

[117] Horniman to Lady Gregory, 26 December 1906; Saddlemyer, 196; Hogan and Kilroy, 3:94–96.

[118] Horniman to WBY, 28 December 1906; Saddlemyer, 195.

[119] Lady Gregory to Synge [5 January 1907]; Saddlemyer, 196.

months and to allow foreign actors, but only in Yeats's plays (or foreign plays already planned); the second rejected the basis of Horniman's scheme, declaring that the NTS was not "an Irish toy," and claimed the right of the company to work in its own way another six months—with tours of England—before a reconsideration of the necessity for drastic changes at the end of this period.^[120] The first counterproposal, as being the "easiest," was presented to Yeats for his approval, but before he was able to respond, Horniman again threw a wrench in the works.

In the contest for control of the NTS, Lady Gregory showed a certain amount of pluck in standing up to Horniman, saying that if the Englishwoman did have money, the theatre, and the patent, the Irish authors had the plays and the players. Not all the plays, Horniman shot back; not the plays of Yeats. According to a "secret treaty," she told Lady Gregory, if Horniman left the Abbey, she would take Yeats and his plays with her. This was a deft thrust of the hatpin. Lady Gregory, already deeply troubled with thoughts of treason, now sank under the threat of betrayal by her closest friend. For Synge's benefit, she showed great faith in Yeats, saying she was sure he "never had given his promise consciously,"^[121] but she treated Yeats himself to the full force of her disappointment. The letter Lady Gregory wrote to her friend is an appeal "from Philip drunk to Philip sober": it seeks to awaken Yeats to his own sense of honor, or what ought to be his sense of honor:

You so often talked of independence—even in your letter yesterday—as what [we] are trying for in the end. But if that "promise" holds we go into a fight, either at the end of the patent period or sooner, with our right hand tied. You will have given Miss Horniman one of our strongest possessions or weapons. She can take your plays from Ireland altogether or force you to put them into some movement opposed to your views. You will have betrayed those who have been working for you. You will yourself be in a humiliating position, seeing

[120] Lady Gregory to Synge, [7? January 1907]; Saddlemyer, 198–200.

[121] Lady Gregory to Synge, 10 [January 1907]; Saddlemyer, 202.

your friends and comrades dictated to and not being able to take their side. Synge and I have a right to protest because we were never told of this supposed bargain at the same time we accepted the subsidy. I certainly should not have done so at that price. . . . I am taking it to heart very much. Those plays were our own children, I was so proud of them, and loved them, and now I cannot think of them without the greatest pain.^[122]

Lady Gregory here brought into play the most magnificent qualities of her character—her genius for tact, her profound sincerity, and her fundamental nobility of feeling—and applied their combined forces to the most intimate point of her relation to Yeats, in a magical conflation of lecture and love letter. She could truly speak of Yeats's plays as their children, not just because in their strange affair they had no other offspring, but because of her role in their common parentage: she had both created the environment at Coole in which they had been written and nurtured them with her own scenarios and dialogue. Lady Gregory's letter offers Yeats a wonderfully melodramatic choice: Horniman's money or my friendship and your country's welfare.

Perhaps one might wish the poet had needed less prodding, but, however late, at last Yeats stood the test. Not only did he immediately write Horniman saying he did not recollect entering into any such "Secret Treaty,"^[123] but six months later he composed a stirring declaration of his duty to his country:

My dear Miss Horniman,

I have thought carefully over your proposal of yesterday and have decided that it is impossible. . . . I am not young

[122] Lady Gregory to WBY, [? January 1907]; Saddlemyer, 202.

[123] Horniman replied that there was no "Secret Treaty," only a "well-meant offer" that in a shipwreck of the NTS, she would save "the best part of the cargo" for another theatrical venture in England. She said she had returned to the issue later and asked Yeats to "Promise me yours . . ." "after the Patent has lapsed." Yeats, she recollected, had agreed. Horniman's memory, based on her letter to Yeats of 17 June 1906, was perfectly accurate as to her proposal; no record remains as to Yeats's acceptance of it.

enough to change my nationality—it would really amount to that. Though I wish for a universal audience, in play-writing there is always an immediate audience also. If I am to try and find the immediate audience in England I would fail through lack of understanding on my part, perhaps through lack of sympathy. I understand my own race and in all my work, lyric or dramatic, I have thought of it. If the theatre fails I may or may not write plays—but I shall write for my own people—whether in love or hate of them matters little—probably I shall not know which it is. Nor can I make any permanent allocation of my plays while the Irish theatre may at any moment need my help. At any moment I may have to ask friends for funds with the whole mass of plays for bait.^[124]

One can understand why, of all the letters Yeats wrote to Horniman, he made a copy of this document for posterity. It does him as much credit as any letter he ever wrote.

The episode concerning the "Secret Treaty" between Yeats and Horniman did not have an instant effect on Horniman's attempts at self-expression through the Abbey Theatre. Yeats contrived a case of tactical amnesia about any "promise"; Horniman backed down from her absolute claim to his work; Yeats accepted the counterproposal of Lady Gregory and Synge; Fay agreed to step down (with a complimentary salary boost to £100 a year and a promise of no further interference); the young Englishman Ben Iden Payne was appointed stage manager of the NTS; Florence Darragh was retained once again as leading lady; and the repertoire was broadened to include a performance of Maeterlinck's Interior . To all appearances, then, Horniman's scheme for the Anglicization of the NTS was put into effect. But the "Secret Treaty" episode gave Lady Gregory the occasion to speak her mind on the diplomatic double game Yeats was playing, approaching Horniman as the "emissary of the other directors' greed" and appearing before the other directors as the ambassador of Horniman's

[124] WBY to Horniman, n.d.; Wade, 500. Wade dates the letter to early 1908, after Horniman's opening of the Manchester Gaiety in September 1907, but it actually belongs with other Horniman/Yeats correspondence of June–July 1907 on planning a new theatre; it is mentioned in a Lady Gregory communication to Synge that Saddlemyer dates 20 June 1907 (Saddlemyer, 223).

power. Whether for good or ill, Lady Gregory was always the conscience of the "noble" side of Yeats's character, making him feel to the quick the grandeur of certain aristocratic values: friendship among the strong, oversight of the weak, service to country, and superiority to middle-class money. The "Secret Treaty" episode enabled her to appeal to these values in breaking up the Horniman-Yeats combination and leaguing Yeats with Synge, herself, and the Irish against Horniman. As a result, the plan for the transformation of the NTS was seen as Horniman's, not Yeats's at all. With no support from the Board of Authors, the inherent weaknesses of the arrangement were suffered to take their course.^[125]

Horniman soon sensed that the change in her position was not what she had contemplated. She had pictured a situation in which she as owner had her own man in complete charge, a nice English boy who would officially report to the directors, but was under private instructions that based on his reporting to her about progress toward the NTS becoming an International Art Institution, she would decide whether or not to continue footing the bill. Gradually, it appeared to her that as soon as she signed the draft agreements for the new scheme, she was as much as dismissed by the Board of Authors. Alone in London, she suspected constant plots against her by the conspirators in Dublin, now joined by Yeats: they had suckered Payne into a dangerous spot, she charged, by allowing him to cast himself as lead in Oedipus the King , and his wife as lead in Deirdre ; they twisted the language of Fay's

[125] Horniman accused the directors of bad faith in carrying out the plan, blaming them (1) for allowing Payne to give himself the lead in Oedipus the King , in her opinion a plot to make Payne unpopular; (2) for not changing the Abbey stationery in such a way to make clear that Payne was completely in charge—a copyeditor's mistake, Yeats angrily shot back (Horniman to WBY, 27 March 1907; WBY to Horniman [29 March 1907?]; Horniman to WBY, 30 March 1907); and (3) for allowing Fay to produce The King's Threshold , not permitted according to her interpretation of Fay's contract to produce "all plays in dialect, and such other plays as he may be specially selected to produce" (NTS and W. G. Fay, memorandum of agreement; 15 February 1907). Payne sensibly resigned from a company in which he did not belong, and Horniman immediately stopped Fay's increased salary (Horniman to WBY, 6 June 1907).

contract to allow him to stage-manage Yeats's The King's Threshold . To a degree, Horniman was simply showing her chronic paranoia and irritability. In fact, although the Board of Authors was happy to let the new scheme fail from its own flaws, they avoided doing anything that would leave them open to the charge of destroying its chance of success.^[126] But Horniman was certainly correct that her wishes—for control, for self-expression—were not being fulfilled; and she was also correct in noticing that Yeats had turned (or been turned) against her.

Within months, the curtain fell on the scheme Horniman plotted. Payne resigned, citing as his first reason that "an English manager is out of place in an Irish national theatre."^[127] Yeats then floated another dream for Horniman to finance: a second theatre, which he fancied could be in Dublin—either a second company run out of the Abbey or a new theatre building altogether. Yeats even applied a certain pressure on Horniman, arguing that she had given her word to build "a stately home on the banks of the limpid Liffey" in a 1904 interview with the Leader.^[128] Horniman, however, was obviously

[126] The measure of their good faith is given by a letter from Synge to his fellow directors written during the NTS tour of England in the spring of 1907. Although Synge hated Payne's stage management, calling his production of Wilfred Scawen Blunt's Fand "deplorable," "a bastard literary pantomime," and "the end of all Samhain Principles," he allowed that Payne was doing his best and might "come to understand our methods in time" (Synge to Lady Gregory and WBY, 7 May [1907]; Saddlemyer, 220). Lady Gregory was "sorry . . . but not surprised" at Payne's failure: "He has only the common method, & he doesn't yet believe in our work" (Lady Gregory to Synge, 10 [May 1907]; Saddlemyer, 221).

[127] Other reasons cited in Payne's 22 June 1907 letter of resignation are that it was "an impossible task" to train Abbey actors for foreign masterpieces, that he had a distaste for making so much money for so little work, and that his false position in the company "must have the effect of stultifying all my efforts" (Saddlemyer, 225–26).

[128] Horniman to [WBY?], 31 July 1907. Even after she had entered negotiations with Payne for establishing a repertory company in Manchester, Lady Gregory and Yeats continued to press the claim that by a remark to the Leader —"Yes, I hope to live to see my little theatre in the hands of the housebreakers, torn down to make room for a stately home for drama near 'the limpid Liffey'"—Horniman had incurred an obligation to build her next theatre in Dublin.

done with Dublin. Her second theatre would be safe in England, run by English managers for English audiences. She repaid Yeats for his fantastic pettifoggery over "the vague remembrance of the Leader " by bringing up the "Secret Treaty." Yeats then came through with the noble declaration, examined above, that he would write for his own people. The descent of the Horniman-Yeats relation into the nastiness of quasi-legal wrangling (rather like a divorce) plunged Horniman at last into plain recrimination. She seized upon a trivial occasion—the dismissal notice of the business manager, W. A. Henderson, in July 1907—for the expression of her anguish. Horniman suspected that Yeats had asked leave of his fellow directors, and even of Fay, before he had given Henderson a statement of her case; by this consultation, she complained, he had removed the poison from her sting and made her a laughable, ineffectual person: "Don't you see how [prior consultation with others] is very insulting to me? To consult other people—then come here as if it were a private matter to me & not tell me of the others at all; that puts me alone against a group of people, all determined to get that legacy money out of me somehow." She thought his new "diplomacy" was Lady Gregory's doing: "You are ceaselessly victimised on the score of your gratitude for her kindness." But Lady Gregory's motherly care for Yeats's comfort at Coole Park was really, Horniman warned, a terrible, delicate trap: "You are under the nets again. The poor little strawberries will soon be eaten and you will starve amongst the leaves & the gardeners won't come to let you out when they understand that nothing more is to be got out of me."^[129]

If the tone is vile, the tenor is true: Horniman knew Yeats would miss her money; the little boy loved his strawberries. But Yeats was "touched by that vampire Kathleen ni Houlihan": the kiss of nationalism had made him "bond-slave" to the gang of Irish ghouls. This desperate language is the seal of Horniman's defeat: in the struggle for the soul of Yeats, she turned at last to scratching and biting.

[129] Horniman to WBY, [19? June 1907].

10

It would be inadequate to portray the dispute over the scheme for foreign management at the Abbey as simply a struggle between two older women for the love of W. B. Yeats. Of course, Annie Horniman loved Yeats, but both the scheme and the poet meant much more to her than an affair of the heart. She wanted to achieve self-expression, through her money, through Yeats, through transformation of the Abbey Theatre. Her jealousy of Lady Gregory was as much an aspect of her thwarted desire for self-expression as it was of unrequited, stolen love. Lady Gregory wrote plays, Florence Farr cantillated, Maud Gonne orated, but Horniman could not simply have the Abbey's curtain drawn to reveal stacks of her money on stage, night after despairing night. Her money, however, would be the procurer between her need and her object: someone of talent, someone like Yeats, had to do the job of artistic expression for her. Certainly, in many ways, he would not and could not. Horniman once remarked to Yeats, in the midst of other temperamental exasperations, "When I'm dead, your elegy on me should be great literature."^[130] It is a fact that, though the list of Yeats's poems to friends is a long, distinguished list, no such elegy was written, no poem at all for his patron, not even an allusion to her during her life or after her death. If he did not speak of her, for her, or to her in his poems or plays, he could and did nonetheless write plays and stage plays answerable to her taste within the theatre she provided, plays that were for the few, that were artistic, in vogue, and not too strenuously Irish.

Yeats liked to brag that his theatre, because of its subsidy, was a place where the authors put on plays they thought good and kept them on stage whether the audience liked them or not; at the Abbey, contrary to the adage, he argued, the piper called the tune.^[131] It should be obvious by now that in fact Horniman, who paid the piper, called the tune. But

[130] Horniman to WBY, 13 May 1907.

[131] WBY, "Notes," Samhain: 1906 , in Frayne and Johnson, 2:347–48.

her ability to bring forth a music to delight her ears was hampered all around. She lacked not only any capacity for self-expression but also the ability to have a stimulating and encouraging effect upon the people around her. Who composed, who played, to whose ears, at what place, and under whose control: all these she tried to order to her liking, and sometimes did, but she somehow lacked the ability to name the right tune: the Abbey did not play her song. When Holloway told the old folklorist George Sigerson that Horniman paid the piper and had a right to call the tune, Sigerson looked around the empty seats at the Abbey and muttered, "But they don't dance." For although Horniman might howl that the Abbey must articulate her wishes, the actors, playwrights, and audiences of the Abbey would not and could not fully meet the request.

In an interpretation of a passage from Timon of Athens , Marx explores the distorting power of money. In the psychology of capitalism, what you can buy is what you are:

Thus what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women [or most appealing of men]. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness—its deterrent power—is nullified by money. . . . I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has power over the clever not more clever than the clever? . . . Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?^[132]

No, if Horniman is the example, money does not quite transform all incapacities into their contrary. True, its chemically transformative power gave authority to otherwise negligible features of her personality: it converted quirks to shrewdness, piques to official prohibitions, and class prejudice to artistic policy. Her money brought about what Marx calls "the frater-

[132] Karl Marx, "Money," Early Writings , trans. and ed. T. B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 190–94.

nisation of impossibilities": it made contradictions embrace, as a rich vulgarian joined forces with the twentieth century's greatest poet. But if Annie Horniman was little without her money, she was not all that she sought to be with it: she could not buy love or self-expression. For Marx is partly wrong to say that "money is the external, universal medium and faculty (not springing from man as man or from human society as human society) for turning an image into reality," because while it is the medium, it is not a sufficient faculty. One must have not only money, but a "real, essential power" within, and that internal, individual power Horniman did not possess; as a result, her image of herself as a woman of the theatre never became real at the Abbey. Marx concludes his discussion of the distorting power of money with a vision of the world with unhappiness and frustration, but without the confusions and transpositions of natural human qualities caused by capital:

Let us assume man to be man , and his relation to the world to be a human one. Then love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust, etc. If you wish to enjoy art you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you wish to influence other people you must be a person who really has a stimulating and encouraging effect upon others. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression , corresponding to an object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return, i.e. if you are not able, by the manifestation of yourself as a loving person, to make yourself a beloved person , then your love is impotent and a misfortune.^[133]

Annie Horniman's desire was, for all her capital, to herself impotent, a misfortune —she suffered that finely unmediated acquaintance with the inadequacy of her "real individual life." She could by means of her money distort (expand, constrict, thwart) the expression of Irish drama, but, though she screamed and screamed, she could not make it ring true as her self-expression. What she took for a mirror was a cave

[133] Ibid., 193–94.

mouth of mysteries, the forbidden entrance to the dark, alien workshop of art.^[134]

11

The lasting effect of Horniman's schemes at the Abbey shows itself in one of Lady Gregory's best plays, Dervorgilla , first produced on 31 October 1907, but composed (she recollects) "at a time when circumstances had forced us to accept an English stage-manager" and when she sought to move Yeats "from the path of expediency."^[135] The secret politics of the business displays itself in the legendary drama, but only as closely knotted needlework appears, verso , in the rich illusion of a tapestry.

In Irish folk history, Dervorgilla bears the responsibility of bringing the curse of English rule upon Ireland. The wife of O'Rourke, king of Breffny, she ran away with her lover Diarmuid, king of Leinster, who consequently made a bargain with Norman warriors to defend him against the wrath of O'Rourke in exchange for property in Ireland, the foothold of their future ascendancy. Lady Gregory sets her play at a date in the old age of Dervorgilla, who has retired in remorse to a monastic life behind walls. Only two loyal family retainers—Mona and her husband Flann—know the secret of her identity. Dervorgilla emerges from her solitude at the beginning of the play to dispense money to the poor and prizes to young people for their sports, in the hope of one day being remembered for good deeds. While she is holding court, a song-maker wanders on the scene seeking to impose on her hospi-

[134] To draw back from the essential sadness of this story and put the situation in larger terms, we can say that the relation of base to superstructure is complex, both enabling and disabling. The economic base of the Abbey does not throw a perfect echo in its superstructure. It does, however, determine the activities of the theatre in two restricted senses of the term: to place limits upon and to attempt to force by will . Mainly, it simply lies under , but not quietly or motionlessly, first to raise up and later to subvert the cultural processes of the superstructure.

[135] Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre , 92–93.

tality. Upon payment by Dervorgilla, he offers her a song: it is, horribly, the tale of the coming of the Gall into Ireland through the wickedness of Dervorgilla. The songmaker, getting no praise for his craft, leaves to play his old tricks for a new crowd: the English soldiers. Dervorgilla worries that he will spread the report of her perfidy across the country, and she permits old Flann to go after him and pay the songmaker to leave Ireland altogether. Only moments later, a young man returns with the news that Flann has been killed by the English for trying to stop the songmaker from telling a story. Dervorgilla is tormented that another has died for her sake. When Mona says that she will not blame Dervorgilla for the death of Flann, any more than for O'Rourke's death or Diarmuid's lechery, she unintentionally gives away the secret of Dervorgilla's identity to the young people gathered around. One by one, during a final long sad speech by Dervorgilla, the boys and girls of Ireland lay down their presents—cups and necklaces, hurley stick and silver ball—at the feet of the queen, and walk away, delivering "the swift, unflinching, terrible judgment of the young."^[136]

Even though the play is connected to aspects of Abbey "theatre business"—poets who sing for pay, the evil of English invasion, the resentment of young Irish nationalists—it is not an allegory: the audience was in no way invited behind the scenes to gain a perspective on that level of reference. Abbey politics are its motive, not its meaning: the play springs from an inchoate feeling of class guilt, the well of Lady Gregory's creativity, as she sought to make reparations through her privilege, wealth, and talent to the Irish nation. Is there a warrant for seeing Lady Gregory dividing her feelings about Yeats into Diarmuid and the Songmaker, the first a young man not her husband, love of whom brought trouble from the English; the second a poet who imposes on the hospitality of a woman, who is always in need of money, who

[136] Lady Gregory, The Collected Plays , ed. Ann Saddlemyer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 2:110.

sings for anyone that pays (Irish or English), but who always, nonetheless, sings the truth in songs his country will remember? The answer is on the other side of the curtain; what lies on this side, and can be seen, is that the power of the play's conclusion is its dramatization of the fact that the very privilege that makes it possible to make gifts compromises those gifts and leads to further domination. This bitter awakening to her own guilt, and certainly to the venality of songmaker Yeats, was the fruit of Lady Gregory's association with Horniman. She knew only too intimately that Horniman's "generosity" meant foreign domination at the Abbey. In going along with Horniman, Lady Gregory admitted, she "felt as if [she] should be spoken of some day as one who had betrayed her country's trust." Nothing I say can, however, cheat her of the reward of courage in "seeing and knowing that a deed once done has no undoing": the subornation of the Board of Authors of the Abbey Theatre in the ongoing policy that the National Theatre Society not be national.^[137]

[137] Once Horniman had decisively shifted her capital to the Manchester theatre, Yeats wrote Synge: "There is a remote chance of money coming to us from some other quarter at the end of the patent period and that chance would be much better if we made ourselves a representative Irish institution" (WBY to Synge, 15 August 1907; Saddlemyer, 235). This letter clearly implies that the NTS had not been, had not tried to be, and had not been free to become "a representative Irish institution" while Horniman was involved with it.