people who for years gave us the reasons why we did not succeed....  All their advice, or at least some of it, might have been good if we had wanted to make money, to make a common place of amusement.  Our advisers did not see that what we wanted was to create for Ireland a theatre with a base of realism, with an apex of beauty.  Well, last summer I made a fable for this meditation, this emotion, at the back of my mind to drive.

I pictured to myself, for I usually first see a play as a picture, a young man, a mere lad, very sleepy in the daytime.  He was surrounded by people kind and wise, who lamented over his rags and idleness and assured him that if he didn’t get up early and do his work in the daytime he would never know the feel of money in his hand.  He listens to all their advice, but he does not take it, because he knows what they do not know, that it is in the night time precisely he is filling his pocket, in the night when, as I think, we receive gifts from the unseen.  I placed him in the house of a miser, an old man who had saved a store of gold.  I called the old man Damer, from a folk-story of a chandler who had bought for a song the kegs of gold the Danes had covered with tallow as a disguise when they were driven out of Ireland, and who had been rich and a miser ever after.  I did not mean this old man, Damer, to appear at all.  He was to be as invisible as that Heaven of which we are told the violent take it by force.  My intention at first was that he should be robbed, but then I saw robbery would take too much sympathy from my young lad, and I decided the money should be won by the lesser sin of cardplaying, but still behind the scenes.  Then I thought it would have a good stage effect if old Damer could just walk once across the stage in the background.  His relations might have come into the house to try and make themselves agreeable to him, and he would appear and they would vanish. ...  Damer comes in, and contrary to my intention, he begins to find a tongue of his own.  He has made his start in the world, and has more than a word to say.  How that play will work out I cannot be sure, or if it will ever be finished at all.  But if ever it is I am quite sure it will go as Damer wants, not as I want.

That is what I said last winter, and now in harvest time the play is all but out of my hands.  But as I foretold, Damer has taken possession of it, turning it to be as simple as a folk-tale, where the innocent of the world confound the wisdom of the wise.  The idea with which I set out has not indeed quite vanished, but is as if “extinct and pale; not darkness, but light that has become dead.”

As to Damer’s changes of mood, it happened a little time ago, when the play was roughly written, but on its present lines, that I took up a volume of Montaigne, and found in it his justification by high examples: