Rock: You would seem to have done with your complaints about the universe, and your great plan to change it overthrown.

Conan: Not a complaint!  What call have I to go complaining?  The world is a very good world, the best nearly I ever knew.
        (Sings.)

  “O, a little cock sparrow he sat on a tree,
  O, a little cock sparrow he sat on a tree,
  O, a little cock sparrow he sat on a tree,
  And he was as happy as happy could be,
  With a chirrup, a chirrup, a chirrup!

  “A chirrup, a chirrup, a chirrup! 
  A chirrup, a chirrup, a chirrup! 
  A chirrup, a chirrup, a chirrup! 
  A chirrup, a chirrup, a——!”

CURTAIN

NOTE TO ARISTOTLE’S BELLOWS

I had begun to put down some notes for this play when in the autumn of 1919 I was suddenly obliged (through the illness and death of the writer who had undertaken it) to take in hand the writing of the “Life and Achievement” of my nephew Hugh Lane, and this filled my mind and kept me hard at work for a year.

When the proofs were out of my hands I turned with but a vague recollection to these notes, and was surprised to find them fuller than they had appeared in my memory, so that the idea was rekindled and the writing was soon begun.  And I found a certain rest and ease of mind in having turned from a long struggle (in which, alas, I had been too often worsted) for exactitude in dates and names and in the setting down of facts, to the escape into a world of fantasy where I could create my own.  And so before the winter was over the play was put in rehearsal at the Abbey Theatre, and its first performance was on St. Patrick’s Day, 1921.

I have been looking at its first scenario, made according to my habit in rough pen and ink sketches, coloured with a pencil blue and red, and the changes from that early idea do not seem to have been very great, except that in the scene where Conan now hears the secret of the hiding-place of the Spell from the talk of the cats, the Bellows had been at that time left beside him by a dwarf from the rath, in his sleep.  The cats work better, and I owe their success to the genius of our Stage Carpenter, Mr. Sean Barlow, whose head of the Dragon from my play of that name had been such a masterpiece that I longed to see these other enchanted heads from his hand.

The name of the play in that first scenario was “The Fault-Finder,” but my cranky Conan broke from that narrowness.  If the play has a moral it is given in the words of the Mother, “It’s best make changes little by little, the same as you’d put clothes upon a growing child.”  The restlessness of the time may have found its way into Conan’s mind, or as some critic wrote, “He thinks of the Bellows as Mr. Wilson thought of the League of Nations,” and so his disappointment comes.  As A.E. writes in “The National Being,” “I am sympathetic with idealists