[In the following essay, first delivered as a speech for the first Abbey Theatre Dramatic Festival in 1938, Robinson—who served as a manager, producer, and director at the Abbey Theatre—describes Lady Augusta Gregory's contributions to the Abbey Theatre.]

To understand Lady Gregory fully it is necessary to visualise her background. She was born in a big country-house in Co. Galway in 1852, and married in 1881 Sir Richard Gregory. After her marriage her home was Coole Park, a few miles from her birthplace. Her husband was a man of cultivation and taste, and Coole Park, a large eighteenth-century house, was crowded with books and paintings and mementoes of the generations of Gregorys who had been soldiers and statesmen. The walls of the stairs leading from the hall to library and drawing-room were history in themselves. Balzac writing a novel about such a family would have spent fifty pages describing those crowded walls, that library, those pictures. She came from a Protestant, Unionist family but was a “sport”—different, and at a very early age Nationalist in her sympathies. Her connection with the Irish dramatic movement began in 1898. I quote her diary and her book on our Theatre: “I was in London in the beginning of 1898 and Yeats came to tea. He is very full of play-writing. He with the aid of Miss Florence Farr, an actress who thinks more of a romantic than of a paying play, is very keen about taking or building a little theatre somewhere in the suburbs to produce romantic drama, his own plays, Edward Martyn's, one of Bridges', and he is trying to stir up Standish O'Grady and Fiona Macleod to write some.”

It was the time when in London, in Paris, and in Germany the theatre was again beginning to be treated seriously. Intelligent writers were prepared to write for it, George Moore had come back from Paris to London full of excitement for the stage. Later in 1898 Lady Gregory writes: “Mr. Edward Martyn, my neighbour, came to see me, bringing with him Mr. Yeats, whom I did not then know very well, though I cared for his work very much and had already, through his directions, been gathering folklore. They had lunch with us, but it was a wet day and we could not go out. We sat through that wet afternoon, and though I had never been at all interested in theatres, our talk turned on plays. Mr. Martyn had written two, The Heather Field and Maeve. They had been offered to London managers and now he thought of trying to have them produced in Germany, where there seemed to be more room for new drama than in England. I said it was a pity we had no Irish theatre where such plays could be given. Mr. Yeats said that had always been a dream of his but he had of late thought it an impossible one, for it could not at first pay its way, and there was no money to be found for such a thing in Ireland. We went on talking about it and things seemed to grow possible as we talked, and before the end of the afternoon we had made our plan. We said we would collect money, or rather ask to have a certain sum of money guaranteed. We would then take a Dublin theatre and give a performance of Mr. Martyn's Heather Field and one of Mr. Yeats's own plays, The Countess Cathleen. I offered the first guarantee of £25.”

Beyond guaranteeing the twenty-five pounds she asked Yeats how she could help, and he could suggest nothing, yet it was her indomitable will that kept the movement together in those difficult first days. She was driving an awkward tandem and Coole played its important part. Among its woods, by its lake, plays were argued out and shaped. Yeats would spend his summers there, and Lady Gregory was sure that The Wind among the Reeds would never have been finished but for her, “and though we live in an ungrateful world, I think someone will throw a kind word after me, some day, if for nothing else”.

Mr. Bernard Shaw once called her “the charwoman of the Abbey Theatre”. Martyn might split away and make his own theatre, Yeats might live in London or Oxford, Moore grow weary of Ireland and leave it for ever, but she hung on. She had no ambitions as a writer, certainly not as a dramatic writer, but what no one else would do she did, and so it came about that in the early days of the Theatre when there was a need for comedy she set to work to supply it. Her first short comedy, Twenty-Five (1903), was of no great account, but she followed it a year later with Spreading the News, a perfect one-act comedy, and then followed through thirty years plays and tragedies, comedy after comedy, plays of Irish history and fantasy, adaptations from Molière and Goldoni—in all nearly forty pieces.

On the surface her manner was a little austere and many were afraid of her. With much of the Spartan in her, she demanded the same qualities from others. On the day that her son was born, her husband and she were entertaining some distinguished guests at luncheon. After lunch she went upstairs and had her baby—and probably came down in time to pour out tea.

Years later, returning one night from the Abbey Theatre, the Theatre's secretary was conducting her to her tram. It was in the worst days of the Black-and-Tan régime. A lorry was ambushed, shots rang out, and the secretary begged her to lie down on the pavement. Her reply was “Never!” and she drew herself up to her full height—she was not a tall woman—and at the top of her small voice shouted “Up the Rebels!” About the same time an acquaintance of mine was in a tram with her, some trouble started between Irish and English, the tram had to stop, she climbed on the seat, looking keenly out, clapping her hands, and singing under her breath some patriotic ballad.

She was a fine fighter. She fought Dublin Castle over The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet and won; she fought for The Playboy through many weary months in America, in her heart not liking the play but disliking more the censorship of the mob.

Where lies her dramatic genius? First, in her use of Irish country dialect, that speech rich in imagery and imagination, an English to which Gaelic has given a strange twist. Yeats had set her gathering folklore, and she visited much among the country people around her home and had an impeccable memory for their speech, and in that speech most of her plays are written. Synge had been the first to discover what a lovely medium it was to write in. Lady Gregory's speech has not the wild poetry of his, but perhaps it is more authentic. She, Synge, and Padraic Colum were the first to discover that you could write quite seriously and beautifully about “poor” people, quite seriously and beautifully about people who spoke with a country accent, who spoke in dialect. Shakespeare and other writers had used such people in their plays but they had always used them for cheap, comic relief, to make the gallery laugh. It was for Synge to take a poor old woman living in a little cottage in the west of Ireland, and her son and her daughters, and shape out of those humble materials the most tragic and moving short play in the English language. It was for Lady Gregory to take a policeman, a butcher, a postmistress, and a telegraph-boy in a country village and out of these apparently farcical materials to build a high, delicate comedy. She learnt much from Molière, his quick patter of dialogue culminating in some long, eloquent speech. Perhaps she learned to love words too much and in her later plays might bury her situation under a load of beautiful fantastic phrases, an imagination run riot, a rich, curious dialogue, in detail of great beauty and subtle wit but undramatic in its essence. There are moments in drama when the only thing that matters is speed; like some ship flying to port before a tempest, all must be thrown overboard to lighten the ship, it must rush under bare poles; but Lady Gregory, stern at the helm, refused to sacrifice a single bale of merchandise or shorten a yard of sail, and in the end her craft is waterlogged, ready to sink under the weight of its own wealth.

This is an exaggerated statement; no play of hers has utterly foundered, yet some of them would have been greater successes if, at their most dramatic moments, the dialogue had been thinner. Compare Hyacinth Halvey with Damer's Gold; Hyacinth is as tight as a fiddle-string and enormously effective on the stage, Damer every now and then loses himself in a maze of words.

So varied was her output that it is best to consider it under certain easily defined heads. First, her short comedies, mostly early work and almost faultless. The more one studies these plays the better one appreciates her genius for construction. She realised, as every dramatist should, that construction is the bones of a play; once get them right and clothing them with flesh—with dialogue—is an easy matter. So she took great pains over her construction, and the result is seen, for instance, in The Jackdaw or Hyacinth Halvey. How superb are the situations, how they grow every moment in richness, piling themselves up like a great wedding-cake, tier above tier, crowned at last by some triumphant absurdity. Of the longer comedies I think The Image the finest; thin the dialogue a little here and there, and it is a beautiful character-piece, profound and entertaining. (She was aware of her over-rich dialogue and once allowed me to prune Damer's Gold. Few authors would be modest enough to submit to such a thing.)

The pieces in the two volumes of Folk-History Plays never had a great popular success. Yet Kincora, The White Cockade, and The Canavans deserve to be more often played. The first two are very early work and lack just that quality which was to mar some of her late work—the quality of thickness. The White Cockade qualities are of the most delicate, the play trembles between comedy and tragedy; Kincora has stouter qualities and is a fine heroic play; The Canavans, delicious farce. But greater than all these plays is Grania, a play that can easily stand beside Deirdre of the Sorrows. Here is a tragic legend treated with all the richness of folklore, here are situations simplified to the last degree—there are but four characters and the play is a long one. I do not know how it succeeds on the stage, for Lady Gregory could never get a cast in Ireland to her liking and therefore would not let it be performed.

She loved the noble tragic failures of history, the dreamer, the man with an impossible, unrealisable ideal. And so we have old Malachi Naughton in The Image, Patrick Sarsfield in The White Cockade, Parnell in The Deliverer, Don Quixote in Sancho's Master, Christ in The Story brought by Brigit. Feeling as deeply and as passionately on political affairs as any modern Irish dramatist in our years of acute national distress, no breath of contemporary politics blows across her plays. In 1907 she had written The Rising of the Moon, its subject a man torn between his duty to his king and his love for his country, but when that situation had become a commonplace of Irish life she invented for herself some country, some island half-way between Clare-Galway and fairyland.

For from 1919 to 1921 her genius took a new turn and she wrote three plays unique in Irish drama—The Golden Apple, The Dragon, and Aristotle's Bellows. The first is not quite successful, there are too many scenes, the plot is confused; but the other two plays are entirely successful. These plays are realistic fantasy; it is only by such a contradiction of terms that they can be described. There are kings and queens and witches and magic charms and dragons and cooks mixed up with all the homely things of everyday Irish life in a most delightful way. The plays could take place nowhere but in the imagination of a genius; they brought beauty and extravagance into our Theatre when it had grown tragic and grimly realistic. They have had no imitators, more is the pity.

But her interests were not confined to the Theatre. Dr. Douglas Hyde had been a frequent visitor to Coole and had written some of his Gaelic plays there, and she grew interested in the Gaelic language and learnt enough Gaelic to retell in English some of our great Irish stories and to translate Dr. Hyde's plays into English. One of her loveliest books, half folklore and half history, is Poets and Dreamers, and for some years she had the satisfaction of following the meteoric career of her nephew Hugh Lane. She had helped to turn his mind to pictures, and he had made, as a result, Dublin's Municipal Gallery.

Though she was an old woman and had been in bad health for some years, she was stern with herself to the last and did not surrender until a few hours before the end. She died at Coole as she would have wished. It was the season when it could never have looked more lovely, the woods all tender green and the hawthorns just breaking into bloom. All her life, outside of the Abbey Theatre, had gathered there, her son's pictures, her library—“I shall be sorry to leave all those volumes among which I have lived. They have felt the pressure of my fingers. They have been my friends.” Outside in the garden was the tree scored with the initials of those other friends—Jack Yeats, Sean O'Casey, Augustus John, Bernard Shaw—these and many another cut deep into its bark. Well, she had been a good friend to them all; the dream of a National Theatre for her country had come to fruition, there was little to regret.

As her best friend of all her friends wrote:

Here traveller, scholar, poet take your stand
When all these rooms and passages are gone,
When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound
And saplings root among the broken stone,
And dedicate—eyes bent upon the ground,
Back turned upon the brightness of the sun
And all the sensuality of the shade—
A moment's memory to that laurelled head.