Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/489

Rh the thought of the Mask, which I have used in these memoirs to explain men's characters. A few months ago at Oxford I was asking myself why it should be "An image of one who sleeps" and took down from the shelf not knowing why I was doing so, a book which I had never read, Burkitt's Early Eastern Christianity, and opened it at random. My eyes lit upon a passage from a Gnostic Hymn telling how a certain King's son being exiled, slept in Egypt, a symbol of the natural state, and while he slept an Angel brought him a royal mantle; and at the bottom of the page I found a footnote saying that the word mantle did not represent the meaning properly for that which the Angel gave had the exile's own form and likeness. I did not however find in the Gnostic Hymn, my other thought, that Egypt and that which the Mask represents are antithetical. That I think became clear, though I had had some premonitions when a countryman told Lady Gregory and myself that he had heard the crying of new-dropped lambs in November—spring in the world of Fairy being November with us.

On the sea-coast at Duras a few miles from Coole an old French count Florimond de Bastero lived for certain months in every year; Lady Gregory and I talked over my project of an Irish Theatre looking out upon the lawn of his house, watching a large flock of ducks that was always gathered for his arrival from Paris, and that would be a very small flock if indeed it were a flock at all when he set out for Rome in the autumn. 1 told her that I had given up my project because it was impossible to get the few pounds necessary for a start in little halls, and she promised to collect or give the money necessary. That was her first great service to the Irish intellectual movement. She reminded me the other day that when she first asked me what she could do to help our movement I suggested nothing, and certainly I no more foresaw her genius than I foresaw that of John Synge, nor had she herself foreseen it. Our theatre had been established before she wrote or had any ambition to write, and yet her little comedies have merriment and beauty, an unusual combination, and those two volumes where the Heroic Tales are arranged and translated in an English so simple and so noble, may do more than other books to deepen Irish imagination. They contain our ancient literature, are something better than our Mabi-