themselves through our minds, and we move others, not because we have understood or thought about them at all, but because all life has the same root. Coventry Patmore has said, ‘The end of art is peace,’ and the following of art is little different from the following of religion in the intense preoccupation that it demands. Somebody has said, ‘God asks nothing of the highest soul except attention’; and so necessary is attention to mastery in any art, that there are moments when one thinks that nothing else is necessary, and nothing else so difficult. The religious life has created for itself monasteries and convents where men and women may forget in prayer and contemplation everything that seems necessary to the most useful and busy citizens of their towns and villages, and one imagines that even in the monastery and the convent there are passing things, the twitter of a sparrow in the window, the memory of some old quarrel, things lighter than air, that keep the soul from its joy. How many of those old religious sayings can one not apply to the life of art? ‘The Holy Spirit,’ wrote S. Thomas à Kempis, ‘has liberated me from a multitude of opinions.’ When one sets out to cast into some mould so much of life merely for life’s sake, one is tempted at every moment to twist it from its eternal shape to help some friend or harm some enemy. Alas, all men, we in Ireland more than others, are fighters, and it is a hard law that compels us to cast away our swords when we enter the house of the Muses, as men cast them away at the doors of the banqueting-hall at Tara. A weekly paper in reviewing last year’s _Samhain_, convinced itself, or at any rate its readers—for that is the heart of the business in propaganda—that I only began to say these things a few months ago under I know not what alien influence; and yet I seem to have been saying them all my life. I took up an anthology of Irish verse that I edited some ten years ago, and I found them there, and I think they were a chief part of an old fight over the policy of the _New Irish Library_. Till they are accepted by writers and readers in this country it will never have a literature, it will never escape from the election rhyme and the pamphlet. So long as I have any control over the National Theatre Society it will be carried on in this spirit, call it art for art’s sake if you will; and no plays will be produced at it which were written, not for the sake of a good story or fine verses or some revelation of character, but to please those friends of ours who are ever urging us to attack the priests or the English, or wanting us to put our imagination into handcuffs that we may be sure of never seeming to do one or the other.