In the evening there were people waiting round the door to hear the songs and the pipes again. An old man among them was speaking with many gestures, his voice rising, and a crowd gathering about him. '_Tha se beo, tha se beo_'--'he is living, he is living,' I heard him say over and over again. I asked what he was saying, and was told: 'He says that Parnell is alive yet.' I was pushed away from him by the crowd to where a policeman was looking on. 'He says that Parnell is alive still,' I said. 'There are many say that,' he answered. 'And, after all, no one ever saw the body that was buried.'
The rising again of Ireland, of her old speech, of her last leader, dreams all, as we are told. But here, on the edge of the world, dreams are real things, and every heart is watching for the opening of one or another grave.
I hold that the beginning of modern Irish drama was in the winter of 1898, at a school feast at Coole, when Douglas Hyde and Miss Norma Borthwick acted in Irish in a Punch and Judy show; and the delighted children went back to tell their parents what grand curses _An Craoibhin_ had put on the baby and the policeman.
A little time after that, when a play was wanted for our Literary Theatre, Dr. Hyde wrote, and then acted in, 'The Twisting of the Rope,' the first Irish play ever given in a Dublin theatre.
It has been acted many times since then, in Dublin, in London, in Galway, in Galway Workhouse, in Cornamona, Ballaghaderreen, Ballymoe, and other places. It has always given great delight, and its success is very natural; for the Irish-speakers, who are its audience, have an inborn love of drama, as is shown by their handing down of such long dramatic dialogues as those between Oisin and St. Patrick, from century to century. At country gatherings, those old dialogues, and the newer ones between Death and Raftery, or between the farmers of two provinces, are followed with a patient joy; and the creation of acting plays is the natural outcome of this living tradition. And Douglas Hyde's dramas grow directly from the folk-memory. The tradition and the beautiful old air, and the song of 'The Twisting of the Rope,' are very well known:--
'What was the dead cat that put me in this place, And all the pretty young girls I left after me? I came into the house where was the bright love of my heart, And the old hag put me out by the Twisting of the Rope.