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him a 'dweller in a Celtic twilight'2 and if that was an unfortunate place to dwell,in Ireland during the Troubles, then it was even less appropriate in Australia in theearly decades of this century.The fmal irony is that Esson was a nationalist who needed a heroic model andthat he didn't find one in Australia. After an initial dislike he came to have greatrespect for Henry Lawson, who achieved in the short story a great deal of whatEsson hoped to achieve in drama, including the international recognition, butLawson was never a friend or a personal role model. The nationalist Australian poetBernard O'Dowd was a strong influence on him early in his career, as was, later,the American playwright Eugene O'Neill, but Esson found his strongest personalinspiration in the charismatic leadership of William Yeats and his artistic modelin John Synge.These conficts and the personal doubts which they engendered pervaded all ofEsson's work and his relationship with Yeats and the Irish model. They were doubtsand conflicts which he never resolved.* * *Esson only personally met Yeats twice, on two separate trips to Europe whichtook on for him the character of pilgrimages. His excitement over meeting the greatpoet was partly simply the result of Yeats' flattering interest in him. Especially onthe second trip, in the early 1920s, Esson was very excited that the great Irishmanhad read some of his published one-act plays and sought him out.Yet another ironic reflection of the international base of Esson's nationalism wasthe fact that he kept meeting his key Irish mentors everywhere but in Ireland. Onhis first trip, in 1904, before he had begun to write plays at all, he attended a receptiongiven by Lady Gregory after a performance of the Irish Players in London. Therehe met John Masefield who invited him to dinner in his rooms to meet Synge. Essonand Synge discussed art and literature and literary nationalism until 2 o'clock inthe morning. Walking home together down the Edgware Road to Bloomsbury,Synge, who had at that time published no plays but had had Riders to the Seaand The Shadow of the Glen produced, revealed that he was writing a full-lengthplay. He invited Esson to Dublin to see the Abbey Theatre and to attend somerehearsals. The play turned out to be The Well of the Saints, which along with TheTinker's Wedding, had a great influence on Esson when he came to write VagabondCamp. 3Esson duly travelled to Paris, still in pursuit of the bright lights of Montmartre.He was living there when a note came from Synge confirming the dates, to Dublin.He attended the opening performance at the Abbey Theatre, in late December 1904,where he saw Yeats' On Baile's Strand, Lady Gregory's Spreading the News anda revival of the play which began it all, Yeats' Cathleen Ni Houlihan. He was rathershocked to find that the threatre was so tiny, so distant from the centre of Dublin,and that the audiences, even at the opening, were rather small. 'Even at that time',he wrote many years later, 'I had no doubt that the Abbey was the most importanttheatre in the English speaking world.' He was also conscious of the difficult taskon which the Abbey was engaged, in a philistine country, like his own:There never was an art-loving nation, so Whistler maintained; and when the curtain fellon one of the plays, I heard a young man remark: "I don't know if Ireland can be savedby Symbolist drama!'"He does not say but this was presumably one of the Yeats plays. Perhaps Essontook the comment to heart, for although he took Yeats' practical advice and wasinspired by Yeats' personality, he took Synge as his dramatic model.WESTERLY, No.2, JUNE, 1989 35