Douglas Hyde's “share" In The Unicorn From The Stars

ON FEBRUARY 12, 1908, W. B. Yeats wrote to A. H. Bullen refusing to allow the latter to include Where There Is Nothing in the Collected Edition of Yeats's works for the following reason: Though The Unicorn is almost altogether Lady Gregory's writing it has far more of my spirit in it than Where there is Nothing which she and I and Douglas Hyde wrote in a fortnight to keep George Moore from stealing the plot. Hyde forbade me to mention his name for fear of consequences, and you must not mention it even now ... Not until this letter was published by Wade in 1954 did Hyde's share in the first version of The Unicorn from the Stars become generally known. As late as 1936, three years after Moore's death, when all danger of his bringing a lawsuit had consequently disappeared, the malicious and delicious account of the Yeats-Moore quarrel in Dramatis Personae referred to Hyde only as "a certain cautious friend, whose name must be left out of this narrative .... " Since Yeats predeceased Hyde by many years, this is how the passage still stands in the Autobiography. I assume that Hyde was less afraid of Moore's taste for litigation than he was of offending the Roman Catholic clergy and laity of Ireland. Where There Is Nothing contains much that they would regard as blasphemous and heretical. If Yeats had revealed Hyde's share in it even in 1936, I wonder whether Hyde could have been elected President of Ireland in 1938.