No More Learning

It would be very hard for a much more experienced
dramatist to make anything out of the ugly violence, the threadbare,
second-hand imaginations that flow in upon one out of the newspapers,
when one has founded one's work on proselytizing zeal, instead of one's
experience of life and one's curiosity about it. These two were the
only plays, out of a number that have been played in Irish, that I have
seen this year. I went to Galway Feis, like many others, to see Dr.
Hyde's _Lost Saint_, for I had missed every performance of it hitherto
though I had read it to many audiences in America, and I awaited the
evening with some little excitement. Although the _Lost Saint_ was on
the programme, an Anti-Emigration play was put in its place. I did not
wait for this, but, whatever its merits, it is not likely to have
contained anything so beautiful as the old man's prayer in the other:
'O Lord, O God, take pity on this little soft child. Put wisdom in his
head, cleanse his heart, scatter the mist from his mind and let him
learn his lessons like the other boys. O Lord, Thou wert Thyself young
one time; take pity on youth. O Lord, Thou, Thyself, shed tears; dry
the tears of this little lad. Listen, O Lord, to the prayer of Thy
servant, and do not keep from him this little thing he is asking of
Thee. O Lord, bitter are the tears of a child, sweeten them: deep are
the thoughts of a child, quiet them: sharp is the grief of a child,
take it from him: soft is the heart of a child, do not harden it. '

A certain number of propagandist plays are unavoidable in a popular
movement like the Gaelic revival, but they may drive out everything
else. The plays, while Father Peter O'Leary and Father Dineen and
Dr. Hyde were the most popular writers and the chief influence, were
full of the traditional folk-feeling that is the mastering influence
in all old Irish literature. Father O'Leary chose for his subjects
a traditional story of a trick played upon a simple villager, a
sheep-stealer frightened by what seemed to him a ghost, the quarrels
between Maeve and Aleel of Cruachan; Father Dineen chose for his a
religious crisis, alive as with the very soul of tragedy, or a well
sacred to the fairies; while Dr. Hyde celebrated old story-tellers
and poets, and old saints, and the Mother of God with the countenance
she wears in Irish eyes. Hundreds of men scattered through the world,
angry at the spectacle of modern vulgarity, rejoiced in this movement,
for it seemed impossible for anything begun in so high a spirit, so
inspired by whatever is ancient, or simple, or noble, to sink into the
common base level of our thought. This year one has heard little of the
fine work, and a great deal about plays that get an easy cheer, because
they make no discoveries in human nature, but repeat the opinions of
the audience, or the satire of its favourite newspapers. I am only
speaking of the plays of a year, and that is but a short period in what
one hopes may be a great movement, but it is not wise to say, as do
many Gaelic Leaguers, who know the weaknesses of their movement, that
if the present thinks but of grammar and propaganda the future will do
all the rest. A movement will often in its first fire of enthusiasm
create more works of genius than whole easy-going centuries that come
after it.

Nearly everything that is greatest as English prose was written in a
generation or two after the first beautiful use of prose in England:
and Mistral has made the poems of modern Provence, as well as reviving
and all but inventing the language: for genius is more often of the
spring than of the middle green of the year. We cannot settle times and
seasons, flowering-time and harvest-time are not in our hands, but we
are to blame if genius comes and we do not gather in the fruit or the
blossom. Very often we can do no more for the man of genius than to
distract him as little as may be with the common business of the day.
His own work is more laborious than any other, for not only is thought
harder than action, as Goethe said, but he must brood over his work so
long and so unbrokenly that he find there all his patriotism, all his
passion, his religion even--it is not only those that sweep a floor that
are obedient to heaven--until at last he can cry with Paracelsus, 'In
this crust of bread I have found all the stars and all the heavens. '

The following new plays were produced by the National Theatre Society
during the last twelve months:--_The Shadow of the Glen_ and _Riders
to the Sea_, by Mr. J. M. Synge; _Broken Soil_, by Mr. Colm; _The
Townland of Tamney_, by Mr. Seumas MacManus; _The Shadowy Waters_
and _The King's Threshold_, by myself. The following plays were
revived:--_Deirdre_, by A. E. ; _Twenty-five_, by Lady Gregory; _Cathleen
ni Houlihan_, _The Pot of Broth_, and _The Hour-Glass_, by myself.
We could have given more plays, but difficulties about the place of
performance, the shifting of scenery from where we rehearsed to where
we acted, and so on, always brought a great deal of labour upon the
Society. The Society went to London in March and gave two performances
at The Royalty to full houses. They played there Mr. Synge's two
plays, Mr. Colm's play, and my _King's Threshold_ and _Pot of Broth_.
We were commended by the critics with generous sympathy, and had an
enthusiastic and distinguished audience.

We have many plays awaiting performance during the coming winter. Mr.
Synge has written us a play in three acts called _The Well of the
Saints_, full, as few works of our time are, with temperament, and of a
true and yet bizarre beauty. Lady Gregory has written us an historical
tragedy in three acts about King Brian and a very merry comedy of
country life. Mr. Bernard Shaw has written us a play[H] in four acts,
his first experiment in Irish satire; Mr. Tarpey, an Irishman whose
comedy _Windmills_ was successfully prepared by the Stage Society some
years ago, a little play which I have not yet seen; and Mr. Boyle, a
village comedy in three acts; and I hear of other plays by competent
hands that are coming to us. My own _Baile's Strand_ is in rehearsal,
and I hope to have ready for the spring a play on the subject of
_Deirdre_, with choruses somewhat in the Greek manner. We are, of
course, offered from all parts of the world great quantities of plays
which are impossible for literary or dramatic reasons. Some of them
have a look of having been written for the commercial theatre and of
having been sent to us on rejection. It will save trouble if I point
out that a play which seems to its writer to promise an ordinary London
or New York success is very unlikely to please us, or succeed with our
audience if it did. Writers who have a better ambition should get some
mastery of their art in little plays before spending many months of
what is almost sure to be wasted labour on several acts.

We were invited to play in the St. Louis Exhibition, but thought that
our work should be in Ireland for the present, and had other reasons
for refusing.

A Company, which has been formed in America by Miss Witcherly, who
played in _Everyman_ during a part of its tour in America, to take
some of our plays on tour, has begun with three one-act plays of mine,
_Cathleen ni Houlihan_, _The Hour-Glass_, and _The Land of Heart's
Desire_. It announces on its circulars that it is following the methods
of our Theatre.

Though the commercial theatre of America is as unashamedly commercial
as the English, there is a far larger audience interested in fine
drama than here. When I was lecturing in, I think, Philadelphia--one
town mixes with another in my memory at times--some one told me that he
had seen the _Duchess of Malfi_ played there by one of the old stock
companies in his boyhood; and _Everyman_ has been far more of a success
in America than anywhere else. They have numberless University towns
each with its own character and with an academic life animated by a
zeal and by an imagination unknown in these countries. There is nearly
everywhere that leaven of highly-cultivated men and women so much more
necessary to a good theatrical audience to-day than were ever Raleigh
and Sidney, when the groundling could remember the folk-songs and the
imaginative folk-life. The more an age is busy with temporary things,
the more must it look for leadership in matters of art to men and women
whose business or whose leisure has made the great writers of the world
their habitual company. Literature is not journalism because it can
turn the imagination to whatever is essential and unchanging in life.

FIRST PRINCIPLES.

Two Irish writers had a controversy a month ago, and they accused one
another of being unable to think, with entire sincerity, though it was
obvious to uncommitted minds that neither had any lack of vigorous
thought. But they had a different meaning when they spoke of thought,
for the one, though in actual life he is the most practical man I
know, meant thought as Paschal, as Montaigne, as Shakespeare, or as,
let us say, Emerson, understood it--a reverie about the adventures
of the soul, or of the personality, or some obstinate questioning
of the riddle. Many who have to work hard always make time for this
reverie, but it comes more easily to the leisured, and in this it is
like a broken heart, which is, a Dublin newspaper assured us lately,
impossible to a busy man. The other writer had in mind, when he spoke
of thought, the shaping energy that keeps us busy, and the obstinate
questionings he had most respect for were, how to change the method of
government, how to change the language, how to revive our manufactures,
and whether it is the Protestant or the Catholic that scowls at the
other with the darker scowl. Ireland is so poor, so misgoverned, that
a great portion of the imagination of the land must give itself to
a very passionate consideration of questions like these, and yet it
is precisely these loud questions that drive away the reveries that
incline the imagination to the lasting work of literature and give,
together with religion, sweetness, and nobility, and dignity to life.
We should desire no more from these propagandist thinkers than that
they carry out their work, as far as possible, without making it more
difficult for those, fitted by Nature or by circumstance for another
kind of thought, to do their work also; and certainly it is not well
that Martha chide at Mary, for they have the One Master over them.

When one all but despairs, as one does at times, of Ireland welcoming
a National Literature in this generation, it is because we do not
leave ourselves enough of time, or of quiet, to be interested in men
and women. A writer in _The Leader_, who is unknown to me, elaborates
this argument in an article full of beauty and dignity. He is speaking
of our injustice to one another, and he says that we are driven into
injustice 'not wantonly but inevitably, and at call of the exacting
qualities of the great things. Until this latter dawning, the genius of
Ireland has been too preoccupied really to concern itself about men and
women; in its drama they play a subordinate part, born tragic comedians
though all the sons and daughters of the land are. A nation is the
heroic theme we follow, a mourning, wasted land its moving spirit;
the impersonal assumes personality for us. ' When I wrote my _Countess
Cathleen_, I thought, of course, chiefly of the actual picture that
was forming before me, but there was a secondary meaning that came
into my mind continuously. 'It is the soul of one that loves Ireland,'
I thought, 'plunging into unrest, seeming to lose itself, to bargain
itself away to the very wickedness of the world, and to surrender what
is eternal for what is temporary,' and I know that this meaning seemed
natural to others, for that great orator, J. F. Taylor, who was not
likely to have searched very deeply into any work of mine, for he cared
little for mine, or, indeed, any modern work, turned the play into such
a parable in one of his speeches.

There is no use being angry with necessary conditions, or failing to
see that a man who is busy with some reform that can only be carried
out in a flame of energetic feeling, will not only be indifferent to
what seems to us the finer kind of thinking, but that he will support
himself by generalisations that seem untrue to the man of letters. A
little play, _The Rising of the Moon_, which is in the present number
of _Samhain_, and is among those we are to produce during the winter,
has, for instance, roused the suspicions of a very resolute leader of
the people, who has a keen eye for rats behind the arras. A Fenian
ballad-singer partly converts a policeman, and is it not unwise under
any circumstances to show a policeman in so favourable a light? It is
well known that many of the younger policemen were Fenians: but it is
necessary that the Dublin crowds should be kept of so high a heart
that they will fight the police at any moment. Are not morals greater
than literature? Others have objected to Mr. Synge's _Shadow of the
Glen_ because Irish women, being more chaste than those of England
and Scotland, are a valuable part of our national argument. Mr. Synge
should not, it is said by some, have chosen an exception for the
subject of his play, for who knows but the English may misunderstand
him? Some even deny that such a thing could happen at all, while others
that know the country better, or remember the statistics, say that it
could but should never have been staged. All these arguments, by their
methods even more than by what they have tried to prove, misunderstand
how literature does its work. Men of letters have sometimes said that
the characters of a romance or of a play must be typical. They mean
that the character must be typical of something which exists in all
men because the writer has found it in his own mind. It is one of the
most inexplicable things about human nature that a writer, with a
strange temperament, an Edgar Allan Poe, let us say, made what he is by
conditions that never existed before, can create personages and lyric
emotions, which startle us by being at once bizarre and an image of
our own secret thoughts. Are we not face to face with the microcosm,
mirroring everything in universal nature? It is no more necessary
for the characters created by a romance writer, or a dramatist, to
have existed before, than for his own personality to have done so;
characters and personality alike, as is perhaps true in the instance
of Poe, may draw half their life not from the solid earth but from
some dreamy drug. This is true even of historical drama, for it was
Goethe, the founder of the historical drama of Germany, who said 'we
do the people of history the honour of naming after them the creations
of our own minds. ' All that a dramatic writer need do is to persuade
us, during the two hours' traffic of the stage, that the events of
his play did really happen. He must know enough of the life of his
country, or of history, to create this illusion, but no matter how
much he knows, he will fail if his audience is not ready to give up
something of the dead letter. If his mind is full of energy he will
not be satisfied with little knowledge, but he will be far more likely
to alter incidents and characters, wilfully even as it may seem, than
to become a literal historian. It was one of the complaints against
Shakespeare, in his own day, that he made Sir John Falstaff out of a
praiseworthy old Lollard preacher. One day, as he sat over Holinshed's
History of England, he persuaded himself that Richard the Second, with
his French culture, 'his too great friendliness to his friends,' his
beauty of mind, and his fall before dry, repelling Bolingbroke, would
be a good image for an accustomed mood of fanciful, impracticable
lyricism in his own mind. The historical Richard has passed away for
ever and the Richard of the play lives more intensely, it seems, than
did ever living man. Yet Richard the Second, as Shakespeare made him,
could never have been born before the Renaissance, before the Italian
influence, or even one hour before the innumerable streams that flowed
in upon Shakespeare's mind; the innumerable experiences we can never
know, brought Shakespeare to the making of him. He is typical not
because he ever existed, but because he has made us know of something
in our own minds we had never known of had he never been imagined.

Our propagandists have twisted this theory of the men of letters
into its direct contrary, and when they say that a writer should
make typical characters they mean personifications of averages, of
statistics, or even personified opinions, or men and women so faintly
imagined that there is nothing about them to separate them from the
crowd, as it appears to our hasty eyes. We must feel that we could
engage a hundred others to wear the same livery as easily as we could
engage a coachman. We must never forget that we are engaging them to
be the ideal young peasant, or the true patriot, or the happy Irish
wife, or the policeman of our prejudices, or to express some other of
those invaluable generalisations, without which our practical movements
would lose their energy. Who is there that likes a coachman to be too
full of human nature, when he has his livery on? No one man is like
another, but one coachman should be as like another as possible, though
he may assert himself a little when he meets the gardener. The patriots
would impose on us heroes and heroines, like those young couples in the
Gaelic plays, who might all change brides or bridegrooms in the dance
and never find out the difference. The personifications need not be
true even, if they are about our enemy, for it might be more difficult
to fight out our necessary fight if we remembered his virtue at wrong
moments; and might not Teig and Bacach, that are light in the head, go
over to his party?

Ireland is indeed poor, is indeed hunted by misfortune, and has indeed
to give up much that makes life desirable and lovely, but is she so
very poor that she can afford no better literature than this? Perhaps
so, but if it is a Spirit from beyond the world that decides when a
nation shall awake into imaginative energy, and no philosopher has ever
found what brings the moment, it cannot be for us to judge. It may be
coming upon us now, for it is certain that we have more writers who are
thinking, as men of letters understand thought, than we have had for
a century, and he who wilfully makes their work harder may be setting
himself against the purpose of that Spirit.

I would not be trying to form an Irish National Theatre if I did not
believe that there existed in Ireland, whether in the minds of a
few people or of a great number I do not know, an energy of thought
about life itself, a vivid sensitiveness as to the reality of things,
powerful enough to overcome all those phantoms of the night. One thing
calls up its contrary, unreality calls up reality, and, besides, life
here has been sufficiently perilous to make men think. I do not think
it a national prejudice that makes me believe we are a harder, a more
masterful race than the comfortable English of our time, and that this
comes from an essential nearness to reality of those few scattered
people who have the right to call themselves the Irish race. It is
only in the exceptions, in the few minds, where the flame has burnt as
it were pure, that one can see the permanent character of a race. If
one remembers the men who have dominated Ireland for the last hundred
and fifty years, one understands that it is strength of personality,
the individualizing quality in a man, that stirs Irish imagination
most deeply in the end. There is scarcely a man who has led the Irish
people, at any time, who may not give some day to a great writer
precisely that symbol he may require for the expression of himself. The
critical mind of Ireland is far more subjugated than the critical mind
of England by the phantoms and misapprehensions of politics and social
necessity, but the life of Ireland has rejected them more resolutely.
Indeed, it is in life itself in England that one finds the dominion of
what is not human life.

We have no longer in any country a literature as great as the
literature of the old world, and that is because the newspapers, all
kinds of second-rate books, the preoccupation of men with all kinds
of practical changes, have driven the living imagination out of the
world. I have read hardly any books this summer but Cervantes and
Boccaccio and some Greek plays. I have felt that these men, divided
from one another by so many hundreds of years, had the same mind.
It is we who are different; and then the thought would come to me,
that has come to me so often before, that they lived at times when
the imagination turned to life itself for excitement. The world was
not changing quickly about them. There was nothing to draw their
imagination from the ripening of their fields, from the birth and death
of their children, from the destiny of their souls, from all that is
the unchanging substance of literature. They had not to deal with the
world in such great masses that it could only be represented to their
minds by figures and by abstract generalisations. Everything that
their minds ran on came to them vivid with the colour of the senses,
and when they wrote it was out of their own rich experience, and they
found their symbols of expression in things that they had known all
their life long. Their very words were more vigorous than ours, for
their phrases came from a common mint, from the market, or the tavern,
or from the great poets of a still older time. It is the change, that
followed the Renaissance and was completed by newspaper government and
the scientific movement, that has brought upon us all these phrases and
generalisations, made by minds that would grasp what they have never
seen. Yesterday I went out to see the reddening apples in the garden,
and they faded from my imagination sooner than they would have from
the imagination of that old poet, who made the songs of the seasons
for the Fianna, or out of Chaucer's, that celebrated so many trees.
Theories, opinions, these opinions among the rest, flowed in upon me
and blotted them away. Even our greatest poets see the world with
preoccupied minds. Great as Shelley is, those theories about the coming
changes of the world, which he has built up with so much elaborate
passion, hurry him from life continually. There is a phrase in some old
cabalistic writer about man falling into his own circumference, and
every generation we get further away from life itself, and come more
and more under the influence which Blake had in his mind when he said,
'Kings and Parliament seem to me something other than human life. '
We lose our freedom more and more as we get away from ourselves, and
not merely because our minds are overthrown by abstract phrases and
generalisations, reflections in a mirror that seem living, but because
we have turned the table of value upside down, and believe that the
root of reality is not in the centre but somewhere in that whirling
circumference. How can we create like the ancients, while innumerable
considerations of external probability or social utility or of what is
becoming in so meritorious a person as ourselves, destroy the seeming
irresponsible creative power that is life itself? Who to-day could
set Richmond's and Richard's tents side by side on the battlefield,
or make Don Quixote, mad as he was, mistake a windmill for a giant in
broad daylight? And when I think of free-spoken Falstaff I know of
no audience, but the tinkers of the roadside, that could encourage
the artist to an equal comedy. The old writers were content if their
inventions had but an emotional and moral consistency, and created out
of themselves a fantastic, energetic, extravagant art. A Civilisation
is very like a man or a woman, for it comes in but a few years into its
beauty and its strength, and then, while many years go by, it gathers
and makes order about it, the strength and beauty going out of it the
while, until in the end it lies there with its limbs straightened out
and a clean linen cloth folded upon it. That may well be, and yet we
need not follow among the mourners, for it may be, before they are at
the tomb, a messenger will run out of the hills and touch the pale lips
with a red ember, and wake the limbs to the disorder and the tumult
that is life. Though he does not come, even so we will keep from among
the mourners and hold some cheerful conversation among ourselves; for
has not Virgil, a knowledgeable man and a wizard, foretold that other
Argonauts shall row between cliff and cliff, and other fair-haired
Achaeans sack another Troy?

Every argument carries us backwards to some religious conception, and
in the end the creative energy of men depends upon their believing that
they have, within themselves, something immortal and imperishable,
and that all else is but as an image in a looking-glass. So long as
that belief is not a formal thing, a man will create out of a joyful
energy, seeking little for any external test of an impulse that may be
sacred, and looking for no foundation outside life itself. If Ireland
could escape from those phantoms of hers she might create, as did the
old writers; for she has a faith that is as theirs, and keeps alive
in the Gaelic traditions--and this has always seemed to me the chief
intellectual value of Gaelic--a portion of the old imaginative life.
When Dr. Hyde or Father Peter O'Leary is the writer, one's imagination
goes straight to the century of Cervantes, and, having gone so far,
one thinks at every moment that they will discover his energy. It is
precisely because of this reason that one is indignant with those who
would substitute for the ideas of the folk-life the rhetoric of the
newspapers, who would muddy what had begun to seem a fountain of life
with the feet of the mob. Is it impossible to revive Irish and yet to
leave the finer intellects a sufficient mastery over the more gross, to
prevent it from becoming, it may be, the language of a Nation, and yet
losing all that has made it worthy of a revival, all that has made it a
new energy in the mind?

Before the modern movement, and while it was but new, the ordinary
man, whether he could read and write or not, was ready to welcome
great literature. When Ariosto found himself among the brigands, they
repeated to him his own verses, and the audience in the Elizabethan
Theatres must have been all but as clever as an Athenian audience. But
to-day we come to understand great literature by a long preparation, or
by some accident of nature, for we only begin to understand life when
our minds have been purified of temporary interests by study.

But if literature has no external test, how are we to know that it is
indeed literature? The only test that nature gives, to show when we
obey her, is that she gives us happiness, and when we are no longer
obedient she brings us to pain sooner or later. Is it not the same
with the artist? The sign that she makes to him is that happiness we
call delight in beauty. He can only convey this in its highest form
after he has purified his mind with the great writers of the world; but
their example can never be more than a preparation. If his art does
not seem, when it comes, to be the creation of a new personality, in
a few years it will not seem to be alive at all. If he is a dramatist
his characters must have a like newness. If they could have existed
before his days, or have been imagined before his day, we may be
certain that the spirit of life is not in them in its fulness. This
is because art, in its highest moments, is not a deliberate creation,
but the creation of intense feeling, of pure life; and every feeling
is the child of all past ages and would be different if even a moment
had been left out. Indeed, is it not that delight in beauty, which
tells the artist that he has imagined what may never die, itself but a
delight in the permanent yet ever-changing form of life, in her very
limbs and lineaments? When life has given it, has she given anything
but herself? Has she any other reward, even for the saints? If one
flies to the wilderness, is not that clear light that falls about the
soul when all irrelevant things have been taken away, but life that has
been about one always, enjoyed in all its fulness at length? It is as
though she had put her arms about one, crying: 'My beloved, you have
given up everything for me. ' If a man spend all his days in good works
till there is no emotion in his heart that is not full of virtue, is
not the reward he prays for eternal life? The artist, too, has prayers
and a cloister, and if he do not turn away from temporary things, from
the zeal of the reformer and the passion of revolution, that zealous
mistress will give him but a scornful glance.

What attracts one to drama is that it is, in the most obvious way, what
all the arts are upon a last analysis. A farce and a tragedy are alike
in this that they are a moment of intense life. An action is taken out
of all other actions; it is reduced to its simple form, or at anyrate
to as simple a form as it can be brought to without our losing the
sense of its place in the world. The characters that are involved in
it are freed from everything that is not a part of that action; and
whether it is, as in the less important kinds of drama, a mere bodily
activity, a hair-breadth escape or the like, or as it is in the more
important kinds, an activity of the souls of the characters, it is
an energy, an eddy of life purified from everything but itself. The
dramatist must picture life in action, with an unpreoccupied mind, as
the musician pictures her in sound and the sculptor in form.

But if this be true, has art nothing to do with moral judgments?
Surely it has, and its judgments are those from which there is no
appeal. The character, whose fortune we have been called in to see,
or the personality of the writer, must keep our sympathy, and whether
it be farce or tragedy, we must laugh and weep with him and call down
blessings on his head. This character who delights us may commit murder
like Macbeth, or fly the battle for his sweetheart as did Antony, or
betray his country like Coriolanus, and yet we will rejoice in every
happiness that comes to him and sorrow at his death as if it were our
own. It is no use telling us that the murderer and the betrayer do not
deserve our sympathy. We thought so yesterday, and we still know what
crime is, but everything has been changed of a sudden; we are caught up
into another code, we are in the presence of a higher court. Complain
of us if you will, but it will be useless, for before the curtain
falls a thousand ages, grown conscious in our sympathies, will have
cried _Absolvo te_. Blame if you will the codes, the philosophies, the
experiences of all past ages that have made us what we are, as the
soil under our feet has been made out of unknown vegetations: quarrel
with the acorns of Eden if you will, but what has that to do with us?
We understand the verdict and not the law; and yet there is some law,
some code, some judgment. If the poet's hand had slipped, if Antony
had railed at Cleopatra in the tower, if Coriolanus had abated that
high pride of his in the presence of death, we might have gone away
muttering the Ten Commandments. Yet may be we are wrong to speak of
judgment, for we have but contemplated life, and what more is there to
say when she that is all virtue, the gift and the giver, the fountain
whither all flows again, has given all herself? If the subject of drama
or any other art, were a man himself, an eddy of momentary breath, we
might desire the contemplation of perfect characters; but the subject
of all art is passion, the flame of life itself, and a passion can only
be contemplated when separated by itself, purified of all but itself,
and aroused into a perfect intensity by opposition with some other
passion, or it may be with the law, that is the expression of the whole
whether of Church or Nation or external nature. Had Coriolanus not been
a law-breaker neither he nor we had ever discovered, it may be, that
noble pride of his, and if we had not seen Cleopatra through the eyes
of so many lovers, would we have known that soul of hers to be all
flame, and wept at the quenching of it? If we were not certain of law
we would not feel the struggle, the drama, but the subject of art is
not law, which is a kind of death, but the praise of life, and it has
no commandments that are not positive.

But if literature does not draw its substance from history, or anything
about us in the world, what is a National literature? Our friends have
already told us, writers for the Theatre in Abbey Street, that we have
no right to the name, some because we do not write in Irish, and others
because we do not plead the National cause in our plays, as if we
were writers for the newspapers. I have not asked my fellow-workers
what they mean by the words National literature, but though I have
no great love for definitions, I would define it in some such way as
this: It is the work of writers, who are moulded by influences that
are moulding their country, and who write out of so deep a life that
they are accepted there in the end. It leaves a good deal unsettled--was
Rossetti an Englishman, or Swift an Irishman? --but it covers more kinds
of National literature than any other I can think of. If one says a
National literature must be in the language of the country, there are
many difficulties. Should it be written in the language that one's
country does speak or the language that it ought to speak? Was Milton
an Englishman when he wrote in Latin or Italian, and had we no part in
Columbanus when he wrote in Latin the beautiful sermon comparing life
to a highway and to a smoke? And then there is Beckford, who is in
every history of English literature, and yet his one memorable book, a
story of Persia, was written in French.

Our theatre is of no great size, for though we know that if we write
well we shall find acceptance among our countrymen in the end, we would
think our emotions were on the surface if we found a ready welcome.
Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman are National writers of America,
although the one had his first true acceptance in France and the other
in England and Ireland.
When I was a boy, six persons, who, alone out
of the whole world it may be, believed Walt Whitman a great writer,
sent him a message of admiration, and of those names four were English
and two Irish, my father's and Prof. Dowden's. It is only in our own
day that America has begun to prefer him to Lowell, who is not a poet
at all.

I mean by deep life that men must put into their writing the emotions
and experiences that have been most important to themselves. If they
say, 'I will write of Irish country people and make them charming and
picturesque like those dear peasants my great grandmother used to
put in the foreground of her water-colour paintings,' then they had
better be satisfied with the word 'provincial. ' If one condescends
to one's material, if it is only what a popular novelist would call
local colour, it is certain that one's real soul is somewhere else.
Mr. Synge, upon the other hand, who is able to express his own finest
emotions in those curious ironical plays of his, where, for all that,
by the illusion of admirable art, everyone seems to be thinking and
feeling as only countrymen could think and feel, is truly a National
writer, as Burns was when he wrote finely and as Burns was not when he
wrote _Highland Mary_ and _The Cotter's Saturday Night_.

A writer is not less National because he shows the influence of other
countries and of the great writers of the world. No nation, since the
beginning of history, has ever drawn all its life out of itself. Even
The Well of English Undefiled, the Father of English Poetry himself,
borrowed his metres, and much of his way of looking at the world, from
French writers, and it is possible that the influence of Italy was
more powerful among the Elizabethan poets than any literary influence
out of England herself. Many years ago, when I was contending with Sir
Charles Gavan Duffy over what seemed to me a too narrow definition
of Irish interests, Professor York Powell either said or wrote to me
that the creative power of England was always at its greatest when
her receptive power was greatest. If Ireland is about to produce a
literature that is important to her, it must be the result of the
influences that flow in upon the mind of an educated Irishman to-day,
and, in a greater degree, of what came into the world with himself.
Gaelic can hardly fail to do a portion of the work, but one cannot say
whether it may not be some French or German writer who will do most to
make him an articulate man. If he really achieve the miracle, if he
really make all that he has seen and felt and known a portion of his
own intense nature, if he put it all into the fire of his energy, he
need not fear being a stranger among his own people in the end. There
never have been men more unlike an Englishman's idea of himself than
Keats and Shelley, while Campbell, whose emotion came out of a shallow
well, was very like that idea. We call certain minds creative because
they are among the moulders of their nation and are not made upon its
mould, and they resemble one another in this only--they have never been
fore-known or fulfilled an expectation.

It is sometimes necessary to follow in practical matters some
definition which one knows to have but a passing use. We, for instance,
have always confined ourselves to plays upon Irish subjects, as if
no others could be National literature. Our theatre inherits this
limitation from previous movements, which found it necessary and
fruitful. Goldsmith and Sheridan and Burke had become so much a part
of English life, were so greatly moulded by the movements that were
moulding England, that, despite certain Irish elements that clung
about them, we could not think of them as more important to us than
any English writer of equal rank. Men told us that we should keep our
hold of them, as it were, for they were a part of our glory; but we
did not consider our glory very important. We had no desire to turn
braggarts, and we did suspect the motives of our advisers. Perhaps they
had reasons, which were not altogether literary, for thinking it might
be well if Irishmen of letters, in our day also, would turn their faces
to England. But what moved me always the most, and I had something to
do with forcing this limitation upon our organisations, is that a new
language of expression would help to awaken a new attitude in writers
themselves, and that if our organisations were satisfied to interpret
a writer to his own countrymen merely because he was of Irish birth,
the organisations would become a kind of trade union for the helping
of Irishmen to catch the ear of London publishers and managers, and
for upholding writers who had been beaten by abler Englishmen. Let a
man turn his face to us, accepting the commercial disadvantages that
would bring upon him, and talk of what is near to our hearts, Irish
Kings and Irish Legends and Irish Countrymen, and we would find it a
joy to interpret him. Our one philosophical critic, Mr. John Eglinton,
thinks we were very arbitrary, and yet I would not have us enlarge our
practice. England and France, almost alone among nations, have great
works of literature which have taken their subjects from foreign lands,
and even in France and England this is more true in appearance than
reality. Shakespeare observed his Roman crowds in London, and saw,
one doubts not, somewhere in his own Stratford, the old man that gave
Cleopatra the asp. Somebody I have been reading lately finds the Court
of Louis the Fourteenth in Phedre and Andromaque. Even in France and
England almost the whole prose fiction professes to describe the life
of the country, often of the districts where its writers have lived,
for, unlike a poem, a novel requires so much minute observation of the
surface of life that a novelist who cares for the illusion of reality
will keep to familiar things. A writer will indeed take what is most
creative out of himself, not from observation, but experience, yet he
must master a definite language, a definite symbolism of incident and
scene. Flaubert explains the comparative failure of his Salammbo by
saying 'one cannot frequent her. ' He could create her soul, as it were,
but he could not tell with certainty how it would express itself before
Carthage fell to ruins. In the small nations which have to struggle
for their National life, one finds that almost every creator, whether
poet or novelist, sets all his stories in his own country. I do not
recollect that Bjornson ever wrote of any land but Norway, and Ibsen,
though he lived in exile for many years, driven out by his countrymen,
as he believed, carried the little seaboard towns of Norway everywhere
in his imagination. So far as one can be certain of anything, one
may be certain that Ireland with her long National struggle, her old
literature, her unbounded folk-imagination, will, in so far as her
literature is National at all, be more like Norway than England or
France.

If Literature is but praise of life, if our writers are not to plead
the National Cause, nor insist upon the Ten Commandments, nor upon the
glory of their country, what part remains for it, in the common life
of the country? It will influence the life of the country immeasurably
more, though seemingly less, than have our propagandist poems and
stories. It will leave to others the defence of all that can be
codified for ready understanding, of whatever is the especial business
of sermons, and of leading articles; but it will bring all the ways of
men before that ancient tribunal of our sympathies. It will measure all
things by the measure not of things visible but of things invisible.
In a country like Ireland, where personifications have taken the place
of life, men have more hate than love, for the unhuman is nearly the
same as the inhuman, but literature, which is a part of that charity
that is the forgiveness of sins, will make us understand men no matter
how little they conform to our expectations. We will be more interested
in heroic men than in heroic actions, and will have a little distrust
for everything that can be called good or bad in itself with a very
confident heart. Could we understand it so well, we will say, if it
were not something other than human life? We will have a scale of
virtues, and value most highly those that approach the indefinable.
Men will be born among us of whom it is possible to say, not 'What a
philanthropist,' 'What a patriot,' 'How practical a man,' but, as we
say of the men of the Renaissance, 'What a nature,' 'How much abundant
life. ' Even at the beginning we will value qualities more than actions,
for these may be habit or accident; and should we say to a friend,
'You have advertised for an English cook,' or 'I hear that you have no
clerks who are not of your own faith,' or 'You have voted an address to
the king,' we will add to our complaint, 'You have been unpatriotic and
I am ashamed of you, but if you cease from doing any of these things
because you have been terrorized out of them, you will cease to be
my friend. ' We will not forget how to be stern, but we will remember
always that the highest life unites, as in one fire, the greatest
passion and the greatest courtesy.

A feeling for the form of life, for the graciousness of life, for
the dignity of life, for the moving limbs of life, for the nobleness
of life, for all that cannot be written in codes, has always been
greatest among the gifts of literature to mankind. Indeed, the Muses
being women, all literature is but their love-cries to the manhood of
the world. It is now one and now another that cries, but the words
are the same--'Love of my heart, what matter to me that you have been
quarrelsome in your cups, and have slain many, and have given your love
here and there? It was because of the whiteness of your flesh and the
mastery in your hands that I gave you my love, when all life came to me
in your coming. ' And then in a low voice that none may overhear--'Alas!
I am greatly afraid that the more they cry against you the more I love
you. '

There are two kinds of poetry, and they are co-mingled in all the
greatest works. When the tide of life sinks low there are pictures,
as in _The Ode to a Grecian Urn_ and in Virgil at the plucking of the
Golden Bough. The pictures make us sorrowful. We share the poet's
separation from what he describes. It is life in the mirror, and our
desire for it is as the desire of the lost souls for God; but when
Lucifer stands among his friends, when Villon sings his dead ladies to
so gallant a rhythm, when Timon makes his epitaph, we feel no sorrow,
for life herself has made one of her eternal gestures, has called up
into our hearts her energy that is eternal delight. In Ireland, where
the tide of life is rising, we turn, not to picture-making, but to the
imagination of personality--to drama, gesture.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] Both Mr. Moore and Mr. Martyn dropped out of the movement after the
third performance at the Irish Literary Theatre in 1901. --W. B. Y.

[B] That mood has gone, with Fenianism and its wild hopes. The National
movement has been commercialized in the last few years. How much real
ideality is but hidden for a time one cannot say. --W. B. Y. , _March, 1908_.

[C] An illusion, as he himself explained to me. He had never seen
_Phedre_. The players were quiet and natural, because they did not know
what else to do. They had not learned to go wrong. --W. B. Y. , _March,
1908_.

[D] This play was _John Bull's Other Island_. When it came out in the
spring of 1905 we felt ourselves unable to cast it without wronging Mr.
Shaw. We had no 'Broadbent' or money to get one. --W. B. Y. , _March, 1908_.

[E] _The Poor House_, written in Irish by Dr. Hyde on a scenario by
Lady Gregory.

[F] _Riders to the Sea. _ This play made its way very slowly with our
audiences, but is now very popular. --W. B. Y. , _March, 1908_.

[G] The players, though not the playwrights, are now all paid. --W. B. Y. ,
_March, 1908_.

[H] _John Bull's Other Island. _




THE PLAY, THE PLAYER, AND THE SCENE.


I have been asked to put into this year's _Samhain_ Miss Horniman's
letter offering us the use of the Abbey Theatre. I have done this, but
as Miss Horniman begins her letter by stating that she has made her
offer out of 'great sympathy with the Irish National Theatre Company as
publicly explained by Mr. Yeats on various occasions,' she has asked me
to go more into detail as to my own plans and hopes than I have done
before. I think they are the plans and hopes of my fellow dramatists,
for we are all of one movement, and have influenced one another, and
have in us the spirit of our time. I discussed them all very shortly in
last _Samhain_. And I know that it was that _Samhain_, and a certain
speech I made in front of the curtain, that made Miss Horniman entrust
us with her generous gift. But last _Samhain_ is practically out of
print, and my speech has gone even out of my own memory. I will repeat,
therefore, much that I have said already, but adding a good deal to it.

_First. _ Our plays must be literature or written in the spirit of
literature. The modern theatre has died away to what it is because
the writers have thought of their audiences instead of their subject.
An old writer saw his hero, if it was a play of character; or some
dominant passion, if it was a play of passion, like Phedre or
Andromaque, moving before him, living with a life he did not endeavour
to control. The persons acted upon one another as they were bound
by their natures to act, and the play was dramatic, not because he
had sought out dramatic situations for their own sake, but because
will broke itself upon will and passion upon passion. Then the
imagination began to cool, the writer began to be less alive, to seek
external aids, remembered situations, tricks of the theatre, that
had proved themselves again and again. His persons no longer will
have a particular character, but he knows that he can rely upon the
incidents, and he feels himself fortunate when there is nothing in
his play that has not succeeded a thousand times before the curtain
has risen. Perhaps he has even read a certain guide-book to the stage
published in France, and called 'The Thirty-six Situations of Drama. '
The costumes will be magnificent, the actresses will be beautiful,
the Castle in Spain will be painted by an artist upon the spot. We
will come from his play excited if we are foolish, or can condescend
to the folly of others, but knowing nothing new about ourselves, and
seeing life with no new eyes and hearing it with no new ears. The whole
movement of theatrical reform in our day has been a struggle to get
rid of this kind of play, and the sincere play, the logical play, that
we would have in its place, will always seem, when we hear it for the
first time, undramatic, unexciting. It has to stir the heart in a long
disused way, it has to awaken the intellect to a pleasure that ennobles
and wearies. I was at the first performance of an Ibsen play given in
England. It was _The Doll's House_, and at the fall of the curtain I
heard an old dramatic critic say, 'It is but a series of conversations
terminated by an accident. ' So far, we here in Dublin mean the same
thing as do Mr. Max Beerbohm, Mr. Walkley, and Mr. Archer, who are
seeking to restore sincerity to the English stage, but I am not certain
that we mean the same thing all through. The utmost sincerity, the most
unbroken logic, give me, at any rate, but an imperfect pleasure if
there is not a vivid and beautiful language. Ibsen has sincerity and
logic beyond any writer of our time, and we are all seeking to learn
them at his hands; but is he not a good deal less than the greatest
of all times, because he lacks beautiful and vivid language? 'Well,
well, give me time and you shall hear all about it. If only I had Peter
here now,' is very like life, is entirely in its place where it comes,
and when it is united to other sentences exactly like itself, one is
moved, one knows not how, to pity and terror, and yet not moved as if
the words themselves could sing and shine. Mr. Max Beerbohm wrote once
that a play cannot have style because the people must talk as they
talk in daily life. He was thinking, it is obvious, of a play made out
of that typically modern life where there is no longer vivid speech.
Blake says that a work of art must be minutely articulated by God or
man, and man has too little help from that occasional collaborateur
when he writes of people whose language has become abstract and dead.
Falstaff gives one the sensation of reality, and when one remembers the
abundant vocabulary of a time when all but everything present to the
mind was present to the senses, one imagines that his words were but
little magnified from the words of such a man in real life. Language
was still alive then, alive as it is in Gaelic to-day, as it is in
English-speaking Ireland where the Schoolmaster or the newspaper has
not corrupted it. I know that we are at the mere beginning, laboriously
learning our craft, trying our hands in little plays for the most
part, that we may not venture too boldly in our ignorance; but I never
hear the vivid, picturesque, ever-varied language of Mr. Synge's
persons without feeling that the great collaborateur has his finger
in our business. May it not be that the only realistic play that will
live as Shakespeare has lived, as Calderon has lived, as the Greeks
have lived, will arise out of the common life, where language is as
much alive as if it were new come out of Eden? After all, is not the
greatest play not the play that gives the sensation of an external
reality but the play in which there is the greatest abundance of life
itself, of the reality that is in our minds? Is it possible to make
a work of art, which needs every subtlety of expression if it is to
reveal what hides itself continually, out of a dying, or at any rate
a very ailing language? and all language but that of the poets and of
the poor is already bed-ridden. We have, indeed, persiflage, the only
speech of educated men that expresses a deliberate enjoyment of words:
but persiflage is not a true language. It is impersonal; it is not in
the midst but on the edge of life; it covers more character than it
discovers: and yet, such as it is, all our comedies are made out of it.

What the ever-moving delicately-moulded flesh is to human beauty, vivid
musical words are to passion. Somebody has said that every nation
begins with poetry and ends with algebra, and passion has always
refused to express itself in algebraical terms.

Have we not been in error in demanding from our playwrights personages
who do not transcend our common actions any more than our common
speech? If we are in the right, all antiquity has been in error. The
scholars of a few generations ago were fond of deciding that certain
persons were unworthy of the dignity of art. They had, it may be, an
over-abounding preference for kings and queens, but we are, it may be,
very stupid in thinking that the average man is a fit subject at all
for the finest art. Art delights in the exception, for it delights in
the soul expressing itself according to its own laws and arranging
the world about it in its own pattern, as sand strewn upon a drum
will change itself into different patterns, according to the notes of
music that are sung or played to it. But the average man is average
because he has not attained to freedom. Habit, routine, fear of public
opinion, fear of punishment here or hereafter, a myriad of things that
are 'something other than human life,' something less than flame,
work their will upon his soul and trundle his body here and there. At
the first performance of _Ghosts_ I could not escape from an illusion
unaccountable to me at the time. All the characters seemed to be less
than life-size; the stage, though it was but the little Royalty stage,
seemed larger than I had ever seen it. Little whimpering puppets moved
here and there in the middle of that great abyss. Why did they not
speak out with louder voices or move with freer gestures? What was it
that weighed upon their souls perpetually? Certainly they were all in
prison, and yet there was no prison. In India there are villages so
obedient that all the jailer has to do is to draw a circle upon the
ground with his staff, and to tell his thief to stand there so many
hours; but what law had these people broken that they had to wander
round that narrow circle all their lives? May not such art, terrible,
satirical, inhuman, be the medicine of great cities, where nobody is
ever alone with his own strength? Nor is Maeterlinck very different,
for his persons 'enquire after Jerusalem in the regions of the grave,
with weak voices almost inarticulate, wearying repose. ' Is it the
mob that has robbed those angelic persons of the energy of their
souls? Will not our next art be rather of the country, of great open
spaces, of the soul rejoicing in itself? Will not the generations to
come begin again to have an over-abounding faith in kings and queens,
in masterful spirits, whatever names we call them by? I had Moliere
with me on my way to America, and as I read I seemed to be at home in
Ireland listening to that conversation of the people which is so full
of riches because so full of leisure, or to those old stories of the
folk which were made by men who believed so much in the soul, and so
little in anything else, that they were never entirely certain that
the earth was solid under the foot-sole. What is there left for us,
that have seen the newly-discovered stability of things changed from an
enthusiasm to a weariness, but to labour with a high heart, though it
may be with weak hands, to rediscover an art of the theatre that shall
be joyful, fantastic, extravagant, whimsical, beautiful, resonant, and
altogether reckless? The arts are at their greatest when they seek for
a life growing always more scornful of everything that is not itself
and passing into its own fulness, as it were, ever more completely, as
all that is created out of the passing mode of society slips from it;
and attaining that fulness, perfectly it may be--and from this is tragic
joy and the perfectness of tragedy--when the world itself has slipped
away in death. We, who are believers, cannot see reality anywhere but
in the soul itself, and seeing it there we cannot do other than rejoice
in every energy, whether of gesture, or of action, or of speech, coming
out of the personality, the soul's image, even though the very laws of
nature seem as unimportant in comparison as did the laws of Rome to
Coriolanus when his pride was upon him. Has not the long decline of the
arts been but the shadow of declining faith in an unseen reality?

'If the sun and moon would doubt,
They'd immediately go out. '

_Second. _ If we are to make a drama of energy, of extravagance, of
phantasy, of musical and noble speech, we shall need an appropriate
stage management. Up to a generation or two ago, and to our own
generation, here and there, lingered a method of acting and of
stage-management, which had come down, losing much of its beauty
and meaning on the way, from the days of Shakespeare. Long after
England, under the influence of Garrick, began the movement towards
Naturalism, this school had a great popularity in Ireland, where it
was established at the Restoration by an actor who probably remembered
the Shakespearean players. France has inherited from Racine and from
Moliere an equivalent art, and, whether it is applied to comedy
or to tragedy, its object is to give importance to the words. It
is not only Shakespeare whose finest thoughts are inaudible on the
English stage. Congreve's _Way of the World_ was acted in London last
Spring, and revived again a month ago, and the part of Lady Wishfort
was taken by a very admirable actress, an actress of genius who has
never had the recognition she deserves. There is a scene where Lady
Wishfort turns away a servant with many words. She cries--'Go, set up
for yourself again, do; drive a trade, do, with your three pennyworth
of small ware, flaunting upon a packthread under a brandy-seller's
bulk, or against a dead wall by a ballad-monger; go, hang out an old
frisoneer-gorget, with a yard of yellow colberteen again, do; an old
gnawed mask, two rows of pins, and a child's fiddle; a glass necklace
with the beads broken, and a quilted nightcap with one ear. Go, go,
drive a trade. ' The conversation of an older time, of Urquhart, the
translator of Rabelais, let us say, awakes with a little of its old
richness. The actress acted so much and so admirably that when she
first played it--I heard her better a month ago, perhaps because I
was nearer to the stage--I could not understand a word of a passage
that required the most careful speech. Just as the modern musician,
through the over-development of an art that seems exterior to the
poet, writes so many notes for every word that the natural energy of
speech is dissolved and broken and the words made inaudible, so did
this actress, a perfect mistress of her own art, put into her voice so
many different notes, so run up and down the scale under an impulse of
anger and scorn, that one had hardly been more affronted by a musical
setting. Everybody who has spoken to large audiences knows that he must
speak difficult passages, in which there is some delicacy of sound
or of thought, upon one or two notes. The larger his audience, the
more he must get away, except in trivial passages, from the methods
of conversation. Where one requires the full attention of the mind,
one must not weary it with any but the most needful changes of pitch
and note, or by an irrelevant or obtrusive gesture. As long as drama
was full of poetical beauty, full of description, full of philosophy,
as long as its words were the very vesture of sorrow and laughter,
the players understood that their art was essentially conventional,
artificial, ceremonious.

The stage itself was differently shaped, being more a platform than
a stage, for they did not desire to picture the surface of life, but
to escape from it. But realism came in, and every change towards
realism coincided with a decline in dramatic energy. The proscenium
was imported into England at the close of the seventeenth century,
appropriate costumes a generation later. The audience were forbidden to
sit upon the stage in the time of Sheridan, the last English-speaking
playwright whose plays have lived. And the last remnant of the
platform, the part of the stage that still projected beyond the
proscenium, dwindled in size till it disappeared in their own day.
The birth of science was at hand, the birth-pangs of its mother had
troubled the world for centuries. But now that Gargantua is born at
last, it may be possible to remember that there are other giants.

We can never bring back old things precisely as they were, but must
consider how much of them is necessary to us, accepting, even if it
were only out of politeness, something of our own time.