1902
The Irish Literary Theatre wound up its three years of experiment last
October with _Diarmuid and Grania_, which was played by Mr.
The Irish Literary Theatre wound up its three years of experiment last
October with _Diarmuid and Grania_, which was played by Mr.
Yeats
_
EMER.
I am come to praise you and to put courage into you, Cuchulain, as a
wife should, that they may not take the championship of the men of
Ireland from you.
LEAGERIE'S WIFE.
You lie, Emer, for it is Cuchulain and Conal who are taking the
championship from my husband.
CONAL'S WIFE.
Cuchulain has taken it.
CUCHULAIN.
Townland against townland, barony against barony, kingdom against
kingdom, province against province, and if there be but two door-posts
to a door the one fighting against the other. [_He takes up the Helmet
which LEAGERIE had laid down upon the table when he went to break out
the bottom of the window. _] This Helmet will bring no more wars into
Ireland. [_He throws it into the sea. _]
LEAGERIE'S WIFE.
You have done that to rob my husband.
CONAL'S WIFE.
You could not keep it for yourself, and so you threw it away that
nobody else might have it.
CONAL.
You should not have done that, Cuchulain.
LEAGERIE.
You have done us a great wrong.
EMER.
Who is for Cuchulain?
CUCHULAIN.
Let no one stir.
EMER.
Who is for Cuchulain, I say?
[_She draws her dagger from her belt and sings the same
words as before, flourishing it about. While she has
been singing, CONAL'S WIFE and LEAGERIE'S WIFE have
drawn their daggers and run at her to kill her, but
CUCHULAIN has forced them back. CONAL and LEAGERIE have
drawn their swords to strike CUCHULAIN. _
CONAL'S WIFE.
[_While EMER is still singing. _]
Silence her voice, silence her voice, blow the horns, make a noise!
[_The _Scullions_ and _Horseboys_ blow their horns or
fight among themselves. There is a deafening noise and
a confused fight. Suddenly three black hands holding
extinguishers come through the window and extinguish
the torches. It is now pitch dark but for a very faint
light outside the house which merely shows that there
are moving forms, but not who or what they are, and in
the darkness one can hear low terrified voices. _
FIRST VOICE.
Did you see them putting out the torches?
ANOTHER VOICE.
They came up out of the sea, three black men.
ANOTHER VOICE.
They have heads of cats upon them.
ANOTHER VOICE.
They came up mewing out of the sea.
ANOTHER VOICE.
How dark it is! one of them has put his hand over the moon.
[_A light gradually comes into the windows as if
shining from the sea. The RED MAN is seen standing in
the midst of the house. _
RED MAN.
I demand the debt that is owing. I demand that some man shall stoop
down that I may cut his head off as my head was cut off. If my debt is
not paid, no peace shall come to Ireland, and Ireland shall lie weak
before her enemies. But if my debt is paid there shall be peace.
CUCHULAIN.
The quarrels of Ireland shall end. What is one man's life? I will pay
the debt with my own head. [_EMER wails. _] Do not cry out, Emer, for
if I were not myself, if I were not Cuchulain, one of those that God
has made reckless, the women of Ireland had not loved me, and you had
not held your head so high. [_He stoops, bending his head. Three _Black
Men_ come to the door. Two hold torches, and one stooping between them
holds up the Golden Helmet. The RED MAN gives one of the _Black Men_
his sword and takes the Helmet. _] What do you wait for, old man? Come,
raise up your sword!
RED MAN.
I will not harm you, Cuchulain. I am the guardian of this land, and
age after age I come up out of the sea to try the men of Ireland. I
give you the championship because you are without fear, and you shall
win many battles with laughing lips and endure wounding and betrayal
without bitterness of heart; and when men gaze upon you, their hearts
shall grow greater and their minds clear; until the day come when I
darken your mind, that there may be an end to the story, and a song on
the harp-string.
THE IRISH DRAMATIC MOVEMENT
_The Irish dramatic movement began in May, 1899, with the performance
of certain plays by English actors who were brought to Dublin for the
purpose; and in the spring of the following year and in the autumn of
the year after that, performances of like plays were given by like
actors at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin. In the third year I started
SAMHAIN to defend the work, and on re-reading it and reading it for
the first time throughout, have found it best to reprint my part of
it unchanged. A number has been published about once a year till very
lately, and the whole series of notes are a history of a movement which
is important because of the principles it is rooted in whatever be its
fruits, and these principles are better told of in words that rose
out of the need, than were I to explain all again and with order and
ceremony now that the old enmities and friendships are ruffled by new
ones that have other things to be done and said. _
_March, 1908. _
SAMHAIN: 1901
When Lady Gregory, Mr. Edward Martyn, and myself planned the Irish
Literary Theatre, we decided that it should be carried on in the form
we had projected for three years. We thought that three years would
show whether the country desired to take up the project, and make it a
part of the national life, and that we, at any rate, could return to
our proper work, in which we did not include theatrical management,
at the end of that time. A little later, Mr. George Moore[A] joined
us; and, looking back now upon our work, I doubt if it could have been
done at all without his knowledge of the stage; and certainly if the
performances of this present year bring our adventure to a successful
close, a chief part of the credit will be his. Many, however, have
helped us in various degrees, for in Ireland just now one has only to
discover an idea that seems of service to the country for friends and
helpers to start up on every hand. While we needed guarantors we had
them in plenty, and though Mr. Edward Martyn's public spirit made it
unnecessary to call upon them, we thank them none the less.
Whether the Irish Literary Theatre has a successor made on its own
model or not, we can claim that a dramatic movement which will not
die has been started. When we began our work, we tried in vain to
get a play in Gaelic. We could not even get a condensed version of
the dialogue of Oisin and Patrick. We wrote to Gaelic enthusiasts in
vain, for their imagination had not yet turned towards the stage, and
now there are excellent Gaelic plays by Dr. Douglas Hyde, by Father
O'Leary, by Father Dineen, and by Mr. MacGinlay; and the Gaelic League
has had a competition for a one-act play in Gaelic, with what results I
do not know. There have been successful performances of plays in Gaelic
at Dublin and at Macroom, and at Letterkenny, and I think at other
places; and Mr. Fay has got together an excellent little company which
plays both in Gaelic and English. I may say, for I am perhaps writing
an epitaph, and epitaphs should be written in a genial spirit, that
we have turned a great deal of Irish imagination towards the stage.
We could not have done this if our movement had not opened a way of
expression for an impulse that was in the people themselves. The truth
is that the Irish people are at that precise stage of their history
when imagination, shaped by many stirring events, desires dramatic
expression. One has only to listen to a recitation of Raftery's
_Argument with Death_ at some country Feis to understand this. When
Death makes a good point, or Raftery a good point, the audience applaud
delightedly, and applaud, not as a London audience would, some verbal
dexterity, some piece of smartness, but the movements of a simple and
fundamental comedy. One sees it too in the reciters themselves, whose
acting is at times all but perfect in its vivid simplicity. I heard a
little Claddagh girl tell a folk-story at Galway Feis with a restraint
and a delightful energy that could hardly have been bettered by the
most careful training.
The organization of this movement is of immediate importance. Some of
our friends propose that somebody begin at once to get a small stock
company together, and that he invite, let us say, Mr. Benson, to find
us certain well-trained actors, Irish if possible, but well trained of
a certainty, who will train our actors, and take the more difficult
parts at the beginning. These friends contend that it is necessary to
import our experts at the beginning, for our company must be able to
compete with travelling English companies, but that a few years will be
enough to make many competent Irish actors. The Corporation of Dublin
should be asked, they say, to give a small annual sum of money, such
as they give to the Academy of Music; and the Corporations of Cork
and Limerick and Waterford, and other provincial towns, to give small
endowments in the shape of a hall and attendants and lighting for a
week or two out of every year; and the Technical Board to give a small
annual sum of money to a school of acting which would teach fencing and
declamation, and gesture and the like. The stock company would perform
in Dublin perhaps three weeks in spring, and three weeks in autumn,
and go on tour the rest of the time through Ireland, and through the
English towns where there is a large Irish population. It would perform
plays in Irish and English, and also, it is proposed, the masterpieces
of the world, making a point of performing Spanish and Scandinavian,
and French, and perhaps Greek masterpieces rather more than
Shakespeare, for Shakespeare one sees, not well done indeed, but not
unendurably ill done in the Theatre of Commerce. It would do its best
to give Ireland a hardy and shapely national character by opening the
doors to the four winds of the world, instead of leaving the door that
is towards the east wind open alone. Certainly, the national character,
which is so essentially different from the English that Spanish and
French influences may well be most healthy, is at present like one of
those miserable thorn bushes by the sea that are all twisted to one
side by some prevailing wind.
It is contended that there is no reason why the company should not be
as successful as similar companies in Germany and Scandinavia, and
that it would be even of commercial advantage to Dublin by making it
a pleasanter place to live in, besides doing incalculable good to the
whole intellect of the country. One, at any rate, of those who press
the project on us has much practical knowledge of the stage and of
theatrical management, and knows what is possible and what is not
possible.
Others among our friends, and among these are some who have had more
than their share of the hard work which has built up the intellectual
movement in Ireland, argue that a theatre of this kind would require
too much money to be free, that it could not touch on politics, the
most vital passion and vital interest of the country, as they say,
and that the attitude of continual compromise between conviction and
interest, which it would necessitate, would become demoralising to
everybody concerned, especially at moments of political excitement.
They tell us that the war between an Irish Ireland and an English
Ireland is about to become much fiercer, to divide families and friends
it may be, and that the organisations that will lead in the war must
be able to say everything the people are thinking. They would have
Irishmen give their plays to a company like Mr. Fay's, when they are
within its power, and if not, to Mr. Benson or to any other travelling
company which will play them in Ireland without committees, where
everybody compromises a little. In this way, they contend, we would
soon build up an Irish theatre from the ground, escaping to some extent
the conventions of the ordinary theatre, and English voices which
give a foreign air to one's words. And though we might have to wait
some years, we would get even the masterpieces of the world in good
time. Let us, they think, be poor enough to whistle at the thief who
would take away some of our thoughts, and after Mr. Fay has taken his
company, as he plans, through the villages and the country towns, he
will get the little endowment that is necessary, or if he does not some
other will.
I do not know what Lady Gregory or Mr. Moore think of these projects.
I am not going to say what I think. I have spent much of my time and
more of my thought these last ten years on Irish organisation, and now
that the Irish Literary Theatre has completed the plan I had in my head
ten years ago, I want to go down again to primary ideas. I want to put
old stories into verse, and if I put them into dramatic verse it will
matter less to me henceforward who plays them than what they play, and
how they play. I hope to get our heroic age into verse, and to solve
some problems of the speaking of verse to musical notes.
There is only one question which is raised by the two projects I
have described on which I will give an opinion. It is of the first
importance that those among us who want to write for the stage study
the dramatic masterpieces of the world. If they can get them on the
stage so much the better, but study them they must if Irish drama is to
mean anything to Irish intellect. At the present moment, Shakespeare
being the only great dramatist known to Irish writers has made them
cast their work too much on the English model. Miss Milligan's _Red
Hugh_, which was successfully acted in Dublin the other day, had no
business to be in two scenes; and Father O'Leary's _Tadg Saor_, despite
its most vivid and picturesque, though far too rambling dialogue,
shows in its half dozen changes of scene the influence of the same
English convention which arose when there was no scene painting, and
is often a difficulty where there is, and is always an absurdity in
a farce of thirty minutes, breaking up the emotion and sending one's
thoughts here and there. Mr. MacGinlay's _Elis agus an bhean deirce_
has not this defect, and though I had not Irish enough to follow it
when I saw it played, and excellently played, by Mr. Fay's company, I
could see from the continual laughter of the audience that it held them
with an unbroken emotion. The best Gaelic play after Dr. Hyde's is, I
think, Father Dineen's _Creideamh agus gorta_, and though it changes
the scene a little oftener than is desirable under modern conditions,
it does not remind me of an English model. It reminds me of Calderon
by its treatment of a religious subject, and by something in Father
Dineen's sympathy with the people that is like his. But I think if
Father Dineen had studied that great Catholic dramatist he would not
have failed, as he has done once or twice, to remember some necessary
detail of a situation. In the first scene he makes a servant ask his
fellow-servants about things he must have known as well as they; and he
loses a dramatic moment in his third scene by forgetting that Seagan
Gorm has a pocket-full of money which he would certainly, being the man
he was, have offered to the woman he was urging into temptation. The
play towards the end changes from prose to verse, and the reverence and
simplicity of the verse makes one think of a mediaeval miracle play.
The subject has been so much a part of Irish life that it was bound
to be used by an Irish dramatist, though certainly I shall always
prefer plays which attack a more eternal devil than the proselytiser.
He has been defeated, and the arts are at their best when they are
busy with battles that can never be won. It is possible, however, that
we may have to deal with passing issues until we have re-created the
imaginative tradition of Ireland, and filled the popular imagination
again with saints and heroes. These short plays (though they would
be better if their writers knew the masters of their craft) are very
dramatic as they are, but there is no chance of our writers of Gaelic,
or our writers of English, doing good plays of any length if they do
not study the masters. If Irish dramatists had studied the romantic
plays of Ibsen, the one great master the modern stage has produced,
they would not have sent the Irish Literary Theatre imitations of
Boucicault, who had no relation to literature, and Father O'Leary would
have put his gift for dialogue, a gift certainly greater than, let us
say, Mr. Jones' or Mr. Grundy's, to better use than the writing of
that long rambling dramatisation of the _Tain bo Cuailgne_, in which
I hear in the midst of the exuberant Gaelic dialogue the worn-out
conventions of English poetic drama. The moment we leave even a little
the folk-tradition of the peasant, as we must in drama, if we do not
know the best that has been said and written in the world, we do not
even know ourselves. It is no great labour to know the best dramatic
literature, for there is very little of it. We Irish must know it all,
for we have, I think, far greater need of the severe discipline of
French and Scandinavian drama than of Shakespeare's luxuriance.
If the _Diarmuid and Grania_ and the _Casadh an t-Sugain_ are not well
constructed, it is not because Mr. Moore and Dr. Hyde and myself do not
understand the importance of construction, and Mr. Martyn has shown by
the triumphant construction of _The Heather Field_ how much thought he
has given to the matter; but for the most part our Irish plays read
as if they were made without a plan, without a 'scenario,' as it is
called. European drama began so, but the European drama had centuries
for its growth, while our art must grow to perfection in a generation
or two if it is not to be smothered before it is well above the earth
by what is merely commercial in the art of England.
Let us learn construction from the masters, and dialogue from
ourselves. A relation of mine has just written me a letter, in which
he says: 'It is natural to an Irishman to write plays, he has an
inborn love of dialogue and sound about him, of a dialogue as lively,
gallant, and passionate as in the times of great Eliza. In these
days an Englishman's dialogue is that of an amateur, that is to say,
it is never spontaneous. I mean in _real life_. Compare it with an
Irishman's, above all a poor Irishman's, reckless abandonment and
naturalness, or compare it with the only fragment that has come down
to us of Shakespeare's own conversation. ' (He is remembering a passage
in, I think, Ben Jonson's _Underwoods_. ) 'Petty commerce and puritanism
have brought to the front the wrong type of Englishman; the lively,
joyous, yet tenacious man has transferred himself to Ireland. We have
him and we will keep him unless the combined nonsense of . . . and . . .
and . . . succeed in suffocating him. '
In Dublin the other day I saw a poster advertising a play by a Miss
. . . under the patronage of certain titled people. I had little hope of
finding any reality in it, but I sat out two acts. Its dialogue was
above the average, though the characters were the old rattle-traps of
the stage, the wild Irish girl, and the Irish servant, and the bowing
Frenchman, and the situations had all been squeezed dry generations
ago. One saw everywhere the shadowy mind of a woman of the Irish
upper classes as they have become to-day, but under it all there was
a kind of life, though it was but the life of a string and a wire. I
do not know who Miss . . . is, but I know that she is young, for I saw
her portrait in a weekly paper, and I think that she is clever enough
to make her work of some importance. If she goes on doing bad work
she will make money, perhaps a great deal of money, but she will do a
little harm to her country. If, on the other hand, she gets into an
original relation with life, she will, perhaps, make no money, and she
will certainly have her class against her.
The Irish upper classes put everything into a money measure. When
anyone among them begins to write or paint they ask him 'How much money
have you made? ' 'Will it pay? ' Or they say, 'If you do this or that you
will make more money. ' The poor Irish clerk or shopboy,[B] who writes
verses or articles in his brief leisure, writes for the glory of God
and of his country; and because his motive is high, there is not one
vulgar thought in the countless little ballad books that have been
written from Callinan's day to this. They are often clumsily written
for they are in English, and if you have not read a great deal, it is
difficult to write well in a language which has been long separated,
from the 'folk-speech'; but they have not a thought a proud and simple
man would not have written. The writers were poor men, but they left
that money measure to the Irish upper classes. All Irish writers have
to choose whether they will write as the upper classes have done,
not to express but to exploit this country; or join the intellectual
movement which has raised the cry that was heard in Russia in the
seventies, the cry 'to the people. '
Moses was little good to his people until he had killed an Egyptian;
and for the most part a writer or public man of the upper classes is
useless to this country till he has done something that separates him
from his class. We wish to grow peaceful crops, but we must dig our
furrows with the sword.
Our plays this year will be produced by Mr. Benson at the Gaiety
Theatre on October the 21st, and on some of the succeeding days. They
are Dr. Douglas Hyde's _Casadh an t-Sugain_, which is founded on a well
known Irish story of a wandering poet; and _Diarmuid and Grania_, a
play in three acts and in prose by Mr. George Moore and myself, which
is founded on the most famous of all Irish stories, the story of the
lovers whose beds were the cromlechs. The first act of _Diarmuid and
Grania_ is in the great banqueting hall of Tara, and the second and
third on the slopes of Ben Bulben in Sligo. We do not think there is
anything in either play to offend anybody, but we make no promises. We
thought our plays inoffensive last year and the year before, but we
were accused the one year of sedition, and the other of heresy.
I have called this little collection of writings _Samhain_, the old
name for the beginning of winter, because our plays this year are in
October, and because our Theatre is coming to an end in its present
shape.
1902
The Irish Literary Theatre wound up its three years of experiment last
October with _Diarmuid and Grania_, which was played by Mr. Benson's
Company, Mr. Benson himself playing Diarmuid with poetry and fervour,
and _Casadh an t-Sugain_, played by Dr. Hyde and some members of the
Gaelic League. _Diarmuid and Grania_ drew large audiences, but its
version of the legend was a good deal blamed by critics, who knew only
the modern text of the story. There are two versions, and the play
was fully justified by Irish and Scottish folk-lore, and by certain
early Irish texts, which do not see Grania through very friendly
eyes. Any critic who is interested in so dead a controversy can look
at the folk-tales quoted by Campbell in, I think, _West Highland
Superstitions_, and at the fragment translated by Kuno Meyer, at page
458 of Vol. I. of _Zeitschrift fur Keltische Philologie_. Dr. Hyde's
play, on the other hand, pleased everybody, and has been played a good
many times in a good many places since. It was the first play in Irish
played in a theatre, and did much towards making plays a necessary part
in Irish propaganda.
The Irish Literary Theatre has given place to a company of Irish
actors. Its Committee saw them take up the work all the more gladly
because it had not formed them or influenced them. A dramatic society
with guarantors and patrons can never have more than a passing use,
because it can never be quite free; and it is not successful until it
is able to say it is no longer wanted. Amateur actors will perform for
_Cumann-na-Gael_ plays chosen by themselves, and written by A. E. , by
Mr. Cousins, by Mr. Ryan, by Mr. MacGinlay and by myself. These plays
will be given at the Antient Concert Rooms at the end of October, but
the National Theatrical Company will repeat their successes with new
work in a very little hall they have hired in Camden Street. If they
could afford it they would have hired some bigger house, but, after
all, M. Antoine founded his _Theatre Libre_ with a company of amateurs
in a hall that only held three hundred people.
The first work of theirs to get much attention was their performance,
last spring, at the invitation of _Inghinidhe h-Eireann_ of A. E. 's
_Deirdre_, and my _Cathleen ni Houlihan_. They had Miss Maud Gonne's
help, and it was a fine thing for so beautiful a woman to consent to
play my poor old Cathleen, and she played with nobility and tragic
power. She showed herself as good in tragedy as Dr. Hyde is in comedy,
and stirred a large audience very greatly. The whole company played
well, too, but it was in _Deirdre_ that they interested me most. They
showed plenty of inexperience, especially in the minor characters, but
it was the first performance I had seen since I understood these things
in which the actors kept still enough to give poetical writing its
full effect upon the stage. I had imagined such acting, though I had
not seen it, and had once asked a dramatic company to let me rehearse
them in barrels that they might forget gesture and have their minds
free to think of speech for a while. The barrels, I thought, might
be on castors, so that I could shove them about with a pole when the
action required it. The other day I saw Sara Bernhardt and De Max in
_Phedre_, and understood where Mr. Fay, who stage-manages the National
Theatrical Company, had gone for his model. [C] For long periods the
performers would merely stand and pose, and I once counted twenty-seven
quite slowly before anybody on a fairly well-filled stage moved, as it
seemed, so much as an eye-lash. The periods of stillness were generally
shorter, but I frequently counted seventeen, eighteen or twenty before
there was a movement. I noticed, too, that the gestures had a rhythmic
progression. Sara Bernhardt would keep her hands clasped over, let us
say, her right breast for some time, and then move them to the other
side, perhaps, lowering her chin till it touched her hands, and then,
after another long stillness, she would unclasp them and hold one out,
and so on, not lowering them till she had exhausted all the gestures of
uplifted hands. Through one long scene De Max, who was quite as fine,
never lifted his hand above his elbow, and it was only when the emotion
came to its climax that he raised it to his breast. Beyond them stood
a crowd of white-robed men who never moved at all, and the whole scene
had the nobility of Greek sculpture, and an extraordinary reality and
intensity. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen upon the
stage, and made me understand, in a new way, that saying of Goethe's
which is understood everywhere but in England, 'Art is art because
it is not nature. ' Of course, our amateurs were poor and crude beside
those great actors, perhaps the greatest in Europe, but they followed
them as well as they could, and got an audience of artisans, for the
most part, to admire them for doing it. I heard somebody who sat behind
me say, 'They have got rid of all the nonsense. '
I thought the costumes and scenery, which were designed by A. E.
himself, good, too, though I did not think them simple enough. They
were more simple than ordinary stage costumes and scenery, but I would
like to see poetical drama, which tries to keep at a distance from
daily life that it may keep its emotion untroubled, staged with but
two or three colours. The background, especially in small theatres,
where its form is broken up and lost when the stage is at all crowded,
should, I think, be thought out as one thinks out the background of
a portrait. One often needs nothing more than a single colour with
perhaps a few shadowy forms to suggest wood or mountain. Even on a
large stage one should leave the description of the poet free to call
up the martlet's procreant cradle or what he will. But I have written
enough about decorative scenery elsewhere, and will probably lecture on
that and like matters before we begin the winter's work.
The performances of _Deirdre_ and _Cathleen ni Houlihan_, which will be
repeated in the Antient Concert Rooms, drew so many to hear them that
great numbers were turned away from the doors of St. Theresa's Hall.
Like the plays of the Irish Literary Theatre, they started unexpected
discussion. Mr. Standish O'Grady, who had done more than any other
to make us know the old legends, wrote in his _All Ireland Review_
that old legends could not be staged without danger of 'banishing the
soul of the land. ' The old Irish had many wives for instance, and one
had best leave their histories to the vagueness of legend. How could
uneducated people understand heroes who lived amid such different
circumstances? And so we were to 'leave heroic cycles alone, and not to
bring them down to the crowd. ' A. E. replied in the _United Irishman_
with an impassioned letter. 'The old, forgotten music' he writes about
in his letter is, I think, that regulated music of speech at which both
he and I have been working, though on somewhat different principles. I
have been working with Miss Farr and Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch, who has made
a psaltery for the purpose, to perfect a music of speech which can be
recorded in something like ordinary musical notes; while A. E. has got a
musician to record little chants with intervals much smaller than those
of modern music.
After the production of these plays the most important Irish dramatic
event was, no doubt, the acting of Dr. Hyde's _An Posadh_, in Galway.
Through an accident it had been very badly rehearsed, but his own
acting made amends. One could hardly have had a play that grew more out
of the life of the people who saw it. There may have been old men in
that audience who remembered its hero the poet Raftery, and there was
nobody there who had not come from hearing his poems repeated at the
Galway Feis. I think from its effect upon the audience that this play
in which the chief Gaelic poet of our time celebrates his forerunner
in simplicity, will be better liked in Connaught at any rate than
even _Casadh an t-Sugain_. His _Tincear agus Sidheog_, acted in Mr.
Moore's garden, at the time of the Oireachtas, is a very good play,
but is, I think, the least interesting of his plays as literature. His
imagination, which is essentially the folk-imagination, needs a looser
construction, and probably a more crowded stage. A play that gets its
effect by keeping close to one idea reminds one, when it comes from
the hands of a folk-poet, of Blake's saying, that 'Improvement makes
straight roads, but the crooked roads are the roads of genius. ' The
idea loses the richness of its own life, while it destroys the wayward
life of his mind by bringing it under too stern a law. Nor could
charming verses make amends for that second kiss in which there was
profanation, and for that abounding black bottle. Did not M. Trebulet
Bonhommie discover that one spot of ink would kill a swan?
Among the other plays in Irish acted during the year Father Dineen's
_Tobar Draoidheachta_ is probably the best. He has given up the many
scenes of his _Creadeamh agus Gorta_, and has written a play in one
scene, which, as it can be staged without much trouble, has already
been played in several places. One admires its _naivete_ as much as
anything else. Father Dineen, who, no doubt, remembers how Finn mac
Cumhal when a child was put in a field to catch hares and keep him out
of mischief, has sent the rival lovers of his play when he wanted
them off the scene for a moment, to catch a hare that has crossed the
stage. When they return the good lover is carrying it by the heels, and
modestly compares it to a lame jackass. One rather likes this bit of
nonsense when one comes to it, for in that world of folk-imagination
one thing seems as possible as another. On the other hand, there is
a moment of beautiful dramatic tact. The lover gets a letter telling
of the death of a relative in America, for whom he has no particular
affection, and who has left him a fortune. He cannot lament, for that
would be insincere, and his first words must not be rejoicing. Father
Dineen has found for him the one beautiful thing he could say, 'It's a
lonesome thing death is. ' With, perhaps, less beauty than there is in
the closing scene of _Creadeamh agus Gorta_, the play has more fancy
and a more sustained energy.
Father Peter O'Leary has written a play in his usual number of scenes
which has not been published, but has been acted amid much Munster
enthusiasm. But neither that or _La an Amadan_, which has also been
acted, are likely to have any long life on our country stages. A short
play, with many changes of scene, is a nuisance in any theatre, and
often an impossibility on our poor little stages. Some kind of play,
in English, by Mr. Standish O'Grady, has been acted in the open air
in Kilkenny. I have not seen it, and I cannot understand anything
by the accounts of it, except that there were magic lantern slides
and actors on horseback, and Mr. Standish O'Grady as an Elizabethan
night-watchman, speaking prologues, and a contented audience of two or
three thousand people.
As we do not think that a play can be worth acting and not worth
reading, all our plays will be published in time. Some have been
printed in _The United Irishman_ and _The All Ireland Review_. I have
put my _Cathleen ni Houlihan_ and a little play by Dr. Hyde into this
_Samhain_. Once already this year I have had what somebody has called
the noble pleasure of praising, and I can praise this _Lost Saint_
with as good a conscience as I had when I wrote of _Cuchulain of
Muirthemne_. I would always admire it, but just now, when I have been
thinking that literature should return to its old habit of describing
desirable things, I am in the mood to be stirred by that old man
gathering up food for fowl with his heart full of love, and by those
children who are so full of the light-hearted curiosity of childhood,
and by that schoolmaster who has mixed prayer with his gentle
punishments. It seems natural that so beautiful a prayer as that of
the old saint should have come out of a life so full of innocence and
peace. One could hardly have thought out the play in English, for those
phrases of a traditional simplicity and of a too deliberate prettiness
which become part of an old language would have arisen between the
mind and the story. One might even have made something as unreal as
the sentimental schoolmaster of the Scottish novelists, and how many
children, who are but literary images, would one not have had to hunt
out of one's mind before meeting with those little children? Even if
one could have thought it out in English one could not have written
it in English, unless perhaps in that dialect which Dr. Hyde had
already used in the prose narrative that flows about his _Love Songs of
Connaught_.
Dr. Hyde has written a little play about the birth of Christ which
has the same beauty and simplicity. These plays remind me of my first
reading of _The Love Songs of Connaught_. The prose parts of that book
were to me, as they were to many others, the coming of a new power
into literature. I find myself now, as I found myself then, grudging
to propaganda, to scholarship, to oratory, however necessary, a genius
which might in modern Irish or in that idiom of the English-speaking
country people discover a new region for the mind to wander in. In
Ireland, where we have so much to prove and to disprove, we are ready
to forget that the creation of an emotion of beauty is the only kind
of literature that justifies itself. Books of literary propaganda
and literary history are merely preparations for the creation or
understanding of such an emotion. It is necessary to put so much in
order, to clear away so much, to explain so much, that somebody may be
moved by a thought or an image that is inexplicable as a wild creature.
I cannot judge the language of his Irish poetry, but it is so rich in
poetical thought, when at its best, that it seems to me that if he
were to write more he might become to modern Irish what Mistral was to
modern Provencal. I wish, too, that he could put away from himself some
of the interruptions of that ceaseless propaganda, and find time for
the making of translations, loving and leisurely, like those in _Beside
the Fire_ and _The Love Songs of Connaught_. He has begun to get a
little careless lately. Above all I would have him keep to that English
idiom of the Irish-thinking people of the west which he has begun to
use less often. It is the only good English spoken by any large number
of Irish people to-day, and one must found good literature on a living
speech. English men of letters found themselves upon the English Bible,
where religious thought gets its living speech. Blake, if I remember
rightly, copied it out twice, and I remember once finding a few
illuminated pages of a new decorated copy that he began in his old age.
Byron read it for the sake of style, though I think it did him little
good, and Ruskin founded himself in great part upon it. Indeed, one
finds everywhere signs of a book which is the chief influence in the
lives of English children. The translation used in Ireland has not the
same literary beauty, and if we are to find anything to take its place
we must find it in that idiom of the poor, which mingles so much of
the same vocabulary with turns of phrase that have come out of Gaelic.
Even Irish writers of considerable powers of thought seem to have no
better standard of English than a schoolmaster's ideal of correctness.
If their grammar is correct they will write in all the lightness of
their hearts about 'keeping in touch,' and 'object-lessons,' and
'shining examples,' and 'running in grooves,' and 'flagrant violations'
of various things. Yet, as Sainte-Beuve has said, there is nothing
immortal except style. One can write well in that country idiom without
much thought about one's words, the emotion will bring the right word
itself, for there everything is old and everything alive and nothing
common or threadbare. I recommend to the Intermediate Board--a body
that seems to benefit by advice--a better plan than any they know for
teaching children to write good English. Let every child in Ireland be
set to turn a leading article or a piece of what is called excellent
English, written perhaps by some distinguished member of the Board,
into the idiom of his own country side. He will find at once the
difference between dead and living words, between words that meant
something years ago, and words that have the only thing that gives
literary quality--personality, the breath of men's mouths. Zola, who is
sometimes an admirable critic, has said that some of the greatest pages
in French literature are not even right in their grammar, 'They are
great because they have personality. '
The habit of writing for the stage, even when it is not country people
who are the speakers, and of considering what good dialogue is, will
help to increase our feeling for style. Let us get back in everything
to the spoken word, even though we have to speak our lyrics to the
Psaltery or the Harp, for, as A. E. says, we have begun to forget that
literature is but recorded speech, and even when we write with care we
have begun 'to write with elaboration what could never be spoken. ' But
when we go back to speech let us see that it is either the idiom of
those who have rejected, or of those who have never learned, the base
idioms of the newspapers.
Mr. Martyn argued in _The United Irishman_ some months ago that
our actors should try to train themselves for the modern drama of
society. The acting of plays of heroic life or plays like _Cathleen ni
Houlihan_, with its speech of the country people, did not seem to him
a preparation. It is not; but that is as it should be. Our movement
is a return to the people, like the Russian movement of the early
seventies, and the drama of society would but magnify a condition of
life which the countryman and the artisan could but copy to their
hurt. The play that is to give them a quite natural pleasure should
either tell them of their own life, or of that life of poetry where
every man can see his own image, because there alone does human nature
escape from arbitrary conditions. Plays about drawing-rooms are written
for the middle classes of great cities, for the classes who live in
drawing-rooms, but if you would uplift the man of the roads you must
write about the roads, or about the people of romance, or about great
historical people. We should, of course, play every kind of good play
about Ireland that we can get, but romantic and historical plays, and
plays about the life of artisans and country people are the best worth
getting. In time, I think, we can make the poetical play a living
dramatic form again, and the training our actors will get from plays
of country life, with its unchanging outline, its abundant speech, its
extravagance of thought, will help to establish a school of imaginative
acting. The play of society, on the other hand, could but train up
realistic actors who would do badly, for the most part, what English
actors do well, and would, when at all good, drift away to wealthy
English theatres. If, on the other hand, we busy ourselves with poetry
and the countryman, two things which have always mixed with one another
in life as on the stage, we may recover, in the course of years, a lost
art which, being an imitation of nothing English, may bring our actors
a secure fame and a sufficient livelihood.
1903
I CANNOT describe the various dramatic adventures of the year with as
much detail as I did last year, mainly because the movement has got
beyond me. The most important event of the Gaelic Theatre has been
the two series of plays produced in the Round Room of the Rotunda by
the Gaelic League. Father Dineen's _Tobar Draoidheachta_, and Dr.
Hyde's _An Posadh_, and a chronicle play about Hugh O'Neill, and, I
think, some other plays, were seen by immense audiences. I was not
in Ireland for these plays, but a friend tells me that he could only
get standing-room one night, and the Round Room must hold about 3,000
people. A performance of _Tobar Draoidheachta_ I saw there some months
before, was bad, but I believe there was great improvement, and that
the players who came up from somewhere in County Cork to play it at
this second series of plays were admirable. The players, too, that
brought Dr. Hyde's _An Posadh_ from Ballaghadereen, in County Mayo,
where they had been showing it to their neighbours, were also, I am
told, careful and natural. The play-writing, always good in dialogue,
is still very poor in construction, and I still hear of plays in many
scenes, with no scene lasting longer than four or six minutes, and few
intervals shorter than nine or ten minutes, which have to be filled
up with songs. The Rotunda chronicle play seems to have been rather
of this sort, and I suspect that when I get Father Peter O'Leary's
_Meadhbh_, a play in five acts produced at Cork, I shall find the
masterful old man, in spite of his hatred of English thought, sticking
to the Elizabethan form. I wish I could have seen it played last week,
for the spread of the Gaelic Theatre in the country is more important
than its spread in Dublin, and of all the performances in Gaelic plays
in the country during the year I have seen but one--Dr. Hyde's new play,
_Cleamhnas_, at Galway Feis. I got there a day late for a play by the
Master of Galway Workhouse, but heard that it was well played, and
that his dialogue was as good as his construction was bad. There is
no question, however, about the performance of _Cleamhnas_ being the
worst I ever saw. I do not blame the acting, which was pleasant and
natural, in spite of insufficient rehearsal, but the stage-management.
The subject of the play was a match-making. The terms were in debate
between two old men in an inner room. An old woman, according to the
stage directions, should have listened at the door and reported what
she heard to her daughter's suitor, who is outside the window, and to
her daughter. There was no window on the stage, and the young man stood
close enough to the door to have listened for himself. The door, where
she listened, opened now on the inner room, and now on the street,
according to the necessities of the play, and the young men who acted
the fathers of grown-up children, when they came through the door were
seen to have done nothing to disguise their twenty-five or twenty-six
birthdays. There had been only two rehearsals, and the little boy who
should have come in laughing at the end came in shouting, 'Ho ho, ha
ha,' evidently believing that these were Gaelic words he had never
heard before. Playwrights will have to be careful who they permit to
play their work if it is to be played after only two rehearsals, and
without enough attention to the arrangement of the stage to make the
action plausible.
The only Gaelic performances I have seen during the year have been
ill-done, but I have seen them sufficiently well done in other years
to believe my friends when they tell me that there have been good
performances. _Inghinidhe na h-Eireann_ is always thorough, and one
cannot doubt that the performance of Dr. Hyde's _An Naom ar Iarriad_,
by the children from its classes, was at least careful. A powerful
little play in English against enlisting, by Mr. Colum, was played with
it, and afterwards revived, and played with a play about the Royal
Visit, also in English. I have no doubt that we shall see a good many
of these political plays during the next two or three years, and it
may be even the rise of a more or less permanent company of political
players, for the revolutionary clubs will begin to think plays as
necessary as the Gaelic League is already thinking them. Nobody can
find the same patriotic songs and recitations sung and spoken by
the same people, year in year out, anything but mouldy bread. It is
possible that the players who are to produce plays in October for the
Samhain festival of _Cumann na n-Gaedheal_ may grow into such a company.
Though one welcomes every kind of vigorous life, I am, myself, most
interested in 'The Irish National Theatre Society,' which has no
propaganda but that of good art. The little Camden Street Hall it had
taken has been useful for rehearsal alone, for it proved to be too far
away, and too lacking in dressing-rooms for our short plays, which
involve so many changes. Successful performances were given, however,
at Rathmines, and in one or two country places.
_Deirdre_, by A. E. , _The Racing Lug_, by Mr. Cousins, _The
Foundations_, by Mr. Ryan, and my _Pot of Broth_, and _Cathleen ni
Houlihan_, were repeated, but no new plays were produced until March
14th, when Lady Gregory's _Twenty-five_ and my _Hour-Glass_, drew a
good audience. On May 2nd the _Hour-Glass_, _Twenty-five_, _Cathleen ni
Houlihan_, _Pot of Broth_, and _Foundations_ were performed before the
Irish Literary Society in London, at the Queen's Gate Hall, and plays
and players were generously commended by the Press--very eloquently by
the critic of _The Times_. It is natural that we should be pleased
with this praise, and that we should wish others to know of it, for is
it not a chief pleasure of the artist to be commended in subtle and
eloquent words? The critic of _The Times_ has seen many theatres and
he is, perhaps, a little weary of them, but here in Ireland there are
one or two critics who are so much in love, or pretend to be so much
in love, with the theatre as it is, that they complain when we perform
on a stage two feet wider than Moliere's that it is scarce possible to
be interested in anything that is played on so little a stage. We are
to them foolish sectaries who have revolted against that orthodoxy of
the commercial theatre, which is so much less pliant than the orthodoxy
of the church, for there is nothing so passionate as a vested interest
disguised as an intellectual conviction. If you inquire into its truth
it becomes as angry as a begging-letter writer, when you find some hole
in that beautiful story about the five children and the broken mangle.
In Ireland, wherever the enthusiasts are shaping life, the critic who
does the will of the commercial theatre can but stand against his
lonely pillar defending his articles of belief among a wild people, and
thinking mournfully of distant cities, where nobody puts a raw potato
into his pocket when he is going to hear a musical comedy.
The _Irish Literary Society_ of New York, which has been founded this
year, produced _The Land of Heart's Desire_, _The Pot of Broth_, and
_Cathleen ni Houlihan_, on June 3rd and 4th, very successfully, and
propose to give Dr. Hyde's Nativity Play, _Drama Breithe Chriosta_, and
his _Casadh an t-Sugain_, _Posadh_ and _Naom ar Iarriad_ next year, at
the same time of year, playing them both in Irish and English. I heard
too that his Nativity Play will be performed in New York this winter,
but I know no particulars except that it will be done in connection
with some religious societies.
EMER.
I am come to praise you and to put courage into you, Cuchulain, as a
wife should, that they may not take the championship of the men of
Ireland from you.
LEAGERIE'S WIFE.
You lie, Emer, for it is Cuchulain and Conal who are taking the
championship from my husband.
CONAL'S WIFE.
Cuchulain has taken it.
CUCHULAIN.
Townland against townland, barony against barony, kingdom against
kingdom, province against province, and if there be but two door-posts
to a door the one fighting against the other. [_He takes up the Helmet
which LEAGERIE had laid down upon the table when he went to break out
the bottom of the window. _] This Helmet will bring no more wars into
Ireland. [_He throws it into the sea. _]
LEAGERIE'S WIFE.
You have done that to rob my husband.
CONAL'S WIFE.
You could not keep it for yourself, and so you threw it away that
nobody else might have it.
CONAL.
You should not have done that, Cuchulain.
LEAGERIE.
You have done us a great wrong.
EMER.
Who is for Cuchulain?
CUCHULAIN.
Let no one stir.
EMER.
Who is for Cuchulain, I say?
[_She draws her dagger from her belt and sings the same
words as before, flourishing it about. While she has
been singing, CONAL'S WIFE and LEAGERIE'S WIFE have
drawn their daggers and run at her to kill her, but
CUCHULAIN has forced them back. CONAL and LEAGERIE have
drawn their swords to strike CUCHULAIN. _
CONAL'S WIFE.
[_While EMER is still singing. _]
Silence her voice, silence her voice, blow the horns, make a noise!
[_The _Scullions_ and _Horseboys_ blow their horns or
fight among themselves. There is a deafening noise and
a confused fight. Suddenly three black hands holding
extinguishers come through the window and extinguish
the torches. It is now pitch dark but for a very faint
light outside the house which merely shows that there
are moving forms, but not who or what they are, and in
the darkness one can hear low terrified voices. _
FIRST VOICE.
Did you see them putting out the torches?
ANOTHER VOICE.
They came up out of the sea, three black men.
ANOTHER VOICE.
They have heads of cats upon them.
ANOTHER VOICE.
They came up mewing out of the sea.
ANOTHER VOICE.
How dark it is! one of them has put his hand over the moon.
[_A light gradually comes into the windows as if
shining from the sea. The RED MAN is seen standing in
the midst of the house. _
RED MAN.
I demand the debt that is owing. I demand that some man shall stoop
down that I may cut his head off as my head was cut off. If my debt is
not paid, no peace shall come to Ireland, and Ireland shall lie weak
before her enemies. But if my debt is paid there shall be peace.
CUCHULAIN.
The quarrels of Ireland shall end. What is one man's life? I will pay
the debt with my own head. [_EMER wails. _] Do not cry out, Emer, for
if I were not myself, if I were not Cuchulain, one of those that God
has made reckless, the women of Ireland had not loved me, and you had
not held your head so high. [_He stoops, bending his head. Three _Black
Men_ come to the door. Two hold torches, and one stooping between them
holds up the Golden Helmet. The RED MAN gives one of the _Black Men_
his sword and takes the Helmet. _] What do you wait for, old man? Come,
raise up your sword!
RED MAN.
I will not harm you, Cuchulain. I am the guardian of this land, and
age after age I come up out of the sea to try the men of Ireland. I
give you the championship because you are without fear, and you shall
win many battles with laughing lips and endure wounding and betrayal
without bitterness of heart; and when men gaze upon you, their hearts
shall grow greater and their minds clear; until the day come when I
darken your mind, that there may be an end to the story, and a song on
the harp-string.
THE IRISH DRAMATIC MOVEMENT
_The Irish dramatic movement began in May, 1899, with the performance
of certain plays by English actors who were brought to Dublin for the
purpose; and in the spring of the following year and in the autumn of
the year after that, performances of like plays were given by like
actors at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin. In the third year I started
SAMHAIN to defend the work, and on re-reading it and reading it for
the first time throughout, have found it best to reprint my part of
it unchanged. A number has been published about once a year till very
lately, and the whole series of notes are a history of a movement which
is important because of the principles it is rooted in whatever be its
fruits, and these principles are better told of in words that rose
out of the need, than were I to explain all again and with order and
ceremony now that the old enmities and friendships are ruffled by new
ones that have other things to be done and said. _
_March, 1908. _
SAMHAIN: 1901
When Lady Gregory, Mr. Edward Martyn, and myself planned the Irish
Literary Theatre, we decided that it should be carried on in the form
we had projected for three years. We thought that three years would
show whether the country desired to take up the project, and make it a
part of the national life, and that we, at any rate, could return to
our proper work, in which we did not include theatrical management,
at the end of that time. A little later, Mr. George Moore[A] joined
us; and, looking back now upon our work, I doubt if it could have been
done at all without his knowledge of the stage; and certainly if the
performances of this present year bring our adventure to a successful
close, a chief part of the credit will be his. Many, however, have
helped us in various degrees, for in Ireland just now one has only to
discover an idea that seems of service to the country for friends and
helpers to start up on every hand. While we needed guarantors we had
them in plenty, and though Mr. Edward Martyn's public spirit made it
unnecessary to call upon them, we thank them none the less.
Whether the Irish Literary Theatre has a successor made on its own
model or not, we can claim that a dramatic movement which will not
die has been started. When we began our work, we tried in vain to
get a play in Gaelic. We could not even get a condensed version of
the dialogue of Oisin and Patrick. We wrote to Gaelic enthusiasts in
vain, for their imagination had not yet turned towards the stage, and
now there are excellent Gaelic plays by Dr. Douglas Hyde, by Father
O'Leary, by Father Dineen, and by Mr. MacGinlay; and the Gaelic League
has had a competition for a one-act play in Gaelic, with what results I
do not know. There have been successful performances of plays in Gaelic
at Dublin and at Macroom, and at Letterkenny, and I think at other
places; and Mr. Fay has got together an excellent little company which
plays both in Gaelic and English. I may say, for I am perhaps writing
an epitaph, and epitaphs should be written in a genial spirit, that
we have turned a great deal of Irish imagination towards the stage.
We could not have done this if our movement had not opened a way of
expression for an impulse that was in the people themselves. The truth
is that the Irish people are at that precise stage of their history
when imagination, shaped by many stirring events, desires dramatic
expression. One has only to listen to a recitation of Raftery's
_Argument with Death_ at some country Feis to understand this. When
Death makes a good point, or Raftery a good point, the audience applaud
delightedly, and applaud, not as a London audience would, some verbal
dexterity, some piece of smartness, but the movements of a simple and
fundamental comedy. One sees it too in the reciters themselves, whose
acting is at times all but perfect in its vivid simplicity. I heard a
little Claddagh girl tell a folk-story at Galway Feis with a restraint
and a delightful energy that could hardly have been bettered by the
most careful training.
The organization of this movement is of immediate importance. Some of
our friends propose that somebody begin at once to get a small stock
company together, and that he invite, let us say, Mr. Benson, to find
us certain well-trained actors, Irish if possible, but well trained of
a certainty, who will train our actors, and take the more difficult
parts at the beginning. These friends contend that it is necessary to
import our experts at the beginning, for our company must be able to
compete with travelling English companies, but that a few years will be
enough to make many competent Irish actors. The Corporation of Dublin
should be asked, they say, to give a small annual sum of money, such
as they give to the Academy of Music; and the Corporations of Cork
and Limerick and Waterford, and other provincial towns, to give small
endowments in the shape of a hall and attendants and lighting for a
week or two out of every year; and the Technical Board to give a small
annual sum of money to a school of acting which would teach fencing and
declamation, and gesture and the like. The stock company would perform
in Dublin perhaps three weeks in spring, and three weeks in autumn,
and go on tour the rest of the time through Ireland, and through the
English towns where there is a large Irish population. It would perform
plays in Irish and English, and also, it is proposed, the masterpieces
of the world, making a point of performing Spanish and Scandinavian,
and French, and perhaps Greek masterpieces rather more than
Shakespeare, for Shakespeare one sees, not well done indeed, but not
unendurably ill done in the Theatre of Commerce. It would do its best
to give Ireland a hardy and shapely national character by opening the
doors to the four winds of the world, instead of leaving the door that
is towards the east wind open alone. Certainly, the national character,
which is so essentially different from the English that Spanish and
French influences may well be most healthy, is at present like one of
those miserable thorn bushes by the sea that are all twisted to one
side by some prevailing wind.
It is contended that there is no reason why the company should not be
as successful as similar companies in Germany and Scandinavia, and
that it would be even of commercial advantage to Dublin by making it
a pleasanter place to live in, besides doing incalculable good to the
whole intellect of the country. One, at any rate, of those who press
the project on us has much practical knowledge of the stage and of
theatrical management, and knows what is possible and what is not
possible.
Others among our friends, and among these are some who have had more
than their share of the hard work which has built up the intellectual
movement in Ireland, argue that a theatre of this kind would require
too much money to be free, that it could not touch on politics, the
most vital passion and vital interest of the country, as they say,
and that the attitude of continual compromise between conviction and
interest, which it would necessitate, would become demoralising to
everybody concerned, especially at moments of political excitement.
They tell us that the war between an Irish Ireland and an English
Ireland is about to become much fiercer, to divide families and friends
it may be, and that the organisations that will lead in the war must
be able to say everything the people are thinking. They would have
Irishmen give their plays to a company like Mr. Fay's, when they are
within its power, and if not, to Mr. Benson or to any other travelling
company which will play them in Ireland without committees, where
everybody compromises a little. In this way, they contend, we would
soon build up an Irish theatre from the ground, escaping to some extent
the conventions of the ordinary theatre, and English voices which
give a foreign air to one's words. And though we might have to wait
some years, we would get even the masterpieces of the world in good
time. Let us, they think, be poor enough to whistle at the thief who
would take away some of our thoughts, and after Mr. Fay has taken his
company, as he plans, through the villages and the country towns, he
will get the little endowment that is necessary, or if he does not some
other will.
I do not know what Lady Gregory or Mr. Moore think of these projects.
I am not going to say what I think. I have spent much of my time and
more of my thought these last ten years on Irish organisation, and now
that the Irish Literary Theatre has completed the plan I had in my head
ten years ago, I want to go down again to primary ideas. I want to put
old stories into verse, and if I put them into dramatic verse it will
matter less to me henceforward who plays them than what they play, and
how they play. I hope to get our heroic age into verse, and to solve
some problems of the speaking of verse to musical notes.
There is only one question which is raised by the two projects I
have described on which I will give an opinion. It is of the first
importance that those among us who want to write for the stage study
the dramatic masterpieces of the world. If they can get them on the
stage so much the better, but study them they must if Irish drama is to
mean anything to Irish intellect. At the present moment, Shakespeare
being the only great dramatist known to Irish writers has made them
cast their work too much on the English model. Miss Milligan's _Red
Hugh_, which was successfully acted in Dublin the other day, had no
business to be in two scenes; and Father O'Leary's _Tadg Saor_, despite
its most vivid and picturesque, though far too rambling dialogue,
shows in its half dozen changes of scene the influence of the same
English convention which arose when there was no scene painting, and
is often a difficulty where there is, and is always an absurdity in
a farce of thirty minutes, breaking up the emotion and sending one's
thoughts here and there. Mr. MacGinlay's _Elis agus an bhean deirce_
has not this defect, and though I had not Irish enough to follow it
when I saw it played, and excellently played, by Mr. Fay's company, I
could see from the continual laughter of the audience that it held them
with an unbroken emotion. The best Gaelic play after Dr. Hyde's is, I
think, Father Dineen's _Creideamh agus gorta_, and though it changes
the scene a little oftener than is desirable under modern conditions,
it does not remind me of an English model. It reminds me of Calderon
by its treatment of a religious subject, and by something in Father
Dineen's sympathy with the people that is like his. But I think if
Father Dineen had studied that great Catholic dramatist he would not
have failed, as he has done once or twice, to remember some necessary
detail of a situation. In the first scene he makes a servant ask his
fellow-servants about things he must have known as well as they; and he
loses a dramatic moment in his third scene by forgetting that Seagan
Gorm has a pocket-full of money which he would certainly, being the man
he was, have offered to the woman he was urging into temptation. The
play towards the end changes from prose to verse, and the reverence and
simplicity of the verse makes one think of a mediaeval miracle play.
The subject has been so much a part of Irish life that it was bound
to be used by an Irish dramatist, though certainly I shall always
prefer plays which attack a more eternal devil than the proselytiser.
He has been defeated, and the arts are at their best when they are
busy with battles that can never be won. It is possible, however, that
we may have to deal with passing issues until we have re-created the
imaginative tradition of Ireland, and filled the popular imagination
again with saints and heroes. These short plays (though they would
be better if their writers knew the masters of their craft) are very
dramatic as they are, but there is no chance of our writers of Gaelic,
or our writers of English, doing good plays of any length if they do
not study the masters. If Irish dramatists had studied the romantic
plays of Ibsen, the one great master the modern stage has produced,
they would not have sent the Irish Literary Theatre imitations of
Boucicault, who had no relation to literature, and Father O'Leary would
have put his gift for dialogue, a gift certainly greater than, let us
say, Mr. Jones' or Mr. Grundy's, to better use than the writing of
that long rambling dramatisation of the _Tain bo Cuailgne_, in which
I hear in the midst of the exuberant Gaelic dialogue the worn-out
conventions of English poetic drama. The moment we leave even a little
the folk-tradition of the peasant, as we must in drama, if we do not
know the best that has been said and written in the world, we do not
even know ourselves. It is no great labour to know the best dramatic
literature, for there is very little of it. We Irish must know it all,
for we have, I think, far greater need of the severe discipline of
French and Scandinavian drama than of Shakespeare's luxuriance.
If the _Diarmuid and Grania_ and the _Casadh an t-Sugain_ are not well
constructed, it is not because Mr. Moore and Dr. Hyde and myself do not
understand the importance of construction, and Mr. Martyn has shown by
the triumphant construction of _The Heather Field_ how much thought he
has given to the matter; but for the most part our Irish plays read
as if they were made without a plan, without a 'scenario,' as it is
called. European drama began so, but the European drama had centuries
for its growth, while our art must grow to perfection in a generation
or two if it is not to be smothered before it is well above the earth
by what is merely commercial in the art of England.
Let us learn construction from the masters, and dialogue from
ourselves. A relation of mine has just written me a letter, in which
he says: 'It is natural to an Irishman to write plays, he has an
inborn love of dialogue and sound about him, of a dialogue as lively,
gallant, and passionate as in the times of great Eliza. In these
days an Englishman's dialogue is that of an amateur, that is to say,
it is never spontaneous. I mean in _real life_. Compare it with an
Irishman's, above all a poor Irishman's, reckless abandonment and
naturalness, or compare it with the only fragment that has come down
to us of Shakespeare's own conversation. ' (He is remembering a passage
in, I think, Ben Jonson's _Underwoods_. ) 'Petty commerce and puritanism
have brought to the front the wrong type of Englishman; the lively,
joyous, yet tenacious man has transferred himself to Ireland. We have
him and we will keep him unless the combined nonsense of . . . and . . .
and . . . succeed in suffocating him. '
In Dublin the other day I saw a poster advertising a play by a Miss
. . . under the patronage of certain titled people. I had little hope of
finding any reality in it, but I sat out two acts. Its dialogue was
above the average, though the characters were the old rattle-traps of
the stage, the wild Irish girl, and the Irish servant, and the bowing
Frenchman, and the situations had all been squeezed dry generations
ago. One saw everywhere the shadowy mind of a woman of the Irish
upper classes as they have become to-day, but under it all there was
a kind of life, though it was but the life of a string and a wire. I
do not know who Miss . . . is, but I know that she is young, for I saw
her portrait in a weekly paper, and I think that she is clever enough
to make her work of some importance. If she goes on doing bad work
she will make money, perhaps a great deal of money, but she will do a
little harm to her country. If, on the other hand, she gets into an
original relation with life, she will, perhaps, make no money, and she
will certainly have her class against her.
The Irish upper classes put everything into a money measure. When
anyone among them begins to write or paint they ask him 'How much money
have you made? ' 'Will it pay? ' Or they say, 'If you do this or that you
will make more money. ' The poor Irish clerk or shopboy,[B] who writes
verses or articles in his brief leisure, writes for the glory of God
and of his country; and because his motive is high, there is not one
vulgar thought in the countless little ballad books that have been
written from Callinan's day to this. They are often clumsily written
for they are in English, and if you have not read a great deal, it is
difficult to write well in a language which has been long separated,
from the 'folk-speech'; but they have not a thought a proud and simple
man would not have written. The writers were poor men, but they left
that money measure to the Irish upper classes. All Irish writers have
to choose whether they will write as the upper classes have done,
not to express but to exploit this country; or join the intellectual
movement which has raised the cry that was heard in Russia in the
seventies, the cry 'to the people. '
Moses was little good to his people until he had killed an Egyptian;
and for the most part a writer or public man of the upper classes is
useless to this country till he has done something that separates him
from his class. We wish to grow peaceful crops, but we must dig our
furrows with the sword.
Our plays this year will be produced by Mr. Benson at the Gaiety
Theatre on October the 21st, and on some of the succeeding days. They
are Dr. Douglas Hyde's _Casadh an t-Sugain_, which is founded on a well
known Irish story of a wandering poet; and _Diarmuid and Grania_, a
play in three acts and in prose by Mr. George Moore and myself, which
is founded on the most famous of all Irish stories, the story of the
lovers whose beds were the cromlechs. The first act of _Diarmuid and
Grania_ is in the great banqueting hall of Tara, and the second and
third on the slopes of Ben Bulben in Sligo. We do not think there is
anything in either play to offend anybody, but we make no promises. We
thought our plays inoffensive last year and the year before, but we
were accused the one year of sedition, and the other of heresy.
I have called this little collection of writings _Samhain_, the old
name for the beginning of winter, because our plays this year are in
October, and because our Theatre is coming to an end in its present
shape.
1902
The Irish Literary Theatre wound up its three years of experiment last
October with _Diarmuid and Grania_, which was played by Mr. Benson's
Company, Mr. Benson himself playing Diarmuid with poetry and fervour,
and _Casadh an t-Sugain_, played by Dr. Hyde and some members of the
Gaelic League. _Diarmuid and Grania_ drew large audiences, but its
version of the legend was a good deal blamed by critics, who knew only
the modern text of the story. There are two versions, and the play
was fully justified by Irish and Scottish folk-lore, and by certain
early Irish texts, which do not see Grania through very friendly
eyes. Any critic who is interested in so dead a controversy can look
at the folk-tales quoted by Campbell in, I think, _West Highland
Superstitions_, and at the fragment translated by Kuno Meyer, at page
458 of Vol. I. of _Zeitschrift fur Keltische Philologie_. Dr. Hyde's
play, on the other hand, pleased everybody, and has been played a good
many times in a good many places since. It was the first play in Irish
played in a theatre, and did much towards making plays a necessary part
in Irish propaganda.
The Irish Literary Theatre has given place to a company of Irish
actors. Its Committee saw them take up the work all the more gladly
because it had not formed them or influenced them. A dramatic society
with guarantors and patrons can never have more than a passing use,
because it can never be quite free; and it is not successful until it
is able to say it is no longer wanted. Amateur actors will perform for
_Cumann-na-Gael_ plays chosen by themselves, and written by A. E. , by
Mr. Cousins, by Mr. Ryan, by Mr. MacGinlay and by myself. These plays
will be given at the Antient Concert Rooms at the end of October, but
the National Theatrical Company will repeat their successes with new
work in a very little hall they have hired in Camden Street. If they
could afford it they would have hired some bigger house, but, after
all, M. Antoine founded his _Theatre Libre_ with a company of amateurs
in a hall that only held three hundred people.
The first work of theirs to get much attention was their performance,
last spring, at the invitation of _Inghinidhe h-Eireann_ of A. E. 's
_Deirdre_, and my _Cathleen ni Houlihan_. They had Miss Maud Gonne's
help, and it was a fine thing for so beautiful a woman to consent to
play my poor old Cathleen, and she played with nobility and tragic
power. She showed herself as good in tragedy as Dr. Hyde is in comedy,
and stirred a large audience very greatly. The whole company played
well, too, but it was in _Deirdre_ that they interested me most. They
showed plenty of inexperience, especially in the minor characters, but
it was the first performance I had seen since I understood these things
in which the actors kept still enough to give poetical writing its
full effect upon the stage. I had imagined such acting, though I had
not seen it, and had once asked a dramatic company to let me rehearse
them in barrels that they might forget gesture and have their minds
free to think of speech for a while. The barrels, I thought, might
be on castors, so that I could shove them about with a pole when the
action required it. The other day I saw Sara Bernhardt and De Max in
_Phedre_, and understood where Mr. Fay, who stage-manages the National
Theatrical Company, had gone for his model. [C] For long periods the
performers would merely stand and pose, and I once counted twenty-seven
quite slowly before anybody on a fairly well-filled stage moved, as it
seemed, so much as an eye-lash. The periods of stillness were generally
shorter, but I frequently counted seventeen, eighteen or twenty before
there was a movement. I noticed, too, that the gestures had a rhythmic
progression. Sara Bernhardt would keep her hands clasped over, let us
say, her right breast for some time, and then move them to the other
side, perhaps, lowering her chin till it touched her hands, and then,
after another long stillness, she would unclasp them and hold one out,
and so on, not lowering them till she had exhausted all the gestures of
uplifted hands. Through one long scene De Max, who was quite as fine,
never lifted his hand above his elbow, and it was only when the emotion
came to its climax that he raised it to his breast. Beyond them stood
a crowd of white-robed men who never moved at all, and the whole scene
had the nobility of Greek sculpture, and an extraordinary reality and
intensity. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen upon the
stage, and made me understand, in a new way, that saying of Goethe's
which is understood everywhere but in England, 'Art is art because
it is not nature. ' Of course, our amateurs were poor and crude beside
those great actors, perhaps the greatest in Europe, but they followed
them as well as they could, and got an audience of artisans, for the
most part, to admire them for doing it. I heard somebody who sat behind
me say, 'They have got rid of all the nonsense. '
I thought the costumes and scenery, which were designed by A. E.
himself, good, too, though I did not think them simple enough. They
were more simple than ordinary stage costumes and scenery, but I would
like to see poetical drama, which tries to keep at a distance from
daily life that it may keep its emotion untroubled, staged with but
two or three colours. The background, especially in small theatres,
where its form is broken up and lost when the stage is at all crowded,
should, I think, be thought out as one thinks out the background of
a portrait. One often needs nothing more than a single colour with
perhaps a few shadowy forms to suggest wood or mountain. Even on a
large stage one should leave the description of the poet free to call
up the martlet's procreant cradle or what he will. But I have written
enough about decorative scenery elsewhere, and will probably lecture on
that and like matters before we begin the winter's work.
The performances of _Deirdre_ and _Cathleen ni Houlihan_, which will be
repeated in the Antient Concert Rooms, drew so many to hear them that
great numbers were turned away from the doors of St. Theresa's Hall.
Like the plays of the Irish Literary Theatre, they started unexpected
discussion. Mr. Standish O'Grady, who had done more than any other
to make us know the old legends, wrote in his _All Ireland Review_
that old legends could not be staged without danger of 'banishing the
soul of the land. ' The old Irish had many wives for instance, and one
had best leave their histories to the vagueness of legend. How could
uneducated people understand heroes who lived amid such different
circumstances? And so we were to 'leave heroic cycles alone, and not to
bring them down to the crowd. ' A. E. replied in the _United Irishman_
with an impassioned letter. 'The old, forgotten music' he writes about
in his letter is, I think, that regulated music of speech at which both
he and I have been working, though on somewhat different principles. I
have been working with Miss Farr and Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch, who has made
a psaltery for the purpose, to perfect a music of speech which can be
recorded in something like ordinary musical notes; while A. E. has got a
musician to record little chants with intervals much smaller than those
of modern music.
After the production of these plays the most important Irish dramatic
event was, no doubt, the acting of Dr. Hyde's _An Posadh_, in Galway.
Through an accident it had been very badly rehearsed, but his own
acting made amends. One could hardly have had a play that grew more out
of the life of the people who saw it. There may have been old men in
that audience who remembered its hero the poet Raftery, and there was
nobody there who had not come from hearing his poems repeated at the
Galway Feis. I think from its effect upon the audience that this play
in which the chief Gaelic poet of our time celebrates his forerunner
in simplicity, will be better liked in Connaught at any rate than
even _Casadh an t-Sugain_. His _Tincear agus Sidheog_, acted in Mr.
Moore's garden, at the time of the Oireachtas, is a very good play,
but is, I think, the least interesting of his plays as literature. His
imagination, which is essentially the folk-imagination, needs a looser
construction, and probably a more crowded stage. A play that gets its
effect by keeping close to one idea reminds one, when it comes from
the hands of a folk-poet, of Blake's saying, that 'Improvement makes
straight roads, but the crooked roads are the roads of genius. ' The
idea loses the richness of its own life, while it destroys the wayward
life of his mind by bringing it under too stern a law. Nor could
charming verses make amends for that second kiss in which there was
profanation, and for that abounding black bottle. Did not M. Trebulet
Bonhommie discover that one spot of ink would kill a swan?
Among the other plays in Irish acted during the year Father Dineen's
_Tobar Draoidheachta_ is probably the best. He has given up the many
scenes of his _Creadeamh agus Gorta_, and has written a play in one
scene, which, as it can be staged without much trouble, has already
been played in several places. One admires its _naivete_ as much as
anything else. Father Dineen, who, no doubt, remembers how Finn mac
Cumhal when a child was put in a field to catch hares and keep him out
of mischief, has sent the rival lovers of his play when he wanted
them off the scene for a moment, to catch a hare that has crossed the
stage. When they return the good lover is carrying it by the heels, and
modestly compares it to a lame jackass. One rather likes this bit of
nonsense when one comes to it, for in that world of folk-imagination
one thing seems as possible as another. On the other hand, there is
a moment of beautiful dramatic tact. The lover gets a letter telling
of the death of a relative in America, for whom he has no particular
affection, and who has left him a fortune. He cannot lament, for that
would be insincere, and his first words must not be rejoicing. Father
Dineen has found for him the one beautiful thing he could say, 'It's a
lonesome thing death is. ' With, perhaps, less beauty than there is in
the closing scene of _Creadeamh agus Gorta_, the play has more fancy
and a more sustained energy.
Father Peter O'Leary has written a play in his usual number of scenes
which has not been published, but has been acted amid much Munster
enthusiasm. But neither that or _La an Amadan_, which has also been
acted, are likely to have any long life on our country stages. A short
play, with many changes of scene, is a nuisance in any theatre, and
often an impossibility on our poor little stages. Some kind of play,
in English, by Mr. Standish O'Grady, has been acted in the open air
in Kilkenny. I have not seen it, and I cannot understand anything
by the accounts of it, except that there were magic lantern slides
and actors on horseback, and Mr. Standish O'Grady as an Elizabethan
night-watchman, speaking prologues, and a contented audience of two or
three thousand people.
As we do not think that a play can be worth acting and not worth
reading, all our plays will be published in time. Some have been
printed in _The United Irishman_ and _The All Ireland Review_. I have
put my _Cathleen ni Houlihan_ and a little play by Dr. Hyde into this
_Samhain_. Once already this year I have had what somebody has called
the noble pleasure of praising, and I can praise this _Lost Saint_
with as good a conscience as I had when I wrote of _Cuchulain of
Muirthemne_. I would always admire it, but just now, when I have been
thinking that literature should return to its old habit of describing
desirable things, I am in the mood to be stirred by that old man
gathering up food for fowl with his heart full of love, and by those
children who are so full of the light-hearted curiosity of childhood,
and by that schoolmaster who has mixed prayer with his gentle
punishments. It seems natural that so beautiful a prayer as that of
the old saint should have come out of a life so full of innocence and
peace. One could hardly have thought out the play in English, for those
phrases of a traditional simplicity and of a too deliberate prettiness
which become part of an old language would have arisen between the
mind and the story. One might even have made something as unreal as
the sentimental schoolmaster of the Scottish novelists, and how many
children, who are but literary images, would one not have had to hunt
out of one's mind before meeting with those little children? Even if
one could have thought it out in English one could not have written
it in English, unless perhaps in that dialect which Dr. Hyde had
already used in the prose narrative that flows about his _Love Songs of
Connaught_.
Dr. Hyde has written a little play about the birth of Christ which
has the same beauty and simplicity. These plays remind me of my first
reading of _The Love Songs of Connaught_. The prose parts of that book
were to me, as they were to many others, the coming of a new power
into literature. I find myself now, as I found myself then, grudging
to propaganda, to scholarship, to oratory, however necessary, a genius
which might in modern Irish or in that idiom of the English-speaking
country people discover a new region for the mind to wander in. In
Ireland, where we have so much to prove and to disprove, we are ready
to forget that the creation of an emotion of beauty is the only kind
of literature that justifies itself. Books of literary propaganda
and literary history are merely preparations for the creation or
understanding of such an emotion. It is necessary to put so much in
order, to clear away so much, to explain so much, that somebody may be
moved by a thought or an image that is inexplicable as a wild creature.
I cannot judge the language of his Irish poetry, but it is so rich in
poetical thought, when at its best, that it seems to me that if he
were to write more he might become to modern Irish what Mistral was to
modern Provencal. I wish, too, that he could put away from himself some
of the interruptions of that ceaseless propaganda, and find time for
the making of translations, loving and leisurely, like those in _Beside
the Fire_ and _The Love Songs of Connaught_. He has begun to get a
little careless lately. Above all I would have him keep to that English
idiom of the Irish-thinking people of the west which he has begun to
use less often. It is the only good English spoken by any large number
of Irish people to-day, and one must found good literature on a living
speech. English men of letters found themselves upon the English Bible,
where religious thought gets its living speech. Blake, if I remember
rightly, copied it out twice, and I remember once finding a few
illuminated pages of a new decorated copy that he began in his old age.
Byron read it for the sake of style, though I think it did him little
good, and Ruskin founded himself in great part upon it. Indeed, one
finds everywhere signs of a book which is the chief influence in the
lives of English children. The translation used in Ireland has not the
same literary beauty, and if we are to find anything to take its place
we must find it in that idiom of the poor, which mingles so much of
the same vocabulary with turns of phrase that have come out of Gaelic.
Even Irish writers of considerable powers of thought seem to have no
better standard of English than a schoolmaster's ideal of correctness.
If their grammar is correct they will write in all the lightness of
their hearts about 'keeping in touch,' and 'object-lessons,' and
'shining examples,' and 'running in grooves,' and 'flagrant violations'
of various things. Yet, as Sainte-Beuve has said, there is nothing
immortal except style. One can write well in that country idiom without
much thought about one's words, the emotion will bring the right word
itself, for there everything is old and everything alive and nothing
common or threadbare. I recommend to the Intermediate Board--a body
that seems to benefit by advice--a better plan than any they know for
teaching children to write good English. Let every child in Ireland be
set to turn a leading article or a piece of what is called excellent
English, written perhaps by some distinguished member of the Board,
into the idiom of his own country side. He will find at once the
difference between dead and living words, between words that meant
something years ago, and words that have the only thing that gives
literary quality--personality, the breath of men's mouths. Zola, who is
sometimes an admirable critic, has said that some of the greatest pages
in French literature are not even right in their grammar, 'They are
great because they have personality. '
The habit of writing for the stage, even when it is not country people
who are the speakers, and of considering what good dialogue is, will
help to increase our feeling for style. Let us get back in everything
to the spoken word, even though we have to speak our lyrics to the
Psaltery or the Harp, for, as A. E. says, we have begun to forget that
literature is but recorded speech, and even when we write with care we
have begun 'to write with elaboration what could never be spoken. ' But
when we go back to speech let us see that it is either the idiom of
those who have rejected, or of those who have never learned, the base
idioms of the newspapers.
Mr. Martyn argued in _The United Irishman_ some months ago that
our actors should try to train themselves for the modern drama of
society. The acting of plays of heroic life or plays like _Cathleen ni
Houlihan_, with its speech of the country people, did not seem to him
a preparation. It is not; but that is as it should be. Our movement
is a return to the people, like the Russian movement of the early
seventies, and the drama of society would but magnify a condition of
life which the countryman and the artisan could but copy to their
hurt. The play that is to give them a quite natural pleasure should
either tell them of their own life, or of that life of poetry where
every man can see his own image, because there alone does human nature
escape from arbitrary conditions. Plays about drawing-rooms are written
for the middle classes of great cities, for the classes who live in
drawing-rooms, but if you would uplift the man of the roads you must
write about the roads, or about the people of romance, or about great
historical people. We should, of course, play every kind of good play
about Ireland that we can get, but romantic and historical plays, and
plays about the life of artisans and country people are the best worth
getting. In time, I think, we can make the poetical play a living
dramatic form again, and the training our actors will get from plays
of country life, with its unchanging outline, its abundant speech, its
extravagance of thought, will help to establish a school of imaginative
acting. The play of society, on the other hand, could but train up
realistic actors who would do badly, for the most part, what English
actors do well, and would, when at all good, drift away to wealthy
English theatres. If, on the other hand, we busy ourselves with poetry
and the countryman, two things which have always mixed with one another
in life as on the stage, we may recover, in the course of years, a lost
art which, being an imitation of nothing English, may bring our actors
a secure fame and a sufficient livelihood.
1903
I CANNOT describe the various dramatic adventures of the year with as
much detail as I did last year, mainly because the movement has got
beyond me. The most important event of the Gaelic Theatre has been
the two series of plays produced in the Round Room of the Rotunda by
the Gaelic League. Father Dineen's _Tobar Draoidheachta_, and Dr.
Hyde's _An Posadh_, and a chronicle play about Hugh O'Neill, and, I
think, some other plays, were seen by immense audiences. I was not
in Ireland for these plays, but a friend tells me that he could only
get standing-room one night, and the Round Room must hold about 3,000
people. A performance of _Tobar Draoidheachta_ I saw there some months
before, was bad, but I believe there was great improvement, and that
the players who came up from somewhere in County Cork to play it at
this second series of plays were admirable. The players, too, that
brought Dr. Hyde's _An Posadh_ from Ballaghadereen, in County Mayo,
where they had been showing it to their neighbours, were also, I am
told, careful and natural. The play-writing, always good in dialogue,
is still very poor in construction, and I still hear of plays in many
scenes, with no scene lasting longer than four or six minutes, and few
intervals shorter than nine or ten minutes, which have to be filled
up with songs. The Rotunda chronicle play seems to have been rather
of this sort, and I suspect that when I get Father Peter O'Leary's
_Meadhbh_, a play in five acts produced at Cork, I shall find the
masterful old man, in spite of his hatred of English thought, sticking
to the Elizabethan form. I wish I could have seen it played last week,
for the spread of the Gaelic Theatre in the country is more important
than its spread in Dublin, and of all the performances in Gaelic plays
in the country during the year I have seen but one--Dr. Hyde's new play,
_Cleamhnas_, at Galway Feis. I got there a day late for a play by the
Master of Galway Workhouse, but heard that it was well played, and
that his dialogue was as good as his construction was bad. There is
no question, however, about the performance of _Cleamhnas_ being the
worst I ever saw. I do not blame the acting, which was pleasant and
natural, in spite of insufficient rehearsal, but the stage-management.
The subject of the play was a match-making. The terms were in debate
between two old men in an inner room. An old woman, according to the
stage directions, should have listened at the door and reported what
she heard to her daughter's suitor, who is outside the window, and to
her daughter. There was no window on the stage, and the young man stood
close enough to the door to have listened for himself. The door, where
she listened, opened now on the inner room, and now on the street,
according to the necessities of the play, and the young men who acted
the fathers of grown-up children, when they came through the door were
seen to have done nothing to disguise their twenty-five or twenty-six
birthdays. There had been only two rehearsals, and the little boy who
should have come in laughing at the end came in shouting, 'Ho ho, ha
ha,' evidently believing that these were Gaelic words he had never
heard before. Playwrights will have to be careful who they permit to
play their work if it is to be played after only two rehearsals, and
without enough attention to the arrangement of the stage to make the
action plausible.
The only Gaelic performances I have seen during the year have been
ill-done, but I have seen them sufficiently well done in other years
to believe my friends when they tell me that there have been good
performances. _Inghinidhe na h-Eireann_ is always thorough, and one
cannot doubt that the performance of Dr. Hyde's _An Naom ar Iarriad_,
by the children from its classes, was at least careful. A powerful
little play in English against enlisting, by Mr. Colum, was played with
it, and afterwards revived, and played with a play about the Royal
Visit, also in English. I have no doubt that we shall see a good many
of these political plays during the next two or three years, and it
may be even the rise of a more or less permanent company of political
players, for the revolutionary clubs will begin to think plays as
necessary as the Gaelic League is already thinking them. Nobody can
find the same patriotic songs and recitations sung and spoken by
the same people, year in year out, anything but mouldy bread. It is
possible that the players who are to produce plays in October for the
Samhain festival of _Cumann na n-Gaedheal_ may grow into such a company.
Though one welcomes every kind of vigorous life, I am, myself, most
interested in 'The Irish National Theatre Society,' which has no
propaganda but that of good art. The little Camden Street Hall it had
taken has been useful for rehearsal alone, for it proved to be too far
away, and too lacking in dressing-rooms for our short plays, which
involve so many changes. Successful performances were given, however,
at Rathmines, and in one or two country places.
_Deirdre_, by A. E. , _The Racing Lug_, by Mr. Cousins, _The
Foundations_, by Mr. Ryan, and my _Pot of Broth_, and _Cathleen ni
Houlihan_, were repeated, but no new plays were produced until March
14th, when Lady Gregory's _Twenty-five_ and my _Hour-Glass_, drew a
good audience. On May 2nd the _Hour-Glass_, _Twenty-five_, _Cathleen ni
Houlihan_, _Pot of Broth_, and _Foundations_ were performed before the
Irish Literary Society in London, at the Queen's Gate Hall, and plays
and players were generously commended by the Press--very eloquently by
the critic of _The Times_. It is natural that we should be pleased
with this praise, and that we should wish others to know of it, for is
it not a chief pleasure of the artist to be commended in subtle and
eloquent words? The critic of _The Times_ has seen many theatres and
he is, perhaps, a little weary of them, but here in Ireland there are
one or two critics who are so much in love, or pretend to be so much
in love, with the theatre as it is, that they complain when we perform
on a stage two feet wider than Moliere's that it is scarce possible to
be interested in anything that is played on so little a stage. We are
to them foolish sectaries who have revolted against that orthodoxy of
the commercial theatre, which is so much less pliant than the orthodoxy
of the church, for there is nothing so passionate as a vested interest
disguised as an intellectual conviction. If you inquire into its truth
it becomes as angry as a begging-letter writer, when you find some hole
in that beautiful story about the five children and the broken mangle.
In Ireland, wherever the enthusiasts are shaping life, the critic who
does the will of the commercial theatre can but stand against his
lonely pillar defending his articles of belief among a wild people, and
thinking mournfully of distant cities, where nobody puts a raw potato
into his pocket when he is going to hear a musical comedy.
The _Irish Literary Society_ of New York, which has been founded this
year, produced _The Land of Heart's Desire_, _The Pot of Broth_, and
_Cathleen ni Houlihan_, on June 3rd and 4th, very successfully, and
propose to give Dr. Hyde's Nativity Play, _Drama Breithe Chriosta_, and
his _Casadh an t-Sugain_, _Posadh_ and _Naom ar Iarriad_ next year, at
the same time of year, playing them both in Irish and English. I heard
too that his Nativity Play will be performed in New York this winter,
but I know no particulars except that it will be done in connection
with some religious societies.
