No More Learning

It will leave to others the defence of all that can be
codified for ready understanding, of whatever is the especial business
of sermons, and of leading articles; but it will bring all the ways of
men before that ancient tribunal of our sympathies. It will measure all
things by the measure not of things visible but of things invisible.
In a country like Ireland, where personifications have taken the place
of life, men have more hate than love, for the unhuman is nearly the
same as the inhuman, but literature, which is a part of that charity
that is the forgiveness of sins, will make us understand men no matter
how little they conform to our expectations. We will be more interested
in heroic men than in heroic actions, and will have a little distrust
for everything that can be called good or bad in itself with a very
confident heart. Could we understand it so well, we will say, if it
were not something other than human life? We will have a scale of
virtues, and value most highly those that approach the indefinable.
Men will be born among us of whom it is possible to say, not 'What a
philanthropist,' 'What a patriot,' 'How practical a man,' but, as we
say of the men of the Renaissance, 'What a nature,' 'How much abundant
life. ' Even at the beginning we will value qualities more than actions,
for these may be habit or accident; and should we say to a friend,
'You have advertised for an English cook,' or 'I hear that you have no
clerks who are not of your own faith,' or 'You have voted an address to
the king,' we will add to our complaint, 'You have been unpatriotic and
I am ashamed of you, but if you cease from doing any of these things
because you have been terrorized out of them, you will cease to be
my friend. ' We will not forget how to be stern, but we will remember
always that the highest life unites, as in one fire, the greatest
passion and the greatest courtesy.

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[H] _John Bull's Other Island. _




THE PLAY, THE PLAYER, AND THE SCENE.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can never bring back old things precisely as they were, but must
consider how much of them is necessary to us, accepting, even if it
were only out of politeness, something of our own time. The necessities
of a builder have torn from us, all unwilling as we were, the apron, as
the portion of the platform that came in front of the proscenium used
to be called, and we must submit to the picture-making of the modern
stage. We would have preferred to be able to return occasionally to
the old stage of statue-making, of gesture. On the other hand, one
accepts, believing it to be a great improvement, some appropriateness
of costume, but speech is essential to us. An Irish critic has told us
to study the stage-management of Antoine, but that is like telling a
good Catholic to take his theology from Luther. Antoine, who described
poetry as a way of saying nothing, has perfected naturalistic acting
and carried the spirit of science into the theatre. Were we to study
his methods, we might, indeed, have a far more perfect art than our
own, a far more mature art, but it is better to fumble our way like
children. We may grow up, for we have as good hopes as any other sturdy
ragamuffin.

An actor must so understand how to discriminate cadence from cadence,
and so cherish the musical lineaments of verse or prose, that he
delights the ear with a continually varied music. This one has to say
over and over again, but one does not mean that his speaking should be
a monotonous chant. Those who have heard Mr. Frank Fay speaking verse
will understand me. That speech of his, so masculine and so musical,
could only sound monotonous to an ear that was deaf to poetic rhythm,
and one should never, as do London managers, stage a poetical drama
according to the desire of those who are deaf to poetical rhythm. It
is possible, barely so, but still possible, that some day we may write
musical notes as did the Greeks, it seems, for a whole play, and make
our actors speak upon them--not sing, but speak. Even now, when one
wishes to make the voice immortal and passionless, as in the Angel's
part in my _Hour-Glass_, one finds it desirable for the player to speak
always upon pure musical notes, written out beforehand and carefully
rehearsed. On the one occasion when I heard the Angel's part spoken
in this way with entire success, the contrast between the crystalline
quality of the pure notes and the more confused and passionate speaking
of the Wise Man was a new dramatic effect of great value.

If a song is brought into a play it does not matter to what school the
musician belongs if every word, if every cadence, is as audible and
expressive as if it were spoken. It must be good speech, and one must
not listen to the musician if he promise to add meaning to the words
with his notes, for one does not add meaning to the word 'love' by
putting four o's in the middle, or by subordinating it even slightly to
a musical note. But where will one find a musician so mild, so quiet,
so modest, unless he be a sailor from the forecastle or some ghost out
of the twelfth century? One must ask him for music that shall mean
nothing, or next to nothing, apart from the words, and after all he is
a musician.

When I heard the AEschylean Trilogy at Stratford-on-Avon last spring
I could not hear a word of the chorus, except in a few lines here
and there which were spoken without musical setting. The chorus was
not without dramatic, or rather operatic effect; but why should those
singers have taken so much trouble to learn by heart so much of the
greatest lyric poetry of Greece? 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star,' or
any other memory of their childhood, would have served their turn. If
it had been comic verse, the singing-master and the musician would
have respected it, and the audience would have been able to hear.
Mr. Dolmetsch and Miss Florence Farr have been working for some time
to find out some way of setting serious poetry which will enable us
to hear it, and the singer to sing sweetly and yet never to give a
word, a cadence, or an accent, that would not be given it in ordinary
passionate speech. It is difficult, for they are trying to re-discover
an art that is only remembered or half-remembered in ships and in
hovels and among wandering tribes of uncivilised men, and they have to
make their experiment with singers who have been trained by a method
of teaching that professes to change a human being into a musical
instrument, a creation of science, 'something other than human life. '
In old days the singer began to sing over the rocking cradle or among
the wine-cups, and it was as though life itself caught fire of a
sudden; but to-day the poet, fanatic that he is, watches the singer go
up on to the platform, wondering and expecting every moment that he
will punch himself as if he were a bag. It is certainly impossible to
speak with perfect expression after you have been a bagpipes for many
years, even though you have been making the most beautiful music all
the time.

The success of the chorus in the performance of _Hippolytus_ last
Spring--I did not see the more recent performance, but hear upon all
hands that the chorus was too large--the expressiveness of the greater
portion as mere speech, has, I believe, re-created the chorus as a
dramatic method. The greater portion of the singing, as arranged by
Miss Farr, even when four or five voices sang together, though never
when ten sang together, was altogether admirable speech, and some of
it was speech of extraordinary beauty. When one lost the meaning,
even perhaps where the whole chorus sang together, it was not because
of a defective method, but because it is the misfortune of every new
artistic method that we can only judge of it through performers who
must be for a long time unpractised and amateurish. This new art has a
double difficulty, for the training of a modern singer makes articulate
speech, as a poet understands it, nearly impossible, and those who are
masters of speech very often, perhaps usually, are poor musicians.
Fortunately, Miss Farr, who has some knowledge of music, has, it may
be, the most beautiful voice on the English stage, and is in her
management of it an exquisite artist.

That we may throw emphasis on the words in poetical drama, above all
where the words are remote from real life as well as in themselves
exacting and difficult, the actors must move, for the most part, slowly
and quietly, and not very much, and there should be something in their
movements decorative and rhythmical as if they were paintings on a
frieze. They must not draw attention to themselves at wrong moments,
for poetry and indeed all picturesque writing is perpetually making
little pictures which draw the attention away for a second or two from
the player. The actress who played Lady Wishfort should have permitted
us to give a part of our attention to that little shop or wayside
booth. Then, too, one must be content to have long quiet moments, long
grey spaces, long level reaches, as it were--the leisure that is in all
fine life--for what we may call the business-will in a high state of
activity is not everything, although contemporary drama knows of little
else.

_Third. _ We must have a new kind of scenic art.
I have been the
advocate of the poetry as against the actor, but I am the advocate of
the actor as against the scenery. Ever since the last remnant of the
old platform disappeared, and the proscenium grew into the frame of a
picture, the actors have been turned into a picturesque group in the
foreground of a meretricious landscape-painting. The background should
be of as little importance as the background of a portrait-group, and
it should, when possible, be of one colour or of one tint, that the
persons on the stage, wherever they stand, may harmonise with it or
contrast with it and preoccupy our attention. Their outline should be
clear and not broken up into the outline of windows and wainscotting,
or lost into the edges of colours. In a play which copies the surface
of life in its dialogue one may, with this reservation, represent
anything that can be represented successfully--a room, for instance--but
a landscape painted in the ordinary way will always be meretricious
and vulgar. It will always be an attempt to do something which cannot
be done successfully except in easel painting, and the moment an actor
stands near to your mountain, or your forest, one will perceive that he
is standing against a flat surface. Illusion, therefore, is impossible,
and should not be attempted. One should be content to suggest a scene
upon a canvas, whose vertical flatness one accepts and uses, as the
decorator of pottery accepts the roundness of a bowl or a jug. Having
chosen the distance from naturalism, which will keep one's composition
from competing with the illusion created by the actor, who belongs to
a world with depth as well as height and breadth, one must keep this
distance without flinching. The distance will vary according to the
distance the playwright has chosen, and especially in poetry, which
is more remote and idealistic than prose, one will insist on schemes
of colour and simplicity of form, for every sign of deliberate order
gives remoteness and ideality. But, whatever the distance be, one's
treatment will always be more or less decorative. We can only find out
the right decoration for the different types of play by experiment,
but it will probably range between, on the one hand, woodlands made
out of recurring pattern, or painted like old religious pictures
upon gold background, and upon the other the comparative realism of
a Japanese print. This decoration will not only give us a scenic art
that will be a true art because peculiar to the stage, but it will give
the imagination liberty, and without returning to the bareness of the
Elizabethan stage. The poet cannot evoke a picture to the mind's eye if
a second-rate painter has set his imagination of it before the bodily
eye; but decoration and suggestion will accompany our moods, and turn
our minds to meditation, and yet never become obtrusive or wearisome.
The actor and the words put into his mouth are always the one thing
that matters, and the scene should never be complete of itself, should
never mean anything to the imagination until the actor is in front of
it.

If one remembers that the movement of the actor, and the graduation and
the colour of the lighting, are the two elements that distinguish the
stage picture from an easel painting, one will not find it difficult to
create an art of the stage ranking as a true fine art. Mr. Gordon Craig
has done wonderful things with the lighting, but he is not greatly
interested in the actor, and his streams of coloured direct light,
beautiful as they are, will always seem, apart from certain exceptional
moments, a new externality. One should rather desire, for all but
exceptional moments, an even, shadowless light, like that of noon, and
it may be that a light reflected out of mirrors will give us what we
need.

M. Appia and M. Fortuni are making experiments in the staging of
Wagner for a private theatre in Paris, but I cannot understand what M.
Appia is doing, from the little I have seen of his writing, excepting
that the floor of the stage will be uneven like the ground, and that
at moments the lights and shadows of green boughs will fall over the
player that the stage may show a man wandering through a wood, and
not a wood with a man in the middle of it. One agrees with all the
destructive part of his criticism, but it looks as if he himself is
seeking, not convention, but a more perfect realism. I cannot persuade
myself that the movement of life is flowing that way, for life moves
by a throbbing as of a pulse, by reaction and action. The hour of
convention and decoration and ceremony is coming again.

The experiments of the Irish National Theatre Society will have of
necessity to be for a long time few and timid, and we must often,
having no money and not a great deal of leisure, accept for a while
compromises, and much even that we know to be irredeemably bad. One
can only perfect an art very gradually; and good playwriting, good
speaking, and good acting are the first necessity.


1905

Our first season at the Abbey Theatre has been tolerably successful.
We drew small audiences, but quite as big as we had hoped for, and we
end the year with a little money. On the whole we have probably more
than trebled our audiences of the Molesworth Hall. The same people come
again and again, and others join them, and I do not think we lose any
of them. We shall be under more expense in our new season, for we have
decided to pay some of the company and send them into the provinces,
but our annual expenses will not be as heavy as the weekly expenses of
the most economical London manager. Mr. Philip Carr, whose revivals
of Elizabethan plays and old comedies have been the finest things one
could see in a London theatre, spent three hundred pounds and took
twelve pounds during his last week; but here in Ireland enthusiasm can
do half the work, and nobody is accustomed to get much money, and even
Mr. Carr's inexpensive scenery costs more than our simple decorations.
Our staging of _Kincora_, the work of Mr. Robert Gregory, was
beautiful, with a high, grave dignity and that strangeness which Ben
Jonson thought to be a part of all excellent beauty, and the expense of
scenery, dresses and all was hardly above thirty pounds. If we find a
good scene we repeat it in other plays, and in course of time we shall
be able to put on new plays without any expense for scenery at all. I
do not think that even the most expensive decoration would increase in
any way the pleasure of an audience that comes to us for the play and
the acting.

We shall have abundance of plays, for Lady Gregory has written us a new
comedy besides her _White Cockade_, which is in rehearsal; Mr. Boyle,
a satirical comedy in three acts; Mr. Colum has made a new play out of
his _Broken Soil_; and I have made almost a new one out of my _Shadowy
Waters_; and Mr. Synge has practically finished a longer and more
elaborate comedy than his last. Since our start last Christmas we have
shown eleven plays created by our movement and very varied in substance
and form, and six of these were new: _The Well of the Saints_,
_Kincora_, _The Building Fund_, _The Land_, _On Baile's Strand_, and
_Spreading the News_.

One of our plays, _The Well of the Saints_, has been accepted for
immediate production by the Deutsches Theatre of Berlin; and another,
_The Shadow of the Glen_, is to be played during the season at the
National Bohemian Theatre at Prague; and my own _Cathleen ni Houlihan_
has been translated into Irish and been played at the Oireachtas,
before an audience of some thousands. We have now several dramatists
who have taken to drama as their most serious business, and we claim
that a school of Irish drama exists, and that it is founded upon
sincere observation and experience.

As is natural in a country where the Gaelic League has created a
pre-occupation with the countryman, the greatest number of our
plays are founded on the comedy and tragedy of country life, and
are written more or less in dialect. When the Norwegian National
movement began, its writers chose for their maxim, 'To understand
the saga by the peasant and the peasant by the saga. ' Ireland in our
day has re-discovered the old heroic literature of Ireland, and she
has re-discovered the imagination of the folk. My own pre-occupation
is more with the heroic legend than with the folk, but Lady Gregory
in her _Spreading the News_, Mr. Synge in his _Well of the Saints_,
Mr. Colum in _The Land_, Mr. Boyle in _The Building Fund_, have been
busy, much or little, with the folk and the folk-imagination. Mr.
Synge alone has written of the peasant as he is to all the ages; of
the folk-imagination as it has been shaped by centuries of life among
fields or on fishing-grounds. His people talk a highly-coloured musical
language, and one never hears from them a thought that is of to-day
and not of yesterday. Lady Gregory has written of the people of the
markets and villages of the West, and their speech, though less full of
peculiar idiom than that of Mr. Synge's people, is still always that
vivid speech which has been shaped through some generations of English
speaking by those who still think in Gaelic. Mr. Colum and Mr. Boyle,
on the other hand, write of the countryman or villager of the East
or centre of Ireland, who thinks in English, and the speech of their
people shows the influence of the newspaper and the National Schools.
The people they write of, too, are not the true folk. They are the
peasant as he is being transformed by modern life, and for that very
reason the man of the towns may find it easier to understand them.
There is less surprise, less wonder in what he sees, but there is more
of himself there, more of his vision of the world and of the problems
that are troubling him.

It is not fitting for the showman to overpraise the show, but he is
always permitted to tell you what is in his booths. Mr. Synge is the
most obviously individual of our writers. He alone has discovered a
new kind of sarcasm, and it is this sarcasm that keeps him, and may
long keep him, from general popularity. Mr. Boyle satirises a miserly
old woman, and he has made a very vivid person of her, but as yet his
satire is such as all men accept; it brings no new thing to judgment.
We have never doubted that what he assails is evil, and we are never
afraid that it is ourselves. Lady Gregory alone writes out of a spirit
of pure comedy, and laughs without bitterness and with no thought but
to laugh. She has a perfect sympathy with her characters, even with
the worst of them, and when the curtain goes down we are so far from
the mood of judgment that we do not even know that we have condoned
many sins. In Mr. Colum's _Land_ there is a like comedy when Cornelius
and Sally fill the scene, but then he is too young to be content with
laughter. He is still interested in the reform of society, but that
will pass, for at about thirty every writer, who is anything of an
artist, comes to understand that all a work of art can do is to show
one the reality that is within our minds, and the reality that our eyes
look on. He is the youngest of us all by many years, and we are all
proud to foresee his future.

I think that a race or a nation or a phase of life has but few dramatic
themes, and that when these have been once written well they must
afterwards be written less and less well until one gets at last but
'Soulless self-reflections of man's skill. ' The first man writes
what it is natural to write, the second man what is left to him, for
the imagination cannot repeat itself. The hoydenish young woman,
the sentimental young woman, the villain and the hero alike ever
self-possessed, of contemporary drama, were once real discoveries, and
one can trace their history through the generations like a joke or a
folk-tale, but, unlike these, they grow always less interesting as they
get farther from their cradle. Our opportunity in Ireland is not that
our playwrights have more talent, it is possible that they have less
than the workers in an old tradition, but that the necessity of putting
a life that has not hitherto been dramatised into their plays excludes
all these types which have had their origin in a different social order.

An audience with National feeling is alive, at the worst it is alive
enough to quarrel with. One man came up from the scene of Lady
Gregory's _Kincora_ at Killaloe that he might see her play, and having
applauded loudly, and even cheered for the Dalcassians, became silent
and troubled when Brian took Gormleith for his wife. 'It is a great
pity,' he said to a man next to him, 'that he didn't marry a quiet
girl from his own district. ' Some have quarrelled with me because I
did not take some glorious moment of Cuchulain's life for my play, and
not the killing of his son, and all our playwrights have been attacked
for choosing bad characters instead of good, and called slanderers of
their country. In so far as these attacks come from National feeling,
that is to say, out of an interest or an affection for the life of this
country now and in past times, as did the countryman's trouble about
Gormleith, they are in the long run the greatest help to a dramatist,
for they give him something to startle or to delight. Every writer has
had to face them where his work has aroused a genuine interest. The
Germans at the beginning of the nineteenth century preferred Schiller
to Goethe, and thought him the greater writer, because he put nobler
characters into his books; and when Chaucer met Eros walking in the
month of May, that testy god complains that though he had 'sixty
bookkes olde and newe,' and all full of stories of women and the life
they led, and though for every bad woman there are a hundred good, he
has chosen to write only of the bad ones. He complains that Chaucer
by his _Troilus_ and his _Romaunt of the Rose_ has brought love and
women to discredit. It is the same in painting as in literature, for
when a new painter arises men cry out, even when he is a painter of
the beautiful like Rossetti, that he has chosen the exaggerated or the
ugly or the unhealthy, forgetting that it is the business of art and
of letters to change the values and to mint the coinage. Without this
outcry there is no movement of life in the arts, for it is the sign of
values not yet understood, of a coinage not yet mastered. Sometimes
the writer delights us, when we grow to understand him, with new forms
of virtue discovered in persons where one had not hitherto looked for
it, and sometimes, and this is more and more true of modern art, he
changes the values not by the persons he sets before one, who may be
mean enough, but by his way of looking at them, by the implications
that come from his own mind, by the tune they dance to as it were.
Eros, into whose mouth Chaucer, one doubts not, puts arguments that he
had heard from his readers and listeners, objected to Chaucer's art in
the interests of pedantic mediaeval moralising; the contemporaries of
Schiller commended him for reflecting vague romantic types from the
sentimental literature of his predecessors; and those who object to the
peasant as he is seen in the Abbey Theatre have their imaginations full
of what is least observant and most sentimental in the Irish novelists.
When I was a boy I spent many an afternoon with a village shoemaker who
was a great reader. I asked him once what Irish novels he liked, and
he told me there were none he could read, 'They sentimentalised the
people,' he said angrily; and it was against Kickham that he complained
most. 'I want to see the people,' he said, 'shown up in their naked
hideousness. ' That is the peasant mind as I know it, delight in strong
sensations whether of beauty or of ugliness, in bare facts, and quite
without sentimentality. The sentimental mind is the bourgeois mind, and
it was this mind which came into Irish literature with Gerald Griffin
and later on with Kickham.

It is the mind of the town, and it is a delight to those only who have
seen life, and above all country life, with unobservant eyes, and
most of all to the Irish tourist, to the patriotic young Irishman who
goes to the country for a month's holiday with his head full of vague
idealisms. It is not the art of Mr. Colum, born of the people, and
when at his best looking at the town and not the country with strange
eyes, nor the art of Mr. Synge spending weeks and months in remote
places talking Irish to fishers and islanders. I remember meeting,
about twenty years ago, a lad who had a little yacht at Kingstown.
Somebody was talking of the sea paintings of a great painter, Hook,
I think, and this made him very angry. No yachtsman believed in them
or thought them at all like the sea, he said. Indeed, he was always
hearing people praise pictures that were not a bit like the sea, and
thereupon he named certain of the greatest painters of water--men who
more than all others had spent their lives in observing the effects
of light upon cloud and wave. I met him again the other day, well
on in middle life, and though he is not even an Irishman, indignant
with Mr. Synge's and Mr. Boyle's[I] peasants. He knew the people, he
said, and neither he nor any other person that knew them could believe
that they were properly represented in _The Well of the Saints_ or
_The Building Fund_. Twenty years ago his imagination was under the
influence of popular pictures, but to-day it was under the conventional
idealisms which writers like Kickham and Griffin substitute for the
ever-varied life of the cottages, and that conventional idealism that
the contemporary English Theatre substitutes for all life whatsoever.
I saw _Caste_, the earliest play of the modern school, a few days ago,
and found there more obviously than I expected, for I am not much of
a theatre-goer, the English half of the mischief. Two of the minor
persons had a certain amount of superficial characterization, as if
out of the halfpenny comic papers; but the central persons, the man
and woman that created the dramatic excitement, such as it was, had
not characters of any kind, being vague ideals, perfection as it is
imagined by a common-place mind. The audience could give them its
sympathy without the labour that comes from awakening knowledge. If the
dramatist had put any man and woman of his acquaintance that seemed
to him nearest perfection into his play, he would have had to make it
a study, among other things, of the little petty faults and perverted
desires that come out of the nature or its surroundings. He would have
troubled that admiring audience by making a self-indulgent sympathy
more difficult. He might have even seemed, like Ibsen or the early
Christians, an enemy of the human race. We have gone down to the roots,
and we have made up our minds upon one thing quite definitely--that
in no play that professes to picture life in its daily aspects shall
we admit these white phantoms. We can do this, not because we have
any special talent, but because we are dealing with a life which has
for all practical purposes never been set upon the stage before. The
conventional types of the novelists do not pervert our imagination,
for they are built, as it were, into another form, and no man who has
chosen for himself a sound method of drama, whether it be the drama of
character or of crisis, can use them. The Gaelic League and _Cumann
na nGaedheal_ play does indeed show the influence of the novelists;
but the typical Gaelic League play is essentially narrative and not
dramatic. Every artist necessarily imitates those who have worked in
the same form before him, and when the preoccupation has been with the
same life he almost always, consciously or unconsciously, borrows
more than the form, and it is this very borrowing--affecting thought,
language, all the vehicles of expression--which brings about the most of
what we call decadence.

After all, if our plays are slanders upon their country; if to
represent upon the stage a hard old man like Cosgar, or a rapacious old
man like Shan, or a faithless wife like Nora Burke, or to select from
history treacherous Gormleith for a theme, is to represent this nation
at something less than its full moral worth; if every play played in
the Abbey Theatre now and in times to come be something of a slander,
is anybody a penny the worse? Some ancient or mediaeval races did not
think so. Jusserand describes the French conquerors of mediaeval England
as already imagining themselves in their literature, as they have done
to this day, as a great deal worse than they are, and the English
imagining themselves a great deal better. The greater portion of the
_Divine Comedy_ is a catalogue of the sins of Italy, and Boccaccio
became immortal because he exaggerated with an unceasing playful wit
the vices of his countryside. The Greeks chose for the themes of their
serious literature a few great crimes, and Corneille, in his article on
the theory of the drama, shows why the greatness and notoriety of these
crimes is necessary to tragic drama. The public life of Athens found
its chief celebration in the monstrous caricature of Aristophanes, and
the Greek nation was so proud, so free from morbid sensitiveness, that
it invited the foreign ambassadors to the spectacle. And I answer to
those who say that Ireland cannot afford this freedom because of her
political circumstances, that if Ireland cannot afford it, Ireland
cannot have a literature. Literature has never been the work of slaves,
and Ireland must learn to say--

'Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage. '

The misrepresentation of the average life of a nation that follows
of necessity from an imaginative delight in energetic characters and
extreme types, enlarges the energy of a people by the spectacle of
energy. A nation is injured by the picking out of a single type and
setting that into print or upon the stage as a type of the whole
nation. Ireland suffered in this way from that single whisky-drinking,
humorous type which seemed for a time the accepted type of all. The
Englishwoman is, no doubt, injured in the same way in the minds of
various Continental nations by a habit of caricaturing all Englishwomen
as having big teeth. But neither nation can be injured by imaginative
writers selecting types that please their fancy. They will never
impose a general type on the public mind, for genius differs from
the newspapers in this, that the greater and more confident it is,
the more is its delight in varieties and species. If Ireland were at
this moment, through a misunderstanding terror of the stage Irishman,
to deprive her writers of freedom, to make their imaginations timid,
she would lower her dignity in her own eyes and in the eyes of every
intellectual nation. That old caricature did her very little harm in
the long run, perhaps a few car-drivers have copied it in their lives,
while the mind of the country remained untroubled; but the loss of
imaginative freedom and daring would turn us into old women. In the
long run, it is the great writer of a nation that becomes its image in
the minds of posterity, and even though he represent no man of worth
in his art, the worth of his own mind becomes the inheritance of his
people. He takes nothing away that he does not give back in greater
volume.

If Ireland had not lost the Gaelic she never would have had this
sensitiveness as of a _parvenu_ when presented at Court for the first
time, or of a nigger newspaper. When Ireland had the confidence of
her own antiquity, her writers praised and blamed according to their
fancy, and even as throughout all mediaeval Europe, they laughed when
they had a mind to at the most respected persons, at the sanctities
of Church and State. The story of _The Shadow of the Glen_, found by
Mr. Synge in Gaelic-speaking Aran, and by Mr. Curtain in Munster; the
Song of _The Red-haired Man's Wife_, sung in all Gaelic Ireland; _The
Midnight Court of MacGiolla Meidhre_; _The Vision of MacCoinglinne_;
the old romancers, with their Bricriu and their Conan, laughed and sang
as fearlessly as Chaucer or Villon or Cervantes. It seemed almost as if
those old writers murmured to themselves: 'If we but keep our courage
let all the virtues perish, for we can make them over again; but if
that be gone, all is gone. ' I remember when I was an art student at the
Metropolitan School of Art a good many years ago, saying to Mr. Hughes
the sculptor, as we looked at the work of our fellow-students, 'Every
student here that is doing better work than another is doing it because
he has a more intrepid imagination; one has only to look at the line of
a drawing to see that'; and he said that was his own thought also. All
good art is extravagant, vehement, impetuous, shaking the dust of time
from its feet, as it were, and beating against the walls of the world.

If a sincere religious artist were to arise in Ireland in our day,
and were to paint the Holy Family, let us say, he would meet with
the same opposition that sincere dramatists are meeting with to-day.
The bourgeois mind is never sincere in the arts, and one finds in
Irish chapels, above all in Irish convents, the religious art that
it understands. A Connaught convent a little time ago refused a fine
design for stained glass, because of the personal life in the faces
and in the attitudes, which seemed to them ugly, perhaps even impious.
They sent to the designer an insipid German chromo-lithograph, full
of faces without expression or dignity, and gestures without personal
distinction, and the designer, too anxious for success to reject any
order, has carried out this ignoble design in glass of beautiful
colour and quality. Let us suppose that Meister Stefan were to paint
in Ireland to-day that exquisite Madonna of his, with her lattice of
roses; a great deal that is said of our plays would be said of that
picture. Why select for his model a little girl selling newspapers in
the streets, why slander with that miserable little body the Mother of
God? He could only answer, as the imaginative artist always answers,
'That is the way I have seen her in my mind, and what I have made of
her is very living. ' All art is founded upon personal vision, and the
greater the art the more surprising the vision; and all bad art is
founded upon impersonal types and images, accepted by average men and
women out of imaginative poverty and timidity, or the exhaustion that
comes from labour.

Nobody can force a movement of any kind to take any prearranged pattern
to any very great extent; one can, perhaps, modify it a little, and
that is all. When one says that it is going to develop in a certain
way, one means that one sees, or imagines that one sees, certain
energies which left to themselves are bound to give it a certain form.
Writing in _Samhain_ some years ago, I said that our plays would be of
two kinds, plays of peasant life and plays of a romantic and heroic
life, such as one finds in the folk-tales. To-day I can see other
forces, and can foretell, I think, the form of technique that will
arise. About fifty years ago, perhaps not so many, the playwrights
of every country in the world became persuaded that their plays must
reflect the surface of life; and the author of _Caste_, for instance,
made a reputation by putting what seemed to be average common life and
average common speech for the first time upon the stage in England,
and by substituting real loaves of bread and real cups of tea for
imaginary ones. He was not a very clever nor a very well-educated
man, and he made his revolution superficially; but in other countries
men of intellect and knowledge created that intellectual drama of
real life, of which Ibsen's later plays are the ripened fruit. This
change coincided with the substitution of science for religion in the
conduct of life, and is, I believe, as temporary, for the practice of
twenty centuries will surely take the sway in the end. A rhetorician
in that novel of Petronius, which satirises, or perhaps one should say
celebrates, Roman decadence, complains that the young people of his
day are made blockheads by learning old romantic tales in the schools,
instead of what belongs to common life. And yet is it not the romantic
tale, the extravagant and ungovernable dream which comes out of youth;
and is not that desire for what belongs to common life, whether it
comes from Rome or Greece or England, the sign of fading fires, of
ebbing imaginative desire? In the arts I am quite certain that it is
a substitution of apparent for real truth. Mr. George Moore has a
very vivid character; he is precisely one of those whose characters
can be represented most easily upon the stage. Let us suppose that
some dramatist had made even him the centre of a play in which the
moderation of common life was carefully preserved, how very little he
could give us of that headlong intrepid man, as we know him, whether
through long personal knowledge or through his many books. The more
carefully the play reflected the surface of life the more would the
elements be limited to those that naturally display themselves during
so many minutes of our ordinary affairs. It is only by extravagance,
by an emphasis far greater than that of life as we observe it, that
we can crowd into a few minutes the knowledge of years. Shakespeare
or Sophocles can so quicken, as it were, the circles of the clock, so
heighten the expression of life, that many years can unfold themselves
in a few minutes, and it is always Shakespeare or Sophocles, and not
Ibsen, that makes us say, 'How true, how often I have felt as that man
feels'; or 'How intimately I have come to know those people on the
stage. ' There is a certain school of painters that has discovered that
it is necessary in the representation of light to put little touches of
pure colour side by side. When you went up close to that big picture
of the Alps by Segantini, in Mr. Lane's Loan Exhibition a year ago,
you found that the grass seeds, which looked brown enough from the
other side of the room, were full of pure scarlet colour. If you copy
nature's moderation of colour you do not imitate her, for you have only
white paint and she has light. If you wish to represent character or
passion upon the stage, as it is known to the friends, let us say, of
your principal persons, you must be excessive, extravagant, fantastic
even, in expression; and you must be this, more extravagantly, more
excessively, more fantastically than ever, if you wish to show
character and passion as they would be known to the principal person of
your play in the depths of his own mind. The greatest art symbolises
not those things that we have observed so much as those things that
we have experienced, and when the imaginary saint or lover or hero
moves us most deeply, it is the moment when he awakens within us for
an instant our own heroism, our own sanctity, our own desire. We
possess these things--the greatest of men not more than Seaghan the
Fool--not at all moderately, but to an infinite extent, and though we
control or ignore them, we know that the moralists speak true when they
compare them to angels or to devils, or to beasts of prey. How can any
dramatic art, moderate in expression, be a true image of hell or heaven
or the wilderness, or do anything but create those faint histories that
but touch our curiosity, those groups of persons that never follow us
into our intimate life, where Odysseus and Don Quixote and Hamlet are
with us always?

The scientific movement is ebbing a little everywhere, and here in
Ireland it has never been in flood at all. And I am certain that
everywhere literature will return once more to its old extravagant
fantastical expression, for in literature, unlike science, there are
no discoveries, and it is always the old that returns. Everything in
Ireland urges us to this return, and it may be that we shall be the
first to recover after the fifty years of mistake.

The antagonism of imaginative writing in Ireland is not a habit of
scientific observation but our interest in matters of opinion. A
misgoverned country seeking a remedy by agitation puts an especial
value upon opinion, and even those who are not conscious of any
interest in the country are influenced by the general habit. All fine
literature is the disinterested contemplation or expression of life,
but hardly any Irish writer can liberate his mind sufficiently from
questions of practical reform for this contemplation. Art for art's
sake, as he understands it, whether it be the art of the _Ode to a
Grecian Urn_ or of the imaginer of Falstaff, seems to him a neglect
of public duty. It is as though the telegraph-boys botanised among
the hedges with the undelivered envelopes in their pockets; one must
calculate the effect of one's words before one writes them, who they
are to excite and to what end. We all write if we follow the habit of
the country not for our own delight but for the improvement of our
neighbours, and this is not only true of such obviously propagandist
work as _The Spirit of the Nation_ or a Gaelic League play, but of
the work of writers who seemed to have escaped from every national
influence, like Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. George Moore, or even Mr. Oscar
Wilde. They never keep their head for very long out of the flood of
opinion. Mr. Bernard Shaw, the one brilliant writer of comedy in
England to-day, makes these comedies something less than life by never
forgetting that he is a reformer, and Mr. Wilde could hardly finish an
act of a play without denouncing the British public; and Mr. Moore--God
bless the hearers! --has not for ten years now been able to keep himself
from the praise or blame of the Church of his fathers. Goethe, whose
mind was more busy with philosophy than any modern poet, has said, 'The
poet needs all philosophy, but he must keep it out of his work.