No More Learning

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. ' One
remembers Dante, and wishes that Goethe had left some commentary upon
that saying, some definition of philosophy perhaps, but one cannot
be less than certain that the poet, though it may be well for him to
have right opinions, above all if his country be at death's door, must
keep all opinion that he holds to merely because he thinks it right,
out of his poetry, if it is to be poetry at all. At the enquiry which
preceded the granting of a patent to the Abbey Theatre I was asked if
_Cathleen ni Houlihan_ was not written to affect opinion. Certainly
it was not. I had a dream one night which gave me a story, and I
had certain emotions about this country, and I gave those emotions
expression for my own pleasure. If I had written to convince others I
would have asked myself, not 'Is that exactly what I think and feel? '
but 'How would that strike so-and-so? How will they think and feel when
they have read it? ' And all would be oratorical and insincere. We only
understand our own minds, and the things that are striving to utter
themselves through our minds, and we move others, not because we have
understood or thought about them at all, but because all life has the
same root. Coventry Patmore has said, 'The end of art is peace,' and
the following of art is little different from the following of religion
in the intense preoccupation that it demands. Somebody has said, 'God
asks nothing of the highest soul except attention'; and so necessary
is attention to mastery in any art, that there are moments when one
thinks that nothing else is necessary, and nothing else so difficult.
The religious life has created for itself monasteries and convents
where men and women may forget in prayer and contemplation everything
that seems necessary to the most useful and busy citizens of their
towns and villages, and one imagines that even in the monastery and
the convent there are passing things, the twitter of a sparrow in the
window, the memory of some old quarrel, things lighter than air, that
keep the soul from its joy. How many of those old religious sayings can
one not apply to the life of art? 'The Holy Spirit,' wrote S. Thomas a
Kempis, 'has liberated me from a multitude of opinions. ' When one sets
out to cast into some mould so much of life merely for life's sake,
one is tempted at every moment to twist it from its eternal shape to
help some friend or harm some enemy. Alas, all men, we in Ireland more
than others, are fighters, and it is a hard law that compels us to cast
away our swords when we enter the house of the Muses, as men cast them
away at the doors of the banqueting-hall at Tara. A weekly paper in
reviewing last year's _Samhain_, convinced itself, or at any rate its
readers--for that is the heart of the business in propaganda--that I only
began to say these things a few months ago under I know not what alien
influence; and yet I seem to have been saying them all my life. I took
up an anthology of Irish verse that I edited some ten years ago, and I
found them there, and I think they were a chief part of an old fight
over the policy of the _New Irish Library_. Till they are accepted by
writers and readers in this country it will never have a literature, it
will never escape from the election rhyme and the pamphlet. So long as
I have any control over the National Theatre Society it will be carried
on in this spirit, call it art for art's sake if you will; and no plays
will be produced at it which were written, not for the sake of a good
story or fine verses or some revelation of character, but to please
those friends of ours who are ever urging us to attack the priests or
the English, or wanting us to put our imagination into handcuffs that
we may be sure of never seeming to do one or the other.

I have had very little to say this year in _Samhain_, and I have said
it badly. When I wrote _Ideas of Good and Evil_ and _Celtic Twilight_,
I wrote everything very slowly and a great many times over. A few
years ago, however, my eyesight got so bad that I had to dictate the
first drafts of everything, and then rewrite these drafts several
times. I did the last _Samhain_ this way, dictating all the thoughts
in a few days, and rewriting them in two or three weeks; but this
time I am letting the first draft remain with all its carelessness of
phrase and rhythm. I am busy with a practical project which needs the
saying of many things from time to time, and it is better to say them
carelessly and harshly than to take time from my poetry. One casts
something away every year, and I shall, I think, have to cast away the
hope of ever having a prose style that amounts to anything. After all,
dictation gives one a certain vitality as of vehement speech.


1906

LITERATURE AND THE LIVING VOICE. [J]

I

One Sunday, in summer, a few years ago, I went to the little village
of Killeenan, that is not many miles from Galway, to do honour to the
memory of Raftery, a Gaelic poet who died a little before the famine.
A headstone had been put over his grave in the half-ruined churchyard,
and a priest had come to bless it, and many country people to listen to
his poems. After the shawled and frieze-coated people had knelt down
and prayed for the repose of his soul, they gathered about a little
wooden platform that had been put up in a field. I do not remember
whether Raftery's poem about himself was one of those they listened
to, but certainly it was in the thoughts of many, and it was the
image reflected in that poem that had drawn some of them from distant
villages.

I am Raftery the poet,
Full of hope and love;
With eyes without light;
With gentleness without misery.

Going west on my journey
With the light of my heart;
Weak and tired
To the end of my road.

I am now
And my back to a wall,
Playing music
To empty pockets.

Some few there remembered him, and one old man came out among the
reciters to tell of the burying, where he himself, a young boy at the
time, had carried a candle.

The verses of other Gaelic poets were sung or recited too, and,
although certainly not often fine poetry, they had its spirit, its
_naivete_--that is to say, its way of looking at the world as if it were
but an hour old--its seriousness even in laughter, its personal rhythm.

A few days after I was in the town of Galway, and saw there, as I had
often seen in other country towns, some young men marching down the
middle of a street singing an already outworn London music-hall song,
that filled the memory, long after they had gone by, with a rhythm as
pronounced and as impersonal as the noise of a machine. In the shop
windows there were, I knew, the signs of a life very unlike that I had
seen at Killeenan; halfpenny comic papers and story papers, sixpenny
reprints of popular novels, and, with the exception of a dusty Dumas or
Scott strayed thither, one knew not how, and one or two little books of
Irish ballads, nothing that one calls literature, nothing that would
interest the few thousands who alone out of many millions have what
we call culture. A few miles had divided the sixteenth century, with
its equality of culture, of good taste, from the twentieth, where if a
man has fine taste he has either been born to leisure and opportunity
or has in him an energy that is genius. One saw the difference in the
clothes of the people of the town and of the village, for, as the
Emerald tablet says, outward and inner things answer to one another.
The village men wore their bawneens, their white flannel jackets; they
had clothes that had a little memory of clothes that had once been
adapted to their calling by centuries of continual slight changes. They
were sometimes well dressed, for they suggested nothing but themselves
and wore little that had suited another better. But in the town nobody
was well dressed; for in modern life, only a few people--some few
thousands--set the fashion, and set it to please themselves and to fit
their lives, and as for the rest they must go shabby--the ploughman in
clothes cut for a life of leisure, but made of shoddy, and the tramp
in the ploughman's cast-off clothes, and the scarecrow in the tramp's
battered coat and broken hat.

II

All that love the arts or love dignity in life have at one time or
another noticed these things, and some have wondered why the world has
for some three or four centuries sacrificed so much, and with what
seems a growing recklessness, to create an intellectual aristocracy,
a leisured class--to set apart, and above all others, a number of men
and women who are not very well pleased with one another or the world
they have to live in. It is some comparison, like this that I have
made, which has been the origin, as I think, of most attempts to revive
some old language in which the general business of the world is no
longer transacted. The Provencal movement, the Welsh, the Czech, have
all, I think, been attempting, when we examine them to the heart, to
restore what is called a more picturesque way of life, that is to say,
a way of life in which the common man has some share in imaginative
art. That this is the decisive element in the attempt to revive and to
preserve the Irish language I am very certain. A language enthusiast
does not put it that way to himself; he says, rather, 'If I can make
the people talk Irish again they will be the less English'; but if you
talk to him till you have hunted the words into their burrow you will
find that the word 'Ireland' means to him a form of life delightful to
his imagination, and that the word 'England' suggests to him a cold,
joyless, irreligious and ugly life. The life of the villages, with
its songs, its dances and its pious greetings, its conversations full
of vivid images shaped hardly more by life itself than by innumerable
forgotten poets, all that life of good nature and improvisation grows
more noble as he meditates upon it, for it mingles with the middle ages
until he no longer can see it as it is but as it was, when it ran, as
it were, into a point of fire in the courtliness of kings' houses. He
hardly knows whether what stirred him yesterday was that old fiddler,
playing an almost-forgotten music on a fiddle mended with twine, or a
sudden thought of some king that was of the blood of that old man, some
O'Loughlin or O'Byrne, listening amid his soldiers, he and they at
the one table, they too, lucky, bright-eyed, while the minstrel sang
of angry Cuchulain, or of him men called 'Golden salmon of the sea,
clean hawk of the air. ' It will not please him, however, if you tell
him that he is fighting the modern world, which he calls 'England,' as
Mistral and his fellows called it Paris, and that he will need more
than language if he is to make the monster turn up its white belly.
And yet the difference between what the word England means and all
that the word Gaelic suggests is greater than any that could have been
before the imagination of Mistral. Ireland, her imagination at its noon
before the birth of Chaucer, has created the most beautiful literature
of a whole people that has been anywhere since Greece and Rome, while
English literature, the greatest of all literatures but that of Greece,
is yet the literature of a few. Nothing of it but a handful of ballads
about Robin Hood has come from the folk or belongs to them rightly, for
the good English writers, with a few exceptions that seem accidental,
have written for a small cultivated class; and is not this the reason?
Irish poetry and Irish stories were made to be spoken or sung, while
English literature, alone of great literatures, because the newest of
them all, has all but completely shaped itself in the printing-press.
In Ireland to-day the old world that sang and listened is, it may be
for the last time in Europe, face to face with the world that reads and
writes, and their antagonism is always present under some name or other
in Irish imagination and intellect. I myself cannot be convinced that
the printing-press will be always victor, for change is inconceivably
swift, and when it begins--well, as the proverb has it, everything comes
in at the hole. The world soon tires of its toys, and our exaggerated
love of print and paper seems to me to come out of passing conditions
and to be no more a part of the final constitution of things than the
craving of a woman in child-bed for green apples. When one takes a book
into the corner, one surrenders so much life for one's knowledge, so
much, I mean, of that normal activity that gives one life and strength,
one lays away one's own handiwork and turns from one's friend, and
if the book is good one is at some pains to press all the little
wanderings and tumults of the mind into silence and quiet. If the
reader be poor, if he has worked all day at the plough or the desk,
he will hardly have strength enough for any but a meretricious book;
nor is it only when the book is on the knees that one's life must be
given for it. For a good and sincere book needs the preparation of the
peculiar studies and reveries that prepare for good taste, and make it
easier for the mind to find pleasure in a new landscape; and all these
reveries and studies have need of so much time and thought that it is
almost certain a man cannot be a successful doctor, or engineer, or
Cabinet Minister, and have a culture good enough to escape the mockery
of the ragged art student who comes of an evening sometimes to borrow
a half-sovereign. The old culture came to a man at his work; it was
not at the expense of life, but an exaltation of life itself; it came
in at the eyes as some civic ceremony sailed along the streets, or as
one arrayed oneself before the looking-glass, or it came in at the ears
in a song as one bent over the plough or the anvil, or at that great
table where rich and poor sat down together and heard the minstrel
bidding them pass around the wine-cup and say a prayer for Gawain dead.
Certainly it came without a price; it did not take one from one's
friends and one's handiwork; but it was like a good woman who gives all
for love and is never jealous and is ready to do all the talking when
we are tired.

How the old is to come again, how the other side of the penny is to
come up, how the spit is to turn the other side of the meat to the
fire, I do not know, but that the time will come I am certain; when one
kind of desire has been satisfied for a long time it becomes sleepy,
and other kinds, long quiet, after making a noise begin to order life.
Of the many things, desires or powers or instruments, that are to
change the world, the artist is fitted to understand but two or three,
and the less he troubles himself about the complexity that is outside
his craft, the more will he find it all within his craft, and the more
dexterous will his hand and his thought become. I am trying to see
nothing in the world but the arts, and nothing in this change--which one
cannot prove but only foretell--but the share my own art will have in it.

III

One thing is entirely certain. Wherever the old imaginative life
lingers it must be stirred into life, and kept alive, and in Ireland
this is the work, it may be, of the Gaelic movement. But the nineteenth
century, with its moral zeal, its insistence upon irrelevant interests,
having passed over, the artist can admit that he cares about nothing
that does not give him a new subject or a new technique. Propaganda
would be for him a dissipation, but he may compare his art, if he has a
mind to, with the arts that belonged to a whole people, and discover,
not how to imitate the external form of an epic or a folk-song, but
how to express in some equivalent form whatever in the thoughts of his
own age seem, as it were, to press into the future. The most obvious
difference is that when literature belonged to a whole people, its
three great forms, narrative, lyrical and dramatic, found their way to
men's minds without the mediation of print and paper. That narrative
poetry may find its minstrels again, and lyrical poetry adequate
singers, and dramatic poetry adequate players, he must spend much of
his time with these three lost arts, and the more technical is his
interest the better. When I first began working in Ireland at what some
newspaper has called the Celtic Renaissance, I saw that we had still
even in English a sufficient audience for song and speech. Certain
of our young men and women, too restless and sociable to be readers,
had amongst them an interest in Irish legend and history, and years
of imaginative politics had kept them from forgetting, as most modern
people have, how to listen to serious words. I always saw that some
kind of theatre would be a natural centre for a tradition of feeling
and thought, but that it must--and this was its chief opportunity--appeal
to the interest appealed to by lively conversation or by oratory.
In other words, that it must be made for young people who were
sufficiently ignorant to refuse a pound of flesh even though the Nine
Worthies offered their wisdom in return. They are not, perhaps, very
numerous, for they do not include the thousands of conquered spirits
who in Dublin, as elsewhere, go to see _The Girl from Kay's_, or when
Mr. Tree is upon tour, _The Girl from Prospero's Island_; and the
peasant in Ireland, as elsewhere, has not taken to the theatre, and
can, I think, be moved through Gaelic only.

If one could get them, I thought, one could draw to oneself the
apathetic people who are in every country, and people who don't know
what they like till somebody tells them. Now, a friend has given me
that theatre. It is not very big, but it is quite big enough to seat
those few thousands and their friends in a seven days' run of a new
play; and I have begun my real business. I have to find once again
singers, minstrels, and players who love words more than any other
thing under heaven, for without fine words there is no literature.

IV

I will say but a little of dramatic technique, as I would have it in
this theatre of speech, of romance, of extravagance, for I have written
of all that so many times. In every art, when it seems to one that it
has need of a renewing of life, one goes backwards till one lights upon
a time when it was nearer to human life and instinct, before it had
gathered about it so many mechanical specialisations and traditions.
One examines that earlier condition and thinks out its principles of
life, and one may be able to separate accidental from vital things.
William Morris, for instance, studied the earliest printing, the founts
of type that were made when men saw their craft with eyes that were
still new, and with leisure, and without the restraints of commerce
and custom. And then he made a type that was really new, that had
the quality of his own mind about it, though it reminds one of its
ancestry, of its high breeding as it were. Coleridge and Wordsworth
were influenced by the publication of Percy's _Reliques_ to the making
of a simplicity altogether unlike that of old ballad-writers. Rossetti
went to early Italian painting, to Holy Families and choirs of angels,
that he might learn how to express an emotion that had its roots in
sexual desire and in the delight of his generation in fine clothes and
in beautiful rooms. Nor is it otherwise with the reformers of churches
and of the social order, for reform must justify itself by a return in
feeling to something that our fathers have told us in the old time.

So it is with us. Inspired by players who played before a figured
curtain, we have made scenery, indeed, but scenery that is little more
than a suggestion--a pattern with recurring boughs and leaves of gold
for a wood, a great green curtain with a red stencil upon it to carry
the eye upward for a palace, and so on. More important than these, we
have looked for the centre of our art where the players of the time of
Shakespeare and of Corneille found theirs, in speech, whether it be the
perfect mimicry of the conversation of two countrymen of the roads, or
that idealised speech poets have imagined for what we think but do not
say. Before men read, the ear and the tongue were subtle, and delighted
one another with the little tunes that were in words; every word would
have its own tune, though but one main note may have been marked
enough for us to name it. They loved language, and all literature was
then, whether in the mouth of minstrels, players, or singers, but the
perfection of an art that everybody practised, a flower out of the stem
of life. And language continually renewed itself in that perfection,
returning to daily life out of that finer leisure, strengthened and
sweetened as from a retreat ordered by religion. The ordinary dramatic
critic, when you tell him that a play, if it is to be of a great kind,
must have beautiful words, will answer that you have misunderstood
the nature of the stage and are asking of it what books should give.
Sometimes when some excellent man, a playgoer certainly and sometimes
a critic, has read me a passage out of some poet, I have been set
wondering what books of poetry can mean to the greater number of men.
If they are to read poetry at all, if they are to enjoy beautiful
rhythm, if they are to get from poetry anything but what it has in
common with prose, they must hear it spoken by men who have music in
their voices and a learned understanding of its sound. There is no poem
so great that a fine speaker cannot make it greater or that a bad ear
cannot make it nothing. All the arts when young and happy are but the
point of the spear whose handle is our daily life. When they grow old
and unhappy they perfect themselves away from life, and life, seeing
that they are sufficient to themselves, forgets them. The fruit of the
tree that was in Eden grows out of a flower full of scent, rounds and
ripens, until at last the little stem, that brought to it the sap out
of the tree, dries up and breaks, and the fruit rots upon the ground.

The theatre grows more elaborate, developing the player at the expense
of the poet, developing the scenery at the expense of the player,
always increasing in importance whatever has come to it out of the mere
mechanism of a building or the interests of a class, specialising more
and more, doing whatever is easiest rather than what is most noble,
and creating a class before the footlights as behind, who are stirred
to excitements that belong to it and not to life; until at last life,
which knows that a specialised energy is not herself, turns to other
things, content to leave it to weaklings and triflers, to those in
whose body there is the least quantity of herself.

V

But if we are to delight our three or four thousand young men and women
with a delight that will follow them into their own houses, and if we
are to add the countryman to their number, we shall need more than
the play, we shall need those other spoken arts.
The player rose into
importance in the town, but the minstrel is of the country. We must
have narrative as well as dramatic poetry, and we are making room for
it in the theatre in the first instance, but in this also we must go
to an earlier time. Modern recitation is not, like modern theatrical
art, an over-elaboration of a true art, but an entire misunderstanding.
It has no tradition at all. It is an endeavour to do what can only be
done well by the player. It has no relation of its own to life. Some
young man in evening clothes will recite to you _The Dream of Eugene
Aram_, and it will be laughable, grotesque and a little vulgar.
Tragic emotions that need scenic illusion, a long preparation, a
gradual heightening of emotion, are thrust into the middle of our
common affairs. That they may be as extravagant, as little tempered by
anything ideal or distant as possible, he will break up the rhythm,
regarding neither the length of the lines nor the natural music of
the phrases, and distort the accent by every casual impulse. He will
gesticulate wildly, adapting his movements to the drama as if Eugene
Aram were in the room before us, and all the time we see a young man
in evening dress who has become unaccountably insane. Nothing that he
can do or say will make us forget that he is Mr. Robinson the bank
clerk, and that the toes of his boots turn upward. We have nothing to
learn here. We must go to the villages or we must go back hundreds of
years to Wolfram of Eisenbach and the castles of Thuringia. In this, as
in all other arts, one finds its law and its true purpose when one is
near the source. The minstrel never dramatised anybody but himself. It
was impossible, from the nature of the words the poet had put into his
mouth, or that he had made for himself, that he should speak as another
person. He will go no nearer to drama than we do in daily speech, and
he will not allow you for any long time to forget himself. Our own
Raftery will stop the tale to cry, 'This is what I, Raftery, wrote down
in the book of the people'; or 'I, myself, Raftery, went to bed without
supper that night. ' Or, if it is Wolfram, and the tale is of Gawain
or Parsival, he will tell the listening ladies that he sings of happy
love out of his own unhappy love, or he will interrupt the story of
a siege and its hardships to remember his own house, where there is
not enough food for the mice. He knows how to keep himself interesting
that his words may have weight--so many lines of narrative, and then a
phrase about himself and his emotions. The reciter cannot be a player,
for that is a different art; but he must be a messenger, and he should
be as interesting, as exciting, as are all that carry great news.
He comes from far off, and he speaks of far-off things with his own
peculiar animation, and instead of lessening the ideal and beautiful
elements of speech, he may, if he has a mind to, increase them. He may
speak to actual notes as a singer does if they are so simple that he
never loses the speaking-voice, and if the poem is long he must do so,
or his own voice will become weary and formless. His art is nearer to
pattern than that of the player. It is always allusion, never illusion;
for what he tells of, no matter how impassioned he may become, is
always distant, and for this reason he may permit himself every kind
of nobleness. In a short poem he may interrupt the narrative with a
burden, which the audience will soon learn to sing, and this burden,
because it is repeated and need not tell a story to a first hearing,
can have a more elaborate musical notation, can go nearer to ordinary
song. Gradually other devices will occur to him--effects of loudness
and softness, of increasing and decreasing speed, certain rhythmic
movements of his body, a score of forgotten things, for the art of
speech is lost, and when one begins at it every day is a discovery.
The reciter must be made exciting and wonderful in himself, apart from
what he has to tell, and that is more difficult than it was in the
middle ages. We are not mysterious to one another; we can come from
far off and yet be no better than our neighbours. We are no longer
like those Egyptian birds that flew out of Arabia, their claws full
of spices; nor can we, like an ancient or mediaeval poet, throw into
our verses the emotions and events of our lives, or even dramatise, as
they could, the life of the minstrel into whose mouth we are to put our
words. I can think of nothing better than to borrow from the tellers
of old tales, who will often pretend to have been at the wedding of
the princess or afterwards 'when they were throwing out children by
the basketful,' and to give the story-teller definite fictitious
personality and find for him an appropriate costume. Many costumes and
persons come into my imagination. I imagine an old countryman upon the
stage of the theatre or in some little country court-house where a
Gaelic society is meeting, and I can hear him say that he is Raftery
or a brother, and that he has tramped through France and Spain and the
whole world. He has seen everything, and he has all country love tales
at his finger-tips. I can imagine, too--and now the story-teller is more
serious and more naked of country circumstance--a jester with black
cockscomb and black clothes. He has been in the faery hills; perhaps
he is the terrible _Amadan-na-Breena_ himself; or he has been so long
in the world that he can tell of ancient battles. It is not as good
as what we have lost, but we cannot hope to see in our time, except
by some rare accident, the minstrel who differs from his audience in
nothing but the exaltation of his mood, and who is yet as exciting and
as romantic in their eyes as were Raftery and Wolfram to their people.

It is perhaps nearly impossible to make recitation a living thing,
for there is no existing taste one can appeal to; but it should not
be hard here in Ireland to interest people in songs that are made for
the word's sake and not for the music, or for that only in a secondary
degree. They are interested in such songs already, only the songs have
little subtilty of thought and of language. One does not find in them
that modern emotion which seems new because it has been brought so very
lately out of the cellar. At their best they are the songs of children
and of country people, eternally young for all their centuries, and
yet not even in old days, as one thinks, the art of kings' houses. We
require a method of setting to music that will make it possible to
sing or to speak to notes a poem like Rossetti's translation of _The
Ballad of Dead Ladies_ in such a fashion that no word shall have an
intonation or accentuation it could not have in passionate speech. It
must be set for the speaking-voice, like the songs that sailors make
up or remember, and a man at the far end of the room must be able to
take it down on a first hearing. An English musical paper said the
other day, in commenting on something I had written, 'Owing to musical
necessities, vowels must be lengthened in singing to an extent which in
speech would be ludicrous if not absolutely impossible. ' I have but one
art, that of speech, and my feeling for music dissociated from speech
is very slight, and listening as I do to the words with the better part
of my attention, there is no modern song sung in the modern way that
is not to my taste 'ludicrous' and 'impossible. ' I hear with older
ears than the musician, and the songs of country people and of sailors
delight me. I wonder why the musician is not content to set to music
some arrangement of meaningless liquid vowels, and thereby to make
his song like that of the birds; but I do not judge his art for any
purpose but my own. [K] It is worthless for my purpose certainly, and
it is one of the causes that are bringing about in modern countries
a degradation of language. I have to find men with more music than I
have, who will develop to a finer subtilty the singing of the cottage
and the forecastle, and develop it more on the side of speech than that
of music, until it has become intellectual and nervous enough to be the
vehicle of a Shelley or a Keats. For some purposes it will be necessary
to divine the lineaments of a still older art, and re-create the
regulated declamations that died out when music fell into its earliest
elaborations. Miss Farr has divined enough of this older art, of which
no fragment has come down to us--for even the music of _Aucassin and
Nicolette_, with its definite tune, its recurring pattern of sound, is
something more than declamation--to make the chorus of _Hippolytus_ and
of the _Trojan Women_, at the Court Theatre or the Lyric, intelligible
speech, even when several voices spoke together. She used very often
definite melodies of a very simple kind, but always when the thought
became intricate and the measure grave and slow, fell back upon
declamation regulated by notes. Her experiments have included almost
every kind of verse, and every possible elaboration of sound compatible
with the supremacy of the words. I do not think Homer is ever so
moving as when she recites him to a little tune played on a stringed
instrument not very unlike a lyre. She began at my suggestion with
songs in plays, for it was clearly an absurd thing that words necessary
to one's understanding of the action, either because they explained
some character, or because they carried some emotion to its highest
intensity, should be less intelligible than the bustling and ruder
words of the dialogue. We have tried our art, since we first tried
it in a theatre, upon many kinds of audiences, and have found that
ordinary men and women take pleasure in it and sometimes tell one that
they never understood poetry before. It is, however, more difficult
to move those, fortunately for our purpose but a few, whose ears are
accustomed to the abstract emotion and elaboration of notes in modern
music.

VI

If we accomplish this great work, if we make it possible again for the
poet to express himself, not merely through words, but through the
voices of singers, of minstrels, of players, we shall certainly have
changed the substance and the manner of our poetry. Everyone who has
to interest his audience through the voice discovers that his success
depends upon the clear, simple and varied structure of his thought.
I have written a good many plays in verse and prose, and almost all
those plays I have rewritten after performance, sometimes again and
again, and every change that has succeeded has been an addition to the
masculine element, an increase of strength in the bony structure.

Modern literature, above all poetical literature, is monotonous in
its structure and effeminate in its continual insistence upon certain
moments of strained lyricism. William Morris, who did more than any
modern to recover mediaeval art, did not in his _Earthly Paradise_
copy from Chaucer, from whom he copied so much that was _naive_ and
beautiful, what seems to me essential in Chaucer's art. He thought of
himself as writing for the reader, who could return to him again and
again when the chosen mood had come, and became monotonous, melancholy,
too continuously lyrical in his understanding of emotion and of life.
Had he accustomed himself to read out his poems upon those Sunday
evenings that he gave to Socialist speeches, and to gather an audience
of average men, precisely such an audience as I have often seen in
his house, he would have been forced to Chaucer's variety, to his
delight in the height and depth, and would have found expression for
that humorous many-sided nature of his. I owe to him many truths, but
I would add to those truths the certainty that all the old writers,
the masculine writers of the world, wrote to be spoken or to be sung,
and in a later age to be read aloud, for hearers who had to understand
swiftly or not at all, and who gave up nothing of life to listen, but
sat, the day's work over, friend by friend, lover by lover.


THE ARROW: 1906. [L]

THE SEASON'S WORK.

A character of the winter's work will be the large number of romantic,
poetic and historical plays--that is to say, of plays which require a
convention for their performance; their speech, whether it be verse or
prose, being so heightened as to transcend that of any form of real
life. Our first two years of The Abbey Theatre have been expended
mostly on the perfecting of the Company in peasant comedy and tragedy.
Every national dramatic movement or theatre in countries like Bohemia
and Hungary, as in Elizabethan England, has arisen out of a study of
the common people, who preserve national characteristics more than any
other class, and out of an imaginative recreation of national history
or legend. The life of the drawing-room, the life represented in most
plays of the ordinary theatre of to-day, differs but little all over
the world, and has as little to do with the national spirit as the
architecture of, let us say, St. Stephen's Green, or Queen's Gate, or
of the Boulevards about the Arc de Triomphe.

As we wish our work to be full of the life of this country, our
stage-manager has almost always to train our actors from the beginning,
always so in the case of peasant plays, and this makes the building up
of a theatre like ours the work of years. We are now fairly satisfied
with the representation of peasant life, and we can afford to give
the greater part of our attention to other expressions of our art and
of our life. The romantic work and poetical work once reasonably
good, we can, if but the dramatist arrive, take up the life of our
drawing-rooms, and see if there is something characteristic there,
something which our nationality may enable us to express better than
others, and so create plays of that life and means to play them as
truthful as a play of Hauptmann's or of Ibsen's upon the German or
Scandinavian stage. I am not myself interested in this kind of work,
and do not believe it to be as important as contemporary critics think
it is, but a theatre such as we project should give a reasonably
complete expression to the imaginative interests of its country. In any
case it was easier, and therefore wiser, to begin where our art is most
unlike that of others, with the representation of country life.

It is possible to speak the universal truths of human nature whether
the speakers be peasants or wealthy men, for--

'Love doth sing
As sweetly in a beggar as a king. '

So far as we have any model before us it is the national and municipal
theatre in various Continental towns, and, like the best of these, we
must have in our repertory masterpieces from every great school of
dramatic literature, and play them confidently, even though the public
be slow to like that old stern art, and perhaps a little proudly,
remembering that no other English-speaking theatre can be so catholic.
Certainly the weathercocks of our imagination will not turn those
painted eyes of theirs too long to the quarter of the Scandinavian
winds. If the wind blow long from the Mediterranean, the paint may peel
before we pray for a change in the weather.


THE CONTROVERSY OVER _THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD_.

We have claimed for our writers the freedom to find in their own land
every expression of good and evil necessary to their art, for Irish
life contains, like all vigorous life, the seeds of all good and evil,
and a writer must be free here as elsewhere to watch where weed or
flower ripen. No one who knows the work of our Theatre as a whole can
say we have neglected the flower; but the moment a writer is forbidden
to take pleasure in the weed, his art loses energy and abundance. In
the great days of English dramatic art the greatest English writer of
comedy was free to create _The Alchemist_ and _Volpone_, but a demand
born of Puritan conviction and shop-keeping timidity and insincerity,
for what many second-rate intellects thought to be noble and elevating
events and characters, had already at the outset of the eighteenth
century ended the English drama as a complete and serious art.
Sheridan and Goldsmith, when they restored comedy after an epoch of
sentimentalities, had to apologise for their satiric genius by scenes
of conventional love-making and sentimental domesticity that have set
them outside the company of all, whether their genius be great or
little, whose work is pure and whole. The quarrel of our Theatre to-day
is the quarrel of the Theatre in many lands; for the old Puritanism,
the old dislike of power and reality have not changed, even when they
are called by some Gaelic name.

[On the second performance of _The Playboy of the
Western World_ about forty men who sat in the middle
of the pit succeeded in making the play entirely
inaudible. Some of them brought tin-trumpets, and the
noise began immediately on the rise of the curtain. For
days articles in the Press called for the withdrawal
of the play, but we played for the seven nights we
had announced; and before the week's end opinion had
turned in our favour. There were, however, nightly
disturbances and a good deal of rioting in the
surrounding streets. On the last night of the play
there were, I believe, five hundred police keeping
order in the theatre and in its neighbourhood. Some
days later our enemies, though beaten so far as the
play was concerned, crowded into the cheaper seats for
a debate on the freedom of the stage. They were very
excited, and kept up the discussion until near twelve.
The last paragraphs of my opening statement ran as
follows. ]

_From Mr. Yeats' opening Speech in the Debate on February 4, 1907, at
the Abbey Theatre. _

The struggle of the last week has been long a necessity; various
paragraphs in newspapers describing Irish attacks on Theatres had made
many worthy young men come to think that the silencing of a stage at
their own pleasure, even if hundreds desired that it should not be
silenced, might win them a little fame, and, perhaps, serve their
country. Some of these attacks have been made on plays which are in
themselves indefensible, vulgar and old-fashioned farces and comedies.
But the attack, being an annihilation of civil rights, was never
anything but an increase of Irish disorder. The last I heard of was in
Liverpool, and there a stage was rushed, and a priest, who had set a
play upon it, withdrew his play and apologised to the audience. We have
not such pliant bones, and did not learn in the houses that bred us a
so suppliant knee. But behind the excitement of example there is a
more fundamental movement of opinion. Some seven or eight years ago the
National movement was democratised and passed from the hands of a few
leaders into those of large numbers of young men organised in clubs and
societies. These young men made the mistake of the newly-enfranchised
everywhere; they fought for causes worthy in themselves with the
unworthy instruments of tyranny and violence. Comic songs of a certain
kind were to be driven from the stage, everyone was to wear Irish
cloth, everyone was to learn Irish, everyone was to hold certain
opinions, and these ends were sought by personal attacks, by virulent
caricature and violent derision. It needs eloquence to persuade and
knowledge to expound; but the coarser means come ready to every man's
hand, as ready as a stone or a stick, and where these coarse means are
all, there is nothing but mob, and the commonest idea most prospers and
is most sought for.

Gentlemen of the little clubs and societies, do not mistake the meaning
of our victory; it means something for us, but more for you. When the
curtain of _The Playboy_ fell on Saturday night in the midst of what
_The Sunday Independent_--no friendly witness--described as 'thunders
of applause,' I am confident that I saw the rise in this country of
a new thought, a new opinion, that we had long needed. It was not
all approval of Mr. Synge's play that sent the receipts of the Abbey
Theatre this last week to twice the height they had ever touched
before. The generation of young men and girls who are now leaving
schools or colleges are weary of the tyranny of clubs and leagues. They
wish again for individual sincerity, the eternal quest of truth, all
that has been given up for so long that all might crouch upon the one
roost and quack or cry in the one flock. We are beginning once again
to ask what a man is, and to be content to wait a little before we go
on to that further question: What is a good Irishman? There are some
who have not yet their degrees that will say to friend or neighbour,
'You have voted with the English, and that is bad'; or 'You have sent
away your Irish servants, or thrown away your Irish clothes, or blacked
your face for your singing. I despise what you have done, I keep you
still my friend; but if you are terrorised out of doing any of these
things, evil things though I know them to be, I will not have you for
my friend any more. ' Manhood is all, and the root of manhood is courage
and courtesy.


1907

ON TAKING _THE PLAYBOY_ TO LONDON.

The failure of the audience to understand this powerful and strange
work (_The Playboy of the Western World_) has been the one serious
failure of our movement, and it could not have happened but that the
greater number of those who came to shout down the play were no regular
part of our audience at all, but members of parties and societies whose
main interests are political. We have been denounced with even greater
violence than on the first production of the play for announcing that
we should carry it to London. We cannot see that an attack, which
we believe to have been founded on a misunderstanding of the nature
of literature, should prevent us from selecting, as our custom is,
whatever of our best comes within the compass of our players at the
time, to show in some English theatres. Nearly all strong and strange
writing is attacked on its appearance, and those who press it upon the
world may not cease from pressing it, for their justification is its
ultimate acceptance. Ireland is passing through a crisis in the life
of the mind greater than any she has known since the rise of the Young
Ireland party, and based upon a principle which sets many in opposition
to the habits of thought and feeling come down from that party, for the
seasons change, and need and occupation with them. Many are beginning
to recognise the right of the individual mind to see the world in its
own way, to cherish the thoughts which separate men from one another,
and that are the creators of distinguished life, instead of those
thoughts that had made one man like another if they could, and have but
succeeded in setting hysteria and insincerity in place of confidence
and self-possession. To the Young Ireland writers, who have the ear
of Ireland, though not its distracted mind, truth was historical and
external and not a self-consistent personal vision, and it is but
according to ancient custom that the new truth should force its way
amid riot and great anger.

FOOTNOTES:

[I] Mr. Boyle has since left us as a protest against the performance of
Mr. Synge's _Playboy of the Western World_. --W. B. Y. , _March, 1908. _

[J] This essay was written immediately after the opening of the Abbey
Theatre, though it was not printed, through an accident, until the art
of the Abbey has become an art of peasant comedy. It tells of things
we have never had the time to begin. We still dream of them. --W. B. Y. ,
_March, 1908_.

[K] I have heard musicians excuse themselves by claiming that they put
the words there for the sake of the singer; but if that be so, why
should not the singer sing something she may wish to have by rote?
Nobody will hear the words; and the local time-table, or, so much suet
and so many raisins, and so much spice and so much sugar, and whether
it is to be put in a quick or a slow oven, would run very nicely with a
little management.

[L] _The Arrow_, a briefer chronicle than _Samhain_, was distributed
with the programme for a few months.




APPENDIX I


_THE HOUR-GLASS. _

This play is founded upon the following story, recorded by Lady Wilde
in _Ancient Legends of Ireland_, 1887, vol. i. , pp. 60-67:--

THE PRIEST'S SOUL.

IN former days there were great schools in Ireland where every sort
of learning was taught to the people, and even the poorest had more
knowledge at that time than many a gentleman has now. But as to the
priests, their learning was above all, so that the fame of Ireland went
over the whole world, and many kings from foreign lands used to send
their sons all the way to Ireland to be brought up in the Irish schools.

Now, at this time there was a little boy learning at one of them
who was a wonder to every one for his cleverness. His parents were
only labouring people, and of course very poor; but young as he was,
and poor as he was, no king's or lord's son could come up to him in
learning. Even the masters were put to shame; for when they were trying
to teach him he would tell them something they had never heard of
before, and show them their ignorance. One of his great triumphs was
in argument, and he would go on till he proved to you that black was
white, and then when you gave in, for no one could beat him in talk,
he would turn round and show you that white was black, or may be that
there was no colour at all in the world. When he grew up his poor
father and mother were so proud of him that they resolved to make him a
priest, which they did at last, though they nearly starved themselves
to get the money. Well, such another learned man was not in Ireland,
and he was as great in argument as ever, so that no one could stand
before him. Even the Bishops tried to talk to him, but he showed them
at once they knew nothing at all.

Now, there were no schoolmasters in those times, but it was the priests
taught the people; and as this man was the cleverest in Ireland all the
foreign kings sent their sons to him as long as he had house-room to
give them. So he grew very proud, and began to forget how low he had
been, and, worst of all, even to forget God, who had made him what he
was. And the pride of arguing got hold of him, so that from one thing
to another he went on to prove that there was no Purgatory, and then no
Hell, and then no Heaven, and then no God; and at last that men had no
souls, but were no more than a dog or a cow, and when they died there
was an end of them. 'Who ever saw a soul? ' he would say. 'If you can
show me one, I will believe. ' No one could make any answer to this;
and at last they all came to believe that as there was no other world,
every one might do what they liked in this, the priest setting the
example, for he took a beautiful young girl to wife. But as no priest
or bishop in the whole land could be got to marry them, he was obliged
to read the service over for himself. It was a great scandal, yet no
one dared to say a word, for all the kings' sons were on his side,
and would have slaughtered any one who tried to prevent his wicked
goings-on. Poor boys! they all believed in him, and thought every word
he said was the truth. In this way his notions began to spread about,
and the whole world was going to the bad, when one night an angel came
down from Heaven, and told the priest he had but twenty-four hours to
live. He began to tremble, and asked for a little more time.

But the angel was stiff, and told him that could not be.

'What do you want time for, you sinner? ' he asked.

'Oh, sir, have pity on my poor soul! ' urged the priest.

'Oh, ho! You have a soul, then? ' said the angel. 'Pray how did you find
that out? '

'It has been fluttering in me ever since you appeared,' answered the
priest. 'What a fool I was not to think of it before! '

'A fool, indeed,' said the angel. 'What good was all your learning,
when it could not tell you that you had a soul? '

'Ah, my lord,' said the priest, 'if I am to die, tell me how soon I may
be in heaven. '

'Never,' replied the angel. 'You denied there was a Heaven. '

'Then, my lord, may I go to Purgatory? '

'You denied Purgatory also; you must go straight to Hell,' said the
angel.

'But, my lord, I denied Hell also,' answered the priest, 'so you can't
send me there either. '

The angel was a little puzzled.

'Well,' said he, 'I'll tell you what I can do for you. You may either
live now on earth for a hundred years enjoying every pleasure, and then
be cast into Hell for ever; or you may die in twenty-four hours in the
most horrible torments, and pass through Purgatory, there to remain
till the Day of Judgment, if only you can find some one person that
believes, and through his belief mercy will be vouchsafed to you and
your soul will be saved. '

The priest did not take five minutes to make up his mind.

'I will have death in the twenty-four hours,' he said, 'so that my soul
may be saved at last. '

On this the angel gave him directions as to what he was to do, and left
him.

Then, immediately, the priest entered the large room where all his
scholars and the kings' sons were seated, and called out to them--

'Now, tell me the truth, and let none fear to contradict me. Tell me
what is your belief. Have men souls? '

'Master,' they answered, 'once we believed that men had souls; but,
thanks to your teaching, we believe so no longer. There is no Hell, and
no Heaven, and no God. This is our belief, for it is thus you taught
us.