No More Learning

Nobody can
find the same patriotic songs and recitations sung and spoken by
the same people, year in year out, anything but mouldy bread. It is
possible that the players who are to produce plays in October for the
Samhain festival of _Cumann na n-Gaedheal_ may grow into such a company.

Though one welcomes every kind of vigorous life, I am, myself, most
interested in 'The Irish National Theatre Society,' which has no
propaganda but that of good art. The little Camden Street Hall it had
taken has been useful for rehearsal alone, for it proved to be too far
away, and too lacking in dressing-rooms for our short plays, which
involve so many changes. Successful performances were given, however,
at Rathmines, and in one or two country places.

_Deirdre_, by A. E. , _The Racing Lug_, by Mr. Cousins, _The
Foundations_, by Mr. Ryan, and my _Pot of Broth_, and _Cathleen ni
Houlihan_, were repeated, but no new plays were produced until March
14th, when Lady Gregory's _Twenty-five_ and my _Hour-Glass_, drew a
good audience. On May 2nd the _Hour-Glass_, _Twenty-five_, _Cathleen ni
Houlihan_, _Pot of Broth_, and _Foundations_ were performed before the
Irish Literary Society in London, at the Queen's Gate Hall, and plays
and players were generously commended by the Press--very eloquently by
the critic of _The Times_. It is natural that we should be pleased
with this praise, and that we should wish others to know of it, for is
it not a chief pleasure of the artist to be commended in subtle and
eloquent words? The critic of _The Times_ has seen many theatres and
he is, perhaps, a little weary of them, but here in Ireland there are
one or two critics who are so much in love, or pretend to be so much
in love, with the theatre as it is, that they complain when we perform
on a stage two feet wider than Moliere's that it is scarce possible to
be interested in anything that is played on so little a stage. We are
to them foolish sectaries who have revolted against that orthodoxy of
the commercial theatre, which is so much less pliant than the orthodoxy
of the church, for there is nothing so passionate as a vested interest
disguised as an intellectual conviction. If you inquire into its truth
it becomes as angry as a begging-letter writer, when you find some hole
in that beautiful story about the five children and the broken mangle.
In Ireland, wherever the enthusiasts are shaping life, the critic who
does the will of the commercial theatre can but stand against his
lonely pillar defending his articles of belief among a wild people, and
thinking mournfully of distant cities, where nobody puts a raw potato
into his pocket when he is going to hear a musical comedy.

The _Irish Literary Society_ of New York, which has been founded this
year, produced _The Land of Heart's Desire_, _The Pot of Broth_, and
_Cathleen ni Houlihan_, on June 3rd and 4th, very successfully, and
propose to give Dr. Hyde's Nativity Play, _Drama Breithe Chriosta_, and
his _Casadh an t-Sugain_, _Posadh_ and _Naom ar Iarriad_ next year, at
the same time of year, playing them both in Irish and English. I heard
too that his Nativity Play will be performed in New York this winter,
but I know no particulars except that it will be done in connection
with some religious societies. _The National Theatre Society_ will, I
hope, produce some new plays of his this winter, as well as new plays
by Mr. Synge, Mr. Colum, Lady Gregory, myself, and others. They have
taken the Molesworth Hall for three days in every month, beginning with
the 8th, 9th, and 10th of October, when they will perform Mr. Synge's
_Shadow of the Glen_, a little country comedy, full of a humour that
is at once harsh and beautiful, _Cathleen ni Houlihan_, and a longish
one-act play in verse of my own, called _The King's Threshold_. This
play is founded on the old story of Seanchan the poet, and King Guaire
of Gort, but I have seen the story from the poet's point of view, and
not, like the old storytellers, from the king's. Our repertory of
plays is increasing steadily, and when the winter's work is finished,
a play[D] Mr. Bernard Shaw has promised us may be ready to open the
summer session. His play will, I imagine, unlike the plays we write for
ourselves, be long enough to fill an evening, and it will, I know, deal
with Irish public life and character. Mr. Shaw, more than anybody else,
has the love of mischief that is so near the core of Irish intellect,
and should have an immense popularity among us. I have seen a crowd of
many thousands in possession of his spirit, and keeping the possession
to the small hours.

This movement should be important even to those who are not especially
interested in the Theatre, for it may be a morning cock-crow to that
impartial meditation about character and destiny we call the artistic
life in a country where everybody, if we leave out the peasant who
has his folk-songs and his music, has thought the arts useless unless
they have helped some kind of political action, and has, therefore,
lacked the pure joy that only comes out of things that have never been
indentured to any cause. The play which is mere propaganda shows its
leanness more obviously than a propagandist poem or essay, for dramatic
writing is so full of the stuff of daily life that a little falsehood,
put in that the moral may come right in the end, contradicts our
experience. If Father Dineen or Dr. Hyde were asked why they write
their plays, they would say they write them to help their propaganda;
and yet when they begin to write the form constrains them, and they
become artists--one of them a very considerable artist, indeed. Dr.
Hyde's early poems have even in translation a _naivete_ and wildness
that sets them, as I think, among the finest poetry of our time; but he
had ceased to write any verses but those Oireachtas odes that are but
ingenious rhetoric. It is hard to write without the sympathy of one's
friends, and though the country people sang his verses the readers of
Irish read them but little, partly it may be because he had broken
with that elaborate structure of later Irish poetry which seemed a
necessary part of their propaganda. They read plenty of pamphlets and
grammars, but they disliked--as do other people in Ireland--serious
reading, reading that is an end and not a means, that gives us nothing
but a beauty indifferent to our profuse purposes. But now Dr. Hyde with
his cursing Hanrahan, his old saint at his prayers, is a poet again;
and the Leaguers go to his plays in thousands--and applaud in the right
places, too--and the League puts many sixpences into its pocket.

We who write in English have a more difficult work, for English has
been the language in which the Irish cause has been debated; and we
have to struggle with traditional phrases and traditional points of
view. Many would give us limitless freedom as to the choice of subject,
understanding that it is precisely those subjects on which people feel
most passionately, and, therefore, most dramatically, we would be
forbidden to handle if we made any compromise with powers. But fewer
know that we must encourage every writer to see life afresh, even
though he sees it with strange eyes. Our National Theatre must be so
tolerant, and, if this is not too wild a hope, find an audience so
tolerant that the half-dozen minds, who are likely to be the dramatic
imagination of Ireland for this generation, may put their own thoughts
and their own characters into their work; and for that reason no one
who loves the arts, whether among Unionists or among the Patriotic
Societies, should take offence if we refuse all but every kind of
patronage. I do not say every kind, for if a mad king, a king so mad
that he loved the arts and their freedom, should offer us unconditioned
millions, I, at any rate, would give my voice for accepting them.

We will be able to find conscientious playwrights and players, for our
young men have a power of work, when they are interested in their work,
one does not look for outside a Latin nation, and if we were certain
of being granted this freedom we would be certain that the work would
grow to great importance. It is a supreme moment in the life of a
nation when it is able to turn now and again from its preoccupations,
to delight in the capricious power of the artist as one delights in the
movement of some wild creature, but nobody can tell with certainty when
that moment is at hand.

The two plays in this year's _Samhain_ represent the two sides of the
movement very well, and are both written out of a deep knowledge of
the life of the people. It should be unnecessary to praise Dr. Hyde's
comedy,[E] that comes up out of the foundation of human life, but Mr.
Synge is a new writer and a creation of our movement. He has gone every
summer for some years past to the Arran Islands, and lived there in
the houses of the fishers, speaking their language and living their
lives, and his play[F] seems to me the finest piece of tragic work done
in Ireland of late years. One finds in it, from first to last, the
presence of the sea, and a sorrow that has majesty as in the work of
some ancient poet.

THE REFORM OF THE THEATRE.

I think the theatre must be reformed in its plays, its speaking, its
acting, and its scenery. That is to say, I think there is nothing good
about it at present.

_First. _ We have to write or find plays that will make the theatre a
place of intellectual excitement--a place where the mind goes to be
liberated as it was liberated by the theatres of Greece and England
and France at certain great moments of their history, and as it is
liberated in Scandinavia to-day. If we are to do this we must learn
that beauty and truth are always justified of themselves, and that
their creation is a greater service to our country than writing
that compromises either in the seeming service of a cause. We will,
doubtless, come more easily to truth and beauty because we love some
cause with all but all our heart; but we must remember when truth and
beauty open their mouths to speak, that all other mouths should be as
silent as Finn bade the Son of Lugaidh be in the houses of the great.
Truth and beauty judge and are above judgment. They justify and have no
need of justification.

Such plays will require, both in writers and audiences, a stronger
feeling for beautiful and appropriate language than one finds in the
ordinary theatre. Sainte-Beuve has said that there is nothing immortal
in literature except style, and it is precisely this sense of style,
once common among us, that is hardest for us to recover. I do not
mean by style words with an air of literature about them, what is
ordinarily called eloquent writing. The speeches of Falstaff are as
perfect in their style as the soliloquies of Hamlet. One must be able
to make a king of faery or an old countryman or a modern lover speak
that language which is his and nobody else's, and speak it with so much
of emotional subtlety that the hearer may find it hard to know whether
it is the thought or the word that has moved him, or whether these
could be separated at all.

If one does not know how to construct, if one cannot arrange much
complicated life into a single action, one's work will not hold the
attention or linger in the memory, but if one is not in love with words
it will lack the delicate movement of living speech that is the chief
garment of life; and because of this lack the great realists seem to
the lovers of beautiful art to be wise in this generation, and for the
next generation, perhaps, but not for all generations that are to come.

_Second. _ But if we are to restore words to their sovereignty we must
make speech even more important than gesture upon the stage.

I have been told that I desire a monotonous chant, but that is not
true, for though a monotonous chant may be a safer beginning for an
actor than the broken and prosaic speech of ordinary recitation, it
puts one to sleep none the less. The sing-song in which a child says
a verse is a right beginning, though the child grows out of it. An
actor should understand how to so discriminate cadence from cadence,
and to so cherish the musical lineaments of verse or prose that he
delights the ear with a continually varied music. Certain passages of
lyrical feeling, or where one wishes, as in the Angel's part in _The
Hour-Glass_, to make a voice sound like the voice of an immortal, may
be spoken upon pure notes which are carefully recorded and learned as
if they were the notes of a song. Whatever method one adopts one must
always be certain that the work of art, as a whole, is masculine and
intellectual, in its sound as in its form.

_Third. _ We must simplify acting, especially in poetical drama, and
in prose drama that is remote from real life like my _Hour-Glass_. We
must get rid of everything that is restless, everything that draws the
attention away from the sound of the voice, or from the few moments
of intense expression, whether that expression is through the voice
or through the hands; we must from time to time substitute for the
movements that the eye sees the nobler movements that the heart sees,
the rhythmical movements that seem to flow up into the imagination from
some deeper life than that of the individual soul.

_Fourth. _ Just as it is necessary to simplify gesture that it may
accompany speech without being its rival, it is necessary to simplify
both the form and colour of scenery and costume. As a rule the
background should be but a single colour, so that the persons in the
play, wherever they stand, may harmonize with it and preoccupy our
attention. In other words, it should be thought out not as one thinks
out a landscape, but as if it were the background of a portrait, and
this is especially necessary on a small stage where the moment the
stage is filled the painted forms of the background are broken up and
lost. Even when one has to represent trees or hills they should be
treated in most cases decoratively, they should be little more than an
unobtrusive pattern. There must be nothing unnecessary, nothing that
will distract the attention from speech and movement. An art is always
at its greatest when it is most human. Greek acting was great because
it did everything with the voice, and modern acting may be great when
it does everything with voice and movement. But an art which smothers
these things with bad painting, with innumerable garish colours, with
continual restless mimicries of the surface of life, is an art of
fading humanity, a decaying art.

MORAL AND IMMORAL PLAYS.

A writer in _The Leader_ has said that I told my audience after the
performance of _The Hour-Glass_ that I did not care whether a play
was moral or immoral. He said this without discourtesy, and as I
have noticed that people are generally discourteous when they write
about morals, I think that I owe him upon my part the courtesy of an
explanation. I did not say that I did not care whether a play was
moral or immoral, for I have always been of Verhaeren's opinion that a
masterpiece is a portion of the conscience of mankind. My objection was
to the rough-and-ready conscience of the newspaper and the pulpit in a
matter so delicate and so difficult as literature. Every generation of
men of letters has been called immoral by the pulpit or the newspaper,
and it has been precisely when that generation has been illuminating
some obscure corner of the conscience that the cry against it has been
more confident.

The plays of Shakespeare had to be performed on the south side of
the Thames because the Corporation of London considered all plays
immoral. Goethe was thought dangerous to faith and morals for two or
three generations. Every educated man knows how great a portion of the
conscience of mankind is in Flaubert and Balzac, and yet their books
have been proscribed in the courts of law, and I found some time ago
that our own National Library, though it had two books on the genius
of Flaubert, had refused on moral grounds to have any books written
by him. With these stupidities in one's memory, how can one, as many
would have us, arouse the mob, and in this matter the pulpit and the
newspaper are but voices of the mob, against the English theatre in
Ireland upon moral grounds? If that theatre became conscientious as
men of letters understand the conscience, many that now cry against
it would think it even less moral, for it would be more daring, more
logical, more free-spoken. The English Theatre is demoralizing, not
because it delights in the husband, the wife and the lover, a subject
which has inspired great literature in most ages of the world, but
because the illogical thinking and insincere feeling we call bad
writing, make the mind timid and the heart effeminate. I saw an English
play in Dublin a few months ago called _Mice and Men_. It had run for
five hundred nights in London, and been called by all the newspapers
'a pure and innocent play,' 'a welcome relief,' and so on. In it
occurred this incident: The typical scapegrace hero of the stage, a
young soldier, who is in love with the wife of another, goes away for
a couple of years, and when he returns finds that he is in love with
a marriageable girl. His mistress, who has awaited his return with
what is represented as faithful love, sends him a letter of welcome,
and because he has grown virtuous of a sudden he returns it unopened,
and with so careless a scorn that the husband intercepts it; and the
dramatist approves this manner of crying off with an old love, and
rings down the curtain on his marriage bells. Men who would turn such a
man out of a club bring their wives and daughters to look at him with
admiration upon the stage, so demoralizing is a drama that has no
intellectual tradition behind it. I could not endure it, and went out
into the street and waited there until the end of the play, when I came
in again to find the friends I had brought to hear it, but had I been
accustomed to the commercial theatre I would not even have known that
anything strange had happened upon the stage. If a man of intellect had
written of such an incident he would have made his audience feel for
the mistress that sympathy one feels for all that have suffered insult,
and for that young man an ironical emotion that might have marred
the marriage bells, and who knows what the curate and the journalist
would have said of him? Even Ireland would have cried out: Catholic
Ireland that should remember the gracious tolerance of the Church when
all nations were its children, and how Wolfram of Eisenbach sang from
castle to castle of the courtesy of Parzival, the good husband, and
of Gawain, the light lover, in that very Thuringia where a generation
later the lap of St. Elizabeth was full with roses. A Connaught Bishop
told his people a while since that they 'should never read stories
about the degrading passion of love,' and one can only suppose that
being ignorant of a chief glory of his Church, he has never understood
that this new puritanism is but an English cuckoo.

AN IRISH NATIONAL THEATRE.

[The performance of Mr. Synge's _Shadow of the Glen_
started a quarrel with the extreme national party, and
the following paragraphs are from letters written in
the play's defence. The organ of the party was at the
time _The United Irishman_ (now _Sinn Fein_), but the
first severe attack began in _The Independent_. _The
United Irishman_, however, took up the quarrel, and
from that on has attacked almost every play produced
at our theatre, and the suspicion it managed to arouse
among the political clubs against Mr. Synge especially
led a few years later to the organised attempt to drive
_The Playboy of the Western World_ from the stage. ]

When we were all fighting about the selection of books for the New
Irish Library some ten years ago, we had to discuss the question,
What is National Poetry? In those days a patriotic young man would
have thought but poorly of himself if he did not believe that _The
Spirit of the Nation_ was great lyric poetry, and a much finer kind
of poetry than Shelley's _Ode to the West Wind_, or Keats's _Ode to a
Grecian Urn_. When two or three of us denied this, we were told that we
had effeminate tastes or that we were putting Ireland in a bad light
before her enemies. If one said that _The Spirit of the Nation_ was but
salutary rhetoric, England might overhear us and take up the cry. We
said it, and who will say that Irish literature has not a greater name
in the world to-day than it had ten years ago?

To-day there is another question that we must make up our minds about,
and an even more pressing one, What is a National Theatre? A man may
write a book of lyrics if he have but a friend or two that will care
for them, but he cannot write a good play if there are not audiences
to listen to it. If we think that a national play must be as near as
possible a page out of _The Spirit of the Nation_ put into dramatic
form, and mean to go on thinking it to the end, then we may be sure
that this generation will not see the rise in Ireland of a theatre that
will reflect the life of Ireland as the Scandinavian theatre reflects
the Scandinavian life. The brazen head has an unexpected way of falling
to pieces. We have a company of admirable and disinterested players,
and the next few months will, in all likelihood, decide whether a
great work for this country is to be accomplished. The poetry of Young
Ireland, when it was an attempt to change or strengthen opinion, was
rhetoric; but it became poetry when patriotism was transformed into
a personal emotion by the events of life, as in that lamentation
written by Doheny on his keeping among the hills. Literature is always
personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience,
and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of
others. A community that is opinion-ridden, even when those opinions
are in themselves noble, is likely to put its creative minds into some
sort of a prison. If creative minds preoccupy themselves with incidents
from the political history of Ireland, so much the better, but we
must not enforce them to select those incidents. If in the sincere
working-out of their plot, they alight on a moral that is obviously
and directly serviceable to the National cause, so much the better,
but we must not force that moral upon them. I am a Nationalist, and
certain of my intimate friends have made Irish politics the business
of their lives, and this made certain thoughts habitual with me, and
an accident made these thoughts take fire in such a way that I could
give them dramatic expression. I had a very vivid dream one night, and
I made _Cathleen ni Houlihan_ out of this dream. But if some external
necessity had forced me to write nothing but drama with an obviously
patriotic intention, instead of letting my work shape itself under
the casual impulses of dreams and daily thoughts, I would have lost,
in a short time, the power to write movingly upon any theme. I could
have aroused opinion; but I could not have touched the heart, for I
would have been busy at the oakum-picking that is not the less mere
journalism for being in dramatic form. Above all, we must not say
that certain incidents which have been a part of literature in all
other lands are forbidden to us. It may be our duty, as it has been
the duty of many dramatic movements, to bring new kinds of subjects
into the theatre, but it cannot be our duty to make the bounds of
drama narrower. For instance, we are told that the English theatre is
immoral, because it is pre-occupied with the husband, the wife and
the lover. It is, perhaps, too exclusively pre-occupied with that
subject, and it is certain it has not shed any new light upon it for
a considerable time, but a subject that inspired Homer and about half
the great literature of the world will, one doubts not, be a necessity
to our National Theatre also. Literature is, to my mind, the great
teaching power of the world, the ultimate creator of all values,
and it is this, not only in the sacred books whose power everybody
acknowledges, but by every movement of imagination in song or story or
drama that height of intensity and sincerity has made literature at
all. Literature must take the responsibility of its power, and keep
all its freedom: it must be like the spirit and like the wind that
blows where it listeth, it must claim its right to pierce through
every crevice of human nature, and to describe the relation of the soul
and the heart to the facts of life and of law, and to describe that
relation as it is, not as we would have it be, and in so far as it
fails to do this it fails to give us that foundation of understanding
and charity for whose lack our moral sense can be but cruelty. It must
be as incapable of telling a lie as nature, and it must sometimes say
before all the virtues, 'The greatest of these is charity. ' Sometimes
the patriot will have to falter and the wife to desert her home, and
neither be followed by divine vengeance or man's judgment. At other
moments it must be content to judge without remorse, compelled by
nothing but its own capricious spirit that has yet its message from
the foundation of the world. Aristophanes held up the people of Athens
to ridicule, and even prouder of that spirit than of themselves, they
invited the foreign ambassadors to the spectacle.

I would sooner our theatre failed through the indifference or hostility
of our audiences than gained an immense popularity by any loss of
freedom. I ask nothing that my masters have not asked for, but I ask
all that they were given. I ask no help that would limit our freedom
from either official or patriotic hands, though I am glad of the help
of any who love the arts so dearly that they would not bring them into
even honourable captivity. A good Nationalist is, I suppose, one who
is ready to give up a great deal that he may preserve to his country
whatever part of her possessions he is best fitted to guard, and that
theatre where the capricious spirit that bloweth as it listeth has
for a moment found a dwelling-place, has good right to call itself a
National Theatre.

THE THEATRE, THE PULPIT, AND THE NEWSPAPERS.

I was very well content when I read an unmeasured attack in _The
Independent_ on the Irish National Theatre. There had, as yet, been
no performance, but the attack was confident, and it was evident that
the writer's ears were full of rumours and whisperings. One knew that
some such attack was inevitable, for every dramatic movement that
brought any new power into literature arose among precisely these
misunderstandings and animosities. Drama, the most immediately powerful
form of literature, the most vivid image of life, finds itself opposed,
as no other form of literature does, to those enemies of life, the
chimeras of the Pulpit and the Press. When a country has not begun to
care for literature, or has forgotten the taste for it, and most modern
countries seem to pass through this stage, these chimeras are hatched
in every basket. Certain generalisations are everywhere substituted
for life. Instead of individual men and women and living virtues
differing as one star differeth from another in glory, the public
imagination is full of personified averages, partisan fictions, rules
of life that would drill everybody into the one posture, habits that
are like the pinafores of charity-school children. The priest, trained
to keep his mind on the strength of his Church and the weakness of
his congregation, would have all mankind painted with a halo or with
horns. Literature is nothing to him, he has to remember that Seaghan
the Fool might take to drinking again if he knew of pleasant Falstaff,
and that Paudeen might run after Red Sarah again if some strange chance
put Plutarch's tale of Anthony or Shakespeare's play into his hands,
and he is in a hurry to shut out of the schools that Pandora's box,
_The Golden Treasury_. The newspaper he reads of a morning has not only
the haloes and horns of the vestry, but it has crowns and fools' caps
of its own. Life, which in its essence is always surprising, always
taking some new shape, always individualising, is nothing to it, it has
to move men in squads, to keep them in uniform, with their faces to
the right enemy, and enough hate in their hearts to make the muskets
go off. It may know its business well, but its business is building
and ours is shattering. We cannot linger very long in this great dim
temple where the wooden images sit all round upon thrones, and where
the worshippers kneel, not knowing whether they tremble because their
gods are dead or because they fear they may be alive. In the idol-house
every god, every demon, every virtue, every vice, has been given its
permanent form, its hundred hands, its elephant trunk, its monkey head.
The man of letters looks at those kneeling worshippers who have given
up life for a posture, whose nerves have dried up in the contemplation
of lifeless wood. He swings his silver hammer and the keepers of the
temple cry out, prophesying evil, but he must not mind their cries and
their prophecies, but break the wooden necks in two and throw down the
wooden bodies. Life will put living bodies in their place till new
image-brokers have set up their benches.

Whenever literature becomes powerful, the priest, whose forerunner
imagined St. Patrick driving his chariot-wheels over his own erring
sister, has to acknowledge, or to see others acknowledge, that there
is no evil that men and women may not be driven into by their virtues
all but as readily as by their vices, and the politician, that it is
not always clean hands that serve a country or foul hands that ruin
it. He may even have to say at last, as an old man who had spent many
years in prison to serve a good cause said to me, 'There never was a
cause so evil that it has not been served by good men for what seemed
to them sufficient reasons. ' And if the priest or the politician should
say to the man of letters, 'Into how dangerous a state of mind are you
not bringing us? ' the man of letters can but answer, 'It is dangerous,
indeed,' and say, like my Seanchan, 'When did we promise safety? '

Thought takes the same form age after age, and the things that people
have said to me about this intellectual movement of ours have, I doubt
not, been said in every country to every writer who was a disturber of
the old life. When _The Countess Cathleen_ was produced, the very girls
in the shops complained to us that to describe an Irishwoman as selling
her soul to the devil was to slander the country. The silver hammer had
threatened, as it seems, one of those personifications of an average.
Someone said to me a couple of weeks ago, 'If you put on the stage any
play about marriage that does not point its moral clearly, you will
make it difficult for us to go on attacking the English theatre for its
immorality. ' Again, we were disordering the squads, the muskets might
not all point in the same direction.

Now that these opinions have found a leader and a voice in _The
Independent_, it is easy at anyrate to explain how much one differs
from them. I had spoken of the capricious power of the artist and
compared it to the capricious movements of a wild creature, and _The
Independent_, speaking quite logically from its point of view, tells
me that these movements were only interesting when 'under restraint. '
The writers of the Anglo-Irish movement, it says, 'will never consent
to serve except on terms that never could or should be conceded. ' I
had spoken of the production of foreign masterpieces, but it considers
that foreign masterpieces would be very dangerous. I had asked in
_Samhain_ for audiences sufficiently tolerant to enable the half-dozen
minds who are likely to be the dramatic imagination of Ireland for this
generation to put their own thought and their own characters into their
work. That is to say, I had asked for the amount of freedom which every
nation has given to its dramatic writers. But the newspaper hopes and
believes that no 'such tolerance will be extended to Mr. Yeats and his
friends. '

I have written these lines to explain our thoughts and intentions to
many personal friends, who live too deep in the labour of politics to
give the thought to these things that we have given, and because not
only in our theatre, but in all matters of national life, we have need
of a new discovery of life--of more precise thought, of a more perfect
sincerity. I would see, in every branch of our National propaganda,
young men who would have the sincerity and the precision of those
Russian revolutionists that Kropotkin and Stepniak tell us of, men
who would never use an argument to convince others which would not
convince themselves, who would not make a mob drunk with a passion they
could not share, and who would above all seek for fine things for their
own sake, and for precise knowledge for its own sake, and not for its
momentary use. One can serve one's country alone out of the abundance
of one's own heart, and it is labour enough to be certain one is in the
right, without having to be certain that one's thought is expedient
also.


1904

THE DRAMATIC MOVEMENT

The National Theatre Society has had great difficulties because of
the lack of any suitable playhouse. It has been forced to perform
in halls without proper lighting for the stage, and almost without
dressing-rooms, and with level floors in the auditorium that prevented
all but the people in the front row from seeing properly. These
halls are expensive too, and the players of poetical drama in an age
of musical comedy have light pockets. But now a generous English
friend, Miss Horniman, has rearranged and in part re-built, at very
considerable expense, the old Mechanic's Institute Theatre, now the
Abbey Theatre, and given us the use of it without any charge, and I
need not say that she has gained our gratitude, as she will gain the
gratitude of our audience. The work of decoration and alteration has
been done by Irishmen, and everything, with the exception of some few
things that are not made here, or not of a good enough quality, has
been manufactured in Ireland. The stained glass in the entrance hall
is the work of Miss Sarah Purser and her apprentices, the large copper
mirror frames are from the new metal works at Youghal, and the pictures
of some of our players are by an Irish artist. These details and some
details of form and colour in the building, as a whole, have been
arranged by Miss Horniman herself.

Having been given the free use of this Theatre, we may look upon
ourselves as the first endowed Theatre in any English-speaking country,
the English-speaking countries and Venezuela being the only countries
which have never endowed their theatres; but the correspondents who
write for parts in our plays or posts in the Theatre at a salary are in
error. We are, and must be for some time to come, contented to find our
work its own reward, the player giving[G] his work, and the playwright
his, for nothing; and though this cannot go on always, we start
our winter very cheerfully with a capital of some forty pounds. We
playwrights can only thank these players, who have given us the delight
of seeing our work so well performed, working with so much enthusiasm,
with so much patience, that they have found for themselves a lasting
place among the artists, the only aristocracy that has never been sold
in the market or seen the people rise up against it.

It is a necessary part of our plan to find out how to perform plays for
little money, for it is certain that every increase in expenditure has
lowered the quality of dramatic art itself, by robbing the dramatist
of freedom in experiment, and by withdrawing attention from his words
and from the work of the players. Sometimes one friend or another has
helped us with costumes or scenery, but the expense has never been very
great, ten or twenty pounds being enough in most cases for quite a long
play.
These friends have all accepted the principles I have explained
from time to time in _Samhain_, but they have interpreted them in
various ways according to their temperament.

Miss Horniman staged _The King's Threshold_ at her own expense, and
she both designed and made the costumes. The costumes for the coming
performances of _On Baile's Strand_ are also her work and her gift and
her design. She made and paid for the costumes in _The Shadowy Waters_,
but in this case followed a colour-scheme of mine. The colour-scheme
in _The Hour-Glass_, our first experiment, was worked out by Mr.
Robert Gregory and myself, and the costumes were made by Miss Lavelle,
a member of the company; while Mr. Robert Gregory has designed the
costumes and scenery for _Kincora_. As we gradually accumulate costumes
in all the main colours and shades, we will be able to get new effects
by combining them in different ways without buying new ones. Small
dramatic societies, and our example is beginning to create a number,
not having so many friends as we have, might adopt a simpler plan,
suggested to us by a very famous decorative artist. Let them have
one suit of clothes for a king, another for a queen, another for a
fighting-man, another for a messenger, and so on, and if these clothes
are loose enough to fit different people, they can perform any romantic
play that comes without new cost. The audience would soon get used to
this way of symbolising, as it were, the different ranks and classes
of men, and as the king would wear, no matter what the play might be,
the same crown and robe, they could have them very fine in the end.
Now, one wealthy theatre-goer and now another might add a pearl to the
queen's necklace, or a jewel to her crown, and be the more regular in
attendance at the theatre because that gift shone out there like a good
deed.

We can hardly do all we hope unless there are many more of these little
societies to be centres of dramatic art and of the allied arts. But
a very few actors went from town to town in ancient Greece, finding
everywhere more or less well trained singers among the principal
townsmen to sing the chorus that had otherwise been the chief expense.
In the days of the stock companies two or three well-known actors would
go from town to town finding actors for all the minor parts in the
local companies. If we are to push our work into the small towns and
villages, local dramatic clubs must take the place of the old stock
companies. A good-sized town should be able to give us a large enough
audience for our whole, or nearly our whole, company to go there; but
the need for us is greater in those small towns where the poorest
kind of farce and melodrama have gone and Shakespearean drama has not
gone, and it is here that we will find it hardest to get intelligent
audiences. If a dramatic club existed in one of the larger towns near,
they could supply us not only with actors, should we need them, in
their own town, but with actors when we went to the small towns and to
the villages where the novelty of any kind of drama would make success
certain. These clubs would play in Gaelic far better than we can hope
to, for they would have native Gaelic speakers, and should we succeed
in stirring the imagination of the people enough to keep the rivalry
between plays in English and Irish to a rivalry in quality, the
certain development of two schools with distinct though very kindred
ideals would increase the energy and compass of our art.

At a time when drama was more vital than at present, unpaid actors,
and actors with very little training, have influenced it deeply. The
Mystery Plays and the Miracle Plays got their players at no great
distance from the Church door, and the classic drama of France had
for a forerunner performances of Greek and Latin Classics, given by
students and people of quality, and even at its height Racine wrote two
of his most famous tragedies to be played by young girls at school.
This was before acting had got so far away from our natural instincts
of expression. When the play is in verse, or in rhythmical prose, it
does not gain by the change, and a company of amateurs, if they love
literature, and are not self-conscious, and really do desire to do
well, can often make a better hand of it than the ordinary professional
company.

The greater number of their plays will, in all likelihood, be comedies
of Irish country life, and here they need not fear competition, for
they will know an Irish countryman as no professional can know him; but
whatever they play, they will have one advantage the English amateur
has not: there is in their blood a natural capacity for acting, and
they have never, like him, become the mimics of well-known actors.
The arts have always lost something of their sap when they have been
cut off from the people as a whole; and when the theatre is perfectly
alive, the audience, as at the Gaelic drama to-day in Gaelic-speaking
districts, feels itself to be almost a part of the play. I have never
felt that the dignity of art was imperilled when the audience at Dr.
Hyde's _An Posadh_ cheered the bag of flour or the ham lent by some
local shopkeepers to increase the bridal gifts. It was not merely
because of its position in the play that the Greek chorus represented
the people, and the old ballad singers waited at the end of every
verse till their audience had taken up the chorus; while Ritual, the
most powerful form of drama, differs from the ordinary form, because
everyone who hears it is also a player. Our modern theatre, with the
seats always growing more expensive, and its dramatic art drifting
always from the living impulse of life, and becoming more and more what
Rossetti would have called 'soulless self-reflections of man's skill,'
no longer gives pleasure to any imaginative mind. It is easy for us
to hate England in this country, and we give that hatred something of
nobility if we turn it now and again into hatred of the vulgarity of
commercial syndicates, of all that commercial finish and pseudo-art she
has done so much to cherish. Mr. Standish O'Grady has quoted somebody
as saying 'the passions must be held in reverence, they must not, they
cannot be excited at will,' and the noble using of that old hatred will
win for us sympathy and attention from all artists and people of good
taste, and from those of England more than anywhere, for there is the
need greatest.

Before this part of our work can be begun, it will be necessary to
create a household of living art in Dublin, with principles that have
become habits, and a public that has learnt to care for a play because
it is a play, and not because it is serviceable to some cause. Our
patent is not so wide as we had hoped for, for we had hoped to have
a patent as little restricted as that of the Gaiety or the Theatre
Royal. We were, however, vigorously opposed by these theatres and by
the Queen's Theatre, and the Solicitor-General, to meet them half way,
has restricted our patent to plays written by Irishmen or on Irish
subjects or to foreign masterpieces, provided these masterpieces are
not English. This has been done to make our competition against the
existing theatres as unimportant as possible. It does not directly
interfere with the work of our society to any serious extent, but
it would have indirectly helped our work had such bodies as the
Elizabethan Stage Society, which brought _Everyman_ to Dublin some
years ago, been able to hire the theatre from Miss Horniman, when it is
not wanted by us, and to perform there without the limitations imposed
by a special license.

Everything that creates a theatrical audience is an advantage to us,
and the small number of seats in our theatre would have kept away that
kind of drama, in whatever language, which spoils an audience for good
work.

The enquiry itself was not a little surprising, for the legal
representatives of the theatres, being the representatives of Musical
Comedy, were very anxious for the morals of the town. I had spoken of
the Independent Theatre, and a lawyer wanted to know if a play of mine
which attacked the institution of marriage had not been performed by
it recently. I had spoken of M. Maeterlinck and of his indebtedness
to a theatre somewhat similar to our own, and one of our witnesses,
who knew no more about it than the questioner, was asked if a play by
M. Maeterlinck called _L'Intruse_ had not been so immoral that it was
received with a cry of horror in London. I have written no play about
marriage, and the Independent Theatre died some twelve years ago, and
_L'Intruse_ might be played in a nursery with no worse effects than
a little depression of spirits. Our opponents having thus protested
against our morals, went home with the fees of Musical Comedy in their
pockets.

For all this, we are better off so far as the law is concerned than
we would be in England. The theatrical law of Ireland was made by the
Irish Parliament, and though the patent system, the usual method of
the time, has outlived its use and come to an end everywhere but in
Ireland, we must be grateful to that ruling caste of free spirits, that
being free themselves they left the theatre in freedom. In England
there is a censor, who forbids you to take a subject from the Bible,
or from politics, or to picture public characters, or certain moral
situations which are the foundation of some of the greatest plays of
the world. When I was at the great American Catholic University of
Notre-Dame I heard that the students had given a performance of _OEdipus
the King_, and _OEdipus the King_ is forbidden in London. A censorship
created in the eighteenth century by Walpole, because somebody had
written against election bribery, has been distorted by a puritanism,
which is not the less an English invention for being a pretended hatred
of vice and a real hatred of intellect. Nothing has ever suffered
so many persecutions as the intellect, though it is never persecuted
under its own name. It is but according to old usage when a law that
cherishes Musical Comedy and permits to every second melodrama the
central situation of _The Sign of the Cross_, attempted rape, becomes
one of the secondary causes of the separation of the English Theatre
from life. It does not interfere with anything that makes money, and
Musical Comedy, with its hints and innuendoes, and its consistently low
view of life, makes a great deal, for money is always respectable; but
would a group of artists and students see once again the masterpieces
of the world, they would have to hide from the law as if they had
been a school of thieves; or were we to take with us to London that
beautiful Nativity Play of Dr. Hyde's, which was performed in Sligo
Convent a few months ago, that holy vision of the central story of the
world, as it is seen through the minds and the traditions of the poor,
the constables might upset the cradle. And yet it is precisely these
stories of The Bible that have all to themselves, in the imagination of
English people, especially of the English poor, the place they share in
this country with the stories of Fion and of Oisin and of Patrick.

Milton set the story of Sampson into the form of a Greek play, because
he knew that Sampson was, in the English imagination, what Herakles
was in the imagination of Greece; and I have never been able to see
any other subjects for an English Dramatist who looked for some common
ground between his own mind and simpler minds. An English poet of
genius once told me that he would have tried his hand in plays for the
people, if they knew any story the censor would pass, except Jack and
the Beanstalk.

The Gaelic League has its great dramatic opportunity because of the
abundance of stories known in Irish-speaking districts, and because
of the freedom of choice and of treatment the leaders of a popular
movement can have if they have a mind for it. The Gaelic plays acted
and published during the year selected their subjects from the
popular mind, but the treatment is disappointing. Dr. Hyde, dragged
from gathering to gathering by the necessities of the movement, has
written no new play; and Father Peter O'Leary has thrown his dramatic
power, which is remarkable, into an imaginative novel. Father Dineen
has published a little play that has some life-like dialogue, but
the action is sometimes irrelevant, and the motives of the principal
character are vague and confused, as if it were written in a hurry.
Father Dineen seems to know that he has not done his best, for he
describes it as an attempt to provide more vivid dialogue for beginners
than is to be found in the reading-books rather than a drama. An
anonymous writer has written a play called _The Money of the Narrow
Cross_, which tells a very simple tale, like that of a child's book,
simply and adequately. It is very slight, in low relief as it were, but
if its writer is a young man it has considerable promise.

A Play called _Seaghan na Scuab_ was described in the _United Irishman_
as the best play ever written in Irish; but though the subject of it is
a dramatic old folk-tale, which has shown its vigour by rooting itself
in many countries, the treatment is confused and conventional and there
is a flatness of dialogue unusual in these plays. There is, however,
an occasional sense of comic situation which may come to something if
its writer will work seriously at his craft. One is afraid of quenching
the smoking flax, but this play was selected for performance at the
_Oireachtas_ before a vast audience in the Rotunda. It was accompanied
by _The Doctor_ in English and Irish, written by Mr. O'Beirne, and
performed by the Tawin players, who brought it from their seaside
village in Galway. Mr. O'Beirne deserves the greatest praise for
getting this company together, as well as for all he has done to give
the Tawin people a new pleasure in their language; but I think a day
will come when he will not be grateful to the _Oireachtas_ Committee
for bringing this first crude work of his into the midst of so many
thousand people. It would be very hard for a much more experienced
dramatist to make anything out of the ugly violence, the threadbare,
second-hand imaginations that flow in upon one out of the newspapers,
when one has founded one's work on proselytizing zeal, instead of one's
experience of life and one's curiosity about it. These two were the
only plays, out of a number that have been played in Irish, that I have
seen this year. I went to Galway Feis, like many others, to see Dr.
Hyde's _Lost Saint_, for I had missed every performance of it hitherto
though I had read it to many audiences in America, and I awaited the
evening with some little excitement. Although the _Lost Saint_ was on
the programme, an Anti-Emigration play was put in its place. I did not
wait for this, but, whatever its merits, it is not likely to have
contained anything so beautiful as the old man's prayer in the other:
'O Lord, O God, take pity on this little soft child. Put wisdom in his
head, cleanse his heart, scatter the mist from his mind and let him
learn his lessons like the other boys. O Lord, Thou wert Thyself young
one time; take pity on youth. O Lord, Thou, Thyself, shed tears; dry
the tears of this little lad. Listen, O Lord, to the prayer of Thy
servant, and do not keep from him this little thing he is asking of
Thee. O Lord, bitter are the tears of a child, sweeten them: deep are
the thoughts of a child, quiet them: sharp is the grief of a child,
take it from him: soft is the heart of a child, do not harden it. '

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FIRST PRINCIPLES.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have no longer in any country a literature as great as the
literature of the old world, and that is because the newspapers, all
kinds of second-rate books, the preoccupation of men with all kinds
of practical changes, have driven the living imagination out of the
world. I have read hardly any books this summer but Cervantes and
Boccaccio and some Greek plays. I have felt that these men, divided
from one another by so many hundreds of years, had the same mind.
It is we who are different; and then the thought would come to me,
that has come to me so often before, that they lived at times when
the imagination turned to life itself for excitement. The world was
not changing quickly about them. There was nothing to draw their
imagination from the ripening of their fields, from the birth and death
of their children, from the destiny of their souls, from all that is
the unchanging substance of literature. They had not to deal with the
world in such great masses that it could only be represented to their
minds by figures and by abstract generalisations. Everything that
their minds ran on came to them vivid with the colour of the senses,
and when they wrote it was out of their own rich experience, and they
found their symbols of expression in things that they had known all
their life long.