No More Learning

Has not the long decline of the
arts been but the shadow of declining faith in an unseen reality?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


1905

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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