In all drama which would give direct expression to reverie, to the
speech of the soul with itself, there is some device that checks the
rapidity of dialogue. When Oedipus speaks out of the most vehement
passions, he is conscious of the presence of the chorus, men before
whom he must keep up appearances 'children latest born of Cadmus' line'
who do not share his passion. Nobody is hurried or breathless. We
listen to reports and discuss them, taking part as it were in a council
of state. Nothing happens before our eyes. The dignity of Greek drama,
and in a lesser degree of that of Corneille and Racine depends, as
contrasted with the troubled life of Shakespearean drama, on an almost
even speed of dialogue, and on a so continuous exclusion of the
animation of common life, that thought remains lofty and language rich.
Shakespeare, upon whose stage everything may happen, even the blinding
of Gloster, and who has no formal check except what is implied in the
slow, elaborate structure of blank verse, obtains time for reverie by
an often encumbering Euphuism, and by such a loosening of his plot as
will give his characters the leisure to look at life from without.
Maeterlinck, to name the first modern of the old way who comes to
mind--reaches the same end, by choosing instead of human beings persons
who are as faint as a breath upon a looking-glass, symbols who can
speak a language slow and heavy with dreams because their own life is
but a dream. Modern drama, on the other hand, which accepts the
tightness of the classic plot, while expressing life directly, has been
driven to make indirect its expression of the mind, which it leaves to
be inferred from some common-place sentence or gesture as we infer it
in ordinary life; and this is, I believe, the cause of the perpetual
disappointment of the hope imagined this hundred years that France or
Spain or Germany or Scandinavia will at last produce the master we
await.
The divisions in the arts are almost all in the first instance
technical, and the great schools of drama have been divided from one
another by the form or the metal of their mirror, by the check chosen
for the rapidity of dialogue. Synge found the check that suited his
temperament in an elaboration of the dialects of Kerry and Aran. The
cadence is long and meditative, as befits the thought of men who are
much alone, and who when they meet in one another's houses--as their
way is at the day's end--listen patiently, each man speaking in turn
and for some little time, and taking pleasure in the vaguer meaning of
the words and in their sound. Their thought, when not merely practical,
is as full of traditional wisdom and extravagant pictures as that of
some Aeschylean chorus, and no matter what the topic is, it is as
though the present were held at arms length. It is the reverse of
rhetoric, for the speaker serves his own delight, though doubtless he
would tell you that like Raftery's whiskey-drinking it was but for the
company's sake. A medicinal manner of speech too, for it could not even
express, so little abstract it is and so rammed with life, those worn
generalizations of national propaganda. 'I'll be telling you the finest
story you'd hear any place from Dundalk to Ballinacree with great
queens in it, making themselves matches from the start to the end, and
they with shiny silks on them ... I've a grand story of the great
queens of Ireland, with white necks on them the like of Sarah Casey,
and fine arms would hit you a slap.... What good am I this night, God
help me? What good are the grand stories I have when it's few would
listen to an old woman, few but a girl maybe would be in great fear the
time her hour was come, or a little child wouldn't be sleeping with the
hunger on a cold night.' That has the flavour of Homer, of the Bible,
of Villon, while Cervantes would have thought it sweet in the mouth
though not his food. This use of Irish dialect for noble purpose by
Synge, and by Lady Gregory, who had it already in her Cuchulain of
Muirthemne, and by Dr. Hyde in those first translations he has not
equalled since, has done much for National dignity. When I was a boy I
was often troubled and sorrowful because Scottish dialect was capable
of noble use, but the Irish of obvious roystering humour only; and this
error fixed on my imagination by so many novelists and rhymers made me
listen badly. Synge wrote down words and phrases wherever he went, and
with that knowledge of Irish which made all our country idioms easy to
his hand, found it so rich a thing, that he had begun translating into
it fragments of the great literatures of the world, and had planned a
complete version of the Imitation of Christ. It gave him imaginative
richness and yet left to him the sting and tang of reality. How vivid
in his translation from Villon are those 'eyes with a big gay look out
of them would bring folly from a great scholar.' More vivid surely than
anything in Swinburne's version, and how noble those words which are
yet simple country speech, in which his Petrarch mourns that death came
upon Laura just as time was making chastity easy, and the day come when
'lovers may sit together and say out all things arc in their hearts,'
and 'my sweet enemy was making a start, little by little, to give over
her great wariness, the way she was wringing a sweet thing out of my
sharp sorrow.'