SCENE I

PLAYS

AND

CONTROVERSIES

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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS

ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED

LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA

MELBOURNE

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TORONTO

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[Illustration: A portrait of a young W. B. Yeats,

from a charcoal drawing by John S. Sargent, R.A.]

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PLAYS

AND

CONTROVERSIES

BY

W. B. YEATS

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1924

_All rights reserved_

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COPYRIGHT, 1907, 1912, 1921 AND 1924,

BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

New and Revised Edition.

Set up and electrotyped. Published August, 1924.

_Printed in the United States of America_

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PREFACE

I have gathered into this book two plays, written before the foundation

of the Irish Theatre though much corrected since, and four plays written

but the other day and intended for performance in drawing-room and

studio, and a long series of dramatic notes. I begin the book with these

notes, which are taken for the most part from an occasional publication

called _Samhain_, started in the third year of ‘The Irish Dramatic

Movement’ to defend that movement, and long out of print. In a little

while Dail Eireann and our Dublin newspapers will consider, as I hope,

the foundation of an Irish State Theatre; and I would put these old

notes into evidence. Though often about foolish quarrels, or plays but

little better, they may keep their use even when that occasion passes;

being passionately written, and at a moment when Ireland was preparing,

in that dark portion of the mind which is like the other side of the

moon, for insurrection and anarchic violence; and all in some measure a

plea for intellectual spontaneity against unyielding, mechanical,

abstract principles. I ask indulgence if I overrate their value, for it

may be that I cannot judge sentences that call up memories of the time

when I was most alive, having most friends and enemies. All needful

explanations are in Lady Gregory’s book, _Our Irish Theatre_.

The plays are so abundantly annotated and prefaced that I need say

nothing more except that the first was planned and partly written when I

was little more than a boy, and that it gives me more pleasure in the

memory than any of my plays. It was all thought out in the first fervour

of my generation’s distaste for Victorian rhetoric; that rhetoric once

away, every poetical virtue seemed possible.

W. B. YEATS.

Dublin

February 1923

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CONTENTS

PAGE

THE IRISH DRAMATIC MOVEMENT 1

‘THE COUNTESS CATHLEEN’ 219

NOTE ON ‘THE COUNTESS CATHLEEN’ 285

PREFACE TO ‘THE LAND OF HEART’S DESIRE’ 301

‘THE LAND OF HEART’S DESIRE’ 303

NOTE ON ‘THE LAND OF HEART’S DESIRE’ 329

FOUR PLAYS FOR DANCERS-- 331

‘AT THE HAWK’S WELL’ 337

‘THE ONLY JEALOUSY OF EMER’ 357

‘THE DREAMING OF THE BONES’ 381

‘CALVARY’ 401

NOTE ON THE FIRST PERFORMANCE OF ‘AT THE HAWK’S WELL’ 417

MUSIC FOR ‘AT THE HAWK’S WELL’ 422

NOTE ON ‘THE ONLY JEALOUSY OF EMER’ 440

MUSIC FOR ‘THE DREAMING OF THE BONES’ 442

NOTE ON ‘THE DREAMING OF THE BONES’ 467

NOTE ON ‘CALVARY’ 471

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Portrait of the Author from a charcoal drawing by _Frontispiece_

John S. Sargent R.A.

FACING PAGE

The Guardian of the Well in ‘At the Hawk’s Well’ 337

Design for Black Cloth used in ‘At the Hawk’s 340

Well’

Musician in ‘At the Hawk’s Well’ 342

Old Man in ‘At the Hawk’s Well’ 344

Mask for Old Man in ‘At the Hawk’s Well’ 346

Mask for Young Man in ‘At the Hawk’s Well’ 348

Young Man in ‘At the Hawk’s Well’ 350

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THE IRISH DRAMATIC MOVEMENT

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SAMHAIN: 1901

When Lady Gregory, Mr. Edward Martyn, and myself planned the Irish

Literary Theatre, we decided that it should be carried on in the form we

had projected for three years. We thought that three years would show

whether the country desired to take up the project, and make it a part

of the national life, and that we, at any rate, could return to our

proper work, in which we did not include theatrical management, at the

end of that time. A little later, Mr. George Moore[1] joined us; and,

looking back now upon our work, I doubt if it could have been done at

all without his knowledge of the stage; and certainly if the

performances of this present year bring our adventure to a successful

close, a chief part of the credit will be his. Many, however, have

helped us in various degrees, for in Ireland just now one has only to

discover an idea that seems of service to the country for friends and

helpers to start up on every hand. While we needed guarantors we had

them in plenty, and though Mr. Edward Martyn’s public spirit made it

unnecessary to call upon them, we thank them none the less.

Whether the Irish Literary Theatre has a successor made on its own model

or not, we can claim that a dramatic movement which will not die has

been started. When we began our work, we tried in vain to get a play in

Gaelic. We could not even get a condensed version of the dialogue of

Oisin and Patrick. We wrote to Gaelic enthusiasts in vain, for their

imagination had not yet turned towards the stage, and now there are

excellent Gaelic plays by Dr. Douglas Hyde, by Father O’Leary, by Father

Dineen, and by Mr. MacGinlay; and the Gaelic League has had a

competition for a one-act play in Gaelic, with what results I do not

know. There have been successful performances of plays in Gaelic at

Dublin and at Macroom, and at Letterkenny, and I think at other places;

and Mr. Fay has got together an excellent little company which plays

both in Gaelic and in English. I may say, for I am perhaps writing an

epitaph, and epitaphs should be written in a genial spirit, that we have

turned a great deal of Irish imagination towards the stage. We could not

have done this if our movement had not opened a way of expression for an

impulse that was in the people themselves. The truth is that the Irish

people are at that precise stage of their history when imagination,

shaped by many stirring events, desires dramatic expression. One has

only to listen to a recitation of Raftery’s _Argument with Death_ at

some country Feis to understand this. When Death makes a good point, or

Raftery a good point, the audience applaud delightedly, and applaud, not

as a London audience would, some verbal dexterity, some piece of

smartness, but the movements of a simple and fundamental comedy. One

sees it too in the reciters themselves, whose acting is at times all but

perfect in its vivid simplicity. I heard a little Claddagh girl tell a

folk-story at Galway Feis with a restraint and a delightful energy that

could hardly have been bettered by the most careful training.

* * * * *

The organisation of this movement is of immediate importance. Some of

our friends propose that somebody begin at once to get a small stock

company together, and that he invite, let us say, Mr. Benson, to find us

certain well-trained actors, Irish if possible, but well trained of a

certainty, who will train our actors, and take the more difficult parts

at the beginning. These friends contend that it is necessary to import

our experts at the beginning, for our company must be able to compete

with travelling English companies, but that a few years will be enough

to make many competent Irish actors. The Corporation of Dublin should be

asked, they say, to give a small annual sum of money, such as they give

to the Academy of Music; and the Corporations of Cork and Limerick and

Waterford, and other provincial towns, to give small endowments in the

shape of a hall and attendants and lighting for a week or two out of

every year; and the Technical Board to give a small annual sum of money

to a school of acting which would teach fencing and declamation, and

gesture and the like. The stock company would perform in Dublin perhaps

three weeks in spring, and three weeks in autumn, and go on tour the

rest of the time through Ireland, and through the English towns where

there is a large Irish population. It would perform plays in Irish and

English, and also, it is proposed, the masterpieces of the world, making

a point of performing Spanish, and Scandinavian, and French, and perhaps

Greek masterpieces rather more than Shakespeare, for Shakespeare is

seen, not well done indeed, but not unendurably ill done, in the Theatre

of Commerce. It would do its best to give Ireland a hardy and shapely

national character by opening the doors to the four winds of the world,

instead of leaving the door that is towards the east wind open alone.

Certainly, the national character, which is so essentially different

from the English that Spanish and French influences may well be most

healthy, is at present like one of those miserable thorn bushes by the

sea that are all twisted to one side by some prevailing wind.

* * * * *

It is contended that there is no reason why the company should not be as

successful as similar companies in Germany and Scandinavia, and that it

would be even of commercial advantage to Dublin by making it a

pleasanter place to live in, besides doing incalculable good to the

whole intellect of the country. One, at any rate, of those who press the

project on us has much practical knowledge of the stage and of

theatrical management, and knows what is possible and what is not

possible.

* * * * *

Others among our friends, and among these are some who have had more

than their share of the hard work which has built up the intellectual

movement in Ireland, argue that a theatre of this kind would require too

much money to be free, that it could not touch on politics, the most

vital passion and vital interest of the country, as they say, and that

the attitude of continual compromise between conviction and interest,

which it would necessitate, would become demoralising to everybody

concerned, especially at moments of political excitement. They tell us

that the war between an Irish Ireland and an English Ireland is about to

become much fiercer, to divide families and friends it may be, and that

the organisations that will lead in the war must be able to say

everything the people are thinking. They would have Irishmen give their

plays to a company like Mr. Fay’s, when they are within its power, and

if not, to Mr. Benson or to any other travelling company which will play

them in Ireland without committees, where everybody compromises a

little. In this way, they contend, we would soon build up an Irish

theatre from the ground, escaping to some extent the conventions of the

ordinary theatre, and those English voices which give a foreign air to

our words. And though we might have to wait some years, we would get

even the masterpieces of the world in good time. Let us, they think, be

poor enough to whistle at the thief who would take away some of our

thoughts, and after Mr. Fay has taken his company, as he plans, through

the villages and the country towns, he will get the little endowment

that is necessary, or if he does not, some other will.

* * * * *

I do not know what Lady Gregory or Mr. Moore thinks of these projects. I

am not going to say what I think. I have spent much of my time and more

of my thought these last ten years on Irish organisation, and now that

the Irish Literary Theatre has completed the plan I had in my head ten

years ago, I want to go down again to primary ideas. I want to put old

stories into verse, and if I put them into dramatic verse it will matter

less to me henceforward who plays them than what they play, and how they

play. I hope to get our heroic age into verse, and to solve some

problems of the speaking of verse to musical notes.

* * * * *

There is only one question which is raised by the two projects I have

described on which I will give an opinion. It is of the first importance

that those among us who want to write for the stage should study the

dramatic masterpieces of the world. If they can get them on the stage,

so much the better, but study them they must if Irish drama is to mean

anything to Irish intellect. At the present moment, Shakespeare being

the only great dramatist known to Irish writers has made them cast their

work too much on the English model. Miss Milligan’s _Red Hugh_, which

was successfully acted in Dublin the other day, had no business to be in

two scenes; and Father O’Leary’s _Tadg Saor_, despite its most vivid and

picturesque, though far too rambling dialogue, shows in its half-dozen

changes of scene the influence of the same English convention, which

arose when there was no scene-painting, and is often a difficulty where

there is, and is always an absurdity in a farce of thirty minutes,

breaking up the emotion and sending our thoughts here and there. Mr.

MacGinlay’s _Elis agus an bhean deirce_ has not this defect, and though

I had not Irish enough to follow it when I saw it played, and

excellently played, by Mr. Fay’s company, I could see from the continual

laughter of the audience that it held them with an unbroken emotion. The

best Gaelic play after Dr. Hyde’s is, I think, Father Dineen’s

_Creideamh agus Gorta_, and though it changes the scene a little oftener

than is desirable under modern conditions, it does not remind me of an

English model. It reminds me of Calderon by its treatment of a religious

subject, and by something in Father Dineen’s sympathy with the people

that is like his. But I think if Father Dineen had studied that great

Catholic dramatist he would not have failed, as he has done once or

twice, to remember some necessary detail of a situation. In the first

scene he makes a servant ask his fellow-servants about things he must

have known as well as they; and he loses a dramatic moment in his third

scene by forgetting that Seagan Gorm has a pocketful of money which he

would certainly, being the man he was, have offered to the woman he was

urging into temptation. The play towards the end changes from prose to

verse, and the reverence and simplicity of the verse makes one think of

a mediæval miracle play. The subject has been so much a part of Irish

life that it was bound to be used by an Irish dramatist, though

certainly I shall always prefer plays which attack a more eternal devil

than the proselytiser. He has been defeated, and the arts are at their

best when they are busy with battles that can never be won. It is

possible, however, that we may have to deal with passing issues until we

have re-created the imaginative tradition of Ireland, and filled the

popular imagination again with saints and heroes. These short plays

(though they would be better if their writers knew the masters of their

craft) are very dramatic as they are, but there is no chance of our

writers of Gaelic, or our writers of English, doing good plays of any

length if they do not study the masters. If Irish dramatists had studied

the romantic plays of Ibsen, the one great master the modern stage has

produced, they would not have sent the Irish Literary Theatre imitations

of Boucicault, who had no relation to literature, and Father O’Leary

would have put his gift for dialogue, a gift certainly greater than, let

us say, Mr. Jones’ or Mr. Grundy’s, to better use than the writing of

that long, rambling dramatisation of the _Tain bo Cuailgne_, in which I

hear in the midst of the exuberant Gaelic dialogue the worn-out

conventions of English poetic drama. The moment we leave even a little

the folk-tradition of the peasant, as we must in drama, if we do not

know the best that has been said and written in the world, we do not

even know ourselves. It is no great labour to know the best dramatic

literature, for there is very little of it. We Irish must know it all,

for we have, I think, far greater need of the severe discipline of

French and Scandinavian drama than of Shakespeare’s luxuriance.

* * * * *

If the _Diarmuid and Grania_ and the _Casadh an t-Sugain_ are not well

constructed, it is not because Mr. Moore and Dr. Hyde and myself do not

understand the importance of construction, and Mr. Martyn has shown by

the triumphant construction of _The Heather Field_ how much thought he

has given to the matter; but for the most part our Irish plays read as

if they were made without a plan, without a ‘scenario,’ as it is called.

European drama began so, but the European drama had centuries for its

growth, while our art must grow to perfection in a generation or two if

it is not to be smothered before it is well above the earth by what is

merely commercial in the art of England.

* * * * *

Let us learn construction from the masters, and dialogue from ourselves.

A relation of mine has just written me a letter, in which he says: ‘It

is natural to an Irishman to write plays; he has an inborn love of

dialogue and sound about him, of a dialogue as lively, gallant, and

passionate as in the times of great Eliza. In these days an Englishman’s

dialogue is that of an amateur--that is to say, it is never spontaneous.

I mean in _real life_. Compare it with an Irishman’s, above all a poor

Irishman’s, reckless abandonment and naturalness, or compare it with the

only fragment that has come down to us of Shakespeare’s own

conversation.’ (He is remembering a passage in, I think, Ben Jonson’s

_Underwoods_.) ‘Petty commerce and puritanism have brought to the front

the wrong type of Englishman; the lively, joyous, yet tenacious man has

transferred himself to Ireland. We have him and we will keep him unless

the combined nonsense of ... and ... and ... succeed in suffocating

him.’

* * * * *

In Dublin the other day I saw a poster advertising a play by a Miss ...

under the patronage of certain titled people. I had little hope of

finding any reality in it, but I sat out two acts. Its dialogue was

above the average, though the characters were the old rattle-traps of

the stage, the wild Irish girl, and the Irish servant, and the bowing

Frenchman, and the situations had all been squeezed dry generations ago.

One saw everywhere the shadowy mind of a woman of the Irish upper

classes as they have become to-day, but under it all there was a kind of

life, though it was but the life of a string and a wire. I do not know

who Miss ... is, but I know that she is young, for I saw her portrait in

a weekly paper, and I think that she is clever enough to make her work

of some importance. If she goes on doing bad work she will make money,

perhaps a great deal of money, but she will do a little harm to her

country. If, on the other hand, she gets into an original relation with

life, she will, perhaps, make no money, and she will certainly have her

class against her.

The Irish upper classes put everything into a money measure. When any

one among them begins to write or paint they ask him, ‘How much money

have you made?’ ‘Will it pay?’ Or they say, ‘If you do this or that you

will make more money.’ The poor Irish clerk or shopboy,[2] who writes

verses or articles in his brief leisure, writes for the glory of God and

of his country; and because his motive is high, there is not one vulgar

thought in the countless little ballad books that have been written from

Callinan’s day to this. They are often clumsily written, for they are in

English, and if you have not read a great deal, it is difficult to write

well in a language which has been long separated from the ‘folk-speech’;

but they have not a thought a proud and simple man would not have

written. The writers were poor men, but they left that money measure to

the Irish upper classes. All Irish writers have to choose whether they

will write as the upper classes have done, not to express but to exploit

this country; or join the intellectual movement which has raised the cry

that was heard in Russia in the seventies, the cry, ‘To the people.’

Moses was little good to his people until he had killed an Egyptian; and

for the most part a writer or public man of the upper classes is useless

to this country till he has done something that separates him from his

class. We wish to grow peaceful crops, but we must dig our furrows with

the sword.

* * * * *

Our plays this year will be produced by Mr. Benson at the Gaiety Theatre

on October the 21st, and on some of the succeeding days. They are Dr.

Douglas Hyde’s _Casadh an t-Sugain_, which is founded on a well-known

Irish story of a wandering poet; and _Diarmuid and Grania_, a play in

three acts and in prose by Mr. George Moore and myself, which is founded

on the most famous of all Irish stories, the story of the lovers whose

beds were the cromlechs. The first act of _Diarmuid and Grania_ is in

the great banqueting hall of Tara, and the second and third are on the

slopes of Ben Bulben in Sligo. We do not think there is anything in

either play to offend anybody, but we make no promises. We thought our

plays inoffensive last year and the year before, but we were accused the

one year of sedition, and the other of heresy.

* * * * *

I have called this little collection of writings _Samhain_, the old name

for the beginning of winter, because our plays this year are in October,

and because our Theatre is coming to an end in its present shape.

-----

Footnote 1:

Both Mr. Moore and Mr. Martyn dropped out of the movement after the

third performance at the Irish Literary Theatre in 1901.--W. B. Y.,

1908.

Footnote 2:

That mood has gone, with Fenianism and its wild hopes. The National

movement has been commercialised in the last few years. How much real

ideality is but hidden for a time one cannot say.--W. B. Y., March

1908.

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1902

The Irish Literary Theatre wound up its three years of experiment last

October with _Diarmuid and Grania_, which was played by Mr. Benson’s

Company, Mr. Benson himself playing Diarmuid with poetry and fervour,

and _Casadh an t-Sugain_, played by Dr. Hyde and some members of the

Gaelic League. _Diarmuid and Grania_ drew large audiences, but its

version of the legend was a good deal blamed by critics, who knew only

the modern text of the story. There are two versions, and the play was

fully justified by Irish and Scottish folk-lore, and by certain early

Irish texts, which do not see Grania through very friendly eyes. Any

critic who is interested in so dead a controversy can look at the

folk-tales quoted by Campbell in, I think, _West Highland

Superstitions_, and at the fragment translated by Kuno Meyer, at page

458, of vol. i. of _Zeitschrift für Keltische Philologie_. Dr. Hyde’s

play, on the other hand, pleased everybody, and has been played a good

many times in a good many places since. It was the first play in Irish

played in a theatre, and did much towards making plays a necessary part

in Irish propaganda.

* * * * *

The Irish Literary Theatre has given place to a company of Irish actors.

Its Committee saw them take up the work all the more gladly because it

had not formed them or influenced them. A dramatic society with

guarantors and patrons can never have more than a passing use, because

it can never be quite free; and it is not successful until it is able to

say it is no longer wanted. Amateur actors will perform for

_Cumann-na-Gael_ plays chosen by themselves, and written by A. E., by

Mr. Cousins, by Mr. Ryan, by Mr. MacGinlay, and by myself. These plays

will be given at the Antient Concert Rooms at the end of October, but

the National Theatrical Company will repeat their successes with new

work in a very little hall they have hired in Camden Street. If they

could afford it they would have hired some bigger house, but, after all,

M. Antoine founded his _Théâtre Libre_ with a company of amateurs in a

hall that only held three hundred people.

* * * * *

The first work of theirs to get much attention was their performance,

last spring, at the invitation of _Inghinidhe h-Eireann_, of A. E.’s

_Deirdre_, and my _Cathleen ni Houlihan_. They had Miss Maud Gonne’s

help, and it was a fine thing for so beautiful a woman to consent to

play my poor old Cathleen, and she played with nobility and tragic

power. She showed herself as good in tragedy as Dr. Hyde is in comedy,

and stirred a large audience very greatly. The whole company played

well, too, but it was in _Deirdre_ that they interested me most. They

showed plenty of inexperience, especially in the minor characters, but

it was the first performance I had seen since I understood these things

in which the actors kept still enough to give poetical writing its full

effect upon the stage. I had imagined such acting, though I had not seen

it, and had once asked a dramatic company to let me rehearse them in

barrels that they might forget gesture and have their minds free to

think of speech for a while. The barrels, I thought, might be on

castors, so that I could shove them about with a pole when the action

required it. The other day I saw Sara Bernhardt and De Max in _Phèdre_,

and understood where Mr. Fay, who stage-manages the National Theatrical

Company, had gone for his model.[3] For long periods the performers

would merely stand and pose, and I once counted twenty-seven quite

slowly before anybody on a fairly well-filled stage moved, as it seemed,

so much as an eyelash. The periods of stillness were generally shorter,

but I frequently counted seventeen, eighteen, or twenty before there was

a movement. I noticed, too, that the gestures had a rhythmic

progression. Sara Bernhardt would keep her hands clasped over, let us

say, her right breast for some time, and then move them to the other

side, perhaps, lowering her chin till it touched her hands, and then,

after another long stillness, she would unclasp them and hold one out,

and so on, not lowering them till she had exhausted all the gestures of

uplifted hands. Through one long scene De Max, who was quite as fine,

never lifted his hand above his elbow, and it was only when the emotion

came to its climax that he raised it to his breast. Beyond them stood a

crowd of white-robed men who never moved at all, and the whole scene had

the nobility of Greek sculpture, and an extraordinary reality and

intensity. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen upon the

stage, and made me understand, in a new way, that saying of Goethe’s

which is understood everywhere but in England, ‘Art is art because it is

not nature.’ Of course, our amateurs were poor and crude beside those

great actors, perhaps the greatest in Europe, but they followed them as

well as they could, and got an audience of artisans, for the most part,

to admire them for doing it. I heard somebody who sat behind me say,

‘They have got rid of all the nonsense.’

* * * * *

I thought the costumes and scenery, which were designed by A. E.

himself, good, too, though I did not think them simple enough. They were

more simple than ordinary stage costumes and scenery, but I would like

to see poetical drama, which tries to keep at a distance from daily life

that it may keep its emotion untroubled, staged with but two or three

colours. The background, especially in small theatres, where its form is

broken up and lost when the stage is at all crowded, should, I think be

thought out as one thinks out the background of a portrait. One often

needs nothing more than a single colour, with perhaps a few shadowy

forms to suggest wood or mountain. Even on a large stage one should

leave the description of the poet free to call up the martlet’s

procreant cradle or what he will. But I have written enough about

decorative scenery elsewhere, and will probably lecture on that and like

matters before we begin the winter’s work.

* * * * *

The performances of _Deirdre_ and _Cathleen ni Houlihan_, which will be

repeated in the Antient Concert Rooms, drew so many to hear them that

great numbers were turned away from the doors of St. Theresa’s Hall.

Like the plays of the Irish Literary Theatre, they started unexpected

discussion. Mr. Standish O’Grady, who had done more than any other to

make us know the old legends, wrote in his _All Ireland Review_ that old

legends could not be staged without danger of ‘banishing the soul of the

land.’ The old Irish had many wives, for instance, and we had best leave

their histories to the vagueness of legend. How could uneducated people

understand heroes who lived amid such different circumstances? And so we

were to ‘leave heroic cycles alone, and not to bring them down to the

crowd.’ A. E. replied in _The United Irishman_ with an impassioned

letter. ‘The old, forgotten music’ he writes about in his letter is, I

think, that regulated music of speech at which both he and I have been

working, though on somewhat different principles. I have been working

with Miss Farr and Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch, who has made a psaltery for the

purpose, to perfect a music of speech which can be recorded in something

like ordinary musical notes; while A. E. has got a musician to record

little chants with intervals much smaller than those of modern music.

* * * * *

After the production of these plays the most important Irish dramatic

event was, no doubt, the acting of Dr. Hyde’s _An Posadh_, in Galway.

Through an accident it had been very badly rehearsed, but his own acting

made amends. One could hardly have had a play that grew more out of the

life of the people who saw it. There may have been old men in that

audience who remembered its hero the poet Raftery, and there was nobody

there who had not come from hearing his poems repeated at the Galway

Feis. I think from its effect upon the audience that this play, in which

the chief Gaelic poet of our time celebrates his forerunner in

simplicity, will be better liked in Connaught at any rate than even

_Casadh an t-Sugain_. His _Tincear agus Sidheog_, acted in Mr. Moore’s

garden, at the time of the Oireachtas, is a very good play, but is, I

think, the least interesting of his plays as literature. His

imagination, which is essentially the folk-imagination, needs a looser

construction, and probably a more crowded stage. A play that gets its

effect by keeping close to one idea reminds us, when it comes from the

hands of a folk-poet, of Blake’s saying, that ‘Improvement makes

straight roads, but the crooked roads are the roads of genius.’ The idea

loses the richness of its own life, while it destroys the wayward life

of his mind by bringing it under too stern a law. Nor could charming

verses make amends for that second kiss in which there was profanation,

and for that abounding black bottle. Did not M. Trebulet Bonhommie

discover that one spot of ink would kill a swan?

* * * * *

Among the other plays in Irish acted during the year, Father Dineen’s

_Tobar Draoidheachta_ is probably the best. He has given up the many

scenes of his _Creadeamh agus Gorta_, and has written a play in one

scene, which, as it can be staged without much trouble, has already been

played in several places. One admires its _naïveté_ as much as anything

else. Father Dineen, who, no doubt, remembers how Finn mac Cumhal when a

child was put in a field to catch hares and keep him out of mischief,

has sent the rival lovers of his play, when he wanted them off the scene

for a moment, to catch a hare that has crossed the stage. When they

return the good lover is carrying it by the heels, and modestly compares

it to a lame jackass. One rather likes this bit of nonsense when one

comes to it, for in that world of folk-imagination one thing seems as

possible as another. On the other hand, there is a moment of beautiful

dramatic tact. The lover gets a letter telling of the death of a

relative in America, for whom he has no particular affection, and who

has left him a fortune. He cannot lament, for that would be insincere,

and his first words must not be rejoicing. Father Dineen has found for

him the one beautiful thing he could say, ‘It’s a lonesome thing death

is.’ With, perhaps, less beauty than there is in the closing scene of

_Creadeamh agus Gorta_, the play has more fancy and a more sustained

energy.

* * * * *

Father Peter O’Leary has written a play in his usual number of scenes

which has not been published, but has been acted amid much Munster

enthusiasm. But neither that nor _La an Amadan_, which has also been

acted, is likely to have any long life on our country stages. A short

play, with many changes of scene, is a nuisance in any theatre, and

often an impossibility on our poor little stages. Some kind of play, in

English, by Mr. Standish O’Grady, has been acted in the open air in

Kilkenny. I have not seen it, and I cannot understand anything by the

accounts of it, except that there were magic-lantern slides and actors

on horseback, and Mr. Standish O’Grady as an Elizabethan night-watchman,

speaking prologues, and a contented audience of two or three thousand

people.

As we do not think that a play can be worth acting and not worth

reading, all our plays will be published in time. Some have been printed

in _The United Irishman_ and _The All Ireland Review_. I have put my

_Cathleen ni Houlihan_ and a little play by Dr. Hyde into this

_Samhain_. Once already this year I have had what somebody has called

the noble pleasure of praising, and I can praise this _Lost Saint_ with

as good a conscience as I had when I wrote of _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_.

I would always admire it, but just now, when I have been thinking that

literature should return to its old habit of describing desirable

things, I am in the mood to be stirred by that old man gathering up food

for fowl with his heart full of love, and by those children who are so

full of the light-hearted curiosity of childhood, and by that

schoolmaster who has mixed prayer with his gentle punishments. It seems

natural that so beautiful a prayer as that of the old saint should have

come out of a life so full of innocence and peace. One could hardly have

thought out the play in English, for those phrases of a traditional

simplicity and of a too deliberate prettiness which become part of an

old language would have arisen between the mind and the story. We might

even have made something as unreal as the sentimental schoolmaster of

the Scottish novelist, and how many children who are but literary images

would we have had to hunt out of our minds before meeting with those

little children? Even if one could have thought it out in English one

could not have written it in English, unless perhaps in that dialect

which Dr. Hyde had already used in the prose narrative that flows about

his _Love Songs of Connaught_.

Dr. Hyde has written a little play about the birth of Christ which has

the same beauty and simplicity. These plays remind me of my first

reading of The _Love Songs of Connaught_. The prose parts of that book

were to me, as they were to many others, the coming of a new power into

literature. I find myself now, as I found myself then, grudging to

propaganda, to scholarship, to oratory, however necessary, a genius

which might in modern Irish or in that idiom of the English-speaking

country-people discover a new region for the mind to wander in. In

Ireland, where we have so much to prove and to disprove, we are ready to

forget that the creation of an emotion of beauty is the only kind of

literature that justifies itself. Books of literary propaganda and

literary history are merely preparations for the creation or

understanding of such an emotion. It is necessary to put so much in

order, to clear away so much, to explain so much, that somebody may be

moved by a thought or an image that is inexplicable as a wild creature.

* * * * *

I cannot judge the language of his Irish poetry, but it is so rich in

poetical thought, when at its best, that it seems to me that if he were

to write more he might become to modern Irish what Mistral was to modern

Provençal. I wish, too, that he could put away from himself some of the

interruptions of that ceaseless propaganda, and find time for the making

of translations, loving and leisurely, like those in _Beside the Fire_

and _The Love Songs of Connaught_. He has begun to get a little careless

lately. Above all I would have him keep to that English idiom of the

Irish-thinking people of the west which he has begun to use less often.

It is the only good English spoken by any large number of Irish people

to-day, and we must found good literature on a living speech. English

men of letters found themselves upon the English Bible, where religious

thought gets its living speech. Blake, if I remember rightly, copied it

out twice, and I remember once finding a few illuminated pages of a new

decorated copy that he began in his old age. Byron read it for the sake

of style, though I think it did him little good; and Ruskin founded

himself in great part upon it. Indeed, we find everywhere signs of a

book which is the chief influence in the lives of English children. The

translation used in Ireland has not the same literary beauty, and if we

are to find anything to take its place we must find it in that idiom of

the poor, which mingles so much of the same vocabulary with turns of

phrase that have come out of Gaelic. Even Irish writers of considerable

powers of thought seem to have no better standard of English than a

schoolmaster’s ideal of correctness. If their grammar is correct they

will write in all the lightness of their hearts about ‘keeping in

touch,’ and ‘object-lessons,’ and ‘shining examples,’ and ‘running in

grooves,’ and ‘flagrant violations’ of various things. Yet, as

Sainte-Beuve has said, there is nothing immortal except style. One can

write well in that country idiom without much thought about one’s words;

the emotion will bring the right word itself, for there everything is

old and everything alive and nothing common or threadbare. I recommend

to the Intermediate Board--a body that seems to benefit by advice--a

better plan than any they know for teaching children to write good

English. Let every child in Ireland be set to turn a leading article or

a piece of what is called excellent English, written perhaps by some

distinguished member of the Board, into the idiom of his own

countryside. He will find at once the difference between dead and living

words, between words that meant something years ago and words that have

the only thing that gives literary quality--personality, the breath of

men’s mouths. Zola, who is sometimes an admirable critic, has said that

some of the greatest pages in French literature are not even right in

their grammar: ‘They are great because they have personality.’

* * * * *

The habit of writing for the stage, even when it is not country-people

who are the speakers, and of considering what good dialogue is, will

help to increase our feeling for style. Let us get back in everything to

the spoken word, even though we have to speak our lyrics to the Psaltery

or the Harp, for, as A. E. says, we have begun to forget that literature

is but recorded speech, and even when we write with care we have begun

‘to write with elaboration what could never be spoken.’ But when we go

back to speech let us see that it is the idiom either of those who have

rejected, or of those who have never learned, the base idioms of the

newspapers.

* * * * *

Mr. Martyn argued in _The United Irishman_ some months ago that our

actors should try to train themselves for the modern drama of society.

The acting of plays of heroic life or plays like _Cathleen ni Houlihan_,

with its speech of the country-people, did not seem to him a

preparation. It is not; but that is as it should be. Our movement is a

return to the people, like the Russian movement of the early seventies,

and the drama of society would but magnify a condition of life which the

countryman and the artisan could but copy to their hurt. The play that

is to give them a quite natural pleasure should tell them either of

their own life, or of that life of poetry where every man can see his

own image, because there alone does human nature escape from arbitrary

conditions. Plays about drawing-rooms are written for the middle classes

of great cities, for the classes who live in drawing-rooms; but if you

would ennoble the man of the roads you must write about the roads, or

about the people of romance, or about great historical people. We

should, of course, play every kind of good play about Ireland that we

can get, but romantic and historical plays, and plays about the life of

artisans and country-people, are the best worth getting. In time, I

think, we can make the poetical play a living dramatic form again, and

the training our actors will get from plays of country life, with its

unchanging outline, its abundant speech, its extravagance of thought,

will help to establish a school of imaginative acting. The play of

society, on the other hand, could but train up realistic actors who

would do badly, for the most part, what English actors do well, and

would, when at all good, drift away to wealthy English theatres. If, on

the other hand, we busy ourselves with poetry and the countryman, two

things which have always mixed with one another in life as on the stage,

we may recover, in the course of years, a lost art which, being an

imitation of nothing English, may bring our actors a secure fame and a

sufficient livelihood.

-----

Footnote 3:

An illusion, as he himself explained to me. He had never seen

_Phèdre_. The players were quiet and natural, because they did not

know what else to do. They had not learned to go wrong.--W. B. Y.,

March 1908.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

1903

I cannot describe the various dramatic adventures of the year with as

much detail as I did last year, mainly because the movement has got

beyond me. The most important event of the Gaelic Theatre has been the

two series of plays produced in the Round Room of the Rotunda by the

Gaelic League. Father Dineen’s _Tobar Draoidheachta_, and Dr. Hyde’s _An

Posadh_, and a chronicle play about Hugh O’Neill, and, I think, some

other plays, were seen by immense audiences. I was not in Ireland for

these plays, but a friend tells me that he could only get standing-room

one night, and the Round Room must hold about 3000 people. A performance

of _Tobar Draoidheachta_ I saw there some months before was bad, but I

believe there was great improvement, and that the players who came up

from somewhere in County Cork to play it at this second series of plays

were admirable. The players, too, that brought Dr. Hyde’s _An Posadh_

from Ballaghadereen, in County Mayo, where they had been showing it to

their neighbours, were also, I am told, careful and natural. The

play-writing, always good in dialogue, is still very poor in

construction, and I still hear of plays in many scenes, with no scene

lasting longer than four or six minutes, and few intervals shorter than

nine or ten minutes, which have to be filled up with songs. The Rotunda

chronicle play seems to have been rather of this sort, and I suspect

that when I get Father Peter O’Leary’s _Meadhbh_, a play in five acts

produced at Cork, I shall find the masterful old man, in spite of his

hatred of English thought, sticking to the Elizabethan form. I wish I

could have seen it played last week, for the spread of the Gaelic

Theatre in the country is more important than its spread in Dublin, and

of all the performances of Gaelic plays in the country during the year I

have seen but one--Dr. Hyde’s new play, _Cleamhnas_, at Galway Feis. I

got there a day late for a play by the Master of Galway Workhouse, but

heard that it was well played, and that his dialogue was as good as his

construction was bad. There is no question, however, about the

performance of _Cleamhnas_ being the worst I ever saw. I do not blame

the acting, which was pleasant and natural, in spite of insufficient

rehearsal, but the stage-management. The subject of the play was a

match-making. The terms were in debate between two old men in an inner

room. An old woman, according to the stage directions, should have

listened at the door and reported what she heard to her daughter’s

suitor, who is outside the window, and to her daughter. There was no

window on the stage, and the young man stood close enough to the door to

have listened for himself. The door, where she listened, opened now on

the inner room, and now on the street, according to the necessities of

the play, and the young men who acted the fathers of grown-up children,

when they came through the door, were seen to have done nothing to

disguise their twenty-five or twenty-six birthdays. There had been only

two rehearsals, and the little boy who should have come in laughing at

the end came in shouting, ‘Ho ho, ha ha,’ evidently believing that these

were Gaelic words he had never heard before.

* * * * *

The only Gaelic performances I have seen during the year have been

ill-done, but I have seen them sufficiently well done in other years to

believe my friends when they tell me that there have been good

performances. _Inghinidhe na h-Eireann_ is always thorough, and one

cannot doubt that the performance of Dr. Hyde’s _An Naom ar Iarriad_, by

the children from its classes, was at least careful. A powerful little

play in English against enlisting, by Mr. Colum, was played with it, and

afterwards revived, and played with a play about the Royal Visit, also

in English. I have no doubt that we shall see a good many of these

political plays during the next two or three years, and it may be even

the rise of a more or less permanent company of political players, for

the revolutionary clubs will begin to think plays as necessary as the

Gaelic League is already thinking them. 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 14,

when Lady Gregory’s _Twenty-five_ and my _Hour-Glass_ drew a good

audience. On May 2 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 Molière’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 3 and 4, 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 in English. I heard

too that his Nativity Play will be performed in New York, 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

story-tellers, from the king’s. Our repertory of plays is increasing

steadily, and when the winter’s work is finished, a play[4] 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 _naïveté_ 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,[5] 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[6] 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.

-----

Footnote 4:

This play was _John Bull’s Other Island_. When it came out in the

spring of 1905 we felt ourselves unable to cast it without wronging

Mr. Shaw. We had no ‘Broadbent’ or money to get one.--W. B. Y., March

1908.

Footnote 5:

_The Poor House_, written in Irish by Dr. Hyde on a scenario by Lady

Gregory.

Footnote 6:

_Riders to the Sea._ This play made its way very slowly with our

audiences, but is now very popular.--W. B. Y., March 1908.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

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 judgement. They justify and have no need of justification.

Such plays will require, both in writers and in 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 we do not know how to construct, if we cannot arrange much

complicated life into a single action, our work will not hold the

attention or linger in the memory, but if we are 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 me 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 so to discriminate cadence from cadence, and so to

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 the 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 harmonise 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 all but

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 demoralising, 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 out of their club a man who could so treat a letter

from his mistress bring their wives and daughters to admire him upon the

stage, so demoralising 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 the man

of intellect? 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 Eschenbach 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 of 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_, but the first

serious attack began in _The Independent_. _The United Irishman_,

however, took up the quarrel, and from that time 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.--W. B. Y., 1908.]

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 on 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 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 preoccupied with the husband, the wife, and the lover. It is,

perhaps, too exclusively preoccupied 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 bloweth 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

judgement. 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.

Some one 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 any rate 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 rebuilt, at very considerable

expense, the old Mechanics’ 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[7] 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 every one 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[8] 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 _Œdipus the King_,

and _Œdipus 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 Samson into the form of a Greek play, because he

knew that Samson 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 lifelike 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 a man out of the newspapers, when he has

founded his work on proselytising zeal, instead of his experience of

life and his 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

favorite 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 Provençe, 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[9]; _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[10] in four acts,

his first experiment in Irish satire; Mr. Tarpey, an Irishman whose

comedy _Windmills_ was successfully performed 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.

-----

Footnote 7:

The players though not the playwrights, are now all paid.--W. B. Y.,

March 1908. The playwrights have for a good many years now drawn the

usual Royalties.--W. B. Y., 1923.

Footnote 8:

Our patent has been widened since.--W. B. Y., 1923.

Footnote 9:

This distinguished writer now spells his name Colum.--W. B. Y., 1923.

Footnote 10:

_John Bull’s Other Island._

------------------------------------------------------------------------

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 Pascal, 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 than

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. Everything 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 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 individualising

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 the

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. Their very words were

more vigorous than ours, for their phrases came from a common mint, from

the market, or the tavern, or from the great poets of a still older

time. It is the change, that followed the Renaissance and was completed

by newspaper government and the scientific movement, that has brought

upon us all these phrases and generalisations, made by minds that would

grasp what they have never seen. Yesterday I went out to see the

reddening apples in the garden, and they faded from my imagination

sooner than they would have from the imagination of that old poet, who

made the songs of the seasons for the Fianna, or out of Chaucer’s, that

celebrated so many trees. Theories, opinions, these opinions among the

rest, flowed in upon me and blotted them away. Even our greatest poets

see the world with preoccupied minds. Great as Shelley is, those

theories about the coming changes of the world, which he has built up

with so much elaborate passion, hurry him from life continually. There

is a phrase in some old cabalistic writer about man falling into his own

circumference, and every generation we get further away from life

itself, and come more and more under the influence which Blake had in

his mind when he said, ‘Kings and Parliament seem to me something other

than human life.’ We lose our freedom more and more as we get away from

ourselves, and not merely because our minds are overthrown by abstract

phrases and generalisations, reflections in a mirror that seem living,

but because we have turned the table of value upside down, and believe

that the root of reality is not in the centre but somewhere in that

whirling circumference. How can we create like the ancients, while

innumerable considerations of external probability or social utility

destroy the seeming irresponsible creative power that is life itself?

Who to-day could set Richmond’s and Richard’s tents side by side on the

battlefield, or make Don Quixote, mad as he was, mistake a windmill for

a giant in broad daylight? And when I think of free-spoken Falstaff I

know of no audience, but the tinkers of the roadside, that could

encourage the artist to an equal comedy. The old writers were content if

their inventions had but an emotional and moral consistency, and created

out of themselves a fantastic, energetic, extravagant art. A

Civilisation is very like a man or a woman, for it comes in but a few

years into its beauty, and its strength, and then, while many years go

by, it gathers and makes order about it, the strength and beauty going

out of it the while, until in the end it lies there with its limbs

straightened out and a clean linen cloth folded upon it. That may well

be, and yet we need not follow among the mourners, for it may be, before

they are at the tomb, a messenger will run out of the hills and touch

the pale lips with a red ember, and wake the limbs to the disorder and

the tumult that is life. Though he does not come, even so we will keep

from among the mourners and hold some cheerful conversation among

ourselves; for has not Virgil, a knowledgeable man and a wizard,

foretold that other Argonauts shall row between cliff and cliff, and

other fair-haired Achæans sack another Troy?

* * * * *

Every argument carries us backwards to some religious conception, and in

the end the creative energy of men depends upon their believing that

they have, within themselves, something immortal and imperishable, and

that all else is but as an image in a looking-glass. So long as that

belief is not a formal thing, a man will create out of a joyful energy,

seeking little for any external test of an impulse that may be sacred,

and looking for no foundation outside life itself. If Ireland could

escape from those phantoms of hers she might create, as did the old

writers; for she has a faith that is as theirs, and keeps alive in the

Gaelic traditions--and this has always seemed to me the chief

intellectual value of Gaelic--a portion of the old imaginative life.

When Dr. Hyde or Father Peter O’Leary is the writer, one’s imagination

goes straight to the century of Cervantes, and, having gone so far, one

thinks at every moment that they will discover his energy. It is

precisely because of this reason that one is indignant with those who

would substitute for the ideas of the folk-life the rhetoric of the

newspapers, who would muddy what had begun to seem a fountain of life

with the feet of the mob. Is it impossible to revive Irish and yet to

leave the finer intellects a sufficient mastery over the more gross, to

prevent it from becoming, it may be, the language of a Nation, and yet

losing all that has made it worthy of a revival, all that has made it a

new energy in the mind?

* * * * *

Before the modern movement, and while it was but new, the ordinary man,

whether he could read and write or not, was ready to welcome great

literature. When Ariosto found himself among the brigands, they repeated

to him his own verses, and the audience in the Elizabethan Theatres must

have been all but as clever as an Athenian audience. But to-day we come

to understand great literature by a long preparation, or by some

accident of nature, for we only begin to understand life when our minds

have been purified of temporary interests by study.

* * * * *

But if literature has no external test, how are we to know that it is

indeed literature? The only test that nature gives, to show when we obey

her, is that she gives us happiness, and when we are no longer obedient

she brings us to pain sooner or later. Is it not the same with the

artist? The sign that she makes to him is that happiness we call delight

in beauty. He can only convey this in its highest form after he has

purified his mind with the great writers of the world; but their example

can never be more than a preparation. If his art does not seem, when it

comes, to be the creation of a new personality, in a few years it will

not seem to be alive at all. If he is a dramatist his characters must

have a like newness. If they could have existed before his day, or have

been imagined before his day, we may be certain that the spirit of life

is not in them in its fullness. This is because art, in its highest

moments, is not a deliberate creation, but the creation of intense

feeling, of pure life; and every feeling is the child of all past ages

and would be different if even a moment had been left out. Indeed, is it

not that delight in beauty, which tells the artist that he has imagined

what may never die, itself but a delight in the permanent yet

ever-changing form of life, in her very limbs and lineaments? When life

has given it, has she given anything but herself? Has she any other

reward, even for the saints? If one flies to the wilderness, is not that

clear light that falls about the soul when all irrelevant things have

been taken away, but life that has been about one always, enjoyed in all

its fullness at length? It is as though she had put her arms about one,

crying: ‘My beloved, you have given up everything for me.’ If a man

spend all his days in good works till there is no emotion in his heart

that is not full of virtue, is not the reward he prays for eternal life?

The artist, too, has prayers and a cloister, and if he do not turn away

from temporary things, from the zeal of the reformer and the passion of

revolution, that zealous mistress will give him but a scornful glance.

* * * * *

What attracts me to drama is that it is, in the most obvious way, what

all the arts are upon a last analysis. A farce and a tragedy are alike

in this, that they are a moment of intense life. An action is taken out

of all other actions; it is reduced to its simplest form, or at any rate

to as simple a form as it can be brought to without our losing the sense

of its place in the world. The characters that are involved in it are

freed from everything that is not a part of that action; and whether it

is, as in the less important kinds of drama, a mere bodily activity, a

hair-breadth escape or the like, or as it is in the more important

kinds, an activity of the souls of the characters, it is an energy, an

eddy of life purified from everything but itself. The dramatist must

picture life in action, with an unpreoccupied mind, as the musician

pictures her in sound and the sculptor in form.

* * * * *

But if this be true, has art nothing to do with moral judgements? Surely

it has, and its judgements are those from which there is no appeal. The

character, whose fortune we have been called in to see, or the

personality of the writer, must keep our sympathy, and whether it be

farce or tragedy, we must laugh and weep with him and call down

blessings on his head. This character who delights us may commit murder

like Macbeth, or fly the battle for his sweetheart as did Antony, or

betray his country like Coriolanus, and yet we will rejoice in every

happiness that comes to him and sorrow at his death as if it were our

own. It is no use telling us that the murderer and the betrayer do not

deserve our sympathy. We thought so yesterday, and we still know what

crime is, but everything has been changed of a sudden; we are caught up

into another code, we are in the presence of a higher court. Complain of

us if you will, but it will be useless, for before the curtain falls a

thousand ages, grown conscious in our sympathies, will have cried

_Absolvo te_. Blame if you will the codes, the philosophies, the

experiences of all past ages that have made us what we are, as the soil

under our feet has been made out of unknown vegetations: quarrel with

the acorns of Eden if you will, but what has that to do with us? We

understand the verdict and not the law; and yet there is some law, some

code, some judgement. If the poet’s hand had slipped, if Antony had

railed at Cleopatra in the tower, if Coriolanus had abated that high

pride of his in the presence of death, we might have gone away muttering

the Ten Commandments. Yet maybe we are wrong to speak of judgement, for

we have but contemplated life, and what more is there to say when she

that is all virtue, the gift and the giver, the fountain whither all

flows again, has given all herself? If the subject of drama or any other

art, were a man himself, an eddy of momentary breath, we might desire

the contemplation of perfect characters; but the subject of all art is

passion, and a passion can only be contemplated when separated by

itself, purified of all but itself, and aroused into a perfect intensity

by opposition with some other passion, or it may be with the law, that

is the expression of the whole whether of Church or Nation or external

nature. Had Coriolanus not been a law-breaker, neither he nor we had

ever discovered, it may be, that noble pride of his, and if we had not

seen Cleopatra through the eyes of so many lovers, would we have known

that soul of hers to be all flame, and wept at the quenching of it? If

we were not certain of law we would not feel the struggle, the drama,

but the subject of art is not law, which is a kind of death, but the

praise of life, and it has no commandments that are not positive.

* * * * *

But if literature does not draw its substance from history, or anything

about us in the world, what is a National literature? Our friends have

already told us, writers for the Theatre in Abbey Street, that we have

no right to the name, some because we do not write in Irish, and others

because we do not plead the National cause in our plays, as if we were

writers for the newspapers. I have not asked my fellow-workers what they

mean by the words National literature, but though I have no great love

for definitions, I would define it in some such way as this: It is the

work of writers, who are moulded by influences that are moulding their

country, and who write out of so deep a life that they are accepted

there in the end. It leaves a good deal unsettled--was Rossetti an

Englishman, or Swift an Irishman?--but it covers more kinds of National

literature than any other I can think of. If you say a National

literature must be in the language of the country, there are many

difficulties. Should it be written in the language that your country

does speak or the language that it ought to speak? Was Milton an

Englishman when he wrote in Latin or Italian, and had we no part in

Columbanus when he wrote in Latin the beautiful sermon comparing life to

a highway and to a smoke? And then there is Beckford, who is in every

history of English literature, and yet his one memorable book, a story

of Persia, was written in French.

* * * * *

Our theatre is of no great size, for though we know that if we write

well we shall find acceptance among our countrymen in the end, we would

think our emotions were on the surface if we found a ready welcome.

Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman are National writers of America,

although the one had his first true acceptance in France and the other

in England and Ireland. When I was a boy, six persons, who, alone out of

the whole world it may be, believed Walt Whitman a great writer, sent

him a message of admiration, and of those names four were English and

two Irish, my father’s and Prof. Dowden’s. It is only in our own day

that America has begun to prefer him to Lowell, who is not a poet at

all.

* * * * *

I mean by deep life that men must put into their writing the emotions

and experiences that have been most important to themselves. If they

say, ‘I will write of Irish country-people and make them charming and

picturesque like those dear peasants my great-grandmother used to put in

the foreground of her water-colour paintings,’ then they had better be

satisfied with the word ‘provincial.’ If one condescends to one’s

material, if it is only what a popular novelist would call local colour,

it is certain that one’s real soul is somewhere else. Mr. Synge, upon

the other hand, who is able to express his own finest emotions in those

curious ironical plays of his, where, for all that, by the illusion of

admirable art, every one seems to be thinking and feeling as only

countrymen could think and feel, is truly a National writer, as Burns

was when he wrote finely and as Burns was not when he wrote ‘Highland

Mary’ and ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night.’

A writer is not less National because he shows the influence of other

countries and of the great writers of the world. No nation, since the

beginning of history, has ever drawn all its life out of itself. Even

The Well of English Undefiled, the Father of English Poetry himself,

borrowed his metres, and much of his way of looking at the world, from

French writers, and it is possible that the influence of Italy was more

powerful among the Elizabethan poets than any literary influence out of

England herself. Many years ago, when I was contending with Sir Charles

Gavan Duffy over what seemed to me a too narrow definition of Irish

interests, Professor York Powell either said or wrote to me that the

creative power of England was always at its greatest when her receptive

power was greatest. If Ireland is about to produce a literature that is

important to her, it must be the result of the influences that flow in

upon the mind of an educated Irishman to-day, and, in a greater degree,

of what came into the world with himself. Gaelic can hardly fail to do a

portion of the work, but one cannot say whether it may not be some

French or German writer who will do most to make him an articulate man.

If he really achieve the miracle, if he really make all that he has seen

and felt and known a portion of his own intense nature, if he put it all

into the fire of his energy, he need not fear being a stranger among his

own people in the end. There never have been men more unlike an

Englishman’s idea of himself than Keats and Shelley, while Campbell,

whose emotion came out of a shallow well, was very like that idea. We

call certain minds creative because they are among the moulders of their

nation and are not made upon its mould, and they resemble one another in

this only--they have never been fore-known or fulfilled an expectation.

It is sometimes necessary to follow in practical matters some definition

which one knows to have but a passing use. We, for instance, have always

confined ourselves to plays upon Irish subjects, as if no others could

be National literature. Our theatre inherits this limitation from

previous movements, which found it necessary and fruitful. Goldsmith and

Sheridan and Burke had become so much a part of English life, were so

greatly moulded by the movements that were moulding England, that,

despite certain Irish elements that clung about them, we could not think

of them as more important to us than any English writer of equal rank.

Men told us that we should keep our hold of them, as it were, for they

were a part of our glory; but we did not consider our glory very

important. We had no desire to turn braggarts, and we did suspect the

motives of our advisers. Perhaps they had reasons, which were not

altogether literary, for thinking it might be well if Irishmen of

letters, in our day also, would turn their faces to England. But what

moved me always the most, and I had something to do with forcing this

limitation upon our organisations, is that a new language of expression

would help to awaken a new attitude in writers themselves, and that if

our organisations were satisfied to interpret a writer to his own

countrymen merely because he was of Irish birth, the organisations would

become a kind of trade union for the helping of Irishmen to catch the

ear of London publishers and managers, and for upholding writers who had

been beaten by abler Englishmen. Let a man turn his face to us,

accepting the commercial disadvantages that would bring upon him, and

talk of what is near to our hearts, Irish Kings and Irish Legends and

Irish Countrymen, and we would find it a joy to interpret him. Our one

philosophical critic, Mr. John Eglinton, thinks we were very arbitrary,

and yet I would not have us enlarge our practice. England and France,

almost alone among nations, have great works of literature which have

taken their subjects from foreign lands, and even in France and England

this is more true in appearance than reality. Shakespeare observed his

Roman crowds in London, and saw, one doubts not, somewhere in his own

Stratford, the old man that gave Cleopatra the asp. Somebody I have been

reading lately finds the Court of Louis the Fourteenth in Phèdre and

Andromaque. Even in France and England almost the whole prose fiction

professes to describe the life of the country, often of the districts

where its writers have lived, for, unlike a poem, a novel requires so

much minute observation of the surface of life that a novelist who cares

for the illusion of reality will keep to familiar things. A writer will

indeed take what is most creative out of himself, not from observation,

but experience, yet he must master a definite language, a definite

symbolism of incident and scene. Flaubert explains the comparative

failure of his Salammbô by saying, ‘One cannot frequent her.’ He could

create her soul, as it were, but he could not tell with certainty how it

would express itself before Carthage fell to ruins. In the small nations

which have to struggle for their National life, one finds that almost

every creator, whether poet or novelist, sets all his stories in his own

country. I do not recollect that Björnson ever wrote of any land but

Norway, and Ibsen, though he lived in exile for many years, driven out

by his countrymen, as he believed, carried the little seaboard towns of

Norway everywhere in his imagination. So far as we can be certain of

anything, we may be certain that Ireland with her long National

struggle, her old literature, her unbounded folk-imagination, will, in

so far as her literature is National at all, be more like Norway than

like England or France.

* * * * *

If Literature is but praise of life, if our writers are not to plead the

National Cause, nor insist upon the Ten Commandments, nor upon the glory

of their country, what part remains for it, in the common life of the

country? It will influence the life of the country immeasurably more,

though seemingly less, than have our propagandist poems and stories. It

will leave to others the defence of all that can be codified for ready

understanding, of whatever is the especial business of sermons, and of

leading articles; but it will bring all the ways of men before that

ancient tribunal of our sympathies. It will measure all things by the

measure not of things visible but of things invisible. In a country like

Ireland, where personifications have taken the place of life, men have

more hate than love, for the unhuman is nearly the same as the inhuman,

but literature, which is a part of that charity that is the forgiveness

of sins, will make us understand men no matter how little they conform

to our expectations. We will be more interested in heroic men than in

heroic actions, and will have a little distrust for everything than can

be called good or bad in itself with a very confident heart. Could we

understand it so well, we will say, if it were not something other than

human life? We will have a scale of virtues, and value most highly those

that approach the indefinable. Men will be born among us of whom it is

possible to say, not ‘What a philanthropist,’ ‘What a patriot,’ ‘How

practical a man,’ but, as we say of the men of the Renaissance, ‘What a

nature,’ ‘How much abundant life.’ Even at the beginning we will value

qualities more than actions, for these may be habit or accident; and

should we say to a friend, ‘You have advertised for an English cook,’ or

‘I hear that you have no clerks who are not of your own faith,’ or ‘You

have voted an address to the king,’ we will add to our complaint, ‘You

have been unpatriotic and I am ashamed of you, but if you cease from

doing any of these things because you have been terrorised out of them,

you will cease to be my friend.’ We will not forget how to be stern, but

we will remember always that the highest life unites, as in one fire,

the greatest passion and the greatest courtesy.

A feeling for the form of life, for the graciousness of life, for the

dignity of life, for the moving limbs of life, for the nobleness of

life, for all that cannot be written in codes, has always been greatest

among the gifts of literature to mankind. Indeed, the Muses being women,

all literature is but their love-cries to the manhood of the world. It

is now one and now another that cries, but the words are the same--‘Love

of my heart, what matter to me that you have been quarrelsome in your

cups, and have slain many, and have given your love here and there? It

was because of the whiteness of your flesh and the mastery in your hands

that I gave you my love, when all life came to me in your coming.’ And

then in a low voice that none may overhear--‘Alas! I am greatly afraid

that the more they cry against you the more I love you.’

* * * * *

There are two kinds of poetry, and they are commingled in all the

greatest works. When the tide of life sinks low there are pictures, as

in the _Ode on a Grecian Urn_ and in Virgil at the plucking of the

Golden Bough. The pictures make us sorrowful. We share the poet’s

separation from what he describes. It is life in the mirror, and our

desire for it is as the desire of the lost souls for God; but when

Lucifer stands among his friends, when Villon sings his dead ladies to

so gallant a rhythm, when Timon makes his epitaph, we feel no sorrow,

for life herself has made one of her eternal gestures, has called up

into our hearts her energy that is eternal delight. In Ireland, where

the tide of life is rising, we turn, not to picture-making, but to the

imagination of personality--to drama, gesture.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE PLAY, THE PLAYER, AND THE SCENE

I have been asked to put into this year’s _Samhain_ Miss Horniman’s

letter offering us the use of the Abbey Theatre. I have done this, but

as Miss Horniman begins her letter by stating that she has made her

offer out of ‘great sympathy with the Irish National Theatre Company as

publicly explained by Mr. Yeats on various occasions,’ she has asked me

to go more into detail as to my own plans and hopes than I have done

before. I think they are the plans and hopes of my fellow-dramatists,

for we are all of one movement, and have influenced one another, and

have in us the spirit of our time. I discussed them all very shortly in

last _Samhain_. And I know that it was that _Samhain_, and a certain

speech I made in front of the curtain, that made Miss Horniman entrust

us with her generous gift. But last _Samhain_ is practically out of

print, and my speech has gone even out of my own memory. I will repeat,

therefore, much that I have said already, but adding a good deal to it.

_First._ Our plays must be literature or written in the spirit of

literature. The modern theatre has died away to what it is because the

writers have thought of their audiences instead of their subject. An old

writer saw his hero, if it was a play of character, or some dominant

passion, if it was a play of passion, like Phèdre or Andromaque, moving

before him, living with a life he did not endeavour to control. The

persons acted upon one another as they were bound by their natures to

act, and the play was dramatic, not because he had sought out dramatic

situations for their own sake, but because will broke itself upon will

and passion upon passion. Then the imagination began to cool, the writer

began to be less alive, to seek external aids, remembered situations,

tricks of the theatre, that had proved themselves again and again. His

persons no longer will have a particular character, but he knows that he

can rely upon the incidents, and he feels himself fortunate when there

is nothing in his play that has not succeeded a thousand times before

the curtain has risen. Perhaps he has even read a certain guide-book to

the stage published in France, and called _The Thirty-six Situations of

Drama_. The costumes will be magnificent, the actresses will be

beautiful, the Castle in Spain will be painted by an artist upon the

spot. We will come from his play excited if we are foolish, or can

condescend to the folly of others, but knowing nothing new about

ourselves, and seeing life with no new eyes and hearing it with no new

ears. The whole movement of theatrical reform in our day has been a

struggle to get rid of this kind of play, and the sincere play, the

logical play, that we would have in its place, will always seem, when we

hear it for the first time, undramatic, unexciting. It has to stir the

heart in a long-disused way, it has to awaken the intellect to a

pleasure that ennobles and wearies. I was at the first performance of an

Ibsen play given in England. It was _The Doll’s House_, and at the fall

of the curtain I heard an old dramatic critic say, ‘It is but a series

of conversations terminated by an accident.’ So far, we here in Dublin

mean the same thing as do Mr. Max Beerbohm, Mr. Walkley, and Mr. Archer,

who are seeking to restore sincerity to the English stage, but I am not

certain that we mean the same thing all through. The utmost sincerity,

the most unbroken logic, give me, at any rate, but an imperfect pleasure

if there is not a vivid and beautiful language. Ibsen has sincerity and

logic beyond any writer of our time, and we are all seeking to learn

them at his hands; but is he not a good deal less than the greatest of

all times, because he lacks beautiful and vivid language? ‘Well, well,

give me time and you shall hear all about it. If only I had Peter here

now,’ is very like life, is entirely in its place where it comes, and

when it is united to other sentences exactly like itself, one is moved,

one knows not how, to pity and terror, and yet not moved as if the words

themselves could sing and shine. Mr. Max Beerbohm wrote once that a play

cannot have style because the people must talk as they talk in daily

life. He was thinking, it is obvious, of a play made out of that

typically modern life where there is no longer vivid speech. Blake says

that a work of art must be minutely articulated by God or man, and man

has too little help from that occasional collaborateur when he writes of

people whose language has become abstract and dead. Falstaff gives one

the sensation of reality, and when one remembers the abundant vocabulary

of a time when all but everything present to the mind was present to the

senses, one imagines that his words were but little magnified from the

words of such a man in real life. Language was still alive then, alive

as it is in Gaelic to-day, as it is in English-speaking Ireland where

the Schoolmaster or the newspaper has not corrupted it. I know that we

are at the mere beginning, laboriously learning our craft, trying our

hands in little plays for the most part, that we may not venture too

boldly in our ignorance; but I never hear the vivid, picturesque,

ever-varied language of Mr. Synge’s persons without feeling that the

great collaborateur has his finger in our business. May it not be that

the only realistic play that will live as Shakespeare has lived, as

Calderon has lived, as the Greeks have lived, will arise out of the

common life, where language is as much alive as if it were new come out

of Eden? After all, is not the greatest play not the play that gives the

sensation of an external reality but the play in which there is the

greatest abundance of life itself, of the reality that is in our minds?

Is it possible to make a work of art, which needs every subtlety of

expression if it is to reveal what hides itself continually, out of a

dying, or at any rate a very ailing, language? and all language but that

of the poets and of the poor is already bedridden. We have, indeed,

persiflage, the only speech of educated men that expresses a deliberate

enjoyment of words: but persiflage is not a true language. It is

impersonal; it is not in the midst but on the edge of life; it covers

more character than it discovers: and yet, such as it is, all our

comedies are made out of it.

What the ever-moving, delicately moulded flesh is to human beauty, vivid

musical words are to passion. Somebody has said that every nation begins

with poetry and ends with algebra, and passion has always refused to

express itself in algebraical terms.

Have we not been in error in demanding from our playwrights personages

who do not transcend our common actions any more than our common speech?

If we are in the right, all antiquity has been in error. The scholars of

a few generations ago were fond of deciding that certain persons were

unworthy of the dignity of art. They had, it may be, an over-abounding

preference for kings and queens, but we are, it may be, very stupid in

thinking that the average man is a fit subject at all for the finest

art. Art delights in the exception, for it delights in the soul

expressing itself according to its own laws and arranging the world

about it in its own pattern, as sand strewn upon a drum will change

itself into different patterns, according to the notes of music that are

sung or played to it. But the average man is average because he has not

attained to freedom. Habit, routine, fear of public opinion, fear of

punishment here or hereafter, a myriad of things that are ‘something

other than human life,’ something less than flame, work their will upon

his soul and trundle his body here and there. At the first performance

of _Ghosts_ I could not escape from an illusion unaccountable to me at

the time. All the characters seemed to be less than life-size; the

stage, though it was but the little Royalty stage, seemed larger than I

had ever seen it. Little whimpering puppets moved here and there in the

middle of that great abyss. Why did they not speak out with louder

voices or move with freer gestures? What was it that weighed upon their

souls perpetually? Certainly they were all in prison, and yet there was

no prison. In India there are villages so obedient that all the jailer

has to do is to draw a circle upon the ground with his staff, and to

tell his thief to stand there so many hours; but what law had these

people broken that they had to wander round that narrow circle all their

lives? May not such art, terrible, satirical, inhuman, be the medicine

of great cities, where nobody is ever alone with his own strength? Nor

is Maeterlinck very different, for his persons ‘enquire after Jerusalem

in the regions of the grave, with weak voices almost inarticulate,

wearying repose.’ Is it the mob that has robbed those angelic persons of

the energy of their souls? Will not our next art be rather of the

country, of great open spaces, of the soul rejoicing in itself? Will not

the generations to come begin again to have an over-abounding faith in

kings and queens, in masterful spirits, whatever names we call them by?

I had Molière with me on my way to America, and as I read I seemed to be

at home in Ireland listening to that conversation of the people which is

so full of riches because so full of leisure, or to those old stories of

the folk which were made by men who believed so much in the soul, and so

little in anything else, that they were never entirely certain that the

earth was solid under the foot-sole. What is there left for us, that

have seen the newly discovered stability of things changed from an

enthusiasm to a weariness, but to labour with a high heart, though it

may be with weak hands, to rediscover an art of the theatre that shall

be joyful, fantastic, extravagant, whimsical, beautiful, resonant, and

altogether reckless? The arts are at their greatest when they seek for a

life growing always more scornful of everything that is not itself and

passing into its own fullness, as it were, ever more completely as all

that is created out of the passing mode of society slips from it; and

attaining that fullness, perfectly it may be--and from this is tragic

joy and the perfectness of tragedy--when the world itself has slipped

away in death. We, who are believers, cannot see reality anywhere but in

the soul itself, and seeing it there we cannot do other than rejoice in

every energy, whether of gesture, or of action, or of speech, coming out

of the personality, the soul’s image, even though the very laws of

nature seem as unimportant in comparison as did the laws of Rome to

Coriolanus when his pride was upon him. Has not the long decline of the

arts been but the shadow of declining faith in an unseen reality?

If the sun and moon would doubt,

They’d immediately go out.

* * * * *

_Second._ If we are to make a drama of energy, of extravagance, of

phantasy, of musical and noble speech, we shall need an appropriate

stage-management. Up to a generation or two ago, and to our own

generation, here and there, lingered a method of acting and of

stage-management, which had come down, losing much of its beauty and

meaning on the way, from the days of Shakespeare. Long after England,

under the influence of Garrick, began the movement towards Naturalism,

this school had a great popularity in Ireland, where it was established

at the Restoration by an actor who probably remembered the Shakespearean

players. France has inherited from Racine and from Molière 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 our 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 no

man should, 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 we 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 can we 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 Æschylean 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 we 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. We should be content to suggest a scene upon a canvas, whose

vertical flatness we accept and use, 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 we remember 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, we may 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. We 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 Theater 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

preoccupation 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 rediscovered the

old heroic literature of Ireland, and she has rediscovered the

imagination of the folk. My own preoccupation 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 over-praise 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 judgement. 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

judgement 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 us 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 noble characters into his

books; and when Chaucer encounters Eros 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 mediæval 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, a

mind that delights in strong sensations whether of beauty or of

ugliness, in bare facts, and is quite without sentimentality. The

sentimental mind is found among the middle classes, 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 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 that of

the conventional idealism writers like Kickham and Griffin substitute

for the ever-varied life of the cottages, and of 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 characterisation, 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 commonplace mind. The audience could give them its sympathy without

the labour that comes from awakening knowledge. If the dramatist had put

into his play whatever man or woman of his acquaintance seemed to come

closest to perfection, he would have had to make it a study, among other

things, of the little petty faults and perverted desires that arise 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 nan Gaedheal_ 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 mediæval races did not think

so. Jusserand describes the French conquerors of mediæval 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 for a century 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 mediæval Europe, 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

half-educated 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 meaningless 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 antagonist 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 on 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; a man must calculate the effect

of his words before he writes them, whom 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 heads for very

long out of the flood of opinion. Mr. Bernard Shaw, the one brilliant

writer of comedy in England to-day, makes his 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. If we

understand our own minds, and the things that are striving to utter

themselves through our minds, we move others, not because we have

understood or thought about those others, 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 we think

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 St. Thomas à 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.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

1906

LITERATURE AND THE LIVING VOICE[11]

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

_naïveté_--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 Provençal 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 king’s 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’Bryne, 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 a man takes a book into the corner, he

surrenders so much life for his knowledge, so much, I mean, of that

normal activity that gives him life and strength; he lays away his own

handiwork and turns from his friend, and if the book is good he 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 his own 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 we arrayed ourselves before the looking-glass; or it came

in at the ears in a song as we 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[12] 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 we consider that it has

need of a renewing of life, we go backward till we light upon a time

when it was nearer to human life and instinct, before it had gathered

about it so many mechanical specialisations and traditions. We examine

that earlier condition and think out its principles of life that we 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 the importance of 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

shaping imaginations before the footlights as behind, that 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 Eschenbach 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 Parzival, he will tell the

listening ladies that he sings of happy love out of his own unhappy

love, or he will interrupt the story of a siege and its hardships to

remember his own house, where there is not enough food for the mice. He

knows how to keep himself interesting that his words may have weight--so

many lines of narrative, and then a phrase about himself and his

emotions. The reciter cannot be a player, for that is a different art;

but he must be a messenger, and he should be as interesting, as

exciting, as are all that carry great news. He comes from far off, and

he speaks of far-off things with his own peculiar animation, and instead

of lessening the ideal and beautiful elements of speech he may, if he

has a mind to, increase them. He may speak to actual notes as a singer

does if they are so simple that he never loses the speaking-voice, and

if the poem is long he must do so, or his own voice will become weary

and formless. His art is nearer to pattern than that of the player. It

is always allusion, never illusion; for what he tells of, no matter how

impassioned he may become, is always distant, and for this reason he may

permit himself every kind of nobleness. In a short poem he may interrupt

the narrative with a burden, which the audience will soon learn to sing,

and this burden, because it is repeated and need not tell a story to a

first hearing, can have a more elaborate musical notation, can go nearer

to ordinary song. Gradually other devices will occur to him--effects of

loudness and softness, of increasing and decreasing speed, certain

rhythmic movements of his body, a score of forgotten things, for the art

of speech is lost, and when we begin at it every day is a discovery. The

reciter must be made exciting and wonderful in himself, apart from what

he has to tell, and that is more difficult than it was in the middle

ages. We are not mysterious to one another; we can come from far off and

yet be no better than our neighbours. We are no longer like those

Egyptian birds that flew out of Arabia, their claws full of spices; nor

can we, like an ancient or mediæval poet, throw into our verses the

emotions and events of our lives, or even dramatise, as they could, the

life of the minstrel into whose mouth we are to put our words. I can

think of nothing better than to borrow from the tellers of old tales,

who will often pretend to have been at the wedding of the princess or

afterwards ‘when they were throwing out children by the basketful,’ and

to give the story-teller definite fictitious personality and find for

him an appropriate costume. Many costumes and persons come into my

imagination. I imagine an old countryman upon the stage of the theatre

or in some little country court-house where a Gaelic society is meeting,

and I can hear him say that he is Raftery or a brother, and that he has

tramped through France and Spain and the whole world. He has seen

everything, and he has all country love-tales at his finger-tips. I can

imagine, too--and now the story-teller is more serious and more naked of

country circumstance--a jester with black cockscomb and black clothes.

He has been in the faery hills; perhaps he is the terrible

_Amadan-na-Breena_ himself; or he has been so long in the world that he

can tell of ancient battles. It is not as good as what we have lost, but

we cannot hope to see in our time, except by some rare accident, the

minstrel who differs from his audience in nothing but the exaltation of

his mood, and who is yet as exciting and as romantic in their eyes as

were Raftery and Wolfram to their people.

It is perhaps nearly impossible to make recitation a living thing, for

there is no existing taste we can appeal to; but it should not be hard

here in Ireland to interest people in songs that are made for the word’s

sake and not for the music, or for that only in a secondary degree. They

are interested in such songs already, only the songs have little

subtilty of thought and of language. One does not find in them that

richness of emotion which but seems modern because it has been brought

so very lately out of the cellar. At their best they are the songs of

children and of country people, eternally young for all their centuries,

and yet not even in old days, as one thinks, a vintage for kings’

houses. We require a method of setting to music that will make it

possible to sing or to speak to notes a poem like Rossetti’s translation

of _The Ballad of Dead Ladies_ in such a fashion that no word shall have

an intonation or accentuation it could not have in passionate speech. It

must be set for the speaking-voice, like the songs that sailors make up

or remember, and a man at the far end of the room must be able to take

it down on a first hearing. An English musical paper said the other day,

in commenting on something I had written, ‘Owing to musical necessities,

vowels must be lengthened in singing to an extent which in speech would

be ludicrous if not absolutely impossible.’ I have but one art, that of

speech, and my feeling for music dissociated from speech is very slight,

and listening as I do to the words with the better part of my attention,

there is no modern song sung in the modern way that is not to my taste

‘ludicrous’ and ‘impossible.’ I hear with older ears than the musician,

and the songs of country people and of sailors delight me. I wonder why

the musician is not content to set to music some arrangement of

meaningless liquid vowels, and thereby to make his song like that of the

birds; but I do not judge his art for any purpose but my own.[13] It is

worthless for my purpose certainly, and it is one of the causes that are

bringing about in modern countries a degradation of language. I have to

find men with more music than I have, who will develop to a finer

subtilty the singing of the cottage and the forecastle, and develop it

more on the side of speech than that of music, until it has become

intellectual and nervous enough to be the vehicle of a Shelley or a

Keats. For some purposes it will be necessary to divine the lineaments

of a still older art, and re-create the regulated declamations that died

out when music fell into its earliest elaborations. Miss Farr has

divined enough of this older art, of which no fragment has come down to

us--for even the music of _Aucassin and Nicolette_, with its definite

tune, its recurring pattern of sound, is something more than

declamation--to make the chorus of _Hippolytus_ and of the _Trojan

Women_, at the Court Theatre or the Lyric, intelligible speech, even

when several voices spoke together. She used very often definite

melodies of a very simple kind, but always when the thought became

intricate and the measure grave and slow, fell back upon declamation

regulated by notes. Her experiments have included almost every kind of

verse, and every possible elaboration of sound compatible with the

supremacy of the words. I do not think Homer is ever so moving as when

she recites him to a little tune played on a stringed instrument not

very unlike a lyre. She began at my suggestion with songs in plays, for

it was clearly an absurd thing that words necessary to one’s

understanding of the action, either because they explained some

character, or because they carried some emotion to its highest

intensity, should be less intelligible than the bustling and ruder words

of the dialogue. We have tried our art, since we first tried it in a

theatre, upon many kinds of audiences, and have found that ordinary men

and women take pleasure in it and sometimes say that they never

understood poetry before. It is, however, more difficult to move

those--fortunately for our purpose but a few--whose ears are accustomed

to the abstract emotion and elaboration of notes in modern music.

VI

If we accomplish this great work, if we make it possible again for the

poet to express himself, not merely through words, but through the

voices of singers, of minstrels, of players, we shall certainly have

changed the substance and the manner of our poetry. Every one who has to

interest his audience through the voice discovers that his success

depends upon the clear, simple and varied structure of his thought. I

have written a good many plays in verse and prose, and almost all those

plays I have rewritten after performance, sometimes again and again, and

every re-writing that has succeeded upon the stage has been an addition

to the masculine element, an increase of strength in the bony structure.

Modern literature, above all poetical literature, is monotonous in its

structure and effeminate in its continual insistence upon certain

moments of strained lyricism. William Morris, who did more than any

modern to recover mediæval art, did not in his _Earthly Paradise_ copy

from Chaucer, from whom he copied so much that was _naïve_ and

beautiful, what seems to me essential in Chaucer’s art. He thought of

himself as writing for the reader, who could return to him again and

again when the chosen mood had come, and became monotonous, melancholy,

too continually lyrical in his understanding of emotion and of life. Had

he accustomed himself to read out his poems upon those Sunday evenings

that he gave to Socialist speeches, and to gather an audience of average

men, precisely such an audience as I have often seen in his house, he

would have been forced to Chaucer’s variety, to his delight in the

height and depth, and would have found expression for that humorous,

many-sided nature of his. I owe to him many truths, but I would add to

those truths the certainty that all the old writers, the masculine

writers of the world, wrote to be spoken or to be sung, and in a later

age to be read aloud, for hearers who had to understand swiftly or not

at all, and who gave up nothing of life to listen, but sat, the day’s

work over, friend by friend, lover by lover.

-----

Footnote 11:

This essay was written immediately after the opening of the Abbey

Theatre, though it was not printed, through an accident, until the art

of the Abbey had become an art of peasant comedy. It tells of things

we have never had the time to begin. We still dream of them.--W. B.

Y., March 1908.

Footnote 12:

No, it was some other knight of the table--W. B. Y., 1923.

Footnote 13:

I have heard musicians excuse themselves by claiming that they put the

words there for the sake of the singer; but if that be so, why should

not the singer sing something she may wish to have by rote? Nobody

will hear the words; and the local time-table, or, so much suet and so

many raisins, and so much spice and so much sugar, and whether it is

to be put in a quick or a slow oven, would run very nicely with a

little management.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE ARROW: 1906[14]

THE SEASON’S WORK

A character of the winter’s work will be the large number of romantic,

poetic and historical plays--that is to say, of plays which require a

convention for their performance; their speech, whether it be verse or

prose, being so heightened as to transcend that of any form of real

life. Our first two years of the Abbey Theatre have been expended mostly

on the perfecting of the Company in peasant comedy and tragedy. Every

national dramatic movement or theatre in countries like Bohemia and

Hungary, as in Elizabethan England, has arisen out of a study of the

common people, who preserve national characteristics more than any other

class, and out of an imaginative re-creation of national history or

legend. The life of the drawing-room, the life represented in most plays

of the ordinary theatre of to-day, differs but little all over the

world, and has as little to do with the national spirit as the

architecture of, let us say, St. Stephen’s Green, or Queen’s Gate, or of

the Boulevards about the Arc de Triomphe.

As we wish our work to be full of the life of this country, our

stage-manager has almost always to train our actors from the beginning,

always so in the case of peasant plays, and this makes the building up

of a theatre like ours the work of years. We are now fairly satisfied

with the representation of peasant life, and we can afford to give the

greater part of our attention to other expressions of our art and of our

life. The romantic work and poetical work once reasonably good, we can,

if but the dramatist arrive, take up the life of our drawing-rooms, and

see if there is something characteristic there, something which our

nationality may enable us to express better than others, and so create

plays of that life and means to play them as truthfully as a play of

Hauptmann’s or of Ibsen’s upon the German or Scandinavian stage. I am

not myself interested in this kind of work, and do not believe it to be

as important as contemporary critics think it is, but a theatre such as

we project should give a reasonably complete expression to the

imaginative interests of its country. In any case it was easier, and

therefore wiser, to begin where our art is most unlike that of others,

with the representation of country life.

It is possible to speak the universal truths of human nature whether the

speakers be peasants or wealthy men, for--

Love doth sing

As sweetly in a beggar as a king.

So far as we have any model before us it is the national and municipal

theatres in various Continental towns, and, like the best of these, we

must have in our repertory masterpieces from every great school of

dramatic literature, and play them confidently, even though the public

be slow to like that old stern art, and perhaps a little proudly,

remembering that no other English-speaking theatre can be so catholic.

Certainly the weathercocks of our imagination will not turn those

painted eyes of theirs too long to the quarter of the Scandinavian

winds. If the wind blow long from the Mediterranean, the paint may peel

before we pray for a change in the weather.

-----

Footnote 14:

_The Arrow_, a briefer chronicle than _Samhain_, was distributed with

the programme for a few months.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE CONTROVERSY OVER _THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD_

We have claimed for our writers the freedom to find in their own land

every expression of good and evil necessary to their art, for Irish life

contains, like all vigorous life, the seeds of all good and evil, and a

writer must be free here as elsewhere to watch where weed or flower

ripens. No one who knows the work of our Theatre as a whole can say we

have neglected the flower; but the moment a writer is forbidden to take

pleasure in the weed, his art loses energy and abundance. In the great

days of English dramatic art the greatest English writer of comedy was

free to create _The Alchemist_ and _Volpone_, but a demand born of

Puritan conviction and shopkeeping timidity and insincerity, for what

many second-rate intellects thought to be noble and elevating events and

characters, had already at the outset of the eighteenth century ended

the English drama as a complete and serious art. Sheridan and Goldsmith,

when they restored comedy after an epoch of sentimentalities, had to

apologise for their satiric genius by scenes of conventional love-making

and sentimental domesticity that have set them outside the company of

all, whether their genius be great or little, whose work is pure and

whole. The quarrel of our Theatre to-day is the quarrel of the Theatre

in many lands; for the old Puritanism, the old dislike of power and

reality have not changed, even when they are called by some Gaelic name.

[On the second performance of _The Playboy of the Western World_,

about forty men who sat in the middle of the pit succeeded in making

the play entirely inaudible. Some of them brought tin-trumpets, and

the noise began immediately on the rise of the curtain. For days

articles in the Press called for the withdrawal of the play, but we

played for the seven nights we had announced; and before the week’s

end opinion had turned in our favour. There were, however, nightly

disturbances and a good deal of rioting in the surrounding streets.

On the last night of the play there were, I believe, five hundred

police keeping order in the theatre and in its neighbourhood. Some

days later our enemies, though beaten so far as the play was

concerned, crowded into the cheaper seats for a debate on the

freedom of the stage. They were very excited, and kept up the

discussion until near twelve. The last paragraphs of my opening

statement ran as follows.]

_From Mr. Yeats’ opening Speech in the Debate on February 4, 1907, at

the Abbey Theatre._

The struggle of the last week has been long a necessity; various

paragraphs in newspapers describing Irish attacks on Theatres had made

many worthy young men come to think that the silencing of a stage at

their own pleasure, even if hundreds desired that it should not be

silenced, might win them a little fame, and, perhaps, serve their

country. Some of these attacks have been made on plays which are in

themselves indefensible, vulgar and old-fashioned farces and comedies.

But the attack, being an annihilation of civil rights, was never

anything but an increase of Irish disorder. The last I heard of was in

Liverpool, and there a stage was rushed, and a priest, who had set a

play upon it, withdrew his play and apologised to the audience. We have

not such pliant bones, and did not learn in the houses that bred us a so

suppliant knee. But behind the excitement of example there is a more

fundamental movement of opinion. Some seven or eight years ago the

National movement was democratised and passed from the hands of a few

leaders into those of large numbers of young men organised in clubs and

societies. These young men made the mistake of the newly-enfranchised

everywhere; they fought for causes worthy in themselves with the

unworthy instruments of tyranny and violence. Comic songs of a certain

kind were to be driven from the stage, every one was to wear Irish

cloth, every one was to learn Irish, every one was to hold certain

opinions, and these ends were sought by personal attacks, by virulent

caricature and violent derision. It needs eloquence to persuade and

knowledge to expound; but the coarser means come ready to every man’s

hand, as ready as a stone or a stick, and where these coarse means are

all, there is nothing but mob, and the commonest idea most prospers and

is most sought for.

Gentlemen of the little clubs and societies, do not mistake the meaning

of our victory; it means something for us, but more for you. When the

curtain of _The Playboy_ fell on Saturday night in the midst of what

_The Sunday Independent_--no friendly witness--described as ‘thunders of

applause,’ I am confident that I saw the rise in this country of a new

thought, a new opinion, that we had long needed. It was not all approval

of Mr. Synge’s play that sent the receipts of the Abbey Theatre this

last week to twice the height they had ever touched before. The

generation of young men and girls who are now leaving schools or

colleges are weary of the tyranny of clubs and leagues. They wish again

for individual sincerity, the eternal quest of truth, all that has been

given up for so long that all might crouch upon the one roost and quack

or cry in the one flock. We are beginning once again to ask what a man

is, and to be content to wait a little before we go on to that further

question: What is a good Irishman? There are some who have not yet their

degrees that will say to friend or neighbour, ‘You have voted with the

English, and that is bad’; or ‘You have sent away your Irish servants,

or thrown away your Irish clothes, or blacked your face for your

singing. I despise what you have done, I keep you still my friend; but

if you are terrorised out of doing any of these things, evil things

though I know them to be, I will not have you for my friend any more.’

Manhood is all, and the root of manhood is courage and courtesy.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

1907

ON TAKING _THE PLAYBOY_ TO LONDON

The failure of the audience to understand this powerful and strange work

(_The Playboy of the Western World_) has been the one serious failure of

our movement, and it could not have happened but that the greater number

of those who came to shout down the play were no regular part of our

audience at all, but members of parties and societies whose main

interests are political. We have been denounced with even greater

violence than on the first production of the play for announcing that we

should carry it to London. We cannot see that an attack, which we

believe to have been founded on a misunderstanding of the nature of

literature, should prevent us from selecting, as our custom is, whatever

of our best comes within the compass of our players at the time, to show

in some English theatres. Nearly all strong and strange writing is

attacked on its appearance, and those who press it upon the world may

not cease from pressing it, for their justification is its ultimate

acceptance. Ireland is passing through a crisis in the life of the mind

greater than any she has known since the rise of the Young Ireland

party, and based upon a principle which sets many in opposition to the

habits of thought and feeling come down from that party, for the seasons

change, and need and occupation with them. Many are beginning to

recognise the right of the individual mind to see the world in its own

way, to cherish the thoughts which separate men from one another, and

that are the creators of distinguished life, instead of those thoughts

that had made one man like another if they could, and have but succeeded

in setting hysteria and insincerity in place of confidence and

self-possession. To the Young Ireland writers, who have still the ear of

Ireland, though not its distracted mind, truth was historical and

external and not a self-consistent personal vision, and it is but

according to ancient custom that the new truth should force its way amid

riot and great anger.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

A PEOPLE’S THEATRE[15]

A LETTER TO LADY GREGORY

I

MY DEAR LADY GREGORY--Of recent years you have done all that is anxious

and laborious in the supervision of the Abbey Theatre and left me free

to follow my own thoughts. It is therefore right that I address to you

this letter, wherein I shall explain, half for your ears, half for other

ears, certain thoughts that have made me believe that the Abbey Theatre

can never do all we had hoped. We set out to make a ‘People’s Theatre,’

and in that we have succeeded. But I did not know until very lately that

there are certain things, dear to both our hearts, which no ‘People’s

Theatre’ can accomplish.

II

All exploitation of the life of the wealthy, for the eye and the ear of

the poor and half poor, in plays, in popular novels, in musical comedy,

in fashion papers, at the cinema, in _Daily Mirror_ photographs, is a

travesty of the life of the rich; and if it were not would all but

justify some red terror: and it impoverishes and vulgarises the

imagination, seeming to hold up for envy and to commend a life where all

is display and hurry, passion without emotion, emotion without

intellect, and where there is nothing stern and solitary. The plays and

novels are the least mischievous, for they still have the old-fashioned

romanticism--their threepenny bit, if worn, is silver yet--but they are

without intensity and intellect and cannot convey the charm of either as

it may exist in those they would represent. All this exploitation is a

rankness that has grown up recently among us and has come out of an

historical necessity that has made the furniture and the clothes and the

brains, of all but the leisured and the lettered, copies and travesties.

Shakespeare set upon the stage Kings and Queens, great historical or

legendary persons about whom all was reality, except the circumstance of

their lives which remain vague and summary because--his mind and the

mind of his audience being interested in emotion and intellect at their

moment of union and at their greatest intensity--he could only write his

best when he wrote of those who controlled the mechanism of life. Had

they been controlled by it, intellect and emotion entangled by intricacy

and detail could never have mounted to that union which, as Swedenborg

said of the marriage of the angels, is a conflagration of the whole

being. But since great crowds, changed by popular education with its eye

always on some objective task, have begun to find reality in mechanism

alone,[16] our popular commercial art has substituted for Lear and

Cordelia the real millionaire and the real peeress, and seeks to make

them charming by insisting perpetually that they have all that wealth

can buy, or rather all that average men and women would buy if they had

wealth. Shakespeare’s groundlings watched the stage in terrified

sympathy, while the British working man looks perhaps at the photographs

of these lords and ladies, whom he admires beyond measure, with the

pleasant feeling that they will all be robbed and murdered before he

dies.

III

Then, too, that turning into ridicule of peasant and citizen and all

lesser men could but increase our delight when the great personified

spiritual power, but seems unnatural when the great are but the rich.

During an illness lately I read two popular novels which I had borrowed

from the servants. They were good stories and half consoled me for the

sleep I could not get, but I was a long time before I saw clearly why

everybody with less than a thousand a year was a theme of comedy and

everybody with less than five hundred a theme of farce. Even Rosencrantz

and Guildenstern, courtiers and doubtless great men in their world,

could be but foils for Hamlet because Shakespeare had nothing to do with

objective truth, but we who have nothing to do with anything else, in so

far as we are of our epoch, must not allow a greater style to corrupt

us.

An artisan or a small shopkeeper feels, I think, when he sees upon our

Abbey stage men of his own trade, that they are represented as he

himself would represent them if he had the gift of expression. I do not

mean that he sees his own life expounded there without exaggeration, for

exaggeration is selection and the more passionate the art the more

marked is the selection, but he does not feel that he has strayed into

some other man’s seat. If it is comedy he will laugh at ridiculous

people, people in whose character there is some contortion, but their

station of life will not seem ridiculous. The best stories I have

listened to outside the Theatre have been told me by farmers or sailors

when I was a boy, one or two by fellow-travellers in railway carriages,

and most had some quality of romance, romance of a class and its

particular capacity for adventure; and our Theatre is a people’s theatre

in a sense which no mere educational theatre can be, because its plays

are to some extent a part of that popular imagination. It is very seldom

that a man or woman bred up among the propertied or professional classes

knows any class but his own, and that a class which is much the same all

over the world, and already written of by so many dramatists that it is

nearly impossible to see its dramatic situations with our own eyes, and

those dramatic situations are perhaps exhausted--as Nietzsche thought

the whole universe would be some day--and nothing left but to repeat the

same combinations over again.

When the Abbey Manager sends us a play for our opinion and it is my turn

to read it, if the handwriting of the MSS. or of the author’s

accompanying letter suggests a leisured life I start prejudiced. There

will be no fresh observation of character, I think, no sense of

dialogue, all will be literary second-hand, at best what Rossetti called

‘The soulless self-reflections of man’s skill.’ On the other hand, until

the Abbey plays began themselves to be copied, a handwriting learned in

a national school always made me expect dialogue, written out by some

man who had admired good dialogue before he had seen it upon paper. The

construction would probably be bad, for there the student of plays has

the better luck, but plays made impossible by rambling and redundance

have often contained some character or some dialogue that has stayed in

my memory for years. At first there was often vulgarity, and there still

is in those comic love scenes which we invariably reject, and there is

often propaganda with all its distortion, but these weigh light when set

against life seen as if newly created. At first, in face of your

mockery, I used to recommend some reading of Ibsen or Galsworthy, but no

one has benefited by that reading or by anything but the Abbey audience

and our own rejection of all gross propaganda and gross imitation of the

comic column in the newspapers. Our dramatists, and I am not speaking of

your work or Synge’s but of those to whom you and Synge and I gave an

opportunity, have been excellent just in so far as they have become all

eye and ear, their minds not smoking lamps, as at times they would have

wished, but clear mirrors.

Our players, too, have been vivid and exciting because they have copied

a life personally known to them, and of recent years, since our Manager

has had to select from the ordinary stage-struck young men and women who

have seen many players and perhaps no life but that of the professional

class, it has been much harder, though players have matured more

rapidly, to get the old, exciting, vivid playing. I have never recovered

the good opinion of one recent Manager because I urged him to choose

instead some young man or woman from some little shop who had never

given his or her thoughts to the theatre. Put all the names into a hat,

I think I said, and pick the first that comes. One of our early players

was exceedingly fine in the old woman in _Riders to the Sea_. ‘She has

never been to Aran, she knows nothing but Dublin, surely in that part

she is not objective, surely she creates from imagination,’ I thought;

but when I asked her she said, ‘I copied from my old grandmother.’

Certainly it is this objectivity, this making of all from sympathy, from

observation, never from passion, from lonely dreaming, that has made our

players, at their best, great comedians, for comedy is passionless.

We have been the first to create a true ‘People’s Theatre,’ and we have

succeeded because it is not an exploitation of local colour, or of a

limited form of drama possessing a temporary novelty, but the first

doing of something for which the world is ripe, something that will be

done all over the world and done more and more perfectly: the making

articulate of all the dumb classes each with its own knowledge of the

world, its own dignity, but all objective with the objectivity of the

office and the workshop, of the newspaper and the street, of mechanism

and of politics.

IV

Yet we did not set out to create this sort of theatre, and its success

has been to me a discouragement and a defeat. Dante in that passage in

the _Convito_ which is, I think, the first passage of poignant

autobiography in literary history, for there is nothing in St. Augustine

not formal and abstract beside it, in describing his poverty and his

exile counts as his chief misfortune that he has had to show himself to

all Italy and so publish his human frailties that men who honoured him

unknown honour him no more. Lacking means he had lacked seclusion, and

he explains that men such as he should have but few and intimate

friends. His study was unity of being, the subordination of all parts to

the whole as in a perfectly proportioned human body--his own definition

of beauty--and not, as with those I have described, the unity of things

in the world; and like all subjectives he shrank, because of what he

was, because of what others were, from contact with many men. Had he

written plays he would have written from his own thought and passion,

observing little and using little, if at all, the conversation of his

time--and whether he wrote in verse or in prose his style would have

been distant, musical, metaphorical, moulded by antiquity. We stand on

the margin between wilderness and wilderness, that which we observe

through our senses and that which we can experience only, and our art is

always the description of one or the other. If our art is mainly from

experience we have need of learned speech, of agreed symbols, because

all those things whose names renew experience have accompanied that

experience already many times. A personage in one of Turgenev’s novels

is reminded by the odour of, I think, heliotrope, of some sweetheart

that had worn it, and poetry is any flower that brings a memory of

emotion, while an unmemoried flower is prose, and a flower pressed and

named and numbered science; but our poetical heliotrope need bring to

mind no sweetheart of ours, for it suffices that it crowned the bride of

Paris, or Pelius’ bride. Neither poetry nor any subjective art can exist

but for those who do in some measure share its traditional knowledge, a

knowledge learned in leisure and contemplation. Even Burns, except in

those popular verses which are as lacking in tradition, as modern, as

topical, as Longfellow, was, as Henley said, not the founder but the

last of a dynasty.

Once such men could draw the crowd because the circumstance of life

changed slowly and there was little to disturb contemplation and so men

repeated old verses and old stories, and learned and simple had come to

share in common much allusion and symbol. Where the simple were ignorant

they were ready to learn and so became receptive, or perhaps even to

pretend knowledge like the clowns in the mediæval poem that describes

the arrival of Chaucer’s Pilgrims at Canterbury, who that they may seem

gentlemen pretend to know the legends in the stained-glass windows.

Shakespeare, more objective than Dante--for, alas, the world must

move--was still predominantly subjective, and he wrote during the latest

crisis of history that made possible a Theatre of his kind. There were

still among the common people many traditional songs and stories, while

court and university, which were much more important to him, had an

interest Chaucer never shared in great dramatic persons, in those men

and women of Plutarch, who made their death a ritual of passion; for

what is passion but the straining of man’s being against some obstacle

that obstructs its unity?

You and I and Synge, not understanding the clock, set out to bring again

the Theatre of Shakespeare or rather perhaps of Sophocles. I had told

you how at Young Ireland Societies and the like, young men when I was

twenty had read papers to one another about Irish legend and history,

and you yourself soon discovered the Gaelic League, then but a new weak

thing, and taught yourself Irish. At Spiddal or near it an innkeeper had

sung us Gaelic songs, all new village work that though not literature

had _naïveté_ and sincerity. The writers, caring nothing for cleverness,

had tried to express emotion, tragic or humorous, and great

masterpieces, _The Grief of a Girl’s Heart_, for instance, had been

written in the same speech and manner and were still sung. We know that

the songs of the Thames boatmen, to name but these, in the age of Queen

Elizabeth had the same relation to great masterpieces. These Gaelic

songs were as unlike as those to the songs of the Music Hall with their

clever ear-catching rhythm, the work of some mind as objective as that

of an inventor or of a newspaper reporter. We thought we could bring the

old folk-life to Dublin, patriotic feeling to aid us, and with the

folk-life all the life of the heart, understanding heart, according to

Dante’s definition, as the most interior being; but the modern world is

more powerful than any Propaganda or even than any special circumstance,

and our success has been that we have made a theatre of the head, and

persuaded Dublin playgoers to think about their own trade or profession

or class and their life within it, so long as the stage curtain is up,

in relation to Ireland as a whole. For certain hours of an evening they

have objective modern eyes.

V

The objective nature and the subjective are mixed in different

proportions as are the shadowed and the bright parts in the lunar

phases. In Dante there was little shadow, in Shakespeare a larger

portion, while you and Synge, it may be, resemble the moon when it has

just passed its third quarter, for you have constant humour--and humour

is of the shadowed part--much observation and a speech founded upon that

of real life. You and he will always hold our audience, but both have

used so constantly a measure of lunar light, have so elaborated style

and emotion, an individual way of seeing, that neither will ever, till a

classic and taught in school, find a perfect welcome.

The outcry against _The Playboy_ was an outcry against its style,

against its way of seeing; and when the audience called Synge

‘decadent’--a favourite reproach from the objective everywhere--it was

but troubled by the stench of its own burnt cakes. How could they that

dreaded solitude love that which solitude had made? And never have I

heard any, that laugh the loudest at your comedies, praise that musical

and delicate style that makes them always a fit accompaniment for verse

and sets them at times among the world’s great comedies. Indeed, the

louder they laugh the readier are they to rate them with the hundred

ephemeral farces they have laughed at and forgotten. Synge they have at

least hated. When you and Synge find such an uneasy footing, what shall

I do there who have never observed anything, or listened with an

attentive ear, but value all I have seen or heard because of the

emotions they call up or because of something they remind me of that

exists, as I believe, beyond the world? Oh, yes, I am listened to--am I

not a founder of the theatre?--and here and there scattered solitaries

delight in what I have made and return to hear it again; but some young

Corkman, all eyes and ears, whose first rambling play we have just

pulled together or half together, can do more than that. He will be

played by players who have spoken dialogue like his every night for

years, and sentences that it had been a bore to read will so delight the

whole house that to keep my hands from clapping I shall have to remind

myself that I gave my voice for the play’s production and must not

applaud my own judgement.

VI

I want to create for myself an unpopular theatre and an audience like a

secret society where admission is by favour and never to many. Perhaps I

shall never create it, for you and I and Synge have had to dig the stone

for our statue and I am aghast at the sight of a new quarry, and besides

I want so much--an audience of fifty, a room worthy of it (some great

dining-room or drawing-room), half-a-dozen young men and women who can

dance and speak verse or play drum and flute and zither, and all the

while, instead of a profession, I but offer them ‘an accomplishment.’

However, there are my _Four Plays for Dancers_ as a beginning, some

masks by Mr. Dulac, music by Mr. Dulac and by Mr. Rummell. In most towns

one can find fifty people for whom one need not build all on observation

and sympathy, because they read poetry for their pleasure and understand

the traditional language of passion. I desire a mysterious art, always

reminding and half-reminding those who understand it of dearly loved

things, doing its work by suggestion, not by direct statement, a

complexity of rhythm, colour, gesture, not space-pervading like the

intellect but a memory and a prophecy: a mode of drama Shelley and Keats

could have used without ceasing to be themselves, and for which even

Blake in the mood of _The Book of Thell_ might not have been too

obscure. Instead of advertisements in the press I need a hostess, and

even the most accomplished hostess must choose with more than usual

care, for I have noticed that city-living cultivated people, those whose

names would first occur to her, set great value on painting, which is a

form of property, and on music, which is a part of the organisation of

life, while the lovers of literature, those who read a book many times,

either are young men with little means or live far away from big towns.

What alarms me most is how a new art needing so elaborate a technique

can make its first experiments before those who, as Molière said of the

courtiers of his day, have seen so much. How shall our singers and

dancers be welcomed by those who have heard Chaliapin in all his parts

and who know all the dances of the Russians? Yet where can I find Mr.

Dulac and Mr. Rummell or any to match them, but in London[17] or in

Paris, and who but the leisured will welcome an elaborate art or pay for

its first experiments? In one thing the luck might be upon our side. A

man who loves verse and the visible arts has, in a work such as I

imagine, the advantage of the professional player. The professional

player becomes the amateur, the other has been preparing all his life,

and certainly I shall not soon forget the rehearsal of _The Hawk’s

Well_, when Mr. Ezra Pound, who had never acted on any stage, in the

absence of our chief player rehearsed for half an hour. Even the forms

of subjective acting that were natural to the professional stage have

ceased. Where all now is sympathy and observation no Irving can carry

himself with intellectual pride, nor any Salvini in half-animal

nobility, both wrapped in solitude.

I know that you consider Ireland alone our business, and in that we do

not differ, except that I care very little where a play of mine is first

played so that it find some natural audience and good players. My rooks

may sleep abroad in the fields for a while, but when the winter come

they will remember the way home to the rookery trees. Indeed, I have

Ireland especially in mind, for I want to make, or to help some man some

day to make, a feeling of exclusiveness, a bond among chosen spirits, a

mystery almost for leisured and lettered people. Ireland has suffered

more than England from democracy, for since the Wild Geese fled, who

might have grown to be leaders in manners and in taste, she has had but

political leaders. As a drawing is defined by its outline and taste by

its rejections, I too must reject and draw an outline about the thing I

seek; and say that I seek, not a theatre but the theatre’s anti-self, an

art that can appease all within us that becomes uneasy as the curtain

falls and the house breaks into applause.

VII

Meanwhile the Popular Theatre should grow always more objective; more

and more a reflection of the general mind; more and more a discovery of

the simple emotions that make all men kin, clearing itself the while of

sentimentality, the wreckage of an obsolete popular culture, seeking

always not to feel and to imagine but to understand and to see. Let

those who are all personality, who can only feel and imagine, leave it,

before their presence become a corruption and turn it from its honesty.

The rhetoric of d’Annunzio, the melodrama and spectacle of the later

Maeterlinck, are the insincerities of subjectives, who being very able

men have learned to hold an audience that is not their natural audience.

To be intelligible they are compelled to harden, to externalise and

deform. The popular play left to itself may not lack vicissitude and

development, for it may pass, though more slowly than the novel which

need not carry with it so great a crowd, from the physical objectivity

of Fielding and Defoe to the spiritual objectivity of Tolstoy and

Dostoievsky, for beyond the whole we reach by unbiassed intellect there

is another whole reached by resignation and the denial of self.

VIII

The two great energies of the world that in Shakespeare’s day penetrated

each other have fallen apart as speech and music fell apart at the

Renaissance, and that has brought each to greater freedom, and we have

to prepare a stage for the whole wealth of modern lyricism, for an art

that is close to pure music, for those energies that would free the arts

from imitation, that would ally acting to decoration and to the dance.

We are not yet conscious, for as yet we have no philosophy while the

opposite energy is conscious. All visible history, the discoveries of

science, the discussions of politics, are with it; but as I read the

world, the sudden changes, or rather the sudden revelation of future

changes, are not from visible history but from its anti-self. Blake says

somewhere in a Prophetic Book that things must complete themselves

before they pass away, and every new logical development of the

objective energy intensifies in an exact correspondence a counter

energy, or rather adds to an always deepening unanalysable longing. That

counter longing, having no visible past, can only become a conscious

energy suddenly, in those moments of revelation which are as a flash of

lightning. Are we approaching a supreme moment of self-consciousness,

the two halves of the soul separate and face to face? A certain friend

of mine has written upon this subject a couple of intricate poems called

‘The Faces of the Moon’ and ‘The Double Vision’ respectively, which are

my continual study, and I must refer the reader to these poems for the

necessary mathematical calculations. Were it not for that other gyre

turning inward in exact measure with the outward whirl of its fellow, we

would fall in a generation or so under some tyranny that would cease at

last to be a tyranny, so perfect our acquiescence.

Constrained, arraigned, baffled, bent and unbent

By these wire-jointed jaws and limbs of wood,

Themselves obedient,

Knowing not evil and good;

Obedient to some hidden magical breath.

They do not even feel, so abstract are they,

So dead beyond our death,

Triumph that we obey.

W. B. YEATS.

-----

Footnote 15:

I took the title from a book by Romain Rolland on some French

theatrical experiments. ‘A People’s Theatre’ is not quite the same

thing as ‘A Popular Theatre.’ The essay was published in _The Irish

Statesman_ in the autumn of 1919.--W. B. Y., 1923.

Footnote 16:

I have read somewhere statistics that showed how popular education has

coincided with the lessening of Shakespeare’s audience. In every chief

town before it began Shakespeare was constantly played.

Footnote 17:

I live in Dublin now, and indolence and hatred of travel will probably

compel me to make my experiment there after all.--W. B. Y., 1923.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE COUNTESS CATHLEEN

------------------------------------------------------------------------

‘The sorrowful are dumb for thee’

_Lament of Morion Shehone_

_for Miss Mary Bourke._

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TO

MAUD GONNE

------------------------------------------------------------------------

_PERSONS IN THE PLAY_

SHEMUS RUA, _a Peasant_.

MARY, _his Wife_.

TEIG, _his Son_.

ALEEL, _a Poet_.

THE COUNTESS CATHLEEN.

OONA, _her Foster Mother_.

Two Demons disguised as Merchants.

Peasants, Servants, Angelical Beings.

_The Scene is laid in Ireland and in old times._

------------------------------------------------------------------------

SCENE I

SCENE.--_A room with lighted fire, and a door into the open air,

through which one sees, perhaps, the trees of a wood, and these trees

should be painted in flat colour upon a gold or diapered sky. The

walls are of one colour. The scene should have the effect of missal

painting._ MARY, _a woman of forty years or so, is grinding a quern_.

MARY. What can have made the grey hen flutter so?

[TEIG, _a boy of fourteen, is coming in with turf, which he lays

beside the hearth_.

TEIG. They say that now the land is famine struck

The graves are walking.

MARY. There is something that the hen hears.

TEIG. And that is not the worst; at Tubber-vanach

A woman met a man with ears spread out,

And they moved up and down like a bat’s wing.

MARY. What can have kept your father all this while?

TEIG. Two nights ago, at Carrick-orus churchyard,

A herdsman met a man who had no mouth,

Nor eyes, nor ears! his face a wall of flesh:

He saw him plainly by the light of the moon.

MARY. Look out, and tell me if your father’s coming.

[TEIG _goes to door._

TEIG. Mother!

MARY. What is it?

TEIG. In the bush beyond,

There are two birds--if you can call them birds--

I could not see them rightly for the leaves.

But they’ve the shape and colour of horned owls

And I’m half certain they’ve a human face.

MARY. Mother of God, defend us!

TEIG. They’re looking at me.

What is the good of praying? father says.

God and the Mother of God have dropped asleep.

What do they care, he says, though the whole land

Squeal like a rabbit under a weasel’s tooth?

MARY. You’ll bring misfortune with your blasphemies

Upon your father, or yourself, or me.

Would God that he were home--ah, there he is.

[SHEMUS _comes in_.

What was it kept you in the wood? You know

I cannot get all sorts of accidents

Out of my mind till you are home again.

SHEMUS. I’m in no mood to listen to your clatter.

Although I tramped the woods for half a day,

I’ve taken nothing, for the very rats,

Badgers, and hedgehogs seem to have died of drought,

And there was scarce a wind in the parched leaves.

TEIG. Then you have brought no dinner.

SHEMUS. After that

I sat among the beggars at the cross-roads,

And held a hollow hand among the others.

MARY. What, did you beg?

SHEMUS. I had no chance to beg,

For when the beggars saw me they cried out

They would not have another share their alms,

And hunted me away with sticks and stones.

TEIG. You said that you would bring us food or money.

SHEMUS. What’s in the house?

TEIG. A bit of mouldy bread.

MARY. There’s flour enough to make another loaf.

TEIG. And when that’s gone?

MARY. There is the hen in the coop.

SHEMUS. My curse upon the beggars, my curse upon them!

TEIG. And the last penny gone.

SHEMUS. When the hen’s gone,

What can we do but live on sorrel and dock,

And dandelion, till our mouths are green?

MARY. God, that to this hour has found bit and sup,

Will cater for us still.

SHEMUS. His kitchen’s bare.

There were five doors that I looked through this day

And saw the dead and not a soul to wake them.

MARY. Maybe He’d have us die because He knows,

When the ear is stopped and when the eye is stopped,

That every wicked sight is hid from the eye,

And all fool talk from the ear.

SHEMUS. Who’s passing there?

And mocking us with music?

[_A stringed instrument without._

TEIG. A young man plays it,

There’s an old woman and a lady with him.

SHEMUS. What is the trouble of the poor to her?

Nothing at all or a harsh radishy sauce

For the day’s meat.

MARY. God’s pity on the rich.

Had we been through as many doors, and seen

The dishes standing on the polished wood

In the wax candle light, we’d be as hard,

And there’s the needle’s eye at the end of all.

SHEMUS. My curse upon the rich.

TEIG. They’re coming here.

SHEMUS. Then down upon that stool, down quick, I say,

And call up a whey face and a whining voice,

And let your head be bowed upon your knees.

MARY. Had I but time to put the place to rights.

CATHLEEN, OONA, _and_ ALEEL _enter_.

CATHLEEN. God save all here. There is a certain house,

An old grey castle with a kitchen garden,

A cider orchard and a plot for flowers,

Somewhere among these woods.

MARY. We know it, lady.

A place that’s set among impassable walls

As though world’s trouble could not find it out.

CATHLEEN. It may be that we are that trouble, for we--

Although we’ve wandered in the wood this hour--

Have lost it too, yet I should know my way,

For I lived all my childhood in that house.

MARY. Then you are Countess Cathleen?

CATHLEEN. And this woman,

Oona, my nurse, should have remembered it,

For we were happy for a long time there.

OONA. The paths are overgrown with thickets now,

Or else some change has come upon my sight.

CATHLEEN. And this young man, that should have known the woods--

Because we met him on their border but now,

Wandering and singing like a wave of the sea--

Is so wrapped up in dreams of terrors to come

That he can give no help.

MARY. You have still some way,

But I can put you on the trodden path

Your servants take when they are marketing.

But first sit down and rest yourself awhile,

For my old fathers served your fathers, lady,

Longer than books can tell--and it were strange

If you and yours should not be welcome here.

CATHLEEN. And it were stranger still were I ungrateful

For such kind welcome--but I must be gone,

For the night’s gathering in.

SHEMUS. It is a long while

Since I’ve set eyes on bread or on what buys it.

CATHLEEN. So you are starving even in this wood,

Where I had thought I would find nothing changed.

But that’s a dream, for the old worm o’ the world

Can eat its way into what place it pleases.

[_She gives money._

TEIG. Beautiful lady, give me something too;

I fell but now, being weak with hunger and thirst,

And lay upon the threshold like a log.

CATHLEEN. I gave for all and that was all I had.

Look, my purse is empty. I have passed

By starving men and women all this day,

And they have had the rest; but take the purse,

The silver clasps on’t may be worth a trifle.

And if you’ll come to-morrow to my house

You shall have twice the sum.

[ALEEL _begins to play_.

SHEMUS [_muttering_]. What, music, music!

CATHLEEN. Ah, do not blame the finger on the string;

The doctors bid me fly the unlucky times

And find distraction for my thoughts, or else

Pine to my grave.

SHEMUS. I have said nothing, lady.

Why should the like of us complain?

OONA. Have done.

Sorrows that she’s but read of in a book

Weigh on her mind as if they had been her own.

[OONA, MARY, _and_ CATHLEEN _go out_. ALEEL _looks defiantly at_

SHEMUS.

ALEEL [_singing_]. Were I but crazy for love’s sake

I know who’d measure out his length,

I know the heads that I should break,

For crazy men have double strength.

There! all’s out now to leave or take,

And who mocks music mocks at love;

And when I’m crazy for love’s sake

I’ll not go far to choose.

[_Snapping his fingers in_ SHEMUS’ _face_.]

Enough!

I know the heads that I should break.

[_He takes a step towards the door and then turns again._

Shut to the door before the night has fallen,

For who can say what walks, or in what shape.

Some devilish creature flies in the air; but now

Two grey-horned owls hooted above our heads.

[_He goes out, his singing dies away._ MARY _comes in_. SHEMUS

_has been counting the money_.

SHEMUS. So that fool’s gone.

TEIG. He’s seen the horned owls too.

There’s no good luck in owls, but it may be

That the ill luck’s to fall upon his head.

MARY. You never thanked her ladyship.

SHEMUS. Thank her,

For seven halfpence and a silver bit?

TEIG. But for this empty purse?

SHEMUS. What’s that for thanks,

Or what’s the double of it that she promised?

With bread and flesh and every sort of food

Up to a price no man has heard the like of

And rising every day.

MARY. We have all she had;

She emptied out the purse before our eyes.

SHEMUS [_to_ MARY, _who has gone to close the door_]. Leave that

door open.

MARY. When those that have read books,

And seen the seven wonders of the world,

Fear what’s above or what’s below the ground,

It’s time that poverty should bolt the door.

SHEMUS. I’ll have no bolts, for there is not a thing

That walks above the ground or under it

I had not rather welcome to this house

Than any more of mankind, rich or poor.

TEIG. So that they brought us money.

SHEMUS. I heard say

There’s something that appears like a white bird,

A pigeon or a seagull or the like,

But if you hit it with a stone or a stick

It clangs as though it had been made of brass,

And that if you dig down where it was scratching

You’ll find a crock of gold.

TEIG. But dream of gold

For three nights running, and there’s always gold.

SHEMUS. You might be starved before you’ve dug it out.

TEIG. But maybe if you called, something would come,

They have been seen of late.

MARY. Is it call devils?

Call devils from the wood, call them in here?

SHEMUS. So you’d stand up against me, and you’d say

Who or what I am to welcome here.

[_He hits her._

That is to show who’s master.

TEIG. Call them in.

MARY. God help us all!

SHEMUS. Pray, if you have a mind to.

It’s little that the sleepy ears above

Care for your words; but I’ll call what I please.

TEIG. There is many a one, they say, had money from them.

SHEMUS [_at door_]. Whatever you are that walk the woods at night,

So be it that you have not shouldered up

Out of a grave--for I’ll have nothing human--

And have free hands, a friendly trick of speech,

I welcome you. Come, sit beside the fire.

What matter if your head’s below your arms

Or you’ve a horse’s tail to whip your flank,

Feathers instead of hair, that’s all but nothing,

Come, share what bread and meat is in the house,

And stretch your heels and warm them in the ashes.

And after that, let’s share and share alike

And curse all men and women. Come in, come in.

What, is there no one there? [_Turning from door._]

And yet they say

They are as common as the grass, and ride

Even upon the book in the priest’s hand.

[TEIG _lifts one arm slowly and points toward the door and begins

moving backward_. SHEMUS _turns, he also sees something and

begins moving backward_. MARY _does the same. A man dressed as

an Eastern merchant comes in carrying a small carpet. He

unrolls it and sits cross-legged at one end of it. Another man

dressed in the same way follows, and sits at the other end.

This is done slowly and deliberately. When they are seated they

take money out of embroidered purses at their girdles and begin

arranging it on the carpet._

TEIG. You speak to them.

SHEMUS. No, you.

TEIG. ’Twas you that called them.

SHEMUS [_coming nearer_]. I’d make so bold, if you would pardon it,

To ask if there’s a thing you’d have of us.

Although we are but poor people, if there is,

Why, if there is----

FIRST MERCHANT. We’ve travelled a long road,

For we are merchants that must tramp the world,

And now we look for supper and a fire

And a safe corner to count money in.

SHEMUS. I thought you were ... but that’s no matter now--

There had been words between my wife and me

Because I said I would be master here,

And ask in what I pleased or who I pleased

And so ... but that is nothing to the point,

Because it’s certain that you are but merchants.

FIRST MERCHANT. We travel for the Master of all merchants.

SHEMUS. Yet if you were that I had thought but now

I’d welcome you no less. Be what you please

And you’ll have supper at the market rate,

That means that what was sold for but a penny

Is now worth fifty.

FIRST MERCHANT [_arranging money_]. Our Master bids us pay

So good a price, that all who deal with us

Shall eat, drink, and be merry.

SHEMUS [_to_ MARY]. Bestir yourself,

Go kill and draw the fowl, while Teig and I

Lay out the plates and make a better fire.

MARY. I will not cook for you.

SHEMUS. Not cook! not cook!

Do not be angry. She wants to pay me back

Because I struck her in that argument.

But she’ll get sense again. Since the dearth came

We rattle one on another as though we were

Knives thrown into a basket to be cleaned.

MARY. I will not cook for you, because I know

In what unlucky shape you sat but now

Outside this door.

TEIG. It’s this, your honours:

Because of some wild words my father said

She thinks you are not of those who cast a shadow.

SHEMUS. I said I’d make the devils of the wood

Welcome, if they’d a mind to eat and drink;

But it is certain that you are men like us.

FIRST MERCHANT. It’s strange that she should think we cast no

shadow,

For there is nothing on the ridge of the world

That’s more substantial than the merchants are

That buy and sell you.

MARY. If you are not demons,

And seeing what great wealth is spread out there,

Give food or money to the starving poor.

FIRST MERCHANT. If we knew how to find deserving poor

We’d do our share.

MARY. But seek them patiently.

FIRST MERCHANT. We know the evils of mere charity.

MARY. Those scruples may befit a common time.

I had thought there was a pushing to and fro,

At times like this, that overset the scale

And trampled measure down.

FIRST MERCHANT. But if already

We’d thought of a more prudent way than that?

SECOND MERCHANT. If each one brings a bit of merchandise,

We’ll give him such a price he never dreamt of.

MARY. Where shall the starving come at merchandise?

FIRST MERCHANT. We will ask nothing but what all men have.

MARY. Their swine and cattle, fields and implements

Are sold and gone.

FIRST MERCHANT. They have not sold all yet.

For there’s a vaporous thing--that may be nothing,

But that’s the buyer’s risk--a second self,

They call immortal for a story’s sake.

SHEMUS. They come to buy our souls?

TEIG. I’ll barter mine.

Why should we starve for what may be but nothing?

MARY. Teig and Shemus----

SHEMUS. What can be but nothing?

What has God poured out of His bag but famine?

Satan gives money.

TEIG. Yet no thunder stirs.

FIRST MERCHANT. There is a heap for each.

[SHEMUS _goes to take money_.

But no, not yet,

For there’s a work I have to set you to.

SHEMUS. So then you’re as deceitful as the rest,

And all that talk of buying what’s but a vapour

Is fancy bread. I might have known as much,

Because that’s how the trick-o’-the-loop man talks.

FIRST MERCHANT. That’s for the work, each has its separate price;

But neither price is paid till the work’s done.

TEIG. The same for me.

MARY. Oh, God, why are you still?

FIRST MERCHANT. You’ve but to cry aloud at every cross-road,

At every house door, that we buy men’s souls

And give so good a price that all may live

In mirth and comfort till the famine’s done,

Because we are Christian men.

SHEMUS. Come, let’s away.

TEIG. I shall keep running till I’ve earned the price.

SECOND MERCHANT [_who has risen and

gone towards fire_]. Stop; you must have proof behind the words.

So here’s your entertainment on the road.

[_He throws a bag of money on the ground._

Live as you please; our Master’s generous.

[TEIG _and_ SHEMUS _have stopped_. TEIG _takes the money. They go

out._

MARY. Destroyers of souls, God will destroy you quickly.

You shall at last dry like dry leaves and hang

Nailed like dead vermin to the doors of God.

SECOND MERCHANT. Curse to your fill, for saints will have their

dreams.

FIRST MERCHANT. Though we’re but vermin that our Master sent

To overrun the world, he at the end

Shall pull apart the pale ribs of the moon

And quench the stars in the ancestral night.

MARY. God is all powerful.

SECOND MERCHANT. Pray, you shall need Him.

You shall eat dock and grass, and dandelion,

Till that low threshold there becomes a wall,

And when your hands can scarcely drag your body

We shall be near you.

[MARY _faints_.

[_The_ FIRST MERCHANT _takes up the carpet, spreads it before the

fire and stands in front of it warming his hands_.

FIRST MERCHANT. Our faces go unscratched,

Wring the neck o’ that fowl, scatter the flour

And look if there is bread upon the shelves.

We’ll turn the fowl upon the spit and roast it,

And eat the supper we were bidden to,

Now that the house is quiet, praise our Master,

And stretch and warm our heels among the ashes.

END OF SCENE I

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