The little theatrical company I write my plays for had come to a west of
Ireland town, and was to give a performance in an old ball-room, for
there was no other room big enough. I went there from a neighbouring
country-house, and, arriving a little before the players, tried to open
a window. My hands were black with dirt in a moment, and presently a
pane of glass and a part of the window-frame came out in my hands.
Everything in this room was half in ruins, the rotten boards cracked
under my feet, and our new proscenium and the new boards of the platform
looked out of place, and yet the room was not really old, in spite of
the musicians' gallery over the stage. It had been built by some
romantic or philanthropic landlord some three or four generations ago,
and was a memory of we knew not what unfinished scheme.
From there I went to look for the players, and called for information on
a young priest, who had invited them and taken upon himself the finding
of an audience. He lived in a high house with other priests, and as I
went in I noticed with a whimsical pleasure a broken pane of glass in
the fanlight over the door, for he had once told me the story of an old
woman who a good many years ago quarrelled with the bishop, got drunk
and hurled a stone through the painted glass. He was a clever man who
read Meredith and Ibsen, but some of his books had been packed in the
fire-grate by his housekeeper, instead of the customary view of an
Italian lake or the coloured tissue-paper. The players, who had been
giving a performance in a neighbouring town, had not yet come, or were
unpacking their costumes and properties at the hotel he had recommended
them. We should have time, he said, to go through the half-ruined town
and to visit the convent schools and the cathedral, where, owing to his
influence, two of our young Irish sculptors had been set to carve an
altar and the heads of pillars. I had only heard of this work, and I
found its strangeness and simplicity--one of them had been Rodin's
pupil--could not make me forget the meretriciousness of the architecture
and the commercial commonplace of the inlaid pavement. The new movement
had seized on the cathedral midway in its growth, and the worst of the
old and the best of the new were side by side without any sign of
transition. The convent school was, as other like places have been to
me,--a long room in a workhouse hospital at Portumna, in particular,--a
delight to the imagination and the eyes. A new floor had been put into
some ecclesiastical building and the light from a great mullioned
window, cut off at the middle, fell aslant upon rows of clean and
seemingly happy children. The nuns, who show in their own convents,
where they can put what they like, a love of what is mean and pretty,
make beautiful rooms where the regulations compel them to do all with a
few colours and a few flowers. I think it was that day, but am not sure,
that I had lunch at a convent and told fairy stories to a couple of
nuns, and I hope it was not mere politeness that made them seem to have
a child's interest in such things.
A good many of our audience, when the curtain went up in the old
ball-room, were drunk, but all were attentive, for they had a great deal
of respect for my friend, and there were other priests there. Presently
the man at the door opposite to the stage strayed off somewhere and I
took his place, and when boys came up offering two or three pence and
asking to be let into the sixpenny seats, I let them join the melancholy
crowd. The play professed to tell of the heroic life of ancient Ireland,
but was really full of sedentary refinement and the spirituality of
cities. Every emotion was made as dainty-footed and dainty-fingered as
might be, and a love and pathos where passion had faded into sentiment,
emotions of pensive and harmless people, drove shadowy young men through
the shadows of death and battle. I watched it with growing rage. It was
not my own work, but I have sometimes watched my own work with a rage
made all the more salt in the mouth from being half despair. Why should
we make so much noise about ourselves and yet have nothing to say that
was not better said in that workhouse dormitory, where a few flowers and
a few coloured counterpanes and the coloured walls had made a severe and
gracious beauty? Presently the play was changed and our comedian began
to act a little farce, and when I saw him struggle to wake into laughter
an audience out of whom the life had run as if it were water, I
rejoiced, as I had over that broken window-pane. Here was something
secular, abounding, even a little vulgar, for he was gagging horribly,
condescending to his audience, though not without contempt.
We had supper in the priest's house, and a government official who had
come down from Dublin, partly out of interest in this attempt 'to
educate the people,' and partly because it was his holiday and it was
necessary to go somewhere, entertained us with little jokes. Somebody,
not, I think, a priest, talked of the spiritual destiny of our race and
praised the night's work, for the play was refined and the people really
very attentive, and he could not understand my discontent; but presently
he was silenced by the patter of jokes.
I had my breakfast by myself the next morning, for the players had got
up in the middle of the night and driven some ten miles to catch an
early train to Dublin, and were already on their way to their shops and
offices. I had brought the visitors' book of the hotel, to turn over its
pages while waiting for my bacon and eggs, and found several pages full
of obscenities, scrawled there some two or three weeks before, by Dublin
visitors, it seemed, for a notorious Dublin street was mentioned. Nobody
had thought it worth his while to tear out the page or blacken out the
lines, and as I put the book away impressions that had been drifting
through my mind for months rushed up into a single thought. 'If we poets
are to move the people, we must reintegrate the human spirit in our
imagination. The English have driven away the kings, and turned the
prophets into demagogues, and you cannot have health among a people if
you have not prophet, priest and king.'