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