I did not find a word in the printed criticism of Synge's _Deirdre of
the Sorrows_ about the qualities that made certain moments seem to me
the noblest tragedy, and the play was judged by what seemed to me but
wheels and pulleys necessary to the effect, but in themselves nothing.
Upon the other hand, those who spoke to me of the play never spoke of
these wheels and pulleys, but if they cared at all for the play, cared
for the things I cared for. One's own world of painters, of poets, of
good talkers, of ladies who delight in Ricard's portraits or Debussey's
music, all those whose senses feel instantly every change in our mother
the moon, saw the stage in one way; and those others who look at plays
every night, who tell the general playgoer whether this play or that
play is to his taste, saw it in a way so different that there is
certainly some body of dogma--whether in the instincts or in the
memory, pushing the ways apart. A printed criticism, for instance, found
but one dramatic moment, that when Deirdre in the second act overhears
her lover say that he may grow weary of her; and not one--if I remember
rightly--chose for praise or explanation the third act which alone had
satisfied the author, or contained in any abundance those sentences that
were quoted at the fall of the curtain and for days after.
Deirdre and her lover, as Synge tells the tale, returned to Ireland,
though it was nearly certain they would die there, because death was
better than broken love, and at the side of the open grave that had been
dug for one and would serve for both, quarrelled, losing all they had
given their life to keep. 'Is it not a hard thing that we should miss
the safety of the grave and we trampling its edge?' That is Deirdre's
cry at the outset of a reverie of passion that mounts and mounts till
grief itself has carried her beyond grief into pure contemplation. Up to
this the play has been a Master's unfinished work, monotonous and
melancholy, ill-arranged, little more than a sketch of what it would
have grown to, but now I listened breathless to sentences that may never
pass away, and as they filled or dwindled in their civility of sorrow,
the player, whose art had seemed clumsy and incomplete, like the writing
itself, ascended into that tragic ecstasy which is the best that
art--perhaps that life--can give. And at last when Deirdre, in the
paroxysm before she took her life, touched with compassionate fingers
him that had killed her lover, we knew that the player had become, if
but for a moment, the creature of that noble mind which had gathered its
art in waste islands, and we too were carried beyond time and persons to
where passion, living through its thousand purgatorial years, as in the
wink of an eye, becomes wisdom; and it was as though we too had touched
and felt and seen a disembodied thing.
One dogma of the printed criticism is that if a play does not contain
definite character, its constitution is not strong enough for the stage,
and that the dramatic moment is always the contest of character with
character.
In poetical drama there is, it is held, an antithesis between character
and lyric poetry, for lyric poetry--however much it move you when read
out of a book--can, as these critics think, but encumber the action. Yet
when we go back a few centuries and enter the great periods of drama,
character grows less and sometimes disappears, and there is much lyric
feeling, and at times a lyric measure will be wrought into the dialogue,
a flowing measure that had well-befitted music, or that more lumbering
one of the sonnet. Suddenly it strikes us that character is continuously
present in comedy alone, and that there is much tragedy, that of
Corneille, that of Racine, that of Greece and Rome, where its place is
taken by passions and motives, one person being jealous, another full of
love or remorse or pride or anger. In writers of tragi-comedy (and
Shakespeare is always a writer of tragi-comedy) there is indeed
character, but we notice that it is in the moments of comedy that
character is defined, in Hamlet's gaiety let us say; while amid the
great moments, when Timon orders his tomb, when Hamlet cries to Horatio
'absent thee from felicity awhile,' when Anthony names 'Of many thousand
kisses the poor last,' all is lyricism, unmixed passion, 'the integrity
of fire.' Nor does character ever attain to complete definition in these
lamps ready for the taper, no matter how circumstantial and gradual the
opening of events, as it does in Falstaff who has no passionate purpose
to fulfill, or as it does in Henry the Fifth whose poetry, never touched
by lyric heat, is oratorical; nor when the tragic reverie is at its
height do we say, 'How well that man is realised, I should know him were
I to meet him in the street,' for it is always ourselves that we see
upon the stage, and should it be a tragedy of love we renew, it may be,
some loyalty of our youth, and go from the theatre with our eyes dim for
an old love's sake.
I think it was while rehearsing a translation of _Les Fourberies de
Scapin_ in Dublin, and noticing how passionless it all was, that I saw
what should have been plain from the first line I had written, that
tragedy must always be a drowning and breaking of the dykes that
separate man from man, and that it is upon these dykes comedy keeps
house. But I was not certain of the site (one always doubts when one
knows no testimony but one's own); till somebody told me of a certain
letter of Congreve's. He describes the external and superficial
expressions of 'humour' on which farce is founded and then defines
'humour' itself, the foundation of comedy as a 'singular and unavoidable
way of doing anything peculiar to one man only, by which his speech and
actions are distinguished from all other men,' and adds to it that
'passions are too powerful in the sex to let humour have its course,' or
as I would rather put it, that you can find but little of what we call
character in unspoiled youth, whatever be the sex, for as he indeed
shows in another sentence, it grows with time like the ash of a burning
stick, and strengthens towards middle life till there is little else at
seventy years.
Since then I have discovered an antagonism between all the old art and
our new art of comedy and understand why I hated at nineteen years
Thackeray's novels and the new French painting. A big picture of
cocottes sitting at little tables outside a cafe, by some follower of
Manet's, was exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy while I was a
student at a life class there, and I was miserable for days. I found no
desirable place, no man I could have wished to be, no woman I could have
loved, no Golden Age, no lure for secret hope, no adventure with myself
for theme out of that endless tale I told myself all day long. Years
after I saw the _Olympia_ of Manet at the Luxembourg and watched it
without hostility indeed, but as I might some incomparable talker whose
precision of gesture gave me pleasure, though I did not understand his
language. I returned to it again and again at intervals of years, saying
to myself, 'some day I will understand'; and yet, it was not until Sir
Hugh Lane brought the _Eva Gonzales_ to Dublin, and I had said to
myself, 'How perfectly that woman is realised as distinct from all
other women that have lived or shall live' that I understood I was
carrying on in my own mind that quarrel between a tragedian and a
comedian which the Devil on Two Sticks in Le Sage showed to the young
man who had climbed through the window.
There is an art of the flood, the art of Titian when his Ariosto, and
his Bacchus and Ariadne, give new images to the dreams of youth, and of
Shakespeare when he shows us Hamlet broken away from life by the
passionate hesitations of his reverie. And we call this art poetical,
because we must bring more to it than our daily mood if we would take
our pleasure; and because it delights in picturing the moment of
exaltation, of excitement, of dreaming (or in the capacity for it, as in
that still face of Ariosto's that is like some vessel soon to be full of
wine). And there is an art that we call real, because character can only
express itself perfectly in a real world, being that world's creature,
and because we understand it best through a delicate discrimination of
the senses which is but entire wakefulness, the daily mood grown cold
and crystalline.
We may not find either mood in its purity, but in mainly tragic art one
distinguishes devices to exclude or lessen character, to diminish the
power of that daily mood, to cheat or blind its too clear perception. If
the real world is not altogether rejected, it is but touched here and
there, and into the places we have left empty we summon rhythm, balance,
pattern, images that remind us of vast passions, the vagueness of past
times, all the chimeras that haunt the edge of trance; and if we are
painters, we shall express personal emotion through ideal form, a
symbolism handled by the generations, a mask from whose eyes the
disembodied looks, a style that remembers many masters, that it may
escape contemporary suggestion; or we shall leave out some element of
reality as in Byzantine painting, where there is no mass, nothing in
relief, and so it is that in the supreme moment of tragic art there
comes upon one that strange sensation as though the hair of one's head
stood up. And when we love, if it be in the excitement of youth, do we
not also, that the flood may find no stone to convulse, no wall to
narrow it, exclude character or the signs of it by choosing that beauty
which seems unearthly because the individual woman is lost amid the
labyrinth of its lines as though life were trembling into stillness and
silence, or at last folding itself away? Some little irrelevance of
line, some promise of character to come, may indeed put us at our ease,
'give more interest' as the humour of the old man with the basket does
to Cleopatra's dying; but should it come as we had dreamed in love's
frenzy to our dying for that woman's sake, we would find that the
discord had its value from the tune.
Nor have we chosen illusion in choosing the outward sign of that moral
genius that lives among the subtlety of the passions, and can for her
moment make her of the one mind with great artists and poets. In the
studio we may indeed say to one another 'character is the only beauty,'
but when we choose a wife, as when we go to the gymnasium to be shaped
for woman's eyes, we remember academic form, even though we enlarge a
little the point of interest and choose "a painter's beauty," finding it
the more easy to believe in the fire because it has made ashes.
When we look at the faces of the old tragic paintings, whether it is in
Titian or in some painter of medieval China, we find there sadness and
gravity, a certain emptiness even, as of a mind that waited the supreme
crisis (and indeed it seems at times as if the graphic art, unlike
poetry which sings the crisis itself, were the celebration of waiting).
Whereas in modern art, whether in Japan or Europe, 'vitality' (is not
that the great word of the studios?), the energy, that is to say, which
is under the command of our common moments, sings, laughs, chatters or
looks its busy thoughts.
Certainly we have here the Tree of Life and that of the knowledge of
Good and Evil which is rooted in our interests, and if we have forgotten
their differing virtues it is surely because we have taken delight in a
confusion of crossing branches. Tragic art, passionate art, the drowner
of dykes, the confounder of understanding, moves us by setting us to
reverie, by alluring us almost to the intensity of trance. The persons
upon the stage, let us say, greaten till they are humanity itself. We
feel our minds expand convulsively or spread out slowly like some
moon-brightened image-crowded sea. That which is before our eyes
perpetually vanishes and returns again in the midst of the excitement it
creates, and the more enthralling it is, the more do we forget it.
August, 1910.