I
I remember, some years ago, advising a distinguished, though too little
recognized, writer of poetical plays to write a play as unlike ordinary
plays as possible, that it might be judged with a fresh mind, and to put
it on the stage in some small suburban theatre, where a small audience
would pay its expenses. I said that he should follow it the year after, at
the same time of the year, with another play, and so on from year to year;
and that the people who read books, and do not go to the theatre, would
gradually find out about him. I suggested that he should begin with a
pastoral play, because nobody would expect from a pastoral play the
succession of nervous tremours which the plays of commerce, like the
novels of commerce, have substituted for the purification that comes with
pity and terror to the imagination and intellect. He followed my advice in
part, and had a small but perfect success, filling his small theatre for
twice the number of performances he had announced; but instead of being
content with the praise of his equals, and waiting to win their praise
another year, he hired immediately a big London theatre, and put his
pastoral play and a new play before a meagre and unintelligent audience. I
still remember his pastoral play with delight, because, if not always of a
high excellence, it was always poetical; but I remember it at the small
theatre, where my pleasure was magnified by the pleasure of those about
me, and not at the big theatre, where it made me uncomfortable, as an
unwelcome guest always makes one uncomfortable.
Why should we thrust our works, which we have written with imaginative
sincerity and filled with spiritual desire, before those quite excellent
people who think that Rossetti's women are 'guys,' that Rodin's women are
'ugly,' and that Ibsen is 'immoral,' and who only want to be left at
peace to enjoy the works so many clever men have made especially to suit
them? We must make a theatre for ourselves and our friends, and for a few
simple people who understand from sheer simplicity what we understand from
scholarship and thought. We have planned the Irish Literary Theatre with
this hospitable emotion, and, that the right people may find out about us,
we hope to act a play or two in the spring of every year; and that the
right people may escape the stupefying memory of the theatre of commerce
which clings even to them, our plays will be for the most part remote,
spiritual, and ideal.
A common opinion is that the poetic drama has come to an end, because
modern poets have no dramatic power; and Mr. Binyon seems to accept this
opinion when he says: 'It has been too often assumed that it is the
manager who bars the way to poetic plays. But it is much more probable
that the poets have failed the managers. If poets mean to serve the
stage, their dramas must be dramatic.' I find it easier to believe that
audiences, who have learned, as I think, from the life of crowded cities
to live upon the surface of life, and actors and managers, who study to
please them, have changed, than that imagination, which is the voice of
what is eternal in man, has changed. The arts are but one Art; and why
should all intense painting and all intense poetry have become not merely
unintelligible but hateful to the greater number of men and women, and
intense drama move them to pleasure? The audiences of Sophocles and of
Shakespeare and of Calderon were not unlike the audiences I have heard
listening in Irish cabins to songs in Gaelic about 'an old poet telling
his sins,' and about 'the five young men who were drowned last year,' and
about 'the lovers that were drowned going to America,' or to some tale of
Oisin and his three hundred years in _Tir nan Oge_. Mr. Bridges' _Return
of Ulysses_, one of the most beautiful and, as I think, dramatic of modern
plays, might have some success in the Aran Islands, if the Gaelic League
would translate it into Gaelic, but I am quite certain that it would have
no success in the Strand.
Blake has said that all Art is a labour to bring again the Golden Age, and
all culture is certainly a labour to bring again the simplicity of the
first ages, with knowledge of good and evil added to it. The drama has
need of cities that it may find men in sufficient numbers, and cities
destroy the emotions to which it appeals, and therefore the days of the
drama are brief and come but seldom. It has one day when the emotions of
cities still remember the emotions of sailors and husbandmen and shepherds
and users of the spear and the bow; as the houses and furniture and
earthen vessels of cities, before the coming of machinery, remember the
rocks and the woods and the hillside; and it has another day, now
beginning, when thought and scholarship discover their desire. In the
first day, it is the Art of the people; and in the second day, like the
dramas acted of old times in the hidden places of temples, it is the
preparation of a Priesthood. It may be, though the world is not old enough
to show us any example, that this Priesthood will spread their Religion
everywhere, and make their Art the Art of the people.
When the first day of the drama had passed by, actors found that an always
larger number of people were more easily moved through the eyes than
through the ears. The emotion that comes with the music of words is
exhausting, like all intellectual emotions, and few people like exhausting
emotions; and therefore actors began to speak as if they were reading
something out of the newspapers. They forgot the noble art of oratory,
and gave all their thought to the poor art of acting, that is content
with the sympathy of our nerves; until at last those who love poetry found
it better to read alone in their rooms what they had once delighted to
hear sitting friend by friend, lover by beloved. I once asked Mr. William
Morris if he had thought of writing a play, and he answered that he had,
but would not write one, because actors did not know how to speak poetry
with the half-chant men spoke it with in old times. Mr. Swinburne's
_Locrine_ was acted a month ago, and it was not badly acted, but nobody
could tell whether it was fit for the stage or not, for not one rhythm,
not one cry of passion, was spoken with a musical emphasis, and verse
spoken without a musical emphasis seems but an artificial and cumbersome
way of saying what might be said naturally and simply in prose.
As audiences and actors changed, managers learned to substitute
meretricious landscapes, painted upon wood and canvas, for the
descriptions of poetry, until the painted scenery, which had in Greece
been a charming explanation of what was least important in the story,
became as important as the story. It needed some imagination, some gift
for day-dreams, to see the horses and the fields and flowers of Colonus as
one listened to the elders gathered about OEdipus, or to see 'the
pendent bed and procreant cradle' of the 'martlet' as one listened to
Duncan before the castle of Macbeth; but it needs no imagination to admire
a painting of one of the more obvious effects of nature painted by
somebody who understands how to show everything to the most hurried
glance. At the same time the managers made the costumes of the actors more
and more magnificent, that the mind might sleep in peace, while the eye
took pleasure in the magnificence of velvet and silk and in the physical
beauty of women. These changes gradually perfected the theatre of
commerce, the masterpiece of that movement towards externality in life and
thought and Art, against which the criticism of our day is learning to
protest.
Even if poetry were spoken as poetry, it would still seem out of place in
many of its highest moments upon a stage, where the superficial
appearances of nature are so closely copied; for poetry is founded upon
convention, and becomes incredible the moment painting or gesture remind
us that people do not speak verse when they meet upon the highway. The
theatre of Art, when it comes to exist, must therefore discover grave and
decorative gestures, such as delighted Rossetti and Madox Brown, and grave
and decorative scenery, that will be forgotten the moment an actor has
said 'It is dawn,' or 'It is raining,' or 'The wind is shaking the trees';
and dresses of so little irrelevant magnificence that the mortal actors
and actresses may change without much labour into the immortal people of
romance. The theatre began in ritual, and it cannot come to its greatness
again without recalling words to their ancient sovereignty.
It will take a generation, and perhaps generations, to restore the theatre
of Art; for one must get one's actors, and perhaps one's scenery, from the
theatre of commerce, until new actors and new painters have come to help
one; and until many failures and imperfect successes have made a new
tradition, and perfected in detail the ideal that is beginning to float
before our eyes. If one could call one's painters and one's actors from
where one would, how easy it would be. I know some painters, who have
never painted scenery, who could paint the scenery I want, but they have
their own work to do; and in Ireland I have heard a red-haired orator
repeat some bad political verses with a voice that went through one like
flame, and made them seem the most beautiful verses in the world; but he
has no practical knowledge of the stage, and probably despises it.
May 1899.