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
either tell them 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 uplift 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.
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 3,000
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 in 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. Playwrights will have to be careful who they permit to
play their work if it is to be played after only two rehearsals, and
without enough attention to the arrangement of the stage to make the
action plausible.
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
14th, when Lady Gregory’s _Twenty-five_ and my _Hour-Glass_, drew a
good audience. On May 2nd 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 3rd and 4th, 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 English. I heard
too that his Nativity Play will be performed in New York this winter,
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 storytellers, from the king’s. Our repertory of
plays is increasing steadily, and when the winter’s work is finished,
a play[D] 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,[E] 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[F] 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.
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 judgment. They justify and have no
need of justification.
Such plays will require, both in writers and 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 one does not know how to construct, if one cannot arrange much
complicated life into a single action, one’s work will not hold the
attention or linger in the memory, but if one is 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 one 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 to so discriminate cadence from cadence,
and to so 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 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 harmonize 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 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.