the Thames because the Corporation of London considered all plays
immoral. Goethe was thought dangerous to faith and morals for two or
three generations. Every educated man knows how great a portion of the
conscience of mankind is in Flaubert and Balzac, and yet their books
have been proscribed in the courts of law, and I found some time ago
that our own National Library, though it had two books on the genius
of Flaubert, had refused on moral grounds to have any books written
by him. With these stupidities in one’s memory, how can one, as many
would have us, arouse the mob, and in this matter the pulpit and the
newspaper are but voices of the mob, against the English theatre in
Ireland upon moral grounds? If that theatre became conscientious as
men of letters understand the conscience, many that now cry against
it would think it even less moral, for it would be more daring, more
logical, more free-spoken. The English Theatre is demoralizing, not
because it delights in the husband, the wife and the lover, a subject
which has inspired great literature in most ages of the world, but
because the illogical thinking and insincere feeling we call bad
writing, make the mind timid and the heart effeminate. I saw an English
play in Dublin a few months ago called _Mice and Men_. It had run for
five hundred nights in London, and been called by all the newspapers
‘a pure and innocent play,’ ‘a welcome relief,’ and so on. In it
occurred this incident: The typical scapegrace hero of the stage, a
young soldier, who is in love with the wife of another, goes away for
a couple of years, and when he returns finds that he is in love with
a marriageable girl. His mistress, who has awaited his return with
what is represented as faithful love, sends him a letter of welcome,
and because he has grown virtuous of a sudden he returns it unopened,
and with so careless a scorn that the husband intercepts it; and the
dramatist approves this manner of crying off with an old love, and
rings down the curtain on his marriage bells. Men who would turn such a
man out of a club bring their wives and daughters to look at him with
admiration upon the stage, so demoralizing is a drama that has no
intellectual tradition behind it. I could not endure it, and went out
into the street and waited there until the end of the play, when I came
in again to find the friends I had brought to hear it, but had I been
accustomed to the commercial theatre I would not even have known that
anything strange had happened upon the stage. If a man of intellect had
written of such an incident he would have made his audience feel for
the mistress that sympathy one feels for all that have suffered insult,
and for that young man an ironical emotion that might have marred
the marriage bells, and who knows what the curate and the journalist
would have said of him? Even Ireland would have cried out: Catholic
Ireland that should remember the gracious tolerance of the Church when
all nations were its children, and how Wolfram of Eisenbach sang from
castle to castle of the courtesy of Parzival, the good husband, and
of Gawain, the light lover, in that very Thuringia where a generation
later the lap of St. Elizabeth was full with roses. A Connaught Bishop
told his people a while since that they ‘should never read stories
about the degrading passion of love,’ and one can only suppose that
being ignorant of a chief glory of his Church, he has never understood
that this new puritanism is but an English cuckoo.
AN IRISH NATIONAL THEATRE.
[The performance of Mr. Synge’s _Shadow of the Glen_
started a quarrel with the extreme national party, and
the following paragraphs are from letters written in
the play’s defence. The organ of the party was at the
time _The United Irishman_ (now _Sinn Fein_), but the
first severe attack began in _The Independent_. _The
United Irishman_, however, took up the quarrel, and
from that on has attacked almost every play produced
at our theatre, and the suspicion it managed to arouse
among the political clubs against Mr. Synge especially
led a few years later to the organised attempt to drive
_The Playboy of the Western World_ from the stage.]
When we were all fighting about the selection of books for the New
Irish Library some ten years ago, we had to discuss the question,
What is National Poetry? In those days a patriotic young man would
have thought but poorly of himself if he did not believe that _The
Spirit of the Nation_ was great lyric poetry, and a much finer kind
of poetry than Shelley’s _Ode to the West Wind_, or Keats’s _Ode to a
Grecian Urn_. When two or three of us denied this, we were told that we
had effeminate tastes or that we were putting Ireland in a bad light
before her enemies. If one said that _The Spirit of the Nation_ was but
salutary rhetoric, England might overhear us and take up the cry. We
said it, and who will say that Irish literature has not a greater name
in the world to-day than it had ten years ago?
To-day there is another question that we must make up our minds about,
and an even more pressing one, What is a National Theatre? A man may
write a book of lyrics if he have but a friend or two that will care
for them, but he cannot write a good play if there are not audiences
to listen to it. If we think that a national play must be as near as
possible a page out of _The Spirit of the Nation_ put into dramatic
form, and mean to go on thinking it to the end, then we may be sure
that this generation will not see the rise in Ireland of a theatre that
will reflect the life of Ireland as the Scandinavian theatre reflects
the Scandinavian life. The brazen head has an unexpected way of falling
to pieces. We have a company of admirable and disinterested players,
and the next few months will, in all likelihood, decide whether a
great work for this country is to be accomplished. The poetry of Young
Ireland, when it was an attempt to change or strengthen opinion, was
rhetoric; but it became poetry when patriotism was transformed into
a personal emotion by the events of life, as in that lamentation
written by Doheny on his keeping among the hills. Literature is always
personal, always one man’s vision of the world, one man’s experience,
and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of
others. A community that is opinion-ridden, even when those opinions
are in themselves noble, is likely to put its creative minds into some
sort of a prison. If creative minds preoccupy themselves with incidents
from the political history of Ireland, so much the better, but we
must not enforce them to select those incidents. If in the sincere
working-out of their plot, they alight on a moral that is obviously
and directly serviceable to the National cause, so much the better,
but we must not force that moral upon them. I am a Nationalist, and
certain of my intimate friends have made Irish politics the business
of their lives, and this made certain thoughts habitual with me, and
an accident made these thoughts take fire in such a way that I could
give them dramatic expression. I had a very vivid dream one night, and
I made _Cathleen ni Houlihan_ out of this dream. But if some external
necessity had forced me to write nothing but drama with an obviously
patriotic intention, instead of letting my work shape itself under
the casual impulses of dreams and daily thoughts, I would have lost,
in a short time, the power to write movingly upon any theme. I could
have aroused opinion; but I could not have touched the heart, for I
would have been busy at the oakum-picking that is not the less mere
journalism for being in dramatic form. Above all, we must not say
that certain incidents which have been a part of literature in all
other lands are forbidden to us. It may be our duty, as it has been
the duty of many dramatic movements, to bring new kinds of subjects
into the theatre, but it cannot be our duty to make the bounds of
drama narrower. For instance, we are told that the English theatre is
immoral, because it is pre-occupied with the husband, the wife and
the lover. It is, perhaps, too exclusively pre-occupied with that
subject, and it is certain it has not shed any new light upon it for
a considerable time, but a subject that inspired Homer and about half
the great literature of the world will, one doubts not, be a necessity
to our National Theatre also. Literature is, to my mind, the great
teaching power of the world, the ultimate creator of all values,
and it is this, not only in the sacred books whose power everybody
acknowledges, but by every movement of imagination in song or story or
drama that height of intensity and sincerity has made literature at
all. Literature must take the responsibility of its power, and keep
all its freedom: it must be like the spirit and like the wind that
blows where it listeth, it must claim its right to pierce through
every crevice of human nature, and to describe the relation of the soul
and the heart to the facts of life and of law, and to describe that
relation as it is, not as we would have it be, and in so far as it
fails to do this it fails to give us that foundation of understanding
and charity for whose lack our moral sense can be but cruelty. It must
be as incapable of telling a lie as nature, and it must sometimes say
before all the virtues, ‘The greatest of these is charity.’ Sometimes
the patriot will have to falter and the wife to desert her home, and
neither be followed by divine vengeance or man’s judgment. At other
moments it must be content to judge without remorse, compelled by
nothing but its own capricious spirit that has yet its message from
the foundation of the world. Aristophanes held up the people of Athens
to ridicule, and even prouder of that spirit than of themselves, they
invited the foreign ambassadors to the spectacle.
I would sooner our theatre failed through the indifference or hostility
of our audiences than gained an immense popularity by any loss of
freedom. I ask nothing that my masters have not asked for, but I ask
all that they were given. I ask no help that would limit our freedom
from either official or patriotic hands, though I am glad of the help
of any who love the arts so dearly that they would not bring them into
even honourable captivity. A good Nationalist is, I suppose, one who
is ready to give up a great deal that he may preserve to his country
whatever part of her possessions he is best fitted to guard, and that
theatre where the capricious spirit that bloweth as it listeth has
for a moment found a dwelling-place, has good right to call itself a
National Theatre.
THE THEATRE, THE PULPIT, AND THE NEWSPAPERS.
I was very well content when I read an unmeasured attack in _The
Independent_ on the Irish National Theatre. There had, as yet, been
no performance, but the attack was confident, and it was evident that
the writer’s ears were full of rumours and whisperings. One knew that
some such attack was inevitable, for every dramatic movement that
brought any new power into literature arose among precisely these
misunderstandings and animosities. Drama, the most immediately powerful
form of literature, the most vivid image of life, finds itself opposed,
as no other form of literature does, to those enemies of life, the
chimeras of the Pulpit and the Press. When a country has not begun to
care for literature, or has forgotten the taste for it, and most modern
countries seem to pass through this stage, these chimeras are hatched
in every basket. Certain generalisations are everywhere substituted
for life. Instead of individual men and women and living virtues
differing as one star differeth from another in glory, the public
imagination is full of personified averages, partisan fictions, rules
of life that would drill everybody into the one posture, habits that
are like the pinafores of charity-school children. The priest, trained
to keep his mind on the strength of his Church and the weakness of
his congregation, would have all mankind painted with a halo or with
horns. Literature is nothing to him, he has to remember that Seaghan
the Fool might take to drinking again if he knew of pleasant Falstaff,
and that Paudeen might run after Red Sarah again if some strange chance
put Plutarch’s tale of Anthony or Shakespeare’s play into his hands,
and he is in a hurry to shut out of the schools that Pandora’s box,
_The Golden Treasury_. The newspaper he reads of a morning has not only
the haloes and horns of the vestry, but it has crowns and fools’ caps
of its own. Life, which in its essence is always surprising, always
taking some new shape, always individualising, is nothing to it, it has
to move men in squads, to keep them in uniform, with their faces to
the right enemy, and enough hate in their hearts to make the muskets
go off. It may know its business well, but its business is building
and ours is shattering. We cannot linger very long in this great dim
temple where the wooden images sit all round upon thrones, and where
the worshippers kneel, not knowing whether they tremble because their
gods are dead or because they fear they may be alive. In the idol-house
every god, every demon, every virtue, every vice, has been given its
permanent form, its hundred hands, its elephant trunk, its monkey head.
The man of letters looks at those kneeling worshippers who have given
up life for a posture, whose nerves have dried up in the contemplation
of lifeless wood. He swings his silver hammer and the keepers of the
temple cry out, prophesying evil, but he must not mind their cries and
their prophecies, but break the wooden necks in two and throw down the
wooden bodies. Life will put living bodies in their place till new
image-brokers have set up their benches.
Whenever literature becomes powerful, the priest, whose forerunner
imagined St. Patrick driving his chariot-wheels over his own erring
sister, has to acknowledge, or to see others acknowledge, that there
is no evil that men and women may not be driven into by their virtues
all but as readily as by their vices, and the politician, that it is
not always clean hands that serve a country or foul hands that ruin
it. He may even have to say at last, as an old man who had spent many
years in prison to serve a good cause said to me, ‘There never was a
cause so evil that it has not been served by good men for what seemed
to them sufficient reasons.’ And if the priest or the politician should
say to the man of letters, ‘Into how dangerous a state of mind are you
not bringing us?’ the man of letters can but answer, ‘It is dangerous,
indeed,’ and say, like my Seanchan, ‘When did we promise safety?’
Thought takes the same form age after age, and the things that people
have said to me about this intellectual movement of ours have, I doubt
not, been said in every country to every writer who was a disturber of
the old life. When _The Countess Cathleen_ was produced, the very girls
in the shops complained to us that to describe an Irishwoman as selling
her soul to the devil was to slander the country. The silver hammer had
threatened, as it seems, one of those personifications of an average.
Someone said to me a couple of weeks ago, ‘If you put on the stage any
play about marriage that does not point its moral clearly, you will
make it difficult for us to go on attacking the English theatre for its
immorality.’ Again, we were disordering the squads, the muskets might
not all point in the same direction.
Now that these opinions have found a leader and a voice in _The
Independent_, it is easy at anyrate to explain how much one differs
from them. I had spoken of the capricious power of the artist and
compared it to the capricious movements of a wild creature, and _The
Independent_, speaking quite logically from its point of view, tells
me that these movements were only interesting when ‘under restraint.’
The writers of the Anglo-Irish movement, it says, ‘will never consent
to serve except on terms that never could or should be conceded.’ I
had spoken of the production of foreign masterpieces, but it considers
that foreign masterpieces would be very dangerous. I had asked in
_Samhain_ for audiences sufficiently tolerant to enable the half-dozen
minds who are likely to be the dramatic imagination of Ireland for this
generation to put their own thought and their own characters into their
work. That is to say, I had asked for the amount of freedom which every
nation has given to its dramatic writers. But the newspaper hopes and
believes that no ‘such tolerance will be extended to Mr. Yeats and his
friends.’
I have written these lines to explain our thoughts and intentions to
many personal friends, who live too deep in the labour of politics to
give the thought to these things that we have given, and because not
only in our theatre, but in all matters of national life, we have need
of a new discovery of life—of more precise thought, of a more perfect
sincerity. I would see, in every branch of our National propaganda,
young men who would have the sincerity and the precision of those
Russian revolutionists that Kropotkin and Stepniak tell us of, men
who would never use an argument to convince others which would not
convince themselves, who would not make a mob drunk with a passion they
could not share, and who would above all seek for fine things for their
own sake, and for precise knowledge for its own sake, and not for its
momentary use. One can serve one’s country alone out of the abundance
of one’s own heart, and it is labour enough to be certain one is in the
right, without having to be certain that one’s thought is expedient
also.
1904
THE DRAMATIC MOVEMENT
The National Theatre Society has had great difficulties because of
the lack of any suitable playhouse. It has been forced to perform
in halls without proper lighting for the stage, and almost without
dressing-rooms, and with level floors in the auditorium that prevented
all but the people in the front row from seeing properly. These
halls are expensive too, and the players of poetical drama in an age
of musical comedy have light pockets. But now a generous English
friend, Miss Horniman, has rearranged and in part re-built, at very
considerable expense, the old Mechanic’s Institute Theatre, now the
Abbey Theatre, and given us the use of it without any charge, and I
need not say that she has gained our gratitude, as she will gain the
gratitude of our audience. The work of decoration and alteration has
been done by Irishmen, and everything, with the exception of some few
things that are not made here, or not of a good enough quality, has
been manufactured in Ireland. The stained glass in the entrance hall
is the work of Miss Sarah Purser and her apprentices, the large copper
mirror frames are from the new metal works at Youghal, and the pictures
of some of our players are by an Irish artist. These details and some
details of form and colour in the building, as a whole, have been
arranged by Miss Horniman herself.
Having been given the free use of this Theatre, we may look upon
ourselves as the first endowed Theatre in any English-speaking country,
the English-speaking countries and Venezuela being the only countries
which have never endowed their theatres; but the correspondents who
write for parts in our plays or posts in the Theatre at a salary are in
error. We are, and must be for some time to come, contented to find our
work its own reward, the player giving[G] his work, and the playwright
his, for nothing; and though this cannot go on always, we start
our winter very cheerfully with a capital of some forty pounds. We
playwrights can only thank these players, who have given us the delight
of seeing our work so well performed, working with so much enthusiasm,
with so much patience, that they have found for themselves a lasting
place among the artists, the only aristocracy that has never been sold
in the market or seen the people rise up against it.
It is a necessary part of our plan to find out how to perform plays for
little money, for it is certain that every increase in expenditure has
lowered the quality of dramatic art itself, by robbing the dramatist
of freedom in experiment, and by withdrawing attention from his words
and from the work of the players. Sometimes one friend or another has
helped us with costumes or scenery, but the expense has never been very
great, ten or twenty pounds being enough in most cases for quite a long
play. These friends have all accepted the principles I have explained
from time to time in _Samhain_, but they have interpreted them in
various ways according to their temperament.
Miss Horniman staged _The King’s Threshold_ at her own expense, and
she both designed and made the costumes. The costumes for the coming
performances of _On Baile’s Strand_ are also her work and her gift and
her design. She made and paid for the costumes in _The Shadowy Waters_,
but in this case followed a colour-scheme of mine. The colour-scheme
in _The Hour-Glass_, our first experiment, was worked out by Mr.
Robert Gregory and myself, and the costumes were made by Miss Lavelle,
a member of the company; while Mr. Robert Gregory has designed the
costumes and scenery for _Kincora_. As we gradually accumulate costumes
in all the main colours and shades, we will be able to get new effects
by combining them in different ways without buying new ones. Small
dramatic societies, and our example is beginning to create a number,
not having so many friends as we have, might adopt a simpler plan,
suggested to us by a very famous decorative artist. Let them have
one suit of clothes for a king, another for a queen, another for a
fighting-man, another for a messenger, and so on, and if these clothes
are loose enough to fit different people, they can perform any romantic
play that comes without new cost. The audience would soon get used to
this way of symbolising, as it were, the different ranks and classes
of men, and as the king would wear, no matter what the play might be,
the same crown and robe, they could have them very fine in the end.
Now, one wealthy theatre-goer and now another might add a pearl to the
queen’s necklace, or a jewel to her crown, and be the more regular in
attendance at the theatre because that gift shone out there like a good
deed.
We can hardly do all we hope unless there are many more of these little
societies to be centres of dramatic art and of the allied arts. But
a very few actors went from town to town in ancient Greece, finding
everywhere more or less well trained singers among the principal
townsmen to sing the chorus that had otherwise been the chief expense.
In the days of the stock companies two or three well-known actors would
go from town to town finding actors for all the minor parts in the
local companies. If we are to push our work into the small towns and
villages, local dramatic clubs must take the place of the old stock
companies. A good-sized town should be able to give us a large enough
audience for our whole, or nearly our whole, company to go there; but
the need for us is greater in those small towns where the poorest
kind of farce and melodrama have gone and Shakespearean drama has not
gone, and it is here that we will find it hardest to get intelligent
audiences. If a dramatic club existed in one of the larger towns near,
they could supply us not only with actors, should we need them, in
their own town, but with actors when we went to the small towns and to
the villages where the novelty of any kind of drama would make success
certain. These clubs would play in Gaelic far better than we can hope
to, for they would have native Gaelic speakers, and should we succeed
in stirring the imagination of the people enough to keep the rivalry
between plays in English and Irish to a rivalry in quality, the
certain development of two schools with distinct though very kindred
ideals would increase the energy and compass of our art.
At a time when drama was more vital than at present, unpaid actors,
and actors with very little training, have influenced it deeply. The
Mystery Plays and the Miracle Plays got their players at no great
distance from the Church door, and the classic drama of France had
for a forerunner performances of Greek and Latin Classics, given by
students and people of quality, and even at its height Racine wrote two
of his most famous tragedies to be played by young girls at school.
This was before acting had got so far away from our natural instincts
of expression. When the play is in verse, or in rhythmical prose, it
does not gain by the change, and a company of amateurs, if they love
literature, and are not self-conscious, and really do desire to do
well, can often make a better hand of it than the ordinary professional
company.
The greater number of their plays will, in all likelihood, be comedies
of Irish country life, and here they need not fear competition, for
they will know an Irish countryman as no professional can know him; but
whatever they play, they will have one advantage the English amateur
has not: there is in their blood a natural capacity for acting, and
they have never, like him, become the mimics of well-known actors.
The arts have always lost something of their sap when they have been
cut off from the people as a whole; and when the theatre is perfectly
alive, the audience, as at the Gaelic drama to-day in Gaelic-speaking
districts, feels itself to be almost a part of the play. I have never
felt that the dignity of art was imperilled when the audience at Dr.
Hyde’s _An Posadh_ cheered the bag of flour or the ham lent by some
local shopkeepers to increase the bridal gifts. It was not merely
because of its position in the play that the Greek chorus represented
the people, and the old ballad singers waited at the end of every
verse till their audience had taken up the chorus; while Ritual, the
most powerful form of drama, differs from the ordinary form, because
everyone who hears it is also a player. Our modern theatre, with the
seats always growing more expensive, and its dramatic art drifting
always from the living impulse of life, and becoming more and more what
Rossetti would have called ‘soulless self-reflections of man’s skill,’
no longer gives pleasure to any imaginative mind. It is easy for us
to hate England in this country, and we give that hatred something of
nobility if we turn it now and again into hatred of the vulgarity of
commercial syndicates, of all that commercial finish and pseudo-art she
has done so much to cherish. Mr. Standish O’Grady has quoted somebody
as saying ‘the passions must be held in reverence, they must not, they
cannot be excited at will,’ and the noble using of that old hatred will
win for us sympathy and attention from all artists and people of good
taste, and from those of England more than anywhere, for there is the
need greatest.