create a household of living art in Dublin, with principles that have
become habits, and a public that has learnt to care for a play because
it is a play, and not because it is serviceable to some cause. Our
patent is not so wide as we had hoped for, for we had hoped to have
a patent as little restricted as that of the Gaiety or the Theatre
Royal. We were, however, vigorously opposed by these theatres and by
the Queen’s Theatre, and the Solicitor-General, to meet them half way,
has restricted our patent to plays written by Irishmen or on Irish
subjects or to foreign masterpieces, provided these masterpieces are
not English. This has been done to make our competition against the
existing theatres as unimportant as possible. It does not directly
interfere with the work of our society to any serious extent, but
it would have indirectly helped our work had such bodies as the
Elizabethan Stage Society, which brought _Everyman_ to Dublin some
years ago, been able to hire the theatre from Miss Horniman, when it is
not wanted by us, and to perform there without the limitations imposed
by a special license.
Everything that creates a theatrical audience is an advantage to us,
and the small number of seats in our theatre would have kept away that
kind of drama, in whatever language, which spoils an audience for good
work.
The enquiry itself was not a little surprising, for the legal
representatives of the theatres, being the representatives of Musical
Comedy, were very anxious for the morals of the town. I had spoken of
the Independent Theatre, and a lawyer wanted to know if a play of mine
which attacked the institution of marriage had not been performed by
it recently. I had spoken of M. Maeterlinck and of his indebtedness
to a theatre somewhat similar to our own, and one of our witnesses,
who knew no more about it than the questioner, was asked if a play by
M. Maeterlinck called _L’Intruse_ had not been so immoral that it was
received with a cry of horror in London. I have written no play about
marriage, and the Independent Theatre died some twelve years ago, and
_L’Intruse_ might be played in a nursery with no worse effects than
a little depression of spirits. Our opponents having thus protested
against our morals, went home with the fees of Musical Comedy in their
pockets.
For all this, we are better off so far as the law is concerned than
we would be in England. The theatrical law of Ireland was made by the
Irish Parliament, and though the patent system, the usual method of
the time, has outlived its use and come to an end everywhere but in
Ireland, we must be grateful to that ruling caste of free spirits, that
being free themselves they left the theatre in freedom. In England
there is a censor, who forbids you to take a subject from the Bible,
or from politics, or to picture public characters, or certain moral
situations which are the foundation of some of the greatest plays of
the world. When I was at the great American Catholic University of
Notre-Dame I heard that the students had given a performance of _Œdipus
the King_, and _Œdipus the King_ is forbidden in London. A censorship
created in the eighteenth century by Walpole, because somebody had
written against election bribery, has been distorted by a puritanism,
which is not the less an English invention for being a pretended hatred
of vice and a real hatred of intellect. Nothing has ever suffered
so many persecutions as the intellect, though it is never persecuted
under its own name. It is but according to old usage when a law that
cherishes Musical Comedy and permits to every second melodrama the
central situation of _The Sign of the Cross_, attempted rape, becomes
one of the secondary causes of the separation of the English Theatre
from life. It does not interfere with anything that makes money, and
Musical Comedy, with its hints and innuendoes, and its consistently low
view of life, makes a great deal, for money is always respectable; but
would a group of artists and students see once again the masterpieces
of the world, they would have to hide from the law as if they had
been a school of thieves; or were we to take with us to London that
beautiful Nativity Play of Dr. Hyde’s, which was performed in Sligo
Convent a few months ago, that holy vision of the central story of the
world, as it is seen through the minds and the traditions of the poor,
the constables might upset the cradle. And yet it is precisely these
stories of The Bible that have all to themselves, in the imagination of
English people, especially of the English poor, the place they share in
this country with the stories of Fion and of Oisin and of Patrick.
Milton set the story of Sampson into the form of a Greek play, because
he knew that Sampson was, in the English imagination, what Herakles
was in the imagination of Greece; and I have never been able to see
any other subjects for an English Dramatist who looked for some common
ground between his own mind and simpler minds. An English poet of
genius once told me that he would have tried his hand in plays for the
people, if they knew any story the censor would pass, except Jack and
the Beanstalk.
The Gaelic League has its great dramatic opportunity because of the
abundance of stories known in Irish-speaking districts, and because
of the freedom of choice and of treatment the leaders of a popular
movement can have if they have a mind for it. The Gaelic plays acted
and published during the year selected their subjects from the
popular mind, but the treatment is disappointing. Dr. Hyde, dragged
from gathering to gathering by the necessities of the movement, has
written no new play; and Father Peter O’Leary has thrown his dramatic
power, which is remarkable, into an imaginative novel. Father Dineen
has published a little play that has some life-like dialogue, but
the action is sometimes irrelevant, and the motives of the principal
character are vague and confused, as if it were written in a hurry.
Father Dineen seems to know that he has not done his best, for he
describes it as an attempt to provide more vivid dialogue for beginners
than is to be found in the reading-books rather than a drama. An
anonymous writer has written a play called _The Money of the Narrow
Cross_, which tells a very simple tale, like that of a child’s book,
simply and adequately. It is very slight, in low relief as it were, but
if its writer is a young man it has considerable promise.
A Play called _Seaghan na Scuab_ was described in the _United Irishman_
as the best play ever written in Irish; but though the subject of it is
a dramatic old folk-tale, which has shown its vigour by rooting itself
in many countries, the treatment is confused and conventional and there
is a flatness of dialogue unusual in these plays. There is, however,
an occasional sense of comic situation which may come to something if
its writer will work seriously at his craft. One is afraid of quenching
the smoking flax, but this play was selected for performance at the
_Oireachtas_ before a vast audience in the Rotunda. It was accompanied
by _The Doctor_ in English and Irish, written by Mr. O’Beirne, and
performed by the Tawin players, who brought it from their seaside
village in Galway. Mr. O’Beirne deserves the greatest praise for
getting this company together, as well as for all he has done to give
the Tawin people a new pleasure in their language; but I think a day
will come when he will not be grateful to the _Oireachtas_ Committee
for bringing this first crude work of his into the midst of so many
thousand people. It would be very hard for a much more experienced
dramatist to make anything out of the ugly violence, the threadbare,
second-hand imaginations that flow in upon one out of the newspapers,
when one has founded one’s work on proselytizing zeal, instead of one’s
experience of life and one’s curiosity about it. These two were the
only plays, out of a number that have been played in Irish, that I have
seen this year. I went to Galway Feis, like many others, to see Dr.
Hyde’s _Lost Saint_, for I had missed every performance of it hitherto
though I had read it to many audiences in America, and I awaited the
evening with some little excitement. Although the _Lost Saint_ was on
the programme, an Anti-Emigration play was put in its place. I did not
wait for this, but, whatever its merits, it is not likely to have
contained anything so beautiful as the old man’s prayer in the other:
‘O Lord, O God, take pity on this little soft child. Put wisdom in his
head, cleanse his heart, scatter the mist from his mind and let him
learn his lessons like the other boys. O Lord, Thou wert Thyself young
one time; take pity on youth. O Lord, Thou, Thyself, shed tears; dry
the tears of this little lad. Listen, O Lord, to the prayer of Thy
servant, and do not keep from him this little thing he is asking of
Thee. O Lord, bitter are the tears of a child, sweeten them: deep are
the thoughts of a child, quiet them: sharp is the grief of a child,
take it from him: soft is the heart of a child, do not harden it.’
A certain number of propagandist plays are unavoidable in a popular
movement like the Gaelic revival, but they may drive out everything
else. The plays, while Father Peter O’Leary and Father Dineen and
Dr. Hyde were the most popular writers and the chief influence, were
full of the traditional folk-feeling that is the mastering influence
in all old Irish literature. Father O’Leary chose for his subjects
a traditional story of a trick played upon a simple villager, a
sheep-stealer frightened by what seemed to him a ghost, the quarrels
between Maeve and Aleel of Cruachan; Father Dineen chose for his a
religious crisis, alive as with the very soul of tragedy, or a well
sacred to the fairies; while Dr. Hyde celebrated old story-tellers
and poets, and old saints, and the Mother of God with the countenance
she wears in Irish eyes. Hundreds of men scattered through the world,
angry at the spectacle of modern vulgarity, rejoiced in this movement,
for it seemed impossible for anything begun in so high a spirit, so
inspired by whatever is ancient, or simple, or noble, to sink into the
common base level of our thought. This year one has heard little of the
fine work, and a great deal about plays that get an easy cheer, because
they make no discoveries in human nature, but repeat the opinions of
the audience, or the satire of its favourite newspapers. I am only
speaking of the plays of a year, and that is but a short period in what
one hopes may be a great movement, but it is not wise to say, as do
many Gaelic Leaguers, who know the weaknesses of their movement, that
if the present thinks but of grammar and propaganda the future will do
all the rest. A movement will often in its first fire of enthusiasm
create more works of genius than whole easy-going centuries that come
after it.
Nearly everything that is greatest as English prose was written in a
generation or two after the first beautiful use of prose in England:
and Mistral has made the poems of modern Provençe, as well as reviving
and all but inventing the language: for genius is more often of the
spring than of the middle green of the year. We cannot settle times and
seasons, flowering-time and harvest-time are not in our hands, but we
are to blame if genius comes and we do not gather in the fruit or the
blossom. Very often we can do no more for the man of genius than to
distract him as little as may be with the common business of the day.
His own work is more laborious than any other, for not only is thought
harder than action, as Goethe said, but he must brood over his work so
long and so unbrokenly that he find there all his patriotism, all his
passion, his religion even—it is not only those that sweep a floor that
are obedient to heaven—until at last he can cry with Paracelsus, ‘In
this crust of bread I have found all the stars and all the heavens.’
The following new plays were produced by the National Theatre Society
during the last twelve months:—_The Shadow of the Glen_ and _Riders
to the Sea_, by Mr. J. M. Synge; _Broken Soil_, by Mr. Colm; _The
Townland of Tamney_, by Mr. Seumas MacManus; _The Shadowy Waters_
and _The King’s Threshold_, by myself. The following plays were
revived:—_Deirdre_, by A.E.; _Twenty-five_, by Lady Gregory; _Cathleen
ni Houlihan_, _The Pot of Broth_, and _The Hour-Glass_, by myself.
We could have given more plays, but difficulties about the place of
performance, the shifting of scenery from where we rehearsed to where
we acted, and so on, always brought a great deal of labour upon the
Society. The Society went to London in March and gave two performances
at The Royalty to full houses. They played there Mr. Synge’s two
plays, Mr. Colm’s play, and my _King’s Threshold_ and _Pot of Broth_.
We were commended by the critics with generous sympathy, and had an
enthusiastic and distinguished audience.
We have many plays awaiting performance during the coming winter. Mr.
Synge has written us a play in three acts called _The Well of the
Saints_, full, as few works of our time are, with temperament, and of a
true and yet bizarre beauty. Lady Gregory has written us an historical
tragedy in three acts about King Brian and a very merry comedy of
country life. Mr. Bernard Shaw has written us a play[H] in four acts,
his first experiment in Irish satire; Mr. Tarpey, an Irishman whose
comedy _Windmills_ was successfully prepared by the Stage Society some
years ago, a little play which I have not yet seen; and Mr. Boyle, a
village comedy in three acts; and I hear of other plays by competent
hands that are coming to us. My own _Baile’s Strand_ is in rehearsal,
and I hope to have ready for the spring a play on the subject of
_Deirdre_, with choruses somewhat in the Greek manner. We are, of
course, offered from all parts of the world great quantities of plays
which are impossible for literary or dramatic reasons. Some of them
have a look of having been written for the commercial theatre and of
having been sent to us on rejection. It will save trouble if I point
out that a play which seems to its writer to promise an ordinary London
or New York success is very unlikely to please us, or succeed with our
audience if it did. Writers who have a better ambition should get some
mastery of their art in little plays before spending many months of
what is almost sure to be wasted labour on several acts.
We were invited to play in the St. Louis Exhibition, but thought that
our work should be in Ireland for the present, and had other reasons
for refusing.
A Company, which has been formed in America by Miss Witcherly, who
played in _Everyman_ during a part of its tour in America, to take
some of our plays on tour, has begun with three one-act plays of mine,
_Cathleen ni Houlihan_, _The Hour-Glass_, and _The Land of Heart’s
Desire_. It announces on its circulars that it is following the methods
of our Theatre.
Though the commercial theatre of America is as unashamedly commercial
as the English, there is a far larger audience interested in fine
drama than here. When I was lecturing in, I think, Philadelphia—one
town mixes with another in my memory at times—some one told me that he
had seen the _Duchess of Malfi_ played there by one of the old stock
companies in his boyhood; and _Everyman_ has been far more of a success
in America than anywhere else. They have numberless University towns
each with its own character and with an academic life animated by a
zeal and by an imagination unknown in these countries. There is nearly
everywhere that leaven of highly-cultivated men and women so much more
necessary to a good theatrical audience to-day than were ever Raleigh
and Sidney, when the groundling could remember the folk-songs and the
imaginative folk-life. The more an age is busy with temporary things,
the more must it look for leadership in matters of art to men and women
whose business or whose leisure has made the great writers of the world
their habitual company. Literature is not journalism because it can
turn the imagination to whatever is essential and unchanging in life.
FIRST PRINCIPLES.
Two Irish writers had a controversy a month ago, and they accused one
another of being unable to think, with entire sincerity, though it was
obvious to uncommitted minds that neither had any lack of vigorous
thought. But they had a different meaning when they spoke of thought,
for the one, though in actual life he is the most practical man I
know, meant thought as Paschal, as Montaigne, as Shakespeare, or as,
let us say, Emerson, understood it—a reverie about the adventures
of the soul, or of the personality, or some obstinate questioning
of the riddle. Many who have to work hard always make time for this
reverie, but it comes more easily to the leisured, and in this it is
like a broken heart, which is, a Dublin newspaper assured us lately,
impossible to a busy man. The other writer had in mind, when he spoke
of thought, the shaping energy that keeps us busy, and the obstinate
questionings he had most respect for were, how to change the method of
government, how to change the language, how to revive our manufactures,
and whether it is the Protestant or the Catholic that scowls at the
other with the darker scowl. Ireland is so poor, so misgoverned, that
a great portion of the imagination of the land must give itself to
a very passionate consideration of questions like these, and yet it
is precisely these loud questions that drive away the reveries that
incline the imagination to the lasting work of literature and give,
together with religion, sweetness, and nobility, and dignity to life.
We should desire no more from these propagandist thinkers than that
they carry out their work, as far as possible, without making it more
difficult for those, fitted by Nature or by circumstance for another
kind of thought, to do their work also; and certainly it is not well
that Martha chide at Mary, for they have the One Master over them.
When one all but despairs, as one does at times, of Ireland welcoming
a National Literature in this generation, it is because we do not
leave ourselves enough of time, or of quiet, to be interested in men
and women. A writer in _The Leader_, who is unknown to me, elaborates
this argument in an article full of beauty and dignity. He is speaking
of our injustice to one another, and he says that we are driven into
injustice ‘not wantonly but inevitably, and at call of the exacting
qualities of the great things. Until this latter dawning, the genius of
Ireland has been too preoccupied really to concern itself about men and
women; in its drama they play a subordinate part, born tragic comedians
though all the sons and daughters of the land are. A nation is the
heroic theme we follow, a mourning, wasted land its moving spirit;
the impersonal assumes personality for us.’ When I wrote my _Countess
Cathleen_, I thought, of course, chiefly of the actual picture that
was forming before me, but there was a secondary meaning that came
into my mind continuously. ‘It is the soul of one that loves Ireland,’
I thought, ‘plunging into unrest, seeming to lose itself, to bargain
itself away to the very wickedness of the world, and to surrender what
is eternal for what is temporary,’ and I know that this meaning seemed
natural to others, for that great orator, J. F. Taylor, who was not
likely to have searched very deeply into any work of mine, for he cared
little for mine, or, indeed, any modern work, turned the play into such
a parable in one of his speeches.
There is no use being angry with necessary conditions, or failing to
see that a man who is busy with some reform that can only be carried
out in a flame of energetic feeling, will not only be indifferent to
what seems to us the finer kind of thinking, but that he will support
himself by generalisations that seem untrue to the man of letters. A
little play, _The Rising of the Moon_, which is in the present number
of _Samhain_, and is among those we are to produce during the winter,
has, for instance, roused the suspicions of a very resolute leader of
the people, who has a keen eye for rats behind the arras. A Fenian
ballad-singer partly converts a policeman, and is it not unwise under
any circumstances to show a policeman in so favourable a light? It is
well known that many of the younger policemen were Fenians: but it is
necessary that the Dublin crowds should be kept of so high a heart
that they will fight the police at any moment. Are not morals greater
than literature? Others have objected to Mr. Synge’s _Shadow of the
Glen_ because Irish women, being more chaste than those of England
and Scotland, are a valuable part of our national argument. Mr. Synge
should not, it is said by some, have chosen an exception for the
subject of his play, for who knows but the English may misunderstand
him? Some even deny that such a thing could happen at all, while others
that know the country better, or remember the statistics, say that it
could but should never have been staged. All these arguments, by their
methods even more than by what they have tried to prove, misunderstand
how literature does its work. Men of letters have sometimes said that
the characters of a romance or of a play must be typical. They mean
that the character must be typical of something which exists in all
men because the writer has found it in his own mind. It is one of the
most inexplicable things about human nature that a writer, with a
strange temperament, an Edgar Allan Poe, let us say, made what he is by
conditions that never existed before, can create personages and lyric
emotions, which startle us by being at once bizarre and an image of
our own secret thoughts. Are we not face to face with the microcosm,
mirroring everything in universal nature? It is no more necessary
for the characters created by a romance writer, or a dramatist, to
have existed before, than for his own personality to have done so;
characters and personality alike, as is perhaps true in the instance
of Poe, may draw half their life not from the solid earth but from
some dreamy drug. This is true even of historical drama, for it was
Goethe, the founder of the historical drama of Germany, who said ‘we
do the people of history the honour of naming after them the creations
of our own minds.’ All that a dramatic writer need do is to persuade
us, during the two hours’ traffic of the stage, that the events of
his play did really happen. He must know enough of the life of his
country, or of history, to create this illusion, but no matter how
much he knows, he will fail if his audience is not ready to give up
something of the dead letter. If his mind is full of energy he will
not be satisfied with little knowledge, but he will be far more likely
to alter incidents and characters, wilfully even as it may seem, than
to become a literal historian. It was one of the complaints against
Shakespeare, in his own day, that he made Sir John Falstaff out of a
praiseworthy old Lollard preacher. One day, as he sat over Holinshed’s
History of England, he persuaded himself that Richard the Second, with
his French culture, ‘his too great friendliness to his friends,’ his
beauty of mind, and his fall before dry, repelling Bolingbroke, would
be a good image for an accustomed mood of fanciful, impracticable
lyricism in his own mind. The historical Richard has passed away for
ever and the Richard of the play lives more intensely, it seems, than
did ever living man. Yet Richard the Second, as Shakespeare made him,
could never have been born before the Renaissance, before the Italian
influence, or even one hour before the innumerable streams that flowed
in upon Shakespeare’s mind; the innumerable experiences we can never
know, brought Shakespeare to the making of him. He is typical not
because he ever existed, but because he has made us know of something
in our own minds we had never known of had he never been imagined.