into its direct contrary, and when they say that a writer should
make typical characters they mean personifications of averages, of
statistics, or even personified opinions, or men and women so faintly
imagined that there is nothing about them to separate them from the
crowd, as it appears to our hasty eyes. We must feel that we could
engage a hundred others to wear the same livery as easily as we could
engage a coachman. We must never forget that we are engaging them to
be the ideal young peasant, or the true patriot, or the happy Irish
wife, or the policeman of our prejudices, or to express some other of
those invaluable generalisations, without which our practical movements
would lose their energy. Who is there that likes a coachman to be too
full of human nature, when he has his livery on? No one man is like
another, but one coachman should be as like another as possible, though
he may assert himself a little when he meets the gardener. The patriots
would impose on us heroes and heroines, like those young couples in the
Gaelic plays, who might all change brides or bridegrooms in the dance
and never find out the difference. The personifications need not be
true even, if they are about our enemy, for it might be more difficult
to fight out our necessary fight if we remembered his virtue at wrong
moments; and might not Teig and Bacach, that are light in the head, go
over to his party?
Ireland is indeed poor, is indeed hunted by misfortune, and has indeed
to give up much that makes life desirable and lovely, but is she so
very poor that she can afford no better literature than this? Perhaps
so, but if it is a Spirit from beyond the world that decides when a
nation shall awake into imaginative energy, and no philosopher has ever
found what brings the moment, it cannot be for us to judge. It may be
coming upon us now, for it is certain that we have more writers who are
thinking, as men of letters understand thought, than we have had for
a century, and he who wilfully makes their work harder may be setting
himself against the purpose of that Spirit.
I would not be trying to form an Irish National Theatre if I did not
believe that there existed in Ireland, whether in the minds of a
few people or of a great number I do not know, an energy of thought
about life itself, a vivid sensitiveness as to the reality of things,
powerful enough to overcome all those phantoms of the night. One thing
calls up its contrary, unreality calls up reality, and, besides, life
here has been sufficiently perilous to make men think. I do not think
it a national prejudice that makes me believe we are a harder, a more
masterful race than the comfortable English of our time, and that this
comes from an essential nearness to reality of those few scattered
people who have the right to call themselves the Irish race. It is
only in the exceptions, in the few minds, where the flame has burnt as
it were pure, that one can see the permanent character of a race. If
one remembers the men who have dominated Ireland for the last hundred
and fifty years, one understands that it is strength of personality,
the individualizing quality in a man, that stirs Irish imagination
most deeply in the end. There is scarcely a man who has led the Irish
people, at any time, who may not give some day to a great writer
precisely that symbol he may require for the expression of himself. The
critical mind of Ireland is far more subjugated than the critical mind
of England by the phantoms and misapprehensions of politics and social
necessity, but the life of Ireland has rejected them more resolutely.
Indeed, it is in life itself in England that one finds the dominion of
what is not human life.
We have no longer in any country a literature as great as the
literature of the old world, and that is because the newspapers, all
kinds of second-rate books, the preoccupation of men with all kinds
of practical changes, have driven the living imagination out of the
world. I have read hardly any books this summer but Cervantes and
Boccaccio and some Greek plays. I have felt that these men, divided
from one another by so many hundreds of years, had the same mind.
It is we who are different; and then the thought would come to me,
that has come to me so often before, that they lived at times when
the imagination turned to life itself for excitement. The world was
not changing quickly about them. There was nothing to draw their
imagination from the ripening of their fields, from the birth and death
of their children, from the destiny of their souls, from all that is
the unchanging substance of literature. They had not to deal with the
world in such great masses that it could only be represented to their
minds by figures and by abstract generalisations. Everything that
their minds ran on came to them vivid with the colour of the senses,
and when they wrote it was out of their own rich experience, and they
found their symbols of expression in things that they had known all
their life long. Their very words were more vigorous than ours, for
their phrases came from a common mint, from the market, or the tavern,
or from the great poets of a still older time. It is the change, that
followed the Renaissance and was completed by newspaper government and
the scientific movement, that has brought upon us all these phrases and
generalisations, made by minds that would grasp what they have never
seen. Yesterday I went out to see the reddening apples in the garden,
and they faded from my imagination sooner than they would have from
the imagination of that old poet, who made the songs of the seasons
for the Fianna, or out of Chaucer’s, that celebrated so many trees.
Theories, opinions, these opinions among the rest, flowed in upon me
and blotted them away. Even our greatest poets see the world with
preoccupied minds. Great as Shelley is, those theories about the coming
changes of the world, which he has built up with so much elaborate
passion, hurry him from life continually. There is a phrase in some old
cabalistic writer about man falling into his own circumference, and
every generation we get further away from life itself, and come more
and more under the influence which Blake had in his mind when he said,
‘Kings and Parliament seem to me something other than human life.’
We lose our freedom more and more as we get away from ourselves, and
not merely because our minds are overthrown by abstract phrases and
generalisations, reflections in a mirror that seem living, but because
we have turned the table of value upside down, and believe that the
root of reality is not in the centre but somewhere in that whirling
circumference. How can we create like the ancients, while innumerable
considerations of external probability or social utility or of what is
becoming in so meritorious a person as ourselves, destroy the seeming
irresponsible creative power that is life itself? Who to-day could
set Richmond’s and Richard’s tents side by side on the battlefield,
or make Don Quixote, mad as he was, mistake a windmill for a giant in
broad daylight? And when I think of free-spoken Falstaff I know of
no audience, but the tinkers of the roadside, that could encourage
the artist to an equal comedy. The old writers were content if their
inventions had but an emotional and moral consistency, and created out
of themselves a fantastic, energetic, extravagant art. A Civilisation
is very like a man or a woman, for it comes in but a few years into its
beauty and its strength, and then, while many years go by, it gathers
and makes order about it, the strength and beauty going out of it the
while, until in the end it lies there with its limbs straightened out
and a clean linen cloth folded upon it. That may well be, and yet we
need not follow among the mourners, for it may be, before they are at
the tomb, a messenger will run out of the hills and touch the pale lips
with a red ember, and wake the limbs to the disorder and the tumult
that is life. Though he does not come, even so we will keep from among
the mourners and hold some cheerful conversation among ourselves; for
has not Virgil, a knowledgeable man and a wizard, foretold that other
Argonauts shall row between cliff and cliff, and other fair-haired
Achæans sack another Troy?
Every argument carries us backwards to some religious conception, and
in the end the creative energy of men depends upon their believing that
they have, within themselves, something immortal and imperishable,
and that all else is but as an image in a looking-glass. So long as
that belief is not a formal thing, a man will create out of a joyful
energy, seeking little for any external test of an impulse that may be
sacred, and looking for no foundation outside life itself. If Ireland
could escape from those phantoms of hers she might create, as did the
old writers; for she has a faith that is as theirs, and keeps alive
in the Gaelic traditions—and this has always seemed to me the chief
intellectual value of Gaelic—a portion of the old imaginative life.
When Dr. Hyde or Father Peter O’Leary is the writer, one’s imagination
goes straight to the century of Cervantes, and, having gone so far,
one thinks at every moment that they will discover his energy. It is
precisely because of this reason that one is indignant with those who
would substitute for the ideas of the folk-life the rhetoric of the
newspapers, who would muddy what had begun to seem a fountain of life
with the feet of the mob. Is it impossible to revive Irish and yet to
leave the finer intellects a sufficient mastery over the more gross, to
prevent it from becoming, it may be, the language of a Nation, and yet
losing all that has made it worthy of a revival, all that has made it a
new energy in the mind?
Before the modern movement, and while it was but new, the ordinary
man, whether he could read and write or not, was ready to welcome
great literature. When Ariosto found himself among the brigands, they
repeated to him his own verses, and the audience in the Elizabethan
Theatres must have been all but as clever as an Athenian audience. But
to-day we come to understand great literature by a long preparation, or
by some accident of nature, for we only begin to understand life when
our minds have been purified of temporary interests by study.
But if literature has no external test, how are we to know that it is
indeed literature? The only test that nature gives, to show when we
obey her, is that she gives us happiness, and when we are no longer
obedient she brings us to pain sooner or later. Is it not the same
with the artist? The sign that she makes to him is that happiness we
call delight in beauty. He can only convey this in its highest form
after he has purified his mind with the great writers of the world; but
their example can never be more than a preparation. If his art does
not seem, when it comes, to be the creation of a new personality, in
a few years it will not seem to be alive at all. If he is a dramatist
his characters must have a like newness. If they could have existed
before his days, or have been imagined before his day, we may be
certain that the spirit of life is not in them in its fulness. This
is because art, in its highest moments, is not a deliberate creation,
but the creation of intense feeling, of pure life; and every feeling
is the child of all past ages and would be different if even a moment
had been left out. Indeed, is it not that delight in beauty, which
tells the artist that he has imagined what may never die, itself but a
delight in the permanent yet ever-changing form of life, in her very
limbs and lineaments? When life has given it, has she given anything
but herself? Has she any other reward, even for the saints? If one
flies to the wilderness, is not that clear light that falls about the
soul when all irrelevant things have been taken away, but life that has
been about one always, enjoyed in all its fulness at length? It is as
though she had put her arms about one, crying: ‘My beloved, you have
given up everything for me.’ If a man spend all his days in good works
till there is no emotion in his heart that is not full of virtue, is
not the reward he prays for eternal life? The artist, too, has prayers
and a cloister, and if he do not turn away from temporary things, from
the zeal of the reformer and the passion of revolution, that zealous
mistress will give him but a scornful glance.
What attracts one to drama is that it is, in the most obvious way, what
all the arts are upon a last analysis. A farce and a tragedy are alike
in this that they are a moment of intense life. An action is taken out
of all other actions; it is reduced to its simple form, or at anyrate
to as simple a form as it can be brought to without our losing the
sense of its place in the world. The characters that are involved in
it are freed from everything that is not a part of that action; and
whether it is, as in the less important kinds of drama, a mere bodily
activity, a hair-breadth escape or the like, or as it is in the more
important kinds, an activity of the souls of the characters, it is
an energy, an eddy of life purified from everything but itself. The
dramatist must picture life in action, with an unpreoccupied mind, as
the musician pictures her in sound and the sculptor in form.
But if this be true, has art nothing to do with moral judgments?
Surely it has, and its judgments are those from which there is no
appeal. The character, whose fortune we have been called in to see,
or the personality of the writer, must keep our sympathy, and whether
it be farce or tragedy, we must laugh and weep with him and call down
blessings on his head. This character who delights us may commit murder
like Macbeth, or fly the battle for his sweetheart as did Antony, or
betray his country like Coriolanus, and yet we will rejoice in every
happiness that comes to him and sorrow at his death as if it were our
own. It is no use telling us that the murderer and the betrayer do not
deserve our sympathy. We thought so yesterday, and we still know what
crime is, but everything has been changed of a sudden; we are caught up
into another code, we are in the presence of a higher court. Complain
of us if you will, but it will be useless, for before the curtain
falls a thousand ages, grown conscious in our sympathies, will have
cried _Absolvo te_. Blame if you will the codes, the philosophies, the
experiences of all past ages that have made us what we are, as the
soil under our feet has been made out of unknown vegetations: quarrel
with the acorns of Eden if you will, but what has that to do with us?
We understand the verdict and not the law; and yet there is some law,
some code, some judgment. If the poet’s hand had slipped, if Antony
had railed at Cleopatra in the tower, if Coriolanus had abated that
high pride of his in the presence of death, we might have gone away
muttering the Ten Commandments. Yet may be we are wrong to speak of
judgment, for we have but contemplated life, and what more is there to
say when she that is all virtue, the gift and the giver, the fountain
whither all flows again, has given all herself? If the subject of drama
or any other art, were a man himself, an eddy of momentary breath, we
might desire the contemplation of perfect characters; but the subject
of all art is passion, the flame of life itself, and a passion can only
be contemplated when separated by itself, purified of all but itself,
and aroused into a perfect intensity by opposition with some other
passion, or it may be with the law, that is the expression of the whole
whether of Church or Nation or external nature. Had Coriolanus not been
a law-breaker neither he nor we had ever discovered, it may be, that
noble pride of his, and if we had not seen Cleopatra through the eyes
of so many lovers, would we have known that soul of hers to be all
flame, and wept at the quenching of it? If we were not certain of law
we would not feel the struggle, the drama, but the subject of art is
not law, which is a kind of death, but the praise of life, and it has
no commandments that are not positive.
But if literature does not draw its substance from history, or anything
about us in the world, what is a National literature? Our friends have
already told us, writers for the Theatre in Abbey Street, that we have
no right to the name, some because we do not write in Irish, and others
because we do not plead the National cause in our plays, as if we
were writers for the newspapers. I have not asked my fellow-workers
what they mean by the words National literature, but though I have
no great love for definitions, I would define it in some such way as
this: It is the work of writers, who are moulded by influences that
are moulding their country, and who write out of so deep a life that
they are accepted there in the end. It leaves a good deal unsettled—was
Rossetti an Englishman, or Swift an Irishman?—but it covers more kinds
of National literature than any other I can think of. If one says a
National literature must be in the language of the country, there are
many difficulties. Should it be written in the language that one’s
country does speak or the language that it ought to speak? Was Milton
an Englishman when he wrote in Latin or Italian, and had we no part in
Columbanus when he wrote in Latin the beautiful sermon comparing life
to a highway and to a smoke? And then there is Beckford, who is in
every history of English literature, and yet his one memorable book, a
story of Persia, was written in French.
Our theatre is of no great size, for though we know that if we write
well we shall find acceptance among our countrymen in the end, we would
think our emotions were on the surface if we found a ready welcome.
Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman are National writers of America,
although the one had his first true acceptance in France and the other
in England and Ireland. When I was a boy, six persons, who, alone out
of the whole world it may be, believed Walt Whitman a great writer,
sent him a message of admiration, and of those names four were English
and two Irish, my father’s and Prof. Dowden’s. It is only in our own
day that America has begun to prefer him to Lowell, who is not a poet
at all.
I mean by deep life that men must put into their writing the emotions
and experiences that have been most important to themselves. If they
say, ‘I will write of Irish country people and make them charming and
picturesque like those dear peasants my great grandmother used to
put in the foreground of her water-colour paintings,’ then they had
better be satisfied with the word ‘provincial.’ If one condescends
to one’s material, if it is only what a popular novelist would call
local colour, it is certain that one’s real soul is somewhere else.
Mr. Synge, upon the other hand, who is able to express his own finest
emotions in those curious ironical plays of his, where, for all that,
by the illusion of admirable art, everyone seems to be thinking and
feeling as only countrymen could think and feel, is truly a National
writer, as Burns was when he wrote finely and as Burns was not when he
wrote _Highland Mary_ and _The Cotter’s Saturday Night_.
A writer is not less National because he shows the influence of other
countries and of the great writers of the world. No nation, since the
beginning of history, has ever drawn all its life out of itself. Even
The Well of English Undefiled, the Father of English Poetry himself,
borrowed his metres, and much of his way of looking at the world, from
French writers, and it is possible that the influence of Italy was
more powerful among the Elizabethan poets than any literary influence
out of England herself. Many years ago, when I was contending with Sir
Charles Gavan Duffy over what seemed to me a too narrow definition
of Irish interests, Professor York Powell either said or wrote to me
that the creative power of England was always at its greatest when
her receptive power was greatest. If Ireland is about to produce a
literature that is important to her, it must be the result of the
influences that flow in upon the mind of an educated Irishman to-day,
and, in a greater degree, of what came into the world with himself.
Gaelic can hardly fail to do a portion of the work, but one cannot say
whether it may not be some French or German writer who will do most to
make him an articulate man. If he really achieve the miracle, if he
really make all that he has seen and felt and known a portion of his
own intense nature, if he put it all into the fire of his energy, he
need not fear being a stranger among his own people in the end. There
never have been men more unlike an Englishman’s idea of himself than
Keats and Shelley, while Campbell, whose emotion came out of a shallow
well, was very like that idea. We call certain minds creative because
they are among the moulders of their nation and are not made upon its
mould, and they resemble one another in this only—they have never been
fore-known or fulfilled an expectation.
It is sometimes necessary to follow in practical matters some
definition which one knows to have but a passing use. We, for instance,
have always confined ourselves to plays upon Irish subjects, as if
no others could be National literature. Our theatre inherits this
limitation from previous movements, which found it necessary and
fruitful. Goldsmith and Sheridan and Burke had become so much a part
of English life, were so greatly moulded by the movements that were
moulding England, that, despite certain Irish elements that clung
about them, we could not think of them as more important to us than
any English writer of equal rank. Men told us that we should keep our
hold of them, as it were, for they were a part of our glory; but we
did not consider our glory very important. We had no desire to turn
braggarts, and we did suspect the motives of our advisers. Perhaps they
had reasons, which were not altogether literary, for thinking it might
be well if Irishmen of letters, in our day also, would turn their faces
to England. But what moved me always the most, and I had something to
do with forcing this limitation upon our organisations, is that a new
language of expression would help to awaken a new attitude in writers
themselves, and that if our organisations were satisfied to interpret
a writer to his own countrymen merely because he was of Irish birth,
the organisations would become a kind of trade union for the helping
of Irishmen to catch the ear of London publishers and managers, and
for upholding writers who had been beaten by abler Englishmen. Let a
man turn his face to us, accepting the commercial disadvantages that
would bring upon him, and talk of what is near to our hearts, Irish
Kings and Irish Legends and Irish Countrymen, and we would find it a
joy to interpret him. Our one philosophical critic, Mr. John Eglinton,
thinks we were very arbitrary, and yet I would not have us enlarge our
practice. England and France, almost alone among nations, have great
works of literature which have taken their subjects from foreign lands,
and even in France and England this is more true in appearance than
reality. Shakespeare observed his Roman crowds in London, and saw,
one doubts not, somewhere in his own Stratford, the old man that gave
Cleopatra the asp. Somebody I have been reading lately finds the Court
of Louis the Fourteenth in Phèdre and Andromaque. Even in France and
England almost the whole prose fiction professes to describe the life
of the country, often of the districts where its writers have lived,
for, unlike a poem, a novel requires so much minute observation of the
surface of life that a novelist who cares for the illusion of reality
will keep to familiar things. A writer will indeed take what is most
creative out of himself, not from observation, but experience, yet he
must master a definite language, a definite symbolism of incident and
scene. Flaubert explains the comparative failure of his Salammbô by
saying ‘one cannot frequent her.’ He could create her soul, as it were,
but he could not tell with certainty how it would express itself before
Carthage fell to ruins. In the small nations which have to struggle
for their National life, one finds that almost every creator, whether
poet or novelist, sets all his stories in his own country. I do not
recollect that Björnson ever wrote of any land but Norway, and Ibsen,
though he lived in exile for many years, driven out by his countrymen,
as he believed, carried the little seaboard towns of Norway everywhere
in his imagination. So far as one can be certain of anything, one
may be certain that Ireland with her long National struggle, her old
literature, her unbounded folk-imagination, will, in so far as her
literature is National at all, be more like Norway than England or
France.