Spring—I did not see the more recent performance, but hear upon all
hands that the chorus was too large—the expressiveness of the greater
portion as mere speech, has, I believe, re-created the chorus as a
dramatic method. The greater portion of the singing, as arranged by
Miss Farr, even when four or five voices sang together, though never
when ten sang together, was altogether admirable speech, and some of
it was speech of extraordinary beauty. When one lost the meaning,
even perhaps where the whole chorus sang together, it was not because
of a defective method, but because it is the misfortune of every new
artistic method that we can only judge of it through performers who
must be for a long time unpractised and amateurish. This new art has a
double difficulty, for the training of a modern singer makes articulate
speech, as a poet understands it, nearly impossible, and those who are
masters of speech very often, perhaps usually, are poor musicians.
Fortunately, Miss Farr, who has some knowledge of music, has, it may
be, the most beautiful voice on the English stage, and is in her
management of it an exquisite artist.
That we may throw emphasis on the words in poetical drama, above all
where the words are remote from real life as well as in themselves
exacting and difficult, the actors must move, for the most part, slowly
and quietly, and not very much, and there should be something in their
movements decorative and rhythmical as if they were paintings on a
frieze. They must not draw attention to themselves at wrong moments,
for poetry and indeed all picturesque writing is perpetually making
little pictures which draw the attention away for a second or two from
the player. The actress who played Lady Wishfort should have permitted
us to give a part of our attention to that little shop or wayside
booth. Then, too, one must be content to have long quiet moments, long
grey spaces, long level reaches, as it were—the leisure that is in all
fine life—for what we may call the business-will in a high state of
activity is not everything, although contemporary drama knows of little
else.
_Third._ We must have a new kind of scenic art. I have been the
advocate of the poetry as against the actor, but I am the advocate of
the actor as against the scenery. Ever since the last remnant of the
old platform disappeared, and the proscenium grew into the frame of a
picture, the actors have been turned into a picturesque group in the
foreground of a meretricious landscape-painting. The background should
be of as little importance as the background of a portrait-group, and
it should, when possible, be of one colour or of one tint, that the
persons on the stage, wherever they stand, may harmonise with it or
contrast with it and preoccupy our attention. Their outline should be
clear and not broken up into the outline of windows and wainscotting,
or lost into the edges of colours. In a play which copies the surface
of life in its dialogue one may, with this reservation, represent
anything that can be represented successfully—a room, for instance—but
a landscape painted in the ordinary way will always be meretricious
and vulgar. It will always be an attempt to do something which cannot
be done successfully except in easel painting, and the moment an actor
stands near to your mountain, or your forest, one will perceive that he
is standing against a flat surface. Illusion, therefore, is impossible,
and should not be attempted. One should be content to suggest a scene
upon a canvas, whose vertical flatness one accepts and uses, as the
decorator of pottery accepts the roundness of a bowl or a jug. Having
chosen the distance from naturalism, which will keep one’s composition
from competing with the illusion created by the actor, who belongs to
a world with depth as well as height and breadth, one must keep this
distance without flinching. The distance will vary according to the
distance the playwright has chosen, and especially in poetry, which
is more remote and idealistic than prose, one will insist on schemes
of colour and simplicity of form, for every sign of deliberate order
gives remoteness and ideality. But, whatever the distance be, one’s
treatment will always be more or less decorative. We can only find out
the right decoration for the different types of play by experiment,
but it will probably range between, on the one hand, woodlands made
out of recurring pattern, or painted like old religious pictures
upon gold background, and upon the other the comparative realism of
a Japanese print. This decoration will not only give us a scenic art
that will be a true art because peculiar to the stage, but it will give
the imagination liberty, and without returning to the bareness of the
Elizabethan stage. The poet cannot evoke a picture to the mind’s eye if
a second-rate painter has set his imagination of it before the bodily
eye; but decoration and suggestion will accompany our moods, and turn
our minds to meditation, and yet never become obtrusive or wearisome.
The actor and the words put into his mouth are always the one thing
that matters, and the scene should never be complete of itself, should
never mean anything to the imagination until the actor is in front of
it.
If one remembers that the movement of the actor, and the graduation and
the colour of the lighting, are the two elements that distinguish the
stage picture from an easel painting, one will not find it difficult to
create an art of the stage ranking as a true fine art. Mr. Gordon Craig
has done wonderful things with the lighting, but he is not greatly
interested in the actor, and his streams of coloured direct light,
beautiful as they are, will always seem, apart from certain exceptional
moments, a new externality. One should rather desire, for all but
exceptional moments, an even, shadowless light, like that of noon, and
it may be that a light reflected out of mirrors will give us what we
need.
M. Appia and M. Fortuni are making experiments in the staging of
Wagner for a private theatre in Paris, but I cannot understand what M.
Appia is doing, from the little I have seen of his writing, excepting
that the floor of the stage will be uneven like the ground, and that
at moments the lights and shadows of green boughs will fall over the
player that the stage may show a man wandering through a wood, and
not a wood with a man in the middle of it. One agrees with all the
destructive part of his criticism, but it looks as if he himself is
seeking, not convention, but a more perfect realism. I cannot persuade
myself that the movement of life is flowing that way, for life moves
by a throbbing as of a pulse, by reaction and action. The hour of
convention and decoration and ceremony is coming again.
The experiments of the Irish National Theatre Society will have of
necessity to be for a long time few and timid, and we must often,
having no money and not a great deal of leisure, accept for a while
compromises, and much even that we know to be irredeemably bad. One
can only perfect an art very gradually; and good playwriting, good
speaking, and good acting are the first necessity.
1905
Our first season at the Abbey Theatre has been tolerably successful.
We drew small audiences, but quite as big as we had hoped for, and we
end the year with a little money. On the whole we have probably more
than trebled our audiences of the Molesworth Hall. The same people come
again and again, and others join them, and I do not think we lose any
of them. We shall be under more expense in our new season, for we have
decided to pay some of the company and send them into the provinces,
but our annual expenses will not be as heavy as the weekly expenses of
the most economical London manager. Mr. Philip Carr, whose revivals
of Elizabethan plays and old comedies have been the finest things one
could see in a London theatre, spent three hundred pounds and took
twelve pounds during his last week; but here in Ireland enthusiasm can
do half the work, and nobody is accustomed to get much money, and even
Mr. Carr’s inexpensive scenery costs more than our simple decorations.
Our staging of _Kincora_, the work of Mr. Robert Gregory, was
beautiful, with a high, grave dignity and that strangeness which Ben
Jonson thought to be a part of all excellent beauty, and the expense of
scenery, dresses and all was hardly above thirty pounds. If we find a
good scene we repeat it in other plays, and in course of time we shall
be able to put on new plays without any expense for scenery at all. I
do not think that even the most expensive decoration would increase in
any way the pleasure of an audience that comes to us for the play and
the acting.
We shall have abundance of plays, for Lady Gregory has written us a new
comedy besides her _White Cockade_, which is in rehearsal; Mr. Boyle,
a satirical comedy in three acts; Mr. Colum has made a new play out of
his _Broken Soil_; and I have made almost a new one out of my _Shadowy
Waters_; and Mr. Synge has practically finished a longer and more
elaborate comedy than his last. Since our start last Christmas we have
shown eleven plays created by our movement and very varied in substance
and form, and six of these were new: _The Well of the Saints_,
_Kincora_, _The Building Fund_, _The Land_, _On Baile’s Strand_, and
_Spreading the News_.
One of our plays, _The Well of the Saints_, has been accepted for
immediate production by the Deutsches Theatre of Berlin; and another,
_The Shadow of the Glen_, is to be played during the season at the
National Bohemian Theatre at Prague; and my own _Cathleen ni Houlihan_
has been translated into Irish and been played at the Oireachtas,
before an audience of some thousands. We have now several dramatists
who have taken to drama as their most serious business, and we claim
that a school of Irish drama exists, and that it is founded upon
sincere observation and experience.
As is natural in a country where the Gaelic League has created a
pre-occupation with the countryman, the greatest number of our
plays are founded on the comedy and tragedy of country life, and
are written more or less in dialect. When the Norwegian National
movement began, its writers chose for their maxim, ‘To understand
the saga by the peasant and the peasant by the saga.’ Ireland in our
day has re-discovered the old heroic literature of Ireland, and she
has re-discovered the imagination of the folk. My own pre-occupation
is more with the heroic legend than with the folk, but Lady Gregory
in her _Spreading the News_, Mr. Synge in his _Well of the Saints_,
Mr. Colum in _The Land_, Mr. Boyle in _The Building Fund_, have been
busy, much or little, with the folk and the folk-imagination. Mr.
Synge alone has written of the peasant as he is to all the ages; of
the folk-imagination as it has been shaped by centuries of life among
fields or on fishing-grounds. His people talk a highly-coloured musical
language, and one never hears from them a thought that is of to-day
and not of yesterday. Lady Gregory has written of the people of the
markets and villages of the West, and their speech, though less full of
peculiar idiom than that of Mr. Synge’s people, is still always that
vivid speech which has been shaped through some generations of English
speaking by those who still think in Gaelic. Mr. Colum and Mr. Boyle,
on the other hand, write of the countryman or villager of the East
or centre of Ireland, who thinks in English, and the speech of their
people shows the influence of the newspaper and the National Schools.
The people they write of, too, are not the true folk. They are the
peasant as he is being transformed by modern life, and for that very
reason the man of the towns may find it easier to understand them.
There is less surprise, less wonder in what he sees, but there is more
of himself there, more of his vision of the world and of the problems
that are troubling him.
It is not fitting for the showman to overpraise the show, but he is
always permitted to tell you what is in his booths. Mr. Synge is the
most obviously individual of our writers. He alone has discovered a
new kind of sarcasm, and it is this sarcasm that keeps him, and may
long keep him, from general popularity. Mr. Boyle satirises a miserly
old woman, and he has made a very vivid person of her, but as yet his
satire is such as all men accept; it brings no new thing to judgment.
We have never doubted that what he assails is evil, and we are never
afraid that it is ourselves. Lady Gregory alone writes out of a spirit
of pure comedy, and laughs without bitterness and with no thought but
to laugh. She has a perfect sympathy with her characters, even with
the worst of them, and when the curtain goes down we are so far from
the mood of judgment that we do not even know that we have condoned
many sins. In Mr. Colum’s _Land_ there is a like comedy when Cornelius
and Sally fill the scene, but then he is too young to be content with
laughter. He is still interested in the reform of society, but that
will pass, for at about thirty every writer, who is anything of an
artist, comes to understand that all a work of art can do is to show
one the reality that is within our minds, and the reality that our eyes
look on. He is the youngest of us all by many years, and we are all
proud to foresee his future.
I think that a race or a nation or a phase of life has but few dramatic
themes, and that when these have been once written well they must
afterwards be written less and less well until one gets at last but
‘Soulless self-reflections of man’s skill.’ The first man writes
what it is natural to write, the second man what is left to him, for
the imagination cannot repeat itself. The hoydenish young woman,
the sentimental young woman, the villain and the hero alike ever
self-possessed, of contemporary drama, were once real discoveries, and
one can trace their history through the generations like a joke or a
folk-tale, but, unlike these, they grow always less interesting as they
get farther from their cradle. Our opportunity in Ireland is not that
our playwrights have more talent, it is possible that they have less
than the workers in an old tradition, but that the necessity of putting
a life that has not hitherto been dramatised into their plays excludes
all these types which have had their origin in a different social order.
An audience with National feeling is alive, at the worst it is alive
enough to quarrel with. One man came up from the scene of Lady
Gregory’s _Kincora_ at Killaloe that he might see her play, and having
applauded loudly, and even cheered for the Dalcassians, became silent
and troubled when Brian took Gormleith for his wife. ‘It is a great
pity,’ he said to a man next to him, ‘that he didn’t marry a quiet
girl from his own district.’ Some have quarrelled with me because I
did not take some glorious moment of Cuchulain’s life for my play, and
not the killing of his son, and all our playwrights have been attacked
for choosing bad characters instead of good, and called slanderers of
their country. In so far as these attacks come from National feeling,
that is to say, out of an interest or an affection for the life of this
country now and in past times, as did the countryman’s trouble about
Gormleith, they are in the long run the greatest help to a dramatist,
for they give him something to startle or to delight. Every writer has
had to face them where his work has aroused a genuine interest. The
Germans at the beginning of the nineteenth century preferred Schiller
to Goethe, and thought him the greater writer, because he put nobler
characters into his books; and when Chaucer met Eros walking in the
month of May, that testy god complains that though he had ‘sixty
bookkes olde and newe,’ and all full of stories of women and the life
they led, and though for every bad woman there are a hundred good, he
has chosen to write only of the bad ones. He complains that Chaucer
by his _Troilus_ and his _Romaunt of the Rose_ has brought love and
women to discredit. It is the same in painting as in literature, for
when a new painter arises men cry out, even when he is a painter of
the beautiful like Rossetti, that he has chosen the exaggerated or the
ugly or the unhealthy, forgetting that it is the business of art and
of letters to change the values and to mint the coinage. Without this
outcry there is no movement of life in the arts, for it is the sign of
values not yet understood, of a coinage not yet mastered. Sometimes
the writer delights us, when we grow to understand him, with new forms
of virtue discovered in persons where one had not hitherto looked for
it, and sometimes, and this is more and more true of modern art, he
changes the values not by the persons he sets before one, who may be
mean enough, but by his way of looking at them, by the implications
that come from his own mind, by the tune they dance to as it were.
Eros, into whose mouth Chaucer, one doubts not, puts arguments that he
had heard from his readers and listeners, objected to Chaucer’s art in
the interests of pedantic mediæval moralising; the contemporaries of
Schiller commended him for reflecting vague romantic types from the
sentimental literature of his predecessors; and those who object to the
peasant as he is seen in the Abbey Theatre have their imaginations full
of what is least observant and most sentimental in the Irish novelists.
When I was a boy I spent many an afternoon with a village shoemaker who
was a great reader. I asked him once what Irish novels he liked, and
he told me there were none he could read, ‘They sentimentalised the
people,’ he said angrily; and it was against Kickham that he complained
most. ‘I want to see the people,’ he said, ‘shown up in their naked
hideousness.’ That is the peasant mind as I know it, delight in strong
sensations whether of beauty or of ugliness, in bare facts, and quite
without sentimentality. The sentimental mind is the bourgeois mind, and
it was this mind which came into Irish literature with Gerald Griffin
and later on with Kickham.
It is the mind of the town, and it is a delight to those only who have
seen life, and above all country life, with unobservant eyes, and
most of all to the Irish tourist, to the patriotic young Irishman who
goes to the country for a month’s holiday with his head full of vague
idealisms. It is not the art of Mr. Colum, born of the people, and
when at his best looking at the town and not the country with strange
eyes, nor the art of Mr. Synge spending weeks and months in remote
places talking Irish to fishers and islanders. I remember meeting,
about twenty years ago, a lad who had a little yacht at Kingstown.
Somebody was talking of the sea paintings of a great painter, Hook,
I think, and this made him very angry. No yachtsman believed in them
or thought them at all like the sea, he said. Indeed, he was always
hearing people praise pictures that were not a bit like the sea, and
thereupon he named certain of the greatest painters of water—men who
more than all others had spent their lives in observing the effects
of light upon cloud and wave. I met him again the other day, well
on in middle life, and though he is not even an Irishman, indignant
with Mr. Synge’s and Mr. Boyle’s[I] peasants. He knew the people, he
said, and neither he nor any other person that knew them could believe
that they were properly represented in _The Well of the Saints_ or
_The Building Fund_. Twenty years ago his imagination was under the
influence of popular pictures, but to-day it was under the conventional
idealisms which writers like Kickham and Griffin substitute for the
ever-varied life of the cottages, and that conventional idealism that
the contemporary English Theatre substitutes for all life whatsoever.
I saw _Caste_, the earliest play of the modern school, a few days ago,
and found there more obviously than I expected, for I am not much of
a theatre-goer, the English half of the mischief. Two of the minor
persons had a certain amount of superficial characterization, as if
out of the halfpenny comic papers; but the central persons, the man
and woman that created the dramatic excitement, such as it was, had
not characters of any kind, being vague ideals, perfection as it is
imagined by a common-place mind. The audience could give them its
sympathy without the labour that comes from awakening knowledge. If the
dramatist had put any man and woman of his acquaintance that seemed
to him nearest perfection into his play, he would have had to make it
a study, among other things, of the little petty faults and perverted
desires that come out of the nature or its surroundings. He would have
troubled that admiring audience by making a self-indulgent sympathy
more difficult. He might have even seemed, like Ibsen or the early
Christians, an enemy of the human race. We have gone down to the roots,
and we have made up our minds upon one thing quite definitely—that
in no play that professes to picture life in its daily aspects shall
we admit these white phantoms. We can do this, not because we have
any special talent, but because we are dealing with a life which has
for all practical purposes never been set upon the stage before. The
conventional types of the novelists do not pervert our imagination,
for they are built, as it were, into another form, and no man who has
chosen for himself a sound method of drama, whether it be the drama of
character or of crisis, can use them. The Gaelic League and _Cumann
na nGaedheal_ play does indeed show the influence of the novelists;
but the typical Gaelic League play is essentially narrative and not
dramatic. Every artist necessarily imitates those who have worked in
the same form before him, and when the preoccupation has been with the
same life he almost always, consciously or unconsciously, borrows
more than the form, and it is this very borrowing—affecting thought,
language, all the vehicles of expression—which brings about the most of
what we call decadence.
After all, if our plays are slanders upon their country; if to
represent upon the stage a hard old man like Cosgar, or a rapacious old
man like Shan, or a faithless wife like Nora Burke, or to select from
history treacherous Gormleith for a theme, is to represent this nation
at something less than its full moral worth; if every play played in
the Abbey Theatre now and in times to come be something of a slander,
is anybody a penny the worse? Some ancient or mediæval races did not
think so. Jusserand describes the French conquerors of mediæval England
as already imagining themselves in their literature, as they have done
to this day, as a great deal worse than they are, and the English
imagining themselves a great deal better. The greater portion of the
_Divine Comedy_ is a catalogue of the sins of Italy, and Boccaccio
became immortal because he exaggerated with an unceasing playful wit
the vices of his countryside. The Greeks chose for the themes of their
serious literature a few great crimes, and Corneille, in his article on
the theory of the drama, shows why the greatness and notoriety of these
crimes is necessary to tragic drama. The public life of Athens found
its chief celebration in the monstrous caricature of Aristophanes, and
the Greek nation was so proud, so free from morbid sensitiveness, that
it invited the foreign ambassadors to the spectacle. And I answer to
those who say that Ireland cannot afford this freedom because of her
political circumstances, that if Ireland cannot afford it, Ireland
cannot have a literature. Literature has never been the work of slaves,
and Ireland must learn to say—
‘Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage.’