of necessity from an imaginative delight in energetic characters and
extreme types, enlarges the energy of a people by the spectacle of
energy. A nation is injured by the picking out of a single type and
setting that into print or upon the stage as a type of the whole
nation. Ireland suffered in this way from that single whisky-drinking,
humorous type which seemed for a time the accepted type of all. The
Englishwoman is, no doubt, injured in the same way in the minds of
various Continental nations by a habit of caricaturing all Englishwomen
as having big teeth. But neither nation can be injured by imaginative
writers selecting types that please their fancy. They will never
impose a general type on the public mind, for genius differs from
the newspapers in this, that the greater and more confident it is,
the more is its delight in varieties and species. If Ireland were at
this moment, through a misunderstanding terror of the stage Irishman,
to deprive her writers of freedom, to make their imaginations timid,
she would lower her dignity in her own eyes and in the eyes of every
intellectual nation. That old caricature did her very little harm in
the long run, perhaps a few car-drivers have copied it in their lives,
while the mind of the country remained untroubled; but the loss of
imaginative freedom and daring would turn us into old women. In the
long run, it is the great writer of a nation that becomes its image in
the minds of posterity, and even though he represent no man of worth
in his art, the worth of his own mind becomes the inheritance of his
people. He takes nothing away that he does not give back in greater
volume.
If Ireland had not lost the Gaelic she never would have had this
sensitiveness as of a _parvenu_ when presented at Court for the first
time, or of a nigger newspaper. When Ireland had the confidence of
her own antiquity, her writers praised and blamed according to their
fancy, and even as throughout all mediæval Europe, they laughed when
they had a mind to at the most respected persons, at the sanctities
of Church and State. The story of _The Shadow of the Glen_, found by
Mr. Synge in Gaelic-speaking Aran, and by Mr. Curtain in Munster; the
Song of _The Red-haired Man’s Wife_, sung in all Gaelic Ireland; _The
Midnight Court of MacGiolla Meidhre_; _The Vision of MacCoinglinne_;
the old romancers, with their Bricriu and their Conan, laughed and sang
as fearlessly as Chaucer or Villon or Cervantes. It seemed almost as if
those old writers murmured to themselves: ‘If we but keep our courage
let all the virtues perish, for we can make them over again; but if
that be gone, all is gone.’ I remember when I was an art student at the
Metropolitan School of Art a good many years ago, saying to Mr. Hughes
the sculptor, as we looked at the work of our fellow-students, ‘Every
student here that is doing better work than another is doing it because
he has a more intrepid imagination; one has only to look at the line of
a drawing to see that’; and he said that was his own thought also. All
good art is extravagant, vehement, impetuous, shaking the dust of time
from its feet, as it were, and beating against the walls of the world.
If a sincere religious artist were to arise in Ireland in our day,
and were to paint the Holy Family, let us say, he would meet with
the same opposition that sincere dramatists are meeting with to-day.
The bourgeois mind is never sincere in the arts, and one finds in
Irish chapels, above all in Irish convents, the religious art that
it understands. A Connaught convent a little time ago refused a fine
design for stained glass, because of the personal life in the faces
and in the attitudes, which seemed to them ugly, perhaps even impious.
They sent to the designer an insipid German chromo-lithograph, full
of faces without expression or dignity, and gestures without personal
distinction, and the designer, too anxious for success to reject any
order, has carried out this ignoble design in glass of beautiful
colour and quality. Let us suppose that Meister Stefan were to paint
in Ireland to-day that exquisite Madonna of his, with her lattice of
roses; a great deal that is said of our plays would be said of that
picture. Why select for his model a little girl selling newspapers in
the streets, why slander with that miserable little body the Mother of
God? He could only answer, as the imaginative artist always answers,
‘That is the way I have seen her in my mind, and what I have made of
her is very living.’ All art is founded upon personal vision, and the
greater the art the more surprising the vision; and all bad art is
founded upon impersonal types and images, accepted by average men and
women out of imaginative poverty and timidity, or the exhaustion that
comes from labour.
Nobody can force a movement of any kind to take any prearranged pattern
to any very great extent; one can, perhaps, modify it a little, and
that is all. When one says that it is going to develop in a certain
way, one means that one sees, or imagines that one sees, certain
energies which left to themselves are bound to give it a certain form.
Writing in _Samhain_ some years ago, I said that our plays would be of
two kinds, plays of peasant life and plays of a romantic and heroic
life, such as one finds in the folk-tales. To-day I can see other
forces, and can foretell, I think, the form of technique that will
arise. About fifty years ago, perhaps not so many, the playwrights
of every country in the world became persuaded that their plays must
reflect the surface of life; and the author of _Caste_, for instance,
made a reputation by putting what seemed to be average common life and
average common speech for the first time upon the stage in England,
and by substituting real loaves of bread and real cups of tea for
imaginary ones. He was not a very clever nor a very well-educated
man, and he made his revolution superficially; but in other countries
men of intellect and knowledge created that intellectual drama of
real life, of which Ibsen’s later plays are the ripened fruit. This
change coincided with the substitution of science for religion in the
conduct of life, and is, I believe, as temporary, for the practice of
twenty centuries will surely take the sway in the end. A rhetorician
in that novel of Petronius, which satirises, or perhaps one should say
celebrates, Roman decadence, complains that the young people of his
day are made blockheads by learning old romantic tales in the schools,
instead of what belongs to common life. And yet is it not the romantic
tale, the extravagant and ungovernable dream which comes out of youth;
and is not that desire for what belongs to common life, whether it
comes from Rome or Greece or England, the sign of fading fires, of
ebbing imaginative desire? In the arts I am quite certain that it is
a substitution of apparent for real truth. Mr. George Moore has a
very vivid character; he is precisely one of those whose characters
can be represented most easily upon the stage. Let us suppose that
some dramatist had made even him the centre of a play in which the
moderation of common life was carefully preserved, how very little he
could give us of that headlong intrepid man, as we know him, whether
through long personal knowledge or through his many books. The more
carefully the play reflected the surface of life the more would the
elements be limited to those that naturally display themselves during
so many minutes of our ordinary affairs. It is only by extravagance,
by an emphasis far greater than that of life as we observe it, that
we can crowd into a few minutes the knowledge of years. Shakespeare
or Sophocles can so quicken, as it were, the circles of the clock, so
heighten the expression of life, that many years can unfold themselves
in a few minutes, and it is always Shakespeare or Sophocles, and not
Ibsen, that makes us say, ‘How true, how often I have felt as that man
feels’; or ‘How intimately I have come to know those people on the
stage.’ There is a certain school of painters that has discovered that
it is necessary in the representation of light to put little touches of
pure colour side by side. When you went up close to that big picture
of the Alps by Segantini, in Mr. Lane’s Loan Exhibition a year ago,
you found that the grass seeds, which looked brown enough from the
other side of the room, were full of pure scarlet colour. If you copy
nature’s moderation of colour you do not imitate her, for you have only
white paint and she has light. If you wish to represent character or
passion upon the stage, as it is known to the friends, let us say, of
your principal persons, you must be excessive, extravagant, fantastic
even, in expression; and you must be this, more extravagantly, more
excessively, more fantastically than ever, if you wish to show
character and passion as they would be known to the principal person of
your play in the depths of his own mind. The greatest art symbolises
not those things that we have observed so much as those things that
we have experienced, and when the imaginary saint or lover or hero
moves us most deeply, it is the moment when he awakens within us for
an instant our own heroism, our own sanctity, our own desire. We
possess these things—the greatest of men not more than Seaghan the
Fool—not at all moderately, but to an infinite extent, and though we
control or ignore them, we know that the moralists speak true when they
compare them to angels or to devils, or to beasts of prey. How can any
dramatic art, moderate in expression, be a true image of hell or heaven
or the wilderness, or do anything but create those faint histories that
but touch our curiosity, those groups of persons that never follow us
into our intimate life, where Odysseus and Don Quixote and Hamlet are
with us always?
The scientific movement is ebbing a little everywhere, and here in
Ireland it has never been in flood at all. And I am certain that
everywhere literature will return once more to its old extravagant
fantastical expression, for in literature, unlike science, there are
no discoveries, and it is always the old that returns. Everything in
Ireland urges us to this return, and it may be that we shall be the
first to recover after the fifty years of mistake.
The antagonism of imaginative writing in Ireland is not a habit of
scientific observation but our interest in matters of opinion. A
misgoverned country seeking a remedy by agitation puts an especial
value upon opinion, and even those who are not conscious of any
interest in the country are influenced by the general habit. All fine
literature is the disinterested contemplation or expression of life,
but hardly any Irish writer can liberate his mind sufficiently from
questions of practical reform for this contemplation. Art for art’s
sake, as he understands it, whether it be the art of the _Ode to a
Grecian Urn_ or of the imaginer of Falstaff, seems to him a neglect
of public duty. It is as though the telegraph-boys botanised among
the hedges with the undelivered envelopes in their pockets; one must
calculate the effect of one’s words before one writes them, who they
are to excite and to what end. We all write if we follow the habit of
the country not for our own delight but for the improvement of our
neighbours, and this is not only true of such obviously propagandist
work as _The Spirit of the Nation_ or a Gaelic League play, but of
the work of writers who seemed to have escaped from every national
influence, like Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. George Moore, or even Mr. Oscar
Wilde. They never keep their head for very long out of the flood of
opinion. Mr. Bernard Shaw, the one brilliant writer of comedy in
England to-day, makes these comedies something less than life by never
forgetting that he is a reformer, and Mr. Wilde could hardly finish an
act of a play without denouncing the British public; and Mr. Moore—God
bless the hearers!—has not for ten years now been able to keep himself
from the praise or blame of the Church of his fathers. Goethe, whose
mind was more busy with philosophy than any modern poet, has said, ‘The
poet needs all philosophy, but he must keep it out of his work.’ One
remembers Dante, and wishes that Goethe had left some commentary upon
that saying, some definition of philosophy perhaps, but one cannot
be less than certain that the poet, though it may be well for him to
have right opinions, above all if his country be at death’s door, must
keep all opinion that he holds to merely because he thinks it right,
out of his poetry, if it is to be poetry at all. At the enquiry which
preceded the granting of a patent to the Abbey Theatre I was asked if
_Cathleen ni Houlihan_ was not written to affect opinion. Certainly
it was not. I had a dream one night which gave me a story, and I
had certain emotions about this country, and I gave those emotions
expression for my own pleasure. If I had written to convince others I
would have asked myself, not ‘Is that exactly what I think and feel?’
but ‘How would that strike so-and-so? How will they think and feel when
they have read it?’ And all would be oratorical and insincere. We only
understand our own minds, and the things that are striving to utter
themselves through our minds, and we move others, not because we have
understood or thought about them at all, but because all life has the
same root. Coventry Patmore has said, ‘The end of art is peace,’ and
the following of art is little different from the following of religion
in the intense preoccupation that it demands. Somebody has said, ‘God
asks nothing of the highest soul except attention’; and so necessary
is attention to mastery in any art, that there are moments when one
thinks that nothing else is necessary, and nothing else so difficult.
The religious life has created for itself monasteries and convents
where men and women may forget in prayer and contemplation everything
that seems necessary to the most useful and busy citizens of their
towns and villages, and one imagines that even in the monastery and
the convent there are passing things, the twitter of a sparrow in the
window, the memory of some old quarrel, things lighter than air, that
keep the soul from its joy. How many of those old religious sayings can
one not apply to the life of art? ‘The Holy Spirit,’ wrote S. Thomas à
Kempis, ‘has liberated me from a multitude of opinions.’ When one sets
out to cast into some mould so much of life merely for life’s sake,
one is tempted at every moment to twist it from its eternal shape to
help some friend or harm some enemy. Alas, all men, we in Ireland more
than others, are fighters, and it is a hard law that compels us to cast
away our swords when we enter the house of the Muses, as men cast them
away at the doors of the banqueting-hall at Tara. A weekly paper in
reviewing last year’s _Samhain_, convinced itself, or at any rate its
readers—for that is the heart of the business in propaganda—that I only
began to say these things a few months ago under I know not what alien
influence; and yet I seem to have been saying them all my life. I took
up an anthology of Irish verse that I edited some ten years ago, and I
found them there, and I think they were a chief part of an old fight
over the policy of the _New Irish Library_. Till they are accepted by
writers and readers in this country it will never have a literature, it
will never escape from the election rhyme and the pamphlet. So long as
I have any control over the National Theatre Society it will be carried
on in this spirit, call it art for art’s sake if you will; and no plays
will be produced at it which were written, not for the sake of a good
story or fine verses or some revelation of character, but to please
those friends of ours who are ever urging us to attack the priests or
the English, or wanting us to put our imagination into handcuffs that
we may be sure of never seeming to do one or the other.
I have had very little to say this year in _Samhain_, and I have said
it badly. When I wrote _Ideas of Good and Evil_ and _Celtic Twilight_,
I wrote everything very slowly and a great many times over. A few
years ago, however, my eyesight got so bad that I had to dictate the
first drafts of everything, and then rewrite these drafts several
times. I did the last _Samhain_ this way, dictating all the thoughts
in a few days, and rewriting them in two or three weeks; but this
time I am letting the first draft remain with all its carelessness of
phrase and rhythm. I am busy with a practical project which needs the
saying of many things from time to time, and it is better to say them
carelessly and harshly than to take time from my poetry. One casts
something away every year, and I shall, I think, have to cast away the
hope of ever having a prose style that amounts to anything. After all,
dictation gives one a certain vitality as of vehement speech.
1906
LITERATURE AND THE LIVING VOICE.[J]
I
One Sunday, in summer, a few years ago, I went to the little village
of Killeenan, that is not many miles from Galway, to do honour to the
memory of Raftery, a Gaelic poet who died a little before the famine.
A headstone had been put over his grave in the half-ruined churchyard,
and a priest had come to bless it, and many country people to listen to
his poems. After the shawled and frieze-coated people had knelt down
and prayed for the repose of his soul, they gathered about a little
wooden platform that had been put up in a field. I do not remember
whether Raftery’s poem about himself was one of those they listened
to, but certainly it was in the thoughts of many, and it was the
image reflected in that poem that had drawn some of them from distant
villages.
I am Raftery the poet,
Full of hope and love;
With eyes without light;
With gentleness without misery.
Going west on my journey
With the light of my heart;
Weak and tired
To the end of my road.
I am now
And my back to a wall,
Playing music
To empty pockets.
Some few there remembered him, and one old man came out among the
reciters to tell of the burying, where he himself, a young boy at the
time, had carried a candle.
The verses of other Gaelic poets were sung or recited too, and,
although certainly not often fine poetry, they had its spirit, its
_naïveté_—that is to say, its way of looking at the world as if it were
but an hour old—its seriousness even in laughter, its personal rhythm.
A few days after I was in the town of Galway, and saw there, as I had
often seen in other country towns, some young men marching down the
middle of a street singing an already outworn London music-hall song,
that filled the memory, long after they had gone by, with a rhythm as
pronounced and as impersonal as the noise of a machine. In the shop
windows there were, I knew, the signs of a life very unlike that I had
seen at Killeenan; halfpenny comic papers and story papers, sixpenny
reprints of popular novels, and, with the exception of a dusty Dumas or
Scott strayed thither, one knew not how, and one or two little books of
Irish ballads, nothing that one calls literature, nothing that would
interest the few thousands who alone out of many millions have what
we call culture. A few miles had divided the sixteenth century, with
its equality of culture, of good taste, from the twentieth, where if a
man has fine taste he has either been born to leisure and opportunity
or has in him an energy that is genius. One saw the difference in the
clothes of the people of the town and of the village, for, as the
Emerald tablet says, outward and inner things answer to one another.
The village men wore their bawneens, their white flannel jackets; they
had clothes that had a little memory of clothes that had once been
adapted to their calling by centuries of continual slight changes. They
were sometimes well dressed, for they suggested nothing but themselves
and wore little that had suited another better. But in the town nobody
was well dressed; for in modern life, only a few people—some few
thousands—set the fashion, and set it to please themselves and to fit
their lives, and as for the rest they must go shabby—the ploughman in
clothes cut for a life of leisure, but made of shoddy, and the tramp
in the ploughman’s cast-off clothes, and the scarecrow in the tramp’s
battered coat and broken hat.
II