another noticed these things, and some have wondered why the world has
for some three or four centuries sacrificed so much, and with what
seems a growing recklessness, to create an intellectual aristocracy,
a leisured class—to set apart, and above all others, a number of men
and women who are not very well pleased with one another or the world
they have to live in. It is some comparison, like this that I have
made, which has been the origin, as I think, of most attempts to revive
some old language in which the general business of the world is no
longer transacted. The Provençal movement, the Welsh, the Czech, have
all, I think, been attempting, when we examine them to the heart, to
restore what is called a more picturesque way of life, that is to say,
a way of life in which the common man has some share in imaginative
art. That this is the decisive element in the attempt to revive and to
preserve the Irish language I am very certain. A language enthusiast
does not put it that way to himself; he says, rather, ‘If I can make
the people talk Irish again they will be the less English’; but if you
talk to him till you have hunted the words into their burrow you will
find that the word ‘Ireland’ means to him a form of life delightful to
his imagination, and that the word ‘England’ suggests to him a cold,
joyless, irreligious and ugly life. The life of the villages, with
its songs, its dances and its pious greetings, its conversations full
of vivid images shaped hardly more by life itself than by innumerable
forgotten poets, all that life of good nature and improvisation grows
more noble as he meditates upon it, for it mingles with the middle ages
until he no longer can see it as it is but as it was, when it ran, as
it were, into a point of fire in the courtliness of kings’ houses. He
hardly knows whether what stirred him yesterday was that old fiddler,
playing an almost-forgotten music on a fiddle mended with twine, or a
sudden thought of some king that was of the blood of that old man, some
O’Loughlin or O’Byrne, listening amid his soldiers, he and they at
the one table, they too, lucky, bright-eyed, while the minstrel sang
of angry Cuchulain, or of him men called ‘Golden salmon of the sea,
clean hawk of the air.’ It will not please him, however, if you tell
him that he is fighting the modern world, which he calls ‘England,’ as
Mistral and his fellows called it Paris, and that he will need more
than language if he is to make the monster turn up its white belly.
And yet the difference between what the word England means and all
that the word Gaelic suggests is greater than any that could have been
before the imagination of Mistral. Ireland, her imagination at its noon
before the birth of Chaucer, has created the most beautiful literature
of a whole people that has been anywhere since Greece and Rome, while
English literature, the greatest of all literatures but that of Greece,
is yet the literature of a few. Nothing of it but a handful of ballads
about Robin Hood has come from the folk or belongs to them rightly, for
the good English writers, with a few exceptions that seem accidental,
have written for a small cultivated class; and is not this the reason?
Irish poetry and Irish stories were made to be spoken or sung, while
English literature, alone of great literatures, because the newest of
them all, has all but completely shaped itself in the printing-press.
In Ireland to-day the old world that sang and listened is, it may be
for the last time in Europe, face to face with the world that reads and
writes, and their antagonism is always present under some name or other
in Irish imagination and intellect. I myself cannot be convinced that
the printing-press will be always victor, for change is inconceivably
swift, and when it begins—well, as the proverb has it, everything comes
in at the hole. The world soon tires of its toys, and our exaggerated
love of print and paper seems to me to come out of passing conditions
and to be no more a part of the final constitution of things than the
craving of a woman in child-bed for green apples. When one takes a book
into the corner, one surrenders so much life for one’s knowledge, so
much, I mean, of that normal activity that gives one life and strength,
one lays away one’s own handiwork and turns from one’s friend, and
if the book is good one is at some pains to press all the little
wanderings and tumults of the mind into silence and quiet. If the
reader be poor, if he has worked all day at the plough or the desk,
he will hardly have strength enough for any but a meretricious book;
nor is it only when the book is on the knees that one’s life must be
given for it. For a good and sincere book needs the preparation of the
peculiar studies and reveries that prepare for good taste, and make it
easier for the mind to find pleasure in a new landscape; and all these
reveries and studies have need of so much time and thought that it is
almost certain a man cannot be a successful doctor, or engineer, or
Cabinet Minister, and have a culture good enough to escape the mockery
of the ragged art student who comes of an evening sometimes to borrow
a half-sovereign. The old culture came to a man at his work; it was
not at the expense of life, but an exaltation of life itself; it came
in at the eyes as some civic ceremony sailed along the streets, or as
one arrayed oneself before the looking-glass, or it came in at the ears
in a song as one bent over the plough or the anvil, or at that great
table where rich and poor sat down together and heard the minstrel
bidding them pass around the wine-cup and say a prayer for Gawain dead.
Certainly it came without a price; it did not take one from one’s
friends and one’s handiwork; but it was like a good woman who gives all
for love and is never jealous and is ready to do all the talking when
we are tired.
How the old is to come again, how the other side of the penny is to
come up, how the spit is to turn the other side of the meat to the
fire, I do not know, but that the time will come I am certain; when one
kind of desire has been satisfied for a long time it becomes sleepy,
and other kinds, long quiet, after making a noise begin to order life.
Of the many things, desires or powers or instruments, that are to
change the world, the artist is fitted to understand but two or three,
and the less he troubles himself about the complexity that is outside
his craft, the more will he find it all within his craft, and the more
dexterous will his hand and his thought become. I am trying to see
nothing in the world but the arts, and nothing in this change—which one
cannot prove but only foretell—but the share my own art will have in it.
III
One thing is entirely certain. Wherever the old imaginative life
lingers it must be stirred into life, and kept alive, and in Ireland
this is the work, it may be, of the Gaelic movement. But the nineteenth
century, with its moral zeal, its insistence upon irrelevant interests,
having passed over, the artist can admit that he cares about nothing
that does not give him a new subject or a new technique. Propaganda
would be for him a dissipation, but he may compare his art, if he has a
mind to, with the arts that belonged to a whole people, and discover,
not how to imitate the external form of an epic or a folk-song, but
how to express in some equivalent form whatever in the thoughts of his
own age seem, as it were, to press into the future. The most obvious
difference is that when literature belonged to a whole people, its
three great forms, narrative, lyrical and dramatic, found their way to
men’s minds without the mediation of print and paper. That narrative
poetry may find its minstrels again, and lyrical poetry adequate
singers, and dramatic poetry adequate players, he must spend much of
his time with these three lost arts, and the more technical is his
interest the better. When I first began working in Ireland at what some
newspaper has called the Celtic Renaissance, I saw that we had still
even in English a sufficient audience for song and speech. Certain
of our young men and women, too restless and sociable to be readers,
had amongst them an interest in Irish legend and history, and years
of imaginative politics had kept them from forgetting, as most modern
people have, how to listen to serious words. I always saw that some
kind of theatre would be a natural centre for a tradition of feeling
and thought, but that it must—and this was its chief opportunity—appeal
to the interest appealed to by lively conversation or by oratory.
In other words, that it must be made for young people who were
sufficiently ignorant to refuse a pound of flesh even though the Nine
Worthies offered their wisdom in return. They are not, perhaps, very
numerous, for they do not include the thousands of conquered spirits
who in Dublin, as elsewhere, go to see _The Girl from Kay’s_, or when
Mr. Tree is upon tour, _The Girl from Prospero’s Island_; and the
peasant in Ireland, as elsewhere, has not taken to the theatre, and
can, I think, be moved through Gaelic only.
If one could get them, I thought, one could draw to oneself the
apathetic people who are in every country, and people who don’t know
what they like till somebody tells them. Now, a friend has given me
that theatre. It is not very big, but it is quite big enough to seat
those few thousands and their friends in a seven days’ run of a new
play; and I have begun my real business. I have to find once again
singers, minstrels, and players who love words more than any other
thing under heaven, for without fine words there is no literature.
IV
I will say but a little of dramatic technique, as I would have it in
this theatre of speech, of romance, of extravagance, for I have written
of all that so many times. In every art, when it seems to one that it
has need of a renewing of life, one goes backwards till one lights upon
a time when it was nearer to human life and instinct, before it had
gathered about it so many mechanical specialisations and traditions.
One examines that earlier condition and thinks out its principles of
life, and one may be able to separate accidental from vital things.
William Morris, for instance, studied the earliest printing, the founts
of type that were made when men saw their craft with eyes that were
still new, and with leisure, and without the restraints of commerce
and custom. And then he made a type that was really new, that had
the quality of his own mind about it, though it reminds one of its
ancestry, of its high breeding as it were. Coleridge and Wordsworth
were influenced by the publication of Percy’s _Reliques_ to the making
of a simplicity altogether unlike that of old ballad-writers. Rossetti
went to early Italian painting, to Holy Families and choirs of angels,
that he might learn how to express an emotion that had its roots in
sexual desire and in the delight of his generation in fine clothes and
in beautiful rooms. Nor is it otherwise with the reformers of churches
and of the social order, for reform must justify itself by a return in
feeling to something that our fathers have told us in the old time.
So it is with us. Inspired by players who played before a figured
curtain, we have made scenery, indeed, but scenery that is little more
than a suggestion—a pattern with recurring boughs and leaves of gold
for a wood, a great green curtain with a red stencil upon it to carry
the eye upward for a palace, and so on. More important than these, we
have looked for the centre of our art where the players of the time of
Shakespeare and of Corneille found theirs, in speech, whether it be the
perfect mimicry of the conversation of two countrymen of the roads, or
that idealised speech poets have imagined for what we think but do not
say. Before men read, the ear and the tongue were subtle, and delighted
one another with the little tunes that were in words; every word would
have its own tune, though but one main note may have been marked
enough for us to name it. They loved language, and all literature was
then, whether in the mouth of minstrels, players, or singers, but the
perfection of an art that everybody practised, a flower out of the stem
of life. And language continually renewed itself in that perfection,
returning to daily life out of that finer leisure, strengthened and
sweetened as from a retreat ordered by religion. The ordinary dramatic
critic, when you tell him that a play, if it is to be of a great kind,
must have beautiful words, will answer that you have misunderstood
the nature of the stage and are asking of it what books should give.
Sometimes when some excellent man, a playgoer certainly and sometimes
a critic, has read me a passage out of some poet, I have been set
wondering what books of poetry can mean to the greater number of men.
If they are to read poetry at all, if they are to enjoy beautiful
rhythm, if they are to get from poetry anything but what it has in
common with prose, they must hear it spoken by men who have music in
their voices and a learned understanding of its sound. There is no poem
so great that a fine speaker cannot make it greater or that a bad ear
cannot make it nothing. All the arts when young and happy are but the
point of the spear whose handle is our daily life. When they grow old
and unhappy they perfect themselves away from life, and life, seeing
that they are sufficient to themselves, forgets them. The fruit of the
tree that was in Eden grows out of a flower full of scent, rounds and
ripens, until at last the little stem, that brought to it the sap out
of the tree, dries up and breaks, and the fruit rots upon the ground.
The theatre grows more elaborate, developing the player at the expense
of the poet, developing the scenery at the expense of the player,
always increasing in importance whatever has come to it out of the mere
mechanism of a building or the interests of a class, specialising more
and more, doing whatever is easiest rather than what is most noble,
and creating a class before the footlights as behind, who are stirred
to excitements that belong to it and not to life; until at last life,
which knows that a specialised energy is not herself, turns to other
things, content to leave it to weaklings and triflers, to those in
whose body there is the least quantity of herself.
V
But if we are to delight our three or four thousand young men and women
with a delight that will follow them into their own houses, and if we
are to add the countryman to their number, we shall need more than
the play, we shall need those other spoken arts. The player rose into
importance in the town, but the minstrel is of the country. We must
have narrative as well as dramatic poetry, and we are making room for
it in the theatre in the first instance, but in this also we must go
to an earlier time. Modern recitation is not, like modern theatrical
art, an over-elaboration of a true art, but an entire misunderstanding.
It has no tradition at all. It is an endeavour to do what can only be
done well by the player. It has no relation of its own to life. Some
young man in evening clothes will recite to you _The Dream of Eugene
Aram_, and it will be laughable, grotesque and a little vulgar.
Tragic emotions that need scenic illusion, a long preparation, a
gradual heightening of emotion, are thrust into the middle of our
common affairs. That they may be as extravagant, as little tempered by
anything ideal or distant as possible, he will break up the rhythm,
regarding neither the length of the lines nor the natural music of
the phrases, and distort the accent by every casual impulse. He will
gesticulate wildly, adapting his movements to the drama as if Eugene
Aram were in the room before us, and all the time we see a young man
in evening dress who has become unaccountably insane. Nothing that he
can do or say will make us forget that he is Mr. Robinson the bank
clerk, and that the toes of his boots turn upward. We have nothing to
learn here. We must go to the villages or we must go back hundreds of
years to Wolfram of Eisenbach and the castles of Thuringia. In this, as
in all other arts, one finds its law and its true purpose when one is
near the source. The minstrel never dramatised anybody but himself. It
was impossible, from the nature of the words the poet had put into his
mouth, or that he had made for himself, that he should speak as another
person. He will go no nearer to drama than we do in daily speech, and
he will not allow you for any long time to forget himself. Our own
Raftery will stop the tale to cry, ‘This is what I, Raftery, wrote down
in the book of the people’; or ‘I, myself, Raftery, went to bed without
supper that night.’ Or, if it is Wolfram, and the tale is of Gawain
or Parsival, he will tell the listening ladies that he sings of happy
love out of his own unhappy love, or he will interrupt the story of
a siege and its hardships to remember his own house, where there is
not enough food for the mice. He knows how to keep himself interesting
that his words may have weight—so many lines of narrative, and then a
phrase about himself and his emotions. The reciter cannot be a player,
for that is a different art; but he must be a messenger, and he should
be as interesting, as exciting, as are all that carry great news.
He comes from far off, and he speaks of far-off things with his own
peculiar animation, and instead of lessening the ideal and beautiful
elements of speech, he may, if he has a mind to, increase them. He may
speak to actual notes as a singer does if they are so simple that he
never loses the speaking-voice, and if the poem is long he must do so,
or his own voice will become weary and formless. His art is nearer to
pattern than that of the player. It is always allusion, never illusion;
for what he tells of, no matter how impassioned he may become, is
always distant, and for this reason he may permit himself every kind
of nobleness. In a short poem he may interrupt the narrative with a
burden, which the audience will soon learn to sing, and this burden,
because it is repeated and need not tell a story to a first hearing,
can have a more elaborate musical notation, can go nearer to ordinary
song. Gradually other devices will occur to him—effects of loudness
and softness, of increasing and decreasing speed, certain rhythmic
movements of his body, a score of forgotten things, for the art of
speech is lost, and when one begins at it every day is a discovery.
The reciter must be made exciting and wonderful in himself, apart from
what he has to tell, and that is more difficult than it was in the
middle ages. We are not mysterious to one another; we can come from
far off and yet be no better than our neighbours. We are no longer
like those Egyptian birds that flew out of Arabia, their claws full
of spices; nor can we, like an ancient or mediæval poet, throw into
our verses the emotions and events of our lives, or even dramatise, as
they could, the life of the minstrel into whose mouth we are to put our
words. I can think of nothing better than to borrow from the tellers
of old tales, who will often pretend to have been at the wedding of
the princess or afterwards ‘when they were throwing out children by
the basketful,’ and to give the story-teller definite fictitious
personality and find for him an appropriate costume. Many costumes and
persons come into my imagination. I imagine an old countryman upon the
stage of the theatre or in some little country court-house where a
Gaelic society is meeting, and I can hear him say that he is Raftery
or a brother, and that he has tramped through France and Spain and the
whole world. He has seen everything, and he has all country love tales
at his finger-tips. I can imagine, too—and now the story-teller is more
serious and more naked of country circumstance—a jester with black
cockscomb and black clothes. He has been in the faery hills; perhaps
he is the terrible _Amadan-na-Breena_ himself; or he has been so long
in the world that he can tell of ancient battles. It is not as good
as what we have lost, but we cannot hope to see in our time, except
by some rare accident, the minstrel who differs from his audience in
nothing but the exaltation of his mood, and who is yet as exciting and
as romantic in their eyes as were Raftery and Wolfram to their people.
It is perhaps nearly impossible to make recitation a living thing,
for there is no existing taste one can appeal to; but it should not
be hard here in Ireland to interest people in songs that are made for
the word’s sake and not for the music, or for that only in a secondary
degree. They are interested in such songs already, only the songs have
little subtilty of thought and of language. One does not find in them
that modern emotion which seems new because it has been brought so very
lately out of the cellar. At their best they are the songs of children
and of country people, eternally young for all their centuries, and
yet not even in old days, as one thinks, the art of kings’ houses. We
require a method of setting to music that will make it possible to
sing or to speak to notes a poem like Rossetti’s translation of _The
Ballad of Dead Ladies_ in such a fashion that no word shall have an
intonation or accentuation it could not have in passionate speech. It
must be set for the speaking-voice, like the songs that sailors make
up or remember, and a man at the far end of the room must be able to
take it down on a first hearing. An English musical paper said the
other day, in commenting on something I had written, ‘Owing to musical
necessities, vowels must be lengthened in singing to an extent which in
speech would be ludicrous if not absolutely impossible.’ I have but one
art, that of speech, and my feeling for music dissociated from speech
is very slight, and listening as I do to the words with the better part
of my attention, there is no modern song sung in the modern way that
is not to my taste ‘ludicrous’ and ‘impossible.’ I hear with older
ears than the musician, and the songs of country people and of sailors
delight me. I wonder why the musician is not content to set to music
some arrangement of meaningless liquid vowels, and thereby to make
his song like that of the birds; but I do not judge his art for any
purpose but my own.[K] It is worthless for my purpose certainly, and
it is one of the causes that are bringing about in modern countries
a degradation of language. I have to find men with more music than I
have, who will develop to a finer subtilty the singing of the cottage
and the forecastle, and develop it more on the side of speech than that
of music, until it has become intellectual and nervous enough to be the
vehicle of a Shelley or a Keats. For some purposes it will be necessary
to divine the lineaments of a still older art, and re-create the
regulated declamations that died out when music fell into its earliest
elaborations. Miss Farr has divined enough of this older art, of which
no fragment has come down to us—for even the music of _Aucassin and
Nicolette_, with its definite tune, its recurring pattern of sound, is
something more than declamation—to make the chorus of _Hippolytus_ and
of the _Trojan Women_, at the Court Theatre or the Lyric, intelligible
speech, even when several voices spoke together. She used very often
definite melodies of a very simple kind, but always when the thought
became intricate and the measure grave and slow, fell back upon
declamation regulated by notes. Her experiments have included almost
every kind of verse, and every possible elaboration of sound compatible
with the supremacy of the words. I do not think Homer is ever so
moving as when she recites him to a little tune played on a stringed
instrument not very unlike a lyre. She began at my suggestion with
songs in plays, for it was clearly an absurd thing that words necessary
to one’s understanding of the action, either because they explained
some character, or because they carried some emotion to its highest
intensity, should be less intelligible than the bustling and ruder
words of the dialogue. We have tried our art, since we first tried
it in a theatre, upon many kinds of audiences, and have found that
ordinary men and women take pleasure in it and sometimes tell one that
they never understood poetry before. It is, however, more difficult
to move those, fortunately for our purpose but a few, whose ears are
accustomed to the abstract emotion and elaboration of notes in modern
music.
VI
If we accomplish this great work, if we make it possible again for the
poet to express himself, not merely through words, but through the
voices of singers, of minstrels, of players, we shall certainly have
changed the substance and the manner of our poetry. Everyone who has
to interest his audience through the voice discovers that his success
depends upon the clear, simple and varied structure of his thought.
I have written a good many plays in verse and prose, and almost all
those plays I have rewritten after performance, sometimes again and
again, and every change that has succeeded has been an addition to the
masculine element, an increase of strength in the bony structure.
Modern literature, above all poetical literature, is monotonous in
its structure and effeminate in its continual insistence upon certain
moments of strained lyricism. William Morris, who did more than any
modern to recover mediæval art, did not in his _Earthly Paradise_
copy from Chaucer, from whom he copied so much that was _naïve_ and
beautiful, what seems to me essential in Chaucer’s art. He thought of
himself as writing for the reader, who could return to him again and
again when the chosen mood had come, and became monotonous, melancholy,
too continuously lyrical in his understanding of emotion and of life.
Had he accustomed himself to read out his poems upon those Sunday
evenings that he gave to Socialist speeches, and to gather an audience
of average men, precisely such an audience as I have often seen in
his house, he would have been forced to Chaucer’s variety, to his
delight in the height and depth, and would have found expression for
that humorous many-sided nature of his. I owe to him many truths, but
I would add to those truths the certainty that all the old writers,
the masculine writers of the world, wrote to be spoken or to be sung,
and in a later age to be read aloud, for hearers who had to understand
swiftly or not at all, and who gave up nothing of life to listen, but
sat, the day’s work over, friend by friend, lover by lover.
THE ARROW: 1906.[L]
THE SEASON’S WORK.
A character of the winter’s work will be the large number of romantic,
poetic and historical plays—that is to say, of plays which require a
convention for their performance; their speech, whether it be verse or
prose, being so heightened as to transcend that of any form of real
life. Our first two years of The Abbey Theatre have been expended
mostly on the perfecting of the Company in peasant comedy and tragedy.
Every national dramatic movement or theatre in countries like Bohemia
and Hungary, as in Elizabethan England, has arisen out of a study of
the common people, who preserve national characteristics more than any
other class, and out of an imaginative recreation of national history
or legend. The life of the drawing-room, the life represented in most
plays of the ordinary theatre of to-day, differs but little all over
the world, and has as little to do with the national spirit as the
architecture of, let us say, St. Stephen’s Green, or Queen’s Gate, or
of the Boulevards about the Arc de Triomphe.
As we wish our work to be full of the life of this country, our
stage-manager has almost always to train our actors from the beginning,
always so in the case of peasant plays, and this makes the building up
of a theatre like ours the work of years. We are now fairly satisfied
with the representation of peasant life, and we can afford to give
the greater part of our attention to other expressions of our art and
of our life. The romantic work and poetical work once reasonably
good, we can, if but the dramatist arrive, take up the life of our
drawing-rooms, and see if there is something characteristic there,
something which our nationality may enable us to express better than
others, and so create plays of that life and means to play them as
truthful as a play of Hauptmann’s or of Ibsen’s upon the German or
Scandinavian stage. I am not myself interested in this kind of work,
and do not believe it to be as important as contemporary critics think
it is, but a theatre such as we project should give a reasonably
complete expression to the imaginative interests of its country. In any
case it was easier, and therefore wiser, to begin where our art is most
unlike that of others, with the representation of country life.
It is possible to speak the universal truths of human nature whether
the speakers be peasants or wealthy men, for—
‘Love doth sing
As sweetly in a beggar as a king.’
So far as we have any model before us it is the national and municipal
theatre in various Continental towns, and, like the best of these, we
must have in our repertory masterpieces from every great school of
dramatic literature, and play them confidently, even though the public
be slow to like that old stern art, and perhaps a little proudly,
remembering that no other English-speaking theatre can be so catholic.
Certainly the weathercocks of our imagination will not turn those
painted eyes of theirs too long to the quarter of the Scandinavian
winds. If the wind blow long from the Mediterranean, the paint may peel
before we pray for a change in the weather.