No More Learning

It had run for
five hundred nights in London, and been called by all the newspapers
'a pure and innocent play,' 'a welcome relief,' and so on. In it
occurred this incident: The typical scapegrace hero of the stage, a
young soldier, who is in love with the wife of another, goes away for
a couple of years, and when he returns finds that he is in love with
a marriageable girl. His mistress, who has awaited his return with
what is represented as faithful love, sends him a letter of welcome,
and because he has grown virtuous of a sudden he returns it unopened,
and with so careless a scorn that the husband intercepts it; and the
dramatist approves this manner of crying off with an old love, and
rings down the curtain on his marriage bells. Men who would turn such a
man out of a club bring their wives and daughters to look at him with
admiration upon the stage, so demoralizing is a drama that has no
intellectual tradition behind it. I could not endure it, and went out
into the street and waited there until the end of the play, when I came
in again to find the friends I had brought to hear it, but had I been
accustomed to the commercial theatre I would not even have known that
anything strange had happened upon the stage. If a man of intellect had
written of such an incident he would have made his audience feel for
the mistress that sympathy one feels for all that have suffered insult,
and for that young man an ironical emotion that might have marred
the marriage bells, and who knows what the curate and the journalist
would have said of him? Even Ireland would have cried out: Catholic
Ireland that should remember the gracious tolerance of the Church when
all nations were its children, and how Wolfram of Eisenbach sang from
castle to castle of the courtesy of Parzival, the good husband, and
of Gawain, the light lover, in that very Thuringia where a generation
later the lap of St. Elizabeth was full with roses. A Connaught Bishop
told his people a while since that they 'should never read stories
about the degrading passion of love,' and one can only suppose that
being ignorant of a chief glory of his Church, he has never understood
that this new puritanism is but an English cuckoo.

AN IRISH NATIONAL THEATRE.

[The performance of Mr. Synge's _Shadow of the Glen_
started a quarrel with the extreme national party, and
the following paragraphs are from letters written in
the play's defence. The organ of the party was at the
time _The United Irishman_ (now _Sinn Fein_), but the
first severe attack began in _The Independent_. _The
United Irishman_, however, took up the quarrel, and
from that on has attacked almost every play produced
at our theatre, and the suspicion it managed to arouse
among the political clubs against Mr. Synge especially
led a few years later to the organised attempt to drive
_The Playboy of the Western World_ from the stage.
]

When we were all fighting about the selection of books for the New
Irish Library some ten years ago, we had to discuss the question,
What is National Poetry? In those days a patriotic young man would
have thought but poorly of himself if he did not believe that _The
Spirit of the Nation_ was great lyric poetry, and a much finer kind
of poetry than Shelley's _Ode to the West Wind_, or Keats's _Ode to a
Grecian Urn_. When two or three of us denied this, we were told that we
had effeminate tastes or that we were putting Ireland in a bad light
before her enemies. If one said that _The Spirit of the Nation_ was but
salutary rhetoric, England might overhear us and take up the cry. We
said it, and who will say that Irish literature has not a greater name
in the world to-day than it had ten years ago?

To-day there is another question that we must make up our minds about,
and an even more pressing one, What is a National Theatre? A man may
write a book of lyrics if he have but a friend or two that will care
for them, but he cannot write a good play if there are not audiences
to listen to it. If we think that a national play must be as near as
possible a page out of _The Spirit of the Nation_ put into dramatic
form, and mean to go on thinking it to the end, then we may be sure
that this generation will not see the rise in Ireland of a theatre that
will reflect the life of Ireland as the Scandinavian theatre reflects
the Scandinavian life. The brazen head has an unexpected way of falling
to pieces. We have a company of admirable and disinterested players,
and the next few months will, in all likelihood, decide whether a
great work for this country is to be accomplished. The poetry of Young
Ireland, when it was an attempt to change or strengthen opinion, was
rhetoric; but it became poetry when patriotism was transformed into
a personal emotion by the events of life, as in that lamentation
written by Doheny on his keeping among the hills. Literature is always
personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience,
and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of
others. A community that is opinion-ridden, even when those opinions
are in themselves noble, is likely to put its creative minds into some
sort of a prison. If creative minds preoccupy themselves with incidents
from the political history of Ireland, so much the better, but we
must not enforce them to select those incidents. If in the sincere
working-out of their plot, they alight on a moral that is obviously
and directly serviceable to the National cause, so much the better,
but we must not force that moral upon them. I am a Nationalist, and
certain of my intimate friends have made Irish politics the business
of their lives, and this made certain thoughts habitual with me, and
an accident made these thoughts take fire in such a way that I could
give them dramatic expression.