No More Learning

1900.




THE THEATRE


I

I REMEMBER, some years ago, advising a distinguished, though too little
recognised, writer of poetical plays to write a play as unlike ordinary
plays as possible, that it might be judged with a fresh mind, and to
put it on the stage in some small suburban theatre, where a small
audience would pay its expenses. I said that he should follow it the
year after, at the same time of the year, with another play, and so
on from year to year; and that the people who read books, and do not
go to the theatre, would gradually find out about him. I suggested
that he should begin with a pastoral play, because nobody would expect
from a pastoral play the succession of nervous tremours which the
plays of commerce, like the novels of commerce, have substituted for
the purification that comes with pity and terror to the imagination
and intellect. He followed my advice in part, and had a small but
perfect success, filling his small theatre for twice the number of
performances he had announced; but instead of being content with the
praise of his equals, and waiting to win their praise another year,
he hired immediately a big London theatre, and put his pastoral play
and a new play before a meagre and unintelligent audience. I still
remember his pastoral play with delight, because, if not always of a
high excellence, it was always poetical; but I remember it at the small
theatre, where my pleasure was magnified by the pleasure of those about
me, and not at the big theatre, where it made me uncomfortable, as an
unwelcome guest always makes one uncomfortable.

Why should we thrust our works, which we have written with imaginative
sincerity and filled with spiritual desire, before those quite
excellent people who think that Rossetti's women are 'guys,' that
Rodin's women are 'ugly,' and that Ibsen is 'immoral,' and who only
want to be left at peace to enjoy the works so many clever men have
made especially to suit them? We must make a theatre for ourselves and
our friends, and for a few simple people who understand from sheer
simplicity what we understand from scholarship and thought. We have
planned the Irish Literary Theatre with this hospitable emotion, and,
that the right people may find out about us, we hope to act a play or
two in the spring of every year; and that the right people may escape
the stupefying memory of the theatre of commerce which clings even to
them, our plays will be for the most part remote, spiritual, and ideal.

A common opinion is that the poetic drama has come to an end, because
modern poets have no dramatic power; and Mr. Binyon seems to accept
this opinion when he says: 'It has been too often assumed that it is
the manager who bars the way to poetic plays. But it is much more
probable that the poets have failed the managers. If poets mean to
serve the stage, their dramas must he dramatic. ' I find it easier
to believe that audiences, who have learned, as I think, from the
life of crowded cities to live upon the surface of life, and actors
and managers, who study to please them, have changed, than that
imagination, which is the voice of what is eternal in man, has changed.
The arts are but one Art; and why should all intense painting and
all intense poetry have become not merely unintelligible but hateful
to the greater number of men and women, and intense drama move them
to pleasure?
The audiences of Sophocles and of Shakespeare and of
Calderon were not unlike the audiences I have heard listening in Irish
cabins to songs in Gaelic about 'an old poet telling his sins,' and
about 'the five young men who were drowned last year,' and about 'the
lovers that were drowned going to America,' or to some tale of Oisin
and his three hundred years in _Tir nan Oge_. Mr. Bridges' _Return of
Ulysses_, one of the most beautiful and, as I think, dramatic of modern
plays, might have some success in the Aran Islands, if the Gaelic
League would translate it into Gaelic, but I am quite certain that it
would have no success in the Strand.

Blake has said that all Art is a labour to bring again the Golden Age,
and all culture is certainly a labour to bring again the simplicity
of the first ages, with knowledge of good and evil added to it. The
drama has need of cities that it may find men in sufficient numbers,
and cities destroy the emotions to which it appeals, and therefore
the days of the drama are brief and come but seldom. It has one day
when the emotions of cities still remember the emotions of sailors and
husbandmen and shepherds and users of the spear and the bow; as the
houses and furniture and earthern vessels of cities, before the coming
of machinery, remember the rocks and the woods and the hillside;
and it has another day, now beginning, when thought and scholarship
discover their desire. In the first day, it is the Art of the people;
and in the second day, like the dramas acted of old times in the hidden
places of temples, it is the preparation of a Priesthood. It may be,
though the world is not old enough to show us any example, that this
Priesthood will spread their Religion everywhere, and make their Art
the Art of the people.

When the first day of the drama had passed by, actors found that an
always larger number of people were more easily moved through the eyes
than through the ears. The emotion that comes with the music of words
is exhausting, like all intellectual emotions, and few people like
exhausting emotions; and therefore actors began to speak as if they
were reading something out of the newspapers. They forgot the noble art
of oratory, and gave all their thought to the poor art of acting, that
is content with the sympathy of our nerves; until at last those who
love poetry found it better to read alone in their rooms what they had
once delighted to hear sitting friend by friend, lover by beloved. I
once asked Mr. William Morris if he had thought of writing a play, and
he answered that he had, but would not write one, because actors did
not know how to speak poetry with the half-chant men spoke it with in
old times. Mr. Swinburne's _Locrine_ was acted a month ago, and it was
not badly acted, but nobody could tell whether it was fit for the stage
or not, for not one rhythm, not one cry of passion, was spoken with a
musical emphasis, and verse spoken without a musical emphasis seems but
an artificial and cumbersome way of saying what might be said naturally
and simply in prose.

As audiences and actors changed, managers learned to substitute
meretricious landscapes, painted upon wood and canvas, for the
descriptions of poetry, until the painted scenery, which had in Greece
been a charming explanation of what was least important in the story,
became as important as the story.