No More Learning

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.