No More Learning

It is impersonal; it is not in
the midst but on the edge of life; it covers more character than it
discovers: and yet, such as it is, all our comedies are made out of it.

What the ever-moving delicately-moulded flesh is to human beauty, vivid
musical words are to passion. Somebody has said that every nation
begins with poetry and ends with algebra, and passion has always
refused to express itself in algebraical terms.

Have we not been in error in demanding from our playwrights personages
who do not transcend our common actions any more than our common
speech? If we are in the right, all antiquity has been in error. The
scholars of a few generations ago were fond of deciding that certain
persons were unworthy of the dignity of art. They had, it may be, an
over-abounding preference for kings and queens, but we are, it may be,
very stupid in thinking that the average man is a fit subject at all
for the finest art. Art delights in the exception, for it delights in
the soul expressing itself according to its own laws and arranging
the world about it in its own pattern, as sand strewn upon a drum
will change itself into different patterns, according to the notes of
music that are sung or played to it. But the average man is average
because he has not attained to freedom. Habit, routine, fear of public
opinion, fear of punishment here or hereafter, a myriad of things that
are 'something other than human life,' something less than flame,
work their will upon his soul and trundle his body here and there. At
the first performance of _Ghosts_ I could not escape from an illusion
unaccountable to me at the time. All the characters seemed to be less
than life-size; the stage, though it was but the little Royalty stage,
seemed larger than I had ever seen it. Little whimpering puppets moved
here and there in the middle of that great abyss. Why did they not
speak out with louder voices or move with freer gestures? What was it
that weighed upon their souls perpetually?
Certainly they were all in
prison, and yet there was no prison. In India there are villages so
obedient that all the jailer has to do is to draw a circle upon the
ground with his staff, and to tell his thief to stand there so many
hours; but what law had these people broken that they had to wander
round that narrow circle all their lives? May not such art, terrible,
satirical, inhuman, be the medicine of great cities, where nobody is
ever alone with his own strength? Nor is Maeterlinck very different,
for his persons 'enquire after Jerusalem in the regions of the grave,
with weak voices almost inarticulate, wearying repose. ' Is it the
mob that has robbed those angelic persons of the energy of their
souls? Will not our next art be rather of the country, of great open
spaces, of the soul rejoicing in itself? Will not the generations to
come begin again to have an over-abounding faith in kings and queens,
in masterful spirits, whatever names we call them by? I had Moliere
with me on my way to America, and as I read I seemed to be at home in
Ireland listening to that conversation of the people which is so full
of riches because so full of leisure, or to those old stories of the
folk which were made by men who believed so much in the soul, and so
little in anything else, that they were never entirely certain that
the earth was solid under the foot-sole. What is there left for us,
that have seen the newly-discovered stability of things changed from an
enthusiasm to a weariness, but to labour with a high heart, though it
may be with weak hands, to rediscover an art of the theatre that shall
be joyful, fantastic, extravagant, whimsical, beautiful, resonant, and
altogether reckless? The arts are at their greatest when they seek for
a life growing always more scornful of everything that is not itself
and passing into its own fulness, as it were, ever more completely, as
all that is created out of the passing mode of society slips from it;
and attaining that fulness, perfectly it may be--and from this is tragic
joy and the perfectness of tragedy--when the world itself has slipped
away in death. We, who are believers, cannot see reality anywhere but
in the soul itself, and seeing it there we cannot do other than rejoice
in every energy, whether of gesture, or of action, or of speech, coming
out of the personality, the soul's image, even though the very laws of
nature seem as unimportant in comparison as did the laws of Rome to
Coriolanus when his pride was upon him. Has not the long decline of the
arts been but the shadow of declining faith in an unseen reality?

'If the sun and moon would doubt,
They'd immediately go out. '

_Second. _ If we are to make a drama of energy, of extravagance, of
phantasy, of musical and noble speech, we shall need an appropriate
stage management. Up to a generation or two ago, and to our own
generation, here and there, lingered a method of acting and of
stage-management, which had come down, losing much of its beauty
and meaning on the way, from the days of Shakespeare.