No More Learning

' All art is founded upon personal vision, and the
greater the art the more surprising the vision; and all bad art is
founded upon impersonal types and images, accepted by average men and
women out of imaginative poverty and timidity, or the exhaustion that
comes from labour.

Nobody can force a movement of any kind to take any prearranged pattern
to any very great extent; one can, perhaps, modify it a little, and
that is all. When one says that it is going to develop in a certain
way, one means that one sees, or imagines that one sees, certain
energies which left to themselves are bound to give it a certain form.
Writing in _Samhain_ some years ago, I said that our plays would be of
two kinds, plays of peasant life and plays of a romantic and heroic
life, such as one finds in the folk-tales. To-day I can see other
forces, and can foretell, I think, the form of technique that will
arise. About fifty years ago, perhaps not so many, the playwrights
of every country in the world became persuaded that their plays must
reflect the surface of life; and the author of _Caste_, for instance,
made a reputation by putting what seemed to be average common life and
average common speech for the first time upon the stage in England,
and by substituting real loaves of bread and real cups of tea for
imaginary ones. He was not a very clever nor a very well-educated
man, and he made his revolution superficially; but in other countries
men of intellect and knowledge created that intellectual drama of
real life, of which Ibsen's later plays are the ripened fruit. This
change coincided with the substitution of science for religion in the
conduct of life, and is, I believe, as temporary, for the practice of
twenty centuries will surely take the sway in the end. A rhetorician
in that novel of Petronius, which satirises, or perhaps one should say
celebrates, Roman decadence, complains that the young people of his
day are made blockheads by learning old romantic tales in the schools,
instead of what belongs to common life. And yet is it not the romantic
tale, the extravagant and ungovernable dream which comes out of youth;
and is not that desire for what belongs to common life, whether it
comes from Rome or Greece or England, the sign of fading fires, of
ebbing imaginative desire? In the arts I am quite certain that it is
a substitution of apparent for real truth. Mr. George Moore has a
very vivid character; he is precisely one of those whose characters
can be represented most easily upon the stage. Let us suppose that
some dramatist had made even him the centre of a play in which the
moderation of common life was carefully preserved, how very little he
could give us of that headlong intrepid man, as we know him, whether
through long personal knowledge or through his many books. The more
carefully the play reflected the surface of life the more would the
elements be limited to those that naturally display themselves during
so many minutes of our ordinary affairs.
It is only by extravagance,
by an emphasis far greater than that of life as we observe it, that
we can crowd into a few minutes the knowledge of years. Shakespeare
or Sophocles can so quicken, as it were, the circles of the clock, so
heighten the expression of life, that many years can unfold themselves
in a few minutes, and it is always Shakespeare or Sophocles, and not
Ibsen, that makes us say, 'How true, how often I have felt as that man
feels'; or 'How intimately I have come to know those people on the
stage. ' There is a certain school of painters that has discovered that
it is necessary in the representation of light to put little touches of
pure colour side by side. When you went up close to that big picture
of the Alps by Segantini, in Mr. Lane's Loan Exhibition a year ago,
you found that the grass seeds, which looked brown enough from the
other side of the room, were full of pure scarlet colour. If you copy
nature's moderation of colour you do not imitate her, for you have only
white paint and she has light. If you wish to represent character or
passion upon the stage, as it is known to the friends, let us say, of
your principal persons, you must be excessive, extravagant, fantastic
even, in expression; and you must be this, more extravagantly, more
excessively, more fantastically than ever, if you wish to show
character and passion as they would be known to the principal person of
your play in the depths of his own mind. The greatest art symbolises
not those things that we have observed so much as those things that
we have experienced, and when the imaginary saint or lover or hero
moves us most deeply, it is the moment when he awakens within us for
an instant our own heroism, our own sanctity, our own desire. We
possess these things--the greatest of men not more than Seaghan the
Fool--not at all moderately, but to an infinite extent, and though we
control or ignore them, we know that the moralists speak true when they
compare them to angels or to devils, or to beasts of prey. How can any
dramatic art, moderate in expression, be a true image of hell or heaven
or the wilderness, or do anything but create those faint histories that
but touch our curiosity, those groups of persons that never follow us
into our intimate life, where Odysseus and Don Quixote and Hamlet are
with us always?

The scientific movement is ebbing a little everywhere, and here in
Ireland it has never been in flood at all. And I am certain that
everywhere literature will return once more to its old extravagant
fantastical expression, for in literature, unlike science, there are
no discoveries, and it is always the old that returns. Everything in
Ireland urges us to this return, and it may be that we shall be the
first to recover after the fifty years of mistake.

The antagonism of imaginative writing in Ireland is not a habit of
scientific observation but our interest in matters of opinion. A
misgoverned country seeking a remedy by agitation puts an especial
value upon opinion, and even those who are not conscious of any
interest in the country are influenced by the general habit. All fine
literature is the disinterested contemplation or expression of life,
but hardly any Irish writer can liberate his mind sufficiently from
questions of practical reform for this contemplation.