No More Learning

Modern literature, above all poetical literature, is monotonous in
its structure and effeminate in its continual insistence upon certain
moments of strained lyricism. William Morris, who did more than any
modern to recover mediaeval art, did not in his _Earthly Paradise_
copy from Chaucer, from whom he copied so much that was _naive_ and
beautiful, what seems to me essential in Chaucer's art. He thought of
himself as writing for the reader, who could return to him again and
again when the chosen mood had come, and became monotonous, melancholy,
too continuously lyrical in his understanding of emotion and of life.
Had he accustomed himself to read out his poems upon those Sunday
evenings that he gave to Socialist speeches, and to gather an audience
of average men, precisely such an audience as I have often seen in
his house, he would have been forced to Chaucer's variety, to his
delight in the height and depth, and would have found expression for
that humorous many-sided nature of his. I owe to him many truths, but
I would add to those truths the certainty that all the old writers,
the masculine writers of the world, wrote to be spoken or to be sung,
and in a later age to be read aloud, for hearers who had to understand
swiftly or not at all, and who gave up nothing of life to listen, but
sat, the day's work over, friend by friend, lover by lover.


THE ARROW: 1906. [L]

THE SEASON'S WORK.

A character of the winter's work will be the large number of romantic,
poetic and historical plays--that is to say, of plays which require a
convention for their performance; their speech, whether it be verse or
prose, being so heightened as to transcend that of any form of real
life. Our first two years of The Abbey Theatre have been expended
mostly on the perfecting of the Company in peasant comedy and tragedy.
Every national dramatic movement or theatre in countries like Bohemia
and Hungary, as in Elizabethan England, has arisen out of a study of
the common people, who preserve national characteristics more than any
other class, and out of an imaginative recreation of national history
or legend. The life of the drawing-room, the life represented in most
plays of the ordinary theatre of to-day, differs but little all over
the world, and has as little to do with the national spirit as the
architecture of, let us say, St. Stephen's Green, or Queen's Gate, or
of the Boulevards about the Arc de Triomphe.

As we wish our work to be full of the life of this country, our
stage-manager has almost always to train our actors from the beginning,
always so in the case of peasant plays, and this makes the building up
of a theatre like ours the work of years. We are now fairly satisfied
with the representation of peasant life, and we can afford to give
the greater part of our attention to other expressions of our art and
of our life. The romantic work and poetical work once reasonably
good, we can, if but the dramatist arrive, take up the life of our
drawing-rooms, and see if there is something characteristic there,
something which our nationality may enable us to express better than
others, and so create plays of that life and means to play them as
truthful as a play of Hauptmann's or of Ibsen's upon the German or
Scandinavian stage.
I am not myself interested in this kind of work,
and do not believe it to be as important as contemporary critics think
it is, but a theatre such as we project should give a reasonably
complete expression to the imaginative interests of its country. In any
case it was easier, and therefore wiser, to begin where our art is most
unlike that of others, with the representation of country life.

It is possible to speak the universal truths of human nature whether
the speakers be peasants or wealthy men, for--

'Love doth sing
As sweetly in a beggar as a king. '

So far as we have any model before us it is the national and municipal
theatre in various Continental towns, and, like the best of these, we
must have in our repertory masterpieces from every great school of
dramatic literature, and play them confidently, even though the public
be slow to like that old stern art, and perhaps a little proudly,
remembering that no other English-speaking theatre can be so catholic.
Certainly the weathercocks of our imagination will not turn those
painted eyes of theirs too long to the quarter of the Scandinavian
winds. If the wind blow long from the Mediterranean, the paint may peel
before we pray for a change in the weather.


THE CONTROVERSY OVER _THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD_.

We have claimed for our writers the freedom to find in their own land
every expression of good and evil necessary to their art, for Irish
life contains, like all vigorous life, the seeds of all good and evil,
and a writer must be free here as elsewhere to watch where weed or
flower ripen. No one who knows the work of our Theatre as a whole can
say we have neglected the flower; but the moment a writer is forbidden
to take pleasure in the weed, his art loses energy and abundance. In
the great days of English dramatic art the greatest English writer of
comedy was free to create _The Alchemist_ and _Volpone_, but a demand
born of Puritan conviction and shop-keeping timidity and insincerity,
for what many second-rate intellects thought to be noble and elevating
events and characters, had already at the outset of the eighteenth
century ended the English drama as a complete and serious art.
Sheridan and Goldsmith, when they restored comedy after an epoch of
sentimentalities, had to apologise for their satiric genius by scenes
of conventional love-making and sentimental domesticity that have set
them outside the company of all, whether their genius be great or
little, whose work is pure and whole. The quarrel of our Theatre to-day
is the quarrel of the Theatre in many lands; for the old Puritanism,
the old dislike of power and reality have not changed, even when they
are called by some Gaelic name.

[On the second performance of _The Playboy of the
Western World_ about forty men who sat in the middle
of the pit succeeded in making the play entirely
inaudible. Some of them brought tin-trumpets, and the
noise began immediately on the rise of the curtain. For
days articles in the Press called for the withdrawal
of the play, but we played for the seven nights we
had announced; and before the week's end opinion had
turned in our favour. There were, however, nightly
disturbances and a good deal of rioting in the
surrounding streets.