No More Learning

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. It needed some imagination, some gift
for day-dreams, to see the horses and the fields and flowers of Colonus
as one listened to the elders gathered about OEdipus, or to see 'the
pendent bed and procreant cradle' of the 'martlet' as one listened to
Duncan before the castle of Macbeth; but it needs no imagination to
admire a painting of one of the more obvious effects of nature painted
by somebody who understands how to show everything to the most hurried
glance. At the same time the managers made the costumes of the actors
more and more magnificent, that the mind might sleep in peace, while
the eye took pleasure in the magnificence of velvet and silk and in the
physical beauty of women. These changes gradually perfected the theatre
of commerce, the masterpiece of that movement towards externality in
life and thought and Art, against which the criticism of our day is
learning to protest.

Even if poetry were spoken as poetry, it would still seem out of place
in many of its highest moments upon a stage, where the superficial
appearances of nature are so closely copied; for poetry is founded
upon convention, and becomes incredible the moment painting or gesture
remind us that people do not speak verse when they meet upon the
highway. The theatre of Art, when it comes to exist, must therefore
discover grave and decorative gestures, such as delighted Rossetti and
Madox Brown, and grave and decorative scenery, that will be forgotten
the moment an actor has said 'It is dawn,' or 'It is raining,' or
'The wind is shaking the trees'; and dresses of so little irrelevant
magnificence that the mortal actors and actresses may change without
much labour into the immortal people of romance. The theatre began in
ritual, and it cannot come to its greatness again without recalling
words to their ancient sovereignty.

It will take a generation, and perhaps generations, to restore the
theatre of Art; for one must get one's actors, and perhaps one's
scenery, from the theatre of commerce, until new actors and new
painters have come to help one; and until many failures and imperfect
successes have made a new tradition, and perfected in detail the ideal
that is beginning to float before our eyes. If one could call one's
painters and one's actors from where one would, how easy it would be!
I know some painters, who have never painted scenery, who could paint
the scenery I want, but they have their own work to do; and in Ireland
I have heard a red-haired orator repeat some bad political verses with
a voice that went through one like flame, and made them seem the most
beautiful verses in the world; but he has no practical knowledge of the
stage, and probably despises it.

May, 1899.