No More Learning

I have to find once again
singers, minstrels, and players who love words more than any other
thing under heaven, for without fine words there is no literature.

IV

I will say but a little of dramatic technique, as I would have it in
this theatre of speech, of romance, of extravagance, for I have written
of all that so many times. In every art, when it seems to one that it
has need of a renewing of life, one goes backwards till one lights upon
a time when it was nearer to human life and instinct, before it had
gathered about it so many mechanical specialisations and traditions.
One examines that earlier condition and thinks out its principles of
life, and one may be able to separate accidental from vital things.
William Morris, for instance, studied the earliest printing, the founts
of type that were made when men saw their craft with eyes that were
still new, and with leisure, and without the restraints of commerce
and custom. And then he made a type that was really new, that had
the quality of his own mind about it, though it reminds one of its
ancestry, of its high breeding as it were. Coleridge and Wordsworth
were influenced by the publication of Percy's _Reliques_ to the making
of a simplicity altogether unlike that of old ballad-writers. Rossetti
went to early Italian painting, to Holy Families and choirs of angels,
that he might learn how to express an emotion that had its roots in
sexual desire and in the delight of his generation in fine clothes and
in beautiful rooms. Nor is it otherwise with the reformers of churches
and of the social order, for reform must justify itself by a return in
feeling to something that our fathers have told us in the old time.

So it is with us. Inspired by players who played before a figured
curtain, we have made scenery, indeed, but scenery that is little more
than a suggestion--a pattern with recurring boughs and leaves of gold
for a wood, a great green curtain with a red stencil upon it to carry
the eye upward for a palace, and so on. More important than these, we
have looked for the centre of our art where the players of the time of
Shakespeare and of Corneille found theirs, in speech, whether it be the
perfect mimicry of the conversation of two countrymen of the roads, or
that idealised speech poets have imagined for what we think but do not
say. Before men read, the ear and the tongue were subtle, and delighted
one another with the little tunes that were in words; every word would
have its own tune, though but one main note may have been marked
enough for us to name it. They loved language, and all literature was
then, whether in the mouth of minstrels, players, or singers, but the
perfection of an art that everybody practised, a flower out of the stem
of life. And language continually renewed itself in that perfection,
returning to daily life out of that finer leisure, strengthened and
sweetened as from a retreat ordered by religion.
The ordinary dramatic
critic, when you tell him that a play, if it is to be of a great kind,
must have beautiful words, will answer that you have misunderstood
the nature of the stage and are asking of it what books should give.
Sometimes when some excellent man, a playgoer certainly and sometimes
a critic, has read me a passage out of some poet, I have been set
wondering what books of poetry can mean to the greater number of men.
If they are to read poetry at all, if they are to enjoy beautiful
rhythm, if they are to get from poetry anything but what it has in
common with prose, they must hear it spoken by men who have music in
their voices and a learned understanding of its sound. There is no poem
so great that a fine speaker cannot make it greater or that a bad ear
cannot make it nothing. All the arts when young and happy are but the
point of the spear whose handle is our daily life. When they grow old
and unhappy they perfect themselves away from life, and life, seeing
that they are sufficient to themselves, forgets them. The fruit of the
tree that was in Eden grows out of a flower full of scent, rounds and
ripens, until at last the little stem, that brought to it the sap out
of the tree, dries up and breaks, and the fruit rots upon the ground.

The theatre grows more elaborate, developing the player at the expense
of the poet, developing the scenery at the expense of the player,
always increasing in importance whatever has come to it out of the mere
mechanism of a building or the interests of a class, specialising more
and more, doing whatever is easiest rather than what is most noble,
and creating a class before the footlights as behind, who are stirred
to excitements that belong to it and not to life; until at last life,
which knows that a specialised energy is not herself, turns to other
things, content to leave it to weaklings and triflers, to those in
whose body there is the least quantity of herself.

V

But if we are to delight our three or four thousand young men and women
with a delight that will follow them into their own houses, and if we
are to add the countryman to their number, we shall need more than
the play, we shall need those other spoken arts. The player rose into
importance in the town, but the minstrel is of the country. We must
have narrative as well as dramatic poetry, and we are making room for
it in the theatre in the first instance, but in this also we must go
to an earlier time. Modern recitation is not, like modern theatrical
art, an over-elaboration of a true art, but an entire misunderstanding.
It has no tradition at all. It is an endeavour to do what can only be
done well by the player. It has no relation of its own to life. Some
young man in evening clothes will recite to you _The Dream of Eugene
Aram_, and it will be laughable, grotesque and a little vulgar.