No More Learning

The periods of stillness were generally
shorter, but I frequently counted seventeen, eighteen or twenty before
there was a movement. I noticed, too, that the gestures had a rhythmic
progression. Sara Bernhardt would keep her hands clasped over, let us
say, her right breast for some time, and then move them to the other
side, perhaps, lowering her chin till it touched her hands, and then,
after another long stillness, she would unclasp them and hold one out,
and so on, not lowering them till she had exhausted all the gestures of
uplifted hands. Through one long scene De Max, who was quite as fine,
never lifted his hand above his elbow, and it was only when the emotion
came to its climax that he raised it to his breast. Beyond them stood
a crowd of white-robed men who never moved at all, and the whole scene
had the nobility of Greek sculpture, and an extraordinary reality and
intensity. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen upon the
stage, and made me understand, in a new way, that saying of Goethe's
which is understood everywhere but in England, 'Art is art because
it is not nature. ' Of course, our amateurs were poor and crude beside
those great actors, perhaps the greatest in Europe, but they followed
them as well as they could, and got an audience of artisans, for the
most part, to admire them for doing it. I heard somebody who sat behind
me say, 'They have got rid of all the nonsense. '

I thought the costumes and scenery, which were designed by A. E.
himself, good, too, though I did not think them simple enough. They
were more simple than ordinary stage costumes and scenery, but I would
like to see poetical drama, which tries to keep at a distance from
daily life that it may keep its emotion untroubled, staged with but
two or three colours. The background, especially in small theatres,
where its form is broken up and lost when the stage is at all crowded,
should, I think, be thought out as one thinks out the background of
a portrait. One often needs nothing more than a single colour with
perhaps a few shadowy forms to suggest wood or mountain. Even on a
large stage one should leave the description of the poet free to call
up the martlet's procreant cradle or what he will.
But I have written
enough about decorative scenery elsewhere, and will probably lecture on
that and like matters before we begin the winter's work.

The performances of _Deirdre_ and _Cathleen ni Houlihan_, which will be
repeated in the Antient Concert Rooms, drew so many to hear them that
great numbers were turned away from the doors of St. Theresa's Hall.
Like the plays of the Irish Literary Theatre, they started unexpected
discussion. Mr. Standish O'Grady, who had done more than any other
to make us know the old legends, wrote in his _All Ireland Review_
that old legends could not be staged without danger of 'banishing the
soul of the land. ' The old Irish had many wives for instance, and one
had best leave their histories to the vagueness of legend. How could
uneducated people understand heroes who lived amid such different
circumstances? And so we were to 'leave heroic cycles alone, and not to
bring them down to the crowd. ' A. E. replied in the _United Irishman_
with an impassioned letter. 'The old, forgotten music' he writes about
in his letter is, I think, that regulated music of speech at which both
he and I have been working, though on somewhat different principles. I
have been working with Miss Farr and Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch, who has made
a psaltery for the purpose, to perfect a music of speech which can be
recorded in something like ordinary musical notes; while A. E.