No More Learning

The last paragraphs of my opening statement ran as
follows. ]

_From Mr. Yeats' opening Speech in the Debate on February 4, 1907, at
the Abbey Theatre. _

The struggle of the last week has been long a necessity; various
paragraphs in newspapers describing Irish attacks on Theatres had made
many worthy young men come to think that the silencing of a stage at
their own pleasure, even if hundreds desired that it should not be
silenced, might win them a little fame, and, perhaps, serve their
country. Some of these attacks have been made on plays which are in
themselves indefensible, vulgar and old-fashioned farces and comedies.
But the attack, being an annihilation of civil rights, was never
anything but an increase of Irish disorder. The last I heard of was in
Liverpool, and there a stage was rushed, and a priest, who had set a
play upon it, withdrew his play and apologised to the audience. We have
not such pliant bones, and did not learn in the houses that bred us a
so suppliant knee. But behind the excitement of example there is a
more fundamental movement of opinion. Some seven or eight years ago the
National movement was democratised and passed from the hands of a few
leaders into those of large numbers of young men organised in clubs and
societies. These young men made the mistake of the newly-enfranchised
everywhere; they fought for causes worthy in themselves with the
unworthy instruments of tyranny and violence. Comic songs of a certain
kind were to be driven from the stage, everyone was to wear Irish
cloth, everyone was to learn Irish, everyone was to hold certain
opinions, and these ends were sought by personal attacks, by virulent
caricature and violent derision. It needs eloquence to persuade and
knowledge to expound; but the coarser means come ready to every man's
hand, as ready as a stone or a stick, and where these coarse means are
all, there is nothing but mob, and the commonest idea most prospers and
is most sought for.

Gentlemen of the little clubs and societies, do not mistake the meaning
of our victory; it means something for us, but more for you. When the
curtain of _The Playboy_ fell on Saturday night in the midst of what
_The Sunday Independent_--no friendly witness--described as 'thunders
of applause,' I am confident that I saw the rise in this country of
a new thought, a new opinion, that we had long needed.
It was not
all approval of Mr. Synge's play that sent the receipts of the Abbey
Theatre this last week to twice the height they had ever touched
before. The generation of young men and girls who are now leaving
schools or colleges are weary of the tyranny of clubs and leagues. They
wish again for individual sincerity, the eternal quest of truth, all
that has been given up for so long that all might crouch upon the one
roost and quack or cry in the one flock. We are beginning once again
to ask what a man is, and to be content to wait a little before we go
on to that further question: What is a good Irishman? There are some
who have not yet their degrees that will say to friend or neighbour,
'You have voted with the English, and that is bad'; or 'You have sent
away your Irish servants, or thrown away your Irish clothes, or blacked
your face for your singing. I despise what you have done, I keep you
still my friend; but if you are terrorised out of doing any of these
things, evil things though I know them to be, I will not have you for
my friend any more. ' Manhood is all, and the root of manhood is courage
and courtesy.


1907

ON TAKING _THE PLAYBOY_ TO LONDON.

The failure of the audience to understand this powerful and strange
work (_The Playboy of the Western World_) has been the one serious
failure of our movement, and it could not have happened but that the
greater number of those who came to shout down the play were no regular
part of our audience at all, but members of parties and societies whose
main interests are political. We have been denounced with even greater
violence than on the first production of the play for announcing that
we should carry it to London. We cannot see that an attack, which
we believe to have been founded on a misunderstanding of the nature
of literature, should prevent us from selecting, as our custom is,
whatever of our best comes within the compass of our players at the
time, to show in some English theatres. Nearly all strong and strange
writing is attacked on its appearance, and those who press it upon the
world may not cease from pressing it, for their justification is its
ultimate acceptance. Ireland is passing through a crisis in the life
of the mind greater than any she has known since the rise of the Young
Ireland party, and based upon a principle which sets many in opposition
to the habits of thought and feeling come down from that party, for the
seasons change, and need and occupation with them. Many are beginning
to recognise the right of the individual mind to see the world in its
own way, to cherish the thoughts which separate men from one another,
and that are the creators of distinguished life, instead of those
thoughts that had made one man like another if they could, and have but
succeeded in setting hysteria and insincerity in place of confidence
and self-possession. To the Young Ireland writers, who have the ear
of Ireland, though not its distracted mind, truth was historical and
external and not a self-consistent personal vision, and it is but
according to ancient custom that the new truth should force its way
amid riot and great anger.