No More Learning

Colum, born of the people, and
when at his best looking at the town and not the country with strange
eyes, nor the art of Mr. Synge spending weeks and months in remote
places talking Irish to fishers and islanders. I remember meeting,
about twenty years ago, a lad who had a little yacht at Kingstown.
Somebody was talking of the sea paintings of a great painter, Hook,
I think, and this made him very angry. No yachtsman believed in them
or thought them at all like the sea, he said. Indeed, he was always
hearing people praise pictures that were not a bit like the sea, and
thereupon he named certain of the greatest painters of water--men who
more than all others had spent their lives in observing the effects
of light upon cloud and wave. I met him again the other day, well
on in middle life, and though he is not even an Irishman, indignant
with Mr. Synge's and Mr. Boyle's[I] peasants. He knew the people, he
said, and neither he nor any other person that knew them could believe
that they were properly represented in _The Well of the Saints_ or
_The Building Fund_. Twenty years ago his imagination was under the
influence of popular pictures, but to-day it was under the conventional
idealisms which writers like Kickham and Griffin substitute for the
ever-varied life of the cottages, and that conventional idealism that
the contemporary English Theatre substitutes for all life whatsoever.
I saw _Caste_, the earliest play of the modern school, a few days ago,
and found there more obviously than I expected, for I am not much of
a theatre-goer, the English half of the mischief. Two of the minor
persons had a certain amount of superficial characterization, as if
out of the halfpenny comic papers; but the central persons, the man
and woman that created the dramatic excitement, such as it was, had
not characters of any kind, being vague ideals, perfection as it is
imagined by a common-place mind. The audience could give them its
sympathy without the labour that comes from awakening knowledge. If the
dramatist had put any man and woman of his acquaintance that seemed
to him nearest perfection into his play, he would have had to make it
a study, among other things, of the little petty faults and perverted
desires that come out of the nature or its surroundings.
He would have
troubled that admiring audience by making a self-indulgent sympathy
more difficult. He might have even seemed, like Ibsen or the early
Christians, an enemy of the human race. We have gone down to the roots,
and we have made up our minds upon one thing quite definitely--that
in no play that professes to picture life in its daily aspects shall
we admit these white phantoms. We can do this, not because we have
any special talent, but because we are dealing with a life which has
for all practical purposes never been set upon the stage before. The
conventional types of the novelists do not pervert our imagination,
for they are built, as it were, into another form, and no man who has
chosen for himself a sound method of drama, whether it be the drama of
character or of crisis, can use them. The Gaelic League and _Cumann
na nGaedheal_ play does indeed show the influence of the novelists;
but the typical Gaelic League play is essentially narrative and not
dramatic. Every artist necessarily imitates those who have worked in
the same form before him, and when the preoccupation has been with the
same life he almost always, consciously or unconsciously, borrows
more than the form, and it is this very borrowing--affecting thought,
language, all the vehicles of expression--which brings about the most of
what we call decadence.

After all, if our plays are slanders upon their country; if to
represent upon the stage a hard old man like Cosgar, or a rapacious old
man like Shan, or a faithless wife like Nora Burke, or to select from
history treacherous Gormleith for a theme, is to represent this nation
at something less than its full moral worth; if every play played in
the Abbey Theatre now and in times to come be something of a slander,
is anybody a penny the worse? Some ancient or mediaeval races did not
think so. Jusserand describes the French conquerors of mediaeval England
as already imagining themselves in their literature, as they have done
to this day, as a great deal worse than they are, and the English
imagining themselves a great deal better. The greater portion of the
_Divine Comedy_ is a catalogue of the sins of Italy, and Boccaccio
became immortal because he exaggerated with an unceasing playful wit
the vices of his countryside. The Greeks chose for the themes of their
serious literature a few great crimes, and Corneille, in his article on
the theory of the drama, shows why the greatness and notoriety of these
crimes is necessary to tragic drama. The public life of Athens found
its chief celebration in the monstrous caricature of Aristophanes, and
the Greek nation was so proud, so free from morbid sensitiveness, that
it invited the foreign ambassadors to the spectacle. And I answer to
those who say that Ireland cannot afford this freedom because of her
political circumstances, that if Ireland cannot afford it, Ireland
cannot have a literature. Literature has never been the work of slaves,
and Ireland must learn to say--

'Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage. '

The misrepresentation of the average life of a nation that follows
of necessity from an imaginative delight in energetic characters and
extreme types, enlarges the energy of a people by the spectacle of
energy.