No More Learning

It is contended that there is no reason why the company should not be
as successful as similar companies in Germany and Scandinavia, and
that it would be even of commercial advantage to Dublin by making it
a pleasanter place to live in, besides doing incalculable good to the
whole intellect of the country. One, at any rate, of those who press
the project on us has much practical knowledge of the stage and of
theatrical management, and knows what is possible and what is not
possible.

Others among our friends, and among these are some who have had more
than their share of the hard work which has built up the intellectual
movement in Ireland, argue that a theatre of this kind would require
too much money to be free, that it could not touch on politics, the
most vital passion and vital interest of the country, as they say,
and that the attitude of continual compromise between conviction and
interest, which it would necessitate, would become demoralising to
everybody concerned, especially at moments of political excitement.
They tell us that the war between an Irish Ireland and an English
Ireland is about to become much fiercer, to divide families and friends
it may be, and that the organisations that will lead in the war must
be able to say everything the people are thinking. They would have
Irishmen give their plays to a company like Mr. Fay's, when they are
within its power, and if not, to Mr. Benson or to any other travelling
company which will play them in Ireland without committees, where
everybody compromises a little. In this way, they contend, we would
soon build up an Irish theatre from the ground, escaping to some extent
the conventions of the ordinary theatre, and English voices which
give a foreign air to one's words. And though we might have to wait
some years, we would get even the masterpieces of the world in good
time. Let us, they think, be poor enough to whistle at the thief who
would take away some of our thoughts, and after Mr. Fay has taken his
company, as he plans, through the villages and the country towns, he
will get the little endowment that is necessary, or if he does not some
other will.

I do not know what Lady Gregory or Mr. Moore think of these projects.
I am not going to say what I think. I have spent much of my time and
more of my thought these last ten years on Irish organisation, and now
that the Irish Literary Theatre has completed the plan I had in my head
ten years ago, I want to go down again to primary ideas.
I want to put
old stories into verse, and if I put them into dramatic verse it will
matter less to me henceforward who plays them than what they play, and
how they play. I hope to get our heroic age into verse, and to solve
some problems of the speaking of verse to musical notes.

There is only one question which is raised by the two projects I
have described on which I will give an opinion. It is of the first
importance that those among us who want to write for the stage study
the dramatic masterpieces of the world. If they can get them on the
stage so much the better, but study them they must if Irish drama is to
mean anything to Irish intellect. At the present moment, Shakespeare
being the only great dramatist known to Irish writers has made them
cast their work too much on the English model. Miss Milligan's _Red
Hugh_, which was successfully acted in Dublin the other day, had no
business to be in two scenes; and Father O'Leary's _Tadg Saor_, despite
its most vivid and picturesque, though far too rambling dialogue,
shows in its half dozen changes of scene the influence of the same
English convention which arose when there was no scene painting, and
is often a difficulty where there is, and is always an absurdity in
a farce of thirty minutes, breaking up the emotion and sending one's
thoughts here and there. Mr. MacGinlay's _Elis agus an bhean deirce_
has not this defect, and though I had not Irish enough to follow it
when I saw it played, and excellently played, by Mr. Fay's company, I
could see from the continual laughter of the audience that it held them
with an unbroken emotion. The best Gaelic play after Dr. Hyde's is, I
think, Father Dineen's _Creideamh agus gorta_, and though it changes
the scene a little oftener than is desirable under modern conditions,
it does not remind me of an English model. It reminds me of Calderon
by its treatment of a religious subject, and by something in Father
Dineen's sympathy with the people that is like his. But I think if
Father Dineen had studied that great Catholic dramatist he would not
have failed, as he has done once or twice, to remember some necessary
detail of a situation. In the first scene he makes a servant ask his
fellow-servants about things he must have known as well as they; and he
loses a dramatic moment in his third scene by forgetting that Seagan
Gorm has a pocket-full of money which he would certainly, being the man
he was, have offered to the woman he was urging into temptation. The
play towards the end changes from prose to verse, and the reverence and
simplicity of the verse makes one think of a mediaeval miracle play.