No More Learning

But if some external
necessity had forced me to write nothing but drama with an obviously
patriotic intention, instead of letting my work shape itself under
the casual impulses of dreams and daily thoughts, I would have lost,
in a short time, the power to write movingly upon any theme. I could
have aroused opinion; but I could not have touched the heart, for I
would have been busy at the oakum-picking that is not the less mere
journalism for being in dramatic form. Above all, we must not say
that certain incidents which have been a part of literature in all
other lands are forbidden to us. It may be our duty, as it has been
the duty of many dramatic movements, to bring new kinds of subjects
into the theatre, but it cannot be our duty to make the bounds of
drama narrower. For instance, we are told that the English theatre is
immoral, because it is pre-occupied with the husband, the wife and
the lover. It is, perhaps, too exclusively pre-occupied with that
subject, and it is certain it has not shed any new light upon it for
a considerable time, but a subject that inspired Homer and about half
the great literature of the world will, one doubts not, be a necessity
to our National Theatre also. Literature is, to my mind, the great
teaching power of the world, the ultimate creator of all values,
and it is this, not only in the sacred books whose power everybody
acknowledges, but by every movement of imagination in song or story or
drama that height of intensity and sincerity has made literature at
all. Literature must take the responsibility of its power, and keep
all its freedom: it must be like the spirit and like the wind that
blows where it listeth, it must claim its right to pierce through
every crevice of human nature, and to describe the relation of the soul
and the heart to the facts of life and of law, and to describe that
relation as it is, not as we would have it be, and in so far as it
fails to do this it fails to give us that foundation of understanding
and charity for whose lack our moral sense can be but cruelty. It must
be as incapable of telling a lie as nature, and it must sometimes say
before all the virtues, 'The greatest of these is charity. ' Sometimes
the patriot will have to falter and the wife to desert her home, and
neither be followed by divine vengeance or man's judgment. At other
moments it must be content to judge without remorse, compelled by
nothing but its own capricious spirit that has yet its message from
the foundation of the world. Aristophanes held up the people of Athens
to ridicule, and even prouder of that spirit than of themselves, they
invited the foreign ambassadors to the spectacle.

I would sooner our theatre failed through the indifference or hostility
of our audiences than gained an immense popularity by any loss of
freedom. I ask nothing that my masters have not asked for, but I ask
all that they were given. I ask no help that would limit our freedom
from either official or patriotic hands, though I am glad of the help
of any who love the arts so dearly that they would not bring them into
even honourable captivity.
A good Nationalist is, I suppose, one who
is ready to give up a great deal that he may preserve to his country
whatever part of her possessions he is best fitted to guard, and that
theatre where the capricious spirit that bloweth as it listeth has
for a moment found a dwelling-place, has good right to call itself a
National Theatre.

THE THEATRE, THE PULPIT, AND THE NEWSPAPERS.

I was very well content when I read an unmeasured attack in _The
Independent_ on the Irish National Theatre. There had, as yet, been
no performance, but the attack was confident, and it was evident that
the writer's ears were full of rumours and whisperings. One knew that
some such attack was inevitable, for every dramatic movement that
brought any new power into literature arose among precisely these
misunderstandings and animosities. Drama, the most immediately powerful
form of literature, the most vivid image of life, finds itself opposed,
as no other form of literature does, to those enemies of life, the
chimeras of the Pulpit and the Press. When a country has not begun to
care for literature, or has forgotten the taste for it, and most modern
countries seem to pass through this stage, these chimeras are hatched
in every basket. Certain generalisations are everywhere substituted
for life. Instead of individual men and women and living virtues
differing as one star differeth from another in glory, the public
imagination is full of personified averages, partisan fictions, rules
of life that would drill everybody into the one posture, habits that
are like the pinafores of charity-school children. The priest, trained
to keep his mind on the strength of his Church and the weakness of
his congregation, would have all mankind painted with a halo or with
horns. Literature is nothing to him, he has to remember that Seaghan
the Fool might take to drinking again if he knew of pleasant Falstaff,
and that Paudeen might run after Red Sarah again if some strange chance
put Plutarch's tale of Anthony or Shakespeare's play into his hands,
and he is in a hurry to shut out of the schools that Pandora's box,
_The Golden Treasury_. The newspaper he reads of a morning has not only
the haloes and horns of the vestry, but it has crowns and fools' caps
of its own. Life, which in its essence is always surprising, always
taking some new shape, always individualising, is nothing to it, it has
to move men in squads, to keep them in uniform, with their faces to
the right enemy, and enough hate in their hearts to make the muskets
go off. It may know its business well, but its business is building
and ours is shattering. We cannot linger very long in this great dim
temple where the wooden images sit all round upon thrones, and where
the worshippers kneel, not knowing whether they tremble because their
gods are dead or because they fear they may be alive. In the idol-house
every god, every demon, every virtue, every vice, has been given its
permanent form, its hundred hands, its elephant trunk, its monkey head.