No More Learning

' And here, if one can believe
many devout people whose stories are in the book, Christ has walked
upon the roads, bringing the needy to some warm fire-side, and sending
one of His Saints to anoint the dying.

I do not think these country imaginations have changed much for
centuries, for they are still busy with those two themes of the ancient
Irish poets, the sternness of battle and the sadness of parting and
death. The emotion that in other countries has made many love songs has
here been given, in a long wooing, to danger, that ghostly bride. It is
not a difference in the substance of things that the lamentations that
were sung after battles are now sung for men who have died upon the
gallows.

The emotion has become not less, but more noble, by the change, for the
man who goes to death with the thought--

'It is with the people I was,
It is not with the law I was,'

has behind him generations of poetry and poetical life.

The poets of to-day speak with the voice of the unknown priest who
wrote, some two hundred years ago, that _Sorrowful Lament for Ireland_,
Lady Gregory has put into passionate and rhythmical prose--

'I do not know of anything under the sky
That is friendly or favourable to the Gael,
But only the sea that our need brings us to,
Or the wind that blows to the harbour
The ship that is bearing us away from Ireland;
And there is reason that these are reconciled with us,
For we increase the sea with our tears,
And the wandering wind with our sighs. '

There is still in truth upon these great level plains a people, a
community bound together by imaginative possessions, by stories and
poems which have grown out of its own life, and by a past of great
passions which can still waken the heart to imaginative action. One
could still, if one had the genius, and had been born to Irish, write
for these people plays and poems like those of Greece. Does not the
greatest poetry always require a people to listen to it? England or
any other country which takes its tune from the great cities and gets
its taste from schools and not from old custom, may have a mob, but it
cannot have a people. In England there are a few groups of men and
women who have good taste, whether in cookery or in books; and the
great multitudes but copy them or their copiers. The poet must always
prefer the community where the perfected minds express the people, to a
community that is vainly seeking to copy the perfected minds. To have
even perfectly the thoughts than can be weighed, the knowledge that
can be got from books, the precision that can be learned at school, to
belong to any aristocracy, is to be a little pool that will soon dry
up. A people alone are a great river; and that is why I am persuaded
that where a people has died, a nation is about to die.

1903.
EMOTION OF MULTITUDE


I HAVE been thinking a good deal about plays lately, and I have been
wondering why I dislike the clear and logical construction which seems
necessary if one is to succeed on the Modern Stage. It came into my
head the other day that this construction, which all the world has
learnt from France, has everything of high literature except the
emotion of multitude. The Greek drama has got the emotion of multitude
from its chorus, which called up famous sorrows, long-leaguered Troy,
much-enduring Odysseus, and all the gods and heroes to witness, as it
were, some well-ordered fable, some action separated but for this from
all but itself. The French play delights in the well-ordered fable,
but by leaving out the chorus it has created an art where poetry and
imagination, always the children of far-off multitudinous things,
must of necessity grow less important than the mere will. This is
why, I said to myself, French dramatic poetry is so often a little
rhetorical, for rhetoric is the will trying to do the work of the
imagination. The Shakespearian Drama gets the emotion of multitude out
of the sub-plot which copies the main plot, much as a shadow upon the
wall copies one's body in the firelight. We think of King Lear less
as the history of one man and his sorrows than as the history of a
whole evil time. Lear's shadow is in Gloster, who also has ungrateful
children, and the mind goes on imagining other shadows, shadow beyond
shadow till it has pictured the world. In _Hamlet_, one hardly notices,
so subtly is the web woven, that the murder of Hamlet's father and the
sorrow of Hamlet are shadowed in the lives of Fortinbras and Ophelia
and Laertes, whose fathers, too, have been killed. It is so in all the
plays, or in all but all, and very commonly the sub-plot is the main
plot working itself out in more ordinary men and women, and so doubly
calling up before us the image of multitude. Ibsen and Maeterlinck
have on the other hand created a new form, for they get multitude from
the Wild Duck in the Attic, or from the Crown at the bottom of the
Fountain, vague symbols that set the mind wandering from idea to idea,
emotion to emotion. Indeed all the great Masters have understood,
that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the
fable, which is always the better the simpler it is, and the rich,
far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it. There
are some who understand that the simple unmysterious things living as
in a clear noonlight are of the nature of the sun, and that vague,
many-imaged things have in them the strength of the moon. Did not the
Egyptian carve it on emerald that all living things have the sun for
father and the moon for mother, and has it not been said that a man of
genius takes the most after his mother?

1903.




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