No More Learning

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[I] Mr. Boyle has since left us as a protest against the performance of
Mr. Synge's _Playboy of the Western World_. --W. B. Y. , _March, 1908.
_

[J] This essay was written immediately after the opening of the Abbey
Theatre, though it was not printed, through an accident, until the art
of the Abbey has become an art of peasant comedy. It tells of things
we have never had the time to begin. We still dream of them. --W. B. Y. ,
_March, 1908_.

[K] I have heard musicians excuse themselves by claiming that they put
the words there for the sake of the singer; but if that be so, why
should not the singer sing something she may wish to have by rote?
Nobody will hear the words; and the local time-table, or, so much suet
and so many raisins, and so much spice and so much sugar, and whether
it is to be put in a quick or a slow oven, would run very nicely with a
little management.

[L] _The Arrow_, a briefer chronicle than _Samhain_, was distributed
with the programme for a few months.




APPENDIX I


_THE HOUR-GLASS. _

This play is founded upon the following story, recorded by Lady Wilde
in _Ancient Legends of Ireland_, 1887, vol. i. , pp. 60-67:--

THE PRIEST'S SOUL.

IN former days there were great schools in Ireland where every sort
of learning was taught to the people, and even the poorest had more
knowledge at that time than many a gentleman has now.