No More Learning

They
were more simple than ordinary stage costumes and scenery, but I would
like to see poetical drama, which tries to keep at a distance from
daily life that it may keep its emotion untroubled, staged with but
two or three colours. The background, especially in small theatres,
where its form is broken up and lost when the stage is at all crowded,
should, I think, be thought out as one thinks out the background of
a portrait. One often needs nothing more than a single colour with
perhaps a few shadowy forms to suggest wood or mountain. Even on a
large stage one should leave the description of the poet free to call
up the martlet's procreant cradle or what he will. But I have written
enough about decorative scenery elsewhere, and will probably lecture on
that and like matters before we begin the winter's work.

The performances of _Deirdre_ and _Cathleen ni Houlihan_, which will be
repeated in the Antient Concert Rooms, drew so many to hear them that
great numbers were turned away from the doors of St. Theresa's Hall.
Like the plays of the Irish Literary Theatre, they started unexpected
discussion. Mr. Standish O'Grady, who had done more than any other
to make us know the old legends, wrote in his _All Ireland Review_
that old legends could not be staged without danger of 'banishing the
soul of the land. ' The old Irish had many wives for instance, and one
had best leave their histories to the vagueness of legend. How could
uneducated people understand heroes who lived amid such different
circumstances? And so we were to 'leave heroic cycles alone, and not to
bring them down to the crowd. ' A. E.
replied in the _United Irishman_
with an impassioned letter. 'The old, forgotten music' he writes about
in his letter is, I think, that regulated music of speech at which both
he and I have been working, though on somewhat different principles. I
have been working with Miss Farr and Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch, who has made
a psaltery for the purpose, to perfect a music of speech which can be
recorded in something like ordinary musical notes; while A. E. has got a
musician to record little chants with intervals much smaller than those
of modern music.

After the production of these plays the most important Irish dramatic
event was, no doubt, the acting of Dr. Hyde's _An Posadh_, in Galway.
Through an accident it had been very badly rehearsed, but his own
acting made amends. One could hardly have had a play that grew more out
of the life of the people who saw it. There may have been old men in
that audience who remembered its hero the poet Raftery, and there was
nobody there who had not come from hearing his poems repeated at the
Galway Feis. I think from its effect upon the audience that this play
in which the chief Gaelic poet of our time celebrates his forerunner
in simplicity, will be better liked in Connaught at any rate than
even _Casadh an t-Sugain_. His _Tincear agus Sidheog_, acted in Mr.
Moore's garden, at the time of the Oireachtas, is a very good play,
but is, I think, the least interesting of his plays as literature. His
imagination, which is essentially the folk-imagination, needs a looser
construction, and probably a more crowded stage. A play that gets its
effect by keeping close to one idea reminds one, when it comes from
the hands of a folk-poet, of Blake's saying, that 'Improvement makes
straight roads, but the crooked roads are the roads of genius.