No More Learning

If they
could afford it they would have hired some bigger house, but, after
all, M. Antoine founded his _Theatre Libre_ with a company of amateurs
in a hall that only held three hundred people.

The first work of theirs to get much attention was their performance,
last spring, at the invitation of _Inghinidhe h-Eireann_ of A. E. 's
_Deirdre_, and my _Cathleen ni Houlihan_. They had Miss Maud Gonne's
help, and it was a fine thing for so beautiful a woman to consent to
play my poor old Cathleen, and she played with nobility and tragic
power. She showed herself as good in tragedy as Dr. Hyde is in comedy,
and stirred a large audience very greatly. The whole company played
well, too, but it was in _Deirdre_ that they interested me most. They
showed plenty of inexperience, especially in the minor characters, but
it was the first performance I had seen since I understood these things
in which the actors kept still enough to give poetical writing its
full effect upon the stage. I had imagined such acting, though I had
not seen it, and had once asked a dramatic company to let me rehearse
them in barrels that they might forget gesture and have their minds
free to think of speech for a while. The barrels, I thought, might
be on castors, so that I could shove them about with a pole when the
action required it. The other day I saw Sara Bernhardt and De Max in
_Phedre_, and understood where Mr. Fay, who stage-manages the National
Theatrical Company, had gone for his model. [C] For long periods the
performers would merely stand and pose, and I once counted twenty-seven
quite slowly before anybody on a fairly well-filled stage moved, as it
seemed, so much as an eye-lash.
The periods of stillness were generally
shorter, but I frequently counted seventeen, eighteen or twenty before
there was a movement. I noticed, too, that the gestures had a rhythmic
progression. Sara Bernhardt would keep her hands clasped over, let us
say, her right breast for some time, and then move them to the other
side, perhaps, lowering her chin till it touched her hands, and then,
after another long stillness, she would unclasp them and hold one out,
and so on, not lowering them till she had exhausted all the gestures of
uplifted hands. Through one long scene De Max, who was quite as fine,
never lifted his hand above his elbow, and it was only when the emotion
came to its climax that he raised it to his breast. Beyond them stood
a crowd of white-robed men who never moved at all, and the whole scene
had the nobility of Greek sculpture, and an extraordinary reality and
intensity. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen upon the
stage, and made me understand, in a new way, that saying of Goethe's
which is understood everywhere but in England, 'Art is art because
it is not nature. ' Of course, our amateurs were poor and crude beside
those great actors, perhaps the greatest in Europe, but they followed
them as well as they could, and got an audience of artisans, for the
most part, to admire them for doing it. I heard somebody who sat behind
me say, 'They have got rid of all the nonsense. '

I thought the costumes and scenery, which were designed by A. E.
himself, good, too, though I did not think them simple enough. 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.