No More Learning

One rather likes this bit of
nonsense when one comes to it, for in that world of folk-imagination
one thing seems as possible as another. On the other hand, there is
a moment of beautiful dramatic tact. The lover gets a letter telling
of the death of a relative in America, for whom he has no particular
affection, and who has left him a fortune. He cannot lament, for that
would be insincere, and his first words must not be rejoicing. Father
Dineen has found for him the one beautiful thing he could say, 'It's a
lonesome thing death is. ' With, perhaps, less beauty than there is in
the closing scene of _Creadeamh agus Gorta_, the play has more fancy
and a more sustained energy.

Father Peter O'Leary has written a play in his usual number of scenes
which has not been published, but has been acted amid much Munster
enthusiasm. But neither that or _La an Amadan_, which has also been
acted, are likely to have any long life on our country stages. A short
play, with many changes of scene, is a nuisance in any theatre, and
often an impossibility on our poor little stages. Some kind of play,
in English, by Mr. Standish O'Grady, has been acted in the open air
in Kilkenny. I have not seen it, and I cannot understand anything
by the accounts of it, except that there were magic lantern slides
and actors on horseback, and Mr. Standish O'Grady as an Elizabethan
night-watchman, speaking prologues, and a contented audience of two or
three thousand people.

As we do not think that a play can be worth acting and not worth
reading, all our plays will be published in time. Some have been
printed in _The United Irishman_ and _The All Ireland Review_.
I have
put my _Cathleen ni Houlihan_ and a little play by Dr. Hyde into this
_Samhain_. Once already this year I have had what somebody has called
the noble pleasure of praising, and I can praise this _Lost Saint_
with as good a conscience as I had when I wrote of _Cuchulain of
Muirthemne_. I would always admire it, but just now, when I have been
thinking that literature should return to its old habit of describing
desirable things, I am in the mood to be stirred by that old man
gathering up food for fowl with his heart full of love, and by those
children who are so full of the light-hearted curiosity of childhood,
and by that schoolmaster who has mixed prayer with his gentle
punishments. It seems natural that so beautiful a prayer as that of
the old saint should have come out of a life so full of innocence and
peace. One could hardly have thought out the play in English, for those
phrases of a traditional simplicity and of a too deliberate prettiness
which become part of an old language would have arisen between the
mind and the story. One might even have made something as unreal as
the sentimental schoolmaster of the Scottish novelists, and how many
children, who are but literary images, would one not have had to hunt
out of one's mind before meeting with those little children? Even if
one could have thought it out in English one could not have written
it in English, unless perhaps in that dialect which Dr. Hyde had
already used in the prose narrative that flows about his _Love Songs of
Connaught_.

Dr. Hyde has written a little play about the birth of Christ which
has the same beauty and simplicity. These plays remind me of my first
reading of _The Love Songs of Connaught_. The prose parts of that book
were to me, as they were to many others, the coming of a new power
into literature. I find myself now, as I found myself then, grudging
to propaganda, to scholarship, to oratory, however necessary, a genius
which might in modern Irish or in that idiom of the English-speaking
country people discover a new region for the mind to wander in. In
Ireland, where we have so much to prove and to disprove, we are ready
to forget that the creation of an emotion of beauty is the only kind
of literature that justifies itself. Books of literary propaganda
and literary history are merely preparations for the creation or
understanding of such an emotion.