No More Learning

Robinson the bank
clerk, and that the toes of his boots turn upward. We have nothing to
learn here. We must go to the villages or we must go back hundreds of
years to Wolfram of Eisenbach and the castles of Thuringia. In this, as
in all other arts, one finds its law and its true purpose when one is
near the source. The minstrel never dramatised anybody but himself. It
was impossible, from the nature of the words the poet had put into his
mouth, or that he had made for himself, that he should speak as another
person. He will go no nearer to drama than we do in daily speech, and
he will not allow you for any long time to forget himself. Our own
Raftery will stop the tale to cry, 'This is what I, Raftery, wrote down
in the book of the people'; or 'I, myself, Raftery, went to bed without
supper that night. ' Or, if it is Wolfram, and the tale is of Gawain
or Parsival, he will tell the listening ladies that he sings of happy
love out of his own unhappy love, or he will interrupt the story of
a siege and its hardships to remember his own house, where there is
not enough food for the mice. He knows how to keep himself interesting
that his words may have weight--so many lines of narrative, and then a
phrase about himself and his emotions. The reciter cannot be a player,
for that is a different art; but he must be a messenger, and he should
be as interesting, as exciting, as are all that carry great news.
He comes from far off, and he speaks of far-off things with his own
peculiar animation, and instead of lessening the ideal and beautiful
elements of speech, he may, if he has a mind to, increase them. He may
speak to actual notes as a singer does if they are so simple that he
never loses the speaking-voice, and if the poem is long he must do so,
or his own voice will become weary and formless. His art is nearer to
pattern than that of the player. It is always allusion, never illusion;
for what he tells of, no matter how impassioned he may become, is
always distant, and for this reason he may permit himself every kind
of nobleness.
In a short poem he may interrupt the narrative with a
burden, which the audience will soon learn to sing, and this burden,
because it is repeated and need not tell a story to a first hearing,
can have a more elaborate musical notation, can go nearer to ordinary
song. Gradually other devices will occur to him--effects of loudness
and softness, of increasing and decreasing speed, certain rhythmic
movements of his body, a score of forgotten things, for the art of
speech is lost, and when one begins at it every day is a discovery.
The reciter must be made exciting and wonderful in himself, apart from
what he has to tell, and that is more difficult than it was in the
middle ages. We are not mysterious to one another; we can come from
far off and yet be no better than our neighbours. We are no longer
like those Egyptian birds that flew out of Arabia, their claws full
of spices; nor can we, like an ancient or mediaeval poet, throw into
our verses the emotions and events of our lives, or even dramatise, as
they could, the life of the minstrel into whose mouth we are to put our
words. I can think of nothing better than to borrow from the tellers
of old tales, who will often pretend to have been at the wedding of
the princess or afterwards 'when they were throwing out children by
the basketful,' and to give the story-teller definite fictitious
personality and find for him an appropriate costume. Many costumes and
persons come into my imagination. I imagine an old countryman upon the
stage of the theatre or in some little country court-house where a
Gaelic society is meeting, and I can hear him say that he is Raftery
or a brother, and that he has tramped through France and Spain and the
whole world. He has seen everything, and he has all country love tales
at his finger-tips. I can imagine, too--and now the story-teller is more
serious and more naked of country circumstance--a jester with black
cockscomb and black clothes. He has been in the faery hills; perhaps
he is the terrible _Amadan-na-Breena_ himself; or he has been so long
in the world that he can tell of ancient battles. It is not as good
as what we have lost, but we cannot hope to see in our time, except
by some rare accident, the minstrel who differs from his audience in
nothing but the exaltation of his mood, and who is yet as exciting and
as romantic in their eyes as were Raftery and Wolfram to their people.

It is perhaps nearly impossible to make recitation a living thing,
for there is no existing taste one can appeal to; but it should not
be hard here in Ireland to interest people in songs that are made for
the word's sake and not for the music, or for that only in a secondary
degree. They are interested in such songs already, only the songs have
little subtilty of thought and of language. One does not find in them
that modern emotion which seems new because it has been brought so very
lately out of the cellar. At their best they are the songs of children
and of country people, eternally young for all their centuries, and
yet not even in old days, as one thinks, the art of kings' houses.