No More Learning

Our repertory of
plays is increasing steadily, and when the winter's work is finished,
a play[D] Mr. Bernard Shaw has promised us may be ready to open the
summer session. His play will, I imagine, unlike the plays we write for
ourselves, be long enough to fill an evening, and it will, I know, deal
with Irish public life and character. Mr. Shaw, more than anybody else,
has the love of mischief that is so near the core of Irish intellect,
and should have an immense popularity among us. I have seen a crowd of
many thousands in possession of his spirit, and keeping the possession
to the small hours.

This movement should be important even to those who are not especially
interested in the Theatre, for it may be a morning cock-crow to that
impartial meditation about character and destiny we call the artistic
life in a country where everybody, if we leave out the peasant who
has his folk-songs and his music, has thought the arts useless unless
they have helped some kind of political action, and has, therefore,
lacked the pure joy that only comes out of things that have never been
indentured to any cause. The play which is mere propaganda shows its
leanness more obviously than a propagandist poem or essay, for dramatic
writing is so full of the stuff of daily life that a little falsehood,
put in that the moral may come right in the end, contradicts our
experience. If Father Dineen or Dr. Hyde were asked why they write
their plays, they would say they write them to help their propaganda;
and yet when they begin to write the form constrains them, and they
become artists--one of them a very considerable artist, indeed. Dr.
Hyde's early poems have even in translation a _naivete_ and wildness
that sets them, as I think, among the finest poetry of our time; but he
had ceased to write any verses but those Oireachtas odes that are but
ingenious rhetoric. It is hard to write without the sympathy of one's
friends, and though the country people sang his verses the readers of
Irish read them but little, partly it may be because he had broken
with that elaborate structure of later Irish poetry which seemed a
necessary part of their propaganda. They read plenty of pamphlets and
grammars, but they disliked--as do other people in Ireland--serious
reading, reading that is an end and not a means, that gives us nothing
but a beauty indifferent to our profuse purposes. But now Dr.
Hyde with
his cursing Hanrahan, his old saint at his prayers, is a poet again;
and the Leaguers go to his plays in thousands--and applaud in the right
places, too--and the League puts many sixpences into its pocket.

We who write in English have a more difficult work, for English has
been the language in which the Irish cause has been debated; and we
have to struggle with traditional phrases and traditional points of
view. Many would give us limitless freedom as to the choice of subject,
understanding that it is precisely those subjects on which people feel
most passionately, and, therefore, most dramatically, we would be
forbidden to handle if we made any compromise with powers. But fewer
know that we must encourage every writer to see life afresh, even
though he sees it with strange eyes. Our National Theatre must be so
tolerant, and, if this is not too wild a hope, find an audience so
tolerant that the half-dozen minds, who are likely to be the dramatic
imagination of Ireland for this generation, may put their own thoughts
and their own characters into their work; and for that reason no one
who loves the arts, whether among Unionists or among the Patriotic
Societies, should take offence if we refuse all but every kind of
patronage. I do not say every kind, for if a mad king, a king so mad
that he loved the arts and their freedom, should offer us unconditioned
millions, I, at any rate, would give my voice for accepting them.

We will be able to find conscientious playwrights and players, for our
young men have a power of work, when they are interested in their work,
one does not look for outside a Latin nation, and if we were certain
of being granted this freedom we would be certain that the work would
grow to great importance. It is a supreme moment in the life of a
nation when it is able to turn now and again from its preoccupations,
to delight in the capricious power of the artist as one delights in the
movement of some wild creature, but nobody can tell with certainty when
that moment is at hand.

The two plays in this year's _Samhain_ represent the two sides of the
movement very well, and are both written out of a deep knowledge of
the life of the people. It should be unnecessary to praise Dr. Hyde's
comedy,[E] that comes up out of the foundation of human life, but Mr.
Synge is a new writer and a creation of our movement. He has gone every
summer for some years past to the Arran Islands, and lived there in
the houses of the fishers, speaking their language and living their
lives, and his play[F] seems to me the finest piece of tragic work done
in Ireland of late years. One finds in it, from first to last, the
presence of the sea, and a sorrow that has majesty as in the work of
some ancient poet.

THE REFORM OF THE THEATRE.

I think the theatre must be reformed in its plays, its speaking, its
acting, and its scenery.