No More Learning

If a dramatic club existed in one of the larger towns near,
they could supply us not only with actors, should we need them, in
their own town, but with actors when we went to the small towns and to
the villages where the novelty of any kind of drama would make success
certain. These clubs would play in Gaelic far better than we can hope
to, for they would have native Gaelic speakers, and should we succeed
in stirring the imagination of the people enough to keep the rivalry
between plays in English and Irish to a rivalry in quality, the
certain development of two schools with distinct though very kindred
ideals would increase the energy and compass of our art.

At a time when drama was more vital than at present, unpaid actors,
and actors with very little training, have influenced it deeply. The
Mystery Plays and the Miracle Plays got their players at no great
distance from the Church door, and the classic drama of France had
for a forerunner performances of Greek and Latin Classics, given by
students and people of quality, and even at its height Racine wrote two
of his most famous tragedies to be played by young girls at school.
This was before acting had got so far away from our natural instincts
of expression. When the play is in verse, or in rhythmical prose, it
does not gain by the change, and a company of amateurs, if they love
literature, and are not self-conscious, and really do desire to do
well, can often make a better hand of it than the ordinary professional
company.

The greater number of their plays will, in all likelihood, be comedies
of Irish country life, and here they need not fear competition, for
they will know an Irish countryman as no professional can know him; but
whatever they play, they will have one advantage the English amateur
has not: there is in their blood a natural capacity for acting, and
they have never, like him, become the mimics of well-known actors.
The arts have always lost something of their sap when they have been
cut off from the people as a whole; and when the theatre is perfectly
alive, the audience, as at the Gaelic drama to-day in Gaelic-speaking
districts, feels itself to be almost a part of the play. I have never
felt that the dignity of art was imperilled when the audience at Dr.
Hyde's _An Posadh_ cheered the bag of flour or the ham lent by some
local shopkeepers to increase the bridal gifts. It was not merely
because of its position in the play that the Greek chorus represented
the people, and the old ballad singers waited at the end of every
verse till their audience had taken up the chorus; while Ritual, the
most powerful form of drama, differs from the ordinary form, because
everyone who hears it is also a player. Our modern theatre, with the
seats always growing more expensive, and its dramatic art drifting
always from the living impulse of life, and becoming more and more what
Rossetti would have called 'soulless self-reflections of man's skill,'
no longer gives pleasure to any imaginative mind. It is easy for us
to hate England in this country, and we give that hatred something of
nobility if we turn it now and again into hatred of the vulgarity of
commercial syndicates, of all that commercial finish and pseudo-art she
has done so much to cherish. Mr. Standish O'Grady has quoted somebody
as saying 'the passions must be held in reverence, they must not, they
cannot be excited at will,' and the noble using of that old hatred will
win for us sympathy and attention from all artists and people of good
taste, and from those of England more than anywhere, for there is the
need greatest.
Before this part of our work can be begun, it will be necessary to
create a household of living art in Dublin, with principles that have
become habits, and a public that has learnt to care for a play because
it is a play, and not because it is serviceable to some cause. Our
patent is not so wide as we had hoped for, for we had hoped to have
a patent as little restricted as that of the Gaiety or the Theatre
Royal. We were, however, vigorously opposed by these theatres and by
the Queen's Theatre, and the Solicitor-General, to meet them half way,
has restricted our patent to plays written by Irishmen or on Irish
subjects or to foreign masterpieces, provided these masterpieces are
not English. This has been done to make our competition against the
existing theatres as unimportant as possible. It does not directly
interfere with the work of our society to any serious extent, but
it would have indirectly helped our work had such bodies as the
Elizabethan Stage Society, which brought _Everyman_ to Dublin some
years ago, been able to hire the theatre from Miss Horniman, when it is
not wanted by us, and to perform there without the limitations imposed
by a special license.

Everything that creates a theatrical audience is an advantage to us,
and the small number of seats in our theatre would have kept away that
kind of drama, in whatever language, which spoils an audience for good
work.

The enquiry itself was not a little surprising, for the legal
representatives of the theatres, being the representatives of Musical
Comedy, were very anxious for the morals of the town. I had spoken of
the Independent Theatre, and a lawyer wanted to know if a play of mine
which attacked the institution of marriage had not been performed by
it recently. I had spoken of M. Maeterlinck and of his indebtedness
to a theatre somewhat similar to our own, and one of our witnesses,
who knew no more about it than the questioner, was asked if a play by
M. Maeterlinck called _L'Intruse_ had not been so immoral that it was
received with a cry of horror in London. I have written no play about
marriage, and the Independent Theatre died some twelve years ago, and
_L'Intruse_ might be played in a nursery with no worse effects than
a little depression of spirits. Our opponents having thus protested
against our morals, went home with the fees of Musical Comedy in their
pockets.

For all this, we are better off so far as the law is concerned than
we would be in England. The theatrical law of Ireland was made by the
Irish Parliament, and though the patent system, the usual method of
the time, has outlived its use and come to an end everywhere but in
Ireland, we must be grateful to that ruling caste of free spirits, that
being free themselves they left the theatre in freedom. In England
there is a censor, who forbids you to take a subject from the Bible,
or from politics, or to picture public characters, or certain moral
situations which are the foundation of some of the greatest plays of
the world.