No More Learning

Boyle,
on the other hand, write of the countryman or villager of the East
or centre of Ireland, who thinks in English, and the speech of their
people shows the influence of the newspaper and the National Schools.
The people they write of, too, are not the true folk. They are the
peasant as he is being transformed by modern life, and for that very
reason the man of the towns may find it easier to understand them.
There is less surprise, less wonder in what he sees, but there is more
of himself there, more of his vision of the world and of the problems
that are troubling him.

It is not fitting for the showman to overpraise the show, but he is
always permitted to tell you what is in his booths. Mr. Synge is the
most obviously individual of our writers. He alone has discovered a
new kind of sarcasm, and it is this sarcasm that keeps him, and may
long keep him, from general popularity. Mr. Boyle satirises a miserly
old woman, and he has made a very vivid person of her, but as yet his
satire is such as all men accept; it brings no new thing to judgment.
We have never doubted that what he assails is evil, and we are never
afraid that it is ourselves. Lady Gregory alone writes out of a spirit
of pure comedy, and laughs without bitterness and with no thought but
to laugh. She has a perfect sympathy with her characters, even with
the worst of them, and when the curtain goes down we are so far from
the mood of judgment that we do not even know that we have condoned
many sins. In Mr. Colum's _Land_ there is a like comedy when Cornelius
and Sally fill the scene, but then he is too young to be content with
laughter.
He is still interested in the reform of society, but that
will pass, for at about thirty every writer, who is anything of an
artist, comes to understand that all a work of art can do is to show
one the reality that is within our minds, and the reality that our eyes
look on. He is the youngest of us all by many years, and we are all
proud to foresee his future.

I think that a race or a nation or a phase of life has but few dramatic
themes, and that when these have been once written well they must
afterwards be written less and less well until one gets at last but
'Soulless self-reflections of man's skill. ' The first man writes
what it is natural to write, the second man what is left to him, for
the imagination cannot repeat itself. The hoydenish young woman,
the sentimental young woman, the villain and the hero alike ever
self-possessed, of contemporary drama, were once real discoveries, and
one can trace their history through the generations like a joke or a
folk-tale, but, unlike these, they grow always less interesting as they
get farther from their cradle. Our opportunity in Ireland is not that
our playwrights have more talent, it is possible that they have less
than the workers in an old tradition, but that the necessity of putting
a life that has not hitherto been dramatised into their plays excludes
all these types which have had their origin in a different social order.

An audience with National feeling is alive, at the worst it is alive
enough to quarrel with. One man came up from the scene of Lady
Gregory's _Kincora_ at Killaloe that he might see her play, and having
applauded loudly, and even cheered for the Dalcassians, became silent
and troubled when Brian took Gormleith for his wife. 'It is a great
pity,' he said to a man next to him, 'that he didn't marry a quiet
girl from his own district. ' Some have quarrelled with me because I
did not take some glorious moment of Cuchulain's life for my play, and
not the killing of his son, and all our playwrights have been attacked
for choosing bad characters instead of good, and called slanderers of
their country. In so far as these attacks come from National feeling,
that is to say, out of an interest or an affection for the life of this
country now and in past times, as did the countryman's trouble about
Gormleith, they are in the long run the greatest help to a dramatist,
for they give him something to startle or to delight. Every writer has
had to face them where his work has aroused a genuine interest. The
Germans at the beginning of the nineteenth century preferred Schiller
to Goethe, and thought him the greater writer, because he put nobler
characters into his books; and when Chaucer met Eros walking in the
month of May, that testy god complains that though he had 'sixty
bookkes olde and newe,' and all full of stories of women and the life
they led, and though for every bad woman there are a hundred good, he
has chosen to write only of the bad ones. He complains that Chaucer
by his _Troilus_ and his _Romaunt of the Rose_ has brought love and
women to discredit. It is the same in painting as in literature, for
when a new painter arises men cry out, even when he is a painter of
the beautiful like Rossetti, that he has chosen the exaggerated or the
ugly or the unhealthy, forgetting that it is the business of art and
of letters to change the values and to mint the coinage. Without this
outcry there is no movement of life in the arts, for it is the sign of
values not yet understood, of a coinage not yet mastered.