No More Learning

He was thinking, it is obvious, of a play made out
of that typically modern life where there is no longer vivid speech.
Blake says that a work of art must be minutely articulated by God or
man, and man has too little help from that occasional collaborateur
when he writes of people whose language has become abstract and dead.
Falstaff gives one the sensation of reality, and when one remembers the
abundant vocabulary of a time when all but everything present to the
mind was present to the senses, one imagines that his words were but
little magnified from the words of such a man in real life. Language
was still alive then, alive as it is in Gaelic to-day, as it is in
English-speaking Ireland where the Schoolmaster or the newspaper has
not corrupted it. I know that we are at the mere beginning, laboriously
learning our craft, trying our hands in little plays for the most
part, that we may not venture too boldly in our ignorance; but I never
hear the vivid, picturesque, ever-varied language of Mr. Synge's
persons without feeling that the great collaborateur has his finger
in our business. May it not be that the only realistic play that will
live as Shakespeare has lived, as Calderon has lived, as the Greeks
have lived, will arise out of the common life, where language is as
much alive as if it were new come out of Eden? After all, is not the
greatest play not the play that gives the sensation of an external
reality but the play in which there is the greatest abundance of life
itself, of the reality that is in our minds? Is it possible to make
a work of art, which needs every subtlety of expression if it is to
reveal what hides itself continually, out of a dying, or at any rate
a very ailing language? and all language but that of the poets and of
the poor is already bed-ridden. We have, indeed, persiflage, the only
speech of educated men that expresses a deliberate enjoyment of words:
but persiflage is not a true language. It is impersonal; it is not in
the midst but on the edge of life; it covers more character than it
discovers: and yet, such as it is, all our comedies are made out of it.

What the ever-moving delicately-moulded flesh is to human beauty, vivid
musical words are to passion. Somebody has said that every nation
begins with poetry and ends with algebra, and passion has always
refused to express itself in algebraical terms.

Have we not been in error in demanding from our playwrights personages
who do not transcend our common actions any more than our common
speech?
If we are in the right, all antiquity has been in error. The
scholars of a few generations ago were fond of deciding that certain
persons were unworthy of the dignity of art. They had, it may be, an
over-abounding preference for kings and queens, but we are, it may be,
very stupid in thinking that the average man is a fit subject at all
for the finest art. Art delights in the exception, for it delights in
the soul expressing itself according to its own laws and arranging
the world about it in its own pattern, as sand strewn upon a drum
will change itself into different patterns, according to the notes of
music that are sung or played to it. But the average man is average
because he has not attained to freedom. Habit, routine, fear of public
opinion, fear of punishment here or hereafter, a myriad of things that
are 'something other than human life,' something less than flame,
work their will upon his soul and trundle his body here and there. At
the first performance of _Ghosts_ I could not escape from an illusion
unaccountable to me at the time. All the characters seemed to be less
than life-size; the stage, though it was but the little Royalty stage,
seemed larger than I had ever seen it. Little whimpering puppets moved
here and there in the middle of that great abyss. Why did they not
speak out with louder voices or move with freer gestures? What was it
that weighed upon their souls perpetually? Certainly they were all in
prison, and yet there was no prison. In India there are villages so
obedient that all the jailer has to do is to draw a circle upon the
ground with his staff, and to tell his thief to stand there so many
hours; but what law had these people broken that they had to wander
round that narrow circle all their lives? May not such art, terrible,
satirical, inhuman, be the medicine of great cities, where nobody is
ever alone with his own strength? Nor is Maeterlinck very different,
for his persons 'enquire after Jerusalem in the regions of the grave,
with weak voices almost inarticulate, wearying repose. ' Is it the
mob that has robbed those angelic persons of the energy of their
souls?