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Title: Plays and controversies
Author: W. B. Yeats
Artist: John Singer Sargent
Contributor: Edmund Dulac
Walter Morse Rummel
Release date: August 27, 2026 [eBook #79460]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79460
Credits: Chris Hapka, Music transcribed by Jude Eylander and Linda Cantoni. and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PLAYS AND CONTROVERSIES ***
PLAYS
AND
CONTROVERSIES
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: A portrait of a young W. B. Yeats,
from a charcoal drawing by John S. Sargent, R.A.]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PLAYS
AND
CONTROVERSIES
BY
W. B. YEATS
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1924
_All rights reserved_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT, 1907, 1912, 1921 AND 1924,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
New and Revised Edition.
Set up and electrotyped. Published August, 1924.
_Printed in the United States of America_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE
I have gathered into this book two plays, written before the foundation
of the Irish Theatre though much corrected since, and four plays written
but the other day and intended for performance in drawing-room and
studio, and a long series of dramatic notes. I begin the book with these
notes, which are taken for the most part from an occasional publication
called _Samhain_, started in the third year of ‘The Irish Dramatic
Movement’ to defend that movement, and long out of print. In a little
while Dail Eireann and our Dublin newspapers will consider, as I hope,
the foundation of an Irish State Theatre; and I would put these old
notes into evidence. Though often about foolish quarrels, or plays but
little better, they may keep their use even when that occasion passes;
being passionately written, and at a moment when Ireland was preparing,
in that dark portion of the mind which is like the other side of the
moon, for insurrection and anarchic violence; and all in some measure a
plea for intellectual spontaneity against unyielding, mechanical,
abstract principles. I ask indulgence if I overrate their value, for it
may be that I cannot judge sentences that call up memories of the time
when I was most alive, having most friends and enemies. All needful
explanations are in Lady Gregory’s book, _Our Irish Theatre_.
The plays are so abundantly annotated and prefaced that I need say
nothing more except that the first was planned and partly written when I
was little more than a boy, and that it gives me more pleasure in the
memory than any of my plays. It was all thought out in the first fervour
of my generation’s distaste for Victorian rhetoric; that rhetoric once
away, every poetical virtue seemed possible.
W. B. YEATS.
Dublin
February 1923
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE IRISH DRAMATIC MOVEMENT 1
‘THE COUNTESS CATHLEEN’ 219
NOTE ON ‘THE COUNTESS CATHLEEN’ 285
PREFACE TO ‘THE LAND OF HEART’S DESIRE’ 301
‘THE LAND OF HEART’S DESIRE’ 303
NOTE ON ‘THE LAND OF HEART’S DESIRE’ 329
FOUR PLAYS FOR DANCERS-- 331
‘AT THE HAWK’S WELL’ 337
‘THE ONLY JEALOUSY OF EMER’ 357
‘THE DREAMING OF THE BONES’ 381
‘CALVARY’ 401
NOTE ON THE FIRST PERFORMANCE OF ‘AT THE HAWK’S WELL’ 417
MUSIC FOR ‘AT THE HAWK’S WELL’ 422
NOTE ON ‘THE ONLY JEALOUSY OF EMER’ 440
MUSIC FOR ‘THE DREAMING OF THE BONES’ 442
NOTE ON ‘THE DREAMING OF THE BONES’ 467
NOTE ON ‘CALVARY’ 471
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ILLUSTRATIONS
Portrait of the Author from a charcoal drawing by _Frontispiece_
John S. Sargent R.A.
FACING PAGE
The Guardian of the Well in ‘At the Hawk’s Well’ 337
Design for Black Cloth used in ‘At the Hawk’s 340
Well’
Musician in ‘At the Hawk’s Well’ 342
Old Man in ‘At the Hawk’s Well’ 344
Mask for Old Man in ‘At the Hawk’s Well’ 346
Mask for Young Man in ‘At the Hawk’s Well’ 348
Young Man in ‘At the Hawk’s Well’ 350
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE IRISH DRAMATIC MOVEMENT
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SAMHAIN: 1901
When Lady Gregory, Mr. Edward Martyn, and myself planned the Irish
Literary Theatre, we decided that it should be carried on in the form we
had projected for three years. We thought that three years would show
whether the country desired to take up the project, and make it a part
of the national life, and that we, at any rate, could return to our
proper work, in which we did not include theatrical management, at the
end of that time. A little later, Mr. George Moore[1] joined us; and,
looking back now upon our work, I doubt if it could have been done at
all without his knowledge of the stage; and certainly if the
performances of this present year bring our adventure to a successful
close, a chief part of the credit will be his. Many, however, have
helped us in various degrees, for in Ireland just now one has only to
discover an idea that seems of service to the country for friends and
helpers to start up on every hand. While we needed guarantors we had
them in plenty, and though Mr. Edward Martyn’s public spirit made it
unnecessary to call upon them, we thank them none the less.
Whether the Irish Literary Theatre has a successor made on its own model
or not, we can claim that a dramatic movement which will not die has
been started. When we began our work, we tried in vain to get a play in
Gaelic. We could not even get a condensed version of the dialogue of
Oisin and Patrick. We wrote to Gaelic enthusiasts in vain, for their
imagination had not yet turned towards the stage, and now there are
excellent Gaelic plays by Dr. Douglas Hyde, by Father O’Leary, by Father
Dineen, and by Mr. MacGinlay; and the Gaelic League has had a
competition for a one-act play in Gaelic, with what results I do not
know. There have been successful performances of plays in Gaelic at
Dublin and at Macroom, and at Letterkenny, and I think at other places;
and Mr. Fay has got together an excellent little company which plays
both in Gaelic and in English. I may say, for I am perhaps writing an
epitaph, and epitaphs should be written in a genial spirit, that we have
turned a great deal of Irish imagination towards the stage. We could not
have done this if our movement had not opened a way of expression for an
impulse that was in the people themselves. The truth is that the Irish
people are at that precise stage of their history when imagination,
shaped by many stirring events, desires dramatic expression. One has
only to listen to a recitation of Raftery’s _Argument with Death_ at
some country Feis to understand this. When Death makes a good point, or
Raftery a good point, the audience applaud delightedly, and applaud, not
as a London audience would, some verbal dexterity, some piece of
smartness, but the movements of a simple and fundamental comedy. One
sees it too in the reciters themselves, whose acting is at times all but
perfect in its vivid simplicity. I heard a little Claddagh girl tell a
folk-story at Galway Feis with a restraint and a delightful energy that
could hardly have been bettered by the most careful training.
* * * * *
The organisation of this movement is of immediate importance. Some of
our friends propose that somebody begin at once to get a small stock
company together, and that he invite, let us say, Mr. Benson, to find us
certain well-trained actors, Irish if possible, but well trained of a
certainty, who will train our actors, and take the more difficult parts
at the beginning. These friends contend that it is necessary to import
our experts at the beginning, for our company must be able to compete
with travelling English companies, but that a few years will be enough
to make many competent Irish actors. The Corporation of Dublin should be
asked, they say, to give a small annual sum of money, such as they give
to the Academy of Music; and the Corporations of Cork and Limerick and
Waterford, and other provincial towns, to give small endowments in the
shape of a hall and attendants and lighting for a week or two out of
every year; and the Technical Board to give a small annual sum of money
to a school of acting which would teach fencing and declamation, and
gesture and the like. The stock company would perform in Dublin perhaps
three weeks in spring, and three weeks in autumn, and go on tour the
rest of the time through Ireland, and through the English towns where
there is a large Irish population. It would perform plays in Irish and
English, and also, it is proposed, the masterpieces of the world, making
a point of performing Spanish, and Scandinavian, and French, and perhaps
Greek masterpieces rather more than Shakespeare, for Shakespeare is
seen, not well done indeed, but not unendurably ill done, in the Theatre
of Commerce. It would do its best to give Ireland a hardy and shapely
national character by opening the doors to the four winds of the world,
instead of leaving the door that is towards the east wind open alone.
Certainly, the national character, which is so essentially different
from the English that Spanish and French influences may well be most
healthy, is at present like one of those miserable thorn bushes by the
sea that are all twisted to one side by some prevailing wind.
* * * * *
It is contended that there is no reason why the company should not be as
successful as similar companies in Germany and Scandinavia, and that it
would be even of commercial advantage to Dublin by making it a
pleasanter place to live in, besides doing incalculable good to the
whole intellect of the country. One, at any rate, of those who press the
project on us has much practical knowledge of the stage and of
theatrical management, and knows what is possible and what is not
possible.
* * * * *
Others among our friends, and among these are some who have had more
than their share of the hard work which has built up the intellectual
movement in Ireland, argue that a theatre of this kind would require too
much money to be free, that it could not touch on politics, the most
vital passion and vital interest of the country, as they say, and that
the attitude of continual compromise between conviction and interest,
which it would necessitate, would become demoralising to everybody
concerned, especially at moments of political excitement. They tell us
that the war between an Irish Ireland and an English Ireland is about to
become much fiercer, to divide families and friends it may be, and that
the organisations that will lead in the war must be able to say
everything the people are thinking. They would have Irishmen give their
plays to a company like Mr. Fay’s, when they are within its power, and
if not, to Mr. Benson or to any other travelling company which will play
them in Ireland without committees, where everybody compromises a
little. In this way, they contend, we would soon build up an Irish
theatre from the ground, escaping to some extent the conventions of the
ordinary theatre, and those English voices which give a foreign air to
our words. And though we might have to wait some years, we would get
even the masterpieces of the world in good time. Let us, they think, be
poor enough to whistle at the thief who would take away some of our
thoughts, and after Mr. Fay has taken his company, as he plans, through
the villages and the country towns, he will get the little endowment
that is necessary, or if he does not, some other will.
* * * * *
I do not know what Lady Gregory or Mr. Moore thinks of these projects. I
am not going to say what I think. I have spent much of my time and more
of my thought these last ten years on Irish organisation, and now that
the Irish Literary Theatre has completed the plan I had in my head ten
years ago, I want to go down again to primary ideas. I want to put old
stories into verse, and if I put them into dramatic verse it will matter
less to me henceforward who plays them than what they play, and how they
play. I hope to get our heroic age into verse, and to solve some
problems of the speaking of verse to musical notes.
* * * * *
There is only one question which is raised by the two projects I have
described on which I will give an opinion. It is of the first importance
that those among us who want to write for the stage should study the
dramatic masterpieces of the world. If they can get them on the stage,
so much the better, but study them they must if Irish drama is to mean
anything to Irish intellect. At the present moment, Shakespeare being
the only great dramatist known to Irish writers has made them cast their
work too much on the English model. Miss Milligan’s _Red Hugh_, which
was successfully acted in Dublin the other day, had no business to be in
two scenes; and Father O’Leary’s _Tadg Saor_, despite its most vivid and
picturesque, though far too rambling dialogue, shows in its half-dozen
changes of scene the influence of the same English convention, which
arose when there was no scene-painting, and is often a difficulty where
there is, and is always an absurdity in a farce of thirty minutes,
breaking up the emotion and sending our thoughts here and there. Mr.
MacGinlay’s _Elis agus an bhean deirce_ has not this defect, and though
I had not Irish enough to follow it when I saw it played, and
excellently played, by Mr. Fay’s company, I could see from the continual
laughter of the audience that it held them with an unbroken emotion. The
best Gaelic play after Dr. Hyde’s is, I think, Father Dineen’s
_Creideamh agus Gorta_, and though it changes the scene a little oftener
than is desirable under modern conditions, it does not remind me of an
English model. It reminds me of Calderon by its treatment of a religious
subject, and by something in Father Dineen’s sympathy with the people
that is like his. But I think if Father Dineen had studied that great
Catholic dramatist he would not have failed, as he has done once or
twice, to remember some necessary detail of a situation. In the first
scene he makes a servant ask his fellow-servants about things he must
have known as well as they; and he loses a dramatic moment in his third
scene by forgetting that Seagan Gorm has a pocketful of money which he
would certainly, being the man he was, have offered to the woman he was
urging into temptation. The play towards the end changes from prose to
verse, and the reverence and simplicity of the verse makes one think of
a mediæval miracle play. The subject has been so much a part of Irish
life that it was bound to be used by an Irish dramatist, though
certainly I shall always prefer plays which attack a more eternal devil
than the proselytiser. He has been defeated, and the arts are at their
best when they are busy with battles that can never be won. It is
possible, however, that we may have to deal with passing issues until we
have re-created the imaginative tradition of Ireland, and filled the
popular imagination again with saints and heroes. These short plays
(though they would be better if their writers knew the masters of their
craft) are very dramatic as they are, but there is no chance of our
writers of Gaelic, or our writers of English, doing good plays of any
length if they do not study the masters. If Irish dramatists had studied
the romantic plays of Ibsen, the one great master the modern stage has
produced, they would not have sent the Irish Literary Theatre imitations
of Boucicault, who had no relation to literature, and Father O’Leary
would have put his gift for dialogue, a gift certainly greater than, let
us say, Mr. Jones’ or Mr. Grundy’s, to better use than the writing of
that long, rambling dramatisation of the _Tain bo Cuailgne_, in which I
hear in the midst of the exuberant Gaelic dialogue the worn-out
conventions of English poetic drama. The moment we leave even a little
the folk-tradition of the peasant, as we must in drama, if we do not
know the best that has been said and written in the world, we do not
even know ourselves. It is no great labour to know the best dramatic
literature, for there is very little of it. We Irish must know it all,
for we have, I think, far greater need of the severe discipline of
French and Scandinavian drama than of Shakespeare’s luxuriance.
* * * * *
If the _Diarmuid and Grania_ and the _Casadh an t-Sugain_ are not well
constructed, it is not because Mr. Moore and Dr. Hyde and myself do not
understand the importance of construction, and Mr. Martyn has shown by
the triumphant construction of _The Heather Field_ how much thought he
has given to the matter; but for the most part our Irish plays read as
if they were made without a plan, without a ‘scenario,’ as it is called.
European drama began so, but the European drama had centuries for its
growth, while our art must grow to perfection in a generation or two if
it is not to be smothered before it is well above the earth by what is
merely commercial in the art of England.
* * * * *
Let us learn construction from the masters, and dialogue from ourselves.
A relation of mine has just written me a letter, in which he says: ‘It
is natural to an Irishman to write plays; he has an inborn love of
dialogue and sound about him, of a dialogue as lively, gallant, and
passionate as in the times of great Eliza. In these days an Englishman’s
dialogue is that of an amateur--that is to say, it is never spontaneous.
I mean in _real life_. Compare it with an Irishman’s, above all a poor
Irishman’s, reckless abandonment and naturalness, or compare it with the
only fragment that has come down to us of Shakespeare’s own
conversation.’ (He is remembering a passage in, I think, Ben Jonson’s
_Underwoods_.) ‘Petty commerce and puritanism have brought to the front
the wrong type of Englishman; the lively, joyous, yet tenacious man has
transferred himself to Ireland. We have him and we will keep him unless
the combined nonsense of ... and ... and ... succeed in suffocating
him.’
* * * * *
In Dublin the other day I saw a poster advertising a play by a Miss ...
under the patronage of certain titled people. I had little hope of
finding any reality in it, but I sat out two acts. Its dialogue was
above the average, though the characters were the old rattle-traps of
the stage, the wild Irish girl, and the Irish servant, and the bowing
Frenchman, and the situations had all been squeezed dry generations ago.
One saw everywhere the shadowy mind of a woman of the Irish upper
classes as they have become to-day, but under it all there was a kind of
life, though it was but the life of a string and a wire. I do not know
who Miss ... is, but I know that she is young, for I saw her portrait in
a weekly paper, and I think that she is clever enough to make her work
of some importance. If she goes on doing bad work she will make money,
perhaps a great deal of money, but she will do a little harm to her
country. If, on the other hand, she gets into an original relation with
life, she will, perhaps, make no money, and she will certainly have her
class against her.
The Irish upper classes put everything into a money measure. When any
one among them begins to write or paint they ask him, ‘How much money
have you made?’ ‘Will it pay?’ Or they say, ‘If you do this or that you
will make more money.’ The poor Irish clerk or shopboy,[2] who writes
verses or articles in his brief leisure, writes for the glory of God and
of his country; and because his motive is high, there is not one vulgar
thought in the countless little ballad books that have been written from
Callinan’s day to this. They are often clumsily written, for they are in
English, and if you have not read a great deal, it is difficult to write
well in a language which has been long separated from the ‘folk-speech’;
but they have not a thought a proud and simple man would not have
written. The writers were poor men, but they left that money measure to
the Irish upper classes. All Irish writers have to choose whether they
will write as the upper classes have done, not to express but to exploit
this country; or join the intellectual movement which has raised the cry
that was heard in Russia in the seventies, the cry, ‘To the people.’
Moses was little good to his people until he had killed an Egyptian; and
for the most part a writer or public man of the upper classes is useless
to this country till he has done something that separates him from his
class. We wish to grow peaceful crops, but we must dig our furrows with
the sword.
* * * * *
Our plays this year will be produced by Mr. Benson at the Gaiety Theatre
on October the 21st, and on some of the succeeding days. They are Dr.
Douglas Hyde’s _Casadh an t-Sugain_, which is founded on a well-known
Irish story of a wandering poet; and _Diarmuid and Grania_, a play in
three acts and in prose by Mr. George Moore and myself, which is founded
on the most famous of all Irish stories, the story of the lovers whose
beds were the cromlechs. The first act of _Diarmuid and Grania_ is in
the great banqueting hall of Tara, and the second and third are on the
slopes of Ben Bulben in Sligo. We do not think there is anything in
either play to offend anybody, but we make no promises. We thought our
plays inoffensive last year and the year before, but we were accused the
one year of sedition, and the other of heresy.
* * * * *
I have called this little collection of writings _Samhain_, the old name
for the beginning of winter, because our plays this year are in October,
and because our Theatre is coming to an end in its present shape.
-----
Footnote 1:
Both Mr. Moore and Mr. Martyn dropped out of the movement after the
third performance at the Irish Literary Theatre in 1901.--W. B. Y.,
1908.
Footnote 2:
That mood has gone, with Fenianism and its wild hopes. The National
movement has been commercialised in the last few years. How much real
ideality is but hidden for a time one cannot say.--W. B. Y., March
1908.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1902
The Irish Literary Theatre wound up its three years of experiment last
October with _Diarmuid and Grania_, which was played by Mr. Benson’s
Company, Mr. Benson himself playing Diarmuid with poetry and fervour,
and _Casadh an t-Sugain_, played by Dr. Hyde and some members of the
Gaelic League. _Diarmuid and Grania_ drew large audiences, but its
version of the legend was a good deal blamed by critics, who knew only
the modern text of the story. There are two versions, and the play was
fully justified by Irish and Scottish folk-lore, and by certain early
Irish texts, which do not see Grania through very friendly eyes. Any
critic who is interested in so dead a controversy can look at the
folk-tales quoted by Campbell in, I think, _West Highland
Superstitions_, and at the fragment translated by Kuno Meyer, at page
458, of vol. i. of _Zeitschrift für Keltische Philologie_. Dr. Hyde’s
play, on the other hand, pleased everybody, and has been played a good
many times in a good many places since. It was the first play in Irish
played in a theatre, and did much towards making plays a necessary part
in Irish propaganda.
* * * * *
The Irish Literary Theatre has given place to a company of Irish actors.
Its Committee saw them take up the work all the more gladly because it
had not formed them or influenced them. A dramatic society with
guarantors and patrons can never have more than a passing use, because
it can never be quite free; and it is not successful until it is able to
say it is no longer wanted. Amateur actors will perform for
_Cumann-na-Gael_ plays chosen by themselves, and written by A. E., by
Mr. Cousins, by Mr. Ryan, by Mr. MacGinlay, and by myself. These plays
will be given at the Antient Concert Rooms at the end of October, but
the National Theatrical Company will repeat their successes with new
work in a very little hall they have hired in Camden Street. If they
could afford it they would have hired some bigger house, but, after all,
M. Antoine founded his _Théâtre Libre_ with a company of amateurs in a
hall that only held three hundred people.
* * * * *
The first work of theirs to get much attention was their performance,
last spring, at the invitation of _Inghinidhe h-Eireann_, of A. E.’s
_Deirdre_, and my _Cathleen ni Houlihan_. They had Miss Maud Gonne’s
help, and it was a fine thing for so beautiful a woman to consent to
play my poor old Cathleen, and she played with nobility and tragic
power. She showed herself as good in tragedy as Dr. Hyde is in comedy,
and stirred a large audience very greatly. The whole company played
well, too, but it was in _Deirdre_ that they interested me most. They
showed plenty of inexperience, especially in the minor characters, but
it was the first performance I had seen since I understood these things
in which the actors kept still enough to give poetical writing its full
effect upon the stage. I had imagined such acting, though I had not seen
it, and had once asked a dramatic company to let me rehearse them in
barrels that they might forget gesture and have their minds free to
think of speech for a while. The barrels, I thought, might be on
castors, so that I could shove them about with a pole when the action
required it. The other day I saw Sara Bernhardt and De Max in _Phèdre_,
and understood where Mr. Fay, who stage-manages the National Theatrical
Company, had gone for his model.[3] For long periods the performers
would merely stand and pose, and I once counted twenty-seven quite
slowly before anybody on a fairly well-filled stage moved, as it seemed,
so much as an eyelash. The periods of stillness were generally shorter,
but I frequently counted seventeen, eighteen, or twenty before there was
a movement. I noticed, too, that the gestures had a rhythmic
progression. Sara Bernhardt would keep her hands clasped over, let us
say, her right breast for some time, and then move them to the other
side, perhaps, lowering her chin till it touched her hands, and then,
after another long stillness, she would unclasp them and hold one out,
and so on, not lowering them till she had exhausted all the gestures of
uplifted hands. Through one long scene De Max, who was quite as fine,
never lifted his hand above his elbow, and it was only when the emotion
came to its climax that he raised it to his breast. Beyond them stood a
crowd of white-robed men who never moved at all, and the whole scene had
the nobility of Greek sculpture, and an extraordinary reality and
intensity. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen upon the
stage, and made me understand, in a new way, that saying of Goethe’s
which is understood everywhere but in England, ‘Art is art because it is
not nature.’ Of course, our amateurs were poor and crude beside those
great actors, perhaps the greatest in Europe, but they followed them as
well as they could, and got an audience of artisans, for the most part,
to admire them for doing it. I heard somebody who sat behind me say,
‘They have got rid of all the nonsense.’
* * * * *
I thought the costumes and scenery, which were designed by A. E.
himself, good, too, though I did not think them simple enough. They were
more simple than ordinary stage costumes and scenery, but I would like
to see poetical drama, which tries to keep at a distance from daily life
that it may keep its emotion untroubled, staged with but two or three
colours. The background, especially in small theatres, where its form is
broken up and lost when the stage is at all crowded, should, I think be
thought out as one thinks out the background of a portrait. One often
needs nothing more than a single colour, with perhaps a few shadowy
forms to suggest wood or mountain. Even on a large stage one should
leave the description of the poet free to call up the martlet’s
procreant cradle or what he will. But I have written enough about
decorative scenery elsewhere, and will probably lecture on that and like
matters before we begin the winter’s work.
* * * * *
The performances of _Deirdre_ and _Cathleen ni Houlihan_, which will be
repeated in the Antient Concert Rooms, drew so many to hear them that
great numbers were turned away from the doors of St. Theresa’s Hall.
Like the plays of the Irish Literary Theatre, they started unexpected
discussion. Mr. Standish O’Grady, who had done more than any other to
make us know the old legends, wrote in his _All Ireland Review_ that old
legends could not be staged without danger of ‘banishing the soul of the
land.’ The old Irish had many wives, for instance, and we had best leave
their histories to the vagueness of legend. How could uneducated people
understand heroes who lived amid such different circumstances? And so we
were to ‘leave heroic cycles alone, and not to bring them down to the
crowd.’ A. E. replied in _The United Irishman_ with an impassioned
letter. ‘The old, forgotten music’ he writes about in his letter is, I
think, that regulated music of speech at which both he and I have been
working, though on somewhat different principles. I have been working
with Miss Farr and Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch, who has made a psaltery for the
purpose, to perfect a music of speech which can be recorded in something
like ordinary musical notes; while A. E. has got a musician to record
little chants with intervals much smaller than those of modern music.
* * * * *
After the production of these plays the most important Irish dramatic
event was, no doubt, the acting of Dr. Hyde’s _An Posadh_, in Galway.
Through an accident it had been very badly rehearsed, but his own acting
made amends. One could hardly have had a play that grew more out of the
life of the people who saw it. There may have been old men in that
audience who remembered its hero the poet Raftery, and there was nobody
there who had not come from hearing his poems repeated at the Galway
Feis. I think from its effect upon the audience that this play, in which
the chief Gaelic poet of our time celebrates his forerunner in
simplicity, will be better liked in Connaught at any rate than even
_Casadh an t-Sugain_. His _Tincear agus Sidheog_, acted in Mr. Moore’s
garden, at the time of the Oireachtas, is a very good play, but is, I
think, the least interesting of his plays as literature. His
imagination, which is essentially the folk-imagination, needs a looser
construction, and probably a more crowded stage. A play that gets its
effect by keeping close to one idea reminds us, when it comes from the
hands of a folk-poet, of Blake’s saying, that ‘Improvement makes
straight roads, but the crooked roads are the roads of genius.’ The idea
loses the richness of its own life, while it destroys the wayward life
of his mind by bringing it under too stern a law. Nor could charming
verses make amends for that second kiss in which there was profanation,
and for that abounding black bottle. Did not M. Trebulet Bonhommie
discover that one spot of ink would kill a swan?
* * * * *
Among the other plays in Irish acted during the year, Father Dineen’s
_Tobar Draoidheachta_ is probably the best. He has given up the many
scenes of his _Creadeamh agus Gorta_, and has written a play in one
scene, which, as it can be staged without much trouble, has already been
played in several places. One admires its _naïveté_ as much as anything
else. Father Dineen, who, no doubt, remembers how Finn mac Cumhal when a
child was put in a field to catch hares and keep him out of mischief,
has sent the rival lovers of his play, when he wanted them off the scene
for a moment, to catch a hare that has crossed the stage. When they
return the good lover is carrying it by the heels, and modestly compares
it to a lame jackass. One rather likes this bit of nonsense when one
comes to it, for in that world of folk-imagination one thing seems as
possible as another. On the other hand, there is a moment of beautiful
dramatic tact. The lover gets a letter telling of the death of a
relative in America, for whom he has no particular affection, and who
has left him a fortune. He cannot lament, for that would be insincere,
and his first words must not be rejoicing. Father Dineen has found for
him the one beautiful thing he could say, ‘It’s a lonesome thing death
is.’ With, perhaps, less beauty than there is in the closing scene of
_Creadeamh agus Gorta_, the play has more fancy and a more sustained
energy.
* * * * *
Father Peter O’Leary has written a play in his usual number of scenes
which has not been published, but has been acted amid much Munster
enthusiasm. But neither that nor _La an Amadan_, which has also been
acted, is likely to have any long life on our country stages. A short
play, with many changes of scene, is a nuisance in any theatre, and
often an impossibility on our poor little stages. Some kind of play, in
English, by Mr. Standish O’Grady, has been acted in the open air in
Kilkenny. I have not seen it, and I cannot understand anything by the
accounts of it, except that there were magic-lantern slides and actors
on horseback, and Mr. Standish O’Grady as an Elizabethan night-watchman,
speaking prologues, and a contented audience of two or three thousand
people.
As we do not think that a play can be worth acting and not worth
reading, all our plays will be published in time. Some have been printed
in _The United Irishman_ and _The All Ireland Review_. I have put my
_Cathleen ni Houlihan_ and a little play by Dr. Hyde into this
_Samhain_. Once already this year I have had what somebody has called
the noble pleasure of praising, and I can praise this _Lost Saint_ with
as good a conscience as I had when I wrote of _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_.
I would always admire it, but just now, when I have been thinking that
literature should return to its old habit of describing desirable
things, I am in the mood to be stirred by that old man gathering up food
for fowl with his heart full of love, and by those children who are so
full of the light-hearted curiosity of childhood, and by that
schoolmaster who has mixed prayer with his gentle punishments. It seems
natural that so beautiful a prayer as that of the old saint should have
come out of a life so full of innocence and peace. One could hardly have
thought out the play in English, for those phrases of a traditional
simplicity and of a too deliberate prettiness which become part of an
old language would have arisen between the mind and the story. We might
even have made something as unreal as the sentimental schoolmaster of
the Scottish novelist, and how many children who are but literary images
would we have had to hunt out of our minds before meeting with those
little children? Even if one could have thought it out in English one
could not have written it in English, unless perhaps in that dialect
which Dr. Hyde had already used in the prose narrative that flows about
his _Love Songs of Connaught_.
Dr. Hyde has written a little play about the birth of Christ which has
the same beauty and simplicity. These plays remind me of my first
reading of The _Love Songs of Connaught_. The prose parts of that book
were to me, as they were to many others, the coming of a new power into
literature. I find myself now, as I found myself then, grudging to
propaganda, to scholarship, to oratory, however necessary, a genius
which might in modern Irish or in that idiom of the English-speaking
country-people discover a new region for the mind to wander in. In
Ireland, where we have so much to prove and to disprove, we are ready to
forget that the creation of an emotion of beauty is the only kind of
literature that justifies itself. Books of literary propaganda and
literary history are merely preparations for the creation or
understanding of such an emotion. It is necessary to put so much in
order, to clear away so much, to explain so much, that somebody may be
moved by a thought or an image that is inexplicable as a wild creature.
* * * * *
I cannot judge the language of his Irish poetry, but it is so rich in
poetical thought, when at its best, that it seems to me that if he were
to write more he might become to modern Irish what Mistral was to modern
Provençal. I wish, too, that he could put away from himself some of the
interruptions of that ceaseless propaganda, and find time for the making
of translations, loving and leisurely, like those in _Beside the Fire_
and _The Love Songs of Connaught_. He has begun to get a little careless
lately. Above all I would have him keep to that English idiom of the
Irish-thinking people of the west which he has begun to use less often.
It is the only good English spoken by any large number of Irish people
to-day, and we must found good literature on a living speech. English
men of letters found themselves upon the English Bible, where religious
thought gets its living speech. Blake, if I remember rightly, copied it
out twice, and I remember once finding a few illuminated pages of a new
decorated copy that he began in his old age. Byron read it for the sake
of style, though I think it did him little good; and Ruskin founded
himself in great part upon it. Indeed, we find everywhere signs of a
book which is the chief influence in the lives of English children. The
translation used in Ireland has not the same literary beauty, and if we
are to find anything to take its place we must find it in that idiom of
the poor, which mingles so much of the same vocabulary with turns of
phrase that have come out of Gaelic. Even Irish writers of considerable
powers of thought seem to have no better standard of English than a
schoolmaster’s ideal of correctness. If their grammar is correct they
will write in all the lightness of their hearts about ‘keeping in
touch,’ and ‘object-lessons,’ and ‘shining examples,’ and ‘running in
grooves,’ and ‘flagrant violations’ of various things. Yet, as
Sainte-Beuve has said, there is nothing immortal except style. One can
write well in that country idiom without much thought about one’s words;
the emotion will bring the right word itself, for there everything is
old and everything alive and nothing common or threadbare. I recommend
to the Intermediate Board--a body that seems to benefit by advice--a
better plan than any they know for teaching children to write good
English. Let every child in Ireland be set to turn a leading article or
a piece of what is called excellent English, written perhaps by some
distinguished member of the Board, into the idiom of his own
countryside. He will find at once the difference between dead and living
words, between words that meant something years ago and words that have
the only thing that gives literary quality--personality, the breath of
men’s mouths. Zola, who is sometimes an admirable critic, has said that
some of the greatest pages in French literature are not even right in
their grammar: ‘They are great because they have personality.’
* * * * *
The habit of writing for the stage, even when it is not country-people
who are the speakers, and of considering what good dialogue is, will
help to increase our feeling for style. Let us get back in everything to
the spoken word, even though we have to speak our lyrics to the Psaltery
or the Harp, for, as A. E. says, we have begun to forget that literature
is but recorded speech, and even when we write with care we have begun
‘to write with elaboration what could never be spoken.’ But when we go
back to speech let us see that it is the idiom either of those who have
rejected, or of those who have never learned, the base idioms of the
newspapers.
* * * * *
Mr. Martyn argued in _The United Irishman_ some months ago that our
actors should try to train themselves for the modern drama of society.
The acting of plays of heroic life or plays like _Cathleen ni Houlihan_,
with its speech of the country-people, did not seem to him a
preparation. It is not; but that is as it should be. Our movement is a
return to the people, like the Russian movement of the early seventies,
and the drama of society would but magnify a condition of life which the
countryman and the artisan could but copy to their hurt. The play that
is to give them a quite natural pleasure should tell them either of
their own life, or of that life of poetry where every man can see his
own image, because there alone does human nature escape from arbitrary
conditions. Plays about drawing-rooms are written for the middle classes
of great cities, for the classes who live in drawing-rooms; but if you
would ennoble the man of the roads you must write about the roads, or
about the people of romance, or about great historical people. We
should, of course, play every kind of good play about Ireland that we
can get, but romantic and historical plays, and plays about the life of
artisans and country-people, are the best worth getting. In time, I
think, we can make the poetical play a living dramatic form again, and
the training our actors will get from plays of country life, with its
unchanging outline, its abundant speech, its extravagance of thought,
will help to establish a school of imaginative acting. The play of
society, on the other hand, could but train up realistic actors who
would do badly, for the most part, what English actors do well, and
would, when at all good, drift away to wealthy English theatres. If, on
the other hand, we busy ourselves with poetry and the countryman, two
things which have always mixed with one another in life as on the stage,
we may recover, in the course of years, a lost art which, being an
imitation of nothing English, may bring our actors a secure fame and a
sufficient livelihood.
-----
Footnote 3:
An illusion, as he himself explained to me. He had never seen
_Phèdre_. The players were quiet and natural, because they did not
know what else to do. They had not learned to go wrong.--W. B. Y.,
March 1908.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1903
I cannot describe the various dramatic adventures of the year with as
much detail as I did last year, mainly because the movement has got
beyond me. The most important event of the Gaelic Theatre has been the
two series of plays produced in the Round Room of the Rotunda by the
Gaelic League. Father Dineen’s _Tobar Draoidheachta_, and Dr. Hyde’s _An
Posadh_, and a chronicle play about Hugh O’Neill, and, I think, some
other plays, were seen by immense audiences. I was not in Ireland for
these plays, but a friend tells me that he could only get standing-room
one night, and the Round Room must hold about 3000 people. A performance
of _Tobar Draoidheachta_ I saw there some months before was bad, but I
believe there was great improvement, and that the players who came up
from somewhere in County Cork to play it at this second series of plays
were admirable. The players, too, that brought Dr. Hyde’s _An Posadh_
from Ballaghadereen, in County Mayo, where they had been showing it to
their neighbours, were also, I am told, careful and natural. The
play-writing, always good in dialogue, is still very poor in
construction, and I still hear of plays in many scenes, with no scene
lasting longer than four or six minutes, and few intervals shorter than
nine or ten minutes, which have to be filled up with songs. The Rotunda
chronicle play seems to have been rather of this sort, and I suspect
that when I get Father Peter O’Leary’s _Meadhbh_, a play in five acts
produced at Cork, I shall find the masterful old man, in spite of his
hatred of English thought, sticking to the Elizabethan form. I wish I
could have seen it played last week, for the spread of the Gaelic
Theatre in the country is more important than its spread in Dublin, and
of all the performances of Gaelic plays in the country during the year I
have seen but one--Dr. Hyde’s new play, _Cleamhnas_, at Galway Feis. I
got there a day late for a play by the Master of Galway Workhouse, but
heard that it was well played, and that his dialogue was as good as his
construction was bad. There is no question, however, about the
performance of _Cleamhnas_ being the worst I ever saw. I do not blame
the acting, which was pleasant and natural, in spite of insufficient
rehearsal, but the stage-management. The subject of the play was a
match-making. The terms were in debate between two old men in an inner
room. An old woman, according to the stage directions, should have
listened at the door and reported what she heard to her daughter’s
suitor, who is outside the window, and to her daughter. There was no
window on the stage, and the young man stood close enough to the door to
have listened for himself. The door, where she listened, opened now on
the inner room, and now on the street, according to the necessities of
the play, and the young men who acted the fathers of grown-up children,
when they came through the door, were seen to have done nothing to
disguise their twenty-five or twenty-six birthdays. There had been only
two rehearsals, and the little boy who should have come in laughing at
the end came in shouting, ‘Ho ho, ha ha,’ evidently believing that these
were Gaelic words he had never heard before.
* * * * *
The only Gaelic performances I have seen during the year have been
ill-done, but I have seen them sufficiently well done in other years to
believe my friends when they tell me that there have been good
performances. _Inghinidhe na h-Eireann_ is always thorough, and one
cannot doubt that the performance of Dr. Hyde’s _An Naom ar Iarriad_, by
the children from its classes, was at least careful. A powerful little
play in English against enlisting, by Mr. Colum, was played with it, and
afterwards revived, and played with a play about the Royal Visit, also
in English. I have no doubt that we shall see a good many of these
political plays during the next two or three years, and it may be even
the rise of a more or less permanent company of political players, for
the revolutionary clubs will begin to think plays as necessary as the
Gaelic League is already thinking them. Nobody can find the same
patriotic songs and recitations sung and spoken by the same people, year
in year out, anything but mouldy bread. It is possible that the players
who are to produce plays in October for the Samhain festival of _Cumann
na n-Gaedheal_ may grow into such a company.
* * * * *
Though one welcomes every kind of vigorous life, I am, myself, most
interested in ‘The Irish National Theatre Society,’ which has no
propaganda but that of good art. The little Camden Street Hall it had
taken has been useful for rehearsal alone, for it proved to be too far
away, and too lacking in dressing-rooms for our short plays, which
involve so many changes. Successful performances were given, however, at
Rathmines, and in one or two country places.
* * * * *
_Deirdre_, by A. E., _The Racing Lug_, by Mr. Cousins, _The
Foundations_, by Mr. Ryan, and my _Pot of Broth_, and _Cathleen ni
Houlihan_ were repeated, but no new plays were produced until March 14,
when Lady Gregory’s _Twenty-five_ and my _Hour-Glass_ drew a good
audience. On May 2 the _Hour-Glass_, _Twenty-five_, _Cathleen ni
Houlihan_, _Pot of Broth_, and _Foundations_ were performed before the
Irish Literary Society in London, at the Queen’s Gate Hall, and plays
and players were generously commended by the Press--very eloquently by
the critic of _The Times_. It is natural that we should be pleased with
this praise, and that we should wish others to know of it, for is it not
a chief pleasure of the artist to be commended in subtle and eloquent
words? The critic of _The Times_ has seen many theatres and he is,
perhaps, a little weary of them, but here in Ireland there are one or
two critics who are so much in love, or pretend to be so much in love,
with the theatre as it is, that they complain when we perform on a stage
two feet wider than Molière’s that it is scarce possible to be
interested in anything that is played on so little a stage. We are to
them foolish sectaries who have revolted against that orthodoxy of the
commercial theatre, which is so much less pliant than the orthodoxy of
the Church, for there is nothing so passionate as a vested interest
disguised as an intellectual conviction. If you inquire into its truth
it becomes as angry as a begging-letter writer, when you find some hole
in that beautiful story about the five children and the broken mangle.
In Ireland, wherever the enthusiasts are shaping life, the critic who
does the will of the commercial theatre can but stand against his lonely
pillar defending his articles of belief among a wild people, and
thinking mournfully of distant cities, where nobody puts a raw potato
into his pocket when he is going to hear a musical comedy.
* * * * *
The Irish Literary Society of New York, which has been founded this
year, produced _The Land of Heart’s Desire_, _The Pot of Broth_, and
_Cathleen ni Houlihan_, on June 3 and 4, very successfully, and propose
to give Dr. Hyde’s Nativity Play, _Drama Breithe Chriosta_, and his
_Casadh an t-Sugain_, _Posadh_, and _Naom ar Iarriad_ next year, at the
same time of year, playing them both in Irish and in English. I heard
too that his Nativity Play will be performed in New York, but I know no
particulars except that it will be done in connection with some
religious societies. The National Theatre Society will, I hope, produce
some new plays of his this winter, as well as new plays by Mr. Synge,
Mr. Colum, Lady Gregory, myself, and others. They have taken the
Molesworth Hall for three days in every month, beginning with the 8th,
9th, and 10th of October, when they will perform Mr. Synge’s _Shadow of
the Glen_, a little country comedy, full of a humour that is at once
harsh and beautiful, _Cathleen ni Houlihan_, and a longish one-act play
in verse of my own, called _The King’s Threshold_. This play is founded
on the old story of Seanchan the poet, and King Guaire of Gort, but I
have seen the story from the poet’s point of view, and not, like the old
story-tellers, from the king’s. Our repertory of plays is increasing
steadily, and when the winter’s work is finished, a play[4] 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 _naïveté_ 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,[5] 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[6] 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.
-----
Footnote 4:
This play was _John Bull’s Other Island_. When it came out in the
spring of 1905 we felt ourselves unable to cast it without wronging
Mr. Shaw. We had no ‘Broadbent’ or money to get one.--W. B. Y., March
1908.
Footnote 5:
_The Poor House_, written in Irish by Dr. Hyde on a scenario by Lady
Gregory.
Footnote 6:
_Riders to the Sea._ This play made its way very slowly with our
audiences, but is now very popular.--W. B. Y., March 1908.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE REFORM OF THE THEATRE
I think the theatre must be reformed in its plays, its speaking, its
acting, and its scenery. That is to say, I think there is nothing good
about it at present.
_First._ We have to write or find plays that will make the theatre a
place of intellectual excitement--a place where the mind goes to be
liberated as it was liberated by the theatres of Greece and England and
France at certain great moments of their history, and as it is liberated
in Scandinavia to-day. If we are to do this we must learn that beauty
and truth are always justified of themselves, and that their creation is
a greater service to our country than writing that compromises either in
the seeming service of a cause. We will, doubtless, come more easily to
truth and beauty because we love some cause with all but all our heart;
but we must remember when truth and beauty open their mouths to speak,
that all other mouths should be as silent as Finn bade the Son of
Lugaidh be in the houses of the great. Truth and beauty judge and are
above judgement. They justify and have no need of justification.
Such plays will require, both in writers and in audiences, a stronger
feeling for beautiful and appropriate language than one finds in the
ordinary theatre. Sainte-Beuve has said that there is nothing immortal
in literature except style, and it is precisely this sense of style,
once common among us, that is hardest for us to recover. I do not mean
by style words with an air of literature about them, what is ordinarily
called eloquent writing. The speeches of Falstaff are as perfect in
their style as the soliloquies of Hamlet. One must be able to make a
king of faery or an old countryman or a modern lover speak that language
which is his and nobody else’s, and speak it with so much of emotional
subtlety that the hearer may find it hard to know whether it is the
thought or the word that has moved him, or whether these could be
separated at all.
If we do not know how to construct, if we cannot arrange much
complicated life into a single action, our work will not hold the
attention or linger in the memory, but if we are not in love with words
it will lack the delicate movement of living speech that is the chief
garment of life; and because of this lack the great realists seem to the
lovers of beautiful art to be wise in this generation, and for the next
generation, perhaps, but not for all generations that are to come.
_Second._ But if we are to restore words to their sovereignty we must
make speech even more important than gesture upon the stage.
I have been told that I desire a monotonous chant, but that is not true,
for though a monotonous chant may be a safer beginning for an actor than
the broken and prosaic speech of ordinary recitation, it puts me to
sleep none the less. The sing-song in which a child says a verse is a
right beginning, though the child grows out of it. An actor should
understand how so to discriminate cadence from cadence, and so to
cherish the musical lineaments of verse or prose that he delights the
ear with a continually varied music. Certain passages of lyrical
feeling, or where one wishes, as in the Angel’s part in _The
Hour-Glass_, to make a voice sound like the voice of an immortal, may be
spoken upon pure notes which are carefully recorded and learned as if
they were the notes of a song. Whatever method one adopts, one must
always be certain that the work of art, as a whole, is masculine and
intellectual, in its sound as in its form.
_Third._ We must simplify acting, especially in poetical drama, and in
prose drama that is remote from real life like my _Hour-Glass_. We must
get rid of everything that is restless, everything that draws the
attention away from the sound of the voice, or from the few moments of
intense expression, whether that expression is through the voice or
through the hands; we must from time to time substitute for the
movements that the eye sees the nobler movements that the heart sees,
the rhythmical movements that seem to flow up into the imagination from
some deeper life than that of the individual soul.
_Fourth._ Just as it is necessary to simplify gesture that it may
accompany speech without being its rival, it is necessary to simplify
both the form and the colour of scenery and costume. As a rule the
background should be but a single colour, so that the persons in the
play, wherever they stand, may harmonise with it and preoccupy our
attention. In other words, it should be thought out not as one thinks
out a landscape, but as if it were the background of a portrait, and
this is especially necessary on a small stage where the moment the stage
is filled the painted forms of the background are broken up and lost.
Even when one has to represent trees or hills they should be treated in
most cases decoratively, they should be little more than an unobtrusive
pattern. There must be nothing unnecessary, nothing that will distract
the attention from speech and movement. An art is always at its greatest
when it is most human. Greek acting was great because it did all but
everything with the voice, and modern acting may be great when it does
everything with voice and movement. But an art which smothers these
things with bad painting, with innumerable garish colours, with
continual restless mimicries of the surface of life, is an art of fading
humanity, a decaying art.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MORAL AND IMMORAL PLAYS
A writer in _The Leader_ has said that I told my audience after the
performance of _The Hour-Glass_ that I did not care whether a play was
moral or immoral. He said this without discourtesy, and as I have
noticed that people are generally discourteous when they write about
morals, I think that I owe him upon my part the courtesy of an
explanation. I did not say that I did not care whether a play was moral
or immoral, for I have always been of Verhaeren’s opinion that a
masterpiece is a portion of the conscience of mankind. My objection was
to the rough-and-ready conscience of the newspaper and the pulpit in a
matter so delicate and so difficult as literature. Every generation of
men of letters has been called immoral by the pulpit or the newspaper,
and it has been precisely when that generation has been illuminating
some obscure corner of the conscience that the cry against it has been
more confident.
The plays of Shakespeare had to be performed on the south side of the
Thames because the Corporation of London considered all plays immoral.
Goethe was thought dangerous to faith and morals for two or three
generations. Every educated man knows how great a portion of the
conscience of mankind is in Flaubert and Balzac, and yet their books
have been proscribed in the courts of law, and I found some time ago
that our own National Library, though it had two books on the genius of
Flaubert, had refused on moral grounds to have any books written by him.
With these stupidities in one’s memory, how can one, as many would have
us, arouse the mob, and in this matter the pulpit and the newspaper are
but voices of the mob, against the English theatre in Ireland upon moral
grounds? If that theatre became conscientious as men of letters
understand the conscience, many that now cry against it would think it
even less moral, for it would be more daring, more logical, more
free-spoken. The English theatre is demoralising, not because it
delights in the husband, the wife, and the lover, a subject which has
inspired great literature in most ages of the world, but because the
illogical thinking and insincere feeling we call bad writing make the
mind timid and the heart effeminate. I saw an English play in Dublin a
few months ago called _Mice and Men_. It had run for five hundred nights
in London, and been called by all the newspapers ‘a pure and innocent
play,’ ‘a welcome relief,’ and so on. In it occurred this incident: The
typical scapegrace hero of the stage, a young soldier, who is in love
with the wife of another, goes away for a couple of years, and when he
returns finds that he is in love with a marriageable girl. His mistress,
who has awaited his return with what is represented as faithful love,
sends him a letter of welcome, and because he has grown virtuous of a
sudden he returns it unopened, and with so careless a scorn that the
husband intercepts it; and the dramatist approves this manner of crying
off with an old love, and rings down the curtain on his marriage bells.
Men who would turn out of their club a man who could so treat a letter
from his mistress bring their wives and daughters to admire him upon the
stage, so demoralising is a drama that has no intellectual tradition
behind it. I could not endure it, and went out into the street and
waited there until the end of the play, when I came in again to find the
friends I had brought to hear it, but had I been accustomed to the
commercial theatre I would not even have known that anything strange had
happened upon the stage. If a man of intellect had written of such an
incident he would have made his audience feel for the mistress that
sympathy one feels for all that have suffered insult, and for that young
man an ironical emotion that might have marred the marriage bells, and
who knows what the curate and the journalist would have said of the man
of intellect? Even Ireland would have cried out: Catholic Ireland that
should remember the gracious tolerance of the Church when all nations
were its children, and how Wolfram of Eschenbach sang from castle to
castle of the courtesy of Parzival, the good husband, and of Gawain, the
light lover, in that very Thuringia where a generation later the lap of
St. Elizabeth was full of roses. A Connaught Bishop told his people a
while since that they ‘should never read stories about the degrading
passion of love,’ and one can only suppose that, being ignorant of a
chief glory of his Church, he has never understood that this new
puritanism is but an English cuckoo.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
AN IRISH NATIONAL THEATRE
[The performance of Mr. Synge’s _Shadow of the Glen_ started a
quarrel with the extreme national party, and the following
paragraphs are from letters written in the play’s defence. The organ
of the party was at the time _The United Irishman_, but the first
serious attack began in _The Independent_. _The United Irishman_,
however, took up the quarrel, and from that time on has attacked
almost every play produced at our theatre, and the suspicion it
managed to arouse among the political clubs against Mr. Synge
especially led a few years later to the organised attempt to drive
_The Playboy of the Western World_ from the stage.--W. B. Y., 1908.]
When we were all fighting about the selection of books for the New Irish
Library some ten years ago, we had to discuss the question, What is
National Poetry? In those days a patriotic young man would have thought
but poorly of himself if he did not believe that _The Spirit of the
Nation_ was great lyric poetry, and a much finer kind of poetry than
Shelley’s _Ode to the West Wind_, or Keats’s _Ode on a Grecian Urn_.
When two or three of us denied this, we were told that we had effeminate
tastes or that we were putting Ireland in a bad light before her
enemies. If one said that _The Spirit of the Nation_ was but salutary
rhetoric, England might overhear us and take up the cry. We said it, and
who will say that Irish literature has not a greater name in the world
to-day than it had ten years ago?
To-day there is another question that we must make up our minds about,
and an even more pressing one, What is a National Theatre? A man may
write a book of lyrics if he have but a friend or two that will care for
them, but he cannot write a good play if there are not audiences to
listen to it. If we think that a national play must be as near as
possible a page out of _The Spirit of the Nation_ put into dramatic
form, and mean to go on thinking it to the end, then we may be sure that
this generation will not see the rise in Ireland of a theatre that will
reflect the life of Ireland as the Scandinavian theatre reflects the
Scandinavian life. The brazen head has an unexpected way of falling to
pieces. We have a company of admirable and disinterested players, and
the next few months will, in all likelihood, decide whether a great work
for this country is to be accomplished. The poetry of Young Ireland,
when it was an attempt to change or strengthen opinion, was rhetoric;
but, it became poetry when patriotism was transformed into a personal
emotion by the events of life, as in that lamentation written by Doheny
‘on his keeping’ among the hills. Literature is always personal, always
one man’s vision of the world, one man’s experience, and it can only be
popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others. A community
that is opinion-ridden, even when those opinions are in themselves
noble, is likely to put its creative minds into some sort of prison. If
creative minds preoccupy themselves with incidents from the political
history of Ireland, so much the better, but we must not enforce them to
select those incidents. If, in the sincere working-out of their plot,
they alight on a moral that is obviously and directly serviceable to the
National cause, so much the better, but we must not force that moral
upon them. I am a Nationalist, and certain of my intimate friends have
made Irish politics the business of their lives, and this made certain
thoughts habitual with me, and an accident made these thoughts take fire
in such a way that I could give them dramatic expression. I had a very
vivid dream one night, and I made _Cathleen ni Houlihan_ out of this
dream. But if some external necessity had forced me to write nothing but
drama with an obviously patriotic intention, instead of letting my work
shape itself under the casual impulses of dreams and daily thoughts, I
would have lost, in a short time, the power to write movingly upon any
theme. I could have aroused opinion; but I could not have touched the
heart, for I would have been busy at the oakum-picking that is not the
less mere journalism for being in dramatic form. Above all, we must not
say that certain incidents which have been a part of literature in all
other lands are forbidden to us. It may be our duty, as it has been the
duty of many dramatic movements, to bring new kinds of subjects into the
theatre, but it cannot be our duty to make the bounds of drama narrower.
For instance, we are told that the English theatre is immoral, because
it is preoccupied with the husband, the wife, and the lover. It is,
perhaps, too exclusively preoccupied with that subject, and it is
certain it has not shed any new light upon it for a considerable time,
but a subject that inspired Homer and about half the great literature of
the world will, one doubts not, be a necessity to our National Theatre
also. Literature is, to my mind, the great teaching power of the world,
the ultimate creator of all values, and it is this, not only in the
sacred books whose power everybody acknowledges, but by every movement
of imagination in song or story or drama that height of intensity and
sincerity has made literature at all. Literature must take the
responsibility of its power, and keep all its freedom: it must be like
the spirit and like the wind that bloweth where it listeth; it must
claim its right to pierce through every crevice of human nature, and to
describe the relation of the soul and the heart to the facts of life and
of law, and to describe that relation as it is, not as we would have it
be; and in so far as it fails to do this it fails to give us that
foundation of understanding and charity for whose lack our moral sense
can be but cruelty. It must be as incapable of telling a lie as nature,
and it must sometimes say before all the virtues, ‘The greatest of these
is charity.’ Sometimes the patriot will have to falter and the wife to
desert her home, and neither be followed by divine vengeance or man’s
judgement. At other moments it must be content to judge without remorse,
compelled by nothing but its own capricious spirit that has yet its
message from the foundation of the world. Aristophanes held up the
people of Athens to ridicule, and even prouder of that spirit than of
themselves, they invited the foreign ambassadors to the spectacle.
I would sooner our theatre failed through the indifference or hostility
of our audiences than gained an immense popularity by any loss of
freedom. I ask nothing that my masters have not asked for, but I ask all
that they were given. I ask no help that would limit our freedom from
either official or patriotic hands, though I am glad of the help of any
who love the arts so dearly that they would not bring them into even
honourable captivity. A good Nationalist is, I suppose, one who is ready
to give up a great deal that he may preserve to his country whatever
part of her possessions he is best fitted to guard, and that theatre
where the capricious spirit that bloweth as it listeth has for a moment
found a dwelling-place, has good right to call itself a National
Theatre.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE THEATRE, THE PULPIT, AND THE NEWSPAPERS
I was very well content when I read an unmeasured attack in _The
Independent_ on the Irish National Theatre. There had, as yet, been no
performance, but the attack was confident, and it was evident that the
writer’s ears were full of rumours and whisperings. One knew that some
such attack was inevitable, for every dramatic movement that brought any
new power into literature arose among precisely these misunderstandings
and animosities. Drama, the most immediately powerful form of
literature, the most vivid image of life, finds itself opposed, as no
other form of literature does, to those enemies of life, the chimeras of
the Pulpit and the Press. When a country has not begun to care for
literature, or has forgotten the taste for it, and most modern countries
seem to pass through this stage, these chimeras are hatched in every
basket. Certain generalisations are everywhere substituted for life.
Instead of individual men and women and living virtues differing as one
star differeth from another in glory, the public imagination is full of
personified averages, partisan fictions, rules of life that would drill
everybody into the one posture, habits that are like the pinafores of
charity-school children. The priest, trained to keep his mind on the
strength of his Church and the weakness of his congregation, would have
all mankind painted with a halo or with horns. Literature is nothing to
him, he has to remember that Seaghan the Fool might take to drinking
again if he knew of pleasant Falstaff, and that Paudeen might run after
Red Sarah again if some strange chance put Plutarch’s tale of Anthony or
Shakespeare’s play into his hands, and he is in a hurry to shut out of
the schools that Pandora’s box, _The Golden Treasury_. The newspaper he
reads of a morning has not only the haloes and horns of the vestry, but
it has crowns and fools’ caps of its own. Life, which in its essence is
always surprising, always taking some new shape, always individualising,
is nothing to it, it has to move men in squads, to keep them in uniform,
with their faces to the right enemy, and enough hate in their hearts to
make the muskets go off. It may know its business well, but its business
is building and ours is shattering. We cannot linger very long in this
great dim temple where the wooden images sit all round upon thrones, and
where the worshippers kneel, not knowing whether they tremble because
their gods are dead or because they fear they may be alive. In the
idol-house every god, every demon, every virtue, every vice, has been
given its permanent form, its hundred hands, its elephant trunk, its
monkey head. The man of letters looks at those kneeling worshippers who
have given up life for a posture, whose nerves have dried up in the
contemplation of lifeless wood. He swings his silver hammer and the
keepers of the temple cry out, prophesying evil, but he must not mind
their cries and their prophecies, but break the wooden necks in two and
throw down the wooden bodies. Life will put living bodies in their place
till new image-brokers have set up their benches.
Whenever literature becomes powerful, the priest, whose forerunner
imagined St. Patrick driving his chariot-wheels over his own erring
sister, has to acknowledge, or to see others acknowledge, that there is
no evil that men and women may not be driven into by their virtues all
but as readily as by their vices, and the politician, that it is not
always clean hands that serve a country or foul hands that ruin it. He
may even have to say at last, as an old man who had spent many years in
prison to serve a good cause said to me, ‘There never was a cause so
evil that it has not been served by good men for what seemed to them
sufficient reasons.’ And if the priest or the politician should say to
the man of letters, ‘Into how dangerous a state of mind are you not
bringing us?’ the man of letters can but answer, ‘It is dangerous,
indeed,’ and say, like my Seanchan, ‘When did we promise safety?’
Thought takes the same form age after age, and the things that people
have said to me about this intellectual movement of ours have, I doubt
not, been said in every country to every writer who was a disturber of
the old life. When _The Countess Cathleen_ was produced, the very girls
in the shops complained to us that to describe an Irishwoman as selling
her soul to the devil was to slander the country. The silver hammer had
threatened, as it seems, one of those personifications of an average.
Some one said to me a couple of weeks ago, ‘If you put on the stage any
play about marriage that does not point its moral clearly, you will make
it difficult for us to go on attacking the English theatre for its
immorality.’ Again, we were disordering the squads, the muskets might
not all point in the same direction.
Now that these opinions have found a leader and a voice in _The
Independent_, it is easy at any rate to explain how much one differs
from them. I had spoken of the capricious power of the artist and
compared it to the capricious movements of a wild creature, and _The
Independent_, speaking quite logically from its point of view, tells me
that these movements were only interesting when ‘under restraint.’ The
writers of the Anglo-Irish movement, it says, ‘will never consent to
serve except on terms that never could or should be conceded.’ I had
spoken of the production of foreign masterpieces, but it considers that
foreign masterpieces would be very dangerous. I had asked in _Samhain_
for audiences sufficiently tolerant to enable the half-dozen minds who
are likely to be the dramatic imagination of Ireland for this generation
to put their own thought and their own characters into their work. That
is to say, I had asked for the amount of freedom which every nation has
given to its dramatic writers. But the newspaper hopes and believes that
no ‘such tolerance will be extended to Mr. Yeats and his friends.’
I have written these lines to explain our thoughts and intentions to
many personal friends, who live too deep in the labour of politics to
give the thought to these things that we have given, and because not
only in our theatre, but in all matters of national life, we have need
of a new discovery of life--of more precise thought, of a more perfect
sincerity. I would see, in every branch of our National propaganda,
young men who would have the sincerity and the precision of those
Russian revolutionists that Kropotkin and Stepniak tell us of, men who
would never use an argument to convince others which would not convince
themselves, who would not make a mob drunk with a passion they could not
share, and who would above all seek for fine things for their own sake,
and for precise knowledge for its own sake, and not for its momentary
use. One can serve one’s country alone out of the abundance of one’s own
heart, and it is labour enough to be certain one is in the right,
without having to be certain that one’s thought is expedient also.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1904
THE DRAMATIC MOVEMENT
The National Theatre Society has had great difficulties because of the
lack of any suitable playhouse. It has been forced to perform in halls
without proper lighting for the stage, and almost without
dressing-rooms, and with level floors in the auditorium that prevented
all but the people in the front row from seeing properly. These halls
are expensive too, and the players of poetical drama in an age of
musical comedy have light pockets. But now a generous English friend,
Miss Horniman, has rearranged and in part rebuilt, at very considerable
expense, the old Mechanics’ Institute Theatre, now the Abbey Theatre,
and given us the use of it without any charge, and I need not say that
she has gained our gratitude, as she will gain the gratitude of our
audience. The work of decoration and alteration has been done by
Irishmen, and everything, with the exception of some few things that are
not made here, or not of a good enough quality, has been manufactured in
Ireland. The stained glass in the entrance hall is the work of Miss
Sarah Purser and her apprentices, the large copper mirror frames are
from the new metal works at Youghal, and the pictures of some of our
players are by an Irish artist. These details and some details of form
and colour in the building, as a whole, have been arranged by Miss
Horniman herself.
Having been given the free use of this Theatre, we may look upon
ourselves as the first endowed Theatre in any English-speaking country,
the English-speaking countries and Venezuela being the only countries
which have never endowed their theatres; but the correspondents who
write for parts in our plays or posts in the Theatre at a salary are in
error. We are, and must be for some time to come, contented to find our
work its own reward, the player giving[7] his work, and the playwright
his, for nothing; and though this cannot go on always we start our
winter very cheerfully with a capital of some forty pounds. We
playwrights can only thank these players, who have given us the delight
of seeing our work so well performed, working with so much enthusiasm,
with so much patience, that they have found for themselves a lasting
place among the artists, the only aristocracy that has never been sold
in the market or seen the people rise up against it.
* * * * *
It is a necessary part of our plan to find out how to perform plays for
little money, for it is certain that every increase in expenditure has
lowered the quality of dramatic art itself, by robbing the dramatist of
freedom in experiment, and by withdrawing attention from his words and
from the work of the players. Sometimes one friend or another has helped
us with costumes or scenery, but the expense has never been very great,
ten or twenty pounds being enough in most cases for quite a long play.
These friends have all accepted the principles I have explained from
time to time in _Samhain_, but they have interpreted them in various
ways according to their temperament.
* * * * *
Miss Horniman staged _The King’s Threshold_ at her own expense, and she
both designed and made the costumes. The costumes for the coming
performances of _On Baile’s Strand_ are also her work and her gift and
her design. She made and paid for the costumes in _The Shadowy Waters_,
but in this case followed a colour-scheme of mine. The colour-scheme in
_The Hour-Glass_, our first experiment, was worked out by Mr. Robert
Gregory and myself and the costumes were made by Miss Lavelle, a member
of the company; while Mr. Robert Gregory has designed the costumes and
scenery for _Kincora_. As we gradually accumulate costumes in all the
main colours and shades, we will be able to get new effects by combining
them in different ways without buying new ones. Small dramatic
societies, and our example is beginning to create a number, not having
so many friends as we have, might adopt a simpler plan, suggested to us
by a very famous decorative artist. Let them have one suit of clothes
for a king, another for a queen, another for a fighting man, another for
a messenger, and so on, and if these clothes are loose enough to fit
different people, they can perform any romantic play that comes without
new cost. The audience would soon get used to this way of symbolising,
as it were, the different ranks and classes of men, and as the king
would wear, no matter what the play might be, the same crown and robe,
they could have them very fine in the end. Now, one wealthy theatre-goer
and now another might add a pearl to the queen’s necklace, or a jewel to
her crown, and be the more regular in attendance at the theatre because
that gift shone out there like a good deed.
We can hardly do all we hope unless there are many more of these little
societies to be centres of dramatic art and of the allied arts. But a
very few actors went from town to town in ancient Greece, finding
everywhere more or less well-trained singers among the principal
townsmen to sing the chorus that had otherwise been the chief expense.
In the days of the stock companies two or three well-known actors would
go from town to town finding actors for all the minor parts in the local
companies. If we are to push our work into the small towns and villages,
local dramatic clubs must take the place of the old stock companies. A
good-sized town should be able to give us a large enough audience for
our whole, or nearly our whole, company to go there; but the need for us
is greater in those small towns where the poorest kind of farce and
melodrama have gone and Shakespearean drama has not gone, and it is here
that we will find it hardest to get intelligent audiences. 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 every one 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[8] 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.
When I was at the great American Catholic University of Notre Dame I
heard that the students had given a performance of _Œdipus the King_,
and _Œdipus the King_ is forbidden in London. A censorship created in
the eighteenth century by Walpole, because somebody had written against
election bribery, has been distorted by a puritanism, which is not the
less an English invention for being a pretended hatred of vice and a
real hatred of intellect. Nothing has ever suffered so many persecutions
as the intellect, though it is never persecuted under its own name. It
is but according to old usage when a law that cherishes Musical Comedy
and permits to every second melodrama the central situation of _The Sign
of the Cross_, attempted rape, becomes one of the secondary causes of
the separation of the English Theatre from life. It does not interfere
with anything that makes money, and Musical Comedy, with its hints and
innuendoes, and its consistently low view of life, makes a great deal,
for money is always respectable; but would a group of artists and
students see once again the masterpieces of the world, they would have
to hide from the law as if they had been a school of thieves; or were we
to take with us to London that beautiful Nativity Play of Dr. Hyde’s,
which was performed in Sligo Convent a few months ago, that holy vision
of the central story of the world, as it is seen through the minds and
the traditions of the poor, the constables might upset the cradle. And
yet it is precisely these stories of the Bible that have all to
themselves, in the imagination of English people, especially of the
English poor, the place they share in this country with the stories of
Fion and of Oisin and of Patrick.
Milton set the story of Samson into the form of a Greek play, because he
knew that Samson was, in the English imagination, what Herakles was in
the imagination of Greece; and I have never been able to see any other
subjects for an English Dramatist who looked for some common ground
between his own mind and simpler minds. An English poet of genius once
told me that he would have tried his hand in plays for the people, if
they knew any story the censor would pass, except Jack and the
Beanstalk.
* * * * *
The Gaelic League has its great dramatic opportunity because of the
abundance of stories known in Irish-speaking districts, and because of
the freedom of choice and of treatment the leaders of a popular movement
can have if they have a mind for it. The Gaelic plays acted and
published during the year selected their subjects from the popular mind,
but the treatment is disappointing. Dr. Hyde, dragged from gathering to
gathering by the necessities of the movement, has written no new play;
and Father Peter O’Leary has thrown his dramatic power, which is
remarkable, into an imaginative novel. Father Dineen has published a
little play that has some lifelike dialogue, but the action is sometimes
irrelevant, and the motives of the principal character are vague and
confused, as if it were written in a hurry. Father Dineen seems to know
that he has not done his best, for he describes it as an attempt to
provide more vivid dialogue for beginners than is to be found in the
reading-books rather than a drama. An anonymous writer has written a
play called _The Money of the Narrow Cross_, which tells a very simple
tale, like that of a child’s book, simply and adequately. It is very
slight, in low relief as it were, but if its writer is a young man it
has considerable promise.
* * * * *
A play called _Seaghan na Scuab_ was described in _The United Irishman_
as the best play ever written in Irish; but though the subject of it is
a dramatic old folk-tale, which has shown its vigour by rooting itself
in many countries, the treatment is confused and conventional and there
is a flatness of dialogue unusual in these plays. There is, however, an
occasional sense of comic situation which may come to something if its
writer will work seriously at his craft. One is afraid of quenching the
smoking flax, but this play was selected for performance at the
Oireachtas before a vast audience in the Rotunda. It was accompanied by
_The Doctor_ in English and Irish, written by Mr. O’Beirne, and
performed by the Tawin players, who brought it from their seaside
village in Galway. Mr. O’Beirne deserves the greatest praise for getting
this company together, as well as for all he has done to give the Tawin
people a new pleasure in their language; but I think a day will come
when he will not be grateful to the Oireachtas Committee for bringing
this first crude work of his into the midst of so many thousand people.
It would be very hard for a much more experienced dramatist to make
anything out of the ugly violence, the threadbare, second-hand
imaginations that flow in upon a man out of the newspapers, when he has
founded his work on proselytising zeal, instead of his experience of
life and his curiosity about it. These two were the only plays, out of a
number that have been played in Irish, that I have seen this year. I
went to Galway Feis, like many others, to see Dr. Hyde’s _Lost Saint_,
for I had missed every performance of it hitherto though I had read it
to many audiences in America, and I awaited the evening with some little
excitement. Although the _Lost Saint_ was on the programme, an
Anti-Emigration play was put in its place. I did not wait for this, but,
whatever its merits, it is not likely to have contained anything so
beautiful as the old man’s prayer in the other: ‘O Lord, O God, take
pity on this little soft child. Put wisdom in his head, cleanse his
heart, scatter the mist from his mind and let him learn his lessons like
the other boys. O Lord, Thou wert Thyself young one time; take pity on
youth. O Lord, Thou, Thyself, shed tears; dry the tears of this little
lad. Listen, O Lord, to the prayer of Thy servant, and do not keep from
him this little thing he is asking of Thee. O Lord, bitter are the tears
of a child, sweeten them: deep are the thoughts of a child, quiet them:
sharp is the grief of a child, take it from him: soft is the heart of a
child, do not harden it.’
* * * * *
A certain number of propagandist plays are unavoidable in a popular
movement like the Gaelic revival, but they may drive out everything
else. The plays, while Father Peter O’Leary and Father Dineen and Dr.
Hyde were the most popular writers and the chief influence, were full of
the traditional folk-feeling that is the mastering influence in all old
Irish literature. Father O’Leary chose for his subjects a traditional
story of a trick played upon a simple villager, a sheep-stealer
frightened by what seemed to him a ghost, the quarrels between Maeve and
Aleel of Cruachan; Father Dineen chose for his a religious crisis, alive
as with the very soul of tragedy, or a well sacred to the fairies; while
Dr. Hyde celebrated old story-tellers and poets, and old saints, and the
Mother of God with the countenance she wears in Irish eyes. Hundreds of
men scattered through the world, angry at the spectacle of modern
vulgarity, rejoiced in this movement, for it seemed impossible for
anything begun in so high a spirit, so inspired by whatever is ancient,
or simple, or noble, to sink into the common base level of our thought.
This year one has heard little of the fine work, and a great deal about
plays that get an easy cheer, because they make no discoveries in human
nature, but repeat the opinions of the audience, or the satire of its
favorite newspapers. I am only speaking of the plays of a year, and that
is but a short period in what one hopes may be a great movement, but it
is not wise to say, as do many Gaelic Leaguers, who know the weaknesses
of their movement, that if the present thinks but of grammar and
propaganda the future will do all the rest. A movement will often in its
first fire of enthusiasm create more works of genius than whole
easy-going centuries that come after it.
Nearly everything that is greatest as English prose was written in a
generation or two after the first beautiful use of prose in England: and
Mistral has made the poems of modern Provençe, as well as reviving and
all but inventing the language: for genius is more often of the spring
than of the middle green of the year. We cannot settle times and
seasons, flowering-time and harvest-time are not in our hands, but we
are to blame if genius comes and we do not gather in the fruit or the
blossom. Very often we can do no more for the man of genius than to
distract him as little as may be with the common business of the day.
His own work is more laborious than any other, for not only is thought
harder than action, as Goethe said, but he must brood over his work so
long and so unbrokenly that he find there all his patriotism, all his
passion, his religion even--it is not only those that sweep a floor that
are obedient to heaven--until at last he can cry with Paracelsus, ‘In
this crust of bread I have found all the stars and all the heavens.’
* * * * *
The following new plays were produced by the National Theatre Society
during the last twelve months: _The Shadow of the Glen_ and _Riders to
the Sea_, by Mr. J. M. Synge; _Broken Soil_, by Mr. Colm[9]; _The
Townland of Tamney_, by Mr. Seumas MacManus; _The Shadowy Waters_ and
_The King’s Threshold_, by myself. The following plays were revived:
_Deirdre_, by A. E.; _Twenty-five_, by Lady Gregory; _Cathleen ni
Houlihan_, _The Pot of Broth_, and _The Hour-Glass_, by myself. We could
have given more plays, but difficulties about the place of performance,
the shifting of scenery from where we rehearsed to where we acted, and
so on, always brought a great deal of labour upon the Society. The
Society went to London in March and gave two performances at The Royalty
to full houses. They played there Mr. Synge’s two plays, Mr. Colm’s
play, and my _King’s Threshold_ and _Pot of Broth_. We were commended by
the critics with generous sympathy, and had an enthusiastic and
distinguished audience.
* * * * *
We have many plays awaiting performance during the coming winter. Mr.
Synge has written us a play in three acts called _The Well of the
Saints_, full, as few works of our time are, with temperament, and of a
true and yet bizarre beauty. Lady Gregory has written us an historical
tragedy in three acts about King Brian and a very merry comedy of
country life. Mr. Bernard Shaw has written us a play[10] in four acts,
his first experiment in Irish satire; Mr. Tarpey, an Irishman whose
comedy _Windmills_ was successfully performed by the Stage Society some
years ago, a little play which I have not yet seen; and Mr. Boyle, a
village comedy in three acts; and I hear of other plays by competent
hands that are coming to us. My own _Baile’s Strand_ is in rehearsal,
and I hope to have ready for the spring a play on the subject of
_Deirdre_, with choruses somewhat in the Greek manner. We are, of
course, offered from all parts of the world great quantities of plays
which are impossible for literary or dramatic reasons. Some of them have
a look of having been written for the commercial theatre and of having
been sent to us on rejection. It will save trouble if I point out that a
play which seems to its writer to promise an ordinary London or New York
success is very unlikely to please us, or succeed with our audience if
it did. Writers who have a better ambition should get some mastery of
their art in little plays before spending many months of what is almost
sure to be wasted labour on several acts.
* * * * *
We were invited to play in the St. Louis Exhibition, but thought that
our work should be in Ireland for the present, and had other reasons for
refusing.
A Company, which has been formed in America by Miss Witcherly, who
played in _Everyman_ during a part of its tour in America, to take some
of our plays on tour, has begun with three one-act plays of mine,
_Cathleen ni Houlihan_, _The Hour-Glass_, and _The Land of Heart’s
Desire_. It announces on its circulars that it is following the methods
of our Theatre.
Though the commercial theatre of America is as unashamedly commercial as
the English, there is a far larger audience interested in fine drama
than here. When I was lecturing in, I think, Philadelphia--one town
mixes with another in my memory at times--some one told me that he had
seen _The Duchess of Malfi_ played there by one of the old stock
companies in his boyhood; and _Everyman_ has been far more of a success
in America than anywhere else. They have numberless University towns
each with its own character and with an academic life animated by a zeal
and by an imagination unknown in these countries. There is nearly
everywhere that leaven of highly-cultivated men and women so much more
necessary to a good theatrical audience to-day than were ever Raleigh
and Sidney, when the groundling could remember the folk-songs and the
imaginative folk-life. The more an age is busy with temporary things,
the more must it look for leadership in matters of art to men and women
whose business or whose leisure has made the great writers of the world
their habitual company. Literature is not journalism because it can turn
the imagination to whatever is essential and unchanging in life.
-----
Footnote 7:
The players though not the playwrights, are now all paid.--W. B. Y.,
March 1908. The playwrights have for a good many years now drawn the
usual Royalties.--W. B. Y., 1923.
Footnote 8:
Our patent has been widened since.--W. B. Y., 1923.
Footnote 9:
This distinguished writer now spells his name Colum.--W. B. Y., 1923.
Footnote 10:
_John Bull’s Other Island._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIRST PRINCIPLES
Two Irish writers had a controversy a month ago, and they accused one
another of being unable to think, with entire sincerity, though it was
obvious to uncommitted minds that neither had any lack of vigorous
thought. But they had a different meaning when they spoke of thought,
for the one, though in actual life he is the most practical man I know,
meant thought as Pascal, as Montaigne, as Shakespeare, or as, let us
say, Emerson, understood it--a reverie about the adventures of the soul,
or of the personality, or some obstinate questioning of the riddle. Many
who have to work hard always make time for this reverie, but it comes
more easily to the leisured, and in this it is like a broken heart,
which is, a Dublin newspaper assured us lately, impossible to a busy
man. The other writer had in mind, when he spoke of thought, the shaping
energy that keeps us busy, and the obstinate questionings he had most
respect for were, how to change the method of government, how to change
the language, how to revive our manufactures, and whether it is the
Protestant or the Catholic that scowls at the other with the darker
scowl. Ireland is so poor, so misgoverned, that a great portion of the
imagination of the land must give itself to a very passionate
consideration of questions like these, and yet it is precisely these
loud questions that drive away the reveries that incline the imagination
to the lasting work of literature and give, together with religion,
sweetness, and nobility, and dignity to life. We should desire no more
from these propagandist thinkers than that they carry out their work, as
far as possible, without making it more difficult for those, fitted by
Nature or by circumstance for another kind of thought, to do their work
also; and certainly it is not well that Martha chide at Mary, for they
have the One Master over them.
* * * * *
When one all but despairs, as one does at times, of Ireland welcoming a
National Literature in this generation, it is because we do not leave
ourselves enough of time, or of quiet, to be interested in men and
women. A writer in _The Leader_, who is unknown to me, elaborates this
argument in an article full of beauty and dignity. He is speaking of our
injustice to one another and he says that we are driven into injustice
‘not wantonly but inevitably, and at call of the exacting qualities of
the great things. Until this latter dawning, the genius of Ireland has
been too preoccupied really to concern itself about men and women; in
its drama they play a subordinate part, born tragic comedians though all
the sons and daughters of the land are. A nation is the heroic theme we
follow, a mourning, wasted land its moving spirit; the impersonal
assumes personality for us.’ When I wrote my _Countess Cathleen_, I
thought, of course, chiefly of the actual picture that was forming
before me, but there was a secondary meaning that came into my mind
continuously: ‘It is the soul of one that loves Ireland,’ I thought,
‘plunging into unrest, seeming to lose itself, to bargain itself away to
the very wickedness of the world, and to surrender what is eternal for
what is temporary,’ and I know that this meaning seemed natural to
others, for that great orator, J. F. Taylor, who was not likely to have
searched very deeply into any work of mine, for he cared little for
mine, or, indeed, any modern work, turned the play into such a parable
in one of his speeches.
* * * * *
There is no use being angry with necessary conditions, or failing to see
that a man who is busy with some reform that can only be carried out in
a flame of energetic feeling, will not only be indifferent to what seems
to us the finer kind of thinking, but that he will support himself by
generalisations that seem untrue to the man of letters. A little play,
_The Rising of the Moon_, which is in the present number of _Samhain_,
and is among those we are to produce during the winter, has, for
instance, roused the suspicions of a very resolute leader of the people,
who has a keen eye for rats behind the arras. A Fenian ballad-singer
partly converts a policeman, and is it not unwise under any
circumstances to show a policeman in so favourable a light? It is well
known that many of the younger policemen were Fenians: but it is
necessary that the Dublin crowds should be kept of so high a heart that
they will fight the police at any moment. Are not morals greater than
literature? Others have objected to Mr. Synge’s _Shadow of the Glen_
because Irish women, being more chaste than those of England and
Scotland, are a valuable part of our national argument. Mr. Synge should
not, it is said by some, have chosen an exception for the subject of his
play, for who knows but the English may misunderstand him? Some even
deny that such a thing could happen at all, while others that know the
country better, or remember the statistics, say that it could but should
never have been staged. All these arguments, by their methods, even more
than by what they have tried to prove, misunderstand how literature does
its work. Men of letters have sometimes said that the characters of a
romance or of a play must be typical. They mean that the character must
be typical of something which exists in all men because the writer has
found it in his own mind. It is one of the most inexplicable things
about human nature that a writer, with a strange temperament, an Edgar
Allan Poe, let us say, made what he is by conditions that never existed
before, can create personages and lyric emotions, which startle us by
being at once bizarre and an image of our own secret thoughts. Are we
not face to face with the microcosm, mirroring everything in universal
nature? It is no more necessary for the characters created by a romance
writer, or a dramatist, to have existed before, than for his own
personality to have done so; characters and personality alike, as is
perhaps true in the instance of Poe, may draw half their life not from
the solid earth, but from some dreamy drug. This is true even of
historical drama, for it was Goethe, the founder of the historical drama
of Germany, who said, ‘We do the people of history the honour of naming
after them the creations of our own minds.’ All that a dramatic writer
need do is to persuade us, during the two hours’ traffic of the stage,
that the events of his play did really happen. He must know enough of
the life of his country, or of history, to create this illusion, but no
matter how much he knows, he will fail if his audience is not ready to
give up something of the dead letter. If his mind is full of energy he
will not be satisfied with little knowledge, but he will be far more
likely to alter incidents and characters, wilfully even as it may seem,
than to become a literal historian. It was one of the complaints against
Shakespeare, in his own day, that he made Sir John Falstaff out of a
praiseworthy old Lollard preacher. One day, as he sat over Holinshed’s
_History of England_, he persuaded himself that Richard the Second, with
his French culture, ‘his too great friendliness to his friends,’ his
beauty of mind, and his fall before dry, repelling Bolingbroke, would be
a good image for an accustomed mood of fanciful, impracticable lyricism
in his own mind. The historical Richard has passed away for ever and the
Richard of the play lives more intensely, it seems, than did ever living
man. Yet Richard the Second, as Shakespeare made him, could never have
been born before the Renaissance, before the Italian influence, or even
one hour before the innumerable streams that flowed in upon
Shakespeare’s mind; the innumerable experiences we can never know,
brought Shakespeare to the making of him. He is typical not because he
ever existed, but because he has made us know of something in our own
minds we had never known of had he never been imagined.
* * * * *
Our propagandists have twisted this theory of the men of letters into
its direct contrary, and when they say that a writer should make typical
characters they mean personifications of averages, of statistics, or
even personified opinions, or men and women so faintly imagined than
there is nothing about them to separate them from the crowd, as it
appears to our hasty eyes. We must feel that we could engage a hundred
others to wear the same livery as easily as we could engage a coachman.
We must never forget that we are engaging them to be the ideal young
peasant, or the true patriot, or the happy Irish wife, or the policeman
of our prejudices, or to express some other of those invaluable
generalisations, without which our practical movements would lose their
energy. Who is there that likes a coachman to be too full of human
nature, when he has his livery on? No one man is like another, but one
coachman should be as like another as possible, though he may assert
himself a little when he meets the gardener. The patriots would impose
on us heroes and heroines, like those young couples in the Gaelic plays,
who might all change brides or bridegrooms in the dance and never find
out the difference. The personifications need not be true even, if they
are about our enemy, for it might be more difficult to fight out our
necessary fight if we remembered his virtue at wrong moments; and might
not Teig and Bacach, that are light in the head, go over to his party?
Ireland is indeed poor, is indeed hunted by misfortune, and has indeed
to give up much that makes life desirable and lovely, but is she so very
poor that she can afford no better literature than this? Perhaps so, but
if it is a Spirit from beyond the world that decides when a nation shall
awake into imaginative energy, and no philosopher has ever found what
brings the moment, it cannot be for us to judge. It may be coming upon
us now, for it is certain that we have more writers who are thinking, as
men of letters understand thought, than we have had for a century, and
he who wilfully makes their work harder may be setting himself against
the purpose of that Spirit.
I would not be trying to form an Irish National Theatre if I did not
believe that there existed in Ireland, whether in the minds of a few
people or of a great number I do not know, an energy of thought about
life itself, a vivid sensitiveness as to the reality of things, powerful
enough to overcome all those phantoms of the night. Everything calls up
its contrary, unreality calls up reality, and, besides, life here has
been sufficiently perilous to make men think. I do not think it a
national prejudice that makes me believe we are harder, a more masterful
race than the comfortable English of our time, and that this comes from
an essential nearness to reality of those few scattered people who have
the right to call themselves the Irish race. It is only in the
exceptions, in the few minds, where the flame has burnt as it were pure,
that one can see the permanent character of a race. If one remembers the
men who have dominated Ireland for the last hundred and fifty years, one
understands that it is strength of personality, the individualising
quality in a man, that stirs Irish imagination most deeply in the end.
There is scarcely a man who has led the Irish people, at any time, who
may not give some day to a great writer precisely that symbol he may
require for the expression of himself. The critical mind of Ireland is
far more subjugated than the critical mind of England by the phantoms
and misapprehensions of politics and social necessity, but the life of
Ireland has rejected them more resolutely. Indeed, it is in life itself
in England that one finds the dominion of what is not human life.
* * * * *
We have no longer in any country a literature as great as the literature
of the old world, and that is because the newspapers, all kinds of
second-rate books, the preoccupation of men with all kinds of practical
changes, have driven the living imagination out of the world. I have
read hardly any books this summer but Cervantes and Boccaccio and some
Greek plays. I have felt that these men, divided from one another by so
many hundreds of years, had the same mind. It is we who are different;
and then the thought would come to me, that has come to me so often
before, that they lived at times when the imagination turned to life
itself for excitement. The world was not changing quickly about them.
There was nothing to draw their imagination from the ripening of the
fields, from the birth and death of their children, from the destiny of
their souls, from all that is the unchanging substance of literature.
They had not to deal with the world in such great masses that it could
only be represented to their minds by figures and by abstract
generalisations. Everything that their minds ran on came to them vivid
with the colour of the senses, and when they wrote it was out of their
own rich experience, and they found their symbols of expression in
things that they had known all their life long. Their very words were
more vigorous than ours, for their phrases came from a common mint, from
the market, or the tavern, or from the great poets of a still older
time. It is the change, that followed the Renaissance and was completed
by newspaper government and the scientific movement, that has brought
upon us all these phrases and generalisations, made by minds that would
grasp what they have never seen. Yesterday I went out to see the
reddening apples in the garden, and they faded from my imagination
sooner than they would have from the imagination of that old poet, who
made the songs of the seasons for the Fianna, or out of Chaucer’s, that
celebrated so many trees. Theories, opinions, these opinions among the
rest, flowed in upon me and blotted them away. Even our greatest poets
see the world with preoccupied minds. Great as Shelley is, those
theories about the coming changes of the world, which he has built up
with so much elaborate passion, hurry him from life continually. There
is a phrase in some old cabalistic writer about man falling into his own
circumference, and every generation we get further away from life
itself, and come more and more under the influence which Blake had in
his mind when he said, ‘Kings and Parliament seem to me something other
than human life.’ We lose our freedom more and more as we get away from
ourselves, and not merely because our minds are overthrown by abstract
phrases and generalisations, reflections in a mirror that seem living,
but because we have turned the table of value upside down, and believe
that the root of reality is not in the centre but somewhere in that
whirling circumference. How can we create like the ancients, while
innumerable considerations of external probability or social utility
destroy the seeming irresponsible creative power that is life itself?
Who to-day could set Richmond’s and Richard’s tents side by side on the
battlefield, or make Don Quixote, mad as he was, mistake a windmill for
a giant in broad daylight? And when I think of free-spoken Falstaff I
know of no audience, but the tinkers of the roadside, that could
encourage the artist to an equal comedy. The old writers were content if
their inventions had but an emotional and moral consistency, and created
out of themselves a fantastic, energetic, extravagant art. A
Civilisation is very like a man or a woman, for it comes in but a few
years into its beauty, and its strength, and then, while many years go
by, it gathers and makes order about it, the strength and beauty going
out of it the while, until in the end it lies there with its limbs
straightened out and a clean linen cloth folded upon it. That may well
be, and yet we need not follow among the mourners, for it may be, before
they are at the tomb, a messenger will run out of the hills and touch
the pale lips with a red ember, and wake the limbs to the disorder and
the tumult that is life. Though he does not come, even so we will keep
from among the mourners and hold some cheerful conversation among
ourselves; for has not Virgil, a knowledgeable man and a wizard,
foretold that other Argonauts shall row between cliff and cliff, and
other fair-haired Achæans sack another Troy?
* * * * *
Every argument carries us backwards to some religious conception, and in
the end the creative energy of men depends upon their believing that
they have, within themselves, something immortal and imperishable, and
that all else is but as an image in a looking-glass. So long as that
belief is not a formal thing, a man will create out of a joyful energy,
seeking little for any external test of an impulse that may be sacred,
and looking for no foundation outside life itself. If Ireland could
escape from those phantoms of hers she might create, as did the old
writers; for she has a faith that is as theirs, and keeps alive in the
Gaelic traditions--and this has always seemed to me the chief
intellectual value of Gaelic--a portion of the old imaginative life.
When Dr. Hyde or Father Peter O’Leary is the writer, one’s imagination
goes straight to the century of Cervantes, and, having gone so far, one
thinks at every moment that they will discover his energy. It is
precisely because of this reason that one is indignant with those who
would substitute for the ideas of the folk-life the rhetoric of the
newspapers, who would muddy what had begun to seem a fountain of life
with the feet of the mob. Is it impossible to revive Irish and yet to
leave the finer intellects a sufficient mastery over the more gross, to
prevent it from becoming, it may be, the language of a Nation, and yet
losing all that has made it worthy of a revival, all that has made it a
new energy in the mind?
* * * * *
Before the modern movement, and while it was but new, the ordinary man,
whether he could read and write or not, was ready to welcome great
literature. When Ariosto found himself among the brigands, they repeated
to him his own verses, and the audience in the Elizabethan Theatres must
have been all but as clever as an Athenian audience. But to-day we come
to understand great literature by a long preparation, or by some
accident of nature, for we only begin to understand life when our minds
have been purified of temporary interests by study.
* * * * *
But if literature has no external test, how are we to know that it is
indeed literature? The only test that nature gives, to show when we obey
her, is that she gives us happiness, and when we are no longer obedient
she brings us to pain sooner or later. Is it not the same with the
artist? The sign that she makes to him is that happiness we call delight
in beauty. He can only convey this in its highest form after he has
purified his mind with the great writers of the world; but their example
can never be more than a preparation. If his art does not seem, when it
comes, to be the creation of a new personality, in a few years it will
not seem to be alive at all. If he is a dramatist his characters must
have a like newness. If they could have existed before his day, or have
been imagined before his day, we may be certain that the spirit of life
is not in them in its fullness. This is because art, in its highest
moments, is not a deliberate creation, but the creation of intense
feeling, of pure life; and every feeling is the child of all past ages
and would be different if even a moment had been left out. Indeed, is it
not that delight in beauty, which tells the artist that he has imagined
what may never die, itself but a delight in the permanent yet
ever-changing form of life, in her very limbs and lineaments? When life
has given it, has she given anything but herself? Has she any other
reward, even for the saints? If one flies to the wilderness, is not that
clear light that falls about the soul when all irrelevant things have
been taken away, but life that has been about one always, enjoyed in all
its fullness at length? It is as though she had put her arms about one,
crying: ‘My beloved, you have given up everything for me.’ If a man
spend all his days in good works till there is no emotion in his heart
that is not full of virtue, is not the reward he prays for eternal life?
The artist, too, has prayers and a cloister, and if he do not turn away
from temporary things, from the zeal of the reformer and the passion of
revolution, that zealous mistress will give him but a scornful glance.
* * * * *
What attracts me to drama is that it is, in the most obvious way, what
all the arts are upon a last analysis. A farce and a tragedy are alike
in this, that they are a moment of intense life. An action is taken out
of all other actions; it is reduced to its simplest form, or at any rate
to as simple a form as it can be brought to without our losing the sense
of its place in the world. The characters that are involved in it are
freed from everything that is not a part of that action; and whether it
is, as in the less important kinds of drama, a mere bodily activity, a
hair-breadth escape or the like, or as it is in the more important
kinds, an activity of the souls of the characters, it is an energy, an
eddy of life purified from everything but itself. The dramatist must
picture life in action, with an unpreoccupied mind, as the musician
pictures her in sound and the sculptor in form.
* * * * *
But if this be true, has art nothing to do with moral judgements? Surely
it has, and its judgements are those from which there is no appeal. The
character, whose fortune we have been called in to see, or the
personality of the writer, must keep our sympathy, and whether it be
farce or tragedy, we must laugh and weep with him and call down
blessings on his head. This character who delights us may commit murder
like Macbeth, or fly the battle for his sweetheart as did Antony, or
betray his country like Coriolanus, and yet we will rejoice in every
happiness that comes to him and sorrow at his death as if it were our
own. It is no use telling us that the murderer and the betrayer do not
deserve our sympathy. We thought so yesterday, and we still know what
crime is, but everything has been changed of a sudden; we are caught up
into another code, we are in the presence of a higher court. Complain of
us if you will, but it will be useless, for before the curtain falls a
thousand ages, grown conscious in our sympathies, will have cried
_Absolvo te_. Blame if you will the codes, the philosophies, the
experiences of all past ages that have made us what we are, as the soil
under our feet has been made out of unknown vegetations: quarrel with
the acorns of Eden if you will, but what has that to do with us? We
understand the verdict and not the law; and yet there is some law, some
code, some judgement. If the poet’s hand had slipped, if Antony had
railed at Cleopatra in the tower, if Coriolanus had abated that high
pride of his in the presence of death, we might have gone away muttering
the Ten Commandments. Yet maybe we are wrong to speak of judgement, for
we have but contemplated life, and what more is there to say when she
that is all virtue, the gift and the giver, the fountain whither all
flows again, has given all herself? If the subject of drama or any other
art, were a man himself, an eddy of momentary breath, we might desire
the contemplation of perfect characters; but the subject of all art is
passion, and a passion can only be contemplated when separated by
itself, purified of all but itself, and aroused into a perfect intensity
by opposition with some other passion, or it may be with the law, that
is the expression of the whole whether of Church or Nation or external
nature. Had Coriolanus not been a law-breaker, neither he nor we had
ever discovered, it may be, that noble pride of his, and if we had not
seen Cleopatra through the eyes of so many lovers, would we have known
that soul of hers to be all flame, and wept at the quenching of it? If
we were not certain of law we would not feel the struggle, the drama,
but the subject of art is not law, which is a kind of death, but the
praise of life, and it has no commandments that are not positive.
* * * * *
But if literature does not draw its substance from history, or anything
about us in the world, what is a National literature? Our friends have
already told us, writers for the Theatre in Abbey Street, that we have
no right to the name, some because we do not write in Irish, and others
because we do not plead the National cause in our plays, as if we were
writers for the newspapers. I have not asked my fellow-workers what they
mean by the words National literature, but though I have no great love
for definitions, I would define it in some such way as this: It is the
work of writers, who are moulded by influences that are moulding their
country, and who write out of so deep a life that they are accepted
there in the end. It leaves a good deal unsettled--was Rossetti an
Englishman, or Swift an Irishman?--but it covers more kinds of National
literature than any other I can think of. If you say a National
literature must be in the language of the country, there are many
difficulties. Should it be written in the language that your country
does speak or the language that it ought to speak? Was Milton an
Englishman when he wrote in Latin or Italian, and had we no part in
Columbanus when he wrote in Latin the beautiful sermon comparing life to
a highway and to a smoke? And then there is Beckford, who is in every
history of English literature, and yet his one memorable book, a story
of Persia, was written in French.
* * * * *
Our theatre is of no great size, for though we know that if we write
well we shall find acceptance among our countrymen in the end, we would
think our emotions were on the surface if we found a ready welcome.
Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman are National writers of America,
although the one had his first true acceptance in France and the other
in England and Ireland. When I was a boy, six persons, who, alone out of
the whole world it may be, believed Walt Whitman a great writer, sent
him a message of admiration, and of those names four were English and
two Irish, my father’s and Prof. Dowden’s. It is only in our own day
that America has begun to prefer him to Lowell, who is not a poet at
all.
* * * * *
I mean by deep life that men must put into their writing the emotions
and experiences that have been most important to themselves. If they
say, ‘I will write of Irish country-people and make them charming and
picturesque like those dear peasants my great-grandmother used to put in
the foreground of her water-colour paintings,’ then they had better be
satisfied with the word ‘provincial.’ If one condescends to one’s
material, if it is only what a popular novelist would call local colour,
it is certain that one’s real soul is somewhere else. Mr. Synge, upon
the other hand, who is able to express his own finest emotions in those
curious ironical plays of his, where, for all that, by the illusion of
admirable art, every one seems to be thinking and feeling as only
countrymen could think and feel, is truly a National writer, as Burns
was when he wrote finely and as Burns was not when he wrote ‘Highland
Mary’ and ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night.’
A writer is not less National because he shows the influence of other
countries and of the great writers of the world. No nation, since the
beginning of history, has ever drawn all its life out of itself. Even
The Well of English Undefiled, the Father of English Poetry himself,
borrowed his metres, and much of his way of looking at the world, from
French writers, and it is possible that the influence of Italy was more
powerful among the Elizabethan poets than any literary influence out of
England herself. Many years ago, when I was contending with Sir Charles
Gavan Duffy over what seemed to me a too narrow definition of Irish
interests, Professor York Powell either said or wrote to me that the
creative power of England was always at its greatest when her receptive
power was greatest. If Ireland is about to produce a literature that is
important to her, it must be the result of the influences that flow in
upon the mind of an educated Irishman to-day, and, in a greater degree,
of what came into the world with himself. Gaelic can hardly fail to do a
portion of the work, but one cannot say whether it may not be some
French or German writer who will do most to make him an articulate man.
If he really achieve the miracle, if he really make all that he has seen
and felt and known a portion of his own intense nature, if he put it all
into the fire of his energy, he need not fear being a stranger among his
own people in the end. There never have been men more unlike an
Englishman’s idea of himself than Keats and Shelley, while Campbell,
whose emotion came out of a shallow well, was very like that idea. We
call certain minds creative because they are among the moulders of their
nation and are not made upon its mould, and they resemble one another in
this only--they have never been fore-known or fulfilled an expectation.
It is sometimes necessary to follow in practical matters some definition
which one knows to have but a passing use. We, for instance, have always
confined ourselves to plays upon Irish subjects, as if no others could
be National literature. Our theatre inherits this limitation from
previous movements, which found it necessary and fruitful. Goldsmith and
Sheridan and Burke had become so much a part of English life, were so
greatly moulded by the movements that were moulding England, that,
despite certain Irish elements that clung about them, we could not think
of them as more important to us than any English writer of equal rank.
Men told us that we should keep our hold of them, as it were, for they
were a part of our glory; but we did not consider our glory very
important. We had no desire to turn braggarts, and we did suspect the
motives of our advisers. Perhaps they had reasons, which were not
altogether literary, for thinking it might be well if Irishmen of
letters, in our day also, would turn their faces to England. But what
moved me always the most, and I had something to do with forcing this
limitation upon our organisations, is that a new language of expression
would help to awaken a new attitude in writers themselves, and that if
our organisations were satisfied to interpret a writer to his own
countrymen merely because he was of Irish birth, the organisations would
become a kind of trade union for the helping of Irishmen to catch the
ear of London publishers and managers, and for upholding writers who had
been beaten by abler Englishmen. Let a man turn his face to us,
accepting the commercial disadvantages that would bring upon him, and
talk of what is near to our hearts, Irish Kings and Irish Legends and
Irish Countrymen, and we would find it a joy to interpret him. Our one
philosophical critic, Mr. John Eglinton, thinks we were very arbitrary,
and yet I would not have us enlarge our practice. England and France,
almost alone among nations, have great works of literature which have
taken their subjects from foreign lands, and even in France and England
this is more true in appearance than reality. Shakespeare observed his
Roman crowds in London, and saw, one doubts not, somewhere in his own
Stratford, the old man that gave Cleopatra the asp. Somebody I have been
reading lately finds the Court of Louis the Fourteenth in Phèdre and
Andromaque. Even in France and England almost the whole prose fiction
professes to describe the life of the country, often of the districts
where its writers have lived, for, unlike a poem, a novel requires so
much minute observation of the surface of life that a novelist who cares
for the illusion of reality will keep to familiar things. A writer will
indeed take what is most creative out of himself, not from observation,
but experience, yet he must master a definite language, a definite
symbolism of incident and scene. Flaubert explains the comparative
failure of his Salammbô by saying, ‘One cannot frequent her.’ He could
create her soul, as it were, but he could not tell with certainty how it
would express itself before Carthage fell to ruins. In the small nations
which have to struggle for their National life, one finds that almost
every creator, whether poet or novelist, sets all his stories in his own
country. I do not recollect that Björnson ever wrote of any land but
Norway, and Ibsen, though he lived in exile for many years, driven out
by his countrymen, as he believed, carried the little seaboard towns of
Norway everywhere in his imagination. So far as we can be certain of
anything, we may be certain that Ireland with her long National
struggle, her old literature, her unbounded folk-imagination, will, in
so far as her literature is National at all, be more like Norway than
like England or France.
* * * * *
If Literature is but praise of life, if our writers are not to plead the
National Cause, nor insist upon the Ten Commandments, nor upon the glory
of their country, what part remains for it, in the common life of the
country? It will influence the life of the country immeasurably more,
though seemingly less, than have our propagandist poems and stories. It
will leave to others the defence of all that can be codified for ready
understanding, of whatever is the especial business of sermons, and of
leading articles; but it will bring all the ways of men before that
ancient tribunal of our sympathies. It will measure all things by the
measure not of things visible but of things invisible. In a country like
Ireland, where personifications have taken the place of life, men have
more hate than love, for the unhuman is nearly the same as the inhuman,
but literature, which is a part of that charity that is the forgiveness
of sins, will make us understand men no matter how little they conform
to our expectations. We will be more interested in heroic men than in
heroic actions, and will have a little distrust for everything than can
be called good or bad in itself with a very confident heart. Could we
understand it so well, we will say, if it were not something other than
human life? We will have a scale of virtues, and value most highly those
that approach the indefinable. Men will be born among us of whom it is
possible to say, not ‘What a philanthropist,’ ‘What a patriot,’ ‘How
practical a man,’ but, as we say of the men of the Renaissance, ‘What a
nature,’ ‘How much abundant life.’ Even at the beginning we will value
qualities more than actions, for these may be habit or accident; and
should we say to a friend, ‘You have advertised for an English cook,’ or
‘I hear that you have no clerks who are not of your own faith,’ or ‘You
have voted an address to the king,’ we will add to our complaint, ‘You
have been unpatriotic and I am ashamed of you, but if you cease from
doing any of these things because you have been terrorised out of them,
you will cease to be my friend.’ We will not forget how to be stern, but
we will remember always that the highest life unites, as in one fire,
the greatest passion and the greatest courtesy.
A feeling for the form of life, for the graciousness of life, for the
dignity of life, for the moving limbs of life, for the nobleness of
life, for all that cannot be written in codes, has always been greatest
among the gifts of literature to mankind. Indeed, the Muses being women,
all literature is but their love-cries to the manhood of the world. It
is now one and now another that cries, but the words are the same--‘Love
of my heart, what matter to me that you have been quarrelsome in your
cups, and have slain many, and have given your love here and there? It
was because of the whiteness of your flesh and the mastery in your hands
that I gave you my love, when all life came to me in your coming.’ And
then in a low voice that none may overhear--‘Alas! I am greatly afraid
that the more they cry against you the more I love you.’
* * * * *
There are two kinds of poetry, and they are commingled in all the
greatest works. When the tide of life sinks low there are pictures, as
in the _Ode on a Grecian Urn_ and in Virgil at the plucking of the
Golden Bough. The pictures make us sorrowful. We share the poet’s
separation from what he describes. It is life in the mirror, and our
desire for it is as the desire of the lost souls for God; but when
Lucifer stands among his friends, when Villon sings his dead ladies to
so gallant a rhythm, when Timon makes his epitaph, we feel no sorrow,
for life herself has made one of her eternal gestures, has called up
into our hearts her energy that is eternal delight. In Ireland, where
the tide of life is rising, we turn, not to picture-making, but to the
imagination of personality--to drama, gesture.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE PLAY, THE PLAYER, AND THE SCENE
I have been asked to put into this year’s _Samhain_ Miss Horniman’s
letter offering us the use of the Abbey Theatre. I have done this, but
as Miss Horniman begins her letter by stating that she has made her
offer out of ‘great sympathy with the Irish National Theatre Company as
publicly explained by Mr. Yeats on various occasions,’ she has asked me
to go more into detail as to my own plans and hopes than I have done
before. I think they are the plans and hopes of my fellow-dramatists,
for we are all of one movement, and have influenced one another, and
have in us the spirit of our time. I discussed them all very shortly in
last _Samhain_. And I know that it was that _Samhain_, and a certain
speech I made in front of the curtain, that made Miss Horniman entrust
us with her generous gift. But last _Samhain_ is practically out of
print, and my speech has gone even out of my own memory. I will repeat,
therefore, much that I have said already, but adding a good deal to it.
_First._ Our plays must be literature or written in the spirit of
literature. The modern theatre has died away to what it is because the
writers have thought of their audiences instead of their subject. An old
writer saw his hero, if it was a play of character, or some dominant
passion, if it was a play of passion, like Phèdre or Andromaque, moving
before him, living with a life he did not endeavour to control. The
persons acted upon one another as they were bound by their natures to
act, and the play was dramatic, not because he had sought out dramatic
situations for their own sake, but because will broke itself upon will
and passion upon passion. Then the imagination began to cool, the writer
began to be less alive, to seek external aids, remembered situations,
tricks of the theatre, that had proved themselves again and again. His
persons no longer will have a particular character, but he knows that he
can rely upon the incidents, and he feels himself fortunate when there
is nothing in his play that has not succeeded a thousand times before
the curtain has risen. Perhaps he has even read a certain guide-book to
the stage published in France, and called _The Thirty-six Situations of
Drama_. The costumes will be magnificent, the actresses will be
beautiful, the Castle in Spain will be painted by an artist upon the
spot. We will come from his play excited if we are foolish, or can
condescend to the folly of others, but knowing nothing new about
ourselves, and seeing life with no new eyes and hearing it with no new
ears. The whole movement of theatrical reform in our day has been a
struggle to get rid of this kind of play, and the sincere play, the
logical play, that we would have in its place, will always seem, when we
hear it for the first time, undramatic, unexciting. It has to stir the
heart in a long-disused way, it has to awaken the intellect to a
pleasure that ennobles and wearies. I was at the first performance of an
Ibsen play given in England. It was _The Doll’s House_, and at the fall
of the curtain I heard an old dramatic critic say, ‘It is but a series
of conversations terminated by an accident.’ So far, we here in Dublin
mean the same thing as do Mr. Max Beerbohm, Mr. Walkley, and Mr. Archer,
who are seeking to restore sincerity to the English stage, but I am not
certain that we mean the same thing all through. The utmost sincerity,
the most unbroken logic, give me, at any rate, but an imperfect pleasure
if there is not a vivid and beautiful language. Ibsen has sincerity and
logic beyond any writer of our time, and we are all seeking to learn
them at his hands; but is he not a good deal less than the greatest of
all times, because he lacks beautiful and vivid language? ‘Well, well,
give me time and you shall hear all about it. If only I had Peter here
now,’ is very like life, is entirely in its place where it comes, and
when it is united to other sentences exactly like itself, one is moved,
one knows not how, to pity and terror, and yet not moved as if the words
themselves could sing and shine. Mr. Max Beerbohm wrote once that a play
cannot have style because the people must talk as they talk in daily
life. 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 bedridden. 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? Will not our next art be rather of the
country, of great open spaces, of the soul rejoicing in itself? Will not
the generations to come begin again to have an over-abounding faith in
kings and queens, in masterful spirits, whatever names we call them by?
I had Molière with me on my way to America, and as I read I seemed to be
at home in Ireland listening to that conversation of the people which is
so full of riches because so full of leisure, or to those old stories of
the folk which were made by men who believed so much in the soul, and so
little in anything else, that they were never entirely certain that the
earth was solid under the foot-sole. What is there left for us, that
have seen the newly discovered stability of things changed from an
enthusiasm to a weariness, but to labour with a high heart, though it
may be with weak hands, to rediscover an art of the theatre that shall
be joyful, fantastic, extravagant, whimsical, beautiful, resonant, and
altogether reckless? The arts are at their greatest when they seek for a
life growing always more scornful of everything that is not itself and
passing into its own fullness, as it were, ever more completely as all
that is created out of the passing mode of society slips from it; and
attaining that fullness, perfectly it may be--and from this is tragic
joy and the perfectness of tragedy--when the world itself has slipped
away in death. We, who are believers, cannot see reality anywhere but in
the soul itself, and seeing it there we cannot do other than rejoice in
every energy, whether of gesture, or of action, or of speech, coming out
of the personality, the soul’s image, even though the very laws of
nature seem as unimportant in comparison as did the laws of Rome to
Coriolanus when his pride was upon him. Has not the long decline of the
arts been but the shadow of declining faith in an unseen reality?
If the sun and moon would doubt,
They’d immediately go out.
* * * * *
_Second._ If we are to make a drama of energy, of extravagance, of
phantasy, of musical and noble speech, we shall need an appropriate
stage-management. Up to a generation or two ago, and to our own
generation, here and there, lingered a method of acting and of
stage-management, which had come down, losing much of its beauty and
meaning on the way, from the days of Shakespeare. Long after England,
under the influence of Garrick, began the movement towards Naturalism,
this school had a great popularity in Ireland, where it was established
at the Restoration by an actor who probably remembered the Shakespearean
players. France has inherited from Racine and from Molière an equivalent
art, and, whether it is applied to comedy or to tragedy, its object is
to give importance to the words. It is not only Shakespeare whose finest
thoughts are inaudible on the English stage. Congreve’s _Way of the
World_ was acted in London last spring, and revived again a month ago,
and the part of Lady Wishfort was taken by a very admirable actress, an
actress of genius who has never had the recognition she deserves. There
is a scene where Lady Wishfort turns away a servant with many words. She
cries: ‘Go, set up for yourself again, do; drive a trade, do, with your
three pennyworth of small ware, flaunting upon a packthread under a
brandy-seller’s bulk, or against a dead wall by a ballad-monger; go,
hang out an old frisoneer-gorget, with a yard of yellow colberteen
again, do; an old gnawed mask, two rows of pins, and a child’s fiddle; a
glass necklace with the beads broken, and a quilted nightcap with one
ear. Go, go, drive a trade.’ The conversation of an older time, of
Urquhart, the translator of Rabelais, let us say, awakes with a little
of its old richness. The actress acted so much and so admirably that
when she first played it--I heard her better a month ago, perhaps
because I was nearer to the stage--I could not understand a word of a
passage that required the most careful speech. Just as the modern
musician, through the over-development of an art that seems exterior to
the poet, writes so many notes for every word that the natural energy of
speech is dissolved and broken and the words made inaudible, so did this
actress, a perfect mistress of her own art, put into her voice so many
different notes, so run up and down the scale under an impulse of anger
and scorn, that one had hardly been more affronted by a musical setting.
Everybody who has spoken to large audiences knows that he must speak
difficult passages, in which there is some delicacy of sound or of
thought, upon one or two notes. The larger his audience, the more he
must get away, except in trivial passages, from the methods of
conversation. Where one requires the full attention of the mind, one
must not weary it with any but the most needful changes of pitch and
note, or by an irrelevant or obtrusive gesture. As long as drama was
full of poetical beauty, full of description, full of philosophy, as
long as its words were the very vesture of sorrow and laughter, the
players understood that their art was essentially conventional,
artificial, ceremonious.
The stage itself was differently shaped, being more a platform than a
stage, for they did not desire to picture the surface of life, but to
escape from it. But realism came in, and every change towards realism
coincided with a decline in dramatic energy. The proscenium was imported
into England at the close of the seventeenth century, appropriate
costumes a generation later. The audience were forbidden to sit upon the
stage in the time of Sheridan, the last English-speaking playwright
whose plays have lived. And the last remnant of the platform, the part
of the stage that still projected beyond the proscenium, dwindled in
size till it disappeared in our own day. The birth of science was at
hand, the birth-pangs of its mother had troubled the world for
centuries. But now that Gargantua is born at last, it may be possible to
remember that there are other giants.
We can never bring back old things precisely as they were, but must
consider how much of them is necessary to us, accepting, even if it were
only out of politeness, something of our own time. The necessities of a
builder have torn from us, all unwilling as we were, the apron, as the
portion of the platform that came in front of the proscenium used to be
called, and we must submit to the picture-making of the modern stage. We
would have preferred to be able to return occasionally to the old stage
of statue-making, of gesture. On the other hand, one accepts, believing
it to be a great improvement, some appropriateness of costume, but
speech is essential to us. An Irish critic has told us to study the
stage-management of Antoine, but that is like telling a good Catholic to
take his theology from Luther. Antoine, who described poetry as a way of
saying nothing, has perfected naturalistic acting and carried the spirit
of science into the theatre. Were we to study his methods, we might,
indeed, have a far more perfect art than our own, a far more mature art,
but it is better to fumble our way like children. We may grow up, for we
have as good hopes as any other sturdy ragamuffin.
An actor must so understand how to discriminate cadence from cadence,
and so cherish the musical lineaments of verse or prose, that he
delights the ear with a continually varied music. This one has to say
over and over again, but one does not mean that his speaking should be a
monotonous chant. Those who have heard Mr. Frank Fay speaking verse will
understand me. That speech of his, so masculine and so musical, could
only sound monotonous to an ear that was deaf to poetic rhythm, and no
man should, as do London managers, stage a poetical drama according to
the desire of those who are deaf to poetical rhythm. It is possible,
barely so, but still possible, that some day we may write musical notes
as did the Greeks, it seems, for a whole play, and make our actors speak
upon them--not sing, but speak. Even now, when one wishes to make the
voice immortal and passionless, as in the Angel’s part in my
_Hour-Glass_, one finds it desirable for the player to speak always upon
pure musical notes, written out beforehand and carefully rehearsed. On
the one occasion when I heard the Angel’s part spoken in this way with
entire success, the contrast between the crystalline quality of the pure
notes and the more confused and passionate speaking of the Wise Man was
a new dramatic effect of great value.
If a song is brought into a play it does not matter to what school the
musician belongs if every word, if every cadence, is as audible and
expressive as if it were spoken. It must be good speech, and we must not
listen to the musician if he promise to add meaning to the words with
his notes, for one does not add meaning to the word ‘love’ by putting
four o’s in the middle, or by subordinating it even slightly to a
musical note. But where can we find a musician so mild, so quiet, so
modest, unless he be a sailor from the forecastle or some ghost out of
the twelfth century? One must ask him for music that shall mean nothing,
or next to nothing, apart from the words, and after all he is a
musician.
When I heard the Æschylean Trilogy at Stratford-on-Avon last spring I
could not hear a word of the chorus, except in a few lines here and
there which were spoken without musical setting. The chorus was not
without dramatic, or rather operatic effect; but why should those
singers have taken so much trouble to learn by heart so much of the
greatest lyric poetry of Greece? ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star,’ or any
other memory of their childhood, would have served their turn. If it had
been comic verse, the singing-master and the musician would have
respected it, and the audience would have been able to hear. Mr.
Dolmetsch and Miss Florence Farr have been working for some time to find
out some way of setting serious poetry which will enable us to hear it,
and the singer to sing sweetly and yet never to give a word, a cadence,
or an accent that would not be given it in ordinary passionate speech.
It is difficult, for they are trying to re-discover an art that is only
remembered or half-remembered in ships and in hovels and among wandering
tribes of uncivilised men, and they have to make their experiment with
singers who have been trained by a method of teaching that professes to
change a human being into a musical instrument, a creation of science,
‘something other than human life.’ In old days the singer began to sing
over the rocking-cradle or among the wine-cups, and it was as though
life itself caught fire of a sudden; but to-day the poet, fanatic that
he is, watches the singer go up on to the platform, wondering and
expecting every moment that he will punch himself as if he were a bag.
It is certainly impossible to speak with perfect expression after you
have been a bagpipes for many years, even though you have been making
the most beautiful music all the time.
The success of the chorus in the performance of _Hippolytus_ last
spring--I did not see the more recent performance, but hear upon all
hands that the chorus was too large--the expressiveness of the greater
portion as mere speech, has, I believe, re-created the chorus as a
dramatic method. The greater portion of the singing, as arranged by Miss
Farr, even when four or five voices sang together, though never when ten
sang together, was altogether admirable speech, and some of it was
speech of extraordinary beauty. When one lost the meaning, even perhaps
where the whole chorus sang together, it was not because of a defective
method, but because it is the misfortune of every new artistic method
that we can only judge of it through performers who must be for a long
time unpractised and amateurish. This new art has a double difficulty,
for the training of a modern singer makes articulate speech, as a poet
understands it, nearly impossible, and those who are masters of speech
very often, perhaps usually, are poor musicians. Fortunately, Miss Farr,
who has some knowledge of music, has, it may be, the most beautiful
voice on the English stage, and is in her management of it an exquisite
artist.
That we may throw emphasis on the words in poetical drama, above all
where the words are remote from real life as well as in themselves
exacting and difficult, the actors must move, for the most part, slowly
and quietly, and not very much, and there should be something in their
movements decorative and rhythmical as if they were paintings on a
frieze. They must not draw attention to themselves at wrong moments, for
poetry and indeed all picturesque writing is perpetually making little
pictures which draw the attention away for a second or two from the
player. The actress who played Lady Wishfort should have permitted us to
give a part of our attention to that little shop or wayside booth. Then,
too, one must be content to have long quiet moments, long grey spaces,
long level reaches, as it were--the leisure that is in all fine
life--for what we may call the business-will in a high state of activity
is not everything, although contemporary drama knows of little else.
* * * * *
_Third._ We must have a new kind of scenic art. I have been the advocate
of the poetry as against the actor, but I am the advocate of the actor
as against the scenery. Ever since the last remnant of the old platform
disappeared, and the proscenium grew into the frame of a picture, the
actors have been turned into a picturesque group in the foreground of a
meretricious landscape-painting. The background should be of as little
importance as the background of a portrait-group, and it should, when
possible, be of one colour or of one tint, that the persons on the
stage, wherever they stand, may harmonise with it or contrast with it
and preoccupy our attention. Their outline should be clear and not
broken up into the outline of windows and wainscotting, or lost into the
edges of colours. In a play which copies the surface of life in its
dialogue we may, with this reservation, represent anything that can be
represented successfully--a room, for instance--but a landscape painted
in the ordinary way will always be meretricious and vulgar. It will
always be an attempt to do something which cannot be done successfully
except in easel painting, and the moment an actor stands near to your
mountain, or your forest, one will perceive that he is standing against
a flat surface. Illusion, therefore, is impossible, and should not be
attempted. We should be content to suggest a scene upon a canvas, whose
vertical flatness we accept and use, as the decorator of pottery accepts
the roundness of a bowl or a jug. Having chosen the distance from
naturalism, which will keep one’s composition from competing with the
illusion created by the actor, who belongs to a world with depth as well
as height and breadth, one must keep this distance without flinching.
The distance will vary according to the distance the playwright has
chosen, and especially in poetry, which is more remote and idealistic
than prose, one will insist on schemes of colour and simplicity of form,
for every sign of deliberate order gives remoteness and ideality. But,
whatever the distance be, one’s treatment will always be more or less
decorative. We can only find out the right decoration for the different
types of play by experiment, but it will probably range between, on the
one hand, woodlands made out of recurring pattern, or painted like old
religious pictures upon gold background, and upon the other the
comparative realism of a Japanese print. This decoration will not only
give us a scenic art that will be a true art because peculiar to the
stage, but it will give the imagination liberty, and without returning
to the bareness of the Elizabethan stage. The poet cannot evoke a
picture to the mind’s eye if a second-rate painter has set his
imagination of it before the bodily eye; but decoration and suggestion
will accompany our moods, and turn our minds to meditation, and yet
never become obtrusive or wearisome. The actor and the words put into
his mouth are always the one thing that matters, and the scene should
never be complete of itself, should never mean anything to the
imagination until the actor is in front of it.
If we remember that the movement of the actor, and the graduation and
the colour of the lighting, are the two elements that distinguish the
stage picture from an easel painting, we may not find it difficult to
create an art of the stage ranking as a true fine art. Mr. Gordon Craig
has done wonderful things with the lighting, but he is not greatly
interested in the actor, and his streams of coloured direct light,
beautiful as they are, will always seem, apart from certain exceptional
moments, a new externality. We should rather desire, for all but
exceptional moments, an even, shadowless light, like that of noon, and
it may be that a light reflected out of mirrors will give us what we
need.
* * * * *
M. Appia and M. Fortuni are making experiments in the staging of Wagner
for a private theatre in Paris, but I cannot understand what M. Appia is
doing, from the little I have seen of his writing, excepting that the
floor of the stage will be uneven like the ground, and that at moments
the lights and shadows of green boughs will fall over the player that
the stage may show a man wandering through a wood, and not a wood with a
man in the middle of it. One agrees with all the destructive part of his
criticism, but it looks as if he himself is seeking, not convention, but
a more perfect realism. I cannot persuade myself that the movement of
life is flowing that way, for life moves by a throbbing as of a pulse,
by reaction and action. The hour of convention and decoration and
ceremony is coming again.
The experiments of the Irish National Theatre Society will have of
necessity to be for a long time few and timid, and we must often, having
no money and not a great deal of leisure, accept for a while
compromises, and much even that we know to be irredeemably bad. One can
only perfect an art very gradually; and good playwriting, good speaking,
and good acting are the first necessity.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1905
Our first season at the Abbey Theatre has been tolerably successful. We
drew small audiences, but quite as big as we had hoped for, and we end
the year with a little money. On the whole, we have probably more than
trebled our audiences of the Molesworth Hall. The same people come again
and again, and others join them, and I do not think we lose any of them.
We shall be under more expense in our new season, for we have decided to
pay some of the company and send them into the provinces, but our annual
expenses will not be as heavy as the weekly expenses of the most
economical London manager. Mr. Philip Carr, whose revivals of
Elizabethan plays and old comedies have been the finest things one could
see in a London theatre, spent three hundred pounds and took twelve
pounds during his last week; but here in Ireland enthusiasm can do half
the work, and nobody is accustomed to get much money, and even Mr.
Carr’s inexpensive scenery costs more than our simple decorations. Our
staging of _Kincora_, the work of Mr. Robert Gregory, was beautiful,
with a high, grave dignity and that strangeness which Ben Jonson thought
to be a part of all excellent beauty, and the expense of scenery,
dresses and all was hardly above thirty pounds. If we find a good scene
we repeat it in other plays, and in course of time we shall be able to
put on new plays without any expense for scenery at all. I do not think
that even the most expensive decoration would increase in any way the
pleasure of an audience that comes to us for the play and the acting.
We shall have abundance of plays, for Lady Gregory has written us a new
comedy besides her _White Cockade_, which is in rehearsal; Mr. Boyle, a
satirical comedy in three acts; Mr. Colum has made a new play out of his
_Broken Soil_; and I have made almost a new one out of my _Shadowy
Waters_; and Mr. Synge has practically finished a longer and more
elaborate comedy than his last. Since our start last Christmas we have
shown eleven plays created by our movement and very varied in substance
and form, and six of these were new: _The Well of the Saints_,
_Kincora_, _The Building Fund_, _The Land_, _On Baile’s Strand_, and
_Spreading the News_.
One of our plays, _The Well of the Saints_, has been accepted for
immediate production by the Deutsches Theater of Berlin; and another,
_The Shadow of the Glen_, is to be played during the season at the
National Bohemian Theatre at Prague; and my own _Cathleen ni Houlihan_
has been translated into Irish and been played at the Oireachtas, before
an audience of some thousands. We have now several dramatists who have
taken to drama as their most serious business, and we claim that a
school of Irish drama exists, and that it is founded upon sincere
observation and experience.
* * * * *
As is natural in a country where the Gaelic League has created a
preoccupation with the countryman, the greatest number of our plays are
founded on the comedy and tragedy of country life, and are written more
or less in dialect. When the Norwegian National movement began, its
writers chose for their maxim, ‘To understand the saga by the peasant
and the peasant by the saga.’ Ireland in our day has rediscovered the
old heroic literature of Ireland, and she has rediscovered the
imagination of the folk. My own preoccupation is more with the heroic
legend than with the folk, but Lady Gregory in her _Spreading the News_,
Mr. Synge in his _Well of the Saints_, Mr. Colum in _The Land_, Mr.
Boyle in _The Building Fund_, have been busy, much or little, with the
folk and the folk-imagination. Mr. Synge alone has written of the
peasant as he is to all the ages; of the folk-imagination as it has been
shaped by centuries of life among fields or on fishing-grounds. His
people talk a highly-coloured musical language, and one never hears from
them a thought that is of to-day and not of yesterday. Lady Gregory has
written of the people of the markets and villages of the West, and their
speech, though less full of peculiar idiom than that of Mr. Synge’s
people, is still always that vivid speech which has been shaped through
some generations of English speaking by those who still think in Gaelic.
Mr. Colum and Mr. 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 over-praise 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 judgement. 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
judgement 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 us 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 noble characters into his
books; and when Chaucer encounters Eros 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. Sometimes the writer delights us, when we grow to
understand him, with new forms of virtue discovered in persons where one
had not hitherto looked for it, and sometimes--and this is more and more
true of modern art--he changes the values not by the persons he sets
before one, who may be mean enough, but by his way of looking at them,
by the implications that come from his own mind, by the tune they dance
to as it were. Eros, into whose mouth Chaucer, one doubts not, puts
arguments that he had heard from his readers and listeners, objected to
Chaucer’s art in the interests of pedantic mediæval moralising; the
contemporaries of Schiller commended him for reflecting vague romantic
types from the sentimental literature of his predecessors; and those who
object to the peasant as he is seen in the Abbey Theatre have their
imaginations full of what is least observant and most sentimental in the
Irish novelists. When I was a boy I spent many an afternoon with a
village shoemaker who was a great reader. I asked him once what Irish
novels he liked, and he told me there were none he could read. ‘They
sentimentalised the people,’ he said angrily; and it was against Kickham
that he complained most. ‘I want to see the people,’ he said, ‘shown up
in their naked hideousness.’ That is the peasant mind as I know it, a
mind that delights in strong sensations whether of beauty or of
ugliness, in bare facts, and is quite without sentimentality. The
sentimental mind is found among the middle classes, and it was this mind
which came into Irish literature with Gerald Griffin and later on with
Kickham.
It is the mind of the town, and it is a delight to those only who have
seen life, and above all country life, with unobservant eyes, and most
of all to the Irish tourist, to the patriotic young Irishman who goes to
the country for a month’s holiday with his head full of vague idealisms.
It is not the art of Mr. Colum, born of the people, and when at his best
looking at the town and not the country with strange eyes, nor the art
of Mr. Synge, spending weeks and months in remote places talking Irish
to fishers and islanders. I remember meeting, about twenty years ago, a
lad who had a little yacht at Kingstown. Somebody was talking of the sea
paintings of a great painter, Hook, I think, and this made him very
angry. No yachtsman believed in them or thought them at all like the
sea, he said. Indeed, he was always hearing people praise pictures that
were not a bit like the sea, and thereupon he named certain of the
greatest painters of water--men who more than all others had spent their
lives in observing the effects of light upon cloud and wave. I met him
again the other day, well on in middle life, and though he is not even
an Irishman, indignant with Mr. Synge’s and Mr. Boyle’s peasants. He
knew the people, he said, and neither he nor any other person that knew
them could believe that they were properly represented in _The Well of
the Saints_ or _The Building Fund_. Twenty years ago his imagination was
under the influence of popular pictures, but to-day it was under that of
the conventional idealism writers like Kickham and Griffin substitute
for the ever-varied life of the cottages, and of that conventional
idealism that the contemporary English Theatre substitutes for all life
whatsoever. I saw _Caste_, the earliest play of the modern school, a few
days ago, and found there more obviously than I expected, for I am not
much of a theatre-goer, the English half of the mischief. Two of the
minor persons had a certain amount of superficial characterisation, as
if out of the halfpenny comic papers; but the central persons, the man
and woman that created the dramatic excitement, such as it was, had not
characters of any kind, being vague ideals, perfection as it is imagined
by a commonplace mind. The audience could give them its sympathy without
the labour that comes from awakening knowledge. If the dramatist had put
into his play whatever man or woman of his acquaintance seemed to come
closest to perfection, he would have had to make it a study, among other
things, of the little petty faults and perverted desires that arise out
of the nature or its surroundings. He would have troubled that admiring
audience by making a self-indulgent sympathy more difficult. He might
have even seemed, like Ibsen or the early Christians, an enemy of the
human race. We have gone down to the roots, and we have made up our
minds upon one thing quite definitely--that in no play that professes to
picture life in its daily aspects shall we admit these white phantoms.
We can do this, not because we have any special talent, but because we
are dealing with a life which has for all practical purposes never been
set upon the stage before. The conventional types of the novelists do
not pervert our imagination, for they are built, as it were, into
another form, and no man who has chosen for himself a sound method of
drama, whether it be the drama of character or of crisis, can use them.
The Gaelic League and _Cumann nan Gaedheal_ play does indeed show the
influence of the novelists; but the typical Gaelic League play is
essentially narrative and not dramatic. Every artist necessarily
imitates those who have worked in the same form before him, and when the
preoccupation has been with the same life he almost always, consciously
or unconsciously, borrows more than the form, and it is this very
borrowing--affecting thought, language, all the vehicles of
expression--which brings about the most of what we call decadence.
* * * * *
After all, if our plays are slanders upon their country; if to represent
upon the stage a hard old man like Cosgar, or a rapacious old man like
Shan, or a faithless wife like Nora Burke, or to select from history
treacherous Gormleith for a theme, is to represent this nation at
something less than its full moral worth; if every play played in the
Abbey Theatre now and in times to come be something of a slander, is
anybody a penny the worse? Some ancient or mediæval races did not think
so. Jusserand describes the French conquerors of mediæval England as
already imagining themselves in their literature, as they have done to
this day, as a great deal worse than they are, and the English imagining
themselves a great deal better. The greater portion of the _Divine
Comedy_ is a catalogue of the sins of Italy, and Boccaccio became
immortal because he exaggerated with an unceasing playful wit the vices
of his countryside. The Greeks chose for the themes of their serious
literature a few great crimes, and Corneille, in his article on the
theory of the drama, shows why the greatness and notoriety of these
crimes is necessary to tragic drama. The public life of Athens found its
chief celebration in the monstrous caricature of Aristophanes, and the
Greek nation was so proud, so free from morbid sensitiveness, that it
invited the foreign ambassadors to the spectacle. And I answer to those
who say that Ireland cannot afford this freedom because of her political
circumstances, that if Ireland cannot afford it, Ireland cannot have a
literature. Literature has never been the work of slaves, and Ireland
must learn to say--
Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage.
* * * * *
The misrepresentation of the average life of a nation that follows of
necessity from an imaginative delight in energetic characters and
extreme types, enlarges the energy of a people by the spectacle of
energy. A nation is injured by the picking out of a single type and
setting that into print or upon the stage as a type of the whole nation.
Ireland suffered for a century from that single whisky-drinking,
humorous type which seemed for a time the accepted type of all. The
Englishwoman is, no doubt, injured in the same way in the minds of
various Continental nations by a habit of caricaturing all Englishwomen
as having big teeth. But neither nation can be injured by imaginative
writers selecting types that please their fancy. They will never impose
a general type on the public mind, for genius differs from the
newspapers in this, that the greater and more confident it is, the more
is its delight in varieties and species. If Ireland were at this moment,
through a misunderstanding terror of the stage Irishman, to deprive her
writers of freedom, to make their imaginations timid, she would lower
her dignity in her own eyes and in the eyes of every intellectual
nation. That old caricature did her very little harm in the long run,
perhaps a few car-drivers have copied it in their lives, while the mind
of the country remained untroubled; but the loss of imaginative freedom
and daring would turn us into old women. In the long run, it is the
great writer of a nation that becomes its image in the minds of
posterity, and even though he represent no man of worth in his art, the
worth of his own mind becomes the inheritance of his people. He takes
nothing away that he does not give back in greater volume.
* * * * *
If Ireland had not lost the Gaelic she never would have had this
sensitiveness as of a _parvenu_ when presented at Court for the first
time, or of a nigger newspaper. When Ireland had the confidence of her
own antiquity, her writers praised and blamed according to their fancy,
and even, as throughout all mediæval Europe, laughed when they had a
mind to at the most respected persons, at the sanctities of Church and
State. The story of _The Shadow of the Glen_, found by Mr. Synge in
Gaelic-speaking Aran, and by Mr. Curtain in Munster; the Song of _The
Red-haired Man’s Wife_, sung in all Gaelic Ireland; _The Midnight Court
of MacGiolla Meidhre_; _The Vision of MacCoinglinne_; the old romancers,
with their Bricriu and their Conan, laughed and sang as fearlessly as
Chaucer or Villon or Cervantes. It seemed almost as if those old writers
murmured to themselves: ‘If we but keep our courage let all the virtues
perish, for we can make them over again; but if that be gone, all is
gone.’ I remember when I was an art student at the Metropolitan School
of Art a good many years ago, saying to Mr. Hughes the sculptor, as we
looked at the work of our fellow-students, ‘Every student here that is
doing better work than another is doing it because he has a more
intrepid imagination; one has only to look at the line of a drawing to
see that’; and he said that was his own thought also. All good art is
extravagant, vehement, impetuous, shaking the dust of time from its
feet, as it were, and beating against the walls of the world.
* * * * *
If a sincere religious artist were to arise in Ireland in our day, and
were to paint the Holy Family, let us say, he would meet with the same
opposition that sincere dramatists are meeting with to-day. The
half-educated mind is never sincere in the arts, and one finds in Irish
chapels, above all in Irish convents, the religious art that it
understands. A Connaught convent a little time ago refused a fine design
for stained glass, because of the personal life in the faces and in the
attitudes, which seemed to them ugly, perhaps even impious. They sent to
the designer an insipid German chromo-lithograph, full of faces without
expression or dignity, and gestures without personal distinction, and
the designer, too anxious for success to reject any order, has carried
out this meaningless design in glass of beautiful colour and quality.
Let us suppose that Meister Stefan were to paint in Ireland to-day that
exquisite Madonna of his, with her lattice of roses; a great deal that
is said of our plays would be said of that picture. Why select for his
model a little girl selling newspapers in the streets, why slander with
that miserable little body the Mother of God? He could only answer, as
the imaginative artist always answers, ‘That is the way I have seen her
in my mind, and what I have made of her is very living.’ All art is
founded upon personal vision, and the greater the art the more
surprising the vision; and all bad art is founded upon impersonal types
and images, accepted by average men and women out of imaginative poverty
and timidity, or the exhaustion that comes from labour.
Nobody can force a movement of any kind to take any prearranged pattern
to any very great extent; one can, perhaps, modify it a little, and that
is all. When one says that it is going to develop in a certain way, one
means that one sees, or imagines that one sees, certain energies which
left to themselves are bound to give it a certain form. Writing in
_Samhain_ some years ago, I said that our plays would be of two kinds,
plays of peasant life and plays of a romantic and heroic life, such as
one finds in the folk-tales. To-day I can see other forces, and can
foretell, I think, the form of technique that will arise. About fifty
years ago, perhaps not so many, the playwrights of every country in the
world became persuaded that their plays must reflect the surface of
life; and the author of _Caste_, for instance, made a reputation by
putting what seemed to be average common life and average common speech
for the first time upon the stage in England, and by substituting real
loaves of bread and real cups of tea for imaginary ones. He was not a
very clever nor a very well-educated man, and he made his revolution
superficially; but in other countries men of intellect and knowledge
created that intellectual drama of real life, of which Ibsen’s later
plays are the ripened fruit. This change coincided with the substitution
of science for religion in the conduct of life, and is, I believe, as
temporary, for the practice of twenty centuries will surely take the
sway in the end. A rhetorician in that novel of Petronius, which
satirises, or perhaps one should say celebrates, Roman decadence,
complains that the young people of his day are made blockheads by
learning old romantic tales in the schools, instead of what belongs to
common life. And yet is it not the romantic tale, the extravagant and
ungovernable dream which comes out of youth; and is not that desire for
what belongs to common life, whether it comes from Rome or Greece or
England, the sign of fading fires, of ebbing imaginative-desire? In the
arts I am quite certain that it is a substitution of apparent for real
truth. Mr. George Moore has a very vivid character; he is precisely one
of those whose characters can be represented most easily upon the stage.
Let us suppose that some dramatist had made even him the centre of a
play in which the moderation of common life was carefully preserved, how
very little he could give us of that headlong intrepid man, as we know
him, whether through long personal knowledge or through his many books.
The more carefully the play reflected the surface of life the more would
the elements be limited to those that naturally display themselves
during so many minutes of our ordinary affairs. It is only by
extravagance, by an emphasis far greater than that of life as we observe
it, that we can crowd into a few minutes the knowledge of years.
Shakespeare or Sophocles can so quicken, as it were, the circles of the
clock, so heighten the expression of life, that many years can unfold
themselves in a few minutes, and it is always Shakespeare or Sophocles,
and not Ibsen, that makes us say, ‘How true, how often I have felt as
that man feels’; or ‘How intimately I have come to know those people on
the stage.’ There is a certain school of painters that has discovered
that it is necessary in the representation of light to put little
touches of pure colour side by side. When you went up close to that big
picture of the Alps by Segantini, in Mr. Lane’s Loan Exhibition a year
ago, you found that the grass seeds, which looked brown enough from the
other side of the room, were full of pure scarlet colour. If you copy
nature’s moderation of colour you do not imitate her, for you have only
white paint and she has light. If you wish to represent character or
passion upon the stage, as it is known to the friends, let us say, of
your principal persons, you must be excessive, extravagant, fantastic
even, in expression; and you must be this, more extravagantly, more
excessively, more fantastically than ever, if you wish to show character
and passion as they would be known to the principal person of your play
in the depths of his own mind. The greatest art symbolises not those
things that we have observed so much as those things that we have
experienced, and when the imaginary saint or lover or hero moves us most
deeply, it is the moment when he awakens within us for an instant our
own heroism, our own sanctity, our own desire. We possess these
things--the greatest of men not more than Seaghan the Fool--not at all
moderately, but to an infinite extent, and though we control or ignore
them, we know that the moralists speak true when they compare them to
angels or to devils, or to beasts of prey. How can any dramatic art,
moderate in expression, be a true image of hell or heaven or the
wilderness, or do anything but create those faint histories that but
touch our curiosity, those groups of persons that never follow us into
our intimate life, where Odysseus and Don Quixote and Hamlet are with us
always?
The scientific movement is ebbing a little everywhere, and here in
Ireland it has never been in flood at all. And I am certain that
everywhere literature will return once more to its old extravagant
fantastical expression, for in literature, unlike science, there are no
discoveries, and it is always the old that returns. Everything in
Ireland urges us to this return, and it may be that we shall be the
first to recover after the fifty years of mistake.
* * * * *
The antagonist of imaginative writing in Ireland is not a habit of
scientific observation but our interest in matters of opinion. A
misgoverned country seeking a remedy by agitation puts an especial value
upon opinion, and even those who are not conscious of any interest in
the country are influenced by the general habit. All fine literature is
the disinterested contemplation or expression of life, but hardly any
Irish writer can liberate his mind sufficiently from questions of
practical reform for this contemplation. Art for art’s sake, as he
understands it, whether it be the art of the _Ode on a Grecian Urn_ or
of the imaginer of Falstaff, seems to him a neglect of public duty. It
is as though the telegraph-boys botanised among the hedges with the
undelivered envelopes in their pockets; a man must calculate the effect
of his words before he writes them, whom they are to excite and to what
end. We all write if we follow the habit of the country not for our own
delight but for the improvement of our neighbours, and this is not only
true of such obviously propagandist work as _The Spirit of the Nation_
or a Gaelic League play, but of the work of writers who seemed to have
escaped from every national influence, like Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. George
Moore, or even Mr. Oscar Wilde. They never keep their heads for very
long out of the flood of opinion. Mr. Bernard Shaw, the one brilliant
writer of comedy in England to-day, makes his comedies something less
than life by never forgetting that he is a reformer, and Mr. Wilde could
hardly finish an act of a play without denouncing the British public;
and Mr. Moore--God bless the hearers!--has not for ten years now been
able to keep himself from the praise or blame of the Church of his
fathers. Goethe, whose mind was more busy with philosophy than any
modern poet, has said, ‘The poet needs all philosophy, but he must keep
it out of his work.’ One remembers Dante, and wishes that Goethe had
left some commentary upon that saying, some definition of philosophy
perhaps; but one cannot be less than certain that the poet, though it
may be well for him to have right opinions, above all if his country be
at death’s door, must keep all opinion that he holds to merely because
he thinks it right, out of his poetry, if it is to be poetry at all. At
the enquiry which preceded the granting of a patent to the Abbey Theatre
I was asked if _Cathleen ni Houlihan_ was not written to affect opinion.
Certainly it was not. I had a dream one night which gave me a story, and
I had certain emotions about this country, and I gave those emotions
expression for my own pleasure. If I had written to convince others I
would have asked myself, not ‘Is that exactly what I think and feel?’
but ‘How would that strike so-and-so? How will they think and feel when
they have read it?’ And all would be oratorical and insincere. If we
understand our own minds, and the things that are striving to utter
themselves through our minds, we move others, not because we have
understood or thought about those others, but because all life has the
same root. Coventry Patmore has said, ‘The end of art is peace,’ and the
following of art is little different from the following of religion in
the intense preoccupation that it demands. Somebody has said, ‘God asks
nothing of the highest soul except attention’; and so necessary is
attention to mastery in any art, that there are moments when we think
that nothing else is necessary, and nothing else so difficult. The
religious life has created for itself monasteries and convents where men
and women may forget in prayer and contemplation everything that seems
necessary to the most useful and busy citizens of their towns and
villages, and one imagines that even in the monastery and the convent
there are passing things, the twitter of a sparrow in the window, the
memory of some old quarrel, things lighter than air, that keep the soul
from its joy. How many of those old religious sayings can one not apply
to the life of art? ‘The Holy Spirit,’ wrote St. Thomas à Kempis, ‘has
liberated me from a multitude of opinions.’ When one sets out to cast
into some mould so much of life merely for life’s sake, one is tempted
at every moment to twist it from its eternal shape to help some friend
or harm some enemy. Alas! all men, we in Ireland more than others, are
fighters, and it is a hard law that compels us to cast away our swords
when we enter the house of the Muses, as men cast them away at the doors
of the banqueting-hall at Tara. A weekly paper, in reviewing last year’s
_Samhain_, convinced itself, or at any rate its readers--for that is the
heart of the business in propaganda--that I only began to say these
things a few months ago under I know not what alien influence; and yet I
seem to have been saying them all my life. I took up an anthology of
Irish verse that I edited some ten years ago, and I found them there,
and I think they were a chief part of an old fight over the policy of
the New Irish Library. Till they are accepted by writers and readers in
this country it will never have a literature, it will never escape from
the election rhyme and the pamphlet. So long as I have any control over
the National Theatre Society it will be carried on in this spirit, call
it art for art’s sake if you will; and no plays will be produced at it
which were written, not for the sake of a good story or fine verses or
some revelation of character, but to please those friends of ours who
are ever urging us to attack the priests or the English, or wanting us
to put our imagination into handcuffs that we may be sure of never
seeming to do one or the other.
* * * * *
I have had very little to say this year in _Samhain_, and I have said it
badly. When I wrote _Ideas of Good and Evil_ and _Celtic Twilight_, I
wrote everything very slowly and a great many times over. A few years
ago, however, my eyesight got so bad that I had to dictate the first
drafts of everything, and then rewrite these drafts several times. I did
the last _Samhain_ this way, dictating all the thoughts in a few days,
and rewriting them in two or three weeks; but this time I am letting the
first draft remain with all its carelessness of phrase and rhythm. I am
busy with a practical project which needs the saying of many things from
time to time, and it is better to say them carelessly and harshly than
to take time from my poetry. One casts something away every year, and I
shall, I think, have to cast away the hope of ever having a prose style
that amounts to anything.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1906
LITERATURE AND THE LIVING VOICE[11]
I
One Sunday, in summer, a few years ago, I went to the little village of
Killeenan, that is not many miles from Galway, to do honour to the
memory of Raftery, a Gaelic poet who died a little before the famine. A
headstone had been put over his grave in the half-ruined churchyard, and
a priest had come to bless it, and many country people to listen to his
poems. After the shawled and frieze-coated people had knelt down and
prayed for the repose of his soul, they gathered about a little wooden
platform that had been put up in a field. I do not remember whether
Raftery’s poem about himself was one of those they listened to, but
certainly it was in the thoughts of many, and it was the image reflected
in that poem that had drawn some of them from distant villages.
I am Raftery the poet,
Full of hope and love;
With eyes without light;
With gentleness without misery.
Going west on my journey
With the light of my heart;
Weak and tired
To the end of my road.
I am now
And my back to a wall,
Playing music
To empty pockets.
Some few there remembered him, and one old man came out among the
reciters to tell of the burying, where he himself, a young boy at the
time, had carried a candle.
The verses of other Gaelic poets were sung or recited too, and, although
certainly not often fine poetry, they had its spirit, its
_naïveté_--that is to say, its way of looking at the world as if it were
but an hour old--its seriousness even in laughter, its personal rhythm.
A few days after I was in the town of Galway, and saw there, as I had
often seen in other country towns, some young men marching down the
middle of a street singing an already outworn London music-hall song,
that filled the memory, long after they had gone by, with a rhythm as
pronounced and as impersonal as the noise of a machine. In the shop
windows there were, I knew, the signs of a life very unlike that I had
seen at Killeenan: halfpenny comic papers and story papers, sixpenny
reprints of popular novels, and with the exception of a dusty Dumas or
Scott strayed thither, one knew not how, and one or two little books of
Irish ballads, nothing that one calls literature, nothing that would
interest the few thousands who alone out of many millions have what we
call culture. A few miles had divided the sixteenth century, with its
equality of culture, of good taste, from the twentieth, where if a man
has fine taste he has either been born to leisure and opportunity or has
in him an energy that is genius. One saw the difference in the clothes
of the people of the town and of the village, for, as the Emerald Tablet
says, outward and inner things answer to one another. The village men
wore their bawneens, their white flannel jackets; they had clothes that
had a little memory of clothes that had once been adapted to their
calling by centuries of continual slight changes. They were sometimes
well dressed, for they suggested nothing but themselves and wore little
that had suited another better. But in the town nobody was well dressed;
for in modern life, only a few people--some few thousands--set the
fashion, and set it to please themselves and to fit their lives; and as
for the rest, they must go shabby--the ploughman in clothes cut for a
life of leisure, but made of shoddy, and the tramp in the ploughman’s
cast-off clothes, and the scarecrow in the tramp’s battered coat and
broken hat.
II
All that love the arts or love dignity in life have at one time or
another noticed these things, and some have wondered why the world has
for some three or four centuries sacrificed so much, and with what seems
a growing recklessness, to create an intellectual aristocracy, a
leisured class--to set apart, and above all others, a number of men and
women who are not very well pleased with one another or the world they
have to live in. It is some comparison, like this that I have made,
which has been the origin, as I think, of most attempts to revive some
old language in which the general business of the world is no longer
transacted. The Provençal movement, the Welsh, the Czech, have all, I
think, been attempting, when we examine them to the heart, to restore
what is called a more picturesque way of life--that is to say, a way of
life in which the common man has some share in imaginative art. That
this is the decisive element in the attempt to revive and to preserve
the Irish language I am very certain. A language enthusiast does not put
it that way to himself; he says, rather, ‘If I can make the people talk
Irish again they will be the less English’; but if you talk to him till
you have hunted the words into their burrow you will find that the word
‘Ireland’ means to him a form of life delightful to his imagination, and
that the word ‘England’ suggests to him a cold, joyless, irreligious and
ugly life. The life of the villages, with its songs, its dances and its
pious greetings, its conversations full of vivid images shaped hardly
more by life itself than by innumerable forgotten poets, all that life
of good nature and improvisation grows more noble as he meditates upon
it, for it mingles with the middle ages until he no longer can see it as
it is but as it was, when it ran, as it were, into a point of fire in
the courtliness of king’s houses. He hardly knows whether what stirred
him yesterday was that old fiddler, playing an almost-forgotten music on
a fiddle mended with twine, or a sudden thought of some king that was of
the blood of that old man, some O’Loughlin or O’Bryne, listening amid
his soldiers, he and they at the one table, they too, lucky,
bright-eyed, while the minstrel sang of angry Cuchulain, or of him men
called ‘Golden salmon of the sea, clean hawk of the air.’ It will not
please him, however, if you tell him that he is fighting the modern
world, which he calls ‘England,’ as Mistral and his fellows called it
Paris, and that he will need more than language if he is to make the
monster turn up its white belly. And yet the difference between what the
word England means and all that the word Gaelic suggests is greater than
any that could have been before the imagination of Mistral. Ireland, her
imagination at its noon before the birth of Chaucer, has created the
most beautiful literature of a whole people that has been anywhere since
Greece and Rome, while English literature, the greatest of all
literatures but that of Greece, is yet the literature of a few. Nothing
of it but a handful of ballads about Robin Hood has come from the folk
or belongs to them rightly, for the good English writers, with a few
exceptions that seem accidental, have written for a small cultivated
class; and is not this the reason? Irish poetry and Irish stories were
made to be spoken or sung, while English literature, alone of great
literatures, because the newest of them all, has all but completely
shaped itself in the printing-press. In Ireland to-day the old world
that sang and listened is, it may be for the last time in Europe, face
to face with the world that reads and writes, and their antagonism is
always present under some name or other in Irish imagination and
intellect. I myself cannot be convinced that the printing-press will be
always victor, for change is inconceivably swift, and when it
begins--well, as the proverb has it, everything comes in at the hole.
The world soon tires of its toys, and our exaggerated love of print and
paper seems to me to come out of passing conditions and to be no more a
part of the final constitution of things than the craving of a woman in
child-bed for green apples. When a man takes a book into the corner, he
surrenders so much life for his knowledge, so much, I mean, of that
normal activity that gives him life and strength; he lays away his own
handiwork and turns from his friend, and if the book is good he is at
some pains to press all the little wanderings and tumults of the mind
into silence and quiet. If the reader be poor, if he has worked all day
at the plough or the desk, he will hardly have strength enough for any
but a meretricious book; nor is it only when the book is on the knees
that his own life must be given for it. For a good and sincere book
needs the preparation of the peculiar studies and reveries that prepare
for good taste, and make it easier for the mind to find pleasure in a
new landscape; and all these reveries and studies have need of so much
time and thought that it is almost certain a man cannot be a successful
doctor, or engineer, or Cabinet Minister, and have a culture good enough
to escape the mockery of the ragged art student who comes of an evening
sometimes to borrow a half-sovereign. The old culture came to a man at
his work; it was not at the expense of life, but an exaltation of life
itself; it came in at the eyes as some civic ceremony sailed along the
streets, or as we arrayed ourselves before the looking-glass; or it came
in at the ears in a song as we bent over the plough or the anvil, or at
that great table where rich and poor sat down together and heard the
minstrel bidding them pass around the wine-cup and say a prayer for
Gawain[12] dead. Certainly it came without a price; it did not take one
from one’s friends and one’s handiwork: but it was like a good woman who
gives all for love and is never jealous and is ready to do all the
talking when we are tired.
How the old is to come again, how the other side of the penny is to come
up, how the spit is to turn the other side of the meat to the fire, I do
not know, but that the time will come I am certain. When one kind of
desire has been satisfied for a long time it becomes sleepy, and other
kinds, long quiet, after making a noise begin to order life. Of the many
things, desires or powers or instruments, that are to change the world,
the artist is fitted to understand but two or three, and the less he
troubles himself about the complexity that is outside his craft, the
more will he find it all within his craft, and the more dexterous will
his hand and his thought become. I am trying to see nothing in the world
but the arts, and nothing in this change--which one cannot prove but
only foretell--but the share my own art will have in it.
III
One thing is entirely certain. Wherever the old imaginative life lingers
it must be stirred into life, and kept alive, and in Ireland this is the
work, it may be, of the Gaelic movement. But the nineteenth century,
with its moral zeal, its insistence upon irrelevant interests, having
passed over, the artist can admit that he cares about nothing that does
not give him a new subject or a new technique. Propaganda would be for
him a dissipation, but he may compare his art, if he has a mind to, with
the arts that belonged to a whole people, and discover, not how to
imitate the external form of an epic or a folk-song, but how to express
in some equivalent form whatever in the thoughts of his own age seem, as
it were, to press into the future. The most obvious difference is that
when literature belonged to a whole people, its three great forms,
narrative, lyrical, and dramatic, found their way to men’s minds without
the mediation of print and paper. That narrative poetry may find its
minstrels again, and lyrical poetry adequate singers, and dramatic
poetry adequate players, he must spend much of his time with these three
lost arts, and the more technical is his interest the better. When I
first began working in Ireland at what some newspaper has called the
Celtic Renaissance, I saw that we had still even in English a sufficient
audience for song and speech. Certain of our young men and women, too
restless and sociable to be readers, had amongst them an interest in
Irish legend and history, and years of imaginative politics had kept
them from forgetting, as most modern people have, how to listen to
serious words. I always saw that some kind of theatre would be a natural
centre for a tradition of feeling and thought, but that it must--and
this was its chief opportunity--appeal to the interest appealed to by
lively conversation or by oratory. In other words, that it must be made
for young people who were sufficiently ignorant to refuse a pound of
flesh even though the Nine Worthies offered their wisdom in return. They
are not, perhaps, very numerous, for they do not include the thousands
of conquered spirits who in Dublin, as elsewhere, go to see _The Girl
from Kay’s_, or when Mr. Tree is upon tour, _The Girl from Prospero’s
Island_; and the peasant in Ireland, as elsewhere, has not taken to the
theatre, and can, I think, be moved through Gaelic only.
If one could get them, I thought, one could draw to oneself the
apathetic people who are in every country, and people who don’t know
what they like till somebody tells them. Now, a friend has given me that
theatre. It is not very big, but it is quite big enough to seat those
few thousands and their friends in a seven days’ run of a new play; and
I have begun my real business. I have to find once again singers,
minstrels, and players who love words more than any other thing under
heaven, for without fine words there is no literature.
IV
I will say but a little of dramatic technique, as I would have it in
this theatre of speech, of romance, of extravagance, for I have written
of all that so many times. In every art, when we consider that it has
need of a renewing of life, we go backward till we light upon a time
when it was nearer to human life and instinct, before it had gathered
about it so many mechanical specialisations and traditions. We examine
that earlier condition and think out its principles of life that we may
be able to separate accidental from vital things. William Morris, for
instance, studied the earliest printing, the founts of type that were
made when men saw their craft with eyes that were still new, and with
leisure, and without the restraints of commerce and custom. And then he
made a type that was really new, that had the quality of his own mind
about it, though it reminds one of its ancestry, of its high breeding as
it were. Coleridge and Wordsworth were influenced by the publication of
Percy’s _Reliques_ to the making of a simplicity altogether unlike that
of old ballad-writers. Rossetti went to early Italian painting, to Holy
Families and choirs of angels, that he might learn how to express an
emotion that had its roots in sexual desire and in the delight of his
generation in fine clothes and in beautiful rooms. Nor is it otherwise
with the reformers of churches and of the social order, for reform must
justify itself by a return in feeling to something that our fathers have
told us in the old time.
So it is with us. Inspired by players who played before a figured
curtain, we have made scenery, indeed, but scenery that is little more
than a suggestion--a pattern with recurring boughs and leaves of gold
for a wood, a great green curtain with a red stencil upon it to carry
the eye upward for a palace, and so on. More important than these, we
have looked for the centre of our art where the players of the time of
Shakespeare and of Corneille found theirs--in speech, whether it be the
perfect mimicry of the conversation of two countrymen of the roads, or
that idealised speech poets have imagined for what we think but do not
say. Before men read, the ear and the tongue were subtle, and delighted
one another with the little tunes that were in words; every word would
have its own tune, though but one main note may have been marked enough
for us to name it. They loved language, and all literature was then,
whether in the mouth of minstrels, players, or singers, but the
perfection of an art that everybody practised, a flower out of the stem
of life. And language continually renewed itself in that perfection,
returning to daily life out of that finer leisure, strengthened and
sweetened as from a retreat ordered by religion. The ordinary dramatic
critic, when you tell him that a play, if it is to be of a great kind,
must have beautiful words, will answer that you have misunderstood the
nature of the stage and are asking of it what books should give.
Sometimes when some excellent man, a playgoer certainly and sometimes a
critic, has read me a passage out of some poet, I have been set
wondering what books of poetry can mean to the greater number of men. If
they are to read poetry at all, if they are to enjoy beautiful rhythm,
if they are to get from poetry anything but what it has in common with
prose, they must hear it spoken by men who have music in their voices
and a learned understanding of its sound. There is no poem so great that
a fine speaker cannot make it greater or that a bad ear cannot make it
nothing. All the arts when young and happy are but the point of the
spear whose handle is our daily life. When they grow old and unhappy
they perfect themselves away from life, and life, seeing that they are
sufficient to themselves, forgets them. The fruit of the tree that was
in Eden grows out of a flower full of scent, rounds and ripens, until at
last the little stem, that brought to it the sap out of the tree, dries
up and breaks, and the fruit rots upon the ground.
The theatre grows more elaborate, developing the player at the expense
of the poet, developing the scenery at the expense of the player, always
increasing the importance of whatever has come to it out of the mere
mechanism of a building or the interests of a class, specialising more
and more, doing whatever is easiest rather than what is most noble, and
shaping imaginations before the footlights as behind, that are stirred
to excitements that belong to it and not to life; until at last life,
which knows that a specialised energy is not herself, turns to other
things, content to leave it to weaklings and triflers, to those in whose
body there is the least quantity of herself.
V
But if we are to delight our three or four thousand young men and women
with a delight that will follow them into their own houses, and if we
are to add the countryman to their number, we shall need more than the
play, we shall need those other spoken arts. The player rose into
importance in the town, but the minstrel is of the country. We must have
narrative as well as dramatic poetry, and we are making room for it in
the theatre in the first instance, but in this also we must go to an
earlier time. Modern recitation is not, like modern theatrical art, an
over-elaboration of a true art, but an entire misunderstanding. It has
no tradition at all. It is an endeavour to do what can only be done well
by the player. It has no relation of its own to life. Some young man in
evening clothes will recite to you _The Dream of Eugene Aram_, and it
will be laughable, grotesque and a little vulgar. Tragic emotions that
need scenic illusion, a long preparation, a gradual heightening of
emotion, are thrust into the middle of our common affairs. That they may
be as extravagant, as little tempered by anything ideal or distant as
possible, he will break up the rhythm, regarding neither the length of
the lines nor the natural music of the phrases, and distort the accent
by every casual impulse. He will gesticulate wildly, adapting his
movements to the drama as if Eugene Aram were in the room before us, and
all the time we see a young man in evening dress who has become
unaccountably insane. Nothing that he can do or say will make us forget
that he is Mr. 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 Eschenbach 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 Parzival, 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 we begin 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 mediæval 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 we 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
richness of emotion which but seems modern 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, a vintage for kings’
houses. We require a method of setting to music that will make it
possible to sing or to speak to notes a poem like Rossetti’s translation
of _The Ballad of Dead Ladies_ in such a fashion that no word shall have
an intonation or accentuation it could not have in passionate speech. It
must be set for the speaking-voice, like the songs that sailors make up
or remember, and a man at the far end of the room must be able to take
it down on a first hearing. An English musical paper said the other day,
in commenting on something I had written, ‘Owing to musical necessities,
vowels must be lengthened in singing to an extent which in speech would
be ludicrous if not absolutely impossible.’ I have but one art, that of
speech, and my feeling for music dissociated from speech is very slight,
and listening as I do to the words with the better part of my attention,
there is no modern song sung in the modern way that is not to my taste
‘ludicrous’ and ‘impossible.’ I hear with older ears than the musician,
and the songs of country people and of sailors delight me. I wonder why
the musician is not content to set to music some arrangement of
meaningless liquid vowels, and thereby to make his song like that of the
birds; but I do not judge his art for any purpose but my own.[13] It is
worthless for my purpose certainly, and it is one of the causes that are
bringing about in modern countries a degradation of language. I have to
find men with more music than I have, who will develop to a finer
subtilty the singing of the cottage and the forecastle, and develop it
more on the side of speech than that of music, until it has become
intellectual and nervous enough to be the vehicle of a Shelley or a
Keats. For some purposes it will be necessary to divine the lineaments
of a still older art, and re-create the regulated declamations that died
out when music fell into its earliest elaborations. Miss Farr has
divined enough of this older art, of which no fragment has come down to
us--for even the music of _Aucassin and Nicolette_, with its definite
tune, its recurring pattern of sound, is something more than
declamation--to make the chorus of _Hippolytus_ and of the _Trojan
Women_, at the Court Theatre or the Lyric, intelligible speech, even
when several voices spoke together. She used very often definite
melodies of a very simple kind, but always when the thought became
intricate and the measure grave and slow, fell back upon declamation
regulated by notes. Her experiments have included almost every kind of
verse, and every possible elaboration of sound compatible with the
supremacy of the words. I do not think Homer is ever so moving as when
she recites him to a little tune played on a stringed instrument not
very unlike a lyre. She began at my suggestion with songs in plays, for
it was clearly an absurd thing that words necessary to one’s
understanding of the action, either because they explained some
character, or because they carried some emotion to its highest
intensity, should be less intelligible than the bustling and ruder words
of the dialogue. We have tried our art, since we first tried it in a
theatre, upon many kinds of audiences, and have found that ordinary men
and women take pleasure in it and sometimes say that they never
understood poetry before. It is, however, more difficult to move
those--fortunately for our purpose but a few--whose ears are accustomed
to the abstract emotion and elaboration of notes in modern music.
VI
If we accomplish this great work, if we make it possible again for the
poet to express himself, not merely through words, but through the
voices of singers, of minstrels, of players, we shall certainly have
changed the substance and the manner of our poetry. Every one who has to
interest his audience through the voice discovers that his success
depends upon the clear, simple and varied structure of his thought. I
have written a good many plays in verse and prose, and almost all those
plays I have rewritten after performance, sometimes again and again, and
every re-writing that has succeeded upon the stage has been an addition
to the masculine element, an increase of strength in the bony structure.
Modern literature, above all poetical literature, is monotonous in its
structure and effeminate in its continual insistence upon certain
moments of strained lyricism. William Morris, who did more than any
modern to recover mediæval art, did not in his _Earthly Paradise_ copy
from Chaucer, from whom he copied so much that was _naïve_ and
beautiful, what seems to me essential in Chaucer’s art. He thought of
himself as writing for the reader, who could return to him again and
again when the chosen mood had come, and became monotonous, melancholy,
too continually lyrical in his understanding of emotion and of life. Had
he accustomed himself to read out his poems upon those Sunday evenings
that he gave to Socialist speeches, and to gather an audience of average
men, precisely such an audience as I have often seen in his house, he
would have been forced to Chaucer’s variety, to his delight in the
height and depth, and would have found expression for that humorous,
many-sided nature of his. I owe to him many truths, but I would add to
those truths the certainty that all the old writers, the masculine
writers of the world, wrote to be spoken or to be sung, and in a later
age to be read aloud, for hearers who had to understand swiftly or not
at all, and who gave up nothing of life to listen, but sat, the day’s
work over, friend by friend, lover by lover.
-----
Footnote 11:
This essay was written immediately after the opening of the Abbey
Theatre, though it was not printed, through an accident, until the art
of the Abbey had become an art of peasant comedy. It tells of things
we have never had the time to begin. We still dream of them.--W. B.
Y., March 1908.
Footnote 12:
No, it was some other knight of the table--W. B. Y., 1923.
Footnote 13:
I have heard musicians excuse themselves by claiming that they put the
words there for the sake of the singer; but if that be so, why should
not the singer sing something she may wish to have by rote? Nobody
will hear the words; and the local time-table, or, so much suet and so
many raisins, and so much spice and so much sugar, and whether it is
to be put in a quick or a slow oven, would run very nicely with a
little management.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE ARROW: 1906[14]
THE SEASON’S WORK
A character of the winter’s work will be the large number of romantic,
poetic and historical plays--that is to say, of plays which require a
convention for their performance; their speech, whether it be verse or
prose, being so heightened as to transcend that of any form of real
life. Our first two years of the Abbey Theatre have been expended mostly
on the perfecting of the Company in peasant comedy and tragedy. Every
national dramatic movement or theatre in countries like Bohemia and
Hungary, as in Elizabethan England, has arisen out of a study of the
common people, who preserve national characteristics more than any other
class, and out of an imaginative re-creation of national history or
legend. The life of the drawing-room, the life represented in most plays
of the ordinary theatre of to-day, differs but little all over the
world, and has as little to do with the national spirit as the
architecture of, let us say, St. Stephen’s Green, or Queen’s Gate, or of
the Boulevards about the Arc de Triomphe.
As we wish our work to be full of the life of this country, our
stage-manager has almost always to train our actors from the beginning,
always so in the case of peasant plays, and this makes the building up
of a theatre like ours the work of years. We are now fairly satisfied
with the representation of peasant life, and we can afford to give the
greater part of our attention to other expressions of our art and of our
life. The romantic work and poetical work once reasonably good, we can,
if but the dramatist arrive, take up the life of our drawing-rooms, and
see if there is something characteristic there, something which our
nationality may enable us to express better than others, and so create
plays of that life and means to play them as truthfully as a play of
Hauptmann’s or of Ibsen’s upon the German or Scandinavian stage. I am
not myself interested in this kind of work, and do not believe it to be
as important as contemporary critics think it is, but a theatre such as
we project should give a reasonably complete expression to the
imaginative interests of its country. In any case it was easier, and
therefore wiser, to begin where our art is most unlike that of others,
with the representation of country life.
It is possible to speak the universal truths of human nature whether the
speakers be peasants or wealthy men, for--
Love doth sing
As sweetly in a beggar as a king.
So far as we have any model before us it is the national and municipal
theatres in various Continental towns, and, like the best of these, we
must have in our repertory masterpieces from every great school of
dramatic literature, and play them confidently, even though the public
be slow to like that old stern art, and perhaps a little proudly,
remembering that no other English-speaking theatre can be so catholic.
Certainly the weathercocks of our imagination will not turn those
painted eyes of theirs too long to the quarter of the Scandinavian
winds. If the wind blow long from the Mediterranean, the paint may peel
before we pray for a change in the weather.
-----
Footnote 14:
_The Arrow_, a briefer chronicle than _Samhain_, was distributed with
the programme for a few months.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE CONTROVERSY OVER _THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD_
We have claimed for our writers the freedom to find in their own land
every expression of good and evil necessary to their art, for Irish life
contains, like all vigorous life, the seeds of all good and evil, and a
writer must be free here as elsewhere to watch where weed or flower
ripens. No one who knows the work of our Theatre as a whole can say we
have neglected the flower; but the moment a writer is forbidden to take
pleasure in the weed, his art loses energy and abundance. In the great
days of English dramatic art the greatest English writer of comedy was
free to create _The Alchemist_ and _Volpone_, but a demand born of
Puritan conviction and shopkeeping timidity and insincerity, for what
many second-rate intellects thought to be noble and elevating events and
characters, had already at the outset of the eighteenth century ended
the English drama as a complete and serious art. Sheridan and Goldsmith,
when they restored comedy after an epoch of sentimentalities, had to
apologise for their satiric genius by scenes of conventional love-making
and sentimental domesticity that have set them outside the company of
all, whether their genius be great or little, whose work is pure and
whole. The quarrel of our Theatre to-day is the quarrel of the Theatre
in many lands; for the old Puritanism, the old dislike of power and
reality have not changed, even when they are called by some Gaelic name.
[On the second performance of _The Playboy of the Western World_,
about forty men who sat in the middle of the pit succeeded in making
the play entirely inaudible. Some of them brought tin-trumpets, and
the noise began immediately on the rise of the curtain. For days
articles in the Press called for the withdrawal of the play, but we
played for the seven nights we had announced; and before the week’s
end opinion had turned in our favour. There were, however, nightly
disturbances and a good deal of rioting in the surrounding streets.
On the last night of the play there were, I believe, five hundred
police keeping order in the theatre and in its neighbourhood. Some
days later our enemies, though beaten so far as the play was
concerned, crowded into the cheaper seats for a debate on the
freedom of the stage. They were very excited, and kept up the
discussion until near twelve. The last paragraphs of my opening
statement ran as follows.]
_From Mr. Yeats’ opening Speech in the Debate on February 4, 1907, at
the Abbey Theatre._
The struggle of the last week has been long a necessity; various
paragraphs in newspapers describing Irish attacks on Theatres had made
many worthy young men come to think that the silencing of a stage at
their own pleasure, even if hundreds desired that it should not be
silenced, might win them a little fame, and, perhaps, serve their
country. Some of these attacks have been made on plays which are in
themselves indefensible, vulgar and old-fashioned farces and comedies.
But the attack, being an annihilation of civil rights, was never
anything but an increase of Irish disorder. The last I heard of was in
Liverpool, and there a stage was rushed, and a priest, who had set a
play upon it, withdrew his play and apologised to the audience. We have
not such pliant bones, and did not learn in the houses that bred us a so
suppliant knee. But behind the excitement of example there is a more
fundamental movement of opinion. Some seven or eight years ago the
National movement was democratised and passed from the hands of a few
leaders into those of large numbers of young men organised in clubs and
societies. These young men made the mistake of the newly-enfranchised
everywhere; they fought for causes worthy in themselves with the
unworthy instruments of tyranny and violence. Comic songs of a certain
kind were to be driven from the stage, every one was to wear Irish
cloth, every one was to learn Irish, every one was to hold certain
opinions, and these ends were sought by personal attacks, by virulent
caricature and violent derision. It needs eloquence to persuade and
knowledge to expound; but the coarser means come ready to every man’s
hand, as ready as a stone or a stick, and where these coarse means are
all, there is nothing but mob, and the commonest idea most prospers and
is most sought for.
Gentlemen of the little clubs and societies, do not mistake the meaning
of our victory; it means something for us, but more for you. When the
curtain of _The Playboy_ fell on Saturday night in the midst of what
_The Sunday Independent_--no friendly witness--described as ‘thunders of
applause,’ I am confident that I saw the rise in this country of a new
thought, a new opinion, that we had long needed. It was not all approval
of Mr. Synge’s play that sent the receipts of the Abbey Theatre this
last week to twice the height they had ever touched before. The
generation of young men and girls who are now leaving schools or
colleges are weary of the tyranny of clubs and leagues. They wish again
for individual sincerity, the eternal quest of truth, all that has been
given up for so long that all might crouch upon the one roost and quack
or cry in the one flock. We are beginning once again to ask what a man
is, and to be content to wait a little before we go on to that further
question: What is a good Irishman? There are some who have not yet their
degrees that will say to friend or neighbour, ‘You have voted with the
English, and that is bad’; or ‘You have sent away your Irish servants,
or thrown away your Irish clothes, or blacked your face for your
singing. I despise what you have done, I keep you still my friend; but
if you are terrorised out of doing any of these things, evil things
though I know them to be, I will not have you for my friend any more.’
Manhood is all, and the root of manhood is courage and courtesy.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1907
ON TAKING _THE PLAYBOY_ TO LONDON
The failure of the audience to understand this powerful and strange work
(_The Playboy of the Western World_) has been the one serious failure of
our movement, and it could not have happened but that the greater number
of those who came to shout down the play were no regular part of our
audience at all, but members of parties and societies whose main
interests are political. We have been denounced with even greater
violence than on the first production of the play for announcing that we
should carry it to London. We cannot see that an attack, which we
believe to have been founded on a misunderstanding of the nature of
literature, should prevent us from selecting, as our custom is, whatever
of our best comes within the compass of our players at the time, to show
in some English theatres. Nearly all strong and strange writing is
attacked on its appearance, and those who press it upon the world may
not cease from pressing it, for their justification is its ultimate
acceptance. Ireland is passing through a crisis in the life of the mind
greater than any she has known since the rise of the Young Ireland
party, and based upon a principle which sets many in opposition to the
habits of thought and feeling come down from that party, for the seasons
change, and need and occupation with them. Many are beginning to
recognise the right of the individual mind to see the world in its own
way, to cherish the thoughts which separate men from one another, and
that are the creators of distinguished life, instead of those thoughts
that had made one man like another if they could, and have but succeeded
in setting hysteria and insincerity in place of confidence and
self-possession. To the Young Ireland writers, who have still the ear of
Ireland, though not its distracted mind, truth was historical and
external and not a self-consistent personal vision, and it is but
according to ancient custom that the new truth should force its way amid
riot and great anger.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A PEOPLE’S THEATRE[15]
A LETTER TO LADY GREGORY
I
MY DEAR LADY GREGORY--Of recent years you have done all that is anxious
and laborious in the supervision of the Abbey Theatre and left me free
to follow my own thoughts. It is therefore right that I address to you
this letter, wherein I shall explain, half for your ears, half for other
ears, certain thoughts that have made me believe that the Abbey Theatre
can never do all we had hoped. We set out to make a ‘People’s Theatre,’
and in that we have succeeded. But I did not know until very lately that
there are certain things, dear to both our hearts, which no ‘People’s
Theatre’ can accomplish.
II
All exploitation of the life of the wealthy, for the eye and the ear of
the poor and half poor, in plays, in popular novels, in musical comedy,
in fashion papers, at the cinema, in _Daily Mirror_ photographs, is a
travesty of the life of the rich; and if it were not would all but
justify some red terror: and it impoverishes and vulgarises the
imagination, seeming to hold up for envy and to commend a life where all
is display and hurry, passion without emotion, emotion without
intellect, and where there is nothing stern and solitary. The plays and
novels are the least mischievous, for they still have the old-fashioned
romanticism--their threepenny bit, if worn, is silver yet--but they are
without intensity and intellect and cannot convey the charm of either as
it may exist in those they would represent. All this exploitation is a
rankness that has grown up recently among us and has come out of an
historical necessity that has made the furniture and the clothes and the
brains, of all but the leisured and the lettered, copies and travesties.
Shakespeare set upon the stage Kings and Queens, great historical or
legendary persons about whom all was reality, except the circumstance of
their lives which remain vague and summary because--his mind and the
mind of his audience being interested in emotion and intellect at their
moment of union and at their greatest intensity--he could only write his
best when he wrote of those who controlled the mechanism of life. Had
they been controlled by it, intellect and emotion entangled by intricacy
and detail could never have mounted to that union which, as Swedenborg
said of the marriage of the angels, is a conflagration of the whole
being. But since great crowds, changed by popular education with its eye
always on some objective task, have begun to find reality in mechanism
alone,[16] our popular commercial art has substituted for Lear and
Cordelia the real millionaire and the real peeress, and seeks to make
them charming by insisting perpetually that they have all that wealth
can buy, or rather all that average men and women would buy if they had
wealth. Shakespeare’s groundlings watched the stage in terrified
sympathy, while the British working man looks perhaps at the photographs
of these lords and ladies, whom he admires beyond measure, with the
pleasant feeling that they will all be robbed and murdered before he
dies.
III
Then, too, that turning into ridicule of peasant and citizen and all
lesser men could but increase our delight when the great personified
spiritual power, but seems unnatural when the great are but the rich.
During an illness lately I read two popular novels which I had borrowed
from the servants. They were good stories and half consoled me for the
sleep I could not get, but I was a long time before I saw clearly why
everybody with less than a thousand a year was a theme of comedy and
everybody with less than five hundred a theme of farce. Even Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern, courtiers and doubtless great men in their world,
could be but foils for Hamlet because Shakespeare had nothing to do with
objective truth, but we who have nothing to do with anything else, in so
far as we are of our epoch, must not allow a greater style to corrupt
us.
An artisan or a small shopkeeper feels, I think, when he sees upon our
Abbey stage men of his own trade, that they are represented as he
himself would represent them if he had the gift of expression. I do not
mean that he sees his own life expounded there without exaggeration, for
exaggeration is selection and the more passionate the art the more
marked is the selection, but he does not feel that he has strayed into
some other man’s seat. If it is comedy he will laugh at ridiculous
people, people in whose character there is some contortion, but their
station of life will not seem ridiculous. The best stories I have
listened to outside the Theatre have been told me by farmers or sailors
when I was a boy, one or two by fellow-travellers in railway carriages,
and most had some quality of romance, romance of a class and its
particular capacity for adventure; and our Theatre is a people’s theatre
in a sense which no mere educational theatre can be, because its plays
are to some extent a part of that popular imagination. It is very seldom
that a man or woman bred up among the propertied or professional classes
knows any class but his own, and that a class which is much the same all
over the world, and already written of by so many dramatists that it is
nearly impossible to see its dramatic situations with our own eyes, and
those dramatic situations are perhaps exhausted--as Nietzsche thought
the whole universe would be some day--and nothing left but to repeat the
same combinations over again.
When the Abbey Manager sends us a play for our opinion and it is my turn
to read it, if the handwriting of the MSS. or of the author’s
accompanying letter suggests a leisured life I start prejudiced. There
will be no fresh observation of character, I think, no sense of
dialogue, all will be literary second-hand, at best what Rossetti called
‘The soulless self-reflections of man’s skill.’ On the other hand, until
the Abbey plays began themselves to be copied, a handwriting learned in
a national school always made me expect dialogue, written out by some
man who had admired good dialogue before he had seen it upon paper. The
construction would probably be bad, for there the student of plays has
the better luck, but plays made impossible by rambling and redundance
have often contained some character or some dialogue that has stayed in
my memory for years. At first there was often vulgarity, and there still
is in those comic love scenes which we invariably reject, and there is
often propaganda with all its distortion, but these weigh light when set
against life seen as if newly created. At first, in face of your
mockery, I used to recommend some reading of Ibsen or Galsworthy, but no
one has benefited by that reading or by anything but the Abbey audience
and our own rejection of all gross propaganda and gross imitation of the
comic column in the newspapers. Our dramatists, and I am not speaking of
your work or Synge’s but of those to whom you and Synge and I gave an
opportunity, have been excellent just in so far as they have become all
eye and ear, their minds not smoking lamps, as at times they would have
wished, but clear mirrors.
Our players, too, have been vivid and exciting because they have copied
a life personally known to them, and of recent years, since our Manager
has had to select from the ordinary stage-struck young men and women who
have seen many players and perhaps no life but that of the professional
class, it has been much harder, though players have matured more
rapidly, to get the old, exciting, vivid playing. I have never recovered
the good opinion of one recent Manager because I urged him to choose
instead some young man or woman from some little shop who had never
given his or her thoughts to the theatre. Put all the names into a hat,
I think I said, and pick the first that comes. One of our early players
was exceedingly fine in the old woman in _Riders to the Sea_. ‘She has
never been to Aran, she knows nothing but Dublin, surely in that part
she is not objective, surely she creates from imagination,’ I thought;
but when I asked her she said, ‘I copied from my old grandmother.’
Certainly it is this objectivity, this making of all from sympathy, from
observation, never from passion, from lonely dreaming, that has made our
players, at their best, great comedians, for comedy is passionless.
We have been the first to create a true ‘People’s Theatre,’ and we have
succeeded because it is not an exploitation of local colour, or of a
limited form of drama possessing a temporary novelty, but the first
doing of something for which the world is ripe, something that will be
done all over the world and done more and more perfectly: the making
articulate of all the dumb classes each with its own knowledge of the
world, its own dignity, but all objective with the objectivity of the
office and the workshop, of the newspaper and the street, of mechanism
and of politics.
IV
Yet we did not set out to create this sort of theatre, and its success
has been to me a discouragement and a defeat. Dante in that passage in
the _Convito_ which is, I think, the first passage of poignant
autobiography in literary history, for there is nothing in St. Augustine
not formal and abstract beside it, in describing his poverty and his
exile counts as his chief misfortune that he has had to show himself to
all Italy and so publish his human frailties that men who honoured him
unknown honour him no more. Lacking means he had lacked seclusion, and
he explains that men such as he should have but few and intimate
friends. His study was unity of being, the subordination of all parts to
the whole as in a perfectly proportioned human body--his own definition
of beauty--and not, as with those I have described, the unity of things
in the world; and like all subjectives he shrank, because of what he
was, because of what others were, from contact with many men. Had he
written plays he would have written from his own thought and passion,
observing little and using little, if at all, the conversation of his
time--and whether he wrote in verse or in prose his style would have
been distant, musical, metaphorical, moulded by antiquity. We stand on
the margin between wilderness and wilderness, that which we observe
through our senses and that which we can experience only, and our art is
always the description of one or the other. If our art is mainly from
experience we have need of learned speech, of agreed symbols, because
all those things whose names renew experience have accompanied that
experience already many times. A personage in one of Turgenev’s novels
is reminded by the odour of, I think, heliotrope, of some sweetheart
that had worn it, and poetry is any flower that brings a memory of
emotion, while an unmemoried flower is prose, and a flower pressed and
named and numbered science; but our poetical heliotrope need bring to
mind no sweetheart of ours, for it suffices that it crowned the bride of
Paris, or Pelius’ bride. Neither poetry nor any subjective art can exist
but for those who do in some measure share its traditional knowledge, a
knowledge learned in leisure and contemplation. Even Burns, except in
those popular verses which are as lacking in tradition, as modern, as
topical, as Longfellow, was, as Henley said, not the founder but the
last of a dynasty.
Once such men could draw the crowd because the circumstance of life
changed slowly and there was little to disturb contemplation and so men
repeated old verses and old stories, and learned and simple had come to
share in common much allusion and symbol. Where the simple were ignorant
they were ready to learn and so became receptive, or perhaps even to
pretend knowledge like the clowns in the mediæval poem that describes
the arrival of Chaucer’s Pilgrims at Canterbury, who that they may seem
gentlemen pretend to know the legends in the stained-glass windows.
Shakespeare, more objective than Dante--for, alas, the world must
move--was still predominantly subjective, and he wrote during the latest
crisis of history that made possible a Theatre of his kind. There were
still among the common people many traditional songs and stories, while
court and university, which were much more important to him, had an
interest Chaucer never shared in great dramatic persons, in those men
and women of Plutarch, who made their death a ritual of passion; for
what is passion but the straining of man’s being against some obstacle
that obstructs its unity?
You and I and Synge, not understanding the clock, set out to bring again
the Theatre of Shakespeare or rather perhaps of Sophocles. I had told
you how at Young Ireland Societies and the like, young men when I was
twenty had read papers to one another about Irish legend and history,
and you yourself soon discovered the Gaelic League, then but a new weak
thing, and taught yourself Irish. At Spiddal or near it an innkeeper had
sung us Gaelic songs, all new village work that though not literature
had _naïveté_ and sincerity. The writers, caring nothing for cleverness,
had tried to express emotion, tragic or humorous, and great
masterpieces, _The Grief of a Girl’s Heart_, for instance, had been
written in the same speech and manner and were still sung. We know that
the songs of the Thames boatmen, to name but these, in the age of Queen
Elizabeth had the same relation to great masterpieces. These Gaelic
songs were as unlike as those to the songs of the Music Hall with their
clever ear-catching rhythm, the work of some mind as objective as that
of an inventor or of a newspaper reporter. We thought we could bring the
old folk-life to Dublin, patriotic feeling to aid us, and with the
folk-life all the life of the heart, understanding heart, according to
Dante’s definition, as the most interior being; but the modern world is
more powerful than any Propaganda or even than any special circumstance,
and our success has been that we have made a theatre of the head, and
persuaded Dublin playgoers to think about their own trade or profession
or class and their life within it, so long as the stage curtain is up,
in relation to Ireland as a whole. For certain hours of an evening they
have objective modern eyes.
V
The objective nature and the subjective are mixed in different
proportions as are the shadowed and the bright parts in the lunar
phases. In Dante there was little shadow, in Shakespeare a larger
portion, while you and Synge, it may be, resemble the moon when it has
just passed its third quarter, for you have constant humour--and humour
is of the shadowed part--much observation and a speech founded upon that
of real life. You and he will always hold our audience, but both have
used so constantly a measure of lunar light, have so elaborated style
and emotion, an individual way of seeing, that neither will ever, till a
classic and taught in school, find a perfect welcome.
The outcry against _The Playboy_ was an outcry against its style,
against its way of seeing; and when the audience called Synge
‘decadent’--a favourite reproach from the objective everywhere--it was
but troubled by the stench of its own burnt cakes. How could they that
dreaded solitude love that which solitude had made? And never have I
heard any, that laugh the loudest at your comedies, praise that musical
and delicate style that makes them always a fit accompaniment for verse
and sets them at times among the world’s great comedies. Indeed, the
louder they laugh the readier are they to rate them with the hundred
ephemeral farces they have laughed at and forgotten. Synge they have at
least hated. When you and Synge find such an uneasy footing, what shall
I do there who have never observed anything, or listened with an
attentive ear, but value all I have seen or heard because of the
emotions they call up or because of something they remind me of that
exists, as I believe, beyond the world? Oh, yes, I am listened to--am I
not a founder of the theatre?--and here and there scattered solitaries
delight in what I have made and return to hear it again; but some young
Corkman, all eyes and ears, whose first rambling play we have just
pulled together or half together, can do more than that. He will be
played by players who have spoken dialogue like his every night for
years, and sentences that it had been a bore to read will so delight the
whole house that to keep my hands from clapping I shall have to remind
myself that I gave my voice for the play’s production and must not
applaud my own judgement.
VI
I want to create for myself an unpopular theatre and an audience like a
secret society where admission is by favour and never to many. Perhaps I
shall never create it, for you and I and Synge have had to dig the stone
for our statue and I am aghast at the sight of a new quarry, and besides
I want so much--an audience of fifty, a room worthy of it (some great
dining-room or drawing-room), half-a-dozen young men and women who can
dance and speak verse or play drum and flute and zither, and all the
while, instead of a profession, I but offer them ‘an accomplishment.’
However, there are my _Four Plays for Dancers_ as a beginning, some
masks by Mr. Dulac, music by Mr. Dulac and by Mr. Rummell. In most towns
one can find fifty people for whom one need not build all on observation
and sympathy, because they read poetry for their pleasure and understand
the traditional language of passion. I desire a mysterious art, always
reminding and half-reminding those who understand it of dearly loved
things, doing its work by suggestion, not by direct statement, a
complexity of rhythm, colour, gesture, not space-pervading like the
intellect but a memory and a prophecy: a mode of drama Shelley and Keats
could have used without ceasing to be themselves, and for which even
Blake in the mood of _The Book of Thell_ might not have been too
obscure. Instead of advertisements in the press I need a hostess, and
even the most accomplished hostess must choose with more than usual
care, for I have noticed that city-living cultivated people, those whose
names would first occur to her, set great value on painting, which is a
form of property, and on music, which is a part of the organisation of
life, while the lovers of literature, those who read a book many times,
either are young men with little means or live far away from big towns.
What alarms me most is how a new art needing so elaborate a technique
can make its first experiments before those who, as Molière said of the
courtiers of his day, have seen so much. How shall our singers and
dancers be welcomed by those who have heard Chaliapin in all his parts
and who know all the dances of the Russians? Yet where can I find Mr.
Dulac and Mr. Rummell or any to match them, but in London[17] or in
Paris, and who but the leisured will welcome an elaborate art or pay for
its first experiments? In one thing the luck might be upon our side. A
man who loves verse and the visible arts has, in a work such as I
imagine, the advantage of the professional player. The professional
player becomes the amateur, the other has been preparing all his life,
and certainly I shall not soon forget the rehearsal of _The Hawk’s
Well_, when Mr. Ezra Pound, who had never acted on any stage, in the
absence of our chief player rehearsed for half an hour. Even the forms
of subjective acting that were natural to the professional stage have
ceased. Where all now is sympathy and observation no Irving can carry
himself with intellectual pride, nor any Salvini in half-animal
nobility, both wrapped in solitude.
I know that you consider Ireland alone our business, and in that we do
not differ, except that I care very little where a play of mine is first
played so that it find some natural audience and good players. My rooks
may sleep abroad in the fields for a while, but when the winter come
they will remember the way home to the rookery trees. Indeed, I have
Ireland especially in mind, for I want to make, or to help some man some
day to make, a feeling of exclusiveness, a bond among chosen spirits, a
mystery almost for leisured and lettered people. Ireland has suffered
more than England from democracy, for since the Wild Geese fled, who
might have grown to be leaders in manners and in taste, she has had but
political leaders. As a drawing is defined by its outline and taste by
its rejections, I too must reject and draw an outline about the thing I
seek; and say that I seek, not a theatre but the theatre’s anti-self, an
art that can appease all within us that becomes uneasy as the curtain
falls and the house breaks into applause.
VII
Meanwhile the Popular Theatre should grow always more objective; more
and more a reflection of the general mind; more and more a discovery of
the simple emotions that make all men kin, clearing itself the while of
sentimentality, the wreckage of an obsolete popular culture, seeking
always not to feel and to imagine but to understand and to see. Let
those who are all personality, who can only feel and imagine, leave it,
before their presence become a corruption and turn it from its honesty.
The rhetoric of d’Annunzio, the melodrama and spectacle of the later
Maeterlinck, are the insincerities of subjectives, who being very able
men have learned to hold an audience that is not their natural audience.
To be intelligible they are compelled to harden, to externalise and
deform. The popular play left to itself may not lack vicissitude and
development, for it may pass, though more slowly than the novel which
need not carry with it so great a crowd, from the physical objectivity
of Fielding and Defoe to the spiritual objectivity of Tolstoy and
Dostoievsky, for beyond the whole we reach by unbiassed intellect there
is another whole reached by resignation and the denial of self.
VIII
The two great energies of the world that in Shakespeare’s day penetrated
each other have fallen apart as speech and music fell apart at the
Renaissance, and that has brought each to greater freedom, and we have
to prepare a stage for the whole wealth of modern lyricism, for an art
that is close to pure music, for those energies that would free the arts
from imitation, that would ally acting to decoration and to the dance.
We are not yet conscious, for as yet we have no philosophy while the
opposite energy is conscious. All visible history, the discoveries of
science, the discussions of politics, are with it; but as I read the
world, the sudden changes, or rather the sudden revelation of future
changes, are not from visible history but from its anti-self. Blake says
somewhere in a Prophetic Book that things must complete themselves
before they pass away, and every new logical development of the
objective energy intensifies in an exact correspondence a counter
energy, or rather adds to an always deepening unanalysable longing. That
counter longing, having no visible past, can only become a conscious
energy suddenly, in those moments of revelation which are as a flash of
lightning. Are we approaching a supreme moment of self-consciousness,
the two halves of the soul separate and face to face? A certain friend
of mine has written upon this subject a couple of intricate poems called
‘The Faces of the Moon’ and ‘The Double Vision’ respectively, which are
my continual study, and I must refer the reader to these poems for the
necessary mathematical calculations. Were it not for that other gyre
turning inward in exact measure with the outward whirl of its fellow, we
would fall in a generation or so under some tyranny that would cease at
last to be a tyranny, so perfect our acquiescence.
Constrained, arraigned, baffled, bent and unbent
By these wire-jointed jaws and limbs of wood,
Themselves obedient,
Knowing not evil and good;
Obedient to some hidden magical breath.
They do not even feel, so abstract are they,
So dead beyond our death,
Triumph that we obey.
W. B. YEATS.
-----
Footnote 15:
I took the title from a book by Romain Rolland on some French
theatrical experiments. ‘A People’s Theatre’ is not quite the same
thing as ‘A Popular Theatre.’ The essay was published in _The Irish
Statesman_ in the autumn of 1919.--W. B. Y., 1923.
Footnote 16:
I have read somewhere statistics that showed how popular education has
coincided with the lessening of Shakespeare’s audience. In every chief
town before it began Shakespeare was constantly played.
Footnote 17:
I live in Dublin now, and indolence and hatred of travel will probably
compel me to make my experiment there after all.--W. B. Y., 1923.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE COUNTESS CATHLEEN
------------------------------------------------------------------------
‘The sorrowful are dumb for thee’
_Lament of Morion Shehone_
_for Miss Mary Bourke._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO
MAUD GONNE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_PERSONS IN THE PLAY_
SHEMUS RUA, _a Peasant_.
MARY, _his Wife_.
TEIG, _his Son_.
ALEEL, _a Poet_.
THE COUNTESS CATHLEEN.
OONA, _her Foster Mother_.
Two Demons disguised as Merchants.
Peasants, Servants, Angelical Beings.
_The Scene is laid in Ireland and in old times._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SCENE I
SCENE.--_A room with lighted fire, and a door into the open air,
through which one sees, perhaps, the trees of a wood, and these trees
should be painted in flat colour upon a gold or diapered sky. The
walls are of one colour. The scene should have the effect of missal
painting._ MARY, _a woman of forty years or so, is grinding a quern_.
MARY. What can have made the grey hen flutter so?
[TEIG, _a boy of fourteen, is coming in with turf, which he lays
beside the hearth_.
TEIG. They say that now the land is famine struck
The graves are walking.
MARY. There is something that the hen hears.
TEIG. And that is not the worst; at Tubber-vanach
A woman met a man with ears spread out,
And they moved up and down like a bat’s wing.
MARY. What can have kept your father all this while?
TEIG. Two nights ago, at Carrick-orus churchyard,
A herdsman met a man who had no mouth,
Nor eyes, nor ears! his face a wall of flesh:
He saw him plainly by the light of the moon.
MARY. Look out, and tell me if your father’s coming.
[TEIG _goes to door._
TEIG. Mother!
MARY. What is it?
TEIG. In the bush beyond,
There are two birds--if you can call them birds--
I could not see them rightly for the leaves.
But they’ve the shape and colour of horned owls
And I’m half certain they’ve a human face.
MARY. Mother of God, defend us!
TEIG. They’re looking at me.
What is the good of praying? father says.
God and the Mother of God have dropped asleep.
What do they care, he says, though the whole land
Squeal like a rabbit under a weasel’s tooth?
MARY. You’ll bring misfortune with your blasphemies
Upon your father, or yourself, or me.
Would God that he were home--ah, there he is.
[SHEMUS _comes in_.
What was it kept you in the wood? You know
I cannot get all sorts of accidents
Out of my mind till you are home again.
SHEMUS. I’m in no mood to listen to your clatter.
Although I tramped the woods for half a day,
I’ve taken nothing, for the very rats,
Badgers, and hedgehogs seem to have died of drought,
And there was scarce a wind in the parched leaves.
TEIG. Then you have brought no dinner.
SHEMUS. After that
I sat among the beggars at the cross-roads,
And held a hollow hand among the others.
MARY. What, did you beg?
SHEMUS. I had no chance to beg,
For when the beggars saw me they cried out
They would not have another share their alms,
And hunted me away with sticks and stones.
TEIG. You said that you would bring us food or money.
SHEMUS. What’s in the house?
TEIG. A bit of mouldy bread.
MARY. There’s flour enough to make another loaf.
TEIG. And when that’s gone?
MARY. There is the hen in the coop.
SHEMUS. My curse upon the beggars, my curse upon them!
TEIG. And the last penny gone.
SHEMUS. When the hen’s gone,
What can we do but live on sorrel and dock,
And dandelion, till our mouths are green?
MARY. God, that to this hour has found bit and sup,
Will cater for us still.
SHEMUS. His kitchen’s bare.
There were five doors that I looked through this day
And saw the dead and not a soul to wake them.
MARY. Maybe He’d have us die because He knows,
When the ear is stopped and when the eye is stopped,
That every wicked sight is hid from the eye,
And all fool talk from the ear.
SHEMUS. Who’s passing there?
And mocking us with music?
[_A stringed instrument without._
TEIG. A young man plays it,
There’s an old woman and a lady with him.
SHEMUS. What is the trouble of the poor to her?
Nothing at all or a harsh radishy sauce
For the day’s meat.
MARY. God’s pity on the rich.
Had we been through as many doors, and seen
The dishes standing on the polished wood
In the wax candle light, we’d be as hard,
And there’s the needle’s eye at the end of all.
SHEMUS. My curse upon the rich.
TEIG. They’re coming here.
SHEMUS. Then down upon that stool, down quick, I say,
And call up a whey face and a whining voice,
And let your head be bowed upon your knees.
MARY. Had I but time to put the place to rights.
CATHLEEN, OONA, _and_ ALEEL _enter_.
CATHLEEN. God save all here. There is a certain house,
An old grey castle with a kitchen garden,
A cider orchard and a plot for flowers,
Somewhere among these woods.
MARY. We know it, lady.
A place that’s set among impassable walls
As though world’s trouble could not find it out.
CATHLEEN. It may be that we are that trouble, for we--
Although we’ve wandered in the wood this hour--
Have lost it too, yet I should know my way,
For I lived all my childhood in that house.
MARY. Then you are Countess Cathleen?
CATHLEEN. And this woman,
Oona, my nurse, should have remembered it,
For we were happy for a long time there.
OONA. The paths are overgrown with thickets now,
Or else some change has come upon my sight.
CATHLEEN. And this young man, that should have known the woods--
Because we met him on their border but now,
Wandering and singing like a wave of the sea--
Is so wrapped up in dreams of terrors to come
That he can give no help.
MARY. You have still some way,
But I can put you on the trodden path
Your servants take when they are marketing.
But first sit down and rest yourself awhile,
For my old fathers served your fathers, lady,
Longer than books can tell--and it were strange
If you and yours should not be welcome here.
CATHLEEN. And it were stranger still were I ungrateful
For such kind welcome--but I must be gone,
For the night’s gathering in.
SHEMUS. It is a long while
Since I’ve set eyes on bread or on what buys it.
CATHLEEN. So you are starving even in this wood,
Where I had thought I would find nothing changed.
But that’s a dream, for the old worm o’ the world
Can eat its way into what place it pleases.
[_She gives money._
TEIG. Beautiful lady, give me something too;
I fell but now, being weak with hunger and thirst,
And lay upon the threshold like a log.
CATHLEEN. I gave for all and that was all I had.
Look, my purse is empty. I have passed
By starving men and women all this day,
And they have had the rest; but take the purse,
The silver clasps on’t may be worth a trifle.
And if you’ll come to-morrow to my house
You shall have twice the sum.
[ALEEL _begins to play_.
SHEMUS [_muttering_]. What, music, music!
CATHLEEN. Ah, do not blame the finger on the string;
The doctors bid me fly the unlucky times
And find distraction for my thoughts, or else
Pine to my grave.
SHEMUS. I have said nothing, lady.
Why should the like of us complain?
OONA. Have done.
Sorrows that she’s but read of in a book
Weigh on her mind as if they had been her own.
[OONA, MARY, _and_ CATHLEEN _go out_. ALEEL _looks defiantly at_
SHEMUS.
ALEEL [_singing_]. Were I but crazy for love’s sake
I know who’d measure out his length,
I know the heads that I should break,
For crazy men have double strength.
There! all’s out now to leave or take,
And who mocks music mocks at love;
And when I’m crazy for love’s sake
I’ll not go far to choose.
[_Snapping his fingers in_ SHEMUS’ _face_.]
Enough!
I know the heads that I should break.
[_He takes a step towards the door and then turns again._
Shut to the door before the night has fallen,
For who can say what walks, or in what shape.
Some devilish creature flies in the air; but now
Two grey-horned owls hooted above our heads.
[_He goes out, his singing dies away._ MARY _comes in_. SHEMUS
_has been counting the money_.
SHEMUS. So that fool’s gone.
TEIG. He’s seen the horned owls too.
There’s no good luck in owls, but it may be
That the ill luck’s to fall upon his head.
MARY. You never thanked her ladyship.
SHEMUS. Thank her,
For seven halfpence and a silver bit?
TEIG. But for this empty purse?
SHEMUS. What’s that for thanks,
Or what’s the double of it that she promised?
With bread and flesh and every sort of food
Up to a price no man has heard the like of
And rising every day.
MARY. We have all she had;
She emptied out the purse before our eyes.
SHEMUS [_to_ MARY, _who has gone to close the door_]. Leave that
door open.
MARY. When those that have read books,
And seen the seven wonders of the world,
Fear what’s above or what’s below the ground,
It’s time that poverty should bolt the door.
SHEMUS. I’ll have no bolts, for there is not a thing
That walks above the ground or under it
I had not rather welcome to this house
Than any more of mankind, rich or poor.
TEIG. So that they brought us money.
SHEMUS. I heard say
There’s something that appears like a white bird,
A pigeon or a seagull or the like,
But if you hit it with a stone or a stick
It clangs as though it had been made of brass,
And that if you dig down where it was scratching
You’ll find a crock of gold.
TEIG. But dream of gold
For three nights running, and there’s always gold.
SHEMUS. You might be starved before you’ve dug it out.
TEIG. But maybe if you called, something would come,
They have been seen of late.
MARY. Is it call devils?
Call devils from the wood, call them in here?
SHEMUS. So you’d stand up against me, and you’d say
Who or what I am to welcome here.
[_He hits her._
That is to show who’s master.
TEIG. Call them in.
MARY. God help us all!
SHEMUS. Pray, if you have a mind to.
It’s little that the sleepy ears above
Care for your words; but I’ll call what I please.
TEIG. There is many a one, they say, had money from them.
SHEMUS [_at door_]. Whatever you are that walk the woods at night,
So be it that you have not shouldered up
Out of a grave--for I’ll have nothing human--
And have free hands, a friendly trick of speech,
I welcome you. Come, sit beside the fire.
What matter if your head’s below your arms
Or you’ve a horse’s tail to whip your flank,
Feathers instead of hair, that’s all but nothing,
Come, share what bread and meat is in the house,
And stretch your heels and warm them in the ashes.
And after that, let’s share and share alike
And curse all men and women. Come in, come in.
What, is there no one there? [_Turning from door._]
And yet they say
They are as common as the grass, and ride
Even upon the book in the priest’s hand.
[TEIG _lifts one arm slowly and points toward the door and begins
moving backward_. SHEMUS _turns, he also sees something and
begins moving backward_. MARY _does the same. A man dressed as
an Eastern merchant comes in carrying a small carpet. He
unrolls it and sits cross-legged at one end of it. Another man
dressed in the same way follows, and sits at the other end.
This is done slowly and deliberately. When they are seated they
take money out of embroidered purses at their girdles and begin
arranging it on the carpet._
TEIG. You speak to them.
SHEMUS. No, you.
TEIG. ’Twas you that called them.
SHEMUS [_coming nearer_]. I’d make so bold, if you would pardon it,
To ask if there’s a thing you’d have of us.
Although we are but poor people, if there is,
Why, if there is----
FIRST MERCHANT. We’ve travelled a long road,
For we are merchants that must tramp the world,
And now we look for supper and a fire
And a safe corner to count money in.
SHEMUS. I thought you were ... but that’s no matter now--
There had been words between my wife and me
Because I said I would be master here,
And ask in what I pleased or who I pleased
And so ... but that is nothing to the point,
Because it’s certain that you are but merchants.
FIRST MERCHANT. We travel for the Master of all merchants.
SHEMUS. Yet if you were that I had thought but now
I’d welcome you no less. Be what you please
And you’ll have supper at the market rate,
That means that what was sold for but a penny
Is now worth fifty.
FIRST MERCHANT [_arranging money_]. Our Master bids us pay
So good a price, that all who deal with us
Shall eat, drink, and be merry.
SHEMUS [_to_ MARY]. Bestir yourself,
Go kill and draw the fowl, while Teig and I
Lay out the plates and make a better fire.
MARY. I will not cook for you.
SHEMUS. Not cook! not cook!
Do not be angry. She wants to pay me back
Because I struck her in that argument.
But she’ll get sense again. Since the dearth came
We rattle one on another as though we were
Knives thrown into a basket to be cleaned.
MARY. I will not cook for you, because I know
In what unlucky shape you sat but now
Outside this door.
TEIG. It’s this, your honours:
Because of some wild words my father said
She thinks you are not of those who cast a shadow.
SHEMUS. I said I’d make the devils of the wood
Welcome, if they’d a mind to eat and drink;
But it is certain that you are men like us.
FIRST MERCHANT. It’s strange that she should think we cast no
shadow,
For there is nothing on the ridge of the world
That’s more substantial than the merchants are
That buy and sell you.
MARY. If you are not demons,
And seeing what great wealth is spread out there,
Give food or money to the starving poor.
FIRST MERCHANT. If we knew how to find deserving poor
We’d do our share.
MARY. But seek them patiently.
FIRST MERCHANT. We know the evils of mere charity.
MARY. Those scruples may befit a common time.
I had thought there was a pushing to and fro,
At times like this, that overset the scale
And trampled measure down.
FIRST MERCHANT. But if already
We’d thought of a more prudent way than that?
SECOND MERCHANT. If each one brings a bit of merchandise,
We’ll give him such a price he never dreamt of.
MARY. Where shall the starving come at merchandise?
FIRST MERCHANT. We will ask nothing but what all men have.
MARY. Their swine and cattle, fields and implements
Are sold and gone.
FIRST MERCHANT. They have not sold all yet.
For there’s a vaporous thing--that may be nothing,
But that’s the buyer’s risk--a second self,
They call immortal for a story’s sake.
SHEMUS. They come to buy our souls?
TEIG. I’ll barter mine.
Why should we starve for what may be but nothing?
MARY. Teig and Shemus----
SHEMUS. What can be but nothing?
What has God poured out of His bag but famine?
Satan gives money.
TEIG. Yet no thunder stirs.
FIRST MERCHANT. There is a heap for each.
[SHEMUS _goes to take money_.
But no, not yet,
For there’s a work I have to set you to.
SHEMUS. So then you’re as deceitful as the rest,
And all that talk of buying what’s but a vapour
Is fancy bread. I might have known as much,
Because that’s how the trick-o’-the-loop man talks.
FIRST MERCHANT. That’s for the work, each has its separate price;
But neither price is paid till the work’s done.
TEIG. The same for me.
MARY. Oh, God, why are you still?
FIRST MERCHANT. You’ve but to cry aloud at every cross-road,
At every house door, that we buy men’s souls
And give so good a price that all may live
In mirth and comfort till the famine’s done,
Because we are Christian men.
SHEMUS. Come, let’s away.
TEIG. I shall keep running till I’ve earned the price.
SECOND MERCHANT [_who has risen and
gone towards fire_]. Stop; you must have proof behind the words.
So here’s your entertainment on the road.
[_He throws a bag of money on the ground._
Live as you please; our Master’s generous.
[TEIG _and_ SHEMUS _have stopped_. TEIG _takes the money. They go
out._
MARY. Destroyers of souls, God will destroy you quickly.
You shall at last dry like dry leaves and hang
Nailed like dead vermin to the doors of God.
SECOND MERCHANT. Curse to your fill, for saints will have their
dreams.
FIRST MERCHANT. Though we’re but vermin that our Master sent
To overrun the world, he at the end
Shall pull apart the pale ribs of the moon
And quench the stars in the ancestral night.
MARY. God is all powerful.
SECOND MERCHANT. Pray, you shall need Him.
You shall eat dock and grass, and dandelion,
Till that low threshold there becomes a wall,
And when your hands can scarcely drag your body
We shall be near you.
[MARY _faints_.
[_The_ FIRST MERCHANT _takes up the carpet, spreads it before the
fire and stands in front of it warming his hands_.
FIRST MERCHANT. Our faces go unscratched,
Wring the neck o’ that fowl, scatter the flour
And look if there is bread upon the shelves.
We’ll turn the fowl upon the spit and roast it,
And eat the supper we were bidden to,
Now that the house is quiet, praise our Master,
And stretch and warm our heels among the ashes.
END OF SCENE I
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SCENE II
FRONT SCENE.--_A wood with perhaps distant view of turreted house at
one side, but all in flat colour, without light and shade and against
a diapered or gold background._
COUNTESS CATHLEEN _comes in leaning upon_ ALEEL’S _arm_. OONA _follows
them_.
CATHLEEN [_stopping_]. Surely this leafy corner, where one smells
The wild bee’s honey, has a story too?
OONA. There is the house at last.
ALEEL. A man, they say,
Loved Maeve the Queen of all the invisible host,
And died of his love nine centuries ago.
And now, when the moon’s riding at the full,
She leaves her dancers lonely and lies there
Upon that level place, and for three days
Stretches and sighs and wets her long pale cheeks.
CATHLEEN. So she loves truly.
ALEEL. No, but wets her cheeks,
Lady, because she has forgot his name.
CATHLEEN. She’d sleep that trouble away--though it must be
A heavy trouble to forget his name--
If she had better sense.
OONA. Your own house, lady.
ALEEL. She sleeps high up on wintry Knock-na-rea
In an old cairn of stones; while her poor women
Must lie and jog in the wave if they would sleep--
Being water born--yet if she cry their names
They run up on the land and dance in the moon
Till they are giddy and would love as men do,
And be as patient and as pitiful.
But there is nothing that will stop in their heads
They’ve such poor memories, though they weep for it.
Oh, yes, they weep; that’s when the moon is full.
CATHLEEN. Is it because they have short memories
They live so long?
ALEEL. What’s memory but the ash
That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?
And they’ve a dizzy, everlasting fire.
OONA. There is your own house, lady.
CATHLEEN. Why, that’s true,
And we’d have passed it without noticing.
ALEEL. A curse upon it for a meddlesome house!
Had it but stayed away I would have known
What Queen Maeve thinks on when the moon is pinched;
And whether now--as in the old days--the dancers
Set their brief love on men.
OONA. Rest on my arm.
These are no thoughts for any Christian ear.
ALEEL. I am younger, she would be too heavy for you.
[_He begins taking his lute out of the bag_; CATHLEEN, _who has
turned towards_ OONA, _turns back to him_.
This hollow box remembers every foot
That danced upon the level grass of the world,
And will tell secrets if I whisper to it.
[_Sings_]
Lift up the white knee;
Hear what they sing,
Those young dancers
That in a ring
Raved but now
Of the hearts that broke
Long, long ago
For their sake.
OONA. New friends are sweet.
ALEEL
‘But the dance changes,
Lift up the gown,
All that sorrow
Is trodden down.’
OONA. The empty rattle-pate! Lean on this arm,
That I can tell you is a christened arm,
And not like some, if we are to judge by speech.
But as you please. It is time I was forgot.
Maybe it is not on this arm you slumbered
When you were as helpless as a worm.
ALEEL. Stay with me till we come to your own house.
CATHLEEN [_sitting down_]. When I am rested I will need no help.
ALEEL. I thought to have kept her from remembering
The evil of the times for full ten minutes;
But now when seven are out you come between.
OONA. Talk on; what does it matter what you say,
For you have not been christened?
ALEEL. Old woman, old woman,
You robbed her of three minutes’ peace of mind,
And though you live unto a hundred years,
And wash the feet of beggars and give alms,
And climb Croaghpatrick, you shall not be pardoned.
OONA. How does a man who never was baptized
Know what Heaven pardons?
ALEEL. You are a sinful woman.
OONA. I care no more than if a pig had grunted.
_Enter_ CATHLEEN’S _Steward_.
STEWARD. I am not to blame, for I had locked the gate,
The forester’s to blame. The men climbed in
At the east corner where the elm-tree is.
CATHLEEN. I do not understand you, who has climbed?
STEWARD. Then God be thanked, I am the first to tell you.
I was afraid some other of the servants--
Though I’ve been on the watch--had been the first,
And mixed up truth and lies, your ladyship.
CATHLEEN [_rising_]. Has some misfortune happened?
STEWARD. Yes, indeed.
The forester that let the branches lie
Against the wall’s to blame for everything,
For that is how the rogues got into the garden.
CATHLEEN. I thought to have escaped misfortune here.
Has any one been killed?
STEWARD. Oh, no, not killed.
They have stolen half a cart-load of green cabbage.
CATHLEEN. But maybe they were starving.
STEWARD. That is certain.
To rob or starve, that was the choice they had.
CATHLEEN. A learned theologian has laid down
That starving men may take what’s necessary,
And yet be sinless.
OONA. Sinless and a thief!
There should be broken bottle on the wall.
CATHLEEN. And if it be a sin, while faith’s unbroken
God cannot help but pardon. There is no soul
But it’s unlike all others in the world,
Nor one but lifts a strangeness to God’s love
Till that’s grown infinite, and therefore none
Whose loss were less than irremediable
Although it were the wickedest in the world.
_Enter_ TEIG _and_ SHEMUS.
STEWARD. What are you running for? Pull off your cap,
Do you not see who’s there?
SHEMUS. I cannot wait.
I am running to the world with the best news
That has been brought it for a thousand years.
STEWARD. Then get your breath and speak.
SHEMUS. If you’d my news
You’d run as fast and be as out of breath.
TEIG. Such news, we shall be carried on men’s shoulders.
SHEMUS. There’s something every man has carried with him.
And thought no more about than if it were
A mouthful of the wind; and now it’s grown
A marketable thing!
TEIG. And yet it seemed
As useless as the paring of one’s nails.
SHEMUS. What sets me laughing when I think of it,
Is that a rogue who’s lain in lousy straw,
If he but sell it, may set up his coach.
TEIG [_laughing_]. There are two gentlemen who buy men’s souls.
CATHLEEN. O God!
TEIG. And maybe there’s no soul at all.
STEWARD. They’re drunk or mad.
TEIG. Look at the price they give.
[_Showing money._
SHEMUS [_tossing up money_]. ‘Go cry it all about the world,’ they
said.
‘Money for souls, good money for a soul.’
CATHLEEN. Give twice and thrice and twenty times their money,
And get your souls again. I will pay all.
SHEMUS. Not we! not we! For souls--if there are souls--
But keep the flesh out of its merriment.
I shall be drunk and merry.
TEIG. Come, let’s away.
[_He goes._
CATHLEEN. But there’s a world to come.
SHEMUS. And if there is,
I’d rather trust myself into the hands
That can pay money down than to the hands
That have but shaken famine from the bag.
[_He goes out R._
[_Lilting_]
‘There’s money for a soul, sweet yellow money.
There’s money for men’s souls, good money, money.’
CATHLEEN [to ALEEL]. Go call them here again, bring them by force,
Beseech them, bribe, do anything you like;
[ALEEL _goes._
And you too follow, add your prayers to his.
[OONA, _who has been praying, goes out_.
Steward, you know the secrets of my house.
How much have I?
STEWARD. A hundred kegs of gold.
CATHLEEN. How much have I in castles?
STEWARD. As much more.
CATHLEEN. How much have I in pasture?
STEWARD. As much more.
CATHLEEN. How much have I in forests?
STEWARD. As much more.
CATHLEEN. Keeping this house alone, sell all I have.
Go barter where you please, but come again
With herds of cattle and with ships of meal.
STEWARD. God’s blessing light upon your ladyship.
You will have saved the land.
CATHLEEN. Make no delay.
[_He goes_ L.
ALEEL _and_ OONA _return_.
CATHLEEN. They have not come; speak quickly.
ALEEL. One drew his knife.
And said that he would kill the man or woman
That stopped his way; and when I would have stopped him
He made this stroke at me; but it is nothing.
CATHLEEN. You shall be tended. From this day for ever
I’ll have no joy or sorrow of my own.
OONA. Their eyes shone like the eyes of birds of prey.
CATHLEEN. Come, follow me, for the earth burns my feet
Till I have changed my house to such a refuge
That the old and ailing, and all weak of heart,
May escape from beak and claw; all, all, shall come
Till the walls burst and the roof fall on us.
From this day out I have nothing of my own.
[_She goes._
OONA [_taking_ ALEEL _by the arm and as she speaks bandaging his
wound_]. She has found something now to put her hand to,
And you and I are of no more account
Than flies upon a window-pane in the winter.
[_They go out._
END OF SCENE II
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SCENE III
SCENE.--_Hall in the house of_ COUNTESS CATHLEEN. _At the Left an
oratory with steps leading up to it. At the Right a tapestried wall,
more or less repeating the form of the oratory, and a great chair
with its back against the wall. In the Centre are two or more arches
through which one can see dimly the trees of the garden._ CATHLEEN
_is kneeling in front of the altar in the oratory; there is a hanging
lighted lamp over the altar_. ALEEL _enters_.
ALEEL. I have come to bid you leave this castle and fly
Out of these woods.
CATHLEEN. What evil is there here
That is not everywhere from this to the sea?
ALEEL. They who have sent me walk invisible.
CATHLEEN. So it is true what I have heard men say,
That you have seen and heard what others cannot.
ALEEL. I was asleep in my bed, and while I slept
My dreams became a fire; and in the fire
One walked and he had birds about his head.
CATHLEEN. I have heard that one of the old gods walked so.
ALEEL. It may be that he is angelical;
And, lady, he bids me call you from these woods.
And you must bring but your old foster-mother,
And some few serving men, and live in the hills,
Among the sounds of music and the light
Of waters, till the evil days are done.
For here some terrible death is waiting you,
Some unimagined evil, some great darkness
That fable has not dreamt of, nor sun nor moon
Scattered.
CATHLEEN. No, not angelical.
ALEEL. This house
You are to leave with some old trusty man,
And bid him shelter all that starve or wander
While there is food and house room.
CATHLEEN. He bids me go
Where none of mortal creatures but the swan
Dabbles, and there you would pluck the harp, when the trees
Had made a heavy shadow about our door,
And talk among the rustling of the reeds,
When night hunted the foolish sun away
With stillness and pale tapers. No--no--no!
I cannot. Although I weep, I do not weep
Because that life would be most happy and here
I find no way, no end. Nor do I weep
Because I had longed to look upon your face,
But that a night of prayer has made me weary.
ALEEL [_prostrating himself before her_]. Let Him that made mankind,
the angels and devils
And dearth and plenty, mend what He has made,
For when we labour in vain and eye still sees
Heart breaks in vain.
CATHLEEN. How would that quiet end?
ALEEL. How but in healing?
CATHLEEN. You have seen my tears
And I can see your hand shake on the floor.
ALEEL [_faltering_]. I thought but of healing.
He was angelical.
CATHLEEN [_turning away from him_]. No, not angelical, but of the
old gods,
Who wander about the world to awaken the heart----
The passionate, proud heart--that all the angels,
Leaving nine heavens empty, would rock to sleep.
[_She goes to chapel door_; ALEEL _holds his clasped hands
towards her for a moment hesitatingly, and then lets them fall
beside him_.
CATHLEEN. Do not hold out to me beseeching hands.
This heart shall never waken on earth. I have sworn,
By her whose heart the seven sorrows have pierced,
To pray before this altar until my heart
Has grown to Heaven like a tree, and there
Rustled its leaves, till Heaven has saved my people.
ALEEL [_who has risen_]. When one so great has spoken of love to one
So little as I, though to deny him love,
What can he but hold out beseeching hands,
Then let them fall beside him, knowing how greatly
They have overdared?
[_He goes towards the door of the hall. The_ COUNTESS CATHLEEN
_takes a few steps towards him_.
CATHLEEN. If the old tales are true,
Queens have wed shepherds and kings beggar-maids;
God’s procreant waters flowing about your mind
Have made you more than kings or queens; and not you
But I am the empty pitcher.
ALEEL. Being silent,
I have said all, yet let me stay beside you.
CATHLEEN. No, no, not while my heart is shaken. No.
But you shall hear wind cry and water cry,
And curlew cry, and have the peace I longed for.
ALEEL. Give me your hand to kiss.
CATHLEEN. I kiss your forehead.
And yet I send you from me. Do not speak;
There have been women that bid men to rob
Crowns from the Country-under-Wave or apples
Upon a dragon-guarded hill, and all
That they might sift men’s hearts and wills,
And trembled as they bid it, as I tremble
That lay a hard task on you, that you go,
And silently, and do not turn your head;
Good-bye; but do not turn your head and look;
Above all else, I would not have you look.
[ALEEL _goes_.
I never spoke to him of his wounded hand,
And now he is gone. [_She looks out._]
I cannot see him, for all is dark outside.
Would my imagination and my heart
Were as little shaken as this holy flame!
[_She goes slowly into the chapel. The distant sound of an alarm
bell. The two_ MERCHANTS _enter hurriedly_.
SECOND MERCHANT. They are ringing the alarm, and in a moment
They’ll be upon us.
FIRST MERCHANT [_going to a door at the side_]. Here is the
Treasury,
You’d my commands to put them all to sleep.
SECOND MERCHANT. Some angel or else her prayers protected them.
[_Goes into the Treasury and returns with bags of treasure._
FIRST MERCHANT _has been listening at the oratory door_.
FIRST MERCHANT. She has fallen asleep.
[SECOND MERCHANT _goes out through one of the arches at the back
and stands listening. The bags are at his feet._
SECOND MERCHANT. We’ve all the treasure now,
So let’s away before they’ve tracked us out.
FIRST MERCHANT. I have a plan to win her.
SECOND MERCHANT. You have time enough
If you would kill her and bear off her soul
Before they are upon us with their prayers;
They search the Western Tower.
FIRST MERCHANT. That may not be.
We cannot face the heavenly host in arms.
Her soul must come to us of its own will;
But being of the ninth and mightiest Hell
Where all are kings, I have a plan to win it.
Lady, we’ve news that’s crying out for speech.
[CATHLEEN _wakes and comes to door of chapel_.
CATHLEEN. Who calls?
FIRST MERCHANT. Lady, we have brought news.
CATHLEEN. What are you?
FIRST MERCHANT. We are merchants, and we know the book of the world
Because we have walked upon its leaves; and there
Have read of late matters that much concern you;
And noticing the castle door stand open,
Came in to find an ear.
CATHLEEN. The door stands open,
That no one who is famished or afraid,
Despair of help or of a welcome with it.
But you have news, you say.
FIRST MERCHANT. We saw a man,
Heavy with sickness in the bog of Allen,
Whom you had bid buy cattle. Near Fair Head
We saw your grain ships lying all becalmed
In the dark night; and not less still than they,
Burned all their mirrored lanthorns in the sea.
CATHLEEN. Thanks be to God there’s money in the house
That can buy grain from those who have stored it up
To prosper on the hunger of the poor.
But you’ve been far and know the signs of things,
When will this famine end?
FIRST MERCHANT. Day copies day,
And there’s no sign of change, nor can it change,
With the wheat withered and the cattle dead.
CATHLEEN. And heard you of the demons who buy souls?
FIRST MERCHANT. There are some men who hold they have wolves’ heads,
And say their limbs--dried by the infinite flame--
Have all the speed of storms; others, again,
Say they are gross and little; while a few
Will have it they seem much as mortals are,
But tall and brown and travelled--like us, lady--
Yet all agree a power is in their looks
That makes men bow, and flings a casting-net
About their souls, and that all men would go
And barter those poor vapours, were it not
You bribe them with the safety of your gold.
CATHLEEN. Praise God that I am wealthy.
Why do they sell?
FIRST MERCHANT. As we came in at the great door we saw
Your porter sleeping in his niche--a soul
Too little to be worth a hundred pence,
And yet they buy it for a hundred crowns.
But for a soul like yours, I heard them say,
They would give five hundred thousand crowns and more.
CATHLEEN. How can a heap of crowns pay for a soul?
Is the green grave so terrible a thing?
FIRST MERCHANT. Some sell because the money gleams, and some
Because they are in terror of the grave,
And some because their neighbours sold before,
And some because there is a kind of joy
In casting hope away, in losing joy,
In ceasing all resistance, in at last
Opening one’s arms to the eternal flames,
In casting all sails out upon the wind;
To this--full of the gaiety of the lost--
Would all folk hurry if your gold were gone.
CATHLEEN. There is a something, Merchant, in your voice
That makes me fear. When you were telling how
A man may lose his soul and lose his God
Your eyes were lighted up, and when you told
How my poor money serves the people, both--
Merchants, forgive me--seemed to smile.
FIRST MERCHANT. I laugh
To think that all these people should be swung
As on a lady’s shoe-string,--under them
The glowing leagues of never-ending flame.
CATHLEEN. There is a something in you that I fear;
A something not of us; were you not born
In some most distant corner of the world?
[_The_ SECOND MERCHANT, _who has been listening at the door,
comes forward, and as he comes a sound of voices and feet is
heard_.
SECOND MERCHANT. Away now--they are in the passage--hurry,
For they will know us, and freeze up our hearts
With Ave Marys, and burn all our skin
With holy water.
FIRST MERCHANT. Farewell; for we must ride
Many a mile before the morning come;
Our horses beat the ground impatiently.
[_They go out. A number of_ PEASANTS _enter by other door_.
FIRST PEASANT. Forgive us, lady, but we heard a noise.
SECOND PEASANT. We sat by the fireside telling vanities.
FIRST PEASANT. We heard a noise, but though we have searched the
house
We have found nobody.
CATHLEEN. You are too timid,
For now you are safe from all the evil times,
There is no evil that can find you here.
OONA [_entering hurriedly_]. Ochone! Ochone! The treasure room is
broken in.
The door stands open, and the gold is gone.
[PEASANTS _raise a lamentable cry_.
CATHLEEN. Be silent. [_The cry ceases._]
Have you seen nobody?
OONA. Ochone!
That my good mistress should lose all this money.
CATHLEEN. Let those among you--not too old to ride--
Get horses and search all the country round,
I’ll give a farm to him who finds the thieves.
[_A man with keys at his girdle has come in while she speaks.
There is a general murmur of ‘The porter! the porter!’_
PORTER. Demons were here. I sat beside the door
In my stone niche, and two owls passed me by,
Whispering with human voices.
OLD PEASANT. God forsakes us.
CATHLEEN. Old man, old man, He never closed a door
Unless one opened. I am desolate,
Because of a strange thought that’s in my heart;
But I have still my faith; therefore be silent;
For surely He does not forsake the world,
But stands before it modelling in the clay
And moulding there His image. Age by age
The clay wars with His fingers and pleads hard
For its old, heavy, dull and shapeless ease;
But sometimes--though His hand is on it still--
It moves awry and demon hordes are born.
[PEASANTS _cross themselves_.
Yet leave me now, for I am desolate,
I hear a whisper from beyond the thunder.
[_She comes from the oratory door._
Yet stay an instant. When we meet again
I may have grown forgetful. Oona, take
These two--the larder and the dairy keys.
[_To the_ PORTER.]
But take you this. It opens the small room
Of herbs for medicine, every kind of herb.
The book of curses is on the upper shelf.
PORTER. Why do you do this, lady; did you see
Your coffin in a dream?
CATHLEEN. Ah, no, not that.
But I have come to a strange thought. I have heard
A sound of wailing in unnumbered hovels,
And I must go down, down--I know not where--
Pray for all men and women mad from famine;
Pray, you good neighbours.
[_The_ PEASANTS _all kneel_. COUNTESS CATHLEEN _ascends the steps
to the door of the oratory, and turning round stands there
motionless for a little, and then cries in a loud voice_:
Mary, Queen of angels,
And all you clouds on clouds of saints, farewell!
END OF SCENE III
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SCENE IV
FRONT SCENE.--_A wood near the Castle, as in Scene II. A group of_
PEASANTS _pass_.
FIRST PEASANT. I have seen silver and copper, but not gold.
SECOND PEASANT. It’s yellow and it shines.
FIRST PEASANT. It’s beautiful.
The most beautiful thing under the sun,
That’s what I’ve heard.
THIRD PEASANT. I have seen gold enough.
FOURTH PEASANT. I would not say that it’s so beautiful.
FIRST PEASANT. But doesn’t a gold piece glitter like the sun?
That’s what my father, who’d seen better days,
Told me when I was but a little boy--
So high--so high, it’s shining like the sun,
Round and shining, that is what he said.
SECOND PEASANT. There’s nothing in the world it cannot buy.
FIRST PEASANT. They’ve bags and bags of it.
[_They go out. The two_ MERCHANTS _follow silently. Then_ ALEEL
_passes over the stage singing_.
ALEEL
Impetuous heart, be still, be still,
Your sorrowful love can never be told,
Cover it up with a lonely tune.
He who could bend all things to His will
Has covered the door of the infinite fold
With the pale stars and the wandering moon.
END OF SCENE IV
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SCENE V
SCENE.--_The house of_ SHEMUS RUA. _There is an alcove at the back with
curtains; in it a bed, and on the bed is the body of_ MARY _with
candles round it. The two_ MERCHANTS _while they speak put a large
book upon a table, arrange money, and so on_.
FIRST MERCHANT. Thanks to that lie I told about her ships
And that about the herdsman lying sick,
We shall be too much thronged with souls to-morrow.
SECOND MERCHANT. What has she in her coffers now but mice?
FIRST MERCHANT. When the night fell and I had shaped myself
Into the image of the man-headed owl,
I hurried to the cliffs of Donegal,
And saw with all their canvas full of wind
And rushing through the parti-coloured sea
Those ships that bring the woman grain and meal.
They’re but three days from us.
SECOND MERCHANT. When the dew rose
I hurried in like feathers to the east,
And saw nine hundred oxen driven through Meath
With goads of iron. They’re but three days from us.
FIRST MERCHANT. Three days for traffic.
[PEASANTS _crowd in with_ TEIG _and_ SHEMUS.
SHEMUS. Come in, come in, you are welcome.
That is my wife. She mocked at my great masters,
And would not deal with them. Now there she is;
She does not even know she was a fool,
So great a fool she was.
TEIG. She would not eat
One crumb of bread bought with our master’s money,
But lived on nettles, dock, and dandelion.
SHEMUS. There’s nobody could put into her head
That Death is the worst thing can happen us.
Though that sounds simple, for her tongue grew rank
With all the lies that she had heard in chapel.
Draw to the curtain.
[TEIG _draws it_.]
You’ll not play the fool
While these good gentlemen are there to save you.
SECOND MERCHANT. Since the drought came they drift about in a
throng,
Like autumn leaves blown by the dreary winds.
Come, deal--come, deal.
FIRST MERCHANT. Who will come deal with us?
SHEMUS. They are out of spirit, sir, with lack of food,
Save four or five. Here, sir, is one of these;
The others will gain courage in good time.
MIDDLE-AGED MAN. I come to deal--if you give honest price.
FIRST MERCHANT [_reading in a book_]. ‘John Maher, a man of
substance, with dull mind,
And quiet senses and unventurous heart.
The angels think him safe.’ Two hundred crowns,
All for a soul, a little breath of wind.
THE MAN. I ask three hundred crowns. You have read there
That no mere lapse of days can make me yours.
FIRST MERCHANT. There is something more writ here--‘Often at night
He is wakeful from a dread of growing poor,
And thereon wonders if there’s any man
That he could rob in safety.’
A PEASANT. Who’d have thought it?
And I was once alone with him at midnight.
ANOTHER PEASANT. I will not trust my mother after this.
FIRST MERCHANT. There is this crack in you--two hundred crowns.
A PEASANT. That’s plenty for a rogue.
ANOTHER PEASANT. I’d give him nothing.
SHEMUS. You’ll get no more--so take what’s offered you.
[_A general murmur, during which the_ MIDDLE-AGED MAN _takes
money, and slips into background, where he sinks on to a seat_.
FIRST MERCHANT. Has no one got a better soul than that?
If only for the credit of your parishes,
Traffic with us.
A WOMAN. What will you give for mine?
FIRST MERCHANT [_reading in book_]. ‘Soft, handsome, and still
young’--not much, I think.
‘It’s certain that the man she’s married to
Knows nothing of what’s hidden in the jar
Between the hour-glass and the pepper-pot.’
THE WOMAN. The scandalous book.
FIRST MERCHANT. ‘Nor how when he’s away
At the horse fair the hand that wrote what’s hid
Will tap three times upon the window-pane.’
THE WOMAN. And if there is a letter, that is no reason
Why I should have less money than the others.
FIRST MERCHANT. You’re almost safe, I give you fifty crowns.
[_She turns to go._
A hundred, then.
SHEMUS. Woman, have sense--come, come.
Is this a time to haggle at the price?
There, take it up. There, there. That’s right.
[_She takes them and goes into the crowd._
FIRST MERCHANT. Come, deal, deal, deal. It is but for charity
We buy such souls at all; a thousand sins
Made them our Master’s long before we came.
ALEEL _enters_.
ALEEL. Here, take my soul, for I am tired of it.
I do not ask a price.
SHEMUS. Not ask a price?
How can you sell your soul without a price?
I would not listen to his broken wits;
His love for Countess Cathleen has so crazed him
He hardly understands what he is saying.
ALEEL. The trouble that has come on Countess Cathleen,
The sorrow that is in her wasted face,
The burden in her eyes, have broke my wits,
And yet I know I’d have you take my soul.
FIRST MERCHANT. We cannot take your soul, for it is hers.
ALEEL. No, but you must. Seeing it cannot help her
I have grown tired of it.
FIRST MERCHANT. Begone from me,
I may not touch it.
ALEEL. Is your power so small?
And must I bear it with me all my days?
May you be scorned and mocked!
FIRST MERCHANT. Drag him away. He troubles me.
[TEIG _and_ SHEMUS _lead_ ALEEL _into the crowd_.
SECOND MERCHANT. His gaze has filled me, brother,
With shaking and a dreadful fear.
FIRST MERCHANT. Lean forward
And kiss the circlet where my Master’s lips
Were pressed upon it when he sent us hither;
You shall have peace once more.
[SECOND MERCHANT _kisses the gold circlet that is about the head
of the_ FIRST MERCHANT.
I, too, grow weary,
But there is something moving in my heart
Whereby I know that what we seek the most
Is drawing near--our labour will soon end.
Come, deal, deal, deal, deal, deal; are you all dumb?
What, will you keep me from our ancient home,
And from the eternal revelry?
SECOND MERCHANT. Deal, deal.
SHEMUS. They say you beat the woman down too low.
FIRST MERCHANT. I offer this great price: a thousand crowns
For an old woman who was always ugly.
[_An old_ PEASANT WOMAN _comes forward, and he takes up a book
and reads_:
There is but little set down here against her.
‘She has stolen eggs and fowl when times were bad,
But when the times grew better has confessed it;
She never missed her chapel of a Sunday
And when she could, paid dues.’ Take up your money.
OLD WOMAN. God bless you, sir. [_She screams._] Oh, sir, a pain went
through me!
FIRST MERCHANT. That name is like a fire to all damned souls.
[_Murmur among the_ PEASANTS, _who shrink back from her as she
goes out_.
A PEASANT. How she screamed out!
SECOND PEASANT. And maybe we shall scream so.
THIRD PEASANT. I tell you there is no such place as hell.
FIRST MERCHANT. Can such a trifle turn you from your profit?
Come, deal; come, deal.
MIDDLE-AGED MAN. Master, I am afraid.
FIRST MERCHANT. I bought your soul, and there’s no sense in fear
Now the soul’s gone.
MIDDLE-AGED MAN. Give me my soul again.
WOMAN [_going on her knees and clinging to_ MERCHANT]. And take this
money too, and give me mine.
SECOND MERCHANT. Bear bastards, drink or follow some wild fancy;
For sighs and cries are the soul’s work,
And you have none.
[_Throws the woman off._
PEASANT. Come, let’s away.
ANOTHER PEASANT. Yes, yes.
ANOTHER PEASANT. Come quickly; if that woman had not screamed
I would have lost my soul.
ANOTHER PEASANT. Come, come away.
[_They turn to door, but are stopped by shouts of ‘Countess
Cathleen! Countess Cathleen!’_
CATHLEEN [_entering_]. And so you trade once more?
FIRST MERCHANT. In spite of you.
What brings you here, saint with the sapphire eyes?
CATHLEEN. I come to barter a soul for a great price.
SECOND MERCHANT. What matter, if the soul be worth the price?
CATHLEEN. The people starve, therefore the people go
Thronging to you. I hear a cry come from them
And it is in my ears by night and day,
And I would have five hundred thousand crowns
That I may feed them till the dearth go by.
FIRST MERCHANT. It may be the soul’s worth it.
CATHLEEN. There is more:
The souls that you have bought must be set free.
FIRST MERCHANT. We know of but one soul that’s worth the price.
CATHLEEN. Being my own it seems a priceless thing.
SECOND MERCHANT. You offer us----
CATHLEEN. I offer my own soul.
A PEASANT. Do not, do not, for souls the like of ours
Are not precious to God as your soul is.
O! what would Heaven do without you, lady?
ANOTHER PEASANT. Look how their claws clutch in their leathern
gloves.
FIRST MERCHANT. Five hundred thousand crowns; we give the price.
The gold is here; the souls even while you speak
Have slipped out of our bond, because your face
Has shed a light on them and filled their hearts.
But you must sign, for we omit no form
In buying a soul like yours.
SECOND MERCHANT. Sign with this quill.
It was a feather growing on the cock
That crowed when Peter dared deny his Master,
And all who use it have great honour in Hell.
[CATHLEEN _leans forward to sign_.
ALEEL [_rushing forward and snatching the pen from her_]. Leave all
things to the builder of the heavens.
CATHLEEN. I have no thoughts; I hear a cry--a cry.
ALEEL [_casting the pen on the ground_]. I have seen a vision under
a green hedge,
A hedge of hips and haws--men yet shall hear
The Archangels rolling Satan’s empty skull
Over the mountain-tops.
FIRST MERCHANT. Take him away.
[TEIG _and_ SHEMUS _drag him roughly away so that he falls upon
the floor among the_ PEASANTS. CATHLEEN _picks up parchment and
signs, then turns towards the_ PEASANTS.
CATHLEEN. Take up the money, and now come with me;
When we are far from this polluted place
I will give everybody money enough.
[_She goes out, the_ PEASANTS _crowding around her and kissing
her dress_. ALEEL _and the two_ MERCHANTS _are left alone_.
SECOND MERCHANT. We must away and wait until she dies,
Sitting above her tower as two grey owls,
Waiting as many years as may be, guarding
Our precious jewel; waiting to seize her soul.
FIRST MERCHANT. We need but hover over her head in the air,
For she has only minutes. When she signed
Her heart began to break. Hush, hush, I hear
The brazen door of Hell move on its hinges, and the eternal revelry
float hither
To hearten us.
SECOND MERCHANT. Leap feathered on the air
And meet them with her soul caught in your claws.
[_They rush out._ ALEEL _crawls into the middle of the room. The
twilight has fallen and gradually darkens as the scene goes on.
There is a distant muttering of thunder and a sound of rising
storm._
ALEEL. The brazen door stands wide, and Balor comes
Borne in his heavy car, and demons have lifted
The age-weary eyelids from the eyes that of old
Turned gods to stone; Barach, the traitor, comes
And the lascivious race, Cailitin,
That cast a druid weakness and decay
Over Sualtem’s and old Dectera’s child;
And that great king Hell first took hold upon
When he killed Naisi and broke Deirdre’s heart
And all their heads are twisted to one side,
For when they lived they warred on beauty and peace
With obstinate, crafty, sidelong bitterness.
[OONA _enters_.
Crouch down, old heron, out of the blind storm.
OONA. Where is the Countess Cathleen? All this day
Her eyes were full of tears, and when for a moment
Her hand was laid upon my hand it trembled,
And now I do not know where she is gone.
ALEEL. Cathleen has chosen other friends than us,
And they are rising through the hollow world.
Demons are out, old heron.
OONA. God guard her soul.
ALEEL. She’s bartered it away this very hour,
As though we two were never in the world.
[_He points downward._
First, Orchill, her pale, beautiful head alive,
Her body shadowy as vapour drifting
Under the dawn, for she who awoke desire
Has but a heart of blood when others die;
About her is a vapoury multitude
Of women alluring devils with soft laughter;
Behind her a host heat of the blood made sin,
But all the little pink white nails have grown
To be great talons.
[_He seizes_ OONA _and drags her into the middle of the room and
points downward with vehement gestures. The wind roars._
They begin a song
And there is still some music on their tongues.
OONA [_casting herself face downward on the floor_]. O, Maker of
all, protect her from the demons,
And if a soul must need be lost, take mine.
[ALEEL _kneels beside her, but does not seem to hear her words.
The_ PEASANTS _return. They carry the_ COUNTESS CATHLEEN _and
lay her upon the ground before_ OONA _and_ ALEEL. _She lies
there as if dead._
OONA. O, that so many pitchers of rough clay
Should prosper and the porcelain break in two!
[_She kisses the hands of_ CATHLEEN.
A PEASANT. We were under the tree where the path turns,
When she grew pale as death and fainted away.
And while we bore her hither cloudy gusts
Blackened the world and shook us on our feet;
Draw the great bolt, for no man has beheld
So black, bitter, blinding, and sudden a storm.
[_One who is near the door draws the bolt._
CATHLEEN. O, hold me, and hold me tightly, for the storm
Is dragging me away.
[OONA _takes her in her arms. A_ WOMAN _begins to wail_.
PEASANTS. Hush!
PEASANTS. Hush!
PEASANT WOMEN. Hush!
OTHER PEASANT WOMEN. Hush!
CATHLEEN [_half rising_]. Lay all the bags of money in a heap,
And when I am gone, old Oona, share them out
To every man and woman: judge, and give
According to their needs.
A PEASANT WOMAN. And will she give
Enough to keep my children through the dearth?
ANOTHER PEASANT WOMAN. O, Queen of Heaven, and all you blessed
saints,
Let us and ours be lost so she be shriven.
CATHLEEN. Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel;
I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes
Upon the nest under the eave, before
She wander the loud waters. Do not weep
Too great a while, for there is many a candle
On the High Altar though one fall. Aleel,
Who sang about the dancers of the woods,
That know not the hard burden of the world,
Having but breath in their kind bodies, farewell!
And farewell, Oona, you who played with me,
And bore me in your arms about the house
When I was but a child and therefore happy,
Therefore happy, even like those that dance.
The storm is in my hair and I must go.
[_She dies._
OONA. Bring me the looking-glass.
[A WOMAN _brings it to her out of the inner room._ OONA _holds it
over the lips of_ CATHLEEN. _All is silent for a moment. And
then she speaks in a half scream_:
O, she is dead!
A PEASANT. She was the great white lily of the world.
A PEASANT. She was more beautiful than the pale stars.
AN OLD PEASANT WOMAN. The little plant I love is broken in two.
[ALEEL _takes looking-glass from_ OONA _and flings it upon the
floor so that it is broken in many pieces_.
ALEEL. I shatter you in fragments, for the face
That brimmed you up with beauty is no more:
And die, dull heart, for she whose mournful words
Made you a living spirit has passed away
And left you but a ball of passionate dust.
And you, proud earth and plumy sea, fade out!
For you may hear no more her faltering feet,
But are left lonely amid the clamorous war
Of angels upon devils.
[_He stands up; almost every one is kneeling, but it has grown so
dark that only confused forms can be seen._
And I who weep
Call curses on you, Time and Fate and Change,
And have no excellent hope but the great hour
When you shall plunge headlong through bottomless space.
[_A flash of lightning followed immediately by thunder._
A PEASANT WOMAN. Pull him upon his knees before his curses
Have plucked thunder and lightning on our heads.
ALEEL. Angels and devils clash in the middle air,
And brazen swords clang upon brazen helms.
[_A flash of lightning followed immediately by thunder._
Yonder a bright spear, cast out of a sling,
Has torn through Balor’s eye, and the dark clans
Fly screaming as they fled Moytura of old.
[_Everything is lost in darkness._
AN OLD MAN. The Almighty wrath at our great weakness and sin
Has blotted out the world and we must die.
[_The darkness is broken by a visionary light. The_ PEASANTS
_seem to be kneeling upon the rocky slope of a mountain, and
vapour full of storm and ever-changing light is sweeping above
them and behind them. Half in the light, half in the shadow,
stand armed angels. Their armour is old and worn, and their
drawn swords dim and dinted. They stand as if upon the air in
formation of battle and look downward with stern faces. The_
PEASANTS _cast themselves on the ground_.
ALEEL. Look no more on the half-closed gates of Hell,
But speak to me, whose mind is smitten of God,
That it may be no more with mortal things,
And tell of her who lies there.
[_He seizes one of the angels._
Till you speak
You shall not drift into eternity.
THE ANGEL. The light beats down; the gates of pearl are wide
And she is passing to the floor of peace,
And Mary of the seven times wounded heart
Has kissed her lips, and the long blessed hair
Has fallen on her face; The Light of Lights
Looks always on the motive, not the deed,
The Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone.
[ALEEL _releases the_ ANGEL _and kneels_.
OONA. Tell them who walk upon the floor of peace
That I would die and go to her I love;
The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind
And I am broken by their passing feet.
[_A sound of far-off horns seems to come from the heart of the
Light. The vision melts away, and the forms of the kneeling_
PEASANTS _appear faintly in the darkness_.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE
‘THE COUNTESS CATHLEEN’
I found the story of the Countess Cathleen in what professed to be a
collection of Irish folk-lore in an Irish newspaper some years ago. I
wrote to the compiler, asking about its source, but got no answer, but
have since heard that it was translated from _Les Matinées de Timothée
Trimm_ a good many years ago, and has been drifting about the Irish
press ever since. Léo Lespès gives it as an Irish story, and though the
editor of _Folklore_ has kindly advertised for information, the only
Christian variant I know of is a Donegal tale, given by Mr. Larminie in
his _West Irish Folk Tales and Romances_, of a woman who goes to hell
for ten years to save her husband, and stays there another ten, having
been granted permission to carry away as many souls as could cling to
her skirt. Léo Lespès may have added a few details, but I have no doubt
of the essential antiquity of what seems to me the most impressive form
of one of the supreme parables of the world. The parable came to the
Greeks in the sacrifice of Alcestis, but her sacrifice was less
overwhelming, less apparently irremediable. Léo Lespès tells the story
as follows:--
Ce que je vais vous dire est un récit du carême irlandais. Le boiteux,
l’aveugle, le paralytique des rues de Dublin ou de Limerick, vous le
diraient mieux que moi, cher lecteur, si vous alliez le leur demander,
un sixpence d’argent à la main.--Il n’est pas une jeune fille catholique
à laquelle on ne l’ait appris pendant les jours de préparation à la
communion sainte, pas un berger des bords de la Blackwater qui ne le
puisse redire à la veillée.
Il y a bien longtemps qu’il apparut tout-à-coup dans la vieille Irlande
deux marchands inconnus dont personne n’avait ouï parler, et qui
parlaient néanmoins avec la plus grande perfection la langue du pays.
Leurs cheveux étaient noirs et ferrés avec de l’or et leurs robes d’une
grande magnificence.
Tous deux semblaient avoir le même âge; ils paraissaient être des hommes
de cinquante ans, car leur barbe grisonnait un peu.
Or, à cette époque, comme aujourd’hui, l’Irlande était pauvre, car le
soleil avait été rare, et des récoltes presque nulles. Les indigents ne
savaient à quel saint se vouer, et la misère devenait de plus en plus
terrible.
Dans l’hôtellerie où descendirent les marchands fastueux on chercha à
pénétrer leurs desseins: mais ce fut en vain, ils demeurèrent silencieux
et discrets.
Et pendant qu’ils demeurêrent dans l’hôtellerie, ils ne cessèrent de
compter et de recompter des sacs de pièces d’or, dont la vive clarté
s’apercevait à travers les vitres du logis.
Gentlemen, leur dit l’hôtesse un jour, d’où vient que vous êtes si
opulents, et que, venus pour secourir la misère publique, vous ne
fassiez pas de bonnes œuvres?
--Belle hôtesse, répondit l’un d’eux, nous n’avons pas voulu aller
au-devant d’infortunes honorables, dans la crainte d’être trompés par
des misères fictives: que la douleur frappe à la porte, nous ouvrirons.
Le lendemain, quand on sut qu’il existait deux opulents étrangers prêts
à prodiguer l’or, la foule assiégea leur logis; mais les figures des
gens qui en sortaient étaient bien diverses. Les uns avaient la fierté
dans le regard, les autres portaient la honte au front. Les deux
trafiquants achetaient des âmes pour le démon. L’âme d’un vieillard
valait vingt pièces d’or, pas un penny de plus; car Satan avait eu le
temps d’y former hypothèque. L’âme d’une épouse en valait cinquante
quand elle était jolie, ou cent quand elle était laide. L’âme d’une
jeune fille se payait des prix fous: les fleurs les plus belles et les
plus pures sont les plus chères.
Pendant ce temps, il existait dans la ville un ange de beauté, la
comtesse Ketty O’Connor. Elle était l’idole du peuple, et la providence
des indigents. Dès qu’elle eut appris que des mécréants profitaient de
la misère publique pour dérober des cœurs à Dieu, elle fit appeler son
majordome.
--Master Patrick, lui dit-elle, combien ai-je de pièces d’or dans mon
coffre?
--Cent mille.
--Combien de bijoux?
--Pour autant d’argent.
--Combien de chateaux, de bois et de terres?
--Pour le double de ces sommes.
--Eh bien! Patrick, vendez tout ce qui n’est pas or et apportez-m’en le
montant. Je ne veux garder à moi que ce castel et le champ qui
l’entoure.
Deux jours après, les ordres de la pieuse Ketty étaient exécutés et le
trésor était distribué aux pauvres au fur et à mesure de leurs besoins.
Ceci ne faisait pas le compte, dit la tradition, des commis-voyageurs du
malin esprit, qui ne trouvaient plus d’âmes à acheter.
Aidés par un valet infâme, ils pénétrèrent dans la retraite de la noble
dame et lui dérobèrent le reste de son trésor ... en vain lutta-t-elle
de toutes ses forces pour sauver le contenu de son coffre, les larrons
diaboliques furent les plus forts. Si Ketty avait eu les moyens de faire
un signe de croix, ajoute la légende irlandaise, elle les eût mis en
fuite, mais ses mains étaient captives--Le larcin fut effectué. Alors
les pauvres sollicitèrent en vain près de Ketty dépouillée, elle ne
pouvait plus secourir leur misère;--elle les abandonnait à la tentation.
Pourtant il n’y avait plus que huit jours à passer pour que les grains
et les fourrages arrivassent en abondance des pays d’Orient. Mais, huit
jours, c’était un siècle: huit jours nécessitaient une somme immense
pour subvenir aux exigences de la disette, et les pauvres allaient ou
expirer dans les angoisses de la faim, ou, reniant les saints maximes de
l’Evangile, vendre à vil prix leur âme, le plus beau présent de la
munificence du Seigneur tout-puissant.
Et Ketty n’avait plus une obole, car elle avait abandonné son château
aux malheureux.
Elle passa douze heures dans les larmes et le deuil, arrachant ses
cheveux couleur de soleil et meurtrissant son sein couleur du lis: puis
elle se leva résolue, animée par un vif sentiment de désespoir.
Elle se rendit chez les marchands d’âmes.
--Que voulez-vous? dirent-ils.
--Vous achetez des âmes?
--Oui, un peu malgré vous, n’est-ce pas, sainte aux yeux de saphir?
--Aujourd’hui je viens vous proposer un marché, reprit-elle.
--Lequel?
--J’ai une âme à vendre; mais elle est chère.
--Qu’importe si elle est précieuse? l’âme, comme le diamant, s’apprécie
à sa blancheur.
--C’est la mienne, dit Ketty.
Les deux envoyés de Satan tressaillirent. Leurs griffes s’allongèrent
sous leurs gants de cuir; leurs yeux gris étincelèrent:--l’âme, pure,
immaculée, virginale de Ketty!... c’était une acquisition inappreciable.
--Gentille dame, combien voulez-vous?
--Cent cinquante mille écus d’or.
--C’est fait, dirent les marchands: et ils tendirent à Ketty un
parchemin cacheté de noir, qu’elle signa en frissonnant.
La somme lui fut comptée.
Dès qu’elle fut rentrée, elle dit au majordome:
--Tenez, distribuez ceci. Avec la somme que je vous donne les pauvres
attendront la huitaine nécessaire et pas une de leurs âmes ne sera
livrée au démon.
Puis elle s’enferma et recommanda qu’on ne vint pas la déranger.
Trois jours se passèrent; elle n’appela pas; elle ne sortit pas.
Quand on ouvrit sa porte, on la trouva raide et froide: elle était morte
de douleur.
Mais la vente de cette âme si adorable dans sa charité fut déclarée
nulle par le Seigneur: car elle avait sauvé ses concitoyens de la mort
éternelle.
Après la huitaine, des vaisseaux nombreux amenèrent à l’Irlande affamée
d’immenses provisions de grains.
La famine n’était plus possible. Quant aux marchands, ils disparurent de
leur hôtellerie, sans qu’on sût jamais ce qu’ils étaient devenus.
Toutefois, les pêcheurs de la Blackwater prétendent qu’ils sont
enchaînés dans une prison souterraine par ordre de Lucifer jusqu’au
moment où ils pourront livrer l’âme de Ketty qui leur a échappé. Je vous
dis la légende telle que je la sais.
Mais les pauvres l’ont raconté d’âge en âge et les enfants de Cork et de
Dublin chantent encore la ballade dont voici les derniers couplets:--
Pour sauver les pauvres qu’elle aime
Ketty donna
Son esprit, sa croyance même:
Satan paya
Cette âme au dévoûment sublime,
En écus d’or,
Disons pour racheter son crime,
_Confiteor_.
Mais l’ange qui se fit coupable
Par charité
Au séjour d’amour ineffable
Est remonté.
Satan vaincu n’eut pas de prise
Sur ce cœur d’or;
Chantons sous la nef de l’église,
_Confiteor_.
N’est-ce pas que ce récit, né de l’imagination des poètes catholiques de
la verte Erin, est une véritable récit de carême?
_The Countess Cathleen_ was acted in Dublin in 1899, with Mr. Marcus St.
John and Mr. Trevor Lowe as the First and Second Demon, Mr. Valentine
Grace as Shemus Rua, Master Charles Sefton as Teig, Madame San Carola as
Mary, Miss Florence Farr as Aleel, Miss Anna Mather as Oona, Mr. Charles
Holmes as the Herdsman, Mr. Jack Wilcox as the Gardener, Mr. Walford as
a Peasant, Miss Dorothy Paget as a Spirit, Miss M. Kelly as a Peasant
Woman, Mr. T. E. Wilkinson as a Servant, and Miss May Whitty as the
Countess Kathleen. They had to face a very vehement opposition stirred
up by a politician and a newspaper, the one accusing me in a pamphlet,
the other in long articles day after day, of blasphemy because of the
language of the demons or of Shemus Rua, and because I made a woman sell
her soul and yet escape damnation, and of a lack of patriotism because I
made Irish men and women, who, it seems, never did such a thing, sell
theirs. The politician or the newspaper persuaded some forty Catholic
students to sign a protest against the play, and a Cardinal, who avowed
that he had not read it, to make another, and both politician and
newspaper made such obvious appeals to the audience to break the peace,
that a score or so of police were sent to the theatre to see that they
did not. I had, however, no reason to regret the result, for the stalls,
containing almost all that was distinguished in Dublin, and a gallery of
artisans alike insisted on the freedom of literature.
After the performance in 1899 I added the love scene between Aleel and
the Countess, and in this new form the play was revived in New York by
Miss Wycherley as well as being played a good deal in England and
America by amateurs. Now at last I have made a complete revision to make
it suitable for performance at the Abbey Theatre. The first two scenes
are almost wholly new, and throughout the play I have added or left out
such passages as a stage experience of some years showed me encumbered
the action; the play in its first form having been written before I knew
anything of the theatre. I have left the old end, however, in the
version printed in the body of this book, because the change for
dramatic purposes has been made for no better reason than that
audiences--even at the Abbey Theatre--are almost ignorant of Irish
mythology--or because a shallow stage made the elaborate vision of armed
angels upon a mountain-side impossible. The new end is particularly
suited to the Abbey stage, where the stage platform can be brought out
in front of the proscenium and have a flight of steps at one side up
which the Angel comes, crossing towards the back of the stage at the
opposite side. The principal lighting is from two arc lights in the
balcony which throw their lights into the faces of the players, making
footlights unnecessary. The room at Shemus Rua’s house is suggested by a
great grey curtain--a colour which becomes full of rich tints under the
stream of light from the arcs. The two or more arches in the third scene
permit the use of a gauze. The short front scene before the last is just
long enough when played with incidental music to allow the scene set
behind it to be changed. The play when played without interval in this
way lasts a little over an hour.
The play was performed at the Abbey Theatre for the first time on
December 14, 1911, Miss Maire O’Neill taking the part of the Countess,
and the last scene from the going out of the Merchants was as follows:--
[MERCHANTS _rush out_. ALEEL _crawls into the middle of the room;
the twilight has fallen and gradually darkens as the scene goes
on_.
ALEEL. They’re rising up--they’re rising through the earth,
Fat Asmodel and giddy Belial,
And all the fiends. Now they leap in the air.
But why does Hell’s gate creak so? Round and round.
Hither and hither, to and fro they’re running.
[_He moves about as though the air was full of spirits._ OONA
_enters_.
Crouch down, old heron, out of the blind storm.
OONA. Where is the Countess Cathleen? All this day
Her eyes were full of tears, and when for a moment
Her hand was laid upon my hand, it trembled.
And now I do not know where she is gone.
ALEEL. Cathleen has chosen other friends than us,
And they are rising through the hollow world.
Demons are out, old heron.
OONA. God guard her soul.
ALEEL. She’s bartered it away this very hour,
As though we two were never in the world.
[_He kneels beside her, but does not seem to hear her words. The_
PEASANTS _return. They carry the_ COUNTESS CATHLEEN _and lay
her upon the ground before_ OONA _and_ ALEEL. _She lies there
as if dead._
OONA. O, that so many pitchers of rough clay
Should prosper and the porcelain break in two!
[_She kisses the hands of_ CATHLEEN.
A PEASANT. We were under the tree where the path turns
When she grew pale as death and fainted away.
CATHLEEN. O, hold me, and hold me tightly, for the storm
Is dragging me away.
[OONA _takes her in her arms_. A WOMAN _begins to wail_.
PEASANTS. Hush!
PEASANTS. Hush!
PEASANT WOMEN. Hush!
OTHER PEASANT WOMEN. Hush!
CATHLEEN [_half rising_]. Lay all the bags of money in a heap,
And when I am gone, old Oona, share them out
To every man and woman: judge, and give
According to their needs.
A PEASANT WOMAN. And will she give
Enough to keep my children through the dearth?
ANOTHER PEASANT WOMAN. O, Queen of Heaven, and all you blessed
saints,
Let us and ours be lost, so she be shriven.
CATHLEEN. Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel;
I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes
Upon the nest under the eave, before
She wander the loud waters. Do not weep
Too great a while, for there is many a candle
On the High Altar though one fall. Aleel,
Who sang about the dancers of the woods,
That know not the hard burden of the world,
Having but breath in their kind bodies, farewell!
And farewell, Oona, you who played with me
And bore me in your arms about the house
When I was but a child--and therefore happy,
Therefore happy even like those that dance.
The storm is in my hair and I must go.
_She dies._
OONA. Bring me the looking-glass.
[_A_ WOMAN _brings it to her out of inner room_. OONA _holds the
glass over the lips of_ CATHLEEN. _All is silent for a moment,
then she speaks in a half-scream._
O, she is dead!
A PEASANT. She was the great white lily of the world.
A PEASANT. She was more beautiful than the pale stars.
AN OLD PEASANT WOMAN. The little plant I loved is broken in two.
[ALEEL _takes looking-glass from_ OONA _and flings it upon floor,
so that it is broken in many pieces_.
ALEEL. I shatter you in fragments, for the face
That brimmed you up with beauty is no more;
And die, dull heart, for you that were a mirror
Are but a ball of passionate dust again!
And level earth and plumy sea, rise up!
And haughty sky, fall down!
A PEASANT WOMAN. Pull him upon his knees,
His curses will pluck lightning on our heads.
ALEEL. Angels and devils clash in the middle air,
And brazen swords clang upon brazen helms.
Look, look, a spear has gone through Belial’s eye!
[_A winged_ ANGEL, _carrying a torch and a sword, enters from
the_ R. _with eyes fixed upon some distant thing. The_ ANGEL
_is about to pass out to the_ L. _when_ ALEEL _speaks. The_
ANGEL _stops a moment and turns_.
Look no more on the half-closed gates of Hell,
But speak to me whose mind is smitten of God,
That it may be no more with mortal things:
And tell of her who lies there.
[_The_ ANGEL _turns again and is about to go, but is seized by_
ALEEL.
Till you speak
You shall not drift into eternity.
THE ANGEL. The light beats down; the gates of pearl are wide.
And she is passing to the floor of peace,
And Mary of the seven times wounded heart
Has kissed her lips, and the long blessed hair
Has fallen on her face; the Light of Lights
Looks always on the motive, not the deed,
The Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone.
[ALEEL _releases the_ ANGEL _and kneels_.
OONA. Tell them to walk upon the floor of peace,
That I would die and go to her I love;
The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE LAND OF HEART’S DESIRE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_O Rose, thou art sick._
WILLIAM BLAKE.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO
FLORENCE FARR
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_PERSONS OF THE PLAY_
MAURTEEN BRUIN.
BRIDGET BRUIN.
SHAWN BRUIN.
MARY BRUIN.
FATHER HART.
A FAERY CHILD.
_The Scene is laid in the Barony of Kilmacowen, in the County of Sligo,
and at a remote time._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE
This play contains more of my first experiments in blank verse than any
other in my books, for _The Countess Cathleen_, though published before
it, was all rewritten for later editions. Many passages that pleased me
when I wrote them, and some that please me still, are mere ornament
without dramatic value. A revival of the play but a few days ago at the
Abbey Theatre enabled me to leave out these and other passages and to
test the play without them. I think that it gained greatly, became
indeed for the first time tolerable drama; certainly for the first time
for many years gave its author pleasure. Amateurs perform it more often
than any other play of mine, and I urge them to omit all lines that I
have enclosed in brackets. It should sound simple and natural if played
with the text I recommend, and it may be that it would read better too,
being a more perfect action, but I hesitate to leave out altogether what
many people like, what, it may be, I can no longer judge. Somebody, Dr.
Todhunter, the dramatic poet, I think, had said in my hearing that
dramatic poetry must be oratorical, and I think that I wrote partly to
prove that false; but every now and then I lost courage, as it seems,
and remembering that I had some reputation as a lyric poet wrote for the
reader of lyrics. When I saw it played with all needless and all mere
lyrical passages cut away, I recalled the kind of pleasure that I had
sought to create, and at last listened with the hope that this pleasure
had reached those about me. Mr. Lennox Robinson, the producer, had kept
all the players except the fairy child as still and statuesque as
possible, so that the blank verse where there is so little animation
seemed their natural utterance.
W. B. YEATS.
March 10.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SCENE.--_A room with a hearth on the floor in the middle of a deep
alcove to the Right. There are benches in the alcove and a table; and
a crucifix on the wall. The alcove is full of a glow of light from
the fire. There is an open door facing the audience to the Left, and
to the left of this a bench. Through the door one can see the forest.
It is night, but the moon or a late sunset glimmers through the trees
and carries the eye far off into a vague, mysterious world._ MAURTEEN
BRUIN, SHAWN BRUIN, _and_ BRIDGET BRUIN _sit in the alcove at the
table or about the fire. They are dressed in the costume of some
remote time, and near them sits an old priest_, FATHER HART. _He may
be dressed as a friar. There is food and drink upon the table._ MARY
BRUIN _stands by the door reading a book. If she looks up she can see
through the door into the wood._
BRIDGET. Because I bid her clean the pots for supper
She took that old book down out of the thatch;
She has been doubled over it ever since.
We should be deafened by her groans and moans
Had she to work as some do, Father Hart;
Get up at dawn like me and mend and scour
Or ride abroad in the boisterous night like you,
The pyx and blessed bread under your arm.
SHAWN. Mother, you are too cross.
BRIDGET. You’ve married her,
And fear to vex her and so take her part.
MAURTEEN [_to_ FATHER HART]. It is but right that youth should side
with youth;
She quarrels with my wife a bit at times,
And is too deep just now in the old book!
But do not blame her greatly; [she will grow
As quiet as a puff-ball in a tree
When but the moons of marriage dawn and die
For half a score of times.]
FATHER HART. Their hearts are wild,
As be the hearts of birds, till children come.
BRIDGET. She would not mind the kettle, milk the cow,
Or even lay the knives and spread the cloth.
SHAWN. Mother, if only----
MAURTEEN. Shawn, this is half empty;
Go, bring up the best bottle that we have.
FATHER HART. I _never_ saw her read a book before,
What can it be?
MAURTEEN [_to_ SHAWN]. What are you waiting for?
You must not shake it when you draw the cork;
It’s precious wine, so take you time about it.
[SHAWN _goes_.
[_To Priest._]
[There was a Spaniard wrecked at Ocris Head,
When I was young, and I have still some bottles.]
He cannot bear to hear her blamed; the book
Has lain up in the thatch these fifty years;
My father told me my grandfather wrote it,
And killed a heifer for the binding of it--
[But supper’s spread, and we can talk and eat]
It was little good he got out of the book,
Because it filled his house with rambling fiddlers,
And rambling ballad-makers and the like.
[The griddle-bread is there in front of you.]
Colleen, what is the wonder in that book,
That you must leave the bread to cool? Had I
Or had my father read or written books
There were no stocking stuffed with yellow guineas
To come when I am dead to Shawn and you.
FATHER HART. You should not fill your head with foolish dreams.
What are you reading?
MARY. How a Princess Edane,
A daughter of a King of Ireland, heard
A voice singing on a May Eve like this,
And followed half awake and half asleep,
Until she came into the Land of Faery,
Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,
Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,
Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.
And she is still there, busied with a dance
Deep in the dewy shadow of a wood,
[Or where stars walk upon a mountain-top.]
MAURTEEN. Persuade the colleen to put down the book;
My grandfather would mutter just such things,
And he was no judge of a dog or a horse,
And any idle boy could blarney him;
Just speak your mind.
FATHER HART. Put it away, my colleen;
[God spreads the heavens above us like great wings
And gives a little round of deeds and days,
And then come the wrecked angels and set snares,
And bait them with light hopes and heavy dreams,
Until the heart is puffed with pride and goes
Half shuddering and half joyous from God’s peace;]
For it was some wrecked angel, blind with tears,
Who flattered Edane’s heart with merry words.
My colleen, I have seen some other girls
Restless and ill at ease, but years went by
And they grew like their neighbours and were glad
In minding children, working at the churn,
And gossiping of weddings and of wakes;
[For life moves out of a red flare of dreams
Into a common light of common hours,
Until old age bring the red flare again.]
MAURTEEN. That’s true--but she’s too young to know it’s true.
BRIDGET. She’s old enough to know that it is wrong
To mope and idle.
MAURTEEN. I’ve little blame for her;
She’s dull when my big son is in the fields,
And that and maybe this good woman’s tongue
Have driven her to hide among her dreams
Like children from the dark under the bed-clothes.
BRIDGET. She’d never do a turn if I were silent.
MAURTEEN. And maybe it is natural upon May Eve
To dream of the good people. But tell me, girl,
If you’ve the branch of blessed quicken wood
That women hang upon the post of the door
That they may send good luck into the house?
Remember they may steal new-married brides
After the fall of twilight on May Eve,
Or what old women mutter at the fire
Is but a pack of lies.
FATHER HART. It may be truth.
We do not know the limit of those powers
God has permitted to the evil spirits
For some mysterious end. You have done right [_to_ MARY];
It’s well to keep old innocent customs up.
[MARY BRUIN _has taken a bough of quicken wood from a seat and
hung it on a nail in the door-post. A girl child strangely
dressed, perhaps in faery green, comes out of the wood and
takes it away._
MARY. I had no sooner hung it on the nail
Before a child ran up out of the wind;
She has caught it in her hand and fondled it;
[Her face is pale as water before dawn.]
FATHER HART. Whose child can this be?
MAURTEEN. No one’s child at all.
She often dreams that some one has gone by,
When there was nothing but a puff of wind.
MARY. They have taken away the blessed quicken wood,
They will not bring good luck into the house;
Yet I am glad that I was courteous to them,
For are not they, likewise, children of God?
FATHER HART. Colleen, they are the children of the fiend,
And they have power until the end of Time,
When God shall fight with them a great pitched battle
And hack them into pieces.
MARY. He will smile,
Father, perhaps, and open His great door.
FATHER HART. Did but the lawless angels see that door
They would fall, slain by everlasting peace;
And when such angels knock upon our doors,
Who goes with them must drive through the same storm.
[_An arm comes around the door-post and knocks and beckons. It is
clearly seen in the silvery light._ MARY BRUIN _goes to door
and stands in it for a moment_. MAURTEEN BRUIN _is busy
filling_ FATHER HART’S _plate_. BRIDGET BRUIN _stirs the fire_.
MARY [_coming to table_]. There’s somebody out there that beckoned
me
And raised her hand as though it held a cup,
And she was drinking from it, so it may be
That she is thirsty.
[_She takes milk from the table and carries it to the door._
FATHER HART. That will be the child
That you would have it was no child at all.
BRIDGET. [And maybe, Father, what he said was true;
For there is not another night in the year
So wicked as to-night.
MAURTEEN. Nothing can harm us
While the good Father’s underneath our roof.
MARY. A little queer old woman dressed in green.
BRIDGET. The good people beg for milk and fire
Upon May Eve--woe to the house that gives,
For they have power upon it for a year.
MAURTEEN. Hush, woman, hush!
BRIDGET. She’s given milk away.
I knew she would bring evil on the house.
MAURTEEN. Who was it?
MARY. Both the tongue and face were strange.
MAURTEEN. Some strangers came last week to Clover Hill;
She must be one of them.]
BRIDGET. I am afraid.
FATHER HART. The Cross will keep all evil from the house
While it hangs there.
MAURTEEN. Come, sit beside me, colleen,
And put away your dreams of discontent,
For I would have you light up my last days,
Like the good glow of the turf; and when I die
You’ll be the wealthiest hereabout, for, colleen,
I have a stocking full of yellow guineas
Hidden away where nobody can find it.
BRIDGET. You are the fool of every pretty face,
And I must spare and pinch that my son’s wife
May have all kinds of ribbons for her head.
MAURTEEN. Do not be cross; she is a right good girl!
[The butter is by your elbow, Father Hart.
My colleen, have not Fate and Time and Change
Done well for me and for old Bridget there?]
We have a hundred acres of good land,
And sit beside each other at the fire.
I have this reverend Father for my friend,
I look upon your face and my son’s face--
We’ve put his plate by yours--and here he comes,
And brings with him the only thing we have lacked,
Abundance of good wine. [SHAWN _comes in_]. Stir up the fire,
And put new turf upon it till it blaze;
To watch the turf-smoke coiling from the fire,
And feel content and wisdom in your heart,
This is the best of life; [when we are young
We long to tread a way none trod before,
But find the excellent old way through love,
And through the care of children, to the hour
For bidding Fate and Time and Change good-bye.]
[MARY _stands for a moment in the door, and then takes a sod of
turf from the fire and goes out through the door_. SHAWN
_follows her and meets her coming in_.
SHAWN. What is it draws you to the chill o’ the wood?
There is a light among the stems of the trees
That makes one shiver.
MARY. [A little queer old man
Made me a sign to show he wanted fire
To light his pipe.]
BRIDGET. You’ve given milk and fire
Upon the unluckiest night of the year and brought,
For all you know, evil upon the house.
Before you married you were idle and fine
And went about with ribbons on your head;
And now--no, Father, I will speak my mind--
She is not a fitting wife for any man----
SHAWN. Be quiet, mother!
MAURTEEN. You are much too cross.
MARY. What do I care if I have given this house,
Where I must hear all day a bitter tongue,
Into the power of faeries!
BRIDGET. You know well
How calling the good people by that name,
Or talking of them over much at all,
May bring all kinds of evil on the house.
MARY. Come, faeries, take me out of this dull house!
Let me have all the freedom I have lost;
Work when I will and idle when I will!
Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
[Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,]
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.
FATHER HART. You cannot know the meaning of your words.
MARY. Father, I am right weary of four tongues:
A tongue that is too crafty and too wise,
A tongue that is too godly and too grave,
A tongue that is more bitter than the tide,
And a kind tongue too full of drowsy love,
Of drowsy love and my captivity.
[SHAWN BRUIN _leads her to a seat at the left of the door_.
SHAWN. Do not blame me; I often lie awake
Thinking that all things trouble your bright head.
How beautiful it is--your broad pale forehead
Under a cloudy blossoming of hair!
Sit down beside me here--these are too old,
And have forgotten they were ever young.
MARY. O, you are the great door-post of this house,
And I the branch of blessed quicken wood,
And if I could I’d hang upon the post,
Till I had brought good luck into the house.
[_She would put her arms about him, but looks shyly at the priest
and lets her arms fall._
FATHER HART. My daughter, take his hand--by love alone
God binds us to Himself and to the hearth,
That shuts us from the waste beyond His peace,
From maddening freedom and bewildering light.
SHAWN. Would that the world were mine to give it you,
And not its quiet hearths alone, but even
All that bewilderment of light and freedom,
If you would have it.
MARY. I would take the world
And break it into pieces in my hands
To see you smile watching it crumble away.
SHAWN. Then I would mould a world of fire and dew,
With no one bitter, grave or over wise,
And nothing marred or old to do you wrong,
And crowd the enraptured quiet of the sky
With candles burning to your lonely face.
MARY. Your looks are all the candles that I need.
SHAWN. Once a fly dancing in a beam of the sun,
Or the light wind blowing out of the dawn,
Could fill your heart with dreams none other knew,
But now the indissoluble sacrament
Has mixed your heart that was most proud and cold
With my warm heart for ever; the sun and moon
Must fade and heaven be rolled up like a scroll;
But your white spirit still walks by my spirit.
[_A Voice singing in the wood._
MAURTEEN. There’s some one singing. Why, it’s but a child.
It sang, ‘The lonely of heart is withered away.’
A strange song for a child, but she sings sweetly.
Listen, listen!
[_Goes to door._
MARY. O, cling close to me,
Because I have said wicked things to-night.
THE VOICE. The wind blows out of the gates of the day,
The wind blows over the lonely of heart,
And the lonely of heart is withered away.
While the faeries dance in a place apart,
Shaking their milk-white feet in a ring,
Tossing their milk-white arms in the air;
For they hear the wind laugh and murmur and sing
Of a land where even the old are fair,
And even the wise are merry of tongue;
But I heard a reed of Coolaney say,
‘When the wind has laughed and murmured and sung
The lonely of heart is withered away!’
MAURTEEN. Being happy, I would have all others happy,
So I will bring her in out of the cold.
[_He brings in the faery child._
THE CHILD. [I tire of winds and waters and pale lights.
MAURTEEN. And that’s no wonder, for when night has fallen]
The wood’s a cold and a bewildering place,
But you are welcome here.
THE CHILD. I am welcome here.
[For when I tire of this warm little house]
But there is one here that must away, away.
MAURTEEN. O, listen to her dreamy and strange talk.
Are you not cold?
THE CHILD. I will crouch down beside you,
For I have run a long, long way this night.
BRIDGET. You have a comely shape.
MAURTEEN. Your hair is wet.
BRIDGET. I’ll warm your chilly feet.
MAURTEEN. You have come indeed
A long, long way--for I have never seen
Your pretty face--and must be tired and hungry,
Here is some bread and wine.
THE CHILD. The wine is bitter.
Old mother, have you no sweet food for me?
BRIDGET. I have some honey.
[_She goes into the next room._
MAURTEEN. You have coaxing ways,
The mother was quite cross before you came.
[BRIDGET _returns with the honey and fills a porringer with
milk_.
BRIDGET. She is the child of gentle people; look
At her white hands and at her pretty dress.
I’ve brought you some new milk, but wait a while
And I will put it to the fire to warm,
For things well fitted for poor folk like us
Would never please a high-born child like you.
THE CHILD. From dawn, when you must blow the fire ablaze,
You work your fingers to the bone, old mother.
The young may lie in bed and dream and hope,
But you must work your fingers to the bone
Because your heart is old.
BRIDGET. The young are idle.
THE CHILD. Your memories have made you wise, old father;
The young must sigh through many a dream and hope,
But you are wise because your heart is old.
[BRIDGET _gives her more bread and honey_.
MAURTEEN. O, who would think to find so young a girl
Loving old age and wisdom?
THE CHILD. No more, mother.
MAURTEEN. What a small bite! The milk is ready now. [_Hands it to
her._]
What a small sip!
THE CHILD. Put on my shoes, old mother.
For I would like to dance now I have eaten,
The reeds are dancing by Coolaney lake,
And I would like to dance until the reeds
And the white waves have danced themselves asleep.
[BRIDGET _puts on the shoes, and the_ CHILD _is about to dance,
but suddenly sees the crucifix and shrieks and covers her
eyes_.
What is that ugly thing on the black cross?
FATHER HART. You cannot know how naughty your words are!
That is our Blessed Lord.
THE CHILD. Hide it away!
BRIDGET. I have begun to be afraid again.
THE CHILD. Hide it away!
MAURTEEN. That would be wickedness!
BRIDGET. That would be sacrilege!
THE CHILD. The tortured thing!
Hide it away!
MAURTEEN. Her parents are to blame.
FATHER HART. That is the image of the Son of God.
THE CHILD [_caressing him_]. Hide it away, hide it away!
MAURTEEN. No, no.
FATHER HART. Because you are so young and like a bird,
That must take fright at every stir of the leaves.
I will go take it down.
THE CHILD. Hide it away!
And cover it out of sight and out of mind!
[FATHER HART _takes crucifix from wall and carries it towards
inner room_.
FATHER HART. Since you have come into this barony,
I will instruct you in our blessed faith;
And being so keen witted you’ll soon learn.
[_To the others._
We must be tender to all budding things,
Our Maker let no thought of Calvary
Trouble the morning stars in their first song.
[_Puts crucifix in inner room._
THE CHILD. Here is level ground for dancing; I will dance.
[_Sings._]
The wind blows out of the gates of the day,
The wind blows over the lonely of heart,
And the lonely of heart is withered away.
[_She dances._
MARY [_to_ SHAWN]. Just now when she came near I thought I heard
Other small steps beating upon the floor,
And a faint music blowing in the wind,
Invisible pipes giving her feet the tune.
SHAWN. I heard no steps but hers.
MARY. I hear them now,
The unholy powers are dancing in the house.
MAURTEEN. Come over here, and if you promise me
Not to talk wickedly of holy things
I will give you something.
THE CHILD. Bring it me, old father.
MAURTEEN. Here are some ribbons that I bought in the town
For my son’s wife--but she will let me give them
To tie up that wild hair the winds have tumbled.
THE CHILD. Come, tell me, do you love me?
MAURTEEN. Yes, I love you.
THE CHILD. Ah, but you love this fireside. Do you love me?
FATHER HART. When the Almighty puts so great a share
Of His own ageless youth into a creature,
To look is but to love.
THE CHILD. But you love Him?
BRIDGET. She is blaspheming.
THE CHILD. And do you love me too?
MARY. I do not know.
THE CHILD. You love that young man there,
Yet I could make you ride upon the winds,
[Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,]
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.
MARY. Queen of Angels and kind saints defend us!
Some dreadful thing will happen. A while ago
She took away the blessed quicken wood.
FATHER HART. You fear because of her unmeasured prattle;
She knows no better. Child, how old are you?
THE CHILD. When winter sleep is abroad my hair grows thin,
My feet unsteady. When the leaves awaken
My mother carries me in her golden arms;
I’ll soon put on my womanhood and marry
The spirits of wood and water, but who can tell
When I was born for the first time? I think
I am much older than the eagle cock
[That blinks and blinks on Ballygawley Hill,]
And he is the oldest thing under the moon.
FATHER HART. O she is of the faery people.
THE CHILD. One called,
I sent my messengers for milk and fire,
She called again and after that I came.
[_All except_ SHAWN _and_ MARY BRUIN _gather behind the priest
for protection_.
SHAWN [_rising_]. Though you have made all these obedient,
You have not charmed my sight and won from me
A wish or gift to make you powerful;
I’ll turn you from the house.
FATHER HART. No, I will face her.
THE CHILD. Because you took away the crucifix
I am so mighty that there’s none can pass,
Unless I will it, where my feet have danced
Or where I’ve whirled my finger-tops.
[SHAWN _tries to approach her and cannot_.
MAURTEEN. Look, look!
There something stops him--look how he moves his hands
As though he rubbed them on a wall of glass!
FATHER HART. I will confront this mighty spirit alone;
Be not afraid, the Father is with us,
[The Holy Martyrs and the Innocents,
The adoring Magi in their coats of mail,]
And He who died and rose on the third day,
[And all the nine angelic hierarchies.]
[_The_ CHILD _kneels upon the settle beside_ MARY _and puts her
arms about her_.
Cry, daughter, to the Angels and the Saints.
THE CHILD. You shall go with me, newly-married bride.
And gaze upon a merrier multitude.
[White-armed Nuala, Aengus of the Birds,
Feacra of the hurtling foam, and him
Who is the ruler of the Western Host,
Finvarra, and their Land of Heart’s Desire,]
Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,
But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song.
I kiss you and the world begins to fade.
SHAWN. Awake out of that trance--and cover up
Your eyes and ears.
FATHER HART. She must both look and listen,
For only the soul’s choice can save her now.
Come over to me, daughter; stand beside me;
Think of this house and of your duties in it.
THE CHILD. Stay and come with me, newly-married bride,
For if you hear him you grow like the rest;
Bear children, cook, and bend above the churn,
And wrangle over butter, fowl, and eggs,
Until at last, grown old and bitter of tongue,
You’re crouching there and shivering at the grave.
FATHER HART. Daughter, I point you out the way to Heaven.
THE CHILD. But I can lead you, newly-married bride,
Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,
Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,
Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue,
And where kind tongues bring no captivity;
For we are but obedient to the thoughts
That drift into the mind at a wink of the eye.
FATHER HART. By the dear Name of the One crucified,
I bid you, Mary Bruin, come to me.
THE CHILD. I keep you in the name of your own heart.
FATHER HART. It is because I put away the crucifix
That I am nothing, and my power is nothing.
I’ll bring it here again.
MAURTEEN [_clinging to him_]. No.
BRIDGET. Do not leave us.
FATHER HART. O, let me go before it is too late;
It is my sin alone that brought it all.
[_Singing outside._
THE CHILD. I hear them sing, ‘Come, newly-married bride,
Come, to the woods and waters and pale lights.’
MARY. I will go with you.
FATHER HART. She is lost, alas!
THE CHILD [_standing by the door_]. But clinging mortal hope must
fall from you,
For we who ride the winds, run on the waves,
And dance upon the mountains are more light
Than dewdrops on the banner of the dawn.
MARY. O, take me with you.
SHAWN. Beloved, I will keep you.
I’ve more than words, I have these arms to hold you,
Nor all the faery host, do what they please,
Shall ever make me loosen you from these arms.
MARY. Dear face! Dear voice!
THE CHILD. Come, newly-married bride.
MARY. I always loved her world--and yet--and yet----
THE CHILD. White bird, white bird, come with me, little bird.
MARY. She calls me!
THE CHILD. Come with me, little bird.
[_Distant dancing figures appear in the wood._
MARY. I can hear songs and dancing.
SHAWN. Stay with me.
MARY. I think that I would stay--and yet--and yet----
THE CHILD. Come, little bird with crest of gold.
MARY [_very softly_]. And yet----
THE CHILD. Come, little bird with silver feet!
[MARY BRUIN _dies, and the_ CHILD _goes_.
SHAWN. She is dead!
BRIDGET. Come from that image; body and soul are gone.
You have thrown your arms about a drift of leaves,
Or bole of an ash-tree changed into her image.
FATHER HART. Thus do the spirits of evil snatch their prey,
Almost out of the very hand of God;
And day by day their power is more and more,
And men and women leave old paths, for pride
Comes knocking with thin knuckles on the heart.
[_Outside there are dancing figures, and it may be a white bird,
and many voices singing_:
The wind blows out of the gates of the day,
The wind blows over the lonely of heart,
And the lonely of heart is withered away;
[While the faeries dance in a place apart,
Shaking their milk-white feet in a ring,
Tossing their milk-white arms in the air;
For they hear the wind laugh and murmur and sing
Of a land where even the old are fair,
And even the wise are merry of tongue;
But I heard a reed of Coolaney say--
‘When the wind has laughed and murmured and sung,
The lonely of heart is withered away.’]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE
‘THE LAND OF HEART’S DESIRE’
This little play was produced at the Avenue Theatre in the spring of
1894, with the following cast:--Maurteen Bruin, Mr. James Welch; Shawn
Bruin, Mr. A. E. W. Mason; Father Hart, Mr. G. R. Foss; Bridget Bruin,
Miss Charlotte Morland; Mary Bruin, Miss Winifred Fraser; A Faery Child,
Miss Dorothy Paget. It ran for a little over six weeks. It was revived
in America in 1901, when it was taken on tour by Mrs. Lemoyne. It has
been played two or three times professionally since then in America, and
a great many times in England and America by amateurs. Till lately it
was not part of the repertory of the Abbey Theatre, for I had grown to
dislike it without knowing what I disliked in it. This winter, however,
I have made many revisions, and now it plays well enough to give me
pleasure. It is printed in this book in the new form, which was acted
for the first time on February 22, 1912, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.
At the Abbey Theatre, where the platform of the stage comes out in front
of the curtain, the curtain falls before the priest’s last words. He
remains outside the curtain and the words are spoken to the audience
like an epilogue.--W. B. Y., 1912.
When revived last spring the passages between brackets were left
out.--W. B. Y., 1923.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR PLAYS FOR DANCERS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE
Two of these plays must be opened by the unfolding and folding of the
cloth, a substitute for the rising of the curtain, and all must be
closed by it. The others, _The Dreaming of the Bones_ and _Calvary_,
should have the same opening, unless played after plays of the same
kind, when it may seem a needless repetition. All must be played to the
accompaniment of drum and zither and flute, but on no account must the
words be spoken ‘through music’ in the fashionable way; and the players
must move a little stiffly and gravely like marionettes and, I think, to
the accompaniment of drum taps. I felt, however, during the performance
of _The Hawk’s Well_, the only one played up to this, that there was
much to discover. Should I make a serious attempt, which I may not,
being rather tired of the theatre, to arrange and supervise
performances, the dancing will give me most trouble, for I know but
vaguely what I want. I do not want any existing form of stage dancing,
but something with a smaller gamut of expression, something more
reserved, more self-controlled, as befits performers within arm’s reach
of their audience.
Mr. Edmund Dulac designed the masks and costumes used in the first
performance of _The Hawk’s Well_. The beautiful mask of Cuchulain may, I
think, serve for Dervorgilla, and if I write plays and organise
performances on any scale and with any system, I shall hope for a small
number of typical masks, each capable of use in several plays. The face
of the speaker should be as much a work of art as the lines that he
speaks or the costume that he wears, that all may be as artificial as
possible. Perhaps in the end one would write plays for certain masks. If
some fine sculptor should create for my _Calvary_, for instance, the
masks of Judas, of Lazarus, and of Christ, would not this suggest other
plays now, or many generations from now, and possess one cannot tell
what philosophical virility? The mask, apart from its beauty, may
suggest new situations at a moment when the old ones seem exhausted;
_The Only Jealousy of Emer_ was written to find what dramatic effect one
could get out of a mask, changed while the player remains upon the stage
to suggest a change of personality. At the end of this book there is
some music by Mr. Rummell, which my friends tell me is both difficult
and beautiful, for _The Dreaming of the Bones_. It will require, I am
told, either a number of flutes of which the flute-player will pick now
one, now another, or an elaborate modern flute, which would not look in
keeping. I prefer the first suggestion. I notice that Mr. Rummell has
written no music for the dance, and I have some vague memory that when
we talked it over in Paris he felt that he could not without the
dancer’s help. There is also music for _The Hawk’s Well_ by Mr. Dulac,
which is itself an exposition of method, for it was written after a
number of rehearsals and for instruments that have great pictorial
effect....
_At the Hawk’s Well_ and _The Only Jealousy of Emer_ are the first and
last plays of a series of four dealing with Cuchulain’s life (see _Plays
in Prose and Verse_).
That I might write _The Dreaming of the Bones_, Mr. W. A. Henderson with
great kindness wrote out for me all historical allusions to
‘Dervorgilla’; but neither that nor any of these plays could have
existed if Mr. Edmund Dulac had not taught me the value and beauty of
the mask and rediscovered how to design and make it.
W. B. YEATS.
_July 1920._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: The Guardian of the Well in ‘At the Hawk’s Well.’]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
AT THE HAWK’S WELL
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_PERSONS OF THE PLAY_
THREE MUSICIANS (_their faces made up to resemble masks_).
THE GUARDIAN OF THE WELL (_with face made up to resemble a mask_).
AN OLD MAN (_wearing a mask_).
A YOUNG MAN (_wearing a mask_).
_The Time--the Irish Heroic Age._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_The stage is any bare space before a wall against which stands a
patterned screen. A drum and a gong and a zither have been laid close
to the screen before the play begins. If necessary, they can be
carried in, after the audience is seated, by the_ FIRST MUSICIAN,
_who also can attend to the lights if there is any special lighting.
We had two lanterns upon posts--designed by Mr. Dulac--at the outer
corners of the stage, but they did not give enough light, and we
found it better to play by the light of a large chandelier. Indeed, I
think, so far as my present experience goes, that the most effective
lighting is the lighting we are most accustomed to in our rooms.
These masked players seem stranger when there is no mechanical means
of separating them from us. The_ FIRST MUSICIAN _carries with him a
folded black cloth and goes to the centre of the stage towards the
front and stands motionless, the folded cloth hanging from between
his hands. The two musicians enter and, after standing a moment at
either side of the stage, go towards him and slowly unfold the cloth,
singing as they do so_:
I call to the eye of the mind
A well long choked up and dry
And boughs long stripped by the wind,
And I call to the mind’s eye
Pallor of an ivory face,
Its lofty dissolute air,
A man climbing up to a place
The salt sea wind has swept bare.
[Illustration: Design for Black Cloth used in ‘At the Hawk’s Well.’]
_As they unfold the cloth, they go backward a little so that the
stretched cloth and the wall make a triangle with the_ FIRST MUSICIAN
_at the apex supporting the centre of the cloth. On the black cloth
is a gold pattern suggesting a hawk. The_ SECOND _and_ THIRD
MUSICIANS _now slowly fold up the cloth again, pacing with a rhythmic
movement of the arms towards the_ FIRST MUSICIAN _and singing_:
What were his life soon done!
Would he lose by that or win?
A mother that saw her son
Doubled over a speckled shin,
Cross-grained with ninety years,
Would cry, ‘How little worth
Were all my hopes and fears
And the hard pain of his birth!’
_The words ‘a speckled shin’ are familiar to readers of Irish legendary
stories in descriptions of old men bent double over the fire. While
the cloth has been spread out, the_ GUARDIAN OF THE WELL _has entered
and is now crouching upon the ground. She is entirely covered by a
black cloak. The three musicians have taken their places against the
wall beside their instruments of music; they will accompany the
movements of the players with gong or drum or zither._
FIRST MUSICIAN [_singing_]
The boughs of the hazel shake,
The sun goes down in the west.
SECOND MUSICIAN [_singing_]
The heart would be always awake,
The heart would turn to its rest.
[_They now go to one side of the stage rolling up the cloth. A_
GIRL _has taken her place by a square blue cloth representing a
well. She is motionless._
FIRST MUSICIAN [_speaking_]. Night falls;
The mountain-side grows dark;
The withered leaves of the hazel
Half-choke the dry bed of the well;
The guardian of the well is sitting
Upon the old grey stone at its side,
Worn out from raking its dry bed,
Worn out from gathering up the leaves.
Her heavy eyes
Know nothing, or but look upon stone.
The wind that blows out of the sea
Turns over the heaped-up leaves at her side;
They rustle and diminish.
SECOND MUSICIAN. I am afraid of this place.
BOTH MUSICIANS [_singing_]
‘Why should I sleep?’ the heart cries.
‘For the wind, the salt wind, the sea wind,
Is beating a cloud through the skies;
I would wander always like the wind.’
_An_ OLD MAN _enters through the audience_.
FIRST MUSICIAN [_speaking_]. That old man climbs up hither,
Who has been watching by his well
These fifty years.
He is all doubled up with age;
The old thorn-trees are doubled so
Among the rocks where he is climbing.
[_The_ OLD MAN _stands for a moment motionless by the side of the
stage with bowed head. He lifts his head at the sound of a drum
tap. He goes towards the front of the stage moving to the taps
of the drum. He crouches and moves his hands as if making a
fire. His movements, like those of the other persons of the
play, suggest a marionette._
[Illustration: Musician in ‘At the Hawk’s Well.’]
FIRST MUSICIAN [_speaking_]. He has made a little heap of leaves;
He lays the dry sticks on the leaves
And, shivering with cold, he has taken up
The fire-stick and socket from its hole.
He whirls it round to get a flame;
And now the dry sticks take the fire
And now the fire leaps up and shines
Upon the hazels and the empty well.
MUSICIANS [_singing_]
‘O wind, O salt wind, O sea wind!’
Cries the heart, ‘it is time to sleep;
Why wander and nothing to find?
Better grow old and sleep.’
OLD MAN [_speaking_]. Why don’t you speak to me? Why don’t you say,
‘Are you not weary gathering those sticks?
Are not your fingers cold?’ You have not one word,
While yesterday you spoke three times. You said:
‘The well is full of hazel leaves.’ You said:
‘The wind is from the west.’ And after that:
‘If there is rain it’s likely there’ll be mud.’
To-day you are as stupid as a fish,
No, worse, worse, being less lively and as dumb.
[_He goes nearer._
Your eyes are dazed and heavy. If the Sidhe
Must have a guardian to clean out the well
And drive the cattle off, they might choose somebody
That can be pleasant and companionable
Once in the day. Why do you stare like that?
You had that glassy look about the eyes
Last time it happened. Do you know anything?
It is enough to drive an old man crazy
To look all day upon these broken rocks,
And ragged thorns, and that one stupid face,
And speak and get no answer.
YOUNG MAN [_who has entered through the audience during the last
speech_]. Then speak to me,
For youth is not more patient than old age;
And though I have trod the rocks for half a day
I cannot find what I am looking for.
OLD MAN. Who speaks?
Who comes so suddenly into this place
Where nothing thrives? If I may judge by the gold
On head and feet and glittering in your coat,
You are not of those who hate the living world.
[Illustration: Old Man in ‘At the Hawk’s Well.’]
YOUNG MAN. I am named Cuchulain, I am Sualtam’s son.
OLD MAN. I have never heard that name.
CUCHULAIN. It is not unknown.
I have an ancient house beyond the sea.
OLD MAN. What mischief brings you hither--you are like those
Who are crazy for the shedding of men’s blood,
And for the love of women?
YOUNG MAN. A rumour has led me,
A story told over the wine towards dawn.
I rose from table, found a boat, spread sail
And with a lucky wind under the sail
Crossed waves that have seemed charmed, and found this shore.
OLD MAN. There is no house to sack among these hills
Nor beautiful woman to be carried off.
YOUNG MAN. You should be native here, for that rough tongue
Matches the barbarous spot. You can, it may be,
Lead me to what I seek, a well wherein
Three hazels drop their nuts and withered leaves,
And where a solitary girl keeps watch
Among grey boulders. He who drinks, they say,
Of that miraculous water lives for ever.
OLD MAN. And are there not before your eyes at the instant
Grey boulders and a solitary girl
And three stripped hazels?
YOUNG MAN. But there is no well.
OLD MAN. Can you see nothing yonder?
YOUNG MAN. I but see
A hollow among stones half-full of leaves.
OLD MAN. And do you think so great a gift is found
By no more toil than spreading out a sail,
And climbing a steep hill? Oh, folly of youth,
Why should that hollow place fill up for you,
That will not fill for me? I have lain in wait
For more than fifty years to find it empty,
Or but to find the stupid wind of the sea
Drive round the perishable leaves.
YOUNG MAN. So it seems
There is some moment when the water fills it.
OLD MAN. A secret moment that the holy shades
That dance upon the desolate mountain know,
And not a living man, and when it comes
The water has scarce plashed before it is gone.
[Illustration: Mask for Old Man in ‘At the Hawk’s Well.’]
YOUNG MAN. I will stand here and wait. Why should the luck
Of Sualtam’s son desert him now? For never
Have I had long to wait for anything.
OLD MAN. No! Go from this accursed place, this place
Belongs to me, that girl there and those others,
Deceivers of men.
YOUNG MAN. And who are you who rail
Upon those dancers that all others bless?
OLD MAN. One whom the dancers cheat. I came like you
When young in body and in mind, and blown
By what had seemed to me a lucky sail.
The well was dry, I sat upon its edge,
I waited the miraculous flood, I waited
While the years passed and withered me away.
I have snared the birds for food and eaten grass
And drunk the rain, and neither in dark nor shine
Wandered too far away to have heard the plash,
And yet the dancers have deceived me. Thrice
I have awakened from a sudden sleep
To find the stones were wet.
YOUNG MAN. My luck is strong,
It will not leave me waiting, nor will they
That dance among the stones put me asleep;
If I grow drowsy I can pierce my foot.
OLD MAN. No, do not pierce it, for the foot is tender,
It feels pain much. But find your sail again
And leave the well to me, for it belongs
To all that’s old and withered.
YOUNG MAN. No, I stay.
[_The_ GIRL _gives the cry of the hawk_.
There is that bird again.
OLD MAN. There is no bird.
YOUNG MAN. It sounded like the sudden cry of a hawk,
But there’s no wing in sight. As I came hither
A great grey hawk swept down out of the sky,
And though I have good hawks, the best in the world
I had fancied, I have not seen its like. It flew
As though it would have torn me with its beak,
Or blinded me, smiting with that great wing.
I had to draw my sword to drive it off,
And after that it flew from rock to rock.
I pelted it with stones, a good half-hour,
And just before I had turned the big rock there
And seen this place, it seemed to vanish away.
Could I but find a means to bring it down
I’d hood it.
[Illustration: Mask for Young Man in ‘At the Hawk’s Well.’]
OLD MAN. The woman of the Sidhe herself,
The mountain witch, the unappeasable shadow.
She is always flitting upon this mountain-side,
To allure or to destroy. When she has shown
Herself to the fierce women of the hills
Under that shape they offer sacrifice
And arm for battle. There falls a curse
On all who have gazed in her unmoistened eyes;
So get you gone while you have that proud step
And confident voice, for not a man alive
Has so much luck that he can play with it.
Those that have long to live should fear her most,
The old are cursed already. That curse may be
Never to win a woman’s love and keep it;
Or always to mix hatred in the love;
Or it may be that she will kill your children,
That you will find them, their throats torn and bloody,
Or you will be so maddened that you kill them
With your own hand.
YOUNG MAN. Have you been set down there
To threaten all who come, and scare them off?
You seem as dried up as the leaves and sticks,
As though you had no part in life.
[GIRL _gives hawk cry again_.
That cry!
There is that cry again. That woman made it,
But why does she cry out as the hawk cries?
OLD MAN. It was her mouth, and yet not she, that cried.
It was that shadow cried behind her mouth;
And now I know why she has been so stupid
All the day through, and had such heavy eyes.
Look at her shivering now, the terrible life
Is slipping through her veins. She is possessed.
Who knows whom she will murder or betray
Before she awakes in ignorance of it all,
And gathers up the leaves! But they’ll be wet;
The water will have come and gone again;
That shivering is the sign. Oh, get you gone,
At any moment now I shall hear it bubble.
If you are good you will leave it. I am old,
And if I do not drink it now, will never;
I have been watching all my life and maybe
Only a little cupful will bubble up.
[Illustration: Young Man in ‘At the Hawk’s Well.’]
YOUNG MAN. I’ll take it in my hands. We shall both drink,
And even if there are but a few drops,
Share them.
OLD MAN. But swear that I may drink the first;
The young are greedy, and if you drink the first
You’ll drink it all. Ah, you have looked at her;
She has felt your gaze and turned her eyes on us;
I cannot bear her eyes, they are not of this world,
Nor moist, nor faltering; they are no girl’s eyes.
[_He covers his head. The_ GUARDIAN OF THE WELL _throws off her
cloak and rises. Her dress under the cloak suggests a hawk._
YOUNG MAN. Why do you gaze upon me with the eyes of a hawk?
I am not afraid of you, bird, woman, or witch.
[_He goes to the side of the well, which the_ GUARDIAN OF THE
WELL _has left_.
Do what you will, I shall not leave this place
Till I have grown immortal like yourself.
[_He has sat down, the_ GIRL _has begun to dance, moving like a
hawk. The_ OLD MAN _sleeps. The dance goes on for some time._
FIRST MUSICIAN [_singing or half-singing_]
O God, protect me
From a horrible deathless body
Sliding through the veins of a sudden.
[_The dance goes on for some time. The_ YOUNG MAN _rises slowly_.
FIRST MUSICIAN [_speaking_]. The madness has laid hold upon him now,
For he grows pale and staggers to his feet.
[_The dance goes on._
YOUNG MAN. Run where you will,
Grey bird, you shall be perched upon my wrist,
Some were called queens and yet have been perched there.
[_The dance goes on._
FIRST MUSICIAN [_speaking_]. I have heard water plash! it comes, it
comes;
It glitters among the stones and he has heard the plash;
Look, he has turned his head.
[_The Hawk has gone out. The_ YOUNG MAN _drops his spear as if in
a dream and goes out_.
MUSICIANS [_singing_]
He has lost what may not be found
Till men heap his burial mound
And all the history ends.
He might have lived at his ease,
An old dog’s head on his knees,
Among his children and friends.
[_The_ OLD MAN _creeps up to the well_.
OLD MAN. The accursed shadows have deluded me,
The stones are dark and yet the well is empty;
The water flowed and emptied while I slept;
You have deluded me my whole life through.
Accursed dancers, you have stolen my life.
That there should be such evil in a shadow!
YOUNG MAN [_entering_]. She has fled from me and hidden in the
rocks.
OLD MAN. She has but led you from the fountain. Look!
The stones and leaves are dark where it has flowed,
Yet there is not a drop to drink.
[_The Musicians cry ‘Eofe! Eofe!’ and strike gong._
YOUNG MAN. What are those cries?
What is that sound that runs along the hill?
Who are they that beat a sword upon a shield?
OLD MAN. She has roused up the fierce women of the hills,
Eofe, and all her troop, to take your life,
And never till you are lying in the earth
Can you know rest.
YOUNG MAN. The clash of arms again!
OLD MAN. Oh, do not go! The mountain is accursed;
Stay with me, I have nothing more to lose,
I do not now deceive you.
YOUNG MAN. I will face them.
[_He goes out no longer as if in a dream, but shouldering his
spear and calling_:
He comes! Cuchulain, son of Sualtam, comes!
[_The Musicians stand up; one goes to centre with folded cloth.
The others unfold it. While they do so they sing. During the
singing, and while hidden by the cloth, the_ OLD MAN _goes out.
When the play is performed with Mr. Dulac’s music, the
Musicians do not rise or unfold the cloth till after they have
sung the words ‘a bitter life.’_
[_Songs for the unfolding and folding of the cloth._]
Come to me, human faces,
Familiar memories;
I have found hateful eyes
Among the desolate places,
Unfaltering, unmoistened eyes.
Folly alone I cherish,
I choose it for my share;
Being but a mouthful of air,
I am content to perish;
I am but a mouthful of sweet air.
O lamentable shadows,
Obscurity of strife,
I choose a pleasant life,
Among indolent meadows;
Wisdom must live a bitter life.
[_They then fold up the cloth, singing._
‘The man that I praise,’
Cries out the empty well,
‘Lives all his days
Where a hand on the bell
Can call the milch cows
To the comfortable door of his house.
Who but an idiot would praise
Dry stones in a well?
‘The man that I praise,’
Cries out the leafless tree,
‘Has married and stays
By an old hearth, and he
On naught has set store
But children and dogs on the floor.
Who but an idiot would praise
A withered tree?’
[_They go out._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE ONLY JEALOUSY OF EMER
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_PERSONS OF THE PLAY_
THREE MUSICIANS (_their faces made up to resemble masks_).
THE GHOST OF CUCHULAIN (_wearing a mask_).
THE FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN (_wearing a mask_).
EMER } (_masked, or their faces made up
EITHNE INGUBA } to resemble masks_).
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE (_wearing a mask_).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_Enter Musicians, who are dressed and made up as in ‘At the Hawk’s
Well.’ They have the same musical instruments, which can either be
already upon the stage or be brought in by the_ FIRST MUSICIAN
_before he stands in the centre with the cloth between his hands, or
by a player when the cloth has been unfolded. The stage as before can
be against the wall of any room, and the same black cloth can be used
as in ‘At the Hawk’s Well.’_
[_Song for the folding and unfolding of the cloth._]
FIRST MUSICIAN. A woman’s beauty is like a white
Frail bird, like a white sea-bird alone
At daybreak after stormy night
Between two furrows upon the ploughed land:
A sudden storm and it was thrown
Between dark furrows upon the ploughed land.
How many centuries spent
The sedentary soul
In toils of measurement
Beyond eagle or mole,
Beyond hearing or seeing,
Or Archimedes’ guess,
To raise into being
That loveliness?
A strange unserviceable thing,
A fragile, exquisite, pale shell,
That the vast troubled waters bring
To the loud sands before day has broken.
The storm arose and suddenly fell
Amid the dark before day had broken.
What death? what discipline?
What bonds no man could unbind
Being imagined within
The labyrinth of the mind,
What pursuing or fleeing,
What wounds, what bloody press
Dragged into being
This loveliness?
[_When the cloth is folded again the Musicians take their place
against the wall. The folding of the cloth shows on one side of
the stage the curtained bed or litter on which lies a man in
his grave-clothes. He wears an heroic mask. Another man with
exactly similar clothes and mask crouches near the front._ EMER
_is sitting beside the bed_.
FIRST MUSICIAN [_speaking_]. I call before the eyes a roof
With cross-beams darkened by smoke;
A fisher’s net hangs from a beam,
A long oar lies against the wall.
I call up a poor fisher’s house;
A man lies dead or swooning,
That amorous man,
That amorous, violent man, renowned Cuchulain,
Queen Emer at his side.
At her own bidding all the rest have gone;
But now one comes on hesitating feet,
Young Eithne Inguba, Cuchulain’s mistress.
She stands a moment in the open door,
Beyond the open door the bitter sea,
The shining, bitter sea, is crying out,
[_singing_] White shell, white wing!
I will not choose for my friend
A frail unserviceable thing
That drifts and dreams, and but knows
That waters are without end
And that wind blows.
EMER [_speaking_]. Come hither, come sit down beside the bed;
You need not be afraid, for I myself
Sent for you, Eithne Inguba.
EITHNE INGUBA. No, Madam,
I have too deeply wronged you to sit there.
EMER. Of all the people in the world we two,
And we alone, may watch together here,
Because we have loved him best.
EITHNE INGUBA. And is he dead?
EMER. Although they have dressed him out in his grave-clothes
And stretched his limbs, Cuchulain is not dead;
The very heavens when that day’s at hand,
So that his death may not lack ceremony,
Will throw out fires, and the earth grow red with blood.
There shall not be a scullion but foreknows it
Like the world’s end.
EITHNE INGUBA. How did he come to this?
EMER. Towards noon in the assembly of the kings
He met with one who seemed a while most dear.
The kings stood around; some quarrel was blown up;
He drove him out and killed him on the shore
At Baile’s tree, and he who was so killed
Was his own son begot of some wild woman
When he was young, or so I have heard it said;
And thereupon, knowing what man he had killed,
And being mad with sorrow, he ran out;
And after, to his middle in the foam
With shield before him and with sword in hand,
He fought the deathless sea. The kings looked on
And not a king dared stretch an arm, or even
Dared call his name, but all stood wondering
In that dumb stupor like cattle in a gale,
Until at last, as though he had fixed his eyes
On a new enemy, he waded out
Until the water had swept over him;
But the waves washed his senseless image up
And laid it at this door.
EITHNE INGUBA. How pale he looks!
EMER. He is not dead.
EITHNE INGUBA. You have not kissed his lips
Nor laid his head upon your breast.
EMER. It may be
An image has been put into his place,
A sea-borne log bewitched into his likeness,
Or some stark horseman grown too old to ride
Among the troops of Mananan, Son of the Sea,
Now that his joints are stiff.
EITHNE INGUBA. Cry out his name.
All that are taken from our sight, they say,
Loiter amid the scenery of their lives
For certain hours or days, and should he hear
He might, being angry, drive the changeling out.
EMER. It is hard to make them hear amid their darkness,
And it is long since I could call him home;
I am but his wife, but if you cry aloud
With that sweet voice that is so dear to him
He cannot help but listen.
EITHNE INGUBA. He loves me best,
Being his newest love, but in the end
Will love the woman best who loved him first
And loved him through the years when love seemed lost.
EMER. I have that hope, the hope that some day somewhere
We’ll sit together at the hearth again.
EITHNE INGUBA. Women like me, the violent hour passed over,
Are flung into some corner like old nutshells.
Cuchulain, listen.
EMER. No, not yet, for first
I’ll cover up his face to hide the sea;
And throw new logs upon the hearth and stir
The half-burnt logs until they break in flame.
Old Mananan’s unbridled horses come
Out of the sea, and on their backs his horsemen;
But all the enchantments of the dreaming foam
Dread the hearth-fire.
[_She pulls the curtains of the bed so as to hide the sick man’s
face, that the actor may change his mask unseen. She goes to
one side of platform and moves her hand as though putting logs
on a fire and stirring it into a blaze. While she makes these
movements the Musicians play, marking the movements with drum
and flute perhaps._
_Having finished she stands beside the imaginary fire at a
distance from_ CUCHULAIN _and_ EITHNE INGUBA.
Call on Cuchulain now.
EITHNE INGUBA. Can you not hear my voice?
EMER. Bend over him;
Call out dear secrets till you have touched his heart
If he lies there; and if he is not there
Till you have made him jealous.
EITHNE INGUBA. Cuchulain, listen.
EMER. Those words sound timidly; to be afraid
Because his wife is but three paces off,
When there is so great a need, were but to prove
The man that chose you made but a poor choice:
We’re but two women struggling with the sea.
EITHNE INGUBA. O my beloved, pardon me, that I
Have been ashamed and you in so great need.
I have never sent a message or called out,
Scarce had a longing for your company
But you have known and come; and if indeed
You are lying there, stretch out your arms and speak;
Open your mouth and speak, for to this hour
My company has made you talkative.
What ails your tongue, or what has closed your ears?
Our passion had not chilled when we were parted
On the pale shore under the breaking dawn.
He cannot speak: or else his ears are closed
And no sound reaches him.
EMER. Then kiss that image;
The pressure of your mouth upon his mouth
May reach him where he is.
EITHNE INGUBA [_starting back_]. It is no man.
I felt some evil thing that dried my heart
When my lips touched it.
EMER. No, his body stirs;
The pressure of your mouth has called him home;
He has thrown the changeling out.
EITHNE INGUBA [_going further off_]. Look at that arm;
That arm is withered to the very socket.
EMER [_going up to the bed_]. What do you come for; and from where?
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. I have come
From Mananan’s court upon a bridleless horse.
EMER. What one among the Sidhe has dared to lie
Upon Cuchulain’s bed and take his image?
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. I am named Bricriu--not the man--that Bricriu,
Maker of discord among gods and men,
Called Bricriu of the Sidhe.
EMER. Come for what purpose?
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN [_sitting up parting curtain and showing its
distorted face, as_ EITHNE INGUBA _goes out_]. I show my face and
everything he loves
Must fly away.
EMER. You people of the wind
Are full of lying speech and mockery:
I have not fled your face.
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. You are not loved.
EMER. And therefore have no dread to meet your eyes
And to demand him of you.
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. For that I have come.
You have but to pay the price and he is free.
EMER. Do the Sidhe bargain?
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. When they would free a captive
They take in ransom a less valued thing.
The fisher when some knowledgeable man
Restores to him his wife, or son, or daughter,
Knows he must lose a boat or net, or it may be
The cow that gives his children milk; and some
Have offered their own lives. I do not ask
Your life, or any valuable thing;
You spoke but now of the mere chance that some day
You’d be the apple of his eye again
When old and ailing, but renounce that chance
And he shall live again.
EMER. I do not question
But you have brought ill luck on all he loves;
And now, because I am thrown beyond your power
Unless your words are lies, you come to bargain.
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. You loved your mastery, when but newly married,
And I love mine for all my withered arm;
You have but to put yourself into that power
And he shall live again.
EMER. No, never, never.
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. You dare not be accursed, yet he has dared.
EMER. I have but two joyous thoughts, two things I prize,
A hope, a memory, and now you claim that hope.
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. He’ll never sit beside you at the hearth
Or make old bones, but die of wounds and toil
On some far shore or mountain, a strange woman
Beside his mattress.
EMER. You ask for my one hope
That you may bring your curse on all about him.
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. You’ve watched his loves and you have not been
jealous
Knowing that he would tire, but do those tire
That love the Sidhe?
EMER. What dancer of the Sidhe,
What creature of the reeling moon has pursued him?
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. I have but to touch your eyes and give them
sight;
But stand at my left side.
[_He touches her eyes with his left hand, the right being
withered._
EMER. My husband there.
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. But out of reach--I have dissolved the dark
That hid him from your eyes, but not that other
That’s hidden you from his.
EMER. Husband, husband!
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. Be silent, he is but a phantom now
And he can neither touch, nor hear, nor see;
The longing and the cries have drawn him hither.
He heard no sound, heard no articulate sound;
They could but banish rest, and make him dream,
And in that dream, as do all dreaming shades
Before they are accustomed to their freedom,
He has taken his familiar form; and yet
He crouches there not knowing where he is
Or at whose side he is crouched.
[_A_ WOMAN OF THE SIDHE _has entered and stands a little inside
the door_.
EMER. Who is this woman?
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. She has hurried from the Country-Under-Wave
And dreamed herself into that shape that he
May glitter in her basket; for the Sidhe
Are dextrous fishers and they fish for men
With dreams upon the hook.
EMER. And so that woman
Has hid herself in this disguise and made
Herself into a lie.
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. A dream is body;
The dead move ever towards a dreamless youth
And when they dream no more return no more;
And those more holy shades that never lived
But visit you in dreams.
EMER. I know her sort.
They find our men asleep, weary with war,
Or weary with the chase, and kiss their lips
And drop their hair upon them; from that hour
Our men, who yet knew nothing of it all,
Are lonely, and when at fall of night we press
Their hearts upon our hearts their hearts are cold.
[_She draws a knife from her girdle._
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. And so you think to wound her with a knife.
She has an airy body. Look and listen;
I have not given you eyes and ears for nothing.
[_The_ WOMAN OF THE SIDHE _moves round the crouching_ GHOST OF
CUCHULAIN _at front of stage in a dance that grows gradually
quicker, as he slowly awakes. At moments she may drop her hair
upon his head but she does not kiss him. She is accompanied by
string and flute and drum. Her mask and clothes must suggest
gold or bronze or brass or silver, so that she seems more an
idol than a human being. This suggestion may be repeated in her
movements. Her hair, too, must keep the metallic suggestion._
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. Who is it stands before me there
Shedding such light from limb and hair
As when the moon, complete at last
With every labouring crescent past,
And lonely with extreme delight,
Flings out upon the fifteenth night?
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. Because I long I am not complete.
What pulled your hands about your feet
And your head down upon your knees,
And hid your face?
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. Old memories:
A dying boy, with handsome face
Upturned upon a beaten place;
A sacred yew-tree on a strand;
A woman that held in steady hand,
In all the happiness of her youth
Before her man had broken troth,
A burning wisp to light the door;
And many a round or crescent more;
Dead men and women. Memories
Have pulled my head upon my knees.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. Could you that have loved many a woman
That did not reach beyond the human,
Lacking a day to be complete,
Love one that though her heart can beat,
Lacks it but by an hour or so?
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. I know you now, for long ago
I met you on the mountain-side,
Beside a well that seemed long dry,
Beside old thorns where the hawk flew.
I held out arms and hands; but you,
That now seem friendly, fled away
Half woman and half bird of prey.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. Hold out your arms and hands again;
You were not so dumbfounded when
I was that bird of prey, and yet
I am all woman now.
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. I am not
The young and passionate man I was
And though that brilliant light surpass
All crescent forms, my memories
Weigh down my hands, abash my eyes.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. Then kiss my mouth. Though memory
Be beauty’s bitterest enemy
I have no dread, for at my kiss
Memory on the moment vanishes:
Nothing but beauty can remain.
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. And shall I never know again
Intricacies of blind remorse?
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. Time shall seem to stay his course;
When your mouth and my mouth meet
All my round shall be complete
Imagining all its circles run;
And there shall be oblivion
Even to quench Cuchulain’s drouth,
Even to still that heart.
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. Your mouth.
[_They are about to kiss, he turns away._
O Emer, Emer.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. So then it is she
Made you impure with memory.
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. Still in that dream I see you stand,
A burning wisp in your right hand,
To wait my coming to the house,
As when our parents married us.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. Being among the dead you love her
That valued every slut above her
While you still lived.
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. O my lost Emer.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. And there is not a loose-tongued schemer
But could draw you, if not dead,
From her table and her bed.
But what could make you fit to wive
With flesh and blood, being born to live
Where no one speaks of broken troth,
For all have washed out of their eyes
Wind-blown dirt of their memories
To improve their sight?
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. Your mouth, your mouth.
[_Their lips approach, but_ CUCHULAIN _turns away as_ EMER
_speaks_.
EMER. If but the dead will set him free
That I may speak with him at whiles
By the hearth-stone, I am content--
Content that he shall turn on me
Eyes that the cold moon, or the vague sea,
Or what I know not’s made indifferent.
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. What a wise silence has fallen in this dark!
I know you now in all your ignorance
Of all whereby a lover’s quiet is rent.
What dread so great as that he should forget
The least chance sight or sound, or scratch or mark
On an old door, or frail bird heard and seen
In the incredible clear light love cast
All round about her some forlorn lost day?
That face, though fine enough, is a fool’s face
And there’s a folly in the deathless Sidhe
Beyond man’s reach.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. I told you to forget
After my fashion; you would have none of it;
So now you may forget in a man’s fashion.
There’s an unbridled horse at the sea’s edge;
Mount; it will carry you in an eye’s wink
To where the King of Country-Under-Wave,
Old Mananan, nods above the board and moves
His chessmen in a dream. Demand your life
And come again on the unbridled horse.
GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. Forgive me those rough words. How could you know
That man is held to those whom he has loved
By pain they gave, or pain that he has given,
Intricacies of pain.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. I am ashamed
That being of the deathless shades I chose
A man so knotted to impurity.
[_The_ GHOST OF CUCHULAIN _goes out_.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE [_to_ FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN]. To you that have no
living light, being dropped
From a last leprous crescent of the moon,
I owe it all.
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. Because you have failed
I must forego your thanks, I that took pity
Upon your love and carried out your plan
To tangle all his life and make it nothing
That he might turn to you.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. Was it from pity
You taught the woman to prevail against me?
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. You know my nature--by what name I am called.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. Was it from pity that you hid the truth
That men are bound to women by the wrongs
They do or suffer?
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. You know what being I am.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. I have been mocked and disobeyed--your power
Was more to you than my good-will, and now
I’ll have you learn what my ill-will can do;
I lay you under bonds upon the instant
To stand before your King and face the charge
And take the punishment.
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. I’ll stand there first,
And tell my story first, and Mananan
Knows that his own harsh sea made my heart cold.
WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. My horse is there and shall outrun your horse.
[_The_ FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN _falls back, the_ WOMAN OF THE SIDHE
_goes out. Drum taps, music resembling horse hoofs._
EITHNE INGUBA [_entering quickly_]. I heard the beat of hoofs, but
saw no horse,
And then came other hoofs, and after that
I heard low angry cries and thereupon
I ceased to be afraid.
EMER. Cuchulain wakes.
[_The figure turns round. It once more wears the heroic mask._
CUCHULAIN. Your arms, your arms. O Eithne Inguba,
I have been in some strange place and am afraid.
[_The_ FIRST MUSICIAN _comes to the front of stage, the others
from each side and unfold the cloth singing_.
[_Song for the unfolding and folding of the cloth._]
THE MUSICIANS
Why does your heart beat thus?
Plain to be understood
I have met in a man’s house
A statue of solitude,
Moving there and walking;
Its strange heart beating fast
For all our talking.
O still that heart at last.
O bitter reward
Of many a tragic tomb!
And we though astonished are dumb
And give but a sigh and a word,
A passing word.
Although the door be shut
And all seem well enough,
Although wide world hold not
A man but will give you his love
The moment he has looked at you,
He that has loved the best
May turn from a statue
His too human breast.
O bitter reward
Of many a tragic tomb!
And we though astonished are dumb
Or give but a sigh and a word,
A passing word.
What makes your heart so beat?
Is there no man at your side?
When beauty is complete
Your own thought will have died
And danger not be diminished;
Dimmed at three-quarter light
When moon’s round is finished
The stars are out of sight.
O bitter reward
Of many a tragic tomb!
And we though astonished are dumb
Or give but a sigh and a word,
A passing word.
[_When the cloth is folded again the stage is bare._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE DREAMING OF THE BONES
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_PERSONS OF THE PLAY_
THREE MUSICIANS (_their faces made up to resemble masks_).
A YOUNG MAN.
A STRANGER (_wearing a mask_).
A YOUNG GIRL (_wearing a mask_).
_Time_--1916.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The stage is any bare place in a room close to the wall. A screen, with
a pattern of mountain and sky, can stand against the wall, or a
curtain with a like pattern hang upon it, but the pattern must only
symbolise or suggest. One musician enters and then two others; the
first stands singing, as in preceding plays, while the others take
their places. Then all three sit down against the wall by their
instruments, which are already there--a drum, a zither, and a flute.
Or they unfold a cloth as in ‘At the Hawk’s Well,’ while the
instruments are carried in.
[_Song for the folding and unfolding of the cloth._]
FIRST MUSICIAN
[_or all three musicians, singing_]
Why does my heart beat so?
Did not a shadow pass?
It passed by a moment ago.
Who can have trod in the grass?
What rogue is night-wandering?
Have not old writers said
That dizzy dreams can spring
From the dry bones of the dead?
And many a night it seems
That all the valley fills
With those fantastic dreams.
They overflow the hills,
So passionate is a shade,
Like wine that fills to the top
A grey-green cup of jade,
Or maybe an agate cup.
[_The three Musicians are now seated by the drum, flute, and
zither at the back of the stage. The_ FIRST MUSICIAN _speaks_.
The hour before dawn and the moon covered up;
The little village of Abbey is covered up;
The little narrow trodden way that runs
From the white road to the Abbey of Corcomroe
Is covered up; and all about the hills
Are like a circle of Agate or of Jade.
Somewhere among great rocks on the scarce grass
Birds cry, they cry their loneliness.
Even the sunlight can be lonely here,
Even hot noon is lonely. I hear a footfall--
A young man with a lantern comes this way.
He seems an Aran fisher, for he wears
The flannel bawneen and the cow-hide shoe.
He stumbles wearily, and stumbling prays.
[_A young man enters, praying in Irish._
Once more the birds cry in their loneliness,
But now they wheel about our heads; and now
They have dropped on the grey stone to the northeast.
[_A man and a girl, in the costume of a past time, come in. They
wear heroic masks._
YOUNG MAN [_raising his lantern_]. Who is there? I cannot see what
you are like.
Come to the light.
STRANGER. But what have you to fear?
YOUNG MAN. And why have you come creeping through the dark?
[_The girl blows out lantern._
The wind has blown my lantern out. Where are you?
I saw a pair of heads against the sky
And lost them after; but you are in the right,
I should not be afraid in County Clare;
And should be, or should not be have no choice,
I have to put myself into your hands,
Now that my candle’s out.
STRANGER. You have fought in Dublin?
YOUNG MAN. I was in the Post Office, and if taken
I shall be put against a wall and shot.
STRANGER. You know some place of refuge, have some plan
Or friend who will come to meet you?
YOUNG MAN. I am to lie
At daybreak on the mountain and keep watch
Until an Aran coracle puts in
At Muckanish or at the rocky shore
Under Finvarra, but would break my neck
If I went stumbling there alone in the dark.
STRANGER. We know the pathways that the sheep tread out,
And all the hiding-places of the hills,
And that they had better hiding-places once.
YOUNG MAN. You’d say they had better before English robbers
Cut down the trees or set them upon fire
For fear their owners might find shelter there.
What is that sound?
STRANGER. An old horse gone astray.
He has been wandering on the road all night.
YOUNG MAN. I took him for a man and horse. Police
Are out upon the roads. In the late Rising
I think there was no man of us but hated
To fire at soldiers who but did their duty
And were not of our race, but when a man
Is born in Ireland and of Irish stock,
When he takes part against us--
STRANGER. I will put you safe,
No living man shall set his eyes upon you;
I will not answer for the dead.
YOUNG MAN. The dead?
STRANGER. For certain days the stones where you must lie
Have in the hour before the break of day Been haunted.
YOUNG MAN. But I was not born at midnight.
STRANGER. Many a man that was born in the full daylight
Can see them plain, will pass them on the high-road
Or in the crowded market-place of the town,
And never know that they have passed.
YOUNG MAN. My Grandam
Would have it they did penance everywhere;
Some lived through their old lives again.
STRANGER. In a dream;
And some for an old scruple must hang spitted
Upon the swaying tops of lofty trees;
Some are consumed in fire, some withered up
By hail and sleet out of the wintry North,
And some but live through their old lives again.
YOUNG MAN. Well, let them dream into what shape they please
And fill waste mountains with the invisible tumult
Of the fantastic conscience. I have no dread;
They cannot put me into jail or shoot me,
And seeing that their blood has returned to fields,
That have grown red from drinking blood like mine,
They would not if they could betray.
STRANGER. This pathway
Runs to the ruined Abbey of Corcomroe;
The Abbey passed, we are soon among the stone
And shall be at the ridge before the cocks
Of Aughanish or Bailevelehan
Or grey Aughtmana shake their wings and cry.
[_They go round the stage once._
FIRST MUSICIAN [_speaking_]. They’ve passed the shallow well and the
flat stone
Fouled by the drinking cattle, the narrow lane
Where mourners for five centuries have carried
Noble or peasant to his burial;
An owl is crying out above their heads.
[_Singing._]
Why should the heart take fright?
What sets it beating so?
The bitter sweetness of the night
Has made it but a lonely thing.
Red bird of March, begin to crow,
Up with the neck and clap the wing,
Red cock, and crow.
[_They go round the stage once. The_ FIRST MUSICIAN _speaks_.
And now they have climbed through the long grassy field
And passed the ragged thorn trees and the gap
In the ancient hedge; and the tomb-nested owl
At the foot’s level beats with a vague wing.
[_Singing._]
My head is in a cloud;
I’d let the whole world go;
My rascal heart is proud
Remembering and remembering.
Red bird of March, begin to crow,
Up with the neck and clap the wing,
Red cock, and crow.
[_They go round the stage once. The_ FIRST MUSICIAN _speaks_.
They are among the stones above the ash
Above the briar and thorn and the scarce grass;
Hidden amid the shadow far below them
The cat-headed bird is crying out.
[_Singing._]
The dreaming bones cry out
Because the night winds blow
And heaven’s a cloudy blot.
Calamity can have its fling.
Red bird of March, begin to crow,
Up with the neck and clap the wing,
Red cock, and crow.
STRANGER. We’re almost at the summit and can rest.
The road is a faint shadow there; and there
The Abbey lies amid its broken tombs.
In the old days we should have heard a bell
Calling the monks before day broke to pray;
And when the day has broken on the ridge,
The crowing of its cocks.
YOUNG MAN. Is there no house
Famous for sanctity or architectural beauty
In Clare or Kerry, or in all wide Connacht,
The enemy has not unroofed?
STRANGER. Close to the altar
Broken by wind and frost and worn by time
Donogh O’Brien has a tomb, a name in Latin.
He wore fine clothes and knew the secrets of women,
But he rebelled against the King of Thomond
And died in his youth.
YOUNG MAN. And why should he rebel?
The King of Thomond was his rightful master.
It was men like Donogh who made Ireland weak--
My curse on all that troop, and when I die
I’ll leave my body, if I have any choice,
Far from his ivy tod and his owl; have those
Who, if your tale is true, work out a penance
Upon the mountain-top where I am to hide,
Come from the Abbey graveyard?
YOUNG GIRL. They have not that luck,
But are more lonely; those that are buried there,
Warred in the heat of the blood; if they were rebels
Some momentary impulse made them rebels,
Or the commandment of some petty king
Who hated Thomond. Being but common sinners,
No callers in of the alien from oversea,
They and their enemies of Thomond’s party
Mix in a brief dream battle above their bones;
Or make one drove; or drift in amity;
Or in the hurry of the heavenly round
Forget their earthly names. These are alone
Being accursed.
YOUNG MAN. But if what seems is true
And there are more upon the other side
Than on this side of death, many a ghost
Must meet them face to face and pass the word
Even upon this grey and desolate hill.
YOUNG GIRL. Until this hour no ghost or living man
Has spoken though seven centuries have run
Since they, weary of life and of men’s eyes,
Flung down their bones in some forgotten place
Being accursed.
YOUNG MAN. I have heard that there are souls
Who, having sinned after a monstrous fashion,
Take on them, being dead, a monstrous image
To drive the living, should they meet its face,
Crazy, and be a terror to the dead.
YOUNG GIRL. But these
Were comely even in their middle life
And carry, now that they are dead, the image
Of their first youth, for it was in that youth
Their sin began.
YOUNG MAN. I have heard of angry ghosts
Who wander in a wilful solitude.
YOUNG GIRL. These have no thought but love; nor joy
But that upon the instant when their penance
Draws to its height and when two hearts are wrung
Nearest to breaking, if hearts of shadows break,
His eyes can mix with hers; nor any pang
That is so bitter as that double glance,
Being accursed.
YOUNG MAN. But what is this strange penance--
That when their eyes have met can wring them most?
YOUNG GIRL. Though eyes can meet, their lips can never meet.
YOUNG MAN. And yet it seems they wander side by side.
But doubtless you would say that when lips meet
And have not living nerves, it is no meeting.
YOUNG GIRL. Although they have no blood, or living nerves,
Who once lay warm and live the live-long night
In one another’s arms, and knew their part
In life, being now but of the people of dreams,
Is a dream’s part; although they are but shadows,
Hovering between a thorn tree and a stone,
Who have heaped up night on winged night; although
No shade however harried and consumed
Would change his own calamity for theirs,
Their manner of life were blessed could their lips
A moment meet; but when he has bent his head
Close to her head, or hand would slip in hand,
The memory of their crime flows up between
And drives them apart.
YOUNG MAN. The memory of a crime--
He took her from a husband’s house it may be,
But does the penance for a passionate sin
Last for so many centuries?
YOUNG GIRL. No, no;
The man she chose, the man she was chosen by
Cared little and cares little from whose house
They fled towards dawn amid the flights of arrows,
Or that it was a husband’s and a king’s;
And how, if that were all, could she lack friends,
On crowded roads or on the unpeopled hill?
Helen herself had opened wide the door
Where night by night she dreams herself awake
And gathers to her breast a dreaming man.
YOUNG MAN. What crime can stay so in the memory?
What crime can keep apart the lips of lovers
Wandering and alone?
YOUNG GIRL. Her king and lover
Was overthrown in battle by her husband,
And for her sake and for his own, being blind
And bitter and bitterly in love, he brought
A foreign army from across the sea.
YOUNG MAN. You speak of Dermot and of Dervorgilla
Who brought the Norman in?
YOUNG GIRL. Yes, yes, I spoke
Of that most miserable, most accursed pair
Who sold their country into slavery, and yet
They were not wholly miserable and accursed
If somebody of their race at last would say:
‘I have forgiven them.’
YOUNG MAN. Oh, never, never
Shall Dermot and Dervorgilla be forgiven.
YOUNG GIRL. If some one of their race forgave at last
Lip would be pressed on lip.
YOUNG MAN. Oh, never, never
Shall Dermot and Dervorgilla be forgiven.
You have told your story well, so well indeed
I could not help but fall into the mood
And for a while believe that it was true
Or half believe; but better push on now.
The horizon to the East is growing bright.
[_They go round stage once. The musicians play._
So here we’re on the summit. I can see
The Aran Islands, Connemara Hills,
And Galway in the breaking light; there too
The enemy has toppled roof and gable;
And torn the panelling from ancient rooms;
What generations of old men had known
Like their own hands, and children wondered at,
Has boiled a trooper’s porridge. That town had lain,
But for the pair that you would have me pardon,
Amid its gables and its battlements
Like any old admired Italian town;
For though we have neither coal, nor iron ore,
To make us wealthy and corrupt the air,
Our country, if that crime were uncommitted,
Had been most beautiful. Why do you dance?
Why do you gaze, and with so passionate eyes,
One on the other; and then turn away,
Covering your eyes, and weave it in a dance?
Who are you? what are you? you are not natural.
YOUNG GIRL. Seven hundred years our lips have never met.
YOUNG MAN. Why do you look so strangely at one another,
So strangely and so sweetly?
YOUNG GIRL. Seven hundred years.
YOUNG MAN. So strangely and so sweetly. All the ruin,
All, all their handiwork is blown away
As though the mountain air had blown it away
Because their eyes have met. They cannot hear,
Being folded up and hidden in their dance.
The dance is changing now. They have dropped their eyes,
They have covered up their eyes as though their hearts
Had suddenly been broken--never, never
Shall Dermot and Dervorgilla be forgiven.
They have drifted in the dance from rock to rock.
They have raised their hands as though to snatch the sleep
That lingers always in the abyss of the sky
Though they can never reach it. A cloud floats up
And covers all the mountain head in a moment;
And now it lifts and they are swept away.
[_The_ STRANGER _and the_ YOUNG GIRL _go out_.
I had almost yielded and forgiven it all--
This is indeed a place of terrible temptation.
[_The Musicians begin unfolding and folding a black cloth. The_
FIRST MUSICIAN _comes forward to the front of the stage, at the
centre. He holds the cloth before him. The other two come one
on either side and unfold it. They afterwards fold it up in the
same way. While it is unfolded, the_ YOUNG MAN _leaves the
stage_.
[_Songs for the unfolding and folding of the cloth._]
THE MUSICIANS [_singing_]
I
At the grey round of the hill
Music of a lost kingdom
Runs, runs and is suddenly still.
The winds out of Clare-Galway
Carry it: suddenly it is still.
I have heard in the night air
A wandering airy music;
And moidered in that snare
A man is lost of a sudden,
In that sweet wandering snare.
What finger first began
Music of a lost kingdom?
They dream that laughed in the sun.
Dry bones that dream are bitter,
They dream and darken our sun.
Those crazy fingers play
A wandering airy music;
Our luck is withered away,
And wheat in the wheat-ear withered,
And the wind blows it away.
II
My heart ran wild when it heard
The curlew cry before dawn
And the eddying cat-headed bird;
But now the night is gone.
I have heard from far below
The strong March birds a-crow,
Stretch neck and clap the wing,
Red cocks, and crow.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CALVARY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_PERSONS OF THE PLAY_
THREE MUSICIANS (_their faces made up to resemble masks_).
CHRIST (_wearing a mask_).
LAZARUS (_wearing a mask_).
JUDAS (_wearing a mask_).
THREE ROMAN SOLDIERS (_their faces masked or made up to resemble
masks_).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_At the beginning of the play the_ FIRST MUSICIAN _comes to the front
of the bare place, round three sides of which the audience are
seated, with a folded cloth hanging from his joined hands. Two other
musicians come, as in the preceding plays, one from either side, and
unfold the cloth so that it shuts out the stage, and then fold it
again, singing and moving rhythmically. They do the same at the end
of the play, which enables the players to leave the stage unseen._
[_Song for the folding and the unfolding of the cloth_]
FIRST MUSICIAN
Motionless under the moon-beam,
Up to his feathers in the stream;
Although fish leap, the white heron
Shivers in a dumbfounded dream.
SECOND MUSICIAN
God has not died for the white heron.
THIRD MUSICIAN
Although half famished he’ll not dare
Dip or do anything but stare
Upon the glittering image of a heron,
That now is lost and now is there.
SECOND MUSICIAN
God has not died for the white heron.
FIRST MUSICIAN
But that the full is shortly gone
And after that is crescent moon,
It’s certain that the moon-crazed heron
Would be but fishes’ diet soon.
SECOND MUSICIAN
God has not died for the white heron.
[_The three musicians are now seated by the drum, flute, and
zither at the back of stage._
FIRST MUSICIAN. The road to Calvary, and I beside it
Upon an ancient stone. Good Friday’s come,
The day whereon Christ dreams His passion through.
He climbs up hither but as a dreamer climbs.
The cross that but exists because He dreams it
Shortens His breath and wears away His strength.
And now He stands amid a mocking crowd,
Heavily breathing.
[_A player with the mask of Christ and carrying a cross has
entered and now stands leaning upon the cross._
Those that are behind
Climb on the shoulders of the men in front
To shout their mockery: ‘Work a miracle,’
Cries one, and ‘Save yourself’; another cries,
‘Call on your father now before your bones
Have been picked bare by the great desert birds’;
Another cries, ‘Call out with a loud voice
And tell him that his son is cast away
Amid the mockery of his enemies.’
[_Singing_]
Oh, but the mockers’ cry
Makes my heart afraid,
As though a flute of bone
Taken from a heron’s thigh,
A heron crazed by the moon,
Were cleverly, softly played.
[_Speaking_]
Who is this from whom the crowd has shrunk,
As though he had some look that terrified?
He has a deathly face, and yet he moves
Like a young foal that sees the hunt go by
And races in the field.
[_A player with the mask of Lazarus has entered._
LAZARUS. He raised me up.
I am the man that died and was raised up;
I am called Lazarus.
CHRIST. Seeing that you died,
Lay in the tomb four days and were raised up,
You will not mock at me.
LAZARUS. For four whole days
I had been dead and I was lying still
In an old comfortable mountain cavern
When you came climbing there with a great crowd
And dragged me to the light.
CHRIST. I called your name.
‘Lazarus, come out,’ I said, and you came out
Bound up in cloths, your face bound in a cloth.
LAZARUS. You took my death, give me your death instead.
CHRIST. I gave you life.
LAZARUS. But death is what I ask.
Alive I never could escape your love,
And when I sickened towards my death I thought
I’ll to the desert, or chuckle in a corner
Mere ghost, a solitary thing. I died
And saw no more until I saw you stand
In the opening of the tomb; ‘Come out!’ you called;
You dragged me to the light as boys drag out
A rabbit when they have dug its hole away;
And now with all the shouting at your heels
You travel towards the death I am denied.
And that is why I have hurried to this road;
And that is why I claim your death.
CHRIST. I have conquered death
And all the dead shall be raised up again.
LAZARUS. Then what I heard is true. I thought to die
When my allotted years ran out again;
And that, being gone, you could not hinder it;
But now you will blind with light the solitude
That death has made; you will disturb that corner
Where I had thought I might lie safe for ever.
CHRIST. I do my Father’s will.
LAZARUS. And not your own;
And I was free four days, four days being dead.
Climb up to Calvary, but turn your eyes
From Lazarus that cannot find a tomb
Although he search all height and depth: make way,
Make way for Lazarus that must go search
Among the desert places where there is nothing
But howling wind and solitary birds.
[_He goes out._
FIRST MUSICIAN. The crowd shrinks backward from the face that seems
Death stricken and death hungry still; and now
Martha, and those three Marys, and the rest
That live but in His love are gathered round Him.
He holds His right arm out, and on His arm
Their lips are pressed and their tears fall; and now
They cast them on the ground before His dirty
Blood-dabbled feet and clean them with their hair.
[_Sings_]
Take but His love away
Their love becomes a feather
Of eagle, swan or gull,
Or a drowned heron’s feather
Tossed hither and thither
Upon the bitter spray
And the moon at the full.
CHRIST. I felt their hair upon my feet a moment
And then they fled away--why have they fled?
Why has the street grown empty of a sudden
As though all fled from it in terror?
JUDAS [_who has just entered_]. I am Judas
That sold you for the thirty pieces of silver.
CHRIST. You were beside me every day, and saw
The dead raised up and blind men given their sight,
And all that I have said and taught you have known,
Yet doubt that I am God.
JUDAS. I have not doubted;
I knew it from the first moment that I saw you;
I had no need of miracles to prove it.
CHRIST. And yet you have betrayed me.
JUDAS. I have betrayed you
Because you seemed all-powerful.
CHRIST. My Father
Even now, if I were but to whisper it,
Would break the world in His miraculous fury
To set me free.
JUDAS. And is there not one man
In the wide world that is not in your power?
CHRIST. My Father put all men into my hands.
JUDAS. That was the very thought that drove me wild,
I could not bear to think you had but to whistle
And I must do; but after that I thought
Whatever man betrays Him will be free;
And life grew bearable again. And now
Is there a secret left I do not know,
Knowing that if a man betrays a God
He is the stronger of the two.
CHRIST. But if
’Twere the commandment of that God Himself
That God were still the stronger?
JUDAS. When I planned it
There was no live thing near me but a heron
So full of itself that it seemed terrified.
CHRIST. But my betrayal was decreed that hour
When the foundations of the world were laid.
JUDAS. It was decreed that somebody betray you--
I’d thought of that--but not that I should do it,
I the man Judas, born on such a day,
In such a village, such and such his parents;
Nor that I’d go with my old coat upon me
To the High Priest, and chuckle to myself
As people chuckle when alone, and that I’d do it
For thirty pieces and no more, no less,
And neither with a nod, a look, nor a sent message,
But with a kiss upon your cheek. I did it,
I, Judas, and no other man, and now
You cannot even save me.
CHRIST. Begone from me.
_Three Roman soldiers have entered._
FIRST ROMAN SOLDIER. He has been chosen to hold up the cross.
[_During what follows_, JUDAS _holds up the cross while_ CHRIST
_stands with His arms stretched out upon it_.
SECOND ROMAN SOLDIER. We’ll keep the rest away; they are too
persistent;
They are always wanting something.
THIRD ROMAN SOLDIER. Die in peace.
There’s no one here but Judas and ourselves.
CHRIST. And who are you that ask your God for nothing?
THIRD ROMAN SOLDIER. We are the gamblers, and when you are dead
We’ll settle who is to have that cloak of yours
By throwing dice.
SECOND ROMAN SOLDIER. Our dice were carved
Out of an old sheep’s thigh at Ephesus.
FIRST ROMAN SOLDIER. Although but one of us can win the cloak
That will not make us quarrel; what does it matter?
One day one loses and the next day wins.
SECOND ROMAN SOLDIER. Whatever happens is the best we say
So that it’s unexpected.
THIRD ROMAN SOLDIER. Had you sent
A crier through the world you had not found
More comfortable companions for a death-bed
Than three old gamblers that have asked for nothing.
FIRST ROMAN SOLDIER. They say you’re good and that you made the
world,
But it’s no matter.
SECOND ROMAN SOLDIER. Come; now let us dance
The dance of the dice-throwers, for it may be
He cannot live much longer and has not seen it.
THIRD ROMAN SOLDIER. If he were but the God of dice he’d know it,
But he is not that God.
FIRST ROMAN SOLDIER. One thing is plain,
To know that he has nothing that we need
Must be a comfort to him.
SECOND ROMAN SOLDIER. In the dance
We quarrel for a while, but settle it
By throwing dice, and after that, being friends,
Join hand to hand and wheel about the cross.
[_They dance._
CHRIST. My Father, why hast Thou forsaken Me.
[_Song of the folding and unfolding of the cloth_]
FIRST MUSICIAN
Lonely the sea-bird lies at her rest
Blown like a dawn-blenched parcel of spray
Upon the wind, or follows her prey
Under a great wave’s hollowing crest.
SECOND MUSICIAN
God has not appeared to the birds.
THIRD MUSICIAN
The geer-eagle has chosen his part
In blue deep of the upper air
Where one-eyed day can meet his stare;
He is content with his savage heart.
SECOND MUSICIAN
God has not appeared to the birds.
FIRST MUSICIAN
But where have last year’s cygnets gone?
The lake is empty; why do they fling
White wing out beside white wing?
What can a swan need but a swan?
SECOND MUSICIAN
God has not appeared to the birds.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES AND MUSIC
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE ON THE FIRST PERFORMANCE OF ‘AT THE HAWK’S WELL’
A couple of years ago I was sitting in my stall at the Court Theatre in
London watching one of my own plays, _The King’s Threshold_. In front of
me were three people, seemingly a husband, a wife, and a woman friend.
The husband was bored; he yawned and stretched himself and shifted in
his seat, and I watched him with distress. I was inclined to be angry,
but reminded myself that music, where there are no satisfying audible
words, bores me as much, for I have no ear or only a primitive ear.
Presently when the little princesses came upon the stage in their red
clothes, the woman friend, who had seemed also a little bored, said:
‘They do things very well,’ and became attentive. The distinguished
painter who had designed the clothes at any rate could interest her. The
wife, who had sat motionless from the first, said when the curtain had
fallen and the applause--was it politeness or enthusiasm?--had come to
an end, ‘I would not have missed it for the world.’ She was perhaps a
reader of my poetry who had persuaded the others to come, and she had
found a pleasure, the book could not give her, in the combination of
words and speech. Yet when I think of my play, I do not call her to the
mind’s eye, or even her friend who found the long red gloves of the
little princesses amusing, but always that bored man; the worst of it is
that I could not pay my players, or the seamstress, or the owner of the
stage, unless I could draw to my plays those who prefer light amusement
or have no ear for verse, and fortunately they are all very polite.
Being sensitive, or not knowing how to escape the chance of sitting
behind the wrong people, I have begun to shrink from sending my muses
where they are but half-welcomed; and even in Dublin, where the pit has
an ear for verse, I have no longer the appetite to carry me through the
daily rehearsals. Yet I need a theatre; I believe myself to be a
dramatist; I desire to show events and not merely tell of them: and two
of my best friends were won for me by my plays, and I seem to myself
most alive at the moment when a room full of people share the one lofty
emotion. My blunder has been that I did not discover in my youth that my
theatre must be the ancient theatre that can be made by unrolling a
carpet or marking out a place with a stick, or setting a screen against
the wall. Certainly those who care for my kind of poetry must be
numerous enough, if I can bring them together, to pay half-a-dozen
players who can bring all their properties in a cab and perform in their
leisure moments.
I have found my first model--and in literature if we would not be
parvenus we must have a model--in the ‘Noh’ stage of aristocratic Japan.
I have described in _Certain Noble Plays of Japan_ what has seemed to me
important on that most subtle stage. I do not think of my discovery as
mere economy, for it has been a great gain to get rid of scenery, to
substitute for a crude landscape painted upon canvas three performers
who, sitting before the wall or a patterned screen, describe landscape
or event, and accompany movement with drum and gong, or deepen the
emotion of the words with zither or flute. Painted scenery after all is
unnecessary to my friends and to myself, for our imagination kept living
by the arts can imagine a mountain covered with thorn-trees in a
drawing-room without any great trouble, and we have many quarrels with
even good scene-painting.
Then too the masks forced upon us by the absence of any special
lighting, or by the nearness of the audience, who surround the players
upon three sides, do not seem to us eccentric. We are accustomed to
faces of bronze and of marble, and what could be more suitable than that
Cuchulain, let us say, a half-supernatural legendary person, should show
to us a face, not made before the looking-glass by some leading
player--there too we have many quarrels--but moulded by some
distinguished artist? We are a learned people, and we remember how the
Roman theatre, when it became more intellectual, abandoned ‘make-up’ and
used the mask instead, and that the most famous artists of Japan
modelled masks that are still in use after hundreds of years. It would
be a stirring adventure for a poet and an artist, working together, to
create once more heroic or grotesque types that, keeping always an
appropriate distance from life, would seem images of those profound
emotions that exist only in solitude and in silence. Nor has any one
told me after a performance that he has missed a changing facial
expression, for the mask seems to change with the light that falls upon
it, and besides, in poetical and tragic art, as every ‘producer’ knows,
expression is mainly in those movements that are of the entire body.
_At the Hawk’s Well_ was performed for the first time in April, 1916, in
a friend’s drawing-room, and only those who cared for poetry were
invited. It was played upon the floor, and the players came in by the
same door as the audience, and the audience and the players and I myself
were pleased. A few days later it was revived in Lady Islington’s big
drawing-room at Chesterfield Gardens for the benefit of a war charity.
And round the platform upon three sides were three hundred fashionable
people, and once more my muses were but half welcome. I remember,
however, with a little pleasure that we found a newspaper photographer
planting his camera in a dressing-room, and explained to him that as
fifty people could pay our expenses, we did not invite the press, and
that flashlight photographs were not desirable for their own sake. He
was incredulous and persistent--a whole page somewhere or other was at
our disposal--and it was nearly ten minutes before we could persuade him
to go away. What a relief after directing a theatre for so many
years--for I am one of the two directors of the Abbey Theatre in
Dublin--to think no more of pictures unless Mr. Dulac or some other
distinguished man has made them, nor of all those paragraphs written by
young men, perhaps themselves intelligent, who must applaud the common
taste or starve!
Perhaps I shall turn to something else now that our Japanese dancer, Mr.
Itow, whose minute intensity of movement in the dance of the hawk so
well suited our small room and private art, has been hired by a New York
theatre, or perhaps I shall find another dancer. I am certain, however,
that whether I grow tired or not--and one does grow tired of always
quarrying the stone for one’s statue--I have found out the only way the
subtler forms of literature can find dramatic expression. Shakespeare’s
art was public, now resounding and declamatory, now lyrical and subtle,
but always public, because poetry was a part of the general life of a
people who had been trained by the Church to listen to difficult words,
and who sang, instead of the songs of the music-halls, many songs that
are still beautiful. A man who had sung ‘Barbara Allan’ in his own house
would not, as I have heard the gallery of the Lyceum Theatre, receive
the love speeches of Juliet with an ironical chirruping. We must
recognise the change as the painters did when, finding no longer palaces
and churches to decorate, they made framed pictures to hang upon a wall.
Whatever we lose in mass and in power we should recover in elegance and
in subtlety. Our lyrical and our narrative poetry alike have used their
freedom and have approached nearer, as Pater said all the arts would if
they were able, to ‘the condition of music’; and if our modern poetical
drama has failed, it is mainly because, always dominated by the example
of Shakespeare, it would restore an irrevocable past.
W. B. Y., 1916.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MUSIC FOR ‘AT THE HAWK’S WELL’[18]
BY EDMUND DULAC
A NOTE ON THE INSTRUMENTS
In order to apply to the music the idea of great simplicity of execution
underlying the whole spirit of the performance, it was necessary to use
instruments that any one with a fair idea of music could learn in a few
days.
The following offer hardly any difficulty, while they provide a
sufficient background of simple sounds which the performer can, after a
very little amount of practice, elaborate at will.
A plain bamboo flute giving the appropriate scale.
A harp, a drum and a gong. For these last two, any instruments on
oriental lines with a good shape and a deep mellow sound.
For the harp an ordinary zither, such as shown in the design of the
musician, can be used. The strings, beginning by the lower ones, are
grouped in nine or ten chords of four notes consisting of: the key-note,
two strings in unison giving the fifth above, and the octave of the
key-note.
Ex.:
[Musical example showing, in bass clef, the note D, G in two octaves,
and then D again.]
Beyond these chords there are seven double strings tuned to any
pentatonic scale that suits the play.
The tuning of the chords and free strings would be altered according to
the performance, and several flutes giving different scales would be
required.
The same chords and scales should be used throughout any one play.
The instruments are distributed as follows: one musician plays the drum
and gong, one the flute, the singer takes the harp.
The drum and the gong must be used at times during the performance to
emphasise the spoken word; no definite notation of this can be given,
and it is left to the imagination and taste of the musician.
SCALES FOR THE INSTRUMENTS
[Three musical examples. The first two are for the harp, showing,
first, the chords, and second, the free strings. The second is for the
flute.]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MUSIC FOR “AT THE HAWK’S WELL”
_To be sung without accompaniment as they unfold the curtain._
[Illustration: A musical score for the following passage:]
I call to the eye of the mind
A well long choked up and dry
And boughs long stripped by the wind,
And I call to the mind’s eye
Pallor of an ivory face,
Its lofty dissolute air,
A man climbing up to a place
The salt sea wind has swept bare.
What were his life soon done!
Would he lose by that or win?
A mother that saw her son
Doubled over a speckled shin,
Cross-grained with ninety years,
Would cry, ‘How little worth
Were all my hopes and fears
And the hard pain of his birth!’
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_To be sung as they sit down_
[Illustration: A musical score for the following passage:]
The boughs of the hazel shake,
The sun goes down in the west.
The heart would be always awake,
The heart would turn to its rest.
‘Why should I sleep?’ the heart cries.
‘For the wind, the salt wind, the sea wind,
Is beating a cloud through the skies;
I would wander always like the wind.’
‘O wind, O salt wind, O sea wind!’
Cries the heart, ‘it is time to sleep;
Why wander and nothing to find?
Better grow old and sleep.’
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PRELUDE TO THE DANCE
_To begin when the Young Man says_:
“Ah, you have looked at her....”]
[Illustration: A musical score for an instrumental passage.]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE DANCE
The Dance is played through to ⨁ A, begun again at ⨁ going to B, begun
again at ⨁ and played to the end, omitting the passage from A to B.
Thus it ought to last about 3½ minutes.
_This Dance is joined on to the Prelude by a soft roll on the gong
while the girl begins to move._
[Illustration: A musical score for an instrumental passage.]
[Illustration: A musical score for the following passage:]
He has lost what may not be found
Till men heap his burial mound
And all the history ends.
He might have lived at his ease,
An old dog’s head on his knees,
Among his children and friends.
_To be sung before they rise to unfold the curtain._
[Illustration: A musical score for the following passage:]
Come to me, human faces,
Familiar memories;
I have found hateful eyes
Among the desolate places,
Unfaltering, unmoistened eyes.
Folly alone I cherish,
I choose it for my share;
Being but a mouthful of air,
I am content to perish;
I am but a mouthful of sweet air.
O lamentable shadows,
Obscurity of strife,
I choose a pleasant life,
Among indolent meadows;
Wisdom must live a bitter life.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_To be sung while they unfold and fold up the curtain._
[Illustration: A musical score for the following passage:]
‘The man that I praise,’
Cries out the empty well,
‘Lives all his days
Where a hand on the bell
Can call the milch cows
To the comfortable door of his house.
Who but an idiot would praise
Dry stones in a well?
‘The man that I praise,’
Cries out the leafless tree,
‘Has married and stays
By an old hearth, and he
On naught has set store
But children and dogs on the floor.
Who but an idiot would praise
A withered tree?’
-----
Footnote 18:
All rights of performance reserved by Edmund Dulac.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE ON ‘THE ONLY JEALOUSY OF EMER’
While writing these plays, intended for some fifty people in a
drawing-room or a studio, I have so rejoiced in my freedom from the
stupidity of an ordinary audience that I have filled _The Only Jealousy
of Emer_ with convictions about the nature and history of a woman’s
beauty, which Robartes found in the _Speculum_ of Gyraldus and in Arabia
Deserta among the Judwalis. The soul through each cycle of its
development is held to incarnate through twenty-eight typical
incarnations, corresponding to the phases of the moon, the light part of
the moon’s disc symbolising the subjective and the dark part the
objective nature, the wholly dark moon (called Phase 1) and the wholly
light (called Phase 15) symbolising complete objectivity and complete
subjectivity respectively. In a poem called ‘The Phases of the Moon’ in
_The Wild Swans at Coole_ I have described certain aspects of this
symbolism, which needs, however, 100 pages or more for its exposition,
for it purports to be a complete classification and analysis of every
possible type of human intellect, Phase 1 and Phase 15 symbolising,
however, two incarnations not visible to human eyes nor having human
characteristics. The invisible fifteenth incarnation is that of the
greatest possible bodily beauty, and the fourteenth and sixteenth those
of the greatest beauty visible to human eyes. Much that Robartes has
found might be a commentary on Castiglione’s saying that the physical
beauty of woman is the spoil or monument of the victory of the soul, for
physical beauty, only possible to subjective natures, is described as
the result of emotional toil in past lives. Objective natures are
declared to be always ugly, hence the disagreeable appearance of
politicians, reformers, philanthropists, and men of science. A saint or
sage before his final deliverance has one incarnation as a woman of
supreme beauty.
In writing these little plays I knew that I was creating something which
could only fully succeed in a civilisation very unlike ours. I think
they should be written for some country where all classes share in a
half-mythological, half-philosophical folk-belief which the writer and
his small audience lift into a new subtlety. All my life I have longed
for such a country, and always found it quite impossible to write
without having as much belief in its real existence as a child has in
that of the wooden birds, beasts, and persons of his toy Noah’s ark. I
have now found all the mythology and philosophy I need.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MUSIC FOR ‘THE DREAMING OF THE BONES’[19]
By WALTER MORSE RUMMEL
(1917)
_Music of tone and music of speech are distinct from each other._
_Here my sole object has been to find some tone formula which will
enhance and bring out a music underlying the words. The process is
therefore directly opposed to that of tone-music creation, which from
the formless directly creates its tone form, whereas I seek to derive a
formless overflow from the already formed._
FIRST MUSICIAN: _A medium voice_, more chanting than singing, not
letting the musical value of the sound predominate too greatly the
spoken value.
The First Musician uses a _Plucked Instrument_ (harp or zither) to
reinforce the notes of his song in unison or in the octave. (It is
advisable not to reinforce _each_ note sung, but only each _beat_,
unless certain difficulties of pitch would necessitate the reinforcing
of such note.)
During the symphonic moments of the play the Plucked Instrument assumes
a more individual part.
SECOND MUSICIAN: Using a _Flute_, of a soft and discreet quality.
THIRD MUSICIAN: Using a _Bowed Instrument_, one-stringed, more like a
Hindu Sarinda, perhaps with a sympathetic vibrating string, giving a
nasal sound. This part furnishes a bass, a sort of horizon to the
song, and becomes more individual in the symphonic parts of the play.
FOURTH MUSICIAN: Using a _Drum_, preferably also an oriental model,
played with the palm and the fingers of the hand. The drum part is
indicated by ¯ (long) and ˘ (short). The numbers below these
indications signify the fingers employed. The using of the palm of the
hand is indicated by P.
In case there are only _Three Musicians_, the Second and Third Musicians
can alternatively take the Drum part in places where they are
unoccupied.
_All instrumental music, especially during the speaking parts, must
always leave the voice in the foreground._
W. M. R.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE DREAMING OF THE BONES
_The stage is any bare place in a room with a wall beyond it. A screen
or curtain hung with a pattern of mountain and sky can stand against
it, but the pattern must only symbolize or suggest._
THREE (FOUR) MUSICIANS _enter. One stands singing while the others sit
down against the wall by their instruments which are already there: a
plucked instrument, a bowed instrument, and flute and drum._
FIRST MUSICIAN (_singing_).
[Illustration: A musical score for the following passage:]
Why does my heart beat so?
Did not a shadow pass?
It passed by a moment ago.
Who can have trod in the grass?
What rogue is night-wandering?
Have not old writers said
That dizzy dreams can spring
From the dry bones of the dead?
And many a night it seems
That all the valley fills
With those fantastic dreams.
They overflow the hills,
So passionate is a shade,
Like wine that fills to the top
A grey-green cup of jade,
Or maybe an agate cup.
[Illustration: Short musical scores providing background music for the
following passages:]
The hour before dawn and the moon covered up;
The little village of Abbey is covered up;
The little narrow trodden way that runs
From the white road to the Abbey of Corcomroe
Is covered up; and all about the hills
Are like a circle of Agate or of Jade.
Somewhere among great rocks on the scarce grass
Birds cry, they cry their loneliness.
Even the sunlight can be lonely here,
Even hot noon is lonely. I hear a footfall--
A young man with a lantern comes this way.
He seems an Aran fisher, for he wears
The flannel bawneen and the cow-hide shoe.
He stumbles wearily, and stumbling prays.
[_A young man enters, praying in Irish._
Once more the birds cry in their loneliness,
But now they wheel about our heads; and now
They have dropped on the grey stone to the northeast.
[_A Young Man and Young Girl come in._
For fear their owners might find shelter there.
What is that sound?
An old horse....
Or grey Aughtmana shake their wings and....
THE WALK AROUND THE STAGE
Two steps may be taken to each musical measure, making it a very slow
figurative step. This will mean about 24 steps to one walk around the
stage (Round). The last two steps may be twice as long (_in time_),
accompanied by certain movements of expectancy. In calculating that each
step amounts to half a metre, the length of the stage would have to be
five metres.
[A diagram of a stage, with a walk of five metres across and five
metres back shown in the centre and one metre on either side, making 12
metres in all.]
If necessary the two opening measures may be repeated at will, the same
at beginning of each round.
As to the spoken part preceding the song in each round, this must be
arranged for by the singer. The singing voice must be able to easily
enter in time at its proper place. The spoken part, however, can be
begun before the time indicated for it in the music, or after, according
to the speed of speech. The rhythm of the music should be _slow_.
STRANGER:--cry
1ST ROUND. _In a slow mysterious rhythm_
[Illustration: A musical score for the following passage:]
FIRST MUSICIAN [_speaking_]. They’ve passed the shallow well and the
flat stone
Fouled by the drinking cattle, the narrow lane
Where mourners for five centuries have carried
Noble or peasant to his burial;
An owl is crying out above their heads.
[_Singing._]
Why should the heart take fright?
What sets it beating so?
The bitter sweetness of the night
Has made it but a lonely thing.
Red bird of March, begin to crow,
Up with the neck and clap the wing,
Red cock, and crow.
[_They go round the stage once. The_ FIRST MUSICIAN _speaks_.
And now they have climbed through the long grassy field
And passed the ragged thorn trees and the gap
In the ancient hedge; and the tomb-nested owl
At the foot’s level beats with a vague wing.
[_Singing._]
My head is in a cloud;
I’d let the whole world go;
My rascal heart is proud
Remembering and remembering.
Red bird of March, begin to crow,
Up with the neck and clap the wing,
Red cock, and crow.
[_They go round the stage once. The_ FIRST MUSICIAN _speaks_.
They are among the stones above the ash
Above the briar and thorn and the scarce grass;
Hidden amid the shadow far below them
The cat-headed bird is crying out.
[_Singing._]
The dreaming bones cry out
Because the night winds blow
And heaven’s a cloudy blot.
Calamity can have its fling.
Red bird of March, begin to crow,
Up with the neck and clap the wing,
Red cock, and crow.
_Speaking_:--THE STRANGER: We’re almost, etc. _No music_
CLOSING SONG
THE MUSICIAN _singing_
[Illustration: A musical score for the following passage:]
At the grey round of the hill
Music of a lost kingdom
Runs, runs and is suddenly still.
The winds out of Clare-Galway
Carry it: suddenly it is still.
I have heard in the night air
A wandering airy music;
And moidered in that snare
A man is lost of a sudden,
In that sweet wandering snare.
What finger first began
Music of a lost kingdom?
They dream that laughed in the sun.
Dry bones that dream are bitter,
They dream and darken our sun.
Those crazy fingers play
A wandering airy music;
Our luck is withered away,
And wheat in the wheat-ear withered,
And the wind blows it away.
My heart ran wild when it heard
The curlew cry before dawn
And the eddying cat-headed bird;
But now the night is gone.
I have heard from far below
The strong March birds a-crow,
Stretch neck and clap the wing,
Red cocks, and crow.
PARIS, _September 1917_.
-----
Footnote 19:
All rights of performance reserved by W. M. Rummel.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE ON
‘THE DREAMING OF THE BONES’
Dervorgilla’s few lines can be given, if need be, to Dermot, and
Dervorgilla’s part taken by a dancer who has the training of a dancer
alone; nor need that masked dancer be a woman.
The conception of the play is derived from the world-wide belief that
the dead dream back, for a certain time, through the more personal
thoughts and deeds of life. The wicked, according to Cornelius Agrippa,
dream themselves to be consumed by flames and persecuted by demons; and
there is precisely the same thought in a Japanese ‘Noh’ play, where a
spirit, advised by a Buddhist priest she has met upon the road, seeks to
escape from the flames by ceasing to believe in the dream. The lovers in
my play have lost themselves in a different but still self-created
winding of the labyrinth of conscience. The Judwalis distinguish between
the Shade which dreams back through events in the order of their
intensity, becoming happier as the more painful and, therefore, more
intense wear themselves away, and the Spiritual Being, which lives back
through events in the order of their occurrence, this living back being
an exploration of their moral and intellectual origin.
All solar natures, to use the Arabian terms, during life move towards a
more objective form of experience, the lunar towards a more subjective.
After death a lunar man, reversing the intellectual order, grows always
closer to objective experience, which in the spiritual world is wisdom,
while a solar man mounts gradually to the most extreme subjective
experience possible to him. In the spiritual world subjectivity is
innocence, and innocence, in life an accident of nature, is now the
highest achievement of the intellect. I have already put the thought in
verse.
He grows younger every second
That were all his birthdays reckoned
Much too solemn seemed;
Because of what he had dreamed,
Or the ambitions that he served,
Much too solemn and reserved.
Jaunting, journeying
To his own dayspring,
He unpacks the loaded pern
Of all ’twas pain or joy to learn,
Of all that he had made.
The outrageous war shall fade;
At some old winding whitethorn root
He’ll practise on the shepherd’s flute,
Or on the close-cropped grass
Court his shepherd lass,
Or run where lads reform our daytime
Till that is their long shouting playtime;
Knowledge he shall unwind
Through victories of the mind,
Till, clambering at the cradle side,
He dreams himself his mother’s pride,
All knowledge lost in trance
Of sweeter ignorance.
The Shade is said to fade out at last, but the Spiritual Being does not
fade, passing on to other states of existence after it has attained a
spiritual state, of which the surroundings and aptitudes of early life
are a correspondence. When, as in my poem, I speak of events while
describing the ascent of the Spiritual Being, I but use them as
correspondence or symbol. Michael Robartes writes to Aherne, under the
date of May 1917, a curious letter on this subject: ‘There is an analogy
between the dreaming back of the Body of Passion’ (I have used instead
of this term the more usual term Shade), ‘and our ordinary dreams--and
between the life of Spirit and Celestial Body taken together’ (I have
substituted for both terms the less technical, though, I fear, vague
term Spiritual Being), ‘and those coherent thoughts of dreamless sleep,
which, as I know on my personal knowledge, coincide with dreams. These
dreams are at one time their symbols, and at another live with an
independent life. I have several times been present while my friend, an
Arab doctor in Bagdad, carried on long conversations with a sleeping
man, and I have myself joined in those conversations. I do not say a
hypnotised man, or even a somnambulist, for the sleep seemed natural
sleep produced by fatigue, though sometimes with a curious suddenness.
The sleeper would discuss the most profound truths and yet while doing
so make, now and again, some movement that suggested dreaming, although
the part that spoke remained entirely unconscious of the dream. On
waking he would often describe a long dream, sometimes a symbolic
reflection of the conversation, but more often produced by some external
stimulus--a fall in temperature in the rooms, or some condition of body
perhaps. Now and again these dreams would interrupt the conversation, as
when he dreamed he had feathers in his mouth and began to blow. Seeing,
therefore, that I have observed a separation between two parts of the
nature during life, I find no difficulty in believing in a more complete
separation, affirmed by my teachers, and supported by so much tradition,
when the body is no longer there to hold the two parts together.’
I wrote my play before the Robartes papers came into my hands, even
before I myself had received much of their thought from a different
source, and in making the penance of Dermot and Dervorgilla last so many
centuries I have done something for which I had no warrant in these
papers or from that source, but warrant there certainly is in the
folklore of all countries. At certain moments the Spiritual Being, or
rather that part of it which Robartes calls ‘the Spirit,’ is said to
enter into the Shade, and during those moments it can converse with
living men, though but within the narrow limits of its dream.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE ON ‘CALVARY’
I have written the little songs of the chorus to please myself,
confident that singer and composer, when the time came for performance,
would certainly make it impossible for the audience to know what the
words were. I used to think that singers should sing a recipe for a good
dish, or a list of local trains, or something else they want to get by
heart, but I have changed my mind and now I prefer to give him some
mystery or secret. A reader can always solve the mystery and learn the
secret by turning to a note, which need not be as long as those Dante
put to several of the odes in the _Convito_. I use birds as symbols of
subjective life, and my reason for this, and for certain other things,
cannot be explained fully till I have published some part at any rate of
those papers of Michael Robartes, over which I have now spent several
years. The following passage in a letter written by Robartes to Aherne
in the spring of 1917 must suffice. ‘At present I rather pride myself on
believing all the superstitions of the Judwalis, or rather in believing
that there is not one amongst them that may not be true, but at first my
West European mind rebelled. Once in the early morning, when I was
living in a horse-hair tent among other similar tents, a young Arab woke
me and told me to come with him if I would see a great wonder. He
brought me to a level place in the sand, just outside the tent of a
certain Arab, who had arrived the night before and had, as I knew, a
reputation as a wonder-worker, and showed me certain marks on the sand.
I said they were the marks of a jackal, but he would not have this. When
he had passed by a little after sunrise there was not a mark, and a few
minutes later the marks were there. No beast could have come and gone
unseen. When I asked his explanation he said they were made by the
wonder-worker’s “Daimon” or “Angel.” “What,” I said, “has it a beast’s
form?” “He goes much about the world,” he said; “he has been in Persia
and in Afghanistan, and as far west as Tripoli. He is interested in
things, in places, he likes to be with many people, and that is why his
Daimon has the form of a beast, but your Daimon would have a bird’s
shape because you are a solitary man.” Later on, when I mastered their
philosophy, I came to learn that the boy had but classified the
wonder-worker and myself according to their division of all mankind into
those who are dominated by objects and those who are dominated by the
self or _Zat_, or, as we would say, into objective and subjective
natures. Certain birds, especially as I see things, such lonely birds as
the heron, hawk, eagle, and swan, are the natural symbols of
subjectivity, especially when floating upon the wind alone or alighting
upon some pool or river, while the beasts that run upon the ground,
especially those that run in packs, are the natural symbols of objective
man. Objective men, however personally alone, are never alone in their
thought, which is always developed in agreement or in conflict with the
thought of others and always seeks the welfare of some cause or
institution, while subjective men are the more lonely the more they are
true to type, seeking always that which is unique or personal.’
I have used my bird-symbolism in these songs to increase the objective
loneliness of Christ by contrasting it with a loneliness, opposite in
kind, that unlike His can be, whether joyous or sorrowful, sufficient to
itself. I have surrounded Him with the images of those He cannot save,
not only with the birds, who have served neither God nor Cæsar, and
await for none or for a different saviour, but with Lazarus and Judas
and the Roman soldiers for whom He has died in vain. ‘Christ,’ writes
Robartes, ‘only pitied those whose suffering is rooted in death, in
poverty, or in sickness, or in sin, in some shape of the common lot, and
He came especially to the poor who are most subject to exterior
vicissitude.’ I have therefore represented in Lazarus and Judas types of
that intellectual despair that lay beyond His sympathy, while in the
Roman soldiers I suggest a form of objectivity that lay beyond His help.
Robartes said in one of the conversations recorded by Aherne: ‘I heard
much of _Three Songs of Joy_, written by a certain old Arab, which owing
to the circumstances of their origin were considered as proofs of great
sanctity. He held the faith of Kusta ben Luki, but did not live with any
of the two or three wandering companies of Judwalis. We lived in the
town of Hâyel as servant to a rich Arab merchant. He himself had been a
rich merchant of Aneyza and had been several times to India. On his
return from one of these journeys he had found his house in possession
of an enemy and was himself driven from Aneyza by the Wahâbies on some
charge, I think of impiety, and it was then he made his first song of
joy. A few years later his wife and child were murdered by robbers in
the desert, and after certain weeks, during which it was thought that he
must die of grief, his face cleared and his step grew firm and he made
his second song. He gave away all his goods and became a servant in
Hâyel, and a year or two later, believing that his death was near, he
made his third song of joy. He lived, however, for several months, and
when I met him had the use of all his faculties. I asked him about the
“Three Songs,” for I knew that even on his deathbed, as became the
votary of a small, contentious sect, he would delight in exposition. I
said (though I knew from his songs themselves, that this was not his
thought, but I wanted his explanation in his own words): “You have
rejoiced that the Will of God should be done even though you and yours
must suffer.” He answered with some emotion: “Oh, no, Kusta ben Luki has
taught us to divide all things into Chance and Choice; one can think
about the world and about man, or anything else until all has vanished
but these two things, for they are indeed the first cause of the animate
and inanimate world. They exist in God, for if they did not He would not
have freedom, He would be bound by His own Choice. In God alone, indeed,
can they be united, yet each be perfect and without limit or hindrance.
If I should throw from the dice-box there would be but six possible
sides on each of the dice, but when God throws He uses dice that have
all numbers and sides. Some worship His Choice; that is easy; to know
that He has willed for some unknown purpose all that happens is
pleasant; but I have spent my life in worshipping His Chance, and that
moment when I understand the immensity of His Chance is the moment when
I am nearest Him. Because it is very difficult and because I have put my
understanding into three songs I am famous among my people.”’
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcriber’s Notes
This file uses _underscores_ to indicate italic text. New original cover
art included with this ebook is granted to the public domain.
The following changes and corrections have been made:
• p. 44: Replaced “year” with “year’s” in phrase “The two plays in this
year’s _Samhain_.”
• p. 154: Added closing single quotation mark after phrase “what I have
made of her is very living.”
• p. 194: Replaced “is” with “it” in phrase “even if hundreds desired
that it should not be silenced.”
• p. 229: Replaced period with comma after phrase “So you are starving
even in this wood.”
• p. 229: Replaced period with comma after phrase “being weak with
hunger and thirst.”
• p. 286: Replaced “éte” with “été” in phrase “car le soleil avait été
rare.”
• p. 353: Removed extra quotation mark after first “Eofe!” in phrase
“The Musicians cry ‘Eofe! Eofe!’ and strike gong.”
• p. 360: Replaced “Archimedes” with “Archimedes’” in phrase “Beyond
hearing or seeing, / Or Archimedes’ guess.”
• p. 368: Moved period outside of closing bracket after direction “_to_
FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN.”
• p. 378: Added period after phrase “Knows that his own harsh sea made
my heart cold.”
• p. 398: Added period after phrase “Songs for the unfolding and
folding of the cloth.”
• p. 443: Added closing single quotation mark after phrase “They do
things very well.”
• p. 450: Replaced “neccessary” with “necessary” in phrase “If
necessary the two opening measures may be repeated at will.”
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