Some country-men in Galway, whither we carried our plays in dialect a few weeks ago, said that it was no use going in to see them because they showed people that could be seen on the road every day; but these were but a few, and we had a great popular success, crowds being turned away every evening from the doors.1 Ireland is always Connacht to my imagination, for there more than elsewhere is the folk tradition that is the loftiest thing that has come down to us within the ring of Ireland. I knew an observant and cultivated French count, descendant of émigrés, who came for a few months in every summer to a property they had left him upon the Galway shore. He came from Paris or from Rome, but would not stay, if he could help it, even a few hours in Dublin, because Dublin was ‘Shabby England’. 2 We find our most highly trained audiences of late in Dublin, but the majority of theatre-goers drift between what is Irish and what is English in confused uncertainty, and have not even begun the search for what is their own.
Somebody in Un grand homme de province à Paris says, with I know not what truth, that French actresses pay more for attacks than admiring criticism, for ‘controversy is fame’.3 In Ireland this would be an unnecessary expense, and many of the attacks which have followed us from the beginning in such plenty have arisen out of conceptions of life which, unknown to the journalists who have made them, are essentially English, though of an England that has begun to change its clothes since Matthew Arnold and his contemporaries began a truer popular culture. Even at this moment the early Victorian thought is not so out of fashion that English newspapers would not revive it and talk of the duties of writers to preach and the like, all that old Utilitarianism, if the drama, let us say, were taken seriously enough for leading articles instead of being left to the criticism of a few writers who really know something of their business.4 Some fifteen years ago, English critics themselves wrote of Ibsen very much as our more hysterical patriots write of us. These patriots, with an heretical preference for faith over works—for have not opinions and second- and third-hand† conceptions of life, images of what we wish to be, a substance of things hoped for, come from the pawnshop of schismatical faith?—continually attack in the interest of some point of view popularised by Macaulay and his contemporaries, or of some reflection from English novelists and the like, Irish emotion and temperament discovered by some writer in himself after years of labour, for all reality comes to us as the reward of labour.5 Forms of emotion and thought which the future will recognise as peculiarly Irish, for no other country has had the like, are looked upon as un-Irish because of their novelty in a land that is so nearly conquered it has all but nothing of its own. English provincialism shouts through the lips of Irish patriots who have no knowledge of other countries to give them a standard of comparison, and they, with the confidence of all who speak the opinions of others, labour to thwart everybody who would dig a well for Irish water to bubble in.
In 1892, when I started the National Literary Society, and began a movement that was intended to lead up to the establishment of an Irish Dramatic School, the songs and ballads of Young Ireland were used as examples to prove the personal, and therefore Irish art of A. E., Lionel Johnson, Katharine Tynan and myself (see Lionel Johnson’s essay,† Poetry and Politics), an un-Irish† thing.6 And yet those songs and ballads, with the exception of a small number which are partly copied from Gaelic models, and a few, almost all by Mangan, that have a personal style, are imitations of the poetry of Burns and Macaulay and Scott.7 All literature in every country is derived from models, and as often as not these are foreign models, and it is the presence of a personal element alone that can give it nationality in a fine sense, the nationality of its maker. It is only before personality has been attained that a race struggling towards self-consciousness is the better for having, as in primitive times, nothing but native models, for before this has been attained it can neither assimilate nor reject. It was precisely at this passive moment, attainment approaching but not yet come, that the Irish heart and mind surrendered to England, or rather to what is most temporary in England; and Irish patriotism, content that the names and the opinions should be Irish, was deceived and satisfied. It is always necessary to affirm and to reaffirm that nationality is in the things that escape analysis. We discover it, as we do the quality of saltness or sweetness, by the taste, and literature is a cultivation of taste.
The Irish novelists of the nineteenth century, who established themselves, like the Young Ireland poets, upon various English writers, without, except at rare moments—Castle Rackrent was, it may be, the most inspired of those moments—attaining to personality, have filled the popular mind with images of character, with forms of construction, with a criticism of life, which are all so many arguments to prove that some play that has arisen out of a fresh vision is unlike every Irish thing.8 A real or fancied French influence is pointed out at once and objected to, but the English influence, which runs through the patriotic reading of the people, is not noticed because it is everywhere. I say, with certainty, that The Playboy of the Western World, so rich in observation, so full of the temperament of a unique man, has more of Ireland in its characters, in its method of art, in its conception of morals, than all the novels of Kickham;† Michael Banim (I have much respect for his brother John, perhaps because French influence in part annulled the influence of Mrs. Radcliffe, and so helped him to personality); Gerald Griffin, so full of amiable English sentiment; Carleton, in his longer tales, powerful spirit though he was; and, of course, much more in any page of it than in all those romances founded upon Walter Scott, which are or used to be published in Irish newspapers, to make boys and girls into patriots.9 Here and there, of course, one finds Irish elements. In Lever, for instance, even after one has put aside all that is second-hand,† there is a rightful Irish gaiety, but one finds these elements only just in so far as the writers had come to know themselves in the Socratic sense.10 Of course, too, the tradition itself was not all English, but it is impossible to divide what is new and, therefore, Irish, what is very old and, therefore, Irish, from all that is foreign, from all that is an accident of imperfect culture, before we have had some revelation of Irish character, pure enough and varied enough to create a standard of comparison. I do not speak carelessly of the Irish novelists, for when I was in London during the first years of my literary life, I read them continually, seeking in them an image of Ireland that I might not forget what I meant to be the foundations of my art, trying always to winnow as I read. I only escaped from many misconceptions when, in 1897, I began an active Irish life, comparing what I saw about me with what I heard of in Galway cottages.11 Yet for all that, it was from the novelists and poets that I learned in part my symbols of expression. Somebody has said that all sound philosophy is but biography, and what I myself did, getting into an original relation to Irish life, creating in myself a new character, a new pose—in the French sense of the word—the literary mind of Ireland must do as a whole, always understanding that the result must be no bundle of formulas, not faggots but a fire.12 We never learn to know ourselves by thought, said Goethe, but by action only; and to a writer creation is action.13
A moment comes in every country when its character expresses itself through some group of writers, painters, or musicians, and it is this moment, the moment of Goethe in Germany, of the Elizabethan poets in England, of the Van Eycks in the Low Countries, of Corneille and Racine in France, of Ibsen and Björnson in Scandinavia, which fixes the finer elements of national character for generations.14 This moment is impossible until public opinion is ready to welcome in the mind of the artist a power, little affected by external things, being self-contained, self-created, self-sufficing, the seed of character. Generally up to that moment literature has tried to express everybody’s thought, history being considered merely as a chronicle of facts, but now, at the instant of revelation, writers think the world is but their palette, and if history amuses them, it is but, as Goethe says, because they would do its personages the honour of naming after them their own thoughts.15
In the same spirit they approach their contemporaries when they borrow for their own passions the images of living men, and, at times, external facts will be no more to them than the pewter pot gleaming in the sunlight that started Jacob Boehme into his seven days’ trance.16
There are moments, indeed, when they will give you more powerful and exact impressions of the outer world than any other can, but these impressions are always those which they have been the first to receive, and more often than not, to make them the more vivid, they will leave out everything that everybody can see every day. The man of genius may be Signor Mancini if he please, but never Mr. Lafayette.17
Just as they use the life of their own times they use past literature, their own and that of other countries, selecting here and there under what must always seem, until their revelation is understood, an impulse of mere caprice, and the more original, that is to say the more pure, the revelation, the greater the caprice. It was a moment of importance in Scandinavia when a certain pamphlet announced that an historical play could not find its justification in history alone, for it must contain an idea, meaning by an idea thought flowing out of character, as opinions are thought arising out of the necessities of organization.18 We grow like others through opinions, but through ideas discover ourselves, for these are only true when images of our own power.
In no country has this independence of mind, this audacity I had almost said, been attained without controversy, for the men who affirm it seem the enemies of all other interests. In Ireland, in addition to the external art of our predecessors, full of the misunderstandings created by English influence, there is a preoccupation of a great part of the population with opinions and a habit of deciding that a man is useful to his country, or otherwise, not by what he is in himself or by what he does in his whole life, but by the opinions he holds on one or two subjects. Balzac in Les Comédiens sans le savoir, describes a sculptor, a follower of the Socialist Fourier, who has made an allegorical figure of harmony, and got into his statue the doctrine of his master by giving it six breasts, and by putting under its feet an enormous Savoy cabbage. One of his friends promises that when everybody is converted to their doctrine he will be the foremost man of his craft, but another and a wiser says of him that ‘while opinions cannot give talent they inevitably spoil it’, and adds that an artist’s opinion ought to be a faith in works, and that there is no way for him to succeed but by work, ‘while nature gives the sacred fire’.19 In Paris, according to Balzac, it is ambition that makes artists and writers identify themselves with a cause that gives them the help of politicians, of journalists, or of society, as the case may be, but in Ireland, so far as I am able to see, they do it for sociability’s sake, to have a crowd to shout with, and therefore by half deliberate sophistry they persuade themselves that the old tale is not true, and that art is not ruined so. I do not mean that the artist should not as a man be a good citizen and hold opinions like another; Balzac was a Catholic and a Monarchist. We, too, in following his great example, have not put away in anything the strong opinions that we set out with, but in our art they have no place. Every trouble of our theatre in its earlier years, every attack on us in any year, has come directly or indirectly either from those who prefer Mr. Lafayette to Signor Mancini, or from those who believe from a defective education that the writer who does not help some cause, who does not support some opinion, is but an idler, or if his air be too serious for that, the supporter of some hidden wickedness. A principal actor left us in our first year because he believed The Hour-Glass to be a problem play.20 This is all natural enough in a country where the majority have been denied University teaching. I found precisely the same prejudices among the self-educated workingmen about William Morris, and among some few educated persons, generally women, who took their tune from the workingmen†. One woman used to repeat as often as possible that to paint pictures or to write poetry in this age was to fiddle while Rome was burning.21 The artist who permits opinion to master his work is always insincere, always what Balzac calls an unconscious comedian, a man playing to a public for an end, or a philanthropist who has made the most tragic and the most useless of sacrifices.
Certain among the Nationalist attacks have been the work of ignorant men, untruthful, imputing unworthy motives, the kind of thing one cannot answer. But the Unionist hostility, though better mannered, has been more injurious. Our Nationalist pit has grown to understand us, and night after night we have not been able to find room for all who came, but except at rare moments and under exceptional circumstances our stalls have been almost empty, though the people who keep away from us in Ireland flock to us in London, where there is culture enough to make us a fashion. I think that tide is turning, however, for we played, before many Unionists at Galway matinées, Cathleen ni Houlihan, The Gaol Gate, and The Rising of the Moon, all plays that have been objected to at some time or another by some section or other of official Dublin, or that we have been warned against in friendlier moods.22 When Cathleen ni Houlihan was first played in the Abbey I was hissed by a group of young men at the door, and we were offered a good deal of support once towards the filling of our empty stalls if we would drop it from our list. I heard a while ago we had lost financial support through The Rising of the Moon, but returned to tranquillity when I found that it would have been a donation to the National Literary Society—God save the mark!—given under the belief that we and it were the same body.23
In most modern countries when the moment has arrived for a personal impulse either for the first time or in some art hitherto external and conventional, the cry has been raised against the writer that he is preaching sexual immorality, for that is the subject upon which the newspapers, at any rate, most desire to see certain opinions always in force, and a view of the world as sexually unexciting as possible always displayed as if it were reality. Balzac in his preface to the Comédie humaine† had to defend himself from this charge, but it is not the burning question with us at present, for politics are our national passion.24 We have to free our vision of reality from political prepossession, for entangled as it were with all that is exaggerated, lifeless, frozen in the attitudes of party, there are true thoughts about all those things that Ireland is most interested in, a reverie over the emptiness and the fullness of Irish character which is not less a part of wisdom because politics like art have their exaggerations. We cannot renounce political subjects in renouncing mere opinions, for that pleasure in the finer culture of England, that displeasure in Irish disunions and disorders which are the root of reasoned Unionism, are as certainly high and natural thoughts† as the self-denying enthusiasm that leads Michael Gillane to probable death or exile, and Dervorgilla to her remorse, and Patrick Sarsfield of The White Cockade to his sense of what a king should be; and we cannot renounce them because politicians believe that one thought or another may help their opponents, any more than Balzac could have refused to write the Comédie humaine because somebody was afraid Madame l’Épicière might run away from her husband.25
At the close of my speech at one of the performances we were asked to give to the British Association I used these words:26
‘When I was coming up in the train the other day from Galway, I began thinking how unlike your work was to my work, and then suddenly it struck me that it was all the same. A picture arose before my mind’s eye: I saw Adam numbering the creatures of Eden; soft and terrible, foul and fair, they all went before him.27 That, I thought, is the man of science, naming and numbering, for our understanding, everything in the world. But then, I thought, we writers, do we not also number and describe, though with a difference? You are busy with the exterior world, and we with the interior. Science understands that everything must be known in the world our eyes look at; there is nothing too obscure, too common, too vile, to be the subject of knowledge. When a man of science discovers a new species, or a new law, you do not ask the value of the law, or the value of the species, before you do him honour; you leave all that to the judgment of the generations. It is your pride that in you the human race contemplates all things with so pure, so disinterested an eyesight that it forgets its own necessities and infirmities, all its hopes and fears, in the contemplation of truth for the sake of truth, reality for the sake of reality.
‘We, on the other hand, are Adams of a different Eden, a more terrible Eden, perhaps, for we must name and number the passions and motives of men. There, too, everything must be known, everything understood, everything expressed; there, also, there is nothing common, nothing unclean; every motive must be followed through all the obscure mystery of its logic. Mankind must be seen and understood in every possible circumstance, in every conceivable situation. There is no laughter too bitter, no irony too harsh for utterance, no passion too terrible to be set before the minds of men. The Greeks knew that. Only in this way can mankind be understood, only when we have put ourselves in all the possible positions of life, from the most miserable to those that are so lofty that we can only speak of them in symbols and in mysteries, will entire wisdom be possible. All wise government depends upon this knowledge not less than upon that other knowledge which is your business rather than ours; and we and you alike rejoice in battle, finding the sweetest of all music to be the stroke of sword.’28
October, 1908