Our plays this year have a half deliberate unity. Mr. Martyn’s Maeve, which I understand to symbolise Ireland’s choice between English materialism and her own natural idealism, as well as the choice of every individual soul, will be followed, as Greek tragedies were followed by satires and Elizabethan masques by antimasques, by Mr. George Moore’s The Bending of the Bough, which tells of a like choice and of a contrary decision. Mr. Moore’s play, which is, in its external form, the history of two Scottish cities, the one Celtic in the main and the other Saxon in the main, is a microcosm of the last ten years of public life in Ireland. I know, however, that he wishes it to be understood that he has in no instance consciously satirised individual men, for he wars, as Blake claimed to do, with states of mind and not with individual men.1 If any person upon the stage resembles any living person it will be because he is himself a representative of the type. Mr. Moore uses for a symbol of any cause, that seeks the welfare of the nation as a whole, that movement for financial equity which has won the support of all our parties. If the play touches the imagination at all, it should make every man see beyond the symbol the cause nearest his heart, and its struggle against the common failings of humanity and those peculiar to Ireland. I do not think the followers of any Nationalist leader, on the one hand, or of Mr. Lecky or Mr. Plunkett, on the other, can object to its teaching, for it is aimed against none but those persons and parties who would put private or English interests before Irish interests.2 As Allingham wrote long since,
We are one at heart if you be Ireland’s friend,
Though leagues asunder our opinions tend:
There are but two great parties in the end!3
The Last Feast of the Fianna has an antiquarian as well as an artistic interest. Dr. Hyde is of opinion that the Oisin and Patrick dialogues were spoken in character by two reciters, and that had Irish literature followed a natural development a regular drama would have followed from this beginning.4 Miss Milligan has added other characters while preserving the emotions and expressions of the dialogues; and if her play were acted without scenery it would resemble a possible form of old Irish drama.5 But for the extreme difficulty of the metre of the dialogues we would have acted this play in Irish, but the translator gave up after a few verses. We are anxious to get plays in Irish, and can we do so will very possibly push our work into the western counties, where it would be an important help to that movement for the revival of the Irish language on which the life of the nation may depend.
Mr. Moore and Mr. Martyn have put into their plays several eloquent things about the Celtic race, and certainly, if one were to claim that there is something in sacred races, and that the Celt is of them, and to found one’s claim on Mr. Nutt’s pamphlets alone, one would not lack arguments.6 I am myself, however, more inclined to agree with Renan and to set store by a certain native tradition of thought that is passed on in the conversations of father and son, and in the institutions of life, and in literature, and in the examples of history.7 It is these that make nations and that mould the foreign settler after the national type in a few years; and it is these, whether they were made by men of foreign or of Celtic blood, that our theatre would express. If I call them Celtic—and I think Mr. Moore and Mr. Martyn would say the same—it is because of common usage, because the men who made them have less foreign than Celtic blood, and because it is the only word that describes us and those people of Western Scotland who share our language and all but what is most modern in our national traditions.
Prophecies are generally unfortunate, and I made some last year that have not come true; but I think I may say that we will have no difficulty in getting good plays for next year.8 Mr. Martyn has finished a new play, Mr. Bernard Shaw promises us a play which he describes as an Irish Rogue’s Comedy, and Mr. George Moore and myself are half through a three-act play in prose on the legend of Diarmuid and Grania.9 I have also finished a play in verse, but I rather shrink from producing another verse play unless I get some opportunity for private experiment with my actors in the speaking of verse.10 The acting of the poetical drama should be as much oratory as acting, and oratory is a lost art upon the stage. Time too will, doubtless, bring us other plays to choose among, and we have decided to have a play in Irish if we can get it.
Mr. Moore and Mr. Martyn have sent me articles that see the decline of England in the decline of her drama.11 Shelley had a like thought when he said, ‘In periods of the decay of social life the drama sympathises with that decay. . . . It† is indisputable that the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the extinction of the drama in a nation, where it has once flourished, is a mark of the corruption of manners and an extinction of the energies which sustain the soul of social life’. 12 I myself throw the blame for that decline of the spiritual and intellectual energies of which Mr. Martyn and Mr. Moore are convinced, as were Ruskin and Morris and Arnold and Carlyle, upon that commercialism and materialism on which these men warred; and not upon race as do certain of my countrymen.13 It should be our business to bring Ireland from under the ruins, appealing to her, as Grattan appealed to her in his speech on the tythes, by her own example and her own hopes.14
If any money should be made by our plays, which is extremely unlikely, it will be paid into a fund for the production of plays in future years.
The Irish Literary Theatre works under the auspices of the National Literary Society.
EDITOR OF ‘BELTAINE’.