Mr. Moore has given reasons elsewherewhy the founders of the Irish Literary Theatre believe good plays more possible in Ireland than in London; but I think he makes too much of these reasons when he makes them our chief impulse.1 I know that he and Mr. Martyn and myself, and those who are working with us, believe that we have things to say to our countrymen which it is our pleasure and our duty to say. If we write plays that are literature, and find people to like them, it will be because that strong imaginative energy, which is needed to fill with life the elaborate circumstance of a play, has not often come except as from a Sinai to some nation wandering as in a wilderness; but that strong imaginative energy comes among men, as I think, not because they have followed it from country to country, but because a genius greater than their own, and, it may be, without their knowledge or their consent, has thrown its shadow upon them.2 Dionysius, the Areopagite, wrote that ‘He has set the borders of the nations according to His angels’.3 It is these angels, each one the genius of some race about to be unfolded, that are the founders of intellectual traditions; and as lovers understand in their first glance all that is to befall them, and as poets and musicians see the whole work in its first impulse, so races prophesy at their awakening whatever the generations that are to prolong their traditions shall accomplish in detail. It is only at the awakening—as in ancient Greece, or in Elizabethan England, or in contemporary Scandinavia—that great numbers of men understand that a right understanding of life and of destiny is more important than amusement. In London, where all the intellectual traditions gather to die, men hate a play if they are told it is literature, for they will not endure a spiritual superiority; but in Athens, where so many intellectual traditions were born, Euripides once changed hostility to enthusiasm by asking his playgoers whether it was his business to teach them, or their business to teach him.4 New races understand instinctively, because the future cries in their ears, that the old revelations are insufficient, and that all life is revelation beginning in miracle and enthusiasm, and dying out as it unfolds itself in what we have mistaken for progress. It is one of our illusions, as I think, that education, the softening of manners, the perfecting of law—countless images of a fading light—can create nobleness and beauty, and that life moves slowly and evenly towards some perfection. Progress is miracle, and it is sudden, because miracles are the work of an all-powerful energy, and nature in herself has no power except to die and to forget. If one studies one’s own mind, one comes to think with Blake, that “every time less than a pulsation of the artery is equal to 6000years, for in this period the poet’s work is done; and all the great events of time start forth and are conceived in such a period, within a pulsation of the artery”. 5
Scandinavia is, as it seems, passing from her moments of miracle; and some of us think that Ireland is passing to hers. She may not produce any important literature, but because her moral nature has been aroused by political sacrifices, and her imagination by a political pre-occupation with her own destiny, she is ready to be moved by profound thoughts that are a part of the unfolding of herself. Mr. Martyn lit upon one of them in his Heather Field, which shares it with old Celtic legends. He describes a man who attained the Divine vision as his brain perished, and our Irish playgoers sympathised with this man so perfectly that they hissed the doctors who found that he was mad. The London playgoers, whose life, as must be wherever success is too highly valued, is established in a contrary thought, sympathised with the doctors, and held the Divine vision a dream. This year Mr. Martyn will return to the same thought with his Maeve, which tells of an old woman who begs her way from door to door in life, and is a great and beautiful queen in faery, and who persuades a young girl to renounce life and seek perfection in what unfolds as death. Miss Milligan, not influenced by Mr. Martyn, or by anything but old legends, has the same thought in her The Last Feast of the Fianna, which, as I think, would make one remember the mortality and indignity of all that lives. Her bard Oisin goes to faery, and is made immortal like his songs; while the heroes and Grania, the most famous of the beautiful, sink into querulous old age. Mr. Moore, in his The Bending of the Bough, the longest and most elaborate of our three plays, has written of the rejection of a spiritual beauty, which his play expounds, as the ideal hope, not of individual life, but of the race—its vision of itself made perfect—and the acceptance of mere individual life. His story, which pretends to describe the relations between two towns, one in the Celtic north and one in the Saxon south of a Scotland as vague as the sea-coast of Bohemia,6 really describes the war of this vision with surrounding circumstance, and its betrayal by the light-souled and the self-seeking. It shows many real types of men and women in the fire of an impassioned satire, and will perhaps awaken some sleeping dogs. This thought of the war of immortal upon mortal life has been the moving thought of much Irish poetry, and may yet, so moving and necessary a thought it is, inspire many plays which, whether important or unimportant, shall have the sincerity of youth. It has come upon us, not because we have sought it out, but because we share, as I think, a moiety of the blood and the intellectual traditions of the race that gave romance and the kingdom of faery to European literature, and which has always waited with amorous eyes for some impossible beauty. Our daily life has fallen among prosaic things and ignoble things, but our dreams remember the enchanted valleys.
(Reprinted from THE DOME.)