IV
As I write these words the Abbey Players are finishing a successful American tour. These tours, and Irish songs and novels, when they come from a deeper life than their nineteenth-century predecessors, are taking the place of political speakers, political organisations, in holding together the twenty scattered millions conscious of their Irish blood. The attitude towards life of Irish writers and dramatists at this moment will have historical importance. The success of the Abbey Theatre has grown out of a single conviction of its founders: I was the spokesman because I was born arrogant and had learnt an artist’s arrogance—‘Not what you want but what we want’—and we were the first modern theatre that said it. I did not speak for John Synge, Augusta Gregory and myself alone, but for all the dramatists of the theatre. Again and again somebody speaking for our audience, for an influential newspaper or political organisation, has demanded more of this kind of play or less, or none, of that. They have not understood that we cannot, and if we could would not comply; the moment any dramatist has some dramatic sense and applies it to our Irish theme he is played. We may help him with his technique or to clear his mind of the second-hand or the second-rate in their cruder forms, but beyond that we can do nothing. He must find himself and mould his dramatic form to his nature after his own fashion, and that is why we have produced some of the best plays of modern times, and a far greater number of the worst. And what I have said of the dramatists is true of the actors, though there the bad comedians do not reach our principal company. I have seen English producers turn their players into mimics; but all our producers do for theirs, or so it was in my day and I suppose it is still the same, is to help them to understand the play and their own natures.
Yet the theatre has not, apart from this one quality, gone my way or in any way I wanted it to go, and often looking back I have wondered if I did right in giving so much of my life to the expression of other men’s genius. According to the Indians a man may do much good yet lose his own soul. Then I say to myself, I have had greater luck than any other modern English-speaking dramatist; I have aimed at tragic ecstasy, and here and there in my own work and in the work of my friends I have seen it greatly played. What does it matter that it belongs to a dead art and to a time when a man spoke out of an experience and a culture that were not of his time alone, but held his time, as it were, at arm’s length, that he might be a spectator of the ages. I am haunted by certain moments: Miss O’Neill in the last act of Synge’s Deirdre ‘Stand a little further off with the quarrelling of fools’; Kerrigan and Miss O’Neill playing in a private house that scene in Augusta Gregory’s Full Moon where the young mad people in their helpless joy sing ‘The Boys of Queen Anne’; Frank Fay’s entrance in the last act of The Well of the Saints; William Fay at the end of On Baile’s Strand; Mrs Patrick Campbell in my Deirdre, passionate and solitary; and in later years that great artist Ninette de Valois in Fighting the Waves. These things will, it may be, haunt me on my deathbed; what matter if the people prefer another art, I have had my fill.