DmîATIC THEORY AITH PRACTICE IH THE IRISH LITERiiRY THEATRE5^Costume for the Fool in “The Hour Glass” draw ing by Edward Gordon Craig, 1910■’m t' V dA study of the Dramatic Theory developed by the founders of The Irish Literary Theatre and the attempt to apply this theory in The Abbey Theatre, with particular reference to the achievements of the major figures during the first two decades of the movement.^7Eleanor Ann Saddlemyer1961Being a thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of London.ProQuest Number: 10098063All rights reservedINF0RMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted.In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removeda note will indicate the deletion.uest.ProQuest 10098063Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author.All rights reserved.This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States CodeMicroform Edition © ProQuest LLC.ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.Q. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346THESIS ABSTRACT'%at we wanted was to create for Ireland a theatre with a base of realism, with an apex of beauty,’* Lady Gregory wrote of the early Abbey. This study examines, with-special reference to the theatre movement in Ireland during the first two decades of this century, the dramatic theory and practice developed by William Butler Yeats,Lady Gregory, and John Millington Synge, in their attempt to create an Irish literary theatre.It begins by considering the background of all three writers in an effort to place each within the aesthetic and national climate which nurtured their development and affected their aims and practice. This section traces the major European and Irish currents of thought in which they were involved.A theatre with a base of realism and an apex of beauty implies special qualifications and involves certain basic conflicts. The main body of the thesis is devoted to a study of the development in theory and craftsmanship of these three playwrights as each evolved a dramatic form which would satisfy his artistic theories. Emphasis is placed on the achievements of each during the period I9OO to 1919*The general development of the theatre as distinct from the individual work of its directors is then considered, and a survey made of the gradual evolution of a policy which gave rise to "the Abbey tradition" of writing and acting. A brief examination is made of the degree of interdependence between playwright, player, producer, and audience.The founders succeeded in creating a theatre, but not in realizing their dream. The final chapter places the individual achievement of Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Synge against this background of the general movement and the theatre they founded, in an effort to determine the cause of this success and failure, and the reality of the dream.PREFACE"If we all told the story we would all tell it differently," Yeats commented on the creation of the Abbey Theatre. The first study of the Irish literary movement appeared in 1894» five years before the theatre was born; the latest is but a few months old. Many books have been written, all contributing either through personal reminiscence or the discovery of new material to an increasingly detailed picture of the theatre and its founders. But in part because of the emotional forces which played a decisive role in its creation, in part because of the awesome stature of the major figures involved, most of these studies of the movement have been limited in aim and interpretation. All tend to restrict their examination to a horizontal survey of the early years; few attempt to disentangle the principles of the founders in order to trace the individual development of each.There are obvious disadvantages to one who arrives on the scene sixty years late, for it is impossible to recapture the initial atmosphere of excitement that inevitably exists during a period of revaluation and re-creation. Yet there are compensating advantages: ardour has cooled, material is available, distance encourages perspective on a deeper and broader scale. The participants can be placed not only against each other, which frequently again leads to false perspective, but against the broader European background in which each was involved. Furthermore, the histories are written and the groundwork already explored. All students of Irish theatre owe much to the preliminary work done by A.E.Malone in The Irish Drama and by Professor Una Ellis-Fermor in The Irish Dramatic Movement.I am indebted not only to these works but to much unpublished material hitherto unavailable. Mrs. L.M.Stephens, literary executor of the J.M.Synge estate, offered me not only hospitality but all of the Synge papers and the late E.M.Stephens*s invaluable manuscript on the life and work of Synge. Mrs. W.B.Yeats gave me access to all of thetheatre material in her possession, including all the extant correspondence between Miss Horniman and the Abbey Directors and two scrapbooks, apparently collected by Lady Gregory, containing a record of Yeats’s early public career; she also gave me permission to examine the drafts of his plays and all the material pertaining to his work which is now deposited in the National Library of Ireland. Miss Ria Mooney, present director of the Abbey Theatre, Miss Siobhan Mackenna, former actress at the Abbey, kindly answered innumerable questions.Mr. Edward Gordon Craig corresponded freely and helpfully; information was also received from Mr. Ezra Pound, Professor Denis Gwynn, Mr.Iain Fletcher, and Mr. Rupert Hart-Davis. Mr. Owen Linnane placed his valuable recollections of Edward Martyn at my disposal. My grateful thanks go also to Mr. Alf MacLochlain of the National Library of Ireland and Miss Mary Pollard of the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, for the endless pains both took in seeking out relevant information and material; also to Dr. Gwladys Downes, Mrs. A.LeBrocquy, Mrs. Dora McAuliffe, îvtrs. Eleanor Morgan, and Mrs. R.N. White.Mrs. Yeats has kindly given me permission to print the Black Jester’s prologue; she and^Iacmillan Company have also allowed me to reprint the material in the other appendices; the illustrations are acknowledged separately.The idea for this thesis first occurred during research for The Plays of John Millington Synge, an M.A.Thesis for Queen’s University, Canada, in 1956. Work was begun under the direction of the late Professor Una Ellis-Fermor; it was brought to completion under the guidance of Miss Margery M. Morgan, whose patience and encouragement, as well as that of Professor Kathleen Tillotson, I gratefully acknowledge..3TABLE OP CONTENTSAbstractPrefaceIllustrationspage45 9Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 5 Chapter 4Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8PART ONE - PROLOGUE: DREAMS AND REALITIESManifestos: 1897 and 1919 11Nationalism 19Cosmopolitanism 80Revolution in the Theatre I5IPART TWO - THE PLAYWRIGHTS AND THEIR PLAYSWilliam Butler Yeats 214Augusta, Lady Gregory )09John Millington Synge 574Ursa MinorEdward Martyn and George Moore 4&7George Russell (AE) 495Alice Milligan and James Cousins 502Padraic Colum 505Lennox Robinson and the "Cork Realists" 509William Boyle 515George Fitzmaurice 514PART THREE - THEATRE, PLAYERS, AND PUBLICChapter 9 ResponsibilitiesDirectors: First and Second Triumvirates 520Actors and Producers 556Costume and Setting 574Audience Participation 586Chapter 10Appendix A Appendix B Appendix C Appendix DFinale: The Divided Image"Cuchulain, the Girl, and the Fool" Prologue to The King * s Threshold The Black Jester’s Prologue Prologue to The Death of Cuchulain594604606608610List of Works ConsultedA. BibliographiesB.C.D.E.F.Background Material (Chapters 1Primary SourcesSecondary SourcesThesesManuscripts- 4)6126l4631650657658I L L U S T R A T I O N SpageCostume for the Pool in The Hour Glass from a drawing by Edward Gordon Craig, 1910, by permission of the artistScene for The Hour Glass from a drawing by EdwardGordon Craig, 1910, by permission of the artist 204Scene blockings by W.B.Yeats for an early draft of Beirdre including instructions for the BlackJester, circa 1904, by permission of Mrs. Yeats 281Jack Yeats’s sketches of jockey costumes for The Playboy, Act III, in a letter to Synge, 1907, by permission of Mrs. L.M.Stephens 57910PART ONE PROLOGUE: DREAMS AMD REALITIES11CHAPTER 1 - MANIFESTOS: 1897 AND I919 In the autumn of I897 a small group of public figures received the announcement of the birth of a new theatre. The recipients were carefully selected, having two characteristics in common, Irish sympathies and literary leanings. The signatories on the prospectus had very little else in common, and only one was in any sense well-knov/n. The announcement read in part as follows:We propose to have performed in Dublin, in the spring of every year certain Celtic and Irish plays, which whatever be their degree of excellence will be written with a high ambition, and so to build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature. We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted and imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory, and believe that our desire to bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland will ensure for us a tolerant welcome, and that freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres of England, and without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed. We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism. We are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside all the political questions that divide us.It v/as signed by Augusta Gregory, Edward Martyn, and William Butler Yeats.^ Response was generous and the experiment in Irish dramawas realized. But one more literary theatre made very little difference to the general scene. New movements were almost an everyday occurrence in the ’nineties.This movement persisted, however, and many of the same public figures were somewhat startled to read seven years later that it had gone to school in its own building (provided by an Englishwoman), thereby becoming "the first endowed Theatre in any English-speaking country."2 Once again first principles were expounded;^Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre (London and New York:G.P.Putnam’s, 1913), 8-9. Lady Gregory gives the date as 1898, but Yeats’s letters to her in 1897 clearly indicate that the prospectus was circulated in that year. Cf. ^ Letters of W.B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (New York:Macmillan, 1955),288 and 290.^"The Irish Dramatic Movement," Samhain. I904*12First. Our plays must be literature or written in the spirit of literature ....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 ....Third. We must have a new kind of scenic art ....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.^The principles expounded differed little from those of the 1897 manifesto.However, both the audience addressed and the list of signatories hadaltered and expanded. All who could find their way to the Abbey Theatreon the less fashionable side of the River Liffey, whether of literaryleanings or nationalist sympathy, were appealed to in Samhain.Edward Martyn*s name is absent, but among the signatures of directorsand players was included that of John Millington Synge.Fifteen more years passed. The movement was of age, and had beenreceived into the most conservative theatres of London and America. Ithad been praised and on occasion martyred. Books had been written aboutit; schools had been founded after it. Once more an open letterappeared, this time signed by only one director, W.B. Yeats, and addressed,through the public, to the other founder-director. Lady Gregory. Thenote of hopeful planning has been replaced by a tone of discouragedrenunciation:The Abbey Theatre can never do all we had hoped ....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 ownknowledge 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. Yet we did not set out to create this sort of theatre, and its success has been to me a discouragement and a defeat .... You and I and Synge, not understanding the clock, set out to bring again the Theatre of Shakespeare or rather perhaps of Sophocles .... We thought we could bring theJ-»The Play, the Player, and the Scene," Samhain, 1904.15old 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 pl&ygoers 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. ...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. ...not a theatre but the theatre’s anti-self.^The Abbey Theatre as a "People’s Theatre" continues: the early playsare rarely produced; the plays of one founding dramatist are studied throughout the world as exajuples of the finest twentieth century drama, the plays of another are too frequently treated as interesting "source books" for the exposition of his poetry, the name of the third is rarely heard outside of the company of her famous colleagues. And the theatre of which they had such high hopes has become a parody, albeit a good- natured one, of their Samhain principles. This failure, as Yeats observed, occurred long before 1919* Perhaps it had been incipient from the beginning. Perhaps the principles of Samhain were in fact impossible to fulfil. The purpose of this thesis is to trace those principles from their foundation to their final issue, and to attempt some estimate of the success and failure of Yeats’s dream and of the movement he initiated.For the opening of that small theatre in Lower Abbey Street marked not only the achievement of a dream held for a decade by a small nucleus of Irish men and women, but the convergence of many interests and ideals, provincial, national, and cosmopolitan. The history of the Abbey has been frequently and well told by players, playwrights, audience, and critics: hov/ Yeats and Martyn brought lloore back to Ireland and v/ere jjoined first by Lady Gregory, later by the Pay brothers ; how the generous^"A People’s Theatre. A Letter to Lady Gregory," Irish Statesman, 29 November and 6 December, I919* Reprinted in W.B.Yeats, Plays and Controversies (London:Macmillan,1925)>199-218.14but single-minded English heiress, Annie Homiman, endowed a theatre to her fellow-theosophist*8 muse; how Yeats "discovered" their first great playwright in a Paris attic, and twenty years later his fellow- director nurtured the second in a Dublin slum; and how during the period between Synge and O’Casey the Abbey became a symbol not only of the "Celtic Renaissance," but of a specific tradition in playwriting, producing, and acting. By examining these numerous accounts and the plays themselves, supplemented by records hitherto unavailable, it is possible tô isolate the basic theories developed by the leaders of the movement which culminated in the Abbey Theatre, and to trace those theories through various stages to their final form in Irish drama.^As Professor Ellis-Fermor illustrated, the leaders carried their ideals into the theatre workshop, where they were tempered into a definite tradition; "poetic faith, poetic practice, and poetic t h e o r y . A n d one of the most distinctive features of the Abbey Theatre is that, like its famous predecessor the Theatre-Libre, it was conceived and established primarily as a playwright’s theatre. In this sense dramatic theory determined not only the form and material of the play but the actual production as well; in turn, as the play wrists were also the directors and producers, production, performance, and policy influenced the scope and structure of the play. However, this line of development was not as simple as it may sound.The dramatist-directors developed each at his own pace and in his own direction; occasionally the resultant plays never reached the Abbey company; frequently their plays varied considerably from both the "Abbey tradition" and the work of their colleagues. It is a tribute to the artistic integrity of all three that none was limited to or by the theatre they had created. A thorough examination of theThe latest of these histories, Gerard Pay’s The Abbey Theatre: Cradle of Genius (London:Hollis and Carter,1958)» is restricted mainly to a more thorough study of the contributions of the Fays, but otherwise retraces old ground and occasionally sinks into the same quicksand.The best history of the movement remains, as Professor Ellis-Fermor indicated, A.E.Malone’s The Irish Drama (London:Constable,1929)^Una Ellis-Fermor, The Irish Dramatic Movement, 2nd ed. (London:Methuen,1954)> 59»15dramatic theory and practice developed by the founders of the Irish dramatic movement requires one step further still, therefore, back to the initial impulse which stirred each, to an analysis of the basic motives that resulted in the formation not only of an Irish theatre but of their own individual plays.Like its sister theatres on the continent, the Abbey was the product of mixed parentage, one parent cosmopolitan and sophisticated, the other ruder and more provincial. Despite nationalistic stirrings, Dublin of the nineteenth century was still both artistically and socially the second capital of the Empire^; those who were Protestant and sufficiently wealthy sent their children to England (and to England’s Irish outpost. Trinity College) for their education, and to Prance for their culture; those who were Catholic and wealthy did the same; the others on the whole scrambled through what education they could in Ireland. The link with England through Castle, government, and trade was strong if at times difficult for some to bear; Paris had for so long been a refuge of "wild geese" and political exiles that a strong sympathetic bond had been forged between the French and the Irish, occasionally exhibiting itself in subversive underground movements.^ Consequently the young writers of the "ascendancy class", educated abroad, returned to their homeland with a cosmopolitan background which rested comfortably if not always unselfconsciously on their shoulders. Further, distance and a broader basis of experience invested them with a more objective, critical, and hence occasionally didactic, attitude towards their country and countrymen.3 And most important of all, participation in the restless, constantly shifting.Elizabeth Plunkett, Countess of Fingall, Seventy Years Young As Told to Pamela Hinkson (London:Collins, 1957)*456-70 £t passim.%aud Gonne MacBride, A Servant of the Queen (London:Gollancz, 1958), chs. 5,15 et passim."5çf. John Eglinton-Iw.K. Mage^ , Preface to Anglo-Irish Essays (Dublin:Talbot Press, 1917),4-5#16allegiances and coteries of the arts abroad stirred them to propagate their own aesthetic ideals at home.Examined in retrospect, the origin of the Irish dramatic movement might in fact be considered the third stage of a favourite twentieth century theme - the exile’s return. The early years of Yeats, Martyn, and Moore followed the curiously similar pattern appropriate to their birth and station. All three had spent part of their boyhood in London and chose to return there as young men. While Martyn went up to Oxford, the other two studied painting, Moore in Paris and Yeats in Dublin. By the 1880’s all were once again in London, intent on literary careers, and while each made regular trips to Ireland and occasional visits to the continent, for the last decade of the nineteenth century their centre of intellectual interest remained London. Even their literary apprenticeship followed similar lines: poetry, novels, plays and critical essays with varying success. (The tradition of creating dramatists out of other material still exists in the Abbey Theatre.). Al^hou^ Lady Gregory’s development as a dramatist occurred much later, she too arrived by a devious route, through research into folklore, translation from the Irish, and collaboration. As wife of a colonial governor, she had journeyed extensively abroad, gained an increasing critical knowledge and experience of the arts, and for many years kept a house in London.^ "AE", too, shared his colleagues’ cosmopolitanism: born in Ulster,he may have spent some of his early years in London, ^ and after a desultory study of painting in Dublin, devoted himself to the study^Cf. Autobiography of Sir William Gregory, ed. Lady Gregory (London:John Murray,189477 Elizabeth Coxhead, Lady Gregory: A Literary Portrait (London:Macmillan, 196]), chs. 1 and 2.A private letter to the present writer suggests that he might have studied for some time in London; this has not been verified.17of theosophy, which in itself presupposes an international outlook,1 and to the propagation of Horace Plunkett’s economic land reforms.The youngest of that company, John Synge, travelled directly to the continent from Trinity College, and for ten years divided his time between Paris and rural Ireland. He, too, passed from one art to the other, studying music before finally turning to poetry, criticism, and drama.This dual education proved of advantage when the forces gathered in Dublin at the end of the century. Having been educated to look beyond Ireland for their culture, they were prevented by their Irish heritage from complete identification with any other nation. Although each possessed the instincts of the Irish by nature from childhood, extensive travel gave them a cosmopolitan attitude towards the arts and their own country, thereby preserving them from the greatest dangers of an insular habit of mind. Nor were they hampered by any sense of inferiority which might prevent them from participating in the intellectual activities they discovered in their travels, no matter how self-conscious they mi^t become at home. For the contribution of Irish men of letters to world literature was already a firmly established tradition, which would extend from Goldsmith, Congreve, Sheridan, Swift, throu^ Allingham, Boucicault and Wilde, to Shaw and Joyce.Equally significant and provocative in the formation of the Irish dramatic movement was the fresh wave of nationalist feeling which was flooding the political and literary circles of Dublin, carrying on its crest most of the individual and highly eloquent leaders of the time and even seeping through the hitherto impervious gates of Trinity College. Irish wares, literature, and language became fashionable, and Irish writers discovered overnight the vast unfathomed treasure of their own folklore and legend, buried until now in dusty manuscripts. To^Cf. The Internationalist, edd. George Russell and H.A.W.Coryn, Dublin, 1897-1898.18. these returned "exiles," came the inevitable question, where there is ' so much native material, might not there also be a native audience?, Must the drama, like most of the literature, remain "cross-channel" in subject and inspiration as well as in policy and performance? And so the desire to create a truly indigenous drama took its place beside the impulse to create an ideal theatre of the arts.The origin of the Abbey Theatre was, then, artificial in the sense that it resulted from a deliberate and self-conscious effort to create something out of two disparate elements. That the graft was at all successful is due not only to the condition of the soil, but to the skill and inspiration of those who tended it. One of the purposes of this study will be an attempt to determine what qualities effected this transformation, its permanency, its originality, and, most essential of all in the production of an artistic form, its creativity.19CHAPTER 2 - NATIONALISMWe will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism. We are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside all the political questions that divide us.(Irish Literary Theatre Prospectus,1897)There are things a man must not do to save a nation.(John O’Leary)Nurtured as he was on the cosmopolitan ideals of Prance, England, and Norway, it was only natural that when Yeats met Lady Gregory in 1896 their talk "turned on p l a y s . B u t this most public of the arts had another appeal, perhaps most obvious in Lady Gregory. For despite their nominal membership of the "Ascendancy" class, Yeats, Martyn and Lady Gregory had each developed strong nationalist sentiments. For none of them could Art for its^sake remain sufficient; Art must somehow, without lowering its own standard in any way, be for the Nation as well. Ten years later the title page of The Arrow, founded by the Abbey directors in defiance of the very audience they wished to serve, would flaunt the following quotation from Wagner:In the Theatre there lies the spiritual seed and kernel of all national poetic and national moral culture. No other branch of Art can ever truly flourish or ever aid in cultivating the people until the Theatre’s all-powerful assistance has been completely recognised and guaranteed.2• In the late ’nineties, however, while declaring their belief in "national life and national feeling" as "the basis of admirable ' literature,"5 the founders of the Irish Literary Theatre must have wondered at their own temerity in striding forth where so many had already fallen.^Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre (New York and London:G.P.Putnam’s Sons, 1915),6. Lady Gregory implies that they did not meet until 1897, but according to Yeats *s letters they had met by I896. ^f. The Letters of W.B.Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (N.Y:Macmillan, 1955),287.^The Arrow,vol.1 nos.1-5 (20 October 1906-25 August 1909), by Yeats.^Quotation from Yeats’ lecture on "Dramatic Ideals and the Irish Literary Theatre," Dublin Daily Express. 8 May 1899,6.20For despite indications of literary uprisings in Irish literature, the intellectual climate of Dublin was not markedly different from the^ oT earlier decades of the century. Writers of Irish literature in the English language could roughly be separated into two main parties: the "West Britons" or literary Unionists whose residence in Ireland seemed a mere accident from a literary point of view, and the true Anglo-Irish writers who, if not always writing for Ireland, wrote of it.Professor Edward Dowden of Trinity College might be considered the "grand old man" of literary Unionism. Poet, scholar, critic, and boyhood friend of John Butler Yeats, "for perhaps a couple of years he was an image of romance" to the painter’s son.^ His "quiet influence" was praised by Nationalist and English alike,% but he did not have the imagination (or in the Yeatses’ opinion the courage) to believe in an Irish renaissance, and remained distrustful of any movement that broke away from the great traditions of the English renaissance.5 Perhaps his closest contact with the new movement was unknown to him, when a young college student, John Synge, recorded and preserved his lectures on the ethical qualities of Elizabethan literature.^Trinity College tended to remain a bulwark of anti-nationalism in the eyes of the young literary nationalists, however. Professor Atkinson incurred lasting opprobrium by publicly declaring that the "Gaelic Irish literature" on which their hopes and beliefs were based, was"intolerably low in tone," having "very little idealism in it, and^Autobiographies (London:Maomillan,1955)i 86.^Cf. John Eglinton, "Professor Dowden," Dublin Daily Express.10 December 1898,5*^Letters of Edward Dowden and his Correspondents (London:Dent,l914)• Cf. Yeats’s letter to the Daily Express. 26 January 1895,5, in reply toProfessor Dowden’s denunciation of the new movement; also his attack onDowden in "The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson, "Dublin University Review, II(November 1886),925-41*^Collected papers of John Millington Synge in the possession of Mrs. L.M. Stephens.21very little imagination."! And in I914 Provo$t i Mahaffy gained notoriety by prohibiting "the man Pearse" from lecturing within the College walls. But even when favourably disposed towards the new movement, such Trinity College men as George Savage-Armstrong (I845-I9O6 ) and Dr. John Todhunter (1839-1916)5 remained English both in output and outlook, preferring the spirit of Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth to the "ancient idealism" of the Celt. For any forecast of the renaissance at the end of the century, therefore, we must look elsewhere.The term describing the work of our second general category ofIrish writers, "Anglo-Irish literature," has always been a difficultone to define. It was used most accurately, perhaps, by ThomasMacDonagh, now celebrated as one of the patriots of I916, known thennot only as "helper and friend" to the schoolmaster Pearse,4 but asan astute literary critic and one of the more hopeful poets. In acollection of essays published in I916 MacDonagh looks back on theliterary movement which had to all appearances then passed its zenith:The term Anglo-Irish literature ... is worth having as a term only to apply to the literature produced by the English-speaking Irish, and by those in general only when writing in Ireland and for the Irish people .... so much in love with Ireland, ... in consonance with the Irish rhythm of life and literature, in converse with Irish people and out of converse with others.By applying this measure, MacDonagh felt justified in rejecting certain^Quoted by Standish 0*Grady in a review of Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men, All-Ireland Review. 28 January 1905,41*^This gave rise to a publication in 1947 of Yeats’s speech at the Thomas Davis Centenary meeting, held in Dublin on November 20th,1914 with Dr. Mahaffy’s prohibition, and an unpublished protest by AE. Cf. Tribute to Thomas Davis (Oxford:Cork University Press,1947). Pearse was one of the leaders of the Easter Rebellion in I916.^See below, chapter 4 ,^Cf. "Easter 1916", The Collected Poems of W.B.Yeats (London:Macmi1Ian,1952),202-205.22writers of Gaelic stock as "more Greek than Gael," and accepting such alien friends as Lionel Johnson and Nora Chesson.lYeats, like all successful autocrats inclined to create, alter, or discard on the sincerity of the moment, was willing to extend his interpretation of Anglo-Irish letters not only to embrace his good friends Lionel Johnson and Arthur Symons, but to sense an undefined Celtic sympathy even in such opposite forces as William Blake and Maurice Maeterlinck. But if he allowed himself extremes in one direction, he channelled his enthusiasms in others. Like two other major Irish critics, the brilliant but testy historian Standish 0*Grady, and "our one philosophical critic," John Eglinton,^ Yeats never succumbed to the Irish language as thoroughly as George Moore or Edward Martyn, believing instead that "we must put Irish emotion into the English language if we were to reach our generation."^ For the purposes of this study, then, we may accept as Anglo-Irish writers those authors who wrote for Ireland and the Irish, while maintaining their belief in literature "as an expression of such insight into life and nature as man can gain by any means in his powerThe Anglo-Irish tradition of letters has been a long and noble if not always consistent one, achieving its greatest breadth and following in the nineteenth century. It in turn can be sub-divided as to motive, between those who, although self-consciously Irish, wrote with one eye cocked at the English market, and those who were content, sometimes naively so, to sing their native woodnotes wild. Some of the more sophisticated writers were distinctively Irish only in subject matter, such as the poet William Allingham (1824-1889), whose best lyrics^Thomas MacDonagh, Literature in Ireland:Studies Irish and Anglo- Irish (Dublin:Talbot Press,191^),28-29 et passim.^Samhain.I904.5The Irish National Theatre (Roma:Reale Accademia d*Italia,1955),6.^John Eglinton, "A Word for Anglo-Irish Literature," United Irishman. 22 March 1902),5»25display the lightness and grace which so charmed his friends Ruskin and Rossetti; but even Allingham did not hesitate to import the English fairy kingdom when required. Others, more consistently and deliberately Irish, yet remained travellers in a strange land, observing, recording, occasionally in the interests of good storytelling exaggerating, the life about them. Earlier writers such as the novelists, Samuel Lover (1797-1868), Charles Lever (I8O6-I872), and Gerald Griffin (I8O3-I84O), although possessing a gift for character and situation, had remained Irish "on purpose rather than out[of] the necessity of ... blood."! Even "the great Maria," Miss Edgeworth (1767-I849), destined for dual fame through her influence on the model chosen by the new nationalists. Sir Walter Scott, had flinched from the realities staring at her during the miseries of famine and poverty.^But the Anglo-Irish writers to whom the new nationalists looked for encouragement and example came of a different strain. These were the novelists and poets who wrote not only of Ireland but only for Irelajid as well. Some belonged to the Ascendancy class; many more came from the peasantry of whom they spoke and sang. At their best they achieved a "square-built power"5 and realism in advance of their fellow novelists in England; at their worst they lapsed into the "buffoonery and easy sentiment" deplored by the new literary school. Among the novelists, William Carleton (1794-1869), "the Walter Scott of Ireland,"4 perhaps best known for his Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (I850), is outstanding. Of peasant stock and casual , education, Carleton was well qualified among those who "saw the whole of everything they looked at ... the brutal with the tender, the coarse with the refined."5 In 1889 Yeats edited a selection of^Yeats’s letter to Father Matthew Russell, December 1889,Letters. 145*^Letter to her brother in 1850, quoted by Benedict Kiely in Poor Scholar: A Study of William Carleton (London:Sheed and Ward, 1947),H5*^Yeats, letter to Father Matthew Russell, December 1889, Letters,145. .^Daniel O’Connor, quoted by Kiely, Poor Scholar,177#^Yeats, ibid.24Carleton*s stories, and two years later gave him pride of place in his Representative Irish Tales.^ As late as 1901 he mentioned proudly that his publisher found him equal with Carleton in unpopularity among Dublin booksellers.^A less virile strain had entered Irish literature with the poetry of Thomas Moore (1779-1852), whose "dazzling lightness and insincere sentiment" were frowned upon by later sterner critics.5 But the tenderness and pathos of Moore’s Irish Melodies (1807) and National Airs (I8I5) coloured poets* visions of Ireland for almost a century.The popular sentiment of his poetry in turn paved the way for the sentimental nationalism and propaganda of The Nation, whose founders "united literature to their politics and civil morality to literature."4 Charles Cavan Duffy (I8I6-I9O5), editor of the newspaper, and Thomas Davis (I8I4-I845); leading spirit of The Nation’s political school of poetry, together inspired and created the picture of Ireland still broadcast by sentimental Irish emigrants, raising Irish patriotism to "a sort of religious or idealistic status" later realists have never been allowed to alter.5 By encouraging and publishing the poems of Irish men and women of all classes and creeds, The Nation truly became the voice of Ireland, but the sacrifice of quality to quantity built up an idealistic concept of Ireland which became so mingled with patriotism that criticism automatically implied a dismissal of national values as well. "If we said that The Spirit of the Nation (a collection of selections^Stories from Carleton (London:Walter Scott,1888); Representative Irish Tales. First Series (nY and LondoniG.P.Putnam’s Sons,189l).^Letter to Lady Gregory, 21 May 1901.Letters.550*^Stopford A.Brooke, "Thomas Moore," A Treasury of Irish Poetry the Engli gh Tongue, edd. Stopford Brooke and T.W.Rolleston(London:Smith, Elder & Co.,1900),54-41*^Brooke.op.cit.,xii.^John Eglinton,"The De-Davisisation of Irish Literature," Bards and Saints (Dublin;Maunsel,I9O6 ),58 (Tower Press Booklets, first series).25from the newspape:^ was but salutary rhetoric, England might overhear us and take up the cry.**l Although recognizing the importance of such "images for the affections the Soldier, the Orator, the Patriot, the Poet, the Chieftain, and above all the Peasant," Yeats and his colleagues deplored the rhetoric, convention and sentimentality begotten by this levelling process. Believing that "the sentimental mind is the bourgeois mind" (and the Irish are descendants of kings), they in their turn dreamed of the unspoilt peasant untouched by "the mind of the town," at times perhaps just as artificial an ideal as the one against which they so violently reacted.3 A great deal of Yeats’s own unpopularity in Ireland can be traced to his frequent and vehement ' denunciations^ of what AE called "boyscoutish" propaganda which lacked "a single thought older than a boy of twenty-one might h a v e . M a n y • years later Yeats still had difficulty shaking off memories of "the Tower and wolf-dog, harp and shamrock, verdigris-green sectaries who ' wrecked my movement for the time.But deplorable as its aesthetic qualities might be, "the rhymed^Yeats, "An Irish National Theatre," Collected Works of W.B.Yeats (Stratford-on-Avon:Shakespeare Head Press,1908),IV,120; cf. excerpt from first draft of Autobiographies. quoted by Richard Ellmann, Yeats the Man and the Masks ( London : Faber, 1961), 109*^Yeats, "J.M.Synge and the Ireland of his Time"(l910), The Cutting of an Agate, Essays and Introductions(London;Macmillan,I96I),313^Samhain,1905,6; Synge diaries, Stephens MS.^Letter to Katharine Tynan,25 March 1895, Letters«254; Letter to the Editor, Dublin Daily Express, 2? February 1895,Letters,246-51; "An Irish Patriot," Bookman,May 1896,49-50; "The Literary Movement in Ireland," Ideals in Ireland, ed. Lady Gregory (London:At the Unicorn, 1901),87-88; Samhain, 1905.6 et seq.; Autobiographies,448 et seq.; Introduction to Gitan.iali by Rabindranath Tagore (London:MacmilIan,1915), xii.5aE to Sean O ’Paolain, 5 April 1953, quoted by Monk Gibbon, ^ Early Years of George Russell TaE) and nis Connection wi^ th t ^Theosophical Movement. Ph.D. Thesis for Trinity College, Dublin,1947- 48,583.^Letter to Olivia Shakespear, 1 August 1921, Letters,6?2. Mrs. Shakespear was the "Diana TTemon" of his early years in London.26lesson book of Davisprovided not only an outlet for hitherto mute inglorious patriots, but a source and goal to which they could direct previously scattered or unexpressed hopes and ideals. Even in the ^rhetoricians" and "newspaper hacksthere could be detected "a certain dignity, an intensity born of continuity of purpose."3 For the first time since the rebellion of 1798, Ireland had a rallying point. Without this step away from localized or provincial loyalties towards nationalism, no matter how artificial the conjuration, the later hopes of the literary nationalists could never have been realized, new "images for the affections" never forged. "They taught fervour, and labour, and religious toleration, and left that memory for an inspiration to the young men of Ireland. "4 Nor was that inspiration reserved for the "Young Ireland" of the middle class and peasantry.The impressive funeral cortege devoted to Thomas Davis resulted in the poetry of "Speranza," the future Lady Wilde.5 And as a young girlLady Gregory,lôkf^ f*rk;\s"be8t customer for Fenian books," chose for her birthday gift that same collection of The Nation’s poetry which inspired Speranza. (Nor was her youthful enthusiasm dampened when a doubtful sister qualified the gift by the inscription, "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel."^)Alongside the "Young Ireland" or Nation writers, two nationalist poets excite interest for their originality and genius, James Clarence Mangan (1805-1849) and Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810-1886).7 Notable^Tribute to Thomas Davis.1914«16.ZYeats, "The New Irish Library," The Bookman,June 1896,853Lady Gregory, Introduction to The Kiltartan Poetry Book (London:Putnam’s Sons,1919),6.^Yeats, "Young Ireland," The Bookman.January 1897,120.^Patrick Byrne, The Wildes of Merrion Square (London:Staples Press,1953,9-14.^Lady Gregory. Kiltartan Poetry Book,4.7cf. Gerard Manfir Hopkins’ description of Ferguson’s poetry in a letter to Coventry Patmore,7 November 1886, Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins. ed. Claude Collier Abbott (London: O.IJ.P., 1956), 225*27for their technical virtuosity and breadth of treatment, both poetsin a sense helped initiate the true Celtic revival which gained suchprominence in the 1890's and the early twentieth century. Almost acentury earlier poets such as J.J. Callanan(l795-1829) and EdwardWalsh(l805-1850) had introduced Gaelic refrains ajid references toGaelic poems in their work; Allingham had re-worked and distributedold street ballads; the poets of The Nation had invoked the name ofthe ancient Gael. Now Ferguson eind Mangan, and to a certain extentAubrey de Vere(1814-1902), not only translated the ancient literatureof the Gael, but reintroduced his very spirit, the "peculiar strainof mingled homeliness and grandeur, of simplicity and elaboration, ofsensuousness and m y s t i c i s m . T h e works of both differ strongly fromthe propagandist verse of the time, although both were in their ownways strongly nationalist. Their most distinguishing feature is,perhaps, their scholarship, for they combined the passionate subjectand temper of the Irish translations with a thorough knowledge offoreign work. Mangan translated extensively from the German, followingthe fashion in Orientalism as well. Ferguson turned to the classics,attempting with Irish subjects the breadth and manner of the epic. Bothtempered their patriotism to their art, and by doing so provided themodels the writers of the 'nineties were seeking.If literatures are to go on they must add art to impulse and temper their fire with knowledge. Literary Ireland is going through such a training. The days of Davis were followed by those of Allingham's Ballyshannon songs and de Vere's "Innisfail" and his "Legends of St. Patrick" and Ferguson's later and greater work, his "Deirdre" and "Conary." Those men were all experimenters, trying to find out a literary style that would be polished and yet Irish of the Irish. Those who follow them have their work made more easy through their experiments.^Ferguson's Lays of the Western Gael (I864) in particular, the firstwork of any length to deal with the epic cycles of Ireland, can perhaps^T.W.Rolleston, Treasury of Irish Poetry,115*^Yeats's review of Katharine Qian's Ballads and Lyrics( 1891), "Poems by Miss Tynan," Evening Herald,2 January 1892, reprinted in Notes to W.B.Yeats Letters to Katharine Tynan, ed. Roger McHugh(Dublin: Clonmore and Reynolds,1953),181.28be considered the Chronicle on which later writers based and developed and expanded their work. But neither Ferguson nor Mangan achieved the recognition they deserved, and Yeats may have been thinking of these two writers when he explained his own intentions in writing The Secret Rose (1897):It is at any rate an honest attempt towards that aristocratic esoteric Irish literature, which has been my chief ambition.We have a literature for the people but nothing yet for the few.lBut the field which mainly concerned the new movement as a whole was the drama. Dublin had always been, and often still is, used as a "trial run" for English productions. Actor-managers considered their frequent visits as important extensions of their provincial tours. In the past there had been occasional Irish "stars" and more frequently managers (Thomas Sheridan (1719-1788], the playwright's father, whooprovoked one of the most notable of Dublin's early theatre riots ;Joseph Ashbury |l658-1720j, actor, manager. Master of the Revels under five monarchs), but on the whole the traffic maintained a steady east- westerly streeun.^ There are occasional records, also^of "native Irish" plays: The Pride of Life, a fragment of fifteenth century m o r a l i t y ;4an improvised Masque enacted in the Abbey of Galway the year after the Armada;5 Ireland's first comedy in I665, Hie et Ubique. or the Humours of Dublin, by Richard Head;^ the first comedy of Dublin manners about^Letter to John O'Leary,50 May 1897,Letters,285*^W.J.Lawrence, Old Theatre Days and Ways (London:Harrap,1935), 218-25.^Cf. Peter Kavanagh, The Irish Theatre (Tralee:Kerryman Press, 1946),ch.2 at passim; William Smith Clark, The Early Irish Stage (Oxford:Clarendon,1955), Appendices C and D.^Clark.ibid..9.^"Ireland and the Drama," All-Ireland Review.ed.Standish O'Grady,25 November 1901,297.^W.Henderson,"The Stage Literature of Ireland," New Ireland Review, May 1897, 168-78.291700, St. Stephen's Green; or The Generous Lovers, by the Governor of Londonderry's son, William Philips, whose dedication opens with the significant remark; "I writ it, and fov^ our Irish Stage^ in the next century William Carleton recalled his role at the age of ten (I8O4) as stage-director and prompter to amateur productions on the 81-ttge of Derry and the Battle of Aughrim;^ and in 1899, a drama critic looking back nostalgically over twenty-two yeso*s, recalled "a rattling good Irish pantomine ... racy of the soil" entitled "The Man in the Moon, or Dan O'Rourke and the Eagle: Harlequin 0'Donaghue of the Lakes and the Leprechauns of the Fairy Valley."3But although the Irish appear to have early shown an innate love for the stage and oratory, they produced very few plays themselves; what is even more puzzling, they were content to accept the English theatre tradition of "the stage Irishman."4 From the 1897 declaration of war against "buffoonery and .. easy sentiment" to Yeats's withdrawal from his "people's theatre" in 1919, the literary revolutionists waged war against this walking cliche that had become so firmly imbedded in popular fiction and drama. Audiences and playwrights alike, increasingly self-conscious of this false portrayal of Irish life and character on the stage, became hyper-sensitive to any representation which might slander or impute any indignity to the fair name of 4 Ireland. It is worthwhile, therefore, to examine moie closely theI four faces of this stock character as he appeared first to playgoers|j of the seventeenth century and later both in dramas and novels.J| When he first appeared on the stage, the stock Irishman could beI distinguished in four main roles; "the Irish in Dumb Show, the shamI Irishman, the Irish soldier, and the Irish serving man."5 The firstij ^Clark,op.cit.,II6-I7.I ^Kiely, Poor Scholar.36-37*! , 3"Hokey-Pokey," "Thirty Years of ... Dublin Pantomimes," TheÎ Irish Playgoer 21 December 1899,18-20. ---j ^01ark. The Early Irish Stage. 77 £t passim.I 3Florence R.Scott,"Teg — the Stage Irishman," Modern Language1 Review 42 (1947),314* Maurice Bourgeois in John Millington Synge and! Irish Theatre (London: Constable,1913), reprints opposite page 108! a sketch of the stage Irishman as seen by Jack Yeats.50two depended on a particular type of plot, and so their appearances were limited. As the soldier and serving man, however, the stage Irishman really came into his own. Shakespeare’s fiery Captain Macmorris (l599) gave way to Jonson’s less savoury Captain Whit (1631)5 both spoke variants of the bastard dialect most fully employed by Jonson in his Irish Mas que (I6 1 5) and faithfully reproduced by play- wrights of the next two centuries. The faithful serving man had a more sympathetic if not less extravagant lineage; a strong genial Irish footman first appeared in The Life of Sir John Oldcastle (16OO) and reached liis fullest characterization as the witty, likeable Teg of Sir Robert Howard's The Committee (1662). Prototype for all later fictional Irishmen, Teg possessed all the qualities generally associated with his race: friendliness, loyalty, poverty; a seemingly inexhaustible stock of spurious experiences attributed to Saint Patrick; mild but frequent profanity, outrageous blunders and "bulls"; whiskey (poitin) and potatoes for his diet, shamrocks for his emblem, shillelasfor comfort, and pigs for company.^Like all stage characters, the stock Irishman must have originally had some basis in fact; his mispronunciations and apparently incomprehensible phrases can, for example, frequently be traced to the original Gaelic. By the time Teg arrived, however, all attempts at authenticity had apparently disappeared. Both on the English and theIrish stage this stock character became a convention, usually as anobject for laughter. More serious still, even those Anglo-Irish authors who wrote for their own Dublin audiences accepted this convention,^ and so we see Teg, now a peasant, reflected in the novel as well. Even Maria Edgeworth (Castle Rackrent,I8QO) and William Carleton (Parra^Scott, "Teg— the Stage Irishman," J.0.Bartley, "TheDevelopment of a Stock Character, the Stage Irisbuman to 1800," Modern Language Review 57(1945),445; Bourgeois, John Millington Synge,107-112.^Bartley.op.aid.,441-42.^Cf« the negro minstrel who whitened his face to play a white man and blackened it to play a black man, described by Yeats, Autobiographies,5 65•À31Sastha; or Paddy-Go-Easy and his wife, Nancy,1845)* could,with the best of intentions, be guilty of selling their birthright. By the nineteenth century, then, this national caricature was well in control of both the stage and the novel, and had lost nearly all basis in fact.During the latter part of the nineteenth century, when drama in Ireland appeared to have lost any vigour it might kcwe had,audiences turned with relief to Dion Boucicault (1820-1890), an Irish- American playwright-actor-manager. Exiles in America, always intensely nationalist, found in auch dramas as The Colleen Bawn: or the Brides of Garryowgy>(i860), Arrah-na-Pogue; or The Wicklow Wedding (I865), and The Shaughraun (1875) a combination of the whole-hearted laughter associated with the stock Irish character and the sentimental dreams they held of Ireland. Although born in Dublin, Boucicault achieved fame first in America and England, not only for his"skill and shrewdness in knocking together effective situations and spinning lively dialogue,"I but for his practical reforms as playwright and theatre manager.^ He arrived at a time when Ireland needed new blood; the stage Irishman with his shillela and brogue had strutted the boards too long as food for the laughter of his English conquerors; Boucicault*s melodramas flattered local self-esteem,^ and as late as 1909 he was commended for his ability to "put his countrymen in a pleasant, bright, and agreeable light, and not to degrade them."4But although moving away from the typical stock comic character and spurious dialect employed by his predecessors, Boucicault was writing to suit the demands of the audience; consequently his dramas reflected current taste rather theui any dramatic ideal. He presented a^Henry James, quoted by Michael 0 hAodha,"On the Track of Boucicault? Irish Times, 6 and 7 February I96O.^0 hAodha, ibid.^John Gassner, Masters of the Drama, (NewYork:Random House,1940),543; Allardyce Nicoll, "Dion Boucicault," Forbidden Fruit and other Plays (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1940), viii.^Review of a revival of The Shaughraun at the Theatre Royal,Dublin, May 1909, preserved in W.A.Henderson's Diaries, National Library of Ireland,MSI732,289.52heightened picture of Ireland that homesick or sentimental audiences wanted to see rather than any realistic picture of the people as he saw them. And, because the national stock character had for so long dominated the Irish stage, Boucicault was not averse to including a touch of him as well, for those who stil]|/held him in sentimental regard. Nor did his dictum, "plays are not written, they are rewritten," die with him;^ melodramatic variations on his themes and echoes of his high-sounding rhetoric and deeds of daring continued to be applauded well into the twentieth century.^ "We may regret that the average audience in Ireland should prefer the modern music hall comedy to the works of even Shakespeare himself," commented the editor of The Irish Playgoer in 1899, "but all the regret in the world will not alter the fact."3 And a comparison of the theatre programmes for 1899 with those listed in his Theatre Diary of 1907 by Joseph Holloway, Abbey Theatre architect and self-appointed arbiter of public taste, indicates no radical change.4Despite the melodramatic ideal Boucicault held up for Irish theatre, however, his influence in turning the spotlight away from the laughable stage Irishman towards a more sympathetic and human if not less unrealistic character cannot be denied, nor can his importance as a man of the theatre be under-rated. He restored pride of nationality to the^ ‘Quoted by 0 hAodha, op.cit.2Cf. "Irish Drama: A Symposium," New Ireland Review, 111,2(April 1895),104-114; "All Ireland," United Irishman,10 May 1902,1; letter from Joseph Holloway, 2^ January 1907 to Father Sheehy of All Hallows College in reply to a request for "good Anglo-Irish plays, not ... the Abbey ones," quoted in Holloway's Diary, National Library of Ireland MS 1805,62.5"A Foreword," The Irish Playgoer,Dublin.9 November 1899,11.^Irish Playgoer,4 January 1900,5,8, and 19; Holloway MS.. 1805,899. Cf. Alan Cole, Stagecraft in the Modern Dublin Theatre, Ph.D. Thesis for Trinity College, Dublin,1952^5* Maire Nie Shiabhlaigh and Edward Kenny, The Splendid Years (Dublin:James Duffy,1955),7»53stage, and the audience in turn, once initiated, zealously guarded it. Indeed, by breaking ground for the reformers of the early twentieth century, Boucicault at the same time increased the natural distrust by the audience of the playwright; he too came under suspicion. And the tradition of theatre rioting which had begun in the seventeenth century thus continued under new management in the Abbey Theatre three centuries later.When Yeats, Martyn, and Lady Gregory published their manifesto and declared their faith in the people, the traditions in drama, prose, and poetry were therefore against them. The literary traffic of Ireland, like that of England, pursued its sluggish journey down the centre of the stream, rarely daring to alter course. But at the same time, the revolutionary triumvirate was not working completely alone or without example. They were^in fact, the logical and legitimate successors to a movement that had been quietly but steadily acquiring momentum and followers throughout the preceding decade.Although generally referred to as the "Celtic Renaissance," the increasing interest in the early literature of the Gael might with more accuracy be termed a revival of Irish scholarship. For its original impetus was critical and corrective rather than creative; indeed, one of the permanent characteristics of this movement throughout its various phases has been its emphasis on teaching, whether of individuals, particular groups, or the general public.^ Its beginning was rooted in traditional scholarship, however, thereby limited to the isolated few who, in the nineteenth century, were not only familiar with the Irish language but qualified to work with the twelve or fourteen hundred octavo volumes of manuscripts then available.2 It^Cf. Beltaine. Samhain, United Irishman editorials, etc.2 — — — —Douglas Hyde, The Story of Early Gaelic Literature(London;T.Fisher Unwin,1895; New Irish Library Series),xxii; J.M.Synge, "La Vieille Littérature Irlandaise," L'Europe^en,15 May 1902; William Sharp, Introduction to Lyra, Celtica.edd.E.A. Sharp and J.Matthay (Edinburgh;John Grant,1932),xxii-iii.34is perhaps significant, also, that this astonishing mass of relatively untouched material should he popularized outside Ireland before receiving general recognition within the country itself. Long before Arnold had delivered his memorable plea for the study of Celtic literature or Trinity College had made room in its curriculum for the study of Irish history, German scholarship was attacking the field with customary industry; first Zuess in 1855 with his Grammatica Celtique, followed by Windisch and Zwemmer, and, most popular and industrious of all. Dr. Kuno Meyer, who came to study and remained to teach.Irish scholars and their colleagues in England and America took up the work, and interpretation, often exceedingly free, followed translation, so that by the latter part of the century an increased awareness of the literature of their own country prompted a renewed interest in Irish history, archeology, theology, legend, and, finally, the language itself.There had, of course, been individual forays into these related fields before, especially in the field of Irish folk music and song, whichhad long held a fascination for the collector and musicologist. Collections of traditional music had been made by Bunting (1796),Hudson (1841), Petrie (l855). Pigot (1842), and P.W.Joyce (1875);^ Thomas Moore had composed verses for many anonymous tunes. But whereas the earlier historians had been prompted simply to collect, the renewed interest in the songs of the Pileas, Brehons and Seanachies of the Druidic age, the harpers of the thirteenth century, the wandering songsters of a later period, reflected a more personal, immediate approach. Yeats, Douglas Hyde, Lady Gregory concerned themselves more with the character of the bard himself than with his representative or collectors* value; Douglas Hyde's translation of the Love Songs of^Donal O'Sullivan, Irish Folk Music and Song (Printed in Dublin for the Cultural Relations Committee of Ireland, 1952),29 £t passim; Introduction, The Ballad Poetry of Ireland (New York; Fords' National Library, 1886)Vxiii.35Connacht, while retaining the charm and naïveté" of the original, was a work of art in itself; Yeats's search for legends and traditions of fairy and folklore was to a great extent part of his lifelong search for himself in a world scheme; Lady Gregory haunted the cottages of her tenants and sought out the blind poet Raftery's lonely, unmarked grave.The reaction in other branches of the "Renaissance" similarly reflected this personal interest. Petrie and Stokes with their archeological and architectural studies of early Ireland paved the way for a fresh interest not only in history but in things religious;Edward Martyn strove to preserve traditional music and improve church decoration, interests perhaps resulting largely from his own aesthetic asceticism; Katharine Tynan and Eleanor Hull wrote of the lives of the saints. And just as the folklore and peasant scholarship of Douglas Hyde, Yeats, Lady Gregory and Synge idealized the Celt as peasant, the popular folk history and mythology of Standish O'Grady, Lady Gregory, Alfred Nutt, T.W.Rolleston, William Larminie and Eleanor Hull (as well as countless other minor popular historians)exalted the Celt as hero. The epic cycles of romance, taken from the Book of the Dun Cow, the Book of Leinster, the Speckled Book, and the Yellow Book of Lecan confirmed this mixture of ancient mythology with great heroic battles.^ The new generation desired, in fact, not a realistic knowledge of past history, but an indication for the future, a "deliberate creation of a kind of Holy City in the imagination"^ erected over the cairns of ancient gods and heroes. AE confided in Yeats .^r his hope for an Irish millenium;^ Yeats planned a "Legende des Siècles of Ireland," and Lionel Johnson and Lady Gregory furthered the dream; 4 Synge Wbjne.^In her notes to Cuchulain of Muirthemne (London:John Murray,1902) and Gods and Fighting Men (London;John Murray,I904)> Lady Gregory lists most of the early authorities on whose work later writers based their studies and translations.^Yeats, Autobiographies,493-94.3cf.Passages fromthe Letters of A.E. to W.B.Yeats(Dublin;CualaP r e s s , ----------------------------------------4Yeats, op.cit.56objected to their pattern of fairy belief and epic legend, retaininghis Aran Islands within a realistic framework.Occasionally there were objections to this method of regaining anational literature; Standish O'Grady rebuked Lady Gregory for her2"refinement" of the Saga story, then objected to the dramatization oh of the Deirdre legend on moral grounds.^ John Eglinton questioned(A ^ whether "anything but belles lettres, as distinguished from a national 1^ ' ' literature, is likely to spring from a determined pre-occupation"i with these ancient legends of Ireland.4 And when Yeats and Moore' dared to interpret the legend of Diarmuid and Grania in their ownI 5I way, the general public joined the protest.^' Meanwhile, however, this renewed interest in things Irish prompteda slight industrial renaissance as well. The All-Ireland Review,I edited by Standish O'Grady, campaigned for the use of Irish matchesiand patronage of the Irish Industrial Fair; gradually a new nationalism arosd which attempted to displace the old hatred of England with a concern for Ireland. In 1889 Horace Plunkett formed the first agricultural organisation society in an effort to beat the Danish market for England, in bacon, eggs, and butter. In ten years there were over two hundred societies and a system of agricultural banks, organised under Plunkett's banner byAE.^ Ireland was beginning to stir.^Letter from Lady Gregory to Synge, quoted in Greene and Stephens, J.M. Synge,_120-121.^All-Ireland Review,3,23(9 August 1902),357# However, see his review of Gods and Fighting Men, AIR 6,4 (28 January 1905),41-42.^AE eventually capitulated. The controversy was carried on through the Dublin Daily Express and many of the essays later published in Literary Ideals in Ireland (London:!.Fisher Unwin,1899).4"What Should be the Subjects of a National Drama?" Literary Ideals in Ireland, 11.^See below. Part II, ch.8, p.49%'^Lady Gregory, "Ireland, Real and Idea]^ " Nineteenth Century. November 1898, 770-774.57Alongside Plunkett's Society of Agricultural Co-operation grew a revival of interest in the Irish language; mainly through the efforts of Douglas Hyde and Dr. George Sigerson the Gaelic League was founded in 1895, a society which aimed "not at getting rid of English but at 'keeping Irish spoken where it is spoken still.*"!The agricultural organisations prospered in comparative peace, but the language question remained controversial. Douglas Hyde spoke frequently and vehemently on "the necessity for de-Anglicizing Ireland";^ of his own book of Gaelic poems he wrote, "I would like better to make even one good verse in the language in which I am now writing, than to make a whole book of verse in English. For if there should be any good found in ray English verse^ it would not go to the credit of my mother, Ireland, but of my stepmother, EnglEind."5 At the height of his Irish enthusiasm George Moore threatened to disown his brotherchildren if they did not immediately learn to speak Irish,^ and Edward Martyn was for many years a member of the Coisde Gnotha, governing body of the Gaelic League.3 Lady Gregory, on the other hand, advocated bi-lingualism,^ and Yeats, although in his usual politic manner remaining on friendly terms with the Gaelic Leagers (at one time he even advocated the establishment of a Gaelic touring'•Ibid.. 775-78.2Lecture delivered before the Irish National Literary Society of Dublin, 25 November 1892, published in The Revival of Irish Literature and other Addresses (London:T.Fisher Unwin,1894)*^Translated and quoted by Lady Gregory in Poets and Dreamers 5rd ed. (Dublin:Hodges Figgis,1905)>76.^Cf. Hone, The Life of George Moore (London:Gollancz,1956);George Moore, Hail and Farewell;Ave (London:Heinemann,1911),150-155.5Edward Martyn, Preface to Paragraphs for the Perverse,quoted by Denis Gwynn, Edward Martyn and the Irish Revival (London;Jonathan Cape,1950).^"Ireland, Real and Ideal," Nineteenth Century,November,1898,775.58. company for the Abbey)!, never seriously studied the language. ButSynge, who had studied Irish at Trinity College and practised it onthe Aran Islands, vehemently denounced the Gaelic League as "foundedon a doctrine that is made up of ignorance, fraud, and h y p o c r i s y , "2, and John Eglinton advised a "thought movement" rather than a "language%movement" as the path towards true nationality.''^However, despite the varying attitudes towards the Gaelic League, and the vehemence with which the opposing parties built their platforms, the renewed interest in the Irish language served the double function of increasing the general knowledge of the mythology and folklore utilised by the new writers, and helping Ireland regain her self-respect as a nation.Politically speaking, Ireland had been suffering for some time from the extremes of both hero-worship and its inevitable disillusionment. In 1875 a newly-elected member of Parliament, Charles SWsLrt Parnell, had fired the imagination of the Irish people; five years later he became President of the Land League and largely through his fe efforts the Gladstone government finally passed the Land Act in 1881,recognizing "the three P*s" of Tenant-rights: Fixity of Tenure, FreeSale and Fair Rents.4 Hopes of Home Rule once more rose, to beswamped in 1889 by Captain O’Shea's petition for divorce, citing Parnell _ as co-respondent.^ The machine Parnell had so carefully constructed,Iin which for the first time he had successfuly "reconciled the Nationalist Party with the Fenians, and brought both in contact with^Yeats, "Reasons for and against the Establishment of the Gaelic Co.," written sometime before 1908, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats.^"Can We go Back Into our Mother's Womb?", quoted by Greene and Stephens, J.M.Synge.262.^Preface to Bards and Saints (Dublin:Maunsel,1906),ll.^Rebecca Pauline Christine Brugsma, The Beginning of the Irish Revival. Ph.D. Thesis for the University of Amsterdam,1955,1-25, copy deposited in the National Library of Ireland.^In some of the country areas, Parnell's political enemies incited public opinion by using the "shift" as a symbol for Kitty O'Shea. Cf. j R.S.L.Lyons, The Pall of Parnell (London:Routledge,l96O).59the economic needs and desires of the peasantry," irreparably broke down.^ Economically, matters were not much better. The great Clearances of the 1850*s and the evictions of the 1870's still rankled in the minds of the older peasants; the vast emigration (unaided by the government) which had begun after the famine of I846 continued.All political action seemed to have come to nothing. And so, after the fall of Parnell, the active element adopted a complete reversal of tactics. Parliamentary action gave way to direct action; hope of British aid was replaced by "independent voluntary effort within the domain of economics and social action."3 Social development became more important than political growth, and the energy which had previously been governed by Parnell, or allowed to drain off into unorganized individual interest,4 was channelled into the agricultural co-operative efforts, the Gaelic League, and, for those who still, like the printer- patriot John Mitchel, felt the only remedy lay in "the edge of the sword,"5 the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The first two movements as we have seen continued their efforts to "rehabilitate Ireland from within"; the third aimed at complete separation of Ireland from England.Nationalism, religious consciousness, and the land are laced into the heartstrings of every Irishman;7 they are in turn the basis of Irish literature. But they are also the cause of sensitivity to Irish^Ernest Barker, Ireland in the Last Fifty Years, 2nd ed.(Oxford:Clarendon,1919)»16•^Between I85I and 1905 there were 4,028,589 emigrants. Of."Ireland," Encyclopedia Britannia, 11th ed.^Barker, op.cit.,22-234charles Tennyson, "The Rise of the Irish Theatre," The Contemporary Review, C (l91l),240; Sean O'Faolain, The Irish (London:Penguin Books,1947),ch.9 .3John Mitchel, Jail Journal; or,Five Years in British Prisons Glasgow:R.& T.Y/ashbourne,1876),24* Cf. "Under Ben Bulben^^ Collected Poems,598.^Barker, op.cit.,25.7l)aniel Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (Dublin and Cork: Cork U.P.,1951;,19. -------- --------------------40literature, and further resentment of the "stage Irishman", now inextricably linked with the fall of Parnell, continued to cause suspicion of any portrayal of the national character on stage or printed page. Extremists of the Sinn Pein movement banned any import of English culture as well as English goods, and the Anglo-Irish writers, who chose the English language as their literary medium,, were frequently under fire. The new ideal of Irish literature in a foreign language, English, was accused of heresy.^ And the Gaelic ' League, although ostensibly non-political, was encouraged by these extremists as the only truly "national" literary movement.Fortunately about this time a new "Young Ireland" movement arose, mainly Fenian in its source, but finding as its leader a man who while declaring, "We protest against the right of patriots to perpetrate bad verses,"2 had sufficiently proven his patriotism by going to jail for it. It was through the personal influence of John O'Leary that the younger group of patriots, Yeats,^ AE,^ Maud Gonne,3 the fiery, red- haired orator John F; Taylor,^ and others, found a new call to patriotism, "beautiful, lofty things." And O'Leary, in turn, fired their enthusiasm for Irish folklore and history.? Once again the hopeful young nationalists had a goal, and the "acts and happenings which are long since forgotten"® softened the bitter downfall of "the^P.H.Pearse, Letter to the Editor, ^ Claidheamh Soluis. 29 May1899,157.2Quoted by Richard Ellmann, Yeats The Man and the Masks (London: Faber,1961),46.^Autobiographies, 209-15. For a short time Yeats shared lodgings with O'Leary.4aE, "Politics and Character," Dublin Daily Express, 25 February 1899,5.^aud Gonne MacBride, A Servant of the Queen (London:Gollancz,1958),176-7 8.^Autobiographies,96-99•^Ellmann.op.cit.,47 quotes from his speech in 1886, "What Irishmen Should Know."®AE, op.cit.41Great Comedian," Parnell.^Each of these young nationalists reacted according to his own nature. Yeats, involved in the literary societies of London, found encouragement for his own pursuits. His mission in Ireland was "to serve taste rather than any definite propaganda,"3 to create a National Theatre of Beauty. O'Leary gave him Irish history to read, and hade him create for the sake of Ireland. He in turn used Ireland as the focal point required for his art. "Remember," he warned Katharine Tynan in 1887, "by being Irish as you can, you will be more original and true to yourself and in the long run more interèsting, even to English readers."4 And a few years later, "Much may depend in the future on Ireland now developing writers who know how to formulate in clear expressions the vague feelings now abroad — to formulate them for Ireland's not for England's vse."3 "I would have Ireland recreate the ancient arts, the arts as they were understood in Judea, in India, in Scandinavia, in Greece and Rome, in every ancient land;^"Parnell's Funeral," Collected Poems,319 and commentary. The King of the•Great Clock Tower Commentaries and Poems (Dublin:Cuala Press,1954)> 22-28. £f. "Three Marching Songs," Collected Poems,578: "Fall, and that history turns into rubbish,/ All that great past to a trouble of fools"; "Come Gather Round Me, Parnellites," ibid.,555-56.^Cf* Herbert Howarth, The Irish Writers: 1880-1940. Literature Under Parnell's Star (London:Rockliff,1958),ch.l £t passim. In stating his case, Howarth tends to overlook the influence of the United Irishmen, the Fenians, and O'Leary in the re-birth of nationalism; even the self-critical spirit of the literary movement which he attributes to Parnell's downfall was obvious before.^Letter to Lady Gregory, 25 May 1901, Letters.552. Cf. "An Irish National Theatre," Collected Works,1908,IV,120-123:"I am a Nationalist •••. 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."^August 1887, Letters,50-51. Cf.May 1888,ibid.,71.^October.1889.ibid..138-39.42as they were understood when they moved a whole people and not a few people."IBut Yeats was also aware of the dangers of too narrow a nationalism. Many years later he commented, "A nation should be like an audience in some great theatre — 'In the theatre' said Victor Hugo 'the mob becomes a people' — watching the sacred drama of its own history; every spectator finding self and neighbour there, finding all the world there as we find the sun in the bright spot under the burning g l a s s . "2 And, like the audience, the nation should participate and at the same time criticize. "Young Ireland," he felt, had taught "a study of our history with the glory of Ireland for event."3 Their leader, Davis, had been concerned with "conscious patriotism." "His Ireland was artificial, an idea built up in a couple of generations by a few commonplace men."4 Because of this emphasis on a propaganda that appealed to the commonplace rather than to the individual, "hardly any Irish writer can liberate his mind sufficiently from questions of practical reform for this contemplation. Art for art's sake ... seems to him a neglect of public duty."5 The "poetry of the middle c l a s s m u s t be exchanged for "a speech for our private griefs and sorrows."7 One of the faults^"Ireland and the Arts"(1901), Essays and Introductions, 206.2Commentary on the "Three Songs to the Same Tune," King of the Great Clock Tower,1954.36-38.Synge and the Ireland of his Time"(l910), Essays and Introductions.516. Cf. quotation by Ricketts, Self Portrait; Letters and Journals of Charles Ricketts, comp. T.Sturge Moore, ed. Cecil Lewis (London:Peter Davies,1939)> 268: "Ireland is like a man diseasedwho can only think of his disease."4Autobiographies, 471-72.3samhain.1905.12.The Literary Movement in Ireland"(l899)> Ideals in Ireland, ed. Lady Gregory (London:At the Unicorn,1901),87-88.7Tribute to Thomas Davis, 19.43of Irish writers (including Shaw, Wilde, and George Moore) was their inability to restrain this habit of writing "not for our own delight but for the improvement of our neighbours."^Politically, Yeats refused to commit himself wholeheartedly to any particular party. In part this attitude was due to his cosmopolitan interest in art, which he felt transcended any narrow nationalism, but , in part he wisely refrained from involving himself with any partisan group which might prevent him from receiving the co-operation of any other group for his own literary aims. "I had withdrawn from politics because I could not bear perplexing, by what I said about books, the simple patriotic men whose confidence I had gained by what I said aboutpnationality," he commented in his autobiography. The "infinitetriviality of politics" was not, he felt, his business.3 And, eventhough O'Leary had great influence on his thought, perhaps the model hetook for his own political platform was William Morris. In one sensecertainly his nationalism was a reaction against the Victorian• materialism and ugliness he saw in England and reflected in Dublin.. Speaking at a Wolfe Tone banquet in London in 1898 he tried to transmutethis into a nationalism he himself could believe in:We hated at first the ideals and ambitions of England, the materialisms of England, because they were hers, but we have come to hate them with a nobler hatred. We hate them now because they are evil. We have suffered too long from them, not to understand, that hurry to become rich, that delight in mere bigness, that insolence to the weak are evil and vulgar things.4Where Morris and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood turned to the past for their models, Yeats turned to the Ireland he wished to create.^Samhain.1905.12. Cf. Samhain,1908,11.2Autobiographies,448.^Letter to Lady Gregory, October 1897,Letters,288.^Speech at '98 Centennial Association of Great Britain and Prance, at the Inaugural Banquet held at the Holborn Restaurant, London, 13 - April 1898, quoted by Richard Ellmann, Yeats the Man and the Masks, 114-15. Cf. Samhain.1904.15-16.44His Utopian Ireland, too, owes much of its spirit to Morris.He foresees a nicely ordered world in which people live aestheticallybut everything gets done; enough workers feel inclined to reap whenthe grain has ripened;First of all, we Irish do not desire, like the English, to build up a nation wher^Mkall be a very rich class and a very poor class. ... I think that the best ideal for our people ... is that Ireland is going to become a country where, if there are few rich, there shall be nobody very poor. Wherever men have tried to imagine a perfect life, they have imagined a place where men plough and sow and reap, not a place where there are great wheels turning and great chimneys vomiting smoke. Ireland will always be a country where men plough and sow and reap.^His ideal was by no means a classless society, but, like Morris's,might be termed an aristocratic socialism, A Dream of John Ball forthe arts and intellect. One must "accept the baptism of the gutter,"pif necessary, but he was convinced that "public order cannot long persist without the rule of educated and able men."3 Like Morris's, Butler's, and Shaw's,; his aim if he had one at all was to create that aristocratic society of the intellect. "The end of all government, the end of all politics, the end of all movements is the making of character," and that political movement was best that made "the most men of high and stable character" in a country.4Towards this aim he was willing to contribute time and energy, and for ten years he struggled towards its fulfilment. About the same time that he met John O'Leary, he joined a discussion group called the "Contemporary Club," organized by Charles Hubert Oldham, leader of a group of nationalists at Trinity College and largely responsible for founding the Dublin University Review which published Yeats's first^From an unpublished manuscript of a speech given by Yeats in New York,1904, quoted by Ellmann, op.cit.,116-17. Cf."The Literary Movement in Ireland," North American Review.December.1899, reprinted in Ideals in Ireland. 88-90; "A Postscript," ibid.,105-107.2Letter to Lady Gregory, 10 April 1900, Letters,359.3"Note after Title of 'Three Songs to the Same Tune'", The Spectator.23 February 1934. Of. "Bishop Berkeley"(1931)> Essays; 1931-1936 (Dublin:Cuala,19377746.4yeats's speech at the Delegates' Dinner,Agricultural Organisation Society's Conference,reported by The Irish Homestead,6 November 1897*742.45work.l In 1889, the year before Parnell's fall, he met thenationalist beauty Maudu Gonne, whose hatred of England was rivalledonly by her passionate desire to "free Ireland." The following yearhe paid his first visit to the Southwark Irish Literary Club of London,whose objects were "the cultivation of Irish History, art, andliterature, and the providing of a medium of social and intellectualintercourse for Irish people of both s e x e s . A n d in 1891 he andT.W.Rolleston founded the London Irish Literary Society. He then movedacross to Ireland and proceeded to establish the Irish Literary Societyof Dublin. In a letter to the morning papers, 2 June 1892, he outlinedthe aims the founder-membei5 had in mind;... to circulate a new "Library of Ireland" through the existing Literary Societies and by establishing new bodies for the purpose .... to aid the educational influence of the library by well-organized lectures and discussions .... These books and lectures will be national but not political in any narrow sense of the word. They will endeavour to make the patriotism of the people who read them both deeper and more enlightened, and will set before them the national and legendary heroes as they present themselves to the minds of scholars and thinkers.^Yeats's plans for a New Irish library were taken over by CharlesGavan Duffy and eventually the control of the National Literary Societypassed from his hands, but by then he had turned his nationalistendeavours elsewhere. In 1898, when the Irish Literary Theatre soughtsponsorship, the National Literary Society was on hand to grant itsbenison.4He had, in fact, turned not to London but to Paris. Encouraged by^Ellmann, Man and the Masks, 45#2W.P.Ryan, The Irish Literary Movement (London:published by the author,1894),16. Cf. "The Academic Class and the Agrarian Revolution," Dublin Daily Express. 11 March 1899,3; O.Z., "From a Modern Irish Portrait Gallery: W.B.Yeats," New Ireland Review, no.10 (December 1894),647-59#Letter to the Daily Express. 2 June 1892. The Society was founded by Yeats, John T.Kelly, and the new sub-editor of United Ireland,John McGrath.4cf. report of Dr. Sigerson's speech, "Irish Literary Theatre," Daily Express 8 May 1899,6.46Maudv, Gonne, in 1896 he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and for the next two years travelled between London and Paris in preparations for the great Wolfe Tone Centennial celebrations. Yet still he did not coimit himself; his aim became a "union of the Gael," which would once more restore the ancient sovereignty to the race, through culture, not through politics.^ For in order to achieve the Utopia of the arts he dreamed of for Ireland, union of the various political parties must first be arranged, this time through the common celebration of the great union of 1798* Again he succeeded, and again turned once more to a new scheme, the experiment of an Irish Literary Theatre. But this time the experiment outlasted the limits set for it, and he became involved in a project which was to occupy much of his time and many of his plans for the rest of his life. The last deliberate political move we see him making was a formal letter of protest over Queen Victoria's visit to Ireland in 1900,2 and his contribution to Maud^ Gonne's successful counter-display through the streets of Dublin.^Yeats's nationalism, then, while in itself a strong emotional need,' was in part a result of a much larger dream of art. Art must belong to all and come from all. His aim, therefore, was "to restore what is * called a more picturesque way of life ... in which the common man has ' some share in imaginative art."4 Once securely rooted in the nation,' art then had an audience. By bringing "the imagination and speech of the country, all that poetical tradition descended from the Middle Ages,^Letter to Fiona Macleod, January 1897, Letters.279. A manuscript draft of an early speech is included in a booklet with the March 1889 draft of the "Countess Kathleen O'Shea": "I believe there is a great future before this literature of Ireland. We may yet leave our imprint upon the world. The nations that have long held its ear are in their old age. The past is with them, with us the ... future. They are tangled in technicalities and legalities. In Ireland we have no technicalities or legalities at all, but the ever flaming heart." National Library of Ireland MS, 8758(2), [The italics are his]2"Noble and Ignoble Loyalties," United Irishman, III,6o(21 April 1900).^Cf. MacBride, A Servant of the Queen.4samhain,1906, 5-6.47to the people of the town,"1 the artist was once more free to develop in his own way, secure in his own subject and in the understanding of those for whom he wrote: "I thought we might bring the halves togetherif we had a national literature that made Ireland beautiful in the ' memory, and yet had been freed from provincialism by an exacting ' criticism, a European p o s e ."2 Literature would therefore once more be united to the "great passion of patriotism," thereby ennobling both.3 For these reasons, then, he and his colleagues dreamed of "a school whose declared purpose is to create in Ireland a true, cultivated, patriotic class, and which for the first time unites Montagu and Capulet in the one movement."4 This would require scholarship as -g/v) . much as patriotism,^ artistic freedom as well as collective energy.° "Creative work has always a fatherland,"7 for "in greater poets^Autobiographies,570#Cf.his quotation of Denmark's motto, %f 1 were Four and Twenty (1919) Dublin:Cuala,1940),18: "to understand the peasant by the saga and the saga by the peasant."2Autobiographies,102.3"The Irish National Literary Society," Boston Pilot, 19 November 1892, reprinted in Letters to the New Island, ed. Horace Reynolds (Cambridge,Mass.: CUP),155-56. 0^» Autobiographies,494.^"An Irish Patriot," Yeats's review of Lady Ferguson's Sir Samuel Ferguson in the Ireland of His Day, The Bookman,X,56 (May I896),50. Cf. Samhain,1901, 4; Samhain,1905,5-6; "Estrangement" (1909).Autobiographies, 495-94; Introduction to Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsany (Dundrum; Cuala Press,1912),II.^"For a national literature can only be painted, as it were,/).o . against a background of patient and minute scholarship," "Young Ireland,"■ The Bookman, XI,64,(January 1897),120.Cf. Letter to Father Matthew Russell, July 1889, Letters,130; "The Three 0*Byrnes," Boston Pilot,23 November 1889, reprinted in Letters to the New Island,83-90; report of an interview with Yeats in Chicago Daily News, March 1903; Samhain, 1904,22-23; Dedication to AE, The Secret Rose, Works,1908,VII,3*^Cf. below. Part II, Ch.5,P#7"Mr.William Wills," The Boston Pilot,3 August 1889, reprinted in Letters to the New Island,"^."ITTT^John Eglinton," United Irishman,VI, 141, T3 November I901),3: "The Poet of Ballyshannon," Providence Sunday Journal,2 September 1888, Letters to the New Island,174; "Browning" Boston Pilot, 22 February I89O, op.cit.,103-04; "Poetry and Patriotism" (1907), Poetry and Ire1and: Essays by W.B. Yeats and Lionel Johnson (Dundrum:Cuala,1908),1.48everything has relation to the national life or to profound feeling; nothing is an isolated artistic moment; there is a unity everywhere, everything fulfils a purpose that is not his own; the hailstone is a journeyman of God, and the grass blade carries the universe upon its point."!However, he warns, "though a poet may govern his life by his enthusiasms, he must, when he sits down at his desk, but use them as the potter the clay."2 He must write in the language of hisi X. thoughts, for only then can he be true to himself.^ And if he finds examples elsewhere, he must be free to choose his models from another nation.4 Nationalism must be tempered by cosmopolitanism; "it is ' the presence of a personal element alone that can give it nationality in a fine sense."5 "A writer is not less National because he shows ' the influence of other countries and of the great writers of the w o r l d . N a t i o n a l literature could therefore be defined as "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^"William Allingham," The Poets and the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Alfred H.Miles, V (London:George Routledge,1905)>244*2Introduction to A Book of Irish Verse (LondonrMethuen,1895)> xiv. "Ireland and the Arts" (19OI), Essays and Introductions,206-07; Samhain, 1903,6-7; Samhain,1908,8-9*X^Yeats's address to the Trinity College Historical Society quoted by ^ Claidheamh Soluis, 10 June 1889,200; letter to Father Matthew Russell,Decemberl889, Letters,143: Yeats's address on the Irish Literary Theatre at the National Literary Society's "At Home", reported in the Independent.19 February I9OO; "What is 'Popular Poetry*?"(l90l),Essays and IntroductionsJ.1 *^Samhain,I904*^Samhain.1908.7.^Samhain,1904.21; Cf."A Note on National Drama"(1898), Literary Ideals in Ireland (London;T.Fisher Unwin,1899),17; report on Yeats's speech on Irish Literary Theatre at National Literary Society's "At Home," Daily Express, 10 January 1899*49there in the end."! What Yeats required for his art was stability in the culture of his nation and at the same time a free passport to the widdom of the ages, as befitting that roving aristocrat of the intellect, the artist. If necessary he would by means of his art mould the first to his ideal,2 in spite of his art challenge his right to the second.Lady Gregory (1852-1932)Patriotism for Lady Gregory was a simpler idea, seen on a much smaller scale. Descendant of the Persses of Roxborough, who arrived in Ireland with Cromwell, and the 0*Grady's of literary and legal fame,^ until her marriage with Sir William Gregory of Coole she had seen little of Ireland beyond her own county,’', Galway. But the west of Ireland she did know well; as a young girl she had eagerly observed the great working-estate,4 and as a young widow capably managed the Coole property for her son Robert.^ Yeats had memories of tales told by Mary Battle in the kitchen at Sligo; she heard tales of the faery and — even more stirring, of the rebellion of '98 — from her old nurse Mary Sheridan. Later she herself participated in the foundation^Samhain.1904,20. Yeats, "The Irish Literary Theatre," Daily Express, 14 January 1899,5*2"The fine life is always a part played finely before fine spectators," Preface to Gods and Fighting Men by Lady Gregory (London;John Murray,1904),xxii.^Standish O'Grady the Attorney General who prosecuted Robert Emmet, and Standish Hayes O'Grady, one of the first scholars to translateearly Irish texts, and Standish O'Grady, editor of the All-IrelandReview, were all distant cousins of Lady Gregory.^Elizabeth Coxhead, Lady Gregory;A Literary Portrait (London; Macmillan,1961), chapter 1, gives a more complete picture of her family and childhood than any other account.^In her early history of the movement. Our Irish Theatre (London;Putnam's,1915),106, she records a note in her diary; "Now I feel myself longing to take over the saw-mill, which has stopped with the head sawyer's departure and only wants a steady superintendent." One feels she would have been competent at that, also.50of village libraries, visited the cottages on the estate, and acted as secretary to the families of emigrants to America, Her marriage for some years interrupted her firm relationship with the peasantry, but did not dissolve it, and after her husband died she once more picked up the threads of her friendship with those who still hold her memory dear in Ireland, "She has been like a serving-maid among us," said an old peasant to Yeats,^Patriotic she had always been, ever since the first Fenian pamphlet she bought as a child in the small of Loughrea;"for a romantic love of country had awakened in me, perhaps through the wide beauty of my home ,,,, or it may be through the half revealed sympathy of my old nurse for the rebels whose cheering she remembered when the French landed at Killala in *98; or perhaps but through the natural breaking of a younger child of the house from the conservatism of her elders."2 However, it was not until she found herself turning against England that she became intenséy nationalistic. In 1898 her edition of her husband's grandfather's papers was published, ^and when questioned concerning the Home Rule sentiments that creep into her comments, she replied: "I defy anyone to study Irish History withoutgetting a dislike and distrust of England,"4 (At the unexpected success of Martyn's rewritten play, The Bending of the Bough, she assured the bewildered authors, "We are not working for Home Rule; we are preparing for it,"5) And it was not until after she had become involved in the Irish Literary Theatre that she met John O'Leary and the other political rebels who had influenced Yeats's nationalism,^ Through her husband,^Autobiographies,595.Lily K.MacManus, White Light and Flame (Dublin: Talbot Press,1929),57-40 describes her manner with the peasants.^Lady Gregory, Introduction, The Kiltartan Poetry Book:Prose Translations from the Irish (London:Putnam*s,1919/>5-4#& r , Gregory's Ietter-Box:1813-1830, ed. Lady Gregory (London:Smith, Elder,1898j.4our Irish Theatre (London:Putnam's 1915),55*^Ibid.,28.^Ibid.. 6 3 .51one-time Member of Parliament and Governor of Ceylon, she had mademany friends among English Unionists, but always she managed toreconcile, if at times uneasily, the friendships formed during SirWilliam's work for England and those she herself made in her own workfor Ireland.^ In this sense alone^ she was invaluable to Yeats; he hd.ilftSm of fi»/. -Hie. Sak^ or his dre-aryi^Jyj-t sha. pmVIr;..itwas willing to acceptA"the baptism of clean w a t e r . I n v o l v e m e n t inthe idea of a national theatre, however, increased her nationalistfeelings still more, and where Yeats subordinated his ideals of artto no nation, she avowed her determination to work principally for"the dignity of I r e l a n d . A s her interest in art increased, so toodid her love for her country.4 The one inspiration fed on the other.As she herself sought for the dignity her nationalism demanded of her country, so she also demanded it of others. The patriotic verses in The Spirit of the Nation appealed to her because of "a certain dignity, an intensity born of continuity of purpose; they are roughly hammered links in a chain of unequal workmanship, but stretching back through the centuries to the Munster poets of the days of Elizabeth.In her own work she strove for this same dignity and "continuity of purpose." (Many years later Yeats was to characterize her as Phase Twenty-four of A Vision, the true mask self-reliance and organisation)^ She, like Yeats, was moved by the death of Parnell, however not realizing until later that by tearing from the corner of a newspaper Katherine Tynan's lament, she had "unwittingly taken note of almost the moment of a new impulse in literature^in poetry. For with that^W.H.Lecky, the historian and Member of Parliament for Trinity College, was instrumental in having the Dublin Theatres Bill amended so that the first productions of the Irish Literary Theatre could take place, later withdrew his support because of Yeats's letters concerning Queen Victoria's visit in 1900#^Our Irish Theatre, 71*5jkidk, 57.4"I myself found every year an increased delight and happiness in Ireland," she wrote in her diary for 1900, Our Irish Theatre,61.^Introduction, The Kiltartan Poetry Book, 5-6.DW.B& Yeats, A Vision (London;Macmillan,1957)>169> Queen Victoria is also categorize? in this phase.52death, the loss of that dominant personality, and in the quarrel that followed came the disbanding of an army, the unloosing of forces, the setting free of the imagination of Ireland."1 Always her nationalism retained this strong desire to win once more the dignity of Ireland,and like Yeats, she believed it possible through the arts. One day2while collecting folk tales on Aran, she happened to glance througha volume of Don Quixote, and the thought of England's false half-visionof Ireland crossed her mind;They see in us one part boastful quarrelsome adventurer, one part vulgar rollicking buffoon.... But we begin to think after all that truth is best, that we have worn the mask thrust upon us too long, and that we are more likely to win at least respect when we appear in our own form, .... Poetry and pathos may be granted to us, but when we claim dignity, those who see only the sham fights of Westminster shake their heads. But here, in real Ireland, dignity " can live side by side with the strongest political feeling.3.The words re-echo through the Manifesto of 1897s "We will show that'Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and easy sentiment .... but ofancient idealism."Her nationalism and concern for the historic past of her nation led' her, like Yeats, to a study of folklore. "In these days, when so muchof the printed history we were taught as children is being cast out byscholars, we must refill the vessel by calling in tradition, or if needbe our own imaginings," she wrote in 1912 concerning her highlyindividual treatment of King James in The 7/hi te Cockade. 4 And her^Kiltartan Poetry Book, 7-8*2She saw Synge for the first time on this trip to Aran; Our Irish Theatre, 120.^"Ireland, Real and Ideal," Nineteenth Century,November 1898, 769-782.4**Notes to The White Cockade, " Irish Folk History Plays «Second Series (London;Putnam's,1912),194* Üi*"The Canavans, The Arrow, vol.l, no.2 (24 November I906), 2-): "I took my historical atmosphere lessfrom history books than from the tradition of the people, who have not been taught English history in the schools, and so have learned it through tradition or the songs of the wandering poets, of Raftery, or another."53Kiltartan History Book bears the following dedication: "Dedicatedand Recommended to the History Classes in the New University. But first came her study of the Irish Language, one step further than Yeats had gone.Even as a child, she relates, she had been eager to learn Irish, but had received nothing but discouragement and mockery from her elders. Later, after her marriage, she bought a grammar and "worked at it for a while with the help of a gardener." But it was not until her own son had shown a like interest in the language that she studied it in earnest. By then Dr. Hyde had founded the Gaelic League.(she helped form the Kiltartan branch in 1899))and through the newly awakened interest in the legends of the past as told by the early poets, she discovered "this disclosure of the folk learning, the folk poetry, the ancient tradition," which was "the small beginning of a weighty change." "It was an upsetting of the table of values, an astonishing excitement. The imagination of Ireland had found a new homing place."2 With it her own imagination found foots at last.5 The excitement of this new revolution led her to a study not only of the folklore of the past, "the call .... of my own country, Oisin and Finn and Cuchulain,"4 but to a renewed interest in the folklore of the present, and her excitement joined that of Yeats'" in the collection of stories from the peasantry."The Celtic Twilight" was the first book of Mr. Yeats's that I read, and even before I met him, a little time later, I had begun looking for news of the invisible world; for his stories were of Sligo and I felt jealous for Galway,^The Kiltartan History Book (Dublin:Maunsel,1909)>v. ^The Kiltartan Poetry Book, 8-10.^Our Irish Theatre,76.^Coole (Dublin:Cuala Press,1951)>9*54she confesses in her introduction to Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland!Lady Gregory's contribution to the study and collection of folklorecannot be overestimated. Her contribution was in one sense morescholarly than Yeats's, for as she admits, "Even when I began to gatherthese stories I cared less for the evidence given in them than for thebeautiful rhythmic sentences in which they were told." Having notheories, nothing to prove, she recorded fully, carefully, and sincerely:To gather folk-lore one needs, I think, leisure, patience, reverence, and a good memory. I tried not to change or alter anything, but to write down the very words in which the story had been told .... I filled many copybooks and came to have a very faithful memory for all sides of folk-lore, stories of saints, of heroes, of giants and enchanters, as well as for these visions.^Her collection was not published until 1920, but in her autobiographyshe indicates that she had already begun her work before the plans forthe theatre were initiated.^ Her reliability is still praised by theIrish Folklore Commission, and has gained her the title, "Mother offolklore."4Her search led her far afield, "among the imaginative class, the holders of the traditions of Ireland, country people in thatched houses,^"Introduction to Sea Stories," Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland Collected and Arranged by Lady Gregory: with Two Essays and Notes by W.B.Yeats (London:Putnam's, 1920),1,3. In his notes to these volumes Yeats says that this study in turn led him to a deeper study of spiritualism in an effort to trace "correspondences."^"Introduction to Sea Stories," Visions and Beliefs,4-5» ££• her note to Tl^ Kiltartan Wonder Book (Dublin:Ma\msel, 1910), 105: "I have not changed a word in these stories as they were told to me, but having heard some of them in different versions from different old people,I have sometimes taken a passage or phrase from one and put it in another where it seemed to fit."^Our Irish Theatre,6. An article, "Some Folk Stories of Usheen," was published in the Dublin Daily Express,17 September, 1898.^Coxhead, Lady Gregory,58.55workers in fields and bogs,"^ and by such a circuitous route, she found herself back in the world she had left on her marriage.My own imagination was aroused. I was becoming conscious of a world close to me and that I had been ignorant of. It was not now in the corners of newspapers I looked for poetic emotion, nor even to the singers in the streets. It was among farmers and potato diggers and old men in workhouses and beggars at my own door that I found what was beyond these and yet farther beyond that drawingroom poet jMoor^ of my childhood in the expression of love, and grief, and the pain of parting, that are the disclosure of the individual soul.2Yeats was to search for the celebration of the soul in ancient mythology, turning at last to the legends of his own country; Lady Gregory also . found the synthesis of her nationalism and her art in the tales at her own back door, from "the men and women ... in poorhouses and on roadsides or by the hearth who have kept in mind through many years the great wonders done among the children of the Gael."? And, like Yeats, she found in "The Book of the People" the continuity and re-birth of tradition she was seeking as foundation for her own beliefs and art.4 This continuity of the intellectual life of the people was endangered, however, by "the shoving out of the Language."? No more did minstrel-poets like the blind Raftery celebrated in Poets and Dreamers wander the roads, with the power of satires and curses on their tongues. Her studies of folklore led her in turn, therefore, to a translation of the early myths of Ireland, to the great cycles of the Tuatha de Danaan, the Fianna, and the Warriors of the Red Branch. Cuchulain of Muirthemne appeared in 1903> greeted by Yeats as "the most important book that has come out of Ireland in my time."^ Gods and Fighting Men came in 1904,^Visions and Beliefs, 1,4#^The Kiltartan Poetry Book,10.^A Book of Saints and Wonders (Dundrum, Dun Emer Press,I9O6 ). ^Visions and Beliefs, 1,4#^"Raftery" (19OO), Poets and Dreamers, 3^^ ed. (Dublin:Hodges andFiggis,1905),43.^Yeats, Note to "Baile and Aillinn," Monthly Review, July 1902, reprinted in A Bibliography of t ^ Works o£ W.B.Yeats, ed. Allan wade^2nd ed. ( London : Rupert Hart-Davis,1958)7333-34#56J and Lady Gregory was hailed as "the Irish Malory."1 If her methodof popularisation is referred to, the appellation is a fitting one.But scholastically speaking, these two volumes cannot be accepted with• the same faith as her folklore collections. Nor did Lady Gregory intendthem to be accepted as literal translations. The imagination of theGael, which had first stirred her as she collected folklore among thepeasants, had moved her in turn to recapture that imagination in a formwhich would be available to her countrymen. In her dedication to thepeople of Kiltartan she explains her method and intentions:When I began to gather these stories together, it is of you I was thinking, that you would like to have them and to be reading them. For although you have not to go far to get stories of Finn and Goll and Oisin from any old person in the place, there is very little of the history of Cuchulain and his friends left in the memory of the people, but only that they were brave men and good fighters, and that Deirdre was beautiful.When I went looking for the stories in the old writings, I found that the Irish in them is too hard for any person to read that has not made a long study of it. .... and the stories themselves are confused, every one giving a different account from the others in some small thing, the way there is not much pleasure in reading them. It is what I have tried to do, to take the best of the stories, or whatever parts of each will fit best to one another, and in that way to give a fair account of Cuchulain's life and death. I left out a good deal I thought you would not care about for one reason or another, but I put in nothing of my own that could be helped, only a sentence or so now and again to link the different parts together. I have told the whole story in plain and simple words, in the same way my old nurse Mary Sheridan used to be telling stories from the Irish long ago, and I a child at Roxborough.^Standish 0*Grady, who had himself worked over the same field, sympathised with her attempt to refine and simplify the saga, but « criticized what he felt was her timidity: "One of the great storiesof the whole World ought to be printed and published in the very words that our ancestors thought fit to use, with all the barbarism and the very loose morality of the age set down exactly as those people thought^"The Legendary and Mythological Foundation of the Plays," CollectedWorks, 1908,11,254-55.2Cuchulain of Muirthemne: The Story of the Men of the Red Branch of Ulster (London:John Murray,1902).57. and w r o t e . B u t although she may have been concerned with the sensitive feelings of the drawing-room, as 0*Grady and Rolleston implied, her aim had been to get the sagas into the drawing-room, and there she succeeded. Her two books still remain the source books for most Irish writers, and Yeats himself acknowledged his great debt to his colleague's work. And as long as her books remain, the threat to the traditions of Ireland is in abeyance. And we shall see to what extent she herself makes use of those traditions in her own plays."I have told the whole story in plain and simple words," Lady Gregory stated in her Dedication. Cuchulain of Muirthemne was her first extensive use of the Anglo-Irish dialect referred to as "Kiltartanese," and which she was to use throughout all her plays.The significance of this use of language belongs in a study of her development as a playwright, but it is important to note here the dual importance of her early work. For it, too, came out of her own observations and knowledge of the peasantry, who while speaking in English thought back to an ancient tongue. In 1903 Synge was to use a variant of this language in his first plays; and throughout their work as collaborators, the influence of Lady Gregory's research into language as well as tradition, can be seen in Yeats's own work.Edward Martyn (1859-1923)Yeats and Lady Gregory sought a union of the peasant with the artist-aristocrat, and in Edward Martyn they found the invaluable combination of Catholic peasant and landlord gentry. Martyn, too, came from Galway: his father's family descended from one of the"Fourteen Tribes" who had established themselves in Ireland during the period of the early Crusades; his mother came from the wealthy peasant Smyth family. A sincere Catholic (to the point of asceticism), Martynj > - Standish O'Grady, " Current Events, " All Ireland Review. Ill, 25(9 August 1902),557-58. Of.All Ireland Review.71.4(28 January I905),41-42.2On the occasion of her marriage, his mother's father presented her with her weight in gold. Gf.Sister Marie-Therese Courtney, Edward Martyn the Irish Theatre (NY:Vantage Press,1956),11-12.58had studied at Oxford during the Pater period and taken the Grand Tour under the tutelage of his distant cousin George Moore. His favourite dramatist was Henrik Ibsen; his favourite composers were Palestrina and Wagner.^ Inextricably involved in music, drama, and his country, he represented the three national emotions of religion, patriotism, and the land. But Martyn did not understand or care for the peasants from whom he had sprung, and they in turn had little trust of him.2 His nationalism, though intense, was private and individual, reflecting his own taste and inclinations rather than any deep concern for or sympathy with his countrymen whom, he felt, 'perverse education and worse government have distorted to the degradation of intellectual s a v a g e r y . H o w e v e r , he was deeply concerned for Ireland, and devoted his life and his fortune to "a very determined fight for some of the improvements in civilisation" he sought for his country.I am one of those who walk the thorny path of the reformer, a path everyone knows is as thorny as that of the venerable female of our rather eccentric patriotic device. Perhaps it is because we have chosen a decrepit old woman as the symbol of our country struggling for her rights, and called those who follow her "wild geese," that we may be more difficult material for the reformer than other people^he wrote many years later, looking back at his struggles for the sakeof his dream.4^Por much of these general impressions of Martyn I am indebted to his man-servant, Mr. Owen Linnane, Tulira, Ardrahan, Co.Galway.2Linnane. Cf. letter from Yeats to Martyn quoted by Denis Gwynn, Edward Martyn and the Irish Revival (London;Jonathan Cape,1930) asking Martyn to speak at the Abbey. "It is very important to have somebody there who does really know the Irish peasant." This may refer to the open discussion after The Playboy riots.^"Wagner's Parsifal, or the Cult of Liturgical Aestheticism,"Irish Review. December 1913, 538.4Martyn, unpublished introduction to Paragraphs for the Paverse, a collection of his essays which have, with all his collected papers, since disappeared. Quoted by Gwynn , op.cit., 31-32.59Martyn's passion to help his country was equalled by his hatred of England. Lady Gregory records that his conversion to nationalism came about through a reading of Lecky’s Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, but even during his childhood and schooldays, Martyn hadpdisliked England. His father and only brother had both died young;his mother, determined to mould him to the required standards of arespected ancient family, had given him the education of an Englishgentleman. Years later Martyn was to look back with resentment uponthe wasted training of his youth:"My earlier days were wasted foolishly in trying to inculcate in me an Englishman’s ideas, accent and outlook .... After finishing my so-called education I became the ovmer of an estate and mansion, things I never wanted .... I had no idea how to manage land nor did I want to."3For the rest of his life he regretted not having the education oropportunity to achieve his ideal, the cultivated man of letters. Buthis dislike of England remained, and in I904 Dublin was regaled withthe lawsuit brought against the Kildare Street Club, v;hen, because ofhis letters objecting to the King's visit, he was asked to resign.^Martyn's dislike of England was, like Yeats's, mainly an aestheticone:Indeed a fatal deterioration of the Celt would seem to follow from. his contact with the Saxon. His incomparable sense of refinementand elegance ... fades and vanishes before the comparative grossness [ and materialism of the Saxon touch .... that is why in those partsof Ireland which are much affected with English influence we ' generally remark a certain air of second-hand, shabby England defacing all objects and customs .... V/hile the inhabitants of ' the shabby England are often vulgar, the Celtic peasants of the uncontaminated West are naturally refined.?Our Irish Theatre,73* Lecky's political survey was first published in I86I.2Linnane, "Vvhat he aimed at was to make England's governing ridiculous, by writing and propaganda."^Linnane.A , .Gwynn, Edward Martyn 28;50|-304, and 508-09* On one occasion he ,refused to have "God Save the King" sung at a concert held on his estate.;5"The Use of a Provincial Peis," Publin T)ai Iv Ex-ores s. 1? September j 1898. In Paragraphs for the Perverse he altered the title to "How I Iwas the first to discover traditional singing." j60Like Swift, he disliked "Handy Andy"! believed in a national ideal; like Yeats, he expressed his own vision of Utopia in his writings. That he lacked the genius of either of his countrymen is obvious, but it is ironical that in temperament and inclination he was more kin to the great Dean than to his fellow-worker.Llartyn's first published work was in fact a satirical novel in which, embedded in the egoistic Bowel Philosophy with which he crudely satirizes nineteenth century culture and aestheticism, ca>n be traced his own theories of art and civilization. The influence of Swift and Rabelais mingles with the doctrines of Pater, and Martyn*s description of Agathopolis, "the golden city that sages have yearned to reach, that none may enter with corrupt mind, that chases the unworthy and fades9from his sight," owes much to his own vision of Byzantium." The citizens of Martyn*s "golden city" bear the calm unsullied expressions stea In Butler's Erewhon; true to his own well-developed misogyny, however, they are all "graceful and exquisitely proportioned" youths, "indicating at once a character so courageous, and an ideal of life so lofty, that one might well doubt that they were indeed the sons of men."? The interests of this spiritual aristocracy are, naturally, the antique tradition of Greek literature ("poetry of the higher and more sublime order" and historical criticism), liturgical music, and the theatre.It is governed by a benevolent but firm dictator, "a magnificent patronParagraphs for the P ^ e r s e, Gwynn, op.cit., 31-32: "We havemany clever, brave and consistent people, the best I have ever known in any country, but we have not enough of them."^Sirius ^ d w a r d Martyi^ Morgante the Lesser: his Notorious Life and Wonderful Deeds (London:Swan Sonnenschein,1890)7 Book IX,249,Sister Courtney, o p .cit., describes this as a satire on "Voltairianism", but many of the barbs can more easily find their mark in the more extreme tenets of the "aesthetic school" Martyn encountered at Oxford.hbld..255. ,61of the arts and of gifted men."!Art, then, for Martyn, was a means to an end; "founded on some philosophical idea," it must exert a "defining and educational influence upon the artistic and moral character of the nation."2 If his nationalism was cosmopolitan in character and personal in interpretation, his philosophy of art was subject to the higher demands of education and spiritual refinement. His aim remained constant, the remoulding of the nation to which he owed allegiance into the Agathopolis which could with impunity demand that allegiance. He described himself as "one of those who walk the thorny path of the reformer," and throughout his life he adhered to those early aims, despite the frequent and great provocations to take an easier way.Martyn advocated classicism in the decorative arts and music, tradition in language, aristocracy in politics. Deploring "the vulgarity of pretension and sham«*the vulgarity of the intellect"? he observed in the "trade architecture" which had replaced the simplicity of early Irish art, he encouraged stained-glass artists,4 sculptors and painters^ to return to the style of the early ages.^ Similarly, he advocated a revival of the Irish language. "Nothing Irish will ever succeed until Ireland shakes off her self-imposed slavery and becomes^Ibid.,254ff. Sister Courtney,op.cit.,39 reports that "in later years ... he was to rank aristocracy next to religion as a safeguard for the people."^"A Plea for a National Theatre in Ireland," Samhain,1901,14-15*^Martyn's preface to Robert Elliott, Art and Ireland (Dublin; Sealy,Bryers and Walker,1906)v-vi.AAutobiographies,387 *?In a review of his paintings, he describes John Butler Yeats as "essentially a religious painter," "Two Irish Artists," The Leader(26 October I901),141-42.He approved highly of W.A.Scott's design of the Church at Spiddal.62.really Irish a g a i n , a n d he felt this was impossible unless Gaelic, returned not only to the schools but to "the Big House" as well.2 To, accomplish this he became a member of the governing board of the GaelicLeague and Sinn Fein, of which he was President from I904 to 1908.^Although he early evinced an interest in Irish history and archeology(George Moore records that he travelled with an archeological party inthe west of Ireland^), he himself admits that his interest in thingsIrish was brought about in part by his love of things Greek:My studies of Irish have convinced me that it is finer and more beautiful than any language I know, except Greek, which will always be to me the most beautiful, the tongue of the highest civilisation the world has ever seen.? It was indeed my ... ' Hellenism that first led me to the Irish language through the ' subtle Greek refinements I found in Irish ornamental art.®But perhaps his most abiding passion was again a result of his travelsand studies away from Ireland, the sixteenth century ecclesiasticalmusic of Palestrina. And just as his belief in drama led him to theendowment of the Irish Literary Theatre, so his belief in music ledhim to the much more impressive foundation of the Palestrina Choir inthe Pro-Cathedral of Dublin. Like his colleagues, he was willing todevote all for the sake of his dream.^Article on the Irish Ig^guage, published in An Claidheamh Soluis,quoted by Gwynn, op.cit.,246.^Mr. Henry B.O'Hanlon, information received by Sister Courtney, Edward Martyn.150*^Michael 0 hAeodha, "Edward Martyn," Irish Times. 3 February 1959,5* Martyn was an admirer of Arthur Griffith and while President was responsible for the publication of Griffith's pamphlet, "The Resurrection of Hungary."^Hail and Farewell:Ave.168-69*^Cf. Wilde's statement that Greek and French are the most beautiful languages.^Article in Claidheamh Soluis. quoted by Gwynn, op.cit. ,245*^,Cf. Ireland's Battle for her Language. published by the Gaelic League, in which he denounces "English vulgarity."63George Moore (1852-1933)The name of Edward Martyn immediatelycalls forth the name of his most prolific biographer, George Moore, Although Moore was also a Roman Catholic landlord from the west of Ireland, the similarity between the cousins ends there.^ Like all his enthusiasms, Moore's patriotism passed through all the phases between two extremes. "It is one of Mr. Moore's peculiarities," commented Max Beerboim on Moore's farewell to England, "that whatever is uppermost in his mind seems to him to be the one thing in the world, and he cannot conceive that there will ever be room for anything else .... But even if the Keltic [gicj Renascence prove to be the most important movement ever made in Art itowill not long enchain him." Beerbohm was of course right, and the prodigal did return, his disgust of the English being replaced by an even more fervent disgust of the once-praised Irish. But Moore must be allowed the last word, which he takes in a collection of stories that clearly express his debt to "dear Edward," Yeats, and his entire sojourn in Ireland:"You knew from the beginning that Paris was the source of all art, that everyone here who is more distinguished than the others has been to Paris. We go to Paris with baskets on our backs, and sticks in our hands, and bring back what we can pick up. And having lived immersed in art till you're forty, you return to the Catholic CeltJ Your biographer will be puzzled to explain this last episode, and however he may explain it, it will seem a d i s c r e p a n c y ."3If Yeats's "blasters" brought him metaphors for his poetry, how much moredid Moore's own enthusiasms bring him material for his art.It might be said that Moore, even when most vehemently denouncinghis own country(to the extent of embracing Protestantism), was always^Unless, like Yeats, one considers them the inseparable two sides of the same coin. £f. Autobiographies,401-402 and The Cat and the Moon.2"Au Revoir," Saturday Review 3 February 1900, reprinted in Around Theatres (London:Rupert Hart-Davis,1955),59-61.^"The Way Back," The Untilled Field (London T.Fisher Unwin,1903i597*6:4Irish. And indeed, throughout his work he never really escapes fromhis past. Like Martyn, he also had received his education abroad,substituting the coteries and salons of Paris for the more conventionalstudies of Oxford. Unlike Martyn, he returned to his Irish estates onlyto disencumber himself of them. The Celtic Renaissance was not,however, his first glance at Ireland for "copy." Having publishedA Modern Lover (I883) and A Mummer * s Wife, (I885) both based on Zola'stheory of naturalism and first-hand observation, he wrote A Dramain Muslin, (I886) a sympathetic portrayal of the "marriage trade" ashe observed its practice in the upper circles of Dublin Castle. Buthis task over, including an amusing exchange with the Castle officialsduly publicized by Moore, he once more returned to "civilization,"leaving as his parting shot an unfortunate diatribe against that town"of miserable vice and hideous decrepitude," that "country of abandoneddreams" with its "damp, flaccid, evil smell of poverty."! But tenyears after Parnell and his Island he was back, embracing the once-abandoned dreams, advocating for all but himself the Irish language;"That one child should learn Irish interests me far more than thepublication of a masterpiece," he wrote to Yeats in I9OI. And in 1902he entertained Dublin (those who did not attend as much as those who did)%to a Gaelic lawn party.^ The same year, under the auspices of the Gaelic^Parnell and his Is1and(London; Swann Sonnenschein, Lowry,1887),22, 49,56# He refers to "dirt and patriotism — which are apparently but two words for one and the same thing,"p.179#2Unpublished letter, 5I Jnly I9OI,National Library of Ireland collection. £f.Moore's speech at the banquet given to Irish Literary Theatre, Avre. 150-151,reprinted by Gwynn, op.cit.,240-243#^J.B.Yeats describes the party in a letter to Lily Yeats, summer 1902, J.B.Yeats Letters to his son W.B.Yeats and others 1869-1922, ed. Joseph Hone (London2Faber,1944),71• An Irish play,by Douglas Hyde The Tinker and the Fairy (later published in Irish and English in New Ireland Review, May 1902,185-192), was performed on the occasion by members of the Gaelic League.65League, he published The Untilled Field, translated into Irish by a Trinity College student.!But by then his connection with the Irish theatre had ceased, and with it much of his fervent nationalism. "Ireland ... is no country . for an educated man," the artist hero of "The Untilled Field exclaims.- "Let the Gael disappear... Since Gormac's Chapel he has built nothing but mud cabins. Since the Cross of Cong he has imported Virgins from Germany." Since his nation would not appreciate his art, he could not appreciate the nation. And in 1908, while still living in Dublin he wrote to a friend in Paris, "Ireland is the cemetery of Catholicism.. ■ 'The Celtic Renascence'... does not exist, it is a myth, like a good • many other things."^It would, however, be both unfair and dishonest to leave the impression that Moore's sojourn in Ireland was one of "intellectual slapstick"only.4 Near the end of his life he was to quote as his epitaph, "Nature I loved, and next to nature, art,"? and it was because of this passion for art that he returned to Ireland. Moreover, he involved himself in the Irish Literary movement at the request of Yeats and Martyn, who had had little experience with the theatre at^"Literary Notes," Dublin Penny Journal, 5 April 1902,5*^"In the Clay," 12 and 26. The stories "A Play House in the Waste" and "The Wild Goose" also blame the clergy for the state of affairs in Ireland.^Letters from George Moore to Ed. Dujardin 1886-1922, ed. John Eglinton (New York:Crosby Gaige,1929),6 4. Letter to Edward Marsh, secretary to Lord Asquith, 5 August 1917, quoted by Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (NY:GUP,1959),418-19; letter 7 December 1920, George Moore: Letters to Lady Cunard 1895-1933 (London:Rupert Eart-Davis,19577,106."4/illiam Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure (London:Jonathan Cape,1945),192.^Qpoted by C.Patrick Thompson,"George Moore at Home," John 0'London's Weekly, 6 August 1932,652-3 and 662.66the time, and whose work he respected. A letter written to Yeats in1898 contains the following passage which indicates much of thecharacters of both;I liked it ^?he Countess Cathleenj better on the second reading and I shall have an opportunity of saying how much I admire it in my preface to Martyn's plays which by the way I shall begin tomorrow. I am your best advertiser in all the houses I frequent I cry: I am not the Lord. There is one greater than I, the lachet of whose shoe I am not worthy to tie.Always a willing collaborator, if at times a difficult one, Moore gaveeagerly for the enthusiasm of the moment, and his contribution tothe dramatic work of both Martyn and Yeats will be considered later.However, Moore was never as unwisely hasty in his judgments as manycritics imply, and his attitude towards language in general is proofof this.Speaking of Swinburne, Moore commented, "Like everybody else inthese islands, he looked upon prose narrative as an entertainmentrather than as an art."^ Narrative to Moore meant a plot in language,and the style was more important to him than the plot. His theory infact is very similar to that of the "living speech" Yeats himselfadvocated, and if we examine his interest in the Irish language wefind it an interesting complement to Yeats's own:A language may be compared to a seed, for a seed is a potential flower, and every language is a potential literature? the beauty of the flower and the literature vary according to the quality of the seed and the language, and the influences they use and when they rise into the upper air.... Style becomes necessary when language becomes corrupt .... compel^inj those who desire a work of art to isolate themselves in some less vulgar speech....I plead for the preservation of that mysterious background of legends and traditions out of which Ireland has come, and which a hundred years of determined Anglicisation has not altogether blotted out... In stealing from him ^he peasant] the traditions of his race, his songs and legends, you do not give him what is best in England... but the gutterpress of London.?^15 October 1898, unpublished letter in the National Library of Ireland.^Avowals (London:Heinemann,1919),68."A Plea for the Soul of the Irish People," Nineteenth Century, February 1901,285-95*67Admittedly this is a grafting of Moore's belief in style on to an already burdened branch of Yeatsian dialectic, but through the unwieldy argument one can hear the George Moore of the constant revisions, the incessant search for truth in art, and the struggle to master the tools of that art. And although Moore may have insisted upon carrying on his education in public, as Wilde quipped, the technical virtuosity he finally achieved was a result of this interest in a living language which he could mould to his interpretation of life. "George Moore is the best living novelist," writes Virginia Woolf," — and the worst; writes the most beautiful prose of his time — and the feeblest; has a passion for literature which none of those dismal pundits, his contemporaries, shares.** And her masterly summing-up concludes with the key to Moore's sympathy for the language of his own country, "and has taught himself an accent, a cadence, indeed a language, for saying it in which, though they are not English, but Irish, will give him his place among the lesser immortals of our tongue."!But although Moore himself struggled ;for a style whichhas its roots in the accent of his compatriots, and for a time at any rate believed in the Gaelic League, he never agreed with Yeats's belief in the peasant dialect developed by Lady Gregory. "Is it not true that peasant speech limits the range of our ideas?" he asks in Vale."Peasant speech is only adapted to dialogue," and therefore, to Moore,^The Death of the Moth and other Essays (London;Hogarth Press, 1942),101-14. In a letter to John Eglinton in 1914 Moore himself acknowledges his debt, although referring to Eglinton, Best, and RusseH rather than to Yeats: "You seeJ didn't know how to write until I went over to Ireland — it was you fellows that taught me." Letters of George Moore, ed. John Eglinton (Bournemouth:Sydenham,1942),25•2Nor did he approve of Yeats's involvement in politics. In 1898 he vnrote, "I hope however that you will abandon politics as Wagner did and that you will realize as he did that his mission was not politics but art." National Library of Ireland collection.68whose abilities were by now obviously not dramatic, useless.! Nor,although he would plead for the revival of Gaelic as the only salvationof the peasant, did he ever resign his own aristocratic sympathies."Art is the direct antithesis to democracy," he declared in his 2Confessions. In the same article that pleaded for the soul of the peasant, he insists on a selected audience.^ And not many years later he began issuing his own works in limited editions.Eventually his belief in a literary renaissance disappeared as well, and he returned to civilization, to the London he had abandoned ten years earlier. "Art comes to a country and flourishes in it for awhile, and then leaves it, never to return."4AE (George W.Russell, 1867-1955)Moore's enthusiasm for Yeats was replaced by an equally fervid admiration for AE, "the Angelic Anarchist"? who with Yeats shared the leadership of the more active literary groups of Dublin at the turn of the century.^ AE differed from Moore to an even greater extent than Martyn; b o m in Ulster of a middle class family, he was rescued byYeats from his position as clerk in a dry goods store and sent by^Hail and Farewell;Vale (New York:D.Appleton,I914),180-182. He then proceeds to give his own example of peasant dialect.^Confessions of a Young Man (I888) (Penguin,1959)>85*^"A Plea for the Soul of the Irish People,"289.^Conversations in Ebury Street (London:Heinemann,1924)>228.^Oliver St.John Gogarty, ^ 1 Was Going Down Sackville Street (London:Rich and Cowan,1957),167-80.^A study of the various versions of Sister Teresa indicates Moore's changing attitude: the poet hero of the first edition is Yeats, in the later editions he has been metamorphosed into AE. "George Moore will be in Dublin this week," AE wrote to Yeats. "He writes a note in which he compares me to Saint Teresa. I hope she is all right."Passages from the Letters of A.E. jW W.B.Yeats (Dublin:Cuala,1956),59*69Horace Plunkett into the country districts to organize a co-operative agricultural movement. Although his former experience had been limited to painting and mysticism, he was surprisingly successful and became one of the leading authorities in Ireland not only on co-operatives but on matters economic, political, and social which affected his country.^But during the early years of the literary movement AE's influence was a personal one. As a poet and painter his interest in art equalled Yeats's and Moore's, but his belief in nationalism was rooted in an individual mystic philosophy fed on his own omnivorous reading and thepmore general influence of Madame Blavatsky. AE's test of art was, like the early Yeats's, "its power of creating a noble mood" in which the artist "must think at least as much of his subject as of his craft."? Like Yeats, too, he elevated the power of imagination to a condition of idealism../If we are to have a.school of art worthy the name in Ireland, it must start with a philosophy at least as serious, and be in accord with that peculiar idealism which, in our literature and music has expressed itself with so much passion, pathos, and spiritualI longing,Qf. H.P. Norman, "George Russell," offprint from Year Book of Agricultural Co-operation, 11-27* In a letter to Yeats",'1 February 1898, Passages, 14, AE writes, "How are the mightyhurled from their seats. You mixed up with *98, O'Grady editsa local bi-weekly paper. I explain to starved-looking peasantshow advantageously they could buy their pigs under the benigninfluence of a Rural Bank!"In a letter to Monk Gibbon, quoted in the Early Years of George Russell (AE) and his Connection with the Theosophical Movement, Ph.D. Thesis for Trinity College, Dublin, 1947-48,264, Harry Norman describes him in 1894 as "head over heels a propagandizing theosophist.... a red hot missionary]"^AE, "The Spiritual Influence of Art," Dublin Daily Express,22 April 1899,3.70he wrote of Hugh Lane's first Loan Exhibition in 1899*^ This emphasis upon "insight" over technique was to limit his own work; but the same emphasis resulted in the peculiar mystic nationalism which pervaded all his writings and activities and to a great extent accounts for his personal influence in Ireland.Russell's "idea of the national being"^ was inextricably mixed with his own mystic life in "the Ireland behind the veil," as he described his occult experiences. "The Gods have returned to Eri/^ iand have centred themselves in the sacred mountains and blow the fire through the country," he wrote to Yeats in great excitement in 1896. "Out of Ireland will come a light to transform many ages and peoples."? And he proposed a "declaration of intellectual i n d e p e n d e n c e "4 which, broadcast not only across Ireland but to America as well, would "wake people up and instil into them something which might supply the deficiency in their arid political aspirations." Like Yeats, he was concerned with the influence of "English commercial ideals to make us comfortable, material." They must, he urged, "declare that our aspirations as a people are not for gold alone but to bring forth heroic people; that all the splendours and ideals of the past are possible here and today for us... as the upholders of a natural humanity^Ibid. Cf. letter in 1895 to Carrie Rea, Gibbon*2$2; "To me all external forms are only symbols of thought and life. They are little for themselves but much for what they suggest." And in another early letter, op.cit., 115; "Art and literature do not interest me now, only one thing interests and that is Life or Truth. I want to become rather than to know."^Cf. The National Being (Dublin:Maunse 1^1916).^Letter to Yeats, 2 June,1896, Gibbo%'507. Cf. John Eglinton,A Memoir of AE (LondonsMacmillan,1957),57•^Letter to Yeats,I896, Some Passage8,6-7.71with its mystic ideal and religious hope." "The Celtic twilight is going to break into Da^ /m. "!But AE's scheme for a declaration of ideals never materialized, and he developed a form of nationalism which gradually departed from the path taken by Yeats. Ironically, he who would later become far more involved in the practical institutions of Ireland disapproved of Yeats's temporarily active political life. "The literary man," he felt, "ought to be concerned mainly with intellectual interests, should only intervene in politics when principles affecting the spiritual life of his country are i n v o l v e d ."2 He disapproved of Yeats's stand concerning the Queen's visit, and urged him to "only enter into a political discussion when you have some principle to declare."? Nor was he at first convinced that he could in turn follow Yeats's lead in writing "as a Celt for the Celt." "I am afraid it would be a futile task to try consciously for the Celtic traditional feeling. A certain spirit of it I have but I am not Celt inside, not for many l i v e s ."4 But it; was his play, based on the Celtic legend of Deirdre,that accidenta.(|y touched off the spark which brought the Pays and the Irish Literary Theatre together.He did, however, approve of the Gaelic League's attempt to revive the Irish language. Again he emphasised a nationalism of the spirit;^Letter to Yeats,I896, Gibbon,305* (This portion of the letter is not reprinted in Some Passages...).p"Nationality and Imperialism," Ideals _in Ireland,I6-I7 .^Letter to Yeats, June I9OO, Some Passages,21.^Letter to Yeats, 3 April 1897, Gibbon, op.cit., 328.(Excerpts not published in Some Passages).72We in Ireland would keep in mind our language, teach our children • our history, the story of our heroes, and the long traditions of' our race which stretch back to God___ We feel poignantly it isnot merely Gaelic which is being suppressed, but the spiritual life of our race.And his avowed dislike of England was perhaps even more disconcertingin its expression than the open letters of Martyn, Yeats, and Moore:I confess I do not love England.... But for that myriad humanity which throngs the cities of England I feel a profound pity....I do not say that everything English is stupid, invariably and inevitably wrong. But I do say that every act by which Englandwould make our people other than they would be themselves, isstupid, invariably and inevitably wrong.AE's influence, then, remained a personal one, and although he never contributed another play to the literary movement, he remained involved in its management for several years, sometimes acting as liaison officer between the players and the playwrights, other times upsetting Yeats's carefully-laid plans, but always encouraging and turning a helping hand to all parties. However, as the movement gained momentum and established its aesthetic creed beyond the pale of nationalism, he gradually moved away to his own interests and activities, establishing new movements and encouraging new ideals.John Millington Synge (I87I-I9O9)Synge, the youngest of the company, entered the literary movement as AE was leaving it, after most of the ideals had been expressed and the early policy in the main established. Like Yeats, Martyn, and Moore, he too belonged to the "gentry," albeit a less recognized and more impoverished branch. And he retained his desire for anonymity even while his work acquired notoriety. Unlike his colleagues, his roots were in County Wicklow in the south and east of Ireland; he did ndt visit the west until 1898, and even then he preferred the stony islands of Aran to the faery kingdom of Galway and Connemara. A "quiet,"Nationality and Imperialism," Ideals in Ireland,^. C^f. "In the Shadow of the Gods," The Internationalist.I.6(l5 March 189S),105-07.75solitary man who lived apart," he exulted in violence, colour, and rhetoric, but only in his art, and certainly never in his nation.Like Lady Gregory, Synge practised more than he theorized, and like her?also his contribution to nationalism was of a practical kind reflected in his plays and essays. Like Yeats, he was a romantic, his love of Ireland an intense emotion which he used to interpret himself. However, unlike Yeats, he never tried to rationalize this national feeling, but merely expressed it through his observation and dramatization of the peasantry.Synge differed from the rest of the group in both his upbringing and his education. Coming from a devout, narrow, Protestant sect which had supplied bishops and missionaries to the world for several centuries, his own emotional development though intense, was of necessity private, especially as he discovered himself moving further and further away from the position held by his strict. Unionist family. It wasnot, perhaps, until he left Ireland altogether to study on the continent that he managed to complete his own development and consolidate his own feelings towards his art and his country. For, like many exiles, he could not see his nation steadily and whole until he had left it.2The development of his nationalism followed the pattern one would expect of a poet who felt deeply but rarely expressed himself publicly except through his art. As a youth he had gone through the stage of mystical nationalism where "everything in fact that was Irish had a charm neither human nor divine, rather perhaps as if I had fallen in love with a goddess."^ And, as with Lady Gregory, his first contactCf. David H.Greene and Edward M.Stephens, J.M.Syrnge: 1871-1909 (NY;Lîacmillan,1959),ch.l et passim. I am indebted throughout to the thorough and extremely helpful MS. written by Edward M.Stephens on which this biography is based and which was made available to me by Mrs. L.M*Stephens.oJames Joyce is perhaps the most notable example, closely followedby Shaw.5Stephens MS,49874with patriotic literature had been The Spirit of the Nation, which, like Yeats, he tended to over-estimate as literature because stirred by the sincerity of expression,^ While attending Trinity College he studied the Irish language, at the same time extending his interestPto a thorough study of archeology and history. Later in Paris he continued his studies on Celtic literature under Professor de Joubainville at the Sorbonne, and Anatole le Braz. But still his interest in his country remained an academic one, and it was not until he met Yeats in Paris in I896 and through him joined Maud Gonne's Association Irlandaise that he actively participated in any nationalist cause.3 By then, however, he had taken a theoretical interest in socialism, reading among other works on the subject the writings of William Morris, and had felt the first stirrings of ambition "to do good."4 For a time he was strongly influenced by his new friends, and fancied himself a similar radical.^ However, he realized that his "theory of regeneration for Ireland" differed from the^revolutionary and semi-military movement" inaugurated by Yeats and Miss Gonne. "I wish to work in my own way for the cause of Ireland," he wrote the same^Greene and Stephens,O ¥ VAs well 'as the required texts, his notebooks record his reading The Children of Lir and Diarinuid^nd Crania in Irish, Wakeman's Handbook of Irish Antiquities, Musgrave's Rebellions in Ireland, Froude's The English in Ireland, C.T.Stokes' Ireland and the Celtic Church, Petrie's The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland. (Stephens MS7)^Synge records the date, 21 December I896, in his diary; Yeats is therefore two years out in his preface to The Well of the Saints.^rs. Synge's letter to her son Samuel, quoted by Greene and Stephens, op.cit.,57.^His nephew quotes him as saying in 1900,"A radical is a person who wants change root and branch, and I'm proud to be a radical." (Stephens MS.J.205)*75year in his letter of resignation to the latter.1- But still he did.• not know how, except for a general idea that "Ireland will come to her' own in years to come when socialistic ideas spread in England.In 1898 I went to the Aran Islands — I had known the County Wicklow peasantry — we always spent every summer there — intimates for years — and found the subjects of most of my plays there,Synge wrote in a cryptic note to an American journalist in 190?. ^ Hehad, as Yeats records and the literary world knows, been sent to Aranby Yeats in order that he might learn his craft. Ironically, he alreadyknew far more about the Celtic movements in Europe than he did of theGaelic movement at home, and consexjuently his attitude towards theIrish peasant, although a response to the emotional needs he felt inhimself, was a / ^ influenced by his study of the entire Europeanmovement of which he felt his own nation’s to be an integral part.An article on the Irish legendary material written for a Paris journalin 1902 stresses the European importance of the literature then beingtranslated by Lady Gregory:In our legends and in the cycles which I have just mentioned there is a mythology of the first epoch, a nucleus of the most primitive beliefs of the Indo-European races.... This literature is also important from another point of view. Life, morals and worships described there are none other than the phases of the civilization of all the Celtic races west of Europe at the time of the Caesars.^Quoted in full by Greene and Stephens.op.cit.,62-63. Cf. C.H.H., "John Synge as I Knew Him," Irish Statesman, 5 July 1924,552 + 554; letter by A.Lynch, Irish Statesman, 20 October 1928, concerning his Paris days: "Synge was critical rather in respect to our meansof action than to our ultimate aim"; quotation from HY Evening Sun,2 April 1909, probably by Yeats: "Synge was a keen observer of political conditions, although he never talked politics."^Mrs. Synge’s letter to her son Robert, ibid..65.^Letter to Leon Brodzky,10 December 1907, Spencer Brodney collection in Trinity College, Dublin.76Therefore in reconstructing the world from which our texts have come, a rather clear idea of the ancient Gauls may be arrived at.^An unpublished letter Synge wrote after the Playboy riots indicates thathis attitude towards Ireland as part of a much larger European culturenever changed:How are the mighty fallen! Was there ever a sight so piteous as an old and respectable people setting up the idea of Pee-Gee because, with their eyes glued on John Bull’s navel, they dare not be European for fear the huckster across the street might call them English....It will not be long — we will make it our first hope — till some young man... will sweep over the backside of the world to the uttermost limbo this credo of mouthing gibberish. (l speak here not of the old and magnificent language of our manuscripts, or of the two or three dialects still spoken, though with many barbarisms, in the west and south, but of the incoherent twaddle that is passed off as Irish in the Gaelic League). This young man will teach Ireland again that she is part of Europe.2Like Yeats’s, his nationalism could not be restricted to narrow movements.A national feeling that is "too fiery, too conscious" is more likelyto degenerate into "excited rhetoric" than produce literature of value,he felt.5 Consequently he distrusted the work of the Gaelic League,whose doctrine as has already been stated he regarded as being made upof "ignorance, fraud, and hypocrisy." "Irish as a living language isdying out year by year, he claimed, and Irish nationalists would bebetter employed if they concentrated instead on keeping "the cruderpowers of the Irish mind" occupied until the Irish literature written inEnglish became a more definite influence in Irish life. "Modern peasantGaelic is full of rareness and beauty, but if it was sophisticated byjournalists and translators... it would lose all its freshness; andthen limits, which now make its charm, would tend to prevent all furtherd e v e l o p m e n t . "5 A "special intimacy" with a language can alone" producereal works of literature," and if the new literary movement is to be alasting one, he felt, national feeling must "cease to be an obsession"J"La Vieille Litterat\ire Irlandaise," L’Europeen(Paris), 13 March 1902,11."^Printed in Greene and Stephens,op.cit.,262-65.5"Le Mouvement Intellectuel Irlandais,"L ’Europeen,31 May 1902,12.^Greene and Stephens,op.cit.,262.5"The Old and New in Ireland," Academy and Literature, 6 September,1902,238-59.77so that the language most frequently in use can gradually become thetrue mother tongue.1Synge was in fact preaching National heresy. Furthermore, hepractised it. He found the material he was looking for in "themanifold and beautiful life we have all missed who have been born inmodern Europe," as he observed it among the peasants and tinkers of 2Wicklow. He was charmed by the simplicity and vigour of the Aran Islander, who lived with the harshness and bitterness of reality.^And he loathed the "rampant double-chinned vulgarity" he found among the prosperous Gaelic Leaguers.4 For all his early interest insocialism, in fact, Synge the artist would have been the first to disparage a socialist society as much as Synge the humanitarian would have welcomed the alleviation of the unhappiness and horror of the congested districts. And the attitude of the aristocratic artist who finds the greatest happiness among the peasants he celebrates in his works is clearly expressed throughout his life. "As you know," he wrote to Stephen MacKenna after the Playboy riots, "I have the wildest admiration for the Irish peasants, and for Irish men of known or unknown genius.... But between the two there's an ungodly ruck of fat-faced, sweaty-headed swine."5 Poetic licence and physical discomfort aside, his experiences with Dublin audiences tended to increase^"Le Mouvement Intellectuel Irlandais."^Jottings in a notebook,1902, Stephens MS.1448-49; Notes in a diary about the same time, Stephens MS.1483-84.^Cf. Preface to Playboy of the Western World.^Letter to MacKenna,13 July 1905, quoted by Greene and Stephens, op.cit.,187-88. Cf. his emotion at the audience's reaction to the Irish Literary Theatre performances in 1901, **Le Mouvement Intellectuel Irlandais."^Letter to MacKenna,mid-April,1907, quoted in Greene and Stephens, op.cit.,263-64. Cf. letter to MacKenna 28 January I904, ibid.,156-5?.In notes describing a visit to the races at Arklow Synge comments that the races are far enough from Dublin to be out of reach of "horsey riffraff cities produce." Stephens MS.1326-27.78his romanticism rather than turn him towards realism.He could, however, be extremely realistic in his attitude towards Irish politics. He was aware of the importance of the new movements, but at the same time realized that "in Ireland nothing is done without the influence of a dominating p e r s o n a l i t y . A n d since the fall of Parnell, Ireland's hope lay in her intellectual activity rather than any undirected political energy.^ "I have never known a man with so passionate, so pedantic a value for truth as Synge," his close friend Stephen MacKenna wrote many years after his death. "He didn't so much judge the lie intellectually or morally as simply hate it — as one hates a bad smell or a filthy taste. This alone would put him off any public movement whatever."5 "I take it he wanted as dearly as he wanted anything, to see Ireland quite free; but one thing kept him quiet — he hated publicity, co-operation and ^ ies. He refused to support the Gaelic League because one pamphlet it issued contained the statement...that to know modern Irish was to be in possession of the ancient Saga."4 In a letter to his publisher concerning some articles on the people of the Wicklow glens, Synge wrote, "I greatly prefer... working here for people I know, and I have no wish at all to press for a big price."5 One thing only was important, and that was his fidelity to art and life as he saw it.^"Le Mouvement Intellectuel Irlandais."^Article on the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin,Stephens MS.^Letter from MacKenna to Arthur Lynch in 1928, quoted by E.R.Dodds in his memoir. Journal and Letters of Stephen MacKenna, ed. E.R.Dodds (London: Constable ,1936),39.^Letter by MacKenna to The Irish Statesman, 3 November 1926.^Letter to Joseph Hone, 17 January 1907, L.M.Wilson collection. Trinity College, Dublin.79These, then, were the leaders who came together at the turn of the century and made a new literary movement in Ireland possible. Each strongly individual and resolutely independent, they were bound together by three ties: a dedication to art and their own aestheticcreeds, a passionate desire to create a permanent memorial to their nation, and a sincere respect for each other's work. But art came first, on occasion in defiance of the nation for which each was working and in spite of a high regard for their fellow-workers. "There are things a man must not do to save a nation," John O'Leary had said to Yeats. The history of the Irish Literary Theatre and its successor, the Abbey Theatre, records not only what these men were willing to do for the sake of their nation, but to an even greater extent what they refused to do for the sake of their art. Edward Martyn left the movement to found a theatre of his own which would satisfy his own artistic creed; George Moore returned to the artistic form which expressed his concept of art; AE moved on to encourage other young artists for the glory of Ireland. Yeats and Lady Gregory remained, joined now by the dramatist who was to become their biggest burden and their greatest glory, Synge. But the story of their attempt to synthesise nationalism and art belongs to a later chapter.80CHAPTER 3 - COSMOPOLITANISMThe confusion of the present times is great, the multitude of voices counselling different things bewildering, the number of existing works capable of attracting a young writ el's attention and of becoming his models, immense, V/hat he wants is a hand to guide him through the confusion, a voice to prescribe to him the aim which he should keep in view, and to explain to him that the value of the literary works which offer themselves to his attention is relative to their power of helping him forward on his road towards this aim. (Matthew Arnold, Preface to Poems.1655)The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the culture of an age, move for the most part from different starting-points, and by unconnected roads. As products of the same generation they partake indeed of a common character, and unconsciously illustrate each other; but of the producers themselves, each group is solitary, gaining what advantage or disadvantage there may be in intellectual isolation.(Walter Pater, Preface to The Renaissance,1873)"The Irish Literary Theatre will attempt to do in Dublin something of what has been done in London and Paris," proclaimed the first issue of Beltaine in May 1899. The founders of this new project in Dublin clearly wished to identify themselves with international as well as national movements. And when we recall that these founders had schooled themselves in European- culture before attempting to re-create a genuine Irish culture, it is even more necessary to investigate further not only their models, but the aesthetic philosophy which fostered their artistic aims. "To an Irishman," Yeats had claimed, "England is fairyland."^ And Martyn, Moore and Yeats had for many years lived in the centre of that kingdom. It is to London that we must turn, then, for the earliest signs of the dramatic revival in Ireland. But London itself was an intellectual whirlpool of new ideas and fresh evaluations of all aspects of art. The fresh currents came from the north, the south, and the west; some rose in the provinces, others in the universities. Some trickled out, others gained momentum and direction; but all contributed to the form of the new century's letters. It was^Conversation with Frank O'Connor, quoted by Ellmann, The Man and the Masks,79*|,,‘V or look outward, we left that to the prose v/riters: we looked back,”81these restless tributaries rather than the general stream the young men from Ireland chose to explore.Modern industrialism and the accompanying rise of the middle class had produced in England an age of materialism and ugliness which no artist or thinker could with honesty condone or with sanity endure,T*vvo paths lay open: he could strive to make the world about him worthliving in and working for, or he could turn away and create a world of light and beauty in which he could live and work happily alone.Both solutions had enthusiastic advocates who in turn gained many disciples even more enthusiastic; both looked to an earlier age for an expression of the world they dreamed of, ”We did not look forward ^ ’ wrote Yeats many years later.^But even among "the prose vfriters” this new spirit was evident.^ Matthew Arnold, John Buskin, and William Morris led the body of criticsK ' ( ' àsr? and social reformers who tried to remake the world in a better and more' tasteful image. Like most prophets, they'were misunderstood, often byC j ) V f ^ i jr 7 7 0their own disciples. Deploring the Philistinism and provincialism he hi!/1 s . t found about him, Arnold advocated a return to the simplicity, precision," \. ■: ^ -zand seriousness of the classics Cosmopolitan in learning as well as taste, he turned frequently to the literature of France, at the seme time urging English writers to express life with clarity of vision, to make "the effort to see the object as in itself it really is."While Arnold advocated a classical ideal, Buskin pointed to the art of the middle ages which he felt expressed the morality and freedom of the4 J craftsman. Art to him was the supreme business of life, because the-, f-"Modern Poetry. A Broadcast"(l93^)? Essays and Introductions(London:Macmi1Ian,I961),495*Except, of course, in the Imperialist writings of Kipling and Henley; romantic writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson solved their % , personal problems by escaping into adventure, George Moore praisedr Beau Austin, written by Stevenson and Henley, Pall Mall Gazette,Y September 1892.! ^"Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment"(I865), Essays inCriticism. (London:OUP,1914)•82highest expression of the good in man. As Slade Professor at Oxford (1670-1878), Ruskin dictated the artistic taste of the age^s as social and economic reformer, he preached Carlyle's gospel of work, and wasonot averse to handling a pick-axe himself for the purpose.Foremost of Ruskin's disciples was William Morris. A successful poet and craftsman, he entered vigorously into the campaign against ugliness, and extended the battlefield into the drav;ing-room, the cathedral, and the printing shop. Finally he bore the standard of socialism into the market place, and into the outstretched hands of another young Iris liman, George Bernard Shaw (who promptly carried it into the nearest theatre, where it has been wildly waving ever since^). Morris's activities ranged from designs for wallpaper, tapestry, stained glass, and type, to the propagation of a Utopia where man could express his joy in work and life through beautiful crafts and art.4 He, too, however, looked to the past for inspiration, seeking first in the middle^He was not always a benevolent dictator; his famous lawsuit v/ith Y/histler could in a sense represent the quarrel betvæen the two choices of the artist. William Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure (London:Jonathan Cape,1945)>80-96.^Sir Kenneth Clark, Ruskin at Oxford (Oxford:Clarendon Press,1947)y Among the undergraduates on this road-building expedition to Ferry Hinksey was Oscar Wilde.^Shaw's debt to Morris has been frequently paid in his writings and by others. Cf. St.John Ervine, Bernard Shaw:His Life Work and Friends(London:Constable^1956). One of the recent Royal Court playwrights, Arnold Wesker, says of the final play of his trilogy: "Basically it isa family affair: on another plane it's a play about human relationshipsand on a third and most important plane — it's a story of people moved T'"^ by political ideas in a particular social time. There are many theoriesabout Socialism. Chicken Soup ... handles a Communist aspect. Roots... deals with a personal aspect...which suggests that one can only teach by example. Jerusalem is a sort of study in a William Morris kind of Socialism. If you like, the three plays are three aspects of Socialism played out through the lives of a Jewish family." The Times, 29 Marchi960.Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties. (Penguin,I915) ; Richard Le Gallienne T M Romantic '90s (London:Putnam's,195%)>9-10.85ages and later in the sagas of Iceland for the colour and vitalityhe found lacking in the world about him.^ And he created a lastingimpression not only on Shaw, but on the young Yeats, who was a frequentvisitor to Kelmscott House;^I took to him first because of some little tricks of speech and body that reminded me of my old grandfather in Sligo, but soon discovered his spontaneity and joy and made him my chief of men. Today I do not set his poetry very high, but for an odd altogether wonderful line, or thought; and yet, if some angel offered me the choice, I would choose to live his life, poetry and all, rather than my own or any other man's.^But Yeats's criticism of Morris's poetry came much later in life, and in a review of The Well at the World's End he pays tribute to the prophet who "was the poet of his time who was most perfectly a poet," for "he more than any man of modern days tried to change the life of his time into the life of his dream."4 Morris's appreciation of The Wanderings of Oisin meant much to the young poet;^ and in later years his copy of the Kelmscott Chaucer, resting on a lectern between two blue candles, occupied a prominent position in his rooms on Woburn Walk.^^Dorothy M.Hoare, The Works of Morris and Yeats in relation to early Saga Literature (CUP,1937). Yeats refers to the "new romance" Morris and Wagner have created, "Celtic Element in Literature"(1903), Essays and Introductions,186. Morris was probably as great an influence on Masefield as Yeats, £f. The Locked Chest.1906, based on an Icelandic tale.^His sister studied embroidery with Miss May Morris, and for a time Yeats joined her there to take French lessons; J.M.Hone,W.B.Yeats,65.^Autobiographies,I4I•^The Bookman, November,I896. He once described The Sundering Flood anU News from Nowhere as "the only books I ever read slowly so that I might not come quickly to the end"; Hone,op.cit.,63.^Letters to Katharine Tynan, 24 January 1889, Letters,102.^John Masefield, Some Memories of W.B.Yeats (Dublin:Cuala,I940) 7. Cf. Yeats's description of Morris in "The Happiest of the Poets"(l902), Essays and Introductions, 55 ff, "Poetry and tradition"(1907), 0£.cit., 246.84On the whole George Moore, unlike Yeats, remained unaffected by the ideals represented, but he considered The Defence of G%enevere "one of the most beautiful poems in the language.Martyn, however, arrived in Oxford before Ruskin's retirement, and although he found an immediate interest elsewhere. Modern Painters became one of his favourite works.^ For when Martyn went up to Oxford, and Moore and Yeats dined in the literary circles of London, a more seductive doctrine was attracting the young writers who had less inclination towards outright social reform. And now at last a doctrine that had startled France half a century before^ found its way into England: art not forthe sake of society or culture, but for the sake of itself.The banner of artistic freedom had been raised before in England."Be it remembered," Max Beerbohm reminds us, "that long before this time there had been in the heart of Chelsea a kind of Cult of Beauty.... Beauty had existed long before 1880. It was Mr. Oscar Wilde who first trotted her round."4 The young Yeats had heard his father's circle discuss the aims of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: to paint directlyfrom nature and experiences without conforming to traditional methods; to devote close attention to individual details (always selecting those details and subjects which appealed, of course); and, turning away from the ugliness of this scientific industrial age, to dream of a medieval world where sunlight and happiness prevailed. Leader of the group was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, visionary, poet, and painter, who expressed his desire for beauty in dreamy madonnas, and his rejection of ideas^J.M.Hone, The Life of George Moore (London:Gollancz,I956),36O.He could not stomach Morris's prose, however, ibid.,359»' ^oore. Hail and Farewell:Salve (London:Heinemann,1912),129»^In the preface to Théophile Gautier's novel Mile de Maupin(l836).^"1880," The Yellow Book, January 1895,278.85in sensuous mystical lyrics. William Morris had been strongly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, but the effect shows more in his style than in his theory. Another notable neophyte was a feverish, brilliant young poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne.^ V^ile Morris energetically applied himself to the task of beautifying all he saw in the world about him, the Pre-Raphaelite withdrawal into sensual and f f •*'< decorative beauty influenced Swinburne towards the symbolist movementof France, more specifically to the emphasis on form and technique advocated by Gautier and the Parnassians,^ and on pagan beauty as celebrated by Baudelaire.^Walter Pater (I839-I894)A more positive exposition of this aesthetic doctrine was expressed in the writings and conversation of Walter Pater, Fellow of Brasenose College. Pater had been impressed by Arnold's cosmopolitan attitude towards letters and Ruskin's insistence on the supremacy of art; he read Goethe and translated Flaubert; he lectured on Hegelian dialectic; and he met Swinburne.4 In The Renaissance (1873) and more fully through the adventures of his painfully sensitive hero in Marius the Epicurean^As a young man, J.B.Yeats and "the Brotherhood"(j.T.Nettleship, Edwin Ellis, and George Wilson, artists Yeats worked with) loved Whitman, Swinburne and Shelley, J.B.Yeats:Letters,47, but Swinburne's* I \ attack on W.B.Yeats in his revised edition of his book on Blake turnedthe Elder Yeats against "that damned homunculus... without sweetheart or wife or child or friend," whose poetry "at best is a sort of choric rhetoric," Op.cit.,105.^"The perfection of form is virtue;*' "l am a man for whom the visible world exists." Cf. Ruth Z.Temple, The Critic's Alchemy (NY:Twayne,1955),150.^Ibid.,93. It is interesting'to-note that Swinburne, Symons and Synge all translated Villon.4cf. William. Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure, 52 ff.86(1885), Pater defined his creed: "to rouse, to startle [the human spiri-^ to a life of constant and eager observation." Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. k counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life....To burn always with hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in l i f e . P e r h a p s more important, he elevated to creative status the function of the critic: "to distinguish, analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture...produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced." Beauty for Pater must be defined not in the abstract," but in the most concrete terms possible.Indiscriminately applied to life, this doctrine of "for ever curiously testing new opinions and counting new impressions" reaped its casualties, a danger which led Pater to suppress the relevant passages in the second edition of The Renaissance.^ Adopted as a fair expression of artistic endeavour, it offered writers and artists the scope in subject matter and freedom of treatment they had long been seeking. Arnold had argued for touchstones; Pater illustrated them.^Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance.1st ed.(1875).^Preface to The Renaissance (1875).^Pater also altered the title of the second edition (I877) to The Renaissance : Studies in Art and Poetry. The third edition (1888) replaced the conclusion in revised form. Although Wilde is generally considered the greatest casualty, a more direct victim was perhaps the painter Simeon Solomon, who took Swinburne's pagan games far more seriously than the poet did. Cf. Gaunt,op.cit..45-48. It is debatable whether or not Lionel Johnson whom Yeats admired falls into this category. Cf. his poetry. TheComplete Poems of Lionel Johnson, ed. I.Fletcher (London: Uni corn,1955).87That it could appeal to men as different in temperament and beliefas Edward Martyn and W.B.Yeats testifies to its universality. Eachtook from it according to his temperament and talent. Freed fromthe moral earnestness which marked the work of the social reformers,they inclined even more towards a cosmopolitan attitude in art, askingonly of an artistic work: "Is it beautiful?" And the young Yeatsreflected this ideal. "Beauty is the end and lav/ of poetry," he wroteto AE in 1900.1 But emphasis on the personal test of individual2expression and impression can have its dangers as well. Sense was less important than feeling, and occasionally the temptation to bemuse or shock ("épater le bourgeois") took precedence over the desire to communicate.^ One of Moore's favourite stories was of Baudelaire's "The day that I killed my father..."4, and the cheaper imitations of the fin de siecle movement grasped only this element without the art.The aesthetic movement, as this emphasis on art for the sake ofart rather than for the sake of society might be called, expressed itself in England in four main tendencies, none entirely divorced from the others, but each emphasizing different qualities and each owing much to France.^ The accent on sensation and emotion expressed in a^Letters,343*2Cf. Coventry Patmore's advice to Le Gallienne, The Romantic '90's,74; "You live too much on the capital, rather than the interest, of passion."^Occasionally this can be seen in Beardsley and other artists of The Yellow Book. The reviewer, "the Yellow Dwarf," insisted upon acritical standard of beauty and not utility. Moore himself isconsistently guilty.^James Euneker, "The Baudelaire Legend," Egoists:A Book of Supermen (London:T.Werner Laurie,1909),?6.^In England the aesthetics attempted to synthesize the opposing forces of "Decadence" and "Symbolism" as described by May Daniels,The French Drama of the Unspoken (Edinburgh U.P.,1953),21-25.88personal language resulted in symbolism;^ the importance of ritual and form already partially experienced in the High Church movement at Oxford and heightened by an interest in Swedenborg and Beehme (mainly via Blake), encouraged an interest in mysticism; the constant search for earlier models and fresh material encouraged the "celtic revival" which was by no means limited to Ireland;^ the concern for style and delight in polished language resulted in an elegance and wit reminiscent of neo-classicism.3 Martyn was apparently attracted by Pater and his doctrines; Pater remained one of his favourite authors.4 Moore, having discovered impressionism in French painting, was carried across the channel by "Marius" and symbolism.5 Yeats, already of a mystical cast of mind, became one of the leading symbolist poets.^ All three were first led back to Ireland by the "celtic revival,"7 to be joined by Synge from Paris.^Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: Heinemann,1899); Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle (New York:Scribner,1943); Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, 2nd ed., trans. Angus Davidson,(OUP, 1951); Temple, Oîl.AÜ.T Gaunt,op.cit.2Pierre Loti and Anatole LeBraz, who wrote of Brittany; Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold who wrote of the Celt at large; Fiona Macleod who spoke for Scotland.^Wilde and V/liistler in conversation; W.S.Gilbert and Wilde in drama; Beerbohm and Shaw in essays.^Henry B.O'Hanlon, quoted by Sister Courtney, Edward Martyn,41*^Avowals (London:privately printed,I9I8), chs. IX,X, andXI.^Symons dedicated The Symbolist Movement to Yeats; cf.Ideas of Good and Evil (I903).^Bettàine promises a "Celtic" play by Fiona Macleod.89style - Oscar Wilde (I854-I900)The aesthetic reaction against the Victorian demand for high■ seriousness is seen at its most extreme in the trend towards dandyism.Wilde's purple breeches were the first indication, modified by thestylish dress of Max Beerbohm and Aubrey Beardsley. For years Yeatswore a loose silk tie and flowing cape; and Moore was distinguishedby his French attire when he returned to England.^ Matching thissartorial elegance, the young aesthetes practised the mot juste.At its best and most brilliant, this wit can be enjoyed in Beerbohm'sand Shaw's essays, Wilde's plays, and the Gilbert and Sullivanoperettas. But neither Gilbert nor V/ilde was able to free himselfcompletely from the sentimentality of the commercial theatre: Wilde's2earliest plays were melodramas and his first successes were frankly based on the highly moral well-made pattern of Arthur Wing Pinero (as his novel was based on a conglomerate of well-made patterns with an impeccable moral). The doctfines of the aesthetic movement, like those of their reformer associates, were often misinterpreted and abused by their apostles;^ Gilbert's libretti judiciously balanced clever satire with "right sentiment," and Patience did much to restrain the exaggerated accessories of aestheticism.4 Further, the emphasis^Yeats later chose the conservative black costume befitting the serious poet.^Vera, or Nihilists (I88I) and T M Duchess of Palma (l88Z),both of which contain Wilde's first attempt at the "Lord Henry" figure. Neither has ever been performed in England.^Gilbert had originally intended it to be a satire on the church, but thought better of it and aimed it at Wilde instead. (Actually Bunthorne and his lovesick maids is a better caricature of Yeats, who had not yet appeared on the scene). D'Oyly Carte, the Gilbert and Sullivan impresario, sponsored Wilde's lecture tour to America during the first run of Patience.^Such extremes as pseudo-Gothic architecture had their parallels: the "Japanese craze" and the "blue phase" both introduced by Whistler. Cf.George du Maurier's caricature, reproduced in Gaunt, Aesthetic Adventure.58; "Are you intense?"90on wit encouraged consciousness of style and language; conversation once more became an art outside the theatre,^ Apart from this movement, yet allied to it through the broad distinction of humour, are the plays of James Barrie. Like Gilbert and Sullivan, he maintained excellent terras with the public, which could leave its social responsibilities behind and enter the world of whimsy without endorsing the "decadence" of the aesthetes.The culmination of this emphasis on style can be seen most clearly in the life and work of Oscar Wilde. Like Yeats, Wilde learned his "extravagant style" from Pater. Unlike Yeats or Pater, he developed his belief in artistic creation until it engulfed his entire life, emphasising the individualism of Pater’s aesthetics until the pose became the man, and the mask, like leH George Ball’s, moulded the personality.5 But it is not sufficient to dismiss the "tragedy" of Oscar Wilde as an unfortunate enthusiasm; his life and his art were the result of a deliberate effort at creation. The tragedy lay not in the practice, but in the impractical attempt to apply an aesthetic creed of perfection to that imperfect creation, man. It was Wilde’s y misunderstanding not of Pater’s creed, but of his own, that was at fault.Wilde’s aesthetic creed is stated consistently and clearly throughout his work, from the early plays through his novel, stories, and essays to De Pro fundi s. Frequently it is stated in the same language; nearly always it is spoken by the same character who,Aunder different guises, acts as Wilde’s alter ego. It is expressed most clearly, perhaps, in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray:^Pinero’s plays had always tended slightly towards this "comedy of manners," but always self-consciously.^"The Phases of the Moon," Collected Poems of W.B.Yeats (London; Macmillan,1950),185-88. Cf. Le Gallienne, Romantic ’90’s,55-59 and156-57.^Cf. Max Beerbohm, % e Happy Hypocrite;a fairy Tale for Tired Men (London: Lane,1897)•4prince Paul in Vera, Gilbert in The Critic as Artist,Lord Henry in Dorian Gray, Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere^s Fan, Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband.91The artist is the creator of beautiful things.To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography....They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty....Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art....From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type.Beauty must be appreciated for itself alone and can only be appreciatedthrough the impressions; all of life and nature (which includes theartist) should be translated by the artist into beauty; all thingsare instruments of the artist’s craft. Wilde was in fact takingPater’s doctrine of withdrawal from the "unbeautiful" moment onestep further — into life; in doing so, he imposed upon himself theimpossible task of recreating life in the artist’s image. He succeededas long as he limited his task to a recreation of himself into hisfamous pose; he failed when he tried to apply it to the reality about/ 1, - him. Man can copy art, but nature can not. (it is significant that^ Wilde’s alter ego, while moulding others to his own conception, remains ^ completely detached and unaltered during the process).h, t "Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol.... the artistic life is' , simply self-development," Wilde wrote in Be Profundis, his last publicstatement.^ This emphasis upon selfhood was one of the cardinaltenets of the aesthetic creed of the ’nineties, and Wilde developed itto its finest stage in his doctrine of the mask. "Man is least himselfwhen he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tellyou the truth," says Gilbert in The Critic as Artist. 1/Ian's mask.^De Profundis (1905) (London:Methuen, 1949)»95* Of* ^he Soul of Man under Socialism, which emphasizes "Individualism."^Oscar Wilde’s Plays, Prose Writings, anH Poems (London; Everyman * s,1950 ) ,48 -92in fact, is himself as seen by himself, the essential ego, when he is "perfectly and absolutely h i m s e l f . I n order to achieve this mask, the artist must have the courage to give himself up to his impressions, for "that is the secret of the artistic life."^ Furthermore, by becoming his own creation, man detaches himself from all threat of ugliness, and the greatest cause of ugliness is human suffering. "Through Art only...we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence"); Dorian does not feel safe until his wish to remain as he is in Basil’s painting is granted, and he is "out of nature." Similarly, he can love Sibyl Vane as long as she remains the actress a mask, but "the moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her."4Just as the artist should devote his life to re-creating himself into the mask, so should he impose pattern and style on his material. Consequently, form and technique were more important to Wilde than subject matter. Furthermore, the critical faculty was essential for creation, as only the critic can see with sufficient objectivity."That spirit of choice, that subtle tact of omission, is really the critical faculty in one of its most characteristic moods, and no one who does not possess this critical faculty can create anything at all in art."5 And it is the critical faculty that invents fresh forms, also, thereby avoiding the danger of repetition as we observe it in nature.^ "This love of definite conception, this cleanness of vision, this artistic sense of limit, is the characteristic of all great work^"The Soul of Man Under Socialism," op.cit..267.^"The English Renaissance of Art," Essays and Lectures, 5th ed. (London;Methuen,1920),148*^"The Critic as Artist," op.cit.,40.4"The Picture of Dorian Gray," Oscar Wilde’s Plays,158 and 155. 5"The Critic as Artist," op.cit.,16.Ibid.,16./95and poetry*"! The artist has achieved perfection when the subject cannot be separated from the method of its expression*^ For when the material, form, manner, and technique are in the perfect control of the artist, the creation becomes a tapestry of rhythm, mood, and image; "So far from desiring to isolate {beautj^ in a formula appealing to the intellect, we*..seek to materialise it in a form that gives joy to the soul through the senses."5 The ideal form for this philosophy of correspondences is the paradox, which we see throughout his work the perfect balancing of two halves, and/*is represented in the "two faces" of Earnest. This, then, was the aesthetic doctrine Wilde preached. That he succeeded in his work is evident from the perfection of The Importance of Being Earnest, where at last subject and expression synthesize and eliminate the personality of the artist; that he failed in his attempt to apply the same creed to his life was the result of his blindness in not realizing his own dictum that the method should be suited to the material.It is ironical that the artist who most closely achieves Wilde's aims was his most bitter caricaturist, W.S.Gilbert. For Gilbert succeeded in his plays (and even his libretti are plays) because he recognised the importance of being earnest. Shaw, feeling uneasy about Earnest, fancied a resemblance in plot to Gilbert’s Engaged, written almost twenty years earlier.4 However the closest similarity is not in plot, but in style, as Gilbert’s foreword to the play makes clear:It is absolutely essential to the success of this piece that it should be played with the most perfect earnestness and gravity throughout. There should be no exaggeration in costume, make-up, or demeanour; and the characters, one and all, should appear to believe, throughout, in the perfect sincerity of their words and"The English Renaissance of Art," Essays and Lectures,116. ^Ibid.,136.^"Lecture to Art Students"(1885), Essays and Lectures,199.4our Theatres in the Nineties (London;Cons table,1948),1,41-44.94actions. Directly the actors show that they are conscious of theabsurdity of their utterances the piece begins to drag.His concern, as it was Wilde's, is with the artistic unity of the playas a whole, "when the subject cannot be separated from the method ofexpression."But the two young men most directly influenced by Wilde's aesthetic doctrine were Aubrey Beardsley and W.B.Yeats. Beardsley's paintings graphically illustrate Jilde's belief that the "dark half of the garden" is genuine subject for art as much as the sun-lit side. As his sister commented, "He hated the people who denied the existence of evil, and so being young he filled his pictures with evil. He had a passion for reality. In line and technique as well he emphasised the importance of form and pattern over colour, and the objectivity of the artist is evident in the mockery of the beauty he expressed and satirized. And Yeats in later years saw ip/\"strange, precocious genius" the artist who "would take upon himself not the consequences but the knowledge of sin.Beardsley's poster advertised the first production of The Land of Heart's Desire and both contributed to The Yellow Book. But their closest tie was Wilde, and through Wilde, Pater.If Rossetti was a subconscious influence, and perhaps the most powerful of all, we looked consciously to Pater for our philosophy....Marius the Epicurean...seemed to us all, the only great prose in modern English....It taught us to walk upon a rope tightly stretched throu^ serene air, and we were left to keep our feet upon a swaying rope in a storm,Yeats vvTOte much later.4 And the names of Pater and Wilde recurconstantly throughout his Autobiographies. As much as Wilde, Yeatswas fascinated by "the slow-moving elegance" that characterized Pater'sprose, 5 and strove in his own writing to achieve the same perfection^Quoted by Leslie Daily, The Gilbert and Sullivan Book,4th revised ed. (London;Cassell,1956),154-55. Cf.G.K.Chesterton, "Gilbert and Sullivan," The Eighteen Eighties, ed. Walter de la Mare (CUP,1950), 146-47.^Quoted by Yeats, letter to Lady Gregory, 11 February 1915, Letters.575.^Autobiographies,550-51.^Autobiographies,502-05.^Unpublished draft of Four Years,quoted by Ellmann, Man and Mask.159.95(perhaps most notable in Rosa Alchemica).! And it was this same emphasis on style (both in life and art) that he appreciated in Wilde.AE recalls that Yeats vigorously defended Wilde against the charge of being merely a poseur. "He said it was merely living artistically, and it was the duty of everybody to have a conception of themselves, and he intended to conceive of himself."2 And AE is perhaps right in believing Wilde’s doctrine responsible for Yeats’s own later doctrine of the mask,5 for Yeats admired both the style — Wilde and Shaw were, he felt, "the only dramatists of the nineteenth century whose plays weœ worth going to hear"4— and the man — "in Sheridan and Oscar Wilde,you have personalities, the personalities that make drama."5 As Wildehimself had said, "For there is no art where there is no style, and no style where there is no unity, and unity is of the individual. And out of the struggle for unity comes pattern, the tapestry, the mask.Symbolism - Arthur Symons (1865-1945)While the emphasis on wit exploited many of the techniques of realism, symbolism was the result of suggestion as opposed to factual^Lady Gregory in.her Journals ;1916-1950,ed.Lennox Robinson(London; Putnam,1946),265 quotes him:"But these critics ought to think more of the writing. They have given up God, they shouldn’t give up perfection."Lady Gregory comments; "Well, he practises what he preaches; is workingover those old poems as if for a competition for eternity."^Letter to George.Moore, quoted by John Eglinton, A Memoir of AE (London;Macmillan,1957),110-111. Moore disliked Wilde’s style, cTaiming his sentences "do not sway." Moore versus Harris,ed. Guido Bruno (Chicago ;priyately printed, 1925) ,10-11.^See below. Part Two, Chapter 5 passim.4Quoted in an unpublished letter by Frank Fay to Yeats, 11 December 1902, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats. Wilde’s plays are more successful when adapted to wireless and television than most plays written for the theatre.^Interview with the Francisco Examiner, 51 January I904.^"The Critic as Artist," 17#96statement. "A symbol indeed is the only possible expression ofsoiie invisible essence," Yeats wrote in an essay on Blake in IB96,!And in the work of Arthur Symons are expressed all the various aspectsof symbolism in English literature. Close friend of Yeats, Moore, andMartyn, he participated in almost all the activities before the Englishpublic during the final decade of the century, usually involving hisfriends in one or another of his pursuits. As poet, translator,scholar, theorist, critic, playwright, and journalist, he combined acosmopolitan attitude towards the arts with a stronv desire to interpretthose arts to his fellow countrymen. He was equally at home in Parisand London, and therefore doubly valuable to a poet like Yeats. Hiswritings, in fact, express the specific form synbolisra took in Englandwhen it was adapted from the French-; with strong overtimes of Wilde :I contend on behalf of the liberty of art, and I deny that morals have any right of jurisdiction over it. Art may be served by morality; it can never be its servant... .The moods of men! There I find my ■ subject; there the region over which art rules.. .?diatever has existed has achieved the right of artistic existence.^Although art lives "v/here cities pour/Their turbid human stream throughstreet and mart,"5 there is "no necessary difference in artistic valuebetween a good poem about a flower in the hedge and a good poem aboutthe scent in a satchet."4ISymons's greatest influence, however, lay in his critical rather than his creotive writings, as pedagogue to Yeats, Martyn, and Moore. Attempting in his critical and theoretical writing "to be as little^William Blake and his Illustrations to the Divine Comedy," Essays and Introductions,II6 .^Preface to 2nd edition of London Nights (I896), dedicated to Paul Verlaine, T ^ Collected Works of Arthur Symons;Poems_,I,(London:Seeker,1924),165-66.^Prologue to Days and Nights (I887), "in all gratitude and admiration to Walter Pater," op.cit.,5>4preface to 2nd edition of Silhouettes (I896), "Being a ,/ord on Behalf of Patchouli," op.cit.,97*97abstract as possible, and to study first principles...as they may be discovered... in every achieved form of art," he worked his way towards "a system of aesthetics, of all the arts."! And his twofold insistence on treating each art as a separate developing movement and yet theirinterdependence as parts of an aesthetic whole sharpened a tendency2towards a technical language common to all the arts. Terminology : formerly reserved for painters was adopted by poets and musicians, andvice versa. Whistler’s Nocturnes enraged Ruskin and resulted in the famous lawsuit; "tone poems" might be considered a part of the same tendency.^However, although on a te^nical critical level this enlarged the scope of the artist, on the symbolic level — the expression of a personal emotion — this language tended to widen the gulf between the artist and the layman.4Martyn dedicated The Heather Field and Maeve to Yeats and Symons, and Symons was responsible for the "dream scenes" in Maeye, but the influence was not one-sided. For Yeats had a natural tendency towards the symbolism Symons was studying, and helped considerably in the writing of The Symbolist Movement in Literature (l899)*^ Further, he and Moore agreed in much of their criticism, and as John Freeman points out in his study of Moore, their work and interest in literature followed parallel currents V/here Moore was attracted by Manet and^Preface to Plays Acting and Music;A Book of Theory (1905).^Cf. The Symbolist Movement in Literature(l899); Studies in Seven Arts (1906).^This tendency can be observed in the descriptions of paintings by Ruskin and Pater, in particular, of course, "La Giaconda,"4çf. Yeats’s poem, "On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmund Dulac," Collected Poems.242.^Unpublished letters referred to by Ellmann, Man and the Masks,143-44,315.A Portrait of George Moore in a study of his Work (london:T.Werner Laurie,1922),104-05.98the impressionist painters, who were concerned with "the deeper and more difficult question of getting nature, seen frankly, into the pattern, instead of coming to nature with one’s pattern ready made,"! Symons was instrumental in introducing the work of Mallarmé and the French symbolists to English literature.Mallarmé taught "the spiritualizing of the word" which Symons felt essential to the future of literature, and which Yeats practised in his early poetry and essays. An "impressionist poet"^ who was more concerned with suggestion and allusion than description,^ Mallarmé taught the doctrine of symbolism as the pathway to a higher system of ideas which would eventually lead the poet to the absolute, ultimate truth. Ironically, he had himself "discovered" this sjçtem through reading the v/orks of Edgar Allan Poe,4 but then switched allegiance to his "oher maître," Swinburne.5 (Therefore, while the English poets under Symons’s tutelage were elevating ü/îallarme at the expense of Swinburne and had probably never read Poe, the French poets were paying homage to Swinburne). He also, however, owed a great deal to the Parnassian school, led by Théophile Gautier, whose concern for form and objectivity is translated by Mallarmé and the symbolists into the mood which should arise from perfection in form and a critical refinement resulting from a personal objectivity divorced from reality.During one of his early visits to Paris Yeats met both Mallarmé and Verlaine,^ and one of the sections of his autobiography is taken^"The Painting of the Nineteenth Century"(1905), Studies in Seven Arts(London: Seeker.192A).24.^Ruth Z.Temple, The Critic’s Alchemy (NY)Twayne,1955),111-14;169-70.^Hasye Coonerman, The Aesthetics of Stéphane Mallarme (NY:Privatelypublished,1935ÏÏ9-15.-------------------------------- 7"4cf. Les Poemes d’Edgar Poe, trad. Stéphane Mallarme (Bruxelles: Edmond Deman,1888).5 /Stéphane Mallarme, Five Letters...to Algernon Charles Swinburne(jc.1875-76), ed. De V.Payen-Payne ( London : Privately printed) ,1922.^Letter to John O’Leary, 7 February 1894, Letters.250.99from Mallarmé*s statement, "The whole age is full of the tremblingof the veil of the temple," which Yeats interprets in his own way.^Reading a translation of his works many years later, he commented ina letter to Dorothy Wellesley,I find it exciting, as it shows me the road I and others of my time went for certain furlongs. It is not the way I go now, but one of the legitimate roads. He escapes from history; you and I are in history.2And one of the ways he and the symbolists "escaped from history"was through mysticism.MysticismIn any case, symbolism would naturally lead to an increased interest in mysticism for its own sake. The mood of doubt and disbelief caused by the scientific revolutions of the century had resulted in a search for some philosophy to take the place of "scientific determinism.Modern biological and anthropological studies had in one blow swept away the invulnerability of man's gods and the romantic conception of man himself. Now the sphere of the supernatural which had long been reserved for the devout offered new scope for the artist as well. Man searched around for some proof of his superiority to the rest of the animal world, and looked hopefully towards mysticism. The attractions of ritual and dogma had already led some to High Anglicdnism and even to Rome. Long after he ceased to believe in his calling Pater continued in his determination to become ordained and regularly attended High Church services.4 A poet like Gerard Manj^ r Hopkins, imbued with a much earlier and less complicated religious spirit, had been able to combine the mysticism of Catholicism with the aesthetic ideals of• L^etter to AE, 1 July 1921. Letters .670. The book referred to is The irembling of the Veil. Autobio^aphies. 107-581, and includes his account of "The Tragic Generation," Johnson,Symons,Wilde,the Rhymers' Club.etc.h May 1957.Letters.887Shaw's annotations to Irving Piske, Bernard Shaw's Debt to William Blake (London;Shaw Society,1951),Shavian Tract no.2. See below. Part Two, Chapter 5, passim. Much modern criticism re-applies this doctrine as a basis for aesthetic judgment, for example the brilliant thematic studies of Dover Wilson and other apostles of "higher criticism4Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure, 55Yf.style, design (’'inscape”), and individuality ("instress”). A few of the social philosophers, like Arnold, sought a substitute in humanism;others, like Butler, Wells, and Shaw, transformed the "will to endure”v/ into the "will to perfect”; still others instead turned to theosophyand religions of the East in their pursuit of the marvellous, l^ o^m France came strange, symbolical writings that seemed to dramatize vague longings long felt but never quite understood. And hand in hand with the aroused interest in mysticism with its consoling promise of the unassailable and unfathomable, travelled the "scientific” study of ceremonial magic with its security for the initiated few.When Martyn went up to Oxford the influence of Newman still hung over the university, although altered in course by the doctrines of Pater. Already firmly established within the Church of Rome, Martyn held the position which appealed to many of the undergraduates who were ^following Pater into the incense and ritual of the High Church. The tendency towards the rigours of Catholicism may in fact be a solution to îte^ rtyn’s constant castigation of conscience; he could go no further, and so instead increased his asceticism, even burning his classical poetry.^In London this appeal took a slightly different form. "The Mysticalin Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature — this is what2I am looking for,” Wilde wrote in ^ Profundis. And in I89I the Rhymers* Club was formed, mainly under the auspices of Yeats, Ernest Rhys, and T.W. Rolleston.^ The young poets gathered regularly at the Cheshire Cheese, and in their search for "the Mystical in Art" raised^Sister Courtney, Edward Martyn,46-47; Gwynn, Edward Martyn,77^Op.cit.,150.5Other members were John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, Edwin J.Ellis,G.A.Greene, Herbert Horne, Selwyn Image, Lionel Johnson, Richard Le Gallienne, Victor Plarr, Ernest Radford, Arthur Symons, John Todhunter. William V/atson joined but never came; Francis Thompson appeared once, but never became a member. Hone, W.B.Yeats,79>101poetry to the tradition of a religion, and life itself to the eminenceof ritual. They took their models from the past, trying "to write likethe poets of the Greek Anthology, or like Catullus, or like the Jacobeanlyrists, men who wrote while poetry was still p u r e . B u t although hepublished over a dozen poems in the two volumes of selections issued 2by the Club, Yeats was not satisfied with the "pure gem-like flame"advocated by Pater and expounded by his fellow poets. Already possessingto a great degree the mystical strain of the Irish and dissatisfiedwith the established religions, he first joined Madame Blavatsky*sTheosophical Society and a few years later was initiated into theHermetic Society of the Golden Dawa.^ Defending his interest in magicand ritual, he wrote in 1892:The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write...I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance — the revolt of the soul against the intellect — now beginning in the world.^And, as we shall later see, he practised magic all his life, his interests later becoming a part of his philosophical studies.5However, in seeking endorsement from the past for the eccentricities of the present, these young poets found as models three men as different^"Modern Poetry:A Broadcast"(1956), Essays and Introductions,494-95. Cf. Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (CUP,1956),ix-xi.^The Book of the Rhymers * Club (London:Elkin Matthews,1892); The Second Book of the Rhymers* Club (London:Elkin Mathews and John Lane,1394).C^f_. Transactions of the Blavatasky Lodge of the Theosophical Society (London:Theosophical Pub.Soc..1890); Brief Sketch of the History and Work of the Original Theosophical Society..• now known as the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society (Point Loma, Aryan Theosophical Press,1915)7 Virginia Moore, Th£ Unicorn (London:Macmillan, 1954),chs.4,5, and 6 ; H.P.Blavatsky, Thefeecret Doctrine;the Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy 2 vols. 2nd ed. (London:Theosophical Pub.Co.,188^0^Letter to John 0 *Leary, July 1892, Letters,210-211.^Part Two, Chapter 5 passim.102in life as in work, but who represented qualities they admired and sought in various degrees to emulate; William Blake, Villiers de I'Isle Adam, and Maurice Maeterlinck.Mystic and rebel, Blake represented for these literary revolutionists "the first to claim for imagination the freedom which...was won for the heart by the Renaissance."^ His prophetic books, edited with more enthusiasm and perception than accuracy by Yeats and Edwin Ellis, indicated "an eddy of that flood-tide of symbolism which attained its tide-raark in the magic of the Middle Ages." Prophet and seer, he professed "a system to deliver men from systems," and, to Yeats at least, heralded "the new epoch in which poets and poetic thinkers should be once more, as they were in the days of the Hebrew Prophets, the Spiritual leaders of the r a c e . A n d we shall see later that this early belief in the poet, acting as poet, accepting the responsibilities of leadership, remained a constant one for Yeats as it had for Blake.In 1898 we find him writing;The arts are, I believe, about to take upon their shoulders the burdens that have fallen from the shoulders of priests, and to lead us back upon our journey by filling our thoughts with theessences of things, and not with things.3To the young poets at the Cheshire Cheese and in the incense-soaked rooms of the Blavatsky circle. Count Villiers de l*Isle Adam's strangepoetic Axel seemed rather part of a religious rite than a work forliterary criticism.4 Yeats recalls reading the play with difficulty and so slowly "that certain passages had an exaggerated importance, while all remained so obscure that I could without much effort imagine that here at last was the Sacred Book I longed for."5 Here, he felt,^Yeats, "William Blake," The Bookman, April 1896,21.2Preface to The Works of William Blake;Poetic, Symbolic and Critical, 5 vols.,eds. Edwin John Ellis and W.B.Yeats (London:Quaritch,1895),!, x-xi.^"The Autumn of the Body"(1898), Essays and Introductions,193.4-First pub^shed in 1890, Cf.Yeats's preface to the translation byH.P.R. Pinberg (London:Jarrolds7T925)*^Autobiographies,320.103"was a man crying out for a mythology, and trying to make one because he could not find one to his hand."1 The students' of theosophy had listened attentively to their Brahmin tutor, Mohini Chatterjee, teach m3 the doctrine of the spirit, that "all action and all words that lead to action were a little vulgar, a little t r i v i a l . N o w in Villier's strange vfeary sentences, "words behind which glimmered a spiritual and passionate mood,"5 they saw this doctrine applied to art. His theme of renunciation and disdain of life represented that extreme withdrawal from the world or "fin de siecle" lassitude which helped increase the atmosphere of isolation and indifference the young writers felt to the mundane world about them, encouraging them to break the bonds of tradition and assert the artist's freedom of subject and form they had already experienced in Wilde. The phrase, "As for living, our servants will do that for us," became a password, and the young Yeats printed it at the head of his own mystic manifesto. The Secret Rose. However, as friend of Baudelaire and Wagner, Villiers himself bore little resemblance to the shadowy ideal of withdrawal depicted in Axel. Aserious, if erratic, writer, he dreamed of "a symphonic drama with adensely woven web," reflecting not only personal intrigue, but the characteristics and elements of the nation.4 For Villiers, as for his readers. Axel's castle remained subject for speculation only. But it was not until some years later that English readers discovered that the same playwright had anticipated Ibsen by nine years in the portrayal of domestic rebellion.5 His influence remained that of the mystic^"William Blake and the Imagination" (1897), Essays and Introductions114.^Yeats, "The Way of Wisdom," The Speaker, I4 April I9OO.5"The Autumn of the Body," op.cit.,190-^Villiers' cousin, quoted by James Huneker, Iconoclasts(London;T. Werner Laurie,I9O6),563•La Revolte (I870) was translated by Mrs. Theresa Barclay and published in The Fortnightly Review, December 1897, after Ibsen had been introduced into England.104rather than the realist: "He opened the door of the unknown with a crash, and a generation has gone through them to the infinite."1 Although Yeats admits the influence of Axel on his style and thought during .the 'nineties, the essays and dramas of a Belgian mystic had perhaps even a greater influence.^ Maurice Maeterlinck was also a disciple of Villiers in one sense, sharing the same vague symbolism and elegant disregard for reality.^ One of several Belgian writers reflecting the same moods and emotions,^ he was perhaps more akin to L|g) Emerson as a mystic, claiming that the noblest aim of life was "toseek out [man*^ own special aptitude for a higher life in the midst of the humble and inevitable reality of daily existence.To the extent that man achieves this deeper life does he develop his own innermost soul; and the language of the soul is, for iviaeterlinck as for Wilde, beauty.^ However,where Wilde's aim was to avoid suffering,Maeterlinck approached Mallarmé*s belief that "the value of ourselves is but the value of our melancholy and our disquiet.The true humanR^eray de Gourraent, quoted by Yeats, "John Eglinton and Spiritual Art," Daily Express 29 October 1898, reprinted in Literary Ideals in Ireland,32.^Autobiographies.505.320-21; "William Blake and the Imagination" (1897); Essays and Introductions.114;"The Celtic Element in Literature" (1897 Kop.cit. .187; "The Symbolism of Poetry"(l900),O£.oit. ,162: "Blake's Illustrations to Dante" (1897), 0£.cit.,128; "Discoveries"(l906), op.cit.,296.^Ruth Z.Temple, T ^ Critic's Alchemy, 139.^Others were Georges Rodenbach, Emile Verhaeren, and Camille Lemonnier. £f. W.L.Courtney, The Development of Maurice Maeterlinck (London:Grant Richards, 1904),67-75» Lemonnier's mystery play. The Eyes that Have Seen, trans. by lÆartha Leonard for Togmrrow,July 1897» 31-38, bears a strong resemblance to Maeterlinck.^Maeterlinck,"The Deeper Life," T ^ Treasure of t ^ H^l_e trans. Alfred Sutro (London:Allen, 1897), 171 •^"The Inner Beauty," op.cit.,203.*^ "The Star, " op.cit.,124.105existence can be found not in the conditions of time and space,but in a sphere of its own;1 and although this sphere is most easilyattained by the poet,truth is found not in speech or efforts atcommunication, but in that passive silence "when life is sluggishwithin us. As the greatest silence is the silence of death, wedo not achieve fullness of life until, paradoxically, at the pointof death; "our death is the mould into which our life flows."4Life for Maeterlinck, then, is a mysterious reaching out after theunknown, where silence is more expressive than speech and, as for thetwo lovers of Axel's castle, death fulfils all. And althoughMaeterlinck gradually moved from this mystic fatalism to a morecheerful confidence in man's ability to control his destiny, this^ earlier philosophy was the strongest influence in Eng l a n d . ^ Yeatsquoted him;^ Symons discussed his mysticism;'^ even Synge reviewed him,/• describing ^ Sagesse et la Destinee as one of "the few books of pure and perfect conception"®; AE mentioned with approval his debt to Madame Blavatsky.^^Courtney, op.cit.,4.^"The Star," op.cit.,123.^"Silence," op.cit.,7.^"The Pre-Destined,"op.cit.,52.E.G. Hills, The Evolution of Maeterlinck's Dramatic Theory (Colorado College Publications, Language Series 1),vol.II (April 1907), 29-40.^The Return of Ulysses"(1896), Essays and Introductions,198; "Emotion of Multitude"(1903),op.cit.,216;"The Autumn of the Body"(1898),op.cit., 189; "The Celtic Element in Literature(l897) ihto well-known themes and develop a new approach to old form. Theliter&lry.’y movement gradually became a nationalist and language movement limited to one country, Ireland, with its own periodicals and political platform, as we have seen, thus losing much of its earlier depth and cosmopolitan significance.As early as I856 Ernest Renan explored Brittany and discovered the Celt^; ten years later Matthew Arnold elaborated Renan's description of the Celtic element in literature and advocated a Chair of Celtic Literatures at Oxford.^ Another^fifteen years had shown such an increase in activity that Grant Allen could feel justified in making^Cf.John Rhys, Celtic Britain (London;Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge,1882)and Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom (London;Williams and Norgate,1888); Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville, Le Cycle mythologique irlandais et la mythologie celtique (Paris;E.Thorin,1884), trans. R.I.Best (Dublin:Hodges,Figgis,1905)*^The Poetry of the Celtic Races (I856)(London:Walter Scott, n.d.). Of. Holbrook Jackson, "The Discovery of the Celt,"The Eighteen Nineties (1915) (Penguin,1959),147-56.^"The Study of Celtic Literature," Cornhill Magazine, vol. XIII (1866),282-296,469-483,538-555.108the Celt responsible for all the modern movements in England,^ andby the end of the century innumerable scholars, organizations andperiodicals were devoted to the recovery of the Celt. In hisintroduction to Lyra Celtica, one of the largest and most sweepingcollections of Celtic literature, William Sharp devoted three and2a half pages to a survey of the writings of Celtic specialists.The greatest impetus came from Ireland, as we have seen, where for the first time Old Irish manuscripts had been translated and made available to historians and literary scholars. Writers rejoiced3in the "new fountain of legends" which were thus suddenly available, and both poetry and prose flowed with ancient Irish tales and exciting new symbols. Moreover the Celtic movement was not limited to Ireland. Claimants and supporters arose in Scotland,^ Brittany,5 Wales,Cornwall, and even on the Isle of Man, and the Pan-Celtic Society was founded in 1899. In their enthusiasm for the Celtic virtues, many writers of dubious national heritage claimed a share of the spoils: Arthur Symons qualified doubly as a member, being of Welshbirth and Cornish parentage; Lionel Johnson discovered a strain of Celtic ancestry and was duly admitted.^^"The Celt in English Art," Fortnightly Review.49 K.S(1891),267-77.2Lyra Celtica,I896,xx-xxiii•^Yeats, "The Celtic Element in Literature,^1897), Essays and Introductions, 173-88*^Scotland has the distinction of having produced two literary "frauds", James McPherson's Ossian in the 18th century, and William Sharp's Fiona Macleod in the 19th.^Anna Irene Miller, The Independent Theatre in Europe (NY:Long and Smith,1931),94-96 describes a Celtic Theatre in Brittany, "The Troupe of Sainte-Anne," first production 1902.^Although hardly to be taken as argument, it is interesting to notethat Ibsen wrote to Archer in 1895*"One of the conclusions to which Ihave come is that there are very strong traces in me of ray Scotchdescent," Correspondence of Henrik Ibsen, ed.Mary Morison (London;Hodder and Stoughton,1905T7443* According to Ellraann, Man and the Masks. 108, Yeats early antagonized the Irish division ofthe Pan-Celtic Society by his outspoken literary criticism.109Although the case for Celtic ancestry was at times pushed beyond genealogical sanction, the Celtic movement as it gradually took form in the 1890's illustrated definite tendencies and prevalent characteristics, especially in the work of the major writers, Yeats, "Fiona Macleod," and Ernest Rhys, representing Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. As well as the "natural magic" and "sense of the mystery of life" recognized by Arnold and Renan, there developed a "franker trust in passion and in beauty than was possible to the poets who put their trust in the external world and its laws. The sense of melancholy and vague longings associated with "the Celtic twilight" gradually gave way to specific references to ancient legend and mythology, which in turn sharpened imagery and diction and rooted experience in time and space. That the time was the distant past . and the space some far-off corner of the world strengthened the appeal. and well demonstrated William Blake's belief that "art is a labour to/ 9'bring back again the golden age."^ A critic of this cult of the Celt ' might see in the renewed emphasis on the virtues of the peasant and the glamour of the remote past a natural development of the romanticism!of Rousseau and Ruskin.7 : These, then, were the four main elements of the doctrine of art forr art's sake as expressed in England. It was not, of course, an■ \ >- I integrated movement, but it was a self-conscious one in its attempt todevelop an aesthetic theory and then practise it. The result was a greater consciousness of style with corresponding emphasis on vrit and polish, a greater element of interaction and sympathy between the various arts, and an aristocracy of tone which further separated the artist from his audience. Interest in the "folk element" tended to remain a romantic ideal bearing little resemblance to social reality, and the gulf between audience and artists remained, emphasised on both sides by the illusions each held about itself and the other. In each^Yeats,"Miss Fiona Macleod as a Poet," Bookman, December 1896,92-93.^Yeats, "Mr. Rhys' Welsh Ballads," Bookman, April 1898,14*f --J 110phase of the movement, also, the continental influence can betraced. There had always been a certain amount of sympathy betweenthe arts of England and France, although the corresponding Englishmovements tended to lag behind and were rarely as extreme. Itbecame the practice to take one's literary master from France:Arnold and Edmund Gosse accepted Sainte-Beuve as master; Swinburne,Victor Hugo; Moore, Zola; Symons, Mallarmé. This new cosmopolitanismwas further developed by Symons and Moore, and Moore constituted himselfambassador of the arts, leaving France only "to found the aestheticnovel in English."^ His first published works. Flowers of Passion(I878) and Pagan Poems (I88I) show the obvious influence of 2Baudelaire, and this role was further magnified through his almost single-handed championship of Emile Zola, the master of naturalism.NaturalismWhile the majority of writers in England either turned towardsaestheticism in an attempt to escape from the life about them or became!actively involved in socialist efforts to improve that life, a few were content to "stand and stare." These writers, instead of fighting the influence of the new science, joined forces with it, adapting the y philosophy as well as the techniques to their own literary ends. Ingeneral, this movement concerned itself with the expression of contemporary life and attempted to depict the absolute objective facts of life. The naturalists, as the followers of the movement were called, were sociological in their methods to the extent that they recognized the importance of man's environment towards his development; they were evolutionists to the extent that they acknowledged the influence of heredity. Again, the impetus came from France, Honore de Balzac's Comedie humaine illustrated a "scientific" attempt to classify the various social species ;, Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart series was based^Quoted by Geraint Goodwin, Conversations with George Moore (London: Benn:, 19 29 ), 87.2Flowers of Passion (London:Provost,1878); Pagan Poems(London: Newman,1881). He became known in London as "Pagan Moore." Hone,George Moore.68.Illon the laws of scientific determinism, in particular the influence of heredity, and earned Moore's enthusiastic description as "the Homer of modern life.K This development of naturalism in the nineteenth century was anf ^ almost inevitable culmination of two movements in literature which* v/ere neither original nor modern; the choice of everyday life asIsubject for literature, and insistence upon realistic detail. In his famous preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth had argued a return to "incidents and situations from common life" rooted and described as far as possible "in a selection of language used by men^ ' but Wordsworth was only one of many theorists, Southey, Crabbe, Shelley, Byron, who advocated a choice of common life for subject matter. And Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, celebrated the individual with unrestrained enthusiasm; "I celebrate myself and sing myself." But the poetry of contemporary life extends back further thanv/y Chaucer; nor is the insistence on detail and fidelity of representation,obasic characteristics of the realist method, a new discovery.Concreteness of imagery and a detached, objective point of view have always been qualities associated with classical literature, and we shall also observe a gradual advance of realism in the commercial theatre.It v/as, however, only with the new scientific spirit of the age and the corresponding clinical interest in contemporary detail that this realistic approach to art could have narrowed into a convention with its own rules and technioues. As George Moore implied,^ naturalism attempted the modern epic, but concentration was no longer on man the hero, who had been shorn of his heroic stature and much of his free will by the advances of science, but on his society, and an attempt^Preface to the English translation of Piping Hot! ^otvBouill^ (London:Vizetelly,1885).T^he Oxford English Dictionary defines "realism" as "fidelity of representation, truth to nature, insistence upon details." Of.Pope, Homer.P^reface jkq Piping Hot!, also Preface to The Rush for the Spoil (translation of La Curee) (London:Vizetelly,1886).112at accurate representation of "la tranche de vie," This change of emphasis demanded a corresponding change of form and manner; the artist could no longer be selective, for "photographic realism" (as naturalism was frequently termed) required the inclusion of every detail no matter how insignificant it may have appeared to the bystander. The aim of the naturalists, as defined by Zola, was to replace "les abstractions par des réalités," thereby achieving truth.^ The seeds of naturalism were sown by Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) and Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880). Balzac's aim was to become "The secretary of society"; he saw, Moore claimed, "that the drawing-room was the great feature of civilization": "As God is said to havecreated Adam from a handful of clay, so did Balzac create the French n o v e l . H e aimed at more, not only to record the society of a particular period, but by means of his ambitious scheme, Comedie humaine, (1829-1850) attempt to improve society by moral comment. However, although the detailed settings and minute descriptions give the panoramic impression of early nineteenth century life and crude analysis of dominating passions which revolutionized the modern novel, a romantic flamboyance and oversentimentality too frequently step between the characters and the reader.^ Flaubert's first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857), had little of such romanticism; in fact, it provoked government prosecution for "outrage of public morals and religions." Like Chekhov, he was brought up in a medical environment,X and a clinical influence can be observed in his objectivity and careful documentation. But Flaubert aimed at more than "an abstract and brief chronicle of the times"; detail and documentation were selected and subordinated to the unified artistic effect he wished to create. "Que M, Gustave Flaubert l'avait voulu oijlnon," wrote Zola, "il venait d'apporter au naturalisme la dernière force qui lui manquait, cellede la forme parfait et impérissable qui aide les oeuvres a vivre."4 - — "Zola, "Le Naturalisme au Theatre," Le Roman Experimental,2nd ed. (Paris : G. Charpentier,1880),114-15•2"Some of Balzac's Minor Pieces."Fortnightly Review,1 October 1889,491-504.^E.^. Eugenie Grandet (I855) and Pere Goriot (1855).4 Le Naturalisme au Théâtre (Paris : G.Charpentier,I889),122.115Balzac and Flaubert had a permanent influence on the Irish writers.Yeats worked steadily through all forty volumes of La Comedie humaine(in 1909 he reports that he has only four of five volumes left)^claiming in later life, "I was educated upon Balzac and Shakespeareand cannot go beyond t h e m . M o o r e ' s A Modern Lover (I885) owes muchto Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale (I869) in form as well assituation.^ Wilde's Salome, written first in French, had already beentreated by Huysmans and Flaubert, and in I9II Yeats commented:It is many years since I have read Flaubert. How much of what is most typical in our generation, Wilde's Salome for instance and much elsewhere in his v/ork, has come out of it. Flaubert has made enough fabulous beasts to make the wilderness of romance tremble for another hundred years.4Moore, who confessed to a lyrical love for Shelley and Gautier, was charmed by Flaubert's emphasis on style,^ but perhaps the most far-reaching influence of the French writers of the 'nineties was the impact of Emile Zola (I84O-I902). The Goncourt brothers, Edmond (I822-I896) and Jules (I85O-I870) worked on the same principles of documentation: the conscientious selection of a milieu and thecollection and subsequent discussion of all details, including the slang expressions peculiar to that "slice of life." But it was in Zola's works that this technique of realism was carried to its extreme conclusion as a scientific process of research and observation which would imitate the laboratory in its formulation of the laws of human behaviour.^ And almost single-handed, Moore campaigned for Zola's creed^Letters to J.B.Yeats, 27 December 1908, and 10 October 1909, Letters. 513 and 536.^Letter to Joseph^Hone,I4 February 1932 , Letters,791* Cf. "If I were Four and Twenty(1919)* "The reading of the whole Comedie humaine once changed all my thought."3Cf.Walter D.Ferguson, The Influence of Flaubert on George Moore (Philadelphia:U.of Pennsylvania,1934),11 et passim.Cf. Moore's Preface to The Rush for the Spoil,vii.^Letter to René Francis, translator of Tentation de Saint Antoine,5 September I9II, Letters,562.cConfessions of a Young Man (Penguin,1939),48-49 *^Preface to ^a Fortune des Rougons(1671),Le Roman experi — Naturalisme au théâtre (1889).Paris (1898).114in England. Because of Moore's tendency to embroider fact, it isdifficult to date his entrance into the Naturalist circle. He had fewintimate friends among the naturalist school, and did not meet Zolauntil a return visit to Paris.^ However by then he had already adopted"the idea of a new art based upon science, in opposition to the artof the old world that was based on imagination, an art that shouldexplain all things and embrace modern life in its e n t i r e t y . S t r u c kby "the pain and joy of a sudden and inward light," he eagerly acceptedthe edicts of the master. Here, he triumphantly cried, was "the vividsentiment of modern life rather than the pale dream which reveals to usthe past." The Rougon-Mac quart series, as later would Ibsen's Ghosts,^demonstrated the true epic faculty:Does not the great idea of fate receive a new and more terrible signification? Is not the horror and gloom of the tragedy increased by the fact that the thought was born in the study of the scientist^ and not in the cloud-palace of the dreamer? What poet ever conceived an idea more vast.'4And in his first letter to Zola he speaks proudly of having been "thefirst to sow this grain of truth, as you will understand in view of allthe silly things that have been said of you in the Paris journals howthe ground here is encumbered with daily mounting stupidity in yourregard.For both Balzac (although not as careful a craftsman) and Flaubert, art was more important than science; in Zola, the subtler attributes of art were too often suffocated by the mass of detail his scientific^Hone, George Moore, 72-74.Cf."A Visit to Medan" and "My Impressions of Zola," and Impressions and Opinions.2Confessions of a Young Man,65.^"Note on 'Ghosts'", Impressions and Opinions,162-67*^Preface to Piping Hot!,ix. Of. Impressions and Opinions, Memoirs of my Dead Life, Vale,Avowals.^Quoted by Hone, George Moore, 93*115creed demanded. In attempting to study society as well as the sourceand development of physical and psychological traits, the naturalisttended to lose sight of the characters.J'ai voulu etudier des temperaments et non des caractères.... J ' ai cherche 'a suivre pas a pas dans ces brutes travail souyd^des passions, les poussées de l'instinct, les détraquements cérébraux survenus a la suite d'une crise nerveuse,Zola wrote in his preface to Therese Raquin (the novel, 1890)1. Further,limited as he was to the use of scientific methods and tools, his worldbecame almost entirely mechanistic and materialistic; there was no roomfor fancy or subjectivity in the interpretation or exposition of hischaracters. "Le romancier n'est plus qu'un greffier,"^he claimed.In this effort to see life objectively and whole, the naturalist tendedto compensate for the lack of emotional and subjective description whichis the contribution of the writer to his material by an emphasis on theugly and sordid details of life which had previously been avoided inliterature. The convention itself was too rigid, and the result wasthat writers were either carried away by the description of the .sordidfor its own sake, or like Zola, tumbled over backwards into socialpropaganda. Zola's L'Assommoir (1877) and Nana (l880), powerful studiesof the al^olic and the prostitute, brought storms of protest from thepublic; in later novels such as Les quatres évangiles (1899) we seethe disinterested observer turning social preacher.Although in the extreme sense which Zola expounded, naturalism gainedmore enemies than advocates, its influence extended far beyond theliterary coteries of Paris. In a general sense it freed literaturefrom the shackles of an' outmoded convention (although in the case ofZola it was an escape from one convention into another , equally rigid)and, by virtue of its "shock technique" alone, prepared the public fora more realistic and slightly more tolerant approach to the arts. At^Thérèse Raquin, nouvelle éd. (%ris:Charpentier, 1890),ii*^"Le Naturalisme au Theatre," ^ Roman Experimental,125*116the same time, however, the savagery of its onslaught on orthodoxmores alienated the general public even more than the extreme aspectsof the aesthetic movement had. And Zola's most eloquent disciples, after learning their craft from the master, soon turned back into the more liberal path of realism.This was the case for both Huysmans in Prance and Moore in England.In his Confessions, Moore takes pains to assure us that, despite his enthusiasm for Zola, he "did not fall into the stupid mistake of placing the realistic writers of 1877 side by side with and on the same plan of intellectual vision as the great B a l z a c . W h a t A Modern Lover2did not owe to Flaubert it owed to Zola, as Moore frankly acknowledged,and the novelist hero expounds the naturalist creed:We do not always choose what you call unpleasant subjects, but we try to go to the roots of things; and the basis of life, being material and not spiritual, the analyst inevitably finds himself, sooner or later, handling what this sentimental age calls coarse.5But the contemporary reviews imply, perhaps with some relief, that thedisciple's success was in part due to his deviation (which theyattributed to the young author's delicacy and taste as a Christiangentleman) from the master's path. Although English critics showedsome sympathy with this new approach to the novel, the general public,however, was roused to the same indignant storm of protest which threeyears earlier was accorded the first production of Ibsen in Englandand would be given to Hardy's Jude the Obscure thirteen years later.At the first rumbling of danger those omnipotent dictators of publicprose consumption and self-appointed guardians of Victorian taste, thelending libraries, immediately withdrew A Modern Lover from circulationand so began Moore's lifelong war against Smith's, Mudie's, andcensorship of any form.4 The battle may have extended his interest in^Op.cit.,682Hone,George Moore,96. Cf.preface to Lewis Seymour and Some Women (London:Heinemann,1917).^A Modern Lover (London: Tinsley,188)),1,77^Articles in the Pall Mall Gazette, references in Confessions, Impressions. Conversations in Ebury Street, Memoirs of my Dead Life, preface to Piping Hot!117the standard techniques of naturalism, for his next two novels,A Mummer * s Wife (I885) and A Drama in Muslin (l886)^ were writtenin the same vein, the author travelling with notebook in hand withsome touring players for the first and to Dublin for the second.^Elated at the battle, Moore wrote to Zola:If I succeed, as I expect, in digging a dagger into the heart of the sentimental school, I shall have hopes of bringing about a change in the literature of my country — of being in fact Zola's offshoot in England.^And later, "Certainly I have a great part to play — I am fightingthat Englishmen may exercise a right which they formerly enjoyed,that of writing freely and s a n e l y ."5 In I885 he wrote his pamphlet,Literature at Nurse,attacking the practices of the lending libraries,4and Avowals carries full descriptions of his part in the Vizetellytrials.5But his battle with Dublin Castle had turned his attention toIreland, indeed for a time giving him the status of an IrishNationalist hero,^ and as early as 1885 he had enthusiasticallyreviewed Huysmans’ A rebours for the Fall Mall Gazette. The same year,in his preface to the translation of Piping Hot I he expounds a ’doctrineconflicting with Zola's deterministic and experimental psychology:Art...is a perpetual concession; and the character of the artist is determined by the selection he makes amid the mass of conflicting issues that, all clamouring equally to be chosen, present themselves to his mind.He is more concerned even here with the literary battle not "for either realism or romanticism, but for freedom of s p e e c h . A n d ten years later, in a Preface to Dostoievsky's Poor Folk, he had so far left Zola^A Communication to Friends(London:Nonesuch,1933).28-34*2Quoted by Hone, George Moore,101.^Ibid.,114.^(London:Vizetelly,1885).^0£.cit.,102-109.^Hone, George Moore, 107-109.7 . .'xvii.y118behind that he could write, "the anecdote that does not representa moral idea, however curious, however exciting, can never rise tothe height of great literature....Art is made up in almost equalproportions of truth and falsehood; it is by neglecting nature andby copying nature that we may produce i l l u s i o n . C l e a r l y Mooregives the artist more power to select than Zola ever did. It issignificant that the list of great writers which follows thisstatement contains no reference tol'Zola. Moore has crossed thefloor from science to art.A man of many enthusiasms but, as Max Beerbohm pointed out, ofonly one at a time, Moore found censorship and Ireland more excitingtopics than Zolaism. But although he was to turn away from Zola2himself in disdain, he never forgot his debt or his lesson:He who would be an artist must melt down all things; he must discover new formulas, new moulds, all the old values must be swept aside, and he must arrive at a new estimate.5And his description of "a true novel" aptly indicates his debt toand departure from Zola:a story...based, as far as was humanly possible, upon a novelist's complete knowledge and intuitive understanding of his subject, and told with that indifference to all but aesthetic consequence by which a story-teller is justified.4Naturalism in the extreme form Zola expounded, therefore, madelittle headway in English letters. Besides Moore, Arnold Bennett(I867-I951) and George Gissing (1857-1903) appear to show the mostdirect influences, but it was not until the twentieth century that atheory of naturalism arose in the drama, and this realism as describedby Galsworthy was still not as extreme owing, as we shall see, more^Preface to Poor Folk,trans. Lena MiIman(London:Elkin Matthew and John Lane,I894),vii-viii,xix.2Hone,George Moore,142-44*^Reminiscences of Impressionist Painters (Dublin:Maunsel,1906),l6.^Quoted by Charles Morgan, Epitaph on George Moore (London; Macmillan,1935),2.119to Ibsen than to Zola:To set before the public...the phenomena of life and character, selected and combined, but not distorted, by the dramatist'soutlook to create such an illusion of actual life passing onthe stage as to compel the spectator for the moment to lose all sense of artifice.Although this was in part due to the censorship, operating on hearsayas much as fact, imposed by public opinion and the circulatinglibraries, it was due even more to the time lag which inevitably occursbefore a literary movement finds its way into another culture. AsYeats wrote in 1897,The literary movement of our time has been a movement against the external and heterogeneous, and like all literary movements, its French expression is more intelligible and obvious than its English expression, because more extreme.The English public was no more ready for Moore than Lit - had been forWilde. And so we find the ironical situation of the later movement,aestheticism, which had arisen in France partly as a reaction tonaturalism, preventing the earlier movement, naturalism, from gainingmuch of a foothold in England. Also, as we have seen, the aestheticmovement in England had been a direct reaction to the effects of thenew science and materialism before any such doctrine as naturalismhad time to be formulated. Nor did the young intellectuals feel muchneed for one more landslide to sweep away all traditions and conventions;when the realistic method entered literature its role was one ofsynthesis rather than of destruction: as already indicated in thework of Moore, in its modified form it was to strike a balance betweenthe two schools of art for the sake of art and art as the result ofscience. In the meantime, many of the characteristics of naturalistthought had already been felt in other related arts: the Pre-Raphaelites had earlier reacted against rigid conformity and conventions^John Galsworthy, "Some Platitudes Concerning Drama"(1909), The Inn of Tranquillity (London:Heinemann,1912),190. The italics are his.2"Aglavaine and Selysette," Bookman,September,1897>135*120in painting, and now the French Impressionists, (Courbet, Manet, Monet, Pisarro, Degas, and Renoir), and later the post-impressionists (Cezanne, i ' / ■ Van Gogh and Gau^n) moved across the channel as well. And, as was thecase with English realism, the aims of the early Impressionists to paint what they saw — as Degas stated, "I want to look through the keyhole"— were transmuted in the work of James McNeill Whistler (I834-I905), friend of Wilde, and Walter Sickert (I86O-I942), friend of Moore and Symons, into a sacrifice of design and form for the sake of light andI»fh-! colour, which, they argued, was actually all the eye really saw.rf eI#Furthermore, realism had been steadily gaining ground in the Victoriantheatre, as we shall see, and two new forces in drama, Ibsen andMaeterlinck, presently offered fully developed art forms to those whowished to follow new paths. Instead, therefore, of attacking Englishthought and literature with the force and concentration it had achievedin France, naturalism tended to filter into England through channelsalready carved. Moore expressed this reaction in his own way:"I am the youngest of the naturalists, the eldest of the symbolists. The naturalists affected the art of painting, the symbolists the art of music; and since the symbolists there h«>^ been no artistic manifestation.- the game is played out."The followers of the aesthetic movement were inclined to considernaturalism as one more missile launched by the enemy, science, at thetemple of art. Symons dismissed with contemptthat vague sort of seeing everything in general and feeling nothing at all, which is supposed to be seeing things as they really are. Things as they really are! That paradox for fools. For everyone probably, for the artist certainly, things are as one sees them; and if most people seem to see things in very much the same way, that is only another proof of the small amount of individuality^David M.Robb, The Harper History of Painting:The Occidental Tradition (NY:Harper,1951)>chapters 17 and 18. Of. Moore, Reminiscences of the Impressionist Painters (19O6).2"La Butte," Memoirs of my Dead Life' ( Loudon : He inemann ,1921),48-49.121in the average man, his deplorable faculty of imitation, his inability not only to think but to see for himself,TV/hile Yeats, deploring the "meagre language" and the "action crushedinto the narrow limits of possibility" which he saw in naturalistliterature, advocated the use of "the outer world" for "metaphors andexamples; and that is all. Retiring even more to the inner world,he looked back wistfully to the old masters, who cared little "for whatevery fool can see and every knave can praise,^ To Yeats, as toSymons, the true maker of fine literature "has felt something in thedepth of his mind and he wants to make it as visible and powerful toour senses as possible."4 Doubtless the battle forced both sidesinto overstatement, but it was the case for "art and the individual"that was pressed into the position of defence, as W.H.Auden indicates:When the scientists said, "Science is knowledge of reality. Art is a fairyland," the artists were driven to reply, "Very well, fairies are fun, science is dull." When the former said, "Art has no relation to life," the latter retorted, "Thank God." To the assertion that "every mind can recognize the absolute truths of science, but the values of art are purely relative, an arbitrary affair of individual taste," came back the counterôlaim, "Only the exceptional individual matters."5The necessity each movement felt for proving and justifying its theories gave rise to a large body of critics from within its own ranks, and so we find writers and artists combining the function of creator with that of critic, but not in the sense Wilde was advocating. It^"The Painting of the Nineteenth Century"(1903).Studies in Seven Arts,(London;Seeker,1924)>IX,40.2"Has Drama of Contemporary Life a Root of its Own?"(1906).Essays and Introductions, 2?3*>77,^"Why the Blind Man in Ancient Times was Made a Poet"(l906),op.cit., 280.Cf."The Autumn of the Body"(1898),op.cit.,189; "The Holy Places" (l90?y,op.cit.,295*"^ "Has the Drama of Contemporary Life a Root of its Own?" op. cit.,276.5W.H,Auden, "Yeats as an Example," The Permanence of Yeats, J.Hall and M.Steinmann, eds. (NY:Macmillan,1950JT346.V122might be argued that this dual capacity provoked a greater awareness in artist, critic, and interested public of the theory and forms of art; at the same time, however, the need each group felt to defend and interpret its own members prolonged that divorce between artist and public which the aesthetic movement had helped bring about. The naturalists, like their opponents, tended to maintain an impersonal attitude towards the general public, and the solutions they at times felt compelled to offer for the unsatisfactory state of society were put forward in a detached clinical manner far removed from the personal and emotional upbraidings administered by the earlier band of social reformers led by Ruskin, Arnold, and Morris. It was not until the coming of Ibsen and Shaw to England that an attempt at synthesis between artistic endeavour and socialist fervour once more entered English literature. But by then Yeats, Martyn and Moore had interests elsewhere.Richard Wagner (I8O5-I885)While the naturalists and followers of the aesthetic movement were forcing writers and thinkers to reconsider the foundations of art, anotbsr voice by dint of repetition and sheer strength was heard throughout Europe, the battle-cry of Richard Wagner. Although more inclined towards the aesthetic school than the naturalist's creed, W^agner's philosophy of art was as different from the doctrine of "art for art's sake" as the trombone from the flute. For Wagner was concerned with a union of all the arts, each developed to its highest possible state of perfection, "Beauty e n e r g i s e d . A r t , he claimed, was "only a shadow of its genuine self"; to achieve his ideal of the "living art-work of the future" required "an entire r e - b i r t h . A n d "the highest conjoint of art is the Drama; it can only be at hand in all its possible fulness when in it each separate branch of art is at hand in its own utmost fulness. Complete art comes from feeling and emotion expressed^"Art and Revolution," Prose Works,trans. W.A.Ellis,9 vols.(London: Regan Paul, Trench, Trubner,1892-99)>I>58.2Author's Introduction, Prose Works,I,xviii.^"The Art-Work of the Future," op.cit.,1,83-84»123through the understanding and intellect, "the emotionalizing of the intellect." "We must become knowers through the feeling." The drama, therefore, "goes from within outwards, but it must also grow uppfrom below, blossoming from "a natural culture." We can only know and feel art, then, if we understand the..roots from which it has sprung — "the folk." And he defines the Folk as those who feel a common want, an "absolute need," and who have the will to revolt and withstand for that need.^ Therefore this coinmon denominator of man's surroundings must also be achieved in order to understand the folk and,through the folk, art. "Art is the highest expression of activity ofa race that has developed its physical beauty in unison with itself and N a t u r e ."4 What Wagner really desired, then, was a communism of art. And the theatre became "a glorified symbol of the mass, existing only for that mass; "There exists no higher Pov/er thanMan's Community; there is naught so worthy Love as the Brotherhoodof M a n . B e c a u s e art exists for the Folk, the audience becomes a co-creator:Drama is only conceivable as the fullest expression of a joint artistic longing to impart; while this longing, again, can only parley with a common receptivity.... the true Drama is only conceivable as proceeding from a common urgency of every art towards the most direct appeal to a common public.7%pera and Drama," ibid.,11,171;208-09.^"The Art-Work of the l*titure," ibid. ,183»^Ibid.,205»^"Opera and Drama," ibid.,168-72;38»^Author's Introduction,ibid.,xviii; Cooperman, The Aesthetics of Mallarmé,95»^"Art and Climate," op.cit.,1,263»*^ "The Art-Work of the Future, " op. cit., 183»124Wagner carried these ideals into practice with an energy anddetermination worthy of his Teutonic background. The result was a new^ art form, "music drama," which takes it subject matter from the myth, is in its Germanic qualities decidedly national, and is performed at its own theatre, especially designed according to Wagner's requirements, at Bayreuth whre as much care is devoted to staging and acting as to the musical ability of the singers. In fact, "music drama," being a union of all the arts, ideally places far more emphasis on the actor than on the musician; for the actor should combine all the elements of which drama for Wagner was composed. "I required the Actor in the ^ forefront, and the Singer only as the actor's aid; lastly, therefore,a public who should join me in this c l a i m . A s Symons in a review of the Bayreuth productions commented, "Bayreuth is Wagner's creation inthe world of action, as the music-dramas are his creation in the worldof art....Remember that every artist...has desired his own Bayreuth.As an artist Wagner by his own admission was a poet first and thena musician.^ The form of his tone poems, or music dramas, was dictatedby subject-matter alone,4 and communicated in a manner designed to convey5"as vividly and intelligibly as possible" what he felt, saw, and heard. Symons, calling him "the Turner of music," claimed that Wagner had "made music pictorial." "Utmost clearness was the chief endeavour of my working-out,Wagner stated, and he achieved this clarity by the introduction of the leitmotiv or thematic elaboration, which characterizes the Ring cycle. Not only does the leitmotiv give depth to the drama and introduce innumerable possibilities of development and^"A Communication to my FriendsV(l851),op.cit.,1,337 2"Notes on Wagner at Bayreuth," Plays Acting and Music,297.^"A Communication to my Friends," op.cit.,363.hbid..309.h b l d .,346.^"Notes on Wagner at Bayreuth," op.cit..307-08.7"A Communication to my Friends,"op.cit.,346.125elaboration of basic themes (which might be referred to as "permutations and combinations"), but it actually extends the language of symbolism as well, developing a larger base or composite myth around which the symbols can work. The introduction of the myth was a natural result of this attempt at depth and breadth at the same time. "Art is the fulfillment of a longing to know one’s self in the likeness of an object of one’s love or adoration";^ hence the myth, as expressed through God, the Hero, and man. Like Morris, Wagner had created "new romance," claimed Yeats.^ And since the advent of Wagner, the use of they leitmotiv has been extended to prose, in the works of Shaw, Granville-" ’ Barker, and most clearly of all in Joyce.With his new concept of art and the effort to extend the boundaries of the art form, Wagner’s influence was both direct and indirect. As a musician who was first of all a poet, as a theorist who desired a union of all the arts, as a writer who sought for material from "the folk", and as a mystic who "rendered mysticism through the senses, he had much in common with the aesthetic movement. As a writer who sought his material from life about him and his audience from the largest common denominator, he had some affinity with the naturalists.As an artist who unashamedly preached nationalism, he belongs in part with the social reformers. One might say, in fact, that in theory and practice he most clearly illustrated the interaction and inter-relation of the arts. Throughout the ’nineties a steady stream of pilgrims flowedfrom England to Bayreuth. Symons, Martyn, Moore, and Shaw were all converts to Wagnerism.^ Yeats, notorious for his lack of musical ear, was intrigued by Wagnerian theory and impressed by the actual theatre^"Opera and Drama," op.cit.,154-56.2"The Celtic Element in Literature,"(1897)» Essays and Introduction;, 186- 87.^Symons,"Notes on Wagner at Bayreuth,"op.cit.,301.4Cf. Shaw, "Wagner in Bayreuth," English Illustrated Magazine,October 1889, 49-57.y126at Bayreuth.1 And English aesthetics received it second-hand aswell, through the theoretical writings of Mallarmé. "Carry the/•theories of Mallarmé to a practical conclusion, multiply his powersin a direct ratio, and you have V/agner. It is his failure not tobe Wagner," wrote Symons. Mallarmé idealized and heightened Wagnerianprinciples into a concept of abstract mathematical symmetry in his 2poetry; the result was symbolism.But Wagnerism entered England by a direct route as well, promoted by George Bernard Shaw, Edward Martyn, and George Moore, each hearing and seeing Wagner according to his own interests and training. As music critic for the Star (1888-90), and later for the World (1890-94), Shaw indefatigably electioneered for Wagner as he had earlier campaigned for the Impressionists and for his entire life would fight for Ibsen.^ "The wars of religion were not more bloodthirsty than the discussions of the Wagnerites and Anti-Wagnerites,"^ largely the result of Shavian dialectic. Shaw saw Wagner as "the literary musician par excellence," "not only a consummate musician', like Mozart, but a dramatic poet and a critical and philosophical e s s a y i s t . A s a musicologist, Shaw appreciated the "musical expression of poetic feeling" in Wagner’s tone poetry;^ as a dramatist he delighted in Wagner’s stage management,* which combined "with one stroke a dramatic effect, a scenic effect, and^"At Stratford-on-Avon"(1901),Essays and Introductions,99* He no doubt learned most of it from Symons, but also from Miss Horniman, who was a devout Wagnerian. (Unpublished letters from Miss Horniman to Yeats, in Mrs. Yeats’s possession).2The Symbolist Movement in Literature,(London;Heinemann,1899),117. Cf. May Daniels, The French Drama of the Unspoken (Edinburgh U.P.,1953)» ^-27.^The World 6 July 1892, reprinted in Shaw on Music, ed. Eric Bentley (NY:Doubleday Anchor,1944),41-42,^Preface to London Music in 1888-89 as Heard by ^orno di Bassetto (1933),Bentley,op.cit.,50.^The Perfect Wagnerite (London;Constable,1902),127;129*^The World, 7 January 1894,Bentley,op.cit..113,127a musical e f f e c t . S h a w also recognized Wagner’s "insistence onthe need for sensuous apprehension to give reality to abstract2comprehension," in fact, the naturalism of V^agner’s music. And praising the excellent qualities of the Bayreuth Buhnenfestspielhaus, ^he demanded why such a theatre could not be constructed in England, where it could do double duty for Shakespeare as well.^Another faithful Wagnerite was Edward Martyn, who made his first visit to Bayreuth to see Parsifal at the second festival in 1 8 8 2 . 5 Martyn regularly attended productions both in London and Bayreuth,^ and considered Wagner one of the four greatest musicians of the world (the others being Palestrina, Bach, and Beethoven^). An organist andQkeen student.of liturgical music, he was drawn to Wagner’s technical accomplishments rather than to his theories or dramatic effects, unlike his friend Arthur Symons, who was most impressed by the dramatic and mystic qualities of the Bayreuth productionsMartyn admired the "sincerity of purpose" and "fidelity in practice" with which Wagner in his music dramas defined "the limits of vocal music," and deplored^The World,8 August 1894, ibid.,124.2Perfect Wagnerite.op.cit.,74*^"Wagner in Bayreuth," English Illustrated Magazine.October 1889,54.cSister Courtney, Edward Martyn,154n62.^Gwynn, Edward Martyn,175;Moore, Ave,198ff.-Introduction to Paragraphs for the Perverse,Gwynn,op.cit.,263;Mr. Owen Linnane.8"The chief interest in my life," Gwynn,op.cit.,211. Cf.Arthur Symons, "A Causerie; From a Castle in Ireland," The Savoy,October 1896.^"Notes on Wagner at Bayreuth,"297-514; "On Crossing Stage to Right," 167-172; "A Reflection at a Dolmetsch Concert,"275; "The Dramatisation of Song," 277-85; all included in Plays Acting and Music;A Book of Theory (London;Constable 1909); "The Ideas of Richard Wagner," Studies in Seven Arts (London;Martin Seeker,I924),150-95*128the common tendency "to make great music at the expense of the verbal text. As is to be expected, Wagner’s choral effects appealed to him most,2 "the grand orchestral effects" of the polyphonic school^ which were to lead him eventually back through to "the incomparable Pierluigi," Palesti^ina.^ However, Wagner’s nationalism and emphasis on "the folk" also found favour with Martyn, who came to believe that in "folk hymns" and traditional music5 one could still find the "exquisite melody and tonality"^ so rare in modern performance.7 It was but a short step to the belief that the future of music, as of literature, "mostly lies with the small nationalities.Moore gives Martyn the credit for his conversion to Wagner,9 but his closest friend in Paris, Edouard Dujardin, was editor of La Revue wagnerienne,to which most of the French symbolists contributed.^®Like Martyn, Moore took his Wagnerism seriously, determining to learn more each trip made with his cousin to Bayreuth. Admitting that his ear was "but rudimentary," he like Symons more fully appreciated the "wonderful...conception and literary art" of the dramas, although like Martyn and Dujardin he approved of the Master’s skill in blending music with poetry. "Wagner is so essentially human that there is something^Martyn, The Speaker,1895, quoted by Gwynn,op.cit.,182.^lartyn’s criticism of O ’Brien Butler’s Irish opera, Muirgheis,The Leader,1914,Gwynn,ibid.,272.^The Leader,1896,ibid.,182.^The Speaker.1895.ibid..178.C'^Essay on Schools of National Music,ibid.,262-65.^Introduction to Paragraphs for the Perverse,ibid.,258.7"The Use of a Provincial Peis," Daily Express,17 September 1898.0^ //Schools of National Music,' Gwynn, op.cit.,266.9Ave,198-99: "The Nineness in the Oneness," The Chesterian,September 1919,7 .^^Hone, George Moore,1954.129in his art for everybody," he felt.^ Furthermore, the story-teller in Moore recognized Wagner’s dramatic skill (although he conceded— ^ othat judicious cutting might benefit The Meistersingers ) which was apparent even in the theatre surroundings, ^and, like Symons, admired "the natural world in the midst of which his people of the drama live their passionate life, a world in sympathy with all their passion."4 True to his belief that the novelist should base his work on personal experience, he lost no time in making use of his Wagnerism: Evelyn Innes (1898) and Sister Teresa (I901) tell of a Wagnerian opera singer, whose father is an expert in liturgical music, and whose lover buys a copy of the Wagnerian Review after visiting Bayreuth.5 A little later his knowledge had advanced to an understanding of form and melodic line, and he acknowledged his debt to Lohengrin, his favourite opera, in The Lake (1905).^ Parsifal, on the other hand, held no personal appeal, perhaps a clear indication of the difference between Moore and Martyn, although one is tempted to believe that at a laterstage of his artistic and philosophical development Moore might have7 ^appreciated it.' It was during this Wagnerian phase" that Moore toyedwith the idea of writing "very heroic" scenarios for opera, but thisin turn led him to the drama.® Years later, thinking back upon his^Ave.198-200.2Conversations in Ebury Street (London:Heinemann,1956),234*^IMd., 242-43.^Symons,"Notes on Wagner at Bayreuth."on.cit..507-08.5Which led Wilde to quip, "I hear Evelyn Innes has to be played on the piano." Quoted by Gerald Griffin, The Wild Geese (London:Jarrold’3,1958),66.^"Nineness in the Oneness,"op.cit.,9; Letters from George Moore to Ed. Dujardin. 22 April 1897,58.7Hail and Farewell;Ave,218. Cf. The Brook Kerith.'Letter to Dujardin, 22 April 1897, Letters,58.130experiences in the theatre, he could recall "only one instance of scenery saying something that neither literary nor musical text could say," the rainbow at the end of Das Rhinegold; high praise indeed for Wagner the dramatist.^The Irish writers were to remember Wagner in his capacity both as a national and a revolutionary dramatist when they came to build their own t h e a t r e .2 Even the unmusical Yeats found much of value in the depth and breadth of structure, symbolism, emotional a p p e a l ,5 and theory expressed in Wagner’s work. We shall see later how Yeats in turn developed his own personal myth through his art, like Wagner making it an integral element of structure and form. But most heartening example of all to the founders of the Irish literary theatre, Wagner had achieved his Bayreuth.^"Nineness in the Oneness," op.cit.,8.O- y - J- -- — - 7 2Yeats, "A Note on National Drama," Literary Ideals in Ireland,17. ^Yeats,letter to Symons, 10 September.1905,Letters,460.131CHAPTER 4 - REVOLUTION IN THE THEATREOn the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy; and that is why the intellectual modern drama has failed, and people have grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy, that has been given them in place of the rich joyfound only in what is superb and wild in reality.(j.M.Synge,Preface to The Playboy of the WesternWorld)The English commercial theatre of the ’eighties of which theDublin theatre was merely an offshoot, was itself badly in need ofsome new blood. A serious student of literature would find littlemental nourishment in its heavy diet of spectacle, melodrama, andsolid sentiment. For years it had placidly gone on supplying whatthe public demanded, until both were suffering from intellectualmalnutrition. Variations in diet were eyed with distrust and avoided;a survey conducted in 1884 revealed that the most popular plays werefavourites from the preceding decade, T.W.Robertson’s comfortablysentimental Caste (I867) and H.J.Byron’s farcical Our Boys (l875)«^Foreign offerings were served in familiar sauce; most playwrightsof the period learned their craft by adapting or imitating Frenchplays.2 Even the more conservative critics such as Clement Scottwere dismayed at the condition of the theatre:It is the quality of reverence that, I fear, is wanting; it is the fault of the age, and it is shown in the playhouse as elsewhere.If the player is respected he will command attention; if the author be earnest in his work he will be spared indignity. Too often now- a-days the artist and author alike are mere playthings, to be tossed about hither and thither by an audience utterly indifferent to the dignity of dramatic art, and presumably careless of the personal feelings of those who endeavour to amuse them.5^Conducted by Truth magazine, R.A.Cordell, Introduction to H.A. Jones and the Modern Drama (NY:Long & Smith,1932),12. Robertson is still popular with dramatic schools,cf.The Times,30 November,1959»Cf.Samhain.I905,10.2The most recent French import, Irma la Douce,has been running since July I958.^’’First Nights at the Play,’’ The Theatre, 1884,61-65.132The most popular younger playwrights were Henry Arthur Jones, whobegan with melodrama and proceeded to the conventional society "problemplay"^; Arthur Wing Pinero, who skipped lightly through the comedy ofsituation with one eye on Mrs. Grundy and the other on the box office;and Sydney Grundy, who successfully applied the methods of Scribe andSardou, occasionally achieving such masterpieces of adaptation asA Pair of Spectacles (I890). All adhered to the pattern of thepiece bien faite; ingenious construction, a dash of moral, and a2sufficiently amusing but harmless lesson. Yet even these favourites occasionally fell foul of the strict code of manners and morals the audience imposed upon dramatic subjects. One of Jones’s early melodramas. Welcome Little Stranger, was banned because of "frank references to childbirth,"5 and at the producer’s request Pinero substituted a reconciliation scene for the dramatically valid ending of The Profligate (I889).4By this time the Bancrofts at the Prince of Wales’s and Henry Irving at the Lyceum had succeeded in wooing polite society into the stalls, a change specifically mentioned by Arnold,5 and the Old Pricegriots were a wistful memory to the remaining pittites; but the return^Cf. George Rowell, The Victorian Theatre (LondontOUP,1956),108 et seq; Arnold, Pall Mall Gazette, 6 December 1882. Arnold wrote % y several articles under the pseudonym of "An Old Playgoer," Pall MallGazette, May,1885.^Cf. Shaw, Preface to Three Plays for Puritans(1901)»^Cordell,op.cit.,4O-4I•^Both endings were published in the first edition.^Pall Mall Gazette,6 December 1882. £f. Sir Squire Bancroft,The Bancrofts ; Recollections of Sixty Years (London;Nelson,I9II), chapter 5*^Rowell, op.cit.,4. There was one last upsurge in 1880 at the Haymarket. Cf. Moore, "Mummer-Worship" ( 1 8 9 1 Impressions and Opinions.120-138.133of a more cultivated audience had not raised the standard of drama or eased the stringent taboos of the puritan-minded middle class.The theatre was still considered "the special Colossus of wickedness"; years later J.B.Yeats recalled the Calvinist minister Charles Haddon Spurgeon's (1834-1892) words, "I have seen the trail of the theatre on too many ruined homes not to condemn theatres. The result was..4%' khi. ^ S’ tasteless play which titillated the senses and yet preached the"right sentiments"; the audience could vicariously enjoy the villain'sIfsins and self-righteously applaud the hero.Comedy fared little better than melodrama in the popular theatre.f ■ % •Despite'T.W.Robertson's efforts in his early "cup-and-saucer plays"to adopt a subtler use of detail and action,^ the broad methods ofburlesque and the gags of traditional "characters" drew the applause.W.S.Gilbert, who attempted to puncture boti) moral sentimentality and* . inflated burlesque in his plays and libretti, deplored this indis-I criminate applause and the methods used to draw it:A claptrap sentiment, a burlesque breakdown, a musishall parody, ■V a comic man coming down the chimney, an indelicate joke, a blackeye, a red nose, a pair of trousers with a patch behind, a live ^ ' baby, a real cab, a smash of crockery, a pun in a "comedy," anallusion, however clumsy, to any topic of the day, a piece of f c o s t e r m o n g e r ' s slang, or any strongly marked tailoringeccentricity, is quite sure of a rapturous reception whenever it is presented to an audience.5The audience controlled the curtain; authority on the other sideof the footlights rested with the actor-manager. From Thomas Bettertonat the end of the seventeenth century to Beerbohm Tree at the beginning' :: of the twentieth, this despot of the stage dictated mode and conduct.i ~i Letter to Andrew Jameson, 14 November 1919, Letters of J.B.f Yeats.266.2Cf.the kitchen tea party in Caste; The Bancrofts,ch.4: William Archer, English Dramatists of Today (London: Samps on,Low,Mars ton,Searle and Rivington,1892),21-22.I ^"Thumbnail Sketches" (W.S.Gilbert),London Characters, quoted byI Lynton Hudson, The English Stage:1850-1950(London:Harrap,1951),49-30*134Plays were written generally at his request, although not always with equal success (for example, Browning’s Strafford, written to save Macready from America), and particularly to suit his tastes and talents. "I have worked for the stage some fourteen years, yet only once have I had a play accepted that was not written to order — and then it was not produced," James Alherÿ, author of the popular comedy Two Roses (I87O), confided to his public in 1884.^ The personality of the actor-manager was a far more dangerous barrier between play and public than the "newfangled" footlights.A one-man show offers little encouragement to supporting actors, and it is not surprising that, although the age brought forth many "stars" whose interpretations, such as Porbes-Robertson’s Hamlet^ and Irving’s Mathias in The Bells^ have since been considered classic, the general standard of acting was apparently not very high.5 Audiences went to see their favourites and expected "a good show," with little regard for fidelity to the book or to nature. On the whole, acting remained as broad and declamatory as ever, in plays chosen for theatrical effect rather than for their literary value.^Dramatic Works of James Albery,ed. Wyndham Albery (London;Peter Davis,1939),11,851.2Cf. Rowell,op.cit.,20ff; Ernest Reynolds, Early Victorian Drama; 1850-1870 (Cambridge:Heffer,1956),41-44.^The Times,25 April- I960, describes Forbes-Sobertson's 1915 film of Hamlet. In a letter to Florence Farr, 7 October 1907»Letters, 500, Yeats describes the "gay heroic delight in the serviceable man" as portrayed by Forbes-Robertson’s Caesar and Cleopatra, then adds,"Ah if he had but style, distinction, and was not such a barbarian of the barricades."^Described in detail by Gordon Craig, Henry Irving (London;Dent, 1958),49-61, jcf. photographs in Laurence Irving, Henry Irving;The Actor and his World.(London;Faber.1951).192. All his life Yeats retained the memory^of Irving’s Hamlet, which he had seen as a young boy. Autobiographies,47.^Cf. Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties; Moore, Impressions and Opinions ; J.T.Grain’s articles in To-morrow(I896-98).155Nor was the actor-manager eager to yield his prerogative to others; too frequently the rest of the cast had only one responsibility; to remain as much as possible in the background and throw the hero his cue.^ Irving was first offered a knighthood in 1883,2 and the actor's newly-attained respectability affected the acting tradition: the stagebecame a profession for "respectable young ladies and gentlemen," many of whom had no other qualifications, and too frequently whatever training there was took place before the audience.^ In the English ' theatre, unlike the French, the amount of training considered necessary depended on the tastes of the individual actor-manager rather than on any accepted tradition; for example, Frank Benson, who produced the first plays for the Irish Literary Theatre, was exceptionally fond of athletic displays, so demanded gymnastic prowess over histrionic talent, with what unfortunate results we shall see later.^ Conversely, however, this emphasis on personal taste resulted in a greater awareness of technique and a keener, more critical eye on the part of the audience, who looked for familiar mannerisms. And a comparison of dramatic reviews of the period with those of the preceding decade indicates a developing interest in technique as well as in result and effect.^The actor-manager required a setting suitable to the splendour of his exalted position, and so productions became increasingly glittering^Cf. Beatrice Porbes-Robertson on acting with Irving, BBC Home Service, 17 October 1958;-Craig,op.cit.,49ff.2Rowell,op.cit.,96. Cf.Irving's paper to the Playgoer's Club,11 April 1900,"The Art and Status of the Actor," Fortnightly Review,May 1900,743-54; Irving, Henry Irving;410-12;577-82.^Hesketh Pearson, The Last Actor-Managers (London:Methuen,1950)•4below, Part III, chapter^Shaw, Crein,Archer,Scott.156and spectacular. Shakespeare provided him and the public with the most satisfactory vehicle for lavish display, with emphasis centred on the hero and the scenery rather than on the poetry or dramatic consistency. Productions became more and more elaborate, culminating finally in Beerbohm Tree’s spectacles, complete with livestock and real trees, in a Shakespearean framework. (in a letter to Lady Gregory, Yeats describes Beerbohm Tree’s ideal of beauty as "thrice- vomited flesh,"1 but in an early diary Synge notes with approval his production of Hamlet. ) The devotion of the actor-managers to Shakespeare cannot be denied. They spared neither efforthor money in keeping faith with their public, and despite Irving’s motto,"To succeed as an art the theatre must succeed as a business," Shakespearean productions usually did lose m o n e y . 5 Further, by taking their plays on tour they reached a much larger audience than would otherwise have been possible. Unfortunately, however, too often in their anxiety to praise Shakespeare they tended to bury him.Shakespeare was not the only poet "discovered" by the actor- manager. Byyon’s Werner and Sardongpojbus were popular numbers in Macready*s repertoire, and Browning’s Strafford at least reached the b o a r d s .4 Several of Tennyson’s plays were produced by Irving, and5the role of Becket became one of his favourites. Shelley’s Cenci^26 November I9O9, Letters,559.^Stephens MS.,576.^Hudson, The English Stage,75.^Rowell,op.cite,52ff.qBecket was first produced in 1895» A1lardyce Nicoll, Late Nineteenth Century Drama,2nd ed, (CUP,1959)208-09. In a letter to Lady Gregory, 12 May I905» in the possession of Mrs. Yeats, Yeats describes the play as "sentimental melodrama, with nothing to act, and therefore no acting....The construction of the play is childlike and the characters drawings of the stage." £f. H.Granville-Barker, "Tennyson, Swinburne, Meredith — and the Theatre," The Ejghteen- Seventies. ed. H .Granvilie-Barker (CUP,1929),l6l-91.157was first produced in 1886.^ Victor Hugo's plays were produced and acclaimed as masterpieces. A steady supply of pseudo- Shakespearean blank-verse dramas was provided by Bulwer-Lytton,Sheridan Knowles, W.G.Wills.^ Even Jones tried his hand, butThe ’Tempter was not a success, perhaps because of the devil-hero’s dispensability. None of these plays were masterpieces, but interest in blank verse drama continued into the twentieth century, notably in the plays of Stephen Phillips, whose meteoric rise to fame was equalled only by his eclipse.^ (Moore compared Tree’s production of Phillips* Herod to "the Gustave Dore Gallery with a nigger playing a harmonium in the corner."5) However, despite these efforts, the divorce between theatre and literature continued.Although the era of the actor-manager stunted the natural growth of the play in relation to changing society, it did create a stable relationship between playwright and producer. The actor-manager as producer could make a bad play palatable, and frequently had to; on the other hand, if the resident dramatist followed the rules, he could at least be assured of a hearing. And in the case of T.W.Robertson, collaboration between playwright and manager contributed to technical ^^On the 7 May at the Grand Theatre, Islington, with Hermann Vezin and Alma Murray. Cf. William A.Armstrong, "The Nineteenth Century Matinee," Theatre Notebook, V/inter 1959-60, 58*2Arnold, "The French Plays in London," Nineteenth Century,August 1879,228-243.^Cf. Yeats’s review of Wills’ Claudian, The Boston Pilot, 3 August 1889, reprinted in Letters to the New Island,69-76. Wills was also an artist and appeared for Whistler when he sued Ruskin for libel.^Cf. Priscilla Thouless, Modern Poetic Drama (OUP,1934)>ch.l.Cf, Le Gallienne, op.cit.123*^Quoted by Hamilton Fyfe, "A Crank of Genius," The Spectator,9 August 1930.158refinements which ultimately gave the author more scope in subjectmatter and increased control over form and presentation. The precedingfifty years had seen the gradual emergence of the theatre as we knowit today: elaborate sets replaced the customary two chairs and a table;a complex system of stage machinery nourished the taste for spectacularmelodrama reflected in the modern musical comedy; improvements inlighting influenced both acting technique and presentation, resultingin the experiments of Gordon Craig. Robertson and his managers, theBancrofts, were the first to adapt these technical innovations to thesubtler details of production. They could not bring back the intimacybanished by footlights and larger auditoriums, but they did try toreplace it with a closer fidelity to reality and greater emphasis onstage-play. Robertson’s detailed stage directions, generouslyacknowledged in Pinero’s Trelawny of the "Y/ells"(l898), indicate thatthese overtures to realism were more subtle and vital than a mere useof real doorknobs and windows, and Jones and Pinero readily followedhis example. The move towards reconciliation of stage life with actualexperience had begun. It might not be too fanciful to suggest thatthis enthusiasm for technical innovations and concern for detail, which*caused Archer to dub Robertson "the Pre-Raphaelite of the theatre,"^gave birth to the modern stage manager. Sir John Hare and W.S.Gilbert2both comment on Robertson’s stage-management; and the collaboration between playwright and producer gradually developed into the author- managership of Shaw, Granvi11e-Barker, and the later "Ibsenites."Despite occasional bursts of rapture or wrath from the critics, however, the established theatre pursued its apathetic course, hampered by a sentimental audience demanding the glittering world of make-believe still evident today in the commercial film, and confined by the declamatory style and glorified tradition of the actor-manager.^William Archer, The Old Drama and the New (London:Heinemann,1925)»260.2Rowell,op.cit.,82; Sydney Dark and Rowland Grey, W.S.Gilbert fLondon;Methuen,1925),59; Norman Marshall, The Producer and the Play (London;Macdonald,1957)> ch.1.159The slow progress towards realistic presentation and awareness oftechnique did not rise from a unity of effort or of aim. And whenfresh impetus did stir the sluggish flow of the popular theatre, ittended to come from without, when a fully-developed body of theoryaltered the mainstream of English drama both in course and form. Butmeantime the divorce betweeen literature and the theatre was as markedas ever, and many despaired of any reconciliation. The same year thatClement Scott had analysed the theatre and found it wanting, GeorgeMoore turned his attention to the drama. And Moore too blamed thepublic for discouraging artistic effort and encouraging the long run,which he felt was the main reason for the decline in dramatic writing:The prevalence of the three-hundred-night run dams the current, and a free current is necessary for the development of every literature; secondly, it forces the author to compose strange compounds of farce, comedy, drama, and sensationalism. Thirdly, it forbids all originality of thought and treatment, for such might prove dangerous; mediocrity will alone find favour in ibhe eyes of a million or so of people drawn from all classes of society.^Five years later he joined the lists once again, severely criticizingthis "literature of an age of smug respectability — an age interestedespecially in the preservation of villas and silk hats; an age mostanxious for peace so long as peace does not disturb the money market.""No first-rate man of letters now writes for the stage," he complained."None among those who supply the theatres with plays can, if lookedat from a literary side, compare with any leading novelist or essayist,"5and as far as Moore was concerned, the plays that read well were theplays that acted well^His article on the Theatre-Libre(1884)» quoted by him in "Our Dramatists and their Literature," Fortnightly Review,1 November 1889, revised and reprinted in Impressions and Opinions,157-58.2"Our Dramatists and their Literature," op.cit., quotation not reprinted in Impressions and Opinions.^Ibid., not reprinted in Impressions and Opinions.^"Note on ’Ghost#," Impressions and Opinions,163 and "Why I Don’t V/rite Plays," Pall Mall Gazette,7 September 1892,3*140Younger critics, such as William Archer (of The World and Manchester Guardian), A.B.Walkley (of The Daily Graphic, The Globe, and The Athenaeum), Bernard Shaw (of The Saturday Review), were in general agreement with Moore’s and Scott’s outspoken criticism on the state of the theatre. "Pessimism is the prevailing attitude of the critical mind with regard to the theatre," Archer had written in 1882^5 the only optimistic note struck was by Henry Arthur Jones,owho acclaimed "a renascence of the drama." The passing of thecopyright laws of 1887 and 1891 encouraged playwrights to defend theirplays in print and put a stop to the frequent practice of pirating,but although this provocation increased the tendency towards detailedstage and character directions,^ the reading and attending publicon the whole still maintained separate establishments. PerhapsWilliam Archer, for once agreeing with his fellow-critic Clement Scott,described the situation most accurately;Though the English drama does not exist in literature, it exists and flourishes as a non-literary product....I.should like to see in England a body of playwrights, however small, whose works are not only acted, but printed and read..«.Our dramas have no relevance to the moral facts and problems of English life, as the dramas of Augier, Dumas, Feuillet, and Sardou have to those of French life....It is with the public, I believe, that the fault lies....Modern Englishmen cannot be got to take the drama seriously....1 am convinced that "the coming critic" who must certainly precede "the coming dramatist" is to be looked for rather in the magazines than in the daily press....When he appears, I shallbegin to have_ some hope that the day of regeneration is at hand.4It was largely through the efforts of such critics as Archer and Shaw that signs of regeneration soon appeared.The idea of organizing the theatre, as planned and practised by^English Dramatists of Today,1.2Cf. Jones, The Renascence of the English Drama (London;Macraillan,1895).7Cf.general introductions by the authors to collected plays of Pinero and Jones.^Archer, op.cit.,5-16.141Wagner at Bayreuth, was surprisingly repeated in London by Matthew Arnold, who had hitherto shown little public interest in the theatre.In 1879» however, he reviewed Sarah Bernhardt’s productions in London, and took this opportunity to air his personal views on the theatre. Criticising the existing English theatre as "without organisation, or purpose, or dignity," he claimed that there was "no modern drama at all, except a fantastical one," based on ill-fitting adaptations to an English model of the French ideal of 1’homme sensuel moyen.As a remedy for this deplorable state of affairs, he advised subsidising a repertory company and founding a school of dramatic elocution and declamation: "The theatre is irresistible; organizethe theatre!"!The same year a Mrs.Pfeiffer offered one thousand pounds for "the2regeneration of the English drama," but neither Arnold’s plea nor her funds brought forth any satisfactory result or suggestions from either Arnold’s background of social reformers or the contemporary dramatists. Of the social reformers, only one actively entered the theatre, and then it was in his role as a socialist that William Morris betrayed a momentary interest. Envisaging the theatre this energetic master-of-all-arts might have built, his ardent admirer Bernard Shaw described Morris’s production and participation in an original topical extravaganza. But although the evening was "the most successful first night" in the young critic’s memory, the experiment was never^"The French Play in London," Nineteenth Century,August 1879» 228-45» reprinted in Irish Essays and Others (London:Smith,Elder,1891),169-75* Of. Letters of an Old Playgoer (NY:Dramatic Museum of Columbia U., 1919); Pall Mall Gazette, 25 May,1885*^Hudson, The English Stage :1850-1950,85 *142repeated, and Morris retired to his crafts.^ It was not, therefore, until the advent of GBS himself as a critic-turned-dramatist that social reformers turned seriously to the drama as a means of propaganda and art for the sake of society.Although the reformers betrayed little interest in the theatre, both the followers of the aesthetic movement and the naturalists eagerly adopted the dramatic form to their purposes. And once again, as with the theory, the initial impetus came from France. As we have already seen, the English theatre had long been influenced by the theatres on the other side of the channel. The romanticism of Dumas pere and Victor Hugo (who proclaimed the poet’s mission in society in the preface to Cromwell,1827) on the one hand, and the "well-made play" of Scribe and his collaborators on the other continued to act as models for Victorian popular playwrights well into the next century.^ One of the greatest successes of 1897 was Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, which owes much to Hugo’s Ruy Blas(l838). It is not surprising, therefore, that European experimental drama should also arouse interest and imitators. Indeed, the major influences felt by the young rebels of the English theatre came not from the revered Comedie Française or even from "the divine Sarah", but rather from two theatres opposed in theory but united in aim, Andre Antoine’s Theatre Libre and Lugne-Poe’s TKeatre de l ’Oeuvre.The French theatre was in much the same condition as the English^Our Theatre in the Nineties,II,213* Morris might have had something to do with the Fabian private production of A Doll’s House in the mid-eighties, in which Shaw and Eleanor Marx took part; cf. Harley Granvi11e-Barker, "The Coming of Ibsen," The Eighteen Eighties, ed, Walter de la Mare (CUP,1930) 159-196; W.Y.Tindall, Forces in Modern British Literature;1885-1946 (NYiKnopf,1949)>37*2Archer, The Old Drama and the New,230-51; Jones,Plays, xvii-ix.H145commercial theatre. Eugbne Scribe (1791-1861) and VictorienSardou (I85I-I9O8) produced the well-constructed play with itscarefully isolated plot, logical development of action, effectivelymotivated entries, exits, and denouements. The romantic drama ofAlexandre Dumas fils (1824-1895) and Emile Augier (1820-1889),although more concerned with social relationship and personalresponsibility expounded by the inevitable raisonneur, remained withinthe narrow limits of the piece bien faite. The heroic verse dramaof Victor Hugo (1802-1885) strayed even further from reality. "Ihold the receipt from my father for a successful play," claimedDumas fils : "The first act very clear; the second act very short;interest everyv/here. That is the secret of writing plays."! Thispenchant for the well-contrived play was encouraged by the critic"Uncle" Francisque Sarcey (1827-1899),?dio unlike Archer, Shaw, and"// Moore^ insisted that the function of the critic was to furnish"guideposts," not to lead the way; the principles of dramatic techniquewere conditioned by the nature, of the public, the period, and thetradition; therefore conventions were necessary as the basis ofdramatic illusion; exposition and unity of impression were alsoessential, and could be achieved by constructing the play about ay scene a faire in which the whole action culminated. Preaching thisdramatic theory each day in Le Temps from I867 to 1899, Sarcey dictatedthe success and failure of the French theatre and effectively defended 2the status quo.The style of acting, as exemplified by the two large theatres1 XQuotedjby Lucien Guitry of the Comedie-Francaise, when interviewed by Charles Dauborn,"A Prince of the Paris Stage:Lucien Guitry and his London Visit," Pall Mall Gazette,11 June 1909,5*C^f. Henry Beeque, Souvenirs d’un auteur dramatique (Paris: Bibliotïîeque artistique et littéraire, 1895); S.M.Waxman, Antoine and the TheA.tre-Tii hrA ( Cambridge, Mas s. : Harvard UP,1926),55-56.144subsidized by the state, the Comedie Française and the Odeon, was also unrealistic, and in the naturalist's opinion more suitable to a Hyde Park corner harangue than to characterization within the framework of a play. The scenery and setting, too, were artificial though splendid. It is not surprising, therefore, that the naturalists, having successfully levelled all before them in the novel, should now\ I 1turn to that "derniere forteresse de la convention, the drama.Writing in la Messager de I'Europe in 1879, Zola thundered his denunciation of the contemporary theatre and propounded his solution; "La formule naturaliste doit être la formule du nouvel état social.... Ou le théâtre sera naturaliste, ou il ne sera pas, telle est la conclusion formelle.7/hat Zola had advocated for the novel he now applied to the play, ^ X y"1*etude et la peinture de la vie," "un resume de la langue parlee.... qui met le mot juste en sa place, avec la valeur qu?il doit avoir."5 There had already been isolated attempts By other novelists to break through the stereotyped drama of the contemporary theatre: Balzac's^"Le Naturalisme au théâtre," Le Homan expérimental...,2nd ed. (Paris;G,Charpentier,1880),118. Cf.M'Comas in Shaw's You Never Gan Tell (London:Grant Richards,l900^711»240. ^.Antoine's letters to Sai^ e^y in ^ Temps, quoted by himself in "Mes Souvenirs" sur le Theatre-Libre(Paris-Artheme Fayarde,192^) and Le Theatre (Paris;Les Editions de France,1952).p"Le Naturalisme au theatre,^" op.cit. ,118,147; Antoine LaPorte, Le Naturalisme ou 1 * immoralité littéraire ;Emile Zola,l'homme et l'oeuvre (Paris ;Gautherin,Ï894). La Roman exr^rimental is a collection of articles from Le Messager de l'Europe, a St. Petersburgh review, and two Paris periodicals, 2^ Bien public and Voltaire. Further collections were published in Le Naturalisme au thêEtre (1881) and Nos Auteurs dramatiques (l88l). Cf. Moore, Confessions,64ff.^"Le Naturalisme au ttieatre, " op.cit. ,155-54.145La Maratre (I848), the de Goncourts* Henriette Maréchal (I865) andLa Patrie en danger (I867), Flaubert's ^ Candidat (1874); butalthough more revolutionary than Dumas fils' La Dame aux Camélias(I859), for example, these plays illustrated rather than fulfilledthe need for a more realistic approach. Zola's four-act drama, yTherese Raquin, described by Grein as "the first step of naturalismupon the stage," was produced in 1873; two farces, neither verysuccessful. Les Héritiers Rabourdin (1874) and Le Bouton de rose(I878), followed,although the foimer did reach the Independent Theatrein London in 1894.^ Zola continued to speak most persuasively as/ \critic and theorist, as his preface to Therese Raquin indicates.Two other critics spoke vehemently against the French theatre, Villiers de I'Isle Adam and Henry Beeque. Villiers' Axel had had a profound influence on the aesthetic movement; his La Revolte (I87O) was a landmark of a different nature. Its theme, the ineffectual rebellion of a young wife against the deadening and sterile .outlook of her materialist bourgeois husband, anticipates Ibsen's A Doll's House by nine years, although the dramatic treatment and technique in the two plays differ considerably. Its preface, however, anticipates Zola as well, lamenting the stage of the French theatre, "qui est devenu l'opprobre de l'Art moderne," and hopefully considering ^/ N XRévolté "la premiere tentative, le premier essai, risques sur la\ X 2scene française, pour briser ces soi-disant regies deshonourables!"But Villiers had more influence on the symbolists than on the dramatists, and Henry Beeque, author of only seven plays and a few dramatic sketches, did more than any other contemporary dramatist to prepare for the "new theatre" Zola and his follov/ers demanded. At the same time however. Beeque remained opposed to theory of any kind, especially^Translated by A. Teixeira de Mattos (London:Henry,1894),see below, p./5‘7.^La Revolte(Paris:Lemerre,1870). An English translation was made by Theresa Barclay for Fortnightly Review,December 1897* Gf. E.De Rougemont, Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam; Biographie et Bibliographie (Paris;Mercure de France,I9IO).146the scientific approach advocated by Zola. The drama, he claimed,"is the art of elimination,"! and for subject matter he chose, "uneobservation generale, ti^ es simple et tr*es nette, et qui pouvaitencadrer une pièce sans nuire à la vérité des caractères."2 In thepreface to Les Corbeaux (1877) he describes his technique:Le plus souvent je travaillais devant ma glace; je cherchais jusqu'aux gestes de mes personnages et j'attendais que le mot juste, la phrase exactq me vinssent sur les levres. Tout ce que je veux en écrivant, c'est me satisfaire moi-merae; je ne connaisplus rien ni personne; je ne sais seulement pas s'il y a unpublic.5In his bitter, ironie comedies. Les Corbeaux and La Parisienne (1882), he achieved through this basic method naturalistic drama which became the classical example for the playwrights who followed.Like Zola and Villiers, too. Beeque considered himself the forerunner of a new drama,^ and even went so far as to outline a twelve- point programme for this theatre of the future which, though strongly flavoured by his own personal disappointments and hostility towards directors, contained certain points of prophetic importance:X ' AArticle Premier. II est cree un theatre extraordinaire pour la confection et la refection des auteurs dramatiques....Art.3. Un concours est ouvert pour la place de directeur. Les personnes...devront, en se présentant, justifier d'une qualité indispensable: l 'austérité^....Art.6. Toute pièce, jouée a ce theatre, ne pourra l'etre que pendant trois semaines, le temps nécessaire pour en monter une autre....Art.9. Le materiel du theatre ne pourra comprendre que quatre decors: un temple, une foret, une rue, et un salon....Art.11.Un commissaire du gouvernement sera attaché au theatre avec des attributions nouvelles; il prendra la part^ des auteurs contre le directeur, contrairement'a ce qui s'est passe jusqu'à ce jour.5In formulating this programme for his ideal theatre. Beeque voiced notonly the partially formed ideals of his fellow playwrights, but thegeneral movement within the theatre which culminated in the founding^Quoted by Waxman, Antoine,49*2Beeque, Souvenirs,20. hbid..21.^"Preface 1882," Souvenirs.220.^Ibid..217-iq.147of small groups throughout Europe, all of them united in their desire to create a theatre for new authors, based on a repertory system in opposition to the static established theatre programme, in which the spoken word would be more important than either vocal delivery or scenic devices. In 1888 (Preface to Miss Julie) August Strindberg, and in I896 (Preface to Ubu Hoi) Alfred Jarry, were to carry these demands further still, leaving naturalism behind once more./ ALe Theatre-Libre That day hopefully anticipated in France by Zola, Villiers, and Beeque arrived five years later, but from an entirely unexpected quarter. In 1887 a young clerk, André" Antoine, left his job and risked his small capital on a theatrical venture which was to have a far- reaching influence neither he nor his forerunners would have dreamed/Apossible. The Theatre-Libre, as his company of amateurs was called,/A -1was founded as a protest "contre les tenants du theatre d'alors,"^and among his reforms Antoine projected "new pieces, comfortableplaces, low prices and an ensemble in the interpretation."2 Partlyto avoid "les pattes de la censure," as hypersensitive and active inFrance as in England, and partly to emphasize the individuality of theventure, Antoine's company was founded as a private theatre, "reserve! a / _une e l i t e w h i c h he hoped to find among sympathetic subscribers andmembers of the press. Not until I896 and the Theatre Antoine did heturn his attention towards "the conquest of the general public"; whilethe "derniere lutte contre les traditions officielles et la routine/administrative" took place in earnest at the Odeon, which he directed^Antoine, Souvenirs.6.Quoted from Le Théâtre-Libre, a pamphlet published privately in May I89O for his subscribers, and described by Moore in "Theatre Libre," Impressions and Opinions,173# The chapter entitled "Antoine's Dream," Waxman,op.cit.,121-135,paraphrases most of this rare 186-page brochure.^Souvenirs.121-122.148from 1906 to 1916.1Almost echoing Becque's manifesto, Antoine's aim was to make theThéâtre-Libre a theatre of and for new playwrights, "un refuge pourles jeunes, et un laboratorie d ' e s s a i , where young authors couldperfect their art and enlarge their conceptions in preparation fortheir onslaught on the regular theatres, at present unyieldinglycommemded by a dozen or so established playwrights.^ Antoine constantlyreiterated his belief in the paramount importance of the play itself;that interpretation, production, scenery and presentation must besubordinated to the author's aims;Interpretation with us ought to have only a secondary importance.... The essential thing is to continue assuring young writers of the certainty that their plays will be read and played, even very badly, for that is worth more to them than not to be played at all. These plays will ultimately find talented actors e l s e w h e r e .4And contrary to the "star system" of the French stage,/• A1 'ideal absolu de l'acteur doit etre de devenir un clavier, un instrument merveilleusement accordé, dont l'auteur jouera a songe. ...Les comédiens ne connaissent jamais rien aux pieces qu'ils doivent jouer....Ils sont en réalite des manïiéquins, des marionnettes plus ou moins perfectionnées suivant leur talent, et que l'auteur habille et agite a sa fantaisie.^We shall encounter this concept of the actor-marionette again, fromJarry, Maeterlinck, Craig, and Yeats.If the actor was to have no theories, neither was the producer./ A."Une formule trop étroite serait la mort....Il faut nous tenir prêts a accueillir largement tout le monde," Antoine replied to Bauer's^Ibid..6.2Letter to Sarcey,25 June 1887, Le Temps, reprinted by Antoine in Le Theatre.210.^Le Theatre-Libre,mai I89O, Waxman,op.cit.,122-23.^Letter to Sarcey, December 1892, Le Temps,replying to Sarcey's criticism of the acting in Francois de Curel's Les Fossiles.V/axman, op.cit..174.5 /"^Letter to Le Bargy of the Comedie-Française when asked to persuade Curel to alter L 'Amour brodé, reprinted by Adolphe Thalasso, Le Theatre-Libre,2nd ed.(Paris:Mercure de France,1909)» 171-76*149(the dramatic critic of 1'Echo de Paris) adaptation of Zola, "Le Théâtre-Libre sera naturaliste ou ne sera pas."! The first season of the Théatre-Libre emphasised Antoine's eclectic ideal, when the names of Zola and his followers of the "Soirees de Medan" (Alexis, Hennique, de Maupassant, and Ceard^), Meténier, Theodore de Banville, Baudelaire, and the Wagnerian disciple, Catulle-Mendes^However, as time went on, more and more young dramatists writing under the wing of, or imitating the success of, the naturalists, flocked to the/ATheatre-Libre; and despite his protests, Antoine and his theatrebecame synomymous with naturalist drama.^ Perhaps this wasinevitable in a movement striving for new life in the face of outwornconventions. By 1908, in reply to an international symposiumconducted by Gordon Craig's periodical, The Mask, Antoine could write,J'ai trop combattu pour le réalisme pour que vous puissiez douter que mon absolue conviction est qu'il est la source essentielle de toute beauté...non le réalisme étroit mais l'observation de la vie et de la nature. Zola a dit,"L'oeuvre d'art est l'expression de la nàture'a travers en temperament." Rien de plus profond et de plus fécond que cette parole de notre grand professeur d'energie.^Antoine's basic belief in the actor's role further led him intothe realist movement, in part as a reaction against the exaggeratedtechnique of the time, partly because of his own emphasis on ensembleplaying. Defending his method, he wrote to Sarcey in 1890,/ A X XC'est que ce theatre nouveau (ou^renouvele) exigerait des interprètes nouveaux'ou renouvelas.... c'est qu'une oeuvre vraie^6 mai 1889, quoted by Antoine in Souvenirs,143-44.Cf. "A Visit to Medan, "Confessions of a Young Man; "La Butte," Memoirs of my Dead Life. Moore and Alexis translated W.S.Gilbert's Sweethearts for theOdeon in 1885:Hone, Moore,115.^Richard Wagner,1886, was one of the first defences of Wagner; he also edited la Revue Fantaisiste.4Letter to Sarcey in 1888 mentioned by Waxman,op.cit.,92.^Symposium on realism, The Mask,I (I9O8 ),81-83.150veut etre jouee vraiy de meme qu’une piece classique veut surtout etre dite, puisque le personnage n ’est, le plus souvent, qu’une abstraction, qu’une synthèse, sans vie matérielle.Insisting that acting be based on ’’truth, observation, and direct study2of nature," "portraying the verities of everyday life," Antoinerevolutionized the art, and "Antoine’s Back" became a byword in* Paris%for the realistic effect the young producer introduced.^ His ownacting was highly praised, his elisions, awkward gestures andexpressive silences in fact representing the "realistic truth" Zolahad demanded of the new theatre.La caractéristique de ce nouveau theatre est, n ’est-ce pas?1 ’inconscience des personnages, toujours, comme nous faisons des bêtises et des énormitéssans nous en apercevoir....C’est qu’ils ont des voix comme les nôtres, que leur langage est celui de notre vie journalière, avec ses élisions, ses tours familiers, et non la rhétorique et le style noble de nos classiques.4The actor, therefore, must learn to modify and at the same time amplifyhis movements, imitating "the simple and appropriate gestures of amodern man, living our everyday life,"5 thereby communicating theinner life and thought of the character through subtle nuances anddetails hitherto impossible in the theatre.Antoine was helped considerably in his revolutionary ideas ofacting by an amateur group of actors who, by reason of their veryinexperience, stumbled towards the naturalness he wished them toexpress. Later, Yeats and the Pays found themselves with the sameadvantage. So also with his concept of the ensemble. Having nospotlight-seeking "stars" to deal with, he was able to train his^24 November 1890, Temps, reprinted in Souvenirs,198-99*2Antoine’s 1890 brochure, quoted by Waxman,op.cit.,128-29»^Waxman,op.cit.,98; Anna Irene Miller, The Independent Theatres of Europe (NY;Long and Smith,1951)>59*^Letter to Sarcey,1890,Souvenirs,199. The italics are his.5Antoine’s brochure, quoted by Waxman,op.cit.,130.151company as a team, actors playing a major role one evening and a supernumerary the next. He was encouraged in this attitude by his observations of the Saxe-Meiningen troupe whom he studied in Brussels for several weeks before attempting the crowd scenes in such plays as the de Goncourts’ La Patrie en danger and Leon Hennique’s Mort du duc d ’Enghien. A lengthy letter from Antoine to Sarcey describes this company which emphasized ensemble playing and naturalism that led the Duke on one occasion to bring a dead horse on to the stage. Antoinecomments on "la sensation de la multitude" he felt in these "groupements d ’une vérité extraordinaire," and referring to the Duke’s and Wagner’s technique of dividing the chorus into separate groups, each personifying a particular element of the crowd, he asks why they too might not appropriate the best elements of these interesting innovations.^ Bearing in mind his observations of the Meininger and his own experiences, Antoine described his model ensemble group as "some thirty players of equal ability, of ordinary talent, of simple c/j.vTxIv personality, who would yield always and in spite of every otherconsideration to that fundamental law of ensemble."^ Over thirty years later Yeats’s description of his choice of actors reads strangely . similar*"' "I will go into some crowded room, put the name of everybody in it on a different piece of paper, put all those pieces of paper into a hat and draw the first twelve." The room would be deliberately chosen, the inhabitants sifted, but the principle remained the same Stage decoration, too, must be revolutionized to conform with this new type of play and interpretation of the actor’s role. RejectingEric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker(NY;Meridianl957)»^^3» Between 1874 and 1890 the Meininger company produced forty-one plays in 2,591 performances. Cf.Marshall, The Producer and the Play,20-24, 32,105-05; Lee Simonson, The Stage is Set (nY;Hareourt Brace,1932), 270-508.225 July 1888, Temps, reprinted by Antoine in Souvenirs,108-111. ^1890 brochure, quoted by Waxman,op.cit.,132.4"The Bounty of Sweden," Autobiographies,5^3»152the elaborate scenic devices of the popular theatre, Antoine again referred to the Meiningen company, pleading for settings in keeping with the contemporary life depicted on the stage, in which the characters could move about with comfort and both look and feel at home;/ / / Dans les oeuvres modernes, écrites dans un mouvement de véritéet de naturalisme ou la théorie des milieux et de l’influencedes choses extérieures a pris une si large place, le decorn ’est-il pas le comblement indispensable de l ’oeuvre? Ne doit-ilpas prendre, au theatre, la nteme importance que la descriptiontient dans un roman? N ’est-il pas une sorte d ’exposition dusujet?!And if the stage is too large for the intimacy of the play, he suggests2it be reduced by bringing the acting space forward. Showing his customary concern for details, Antoine joined other innovators in his use of actual door : lighting technique.handles, real wood panels, and experiments in5/ ADuring the first three years of the Theatre-Libre Antoine saw many of his aims put into practice. .One hundred and twenty-five new playswere produced by fifty-one authors, forty-two of them under forty yearsA 5of age;4 several plays had gone to the Comedie-Frangaise, to theOdeon,^ and to the Gymnase;^ his acting technique had been sufficiently^Letter to Sarcey,24 November 1890, reprinted in. Souvenirs,199-200, ^Ibld..200.^Miller, op.cit.,62-ë?; Waxman.op.cit.,135-54. Strindberg's Preface to Miss Julie might have been influenced by Antoine.4 //Cf.appendices to Thalasso, Le Theatre-Libre,and Waxman, op.cit.for lists of authors, programmes, actors, etc.^Catulle-Mendes’ La Femme de Taborin, Theodore de Danville’s Le Baiser, Francois de Curel’s Les Fossiles. ^ 7~ 'Leon Hennique’s dramatization of Zola’s Jacques Damour.7Portft-Riche’s La Chance de Françoise.153accepted for some of his company to move to professional theatres;and most important of all, giving free rein to new authors,Antoine had forced critics and public once again to take stock of thesituation in their theatres; at least twelve thousand articles werewritten about his theatre during these three years. The movementwhich led to Antoine had begun in the work of Zola and Beeque, andin looking back over his own career Beeque remarked of his offspring:» /Tout le mouvement dramatique de ces dix dernieres années, c’est Antoine qui l’a cree. Tous les auteurs dramatiques d ’aujourd’hui et de demain, c’est Antoine qui les a mis en v u e .2But despite his efforts to remain eclectic in policy, Antoinds/ ATheatre-Libre produced only fifteen verse plays during the eight years of his management.^ Consequently, as we shall see, several theatres devoted to poetic drama were founded in opposition to the Theatre- Libre. And during the same period, other small groups were conceived:/ A-Le Cercle des Escholiers, which opened the same night as the Theatre-/Libre and gave Lugne-Poe, soon to become Antoine’s greatest rival,4 t Athe Thea,tre de l ’Application, organized as a studio theatre for young actors of the conservatory/ / Aof the Comedie-Fran^aise; and the Theatre-Libre of Marseilles, founded/ / Ain 1692 by Emile Fabre (later a playwright of the Paris Theatre-Libre) and Auguste Rondel in emulation of the parent group.^ Antoine had been influenced by the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen’s troupe and Wagner’s theatre at Bayreuth; in 1889 he returned the compliment by acting as the model for the Freie-Buhne which in its turn produced Gerhart Hauptmann. Meanwhile a young drama critic in Dublin,^1890 brochure, quoted by Waxman,op.cit.,124»2’’Une Fete Littéraire," quoted by Antoine in Souvenirs,op.cit., 181. ^Thalasso,op.cit.,281-82.^Miller,op.cit.,75-74. hbid..75.154Frank Fay, read with interest news of Antoine’s innovations in Paris.Mainly through the advertisements of George Moore, news of the, A.Theatre-Libre was heard in England. In company with his friend Paul Alexis (of the Medan group), Moore had attended performances at Antoine’s theatre and written in praise of his work. As proud possessor of "probably the only Jcop;^ in England," he quoted from Antoine’s I89O brochure in another article,^ and in still another discussed the possibility of an English Theatre-Libre.^ As we have already seen, Moore had shown an interest in English theatrical conditions as early as I884, when he first suggested that the main reason for the decline in dramatic writing lay in the "long run," a practice which Beeque had also disapproved of, and like every iconoclast before him, Moore blamed the tastes of the age for the "tawdry ware that at present holds the theatrical market."4 But it was also this public that could endow a national theatre, freed from "the thraldom of farcical melodrama and melodramatic f a r c e s . A n d although Moore gradually altered his idea of a national theatre for all to a subsidised theatre open to the few, he felt certain that the "innumerable articles...of much vague content" already written on the subject indicated sufficient interest for the idea of an endowed theatre to be considered seriously.^Like Antoine, Moore considered this theatre one primarily for authors, "a theatre which, by producing some thirty or forty new plays eveiy year, will allow us to say what we have to say, and in the form^"Note on ’Ghosts’"(I890), Impressions and Opinions,162-67* ^"Theatre Libre"(l890),op.cit.,I7 0.^"On the Necessity of an English Theatre Libre" (I89O) ,176-82.4"0ur Dramatic Critics," Pall Mall Gazette, September 1891,2.^"Our Dramatists and their Literature"(I889), Impressions and Opinions.I6I.^"Note on ’Ghosts’" op.cit..167.155which is natural and peculiar to us. He already considers himself one of the playwrights, but feels it necessary to warn his prospective audience,that it is as imperative for aui English as for a French Theatre- Libre to refuse good conventional plays as bad ones....To get the fine fleur of society, literature and art the Theatre-Libre must offer a supremacy of sensation — the strange, the unknown, the unexpected. The plays need not be great plays — great plays are out of the question — they need only be plays with something in them; even though that something is not always deeper than the charm which we find in a piece of bric-a-brac, or a piece of old china.In effect, the plays must provide a nouveau frisson, suitable to English sensibilities. However, he continues, "The most absolute eclecticism should prevail, and...no preference be given one form of art more than another. That the play should be rare is the first and almost the only qualification necessary to secure for it right of representation. Although such rare plays could not at the moment be found in England, he was confident that they could be supplied by the novelists —Michael Field,^ Meredith, Hardy^ Stevenson, and Henley. In a later article Moore judged Henley and Stevenson’s Beau Austin a "perfectly proportioned" comedy, "written with a grace and supple incisiveness not seen in a dramatic work since the ’School for Scandal.’"4 Pinero, Grundy, and Jones could also be drafted, for plays "on the moral and ethical problems of the day." And already on hand were plays from Antoine’s repertoire: Tolstoi’s Dominion of Darkness [sicj, Hennique’sLa Mort du Duc d ’Enghien and Jacques Damour, Metenier’s En Famille, and Ibsen’s Ghosts.^^"Theatre Libre," op.cit.,I6 9.^"On the Necessity of an English Theatre Libre," op.cit.,177-78.^"Michael Field" [Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley3 wrote many plays as well as poems, and among Yeatsfeletters (Letters,407) is a rejection of their Deirdre.^"Our Dramatic Critics," Pall Mall Gazette,10 September 1891,2.^"On the Necessity of an English Theatre Libre,"op.cit.,180-182.156r ABut Moore’s plans for an English Theatre-Libre never went beyondconjecture, and even then he showed no concern about actors. "Thefirst thing to do is get the p l a y s , a n attitude he would later taketowards the Irish Literary Theatre. Fortunately, however, thereappeared someone who was willing to risk the actual project, and inI89I the Independent Theatre Society was founded by a Dutch merchantturned English critic, J.T.Grein. Moore immediately became an2enthusiastic member of the committe, but according to his own account resigned after Grein neglected to acknowledge his help in directing Ghosts.^ The aim of the Society was "to give special performances of plays which have a literary and artistic rather than a commercial value,"4 but if anything Grein was more discerning and censorious than his French colleague. This British Theatre-Libre "would nurture realism but realism of a healthy kind"; "it would strive to annihilate the puppets which have done yeomen’s service for years and years and would instead depict human beings, bearing human characters, speaking human language and torn by human p a s s i o n s . U n l i k e the Theatre-Libre, also, which only produced eleven foreign plays during the eight yearsi^bid.asa.2Cf. his introduction to Edward Martyn’s The Heather Field and Maeve %London:Duckworth,1899),vii-viii*^Barrett H.Clark,"George Moore at Home in Paris"(l922), Intimate Portraits(NY;Dramatists’ Play Service,1951),136-57:"When I quarrel it is for always. Grein speaks and v/rites English with a thick Dutch accent."^Programme reproduced in Michael Orme (Mrs.A.A.Grein) J.T.Grein:The Story of a Pioneer 1862-1935 (London:Murray,1936),?6.^Grein, article in The Weekly Comedy,1899, quoted by Orme, J.T.Grein,70-71. "Editor’s Preface to the Independent TheatreSeries," G.Bernard Shaw, Widowers’ Houses, Being Number One of the Independent Theatre Series of Plays, ed. J.T.Grein(London:Henry,1893), vii.157of Antoine’s management,^ the Independent Theatre did not limit itselfto English playwrights9 In fact, as Moore had prophesied, its firsttwo productions and two-thirds of the next were given over to plays 2in translation. In 1892, however, Grein "discovered" a new playwright, George Bernard Shaw,^ and I895 brought him plays by Moore (in consequence of a wager^), Todhunter, and Michael Field.Other groups based on the same pattern followed. In 1897 the New Century Theatre issued its prospectus, declaring that "the sole endeavour of the Executive will be to further the cause of Drgmatic Art, and, without bias or prejudice, to pave the way for the permanent institution, artistically administered, which is essential to the development of the drama and acting."^ In 1899 the Stage Society was formed"to promote and encourage Dramatic Art; to serve as an Experimental Theatre; to provide such an organization as shall be capable of dealing with any opportunities that may present themselves, or be created, for the permanent establishment of a Repertory Theatre; and to establish and undertake the management and control of such a Theatre. "6Activities of these and similar groups (The Pioneers and Pioneer Players, The Play Actors’ Society, the English Drama Society, the^Thalasso, Le Théatre-Libre,279-80.2 / 'Ibsen’s Ghosts,Zola’s Therese Raguin,Brandss’ A Visit,Banville’sThe Kiss. Moore’s letter to the Editor, Pall Mall Gazette, 29 February1892,2.^Cf.descriptions of this incident by Archer, The World,December 1892; Shaw, Preface to Plays Unpleasant (London:Constable,1906), xi-xii; Eden Greville, "Bernard Shaw and his Plays," Munsey’3 Magazine,March 1906,765-6 8.4"^Vhy I don’t Write Plays," Pall Mall Gazette,7 September 1892,3; Hail and Farewell;Ave,49-51.^Quoted by Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties,111,98.^Quoted by Miller, Independent Theatre in Europe,177»158New Stage Club^) continued into the twentieth century, ^ leading eventually to the Court Theatre of Granvi11e-Barker and Bernard Shaw, but in essence there was very little difference among them. All were concerned, like their French prototype, primarily with the encouragement of playwrights, which eventually led to a similar concern for the actor;For the Independent Theatre, by the very conditions of its existence, is enabled to produce plays which, whether or not they have any commercial value, at all events have the greatest value for the actor, in providing him with such acting parts as he will not often find in the theatres conducted on commercial lines.5As in France, also, they provided an opportunity for the production of the one-act play, which had little value in the commercial theatre except as a rarely-attended curtain raiser. And perhaps most important of all, both the English and the French Theatre-Libres introduced to the general public the most influential dramatic force of the century, Henrik Ibsen.Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)In May 1890, with an approved translation and the benediction of the dramatist himself,^ Antoine introduced Ibsen’s Ghosts to the French public and, incidentally, to George Moore.^ Several of Ibsen’s plays^The New Stage Club was the first in England, to produce Strindberg.^Miller,op.cit.,183-94*^Moore, Letter to the Editor, Pall Mall Gazette,29 February 1892,2.4cf. Ibsen’s letters to Antoine and the translator R.Darzens, reprinted in Le Theatre,249-50; also Antoine’s letter to Sarcey, July1888, describing the Meiningen production of Les Revenants,reprinted inSouvenirs,112. According to Waxman,op.cit.,114-15, it was Zola whocalled Antoine’s attention to a production of Ghosts in Germany,1890.^’’Note on ’Ghosts,”* Impressions and Opinions, 162-67*159had been published in translation,^ but to the Théâtre-Libre must go the credit for once more setting the theatrical fashion of Paris. Le Canard sauvage followed Les Revenants in April 1891, and soon other French theatres followed suit. The Theatre-Libre of Berlin had opened in November I889 with Ghosts,^and by opening his Independent Theatre with the same play in I89I, Grein was following a precedent which by this time implied not only artistic intention but technical ambition. The first production of the New Century Theatre v;as4John Gabriel Borkman, and the "Thalia Society" of Budapest, run on similar lines, was responsible for the success of Ibsen on the Hungarian stage.^ This practice of proclaiming allegiance to the avant-garde^ by flourishing the standard of Ibsen indicates the^Count Moritz Prozor, trans.. Les Revenants, I8 8 9, Revue indépendante. A translation of Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man had appeared in this literary periodical in I8S8 . Les Soutiens de la Société, Pages d’Histoire de Henrik Ibsen (Lady Inger) and Bj/rnson’s ^ Nouveau Système; also first appeared here.^Hedda Gabier, Theatre du Vaudeville, I89I; La Dame de la Mer, Cercle des Escholiers, 1892; Maison de Poupée, Th^tre de Vaudeville, 1894. The Théâtre de l ’Oeuvre opened with Rosmersholm in 1893; the same year produced Un Ennemi du Peuple, then Solness le Constructeur in 1894, Brand in 1^95, Les Soutiens de la Société and Peer Gynt in 1896, ^ Comédie de 1 ’Amour and Jean Gabriel Borkman in 1097.Cf. A. Diklca Recque, Appendix A, Trois Auteurs Dramatiques Scandinaves(Paris : Champion, 1930).?Cf. Halvdan Eoht, The Life of Ibsen, translated by Ruth Lima McMahon and Hanna Astrup Larsen (London:Allen and Unwin, 1937), II, 260-65, for a survey of the progress of Ibsen in Germany.^Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties, 111,97-103; Moore,Introduction to The Heather Field and Maeve, xvi.^Recorded by the foreign correspondent of The Mask, I (I908), 8 7*^Cf. Roger Shattuck , The Banquet Years ; The Origins of the Avant. Garde in France: I883 to World War I (London:Faber, 1939, chapter 1.160importance of his work to contemporary thought and theatre. Indeed, Ibsen’s position in the history of drama is comparable to Yeats’s in poetry several decades later. The published works of both span a wide period, beginning with the conventional forms and methods of the time (Ibsen learned much of his technique from Scribe and Sardou, as the early Yeats echoes Keats, Shelley, and Morris), progressing steadily on to new ground in both technique and subject-matter, encompassing all that came across their path, both in the realm of ideas and form, and without hesitation discarding all dross as they moved on. Although at each stage of their progression they crystallized certain ideas and attitudes which were eagerly recognized and exploited by those who followed in their wake, Ibsen even less than Yeats can be considered the leader of a "school" or movement in the way Zola or Mallarmé can. The charge of "Ibsenisra" applies more accurately to his imitators and apostles than to the dramatist himself, just as the terms "Celticism" and "Celtic Twilight" are inappropriate labels for Yeats’s work. Yet at the same time, by his experiments with form and constant preoccupation with effective clarification and communication of "the temporal and eternal questions... fo^the age and in the community,Ibsen made easier the task of such playwrights as August Strindberg, Gerhart Hauptmann, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O ’Neill, and all who came after him. Deservedly or not, he provided a target for the reaction, sometimes hysterical in intensity, against the ideas and attitudes which became associated in the public mind with the "New Drama." And sometimes this reaction came from writerswhom one would expect a greater sympathy with Ibsen’s artistic aims,asuch as Yeats and Synge.Although each artist must of course experience and refine his material in his own way, Ibsen’s contribution to the theatre might be^Ibsen’s speech to Norwegian students, lOSeptember 1874, Speeches and New Letters,trans. Arne Kildal (London;Frank Palmer,19II),51*I6lconsidered one of synthesis rather than originality. He was, foremost, a.Norwegian poet, writing like Synge and Yeats out of the experience of his age and country to his countrymen. "No poet lives through anything isolated," he declared. "What he lives through all of his countrymen live through together with h i m . H i s characters, too, reflect the dual nature of their country. Living and dreaming through hours and seasons as sharply defined as the background panorama of fjord, forest, and mountain, they yet remain hedged in by the narrow, rigid, and often outworn traditions and prejudices of the small unsophisticated communities from which they spring. Like Yeats and Lady Gregory, Ibsen in his younger days had spent some time collecting folklore and stories of the countryside, which were later to enrich his work. And even though he spent most of his writing life abroad (a self-imposed exile similar to that of another Irish writer, James Joyce^), this served merely to clarify and intensify his own reactions to his country and countrymen, enabling him "to look into myself and into the condition of affairs""^-.with the objectivity he felt necessary: "A poet by nature belongs to the far-sighted. Never have I seen the fatherland and the actual life of the fatherland so fully, so clearly, and at a closer range than just from afar and during my absence, a statement Synge might also have made. Yet also like these Irish^Ibid.,48-52. Cf.M.C.Bradbrook, Ibsen the Norwegian:A Revaluation (London: Chat to and Windus', 1946) •2Cf. Peer Gynt, Little Eyolf, Rosmersholm.5Cf.Joyce’s illuminating remarks on Ibsen, Richard Ellmann,James Joyce (NY:OÜP,1959),54-57,701,707.^Letter to critic Clemens Petersen, 4 December 1865, Speeches and New Letters,71.^Speech to Norwegian students,op.cit.,51; of. letter to Laura Kieler,ll June I87O, The Correspondence of Henrik Ibsen, ed. Mary Morison, trans. J.N. Laurvik and Mary Morison (London;Hodderand Stoughton,1905),193.162writers, Ibsen refused to subordinate his task as an artist to his country’s immediate needs. "I do not think it is our task to take charge of the state’s liberty and independence," he replied to one of Bj^nson’s frequent political appeals,^ "but certainly to awaken into liberty and independence the individual, and as many as possible.To those who sought specific creeds and loyalties in his plays he warned,Y/hatever I have written has been without any conscious thought of making propaganda. I have been more poet and less social philosopher than people generally seemed inclined to believe....To me it has seemed a problem of humanity in general....My task has been the description of humanity.*It is interesting to note that Synge’s reply to the detractors ofThe Playboy almost echoes these words.^Part of the reaction against Ibsen might have been the coincidenceof the productions of his plays at the very time Zola was expoundinghis theories of naturalism. For like other thinkers of the nineteenthcentury, Ibsen was greatly impressed by the scientific and psychological5discoveries of his day and reflected this interest in his plays. Like^Cf.W.H.Schofield, "Personal Impressions of Benson and Ibsen," Atlantic Monthly,LXXXl( 1898),370* Bj^tnson is reported to have described John Gabriel Borkman as "entirely pessimistic and useless; not the kind of thing we want at all. It won’t do anybody any good." La Gallienne, The Romantic ’90’s,40-44*212 July 1879, Speeches and New Letters,86. Ibsen frequently made the distinction between "Liberty" and "liberties" both in his correspondence and his plays, cf. letter to Brandes, 5 January 1882, Correspondence, 350. £f. also letter to Brandes 30 October 1888, ibid.,420.^Speech at the Festival of the Norwegian Women’s Rights League, Christiania, 26 May 1898, Speeches and New Letters,65* The italics are his. £f. letter to Hans Lien-Braekstad, August 1890, Correspondence, 431; Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism,1891.^Greene and Stephens, J.M.Synge, 256-244*5Cf.letters to Lorentz Dietrichson, 19 December 1897 and Brandes,24 September 1871, Correspondence,524 and 218.165Zola he saw man as the repository of the past as well as the productof his immediate environment and circumstances. In this sense Ibsencarried his theory of inherited characteristics even further than Zola,seeing man as heir to a world of prejudices and outmoded beliefs asvestigial as the inherited weaknesses of the body. But at the sametime he commited himself for humanity to a greater extent than Zolaby his belief in man’s innate nobility of soul (or will),^ which heis capable in himself of developing more fully and which, even thoughit may be degraded or distorted by the stupidity of man-made conventions2and institutions, can never be utterly destroyed. The form and type of play Ibsen wrote was a result of this belief and of his subsequent approach to life as material for the artist. The artist must be subjective to the extent that he has undergone and sympathizes with the experience he is treating,^ measuring man against his society as well as against h i m s e l f ,4 and answerable to both.^ He must retain a certain degree of "masked objectivity"^ as well, in order to report dispassionately and deal honestly with the painful or the ugly as with^The power of the human will is expressed, directly and indirectly, throughsout The Lady from the Sea.2Cf. speech at banquet in his honour at Stockholm,24 September 1887, Speeches and New Letters,56-57.^Cf. letters to Magdalene Thoreson, 29 May I87O, Correspondence, I9O; Laura Kieler, 11 June 1870, ibid.,193; Peter Hansen,28 OctoberI870, ibid.,198.^Letter to Brandes,18 May I87I, ibid.,214*cLetters to Count Moritz Prozor, his French translator, 4 December 1890,ibid.,435; Bjorn Kristensen,15 February 1887, ibid.,412; Ludwig Dale, 25 February 1872,ibid.,55; Edmund Gosse,14 October 1872, ibid.,248, Brandes, 24 September I87I, ibid.,218.^Letter to Brandes, 26 June I869, ibid.,173 * Of * letters to Brandes, 24 September 1871,ibid.,218; Ludwig Passarge,l6 June 1880, ibid.,534; Laura Kieler, 11 June 1870,ibid.,194 &nd Brandes,18 May I87I, ibid.,215: "The poet’s task is to see, not to reflect."164the good and beautiful.^Part of the reaction to Ibsen among audience and other playwrights was due to this dark world he saw about him; they did not wait for the flashes springing from his ov/n belief in the potentiality of / mankind to illuminate that darkness. Part of the reaction was alsopdue to"the illusion of reality" Ibsen felt was necessary in order ^ "to see in such a manner that the thing seen is perceived by hisf a u d i e n c e just as the poet saw it. Ibsen himself deplored the■ extremes of naturalism,4 and in his own plays practised a selective ' realism which, we shall see, was also practised by Synge and Lady • Gregory. And in practising this selective realism he introduced other innovations as well: he retained the clarity of action andstrength of line of the "well-made play,"5 avoided any unnatural^Letter to Brandes,l6 July 1869,ibid..176. Cf. Brandes, "Second Impression" (l862), Henrik Ibsen. Bjornstjeme Bjrnson. Critical Studies, trans. Jessie Muir, rev. and ed. William Archer (London:Heirfinann,1899)»46; "the poet of the grim side of life."2 :Letter to Gosse,15 January 1874» Correspondence,269.^Speech to Norwegian students,10 September 1874» Speeches and New Letters,49» letter to S.Schandorph, 6 January 1882, ibid..552.4cf. Ibsen’s early dramatic criticism,I85I» quoted by P.P.D.Tennant, Ibsen’s Dramatic Technique (Cambridge : Bowes and Bowes,1948),53? letter to Mme, Thoreson,29 May I87O, Correspondence.I 190. "Zola descends to the sewer to take a bath, I, in orderto cleanse it," Halvdahn Koht, Henrik Ibsen (Oslo:H.Aschehoug,1929)»II»199» M.C.Bradbrook, Ibsen the Norwegian. 94n2 translates "for a rense den" as "to wash myself."5^Cf.William Archer, "Ibsen’s Apprenticeship," Fortnightly Review, 7 3 (190^ 7 »25-35 and "Ibsen’s Craftmanship," Fortnightly Review.80 (1906),101-13; Archer, P1ay-Making:A Manual of Craftsmanship (London: Chapman and Hall, 1 9 1 2 ), 7 7 - 8 6. ^.also Samlede Voerker. quoted by John Northam, Ibsen’s Dramatic Method:A Study of the Prose Drama (London:Faber,1953 »)l04-05n;140n.L165i interpolation in speech, '1 concentrated on "the genuine, plainI 2language spoken in real life," and replaced the conventional formII of exposition, intrigue, climax, revelation and happy ending by aI subtle retrospective exposition v/hich ruthlessly pursued his' characters into the past, through the present and into the future.By achieving his denouement (if such an indecisive ending can be '’"Mj)!w 80 called) through the natural development of his characters and afastidious attention to detail, carefully balancing action with words by the more subtle methods of inference and implication, he heightened the impression of timelessness within a framework of strictly regulatedunity of time and place. Yet at the same time this force and emphasiscreated an impact on the spectator equivalent to that of Zola’snaturalist technique. The spectator cannot escape from Ibsen's heightened reality any more than he can ignore the naturalist’s exaggerated realism. And so the audience, attuned to the one, i neglected to see beyond the consistency of detail and closely inter-i locking structure of Ibsen's plays to the poetic symbolism behind■ them. The design v/as too scrupulously compounded to unravel easily;^- I' theme and technique were constantly fused and interwoven along themain line of action, emphasising and illuminating, contrasting and. ■.j intensifying each other by means of concentration, intimation, inter-; . play, and dramatic unity. Even Ibsen’s humour played a double role,' resulting in a laughter more ironic than comic, and leaving him open I ’ to the complaint later levelled at Synge, that he had no sense of' humour at all. Yet paradoxically, it was this concern, projected withYLetters to Lucie Wolf the actress,25 May 1885, Correspondence. 567-68; Edmund Gosse, I5 January 1874.ibid..268-69; Brandes,26 June I869, ibid.,174; Schandorph, 6 January 1882.ibid..552.2Letter to Lucie V/olf, 25 May 1885, Correspondence.567-68.3 "Even the titles are symbolic, cf.letters to Count Prozor,4 December 1890.Correspondence.455. and 25 January I89I, ibid,.436.L166such technical skill, not only for the world of appearances but also for the underlying world of truth, with the dream as well as the deed, illusion and reality, fantasy and action, that gave Ibsen’s plays their concentrated power and unrelenting accuracy of aim, so that, by following exactly the opposite course to Maeterlinck, who was frequently praised at Ibsen’s expense, he achieved Materlinck’s, Yeats’s, and Synge’s aim of symbolic realism,^ And like these three dramatists also, Ibsen considered the actor merely a means to an end, belonging "to a complicated machine, in the working of which he is bound by law to take part.The impact of Ibsen’s works was felt gradually, first in Germany,then in France and Italy. Although Ibsen had been "discovered" byEdmund Gosse as early as 1871^ (the year after Dickens’ death and tenyears after Turgenev’s Father and Sons) and there had been occasionalprivate amateur performances of his works during the ’eighties,4 hisplays did not create any great impression on the English public untilthe notorious uproar over the Independent Theatre’s production of 5Ghosts in 1891. "You made a hole in the dyke," Shaw v/rote to Grein thirty years later," and the weight of the flood outside did the rest.^Cf. Shaw, Our Theatres,III,139î "true modern drama...poetically realistic illusion."2Letter to Mme, Thoreson,5 June I87O, Corres /ondence,191.^"A very poor and inadequate interpreter, but still the first," Edmund Gosse, "Ibsen’s Social Dramas," Fortnightly Review, 45(1889),107.^Cf. Appendix 3> Ellis-Fermor, The Irish Dramatic Movement,222-24. £f. Shaw’s reference to "the first performance of Doll’s House"’ in England," "An Aside," Lillah McCarthy, Myself and My Friends (London: Thornton Butterworth,1933),3*^Archer, "Ghosts and Gibberings," Pall Mall Gazette, 8 April I89I; Shaw, Quintessence of Ibsenism»3rd ed.,(London:Constable,1922),87-90«^"Introductory," J.T.Grein, The World of the Theatre :Impressions a^d Memoirs. March 1920-21 (London;Heinemann,1921),vii.167On the whole, however, Ibsen’s influence in England does not appear to have been as direct during these early years as either V/agner’s or Maeterlincks, although few plays written after 1890 can be considered entirely free of "ibscenity," as the leader of the opposition, Clement Scott, dramatic critic for the Daily Telegraph, derogatorily described the uncompromising truths behind Ibsen’s plays. All, though many unwillingly, recognized what Ibsen had achieved with the raw material of the naturalists; and even his supporters found him uncomfortable at times. But whether scatalogical denunciation, witty disparagement,'5 4indignant moralizing,^ or unrestrained hero-worship, the reaction provoked by Ibsen was intense. ’’l'Ænism" and "anti-Ibsenism" became slogans. In fact, the enthusiasm of his admirers was equally if not more responsible than the antipathy of his detractors for the furore raised over Ibsen’s plays in England. The reasons put forward for this strong reaction were many, but they can with impunity be reduced to the propitious converging of the three essential elements of effective theatre; what the dramatist says, how he says it, and when he says it.As has already been described, the English theatre had for a number of years been slowly coming to terms with realism. The process, however, had remained so gradual that the audience had followed it each step of^Gosse, "Henrik Ibsen"(1873)> Northern Studies (London:Walter Scott,1890),58; Gosse, Ibsen (London;Hodder and Stoughton,1907),172; James Huneker, "Henrik Ibsen," Iconoclasts,12.2P. Anstey, Mr. Punch’s Pocket Ibsen (LondoniHeinemann,1895)5 J.M.Barrie, Ibsen’s Ghost; or, Toole up to Date,produced at Toole’s Theatre,50 May 1891; even the censor was inclined to dismiss Ibsen’s plays as "too absurd to do any harm," Shaw, Our Theatres,I,52-53.^Walter Besant’s sequel to A Doll’s House, "The Doll’s House — and After," English Illustrated Magazine, January 1890,315-25, to which, in turn, Shaw wrote a sequel and according to Shaw so did Eleanor Marx Aveling, Quintessence of Ibsenism,86nl.^Archer, "Ibsen and English Criticism," Fortnightly Review,46 (1 July 1889),30-37; Old Drama and the New,506-57.168/the way, remaining aware of the technique while appreciating the effect. Nor had any playwright arisen to challenge this audience control. Consequently, by sheer technical prowess alone the initial impact of Ibsen’s plays was unexpectedly powerful, and the spectator, caught off guard, was helpless to detach himself from the tragedy on the stage. Ibsen had discovered what Shaw was to learn from him, that if you want to convey meaning as well as entertainment, you must first learn to say it so subtly and yet so deftly that through sheer emotional force alone, your audience will listen, identify, and believe. Nor was it possible not to identify one’s self with the action of Ibsen’s plays, for the middle class spectator, accustomed to observe the antics of Pinero’s upper classes, watched with horror the enfolding of a tragedy that could easily have been his own. "Ibsen never presents his play to you as a romance for your entertainment,"Bernard Shaw pointed out. "He says, in effect, ’Here is yourself and myself, our society, our civilization. The evil and good, the horror and the hope of it, are woven out of your life and mine.'"^The actors and stage producers were prepared by the reformers who hadpalready entered the English theatre; the audience, confused and not prepared, was unable to distinguish between art and reporting, and could do nothing but beat the dog that threatened its own comfortable precepts of art and society. Less than twenty years later, the audience, this time the Dublin section, would react in the same way, and for many of the same reasons.This willingness on the part of the audience and critic to consider^Our Theatres in the Nineties,I,103. The reaction was no doubt heightened through the English misunderstanding of a society which has no aristocracy. One critic did try to lessen the impact of A Doll’s House by urging the public to look upon it as part of fairyland. The Athenaeum.15 June,1889,769-70.^See below, p. f Biff,^See below. Part Three, chapter169the selective realism of Ibsen’s plays as mere literal reporting was emphasized by two circumstances of production: first, the choiceof plays, and second, the necessity at first for private single performances. Of all Ibsen’s plays, those which were presented first to the English public were the ones most apt to rouse strong opposing views: Pillars of Society, A Doll’s House, Ghosts, Rosmersholm, and Hedda Gabier.^ These belonged to the period during which Ibsen was primarily concerned with the individual in his society, "with his social and personal morality, with the effects of his conduct at the bar of public opinion and to a greater or less degree also by his own conscience."2 This at a time when through the advances of science and philosophy all conventions were being challenged. Ibsen and especially his unfortunate heroine Nora became involved in the "moral earthquake," as Shaw dramatically put it, "which threatened to bring every suburban villa crashing to the ground in a hurricane of Feminism and Anti- Clericalism and anti-idealism."3 Here was one more example of the advanced liberal slamming the door of convention^Wbr were these early critics given the opportunity of re-assessing their first hasty reactions; this new "realism-symbolism" so neatly employed by Ibsen required, as has already been stated, much careful and painstaking unstitching in order that the craftmanship of the finished product might be recognized. Partly due to the wholesale condemnation of the critics, partly due to the single private performances, the strange never had the opportunity of becoming familiar. And Yeats, who was in London during the height of the reaction against Ibsen, remembered^Cf.Arne Kildal, "Chronological Bibliography," Speeches ^ New Letters.123-202; Archer, "Epilogue Statistical," The Theatrical "World" for 1897 (London:Walter Scott,1898),568.2Una Ellis-Fermor, Introduction to The Master Builders and other Plays (Penguin,1958),7 .^"An Aside," Myself and Kv Friends,?.170, this when, sixteen years later, he demanded and with force finally' received a "fair hearing" for Synge.^ There was a good deal to be2said for Shaw's plea for an Ibsen theatre.Another important factor contributing to the unwillingness of critics and audience to accept Ibsen was caused by the Ibsenites themselves. Drawn from the new aesthetic, naturalist, and Wagnerian coteries on the one hand, and from the socialist philosophers on the other, each group sought and found its own tenets in Ibsen, neglecting to a large or small extent the conscientious objectivity which Ibsen demanded of himself. The socialists, led by the dynamic and eloquent logic of Bernard Shaw, easily claimed him as their own,^ stating in defence that "the existence of a discoverable and perfectly definite thesis in a poet's work by no means depends on the completeness of his ov/n intellectual consciousness of it."4 The same treatment and explanation from the same hand we have already observed.5 The followers of the aesthetic movement, however, were not so willing to accept Ibsen wholesale, any more than they had Wagner. The symbolists, advocating "all its ^ ife*^ desires, and all the joys of living,"^ eagerly embraced Ibsen's doctrine of individual freedom, ignoring the attendant doctrine of individual responsibility. Nor did they wholly accept Ibsen's implication that prose could achieve the heights of poetry, no matter how much they might admire his subtle and^Letter to John Quinn,15 February 1905> Letters,448: "It will be a fight like that over the first realistic plays of Ibsen"; this was written before The Playboy was even conceived by Synge.2Quintessence of Ibsenism,206-10; "Wagner in Bayreuth,"English Illustrated Magazine, October 1889,49-57.^Cf.Ibsen's letter to Brandes, quoted by Gosse in "Ibsen's Social Dramas," Fortnightly Review,45 (l889),109: "The State is the curse of the individual,"etc.^Shaw, Preface to first edition of Quintessence of Ibsenism,xxii.5The Perfect Wagnerite, etc.^Symons, "Nora on the Pavement," London Nights (1895), Collected Works.I.173.171ingenious mastery of the stage.^ Symons preferred Wagner's method of expressing "the subconscious life" with heroic characters and "continuous, unresolved melody" to the "too probable people" of Ibsen's plays, who "speak a language exactly on the level of their desks and their shop-counters. Yeats, charitably admitting their aims in attempting to achieve a new theatre of beauty based on contemporary actuality to be similar, could not feel that the means justified the end. He recognized Ibsen as "the one great master the modern stage has produced,"5 and admired the "provincialism" of Ibsen's characters, the only excuse he would accept for writing about modern educated people,4 but could never forgive the "stale odour of spilt poetry"^ he sensed in Archer's "hygienic" translations.^ To Yeats, Ibsen's characters were imprisoned in their commonplace circumstances and everyday language,? although he grudgingly admitted that Ghosts "has its place among the necessary plays. The dramatist should cast the light of his conscience in dark c o r n e r s . S y n g e , on the other hand, while insisting upon realityy disowned the "joyless and pallid^Symons, "A Theory of the Stage," Plays Acting and Music;A Book of Theory(London;Constable.1909).205;"In the end beauty revenged itself upon him by bringing him to a no-man's land where there were clouds and phantasms that he could no longer direct."2Notes on V/agner at Bayreuth," Plays Acting and Music,310-11. 38amhain,1901,7.^"The Play of Modern Manners"(l906),Essays and Introductions,276.^"The Tragic Generation," Autobiographies,280^"Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends," A Vision,1937,35*7"The Play, the Player, and the Scene," Samhain,1904*0Interview with the San Francisco Examiner, 31 January I904.172v/ortfs" of Ibsen and Zola.^ However,inan unpublished farce written after The Playboy riots^he acknowledges that he and Ibsen were,a in his own manner, fighting for the same liberties. And surprisingly,AS possessed a copy of A Doll's House in 1891.3Martyn and Moore were far more generous in their praise of Ibsen, Moore, at this time still chief apostle of naturalism in England, had been profoundly impressed by Antoine's production of Ghosts, as we have seen, and hailed Ibsen as a modern Sophocles working on scientific principles:The tragedy of fate Ibsen has taken out of the empyrean of Olympus and hexameters, substituting the empyrean of science, and in the simple language of a plain Norwegian household, we learn that though there be no gods to govern us, nature, vast and unknown, for ever dumb to our appeal, holds us in thrall.4Appreciating Ibsen's dialogue^ more than any "message", Moore felt that"the psychological drama" of Ibsen was "the only possible literarydrama in the 19th century."^ Here at last wasthe unusual spectacle of human nature on the stage — human nature moving in its own strange, irregular metre, obeying the terrible logic of destiny, the calm and inscrutable logic which we catch sight of now and then working like a worm through the maze of inherited tendencies.'Converted to V/agnerism by Martyn, Moore also recognized the similarityin the public's reaction to both foreign giants: "Both were regarded^Preface to The Playboy of the Western World.2"National Drama: A Farce," Stephens MS., described in Greene and Stephens, J.M.Synge,150-51.^Gibbon, The Early Years of George Russell,115#^îoore, "Note on 'Ghosts,'", Impressions and Opinions,176.5Quoted by Goodwin, Conversations with George Moore,171:"There is only one man who can write dialogue, and that is Ibsen."Introduction to The Heather Field and Maeve,x.7"Our Dramatic Critics, " Pall Mall Gazette, 10 September 1891,2.173with oblique looks, and few were quite sure that the new music and the new drama were not an immorality, which it was perhaps the duty of the state to star.ip out. For Moore, this antipathy on the part of the public was one more reason to praise the combination of poet, philosopher, and dramatist he found in Ibsen as he and his colleagues had found it in Wagner.Martyn*s enthusiasm exceeded even the temporary extravagances of Moore, settling into a lifetime cult of "this greatest and most original of dramatistswhich, although providing a model for his own plays, eventually ousted him from the theatre he did so much to found. It is only natural that he appreciated in "the subtle, mighty Norwegian"^ those qualities he had most approved of in Wagner: "theeffect of a symphony where idea grows naturally from idea"3* where each theme is "exhibited, and made recur ^icj and explained, and coloured with turns which are like changes into varied keys"^; and where "outer action is all subordinate to the tremendous strife of wills and emotions, which work out to their inevitable conclusions with a mastery of art that intellectually delights a thinking audience."? Like Moore, also, IVIartyn recognized Ibsen's affinity with Greek drama.^ Even more than Moore, he saw in tie "the master"^ the^Introduction to The Heather Field and Maeve,viii.I^bid.ax.^Essay on Little Eyol'f. written about 1899» reprinted by Gwynn, Edward Martyn,142.'^ "Little Eyolf and The Lady from the Sea at the Theatrical Club," Irish Review II,25(February 1913)T^TT.5Essay on Little Eyolf, Gwynn,op.cit.,142.^Essay on The Lady from the Sea and Rosmersholm, about 1899,Gwynn,op.cit.,I4 8.?Ibid:.144.8Ibid.Cf.Moore, "Note on 'Ghosts'", Impressions and Opinions,I6 6.9Gwynn, op.cit.,147»174same "symphonic beauty"^ and music-drama he had found in Wagner, simply moving through another medium. Unlike Yeats, he approved of Ibsen's dialogue, "where subtle mental poetry finds expression in the most direct realism of speech"^; Martyn preferred this "invention" of "the drama of the mind."5 And again contrary to Yeats, Martyn envisaged in the work of Ibsen his ideal theatre, which should be "a centre of education and refinement like a museum or a picture gallery"4 as well as a palace of intellectual pleasure and beauty. "Every great drama, every work worthy to be thought Art, must be founded on some philosophical idea," he believed.3 And so it is only natural that Martyn should admire the "dramatic psychology coming in logical sequence" which separated Ibsen from "the miserable decadence of serious drama throughout England and America, and of course, worstof all, throughout Ireland,"^ "with its low aim at only making moneyby amusing the mob."7But although Martyn admired Ibsen's technique, he could not acceptoall of Ibsen's opinions, and disapproved of the later plays, finding even in Little Eyolf "the beginning of a decadence" that led Ibsen in When We Dead Awaken "almost to travesty his life work."9 It was those opinions, Martyn felt, that were responsible for such "monstrosities"^I l j id . . l 4 ? a 4 8 .^Ib id . . l 4 2 .^I b i d . . l 4 4 .^Preface to Paragraphs for the Perverse, Gwynn.op,clt.,l66.Preface to The All-Alone,vii.^Gwynn,op.cit.,143»7"The Recent Performance of Ibsen's Rosmersholm," Irish Review, III,36(February 1914)>660.0Gwynn,op.cit.,145»^Ibid..142-45.175as lirs. Warren *s Profession, among other modern "imitations" ofIbsen.1 Instead, he preferred the "beautiful prose poem drama" ofThe Lady from the Sea, Rosmersholm, The Master Builder, and LittleEyolf, and it is these plays that he chose as his models when he2came to 7/rite his own plays. In these plays also, Martyn found Ibsen’s most intense nationalism, which may have affected his choice of models, for Martyn, too, believed in internationalism throughnationalism.5The socialist colours have perhaps clung most firmly to Ibsen in England,^ but the early reaction to Ibsen was probably due more to the enthusiastic support of the aesthetic and naturalist movements. Eagerly accepting him as a powerful exponent of their cause (or, as in the case of Yeats, a co-opponent: "though v/e and he had not thesame friends, we had the same enemies"^), his champions aroused in the public the same distrust accorded themselves. As late as 1911 Shaw could still refer to Ibsen as "one of the curiosities of the coterie theatre" in England,^ and the tendency towards aloofness the aesthetes had always shovm, preferring to perfect their arts within a circle of aristocratic solitude, tinged Ibsen as well. Furthermore, he was a^Ibid.,146. Cf.similar criticisms of Shaw’s play by Archer, "Mr. William Archer disowns me because I ’cannot touch pitch without wallowing in it.*" Also J.T.Grein, Dramatic Criticism (London:JohnLong, 1904),IV,7-11.G^v/ynn, op.cit., 142;' cf. ibid., 118.^Ibid.,145: "I thought that I had developed something from £the art of IbsenJ in my Maeve...."^Cf. Harold Hobson, Sunday Times,22 November 1959: "His English admirers... regarding these works as calls to revolt against an evil society and vicious systems of ethics."5"The Tragic Generation," Autobiographies,279*^Preface to Three Plays by Brieux (London:A.C.Pifield,I9II)>xxx.176foreign dramatist, and could never be accepted with the same sympathy the general public (and even the actors) could muster for its own artists. And so we find the paradoxical situation of a dramatic skill so powerful the experience becomes personally uncomfortable, yet, even in translation and with English actors, retaining a mystery and foreign spirit which at times heightened the spectator's self-consciousness even more. Ibsen's effect in England, then, remained iconoclastic rather than remedial. After this "shattering collision,"1 drama was to start out in a different direction again, with the partnership of Shaw and Granvilie-Barker in the Court Theatre. Ibsen's influence " per se turned, instead, and followed Martyn, Moore, and Yeats to' Ireland./ /sLe Theatre de 1'Oeuvre Although Antoine's theatre was founded first in reaction to the conventional coimnercial theatres of Paris, it was Lugné-Poé's company, the Theatre de l'Oeuvre, which with its predecessor had in turn been founded as a protest against Antoine's naturalism, that attracted most attention among the "experimentalists" in England, The Theatre de l'Oeuvre had its roots in an earlier company the Theatre d'Art.Founded in I89O by the symbolist poet Paul Port (I872-I96O), the/ ATheatre d'Art for three years precariously held its own with productions of classics^ and unpublished modern symbolist dramas.^ As Antoine's theatre became the vehicle for the naturalists, Port's acted for the poets, abolishing all details that might interfere with the spoken word; and substituting symbolic designs which would blend with the poetry.^Shaw, "An Aside," Myself and my Friends,1.2Cf. Moore, Preface to The Bending of the Bough, Saturday Review,3 February I9OO.3Shelley's Cenci,Marlowe's Faustus, and an adaptation of the first book of the Iliad, among others.Mallarmé, Van Lerbergh, Verlaine, Rachilde, Maeterlinck, and Fort himself.177’ The spoken word creates the decor as it does all else....It isenough that the settings do not disturb the illusion and for that they must be very simple,read the I89O manifesto. Among the company of unpaid actors who2were in many cases more enthusiastic than experienced, was the young Lugne-Poe5 (who directed some of the productioni^ and in 1893, when the Theatre d'Art experiment disbanded, Lugne-Poe founded the Theatre de l'Oeuvre in order to continue the cosmopolitan and experimentalA X f tideas advanced by Port.^ The Theatre d'Art had introduced the earlier symbolist dramas of Ibsen to Paris, and Lugne-Poe followed tradition by opening his new theatre with Rosmersholm. From then on he introduced an impressive roll call of foreign dramatist, including Hauptmann, Schnitzler, d'Annunzio, Wilde, Synge, and Tolstoi. Among his most important contributions to French drama were productions of the works of Paul Claudel,5 Alfred Jarry, and Maurice Maeterlinck.^Alfred de Musset (1810-1857), whose plays were still being "discovered" among the files of ^ Revue des Deux Mondes as late as the 1880's, had led the revolt of the poets in the French theatre;Quoted by Marshall, The Producer and the Play, 25-26.^Amy Lowell, Six French Poets (NYrMacmillan,1915),280 quotesSarcey: "These studio farces took until two o'clock in the morningto finish."3 ' 'His real name is Auretien-Marie Lugne.^filler. Independent Theatres of Europe,75-76 et passim; Antoine, Le Théâtre,251-53.5 'Claudel's L'Annonce faite a Marie, a mystery play produced byLughe-Poe in 1912, was one of the theatre's greatest successes;bL Claudel's greatest influence on theatre has been in the twentiethcentury, after Maeterlinck's had waned. Cf. Martin Lamm, Modern Drama,trans. Karin Elliott(Oxford:Blackwell,1952),152-54*^ T g h A Belgian by birth, Maeterlinck wrote for the French theatre and with a French public in mind, although his work was strongly influenced by his experiences with Flemish peasants as a boy, and an apt comparison can be traced with the works of the Flemish painters, of. an early short story, "The Massacre of the Innocents," trans. in 1894, by Itrs. Edith Wingate Binder, and reprinted in The Dome,II, 1(January I 8 9 9),49-58• Cf.Alfred Sutro, introduction to Wisdom and Destiny (London;Allen and Sons,1910),xxi.178showing no concern either for theory or moral purpose, his plays represented perhaps the first attempt to free modern French drama from rigid structural and thematic techniques, blending playful fantasy with lyrical language.^ He was followed into the world of fantasy by the still more fantastic Alfred Jarry (1873-1909), who, by accepting the doctrines of the aesthetic school and then turning them upside down, produced in Ubu Roi a grotesque satire on the bourgeoisie which extended the boundaries of symbolical drama and at the same time achieved the immediacy and power of which symbolism in the theatre could be capable. Yeats, who was present at this first performance offers in his description some explanation for its rowdy reception:The players are supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they are all hopping like wooden frogs, and I can see for myself that the chief personage, who is some kind of King, carries for sceptre a brush of the kind that we use to clean a closet."Comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once more,"2 ■ he felt, not recognizing through the "gesticulation of a youngsavage of the woods"5 the same urgency and invention which wouldlead Yeats himself to more extreme and individual experiments. And,although Jarry intended to present a "Guignol," in a letter toLugne-Poe, later published as a preface to the play, he offerssuggestions which were to be eagerly adopted by later symbolists inthe theatre: the use of masks for principal roles; one catchallbackdrop to eliminate the curtain, and the introduction of a suitablycostumed figure to bring in signs indicating the scene, as in puppetshows; the substitution of one symbolic figure of "the mass" for^Cf. Maurice Clouard, Bibliographie des oeuvres d'Alfred de Musset (Paris:Romquette,1883).^"The Trembling of the Veil," Autobiographies,348-49.^Symons, Studies in Seven Arts,236-40* It might most aptly be called the Look Back in Anger of its decade.179crowds; the adoption of an accent or special tone of voice for the principal character; and costumes which would place the characters out of time and history.^ But Ubu Roi *s violence and force might well have prevented Yeats and Symons from momentarily recognizing their affinity with this strange young d r a m a t i s t , ^and instead they turned/ ' Ktheir attention to another symbolist playwright of the Theatre de l'Oeuvre, Maurice Maeterlinck.It was for these productions of the poetic, mysterious dramas of Maeterlinck that the Theatre de l'Oeuvre was chiefly known in England.^ The Belgian mystic, who, as we have seen, acknowledged Villiers de I'Isle Adam as his master in theory, was strongly influenced in his early plays by Axel; and the basis of his revolutionary conception of drama can be traced to the contempt for reality exhibited in Villiers' work, where even the events taking place on the stage are to be interpreted symbolically rather than at face value. Like other symbolists, he was dissatisfied with the "anachronistic" drama of the commercial stage, which he felt dated back "as many years as the art of sculpture',':Indeed, when I go to a theatre, I feel as though I were spending a few hours with my ancestors, who conceived life as something that was primitive, arid and brutal....I am shown... all the sublimity of tradition, but alas, how superficial and materialÎ Blood, surface-tears and death! V^hat can I learn from creatures who have but one fixed idea, and who have not time to live, for that there is a rival, or a mistress, whom it behoves them to put to death?Instead of this primitive picture of violence, Maeterlinck wished for "one of the strange moments of a higher life that flit unperceived through my dreariest hours"; for "the solemn voice of men and things, the voice that issues forth so timidly and hesitatingly, cannot be1 / **Jarry, letter to Lugne-Poe.1896,Ubu Roi(Paris;Revue Blanche,1900).2Cf. Shattuck. The Banquet Years,chapters 7 and 8. Ubu Roi was produced by the BBC Third Programme in their "Art — Anti-Art" series,23 February I96O.^Cf.Shaw's review of the company's visit in March 1895» Our Theatres in the Nineties,1,76-77, where he compares "the artistic superiority of M.Lugné-Poé's company to the Comédie Française."180heard amidst the idle uproar of acts of violence.For, as heexpressed in his mystical writings, it is in "passive silence" thatthe soul can he heard most clearly.^Like the other members of the aesthetic movement, Maeterlincktended to look to the past for justification, and advocated a returnto the "tragedies without movement" of Aeschylus. ^ He wanted, in fact,a static drama which would eliminate all unnecessary action and throwemphasis upon the language and the "inner dialogue" of silence.4I have grown to believe that an old man, seated in his armchair, w aiting patiently, with his lamp beside him, giving unconscious ear to all the eternal laws that reign about his house, interpreting, without comprehending, the silence of doors and windows and the quivering voice of the light, submitting with bent head to the presence of his soul and his destiny — an old man, who conceives not that all the powers of this world, like so many heedful servants, are mingling and keeping vigil in his room, who suspects not that the very sun itself is supporting in space the little table against which he leans, or that every star in heaven and every fibre of the soul are directly concerned in the movement of an eyelid that closes, or a thought that springs to birth — I have grown to believe that he, motionless as he is, does yet live in reality a deeper,more human and more universal life than the lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who conquers in battle, or "the husband who avenges his honour."5Many of these ideas came from Villiers de I'Isle Adam, but they reachedEngland through the frequent translations of Maeterlinck, and were readT"The Tragical in Daily Life," Treasure of the Humble, trans.Alfred Sutro(London;George Allen,1897)>101-103. Shaw, "Why forPuritans?", preface to Three Plays for Puritans.2"Silence," loc.cit.,5-7; see above, chapter^"The Tragical in Daily Life," op.cit.,107* Cf« "The Star," loc.cit.,143.4,iThe Tragical in Daily Life," op. cit. ,98,111. Cf. Aglavaine and Selysette(l897). trans. Alfred SutroXLondon;Allen & Hnwin%1908):"We are waiting for the silence to speak";‘"’look you, it is not only the ear that listens."5iiThe Tragical in Daily Life," op.cit. ,105-06.181and quoted with approval by Symons, Yeats, and Synge.^Maeterlinck's early plays might be considered a prologue to his philosophical writings.^ In them we see this emphasis on the contemplative life of the soul, the preoccupation with the mystery of life and death,^ the haunting shadow of Fate,4 man’s unsuccessful and incomplete efforts to reach out to the Infinite, and the uncertainty and insignificance of all that is tangible in the presence of the , great U n k n o w n . ^ And the preference Maeterlinck shared with Mallarmé for allusion and suggestion rather than direct statements of fact was reflected not only in the incoherent and childlike simplicity of many of his characters, but also in his choice of situation and scenery.The unattainable and unknown were represented on stage by an atmosphere of mystery through which the helpless characters stumbled towards their fate with mute cries, an atmosphere which would in turn react upon the emotions of the audience.^ Thus, in both L'Intruse and Les Aveugles^Yeats quotes directly from Treasure of the Humble in "The Return of Ulysses"(1896), Essays and Introductions,198; £f.also "The Autumn of the Body"(1898),op.cit.,189-194,"Emotion of Multitude"(19O3),0£.£it., 216, and "The Symbolism of Poetry"(19OO)*op«cit.,133-164» Cf. Plays, Acting and Music and Studies in Seven Arts, passim, for Symons's main comments on Maeterlinck. Synge refers with approval to Huysmans and Maeterlinck in his preface to The Playboy and reviewed Maeterlinck's La Sagesse et la Destinée for The Daily Express, 17 December 1898,5»^Le Tr^or des Humbles was not published until I896(translated I897). Serres Chaudes, a book of poems (I889), La Princesse IVÎaleine (I889, trans.1890). Les Aveugles and L'Intruse XÎ89O,trans. U.S.A.I89I,England 1892), Pelleas et Melisande (l892,trans.1892), Three Plays for Marionettes ; Alladine et Palomides, l'Intérieur, La Mort de Tintagiles (Ï894 trans.1899). In addition, he adapted Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a IVhore for the Théâ^tre de l'Oeuvre in 1895»^Cf. "The Star," op.cit.,123»4Ibid.,128;"fatality...is perhaps the distinguishing note of the new theatre."^Cf. Lamm, "The First Symbolists," Modem Drama, 132-78.^E.C.Hills, The Evolution of Maeterlinck's Dramatic Theory (Colorado College Publications, Language Series)l1,26(Apri 1 1907),30-53» £f.J.Y/.Mackail, Introduction to Aglavaine and ^lysette,xxiii.Symons, "A Theory of the Stage," Plays Acting and Music,206; "a visionary of moods....he has brought back mystery to the stage."182the audience was made to feel as one with the blind beings gropingthrough a Platonic cavern towards an unknown and perhaps fearsomereality. There is a similarity of character — whether nobility(Pelleas et Melisande) or peasant (Les Aveugles, L'Intérieur) — andof helpless situation, a repetitive use of scenery symbolizing mysteryand doom — towers, prisons, overhanging trees, stern cliffs, fountains,open windows (L'Intérieur), dark shadows— and a corresponding monotonyof speech and gesture.^Second in importance to the creation of an atmosphere of mysterywas dialogue, or rather, the "unexpressed" impression which Maeterlinck2attempted to convey through his almost inarticulate characters.Often the dialogue is reduced to a monotonous repetition of brokenphrases and seemingly prosaic utterances.^ The simplicity and thematicvariation of dialogue at times, however, is strongly reminiscent ofWagner^ (whom Maeterlinck knew through Villiers and Mallarmé), and atits most poetic approaches a heightened musical effect similar tovers libre. This antiphonal effect can perhaps be seen at its most%effective in Aglavaine et Selysette. Indeed, throughout his plays, despite his fondness for stock situation and scenery, Maeterlinck depends upon the voice to create his mood and give body to his characters, an interest which v/e shall see reflected in the aesthetic followers in England.In both theory and practice Maeterlinck's early work correspondsto the aesthetic school as seen in England and France. He acknowledges1 ySymons,"Annotations by the Way;Pelleas and Melisande," Plays Acting and Music,81. Cf. Jethro Bithell, Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck(London;Walter Scott,1913),33*2Sfjik. May Daniels, The French Drama of the Unspoken (Edinburgh P . ,1953),15-17 et passim.3Cf."Mystic Morality," The Treasure of the Humble,6l. A differentuse of this type of repetitious dialogue can be seen in recent realisticplays, for example, Arnold Wesker's Roots.Maeterlinck's theory that the poet is the true voice of the nation also approaches Wagner's, "The Star," op.cit.,125.185as early influences Villiers, Wagner, an^ j^ îMallarme; indeed his efforts to achieve a unity of impression bear some resemblance, both in technique and effect, to the "totality of effect" demanded by Edgar Allan Poe,^ Imodel for Mallarmé. For support of his theories he looked to worksof the past, especially, as has already been noted, the static drama. of the Greeks, and the chorus-like effect of much of his dialogue' reflects this debt; for subject-matter, on the other hand, he is2frequently indebted to medieval and celtic material, and one might even detect a similarity to the pre-Raphael!tes, especially in La Princesse Maleine. ^ Furthermore, Maeterlinck appeared to share withthe aesthetic movement a disregard for open communications with the’ y / "ordinary public, for none of his early plays except Pelleas et Melisande,■ produced by both Bernhardt and Duse, appear to have been successful onstage. The depersonalized tendency of plays emphasising atmosphere andthe inner life at the expense of character and humanity finally culmin-‘ ated in his "plays for marionettes" where he sees his "puppets against• the permanent darkness... [and] has given them supreme silences."4 Hischaracters, like Wilde's, are essentially puppets, dolls who "do notthemselves know what they are."5 And although Maeterlinck himself^Cf.Edgar Allan Poe, "The Philosophy of Composition," Poems and Essays of Edgar Allan Poe. Memorial ed.(NY:W.J:.Widdleton,1876),259-270.^Many of his characters' names are reminiscent of Mort Darthur.^Bithell,op.cit.,51,reports that at the time Maeterlinck was writing this play the walls of his study were covered with pictures taken from Walter Crane's books for children. Cf.H.Granvilie-Barker, introduction to Maurice Maeterlinck, Three Plays TLondon;Gowan and Gray,191l),vi.^Symons,"A Theory of the Stage," Plays Acting and Music,206.5Speech of the Old Man to the Stranger, Interior, trans. Wm.Archer (I894) Three Plays,op.cit.,65. Wilde's Salome, however, is a soulless doll.184claimed to be influenced moat strongly by Shakespeare,^ he more clearly reflects the "high seriousness" with which the members of the aesthetic movement tended to take themselves. His early plays are singularly lacking in humour, as are the early Yeats's, and it was not until later in such plays of fantasy as The Blue Bird that we find any trace of whimsicality, although these too, despite Yeats's denunciations,I»- were basically serious plays.Later Maeterlinck emphasised the human personality at the expense of "fatality," as we have seen in the development of his philosophy,*^ and turned towards Ibsen, Hauptmann, and Bj#nson.^ But it was his earlier work that won for him his reputation in France and England, and especially his ability to communicate the nouveau frisson the symbolists5felt belonged to art. Symons offered the following explanation for, the "ÎÆaeterlinck vogue," which was recognised even by the urbanely, severe critic Max Beerbohmj^I _ The desire of the West is after variety, but as variety is the\v/vv^ most tiring of all excesses, we are in the mood for welcoming anI ' experience in monotone. And therein lies the originality, therein] ■ also the success of Maeterlinck.•ij The single note of fear, the single method of repetition admired byI Symons,7 however, was not appreciated by George Moore, even though heI required the same nouveau frisson in the plays for his projectedj English Theatre-Libre. "All one need say about Maeterlinck is that heI ____________________________________________________________________________I ^Sutro, introduction'to V7isdom and Des tiny, xv.2Cf.letter to Lady Gregory, 9 December I909, Letters, 541-42;Plays and Controversies, 2l6.^See above, chapter 3, p./P^; V/.L.Courtney, The Development of Maurice Maeterlinck(London: Grant Richards,1904)>56-57•\laeterlinck. The Double Garden, trans. Alfred Sutro (London:George Allen & Sons, 1911), 105.^Symons, Dramatis Personae(Indianapolis;Bobbs-Merrill,1925),2?.^"Plays Repeated," Around Theatres (London:Hart-Davis,1955),94# Cf» Emile Verhaeren's Les Aubes,translated by Arthur Symons as The Dawn (London:Duckv/orth, 1898), which has the same "complaining of the nerves. " Also Mary Ward, "The Wanderers :(After Maeterlinck)", The Dome,III,8 (May 1899),115-19.7Dramatis Personae, 51*185invented a formula and worked it to death....Burne-Jones, like Maeterlinck, invented a formula which everyone understood. And everyone v/as entranced until they became bored."! Yeats, on the other hand, appreciated this monochrome of atmosphere, while at the same time he questioned "this touching the nerves alone...the lack of revery. "2G>lç]However, Maeterlinck as theorist and revolutionary,"who took the red bonnet from the hands of Villiers de I'Isle Adam,"5 [si(^ was "of immense value as a force helping people to understand a more ideal drama,"4 and as such was welcomed by the aesthetic writers in England.As theatre-fare Maeterlinck's plays were eminently suited to the revision in production that Port and Lugne-Poe were demanding. The artificiality of structure, mood, and characterization demanded a similar artificiality in stage production and a new approach to acting. In choosing settings.suggested^; distant time and place Maeterlinck had already indicated the type of staging he required; perhaps the device in L'Intérieur, where distance between audience and action is further emphasized by the double "fourth wall," illustrates most clearly the detachment and trance-like quality he demanded. Lighting effects could further enhance this dream-like atmosphere, but the most revo-ilutionary departure concerned the acting technique necessary for Maeterlinck's plays. Both Symons and Shaw describe the impact this new type of acting made on the contemporary audience. Since the words and silent atmosphere were all-important, action had to be reduced to a minimum. Reviewing a production of Pelleas et Melisande, Symons comments on "that fine monotony which is part of the secret of Maeterlinck," where the actors must submit passively "to the passing^Goodwin, Conversations with George Moore, 49nl.2Letter to Olivia Shakespear, 7 April 1895, Letters,255; review of Aglavaine and Sëïysette in The Bookman,September 1897,155*^Review of The Treasure of the Humble, The Bookman, July 1897,94* ^Letter to Olivia Shakespear, 7 April 1895, Letters,255*186through them of profound emotions, and the betrayal of these emotions in a few, reticent, and almost unwilling words."!z/'"In the Theatre de l'Oeuvre there is not merely the ordinary theatrical intention, but a vigilant artistic conscience in the diction, the stage action, and the stage picture, producing a true poetic atmosphere, and triumphing easily over shabby appointments and ridiculous incidents,"pcommented the even more perceptive Shaw.^ Twelve years later Joseph Holloway commented in similar vein on the Abbey Theatre production of Interior;The players have to deport themselves like puppets speaking in awed whispers, any tone with a touch of nature in it would knock the whole dream-scheme out of focus, and give away the unreality of the poet's weird imaginings.^This emphasis on the stage pictures of static drama and thedelicacy and clarity of speech required by the word-music takes usback once more to Wagner. In describing a visit to Bayreuth, Symonscomments on the "grave regulated motion of the actors":No actor makes a gesture which has not been regulated for him; there is none of the intelligent haphazard known as being "natural"; these people move like music, or with that sense of motion which it is the business of painting to arrest.4Even the technical devices employed by Wagner at Bayreuth could beapplied to these early plays of kîaeterlinck:Distance from the accidents of real life, atmosphere, the space for a new, fairer world to form itself, being of the essence of V/agner's representation, it is worth noticing how adroitly he throws back this world of his, farther and farther into the background, by a thousand tricks of lighting, the actual distance of the stage from the proscenium, and by such calculated effects, as that long scene of the Graal, with its prolonged movement and ritual, through the whole of which Parsifal stands motionless watching it all.^splays,Acting and Music,81.2 / t, rReview of Lugne-Poe's productions of L'Intruse and Pelleas et Melisande, March 1895, Theatres in the Nineties,I,77.^Holloway Diaries, MS 1805, National Library of Ireland,l68.^"On Crossing Stage to Right," Plays,Acting and Music,167.5"The Lesson of Parsifal," pp.cit.,504-05.187Substitute the old man for Parsifal, and we have the situation ofrL'Intérieur and L'Intruse.r •* /ALugne-Poe's Theatre de l'Oeuvre had in turn its own offspring.J.T.Grein, in his theatre magazine. To-morrow, mentions yet anotherart theatre which had even more abstract aims, the "House of Art"in Brussels, founded by a group of writers and artists, its aim:To seek and express these things above the common life of art, the ideas, the work, and the men who, lifting themselves above daily routine, point the way to regions yet unexplored, instead of following the beaten path or living in a land already known.The theatre produced plays in the Hotel de Ville, Brussels, and thegeneral manager, M.William Picard, who chiefly directed the scenery2and stage setting, was a well-known v/riter and publisher.But it was directly through Lugne-Poe that the influence of the aesthetic theatre was felt in England, for his work was an important link both with the tradition of foreign plays and a similar new movement in the English theatre. In 1895 the Independent Theatre, now a limited society, offered official hospitality to the Theatre de l'Oeuvre productions of Rosmersholm, Solness le Constructeur, L 'Intruse, and Pelleas et Melisande.? The following year Lugne-Poe was againinvited to ^ngiand, this time by William Poel, one of the first\theatrical producers to emphasize the need of a new approach to speech and a simplified stage production. For many years Poel had advocated a more literary approach to drama, especially to Shakespeare, and for this purpose had founded a Shakespeare Reading Society which concentrated on a "back to the text" attitude towards Shakespeare's plays.In 1894 he had interested a sufficiently large group to found the Elizabethan Stage Society, which specialized in productions of Elizabethan plays in a sincere attempt to reproduce conditions and^To-Morrow,III.6(June 1897),545-49- 2Cf. Revue indépendante,to which most aesthetes contributed, including Swinburne and Moore.^Cf. Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties,I,76-77.188• 72 ejk passim. Poel qualified this statement: "Poetry in drama must be subservient to incident and character," article in The Contemporary Review, November I915, quoted by Speaight,op.cit.,89.^Ibid..62.I ' :J189at Stratford in 1908.^ Robert Speaight describes Poel'sorchestration for Twelfth Night, produced in 1897 by the E.S.S.:Viola (Mezzo Soprano), Olivia (Contralto), Sebastian (Alto),Antonio (Basso Profundo), Sir Toby (Bass), Sir Andrew (Falsetto), Malvolio (Baritone), Maria (High Soprano), Orsino (Tenor),Clown (Tenor).^Less than ten years later George Moore pointed out that the sameprinciple could be followed for Synge's Well of the Saints.^Poel's insistence on the importance of verse-speaking and uponsimplicity and dramatic fidelity in production was followed by amovement from the poets themselves. But whereas Poel concentratedon the professional stage, the small group led by Yeats, John Todhunter,T.Sturge Moore, Arthur Symons, Edith Craig, Robert Bridges, andFlorence Farr was striving for a "theatre of beauty" which would appealto the understanding few. As has already been mentioned, there hadbeen a few isolated attempts to reintroduce verse drama to thepopular stage, but none of them departed from the traditional form ortheory of stagecraft.'^ The "higher drama" this new order was seeking,vi on the other hand, would first appeal to "the refined and cultivatedand well-read, elaborating piece by piece its convention, thenwidening its range and gathering converts slowly among the many likea new book, not going to the publib, but drawing them to i^elf."5Like Poel, they aimed at a unity of effect, although in their desirefor a "triumph of beauty" which would "illustrate the reveries of awisdom," they were more akin in spirit to Maeterlinck. As an exampleof this "new drama of wisdom," Yeats as self-appointed apologist forthe group, pointed to the poetic dramas of,Robert Bridges, and in -Letters of Miss Horniman to Yeats and Sarah Allgood, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats. Lillah McCarthy, Myself and my Friends,293-95, describes Poel's production of Gilbert Murray's translation of The Bacchae. Cf. Speaight, op.cit.* 170-71 *^Ibid.,111.^Lennox Robinson,I Sometimes Think(Publin;Talbot Press,1956),48.^Cf.,however, J.B.Yeats's letter to Vf.B.Yeats 20 December 1900, J.B, Yeats Letters,64,on Tree's production of Phillips' HerodfT do think that the staging...gave opportunities which,tho' all missed, are still opportunités." The italics are his.^Yeats,"The Children of Lir,"Providence Smiday Journal,10 February 1889,reprinted in Letters to the New Island,175-76.r I I 4I'Tfui'zt/190Achilles in Scyros, The Return of Ulysses, and Prometheus he praisedthe "great tide of song" which flowed "through delicate dramatic verse."!2But Bridges’ plays never found the theatre they required, and the first member to achieve production was Ur. John Todhunter, a leading figure in the little playhouse at Bedford Park, where his Helena in Troas was produced in 1888. Although he v;as later to dismiss Helena in Troas as "an oratorical Swinburnian play"^ with the appeal more of "a scholar to the scholarly,"4 Yeats was however impressed by the "semi-religious effect new to the modern stage" which Todhunter achieved through his "sonorous verse, united to the rhythmical motions of the white-robed chorus, and the solemnity of burning incense."5 In 1890 Todhunter followed his first experiment with A Sicilian Idyll, the pastoral theme apparently suggested by Yeats,^ who by this time was becoming actively involved in the productions at the Bedford Park Clubhouse.^ Once more, he felt, the play appealed to "that circle of cultivated people who remain faithful to the rightful Muses, andohave not bowed the knee to those two slatterns, farce and melodrama." ^Ibid..l75.^Cf. Yeats's letter to Bridges,7 December I896, Letters, 268;"The Return of Ulysses(I896),Essays and Introductions,198-202.Autobiographies,120."^ "The Children of Lir," op.cit. ,175*^"A Sicilian Idyll," Boston Pilot,14 June I89O, reprinted in Letters to the New Island, op.cit.,115-114*^"The Theatre"(I899), Essays and Introductions,l65;Autobiographies,120.7çf. Preface to Letters to the New Island, vii.®"A Sicilian Idyll"(l890), op.cit..114.191(Seventeen years later he was to use the same phrasing and tone inhis defence of the artist against the public).^ Yeats notedespecially how the "beautiful scenery and picturesque costumes"contributed, along with the choice of subject, to the "mood that lifts2the play out of the dust of common life and makes it poetry." Andthe following year, still intrigued by the idea of a new verse formfor the stage, he observed of The Poison Flower, "Much of this charmis in the play itself, but some comes, undoubtedly, from the form — fromthe greater compression and suggestiveness that gives verse its advantageover prose as a dramatic v e h i c l e . Y e a t s ' s final comments on thesetwo plays indicate his o.m early demands for a theatre of poetry:This time he has had nothing to rely upon but dramatic poetry soundly acted; and he has gone near enough to success to make it seem probable that we shall yet have a genuine public, however small, for poetic drama, and that we may see once more the work of poetsm^of heroic passion and lofty diction, instead of commonplace sentiments uttered in words which have at the very best no merit but successful mimicry of the trivial and unbeautiful phraseology of the streets and the tea table. We may again — for genius can never be exhausted — experience dramatic movements mighty as the last agony of FaustusClearly this "higher drama" must be apart from the ordinary subjectsof life, and as such directly opposed to the theatre of the realists:We must go to the stage all eagerness like a mob of eavesdroppers and to be inspired, not amused, if modern drama is to be anything else than a muddy torrent of shallow realism.^The audience was not to be catered to, but developed:^Cf. his speech to the audience over The Playboy riots, below.Part Three, chapter^"A Sicilian Idyll," op.cit..116-17.^"A Poetic Drama," Providence Sunday Journal.26 July I89I, reprinted in Letters to the New Island,220.'^Ibid..217-lS.^"The Children of Lir," Providence Sunday Journal. 10 February 1889, reprinted in Letters to the New Island,175-76.192People needed, coming in fresh from the trivialities of the world of shops and tea tables, the "once upon a time" that begins the make believe of fairy tales....Once get your audience in that mood, and you can do anything v/ith it.!Ten years later the same principle was practised by the Irish LiteraryTheatre; "We went on giving what we thought good until it becamep o p u l a r . I n 1895 the Independent Theatre produced Todhunter*sThe Black Cat ^and finally Yeats himself joined the ranks of producingplaywrights, when in 1894 his play The Land of Heart's Desire wasproduced by Florence Farr at the Avenue Theatre as a curtain-raiserfirst to Todhunter's The Comedy of Sighs and later to Shaw’s Arms andthe Man.4This new approach to the drama in England demanded, then, first a new method of speaking verse, and secondly, a different attitude towards stage decoration. Yeats became directly involved in experiments in both. Prominent among the speech reformers was Miss Florence Farr [Mrs. EmerjJ , ^who had acted in Todhunter's pastoral drama, A Sicilian Idyll and impressed Yeats by her beautiful speech, which gave the poetry "a nobility, a passionate austerity that made it akin for certain moments to the great poetry of the world." "I had discovered for the first time that in the performance of all drama that depends for its effect upon beauty of language, poetical culture may be more important^"The Poison Flower," Boston Pilot,1 August 1891, reprinted in Letters to the New Island,154»2Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre,105» Cf. Shaw, Gur Theatres in ths Nineties,I,94-95,267-68; "Giving the Public what it Doesn't Want — Yet," The Times,26 November 1959»^Produced at the Opera Comique, 8 December 1895; Ellis-Fermor, Appendix 4» Irish Dramatic Movement,lists the date of production as1894.^Todhunter's play was not a success, so was replaced by Shaw's.Cf. Yeats, Autobiographies,280-85.15Described by Ricketts in his diary in I9OI as "a good-natured middle-aged actress,...who has appeared in countless efforts to stage Ibsen, Shaw, etc.". Self Portrait,65.193than professional experience," he commented later.^ Convinced thatMiss Parr had "the most beautiful voice on the English stage"^ andbecoming increasingly sensitive as a poet to the haphazard andinaudible manner in which verse was spoken, Yeats experimented withher in an attempt to develop some universal method of declaiming whichcould be musically annotated and thereby passed on to the others.^Miss Farr, who like Yeats was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn,strove in her experiments to achieve the "really magical powerwhichYeats felt was essential to great poetry:The more a poet rids his verse of heterogeneous knowledge and irrelevant analysis, the more he purifies his mind with elaborate art, the more does the little ritual of his verse resemble the great ritual of nature, and become mysterious and inscrutable.He becomes, as all the great mystics have believed, a vessel of the creative power of God.5To aid her in these efforts, Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch, a specialist insixteenth and seventeenth century music as well as a noted instrument—maker,^ invented a thirteen-stringed instrument attuned to her vocalrange.7 And to the accompaniment of this psaltery, as the instrumentwas called. Miss Farr illustrated her method, and Yeats justified inessays and lectures this "revival of a lost art."® Their partnership - .Autobiographies,121.2"The Play, the Player, and the Scene," Plays and Controversies,131.%The Music of Speech, containing the words of some poets, thinkers and music-makers regarding the practice of the Bardic art together with fra,gments of verse set to its own melody by Florence Farr (London:Elkin Matthews) 1909. In her dedication she refers to Yeats "who suggested to me the notation of speech."^Florence Parr, "Music in Words," Musical World, I5 September I906, reprinted in The Music of Speech...,17-21.^Yeats,"Mr.Robert Bridges," The Boolonan,June 1897>65. Of.letter to AE,November 1899, Letters,327.^Arnold Donington, Work and Ideas üf Arnold Dolm&ia&h(Has 1 emere : Dolmetsch Foundationl952).7Farr,letter to the Editor, The Outlook,reprinted in The Music of Speech...,16-17. ÎÆrs.Patrick Campbell also ordered a psaltery from Dolmetsch.®Letter to Bridges.20 July 1901,Letters,384; to Lady Gregory,22 December 1901,op.cit. ,3o2. Even Williajg. Archer was carried away by this idea,cf.quotation from a review written in May 1902, in The Music of SpeecET..,2-3.194continued for some twenty years, and in 1909 Yeats was still sufficiently involved in the experiments to write to her of "our method."1Anxious like his contemporaries to justify his theorieshistorically, Yeats explained their efforts as:"an attempt to get back to primitive folk music. You must always go back to folk art if you want to get any real art at all; then you must bring your folk art into sympathy with the thought of the age. The greatest of all arts I hold to be the art of speech, and its secret has been lost for centuries. Greeks understood it; and we are trying to go back to the regulated declamations of the Greeks... .Y/e want to make the words live, and restore the art of impassioned speech."2For a modern example of this "folk-singing," Yeats refers to thetraditional Irish singing of the country-women, whospeak their little songs precisely as Miss Farr does some of hers, only with rather less drama....I imagine men spoke their verse first to a regulated pitch without a tune, and then, eager for variety, spoke tc* tunes which gradually became themselves the chief preoccupation until speech died out in music.^Later he was to distinguish between Sara Allgood’s singing method andFlorence Farr's, the one more closely allied to folk-singing,"beautifully humble and simple, whereas Florence Farr's was Greek anda r r o g a n t "4; but the historical reference remained. Looking towardsmore modern examples, Yeats again found justification from others."Even the music of Aucassin and Nicolette, with its definite tune, itsrecurring pattern of sound, is something more than declamation," heco m mented.5 And in a letter to Miss Farr in 1909 he speaks with^arch 1909, Letters,526. For descriptions of Miss Farr's recitals, see W.G.Pay, "The Poet and the Actor," Scattering Branches,120-24; St. John Ervine, George Bernard Shaw,I6O-6I; John Masefield, ^ Long to Learn (London:Heinemann,1952),128.2Interview with Miss Farr and Yeats reported in the Illustrated Standard, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats.^Letter to the Editor, The Academy,? June 1902,Letters,373-74.^Commentary on "The Great Clock Tower," The King of the Great Clock Tower(Dublin:Cuala,1934),15-19.5Plays and Controversies,185./195pleasure at having discovered in a book by Coventry Patmore the same theory.^PLike most poets, Yeats had his own method of chanting verse, stressing the rhythm and extending the vowels in a "wavering ecstatic song"^ which differed considerably from Poel's ideas but was essentially similar to Miss Parr's.'^ If this method could be recorded as he suggested to Miss Parr, then the fixing of pitch would, he felt, give "more delicacy and beauty to the 'personal interpretation,* for it leaves the speaker free to preoccupy himself with the subtlest modulations. In theory and aim, then Yeats and Miss Farr were attempting to achieve on a personal lyric scale what Wagner had earlier tried to do on a grand opera scale. Both justified their theories with the same basic beliefs — an emphasis on the essential mysticism of the arts, the necessity for the union of those arts, and an insistence that the new method be founded on a return to folk-art itself in which present culture, they felt, was so deeply rooted. Nor were these experiments limited to the Yeats-Farr researches. In 1902^March 1909,Letters,326. The book he refers to is Poems by Coventry Patmore,2nd collective ed.(London: George Bell,1886),II,252-35*2Lillah McCarthy, Myself and My Friends,35, describes Swinburne's "choric chant." Masefield, So Long to Leam, 128, describes Y/illiam Morris* reading, and suggests that Yeats may have first received the idea from him.^Masefield, Some Memories of W.B.Yeats,13* Lennox Robinson, "The Man and the Dramatist," Scattering Branches,62 also describes Yeats's reading, as does W.S.Blunt, Diaries. Part Two. 1900-1914(London: Martin Seeker,1920),28. his own description in a broadcast in 1936,repprinted in Essays:1931-1936(Dublin:Cuala,1937),28-29, Standish O'Grady, All-Ireland Review, 8 November 1902,388, reports on Yeats' lecture on speaking to the psaltery.^Robert Speaight, William Poel and the Elizabethan Revival,95*In an unpublished letter to Yeats,19 March 1908, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats, Miss Horniman' quotes William Poel: "He said that you are inclined to make people speak Shakespeare in a way which is only suitable for your own verse. He considers that your versedepends much on metre." See below. Part Three, Chapter 9*p fff f&.^Yeats, letter to the Editor of The Academy, 7 June 1902,Letters,373-74*U ) ( ! | j; î A - » • - - ' 1 9 6H3Yeats refers to the experiment of AE, who had "got a musician to record little chants with intervals much smaller than those of modern music. Edith Sitv/ell's Facade was based on the same theory, and more recently young composers such as Humphrey Searle, Matyas Seiber, and Marc Wilkinson have set the works of Eliot, Joyce, and Beckett to music, incorporating the speaking voice as one of the "instruments."2 It. was perhaps only natural that Yeats, whose earliest publications evinced an interest in poetry for the theatre of beauty^ should apply these theories of speaking verse to the related art of acting, as we shall see in his efforts to develop a literary theatre in Dublin.^And again he turned to Florence Farr for an example of the grave, rhythmical gestures he required in his poetic dramas. But perhaps even more important to him was his search for a new type of stage decoration that "might keep the scenery from realism,thereby concentrating all attention on the poetry. Again he was influenced in his search by the work of two artists who were also seeking a "Theatre of Beauty," Edward Gordon Craig and Charles Ricketts.Edward Gordon Craig (b.l8?2)Craig, a theatrical innovator of Wagnerian stature, not onlyÏreflected but influenced many of Yeats's ideas of the theatre. Famous son of a famous actress, he did not enter the theatre from the stalls as Yeats did; he began as an actor, playing his first role in 1883, and it was not until 1897 that he turned seriously to production. Consequently his early experience, especially the influence of Henry^Samhain,1902,3•2Cf. the Macnaghten concert of modern music, reported in The Times, 12 December 1959,9; the experiments by Christopher Logue in poetry with a jazz backing^the new group "Music To-day."^See below. Part Three, Chapter 9*^Cf. letter to J.B.Yeats, 21 July 1906,Letters,475-76.Yeats's preface to Letters to the New Island,ix-x.197Irving;! clarified many of the physical problems of the stage v/hichremained an enigma to Yeats, who knew what he wanted but in the earlydays did not have the practical experience his theories required."Fundamentally I am a producer and an actor, not a theorist," Craiginsists. "I acted and produced long before I dreamed of enunciatingany theory — even to myself."2 Just as important to the evolutionof Craig's theory and approach to the stage picture was his interestin the work of his father, E.W.Godwin, whose papers on the architectureand costuming of Shakespeare's plays had been published in the 1870's.^Like Wagner, Craig aimed at a union of the arts, all of them devotedto the Theatre of the Future :The Art of the Theatre...consists of all the elements...: action, which is the very spirit of acting; words, which are the body ofthe play; line and colour, which are the very heart of the scene;rhythm, which is the very essence of the dance.4Nor could this unity be possible while the authority and experiencein the theatre remained divided:The relation of the stage director to the actor is precisely the same as that of the conductor to his orchestra, or of the publisher to his printer.^Like the aesthetic school in general, he was concerned with the unity of effect acquired only through the harmony of "spirit and m a t t e r , a^Edward Gordon Craig,Henry Irving(London;Dent,1958),25 et passim; Craig, On Eight Pages for "The Story of the Theatre" by Glenn Hughes with some Fourteen Notes by Edward Gordon Craig(Seattle:U.of Washington Book Store,193l),13.2Craig, On Eight Pages....,11-12."After the practice the theory" was the slogan of The Mask,founded in Florence in I9O8 by Craig.3The Architect, cf.Janet Deeper, Edward Gordon Craig (Penguin,1948), 21. Some of these essays were reprinted in The Mask.^Craig,The Art of the Theatre(Edinburgh and London:T.N.Foulis,I905),17-18;cf.Craig, A Production:Being Thirty-Two Collotype Plates of Designs Projected or Realised for "The Pretenders" of Henrik Ibsen Produced at the Royal Theatre Copenhagen 1926(London; GUP,1930),17.^The Art of the Theatre,26; _cf.Craig's instructions to the young actor, "The Artists of the Theatre of the Future, " The Ivlask, l(l908),60:"the ideal stage manager.... the nature of his position should make him the most important figure in the whole world of the theatre."^Craig, Towards a New Theatre (1912),quoted by Deeper,op.cit.,44»198union of the various theatre arts. Consequently he felt no need toconform to the established form or pattern of the commercial theatre:I let my scenes grow out of not merely the play, but from broad sweeps of thought which the play has conjured up for me, or even other plays by the same author have conjured up....We are notconcerned with short cuts. We are not concerned with what is tobe effective and what is to pay.... Therefore approach it from all sides, surround it, and do not let yourself be attracted away by the idea of scene as an end in itself, of costume as an end in itself, or of stage management or any of those things, and never lose hold of your determination to win through to the secret..., the secret which lies in the creation of another beauty.!The "Theatre of Beauty" Craig sought could not be achieved bythe naturalist method attempted by the modern commercial theatre."I don't want to imitate man or Nature or anything else on the boardsof a theatre," he insisted. "I want to create a new world there —not to copy the real world imperfectly."2This tendency towards the natural has nothing to do with art.... the naturalistic stepped in on the stage because the artificial had grown finicking, insipid;...but do not forget that there is such a thing as noble artificiality.3And so the producer should ignore "any attempt to show the spectatorsan exact view of some historical period of architecture....all the greatplays have an order of architecture of their own, an architecture whichis more or less theatrical, unreal as the play."4 Craig's idealtheatre would replace such concern for detail v/ith atmosphere :Once let the meaning of this word "Beauty" begin to be thoroughly felt once more in the theatre, and vie may say that the awakening day of the theatre is near. Once let the word "effective" be wiped off our lips, and they will be ready to speak this wordBeauty.5Hov/ever, unlike the aesthetes who sought an art for the few, Craig was sufficiently a man of the theatre to desire, a theatre for the many.^"The Artists of the Theatre of the Future,"on.cit.,63-64»^A Production,15»^"The Artists of the Theatre of the Future,"op.cit.,65»^A Production,16.^"The Artists of the Theatre of the Future,"op.cit.,65-66.199Consequently the spectacle was more important than the v/riter'sintentions if the author becomes "complex and difficult." "I haveto consider the whole public," he insists, "— not the more advanced,intellectual, section of it alone."! And so he blames the poet aswell as the naturalist for the problems in the theatre:The reason why the theatre is being kept back to-day is becausethe poet is pulling one way, saying they should only be givenwords; and the people are pulling the other way, saying they desire to see the sights, realistically or poetically shown, not turned into literature.^"The theatre must show them sights, show them life, show them beauty,and not speech in difficult sentences."3 The producer, or "stagedirector," should first "perceive things feelingly rather thanthinkingly," and then "think out a method of making clear to thespectators" what he has felt and seen.4This unity of effect which Craig was attempting in the theatrewas based essentially on the balance and proportion of line, space,light, shade, and colour. Although he made no effort to create realismof detail, he insisted upon stage design which would create theillusion of depth and proportion that were essential to his plan. Inhis productions, therefore, although he depended upon simplicity andproportion to gain this desired atmosphere, he demanded first athree-dimensional rather than the standard two-dimensional scenery,and second, an authentic richness of material and substance far beyondthe reouirements of the ordinary "realistic" productions of the mostlavish commercial theatre. The first requirement led him to theinvention of a set of "screens" which could replace the conventionalscenery; the second led him to experiments with lighting and colourand materials.^A Production,?»^The Art of the Theatre,11-12.^The Art of the Theatre,11. 4a Production,7-8»200Theoretically, ruined architecture would always he better for the actor than a perfect palace, because when a building is ruined it becomes more dramatic, less stilted, and you can see right through two, three, or four rooms and five passages to the furthest wall,he explained.1 If the artist were to go one step further, therefore, and eliminate permanent sets altogether, this would in turn give the actor even more freedom. Working on this principle, Craig designed a set of screens which could be moved about to form different patterns on the stage and through the use of light and shadows create the various impressions and atmosphere demanded by the scene. These screens could be moved in a few moments to create a new scene without the necessity of a drop curtain. ^ And, by being shaped into turrets, walls or forests as necessary, could convey an impression of solidity impossible with the canvas sets of the ’’realistic” theatre.^ But at the same time, by stretching into infinity, "hovering, hiding, advancing, retreating,they helped create the impression of timelessness and motion in space a work of art demands. In order to illustrate this principle of "place," Craig designed a model stage on which he could then experiment with movable painted pieces of cardboard and a candle for lighting until he achieved the effect he desired. ^Similarly, Craig experimented with colour and lighting. At a lecture on "The Reform of the Theatre," given at the time of his productions for Ellen Terry of The Vikings and Much Ado about Nothing in 1905» Craig illustrated his ideas about stage lighting and design on a small model theatre v/hich much impressed W.G .Fay, who describes this "scene in a new style":^Ibid..8.2These screens were successfully employed for The Pretenders, cf.A Production,17-18 and Plate XVII, and for The Hour Glass at the Abbey, cf. Maire Nie Shuibhlaigh and Edward Kenny, The Splendid Years(Dublin; Duffy, 1935)> 34- The use of the screen's is described in Deeper,op.cit.,18-20. See illustration page 204 b^ s-lcfw.^Cf. Eric Bentley, In Search of Theater(NY:Vintage,1934)<217« ^Letter from Edward Gordon Craig, 27 February I96O.A Production,13; Yeats, Preface to Plays in Prose and Verse (London;Macmillan,1922),vi-vii.201It was a simple horizon cloth with some rock and trees in the foreground, painted in monochrome, but lit in three different colours. For the first time it produced a feeling of atmosphere in stage lighting.^He concentrated on the impression of the stage as a whole rather thanon details alone, as illustrated in his design for The Masque of Love,produced in 1901, described in detail by Arthur Symons:Mr. Craig.,.has a genius for line, for novel effects of line....he works in squares and straight lines, hardly ever in curves. He drapes the stage into a square with cloths; he divides these clothsby vertical lines, carrying the eye straight up to an immenseheight, fixing it into a rigid attention. He sets squares of pattern and structure on the stage; he forms his groups into irregular squares, and sets them moving in straight lines, which double in themselves like two arms of a compass; he puts square patterns on the dresses, and drapes the arms with ribbons thathang to the ground, and make almost a square of the body when thearms are held out at right angles. He prefers gestures that have no curves in them; the arras held straight up, or straight forward, or straight out sideways....He links his groups by an arrangement of poles and ribbons, something in the manner of a maypole; each figure is held to the centre by a tightly stretched line like the spoke of a wheel.^Paying special attention to texture, he furthered the effect of line andcolour through his choice of materials :Most of the costumes...were made of sacking, stitched roughly together. Under the cunning handling of the light, they gave you any illusion you pleased, and the beggars of the masque were not more appropriately clothed than the kings and queens. All had dignity, all reposed the eye,Symorfis description continues.5 And Craig’s screens were designed fordifferent materials depending on the effect required.^Frequently in his early productions Craig achieved this atmosphere^W.G.Fay, "The Poet and the Actor," Scattering Branches,133-34>^Arthur Symons, "A New Art of the Stage:(i)"(1902), Studies ' in Seven Arts,226. Cf. James Huneker’s description of The Vikings, Iconoclasts,32.^Symons, "A New Art of the Stage," op.cit.,224.^Letter to the present writer from Edward Gordon Craig, 27 February I96O.202/by lighting effects at the expense of the actors, who were left in shadow without footlights to balance the downward lighting and shadow effects.^ His ideas for the time being had outstripped his facilities, and it was not until he left England and went to Germany that he foundpthe technicians who could visualize his aims. Frequently also the broad sweeping lines of his scenery tended to dwarf his characters out of proportion.5 However here at last was the artist in the theatre who could create the "new and distinct art" Yeats required, staging which "cannot even be separated from the figures that move before it."And the "severe, beautiful, simple effects of colour"^ which Craig achieved through his materials and lighting^ left the imagination "free to follow all the suggestions of the p l a y . " T h e movement of the actor, and the graduation and the colour of the lighting," Yeats came to believe, "are the two elements that distinguish the stage picture from an easel painting"^; and in Craig's work lay the answer to his own problems ofQstage design and decoration. Further, it can safely be assumed that^Hudson, The English Stage.156; "The downward shadow cast on the actors* faces by the Vikings* voluminious headgear made facial play ineffective."Production.14. The Swiss stage designer, Adolphe Appia (1862-1928) was meanwhile experimenting with electric lighting for Wagner * s operas at Bayreuth. Like Craig, but independently of Craig, he too concentrated on lines and shadows. Cf. Craig, On Eight Pages....10-11. Yeats read of Appia*8 work, but felt he was seeking "a more perfect realism." Cf. Letter to T.Sturge Moore, Correspondence.187 and Samhain.1904.33.^"The Artists of the Theatre of the Future," op.cit..6l.Cf.Leeper. op.cit..especially plates 9>17>20,21,25 and illustration page 204^Yeats, Letter to the Editor, The Saturday Review. 5 March 1902, - Letters.566.^Yeats,"At Stratford-on-Avon"(1901).Essays and Introductions.100-101 : "Gordon Craig's purple backcloth that made Dido and Aeneas seem wandering on the edge of eternity.'''^Letter to editor of The Saturday Review. 5 March 1902, Letters.566.^"The Play, the Player and the Scene."Samhain.1904.52.Of."The Theatre of Beauty," Harper's Weekly.11 November 1911,11: Cf.also Craig, Puppets and Poets: The Chapbook.no.20 (February 1921),9.0Although in 1902 he is careful to point out that they arrived at their ideas independently. "The Acting at St. Teresa's Hall," United Irishman. 26 April 1902,5.203Craig's use of colours helped Yeats determine the principles he was later to quote to Sturge Moore when discussing his own requirements for the stage.^But Craig's influence on Yeats extended even further, for in hisdesire for simplicity he, like Yeats, eventually saw in the mask anddance the theatre he could not create with the average actor on theordinary stage. They differed in their approach to the actor and conceptof the actor's role, however; for while Craig considered the scenic 2design first, Yeats was concerned primarily with the poetry; oneattended to the ideal theatre with an artist's eye, the other with thepoet's ear. Like Yeats, however, Craig found the ineptitude of theaverage modern actor almost insurmountable:There is hardly any action which is right, there is hardly any which is natural. Action is a way of spoiling something, says Rimbaud....no action is better than little action....The actor as he is today, must ultimately disappear and be merged in something else if works of art are to be seen in our kingdom of the theatre.3In his celebrated but frequently misunderstood essay,^ "The Actor andthe Uber-Marionette," he pleads for"a new form of acting, consistingfor the main part in symbolical gesture. Today they impersonate andinterpret; tomorrow they must represent and interpret; and the thirdday they must create."The aim of the theatre as a whole is to restore its art and it should commence by banishing from the theatre this idea of impersonation, this idea of reproducing nature; for while impersonation is in the theatre, the theatre can never become free.5^Yeats, letter to T.Sturge Moore,1905,Correspondence,5-6, and below. Part three. Chapter 9,P . f W •^Cf. The Mask,1(1908),18, the editor, John Semar, criticizes Cranville-Barker's reasons for refusing the New York New Theatre's offer: "We venture to suggest that •Atmosphere'^ is not dependent upon the actor so much as upon the play, and, curiously enough, upon the stage setting."^"The Artists of the Theatre of the Future,"op.cit.,58 and 6 5.^Cf. new preface to 1924 edition of On the Art of the Theatre.^The Mask l(l908),4 and 9« The italics are his.MW204o5?*îôi_u c0?<§1u!>m c 12V* Letters,577.^See below. Part Four, Chapter 7 9y page ^ $2.208Charles Ricketts (1866-1951)Painter, sculptor, designer, wood engraver, lithographer,Ricketts was as like Craig in his eclecticism as he was unlike himin temperament. Like Craig, he subordinated all claims to beauty andart, "desirable in themselves, merely because they are what they are —beauty and art."1 Unlike Craig, he advocated tradition in art —meaning for him Rossetti — and emphasised in staging general decorativetreatment over the complicated lighting effects Craig appreciated.^In a letter to Sydney Cockerell, Ricketts summarizes the differencebetween these two stage designers who were both working towards thenew "Theatre of Beauty," at the same time indicating his theory asopposed to Craig's;His designs are more "abstract" in character than mine, and in a sense more whimsical or inconsequent, but not always. The sketches are feeble in execution, they exaggerate also the possibilities of height and space obtainable in any London theatre. He does not realize that a figure is practically one-third of the height of the opening, therefore much of the element of surprise and originality might evaporate under execution. Nevertheless, one experiences an agreeable sense of novelty, a sense of an imaginative atmosphere which I have noticed only in my own work upon the stage.5Whereas the theatre was Craig's palace of art, work for the stage was to Ricketts "a holiday task."4 And like Yeats he approached the stage with the eye of the painter rather than the actor; the delicate details he appreciated in his book designs, illustrations, and paintings were brought to his work for the theatre, often causing him to concentrate^Ricketts, A Bibliography of the Books Issued by Eacon and Ricketts at the Vale Press(London:Ballantyne Press,1914)(British Museum stamp dated 1912),vi. T.Sturge Moore, in his introduction to Charles Ricketts R.A.; Sixty-Five Illustrations(London;Cassell,1955), comments that Ricketts "could not forgive Holbein for painting anyone so ugly as Archbishop W a r h a m . "^Diary note 29 December I9O5, Self Portrait,100.^14 September I9II, Self-Portrait,166-6?. The letter concludes,"If Craig had not attacked me in the Press I should like to write an article on his work."^Sturge Moore, introduction to Charles Ricketts R.A., xii.209on details which would never carry across the footlights.^ "A workof art is a whole in which each portion is exquisite in itself yetco-ordinate," he claimed, and this philosophy followed him into thetheatre. In this sense Ricketts was a more "personal" artist thanCraig, emphasising costume, scenery, and minute details in his effortsto create a stage picture, v/hereas Craig worked from the general effectto the particular. And perhaps also because of this, Ricketts'personality was an even greater influence on those about him than hiswork, influencing not only others, but his own taste in stage design.Yeats described Ricketts as "one of the greatest connoisseurs ofany age, an artist whose woodcuts prolonged the inspiration of Rossetti,whose paintings mirrored the rich colouring of Delacroix." And hereis perhaps the secret of his influence and his theory. Ricketts wasa traditionalist rather than an experimenter, concentrating onachieving an atmosphere of beauty and delicacy of effect within theconventional methods of the time. "When we studied his art we studiedour double," Yeats continues.We, too, thought always that style should be proud of its ancestry, of its traditional high breeding, that an ostentatious originality was out of place whether in the arts or^good manners.^(it is not surprising to find that among Ricketts' admirers was notonly Yeats, but Oscar Wilde). If simplicity is required in stagedecoration, "it should be a beautiful simplicity," he claimed^; butsometimes simplicity is not the essential requirement. "A beautifulsetting should 'seem' simple when this is the character demanded by theplay, not otherwise."5 Instead, he suggested "concentration" as the•^ Ibid.^A Bibliography, vii.^"Modern Poetry:A Broadcast"(l936),Essays and Introductions,495.Cf. letters to Sturge Moore on Ricketts' resemblance to Rossetti, 7 November 1921 and Moore's reply, 8 November 1921, Correspondence, 40 and 42-45.^"The Art of Stage Decoration," Pages on Art(London;Constable,1913),229-30.^Ibid..240-4 1.210essential quality of decoration, creating order and f ocus by emphasiswhere it is wanted, rather than too much elimination. And, like Craig,he constantly emphasised the need of "one designer to control theentire production, from the scenery to the smallest property.Wagner, he felt, despite his greatness,2 fails in his "tendency toover-explain, to underline unnecessarily," because he lacked thispainter's sense of "visualizing his work beautifully," as a w h o l e . 3Although not a revolutionary, Ricketts was a practical man of thetheatre, and many of his recommendations and designs were adopted byYeats in his own theatre. In particular, Yeats appreciated Ricketis'seye for detail in stage effect and costume, which was as practical asit was imaginative. His letters to Yeats and Lady Gregory^ aboundin sketches for costumes, including suggestions for "doubling" oncostumes from other plays,5 details concerning the best inexpensivematerial for background and dresses, including advice concerningseamstresses and estimates of expenditure. Frequently his imaginativedesigns had the effect of giving new life to the players as well.Writing of the new costumes designed by Ricketts for The King'sThreshold performance in London in 1914> Yeats comments,The Company never did the play so well, and such is the effect of costume that whole scenes got a new intensity, and passages or actions that had seemed commonplace became powerful and moving.^And on occasion a suggestion from Ricketts gave Yeats a new idea forI^bid.,247.2_Cf.Ricketts,"Desultory Musical Recollections," reprinted in Self-Portrait,7.^"The Art of Stage Decoration," op.cit.,234-36.^Unpublished correspondence in the possession of îÆrs. Yeats.5A list of costumes for ^ Baile's Strand includes suggestions for costumes incorporated from earlier designs for The King's Threshold and The Green Helmet,in the possession of ÎÆrs. Yeats. Cf. Lady Gregory's letter to Ricketts, June 1914 printed in Self-Portrait,198.^Letter to Ricketts, 11 June 1914, Letters,587.211his revisions.! Nor did Ricketts* influence stop at the stage dressing; he was an acute critic of Yeats's theory of verse-speaking, and did not hesitate to offer his advice concerning the actualoperformances of the actors.Ricketts' stage designs were not limited to the Abbey Theatre, however. From 1905 to 1928 he was active designing productions in London, as well, from the poetic dramas of Sturge Moore, Wilde, Masefield, Maeterlinck, Shakespeare, to Shaw, Barker, Bennett, Wilde, and even Gilbert and Sullivan.^ His influence extended in other ways, also, through T.Sturge Moore (1870-1944) who in turn dressed some of Yeats's plays, following Ricketts' style and manner,4 and his constant encouragement of the younger artists working for a theatre of beauty in London. In I9O6 he and Sturge Moore founded the Literary Theatre Society, mainly for the production of Wilde's Salome", which Ricketts and Wilde had some ten years earlier planned for Paris.5 He had encouraged Yeats's and Florence Farr's f t h e a t r ethe suburbs" for romantic drama long before the Irish Literary Theatre seemed possible.^ At one time, also, he proposed raising the funds for a production of The Countess Cathleen, to be staged by Craig.?- :Unpublished letter to Lady Gregory in the possession of Mrs. Yeats, 7 May 1905, mentions an idea of Ricketts' concerning the magic harp which has led Yeats to a revision of Shadowy Waters.2Unpublished letter from Ricketts to Yeats, probably 1907, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats, criticizes"the abominable performance" of Deirdre,especially the Chorus of Musicians.^Cf.index to Self-Portrait.He also wrote an opera. Nail,produced by Sir Thomas Beecham in 1919*^oore was more concerned with designs for Yeats's books than designs for his plays, however. Cf.Correspondence,especially the early letters; Sturge Moore, Hark to these~hree(London;Matthews,1915),15 et passim;F.L.Gwynn,Sturge MooreTLondon:Richards Press,1952),ch.2.^Cf. Self-Portrait,134-38; "The Art of Stage Decoration," op.cit., 242-4 4,Gwynn, Stur^ye Moore,39-43.^Cf. Our Irish Theatre,2-3; Autobiographies,396.Cf. Yeats's letter to Lady Gregory, 6 January 1903, Letters, 394.212He, like Yeats, Moore, Symons, Edith Craig, Walter Crane, and PamelaColman Smith, was involved in the formation of "The Masquers " in1903, whose object was:....to give performances of plays, masques, ballets, and ceremonies; and to produce only those works which convey a sentiment of beauty. One of its chief endeavours will be to bring the stage back again to that beauty of appropriate simplicity in the presentation of a play which will liberate the attention of an audience for the words of a writer andthe movements of an actor.2And when the Masquers* scheme collapsed, Yeats once again turned toRicketts with the hope of officially appointing him to the AbbeyTheatre company.^ Even after Yeats turned away from the conventionalstage and turned instead to the "two trestles and a board" and thedesigns and music of Edmund Dulac required for his Noh plays, theinfluence of Ricketts, "my education in so many t h i n g s w h o "alwaysdealt en grand seigneur, r e m a i n e d . For Charles Ricketts, likeGordon Craig, William Blake, and William Morris, represented for Yeatsone of "the great myth-makers and mask-makers, the men of aristocraticmind" in Yeats*s kingdom of art.^^"Pixie Smith,"American designer and story-teller, vrho published The Green Sheaf,with contributions by Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory.2Information from a leaflet among Yeats's papers in Mrs. Yeats's possession and a report of the inaugural meeting. Black and YJhite,April 1903. Among the productions projected were Marlowe's Faustus, Congreve's Way of the World, Ford's The Broken Heart, Gilbert Murray's translation of Hip00lytus,Jebb'3 translation of Oedipus Tyrannus, de Musset's Fantasio,Villiers' La Revolte,a ballet by Rameau, Purcell's Masque of Love, Peer Gynt, Les A veugles,and works by d'Annunzio, Bridges, Yeats, Craig, Douglas Hyde, Laurence Irving. _Cf. Hone, W.B. Yeats,192, who quotes a letter from Gilbert Murray describing the society's collapse.5^Letter to Lady Gregory, 2 January I904, Letters,420.^A Vision,1937,298. Cf.Sir William Rothenstein,"Yeats as a Painter Saw Him," Scattering Branches,38.5Shaw's description of Ricketts, quoted by Sturge Moore, Self- Portrait,18.^Autobiographies,550.213PART TWO THE PLAYWRIGHTS AND THEIR PLAYS214CHAPTER 5 - WILLIAT.I BUTLER YEATSWe were the last romantics — chose for theme Traditional sanctity and loveliness;Whatever's written in what poets nameThe hook of the people; whatever most can blessThe mind of man or elevate a rhyme...("Coole Park and Ballylee,1931")It would be fruitless to deny that Yeats was the product of his age and as such influenced by the ideas of his age. Son of an artist gifted with a restless enquiring mind, a fine flow of eloquence (j.B.Yeats was described by an admirer as one of the best talkers in New York)!, and the habit of friendship with artistic rebels of the time, the poet grew up in a household where the principles of the Pre- Raphaelites were established tradition and the claims of intellectualporthodoxy considered pernicious. John Butler Yeats deplored "the gospel of getting on" as a doctrine unfit for a gentleman; there were other more important things to attend to. And so he^ve up a promising career as a barrister to become an artist, then, financial security as a popular painter to follow his own desires in the world of art.5His son also found his work in art. In fact, except for a boyhood interest in natural history — early training which he, like Synge, effectively made use of later — Willie Yeats apparently never considered any other r3le but the artist’s. He thought, acted, even dressed as the artist until finally, like Wilde, he became to a great^£f. Yeats to J.B.Yeats, 10 October 1909,Letters,536; Hone,W.B.Yeats,254.2W.B.Yeats, "Reveries over Childhood and Youth," Autobiographies ;Hone, op.cit.,chs.l & 2; Richard Ellmann, Yeats : The Man and the Masks (London:Faber,1961),ch.2.^Hone,op.cit.,24-25. Of. Yeats, "Estrangement"(1909),Autobiographies, 489: "A gentleman is a man whose principal ideas are not connected with his personal needs and his personal success." Also, J.B.Yeats to W.B. Yeats,1 July I9O8 ,J.B.Yeats Letters,107.215extent his own creation.! And, while painting with AE and modelling with Oliver Sheppard at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, he had already published several poems and made his first attemptspin the dramatic form. "The arts are but one Art," he proclaimedin the first year of the Irish Literary Theatre, echoing Wagner.^Almost forty years later he echoed himself:Then too I would have all the arts draw together; recover their ancient association, the painter painting what the poet has written, the musician setting the poet’s words to simple airs, that the horseman and the engine-driver may sing them at their work.4Poems, plays, short stories, novels, essays all reveal the same attitudes towards life, the same philosophy of art.Li'ie his father, also, Yeats found philosophizing and the workings of his own mind a constant fascination, his classifications and definitions "perpetually growing and dissolving" with each new source of knowledge.^ For his theories, like his father's portraits and his own poetry, were subject to continual revision in the light of his own^The ideal artist would also be "the cultivated man," as Yeats imagined Lionel Johnson to be. For his constant efforts to "re-make" himself into his own concept of the artist, vide Autiobiographies, passfn; his defence of Wilde as a poseur and AE’s comments on his own pose, AE’s letter to George Moore, quoted by John Eglinton in A Memoir of AE (London:Macmillan,1957)>110-11• He dramatizes this process in The Player Queen.2Hone,op.cit.,4 2. Sheppard completed the cycle by designing the statue of Cuchulain in the Dublin G.P.O., commemorating the Easter 1916 rebellion. The Death of Cuchulain.^"The Theatre"(l899)> Essays and Introductions,16?.4"Introduction"(l937), op.cit.,ix. 5Edward Dowden of J.B.Yeats, quoted by Ellmann, Man and Masks,1 9.216experience and his search for a philosophical basis to his art. Eachnew concept, each stage of stylistic development underwent carefulscrutiny and comment until either "hammered into the unity" he sought,or discarded as immalleable. Taking Blake's thesis "All progressis by contraries" for his motto, Yeats was loth to relinquish anytheme or mood which he had found beautiful and sincere, even after it2became no longer applicable. Each former conviction was incorporatedinto his vision of the whole until at last he arrived at the philosophical position which, with refinements, satisfied his concept of both art and life. A close study of Yeatsh unified philosophy as outlined in A Vision is far beyond the scope of this dissertation; we are here concerned with his artistic doctrine alone, and that only as it is applicable to his work with the theatre. However, it is necessary to appreciate the fact that all Yeatsh interests, whether literary, philosophical, or national, were subordinate to this driving need for the achievement of a unity which, in his eyes, would most fully express the self.^Yeats's Aesthetics This celebration of "that little, infinite, faltering eternal flame that one calls oneself, c a r e f u l l y stripped of all external values, is the foundation of all Yeats's art. "Literature, when it is i^Cf.Yeats,If % Were Four-and-^nty(Dublin;Cuala Press, 1940), 1 :"One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head...'Hammer your thoughts into unity.' For days I could think of nothing else, and for years I tested all I did by that sentence."^(Quoted by Yeats, letter to the Editor, United Irishman, 28 January 1905,1. Cf."Poetry and Patriotism"(l907),Poetry and Ireland:Es3ays by W.B.Yeats and Lionel Johnson(Dundrum;Cuala Press,I9O8 ),12:"The nobleness of the Arts is in the mingling of contraries." Also Samhain,1901,7:"The arts are at their best when they are busy with battles that never can be won"; introduction to The Resurrection, ^Wheels and Butterflies (LondonrMacmillan,1934)>108-09* For a discussion of Yeats's adaptation of this theory of opposites, see Ellmann, The Man and the Masks.5^Ellmann sees this "struggle for selfhood" as basic to the Edwardian writer. Cf.Ellmann, "Two Paces of Edward," Edwardians and Late Victorians ;English Institute Essays 1959, ed.Richard Ellmann(NY:Columbia,UP,I960),197-99*See also above,Part One,chapter 3*4cf. Dedication to AE, The Secret Rose(London;Lawrence and Bullen, 1897)* The italics are his.217really literature," does not deal with problems of the hour, but%ith problems of the soul and character," he claimed!; hence itsbusiness is not to convince or proselytize, for that leads to oratory2and insincerity. "We must name and number the passions and motives of men," but for no other purpose.^ Art is "a revelation, and not a criticism."4 However, art should not be elevated into the "terrible queen" of the extreme aesthetes: "Literature must be the expressionof conviction, and be the garment of noble emotion, and not an end in itself."5 One must ask oneself, "Is that exactly what I think and feel?"^ And only when the artist has made his work "a part of his own journey towards beauty and truth"7 does literature have "any right to exist."8All art, then, must be founded upon "personal vision" or experience,9 recording "the disengaging of a soul from place and history."!0 This emphasis on the moods and passions!! leads in its^"Literature and the Conscience," United Irishman,7 December 1901,3.^Samhaln,1905,12-13.^Yeats's speech to the British Association, September 1908, printed in "First Principles," Samhain,1908,12.^"The Body of the Father Christian Rosencrux"(1895), Essays and Introductions,197."Hopes and Fears for Irish Literature," United Irishman,15 October 1892,5.^Samhain, 1905,13. Cf. letter to the Editor, I T . , 20 January 1900.^"Ireland and the Arts"(l90l), Essays and Introductions,207.0Letter to high school friend £.1887, Letters,31. Cf.letters to IVIrs. Clement Shorter, 21 June 1899 and to AE, £.May 1900, op.cit.,322 and 343; letter to Sturge Moore, March 1929, Correspondence,144.^Samhain,1905,10.^^"J.M.Synge and the Ireland of his Time"(l910), Essays and Introductions,339*^^Letter to the Editor, Daily Express (Dublin), 27 February 1895*218highest moments to "the creation of intense feeling, of pure life,"! out of the "energy and abundance"2 of men "who expressed themselves to the full."5 "Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from ... all that is of the brain only."4 "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."5 But, lest we exalt the man of action at the expense of the man of thought, we are also reminded in a quotation from Coventry Patmore that "the end of art is peace"; "the following of art is little different from the following of religion in the intense preoccupation that it demands."^ The artist is essentially a lonely figure, seeking both vision and strength in himself, frequently having to "quarry his 0wnjstone."7The artist is, in fact, a priest, labouring "to bring again the Golden Age" dreamt by William Blake.& But here Yeats found himself in difficulties once more, for there appeared to be two paths literature^"Pirst Principles," Samhain,1904,18-19. See above. Part One, chapter 3, Walter Pater,/»-2"The Irish Dramatic Movement," Collected Works of W.B.Yeats (Stratford-on-Avon;Shakespeare Head Press,1908),IV,227.^"J.M.Synge and the Ireland of his Time," op.cit.,341.^"The Thinking of the Body," Essays and Introductions,292-93* Of. "V/hy the Blind Man in Ancient Times was Made a Poet," op.cit.,279;Edmund Spenser"(1902),ibid.,357.^Samhàin,1904,24. A letter to Katharine Tynan,5 July 1890,Letters, 155> cautions her against too much emphasis on saintliness in her biography of Mother Marv JCaveria Fallon (published in 1891)s"Remember it is the stains of earth)5|^ ïîiat make man differ from man and give interest to biography."^Samhain,1905. Cf. Autiobiographies,475.7 Quoted by Gordon Bottomley,"His Legacy to the Theatre," The Arrow: W.B.Yeats Commemoration Number,Summer,1939,12.Cf.Samhain,1905,5 : Tit is the business of art and of letters to change the values and to mint the coinage." Also Yeats's introduction to A Book of Irish Verse (London: Methuen,1895)>xiv.8"^he Theatre"(May 1899), Essays and Introductions,167. Cf. "TheAutumn of the Body"(l898),qp.GÜ.,193*"The Literary Movement in Ireland^ North Americyi Review.December 1899,reprinted in Ideals in Ireland, ed. Lady Gregory(London:Unicorn,1901),99-100.219might take; "upward into ever-growing subtlety, with Verhaeren, with Mallarmé, wdth Maeterlinck, until ... what seems literature becomes religion; or downward, taking the soul with us until all is simplified and solidified again."! terms of the aesthetic movement, the cult of the mystic or the cult of the Celt. His natural inclination led him towards the mystical, as we shall see; but his critical observations, encouraged by his nationalist sympathies, pointed towards "the book of the people," that "hereditary knowledge of the countryside."^ "All progress is by contraries," however; clearly the new golden age must arise out of the mingling of both."It may be... that this Priesthood will spread their Religion everywhere, and make their Art the Art of the people."3 "We must baptize as well as preach. "4 And so the artist-spriest * s duties became threefold: to sing with the lyric voice of "the highly disciplined orrdindividual kingly mind," of those "thoughts and emotions that were created by the community, by the common people"5 — a yoking of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the sun and the moon, "a marriage of Heaven and Hell"^ — before an audience which he may himself haveto create. 72 '"Personality and the Intellectual Essences"(1907),Essays andIntroductions, 266i)CV.I{.Na:&'ana Menon in The Development of WilliamButler Yeats(London;Oliver and Boyd,1942),71 quotes P.R. Higgins:"There were for him only two commingling states of verse. One,simple, bucolic, rabelaisian; the other, intellectual, exotic orvisionary."^Note to Unicorn from the Stars(l908),Collected Works,III,221.^"The Theatre," loc.cit.^"Ireland and the Arts," Essays and Introductions,203.^Preface to Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men(London; John Murray,1904),xix-xxi. Cf. Introduction, Selections from the Poems of Dorothy Wellesley(London:Macmillan,1936),x.^Note to The Unicorn from the Stars,loc.cit. In 1898 Yeats was planning his novel. The Speckled Bird,in which the plot was to alternate between Aran and Paris, Ellmann,op.cit.,150."Introduction"(1937).Essays and Introductions,x:"f/7 poet is justified not by the expression of himself but by the public he finds or creates."220Grossly oversimplifying, one might trace the pattern of thought inthis manner then: the celebration of the soul justified furtherexploration into the mysteries of the supernatural and a vehementrejection of the vulgarity of realism^; traditional myths discoveredthere found their modern counterpart in the tales of wonder andfolklore of the Irish peasantry, amplified by the recent discoveriesof Celtic scholars. Surely the noble peasant, his feet in the soil,his head in the clouds, held the secret of the ages v/hich the commonplaceman of the towns had bartered for his mess of pottage. The livingtradition of Celtic myth in turn represented for Yeats the continuationof a belief and system of thought ratified by the philosophies ofa n t i q u i t y 2; where could it be better preserved than in that most publicof all arts, the drama, a form the subject matter naturally demanded?And so his dream of a national theatre became as well as an assuranceof the preservation and propagation of Celtic heritage, a temple ofthe ascendancy not of man, but of the spirit. "I planned in those daysto establish a dramatic movement upon the popular passions, as the ritualof religion is established in the emotions that surround birth anddeath and m a r r i a g e ,"3 he wrote of his early aims. Two decades laterhe entered in a diary these words;I would found literature on the three things which Kant thought we must postulate to make life livable — Freedom, God, Immortality.... Recent Irish literature has only delighted me in so far as itAddress at the National Literary Society’s ’’At Home," reported in the Irish Independent,19 February I9OO. "The Irish Literary Theatre," Dublin Daily Express,14 January 1899,3; Samhain,1903;"The Play of Modern Manners"(1906), Essays and Introductions,274. The same philosophy is proclaimed in "To all Artists and Writers," written by Yeats but not signed. Tomorrow,I(August 1924),4.2Yeats’s Preface, The Ten Principal Upanishads,by Yeats and Shree Purohit Swami(London;Faber,1937),9:"It pleases me to fancy that when we turn towards the East...we are turning not less to the ancient west and north." £f. Preface to The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems (Dublin:Cuala,1924).^Preface to The Unicorn from the Stars and other Plays(New York: Macmillan,1908),v-vi.221implies one or the other, in so far as it has been a defiance of all else, in so far as it has created those extravagant characters and emotions which have alvmys arisen spontaneously from the human mind when it sees itself exempt from death and decay, responsible to its source alone.!Mysticism, Magic, and the Myth."Pure mysticism...is still too far away to be the staple andsubstance of coüimon literature," wrote Lionel Johnson in his review2of the Yeats-Ellis Blake. For Yeats, however, literature without spiritual belief was impossible, and he longed for the day prophesied by Blake when the poet, "acting as a poet,"would seek the spiritual leadership of the race.5I am very religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion, almost an infallible Church of poetic tradition, of a fardel of stories, and of personages, and of emotions, inseparable from their first expression, passed on from generation to generation by poets and painters with some help from philosophers and theologians. I wished for a world where I could discover this tradition perpetually.4^Pages from a Diary Written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirty (Dublin:Cuala,1944),49-50.2The Academy,26 August 1895, reprinted in Post Liminium:Essays and Critical Papers of Lionel Johnson,ed. Thomas Whittemore(London:Elkin Matthews,1911),81.^Preface, The Works of William Blake ;Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical, edd.Edwin John Ellis and William Butler Yeats(London;Bernard Quaritch, I893),vii-xiii. The italics are theirs. Cf. Yeats’s review of Richard Garnett’s William Blake in The Bookman,April 1896,21.^AutobiogrqnhiAR.118-16. Cf. unpublished letter from AE to Sean 0 'Faolain,1955, quoted by Monk Gibbon, The Early Years of George Russell,389n; "It was, I think, to get rid of the sceptical element in himself so that he might have a whole faith that he adventured into magic and spiritualism hoping for the clear fact or experience, or sign, which would enable him to have an untroubled faith." Vide F.A.C.Wilson, W.B.Yeats and Tradition(LondoniGollancz,1958),10;"By ’mysticism’ Yeats could and did mean either of two things. He might mean the individual mystic’s quite personal insight into the nature of things, or he might mean the great ’subjective’ tradition of mystical philosophy, based as it is upon the correspondence of many of these insights." Most frequently he meant the latter.222By the time Yeats had begun his serious study of Blake in 1889, he had already been reading theosophy for several years, and had been instrumental in founding the Dublin Hermetic Society in 1885* "I wished for a system of thought that would leave ray imagination free to create as it chose and yet make all that it created, or could create, part of the one history, and that the soul’s."^ Now, spurred by his work on Blake, he carried his explorations further, into the circleof Madame Blavatsky herself, that "great passionate nature, a sort ofj 3female Dr. Johnson."^ But a series of experiments he conducted causedconcern among her followers, and reluctantly he resigned. Next came an introduction to MacGregor Mathers, a man of "much learning but little scholarship, much imagination and imperfect taste."4 In 1890 he was initiated into "The Order of Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn," a society for the practice of Christian Cabalism, and widened his experience from theosophy to magic.5 Here at last was the freedom to experiment and — even more important — the method of ritual. In the unpublished first draft of his Autobiographies, Yeats spoke of this society as the chief influence upon his thought up to perhaps his fortieth yearJust as religion and mysticism were interchangeable realities to Yeats, so were the roles of the priest 'and the mystical conjuror. As a boy he had been fascinated by the figure of the magician?; now as^Autobiographies, 89-92. Yeats v;as chairman at the first meeting; part of his opening address is quoted by Ellmann, op. cit.J.42.pDedication, A Vision(London;Privately printed by T.Werner Laurie, 1925),xi.^Autobiographies,175•^Ibid.,187.^Virginia Moore, The Unicorn (NYîMacmillan,1954),27*^Ellmann,op.cit.,9&*7Autobiographies,46,Ellmann,op.cit.,29.223a young man he found further identification in the r^le of the artist-con juror. Florence Farr, writing under her theosophical designation,S.S.D.D., published a description of the ideal adept:To choose a life that shall bring him in touch with the sorrows of his race rather than accept the Nirvana open to him; and like other Saviours of the world, to remain manifested as a living link between the supernal and terrestial natures.^Once more the role of intermediary between the spiritual and the earth-bound is made attractive. Legends of cults in Paris reached the earsof the young man; Villiers de I’Isle Adam had only recently died, andMallarmé was still writing. "This new pride, that of the adept, wasadded to the pride of the artist."2 Not forgetting his nationalism,he wrote The Secret Rose, and explained to John O ’Leary: "It is atany rate an honest attempt towards that aristocratic esoteric Irishliterature, which has been my chief ambition. We have a literaturefor the people but nothing yet for the few." There was even talkof a French translation.5"An obsession more constant than anything but my love itself wasthe need of mystical rites — a ritual, system of evocation andmeditation — to re-unite the perception of the spirit, of the dream,with natural beauty."4 By now Maudy Gonne had entered his life, andtogether they planned a "Castle of the. Heroes" as place of preparationand rest for those who would bring back to Ireland her ancient dignityand grandeur,^A Short Enquiry Concerning the Hermetic Art, with introduction to alchemy and notes (London:Theosophical Pub.Soc.1894),13#2"Epilogue," Per Arnica Silentia Lunae, Mythologies (London: Macmillan,1959),367.^30 May 1897, Letters.286.4First draft of Autobiographies, quoted by Ellmann,op.cit.,125-26; cf. further quotation op.cit.,132-33.224to be built of Irish stone and decorated only with the Four Jewels of the Tuatha de Danaan (the ancient Irish godsj • •. • the universal symbols appearing in debased form on the Tarot... and foreshadowing the Christian Symbolism of the Saint Grail.!Much time was spent on the elaboration of ritual, with help from suchnoteworthy Celts as Lady Gregory and "Fiona Macleod" fvilliam SharpJbut the dream shattered with Maud's marriage^and the Four Jewelsof the projected Celtic Order — the stone, the cauldron, the spear,and the lance — together vrith the symbolism of the rituals, remainedpimbedded in Yeatsh poetry instead.^The Celtic Tv^ilight (l893) discussed magicians and magic,^ but Yeats’s most impressive public pronouncement appeared in an essay on magic in I9OI;I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are:—(1 ) That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.(2 ) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.(3 ) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.4Just as "all symbolic art should arise out of a real belief,"5 art in turn, then, in its use of symbols, becomes a part of the ritual of^Maud' Gonne,"Yeats and Ireland," Scattering Branches, ed.Stephen Gwynn (London:Macmillan,1940)>23 *^Virginia Moore, op.cit.,30-39.68-82.^"Drumcliff and Rosses," "The Sorcerers."^"Magic," Essays and Introductions,28.^"Religious Belief Necessary to Symbolic Art"(l906), Essays and Introductions,294*225evocation, an appeal to "the Divine Essence."^ Yeatsb system of "chanting" his poetry, and his insistence on intoning to a specificp 5pitch further intensify this impression of ritual. And in 1902 he observed,I...can hardly write at all unless I write about religious ideas.In "The Land of Heart’s Desire," a dreaming girl prefers her own dreams and a wanderingvoice of the night to the priest and his crucifix. In "The Hour Glass"...it is the proud spirit that is defeated by the belief that has seemed folly to the wise. And in "The Countess Cathleen" the commandment of mercy is followed to the forgetting of all else. In "The Shadov/y Waters" human love, and in "Cathleen ni Houlihan" love of country, become through their mere intensity a cry that calls beyond the limits of the world. In "V/liere There is Nothing," Paul, because he is a seeker after God, desires the destruction of all things. So far as I am a dramatist, so far as I have made these people alive, I watch them with wonder and pity, and I do not even ask myself were they right to go upon that journey.4Yeats’s "adventures into magic and spiritualism," then, merely confirmedhis belief in the necessity of faith, the r?le of the artist-priest,and the significance of tradition. Like his "Teachers" of A Vision,they gave more than they received, bringing him "metaphors for poetry"in abundance, and — even more important for our purposes — thetechnique of "visualizing" those symbols.As you know, all my art theories depend upon just this — rooting of mythology in the earth.5The step from mysticism to myth is as short as that from symbol toallegory, and for Yeats even more inevitable. "Allegory and, to a much^Introduction to A Book of Images Drawn by W.T.Horton...(London; Unicorn,18 9 8 ),1 0 and 15*^See above. Part One, Chapter^He was fond of quoting Lionel Johnson,"Life must be a ritual."Cf. Introduction to Oxford Book of Modern Verse (Oxford:Clarendon,1956), ix.4"The Freedom of the Theatre, "U.I. ,1 November 1902.jCf. "The Subject Matter of Drama," Essays and Introductions,28#:"The more religious the subject-matter of an art, the more will it be as it were stationary, and the more ancient will be the emotion that it arouses and the circumstance that it calls up before our eyes."^Letter to Sturge Moore,21 September,1927,Correspondence,114*GY« Letter concerning Spengler,17 April 1929,ibid.,154. In 193lW§l^,^eats wrote to Olivia Shakespear concerning A Vision:"I have constructed a myti , but then one can believe in a myth - one ^ only assents to philosophy." Cf.Jean-Paul Sartrer, interviewed by Kenneth 'Tynan, The Observer, 25 June T961,20:"At bottom, I am always looking for myths."226greater degree, symbolism are a natural language by which the soul when entranced, or even in ordinary sleep, communes with God and with angels. They can speak of things which cannot be spoken of in any other language," he wrote in 1902. ^ Art as a "revelation" has its roots in antiquity, "the accumulated beauty of the a g e , t h a t "common mint."5 "Indeed all the great Masters have understood, that there cannot be great art without the. little limited life of the fable."4 "Once a symbolism has possessed the imagination of large numbers of men, it becomes, as I believe,an embodiment of disembodied powers^ and repeats itself in dreams and visions, age after age."5 The artist, therefore, should seek traditional models, rather than attempt originality, if he wishes to achieve great art. It is only in "a return to the way of our fathers"^ that he will find security of both subject matter and style.? "Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truths, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned."® And had not William Morris, his "King of men," once said of an eminent dramatist,^"Edmund Spenser," Essays and Introductions,368. Yeats accepted Blake’s definitions:"’Vision or imagination’ — meaning symbolism by these words — ’is a representation of what actually exists, really or unchangeably. Fable of Allegory is formed by the daughters of Memory.’" Introduction to A Book of Images,7■2"John Eglinton and Spiritual Art,"Dublin Daily Express,29 October 1898, reprinted in Literary Ideals in Ireland,36.^Samhain,1904,16.^"Emotion of the Multitude"(1903) Essays and Introductions,522:"I must choose a traditional stanza, even what I alter must seem traditional."o"Estrangement"(1909), Autobiographies,490»Cf* "Art and Ideas" (1915),Essays and Introductions,552-55.227"He will never understand any art, because he does not understand that all art is founded upon convention!"In my heart," wrote Yeats looking back at his early years," I thought that only beautiful things should be pa'nted, and that only ancient things and the stuff of dreams were b e a u t i f u l . T h e subject of art is not law, but passion and "the praise of life"5* the aim of art "the ecstasy awakened by the presence before an ever-changing mind of what is permanent in the world."4 However this does not necessarily imply a contradiction of the dream, for "so far from the discussion of our interests and the immediate circumstance of our life being the most moving to the imagination, it is what is old and far off that stirs us the most deeply." And as we have already seen, the dream or vision (as opposed to illusion) is a repetition of the symbolism of the past. Furthermore, it is this "antiquity of thought" which separates the man of genius, the truly "cultivated man," from the modern vulgar realist.^ Because "we come from the permanent things and create them," the artist remains aloof, aristocratic, despising "the mob" and if need be "suffei^n^ at its h a n d s . I n 1937» looking tack over his life’s struggle towards a working aesthetic, Yeats once^"The Acting at St. Teresa's HalT," ÏÏ.I.,26 April 1902,J.2Autobiographies,82. "Any bit of pedantry, a couple of hundred years old seems to him to have a kind of divine authority," AE wrote to George Moore in irritation at Yeats’s manner, quoted by Eglinton,A Memoir of AE,112.^Samhain,1904,20.^"The Two Kinds of Asceticism," Essays and Introductions,287.^"The Subject Matter of Drama," Essays and Introductions,284,^Autobiographies,474* C f . Samhain,1904,4: "The artists, the only aristocracy that has never been sold in the market or seen the people rise up against it." In his preface to Oliver Gogarty’s Wild Apples (Dublin:Cuala,1930), he praises the "sense of a hardship borne and chosen out of pride and joy," likening Gogarty to those other "solitaries," Swift, Berkeley, Shaw, and Synge.228again stated the same beliefs:That it is not the duty of the artist to paint beautiful womenand beautiful places is nonsense. That the exclusion of sexappeal from poetry, painting and sculpture is nonsense (are / the films alone to impose their ideas upon the sexual instinct?).That, on the contrary, all arts are an expression of desire — exciting desirable life, exalting desirable death. That all the arts must be united again, painting and literature, poetry and music. Bless synthesis; damn Thistier and his five o’clock.^"Ireland - The Foundation of my Art"John Synge, I and August Gregory, thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.We three alone in modern times had brought Everything down to that sole test again.Dream of the noble and the beggar-man.("The Municipal Gallery Revisited")"Mien I began to write," Yeats commented in 1913, "I sought some symbolic language reaching far into the past and associated with familiar names and conspicuous hills that I might not be alone amid the obscure impressions of the senses."2 Reaching back to "that early phase of every civilisation...where everything is prescribed, as buried under dream and m y t h , h e found his source in that "oldest of the .aristocracies of thought," folk art,4 "All folk literature, and all 4 ' literature that keeps the folk tradition, delights in unbounded and immortal things, "having a passion one can no longer find in modern literature.5 Here one finds "expression in its first phase of energy,^Hone,W.B.Yeats,438.^"Art and Ideas," Essays and Introductions,347-49» Cf.Samhain,1906,8Introduction to The Cat and the Moon, Wheels and Butterflies,136.£f.Introduction(l888) to Irish Fairy and Folk Tales"Tliondon:Walter Scott, 1893),xii.^"By the Roadside," Mythologies,139»^"The Celtic Element in Literature"(1902),Essays and Introductions, 179» Introduction to Brian Merriman, The Midnight Court, trans.Percy Arland Ussher (London:Jonathan Cape,1926),3-12; Letter to William Rothenstein, 29 December 1938, quoted in Since Fifty:Men and Memories(London:Faber,1939),305»229when all the arts play like children about the one chimney,mingling"the common pleasures of common raan"^ with the "intellectual traditions"of an ancient heritage, the golden dream of king and peasant.5 Andhere at hand, he found that "living folk tradition,"4 the two passionshe sought, "love of the Unseen life and love of country":^Alone among nations, Ireland has in her written Gaelic literature, in her old love tales and battle tales, the forms in which the imagination of Europe Uttâred itself before Greece shaped a tumult of legend into her music of the arts; and she can discover, from the beliefs and emotions of her common people, the habit of mind that created the religion of the muses.Surely that habit of mind is still possible: "The ’Celt’, as it seems,created romance....would ^ t}not be wonderful if he should remouldromance after its oldest image, now that he is recovering hispossessions.He set out to see for himself. Stories of the countryside, of "Them" and "Their" ways, had been told in the kitchen at Sligo.? The Celtic Folklore Commission, the new enthusiasm for translations. Sir Samuel Ferguson, and the British Museum yielded a rich harvest of legend. In 1888 he published Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, then followed it in 1895 with The Celtic Twilight, in which he wrote:^"Art and Ideas,"op.cit.,355»^"The Rhymer’s Club," The Boston Pilot,23 April 1892, reprinted in Letters to the New Island,ed. Horace Reynolds(Cambridge,Mass.:Harvard UB,1934),146" "The Literary Movement in Ireland," Ideals inIreland,op.cit.,100.^"The Irish Literary Theatre,1900," Beltaine,February 1900,24»Cf. "A General Introduction for ray Work"(1957), Essays and Introductions, 516; Letter to J.B.Yeats, 7 Au^st I909, Wade Letters,354»"^"Modern Poetry:A Broadcast"(1956), Essays and Introductions,506.Cf. Letter to Standish O ’Grady, Christmas I898, Letters,op.cit.,508; Samhain.1908.6.^"Ireland and the Arts"(1901),op.cit.,204 » Cf."The Irish Literary Theatre," Daily Express,14 January 1899,5*^"The Literary Movement in Ireland,"op.cit.,98. Cf. "A Note on National Drama"(1898).Literary Traditions in Ireland, op.cit.,19; "The Celtic Element in Literature’^ 1902), op."cTt., 183.^Hone, W.B.Yeats,39-40.250I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them.Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthenne (19O2), Poets and Dreamers (1905),Gods and Fighting Men (1904), and Visions and Beliefs of the West ofIreland (192O) led him further into the study of "that great Celticphantasmagoria whose meaning no man has discovered nor any angelr e v e a l e d . "2 "We had little scientific curiosity, but sought wisdom,peace, and a communion with the people....Dr. Hyde and his League...sought the peasant...but we sought the peasant’s imagination."5 "She■ and I felt that we had got down, as it were, into some fibrous darkness,into some matrix out of which everything has c o m e . "4Although disappointed that "the power of Faery" had dwindled totales of the peasant only,^ Yeats was charmed by his "search for thereligious life of other times among old Irish monuments and legends."^. "Everything seems possible to them," he observed, "and because they'can never be surprised, they imagine the most surprising things."?i"They can hardly separate mere learning from witchcraft, and are fond^"TMs Book,"l.^"A Visionary," Celtic Twilight(Dnblin; Ma unsel,1905); 22. This passage is omitted from Mythologies. Cf. Lady Gregory’s Journals, ed. Lennox Robinson (London:Putnam,1946),261.^Introduction to The Cat and the Moon,op.cit.,156.AE, the "visionary" of Celtic Twilight, rebelled:"I am afraid it would be a futile task to try < consciously for the Celtic traditional feeling. A certain spirit of it I have but I am not Celt inside, not for many lives." Unpublished portion of letter to Yeats, 5 April,1897,quoted by Gibbon, TCD PhD Thesis, op.cit.,527."^Introduction to ^ Indian Monk(l932),Essays and Introductions,429»^"Kidnappers," Celtic Twilight,1903»0P«cit.,118. The sentence is omitted from Mythologies.^"High Grosses of Ireland," Daily Express,28 January 1899. The article is signed "Hosicrux."?Yeats% account of his first meeting with Joyce,October 1902, quoted by Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (NY:O.U.P.,1939),107* 8f. "It is better doubtless to believe much unreason and a little truth than to deny for denial’s sake truth and unreason alike." "Belief and Unbelief," Celtic Twilight,1905.op.cit.,10. The passage is omitted from Mythologies.251of words and verses that keep half their secret to themselves"(another justification for his own system of "incanting" verse).^It was, he felt, that fantasy which was "the unbroken character of Irish genius," a fantasy he was later to recognise in Synge.^ V/hen he wrote his ov/n plays and early poems, he chose to write of "the paradise that the common people tell of about the fire...Tir-nan-og, the Land of the Living Heart, the Grass Green Island of Apples"3 and those "divine people" that "the simple of all times and the wise men of ancient times" have seen and spoken to.4 Delighting in a speech which itself delighted in "rhythmical animation, in idiom, in images, in words full of far-off suggestion"^ reflecting the habit of mind and poetical sayings of their former tongue, Yeats, with the help of Lady Gregory, attempted a recovery of "the spirit of that great Celtic phantasmagoria."I have worked at Irish mythology and filled a great many pages of notes with a certain arrangement of it for my own purposes; and now I find I have a rich background for whatever I want to do and endless symbols to my hands,"? Yeats wrote to a friend in 1899. But long before he had systematized its mythology, Yeats’s mind had turned towards Ireland for subject matter, "England is old...but Ireland has still^What is ’Popular Poetry’?"(l90l). Essays and Introductions,10.^"J.M.Synge and the Ireland of his Time"(l910),Essays and •Introductions,537•^"Literary Movement in Ireland, "op.cit., 100.^ /D/,^Enchanted Woods,"Mythologies,64#. Cf. Review of The Wanderings of Oisin, Pall Mall Gazette,12 July 1889:"He is very naïve, and very primitive, and speaks of his giants with the awe of a child.""^V/hat is ’Popular Poetry’?" loc.cit.^Cf. Preface to Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men(1905), Collected Works,1908,VIII,166.^Letter to Mrs. Clement Shorter, 21 June 1899,Letters,522.252full tables," he commented in a review of Todhunter’s play The Banshee"Here in Ireland the marble block is waiting for us almost untouched,and the statues will come as soon as we have learned to use the chisel."2And so he turned from London "where all the intellectual traditionsgather to d i e , t o his own country, where one could still find "aconception of the heroic life,"4 "of the soul rejoicing in itself."5It cannot be denied that Yeats’s strong sense of nationalism — anemotion readily perceivable in any Irishman — played an important partin directing his thoughts along the pattern of mysticism, magic, andfinally to Celtic folklore. He had already begun his study of folklore,however, before he attempted to fuse the two passions, nation and art.V ffls one critic of the Irish Literary movement phrased it, "Hisoccult mission, it seemed was to celebrate the wedding of MadameBlavatsky and Finn MacCumhail."6) And throughout his life he deploredthe subordination of literature to any other aim.? "I have alwaysfelt that my mission in Ireland is to serve taste rather than any0definite propaganda," he wrote to Lady Gregory in I9OI.I am a Nationalist....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 early thoughts, I would have lost, in a short time, the power to write movingly upon any theme.9^"The Rhymer’s Club"(1892),op.cit.,148.^"The Irish National Literary Society,"Boston Pilot,19 November 1892, reprinted in Letters to the New Island, op.cit.,159*^"The Theatre"(1900), Essays and Introductions,171 *4Letter to Editor, Daily News (London),11 May 1904,4*^Sandiain, 1904,27.0P.Hugh O ’Donnell, The Stage Irishman of the Pseudo-Celtic Drama (London;John Long,I9O4 ),9*nIn 1904 he contemplated challenging Arthur Griffith (editor of United Irishman)to a public debate on the subject. £f.letter to Lady Gregory, 2 January I904,Letters,421-22.oLetters,552.^"An Irish National Theatre"(?1905), Collected Works,1908,IV,121-22.233c, ,^ One could say that for Yeats nationalism v/as in fact subordinate toa' art. We have seen how the aesthetes in their rebellion againstVictorian materialism turned towards the past; Yeats in his turned to 4. t an Ireland he wished to create.This nationality...is really a war between two civilizations, two ideals of life...We desire to preserve into the modern life that ideal, a nation of men who will...remember always the four ancient virtues...; first, honesty amonf^one’s friends. Second, courage amongst one’s enemies. Third, generosity amongst the weak. Fourth,courtesy at all times.^In other words, the ancient culture of the noble and beggarman. Coupledwith this rebellion against the vulgarity of modern life was thedisillusionment over the downfall of Parnell and the aims of a unitedIreland, an earthquake as shattering to Irish hopes as the downfallof Oscar V/ilde was to the doctrines of the aesthetic movement in England.2It is also obvious from a study of his work that although Yeatsspent a great deal of his life away from Ireland, his memory andimagination took him always back to the Irish countryside, and especiallyto the "wild beauty" of the west country, haunted by legends of the pastand events of the near-present^; "I had a conviction, which indeed I havestill, that one’s verses should hold, as in a mirror, the colours ofone’s own climate and scenery in their, right proportion. "4 ’’We shouldmake poems on the familiar landscapes we love, not the strange and rareand glittering scenes we wonder at," he wrote to his fellow-poetKatherine Tynan in 1888.5 Not only would this bring sincerity andoriginality to one’s work, but greater interest as well. "One shouldlove best what is nearest ; and most interwoven with one’s life."6Prom the unpublished manuscript of a speech given in New York in 1904, quoted by Ellmann,op.cit.,116-17.2£f.Yeats’s speech at the Wolfe Tone Banquet in London, 15April 1898, quoted by Ellmann,op.cit.,114-15; Letter to Katherine Tynan,c. October 1889,Letters,158-59.. 5’’Ireland and the Arts’,' op. cit., 205. Cf. "A Note on National Drama,(1898),op.cit.,19. A brief glance at the Titles of his poems and settings for his plays - the .ne exception Player Queen makes this self-evident.4’’V/hat is ’Popular Poetry’?" op. cit., 5.^Letters,op.cit.,99* Cf.Letter to her p.August 1887,op.cit.,31.Letter to Miss Elizabeth hhite (Professor H.O.lVhite ’ s sister) 50 January 1889, op.cit.,104. Cf."One should have a speciality,"letter tn Katherine Tynan, May 1888, ôîT.cit.,?!.254Furthermore, only then would one be able "to create jlrish character] from within."1 Indeed, he soon found that subject matter had given birth to a new style. "I could not now write of any other country but Ireland, for my style has been shaped by the subjects I have worked on, but there was a time when my imagination seemed unwilling, v/hen I found myself writing of some Irish everit”in words that would have better fitted A- some Italian or Eastern event. "2But one writer alone could not create the Irish literature he dreamed of. A body of artists united in aim and an audience educated to appreciate them were also necessary. Here he would join efforts with Dr. Hi^ d^e’s movement. "V/herever the old imaginative life lingers it must be stirred into life and kept alive, and in Ireland this is the v/ork, it may be, of the Gaelic movement. "5 For "the first thing needful if an Irish literature more elaborate and intense than our fine but primitive ballads and novels is to come into being is that readers and v/riters alike should really know the imaginative periods oi^history."4 "One wants to write for one’s own people, who come to the playhouse with a knowledge of one’s subjects and with hearts ready to be moved," he wrote to his American patron, John Quinn.^ Then the artist must take over. "V/hat I myself did, getting into an original i } relation to Irish life, creating in myself a new character, a new pose — in the French sense of the v/ord — the literary mind of Irelandy^ as a w h o l e . " I f we would express Ireland we must know her^Criticism of minor Irish novelists, letter to the Editor, Daily Express. 27 February 1895,op.cit.,248-49.^"Ireland and the Arts," op.cit.,208.^Samhain,1906.7.^"Ireland’s Heroic Age,"Boston Pilot,14 June 1890,reprinted in Letters to the New Island,op.cit.,107. Of. "The Galway Plains"(1905), Essays and Introductions,214»^28 June 1905, Letters,406.^Samhain,1908.8.255to the heart and in all her moods...Absorb Ireland and her tragedy and you will be the poet of a people, perhaps the poet of a new insurrection."^ Having achieved this, literature will then once more become folk art, "the possession of a people,"^ and her artists once more be honoured as the spiritual leaders of the age, speaking "out of a people to a people."5Because of this belief Yeats wrote "as an Irish writer and with Ireland in my mind."4His Dramatic Theory and Practice V/riting of his revised version of The Shadowy Waters in I9O6,Yeats pointed out, "It is to be judged, like all my plays, as part of an attempt to create a national dramatic literature in Ireland, and it takes upon itself its true likeness of a Jack-a-Lantern among more natural and simple things, when set among the plays of my fellow- workers."5 From his first meeting with Lady Gregory in I896 to his final open letter to her in 1917, more of Yeats’s energy than he later cared to admit was spent on this dream of a national theatre, his personal solution to "the seeming needs of my fool-driven l a n d . "6 "In 1897 a new scene was set, new actors appeared," Yeats wrote to^Letter to AE, 22 January 1898,Letters,294-95. Cf."The Man and the Echo," Collected Poems,593: "Did that play of mine send out/Certain men the English shot?"^"J.M.Synge and the Ireland of his Time,"op.cit.,518.^"A General Introduction for my Work,"op.cit.,310.Cf. Commentary on "Three Songs to the Same Tune," The King of the Great Clock Tower, Commentaries and Poems(Dublin:Cuala Press,1954),34-58.^Letter to the Editor, The Gael(Hew York), December 1899* Cf* Letters to Arthur Griffith,I6 July 1901, to AE 8 January I9O6 , to Miss Horniman,?1908, Letters,op.cit.,555,466,500-501; his comments on receipt of the Nobel Prize for Letters, letter to T.Sturge Moore, 25 November 1925,Correspondence,51.^Preface, Poems,1899-1905 (London; Bullen,I9O6 ),xiii.^"All Things Can Tempt Me," Collected Poems,109.256Olivia Shakespear many years later. ^ But long before 1897 hismind was turned tov/ards the theatre.Early in 1889 we find him v/riting enthusiastically to KatharineTynan about his "new poem," The Countess Kathleen;Drama founded on the Countess Kathleen O’Shea in Folklore book.... This new poem of mine promises to be my most interesting poem and I in all ways quite dramatic, I think. I shall try and get it actedby amateurs (if possible in Dublin) and afterwards try it perhaps on some stage manager or actor. It is in five scenes and full of action and very Irish.2Several weeks later, in a more hesitant mood, he reports that he andMaud Gonne "had some talk as to the possibility of getting my’Countess O ’Shea’ acted by amateurs in Dublin and she felt inclinedto help, indeed suggested the attempt herself if I remember rightly."5Although the planned collaboration with Miss Gonne did not materialize(her only appearance in Yeats’s plays was in 1902 as the old woman inKathleen ni Houlihan for the first production of the Irish NationalDramatic Society, of which she was Vice-President),4 it is importantto realize that Yeats already considered himself a playv/right, notmerely a "dramatic poet."5 Nor is it perhaps mere coincidence thatone of the plans for publicizing the National Literary Society’sprojected lending library scheme (suggested by Yeats) was a smalltravelling theatre which would perform plays on patriotic subjects.^And we have already seen that The Land of Heart’s Desire was producedby Florence Farr, with Miss Horniman’s financial backing, in Londonin 1894, on the same bill with a play by Dr. Todhunter, whose earlier^27 February,1954,Letters,820.^End of February-March 8,1889,ibid.,114* Cf. Letters to John O’Leary and Father Matthew Russell, ibid.,125 and 129.^21 March 1889,ibid.,117*^St. Teresa’s Hall, Clarendon St.,2 April 1902.^Yeats always considered The Countess Cathleen one of his most effective plays. Cf. Letters,674»^Ellmann,op.cit.,107•257productions at Bedford Park had impressed Yeats.^2As Richard Ellmann points out, both The Countess Cathleen and The Land of Heart’s Desire are in Yeats's sense "miracle plays," a form he had proposed to Katharine Tynan and Fiona Macleod as well.5 It is not difficult to accept Ellmann's theory that Yeats's first plans for the Irish Literary Theatre were, unknown to his colleagues, part of his larger plan for a Celtic Mystical Order. However, although the dramatic form would naturally appeal to one impressed by ritual as a "manifestation of the invisible world,"4 this does not explain his choice of the dramatic medium in the first place. For long beforethe foundation of the Irish Literary Theatre movement, mysticallybased or not, and even before his serious study of the occult, Yeatswas v/riting plays with production in mind. "To me the dramatic fis far the pltAfK'sa.n}test pooT/s: form," he confided to ^Iss Tynan in 1889.5 And later, he recalled having "the dream of an Irish theatre # in 1892 certainly."6 Y/hile still at art school, he and AE were writing poetic dramas(about magicians in Asia) in rivalry; AE wrote to a friend about 1886, "His great drama. The Equator of Olives, is finished. The episode of the Sculptor's Garden is in it."? But by that time Yeats had written five other poetic dramas, two of them,"Vivien and Time" and "The Island of Statues^’ for an early love to act,^See above,Part One,ch.4,P ' " A Poetic Drama," Letters to the Hew Island,214.^Op.cit.,150-??.^Letters to Miss Tynan, May I89O and 1 July I89O, Letters,152 and 155-54.^Ibid.^21 April 1889, Letters.122.^Letter to K. Tynan,?Autumn I9O6 , on.cit.,476.7Hone,W.B.Yeats,43» The tragedy was variously entitled The Blindness The Epic of the Forest, and The Equator of the Olives,Ellmann,op.cit.,48.258though the latter play "soon grew beyond the scope of drawing-room acting.Of these early poetic dramas Yeats recalls, "I had begun to write poetry in imitation of Shelley and of Edmund Spenser, play after play — for my father exalted draniatic poetry above all other kinds — and I invented fantastic and incoherent p l o t s . O n e plot. Love and Death (dated April 1884), had "a mortality rate comparable to that in Thomas Kyd’s v/orksj 'but is indicative of the "Gemini myth" v/hich was to hauntYeats's poetry throughout his life, as well as his basic theme of theLi hattraction and mingling of opposite qualities; ^a god and a mortalare twin brothers^; a king's daughter falls in love with the god,Seen in the luminous sky above her garden in childhood, and to be v/orthy of him and put away mortality, becomes without pity and commits crimes, and at last, having made her way to the throne by murder, awaits his coming among her courtiers. One by one they become chilly and drop dead, for, unseen by all but her, her godis in the hall. At last he is at her throne's foot and she,her mind in the gardei?('^ain, dies babbling like a child.The fable was suggested to Yeats by one of his father's early desigis.4The remaining early dramas all centre about the magical and the strugglebetween this and another world, with the other world triumphant.5"I was then living a quite harmonious poetic life. Never thinking outJ of my depth. Always harmonious, nahrow, calm. Taking small interestin people but most ardently moved by the more minute kinds of natural^Letter to K.Tynan, 2Inarch 1889,Letters, 117-18. Vivien and Time X was re-written as Time and^'itch Vivian and published in The Wanderings of Oisin,1889. Four of the early verse dramas are included in The Variorum Edition of the Poems, edi). Peter Allt and Russell K.Alspach "(NY;Macmillan, 195T7*^Op.cit.,66-67;80-82. Cf.Ellmann,op.cit.,28.^Ellmann,op.cit.,57•4Autobiographies,74-75. Cf. Note to "Anashuya and Vijaya," "a little Indian dramatic scene Jwhichf was meant to be the first scene of a play about a man loved by two women, who had the one soul between them, the one woman waking when the other slept, and knowing but daylight as the other only night. "Poems (London;Macmillan, 1927 ), 521.. «^See "An Epilogue to 'The Island of Statues' and 'The Seeker'"("The Song of the Happy Shepherd," Collected Poems,7-8); "Words alone are certain good."259beauty." The Island of Statues was, he conceded, "good of its kind.All have the "Shelleyan" Arcadian note, relieved however by a sharpdramatic twist foreshadowing his later theatrical ability.First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams.Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose.Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems.That might adorn old songs or courtly shows...("The Circus Animals' Desertion,"1959)"Since I have left the 'Island', I have been going about onshoreless seas," Yeats wrote to Miss Tynan in 1888. "Nothing anywherehas clear outline*-. Everything is cloud and foam...* The clouds beganabout four years ago. I was finishing the 'Island'. They came androbbed Naschina (shepherdess-heroine of The Island of Statues] of her, u«)Keu' shadow."2 This "cloud and foam" was to haunt Yeats's work for manyyears, for with it came his first genuine Irish subject-matter, seenfirst in The Wajiderings of Oisin, a long epic poem or "series ofincidents"5 which "endeavoured to set forth the impress left on myimagination by the Pre-Christian cycle of legends."4Oisin is important to a study of Yeats's development as a dramatistfor two reasons, his symbolism and his deliberate choice of form.Looking back, Yeats recognised this:For years I have been preoccupied with a certain myth that was itself a reply to a myth. I do not mean a fiction, but one of those statements our nature is compelled to make or employ as a truth though there cannot be sufficient evidence. V/hen I was a I boy everybody talked about progress, and rebellion against rayelders took the form of aversion to that myth. I took satisfaction in certain public disasters, felt a sort of ecstasy at the contemplation of ruin, and then I came upon the story of Oisin in Tir-nan-oge and reshaped it into ray Wandering's of Oisin. He^Letter to Miss Tynan,September 1888,Letters,87.September 1888,Letters,87-88.^Letter to K.Tynan,51 January 1889,Letters,106.4preface to The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (London:T .Fisher Unwin,18R2),240rides across the sea with a spirit, he passes phantoms, a hoy following a girl, a hound chasing a hare, (actually it is a deeifj. emblematic of eternal pursuit, he comes to an island of choral dancing, leaves that after many years, passes the phantoms once again, comes to an island of endless battle for an object never achieved, leaves that after many years, passes the phantoms once again, comes to an island of sleep, leaves that and comes to Ireland, to S.Patrick and old age. I did not pick these images because of any theory, but because I found them impressive, yet all the while abstractions haunted meAlthough Yeats may not have had a specific theory in mind, it isinteresting to note that many of the personal symbols he uses here forthe first time recur throughout his later plays and poems. And eventhen he felt their strength and the necessity of veiling their meaningfrom the uninitiated:^ j , 1 ^ In the second part of 'Oisin* under disguise of symbolism I. have.-1,,.^’ said several things to which I only have the key. The romance is ^ for my readers. They must not even know there is a symbol anywhere.""hey will not find out. If they did, it would spoil the art. Yet the whole poem is full of symbols — if it be full of aught but ^ clouds.^His art was not for all.The first symbolic alteration Yeats made from the original legendwas his use of the three islands, which, he admits, "are wholly my ovm,having no further root in tradition than the Irish peasant's notionthat Tir-n-an-oge [the Country of the Young] is made up of threephantom islands. To the initiated he explains further: "Thereare three incompatible things which man is always seeking — infinitefeeling, infinite battle, infinite repose— hence the three islands."4^Introduction to The Resurrection, Wheels and Butterflies,101-102.^Letter to K.Tynan, after 6 September,1888,Letters,88.^Letter to the Editor, The Spectator,29 July 1889.^Letter to K.Tynan,6 February 1889,Letters,111. Cf. John Butler Yeats's letter to Jack B. Yeats,12 February 1920: "The fact is art is the expression of unsatisfied human desires — a/nd human desire all through the centuries has never altered — tho' it varies continually in strength." J.B.Yeats, Letters,269.241This "chase after the ideal" came to represent for Yeats man's hungerfor the peaceful eternal love of the gods (Shadow:/ Waters, Deirdre) ;the truth and wisdom of the spiritual life (The Hour Glass, V.Here Therea| Nothing) and poetry (The King's Threshold, The Player Queen); andfinally, the mastery of his opposite, his "mask", his unconquerableself (Cuchulain cycle, The Player Queen). (One of the initiationrituals for Yeats's Celtic Mystical Order, the "sword initiation," issub-titled "The Chase after the Ideal"; the candidate is warned ofthe Black, White, and Red Dogs which are illusions on the path as hefollows "the Pa-wn to the Land of the Blessed. "9My deer and hound are properly related to the deer and hound that flicker in and out of the various tellings of the Arthurian legends, leading different knights upon adventures, and to the hounds and to the hornless deer at the beginning of, I think, all tellings of Oisin's journey to the country of the young,Yeats explained in a note to his poem "He Mourns for the Change thathas come upon him and his Beloved"(1897)•This hound and this deer seem plain images of the desire of the man 'which is for the woman,' and 'the desire of the v/oman whichis for the desire of the man,' and of all the desires that areas these. I have read them in this way in The Wanderings of Oisin, and have made my lover sigh because he has seen in their faces 'the immortal desire of Immortals.'2The same vision "flickers in and out" of his own myth. Porgael, inan early draft of The Shadowy Waters, speaks of "the shadows... thatare in the waters and the winds always/The shadows of unappeasabledesire,/ A boy that follows upon flying feet/A girl that has an applein her hand."5 Similarly, the red hound running from a silver arrow^oore. The Unicorn,74-75» '2Collected Poems,525,68. "For somebody hid hatred and hope and desire and fear/Under my feet that they follow you night and day." Cf."Miraculous Creatures," The Celtic Twilight,1905,110-111, passage omitted from Mythologies.^Unpublished MS, in National Library of Ireland, MS. 8762(9).Cf. his description of a Hermetist's vision in "The Philosophy of Shelley's ' Poetry"(1900), Essays and Introductions,90.242in Shadov/y Waters symbolizes, according to Ellmann, "the passionateDec bora fleeing the silver (and therefore lunar, idealizing) loveof Forgael."^ The same picture of eternal, unappeasable desire isrecalled by Yeats's description of Tir-ra-^Oge in The King; of the2Great Clock Tower (l935)* The blossoms Dectora imagines she sees5over a sVeam symbolize "dawn and air and earth and resurrection"; the apples of precious stones are^ '^ perhaps emotions made eternal by their own perfection."4In this long epic poem, too, we see a deliberate choice of form when compared with its "counter-truth,"5 The Countess Cathleen, published three years later. Yeats felt this choice worthy of comment in his 1892 Preface;The chief poem jlhe Countess Cathleen]is an attempt to minglepersonal thought and feeling with the beliefs and customs of Christian Ireland; whereas the longest poem in my earlier book (pisii] endeavoured to set forth the impress left on my imagination by the Pre-Christian cycle of legends. The Christian cycle being mainly concerned with contending mood and moral motives needed, I thought, a dramatic vehicle. The tumultuous and heroic Pagan cycle, on the other hand, having to do with vast and shadov/y activities and with the great impersonal emotions, expressed itself naturally — or so I imagined — in epic and epic-lyric measures. No epic method seemed sufficiently minute and subtle for the one, and no dramatic method elastic and all-containing enough for the other.6 gHere at last we find Yeats coming to terms with the question of dramaticform and its necessity for the treatment of "contending mood and moralmotives." From this point on we see him consciously formulating ideals^The Identity of Yeats (London tMacmillan, 1954) »>^Collected Plays,653-34.7Quoted from an occult diary dated 13 July 1899, Ellmann, op.cit.,8 5.^ote to The Arrow, 1906, quoted by Ellmann,ibid.^"Circus Animals* Desertion," Collected Poems,591-92.^Preface to The Countess Cathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (London;I892). Cf. Note to Deirdre, The Arrow 1,2(November I9O6 ),2;"I have selected certain things which seem to be characteristic of the tale as well as in themselves dramatic, and I have separated these from much that needed an epic form or a more elaborate treatment."243and theories concerning the drama. And although he was to make manyexperiments within the dramatic convention before he satisfied thosetheories, his concept and demand of the dramatic form varied little.Some of my friends, and it is always for a few friends onewrites, do not understand why I have not been content withlyric writing. But one can only do what one wants to do,and to me drama — and I think it has been the same withother writers — has been the search for more of manfulenergy, more of cheerful acceptance of whatever arises outof the logic of events, and for clean outline, instead ofthose outlines of lyric poetry that are blurred v/ith desireand vague regret. All art is in the last analysis anendeavour to condense as out of the flying vapour of theworld an image of human perfection, and for its own and notfor the art's sake.L✓he wrote in I9O6. Four years earlier, defending not his choice of form but his choice of subject, he had stated his position in similar terms ;Drama is a picture of the soul of man, and not of his exterior life.... Drama describes the adventures of men's souls among the thoughts that are most interesting to the dramatist, and therefore, probably most interesting to his time....We are interested in religion and in private morals and personal emotion, and so it is precisely out of the rushing journey of the soul through these " things that Ibsen and Wagner got the tumult that is drama. ^\ J , And in I9O4 he analysed his own dramatic method;' Y/hat attracts me to drama is that it is...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 simple form....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...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 f o r m . 5^Preface to Poems 1899-1905 (London:A.H.Bullen,1906),xii-xiii.^"The Freedom of the 'Theatre, " U.%., 1 November 1902,5»^"First Principles," Samhain,1904,19» Cf.Report on a lecture on dramatic ideals by \7BY,6 May 1899 preserved by W.A.Henderson, National Library of Ireland, MS 1729,11: "...The aim of the drama was action wedded to lovely and majestic words....Such a drarm.would not be dull, because there was no excitement so intense as spiritual excitement."244Except for one brief excursion with Lady Gregory into the "less important kind of drama" (The Pot of Broth,1902), Yeats left the "popular" aspect of the theatre to others, and concentrated on the "activity of the souls of the characters," and more specifically,"the rushing journey of the soul" through religion, private morals,and personal emotion as he himself viewed them in conflict with themodern world. And as time went on, he discovered his own achievement of the ideal in the co-operation of both musician and sculptor to "picture life in action."1Yeats's aesthetic theory, as we have so far traced it, was eminently relevant to the dramatic form. From Pater and Wilde he had learned the importance of style, and now he observed the relationship "between discipline and the theatrical sense": "Active virtue as• distinguished from the passive acceptance of a current code istherefore theatrical, consciously dramatic, the wearing of a mask."A wise theatre" might, in fact, "make a training in strong and beautiful life the fashion, teaching before all else the heroic discipline of the looking-glass."^ As we have seen, in his personal life Yeats consciously strove for this discipline, "the wearing of a mask." Now he applied it to the theatre as well. "Life in itself isa war of forces," he advised Lady Gregory during a time of crisis.4Might not art then, founded as it is upon personal vision, clarify and extend this discipline?^ "In the shaping of an agate, whether in the^ C f the Boiler (Dublin:Cuala,1938),33-54: "Masterpieces, whether of the stage or study, excel in their action, their visibility."2Autobiographies.469. quoted in Mythologies,334.^"Discoveries"(l907), Essays and Introductions. 270.^Unpublished letter dated 18 May 1905 in the possession of Mrs. Yeats. In a letter a few days later, he relates this to himself: "I am always so afraid of the sensitiveness, created by imaginative culture, making one overyielding that I perhaps push things the other way."^Samhain.190?.10.245cutting, or in the making of the design, one discovers... thoughts that seem important and principles that may he applied to life itself. "Perhaps one can explain in plays, where one has much more room than in songs and ballads, even those intricate thoughts, those elaborate emotions, that are one’s self."2 And so we find the proud hero, no matter what his guise — Seanchan, Cuchulain, Deirdre, Naisi, Conchubar or Congal — actively striving with his own opposite and finally achieving success with the acceptance of his own defeat.5 Occasionally success itself is an activating quality; Dectora becomes queen, and the poet's creation in turn createsThe doctrine of the mask, therefore, the struggle of the self for the self, became one of the essential themes in Yeats's work.So, too, Yeats discovered that this'theme bred another wbich was in^Preface to The Cutting of an Agate(1918), Essays and Introductions, 219. Cf. "The Theatre" (l900),op.cit.,171; "The Play, the Player and the Scene," Samhain,1904,25.^Preface to The Poetical Works of >/illiam B. Yeats,I9O6,Yol.I, reprinted in The Variorum,851.A^t one time Yeats contemplated a play about Judas, whose betrayal he saw as necessary to the fulfilment of Christ; letter to Lady Gregory, I4 January 1918,Letters,645. Cf. his description of The \ ^ Hunchback, Phase 26 of A Vision,1937,'176-79* Richard Ellmann, in "TheArt of Yeats : Affirmative Capability," The Kenyon Review X\^ ,3(Summer ’ 1953),377-78, quotes from an essay, "Seven Propositions" which Yeatsnever published. Propositions IV and V read: "IV. The emotional character of a timeless and spaceless spirit reflects itself as its position in time, its intellectual character as its position in space.The position of a Spirit in space and time therefore defines character.V. Human life is either the struggle of a destiny against all other destinies, or a transformation of the character defined in the horoscope into timeless and spaceless existence," This theory closely approximatesthe principle of "synchronicity" as upheld by the I Ching philosophyof Ancient China.T^liis interpretation of the mask or opposite cuts across T.R.Henn's brief discussion of the central themes of the plays as he sees them. The Lonely Tower (London:Methuen,1950),259-60: the Cuchulain , Legend, the tragedy of love, the soul and God, Ireland and theX eighteenth century tradition. These are situations only, through v/hichi Yeats wove his own doctrine.b246itself dramatic, "the war of spiritual with natural order."Allprogress is by contraries," Blake had said. Not only by overcomingone’s self, then, but by overcoming one’s opposite can one find truth.Paul Ruttledge battles against conventional society, which preventsthe soaring of the personality, and conventional religion, whichforbids the laughter of the soul,5 and comes at last to the truth that"where there is nothing, there is G o d ."4 The wise sceptic gainsinsight through the eyes of the fool; "One sinks in on God; we do5not see the truth; God sees the truth in us." Cuchulain’s soul seeksits first, "soft, featheiyshape," freed by a blind man’s desire for^Dedication to AE, The Secret Rose,vii. In an early letter to AE, Yeats describes Forgael as "a world wanderer trying to escape from himself." Letter from AE to Sean O ’Faolain, quoted by Ellmann, The Man and the Mahks,77-78*\^Vhere There is Nothing (London: Bull en, I905 ) , Act I, p. 3: "You see it is a beautiful comb; but the wings are very short. The poor creature can’t fly." .^Ibid.,IV,p.90: "I have learned that one needs a religion so wholly supernatural, that is so opposed to the order of nature that the world can never capture it."^Uf."But now I have grown nothing, knowing all," "Fergus and the Druid," Collected Poems (London:Macmillan, 1952),36-37• "V/here there is Nothing there is God," Mythologies,1^4-90. The Unicorn from the Stars, written in collaboration with Lady Gregory, carries this spirit of salvation throu.h destruction to an even more complete realization of "the central idea of the stories in The Secret Rose," Yeats wrote to Bullen in I9O8, defending its inclusion in his collected works, 12 February 1908,Letters,503> Cf. note to the play. Collected Works,1906, 220-221. A review of the play in I902 compares Yeats as a reformer with Ibsen, Acade y and Literature,31 December 1902,661-62.^The Hour Glass,prose version. £f. "Y/e perish into God and sink away/into reality — the rest's a dream," new version. Collected Plays (London;Macinillan, 1952), 322. In his preface to the new version, The Mask,V,4 (April 1913),327, Yeats states: "I took the plot of ’The Hour Glass’ from an Irish Folk Tale but tried to put my own philosophy into the words." For similar treatments of the same theme see Padraic Colum's "The Foleys — A Play in One Act," U.%.,10 May 1902,3 (never acted at the Abbey), and Lady Gregory’s 'The Travelling Man;A Miracle Play, in which Yeats had a hand.247twelve pennies: "And is not that a strange shape for the soul/Of agreat fighting-man?"^ ilnd Congal, "That wise, victorious, voluble, unlucky/Blasphemous, famous, infamous man," dies at the hands of a fool — himself.^ Perhaps, after all, the lost cause is the best cause.5The importance of style, the drama inherent in the doctrine of the mask lead inevitably as well to the dramatic value of the ritual and the symbolic significance of the actor in a theatre which is a temple to the soul of man. The actor becomes a symbol, a puppet, in fact, his speech and gestures carrying him and the audience to the world of the spirit evoked by the poet’s words. A discussion of actor and ritual belongs to an examination of structure,4 but once again we are involved with Yeats’s concept of the poet as a magus who through his imagination creates the myth by which characters and audience achieve spiritual truth. If the actor is in a sense his created image, then he is the master puppeteer, a combination of the arch-priest and the cultivated whole man. It is through the artist, who uses the world of reality as material for the spiritual world, that unity of being5 can^Collected Plays, 702.^Collected Plays, 6 7 6.^In the first edition of A Vision,1925»2431 Yeats enlarges upon this doctrine: "The Ghostly Self... an emotion which becomes a supernatural contemplation. I so picture my own Deirdre and Naisi when at the spectacle of triumphant evil and the approach of death they sit and play chess, and I wrote my ’Hour Glass’ to describe such contemplation... In the one case natural love is brought to its greatest height, and in the other intellectual search, and both reduced to nothing that the soul may love what it hates, accepting at the same moment what must happen and its own being, for the Ghostly Self is that which is unique in man and in his fate."^Bee below, p.3^7^*5For Yeats, "unity of being" implied both spiritual perfection (in the theoso%ihical-Cabbalistic sense) and woddly savoir-faire (in the Edwardian sense).248be achieved. He creates the dream, and, paradoxically, as Blake’s "spiritual leader," can give that dream reality. As a dramatist, then, Yeats was in turn able to dramatize himself: the magician-poet-creator, his world the spiritual, his audience, which in turn provided material for his pen, Ireland. In an early draft of The Player Queen he gives this ambition of the artist-creator to his heroine :Player Queen: Let me become all your dreams. I will make themwalk about the world in solid bone and flesh.People looking at them will become all fire themselves and they will change, there will be a last judgment on their souls, a burning and dissolving. Perhaps the whole age may change, perhaps the whole age may learn. It is only by continual struggle, by continual violence, we force the gates of heaven, that no one is worthyof art, worthy of love whose jgic] not alwayslike great kings and queens in soul and body like a runner, like a racer....Yellow Martin, {the poe^: We shall become like Tom the Fiddler.He would sing no song that did not please him.Player Q^een: Yes, like Tom the Fiddler,that’s what I want.lThe Subject-Matter of Drama."Any knot of events, where there ds passionate emotion and clashof will, can be made the subject matter of a play, and the less likea play it is at the first sight the better play may come of it in the end," Yeats advised playwrights who contemplated production at thepAbbey Theatre. One must choose the subject-matter and situations whichsuit one’s own theme, "but those themes we share and inherit, so longUnpublished MS.of The Player Queen(before I915),National Library of Ireland, MS 8764. Ellmann’s quotation from a somewhat later draft. The Identity of Y^ts, 108-09: "Septimus told me once that no one finds their genius (untTJf they have found some role, some image, that gives them a pose towards life, that liberates something within them, that had else deaf and numb. Only by images, he said, do wemake the eternal life^ aT’part of our ephemeral life."2Henderson collection. National Library of Ireland MS, 1732,259*249as they engage our emotions, come f i r s t . T h e world Yeats chosewas an intellectual as well as an emotional one (although "philosophyis a dangerous theme"), ^ balanced by the plays of his fellovz-workers,Lady Gregory and Synge.I write of the tragic stories told over the fire by people who are in the comedies of ray friends, and I never see my work played with theirs that I do not feel that my tragedy heightens their comedy and tragi-comedy, and grows itself more moving and intelligible from being mixed into the circumstance of the world by the circumstantial art of comedy. Nor is it only the stories and the country mind that have made us one school, for we have talked over one another's work so many times, that when a play of mine comes into ray memory I cannot always tell how much even of the radical structure I may not owe to the v/riter of 'The Lost Saint, ' or of 'The Shadow of the Glen,' or more than all, to the writer of 'Hyacinth Halvey'; or that I would have written at all in so heady a mood if I did not know that one or the other were at hand to throw a bushel of laughter into the common basket.5But no matter how he might justify the laughing comedies of his friends,Yeats had himself in mind when in 1899 he wrote, "Our plays will be forthe most part remote, spiritual, and ideal."4 Looking back oversufficient distance, Yeats tended to interpret his choice of subjectIn terras of the national situation in Ireland after the fall of Parnell;"Repelled by what had seemed the sole reality, we had turned to romanticdreaming, to the nobility of tradition."5 Hovæver, as we have seen,reaction to the political situation was only a small part of the mythhe wished to express. "Great art, great poetical drama is the utmostof nobility and the utmost of reality comportable with it," he wrotein a diary in 1915» "The persons of a drama fall into two groups^Introduction (1937), Essays and Introductions, iXi~•Preface to The King of the Great Clock Tower (Dublin;Cuala Press,1934).^Preface to Poems ;1899-1905.4"The Theatre," Essays and Introductions,I66.^Introduction to Fighting the Waves(1934)»#ieels and Butterflies,71.2501 ;commonly: the group where nobility predominates and the group wherereality predominates. If there is too much of the first, all become / sentimental, too much of the second, all become sordid. Nobility struggles with reality, the eagle and the s n a k e . T w o years later he further developed this concept of the subject matter of drama, once more linking it with the theory of conflict between two worlds:Now the art I long for is also a battle, but it takes place in the depths of the soul and one of the antagonists does not wear a shape known to the world or speak a mortal tongue. It is the struggle of the dream withJ the world — it is only possible when we transcend circumstances and ourselves, and the greater the contest, the greater the art....But it is not only the mere speech that must be heightened, there must be whole phantasmagoria through which the lifelong contest finds expression. There must be fable, mythology, that the dream and the reality may face one another in visible array. Even when real life moves us deeply... we cease to be realists....Only the intellect...is content with what the eye sees and the intellect only wishes to understand....can only become conscious of a thing by comparing it with its opposite. The two real things we have are our natures and the circumstances that surround us....It is a sudden sense of power and/ypeace that comes ..hen we have before our mind's eye a group of images which obeys us, which leaves us free, and which satisfies the needs of our soul. But we must believe in it and if we left a single painful fact, we would be unable to believe in those images.2"There must be fable, mythology, that the dream and the reality may face one another in visible array." As we have seen, Yeats had already chosen Irish legend as the tapestry through which he could work his themes. "The old Irish poets wove life into life, thereby ^ giving to the v/ildestand strangest romance the solidity and vitalityy [o:^ the Comedie Humaine, and all this romance was knitted into thescenery of the country," Yeats observed in a letter to Robert Bridges.^^Unpublished MS. quoted by Ellmann, Identity of Yeats,3l6nl06.2"The Poet and the Actress," unpublished dialogue(1915),quoted by Ellmann,op.cit.,105-06.^20 July 1901, Letters,355-54./251As early as 1897 he had a similar "long-cherished project — a poetical version of the great Celtic epic tale, Deirdre, Cuchullin at the Ford, and Cuchullin's death, and Bermot and C r a i n n e . " W h e n I was twenty- ■ five or twenty-six I planned a Legende des Siecles of Ireland that was' to set out with my Wanderings of Oisin, and show something of every• century."2But Yeats knew little or no Gaelic,^ and translations were rare.With the publication of Lady Gregory's folk histories, however, he felt that here was "the book of the people" he had been waiting for. And ^ with the exception of The Unicorn from the ^tars^ and The Player Queen,both fantastic, philosophical farces', Yeats drew his material from• his own and Lady Gregory's research into Irish "olklore and knowledge of the Irish peasant. The Countess Cathleen was suggested by Maud Gonne^ and based on a story Yeats included in his Fairy Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry in 1888^; The Land of Heart's Desire^Letter to Fiona Macleod,00.cit.,280.^"Estrangement"(1909), Autobiographies,493»^In a letter to the Editor of The Gael (NY),December 1899,Letters,' 528, Yeats writes,"I have taken up Gaelic again, and though I shall J ' never have entire mastery of it, I hope to be able to get some of the ^feeling of the language." He never did master it.^Yeats, Hyde and Lady Gregory wrote the first rough version of Where There is Nothing in a fortnight to prevent George Moore from stealing the plot, _cf. postjscript to "The Freedom of the Theatre,"U.%., 1 November 1902. Hov/ever, from a correspondence preserved in National Library of Ireland concerning the collaboration and production of Diarmuid and Grania, it would appear that Moore did have some justification for his claim, even though the original idea may have come from Yeats. In a letter dated July 5rd (probably I901) from Ely Place (where he moved in March I901), Moore sends Yeats a detailed scenario in five acts describing the astonishing activities of aprofessor who renounces the university (no doubt Trinity College) for the life of a tinker, writes verses and founds religions, spends some time in Paris, returns to marry "the dirtiest girl in the village," escapes once again to become a circus clown, eventually becomes a hermit in a ruined monastery and is killed by the rabble who have been roused against him by the priests for "reviving the ancient religions" of Eire, including Druidism. The action includes a carousal on porter, a scene which is found in both versions of the Yeats-Gregory play.^Dedication, The Countess Kathleen, 1892,on.cit.. 'i.^Yeats learned later that the story had its origin in a German legend.Cf.section on controversy. Part IT, ch.9>P«5'^ |?.252was in part the result of a quarrel with Maud Gonne and based on his2study of the Irish belief in faery. Cathleen ni Houlihan, ^vritten in 1902 for Maud Gonne to act, took as its subject "Ireland and its struggle for independence."5 "My play, 'The Land of Heart's Desire,' was, in a sense, the call of the heart, the heart seeking its own dream; this play ['Kathleen ni H o ul ih anis the call of country, and I have a plan of following it up with a little play about the call of religion," he explained in a newspaper interview.4 The Hour Glass, the third variation on the same theme, v/as once more based on Irish folklore,5 and the plot for The King's Threshold, although again expressing personal feeling ("It was written when our Society was having a hard fight for the recognition of pure art. "^), v/as based on a middle Irish story recorded by Lady Wilde and reprinted in his Irish Fairy and Folk T a l e s All of the plays included in the Cuchulain cycle — M The Hawk's Well, The Green Helmet, On Haile's Strand, The Only Jealousy of Emer, and The Death of Cuchulain — are founded (with variations) on Lady Gregory's translations, as is the third Noh play, The Dreaming of the Bones. But by then Yeats had completed his o?m mythology, and A Vision took precedence as his source book.^Ellmann, The Man and the Masks ,H11.^Cf. his Irish Fairy Tales (I892), and ^ Celtic Twilight (l893).^United Irishman,5 April, 1902,5* Sarah Allgood, most famous "Kathleen," always believed that this play was Lady Gregory's v/ork.Letter to the present writer from Mrs. Dorothy McAuliffe, 29 May I96I.^I.,loc.cit.5Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland (London:Ward and Downey,1887;,1,60-67. Yeats reprints her story in his Collected Works,1908,IV,233-39*^Note to The King's Threshold, Poems 1899-1905,op.cit.,279-80.^"Seanchan the Bard and the King of the Cats, "141-50^1 verse drama on the same theme, Sancan the Bard (London:Ward and Downey,1895) by Edwin Ellis, who heard the story from Yeats. Cf. Eleanor Hull,A Text Book of Irish Literature,Part II (Dublin:Gill,1907)156-57*25)The Poet and the Image.Seek those imagesThat constitute the wild,The lion and the virgin,The harlot and the child.("Those Images",19)8)The image was central to Yeats's view of the artist and dramatist, for here artist-priest pai'ted company from scholar-saint.We live with images, that is our renunciation, for only the silent sage or saint can make himself into that perfection, turning the life inward at the tongue as though it heard the cry Seereturn meum mihi; choosing not, as we do, to say all and know-nothing, but to know all and to say nothing,^Debarred from that final spiritual communion, it was only by imagesthe artists could "make the eternal life^a part of our ephemerallife."2 And in the creation of those images the poet achieved the"unity of being" peculiar to his art; "It is a sudden sense ofpower and peace that comes when we have before our mind's eye a groupof images which obeys us, which leaves us free, and which satisfiesthe needs of our soul.As with the symbol and the myth, Yeats appears to have received/ his interpretation of the image through his studies of Blake, for itis in a review of Richard Garnett's William Blake in I896 that weencounter his first full discussion of the subject:"The word image," says "The Way of Christ," a compilation from Boehme and Law's interpretation of Boehme, published at Bath when Blake was eighteen, "meaneth not only a creaturely resemblance, in which sense man is said to be the Image of God; but it signifieth also a spiritual substance, a birth or effect of a will, wrought in and by a spiritual being or power. And imagination, which we are apt erroneously to consider an airy, idle, and impotent faculty of the human mind, dealing in fiction and roving in phantasy or idea without producing any powerful or permanent ^ffectsj, is the magia or power of raising and forming such images or substances, and the greatest power in nature.4^Preface to Poems 1899-1905, xiii.2Unpublished MS. of The Player Queen, quoted by Ellmann, Identity of Yeats,109.^"The Poet and the Actress,"unpublished dialogue quoted hv Ellmann, ibid., 106^^06. ^rr\a.r\A. \t\ ^ ^254If we recall his interpretation of Blake's definition of imagination ("'Vision or imagination' — meaning symbolism by these words — is a representation of what actually exists, really or unchangeably.we discover that for Yeats, the "image" was the visualized, — or, in2his case, the dramatized-symbol. The dramatist chose his imagesfrom the vast storehouse of the past and from "the book of the people"he discovered about him:I would, if I could, add to that great and complicated inheritance of images which written literature has substituted for the greater and more complex inheritance of spoken tradition, to that majestic heraldry of the poets some new heraldic images gathered from the o' lips of the common people.5çSfV And by "re-charging" them with his own imagination, they in turntake on a personal, more powerful meaning. "When I wrote thesepoems," he writes of The Wind Among the Reeds in 1909,I had so meditated over the images that came to me..., and other images ■feaM Irish folk-lore, that they had become true symbols.I had sometimes when awake, but more often in sleep, moments of vision, a state very unlike dreaming, when these images took upon themselves what seemed an independent life and became a part of a mystic language, which seemed always as if it would bring me some strange revelation.4It is with these images in his mind, then, that the dramatistbegins to create.He has felt something in the depth of his mind and he wants to make it as visible and powerful to our senses as possible. He will use the most extravagant words or illustrations if they suit his purpose. Or he will invent a wild parable^and the more his mind is on fire or the more creative it is^ the less will he look at the outer world or value it for its own sake. It gives him metaphors and examples^ and that is all.^—Introduction to A Book of Images,op.cit.,7.^A definition ratified by The Oxford English Dictionary: "a symbol, emblem, representation...a mental picture or impression; an idea, conception."^Preface to Countess Cathleen(l901),Collected Works,1908,III,212.^Poems: Second Series (London:Bullen,1909),14^ •^"Has the Drama of Contemporary Life a Root of its Own?"(l907), Essays and Introductions,276-77#.'jyy255The more powerful the imagination, the more significant the image;the less "realistic" the material, the greater the art. "\Yhat isliterature hut the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol andincident?"^ Furthermore, whatever is of reality should, in the workof art, be consumed in the interaction of these images. "We shouldnot as a rule have to say things for their own sake in a play but forthe sake of emotion. The idea should be inherent in the fable."2"The greatest art symbolizes not those things that we have observedso much as those things we have experienced.In Christianity, what was philosophy in Eastern Asia became life, biography and drama. A play passes through the same process in being written. At first, if it has psychological depth, there is a bundle of ideas, something that can be stated in philosophical terms; my » Countess Cathleen■ for instance was once the moral question, may a soul sacrifice itself for a good end? but gradually philosophy is eliminated until at last the only philosophy audible, if there is even that, is the mere expression of one character oranother.4The essence of drama for Yeats, therefore, is character in action, and that character is valuable not for its sake alone, but for the mood,4 emotion or idea of which it is an image.5 However, the dramatistmust beware of the dangers of the modern commercial theatre, whose "personages do not transcend our cornnion actions any more than our common speech,for there "the central persons...had not characters of any kind, being vague ideals, perfection as it is imagined by a comraon-place mind."7 The aim of the dramatist should be "to rediscover^"A Teller of Tales"(1893),Celtic Twilight.1905.6-7: this passage is omitted from Mythologies.2Letter to Brinsley MacNamara, 22 June 1919, Letters,657»^Samhain,1905,11.^"Estrangement" (1909), Autobiographies,468.5 'Later he felt that one of the advantages of the Noh convention wasthe neglect of character, by which "they have made possible a hundredlovely intricacies." "Certain Noble Plays of Japan" (1916), Essays andIntroductions,255*^Samhain,1904,26.7Samhain,1905,7.256, an art of the theatre that shall he joyful, fantastic, extravagant,' whimsical, beautiful, resonant, and altogether reckless," "a dramaof energy, of extravagance, of fantasy, of musical and noble speech.And the characters that will produce such a drama of "strong,imaginative energy"^ must of necessity themselves be "excessive,extravagant, fantastic." "It is only by extravagance, by an emphasisfar greater than that of life as we observe it, that we can crowd intoa few minutes the knowledge of years."5 "I want to see the peopleshown up in their naked hideousness," a learned village shoemaker,' Pat Dirane, once said to him, deploring the sentimentality of certain' Irish novelists.^ And Yeats agreed.Dramatic characters, therefore, as well as being true distillationsof the artist's mind, should be deliberately divorced from the averageman's idea of every day reality. "Art delights in the exception, forit delights in the soul expressing itself according to its own laws andarranging the world about it in its own pattern."5 This mightoccasionally, as in Synge's case, require deliberate effort on thepart of the audience:Great art chills us at first by its coldness or its strangeness, by what seems capricious, and yet it is from these qualities it has authority....The imaginative writer shows us the world as a painter does his picture, reversed in a looking-glass^that we may see it...as [if] we were Adam and this the first morning."Above al%, the artist must have sincerity in his vision and freedomin his creation; only then will his images live. "When one createsa character one does it out of instinct," Yeats commented to Frank Fay.^Samhain.1904.27-28.2"The Irish Literary Theatre,1900," Beltaine.no.2 (February 1900),22 .^Samhain,1903,11-12.^Samhain.1905,6.^Samhain.I904,26-27."J.M.Synge and the Ireland of his Time"(l910), Essays and Introductions,559. Cf. Yeats's criticism of T.S.Eliot's dramas, which "symbolize what we know^not what the author knows," Introduction to t\0 Oxford Book of Modern Verse (Oxford,Clarendon, 19)6),xxii-iii.257"It is as though the character embodied itself. The less one reasons the more living the character.One might assume from his insistence on the "joyful, fantastic, extravagant, whimsical" qualities of drama that Yeats would be concerned mainly with developing an art of comedy that would satisfy his particular requirements as a dramatist. Bat it was only very slowly that Yeats learned to trust himself to the comic style, helped no doubt by his observations of the "new comedy" developed by Synge and Lady Gregory, as well as by his own increasing self-assurance., However Yeats was demanding extravagance and fantasy long before The Playboy. And the comedy Yeats did finally develop differed both in ' treatment and te clinique from that of his colleagues. As we shall see, both Lady Gregory and Synge wrote in the stringent, bitter-sweet manner ’ one usually associates with Jonson on the one hand and O'Casey on the . other, sweeping from tenderness to cruelty with one flowing brush. However Yeats, reflecting a balanced v/orld in a Hegelian mirror, could never accept the hazy "no-man's land" of tragi-comedy. "Tragedy must always be a drowning and breaking of the dykes that separate man from man, and...it is upon these dykes comedy keeps house."5 If Lady ■ Gregory and Synge turned to the seventeenth century for their tradition, he by nature turned to the eighteenth, and at last found his justification in Congreve's definition of "humour" (which to Yeats was the foundation of comedy): ' the^^singular and unavoidable way of doingLetter to Frank Fay, January I904, Letters,425. Cf. Lady Gregory's comment concerning comedy, where the character "puts out little feet and takes his own way." Notes to New Comedies (London:Putnam's,1915).^Ee could appreciate it, however, and in unpublished letters to Lady Gregory in Mrs. Yeats's possession, postmarked 18 and 22 May,1905, he describes having seen The Silent Woman and The Knight of the Burning Pestle in London: "the most joyful, laughable, wonderful cup of youth"; "just such extravagant joyous comedy as we are trying to make."^"The Tragic Theatre"(I9IO), Essays and Introductions,241.258anything peculiar to one man only, by which his speech and actionsare distinguished from all other m e n . F o r Yeats, comedy, beingthe antithesis of tragedy, as character is in opposition to personality,2could never sufficiently detach itself from the reality on which itfed) to achieve the heroic ecstasy of tragedy.^ Or in terms of hisdoctrine of the mask;Tragedy is passion alone, and rejecting character, it gets form from motives, from the wandering of passion; while comedy is the clash of character. Eliminate character from comedy and ' you get farce....Comedy is joyous because all assumption of a part, of a personal mask, whether of the individualised face of comedy or of the grotesque face of farce, is a display of energy, and all energy is joyous. A poet creates tragedy from his own soul, that soul which is alike in all men. It has not joy, as we understand that word, but ecstasy, which is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen, perhaps, by all those that still live. The masks of tragedy contain neither character nor personal energy.... and I think the motives of tragedy are not related to action but to changes of state.5"To express character, which has a great deal of circumstance, of habit, you require a real environment; some one place, some one moment of time; but in tragedy, yfcich comes from that within us which dissolves away limits, there is need for surroundings where beauty, decoration, pattern — that is to say, the universal in form — takes the place of accidental circumstance. It was perhaps this consciousness of "place" or situation in comedy which first made Yeats distrust the^Ibid. The same definition is quoted by Yeats in an address delivered before the Dramatic Club of Harvard University the following year, "The Theatre of Beauty," Harper's Weekly,11 November 1911,11.^Letter to J.B.Yeats, 23 February 1910,Letters,548-49. Cf. "The Tragic Theatre," op.cit.,240. This is "character" in the sense of personal qualities, not in the theatrical sense of the image.^"Character can only express itself perfectly in a real world,""The Tragic Theatre,"op.cit.,24^.^"For comedy is passionless," "A People's Theatre," Plays and Controversies,op.cit.,206.^"Estrangement"(1909),Autobiographies,470-7l.Cf. Preface to Plays for an Irish Theatre(London;Bullen7l91)),viii, a revised version of the same essay.^"The Theatre of Beauty," op.cit.,11./259comic form; clarity of situation would, he felt, detract from theheroic moment when "nobility struggles with reality, the eagle andthe s n a k e . I t was this fear of indignity which had made himdistrust the art of Aubrey Beardsley many years earlier: "I see hisart with more understanding now than when he lived, for in 1895 orI896 1 was in despair at the new breath of comedy that had begun towither the beauty that 1 loved, just when that beauty seemed to haveunited itself to mystery."2 Heroic man was more important than action,for with action itself came the danger of indignity, the sharp flashnot of insight but of spectacle.^ Furthermore, the comic situationdemanded more detail, a conscious effort on the dramatist's part to"block in" the characters according to their type, thereby detractingfrom their power and value as images of the creator's imagination.It might be said that Yeats simply did not have "comic vision."Life to him was serious business, and although he certainly was not'j lacking in humour,^ that was a quality to be consumed, rather thanpreserved, in his art. The comic element was, in fact, a part ofstyle, and as such a conscious effort;The style is in the arrangement of events as in the words, in that touch of extravagance, of irony, of surprise, which is set there after the desire of js^l logic has been satisfied and all that is merely necessary established, and leaves one, not in the circling necessity, but caught up into the freedom of self-delight... If it be very conscious, very deliberate, as it may be in comedy, for comedy is more personal than tragedy, we call it fantasy, perhaps even mischievous fantasy, recognizing how disturbing it is to all that drag a ball at the ankle.51From an unpublished notebook,quoted by Ellmann, Identity of Yeats, 3l6nl06. a.hocd > 2.5'D.A^utobiographies, 3:^. Cf.letter 3 April 1902,Letters,368,to Lady Gregory concerning his efforts to eliminate the "wild humour" of the opening of Cathleen ni Houlihan,a contrast Synge or O'Casey would have deliberately employed.^Samhain,1904,23*^In her autobiography. Life and the Dream(NY;Doubleday,1947),423< Mary Colum writes,"He was not averse to a little gossip, and his humor could be very penetrating. I never saw any wit in him but he had that different thing, humor.""Poetry and Patriotism"(19O7), Poetry and Ireland;Essays by W.B. Yeats and Lionel Johnson(Dundrum:Cuala Press,I9O8),llT260Style and comedy require thought; "passion and not thought makest r a g e d y . C o m e d y sharpens the intellect, tragedy reveals the soul:Tragic art, passionate art, the drowner of dykes, the confounder of understanding, moves us by setting us to reverie, by alluring us almost to the intensity of trance. The persons upon the stage... greaten till they are humanity itself. We feel our minds expand convulsively or spread out slowly like some moon-brightened image-crowded sea.2Comedy belongs to the cloudless light of day, and as soon vanishes.Tragedy "lifts us into a world of knowledge and beauty and serenity...Melodrama can make us weep more; farce can make us laugh more; butwhen the curtain has fallen, they leave nothing behind. They bringus nothing, because they demand nothing from us.Yet Yeats did write comedies. He could in all conscience abandonhimself to the farce and was sufficiently satisfied with "that trivial,unambitious retelling of an old folk-tale,"4 The Pot of Broth (1902)to include it among his Collected Works. ^ But The Pot of Broth wasan occasional play, written for Pay's company, produced in music hallstyle complete with "gags",^ and not considered important enough forrevision.7 "Farce is comedy with character left o u t , a n d Yeats1Note to The Player Queen, Plays in Prose and Verse(London:Macmillan,192277429.^"The Tragic Theatre"(19IO), Essays and Introductions,245.^"A Sicilian Idyll," Boston Pilot,14 June I89O, reprinted in Letters to the New Island, op.cit.,113.^Autobiographies,452.^In a letter to Bullen's secretary concerning the projected Collected works, I4 September I9O7 , Letters,492, Yeats was inclined to drop the play, but changed his mind.^Cf.letter to Lady Gregory concerning the London performance, 4 May 1903» Letters,400. A property list included in W.G.Fay's prompt copy(now in the possession of the National Library 6f Ireland,MS*10.955)» lists the usual stage properties for conventional"Irish"farces. A photograph of the New York Irish Literary Society's production in I903 bears this out. The Gael (NY) September, 1903,311. However, "Cuguan" ^ rthur Griffitlqj^ editor of U.%., 8 November 1902,3,hailed The Pot of Broth as "the first Irish piece which is not a caricature," and the play is still popular.7The Pot of Broth is the only play Yeats never revised.8 Letter quoted by Lady Gregory in Our Irish Theatre,op.cit.106, probably I9O9.261emphasised this attitude by altering the original title, The Beggarman.^ Again, his early collaborations, Diarmuid and Fionia and Where There is Nothing have comic elements v/hich, deliberately or not, border upon farce. But in both cases the wayward pull of opposing attitudes is recognisable.Although in no other sense a comedy, the first version of The King's Threshold had the traditional ending of comedy, with the poet winning through in both worlds. Yeats tried to rationalize the compromise between his inclination and his attitude towards stage requirements in a prologue written for the first production:Old Man: First, he who told the story of Seanchan on King Guaire'sthreshold long ago in the old books told it wTongly, for he was a friend of the king, or maybe afraid of the king, and so he put the king in the right. But he that tells the story now, being a poet, has put the poet in the right.And then...Some think it would be a finer tale if Seanchan had died at the end of it, and the king had the guilt at his door, for that might have served the poet'scause better in the end. But that is not true, for ifhe that is in the story but a shadow and an image of poetry had not risen up from the death that threatened him, the ending would not have been true and joyful enough to be put into the voices of players and proclaimed in the mouths of trumpets, and poetry would have been badly served.2However, the play "remained always of the nature of tragedy and so subjectto vicissitude"^; later he revised the play and gave it the endingit demanded:^Letter to Frank Fay, 7 September 1902, Letters,577#2"A Prologue: written for the first production of "The King's Threshold" in Dublin, but not used, as, owing to the smallness of the company, nobody could be spared to speak it." The King's Threshold and On Baile's Strand; Being Volume Three of Plays for an Irish Theatre (London:Bullen,1904),5-9# See Appendix B.5"Note on the New End to The King's Threshold," Seven Poems and a Fragment (Dundrum:Cuala Press,1922),24.262I have given the play the tragic end I would have given it at the first, had not a friend advised me to "write comedy and have a fev/ happy moments in the theatre." My friend meant that tragic emotion, depending ^s it does upon gradually deepening reverie, is so fragile, thatXis shattered by a wrong movement or cadence, or even by a light in the v/rong place.^So Seanchan the poet at last regained the "tragic joy" of his death.Gradually Yeats did learn to "work into" comedy, but alwayscreating the comic situation deliberately and as a support to a serious■ A'theme. One function of the Pool and the Blind Man in On Baile's Strand is to provide a comic framework to the tragic action of Cuchulain, heightening by contrast the "pure aimless joy"2 evoked by the hero's fight with "the ungovernable sea." Comedy here is a device to glorify the tragic hero. Yet, still following his particular scheme of dramatic logic, Yeats makes the comedy ironical by using the folk characters as foils to Cuchulain and Conchubar; passion and strength (the champion and the fool) are governed by power and cunning (the king and the blind man); both champion and fool are mentally "blind" as the beggar is physically blind (Cuchulain fails to recognize his own son; the Pool does not discover that the fowl has been eaten); both king and fool are supematurally acute (Conchubar traffics with the Druids; the fool is teased by the voices of Faery); both champion and blind man are bound by their own limitations to their appointed leaders, whom in turn they govern through their own passions (the king is forced to put his unruly subject under double oath; the Blind ManNote to The King's Threshold, Plays in Prose and Verse,1922, 423-24. ^t is probably to this play Yeats is referring in his letter to John Quinn, I5 May I903, Letters,403-04: "I have not sent you thelast play for the little book of short plays because I cannot make up my mind about it. I started it on one plan and re-wrote it on quite a different one, and I have got so confused about it that I shall not be able to judge it for a few week^‘^1'suspect."^On the Boiler,35. Cf 2i6-Z.11 bzU*».263must keep the Fool in awe of his mental agility)The subtitle to The Green Helmet ; An Heroic Farce is itself an indication of Yeats's changing attitude towards comedy as a vehicle for his images. Farce he had defined as "comedy with character left out," by "character" meaning the personal characteristics by which one judges a type, "the shape of the vessel"^ by which a man's "speech and actions are distinguished from all other m e n . I n this play he successfully combines that exuberance which is necessary to great art with his own personal image of the hero," one of those that God has made reckless."4 Here the heroic figure gains strength by acting as mediator, and retains his proud and lonely stature by being alone willing to bear the consequences of his race. He takes upon himself the roles of both governor and champion: "He played and paid withhis head, and it's right that we pay him back,/ And give him more than he gave, for he comes in here as a guest."5 The Hero will defend his honoui* against threat of death, public betrayal, and loneliness.The Golden Helmet was first published in 1908, the year following The Playboy riots in which Yeats was battling for his dream against both friends and the public. It is not perhaps too fanciful, then, to see in the endurance and pride of Cuchulain the qualities demanded of Yeats during his prolonged battle with "this Proteus/That turns and changes like his draughty s e a s . A n d , like Cuchulain, Yeats felt himself responsible for the shortcomings of Paudeen.7 The second,^For further discussion of the significance of the fool and blind man images, see below, ff,2"The Theatre of Beauty," Harper's Weekly,11 November 1911,11.^"The Tragic Theatre"(1910),Es says and Introductions,241.^The Golden Helmet,first prose version. Collected Works,1908,IV.^The Green Helmet, revised version in verse. Collected Plays,242.^"At the Abbey Theatre," Collected Poems,107.7'Cf."To a Wealthy Man Who Promised a Second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if It were Proved the People Wanted Pictures" (1912),Collected Poems,119-20; "Paudeen"(1914),ibid.,122: "On Those That Hated 'The Playboy of the Western World,' 1907"(1911 )ibid. ,124.264poetic version of the play, published two years later, is less topical, more symbolic. (This expansion into the more conventional myth might also have been responsible for the alteration of title; Yeats was no doubt aware of the similarities between the Irish myth as told by Lady Gregory in her Cuchulain of Muirthemne and Sir Gawain's encounter with / the green knight). But the Red Man's final exchange with Cuchulainin the earlier version refers directly to the "excessive individualism" which prevents any successful union between Irishmen^:Red Man; If my debt is not paid, no peace shall come to Ireland, and Ireland shall lie weak before her enemies. But if my debt is paid there shall be peace.Cuchulain; The quarrels of Ireland shall end....Red Man; I will not harm you, Cuchulain. I am the guardian ofthis land, and age after age I come up out of the seato try the men of Ireland. I give you the championshipbecause you are without fear, and you shall win many battles with laughing lips and endure wounding andbetrayal without bitterness of heart, and when men gazeupon you, their hearts shall grow greater and their minâsclear; until the day come when I darken your mind, thatthere may be an end to the story, and a song on theharp-8tring.The irony of ^ Baile's Strand has strengthened into satire. Stirredto action by the nation he was striving to help, he replied, as he hadfive years earlier in The King's Threshold, with his most powerful weapon — his art.Somewhat surprised, Yeats discovered himself a comic dramatist. In 1909 he wrote to his father, "I find that ray talent as a stage manager is in the invention of comic business, in fact I am coming to the conclusion that I am really essentially a writer of comedy, but very personal comedy. Wilde wrote in his last book, *'I have made drama aspersonal as a lyric,'* and I think, whether he has done so or not, thatit is the only possible task now."2 And looking back a dozen years^Cf. an acute review of The Green Helmet and Other Poems in The Irish Review,I,2(Anril I9II),100-101.217 January I909, Letters,524. Cf.Y/ilde, De Profundis,77./ actor to the f u l l .2265later, he still felt The Green Helmet a satisfactory play; "gives an animated gay objective stage not too far from the mood of theworld and could be made a very phantastic picture."! In a theatricalsense, he had at last achieved his ideal image;An exciting person, whether the hero of a play or the maker of poems, will display the greatest voluiae of personal energy, and this energy must seem to come out of the body as out of the mind....I even doubt if any play had ever a great popularity that / , did not use, or seem to use, the bodily energies of its principalYeats's last "comedyy The Player Queen, has perhaps the longest history of all his plays. Grateful for her fine performance in his Deirdre, he began work on another tragedy, "a strange little play about the capture of a blind Unicorn,intending to offer it to Mrs. Patrick Campbell for production. But as his philosophy of the mask developed in his mind, so, too, the concept of the play altered, and "abstractions...substituted themselves for the plsy [hej had planned."4I began in, I think, 1907, a verse tragedy, but at that time the thought I have set forth in Per Arnica Silentia Lunae was coming into my head, and I found examples of it everywhere. I wasted the best working months of several years in an attempt to v/rite a poetical play where every character became an example of the finding or not finding of what I 'have called the Antithetical Self; and because passion and not thought makes tragedy, what I made had neither simplicity nor life. I knew precisely what was wrong and yet could neither escape from thought nor give up my play.5^Letter to Allan Wade, 18 October 1921, Letters,674*2"Personality and the Intellectual Essences"(1907), Essays and Introductions,266.^Letter to Florence Parr, February 1906,Letters,471.^Dedication to A Vision,1925,xii. Cf. Wilde, De Profundis,lll: "Those who want a mask must wear it."^Note to The Player Queen (London:Macmillan,1922),59•266Still struggling to force his material into his own definition of tragedy, "passion defined by motives, he worked and re-worked his theme, "that the world being illusion, one must be deluded in some way if one is to triumph in it."2 But he could not escape from his own allegory until Ezra Pound5 suggested he "mocWin a comedy {his] own thought.What he had meant for tragedy became instead "a wild comedy, almost a farce, with a tragic background — a study of a fantastic woman.Reiidefi his basic theme that "a man always tried to become his opposite, to become what he would abhor if he did not desire it, Yeats included his own observations on the rôle of the actor. In an early unpublished draft of Act II the palace servants, waiting for the play to begin, discuss the joys and hazards of the actor's life, these people who, like "mortar that never hardens," take on many shapes in a lifetime. We shall see that Yeats in his ideas of acting closely followed Gordon Craig's concept of the actor as an "uber-marionette." The player- puppet, obedient to the whims of the poet-juggler, symbolizes the images in the poet's mind. Sufficiently divorced from reality by the protective masks of the parts in which they are cast, they live only in his words. They are, in fact, the "bridge" between reality and the dream. An old servant quotes "Aristotle of the books or another";"to know your own true shape that's what a wise man has to do and whathe's here to do and when he's found it he's free of the Court." Free,'/that is, of reality. "If you would have obedience," the ChancellorLetter to Lady Gregory, probably 1909, Our Irish Theatre,106.2Letter to J.B.Yeats, 7 August 1909, Letters,534.3Ellmann, The Man and the' Masks,215.^"Anima Hominis"(l917)> Mythologies,333-34>^Letter to J.B.Yeats, 12 September 1914, Letters,588. ^Introduction to The Resurrection, Wheels and Butterflies,103. '^National Library of Ireland MS 8764(1).267advises the Queen, "you must seem to be all the greatness your people dream of being and have not might of soul to be, all that their shivering heart denies them."The Player Queen is the only work of mine, not mere personal expression, written during these last twenty years, which is not avowedly Irish in its subject matter being all transacted in some No-Man's Land."2 (An early draft sets the play in "the country of Surrico" with a "suggestion of a Spanish street in the architecture but nothing very definite.") Looking back, Yeats explains this as one more debt to Gordon Craig, who designed a set of screens for the Abbey Theatre in 1910. "If it is gayer than my wont it is that I tried to find words and events that v/ould seem well placed under a beam of light reflected from the ivory-coloured surface of the screens,"5 "where every line must suggest some mathematical proportion, where all is phantastic, incredible, and luminous. So, too, he claims, the players have no nationality, in keeping with the fantasy of the architecture.Instead the players and the scene are perhaps Yeats's most successful attempt to symbolize the images of his mind on the stage.In some cases we can trace the actual development of the image: a note in 1899 describes an old man of Sligo who "used to fall down in a fit and rave out descriptions of the Battle (of the Valley of the Black Pi^'5«^Early unpublished draft of Act I, scene ii, ibid.2Preface to Plays in Prose and Verse, 1922,vi-vii.^Ibid.4Note to The Player Queen,1922,39. A contemporary review suggests that the Abbey production bears these aims out, the costumes being "more elaborate than usual for the Abbey Theatre — might suggest anything from a mediaeval masquerade to a modern lunatic asylum." Irish Times, 10 December 1919,6 .^Note to "The Valley of the Black Pig," Wind Among the Reeds,1899.; /268in an early draft of the play "Rat-hole,’* the "ghost-ridden man," falls into a trance and the voice of the Queen's dead father speaks through him? in the final version a depersonalized Old Beggar brays and rolls on straw when "the crown changes. From this one example we can see Yeats's philosophy developing from a direct use of Irish legend to the incorporation of all legend in his own personal myth of the growth of a new age out of the old. In The Player Queen the new age will arise out of the coupling of the harlot player queen with the hitherto chaste unicorn.(in Golden Dawn symbolism the unicorn was the soul, hence "the Unicorn from the Stars" is the godhead^; "The Adoration of the Magi" describes a new age arising from the birth of a unicorn by a harlot-priestess).^The Wise Fool and the Image-MakerAnd when the Pool and Blind man stole the breadCuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is saidIt was the dream itself enchanted me.("The Circus Animals' Desertion," 1939)Throughout these plays, from The Shadowy Waters in I9OO to The Player Queen in 1919, two images are constant, the "wise fool" and the "image-maker"; and, dancing in the shadows behind them, that greatest of all image-makers, creative imagination, which embodies both the wisdom of the "natural" man and the control of the poet-creator. By tracing these images, we can in turn observe Yeats's developing % technique as a craftsman as he experiments with a form which will satisfactorily express his philosophy of the theatre.^^Player Queen, Collected Plays,401. Çf- The £42.-> Sf'iiÉ ^ 67%2Letter to Elizabeth Yeats, 1920, Letters,662.M^ythologies,312. Cf. /'Leda and the Swan", "The Second Coming." F.A.C. Wilson in W.B.Yeats and Tradition(London:Gollancz,1958),177-183, explores the harlot and unicorn symbolism in detail.^One might perhaps compare Yeats's device of transferring image/ characters from one play to another with Shaw's and Ibsen's.269The "wise fool" could be either an heroic or a folk character,but both forms have their origin in Irish tradition. In some cases,indeed, the one learns from the other, and is his mask or reversedreflection. This is true of Cuchulain, the reckless, solitary manwho acts before thought and whose pride is his heroic virtue as wellas the "tragic flaw" which brings about his downfall. The hero placesduty above all else, and his strength is most clearly seen in hispursuit of some abstract quality such as love. Thus, in an early draftof Deirdre, Yeats notes, "Naisi is heroic endurance in love's pursuitand he looks to his endurance rather than to love and the respect ofmen. Deirdre is l o v e . Y / h e n Conchubar's treachery is at lastevident, Naisi is grief-stricken at this betrayal of the pledge ofthe Warriors of the Red Branch and seeks revenge, not/\against himself,2but against the treachery to the heroic values for which he stands. - So, too, his self-control and endurance in the chess scene (for Yeats "the central scene of the play"^) represent his heroic qualities at their finest. Cuchulain in The Green Helmet refuses to lower himself to the threat of ridicule, and Congal, in The Herne's Egg, exults in his triumph over the god by taking his own life, "at my own will, not yours, "4 thereby ennobling Tom Pool's farcical weapons, the kitchen spit and the cauldron lid.^ And in his last play, Cuchulain bindsItaTNational Library of Ireland MS. 8760(5)*2In an early draft Naisi rushes out after Conchubar shrieking "BeastJ Beast!"^Collected Plays,676.^Yeats is here once again "mocking his own philosophy" by suggesting not merely the Red Man’s helmet of discord but the four symbols of the Castle of Heroes, the cauldron, the stone, the spear and the sword.^Early draft,op.cit.Cf.Naisi's speech to Deirdre,Collected Plays,’ And I would have you die as a queen should —In a death-chamber. You are in my charge.What need have I, that gave up all for love.To die like an old king out of a fable.Fighting and passionate? What need is there For all that ostentation at my setting?I have loved truly and betrayed no man.J I need no lightning at the end, no beating In a vairj^ury at the cage's door.270frwIf ’ ’ 1himself to a pillar-stone that he might face death on his feet.Pride however is not restricted to the warrior. The Wise Man of The Hour Glass sets intellectual pride above spiritual humility;Seanchan the poet demands first place at the King's table; Paul Ruttledge contemptuously models his hedge according to the "breeders of fools" surrounding him; the drunken Septimus glories in his player-playwright craft. (Has he not played before Kubla Khan?)Like Naisi, Cuchulain, and Congal, out of their pride they have created their own image. And it is this pride that places them in the power of the fool, makes them, in fact, fools themselves. The Wise Man must learn what Teigue the Pool knows instinctively; Cuchulain must submit to the Blind Man; Naisi is trapped in a net "like a bird or a fish"^; Congal must meet his death at the hands of a fool by the Great Herne's decree and is re-born a donkey; Martin Aherne (Paul Ruttledge) is shot by a stray bullet when his tinker-apostle (who follows him in mistake for someone else) struggles to protect him.^The "fctic" ot traditional Fook is perhaps the most interesting of all Yeats's images, and is certainly the most persistent. Like the proud hero, he, too, plays many roles. A jester walked in the garden of Yeats's dreams in the early 1890's and wins his love by the offertory not of his heart and soul, but of his cap and bells.4 (Although the meaning of "The Cap and Bells" varied from time to time, it always meant a great deal to Y e a t s ) " T h e fool of the woods" gives Porgael the "harp of Aengus" in the 1900 Shadowy Waters. The 1903 version reminds us that, life-ridden, "at the end of all/We have been no better^The Death of Cuchulain,^Collected Plays,699.2Deirdre, Collected Plays,194.^The Unicorn from the Stars, ibid.,382.^"The Cap and Bells"(l894), Collected Poems,71-73.5Note to "The Cap and Bells," Poems ; Second Series,1909.156-57.271off than Seaghan the foo2^/That never did a hand's t u r n . T e i g u e of The Hour Glass and the Pool of ^ Baile's Strand are more at home with the creatures of the other world than with those of this world. The Red Jester of The Green Helmet comes from the gods of the sea to demand his debt. In "The Hour Before I)awn"(l914) "a cursing rogue with a merry face" flees from "a great lad with a beery face" who awaits the "nothing that is God" in drunken stupor.'^ The same year a beggar-fool runs to paradise.^ Five years later a fool prays to God that He ease his "great responsibilities,"^ and holds prisoner in his hands the "great purple butterfly" that "once—lived a schoolmaster/With a stark, denying l o o k . I n 1922 the Pool by the Roadside comments on the Girl and the Hero,^ and the "all-destroying sword-blade" is "carried by the wandering fool."7 And ten years later Crazy Jane, the heroine of Words for Music Perhaps, sings of her wise folly in company with "old Tom the lunatic."® Congal then battles with Tom Pool, and Cuchulain loses his head to the Blind Man who "stood between A Pool and the Sea at Baile's Strand" when he went mad. (it is perhaps significant that Lady Gregory's play. The Jester appeared in 1918, her "Cracked Mary" and the "innocent" Davideen in I9IO).^The Shadowy Waters, Plays for an Irish Theatre, 1913,140*^Collected Poems,130-34.^Collected Poems,129.^"Two Songs of a Fool"(1919),ibid.,190-91.^"Another Song of a Fool"(1919).ibid.,191-92.^See Appendix A, "Cuchulain, the Girl and the Fool."^"Symbols"(1922),Collected Poems,270. The first drafts of "Sailing to Byzantium"(1927) contain the opening lines: "Here all is young; the chapel walls display/A s/eeping infant on his mother's knee./Weary with toil Teigue sleeps till break of day." F.A.C.Wilson, W.B.Yeats and Tradition,op.cit.,232.QCollected Poems,290ff.^The l'un Moon, first acted at the Abbey in 1910.272Traditionally the figure of the fool represents nobility, orderand freedom, for the fool held a special position in the king'shousehold, where his cap and bells granted him special immunity andprivileges of speech. The Pool and the Blind Man belong to Cuchulain'sretinue; he acts as mediator and final judge in their quarrels; yetat the same time they are not answerable to him for their tricks andt h e f t s B u t the Pool as Yeats saw him belong?to a far oldertradition still, "the fool of faery." The Pool of The Hour Glasshas the faery's touch and protection, and Porgael's "fool of thewoods" is identified by Yeats as "the fool of the Rath, the fairyfool of modern Irish folklore, from whose touch no man recovers —the divine fool."2 Writing of the Fool of The Hour Glass and OnBaile'3 Strand, Yeats says, "The Pool in both plays is perhaps thePat Fool of Folk-lore, who is 'as wide and wild as a hill' and notthe Thin Fool of modern r o m a n c e . A n d to identify their relationshipfurther, he commissioned Gordon Craig to design a mask which couldbe used in both plays and^^which makes him seem" less a human beingthan a principle of mind."4But Yeats had encountered the "fool of Faery" much earlier, whenhe was collecting stories of "Them" for his Celtic Twilight:I have heard one Hearne, a witch-doctor {one who has knowledge of the Faery and may even have had "the touch"], who is on the border of Clare and Galway, say that in "every household" of Faery "there is a queen and a fool," and that if you are "touched" by either you never recover, though you may from the touch of any other in Faery.He said of the fool that he was "maybe the wisest of all," and spoke of him as dressed like one of "the mummers that used to be going about the country."^Peter Ure in Towards a Mythology(London;Hodder and Stoughton,1946),102, points out that Gerald Heard, whose writings Yeats knew, has argued that the Fool type "shares the awful distinction of the y Delphic prophétie3s: both are antennae of a submerged consciousness,valued by a highly ordered society precisely because it has lost the knowledge of that consciousness."2Quoted by Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats,op.cit.,82.^Notes to Plays in Prose and Verse,1922,424.^See illustration of Pool's costume, page 2 , reproduced by courtesyof Mr. Edward Gordon Craig. Notes to Plays in Prose and Verse,1922,422.273Obviously, then, in fairy tradition as well, the fool occupies aprivileged position in the court. Later in the same essay Yeatsre-tells the story of a boy who was co-opted by a troop of faeryto battle against another troop and won;But about three years after that he was cutting bushes in a wood and he saw the Amadan ^coming at him. He had a big vessel in his arms, and it was shining, so that the boy could see nothing else; but he put it behind his back then and came running, and the boy said he looked wild and wide, like the side of the hill. And the boy ran, and he threw the vessel after him, and it broke with a great noise, and whatever came out of it, his head was gone there and then. He lived for a while after, and used to tell us many things, but his wits were gone.It is to the race of this fool, with his "shining vessel of someenchantment or wisdom or dream: too powerful for mortal brains" thatYeats's fools belong. ^ In a distinction between the two types ofsymbolism in poetry, Yeats considers "the fool of Faery with his shiningcup full of dreams" an intellectual rather than an emotional symbol.^Writing of his "king of men" in The Trembling of the Veil, he describesa portrait of William Morris by Watts;Its grave wide-open eyes, like the eyes of some dreaming beast, remind me of the open eyes of Titian's Ariosto, while the broad vigorous body suggests a mind that has no need of the intellect to remain sane, though it give itself to every fantasy; the dreamer of the Middle Ages. It is "the fool of Faery...wide and wild as ahill," the resolute European image that yet half remembers Buddha'sf motionless meditation, and has no trait in common with the wavering,D':' _ ' V lean image of hungry speculation, that cannot but because of certainlA famous Hamlets of our stage fill the mind's eye.4 jI The Amadan-na-Breena, or fool of the fort#. It is this expression which gives rise to the Anglo-Irish "omadhaun" or foolish character.^"The Queen and the Fool" (1901).Mythologies,112-16.%"Tlie Symbolism of Poetry" (19OO), Essays and Introductions, l62. ^Autobiographies,I4I-42.274A ' And in A Vision the fool occupies phase tvænty-eight, "natural man"who is next to the phase of complete objectivity, "primary man."He is but a straw blown by the wind, with no mind but the wind and no act but a nameless drifting and turning, and is sometimes called 'the Child of Cod'. At his worst his hands and feet and eyes, his will and his feelings, obey obscure subconscious fantasies, while at his best he would know all wisdom if he could know anything....his thoughts are an aimless reverie; his acts y are aimless like his thoughts ; and it is in this aimlessnessthat he finds his joyTeigue the Fool retains the "foolishness" of communion with the angels,while the Wise Man attempts to overthrow the three worlds of theunlearned with the seven sciences of the learned.2 And to Teigue isgranted the vision of the Wise Man's soul in the clasped hands of theAngel from Paradise. "Fools may get...glimpses of much that sanctityfinds at the end of its painful journey.Yeats drew upon the tradition of the half-crazed wit, as well,for his image of the fool, and perhaps here he comes closest to thevision of Lady Gregory and Synge. He had early learned to incorporatein his plays his experiences with the country folk about him, and anote to The Pot of Broth reads;The words and the air of "There's Broth in the Pot" were taken dovm from an old woman known as Cracked Mary, who wanders about the plain of Aidhne, and who sometimes sees unearthly riders on white horses coming through stony fields to her hovel door in the night time.4This is perhaps the same "Cracked Mary" on which Lady Gregory bases her play The Full Moon (19IO). He had been intrigued by the character1 ■ - ' . ■ — . I . . . . . . . . . . . . . - I - I I . I I . . , . . . . ■ ■ ■ . . . .1 . 1 . I . . 1 . 1 1 . ■ - ' ' ■ ' ■ " ' ■ — ■ ■ ■ 'h Vision, 1957,181-82.2The Hour Glass : A Morality, Plays for an Irish Theatre, 1913tt167 . "^The Queen and the Fool," Mythologies,11$.^"Wote on the Music," The Hour Glass, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, The Pot of Broth;Being Volume Two of Plays for an Irish Tlieatre (London;Bullen,19047,83.275"Peg Inerny” in I^ Iartyn's Maeve, "the curious witch, who was beggarwoman by day and a Q^een of Fairy by night," and who "typified Ireland."^Crazy Jane is more or less founded upon an old womem who lives in a little cottage near Gort. She loves her flower-garden — she jiaS Just sent Lady Gregory some flowers in spite of the season — and Jiias] an amazing power of audacious speech. One of her great performances is a description of how the meanness of a Gort shopkeeper's wife over the price of a glass of porter made her so despair of the human race that she got drunk. The incidents of that drunkenness are of an epic ^ Kkgnificetnce. She is the local satirist and a really terrible o n e . 2One recalls the great powers of the Irish, poets who could kill a manby the strength of their satires.But Teigue's vision of Heaven is qualified by the pre-ChristianHeaven of Tir-naemOge. In an early correspondence with AE, Yeatsconjectured that the fool was associated with Aengus, the god of lovers,either his messenger or "some lower manifestation of him."3 Hence"the wood" which shelters Forgael's fool would symbolize the union ofthe lo v ers.4 Aengus.Og, the old Irish god of love, poetry and ecstasy,is associated with the symbols of the harp and white birds. The harpwas made by his love Etaine from strands of his golden hair; thebirds were four of his kisses transformed. It is the ambition ofAengus Og to lure all lovers to Tir-na#»?Oge, the Land of Eternal Youth,where their love may remain fresh and undimmed forever. This imageof the white bird symbolizing ideal love can be traced through much ofYeats's poetry,^ and the bird itself has great significance to Yeats.Just as the fool represents the closest man can arrive at complete"Plays Produced by the Irish Literary Theatre and by the Irish National Theatre Society," a memorandum written by W.B.Yeats for Horace Plunkett and counsel for the Patent Enquiry in 1904• Typescript in possession of lïîrs. Yeats.2^5 November 1951> Letters, 785-86.^Ellmann, Identity of Yeats,82.^Ibid.^Por example "The Vftiite Birds," Collected Poems,46-47- Wilson in W.B.Yeats and Tradition,175, observes that the white bird is a symbol for the purified soul in Egyptian theurgy, in Platonism, and in ICabbalism, as well as in Irish folklore.276objectivity on the VJheel of Life, so "certain birds, especially such lonely birds as the heron, hawk, eagle, and swan, are the natural symbols of subjectivity."! (Cuchulain’s symbol was the eagle; "ray soul's first shape, a soft feathery shape."2) Porgael sees grey birds : flying, the souls of those killed; and in an early unpublished draftto The Shadowy Waters, the Seabar (called Fomor in a later draft), "aquiline people," grey-robed creatures with eagle heads^demand ^ sacrifices of him.3 In the Byzantium poems, the bird has become golden, a symbol for objective creative art, in opposition to the living birds ,4. of subjectivity. (Perhaps here Byzantium is the artist's rather thanthe lover's Tir-naWOge). The image of the harp symbolizes the jester-fool's association with poetry as well as love; Aengus Og is god of both.A storm-beaten old watch-tower,A blind hermit rings the hour.All-destroying sword-blade still Carried by the wandering fool.Gold-sewn silk on the sword-blade.Beauty and fool together laid.("Symbols",1922)Linking fool of faery with the proud hero is the image of the Blind Man, who shares the Fool's sins in to Baile's Strand^ and later, like Tom Fool, carries off the prize of the hero's head. In one sense^"Note on Calvary, " Plays and Controversies ,459.^Death of Cuchulain, Collected Plays,702.^National Library of Ireland MS 8762(9). In his Autobiographies, 73-74, Yeats describes how as a boy he rose before dawn to hear the sea-birds, for the poem that years later became The Shadowy Waters. For an interesting comparison and contrast, see the optional prologue spoken by hawk-headed Ra, Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra(l912).^In a note to to Baile's Strand, Poems 1899-1905,1906,278, Yeats comments,"The present play is a kind of cross-road where too many interests meet and jostle for the hearer to take them in at a first hearing unless he listen carefully, or know something of the story of the other plays of the cycle."277the Blind Man acts as foil to the Pool, in another, foil to Cuchulain. Yihere the Fool is "natural man" with a true mask, innocent, way ward and finding joy in his aimlessness, the Blind Man is "natural man" with a false mask, cunning, sly, and malicious. He resents the Fool, yet cannot exist without him.^ The Fool in turn depends upon the Blind Man’s wits but cannot control his malice. Like the blind man and cripple of The Cat and the Moon (1917-1924)^ they are two halves of the one whole, or, in other words, the body and the soul.^ The one..*> blind in body, is keen enough to recognize the significance of theI: .T; ■ - 'strange challenger; the other, "blind" in the wits, can "see" past this world to the next. Together they act as Nemesis in the unfolding action; together they open Cuchulain's eyes to the tragedy of his / situation. Further, both Teigue the Fool and the Blind Man beg for pennies; unhampered by the possessions of this world, they place no value on the qualities the tragic hero values most. Tom Fool and the Blind Man cut off heads for a few pennies; "And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread/Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea. To the fools of this world, all things are equal.Finally, the Blind Man might be considered a variant of the "hunchback image", phase twenty-six on Yeats's YVheel of Life, separated from the Pool by the Saint. "The deformity may be of any kind, great or little...He commits crimes, not because he wants to, or...because he can, but because he wants to feel certain that he can; and he is full of malice because, finding no impulse but in his own ambition, he is made jealous by the impulse of others." The Blind Man is earth-bound, the Fool is not. "If he fhe HunchbackJ live amid a theologically minded people, his greatest temptation may be to defy God, to become a Judas who betrays, not for thirty pieces of silver, but that he may call^Notice that Poor Tom Fool of The Herne's Egg also has a rival, "Johnny from Meath." Collected Plays,672.^Collected Plays,46lff.Introduction to TOie Cat and the Moon, V/heels and Butterflies, 138.^"The Circus Animals' Desertion," Collected Poems,392.278y' himself creator."^ The tragedy of Cuchulain's fight with the sea, the murder of his own son, is foretold and hence inevitable, yet inacting as the hero's insight, the Blind Man creates the tragedyConchobar ordains.The image-maker, although also appearing in various forms throughoutthe plays, is closely involved with the image of the fool. The mostobvious connection is through the god Aengus, who is god of love andecstasy and of poetry. It is the harp of Aengus that Porgael receivesfrom the fool of the wood; this harp in turn represents the magicalpower of poetry (or perhaps "poesy") in the early poems and plays. ^ Oisin plays a silver harp on the Island of Youth and Dancing, but hissong is of mortal dreams, and saddens the eternally joyful immortals.^In Book II of The Wanderings of Oisin the promise of Aedh's harp of goldalone will bring deliverance.5 The young bard Aleel is "so wrapped upin dreams of terrors to come" that he can bring no aid to the CountessCathleen in her struggle against the demons but can offer herconsolation by distracting her thoughts to other dreams.^ So, too,I the musicians offer consolation and distraction to Deirdre and Naisias they sit at chess and await their deaths.^ In an early draft ofDeirdre the musicians reply to Fergus;They call us the Love-praisers,Because we have no other theme than love.We earn our living by this trade, and know Of nothing that's delightful to all ears But an immoderate passion that buoys up Two lovers, and before ebb tide has come.Smothers them wretchedly.°h Vision.1957.177-78.2The Wanderings of Oisin, Collected Poems,416-17 »^Ibid.,425. Aedh represents "fire," hence spirituality. Cf."Sailing to Byzantium."^The Countess Cathleen, op.cit.,7-8.^Deirdre,op.cit.,I9I.^Unpublished MS., National Library of Ireland, MS 8760(19).279It is the poet who most strongly represents the image-maker,however. Seanchan of The King's Threshold is in fact "but a shadowand an image of poetry"^ and by his gesture of defiance upholds the Artof which he himself is an image. Replying to his catechism, his oldestpupil explains why poetry is honoured;...the poets hung Images of the life that was in Eden About the child-bed of the world, that it,]()(>' y Looking upon those images, might bear^ Triumphant children. ...foj the Arts should perish,! ’ 'J The world that lacked them would be like a womanThat, looking on the cloven lips of a hare.Brings forth a hare-lipped child.^Like The Green Helmet, The King's Threshold was in one sense anoccasional poem;It was written when our Society was having a bad fight for the recognition of pure art in a community of which one half was buried in the practical affairs of life, and the other half in politics and a propagandist patriotism.5Like The King's Threshold, The Green Helmet also transcends the occasion ^and speaks for the image-maker. For the Red Man is also a creator,. working with man’s spirit to create discord and concord, playing withthe spirits he has created in man to =achieve the championship he, as"Rector of this land," requires. To a certain extent Paul Ruttledgeand Martin Aherne also belong to this category, for as seekers aftera dream, they must destroy the temporal images man has created in orderto achieve the eternal image of truth.Prologue to The King's Threshold(1903)< Appendix B. Of. Yeats's introduction to Words upon the Window-Pane, Wheels and Butterflies,24: "We poets and artists may be called, so small our share in life, 'separated spirits,' words applied by old philosophers to the dead."^The King's Threshold, Collected Plays,111-12.^Note to The King's Threshold, Poems 1899-1905,190679r Collected Poems.71-73*^The Green Helmet(1907-1910), Collected Plays,243.^"V/herefore spin ye, whirl ye, dance ye,/Till Queen Decima’s found her fancy." Player Queen,op.cit.,416.^"All that trouble and nothing to show for it,/Nothing but just another donkey." The Herne’s Egg,op.cit.,678.285"jester with black cockscomb and black clothes, He was one of the characters in a play then being v/ritten.^ But the design was never j used, and the figure of the Black Jester does not appear in any of theplays. But Yeats was working on Deirdre at the time, and among the unpublished papers and early drafts of the play are sketches by Yeats of scene blockings which include the Black Jester.^ And in an early prose scenario this figure enters, to offer Naisi "the robe of honour" after Conchobar*s hired warriors have fled.^ More important still, among the unpublished papers is a prologue, to be spoken by the Black I Jester himself.^: It would appear from these early drafts that the Black Jester wasiI associated in Yeats’s mind with Manannan, son of Lir, the Irish god of• the sea, "as some say, the sea itself.These drafts closely follow ^ the legend as related by Lady Gregory in Cuchulain of Muirthemne, including j among the characters Naisi’s brothers Ardan and Ainnle, the sons of FergusBuinne and lollan, and Lavarcham, Deirdre's old nurse.Lavarcham bears the burden of most of the opening exposition:^Letter to Charles Ricketts,26 July 1904» Letters,436. Cf."Literature and the Living Voice," written I905, not published until October I9O6,Plays and Controversies,181-83; "An Introduction for ray Plays"(1937)>Essays and Introductions,329.2Letter to Charles Ricketts,ibid.5See illustration above, p.281 , reproduced with the permission of Mrs. Y/.B.Yeats. The original papers are in the possession of the National Library of Ireland, MS,876o(l8).^ 88760(15). The lines occur at the bottom of a page and are almost illegible.5See Appendix C. The original pages are in someone else’s hand, probably Frank Pay’s, and it was dictated at Woburn Buildings, London. Occasional slips of the pen, such as "me" for "him" and close comparison with samples of Pay’s handwriting bear this supposition out, as the letter to Ricketts, pp.cit.,makes clear that Pay was to wear the Black Jester’s costume. I am indebted to Mr. Alf McLochlain of the National Library of Ireland for assistance in identifying the hand.Lady Gregory, Notes to Cuchulain of Muirthemne(London:John Murray,1902),356.7Ibid..ch.VII. Her version does not include the prophecy of Manannan.Musician; And is she the daughter of the god or indeed But mortal like us all?Lavarcham; None knows for rightBut it may he that Manannan came up As many say out of his wealthy streams And laying a new born child upon the ground Before King Conchubar, with a loud cry As though he had seen all years that were to come Began, "This weakling shall grow up a v/oman So coveted by the proud kings of the world They shall blow all to quarrel and in that quarrel Your country and all the countries of the west Shall go to rack and ruin"; and thereon He folded his sea green cloak upon his head And vanishedA prose version dated 5 October I904 continues the action of this earlydraft. The game of chess, already the central scene of the play, includesfurther exposition. Manannan presented Conchubar not only with the child Deirdre, but with an iron bowl which held a further prophecy;lollan; Then he took an iron bowl from under his cloak and gaveit to Conchubar with these words;- V/hen all these evils are then about you call upon me and give this bowl to -who you will, and I will give him peace... .V\Tho knows how many of the strong kings of Ireland and of the fair queens and of the good lovers he has brought to their peace withhim in the Land of Promise.But the Cup of Manannan is missing from its place of honour beside thechess board in the House of the Red Branch Warriors. Alarmed by herdreams and the omens of betrayal, Deirdre pleads with Naisi to come away,"come to the floods and to the waste places for there you shall be themore mine." But Naisi is determined not to let their love "unman" them,and the game of chess continues.The ending of this early version draws together the promise of Manannan, the betrayal of the Sons of Usna, and the theme of enchantment. Buinne, son of Fergus, decamps; his brother lollan dies defending his father’s charge; Naisi and his brothers re-enter entranced by Manannan, who has\iS8760(l8), National Library of Ireland, MS. in Yeats’s hand.Vrt;s- h U,285answered Conchubar’s prayer for help. Deirdre speaks to the Sons of Usna in vain; her voice comes to them from another world:Naisi: She is coming over the sea, she is coming by herself ina little boat! She is coming to join us in the happy Plain, the many coloured plain!Ardan: Our father the strong son of the sea who brought us sosafely to this place of peace will bring her to us safely.Naisi; Come to this place Deirdre where there are fruit and flowerson the one tree....Yes, let us go, let us make ready the sunny house for Deirdre. Let us make the pillars of the silver-stemmed trees. Let us roof it with the blossomingboughs, let us spread silk and needlework under her whitefeet. In’our house upon the great plain age will never come, lover will never grow old....And so Naisi and his brothers go to their death joyfully, to prepare thehome they could never grant Deirdre in life.^ Manannan’s promise ofhelp for Conchubar becomes the promise of peace for the lovers.An examination of this early draft indicates, then, that Yeats had at first intended a much more expanded version of the Deirdre myth,"the most famous of all Irish legends.According to Yeats's letter to Charles Ricketts, the prologue can be dated approximately I904, the same year the above early draft of Deirdre vfas composed, and just one year after the revised version of The Shadowy Waters was published. The Black Jester prologue evidently owes much in detail and use of symbolism to both plays. Aengus and Edaine as divine lovers leading Dectora and Porgael to the eternal land of youth and love feature in both versions of Shadowy Waters, although the symbolism is less obvious in the revisedversion. Dectora dreams of pale apple-blossoms over a stream," symbolsof dawn and of air and of earth and of resurrection"; Porgael describes the country of faithful lovers, where the fruit is of precious stones, symbolizing "perhaps emotions made eternal by their own perfection."3 Naisi tells Deirdre of fruit and flowers on the same tree. Around his head the Jester wears ever-blossoming flowers made of precious stones; in his world emotions are perfected, love is eternal, morning and the resurrection\ îS8760, pages dated 5 October 1904*2Note to Deirdre, The Arrow, I,2(November 1906),2.^See above^p, 2-42-,286are past. ("Once out of nature I shall...sing...of what is past, or passing, or to come. "41-) Porgael charts his course by the grey sea-birds: who are the souls of the dead on their way to the Land of the Ever-Living; they promise him "love of a supernatural intensity"^; his harp belongs to Aengus Og. Like Aengus, the Black Jester "would like to lead everybody out of the world away to the waste places v/here there is nothing but my beasts." He is the messenger not only of love (Aengus), but of peace (Manannan). It is from these "waste places" that the Black Jester comes; Deirdre pleads with Naisi to seek the "waste places" of the earth; Naisi prepares a home for her in "the great plain, the many coloured plain" where "age will never come, lover will never grow old."Some of the Jester's figures were picked up "on the wayside"; some he made himself. But even those he carves himself have their origin "in the old Irish books." The Irish poet, too, seeks his images from the wayside, from the folklore about him, and carves others himself out of his own imagination. But even though he may make them himself, the inspiration frequently comes from that same wayside, the ancient book of the poets and people, mythology. And mythology is the temporal form of permanent truths, part of that great repository of the memory of the world. Anima Mundi, the "desert places," from which and to which all truths, all gods, all passions, arrive and eventually return.^ Nor are the Jester's figures all pleasant ones; he must accept even those he fears. These "beasts" have appeared earlier as well. Oisin passes a hound forever pursuing a deer, "the immortal desire of Immortals." The sailors in The Shadowy Waters see a red hound running from a silver arrow, passion fleeing from idealizing love,^ will from reason.^ Stage directions and scenery for the I9OO version of the play include "three rows of^"Sailing to Byzantium," Collected Poems,218.2Summary of the plot in The Arrow,I,2(November I9O6 ),5-4«^Cf. "The Second Coming."^See above,p.1^31,5Programme note. Inis Fail,1905.quoted by Ellmann,Identity of Yeats,81./287hounds, the first dark, the second red, and the third white with red ears, making a conventional pattern upon the s a i l I n a programme note Yeats suggests that these may "correspond to the Tamas, Rajas, and Sattva qualities of the Vedanta philosophy, or to the three colours of the Alchemists."^ Ellmann, calling upon Max Muller’s Six Systems of Indian Philosophy,^ which Yeats knew, glosses the passage as symbolising "thesis, antithesis, and reconciliation." Yeats later identified Tamas as darkness and exhaustion. Rajas as activity and passion. Sattva as brightness and wisdom, the hounds therefore suggesting pursuit of death, of life and passion, and a fusion of the two.^ But in an essay on the symbolism of Shelley's poetry, written in I90O, Yeats himself explains their -significance. He describes a Hermetist's vision of a man led through a wood by a black hound, then the black hound lying dead at "the Meeting of the Suns," the man then followed by a red hound which is in turn pierced by a spear, then, watched by a white fawn, led by a white hound. "But the seer knew that he would follow the fawn at last, and that it vfould lead him among the gods." "I have little doubt," Yeats comments, "that when the man saw the white fawn he was coming out of the darkness and passion of the world into some day of partial r e g e n e r a t i o n ."5 If we recall that Dectora's apple blossoms are symbols "of dawn and of resurrection," then the Jester's deer, the "impossible things" his pale dog "can never overtake," lead to the Land of the Ever-Living, "the Meeting of the Suns," Aengus*s Tir-na??mOge, the "desert places" from which the Jester himself comes to lead his audience "av/ay, away, away," into an^These hounds caused Sturge Moore much trouble. Cf. Correspondence,5-6.^Inis Fail,1905,op.cit.^(NY: Longman's,1899),147•^Ellmann, Identity of Yeats,81-82.5"The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry," Essays and Introductions,90.y288everlasting dream, the world of the eternal imagination. And a glance at the ritual of the sword initiation in Yeats’s Celtic Mystical Order confirms the Jester’s fear of his beasts. The Black, White, and Red Dogs are illusions on the candidate’s path as he follows "the Pavm to the Land of the Blessed," Tir-na-^Woge.^ Similarly, Pamela Colman Smith’s drawing of Number 18 of the Tarot Greater Trumps indicates three other "beasts" of the same natural order: a dark-coloured dog and alight-coloured wolf, "the fears of the natural mind in the presence of that place of exit, when there is only reflected light to guide it," and a red crab-like creature, "that which comes up out of the deeps, the nameless and hideous tendency which is lower than the savage beast." The card itself, the merciful moon, "represents life of the imagination apart from life of the spirit.^But the Black Jester himself is more than the messenger of the gods of youth (love and eternity) and the sea (life and material world)He combines as well the qualities of the image-maker and the wise fool.As poet he carves his ovm images, choosing his material where he wishes, pulling the string's as they dance. As dream-maker, also, he carries the harp of Aengus (the magical quality of poetry) and leads the audience away to Tir-na?fAge, just as the fool of the woods leads Porgael across the seas to eternity. As the "proud" fool he remains independent: "It’s no use shaking your hand at me there. I am going to do just as I like."As the "natural" fool he has intimate knowledge of the supernatural, for he belongs to "the waste places," the Anima Mundi. But unlike the image- maker and fool of this world, his home is beyond. He is subject to the laws of that world while this world is subject to his whims; he fears the beasts, but controls the audience. He is, in fact, part of the dreamSee a b o v e , O f . Moore, The Unicorn, 74-75.2Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot(NY:University Books, 1959)* Waite and Pixie Smith v/ere, like Yeats, members of the Golden Dawn. £f. Part One, ch.J^p.f^K^The sea in Platonic symbolism represents life; hence a boat would represent the soul of man journeying through life to eternity. Cf.T ^ Shadowy Waters. "Sailing to Byzantium."M I : 289he creates: he is the black dog when overwhelmed by the darkness ofthe temporal, material world; he is the red dog when conquered bypassions and will; as the pale dog he strives after the perfection ofemotions in the eternal world of the spirit. "They too are myselfbut that is a great mystery." The Black Minstrel was perhaps "theterrible Amadan-na-Breena himself"; or perhaps "he has been so long in theworld that he can tell of ancient battles"; mysterious and from far-off,yet he was recognizable by the audience as one of them.^ An essay onstyle, written in 190?, gives us yet a further clue:In life courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style, are the sensible impressions of the free mind, for both arise out of a deliberate shaping of all things, and from never being swept away, whatever the emotion, into confusion or dullness....A writer... should never be without style, which is but high breeding in words and in argument. He is indeed the creator of the standards of manners in their subtlety, for he alone can know the ancient records and be like some mystic courtier who has stolen the keys from the girdle of Time, and can wander where it please him amid the splendours of ancient Courts.Sometimes, it may be, he is permitted the licence of cap and bell, or even the madman’s bunch of straws, but he never forgets or leaves at home the seal and the signature. He has at all times the freedom of the well-bred, and being bred to the tact of words can take what theme he pleases,... .l32. Cf. Yeats's explanations of the symbols of The Wind Among the Reeds,1899: "It is probable that only students of the magicaltradition will understand me when I say that 'Michael Robartes' is fire reflected in water, and that Hanrahan is fire blown by the wind, and that Aedh, whose name is not merely the Irish form of Hugh, but the Irish for fire, is fire burning by itself. To put it in a different way, Hanrahan is the simplicity of an imagination too changeable to gather permanent possessions, or the adoration of the shepherds; and Michael Robartes is the pride of the imagination brooding upon the greatness of its possessions, or the adoration of the Magi; while Aedh is the myrrh and frankincense that the imagination offers continually before all that it loves."^Autobiographies,269./291the artist's ovm self-sufficiency. Perhaps because the Jester was himself as well as his creation, his ideal as well as his art, the anti-mask as well as the mask, he could not be captured or revealed.And so the Black Jester returned once more to the waste places, inconceivable even to himself.Dramatic Structure"The principal difficulty with the form of dramatic structure I have adopted is that, unlike the loose Elizabethan form, it continually forces one by its rigour of logic away from one's capacities,experiences, and desires, until...there is rhetoric and logic and dry circumstance where there should be life," Yeats wrote concerning the revised I907 edition of Deirdre.^ The fable of Deirdre and the Sons of Usna had, in fact, caused him great difficulty from the beginning, and by the time it was first produced at the Abbey in I9O6 it had undergone many variations. As with The Shadowy Waters, he found it necessary to excise from the poem all its heavy-worked symbolism, "making the people ansvær each other, and making the groundwork simple and intelligible.And during the process of exorcism the Black Jester disappeared once more into the background. The Player Queen was still ten years in the future; Yeats had not yet discovered the theatrical form which would contain both his philosophy and his treatment of the image through situation. And so the functions of the jester remained separated in his characters, Porgael representing the lover-musician-magician, the Red Man of the Sea symbolizing control-concord-discord.Yeats was constantly preoccupied with this problem of a synthesis of form and subject, but although he had by now mastered the struggle in his poetry, he would not give up the dramatic form:^"A Different Version of Deirdre's Entrance," Appendix II, Works,1908,11,251.^Cf. his letters, Wade, 451-2,453,454,460,561-2.T' 292Yet 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^when a room full of people share the one lofty emotion.4^- Gradually, as he gained experience in writing and defending plays,his treatment of the image and use of material broadened even more;paradoxically, hov/ever, this wider knov;ledge led him still furtheraway from the established theatre conventions of the time, until ^ eventually after much trial and error he developed a dramatic formI which satisfied his demands of the theatre, his concept of the artist,I and his treatment of the image. As we have seen, the dramatic form' as a vehicle for his themes and personal philosophy had appealed tohim from the time he first began to write. A brief examination ofhis pursuit of a satisfactory variation on that form should give us. further insight into the development of his idea of a theatre.' "It seems to me that what plays best before a worthy audience, will' ■’ read best," Yeats observed in 1912.^ And in his own experience he hadnoticed that dramatization could frequently make words come alive.^" Style remained his chief concern, but style involved both language andstructure :^"Note on the First Performance of 'At the Hawk's Well*"(l9l6),Plays and Controversies,416.2Preface to A Selection from the Poetry of W.B.Yeats (Leipzig; Bernhard Tauchnitz,1913)* Cf. George Moore's comment, "Note on ’Ghosts'", Impressions and Opinions (London:T.Werner Laurie,1913)* 163 : "I find myself still unable to adrait the possibility that a play that reads well should act badly."Letter to Lady Gregory, post marked 8 June I905, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats. Cf. letter to Sturge Moore, 26 January 1916, Correspondence 24: "It [judith, Moore's play produced by the Stage Society, 25 January 4^ 9l6j just wants to have those things taken out which as a matter of course are taken out of practically every prose play in rehearsal. The moment one goes into rehearsal one discovers, among other things, that the stage picture is so much more powerful than the words^j^a^there are whole passages which lose their weight. A shifting of^ ''^ avi^ ty talces place and this involves minor changes."295I think it is only when one has so mastered construction that one is conscious of nothing but the subject that one is able to think of so arranging the story that one need never go beyond oneself .4^It is only natural that a mind like Yeats's, which looked upon the world and action as a series of theses and antitheses, should see dramatic construction as a problem of logic. "A play looks easy, but is full of problems, which are almost a part of Mathematics," he wrote to his father in 1918.Ibrench Draaatists display this structure and s / centuryEnglish Dirtmi^ s'ts disguise it, but it is always there. In some strange way, which I have never understood, a play does not ever read well if it has not this mathematics....It takes a lifetime to master dramatic form.2Nor could this logic be achieved by a delicate balance of words alone,for "all the finest poetry comes logically out of the fundamentalaction."5 One of the difficulties with Shadowy Waters, he felt, wasthat "there was no internal life pressing for expression through thecharacters." And one of the advantages to the one-act play was thathere one could see the bare bones of the action.Yeats, in fact, deliberately worked at the one-act form chieflyfor this discipline, "because logic (and stage success is entirely amatter of logic) works itself out most obviously and simply in a shortaction v/ith no change of scene."4 Prom his position as theatredirector, he frequently criticized his play-writing contemporariesfor unnecessary scene^hanges,^ and a criticism of Wilde's Salome isparticularly revealing for his ovm attitude towards structure:^Letter to Sturge Moore,4 October 1907> Correspondence,15.^14 June I9I8, Letters,649.%Letter to Arthur Symons, 10 September 1905> Letters,46O. "^Letter to "Michael Field," 27 July 19055 Letters,408.5Samhain,1901.6; 1902,6-7? 1905,3*294The general construction is all right, is even powerful, but the dialo^e is empty, sluggish and pretentious. It has nothing of drama of any kind, never working to any climax but always endingas it begun. A good play goes like thisbut Salome is as level as a table. Wilde was not a poet but a wit and critic and could not endure his limitations. He thought he was writing beautifully when he had collected beautiful things and thrown them together in a heap. He never made anything organic while he was trying to be a poet....No good actor will ever succeed in inorganic work and you will get yourself into the hands of the amateurs and the dilettante....^Good structure, then, means cumulative action, both in language andplot. "Remember that a play, even if it is in three acts, has to seemonly one action," he warned Lady Gregory when she tackled the longerpform for the first time in Kincora. No matter what the length, the principle remained the same.The achievement of this cumulative effect required, Yeats felt, a strong plan of the action, simplification and conciseness of the symbols, and rigid control of the actors. He early learned to make use of the scenario,^ and advised other would-be playwrights to do the same :Letter to T.Sturge Moore, 6 May I906, Correspondence,8-9. He criticized Shaw's Man Superman because "there was no cumulative effect except in the last act." Letter to Lady Gregory, post marked 22 May 1905> in the possession of Mrs. Yeats. Cf. Letter to Lennox Robinson, 16 April 1929» quoted by Margaret O'Leary, Lightning Flash(London:Cape,1959)»7-9"221 January I904» Letters,42?«^He made two complete prose versions of The Countess Cathleen before writing any of it in verse. Cf. letter to John O'Leary, 7 May I889, Letters,125; Preface to Letters to Wie New Island,ix.295Young writers should remember that they must get all their effects from the logical expression of their subject, and not by the addition of extraneous incidents, and that a v/ork of art can have but one subject. A work of art, though it must have , the effect of nature, is art because it is not nature, as Goethe said.l The Abbey Theatre is continually sent plays which show that their writers have not understood that the attainment of this unity, by what is usually a long shaping and reshaping of the plot, is the principal labour of the dramatist, and not the • writing of the dialogue. Before sending plays of any length, writers would often save themselves some trouble by sending a "scenario," or scheme of the plot.^He constantly re-wrote his own plays, striving for balance of bothaction and myth. ^ An early letter to Lady Gregory describes hisdifficulties with the monastery scene in Where There is Nothing;"I think that some comedy there will help the balance of the play.y Every other act of the play has comedy. I wouldn't mind if one ofthe early acts was quite serious. They would balance then."4Just as he tended to "see" his symbols in concrete form, so hesaw the action of the characters as he created them. With the helpof the little model stage designed by Gordon Craig, he "produced"his plays as he wrote them, moving the figures about as one would the1Probably he first f«arjpve he discusses Shakespeare's use of the subplot to achieve contrasts and balance with the main plot.^Letter to Lady Gregory, 4 December 1902, Letters,38b. Cf.Note to Plays in Prose and Verse,1922,426; Where There is Nothing "became hateful to me because, in desperation, I had caught up from a near table a pamphlet of Tolstoy's on the Sermon on the Mount, and made out of it a satirical scene that became the pivot of the play.The scene seemed amusing on the stage, but its crude speculative commonplaces filled me with shame and I withdrew the play from circulation."296men in a game of c h e s s H e then sketched the action of eachpscene or tableau. As a rule, his construction was determined by the time the play was put into rehearsal. "You can ...see the opening rehearsals and the final ones which will, I suppose, be sufficient.One can only really chop about at the beginning," he wrote to Lady Gregory of the first production of The nhlteCockade. ^ Then, after the production, the process of revision began once more. On one occasion he deliberately gave Shadowy V/aters to Florence Farr for a Theosophical Convention in London^ so that he might see its faults more clearly before re-writing what he felt to be a bad poem, "obscure and vague",^ its "logic and circumstances" all wrong.^ His final aim was a dramatically effective poem, not a theatrical production, despite his concept of drama as "literature in the theatre." In turn, the play itself when completed was in one sense judged in the light of the remainder of the evening's entertainment : "Ho verse play of minerequires much more than an hour for its performance; and most, being intended for a theatre where every evening winds up with comedy or satire, are much s h o r t e r . A n d he encouraged other dramatists to workPreface to Plays for an Irish Theatre,xiii. Apparently he started using a stage model before I905, as that year he compared his to a more detailed model W.G.Fay had designed, according to an unpublished letter to Lady Gregory,25 September I905, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats.2See illustration p.281.3Dictated letter dated 27 September 1905, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats.^Appendix 17, Collected Tvorks. 1908.II.257-58.^The Arrow,I,2(24 November 1906),3.^Letters to Florence Farr, July I905, Letters,453 and 454* Gf. letters to John Quinn,29 June I9O5 and Arthur Symons, 10 September 1905,ibid., 451-2 and 46O.7Preface to Plays in Prose and Verse,1922,vii.297on the same themes, bringing individual imagination to bear on a universal myth: "One of my fellow-playwrights is going I have hope,to take the other side and make a play that can be played after it, as in Greece the farce followed the tragedy," he wrote of The King's Threshold.^The Shadowy Waters continued to cause Yeats trouble. As early as1894 he had written to his father, "In my struggle to keep it concreteI fear I shall so overload it with legendary detail that it will beunfit for any theatrical purposes — at least as such are carried outat present."2 Unwilling to give up the myth, however, he finallycompromised by writing two versions, the poem and a stage version inprose, both published in his 1913 collection:I am most anxious that this book, which I hope will go about among people who have a technical interest in the stage, should show that I understand my trade as a practical dramatist. It will injure me if it contains a play which is evidently unfit for the stage as it V stands. I should not have minded if Shadowy Waters had been left outaltogether. Indeed I had intended to leave it out...but now that it is in I must ask for stage version in Appendix or elsewhere....We are calling the book Plays for an Irish Theatre and that means actable plays or nothing.3However, despite his precautions, the play is even less theatricallyeffective than Deirdre, his other attempt at a compromise between hissymbolic inclinations and theatrical limitations. Yet both approachedhis ideal of the dramatic presentation of the soul of man. The onlyanswer, then, was to keep searching for a dramatic form which wouldallow for the compression of statement and expansion of symbols.^Poems 1899-1905,1906,280.^5 November 1894, Letters,236.^Letter to his publishers, 15 August 1911, op.cit.,561-62.Later he published two versions of The Hour Glass, but in that case the second version was the result of a change in theme and structure.298LanguageAs his prose and verse treatments of the same subject indicate,Yeats realized where the major difficulty lay:V ' ^ If one does not know hovf to construct, if one cannot arrange muchcomplicated life into a single action, one's work will not hold the attention or linger in the memory, but if one is not in love with words it will lack the delicate moment of living speech that is the chief garment of life.And the noblest garment of all is poetry. "We have forgotten that, the Drama began in the chanted ode, and that whenever it has been greatit has been written certainly to delight our eyes, but to delight our' ears more than our eyes," he had written in 1899 in defence of his2theories of simplified stage decoration. Once restore to words "theirancient sovereignty"^ and the magic and ritual of great drama would alsoreturn. "This is really a magical revolution, for the magical wordis the chanted word."4' I wanted all my poetry to be spoken on a stage, or sung....I have spent my life in clearing out of poetry every phrase written for the eye, and bringing all back to syntax that is ■ for ear alone. Let the eye take delight in the form of the singer and in the panorama of the stage and be content with that.^^Samhain, 1903,9 » Of'.'Preface to the First Edition of The Well of the Saint"(^1905), Essays and Introductions,300-301 : "If one has not fine construction, one has not drama, but if one has not beautiful X or powerful and individual speech, one has not literature, or, at'any rate, one has not great literature."2Letter to the Editor, Daily Chronicle,27 January I899, Letters, 509-10, in reply to a criticism by William Archer.3"Dramatic Ideals and the Irish Literary Theatre," lecture by Yeats to the National Literary Society of Dublin, 6 May 1899, reported by Dublin Daily Express 8 May 1899,6. Cf. Preface to Poems 1899-1903, xi-xii; "A Poetic Drama," Providence Sunday Journal, 26 July I89I, reprinted in Letters to the New Island,213-22.^Letter to AE, November 1899, Letters,327 »^"An Introduction for my Plays"(1937), Essays and Introductions,329 Of. Samhain, 1902,5:'''Even on a large stage one should leave the description of the poet free to call up the martlet’s procréant cradle or what he will."299Yeats's ambition to restore words to their ancient sovereignty did not, however, mean a plea for what he referred to as "the modern idea of the poetic." "I avoid every kind of word that seems to me either / 'poetical' or 'modern,'" he wrote to AE in I9OO. "All ancient vision' was definite and precise. Nor, on the other hand, would he accept "the impersonal language that has come, not out of individual life, nor out of life at all, but out of necessities of commerce, of Parliament, of Board Schools, of hurried journeys by r a i l . J u s t as the greatest play is that "in which there is the greatest abundance of life itself, of the reality that is in our own m i n d s , s o the greatest language is that v/hich must keep at all times "an even richness."VJhat the ever-moving delicately-moulded flesh is to human beauty vivid musical words are to p a s s i o n . " A writer's 'purity' is his truth to his own mood," he wrote to Sturge Moore in 1911.^ The poet must be sincere and r natural in his choice of v/ords, writing out of his own thoughts, "in as^May 1900, Letters,543* Cf. his criticism of the language in the poetry of Mrs. Clement Shorter (Dora Sigerson), letter to her, 21 June 1899, op.cit.,321-22. Cf.also "William Blake and his Illustrations to 'The Divine Comedy,'" note dated 1924, Essays and Introductions,143*Preface to the first edition of The Well of the Saints"(l9Q3),Essays and Introductions,300» 1. Yeats's main objection to Ibsen was ^ the language of his translators. Gf. Samhain, 1904,25-26.^Samhain,I9O4 ,26.^Preface to Plays for an Irish Theatre,1913,x.-^Samhain, op. cit.28 July 1911, Correspondence,2L.2(^ In a letter to Yeats, December 1902, Prank Pay writes, "I was glad to see from a letter which you wrote recently to my brother that you agree with me in thinking Oscar Wilde J and CBS the only dramatists of the nineteenth century whose plays areworth going to hear." Letter in the possession of Mrs. Yeats.$00nearly as possible the language we thought them in, as though in a letter to an intimate friend.Although Yeats demanded "living speech," and this meant choice of language that would be true to the artist who uttered them, he worked laboriously to create the "personal language that the heart may still speak."2 "V/hat I am trying to do in writing jis] to express myself without waste, without emphasis. To be impassioned and yet to have a perfect self-possession, to have a precision so absolute that the slightest inflection of voice, the slightest rhythm of sound or emotion plucks the heart-strings," he wrote to Mrs. Patrick Campbell in 1901.5 And later, "Tragic drama must be carved out of speech as a statue is out of stone."4With these aims in mind Yeats constantly revised his plays, and acareful study of many of his revisions will show alterations in languagerather than in action or structure.5If we make it possible again for the poet to express himself, notmerely 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. Everyone 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 goodmany plays in verse and prose, and almost all those plays I havere-written after performance, sometimes again and again, and every change that has succeeded has been an addition to the masculine element, an increase of strength in the bony structure.&Autobiographies,102-05. Of.letter to J.B.Yeats, 5 August 1915, Letters,585:"of recent years...I have tried for more self-portraiture.I have tried to make ray work convincing with a speech so natural and dramatic that the hearer would feel the presence of a man thinking and feeling."2Tribute to Thomas Davis(1914) (Oxford:Cork U.Press,1947),15«^November 1901, Letters,$60.^Preface to Plays for an Irish Theatre,1915,x.5The variations to The Shadowy Waters in the Variorum edition alone bear this^out,. Collations to the earlier plays indicate the alterations better thai^tBe later plays, as Yeats did most of his revising to his later plays in manuscript.^Samhain.I9O6 ,1$.501In a letter to John Quinn concerning the hard-worked Shadowy Waters,Yeats tells of his latest revisions:The very temper of the thing is different. It is full of homelyphrases and of the idiom of daily speech. I have made the sailorsroughj^^s sailors should he, characterized all the people more or les8,#yet not lost any of my lyrical moments. It has become a, simple passionate play I believe more strongly every day" that the element of strength in poetic language is common idiom, just as the element of strength in poetic construction is common passion.And he rejoices in the same letter in his use of "creaking shoes" and"liquorice-root" in a formerly abstract passage.^ Similarly, TheLand of Heart's Desire was in revision thrown back in time "becausethe metrical speech would have sounded unreal if spoken in a countrycottage now that we have so many dialect comedies."2striving for the exact word in the exact place, heexperimented with the verse form, starting with blank verse and graduallydeveloping a more tightened, stringent form which would more easilyapproach "the syntax of passionate speech"^ and at the same time suitthe subject and mood:The Countess Cathleen could speak a blank verse which I had loosened, almost put out of joint, for her need, because I thought of her as mediaeval and thereby " connected her with the general European movement. For Deirdre and Cuchulain and all the other figures of Irish legend are still in the whale's belly.4Still, in other words, clothed in the rougher garb of ancient Irishlegend. Consequently he resorted to ballad metre for ^ha Green Helmet,as more suitable to the Heroic Age. Deirdre and the Cuchulain cycle,^6 September 190$, Letters,462. "21912 Preface to the seventh edition of Poems (London;T.Fisher Unwin,1927),vii-viii.^Interview with Yeats on the occasion of the Nobel Prize av/ard,Irish Times, November 192$.Cf."J.M.Synge and the Ireland of his Time" (1910), Essays and Introduction^$$$.^A General Introduction for my Work"(1957),Easays and Introductions,524- 5.$02on the other hand, demanded a variation of blank verse, which finally led him in his dance plays to a combined blank verse and lyric metre, the songs reflecting the tempo of the action and providing those moments of silent emotion Yeats felt so essential to drama. This "contrapuntal structure," the mingling and counter-balancing of song, dance, and dignified speech, led him at last to the form he was seeking, "where every speech would be short and concentrated, knit by dramatic tension.Although a full discussion of the Anglo-Irish dialect belongs toan examination of the work of Lady Gregory and Synge, mention must bemade here of the fruitful collaboration between Yeats and Lady Gregory.In his preface to the 1922 collection of his plays, Yeats acknowledgeshis debt to Lady Gregory!I have sometimes asked her help because I could not write dialect and sometimes because my construction had fallen into confusion.To the best of my belief "The Unicom from the Stars," but for fable and chief character, is wholly her work. "The Green Helmet" and "The Player Queen" alone perhaps are wholly mine.2Plays in which traces of Lady Gregory's help are most evident are Pot ofBroth, Kathieen-ni-Houlihan, the stage version of Shadowy Waters, thecomic servant scenes in the revised King's Threshold, the opening sceneof On Baile's Strand, and Deirdre.5 pDiarmuid and Grania and Where There_is Nothing have always been listed as collaborations). Perhaps theirfirst collaboration was, however, in Yeats's Stories of Red Hanrahan:^Ibid.,521.Cf. "Introduction to 'Fighting the Waves,'" Wheels and Butterflies,70-71.2Preface to Plays In Prose anh Verse (LondonrMacmillan,1922),vii.Lady Gregory lists some of these plays in Our Irish Theatre,80 £t passim. An unpublished letter to Lady Gregory, 14 January 190$ reads: "I cannot do the new 'Baile Strand' without your help with the opening conversation." Letter in the possession of Mrs. Yeats. Of. also Letter to Lady Gregory,190$, Plays for an Irish Theatre,22$-24;Preface to The Unicorn from the Stars and other Plays^New York:Macmillan, I908),vi-ix.50$Some years ago I wrote some stories of mediaeval Irish life, and as I wrote I was sometimes made wretched by the thought that I knew of no kind of English that fitted them as the language of Morris* prose stories — the most beautiful language I had ever read — fitted his journeys to woods and wells beyond the world.I knew of no language to write about Ireland in but raw modern English; but now Lady Gregory has discovered a speech as beautiful as that of Morris, and a living speech into the bargain,...It is certainly well suited to clothe a literature which never ceased to be folk-lore even when it was recited in the Courts of Kings.lRe-v/riting the stories with her help, they at last achieved "the emotionof folklore" he sought.2They studied the idiom together, v/riting first in the "swift-movingtown dialect" of Pot of Broth, then gradually perfecting "the slow-iimoving country dialect of Kathleen-ni-Houlihan and Lady Gregory’s ownplays.5 "In those first years of the theatre we all helped oneanother with plots, ideas, and dialogue, but certainly 1 was the mostindebted as 1 had no mastery of speech that purported bo be of reall i f e . T h e invaluable Joseph Holloway records a conversation withthe Abbey secretary, W.A.Henderson, which further indicates theextent of their work together:Henderson told us she is the boss of the show and approves of all Yeats's work before it sees the light of the stage. He rescued some passages discarded by her, from^the waste paper basket, of the great WB's, and has them at home.5As late as 1928 they were still collaborating, this time over his"plain man's Oedipus": "Lady Gregory and 1 went through it all, altering^Preface to Cuchulain of Muirthemne (London;John Murray,1911)> viii-ix. £f.note to Early Poems and Stories (London:Macrnillan, 192$),528.2Note in John Quinn's copy of Stories of Red Hanrahan,1904, quoted by Allan Wade, A Bibliography of the Writings of W.B.Yeats,2nd ed.(London:Rupert Hart-Davis,1958TT72*5Autobiographies,451.^Note to Plays in Prose and Verse,1922,421.^Diary of Joseph Holloway, 2$ December I907, National Library of Ireland, MSI8O5.504every sentence that might not be intelligible on the Blasket Islands," Yeats acknowledged in a newspaper interview.^"Let us learn construction from the masters, and dialogue from2ourselves," Yeats had written in Samhain. Much as he admired the country idiom, where "everything is old and everything alive and nothing conmion or threadbare,"5 Yeats recognized that his genius lay in another direction. With Lady Gregory's help he could develop the conversations of his plays, but the Anglo-Irish dialect, being a deliberate effort on his part, did not flow smoothly through the thoughts of his characters as it did in Synge's Riders to the Sea or Lady Gregory's Spreading tj^ News.4 The use of country speechfor a noble purpose, as in the work of Synge, Lady Gregory and Hyde, did "much for National dignity,"5 but he himself had to turn elsewhere. And, as usual, he turned in upon himself. "I have tried for more self-portraiture," he had written to his father in 191$. His fellow playwrights found their art in stepping outside themselves: he inhis turn sought it within. "I always feel that my work is not drama but the ritual of a lost faith," he wrote to Sturge Moore.^ And in order to make credible the "strange events, elaborate words" of that ritual, he required sufficient distance from, rather than involvement in life.7During his American lecture tour in 1911> Yeats stated his main concern in writing poetry for the stage;^Quoted from the New York Times, 1$ January 1955, Jade's ediiion1^901,7-8.^Samhain,1902,8-9.^Notes to Plays in Prose and Verse,1922,421.^"J.M.Synge and the Ireland of his Time"(l910), Essays and Introductions,$$$.^$1 August 1929, Correspondence,1$6.^"Certain Noble Plays of Japan"(April 1 9 1 6),Essays and Introductions,221.505Being a writer of poetic drama, and of tragic drama, desiring always pattern and convention, I would like to keep to suggestion, to symbolism, to pattern like the Japanese.^His early interest in Japanese art is significant, for eventually hedid find his model in the Noh play, but long before Ezra Pound hadintroduced him to this convention he knew what he required for his ideaof a theatre. "The Stage Manager..... says it must be simple, easy tounderstand, all about real human beings," confides the Black Jesterto his audience. "But I am going to please myself this time." AndYeats sought what, he called "reverie," "this twilight between sleepand waking" which was "the condition of tragic pleasure." "Vveshould see certain men and women as if at the edge of a cliff, timebroken away from their feet."5 His attitude towards the Celtic MysticalOrder of the late 'nineties applied to his theory of dramatic languageas well: "the need of mystical rites — a ritual, a system of evocationand meditation — to re-unite the perception of the spirit, of thedream, with natural beauty.I desire a mysterious art, alv/ays reminding and half-reminding those who understand it of dearly loved things, doing its work by suggestionynot by direct statement, a complexity of rhytlim, colour, gesture, not space^pervading like the intellect but a memory and a prophecy.5And we recall that in 1899 he had written enthusiastically to AE: "Thisis really a magical revolution, for the magical word is the chantedw o r d . B u t neither did he wish to return to what he now felt was theabstract vagueness of his early verse. There must be distance from theprosaic everyday reality; at the same time, however, there must be^"The Poetry of Beauty," Harper's Weekly, 11 November 1911,11.2Preface to Plays for an Irish Theatre,191$,ix.^Introduction to "Words Upon the Window-Pane," Wheels and Butterflies,26.4Quoted from first draft of Autobiographies,Ellmann, The Man and the Masks,126.^"A People's Theatre"(1919), Plays and Controversies,212-21$.^Letters,$27.$06precision and truth. "Tragic drama must be carved out of speech as a statue is out of stone."Moreover, the art of the pla^yer can in turn encourage the poet, "for it is speaking or singing before an audience that makes us tell our stories well, and put our thoughts into some lasting order and set our emotions clamboring |sicj to some arduous c l i m a x . H a d not all poetry originated in the art of the minstrel? But dramatic poetry involved this practical problem, finding and training actors to speak verse and on occasion intone it, an irony reflected in the Old Man who must once again teach beggars "the music of the beggar-man,Homer's music."2 Yeats was fortunate, for he found Frank Fay.5 And with Pay as his model he wrote King's Threshold, Deirdre, and OnBaile's Strand, all centred about "one player of genius."^ Nor without Fay could he have attempted Where There is Nothing, an experiment at unity "with no other device than one always dominant person about whom the world was drifting av/ay. "5^Preface (1912), A Selection from the Poetry of W.B.Yeats,1913*2Prologue to The Death of Cuchulain, Appendix D. In a letter, probably 1907, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats, Charles Ricketts complains of "the dreadful interpretations you have always met with (and to which you seem quite blind) ^hicl^ have spoiltyour chances, so far, as a playwright."•5The King's Threshold was dedicated to Frank Fay in memory"of his beautiful speaking in the character of Seancan."^Letter to Allan Wade, 18 October 1921, Letters,6^^Cf. Prologue to Death of Cuchulain, "I could have got^a aancer once, but she is gone."^Letter to A.B.Walkley, 20 June 1903,op.cit.,406. This loose construction is one reason for the failure of the play, which, unlike his other plays, has no "cross-pattern" or balance,The plot would have better served for a picaresque novel in Moore's inimitable manner.307The Musician and the Chorus Yeats's experiments with speech and musical notation for his plays led to his use of the actor-musician and finally to the chorus. "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 v;as essentially conventional, artificial, ceremonious."^ The artifice and convention of the minstrel led him in turn to the convention of the chorus as a device that would not only "check the rapidity of i dialogue"2 and formalize the action, but create even further the distance between drama as ritual and the audience. In this sense, Aleel, the poet in The Countess Cathleen, and the sailors in T ^ Shadowy Waters had functioned as a chorus; later the Fool and Blind Llan acted as a commentary on the heroic action. However, by the time he wrote Deirdre, he had had sufficient experience with musical instruments to trust their introduction into his dramatic structure, and here the three Musicians (reduced from five in an earlier draft)3not only contribute to the exposition and commentary, but play an integral part in the development of the action: they warn Deirdre, provide her with a knife, and later sing the funeral dirge.^ Like the Fool and the Blind Man, they serve to lift the action of the fable from the particular events to the universal myth of heroic life and death. Unlike their earlier counterparts, they remain sufficiently ■ detached observers to reflect the emotions of the onlookers as well. "It is always allusion, never illusion," Yeats had said of the medieval minstrel^; the chorus of musicians, by serving as a bridge^Samhain,1904,28-29*Synge and the Ireland of his Time"(l910),Essays and Introductions,$33*^See illustration, p. 281.^The "singing women" in Baile's Strand are purely a dramatic device for the sake of atmosphere, rather than a part of the functional structure Characteristically, however, even though a great portion of their song is not heard, Yeats took great care with its composition. _Cf. Note to 'On Baile's Strand," Poems 1899-1905,277-78.5„Literature and the Living Voice," Samhain,1906,11.$08between the audience and the action, further heightens the action andincreases the distance from "the pushing world" of everyday reality.With his discovery of the Noh convention, Yeats felt further justifiedin his introduction of the chorus, and here through their songs the1musicians provide the scene and setting as well as the exposition (and in later cases some of the dialogue).^ Then, gradually, as he simplified further still, the musicians once more took upon themselves the dual role of choric-commentators and character-symbols.^ His last play, ïïae Death of Cuchulain, draws in with a fine flourish not only the Cuchulain legend and Noh convention, but the earlier character- symbols heightened to become commentators not only on the action of this play, but on his entire dramatic history. The Old Man of the Prologue, jester and creator, meets the Blind Man, Cuchulain's anti-self, and the harlot sings to the beggar-musicians. The noble is reflected in the beggarman; the epilogue joins with the prologue; the creator again becomes a part of his creation. Language and structure are once more one.^At the Hawk's Well (I917), The Only Jealousy of Emer (I919),The Dreaming of the Bones (1919), Calvary X Ï9ÏÏ0 ), The Resurrection (l9$l).The and jbhe^ Moon (1926). In The Herne ' s E^;g (1939) the soldiers act as a chorus in a manner reminiscent of The Silver Tassie.^The musician-attendants of The King of _t^ Great Clock Tower (1935)and A Full Moon in March (193$). The function of the chorus in histranslations differs. There its main purpose is "to preserve the mood while it rests the mind by change of attention," Preface to Sophocles *King Oedipus (London:Macmillanl928),vi. Yeats evidently considered his use of the chorus quite different from his Greek predecessor's. For further discussion of his use of the chorus see below. Part chapter 10, p . 6 0 L309CHAPTER 6 - AUGUSTA, LADY GREGORY. , . but wo are "image-makers," and must carry out our dreams.(Letter to Sir Hugh Lane)V/liat we wanted was to create for Ireland a theatre with a base of realis.u, with an apex of beauty. (Note to Darner's Gold, 1912)Lady Gregory's first play was produced by the Irish National Theatre Society in 190$; she was fifty years old. Her last play was produced at the Abbey in 1927; last "without advice save from the almanac, and rather from pride than modesty."^ She brought to the Irish literary movement not only a fierce nationalism,2 strong friends, and a natural enthusiasm,5 but a philosophy already formed, and a great deal of experience to draw upon. She received much in return: direction forher nationalism and energy, life-long friendships with fellow-workers,^ and more important still, a form of expression for her ideals and observations.Towards the end of her life Lady Gregory wrote in her diary:If I had not married I should not have learned the quick enrichment of sentences that one gets in conversation; had I not been widowed I should not have found the detachment of mind, the leisure for observation necessary to give insight into character, to express and interpret it. Loneliness made me rich — "full" as Bacon says. Company gave me swiftness in putting thought into a word, a sentence.5But Lady Gregory had already begun writing before her husband died. Sometime during the early 'eighties she wrote ^ !^igrant 's Notebook, a series of anecdotes describing her life at Roxborough and already^Notes, Three Last Plays (London:Putnam,1928),271. £f. note in 1926, Lady Gregory's Journals 1916-1930,ed. Lennox Robinson (London: Putnaiü,1946),$24.^Journals,33. Cf. above. Part One, Chapter 2, p. Vf ^3Cf. the last entry recorded in her Journals,340: "I sometimes think my life has been a series of enthusiasms."4çf. Journals.1 1 6.260.529.559.^Ibid.,358-59..310containing hints of her strength in peasant characterization.^ Shortlyafter her marriage and trip to Egypt, she published s small pamphletin the defence of the Egyptian revolutionary, Arabi B e y .2 In 1892Wilfred Scawen Blunt, friend of the Gregorys, suggested Lady Gregoryas political leader writer for To-morrow, a Woman's Journal for Men,a nev/ paper which was to come out every two months, an indication ofLady Gregory's own intention of becoming a serious w r i t e r .5 Andalthough nothing came of this suggestion, she was by then editing herhusband's j o u r n a l s ^ and was later to publish Mr. Gregory's Letter Box,a selection of letters concerning Sir William's grandfather's workwhen Undersecretary in Ireland.^ Writing, then, had already beenchosen as her career; it v/as simply a matter of waiting for direction.The direction itself did not come from any former interest in thetheatre itself, for in her early biography of the theatre she comments,I had never cared much for the stage, although when living a gooddeal in London, my husband and I went, as others do, to see someof each season's plays. I find, in looking over an old diary, thatmany of these have quite passed from my mind, although books I readever, so long ago, novels and the like, have left at least some fainttrace by which I may recognize them.®Instead, we must turn to her nationalism to find the directing force.As we have seen, she first met Yeats in I896, and had already beendeeply impressed by his writing. She, too, wished to do "something forIreland," but neither she nor Yeats at first realized that her^Portions are quoted by Elizabeth Coxhead, Lady Gregory A Literary Portrait (London:Macmillan,I961),$0-$l. Miss Coxhead dates this unpublished essay as I884, the winter Sir ..'illiam was away on his first visit to Ceylon, and suggests that the title indicates that Lady Gregory considers London her home. Since the memoir is obviously written for her husband, it is more likely the title simply refers to her move fromthe Roxborough world to his world.2Arabi and his Household,1882.^W.S.Blunt, Diaries Part One 1888-1^00(London:Martin Seeker,1919),101-02.4Autobiography of Sir William Gregory (London;Murray,1894)•Mr. Gregory's Letter Box (LondoniMurray,1898).^Our Irish Theatre,8$.311contribution would be more than fund-raising^ or "creation in an inverse method to that of Genesis," the journalism she had earlierpconsidered. However, from the beginning she acted as a catalystfor the literary movement, as later she would for Yeats and otherdramatists,5 and "things seemed to grow possible as we talked."4The combined interest in the theatre as a national vehicle and inYeats’s own work remained the criterion by which she judged all herwork for the Abbey Theatre;The plays that I have cared for most all through, and for love of which I took up this work, are those verse ones by Mr. Yeats The Countess Cathleen with which we began, The Shadov/y Waters,The King’s Threshold, and the rest. They have sometimes seemed to go out of sight because the prose plays are easier to put on and to take from place to place; yet they will always be, if I have my way, a part of our year’s work. I feel verse is more than any prose can be, the apex of the flame, the point of thediamond.5And, as we shall see, these abiding interests helped contribute to the detachment apparent in her own plays and, towards her own creative processes, a quality which allowed her to distinguish more clearly than Yeats between the play and the player, the creation and the production.Chronologically, the theatre came first for Lady Gregory, only secondly her own plays. By the time she began to write herself she had become involved in the problems of production and, through her collaboration with Hyde and Yeats, the problems of construction and dialogue. Consequently her attitude towards the theatre itself and the productions was already established by the time she came to write her own plays^ And, since by then the theatre was organized, she wrote with production at the Abbey in mind, tending at first to restrict^Autobiographies,$80.2Journals,$2$.^Cf.Lennox Robinson's notes. Journals,54,and her ov/n frequent references to collaboration with Yeats on both plays and speeches, Journals. 86 £t passim.4Our Irish Theatre,6-7*5Ibid..78.312her work to the requirements of the Abbey stage and players. Furthermore,. since the Abbey was synonymous in her mind with nationalism, playwright,/ player, and audience must be for her indomitably Irish: "All workingto create, a fine drama, fine acting, a theatre giving opportunity toevery talent in it"^; and always and only for "the dignity of Ireland,"2In 1919» when the first offer of their theatre was made to the government,she wrote in her diary:I told Robinson, in speaking of the Theatre, that we must have two horizons, one the far one, the laying of it "on the threshold of Eternity"; the nearer one the coming of Home Rule or whatever the new arrangement that must come may be when the Irish from America and elsewhere will come back to see their Country. We must keep the Theatre something we should be proud to show.3Nor did her nationalism limit her vision of the theatre as she wishedto see it. "In matters of art the many count less than the few,"4 and' the Abbey directors, as self-appointed arbitrators of art for Ireland,must first remain true to their ovm aesthetic beliefs. "I have foundthat peace comes, not from trying to please one's neighbours but in making• up one’s own mind what is the right path and in then keeping to it," shepvrote to "one who left us but has since r e t u r n e d ."5 And in an articlein Claidhearnh Soluis, she wrote concerning another debate:Sinn Fein — "we ourselves" — isavell enough for the day's bread, but is not Mise Fein — "I myself" — the last word in Art?°Early during their friendship she had said to Yeats, "The only wrong actthat matters is not doing one's best work, and occasionally even these^Journals,$26-27•2Our Irish Theatre,$7 and 245; cf. Lady Gregory, Hugh Lane’s Life and Achievement (London;John Murray,192l"y745n. In an unpublished letter to Yeats, Miss Korniman writes:"Lady Gregory told me long ago that she only was interested in the theatre on its Irish side and as performing to Irish people." Letter dated I5 March I907 is in Mrs. Yeatds possession.Journals,6 1.^Our Irish Theatre,114»"Ibid.,49.Probably I904, quoted by Lady Gregory in Hugh Lane, 62.7Autobiographies,4O8 .313two fellow-workers disagreed over policy. Much of this internaldisagreement was a result of "hidden persuasion" within the theatreitself and as such belongs to the discussion of theatre policy;however it is important to realize here that at no time did Lady Gregoryact simply as "seconder" to Yeats's ideas of the theatre; "I shouldlike the memory of our theatre to be at least almost as free fromcompromise j^s the work of her nephew, Hugh L a n ^ . One should tryand take the whole question before 'the long-remembering harpers' andtheir eternal a u d i e n c e . S h e , like Yeats, was jealous of her passportto eternity. And, like Yeats, she felt that her mission was in part adidactic one; "’Ye went on giving what we thought good until it becamepopular."2 Believing once that they had compromised, she objected,"V/e have been humouring our audience instead of educating it, whichis the work we ought to do....the theatre ...being intended 'for artand a thinking Democracy.' It is just what we set out to do, and nowwe are giving in to stupidity in a Democracy."5 Five years before herdeath, having seen one of Shaw's plays at the Abbey, she wi'ote in herdiary this characteristic comment:I did feel proud and satisfied — a Theatre of our ov/n, Irish plays, sue-I a fine one by our countrymwA- company playing it so splendidly, all our own — something to have lived to see! But there is a good deal of slackness at the Abbey.4Lady Gregory carried the dream of an Irish theatre even furtherthan Yeats, however, as she herself admits in Our Irish Theatre :I had had from the beginning a vision of historical plays being sent by us through all the counties of Ireland. For to have a real success and to come into the life of the country, one must touch a real and eternal emotion, and history comes only next to religion in our country. And although the realism of our young writers is taking the place of fantasy and romance in the cities, I still hopeto see a little season given up every year to plays on history andin sequence at the Abbey, and I think schools and colleges may askto have them sent and played in their halls,as^part of the day'slesson.5Hugh Lane,52.2Our Irish Theatre,10$.^Ibid.,104, probably written in I9O6 . ^Journals,103.^Our Irish Theatre.91-92.514Her first play, Colman and Guaire, was written not with a "stageproduction" in mind, but "a little play in rhyme (whicl^ might perhapsbe learned and acted by Kiltartan school-children."^ And sheconsistently saw the theatre as part of the same movement which hadearlier given impetus to the Gaelic League:It was a movement for keeping the Irish language a spoken one, with, as a chief end, the preserving of our own nationality. That does not sound like the beginning of a revolution, yet it was one.It was the discovery, the disclosure of the folk-learning, the folk-poetry, the folk-tradition». Our Theatre was caught into that current, and it is that current, as I believe, that has brought it on its triumphant way. It is chiefly known now as a folk-theatre. It has not only the great mass of primitive material and legend to draw on, but it has been made a living thing by the excitement of that discovery.2Twenty years later she was still writing plays that children as wellas grown-ups could enjoy. And so, unlike Yeats's, her dream of anIrish theatre v;as fulfilled, with her own work playing a far moreimportant part than she had ever dreamed possible. In 1954 Yeats wrotethat her plays "are constantly acted, not only in Dublin but by littlecompanies in village halls. Their names are as familiar as oldproverbs."5 And a visitor to Ireland will still find her work popular,both in English and in Irish dress, at the Abbey and in the provinces.With these aims in mind, then, she wrote her plays, writing of Irishpeople as she had observed them during her childhood and widowhoodin Galway, of Irish history and folklore as she had collected it forher books, for the children and country folk of her nation.KiltartanIn 1899, before it had occurred to her to turn to playwriting herself. Lady Gregory wrote of Eleonora Duse's plan of building an open air theatre on the Alban hills, where Italian literary plays might be produced. She concluded her article by commenting: "We have, indeed,M^y First Play(London:Elkin Mathews and Marrot,I950),1-2.^Our Irish Theatre,7 6.^Yeats, The Irish National Theatre,1954,6 .315no Duse as yet, but as in Italy the actress called forth the play, perhaps in Ireland the plays may bring an actress into b e i n g . A s we shall see, the plays did produce the actors in Ireland, but the theatre in turn called forth more playwrights, including Lady Gregory herself. "I began by writing bits of dialogue, when wanted," she tells us. "Mr. Yeats used to dictate parts of Diarmuid and Grania to me, and I would suggest a sentence here and there. Then I, as well as another jiouglas Hyd^ , helped to fill spaces in VJhere There is Nothing. "2 Later the two wrote Kathleen ni Houlihan together, Lady Gregory turning ' Yeats's dream into country speech.5 And by the time Pot of Broth was written, she was working on plot and construction as well.4In a sense, then. Lady Gregory approached play-vrriting through the ' ear. Acting as amanuensis for the peasants on her father's estate, later collecting folklore on her o?/n estate, studying Irish with her , son, and faithfully recording the stories and traditions she gathered from the country folk, had taught her her trade before she was even aware of her knowledge. Her people spoke a language distinctive of their own district, Kiltartan,5 the English words transposed from Irish thoughts 'through a grammatical formula peculiar to themselves, and frequently in language reminiscent of the King James version of the Bible and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. In recording their stories and translating from Irish, Lady Gregory faithfully adopted their grammatical formulas as well, employing them perhaps with more frequency than one would observe^"An Italian Literary Drama," Dublin Daily Express, 8 April 1899,3*2Our Irish Theatre,80.^Dedication to Lady Gregory, IVhere There is Nothing(NY;John Lane,1902), reprinted in Our Irish Theatre,82.^Our Irish Theatre,82-8$. In a conversation with the present writer, Mrs. Yeats remarked that Yeats and Lady Gregory collaborated so smoothly that, as in the case of The Pot of Broth, they themselves could not say what belonged to whom.cCT.Coxhead, Lady Gregory,122-2$:"Michael MacLiammoir...tells me that he overheard a new recruit to his company, of whose origins he knew nothing, talking in the green-room, and said to himself: that boy must come from East Galway, he talks like a Gregory character. The boy actually came from Kiltartan." Cf. Yeats "%f I Were Four and Twenty, 21-22;Journals,38.316in a realistic transcript, yet with the same construction. Hence, the "Kiltartan infinitive" which, as Miss Coxhead points out, is "almost her hallmark'! 1"What business would the people here have but jW W minding one another's business?""Sure it's a terrible thing jW £0 in it and to be bound to speak nothing but the truth.""Whether or no, it will be a sharp grief to him, she jW scatter and to go."Similarly, inverted word order ("Putting me down the whole of ye do be, and saying I know nothing.") and constant use of adverbs and adverbial phrases such as "only" and "so" is taken directly from the original Erse. Her use of language can in many of these aspects be compared with that of her fellow director, Synge. Although Lady Gregory and Synge applied their observations to entirely different purposes, both were scrupulously accurate in their transcriptions and sincere in their use of the language they adopted. However, as well as using different dialects (Synge generally used the dialect of Wicklow), the two writers approached their characters and dramatic form from opposite directions; Synge elaborated, enriched, personalized his people until their speech spiralled into romantic poetry; Lady Gregory on the other hand was more concerned with outline and neatness, controlling the; dialogue with balance and almostpclassical precision.But Lady Gregory's use of "Kiltartan" extended beyond the accurate recording of picturesque phrases and turns of speech picked up in the "thatched houses" where she gathered her folklore and poetry.5 A comparison of the difficult iajubic pentameter quatrains of Colman and Guaire with the rich and flowing imagery of her later plays indicates^Ibid..l22.2Of. Seven Short Plays, The Bogie Men, ^ the Racecourse, where the pattern of the dialogue is an important part of the structure and action of the play.^Introduction to The Kiltartan Poetry Book (London:Putnam,1919), 16-18. £f.criticisms of the use of "Kiltartan" by George Moore, Hail ^ d PareY/ell ; Vale. 190-91; T.W.Rolleston, All Ireland R<^view, III, 2$(9 August 1902),357; Ethel Goddard, A.I.R.,V,52(6 August I904),380-81.517the natural and characteristic language of the peasant whose thoughtsflov/ easily into hyperbole and similes drawn from the life about him.In the opening scene of Colman and Guaire, Eoghan, an old servant,describes his master's hospitality:His tables are still spread with food; he bade me Welcome all strangers coming to his court.His name goes far beyond the bounds of Ardee.Guaire, whose bounty gilds the name of Gort.In The Bogie Men, Darby the sweep describes his mythical cousin, "He thatis as straight and^clean as a green rush on the brink of the bog," andhis vision of a grand house in images drawn from his trade:A house would be the capital of the county! One door for the rich, one door for the common! Velvet carpets rolled up, the way there would , no dust from the chimney fall upon them. A hundred wouldn't be many standing in a corner of that p l a c e ! 2Similarly, Taig the Tailor swears vengeance on the fearful dragon whodares to threaten the little Princess Nuala:I'll cut him crossways and lengthways the same as a yard of frieze!I'll make garters of his body! I'll smooth him with a smoothing iron! Not a fear of me! I never lost a bet yet that I wasn't able to pay it!^Mike Mclnerny defends himself: "It is a mean thing for a man that isshivering into seventy years to go changing from place to p l a c e ."4More subtle and yet no less effective: are the contracts between thequestions asked by the neYi English Magistrate of Cloon and the laconicreplies of Jo Muldoon, setting the scene and.mood for Spreading theNews:Magistrate. So that is the Pair Green. Cattle and sheep and mud.No system. What a repulsive sight!Policeman. That is so->indeed.Magistrate. I suppose there is a good deal of disorder in this place? Policeman. There is.Magistrate. Common assault?Policeman. It's common enough.M^y First Play,11.2The Bogie Men, New Comedies (London:Putnam's,1915), 7 and 1$.^The Dragon, Three Wonder Plays (London:Putnam's,192$),70*^The Workhouse Ward, Seven Short Plays,(Dublin:Maunsel,19091138.$18Magistrate. Agrarian crime, no doubt?Policeman. That is so.Magistrate. Boycotting? Maiming of cattle? Firing into houses?Policeman. There was one time, and there might be again.Magistrate. That is bad. Does it go any farther than that?Policeman. Far enough, indeed.Magistrate. Homicide, then!And we are left to assume that the Magistrate will find all he seeks:"The same story — or if it was not altogether the same, anyway it v/as no less than the first story.Nearly always the language of the plays fits the characters like a glove: the direct, incisive language of the policeman in The Risingof the Moon; the more relaxed, "visionary" speech of the character-building community of Hyacinth Halvey and The Full Moon; the "second- leader" debate between Mineog and Hazel in Coats ; the spare, homely imagery of The Gaol Gate; the rich indulgence of the family quarrels in Damer*3 Gold; the swift "hawking" exchange in On the Racecourse; the simple sincerity of Dave. In her folk-histories, she ran into slightly more difficulty, for although dramatic restrictions enabled her to justify the elimination of the "middling class," at times, and notably in Kincora, the leap from peasant talk to noble grandeur is awkward. She solved this problem in The Canavans and The White Cockade by portraying nobility through peasant eyes and comic horseplay, but Dervorgilla demanded almost too much use of peasant chorus to bridge the gap. Grania, on the other hand, being an experiment in technique as well as character portrayal, to a great extent escapes this danger; the three characters maintain a restrained, highly personal tone throughout, with just occasional lapses into Kiltartan rusticity. And in all her plays, as we shall see, the use of the flexible, rich Kiltartan dialect enabled a smooth passage from a sharp Molieresque exchange of dialogue into song.^Spreading the News, op.cit.,$ and 21.519In the notes to her Irish passion play, The Story Brought by Brigit,Lady Gregory reveals the importance of this dialect to her knowledge ofthe peasant life portrayed in her plays ;I knew I could best write it through the voice, as it were, of our ov/n people, and so I have given the story as I think it might have been told by Brigit, "the Mary of the Gael," our great Saint, had she been present during the last days of Him who, tradition tells us, she cherished in his early days.^In a fund-raising lecture on "making a play,"given in London in 1921,she elaborates on the necessity of a "living speech," and the resultanttendency towards myth-making as found in the Irish character;Literary speech would not do. The Irish in their ordinary living speech, had the art common to Hebrew poets of repeating in the second part of the sentence an idea embodied in the first. That sometimes led to an embellishment of the truth.2This is in effect the method Lady Gregory herself uses in constructingher plays. "One must before writing choose the fable and stick to it,"she comments in the same lecture. "A playwright must keep to essentials,and remember that the play must ascend to a climax." Nearly all herplays follow this method of development: some notion or commonplaceincident occurs to her — a quarrelling old couple are reunited in theworkhouse (The Workhouse Ward); the death of a young man just beforehe is to leave gaol (Gaol Gate); well-meant but useless "good advice"(Damer'3 Gold); a fund-raising imposter (The Image); a performance ofThe Dumb Wife in New York (Hanrahan's Oath); childhood memories ofGalway gaol (The Rising of the Moon); "ordinary circumstances of life"forcing reconciliation between quarrellers (Coats); a glimpse in thestalls of a well-dressed young man with a well-established character(Hyacinth Halvey); rumour-mongers exulting over the "defeat" ofThe Playboy (The Bogie Men); half-forgotten memories of children'sstories (The Dragon, The Jester, The Golden Apple); a stray verse fromfolklore (Aristotle's Bellows) — and the fable begins to wind itself^Notes to The Story Brought by Brigit (London:Putnam's,1924),9L*2Report in The Freeman's Journal, 1$ May 1921.$20about her characters. Once her character has drawn breath, "he''has more than a word to say," frequently altering the original springboard out of a]1 recognition.^ And the creator herself, like her guileless, gullible, breathless inhabitants of Cloon, sits back in amazement at the wonders of "the wide world": "It's hard know what might happen fromwhen we get up in the morning to when we go to bed at night ; or half that time."2Myth-MakingOne might safely say, in fact, that the foundation of all Lady Gregory'swork, whether in its final form comedy or tragedy, fiction or history,f' nis that "delight ^nj our incorrigible genius for myth-making, the facultythat makes our traditional history a perpetual joy, because it is, likethe Sidhe, an eternal Shape-changer."5 Her first insight into this"craving for talk" and the resulting fantasy occurred during her searchfor folk tales "among the imaginative class, the holders of the traditionsof Ireland," the country people in the fields and the workhouses:But as I listened, I was moved by the strange contrast between the poverty of the tellers and the splendours of the tales. These men who • had failed in life, and were old and withered, or sickly, or crippled, had not laid up dreams of good houses and fields and sheep and cattle; for they had never possessed enough to think of the possession of more as a possibility. It seemed as if their lives had been so poor and rigid in circumstance that they did not fix their minds, as more prosperous people might do, on thoughts of customary pleasure. The stories that they love are of quite visionary things; of swans that turn into kings' daughters, and of castles with crowns over the doors, and lovers' flights on the backs of eagles, and music-loving water-witches, and journeys to the other world, and sleeps that last for seven hundred years.4^Note to Darner's Gold, New Comedies,139-6$. Cf. Lorna D, Young, The Plays of Lady Gregory, Ph.D. Thesis for Trinity College, Dublin,1958*2The Wrens, The Imar;e and other Plays (London:Putnam's,1922), 228.5Notes to The Bogie Men, Nev/ Comedies,133-56.^"Workhouse Dreams"(1902), Poets and Dreamers(Dublin:Hodges andFiggis,190$),128-29.521"I never could !154Notes to Darner's Gold, New Comedies,159*330asylum; the little wren hoys are long-lost princes, hut ragamuffinsstill beg on St. Steohen's Day: and the Imagists' dreams are shattered.Gradually, as her work gained strength, this seriousness increases indirect proportion to the element of fantasy, and we see the first signsof this tragic-comedy in three plays still bound to a certain extentby the community in which they are placed. The Image (1909), The FullMoon (1910), and Darner’s Gold (1911-12).The Full Moon most clearly marks this move tov.ards greater freedom.But here as well, although soaring into the other world, the play isfirmly moored within her own peculiar brand of realism, the boundariesof Cloon, and it is dedicated "to all ho sane people in or out of Cloonwho know their neighbours to be naturally cracked or someway queer orto have gone wrong in the head. ’’^ Here we have the same community,but "with a difference"; the same setting, but the hour has changed.Lady Gregory has drawn into the play those characters who representthe essential qualities of the earlier comedies? Shawn Early, theinnocent chorus, and Bartley Fallon, the happy melancholic, wander infrom the fair grounds of Spreading the News; the addle-pated butgood-hearted Mrs. Broderick, who has gained considerable weight sinceshe "left off fretting" over her shop, arrives from the scene of TheJackdaw; efficient, bustling M&ss Joyce meets with Peter Tannian,whose dog once more threatens the good character of Hyacinth Halvey.And into this "sane" community dance Cracked Mary and her brother, the"innocent" Davideen. But from the broad, winking daylight of theearlier setting, we move to the shimmering, elusive clarity of thefull moon. Their creator herself has apparently been touched by thecommunity, as her notes to the play indicate;It had sometimes preyed on my mind that Rvacinth Halvev had been left by me in Cloon for his lifetime, bearing the weight of a character that had been put on him by force. But it failed me to release him by reason, that "binds men to the wheel"; it took the call of some of those unruly ones who give in to no limitations.^Dedication to The Full Moon, New Comedies,25531and dance to the sound of music that is outside this world, to bring him out from "roast and boiled and all the comforts of the day." bhere he is now I do not know, but anyway he is free.lMore wisely than she was to act in Shanwalla, she let her little people take their own way.The play revolves around the question of madness, discussed with bewildering certainty by the "sane" characters who, each in his individual way, betrays his ovm daft qualities. In contrast, the "cracked" characters, under the lunar influence of their separate world, represent the voice of sanity. And twisted and turned, pushed in and out. Hyacinth Halvey in his topcoat (like Hanrahan with his boots) links the two groups, just as Tannian's dog changes shape and meaning under the influence of the imaginative rumour-mongers• It is Mrs. Broderick, cheerfully admitting her own propensity to daftness ("There to be any fear of me going astray, I give you my word I'd lose my wits on the moment."), who expresses the theme of the play; "Ah, miracles is gone out of the world this long time, with education, unless that they might happen in your own inside." But it is Halvey who illustrates the lesson. In fact, he calls in the lunar forces, whistling "The Heather Broom" which Davideen later sings, and recalling his ovm "real"life in Carrow before his greatness was thrust upon him by the eager townsfolk of Cloon. Significantly, the voice of truth, spoken by Peter Tannian, is ignored, and not until Cracked Mary appears does Hyacinth find his release.The characters of Mary and Davideen represent the fullest expression of the wayward strain apparent throughout all of Lady Gregory's work. Cousins on the one side to Yeats's Pool (Mary also begs for the necessities of this life while maintaining contact with the life beyond), on the other to Synge's mad Owen and Old Mahon (who also speaks with^Notes to The Pull Moon, op.cit.,156-57*332exaggerated frankness of his spell in the asylum^), they are permanentif disturbing inhabitants of the Gregory universe. Lady Gregory'sattitude towards them is similar in some respects to Yeats's:As to the fool in this world, the pity for him is mingled withsome awe, for who knows what windows may have been opened tothose v/ho are under the moon's spell, who do not give in to our limitations, are not "bound by reason to the w h e e l . "2But, jusb as she would not allow pity to clog the wheels of The Jackdawtheme, so she, like Synge, shrewdly penetrates to the reality of thisfrequent madness in the hills:Miss Joyce : It is likely she was well content in it, and thefriends she had being of her own class.Cracked Mary : Vdiat way could you make friends with peonle wouldbe always talking? Too much of talk and of noisethere was in it, cursing, and praying, and tormenting; some dancing, some singing, and one writing a letter toa she devil called Lucifer. I not to close my ears,I would have lost the sound of Davideen's song....I was my seven months in it, my seven months and a day.Fey though Cracked Mary may be, her insanity is a reality, and hercompanions in the asylum are part of the world outside. However, the"innocent" Davideen draws her to the world beyond as well. Just asCracked Mary's sight is poor during da^^light (which gives her an eeriefeline quality), so Davideen's voice is "'clogged through the daytime."And although Mary's talk on her entrance meets the rather dull, comiaon-place level of Cloon conversation, as the moon ascends in the Cloonsky, so also does her speech, becoming richer, more pregnant and variableuntil at last she and Davideen are transformed from stumbling tatteredhumanity into nimble, graceful children of Faery:Mary : Let you throw open the door, Davideen. It is not ourselvesare in dread that the white man in the sky will be callingnames after us and ridiculing us. Halha.' I might be as foolish as yourselves and as fearful, but for the Almighty that left a little cleft in my skull, that would let in His----------------------------------------Lady Gregory, Introduction to "The Fool of the Forth," Visions Beliefs in The West of Ireland(London:Putnam's,1920),II,195.Gf. Malachi's speech in The Image,70.333candle through the night time. . . . Come on, Davideen, come out now, we have the wideness of the night before us.0 golden God! All bad things quieten in the night time, and the ugly thing itself will put on some sort of a decent face! Come out now to the night that will give you the song, and will show myself out as beautiful as Helen of the Greek gods, that hanged herself the day there first came a wrinkle on her face!And brother and sister dance out in a burst of song to the faery worldof the full moon.As the power of the moon increases, the earthbound folk of Cloonthemselves give way before the power of the imagination: Hyacinthgrows wilder at the thought of his imprisonment in character; PeterTannian's jibes grow more vindictive; Mary Broderick abandons herselfto sympathetic fatuity; Shawn Early lapses still further into blankrepetition; Bartley Fallon reasons his way into a good case ofpseudo-insanity until Hyacinth's assumed madness sends him, impressed,back to his former melancholia ("I declare I amn't worth a match.");only Miss Joyce escapes, but she has her spinster's mind on other affairs.It is Cracked Mary who provides Hyacinth with his release, when hedeserts the "sane" people of Cloon for the freedom and joy of theworld beyond;You have the door open — the speckled horses are on the road! — make a lean on the horse as it goes by, the horse that is without a rider. Can't you hear them puffing and roaring? Their breath is like a fog upon the air. . . . l%ke a snap at the bridle as itpasses by the bush in the western gap. Run out now, run, where youhave the bare ridge of the world before you, and no one to take orders from but yourself, maybe, and God.This is the message of Synge's tramp and Playboy, tinker and beggar.And, as we shall see, it is the call to freedom of Lady Gregory's Image-maker. But the folk of Cloon remain behind, bound once more to the wheelof their own little world, delightful as it may be; "and it is likelythey may be talking of it yet; for the talks of Cloon are long talkS)and the histories told there do not lessen or fail. While The FullMoon was "in the making," Lady Gregory wrote in her diary;^Notes to The Full Moon, New Comedies,157 >334I am really getting to work on a little comedy, of which I think at present that if its feet are of clay, its high head will be of rubbed gold, and that people will stop and dance when they hear it and not know for a while the piping was from beyond the world!But no doubt if it ever gets acted, it will be "what Lady Gregory calls a comedy and everybody else, a farce!"!Surely this time at any rate, the dramatist was right.Davideen and Cracked Mary are but two of a long line of strangecharacters who work their way through Lady Gregory's plays. All of themare poor in this world's goods, rich in the treasures of another world.Most of them are beggars, "scarecrow i m a g e s , some of them are daft;all bring a message to this world. First to appear is the "tattered,moon-mad beggar" of Kincora, who breaks in upon the quarrels ofservants and kings to bid King Brian seek "the hidden key of heaven"at "the table of the angels";Come out before your candle will be spent.At the asking of the Ivlan beyond, the King of Sunday.Make yourself ready for the day of the Mountain,Before your lease will be out and your summons written!^And Brian, who earlier rejected the love song of Aoibhell of the Sidhefor the sake of his beloved Ireland,^ accedes to the strange half-chanted,half-sung, part-Pagan, part-Christian call to peace. But although thetravelling woman of the roads brings him news of peace throughout thefive provinces, she in turn is banished by Gormleith, "Crow of Battle,"and Brian achieves his lasting peace not in the land of the Gael, butin the ever-living world beyond, won at great price in the Battle ofClontarf. "Those who serve Ireland take for their lot lasting battles —lasting quarrels."5 The Gael are not yet ready for the company ofOur Irish Theatre,95*2Young, The Plays of Lady Gregory,236.^Kincora,rev.ed.(1909), Irish Folk-History Plays First Series (London;Putnam's,1912),105-06.^Prologue to Kincora, first version,2nd ed.(Dublin;Maunsel,1905), Vol.II of Abbey Theatre Series.^Ibid.335the angels.1Her next play The White Cockade,again folk-history, once more introduces a messenger from the other world. But this time the message comes not of the kinvdorii of heaven, hut of a new kingdom on earth.And once more hopes must be deferred, as the piteous Lady Dereen mourns the death of her king and the loss of her fortune. Here, too, is another call to Ireland, not of peace, but of war, and the half-mad old lady, who like Kathleen-ni-Houlihan has given her lands and her youth to her dreami, is a tragic contrast to the wandering beggar of Kincora. Like Cracked Mary's, her destiny is the world of the moon, for her eyes are tired "watching for the sun to rise in the e a s t . L i k e Cracked Mary, also, she sees what others cannot, and her rejection of James at the end is as pro hetic as her recognition of "the smooth, white, unlucky Stuart hand" at the beginning.^ And the final touch of irony lies in the exaggerated contrast between the worldly, proverb-spouting Mrs. Kelleher, who regains not only her wealth but her lazy son, and the luckless, wandering, poor Lady Dereen, who has not even been allowed to keep her dream.Vihen next the raggedy beggar appears he acts not only as messenger, but as protagonist; the "ballad-singer" of The Rising £f _t^ Moon, the chattering Song-maker of Dervorgilla, the kingly beggar of The Travelling Man. As their importance to the plot increases, so does the significance of their message from the past to the lives of those about them. The rebel ballad-singer, by reminding the Sergeant of his own Fenian youth, instigates the battle in the policeman's mind between duty to his pledge and love of his country. The young bard from Connach"^ singing "the sorrowful song" of Diarmuid's betrayal, calls down once more upon theCf.criticism by "A Visitor" (?Edward Martyn), Sinn Fein, 20 February 1909: "The travelling woman was a sort of apparition and startled the audience....It looked as if }fir, Yeats had suddenly loosened from the wings Caitlin ni Houlihan and sent her in with a few chants and prophecies to save a very poor situation."^The White Cockade(1905)< Irish Folk-History Plays Second Series (London;Putnam's,1912),81.^The V/hite Cockade, 123*336unhappy Dervorgilla "the swiftsunflinching, terrible judgment of they o u n g . T h e soft-spoken, sweet-natured Travelling Man, in his refusalto judge, intensifies the tragic irony of the Mother's rejection of theKing who gave her all. The device appears again in Crania, where Finndisguises himself as his ovm beggar-messenger. Once more, in her lastplay, the beggar as "Servant of Poverty" makes a brief appearance, butby the time Dave was put into rehearsal, the Beggarwoman had beenexcised from the text. The dramatist had learned to express the messageof the other world through the imperfect huraanity of this world;I think it very much better with Kate as the "messenger," and left her as in the old, showing a little pettishness and human weariness after her ascent to "those high countries," and her message from them, which she had perhaps forgotten.2The second characteristic of Lady Gregory's "strange characters,"their "daftness," is also developed throughout the plays, until itachieves psychological insight in her characterization of the Motherin Aristotle's Bellows and Malachi Naught on of The Image. V/e firstrecognize the touch of madness in Mrs. Broderick of The Jackdaw, whosemind is "tossed" by the troubles of her shop-keeping. As we have alreadyseen, she joins Cracked Mary in Kia Full Moon, adding her scatter-brainedadvice to the chorus of insanity. The Mother in Aristotle's Bellows(1919-1921) is another example of these psychological sketches. OfAristotle's Bellows the author writes.If the play has a moral it is given in the words of the Mother,"It is best make changes little by little, the same as you'd put clothes upon a growing child."5Throughout the play, the Mother as commentator rings the changes on thistheme, although in terms of action she is actually a by-stander. Witha memory "too weak...to be telling lies," she represents the voice of^Dervorgilla, Irish Folk-History Plays First Series,186.^Journals,1926,323-24*3Notes to Aristotle's Bellows, Three Wonder Plays, 155-56337coininon sense — although somewhat addled — in contrast to her step-son, the cranky, idealistic Conan; "It's best leave the time under the mercy of the Man that is over us all." And in her sudden change at the blast of the bellows she amply proves the truth of her proverbs; until she is changed once more "to what I v/as before, and the town and the country vfishing me well, I having got my enough of unfriendly looks and hard w o r d s ! H o w e v e r , in the raggedy mountainy man of The Image we find aswell as a variation on the daftness which sends Cracked Mary to the madhouse, an interesting twist to the messenger theme. For here the harmlessly mad Malachi not only carries the message to others, butconceives it and is in turn affected by it himself. V.here Mrs. Broderickand Conan's mother belong to the community, Malachi prefers to keep to himselfiThe tovms do be in uproar and do be crowded, and the roads to be wet, and wide; and as to the villages, there is spies in them, and traitors, and people you wouldn't like to be talking with.Too venomous they are and too corrupted with drink. I'd like to keep my own company, and I to have no way of living but the berries of the bush.2And when he is driven among the people for love of his "own choice man," his message brings such confusion and chaos that in the end he returns "to the beasts and the birds that pay respect to him," applauded by old Peggy the midwife who in turn, like Malachi and Synge's blind people, rejects the community to follow her own dream.The World of Wonder In I9O8 Lady Gregory translated Moliei^s L 'Avare for the Abbey players. Several years later she returned to the theme of the miser, but as usual her comic vision took its own way, and the result is rather a Timon in reverse, with little similarity to his French cousin. In fact, in the original scenario. Darner was not to appear at all:Aristotle's Bellows,I,99 and 111,152.2The Image, The Image and other Plays,1,9»338I pictured to myself....a young man, a mere lad, very sleepy in the daytime. He was surrounded by people kind and wise, who lamented over his rags and idleness and assured him that if he didn’t get up early ana do his work in the daytime he would never know the feel of money in his hand. He listens to all their advice, but he does not take it, because he knows what they do not know, that it is in the night time precisely he is filling his pocket, in the night when, as I think, we receive gifts from the unseen. I placed him in the houseof a miser, an old man who had saved a store of gold...... I did notmean this old man. Darner, to appear at all. He was to be as invisible as that Heaven of which we are told the violent take it by force. ...Then I thought it would have a good stage effect if old Darner could just walk once across the stage in the background. His relations might have come into the house to try and make themselves agreeable to him, and he would appear and they would vanish. Darner comes in, and contrary to my intention, he begins to find a tongue of his own. He has made his start in the world, and has more than a word to say.... Darner has taken possession of it, turning it to be as simple as à folk-tale, where the innocent of the world confound the wisdom of the wise. The idea with which I set out has not indeed quite vanished, but is as if "extinct and pale; not darkness, but light that has become dead."1Once more, then, we have the character wilfully setting out on little feet of his own, but more significant here, he changes the entire nature of the fable. The ogre is defeated by slow and not-so-simple Simon, the conquered dragon leads the valiant hero to the buried treasure, the wicked sister, promising eternal allegiance, gains a suitable reward; and we have moved with Lady Gregory through one more gateway, into the land of eternal wonder, the fairy tale. The functions of the "stranger" are taken over by the magical devices of the enchanter.In the wonder plays which followed these variations on the daftinhabitants of Cloon County, Lady Gregory is again true to her ideal of the theatre. Her earlier plays had stemmed from her observations of theGalway peasant in particular and the Irish character in general; whilescholars were busily rejecting much of the earlier printed history, she helped refill the vessel "by calling in tradition, or if need be our^Notes to Damer’s Gold, New Comedies,I6O-6I.339own imaginings" in her six folk-history plays, which, if not alwayssuitable for performances in schools, in Synge’s words "made the writingof historical drama again possible."^ And now once more she dug deepinto the folklore of the people in search of "the grimaces calledLaughter." Nor was she disappointed.And who can say whether these have travelled from east to west, or from west to east, for the barony of Kiltartan, in common with at least three continents, holds fragments of the wonder tales told in the childhood of the world,she commented on the similarity between many of her Kiltartan wondertales and classical mythology.2 And so once again. Lady Gregory hasrooted her plays in Kiltartan soil, while soaring beyond the boundariesof this world. "I long had it in my mind to write a play for children,put together from the folk-tales and fairy tales of Ireland," shewrites in her notes to The Golden Apple (1915)> the first of her talesof vfonder. ^ But it was not until she felt free of all earth-bound stagerestrictions that she could give her imagination full rein. And thefirst difference we note in her plays from this point on is the dramaticlicense she allows herself; a well head and a weakly little tree areenough for the Garden at the World’s End; the "Hag of Slaughter" dons apaper mask and cloak for her witching escapades; a few waving boughsand a cloud of smoke create the fearsome Wood of Wonders; the Giantopenly plies his trade on wooden stilts with the aid of a step-ladder;a long grey gown and a cat’s head transform the little Spanish princessinto a cat. The dramatist is now sufficiently at home with her craft tobecome carefree; structure is mastered, and disbelief is willinglysuspended. Indeed, the dramatist takes the audience into her confidenceand openly laughs with us at these dressed-up, make-believe Kiltartanites^Quoted by Lady Gregory in her Notes to The VJhite Cockade, Irish Folk-History Plays Second Series,194»2Note to The Kiltartan Wonder Book_(DublinrMaunsel,1910),105. ^Note to The Golden Apple,107»340For all of the characters are actually inhabitants of Cloon in disguise, and each, from the hot-tempered, ailing King of Ireland to the Witch’s Gardener, speak a richly embroidered Kiltartan, All of them, too, being familiar friends, have lost their bite. The Witch herself, faithfully carrying out her trade according to the diabolical code of witchery, is harried by her selfish, not-so-ugly daughter, Pampogue: "Have youno thought at all for her who cared and reared you, and gave in to everything you would ask?"! The Giant, Patach Mor, cannot bear the idea of swallowing "melodious lying Irishmen"; in fact, he has "had a weak stomach since a child" and his bustling wife must coddle him with boiled cabbage and nourishing porridge; "It is often I do be thinking since I turned to be a giant I might have, followed some better trade." His Connacht wife speaks slightingly of Pampogue, whose father was "but a well-looking Munsterman, coaxed the witch with a sweet note in his voice."2 And so the play runs merrily on its way, crammed with harmless magic and frequent shape-changing, with all ending happily — exceptfor the witch, who must suffer the consequences of her profession and crumble into old bones and dust.The Golden Apple twinkles to a happy conclusion, and The Dragon (1917) soon takes its place. Once more we are in the not-so-strange v/orld of the fable, but where the earlier play had been founded upon familiar folk and fairy tales, here we have one of Lady Gregory’s original myths, and as can be expected, there is an underlying hint of seriousness. Grief had entered her life; the beloved nephew Hugh Lane had gone down with the Lusitania, her son Robert was killed in action. And so her natural tendency to moralize was further emphasized, even in this "unseen inevitable kick of the swing towards gay-coloured comedy from the shadow of tragedy." She herself observes;^The Golden Apple,I,28.341It was begun seriously enough, for I see among my scraps of manuscripts that the earliest outline of it is entitled "The Awakening of a Soul," the soul of the little Princess who had not gone "far out in the world." And that idea was never ouite lost, for even when it had all turned to comedy I see as an alternative name "A Change of Heart." For even the Dragon’s heart is changed by force, as happens in the old folk tales and the heart of some innocent creature put in its place by the conqueror’s hand; all change more or less except the Queen.She is yet satisfied that she has moved all things well, and so she must remain till some new breaking up or re-birth.!The framework, however, is laughter, and again the dramatist witha friendly wink warns us not to be taken in by the multi-colouredcostume. Here, too, the comedy comes as much from the characters asfrom the situations in which they involve themselves, and there are .frequent homely touches of Cloon. The governess.-turned-Queen, indulgingin her new authority, sends runners throughout the wide worldadvertising the position of cook at the castle, but does not neglectto put up tablets in the local Post Office. The poor king, frettingfrom hunger and the imminent death of his daughter by a devouringdragon, has a heart "as weighty as that the chair near broke under him."2Taig the Tailor cannot conceal his trade under the Prince’s grandclothes, and the great coach he "borrows" for his approach to the castleis the local magistrate’s, harnessed to two dray horses from the field.Opposed to these changeable Kiltartanites are the new Queen and Fintanthe Astrologer who, although passingly sorry at the fate of the Princess,is enraged at the hinted slight to his profession; "It would be adeception and a disappointment out of measure, there to come no Dragon,and I after foretelling and prophesying him." But all works out tothe satisfaction of everyone, and Fintan can depart v/ith his namecleared; "Ye’ll maybe believe me to have foreknowledge another time,and I proved to be right.^Notes to The Dragon, Three Wonder Plays,84-85,2The Dragon,I,16. hbid. .111,64-66.342The joys of enchantment continue into Aristotle's Bellows (1919),where v/e have not only the mechanical magic of the old bellows, buttwo sardonic fiddle-playing cats as well. Once more the theme ischange, but this time not for the better, and here Lady Gregory seemsto be mocking herself as much as the feckless members of Conan’s household.But the serious tone of the underlying structure remains, for the crankyConan is far more human than the dragon-quelling prince of the earlierfolk-fantasy, and his dream of an orderly world is a recurring themethroughout Lady Gregory’s work. However the play remains comic instructure, effectively banishing the cloud of tragedy with the rhymingcats, a pigeon that turns into a crow, the cyclonic, house-cleaningCelia, the team of Rock and Flannery, who together with the innumerablesongs give the play the quality of a ballad-opera. The reformed would-bereformer concludes the musical romp with a song and a timely observation;Not a complaint! What call have I to go complaining? The world is a very good world, the best nearly I ever knew.!Like Yeats, however. Lady Gregory tended to re-work her themes,examining them from all possible angles before moving on to fresh dramaticexperiments. Consequently we find in her fourth wonder play. The Jester,many characteristics we have encountered before. Again, this is achildren’s play, written for her grandson’s class at Harrow. But herethe serious element is much closer to the surface, and the "message"snaps the slight bonds of musical comedy to take over the entire actionand form of the play;I was asked one Christmas by a little schoolboy to write a play that could be acted at school; and in looking for a subject my memory went back to a story I had read in childhood called "The Discontented Children," where, though I forget J.irs incidents, the gamekeeperte children change places for a while with the children of the Squire, and I thought I might write something on these lines. But my mind soon went miching as our people (and Shakespeare) would say, and broke through the English hedges into the unbounded wonder-world.^^Aristotle’s Bellows, Three Wonder Plays,154.2Notes for The Jester, op.cit.,221.343Her usual procedure is reversed; what first took form in her mind as a light folktale, dons a different pair of boots. Many elements of the play do belong to the world of children’s fantasy: the scene is the Island of Hy-Brasil, which surfaces once in seven years; the wren boys wear paper masks "such as one finds inaChristmas cracker"!; the Ogre, receiving the punishment appropriate to his crime, is turned into the natural quarry of little boys, a rat; there is much good fun when the little princes struggle for their dinner and the little wren-boys scramble for theirs; the Dowager Messengers walk right out of Cinderella, and the old Guardian’s rightful parents are Gilbert and Sullivan; Aristotle’s enchanted cats reappear; and the numerous anachronisms would delight any small boy or larger adult. But the Jester himself belongs to a different world.For once again we encounter the "ragged beggar" who brings word from beyond, but here the messenger himself has power over that other world while acting as protagonist in this one. At his first appearance, the mad jester, "a tramp class of a man," creates disorder amongst the Governor’s well-regulated community, inciting rebellion and contributing to the confusion. He is a jester, and as such performs the tricks of the traditional fool; he wears ragged clothes and broken shoes, the costume appropriate to the wandering minstrel, who stops "in no place, but going through the whole roads of the world" with his songs, his tricks and his riddles. But, like Yeats’s fool, he is more than a jester; and he is dressed in green, the colour we associate both with the land of faery (and the "nature" of folk tales) and Yeats’s earlier Green Helmet. The connection with Yeats’s Image is stronger yet, for when the Jester reappears to bring order once again to Hy-Brasil, we learn that he is "the great lîaster of all magic and all enchantments, Manannan, Son of the Sea."^Ibid..222.344Yes, I am Manannan, that men are apt to call a Jester and a Pool, and a Disturber, and a Mischief-maker, upsetting the order of the world and making confusion in its order and its ways....And now here is ray word of command! Everyone into his right placej!But the difference between Manannan as portrayed by Yeats and the Jesteras seen by Lady Gregory is even more revealing, for both dramatistshave here, as always, remained true to their own comic vision. As wehave seen, Yeats’s Red Jester, like his image of the Pool, belongs toYeatsian mythology, and is a dramatized variation of his concept ofthe creative imagination. Lady Gregory’s Jester, on the other hand,though like Cracked Mary an inhabitant of her personal vision of theworld, has his feet planted firmly in Irish soil; he banishes the Ogre,but the princes and wren boys diagnose their own case and prescribe theremedy. Her Manannan does not change anything; his Mullein-dust merelymakes observers ’’think themselves are blind/Or confused in the mind."They must learn to see for themselves. And though, like the Sea-godof Yeats’s fable, he acts in a sense as "Rector of this land," he inturn pays sacrifice to a more powerful deity:And when I see a plan make The Birds that watch us frown,I come and toss the pancake And turn it upside down!In this I follow after Lycurgus who was wise;To the little god of laughter I make my sacrifice!2Lycurgus, the legendary lawgiver of Sparta, celebrated by Plutarchas gentle of disposition, just and moderate in his government, concernedwith the exercise of virtue and the concord of his people, — it is,then, to this half-man, half-god we must look for Lady Gregory’s parallelto the great Irish god of the sea. lycurgus had himself dedicated alittle statue to Laughter, and even more appropriate as a model forthe schoolboys of Harrow (as he had been for Plato, Diogenes, and Zeno),^The Jester,op.cit..218.^Ibid.345he considered the education of youth the most important and noblestwork of a lawgiver. Mirth itself to the Lacedaemonians must betemperate and seasonable, to be considered not as an end in itself,but"as a pleasant sauce to ease the trouble of their strict and hardl i f e . H o w e v e r Lady Gregory is yet more explicit about the humanizingprocess of her Jester figure, and we read in her notes to the playthat she had a contemporary figure in mind as well as the legendary andhalf-legendary examples :Yet it did not quite run out of reach of human types, for having found some almost illegible notes, I see that at the first appearance of Manannan I had put in brackets the initials "G.B.8.Thus the model Lady Gregory recommends is, after all, a human one;the red-bearded myth-making Irishman, Bernard Shaw, gentlest of friends,5helper yet stern critic of the Abbey Theatre,4 who as puritan andeconomist had much in common with the legendary Spartan, and who, likethe Jester, "for all his quips ; and mischief and ’tricks and wonders,’"5devoted his life to the creation of order in a disorderly world. Andintroduced as runner-up is that other almost legendary Irishman, AE,who with Shaw and Lady Gregory, had never forgotten "the lands ofImmortal Youth which flush with magic the dreams of childhood."^^Plutarch of Chaeronea, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, compared together,trans » out of Greek in to French by James Amyot, and out of French into English by Thomas North (London: Thomas Vautroullier and John Wight,1579),6l" Sancho’s Master, Three Last Plays,108; "Lycurgus himself, v;ho gave laws to the Macedonians." Plutarch’s Lives was one of Lady Gregory’s favourite books, cf. Robinson’s introduction to chapter II, Journals,53;Coole,(Dublin;Guala,1931),12-13 »2Notes for The Jester,op.cit.,221.^Cf.the dedication of The Golden Apple: "To George Bernard Shaw:The Gentlest of my Friends."^Shaw lectured on behalf of the Theatre, wrote John Bull’s Other Island for the company, although for lack of a Broadbent it was not produced there until 1916, severely reprimanded them for rejecting The Silver Tassie.and throughout retained a warm interest. Lady Gregory in turn gave him her lifelong friendship, and they enjoyed discussing each other’s work. It was she who suggested the page’s sneeze in Saint Joan. Cf. Journals.199-216;110-111:66-67.^Notes for The Jester,221.^Ibid..222.346Strong People of the World As we have seen, the base to Lady Gregory’s personal theatre was the little community of Kiltartan, where through restricted dialect and characterization she managed to express her universal comic vision.Closer examination reveals two basic themes -hich are both universal and persistent: the idealist and his shattered dream. As all vhoknew her attest, and as can readily be observed from her writings. Lady Gregory had a deep sympathy with the "image-maker," the rebel who must stand alone, apart from his community and yet bound to it by his dream.^ "To think like a wise man, but express oneself like the common people" was her favourite quotation from Aristotle; perhaps she, too, felt the inevitable loneliness of the leader who must take his ovm way. For as Yeats has said, "always her wise man was heroic man.It is not surprising to discover in her first folk-histories, therefore, an emphasis far more personal than historical in her examination of three "strong people of the world"3; the tragic heroines of Irish history, Gormleith, Dervorgilla, and Grania. Kincora,(19O4- 1909), revised many times with the help of Yeats and Synge,^ was one of her first plays; it was also her first tragedy, for in her plays the "strong people" are conceived within a tragic framework of the struggle between those few who believe, and the many who can not. Despite her frequent revisions, Kincora itself remains an unsuccessful play although^Young, The Plays of Lady Gregory,chapter I, quoting from Lennox Robinson’s unpublished biography of Lady Gregory. Cf. Robinson’s introduction to chapter II, Journals, 53*2Yeats, Introduction to "Fighting the V/aves, "V/heels and Butterflies,70.^Dedication to Irish Folk-History Plays First Series : "These threeplays concerning strong people of the world I offer to Theodore Roosevelt one of the world’s strong men."4Notes to Kincora,Irish Folk-History Plays First Series,199-200.Cf. Yeats’s letters to Synge, Greene and Stephens, J .M.Synge,I6 6. An unpublished letter by Lady Gregory to Synge, 7 August I904,/sin the possession of Mrs. Stephens^thanking him for his help over Kincora.y347in a sense her most successful rendering of folk history.^ Howeverthe key figure, Gormleith, rises above the rather stiff historicalpersonages assembled at King Brian’s court to become the personificationof Kathleen ni Houlihan in warlike dress, the Morrigu or Irish wargoddess herself. The tragedy here is Ireland’s, pursued by an"ungovernable heroic emotion"^ which in its strength gives Ireland hergreatness, and in its weakness subsides into petty hatred:Ireland has been fighting these ten thousand years, and that custom to be changed, it is likely she would go to nothing,5claims Gormleith, queen of battle. And Malachi, the High King wiselyforetells :In my opinion you will not see entire peace or the end of quarrels in Ireland, till such time as the grass stops growing or talk comes to the thrush,4a prophecy perhaps still sadly true. But the comment made by an Irish peasant who travelled from Killaloe (near the site of Kincora) to Dublin for the Abbey production expresses most clearly the dramatist’s ability to infuse history with a sense of immediate personal urgency: "It’sa great pity," he said of King Brian to the man next to him, "that he didn’t marry a quiet girl from his own district."5It is this quality of personal tragedy that pervades Dervorgilla (1907) and Grania (19II), the latter perhaps too personal a commentary, for Lady Gregory refused to have it produced during her lifetime. In ^££• Yeats’s letter to John Quinn, 29 June 1905, Letters, 452 and his later comment concerning the revised version in 1909, Autobiographies, 483.2Yeats’s memorandum to Horace Plunkett for the patent enquiry in 1904, "Plays Produced by the Irish Literary Theatre and by the Irish National Theatre Society," in the possession of Mrs. Yeats.5Kincora,op.cit.,111,135*R b i d . .l,94-95.5Quoted by Yeats, Samhain,1905,5. and reprinted by Lady Gregory in her notes to Kincora,op.cit.,204»348these two plays, as in most of her work, the history of Ireland is made a means to an end, the working-out of a personal theme of the dramatist, in this case the tragedy which must inevitably follow those who like Synge’s Deirdre reach out for the joys and sorrows of a fully-expressed life. But Lady Gregory’s heroines are cast in a far different mould, as can be expected of one whose comedy even rejects the softening quality of pity:I think I turned to Grania because so mtny have written about sad, lovely Deirdre, who vdienovertaken by sorrow made no good battle at the last. Grania had more power of will, and for good or evil twice took the shaping of her life into her own hands.This deep personal tone sounds throughout both plays, and unlike herearlier folk dramas, the epic framework is shot through with the immediacywhich comes from deep psychological probing; the characters of Graniaand Dervorgilla are not woven into a tapestry of heroic tradition asin the cycles from which they come, but rather set in stark relief againsta sombre background of proven inevitability. History has already judged,the author merely examines. Nor is there any overtone of a deliberatecramming of dates and events, as Lady Gregory willingly admits; "a questiontempts one more than the beaten path of authorised history.The form of Grania is almost symbolic. There are three characters,but five protagonists, for Love and' Jealousy play equal roles in thisheroic epic tale; and the power of Fate, the "Woman in the Stars," isfelt throughout this fable of three lovers, "one of whom had to die."The path taken is from the beginning preordained:Grania; I asked the old people v;hat love was, and they gave me no good news of it at all. Three sharp blasts of the wind they said it was, a white blast of delight and a grey blastof discontent and a third blast of jealousy that is red.Finn; That red blast is the wickedest of the three.^This theme of love and loss colours the entire play, introduced in acautious duet between Finn and Grania, taken up by Diarrauid ("And whatis a home or a house without a wife and a companion at the h e a r # ? " 3),Notes to Grania, Irish Folk-History Plays First Series,195*2Grania,op.cit.,1,7. h bid..I.12.349sounded in chorus hy all three at parting ("But understand well, it is not as a wife I will bring you, but I will keep my faith with Finn."^), developed once more between the tv/o lovers ("For it is certain it is by the respect of others we partly judge even those we know through and through."2), reaching new heights on the re-appearance of Finn, who comes begging for the sign of their faith ("He trusted me and he could trust me, and now he will never put trust in me again."5), and resounding in full chorus throughout the last act, where, although Finn and Grania hold the stage, the shadow of Diarmuid bears equal weight. Again and again she sounds the chords of love-hate, pride-jealousy, faith-suspicion, The characters interchange, the balance remains. Grania woos Diarmuid away from Finn, but her victory is a sham one. Hatred replaces love for Diarmuid in Finn’s heart, but it is Finn who achieves his lasting loyalty, The union of Grania and Diarrauid comes too late to soften Grania’s bitter pride, and it is the mockery of Diarmuid’s shade that drives her to Finn at the end. The one time Finn appears bearing only hatred in his heart, he comes as Half-Man and masked. And in the final scene, when Grania rejects the memory of her love for her dead husband, it is not out of love for Finn, but because that love had only been half-given;Grania; He had no love for me at any time. It is easy know it now.I knew it all the while, but I would not give in to believe it. His desire was all the time with you yourself and Almhuin. He let on to be taken up with me, and it was but letting on. Why would I fret after him that so soon forgot his wife, and left her in a wretched way?...Does any man at all speak lies at the very brink of death, or hold anysecret in his hesirt?.. .And I have lost all on this side ofthe world, losing that trust and faith I had, and fininghim to think of me no more than of a flock of stairsf&ould cast their shadow on his path.4One had to die and Fate cast for Diarmuid. But the two left remain onlyhalf-alive, for with Diarmuid went their love and trust, the onlyreality:^Ibid.,1.20,^Ibid..II.?2.'I b i d ..II.36.4Ibid..III.61-62.350Finn; I thought to leave you and to go from you, and I cannotdo it. For v;e three have been these seven years as if alonein the world; and it was the cruelty and the malice of lovemade its sport with us, when we thought it was our own way we were taking, driving us here and there, knocking you in between us, like the hall between tv/o goals, and the hurlers being out of sight and beyond the boundaries of the world.And all the three of us have been as if worsted in that play. And nov/ there are but the two of us left, and vfhether we love or hate one another, it is certain I can never feel love or hatred for any other woman from this out, or you yourself for any other man. And so as to yourself and myself, Grania, we must battle it out to the end.^Perhaps it is Diarmuid who wins after all.Dervorgilla is a variation on the same theme, or rather its countertheme . Once again history ends on a question, but here the contest goeson within Dervorgilla’s mind, long after the echoes of battle have faded away. And where Grania was almost ritualistic in its balanced symbolism, Dervorgilla is almost completely realistic, the answer fully stated at the beginning of the play. We know that the onetime Queen of Breffny can only atone for her crime by facing the final judgment of her race.The action winds surely to its inevitable fulfilment, and throughout ‘(ppkr ' the play the sins of the past are re-enacted in the present: the youngpeople at their sport strive to emulate the heroes of Dervorgilla's youth; the English bowmen, an essential background to the personal tragedy of Dervorgilla, kill a harmless crane in flight and the blood stains her cloak; forty-two years of Dervorgilla*s life were devoted to wilful pride and pleasure, forty-two to prayer and pain; a young apprentice songmaker innocently echoes his blind old grandfather’s wisdom, and the inexperienced youths at play must in the end pass judgment on a crime committed long before they were born. The play reaches its climax when the wisdom of age bravely accepts the consequences of youth:351For there is little of my life but is spent, and. there has come upon me this day all the pain of the world and its anguish, seeing and knovâng that a deed once done has no undoing, and the lasting trouble of my unfaithfulness has brought upon you and your children for ever. There is kindness in your unkindness, not leaving me to go and face Michael and the Scales of Judgment wrapped in comfortable words, and the praises of the poor, and the lulling of psalms, but from the swift, unflinching, terrible judgment of the youngjlGod might forgive, but a crime against the people cannot die unlessthey too are willing to forgive. And so Dervorgilla must pay for herdisloyalty to her husband and race, just as Finn, Grania, and Diarmuidface the consequences of their own disloyalties to each other. Trueto her own inexorable dramatic logic. Lady Gregory has once moreparticularized the universal, making the myth human and the fable real;Cuchulain’s bravery, and Deirdre's beauty "that brought the Sons of Usnach to their death" find their way, indeed, into the folk-poetry of all the provinces; but the characters of the Fianna, Crania's fickleness, and Conan's bitter tongue, and Oisin's gentleness to his friends and his keen wit in the arguments with St. Patrick, and Coil's strength, and Osgar's high bravery, and Finn's wisdom, that was beyond that of earth, are as well known as the characteristics of any noticeable man of modern times.^Her comic folk-histories are negative commentaries upon the stronghero, for both The White Cockade and The Canavans deal with weaklingswho refuse to accept either the role put upon them by the people or theconsequences of their own actions. Both are suitably punished by lossof dignity; James is rolled in a barrel, Antony Canavan collapses intohare-like trembling, and Peter the Miller romps to self-expression ina manner strongly reminiscent of The Playboy;Isn't it the fool I was wasting time — wasting the years — looking here and there for the strongest? I give you my word, it was not till this present minute that I knew the strongest to be myself!3Dervorgilla, Irish Folk-History Plays First Series,186.2Notes to Grania, op.cit.,196.^The Canavans, Irish Folk-History Plays Second Series,III,73* Cf. 11,30.352Farce, too, must answer to the same laws.TragedyIt is perhaps inevitable that the celebration of the rebelliousindividual should appear under the mantle of tragedy, for in LadyGregory's universe, as in Yeats's, such is the fate of those who takedestiny into their own hands. But as we have observed in Yeats's heroicfool, clearly the struggle is worth it, for only in controversy againstinevitable Fate or overwhelming odns does he realize his full strength.This is the message of Grania, Gormleith, the penitent Dervorgilla; itis the message of Ireland's history. And when we turn from her tragic"tragic-comedies" to her "pure" tragedies, MacDonough's Wife and TheGaol Gate, we find the same, stirring call to inner strength and theindependent spirit.The world in which Lady Gregory's plays have reality is very mucha peopled world, inhabited by characters who are all gifted withloquacity and infinite capacity to believe, their individuality a resultof fertile imagination. Consequently she rarely scales the heights ofheroic tragedy, for as Yeats pointed out, the spirit of laughter is agreat deflator, and once Lady Gregory allows her little people to takeon their wayward personalities, she is no longer in control:I had been forced to write comedy because it v/as wanted for our theatre, to put on at the end of the verse plays, but ...I think tragedy is easier. For...tragedy shows humanity in the grip of circumstance, of fate, of what our people call "the thing will happen," "the Woman in the Stars that does all." There is a womanin the stars they say, who is alv/ays hurting herself in one way orother, and according to what she is doing at the hour of your birth, so will it happen to you in your lifetime, whether she is hanging herself or drowning herself or burning herself in the fire....Well, you put your actor in the grip of this woman, in the claws of the cat. Once in that grip you know what the end must be. You may let your hero kick or struggle, but he is in the claws all the time, it is a mere question as to how nearly you will let him escape, and when you will allow the pounce. Fate itself is the protagonist, your actor cannot carry much character, it is out of place. You do not want to know the character of a wrestler you see trying his strength at a show.l^Notes to Darner's Gold, New Comedies,158-59 »353Her three tragic folk histories, then, were originally intended to celebrate strength; as we have seen, the author’s sympathy and natural inquisitiveness got in the v/ay, and the wrestlers, even though their final throws were ordained, called forth the exaltation of the tragic hero, but little of the fear and even less of the pity. The bard McDonough is of the same mould; and here the dramatist herself is tempting fate, for in this case her figure does not have the safe veil of centuries wrapped about him. She knew McDonough personally; he had piped at the great sheep-shearing festivals of Roxborough (Cregoostha) had followed her to Coole for her wedding celebrations, and had returned for her son’s coming of age. But as always the "fascination of things difficult" tempted; and the story of McDonough was equally appealing because of the opportunity to observe the Irishman's "incorrigible genius for myth-making" in action. "He was so great a piper that in the few years since his death myths have already begun to gather around him," she commented in her notes to the play. And so the mastery of great grief becomes overwhelmed by "the lasting pride of the artist of all ages:We are the music makersAnd we are the dreamers of dreams...."^McDonough's grief for his wife becomes a part of the art he shares with Yeats's Seanchan, and his stirring cry is one with his pride:J "But I am of the generations of Orpheus, and have in me the breed of his master!"2In The Gaol Gate,on the other hand, the human spirit holds sway over the simple parable of the two ignorant country-women who are helpless against the machinery of the "over-government. "In%3stone poem of the same classic simplicity as Riders to the Sea, Mary Cahel,Notes to McDonough's Wife, New Comedies,I6 4.%icDonoug;h's Wife, op.cit.,151. Cf. The King's Threshold.354like Synge's Maurya (and Shakespeare's Volurania), represents not only the great grief of a mother's labour with death, but through her "tragic joy" the heroic reality of the son. Like Riders to the Sea, the play / has a musical structure: the note of grey uncertainty as the two womenapproach the great walls of the prison; the sombre tidings of an unheroic death expressed through the self-pity of Mary Gushin's caoine;■ and the final upward surge of redeemed honour in the old woman'sthrilling paeoin of joy: "It v/as not a little thing for him to die, and* -|he protecting his neighbour!"^ Rarely can a dramatist capture throughstrong characterization the unhindered qualities of heroic tragedy, madepersonal through the impersonal, universal because immediate. LadyGregory and Synge succeeded; Yeats, bound by his own great genius formyth-making, could not. His was greatness of another cast.Strength comes to those who can believe; tragedy touches as wellthe lives of those who cannot believe. This is the sorrow of the Motherin the miracle play. The Travelling Man, written in collaboration withYeats, but unmistakeably belonging to Lady Gregory's vision of the world.Their collaboration over this play perhaps most clearly distinguishesthe difference between the methods of the dramatists. They had originallywritten the scenario together, based on an idea of Lady Gregory's whichshe had in turn adapted from Irish' folklore; Yeats then took the sametheme for a pagan play, The Black Horse, according to his usual conceptof the mask and the anti-mask; but dissatisfied with the result heonce more passed it back to Lady Gregory.^ The stranger's song waswritten by Yeats; the description of the Golden Mountain (Paradise)sounds familiarly Yeatsian as well:"There is a garden in it, and there is a tree in the garden that has fruit and flowers at the one time....There are birds of all colours that sing at every hour, the way the people will come to^The Gaol Gate, Seven Short Plays,193.2Cf. Yeats's letters to Lady Gregory, December 1902, Letters,390; Our Irish Theatre,105.J355their prayers. And there is a high wall about the garden....There are four gates in the wall: a gate of gold, and a gate ofsilver, and a gate of crystal, and a gate of white brass.1If we recall that The Travelling Man was first attempted in 1902, theyear of The Shadowy Waters^ revisions and the year of Yeats's long essayon Edmund Spenser, the debt in this part, at any rate, is clear.^ Anexchange of letters further indicates their close collaboration as wellas their differences; Lady Gregory objected to the idea of the Rider'ssong:I am not sure about your idea, for if the Stranger wanted the child to be content with the things near him, v/hy did he make the image of the Garden of Paradise and ride to it? I am more inclined to think the idea is the soul having once seen the Christ, the Divine Essence, must always turn back to it again. One feels sure the child will through all its life. And the mother, with all her comforts, has never been quite satisfied, because she wants to see the Christ again. But the earthly side of her built up the dresser, and the child will build up other earthly veils; yet never be quite satisfied. Tvbat do you think?"5Yeats's reply is as consistent with his philosophy;I do not think the Ride to Paradise changes the motive of the little Christ Play from what I suggested. Paradise is happiness, the abundance of earth, the natural life, every man's desire, or some such thing.4Clearly the Christian message of the miracle play belongs to Lady Gregory's vision of the world, not to Yeats's, as does the ternary musical formwhich ties it to The Gaol Gate on the one hand, and the tragedy of self-delusion, which looks forward to The Image on the other. Just as Yeats in his last play finally achieved complete union of philosophy and theme through form, so too did Lady Gregory in her final morality plays. TheStory Brought by Brigit (1922-24) and Dave (1926-27)*^The Travelling Man, Seven Short Plays,171-72.2* "Edmund Spenser," Essays and Introductions,366-385.^Quoted by Lady Gregory in Our Irish Theatre,105*^Letter 27 November 1902, Letters,384* A similar correspondence v/as carried on concerning Hyde's play. The Marriage,whose scenario was also written by Yeats and Lady Gregory. _Cf.Yeats's letters to Lady Gregory,27 November and 6 December 1902, Letters, 584 and 591*356Image-MakersUps and dov/ns, ups and dov/ns; and we know nothing till all is over.He is surely the winner v/ho gets a great tombstone, a figured monument, cherubs blowing trumpets, angels’ tears in marble — or maybe he is the winner who has none of these, who but writes his name in the book of the people. I would like my name set in clean letters in the book of the people.^Sarsfield here speaks for all of those dreamers who aspire to free theirpeople and fail, and the figure of the image-maker was dear to LadyGregory's heart. For she, too, was an image-maker, as she reminds hernephew,^ and must, like the leaders, reformers, and idealists shecelebrates who gave heed "to the lasting cry of luckless Ireland," acceptthe consequence of failure. This is the significance of the motto whichappeared on the programme at the first production of The Image at theAbbey Theatre in I909 and which threw all the critics into confusion.In an open letter to D.P.Moran, another Image-maker, Lady Gregory explained"Secretum meum Mihi":I had but given a 'heart-secret* into the keeping of each of the persons of the play....And each of these images crumbled at the touch of reality, like a wick that has escaped the flame, and is touched by common air. And the more ecstatic the vision the more impossible its realisation until that time when, after the shadoww of the earth, the seer shall 'awake and be satisfied.'3Such is the fate of all the protagonists of the play, a fate shared byBrian of Kincora, Sarsfield of The White Cockade, Moses-Parnell ofThe Deliverer, Grania, Conan of Aristotle's Bellows, Don Quixote ofSancho's Master, and the hero of Twenty-Five/On the Racecourse. But itis developed and examined most thoroughly in one of her chief plays.The Image.4^The V/hite Cockade, Irish Folk-Hi story Plays Second Series, II,i,115. 2Hugh Lane's Life and Achievement, 127 and 154*^Notes to The Image, The Image and other Plays,97-98. Cf. Yeats's Preface(1906) to Poems, 1899-1905,xii-xiii. Moran was one of the "candle- stick-makers" of Ideals in Ireland,contributing the essay "The Battle of Two Civilizations," 25-41."^Journals,80.357Ironically, the play itself, like her comic characters, outdistancedits creator's original plans. She informs us that the idea first camefrom a story told her hy A.E.:I meant to carry this out in the manner of "Spreading the News" or "The Jackdaw," but the "Image" took the matter into its own hands, and whether for good or ill-luck, the three-act play has grown.I think I have not quite failed, yet it also is not what I set out to do.lIt is significant that this play, with the exception of history and chronicle plays, should be the first to be written in three acts, for the theme was one of major importance to her philosophy of life, and as such could not be restricted to the one act form. Nor could she restrict the treatment, and so we find each of the images examined carefully from all sides, each image-maker in turn cherishing his dream, exposing it to the unsympathetic eyes of others, then hugging it to himself once more. As Lady Gregory implies, this rhythm of the play is the natural rhythm of life, for the image-maker must tell his dream, even though it cannot be understood by others or suffers in the exposure; and the more the spoken dream is derided or the dreamer vilified, the more closely does the image-maker hold his private image to his heart.Othi.rPractically all the qualities of The Image echo her^plays as well.The entire plot is based on hearsay, elaborated and embroidered by the characters in much the same manner as the gullible, imaginative townsfolk of Cloon set to work. The reality of the background, a village street with thatched houses against grey sea and grey hills, is contrasted to the soaring visions of the inhabitants. The fierce loyalty of the provinces is reflected in Brian Hosty's praises of his beloved Connacht. The language grows naturally from the life about them ("and look at Darby Costello is running like a heifer had got a pick of a fly, or a rat there would be strong cats foil owing’.'2) or with the tone and^otes to The Image,op.cit.,99-100» The same theme, treated quite differently, is expressed in George A. Birmingham's novel. General John£egan(London:Stoughton,1913)•2The Image,op.cit.,1,19»358phraseology of the scriptures ("It has not a hole made, hut to settle itself it did, against such time as it would be called for and be wanting."!). But the theme around which the plot revolves, the emotion for the structural fable, is man in relation to his dream, for each of these eccentric image-makers is a symbol in miniature of the strong image- workers of the earth, just as the setting of the play itself represents the microcosm. We are introduced to each of these dreamers in turn, almost in order of rank. First comes Thomas Coppinger, the stonecutter, whose life is spent inscribing headstones for the dead but who dreams of erecting a monument that would reflect glory upon him as well, "Some man so great his death would put away laughter in Ireland."2 His wife's dream of America is bound up in her husband's, for the success of his means the possible fulfilment of hers. Brian Hosty lives for the image of his loved Connacht, but it is his fate to be constantly reminded of the greatness of Munster. Darby Costello wistfully dreams of universal peace, but continually involves himself in the petty quarrels of his neighbours. Old Peggy Mahon has devoted her years to ushering the new-born into life ("Every baby is a present from God."), but dreams of reunion after death with the husband whom memory and time have glorified ("Brought away through death he was from this white world, and I myself left after him, a bird alone."3). Malachi, the crazy mountainy man, rejects the lying company of the towns, but sees a message of great wonders on a stray bit of board salvaged from his hungry goat. The dream for this people is more real than the life about them, and colours that reality until it too takes on the quality of the dream: "Sure he must have lived in some place, or why would we be putting up a monument to him?" "There is dreams and dreams," says old Thomas chipping^Ibid..8.^Ibid..27-28.359away at his headstone,And at every thousand years some great thing is apt to happen, such as the Deluge or the coming of the Milesians into Ireland —I tell you there is dreams aud dreams.!And because of his dream a statue is ordered and designs are sent allthe way from Dublin. "There's many things I forgot that I heard in mylifetime. I only recollect things in the broad," Mrs. Coppinger explainspher poor memory of Hugh O'Lorrha. And when the illiterate old Malachireads a message in his "bit of a board" and attending angels in thegreat whales and storm, he is excused, because "There is nothing left tohim in life but high flighty t h o u g h t s . " O l d she is, and it's all inher brain the things she does be talking of," says Darby of old Peggy'smeanderings.4 Nlalachi himself objects to the realization of his imagein the "concrete" form of a statue:His name to be in a song, what would he want with stones or with monuments? Wouldn't any man at all be well satisfied, his name to be going through the generations in a song. My grief that I haven't the wit to make a poem for him or a ballad, and it is a great pity I am not prone to versify.'5But the dream of Hugh O'Lorrha brings magic into his world and raiseshim to the poetic heights of the visionary; "Take care but it was nodream.' Let you go out looking yourself so in the night time. And ifyou do go, it is likely you will see nothing but the flaggy rocks andthe clefts, for it's not all are born to see things of the k i n d . T h e7/or Id of wonders has taken orecedence over the world about them:^Ibid.,9^Ibid.,15.^Ibid.,17.^Ibid.,28.Ibid., 51.Cf. "Jacobite Ballads," Poets and Dreamers, 5 I'd ed, 6 9: "For the Munsterman have alv/ays been more 'prone to versify' than their leaner neighbours on the bogs and stones of Connaught."^The Image,72.560Cop [Dinger ; Well, I have brought you tidings you will wonder at,and that will raise and comfort your heart!Mrs.Coppinger; There is nothing would make me wonder after allhappened in these days past. I to rise up in the morning under lofty rafters in Boston, I give you my word I'd take it as simple as a chicken would be hatcned out of the shelli!But once they have told their dreams, calamity befalls all of them.The statue which never will be to a hero who never was becomes anembarrassment. Malachi turns in scorn from those v/ho belittle hishero: "And I'll know him when I will see him, and that is what you orthe like of you will not do. And another thing, I tell you I'd soonerhe not to be in it, than he to be in it, and to be what you are makinghim out to be!"2 And Old Peggy Mahon has the final word against thosewho cast a blemish upon her "comely Patrick":A queer race ye are, a queer race. It is right Malachi was quitting you, and it was wise. Any person to own a, heart secret, it is best for him hide it in the heart....Oh yes, oh yes. I'll be wary this time and I'll be wise, very wise. I'll be as wise as the man that didn't tell his dream!^So the two great myth-makers return to their solitude, leaving behindthe minor stars of the imaginary universe to take wh ,,t comfort theycan: "Let you not fret, Thomas," comforts Darby Costello. "There didno badness of misfortune every come upon Ireland but someone v/as thebetter of it. ...Let you comfort yourself this time, for it is likelyyou would have failed doing the job."4 Mrs. Coppinger looks withsatisfaction to the full times ahead: "We'll not be scarce of talk forthe rest of our years anyway. For some do be telling the story wasalways in it, but we will be telling the story never was in it beforeand never will be in it at all!"5^IMd.,75.hbid.,84-85.^Ibid..94.4Cf. Mrs. Broderick's comforting remarks at the end of The Full Moon.«5The Image,96.361Despite the cherished dreams of the image-makers, however, there isan atmosphere of futility about the play. This is comedy of situation,but the characters border on the tragic. All of the images are fated, asare the greater dreams of the strong image-makers of the world. One isleft wondering whether perhaps the implication: of Aristotle's Bellowsis not the safest route through life after all. But Conan, Malachi, andPeggy have much in common, for all are dissatisfied with the world aboutthem. "Isn't it terrible to be seeing all this folly around me and notto have a way to better it.'" moans Conan.^ "And why would I do that forany common person, would be maybe as ugly as the people I do be seeingevery day, and as cross and as crabbed? V/hat call would I have goingthrough hardship for a man would be no better maybe, and no betterlooking, than myself?" demands Malachi. And Peggy echoes both:V/hy would any person go set their mind upon the hither side of the grave, and not upon the far side? I have seen them come and seen them go, the scores and the hundreds, the same as if they came on a visit to a neighbour's house, and went from it again the time their clothes would be wore out and tattered.Surely to hold a dream is better than to live with caution, so once againLady Gregory echoes the call of Synge's tramp, peasant, and playboy:And so with my sisters' sons, to whom I have dedicated this play, pbhn Shawe-Taylor^and Hugh Lan^. ..Yet I fancy it was a dream beyond possible realisation that gave each of them the hard patience needed by those who build, anri the courage needed by the "Disturber" who does not often escape some Icnocks and buffetings. But if the dreaimer had never tried to tell the dream that had come across him, even though to "betray his secret to the multitude" must shatter his own perfect vision, the world would grow clogged and dull with the weight of flesh and of clay. And so we must say "God love you" to the Image- makers, for do we not live by the shining of those scattered fragments of their dream?5This is the message of Christianity, of the Abbey Directors, and the message as well of her last **tragic-comedy, " Sancho ' s Master (1927):Aristotle's Bellows, Three Wonder Plays,99.2The Image,op.cit.,40-41*^Notes for The Image,op.cit.,98-99 *562Quixote's story belongs to the world, and some of us have whispered his naae, fitting it to one or another dreamer v/ho seeks to realise the perfect in a community not ready for the Millenium, and where he is likely to meet with anger that strikes or ridicule that scorches, or to have the word flung at him that was flung by Festus at St. Paul.!Allegory — Personal and PoliticalThose v/ho serve Ireland take for their lot lasting battles — lasting quarrels. They are building, and ever building; and ever and always ruin comes upon them before the house is built.Those who would be most their friends, turn to be most their enemies, till the heart grows dry with bitterness; diy„ as the heads of the mountains under the summer heat.^Aiobhell's warning to the young Brian is in a sense the warning to allimage-makers whose dream is love of their country, and one which ringsmost clearly throughout all the work of the Image-maker herself. Eerfirst publication for the literary movement was a collection of essaysby these image-makers or "candlejstick-makers."^ For Lady Gregory'snationalism not only led her to the theatre, but dictated the themesof her plays. Constantly we are reminded that these are plays notonly for Ireland, but of Ireland. Jo Muldoon of Spreading the Newsrepresents all of those who are in the employ of the "over-government,"torn between loyalty to their masters and loyalty to their country. Theproblem of conflicting loyalties carries through Grania and serves asthe entire action of the little play, The Rising of the Moon.^ AsLady Gregory implies in her notes to The Canavans, "the desire possessingPeter Canavan to be on the safe side, on the side of the strongest,...junps to light more aggressively in [a countr^^ which, like Ireland,has been tilted between two loyalties through so many generations."5^Note to Sancho's Master, Three Last Plays,118-19. Cf. Coole,16-17. 2Prologue to Kincora, 2nd ed.1905,6.^Ideals ^n Ireland, with essays by A.E, D.P.Moran, George Moore, Douglas Hyde, Standish 0*Grady, and Yeats.^The Rising of the Moon, Seven Short Plays,82: "They say he's a wo nder. "^Notes to The Canavans, Irish Folk-History Plays Second Series,189.365The same moon which symbolizes the vision of the new Ireland.! in The Rising of the Moon creates the dreams of Cracked Mary and Malachi Naughton; the personal tragedy of T ^ Gaol Gate is overcast by the helplessness of the ignorant countryfolk in the grip of a foreign law which they cannot understand and which does not seek to understand them. The Wrens, although planned as a human comedy, in turn symbolizes the inner turmoil of Ireland, the singing vagabonds representing opportunism in contrast to the well-defined loyalty of servants and the simplicity of the Porter.2 The young stroller of Dervorgilla reflects the same theme, as he goes off in search of a better welcome from the English bowmen over the hill.5 And the. political allegory continues to On the Racecourse. But the symbol of the patriot-dreamer which most frequently appears throughout the plays is the figure of Ireland's dead King, Charles Simwt Parnell.As perhaps could be expected, the first open reference to Parnell occurs in The Image, when the wrangling between Hosty and Costello represents in miniature the great split which occurred over twenty years earlier in Irish politics. A year later The Deliverer (19IO), was written, "a symbolical play ostensibly about Moses really about P a r n e l l , "4 a strange, bitter tragi-comedy, neither tragedy, comedy, or history, which reflects most clearly Lady Gregory's ov/n attitude towards her country and the characteristics of her countrymen:Malachi (laughing to himself); They were said to give him learningand it is bad learning they gave him. That young man to have read history he would not have come to our help.5The Rising of the Moon,op.cit.,9 6: "when the small rise up and the big fall down...when we all'change plaoas at the Rising of the Moon."Gf. Young, The Plays of Lady Gregory,100.%otes to The Wrens, The Image end Other Plays,232.' ^Dervorgilla, Irish Folk-History Plays First Series,176.^V/.B.Yeats to J.B.Yeats, 24 November 1910, Letters,355.^The Deliverer, Irish Folk-History Plays, Second Series,182.564Set in Biblical times, the attitude of the peasants who speak forcontemporary Ireland bears the mingled pre-Christian and mystictemperament of the folk tale; the setting is classical, but the atmosphereis romantic; the characters are symbolic, but the tone is almost bitterlypersonal. It is the cry of disappointment and sorrow felt by its creatorat the tragic downfall of one more great leader and image-maker, and notuntil a dozen years later, in her Irish passion play, The Story Broughtby Brigit (1922-24), is she able to universalize her bitterness:Joel! That's the way of it,...We wanted him, and we got him, and v/hat we did with him was to kill him. And that is the way it will be ever and always, so long as leaves grow upon tK*. trees .*!Finally, the theme regains balance once more, in the poignant, gentle-sharp tale of still one more great Image-Maker, Sancho's Master (1927).But through all these fables of the strong people of the earth, theimage-makers and weavers of dreans, can be seen Lady Gregory's personalobservation of the passionate love of her countrymen for their country:Love of country, tirgradh,is I think the real p .asion; and bound up with it are love of home, of family, love of God.2Their hearts are, as was Diarmuid*s, always and ever with Almhuin;I am IrelandOlder than the Hag of Beara.Great ray prideI gave birth to great Cuchulain.Great my shameMy own children killed their mother.I am IrelandLonelier than the Hag of Beara.^^The Story Brought by Brigit(London;Putnam's,1924),75* £f.Notes to The Deliverer,op.cit.,195-96•^"West Irish Ballads"(I9OI), Poets and Dreamers,3rd ed. 60 Cf.Note to Aristotle's Bellows, Three Wonder Plays,155-156.^Lady Gregory's translation from the Irish of a poem by Padraic Pearse, quoted in her Journals,3 3 1>563The Framework of the Fable "I usually first see a play as a picture," Lady Gregory informs us in her notes to Darner's Gold^ and illustrates in the development of her idea for Spreading the News.^ Consequently her approach to the actual construction was, like Yeats’s, visual, and a scenario draft tended to be a series of "rough pen and ink sketches coloured with a pencil blue and red," which in turn might actually alter the form of the play itself.^ This linear construction can be seen in the action of the plays, which tend to move out in straight lines from a focal point or in a series of interlocking circles: rarely does one find the spiral construction ofSynge or Fitzmaurice. Lady Gregory’s approach to her material was in fact classical, despite the romantic motivating forces of nationalism and idealism. Just as she watches with delighted interest the creation of her characters, so too she applies the seme penetrating observation to the development of structure. Because of this ability to stand back and observe the dramatic form with a critical, almost impersonal eye, her plays tend on the whole to be clearcut in form, classical in simplicity. Frequently, as in to jkhe^ Racecourse, Dave, Spreading the News, Coats, The Bogie Men, The Gaol Gate, The IVhite Cockade, and Aristotle’s Bellows,this results in a strict adherence to the three unities as well; nearly always the simplicity of form is followed by simplicity of setting and restriction of cast. At her best, (The Rising of jMie Moon, The Image, The Jester, Spreading the News, Grania, Dave), there is a highly skilled fusion of the theatrical qualities of surprise, suspense, and climax; at her worst, (Shanwalla, Coats) difficult material is forced into a readily observable form. As has already been mentioned, frequently she^New Comedies,IbO.2Note to Spreading the News, Seven Short Plays,204.As was the case with the mechanical device of the bellows, which occurred to her when she observed a sketch of Conan defending himself v/ith the umbrella. Cf. Note to Aristotle’s Bellows, Three Wonder Plays , 153-56.5 6 6makes use of the ternary form, both in individual acts (Darner's Gold,!The Gaol Gate, Dervorgilla, On the Racecourse) and in larger three-actplays (Aristotle *s Bellows, The Jester, The Image). The Image isinteresting for its wheel-like action, each of the image-makers movingout from the central theme like spokes in a wheel; the same interlockingstructure is apparent in Dervorgilla, Hyacinth Halvey , The Full Moon.Occasionally she makes effective use of the "play within a play," as inThe Rising of the Moon, The Jackdaw, and On the Racecourse (where thereare actually tv/o inner climaxes). She constantly experiments with formand numbers of characters, and a comparison of The Poorhouse with TheY/orkhouse Ward, Tr/enty Five ^with On the Racecourse, illustrates hereffort to throw the characters into relief against the situation andagainst each other by reducing the number in each case to three and by acorresponding simplification of action and motive. The result is greaterclarity of situation and a strengthening of characterization. The"fascination of things difficult" led her to fresh experiments, as sheadmits in the notes to Grania:When I told Mr. Yeats I had but these three persons in the play, he said incredulously, "They must have a great deal to talk about." And so they have, for the talk of lovers is inexhaustible, being of themselves and one another.3.Coats and The Bogie Men followed with only two characters to each, andshe confesses to a desire at one time of "writing a play for a man anda scarecrow o n l y A s Miss Coxhead points out, Samuel Beckett'sAccording to Miss Coxhead, Lady Gregory,87, Damer's Gold was first planned in three acts, but Lennox Robinson persuaded her to cut it down to two.2Twenty-Five was published with the title A Losing Game in The Gael (New York), December 1902.^Irish Folk-History Plays First Series,195-96.^Our Irish Theatre,90.3671experiment with a man and a tape-recorder would have delighted her, but she herself v/rote only one mono drama, the dramatic poem The Old Woman Remembers, recited by Sally Allgood on the last day of 1925, and in itself an interesting conclusion to the dramatist's long association with the figure of Kafhieen-ni-Houlihan"The balance of weight, the minute calculating of it in advance... comes into the building of a play, as does 'music' — the balanced delight of sentences — of words," Lady Gregory wrote in her revealing chapter on play-writing. Throughout her plays, in structure, dialogue, and characterization, there is anple evidence of this emnhais on balance. Mathematical precision is most obvious in those plays which depend on inter-action between two groups of characters, such as Coat^ The Bogie Men, The Jester, The Workhouse Ward, where the characters are really only half of the whole or "mirror-images," and where the theme is a variation on comradeship.3 It is apparent again in plays containing the more complicated concept of the mask, such as The Rising of the Moon, where the ballad-singer represents the policeman's antithetical self, and Darner's Gold, where young Simon symbolizes Darner's own youth; in jboth of these plays the Yeatsian element is made stronger by the ,juxtaposition of the image from the past and the image of the present.And frequently as well one finds the simple device of contrast: implicit^Coxhead, Lady Gregory,142. The play referred to is Krapp's Last Tape. One might add Ionesco's The Chairs, Yeats's Purge tory (19397 "^ere the boy is only part of the many and Strindberg's The Stranger.2Journals,336.^Lennox Robinson in his biography of Lady Gregory expresses his dislü^ of both Coats and The Bogie Men because "In each case the play starts with a Molieresque misunderstanding, a misunderstanding which the audience understands only too soon and in each case the play is only rather dull dialogue between two men." Quoted by Lorna Young, The Plays of Lady Gregory.TCP Ph.D. Thesis,224- Surely The Bogie Men is redeemed by the theatrical quality of the disguises and the poetry of the language;Goats on the other hand depends too much on a weak mechanical device.7/) irtsU k I ( ^ 4c .568in the situation of The Rising of the Moon, explicit in Dfoner’s abrupt Timonesque transition, an essential part of the characterization of On the Racecourse, as it is also in The Full Moon, The Image, The Gaol Gate,The Deliverer, and Dave. Looking at the plays as a group, frequently we find tnis complementary device explored through several plays, an examination of the same theme from opposing angles; The Bogie Men, Sancho's Master, On the Racecourse compared with and contrasted to The Image and The Deliverer; the tossing of the poet in Hanrahan 's Oath as opposed to the celebration of the artist in McDonough's Wife; the figure of the policeman in Spreading the News and The Rising of the Moon; the threatened realization of the image in Hyacinth Halvey and The Image ; the adventures of the noble dreamer and his peasant companion in The Golden Apple and Sancho *s Master. And on a larger scale yet, one might observe in her "human comedies" a natural complement to the plays of her colleagues: the treatment of hearsay in Spreading the News and On Baile's Strand; the patriot's call to the young man of the household in The White Cockade and Kathleen-ni-Houlihan; character-building in Hyacinth Halvey and The Playboy of the Western World; the preference for the dream in The Image and The Well of the Saints; the celebration of the heroine in Grania and the three Deirdres, Dervorgilla and Dreaming of the Bones ; the treatment of the poet-figure in Hanrahan's Oath (a development of Hyde's The Twisting of the Rope), The King's Threshold and The Playboy; the cry for freedom of Graniaand Nora of The Shadow of the Glen; the brazen, wrangling delight of thetinkers in Where There is Nothing and The Tinker's Wedding; the tragic simplicity of The Gaol Gate and Riders to the Sea; and the treatment of the Passion in The Story Brought by Brigit and Calvary.The dialogue frequently betrays a strong contrapuntal effect as well, especially in the rhythmic antiphonal speeches of the old hags inMcDonough's Wife, and the balanced parallelism of the dialogue in to theRacecourse. But throughout the plays the echo and repetition of the569dialogue corresponds to her customary device of a quick series of successive encounters between different pairs of characters, as can be seen, for example, in Spreading the News and Hyacinth Halvey;Hyacinth: Fardy: gyacinth ; Fardy; Hyacinth :Fardy: Hyacinth;Fardy:Hyacinth:Fardy;Hyacinth:Fardy:.?«, Hyacinth ;Fardy;Will you tell me, I ask you, what way can I undo it?YHiat is it you are wanting to undo?Will you tell me what way can I get rid of my character?To get rid of it, is it?That is what I said. Aren't you after hearing the great character they are after putting on me?That is a good thing to have.It is not. It's the worst in the world. If I hadn't it,I wouldn't be like a prize mangold at a show with every person praising me.If I had it, I wouldn't be like a head in a barrel, with every person making hits at me.If I hadn't it, I wouldn't be shoved into a room with all the clergy watching me and the police in the back-yard.If I had it, I wouldn't be but a message-carrier now, and a clapper scaring birds in the summer time.If I hadn't it, I wouldn't be wearing this button and brought up for an example at the meeting.Maybe you're not, so, what those capers make you out to be? How would I be what they make me out to be? Was there ever any person of that sort since the world was a world, unless it might be Saint Antony of Padua looking down from the chapel wall? If it is like that I was, isn't it in Mount Mel1eray I would be, or with the Friars at Esker?Way would I be living in the world at all, or doing the world's work? ;Y/ho would think, now, there v/ould be so much lies in a small place like Carrow?!At other times, the minor characters serve as a chorus to this dialogue of give-and-take, as in the speeches of the two widows in The Canavans, who not only comment on the situation but provide background material as well. Just as Yeats made use of the musicians to create an impression of timelessness, Lady Gregory used her Kiltartan peasants as a choric comment on the universality of her themes.Lady Gregory's hatural tendency towards theatrical conundrums and duologues was increased and perfected by her translations of Moliere for the Abbey players. However, it would be a mistake to assume that'Hyacinth Halvey, Seven Short Plays, 45-47*370Lady Gregory simnly adapted the French dramatist's methods to her ov;n plays. As Shav/ commented, Lady Gregory had a natural gift for i,vriting dialogue, and the reason hers is so similar to lloliere's work is that she writes about the Irish as Moliere wrote about the Flench.! Technically speaking they have much in common, but they are more akin in spirit than in technique, as a comparison between Lady Gregory's translation of The Miser and Darner's Gold makes evident? the action in Moliere's play marches, in Lady Gregory's the scenes blend; Harpagon is a real miser, intense and tenacious, whereas Darner is a sham miser and soon shifts sides, Delia and her chorus, 8taffy and Ralph, are far more realistic than their French counterparts. A better comparison between the two might be the characterization of Bartley Fallon in Spreading the News and Geronte in The Rogueries of Scapin; for a time both are in two worlds at once.2 But Lady Gregory, like Moliere, knew how to adopt country dialect and country mannerisms for the stage; it was only fitting, then, that she should have been the dramatist to bring the greater French master of comedy to Dublin. "In vital translation," Yeats had written, "a work of art does not go upon its travels* it is re-born in a strange land."5So it is with the Kiltartan Moliere and Goldoni's Mirandolina. 4Letter from Shaw on "Printed 'Plays" in the Times Literary Supplement, May 1923, quoted by Lady Gregory, Journals,213; interview written by Shaw for the New York Evening Sun, 1912, quoted in Our Irish Theatre,302. Of. Lennox Robinson, I Sometimes Think (Dublin:Talbot Press,1956),21.2Cf. Young, The Plays of Lady Gregory,85.^"The Abbey Moliere Performances," Abbey programme for The Rogueries of Scapin,March 11,12,13, 1909, Henderson collection. National Library of Ireland MS.1732, vol.3,27.^She also translated Sudermann's Te.ja and Maeterlinck's Interior; both MSSfWere destroyed in the Abbey fire in 1951* It is interesting to note that during the summer of I9OI James Joyce translated two of Hauptmann's plays. Before Sunrise end Michael Kramer, making use of an Irish country dialect. jCf. Ellmann,James Joyce 91. C£* Fay's description of the Aboey's decision to produce Molière, W.G.Fay and Catherine Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre (London:Rich and Cowan,1935),192-93.371Lady Gregory's notes in her diary concerning the adaptation and staging of _Le Boureois Gentilhomme indicate another characteristic of her plays :I proposed making a feature of the songs, having French airs to them, and at the last, as we can't have the apotheosis of old Jordain, as Coquelin did, bursting into triumphant music....And I think of putting Sally and all the players who can sing on the stage as musicians in the first act, just wearing some of our heroic cloaks over their dress, and little paper hats made from Christmas crackers, that they may sing.!Her comic world was very close to the world of musical comedy, for bothrequire that spirit which makes action more important than reading andwhich comes out of the dialogue as well as the situation. Miss Coxhead2reports that Spreading the News has been made into a comic opera ; in over half of her plays music and song are made an integral part of the plot and she exploits this even more in On the Racecourse, where the songs further the action and reflect the inner conflict and emotions of the characters. Occasionally, as in The Rising of the Moon and Dervorgilla, the music-maker himself comes on; usually the characters burst into song to mark a shift in emphasis or break in tension. On the whole she adapted ballads to this use, and it is not surprising to learn that her favourite brother Frank's hobby was collecting Dublin street ballads.^ (As has already been mentioned, Aristotle's Bellows is almost a ballad-opera).Two plays. The Gaol Gate, and The Story Brought by Brigit include the caoine. The latter also contains a chorus for three women, to which the dramatist appended a note of instructions which is an interesting commentary on her theories as opposed to Yeats's:Journals,85.2Lady Gregory,80. The Heart's A Wonder, a musical version of The Playboy, is successful for the same reasons.^Coxhead, Lady Gregory,10.372As to the verses given to the women, I wish them to he lilted rather than sung. For they have dramatic value, are a part of the play, and any musical setting, however beautiful, that is more complicated than that of the street ballad singer must delay the swift comprehension needed.!As well as music and song. Lady Gregory was fond of introducing costumeand disguise into her plays. The Bogie Men, toani^, The Golden Apple,The Jester, The Dragon, Aristotle's Bellows, On the Racecourse, andSancho *s Master all employ the device of disguise and recognition.Mechanical devices abound in the wonder plays, which is to be expected;it is interesting to note that in Hyacinth Halvey, The Jackdaw, andAristotle's Bellows the stage properties of caged thrush, dead sheep,jackdaw, and pigeon-turned-crow are all essential to the plot. InHyacinth Halvey and Tha Full Moon the sound effects of the harmonium andtrain whistle also contribute to the theatrical effect. However, herlast comedy. On the Racecourse, opens on an empty stage. Although sheintroduced the dance in only one play other than the translations (TheFull Moon), choreographic effects are introduced frequently, especiallythe deliberate tableau effect v/hich Lady Gregory's plays have in commonwith Yeats's; Spreading the Hews, Hanrahan's Oath, Kincora all have thischoreographic quality. Like Yeats, Lady Gregory "saw" her plays asshe wrote them. Perhaps more thr.n either Yeats or Synge, also, shelearned from production, especially in her early plays, and her commenton play-writing most aptly applies to herself;Teaching people to wurite plays...is impossible — but ... placing people in an environment where their early plays can be discussed, criticised, and given the acid test — p r o d u c t i o n . 2Note to The Story Brought by Brigit,84. Masefield in Some Memories of W.B.Yeats,12, describes Lady Gregory's reading: "As always, she read very clearly and agreeably, with a just emphasis and a good sense of rhythm 2Quoted by Hallie Flanagan, Shifting Scenes of the Modern European Theatre (London;Harrap,1929),37* lu the unpublished letters from Yeats to Lady Gregory on theatre business, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats, there are frequent references to cuts in her early plays after they have been put into rehearsal.It373But Lady Gregory gave as much as she received from the Abbey players. She once mentioned that "desire for e xperiment is like fire in the blood, and her own numerous experiments gave far more experience to the small company than either of her fellow-directors'. For it was nearly always with Lady Gregory that the company broke new ground; it was she who popularized the one-act play with its economy and concentration and fine theatrical effect, created a new form of history play that gave characters and incidents immediacy and life, and introduced a new universe, the "Gregorian" fantasy world of her wonder plays. Eventually she too moved away from the limitations of her actors into her powerful, strange, and moving last plays. The ^toi^C Brought by Brigit, Sancho's Master, and Dave, where, like Yeats, she entered a world demanding depth of understanding beyond the Abbey actors. The plays which are most frequently revived within the Abbey theatre itself remain her earlier comedies.The spirit of Lady Gregory reigned longer than either Synge's or Yeats's at the Abbey Theatre, partly because she had learned her trade on its boards, more so because of her one driving ambition, the preservation and care of an institution which, she felt, could once more bring dignity to Ireland. However, never did she let the theatre or her nation infringe upon the essential dignity of the spirit, and if the bulk of her work does not represent "the apex of the flame, the point of the diamond," it is worthy of the base. And in that strange mingling of the ironic and the pathetic, the tragic and the comic, the clarity of vision which penetrated the dusk of Cloon and the moon^drenched Galway quays.Lady Gregory deserves her place in the constellation so clearly marked by her friends and fellow image-makers who worked together for art and for Ireland.^Our Irish Theatre,91.374CHAPTER 7 JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGELife is flying from me, not stopping an hour, and death is making great strides following my track. The days about me, and the days passed over me, are bringing me desolation, and the days to come will be the same surely.(Translation from Petrarch)"Every life is a symphony and the translation of this sequence into music and from music again, for those who are not musicians into literature or painting or sculpture, is the real effort of the artist."(From an unpublished play)The story of Yeats's first encounter with Synge reads like a fairy tale, and has often been turned into one. The year v/as I896; Yeats was in Paris with Maud Gonne on revolutionary activities; he had just returned from a tour of western Ireland with Arthur Symons, where he had stayed with Edward Martyn at Tulira, met Lady Gregory at Coole, and visited the Aran Islands. Synge, having renounced music for literature, had moved to Paris from Germany; he had just returned from a visit to Italy, and was studying Petrarch and French literature at the Sorbonne, reading Thomas à Kempis! and works on socialism, dabbling in the occult with Stephen MacKenna.^ Lady Gregory had acted as a catalyst to Yeats; now Yeats in turn affected Synge. As he himself confesses, he no more recognized Synge's genius than he had Lady Gregory's,^ and at first encouraged him in his efforts to play "second fiddle" to ^irthur Symons as a critic of French literature.^ But Yeats's imagination was full of "those greyThe Imitation of Christ continued to interest him throughout his life; Greene and Stephens, J.M.Synge, record a fragnent of an imaginary conversation between St. Thomas and Rabelais.2He attended at least one Theosophical Society meeting with AE.Cf. Greene and Stephens,op.cit.,69,169. In his article on Loti and Huysmans for The Sneaker, 18 April 1903,37-58, Synge refers to the doctrine of esoteric theosophy as "this illusion of illusions."^Autobiographies,580.^Hone, W.B .Yeats, 139m .575islands where men must reap vâth knives because of the s t o n e s , a n d soon he urged Synge to seek in Aran "a life that had never been expressed in literature, instead of a life where all had been expressed. Two years were to pass before Synge visited Aran for the first time; the rest is Abbey history, for his experiences there resulted in Riders to the Sea and heralded a new genius in world drama. Five years later he died at the age of thirty-nine, having published five plays (in the Shadow of the Glen, Riders to the Sea, The Tinker's Wedding, The Well of the Saints, and The Playboy of the Western World) and a book of essays on his life in Aran (The Aran Islands). His final unfinished play (Peirdre of the Sorrows), a slim volume of verse (Poems and Translations), and a collection of essays, many of which had previously appeared in periodicals (in 586If the artist is to read life truly and strike the balance necessary to wholesome art, he must be occupied with "the whole of life,""for although exalted verse is the highest, it cannot keep its power unless there is more essentially vital verse at the side of i t . O n l y then can he provide "the nourishment, not very easy to define, on which our imaginations live" (Preface to The Tinker’s Wedding). And that nourishment, the power of exalted verse, is found in the reality and zest of life, the "strong things of life" (Preface to Poems and Translations), rather than in the "seedy problems" of modern plays (Preface to The Tinker’s Wedding). "On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy," Synge wrote in his Preface to The Playboy; we cannot find this union in the "joyless and pallid words" of Ibsen and Zola, or in the works of Mallarmé and Huysmans who are far away from "the profound and common interests in life." We must seek "the rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality." It is when we combine the ecstasy of a life superb and wild with the stoicism and simplicity of the realities of life that we achieve art that is lasting. Such was the case in England, France, and Spain "v/hen the drama was at its richest" (Preface to The Tinker’s Wedding), "in the happy ages of literature" (Preface to The Playboy). Art in this sense escapes both the extremes of aestheticism and naturalism; rather, it brings the enlargement of a life detached from the ordinary problems of every day and yet with "strong roots among the clay and the worms" (Preface to Poems and Translations).2 Furthermore, by seeking to express the whole of life the artist will achieve not only the universality he requires, but the uniqueness as well:Letter to Yeats, probably 1908, in the possession of Mrs. Stephens.2Cf. Yeats, "J.M.Synge and the Ireland of his Time," Essays and Introductions, 526-2?: "He loves all that has edge, all that is salt in the mouth..."587The profound is always inimitable....Profound insight finds the inner and essential mood of the things it treats of andhence gives us art that is absolutely distinct and inimitable, — a thing never done before and never to be done again.!But in choosing a life that is "superb and wild" one cannot expectto find only sweetness and light. Tlien men preserve "their poeticfeeling for ordinary life" and use "the whole of their personal lifeas their material," they preserve the bitter and the harsh as wellas the sweet and the gentle; very often it is the bitter that makesthe sweet, "It may almost be said that before verse can be human againit must learn to be brutal," Synge wrote in his preface to Poems andTranslations. And this may require the presentation of wildness as wellas strength, evil as well as good, tragedy as well as humour.We all of us delight in strength, v/hether we see it in other things,or feel it in ourselves. There is joy in the mad rush of a mountaintorrent, in the flying foam of waves, and in the storn itself when it comes rushing to us through the terrified pine trees,he wrote in his diary in 1888.2 Almost twenty years later he commentadconcerning The Playboy, "the wildness, and if you will, vices of theIrish peasantry are due, like their extraordinary good points of allkinds, to the richness of their nature — a thing that is pricelessbeyond words."3 "I notice that when anybody here writes a play italways works out, whatever the ideas of the writer, into a cry for amore abundant and a more intense life," Yeats wrote to Charles Rickettsin 1904.4^Notebook, perhaps 1898, Stephens MS 1054* Cf. Synge's remark quoted by Yeats, Essays and Introductions,325: "The sciolist is never sad."^Stephens MS, 5^7 •^"A letter to a Young Man," 19 February 1907, Plays,1932,vii. According to Yeats, Bartholomew Fair influenced Synge, letter to Allan Wade, 10 July 1921, Letters,671. Cf. Jack B. Yeats, "With Synge in Connemara," Synge and the Ireland of his Time (Dublin;Cuala,1911),42-45; Masefield, John M. Synge.15: "He was puzzled by the talk of the clever young men from Oxford. *I wonder what makes them talk like that?I suppose they’re always stewing over dead things.’"^26 July 1904, Letters,436.588Similarly, the artist must accept life in the mixture in which it comes:The man who feels most exquisitely the joy of contact with what is perfect in nature and art is the man who from the width and power of his thought hides the greatest number of satanic or barbarous sympathies.ISqueamishness was not only dishonest, but a disease' "Ireland will gainif Irish riters deal manfully, directly and decently with the entirereality of life. I think the law-maker and the law-breaker are bothneedful in society." "No drama can grow out of anything other than thefundamental realities of life,"2 whether these realities are innocentor otherwise:There are beautiful and interesting plants which are deadly, and others that are kindly. It is absurd to say a flower is not beautiful nor admire its beauty because it is deadly, but it is absurd also to deny its deadliness.5Consequently the artist may find himself outside the sympathies of bothorthodox religion and morality. In 1904 after reading Anatole Francehe commented in his diary.In reading French literature one is tempted to wonder what nature literature is likely to take in the perhaps distant years when the science of men like Huxley and Haeckel...will have taken a place definitely in the intelligence of waiters and readers....It makes one ask...what in the new literature I have dreamed of will be the conception of love for on it will depend a good deal of the fortunes of humanity....Yfhat form in this case would the new representatives, of St. Theresa and St. Thomas a Kempis take with an outlook on the world like Haeckel's? In what way will they create for us a romance of reality... .Most important of all — H oyt will they rescue love — the word is not too strong — from the French?^It was this "romance of reality" Synge sought in his own work, and toachieve it he was willing to reach not only towards the zest and joy ofNotebooks, 1890,SteDhens MS, 411-412.2Letter to MacKenna, 28 January 1904, Greene and Stephens,op.cit., 158 and 157'^Notebooks, probably 1907, Plays,1932, v.^Notebooks, about July I904, Stephens MS,1749-31*589life, but among the clay and worms. Like Yeats and Lady Gregory, he v/as willing to forego popularity and friendship for the sake of his belief, and before he died he had forsaken both family and friends.Like Lady Gregory and Yeats as well, he would defend the Samhain principles even against his fellovf-directors. "I am prepared to stake everything on a creative movement even if we all go to the work-house at the end of four years," he worote in a memorandum to Yeats over a disagreement in policy.^, Art which deals with the whole of life will by its very nature . encompass both tragedy and comedy, for "it is only the catastrophes of life that give substance and power to the tragedy and humour which are the true poles of art. Humour, he felt, v/as "the essentiallyII -7poetic quality in vital verse.2 Moreover, humour is the true testof morals, both in art and in life, "as no vice is humorous";Bestial is, in its very essence, opposed to the idea of humour. All decadence is opposed to true humour. The heartiness of real and frank laughter is a sign that cannot be mistaken that what we laugh at is not out of harmony with that instinct of sanity that we call by so many names.4But the sorrows and bitterness of life will in turn leave their mark onhumour, and again he points to "the frank philosophy of large classesamong the French, v/ho are kept healthy by an ironical attitude towardstheir own distress."5 Comedy, like tragedy, will inevitably containbrutality as well as beauty, and as in life itself, the mingling of thetwo will provide the richness v/hich nourishes.^lemorandum in the possession of Mrs. Stephens. _Cf. Fay and Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre, 211: after the row over The^hadow of theGlen, Synge said, "Very well, then; the next play I write I will make |sure it will annoy them." i^Notebooks, probably 1907, Plays,1932,iii.%Letter to Yeats, probably 190%,in the possession of Mrs. Stephens.^Notebooks, probably 1907? Plays,1932,v. |^"Loti and Huysmans," The Speaker,18 April 1905,38. After the first production of The Playboy Synge commented, "We shall have to establish a society for the preservation of Irish humour."390But where can one find in this modern world the "strong things of life" that will make the drama the powerful nourishment it once was? Synge's wanderings among the hills of Wicklow, the wild wastes of Connemara, and the bare grey islands of Aran provided the ansv/er — the peasant folk of Ireland, a people in whom there still remained "a popular imagination that is fiery, and magnificent, and tender" (Preface to The Playboy). "For the present the only possible beauty in drama is peasant drama," Synge wrote in his notebook. "For the future we must await the making of life beautiful again before we can have beautiful drama.You cannot gather grapes chimney pots."! But in the lives ofthese people, in whom "the springtime of the local life has beenforgotten," there was ample material for his pen.V/ith these tenets in mind, then, Synge wrote his plays, seeking not the didactic interests of a particular moment in history, but the rich joy of a life "superb and wild," keyed much higher than the "overcrowdedQwretchedness" of the t o w n s . N o r was his joy confined to comedy, hisseriousness to tragedy, his reality to plays of modern life. Drama,whether tragedy or comedy, had to answer first as the expression of hissympathy and enthusiasm for life. His comment concerning The Playboyapplies to all of his work:I wrote ji-^ directly, as a piece of life, without thinking, or caring to think, whether it was a comedy, tragedy, or extravaganza, or whether it would be held to have, or not to have a purpose.5Drama must first provide that "nourishment, not very easy to define, onwhich our imaginations live." bhat else it does depends upon the personalvision of the dramatist.Notebooks, 18 March 1907, Greene and Stephens,op.cit.,239. According to Annemarie Aufhauser, Sind die Dramen von John Millington Synge durch franz6*sische vorbilden b e ingflusst ? (Wur zburg : Hi chard May r, 1935),18, Synge was impressed by Jean-François Millet's paintings.^Note from his diary, 17 Ipril 1892, Stephens MS,313•^"A Letter to a Young Man," 19 February 1907, Plays,1932,vii.391The Shock of New ÎÆaterialAdieu, sweet Angus, Maeve, and Fand,Ye plumed yet skinny Shee,That poets played with hand in hand To learn their ecstasy.We'll stretch in Red Dan Sally's ditch.And drink in Tuhber fair,Or poach with Red Dan Philly's bitch The badger and the hare.("The passing of the Shee")"Is not style born out of the shock of new material?" Synge onceremarked to Yeats,^ and certainly in his plays we find much that, likethe poit^n of Inishmaan, brings "a shock of joy to the blood."2 Byhis own admission, Synge found the material for his plays in his travelsin Ireland: much of it, indeed, can be traced to his essays on Wicklow,Connemara, and the Aran Islands.In I898 I went to the Aran Islands — I had known the Co.Wicklow peasantry — we always spent every summer there — intimates for years — and found the subjects of most of my plays there,he wrote to an Aiûerican journalist. 5 In another note he remarked,"Remember that the Kerry 'stuff that is in the Shanachie is more or lessraw material only."4 "No drama can grow out of anything other than thefundamental realities of life," he had written to MacKenna. It is tohis essays we must turn, therefore, for the rav/ material of his plays.Yeats sought for subject matter in a world of his own creation; Synge,like Lady Gregory, achieved himself in this world. Like Lady Gregory,also, Synge transmuted his source material into the reality of a lifethat is timeless and of lasting truth. Reaching beyond his fellowfolk-dramatist, he captured the spirit of lyrical beauty as well, mouldinghis raw material into his own personal cry for "what is best and Richest,if it's for a short space only" on "the ridge of the world." A brief^Quoted by Virginia Moore, The Unicorn,6.khe Aran Islands. Works. 1910.III.47.10 December 1907, Spencer Brodney collection. Trinity College,Dublin.^24 December 1907, Spencer Brodney collection, TCD.392examine.tion of these sources will he of value,.then, for a deeperunderstanding not only of the plays themselves, but of the attitude anddevelopment of the dramatist who used them.A study of his travel sketches reveals not so much a topographicalsurvey as a personal record of the moods, atmosphere, and colouringof the Irish countryside and people reflected in a sensitive observer."I have given a direct account of my life on the islands, and of whatI met with among them," Synge wrote in the Introduction to The AranIslands, "inventing nothing, and changing nothing that is essential."!Throughout he remained the passive but sympathetic witness, reacting toeach subtle alteration in weather and temperament, sharing briefly inthe emotional climate of the life he was privileged to penetrate. Weas readers see clearly because he felt intensely, and it is this strangebut complete involvement rather than actual deeds or events whichprovided him with the material for his plays. A comparison with theplays indicates that, except for The Well of the Saints, Synge chosefor dramatization plots that he had already recorded in his essays,and in this play as well we find reflected his experiences with thepeople and his personal feelings for the country he loved.Although In the Shadow of the Glen was the first of his plays to reach2the stage, Synge had already written Riders to the Sea, which is based almost entirely on incidents he observed on his first visit to Aran in 1898. The key to the figure of Maurya can be found in the following comments :The maternal feeling is so powerful on these islands that it gives a life of torment to the women. Their sons grow up to be banished as soon as they are of age, or to live here in continual danger on the sea; their daughters go away also, or are worn out in their youth with bearing children that grow up to harass them in their own turn a little later;^^The Aran Islands, Works,1910,III,vi.2Letter to Brodney (Brodzky), 12 December 1907, TCD collection.^The Aran Islands, Works,1910,III,111-112.393On these islands the v/omen live only for their children, and it is hard to estimate the power of the impulse that made this old woman stand out and curse her son.^Maurya's vision has its roots in a vision related to Synge:Vvhen the horses were coming down to the slip an old woman saw her son, that was drowned a while ago, riding on one of t h e m . 2The atmosphere of doom pervading the play may have come from Synge’s ownfeelings after witnessing the funeral of a young man drovmed at sea:As they talked to me and gave me a little poteen and a little bread when they thought I was hungry, I could not help feeling that I was talking with men who were under judgment of death. I knew that every one of them would be drowned in the sea in a fev/ years and battered naked on the rocks, or would die in his o m cottage and be buried with another fearful scene in the graveyard I had come f r o m . 5And old Maurya’s final speech of acquiescence and reconciliation may havebeen born of the following comment in a letter from his Aran friend,Martin McDonough: "But at the same time we have to be satisfied becausea person cannot live a l w a y s ."4 Out of these unrelated incidents andemotions Synge experienced as he watched these people pit their strengthin a losing battle against the sea, he wrote his play.His second published play. In the Shadow of the Glen, rose out of evenearlier experiences in County Wicklow. It is set in Glenmalure, one ofthe longest and loneliest glens in Ireland. At the head of the glen standsan old cottage, and in this almost inaccessible setting Synge found thescene for his play. Mood and atmosphere come from his own feelings as hewalked the lonely roads of Wicklow:4Ibid.,81-82.^Ibid.,220-222.^The Aran Islands, Works,1910,III, 216.. ^Quoted by Greene and Stephens,op.cit.,105. Lord Dunsany,"IrishWriters I Have Knov/n," Atlantic Monthly, 1913,66, remarks on the similarity f ■ to a stanza from Kipling’s "The Gift of the Sea"(l890):"Be still," she ' said, "What more can ye do to me?" Pierre Loti’s Pecheur d ’Islande has a• similar passage, but the approach of the two writers is entirely different. The Green Sheaf,no.6,p.12(1903) includes "Cobus on Death," a translation by Christopher St. John from H. Heijermans’ The Good Hope. Although Synge contributed "A Dream on Inishmaan" to the second issue in 1903, there is no other indication that he knew Heijermans’ play when he wrote Riders ip Sea.394Among the cottages that are scattered through the hills of County Wicklov/ I have met with many people who show in a singular way the influence of a particular locality. These people live for the most part beside old roads and pathways where hardly one man passes in the day, and look out all the year on unbroken barriers of heath. At every season heavy rains fall for often a week at a time, till the thatch drips with water stained to a dull chestnut and the floor in the cottages seems to be going back to the conditions of the bogs near it. Then the clouds break, and there is a night of terrific storm from the south-west...when the winds come'down through the narrow glens with a congested whirl and roar of a torrent, breaking at times for sudden moments of silence that keep up the tension of the mind. At such times the people crouch all night over a few sods of turf and the dogs howl in the lanes.... This peculiar climate, acting - on a population that is already lonely and dwindling, has caused or . increased a tendency to nervous depression among the people, and every degree of sadness, from that of the man v/ho is merely mournful to that of the man v/ho has spent half his life in the madhouse, is common among these hills.!Again and again he refers to the "sense of desolation" and loneliness2felt among the Wicklow hills, and "the three shadowy countries that are never forgotten in Wicklow — America (their El Dorado), the Union and the Madhouse." The madhouse is most frequently mentioned^; consequently his Wicklow sketches provide the material for the subplot of Patch Darcy’sdeath as well, including the tale of a similar incident.4The plot itself, however, was told to Synge in Aran in 1898 by Pat Dirane, one of the lineal descendants of the ancient seanachies. ^ And although the story of a man who "plays dead" in order to test his wife’s fidelity is an old one in world literature, Synge retained the form as it was told him by the old man of Inishmaan. Ten years later while defending The Playboy from violent Irish-Araerican exiles. Lady Gregory was told by an old nurse that In the Shadow of the Glen was but "a fireside story" she had often heard in her youth in Ireland.^^"The Oppression of the Hills," In Wicklow,Works,1910,IV,13-14.^Cf. "Glencree," on.cit.,38-59»^"The People of the Glens," op.cit.,27.50,55-34.4"The Oppression of the Hills,"op.cit.,14-15* Cf. "At a WicklowPair," op.cit~. .47.^The Aran Islands,Works,1910,111,42-46.Of.David H.Greene,"The Shadow of the Glen and the kidow of Ephesus," PMLA,1947,233^1 et passim. ^ ,, Qnr Irish Theatre, 110-111.Cf.ly.G.Fay and Catherine Carswell,The Pays of the Abbey Theatre (iTY : Hare our t Brace,1935),92. AE, in "Religion aïïH Love,"^^ 8^. 1,2 (June 1904),45-49, complains about arranged marriages in Ireland.395The source for The Tinker’s Wedding again comes from Synge’s sketchesof *.icklow and his own observations on the life of the vagrants of thewest. The main plot comes from a tale he heard while visiting a fair,in which two tinkers persuade the priest to wed them "for half a' sovereign...and a tin can"; when they renege on the can, they are packed1 off by the priest as "a pair of rogues and schemers."^ The marriagecustoms among the tinkers were told to him by another traveller he meton the roads and supplied Synge with the relationship between Michael2Byrne and Sarah Casey. The incident of tying the priest in a bag might be traced to "The Lout and his Mother," a poem in Douglas Hyde’s Religious Songs of Connacht with which Synge was certainly f a m i l i a r ,3 but as we shall see, Synge has employed his sources in his own way.The Well of the Saints takes us beyond Ireland to an old French farce Synge va^ :;uely remembered."^ It has since been traced to a fifteenth century mystère Synge made notes of while reading for his courses at the Sorbonne.5 Although many sources have been suggested by diligent critics — Clemenceau’s Le Voile de Bonheur,6 Bulwer-Lytton’s Pilgrims of the Rhine,? Maeterlinck’s Les Aveugles^ — , again we find^In Wicklow, Works,1910,IV,47-48.^Ibid.,5-6. Cf. Moore’s account of the same incident in Vale,200-201, v/hich varies slightly.^Cf.Cornelius Weygandt, Irish Plays and Playwrights(London ; Constable, 1913)5171' The Aran Islands, Works,1910,III,117-18; Greene and Stephens,op.cit.,129.^Gertrude Schoepperle, "John Synge and his old French Farce,"North American Review,1921,504*5 X»Notes, probably spring 1903, record excerpts from "La Moralité de l’Aveugle et du Boiteau" 1496 by Andrieu de la Vigne, quoted in Petit de Julleville’s Histoire duc Theatre en France, which Synge read in I896.^George Moore, Preface to The Untilled Field,2nd ed. (London:Heinemann,1914),ix.n'Maurice Bourgeois, John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre (LondonrConstable,1913),I87-I9O.^Martin Ellehauge, Striking Figures Among Modern Engdish Dramatists (Copenhagan:Levin and Munksgaard,193l),20.396incidents in his journals which suggest more of the main story and many of the details. "The Vagrants of Wicklow" records the great dismay ■ and sorrow of an old man whose long white hair had been cut off in prison:"V/hat use is an old man without his hair? A man has only his bloom like the trees; and what use is an old man v/ithout his white hair?!The Aran Islands refers to the old ruined church of the Ceathair Aluinn (The Four Beautiful Persons) and the holy well near it famous for curesoof blindness and epilepsy.^ Synge’s first teacher on Aran was a "dark man," Old Mourteen, noted as much for his sly earthy humour as for his gift of the tongue.5 One might safely state, therefore, that although his main plot did not come from his notebook, Synge’s experiences in Ireland again served to give the play its final form.One of the greatest battles in twentieth century theatre occurred over The Playboy of the Western World,a fairly even match between those who vehemently denied and those v/ho eagerly affirmed the author’s sources and intentions. Once more Synge set his scene in rural Ireland, choosing this time a country shebeen or public house in the wilds of Mayo. And again we can find his material in the travel sketches. The story of "a Connaught man who killed his father with the blow of a spade when he v/as in a passion" was a familiar one in Aran4 and was told to both Yeats and Symons before Synge heard it5; in addition, the taleWicklow, Works, 1910.IV.3-4.^The Aran Islands.Works.1910.III.15-14.X^Aran Islands,op.cit,,4 and 12-13.4The Aran Islands.Works,1910.III.88-89.^Cf. Autobiographies,545-44.569; Arthur Symons, Cities and Sea-Coastsand Islands(London:W.Collins Sons,1918),307ff.; Thomas Johnson Westropp. Illustrated Guide to the Northern, Western, and Southern Islands and Coast of Ireland (Dublin:Antiquarian Handbook Series,I905),87; Greane and Stephens,op.cit.,79* Gerard Pay, "The ’Playboy’ Eiot," Manchester Guardian Weekly,31 January 1957»7: Denis Brogan, Senior told of "the man from his own village who v/as known as ’Bagdad, ’ not only because he had lived in the Middle East but because, infuriated at his father’s longevity and the delay in inheriting the family farm, he had shot at the old man with both barrels of a shot-gun but had succeeded only in winging him. A well-known among the peasantry, according to Mr. Brogan." Holloway,27 June 1907,National Library of Ireland MS 1805,412-414, records the story as told to him by Michael Tighe «397paralleled a recent incident, "the Lynchehaun case," although Synge expressly states that he did not have this case in mind.^ Eoy/ever, the r characterizations of the peasants, the Islanders’ delight in roguery and romance, ^ the strange combination of "wildness and reserve"5 which he observed in his travels, as well as actual phrases and expressions,can be found in his essays on Aran and the west of Ireland: "Listen to whatI’m telling you: a man who is not married is no better than an oldjackass"4; "*We|.l,’ he said, when he was quiet again, ’isn’t it a greatwonder to think that those men are as big rogues as ourselves’"5*' "Would any one kill his father if he was able to help it?"^; "’They’re like me so,’ she said; ’would any one have thought that!”’?; "Is there any war in the world at this time, noble person?"®; "Y/ishing you the , best compliments of this season."9 Similarly, he transferred the Stooks , of the Dead Women from Dingle B a y , r a c i n g from the sands of Kerry,Ü and his "little hostess" from Great Blasket^^ to the more advantageous , setting of County Mcjfo. But as we shall see later, the importance of the play lies not in the original deed or the immediate environment, but in the development of the Playboy himself.^Letter to MacKenna, quoted by Greene and Stephens,op.cit.,263. Hov/ever, an early draft contains a reference to Lynchehaun.^The Aran Islands,op.cit.,239; In V/icklow, Works, 1910,IV,98*A^ran Islands,op.cit.,136-39; 75; 63; 168-69; 218-220.4lbid.,155.^Ibid.,259.6lbid.,89.7lbid..l22.^Ibid.,119;20.^Greene and Stephens «0T>. cit., 105. Cf .ibid. ,186.West Kerry. Works,1910,IV,119•^^Ibid..155-55. Cf. Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre,5-4.12Cf. Greene and Stephens,op.cit.,189.398Deirdre of the Sorrows brought Synge directly into the mainstreamof the Irish literary movement for the first time, and back into thefolklore of his people as well. Lady Gregory had translated this taleof the Irish Helen, breathing Kiltartan life into those "rare and royalnames/ ormy sheepskin yet r e t a i n s , a n d as we have seen later wrote herown personal myth round the variation of the tale in Grania; AE hadconj .red a spirited wraith wandering through Druid mists: more recentlyYeats had added his heroic vision to the lovers’ tale. Synge’s departurebegan with choice of source. The earlier dramatists had made use of afifteenth century version previously translated by Standish 0 ’Gradyand Douglas Hyde2. Synge on the other hand chose a version in modernJ Irish, which he had in part translated on a visit to Aran in 1901.^However, he was also familiar with Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne,which he had reviewed in 1902.^ The same year, his article on 03d Irish, literature for 1 'European singled out the qualities in the saga whichfulfilled his demands for the most exalted poetry:Plusieurs récits qui y appartiennent, tel que l£ Sort Des Fils d ’Uisneach, sont tous imprégnés de cette poesie particulièrement celtique qui raunit d ’une façon inattendue une tendresse timide, un hêroisme rude et maie et un amour infini pour les beautés de la nature.5But the time had not yet come for him to turn away from the tramp life of the present to the heroic personages of the past. Just as he was not able to synthesize the irony of comedy with the tragic quality of the^"Queens," Poems and Translations, Dorks,1910,11,203.^Cf.Notes to Cuchulain of Muirthemne, 359-60.^Andrev/ MacCurtin, Fate of the Children of Uisneach (Dublin:Society . for the Preservation of the Irish Language, 1898). The MS from which tbs text . is taken was written in 1740. Synge’s translation is in the possession of î.îrs. Stephens.^"An Epic of Ulster," The Speaker, 7 June 1902,284-85. He also reviewed a version of A.E.Leahy in Heroic Romances of Ireland, "A Translation of Irish Romance," The Manchester Guardian, 6 March 1906,5.5 ^ X""La Vieille Littérature Irlandaise," L ’Européen,15 March 1902,11.Gf^ Edward M. Stephens, "Synge’s Last Play," Contemporary Review,1954, 288-93.399dream until he had written The Well of the Saints, he was not yet equipped to approach the lyrical and restrained moonlight beauty of the classical myth until he had passed through the vigorous, colourful, myth-making turbulence of The Playboy. Only then could he realize that past and present are one, and illuminate his personal observations and emotions within the formal ritual of a fate foretold. And then, only after deeper experiences in his own life as well as his observations of others, could he recognize the coLimon bond between "Golden Deirdre" and "a tinker's doxy,"! "Priend of Ronsard" and "Lark of Ulster."2When he did finally begin work on Deirdre of the Sorrows, Synge followed AE's e..ample and wrote his play in three acts. Unfortunately the play was not completed when he died, and only the last act was deemed satisfactory by Synge. The remainder of the play was pieced together by Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Synge's fiancee Maire O'Neill (Molly Allgood).^ • Although he was apparently intending to introduce several original elements into the plot, as it stands the play does not wander far from the original action of the saga. He follows Deirdre from the time she is twenty in Lavarcham's house in Slieve liiadh, to Alba y/ith Naisi and his two brothers, and back to Emain Macha to meet her death and fulfil the prophecy. Within this framework Synge tells his tale; it is in characterization and general treatment of theme that we see the greatest freedom he makes v/ith his material. And here, too, there is a consistent thread v/hich follov/s from his first one-act plays through the riotous comedy of The Tinker * s Wedding and deeper ironical strain of Well of the Saints to fruition in The Playboy./^"Queens," Poeias and Translations, Works, 1910, II, 203. 2"0n a Birthday," op.cit.,225.Greene and Stephens,op.cit.,300.400Life and the DreamWoods of Cuan, woods of Cuan, dear country of the eastj It’s sevenyears we’ve had a life was joy only, and this day we’re going west,J this day we're facing death, maybe, and death should be a poor, untidything, though it’s a queen that dies.(Peirdre of the Sorrows, Act II,521^)The basic themes underlying Synge’s plays followed naturally fromhis theories of art and drama and his approach to material. For artwhich has its roots in "the clay and worms," yet seeks after what is"superb and wild in reality," implies a conflict. This conflict betweenthe ordinary and the ideal, the bitter and the sweet, the real and thedream, reason and the imagination, reality and fantasy, Synge saw asbasic both to life and to nature. The conflict takes two forms in hisplays — externally in nature, and internally in the heart and mind ofman. In external nature there is the continual struggle between the beautyand joy of life and youth and the ugliness and sorrow of old age and death.2In the soul of man this struggle is reflected in his eternal conflictbetween the illusion and the reality. Nature to man symbolizes power,wildness, and a dreadful joy; the"common, week-day kind of" life manhas built around him symbolizes ugliness, boredom, decay, and eventuallyan unnappy death. By choosing to dramatize the life of the Aran Islandersand the vagrants of Wicklow, Synge was tearing away the veils ofsophistication one finds in tovm life, and was dealing with reality inits more elemental form." The continual passing in this island between the misery of last night and the splendour of to-day seems to create an affinity between the '■ moods of these people and the moods of varying rapture and dismay that are frequent in artists, and ir^ertain forms of alienation....In Inishraaan one is forced to believe in a sympathy between man and nature,^All references to the plays will use the pagination of the 1932 edition of the Plays.2£f. Entry 27 December 1888, notebooks quoted in Stephens MS,36?: "We fear death it seems to me as we fear getting an old tooth out. Life and old teeth are unquestionably misfortunes but dentists and death beds are horrible."401he comments in The Aran Islands.^ Humanity, art, and nature areinextricably bound in the conflict between the real and the ideal, lifeand the dream. We can examine this basic conflict first as Syngerepresents it in the power of external nature, second in the lives andemotions of his characters, third in the most elaborate effect thisconflict has on his people — the creation of the myth.The religious art is a thing of the past only — a vain and foolish regret — and its place has been taken by our quite modern feeling for the beauty and mystery of nature, an emotion that has gradually risen up as religion in the dogmatic sense has gradually died. Our pilgrimages are not to Canterbury or Jerusalem, but to Killarney, Cumberland and the Alps. In my olays and topographical books I have tried to give humanity and this mysterious external world.2The power of external nature is uerhaps the first impression onereceives from Synge’s plays. Nature actually effects the climax in bothRiders to the Sea and In the Shadow of the Glen: more subtly, it reflectsthe motivation behind Peirdre of the Sorrows » Nature attracts — yetrepels, heightens yet depresses, strengthens yet enfeebles, enriches yetdeprives, releases yet binds. For these strong, simple people whosewisdom reaches back into the folk imagination of the past and yet whoseemotions are almost childlike in their spontaneity, nature is the onedependable reality in a world which restlessly hovers between the ecstasyof fulfilment and the tragedy of oblivion. Intensity of emotion merelyreflects this sharp clarity of nature's moods:This procession along the olive bogs, between the mountains and the sea, on this grey day of autumn, seemed to wrin^ me with the pang of emotion one meets everywhere in Irelana — an emotion that is partly local and patriotic, and partly a share of the desolation that is mixed everywhere with the supreme beauty of the w o r l d .3^The Aran Islands,Works'. 1910.III.49-51.Cf."The Old and New in Ireland,"The Academy and Literature, 6 September, 1902,238.^Notebooks, probably 190?» Plays,1932,iii.^In West Kerry, Works,1910,IV,71 « Cf.note 7 May 1905 quoted in Stephens MS, 1885:"Donegal, Lough Swilly - morning, curious wistfulness and delicacy of beauty, loneliness, illusions. Mulroy Bay — tension of the isolation of vhat is most divine." In a letter to Molly 28 August I9O5, Greene and Stephens,op.cit.,209, he wrote of the woods of Kerry, "It is good for anyone to be out in such beauty as this and it stirs me up to try and make my Irish plays as beautiful as Ireland." Cf."Prelude," Poem8,Works,1910,II,223.402It is this mystical acceptance of nature v.hich we find in all of Synge's plays.The sea broods over Riders to the Sea from the opening speech of the young girls; they speak of their drowned brother Michael and examine his clothing; they are anxious about Bartley who insists on travelling when "the tide's turned to the wind." There is no synonym, no adjective, no personification for "the sea"; the words anpear on every page until it becomes some irresistible power that lures away a v/oinan's strong sons and leaves the old desolate. In the face of active nature the women are passive, and at the end Maurya's lifelong struggle against this acceptance of the powerful forces of nature is over: "They're all gonenow, and there isn't anything ..ore the sea can do to me"(53)* There is resignation, not to old age or to the coming of death, but a relief that at last the sea holds no terror. It is the sea that judges and condemns, that takes away life and bestows the peace of resignation:"No man at all can be living forever, and we must be satisfied"(55)*But for the young men the sea has an attraction, and Bartley must go even at the cost of losing his mother's blessing. "It's the life of a young man to be going on the sea, and who would listen to an old woman with one thing and she saying it over?"(4 2). They alone have the strength to challenge the sea, and they go to their deaths with the glory of nature's strength. Nature and the sea mean death but at the same time represent life, for there is no life without the acceptance of challenge even against the inevitable.Similarly, nature provides the whole atmosphere and setting of In the Shadow of the Glen, and is directly responsible for the actions of the characters. Conversation centres on the rain and mist and bogs; the story of Patch Darcy, one of the strong men vho eventually succumbs to the loneliness of the hills, haunts those who are still struggling;403"for isn't a dead man itself more company than to be sitting alone, and hearing the winds crying, and you not knowing on what thing your mind would stay?"(l8) Nora has felt the oppression of the hills, has spent long days seeing "nothing but the mists rolling down the bog, and the mists again and they rolling up the bog, and hearing nothing but the wind crying out in the bits of broken trees were left from the great storm, and the streams roaring with the rain"(25); to marry Michael Dara would - be to commit herself once more to a marriage of convenience and the same dreary solitude. The oppression of the mists and hills cannot be reversed by human action.The action of ^ the Shadow of the Glen takes place on a miserable, wet, windy night. The setting of Peirdre of jth£ Sorrows is also at the death of the day and the year. Darkness follows the travels of Deirdre and Naisi. "It's dark with the clouds are coming from the west and south," says Lavarcnarn on the night that draws Deirdre and the Sons of Usna to a common fate(275); "the night will be the worst. I'm thinking, we've seen these years gone by"(288). The seven years in Alban are happy, but it is at the beginning of the darkness of winter that the lovers choose to leave;I'm well pleased, Naisi, we're going forward in the winter the time the sun has a lov/ place, and 'the moon hsis her mastery in a dark sky, for it's you and I are well lodged our last day, where there is a light behind the clear trees, and the berries on the thorns are a red wall (314-15).And the flames of Ema:-ii Macha stand out against a black slQ^ when thetragedy of Deirdre finally reaches its climax: "Deirdre is dead, andNaisi is dead; and if the oaks and stars could die for sorrow, it's adark sk;^’ and a hard and naked earth we'd have this night in Emain"(548).Lavarcham's words call forth the grief of a sympathetic nature to meet thesorrow of humanity. In Well of the Saints, the bleakness of Martin'sspirit is reflected in the darkness which returns to his eyes; "Is ita storm of thunder is coming, or the last end of the world?...The heavensis closing. I'm thinking, with darkness and great trouble passing in thesky"(142).404But with darkness comes relief to Martin and Mary Doul, and theycan once more, like Nora, the Tramp, the youthful Deirdre, and the tinkers,appreciate the attractions of nature as well as its power. All feelthe freedom of nature, and joyfully answer its call to farther horizons.The Tramp most clearly represents man who has discovered the solution tothis tension in the external world; by accepting nature and bending withit, he has found peace:We'll be going now. I'm telling you, and the time you'll be feeling the cold, and the frost, and the great rain, and the sun again, and the south wind blowing in the glens, you'll not be sitting up on awet ditch, the way you're after sitting in this place, making yourselfold with looking on each day, and it passing you by. You'll be saying one time) "It's a grand evening, by the grace of God," and another time, "It's a wild night, God help us; but it'll pass, surely (31).Mary Byrne feels this oneness with nature as well: "It's a grand thingto be waking up a day the like of this, v/hen there's a warm sui in it,and a kind air, and you'll hear the cuckoos singing and crying out onthe top of the hills"^(8l). Martin and Mary Doul also share this senseof intimacy and companionship with nature. The sounds and smells ofnature are worked into the fabric of the play, and rejoicing in their safereturn to blindness, the old couple rhapsodize on the sympathy of nature:Mary Doul. There's the sound:of one of them twittering yellow birds do be coming in the springtime from beyond the sea, and there'll be a fine warmth novv in the sun, and a sweetness in the air, the way it'll be a grand thing to be sitting here quiet and easy, smelling the/things growing up, and budding from the earth.Martin Doul.I'm smelling the furze a while back sprouting on the hill, and if you'd hold your tongue you'd hear the lambs of Grianan, though it's near drowned their crying is with the full river making noises in the &len.Mary Doul....The lambs is bleating, surely, and there's cocks and laying J hens making a fine stir a mile off on the face of thehill.(153-154).^David Greene,"The Tinker's Wedding,a Revaluation,"825, records a , lyrical passage in the early drafts of the play: "VDiat is it the Almighty God would care of the like of us? You'Id never see the Almighty doing a • thing to the larks or to the swallows or to the swift birds do be crying out when the sun is set, or to the hares do be racing above in the fine •spring and what way would he be following us in the dark nights when it's quiet and easy we are, and v/e never asking him a thing at all," Here Molly Byrne identifies herself with nature and in opposition to Christianity.405Even the Saint mingles his Christian asceticism with the pagan ecstasyof nature-worship, praising "glittering seas, and the furze isopening above, will soon have the hills shining as if it was fine creelsof gold they were, rising to the sky"(l6l). Nature unites Deirdre andNaisi? "By the sun and moon and the whole earth, I wed Deirdre to Naisi.•••May the air bless you, and water and the wind, the sea, and all the hoursof the sun and moon"(30l).Images borrowed from nature constantly rise to the lips of Synge'scharacters. The smallest detail is not allowed to pass unnoticed, andbecomes a characteristic part of their speech. A day may come in thewest for Deirdre "that the larks are cocking their crests on the edgeof the clouds, and the cuckoos making a stir"(350). Deirdre has keptNaisi*8 tent "these seven years as tidy as a bee-hive or a linnet'snest"(528). Naisi's return to Eniain is as meaningless "as the thrushescome from the north, or young birds fly out on a dark sea"(314)* Christycomes from "a windy corner of high, distant hills"(192) and would be"as happy as the sunshine of St. Martin's day"(l99)* "Let you tell usyour story before Pegeen will come," admonishes the Widow Quin," inplace of grinning your ears off like the moon of May"(213). The sunrises "to the noon of day," and Christy is "mounted on the spring-tideof the stars of luck"(258). Sarah Casey is "a terror since the moondid change"(82), for "the spring-time is a queer time"(62). There isa pastoral, almost liturgical quality in Deirdre's speeches:Since that, Naisi, I have been one time the like of a ewe looking for a lamb that had been taken away from her, an one time seeing new goldon the stars, and a new face on the moon, and all times dreadingEinain ( 296-97 ).Old Lavarcham comments, "Birds go mating in the spring of the year, and ewes at leaves falling, but a young girl must have her lover in all the course of the sun and moon"(300). Naisi's eyes are described by Owen as "sheep's eyes"; the people of the glens frequently refer to their e.periences with the herds; "the sheep were ly^ng under the ditch and406every one of them coughing and choking like an old man, with the greatrain and the fog"(l6); and husband and wife attack each other withimages drawn from their lives as shepherds. Deirdre, embroidering 'the O»'green gap olAWOod, " dreams of "a man with his hair like the raven, maybe, and his skin like the snow, and his lips like blood spilt . -on it"(282).This sympathy they feel with nature works the other way as well, and Synge's people in turn endow nature with human frailty. Christy was "born lonesome. I'm thinking, as the moon of dawn"(221). Mornings are lonesome for those exiled from Ireland, "with birds crying on the bogs"(510). The Saint speaks of a "bare starving rock"(ll7), and blind keen ears can hear "a soft wind turning round the little leaves of the spring"(l67)/tr^nfears the return of blindness, "sitting alone in the cold air, hearing the night coming, and the blackbirds flying round in the briers crying to themselves"(I48). "It's lonesome and cold you'll be feeling the ditch.where you'll be lying down that night. I'm telling you," Sarah Casey warns Michael Byrne," and you hearing the old woman making a great noise in her sleep, and the bats squeaking in the trees"(65)This appreciation of the external world is naturally accompanied by an admiration for physical beauty. It is this admiration which causes the pathos of the two old beggars in The Well of jbhe Saints %Ao receive the gift of sight only to have their illusions of beauty destroyed; consolation can come only when they replace the disillusion of the present by a fresh dream of the beauty of old age, long white hair, and a silken beard. Molly Byrne's "sweet beautiful voice you'd never tire to be hearing** 'must belong to "a fine, soft, rounded woman," thinks blind Martin (104). And the beauty of Molly and Pegeen gives rise in turn to the poetic flights of Martin and Christy;^Cf. "The Pine Time of the Year Increases Petrarch's Sorrow," Translations. Works, 1910,11,237*407Martin Doul. I'm thinking by the mercy of God it's few sees anything but them is blind for a space.....It ' s few sees the old women rotting for the grave, and it’s few sees the like of yourselfThough it's shining you are, like a high lamp would drag in the ships out of the sea(l4 0).Christy. Isn't there the light of seven heavens in your heart alone, the way you'll be an angel's lamp to me from this out, and I abroad in the darkness, spearing salmons in the Owen or the Carrowmore? (251-52).It is but a short step from a love and appreciation of the beauty ofnature to the dread that beauty and the joys of the life of nature will/ eventually disappear, leaving ugliness and old age in their wake. Norarealizes that she and Michael Dara cannot escape the fate of old DanBurke :You'll be getting old, and I'll be getting old, and in a little while.I'm telling you, you'll be sitting up in your bed — the way himselfwas sitting — with a shake in your face, and your teeth falling, and the white hair sticking out round you like an old bush where sheep . do be leaping a gap.... It's a pitiful thing to be getting old, but/ it's a queer thing surely(27)*Mary Byrne, the old reprobate tinker, soliloquizes on the brevity of youthand the necessity of tasting the joy of life and nature while we can:"Maybe the two of them have a good right to be walking out the littleshort while they'd be young"(78). She reserves the same rights forherself as well: "Y/hat's a little stroke on your head beside sittinglonesome on a fine night, hearing the dogs barkin^, and the batssqueaking, and you saying over, it's a short while only till you die"(79)*^pPegeen, like Nora, has hersliare of "horizon-fever" ; "And myself, a girl, was tempted often to go sailing the seas till I'd marry a Jev/-man, v/ith ten kegs of gold, and I not knowing-at all there was the like of you drawing nearer, like the stars of God"(255)*^Cf.Jan Setterquist, Ibsen and the Beginnings of Anglo-Irish Drama.I.John Millington Synge (Upsala Irish Studies)(Dublin:Hodger Figgis,1951)719.. The Aran Islands,Works,1910.111,171:"The black curagh working slowly through the world of grey, and the soft hissing of the rain, gave me one of the moods in which we realize with immense distress the short moment we have left us to experience all the wonder and beauty of the world"; ibid.,6 3.If408But in Deirdre of the Sorrov/s the dread of the ugliness and fatigueof old age and the desperate reaching out after life are woveninextricably into the theme. It is this dread that gives Deirdre andNaisi the strength to face an early death:It's this hour we're between the daytime and a night where there is sleep for ever, and isn't it a better thing to be following on to a near death, than to be bending the head down, and dragging with the feet, and seeing one day a blight showing upon love where it is sweet and tender?(515)There is "no safe place...on the ridge of the world"(515) against theonslaught of old age. Owen constantly reminds Deirdre that old ageis no respecter of persons; "Queens get old, Deirdre, with their whiteand long arms going from them, and their backs hooping. I tell you it'sa poor thing to see a queen's nose reaching down to scrape her chin"(508)^ .Conchubor the High King has already reached this knov/ledge: "There'sone sorrow has no end surely — that's being old and lonesome"(557)•Deirdre rejoices that death has erased the fear of old age for herthree comrades, and it is this realization that gives her the courageto face death herself: "The dav/n and evening are a little while, thewinter and the summer pass quickly, and what way would you and I, Naisi,have joy for ever?"(514)*The importance of nature ih the lives of Synge's people leadsnaturally to the second theme running through his plays, the conflictwithin these characters themselves between reality and the dream, thelife they lead and the dream of escape into a world of beauty and joywhich old age cannot wither. Some have the opportunity to reach outfor that dream; some reach past the dream to a richer feality beyond.We have seen that nature'constantly reminds us that life is short, beautyis transient, and old age brings ugliness and a withering into death.But nature in a friendlier mood symbolizes the freedom and joy oflove and life. Nora in the freedom of the road, Pegeen in her dream of^Cf. Lavarcham's warning to Conchubor in Act III: "There's things a king can't have, Conchubor....Pools and kings and scholars are all one in a story with her like."409the Playboy, Deirdre in her seven years of love, all reach out for the richness of a life that is "superb and v;ild." All three are keenly aware of the vanishing of beauty and the brevity of life; all seek something better than the dull, conventional life they lead. And so each chooses to give up the security of her ordinary surroundings and is willing to face the unknown in an effort to attain and preserve, if only for a little while, the ideal. Even the carefree tinkers sense the brevity of life and the need to taste the joys of life while they can; Mary Byrne, too, has a right to "her full pint when the night's fine, and there's a dr%- moon in the sky"(78).^But this spiritual conflict effected by external nature goes deeper yet. Nature itself can be either real or illusory. The Tramp's view of nature is realistic, but optimistic: "the rain is falling, but theair is kind, and maybe it'll be a grand morning, by the grace of God"(3l).He prefers the risk to the settled life of the herd or even "the poor raountainy man. " Nora, too, realizes that escape implies its ov/n set of values: "I'm thinking it's myself will be wheezing that time with lyingdovm under the heavens when the night is cold," she replies humorously(32). But "the like of her" could never be happy within the ugly man-made conventions of materialism, so it's with the Tramp she goes.In The Tinker's Wedding v/e have this situation reversed, for Sarah Casey yearns for the symbol of materialism and convention: "I'll be married now in a short while; and from this day there will no one have a right to call me a dirty name, and I selling cans in Wicklow or Wexford or the city of Dublin itself"(85). But the tinker's law has more reality and joy than the semi-civilization Sarah aspires to, and here Mary Byrne represents the truth of the- vagrant's world; "Is it putting that ring on your finger will keep you from getting an aged woman and losing the fine face you have, or be easing your pains...?"(80) Both Sarah andthe priest are justly paid for their foolishness in meddling with worlds to which neither is constitutionally attuned. Sarah Casey, like Nora Burke, belongs on the roads, and for both the life that is a joy only comes with the freedom of the wanderer.1Cf. ".in Old Woman's Lamentations, " Translations,Works, 1910,II,246-47.410The risk Nora, Sarah, and Deirdre take in following their dream has its roots in the acceptance of the inevitable course of nature. All, like the Trarap, must be v/illing to accept complete commitment to nature’s laws. For Sarah Casey this means a continuation in the way of the tinker's life and the hardships and joys represented by Mary Byrne. On the other hand, væ leave Nora on the threshold: for her, the risk is greater because unknown; but whether the outcome is pleasant or not, it is infinitely preferable to the only other choice left open to her,"the fine Union below in Rathdrum." (Michael Dara is but a shadowy symbol of the insufficient consolation offered by life in the glens.)In the evolution of Deirdre this whole conflict between life and • the dream is both more sharply and more subtly drawn. In the first ’place, the framework is already established; we know the end of the saga; "the troubles are foretold." Furthermore, the characters themselves know that not only are they as human beings subject to the inevitable laws of nature, the surety of death and the ugliness of old age, but their own personal stories within that universe are also pre-ordained and irrevocable.1 Lavarcham, Deirdre*s old nurse, acts as a chorus not only of present action but of future prophecy: "Who'd check her like was made to have her pleasure only, the way if there were no warnings told about her you'd see troubles coming when an old king is taking her, and she without a thought but for her beauty and to be straying the hills"(276). Yet within this framework of the mingling of tv/o worlds — that of ancient prophecy and the personal human note of mortal longings — each character is given the choice of action and self-realization, the desperate reaching-out after the rich joys of life and youth. Impelled by their ovm natures, Deirdre, Naisi, Conchubar and even Owen give voice and meaning to their desires through the ancient words of the prophecy; the past mingles with the present, each illuminating and enlarging the^In a letter to Maire O'Neill, December I906, Synge wrote, "My next play must be quite different from the P.Boy. I want to do something quiet and stately and restrained." Greene and Stephens,op.cit.,223.411significance of the other. Because each is what he is, the ancient prophecy merely reflects the inevitable outcome of this interaction of characters. Conchubor seeks the dream he has held for twenty years,"a place is safe and splendid," with a "light and airy" comrade whose gaiety and liveliness will ease the "store of knowledge that's a weight and terror." But his dream is false, for he cannot buy youth and happiness with all the glory and riches of Emain. "It's yourself has made a crazy story, and let you go back to your arms, Conchubor, and to councils where your name is great, for in this place you are an old man and a fool only"('JV2), cries Deirdre from the edge of Naisi's grave.Conchubor's dream is limited to material happiness which can be bought and power which can be commanded with arms : Deirdre's dream is the realization of her own nature. Though she speaks with the dignity and com.;iand of a queen, she reveals the same longings and despair, the same sincerity that we find in all Synge's women characters from old Maurya to Mary Byrne. It is Deirdre who reaches out and grasps what all her peasant sisters have dimly felt. V/e meet her first as the young girl in sympathy with natural beauty and in love with youth. Conchubor's white hounds and grey horses can have no appeal for "the like of her";"I'm a long while watching the days getting a great speed passing me by. I'm too long taking my will, and it's that way I'll be living always"(285)The wilful young girl, having rejected her first offer of "reality,"becomes in a few brief moments "the queen who is a master, taking her own choice and raking a stir to the edges of the seas"(289). But whereas the Tramp remained merely a symbol of the richer, freer life Nora Burke was seeking, Deirdre's fulfilment depends upon Naisi's willingness toshare the same dream. For he, too, enters the play with a private vision:Deirdre. It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and richest, if it's for a short space only.Naisi. (very distressed) And we've a short space only to betriumphant and brave (297).412In as brief a time we see the gay, careless comrade-at-arms, revellingin the "nights when a king like Conchubor would spit upon his arm ring,and queens will stick their tongues out at the rising moon"(295)>accepting with Deirdre a greater reality well paid "with silence and anear death"(298). Even though he'll have dreams of old age and weariness,they remain dreams only until once more "the ridge of the world" losesits safety and peace. V/ith the reality of death facing them, sevenyears seem but a dream in their turn:We've had a dream, but this night has waked us surely. In a littlevdiile we've lived too long, Naisi, and isn't it a poor thing weshould miss the safety of the grave, and we trampling its edge?(534)The ridge of the world narrows once more, to the space of a narrow,new-made grave. The final reality for Deirdre and the Sons of Usnabelongs once again to mythology, "a story told of a ruined city and araving king and a woman will be young for ever"(343)*Creating the I/iyth Nora and Deirdre have the courage to reach out to a life beyond and accept the rules of the nature they embrace. Nora, like the Tramp, chooses to become one with nature and face inevitable decay and old age. Deirdre, too, accepts nature's irrevocable law. "There is no way to keep life, or love with it, a short space only"(3l6); and so. unwilling to keep watch on "a love had no match and it wasting away"(316), she faces "the end that's come." Reality and nature demand payment in kind. But even with the risk Nora and Deirdre must take, perhaps they are better off th n those who depend upon unrestrained imagination and not action to set them free from the horror and ugliness of their world.For these people, imagination becomes a refuge. It may deceive with simple fantasy, as it does in ^le Well £_f the Saints, or it may liberate, as it does in In the Shadov/ of the Glen, The Tinker's Wedding, and most 'of all in The Playboy./413The power of the imagination is a basic thread running through the pattern of both The Well of the Saints and The Playboy. Martin Doul and Christy Mahon are most affected by illusion and disillusion. In Martin, we see the destructive effect of the imagination; to regain happiness he is forced to create new illusions. In Christy, we see the constructive power of the imagination; it liberates the soul of Christy and creates him anew in the r6le of poet-hero that his admirers have granted him.^ Here the imagination and illusion of symbolism joins hands with the reality of the naturalist tradition. "In Ireland, for a few years more, we have a popular imagination that is fiery, and magnificent, and tender," Synge wrote in his Preface to The Playboy.It is when the reins of this "fiery, and magnificent, and tender" imagination are loosened in an effort to escape from confining reality, that the myth — the most mature stage of this conflict in man betv/een the dream and the reality — is created. The Well of the Saints examines ' man’s need for the myth; The Playboy of the Western World deals with the actual creation of the myth; Deirdre of the Sorrows explores the myth already created as further material for creation.Mary and Martin Doul live in a world of illusion created for them by those who live in the world of reality. Here Synge wanted to write "like a monochrome painting, all in shades of the one colour," Willie Pay reports.2 The entire play is built upon this contrast between "vision" and "insight"; action and theme move backwards and forwards between the world of the blind and the world of sight, between deception and clarity, disappointment and realization. In turn, those who see are torn between bitterness and kindliness, self-deception and self-awareness; those vfho are blind balance and fulfil each other. Those who see have their sight sharpened — and their worlds darkened — by those to whom^Prank O’Connor, "Synge," The Irish Theatre, ed. Lennox Robinson (London;Macmillan,1939),45, cites the Irish proverb: "Praise youth and it will prosper."^Pay and Carswell, The Pays of The Abbey Theatre,I66-68.414sight has been granted: "But it's a queer thing the way yourself andMary Doul are after setting every person in this place, and up beyondto Rathvanna, talking of nothing^and thinking of nothing, but the waythey do be looking in the face," remarks Timmy the Smith(l35)« Theblind in turn enter a darker world once they are enabled to see:For it's a raw, beastly day we do have each day, till I do be thinking it's well for the blind don't be seeing them grey clouds driving on the hill, and don't be looking on people with their noses red, thelike of your nose, and their eyes weeping and watering, the like ofyour eyes, God help you, Timmy the Smith(l30).For both groups, the world becomes too real to be borne, and the great, gift of sight, dreamed of and longed for by the blind, becomes insteada greater misery to both giver and receiver. Martin and Mary can regaintheir former happiness only by darkening their own minds once more,and this is not possible in the surroundings they themselves have madeunbearable. For their disillusionment has in turn created bitternessamongst those who had contributed to the creation — and destruction —.of their former dream; this second dream must be more powerful still,first because they create it in spite of their surroundings and the'knowledge of sight, second because they must seek a world in which theycan live their dream, and the risk is death.The tvfo blind people are an’interesting complement and contrast toeach other. Mary is complacent and easily satisfied, first in herillusion of beauty and "long yellow hair," later in her vision of "aface would be a great wonder when it'll have soft white hair fallingaround it"(l5l). Yet she has few illusions about the world and thepeople, about her. "Well, the Saint's a simple fellow and it's no lie,"she laughs to herself, for his belief that young girls are "thecleanest holy people you'd see walking the world"(ll2). And althoughshe accepts the comforts of illusion, at the same time she never losesher hold on reality: "And v/hat good'll our grey hairs be itself, ifwe have our sight, the way we'll see them falling each day, and turningdirty in the rain?"(155)415Martin on the other hand must enter completely into the dream if he is to believe it at all. He is nervously active and out-going, desiring to be v/ith "those that have their sight" and "dreaming dreams" of the world he cannot see. Then he does gain his sight, disillusionment is harsher for him, and so, like the poet, he strives to endow the world about him, strongly rooted as it is among the clay and worms, v/ith the exaltation of the dream. But reality is too strong for him, and his dreams are y shattered by further disillusionment of "the villainy of a woman and the bloody strength of a raan"(l46). IVhen blindness returns, "the blackness wasn’t so black at all the other time as it is this time"(147)» And it is he who acts, at the end, in a desperate effort to preserve the nevi world y he and Mary have created, even though it means the Saint’s anger, thepeople’s scorn, and isolation forever from the world he once took delight in imagining;For if it’s a right some of you have to be v/orlfing and sweating the like of Timmy the smith, and a right some of you have to be fasting and praying and talking holy talk the like of yourself, I’m thinking it’s a good right ourselves have to be sitting blind, hearing a soft wind turning round the little leaves of the spring and feeling the sun, J and we not tormenting our souls with the sight of the grey days, andthe holy men, and the dirty feet is trampling the world(l67).Like Nora, the Tramp, Sarah Casey, Mary Byrne, and Deirdre and Naisi,Martin and Mary Doul have a right to the world which gives them the richjoy and nourisliment on which their imaginations live.In contrast, the harsh world of Timmy the Smith and Molly Byrne offersas little beauty and happiness as Conchubor*s, the Priest’s, or DanBurke’s. There, reality is grey and dull and, it may be, just as fullof illusion. Timmy and the Saint both pity those who "aren't the likeof simple men,, who do be working every day, and praying, and living likeourselves"(166). They are too involved in their world to see the uglinessand harshness revealed to Martin; "It's few sees anything but them isblind for a space"(l40). Those who can see may have the doubtful pleasureof earning their bread, but those who are blind have the sensibility toappreciate the glories of the world of the imagination.g,c Va416Thus Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Synge all deal v/ith the theme of a/ miracle-changing world, each, as v/e have seen, treating it according tohis own personal view of that orld. Further, all three base their workon folklore, thereby retaining the element of simplicity and wondernecessary to the individual treatment. Yeats weaves "dark, mythicalsecrets" through The Cat and the Moon; Lady Gregory explores the myth,then discards it in Aristotle's Bellows; Synge examines man’s need for ^ ' the myth, discarding the myth only to accept the truth behind it. And' The Well of the Saints the folklore element itself is adapted to thisdeeper level; for ironically, if man will not accept reality and,ij' recognize his ov/n illusions, miracles can no longer help him to live 1 ') within the world of reality., In The Playboy o_f the Western World v/e see the power of the myth to' create a reality out of the dream or illusion itself. The inhabitants of a small isolated village in the west of Ireland have had fev/ opportunities to build myths from their simple lives, in "this place where you'll meet none but Red Linahan, has a squint in his eye, and Patcheen is lame in his heel, or the mad Mulrannies were driven from California and they lost in their wits"(179)* Their heroes are few and familiar, "Daneen Sullivan knocked the eye from a peeler? or Marcus Quin, God rest him, got six months for maiming ewes, and he a great warrant to tell stories of holy Ireland till he’d have the old women shedding down tears about their feet"(l80). But Christy is braver than Daneen, for he has killed his Da, and a man "should have had good reason for doing the like of that"(l9l). This is no "common week-day kind of^murderer," but a man "should be a. great terror when his temper's roused"(192): "Bravery's a treasure in a lonesome place, and a ladwould kill his father. I'm thinking, would face a foxy djvil with a pitchpike on the flags of hell"(l93)* Christy is also a greater storyteller than Marcus Quin, for "any girl would walk her heart out before she'd meet a young man was your like for eloquence, or talk at all.(25l).417"I’ve heard all times it’s the poets are your like — fine, fiery fellows with great rages v/hen their temper's roused," says Pegeen(l97)* A combination of "such poet's talking, and such bravery of heart" is fit subject for hero-worship, and with this welcome, Christy becomes a celebrity in their wishful lives, "when you'd be ashamed this place, going up winter and summer with nothing worth while to confess at all"(210).In his own eyes as well Christy grows; the "loony of Mahon's" for the first time tastes the sweetness of respect and attention. A simple lad who never "did hurt to any saving only that one single blow"(2ol)^he reasons that if others think so, it must be true; for the first time he experiences self-respect. "Is it me?...Oh, they're bloody liars in the naked parish where I grew a man"(l96). To these new emotions come the joyousness and richness of a love returned; his shyness disappears, for the first time he expresses his love and feelings for nature, and out comes poetry. Like blind Martin, in turn his fascination and eloquence to a certain extent overcome his appearance until he grows in stature and beauty as well from the "slight young man...very tired and frightened and dirty" who begs refuge in the shebeen parlour(l86):Didn't I know rightly, I was handsome, though it was the divil's ownmirror we had beyond, would twist a squint across an angel's brow;and I'll be growing fine from this day...(208-209).Thus confident in his new-found daring and self-respect, Christy is only bewildered when a second attempt at killing his Da does not regain his former status with the hero-worshipping audience. The hero is real to him; he has proved to himself that he does have the courage to slay his father.The role of the poet has become real also. "If I am an idiot," he proclaims, "I’m after hearing my voice this day saying words would raise the top-knot on a poet in a merchant's town."(263). Disillusionment comes not to his picture of himself as the poet-hero, but to his faith in these people who had seemed so different from his earlier acquaintances. But disillusionirient brings strength to Christy as it had to Martin Doul:418I Shut your yelling, for if you're after making a mighty man of meI' this day by the power of a lie, you're after setting me now to thinkI if it's a poor thing to be lonesome it's worse, maybe, go mixingI y' with the fools of earth(263).I This new self-admiration can even compensate for the loss of Pegeen's• love; he has more faith in the myth than she has, and there will beother conquests for this "likely gaffer in the end of all"(270). In thei creation of Christy, Synge implies that there is a place for dreams inj our lives and that the imagination may yield to us what is joyous and4 . full in reality — if only we have the courage to reach out and graspit.^ "My story — in its essence fessence" underlined four timcjQ isprobable given the psychic state of the locality," he remarked in a letter 2I to MacïCenna. The "life-lie" is as real to Christy as it had been toI ’ Martin and Mary Doul and Ibsen's Hjalmar Ekdal,I The joyous moment of recognition ("Is it me?") is not limited toChristy, however. Christy is also the probable offspring of old Mahon I who in turn represents the v/onder-loving peasant at its fullestI development. "Amn't I a great wonder to think I've traced him ten dayswith that rent in my crown?"(229) he asks as he proudly displays his bandaged head, with the same delight in romance that causes awe in the Mayoites at Christy, the "puszle-the-world," and attracts while repelling Molly Byrne to the rapturous eloquence of Martin Doul. Christy's history ‘ has brought hiS/^restige as well, "and I doing nothing but telling stories of th@fnaked truth"(240). He accepts the Widow Quin's suggestion of . madness with equal delight, for "a sniggering maniac" is also a wonder, and recalls "the terrible and fearful case" he once was, "screeching in a straightened waistcoat, with seven doctors writing out my sayings in a printed book"(248), a touch prepared for us by Christy in ct I.But whereas Christy's wonders reach the poetic heights of great comedy,Old Mahon remains a subject of farce, "a hideous, fearful villain, and the^Cf. "Can we go Back into Our Mother's Womb?": "a young man...with blood in his veins, logic in his wits, and courage in his heart." MSL in the possession of Mrs. Stephens.2Greene and Stephens,on.cit.,265./419spit of you"(252). Christy's anger at this deceit parallels Martin’srage when he discovers the trick the villagers have played upon him;To be letting on he was dead, and coming back to life, and . ' i,"following after me like an old weasel tracing a rat, and coming in here laying desolation between my own self and the fine women of Ireland, and he a kind of carcase that you'd fling upon the sea...(233)But such is the power of the imagination that both Christy and Martingain in stature over this shock of reality, while their realist opponentslessen in the eyes of the audience. The poetic fool triumphs here as well,and old Mahon re-works his dream into the fabric of Christy's; "Is itme?... .Glory be to God.'... I am crazy again. "(27O) ,Hand in hand with Christy's blossoming, Pegeen is transformed as well,from "the fright of seven townlands" for her "biting tongue" into thesweet talker who is a fitting companion for this daring young poet;"Well, the heart's a wonder; and. I'm thinking, there won't be our likein Mayo, for gallant lovers, from this hour to-day"(253)• But when putto the test of reality, Pegeen lacks the courage of her sisters Nora andDeirdre, and so she loses "the only Playboy of the Western World." Herloss is greater than Christy's however; for she is tied to the world ofreality("Wouldn't it be a bitter thing for a girl to go marrying thelike of Shaneen, and he a middling kind of a scarecrow, with no savageryor fine words in him at all?"255)* Hurt and bewildered by the downfall'of the hero her own dreams and sympathy have created, she reverts to her' only defence — a sharp tongue and brutal manner. Christy will "go' romancing through a romping lifetime from this hour to the dawning of theJudgment Day"; Pegeen's fate has banned her from both the life of herdream and her former security. She has learned the lesson of reality:I'll say, a strange man is a marvel, with his mighty talk; but what's a squabble in your back yard, and the blow of a loy, have taught me that there's a great gap between a gallons story and a dirtydeed(266—67)•But that can never compensate for the loss of a wonder once tasted, a dream once lived. The greatest loneliness is the vision of what might have been.T-420The warning Pegeen could not heed resounds throughout Synge’s next treatment of the myth, Deirdre of the Sorrows. For hei'eagain, as we have seen, dream and reality conflict within man. Deirdre and Naisi reach out for a life of happiness and freedom; for seven years they enjoy the life that is "superb and wild in reality"; then, realizing that this life cannot last, they choose an early death rather than the withering of a lingering old age. About this theme Synge twines his other basic theme, the fear of the ugliness and loneliness of old age and the overshadowing of inevitable death as symbolized in the cycle of nature. As in The Playboy, we meet an heroic character who gains in stature and dignity as the play progresses; but instead of the riotous, joyful comedy of the earlier play, Synge gives us in Deirdre a picture of restraint and nobility and a much deeper awareness of the basic conflicts in man. She grows in stature from a young girl who identifies her freedom y ^with the wildness of nature (the stage at which we leave Nora) to a 'mature woman who deliberately chooses to have an early death and the shortness of life rather than the ugliness of old age and the fading of energy. Here the best of two worlds are combined in the framework ■ : of the myth; the Celtic spirit with its sympathetic awareness of nature and the intensely human spirit of the two young lovers. The courage, light-heartedness, and nobility of Deirdre and Naisi arise like Christy’s from their active attitude towards life: but they gainin stature after Christy ceases growing because of their awareness of the choice and action. The Irish folk spirit of the legend is reflected in the modern world of the unsophisticated peasant. By mingling these elements Synge has not only captured the timber of poetry, "strong ‘roots among the clay and v/orms," but the essential truth of the myth. Deirdre and Naisi, two very human lovers of an earthy folk tale, become symbols of the striving of all humanity towards a life and love that will not die.421This too is an essential quality of the myth — "a good story."Christy is aware of the value of his story and he "tells it lovely"!;Shawn Keogh, but "a poor scholar with middling faculties to coin a lie,", is no match for the romping poet. Deirdre and Naisi are constantly aware of their place in the saga; by "putting a sharp end to the day is brave and glorious," they assure their place in the story "told ' of a ruined city and a raving king and a woman will be young for ever."As Miss Sorg states, in Synge’s wcrk soul and imagination are virtuallyosynonymous ; in the work of the imagination the soul is not only regenerated but perpetuated. In a review in I903 Synge had commented on Loti’s "terrified search for some sign of the persistence of the person."3 In the power of the imagination, especially in the mature and permanent form of the myth, Synge had discovered the artist's assurance of that persistence. Writing of The Playboy in I907, he stated:It is not a play with "a purpose" in the modern sense of the word? but although parts of it are, or are meant to be, extravagant comedy, still a great deal that is in it, and a great deal more j that is behind it, is perfectly serious, when looked at in acertain light.4So much could be said for all of his plays.The Irony of Fate Inevitably in any interpretation of nature's effect on man, the question of fate arises. In Synge’s plays nature does create another conflict within man, between his awareness of nature as a power itself^Draft F of Act I of The Playboy contains the follov/ing lines during the argument between Pegeen and the Widow Quin over Christy: "He’ll not stir — you’re like to be the talk and terror of Mayo for ten years to I come, but if you go along with her there isn’t one in this place willgive a thought to you at all." MS.in the possession of Mrs. Stephens.2janet L.Sorg.Svnge Shakesneare.B.Litt.Thesis for Trinity College,Dublin, 1953,56-57.^"Loti and Huysmans," The Sneaker.18 April 1903.58.Cf.Stephens MS. 1259concerning a conversation E.M.Stephens had with Mrs.Synge concerning bynge’s religious beliefs: "He had been on the verge of abandoning all belief in the spirit world when Yeats was sent to him by the spirits to show him his mistake. V.bat Yeats had shown him Mrs. Synge did not Icnow,But she said it had been enough to remove from his mind all doubt about our survival after death."^Letter to the Editor, The Irish Times.30 January I9O7 .422and his Christian faith. But at the same time, Synge recognized that the Irish peasant on the v/hole manages to maintain a balance, uneasy though it may be, between the depth of his feeling for his religious beliefs and the overwhelming influence of nature. "Didn’t the young priest say the Almighty God won't leave her destitute with no son living?" asks Nora. But Maurya's reply reflects the essential conflict between nature and faith; "It's little the like of him knows of the Sea"(50). In his essays Synge describes the irony of this truce between religion and fate! vdien it is most apparent — at the burial of the dead;In Inishmaan one is forced to believe in a sympathy between man and nature, and at this moment, when the thunder sounded a death- peal of extraordinary grandeur above the voices of the women, I could see the faces near me stiff and drawn with emotion.... This grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island. In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas. They are usually silent, but in the presence of death all outward show ofindifference or patience is forgotten, and they shriek with pitiable despair before the horror of the fate to which they all are doomed.... There was an irony in these words of atonement and Catholic belief spoken by voices that were still hoarse with the cries of pagan desperation....I saw a line of old women....who were beginning to talk again of the daily trifles that veil from them the terrors of the world.2The wail of the caoine echoes throughout Riders to the Sea; muted tonesstill remain in Deirdre's farewell to the world: "I have put away sorrowlike a shoe that is worn out and muddy...."The sympathy these people feel with nature and their awareness thatnature means death as well as life lend them a dignity and simplicitythat is reflected most powerfully in Riders to the Sea and Deirdre ofthe Sorrows. Although one is supposedly written within the Christianframev/ork, the other within a pagan one, both plays are fundamentally^Cf.The Aran Islands,Works,1910.III.62:"the fairies have a tenth of all the produce of the country," nature's tithe.^The Aran Islands, Works, 1910,111,51-55. Cf.ibid.,214-15.425alike in the prevailing sense of fate. In neither play is the conflict between nature’s fate and man's faith resolved; instead the natural tends to blend into the supernatural.^ Yet both heroines in a spirit of acquiescence transcend their narre, situations and touch what is most hu.ran and universal. "The dawn and evening are a little while, the winter and the summer pass quickly, and what way would you and I, Naisi, have joy for ever?" asks the heart-broken Deirdre. It is Maurya who provides the answer: "No man at all can be living forever, and we mustbe satisfied." Death and nature take life, but the human spirit triumphs.2 In this triumph the two plays achieve the quality of high tragedy.The old mother who, through her intense suffering and loss moves from a human figure to a symbol of universal motherhood, reflects the spirit of Sophoclean drama which accepts life because it cannot be otherwise.^Yet in his concentration on an atmosphere of fate, Synge has written a lyriciin tragic mood rather than a dramatic tragedy in which the characters actively move towards or struggle against their fate out of their own volition. Even Bartley's silent defiance of his mother is simply acquiescence ii\ his role in this inevitable unfolding of tragedy; "It's the life of a young man to be going on the sea, and who would listen to an old woman with one thing and she saying it over?" Maurya's final attitude is one of resignation, a chord blending the tones of fear, horror, and death-in-life heard throughout the play. She has not really struggled against the sea, but against the acceptance of a fate she 0 knows is hers, and in the presentation of a weak mother overpowered by the strength of the sea, Synge has stripped even the bare powerful architecture of tragic drama to the essential lyricism of pity and fear.The suffering and emotion are no less intense; a sense of impending doom hangs^ver the play from the time the curtain rises until Maurya's^Cf.Ibid..149-51.^Cf.notebooks,1898, Greene and Stephens,op.cit,,71: "Is life a stage and all the men and women merely players, or an arena wheremen and women and children are captives of destiny to be torn with beastsand gladiators — who appear only to destroy and be destroyed..."?£f.entry in notebook (undated), quoted in Stephens MS*1209; "Is Sophocles the Raphael of Drama?" Also Moore's description of Yeats's admiration for Synge, Vale,202, and Dublin's witty reaction as described by Padroix Colum in The Road Round Ireland,558-59*424last courageous speech, and intensifies the pathos of the play.^From the tragic lyricism of Riders to jbhe Sea Synge moved to the tragic drama of Deirdre of the Sorrows. Through Deirdre, also, moves the feelingof inevitability — all is f o r e t o l d , 2 and although Deirdre can delay herfate, she cannot prevent it, in fact does not even appear to desire prevention. She will get her little grave as prophesied; "The gods1 1 )send they don't set eyes on her," Lavarcham says of the Sons of Usna, "—I yet if they do itself, it v/asn't my v/ish brought them or could send themI away"(275-76). Here the fate of external nature moves towards the fateI of an unseen nature, the prophecy of pagan folklore and myth. Thej difference between the two plays can be traced in this difference inj understanding be tv/e en the two heroines. Maurya watches the sea take awayher men one by one; she tries to delay Bartley's ride to death, but "it's the life of a young man to be going on the sea." Deirdre also realizes from the beginning that the end is foretold; but "it should be a sweet thing to have what is best and richest, if it's for a short space only." She takes her gift of seven wonderful years v/ith Naisi, and at the end faces the consequences of reality. By thus stepy ing out to meet ^ her fate Deirdre transcends Maurya as a tragic heroine. In both plays, jÇptA ' the tragic quality is achieved, but neither ceases to be human as well.The irony of fate as seen in Synge's tragic plays is softened to theI gentler irony of man's own illusions inSynyfcomic works. "The irony ofI it" is apparent everywhere in his v/riting, moving from quiet shades ofI grey in the heroic lovers' blindness to each other's fears although both' are constantly aware of the doom awaiting them,^ to the multi-coloured^Cf.L.A .G.Strong;, John Millington Synge (P.E.N .Books,London;Allen and Unwin,1941)>52; "I remember, at a Drama Festival in the Highlands, which was held in a sea-side town, a company from an inland village played Riders to the Sea, and played it well. Tlie audience was painfully moved, and afterwards protested that the play came too near the central terror of ’j their lives. It was not right, they said, to perform such a play"; Pay andj Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre,153»i The expression "the troubles are foretold" occurs almost a1 dozen times in the play.I 3.| This irony gains momentum through the play until the final quarrelI J in Act III when Deirdre does not realize that part of Naisi's dream is ' still his loyalty to Ainnle and Ardan.425jesting of The Tinker’s Wedding and The Playboy. There is tragic irony in the realization that the richness of life leads to death; there is comic irony in the fool's aspiration for beauty and the dream. Following immediately after Christy's elaboration on "the tap of a loy," his Da proudly shows his bandaged skull to the appreciative Widow Quin. "Well... it's great luck and company I've won me in the end of time...till I'm thinking this night wasn't I a foolish fellow not to kill my father in the years gone by," muses the Playboy in all seriousness as the curtain falls in Act I (207). "Oh, it's a hard case to be an orphan and not to have your father that you're used to, and you'd easy kill and make yourself a hero in the sight of all," mourns Shawn Keogh (226). There's a great difference to the Mayoites between "that murderer," the Widow Quin, and the "louty schemer," Christy. "Do you take me for a slaughter- boy?" asks Christy, scandalized, when they suggest he murdered his father with "a hilted knife"(I9I).^ "And isn't it a poor thing to be blind v/hen you can't run off itself, and you fearing to see?" whimpers Martin Doul as he scrambles ay/ay from the sound of the Saint’s bell(155)* Mary , Doul laughs slyly at the Saint's great simplicity over the young girls,' but willingly believes herself to be "the beautiful dark woman" of Ballinatone. Timmy the Smith complains that the blind couple have made the entire population self-conscious of their appearance, but concludes .with "and I'd do right, maybe, to step in and wash the blackness from my eyes"(l35)* "The Lord protect us from the saints of Cod!" cries Mary Doul(154). Martin's primitive theology reflects the same element when he prays for a hell where he can see Timmy the Smith and Molly Byrne in torment, "and it's fine care I'll be taking the Lord Almighty doesn't know"(146).The ironic vision is central to Synge's basic theme of the conflict between illusion and reality and is expressed most clearly, as we have seen, in Well of the Saints, where the entire fabric is shot through withThe entire passage, with its rapid-fire questions which grow in fantasy as Christy's seriousness increases, is doubly ironical, and foreshadows Christy's own embroidery of the truth.426the irony of the dream fulfilled and resultant disillusionnent. Irony is implicit throughout Riders to the Sea from Maurya's first dismissal of the priest to the final ceu>fne with its pagan overtones. Again, the vfish that is granted hut then in turn implies further obligations is expressed throughout the tale of the lovers of Alban; in order to retain their love — rooted deeply in their desire for a life that is rich and beautiful — Deirdre and Haisi must die. There is further irony as well as pathos in the final meeting of the lovers with Conchubor; the presence of the grave for a moment dispels the temporary emotions of jealousy and hatred, yet at the same time the open grave represents the final stage in an action Conchubor is now powerless to prevent. The love of Conchubor itself — half paternal as he bends over Deirdre's workbox or speaks of her rearing — is but a shadow of passion, yet he too must play his part in the fulfilment of the ancient prophecy.Pegeen liberates the Playboy, but cannot follow him. The para,dox implied in the risk of the dream follows Nora and the Tramp onto the Wicklow roads and sends the tinkers frolicking after them. But here irony has once more softened to the "sanity of laughter.It is in "the heartiness of real end frank laughter" Synge felt so essential to art that we recognize the basic folk element in his plays. Like the folk humour he drew upon, Synge’s laughter could be brutal,phis comedy malicious. His description of old Mourteen, his blind guide on Aranmor, is typical of the Mayoites who adopt Christy only to disown him and of the Wicklow peasants who praise the Douls in order to mock them:As we talked he sat huddled/^over the fire, shaking and blind, yet his face was indescribably pliant, lighting up with an acstasy of humour when he told me anything that had a point of vfit or malice, and growing sombre and desolate again when he spoke of religion or the fairies.5^Notebook,1907,Plays,1932,V.2Masefield,"John Millington Synge," Dictionary of National Biography, op.cit.,470,refers to the "bright malice of fun" Synge always had ready.^The Aran Islands, Works,1910,111,4* Cf. op.cit.,175-74»427The simplicity Synge admired in the peasants and vagrants he met on his travels in Ireland^ is to a certain extent the simplicity of the child, where violence meets violence with equal cruelty, passing as quickly from hatred to camaderie. In his diaries Synge admits the fascination childhood — especially the wild children of the Dublin slums — held for him,and this same childlike abandon can be recognized in hispcharacters. For them, as for children, life is unrestricted, emotionsare unhampered, reality can be transformed by the imagination, and aboveall, laughter is unsonhisticated. It is not surprising, therefore, todiscover that this studious, silent traveller could gain as muchenjoyment out of a melodrama at the Queen’s as he could poetry at theIrish literary theatre; perhaps he gained more. In an unsigned reviewof Boucicault’s Kie Shaughraun in I904, he remarks.The characters of Conn the Shaughraun, and in a less degree those of Mrs. 0 ’Kelly and Moya...had a breadth of naive humour that is now rare on the stage....One felt how much the modern stage has lost in substituting impersonal wit for personal humour.5It is this naive and personal humour Synge sought in his own plays,and achieved in the rough, roistering comedy of the fabliau as exploitedin The Tinker’s Wedding, In the Shadow of the Glen, The Well of theSaints and The Playboy.4Mary Byrne provides much of this knock-about farcical element inThe Tinker’s Wedding, from her first collision with the priest as shelustily sings "The night before Larry was stretched"^ to her hastyscramble away from the strong arm of Sarah Casey; "I’d be safer inthe chapel. I ’m thinking*, for if she caught me after on the road, maybe^Cf. In Wicklow, Works,1910,IV,27.2Stephens MS,409-410. Cf.Shaw’s description of the Norwegian character. The Quintespence of Ibsenism, Ma.jor Critical Essays (London: Constable, 1932 ), 84-85^The Academy and Literature,11 'June 1904,630. This was doubtless the occasion Jack Yeats refers to in "With Synge in Connemara," Synge and the Ireland of his Time(Dublin;Cuala,1911),41-42.^Cf. Yeats, "First Principles," Samhain,1904,17.c0Î. A Broadside with illustrations by Jack B. Yeats ( Duniirum : Cuala,1912)./428she v/ould kill me then." Mary sympathizes i,vith the hard lot of the priest ;It’d break my heart to hear you talking and sighing the like of that, your reverence, (She pats him on the knee.) Let you rouse up now, if it’s a poor, single man you are itself, and I ’ll be singing you songs unto the dawn of day(72-73)*Her bland comment at the opening of Act II greets the day with laughter;...it’s a great stir you’re making this day, washing your face. I’m that used to the hammer, I wouldn’t hear it at all; but washing is J a rare thing, and you’re after waking me up, and I having a greatsleep in the sun(8l).Although not as trenchant as the laughter of The Tinker’s Wedding, Inthe Shadow of the Glen also has the robust gaiety of the fabliau. Thishumour is evident from the Tramp’s quick aside, "There’s great safety ina needle, lady of the house"(l8), and his terror of the thirsting corpse,to the nantomime behind Nora as she describes the old man, his "teethfalling, and ...white hair sticking out round...like an old bush wheresheep do be leaping a gap"(27). Michael’s timid suggestion of the"fine Hnion below" is echoed again in Shavm Keogh’s fear of FatherReilly and the Holy Father and "the scarlet-coated bishops of the Courts. of Rome"(185). The humour throughout is the childlike delight of the' vagrant rather than the bitterness of a Swift. And Synge's basic beliefthat drama should not be didactic further eliminated any possibility of7 ,satire. The primitive folklore element allows this exuberance of nature* the sympathy behind these dramas of human efforts and human limitations prohibits the irony from becoming bitter or sardonic. Similarly the serious theme interwoven with the comedy prevents collapse into slapstick farce.In the greater part of Ireland, however, the whole people, fromthe tinkers to the clergy, have still a life, and view of life,that are rich and genial and humorous. I do not think that these country people, v/ho have so much humour themselves, will mind being laughed at without malice, as the people in every country have been laughed at in their own comedies,Synge had written in his Preface to The Tinker’s Wedding. If the maliceis there, he Aearned it from them.%429But comedy which is ironic implies seriousness, as we have seen, and becomes instead tragi-comedy. The ludicrousness of Dan Burke "letting on to be dead" is balanced by the desolation of his young wife, a solitary, sensitive woman, torn between the appeal of the dream and the realistic dread of insecurity, confined to the oppressive existence of the glens, yet craving the adventure of freedom and youth. The joyful spirit of vagabondage in the actions and speeches of the tinkers is shadowed by the wistful if temporary desire of Sarah Casey for the pastures across the ditch. The gay, colourful comedy of The Playboy sweeps from the intrigues of that life-loving modern Wife of Bath, the Widow Quin, to Pegeen's tragic loss, from the gallant, gullible Christy to the thin, suspicious Philly.Nor are the heroes safe on their pedestals; even they are mocked v/hile they are glorified.^ The genius of Synge’s comedy is the genius of his tragedy — v/hile taking us into the horror of humanity, dehumanized and abstract, at the same time on another level he shows us real peoplelusS-with whom we can identify/^ Similarly in his comedies the extravagance and fantasy are placed within such a realistic framework that the audience can never completely escape into the pure enjoyment of comedy-fantasy as is possible with Lady Gregory’s plays. The "bitter-sweetness" of Synge’s comedies makes us care. Basically, perhaps, the irony in his plays is simply the irony of nature itself, which constantly reminds us that all good things must end. And this awareness makes us even more anxious to enjoy what we can while we may. This irony and appreciation of life provide Synge’s tragi-comedies with "strong roots among the clay and worms."The Poet and his AudienceAll art is a,collaboration.....(Preface to The Playboy of the Western World)As we have seen, by the time Synge entered the Irish dramatic movement the drama had cut loose its ties with the earlier stage Irish character and was experimenting with new material — the Irish peasant as he appeared to them rather than as he had developed into a particular mould over the^Sorg, Synge and Shakespeare, TOD B.Litt.Thesis,1955,113•/430years, the language of the peasant as it sounded to them, and, mostimportant of all, a sympathetic treatment of the peasant rather thanthe earlier custom of debasing him as a subject for the laughter ofthe supposedly superior and refined taste of an English audience.Synge's development in characterization is consistent with his theoriesand themes; his use of language, although a development along the samelines followed earlier by Douglas Hyde, Standish O'Grady,and Lady Gregory,is at the same time consistent with his ov.n theories and earliertraining as well. Here, too, he branched of^ on paths of his ovm,endowing his peasant material with the sensitivity and sympathy he feltas he moved among them. In this sense he is more realistic than hisforerunners: intimate details of household and custom are woven intothe experience of his plays; expressions are culled and hoarded fortheir colour and expository qualities; incidents are keenly observedand appreciated for the characteristics they reveal.At the same time, hov/ever, like other dramatists, he selects anddiscards according to his ovm peculiar vision.^ The qualities ofsimplicity and natural refinement he admires are emphasized; that whichhe himself is not in sympathy with is overlooked. He admires thephysical perfection of the Aran Islanders and highlights those qualitiesin their lives that eliminate' "the clumsy, foolhardy, or timid m e n ."2In contrast, a letter to Stephen MacKenna on the "congested districts"of Connemara, refers to this process of deliberate selection:There are sides of all that western life, the groggy-patriot- publican-general-shopman who is married to the priest's half-sister ani^s second cousin once removed of the dispensary d-octor, that are horrible and awful....All that side of the matter of course I left untouched in my stuff. I sometimes wish to God I hadn't a soul and then I could give myself up to putting those lads on the stage. God, wouldn't they hop! In a way it is all heartrending, in one place the people are starving but wonderfully attractive and charming, and inanother place where things are going well one has a rampant double- chinned vulgarity I haven't seen the like of.^Cf. "Hr. Synge Interviewed," Dublin Mail, after first night of The PIayboy:"Simply the idea appealed to me - it pleased myself, and I worked it up." W.A.Henderson collection,National Library of Ireland.^The Aran Islands. Works.1910.Ill.32-33!86-87.13 July 1903, Greene and Stephens,on.cit.,18?-88.451Synge saw too clearly the ugly vulgar side of modern life? as a poet, therefore, true to his belief in a rich life "superb and wild in reality" as fit subject for art, he looked beyond and back to the life he, like his characters, grasped at as it passed away. "People like these," he commented on a tinker's camp he passed in his wanderings, "like the old woman and these two beautiful children, are a precious possession for any country, they console us one moment at least for the manifold and beautiful life we have all missed who have been born in modern Europe."!These are the people he chose to celebrate in his work, representatives of a life superb and wild. Their days are a continual struggle to maintain a livelihood. They have no time for the trivial in life. They look out on the world with great gusto and reach out for all they can grasp of the wildness that brings "a shock of joy to the blood." Life, love, and laughter are rough and undiluted. Even in his dramatization of an old legend Synge retains the joy in life and beauty that his people felt years ago and still admire, that essential Celtic spirit and delight in personality, the love for life and nature Gaelic poets had for centuries expressed with the same vigorous language. But the folk spirit of the tales told to Synge by the peasants also accounts for his selection of characters. His quality of imaginative insight transferred his plots from the individual 'experience reported in his notebooks into a knowledge of the lives of these people, as we have seen. This insight in turn gave depth and universality to his portrayal of the peasant character. And so in his characterization we find the elemental forces he believed in and discovered in the life of the Irish peasant: a loveof beauty, youth and nature, and a constant search for the dream and a world where youth and love and beauty do not wither. We find in his forty characters, therefore, two main prototypes that appear and develop consistently through his plays: the woman who senses almost too deeplywhat could have been, and the tramp who follows the free life of the road and sings sweetly of it.^1902 notebook, Stephens MS, 1448-49.452Of the women of Aran Synge comLients in his notebooks in 1898:I have found a couple that have been turned in on themselves by some circumstances of their lives and seem to sum up in the expressions of their blue grey eyes the whole external symphony of the sky and seas. They have wildness and humour and passion kept in continual subjection by the reverence for life and the sea that is inevitable in this place.^As early as the one-act plays we find the woman who reaches out for the unattainable and who suffers more deeply because she is aware of what might have been. Maurya, the universal mother, who has seen all her men perish in the battle with the sea, gains at the end a calm and stoic acceptance of vhat must be. As often happens, the lesser characters around her cannot understand, for they have not been given a glimpse of this deeper understanding. "It's fonder she was of Michael," whispers her youngest daughter to Gathleen," and would any have thought that?"(54) "It's a great wonder she wouldn't think of the nails, and all the coffins she's seen made already," comments an old neighbour (54)* Nora of the glens realizes that to marry Michael would be a further commitment to the same life of mists and loneliness. , She has realized too late that a life of security is no compensation for the loss of motherhood and freedom and the beauty of wild nature. Even old Mary Byrne is aware that the security of a v/edding ring will not ease the restlessness of Sarah Casey. As we have seen, Pegeen and Deirdre represent the fullest development of this sensitive understanding woman who suffers more keenly because of her deeper insight into the real values of life. Pegeen discerns the potential for poetry in the strange young man and brings out all that is rich and exuberant in his nature. At the end of the / play she alone of the Mayoites realizes most clearly their loss and knows that she can never again return to her former life. Deirdre, queenly as she is, reveals this same simplicity and sincerity of nature that Synge portrays in his peasant women. "Am I well pleased seven years seeing the same sun throwing light across the branches at the dawn of^Greene and Stephens,op.cit.,82.455day?" she replies to Owen!(30?). Deirdre realizes her dream, and assures her earlier peasant sisters that the happiness of love and nature "will he a joy and triumph to the ends of life and time." Yet she, too, is mortal, and the greatness of happiness achieved is broken into by the human bitterness which separates the t?/o lovers at the end. After her lover's death, Deirdre is left a lonely, broken-hearted woman; no queen about her then.It is not to be wondered at, therefore,that these women most fullyappreciate all the tramp stands for, and further, liberate the poeticspirit in him. Again and again in his notebooks and plays we see Synge'ssympathy for the vagabond and his awareness of the "artistic health"the vagrant's life can represent:In all the circumstances of this tramp life there is a certain wildness that gives it romance and a peculiar value for those who look at life in Ireland with an eye that is aware of the arts also. In all the healthy movements of art, variations^from the ordinary types of manhood are made interesting for the ordinary man, and in this way only the higher arts are universal.2It is the tramp who most clearly balances the desolation and lonelinessfound in nature; "and it often happens that, in moments when one is mostaware of this ceaseless fading of beauty, some incident of tramp lifegives a local human intensity to the shadow of one's own mood."5 Similarly,the life of the trajnp most clearly represents the revolt against a settledexistence and a narrow life. And in the spirit of the vagabond can be^Gf. Yeats' Deirdre: "Myself wars on myself."^In Wicklow, Works,1910,IV,11-12, 1-2. Cf."The Old and New in Ireland," Academy and Literature, 6 September 1902,239-59: "the peculiar restlessness that goes everywhere with artistic life"; The Aran Islands, Works,1910,111,49-51.^In Wicklow,op.cit.,6; 30-&2. Cf. Notebooks, Stephens MS.996: "It is a great gain to have learned to wander. If trouble overtakes me I setout and in new scenes becoming always a new soul, I am not any more theman who was suffering. I do not forget my grief, but ponder it continually with the tamed sympathy one may feel for a bereaved brother or sister, till it grows powerless to wound." Synge's wanderings with the vagrants mightbe compared to Augustus John's travels v/ith the gypsies./454found the wild outburst of poetry that comes when one is in love withlife and with that which is "rich and superb" in reality. In Nora'sTramp, the tinkers, Martin Doul, and Christy, Synge combines this loveof the free and wild life of the roads with the poetry of a speech thatis as unconfined as the life they lead. (Most clearly in ^ the Shadowof the Glen, the Tramp is a combination of the poetic-comic figure ofthe vagrant with the symbolism of the fine-talking stranger who opensthe door to the life superb and wild.^)But there are variations on this portrayal of the poet-vagrant. Aswe have seen, Martin Doul experiences all of the desires for a rich andfull life, but is doomed to failure and disillusionment, sending himback to the "second-best" life of unfulfilled and therefore safe illusion.Christy represents the fullest development of the poet-hero, but atthe same time he acts as commentator on those who first worship and thendeny him.^ Both Martin and Christy, like the tinkers, are in this sense, fools as well as wise men. They are both artists and audience, made. aware not only of the joys but the pitfalls of poetry; for although' poetry (and the corresponding life of the vagrant) elevates them, it' also isolates them. In the characterization of Owen Synge not onlydeparts from the conventional treatment of the Deirdre theme, but fromhis own "variations v/hich are a condition and effect of all vigorouslife." For here we have the freak of nature, the mad-man.^ On theone hand Owen's wildness and grotesqueness make him akin to the Jacobeanconcept of the fool; on the other he serves as Synge's strongest reminderthat old age is accompanied by ugliness and the weariness of love:I'll give you a riddle, Deirdre; Why isn't my father as ugly andold as Conchubor? You've no answer?...It's because Naisi killed him(509),^Cf.David H.Greene,"The Shadow of the Glen and The Widow of Ephesus,"PMLA,1947,234-55.2For an interesting contemporary criticism of Pegeen and Christy,see John Butler Yeats, "Synge and the Irish" Essays Irish and American(London:!,Fisher Unwin,I9I8 ),31-61.^Owen's madness is left beyond doubt in Synge's latest draft to Act II. £f. David H.Greene, "Synge's Unfinished Deirdre., " PMLA,1948,1514-21.mr""455/Ov/en represents the harshness of nature; "It's three weeks I am losingmy manners beside the Saxon bull-frogs at the head of the bog"(507). Yethe, too, belongs to their world, for he has felt love and loneliness:Yet there are many roads, Deirdre, and I tell you I'd liefer be bleaching in a bog-hole than living on without a touch of kindness from your eyes and voice. It's a poor thing to be so lonesome you'd squeeze kisses on a cur dog's nose(508).But a voicing Deirdre's hidden fears and acting as a contrastto liaisi, Owen's madness acts as foil to Conchubor's simulated passionalso. In neither is love complete or balanced; the illusion is divorcedfrom reality, but where Conchubor's almost paternal demands lead to thepathetic picture of a broken and lonely old man, Owen's unappeasabledesires drive him to raging madness. "Men v/ho'll die for Deirdre'sbeauty; I'll be before you in the grave!"(5I8 ) The importance of Owenis made clear in Yeats's notes to the play:He felt that the story, as he had told it, required a grotesque element mixed into its lyrical melancholy to give contrast and create an impression of solidity, and had begun this mixing with the character of Owen, who would have had some part in the first act also, where he v/as to have entered Lavarcham's cottage with Gonchubar. Conchubar would have taken a knife from his belt to cut himself free from threads of silk that caught in brooch or pin as he leant over Deirdre's embroidery frame, and forgotten this knife behind him. Owen was to have found it or stolen it.,.. .iVhen Ov/en killed himself in the second act, he was to have done it with Conchubar's knife.^In Deirdre of the Sorrows as well, ecstasy must have its roots in the claynand worms.Also isolated from the people about them are the priest and the Saint. The reference in Riders to the Sea is to a human young man not yet experienced in this battle with the elements to realize the nature of the force that broods over the fishermen's lives. The Saint in The Well of the Saints appreciates the mysticism of nature, but is cut off from the^Preface to Deirdre of the Sorrows (Dublin:Cuala Press,I9IO). Cf. Autobiographies.487•2Frank O'Connor, "Synge," The Irish Theatre,58 reports: "WhenSynge heard an English producer was to stage Deirdre, he said gloomily,*He'll turn it into the Second Mrs. Conchubor/"456complementary love of the joys and beauty of life. But in The Tinker'sWedding we are given a vivid and sympathetic characterization of thepeasant-turned-priest:It's a hard life, I'm telling you, a hard life, Mary Byrne; and there's the bishop coming in the morning, and he an old man, would have you destroyed if he seen a thing at all(72).^Here the priest represents a Christian world the tinkers neither comprehendnor care for; but at the same time he is not a superhiunan being. In thislittle sketch of the tinkers and the priest we glimpse Synge's sympathy,2tinged with mordant humour, for the man underneath the mask.But Synge, too, was moving away from the peasant and the tramp.Deirdre of the Sorrows, he informed a friend, was "an experiment chiefly to change my hand. "5 Yeats reports that while writing his last pla,y, Synge commented "that he was sick of the Irish peasant on the stage, and that he was contemplating a play of Dublin slum life."4 Obviously he had no intention of cultivating a cult of "the noble peasant"; as we have seen, true to his theory of art, his peasants are a mixture of earthiness and lyricism in equal proportions. And Deirdre of the Sorrows^although much of it is couched in the language his peasants employ, reflects this tendency^Alan Price, Synge and Anglo-Irish Drama (London:Methuen,I96I),129-52, overlooks this mingling of the Christian and pagan elements in the Irish peasant as represented by the priest. An interpretation comparable to Synge's is seen in Sean O'Casey's The Bishop's Bonfire.2Greene,"The Tinker's Wedding, A Revaluation," 827, quotes from an earlier draft of Synge's Preface: "In a great part of Ireland, however, to this day the whole people from the tinkers to the clergy have a life and a view of life that are rich and genial in themselves and I do not think these country clergy, who have so much humour, and so much heroism when they face typhus or dangerous seas for the comfort of their people on the coasts of the west, will mind being laughed at for half an hour without malice, as the clergy in every Roman Catholic country were laughed at through the ages that had real religion."3Letter to Brodzky, 10 December 1907, Spencer Brodney collection,TGD. ■ .^Francis Bickley, J.M.Synge and the Irish Dramatic Movement (London:Constable,1912),48 n 1.y457av/ay from the glorification of the vagrant. By choosing an old familiar story of the Gael, Synge has shown that he was not dependent on his peasant material, and yet was still able to work with the knowledge he had gained from it. Deirdre is a queen, and yet, in her love for Naisi and her impulse for the dream, she displays the same intense characteristics of Nora and Pegeen. But where Nora and Pegeen have the same harshly impetuous nature of the peasant Synge observed in his travels, Deirdre displays the restraint and dignity befitting a queen. In his search for what he felt important in life, it is only natural that Synge should look to the unsophisticated peasant for his material, for here,"for a few years more, v/e have a popular imagination that is fiery, and magnificent, and tender" (Preface to The Playboy). But among the peasants, too, life was changing, an observation Synge made frequently in his essays. As a dramatist desiring to write out of his time and environment, Synge was prepared to move as well. Perhaps it would not be too presumptuous to su, gest that he would find in the slum people he was so fond of observing on the streets of Dublin, the same desire for what is rich and wild in reality, and a wish to live life to the full."There's Talking!"/ :In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple, and such speeches cannot be written by any one who works among people who have shut their lips on poetry.(Preface to The Playboy).Like Lady Gregory's characters, Synge's people took on a life oftheir own, speaking and acting almost independently of their creator.W.G.Pay once recalls,I remember asking him once if he did not think that a certain speech ^ might be improved. He replied, "I quite agree, but these were the words he used and I only set them down."1^Pay and Carsv/ell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre, 138. Cf. Sara Allgood's reminiscences, The Weekly Freeman,17 March 1909: "It must be said that all his characters are boldly and definitely outlined.... All Mr, Synge's conceptions spring, like Minerva, fully developed from his head."458With Synge, as with Lady Gregory, this process was carried further, for his characters speak a language not only true to themselves hut true to the material from which they are developed. "I have used one or two words only that I have not heard among the countinr people of Ireland, or spoken in my own nursery before I could read the newspapers," he wrote in the Preface to The Playboy. But in the process of selection, heightening, and compression of that material as we see it in its final polished form in his plays, Synge raises that language to a poetic ecstasy far exceeding the language of any other playwright of the Irish dramatic movement.Synge came to the movement with his theories of language already fully developed, and more important still, with a deep knowledge of the structure of language and musical form. As has already been mentioned, he had studied Erse and Hebrew at Trinity College, French, German and ' Italian on his travels on the continent. While in Paris he attended M ,Paul Passy's lectures on "Les Sons du Français" at the Sorbonne and : developed an interest in patois.^ His interest in Breton was inspired by the lectures of Anatole le Braz, and led to a visit to Brittany in 1899*^3, He was interested in experimental phonetics, and had already begun his . own experiments in the translation of Villon, Musset, and Petrarch.4 . V/hen he finally came into contact with the aims and work of the Irish literary movement, therefore, he had a working knowledge that prepared him for a ready reception of their ideas and work, especially that ofj ^Maurice Bourgeois, John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre(London:Constable,1915)> 56.2Greene and Stephens,op.cit.,65o^Bourgeois,ibid.; Aufhauser, Sind die Dramen von John Millington Synge ,56.\lasefield, John M.Synge,16^ quotes Synge as saying, "No good writer can ever be translated," but Synge quotes with approval the old Aranmor sailor's comments on translation from the Irish, Aran Islands,Works,1910,111,190-191.459Douglas Kyde and Lady Gregory.^ But here again Synge developed his own theory and method, based on his personal experience., True to his belief that a work of art "must have been possible to only one man at one period and in one place," Synge claimed that "real works of literature" can only be achieved by a "special intimacy" with the language and the people who speak it.^ This is the advantage of Anglo-Irish idiom. "Y/ith the present generation, " he commented in an essay in 1902, "the linguistic atmosphere of Ireland has become definitely English enough, for the first time, to allow work to be done in English , that is perfectly Irish in its essence, yet has sureness and purity of form."5 In addition, words themselves had a "cycle of life; the time f came when they were too worn out for journalism even; then one might bring them back into dramatic speech again," thereby giving them new r life and energy.^ For this reason he chose the idiom of the peasants, where language was still fresh and part of life, and although he ■ experimented with verse drama, he soon abandoned it for his experiments , with d i a l e c t .5 Here his method was similar to Lady Gregory's:^£f. Lady Gregory in an interview by The New York Sun, 10 December 1911: "He said he was amazed to find in my Cuchulain of Muirthemne his desired dialect." Notes to The White Cockadefl903),""lrish Folk History ’ Second Series, 194: "Y/hen my White Cockade was first produced I, v/as pleased to hear that J.M.Synge had said my method had made the writing of historical draraa again possible."^"Le Mouvement Intellectual Irlandais," L'Européen, 31 May 1902,12.5"The Old and New in Ireland," Academy and Literature, 6 September 1902,238-59• £f. Thomas MacDonagh, Literature in Ireland : Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish,47-48: "New images have to be supplied from current life 'in Ireland: the dialect at its best is more vigorous, fresh and simple' than either of the tv/o languages between which it stands. "Also Stopford ' A.Brooke, "Introduction," A Treasury of Irish Poetry in jUie English Tongue,vii-xxxvi.^Quoted by Padraic Colura, The Road Round Ireland,364-6 3.5A fairly extensive section of the play referred to in his notes as "Vernal Play," written in the spring of 1902, is in rather loose rhymed couplets; a draft, "The Lady O'Conor," based on a story heard on Inishmaan and published in New Ireland Review,November 1898, 135-56, is written in verse also. (MSS in the possession of Mrs. Stephens). The latter includes the lines Yeats was fond of quoting: "\7hile we live shut in ships that roll and pitch/We eating salt till our shin marrows itch."Ai"440I look on the "Aran Islands" as my first serious piece of work — it was written before any of the plays. In writing out the talks of the people and their stories in this book and in a certain nuraber of articles on b'icklow Peasantry which I have not yet collected —I learned to write the peasant dialect and dialogue which I use inmy plays,he wrote in 1907 .^ Language cannot be divorced from the characters who speak it; raality and joy must be found in language as well as inplot, characterization and theme if one is to achieve the synthesis ofecstasy, stoicism, and asceticism essential to great art.The total rhythmic effect of the strange and musical language of Synge’s world can be seen on every page of his work, and betrays the main influences behind the language as he adapted it from the peasants’/ speech: the grairjnatical construction of the Erse or Irish language,/ the vocabulary of the Elizabethan period, and the phrasing and imagery/ of the King James version of the Bible.^ His technique can be analysedunder the following headings ; vocabulary and imagery, syntax, emphasis,and the resulting effect of "cadenced rhythm."5 Even without a complete•analysis of his use of language, it can be seen that the key,to his • te clinique is morphological rather than phonetic. There is no attempt at spurious pronunciation: except for the one v/ord-polis ("police").u-, •there is none of the "eye-dialect" often found in American literary.dialectsVvhatever Synge did was internal and organic and as necessary• to the interpretation of his characters as the characterization and local ■ colour are to the dramatic experience. Further, considering the wealth^Letter to Leon Brodzky, 12 December 1907? Spencer Brodney collection, Trinity College, Dublin.PJoyce, English as Ue Speak it in Ireland, 2nd ed. (London:, Longmans,Green,1910),Iff. A thorough analysis of Synge’s language has not yet been attempted although there have been several studies of the Anglo-Irish language which draw upon Synge’s and Yeats’s work for• examples, A.G. van Hamel, "On ilnglo-Irish Syntax," Bnglisches studien,. Band 45(l912),272-292; Jiro Taniguchi, g^rammatial Analysis. .of IrishEnglish (Tokyo;Shorin,1955).R^hythm here includes every possible aspect of a pattern of stresses, metre being a relatively small part of rhythm.^Gf. H.L.Mencken, The American Language, Supplement II (NY:Knopf,1948).\i441of vocabulary Synge’s people employ, it is surprising to discover that very few words are actually dialect, and few of these, in contrast to Lady Gregory’s, are local dialect words.^ Many are archaisms betrayingthe strong Elizabethan influence still seen in the Anglo-Irish of the peasant.^ In a letter to a young poet, Synge remarked, "Some of your lines are not quite grammatically or verbally accurate and do not quite say what they ought."5 In his own work the only grammatically incorrect expressions for which there are no Irish derivations are I amn’t and yous, both necessary to the balance and rhythm of the speeches as he employed them. But most of his phrases and expressions take their peculiar colour and sound value from direct translation from the language in which the peasant still thought: adverbs and adverbial phrases such as "atall," "after," "only," "so," "all times," and "surely"4* use of "the time" for "when" and "the way" for "how" or "so that." Similarly the unconventional syntax is due to the structure of the original Irish taken over by the speaker into Anglo-Irish, frequently gaining terseness and speed in the process: frequent omission of the relative pronoun^e.g.curagh(Galway,"small boat"). Mountainy(Kerry and Galway, "mountain-dwelling"), hooshing (west.Ireland, "stealing"), kilt (west.Ireland, "hurt"). Many of the dialect words are listed by Wright’s Dialect Dictionary as common to all Gaelic-speaking areas, as are the diminutives formed by the suffix een (Gaelic ^)»£.£. priesteen, supeen, Shaneen.^e.g.,afeard ("afraid"), blathering ("foolish talking"),ails ("troubles"J, bet ("beat"), shut of ("free of"), shift ("petticoat"), pandied ("struck"or "beat"), gallous ("mischievous").^Letter to M.J.Nolan, 3I January 1909? L.M.Wilson collection. Trinity College, Dublin.Bourgeois, John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre,228nl, comments that "surely" occurs a little too frequently in the plays.w442("it’s in a lonesome place you do have to be talking v/ith someone"); use of the present participle in place of an adverbial clause ("he’d always look in here and he passing up or passing down") the use of "and" in . place of most conjunct'ons ("what way would I live, and I an old woman"). The variety of forms is again a result of the comparatively few common verbs in Irish: the verb "to be" is used to imply continuous action• ("It's of little else at all I would be thinking"); in place of the perfect and pluperfect tenses, "after" and the participial form follow the verb "to be" ("I'm after bringing down a smart drou"). And, as has ' already been observed in Lady Gregory's adaptation of the language, syntactical redundancy is frequent: "it's" as an introduction to an inverted sentence, ("when it's dead he is"), the additional "itself" or "himself" after the noun ("if it is itself"), and the use of "himself" instead of the common pronoun ("Isn’t it yourself is after playing lies on me").The change in word order thus caused by these variations in syntax is one means by which Synge creates the effect of musical cadence in his speech, so that the emphasis falls in unexpected places: "But those« have a great love for yourself have a right to be in dread always"(3O3); "but it’s a great rest I'll have now, and it's time, surely"(55); "and it’s not my blather you'll be'hearing only, but you’ll be hearing thebeherons crying out over the black lakes, and you’ll/»hearî/ÿhe grouse and ^ the owls ?/ith them, and the larks and the big thrushes when the days\ jjY ' are warm"(52). But emphasis and rhytlm are also created through theuse of repetition. As well as the common inversion to conclude a sentence ("in two weeks or three"), there is frequent use of alliterative expressions ("facing hog, dog, or divil on the highv/ay of the road"192; "toiling, moiling, digging, dodging from the dawn till dusk"199; "Brink a health to the wonders of the western world, the pirates, preachers, poteen-makers, with the jobbing jockies; parching peelers, and the juries fill their stomachs selling judgments of the English law"2l6).Prom these examples it can be seen that Synge’s delight in colourfulX «jOav-c ^ - A viOu/e | a.r*éL445and exaggerated language abounds throughout all his nlays. His languagevaries from the simplicity of homely images of the kitchen and hearth,the familiar countryside and animals, to the colour and phrasingborrowed from the Bible. Often the homely images are reminiscent ofC h a u c e r . s h e '11 be getting her death... with crying and lamenting"38;"and they walking as easy as you'd see a child walk who'd have a dozeneggs hid in her bib"111; "Conchubor'11 be in a blue stew this nightand herself abroad"276). As we have seen, the most frequent images areborrowed from nature, but religious imagery also abounds throughout theplays. "Y/ith the help of God" and "God help you" echo in the speechesfrom the first page of In the Shadow of the Gl^n. But the playcontaining most of the religious imagery is The Playboy, which in earlierdrafts contained even more vigorous and riotous language.! Theflamboyancy of his imagery reaches a climax in the magnificent lovescene between Christy and Pegeen:It's a little you'll think if my love's a poacher's, or an earl's itself, when you'll feel my two hands stretched around you, and I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips, till I'd feel a kind of pity for the Lord God is all ages sitting lonesome in His golden chair (250-51)If the mitred bishops seen you that time, they'd be the like of the holy prophets. I'm thinking, do be straining the bars of paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of Troy, and she abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in her golden shawl(251).But this combination of pagan sentiment with religious imagery is apparent throughout the play:?"belching ass" for "Kerry mule", "lies stinking in his obscure grave"for "lies rotting." David.H.Greene, "The 'Playboy' and ■ Irish Nationalism," The Journal of English and Germanic Philology,April 1947>201-05 comments, "It is hair-raising to think of how the indignant audiences would have received the deleted ;^rase c^ f c^me ^ 'early drafts which read, 'To hell with the Pope. ' "A^^ïs* in^ a^ïe?ter t*o• Synge mid-August 1904> Greene and Stephens,on.cit.,l66, objected to ' the frequency of "Almighty God" ’ in Well of the Saints.2Of."Dread," Poems, Works,1910,II,219: "Now by this window, where there's none can see,/The Lord God's jealous of yourself and me."444Amn't I after seeing the love-light of the star of knowledge shining from her brow, and hearing words would put you thinking on the holy Brigid speaking to the infant saints(234);Aid me for to win her, and I'll be asking God to stretch a hand to you in the hour of death, and lead you short cuts through the Meadows of Ease, and up the floor of Heaven to the Footstool of the Virgin's Son(256).One can only comment with the Widow Quin, "There's praying!"!The delight in a wealth of colourful imagery is sharply contrastedby the simplicity and dignity of Maurya's speech: "They're all gone• now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me." The earlierlyrics. Riders to the gea and In the Shadow of the Glen, show a restraintand simplicity that is almost classical. In keeping with the emphasison atmosphere rather than action, each sentence is weighted with meaningand a sense of hidden urgency; "It's a great rest I'll have now, and'it's time>surely"(55); "and isn't it a grand thing when you hear aliving man saying a good word of a dead man, and he mad dying?"(23-24)As Synge's dramatic technique developed, the ease with which he handledhis language improved. The language of The Tinker's Wedding, with itsmore colourful imagery, appears a little self-conscious after theausterity of the earlier plays. By the time of The Well of the Saintsand The Playboy, however, the vigour and roughness become almost violentin the rush of coloui' and imagery and speech "as fully flavoured as anut or apple." Language responds to sense and characterization. Thetorrent of vituperation in Well of the Saints accords with thequarrelsome natures of the two blind beggars ("and it's great timeswe'll have yet, maybe, and great talking before we die"153)« The ironyof Martin's poetic pleading to Molly Byrne is increased by the earthinessMany of the critics prefer to echo Old Mahon, "Leave troubling the Lord God." Even Mackenna balked at one word in Well of the Saints, Greene and Stephens,op.cit.,183, and the musical version of The Playboy, ' The Heart'3 ^ Wonder, drew letters of objection in 1958* ££• Synge's'comment on Huysmans' "curiously brutal slang," "Loti and Huysmans,"58; "the power of the language is a power gained in a workshop where the •teachers are not saints."445and wildness of his language. The whole air of The Playboy is one of excitement, tension, surprise, whipped up to increasing heights by the amorous raptures of Christy, the angry quarrels of the v/omen, the drunken comments of Michael Jaraes and his friends. Various drafts carry notes and suggestions for verbal revisions even after the play has gone into rehearsal or actually been published.!In the language of Deirdre of the Sorrows, as well as in choice of plot and characterization, there can be seen a conscious effort on Synge's part to change his style and material. The very nature of the subject demanded greater dignity and restraint than Synge had employed in The Playboy or Well of the Saints. The consistent use of metaphor and symbol (in the nature imagery) has already been observed. There is no suggestion of "flavouring" a speech without reference to content. George Moore pointed out that there is less peasant idiom in the thirdnfinished act than in the first two acts, and it may be that Synge would have removed all traces of this idiom had he lived to finish the ' play. It has already been mentioned that he planned to leave the peasant dialect in his next work. However, as the play now stands, such / characters as Owen and Lavarcham are genuine folk characters, and they . retain the folk quality this myth should have. Yet at the same time, Deirdre is a queen, and in her speeches the restraint and dignity have refined all rougher elements to such an extent that she reproves Owen .for his lack of civility. In the final act, which contains the most intense mood and heightened passion of any of Synge's plays, the eloquent simplicity of Deirdre's speeches lends the play both the dignity of tragedy and the homeliness of the universally human:^Cf. Greene, "The Playboy and Irish Nationalism,"op.cit.,201.Synge revised the third act of Well of the Saints after its first production in 1905 (see Plays,1932), but this revision was mainly to include speeches for minor characters. The present writer has • discovered a different set of verbal revisions concentrating more on . /.'O, • phrasing and rhythm, annotated in Synge's hand in his own Abbey Theatrey ' edition of the play, in the possession of Mrs. Stephens.^Hail and Farewell:Vale,217.446...by a new-made grave there's no man will keep brooding on a woman's lips, or on the man he hates(332);Draw a little back with the squabbling of fools when I am broken up with misery(345).I have put away sorrow like a shoe that is worn out and muddy, for it is I have had a life that wlll^e envied by great companies. Itwas not by a low birth I made kings uneasy, and they sitting in thehalls of Eiïiain. It was not a low thing to be chosen by Conchubor, v/ho was wise, and Naisi had no juatch for bravery. It is not a small ' thing to be rid of grey hairs, and the loosening of the teeth. (With' & sort of triumoh.) It was the choice of lives we had in the• clear woods, and in the grave we're safe, surely...(344).!. The lyricism of his earlier plays is here synthesized with the dramaticp' element of his more developed stage as a dramatist.^Although we can trace this development in his language, it can be .seen that through all his plays Synge has retained the simplicity as 'well as the joy of the Anglo-Irish idiom on which he based his work.Even in the riot and colour of The Playboy the words are simple andthe combinations of these words produce the different lyrical effects.In a letter to Max Meyerfield concerning a translation cf The Well of the Saints he wrote,qIt is interesting to compare the various endings to the versions of this legend of Deirdre and the Sons of Usna. Conchubor speaks the lines of farewell in Lady Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne,I4 0:"A thousand deaths on the time I brought death on my sister's children; now I am myself without Deirdre, and they themselves are without life.They were my sister's children, the three brothers I vexed with blows, Naoise, and Ainnle, and Ardan; they have died along v/ith Deirdre."AE also gives the farewell to Concobar in his Deirdre, Imaginations and Reveries,(Dublin:Maunsel,1915),235."I have two divided kingdoms, and one is in my ovm heart. Thus do I pay homage to thee, 0 Queen, who will rule, being dead. (He bends over the body of Deirdre and kisses iper hand. " iThe Musicians sing Yeats's farewell, Deirdre, Collected Plays,201-202. |And in Synge's play Lavarcham speaks the last lines. j^Cf. Yeats's "Preface to the First Edition of The Well of the Saints','; Essays and Introductions,300; "all his people would change their life if | the rhythm changed." !T 447/...a great part of the dialogue...depends for its effect on the peculiar colour-quality of the dialect I have used. I imagine in the German "Volkslieder" one would get a language that would he pretty nearly what is needed.!And later in another letter,I do not think you will find the general language hard to follow , v/hen you have done a few pages, as the same idioms are often repeated, and the purely local words are not very numerous.2In striving for a lyrical cadence Synge has produced a smoothness andease in the rhythm of his language v/hich is of course not heard in theeveryday speech of the peasant. But Synge is re-creating speech, notmerely transcribing verbatim. His nephew records a discussion withSynge concerning realism in drama:I said, "What is realism?" He replied that it was a v/ay of conveying ' ' impressions by mentioning significant details instead of attempting ,to describe feelings. "For example," he said, "suppose you wanted to convey an impression of a very v/et day in town, you might say - 'the drops were falling one by one from the point of the policeman's ' helmet' - that would be far more effective than any description of j how wet the day seemed to you."3Furthermore, in making this dialect the basis of his dialogue, ^Synge has all his people, no matter in what part of Ireland the play Iis supposedly situated, speaking the same dialect. His notebooks abound in short transcriptions of comments and phrases he felt worth remembering, and whiich frequently found their way into his plays.4 But here, too, the important thing is what the dramatist v/as able to do with these^26th May 1903, National Library of Ireland MS.778’^ 3«^10 July 1903, National Library of Ireland MS.778-^7* Further lettersi of 12 and 21 August, 25 September I903 comment on individual words and ; phrases; few of them are local dialect expressions.3Stephens MS,I846; the conversation took place in January,I905.^Quoted in Stephens MS, 1443?1541)1787-88. In his letter to M.J.Nolan, 31 January 1909? Wilson collection, TGD, Synge v/rote; "there is too much description and your characters are not alive enough. All these faults are inevitable in inexperienced work."(The italics are his). Synge's programme note to the first production of The Playboy,Henderson collection. National Library of Ireland 1720, is even more explicit about the necessity of realism in language. iI) li448gleanings. Like a true musician, he takes rough material, words andphrases that have their roots deep in the consciousness of the people,and transforms them into a vehicle which conveys not only his impressionsof that reality, hut his ovm attitudes towards life and art. If wecompare Michael James's speech to Christy with the original speechof Old Mourteen to Synge, we can see how Synge has tightened thedialogue and compressed the essential spirit, yet at the same timepreserved the cadence and charm of the original:"Bedad, noble person. I'm thinking it's soon you'll be getting married. Listen to what I'm telling you; a man who is not married is no better than an old jackass. He goes into his sister's house,and into his brother's house; he eats a bit in this place and a bitin another place, but he has no home for himself; like an old ^ jackass straying on the rocks."!Y/hat's a single man, I ask you, eating a bit in one house anddrinking a sup in another, and he with no place of his own, likean old braying jackass strayed upon the rocks? (258-59)Only v/ith the flexibility of such a language as Anglo-Irish could Syngehave learned his medium. By combining the element of exaltation hefound in life with the flavour and cadence of a peasant speech whichstill reflects "a popular imagination that is fiery, and magnificent,and tender," Synge in his language as well has proven that good theatremay also be good poetry.All art is a collaboration; and there is little doubt that in the happy ages of literature, striking and beautiful phrases were as ready to the story-teller's or the play-wright's hand, as the rich cloaks and dresses of his time.... In a good play every speech h it , should be as fully flavoured, as a nut or apple, and such speeches ^ cannot be v/ritten by any one who works among, people who have shuttheir lips on poetry,Synge wrote in his Preface to The Playboy. Like Yeats, Synge wasconcerned v/ith the art of the minstrel. As early as 1898 he commentedin his notebooks,There exists yet in lonely places the unlettered literature which v/as the real source of all the art of words. In the Gaelic-speaking districts of Ireland, for instance, recitation is of extraordinary merit.^Aran Islands.Works.1910.III.15?.2Greene and Stephens,op.cit.,84., y J means of internal punctuation, which is rhetorical rather than »vV ' grammatical, and would, along with the odd syntax, assure proper delivery,If "breaks" are allowed only where his frequently oddly-placed commea occur, and the lines are read in the long sweeps applied to blank verse, the shape of the line and rhythm immediately become clear.3 Nor does this reading necessarily mean a deliberate slowing of delivery, for like all drama, Synge’s plays would lose much of their dramatic effect if the natural speed of speech is checked. It will be noticed also that, as Synge wrote this speech, there is no indication of the slurring formerly applied to the speech of the comic Irish character, although an^Ibid.,Gf. The Aran Islands,V/orks, 1910,III, 12.^19 November 1905» National Library of Ireland MS. 778^14*^In an interview with the writer, 6 September 1957» Miss Siobhan McKenna, the Irish actress, verified this int rpretation of Synge’s punctuation, adding that the same rules apolied to Shaw.449And in an unpublished essay he argued that poetry should have a dual existence, in the voice of the poet and in the voice of the reader- performer;In primitive times every poet recited his own poem with the music he conceived with the words in his moment of excitement. And his hearers who admired the work repeated it with the exact music of the poet. This is still done among the Aran islanders. An old man who could not read has dravm tears to ray eyes by reciting verse in Gaelic I did not fully understand.!The musici.an’s ear must work in harmony with the poet's eye. Syngeworked hard to achieve this musical rhythm in his speeches, re-v/orkingindividual lines until they achieved the phrasing he required even afterhe had selected the individual words v/hich provided the colour and tonehe desired. In a letter to Max Meyerfield he explained some of the"cuts" in Well of the SaintstSome of the cuts...I merely made...because I thought the speeches spoke more lightly without the words I cut out....Till one gets into the actual rehearsal it is I think better to do as little cutting as possible. Then if a speech drags on the stage it must of course be amended.^He even went so far as to indicate the exact rhythm of his lines by450Anglo-Irish speaker would doubtless alloY/ for the palatal of the "ing"ending. ith these ideas in mind, then, the shape and sweep of thelin -s provide the natural cadence an I music of the longer speeches:...it’s a grand thing to be waking up a day the like of this, when there’s a warm sun in it, and a kind air, and you’ll hear the cuckoos singing and crying out on the too of the hil]s(8l).It’s well you know it-’s a lonesome thing to be passing small towns with the lights shining sideways when the night is down, or going in strange places with a dog noising before you and a dog noising behind, or dravai to the cities where you’d hear a voice kissing and talking deep love in every shadow of the ditch, and you passing on with an empty, hungry stomach falling from your heart(220-21).I’m a long while in the woods with my oim self, and I’m in little ■dread of death, and it earned with riches would make the sun red with envy, and he going up the heavens; and the moon pale and lonesome, and she wasting away(298).^Without Synge’s sense of proportion as an artist, this language would not have been possible. His dialogue is never lyrical for the sake of lyricism alone; much as his characters appreciate ’’poetry- talk,” he has managed to avoid "talking for talking’s sake"; nor is there any sentimentality. Professor Ellis-Permor has pointed out that in Synge’s ability to condense thought and passion, giving his imagination full rein only where it is consistent with plot and action, Synge is akin to the Jacobeans. In Synge’s belief in a popular imagination that^Gf. Yeats’s letter to Lady Gregory, 26 November 1909? Letters,538 concerning a matinée performance of The Tinker ’ s vVedding by the "Afternoon Theatre" organization, His lîajesty’s Theatre, London: "a most disgraceful performance, every poetical and literary quality sacrificed to continuous emphasis and restlessness.... the continual emphasis and change of note made the speeches inaudible, as they are in verse plays treated in the same way. This emphatic delivery and movement — which I is the essence of the English idea of romantic acting — evidently fits nothing but plays written in short sentences without music or suggestion." Yeats had grasped the atmosphere behind the opening dialogue of the play as these players evidently had not, "which Syhge meant to be quiet, with ' the heaviness of roads in it."2Ellis-Permor, The Irish Dramatic Movement, 2nd ed.,185-86.451is "fiery, and magnificent, and tender" and in the artist’s ability to use that imagination to give "the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form," he himself recognizes his kinship with the Elizabethans. But Synge was above all a man of his time. By dealing with the reality as well as the joy, and by retaining the flavour of a language which is still fresh and living, the folk-imagination of his people, he has ensured his plays of a vital and universal appeal.^ His realization that the most valuable drama is that Y/hich sustains itself by the speech of the people is perhaps one of his greatest contributions to twentieth-century theatre."A Comprehensive and Natural Form""The effort of writing is to make the impossible seem inevitable,"Synge noted in his diary.2 It was this inevitability he attempted toconvey in the structure as well as the characterization and languageof his plays. And again he drew heavily on his earlier studies ofmusical form. Just as the speeches of individual characters have arhythEi and cadence of their ov/n, so has the structure of each act,perhaps most noticeably in his early one-act plays. He constantlyrevised his work, completely re-writing the entire act each time aswell as revising paragraphs of action within the act, as he explainedin a letter to John Qpinn concerning The Playboy:I’lj final drafts — I letter them as I go along -- were "G" for the first act, "I" for the second, and "K" for the third. I really wrote parts of the last act more than eleven times, as I often took out individual scenes and worked at them separately.5 -Those critics who speak of the limitations of Synge’s language have surely misunderstood his theory of language. Language must express the mood and minds of the characters who speak it; change the character’s nationality and environment and it is necessary to change the language as well so that once more it expresses the life of the people involved in the fable. For this reason Lady Gregory’s Kiltartan Molière is most successful when she freely adapts structure and motive as well as language. Examples might also be drawn from Lorca, Faulkner, and D.H. Lawrence.Zprotably I90O-I9OI, Stephens MS. 12J7.^5 September 1907» Greene and Stephens,op.cit.,275.452Deirdre vms rewritten over twenty times, and was still unfinished athis death.^ Synge’s advice to a young writer perhaps most clearlyillustrates his contrapuntal method;I thought one speech...excellent comedy growing out of the situation of the two characters — but I am afraid as a whole the play is quite too slight for performance — and too without shape...■.Also one has to interlace one’s characters — a first act all A and B, with a second act all A and C is not satisfactory.2Synge applied this same analytical care to his ov.n writing, constantlystriving for balance in characterization, action, and language, buildingup "currents" of tension through crescendos and contrasts, juxtaposingtragedy and comedy through exposition and poetry.5 As W.G. Fayremarked, "You cannot cut a line in any of his plays without damagingthe whole structure.One of the first things Synge learned was the value of simplicityin structure and action. In both In the Shadow of the Glen and Riders_to the Sea he deals with single themes in which action is cut down toa minimum and atmosphere and mood are intensified. In Riders to the Seaespecially the conflict between Man and the power of Nature supersedesindividual characterization and action. The mood alone is established,first by the continual reference to "the sea" and "the white boards"and by Maurya’s constant mourning which grows in a crescendo to thev/ailing of the caoine. Second, there is no "padding" in the play; thedetails are carefully planned so that almost every speech and movementGreene, "The Tinker’s Wedding,A Revaluation,"825-26. There were twelve versions of Act III of Deirdre, Greene and Stephens,op.cit.,278. f In a letter to Brodzky, 10 December 1907? Spencer Brodney collection,' TCD, Synge commented, "There is no work tnat requires such slow care as writing a play."2Letter to M.J.Nolan, 7 December I9O8, L.M.Wilson collection,TCD.^Cf.Notebooks,c.1901, Stephens MS.1415: "Contrast gives wonder of life. It is found in(a) Misery of earth consciously set against Heaven, see pious writing. Happy other World, Hearn etc,(b) Wonder of world set a,,ainst the misery of age and death (see Villon)."^Fay and Carswell, The Fay^ s £f the Abbey Theatre, 138-39»453plays an important part in establishing the atmosphere of doom: Cathleen’s simple comment, "It’s a long time we’ll be, and the two of us crying"; the old woman's pathetic complaint, "In the big world the old people do be leaving things after them for their sons and children, but in this place it is the young men do be leaving things behind for them that do be old." The homeliness of such details as the kelp for the fire, the pig with the black feet, Bartley’s instructions to his sisters, serves to intensify other touches which become symbols of doom: the white boards, the forgotten bit of bread, and Michael’s clothes. The silences are as eloquent: Cathleen at the spinning wheel, Maurya's aimless raking at theopen fire. The rhythm of the entire play has the steady relentless beating of waves against a rock, gradually increasing in strength to the accompaniment of the low moan of the £aojuie. Against this eternal rhythm of nature the characters move in dream-like measures towards their inevitable destiny.Again in his next play. In the Shadow of j^ he Gl£n, Synge makes use of the same careful characteristics of the craftsman: simplicity of moodand plot made more powerful by localization; intensity carrying the emotional atmosphere across the footlights until each member of the audience feels it personally; the fastidious attention to details which outline each move and emotion'so that they, too, ta%e on personal significance. But here the monotone of fate is replaced by the contrast between nature's oppression and the farcical elements of the fahy.au.The conversations Nora holds first with the tramp and later with Michael build up the atmosphere of loneliness; the conversations the old man holds with tramp and rival contribute to the comedy of the situation.As with all of his %)lays, the curtain rises on a tableau which emphasizes the essential mood which is later broken into by a contrapuntal theme.Here the peat fire casting a glow over the set, the glasses and bottle on the table standing out almost in silhouette, the covered body lying stiffly on the bed at the back, the restless movements of Nora, all454create an atmosphere of stillness and expectancy almost akin to that ofMaeterlinck's early plays. (This same mood of "listening for the unknown"initiates the action in all of the other plays ). Then, as the actionprogresses, the setting becomes less sinister. The Tramp's fear ofthe body, the "dead man's" thirst and the tramp's efforts to keep himcovered, Michael's fear of the stick and of Dan build up to the ironicscene at the end, when the departure of Nora with the Tramp (again aconclusion comion to most of the plays) leaves old Dan enjoying a nuietdrink with the quiet and harmless Michael Dara. Here, too, Synge employsthe device of contrast to emphasize the basic conflict felt throughoutall his plays. The few possessions Nora bundles into her shawl when she' leaves contrast sharply with the stage directions at the beginning of the' clay when she hears the Tramp's knock: She takes up a stocking with money' from the table and puts it in her pocket. 'Wliile she is indulging inreverie over the mists in the glen, Michael is counting the old man'smoney. The ending of the play follows naturally out of the action;Michael's interests dwindle away with the retreating money; Nora leaveswith the Tramp only when her irate husband forces her to make the decision.In both of these early plays, and especially in y. the Shadow of theGlen, Synge employs the retrospective technique, by means of carefulchoice of detail. Nora's speeches are not only an exposition of herpresent mood but a recapitulation of her past life in the glen;Maybe cold would be no sign of death with the like of him, for he was always cold, every day since I knew him...and every night, stranger(13).• God spare Darcy; he'd always look in here and he passing up orpassing down, and it's very lonesome I was after him a long while,..»and then I got happy again — if it's ever happy we are, stranger —for I got used to being lonesome(17).Riders to the Sea evokes the same impression of the present reflectingthe past:pTIt's little the like of him knowsthe sea (50).■ ...six fine men, though it was a hard birth I had with every one of them and they coming “■ to the world — and some of the them were found and some of them were not found, but they're gone now the lot of them..,(50).455But the most striking evocation of the past occurs in the parallel action. The old mother has barely completed her account of how Patch’s body v/as brought home when her last son’s body is carried in to the accompaniment of this shadov/ of the past.The Tinker’s Wedding,SyAycconly two-act play, might be considered an "experiment in expansion,"! for early manuscripts indicate that originally, the play was written in only one act and that Synge reworked his original plot six times, adding material and developing characterization. It was begun the summer of 1902, when Synge was working on Riders to the Sea and In the Shadow of the Glen; he continued rewriting it until December 1907, and it was published in its final form in January of the following year. An earlier title. Movements of May, aptly represents Synge’s first idea in dramatizing the life of the tinkers he had met on the roads, for included within the framework of the tinkers’ desire to marry are several tinker children and, in contrast, representatives of the conventional life to which the priest belongs: a village woman to whomthe tinkers sell the can, and in an intermediary draft several village children.on their way to the priest’s confirmation class. The entire structure is much looser, the characterization thinner, the springtime of the year emphasized over the later call of the vagrant. Again, Synge's marginal instructions to himsélf ("put more current into duo," "cut out girls in white") indicate his careful eye for both baleince of tension and character develonment. As he restricted his cast and humanized his vagabonds, the final scene of confusion gained momentum and power from his earliest weak ending where Michael hurls a stone at the retreating priest to the later towering malediction as the tinkers themselves scurry off. But despite the presentation of "a life, and view of life, that are rich and genial and humorous," the dramatist himself remained dissatisfied with this apprenticeship wto'- the longer^Greene, "The Tinker’s Wedding, A Revaluation,"824.oDrafts of The Tinker’s Wedding in the possession of Tvlrs. Stephens.456form. Althoughfhis material carried more potential for dramatic action*- ( 1 cthan his^.plays, lyricism had not sufficiently blended v^ ith reality to create the "comprehensive and natural form" he desired. The single melodic line lacked sufficient strength to carry the weight of character and mood his theme implied.The fraiüework of The Well of the Saints,on the other hand, with its careful blending of contrapuntal themes, provided sufficient scone for greater fullness and richness of treatment and consequently falls naturally into the three-act form. Here, each act builds up to a climax, at the same time carrying with ease the thematic variations to be developed in the other acts. Act I picks up and elaborates the motif‘sounded throughout The Tinker's Wedding,the happy carefree life of the two blind beggars divorced from yet accented by conventional society. The climax of the act, the quarrel between Mary a,nd Martin, plunges from comedy to tragedy, and prepares us for the "second subject" which will in turn develop in strength through the next two acts, sounding stridently in the comic episode between Martin and Timmy the Smith, softening to the lyrical, yet still minor, duet between Martin and Molly Byrne. Act III picks up both melodies, hope reawakened in the rhapsodic hymn to nature between Martin and Mary, building to a climax in the crowd scene which provides a growling accompaniment to the frantic efforts of Martin and Mary to keep their new-found dream.^Among the papers in the possession of the executors is an incomplete ' analysis in Synge's handwriting of The Well of tj^ Saints, which reads as follov/s :Act IIIIII1 Martin and Mary Exposition o2 plus Timmycrescendo narrativeComedy3 plus girls current now Martin excitement4 plus SaintS minus Saint6 ouarrel tragie--Tiiiii.xy and Martin no current comic2 Martin and Molly love current nnethcn]--Martin and Marycurrent of reav;akened interest2 plus crowdcurrent to make Martin be cured457The weak point in the structure, as Synge recognized, is in subject rather than thematic development. In a letter to Meyerfield he confesses his difficulty;I agree with you that the Vfay I have treated their going blind again is open to criticism, but if I had taken the motive that their blindness was a punish'.ent, I would have got out of the spirit of the play, or have fallen into needless complications so I passed lightly over the matter as it was not really essential to what is most important in the play.!It is significant that this is the only play in which Synge makes use of a deus ex machina to develop his theme. Motivation had not yet fused with characterization, but in his next plays he overcomes this difficulty as well. Again in Well of the Saints, however, we see his ability to foreshadow by subtly introducing a variation on a theme; the play-acting interlude with the Saint's cloak and bell introduces the spiritual element of heavenly machinery still clogged by the coarse humour of the peasants (which will in turn echo throughout the Louis'f section of this theme);Mary and Martin's ineffectual attempt to hide from that same heavenly machinery prepares us for the ironical blending of themes in the climax. And as has already been observed, the richness and texture of the undersong of nature's moods are evident throughout the play, echoed in the speeches of the keen-hearing blind people. Years later Yeats recalled the extraordinary dramatic effect of the "stillness" of the first act.^It is not surprising that George Moore found in The Well of the Saints an ideal libretto for a grand opera.^21 August 1905, National Library if Ireland MS 778^8. In another letter to Dr. Meyerfield, 7 April I906,Synge remarks that he is still "in some ways...not wholly satisfied with it." Louis Untermeyer in New York Times Saturday Review of" Books,14 April I909, quotes from a letter from Synge in which he refers to The Tinker's Wedding as "rather slight."2"An Introduction for my Plays"(1957)? Essays and Introductions, 527-28.5Quoted by Lennox Robinson, 1 Sometimes Think,48-49: "The blind man, basso; his wife, mezzo; Tinnay the Smith, tenor; his girl, of course, soprano; the Friar fpicl, baritone; and then the peasant chorus."458In carefully working out the sequence of events in the play and providing each act with its own rising action and climax, The Well of jWqe Saints lost in freshness and spontaneity while at the same time gaining in thematic contrast and harmonic shading. The Playboy of the Western World indicates Synge’s growing strength in handling of plot and structure as well as in character-drawing and sustained harmonies.^ In this next play Synge weaves an intricate, richly textured design from the unrelated incidents of his sources, at the same ti .e retaining the clarity of line observable in his earlier plays. There is plenty of action, but it too shows greater control (perhaps because Synge here is creating his own fable instead of depending upon a familiar folk tale); there are no ragged edges; the movement of the olay steadily progresses to the climax but allows for more intricate variations and amplification of his leit-motiv. Interest grows with each act, incident piles upon incident, but never obscuring the grand finale when Christy reaches his full stature as hero-playboy and is forever freed from the restricting v/orship of the Mayoites.having a much larger canvas to work on than for The Well of the Saints,Synge creates a much different atmosnhere in The Playboy. The strange and distant country of The Well of the Saints with itsCf.Notes on musical form and composition taken by Synge in October I892 and quoted in Stephens MS,578-59:"(i) Never attempt to get rid of the idea of harmony which will come into your head together with any melody you may conceive.(ii) Never allow yourself to modulate from key to key on any instrument vathout an effort to produce some melody along with your harmonies.(iii)Never commit to paper and retain as approved any melodic conception which fails to realize all above conditions.(iv) Never rest satisfied with any composition, hovæver good its harmony, form, counterpoint or instrumentation unless it is founded on good and regular melodies.(v) ANALYSE."These rules are followed by notes on an article describing "Beethoven’s practice of putting identical ideas into different lights."459constantly surprising familiarity of detail is replaced by the bustling scene the curtain reveals for the opening of 'The Playboy. With little preliminary "orchestration," the opening theme is introduced in Pegeen's first words:Six yards of stuff for to make a yellow govm. A pair of lace boots with lengthy heels on them and brassy eyes. A hat is suited for a wedding-day. A fine-tooth comb. To be sent with three barrels of y porter in Jimmy Farrell’s creel cart on the evening of the comingPair to Mister Michael James Flaherty. With the best compliments of the season. Margaret Flaherty(l77-78).Then Shavm Keogh enters with news of "a kind of fellow above in the furzyditch." Homeliness and familiaiity of details, delivered with sharp,incisive thrusts, are shocked into unfamiliar clarity by the unexpected.Similarly, dialogue replaces stage directions in "setting the scene."Compare the opening stage directions for In the Shadow £f the Glen withShawn’s first speech:I stood a while outside wondering would I have a right to pass on or to walk in and see you, Pegeen Mikc^^and I could hear the cows / breathing and sighing in the stillness of the air, and not a stepmoving any place from this gate to the bridge(178).The same atmosphere of expectancy and stillness is attained, but morenaturally through the speech of the characters; similarly, Shavm’sappearance introduces by muted contrast the second subject, Pegeen’spreference for the Playboy’s "poet’s talk" and "bravery of heart" overthe material wealth her weakling fiance offers. Further, Synge haslearned to carry his device of contrast and balance over from one act to, the next. The opening of Act II parallels Pegeen’s introductory scene,where a similar side of Christy, the peasant who counts security bypossessions, is revealed:Half a hundred beyond. Ten there. A score that's above. Eighty jugs. Six cups and a broken one. Two plates. A power of glasses. Bottles, a schoolmaster’d be hard set to count, and enough in them. I’m thinking, to drunken all the wealth and wisdom of the county Clare (208).460And again, the interruption of his monologue reflects not only the eaxlier contrast of the timid bridegroom, but foreshadows the entrance of Christy's Da, whose arrival smashes Pegeen's dream. Mahon's entrances \ in turn illustrate a development of another dramatic technique : tension is • created by causing the action to be interrupted as soon as something ^ ' important is about to be revealed. In Riders to the Sea it was Michael'sclothes; in The Playboy the technique is applied to the question of ' old Mahon's identity. Similarly, Christy's flow of words gains further strength in its spiral movement through the occasional checks applied by his awestruck audience; "There's praying!" "There's talking!"In reply to a criticism of The Playboy sent him by John Quinn,Synge commented.When he blames the "coarseness" hov/ever, I don't think he sees that( the romantic note and a Rabelaisian note are working to a climax through a great part of the play and that the Rabelaisian note, the "gross note," if you will, must have its climax no matter who may be shocked.!V/e have already observed how through selection, intensification, andcompression Synge was able to make the raw material of his language bothmore lyrical and more dramatic; plot and character pass through the sameprocess to construct the architecturally sound Playboy . At one timeSynge himself despaired, and in a letter to Molly Allgood wrote.Parts of it are the best work, I think, that I have ever done, but parts of it are not structurally strong or good. I have been all this time trying to get over weak situations by strong writing, but now I find it won't do, and I'm at my wit's e n d . 2But eventually he succeeded in working the two themes, Rabelaisian andromantic, through plot and character as well as language. Furthermore,he was able to do without the movement of recapitulation in each actwhich he had found necessary in The Well of _the_ Saints. Here insteadhe sustains both leit-motifs while contrasting and amplifying them,working them contrapuntally through the earlier scenes in sympathy with5 September 1907? Greene and Stephens,op.cit.,275»250 October 1906, Greene and Stephens,op.cit.,217.i.461the sharp shifts in action and mood as Christy alternately succeeds/ and fails in his efforts to wear the mask held out to him, sounding themtogether in the increasingly raoturous duets between the two lovers.Never are the themes obscured or blurred, hov/ever; both gain in strengthand brilliance throughout the play until the final climax, where eachreaches full development and range in keeping with the intensity ofcomedy and tragedy from which hero and heroine make their separate exits.Plot, character and theme here synthesize in an almost bewilderingkaleidoscope of language and action., Writing of The Playboy to Max Meyerfield, Synge remarked, "It is• certainly a much stronger stage-play than the 'Well of the Saints' orany of my other v/ork. "! As has already been observed, Synge re-wroteeach act many times in his effort to achieve this clarity, with eachrevision developing and strengthening plot and theme as well as characterand language. The first indication of the plot in his notebook was madein September I905 during his visit to the Blasket Islands off the Dinglepeninsula in County Kerry. It is entitled simply "Idea for play";Island with population of wreckers, smugglers, poteen-makers etc. are startled by the arrival of a stranger and reform for dread of him. He is an escaped criminal and wants them to help him over to America, but he thinks that they are so virtuous he is afraid to confess his deeds for fear they should hand him over to the law that they are so apparently in awe of. At last all comes out and he is got off safely.Little Queen daughter of ferryman of Dinish Island in play.2 Lady Gregory tells us that he had at first planned to stage the first act in the field on the "high, distant hills."5 The various drafts indicate change of title as well, from "Murder will Out," "The Pool of the Family," "Christy Mahon," to the final form. Although practically4 May 1907, National Library of Ireland MS. 778^ 24. The italics are his.2Stephens MS,1971a; Greene and Stephens, op.cit.,190-191 quote all but the last line.^Dur Irish Theatre.151-152.462every scene has been re-written,^ perhaps the most significant alteration is in the ending; instead of the tragi-comedy of Pegeen's loss and Christy’s flourish, the play ends on a note of tragic farce, Christy being driven out by his father and followed by the Widow Quinn, leaving Pegeen and Shawn to make it up before the curtain falls.2In most of his plays Synge was able to adhere to the conventionaldramatic unities; the pace of the first two acts of The Well of theSaints creates the illusion of ininterrupted action as well. Deirdre of the Sorrows, however, presented several problems. First, the story is well known among Irish people; as we have seen, Synge very wisely sounded the note of foreboding firmly at the beginning. Second, it is a narrative stretching over a number of years; both the early versionsof his play and his reports on progress indicate the difficulties Syngehad with the important second act which must sustain the first theme while at the same time developing and elaborating the counter-theme.As we have seen, he sketched but did not live to complete the full development of the true subsidiary theme, the note of uncontrollable passion sounded by Owen, However, the lyrical note expressed by the two lovers, their dread of life and death, and the accompanying "nature" motif are fully developed throughout the play. The theme of two young people caught in the current of destiny is strengthened by the introduction of little incidents which emphasize this human frailty:^In draft A Pegeen and Christy cry in each other’s arms at the thought of Christy being hanged; Shavm’s sister acts as a sort of TJr- Y/idow Quin; Christy and Shawn have a sham fight at Pegeen's instigation, both afraid. In draft B Christy’s Da ^ states that he is ruined, his land taken from him. Until^draft E the Widow Quin is much more sympathetic and disinterested. The drafts are in the possession of the executors.2From a fairly full scenario jotted on the back of an early draft of Act I. Instructions in the margin indicate Synge’s concern to keep the contrast between the Rabelaisian and romantic notes throughout./465the eavesdropping scene in the second act which reveals the truth Naisihas tried to hide from Deirdre; the bitter quarrel in the shadow ofdeath in the last act. Lavarcham and Conchubor each have their "signature-tunes" as well: the old nurse’s peevishness and warmth; the lonelyking’s burden of sad desires and heavy responsibilities. And here alsoindividual themes are made sharper by deft stage-play: the lovers whosought the ridge of the world find security at the last only in a narrowgrave ; the confidence of the king’s offer of the glories of the materialworld is shattered by the great blaze of Emain; Conchubor brings giftsof jewels and rings, but Deirdre enters with a bag of nuts and a handleof twigs; ITaisi dies to the fulfilment of "a love that will lastforever"; while his rival lives to mourn his dream.^Although the subject itself provides a larger canvas than any of hisearlier plays, Synge manages to retain simplicity of plot and action;characters are comparatively fev/ and language is compressed and 2intensified. Stoicism, asceticism, and ecstasy are at last synthesized in the development of the dramatist. Further, this perfection of technique has enabled the dramatist himself to assimilate his ovm experiences and emotions so that they become a part of his technical knowledge and theories. A brief comparison of these later plays with Synge's first finished play gives some indication of the remarkable speed with which he mastered his medium. The main plot, the story of a young Irish writer who returns from Paris to his uncle’s deathbed and there falls in love with his cousin, a nun in a nursing order, represents Synge's first consistent attempt to project his own emotions and experiences into the dramatic form-. All of the themes developed in his later plays are here sounded with much strength but little harmony: his basic belief in the fulfilment of life; a passionate hatred of false,^Contrasts here are in keeping with the over-all atmosphere of the play, as in The Tinker's Wedding the collisions between LTary Byrne and the priest in turn substantiate the rowdier atmosphere of the earlier play,2Cf. Lady Gregory's Grania.464unnatural or outworn attitudes vdiich pervert or restrict that fulfilment; his deep sympathy for the suffering and limitations of others; his sensitivity to nature. Further, the dialogue of the peasants (in contrast with the speech of the "Big House") represents his early experiments in language, while the thinly disguised self-pity betrays the emotional immaturity reflected in much of his poetry. And the awkwardly expressed conflict between the nun's advocacy _i of a spiritual love and the hero's desire for physical fulfilment ("The only truth we know is that we are a flood of magnificent life, the fruit of some frenzy of the earth.") represents Synge's first attempt to develop and blend the "romantic note" with the "Rabelaisian." (One of/^arly dialogues is a discussion of the relative merits of the religious book the nun is reading and the illustrated Rabelais belonging to the hero). The play is talk for the sake of the ideas the author felt compelled to express, but obviously the potential strength of neither form nor material had been explored or even grasped.^ Yet six years later the same author hadpwritten The Playboy and begun Deirdre of the Sorrows.Again, an exploration of the many varying rèles played by nature throughout his published work indicates the general development of this mastery of technique. In the early plays, Riders to the Sea and In the Shadow of the Glen, natiure is the protagonist, directly influencing mood and action. In his later plays we see a less self-conscious use of nature, and instead a subtle blending with man's actions so that the outcome of the play is man's own doing. By the time of The Playboy,^MSS.in the possession of the executors. Work is in progress on a complete definitive edition of Synge's plays, including publication of this play and various scenarios.2Yeats was fond of describing a scenario on the '98 rebellion offered to the company by Synge, Autobiographies,568. According to a letter from Frank Fay to Synge in the spring of 1904, this scenario was sketched at Fay's request for "a drama of '98 as much alive as In Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea showing what the peasantry had to endure. I believe there were whole districts in which there was not a woman unviolated." Letter in the possession of Mrs. Stephens.465nature is no longer a protagonist, but rather provides an undercurrent,brilliant in detail and necessary in mood. Deirdre of the Sorrowsmarks the perfection of this technique of assimilation. Nature here isneither the direct protagonist nor an ornament. Synge's own directexperiences with nature and the people about him have here becomerecollected in tranquillity, and out of this deeper understanding ofhimself in relation to his environment arises a corresponding maturityin the handling of theme and dialogue. Dramatic skill unites withthe mature interpretive faculty; once again realism joins withlyricism. In presenting a view of life that is true and rich, Syngehad learned to "give the reality, which is the root of all poetry,in a comprehensive and natural form."And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,That dying chose the living world for text And never could have rested in the tomb But that, long travelling, he had come Towards nightfall upon certain set apart In a most desolate stony place.Towards nightfall upon a race.Passionate and simple like his heart.(Yeats, "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory")Yeats founded the theatre movement; Lady Gregory extended its life. Synge's position is more difficult to define. As an artist and a man he walked alone, speaking little of himself yet writing only of himself, observing with restrained objectivity out of his complete involvement.' Strongly and proudly Irish,^ he yet remained apart from the other directors and from the entire national movement; an excellent producer, he frequently considered vdthdrawal from the Abbey he helped to direct.2 The same paradox can be seen in the réaction to his work: first to^Cf.letter to Meyerfield, 12 September 1905, National Library of Ireland MS 778#10: "Synge is, of course, pronounced 'sing,' since they have been in Ireland for nearly three centuries, so that there is now - a good deal of Celtic, or more exactly, Gaelic blood in the family."2Cf. correspondence vfith Molly Allgood, Frank Fay, and Yeats,Greene and Stephens, on.cit.,258-68.466achieve international fame^his piays^caused bitter controversy and further hindered the directors* already difficult task of creating a theatre for Ireland. Although argument still flourishes over his intentions and status, it is now generally accepted that in choice of subject and language his source was national, even local. But Synge came to that material with his theories already formed, his themes already developed. He felt no compulsion to change his ideas so that they conformed to the aims of his co-directors or his audience. In reworking his material for the stage he was concerned "with perfection of dramatic technique, characterization of peasant and tramp, shaping of a language that was musical and joyful yet had roots in reality.But all of these aims were in turn subordinate to his primary concern with art free of didacticism and artificially imposed limitations.It was this belief that led to the achievement of the lyrical and dramatic synthesis of The Playboy and Deirdre. And it was this belief that eventually led him to discard his earlier localized material when it became too limiting in its turn and to move towards the broader scope of the myth and less regional subjects. Synge therefore does not belong entirely within the narrow scope of a "people's theatre" any more than Yeats himself does. With his feet firmly established on Irish soil, he yet dealt with those aspects of life which are common to all; by striving sincerely to interpret the elemental passions and conflicts of life and the dream, he unconsciously moved from the particular to the universal. By practising his belief in art which enlarges as it records, enriches as it illustrates, more than any other playwright of his time he provides that lasting nourishment on which and for which our imaginations live.467CHAPTER 8 - URSA MINORIt will take a generation, and perhaps generations, to restorethe Theatre of Art....(Beltaine,18 9 9)We all did something, but none of us did what he set out to do.Yeats founded a realistic theatre.(Preface to ^ e Unbilled Field,1914)The conflict between aestheticism and naturalism which drovethe founders of the Irish Literary Theatre to Ireland is reflectedin less extreme measures in the three plays Edward Martyncontributed to the movement; further, perhaps in his plays can mostclearly be seen the first warning of the struggle within the Abbeyitself, between the Theatre of Beauty dreamed of by the foundersand the Theatre of Realism which eventually established the "Abbeytradition." In the plays of Yeats, Synge, and to a less extent ofLady Gregory, the Theatre of Art won the first round at the cost oflosing both Martyn and Moore. Yet paradoxically Martyn*s dream ofan "intellectual theatre" taking as its models Wagner, Ibsen,Sudermann, and Hauptmann,^ had from the beginning a much betterchance of success. It is ironical to reflect that if Martyn had2built his theatre and "put the key in his pocket," the Abbey tradition as we see it today would doubtless be a great deal better*As we have seen, Martyn was already interested in the theatre before 1897; like Yeats, Synge, and Moore, he had tried his hand at playwriting before becoming involved in a dramatic movement. The^"The Modern Drama in Germany," Daily Express,11 February 1 8 9 9,3 .2Quoted by Lady Gregory, Journals, 139.468Heather Field was written before 1894, Maeve before 1899; likethem, too, he had already developed the aesthetic creed which helater applied to his plays. And, like his colleagues, he believedthat "it is the dramatist makes the theatre, and not the theatrethe dramatist."^ Dramatists, "being men of genius, control thepublic taste instead of striving to gratify its caprices, like those2who possess no talent." But Martyn subordinated his aestheticism to didacticism. Art, and the drama in particular, he considered "a vehicle for enunciating high and philosophical truths," deriving its glory from "those old, yet ever new springs of emotion in human nature.From the beginning Martyn was more concerned than Yeats andLady Gregory with the "drama of ideas" exemplified by Ibsen: "Everygreat drama, every work worthy to be thought Art, must be founded on4some philosophical idea." Although nationalist in politics as wehave seen, his ideal in art was avowedly cosmopolitan:put before the people of Ireland native works, also translations of the dramatic masterworks of all lands, for it is only by accustoming a public to the highest art that it can be led to appreciate art, and that dramatists may be inspired to work in the great art t r a d i t i o n .51Preface to Henry B.O'Hanlon's The All-Alone (Dublin:Kiersey,1 9 2 2),vi.2Morgante the Lesser, 273-74.3"The Modern Drama in Germany," op.cit.: Morgante the Lesser,264-63. --- --- --- -----------4Preface to The All-Alone, vii.5"A Plea for a National Theatre in Ireland," Samhain,1901,13. Cf. Moore's letter to Martyn, Courtney, Edward Martyn and the Irish Theatre.Annendix D.170.469Like Moore, he felt that the actor was mainly responsible for thepresent state of the commercial theatre, for "where the actorpredominates over the playwright, the drama is worthless, becauseit must be written with the false view of exhibiting the qualitiesof the former at expense of what originality, fertility, and logicaldramatic sequence may struggle for expression in the latter©"^ Anactor concerned only with satisfying his personal vanity could neverbe interested in the drama of ideas, which is free from the2"mechanical sterility" of convention. The first requisite for anynational theatre was, therefore, to establish a school for thetraining of actors and actresses, "a most important branch of whichshould be devoted to teaching them to act plays in the Irishlanguage."^ A second reason for the lamentable state of Englishdrama was, he believed, the financial necessity of "pandering" topublic taste and encouraging long runs, a belief shared by MooreoHis solution was similar as well, "a state subsidy or a subsidy fromprivate individuals, whereby a theatre might be made independent ofpublic favour, and so might become a public instructor," as one4finds in France and Germany.These three aims — "educating the multitude" to an appreciation of good modern drama, establishing a company "that will be morePreface to The All-Alone, vi.2Preface to Paragraphs for the Perverse, Gwynn, Edward Mart yn ^nd the Irish Revival, 163-5*7.^Samhain. 1901,14.4"The Modern Drama in Germany," Dublin Daily Express,11 February 1899.470interested in Arts than in Philistinism and personal vanity,"^ and founding a subsidised theatre which would be free to experiment — remained basic to Martyn's work in the theatre throughout his life. The first he was able to fulfil privately, financing the earlyproductions of the Irish Literary Theatre, "the most significant2 3action of my life," and later establishing The Irish Theatre.The second aim resulted in a lifelong crusade for his beloved Ibsen,who remained the most profound effect on his own work. The thirdled to his break with the theatre he had done so much to found andhis frequent struggles with amateur actors in Dublin. ("The greatestdifficulty with which a reforming dramatist in Ireland has tocontend is the kind of people whom he is forced to employ as 4actors." )Martyn*s great respect for Ibsen as a craftsman is reflected in his own concept of the ideal play, which should be "a problem to be set out, so to speak, by living characters on a big blackboard called the stage while the audience, presumably an intelligent one, was expected to do a little sum."^ It must have well-contrasted characterization, "the true atmosphere of mystery and romance," and clear and "logical sequences depending for understanding and^Paragraphs for the Perverse, Gwynn,op.cit.,132-33.2 'Preface to Paragraphs for the Perverse, Gwynn, op.cit.,l64.^Founded in 1914 by Martyn, Thomas MacDonough, and Joseph Mary Plunkett. Cf."A Plea for the Revival of the Irish Literary Theatre." T ^ Irish Review, April 1914,79-84.4Paragraphs for the Perverse, Gwynn, op.cit.*132.^Quoted by Henry B.O'Hanlon, Courtney, op.cit.,66.471enjoyment on intelligent attention to every speech." Preferably itshould present "the supernatural interwoven with the everyday1realism of life" ; always it should have "a most refining andeducational influence upon the artistic and moral character of the 2nation." Ideally, therefore, it should move beyond the narrowborders of peasant life to an Irish expression of the universal. Itis in the light of these aims that we must examine his contributionto the Irish literary theatre.The Heather Field was Martyn's first play and the new movement'sfirst success.^ On the one hand, with its "mental drama arisingfrom the clash of the poetic and matter-of-fact temperaments" of the 4protagonists , the play strongly echoes Ibsen's psychological drama ("This simple barren prose of your mind — I It is that that is driving me mad." ). On the other, the conflict between Carden Tyrell's dream of the "departed joys" of his youth as reflected in the heather field and the reality of the troubled times of the present strikes the note to be sounded more powerfully in the works of Synge and later Irish dramatists. ("Can there possibly be a doubt as to which is the reality and which is the dream?" asks the hero in^Preface to The All-Alone,ix-x.Samhain, 1901,14.3Cf. Yeats, "Plays Produced by the Irish Literary Theatre...", Memorandum written for Horace Plunkett, 1904: "The Heather Fieldproved itself in performance an extremely powerful play." According to contemporary reviews, the audience saw it as an allegory of the state of Ireland.4Martyn in a letter 26 August 1910, Courtney, op.cit., ?8.^The Heather Field, 2nd ed. (London:Duckworth,191?),2 8 .472horror.^) By following his dream through the heather field, Carden2Tyrell recaptures the beauty of "the music of the morning." But Martyn's dreamer seeks a world far different from the call of Synge's vagrant ; and the voice of the author can be more clearly heard in the generous but melancholy philosopher, Barry Ussher, who appreciates the musio. of the morning ("nature's ethereal phonograph") but recognizes the inevitable acceptance of "the pain of loss," a "true idealist... in a way so drilled and careful, that he will never let himself go. Martyn's comments on The All-Alone, by the dramatist discovered by his Irish Theatre over twenty years later, might have been written about the philosophical idea underlying The Heather Field, the sea replacing Carden Tyrell's dream of the reclaimed land:The All-Alone is a drama of the sea. The idea is the vaguecharm and longing which the sight of the ocean awakens in thehuman heart, and the fatality which results from over-mastering obsession by this or any other mental passion. In this lies material for the most awful tragedy, all the more awful because it is psychological in the truest sensed for it is only when a particular passion gets into the head, so as to become a sort of cult, that the sufferer is to be pitied as the most unfortunate of men. The more highly strung or imaginative he is, the greater is the difficulty of his deliverance; because the poetry and idealism with which he looks out on life are lighted up with the flame of this fatal beauty, and without it his prospect of the world appears to him in ^.. uninteresting gloom. It is only those who conquer know, that there is no happiness in passion, that happiness was not made for this world, and that the nearestapproach to it is the peace its conquest brings. So truly is theThe Heather Field, 30.2.Ibid.. 92; çî. 52.^Ibid..74:16. Cf. the opposing view held by Sister Courtney, who considers Ussher "the most reprehensible personage in the play."473soul made for immortality!^Here speaks the young poet who burned his verses as penance forindulgence in the beauties of this world, the elderly ascetic whowilled his body to science as final mortification of the flesh.The Heather Field is Martyn's best play, constructed with theclear and logical framework he felt essential to a satisfactory workof art. The patterning and balance are almost extreme in theirformalism; Tyrell's idealization and the inevitable failure of hiswork on the heather field is foreshadowed by his earlier idealizationof marriage; his own "wild untamable nature" avenges itself as doesnature through the heather field; his love of Hellenic beauty istransposed to the dream of the green fields of Ireland; his youngson's joy of life reflects the qualities he appreciated in hisbrother Miles (who was the same age as Kit when Tyrell lost theideal world of his youth by attaining his dream of marriage); theflowers Kit lovingly gathers for his father in the first act become .the passport to madness in the final scene. Each act builds up toan emotional climax increasing in intensity to the final breakdown;the past is constantly reflected in the present; conversations betweenTyrell, Ussher, and Miles are paralleled by conversations between2Grace and the Shrules. The play, too, sounds the themes which arePreface to T h e All-A l o n e , 1919 revised version for publication in Paragraphs for the P er vers e, Gwynn, op.c i t ., 168-69* The revisions make the comments even more applicable to Martyn's own work.Gi* An Enchanted Sea.Lord Shrule might be patterned on Sir William Gregory.Cfo Lady Gregory's Journals,30*474developed and elaborated in his later work: the sharp portrait of Grace Tyrell prepares the way for the acrid etching of Catherine Devlin in Grangecolman(1912)^; the call of the unknown echoes throughout ^ Enchanted Sea(l902); the satirical sketch of the doctors is transformed into the bitter wranglings of the Aldermenin The Tale of a Town(l899), the farcifâl hairdressers of Romulus2 3and Remus , and the weak intriguers of The Place-Hunters ; thetentative note of danger sounded in Tyrell's romantic idealism iscoarsened in the farcical caricature of George Augustus Moon ofThe Dream Physician (1914); and the sensitive evocation of thebeauties of nature is deepened in the Celtic glamour of Maeve.In his review of The-Heather Field and Maeve in the DailyExpress, AE commented on "the current of subtle spiritual reverie4which is characteristic of the awakening genius of the Gael" ; certainly in his second play Martyn is more strongly influenced by the "Celtic twilight" of his fellow nationalists than by Ibsen's^Cf. Miss. Horniman's letter rejecting Grangecolman, Gwynn,_op. c ^ ., 131.^Romulus and Remus, or The Makers of Delights: A symbolist extravaganza in one act, Irish People.Christmas Supplement,21 December 1907* An unpublished letter 4 September I9IO, Courtney, op.cit.,119. indicates "the originals of Romulus, Remus and Daisy Houlihan as George Moore, Yeats and Lady Gregory, and Denis d'Oran as myself." Sister Courtney is doubtless correct in her identification of Mrs. Cornucopia Moynihan as Miss. Horniman. The humour is as heavy-footed as these labels suggest.^The Place-Hunters, a political comedy in one act, The Leader, 26 July 1902. The sketch simply transfers the intrigues of The Tale of a Town to the Four Courts in Dublin, and again in the character of Counsellor Hugh Daly, Martyn reserves the most sympathetic characterization and the wittiest comments for himself.4AE,"The Irish Literary Drama," Daily Express, 28 January1899,3.475clear cold light of dawn.^ Again the scene is Ireland, thecentral figure an idealist who strives to unite the Hellenic beauty2of form ("Form is my beauty and my love$" ) with the magic of themythical Celt ("Such beautiful dead people.... Oh, I am dyingbecause I am exiled from such beauty."^). But whereas CardenTyrell's tragedy is the result of a disposition "too eerie, tooethereal, too untajnable for good, steady, domestic cultivation"(like the heather field), Maeve's dream of a love which would notbe returned is as unsympathetic as her cold and distant nature("Those feelings and impulses which are in our hearts and whichgovern our affections, with her are all in the head," comments her4much more human and lovable sister. ). Here Martyn has managed tocombine the worst qualities of both extreme aestheticism andcelticism in one characterization. His aim is reflected in his ownanalysis of Hauptmann's Hannele, published in the Daily Express thesame month that Maeve appeared in print:With what marvellous art this beautiful dream-drama brings before us the dream of life and the life of dream. It is a masterwork of construction, and profoundly original withal, although the first idea may possibly have been suggested by Calderon's "Life and the Dream". It is impossible to give an idea of the perfection of the scenes. Those of the peasants and paupers have a sort of Dutch charm like the genre pieces of Boers by Teniers and Ostade, while the dream visions, with their^he second act of The Heather Field might also owe something to Strindberg's The Father.^Maeve.2nd ed.(London:Duckworth,1917),42.I^bid«.5.^Ibid.,8.476soft beauty as of the poetic, ingenious designs of Bontet de Montvel, go with simple pathos to the heartThis is not to imply that Martyn felt his own work to be of thestandard of Hannele, but in his dramatization of a girl pining todie for a lover who had no existence, set within a realisticframework of peasants in the west of Ireland, he too was attemptingto portray a "dream-drama," "the wistful dream of beauty which hauntsthe heart of the modern Celt as it haunted the heart of the ancient 2Greek," ("Each man who comes to his ideal has come to Tir-nan-3ogue." ) The fault lies not so much in the idea as in theconstruction and characterization: the awkward blending of momentsof vision with textual dissertations on Irish folklore andarcheology; the crude and unconvincing attempt to symbolize Englishrapacity in the anxious character of Hugh Fitzwalter; the overloadedsetting with its ruined abbeys, cairns, round towers, and distantmountains. But in his minor characters Martyn is more successful.The O'Heyne, Prince of Burren, strikes a more authentic note in his4peevish reiteration of bad luck and resentment; Finola is the only sympathetic woman character in all of Martyn's work; and in the characterization of Peg Inerny, the sly old vagrant who reigns in the life of dreams as the beautiful Queen Maeve, there is a touch of^"The Modern Drama in Germany," Dublin Daily Express,11 February 1899i3* The Heather Field and Maeve(London:Duckworth, 1899) appeared in February 1899*2Cf. Letter to the Editor, United Irishman, 19 April 1902, 1, concerning the production of AE's Deirdre; also Gwynn, op.cit,,l45*^Maeve,1917. 42,4Cf. Eugene O'Neill's sea captain in Anna Christie.477genius. The play's reception was as mixed as its ingredients;Maeve*s continual longing for "the day-ghost" and "the immortal beautyof form" brought unsympathetic titters from the audience and causedYeats several years later to fear a similar reaction to Synge'sverbal repetitions.^ But the enthusiastic applause to Peg Inerny'sfinal triumphant speech led directly to the creation of Yeats'sKathleen-ni-Houlihan: "You think I am only an old woman; but I tell2you that Eire can never be subdued."The most successful scene in Maeve is the dream sequence in Act II, which although conceived by Martyn was "polished" for the stage by Arthur Symons.^ He was less successful in his next rather unwilling collaboration, when George Moore and Yeats revised The Tale of a Town as The Bending the Bough. The story of this strange collaboration has been frequently told, first by Moore with^Letter to Synge, mid-Augtiêt 1904, Green^]o^f%^% 16^-66.Cf."An Old Playgoer," "The Irish Literary Theatre," 'The Irish Playgoer .Vol. 1.22 February 1900,4-5;Yeats''s: address on "The Irish Literary Theatre," reported in The Independent. 19 February 1900:"From the Study Chair: The Irish Literary Theatre 1900,"New Ireland Review.March 1900,49-53*2£f.Yeats'8 memorandum for Horace Plunkett in the Patent Enquiry,1904, "Plays Produced by the Irish Literary Theatre...": "In addition to the primary meaning of the allegory there was a secondary meaning. The girl was Ireland wavering between her religious ideal, her spiritual dreams and the material civilization of England. The audience showed itself a very clever audience by very quickly understanding this. The remarkable thing in the play however was the character of Peg Inerny, the curious witch, who was beggar woman by day and a Queen of Fairy by night. She typified Ireland"; also Our Irish Theatre.27-28.3Cf. Gwynn,op.cit., 121-25; Court ne y ,£p.cit.,44. Mart yn dedicated the first edition of The Heather Field and Maeve to George Moore, W.B.Yeats, and Arthur Symons.478elaborations and unkind shafts in Hail and Farewell l a t e r by2Yeats in his Autobiographies, more indirectly by Martyn himself in Romulus and Remus. Martyn*s play as it stands, "a comedy of affairs in five acts," is an unwieldy indictment with symbolic overtones of small-town politics, reminiscent of but not slavishly copying Ibsen’s ^ Enemy of the People. Powerful but clumsy in characterization, overtly nationalist in theme and intention, it was the movement’s first attempt to portray contemporary town life on the stage and as such its sharply outlined criticism provided a sturdy example for such playwrights as Padraic Colum and Lennox Robinson. It was also the most original of Martyn’s plays, exhibiting both the admirable qualities of The Heather Field and Maeve and the defects of all his work. The characters are well contrasted, the "philosophical idea" — again the conflict between compromise and the ideal — probable, the situation appealing to a nationalist audience. But in his portrayal both of character and of situation Martyn exhibited the lack of "literary tact" which was already proving embarrassing to his colleagues.^ General acrimonious argument around the council table is paralleled by the petty family jealousies around the maiden aunts* tea table, the tangles of both restricting rather than contributing to theatrical interest; Millicent Fell, the young hero’s fiancee, is-an acid^Ave. 165-67, 171,205-07,254-55, 251-52,278-290.2427-430. £f. also Our Irish Theatre, 26-27; Journals, 30-31#^Ave, 215.479portrait of the qualities Martyn detested in the Oxford "bluestocking," with insufficient sympathy to make her human; there is little distinction between family squabbles and party politics. Furthermore, having little of the poetry of Maeve or Ibsen, the play moved further still towards the naturalism Yeats opposed. It is not surprising that the Directors felt that The Tale of a Town "did not ... come up to the required standard."^What is surprising is that they should think Moore’s adaptation, The Bending of the Bough , did come up to that standard. For although Moore has deepened the characterization, tightened the construction, and emphasized the political at the expense of the personal element in the play, the result is not much of an improvement over the original version. There is in fact almost as much loss: the bluff outspoken Mrs. Costigan is transformed into the unsuccessful politician Macnee; the play on "union of hearts" is omitted, thereby losing much of the political overtones that phrase implied during the years immediately following the split in the Parnell party; the "blarney" of the original visiting Mayor is dispensed with, thus eliminating any interest this scene did have. The most interesting alteration occurs in the characterization of Jasper Dean, who in the second version paradoxically achieves more of the idealist spirit apparent in Martyn’s earlier plays, torn as he is between the call to realism represented by his fiancee and the material advantages of her^Lady Gregory to Padraic Colum, ?January I906, Greene and Stephens, op.cit.,193* In his review, "Two Irish Plays," United Irishman, 9 November 1901,6, Frank Fay severely criticized the play.480position, and the prophetic oratory of Kirwan, who represents notonly idealism in politics but "the spiritual destiny of the Celticrace."^ ("The difficulty in life is the choice, and all the wonderof life is in the choice.") Yeats also had a hand in the revisions,2his main contribution being Jasper Dean’s speech in the first act.Although the theme of the play, universal in interest andnational in significance, had value and in more capable hands hassince proved eminently suitable for dramatization, the failure ofboth Martyn and Moore indicates their limitations as dramatists. Onthe other hand, the weakness of Lady Gregory and Yeats in acceptingthe play in either form indicates the first departure from theiroriginal aims and prepares us for the ultimate failure of their idealtheatre. For neither approved of Moore’s version of the play, asYeats implies in a letter reporting on the progress of the revision:It is foolish of Martyn to call the play "ugly," for ugly as it is from my point of view and yours, it is beauty itself beside what it was; and as for "commonness" in the writing, neither of them know what style is, but Moore can at least be coherent and sensible.3The play was of value, he felt, as "a splendid and intricate gospel4of nationality and miocy ^ be almost epoch-making in Ireland." Thiswas the attitude Moore himself had towards his adopted child,5believing that "it will cause a revolution."^The Bending dtf the Bough (London: Fisher Unwin, 1900) ,61.2Letter to Lady Gregory, 21 December 1899, Letters, 332.^Letter to Lady Gregory, 28 November 1899, Letters, 329-30.4Letter to Lady Gregory, 21 December 1899, Letters, 332.^Our Irish Theatre,27.481As a nationalist piece of propaganda, the play fared well, receiving the same applause Martyn’s Peg Inerny aroused.^ But Maeve had been chosen for its passages of beauty, and the nationalist approval came as a surprise. The Bending of the Bough had only its sentiment to recommend it; as Frank Fay commented in his perceptive review of the Irish Literary Theatre experiment, its basic defects were theatrical, not literary ones: ’’writing for applause and a good curtain.’’ In their anxiety to practise their dream, Yeats and Lady Gregory had for the first time invoked the double standard, accepting a play which fell short of the standard they demanded of their ownIworks. In the perilous compromise between nationalism and art, thenation had won first round.The Tale of a Town was Martyn’s last contribution to thedramatic movement he had helped initiate and sponsor. His next stepwas a further embarrassment to Yeats, and an indication of the course he was to follow in the pursuit of his ideals for the theatre. In reply to Yeat’s request for an article on the Fays’ production of AE’s Deirdre,^ he wrote a letter extolling the play but damning the actors with faint praise:* J : •’’The Irish Literary Theatre,’’ United Irishman,24 February 1900,5; Letter to the Editor (possibly from Mrs. George Coffey), All-Ireland Review, 3 March 1900,4.^F.J.Fay, ’’The Irish Literary Theatre — and After',’» United Irishman,23 November 1901,3. Yet according to Holloway, 19 July 1907,National Library of Ireland MS 1805,447-48, Fay felt that Moore must have had a hand in The Heather Field as well.Yeats’ letter to Lady Gregory, 10 April 1902, Letters,370.482The excellence of AE’s play ’’Deirdre", I never for a moment doubted....! saw in the reading that the acts were scientifically right in construction; and the performance confirmed my opinion....The charm with which the great story of "Deirdre" is set forth was manifest to all, and the movement and many dramatic situations would have been more manifest under conditions of a more competent acting and stage management. I do not mean to say that the acting was bad. On the contrary, it had some good features in it, notably the all-important feature of being in the right key. It was, however, ineffective and quite wanting in that intensity which is necessary to give life to any strong dramatic situation.1The following year Yeats reports in a letter to John Quinn thatMartyn has "taken up another amateur company and is getting them toplay his plays. He took a big theatre for them last week and paidthem. George Moore did the stage-management, and the company playedThe Heather Field and A Doll’s House. W i t h this gesture Martynended his association with the Irish Literary Theatre; for the restof his life he gave generously of both time and money to establishhis dream of "a society for producing native drama and continentalmasterpieces" which would deal with "the problems of people morecomplex and refined" than those of the Abbey Theatre.^ Finally' with the foundation of The Irish Theatre in 1914 "for the productionof non-peasant drama by Irishmen, of plays in the Irish Language,' and of English translations from European master-works for thetheatre," he found what he had been seeking.^ Perhaps more than^Letter to the Editor, United Irishman,19 April 1902,1.^28 June 1903, Letters, 407.^’’A Plea for the Revival of the Irish Literary Theatre," The Irish Review, April 1914, 79-84. Cf. Joseph Plunkett, "The I r i ^ Theatre," The Irish Review, September 1914, 337-38.4Preface to The All-Alone, v-vi.483either of his co-directors, Martyn remained faithful to his earlyideals of the theatre. Looking back at the end of his life to thatfirst experiment, he could still admit, "But the Abbey plan wasintellectually sound, and it triumphed by creating a thinkingaudience for itself."^ That it was not his audience, he hadlearned long before Yeats made the same discovery. It is to Martyn’scredit that he withdrew from the venture he had done so much toencourage with more grace than those who remained had shown towardshim. His failure as a playwright did not alter either his idealsfor the theatre or his faith in his dream. His statement of thatfaith, as expressed in 1902, illustrates not only his strength buthis devotion to both Art and his Nation:Gratitude — Of course we don’t expect any gratitude! It is only weaklings hanker after gratitude. Nation-builders, in working out their will, think themselves lucky if they even escape assassination.^Referring to their unfortunate collaboration over The Bendingof the Bough, Yeats comments in his Autobiographies,The finished work was Moore’s in its construction and characterization, but most of the political epigrams and certain bitter sentences put into the mouth of Deane, a dramatization of Standish 0 ’Grady, were mine. A rhetorical, undramatic second y act about the Celtic Movement, which I had begun to outlive, wasall Moore’s; as convert he was embarrassing, unsubduable, preposterous•3But embarrassing as he might be as a supporter and difficult as a collaborator, it is doubtful whether without Moore’s encouragement^"A Plea for the Revival of the Irish Literary Theatre," 79-84.2The Place-Hunters, The Leader, 26 July 1902, 349.Autobiographies, 427,484Yeats could have succeeded in establishing the Irish Literary Theatrewhen he did. For Moore’s idea of a theatre was in many ways similarto Martyn’s and strengthened both: an endowed theatre which would befree from the dictates of that "filthy cur, feeding upon offal," thegeneral public; a company untouched by the "mummer warship" currentin the commercial theatre, thereby once more elevating playwright over 2actor; a policy cosmopolitan in design, recommending "great dramaticmasterpieces of European renown, and plays dealing with our ownnational life, history, and legend"^ ( which in Moore’s temporary4support of the Gaelic League included plays in Irish ). Also, Moore arrived fresh from his battles for and with the Independent Theatre of London, with much of the "fine fleur" of France still about him as well;^ in the eyes of the relatively inexperienced Irish trio, he represented both the experience and knowledge they required. But from the beginning the partnership,as with Martyn, was an uneasy one, For Moore also believed that "the modern realistic drama... of the^"Mr. George Moore Replies," London Daily Chronicle, 25 January 18991 a reply to William Archer’s review of Moore’s preface to Martyn’s The Heather Field and Maeve. Cf. "Why I Don’t Write Plays," Pall Mall Gazette, 7 September 1892, 5; ”A Preface to Tkg Bending gf the Bough." Fortnightly Review, 1 February 1900, 317-24.2"Mummer Worship," Impressions and Opinions, 120-138. Cf. Part One, Chapter 4 of this thesis.^"Is the Theatre a Place of Amusement?" Beltaine, 1900,9*4"The Irish Literary Renaissance and the Irish Language," New Ireland Review, April 1900, 65-72.^Cf. "Why I Don’t Write Plays," Pall Mall Gazette, 7 September 1892,3 ; Introduction to The Heather Field and Maeve, vii-viii.485present day — is the acting d r a m a , a n d took Ibsen*s "perfect sense of2craftmanship" as his model* Hence we have from the very beginning theparadox which was to be reflected within the Abbey Theatre policythroughout the founders* lifetime, an attempt to create the Theatreof Beauty but receiving its support from the Theatre of Realism.Moore*s concept of the ideal play was almost identical to2Martyn*s — emphasis on plan and form, an^ effort to achieve the4"balance, design and sequence" he admired in Ibsen*s "psychological d r a m a , a n d concern for "the development of a moral idea*"^ His ambition in drama was in fact his concern in the novel, the problem7of "conveying an interesting and truthful reflection of life." Perhaps this was also his main departure from Martyn’s creed as well; for Moore "the only end of life is life, and the only end of art is to^Letter to the Editor, Pall Mall Gazette. 29 February 1892,2; "Note on *Ghotfts,*". Impressions and Opinions. 164-65,2Goodwin, Conversations with George Moore. 171; "A Preface to The Bending of the Bough." Fortnightly Review. 1 February 1900,317.3Goodwin, Conversations with George Moore. 62; Preface to The Lake (London:Heinemann, 1921), ix.4Introduction to The Heather Field and Maeve. xxii-xxiii.Cf. Preface to The Coming of Gabrielle (London : private ly printed, 1920), xvi,^Ibid*, ix-xi. Cf. "Our Dramatic Critics," Pall Mall Gazette.9 and 10 September 1892.^Note to The Strike at Arlingford (London:Walter Scott, 1893), 5,^Ibid.. 14.486help us to live," and the artist should go no further in hisdidacticism.^ "The only two conditions that can be fairly imposedupon a playwright are — firstly, that his work should be a work of2art; secondly, that it should interest." Further, Moore had a moreprofound grasp of Ibsen*s technical accomplishment, and like himturned to France for his first model, a debt he indicated inconversation with Michael Field:We talked much of the construction of plays for the stage; he made me realize the leading fault of our work ~ its want of rhythmical progression — the haphazard development of plot which has contented us. The firm yet pliant structure of a work is one of the requirements of style. And preparation for events and entrances is the true forethought that gives dramatic art integrity and musical movement.And so he brought with him to Ireland not only a superior knowledgeof stagecraft but the emphasis on style and structure idiich wouldlead him first into collaboration with his fellow directors andeventually send him once more to the form of art he found moresatisfactory, the novel.Moore*s interest in structure and situation was both hisstrength and his weakness as a playwright. Because of it thedramatic form intrigued him and gave him a clearer grasp of stagecraft^Letter June 1903, Letters from George Moore to Ed. Duiardin,47, Cf, Moore*s criticism of Granville Barker, quoted by Clark, "George Moore at Home in Paris" (l922), Intimate Portraits, 133-34:"He prattles about educating the public by means of the theatre.What the hell does he want to do that for?"^Interview witji The Pall Mall Gazette. 21 February 1893,2.^orks and Days from the Journal of Michael Field, ed,T, and D.C, Sturge Moore (London:John Murray,1933), 198; Preface to The Coming of Gabrielle. x-xiii*487than either Yeats or Martyn at that time had. In spite of it,however, he was unable to make the next essential step in theconstruction of a play, the development of that situation throughdialogue. "The situation was quite perfect, but Wien I wanted wordsthey would not come," he confessed to Michael Field.^ Both Martynand Yeats recognized his "power of inventing a dramatic climax" and2consequently were willing to accept his help, as he in turn was willing to accept theirs for the sake of "the beauty of the creation." Neither, however, could overcome the difficulties of working with4"that headlong intrepid man." And so for the first time, but not the last, theatre policy became further entangled with the problems of personality.But although the part Moore played in the establishment of the Irish Literary Theatre has since been distorted by the accounts and^Works and Days.199. Cf. "Note on ♦Ghosts,*" Impressions and Opinions. 163: "Plays read to me exactly as they act — only better."Also his revealing comment on Martyn*s Maeve," The Irish Literary Theatre," Samhain. 1901,13: "the idea of the play is clearer in the printed text than it was on the stage."2Cf. Yeats*s letter to Moore, ?January 1901, Letters. 347; Autobiographies. 426,3Cf. Moore*8 letter to Yeats, probably the spring of 1898, in the possession of the National Library of Ireland, referring toYeats*s help with the characterization of Ulick Dean in EvelynInnes: "I am most grateful to you for your assistance, but I will suggest that you do not take any one into your confidence regarding this little collaboration. To do so would merely give occasion for some vain merriment and would prevent the beauty of the present creation from being seen. I am willing to take the credit for work which I have not done without assistance so that the few who arecapable of seeing may see its beauty."^eats, "Notes and Opinions," Samhain. 1905,11.488counter-attacks of both Yeats and Moore, his influence as "manof the theatre" and collaborator cannot be ignored. If it had notbeen for Moore the first productions might never have reached thestage; he "gave excellent help in finding actors," and virtuallytook charge of rehearsals.^ He both defended and encouraged the2enterprise with his customary energy and publicity; Yeats in turnoadmired his efficiency and dubbed him "the Aristophanes of Ireland." Most important of all, perhaps, he wrote a play with Yeats. For like Martyn, Moore had also breathed the rarified air of the Celtic Twilight, and in his Hall of Fame set beside Ibsen "the genius of W.B. Yeats, being a survival of that of the prophet and the seer of4old Time." He greatly admired that "divine play," The Countess Cathleen. and gave liberally of both his praise and constructive criticism.^ But Moore could never resist involvement; soon the inevitable suggestion followed, a scenario "Wiich might be of some use," and finally collaboration.As we have seen, this was not the first time Moore had acted as collaborator. His first attempt at writing had in fact been two^Our Irish Theatre. 20: Autobiographies. 413.2Introduction to The Heather Field and Maeve: controversy in the Daily Chronicle with William Archer, 25 January 1899; Gwynn, Edward Martyn. 130-131.3John Eglinton, introduction to Letters from George Moore to Ed.Dujardin. 6; Autobiographies. 435-36.4Introduction to The Heather Field and Maeve. xx-xxiii.^Letters to Yeats, National Library of Ireland, MS8777, Later he wrote to Synge, praising and criticizing The Playboy. Greene and Stephens, op.cit., 255-56.489plays "of which, I am glad to say, no trace remains."^ The Strikeat Arlingford. the result of a wager and produced by the Independent2Theatre in 1893, was written in collaboration with Arthur Kennedy, (William Archer compared the play favourably with Shaw*s Widowers*3Houses. ), He had helped Martyn with The Heather Field. Maeve. and The Tale of a Town. He and his friend Alexis had made a French version of Gilbert*s Sweethearts;^ he and Mrs. Pearl Craigie ("John Oliver Hobbes") wrote a one-act play in 1894.^ Later he was to write Peacock*s Feathers in collaboration with Mrs. Craigie, a0revision called Elizabeth Cooper in collaboration with Dujardin, anda further revision. The Coming of Gabrielle. A "very intelligent young man" contributed to the first dramatization of Esther Waters which was produced by the Stage Society on Bernard Shaw*s^Avowals. 258. In 1879 he published Martin Luther, written in collaboration with Bernard Lopez.^Clark, Intimate Portraits. 91-92. The story of The Strike at Arlingford is told in "Why I Don*t Write Plays," Pall Mall Gazette.7 September 1892; Aye, 49-51. Moore explains his intentions in an interview with Pall Mall Gazette. 21 February 1893: "What I have tried to do is to depict a weak man in a position too strong for him — a kind of modern Hamlet, so to speak, whose mind and resolution are overborne by his circumstances." He was proud of his "Racenian Liisl drama" (letter to Gosse, July 1893, Hone, George Moore. 183) and borrowed several of its incidents for several stories in Memoirs of my Dead Life. Later he was to say, "The audience doesn’t want reasons, they want drama," Clark, Intimate Portraits. 98.^William Archer, The Theatrical "World" for 1893 (London:Walter Scott, 1894), 70-75.^Clark, Intimate Portraits. 151-52.Journeys End and Lovers Meeting, produced by Forbes Robertson at Daly*s.I^bid.. 91.4901 2 recommendation, and later revised with the help of Barrett Clark.He was constantly considering scenarios for operas (including oneobased on Deirdre, and one borrowed from Synge's Well of the Saints ). He bombarded Yeats with criticisms^ and suggestions for scenarios,^ and finally in 1901 their Diarmuid and Grania reached the stage.Their collaboration on this play has been described amusingly and fairly accurately by Moore in Hail and Farewell, more discreetly by Yeats in Dramatis Personae. The idea apparently first came from Moore and work had already begun when they turned their attention to The Tale of a Town. In a letter to his sister in 1899 Yeats describes the "compact" agreed upon:^Moore quotes a postcard from Shaw in his preface to Esther Waters (London:Heinemann, 1913). Seven years later he wrote to Frank Harris, Moore versus Harris ed. Guido Bruno (Chicago:privately printed, 1925),18: "Shaw is without any aestheticism whatever....his jokes are vulgar claptrap, the jokes of the clowns in the pantomime."2Clark, Intimate Portraits. 91-92.3 'Letters 14 and 19 November 1908, Letters from George Moore to Ed. Dujardin. 68-69 and 71-72. In 1927 he published The Making of an Immortal, his theory of Shakespeare’s identity, in 1923 a dramatization of The Brook Kerith called The Apostle, a further dramatization in 1930, The Passing of th^ Essenes.4In 1899 AE wrote to Yeats, Passages from the Letters of AE to W.B. Yeats,20: "I am very sorry you are changing Shadowy Waters.I swore at Moore when I heard it. I suppose he is the friend itho has suggested alterations. I would like to strangle him."^Where There is Nothing originated in an idea told to Yeats by Dr. Sigerson on which Moore based a scenario and sent to Moore; cf. John Eglinton, A Memoir of AE. 107; Holloway also records the story in his diary, 21 November 1907, National Library of Ireland MS1805,788. According to the correspondence between Moore and Yeats in the National Library of Ireland, MS8777, Moore suggested the plot of Diarmuid and Grania to Yeats, and may even have written the first outline scenario. Cf. Section Two, Chapter 5 of this thesis.491We have made the first draft and have got, as I think, a very powerful plot and arrangement of scenes. It will be a wonderful part for a great actress if she can be found. Moore is in boundless enthusiasm. The play will be in prose.....Moore is now writing the play out fully. He will then give it to me and I will go over it all putting it into my own language so as to keep the same key throughout and^making any other changes I think fit and send it back to Moore.In theory, Yeats was willing to recognize Moore's superior knowledgeof the stage, "a power of construction, a power of inventing adramatic climax far beyond me"; Moore in turn was content to allow3Yeats's authority on questions of style. Despite occasional outbursts of impractical enthusiasm (they once considered carrying the plot through three different languages before turning it into Anglo-Irish, according to Moore^) and heated disagreements (at another time Arthur Symons was called in as mediator^), the play was finally completed, and produced by F.B. Benson's company in October 1901, in the third year of the Irish Literary Theatre's experiment.^The play was first offered to Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who offered "to pay a sum on account," but could not produce the play in Ireland. Letter from Moore to Yeats, before 1901, National Library of Ireland MS8777, envelope 1. Cf. Autobiograrfiies. 441-42. Moore persuaded Sir Edward Elgar to compose special music.^1 November 1899, Letters. 326.^oore-Yeats correspondence. National Library of Ireland, MS8777. Cf. Susan Mitchell, George Moore (Dublin:Maunsel, 1916), 101-02: "Yeats had come to the collaboration determined to be substantial and material like Moore. Moore had resolved to rise to the heaven of the picturesque and beautiful to meet Yeats. They had passed each other on the journey."‘*Ave. 342-362.^Letter from Yeats to Moore, Letters. 347-48.492The collaboration was more successful than the performance;or the audience:; reaction: the English company could not pronounce1 2 the Irish names; nationalists objected to Elgar's "English" music;critics denounced the "coarse English society play presented to usin fancy dress" as "a heartless piece of vandalism practised on a3great Irish story." The nationalist campaign against the Irish Literary Theatre which had begun with The Countess Cathleen was gaining strength. Both Yeats and Moore replied to their critics, asserting the right to interpret the legend as they saw it, "the tragedy of a hero who has married a frail woman." The emphasis upon the "moral idea" and "the essence ... as an escapement from formal4life" iÜ reminiscent of Moore's earlier pronouncements on the drama,$and much of the staging (the banquet-hall setting, Diarmuid's ^Robinson, Ireland's Abbey Theatre, 21.^Arthur Griffiths, "All Ireland," United Irishman. 14 and 21 September 1901: "There are Seven that Pull the Thread," a song from Act I of Diarmuid and Grania. with music by Elgar, was published by Novello in 1902 and reprinted in a Broadsheet in January, 1902, under the title "Spinning Song." The play, edited by William Becker and published in The Dublin Magazine.April-June. 1951. does not contain the song.^Standish 0'Grady, "The Story of Diarmuid and Grania," All Ireland Review. 19 October 1901,244, objected to this "writing and exhibiting an Irish drama founded upon an utterly untrue chapter of pretended Irish history, written in the decadence of heroic and romantic Irish literature." Later he objected to AE's Deirdre on the same grounds. Cf. also The Leader. 12 November 1901, 155-58; MacManus, White Light and Flame,46-47. Fournier, editor of Celtia. November 1901,170 did approve.^oore, "On the Thoughtlessness of Critics," The Leader.9 November 1901, Yeats, "Literature and the Conscience," United Irishman. 7 December 1901. Cf. Note to The Strike at Arlingford; letter Autumn 1900, George Moore ; Letters to Lady Cuuard ed.Rupert Hart-Davis (London :Hart-Davi s, 1957Y7 31.493sheep-shearing,^ the unrealistic love-scene^ appear to be his workalso. But although the storm scene in the last act, one of themost powerful scenes in the play, may owe something to Moore'sexperiences at Bayreuth, it smacks even more strongly of Yeats's2recent visits to Stratford-on-Avon. The defects of Diarmuid andGrania are obvious: the plot, as Yeats himself remarks, "is indeed/ but a succession of detached episodes"the incidents and thelanguage swing awkwardly from the lyrical and abstract to the prosaicand sensuous; the characterization of Grania, although more vividthan Diarmuid's, betrays the authors in two minds. The play isneither a failure nor a success, and Yeats's comments years laterperhaps most clearly define the reason for both:Lady Gregory thought such collaboration would injure my own art, and was perhaps right. Because his mind was argumentative, abstract, diagraimnatic, mine sensuous, concrete, rhythmical, we argued about words. In later years, through much knowledge of the stage, through the exfoliation of my own style, I learnt that occasional prosaic words gave the impression of an active man speaking. ...Our worst quarrels, however, were when he tried to be poetical, to write in what he considered my style....we made peace at last, Mogre accepting ny judgment upon words, I his upon construction. To that he would sacrifice idiat he had thought the day before not only his best scene but "the best scene in any modern play," and without regret: all must receive its being from the central idea; nothing be in itself anything.*Cf. Lady Gregory's Journals. 119.^"At Stratford-on-Avon" (May 1901), Essays and Introductions.9Bff.Preface to Gods and Fighting Men, xiv.^eats to Lady Gregory, 27 December 1900, Introduction to Diarmuid and Grania: "When one has to give up one's own standard as I have had to do in this play, one rather loses the power of judging at all."494/He would have been a master of construction, but that his practice as a yovelist made him long for descriptions and reminiscences.The greater playwright, capable of learning more, gained most.After the production, several attempts were made to improve2upon the collaboration, and letters to Lady Gregory indicate Yeats's willingness to accept criticism of On Haile's Strand from both3Martyn and Moore. But mean^yhile new faces had appeared: the Pays, encouraged by AE, had replaced the English actors; Synge joined the movement; Lady Gregory having learned her trade with Diarmuid and4Grania. had begun to write. The forces of folk^ drama and verse^\ plays for the moment had the upper hand, and the rival stage tradition represented by Martyn and Moore was for the time being routed.^ The uneasy friendship between the two cousins continued in a new theatre venture, but Moore, who had "never pretended to have any great claims^Autobiographies. 434-36. Cf. Moore's preface to The Coming of Gabrielle: "one must write in the idiom of one's own time, however indifferent the idiom is." Also Clark, Intimate Portraits. 104.better to Lady Gregory. 3 April 1902, Letters. 368; to Franic Fay, 13 November 1904, 443. Also AE to Yeats, 1903, Passages from the Letters. 39-40. A few years before his death Yeats commented to Lennox Robinson, Ireland's Abbey Theatre. 20: "I think it's better than I remembered it to be," an apt epitaph to an ill-fated play.3Letters to Lady Gregory, 13 January and 5 April 1902,Letters. 363 and 369.4Our Irish Theatre. 80: "I began by writing bits of dialogue, when wanted. Mr. Yeats used to dictate parts of Diarmuid and Grania to me, and I would suggest a sentence here and there,"5Yeats to Frank Fay, 13 November 1904, Letters. 443.495on the theatre," returned to a happier means of expression,^ "We all did something, but none did what he set out to do, Yeats founded a realistic theatre, Edward emptied two churches — heoand Palestrina between them — and I wrote The Untilled Field,"*"With this, Moore's association with the new literary movement in Ireland ended.It is ironical yet at the same time typical that Moore's change of allegiance from Yeats to AE should coincide with the letter's essay into the Irish Literary Theatre, But although AE's friendly advice might occasionally cause Yeats some difficulties, the support of his mystical friend was of more value than the earlier Martyn-Moore contribution. For AE's aesthetic doctrine, like his nationalism, was far removed from the realist tradition advocated by Martyn and Moore, Russell, like Yeats, strove for a spiritual note in Irish letters, and wrote of "the spirituality of3the peasant, and the beauty and heroism of the past," He differedfrom Yeats as well as from Martyn and Moore, however, in his beliefin a national literature completely divorced from the cosmopolitan:,,,we have arrived at a parting of ways. One path leads, and has already led many Irishmen, to obliterate all nationality from their work. The other path winds upward to a mountain-top^Goodwin, Conversations with George Moore, 171, Cf, "Why I Don't Write Plays," Pall Mall Gazette. 7 September 1892,3,Preface to The Untilled Field (London:Heinemann,1914),v,3 — — ^AE, "A New Irish Poetess," Dublin Daily Express. 26 November 1898,3, a review of Eva Gore-Booth's poems.496of our own, which may be in^the future the Mecca to which many worshippers will turn.With this mystical nationalism in mind, he advised Irish writers tocontemplate "the creation of heroic figures," and experimented/V himself with the folk-saga of the Pate of the Sons of Usna, Hepublished his experiment in the New Ireland Review, therebyunwittingly ushering in the second wave of the Irish dramaticmovement, for it caught the eye of a young drama critic with ideas2about verse-speaking, Frank Fay, In a letter written many yearslater AE describes the sequence of events:Deirdre was written at a time when I do not believe I had been in a theatre twice in my life and I knew absolutely gothing about stage technique or the construction of a play. It was written hastily in response to the request of two young actors,^"Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Literature," Literary Ideals in Ireland. 87-88,2On the suggestion of Seamas O'Cuisin, "Note to 'The Clansmen,'" United Irishman. 18 March 1905, 2-3, According to Eglinton, A Memoir of AE.34. Bussell and James Pryse had collaborated on a serial story in The Irish Theosophist. "The Enchantment of Cuchullin," with illustrations by AE. "Scene from 'The Flight of Deirdre'" the first act of Deirdre. appeared in the New Ireland Review on the 6,13 and 20 of July 1901; "Recall of the Sons of Usna" 26 October and 2 November 1901; and "Act III of 'Deirdre 8 and 15 February 1902, The entire play was published as a supplement to The Green Sheaf no. 7,1903, with two coloured illustrations by Cecil French and Pamela Colman Smith, The pl«y was again published in Imaginations and Reveries (Dublin:Maunsel, 1915), 202-255, Two acts were produced in the open air, at Mr,George Coffey's house in Hareourt Street, Maud Gonne was impressed, according to Yeats in a letter to Lady Gregory, 20 January 1902, Letters ^ 365, Six photographs of this production are in the possession of Mr. Michael Walshe of Hodges and Figgis, Dublin.oCf, AE to Yeats, 19 April 1902, Some Passages from the Letters. 30; Our Irish Theatre. 30-31,497William and Frank Fay, who asked me to complete a scene I had written in one night without any idea of being staged at all.The second and third acts were written with the knowledge that the play would be spoken on a stage. It was intended to be acted behind a gauze curtain to give a remote and legendary character to all that took place on the stage, and was so staged on its first performance. This first and only attempt at playwrit):^ 4 was made yith the high confidence of absolute ignorance of the stage.The play itself has all of the defects the author cheerfully admitsto. Paradoxically, the first act is perhaps more consistent thanthe later two, for here King Concobar speaks for AE and prophesiesthe new age his creator foresaw in Ireland:We must guard well the safety of the Red Branch, Druidess, you have seen with subtle eyes the shining life beyond this. But through the ancient traditions of Ulla, which the bards'have kept and woven into song, I have seen the shining law enter men's minds, and subdue the lawless into love of justice, A great tradition is shaping a heroic race; and the gods who fought at Moytura are descending and dwelling in the hearts of the Red Branch. Deeds will be done in our time as mighty as those wrought by the giants who battled at the dawn; and through the memory of our days and deeds the gods gill build themselves an eternal empire in the mind of the Gael.In this act also the character of Lavarcam who is a Druidess withstrong overtones of Moore-Yeats's Laban, is granted a moment ofhuman insight in compensation for her weary hours of mystic vision:Thou art the light^of the Ultonians, Naisi, but thou art not the star of knowledge.The remainder of the play follows the ill-fated lovers and Naisi's brothers to Loch Etive in Alba, and back to the accompaniment of^Curtis Canfield, Plays of the Irish Renaissance (NY:Ives Washburn, 1938), 26, Cf, Eglinton, A Memoir of AE. 53-54.- o/ Deirdre, Imaginations and Reveries. 206-207.%bid.. 215.498Deirdre*8 Druid wails to their inevitable doom, Concobar's Red Branch is torn by internal strife to which he himself contributes, Deirdre despite her gift of prophecy remains more the naïve child than the tragic queen, and Naisi after a rather weak struggle subsides with the other Lights of Valour, Yeats disliked the play, considering it "superficial and sentimental," but later learned to appreciate the absence of character which, he felt, "is like the absence of individual expression in wall decoration,"^ Standish 0'Grady again complained that vivid dramatization of the sagas would2"degrade the ideals of Ireland and ,,.banish the soul from the land,"AE replied with dignity, stating his own belief in the theatre:The drama in its nystical beginning was the vehicle through idiich divine ideas, which are beyond the sphere even of heroic life and passion, were expressed; and if Mr, Yeats and myself fail of such greatness, it is not for that reason that the soul of Ireland will depart,,,,The danger of art is not in its subjects, but in the attitude of the artist's mind. The nobler influences of art arise, not because heroes are the theme, but because of noble treatment and the intuition whjch perceives the inflexible working out of great moral laws,^Letters to Lady Gregory, 3 and 5 April 1902, Letters,368; cf, letter 20 January, op,cit,. 365, It is interesting to note that in a letter to St.John Ervine praising Mixed Marriage, which was produced at the Abbey in January 1911, AE should make a similar complaint of Yeats and Lady Gregory, who "treat people in drama as Whistler treats his sitters, turning them into arrangements and harmonies, and I was very tired of their world"; quoted by Eglinton,A Memoir of AE. 4,^All Ireland Heview. 12 April 1902, 84.O"The Dramatic Treatment of Heroic Literature," Samhain.1902,12-13, Cf, letters to Yeats, April 1902 and 1903, Some Passages from the Letters of AE. 28-30 and 34-35, In "The Red Branch of Ulster," United Irishman. 24 May 1902,2, AE praises Lady Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne, hailing her as "the fairy godmother of Young Ireland,"499But later he suggested that perhaps 0'Grady had been right,^ a decision in keeping with his belief that "the true and the Good," the idea rather than the form, should be the main concern of the artist,^ ("The final value of a work of art is not determined by its technical merits, but by the imagination and insight of its creator*"^)Deirdre was a success in production, drawing even more4applause than Maud Gonne's acting in Yeats's Kathleen-ni-Houlihan, For the first time Irish dramatists, writing on Irish subjects, had joined with Irish actors to delight an Irish audience. Many of the qualities of AE's play which impressed were those fulfilling Yeats's own demands: the treatment of an heroic subject in poetry, emphasis upon words over acting, of acting over scenery; an attempt at the Theatre of Beauty:Preface to Some Irish Essays. Tower Press Booklets no, 1 (Dublin:Maunsel, 1906), 7, Yet in a review of James Stephens's Deirdre in The Irish Statesman. 29 September 1923,84-85, he had once more changed his mind, com^e.ht#mg that 0'Grady, Yeats and Austin Clarke "wrote as if they knew the bardic world had no relation to history, but was a creation of the Gaelic imagination,"2Letters to Yeats, 1900, Some Passages from the Letters of 25,26-27.^"The Spiritual Influence of Art," Dublin Daily Express.22 April 1899, 3, Cf, letter 4 July 1905 to Clifford Bax, quoted by Bax in "AE:The Strayed Angel," Some I^ Knew Well (London:Phoenix House, 1951), 79: "Every thought or mood is the opening or closing of a door to the divine world,,..Art for art's sake is considering the door as a decoration and not for its uses in the house of life."4Autobiographies.450, Later productions of the play by the Theatre of Ireland were also greeted with enthusiasm, cf. Holloway's diary, 13 December 1907, National Library of Ireland MS 1805,851; "The Drama in Ireland," The Irish Review. May 1913, 142.43.500the rhythmic beauty of his sentences; by the rise and fall of emotions which never break into discordant violence; by careful grouping of the actors, and the choice of a colour scheme, tries to create in the mind of the spectators themood through which ideas of beauty flash like radiant figures in a dream» His play is not realistic; it scarcely even tells a story; it is rather Ijke a strain of music carrying a sweet and subtle enchantment»But AE was a poet, not a playwright; a nationalist, not acosmopolitan; a socialist rather than an aristocrat in the kingdom2of art. He contemplated further dramas, but never wrote them.Like Moore, eventually he became an embarrassing ally and it wasceil cuyiecfwith relief mingled with little regretyythat the **gentle anarchist"finally withdrew with the nationalists and turned his energieselsewhere* He, too, had served his turn for the Theatre of Yeats'sdreams, receiving as much as he gave, Yeats and AE remained closefriends united by a common antagonism ;The trouble about literary movements in any country is this that there are only two or three writers of genius and they generally hate each other because they see different eternities,^,Y, (probably Ella Young), "The Irish Plays," All Ireland Review. 19 April 1902,101,2Autobiographies.449, Eglinton, A Memoir of AE.54. says that there is a sketch for a comedy among his papers. Like his secretary, Susan Mitchell, author of Aids to the Immortality of Certain Persons in Ireland (Dublin:Maunsel,1913), AE was an excellent satirist. The Henderson collection. National Library of Ireland, MS 1720,70-72, includes a parody of Yeats's Kathleen-ni- Houlihan and Synge's Playboy. "Britannia Rule-the-Wave: A Comedy TlnTOne^Act and in Prose)" published in Sinn Fein during the week of February 4 1907, a dialogue between "Chief Poet of Ireland," "Chief Actor of Ireland," and "Old Lady" dressed suspiciously like Britannia*^Cf, Yeats's Preface to The Ten Principal Upanishads by W*B, Yeats and Shree Purohit Swami (London: Faber,1937),7,501AE wrote towards the end of his life,^ It is to the credit ofboth that each sought and remained true to his particular visionof that eternity.Deirdre had not been the first dream-drama of the ancientdays of Irish chivalry. Two years earlier, in 1900, The LastFeast of the Fianna. "a narrative undramatic play by Alice Milligan"2had been produced. Miss Milligan, an Ulster Protestant and3fervent Gaelic Leaguer, was perhaps the most scholarly contributor to the dramatic movement, bringing with her a solid knowledge of the Irish language and an equal determination to recapture "the4breath of the Ossianic legends" in their natural medium. The play, actually only a brief sketch in dialogue form, was written in ^^Letter to Kingsley Porter, 16 December 1932, AE's Letters to Minanlabain (NYsMacmillan, 1937), 67.2Autobiographies.429-430. Incidental music was especially composed by C. Milligan-Fox, Miss Milligan's sister. John O'Leary appeared as an ancient warrior. The Henderson collection,National Library of Ireland, MS1729, vol.I,132-33, contains a copy of the text, probably printed in the Dublin Daily Express.February 20, 1900, The present writer is indebted to Miss Mary Pollard, librarian at Trinity College and Marsh's Library, Dublin, for help in tracing this play.^iss Milligan edited the Shan Van Vocht with Ethna Carbery (Mrs, Seumas MacManus), MacManus, White Light and F lame. 49-50,Cf. Thomas MacDonagh, "The Best Living Irish Poet," The Irish Review. September-November 1914,287-293; Ella Young, Flowering Dusk (NY;Longmans Green,1945),57-58.^Note to first scene of The Last Feast of the Fianna;"written with a view to translation into the Irish language in the Ossianic stanza, which would have been the natural medium of Gaelic drama if that form had ever developed a step further than the dialogue recitals^" Cf, Her letter to the Editor, Daily Express.21 January 1899,3; Yeats, "Plans and Methods," Beltaine,February 1900,4.502unrhymed stanzas of four lines, and was produced as a series oftableaux,^ The setting is the home of Finn in old age, with ahaggard and bitter-tongued Grania producing rancour among theFianna and eventually forcing Oisin to follow Niamh to Tir-na;^mbge.The plot had none of the poetic beauty of Yeats's The Wanderingsof Oisin nor the dramatic qualities of Diarmuid and Grania. butthe spirit was more in keeping with its pre-Christian source thanperhaps any other work of the literary movement. It is notsurprising that seven years later during The Playboy riots itsauthor should advocate realism over romance, while at the sametime deploring the Theatre's departure from the cause of 2nationalism.The same year in which AE's Deirdre appeared brought another aspiring poet-dramatist into the Irish National Dramatic Company, James Cousins, idio soon became more important as a principle of3dissension than as a playwright. Cousins's one-act allegory.The Sleep of the King, was apparently written at the suggestion of^"The Irish Literary Theatre," United Irishman. 24 February 1900,5.Henderson collection. National Library of Ireland MS1720,41. Alice Milligan was one of AE's "singing birds," and - contributed to his anthology. New Songs (^ Dub 1 in : 0 ' Dono ghue and Co., 1904).3Cousins wrote plays and poetry under the name of Seamas O'Cuisin, and acted under the name of H. Sproule.503Frank Fay, and produced by the company in October 1902.^ Of alater production Yeats was to write in his diary.The play professed to tell of the heroic life of ancient Ireland^but was really full of sedentary refinement and the spirituality of cities. Every emotion was made as daintyfooted and dainty-fingered as might be, and a love and pathos where passion had faded into sentiment, emotions of pensive and harmless people, drove shadowy young men through the ^ shadows of death and battle. I watched it with growing rage.But as yet he could say nothing. The Racing-Lug. considered by Frank Faythe best one-act play he had seen in fifteen years, followed in the same3week, despite Yeats's justifiable objections to its poor construction,^The Sleep of the King was published in The United Irishman.21 June 1902,3. A note indicated that "the play has been written for performance among trees in twilight" and a long postscript addressed to Frank Fay read in part: "When you first directed my thought towards the dramatic possibilities of the Story...I was somewhat deterred by its scanty detail and want of climax. But...I attained to the perception of something behind the story....that Spirit, which some call Wisdom, and others have named Beauty and Love, moving among the Trees of Life and Knowledge and calling away the soul of man in the hour when the king — who sways the sceptre of material things, of passions, of strivings — is lulled to sleep,"^Discoveries (1907), Essays and Introductions.263. Although Yeats does not name the play. The Sleep of the King is the only play at that time produced which fits the description. Yet Peter Kavanagh, The Story of the Abbey Theatre (NY:Devin-Adair,1950),35, records that Yeats "came over to O'Cuisin, clapped him on the back and said, 'Splendid, my boy, beautiful verse, beautifully spoken; just what is wanted. '" This may merely indicate Yeats's enthusiasm for a company which could speak verse at all.3The Racing-Lug was published in The United Irishman.5 July 1902,3. Gerard Fay, The Abbey Theatre.39. dates his father's letter to Yeats concerning the play as early May, 1901, but a letter from Yeats to Lady Gregory, 10 April 1902, Letters. 370, quoting Frank Fay's letter, indicates that this should be dated early April, 1902. Letter from Fay to Yeats, 25 July 1902, in the possession of Mrs, Yeats, refers to Yeats's objections to the play.504Cousins as well as Fay^ had fallen under the spell of Ibsen, as ismore clearly apparent in his next play. Sold. "A Comedy of Real2Life in Two Acts," Again Yeats objected to the "rubbish and / vulgar rubbish," informing Lady Gregory that "Cousins is evidently3hopeless and the sooner I have him as an eneny the better." And this time Yeats won. Another heroic play, The Sword of Dermot. was produced at an "Original Night" by the National Literary Society in 1903, and Cousins's association with the dramatic movement too was ended. He became as fervent an opponent of the Abbey Theatre as Yeats had been of him, and two months after Synge's death in 1909 delivered a public lecture attacking both the playwright and the movement,^The struggle for control between Yeats and the Fays was to continue for six more years, growing in strength along with the^Cf. Seamas O'Cuisin, "Note to 'The Clansmen, '" United Irishman.18 March 1905,2-3; In a review of An Enchanted Sea."Two Irish Plays," United Irishman. 9 November 1901,6 Fay admires Martyn's use of Ibsen's methods. The Racing-Lug may also have been influenced by Martyn's play.^United Irishman. 27 December 1902.5-7.3Letter?26 September 1902, Letters.379—80. Yeats continues,"I think Fay will see from my letter that, although I do not interfere with their freedom to produce what they like, too much Cousins would make work in common out of the question." It is interesting that the last performance at the old Queen's Theatre (famous for its melodramas) on 18 March 1907, was Cousins's Sold; the wheel has come full circle, and the Abbey Theatre company, producing few plays that Yeats could approve of, has been playing at the Queen's since the Abbey Theatre burned down in 1951.^ he Sword of Dermot was published in United Irishman. 2 May 1903, 2-3. In a letter to 0'Grady, All-Ire land Review. 25 April 1903,138-39, Cousins describes his aims. Cf. "J.M. Synge : His Art and Message," Sinn Fein. 17 July 1909, for the substance of his lecture on Synge./505Abbey movement and eventually leading to the Fays* resignation in1908. But meanwhile, although signs of the schism were alreadyevident, the Yeats faction gained the support of a playwright whoarrived in the same year as Synge, Padraic Colum, Ironically, onceagain help came from the realists. For although Colum*s firstdramatic experiments were based on Irish mythology and history,^he soon directed his nationalism into the bitter folk realism whichbecame the model for the ’’kitchen drama” that later flooded theAbbey stage. A young Irish Catholic and fervent Gaelic Leaguer,Colum in the three short plays performed by the Cumann na nGaedfaal(the political group preceding Fine Gael) and published in The United 2Irishman struck the themes which he developed in all his plays and which were taken up by the ’’Cork realists” who followed him; the stern devotion of the older generation to the land; the pitiless revolt of the younger genera.tion against the dictates of arranged marriages and their demand for the joys of life; the nationalist’s fervent hatred of all things English and equal desire for all things American. His models were Ibsen and Maeterlinck,^ but his^Malone, Thé Irish Drama, I6 5. None of these plays was published.^The Foleys, 10 May 1902; The Kingdom of the Young, l4 June 1902;The Saxon Shillin*, 15 November 1902. He signed his name in Irish, Padraig MacCormac Colm.^Holloway complains in his diary 25 March 190?: "Joy and a fewothers has been the literary ruin of young Colm. They talked all originality out of him by their literary jargon and left him stranded with only high-sounding words to juggle with. To hear Colm make a speech is to hear him flounder about in a sea of echoes of other writers, imperfectly digested.” Michael Joy was a journalist on the staff of United Irishman, and greatly disliked by Miss Horniman.506subject was Kathleen-ni-Houlihan in less gentle times. After hisfirst production by the Irish National Theatre Society in 1903, AEand Yeats hailed an original genius^ and Oliver Gogarty wrote inThe United Irishman;Broken Soil is a national drama in a fuller sense perhaps than any yet presented, not because its theme is Irish, but because the play is built and the catastrophe produced from circumstances arising out of the temperament, religion and tradition peculiar to the Irish people,Colum in this first play, rewritten and produced sixteen years lateras The Fiddler^s House. was dealing with themes similar to Synge's —the call of the roads which old Conn Hourican the fiddler finallymust answer; the economic struggles which tie the younger generationto a life barren of any joy or freedom; the conflicts between oldand young, materialist and artist. But Broken Soil, with itssympathetic portrayal of the old fiddler who can no longer obey thevoice of common sense^was followed by a much more bitter "agrariancomedy," The Land, whose pertinence to the times makes it almostan "occasional" play;"The Land" was written to celebrate the redemption of the soil of Ireland — an event made possible by the Land Act of 1903,This event, as it represented the passing of Irish acres from an alien landlordism, was considered to be of national importance. "The^ Land" also dealt with a movement that ran counter to the rooting of the Celtic people in the soil — emigration — the emigration to America of the young and the^1903, Some Passages from the Letters ^ to W.B, Yeats. 41;Yeats to Edward Garnett, 12 April 1904, Letters.324-33, Cf. Yeats to Lily Yeats, 25 December 1903, Letters.417.2Quoted by Fay and Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre.146-48.0'Grady in All Ireland Review. 12 December 1903, 425, commended the "sincerity and directness of the dialogue; also a certain artistic restraint which, while revealing sentiment, never allowed the characters to stray into the easy path of sentimentality."507fit. In "The Land" I tried to show that it was not altogether an economic necessity that was driving young men and women out of the Irish rural districts; the lack of life and the lack of freedom there had much to do with emigration. "The Land" touched upon a typical conflict, the conflict between the individual jnd that which, in Ireland, has much authority, the family group.The Land was produced in 1905, the year/^Synge * s Well of the Saints ;Thomas Muskerry followed in 1910, the year of Deirdre of the Sorrows,The characters are again unpleasant, but the plot lacks the strengthand restraint of his other plays. Again, however, Colum is concernedwith the harsh rebellion of the children against the father, and oncemore his sympathy lies with the older generation. The character ofMyles Gorman, the blind old piper, once more sings of the call of theroads and the poet's life of the vagrant. But by then Colum'sconnection with the National Theatre Society was broken, and four yearslater he too emigrated to America,Colum entered the dramatic movement with Synge and left it the1year after Synge's death. In many ways the two dramatists had muchfin coumon; both sang of the life of the roads and both, Synge indirectly,, Colum overtly, condemned the narrowness of a poverty-stricken hard generation whose passion for the land overcame all gentler thoughts.Both, too, in their language elaborated on what they heard about them; however, Colum's "curious dialect" was a compound of Anglo-Irish idiom with journalist and text-book jargon, giving, as Yeats commented, "a^Author's Note to Three Plays, revised ed, (NY:Macmillan,1925), vi. According to a letter from Yeats to Lady Gregory, 5 April 1905, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats, both Yeats and Lady Gregory helped Colum with The Lj^d. Lady Gregory also implies this in her letter to Colum early in 1906, Greene and Stephens, op,cit.. 194-95,508/ very curious sense of reality though rather a horrid one,"^ Colum's plays, unlike Synge's, lacked both character and humour, "The dramatist is concerned not primarily with the creation of character, but with the creation of situations," he claimed in his preface to Thomas Muskerry;For character conceived as a psychological synthesis he has only a secondary concern. His main effort is always towards the creation of situations that will produce impression on an audience, for it is situation that makes the strongest appeal to our sympathies,^Synge sang of himself and became universal; Colum wrote to the audienceand remained natXon&l, almost provincial^ ^ i s perhaps is the reason forColum's popularity with the audience; although he depicted life in muchharsher and greyer tones than his fellow dramatist, he portrayed types, which could easily be recognized as one's neighbour, but did not callforth the sympathy which involved one's self ; the playgoer listened to theauthor's message with the clear, detached mind he applied to the census. reports. And so Colum's plays were hailed as "a triumph of realism" idiile. Synge's were denounced as a desecration of the Irish character, Colum'ssociological approach is further indicated in his early aims:^eats to John Quinn, 15 February 1905, Letters. 448.2In a letter to Lady Gregory, 6 May 1910, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats, Lennox Robinson remarks, "Kerrigan has made a wonderful thing out of Crofton Crilly — it is not Colum's Crilly but it is a very good thing and supplies some humour which the play needed,"Q(Dublin;Maunsel, 1910), 4-5. Earlier in the same preface he remarks, "Life, in terms of Catholic philosophy, is means to the individualization of the spirit. Socially one may have more sympathy with Thomas Muskerry than with Crofton Crilly or Felix Tourneur, but the dramatist is unable to conceive of one life being less significant than another," In an article written for The Spectator in 1932, "From Circus to Theatre," Spectator's Gallery, edd«Peter Fleming and Derek Verschoyle (London; Spectator, 1933),124-27, Colum comes near to Yeats's theory of character;"It is the business of the writer for the theatre to take a type and enrich it. Characters in plays should be, as actors always are, animated masks.The audience must be able at once to identify the person on the stage,"5ü9Some years ago I thought of a grandiose task, the writing of the comedy of Irish life through all the social stages, I had thought of this worÿ (perhaps after discovering Balzac) as a piece of social history.But his plans for an "Irish Human Comedy" based on the merchant, the2landowner, the political and the intellectual leader" were limited to the three types portrayed in his plays : Murtagh Cosgar of The Land (the peasant). Conn Hourican of The Fiddler's House (the artist) and Thomas Muskerry (the official). Like Martyn, Colum remained dominated ly his subject, and thus never achieved the greatness as a dramatist which his3early plays appeared to promise.He did, however, remain an influence out of all proportion to his dramatic achievement, and the path opened by Colum was followed by three playwrights who might justifiably claim to have established the Abbey tradition of kitchen comedy and middle-class tragedy, the "Cork realists," Lennox Robinson, R,J. Ray, and T,C. Murray, Of these Robinson is best kno\m, for he soon outstripped all of the other younger dramatists both in4ability and achievemenbj eventually becoming a producer and director as well, Robinson was converted to nationalism during the short space of a Saturday mating performance by the Abbey players of Cathleen-ni-Houlihan c^ t\4g 'The Rising of the Moon in the Cork Opera House, He went home and wrote a play; it was accepted, and his long association with the theatre began.The Clancy Name, a one-act melodrama with no humour but strong characterization, was produced in 1908 and followed less than a year later by a three-act play^ The Cross Roads, again containing much melodrama, but less characterization and more sociology.Preface to Thomas Muskerry.5,^Author's Note to Three Plays, viii,^Yeats to Florence Farr, 6 October 1905, Letters.464,twenty-three of his playsAproduced by the Abbey Theatre between 1909 and 1948, making hie^ i second only to Lady Gregory, who wrote thirty- five plays for production at the Abbey,^Our Irish Theatre. 99-100: Leon O'Broin, "A Day with Lennox Robinson," Hibernia. 25 September 1959,3,510iAfter Cross-Roads came another "logical” play, Harvest, again dwellingon the conflict not so much between generations as between the dreamof the town and the life of the country, and again a social tragedyof manners.^ Uneasy at the grim sincerity of Robinson's early playsyet sensible to the terrible power they exhibited, Yeats wrote to LadyGregory, "The young man told my sisters that it was Kathleen-na-Houlihan that changed his politics and also set him writing, so I2should share the enthusiasm but I don't.” The critics misunderstoodthe plays and praised their realism; Yeats feared and understood alltoo well the new attitude towards life and art they heralded.Robinson's next play. Patriots, strongly reflecting the influence ofIbsen,^ confirmed his fears. In this grimly ironic tragedy of thereturned Fenian, the romantic conception of nationalism had passed,and with it the Theatre of Beauty. "We young men, a generation laterthan Yeats,” v/rote Robinson, "no longer saw [jreland] as a queen;"....maybe we loved her more deeply, but just because we loved her so deeply her faults were clear to us. Perhaps we realists saw her faults too clearly, perhaps we saw her too often as a grasping, middle-aged hag. She was avaricious, she was mean, for family pride she would force a son into the Church against his will, she would commit arson, she would lie, she would cheat, she would murder and yet we would write all our terrible words about her out of our love.4^Cf. Autobiographies.512-513. An unpublished letter to Miss Horniman, 22 January 1910, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats, expresses Yeats's admiration and fears.2Yeats to Lady Gregory, 5 April 1909,Letters,527*Of. Robinson, 1 Sometimes Think,26. Patriots in one sense might be considered a reply to Conal O'Riordan's The Piper, a one-act play dealing with the Wexford rising which caused a protest on its production in 1908. In a programme note written for the production of The Piper in Manchester in 1909» Yeats wrote:"I saw the eternal, heroic aspirations of the Irish people embodied in the character of the piper; .0©Charles Stewart" Parnell..©that angry heroic man once again.© ©face to face with Irish futility."2fRobinson, Ireland's Abbey Theatre,84. Cf. Yeats, The Irish National Theatre.1955. 10-1 1.511Political plays now were not calls to arms, but historical studies ofa great man's failure © The Dreamers analyzed Robert Emmet's dream,just one year before that dream was tried once more in the I916rebellion.vj The Lost Leader (I918), "nearly a great play but not2quite," joined Lady Gregory's studies of the spirit of Parnell. But in between, the grim irony explicit in Robinson's early plays at last joined the gentler spirit of comedy in Robinson's masterpiece. The Whiteheaded Boy (I9 1 6). Satirical in intention, comedy of small town manners in execution, the play belongs with the best of Lady Gregory's in the laugh-provoking "selection and rejection of incidents and characters" which Robinson believed to be "the beginning and end of all p l a y m a k i n g . T h e young men from Cork had at last vindicated Yeat's troubled faith.In 1935 looking back at the realist theatre he had inadvertentlyfounded, Yeats wrote,Those who learned from Synge had often little knowledge of the country and always little interest in fts dialect. Their plays are frequently attacks upon obvious abuses, the bribery at the appointment of a dispensary Doctor, the attempts of some local politician to remain friends with all parties. Indeed the young Ministers and party politicians of the Free State have had, I think, some of their education from our plays.For as early as I9IO it appeared that Martyn and the spirit of Ibsenhad conquered; the younger playwrights had learned courage andsincerity from Synge's battle with the mob, but they applied it to a^Cf« Robinson's Preface to The Dreamers (Dublin:Maunsel,1913): "Dreams are the only permanent things in life, the only heritage that can be hoarded or spent and yet handed down intact from generation to generation." Here Robinson appears to come closest to Lady Gregory's vision.2Yeats to Lady Gregory, I6 December 1917, Letters,633»3Preface to The Dreamers. Cf. I Sometimes Think,39: "The perfect kind of play to my mind is tragedy written in terms of comedy, of which no more perfect example could be found in miniature than in Synge's In the Shadow of the Glen©"5121 4different school. The first of these new realists had been FrederickRyan, whose play The Laying of the Foundations (1902), since lost,followed Martyn and Moore and the spirit of Ibsen's ^ Enemy of thePeople in its sober depiction of small town politics and the resulting2conflict between materialism and ideals. Now within a year ofRobinson's arrival R.J.Ray entered the field of bitter melodrama, hisfive plays. The White Feather (I909), The Casting out of Martin Whelan(1910), The Gombeen Man (1913), The Strong Hand (1917), and The MoralLaw (1922), all powerful studies of the most brutal types of Irishhumanity which suffered under the scourge of the "gombeen-man,"vicious successor to the absentee landlord.^ Ray's plays were accepted4and produced, but none received the benison of Abbey publication;Yeats and Lady Gregory had by now given in to the demands of the theatre, but they would not lower their literary standards. The split had widened.T.C©Murray for a time did much to bridge the gap and meritedboth literary and theatrical consideration. Again we have unbeautiful5Ireland, the tragedy of Birthright (I9IO), Maurice Harte (1912), Spring^Autobiographies,370-571>2Malone, The Irish Drama, 222, considers The Laying of the Foundations the first of the laughter-making comedies in the manner of William Boyle's early farces. However, a lengthy review and summary of the action published in The United Irishman,8 November 1902,p.3, by "Seumas"(probably Arthur Griffiths), indicates that the play is far more serious in intention and considered a serious "thesis-play" by both the company and the audience.^The^Gombeen-man" is a trader who supplies customers with the necessities for farming in return for their produce, thereby settling the prices to his own advantage and usually in this way controlling the entire community* During "hard times" gombeenism flourished further through appropriation of the land for debts. Cf. Malone, The Irish Drama,273-74: O'Casey's The Bishop's Bonfire.4Among the unpublished correspondence in the possession of Mrs. Yeats is a letter from Ray giving a fij^ l scenario of The Gombeen-Man, with reference to Yeats's criticisms^suggestions.^Elected the most outstanding foreign play of 1911-1912 by the American critics.513(1918), and The Briery Gap (1917) melodramatic; the comedy of Sovereign Love (1913) ironic; the only exception being his "miracle play," The Pipe in the Fields (1927), which most clearly illustrates his belief that man can achieve happiness only through the blessing of the church. Murray's strength as a dramatist lies in the harsh truth of ./his vision and the intensity of his dialogue; perhaps more than any dramatist of the movement he approached the stark insight of Eugene O'Neill. St. John Ervine joined from the north, with Mixed Marriage (1911), The Magnanimous Lover (1912), John Ferguson (1913)# Then Rutherford Mayne (Samuel John Waddell) appeared, also from Ulster, his Red Turf (1911) adding further strength to the now well-established "Abbey tradition." St. John Gogarty ("A.& 0.") contributed a closely- reasoned study of tenement life in Blight ( 1 9 1 7 ) And with four plays by Seumas 0 'Kelly, ^ Shuiler's Child (1910), Tt^ Bribe (1913), The ParneHite (1917), Meadowsweet (1919), the Irishman's view of Ibsen and the world around him reached its height. The Abbey Theatre had succeeded with half of its aims; but the bitterness of the clay and worms, now firmly engrained in the structure of the theatre, stretched far beyond Synge and Ibsen to the naturalism of Zola©Nor was there much joy in the work of these new playwrights, and little of that heroic. While Lady Gregory was still delightedly discovering the antics of Cloon, William Boyle arrived at the Abbey.The Building Fund was produced in 1903, the year of The Well of the Saints and The Land, and it appeared for a short time that Boyle would be one of the most popular of the Abbey dramatists. But his first play remained his best, and although Yeats and Synge did their best to raise his work above the level of farce, they were defeated by both audience and playwright, who preferred the safe tricks of the "well-made play" and the stock characterizations popularized by Dion^Gogarty contributed one other play^^%ey. The Enchanted Trousers (1919) under the pseudonym of "Gideon Ousley."2Yeats's letter to Florence Farr, 6 October 1903, Letters,464.514Boucicault.^ His next plays, The Eloquent Dempsey(1906) and TheMineral Workers(I9 0 6) were denounced by both Yeats and Synge as~ 2"hopelessly vulgar" , but this time the Fays, supported strangely enough by AE, won. Once more compromise entered the theatre. It was with relief that the directors accepted the playwright's withdrawal on conscientious grounds over The Playboy, bot public opinion was strong, and Boyle returned to the Abbey in I9 0 9# The chasm between theory and practice grew irreparably deeper; Yeats's "heroic theatre" was in danger of becoming its own travesty.The year of The Playboy brought another dramatist to the Abbey,however, who for a short time appeared to reconcile the new school withthe first movement. George Fitzmaurice's first play. The CountryDressmaker, owed much to Synge both in spirit and structure, and was3received with mixed feelings by the audience and players alike. Fitzmaurice came from Kerry, and his characters spoke with the richness formerly heard only from Synge. His realism was blended with the colourful fantasy of Synge's and Lady Gregory's world. Yet in all of his plays the dream is mingled with a reality harsher than that of his^Boyle's most avid admirer aside from himself was Joseph Holloway, who includes in his Diary a detailed account of the playwright's plans and methods, quoting freely from letters and conversations. National Library of Ireland MS'I803 passim.2Cf. On the Boiler, 34; Yeats to Synge, 13 August I9 0 3,Greene and Stephens, op.cit., 191-192. A letter from Lady Gregory to Synge 13 August 1 9 0 3, Stephens MS.P*196l states, "I think Boyle dreadful."^Holloway records his introduction to Fitzmaurice in his diary,11 October 1907, National Library of Ireland MS I8 0 3, 647-48; "I... found him a nice, unassuming fellow, with I am sorry to say a hankering after Synge and his methods of presenting the Irish character on the boards. We had a long argument over the matter but he was of the same opinion at the end, I fear. He thinlcs hardly of the Irish peasant but agreed that the stage was a place for selection and everything one saw or heard should not be crudely noted down and served up for towns- folks consumption. Much of the peasants ways would seem hard and coarse and misunderstood by audience in the Abbey for instance. " £f. Yeats to Quinn, 4 October I9 0 7, Letters. 496; "He thinks himself a follower of V Synge, which he is not©"515forerunners; the romance tends to disappear, leaving only the bitter ashes of a cold world. Julia Shea, the little country dressmaker, her capacity for romance increasing with her consumption of cheap novelettes, creates her own dream in the long-awaited return of an Irish-American, Pats Connor. But Pats is not worthy of the dream, and neither is Julia. Like Martin and Mary Doul, she must face disillusionment, forbidden by her stern young creator the escape to a greater dream. The play swings from bitter comedy to harsher tragedy as the not-so-young and less happy couple face a marriage which offers little beauty in the knowledge that one must learn to "make the best of it."The Pie-Dish, produced six months later, was received with somebewilderment by both actors and audience. Here in the space of one actFitzmaurice sketches the tragedy of an artist:Twenty years at my pie-dish, twenty years© and thirty years before that thinking of it, but I neglecting to give under making it all that time with diversions coming between me and it. But it's fifty years the pie-dish is in my brain, and isn't it great work if I don't get time to finish it in the heel? and isn't it great work if I don't get time to finish it in the heel?^But the would-be Faust receives help from neither God nor the Devil,; 2 and dies as his almost-completed work of art crashes to the floor.The priest, voice of the narrow reality old Leum rejects in favour ofhis dream, is left to pronounce his damnation in terms of the valuesof the harsh peasant world :What folly and vanity there do be in this short world! But what was in this at all? (Takes up pieces of pie-dish.) What was in this at all?3With his next one-act play, The Magic Glasses(l913), Fitzmaurice grants his aspiring artist a glimpse of the dream only to dull it with suspicion and faint shame. Jaymony confides sadly,^The Pie-Dish, Five Plays (Dublin:Maunsel,1914),133*^Cf. Moore, The Untilled Field,^The Pie-Dish, 155-516Times I know it's a fool I am, surely, but the fancy's got stuck in me for them Magic Glasses, and the sport I had with them up in that top loft'.For the coloured glasses take him away from this life where success is measured by material possession to the beauty and timeless love of Tir-na-^riOge, the ancient battles of heroes, and the glories of the great world: "Wisha, 'tis better than being in the slush — same oldthing every day — this an ugly spot, and the people ignorant, grumpy, and savage. But those bound by this world are too timid to accept the outsider, and superstition leads to violence and death for the harmless dreamer.The harsh greyness of the peasant world itself loosed from reality provides the only framework for his next fantasy. The Dandy Dolls, published in 1914 but never produced. Here as in The Pie-Dish the dream too is unbeautiful, the artist unsympathetic. Pagan wars with Christian, the eerie world of hags and witches struggles against the cloth of the Church, the magic draughts of the Grey Man weigh against the holy water of the Priest — and the greater reality of the terrible supernatural wins. The dream has become a nightmare. One more play appeared, rooted once again in the peasant world of County Kerry. In his four-act tragedy The Moonlighter, Fitzmaurice turned his attention from the weird fantasy of his one-act plays to a dream held by the world about him, and found it wanting. Here, too, values are reversed, and the sincerity of the old Fenian Peter Guerin outweighs all the romantic, fervent eloquence of the younger patriots, who celebrate their nationalism in capers by moonlight but lack the courage to uphold the vision against the mean values of the peasant community. "Leave me alone. I'm saying," cries Eugene Guerin as he stands by the corpses of his father and friend. "New thoughts have come to me, and^The Magic Glasses, Five Plays, 170.517I am what the Lord God made me." In the bitter world of Fitzmaurice, self-knowledge brings no relief; there can be no joy for dreamer or dream.The harshness of Fitzmaurice*s tragedy is reflected in hiscomedy, his characters, and their language. Laughter is rough in apeasant world blackly etched in strong passions and words. Thepowerful personalities of Luke Quilter, the matchmaker from themountains in The Country Dressmaker, Malachi Cantillon, the sentimentalgombeen man of The Moonlighter, Eugene, the crippled "scholard" of ThePie-Dish, Mr. Quille, the miracle-worker of The Magic Glasses, arecrudely drawn, in keeping with the stark tragi-comic situation throughwhich they stride. Set against them are the peasants whose lives arenarrowed by fear of priest, neighbour, and the supernatural* Neithergroup can enter the world of the dreamer, and even the dream issuspect. All speak a language strongly regional, gratingly poetic:My heart is bubbling. We are in the heel of our days, and it must be the Lord in His mercy is thinking of relenting towards us and lifting from us the heavy hand that kept our noses to the ground and broke the melt in us so long. Flaming years have passed over our heads, and we have brought our scars out of the raging battling times, but there is a quietness all around, and now at last, maybe, there is opening before us a little while of joy© 'Tisn't me should be confident, Malachi, still, there is throbbing in my bosom the warmest hope we'll all rise contented at to-morrow's dawn, calm and rational for ourselves, without the pains of villainous torments darting through our eyeballs, and we blinking out at the sky of heaven and the fields so green.2The action, like the language, presses solidly and swiftly forward,the strange choric repetition of key phrases reflecting the relentless,certain, realistically fantastic fate of the characters.^^ We hadn't the genius of Synge, his genius of combining poetry of^In this portrayal of separate worlds, each man forbidden communication with his fellow, and the mingling of naturalist method with a fearful fantasy, Fitzmaurice has much in common with such recent playwrights as Harold Pinter.2The Moonlighter, Five Plays, ll4.518speech with humdrum facts, and, of course we hadn't the poetry of YeatsLennox Robinson has written of that first Abbey school.^ Yet in the strange, original genius of George Fitzmaurice they struck and ignored a vein of rich fantasy which might have yielded greater treasure. From a distance of almost fifty years it is as difficult to assign praise or blame as it is to prophesy with certainty what might have been. That Fitzmaurice's originality was recognized is obvious. Yeats wrote of The Country Dressmaker; "A harsh, strong, ugly comedy.It really gives a much worse view of the people than The Playboy. Even I rather dislike it, though I admire its sincerity."^ But it is equally clear that he was given neither the opportunity of William Boyle nor the encouragement of Padraic Colum. However, his fate appears to have been the result of ill-timing rather than any personal antagonism or deliberate oversight. The Country Dressmaker was produced in October, 1907, when the company was going through one of the most difficult periods of its first decade: The Playboy riots hadoccurred in January; Ben Iden Payne, the English manager brought over by Miss. Horniman, had arrived in February and after a rather unpleasant six months had returned to England; in June Synge's play had. been taken to Oxford and London; the Fays were to resign in December. The Pie- Dish appeared in March of the following year as a curtain-raiser to The Golden Helmet, and partly because of its unheroic subject, partly because of the contrast with Yeats's heroic farce, the audience greeted it as a comedy.^ The Magic Glasses again struck troubled times, during a period devoted to productions of Hauptmann, Strindberg, and Tagore by the "second company" while the main company toured the United States. But by then Fitzmaurice had lost faith as well. Overshadowed by Synge's greatness and the battle of The Playboy from the beginning, he had never succeeded in breaking through the barrier^Ireland's Abbey Theatre, 84.2Letter to John Quinn, 4 October 1907, Letters,493*^Malone, The Irish Drama, 171.519of misunderstanding to the sympathetic involvement required by the strange new form of his bitter fantasy-realism. Without realizing it, Yeats had lost a valuable ally in his losing battle against the "Abbey traditionalists"; the dream at last became a divided image. How this in turn affected the theatre as a whole, will be explored in the next section.BPJ520PART THREETHEATRE, PLAYERS, AND PUBLIC521CHAPTER 9 - RESPONSIBILITIESIs there a bridle for this ProteusThat turns and changes like his draughty seas?Or is there none, most popular of men,But when they mock us, that we mock again?(Yeats, "At the Abbey Theatre," 1912)We should keep before our minds the final object which is to create in this country a National Theatre something after the continental pattern.(Yeats, Memorandum, December 1906)The Irish Literary Theatre (1899-1901) might be considered both in aim and execution the curtain-raiser to the Irish Dramatic Movement proper* Frankly advertised by its founders as a short-term experiment modelled on a well-established pattern, its purpose to "warm up" the audience for greater things to come, this first theatrical enterprise was, as we have seen, as much the result of the opportune convergence of personal ambitions as of national feeling. Furthermore, an examination of the aims and methods of this first group indicates that the "People's Theatre" deplored by Yeats in 1919 was an inevitable outcome of the conflicting forces invoked by the first directorate in 1899* For from the beginning Yeats, Martyn, and Lady Gregory sought an uneasy "union of hearts"; their three-year experiment was to be not only national in design but cosmopolitan in theory, not only educational in aim but aesthetic in practice*As we have seen, Yeats's plan for a literary theatre began much earlier than 1899 or even than 1896 when he first met Lady Gregory,In March 1888 Yeats made his first visit to the Southwark Irish/522Literary Club,^ In 1891 he helped found the Irish Literary Societyof London, and in the same year met Edward Martyn through Arthur 2Symons* The following year he travelled to Dublin to found the3National Literary Society, but returned to London to discuss withFlorence Farr a "small theatre in the suburbs *" In April 1894, TheLand of Heart's Desire was performed at the Avenue Theatre in London,under Miss Farr's management and with Miss Horniman*s funds; several4months later he met George Moore* His early letters to Katharine Tynan indicate his desire to have his plays produced, a desire perhaps5strengthened by Todhunter's work in the Bedford Park playhouse* In1896 he met both Lady Gregory and Synge and visited the Aran Islands*He was still suggesting projects for the National Literary Society andwriting plays. Then in January 1897, he wrote to Fiona Macleod from Paris:Our Irish Literary and Political literary organizations are pretty complete (l am trying to start a Young Ireland Society, among the Irish here in Paris at the moment) and I think it would be very possible to get up Celtic plays through these Societies. They would be far more effective than lectures and might do more than anything else we can do to make the Irish, Scotch and other Celts recognise their solidarity. My own plays are too elaborate^ I think, for a start, and have also the disadvantage that I cannot urge my own work in committee. If we have one or two short direct prose plays,^0*Z., "From a Modern Irish Portrait Gallery: W*B* Yeats," New Ireland Review. December 1894,647-59*^Autobiographies. 403ff; 199ff*^The National Literary Society of Ireland. Rules. Proceedings. etc* (Dublin,1897); W*P. Ryan, The Irish Literary Movement (London: pub, by the author, 1894), 126*&one, W.B. Yeats. 108-109.^Cf. above, Part One, Chapter 4,p.f40ff-523of (say) a mythological and folklore kind, by you and by some writer (l may be able to move 0'Grady, I have already spoken to him about it urgently) I feel jure we could get the Irish Literary Society to make a start*He was already distinguishing between plays by others for the sake ofthe nation, and plays by himself for the sake of art. "The people,after generations of politics, read nothing but the newspapers, butthey would listen (to what interminable speeches had they listened)2and they would listen to plays." Until now, Yeats had managed to keep his nationalism and his literary work separate, the two converging only in his vague desire to be considered an Irish rather than an English writer. But during the summer of 1897 he visited Lady Gregory at Coole, and for the first time a union of interests seemed possible. That winter work began, and Yeats wrote from London of a meeting arranged with Barry O'Brien, the President of the Irish Literary3Society, to discuss "the Celtic Theatre."Edward Martyn, as we have seen, had already written two playswhich had been rejected by London managers, and was deeply engrossed4in his admiration of Ibsen and interest in the Irish language* He too sought a union of aims. During the summer of 1898 their request for subscriptions amounting to three hundred pounds was circulated,^L^etters. 279*^The Irish National Theatre.1934.6*^Letter to Lady Gregory, 24 December 1897.Letters.292-93*4Cf* Moore, Aye,1-2.^Cf. Robinson, Ireland's Abbey Theatre,2-3, for list of guarantors.524and with the help of W.E.H* Lecky the law ivas altered to allow the granting of "an occasional license for the performance of any stage play or other dramatic entertainment in any theatre, room, or building where the profits arising therefrom are to be applied for charitable purpose or in aid of the funds of any society instituted for the purpose of science, literature, or the fine arts exclusively."^ Lady Gregory acted as provisional Honorary Secretary, and in January 1899 the Irish Literary Theatre was founded under the auspices of the National LiterarySociety, with Miss Florence Farr as General Manager and Edward Martyn as2 3Treasurer. Martyn promptly offered to finance the first year's venture.The movement was gaining strength.As soon as the Irish Literary Theatre was assured of a nationalistbacking, it started to dissociate itself from any political aim, and theIlong struggle with the public began. On the one hand support was required to achieve the avowed aim of establishing "a kind of racial4festival" with the Theatre at the core ; on the other, the founders claimed their right to ignore all propaganda "but that of good art*"^^Our Irish Theatre.19. Cf* Martyn's letter to the Town Clerk for permission to give performances in the Antient Concert Rooms, referring to this clause, Gwynn, Edward Martyn and the Irish Revival. 126—27. Also Yeats's reference to the law in his address on the Irish Literary Tlieatre at the National Literary Society "At Home ; " reported by the Dublin Daily Express. 10 January 1899.%îxtract from the Minutes of the National Literary Society, 16 January 1899, Henderson collection. National Library of Ireland MS1729,7 and 20.^Original letter of guarantee in Henderson collection, ibid..17.%eats, lecture on "Dramatic Ideals and the Irish Literary Theatre," Dublin Daily Express. 8 May 1899,6.^Samhain. 1903,5,525For their model they looked to the continental municipal theatres and especially to the encouraging example offered by Norway;^ for theirmaterial they turned to "the imagination and speech of the country, all/ 2'' that poetical tradition descended from the Middle Ages." Their work3must be for "the countryman and the artisan," yet they appealed to "the imaginative minority and not to the majority which is content with4the theatre of commerce." But they believed that both minority andmajority (once educated), their "moral nature" aroused by politicalsacrifices and their imagination by "a political preoccupation" withtheir own destiny, were ready to be moved by the "profound thoughts" agpopular literary theatre could provide. "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 rightgunderstanding of life and of destiny is more important than amusement*" Because they believed Ireland to be on the verge of awakening, men like Yeats, Martyn, and Moore had things to say to their countrymen, "which it is our pleasure and our duty to say," and Lady Gregory was equally^"The Irish Literary Theatre," Daily Express. 14 January 1899, 3; "The Irish Dramatic Movement," Works,1908,IV,226; Beltaine. 1899,6: Samhain,1908,7: "All literature...is derived from models....it is the presence of a personal element alone that can give it nationality in a fine sense."^Tbe Bounty of Sweden," Autobiographies. 570.^Samhain 1902,9; The Arrow, no.1,1906.^"The Irish Literary Theatre,” Literature. 6 May 1899,474.^"The Irish Literary Theatre,1900," Beltaine.1900.22-24. reprinted from The Dome. January 1900; Beltaine.1899.6.^Be1taine.1900.22-23.5261determined that they should have the opportunity."National life and national feeling — these had always beenthe basis of admirable literature," Yeats declared at an early 2lecture. However, equal emphasis was placed on their desire tocreate a literary theatre as well as a national one, as the theatreprogramme for the first performance makes clear;By the word "literary" is meant production which, however much it may fall short of its aim, will at least be inspired by artistic ideas, uninfluenced by the purpose which under present conditions governs the production of plays on the regular stage — that of achieving immediate commercial success. The Irish Literary Theatre will appeal rather to the intellect and spirit than to the senses. It will eventually, it is hoped, furnish a vehicle for the literary expression of the national thought and ideals of Ireland such as has not hitherto been in existence. In this object it hopes for the support of Irish people of all sections who desire to aid in serving^the higher intellectual and artistic interests of the country.In order to further their aesthetic aims, they insisted that "inall or almost all cases the plays must be published before theyare acted, and no play will be published which could not hope to4succeed as a book."In these first three years of experiment, therefore, the principles were established and the dual aim acknowledged; theBeltaine, 1900,22.2Lecture on the Irish Literary Theatre, Daily Express, 8 May 1899,6. Cf.report of same lecture by Irish Daily Independent,8 May 1899: "What they now aimed at was the making of an ark where the few who remained faithful to intellectual ideals might take refuge until the time of debasement ceased."^Courtney, Edward Martyn and the Irish Theatre,71. Many critics objected to the terminology, especially United Irishman, whose editor, William Rooney?doubted "the possibilities of revolutionising taste by appealing to the intellect," 29 April 1899,1.^Beltaine,1899,7•527theatre would be national, but first it must be art. In 1900 Yeats had felt sufficiently encouraged to write,We have brought the "literary drama" to Ireland, and it has become a reality. ...In Ireland, we had among our audience almost everybody who is making opinion in Ireland, who is a part of his time, and numbers went out of the playhouse thinking a little differently of that Ireland which their work is shaping: some went away angry, some delighted, but all had seen that upon the stage at which they could not look altogether unmoved....On the whole, therefore, I have a good hope that our three years of experiment, which is all we proposed to ourselves at the outset, will make literary drama permanent in Ireland during our ^ime, and give the Irish nation a new method of expression.But already in 1901, the final year of the Irish Literary Theatre,the emphasis was more national than literary. Diarmuid and Grania,an uneasy attempt at modernizing folk drama, proved beyomd thecapacities of the English company; and Douglas Hyde's Casadh anTsug^in, the first Gaelic play produced in a theatre, was actedby amateurs, members of the Keating Branch of the Gaelic League,under the direction of W.G. Fay. Present in the audience werej*"rank Fay and John Millington Synge. So far as the venture hadbeen "an experimental movement to test whether Irish plays could2be acted by professional actors," the results were negative.Actors as well as audience would have to be trained. And so the experiment ended, sufficiently successful as far as audience and playwrights were concerned; not so promising when it came to theatrical conditions. The Directors retired, intending to returnto their "proper work," which, Yeats strongly affirmed, "did not3include theatrical management." Martyn and Moore turned their attention elsewhere; Yeats and Lady Gregory sat back and waited.B^eltaine,1900,4-5.^Henderson collection. National Library of Ireland MS. 1729,vol.l.^"Windlestraws," Samhain,1901,3.528But the experiment had been more successful than the Directors at first realized, for the next move came from within, and this time the impetus was almost entirely national. In 1899 Willie and Frank Fay, the brothers who had for some time been prominent entertainers in the clubrooms and "Coffee Palaces" of Dublin, had organized a small group of amateur actors called the Ormonde Dramatic Society,Both had watched with interest the efforts of the Irish Literary Theatre, Frank reviewing the productions for United Irishman and frequently writing long articles on the necessity of Irish actors for Irish plays,^ They had recently been asked by Maud Gonne's Inghinidhe na 4iEireann. the Daughters of Erin, to produce some tableaux of Irish historical subjects. In August 1901 in the Antient Concert Rooms, which two years earlier had sheltered the Irish Literary Theatre, they presented Alice Milligan's Deliverance of Red Hugh to an appreciative audience which included Yeats, Lady Gregory, and AE, All wereimpressed; Yeats complimented Frank Fay on "the grave acting" of his 2company, and encouraged by their success the company reassembled as W,G. Fay's Irish National Dramatic Society, The challenge of the Irish Literary Society had been accepted.In the meantime Samhain appeared, indicating that the Irish Literary Theatre had completed its experiment but was looking about for a successor. The Fays were not to wear the mantle yet, for the Directors made it clear that two paths lay open, one representing the cosmopolitan ideal advocated by Martyn and Moore, the other reflecting the narrower aims of the more fervent nationalists. Both groups recognized the necessity of training actors, raising funds, and touring^"The Irish Literary Theatre," 20 July 1901; "Samhain," 26 October 1901,"The Irish Literary Theatre and After,"23 November 1901^Fay, The Abbey Theatre, 34, Cf, Dudley Digges, "A Theatre was Made," The Irish Digest. October 1939,11—14; Padraic Colum, The Road Round Ireland (NY:Macmillan,1930),315. However, he criticized Miss Milligan's play for being in two scenes, Samhain.1901^4,529Ireland, However, one advocated working from without in, suggestinghelp from leading actors (preferably Irish, probably English) andlocal endowment; the other insisted that endowment would eventuallylead to compromise and English actors to English plays, Yeats himselfpublicly indicated a desire to withdraw from active participation, atthe same time shrewdly refraining from commitment to either viewpoint:I do not know what Lady Gregory or Mr. Moore think 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, and that others may have had in their heads for all I know, I want to get back 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 ÿenceforward who plays them than what they play, and how they play it.And in a letter to Lady Gregory, he remarked privately but less astutely.How Moore lives in the present! If the National Theatre is everstarted, what he is and what I am will be weighed and very little what we have said or done, A phrase more or less matters little,When he has got more experience of public life he will know how little these things matter — yet I suppose we would both be more popular if I could keep from saying what I think and he from saying what he does not think. You may tell him that the wisest of men does not know what is expedient, but that we^can all get a very good idea as to what is our own particular truth.Lady Gregory was also biding her time, and replied to Yeats,If all breaks up, we must try and settle something with Fay, possibly a week of the little plays he has been doing through the spring, I have a sketch in my head that might do for Hyde to work on, I will see if it is tog slight when I have noted it down, and if not, will send it to you,^Samhain, 1901.4-6, Cf, Martyn's "A Plea for a National Theatre in Ireland," op,cit,, 14-15,^19 November 1901, Letters.359.QOur Irish Theatre. 30, The play was probably Twenty-Five,530At this point the Fays themselves stepped in. The second actof AE*s Deirdre appeared in the New Ireland Review in November, andFrank Fay asked for a third act with permission to produce all three^,AE suggested they approach Yeats, who gave them Kathleen-ni-Houlihan.Maud Gonne agreed to act in the title role, and the company includedMaire Quinn, Maire Nie Shiubhlaigh ^alkej, Dudley Digges, P.J.Kelly,Padraic Colum, James Cousins, Fred Ryan, all fervent nationalists whowould later contribute to the Abbey Theatre. The plays were a success,with Edward Martyn*s the only dissenting voice. The Fays and thenationalist group from which they drew their support were growingstronger. Again Yeats was approached, this time for a little comedy1"about a man who made soup out of a stone." The remainder of the programme came from the company and their supporters: James Cousins supplied The Sleep of the King and The Racing Lug, i«'red Ryan The Laying of the Foundations, Father p.T. McGinley their second play in Irish, Eilis agus an bhean dlirce > (Ellis and the Beggar Man). Once more the little amateur company changed its name, officially amalgamating with the earlier more ambitious scheme represented by Yeats and Lady Gregory, for Martyn and Moore had long since withdrawn. Yeats became President of the Irish National Theatre Society, with Maud Gonne, AE and Douglas Hyde as Vice-Presidents, and W.G. Fay^Frank Fay to Yeats, quoted in Fay, The Abbey Theatre,41.5311as Stage Manager. Before he had an opportunity of leaving it, Yeats2was once more involved in "Theatre business, management of men."He wrote On Baile's Strand, The Hour-Glass, and The King's Threshold3with the Fays in mind, and gave them The Shadowy Waters. More important for the future of the theatre, he introduced J.M. Synge.Although from the beginning of the second movement Yeats was considered one of the leaders, the balance of power for several years ' was an uneasy one, Yeats, Lady Gregory and eventually Synge on the ’ side of the Fays, AE and the nationalists in effective opposition., Most of the actors, drawn from the various nationalist groups in , Dublin, looked upon membership in the theatre as a part of their political activities. They had at first wanted AE as President because he was more sympathetic to their feelings; but AE retired4in favour of Yeats. Yeats took an active part in determining policy^Unless otherwise stated,the information for this section is drawn from papers in the possession of Mrs. Yeats, the Henderson and Holloway collections in the National Library of Ireland, Malone's The Irish Theatre, and Gerard Fay's The Abbey Theatre, which draws upon his father's unpublished papers. However, the conclusions drawn are the present writer's own. Professor Ellis-Fermor, The Irish Dramatic Movement, Appendices 1 and 2, dates the foundation of the / Irish National Theatre Society as April 1902. However, correspondence between the Secretary, Fred Ryan, W.G.Fay, and Yeats, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats, indicates that although an informal organization took place in 1902, no rules were drawn up until February 1903.^Yeats, "The Fascination of What's Difficult," Collected Poems,104.Cf. Letters to Lady Gregory, 5 April 1902 and 13 June 1902, Letters, 369 and 375; Note to The King's Threshold; and On Baile's Strand. Being Volume Three £f Plays for an Irish TheatreTLondon; Bullen,1904),vii. Here Yeats fefers to "Mr.Fay's 'Irish National Theatre.'" '4Fay, The Abbey Theatre, 44-45; Letters from Fred Ryan to Yeats, 10 August 1902, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats.532and publicizing the movement's aims and theories not only in Irelandbut in England.^ However, AE's voice carried as much weight. Each' member of the society had an equal vote, and as the actors outnumberedthe playwrights and producers, much "lobbying" was necessary ifYeats and the Fays were to get their way. With the acceptance of Inthe Shadow of the Glen, shortly after their successful first visitto London, feelings ran high, and the first open split occurred; Maud■ Gonne, Dudley Digges, and Maire Quinn, whose disapproval of The Landof Heart's Desire as an insult to their religion had prevented its' production, now resigned at the further "insult to Irish womanhood"2• implied by In the Shadow of the Glen. Yeats was relieved, and in a letter to Frank Fay indicated that this defection of the strongest national element would make it easier "to keep a pure artistic3ideal." Differences between the two leaders finally came to a head during the winter of 1903-04, while Yeats was lecturing in America and AE was left in charge. There was further rebellion in the ranks, this time the actors objecting to "the way in which plays were4accepted or rejected without their consent," AE reported to Yeats.Yeats gave frequent lectures on "The Reform of the Theatre" as well as on the "New Art" of chanting. Cf. Letter to Florence Farr, 14 May 1903, Letters,401; letter from Ryan to Yeats,16 February 1903, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats; Robinson, Ireland's Abbey Theatre,32- 33.oFay, The Abbey Theatre ,51 and 60; Robinson, Ireland's Abbey Theatre,36. On the other hand, Colum explains Maud Gonne's resignation as arising from the Fays' refusal to produce The Saxon Shillin', cf. Robinson,op.cit.,37-38.^Letter September 1903, Fay, The Abbey Theatre,62-63.^Probably December 1903, Some Passages from the Letters of AE,42-43.533But the solution AE offered, "some definite rules on a démocratieprinciple," further limited the powers of President and vice-Presidents, and left the majority of actors in control. Controversyhad also arisen over the question of touring. The Society was invitedto take part in the International Exposition at St.Louis, Missouri;AE objected on principle, but a few more actors left to join Dudley2Digges, taking with them permission to produce Deirdre. AE repliedin full to a violent objection from Yeats, at the same time clearlystating his own ambitions for the Irish National Theatre Society:With regard to the question of a vice-president giving away the rights of one of its plays I have already written to you today, and I, for one, will protest against the company having any right to control my action in regard to my disposal of my work outside Ireland or England. You say that the only chance of the Company making money is by an American tour. If that is so, then I think^Among the papers in the possession of Mrs. Yeats there is an unsigned, undated page containing two amendments,III and IV, which appear to belong to this time and are the rules referred to in the letters from AE to Yeats. Amendment IV reads, "In all cases a copy of the play proposed for production shall be submitted to the President and Vice Presidents, or to such of them as may be unable to be present at the reading, together with the Stage Manager's comment as to any alterations that seem to him desirable for theatrical reasons. This Rule, however, must not be considered as limiting the right of the Stage Manager to suggest to the Author such slight changes as may seem desirable during the rehearsal of the play. The opinion of the President and Vice Presidents (should they desire to express any opinion) shall be read to the Company before the final vote which decides upon the acceptance or rejection of the Play.The President and Vice Presidents can vote by proxy. Every Member of the Society shall have one vote, and at the request of any Member the voting shall be taken by ballot. A three quarters majority of the votes shall be required before any play is accepted. The author shall not be allowed to be present when the decision is taken." The Members of the Society were the President, the vice Presidents and the Actors. In his diary 15 February 1907, National Library of Ireland MS 1805, Holloway maliciously quotes a story told him by D.J. O'Donoghue, "that Yeats sent in a play anonymously to the Irish National Theatre Society before it was turned into a limited company and it was not accepted."^According to a letter from Yeats to Lady Gregory, 4 May 1903, Letters,400, the request wasjj^y Lady Aberdeen after the company's successful London visit. Yeats remarks that "Fay is very anxious for it, as he thinks it would start them with prestige and experience." Cf. AE's letters to Yeats, Some Passages from the Letters of AE,1904, ÎT-46. Yeats kept closely in touch with the theatre while Eê was away, cf. Letters,419,420,423,424-25. Also letter quoted by Fay, The Abbey Theatrf.69.534the Company had better dissolve at once for I would lose all interest if it were only to live for America by America. I have no interest in its work outside Ireland and if it is hopeless to expect success by working in Ireland with occasional tours in England then it is in my opinion useless to continue taking any interest in it. With this I think the company would agree. They have refused, rightly I think, to go to the States because it would injure their work here. I am sorry Digges and his people went also because I would like to have seen two or three Irish companies in Ireland.,...I have quite as much interest in the Company as you have, and in my own way have worked quite as much as you have to preserve it here, settling to the best of my ability the rows which threatened its existence, but if they were to assume the right to control my disposal of what I write outside these Islands I would withdraw from them at once....You and the Company will only be known by what you do over here by personal work here, and I think the company realise this well enough.^A few days later he resigned, again explaining in full his position to Yeats:...I feel that as your views and mine about the spirit in which the Society should work are so different, and as the future success of the Society must be to a great extent bound up with your future work, whereas I in all probability will never write again in the dramatic form, it would be unfitting that I should retain an official position in the Society with which your name is associated and which depends almost altogether on your work for its success.2In the struggle between nation and art, Yeats had once more won.But new complications were to enter on the heels of AE which, though increasing Yeats's power in the movement, were to cause further^Letter early 1904, Some Passages from the Letters of AE, 46-48. Although Lady Gregory's name does not enter the controversy, she was apparently involved throughout with Yeats's plans. Cf. Yeats to Russell, April 1904, Letters,433-34.^Letter 1904, Some Passages...,49-50. Cf. Yeats to Katharine Tynan, September 1906, Letters.477 :"When we started on the theatre he |kusselj a^ c^ j^ually^ ^^ tried to persuade Lady Gregory and myself to keep it a sraàïï^theatre, that various interesting souls might be given the opportunity of dramatic expression for the soul's health."535/crises and to force Yeats once more to decide between nationalism and art. Writing in his Autobiographies many years later, Yeats remarks, "Two events brought us victory: a friend gave us a theatre,-Iand we found a strange man of genius, John Synge." Miss Hornimanand Synge arrived in the same year, 1903, and made their debuts atthe same performance, Synge with In the Shadow of the Glen, Miss2Horniman with the costume designs for The King's Threshold. "A painter, learned in a s t r o l o g y , s h e had known Yeats for at least ten years both as a fellow theosophist and as a generous backer of his artistic enterprises.^ In an article written twelve years after her withdrawal from the scheme she helped finance, she recounts her own version of the origin of the Abbey Theatre:1Autobiographies, 566-67.2In a letter 9 October 1903, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats, she writes, "Do you realise that you have now given me the right to call myself 'artist'? How I thank you!" The costumes were apparently not too successful, according to Yeats's letter to Frank Fay, 20 January 1904, Letters,425-26. And a letter from Miss Horniman to Yeats, 16 July 1906, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats, states, "As soon as I found that you and I did not agree about 'decorative treatment'...I never interfered with the 'mise en scene' again."3Cf. Introductory poem by Masefield, Some Memories of W.B.Yeats, 3-4. ~4As already stated, she had financed Florence Farr's management of the Avenue Theatre when The Land of Heart's Desire was first produced in 1894. Her letters to Yeats frequently refer to their work in astrology and theosophy. She was apparently known to AE in the late '80's also, for in a letter to Mrs. Coates about 1886, he writes,"You talk about leaving Armagh.... do you think of trying Miss Horniman?" "Some Passages from the Early Letters of AE," DublinMagazine. April-June 1940,16-17.536I sat alone here in my flat making the costumes for the Irish Players to wear in "The King's Threshold." I was thinking about the hard conditions in which they were working, and the idea struck me that if and when enough money were to turn up, I would spend it on hiring or building a little hall where they could rehearse and perform in fair comfort. I wrote at once to W.B.Yeats, who was then in Ireland. He was not very enthusiastic on the subject. Time went on, and being in Dublin I searched to see if there were any possible places there. Some money came to me quite unexpectedly — enough for me to hire the hall of a derelict Mechanics' Institute in Marlborough Street. There was no space for a vestibule, but the deserted Morgue of the City of Dublin was adjoining, so I hired that from the Corporation The building eventually was called the Abbey Theatre.1Since 1901 Prank Fay had been advocating that the Irish Literary2Theatre build a hall of their own, but help finally came not fromIreland, but from England, not for nationalist reasons but forcosmopolitan ideals, and not to the society itself but to W.B.Yeats.^ In her formal letter offering the use of the theatre tothe Irish National Theatre Society, Miss Horniman stressed the4Samhain principles advertised by Yeats; in her personal letters1Letter to John 0'London * s Weekly,20 August 1932,741.^"The Irish Literary Theatre," United Irishman,4 May 1901,6; letter to Yeats, 25 July 1902, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats, suggesting Martyn as a possible benefactor.3From the amount of correspondence between Miss Horniman, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats, of which Willie Fay knew very little, it is apparent that Miss Horniman at no time felt she was endowing an Irish scheme, but rather an artistic scheme which happened to be set in Ireland and at the same time making use of Irish actors. C£. Fay and Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre, and Robinson, Ireland's Abbey Theatre, which both support the opposing view. Gerard Fay, The Abbey Theatre, makes use of some of this correspondence, but tends to support his uncle's viewpoint.4Samhain, 1904, contains Miss Horniman's formal offer and the company's letter of acceptance, as well as an elaboration of Yeats's principles.537to the Directors she made even more clear her own high ambitions and intense dislikes: "The theatre is a means for carrying out a certain theatrical scheme and as long as you continue in the same path, the theatre is at the disposal of you and your friends under whatever title you may choose to use," she wrote to Yeats on the formation of the Limited Society in January 1906. During the same week she ' wrote to Synge: "The Theatre was given for the carrying out of Mr.' Yeats's artistic dramatic sbbemes and for no other reason. These patriots are all jealous of Art, they want to keep the standard down so as to shine themselves." Yet she also stressed that her main interest was art, not Yeats: "I wanted to malte the nucleus of an Art theatre, not for your work in particular, but a theatre where such work would be done and other good work too of all kinds." The Dublin theatre was to be "the nucleus— the factory--the school— for an international theatre." As an admirer of Wagner, she appreciated the opportunities such a theatre could offer but stopped short of Wagner's theories of the "folk." The fact that the Abbey Theatre happened to be situated in Ireland was purely incidental ("extrinsic to my scheme itself"); Irish plays and players would be accepted if they conformed to her demands for art. Neither nation nor individual could be considered apart from this ideal.^In December 1904 the Abbey Theatre opened with Yeats's On Baile's Strand and Lady Gregory's Spreading the News. The company^Letters from Miss Horniman to Yeats, Synge, and Lady Gregory,and from Miss Darragh to Yeats, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats.538now included Sara Allgood, and Willie Fay was on full salary asStage Manager and general overseer. The Patent had been granted inLady Gregory's name, as Miss Horniman was not resident in Ireland.The venture first suggested by the Irish Literary Theatre and takenup by the Fays had gained considerably both in artistic and practicalstrength, and was now "the first endowed theatre in any Englishspeaking country." The following year it became apparent that thegroup could not continue under the present democratic and ratherchaotic conditions. Plans were made to make the society a professionaltheatre, and Miss Horniman offered a subsidy of £800. Again AEstepped in to help with the constitution, but this time he sided withYeats and the Fays; and now Synge was also an important voice.After much consultation between the dramatists and producers, theArticles of Association were passed,making the Irish National Societya limited company carrying on the objects of the Society of 1903,but managed by a Board of Directors who were empowered to "appointand remove stage manager, business manager and all other employees,fix their salaries and arrange their duties." Yeats, Lady Gregory,and Synge were appointed Directors. Shareholders included the Fay2brothers, Sara Allgood, Udolphus Wright and Vera Esposito. Yeats^Samhain, 1904,3-4. Peter Kavanagh, The Story of the Abbey Theatre (NY:Devin-Adair,1950), Appendix D,213-222, reproduces the Letters Patent granted to the Irish National Theatre Society,22 December 1904.2Rules of the National Theatre Society Limited, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats. Also in the possession of Mrs.Yeats are the letters between Yeats and Lady Gregory discussing the proposed Articles and their plans for carrying the scheme through. Cf. Yeats to Florence Farr,6 October 1905,Letters,463.539had again won, but without yet realizing it, the Fays had lost power, and the theatre was more than ever a literary theatre created for dramatists. Still more actors left the society, again for political reasons. The remaining nationalists, led by Maire Nie Shuibhlaigh, felt that the Society was moving too far from the aims' of a national theatre; after much discussion they seceded and formed1their own group, taking Padraic Colum with them. Frank Fay was granted an additional ten shillings a week to train the remaining actors in verse speaking. Maire O'Neill (Sara Allgood's sister) joined the company. The Theatre continued.p ) N o w that the demands of the extreme nationalists could no longer hamper them, the Directors were free to develop the theatre along their own lines. But here again trouble started, for each Director was finding his own path, discovering his individual method, and demanding special response from the company. All remained constant in their emphasis upon a literary theatre, but it soon became clear^Among the Yeats papers are letters from W.G.Fay to Yeats clearly stating his own position in the company, and insisting upon a formal business arrangement: "Without my brother and myself there would never have existed any acting society to produce these plays and if these people that we have made dont think we are competent we are both ready to leave them to do as they like when they can elect and vote and play round till further notice." Gerard Fay,The Abbey Theatre, 100-101 quotes excerpts from this letter. In January 1906, Lady Gregory drafted a long statement to the seceding players concerning use of the theatre, division of funds, and the preservation of Miss Horniman's rights in the Patent, again emphasizing that "the theatre was given to carry out Mr. Yeats' dramatic projects. No one not acting in association with him, least of all anyone who is in revolt against those projects, has any moral right to expect the theatre free." Colum withdrew his plays, but gave back The Land in August 1907, according to Holloway's diary for that year,418.540that more than one interpretation was involved. Yeats's dreamwas still of a poetic drama concentrating on romantic and historicalplays, a dream shared and encouraged by Miss Horniman. Synge andLady Gregory on the other hand, although both might experiment withhistorical drama, required a different treatment for their peasantplays.. As we have seen, other playwrights had appeared, writingmainly of the towns and requiring an interpretation more in thenaturalist tradition. The movement which Yeats had visualized as"a return to the people" was itself becoming restricted, and althoughhis sympathies extended to the plays produced by his fellow directors,he saw the apex of poetry receding in the distance. However Samhainof 1906 still sounded optimistic:Our work has developed more quickly upon one side, and more slowly upon another, than I had foreseen. We have done little, though we have done something, to find music that would not obscure the meaning and the rhythm of words, and we have done nothing for the story-tellers, but now that our country comedies, with their abundant and vivid speech, are well played and well spoken, we may try out the whole adventure.*He comforted himself by assuring others that "the building up of atheatre like ours is the work of years," and spoke of the evenmore distant future: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. Our romantic work and poetical work once reasonably good, we can, if but the dramatist arrive, take up the life of our drawingrooms, 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 beautiful*Samhain, 1906,3; cf. Samhain, 1908.541as a play of Hauptmann's or of Ibsen's upon the German or Scandinavian type. 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.lMiss Horniman was not as sanguine; it was difficult to standby and see one's money devoted to a scheme which seemed to departin every way from the original project. Moreover, she was not beinggiven either the courtesy or acknowledgement that was her due;suggestions made by her in good faith were shrugged off by the hot-tempered, overworked Willie Fay; Synge, always immersed in his artand private emotions, tried to ignore her frequent and on the wholejustifiable tirades. However, she still had faith in Yeats andLady Gregory, and in their dream. During the summer of 1906, with herusual generosity and solid sense, she resigned any rights she mighthave had in the theatre policy and announced "Home Rule" at the Abbey*But she still handled the purse strings, and was determined to tryonce more to salvage "that part of the cargo which is of real2importance," Yeats's plays. The plan she suggested coincided with Yeats's dissatisfaction with the direction^the theatre appeared to be heading: the engagement of a Managing Director("who should be fairly young, of good manners, and such a temper as will make the position possible for him")who would take over the stage management and"The Season's Work," The Arrow,no.1,1906.2Miss Horniman to Yeats, N in the possession of Mrs. Yeats.ovember 1905 to January 1906, letters542production of all but peasant plays, thereby building up the side of the repertoire which at the moment was being neglected. All of the officers had been troubled for some time by the amount of time demanded by the business side of the theatre, and in an effort to ease the load had appointed W.A.Henderson, secretary of the National Literary Society, as business secretary in August 1906. Clearly, however, this was not enough; in December Yeats addressed a lengthy memorandum to his fellow directors, elaborating the problem and suggesting a solution. The popularity of the theatre at the moment depended, he felt, on Lady Gregory and William Boyle, who would eventually tire the audience or create a school of bad imitators. On the other hand, no second verse writer had appeared,and his own work would not draw large audiences for a considerableytime. Actors, audience, and future dramatists would therefore haveto be trained, and this would require enlarging the capacities ofthe present company, increasing the number and types of playsavailable for performance, and if necessary bringing in both playersand teachers. "We should keep before our minds," he warned, "thefinal object which is to create in this country a National Theatresomething after the continental pattern....To be artistically noble it will have to be the acknowledged centre for some kind of art which no other theatre in the world has in the same perfection....Such a Theatre must however if it is to do the educational work of a National Theatre be prepared543to perform even though others can perform them better representative plays of all great schools.The ideal solution would be, he suggested, the addition of morecapital in order to engage actors "whose imaginations will express' themselves in other forms of work with the same ease and abundancewith which W.Fay's imagination expresses itself in comedy"; toemploy a teacher who could develop this necessary aspect of thetheatre; to become a true repertory theatre, playing continuously;and to engage a Managing Director to correlate all these activities.- This was an ideal, and at the moment highly improbable. But .a smaller scheme which could gradually develop these conditions was, possible: Willie Fay must be freed from the business and non-artisticside of the theatre in order that his talent for comedy might havethe opportunity of improving; a verse teacher should be brought over' once a year; Yeats, as the only writer of verse drama, should havethe right to bring in players when necessary for the properproduction of his own work; and foreign masterpieces should beproduced.*His fellow directors' reactions were not surprising, but unexpectedly violent. Synge's reply ran to three typed pages: the unique value of their theatre was, he believed, the fact that the movement was entirely creative, producing "a new dramatic literature^Memorandum in the possession of Mrs. Yeats. He was still reserving the right to bring in actors for his verse dramas in 1915, memorandum in the possession of Mrs. Yeats, spring of 1915.544in which the interest is in the novelty and power of the new workrather than the quality of the execution"; to turn this now into anexecutive movement "in which the interest lies in the fine and carefulinterpretation of works that are already received as classics" wouldbe disastrous for the movement and for Ireland. Rather than copyingthe continental repertory movement, they should do their best toavoid it for the next ten years; "national dramas have never beencreated by such a theatre." Continuous playing should be avoided aswell, and the company kept small so that it could remain occupied bythe small store of native plays at present available. As for thesuggestion of bringing in a business manager or "foreign" actor,I object to giving Miss Horniman any control over the company whatever. If she is given power it ceases to be an Irish movement worked by Irish people to carry out their ideas, so that if any such arrangement becomes necessary I shall withdraw — my plays of course might remain if they were wanted. I object to Miss Horniman*s control not because she is English, but because I have no confidence in her ideals.1Yeats would clearly get no encouragement from that quarter.Meanwhile Miss Horniman renewed her offer to hire a new manto replace the "incapable" Willie Fay, describing the theatre as2nothing but "an Irish toy." Lady Gregory was not in favour of the proposals either; she did not want the Fays "shoved out either by f force or gentler means," and saw this final secession^an inevitable , result. She wrote to Synge, "I think as Yeats and Fay represent theComments on Yeats's memorandum in the possession of Mrs. Stephens. A slightly different version of the same reply, in a letter to Lady Gregory, is in the possession of Mrs. Yeats.2Letter to Yeats, 13 January 1906,in the possession of Mrs.Yeats.545 ^ extreme right and left, we who are the moderate centre are best' out of it, leaving the rearrangement to them."* But she alsoenclosed two proposals, one "more logical and spirited," the other <"easier," adding, "We can take Miss Horniman's letter seriously ornot, as suits us best." The spirited second proposal doubtlessreflected Lady Gregory's own feelings:We cannot with self respect, and looking at the list of plays produced and the notices of them, accept Miss Horniman's statement that we are "in the public eye an Irish toy." We cannot accept her statement that our stage manager having had "his chance to carry out what he could" has "proved his absolute incapacity." To accept the new man would be to accept these statements. We claim six months in which to work in our own way. We claim the right of taking our work to London and elsewhere before the end of that time, "the public eye" may judge what we can do while still working by ourselves. At the end of six months, should Miss Horniman renew her offer, we should hold a meeting of authors and actors and make our decision.2But the "easier" proposal was finally offered for Yeats's consideration. Synge and Lady Gregory would accept the new man subject to certain ' conditions: that W.G.Fay's wages be raised by a hundred pounds a ' year and that he be given a written contract defining his duties as producer of dialect plays; that the authors be free to withdraw / their plays at the end of six months; that Synge's suggestions concerning the necessity!or a national theatre be agreed upon; and that the new man be "a thorough theatrical business man, if possible an Irishman."^*Lady Gregory to Synge, quoted by Greene and Stephens, J.M.Synge,229. Cf. Our Irish Theatre, 92-94. For further conflicts between Synge and Yeats, see Greene and Stephens,op.cit.,256-268.2Lady Gregory to Synge, in the possession of Mrs. Stephens.Cf. Greene and Stephens,op.cit.,228-231.Synge to Yeats,11 January 1907,in the possession of Mrs.Stephens.546The new man was Ben Iden Payne, who arrived in May 1907,produced Lady Gregory's translation of Maeterlinck's L'Interieurand Wilfred Scawen Blunt's Fand, and left in October. Yeats andMiss- Horniman had lost by winning. But as usual many of MissHorniman's points, although exaggerated, were accurate. "At thismoment Fay in the form of Mr. Synge points one way, and I and yourinterest point in the other," she had written to Yeats on one 1occasion; on another, "I feel as if whatever we do will be fritteredaway unless Fay comes to the conclusion that the Directors must 2direct." Here she struck the root of the problem. Synge, likeLady Gregory and Yeats, believed in a literary theatre first, anational theatre second; concerning their first London visit in 1903he had written to Frank Fay,Archer seems to criticise — at least our prose plays — as dramas first and literature afterwards. The whole interest of our movement is that our little plays try to be literature first — i.e.. to be personal, sincere and beautiful — anddrama afterwards strong and good dramas only will bringus people who are interested in the drama, and they are, after all, the people we must have.^But plays must be performed, and in the Fays both Synge and LadyGregory had discovered actors who in their art employed the same*31 December 1906, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats. Miss Horniman's attitude to Synge varied, depending upon his attitude towards her controversy with Fay. In 1905 she wrote to him, " Ilook upon you as one of the assets of the company," but at the sametime his work remained a threat to Yeats's. Stephens MS.2003.2Quoted by Gerard Fay, The Abbey Theatre,105.^Quoted by Gerard Fay, The Abbey Theatre, 75-77. Cf. OurIrish Theatre,29-30.1^547method of heightened realism found in the plays. The Fays belonged to the theatre each desired; but to them the Fays were actors first, producers second.* The Fays in turn believed in a national theatre, in an artistic rather than a political sense; they had founded the Ormonde Dramatic Society and then sought Irish plays suitable for their Irish actors. "The Abbey Theatre was first and foremost a theatrical not a literary movement," Willie Fay insisted. "Whatus together was enthusiasm for the art of acting."^ And as such, in accordance with general theatrical tradition, the Stage Manager should reign supreme. This basic conflict was inevitable and had shown itself as early as the struggle over Cousins' plays in31902. It finally reached a climax in the year of The Playboy, when Fay objected to the Directors' direct interference with actors and4insisted on the right to choose the plays. If the Directors were*Cf. Yeats's letter to Synge, December 1907, Greene and Stephens, op.cit., 281-82: "I too think compromise is out of the question ordrifting on - but I won't act without Lady Gregory as the loss of Fay affects her work chiefly." Also 1906 Memorandum.2Fay and Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre, 106-07.^See above. Part Two, chapter 8,4The struggle between the Fays and the company had been going on for some time. Willie was not getting on with the actors, who threatened to resign, cf. Greene and Stephens, op.cit., 281-282; letter signed by Sara Allgood, Arthur Sinclair, J.M.Kerrigan, and Maire O'Neill, to the Dublin Daily Express, 22 May 1908,6,contradicting the statements Fay was making in America; also Yeats's letter to theEditor, Daily Express, 22 May 1908,6. Holloway in his diary for 23November 1907, National Library of Ireland MS 1805,791-792, however, reports a conversation with the Fays and Ernest Vaughan, one of the actors: "They are all quite sick of the Yeats- Gregory management. Willie Fay thinks them both off their heads....Yeats had better return to his lyrics again. He had never done anything to equal The Land of Heart's Desire or Countess Kathleen. He and Lady Gregory were played out as dramatists. He made sure that Fitzmaurice's new play would beon in January. He was sick of the whole thing."548to grant his request, they would be renouncing the Samhain principles on which their entire work, peasant and poetry, was based; by refusing, they rejected not only the Fays but their last opportunity to join the traditional theatre.One more schism was to come however, it too inevitable, andagain involving two opposing but equally valid views of art. MissHorniman had finally had enough; the repertory theatre she and Yeatshad planned had not materialized, and she saw the poet whose art sheadmired spending his energies on "business of men." In July 1908she indicated that she would not be prepared to renew her subsidy atthe expiration of the patent in 1910. By this time she had establishedher repertory theatre in Manchester (which in turn became the modelfor the Old Vic), and invited Yeats to join her:I hope that when you have quite got rid of the remains of my old interference that you personally will see that I did my best to carry out the original scheme and that you will accept the fact that there is no place for you in it. Mr. Boyle would be much more useful, suitable and profitable in every way; if not Mr. Boyle, then some other man of like capacity. The very commonnesses in his work which you tried to get rid of are what are wanted, what are required in the natural development of a real theatre in Dublin for Dublin people. You and I tried to maite it an Art theatre and we had not the living material to do it with. Your genius and ray money together were helpless. We must both keep our promises uprightly, but we must not waste our gifts, we have no right to do so.*Yeats was obviously not happy with the Abbey, as his memorandum oftwo years earlier had indicated. At first he felt that the Fays would*Letter in Mrs. Yeats's possession, quoted by Fay, The Abbey Theatre, 123. Miss Horniman's theatre opened in Manchester in July 1907.549win, and wrote to Synge in August 1907:You know of old that I don't believe that Fay is a very competent man to run a theatre, that in fact I think him particularly unfitted for it, but Miss Horniman has definitely announced that she will do nothing more for us at the end of two years. In all probability Fay may survive us, and at the end of that time may carry on some sort of touring company with our good will and what he wants of our plays. I wanted somebody in control over Fay, but now that plan has failed....The theatre is now a desperate enterprise and we must take desperate measures.*If we think back to the two projects suggested in Samhain, 1901, itappears that the first course had been tried and found wanting, thatthe second was inevitable. Yeats's dream of a theatre modelled uponthe continental repertory theatres had failed to materialize and thetheatre evolving was one which had little room for his work. InSamhain, 1904, he had threatened the nationalists that literature "hasan unlucky craving for reality" and would seek it where it might be 2found. The following year he had rapped the same knuckles, claiming that "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 if3you will." Now was an opportunity to retire honourably for the samereasons he had first joined; the Abbey had not become the nationallycentred cosmopolitan theatre he had dreamed of; perhaps that dreamwas impossible in Ireland. But Yeats refused:I have thought carefully over your proposal, of yesterday and have decided that it is impossible so far as I am concerned. IYeats to Synge, 14 August 1907, quoted by Greene and Stephens, cit.,273.^Samhain, 1904,55.^Samhain, 1905,13.550am not young enough to change my nationality — it would really amount to that. Though I wish for a universal audience in playwriting there is always an immediate audience also. If I were to try to find this immediate audience in England I would fail through lack of understanding on my part perhaps through lack of sympathy. I understand my own race and in all my work, lyric or dramatic I have thought of it. If the theatre fails I may or may not write plays, — there is always lyric poetry to return to — but I shall write for my own people — whether in love or hate of them matters little — probably I shall not know which it is. Nor can I make any permanent allocation of my plays while the Irish theatre may at any moment need my help.At any moment I may have to appeal to friends for funds with a whole mass of plays for a bait.lHowever, the only new play by Yeats produced at the Abbey between1908 and 1919 was The Golden Helmet (and its revision. The GreenmHelmet); when The Player Queen was finally produced in December^yithad already received its premiere by the Stage Society in London.The Abbey instead became a business, and Yeats was determined to makeit succeed. "I have often failed as a poet but not^as a businessman,"2he wrote to Olivia Shakespear* towards the end of his life. The Abbey in its later form owes its life as much to that determination shared by Yeats and Lady Gregory, long after it ceased to be the personal venture they had planned, as to the playwrights who carried it off on another path. Samhain of 1908 announced new plans; before the patent expired they hoped "to have made the theatre either self- supporting or nearly so, and to be able to hand it over to some^Rough draft in the possession of Mrs. Yeats. Wade, Letters, 500, dates this as early 1908. It is likely that the offer was actually made in the autumn of 1907 while Yeats was in London. Cf. his letter to the Editor of the New York Gael,December 1899, Letters, 328: "I have always written as an Irish writer and with Ireland in my mind."^25 July 1934, Letters, 825-26.551ymanagement that will work it as a business, while keeping itsartistic a i m . I n his diary for 1909 Yeats commented, "If at allpossible I will now keep at the Theatre till I have seen produced2a mass of fine work." A small pamphlet marked Paragraphs from Samhain; 1909, "Private and Confidential," and signed by the two remaining Directors, had the same familiar ring: the problem of acquiring more money; and the desire to add more translations,r-'enlarging the experience of the players in order to keep the theatre"intellectual and courageous."^ It is significant that in 1910,during a course of lectures attempting to raise the necessarycapital, Yeats pleaded not for his own drama, but for the younger"Cork realists" who would be "driven into exile like Ibsen" if the4Abbey found it necessary to close. As we shall see, for his own work he already had other plans.Lady Gregory and Yeats continued to act in accordance with the Beltaine and Samhain principles, desiring to broaden the repertoire to include*"masterpieces from every school...even though the publicgbe slow to like that old stern art." They approached both Ricketts 1November 1908, 2. Cf. Samhain,1901,3. Their ideal "management" was the Irish Government,to whom they offered the Abbey in 1924, cf. Robinson,Ireland's Abbey Theatre,125-26. A detailed statement is in the possession of Mrs. Yeats.2Autobiographies,483-84.gIn the possession of Mrs. Yeats. It has eight pages and is dated November 1909 from the Abbey Theatre,Dublin. The cover has Elinor Monsell's design of girl and wolf hound. This is not listed in Wade's Bibliography. A letter to Miss Horniman,27 July 1909, in the possession of Mrs. Yeats, reaffirms his belief that the theatre must continue. A statement in 1915 covers the same points.■*Hone, W.B.Yeats, 251.^"The Irish Dramatic Movement," Works,1908,IV,226.552and Craig with requests to join their forces in Dublin, but althoughboth, as we shall see, gave willingly of their advice and talents,both also preferred to remain free. In 1911, finding that the Abbeyplayers had all too clearly become a company of "folk actors," theyfounded a school of acting under the leadership of Nugent Monck,1whose first productions were medieval mysteries. In 1937, two yearsbefore Yeats's death, the Peacock, an experimental theatre, wasopened under the direction of Miss Ria Mooney, present stage directorof the Abbey Theatre. Lady Gregory had translated Molière, Sudermann2and Maeterlinck; Yeats translated Sophocles. But the Abbey itself remained essentially a "people's" theatre; Yeats continued to experiment on his own, and even Lady Gregory moved away from "the Abbey method.""All true arts, as distinguished from their commercial and mechanical imitations, are a festival where it is the fiddler whogcalls the tune," Yeats wrote in Samhain.1906. The Directors of the*Hone,op.cit., 255; letter to J.B.Yeats, 5 March 1912, Letters, 567. Among the papers in the possession of Mrs. Yeats is a memorandum concerning arrangements for the school while the regular company is on tour, apparently written in 1911.2During the first years of the Abbey many productions of foreignmasterpieces were contemplated but not realized; John Eglinton wastranslating Oedipus for Payne, Robert Gregory Antigone, Greene andStephens, on.cit.. 213; Yeats had promised Phedge to Miss Darragh in1906; Mary Colum in Life and the Dream (NY:Doubleday,1947),372,records that Yeats had asked her to translate Claudel's plays for theAbbey. In 1913 translations of Hannele by Hauptmann and There areCrimes and Crimes and The Stronger by Strindberg were produced.3 _p. 3.553Abbey went one step further and elevated the composer at the expenseof the performer. As we have seen, the Directors were soon forcedto distinguish between their requirements for their own plays and thebusiness of training dramatists to keep the theatre going. This basicdistinction between their duty as artists and their duty as educatorswould be more clearly marked as time went on and result in one of theirmost publicized crises, the rejection of O'Casey. But this distinctionis apparent in all of their instructions to aspiring dramatists. In1899 Yeats had written concerning the Irish Literary Theatre,Our plays will all be about Irish subjects; and, if we can find enough writers, and I have little doubt we will find them, who will write with some depth and simplicity about legends associated with the rivers and mountains of Ireland, or about Irish historic personages and events, or about modern Irish life, an increasing number of persons will desire to hear a message that will so often illustrate the circumstance of their lives.1Later they distributed a printed form which advised playwrights onthe difference between Abbey plays and those suitable for thecommercial theatre:A play to be suitable for performance at the Abbey should contain some criticism of life, founded on the experience or personal observation of the writer, or some vision of life,of Irish life by preference, important from its beauty or from some excellence of style; and this intellectual quality is not more necessary to tragedy than to the gayestcomedy.2^"The Irish Literary Theatre," Literature, 6 May 1899,474.2"Advice to Playwrights who are sending Plays to the Abbey, Dublin," Our Irish Theatre, 100-102, Cf. Samhain, 1904, 11:"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."554Careful attention should be paid to dialogue, which must be trueto the author without falling into "the base idioms of the newspaper."^All plays were given careful reading individually by each directorbefore a decision was made, and if the author showed promise hereceived a letter with full comments even though the play might be 2rejected. Dramatists were encouraged to write out their own personalemotions rather than conforming to type, as Yeats states in a letterto Miss Winifred Letts, whose play The Eyes of the Blind had a briefunhappy production in 1907:If you would found your work as much as possible on real life you would find it at once easier to write and more powerful in structure. I mean if you would take the class of people you know most of and invent stories not to amuse or startle but to express the truths of their life. Probably you allow yourself to read authors who keep on the surface. If one writes one can hardly ever afford to read anything but old and simple books, or if modern books only the greatest....Those fantastic plots, a product of the contemporary stage, make sincerity almost impossible. A good play must have truth of atmosphere as in poetic writing — a truth of fact or truth of idea(as with Shaw who overflows with theoretical energy) and truth of fact is generally the best to aim for at the start with most writers for the stage....Take any life you know and express its reality as your own eyes have seen that reality. To know what one has seen is the greater part of the labour of literature.3^Samhain, 1902,9.2Among the papers in the possession of Mrs. Yeats are detailed criticisms of plays which apparently never reached the Abbey stage. Holloway reports a discussion with W.G.Fay in March 1907,MS 1805,166: "No play that was any good that had been sent in had been refused. Good plays were uncommonly hard to get." On the occasion of the rumour that the Fays had left because of the Directors' injustice in their choice of plays, Yeats wrote to the Editor of the Daily Express,15 January 1908,8, challenging him to appoint three persons chosen from the literary men of Dublin, to read the plays rejected by the Abbey during the preceding twelve months.^Reprinted by Winifred Letts,"The Fays of the Abbey Theatre," The Fortnightly,June 1948,420-423. Parts of two letters are quoted in the article, which is not included in Wade's Bibliography. The letter was apparently written shortly after April,1907,Cf.also Samhain,1904,21 and Samhain,1908,7.555But too frequently the dramatists did not appear, and those who did exhibited an increasing penchant for modern Irish life at the expense of the legendary and historical material the Directors also recommended. Too few could "stand above their subject and/ play with it,...their writing...a victory as well as a creation."^2As time went on fewer still showed any strong personal feeling;in later years Yeats sadly reflected that "the old idealistictradition" seemed to have disappeared "from great spaces of thepublic raind."^ But that single conviction of its founders, "Notwhat you want but what we want," remained; despite controversy,the theatre remained free while the Directors retained control: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 pl|ys of modern times, and a far greater number of the worst.In his open letter to Lady Gregory in 1919, although he expressedhis disappointment in the type of theatre produced by their labours,^Letter to Florence Farr, 6 October 1905, Letters, 464.oIn On the Boiler, 32, Yeats recalls accepting a play he disliked because I'the author had won the right to decide upon the merits of his own work." However, in production the play "displayed a series of base actions without anything to show that its author disapproved or expected us to do so."2Op.cit., 33.4Ibid., 13-14. Cf. Synge's comments on Yeats's memorandum, 1906: "a creation of a new dramatic literature in which the interest is the novelty and power of the new work rather than the quality of the execution," Stephens MS.556Yeats could proudly claim that the Abbey had at leastbenefited from "our own rejection of all gross propaganda and gross/ 1imitation of the comic column in the newspapers." The Theatreof Art had perhaps failed, but the Irish Theatre they created wasin this sense at least a credit to their nation. "One should tryand take the whole question before 'the long-remembering harpers*and their eternal audience," Lady Gregory had written meiny years 2earlier. While they remained to call the tune, they sought thebest music they could find. But the harmonies had altered.Actors and ProducersBut actors lacking music Do most excite my spleen.They say it is more human To shuffle, grunt and groan.Not knowing what unearthly stuff Rounds a mighty scene...3During a meeting of the Irish Literary Society in London in1897, Bernard Shaw claimed, "and as to saying there are good Irish, actors, there are not, and there won't be until the conditions inIreland are favourable for the production of d r a m a . I f thefounders of the Irish Literary Theatre were to make the creationof drama possible in Ireland, they would also have to find actorsto perform in it. Their first three years of experiment had provedPlays and Controversies, 204.2Hugh Lane's Life and Achievement, 52.^Yeats, "The Old Stone Cross" (1938), Collected Poems,365-66.4Malone, The Irish Drama, 39.557that the plan was possible, but also clearly indicated that Irish drama required Irish actors. Here they were fortunate, for the Fays with their small band of amateurs were already gathered, waiting for the dramatists and the theatre. But as we have seen, the dramatists quickly assumed control; "enthusiasm for the art of acting" might have brought the two groups together, as Willie Pay claimed, but actors remained subordinate to the material acted. Here again we find a division of theory and practice, players, scenery, and theatrical effects reflecting the same basic trends apparent in subject and form. On the one hand Yeats, with his poetic drama and dream of a Theatre of Beauty, advocated a form and production which would conform to the drama as ritual and would become as aristocratic as the poet who created it; on the other, the heightened realism of Synge's and Lady Gregory's plays, the naturalism of the later realists, required a technique based on close observation of the world about them and an effort to bridge the gulf between players and audience. Both schools required much art and careful training, but the one was more readily accessible and hence more quickly attained. Both at their best demanded a substitution of speech and music for painted scenery,* of gesture and intonation for the false realism ofithe commercial stage.Yeats arrived in Dublin with many definite ideas and a certain amount of experience in practical theatre. In production as well^Introduction to "The Cat and the Moon," Wheels and Butterflies, 135.558as in poetry, the artist "chooses the style according to thesubject," the method in accordance with the aim:All imaginative art remains at a distance and this distance once chosen must be firmly held against a pushing world. Verse, ritual, music and dance in association with action require that gesture, costume, facial expression, stage arrangement must help in keeping the door.Yeats's ideal actor was in fact part-puppet, part-magician, a mostfitting vehicle for the poet-jester's image. His main functionmust be to act as minstrel, with music in his voice and "a learnedunderstanding" of the sound of words.^ But speaking verse whichwas in itself deliberately conceived "to give direct expression to4reverie, to the speech of the soul with itself" required a different convention from the speech of prose, of everyday conversation.^ for the actor must not only "preserve as far as possible the intonation and speed of ordinary passionate speech,"gbut at the same time elevate that speech to song. And so, as with"Certain Noble Plays of Japan" (1916;, Essays and Introductions, 221.^Ibid., 224.^"Literature and the Living Voice" (1905), Plays and Controversies, 177.Synge and the Ireland of his Time"(1910), Essays and Introductions, 333.-"The Play, the Player, and the Scene," Samhain,1904,28-29.^Cf. "The Theatre"(1899), Essays and Introductions, 168-69: "verse spoken without a musical emphasis seems but an artificial and cumbersome way of saying what might be said naturally and simply in prose." Also Yeats's footnote to Moore's article on "The Irish Literary Theatre," Samhain,1901,12: "I do not want dramatic blank / verse to be chanted, as people understand that word, but I do not want actors to speak as prose what I have taken much trouble to write as verse."559his choice of material and treatment of subject-matter and image,Yeats sought a model from an earlier time. "You must always goback to folk art if you want to get any real art at all; then youmust bring your folk art into sympathy with the thought of the age,"he claimed.* The particular folk art he had in mind was of courseIrish, and inevitably the art of the reciter or minstrel, the2blind poet Raftery brought up to date: "The acting of the poeticaldrama should be as much oratory as acting, and oratory is a lost3art upon the stage." Furthermore, the actor should understand "how to so discriminate cadence from cadence, and to so cherish the musical lineaments of verse or prose that he delights the ear4with a continually varied music." This did not necessarily implya "monotonous chant," but rather a conforming to the rhythm of theline rather than to the rhythm of ordinary speech; for a poem, andeven more so a poetic drama, is "an elaboration of the rhythms of5common speech and their association with profound feeling." It is precisely this rhythm that separates good writing from bad, that is the glimmer, the fragrance, the spirit of all intense4Interview with Yeats and Florence Farr in the Illustrated Standard, from a newspaper clipping in the possession of Mrs. Yeats.^"Literature and the Living voice," Samhain,1906,10-13.^Beltaine, no.2. (February 1900), 5. Cf. "The Theatre," op. cit., 168; lecture on "The Reform of the Theatre" (March 1903), reprinted in Samhain, 1903,9-10.4Samhain, 1903,9.^"Modern Poetry: A Broadcast"(1936), Essays and Introductions,508.560literature."* It is this rhythm the actor must capture in his speech.The proper speaking of verse, then, demands first of all anactor who can appreciate poetic drama,"some mind in control inwhich romance and tragedy is a natural means of expression." Itrequires "passion and expression" in both voice and gesture aswell as "great clearness of elocution, a fine feeling for bothline and passage as units of sound, with a sufficient sense of2accent," "force and simplicity." In an unpublished letterconcerning Miss Farr's production of The Shadowy Waters, Yeatscriticized the speech-habits of the actor playing Forgael:He has all the usual faults in an aggravated degree. He rushes up and down the scale merely because he thinks hg

Juno and the Paycock

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