Nobel Lecture*, December 15, 1923
I have chosen as my theme the Irish Dramatic Movement because when I remember
the great honour that you have conferred upon me, I cannot forget many known
and unknown persons. Perhaps the English committees would never have sent
you my name if I had written no plays, no dramatic criticism, if my Iyric
poetry had not a quality of speech practised upon the stage, perhaps even
- though this could be no portion of their deliberate thought - if it were
not in some degree the symbol of a movement. I wish to tell the
Royal Academy of Sweden of the labours,
triumphs, and troubles of my fellow workers.
The modern literature of Ireland, and indeed all that stir of thought which
prepared for the Anglo-Irish War, began when Parnell fell from power in
1891. A disillusioned and embittered Ireland turned away from parliamentary
politics; an event was conceived and the race began, as I think, to be troubled
by that event's long gestation. Dr. Hyde founded the Gaelic League, which
was for many years to substitute for political argument a Gaelic grammar,
and for political meetings village gatherings, where songs were sung and
stories told in the Gaelic language. Meanwhile I had begun a movement in
English, in the language in which modern Ireland thinks and does its business;
founded certain societies where clerks, working men, men of all classes,
could study those Irish poets, novelists, and historians who had written
in English, and as much of Gaelic literature as had been translated into
English. But the great mass of our people, accustomed to interminable political
speeches, read little, and so from the very start we felt that we must have
a theatre of our own. The theatres of Dublin had nothing about them that
we could call our own. They were empty buildings hired by the English travelling
companies and we wanted Irish plays and Irish players. When we thought of
these plays we thought of everything that was romantic and poetical, for
the nationalism we had called up - like that every generation had called
up in moments of discouragement - was romantic and poetical. It was not,
however, until I met in 1896 Lady Gregory, a member of an old Galway family,
who had spent her life between two Galway houses, the house where she was
born and the house into which she was married, that such a theatre became
possible. All about her lived a peasantry who told stories in a form of
English which has much of its syntax from Gaelic, much of its vocabulary
from Tudor English, but it was very slowly that we discovered in that speech
of theirs our most powerful dramatic instrument, not indeed until she began
to write. Though my plays were written without dialect and in English blank
verse, I think she was attracted to our movement because their subject matter
differed but little from the subject matter of the country stories. Her
own house has been protected by her presence, but the house where she was
born was burned down by incendiaries some few months ago; and there has
been like disorder over the greater part of Ireland. A trumpery dispute
about an acre of land can rouse our people to monstrous savagery, and if
in their war with the English auxiliary police they were shown no mercy
they showed none: murder answered murder. Yet ignorance and violence can
remember the noblest beauty. I have in Galway a little old tower, and when
I climb to the top of it I can see at no great distance a green field where
stood once the thatched cottage of a famous country beauty, the mistress
of a small local landed proprietor. I have spoken to old men and women who
remembered her, though all are dead now, and they spoke of her as the old
men upon the wall of Troy spoke of Helen; nor did man and woman differ in
their praise. One old woman, of whose youth the neighbors cherished a scandalous
tale, said of her, «I tremble all over when I think of her»; and
there was another old woman on the neighbouring mountain who said, «The
sun and the moon never shone on anybody so handsome, and her skin was so
white that it looked blue, and she had two little blushes on her cheeks.»
And there were men that told of the crowds that gathered to look at her
upon a fair day, and of a man «who got his death swimming a river»,
that he might look at her. It was a song written by the Gaelic poet Raftery
that brought her such great fame and the cottagers still sing it, though
there are not so many to sing it as when I was young:
It seemed as if the ancient world lay all about us with its freedom of imagination,
its delight in good stories, in man's force and woman's beauty, and that
all we had to do was to make the town think as the country felt; yet we
soon discovered that the town could only think town thought.
In the country you are alone with your own violence, your own heaviness,
and with the common tragedy of life, and if you have any artistic capacity
you desire beautiful emotion; and, certain that the seasons will be the
same always, care not how fantastic its expression.
1 In the town, where everybody crowds upon you, it is
your neighbour not yourself that you hate and, if you are not to embitter
his life and your own life, perhaps even if you are not to murder him in
some kind of revolutionary frenzy, somebody must teach reality and justice.
You will hate that teacher for a while, calling his books and plays ugly,
misdirected, morbid or something of that kind, but you must agree with him
in the end. We were to find ourselves in a quarrel with public opinion that
compelled us against our own will and the will of our players to become
always more realistic, substituting dialect for verse, common speech for
dialect.
I had told Lady Gregory that I saw no likelihood of getting money for a
theatre and so must put away that hope, and she promised to find the money
among her friends. Her neighbour, Mr. Edward Martyn, paid for our first
performances; and our first players came from England; but presently we
began our real work with a little company of Irish amateurs.
2 Somebody had asked me at a lecture, «Where will
you get your actors?» and I said, «I will go into some crowded
room and put the name of everybody in it on a piece of paper and put all
those pieces of paper into a hat and draw the first twelve.» I have
often wondered at that prophecy, for though it was spoken probably to confound
and confuse a questioner, it was very nearly fulfilled. Our two best men
actors were not indeed chosen by chance, for one was a stage-struck solicitor's
clerk and the other a working man who had toured Ireland in a theatrical
company managed by a negro. I doubt if he had learned much in it, for its
methods were rough and noisy, the negro whitening his face when he played
a white man, and, so strong is stage convention, blackening it when he played
a black man. If a player had to open a letter on the stage I have no doubt
that he struck it with the flat of his hand, as I have seen players do in
my youth, a gesture that lost its meaning generations ago when blotting
paper was substituted for sand. We got our women, however, from a little
political society which described its object as educating the children of
the poor, which meant, according to its enemies, teaching them a catechism
that began with this question, «What is the origin of evil?»,
and the answer, «England».
And they came to us for patriotic reasons and acted from precisely the same
impulse that had made them teach, and yet two of them proved players of
genius: Miss Allgood and Miss «Maire O Neill ». They were sisters,
one all simplicity, her mind shaped by folk song and folk stories; the other
sophisticated, lyrical, and subtle. I do not know what their thoughts were
as that strange new power awoke within them, but I think they must have
suffered from a bad conscience, a feeling that the old patriotic impulse
had gone, that they had given themselves up to vanity or ambition. Yet I
think it was that first misunderstanding of themselves that made their peculiar
genius possible, for had they come to us with theatrical ambitions they
would have imitated some well known English player and sighed for well-known
English plays. Nor would they have found their genius if we had not remained
for a long time obscure like the bird within its shell, playing in little
halls, generally in some shabby, out-of-the-way street. We could experiment
and wait, with nothing to fear but political misunderstanding. We had little
money and at first needed little, twenty-five pounds given by Lady Gregory
and twenty pounds by myself and a few pounds picked up here and there. And
our theatrical organization was preposterous, players and authors all sat
together and settled by vote what play should be performed and who should
play it. It took a series of disturbances, weeks of argument, during which
no performance could be given, before Lady Gregory and John Synge and I
were put in control. And our relations with the public were even more disturbed.
One play was violently attacked by the patriotic press because it described
a married peasant woman who had a lover, and when we published the old Aran
folk tale upon which it was founded, the press said the story had been copied
from some decadent author of Pagan Rome. Presently Lady Gregory wrote her
first comedy. My verse plays were not long enough to fill an evening and
so she wrote a little play on a country love story in the dialect of her
neighbourhood. A countryman returns from America with a hundred pounds and
discovers his old sweetheart married to a bankrupt farmer. He plays cards
with the farmer and, by cheating against himself, gives him the hundred
pounds. The company refused to perform that play because they said to admit
an emigrant's return with a hundred pounds would encourage emigration. We
produced evidence of returned emigrants with much larger sums but were told
that only made the matter worse. Then after this interminable argument had
worn us all out, Lady Gregory agreed to reduce the sum to twenty and the
actors gave way. That little play was sentimental and conventional, but
her next discovered her genius. She, too, had desired to serve, and that
genius must have seemed miraculous to herself. She was in middle life and
had written nothing but a volume of political memoirs and had no interest
in the theatre.
Nobody reading today her
Seven Short Plays can understand why one
of them, now an Irish classic,
The Rising of the Moon, could not
be performed for two years because of political hostility. A policeman discovers
an escaped Fenian prisoner and lets him free, because the prisoner has aroused
with some old songs the half forgotten patriotism of his youth. The players
would not perform it because they said it was an unpatriotic act to admit
that a policeman was capable of patriotism. One well known leader of the
mob wrote to me, «How can the Dublin mob be expected to fight the police
if it looks upon them as capable of patriotism?» When performed at
last the play was received with enthusiasm, but only to get us into new
trouble. The chief Unionist Dublin newspaper denounced it for slandering
his Majesty's forces, and Dublin Castle, the centre of English Government
in Ireland, denied to us privileges which we had shared with the other Dublin
theatres, of buying for stage purposes the cast off clothes of the police.
Castle and Press alike knew that the police had frequently let off political
prisoners but «that only made the matter worse». Every political
party had the same desire to substitute for life, which never does the same
thing twice, a bundle of reliable principles and assertions.
3
Nor did religious orthodoxy like us any better than political; my
Countess
Cathleen was denounced by Cardinal Logue as an heretical play, and when
I wrote that we would like to perform «foreign masterpieces »,
a Nationalist newspaper declared that «a foreign masterpiece is a very
dangerous thing ». The little halls where we performed could hold a
couple of hundred people at the utmost and our audience was often not more
than twenty or thirty, and we performed but two or three times a month and
during our periods of quarrelling not even that. But there was no lack of
leading articles, we were from the first a recognised public danger. Two
events brought us victory, a friend gave us a theatre, and we found a strange
man of genius, John Synge. After a particularly angry leading article I
had come in front of the curtain and appealed to the hundred people of the
audience for their support. When I came down from the stage an old friend,
Miss Horniman, from whom I had been expecting a contribution of twenty pounds,
said, «I will find you a theatre.» She found and altered for our
purpose what is now the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and gave us a small subsidy
for a few years.
I had met John Synge in Paris in 1896. Somebody had said, «There is
an Irishman living on the top floor of your hotel; I will introduce you.»
I was very poor, but he was much poorer. He belonged to a very old Irish
family and though a simple, courteous man, remembered it and was haughty
and lonely. With just enough to keep him from starvation, and not always
from half starvation, he had wandered about Europe travelling third class
or upon foot, playing his fiddle to poor men on the road or in their cottages.
He was the man that we needed because he was the only man I have ever known
incapable of a political thought or of a humanitarian purpose. He could
walk the roadside all day with some poor man without any desire to do him
good, or for any reason except that he liked him. He was to do for Ireland,
though more by his influence on other dramatists than by his direct influence,
what Robert Burns did for Scotland. When Scotland thought herself gloomy
and religious, Providence restored her imaginative spontaneity by raising
up Robert Burns to commend drink and the devil. I did not, however, see
what was to come when I advised John Synge to go to a wild island off the
Galway coast and study its life because that life «had never been expressed
in literature». He had learned Gaelic at College, and I told him that,
as I would have told it to any young man who had learned Gaelic and wanted
to write. When he found that wild island he became happy for the first time,
escaping as he said «from the nullity of the rich and the squalor of
the poor». He had bad health, he could not stand the island hardship
long, but he would go to and fro between there and Dublin.
Burns himself could not have more shocked a gathering of Scotch clergy than
did he our players. Some of the women got about him and begged him to write
a play about the rebellion of '98, and pointed out very truthfully that
a play on such a patriotic theme would be a great success. He returned at
the end of a fortnight with a scenario upon which he had toiled in his laborious
way. Two women take refuge in a cave, a Protestant woman and a Catholic,
and carry on an interminable argument about the merits of their respective
religions. The Catholic woman denounces Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth,
and the Protestant woman the Inquisition and the Pope. They argue in low
voices because one is afraid of being ravished by the rebels and the other
by the loyal soldiers. But at last either the Protestant or the Catholic
says that she prefers any fate to remaining any longer in such wicked company
and climbs out. The play was neither written nor performed, and neither
then nor at any later time could I discover whether Synge understood the
shock that he was giving. He certainly did not foresee in any way the trouble
that his greatest play brought on us all.
When I had landed from a fishing yawl on the middle of the island of Aran,
a few months before my first meeting with Synge, a little group of islanders,
who had gathered to watch a stranger's arrival, brought me to «the
oldest man upon the island.»He spoke but two sentences, speaking them
very slowly, «If any gentleman has done a crime we'll hide him. There
was a gentleman that killed his father and I had him in my house three months
till he got away to America. It was a play founded on that old man's story
Synge brought back with him. A young man arrives at a little public house
and tells the publican's daughter that he has murdered his father. He so
tells it that he has all her sympathy, and every time he retells it, with
new exaggerations and additions, he wins the sympathy of somebody or other,
for it is the countryman's habit to be against the law. The countryman thinks
the more terrible the crime the greater must the provocation have been.
The young man himself under the excitement of his own story becomes gay,
energetic, and lucky. He prospers in love and comes in first at the local
races and bankrupts the roulette table afterwards. Then the father arrives
with his head bandaged but very lively, and the people turn upon the impostor.
To win back their esteem he takes up a spade to kill his father in earnest,
but horrified at the threat of what had sounded so well in the story, they
bind him to hand over to the police. The father releases him and father
and son walk off together, the son, still buoyed up by his imagination,
announcing that he will be master henceforth. Picturesque, poetical, fantastical,
a masterpiece of style and of music, the supreme work of our dialect theatre,
it roused the populace to fury. We played it under police protection, seventy
police in the theatre the last night, and five hundred, some newspaper said,
keeping order in the streets outside. It is never played before any Irish
audience for the first time without something or other being flung at the
players. In New York a currant cake and a watch were flung, the owner of
the watch claiming it at the stage door afterwards. The Dublin audience
has, however, long since accepted the play. It has noticed, I think, that
everyone upon the stage is somehow lovable and companionable, and that Synge
described, through an exaggerated symbolism, a reality which he loved precisely
because he loved all reality. So far from being, as they had thought, a
politician working in the interests of England, he was so little a politician
that the world merely amused him and touched his pity. Yet when Synge died
in 1910 opinion had hardly changed, we were playing to an almost empty theatre
and were continually denounced in the Press. Our victory was won by those
who had learned from him courage and sincerity but belonged to a different
school. Synge's work, the work of Lady Gregory, my own
Cathleen ni Houlihan,
and my
Hour glass in its prose form, are characteristic of our first
ambition. They bring the imagination and speech of the country, all that
poetical tradition descended from the middle ages, to the people of the
town. Those who learned from Synge had often little knowledge of the country
and always little interest in its 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. Then, too, there are
many comedies which are not political satires, though they are concerned
with the life of the politic ridden people of the town. Of these Mr. Lennox
Robinson's are the best known; his
Whiteheaded Boy has been played
in England and America. Of late it has seemed as if this school were coming
to an end, for the old plots are repeated with slight variations and the
characterization grows mechanical. It is too soon yet to say what will come
to us from the melodrama and tragedy of the last four years, but if we can
pay our players and keep our theatre open, something will come.
4 We are burdened with debt,
for we have come through war and civil war and audiences grow thin when
there is firing in the streets. We have, however, survived so much that
I believe in our luck, and think that I have a right to say I end my lecture
in the middle or even perhaps at the beginning of the story. But certainly
I have said enough to make you understand why, when I received from the
hands of your King the great honour your Academy has conferred upon me,
I felt that a young man's ghost should have stood upon one side of me and
at the other a living woman in her vigorous old age. I have seen little
in this last week that would not have been memorable and exciting to Synge
and to Lady Gregory, for Sweden has achieved more than we have hoped for
our own country. I think most of all perhaps of that splendid spectacle
of your court, a family beloved and able that has gathered about it not
the rank only but the intellect of its country. No like spectacle will in
Ireland show its work of discipline and of taste, though it might satisfy
a need of the race no institution created by English or American democracy
can satisfy.
That is only the beginning but it runs on in the same mood. Presently a
strange thing happened; I began to smell honey in places where honey could
not be, at the end of a stone passage or at some windy turn of the road
and it came always with certain thoughts. When I got back to Dublin I was
with angry people, who argued over everything or were eager to know the
exact facts. They were in the mood that makes realistic drama.
2 Our first performances were paid for by
Mr. Edward Martyn, a Galway landowner with a house, part fourteenth century,
part that pretentious modern Gothic once dear to Irish Catholic families.
He had a great hall adorned with repeating patterns by that dreary decorator
Crace, where he played Palestrina upon an organ, and a study with pictures
of the poets in poor stained glass, where he read Ibsen and the Fathers
of the Church and nothing else. A sensible friendly man with intelligence,
strength of purpose, and a charming manner, he shrank from women like a
medieval monk and between him and all experience came one overwhelming terror
«If I do such and such a thing or read such and such a book I may lose
my soul.» My
Countess Cathleen and a play of his own were our
first performances. My play's heroine, having sold her soul to the devil,
gets it back again because «God only sees the motive not the deed,»
and her motive is to save starving people from selling their souls for their
bodies' sake. When all our announcements had been made Martyn withdrew his
support because a priest told him that the play was heretical. I got two
priests to say that it was not and he was satisfied, for we have democratic
ideals. He withdrew permanently, however, after a few months, foreseeing
further peril to his soul. He died a couple of months ago and with him died
a family founded in the twelfth century. An unhappy, childless, laborious,
unfinished man, typical of an Ireland that is passing away.
3 Josef Strzygowski in his
Origin of Christian
Church Art (a translation of a series of lectures, delivered in Upsala
in 1919) says that art «flourishes less at courts than anywhere else
in the world. For at the seat of power everything is subordinated to politics;
the forces willing to accept this fact are always welcome; those which are
not willing must either emigrate or remain aloof». The danger to art
and literature comes today from the tyranny and persuasions of revolutionary
societies and forms of political and religious propaganda. The persuasion
has corrupted much modern English literature; and during the twenty years
that led up to our national revolution the tyranny wasted the greater part
of the energy of Irish dramatists and poets. They had to remain perpetually
on the watch to defend their creation; and the more natural the creation
the more difficult the defence.
4 Since I gave my lecture we have produced
Juno and the Paycock by Mr. O'Casey, the greatest success we have
had for years. In this play, which draws its characters and scenes from
the Dublin slums, a mind, not unlike that of Dostoevsky, looks upon the
violence and tragedy of civil war. There is assassination, sudden poverty,
and the humour of drunkards and the philosophy of wastrels, and there is
little but the out-worn theme of seduction, and perhaps a phrase or two
of mechanical humour, to show that its author has not finished his artistic
education. He is a working bricklayer who was taken out to be shot by English
soldiers in mistake for somebody else, but escaped in a moment of confusion.
He knows thoroughly the life which he describes.