I did not find a word in the printed
criticism of Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows
about the qualities that made certain moments seem
to me the noblest tragedy, and the play was judged
by what seemed to me but wheels and pulleys necessary
to the effect, but in themselves nothing.
Upon the other hand, those who spoke
to me of the play never spoke of these wheels and
pulleys, but if they cared at all for the play, cared
for the things I cared for. One’s own world
of painters, of poets, of good talkers, of ladies
who delight in Ricard’s portraits or Debussey’s
music, all those whose senses feel instantly every
change in our mother the moon, saw the stage in one
way; and those others who look at plays every night,
who tell the general playgoer whether this play or
that play is to his taste, saw it in a way so different
that there is certainly some body of dogma whether
in the instincts or in the memory, pushing the ways
apart. A printed criticism, for instance, found
but one dramatic moment, that when Deirdre in the second
act overhears her lover say that he may grow weary
of her; and not one if I remember rightly chose
for praise or explanation the third act which alone
had satisfied the author, or contained in any abundance
those sentences that were quoted at the fall of the
curtain and for days after.
Deirdre and her lover, as Synge tells
the tale, returned to Ireland, though it was nearly
certain they would die there, because death was better
than broken love, and at the side of the open grave
that had been dug for one and would serve for both,
quarrelled, losing all they had given their life to
keep. ’Is it not a hard thing that we should
miss the safety of the grave and we trampling its
edge?’ That is Deirdre’s cry at the outset
of a reverie of passion that mounts and mounts till
grief itself has carried her beyond grief into pure
contemplation. Up to this the play has been a
Master’s unfinished work, monotonous and melancholy,
ill-arranged, little more than a sketch of what it
would have grown to, but now I listened breathless
to sentences that may never pass away, and as they
filled or dwindled in their civility of sorrow, the
player, whose art had seemed clumsy and incomplete,
like the writing itself, ascended into that tragic
ecstasy which is the best that art perhaps
that life can give. And at last when
Deirdre, in the paroxysm before she took her life,
touched with compassionate fingers him that had killed
her lover, we knew that the player had become, if
but for a moment, the creature of that noble mind which
had gathered its art in waste islands, and we too
were carried beyond time and persons to where passion,
living through its thousand purgatorial years, as in
the wink of an eye, becomes wisdom; and it was as
though we too had touched and felt and seen a disembodied
thing.
One dogma of the printed criticism
is that if a play does not contain definite character,
its constitution is not strong enough for the stage,
and that the dramatic moment is always the contest
of character with character.
In poetical drama there is, it is
held, an antithesis between character and lyric poetry,
for lyric poetry however much it move you
when read out of a book can, as these critics
think, but encumber the action. Yet when we go
back a few centuries and enter the great periods of
drama, character grows less and sometimes disappears,
and there is much lyric feeling, and at times a lyric
measure will be wrought into the dialogue, a flowing
measure that had well-befitted music, or that more
lumbering one of the sonnet. Suddenly it strikes
us that character is continuously present in comedy
alone, and that there is much tragedy, that of Corneille,
that of Racine, that of Greece and Rome, where its
place is taken by passions and motives, one person
being jealous, another full of love or remorse or
pride or anger. In writers of tragi-comedy (and
Shakespeare is always a writer of tragi-comedy) there
is indeed character, but we notice that it is in the
moments of comedy that character is defined, in Hamlet’s
gaiety let us say; while amid the great moments, when
Timon orders his tomb, when Hamlet cries to Horatio
‘absent thee from felicity awhile,’ when
Anthony names ’Of many thousand kisses the poor
last,’ all is lyricism, unmixed passion, ’the
integrity of fire.’ Nor does character
ever attain to complete definition in these lamps
ready for the taper, no matter how circumstantial and
gradual the opening of events, as it does in Falstaff
who has no passionate purpose to fulfill, or as it
does in Henry the Fifth whose poetry, never touched
by lyric heat, is oratorical; nor when the tragic reverie
is at its height do we say, ’How well that man
is realised, I should know him were I to meet him
in the street,’ for it is always ourselves that
we see upon the stage, and should it be a tragedy
of love we renew, it may be, some loyalty of our youth,
and go from the theatre with our eyes dim for an old
love’s sake.
I think it was while rehearsing a
translation of Les Fourberies de Scapin in
Dublin, and noticing how passionless it all was, that
I saw what should have been plain from the first line
I had written, that tragedy must always be a drowning
and breaking of the dykes that separate man from man,
and that it is upon these dykes comedy keeps house.
But I was not certain of the site (one always doubts
when one knows no testimony but one’s own);
till somebody told me of a certain letter of Congreve’s.
He describes the external and superficial expressions
of ‘humour’ on which farce is founded and
then defines ‘humour’ itself, the foundation
of comedy as a ’singular and unavoidable way
of doing anything peculiar to one man only, by which
his speech and actions are distinguished from all
other men,’ and adds to it that ‘passions
are too powerful in the sex to let humour have its
course,’ or as I would rather put it, that you
can find but little of what we call character in unspoiled
youth, whatever be the sex, for as he indeed shows
in another sentence, it grows with time like the ash
of a burning stick, and strengthens towards middle
life till there is little else at seventy years.
Since then I have discovered an antagonism
between all the old art and our new art of comedy
and understand why I hated at nineteen years Thackeray’s
novels and the new French painting. A big picture
of cocottes sitting at little tables outside
a cafe, by some follower of Manet’s, was exhibited
at the Royal Hibernian Academy while I was a student
at a life class there, and I was miserable for days.
I found no desirable place, no man I could have wished
to be, no woman I could have loved, no Golden Age,
no lure for secret hope, no adventure with myself
for theme out of that endless tale I told myself all
day long. Years after I saw the Olympia
of Manet at the Luxembourg and watched it without
hostility indeed, but as I might some incomparable
talker whose precision of gesture gave me pleasure,
though I did not understand his language. I returned
to it again and again at intervals of years, saying
to myself, ‘some day I will understand’;
and yet, it was not until Sir Hugh Lane brought the
Eva Gonzales to Dublin, and I had said to myself,
’How perfectly that woman is realised as distinct
from all other women that have lived or shall live’
that I understood I was carrying on in my own mind
that quarrel between a tragedian and a comedian which
the Devil on Two Sticks in Le Sage showed to the young
man who had climbed through the window.
There is an art of the flood, the
art of Titian when his Ariosto, and his Bacchus and
Ariadne, give new images to the dreams of youth, and
of Shakespeare when he shows us Hamlet broken away
from life by the passionate hesitations of his reverie.
And we call this art poetical, because we must bring
more to it than our daily mood if we would take our
pleasure; and because it delights in picturing the
moment of exaltation, of excitement, of dreaming (or
in the capacity for it, as in that still face of Ariosto’s
that is like some vessel soon to be full of wine).
And there is an art that we call real, because character
can only express itself perfectly in a real world,
being that world’s creature, and because we
understand it best through a delicate discrimination
of the senses which is but entire wakefulness, the
daily mood grown cold and crystalline.
We may not find either mood in its
purity, but in mainly tragic art one distinguishes
devices to exclude or lessen character, to diminish
the power of that daily mood, to cheat or blind its
too clear perception. If the real world is not
altogether rejected, it is but touched here and there,
and into the places we have left empty we summon rhythm,
balance, pattern, images that remind us of vast passions,
the vagueness of past times, all the chimeras that
haunt the edge of trance; and if we are painters,
we shall express personal emotion through ideal form,
a symbolism handled by the generations, a mask from
whose eyes the disembodied looks, a style that remembers
many masters, that it may escape contemporary suggestion;
or we shall leave out some element of reality as in
Byzantine painting, where there is no mass, nothing
in relief, and so it is that in the supreme moment
of tragic art there comes upon one that strange sensation
as though the hair of one’s head stood up.
And when we love, if it be in the excitement of youth,
do we not also, that the flood may find no stone to
convulse, no wall to narrow it, exclude character
or the signs of it by choosing that beauty which seems
unearthly because the individual woman is lost amid
the labyrinth of its lines as though life were trembling
into stillness and silence, or at last folding itself
away? Some little irrelevance of line, some promise
of character to come, may indeed put us at our ease,
‘give more interest’ as the humour of the
old man with the basket does to Cleopatra’s
dying; but should it come as we had dreamed in love’s
frenzy to our dying for that woman’s sake, we
would find that the discord had its value from the
tune.
Nor have we chosen illusion in choosing
the outward sign of that moral genius that lives among
the subtlety of the passions, and can for her moment
make her of the one mind with great artists and poets.
In the studio we may indeed say to one another ‘character
is the only beauty,’ but when we choose a wife,
as when we go to the gymnasium to be shaped for woman’s
eyes, we remember academic form, even though we enlarge
a little the point of interest and choose “a
painter’s beauty,” finding it the more
easy to believe in the fire because it has made ashes.
When we look at the faces of the old
tragic paintings, whether it is in Titian or in some
painter of medieval China, we find there sadness and
gravity, a certain emptiness even, as of a mind that
waited the supreme crisis (and indeed it seems at
times as if the graphic art, unlike poetry which sings
the crisis itself, were the celebration of waiting).
Whereas in modern art, whether in Japan or Europe,
‘vitality’ (is not that the great word
of the studios?), the energy, that is to say, which
is under the command of our common moments, sings,
laughs, chatters or looks its busy thoughts.
Certainly we have here the Tree of
Life and that of the knowledge of Good and Evil which
is rooted in our interests, and if we have forgotten
their differing virtues it is surely because we have
taken delight in a confusion of crossing branches.
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, let us
say, greaten till they are humanity itself. We
feel our minds expand convulsively or spread out slowly
like some moon-brightened image-crowded sea.
That which is before our eyes perpetually vanishes
and returns again in the midst of the excitement it
creates, and the more enthralling it is, the more do
we forget it.
August, 1910.