On the Thoughtlessness of Critics

The Leader (Dublin), 9 November 1901, pages 174-176, 3,082 words

Mr. Yeats and myself have received a good deal of criticism from friends and from the Press about the plays that were produced last week at the Gaiety Theatre. A man who has written a book, a man who considered himself to be a leading man, told me he regretted that we had not included in our play the incident of the berries. Diarmuid is hiding from Finn in the quicken tree, and Grania is with him. Finn and Usheen are playing chess under the tree, and Diarmuid, who wishes Usheen to win the game, drops a berry so that Usheen, who is in doubt, may know the move he should make. To desire this incident in a play is extraordinary taste, but it did not surprise me more than one of your remarks about Dr. Hyde's play. My dear editor, your regret that one of the characters in Dr. Douglas Hyde's play should have to resort to telling a lie in order to get the wandering poet out of the house seemed equally extraordinary. The lie Shemus tells about the overturned coach seemed to us quite harmless until you raised the question. The world is full of worldly people who overlook these lapses from the strict path; but an editor cannot be too virtuous, and I think none will succeed in surpassing your virtue. I am not sure that this scrupulousness of yours does not surpass that of the saints, and I hope that the wanton will not laugh at your virtue and the wicked suggest that you are over-doing it. You see how moderate my language is. In a house where everyone screams one has a better chance of being heard if one whispers. But it is not to congratulate you on your admirable conscience that I write to you, nor is it my intention to convince you that Diarmuid and Grania has been misunderstood by you and by your contributor. I write in the interests of the writers of these new plays; it seems to me that it would be well to clear the ground of some of the rubbish heaps, making way for a more cultivated criticism. If I can do this I shall be accomplishing useful work, and I am attracted to the work, for on one point we are all agreed.. We are all agreed that legends may not be altered. Mr. Yeats and myself were agreed on this point from the beginning. The legend comes to us sanctified by the admiration of hundreds of generations; the very fact that it has come down to us proves that it possesses eternal life; to raise one’s hand against a legend is like raising one's hand against the courses of the stars. If a writer selects a legend for the purpose of a play, it is because he believes it contains an eternal truth; his mission is not to alter but to disengage this truth from the mass of folk invention that has collected around it. The business of him who handles a legend is to interpret; he not only may, but he must interpret the legend. This is an important point, and to make myself perfectly clear I will tell the central facts of the legend of Diarmuid and Grania. I will tell the facts that cannot be altered. In every version of the legend these facts are found. Grania will not marry Finn, the chief of the Fianna, because he has grey in his beard. Therefore she collects the Fianna together so that she may choose the comeliest man among them. "Who is that warrior at the shoulder of Goll? she asks. "Who is that graceful legged man at the shoulder of Oscar? Who is that freckled sweet worded man upon whom is curling hair? These are her words. When she has chosen her man she hands round a cup of bewitched ale which makes all her father’s court fall asleep, and while they are sleeping she escapes into the woods with the man she has chosen for his beauty. The next essential event happens seven years later. Grania asks Diarmuid to ask Finn and the Fianna to their house. "Wherefore sayest thou so, oh Grania, when they are enemies to me? "I would fain give them a feast,” said Grania, "so that thou mightest win their Jove." The next essential fact is Diarmuid's death. It has been foretold that a boar was to kill him; Finn knows this. and incites him to the hunting with specious warnings. Grania believes Finn to have murdered her husband, but she consents in the end to marry him.

These are the central facts and these facts cannot be altered. The question therefore arises — what kind of woman is consistent with these facts? Many will think that it would be difficult to invent an incident that portrays a sensual woman more vividly than the assembling of the warriors together in order that a comely man may be chosen from among them. This incident reminds one of Faustina, who used to choose from among the Gladiators. And such brutal sensuality would seem inveterate, for when we examine the legend we find evidence that Diarmuid suspected Grania. During their wanderings long before they settled down in the west, Diarmuid suspected Grania of infidelity. He seems to have felt that the woman who would resort to such violent means to get him would meet with other men to her liking. Here is the passage. One day they meet a warrior wearing a green mantle; he is at the head of a goodly host who have come to attack Diarmuid, and as Diarmuid prepares for battle he says “I trow thou bearest the youth of the green mantle no love, Grania." "Truly I do not," quoth Grania, "and I would I never to this day had borne love to any." Now this passage leaves no doubt that Diarmuid suspected Grania of being false to him even in their wanderings in the woods, and the words "I would I never to this day had borne love to any" seem to imply that Diarmuid was not her first lover. Years after when she asks Diarmuid to ask Finn to their house, his words leave no doubt that he suspects her; and her answer, that she wishes two such great men as Diarmuid and Finn to be friends is surely intended to be the typical evasion under which the woman who assembled the Fianna together so that she might pick a man to carry her away would conceal her desire of change. I do not say her desire of Finn. I say her desire to escape from the life she was leading with Diarmuid. She married Finn from ambition, therefore it is legitimate to say that a desire of Finn was at the time latent in her mind.

I spoke just now of the necessity of interpretation, and by interpretation I mean the exhibition and illumination of the moral idea concealed in the circumstance of the legend. The absence and the presence of a moral idea is what divided tragedy from melodrama. Tragedy is built about a moral idea, and the moral idea embedded in the legend of Diarmuid and Grania seemed to Mr. Yeats and myself to be the tragedy of a hero who has married a frail woman. Such a story is one for all time; it happens in every generation, it happens in the modern as well as in the ancient world; and it passes my understanding to divine the critic’s meaning when he says that such a story is un-Irish. I should have thought that this story was an integral part of our national history.

The reason why writers sometimes select legends for the subject of plays is not because the adventures in legends are singularly well invented, they are often crude and extravagant, but because in the legend we find man stripped of customs and habits, we find the essence and only the essence. The legend is an escapement from formal life; and the writer desires to escape from manners and customs in order that he may exhibit a moral idea, and every great legend contains a moral idea, though it be difficult to find, so over-grown has the legend become with trailing folk inventions. The reading of a legend is often difficult; legends are ambiguous, and the business of the critic is to consider if the dramatist has selected a passable reading, and to examine if he has omitted all that does not exhibit and enforce his reading. That Grania had four sons and a daughter is a detail, and it was omitted from the drama because it would obscure the moral idea.

Turning to the Leader, my dear Editor, I find your contributor saying that the Fianna had no gods. This is one of the most puzzling remarks in journalism, and I have been trying to discover how it came to be written. I shrink from the supposition that your contributor is the most ignorant man in Ireland — such a man would not find a way into your office and the strangest little ideas have been passing through my mind. I have seen your contributor (in my mind’s eye) looking over your "copy” and after reading your admirable remarks about Dr. Hyde's little lie the poor man walked up and down the office considering what virtuous thing he could say to balance your own prodigious virtue. In my vision it seemed to him well to deny all virtue in the heathen world; and the idea that the Fianna had no gods suddenly lit up in his brain. I say I shrink from the supposition that the most ignorant man in Ireland is to be found in your office, and I shrink equally from the supposition that your critic has been fooling you. No one dare to do this, above all a contributor — and the most plausible explanation seems to me to be that an insane desire to rival you in virtue has been your contributor's undoing.

It has been said of some types of savages that they had no gods, but inquiry has always proved the statement untrue; the lowest races have gods. But the Irish in 200 A.D. had reached a high state of civilization, they had reached the state of chivalry and poetic legend, and to say such men had no gods is in the language of the newspapers "a foul calumny." Hitherto all the learned men of Europe, Whitley Stokes, Alfred Butt, Professor Rhys, and De Jubainville, have held that the theocracy of ancient Ireland was as rich as that of ancient Greece. I notice with a certain sort of admiration that your contributor does not argue with these learned men; he indulges in no sophistry, he waives the learned world aside, he meets it with a simple negative, "The Fianna had no gods." A man who writes like this deserves a show to himself; he lacks perception as much as he lacks learning; if he were possessed of ordinary insight he would have known that a race without gods is unthinkable. The case of your contributor is a curious one. He denies that the ancient Irish burnt the dead as well as burying them, though there are many funeral urns in the National Museum. He says the blood bond was not known among the ancient Irish. Yet it is one of those things that must have existed, it is part of humanity, and it is mentioned in the legends, but extrinsic evidence on such a point is vain, one has only to think for a moment to know that the blood bond must have existed among all primitive peoples. It was a necessary deduction from primitive ideas. Never was a man so lacking in perception as your contributor. He says Diarmuid would not deign to shear his sheep. Count Tolstoi goes out and mows for ten hours with his workmen; and who is there amongst us who has not wished to shear a sheep at some moment of his life? The shearing of sheep, the hunting of wild beasts, the tilling of the earth, are still part of modern man. Whether he be rich or poor these things are part of the eternal heritage of man, and it shows as much lack of perception in your contributor to say that it was incongruous to represent Diarmuid shearing his sheep, as it was for him to say that the Fianna had no gods.

I think I have talked long enough with your critic, the dramatization of our legend will not end with Diarmuid and Grania. Some one else will dramatize a legend, and then we will resume the discussion; your contributor and I. In that time he will have read a little and thought a little, and we shall be able to discuss together how many details a modern writer is justified in omitting in his dramatic version of a legend. In three months he will have learned that the modern writers who have dramatized legends are Ibsen and Wagner. I would advise him to read the Saga, out of which Ibsen has made a play entitled "The Heroes of Heligoland "; and I would advise him to read the legends of Parsifal and Tristran, Lohengrin and Tannhauser, and he should read also the legends of the Ring.

And now to turn from your contributor to yourself. You, too, stand in need of a little criticism. I find you speaking of Diarmuid and Grania as a problem play, and this proves that you use the words as other journalists do, without knowing exactly what they mean, as a journalist uses the word symbolist. The problem play was invented by the younger Dumas, and it propounds a question in three or four acts.

First problem play — If a man finds out something about the girl that he is going to marry, what is he to do?

Second problem play — If the girl tells the man she is going to marry, something disagreeable about herself, what is she to do?

Third problem play — If a man finds out after he has married a girl something disagreeable about her, what is he to do?

Fourth problem play — If the girl admits after she is married some disagreeable truths about herself, what is the man to do?

But in Diarmuid and Grania no such questions are asked. The story is one of fate, of a man drawn along in the net of fate to his appointed end, and it is as absurd to call it a problem play as it would be to call "Othello" a problem play. I remember Mr. Archer reading me a passage from a letter he had just received from Ibsen. Ibsen thanked Archer for having corrected some mistakes that had crept into circulation about him. He added, however, philosophically, "there are so many more mistakes to correct." I do not propose to correct all the mistakes in circulation about Diarmuid and Grania, but it will be useful to speak of the characters in the legend. The ancient writers paid little attention to what is known now as character drawing, and Diarmuid is whatever the reader pleases him to be. We only know that he eluded Finn's pursuit for seven years, and that he loved Grania. The reader may make him according to his fancy, and there is plenty of scope. There are some hints that he was jealous of Grania, and that he suspected her of being false to him; but regarding these hints we are as little agreed as we are regarding the evidence against Mary Queen of Scots. Finn's character is clearly indicated, he is as treacherous and as revengeful in this legend as he is in other legends. But it will be said that we have lowered the heroes; that they are no longer heroic. In Homer the heroes are more human than they are in Virgil. Hector runs three times round Troy before Achilles, and the heroes cry out when they are wounded. But in Virgil the heroes are heroes — according to the popular idea. They never show fear, and they do not cry out when they are in pain. These lines are written for the Gaelic League, the dramatization of the legend has been discussed, and if it should be again discussed it would be well that these points should be considered. I have noticed nowhere an attempt to understand, to get under the superficial aspect — for instance, it seems to have been forgotten that we were writing about Pagan and not Christian Ireland, and Pagan Ir~land was surely not so virtuous as Christian Ireland. I might elaborate the point, but I am lacking in energy. I have wandered from door-post to door-post as far as I may, blotting out every little folly that a critic may have written; and to conclude my article, to bring the end into harmony with the beginning, I will return to Dr. Hyde's play; the play in which a little lie occurs that has so wounded your conscience, my dear Editor. Your admirable discovery of this little sin has exalted you, and in your exaltation you do not seem to have noticed that Dr. Hyde's play is about a girl who is in love with two men, that she forgets Shemus to whom she is engaged, and goes into a corner and flirts outrageously with a wandering poet, and that at the end  she gives up the wandering poet and marries Shemus. This is surely very flagrant, this is even the subject of Diarmuid and Grania, and you have forgotten to call Dr. Hyde's a problem play. But we must not seek perfection, it was you who discovered the shameless lie, and thereby you have proved yourself the most perfectly virtuous man in Ireland. Persevere in this extraordinary virtue and fortune awaits you, and though the Church may omit to canonise you when you are dead, be sure the Church has canonised men and women who would not have raised an objection to the little fib which wounded your admirable conscience.

GEORGE MOORE.

[This article is composed as a letter to the editor but is called an article by the author; moreover its length belies the style of a letter. The article is followed by a lengthy editorial rejoinder.]