From the Beginning

Chicago Record-Herald, 4 February 1912, page [1] of section 7 (the Sunday magazine), 1,325 words

[The Sunday magazine in this issue of the Chicago Record-Herald published several articles about Irish theater, including this one by George Moore.]

Yeats’ original ideal of a theater was a little mist, some fairies and a psaltery, and his achievements are realistic plays and an admirable company of actors and actresses. The story of the Abbey Theater is an interesting one, but it is much too long a story for me to attempt now; suffice it to say that when the Irish Literary Theater, founded by Yeats, Martyn and myself, came to an end with the performance of “Diarmuid and Grania,” a play written by Yeats and me and produced by F.R. Benson at the Gaiety Theater in Dublin, Willie Fay and his brother Frank Fay, came to me one evening to ask me to use my influence with the Gaelic League to send them out with the little company to act plays in Irish and in English all over Ireland.

While I was trying to persuade the Gaelic League to accept the offer of the Fays the brothers read a play entitled “Deirdre,” by A.E., and abandoning their project of the provincial company, they decided to devote themselves to the production of “Deirdre” and “Cathleen-ni-Houlihan,” a one-act play written for them by Yeats. The plays were produced in April, 1902, and they were received with so much approval by the audiences that assembled to hear them in St.Teresa’s Hall, Clarendon street, that the Fays determined the idea of an Irish theater should not be dropped; a society was founded entitled the National Theater Society, and Yeats was elected president.

The Indefatigable Yeats.

The choice was a happy one. During the summer of 1902 Yeats placed all his great energy of mind at the service of the Fays; he wrote plays for them, and asked everybody to write plays. He asked me, but I was haughty, whereas Yeats knew how to stoop to conquer, and he conquered because he was possessed of an idea, and an idea is always sufficient to secure success.

Yeats had no knowledge of the technique of the stage, and no aptitude for learning it. I doubt if even today he would be able to produce a play efficiently; instead of acting he preferred, and perhaps still prefers, a sort of chant which he called “the speaking of verse,” He certainly seemed the last man in the world who would succeed in running a theater, and I thought this because I overlooked the fact that he was possessed of an idea.

He liked folk, and he desired a folk theater; peasant plays written in the language the peasant speaks. Art begins in folk as the river begins in the mountains, and we must always return to folk.

If an epigram be permitted in an article, I will say that, though there be no high road to Parnassus, the boreen will take us there. Boreen is Irish for a little road, a byway, and Yeats and his company have reached Olympus by following the borden, that is to say, the dialect.

The plays of the Abbey Theater are written in dialect, or, to speak more exactly, in Anglo-Irish idiom. Idiom redeemed the Abbey Theater from the conventional play; the gentleman in evening dress and diamond studs beseeching a lady in silk attire to leave her husband, and it redeemed the theater from the idiom which we speak and in which our newspapers are written — an idiom dim and defaced like a coin too long in circulation.

It would be interesting to tell how this idiom gradually made its way into literary usage, but if I have abbreviated the story of the Abbey Theater I must leave untold the first babblings in the new speech so that I may have space to speak at some length of him who first used it as an artist and carried it into — well, into a little immortality.

All Strange and New.

Everything connected with the Abbey Theater is strange, for John M. Synge came to Yeats with no literary luster about his brow. Until he met Yeats he was merely an unsuccessful journalist, who wrote so indifferently about Jules Lemaitre and Anatole France that his articles were seldom printed in the magazines to which they were sent. From these Yeats could not have gathered any idea of the literary genius in him, nor could he have gathered it from his conversation, for Synge had none; an appearance awkward and clumsy, with no grace of wit in conversation, silent, morose, avoiding his kind and given to strange ways of life; for what is a stranger way of life than to spend six months of the year in the Latin Quarter and the other six months with the almosts dumb peasants that inhabit the islands off the coast of Ireland?

It must have been his strange manner of life that appealed to Yeats and prompted him to tell Synge to leave off trying to write what he thought was the English language and to write in the Anglo-Irish dialect which he knew so well.

The result of this excellent advice was a play called “The Shadow of the Glen,” which was produced in the Molesworth Hall in October, 1903.

Yeats when he heard it read is said to have cried out “Euripedes!” A few months later Synge read “Riders to the Sea” to the poet, and on this occasion it is stated that Yeats again limited his appreciation to a single word — “Aeschylus!” And the appreciation is not altogether as exaggerated as some people would like to think. Synge has told the story of the old woman whose children have been taken by the sea year after year with beauty and pathos, without sentimentality.

Good Angel Appears.

As soon as the Irish National Theater had produced a masterpiece Miss Horniman came forward with two or three thousand pounds and built the Abbey Theater and gave it to Yeats rent free. He was able to reward the lady’s munificence with another masterpiece — “The Well of the Saints.” No further doubt could exist that Synge was reforming the theater, but not by new methods of acting, stage managing, scene designing, dancing, lighting, wig making. Synge began his reformation by writing literary plays, and it would be a good thing if other reformers were to follow his example.

“The Well of the Saints” being in three acts, and each act perfect in itself, left no room for doubt that a man of genius had come among us; but beautiful and perfect as the play is, it would have been a very subtle critic indeed that would have foreseen “The Playboy of the Western World,” the most original piece of stage literature that has been written since Elizabethan times, exceeding Sheridan and Goldsmith, for these were but echoes of Wycherly and Congreve; whereas Synge in “The Playboy” is himself and nothing but himself.

One listens to this play as one listens to music; it can be heard again and again. At the first hearing one discovers many faults; at every subsequent hearing one of these faults drops away, and when it has been heard for the sixth time no faults are left. Such is my experience with “The Playboy,” and such, I think ought to be the experience of the American audiences, at least every one among the American audiences who is disposed to give his mind to thinking out artistic problems.

About the steps of the throne on which Synge sits are many worthy of attention. Among these — places aux dames — is Lady Gregory, the author of many pleasant farces, all little folk-tales written in the Anglo-Irish idiom, every one of them full of cheerfulness and pleasant humor. “The Rising of the Moon” is quite a dainty trifle, and it is difficult to imagine anybody not being amused by “Hyacinth Halvey,” and not leaving the theater feeling that he had been listening to something more than mere farce.