ABSTRACT
SOME countrymen in Galway, whither we carried our plays in dialect a few weeks ago, said it was no use going in to see them because they showed people that could be seen on the road every day ; but these were but a few, and we had a great popular success, crowds being turned away every evening from the doors. Ireland is always Connacht to my imagination, for there more than elsewhere is the folk tradition that is the loftiest thing that has come down to us within the ring of Ireland. I knew an observant and cultivated French count, descendant of emigres, who came for a few months in every summer to a property they had left him upon the Galway shore. He came from Paris or from Rome, but would not stay, if he could help it, even a few hours in Dublin, because Dublin was “ Shabby England.” We find our most highly trained audiences of late in Dublin, but the majority of theatre-goers drift between what is Irish and what is English in confused uncertainty, and have not even begun the search for what is their own,
Somebody in Un Grand Homme de Province a Paris says, with I know not what truth, that French actresses pay more for attacks than admiring criticism, for “ controversy is fame. ” In Ireland this would be an unnecessary expense, and many of the attacks which have followed us from the beginning in such plenty have arisen out of conceptions of life which, unknown to the journalists who have made them, are essentially English, though of an England that has begun to change its clothes since Matthew Arnold and his contemporaries began a truer popular culture. Even at this moment the early Victorian thought is not so out of fashion that English newspapers would not revive it and talk of the duties of writers to preach and the like, all that old Utilitarianism, if the drama, let us say, were taken seriously enough for leading articles instead of being left to the criticism of a few writers who really know something of their business. Some fifteen years ago, English critics themselves wrote of Ibsen very much as our more hysterical patriots write of us. These patriots, with an heretical preference for faith over works-for have not opinions and second and third hand conceptions of life, images of what we wish to be, a substance of things hoped for, come from the pawnshop of schismatical faith?—continually attack in the interest of some point of view popularised by Macaulay and his contemporaries, or of some reflection from English novelists and the like, Irish emotion and temperament
discovered by some writer in himself after years of labour, for all reality comes to us as the reward of labour. Forms of emotion and thought which the future will recognise as peculiarly Irish, for no other country has had their like, are looked upon as un-Irish because of their novelty in a land that is so nearly conquered it has all but nothing of its own. English provincialism shouts through the lips of Irish patriots who have no knowledge of other countries to give them a standard of comparison, and they, with the confidence of all who speak the opinions of others, labour to thwart everybody who would dig a well for Irish water to bubble in.
