ABSTRACT
MR. MOORE has given reasons elsewhere why the founders of the Irish Literary Theatre believe . good plays more possible in Ireland than in London; but I think he makes too much of these reasons when he makes them our chief impulse. I know that he and Mr. Martyn and myself, and those who are working with us, believe that we have things to say to our countrymen which it is our pleasure and our duty to say. If we write plays that are literature, and find people to like them, it will be because that strong imaginative energy, which is needed to fill with life the elaborate circumstance of a play, has not often come except as from a Sinai to some nation wandering as in a wilderness; but that strong imaginative energy comes among men, as I think, not because they have followed it from country to country, but because a genius greater than their own, and, it may be, without their knowledge or their consent, has thrown its shadow upon them. Dionysius, the Areopagite, wrote that ‘He has set the borders of the nations according to His angels.’ It is these angels, each one the genius of some race about to be unfolded, that are the founders of intellectual traditions ; and as lovers understand in their first glance all that is . to befall them, and as poets and musicians see the whole work in its first impulse, so races prophesy at their awakening whatever the generations that are to prolong their traditions shall accomplish in detail. It is only at the awakening—as in ancient Greece, or in. Elizabethan England, or in contemporary Scandinavia—that great numbers of men understand that a right understanding of life and of destiny is more important than amusement. In London, where all the intellectual traditions gather to die, men hate a play if they are told it is literature, for they will not endure a spiritual superiority; but in Athens, where so many intellectual traditions were born, Euripides once changed hostility to enthusiasm by asking his playgoers whether it was his business to teach them, or their business to teach him. New races understand instinctively, because the future cries in their ears, that the old revelations are insufficient, and that all life is revelation beginning in miracle and enthusiasm, and dying out as it unfolds itself in what we have mistaken for progress. It is one of our illusions, as I think, that education, the softening of manners, the perfecting of law—countless images of a fading light—can create nobleness and beauty, and that life moves slowly and evenly towards some perfection. Progress is miracle, and it is sudden, because miracles are the work of an all-powerful energy, and nature in herself has no power except to die and to forget. If one studies one's own mind, one comes to think with Blake, that ‘every time less than a pulsation of the artery is equal to 6000 years, for in this period the poet's work is done ; and all the great events of time start forth and are conceived in such a period, within a pulsation of the artery.’
