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they make no discoveries in human nature, but repeat the opinions of the audience, or the satire of its favourite newspapers. I am only speaking of the plays of a year, and that is but a short period in what one hopes may be a great movement, but it is not wise to say, as do many Gaelic Leaguers, who know the weaknesses of their movement, that if the present thinks but of grammar and propaganda the future will do all the rest. A movement will often in its first fire of enthusiasm create more works of genius than whole easy-going centuries that come after it.
Nearly everything that is greatest as English prose was written in a generation or two after the first beautiful use of prose in England: and Mistral has made the poems of modern Provençe, as well as reviving and all but inventing the language: for genius is more often of the spring than of the middle green of the year. We cannot settle times and seasons, flowering-time and harvest-time are not in our hands, but we are to blame if genius comes and we do not gather in the fruit or the blossom. Very often we can do no more for the man of genius than to distract him as little as may be with the common business of the day. His own work is more laborious than any other, for not only is thought harder than action, as Goethe said, but he must brood over his work so long and so unbrokenly that he find there all his patriotism, all his passion, his religion even it is not only those that sweep a floor that are obedient to heaven until at last he can cry with Paracelsus, In this crust of bread I have found all the stars and all the heavens.
The following new plays were produced by the National Theatre Society during the last twelve months: The Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea , by Mr. J. M. Synge; Broken Soil , by Mr. Colm; The Townland of Tamney , by Mr. Seumas MacManus; The Shadowy Waters and The Kings Threshold , by myself. The following plays were revived: Deirdre , by A.E.; Twenty-five , by Lady Gregory; Cathleen ni Houlihan , The Pot of Broth , and The Hour-Glass , by myself. We could have given more plays, but difficulties about the place of performance, the shifting of scenery from where we rehearsed to where we acted, and so on, always brought a great deal of labour upon the Society. The Society went to London in March and gave two performances at The Royalty to full houses. They played there Mr. Synges two plays, Mr. Colms play, and my Kings Threshold and Pot of Broth . We were commended by the critics with generous sympathy, and had an enthusiastic and distinguished audience.
We have many plays awaiting performance during the coming winter. Mr. Synge has written us a play in three acts called The Well of the Saints , full, as few works of our time are, with temperament, and of a true and yet bizarre beauty. Lady Gregory has written us an historical tragedy in three acts about King Brian and a very merry comedy of country life. Mr. Bernard Shaw has written us a play in four acts, his first experiment in Irish satire; Mr. Tarpey, an Irishman whose comedy Windmills was successfully prepared by the Stage Society some years ago, a little play which I have not yet seen; and Mr. Boyle, a village comedy in three acts; and I hear of other plays by competent hands that are coming to us. My own Bailes Strand is in rehearsal, and I hope to have ready for the spring a play on the subject of Deirdre , with choruses somewhat in the Greek manner. We are, of course, offered from all parts of the world great quantities of plays which are impossible for literary or dramatic reasons. Some of them have a look of having been written for the commercial theatre and of having been sent to us on rejection. It will save trouble if I point out that a play which seems to its writer to promise an ordinary London or New York success is very unlikely to please us, or succeed with our audience if it did. Writers who have a better ambition should get some mastery of their art in little plays before spending many months of what is almost sure to be wasted labour on several acts.
We were invited to play in the St. Louis Exhibition, but thought that our work should be in Ireland for the present, and had other reasons for refusing.
A Company, which has been formed in America by Miss Witcherly, who played in Everyman during a part of its tour in America, to take some of our
plays on tour, has begun with three one-act plays of mine, Cathleen ni Houlihan , The Hour-Glass , and The Land of Hearts Desire . It announces on its circulars that it is following the methods of our Theatre.
Though the commercial theatre of America is as unashamedly commercial as the English, there is a far larger audience interested in fine drama than here. When I was lecturing in, I think, Philadelphia one town mixes with another in my memory at times some one told me that he had seen the Duchess of Malfi played there by one of the old stock companies in his boyhood; and Everyman has been far more of a success in America than anywhere else. They have numberless University towns each with its own character and with an academic life animated by a zeal and by an imagination unknown in these countries. There is nearly everywhere that leaven of highly-cultivated men and women so much more necessary to a good theatrical audience to-day than were ever Raleigh and Sidney, when the groundling could remember the folk-songs and the imaginative folk-life. The more an age is busy with temporary things, the more must it look for leadership in matters of art to men and women whose business or whose leisure has made the great writers of the world their habitual company. Literature is not journalism because it can turn the imagination to whatever is essential and unchanging in life.