by J. M. Synge
GOOD PICTURES IN DUBLIN
The New Municipal Gallery
ON Monday the 20th of January the new Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin was opened by the Lord Mayor at a ceremony attended by the representatives of all classes and parties in Ireland. This new gallery contains a collection of pictures that would attract attention in any town in Europe, but its establishment in Dublin in the first few years of the new century is particularly noteworthy. A hundred years ago an epoch of Irish culture — the culture of Ireland before the Union — was breaking up, and now many have pleasure in seeing a new intellectual life, of which this gallery is one of the results, gaining ground daily. In many ways this newer life seems peculiarly remote from the life of Dublin in the eighteenth century, yet there is a certain link between them which may become more apparent in the next few years.
Until recently the political affairs of Ireland were directed, to a large extent, by leaders, like Parnell, from the Protestant and landlord classes, but now after the experience of a century the more native portion of the people have reached a stage in which they have little trouble in finding political leaders among themselves. In the arts, however, it is different. Although the Irish popular classes have sympathy with what is expressed in the arts they are necessarily unfamiliar with artistic matters, so that for many years to come artistic movements in Ireland will be the work of individuals whose enthusiasm or skill can be felt by the less-trained instincts of the people. These individuals, a few here and there like the political leaders of the nineteenth century, will be drawn from the classes that have still some trace or tradition of the older culture and yet for various reasons have lost all hold on direct political life. The history of the founding of this new gallery and the work done for it by Mr. Hugh Lane and a few others since 1902 is a good instance of these new courses in Irish affairs.
The pictures of this collection are now hung in 17, Harcourt-street, one of the finest of the older Dublin houses, formerly the town house of Lord Clonmel, and the fine ceilings, chimney-pieces, and staircases add to the pleasure of one’s imagination by their own value and the associations that are connected with them. The pictures themselves have for the most part extraordinary merit. Many of them are from the Forbes and Durand Ruel collections, and Mr. Lane himself has handed over his collection of pictures and drawings of British schools. In one room we have the work of Irish artists, in another English painting, and, finally, two large rooms of French and Continental schools, as fine a collection of its kind, perhaps, as can be found outside Paris. Many students, one believes, will be drawn to Dublin to look at Manet’s ‘Le Concert aux Tuilleries’, or his fine and characteristic portrait of Mile. Eva Gonzales, or at ‘The Present’ of Alfred Stevens, or at the large decorative picture of the beheading of John the Baptist by Puvis de Chavannes. The collection of Corot’s work is the most representative to be found in any public gallery in these islands, and there are also fine examples of the other great landscape painters of his time. In a very different line, some eight pictures by Mancini have extraordinary power. On the staircase there is an interesting series of portraits of contemporary Irish men and women, painted by Mr. J. B. Yeats, R.H.A., Mr. William Orpen, A.R.H.A., and one or two others.
This gallery will impress everyone who visits it, but for those who live in Dublin it is peculiarly valuable. Perhaps no one but Dublin men who have lived abroad also can quite realise the strange thrill it gave me to turn in from Harcourt-street — where I passed by to school long ago — and to find myself among Monets, and Manets and Renoirs, things I connect so directly with the life of Paris. The morning of my first visit was brilliantly sunny, and this magnificent house, with the clear light in the windows, brought back, I do not know how, the whole feeling I have had so often in the Louvre and a few other galleries abroad, but which does not come to one in the rather stiff picture galleries one is used to in England and Ireland. This Dublin gallery, one is tempted to hope, will have a living atmosphere, and become, like the Louvre and the Luxembourg, a sort of home for one’s mind. A new building has been promised by the Corporation of Dublin, but for the time being at least things are well as they are, and I have always felt that pictures are more easily enjoyed when hung in places built for the uses of life, whether palaces or houses, than in formal picture galleries that are built for the purpose.
When one thinks that this collection will now be open to all Dublin people, and that the young men of talent, the writers as well as the painters, will be able to make themselves familiar with all these independent and vigorous works, it is hard to say how much is owed to Mr. Hugh Lane, Alderman Kelly, the Corporation of Dublin, and the artists and others who have carried through this undertaking with such complete success.
A CELTIC THEATRE
WITHIN THE LAST few years several attempts have been made to establish a modern theatre of real merit and vitality. While the most recent of these, the Irish Literary Theatre, was being organised in Dublin, a somewhat similar movement was in progress among the Breton-speaking peasantry of Low or Western Brittany. There is not at first sight much resemblance between these two movements. One is an attempt to replace the worthless plays now familiar to the public by artistic work, the other a survival of the sincere, if sometimes grotesque, religious drama of the Middle Ages; yet they are both produced by the Celtic imagination, and give expression to a limited but puissant nationality.... A modern version in Breton of a mystery play seems in many ways rough, crude writing — fit to draw peals of laughter from the professional litterateur — yet it has a certain early vigour which recalls the first pre-Elizabethan dramas. Whatever one may think of this composition, it seems to have been most effective in the hands of the peasant actors who form the real interest of the movement. It is strange that the Celtic races should have evolved about the same time a unique body of actors in Brittany, and a few poets in Ireland who are producing works that seem incomplete when played with the accent and tradition of the London stage. Unfortunately the players act in Breton, and our poets write in English.
ANATOLE LE BRAZ
SON OF A village schoolmaster, Anatole Le Braz grew up among the scenes he writes of, and it is here, perhaps, one may best mark the difference between him and those who are interested in the Celtic movement in Ireland. He passed his childhood in close contact with the Breton peasantry, speaking chiefly in their language, sharing their simple Christianity; and now, undisturbed by any political or social creed, he sees with a vague and unpractical disquiet the waning of much that he intimately loves. In Ireland it is different. The same survivals of the old have not for us the charms of lingering regret, but rather the incitement of a thing that is rare and beautiful, and still apart from our habitual domain. If an Irishman of modern culture dwells for a while in Inishmaan, or Inisheer, or, perhaps, anywhere among the mountains of Connaught, he will not find there any trace of an external at-homeness, but will rather yield himself up to the entrancing newness of the old. Here, again, lies one great interest of this movement of the Celtic races, for whenever the two streams of humanity — the old and the new — flow for but a moment side by side, blending old attachments with new indomitable joys, this moment grows rich with a pregnant luxuriance undreamed of hitherto, and from moments such as these depend the purer movements of mankind. All who really achieve come seeking in quiet places a sphere for half-tangible fulfilment, and therefore it is that each nation is privileged before others that bears within her own bosom a lofty and prophetic aspiration. The day of fulfilment may be unhopefully postponed, but when its dawn reddens at length the bars of her prison, she will rise unsoiled, if grey-haired, from her sleep of secular enchantment, and her chains, not of diamond, falling in twain, will pass out to the palace of her dream.
THREE FRENCH WRITERS
IN HUYSMANS WE have a man sick with monotony trying to escape by any vice or sanctity from the sameness of Parisian life, and in Pierre Loti a man who is tormented by the wonder of the world... till at last his on
e preoccupation becomes a terrified search for some sign of the persistence of the person. Like most wanderers, he fears death more than others, because he has seen many shadowy or splendid places where he has had no time to live, and has lived in other places long enough to feel in breaking from them a share of the desolation which is completed in death.... In reading [them] one cannot escape a feeling of unreality, a feeling that one is outside what is vital in the growth of European thought, and that an appeal is being made to young men without health, and to women without occupation, rather than to those who count, singly or collectively, in contemporary intellectual life. In work like this neither the sensibility of Pierre Loti nor the fantastic erudition of Huysmans can quite make up for the lack of a mind definitely trained to measure the newer thoughts which come together near the real activities of life, for, usually, such minds, and such minds alone, are influenced by the wider sympathies which reinforce and justify the more serious claims of literature....
It is interesting to note that the most exquisite prose style attained perhaps by any recent French writer has been used and acquired by Anatole France in the treatment of a plain local mood. The half-cynical optimism which he has shown so admirably in the books dealing with Monsieur Bergeret, and elsewhere, is simply the frank philosophy of large classes among the French, who are kept healthy by an ironical attitude towards their own distress. No one, it is possible, will consider this humorous optimism, even when completed, as Anatole France completes it, by socialistic ideals, as a high form of practical philosophy, but some may ask where at the present time we can find a better one that is fearless and perfectly healthy.... [In fact,] to find work which interprets the real life of France, and is fully appreciated there, one must turn to... Anatole France — In his best work, while remaining true to the distinctive tradition of French writing — the tradition which has given us Frère Jean, Tartuffe, and Pangloss — he has contrived to express with curious exactness the irony and the rather fatalistic gaiety which now form the essential mood of the French people....
He has a mastery of the Paris dialect... and is able to give it a delicacy which is absent from the work of men like Flaubert and Balzac who, with all their talent, had not this supremely fine sense for the shades of spoken language....
It is interesting to notice how many of the more important writers of the last quarter of a century have used dialogue for their medium, and thus kept up a direct relation with the spoken language, and the life of those who speak it. How much more effective, for instance, has been the varied treatment of dialogue by Maeterlinck, Oscar Wilde, Anatole France, Ibsen and others, from any elaborate prose produced during the same period. With Flaubert and Pater elaborate prose reached a climax after which only two developments were possible: one has given us Huysmans and Mallarmé who make pitiful efforts to gain new effects by literary devices, the other gives us a simple dialogue such as is seen in Anatole France, and some other writers whose nearness to him I have just noticed.
When one has done praising and enjoying the work of Anatole France one has to remember that his is exquisite satirical work with the limitations and drawbacks that belong to satire, and that if it is looked at in any other way it will show many features from which a less favourable judgement must be drawn. In making a final estimate, however, of Anatole France himself it should not be forgotten that with him as with Voltaire, to whom he owes much, a practical effort to bring justice and peace into the world, exists beside the negative mood shown in his works. This practical effort has brought him into many places where men of letters are not very often seen, and those who heard him speak in public at the time of the Affaire Dreyfus, and who remember the grave power of his words, will not be likely to find in him — as some critics have found — a shallow sophist without sincerity or depth.
A NOTE ON BOUCICAULT AND IRISH DRAMA
SOME RECENT PERFORMANCES of The Shaughraun at the Queen’s Theatre in Dublin have enabled local playgoers to make an interesting comparison between the methods of the early Irish melodrama and those of the Irish National Theatre Society. It is unfortunate for Dion Boucicault’s fame that the absurdity of his plots and pathos has gradually driven people of taste away from his plays, so that at the present time few are perhaps aware what good acting comedy some of his work contains. The characters of Conn the Shaughraun, and in a less degree those of Mrs. O’Kelly and Moya as they were played the other day by members of Mr. Kennedy Miller’s company, had a breadth of naive humour that is now rare on the stage. Mr. James O’Brien especially, in the part of Conn, put a genial richness into his voice that it would be useless to expect from the less guttural vocal capacity of French or English comedians, and in listening to him one felt how much the modern stage has lost in substituting impersonal wit for personal humour. It is fortunate for the Irish National Theatre Society that it has preserved — in plays like The Pot of Broth — a great deal of what was best in the traditional comedy of the Irish stage, and still has contrived by its care and taste to put an end to the reaction against the careless Irish humour of which everyone has had too much. The effects of this reaction, it should be added, are still perceptible in Dublin, and the Irish National Theatre Society is sometimes accused of degrading Ireland’s vision of herself by throwing a shadow of the typical stage Irishman upon her mirror.
CAN WE GO BACK INTO OUR MOTHER’S WOMB?
A Letter to the Gaelic League By A Hedge Schoolmaster
MUCH of the writing that has appeared recently in the papers takes it for granted that Irish is gaining the day in Ireland and that this country will soon speak Gaelic. No supposition is more false. The Gaelic League is founded on a doctrine that is made up of ignorance, fraud and hypocrisy. Irish as a living language is dying out year by year — the day the last old man or woman who can speak Irish only dies in Connacht or Munster — a day that is coming near — will mark a station in the Irish decline which will be final a few years later. As long as these old people who speak Irish only are in the cabins the children speak Irish to them — a child will learn as many languages as it has need of in its daily life — but when they die the supreme good sense of childhood will not cumber itself with two languages where one is enough. It will play, quarrel, say its prayers and make jokes of good and evil, make love when it’s old enough, write if it has wit enough, in this language which is its mother tongue. This result is what could be expected beforehand and it is what is taking place in Ireland in every Irish-speaking district I believe in Ireland. I believe the nation that has made a place in history by seventeen centuries of manhood, a nation that has begotten Grattan and Emmet and Parnell will not be brought to complete insanity in these last days by what is senile and slobbering in the doctrine of the Gaelic League. There was never till this time a movement in Ireland that was gushing, cowardly and maudlin, yet now we are passing England in the hysteria of old women’s talk. A hundred years ago Irishmen could face a dark existence in Kilmainham Jail, or lurch on the halter before a grinning mob, but now they fear any gleam of truth. How are the mighty fallen! Was there ever a sight so piteous as an old and respectable people setting up the ideals of Fee-Gee because, with their eyes glued on John Bull’s navel, they dare not be Europeans for fear the huckster across the street might call them English.
This delirium will not last always. It will not be long — we will make it our first hope — till some young man with blood in his veins, logic in his wits and courage in his heart, will sweep over the backside of the world to the uttermost limbo this credo of mouthing gibberish. (I speak here not of the old and magnificent language of our manuscripts, or of the two or three dialects still spoken, though with many barbarisms, in the west and south, but of the incoherent twaddle that is passed off as Irish by the Gaelic League.) This young man will teach Ireland again that she is part of Europe, and teach Irishmen that they have wits to think, imaginations to work miracles, and souls to possess with sanity. He will teach them that there is more in heaven and earth than the weekly bello
w of the Brazen Bull-calf and all his sweaty gobs, or the snivelling booklets that are going through Ireland like the scab on sheep, and yet he’ll give the pity that is due to the poor stammerers who mean so well though they are stripping the nakedness of Ireland in the face of her own sons.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
EVERY LIFE IS a symphony, and the translation of this life into music, and from music back to literature or sculpture or painting is the real effort of the artist. The emotions which pass through us have neither end nor beginning — are a part of the sequence of existence — and as the laws of the world are in harmony it is this almost cosmic element in the person which gives great art, as that of Michelangelo or Beethoven, the dignity of nature.
I do not think biography — even autobiography — can give this revelation. But while the thoughts and deeds of a lifetime are impersonal and concrete — might have been done by anyone — art is the expression of the essential or abstract beauty of the person.... If by the study of an adult who is before his time we can preconstruct the tendency of life and if — as I believe — we find in childhood perfect traces of the savage, the expression of a personality will reveal evolution from before history to beyond the science of our epoque....
