[In the following essay, Saddlemyer discusses an unpublished essay by John Millington Synge that demonstrates Synge's commitment to Yeats's artistic principles and the ideals of the early Abbey Theatre.]

During the last week of April, 1906, the Irish National Theatre Society visited the north of England for the first time, performing in the Midland Theatre, Manchester, on April 23 and 24 before proceeding to Liverpool and Leeds. As the only Director based in Dublin, Synge had been taking increasing responsibility for Abbey Theatre business, and he arranged to accompany the players on tour. He appears to have written the following article¹ while on the road or immediately after his return to Dublin, intending it for the Manchester Guardian. During the preceding year he had published two travel essays for the Guardian, and a series of twelve commissioned articles, illustrated by Jack B. Yeats, describing the congested districts of the west of Ireland. However, “The Dramatic Movement in Ireland” was apparently never published. Synge may well have had a hand in the writing of a more extensive illustrated souvenir programme describing the history of the movement and its major dramatists which was issued in May, however, when the company toured once again, with Synge in attendance, this time to Cardiff, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Newcastle, Edinburgh, and Hull under the management of Alfred Wareing.²

Although he frequently wrote articles, “paragraphs,” and book reviews for the Manchester Guardian and elsewhere, this manuscript is a rare example of Synge's public assessment of the movement to which he contributed. An article published in L'Européen, May 31, 1902, entitled “Le Mouvement Intellectuel Irlandais,” had included brief summaries of Yeats's Countess Cathleen and Edward Martyn's The Heather Field and a moving testimonial to the influence of the Gaelic League on the occasion of the first production of Douglas Hyde's play in Irish, The Twisting of the Rope: “On venait de sentir flotter un instant dans la salle l'âme d'un peuple.”³ The historical facts Synge recounted then and here are familiar, including the anecdote about the “drunken wanderer” (James Joyce) asleep in the Camden Hall passage. But apart from brief comments in letters, this is the only indication we have of his commitment to what became known as Yeats's “Samhain principles,” his response to the early productions of the Irish Literary Theatre, and his personal judgment of the landmarks and ideals of the early years of the Abbey Theatre.

“THE DRAMATIC MOVEMENT IN IRELAND” BY J. M. SYNGE

The Irish plays which were produced in Manchester the other day are the result of a dramatic movement which has been going on in Ireland for some years. In 1899, Mr. W. B. Yeats, Mr. Edward Martyn, Mr. George Moore, Lady Gregory and some others founded the Irish Literary Theatre, and for the next three years, Irish plays were performed for one week annually in Dublin. The first performances took place in May 1899, when two remarkable plays were produced, The Heather Field by Mr. Edward Martyn and The Countess Cathleen by Mr. W. B. Yeats. They were played by English actors in a concert hall fitted up for the occasion, and The Countess Cathleen, a poetical and delicate play, suffered a good deal from bad scenery and a not very satisfactory delivery of the verse. One part however—that of the poet, Aleel—played by Miss Florence Farr was most musically spoken. The other play which had to do with modern life in Ireland was more easy to perform and was in every sense a success. The following year three plays were given, The Bending of the Bough by Mr. George Moore; Maeve by Mr. Edward Martyn; and The Last Feast of the Fianna by Miss Milligan. The Bending of the Bough had a sort of actuality which gave it a hold upon the audience; but the other two plays were not of much importance. Finally in the autumn of 1901, The Irish Literary Theatre wound up its career by giving two plays in the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, Diarmuid and Grania, written by Mr. W. B. Yeats and Mr. George Moore in collaboration, and a small one-act comedy in Gaelic written by Dr. Douglas Hyde. The first play was acted by Mr. Benson's company and the second by amateurs with Dr. Hyde himself in the principal role as the wandering folk poet. This little play was in some ways the most important of all those produced by The Irish Literary Theatre, as it alone has had an influence on the plays that have been written since, and have made up the present movement. The other plays had many good qualities but none of them had the germ of a new dramatic form or seemed to have found any new store of the materials of drama. The Countess Cathleen differed more in the peculiar beauty and distinction of its writing from the many verse plays that were written in England since the time of Wordsworth and Shelley than in its essentially dramatic qualities. The plays of Mr. Edward Martyn and Mr. George Moore, on the other hand, were closely related to those produced by the school of Ibsen. The Twisting of the Rope however (Dr. Hyde's play), slight as it was, gave a new direction and impulse to Irish Drama, a direction towards which it should be added the thoughts of Mr. W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and others were already tending. The result has been a series of little plays dealing with Irish peasant life which are unlike, it is believed, anything that has preceded them.

Before each series of performances of The Irish Literary Theatre, a small review was edited by Mr. W. B. Yeats. The first two numbers were called Beltaine (the Irish name of the spring festival) and the third, which was produced in autumn, was changed to Samhain, an autumn festival of the Gaels. This name has since been retained for the review which has appeared annually for some years, and must be consulted by those who wish to become familiar with the opinions of Mr. W. B. Yeats,—opinions more or less fully shared by those who work with him—on the dramatic movement in Ireland. In the first Beltaine, published in May 1899, Mr. Yeats thus explains the aims of The Irish Literary Theatre,

The Irish Literary Theatre will attempt to do in Dublin something of what has been done in London and Paris; and if it has even a small welcome it will produce, somewhere about the old festival of Beltaine at the beginning of every spring, a play founded upon an Irish subject. The plays will differ from those produced by associations of men of letters in London and in Paris because times have changed, and because the intellect of Ireland is romantic and spiritual, rather than scientific and analytical, but they will have as little of a commercial ambition. Their writers will appeal to that limited public which gives understanding and not to that unlimited public which gives wealth; and if they interest those among their audience who keep in their memories the songs of Callanan and Walsh or old Irish legends, or who love the good books of any country, they will not mind greatly if others are bored.

Works written with these aims and produced by English actors were hardly likely to produce a dramatic movement of much real vitality, but fortunately, at the end of the three years' work, of The Irish Literary Theatre, a little company of Irish actors was discovered which had been brought together by two brothers, who were much interested in the stage. One of these gentlemen, Mr. W. G. Fay had many years' experience as a professional actor, and then for some [time] he had directed a little company that produced farces and other simple plays in various halls in Dublin. This little company first acted plays relating to the movement of The Irish Literary Theatre in the spring of 1902 when it produced a little play by the poet AE on the saga of Deirdre and the Sons of Usnach and Kathleen ni Houlihan by Mr. W. B. Yeats, one of the most interesting of all the plays that the movement has produced. Since then the actors, writers, and a part at least of the audience, have been intimately related and the movement has lost all resemblance to the movements fostered by purely artistic cliques in London and Paris. The problem the writers have now to master is the one always present in the greater arts, the problem, that is to say, of finding a universal expression for the particular emotions and ideas of the personality of the artist himself. How far this has been done in the plays that have been produced hitherto it is hardly possible to say but in dealing with the movement the popular aim which it includes should not be forgotten.

To resume however the story of the movement itself. In the autumn of 1902 Mr. Fay's company produced various plays, Deirdre, Kathleen ni Houlihan, The Racing Lug, by Mr. Cousins, The Pot of Broth by Mr. W. B. Yeats, and some months later, Lady Gregory's Twenty Five and The Hour Glass by Mr. W. B. Yeats.

In May 1903 the company played five plays in the Queen's Gate Hall, Kensington, with a great deal of success, obtaining with other notices the following review from Mr. Walkley in the supplement to the Times—

Stendhal said that the greatest pleasure he had ever got from the theatre was given him by the performance of some poor Italian strollers in a barn. The Queen's Gate Hall if not exactly a barn can boast none of the glories of the ordinary playhouse and it was here that only a day or two ago a little band of Irishmen and women, strangers to London and to Londoners gave some of us, who for our sins are constant frequenters of the regular playhouses, a few moments of calm delight quite outside the range of anything which those houses have to offer. They were members of The Irish National Theatre Society, which consists, we understand, of amateurs all engaged in daily work who can devote only their leisure time to the stage. That was the case, it will be remembered, with the enthusiasts who helped Antoine to found his Théâtre Libre, but there is this difference that while the French enterprise was an artistic adventure and nothing else, the Irish Theatre is that and something more. It is part of a national movement. It is designed to express the spirit of the race, the “virtue” of it in the medium of acted drama. That is an excellent design. If the peculiarities of Irish thought and feeling can be brought home to us through drama, we shall all be the better for the knowledge; and the art of drama, too, cannot but gain by a change of air, a new outlook, a fresh current of ideas. But with these larger aspects of the matter we are not now concerned. Our present business is to record the keen pleasure which an afternoon with The Irish National Theatre has afforded us, and to do our best to analyse that pleasure.

He speaks then of the pleasure given him by the accents of the Irish actors, their quietness on the stage and passes on to speak of the plays themselves.

The following winter, a considerable number of new plays were produced by the company at the Molesworth Hall, Dublin, including The King's Threshold and Shadowy Waters by Mr. W. B. Yeats; Broken Soil by Mr. Colm; Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen by the present writer. About this time the company rented a small hall entered by two dark passages in a poor street in Dublin, and there the members rehearsed two or three evenings of the week during the winter. Sometimes as at the rehearsals of The King's Threshold and The Shadow of the Glen the little hall was half filled with scenery and costumes and at one end a carpenter was hammering a movable platform and “fit-up” while at the other end the actors were rehearsing the elaborate verses of Mr. Yeats. Many of the costumes were made in the hall also by the ladies of the company during the intervals of their rehearsing and since the members have moved on to more comfortable quarters, many of them look back not unkindly at the little ramshackle hall where the rain came in through the roof on wet nights and drunken wanderers used sometimes to be found asleep in the long passages when it was time to go home.

The following spring another visit was made to London and several plays, The King's Threshold, The Shadow of the Glen, Riders to the Sea, and Broken Soil were given with much success at the Royalty Theatre. Not long afterwards Miss Horniman, with great generosity, fitted up the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, for the use of the company and from that time forward this theatre has been their home. About the same time, Mr. Yeats brought out a double number of Samhain, in the autumn of 1904, in which he explained at length his views on the various aspects of our movements. Our plays, he says, must be literature or written in the spirit of literature. The modern theatre has died away to what it is, because the writers have thought of their audiences instead of their subjects. We must have appropriate stage management, that is, a stage management which will keep us free from gestures, movements and intonations which have lost their meaning and vitality. Again we must have a new kind of scenic art in which the background will be of as little importance as the background of a portrait group and when it is possible of one colour or of one tint with the persons on the stage. The experiments of The National Theatre Society, he adds, will have of necessity to be for a long time few and timid, and we must often, having no money, and not a great deal of leisure, accept, for a while, compromises and much even that we know to be redeemably bad. One can only perfect an art gradually, and good playwriting, good speaking, and good acting are the first necessity.

During the last eighteen months, most of the new plays that the company has produced in the Abbey Theatre have been rather longer than those that preceded them. Lady Gregory has produced two historical plays in three acts which have much interest, although perhaps less vitality than her two admirable farces Spreading the News, and Hyacinth Halvey. The Land by Patrick Colm; The Eloquent Dempsey, and The Building Fund by Mr. Boyle, and The Well of the Saints by the present writer are in three acts also. Fresh aid has been given to the company during the last session by the admirable staging of Mr. Robert Gregory and the music of Mr. Arthur Darley whose playing of traditional Irish music on the violin has brought an element of beauty into many programmes.

OUTSIDE IRELAND

Several of Mr. Yeats's plays have been produced in America, and not long ago The Well of the Saints was played in German at the Deutsches Theatre, Berlin, and The Shadow of the Glen in Bohemian in the theatre at Prague.

Several new plays are in hands for the company's next season in Dublin which will open in September or October next.

Notes

1. Two drafts of this article exist: a typescript with holograph emendations in the Library of Trinity College Dublin; and an incomplete holograph on which the typescript was based, in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. A page originally belonging to the earlier holograph draft was discovered in volume one of the 1910 Works of John M. Synge and is now in the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas. My transcription follows the Trinity College typescript except that titles have been uniformly italicized and a few spelling errors have been silently corrected. The typescript follows the holograph fairly closely, elaborating certain points; the only significant omission occurs in the passage describing rehearsals in the Camden Street Hall, where the Berg holograph includes the sentence, “About this time the present writer first saw company at a rehearsal of the Shadow of the Glen and the King's Threshold a verse play by Mr. Yeats.” Copyright is held by the Trustees of the J. M. Synge Estate, to whom acknowledgement is hereby made.

2. The booklet, entitled Irish Plays by Mr. W. B. Yeats, Mr. J. M. Synge, Mr. Wm. Boyle, and Lady Gregory, has been reprinted as an appendix to Theatre Business, The Correspondence of the first Abbey Theatre Directors: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Gerrards Cross and New York, 1981).

3. Reprinted in J. M. Synge, Collected Works Volume II: Prose, ed. Alan Price (London, 1966), pp. 378-82. In addition to the articles included in this volume, I have discovered further articles and paragraphs by Synge in the Irish Times and The Academy and Literature.