[In the following essay, first published in The Irish Statesman on January 2, 1926, Russell, an important figure in the Irish Literary Renaissance who signed his poetry with the initials “A. E.,” discusses his experiences with the Abbey Theatre at the height of the Literary Revival.]

About a quarter of a century ago Ireland began to assert and practise its right to cultural independence, making it apparent to the world that it had a distinction, a spiritual personality of its own. That personality asserted itself in many directions. It began to drink at the fountain of its own youth, the almost forgotten fountain of Gaelic culture, and at the same time to be intensely modern, to create a literature which had enough of the universal in it to win recognition from lovers of literature in Europe and America. It was our literature more than our political activities which created outside Ireland a true image of our nationality, and brought about the recognition of a spiritual entity which should have a political body to act through. No single activity of that newly kindled Irish personality did so much to attract attention to Ireland as the Abbey Theatre, whose twenty-first birthday, its coming of age, was celebrated last Sunday by a special performance.¹ The swift upspringing of a dramatic literature and art in a soil that seemed sterile, has something mysterious about it. Thirty years ago there did not seem a people in Europe less visited by the creative fire. Then a girl of genius, Alice Milligan, began to have premonitions of a dramatic movement, and she wrote little plays to help the infant Gaelic League, and she went here and there, an elfish stage manager, with a bag crammed with fragments of tapestry to be used on the actors in order to create the illusion of the richly robed ancient Irish of romance. These activities excited a poet of the time to write lines full of an affectionate irony parodying one of her own lyrics and attribute them to Alice:

At Samhain of Little Plays,
As I was in an awful stew;
There were not dresses half enough
And I was wondering what to do;
There came this thought into my mind—
Why, cut the dresses right in two!
At Samhain of Little Plays
I pinned the actors up with care,
And gave to each a leg, a sleeve,
And whispered in their ears, ‘Beware!
My dears, for God and Ireland's sake,
Remember, this side out with care!’

With Alice Milligan, with whom the brothers Fay were co-workers, were the infant beginnings of Irish dramatic art. But even earlier William Butler Yeats had been making essays in poetic drama. In his prodigal boyhood he wrote many strange beautiful poems in dramatic form, The Island of Statues, The Equator of Wild Olives, Mosada, The Seeker and a little Indian play² which alone has a place in his collected works. The Countess Cathleen and The Land of Heart's Desire were his first serious efforts to write poetical plays which might be staged. Mr. Edward Martyn had caught the dramatic infection which was soon to become an epidemic, claiming almost every Irish writer. George Bernard Shaw was beginning, outside Ireland alas, the writing of plays which was finally to make him the most celebrated dramatist of his time. George Moore was deflected for a time from the novel, and has told the history of his brief fever for the land of his birth in that masterpiece of malicious frankness, Ave, Salve, Vale.³

At first the new Irish playwrights were unaware of the genius for acting latent in their countrymen. They brought over professionals from England. But all this was changed when the brothers Fay showed they were capable of training Irish actors to speak beautifully and act with subtlety. After a performance in St. Teresa's Hall, at which the lovely Kathleen Ni Houlihan of Yeats was first staged, it was realised that Irish actors were a more fitting and an infinitely better vehicle for Irish dramatists to use than the English professionals. An Irish Theatre Society was formed. A little later, by the generosity of Miss Horniman, the Abbey Theatre was purchased and presented to Mr. Yeats and his colleagues. At that time hosts of new dramatists were appearing, the most original of these, John Millington Synge, was soon to achieve an international reputation. We have only to mention the names of Lady Gregory, Padraic Colum, Lennox Robinson, Lord Dunsany, T. C. Murray, Oliver Gogarty, Brinsley MacNamara, Seumas O'Kelly, William Boyle, George Fitzmaurice, St. John Ervine, who, with many other writers of talent, helped Mr. Yeats to create the most varied dramatic literature of our time. In Munster, Daniel Corkery, and in Ulster, Rutherford Mayne, with their colleagues, participated in the overflowing vitality, and helped to make regional schools of drama of great merit. That the creative stream has not run dry is proved by the recent emergence of Sean O'Casey, whose Juno and the Paycock, a tragi-comic masterpiece, has excited as intense an interest in London as in Dublin. And what superb acting have we not had for many years. The brothers William and Frank Fay who were the creators of an Irish art in acting, and who fixed the tradition, Dudley Digges, Sara [Sally] Allgood, and her sister, Maire O'Neill, Maire (Mary) Walker, Arthur Sinclair, Fred O'Donovan, J. M. Kerrigan, Arthur Shields, Barry Fitzgerald, Sidney Morgan, Maureen Delany, Eileen Crowe and F. J. MacCormick [sic], a long list of names of past and present Abbey actors who delighted us, come up in memory. The foreigner could recognise in this amazing activity the evidence of a nationality which was creative and living, while the words or deeds of politicians made no such universal appeal. There is, we believe, not a country in Europe from Russia in the East, to Spain in the West, where some work of the new Irish dramatic school have not been translated and staged. We doubt if that genius has been recognised as fully in Ireland, where it was born, as it has been elsewhere. It has been our habit to grumble, to criticise, to accept as a matter of course brilliant writing and acting as if they were nothing, to cry out when venerable superstitions were smashed, as that of our having the finest peasantry in the world, when they really were one of the most incompetent in Europe. There was fresh observation instead of formulae, insight instead of superstition, realism and idealism wedded. The record of the Abbey Theatre will make a splendid page in the literary history of Ireland, and Senator Yeats, Lady Gregory and Lennox Robinson, who for so long have been its directors, may feel a justifiable pride over what has been accomplished.

While we say this in praise, frankly we wish, for the sake of the Abbey itself, that it shall continue to live in that exasperating atmosphere in which it grew up. Nothing can be worse for an intellectual movement than a chorus of approval. Universal approbation means that the people have come to be on its own level, and it is not ahead of them, and therefore it has ceased to belong to the aristocracy of intellect and character. If it ceases to produce plays which set the pit and galleries shouting, it will then be time for it to go into limbo. We need many cultural shocks, the intellect of Ireland has lain sleeping for so many centuries that a national theatre, if it is to play a great part, must probe every problem. It must not only try to rise to the heaven of the national imagination, but it must not be afraid to turn up the sub-soil, explore the depths and abysses. There are many gentle and futile souls who are shocked by realism. But there is no depth which cannot be sounded if the plummet is dropped from a height. We do not wish for the Abbey a career all quarrels and controversies, for that would be contrary to human nature, which must have plenty of jovial, lovable and desirable life to keep it sweet. But we hope it will never lose its ancient fearlessness about public opinion, or that its directors will ever come to hesitate about the production of a masterpiece lest it might for a time lose some popular favour. In the end, its audience will begin to love it for its daring, will prefer the work which shakes them out of their mould of mind to the work which echoes back to them their own surface emotions. It was by such cowardice the great drama of the Elizabethan age degenerated until there was no poetry, no imagination, no reality, only the despicable theatre which came to be known as the Theatre of Commerce. It may seem that our benediction on the Irish National Theatre is mixed, that we are praying for trouble as well as success. It is true, that is our wish, for we know that when the waters are not troubled there is no angel of healing. It is only the smug who want life to stand still and to wear its best covering and to hide not only its high beauty, but its sores. But at the moment, the Abbey has a deserved success, the state has given it recognition,⁴ a minister⁵ speaks at the celebration of its coming of age. We congratulate it, and hope that it will not be killed by all the kind things said about it.

Notes

1. The Abbey Theatre celebrated its twenty-first birthday on 27 Dec 1925. See Andrew A. Malone, ‘The Coming of Age of the Irish Drama’, Dublin Review, 181 (July 1927) 101-14.

2. ‘Anashuya and Vijaya’, in Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1963) pp. 10-14. It was first published under the title ‘Jealousy’ in 1889. In a note in 1925 Yeats said that ‘this little Indian dramatic scene was meant to be the first scene of a play about a man loved by two women, who had the one soul between them’ (A. Norman Jeffares, A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968) p. 6).

3. This trilogy, Hail and Farewell (1911-14), gives a mordant account of Moore's ten years in Dublin with a candour and directness new to his time.

4. Eight hundred and fifty pounds was voted as an annual subsidy (in succeeding years the subsidy was increased), and so the Abbey Theatre became the first state-subsidised theatre in the English-speaking world.

5. Ernest Blythe (then Minister of Finance). See his recollections, pp. 161-71.