3—
Author and Audience:
Stealing the Symbols

If the plot of The King's Threshold implied that privilege and authority belonged to the Irish poet by ancient right, then its style, costume, and setting could be understood to show that a poet thus enfranchised would be disposed, out of the abundance of his Nietzschean heroic will, to shower gifts upon others.^[1] When Yeats's play was staged on 8 October 1903 at Molesworth Hall, Dublin, along with John Millington Synge's In the Shadow of the Glen , the nationalist press was by no means beguiled by the evening's performances. Arthur Griffith, editor of the United Irishman , was irritated by the hunger-striking bard's pretensions in Yeats's play: it is not freedom Seanchan demands, but place, power, and wealth, all without accountability. The sympathy of the audience, according to Griffith, "went out to the honest soldier who wished to put his sword into the selfish old man who lay on the King's steps . . . contending for a soft life in a King's bosom instead of an eternal one in a people's heart. We hold it a pity that King Guaire did not hang Seanchan."^[2] While Griffith had grown embittered

[1] Yeats had been sent Nietzsche's works by John Quinn in September 1902 (Finneran, Harper, and Murphy, 2:106); according to John Kelly's chronology, Yeats had fallen under the spell of this "strong enchanter" by December 1902 (The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats , vol. 1, ed. John Kelly and Eric Domville [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986] xx). One of Yeats's most enthusiastically annotated passages in Nietzsche is the section on "Gift-giving" as the sole responsibility of great individuals. Gifts are the fruits of strong natures that may not be otherwise taxed by the masses of weak natures. Nietzsche's influence is further discussed below.

[2] "All Ireland," United Irishman 10, no. 242 (17 October 1903): 1.

with the Irish National Theatre Society over censorship of Padraic Colum's anti-recruiting The Saxon Shillin ',^[3] it is still a shock that he should, even on a symbolic level, be suggesting the national poet be lynched. But other papers went just as far in their condemnation of the evening's performances. To Yeats's appeal for an "audience so tolerant that the half-dozen minds who are likely to be the dramatic imagination of Ireland for this generation may put their own thoughts and their own characters into their works,"^[4] The Irish Daily Independent and Nation responded with the "sincere hope and belief that no such tolerance will be extended," a statement that could be construed as public incitement to riot. So much for Yeats's attempt to reconcile factions under the authority of the poet: one paper insinuates that he be lynched; the other that the people riot. The King's Threshold soon became part of the second great public controversy in Irish theatre, resounding with the aftershocks of the Countess Cathleen uproar and deepening the discussion of fundamental literary issues.

In his statements in Samhain on the character of a national theatre, the difference between propaganda and literature, the rights of artists, and the proper means of financial support for a national theatre, Yeats began a rhetorical conflict with the nationalist part of the audience that continued throughout the performances of In the Shadow of the Glen and The King's Threshold , and long after they had left the stage. This conflict

[3] Colum's play had won Griffith's United Irishman annual contest for the best propaganda play in English. In a 30 January 1903 letter to WBY, W. G. Fay claimed that he had asked Colum to change the ending of The Saxon Shillin' only for the sake of "stage business," not out of a fear of Unionist backlash. Nonetheless, in the ensuing dispute with Griffith and Maud Gonne, Fay insisted that "a Theatre is no more a political party than its [sic ] a Temperance platform" (Finneran, Harper, and Murphy, 1:117–19). Yeats drew the conclusion that "Fay wants to get out of acting political plays," and, while Yeats told Lady Gregory that he "certainly differ[ed] from him on the point," Yeats supported Fay against Griffith, and The Saxon Shillin' was not produced by the Irish National Theatre Society (WBY, letter to Lady Gregory, 18 November 1903, quoted in Cullingford, Yeats, Ireland and Fascism [New York: New York University Press, 1981], 54).

[4] WBY, "An Irish National Threatre," Samhain , September 1903; rpt. in Explorations , 103.

involved what Kenneth Burke calls "the stealing back and forth of symbols,"^[5] the attempt on the part of classes in conflict to appropriate the symbols of authority. The socially transformative work of political literature goes on in the quarrel around certain concepts, central because ambiguous.^[6] In Dublin during October 1903 and in the months following, the key terms in literary and political discourse were national, politics, literature , and, of course, Irish , each of which has a fundamental instability of suggestion. At their widest, such terms are capacious enough to allow for broad agreement among conflicting groups; and at their narrowest, they are susceptible to appropriation by a single group. The group able to fix the meaning of such terms has an opportunity to establish hegemony over others, in defining the way in which they conceive of the culture. This chapter examines the struggle over the power to define these symbols—what motivated it, how it affected the interpretation of In the Shadow of the Glen and The King's Threshold , and what properties finally were at stake in "the stealing back and forth of symbols."

The controversy that greeted the October 1903 program of the Irish National Theatre Society is sometimes dismissed as part of some irrational miasma of the audience. Andrew Parkin, for instance, says that he is trying "to be fair to Yeats" when he asserts that few writers from any land have faced the terrible forces arrayed against Yeats in Ireland: "obscurantism, ignorance, prejudice, and violence—all springing from a state of mind difficult to comprehend and which could, for instance, be expressed by the actors themselves as well as the

[5] The term belongs to Burke, but credit for elaborating its significance in Gramsci's terms of ideological hegemony goes to Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 79.

[6] See ibid., 80, on ambiguity as a property of revolutionary argument, whereby a "ruling discourse is seized and in the name of ruling discourse, turned against the rulers." For an exemplary study of political language that stresses "the polemical circumstances of its expression" rather than simply its "conceptual character," see also Steven N. Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

mob."^[7] That casually assumed "mob," as if it were descriptive rather than evaluative, shows how completely some Yeats critics assume the ideological stance of the poet on whose behalf they plead. The term mob, however derisive, nonetheless suggests the volatility, the collective will, and the readiness for action of the Dublin audiences. The Irish historian George Boyce, qualifying Yeats's 1899 forecast of an audience "uncorrupted and imaginative . . . trained to listen by its passion for oratory," allows that they had such a passion, but, "nobody's fools," they were "enthusiastic, keen, and perceptive political audiences," trained not just to listen, but also to search out the practical implications for their destiny of any speech, and to demonstrate their judgment publicly. The university-educated liberal humanists the Irish National Theatre Society played for at Oxford or Cambridge may have been more sympathetic to the avante-garde elements in Yeats's theatrical technique, but the Irish audiences were nonetheless tolerant of artistic experiment, and far more sensitive to the political implications of language than foreign audiences.^[8] The Dublin audiences for Irish drama thought of every intellectual act—plays and manifestoes of art being no exception—as involved

[7] Parkin, The Dramatic Imagination of W. B. Yeats, (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1978), 89. The remark on cultural history is incidental to Parkin's sensitive appreciation of Yeats's plays as experimental works of the theatre. In A Reader's Guide to the Plays of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984), 45, Richard Taylor blames the multiplicity of characters in The King's Threshold on the need "to captivate an uninterested audience" that was unable to appreciate the "inescapably meaningful symbolic scheme" of the play.

[8] G. B. Shaw called the Irish audience "the most sensitive and, on provocation, the most turbulent audience in the world" (The Doctor's Dilemma, Getting Married, and The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet [New York: Brentano's, 1911], 404). One example of artistic tolerance may be noted: Arthur Griffith, even after the October 1903 controversy with Yeats, advised his readers that "the production of Mr. Yeats's 'Shadowy Waters' on the stage is an experiment which will excite general interest" (United Irishman 11, no. 255 [4 January 1904]: 1), and while he found the psychological development in the hero obscure, he nonetheless thought the play "better heard than read," so that the performance of it was "justified" (United Irishman 11, no. 256 [23 January 1904]: 1).

in power in every way, caught up in it, used by interests not at all intellectual, and available for such use even without conscious collaboration by its author.^[9]

If drama is considered in the light of rhetoric, as a discourse of purpose played out upon a certain audience, the theatregoing Dublin public was a sensitive, powerful instrument in the hands of a playwright. Indeed, this audience made possible a certain kind of drama, although not the "Theatre of Beauty" Yeats forecast. Instead, "the new form of Irish drama," in the words of the Leader 's theatre critic "Chanel," was "the political allegory" (to be accurate, not so much a new form of drama, as an element in all drama underscored and highlighted by the level of audience response). Chanel thought that The King's Threshold must be an allegory, because otherwise it is "absurd . . . meaningless in the modern world." Irish drama will inevitably, he believes, have an immediate frame of reference: "In a country where so much of the life . . . is intermingled with politics . . . where it has been the cause of so many crimes and so many sacrifices, [politics] will form the matter of our tragedies and comedies."^[10] Regardless of whether the author ignores national debate, disguises it, or joins it, the play will be received as "political allegory" by an audience with a highly charged consciousness of the political character of all social life.

In The King's Threshold, behind the disguise of a historical costume drama, Yeats meant to join battle over the place of art in society. The notes for Poems, 1899–1905 explain that he wrote the play when the INTS was having "a hard fight for the recognition of pure art in a community of which one half was buried in the practical affairs of life, and the other half in politics and a propagandist patriotism."^[11] Through a course of debates between the bard Seanchan and characters from all ranks of society, Seanchan tries to prove that a seat at the

[9] I am indebted for some of the language in this particular description of the "sophisticated political consciousness" to Frank Lentricchia's discussion of Kenneth Burke in Criticism and Social Change, 87.

[10] Chanel, "Plays with Meanings," Leader, 17 October 1903, 124–25.

[11] Alspach, 315.

king's table is worth more than a gift of lands and money from the king, more than the sorrow his death would give his father and mother, more even than relief to the hungry people of the stony townland where he was born. One can imagine the play carrying its audience through the first lessons—yes, land, family, and food in times of famine are great things, but a principle's a principle, and a man's got to be a man, etc.—but gradually losing the audience as Yeats/Seanchan makes ever more absolute claims for art, passing from powerful assertion through hyperbole to delirious megalomania. After Seanchan chokes a monk, dashes to the ground dishes proffered by the hands of princesses, curses his coaxing lover Fedelm, and seems ready to let his students go hang, it may well have seemed that the bard's team of opponents had the better arguments, but Yeats rigged the conclusion to literally give the crown to the loser.^[12]

Considered as rhetoric, there are problems of effectiveness, not only with the argumentative tropes (which oppose abstract to concrete goods), but with the ethos of the wild, unmannerly hero, especially given the nature of the audience. From the beginning, Seanchan's lying about on the steps of the palace, surrounded by silver dishes, looks dangerously like "a fit of the sulks," as A. S. Knowland puts it.^[13] He seems spoiled, pettishly indignant, and desperate for recognition. The court life for which he is willing to sacrifice himself, his family, friends, students, and lover, had its analogue in the modern Irish context only in Dublin's Viceregal Lodge or in some country estate, the exclusive environs of the English and Anglo-Irish. The identification of Seanchan with what the audience would see as a pampered product of the aristocracy approaches the obvious in the scene between the bard and his loyal family retainers, Cian and Brian, who ad-

[12] In a Prologue not actually performed but published in the United Irishman (9 September 1903), the Old Man admits authorial interference with the conclusion: "He that tells the story now, being a poet, puts the poet in the right" (Alspach, 313).

[13] A. S. Knowland, W. B. Yeats: Dramatist of Vision, Irish Literary Studies, 17 (Gerrards Cross, Bucks.: Colin Smythe, 1983), 27.

dress him as "your Honour,"^[14] in the forelock-tugging, obsequious fashion of a nineteenth-century Catholic peasant before a Protestant on a horse. The relation of Seanchan to his servants—charitable noblesse oblige on one side, trust and respect on the other—is actually glorified in the play by comparison with the relation of Seanchan to the mayor, who, with heavy farce, is characterized as pushy, blathering, craven, and uncultured, the very stereotype of the new Irish Catholic politician Yeats hated in the Bantry Gang. In short, the play respects what the audience would ridicule (deference to gentry), and ridicules what it might well respect (natives as local politicians). These aspects of the way in which Yeats dramatized his defense of "pure art" lessened the appeal of his argument to an Irish audience and raised resistance to perception of the play's intent.

Arthur Griffith also tellingly misreads the play when he scorns Seanchan for seeking the "soft life in a King's bosom instead of an eternal one in a people's heart." In fact, in the play the king, monk, and chamberlain all say that the "people" hold the bard high in their affections; should he die, they may well revolt against the king.^[15] This bond between the people and Seanchan, however, may have appeared to some in the audience to be inconsistent with his characterization as an aristocrat of the court, contemptuous of clergy.^[16] Griffith's misreading edits out qualities Seanchan enjoys only by ascription (claimed by the author, but not properly belonging to the character), and reads into him a more deeply inscribed aristocratic pursuit of privilege.^[17]

To the reports of spectators we must add our own look at the text of the play, but if we reject the responses of the Irish audience out of hand, while assuming the attitudes of the au-

[14] Alspach, 277, lines 325qq, 325000.

[15] Alspach, 260, lines 59–62; 285, lines 441b, 445.

[16] The historical accuracy of a reference to the medieval rivalry between Irish bards and monks is less pertinent for the audience than a contemporary reference to Ascendancy contempt for Catholic clergy.

[17] Knowland observes that the people's love of Seanchan is undeveloped (W. B. Yeats: Dramatist of Vision, 29); Griffith goes one better by acting as if it is nonexistent.

thor, as some have done, we not only throw away the benefit of testimony by richly informed, acutely sensitive witnesses, we also lose the opportunity to conceive of Irish dramatic literature as a force in the world, wielded as such and felt as such. It is true that The King's Threshold can be read for its evidence of Nietzsche's influence, its record of Yeats's engagement with Greek or Miltonic models, its reflections of Yeats's feelings after the marriage of Maud Gonne, its sentiments about the genetic powers of art over population (prophetic of attitudes more fully developed later),^[18] but it can also be grasped, with these additional elements, as part of the artist's struggle in the world. The "high endeavor" of art can be an adventure of the will to power, an attempt to gain a purchase on the mind of the public, to throw it under the dominion of a new way of looking at a state of affairs. Surely The King's Threshold is a case of such an assertion of will. It is only in light of the character of the audience over which Yeats sought to assert his will that the assertion itself has its fullest meaning.

2

The philosopher Charles Morris presents a lucid analysis of the process of communication as a five-term relation—v, w, x, y, z —"in which v sets up in w the disposition to react in a

[18] The influence of Nietzsche on the play was noticed by contemporary observers, such as "Chanel" in the Leader (31 October 1903), who regarded it as forgivable, because irrelevant to the plot. It has since been discussed by Richard Ellmann in The Identity of Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 96; by Harold Bloom in Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 149; and most impressively by Frances Oppel in Mask and Tragedy: Yeats and Nietzsche, 1902–10 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1987), 134–47. Peter Ure gave the first, and still the best, account of the models for the play in Yeats the Playwright: A Commentary on Character and Design in the Major Plays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 31–43. In Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: Macmillan, 1948), Ellmann attributes Yeats's adoption of a public mask, a sort of stylistic distance, to his reaction to Maud Gonne's marriage to Major MacBride. Though it is not part of my subject, material for a more intricate psychological reading awaits a critic so disposed in the scenes between Fedelm and Seanchan, in which she cares for his needs and worships at his feet, and he curses her with a rather unmotivated violence—a revealing transformation of the real relationship of Yeats and the woman he loved.

certain kind of way, x, to a certain kind of object, y (not then acting as a stimulus), under certain conditions, z ."^[19] In this system, v would be the interpretant; w, the audience; x, the received meaning; y, the play; and z, the conditions of performance. What is particularly useful in Morris's account of communication is that it has three terms rather than the usual one for "context." Usually, we mean by context nearly every historical dimension of a work excluding the author and the text. Morris clarifies theatrical communication by sorting out the audience from the conditions of performance, and both of these from a critical v factor, the interpretant, which sets up in a specific audience the disposition to interpret in a certain way.

As A. P. Foulkes develops Morris's use of the interpretant, many things—not just the text—can dispose the audience to interpret a work in one way rather than another. An audience can, of course, be predisposed to react in a certain way to a certain sign. The 1903 Molesworth Hall audience for The King's Threshold, for instance, being largely Catholic, would have been predisposed to find fault with a character who snatches the habit of a monk and mocks his God; while for an Edinburgh audience the same gesture might well stand for manly virtue, an anti-papist homily of the Scottish kirk.^[20]

An audience not already prejudiced can be disposed to interpret a work in a certain way by the promotion to consciousness of some element in the conditions of performance, an element that becomes the interpretant for the work as a whole. The first performance of The King's Threshold and In the Shadow of the Glen provides several illustrations of the function of an interpretant derived from the setting in which the audience saw the play. On the evening of the first night, W. G. Fay was surprised to receive a request for six reserve seats from George

[19] Charles Morris, Writings on the General Theory of Signs (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 401–2. A. P. Foulkes calls attention to the value of Morris's work to the interpretation of literary texts in Literature and Propaganda (London: Methuen, 1983), 23.

[20] Alspach, 293, lines 573–79.

Wyndham, the current British chief secretary of Ireland. The theatre at the time was closely identified with the nationalist movement, so it had not drawn much of its clientele from the Ascendancy and was unaccustomed to make provision for special seating. Fay hastily collected six armchairs, and, we are told, "the one assigned to the Chief Secretary chanced to be covered in red."^[21] As a result, Wyndham seemed to have been provided with a royal British throne; the command performance was for his eyes first, for Irish eyes second. On the same evening, across the aisle from Wyndham, and to the side, sat the great-bearded, white-haired Fenian John O'Leary. Padraic Colum reports that the nationalist players felt "the wrong man was in the red chair"; O'Leary "had in his hands the succession we looked for."^[22] For some in the audience on that particular night, the seating arrangements in Molesworth Hall became the interpretant by which the plays of Synge and Yeats were understood. Consequently, the theatre seemed to have turned away from its nationalist origins and to have become something for the entertainment of the upper class. Suspicious and resentful, some spectators looked for meanings in the plays themselves that supported their impression. In this light, Yeats's hero Seanchan was a blue-blooded scoundrel who "contend[ed] for a soft life in a King's bosom," and Synge's Nora was just a creature out of Ibsen preoccupied with "transpontine" "modern sex problems" of little relevance to Ireland.

This interpretant accounts only for the response of some of the audience at one of the performances. Other spectators on other nights were disposed to interpret In the Shadow of the Glen in a certain way by the acting: Maire nic Shiublaigh's erotically charged Nora made some see the character as a "bad wife" rather than as a noble, spiritually profound hero-

[21] David H. Greene and Edward M. Stephens, J. M. Synge, 1871–1909 (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 145. In this account, assigned seems to contradict chanced to be covered , and one may doubt whether a stage-designer like Fay would be insensitive to the symbolism of decor.

[22] Padraic Colum, The Road round Ireland (London: Macmillan, 1927), 295.

ine, oppressed by circumstance.^[23] W. G. Fay's low comic Dan Burke left some spectators, such as Maurice Joy, unprepared to engage the deeper levels of association that emerge in the play's conclusion.^[24] Thus, now one actor, now another, can seize upon the imagination of the audience and influence interpretation of the play as a whole. Perhaps even more effective than performance qualities, reviews control the way in which audiences respond. Lord Ardilaun's Unionist Daily Express , for example, in denying that In the Shadow of the Glen ("the gem of the evening") had "any polemical significance"—just "agreeable fooling" "with a convincing ring of truth"—tried to suppress political rebellion by encouraging the audience to regard the work as light entertainment.^[25] John Butler Yeats did not try to pull off the trick of getting the audience to laugh at adultery in a peasant's cottage; he followed the first performance with a letter to the United Irishman describing the play as an "attack on that Irish institution, the loveless marriage," a formulation that indeed established terms by which the play was discussed for some time.^[26] Alive to these various interpretants—seating arrangements, casting, acting styles, and reviews—many were left uncertain whether to regard the play as farce, light comedy, problem play, tragedy, or travesty of the national character. Synge's "harsh and strange" genius for destabilizing conventions left the play open to this invasion of interpretative forces, but it was the fact that there was something close to a state of open ideological war that gave the conflict over the play its explosive force.^[27]

[23] C. E. Montague, Dramatic Values (London: Methuen, 1911), 54; Greene and Stephens, Synge , 153.

[24] Maurice Joy, "The Drama," United Irishman 11, no. 273 (21 May 1904): 3.

[25] The Daily Express review is quoted in Greene and Stephens, Synge , 147.

[26] John Butler Yeats, "Ireland out of the Dock," United Irishman 10, no. 241 (10 October 1903): 3.

[27] WBY, "J. M. Synge and the Ireland of His Time," in Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 312.

3

At some point, after learning that Horniman had money to spend and might well spend it on one of his theatre projects, Yeats came to know that she would never spend it on the Irish National Theatre Society until he could demonstrate that she would not thereby be making a contribution to an Irish uprising. If he could assure her the theatre would not tolerate nationalists—the sort of people, she said of one (D. P. Moran), that a gentleman couldn't take to a club—then the money was his.^[28] So with the first production of The King's Threshold and In the Shadow of the Glen , Yeats published an essay redefining the meaning of "The Irish National Theatre," now no home to propaganda, he declared, but a place where the "half-dozen minds" of any significance in the nation were granted the privilege of seeing life in their own way. He declared he did not want any financial assistance from nationalists or from Unionists, for that would tie his hands; the only help he would accept would be that of those "who love the arts so dearly they would not bring them into even honorable captivity."^[29] And on the evening of the first performance, Yeats came before the audience to drive the point home. He proclaimed the audience must grant the artist the right to "show life, instead of the desire which every political party would substitute for life." His biographer, Joseph Hone, tells us Yeats expected a donation of £20 from Horniman; surely the poet would not thus have sold himself short.^[30] If he was going to make a parade of apolitical principles, he deserved to get the £13,000 Horniman eventually spent rather than twenty

[28] Horniman to WBY, 2 December 1907; National Library of Ireland, Ms. 13068.

[29] WBY, "An Irish National Theatre," United Irishman 10, no. 241 (10 October 1903): 2; the expanded version from Samhain , speaking of the "unconditioned millions" of a king "who loved the arts and their freedom," is reprinted in Explorations , 103.

[30] Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats: 1865–1939 (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 205: "When he came down from the stage [after his appeal for 'life' as opposed to 'politics'] Miss Horniman, from whom he had been expecting a contribution of twenty pounds, said to him, 'I will give you a theatre.'"

quid. At the end of the evening, Horniman came up to him and offered to give him a theatre.

Horniman did not simply hand over title to a building for the sake of a speech; she had him put it in writing. Specifically, she requested that he reprint his essays on the "Reform of the Theatre" and "The Irish National Theatre" in the 1904 Samhain along with the announcement of her offer. In an extraordinary way, these publications formed Horniman's legal contract with the directorate of the Irish National Theatre Society. "The Samhain Principles" come up again and again as the point of contest in negotiations between the owner of the Abbey and its writer-directors.^[31] Ultimately, they led to the legal arbitration at the time of Horniman's sale of the building.

Some of these principles are strictly dramaturgical. Yeats advocates poetry before the actor, the actor before the scene, and the decorative scene before the realist one, in a general assault upon histrionically colored prose realism. No doubt, these particular principles were important to Yeats's own attempts to make his mark as a playwright, but one wonders how important they ever were to anyone else, not only to the audience, in whom they were never to stimulate a durable passion, but even to his confederates—Synge and Lady Gregory—with their versions of prose realism in a folk mode, or even, at last, to Horniman herself.

What "the Samhain Principles" meant to Horniman, the single principle to which she clung, was the one Yeats most grandiloquently uttered in the 1905 Samhain , but campaigned for throughout the October 1903 controversy: "So long as I have any control over the National Theatre Society, it will be carried on in this spirit, call it art for art's sake if you will; and no plays will be produced at it which were written not for the sake of a good story or fine verses or some revelation of character, but to please those friends of ours who are ever urging

[31] Horniman's letter to WBY of 21 June 1907 is one of many instances in which she threatens to stop everything and close the theatre if it is used for political purposes, in violation of the "Samhain Principles." See ch. 6 below.

us to attack the priests or the English."^[32] Or, as Horniman later put it in an official dispatch to Yeats, bold-faced, double underlined: "NO POLITICS. "

4

Yeats's redefinition of the Irish National Theatre in speeches, letters to the press, and the pages of Samhain became the major interpretants for all of the performances of October 1903, underpinning other interpretant tending to a nationalist critique, and overriding interpretants that would have led to a consensus of aesthetic appreciation. Debate about The King's Threshold concerned the degree of a writer's responsibility to the nation; debate about In the Shadow of the Glen ultimately concerned its appropriateness to the repertoire of an Irish National Theatre—issues raised by Yeats's proclamation of policy.

Annie Horniman's patronage of Yeats was not itself an item in the public discussion, because at this stage her promise was known only to Yeats himself. It is true that Arthur Griffith had warned about "the danger of the theatre falling into foreign and hostile hands"; true that he regarded the Irish National Theatre Society as "our Irish theatre," the property of nationalists in spirit, title, and deed;^[33] and true that in the bitter conflict of October 1903, he paid Yeats the somewhat sinister compliment that he knew the poet to be "a Nationalist who cannot be bought though he may be misled."^[34] However sensitive to the secret affiliations of capital, Griffith still had no reason to suspect a connection between Yeats's new policy and the fresh promise of finance from Horniman.

It was apparent to nationalists, however, that the October performances were the point of application of a shift in policy for the theatre as a whole. At the time of Frank Fay's public

[32] WBY, Explorations , 200.

[33] Arthur Griffith, United Irishman , 8 November 1902; rpt. in Hogan and Kilroy, 2:37.

[34] United Irishman 10, no. 243 (24 October 1903): 2; emphasis added.

critique of the timid, coterie aestheticism of the Irish Literary Theatre, Yeats—as discussed above—had apparently begun to write plays for the Fay brothers' Irish National Dramatic Society according to their orders: simple, popular, national, and observant of Catholic sensibilities. Fay had asserted in an October 1901 article for the United Irishman that Yeats at last recognized "that an Irish theatre would be worthless if it were to be in the hands of people who could in any way prevent it from acting outspoken plays."^[35] After they had begun their collaboration, Fay discussed with Yeats the desirability of having a theatre of their own, because "one could only be outspoken in one's own hall."^[36] By outspoken Fay meant "politically transgressive," and presumed that the author was of one mind with the actors on this score. Fay had reason to believe that Yeats also was disgusted with "this fear to touch politics" and would therefore throw no obstacle in the path of the Irish National Theatre Society's becoming an openly nationalist organization.^[37] However, whatever he may have permitted Fay to imagine, Yeats had always had other fish to fry. He never wanted the job of speaking out on political issues in his plays.^[38] Before October 1903, however, his personal attitude was not the policy of the Irish National Theatre Society, which regularly produced agitational propaganda, such as Yeats and Gregory's Cathleen ni Houlihan and Fred Ryan's The Laying of the Foundations . The new INTS by-laws, in fact, prohibited the production of plays offensive to Irish national ideals.

[35] Frank Fay, Towards a National Theatre: The Dramatic Criticism of Frank J. Fay , ed. Robert Hogan, Irish Theatre Series, no. 1 (London: Oxford University Press; Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1970), 75–77.

[36] Fay's letter of 17 February 1902 is reprinted in Finneran, Harper, and Murphy, 2:93–95.

[37] Frank Fay to WBY, 25 July 1902; quoted in Hogan and Kilroy, 2:30–31.

[38] Yeats's 1902 article on "The Freedom of the Theatre" declares that "art is always a disturber" and society should extend its tolerance to the idiosyncracies of great natures (Frayne and Johnson, 2:295–99). This is really the same position he took in October 1903, but at that time he was speaking, not just for himself, but for the Irish National Theatre Society.

Against this background, the 1903 Samhain principles and Yeats's remarks in defense of In the Shadow of the Glen seemed to many like an abrupt transformation of the nature and purpose of the Irish National Theatre Society. Griffith complained that if the society had "no other propaganda but that of good art," it was "no more Irish and National than the Elizabethan Stage Society."^[39] Furthermore, under the new policy, part of the company's repertoire would become tabu on its own stage.^[40] Week after week, Griffith demanded that Yeats give some reason why the Irish National Theatre Society had any right, with this new policy, to call itself either Irish or national.^[41] The war had begun in earnest for ownership of the tribe's symbols of authority.

In the Shadow of the Glen , a riotous comedy by a mischievous writer, had the added misfortune of coming before the public for the first time as an apparent instance of the new policy to disregard the political considerations of Irish nationalists. Given the governing interpretant, the main question about Synge's play was, "Does it represent the Irish national character?"

5

In the Shadow of the Glen dramatizes the tale of a young woman, Nora, living at the end of a long dark Wicklow glen, whose husband, Dan Burke, has apparently died.^[42] At the beginning of the play, a passing tramp knocks at the cottage door, and Nora, with no fear of strangers, invites him to come in and be the first guest at the wake of her husband. After he settles down with a pipe and a drink, Nora goes out under the cover of fetching mourners, but actually to speak with a young shepherd, Michael Dara. Once she is clear of the cottage, the

[39] This was an intimately cutting thrust since the Elizabethan Stage Society was one of the London dramatic societies through which Yeats had tried to mount his "Theatre of Beauty" in 1902.

[40] United Irishman 10, no. 242 (17 October 1903): 1.

[41] United Irishman 10, no. 243 (24 October 1903): 2.

[42] Synge, 3:29–59.

"corpse" rises up from under his sheet, terrifying the tramp, and demands a drink, for he's "destroyed with the drouth" and "there's been the devil's own fly itching [his] nose."^[43] He tells the tramp he was only letting on to be dead in order to catch his wife with her lover, Michael Dara. He asks the tramp to hand him a big stick, then lies back down under his sheet before the return of Nora and Michael Dara. Michael, it turns out, is no very fiery lover; he is preoccupied with counting out pieces of money and thinking of how much his sheep will prosper on Dan Burke's pasture once the body is buried and he and Nora marry. Nora, however, lets it out that she may be in no hurry to marry Michael, for he will soon be as old, crabbed, and ugly as Dan; anyway, he is not such a fine man as ones she has known in her time, men such as Patch Darcy, a great wild shepherd who used to visit her, but who had since gone mad on the hills and, dying, been left out for the crows to scavenge. In the midst of a speech by Nora on the miseries of mortality, and the hideous sight of the aged, such as Dan Burke, the corpse again rises up from his sheet behind Nora, repeating her words with terrible sarcasm. He orders her out of the house, praying that she may go mad like Darcy or wander a woman of the roads until it is she who is old and crabbed. The tramp then puts his oar in. Saying that such a fate is too hard on a single woman, he suggests that Michael take care of her. But Michael loses interest in Nora once she loses her pastures. For his interference, the tramp is also ordered from the cottage, and, in a lyrical final speech, he invites her to come along with him for a free life on the hills, with all its beauty and its hardship. Acting as though she has a choice, Nora "decides" she will go with the tramp, because he has "a fine bit of talk." Once they leave, at the end of the play, Michael Dara, the former lover, and Dan Burke, the jealous husband, sit down together for a drink of the whiskey laid on for his wake.

Some of the most popular texts for historians of the Literary Revival are taken from the contemporary editorials cen-

[43] Ibid., 43.

tering on the infidelity of an Irish wife; for some Yeats critics, these texts are self-evident proof of Irish chauvinism.^[44] Irish women—"the most virtuous . . . in the world,"^[45] it was claimed—were not properly represented in a national theatre by an adulteress; if so represented, it was no laughing matter. There are apparently no statistics kept on the nations with the most virginal brides and chastest wives, but later Irish literature is full of the agonized satirical confessions of poets condemned to chastity by Irish prudery. One thinks of Patrick Kavanagh's "The Great Hunger," one long scream of sexual frustration, or Austin Clarke's "Pity poor lovers who may not do as they please." It is not at all ridiculous that some should claim Irish women were chaste; it may, however, be questionable whether they should be proud of the claim, Irish Jansenism amounting to something like a mass neurosis.

Arthur Griffith led the reaction against the play by claiming that the plot did not derive from Irish experience or folklore; Synge had taken the story, Griffith suggested, from a tale found in Petronius and Boccaccio, "The Widow of Ephesus," in which a young widow hard upon the death of her husband takes a soldier for lover.^[46] Yeats, as Synge's "able lieutenant,"

[44] The list of literary historians defending Synge against his audience begins early and continues long; it runs from Cornelius Weygandt's Irish Plays and Playwrights (London: Constable; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913) and M. Bourgeois's John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre (1913; New York: Blom, 1965) to a kind of crescendo in Alan Price, who says that the "deplorable" "fierce assaults upon Synge" "are not, in any sense, literary comment or criticism that merits consideration" (Synge and Anglo-Irish Drama [London: Methuen, 1961], 21). More recently, several critics have been less committed to the enterprise of making a reputation for Synge, and have taken into account the response of the audience and contemporary critics. Weldon Thornton uses contemporary reviews to support his thesis that Synge succeeded in an intent to cause "perceptual—specifically aesthetic—shock" (J. M. Synge and the Western Mind [Gerrards Cross, Bucks.: Colin Smythe, 1979], 107). In "Demythologising Cathleen ni Houlihan: Synge and His Sources," Eugene Benson takes a stronger line, justifying nationalist opposition to Synge by arguing that Synge "distorts the folk materials that he dramatizes"; the defense by Synge of his play is, according to Benson, "disingenuous" (Irish Writers and the Theatre , ed. Masaru Sekine, Irish Literary Studies, 23 [Gerrards Cross, Bucks.: Colin Smythe, 1986], 1).

[45] Arthur Griffith, United Irishman 10, no. 243 (24 October 1903): 2.

[46] United Irishman 10, no. 242 (17 October 1903): 1.

counterattacked that Synge had borrowed the tale from the Aran storyteller Pat Dirane; that the story had gone through all countries and perhaps been picked up by wandering Irish bards in the middle ages;^[47] and finally that "everyone knows" that Irish wives "do sometimes grow weary of their husbands and take a lover" ("I heard one very touching tale this summer," gossiped Yeats, both the concerned friend and connoisseur of the bawdy).^[48]

For years, most literary historians gathered support for Yeats's case on behalf of Synge against the "ignorant," "obscurantist" censorship of the "mob." The issue of the folklore basis of the play, however, was finally authoritatively settled in the nationalists' favor by Sean O Suillebhain in "Synge's Use of Irish Folklore."^[49] The ecotype of the play is "The Loving Wife," in which a credulous wife is ready to take for lover the one who brings the news of her husband's death. No variant of this tale is found in Ireland. The motif relevant to Synge's plot, and found in Irish folklore, is "Feigned Death to Test Wife's Faithfulness." The story that Pat Dirane told Synge is a perfect example of this motif: among various frightening experiences, the narrator tells of going into a house where a man has pretended to die in order to catch his "bad wife." The tale always ends with the wife and lover being terribly beaten ("and her blood leapt up and hit the gallery") by the enraged husband, while the narrator flees the scene; it never ends with the wife going away scot-free with a tramp.

[47] Yeats makes the argument about "medieval travellers" during a new inflammation of discussion about In the Shadow of the Glen in January and February 1905. See, for instance, United Irishman , 29 January and 4 February 1905.

[48] WBY, "The Irish National Theatre and the Three Sorts of Ignorance," United Irishman 10, no. 243 (17 October 1903): 2.

[49] Sean O Suillebhain, "Synge's Use of Irish Folklore," in J. M. Synge, Centenary Papers, 1971 , ed. Maurice Harmon (Dublin: Dolmen Press; New York: Humanities Press, 1972), 18–34. According to Nicholas Grene, this article "has finally laid the ghost of 'the Widow of Ephesus'" (Synge: A Critical Study of the Plays [London: Macmillan, 1975], 191. Indeed, O Suillebhain shows the Aran folktale and "the Widow of Ephesus" belong to different tale types, but he also demonstrates that the play's plot belongs to none of the many Irish variants of the tale. Thus the question of whether the play is "native" or "foreign" remains alive.

The question of the plot's derivation was crucial, because Irish folklore was universally accepted as the incorrigible record of the national genius. Griffith was willing to allow that the play showed signs of talent; that Ireland, like other countries, had a problem with the custom of arranged marriages (he published several inoffensive plays attacking the institution); that Irish wives were often frustrated, even unhappy, with their husbands; he did not deny that some of them possibly committed adultery. What he would not allow is that it was representative of the Irish, a part of their fireside wisdom, to show a wife making a better bargain of her life by walking out with a tramp.^[50] Presumably, if Synge had made Dan cast out Nora alone on the roads, or beat her with his big stick, or even if he had made the tramp and Michael beat Dan for his jealousy, in any of these cases, the play might have passed muster as Irish theatre. The play would then have been clearly one genre or another, as well as consonant with Irish social attitudes, patriarchal, puritanical, and house-proud.^[51] But when Synge had made a heroine of a rebellious wife, called her Nora, and sent her triumphantly out the door at the close of the play, the Irish audience smelled a rat: Ibsen. A Doll's House had gone through its London furor some years earlier; Ibsen had been played in Dublin. The audience knew that the theatre was being used to stage "problems," especially the matters of sex and the position of women. Synge was evidently trying to introduce this "morbid" obsession to Ireland by marrying a national folk plot and a modern realist plot: "an evil compound of Ibsen and Boucicault," in the sharp phrase of the Leader .^[52] Synge had defiled the well of

[50] "Men and women in Ireland marry lacking love, and live mostly in a dull level of amity. Sometimes they do not—sometimes the woman lives in bitterness—sometimes she dies of a broken heart—but she does not go away with the Tramp " (Arthur Griffith, "All Ireland," United Irishman 10, no. 242 [17 October 1903]: 1).

[51] For readings of the problem of mixed genres in the play, see Thornton, J. M. Synge and the Western Mind , 97–107, and Grene, Synge: A Critical Study of the Plays , 84–103.

[52] "Plays with Meanings," Leader , 17 October 1903, 124–25.

Irish spirit, its folklore, and, in light of the theatre's new policy, the nationalists would not have it.

6

This part of the controversy, well-rehearsed in the critical tradition, may be taken as not only shop-worn but essentially irrelevant. The question of whether Nora is a "type" of the Irish wife, representative of the Irish nation, does not lead us, we complain, to a closer examination of what she is as an "individual" or as an "expression" of Synge's mind.^[53] In this respect, Yeats has won the argument over critical method and the proper definition of a "literary type." In the 1904 Samhain , the poet explained that the "propagandists" had completely misunderstood the terminology of "men of letters." Men like Griffith thought that "types" were "personifications of averages, of statistics, or even personified opinions." In fact, a character was "typical of something which exists in all men because the writer has found it in his own mind." In a noble sentence on Shakespeare, Yeats declared that "Richard II is typical not because he ever existed, but because [Shakespeare] has made us know of something in our own minds we would have never known had he never been imagined."^[54] This critical approach gratifies our individualism, our belief in the universality of literature, and our scientific urge to create anatomical classifications of literary archetypes.

Examine, however, the assumptions behind this method: is it obvious that what a writer finds in his own mind is necessarily representative of all humanity? What we find in our minds might just as well belong to any one of the "little platoons" in which we march—our family, sex, class, nation, race, and so on. Of course, a "great" writer is different; he (yes, it must be a male) will speak for all, all white people anyway, doubtless in one European language or another. But

[53] See, for example, Price, Synge & Anglo-Irish Drama , 125–26.

[54] WBY, Samhain (A. H. Bullen & Sons: Dublin, 1904), 14–15; rpt. in id., Explorations , 145.

putting aside the question of whether or not great writers can express human universals, it still remains in doubt whether or not Synge is such a great writer. Yeats's defense seemed like a blank check with which any writer could draw on the treasury of national values; it is no surprise that the other litigants in this dispute were not persuaded to endorse it.

Yeats's theory of the type belongs to a Platonic school of criticism, reinvigorated by expressive theories of poetry characteristic of romanticism. There is, of course, another school of theory concerning literary types, the one belonging to the tradition of realism. This tradition opposes observation to romanticism's imagination, objectivity to its subjectivity, and impersonality to its celebration of individual expression. Balzac was a student of "social types," found not in his mind, but on the streets of Paris in the 1830s; Taine distinguishes between "types" that are better and worse as "models" for society; and in the Marxist versions of realism, types are conceived as crystallizing points of social change, reflections of contradictions of social development, both representative of the present and prophetic of the future.^[55] In short, there is a pedigree for the nationalists' opinion that a type was a reflection of a social norm and an epitome of the national character. Indeed, when Griffith asseverated that it was no business of a national theatre to dramatize exceptions if doing so would hurt the morale of the Irish movement, he was working at the living core of the concept of type, what René Wellek calls its "tension between description and prescription, truth and instruction."^[56] One has to conclude, however, that "the typical Irishman," whether in the romantic or the realist tradition, was, in D. P. Moran's tart phrase, a figure "whom, like the banshee (bean-sighe), everybody has heard of, but nobody has seen, or ever will see."^[57] It is nonetheless worth noting

[55] René Wellek, "The Concept of Realism in Literary Scholarship," Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 242–46.

[56] Ibid., 242.

[57] D. P. Moran, The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (Dublin: James Duffy, n.d.), 79.

that the first sort of type appeals for its authority to the writer; the second, to the society.

The audience was initially prepared by the INTS to interpret In the Shadow of the Glen as realism, not as romanticism. Press advances announced that Synge was a Gaelic scholar, who spent much time among the peasantry in order to gather material for folk plays. The dialogue showed that Synge had made an original attempt to exploit the literary possibilities of peasant dialect. The producers had spared no pains in seeking to recreate authentic peasant dress and furniture on stage. All these elements were the calling cards of a realist. And it was as an inaccurate realist that Synge was criticized. But the defense Yeats provided for the play was based on entirely different presuppositions about literature. This was a fact recognized by Griffith when he rejected Yeats's comparison of the outcry over In the Shadow of the Glen with that over The Countess Cathleen: "When Mr. Yeats drew the countess Kathleen he drew her as a being apart . . . Mr. Synge—or else his play has no meaning—places Norah Burke before us as a type—'a personification of an average'—and Norah Burke is a lie."^[58] Griffith's definition of a type is a recipe for a drama of the dismal, but he shows that he is sufficiently sophisticated to distinguish the genre of In the Shadow of the Glen from that of The Countess Cathleen and to recognize that the different genres make different claims to truth.

The critical quarrel over the proper use of literary terminology (the representative , the typical ) is not a pedantic matter; it goes to the heart of the struggle over symbols of authority in the culture. The dispute ultimately concerned whether authors could delegate to themselves the audience's right to political representation. The writer, the lawyer, and the government official are alike in that they all "represent" others. Indeed, the writer, while not under contract to a client, and not subject to rules of evidence or jury trial, can argue a brief in public sessions; moreover, when he states his case, he can

[58] United Irishman , 10, no. 242 (17 October 1903): 1.

at the same time claim, although not elected, that he is standing for his nation. Indeed, the colors under which Yeats and Synage sailed—"The Irish National Theatre Society"—made this claim for all their work. In this fashion, representation is the fundamental move in the literary struggle between classes: each class, as Marx writes in The German Ideology , "is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all members of society . . .; it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones."^[59] The realist critique made by the nationalists impeached Synge's claim to spokesmanship; it charged him with fabricating evidence useful to the opposition, the alien class of the English who happened to be born in Ireland.

John Butler Yeats, an admirer of Synge, intervened in the controversy with a remarkable essay entitled "Ireland out of the Dock."^[60] In a trenchant history of Irish literature, the poet's father said that at one time the country lay under an accusation of unworthiness, and writers were either too proud to plead, or did nothing but plead; now, however, Ireland had won her own dignity; she did not need to defend herself against foreign criticism. In this event, a play was not a trial, and no legal representation by Synge was in order. If he turned up a flaw, it was not a matter for defensiveness; no final judgment of national guilt or innocence was going to fall from a foreign court. The metaphor J. B. Yeats develops is true to the generally litigious state of Irish affairs; his use of it, however, comes to the wrong conclusion. Ireland, still a province, with the fate of landownership mulled in the courts, was no less in the dock in 1903 than during the nineteenth century. Furthermore, when W. B. Yeats sued for control of the national theatre society and reinterpreted its charter, Synge's play became a major article in evidence in a new public proceeding.

[59] Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change , 28; Marx, The German Ideology , ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 65–66.

[60] J. B. Yeats, "Ireland Out of the Dock," United Irishman 10, no. 241 (10 October 1903): 2.

7

The dispute over the meaning of a literary type follows from Yeats's "morning cockcrow" in the October 1903 Samhain heralding an Irish drama that would be an "impartial meditation on character and destiny," not "indentured to any political cause."^[61] After the reaction to Synge's characterization of Nora, Yeats further pressed his separation of literature from propaganda. He understandably complained that "our propagandists" would make it impossible for artists to show life or speak the truth if they forced playwrights to employ only "the ideal young peasant . . . or the happy Irish wife, or the policeman of our prejudices, or . . . some other of those invaluable generalizations, without which our practical movements would lose their energy."^[62] In his guiding similitude, literature, in love with the minute particulars, was happily wedded to life; propaganda was contracted only to a set of barren opinions.

The statement of the difference between literature and propaganda is one of the most impressive and influential aspects of Yeats's critical writings. Its definition of literary values is impressive, richly exemplified, and altogether profound in its expression of those things that cannot be codified by ready understanding, but can be embodied in works of art; its definition of political values, however, is occasionally narrow, polemical, and dismissive. In fact, in these writings, literature and politics are different worlds in different orbits: the literary one is luminous and large; the political, feisty, pinched, and skeletal. For the modern reader, the social origins of this panegyric on art may well be lost; for the Irish audience, however, it was not difficult to dig away at the roots of Yeats's aesthetic. It was, moreover, a Dublin rule of thumb

[61] WBY, "The Reform of the Theatre," Samhain , October 1903 (Sealy Bryers & Walker, and T. Fisher Unwin: Dublin, 1903); rpt. in Explorations , 103.

[62] Samhain: 1904 (Dublin: Sealy Bryers & Walker, and T. Fisher Unwin, 1904); rpt. in Explorations , 146.

that where a doctrine of no politics was affirmed with fervor, one should look for its politics.^[63] Of those whose catchcry was "Politics are the curse of Ireland," a contributor to the United Irishman , "Soerib," explained: "Needless to say, these persons are invariably Unionists. Obviously, if politics are dropped, Ireland's connection with England will not be endangered, nor will the garrison be endangered in losing their Ascendancy."^[64] Yeats was certainly no Unionist; but to his contemporary readers it may well have appeared that the privileges of class he enjoyed may have made him willing to acquiesce a little longer in the continuation of the Union, under the complacencies of a thoroughgoing aestheticism.

Yeats's exclusively aesthetic definition of literature seemed likely to promote public tolerance of the intolerable. He spoke of pure tragedy, but would such plays lead to Irish resignation before British fate? He spoke of pure comedy, but such comedies—purified of political intent—might well promote further acquiescence by their belittlement of human problems. Finally, the "joy" of art that Yeats urged against the purposes of art might simply distract the audience from the historical pain of foreign domination, making it possible for them to bear such domination without complaint. Surely there is an appeal in a celebration of Life with a capital L , in Art with a capital A , but Dublin life in 1903 was for nationalists a matter for lamentation, harangue, rousing calls to action, and embittering nostalgia, not celebration. One nationalist who finally came out and admitted that, yes, he wanted "Art for Ireland's sake," "the handmaiden of Irish nationalism," said that for him there was only one question: "How are we to preserve ourselves from annihilation?"^[65] The mild narcosis of aesthetic pleasure would, for this citizen, simply anaesthetize the Irish to the progressive mortification of their national

[63] Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 28.

[64] "Soerib," "Ireland's Danger," United Irishman 9, no. 216 (18 April 1903): 3.

[65] "Cuguan," "The Play's the Thing," United Irishman 10, no. 246 (14 November 1903): 2.

being: the death of their language, their moral habits, and their spirit of resistance to Anglicization. Yeats consistently spoke of the intrinsic values of art; his critics, however, replied with reflections on the motives of the author and the consequences for the audience.

No one who has read through the plays printed week after week in the United Irishman —presumably, inspected and certified nationalist products—can fail to feel sympathy with Yeats's sense that although Ireland was a poor country, it was desperate indeed if it could afford no better literary showing than such plays offered. After Synge's play was performed, Griffith published a skit entitled In a Real Wicklow Glen , in which a wise old peasant woman discusses life in the Burke household many years after the tramp's visit. Nora has a string of children; she has grown to love old Dan Burke (how couldn't she love him, living together all those years? she explains); the once-young shepherd Michael Dara comes on the scene, ragged and bitter, but still lovelorn. Nora admits that once she preferred him, but since her parents would not bless their marriage, she feels she did right to put him out of her mind altogether. He is the bigger fool for not making something of his life. End of play. The author offhandedly sacrifices the conditions that created the original conflict—Nora's childlessness; her passionate nature; the terrors of the lonely glen; and the wild appeal of the tramp—in order to make his inevitable point: Irish women are virtuous. Even the nationalists who patronized performances of such dramas sometimes complained of their emptiness. Michael Blake wrote to the United Irishman a few months before the performance of In the Shadow of the Glen to lament that the authors of Gaelic plays "regard their work not as an art or craft, but as propagandism pure and simple."^[66]Ta na Francaighe ar an Muir , for instance, was a playlet in the form of King Lear: it took ten minutes to read, was in five acts, with five years elapsing between the fourth and fifth act, and a cast of crowds. Alice Milligan and

[66] Blake, "Two Irish Plays," United Irishman 10, no. 232 (8 August 1903): 6.

James Cousins, Griffith's staff writers for his weekly episodes of Irish Masterpiece Theatre, took longer dramatic flights, indeed, interminable ones, as act after act, brave Gael after vicious Saxon, they ground out Celtic Twilight dramatizations of Gaelic literature, fragrant of holy water and mouldy costumes. If Yeats's "pure art" lay under the suspicion of promoting acquiescence to political oppression, the "applied art" of the nationalists often accommodated the audience to sheer ineptitude.

As long as the problem is conceived as a choice between free "literature" and slavish "propaganda," literature will be obviously preferable, from both an artistic and any farsighted patriotic point of view. But Yeats's absolute distinction forces upon the reader an unreasonably limited choice between a writer with no conscious purpose and one with a single political purpose. Frank Lentricchia finds in Kenneth Burke's Rhetoric of Motives a passage that opens up an intermediate area of expression "that is not wholly deliberate, yet not wholly conscious."^[67] This area "lies midway between aimless utterance and speech directly purposive," between, that is, art with no end but art, and art with the one end of a political message. A complex intellectual creation such as a play, it seems obvious, is going to be overdetermined. The writer will not simply be led by the forceless force of his imaginary characters' needs or guided by the purposiveness without purpose of aesthetic design. He will be pulled by a constellation in the night, unperceived forces and dimly seen lights, as well as by the single guiding star of Art that Yeats hails.

Yeats fashioned a statue of Synge as the ideal artist, "by nature unfitted to think a political thought,"^[68] but Synge, though he had no wish to "get mixed up with a revolutionary and semi-military movement," had an interest in politics, deep political passions, and a fairly clear political philosophy.^[69] As

[67] Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change , 159; Burke, Rhetoric of Motives , xiii.

[68] WBY, Essays and Introductions , 319.

[69] I have relied in this paragraph on Robin Skelton's "The Politics of J. M. Synge," Massachusetts Review 18, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 7–22.

Robin Skelton has shown, he was disposed by his reading of Marx and William Morris to regard himself as a socialist with an appreciation of traditional ways of life; in the Irish scheme of things, he put himself down as a "temperate Nationalis[t]" in a notebook from the late nineties. A member of a Protestant landowning family, Synge was obliged by his political beliefs to renounce his class when antagonism arose between nationalists and Unionists, throwing in his lot with the poor, the ignorant, and the Catholic; he was, however, disposed by his whole training in life to find the neighborhood unpleasant. He was at once enamored with the traditional sanctities of peasant life and disgusted by the "cruder powers of the Irish mind." He hoped that the "half-cultured classes" of the towns would come under the sway of the truly cultured writers expressing themselves in English,^[70] but he recognized that, in John Eglinton's words, "the interest of the whole nation lay in extirpating the conditions which produced" Irish Protestant literature.^[71] Out of these sharp divisions between his public commitments and private hopes, his recent political sympathies and vestigial social snobbery, Synge fashioned the attitude of mind expressed in his works. Like the characters of Anatole France whom he admired, he kept himself healthy by an ironical attitude to his own distress, "a humorous optimism" as answer to a frankly bleak forecast. His ironical appetite for incongruity was especially excited, as Yeats allows, by nearness to his Irish audience.^[72] Their shibboleths delighted his sarcasm, inflated his capriciousness, and drove him to make mischief in the camp of true believers. Synge had the artistic temperament of a satirist who thrives on conditions of possible censorship; he flirted with punishments, flaunted his boldness. He wanted, as he later said, to "make them hop."^[73] When writing In the Shadow of the Glen , Synge knew he was needling the Catholic Irish about their sexual

[70] J. M. Synge, "The Old and the New in Ireland," Academy and Literature , 6 September 1902; rpt. in Synge, 2:382–86.

[71] John Eglinton, Irish Literary Portraits (London, 1935), 26.

[72] WBY, Essays and Introductions , 327.

[73] Synge, 2:283.

"squeamishness"; writing to his friend Stephen MacKenna, he as much as admits the play is, among other things, an attack on Irish marriage customs, in an anarchic celebration of "volcanic forces."^[74] This is not to imply that Synge's play is doctrinaire in any sense of the word, only to suggest the political complexities of motive in the author and the degree of oppositional force within the play itself.

8

Just as "literature" is not so pure an entity as Yeats proposed, the "propaganda" nationalists expected of the Irish National Theatre was not as strictly defined as he claimed. Both Griffith and Moran, while glad of nationalist propaganda when it was provided, were satisfied with national entertainment of any kind. Plays such as The Pot of Broth, The Racing Lug, Broken Soil , and The Hour-Glass —former INTS productions—do not simply dramatize a page from Thomas Davis's Spirit of a Nation , but all these plays met with approval from the nationalist papers. Moran in fact made a point of stating that any "National Unity that is worth having, that is not a worse evil than national chaos, must be the flower of a number of movements for the creation and fostering of all the elements, spiritual and material, that go to the making of a nation."^[75] Moran wanted to allow each movement liberty to work in its own way, but liberty for him did not mean freedom from criticism. Both he and Griffith explicitly granted Yeats the liberty to write what he pleased; they asked that he grant them the liberty to criticize according to their lights. Moran's version of tolerance was a brawl of opinions: "Papers and people will often hit below the belt, and good men will be misrepresented; steady and necessary work may be unjustly belittled and laughed at, and cranks may become uncomfortably numerous. But for all that, liberty with such drawbacks will go further in a week than

[74] Greene and Stephens, Synge , 156.

[75] Moran, Philosophy of Irish Ireland , 78.

one 'strong' organization, bounded . . . by rules, definitions, pedantries . . . will go in a year."^[76] It misconstrues the facts to make Yeats the sole apostle of liberty and the nationalists a vanguard of Leninists enforcing party discipline.

What the nationalists expected of the Irish National Theatre was not that it confine itself to agitprop, but that it sail clear of challenges to the overt ideology of its audience, or that it stand the storm when this ideology was offended. Doubtless, this expectation places some constriction on the artist, especially an artist like Synge whose genius fulfills itself precisely in such sailing across the wind through dangerous waters. But it allowed most Irish writers great latitude in what they wrote. Yeats, for instance, who himself had some "genius for making mischief in a small place,"^[77] never succeeded in stimulating the audience to make a political attack upon any of his own plays after The King's Threshold (which itself simply shouldered part of the blame directed at Synge's half of the double bill). In Deirdre (1907), Yeats went further than Synge in making an Irish heroine give utterance to sexual desire. Yeats's Irish queen knows "nothing but this body, nothing / But that old vehement, bewildering kiss"; she revels in the memory that she "woke the passion that's in all"; but it is of the kiss and the passion of her husband Naoise she speaks.^[78] After his murder, she promises to be the bed partner of Conchubar, tempting him by promising that he will stir more passion in her than Naoise could, but she only says these things, it transpires, as part of a plot to kill herself and save her virtue. Deirdre may have appeared to be idle, prurient, petulant, and hard to please; but in fact, she was just a good Irish wife trying to keep her man. Because Yeats showed respect for the overt ideology of the Irish by confining his glamorization of "sin" to an exemplum of "virtue," no nationalist threw an obstacle in the play's path to popularity.^[79] In

[76] Ibid., 70.

[77] Frank Fay to Maire Garvey, 26 April 1909; Hogan and Kilroy, 3:308.

[78] Alspach, 376, 382.

[79] See Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change , 104, for discussion of the concepts of "respect for overt ideology" and the "ideology of form."

Synge's play, however, there is an obvious violation of the ideology of form: Nora is, by Irish lights, a bad wife: she is too easy with strangers, has a young fellow down the hill, does not respect her husband, complains about her life, and does not have any kids—a plain failure as an Irish wife. Her final act, when she departs with the walk of a queen, is therefore "incorrect" because it violates the repetitive structure of "bad wife" examples. The nationalists objected not that Synge refused to write according to their dictation (no dictation was, or could be, provided), but that he offended their sense of what was both politically and aesthetically correct.

Given that there are degrees of conscious intent in all literature, and that nationalists were not requiring all INTS plays to serve the cause, one may question the original dichotomy of literature and propaganda. Yeats originated his distinction by a classification on the basis of artistic purpose. In a rejoinder to Yeats, "Sarsfield," writing on "The Artistic Value of Propagandist Poetry," classified plays according to their inspiration and effects, claiming that propaganda was not a separate category from literature, but a kind of literature inspired by love of country, just as love poetry was inspired by romantic attachments, religious poetry by love of God, and speculative poetry by academic interests.^[80] Propaganda, Sarsfield claimed, might express an idea, convey a lesson, or make an impression just as well as any other type of literature, often better, since love of country was a more general feeling among the people than, for instance, love of academic speculation. Ceann Maor leapt on Sarsfield's bandwagon with his own curse on "the Slobbering Lyric" of the Celtic Twilight and an anthology of quotations condemning "the Anaemic School of Criticism" raised up to dignify feminine, obscure, and ineffectual literature.^[81] Ceann Maor, speaking up for "the plain people of Ireland" against the pale hierophants of "Art," even

[80] "Sarsfield," "The Artistic Value of Propaganda Poetry," United Irishman 14, no. 350 (11 November 1905): 4.

[81] "Ceann Maor," "The Artistic Value of Propaganda Poetry," United Irishman 14, no. 351 (18 November 1905): 6.

prints his own version of the true stuff: a bold prophetic ballad in the manner of Thomas Davis. While Sarsfield and Ceann Maor originally claimed only that propaganda was one kind of literature, they gradually give the clear impression that, for all true Irishmen, it is the only kind that counts.

What is missing in the debate is the realization that any single work can be classified with respect to its form, motives, or consequences. Classified by form, all plays are "literature"; by consequences, they are "propaganda." If we examine more closely the motives of the author and the embeddedness of the play in history, we are forced to overcome the dichotomy of literature/propaganda and address the politics of form and the aesthetics of struggle. yeats knew better than anyone that his own plays and poems, and those of all writers of the Irish Revival, arose because their "moral nature [had] been aroused by political sacrifices, and [their] imagination by a political preoccupation with [Ireland's] destiny."^[82] It is a paradox that one of the most vigorous twentieth-century defenses of literature against propaganda came from the modern poet with the most intimate sense of the political character of contemporary life and letters. Yeats, however, had a theatre on the condition that he could show Horniman that the INTS was not a "political sideshow"; he had mastery within that theatre if he could demonstrate that "literature" was a thing unto itself, high and holy, justified and needing no justification.

9

It is remarkable that Yeats was left defending a position he agreed to call "art for art's sake" when his own play offers a meditation on a passage from Nietzsche profoundly criticizing this very slogan.^[83] Frances Oppel argues persuasively the pertinence of Nietzsche's "Skirmishes of an Untimely Man" in Twilight of the Idols to Seanchan's defense of his poetry in

[82] "The Irish Literary Theatre," Beltaine 1, no. 2 (February 1900): 23.

[83] WBY, Explorations , 200.

The King's Threshold. Nietzsche says that the "fight against purpose in art is always a fight against the moralizing tendency in art," but it does not follow, he claims, that when moral preaching is removed from art, art is therefore "purposeless, aimless, senseless—in short, l'art pour l'art ." In fact, all art praises, glorifies, chooses, prefers, and in this way "strengthens or weakens certain valuations." Nietzsche concludes that "art is the great stimulus to life."^[84] According to Oppel, "This argument is the central theme and subject of Yeats's play."^[85]

Even if this claim is extravagant, it must be allowed that Seanchan gives a host of examples of how poetry strengthens or weakens certain valuations and, all in all, stimulates us to life. First, he leads his student Senias to speak memorable lines on why poetry is honored:

   . . . the poets hung
Images of the life that was in Eden
About the child-bed of the world, that it,
Looking upon those images, might bear
Triumphant children.^[86]

In Nietzsche's terms, the poet makes images of human perfection that show people the limits of the possible; without such images, future humanity would be disadvantaged, like the cripples who linger on stage in Yeats's play. Poets make the "golden cradle" in which basic values are born and nurtured.^[87] Because poets "christened gold," Seanchan tells the chamberlain, the king's golden crown consecrates his office, and his money has purchasing power. Had not poets praised courage, men would not dare fight in battle; had they not sung of beauty, young people would not have been stimulated to love, and to love a certain kind of beauty most.^[88]

[84] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche contra Wagner, The Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist , trans. Thomas Common (London: H. Henry, 1896), 186.

[85] Oppel, Mask and Tragedy , 141.

[86] Alspach, 264; lines 129ff.

[87] Alspach, 266; line 172.

[88] Alspach, 290; lines 519–35.

Nietzsche's arguments and Yeats's examples express a fundamental truth of the power of literature and culture as a whole: the idea of what it is to be human—to love, fight, and rule—is historically shaped in a process by which artificial symbols become natural truths.

At the same time, however, the struggle over Synge's play and Yeats's theatrical policy was itself a part of this historical process of self-definition. Those who objected to Synge's Nora also believed that art "strengthens or weakens certain valuations"; they simply objected to strengthening the value of erotic fulfillment and weakening the value of marital fidelity. Should such deeds as Nora's departure with a lively young tramp be performed on stage, indeed celebrated there, what would be the consequences for Irish households? For Nietzsche and Yeats, this might be a tonic for exuberant "life," but for an Irish Catholic public, "life" is not necessarily made up of emotionalism, sexual desire, individualism, and attachment to this world. Confronted by his critics, and awaited by Horniman, Yeats retreated several steps from a Nietzschean understanding of the thoroughgoing effectuality of art, and was finally thrown into the position of defending "pure art," "art for art's sake."

10

Yeats's distinction between literature and propaganda served another purpose as well: if propaganda was not literature, then it was, obviously, not Irish national literature, and no part of the INTS program. Arthur Griffith, finding this rhetoric of terminology confusing, expressly took issue with Yeats when he pigeonholed certain obviously propagandistic works as "political": "We should call them National," Griffith rejoined. "The people in this country are not yet marshalled into Liberals and Conservatives. They are still the Irish Nation and the English Garrison."^[89] In the idiom of Dublin na-

[89] United Irishman 10, no. 242 (17 October 1903): 1.

tionalists, "political" was often limited to its most narrow and pejorative denotation. After the fall of Parnell, many Irish patriots—Yeats included—had turned away from parliamentary politics to labor on behalf of Ireland in other ways. Groups such as Douglas Hyde's Gaelic League, Horace Plunkett's Irish Cooperative Association, and Griffith's own Sinn Fein all insisted that they were not "political" organizations, they were "national." By the use of this vague language, Hyde, Plunkett, and Griffith aimed to escape government repression, to distinguish their movements from the bankrupt shenanigans of the Parnellites and anti-Parnellites, and to invite both Home Rulers and separatists, Irish-Irelanders and Unionists to come together and make common cause.^[90] Politics was just a name, in this idiom, for the activity of eighty-six members in Westminster, along with a few hundred rebels sent to jail, and some thousands who occasionally marched in processions to a drum and fife band; there were other ways, beyond politics, for the rest of the population to show that they were Irish.^[91] They could be marshaled to speak Gaelic, wear tweed, improve the dairy system, or support the theatre. It is obvious that these cultural organizations—the Irish National Theatre included—were political in every respect except party affiliation. Under the cloak of adherence to no party, they aimed to form policy, spread propaganda, infiltrate existing organizations, lay the groundwork for local government, and prepare for national independence. While for the impartial observer, all the activities of cultural nationalism were political, and for Griffith, Hyde, Plunkett, and others, none of them were "political," Yeats created confusion by saying some national plays were "political" and some were not.

This was not playing the game. By blowing the cover of a

[90] For discussions of Irish usage of the term "political," see Nicholas Mansergh, The Irish Question, 1840–1921 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965; 3d ed. 1975), 269; Oliver MacDonagh, States of Mind: A Study of Anglo-Irish Conflict, 1790–1980 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), 62, and D. George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 295.

[91] Moran, Philosophy of Irish Ireland , 66.

broadly tolerant patriotic movement, it tended to expose irreconcilable versions of the political future of Ireland held by the different participants. Hitherto, some members of the cultural organizations had looked forward to a republic, some to a dual monarchy, others to a preservation of the current union with Great Britain; all these worked side by side with members envisioning socialist, capitalist, or semi-feudal economic systems; Catholic and Gaelic, Anglo-Irish, British, or continental societies. Once the cultural movement was opened to directly political discussion, the broad coalition was bound to break into factions along the lines of religious, class, and political stress. The debate over the aims of "The Irish National Theatre" did not, of course, halt the progress of the massive movement of cultural nationalism, but it exploded the appearance of silent consensus on what Ireland as a nation was and ought to become. In order to highlight Yeats's own definition of a national theatre, a survey follows of seven definitions of an Irish national theatre, all put on the table for discussion in Dublin, 1900–1905, and most of them represented in the quarrels following the October 1903 INTS productions.

In September 1900 the sharp-tongued D. P. Moran characteristically supplied both the most hard-headed definition of the actual national literature of Ireland and the most extreme definition of its ideal literature. "A Nation's literature," he argued, "is no more and no less than what the people read." The National Library of Ireland, therefore, was not the collection of books shelved in the institution of that name on Kildare Street; not the series of titles published by Fisher & Unwin, mostly favorites of Young Ireland; not the works of the "Celtic Renaissance"; instead, "The National Library of Ireland is simply Eason & Sons' warehouse, the railway bookstalls, and the newsagents' shops." Similarly the national theatre consisted of musical comedies, melodramas, variety shows, pantomimes, and itinerant Shakespeare productions.^[92] Moran was not happy about the fact that Irish

[92] Moran, "A Nation's Literature," Leader , 22 September 1900, 54.

literature was "mostly of a gutter kind, and partly indecent," neither Irish nor literary. That was simply the way things were among the denationalized throng of modern Ireland. The way things ought to be, to his way of thinking, self-respecting, moral, Gaelic-speaking citizens would support an Irish literature that was just what the name said: literature in the Irish language. To realize this ideal, the Gaelic League had to educate the entire nation in its largely lost tongue, the Irish Ireland movement had to turn the people away from English customs, and the "English who happened to be born in Ireland" had to accept the fact that Ireland was a Catholic country.

Between the extremes of Moran's actual deracinated Ireland and his potential Catholic, Gaelic Irish Ireland, other groups entered their candidates for Ireland and its theatre. The third definition comes from William Martin Murphy, capitalist owner of tramways and Catholic nationalist dailies, and Yeats's bête noire. Murphy had his own scheme for the theatrical entertainment of the Irish. He noted approvingly that films and plays were provided by the state in Russia, so that with a cheap ticket peasants could escape their distress. This would be better, Murphy thought, than the "strange, weird one-act metaphysical meanderings about ghouls and faeries in blank verse" that the INTS "thrust upon a suffering people."^[93] In addition, the entertainment of the Irish Catholic masses could then be supervised to prevent their being corrupted by indecency and foreign decadence, without putting them to the trouble of learning Gaelic. From this program for "national" entertainments spreads a vision of a petty capitalist Irish nation, with a thoroughly exploited lower class gulled by patriotism and kept in line by clerical supervision.

In the fourth definition of Irish National Theatre, Maud Gonne showed the sentimental side of the physical force republican movement. She was also concerned with the threat

[93] William M. Murphy, Daniel Tallon, Joseph Mooney, and Count Moore, letter to the editor, Evening Herald; rpt. in United Irishman 9, no. 212 (21 March 1903): 3.

of foreign influence on workers and peasants. The peasants, in her rapture, are "the hidden spring from which flow the seven springs of Gaelic inspiration:"^[94] what arises from peasant life, and returns to it, is for her Irish national theatre. The literature of towns is foreign to them, thus to the nation; the literature of art is too difficult for them, thus for the nation. But unlike the aim of abject escapism of capitalist Murphy, with his plan for the factory production of a national opiate, the ruling principle of Maud Gonne's program is revolt against British tyranny. Cathleen ni Houlihan , in which she played the title role, is her ideal of an incendiary folk theatre; the Paris Reign of Terror, a violent and messianic birth of "democracy," is her vision of Irish government.

Fifth, some Dublin members of the Gaelic League, one generation removed from tillage, were not so enamored of peasant life as Maud Gonne, a colonel's daughter. As G. J. Watson explains, "Paddy and his Pig" was a little too close to home for them.^[95] They wanted a Gaelic theatre, but one modeled on the best foreign plays, Ibsen's A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler . For these intellectuals of the towns, clerical supervision and pantomimes of traditional stories would leave Ireland always a provincial backwater: they wanted to join Europe as a separate, modern nation.

In his response to Maud Gonne's article, J. B. Yeats spoke for Anglo-Irish intellectuals in providing yet another example, to supplement the five already discussed. He refused to see the question as either political or difficult. It was obvious to him that Synge's play was as Irish as the lakes of Killarney, just because it arose on Irish soil from an Irish writer. Everything made in Ireland, by people living in Ireland, was Irish. That much was simple; the hard question was determining if a work was art. As to foreign influences, for JBY the old Brit-

[94] Maud Gonne MacBride, "A National Theatre," United Irishman 10, no. 243 (24 October 1903): 2–3.

[95] Watson, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979), 25ff.

ish liberal policy was good enough: "In art matters, as in the commerce of ideas, there must always be free trade."^[96] This open view of a broad, free, and intellectual culture is characteristic of the Home Rule Protestants, whose claim to being Irish was often residence, not religion, language, or race. It is, in fact, similar to the sentiments of Synge on the question of an Irish national theatre. Like J. B. Yeats, Synge thought that if "you do not a like a work that is passing itself off as national art, you had better show it is not art. If it is good art, it is vain for you to try and show it is not national."^[97]

The seventh and final definition is provided by the largest group of nationalists, those walking in the path of Thomas Davis's Young Ireland movement, who would have been happy to show that certain plays by Irishmen about Ireland were not Irish. That is just what the whole dispute about In the Shadow of the Glen concerned. From the poetry of Milligan, William Rooney, and Eithne Carbery, the novels of Charles Kickham, the memoirs of Wolfe Tone, the historical writings of A. M. Sullivan, and the plays of Seamus O'Sullivan and Padraig Colum, this group gathered a lofty view of the Irish character, in which piety, bravery, love of land and nation, and concern for family predominated.^[98] If the characters in a play did not have these qualities, then, according to this group, the play was not Irish. While the Davisite nationalists officially supported the Gaelic League, many (such as Arthur Griffith himself) were never able actually to learn Irish; therefore, they were satisfied with a national theatre that staged plays in English that upheld their lofty view of the Irish character. More a tradition of sentiment than a political ideology, it is difficult to project into the future the Ireland this large audience discovered in its fond look on Ireland's past. Per-

[96] John Butler Yeats, "The Irish National Theatre," United Irishman 10, no. 244 (31 October 1903): 7.

[97] Greene and Stephens, Synge , 150–51.

[98] Boyce, "The Battle of Three Civilizations," in Nationalism in Ireland , 243ff.

haps it was just the Ireland that came to be: a patriotic nation, Catholic by constitution, primarily middle-class, capitalist with light industries and trade (Yeats: "a nation of shopkeepers"), and a paternalist state.

11

After his October 1903 Samhain statement that he himself was most interested in an Irish National Theatre Society with "no propaganda but that of good art,"^[99] Yeats dealt in turn with very nearly each of the groups supporting the many positions described above. He flattered Hyde's Gaelic theatre, hinted that Moran's moral Catholic theatre was English-imported puritanism, ridiculed the idolatry of Murphy's Catholic newspaper and commended to Irish nationalists the example of Russian revolutionaries, utterly ignored Maud Gonne's letter (allowing his father to speak for him), and treated Griffith's Davisite nationalists to a long critique of the empty rhetoric of the Young Ireland writers.^[100] In short, he fought back, delighting in battle, one man against the town, always aiming to get in the last word. Usually, as a matter of fact, he got in the best words, whose only shortcoming was that they were too fine for the occasion. In a few instances, Arthur Griffith bested him, as when Yeats had defined a nationalist as "one who is prepared to give up a great deal that he may preserve to his country whatever part of her possessions he is best fitted to guard," and Griffith rejoined that Yeats parceled himself out with the ethics of an "impeccable grocer," asking if this was the same playwright who had Cathleen ni Houlihan say, "If anyone would give me help, he must give me himself, he must give me all."^[101] But these skirmishes did not bring out a full-fledged definition of national theatre from Yeats, only a fierce defense of the freedom of the author.

[99] WBY, Explorations , 100.

[100] Ibid., 114–23.

[101] Arthur Griffith, "All Ireland," United Irishman 10, no. 242 (17 October 1903): 1.

A year later, in the 1904 Samhain , Yeats worked out a definition, but it is clear that in 1903 he was operating on the assumption of the sort of national theatre discussed, not in Dublin, in any of its forms, but in London. Literary men in the English theatre, such as Granville-Barker, had broached the idea of an art theatre subsidized by the state, mainly for literary drama and Shakespeare revivals.^[102] In the London discussion, questions of language, religion, or national identity were not at issue; the only concerns were art and a subsidy to free the artists from public taste. Yeats's 1903 notion of an Irish national theatre as a dwelling place "for the capricious spirit that bloweth as it listeth" had its origin in these London discussions and the Horniman subsidy.

In his 1904 Samhain statement of "First Principles," Yeats elaborates on his vision of a national theatre, replying to his Irish critics while not offending his English patron's ban on politics. According to Samhain , what makes an Irish writer is not that he writes in Irish, pleads the national cause, expresses Irish morality, or creates typical Irish characters; not even that he is inspired by Irish literary traditions; certainly not that he executes in his plays the will of the people, or any will but his own. It becomes difficult to see what is left for a writer to do who wishes to be Irish. For Yeats, however, that person's wish should be to make himself not Irish but a writer. Do that and he would be Irish enough. Ultimately, Yeats says, only five or six people have the right to call themselves Irish, people who usually belong, he believes, to the leisured class (read Protestant population), whose thought is harder and more masterful than that of others; these have, he adds, an essential nearness to reality .^[103] The essay goes a step farther than the 1903 pronouncements. They made the author responsible only to himself; this makes a claim for one class—the one that included Yeats, Lady Gregory, and J. M. Synge—having a commanding view of the truth of things. By this time, Yeats

[102] Dennis Kennedy, Granville-Barker and the Dream of Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

[103] WBY, Explorations , 147.

had been given the Abbey Theatre by Horniman; he was president of the Irish National Theatre; his plays, along with those of Synge and Gregory, were its dramatic literature; and he was ready to make the extraordinary claim that he and his friends were the Irish nation. The long struggle of "stealing back and forth the symbols of authority" had come to end; Yeats and his friends owned them; they minted the coin of the realm.

The boldness of the poet is breathtaking. It is as if he heard Zarathustra's call: "Out of you, who have chosen yourselves, there shall grow a chosen people—and out of them, the overman."^[104] His virtue was not to serve the people, but to be the people, acting on behalf of a constituency yet to be born, his majority having only to go through the formality of becoming fact: "[National literature] is the work of writers who are moulded by influences moulding their country, and who write out of so deep a life that they are accepted there in the end [italics added]."^[105] But more than any political ambition, Yeats was actuated by what Nietzsche calls "the terrible egotism of the artist, which is justified by the work he must do, as the mother by the child she will bear."^[106] It is, of course, not decent to act like a superman, and after Yeats had taken the tonic of Nietzschean philosophy, he acted as if he had begun to hang out with a bad crowd—bullies and dandies and a crypto-fascist elite. His father, best friend, and Horniman herself all later complained of his domineering behavior, pinning the blame on Nietzsche.^[107] But if we recoil from the Yeats who

[104] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathrustra , in The Portable Nietzsche , ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954), 189.

[105] WBY, Explorations , 156.

[106] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals , trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 220.

[107] See George William Russell (Æ) to WBY [May 1903], in George Russell, Letters from AE , ed. Alan Denson (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1962), 46–47; Russell to George Moore [6 April 1916], in ibid., 109–10; J. B. Yeats to WBY [1906], in J. B. Yeats: Letters to His Son W. B. Yeats and Others, 1869–1922 , ed. Joseph Hone (1944; London: Secker & Warburg, 1983), 97; J. B. Yeats to WBY, 24 March 1909, in Letters , ed. Hone, 117; Annie Horniman to Yeats, 23 and 26 December 1909 (ms. 13608, NLI). This issue is discussed below in chs. 4 and 6.

wishes to dominate others, we admire the Yeats who always goes onward to overcome himself, who finds fault with his best deeds or discovers his powerlessness over the woman he loves. Indeed, such moments of self-overcoming in poetry would lack salt had he not first overcome others. What portion of the power of his poetry over us is derived from failure, ours to be better than we are, his to be best of all? The attractions of literature may not always be attributable to Christian or humanitarian or universal ethical values, or to democratic or individualist or traditional political values. Like Nietzsche's spectators at an ancient Greek theatre, perhaps we crowd around the stage with a thirst for violence and for tragedy, to watch a man who would be great articulate the limitations of being.