The failure of the audience to understand this powerful and strange work (The Playboy of the Western World) has been the one serious failure of our movement, and it could not have happened but that the greater number of those who came to shout down the play were no regular part of our audience at all, but members of parties and societies whose main interests are political. We have been denounced with even greater violence than on the first production of the play for announcing that we should carry it to London. We cannot see that an attack, which we believe to have been founded on a misunderstanding of the nature of literature, should prevent us from selecting, as our custom is, whatever of our best comes within the compass of our players at the time, to show in some English theatres. Nearly all strong and strange writing is attacked on its appearance, and those who press it upon the world may not cease from pressing it, for their justification is its ultimate acceptance. Ireland is passing through a crisis in the life of the mind greater than any she has known since the rise of the Young Ireland party, and based upon a principle which sets many in opposition to the habits of thought and feeling come down from that party, for the seasons change, and need and occupation with them. Many are beginning to recognise the right of the individual mind to see the world in its own way, to cherish the thoughts which separate men from one another, and that are the creators of distinguished life, instead of those thoughts that had made one man like another if they could, and have but succeeded in setting hysteria and insincerity in place of confidence and self-possession. To the Young Ireland writers, who have the ear of Ireland, though not its distracted mind, truth was historical and external and not a self-consistent personal vision, and it is but according to ancient custom that the new truth should force its way amid riot and great anger.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] Both Mr. Moore and Mr. Martyn dropped out of the movement after the third performance at the Irish Literary Theatre in 1901.—W.B.Y.
[B] That mood has gone, with Fenianism and its wild hopes. The National movement has been commercialized in the last few years. How much real ideality is but hidden for a time one cannot say.—W.B.Y., March, 1908.
[C] An illusion, as he himself explained to me. He had never seen Phèdre. The players were quiet and natural, because they did not know what else to do. They had not learned to go wrong.—W.B.Y., March, 1908.
[D] This play was John Bull’s Other Island. When it came out in the spring of 1905 we felt ourselves unable to cast it without wronging Mr. Shaw. We had no ‘Broadbent’ or money to get one.—W.B.Y., March, 1908.
[E] The Poor House, written in Irish by Dr. Hyde on a scenario by Lady Gregory.
[F] Riders to the Sea. This play made its way very slowly with our audiences, but is now very popular.—W.B.Y., March, 1908.
[G] The players, though not the playwrights, are now all paid.—W.B.Y., March, 1908.
[H] John Bull’s Other Island.