Cathleen Ni Houlihan / By W. B. Yeats. - Full View | Digital Library

Major Release From A Musician

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 23:45:20 +0000

They are coming now. It was impossible, from the nature of the words the poet had put into his mouth, or that he had made for himself, that he should speak as another person. Sometimes I forget how multifaceted Yeats is. When the curtain of The Playboy fell on Saturday night in the midst of what The Sunday Independent—no friendly witness—described as 'thunders of applause, ' I am confident that I saw the rise in this country of a new thought, a new opinion, that we had long needed. Oh cathleen the daughter of houlihan. Surely what you learned at your mother's knees has not been so soon forgotten. A feeling for the form of life, for the graciousness of life, for the dignity of life, for the moving limbs of life, for the nobleness of life, for all that cannot be written in codes, has always been greatest among the gifts of literature to mankind. Break in two high over.

We said it, and who will say that Irish literature has not a greater name in the world to-day than it had ten years ago? Cathleen the daughter of houlihan. Patrick [turning round from the window]. Angers that are like noisy clouds have set our hearts abeat; But we have all bent low and low and kissed the quiet feet. Father Dineen's Tobar Draoidheachta, and Dr. Hyde's An Posadh, and a chronicle play about Hugh O'Neill, and, I think, some other plays, were seen by immense audiences.

We playwrights can only thank these players, who have given us the delight of seeing our work so well performed, working with so much enthusiasm, with so much patience, that they have found for themselves a lasting place among the artists, the only aristocracy that has never been sold in the market or seen the people rise up against it. Certainly it came without a price; it did not take one from one's friends and one's handiwork; but it was like a good woman who gives all for love and is never jealous and is ready to do all the talking when we are tired. Go back to your work and do not stir from it whatever noise comes to you or whatever shape shows itself. I asked him once what Irish novels he liked, and he told me there were none he could read, 'They sentimentalised the people, ' he said angrily; and it was against Kickham that he complained most. The old culture came to a man at his work; it was not at the expense of life, but an exaltation of life itself; it came in at the eyes as some civic ceremony sailed along the streets, or as one arrayed oneself before the looking-glass, or it came in at the ears in a song as one bent [212] over the plough or the anvil, or at that great table where rich and poor sat down together and heard the minstrel bidding them pass around the wine-cup and say a prayer for Gawain dead. How can [154] we create like the ancients, while innumerable considerations of external probability or social utility or of what is becoming in so meritorious a person as ourselves, destroy the seeming irresponsible creative power that is life itself? Tide; For this that all that.

Go down before I lay my hands upon you. I have written no play about marriage, and the Independent Theatre died some twelve years ago, and L'Intruse might be played in a nursery with no worse effects than a little depression of spirits. What is there left for us, that have seen the newly-discovered stability of things changed from an enthusiasm to a weariness, but to labour with a high heart, though it may be with weak hands, to rediscover an art of the theatre that shall be joyful, fantastic, extravagant, whimsical, beautiful, resonant, and altogether reckless? It is not the art of Mr. Colum, born of the people, and when at his best looking at the town and not the country with strange eyes, nor the art of Mr. Synge spending [192] weeks and months in remote places talking Irish to fishers and islanders. Peter [offering the shilling]. The Eloquent Dempsey, by William Boyle. He puts bag on table and goes over and leans against the chimney-jamb.

You drank the first, Cuchulain. All Irish writers have to choose whether they will write as the upper [91] classes have done, not to express but to exploit this country; or join the intellectual movement which has raised the cry that was heard in Russia in the seventies, the cry 'to the people. But the meaning of the book may be different, for only fools and women have thoughts like that; their thoughts were [11] never written upon the walls of Babylon. The Irish Literary Theatre has given place to a company of Irish actors. Leagerie is brave, and Conal is brave. Literature is, to my mind, the great teaching power of the world, the ultimate creator of all values, and it is this, not only in the sacred books whose power everybody acknowledges, but by every movement of imagination in song or story or drama that height of intensity and sincerity has made literature at all. Philip Carr, whose revivals of Elizabethan plays and old comedies have been the finest things one could see in a London theatre, spent three hundred pounds and took twelve pounds during his last week; but here in Ireland enthusiasm can do half the work, and nobody is accustomed to get much money, and even Mr. Carr's inexpensive scenery costs more than our simple decorations. The Mineral Workers, by William Boyle.

I am come to praise you and to put courage into you, Cuchulain, as a wife should, that they may not take the championship of the men of Ireland from you. All fine literature is the disinterested contemplation or expression of life, but hardly any Irish writer can liberate his mind sufficiently from questions of practical reform for this contemplation. Old John Cahel would sooner have kept a share of this a while longer. And they all began to mock him, and repeat his own words that he had taught them—. Yeats, being the talented wordsmith that he is, manages to capture the lilt of Western Irish dialogue perfectly. Do not call the white-scarfed riders To the burying that shall be to-morrow. We are now fairly satisfied with the representation of peasant life, and we can afford to give the greater part of our attention to other expressions of our art and of our life.

But every morning, just before the dawn, I go out and cut the nets with my shears, and the angels fly away. You have had your last disputation. These plays will be given at the Antient Concert Rooms at the end of October, but the National Theatrical Company will repeat their successes with new work in a very little hall they have hired in Camden Street. A few miles had divided the [208] sixteenth century, with its equality of culture, of good taste, from the twentieth, where if a man has fine taste he has either been born to leisure and opportunity or has in him an energy that is genius. Cathleen Ni Houlihan is a mystical old woman who appears in the house of a family preparing for their son's marriage. Page 177, "monotous" changed to "monotonous" (monotonous to an ear). Plus, Maud Gonne played Cathleen when it first opened, and I just love the whole unrequited love thing Yeats had with her. My dear Lady Gregory, —. But I have locked the visions into heaven and turned the key upon them. You want somebody to get up an argument with.

It is difficult, for they are trying to re-discover an art that is only remembered or half-remembered in ships and in hovels and among wandering tribes of uncivilised men, and they have to make their experiment with singers who have been trained by a method of teaching that professes to change a human being into a musical instrument, a creation of science, 'something other than human life. ' Life will put living bodies in their place till new image-brokers have set up their benches. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. That will make them see that it belongs to all of us. Deirdre, by A. E., The Racing Lug, by Mr. Cousins, The Foundations, by Mr. Ryan, and my Pot of Broth, and Cathleen ni Houlihan, were repeated, but no new plays were produced until March 14th, when Lady Gregory's Twenty-five and my Hour-Glass, drew a good audience. He seizes the FOOL by the shoulders, and begins to force him out through the door, then suddenly changes his mind. ] The Last Feast of the Fianna, by Alice Milligan. Through an accident it had been very badly rehearsed, but his own acting made amends.

A Fenian ballad-singer partly converts a policeman, and is it not unwise under any circumstances to show a policeman in so favourable a light? For men were born to pray. Nor did I doubt the entire truth of what she said to me, for my head was full of fables that I had no longer the knowledge and emotion to write. Indeed, it is in life itself in England that one finds the dominion of what is not human life. A man with a red beard came where we were sitting, and as he passed me he cried out that they were taking a golden helmet or some such thing from you and denying you the championship of Ireland. The critical mind of Ireland [152] is far more subjugated than the critical mind of England by the phantoms and misapprehensions of politics and social necessity, but the life of Ireland has rejected them more resolutely. Now, there were no schoolmasters in those times, but it was the priests taught the people; and as this man was the cleverest in Ireland all the foreign kings sent their sons to him as long as he had house-room to give them. If we were not certain of law we would not feel the struggle, the drama, but the subject of art is not law, which is a kind of death, but the praise of life, and it has no commandments that are not positive. Again, we were disordering the squads, the muskets might not all point in the same direction. In time, I think, we can make the poetical play a living dramatic form again, and the training our actors will get from plays of country life, with its unchanging outline, its abundant speech, its extravagance of thought, will help to establish a school of imaginative acting.

Eros, into whose mouth Chaucer, one doubts not, puts arguments that he had heard from his readers and listeners, objected to Chaucer's art in the interests of pedantic mediæval moralising; the contemporaries of Schiller commended him for reflecting vague romantic types from the sentimental literature of his predecessors; and those who object to the peasant as he is seen in the Abbey Theatre have their imaginations full of what is least observant and most sentimental in the Irish novelists. The fruit of the tree that was in Eden grows out of a flower full of scent, rounds and ripens, until at last the little stem, that brought to it the sap out of the tree, dries up and breaks, and the fruit rots upon the ground. They are gathering to help me now. I have made it into a drinking-cup that it may belong to all. You could not keep it for yourself, and so you threw it away that nobody else might have it. I love Henry Merritt's analysis which sees Cathleen as a vampire. The other day I saw Sara Bernhardt and De Max in Phèdre, and understood where Mr. Fay, who stage-manages the National Theatrical Company, had gone for his model. He goes towards the door, but stops with his eyes fixed on the hour-glass. ] One of his great triumphs was in argument, and he would go on till he proved to you that black was white, and then when you gave in, for no one could beat him in talk, he would turn round and show you that white was black, or may be that there was no colour at all in the world. When shall the stars be.

I took up an anthology of Irish verse that I edited some ten years ago, and I found them there, and I think they were a chief part of an old fight over the policy of the New Irish Library. If one could get them, I thought, one could draw to oneself the apathetic people who are in every country, and people who don't know what they like till somebody tells them. There are no horses in it. Men who would turn such a man out of a club bring their wives and daughters to look at him with admiration upon the stage, so demoralizing is a drama that has no [119] intellectual tradition behind it.

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. They had not learned to go wrong. Yeats believed in the purity of the Irish people, in the image of the honest and intellectual peasant, who cared more about abstract things like duty towards the country rather than about material things like money.