could remember them; but where is the serious
playwright? Who is there that can be compared with our poets or our
novelists, not only with a Swinburne or a Meredith, but, in a younger
generation, with a Bridges or a Conrad? The Court Theatre has given us
one or two good realistic plays, the best being Mr. Granville Barker's,
besides giving Mr. Shaw his chance in England, after he had had and
taken it in America. But is there, anywhere but in Ireland, an attempt
to write imaginative literature in the form of drama? The Irish Literary
Theatre has already, in Mr. Yeats and Mr. Synge, two notable writers,
each wholly individual, one a poet in verse, the other a poet in prose.
Neither has yet reached the public, in any effectual way, or perhaps
the limits of his own powers as a dramatist. Yet who else is there for
us to hope in, if we are to have once more an art of the stage, based on
the great principles, and a theatre in which that art can be acted?

The whole universe lies open to the poet who is also a dramatist,
affording him an incomparable choice of subject. Ibsen, the greatest of
the playwrights of modern life, narrowed his stage, for ingenious
plausible reasons of his own, to the four walls of a house, and, at his
best, constrained his people to talk of nothing above their daily
occupations. He got the illusion of everyday life, but at a cruel
expense. These people, until they began to turn crazy, had no vision
beyond their eyesight, and their thoughts never went deep enough to need
a better form for expression than they could find in their newspapers.
They discussed immortal problems as they would have discussed the
entries in their ledger. Think for a moment how the peasants speak in
that play of Tolstoi's which I have called the only modern play in
prose which contains poetry. They speak as Russians speak, with a
certain childishness, in which they are more primitive than our more
civilised peasants. But the speech comes from deeper than they are
aware, it stumbles into a revelation of the soul. A drunken man in
Tolstoi has more wisdom in his cups than all Ibsen's strange ladies who
fumble at their lips for sea-magic.

And as Tolstoi found in this sordid chaos material for tragedy which is
as noble as the Greeks' (a like horror at the root of both, a like
radiance at both summits), so the poet will find stories, as modern as
this if he chooses, from which he can take the same ingredients for his
art. The ingred