The arts are but one Art; and why
should all intense painting and all intense poetry have become not merely
unintelligible but hateful to the greater number of men and women, and
intense drama move them to pleasure? The audiences of Sophocles and of
Shakespeare and of Calderon were not unlike the audiences I have heard
listening in Irish cabins to songs in Gaelic about 'an old poet telling
his sins,' and about 'the five young men who were drowned last year,' and
about 'the lovers that were drowned going to America,' or to some tale of
Oisin and his three hundred years in _Tir nan Oge_. Mr. Bridges' _Return
of Ulysses_, one of the most beautiful and, as I think, dramatic of modern
plays, might have some success in the Aran Islands, if the Gaelic League
would translate it into Gaelic, but I am quite certain that it would have
no success in the Strand.

Blake has said that all Art is a labour to bring again the Golden Age, and
all culture is certainly a labour to bring again the simplicity of the
first ages, with knowledge of good and evil added to it. The drama has
need of cities that it may find men in sufficient numbers, and cities
destroy the emotions to which it appeals, and therefore the days of the
drama are brief and come but seldom. It has one day when the emotions of
cities still remember the emotions of sailors and husbandmen and shepherds
and users of the spear and the bow; as the houses and furniture and
earthen vessels of cities, before the coming of machinery, remember the
rocks and the woods and the hillside; and it has another day, now
beginning, when thought and scholarship discover their desire. In the
first day, it is the Art of the people; and in the second day, like the
dramas acted of old times in the hidden places of temples, it is the
preparation of a Priesthood. It may be, though the world is not old enough
to show us any example, that this Priesthood will spread their Religion
everywhere, and make their Art the Art of the people.

When the first day of the drama had passed by, actors found that an always
larger number of people were more easily moved through the eyes than
through the ears. The emotion that comes with the music of words is
exhausting, like all intellectual emotions, and few people like exhausting
emotions; and therefore actors began to speak as if they were reading
something out of the newspapers. They forgot the noble art of oratory,
and gave all their thought to the poor art of