Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre: A Selection from His Unpublished Journal "Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer"

Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer 1899-1926

PREFACE [The follO'lving preface was written by Joseph Holloway in January 1897, but was inserted in his manuscript for the year 1896.} I FEEL STRONGLY on everything connected with the stage and the art of speech from the audience's point of view, and have an unfortunate habit of expressing truthfully what I feel, whether it pleases or not. I have no prejudices nor fads; all performers appeal to me only on their merits as performers, whether they pose as comedians, tragedians, vocalists, elocutionists, music hall artistes or lecturers. To see whether the mirror has been held up to Nature is the object I always keep betore my mind in writing. . . . It is as an ordinary play-goer, and not in the capacity of a professional critic, that I have given expression to my thoughts. . . . I love the theatre as I love my existence and rejoice exceedingly when I witness art displayed in any of its branches. I am catholic in my tastes, not preferring tragedy to comedy, grand opera to musical farce, provided tllat they are equally good of their respective kinds. With this pronouncement of faith, I open my diary. Josepb Holloway Thur8day, January 5. Went to the Catholic Cammer· cial Club where I heard Mr. P. H. Pearse deliver a lecture on "Irish Saga Literature." The lecturer is quite a young man with a peculiar, jerky, pistol-shot-like delivery that becomes trying to listen to after a time, as it makes him hack his sentences into single words and destroys the sense of his remarks. . . . He was indiscriminantly eulogistic to absurdity over his subject, and the adjectives he employed to describe the. extracts which he read from the Sagas were beyond the beyonds of reason when the stuff so praised became kuown to his listeners. \Voeftll exaggeration or absurd grotesqueness were the only merits they possessed as far as I could see, but then I am not a Gaelic speakiug maniac.... It is this absurd, unmeaning, almost fanati· cal praise that makes the few lovers of the Irish language left us so unbearable alld impractical to all broadminded people. Monday, January 9. Amid most artistic surroundings the members of the. National Literary Society held the first Conversazione in the Leinster Lecture Hall. . . . Mr. W. B. Yeats explained to us his scheme for a national theatre for the production of Celtic drama under the title of "The Irish Literary Theatre," and said it was the intention of the promoters to produce a medieval Celtic drama in verse, and a modem Celtic drama in prose in Dublin in May next. That the scheme may be successful Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer, 1899 5 is my ardent wish. If enthusiasm can command success, then it is assured, as nothing could be more enthusiastic than the manner in which Mr. Yeats has taken up the idea. Saturday, May 6. Attended Mr. \V. B. Yeats's rambling discourse on "Dramatic Ideals and the Irish Literary Theatre," delivered at No.6 Stephen's Green, under the auspices of the National Literary Society before a fashionable and literary audience. Dr. Sigerson presiding. First of all, Mr. Yeats answered effectively the attacks that had been and are being m~de upon his play, The Countess Cathleen, by Frank Hugh Q'Donne11 1 and The Daily Nation, and read a letter from an eminent divine re the correctness and inoffensiveness of its ideas from the Roman Catholic point of view, on which ground it had been bitterly assailed-for personal reasons it would seem. Then Mr. Yeats rambled off without notes to speak of the drama, and mistook the actor's calling for that of the orator or elocutionist in his ideas of how drama ought to be presented. He advocated that poetry should be rhymed or chanted, and that scenery and dress should be subordinated to the words spoken; in short, that good literary writing should appeal to the mind and not the eye, and that acting should not be acting but recitation of the old sing-song order. Certainly Mr. Yeats in speaking acts up to his opinions, as he chants most of his remarks in a monotonous recitative most slumberful in result; only he is so erratic or overladen with ideas, that he continually breaks off at a tangent from a rhymed idea to a commonplace quite foreign to the previous sentence.... I assure you that three gentlemen on...