Emotion of Multitude by W.B. Yeats — Read

I have been thinking a good deal about plays lately, and I have been / wondering why I dislike the clear and logical construction which seems / necessary if one is to succeed on the Modern Stage. It came into my head / the other day that this construction, which all the world has learnt from / France, has everything of high literature except the emotion of multitude. / The Greek drama has got the emotion of multitude from its chorus, which / called up famous sorrows, long-leaguered Troy, much-enduring Odysseus, and / all the gods and heroes to witness, as it were, some well-ordered fable, / some action separated but for this from all but itself. The French play / delights in the well-ordered fable, but by leaving out the chorus it has / created an art where poetry and imagination, always the children of / far-off multitudinous things, must of necessity grow less important than / the mere will. This is why, I said to myself, French dramatic poetry is / so often a little rhetorical, for rhetoric is the will trying to do the / work of the imagination. The Shakespearean Drama gets the emotion of / multitude out of the sub-plot which copies the main plot, much as a shadow / upon the wall copies one's body in the firelight. We think of King Lear / less as the history of one man and his sorrows than as the history of a / whole evil time.

Lear's shadow is in Gloster, who also has ungrateful / children, and the mind goes on imagining other shadows, shadow beyond / shadow till it has pictured the world. In _Hamlet_, one hardly notices, so / subtly is the web woven, that the murder of Hamlet's father and the sorrow / of Hamlet are shadowed in the lives of Fortinbras and Ophelia and Laertes, / whose fathers, too, have been killed. It is so in all the plays, or in all / but all, and very commonly the sub-plot is the main plot working itself / out in more ordinary men and women, and so doubly calling up before us / the image of multitude. Ibsen and Maeterlinck have on the other hand / created a new form, for they get multitude from the Wild Duck in the / Attic, or from the Crown at the bottom of the Fountain, vague symbols that / set the mind wandering from idea to idea, emotion to emotion. Indeed all / the great Masters have understood, that there cannot be great art without / the little limited life of the fable, which is always the better the / simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the / half-seen world beyond it. There are some who understand that the simple / unmysterious things living as in a clear noon-light are of the nature of / the sun, and that vague many-imaged things have in them the strength of / the moon. Did not the Egyptian carve it on emerald that all living things / have the sun for father and the moon for mother, and has it not been said / that a man of genius takes the most after his mother?