No, it is not life.  But there is so much talk just now of getting “down to fundamentals,” of the poetry of the tramp “walking the world,” and the rest of it, that it would be well if we did get down to fundamentals; and this is one thing fundamental—­the tramp is a deserter from life.  He evades the troubled field where great causes are fought; he shuns the battle because of the wounds and the sacrifice; he has no heart for high conflict and victory.  Let him under the cover of darkness but secure his share of the spoils and the world may go to wreck.  Yes, he is the meanest of things—­a deserter.  On the field of battle he would be shot.  If we let him desert the field of life, go his way and walk the world, let us not at least hail him as a hero.

The Repertory Theatre is the nursery of this particular art-cult, and ’twould relieve some of us to talk freely about it.  The Repertory Theatre has already become fashionable, and is quite rapidly become a nuisance.  Men are making songs and plays and lectures for art’s sake, for the praise of a coterie or to shock the bourgeois—­above all shock the bourgeois.  A certain type of artist delights in shocking the bourgeois—­a riot over a play gives him great satisfaction.  In passing, one must note with exasperation, perhaps with some misgiving, how men raise a riot over something not worth a thought, and will not fight for things for which they ought to die.  But he likes the bourgeois to think him a terrible person; in his own esteem he is on an eminence, and he proceeds to send out more shock-the-bourgeois literature; and ’tis mostly very sorry stuff.  Sometimes he tries to be emotional and is but painfully artificial; sometimes he tries to be merry and gives us flippancy for fun.  And we feel a terrible need for getting back to a standard, worthy and true.  Great work can be made only for the love of work; not for money, not for art’s sake, not for intellectual appeal nor flippant ridicule, but for the pure love of things, good, true and beautiful.  With the best of intentions we may fail; and this should be laid down as a safe guiding principle; a dramatist should be moved by his own tragedy; the novelist should be interested in his own story; the poet should make his song for the love of the song and his comedy for the fun of the thing.

VI

We naturally think of the Abbey Theatre when we speak of these things, and as the Abbey work has certainly suffered from overpraise we may correct it by comparison with Shakespeare.  Before the Abbey we were so used to triviality that when clever and artistic work appeared we at once hailed it great.  We did get one or two great things, a fact to note with hearty pleasure and pride.  But the rest was merely clever; and now that we are getting nothing great we must insist, and keep on insisting, that ’tis merely clever.  But let us remember that value of the word great.  Let it be kept for such names as Shakespeare