CRITICAL journalism and the arts must be wary of each other and must recognise the legitimacy and limitations of each other's function, the editor of The Irish Times told the Yeats Summer School yesterday.
Mr Conor Brady opened the 37th annual summer school in Sligo, attended by more than 100 students from 17 countries, at the Hawk's Well Theatre yesterday.
While there must be tension between the spheres of art and journalism, there must be a balance of influence too, he said. "If art becomes impervious to criticism it can lose its ability to communicate with the public. On the other hand, if critical journalism becomes too influential it subverts the relationship between the artist and the public.
"I shudder to think that The Irish Times should ever have, or seek to have, the role in relation to theatre which the New York Times can have in relation to productions on Broadway or with regard to the sales success of published literary work."
Mr Brady had earlier described how Mr R. M. Smyllie, editor of The Irish Times from 1934 to 1954, and a Sligo man, had laid the foundations of critical arts journalism within the newspaper.
It was Smyllie who conceived the notion that the newspaper which was serious about its politics, world news and coverage of the affairs of state should also be serious in its coverage of literature and the arts.
Smyllie built a coterie of literary and artistic figures around him at the Irish Times in the 1930s and 1940s, including novelist Brinsley MacNamara, poet Padraic Fallon, writer Lynn Doyle, poets F.R. Higgins, Donagh MacDonagh and, Patrick Kavanagh, and painters and sculptors like Willie Conor, Harry Kernoff and Jerome Connor.
While Yeats saw little of his work appear in The Irish Times, his best known contribution to it was the poem, September 1913, an intensely political statement for which the newspaper was the appropriate public notice board. It was published on September 8th within the context of a raging argument over the funding of a proposed art gallery in Dublin.
It would appear that the two Sligo men, poet and newspaper editor, had their tensions, said Mr Brady. In his 1934 poem, Why Should Old Men not be Mad?, Yeats wrote of "A likely lad, that shad a sound fly fisher's wrist" who "turned to a drunken journalist". Several authorities had said this was a reference to Smyllie.
If it was, said Mr Brady, it was unjust. Smyllie suffered from diabetes and from health problems probably associated with his years of privation in a German internment camp during the first World War.
But it was 15 years after Yeats wrote those lines that Smyllie's health broke down. In the meantime, his inspired editorship fashioned The Irish Times as a newspaper with a deep commitment to writing and literature.
"Smyllie's objective was not a dogmatic or prescriptive form of criticism," Mr Brady said. "Rather it was grounded in the notion that the arts, and literature in particular, should be enjoyable band accessible to individuals of average intellect and discernment, and that for any one view of an artistic work there might well be other equally valid but contradictory views."
The president of the Yeats Society, Ms Maura McTighe, said this was the first event to take place in the newly refurbished Hawk's Well Theatre. Summer schools, she said, were "the best kind of interpretative centre", and students at them were "the best kind of tourists".
Yeats could never have accepted W. H. Auden's contention that "poetry makes nothing happen", the Very Rev Dr Richard Clarke, Dean of Cork, said at Evensong in Drumcliff church to mark the opening of the school.
The most celebrated evidence of that lies in his poem Cathleen Ni Houlihan. "For me, it is of crucial importance that liturgy - and poetry - can at one and the same time make nothing happen, and yet also provide the potential for anything and everything to happen to that participant," he said.
Continuing to compare poetry and liturgy, he said: "Liturgy without custom and ceremony, without resonance and without ambiguity, is not simply opaque, it is downright dangerous. And that, I suppose, is what is so dreadfully wrong not only with our liturgy today but with our country.
"As a community and nation we have lost the ability, if we ever had it, to live with ambiguity, with variety, with subtlety. All we look for in our political life, and all we would wish our politicians to peddle, is an impenetrable arrogance and hatred that will inevitably send people out once again to shoot and be shot. An existence where "the best lack all conviction, while the worst/are full of passionate intensity".