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Around 1900, Yeats dreamed and put into practice the national theatre that could lead the crowds into a unified nation. And the theatre he imagined was essentially an occult one in which audience’s minds flow into each other and become one Great Mind professed in the doctrines of
‘Magic’ (1901).
After the performances of Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen (1903) and Padriac Column’s The Saxon Shillin’ (1903), Arthur Griffith attacked Yeats for not serving the nationalist’s cause. The ensuing debates around “the national art versus nationalist propaganda” infuriated Yeats, throwing
down his hope for the middle and lower-middle classes. The attack and riots that lasted for a week after the performances of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (1907), and after that the Hugh Lane controversy, deepened his anger towards them. So some poems that is included in
from The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910) and Responsibilities (1914) are full of the crowds, who pull down the high aristocratic values, laying them as “one common level.”
As Yeats’s hope for the crowds vanished, his early theatre project that wanted mass mobilization into a nation changed into the unpopular theatre and an audience like a secret society. He began his work with the Irish theatre by theorizing that a popular nationalist theatre would be an occult one, but by 1915 he desired a theatre as occult precisely because it was not popular. The major difference between the two was the scale on which they operated, namely the nation versus the aristocratic drawing room.