XI


There are artists like Byron, like Goethe, like Shelley, who have
impressive personalities, active wills and all their faculties at the
service of the will; but he belonged to those who like Wordsworth, like
Coleridge, like Goldsmith, like Keats, have little personality, so far as
the casual eye can see, little personal will, but fiery and brooding
imagination. I cannot imagine him anxious to impress, or convince in any
company, or saying more than was sufficient to keep the talk circling.
Such men have the advantage that all they write is a part of knowledge,
but they are powerless before events and have often but one visible
strength, the strength to reject from life and thought all that would mar
their work, or deafen them in the doing of it; and only this so long as
it is a passive act. If Synge had married young or taken some profession,
I doubt if he would have written books or been greatly interested in a
movement like ours; but he refused various opportunities of making money
in what must have been an almost unconscious preparation. He had no life
outside his imagination, little interest in anything that was not its
chosen subject. He hardly seemed aware of the existence of other writers.
I never knew if he cared for work of mine, and do not remember that I had
from him even a conventional compliment, and yet he had the most perfect
modesty and simplicity in daily intercourse, self-assertion was
impossible to him. On the other hand, he was useless amidst sudden
events. He was much shaken by the Playboy riot; on the first night
confused and excited, knowing not what to do, and ill before many days,
but it made no difference in his work. He neither exaggerated out of
defiance nor softened out of timidity. He wrote on as if nothing had
happened, altering 'The Tinker's Wedding' to a more unpopular form, but
writing a beautiful serene 'Deirdre,' with, for the first time since his
'Riders to the Sea,' no touch of sarcasm or defiance. Misfortune shook
his physical nature while it left his intellect and his moral nature
untroubled. The external self, the mask, the persona was a shadow,
character was all.

XII


He was a drifting silent man full of hidden passion, and loved wild
islands, because there, set out in the light of day, he saw what lay
hidden in himself. There is passage after passage in which he dwells upon
some moment of excitement. He describes the shipping of pigs at Kilronan
on the North Island for the English market: 'when the steamer was getting
near, the whole drove was moved down upon the slip and the curraghs were
carried out close to the sea. Then each beast was caught in its turn and
thrown on its side, while its legs were hitched together in a single
knot, with a tag of rope remaining, by which it could be carried.

Probably the pain inflicted was not great, yet the animals shut their
eyes and shrieked with almost human intonations, till the suggestion of
the noise became so intense that the men and women who were merely
looking on grew wild with excitement, and the pigs waiting their turn
foamed at the mouth and tore each other with their teeth.

After a while there was a pause. The whole slip was covered with amass of
sobbing animals, with here and there a terrified woman crouching among
the bodies and patting some special favourite, to keep it quiet while the
curraghs were being launched. Then the screaming began again while the
pigs were carried out and laid in their places, with a waistcoat tied
round their feet to keep them from damaging the canvas. They seemed to
know where they were going, and looked up at me over the gunnel with an
ignoble desperation that made me shudder to think that I had eaten this
whimpering flesh. When the last curragh went out, I was left on the slip
with a band of women and children, and one old boar who sat looking out
over the sea.

The women were over-excited, and when I tried to talk to them they
crowded round me and began jeering and shrieking at me because I am not
married. A dozen screamed at a time, and so rapidly that I could not
understand all they were saying, yet I was able to make out that they
were taking advantage of the absence of their husbands to give me the
full volume of their contempt. Some little boys who were listening threw
themselves down, writhing with laughter among the sea-weed, and the young
girls grew red and embarrassed and stared down in the surf.' The book is
full of such scenes. Now it is a crowd going by train to the Parnell
celebration, now it is a woman cursing her son who made himself a spy for
the police, now it is an old woman keening at a funeral. Kindred to his
delight in the harsh grey stones, in the hardship of the life there, in
the wind and in the mist, there is always delight in every moment of
excitement, whether it is but the hysterical excitement of the women over
the pigs, or some primary passion. Once indeed, the hidden passion
instead of finding expression by its choice among the passions of others,
shows itself in the most direct way of all, that of dream. 'Last night,'
he writes, at Innismaan, 'after walking in a dream among buildings with
strangely intense light on them, I heard a faint rhythm of music
beginning far away on some stringed instrument.

It came closer to me, gradually increasing in quickness and volume with
an irresistibly definite progression. When it was quite near the sound
began to move in my nerves and blood, to urge me to dance with them.

I knew that if I yielded I would be carried away into some moment of
terrible agony, so I struggled to remain quiet, holding my knees together
with my hands.

The music increased continually, sounding like the strings of harps tuned
to a forgotten scale, and having a resonance as searching as the strings
of the 'cello.

Then the luring excitement became more powerful than my will, and my
limbs moved in spite of me.

In a moment I was swept away in a whirlwind of notes. My breath and my
thoughts and every impulse of my body became a form of the dance, till I
could not distinguish between the instrument or the rhythm and my own
person or consciousness. For a while it seemed an excitement that was
filled with joy; then it grew into an ecstasy where all existence was
lost in the vortex of movement. I could not think that there had been a
life beyond the whirling of the dance.

Then with a shock, the ecstasy turned to agony and rage. I struggled to
free myself but seemed only to increase the passion of the steps I moved
to. When I shrieked I could only echo the notes of the rhythm. At last,
with a movement of uncontrollable frenzy I broke back to consciousness
and awoke.

I dragged myself trembling to the window of the cottage and looked out.
The moon was glittering across the bay and there was no sound anywhere on
the island.'

XIII


In all drama which would give direct expression to reverie, to the speech
of the soul with itself, there is some device that checks the rapidity of
dialogue. When Oedipus speaks out of the most vehement passions, he is
conscious of the presence of the chorus, men before whom he must keep up
appearances 'children latest born of Cadmus' line' who do not share his
passion. Nobody is hurried or breathless. We listen to reports and
discuss them, taking part as it were in a council of state. Nothing
happens before our eyes. The dignity of Greek drama, and in a lesser
degree of that of Corneille and Racine depends, as contrasted with the
troubled life of Shakespearean drama, on an almost even speed of
dialogue, and on a so continuous exclusion of the animation of common
life, that thought remains lofty and language rich. Shakespeare, upon
whose stage everything may happen, even the blinding of Gloster, and who
has no formal check except what is implied in the slow, elaborate
structure of blank verse, obtains time for reverie by an often
encumbering Euphuism, and by such a loosening of his plot as will give
his characters the leisure to look at life from without. Maeterlinck, to
name the first modern of the old way who comes to mind--reaches the same
end, by choosing instead of human beings persons who are as faint as a
breath upon a looking-glass, symbols who can speak a language slow and
heavy with dreams because their own life is but a dream. Modern drama, on
the other hand, which accepts the tightness of the classic plot, while
expressing life directly, has been driven to make indirect its expression
of the mind, which it leaves to be inferred from some common-place
sentence or gesture as we infer it in ordinary life; and this is, I
believe, the cause of the perpetual disappointment of the hope imagined
this hundred years that France or Spain or Germany or Scandinavia will at
last produce the master we await.

The divisions in the arts are almost all in the first instance technical,
and the great schools of drama have been divided from one another by the
form or the metal of their mirror, by the check chosen for the rapidity
of dialogue. Synge found the check that suited his temperament in an
elaboration of the dialects of Kerry and Aran. The cadence is long and
meditative, as befits the thought of men who are much alone, and who when
they meet in one another's houses--as their way is at the day's
end--listen patiently, each man speaking in turn and for some little time,
and taking pleasure in the vaguer meaning of the words and in their sound.
Their thought, when not merely practical, is as full of traditional
wisdom and extravagant pictures as that of some Aeschylean chorus, and no
matter what the topic is, it is as though the present were held at arms
length. It is the reverse of rhetoric, for the speaker serves his own
delight, though doubtless he would tell you that like Raftery's whiskey-
drinking it was but for the company's sake. A medicinal manner of speech
too, for it could not even express, so little abstract it is and so
rammed with life, those worn generalizations of national propaganda.
'I'll be telling you the finest story you'd hear any place from Dundalk
to Ballinacree with great queens in it, making themselves matches from
the start to the end, and they with shiny silks on them ... I've a grand
story of the great queens of Ireland, with white necks on them the like
of Sarah Casey, and fine arms would hit you a slap.... What good am I
this night, God help me? What good are the grand stories I have when it's
few would listen to an old woman, few but a girl maybe would be in great
fear the time her hour was come, or a little child wouldn't be sleeping
with the hunger on a cold night.' That has the flavour of Homer, of the
Bible, of Villon, while Cervantes would have thought it sweet in the
mouth though not his food. This use of Irish dialect for noble purpose by
Synge, and by Lady Gregory, who had it already in her Cuchulain of
Muirthemne, and by Dr. Hyde in those first translations he has not
equalled since, has done much for National dignity. When I was a boy I
was often troubled and sorrowful because Scottish dialect was capable of
noble use, but the Irish of obvious roystering humour only; and this
error fixed on my imagination by so many novelists and rhymers made me
listen badly. Synge wrote down words and phrases wherever he went, and
with that knowledge of Irish which made all our country idioms easy to
his hand, found it so rich a thing, that he had begun translating into it
fragments of the great literatures of the world, and had planned a
complete version of the Imitation of Christ. It gave him imaginative
richness and yet left to him the sting and tang of reality. How vivid in
his translation from Villon are those 'eyes with a big gay look out of
them would bring folly from a great scholar.' More vivid surely than
anything in Swinburne's version, and how noble those words which are yet
simple country speech, in which his Petrarch mourns that death came upon
Laura just as time was making chastity easy, and the day come when
'lovers may sit together and say out all things arc in their hearts,' and
'my sweet enemy was making a start, little by little, to give over her
great wariness, the way she was wringing a sweet thing out of my sharp
sorrow.'

XIV


Once when I had been saying that though it seemed to me that a
conventional descriptive passage encumbered the action at the moment of
crisis. I liked 'The Shadow of the Glen' better than 'Riders to the Sea'
that is, for all the nobility of its end, its mood of Greek tragedy, too
passive in suffering; and had quoted from Matthew Arnold's introduction
to 'Empedocles on Etna,' Synge answered, 'It is a curious thing that "The
Riders to the Sea" succeeds with an English but not with an Irish
audience, and "The Shadow of the Glen" which is not liked by an English
audience is always liked in Ireland, though it is disliked there in
theory.' Since then 'The Riders to the Sea' has grown into great
popularity in Dublin, partly because with the tactical instinct of an
Irish mob, the demonstrators against 'The Playboy' both in the press and
in the theatre, where it began the evening, selected it for applause. It
is now what Shelley's 'Cloud' was for many years, a comfort to those who
do not like to deny altogether the genius they cannot understand. Yet I
am certain that, in the long run, his grotesque plays with their lyric
beauty, their violent laughter, 'The Playboy of the Western World' most
of all, will be loved for holding so much of the mind of Ireland. Synge
has written of 'The Playboy' 'anyone who has lived in real intimacy with
the Irish peasantry will know that the wildest sayings in this play are
tame indeed compared with the fancies one may hear at any little hillside
cottage of Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay.' It is the strangest, the
most beautiful expression in drama of that Irish fantasy, which
overflowing through all Irish Literature that has come out of Ireland
itself (compare the fantastic Irish account of the Battle of Clontarf
with the sober Norse account) is the unbroken character of Irish genius.
In modern days this genius has delighted in mischievous extravagance,
like that of the Gaelic poet's curse upon his children, 'There are three
things that I hate, the devil that is waiting for my soul, the worms that
are waiting for my body, my children, who are waiting for my wealth and
care neither for my body nor my soul: Oh, Christ hang all in the same
noose!' I think those words were spoken with a delight in their vehemence
that took out of anger half the bitterness with all the gloom. An old man
on the Aran Islands told me the very tale on which 'The Playboy' is
founded, beginning with the words, 'If any gentleman has done a crime
we'll hide him. There was a gentleman that killed his father, & I had him
in my own house six months till he got away to America.' Despite the
solemnity of his slow speech his eyes shone as the eyes must have shone
in that Trinity College branch of the Gaelic League, which began every
meeting with prayers for the death of an old Fellow of College who
disliked their movement, or as they certainly do when patriots are
telling how short a time the prayers took to the killing of him. I have
seen a crowd, when certain Dublin papers had wrought themselves into an
imaginary loyalty, so possessed by what seemed the very genius of satiric
fantasy, that one all but looked to find some feathered heel among the
cobble stones. Part of the delight of crowd or individual is always that
somebody will be angry, somebody take the sport for gloomy earnest. We
are mocking at his solemnity, let us therefore so hide our malice that he
may be more solemn still, and the laugh run higher yet. Why should we
speak his language and so wake him from a dream of all those emotions
which men feel because they should, and not because they must? Our minds,
being sufficient to themselves, do not wish for victory but are content
to elaborate our extravagance, if fortune aid, into wit or lyric beauty,
and as for the rest 'There are nights when a king like Conchobar would
spit upon his arm-ring and queens will stick out their tongues at the
rising moon.' This habit of the mind has made Oscar Wilde and Mr. Bernard
Shaw the most celebrated makers of comedy to our time, and if it has
sounded plainer still in the conversation of the one, and in some few
speeches of the other, that is but because they have not been able to
turn out of their plays an alien trick of zeal picked up in struggling
youth. Yet, in Synge's plays also, fantasy gives the form and not the
thought, for the core is always as in all great art, an over-powering
vision of certain virtues, and our capacity for sharing in that vision is
the measure of our delight. Great art chills us at first by its coldness
or its strangeness, by what seems capricious, and yet it is from these
qualities it has authority, as though it had fed on locust and wild
honey. The imaginative writer shows us the world as a painter does his
picture, reversed in a looking-glass that we may see it, not as it seems
to eyes habit has made dull, but as we were Adam and this the first
morning; and when the new image becomes as little strange as the old we
shall stay with him, because he has, beside the strangeness, not strange
to him, that made us share his vision, sincerity that makes us share his
feeling.

To speak of one's emotions without fear or moral ambition, to come out
from under the shadow of other men's minds, to forget their needs, to be
utterly oneself, that is all the Muses care for. Villon, pander, thief,
and man-slayer, is as immortal in their eyes, and illustrates in the cry
of his ruin as great a truth as Dante in abstract ecstasy, and touches
our compassion more. All art is the disengaging of a soul from place and
history, its suspension in a beautiful or terrible light, to await the
Judgement, and yet, because all its days were a Last Day, judged already.
It may show the crimes of Italy as Dante did, or Greek mythology like
Keats, or Kerry and Galway villages, and so vividly that ever after I
shall look at all with like eyes, and yet I know that Cino da Pistoia
thought Dante unjust, that Keats knew no Greek, that those country men
and women are neither so lovable nor so lawless as 'mine author sung it
me;' that I have added to my being, not my knowledge.

XV


I wrote the most of these thoughts in my diary on the coast of Normandy,
and as I finished came upon Mont Saint Michel, and thereupon doubted for
a day the foundation of my school. Here I saw the places of assembly,
those cloisters on the rock's summit, the church, the great halls where
monks, or knights, or men at arms sat at meals, beautiful from ornament
or proportion. I remembered ordinances of the Popes forbidding drinking-
cups with stems of gold to these monks who had but a bare dormitory to
sleep in. Even when imagining, the individual had taken more from his
fellows and his fathers than he gave; one man finishing what another had
begun; and all that majestic fantasy, seeming more of Egypt than of
Christendom, spoke nothing to the solitary soul, but seemed to announce
whether past or yet to come an heroic temper of social men, a bondage of
adventure and of wisdom. Then I thought more patiently and I saw that
what had made these but as one and given them for a thousand years the
miracles of their shrine and temporal rule by land and sea, was not a
condescension to knave or dolt, an impoverishment of the common thought
to make it serviceable and easy, but a dead language and a communion in
whatever, even to the greatest saint, is of incredible difficulty. Only
by the substantiation of the soul I thought, whether in literature or in
sanctity, can we come upon those agreements, those separations from all
else that fasten men together lastingly; for while a popular and
picturesque Burns and Scott can but create a province, and our Irish
cries and grammars serve some passing need, Homer, Shakespeare, Dante,
Goethe and all who travel in their road with however poor a stride,
define races and create everlasting loyalties. Synge, like all of the
great kin, sought for the race, not through the eyes or in history, or
even in the future, but where those monks found God, in the depths of the
mind, and in all art like his, although it does not command--indeed
because it does not--may lie the roots of far-branching events. Only
that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not
persuade, which does not condescend, which does not explain is
irresistible. It is made by men who expressed themselves to the full, and
it works through the best minds; whereas the external and picturesque and
declamatory writers, that they may create kilts and bagpipes and
newspapers and guide-books, leave the best minds empty, and in Ireland
and Scotland England runs into the hole. It has no array of arguments and
maxims, because the great and the simple (and the Muses have never known
which of the two most pleases them) need their deliberate thought for the
day's work, and yet will do it worse if they have not grown into or found
about them, most perhaps in the minds of women, the nobleness of emotion,
associated with the scenery and events of their country, by those great
poets, who have dreamed it in solitude, and who to this day in Europe are
creating indestructible spiritual races, like those religion has created
in the East.

W. B. Yeats.

September 14th. 1910.

With Synge in Connemara


I had often spent a day walking with John Synge, but a year or two ago I
travelled for a month alone through the west of Ireland with him. He was
the best companion for a roadway any one could have, always ready and
always the same; a bold walker, up hill and down dale, in the hot sun and
the pelting rain. I remember a deluge on the Erris Peninsula, where we
lay among the sand hills and at his suggestion heaped sand upon ourselves
to try and keep dry.

When we started on our journey, as the train steamed out of Dublin, Synge
said: 'Now the elder of us two should be in command on this trip.' So we
compared notes and I found that he was two months older than myself. So
he was boss and whenever it was a question whether we should take the
road to the west or the road to the south, it was Synge who finally
decided.

Synge was fond of little children and animals. I remember how glad he was
to stop and lean on a wall in Gorumna and watch a woman in afield
shearing a sheep. It was an old sheep and must have often been sheared
before by the same hand, for the woman hardly held it; she just knelt
beside it and snipped away. I remember the sheep raised its lean old head
to look at the stranger, and the woman just put her hand on its cheek and
gently pressed its head down on the grass again.

Synge was delighted with the narrow paths made of sods of grass alongside
the newly-metalled roads, because he thought they had been put there to
make soft going for the bare feet of little children. Children knew, I
think, that he wished them well. In Bellmullet on Saint John's eve, when
we stood in the market square watching the fire-play, flaming sods of
turf soaked in paraffine, hurled to the sky and caught and skied again,
and burning snakes of hay-rope, I remember a little girl in the crowd, in
an ecstasy of pleasure and dread, clutched Synge by the hand and stood
close in his shadow until the fiery games were done.

His knowledge of Gaelic was a great assistance to him in talking to the
people. I remember him holding a great conversation in Irish and English
with an innkeeper's wife in a Mayo inn. She had lived in America in
Lincoln's day. She told us what living cost in America then, and of her
life there; her little old husband sitting by and putting in an odd word.
By the way, the husband was a wonderful gentle-mannered man, for we had
luncheon in his house of biscuits and porter, and rested there an hour,
waiting for a heavy shower to blow away; and when we said good-bye and
our feet were actually on the road, Synge said, 'Did we pay for what we
had?' So I called back to the innkeeper, 'Did we pay you?' and he said
quietly, 'Not yet sir.'

Synge was always delighted to hear and remember any good phrase. I
remember his delight at the words of a local politician who told us how
he became a Nationalist. 'I was,' he said plucking a book from the
mantlepiece (I remember the book--it was 'Paul and Virginia') and
clasping it to his breast--'I was but a little child with my little book
going to school, and by the house there I saw the agent. He took the
unfortunate tenant and thrun him in the road, and I saw the man's wife
come out crying and the agent's wife thrun her in the channel, and when I
saw that, though I was but a child, I swore I'd be a Nationalist. I swore
by heaven, and I swore by hell and all the rivers that run through them.'

Synge must have read a great deal at one time, but he was not a man you
would see often with a book in his hand; he would sooner talk, or rather
listen to talk--almost anyone's talk.

Synge was always ready to go anywhere with one, and when there to enjoy
what came. He went with me to see an ordinary melodrama at the Queen's
Theatre, Dublin, and he delighted to see how the members of the company
could by the vehemence of their movements and the resources of their
voices hold your attention on a play where everything was commonplace. He
enjoyed seeing the contrite villain of the piece come up from the bottom
of the gulch, hurled there by the adventuress, and flash his sweating
blood-stained face up against the footlights; and, though he told us he
had but a few short moments to live, roar his contrition with the voice
of a bull.

Synge had travelled a great deal in Italy in tracks he beat out for
himself, and in Germany and in France, but he only occasionally spoke to
me about these places. I think the Irish peasant had all his heart. He
loved them in the east as well as he loved them in the west, but the
western men on the Aran Islands and in the Blaskets fitted in with his
humour more than any; the wild things they did and said were a joy to
him.

Synge was by spirit well equipped for the roads. Though his health was
often bad, he had beating under his ribs a brave heart that carried him
over rough tracks. He gathered about him very little gear, and cared
nothing for comfort except perhaps that of a good turf fire. He was,
though young in years, 'an old dog for a hard road and not a young pup
for a tow-path.'

He loved mad scenes. He told me how once at the fair of Tralee he saw an
old tinker-woman taken by the police, and she was struggling with them in
the centre of the fair; when suddenly, as if her garments were held
together with one cord, she hurled every shred of clothing from her, ran
down the street and screamed, 'let this be the barrack yard,' which was
perfectly understood by the crowd as suggesting that the police strip and
beat their prisoners when they get them shut in, in the barrack yard. The
young men laughed, but the old men hurried after the naked fleeting
figure trying to throw her clothes on her as she ran.

But all wild sights appealed to Synge, he did not care whether they were
typical of anything else or had any symbolical meaning at all. If he had
lived in the days of piracy he would have been the fiddler in a pirate-
schooner, him they called 'the music--' 'The music' looked on at every
thing with dancing eyes but drew no sword, and when the schooner was
taken and the pirates hung at Cape Corso Castle or The Island of Saint
Christopher's, 'the music' was spared because he _was_ 'the music.'

Jack B. Yeats