J.M. Synge and the Ireland of His Time


I

On Saturday, January 26th, 1907, I was lecturing in Aberdeen, and when my
lecture was over I was given a telegram which said, 'Play great success.'
It had been sent from Dublin after the second Act of 'The Playboy of the
Western World,' then being performed for the first time. After one in the
morning, my host brought to my bedroom this second telegram, 'Audience
broke up in disorder at the word shift.' I knew no more until I got the
Dublin papers on my way from Belfast to Dublin on Tuesday morning. On the
Monday night no word of the play had been heard. About forty young men
had sat on the front seats of the pit, and stamped and shouted and blown
trumpets from the rise to the fall of the curtain. On the Tuesday night
also the forty young men were there. They wished to silence what they
considered a slander upon Ireland's womanhood. Irish women would never
sleep under the same roof with a young man without a chaperon, nor admire
a murderer, nor use a word like 'shift;' nor could anyone recognise the
country men and women of Davis and Kickham in these poetical, violent,
grotesque persons, who used the name of God so freely, and spoke of all
things that hit their fancy.

A patriotic journalism which had seen in Synge's capricious imagination
the enemy of all it would have young men believe, had for years prepared
for this hour, by that which is at once the greatest and most ignoble
power of journalism, the art of repeating a name again and again with
some ridiculous or evil association. The preparation had begun after the
first performance of 'The Shadow of the Glen,' Synge's first play, with
an assertion made in ignorance but repeated in dishonesty, that he had
taken his fable and his characters, not from his own mind nor that
profound knowledge of cot and curragh he was admitted to possess, but
'from a writer of the Roman decadence.' Some spontaneous dislike had been
but natural, for genius like his can but slowly, amid what it has of
harsh and strange, set forth the nobility of its beauty, and the depth of
its compassion; but the frenzy that would have silenced his master-work
was, like most violent things artificial, the defence of virtue by those
that have but little, which is the pomp and gallantry of journalism and
its right to govern the world.

As I stood there watching, knowing well that I saw the dissolution of a
school of patriotism that held sway over my youth, Synge came and stood
beside me, and said, 'A young doctor has just told me that he can hardly
keep himself from jumping on to a seat, and pointing out in that howling
mob those whom he is treating for venereal disease.'

II


Thomas Davis, whose life had the moral simplicity which can give to
actions the lasting influence that style alone can give to words, had
understood that a country which has no national institutions must show
its young men images for the affections, although they be but diagrams of
what it should be or may be. He and his school imagined the Soldier, the
Orator, the Patriot, the Poet, the Chieftain, and above all the Peasant;
and these, as celebrated in essay and songs and stories, possessed so
many virtues that no matter how England, who as Mitchell said 'had the
ear of the world,' might slander us, Ireland, even though she could not
come at the world's other ear, might go her way unabashed. But ideas and
images which have to be understood and loved by large numbers of people,
must appeal to no rich personal experience, no patience of study, no
delicacy of sense; and if at rare moments some 'Memory of the Dead' can
take its strength from one; at all other moments manner and matter will
be rhetorical, conventional, sentimental; and language, because it is
carried beyond life perpetually, will be as wasted as the thought, with
unmeaning pedantries and silences, and a dread of all that has salt and
savour. After a while, in a land that has given itself to agitation
over-much, abstract thoughts are raised up between men's minds and Nature,
who never does the same thing twice, or makes one man like another, till
minds, whose patriotism is perhaps great enough to carry them to the
scaffold, cry down natural impulse with the morbid persistence of minds
unsettled by some fixed idea. They are preoccupied with the nation's
future, with heroes, poets, soldiers, painters, armies, fleets, but only
as these things are understood by a child in a national school, while a
secret feeling that what is so unreal needs continual defence makes them
bitter and restless. They are like some state which has only paper money,
and seeks by punishments to make it buy whatever gold can buy. They no
longer love, for only life is loved, and at last, a generation is like an
hysterical woman who will make unmeasured accusations and believe
impossible things, because of some logical deduction from a solitary
thought which has turned a portion of her mind to stone.

III


Even if what one defends be true, an attitude of defence, a continual
apology, whatever the cause, makes the mind barren because it kills
intellectual innocence; that delight in what is unforeseen, and in the
mere spectacle of the world, the mere drifting hither and thither that
must come before all true thought and emotion. A zealous Irishman,
especially if he lives much out of Ireland, spends his time in a
never-ending argument about Oliver Cromwell, the Danes, the penal laws,
the rebellion of 1798, the famine, the Irish peasant, and ends by
substituting a traditional casuistry for a country; and if he be a
Catholic, yet another casuistry that has professors, schoolmasters,
letter-writing priests, and the authors of manuals to make the meshes
fine, comes between him and English literature, substituting arguments
and hesitations for the excitement at the first reading of the great
poets which should be a sort of violent imaginative puberty. His
hesitations and arguments may have been right, the Catholic philosophy
may be more profound than Milton's morality, or Shelley's vehement
vision; but none the less do we lose life by losing that recklessness
Castiglione thought necessary even in good manners, and offend our Lady
Truth, who would never, had she desired an anxious courtship, have digged
a well to be her parlour.

I admired though we were always quarrelling on some matter, J.F. Taylor,
the orator, who died just before the first controversy over these plays.
It often seemed to me that when he spoke Ireland herself had spoken, one
got that sense of surprise that comes when a man has said what is
unforeseen because it is far from the common thought, and yet obvious
because when it has been spoken, the gate of the mind seems suddenly to
roll back and reveal forgotten sights and let loose lost passions. I have
never heard him speak except in some Irish literary or political society,
but there at any rate, as in conversation, I found a man whose life was a
ceaseless reverie over the religious and political history of Ireland. He
saw himself pleading for his country before an invisible jury, perhaps of
the great dead, against traitors at home and enemies abroad, and a sort
of frenzy in his voice and the moral elevation of his thoughts gave him
for the moment style and music. One asked oneself again and again, 'Why
is not this man an artist, a man of genius, a creator of some kind?' The
other day under the influence of memory, I read through his one book, a
life of Owen Roe O'Neill, and found there no sentence detachable from its
context because of wisdom or beauty. Everything was argued from a
premise; and wisdom, and style, whether in life or letters come from the
presence of what is self-evident, from that which requires but statement,
from what Blake called 'naked beauty displayed.' The sense of what was
unforeseen and obvious, the rolling backward of the gates had gone with
the living voice, with the nobility of will that made one understand what
he saw and felt in what was now but argument and logic. I found myself in
the presence of a mind like some noisy and powerful machine, of thought
that was no part of wisdom but the apologetic of a moment, a woven thing,
no intricacy of leaf and twig, of words with no more of salt and of
savour than those of a Jesuit professor of literature, or of any other
who does not know that there is no lasting writing which does not define
the quality, or carry the substance of some pleasure. How can one, if
one's mind be full of abstractions and images created not for their own
sake but for the sake of party, even if there were still the need, find
words that delight the ear, make pictures to the mind's eye, discover
thoughts that tighten the muscles, or quiver and tingle in the flesh, and
stand like St. Michael with the trumpet that calls the body to
resurrection?

IV


Young Ireland had taught a study of our history with the glory of Ireland
for event, and this for lack, when less than Taylor studied, of
comparison with that of other countries wrecked the historical instinct.
An old man with an academic appointment, who was a leader in the attack
upon Synge, sees in the 11th century romance of Deirdre a re-telling of
the first five act tragedy outside the classic languages, and this
tragedy from his description of it was certainly written on the
Elizabethan model; while an allusion to a copper boat, a marvel of magic
like Cinderella's slipper, persuades him that the ancient Irish had
forestalled the modern dockyards in the making of metal ships. The man
who doubted, let us say, our fabulous ancient kings running up to Adam,
or found but mythology in some old tale, was as hated as if he had
doubted the authority of Scripture. Above all no man was so ignorant,
that he had not by rote familiar arguments and statistics to drive away
amid familiar applause, all those had they but found strange truth in the
world or in their mind, whose knowledge has passed out of memory and
become an instinct of hand or eye. There was no literature, for
literature is a child of experience always, of knowledge never; and the
nation itself, instead of being a dumb struggling thought seeking a mouth
to utter it or hand to show it, a teeming delight that would re-create
the world, had become, at best, a subject of knowledge.

V


Taylor always spoke with confidence though he was no determined man,
being easily flattered or jostled from his way; and this, putting as it
were his fiery heart into his mouth made him formidable. And I have
noticed that all those who speak the thoughts of many, speak confidently,
while those who speak their own thoughts are hesitating and timid, as
though they spoke out of a mind and body grown sensitive to the edge of
bewilderment among many impressions. They speak to us that we may give
them certainty, by seeing what they have seen; and so it is, that
enlargement of experience does not come from those oratorical thinkers,
or from those decisive rhythms that move large numbers of men, but from
writers that seem by contrast as feminine as the soul when it explores in
Blake's picture the recesses of the grave, carrying its faint lamp
trembling and astonished; or as the Muses who are never pictured as
one-breasted amazons, but as women needing protection. Indeed, all art
which appeals to individual man and awaits the confirmation of his senses
and his reveries, seems when arrayed against the moral zeal, the confident
logic, the ordered proof of journalism, a trifling, impertinent,
vexatious thing, a tumbler who has unrolled his carpet in the way of a
marching army.

VI


I attack things that are as dear to many as some holy image carried
hither and thither by some broken clan, and can but say that I have felt
in my body the affections I disturb, and believed that if I could raise
them into contemplation I would make possible a literature, that finding
its subject-matter all ready in men's minds would be, not as ours is, an
interest for scholars, but the possession of a people. I have founded
societies with this aim, and was indeed founding one in Paris when I
first met with J.M. Synge, and I have known what it is to be changed by
that I would have changed, till I became argumentative and unmannerly,
hating men even in daily life for their opinions. And though I was never
convinced that the anatomies of last year's leaves are a living forest,
or thought a continual apologetic could do other than make the soul a
vapour and the body a stone; or believed that literature can be made by
anything but by what is still blind and dumb within ourselves, I have had
to learn how hard in one who lives where forms of expression and habits
of thought have been born, not for the pleasure of begetting but for the
public good, is that purification from insincerity, vanity, malignity,
arrogance, which is the discovery of style. But it became possible to
live when I had learnt all I had not learnt in shaping words, in
defending Synge against his enemies, and knew that rich energies, fine,
turbulent or gracious thoughts, whether in life or letters, are but
love-children.

VII


Synge seemed by nature unfitted to think a political thought, and with
the exception of one sentence, spoken when I first met him in Paris, that
implied some sort of nationalist conviction, I cannot remember that he
spoke of politics or showed any interest in men in the mass, or in any
subject that is studied through abstractions and statistics. Often for
months together he and I and Lady Gregory would see no one outside the
Abbey Theatre, and that life, lived as it were in a ship at sea, suited
him, for unlike those whose habit of mind fits them to judge of men in
the mass, he was wise in judging individual men, and as wise in dealing
with them as the faint energies of ill-health would permit; but of their
political thoughts he long understood nothing. One night when we were
still producing plays in a little hall, certain members of the Company
told him that a play on the Rebellion of '98 would be a great success.
After a fortnight he brought them a scenario which read like a chapter
out of Rabelais. Two women, a Protestant and a Catholic, take refuge in a
cave, and there quarrel about religion, abusing the Pope or Queen
Elizabeth and Henry VIII, but in low voices, for the one fears to be
ravished by the soldiers, the other by the rebels. At last one woman goes
out because she would sooner any fate than such wicked company. Yet, I
doubt if he would have written at all if he did not write of Ireland, and
for it, and I know that he thought creative art could only come from such
preoccupation. Once, when in later years, anxious about the educational
effect of our movement, I proposed adding to the Abbey Company a second
Company to play international drama, Synge, who had not hitherto opposed
me, thought the matter so important that he did so in a formal letter.

I had spoken of a German municipal theatre as my model, and he said that
the municipal theatres all over Europe gave fine performances of old
classics but did not create (he disliked modern drama for its sterility
of speech, and perhaps ignored it) and that we would create nothing if we
did not give all our thoughts to Ireland. Yet in Ireland he loved only
what was wild in its people, and in 'the grey and wintry sides of many
glens.' All the rest, all that one reasoned over, fought for, read of in
leading articles, all that came from education, all that came down from
Young Ireland--though for this he had not lacked a little sympathy--first
wakened in him perhaps that irony which runs through all he wrote, but
once awakened, he made it turn its face upon the whole of life. The women
quarrelling in the cave would not have amused him, if something in his
nature had not looked out on most disputes, even those wherein he himself
took sides, with a mischievous wisdom. He told me once that when he lived
in some peasant's house, he tried to make those about him forget that he
was there, and it is certain that he was silent in any crowded room. It
is possible that low vitality helped him to be observant and
contemplative, and made him dislike, even in solitude, those thoughts
which unite us to others, much as we all dislike, when fatigue or illness
has sharpened the nerves, hoardings covered with advertisements, the
fronts of big theatres, big London hotels, and all architecture which has
been made to impress the crowd. What blindness did for Homer, lameness
for Hephaestus, asceticism for any saint you will, bad health did for him
by making him ask no more of life than that it should keep him living,
and above all perhaps by concentrating his imagination upon one thought,
health itself. I think that all noble things are the result of warfare;
great nations and classes, of warfare in the visible world, great poetry
and philosophy, of invisible warfare, the division of a mind within
itself, a victory, the sacrifice of a man to himself. I am certain that
my friend's noble art, so full of passion and heroic beauty, is the
victory of a man who in poverty and sickness created from the delight of
expression, and in the contemplation that is born of the minute and
delicate arrangement of images, happiness, and health of mind. Some early
poems have a morbid melancholy, and he himself spoke of early work he had
destroyed as morbid, for as yet the craftmanship was not fine enough to
bring the artist's joy which is of one substance with that of sanctity.
In one poem he waits at some street corner for a friend, a woman perhaps,
and while he waits and gradually understands that nobody is coming, sees
two funerals and shivers at the future; and in another written on his
25th birthday, he wonders if the 25 years to come shall be as evil as
those gone by. Later on, he can see himself as but a part of the
spectacle of the world and mix into all he sees that flavour of
extravagance, or of humour, or of philosophy, that makes one understand
that he contemplates even his own death as if it were another's, and
finds in his own destiny but as it were a projection through a burning
glass of that general to men. There is in the creative joy an acceptance
of what life brings, because we have understood the beauty of what it
brings, or a hatred of death for what it takes away, which arouses within
us, through some sympathy perhaps with all other men, an energy so noble,
so powerful, that we laugh aloud and mock, in the terror or the sweetness
of our exaltation, at death and oblivion.

In no modern writer that has written of Irish life before him, except it
may be Miss Edgeworth in 'Castle Rackrent,' was there anything to change
a man's thought about the world or stir his moral nature, for they but
play with pictures, persons, and events, that whether well or ill
observed are but an amusement for the mind where it escapes from
meditation, a child's show that makes the fables of his art as
significant by contrast as some procession painted on an Egyptian wall;
for in these fables, an intelligence, on which the tragedy of the world
had been thrust in so few years, that Life had no time to brew her sleepy
drug, has spoken of the moods that are the expression of its wisdom. All
minds that have a wisdom come of tragic reality seem morbid to those that
are accustomed to writers who have not faced reality at all; just as the
saints, with that Obscure Night of the Soul, which fell so certainly that
they numbered it among spiritual states, one among other ascending steps,
seem morbid to the rationalist and the old-fashioned Protestant
controversialist. The thought of journalists, like that of the Irish
novelists, is neither healthy nor unhealthy, for it has not risen to that
state where either is possible, nor should we call it happy; for who
would have sought happiness, if happiness were not the supreme attainment
of man, in heroic toils, in the cell of the ascetic, or imagined it above
the cheerful newspapers, above the clouds?

VIII


Not that Synge brought out of the struggle with himself any definite
philosophy, for philosophy in the common meaning of the word is created
out of an anxiety for sympathy or obedience, and he was that rare, that
distinguished, that most noble thing, which of all things still of the
world is nearest to being sufficient to itself, the pure artist. Sir
Philip Sidney complains of those who could hear 'sweet tunes' (by which
he understands could look upon his lady) and not be stirred to 'ravishing
delight.'

  'Or if they do delight therein, yet are so closed with wit,
  As with sententious lips to set a title vain on it;
  Oh let them hear these sacred tunes, and learn in Wonder's schools
  To be, in things past bonds of wit, fools if they be not fools!'

Ireland for three generations has been like those churlish logicians.
Everything is argued over, everything has to take its trial before the
dull sense and the hasty judgment, and the character of the nation has so
changed that it hardly keeps but among country people, or where some
family tradition is still stubborn, those lineaments that made Borrow cry
out as he came from among the Irish monks, his friends and entertainers
for all his Spanish Bible scattering, 'Oh, Ireland, mother of the bravest
soldiers and of the most beautiful women!' It was as I believe, to seek
that old Ireland which took its mould from the duellists and scholars of
the 18th century and from generations older still, that Synge returned
again and again to Aran, to Kerry, and to the wild Blaskets.

IX


'When I got up this morning' he writes, after he had been a long time in
Innismaan, 'I found that the people had gone to Mass and latched the
kitchen door from the outside, so that I could not open it to give myself
light.

'I sat for nearly an hour beside the fire with a curious feeling that I
should be quite alone in this little cottage. I am so used to sitting
here with the people that I have never felt the room before as a place
where any man might live and work by himself. After a while as I waited,
with just light enough from the chimney to let me see the rafters and the
greyness of the walls, I became indescribably mournful, for I felt that
this little corner on the face of the world, and the people who live in
it, have a peace and dignity from which we are shut for ever.' This life,
which he describes elsewhere as the most primitive left in Europe,
satisfied some necessity of his nature. Before I met him in Paris he had
wandered over much of Europe, listening to stories in the Black Forest,
making friends with servants and with poor people, and this from an
aesthetic interest, for he had gathered no statistics, had no money to
give, and cared nothing for the wrongs of the poor, being content to pay
for the pleasure of eye and ear with a tune upon the fiddle. He did not
love them the better because they were poor and miserable, and it was
only when he found Innismaan and the Blaskets, where there is neither
riches nor poverty, neither what he calls 'the nullity of the rich' nor
'the squalor of the poor' that his writing lost its old morbid brooding,
that he found his genius and his peace. Here were men and women who under
the weight of their necessity lived, as the artist lives, in the presence
of death and childhood, and the great affections and the orgiastic moment
when life outleaps its limits, and who, as it is always with those who
have refused or escaped the trivial and the temporary, had dignity and
good manners where manners mattered. Here above all was silence from all
our great orator took delight in, from formidable men, from moral
indignation, from the 'sciolist' who 'is never sad,' from all in modern
life that would destroy the arts; and here, to take a thought from
another playwright of our school, he could love Time as only women and
great artists do and need never sell it.

X


As I read 'The Aran Islands' right through for the first time since he
showed it me in manuscript, I come to understand how much knowledge of
the real life of Ireland went to the creation of a world which is yet as
fantastic as the Spain of Cervantes. Here is the story of 'The Playboy,'
of 'The Shadow of the Glen;' here is the 'ghost on horseback' and the
finding of the young man's body of 'Riders to the Sea,' numberless ways
of speech and vehement pictures that had seemed to owe nothing to
observation, and all to some overflowing of himself, or to some mere
necessity of dramatic construction. I had thought the violent quarrels of
'The Well of the Saints' came from his love of bitter condiments, but
here is a couple that quarrel all day long amid neighbours who gather as
for a play. I had defended the burning of Christy Mahon's leg on the
ground that an artist need but make his characters self-consistent, and
yet, that too was observation, for 'although these people are kindly
towards each other and their children, they have no sympathy for the
suffering of animals, and little sympathy for pain when the person who
feels it is not in danger.' I had thought it was in the wantonness of
fancy Martin Dhoul accused the smith of plucking his living ducks, but a
few lines further on, in this book where moral indignation is unknown, I
read, 'Sometimes when I go into a cottage, I find all the women of the
place down on their knees plucking the feathers from live ducks and
geese.'

He loves all that has edge, all that is salt in the mouth, all that is
rough to the hand, all that heightens the emotions by contest, all that
stings into life the sense of tragedy; and in this book, unlike the plays
where nearness to his audience moves him to mischief, he shows it without
thought of other taste than his. It is so constant, it is all set out so
simply, so naturally, that it suggests a correspondence between a lasting
mood of the soul and this life that shares the harshness of rocks and
wind. The food of the spiritual-minded is sweet, an Indian scripture
says, but passionate minds love bitter food. Yet he is no indifferent
observer, but is certainly kind and sympathetic to all about him. When an
old and ailing man, dreading the coming winter, cries at his leaving, not
thinking to see him again; and he notices that the old man's mitten has a
hole in it where the palm is accustomed to the stick, one knows that it
is with eyes full of interested affection as befits a simple man and not
in the curiosity of study. When he had left the Blaskets for the last
time, he travelled with a lame pensioner who had drifted there, why
heaven knows, and one morning having missed him from the inn where they
were staying, he believed he had gone back to the island and searched
everywhere and questioned everybody, till he understood of a sudden that
he was jealous as though the island were a woman.

The book seems dull if you read much at a time, as the later Kerry essays
do not, but nothing that he has written recalls so completely to my
senses the man as he was in daily life; and as I read, there are moments
when every line of his face, every inflection of his voice, grows so
clear in memory that I cannot realize that he is dead. He was no nearer
when we walked and talked than now while I read these unarranged,
unspeculating pages, wherein the only life he loved with his whole heart
reflects itself as in the still water of a pool. Thought comes to him
slowly, and only after long seemingly unmeditative watching, and when it
comes, (and he had the same character in matters of business) it is
spoken without hesitation and never changed. His conversation was not an
experimental thing, an instrument of research, and this made him silent;
while his essays recall events, on which one feels that he pronounces no
judgment even in the depth of his own mind, because the labour of Life
itself had not yet brought the philosophic generalization, which was
almost as much his object as the emotional generalization of beauty. A
mind that generalizes rapidly, continually prevents the experience that
would have made it feel and see deeply, just as a man whose character is
too complete in youth seldom grows into any energy of moral beauty. Synge
had indeed no obvious ideals, as these are understood by young men, and
even as I think disliked them, for he once complained to me that our
modern poetry was but the poetry 'of the lyrical boy,' and this lack
makes his art have a strange wildness and coldness, as of a man born in
some far-off spacious land and time.