SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

WITH A NOTE CONCERNING A WALK THROUGH CONNEMARA WITH HIMBY JACK BUTLER YEATS

CHURCHTOWNDUNDRUMMCMXI

PREFACE

At times during Synge's last illness, Lady Gregory and I would speak ofhis work and always find some pleasure in the thought that unlikeourselves, who had made our experiments in public, he would leave to theworld nothing to be wished away--nothing that was not beautiful orpowerful in itself, or necessary as an expression of his life andthought. When he died we were in much anxiety, for a letter writtenbefore his last illness, and printed in the selection of his poemspublished at the Cuala Press, had shown that he was anxious about thefate of his manuscripts and scattered writings. On the evening of thenight he died he had asked that I might come to him the next day; and mydiary of the days following his death shows how great was our anxiety. Presently however, all seemed to have come right, for the Executors sentme the following letter that had been found among his papers, andpromised to carry out his wishes. 

'May 4th, 1908

'Dear Yeats, 'This is only to go to you if anything should go wrong with me under theoperation or after it. I am a little bothered about my 'papers. ' I have acertain amount of verse that I think would be worth preserving, possiblyalso the 1st and 3rd acts of 'Deirdre, ' and then I have a lot of Kerryand Wicklow articles that would go together into a book. The other earlystuff I wrote I have kept as a sort of curiosity, but I am anxious thatit should not get into print. I wonder could you get someone--say ... Whois now in Dublin to go through them for you and do whatever you and LadyGregory think desirable. It is rather a hard thing to ask you but I donot want my good things destroyed or my bad things printed rashly--especially a morbid thing about a mad fiddler in Paris which I hate. Dowhat you can--Good luck. 

'J. M. Synge'

In the summer of 1909, the Executors sent me a large bundle of papers, cuttings from newspapers and magazines, manuscript and typewritten proseand verse, put together and annotated by Synge himself before his lastillness. I spent a portion of each day for weeks reading and re-readingearly dramatic writing, poems, essays, and so forth, and with theexception of ninety pages which have been published without my consent, made consulting Lady Gregory from time to time the Selection of his workpublished by Messrs. Maunsel. It is because of these ninety pages, thatneither Lady Gregory's name nor mine appears in any of the books, andthat the Introduction which I now publish, was withdrawn by me after ithad been advertised by the publishers. Before the publication of thebooks the Executors discovered a scrap of paper with a sentence by J. M. Synge saying that Selections might be taken from his Essays on theCongested Districts. I do not know if this was written before his letterto me, which made no mention of them, or contained his final directions. The matter is unimportant, for the publishers decided to ignore my offerto select as well as my original decision to reject, and for this act oftheirs they have given me no reasons except reasons of convenience, whichneither Lady Gregory nor I could accept. 

W. B. Yeats. 

 * * * * *

J. M. SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME

On Saturday, January 26th, 1907, I was lecturing in Aberdeen, and when mylecture 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 theWestern World, ' then being performed for the first time. After one in themorning, my host brought to my bedroom this second telegram, 'Audiencebroke up in disorder at the word shift. ' I knew no more until I got theDublin papers on my way from Belfast to Dublin on Tuesday morning. On theMonday night no word of the play had been heard. About forty young menhad sat on the front seats of the pit, and stamped and shouted and blowntrumpets from the rise to the fall of the curtain. On the Tuesday nightalso the forty young men were there. They wished to silence what theyconsidered a slander upon Ireland's womanhood. Irish women would neversleep under the same roof with a young man without a chaperon, nor admirea murderer, nor use a word like 'shift;' nor could anyone recognise thecountry men and women of Davis and Kickham in these poetical, violent, grotesque persons, who used the name of God so freely, and spoke of allthings that hit their fancy. 

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

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

II

Thomas Davis, whose life had the moral simplicity which can give toactions the lasting influence that style alone can give to words, hadunderstood that a country which has no national institutions must showits young men images for the affections, although they be but diagrams ofwhat it should be or may be. He and his school imagined the Soldier, theOrator, the Patriot, the Poet, the Chieftain, and above all the Peasant;and these, as celebrated in essay and songs and stories, possessed somany virtues that no matter how England, who as Mitchell said 'had theear of the world, ' might slander us, Ireland, even though she could notcome at the world's other ear, might go her way unabashed. But ideas andimages which have to be understood and loved by large numbers of people, must appeal to no rich personal experience, no patience of study, nodelicacy of sense; and if at rare moments some 'Memory of the Dead' cantake its strength from one; at all other moments manner and matter willbe rhetorical, conventional, sentimental; and language, because it iscarried beyond life perpetually, will be as wasted as the thought, withunmeaning pedantries and silences, and a dread of all that has salt andsavour. After a while, in a land that has given itself to agitationover-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, tillminds, whose patriotism is perhaps great enough to carry them to thescaffold, cry down natural impulse with the morbid persistence of mindsunsettled by some fixed idea. They are preoccupied with the nation'sfuture, with heroes, poets, soldiers, painters, armies, fleets, but onlyas these things are understood by a child in a national school, while asecret feeling that what is so unreal needs continual defence makes thembitter 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 nolonger love, for only life is loved, and at last, a generation is like anhysterical woman who will make unmeasured accusations and believeimpossible things, because of some logical deduction from a solitarythought which has turned a portion of her mind to stone. 

III

Even if what one defends be true, an attitude of defence, a continualapology, whatever the cause, makes the mind barren because it killsintellectual innocence; that delight in what is unforeseen, and in themere spectacle of the world, the mere drifting hither and thither thatmust come before all true thought and emotion. A zealous Irishman, especially if he lives much out of Ireland, spends his time in anever-ending argument about Oliver Cromwell, the Danes, the penal laws, the rebellion of 1798, the famine, the Irish peasant, and ends bysubstituting a traditional casuistry for a country; and if he be aCatholic, yet another casuistry that has professors, schoolmasters, letter-writing priests, and the authors of manuals to make the meshesfine, comes between him and English literature, substituting argumentsand hesitations for the excitement at the first reading of the greatpoets which should be a sort of violent imaginative puberty. Hishesitations and arguments may have been right, the Catholic philosophymay be more profound than Milton's morality, or Shelley's vehementvision; but none the less do we lose life by losing that recklessnessCastiglione thought necessary even in good manners, and offend our LadyTruth, who would never, had she desired an anxious courtship, have diggeda 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, onegot that sense of surprise that comes when a man has said what isunforeseen because it is far from the common thought, and yet obviousbecause when it has been spoken, the gate of the mind seems suddenly toroll back and reveal forgotten sights and let loose lost passions. I havenever 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 aceaseless reverie over the religious and political history of Ireland. Hesaw himself pleading for his country before an invisible jury, perhaps ofthe great dead, against traitors at home and enemies abroad, and a sortof frenzy in his voice and the moral elevation of his thoughts gave himfor the moment style and music. One asked oneself again and again, 'Whyis not this man an artist, a man of genius, a creator of some kind?' Theother day under the influence of memory, I read through his one book, alife of Owen Roe O'Neill, and found there no sentence detachable from itscontext because of wisdom or beauty. Everything was argued from apremise; and wisdom, and style, whether in life or letters come from thepresence of what is self-evident, from that which requires but statement, from what Blake called 'naked beauty displayed. ' The sense of what wasunforeseen and obvious, the rolling backward of the gates had gone withthe living voice, with the nobility of will that made one understand whathe saw and felt in what was now but argument and logic. I found myself inthe presence of a mind like some noisy and powerful machine, of thoughtthat 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 ofsavour than those of a Jesuit professor of literature, or of any otherwho does not know that there is no lasting writing which does not definethe quality, or carry the substance of some pleasure. How can one, ifone's mind be full of abstractions and images created not for their ownsake but for the sake of party, even if there were still the need, findwords that delight the ear, make pictures to the mind's eye, discoverthoughts that tighten the muscles, or quiver and tingle in the flesh, andstand like St. Michael with the trumpet that calls the body toresurrection?

IV

Young Ireland had taught a study of our history with the glory of Irelandfor event, and this for lack, when less than Taylor studied, ofcomparison with that of other countries wrecked the historical instinct. An old man with an academic appointment, who was a leader in the attackupon Synge, sees in the 11th century romance of Deirdre a re-telling ofthe first five act tragedy outside the classic languages, and thistragedy from his description of it was certainly written on theElizabethan model; while an allusion to a copper boat, a marvel of magiclike Cinderella's slipper, persuades him that the ancient Irish hadforestalled the modern dockyards in the making of metal ships. The manwho 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 haddoubted the authority of Scripture. Above all no man was so ignorant, that he had not by rote familiar arguments and statistics to drive awayamid familiar applause, all those had they but found strange truth in theworld or in their mind, whose knowledge has passed out of memory andbecome an instinct of hand or eye. There was no literature, forliterature is a child of experience always, of knowledge never; and thenation itself, instead of being a dumb struggling thought seeking a mouthto utter it or hand to show it, a teeming delight that would re-createthe 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 itwere his fiery heart into his mouth made him formidable. And I havenoticed that all those who speak the thoughts of many, speak confidently, while those who speak their own thoughts are hesitating and timid, asthough they spoke out of a mind and body grown sensitive to the edge ofbewilderment among many impressions. They speak to us that we may givethem certainty, by seeing what they have seen; and so it is, thatenlargement of experience does not come from those oratorical thinkers, or from those decisive rhythms that move large numbers of men, but fromwriters that seem by contrast as feminine as the soul when it explores inBlake's picture the recesses of the grave, carrying its faint lamptrembling and astonished; or as the Muses who are never pictured asone-breasted amazons, but as women needing protection. Indeed, all artwhich appeals to individual man and awaits the confirmation of his sensesand his reveries, seems when arrayed against the moral zeal, the confidentlogic, the ordered proof of journalism, a trifling, impertinent, vexatious thing, a tumbler who has unrolled his carpet in the way of amarching army. 

VI

I attack things that are as dear to many as some holy image carriedhither and thither by some broken clan, and can but say that I have feltin my body the affections I disturb, and believed that if I could raisethem into contemplation I would make possible a literature, that findingits subject-matter all ready in men's minds would be, not as ours is, aninterest for scholars, but the possession of a people. I have foundedsocieties with this aim, and was indeed founding one in Paris when Ifirst met with J. M. Synge, and I have known what it is to be changed bythat I would have changed, till I became argumentative and unmannerly, hating men even in daily life for their opinions. And though I was neverconvinced that the anatomies of last year's leaves are a living forest, or thought a continual apologetic could do other than make the soul avapour and the body a stone; or believed that literature can be made byanything but by what is still blind and dumb within ourselves, I have hadto learn how hard in one who lives where forms of expression and habitsof thought have been born, not for the pleasure of begetting but for thepublic good, is that purification from insincerity, vanity, malignity, arrogance, which is the discovery of style. But it became possible tolive when I had learnt all I had not learnt in shaping words, indefending Synge against his enemies, and knew that rich energies, fine, turbulent or gracious thoughts, whether in life or letters, are butlove-children. 

VII

Synge seemed by nature unfitted to think a political thought, and withthe exception of one sentence, spoken when I first met him in Paris, thatimplied some sort of nationalist conviction, I cannot remember that hespoke of politics or showed any interest in men in the mass, or in anysubject that is studied through abstractions and statistics. Often formonths together he and I and Lady Gregory would see no one outside theAbbey Theatre, and that life, lived as it were in a ship at sea, suitedhim, for unlike those whose habit of mind fits them to judge of men inthe mass, he was wise in judging individual men, and as wise in dealingwith them as the faint energies of ill-health would permit; but of theirpolitical thoughts he long understood nothing. One night when we werestill producing plays in a little hall, certain members of the Companytold 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 chapterout of Rabelais. Two women, a Protestant and a Catholic, take refuge in acave, and there quarrel about religion, abusing the Pope or QueenElizabeth and Henry VIII, but in low voices, for the one fears to beravished by the soldiers, the other by the rebels. At last one woman goesout because she would sooner any fate than such wicked company. Yet, Idoubt if he would have written at all if he did not write of Ireland, andfor it, and I know that he thought creative art could only come from suchpreoccupation. Once, when in later years, anxious about the educationaleffect of our movement, I proposed adding to the Abbey Company a secondCompany to play international drama, Synge, who had not hitherto opposedme, 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 thatthe municipal theatres all over Europe gave fine performances of oldclassics but did not create (he disliked modern drama for its sterilityof speech, and perhaps ignored it) and that we would create nothing if wedid not give all our thoughts to Ireland. Yet in Ireland he loved onlywhat was wild in its people, and in 'the grey and wintry sides of manyglens. ' All the rest, all that one reasoned over, fought for, read of inleading articles, all that came from education, all that came down fromYoung Ireland--though for this he had not lacked a little sympathy--firstwakened in him perhaps that irony which runs through all he wrote, butonce awakened, he made it turn its face upon the whole of life. The womenquarrelling in the cave would not have amused him, if something in hisnature had not looked out on most disputes, even those wherein he himselftook sides, with a mischievous wisdom. He told me once that when he livedin some peasant's house, he tried to make those about him forget that hewas there, and it is certain that he was silent in any crowded room. Itis possible that low vitality helped him to be observant andcontemplative, and made him dislike, even in solitude, those thoughtswhich unite us to others, much as we all dislike, when fatigue or illnesshas sharpened the nerves, hoardings covered with advertisements, thefronts of big theatres, big London hotels, and all architecture which hasbeen made to impress the crowd. What blindness did for Homer, lamenessfor Hephaestus, asceticism for any saint you will, bad health did for himby 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 poetryand philosophy, of invisible warfare, the division of a mind withinitself, a victory, the sacrifice of a man to himself. I am certain thatmy friend's noble art, so full of passion and heroic beauty, is thevictory of a man who in poverty and sickness created from the delight ofexpression, and in the contemplation that is born of the minute anddelicate arrangement of images, happiness, and health of mind. Some earlypoems have a morbid melancholy, and he himself spoke of early work he haddestroyed as morbid, for as yet the craftmanship was not fine enough tobring 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, seestwo funerals and shivers at the future; and in another written on his25th birthday, he wonders if the 25 years to come shall be as evil asthose gone by. Later on, he can see himself as but a part of thespectacle of the world and mix into all he sees that flavour ofextravagance, or of humour, or of philosophy, that makes one understandthat he contemplates even his own death as if it were another's, andfinds in his own destiny but as it were a projection through a burningglass of that general to men. There is in the creative joy an acceptanceof what life brings, because we have understood the beauty of what itbrings, or a hatred of death for what it takes away, which arouses withinus, 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 sweetnessof our exaltation, at death and oblivion. 

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

VIII

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

 '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 thedull sense and the hasty judgment, and the character of the nation has sochanged that it hardly keeps but among country people, or where somefamily tradition is still stubborn, those lineaments that made Borrow cryout as he came from among the Irish monks, his friends and entertainersfor all his Spanish Bible scattering, 'Oh, Ireland, mother of the bravestsoldiers and of the most beautiful women!' It was as I believe, to seekthat old Ireland which took its mould from the duellists and scholars ofthe 18th century and from generations older still, that Synge returnedagain 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 inInnismaan, 'I found that the people had gone to Mass and latched thekitchen door from the outside, so that I could not open it to give myselflight. 

'I sat for nearly an hour beside the fire with a curious feeling that Ishould be quite alone in this little cottage. I am so used to sittinghere with the people that I have never felt the room before as a placewhere 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 thegreyness of the walls, I became indescribably mournful, for I felt thatthis little corner on the face of the world, and the people who live init, 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 hadwandered over much of Europe, listening to stories in the Black Forest, making friends with servants and with poor people, and this from anaesthetic interest, for he had gathered no statistics, had no money togive, and cared nothing for the wrongs of the poor, being content to payfor the pleasure of eye and ear with a tune upon the fiddle. He did notlove them the better because they were poor and miserable, and it wasonly when he found Innismaan and the Blaskets, where there is neitherriches 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 underthe weight of their necessity lived, as the artist lives, in the presenceof death and childhood, and the great affections and the orgiastic momentwhen life outleaps its limits, and who, as it is always with those whohave refused or escaped the trivial and the temporary, had dignity andgood manners where manners mattered. Here above all was silence from allour great orator took delight in, from formidable men, from moralindignation, from the 'sciolist' who 'is never sad, ' from all in modernlife that would destroy the arts; and here, to take a thought fromanother playwright of our school, he could love Time as only women andgreat artists do and need never sell it. 

X

As I read 'The Aran Islands' right through for the first time since heshowed it me in manuscript, I come to understand how much knowledge ofthe real life of Ireland went to the creation of a world which is yet asfantastic 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 thefinding of the young man's body of 'Riders to the Sea, ' numberless waysof speech and vehement pictures that had seemed to owe nothing toobservation, and all to some overflowing of himself, or to some merenecessity of dramatic construction. I had thought the violent quarrels of'The Well of the Saints' came from his love of bitter condiments, buthere is a couple that quarrel all day long amid neighbours who gather asfor a play. I had defended the burning of Christy Mahon's leg on theground that an artist need but make his characters self-consistent, andyet, that too was observation, for 'although these people are kindlytowards each other and their children, they have no sympathy for thesuffering of animals, and little sympathy for pain when the person whofeels it is not in danger. ' I had thought it was in the wantonness offancy Martin Dhoul accused the smith of plucking his living ducks, but afew lines further on, in this book where moral indignation is unknown, Iread, 'Sometimes when I go into a cottage, I find all the women of theplace down on their knees plucking the feathers from live ducks andgeese. '

He loves all that has edge, all that is salt in the mouth, all that isrough to the hand, all that heightens the emotions by contest, all thatstings into life the sense of tragedy; and in this book, unlike the playswhere nearness to his audience moves him to mischief, he shows it withoutthought of other taste than his. It is so constant, it is all set out sosimply, so naturally, that it suggests a correspondence between a lastingmood of the soul and this life that shares the harshness of rocks andwind. The food of the spiritual-minded is sweet, an Indian scripturesays, but passionate minds love bitter food. Yet he is no indifferentobserver, but is certainly kind and sympathetic to all about him. When anold and ailing man, dreading the coming winter, cries at his leaving, notthinking to see him again; and he notices that the old man's mitten has ahole in it where the palm is accustomed to the stick, one knows that itis with eyes full of interested affection as befits a simple man and notin the curiosity of study. When he had left the Blaskets for the lasttime, he travelled with a lame pensioner who had drifted there, whyheaven knows, and one morning having missed him from the inn where theywere staying, he believed he had gone back to the island and searchedeverywhere and questioned everybody, till he understood of a sudden thathe was jealous as though the island were a woman. 

The book seems dull if you read much at a time, as the later Kerry essaysdo not, but nothing that he has written recalls so completely to mysenses the man as he was in daily life; and as I read, there are momentswhen every line of his face, every inflection of his voice, grows soclear in memory that I cannot realize that he is dead. He was no nearerwhen we walked and talked than now while I read these unarranged, unspeculating pages, wherein the only life he loved with his whole heartreflects itself as in the still water of a pool. Thought comes to himslowly, and only after long seemingly unmeditative watching, and when itcomes, (and he had the same character in matters of business) it isspoken without hesitation and never changed. His conversation was not anexperimental thing, an instrument of research, and this made him silent;while his essays recall events, on which one feels that he pronounces nojudgment even in the depth of his own mind, because the labour of Lifeitself had not yet brought the philosophic generalization, which wasalmost as much his object as the emotional generalization of beauty. Amind that generalizes rapidly, continually prevents the experience thatwould have made it feel and see deeply, just as a man whose character istoo complete in youth seldom grows into any energy of moral beauty. Syngehad indeed no obvious ideals, as these are understood by young men, andeven as I think disliked them, for he once complained to me that ourmodern poetry was but the poetry 'of the lyrical boy, ' and this lackmakes his art have a strange wildness and coldness, as of a man born insome far-off spacious land and time. 

XI

There are artists like Byron, like Goethe, like Shelley, who haveimpressive personalities, active wills and all their faculties at theservice of the will; but he belonged to those who like Wordsworth, likeColeridge, like Goldsmith, like Keats, have little personality, so far asthe casual eye can see, little personal will, but fiery and broodingimagination. I cannot imagine him anxious to impress, or convince in anycompany, 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 visiblestrength, the strength to reject from life and thought all that would martheir work, or deafen them in the doing of it; and only this so long asit 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 amovement like ours; but he refused various opportunities of making moneyin what must have been an almost unconscious preparation. He had no lifeoutside his imagination, little interest in anything that was not itschosen 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 hadfrom him even a conventional compliment, and yet he had the most perfectmodesty and simplicity in daily intercourse, self-assertion wasimpossible to him. On the other hand, he was useless amidst suddenevents. He was much shaken by the Playboy riot; on the first nightconfused and excited, knowing not what to do, and ill before many days, but it made no difference in his work. He neither exaggerated out ofdefiance nor softened out of timidity. He wrote on as if nothing hadhappened, altering 'The Tinker's Wedding' to a more unpopular form, butwriting a beautiful serene 'Deirdre, ' with, for the first time since his'Riders to the Sea, ' no touch of sarcasm or defiance. Misfortune shookhis physical nature while it left his intellect and his moral natureuntroubled. 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 wildislands, because there, set out in the light of day, he saw what layhidden in himself. There is passage after passage in which he dwells uponsome moment of excitement. He describes the shipping of pigs at Kilronanon the North Island for the English market: 'when the steamer was gettingnear, the whole drove was moved down upon the slip and the curraghs werecarried out close to the sea. Then each beast was caught in its turn andthrown on its side, while its legs were hitched together in a singleknot, with a tag of rope remaining, by which it could be carried. 

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

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

The women were over-excited, and when I tried to talk to them theycrowded round me and began jeering and shrieking at me because I am notmarried. A dozen screamed at a time, and so rapidly that I could notunderstand all they were saying, yet I was able to make out that theywere taking advantage of the absence of their husbands to give me thefull volume of their contempt. Some little boys who were listening threwthemselves down, writhing with laughter among the sea-weed, and the younggirls grew red and embarrassed and stared down in the surf. ' The book isfull of such scenes. Now it is a crowd going by train to the Parnellcelebration, now it is a woman cursing her son who made himself a spy forthe police, now it is an old woman keening at a funeral. Kindred to hisdelight in the harsh grey stones, in the hardship of the life there, inthe wind and in the mist, there is always delight in every moment ofexcitement, whether it is but the hysterical excitement of the women overthe pigs, or some primary passion. Once indeed, the hidden passioninstead 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 withstrangely intense light on them, I heard a faint rhythm of musicbeginning far away on some stringed instrument. 

It came closer to me, gradually increasing in quickness and volume withan irresistibly definite progression. When it was quite near the soundbegan 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 ofterrible agony, so I struggled to remain quiet, holding my knees togetherwith my hands. 

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

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

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

Then with a shock, the ecstasy turned to agony and rage. I struggled tofree myself but seemed only to increase the passion of the steps I movedto. When I shrieked I could only echo the notes of the rhythm. At last, with a movement of uncontrollable frenzy I broke back to consciousnessand 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 onthe island. '

XIII

In all drama which would give direct expression to reverie, to the speechof the soul with itself, there is some device that checks the rapidity ofdialogue. When Oedipus speaks out of the most vehement passions, he isconscious of the presence of the chorus, men before whom he must keep upappearances 'children latest born of Cadmus' line' who do not share hispassion. Nobody is hurried or breathless. We listen to reports anddiscuss them, taking part as it were in a council of state. Nothinghappens before our eyes. The dignity of Greek drama, and in a lesserdegree of that of Corneille and Racine depends, as contrasted with thetroubled life of Shakespearean drama, on an almost even speed ofdialogue, and on a so continuous exclusion of the animation of commonlife, that thought remains lofty and language rich. Shakespeare, uponwhose stage everything may happen, even the blinding of Gloster, and whohas no formal check except what is implied in the slow, elaboratestructure of blank verse, obtains time for reverie by an oftenencumbering Euphuism, and by such a loosening of his plot as will givehis characters the leisure to look at life from without. Maeterlinck, toname the first modern of the old way who comes to mind--reaches the sameend, by choosing instead of human beings persons who are as faint as abreath upon a looking-glass, symbols who can speak a language slow andheavy with dreams because their own life is but a dream. Modern drama, onthe other hand, which accepts the tightness of the classic plot, whileexpressing life directly, has been driven to make indirect its expressionof the mind, which it leaves to be inferred from some common-placesentence or gesture as we infer it in ordinary life; and this is, Ibelieve, the cause of the perpetual disappointment of the hope imaginedthis hundred years that France or Spain or Germany or Scandinavia will atlast 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 theform or the metal of their mirror, by the check chosen for the rapidityof dialogue. Synge found the check that suited his temperament in anelaboration of the dialects of Kerry and Aran. The cadence is long andmeditative, as befits the thought of men who are much alone, and who whenthey meet in one another's houses--as their way is at the day'send--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 traditionalwisdom and extravagant pictures as that of some Aeschylean chorus, and nomatter what the topic is, it is as though the present were held at armslength. It is the reverse of rhetoric, for the speaker serves his owndelight, though doubtless he would tell you that like Raftery's whiskey-drinking it was but for the company's sake. A medicinal manner of speechtoo, for it could not even express, so little abstract it is and sorammed with life, those worn generalizations of national propaganda. 'I'll be telling you the finest story you'd hear any place from Dundalkto Ballinacree with great queens in it, making themselves matches fromthe start to the end, and they with shiny silks on them ... I've a grandstory of the great queens of Ireland, with white necks on them the likeof Sarah Casey, and fine arms would hit you a slap.... What good am Ithis night, God help me? What good are the grand stories I have when it'sfew would listen to an old woman, few but a girl maybe would be in greatfear the time her hour was come, or a little child wouldn't be sleepingwith the hunger on a cold night. ' That has the flavour of Homer, of theBible, of Villon, while Cervantes would have thought it sweet in themouth though not his food. This use of Irish dialect for noble purpose bySynge, and by Lady Gregory, who had it already in her Cuchulain ofMuirthemne, and by Dr. Hyde in those first translations he has notequalled since, has done much for National dignity. When I was a boy Iwas often troubled and sorrowful because Scottish dialect was capable ofnoble use, but the Irish of obvious roystering humour only; and thiserror fixed on my imagination by so many novelists and rhymers made melisten badly. Synge wrote down words and phrases wherever he went, andwith that knowledge of Irish which made all our country idioms easy tohis hand, found it so rich a thing, that he had begun translating into itfragments of the great literatures of the world, and had planned acomplete version of the Imitation of Christ. It gave him imaginativerichness and yet left to him the sting and tang of reality. How vivid inhis translation from Villon are those 'eyes with a big gay look out ofthem would bring folly from a great scholar. ' More vivid surely thananything in Swinburne's version, and how noble those words which are yetsimple country speech, in which his Petrarch mourns that death came uponLaura 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 hergreat wariness, the way she was wringing a sweet thing out of my sharpsorrow. '

XIV

Once when I had been saying that though it seemed to me that aconventional descriptive passage encumbered the action at the moment ofcrisis. 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, toopassive in suffering; and had quoted from Matthew Arnold's introductionto 'Empedocles on Etna, ' Synge answered, 'It is a curious thing that "TheRiders to the Sea" succeeds with an English but not with an Irishaudience, and "The Shadow of the Glen" which is not liked by an Englishaudience is always liked in Ireland, though it is disliked there intheory. ' Since then 'The Riders to the Sea' has grown into greatpopularity in Dublin, partly because with the tactical instinct of anIrish mob, the demonstrators against 'The Playboy' both in the press andin the theatre, where it began the evening, selected it for applause. Itis now what Shelley's 'Cloud' was for many years, a comfort to those whodo not like to deny altogether the genius they cannot understand. Yet Iam certain that, in the long run, his grotesque plays with their lyricbeauty, their violent laughter, 'The Playboy of the Western World' mostof all, will be loved for holding so much of the mind of Ireland. Syngehas written of 'The Playboy' 'anyone who has lived in real intimacy withthe Irish peasantry will know that the wildest sayings in this play aretame indeed compared with the fancies one may hear at any little hillsidecottage of Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay. ' It is the strangest, themost beautiful expression in drama of that Irish fantasy, whichoverflowing through all Irish Literature that has come out of Irelanditself (compare the fantastic Irish account of the Battle of Clontarfwith 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 threethings that I hate, the devil that is waiting for my soul, the worms thatare waiting for my body, my children, who are waiting for my wealth andcare neither for my body nor my soul: Oh, Christ hang all in the samenoose!' I think those words were spoken with a delight in their vehemencethat took out of anger half the bitterness with all the gloom. An old manon the Aran Islands told me the very tale on which 'The Playboy' isfounded, beginning with the words, 'If any gentleman has done a crimewe'll hide him. There was a gentleman that killed his father, & I had himin my own house six months till he got away to America. ' Despite thesolemnity of his slow speech his eyes shone as the eyes must have shonein that Trinity College branch of the Gaelic League, which began everymeeting with prayers for the death of an old Fellow of College whodisliked their movement, or as they certainly do when patriots aretelling how short a time the prayers took to the killing of him. I haveseen a crowd, when certain Dublin papers had wrought themselves into animaginary loyalty, so possessed by what seemed the very genius of satiricfantasy, that one all but looked to find some feathered heel among thecobble stones. Part of the delight of crowd or individual is always thatsomebody will be angry, somebody take the sport for gloomy earnest. Weare mocking at his solemnity, let us therefore so hide our malice that hemay be more solemn still, and the laugh run higher yet. Why should wespeak his language and so wake him from a dream of all those emotionswhich men feel because they should, and not because they must? Our minds, being sufficient to themselves, do not wish for victory but are contentto elaborate our extravagance, if fortune aid, into wit or lyric beauty, and as for the rest 'There are nights when a king like Conchobar wouldspit upon his arm-ring and queens will stick out their tongues at therising moon. ' This habit of the mind has made Oscar Wilde and Mr. BernardShaw the most celebrated makers of comedy to our time, and if it hassounded plainer still in the conversation of the one, and in some fewspeeches of the other, that is but because they have not been able toturn out of their plays an alien trick of zeal picked up in strugglingyouth. Yet, in Synge's plays also, fantasy gives the form and not thethought, for the core is always as in all great art, an over-poweringvision of certain virtues, and our capacity for sharing in that vision isthe measure of our delight. Great art chills us at first by its coldnessor its strangeness, by what seems capricious, and yet it is from thesequalities it has authority, as though it had fed on locust and wildhoney. The imaginative writer shows us the world as a painter does hispicture, reversed in a looking-glass that we may see it, not as it seemsto eyes habit has made dull, but as we were Adam and this the firstmorning; and when the new image becomes as little strange as the old weshall stay with him, because he has, beside the strangeness, not strangeto him, that made us share his vision, sincerity that makes us share hisfeeling. 

To speak of one's emotions without fear or moral ambition, to come outfrom under the shadow of other men's minds, to forget their needs, to beutterly oneself, that is all the Muses care for. Villon, pander, thief, and man-slayer, is as immortal in their eyes, and illustrates in the cryof his ruin as great a truth as Dante in abstract ecstasy, and touchesour compassion more. All art is the disengaging of a soul from place andhistory, its suspension in a beautiful or terrible light, to await theJudgement, 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 likeKeats, or Kerry and Galway villages, and so vividly that ever after Ishall look at all with like eyes, and yet I know that Cino da Pistoiathought Dante unjust, that Keats knew no Greek, that those country menand women are neither so lovable nor so lawless as 'mine author sung itme;' 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 fora 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 wheremonks, or knights, or men at arms sat at meals, beautiful from ornamentor proportion. I remembered ordinances of the Popes forbidding drinking-cups with stems of gold to these monks who had but a bare dormitory tosleep in. Even when imagining, the individual had taken more from hisfellows and his fathers than he gave; one man finishing what another hadbegun; and all that majestic fantasy, seeming more of Egypt than ofChristendom, spoke nothing to the solitary soul, but seemed to announcewhether past or yet to come an heroic temper of social men, a bondage ofadventure and of wisdom. Then I thought more patiently and I saw thatwhat had made these but as one and given them for a thousand years themiracles of their shrine and temporal rule by land and sea, was not acondescension to knave or dolt, an impoverishment of the common thoughtto make it serviceable and easy, but a dead language and a communion inwhatever, even to the greatest saint, is of incredible difficulty. Onlyby the substantiation of the soul I thought, whether in literature or insanctity, can we come upon those agreements, those separations from allelse that fasten men together lastingly; for while a popular andpicturesque Burns and Scott can but create a province, and our Irishcries 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 thegreat kin, sought for the race, not through the eyes or in history, oreven in the future, but where those monks found God, in the depths of themind, and in all art like his, although it does not command--indeedbecause it does not--may lie the roots of far-branching events. Onlythat which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does notpersuade, which does not condescend, which does not explain isirresistible. It is made by men who expressed themselves to the full, andit works through the best minds; whereas the external and picturesque anddeclamatory writers, that they may create kilts and bagpipes andnewspapers and guide-books, leave the best minds empty, and in Irelandand Scotland England runs into the hole. It has no array of arguments andmaxims, because the great and the simple (and the Muses have never knownwhich of the two most pleases them) need their deliberate thought for theday's work, and yet will do it worse if they have not grown into or foundabout them, most perhaps in the minds of women, the nobleness of emotion, associated with the scenery and events of their country, by those greatpoets, who have dreamed it in solitude, and who to this day in Europe arecreating indestructible spiritual races, like those religion has createdin 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 Itravelled for a month alone through the west of Ireland with him. He wasthe best companion for a roadway any one could have, always ready andalways the same; a bold walker, up hill and down dale, in the hot sun andthe pelting rain. I remember a deluge on the Erris Peninsula, where welay among the sand hills and at his suggestion heaped sand upon ourselvesto try and keep dry. 

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

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

Synge was delighted with the narrow paths made of sods of grass alongsidethe newly-metalled roads, because he thought they had been put there tomake soft going for the bare feet of little children. Children knew, Ithink, that he wished them well. In Bellmullet on Saint John's eve, whenwe stood in the market square watching the fire-play, flaming sods ofturf 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, inan ecstasy of pleasure and dread, clutched Synge by the hand and stoodclose in his shadow until the fiery games were done. 

His knowledge of Gaelic was a great assistance to him in talking to thepeople. I remember him holding a great conversation in Irish and Englishwith an innkeeper's wife in a Mayo inn. She had lived in America inLincoln's day. She told us what living cost in America then, and of herlife 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 hadluncheon 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 andour feet were actually on the road, Synge said, 'Did we pay for what wehad?' So I called back to the innkeeper, 'Did we pay you?' and he saidquietly, 'Not yet sir. '

Synge was always delighted to hear and remember any good phrase. Iremember his delight at the words of a local politician who told us howhe became a Nationalist. 'I was, ' he said plucking a book from themantlepiece (I remember the book--it was 'Paul and Virginia') andclasping it to his breast--'I was but a little child with my little bookgoing to school, and by the house there I saw the agent. He took theunfortunate tenant and thrun him in the road, and I saw the man's wifecome out crying and the agent's wife thrun her in the channel, and when Isaw that, though I was but a child, I swore I'd be a Nationalist. I sworeby 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 youwould see often with a book in his hand; he would sooner talk, or ratherlisten to talk--almost anyone's talk. 

Synge was always ready to go anywhere with one, and when there to enjoywhat came. He went with me to see an ordinary melodrama at the Queen'sTheatre, Dublin, and he delighted to see how the members of the companycould by the vehemence of their movements and the resources of theirvoices hold your attention on a play where everything was commonplace. Heenjoyed seeing the contrite villain of the piece come up from the bottomof the gulch, hurled there by the adventuress, and flash his sweatingblood-stained face up against the footlights; and, though he told us hehad but a few short moments to live, roar his contrition with the voiceof a bull. 

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

Synge was by spirit well equipped for the roads. Though his health wasoften bad, he had beating under his ribs a brave heart that carried himover rough tracks. He gathered about him very little gear, and carednothing 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 pupfor a tow-path. '

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

But all wild sights appealed to Synge, he did not care whether they weretypical of anything else or had any symbolical meaning at all. If he hadlived 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 everything with dancing eyes but drew no sword, and when the schooner wastaken and the pirates hung at Cape Corso Castle or The Island of SaintChristopher's, 'the music' was spared because he _was_ 'the music. '

Jack B. Yeats