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.'