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?