'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.