Once when I had been saying that though it seemed to me that a
conventional descriptive passage encumbered the action at the moment of
crisis. 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, too passive in suffering; and had quoted from Matthew Arnold's
introduction to 'Empedocles on Etna,' Synge answered, 'It is a curious
thing that "The Riders to the Sea" succeeds with an English but not
with an Irish audience, and "The Shadow of the Glen" which is not liked
by an English audience is always liked in Ireland, though it is
disliked there in theory.' Since then 'The Riders to the Sea' has grown
into great popularity in Dublin, partly because with the tactical
instinct of an Irish mob, the demonstrators against 'The Playboy' both
in the press and in the theatre, where it began the evening, selected
it for applause. It is now what Shelley's 'Cloud' was for many years, a
comfort to those who do not like to deny altogether the genius they
cannot understand. Yet I am certain that, in the long run, his
grotesque plays with their lyric beauty, their violent laughter, 'The
Playboy of the Western World' most of all, will be loved for holding so
much of the mind of Ireland. Synge has written of 'The Playboy' 'anyone
who has lived in real intimacy with the Irish peasantry will know that
the wildest sayings in this play are tame indeed compared with the
fancies one may hear at any little hillside cottage of Geesala, or
Carraroe, or Dingle Bay.' It is the strangest, the most beautiful
expression in drama of that Irish fantasy, which overflowing through
all Irish Literature that has come out of Ireland itself (compare the
fantastic Irish account of the Battle of Clontarf with 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 three things that I
hate, the devil that is waiting for my soul, the worms that are waiting
for my body, my children, who are waiting for my wealth and care
neither for my body nor my soul: Oh, Christ hang all in the same
noose!' I think those words were spoken with a delight in their
vehemence that took out of anger half the bitterness with all the
gloom. An old man on the Aran Islands told me the very tale on which
'The Playboy' is founded, beginning with the words, 'If any gentleman
has done a crime we'll hide him. There was a gentleman that killed his
father, & I had him in my own house six months till he got away to
America.' Despite the solemnity of his slow speech his eyes shone as
the eyes must have shone in that Trinity College branch of the Gaelic
League, which began every meeting with prayers for the death of an old
Fellow of College who disliked their movement, or as they certainly do
when patriots are telling how short a time the prayers took to the
killing of him. I have seen a crowd, when certain Dublin papers had
wrought themselves into an imaginary loyalty, so possessed by what
seemed the very genius of satiric fantasy, that one all but looked to
find some feathered heel among the cobble stones. Part of the delight
of crowd or individual is always that somebody will be angry, somebody
take the sport for gloomy earnest. We are mocking at his solemnity, let
us therefore so hide our malice that he may be more solemn still, and
the laugh run higher yet. Why should we speak his language and so wake
him from a dream of all those emotions which men feel because they
should, and not because they must? Our minds, being sufficient to
themselves, do not wish for victory but are content to elaborate our
extravagance, if fortune aid, into wit or lyric beauty, and as for the
rest 'There are nights when a king like Conchobar would spit upon his
arm-ring and queens will stick out their tongues at the rising moon.'
This habit of the mind has made Oscar Wilde and Mr. Bernard Shaw the
most celebrated makers of comedy to our time, and if it has sounded
plainer still in the conversation of the one, and in some few speeches
of the other, that is but because they have not been able to turn out
of their plays an alien trick of zeal picked up in struggling youth.
Yet, in Synge's plays also, fantasy gives the form and not the thought,
for the core is always as in all great art, an over-powering vision of
certain virtues, and our capacity for sharing in that vision is the
measure of our delight. Great art chills us at first by its coldness or
its strangeness, by what seems capricious, and yet it is from these
qualities it has authority, as though it had fed on locust and wild
honey. The imaginative writer shows us the world as a painter does his
picture, reversed in a looking-glass that we may see it, not as it
seems to eyes habit has made dull, but as we were Adam and this the
first morning; and when the new image becomes as little strange as the
old we shall stay with him, because he has, beside the strangeness, not
strange to him, that made us share his vision, sincerity that makes us
share his feeling.
To speak of one's emotions without fear or moral ambition, to come out
from under the shadow of other men's minds, to forget their needs, to
be utterly oneself, that is all the Muses care for. Villon, pander,
thief, and man-slayer, is as immortal in their eyes, and illustrates in
the cry of his ruin as great a truth as Dante in abstract ecstasy, and
touches our compassion more. All art is the disengaging of a soul from
place and history, its suspension in a beautiful or terrible light, to
await the Judgement, 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 like Keats, or Kerry and Galway villages, and so vividly that
ever after I shall look at all with like eyes, and yet I know that Cino
da Pistoia thought Dante unjust, that Keats knew no Greek, that those
country men and women are neither so lovable nor so lawless as 'mine
author sung it me;' that I have added to my being, not my knowledge.