I
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 countrymen 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.'