I attack things that are as dear to many as some holy image carried
hither and thither by some broken clan, and can but say that I have felt
in my body the affections I disturb, and believed that if I could raise
them into contemplation I would make possible a literature, that,
finding its subject-matter all ready in men's minds, would be, not as
ours is, an interest for scholars, but the possession of a people. I
have founded societies with this aim, and was indeed founding one in
Paris when I first met with J. M. Synge, and I have known what it is to
be changed by that I would have changed, till I became argumentative and
unmannerly, hating men even in daily life for their opinions. And though
I was never convinced that the anatomies of last year's leaves are a
living forest, nor thought a continual apologetic could do other than
make the soul a vapour and the body a stone; nor believed that
literature can be made by anything but by what is still blind and dumb
within ourselves, I have had to learn how hard in one who lives where
forms of expression and habits of thought have been born, not for the
pleasure of begetting but for the public good, is that purification from
insincerity, vanity, malignity, arrogance, which is the discovery of
style. But it became possible to live when I had learnt all I had not
learnt in shaping words, in defending Synge against his enemies, and
knew that rich energies, fine, turbulent or gracious thoughts, whether
in life or letters, are but love-children.
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
craftsmanship 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 twenty-fifth birthday, he wonders
if the twenty-five 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?