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 farther 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 realise 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
generalisation, which was almost as much his object as the emotional
generalisation of beauty. A mind that generalises 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.
X
There are artists like Byron, like Goethe, like Shelley, who have
impressive personalities, active wills and all their faculties at the
service of the will; but he belonged to those who like Wordsworth, like
Coleridge, like Goldsmith, like Keats, have little personality, so far
as the casual eye can see, little personal will, but fiery and brooding
imagination. I cannot imagine him anxious to impress, or convince in any
company, or saying more than was sufficient to keep the talk circling.
Such men have the advantage that all they write is a part of knowledge,
but they are powerless before events and have often but one visible
strength, the strength to reject from life and thought all that would
mar their work, or deafen them in the doing of it; and only this so long
as it is a passive act. If Synge had married young or taken some
profession, I doubt if he would have written books or been greatly
interested in a movement like ours; but he refused various opportunities
of making money in what must have been an almost unconscious
preparation. He had no life outside his imagination, little interest in
anything that was not its chosen subject. He hardly seemed aware of the
existence of other writers. I never knew if he cared for work of mine,
and do not remember that I had from him even a conventional compliment,
and yet he had the most perfect modesty and simplicity in daily
intercourse, self-assertion was impossible to him. On the other hand, he
was useless amidst sudden events. He was much shaken by the _Playboy_
riot; on the first night confused and excited, knowing not what to do,
and ill before many days, but it made no difference in his work. He
neither exaggerated out of defiance nor softened out of timidity. He
wrote on as if nothing had happened, altering _The Tinker's Wedding_ to
a more unpopular form, but writing a beautiful serene _Deirdre_, with,
for the first time since his _Riders to the Sea_, no touch of sarcasm or
defiance. Misfortune shook his physical nature while it left his
intellect and his moral nature untroubled. The external self, the mask,
the persona, was a shadow, character was all.