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, and 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, besides, 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
Judgment, 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.