Oddly enough, there was another dramatist, also an Irishman, whose
practice was precisely the opposite of Mr. Shaw's: a shy, nervous man
who permitted himself to be cheated of a position of authority because
of his modesty. John Millington Synge was what Mr. Shaw might have
been had he allowed his nature to run off to dark corners and hide
itself. Synge could not compel himself to climb on to platforms or make
extravagant boasts. He may have had the desire to make boasts, but he
had not the courage to do so. An excellent comrade for an individual
on a country road, he was so nervous in the presence of an audience of
more than six people that he was in danger of physical sickness, and
he may be said to have died of sheer inability to assert himself. Had
it not been that Mr. Yeats was by to do Synge's boasting for him, the
world might never have heard of that singular man of twisted talent.
Mr. Yeats, indeed, boasted so loudly of Synge's gifts that superficial
persons began to believe that Synge was the greater man of the two, and
I remember on one occasion hearing young women, fresh from Newnham,
boldly declaring that Mr. Yeats's chief title to remembrance would
lie in the fact that he had discovered Synge! I have never been able
to convince myself that Synge was a great man of genius; it is not
necessary to convince oneself that Mr. Yeats is a great man of genius:
the fact is obvious. Synge was a man of peculiar and interesting
talent whose work smelt too strongly of the medicine bottle to be of
supreme merit. He was the sick man in literature, and he had the sick
man's interest in cruelty and harshness and violent temperaments. He
had the weak man's envy of strength and the weak man's tendency to
mistake violence for strength. His plays are better than Mr. Yeats's
plays--"Riders to the Sea" is immeasurably better than "Kathleen ni
Houlihan"--but Mr. Yeats is a greater poet than Synge was a dramatist.
I am disinclined to believe that Synge was a _great_ dramatist. He
brought a desirable element of bitterness and acrid beauty into the
sticky mess of self-satisfaction and sentimentalism which is known as
Irish Literature, but I feel that he was lacking in staying-power. He
shot his bolt when he wrote "The Playboy of the Western World," the
chief value of which lay in the fact that it ripped up the smugness of
the Irish people, than whom there are no other people in the world so
pleased with themselves on such slender grounds, and taught them the
much-needed lesson that they are very like the rest of God's creatures.
Synge portrayed the Irish people faithfully as he saw them: he put in
the element of poetry in the Celtic character, but he also put in the
element of cruelty; he put in the wit and generosity, but he also put
in the dullness and the greed; he put in the gallantry, but he also
put in the cowardice; he put in the nobility, but he also put in the
gross brutality. In other words, he saw at the same time the idealism
of Padraic Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh permeated by the incredible
brutality of De Valera's ruffians. He knew the delicate sense of beauty
which suffuses the poetry of Mr. Padraic Colum and he smelt the odour
of the charnel-house that rises from the work of Mr. James Joyce,
and had he been able to keep the two sides of Irish character justly
poised, he would have been a great man of genius; but he was not able
to keep the balance between them. He tended more and more to see merit
in cruelty and harshness, and he turned away from the sensitive and
delicate beauty of Mr. Colum to the sewer-revelations of Mr. Joyce, who
may fitly be described as Rabelais after a nervous breakdown. People
tell me that "Deirdre of the Sorrows," his unfinished play, is the
greatest of all the plays that have been written about that unhappy
and romantic lady; and perhaps what they say is true, for none of the
plays that have been written about her, Mr. Herbert Trench's or "A.
E.'s" or Mr. Yeats's, are in the great line, though all of them are
interesting. But judged by itself or in relation to plays generally,
it does not seem to me to be a great drama nor is it so meritable as
some of Synge's own plays of earlier origin. It marks to me the limit
of his range, and shows signs of drooping energy. Some may say that I
am attributing to failing powers what should be attributed to sickness
and the imminence of death, but I think I am dealing justly with this
odd intruder into the realm of letters when I say that his talent was a
small one and that had he lived for twice as many years as he actually
did live, he would not have produced anything of greater note than he
had written when he died.