the Englishman acquired all his habits, all his positive and
negative qualities, together with that fear of death which we know
oppressed Dr. Johnson; and though the last hundred years have
much blunted his characteristics, the pattern still remains. He
is still given to much self-contemplation in its various forms
of self-complacency, self-examination, self-condemnation, and
self-exultation. He talks continually of himself; deprived of that
subject and of what is akin to it, he is a silent man. Not to be
the subject of conversation, neither to be praised nor abused, is
to him a disconcerting experience. He is not vain; it is merely
that his occupation is gone. The Americans are too busy with their
own growing fortunes to remember his existence, and for that reason
he is, here in New York, either so gentle and sad or so peppery and
quarrelsome as to be quite unrecognizable. He is no longer himself.
In his own country he is an unwearied egotist. When pleased it
is with himself, when displeased it is still with himself. With
his neighbours he is often sulky; yet his worst quarrels are with
himself, and therefore the hardest to reconcile. His variations are
variations not of idea, but of mood. The French live in a ferment
of opinion; it is their atmosphere--man contending against man with
noise, vociferation, oratory, and much action and movement. Among
the English there is always the silence of inward communing, the
stillness of a people overweighted with meditation. In France new
schools of art and movements in literature are the triumphs or--it
may be--the eccentricities and freaks of the logical process. In
England such movements mean the welcome or unwelcome emergence into
light of a new species. French impressionism was ushered into the
world with loud argument. Turner’s art was something inscrutable
and mysterious, the expression of a temperament that did not
argue and looked for no converts. Under any strong excitement the
Englishman withdraws into himself as into the security of his own
home. The Frenchman, on the contrary, gets away from himself
into the world of friends and ideas and starts a propaganda to
embrace the world. He seeks to impress; his literature and art
are full of dramatic surprises, while English art and literature
have always avoided startling effects; and, if they impress, do
so accidentally, as a tall mountain might the people who lived
in the valley. They continually spring forth from the mysterious
depths of personality, and, concerning themselves only with moods
of feeling, rely for expression on rhythm and music. A personality
cannot explain itself or account for itself; it can only cure its
ache and soothe its irritability by the music--the long-drawn-out
or fantastic music of artistic creation. French art and literature
concern themselves with ideas, and their effort is to make these
brilliant, orderly and specious, using the emphasis and animation
and sonorousness of art rather that its deeper music. So that in
France they watch for a distinguished intellect, while in England
we look for an individuality that is at once powerful, strange,
and intimate, its expression intelligible only to those who have
explored the farthest recesses of consciousness. In France we
find a garden, in England a wilderness. Yet, do not forget, the
gardener will often visit the wilderness in search for new plants
and shrubs. The inductive mind sows that which the deductive mind
plants out and waters.
The egotist is popularly supposed to be a wearisome chatterbox
incessantly talking about himself; and such men do abound in
England. An egotist is any man who habitually and instinctively
makes himself, his likings and dislikings, the sole test of truth;
and it is only when there is some streak of folly or childishness
that he becomes the garrulous chatterbox. Of these men some are
delightful humorists, as was Charles Lamb, or undelightful, as was
his boisterous brother John. Among them are, in fact, all sorts,
including all the bores, cranks and faddists, with the innumerable
company of monologists; including also the great pioneers and
forerunners of thought in poetry and art: the Shakespeares,
Turners, Hogarths, and Constables.
Socially, the egotist, where there is not some great compensating
charm, is a failure; he does not amalgamate; he is ever an alien
in the company, a difficult person. You don’t know whether to
make much of him or drop him altogether. At a dinner-party the
Englishman is apt to be that sad mistake, a guest who has to
be apologized for. Lovers are always poor company except with
each other. This is proverbial, and the Englishman is always in
love--that is, with himself. The sociable man, the welcome guest,
is in love with other people. As it is in the lighter matters of
social intercourse, so it is in graver matters. Gladstone, who, as
a Scotchman in England, was an acute critic, once wrote that the
Englishman needed a great deal of discipline; and this is true.
A community whose members are not spontaneously amenable to one
another’s feelings must have definite rules laid down and enforced
by definite penalties. On the other hand, the Frenchman, with his
social impulses and social training, knows “how to behave.” He
does not need to get rules by heart, for he has intuition; and
where he has not this inner light he turns naturally to reason, the
great sociable spirit, the friendly arbiter, the wise judge before
whom all men are equal. The English egotist has not this social
impulse; neither does he willingly appeal to reason. Latterly
he has become saturated with class feeling, which is neither
sociable nor reasonable; but his original instinct, to which he
constantly returns, is to regard himself as neither a superior nor
an inferior, but different; a humorist who cannot be classed and to
whom no general rules can apply; and such a man will not readily
appeal to a tribunal before which all men are equal.
The Frenchman is a gentleman; he has the finer instinct, the finer
training, and the finer intelligence; wanting these, the Englishman
has to be taught by the cumbrous methods of reward and punishment;
he learns under the whip and becomes more like a well-trained
animal than a reasonable human being. Yet--such is the blessedness
of mere habit--even he ends by doing quite cheerfully what he
learned most unwillingly. Legality, hard-and-fast rules that must
not be broken and that are interpreted in the narrowest spirit,
depressing enough in all conscience although they be, are to him
an enjoyment and a matter of incessant thought; since if they
circumscribe, they also define and secure the spaces of personal
liberty. They are his substitute for ideas, and, if they excite
no enthusiasm and are some of them admittedly bad, all the same,
he makes it his glad duty to obey them. Outside these laws he is
intractable and inclined to be surly, quarrels with his neighbours,
and is as jealous and suspicious of his rights as a dog with a
bone. Yet the Englishman is not unhappy. He has the happiness of a
perpetual self-complacency. Indeed, your self-absorbed egotist will
sometimes extract enjoyment of a kind out of the consciousness that
he is a wet blanket and a perpetual embarrassment and kill-joy;
it does not quicken the pulses, but it flatters his sense of
power, and, strange as it may seem, his sense of hatred. At any
rate, I have met such men both in England and elsewhere. And yet
there is another side to the picture; for this self-contained
egotist, when trained in a good school and taught the amenities
of good behaviour, and when he has received the discipline which
Gladstone said he so much needed, utters the best kind of talk,
since it flows not out of the logic which divides, but out of
the inner personality which makes the whole world kin. There is
in his conversation almost always a flavour of the intimate and
the confidential. He listens well, too, and never contradicts or
seeks to convince. Indeed, it disappoints him to find one opinion
where he thought there had been two. Cultivated Englishmen talking
together are like men sitting in the woods through a long summer’s
night and listening during the intervals of silence to the noise
made by a near-by stream or of a wind among the branches or to the
singing of a nightingale. So always should mortals talk: clamorous
and confident argument are the resource of the intellectual
half-breed.
Out of his habit of mind the egotist gains two valuable qualities.
First of all he learns how to manage himself. This, of course,
is not the same as the high and difficult art of self-mastery,
yet it counts for much that a man should know how to get the best
and leave out the worst from his life, even though that life be
in its essential mean and meagre or vicious and self-indulgent.
Self-management, smooth and adroit, is eminently the Englishman’s
accomplishment. The other quality is still more important; the
egotist makes the best of all husbands if regard be had to the
ordinary woman’s needs; for what are these if they are not all
summed up in the one word--companionship? Now a wife cannot find
a sufficing companionship in her husband’s business concerns. Here
she is beaten by the confidential clerk. There is, however, one
kind of friendship, one kind of companionship, which she alone can
supply in the required abundance; it is when the husband talks of
himself. Here is the chamber into which the wife enters willingly
when everybody else keeps away: the husband’s talk of his pains
and aches and tribulations. There is the pain in his knee or his
elbow, or the never-to-be-sufficiently-indicated pain in his head
or his back, or his cough, and how it differs from every previous
cough in his experience, or bears a dangerous resemblance to some
other body’s cough, together with the innumerable aches of his
wounded and exaggerated self-love. All this wearisome detail about
what is mostly nothing at all and which everybody else flees from,
the “pleasing wife” listens to with an attentive and intelligent
and credulous ear. It is her duty, or so she thinks it, and the
greater the intelligence the greater the credulity. There are
happy wives married to husbands whom it would bore to talk about
themselves, but the happiest woman, in whom content ripens to its
fullest, is the egotist’s wife. Like a bee in a flower, she hides
herself almost out of sight in wifely devotion. He finds happiness
in living in and for himself, she in living out of herself and
in him. Both are pleased. This is English conjugal life as I have
observed it; and here in perfection we have side by side our two
methods of human growth.
SYNGE AND THE IRISH.
The acrimonious dispute carried on in the newspapers over John
M. Synge and his plays is the eternal dispute between the man of
prose and the man of imagination. Synge’s plays, his prefaces to
his plays, and his book on the Aran Islands, like his conversation,
describe a little community rich in natural poetry, in fancy, in
wild humour, and in wild philosophy; as wild flowers among rocks,
these qualities spring out of their lives of incessant danger and
incessant leisure; there are also bitter herbs. When I used to
listen to Synge’s conversation, so rare and sudden, as now when I
read or listen to what he has written, I can say to myself, “Here
among these peasants is the one spot in the British Islands, the
one spot among English-speaking people, where Shakespeare would
have found himself a happy guest.”
The people in Mr. Shaw’s plays would not have bored him, only
because nothing human would have ever bored Shakespeare; but they
would not have inspired him. And though in their company he
might have stayed for a time and been perhaps as witty as Oscar
Wilde or Shaw, the lyrical Shakespeare, the poetical and creating
Shakespeare, would soon have tired of their arid gaieties, and have
gone to sit with the courteous peasants round their turf fires,
that he might listen to their words, musical sentences, musical
names, folk tales, and tales of apparitions, embodying images
and thoughts and theories of life and a whole variegated world
of lovely or bitter and sometimes savage emotion out of which to
construct poetical drama--a very different thing from the drama of
wit or satire or sensationalism whose inspiration is prose.
It was Synge’s luck that he found this people before the modern
reformer had improved them off the face of the earth. Each of us
has his destiny, and this was his. Every event in his life and
every chance encounter did but help to push him along till he
found his real self by living among them in the intimacy of their
family life and in the closer intimacy that came from speaking
with them a language into which they put their inmost feelings and
longings, using English for what was merely external. It was his
destiny to know these people and reveal them, and then die; and
to be denounced as an obscene and indecent writer and artist by a
set of people who will not listen and therefore cannot know, and
whose service to Ireland consists in striving to shout down every
distinguished Irishman.
Synge’s people are primitive in the sense that they are unspoiled.
A lady of fashion among the Chinese would regard the foot of a
European woman as primitive; we think it is unspoiled. Synge’s
offence consists in showing that these people have never been
moulded into the pattern that finds favour with the convent parlour
and in the fashionable drawing-room. New York is proud of its
progress and makes pretensions to high culture; and yet New York
might do worse than turn aside and learn of these humble people. A
young girl told a friend of mine that what she and her companions
always look forward to in Ireland are the long winter evenings
around the kitchen fire when the neighbours come in to talk. I
fancy all New York is in constant conspiracy to cut as short as
possible its dull winter evenings.
In Ireland we are still medieval, and think that how to live is
more important than how to get a living. When I was a young man
if I announced that I intended next morning at break of day to
start on some enterprise of amusement, or it might be of high
duty, the whole family would get up to see me off; but if it were
on some matter of mere commercial gain, I would breakfast in the
care of the servants. It was thus through the whole of Irish life.
If Curran, for instance, fought a duel in Phœnix Park at some
unearthly hour, five hundred sleepy Dublin citizens would rouse
themselves out of their beds and be there to see the fight, to
witness the courage of the combatants and enjoy the wit of Curran,
that never failed when danger threatened--and in those days and in
that country people shot to kill. We Irish are still what we’ve
always been, a people of leisure; like people sitting at a play, we
watch the game of life, we enjoy our neighbours, whether we love or
hate them.
Because of this enjoyment of the spectacle of life, we have
produced the ablest dramatists of latter-day England: Farquhar,
Goldsmith, Sheridan, Oscar Wilde, G. B. Shaw, and finally John
Synge. And of these, Synge, though he died so young, is the
greatest. He stands apart from them all, because he portrays
peasant poetry and passion, and a humour which cuts deep into
the mystery and terror of life. In the other dramatists we have
abundance of wit and liveliness, great powers of enjoyment, and a
commendable contempt for the prudential virtues; but there is also
a denial of spirituality and but a modicum of poetry; the deeper
feelings are never sounded, while their pathos is only a dainty
pity, not the genuine article: not one of them could have written
“Riders to the Sea.” Behind the Irish humour and pity are will
and intellect, as in Swift. In the drawing-room plays of Synge’s
predecessors there is merely the sensitive nature, so easily
chilled by what is not nice, becoming, and charming. Those who
object to Synge’s plays are suffering from the delicate stomach of
people who have lived effeminate lives. Dr. Swift would have come
to Synge’s plays and applauded them.
A good many years ago cultivated people and others began to take
an interest in the Irish peasant; it added something to the gaiety
of London and Dublin drawing-rooms. But socialism and communism,
the labour party and anarchy, had not then been invented to teach
people the seriousness of starving poverty. So Carleton and other
writers set to work to exploit the Irish peasant and make him into
something “fit for a lady’s chamber.” Hence has arisen the foolish
tradition that the Irish are all gentleness and innocence, and,
though wildly amusing, still within the bounds of good taste; hence
also came the comic Irishman, a buffoon without seriousness who
lived by making laughter for his patrons.
Synge’s plays exist to prove the contrary of all this. And yet
there is some truth in the picture. The Irish character has a
side which is turned toward spirituality and poetry, a musical
instrument exquisitely attuned to the beauties of nature and life.
Among this fighting race, square-chinned and with short features,
is scattered another type, with long, oval faces and soft eyes,
born to all hoping gentleness and affection, with imagination fed
on the mysteries of life and death and religion. This type Stella
might have discovered had she not been too English; Swift could
not, because probably he frightened it away. Yet Dr. Goldsmith was
as true an Irishman as Dr. Swift. How vividly Synge knew this side
of the Irish mind is shown in his book on the Aran Islands. The
other side is in his plays.
“A picture,” said Blake, “should be like a lawyer presenting a
writ.” Synge presents us with such a picture. Let us be patient;
people brought up on the literature of good taste cannot be
expected all at once to enjoy the literature of power.
“I can look at a knot in a piece of wood until I am frightened by
it,” so spake William Blake. This is the creative imagination,
and it is that of folklore and of the Aran Islands. These people
know no distinction between natural and supernatural; they believe
everything to be carried on by miracle; and the civilized man who
does not know that behind all science and reason and all moral
systems there is a something transcending all knowledge and which
is a continued miracle of love and beauty is not only incapable of
culture, he is incapable of desiring it. To him the Bible is as
inscrutable as Shelley. These peasants are not as well educated
as, say, Mr. Rockefeller, yet they have this feeling, this feeling
which is the religion of children and poets, and which is not
subject for reason at all--even though it be the source of our
whole intellectual life.
False education is like the pressure which the Chinese mother
applies to the feet of her infant. True education liberates. The
industrial movement would turn these peasants into smug artisans,
without a thought that consoles or a hope that elevates, greedy,
envious, and covetous, seeking only the triumphs of selfishness.
And yet man is naturally a singing bird; sometimes he is singing in
a cage of childish and brutish ignorance; and sometimes, though the
cage be roomy and handsome, he does not sing at all, has not the
heart to do so. True education would liberate him so that he could
sing in the open sky of knowledge and power and desire.
Synge says of these people that they have “some of the emotions
thought peculiar to people who have lived with the arts.” He also
speaks of “the singularly spiritual expression which is so marked”
on the faces of some of these women. And again he says that “they
are a people whose lives have the strange quality that is found in
the oldest legend and poetry.” A priest told me that on his return
from America the servant said she was glad to see him back, “for,”
said she, “while you were away there was a colour of loneliness in
the air.” In these people’s words, as in their lives, is the colour
of beauty, as the blue sky reflects itself in every little pool of
water among the rocks.
As to Synge’s great comedy, “The Playboy of the Western World,”
could Synge have chosen a better type for his hero than Christy
Mahon? Despite certain newspaper critics who have written of the
play, he is neither a weakling nor a fool, but a young poet in the
supreme difficulty of getting born; only in this case the struggle
is a little worse than usual. He has a drink-maddened father of
great strength and most violent passions, whose cruelty, backed
by his strength, has driven away all his family except this young
boy. Of course, Christy has no education, and his circumstances
are altogether so dreadful that to live at all he must live the
life of the imagination, wandering on the hills poaching and
snaring rabbits. Finally he strikes his father with a spade, and
in his terror runs away from home. After travelling for many days
he arrives in Mayo and finds himself a hero; not because he is a
murderer, but because he is a good-looking fellow in distress,
and, as the sequel proves, spirited withal and athletic. His
talk about the murder is a sudden freak of self-advertisement;
no one so cunning as your young poet! Besides, he liked to be
frightening himself. No one really believes it, and the Widow
Quinn is scornfully sceptical; and when, later on, as they think,
he actually murders his father, every one turns against him--his
sweetheart, though it breaks her heart, joining actively in handing
him over to justice.
In every well-constructed drama there is some central point of
interest around which all the other incidents are grouped. The
personality of the girl Pegeen, Christy’s sweetheart, is here the
central interest. She towers over every one, not only by her force,
but by her maidenly purity and Diana-like fierceness; nothing,
neither the coarseness she herself utters in wild humour, nor what
the others say or do, can soil her sunshine. And in the love-talk
between the lovers, he is all imagination and poet’s make-believe,
and she all heart and passion and actuality, which is the peasant
woman’s good sense! It is among peasants of the west of Ireland
that the poetical dramatist must henceforth find his opportunity.
Young gentlemen and young ladies in America have doctrinaire minds;
they have grown up attending classes and listening to lectures in
the atmosphere of a specious self-improvement, and know nothing of
the surroundings amid which this peasant girl grew up straight and
tall as a young tree. Some day people will recognize in this play
Synge’s tribute to the Irish peasant girl. “And to think it’s me is
talking sweetly, Christy Mahon, and I the fright of seven townlands
for my biting tongue. Well, the heart’s a wonder, and I’m thinking
there won’t be our like in Mayo for gallant lovers from this hour.”
The peasants of the west of Ireland are like Christy Mahon; sorrow
and danger and ignorance are their daily portion, yet like
him they live the life of the imagination. Liberate them from
what oppresses, but so that they may still live the life of the
imagination.
Synge’s history was peculiar. He took up music as his profession
and studied it in Germany, Rome, and Paris; and having only a
very small income, for economy’s sake always lived with poor
people. In Paris he stayed with a man cook and his wife, who was
a _couturière_. He told me that they had but one sitting-room, in
which the man did his cooking and the wife her sewing, with another
sewing-woman who helped. When, as sometimes happened, a large
order for hats came in, Synge, who by this time had given up music
for philology, would drop his studies and apply himself also to
hat-making, bending wires, etc. After a year or so he moved into a
hotel, where he met my son, who urged him to leave Paris for the
west of Ireland and apply himself to the study of Irish. Among
these western peasants he thenceforth spent a great part of every
winter, living as one of the family, they calling one another by
their Christian names; and he told me that he would rather live
among them than in the best hotel.
Synge was morally one of the most fastidious men I ever met, at
once too sensitive and too proud and passionate for anything
unworthy. He was a well-built, muscular man, with broad shoulders,
carrying his head finely. He had large, light-hazel eyes which
looked straight at you. His conversation, like his book on the Aran
Islands, had the charm of entire sincerity, a quality rare among
men and artists, though it be the one without which nothing else
matters. He neither deceived himself nor anybody else, and yet he
had the enthusiasm of the poet. In this combination of enthusiasm
and veracity he was like that other great Irishman, Michael Davitt.
Like Davitt, also, he was without any desire to be pugnacious;
resolute, yet essentially gentle, he was a man of peace.
THE MODERN WOMAN
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