The most masterly piece of literary advertising in modern times was
surely Mr. Yeats's enforcement of Synge upon the coteries--or the
choruses--as a writer in the great tradition of Homer and Shakespeare.
So successful has Mr. Yeats been, indeed, in the exaltation of his
friend, that people are in danger of forgetting that it is Mr. Yeats
himself, and not Synge, who is the ruling figure in modern Irish
literature. One does not criticize Mr. Yeats for this. During the Synge
controversy he was a man raising his voice in the heat of battle--a man,
too, praising a generous comrade who was but lately dead. The critics
outside Ireland, however, have had none of these causes of passion to
prevent them from seeing Synge justly. They simply bowed down before the
idol that Mr. Yeats had set up before them, and danced themselves into
ecstasies round the image of the golden playboy.
Mr. Howe, who wrote a sincere and able book on Synge, may be taken as a
representative apostle of the Synge cult. He sets before us a god, not a
man--a creator of absolute beauty--and he asks us to accept the common
view that _The Playboy of the Western World_ is his masterpiece. There
can never be any true criticism of Synge till we have got rid of all
these obsessions and idolatries. Synge was an extraordinary man of
genius, but he was not an extraordinarily great man of genius. He is not
the peer of Shakespeare: he is not the peer of Shelley: he is the peer,
say, of Stevenson. His was a byway, not a high-road, of genius. That is
why he has an immensely more enthusiastic following among clever people
than among simple people.
Once and once only Synge achieved a piece of art that was universal in
its appeal, satisfying equally the artistic formula of Pater and the
artistic formula of Tolstoi. This was _Riders to the Sea. Riders to the
Sea_, a lyrical pageant of pity made out of the destinies of
fisher-folk, is a play that would have been understood in ancient Athens
or in Elizabethan London, as well as by an audience of Irish peasants
to-day.
Here, incidentally, we get a foretaste of that preoccupation with death
which heightens the tensity in so much of Synge's work. There is a
corpse on the stage in _Riders to the Sea_, and a man laid out as a
corpse in _In the Shadow of the Glen_, and there is a funeral party in
_The Playboy of the Western World._ Synge's imagination dwelt much among
the tombs. Even in his comedies, his laughter does not spring from an
exuberant joy in life so much as from excitement among the incongruities
of a world that is due to death. Hence he cannot be summed up either as
a tragic or a comic writer. He is rather a tragic satirist with the soul
of a lyric poet.
If he is at his greatest in _Riders to the Sea_, he is at his most
personal in _The Well of the Saints_, and this is essentially a tragic
satire. It is a symbolic play woven out of the illusions of two blind
beggars. Mr. Howe says that "there is nothing for the symbolists in _The
Well of the Saints_," but that is because he is anxious to prove that
Synge was a great creator of men and women. Synge, in my opinion at
least, was nothing of the sort. His genius was a genius of decoration,
not of psychology. One might compare it to firelight in a dark room,
throwing fantastic shapes on the walls. He loved the fantastic, and he
was held by the darkness. Both in speech and in character, it was the
bizarre and even the freakish that attracted him. In _Riders to the Sea_
he wrote as one who had been touched by the simple tragedy of human
life. But, as he went on writing and working, he came to look on life
more and more as a pattern of extravagances, and he exchanged the noble
style of _Riders to the Sea_ for the gauded and overwrought style of
_The Playboy._
"With _The Playboy of the Western World_," says Mr. Howe, "Synge placed
himself among the masters." But then Mr. Howe thinks that "Pegeen Mike
is one of the most beautiful and living figures in all drama," and that
she "is the normal," and that
Synge, with an originality more absolute than Wordsworth's,
insisted that his readers should regain their poetic feeling for
ordinary life; and presented them with Pegeen with the stink of
poteen on her, and a playboy wet and crusted with his father's
blood.
The conception of ordinary life--or is it only ordinary Irish life?--in
the last half-sentence leaves one meditating.
But, after all, it is not Synge's characters or his plots, but his
language, which is his great contribution to literature. I agree with
Mr. Howe that the question how far his language is the language of the
Irish countryside is a minor one. On the other hand, it is worth noting
that he wrote most beautifully in the first enthusiasm of his discovery
of the wonders of Irish peasant speech. His first plays express, as it
were, the delight of first love. He was always a shaping artist, of
course, in search of figures and patterns; but he kept his passion for
these things subordinate to reality in the early plays. In _The Playboy_
he seemed to be determined to write riotously, like a man straining
after vitality. He exaggerated everything. He emptied bagfuls of wild
phrases--the collections of years--into the conversations of a few
minutes. His style became, in a literary sense, vicious, a thing of
tricks and conventions: blank-verse rhythms--I am sure there are a
hundred blank-verse lines in the play--and otiose adjectives crept in
and spoilt it as prose. It became like a parody of the beautiful English
Synge wrote in the noon of his genius.
I cannot understand the special enthusiasm for _The Playboy_ except
among those who read it before they knew anything of Synge's earlier and
better work. With all its faults, however, it is written by the hand of
genius, and the first hearing or reading of it must come as a revelation
to those who do not know _Riders to the Sea_ or _The Well of the
Saints._ Even when it is played, as it is now played, in an expurgated
form, and with sentimentality substituted for the tolerant but
Mephistophelean malice which Synge threaded into it, the genius and
originality are obvious enough. _The Playboy_ is a marvellous
confection, but it is to _Riders to the Sea_ one turns in search of
Synge the immortal poet.