JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE
It is Synge himself who puts the just phrase on what his life was to
him, and it is, as it could not else be, from the lips of his Deirdre
that it falls. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and
richest, if it's for a short space only." It is Deirdre alone of his men
and women that is introspective at all, Deirdre--and Naisi when he is
mastered by thoughts of home that will not down. Synge wrote the play of
her triumph over death as he himself was dying, and he wrote it with
high heart, and, what is higher, gladness, despite his foreknowledge of
his doom. It was to fulfill his dream of the most queenly girl of old
Irish legend that he wrote "Deirdre of the Sorrows," but he could not
keep out of his writing, had he wished to keep it out, his own love that
death was so soon to end, and the thoughts of what was the worth of
life. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and richest, if
it's for a short space only." It is not a new saying, but it is not to
be identified with the proverbial "a short life and a merry," with which
some confuse it, and of Synge it was a true saying. There are those who,
because of the irony of his writing, an irony that is new to literature,
and, maybe, to some cruel, or at least disillusionizing, may think there
was little joy for him; but the truth is there was never a writer in
whom there was more joy. This "strange still man" as he was even to
those who knew him best, gentle or simple, found all life that was
natural life, even of the barest and rudest, as thrilling as first love.
It is this man, his enemies at home the sated Parisian, who knew a gusto
in living greater than that of any English writer since Borrow. Let no
one forget those lines with which Christy Mahon cries defiance to the
Mayo folk who have known his greatness and his fall: "Ten thousand
blessings upon all that's here, for you've turned me a likely gaffer in
the end of all, the way I'll go romancing through a romping lifetime
from this hour to the dawning of the judgment day." I do not deny that
these words are in a sense wrung from the Playboy, but what I do hold is
that they prove how vital was the genius of the man who wrote them, who
saw the joy there was yet in life for this braggart wastrel just as he
saw that even such a miserable boyhood as Christy's knew a kind of
poacher's joy in running wild on the bogs. Even for poor Nora, turned
out on the roads with a tramp for companion, there is the joy of the
road once she learns to know it. The tramp knows it surely:--
You'll be hearing the herons crying out over the black lakes, and
you'll be hearing the grouse and the owls with them, and the larks
and the big thrushes when the days are warm: and it's not from the
like of them you'll be hearing a tale of getting old like Peggy
Cavanagh, and losing the hair off you and the light of your eyes,
but it's fine songs you'll be hearing when the sun goes up, and
there'll be no old fellow wheezing the like of a sick sheep, close
to your ear.
Of like gusto, too, is the joy of Martin Doul and Mary Doul in their
blindness; and the joy of the three tinkers in the escape of themselves
and their half-sovereign from the priest and in the prospect of "A great
time drinking that bit with the trampers in the green of Clash." And
from such joys as these, wild and earthy and rallying, his exultations
range to the exalted serenity and sadness of Naisi and Deirdre as they
look back on their seven year of love in Glen Masain, of love almost too
perfect and too happy to be human.
[Illustration]
Yes, joy is as distinctive as irony and extravagance of the writing of
Synge, joy in mere living, in life even at the worst, and joy, too, in
life at the best. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and
richest, if it's for a short space only." It was for a short space of
years that Synge had "what is best and richest," hardly for the seven
years of his great lovers. He did not have it when his thought homed to
Ireland in 1899, as a result of a meeting with Mr. Yeats in Paris. His
writing, then, was of little moment, but it grew better when, at home
again, he realized what Irish life was to him, when once renewed contact
with the Irish peasant brought back the familiarity that had been his in
the nursery. It was the Wicklow glens, to which memories of his people
drew him, and the Aran Islands, where he went to study Irish--until then
little more than a book language to him--and to live a life perhaps
"more primitive than any in Europe," that enabled him to find himself.
Further 'prentice work, though of a new sort, followed his sojourns in
Wicklow and Aran, but by 1903 his art had matured to the ripe power of
"In the Shadow of the Glen" and "Riders to the Sea," which, after
adjustment to the stage, were put on respectively October 8, 1903, and
February 25, 1904, at Molesworth Hall, Dublin. "The Tinker's Wedding"
which has been played only once, and then in London, dates from about
the same time. "The Well of the Saints" was produced on February 4,
1905, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and "The Playboy of the Western
World" on January 26, 1907, at the same place, to the accompaniment of
an uproar that a certain element of Irishmen have considered it proper
to create ever since on its first appearance in all cities whatsoever,
whether in Great Britain or America. One wonders what they would have
done had he made it as biting as Ibsen made "Peer Gynt." "Deirdre of the
Sorrows," which Synge left unrevised, was first produced at the Abbey
Theatre on January 13, 1910, the last of the six plays of his maturity.
It was in the years from 1902 to 1909 that he had "what is best and
richest"--a full life, lived largely in the Ireland that he loved; the
artist's joy in making that life into a new beauty, a beauty that was
all compact of exaltation and extravagance and irony; and love for a
woman in whom his man's life and his artist's life were united, for her
who embodied his dream of Pegeen Mike and added her life and her art of
the stage to his dream of Deirdre, as day by day it emerged from his
mind. And so great was his joy in these good things that his precarious
health, and even his year--long last illness, could not, while he had
any strength, lessen the high spirit of his writing. There is none of
his plays more vital than "Deirdre of the Sorrows."
And yet this joy that is basic in Synge, this exaltation, is no more
basic than emotions and attitudes of mind that are often, in other men,
at war with joy and exaltation--irony and grotesquerie, keen insight
into "the black thoughts of men," and insistent awareness of the quick
passing of all good things, _diablerie_ and mordancy. Strange, then,
should be his love passages and strange too, they are at times, ranging
from the bizarre delight of "In Kerry" to the triumphing nobility of
Deirdre's farewell to Alban. One thinks of Mr. Hardy and one thinks of
Donne as one reads "In Kerry":--
"We heard the thrushes by the shore and sea,
And saw the golden stars' nativity,
Then round we went the lane by Thomas Flynn,
Across the church where bones lie out and in;
And there I asked beneath a lonely cloud
Of strange delight, with one bird singing loud,
What change you'd wrought in graveyard, rock and sea,
This new wild paradise to wake for me ...
Yet knew no more than knew those merry sins
Had built this stack of thigh-bones, jaws and shins."
One thinks of no other writer at all, however, when one reads Christy's
wooing of Pegeen, even when one puts down the book in the quiet that
always comes on one in the presence of something great; one thinks of no
other writer, of course, when one sees the lovers and listens to their
words, on the stage, for one is rapt out of one's self by the perfect
accord of drama and actors at one in the service of beauty:--
_Christy_ (_indignantly_). Starting from you, is it? (_He follows
her._) I will not, then, and when the airs is warming, in four
months or five, it's then yourself and me should be pacing Neifin
in the dews of night, the times sweet smells do be rising, and
you'll see a little, shiny new moon, maybe, sinking on the hills.
_Pegeen_ (_looking at him playfully_). And it's that kind of a
poacher's love you'd make, Christy Mahon, on the sides of Neifin,
when the night is down?
_Christy_. It's little you'll think if my love's a poacher's, or an
earl's itself, when you'll feel my two hands stretched around you,
and I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips, till I'd feel a kind
of pity for the Lord God is all ages sitting lonesome in His golden
chair.
_Pegeen_. That'll be right fun, Christy Mahon, and any girl would
walk her heart out before she'd meet a young man was your like for
eloquence, or talk at all.
_Christy_ (_encouraged_). Let you wait, to hear me talking, till
we're astray in Erris, when Good Friday's by, drinking a sup from a
well, and making mighty kisses with our wetted mouths, or gaming in
a gap of sunshine, with yourself stretched back unto your necklace,
in the flowers of the earth.
_Pegeen_ (_in a low voice, moved by his tone_). I'd be nice, so, is
it?
_Christy_ (_with rapture_). If the mitred bishops seen you that
time, they'd be the like of the holy prophets, I'm thinking, do be
straining the bars of Paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of
Troy, and she abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in
her golden shawl.
Borrow, who comes to mind more often than any other writer as one reads
Synge, chose to avoid love scenes, and Borrow's follower, Mr. Hewlett,
for all his gusto, has no such exaltation as this. Had Harry Richmond
taken to the road with Kiomi we might have known something like it. A
chapter out of the early life of Juggling Jerry and his "Old Girl," done
in the manner of "Love in the Valley," would be still nearer to it. As
it is, this passage of the third act of "The Playboy of the Western
World" stands alone. I doubt if Synge had read Meredith, and even had
he, the life of the roads and their cottages that Synge knew so well was
his master, and no writer at all. In a way, of course, the Irish-English
of Dr. Hyde's translations of "The Love Songs of Connacht" was an
influence, and you will find many expressions common to them and Synge.
It is not important, however, whether these expressions have a common
source, or whether Synge took them from "The Love Songs" rather than
from his own note-book. Whatever their source it was Synge who made out
of them a great style, his peasant style. It is another and a severer
style that he uses in his "Deirdre of the Sorrows," the courtly subject
demanding dignity and restraint. This latter style has borrowed some of
the bare simplicity of the personal style of Synge, that style, I mean,
in which he records his own experience in the Aran Islands or in Wicklow
and Kerry.
Romancing, which is the very atmosphere of "The Playboy of the Western
World," would be out of place in any telling of the greatest of old
Irish legends; so it is that Synge has found for "Deirdre of the
Sorrows," or rather for its great moments, an austere epic speech that
seems native to the story. The passionate words are nobly adequate to
the passionate resignation they have to tell, a resignation that has
come of the unwilling belief of the lovers that so great a love as
theirs cannot last longer "without fleck or flaw" than the seven years
it has lasted. Says Deirdre, when she has come to know it is fate that
they will return to Ireland, and death:--
The dawn and evening are a little while, the winter and the summer
pass quickly, and what way would you and I, Naisi, have joy
forever.... It's this hour we're between the daytime and a night
where there is sleep forever, and isn't it better thing to be
following on to a near death than to be bending the head down, and
dragging with the feet, and seeing one day a blight showing upon
love where it is sweet and tender?
_Naisi_ (_his voice broken with distraction_). If a near death is
coming what will be my trouble losing the earth and the stars over
it, and you, Deirdre, are their flame and bright crown? Come away
into the safety of the woods.
_Deirdre_ (_shaking her head slowly_). There are as many ways to
wither love as there are stars in a night of Samhain; but there is
no way to keep life, or love with it, a short space only.... It's
for that there's nothing lonesome like a love is watching out the
time most lovers do be sleeping.... It's for that we're setting out
for Emain Macha when the tide turns on the sand.
_Naisi_ (_giving in_). You're right, maybe. It should be a poor
thing to see great lovers and they sleepy and old.
_Deirdre_ (_with a more tender intensity_). We're seven years
without roughness or growing weary; seven years so sweet and
shining, the gods would be hard set to give us seven days the like
of them. It's for that we're going to Emain, where there'll be a
rest forever, or a place for forgetting, in great crowds and they
making a stir.
_Naisi_ (_very softly_). We'll go, surely, in place of keeping a
watch on a love had no match and it wasting away. (_They cling to
each other, then Naisi looks up._)
And this is from the unfinished second act, that Synge thought would
scarcely be worth preserving. I have quoted it rather than the great
keen over the body of Naisi that brings the play to a close, because
that must of necessity follow the old poem, and this is as Synge
imagined it. Each is "a thing will be a joy and triumph to the ends of
life and time."
I have thrown what I have to say about the exaltation of Synge to the
forefront of what I have to say of him, that all may be read in the
memory of this emphasis and of the exaltation of what I quote, no matter
how fantastic or grotesque or disillusionizing or even ghoulish it may
be. Whatever other quality may be dominant at any moment in Synge there
is always, along with it, exaltation.
It is the extravagance and grotesquerie, of both language and situation,
that is the most immediately arresting of the qualities of Synge. And
this extravagance and grotesquerie have marked his writing from the
start. The old husband playing dead, that he may catch his young wife
with her lover, of his first play, "In the Shadow of the Glen," is a
very old motive, and familiar in the meliorized form that made it known
to the theatre in "Conn the Shaughraun" (1875). Before that, Crofton
Croker had given it currency, in "The Corpse Watchers," among those
outside of the circles in which it was a familiar folk-story. It might,
indeed, be said of "In the Shadow of the Glen" that it begins in the
manner of Boucicault and ends in the manner of Ibsen, for Nora Burke is
in a way a peasant Hedda Gabler. Such a criticism would, of course, be
very superficial. The story is a folk-story of many countries and Synge
was told the version he worked from by the old shanachie of Inishmaan
whom he calls Pat Dirane in "The Aran Islands." At moments the play
approaches farce, as when the supposed corpse rises from the bed where
he is stretched and drinks whiskey with a tramp who has happened in
while Nora is gone to meet her young man. From such a situation it turns
to keen pathos, as Nora sits with tramp and lover and the old husband
she thinks dead, and listens to the wind and rain sweeping through the
high glens about the hut and thinks of "the young growing behind her,"
and the old passing. Where else will you find cheek by jowl such
sardonic humor as this and such poignancy of lament for the passing of
youth? Nora speaks as she pours out whiskey for her young man:--
Why would I marry you, Mike Dara? You'll be getting old and I'll be
getting old, and in a little while, I'm telling you, you'll be
sitting up in your bed--the way himself was sitting--with a shake
in your face, and your teeth falling, and the white hair sticking
out round you like an old bush where sheep do be leaping a gap.
(_Dan Burke sits up noiselessly from under the sheet, with his hand
to his face. His white hair is sticking out round his head. Nora
goes on slowly without hearing him._)
It's a pitiful thing to be getting old, but it's a queer thing
surely. It's a queer thing to see an old man sitting up there in
his bed with no teeth in him, and a rough word in his mouth, and
his chin the way it would take the bark from the edge of an oak
board you'd have building a door.... God forgive me, Michael Dara,
we'll all be getting old, but it's a queer thing surely.
_Michael_. It's too lonesome you are from living a long time with
an old man, Nora, and you're talking again like a herd that would
be coming down from the thick mist (_he puts his arm round her_),
but it's a fine life you'll have now with a young man--a fine life,
surely.
(_Dan sneezes violently. Michael tries to get to the door, but
before he can do so Dan jumps out of the bed in queer white
clothes, with the stick in his hand, and goes over and puts his
back against it._)
_Michael_. Son of God deliver us!
Equal extravagance and equal grotesquerie, and irony biting beyond any
in any other of his plays, you will find in "The Well of the Saints."
This, too, is built up out of Synge's experience of life in Aran and
Wicklow. Old Mourteen, a "dark man," who taught him Gaelic on Aranmor,
suggested Martin Doul, the chief character of the play, and it was
Mourteen told him, too, the story of the well whose water would give
sight to blind eyes. A story told Synge on Inishere supplied the saint,
and a tramp in Wicklow the thoughts of Martin Doul and Mary Doul as to
the glory their hair would be to them in age. As you read his travel
sketches, in fact, you are always coming on passages that very evidently
are the suggestions for situations in this play or that, and sometimes
more than suggestions--stories and situations and very phrases that you
remember as on the lips of the peasants in his plays. In these travel
sketches, too, you find the background of the plays. There is but the
germ of "The Playboy of the Western World" in the story told Synge in
Inishmaan of the hiding there from the police of the man that killed his
father, but there is old Mourteen's comparison of an unmarried man to
"an old jackass straying in the rocks," which later we find transferred
to Michael James Flaherty almost as Synge heard it--"an old braying
jackass straying upon the rocks."
It may be, too, that the famous Lynchehaun case confirmed Synge in
taking the Aran story of the man who killed his father as the basis of
"The Playboy," but it is little he got for his plays from his reading of
"the fearful crimes of Ireland," and little that he got for them from
any of his reading. There are situations in "The Tinker's Wedding"--the
tying-up of the priest in the bag, for instance--that suggest as source
"The Lout and his Mother," included by Dr. Hyde in his "Religious Songs
of Connacht," but Synge records, in "At a Wicklow Fair," that a herd
told him the story of the tinker couple that would be wed, as he and the
herd met the man in the case in Aughrim.
No one who knows Ireland at all would hold that Synge's plays are
typical of the Irish peasant generally, but any one who knows Irish
literature at all, and the life of the roads in Ireland, will admit that
wildness and extravagance are to be found in that literature from the
beginning and in that life even at this day of supposed civilization.
You will find one kind of extravagance in the distortions of Cuchulain
in bardic literature, another kind of extravagance in "Little Red Mary
and the Goat with the Chime of Bells" that your gardener tells you in a
prosaic American suburban town; you will find the primitiveness of
prehistoric life in the burning of poor old Mrs. Cleary by her neighbors
in Tipperary (1895), to drive a demon out of her, and the savage that is
but under the skin of all men in the description of the Spinsters' Ball
at Ballinasloe in "A Drama in Muslin." Said an old shanachie to Synge on
Inishere, when Synge had told him of a stock exchange trick, "Isn't it
a great wonder to think that those men are as big rogues as ourselves?"
It is idle to pretend that it is not true that, in some moods, all men
the world over have sympathy for the rogue. Why do we read of Reynard
the Fox with delight, and Robin Hood, and Uncle Remus, and not only in
the days of our own infantile roguery, but as grown men and women? This
man or that may say it is because of the cleverness of Reynard, the
daring of Robin Hood or his wild-woods setting, and the resourcefulness
of Bre'r Rabbit; but the honest man will admit it is because of an
innate and deeply rooted human sympathy with roguery as well as our
natural human sympathy with the under dog and the man hunted by a
merciless or an alien law. Very often, if the roguery is very great, or
we are brought face to face with its effects and realize it is a real
thing in real life, we will be shocked out of our sympathy with it, and
realize, as did Pegeen Mike, the difference between a "gallous story and
a dirty deed." But sometimes, if we are a people living a primitive
life, we will no more awaken to the reality of the wrong of roguery than
we would as children have been able to sympathize with the farmer whose
pumpkin patch we raided on the eve of Hallowe'en. A sneaking sympathy
with roguery, however, is a very different thing from a delight in
extravagance. That, too, is a universal passion, but not so native to
the Teuton as to Celt or Finn or Oriental. Its absence is what most
differentiates Old Norse literature from Old Irish, with which it so
early came into contact. It is in travelers' tales and in the tales of
seamen and in the writing that was based on these, in rare moments of
religious or romantic ecstasy, or in borrowings from Celt or Oriental
that you will find the most of what extravagance there is in English
literature. In America you find extravagance in our humor, and this
humor, perhaps, owes as much of its extravagance to an Irish ancestry as
to an environment of new wonders that could not be well expressed save
in hyperbole.
It is not only the extravagance of the change wrought in Christy by
unexpected hero-worship and an awakening of self-confidence through love
for the first time known and returned that we wonder at, and the
extravagance of that hero-worship, but the extravagance of the
imagination of his creator, and the beautiful extravagance of his
speech. The freshness and audacity of that imagination, and the
beautiful extravagance of that speech, a speech modulated to a rhythm
that Synge was the first to catch, are in themselves enough to give
distinction to almost any subject. There was granted Synge more than
this, however,--a keenness of vision into the pathetic humanity of ugly
things and a power to realize this with a beauty that was granted to no
one before, though to Swift it was granted to see the ugliness as a
bitter thing. Borrow had, indeed, a glimpse now and then of the pathetic
beauty there is in ugliness, as in the story of Isopel Berners and the
Flaming Tinman, and Whitman, too; but no man before Synge had the power
at once to see the ugly subject as beautiful from a new angle of vision,
humanize it, irradiate it with a new glow of imagination, reveal it
through a style that for the first time ennobles English prose drama as
blank verse has long ennobled English verse drama.
Take "The Tinker's Wedding," for instance. The theme is the desire of a
tinker woman, youngish if not young, to wed the man who has long been
her mate; his mother's unstudied frustration of that scheme by stealing,
to swap for drink, the can they were to give to the priest along with a
half-sovereign for marrying them; and their joy, in the end, that they
have escaped matrimony and the wasting of good money. And yet this theme
is underlaid with an emotion so vital, the emotion of a wild free life,
and invested with a pathos so poignant of the quick passing of all good
things, that no understanding heart can but be profoundly moved by that
pathos and racily rejoiced at that wildness.
It is thus, for instance, soliloquizes Mary Byrne, the rapscalliony old
tinker woman of outrageous behavior of "The Tinker's Wedding." She is
stealing the aforesaid can, in the absence of her son and his Sarah "to
get two of Tim Flaherty's hens": "Maybe the two of them have a good
right to be walking out the little short while they'd be young; but if
they have itself, they'll not keep Mary Byrne from her full pint when
the night's fine, and there's a dry moon in the sky." One thinks, as one
reads, of Villon's old woman and her lament for yesteryear, but there
are not many writers anywhere in the world, of old time or of to-day,
who have such power of blending pathos and ugliness into beauty, and no
other one that I know who can infuse humor into the blend, and make one
at the one time laugh ironically and be thrilled as with great poetry.
There are those, of course, to whom this earthiness and wildness are
repulsive, to whom old Martin Doul's love pleading to Molly Byrne is
unendurable. A dirty "shabby stump of a man," a beggar, blind and
middle-aged, is asking a fine white girl, young, and as teasing as an
ox-eyed and ox-minded colleen may be, to go away with him. Not an
exalting situation, exactly, as you read of it or see it on the stage,
but once you see it on the stage, where its animality you would expect
would be heightened, you realize--and it is strange to you that you do
so realize--first of all its pathos, and again its pathos, and always,
the scene through, its pathos. Had Molly gone with old Martin it would
have revolted you, for it would have been unnatural, but since she did
not, and since she was not the sort to be easily insulted, you only
wonder at the power of passion and realize its pathos, and the irony of
it.
There is, however, a situation ironical of love in "In the Shadow of the
Glen" that is more appalling to some than any irony of "The Well of the
Saints." I mean the scene at the end, where Nora, turned out by her
husband and forsaken by her lover, goes out into the rain with the
tramp, leaving husband and lover drinking together in utmost amity. The
pathos of this and the irony of it are of a part with the pathos of the
close of "Hedda Gabler." Hedda and Nora, selfish and willful both, if
you like, are yet fine women both, and human, as Zenobia and Eustacia
are human, and pathetic in their fates, with a pathos that even
Hawthorne and Mr. Hardy have seldom the power to make us feel. But the
fate of Nora was ironic as the fate of none of the others, for all
three of them escaped the ennui and misery of life, while Nora but
begins a new life, freer for the moment than her old life, but
promising, in the end, only the old dull round.
The irony of it! "The irony of it" is always in Synge's writing even in
its most exalted moments. A seven years' love "without fleck or flaw" is
"surely a wonder," but it is just as surely ironical that it, like all
good things, shall so soon come to an end. That, of course, is but the
way of nature, and so we much question if, after all, the irony of Synge
is more insistent than the irony of nature. If it is it is because he
takes more care to uncover it, but basically his irony is but the irony
of nature. He is in reality less ironical than Mr. Hardy, the great
ironist of English literature of our day, and he is never bitter, for
bitterness comes seldom except to the writer who is interested in
morals, and morals interest Synge only in so far as they are natural. It
is life--not any conventional way of life, or any ideal of life--that
interests Synge, so he escapes ensnarement in any of the questions of
the day. So frankly does he accept life that there is in him no note of
protest whatsoever, which is again fortunate, for protest, too, will
lead a man to morals and leave on his work the taint of a passing system
of morality as it did even on Ibsen.
If there is symbolism to be found in Synge, it is there only by
accident, never as the result of definite intent. He may have had, in
the back of his mind, as he wrote "The Playboy of the Western World,"
the thought of chance making a man, of a man finding himself through
others believing in him who has no belief in himself but that there is
in the play any parable of young Ireland losing its allegiance to a
previous ideal of Ireland, I do not for a moment believe. There is, of
course, in "The Well of the Saints" the old and oft-uttered truth that
men prefer blindness in many things to correct vision of them, that
truth that drives Mr. Shaw to blind anger. Synge has no resentment
against that truth, only interest in it as a fact that is true of people
as he sees them. The play is an unforgettable symbol of that truth, but
to make it such was not why Synge wrote it. He wrote it with a purpose
akin to that which inspired Burns to write his "Jolly Beggars." He wrote
it to make something beautiful out of the life of the beggars of the
Wicklow mountains, and I have no doubt he had a wild joy in the idea of
it, in the irony of its truth, in the grotesquerie of the situations he
garnered from his memory to illustrate its beauty and truth.
Many wonders are possible even to-day in the wild life of the roads and
of the sea-haunted islands that Synge knew, but he was wise to put "The
Well of the Saints" back a hundred years or more. Aran islanders told
him of rye that turned to oats in their fields and of phantom ships that
passed them at sea, but a miracle of healing such as that of "The Well
of the Saints" they were familiar with only in folk-song such as "Mary's
Well," and such a miracle, too, would hardly be attempted by a priest of
to-day.
Synge had the great advantage of writing all his plays, after the
earliest, for the stage. He knew as he wrote that he could test that
writing's stage effect in rehearsal and change it if need be. So he did
change "The Playboy of the Western World," revealing the incident of the
supposed patricide as a bit of narrative addressed by Christy to the
admiring girls of the Mayo village, instead of, as he had intended, a
scene on the stage in "a windy corner of rich Munster land." Had he
written "Riders to the Sea" later, Synge would surely never have crowded
into it incidents that took far longer in the happening than in the
portrayal of that happening on the stage. It is this technical
shortcoming that for me takes away somewhat from the exceeding beauty of
this tragedy of Aran. The story of the finding of the clothes that tell
of the death at sea of the last but one of the five sons of Maurya, and
of the death on the very shore itself of the last son, is in its very
nature a dirge, and demands a slower movement than is possible with its
incidents arranged as he was content to leave them in the play as we
have it. "Riders to the Sea" is less representative of Synge, moreover,
than any other of his plays, for it is written on one note, the note of
the dirge, of the dirge of the tides that sound their menace of the sea
through Inishmaan. It is less representative of Synge because it has in
it no humor, no quick changes of mood, no revelation of tumult of soul.
It is less representative of Synge in that it is less original than any
other of his plays, reminiscent in fact in all but its style, now of
Ibsen, now of M. Maeterlinck, now even of Mr. Edward Martyn. And his
style itself is not what his style was in "In the Shadow of the Glen,"
nor what it became again in "The Well of the Saints."
One wonders where that speech came from, that speech that is, as he
would have it, "fully flavored as a nut or apple." Mr. Yeats and Lady
Gregory tell us that he did not have it until he had been made free,
through residence there, of the life of the Aran Islands. If one has
read, however, the English of the prose translations of Dr. Hyde's "Love
Songs of Connacht," one may see in their style the genesis of the style
of "Riders to the Sea," and if one has read the "Dialogue between Two
Old Women" of "The Religious Songs of Connacht," and "The Lout and his
Mother," one may come to believe that these turned Synge toward the even
more fully flavored and more rhythmic speech of the other plays.
Perhaps, too, there were memories of the rhythm and of the flavor of the
speech of him who made these words for Jasper Petulengro: "Life is
sweet, brother, ... there's night and day, brother, both sweet things;
sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind
on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die!"
The speech of Connacht folk-song rendered into the English of Connacht
by Dr. Hyde, however, and the speech of Borrow were no more than the
start, if they were as much as the start, that put him on the right
road. If ever a man made his style himself, it was Synge. He made it out
of his memory and out of his imagination, using "one or two words only
that I have not heard," he said, "among the country people of Ireland,
or spoken in my own nursery before I could read the newspaper," but
evolving from that memory by his imagination a speech that is in
harmony with the imagination of the people an imagination that is, he
tells us, "fiery and magnificent and tender," though no such actual
speech would be possible of reproduction from any one of them.
Synge is very definite in his statement of what he believes drama should
be, and what he would make his own drama of Irish life, expressing his
belief in the preface to "The Tinker's Wedding":--
The drama is made serious ... not by the degree in which it is
taken up with problems that are serious in themselves, but by the
degree in which it gives the nourishment, not very easy to define,
on which our imaginations live....
We should not go to the theatre as we go to a chemist's or a
dramshop, but as we go to a dinner where the food we need is taken
with pleasure and excitement....
The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything....
Of the things which nourish the imagination, humor is one of the
most needful and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it. Baudelaire
calls laughter the greatest sign of the Satanic element in man; and
where a country loses its humor, as some towns in Ireland are
doing, there will be a morbidity of mind, as Baudelaire's mind was
morbid. In the greater part of Ireland, however, the whole people,
from the tinkers to the clergy, have still a life, and view of
life, that are rich and genial and humorous. I do not think that
these country people, who have so much humor themselves, will mind
being laughed at without malice, as the people in every country
have been laughed at, in their own comedies.
In the preface to "The Playboy of the Western World" is this paragraph,
completing his _credo_ as to drama:--
On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy; and that
is why the intellectual modern drama has failed, and people have
grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy, that has been
given them in place of the rich joy found only in what is superb
and wild in reality.
Although there are only about forty characters, all told, in the six
plays of Synge, and ten of these are in "Deirdre of the Sorrows," which
for all its humanity is a play out of a life that is gone, there are men
and women a-plenty to give us this "rich joy found only in what is
superb and wild in reality." Nora is "superb and wild" in her longings,
and Maurya in her sorrow; and old Martin Doul "superb and wild" in his
dream of life in the South; Sarah Casey and Pegeen Mike "superb and
wild" in the most direct sense of the phrase; and these are all real, if
not representative of the poorer peasantry. And in the high way of
romance who has dreamed what is more superb and wilder than the lament
of Deirdre over Naisi! In the creation of character, as in style, and in
technique of drama, Synge has done what he would. In only one of his
plays, in "Riders to the Sea," are his leading characters representative
Irish peasants; and even Maurya and her children, not only because of
the isolation of their home in Aran, but because of the fate which has
marked her mankind for death at sea, are somewhat apart from the
fisher-people of the west coast. In all his four other plays of modern
life, Synge has chosen characters who are, in his own words, "variations
from the ordinary types of manhood,"--chosen them because of his
deep-seated love of the unconventional. In "In the Shadow of the Glen,"
Michael Dara, the herd, is a common type, and Dan Burke, the old sheep
farmer, not an uncommon type, but the tramp and Nora, the one by his
wandering and the other by her brooding, are "variations," though very
human both. Of the cottager class, too, are Timmy the Smith, Molly
Byrne, and the "villagers" of "The Well of the Saints," as are, too, the
girls and men of "The Playboy of the Western World" other than the
Mahons and Michael James. Shawn Keogh, indeed, is a cut above cottagers,
being almost a strong farmer, and Michael James himself was, no doubt,
of a similar cottager respectability before he took to shebeen-keeping.
Almost all the other characters of these modern plays are, with the
exception of the priest of "The Tinker's Wedding" and the saint of "The
Well of the Saints," squatters, beggars, and tinkers. Among them, few as
they are all told, are very differing personalities--Christy the Playboy
and his father, "a dirty man, God forgive him, and he getting old and
crusty"; Martin Doul, a "shabby stump of a man," "of queer talk,"
middle-aged and blind and a beggar; Michael Byrne, the hardy, thieving,
unimaginative tinker; and the romancing young tramp who gallants Nora
when her own husband turns her out on the road;--"variations" all,
perhaps, but human, and compelling, all of them, our interest, and
greater or less sympathy. And the women! Nora, whom we leave as
road-woman, I have likened to Hedda Gabler, and Sarah Casey in externals
to Isopel Berners, but I do not know to whom to compare the others save
Mary Byrne, as slightly suggestive of Villon's old woman. Mary Doul,
blind Martin's blind wife, has a general likeness to some old witch out
of a fairy tale, but she is far from being a witch; and Widow Quinn the
incomparable might be compared, were she not too high-hearted, to the
hag of "The Lout and Mother" in being
"indecent-spoken, carneying, lying,
Plausible, full of poems and prophecies and sharp edged."
Of the women of the cottager class, Nora, for all her wildness and
bitterness, is the most lovable, and Molly Byrne the least lovable; the
girls of "Riders to the Sea" are not fully enough individualized to make
us feel we know them; but Pegeen Mike, Synge has put before us in
appearance and temperament, character and personality. "A wild-looking
but fine girl," he describes her, "with a divil's own temper," "the
fright of seven town-lands"--as she says--"for my biting tongue," but
susceptible of softening toward a boy of good looks and coaxing ways
such as Christy. He gets around her with "his poet's talking" and his
popularity, his "mighty spirit" and "gamey heart" until she gives him
"words would put you thinking on the holy Brigid speaking to the infant
saints."
There might be incongruity, if one were writing of any other than Synge,
in speaking of Deirdre in such a company. Incongruity, however, is of
the very texture of Synge's art, which has reconciled qualities, as I
have said, never before reconciled in English literature. It is on
Deirdre that Synge has lavished all the ideality that was in him, not
because he had a dream of woman he wished to fulfill, but because to him
Deirdre was all that was queenly. And yet even Deirdre is a "variation,"
as nobility and beauty must ever be. So lofty is she that words even in
praise of her are almost impertinent. Just how lofty her words that I
quoted at the outset show, as does also, by way of contrast, the mention
of her here among these half-tragic, half-grotesque women of the
cottages and of the roads. There is scarcely a poet, of all that have
written of Ireland from the time of Ferguson to our time, that has not
written his dream of Deirdre as he finds her in the old legends of
Ireland, but to my mind no one of them has dreamed her so triumphantly
as has Synge.
It is not, however, of such "variations" as Deirdre that the critics
fall foul, but of the "variations" he puts on Irish roads and in Irish
cottages when he presents the life of to-day. Why he replied to this
criticism when to most criticism he was, if not indifferent, at least
impervious, it is not easy to say. It is more than likely, however, that
it was rather to explain his ideas than to justify his characters that
he did answer. This criticism of the reality of his peasants began with
his "Shadow of the Glen" and is still to be heard in many places to-day.
It rose to its highest pitch of denunciation at the time of the
production of "The Playboy of the Western World" in Dublin, but it was
before that that he answered it fully, in the last paragraph of "The
Vagrants of Wicklow," a travel sketch he made out of his wanderings in
his native country. Here it is, as effective in its answer to subsequent
criticism as to that which it was definitely intended to answer:--
In all the circumstances of this tramp life there is a certain
wildness that gives it romance and a peculiar value for those who
look at life in Ireland with an eye that is aware of the arts
also. In all the healthy movements of art, variations from the
ordinary types of manhood are made interesting for the ordinary
man, and in this way only the higher arts are universal. Beside
this art, however, founded on the variations which are a condition
and effect of all vigorous life, there is another art--sometimes
confounded with it--founded on the freak of nature, in itself a
mere sign of atavism or disease. This latter art, which is occupied
with the antics of the freak, is of interest only to the variation
from ordinary minds, and, for this reason, is never universal. To
be quite plain, the tramp in real life, Hamlet and Faust, in the
arts, are variations; but the maniac in real life, and Des
Esseintes and all his ugly crew in the arts, are freaks only.
It is well to consider all his characters in the light of this
statement, I think, and to re-read, keeping in mind a possible further
application of it, those phrases in the plays that so outrage many at
their hearing in the theatre, I would not for a moment seem to want to
soften the hardness of the life he pictures or to explain away his
delightfully sardonic humor as in reality a reconciling sort of humor,
but I do wish to say that the more I read him the less cruel and
sardonic that humor seems. The impersonality of the man as dramatist
grows on you as you read, you realize more and more his abstention from
playing chorus to his characters, and you come to know that the seeming
cruelty and sardonic joy are largely only the direct outcome of his
courage in allowing Nature to speak for herself. If you turn again to
the plays after learning of their background from his travel sketches,
you see many things in a new light. The irony, the grotesquerie, the
tonic earthiness never grow less, but one learns to discount somewhat
the effect of the hardness of speech on the recipients of that speech,
as through experience one learns--after one's second attendance at a
wake--to discount something of the too voluble sorrow of keening.
That the candor of Synge, in allowing his people of hard nature or of
careless nature to say the ruthless things native to their minds and
temper, hurts many, there is proof every time one sees a play of his on
the stage. You will hear women about you gasp with mingled surprise and
disgust, their sensibilities wholly outraged, but unwilling laughter in
their minds when the Widow Quinn says to Christy, after his praise of
Pegeen, "There's poetry talk for a girl you'd see itching and
scratching, and she with a stale stink of poteen on her from selling in
the shop." Such gasps are nothing, however, to those they utter when
they hear Mary Doul tell Molly Byrne "when the skin shrinks on your
chin, Molly Byrne, there won't be the like of you for a shrunk hag in
the four quarters of Ireland."
Very different is the kind of laughter aroused by the sly malice, native
to the rogue story from the days in which its characters masqueraded as
animals, that is revealed in the remark of Mary Byrne to the priest,
"It's destroyed you must be hearing the sins of the rural people in a
fine spring"; and different again the childish delight in the
extravagance at Christy's threat to send Shawn Keogh "coaching out
through Limbo with my father's ghost"; and still different the
breathless, delighted wonderment in the sense of moral values exhibited
by Michael James, when, fearing that Christy's threatened murder of
Shawn, if carried out, would give his secret trade away, he jumps up
with a shriek, exclaiming, "Murder is it? Is it mad you's are? Would you
go making murder in this place, and it piled with poteen for our drink
to-night?" Different too, is the laughter at the Rabelaisian touches and
at the farcical situations in which the plays abound.
If ever there were characters that lived a life apart from their
author's, those characters are Synge's. It is in the verses and in the
travel sketches that we get the man himself, the man back of the
dramatist that gives to his characters a life independent of his own, a
life that he knows partly in reality and partly in imagination, but that
he himself has lived chiefly as an observer and imaginer. There is no
humor in these verses and travel sketches, not even when he is
describing a humorous scene such as that of the upsetting by pigs
running wild of the constabulary busy about evictions on Inishmaan. We
get the man himself, I say, in these verses and travel sketches, a man
exulting in primitiveness, in wildness, in beauty of woman and child, in
beauty of landscape; but exulting, more than in all else, in his own
moods aroused by these things that he loved. Even here, however, he is
at times almost impossibly impersonal, so that you feel in a certain
description that there is no man between you and the thing described,
but that, to adapt a phrase of Thoreau, it is the hills and the sea and
the atmosphere writing. This impersonality persists even in "The Aran
Islands," so large a part of which is very personal in that it is a
statement of his daily life on Inishmaan. It is not, however, from the
impersonal writing that I would quote,--though I would emphasize this
impersonality because it is part of the very nature of the man,--but
from the personal parts, because they reveal more of the positive part
of him. After a day of storm on Inishmaan, the middle island of the
three that make up the Aran group, Synge writes: "About the sunset the
clouds broke and the storm turned to a hurricane. Bars of purple cloud
stretched across the sound where immense waves were rolling from the
west, wreathed with snowy fantasies of spray. Then there was the bay
full of green delirium and the Twelve Pins touched with mauve and
scarlet in the east." That is the Connacht coast, and this the next
paragraph is Synge: "The suggestion from this world of inarticulate
power was immense, and now at midnight, when the wind is abating, I am
still trembling and flushed with exultation." And here is Synge again,
in another temper, which came to him on the seas about Inishmaan: "The
black curagh working slowly through this world of gray, and the soft
hissing of the rain, gave me one of the moods in which we realize with
immense distress the short moment we have left us to experience all the
wonder and beauty of the world."
"The Aran Islands" is most memorable of his travel writings, because he
spent more time on these rocks at the world's end and came closest here
to the soul of Irish life. There are passages, however, in his
description of the Kerry coast, and even in his newspaper sketches of
the coast of Connemara, that tell not only of the places but of their
visitor. "I got on a long road running through a bog," he writes in "In
West Kerry," "with a smooth mountain on one side and the sea on the
other, and Brandon in front of me, partly covered with clouds. As far
as I could see there were little groups of people on their way to the
chapel at Ballyferriter, the men in homespun and the women wearing blue
cloaks, or, more often, black shawls twisted over their heads. This
procession along the olive bogs, between the mountains and the sea, on
this gray day of autumn, seemed to wring me with the pang of emotion one
meets everywhere in Ireland, an emotion that is partly local and
patriotic, and partly a share of the desolation that is mixed everywhere
with the supreme beauty of the world."
The comment on Ireland, her ways and her place among the peoples, that
many a dramatist would have permitted himself to express through some
character chosen to play chorus to the action, Synge now and then
permits himself in the travel sketches. In "From Galway to Gorumna,"
which he wrote for the "Manchester Guardian's" investigation of the
congested districts, is one of such rare avowals, an avowal to treasure
along with those of his all too short prefaces: "It is part of the
misfortune of Ireland that nearly all the characteristics which give
color and attractiveness to Irish life [he has been speaking of 'men
dressed in homespuns of the gray natural wool, and the women in deep
madder-dyed petticoats and bodices, with brown shawls over their heads']
are bound up with a social condition that is near to penury, while in
countries like Brittany the best external features of the local
life--the rich embroidered dresses, for instance, or the carved
furniture--are connected with a decent and comfortable social
condition."
It is this penury, perhaps, and its gray background that by way of
contrast emphasize so strongly the moments of splendor that Irish
landscape knows. One such moment Synge saw as he looked southward across
the bay from the Dingle peninsula toward Killarney: "The blueness of the
sea and the hills from Carrantuohill to the Skelligs, the singular
loneliness of the hillside I was on, with a few choughs and gulls in
sight only, had a splendor that was almost a grief in the mind."
This splendor Synge found also in his own Wicklow, a lonelier country
than Aran, if loneliness comes from absence of human life. And if there
is not the loneliness of the sea in the inland glens that Synge knew so
well, there is in them the equal loneliness of the mountains. It is this
county of Wicklow that is the background of "In the Shadow of the Glen"
and of "The Well of the Saints" and of "The Tinker's Wedding." And
perhaps had not the Abbey Theatre grown to be a theatre for folk-drama
and for poetic drama of court romance alone, Synge would have made
Wicklow the background of dramas of a high life of yesterday. Certain it
is that in these passages he is thinking of it:--
Every one is used in Ireland to the tragedy that is bound up with
the lives of farmers and fishing-people; but in this garden one
seemed to feel the tragedy of the landlord class also, and of the
innumerable old families that are quickly dwindling away. These
owners of the land are not much pitied at the present day, or much
deserving of pity; and yet one cannot quite forget that they are
the descendants of what was at one time, in the eighteenth century,
a high-spirited and highly cultivated aristocracy. The broken
greenhouses and mouse-eaten libraries, that were designed and
collected by men who voted with Grattan, are perhaps as mournful in
the end as the four mud walls that are so often left in Wicklow as
the only remnants of a farmhouse. The desolation of this life is
often of a peculiarly local kind, and if a playwright chose to go
through the Irish country houses he would find material, it is
likely, for many gloomy plays that would turn on the dying away of
these old families, and on the lives of the one or two delicate
girls that are left so often to represent a dozen hearty men who
were alive a generation or two ago.
I have dwelt on these travel sketches of Synge not alone for their own
sake, but because they are, as I have said, the background of the plays,
and because they contain what are in a sense the diary notes out of
which the plays grew. In a sense, too, they are a commentary on the
plays, and as I have also said a revelation of the playwright. All must
be read for a thorough understanding of the plays, though these alone
should be a delight to all, even if they know no more of Ireland than
that share of human nature which is axiomatically the same in all men of
all races. If you do not read the travel sketches, you may fail to see
how deeply sympathetic Synge is with the Irish peasant, and in no
patronizing way. In "The Aran Islands" he takes the greatest care to
disguise the identity of those he knew intimately lest they be pained by
anything he wrote of them. No one could write with higher courtesy of
those whose guest he had been than Synge. You, reading, are made one of
their home circle, but no family secrets are betrayed. You are made
aware of their weaknesses, but there is never any disloyalty; and always
in his records of them their virtues of courage and endurance, of
adaptiveness and simplicity, of family stanchness and communal
helpfulness, outweigh the drunkenness and roguery that one expects from
the primitive. Synge is, indeed, not only loyal, but full of respect and
liking for the Aran Islanders, and of admiration for their rich
humanity.
It was out of his island life and out of his life of the roads, and out
of his mood, once he knew his doom, that he made the twenty-two poems of
his that are retained of a great deal that he had written, most of it in
his younger years. That Synge faced his fate with bravery the triumphant
tone of "Deirdre of the Sorrows" that I have instanced is proof, but
there could not but be moments when the thought of death was too instant
to be denied. It was in such mood he wrote, either toward the end, or in
earlier moments of anticipation of it, "Queens," "On an Anniversary,"
"To the Oaks of Glencree," "A Question," and "I've Thirty Months." There
is in these verses a certain morbidity, an almost ghoulishness, that is
very seldom present elsewhere in his writing. And yet I may be wrong in
attributing it to his certainty of approaching death, for there is a
more intense preoccupation with death in the plays of M. Maeterlinck's
youth and a greater ghoulishness in the verse of Mr. Hardy's youth. It
is of Mr. Hardy's verses that one thinks oftenest as one reads these
verses of Synge, and not only because of certain likenesses in
subject-matter, but because of the imperfect mastery of both over the
verse forms and a certain epigrammatic gnomic quality common to both.
The verses of Synge are not relatively so important in comparison with
the rest of his writing as Mr. Hardy's verses are in comparison with the
rest of his writing, for they are not needed to explain a philosophy of
life as are Mr. Hardy's verses. Fortunately, Synge attempted no
philosophy, had the rare wisdom to rest content with observation.
In regard to poetry, as to all his art, Synge had, however, definite
views, though his verse is almost too little in bulk to exemplify them.
It was the poetry of exaltation, as it was the drama of exaltation, as
it was the exaltation in living, of change and speed and danger and
love, that meant most to him. He held further that "in these days poetry
is usually a flower of evil or good; but it is the timber of poetry that
wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots
among the clay and worms." The verse of Synge, as all his art, was so
rooted, surely. "Even if we grant," he continues, "that exalted poetry
can be kept successful by itself, the strong things of life are needed
in poetry also, to show that what is exalted or tender is not made by
feeble blood. It may almost be said that before verse can be human again
it must learn to be brutal."
It is sayings of this sort that bring to mind his kinship with Whitman,
to whom he is also bound by the freemasonry of the roads. Both men felt
the call of the road; both loved the changing landscape and the little
adventures of the caravansaries; both loved most of all the men and
women they met. Once only Synge seems to have forgotten humanity when he
took to the road, that time which he has recorded in "Prelude":--
"Still south I went and west and south again,
Through Wicklow from the morning till the night,
And far from cities, and the sights of men,
Lived with the sunshine, and the moon's delight.
"I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds,
The gray and wintry sides of many glens,
And did but half remember human words,
In converse with the mountains, moors, and fens."
It is to this, to the wandering wayside life of Synge that one's thought
of him always returns, and rightly, for it was the road that most
inspired him. It is the memory of the road that most kindles him; and so
it is always to the man of the road that he gives his most lyric
passages; or, perhaps, I should say it is the speech that the thought of
the man of the roads or of the woman of wild heart raises in his mind
that is his most beautiful speech, with the very wildness of the
wandering heart in it, and with the long swing that comes, with second
wind, when you have been a day abroad on the road.
What if the words have now the clauber of the roads upon them, and even
the muck, and now the reek of the shebeen or of the tinker's fire in a
roadside ditch; they have, too, the bog smell, and the smell of the
whin, the smell of ploughed land and of the sea, and they fall into
cadences that are cadences of the wind and of the tides, of full rivers
and clucking streams that sudden rains have filled, as well as the
cadences of the voices of boy and girl and they love-making, and of the
voices of the wild folk of the roads coaxing or loudly quarreling, and
the voices of women and men, young and old, lamenting the hard way of
life and of the sorrow that waits for all in the end. Why quarrel with
Synge, in short, because his style is of the very essence of life, and
of nature, which is the background of life?
To attain a style that is his very self, that is of the very color of
his life, and of the very color of the extravagant phases of the life of
his country, to attain a style that embodies all this, and that for the
first time sets English dramatic prose to a rhythm as noble as the
rhythm of blank verse, is surely in itself title to greatness. But Synge
has other titles, too. In the few characters that he has created, forty
in all, characters all natively Irish, he has attained universality,
because these Irish men and women, Nora and Martin Doul, Sarah Casey and
Christy Mahon, Maurya and Deirdre, are so human that they are prototypes
of men and women the world over. And of dialogue, where style and
characterization blend, he has sure control. Each character of the six
great characters that I have just mentioned speaks and acts just as such
a character would, and not only these, but every other character that
occupies the stage for more than a moment. Michael Dara and Timmy the
Smith, the Priest or Philly Cullen, Bartley and Owen, each one has an
individuality clearly defined.
There is less that is great in the structure of his plays than in any
other component of them, but that structure always clearly reveals the
action which arises from the emotion and theme underlying each,--the
menacing sea in "Riders to the Sea"; the loneliness of the mountain
glens that drives men fey in "The Shadow of the Glen"; the blindness,
the blessed self-delusion of mankind, in "The Well of the Saints"; the
wildness of the life of the roads that law may not tame, in "The
Tinker's Wedding"; the boy's finding of himself through his having to
live up to a community's mistaken ideal of him, in "The Playboy of the
Western World"; and the benison of death that prevents a great love from
dying, in "Deirdre of the Sorrows."
Always the joy of making something beautiful out of his experience and
dream of life is what inspires Synge to write, and though the intention
to read life truly is a passion with him, there is never a suggestion of
didacticism, or even of moralizing, though "The Well of the Saints" is
unquestionably, whether he wills it so or not, a symbol of man's
discontent with things as they are, his preference in some things of the
lie to the truth. I think that Synge did not will to make "The Well of
the Saints" a symbol, and that the play was to him but a reading of
life, as life is, in his characteristic, exalted, ironic, extravagant
way of writing, and that if he was aware of the symbolism, he was not
keenly aware of it or much interested in it. He gives us life untroubled
by the passing agitation of the day, and for that we should be thankful,
and thankful, too, that he has given in his plays "the nourishment, not
very easy to define, on which our imaginations live." His irony, as
desolating to some as the irony of Swift, gives pause to all, as insight
always will, but to me his extravagance is a joy unalloyed, and his
exaltation, so rare a thing in modern literature, should bring to all
men delight and refreshment of spirit. No reading, or seeing and
hearing, of his plays leaves me without a feeling of richness or
without wonder and large content. He gives back my youth to me, both in
the theatre and in my library, and, in the glow that is mine in such
recapture, I call him the greatest dramatist in English that our stage
has known in a century. That I know him to be on sober second thought,
second thought that has been concerned with his art, as I followed it
developing during the slow years from "Riders to the Sea" to "Deirdre of
the Sorrows."