by George Moore
These two men were of the same generation and their interests were the same; both were travelled men; Sir William’s travels were not so original as my father’s, and the racehorses that he kept were not so fast, and his politics were not so definite; he was more of an opportunist than my father, more careful and cautious, and therefore less interesting. Galway has not produced so many interesting man as Mayo; its pastures are richer, but its men are thinner in intellect. But if we are considering Lady Gregory’s rise in the world, we must admit that she owes a great deal to her husband. He took her to London, and she enjoyed at least one season in a tall house in the little enclosure known as St George’s Place; and there met a number of eminent men whose books and conversation were in harmony with her conception of life, still somewhat formal. One afternoon Lecky the historian left her drawing-room as I entered it, and I remember the look of pleasure on her face when she mentioned the name of her visitor, and her pleasure did not end with Lecky, for a few minutes afterwards Edwin Arnold, the poet of The Light of Asia, was announced. She would have liked to have had him all to herself, and I think that she thought my conversation a little ill advised when I spoke to Sir Edwin of a book lately published on the subject of Buddhism, and asked him what book was the best to read on this subject. He did not answer my question directly, but very soon he was telling Lady Gregory that he had just received a letter from India from a distinguished Buddhist who had read The Light of Asia and could find no fault in it; the Buddhist doctrine as related by him had been related faultlessly. And with this little anecdote Sir Edwin thought my question sufficiently answered. The conversation turned on the coloured races, and I remember Sir Edwin’s words. The world will not be perfect, he said, until we get the black notes into the gamut. A pretty bit of Telegraphese which pleased Lady Gregory; and when Sir Edwin rose to go she produced a fan and asked him to write his name upon one of the sticks. But she did not ask me to write my name, though at that time I had written not only A Modern Lover, but also A Mummer’s Wife, and I left the house feeling for the first time that the world I lived in was not so profound as I had imagined it to be. If I remember the circumstances quite rightly, Sir William came into the room just as I was leaving it, and she showed him the fan; he looked a little distressed at her want of tact, and it was some years afterward that I heard, and not without surprise, that she had shown some literary ability in the editing of his Memoirs. The publication of these Memoirs was a great day for Roxborough, but not such a great day for Ireland as the day she drove over to Tillyra.
I was not present at the time, but from Edward’s account of the meeting she seems to have recognised her need in Yeats at once, foreseeing dimly, of course, but foreseeing that he would help her out of conventions and prejudices, and give her wings to soar in the free air of ideas and instincts. She was manifestly captured by his genius, and seemed to dread that the inspiration the hills of Sligo had nourished might wither in the Temple where he used to spend long months with his friend Arthur Symons. He had finished all his best work at the time, the work whereby he will live; The Countess Cathleen had not long been written, and he was dreaming the poem of The Shadowy Waters, and where could he dream it more fortunately than by the lake at Coole? The wild swans gather there, and every summer he returned to Coole to write The Shadowy Waters, writing under her tutelage and she serving him as amanuensis, collecting the different versions, etc.
Thus much of the literary history of this time has already been written, but what has not been written, or only hinted at, is the interdependence of these two minds. It was he, no doubt, who suggested to her the writing of the Cuchulain legends. It must have been so, for he had long been dreaming an epic poem to be called Cuchulain; but feeling himself unable for so long a task he entrusted it to Lady Gregory, and led her from cabin to cabin in search of a style, and they returned to Coole ruminating the beautiful language of the peasants and the masterpiece quickening in it, Yeats a little sad, but by no means envious toward Lady Gregory, and sad, if at all, that his own stories in the volume entitled The Secret Rose were not written in living speech. It is pleasant to think that, as he opened the park gates for her to pass through, the thought glided into his mind that perhaps in some subsequent edition she might help him with the translation. But the moment was for the consideration of a difficulty that had arisen suddenly. The legends of Cuchulain are written in a very remote language, bearing little likeness to the modern Irish which Lady Gregory had learnt in common with everybody connected with the Irish Literary Movement, Yeats and myself excepted. A dictionary of the ancient language exists, and it is easy to look out a word; but a knowledge of Early or Middle Irish is only obtained gradually after years of study; Lady Gregory confesses herself in her preface to be no scholar, and that she pieced together her text from various French and German translations. This method recommends itself to Yeats, who says in his preface that by collating the various versions of the same tale and taking the best bits out of each the stories are now told perfectly for the first time, a singular view for a critic of Yeats’s understanding to hold, a strange theory to advocate, the strangest, we do not hesitate to say, that has ever been put forward by so distinguished a poet and critic as Yeats. He was a severer critic the day that he threw out Edward’s play with so much indignity in Tillyra. He was then a monk of literature, an inquisitor, a Torquemada, but in this preface he bows to Lady Gregory’s taste as if she were the tale-teller that the world had been waiting for, one whose art exceeded that of Balzac or Turgenev, for neither would have claimed the right to refashion the old legends in accordance with his own taste or the taste of his neighbourhood. I left out a good deal, Lady Gregory writes in her preface, I thought you would not care about. The you refers to the people of Kiltartan, to whom Lady Gregory dedicates her book. It seems to me that Balzac and Turgenev would have taken a different view as to the duty of a modern writer to the old legends; both would have said: It is never justifiable to alter a legend; it has come down to us because it contains some precious message, and the message the legend carries will be lost or worsened if the story be altered or mutilated or deformed. And who am I, Balzac would have said, that I should alter a message that has come down from a far-off time, a message often enfolded in the tale so secretly that it is all things to all men? My province, he would have continued, is not to alter the story, but to interpret it, and we have not to listen very intently to hear him say: Not only I may, I must interpret. There can be little doubt that Yeats is often injudicious in his noble preface, and he exposes Lady Gregory to criticism when he depreciates the translation from which Lady Gregory said she worked. She might have written: Which I quote, for she follows Kuno Meyer’s translation of The Wooing of Emer sentence by sentence, and it is our puzzle to discover how Kuno Meyer’s English is worthless when he signs it and beautiful when Lady Gregory quotes it. A clear case of literary transubstantiation, I said, speaking of the miracle to a friend who happened to be a Roman Catholic, and she gave me the definition of the catechism: the substance is the same, but the accident is different. Or it may have been: the incident is the same and the substance is different; one cannot always be sure that one remembers theology correctly. A little examination, however, of Lady Gregory’s text enabled us to dismiss the theological aspect as untenable. Here and there we find she has altered the words; Kuno Meyer’s title is The Wooing of Emer; Lady Gregory has changed it to The Courting of Emer (she is writing living speech); and if Kuno Meyer wrote that Emer received Cuchulain in her bower, Lady Gregory, for the same reason, would certainly change it to: she asked him into her parlour. The word lawn in the sentence: and as the young girls were sitting together on their bench on the lawn they heard coming toward them a clattering of hooves, the creaking of a chariot, the grating of wheels, belongs to Lady Gregory; of that I am so sure that it would be needless for me to refer to Kuno Meyer’s version of the legend.
No light diadem of praise Yeats sets on Lady Gregory’s brow when he says that she ha
s discovered a speech, beautiful as that of Morris, and a living speech into the bargain. He continues, that as she moved among her people she learnt to love the beautiful speech of those who think in Irish, and to understand that it is as true a dialect of English as the dialect that Burns wrote in. But when we look into the beautiful speech that Lady Gregory learnt as she moved among her people, we find that it consists of no more than a dozen turns of speech, dropped into pages of English so ordinary, that redeemed from these phrases it might appear in any newspaper without attracting attention. And she does not seem to have inquired if the phrases she uses are merely local or part of the English language; she writes again and again a phrase which we find in The Burial of Sir John Moore, evidently under the impression that she is writing something extremely Irish:
That the foe and the stranger should tread o’er his head, And we far away on the billow.
It would seem that in the opinion of many the line: And we far away on the billow, marks the poem as having been written by an Irishman, a careless criticism, for it is certain that the turn of speech referred to is to be found in Shakespeare, in Milton, in Morris, even in Dickens. It is heard in England in everyday speech, though not so often as it is heard in Ireland, but it is heard, and it was a mistake on Lady Gregory’s part to accept it as characteristically Irish. And her mistake shows how very little thought she gave to the question of idiomatic speech. She writes: he, himself, instead of omitting the parasitical he as she might very well have done. The omission would have suggested Ireland without any violation to the English language; and her attitude toward the verb to be is quite unconsidered and commonplace. She does not seem to have realised that in Ireland the verb to be is used to imply continuous action; and it seems to me very important to have noticed that Irish English and Provincial English preserve a distinction that has disappeared from English as spoken in polite society and taught at Oxford and Cambridge. Everybody in Ireland and a great many among the English middle classes still say: I shall be seeing So-and-so tonight and will tell him, etc., and everybody in Ireland and a great number among the English middle classes still say: Will you be having your letters sent on, which is surely richer English than: Will you have your letters sent on? My parlourmaid always says: Will you be dressing for dinner tonight? and: Will you be wearing your silk hat tonight? thereby distinguishing between a simple and a continuous future action. It is our parlourmaids and their likes that carry on these subtleties of tense, a much more important point than the aspiration of the letter h. I have heard of something called Extension Lectures at Oxford and Cambridge, but, without having the least notion of what is meant by extension lectures, I would suggest that some of the yeomen of Oxfordshire should be sent for to teach the professors, learned, no doubt, in the Latin and Greek languages, but who have no English.
But the efforts of the uneducated to teach the educated would be made in vain; the English language is perishing and it is natural that it should perish with the race; race and grammatical sense go together. The English have striven — and done a great deal in the world; the English are a tired race, and their weariness betrays itself in the language, and the most decadent of all are the educated classes. We say in Ireland: I am just after feeding the birds, and this is a richer phrase, faintly different from: I have just fed the birds. All these delicate shades have dropped out of modern English; they still exist in the language, but they are no longer used, they are slightly archaic today, or provincial; and the source wherefrom the language is refreshed — rural English — is being destroyed by Board-schools. God help the writer who puts pen to paper in fifty years’ time, for all that will be left of the language will be a dry shank-bone that has been lying a long while on the dust-heap of empire.
The difference between rural and urban speech should have been studied by Lady Gregory, but we fear she has not given a thought to it; she was just content to pepper her page with a few idiomatic turns of speech which she very often does not use correctly. It is what I think, said Ferogain, that it is the fire of Conaire, the High King, and I would be glad he not to be there tonight, for it would be a pity if harm would come on him or his life be shortened, for he is a branch in its blossom. To my ear — and I come from the same country as Lady Gregory — this is not living speech. What the Galway, and I may add the Mayo, peasant would say is: And it’s glad I’d be if he wasn’t there tonight. We read on and at the end of about ten lines we come upon: What use will it be I to speak to him? And then her pen fills up another page before she thinks it necessary to drop in: A welcome before you, a pretty phrase which may be idiom, though I have never heard it in either Mayo or Galway. We turn the leaves and catch sight of: And it’s you have what all the men of Ulster are wanting in. If we continued a little further it is quite possible we should come upon: And they do be saying, and: It is what I think, but we should not meet anywhere in the book an attempt to make, to mould, or to fashion a language out of the idiom of the Galway peasant, and it is astonished I am altogether that Yeats could have brought himself to compare this patchwork to the beautiful speech of Morris or of Burns, and to speak of the manuscripts that were consulted, for Lady Gregory says herself in her preface that she cannot read the manuscripts, but has translated from the French and German versions of the stories. And it is mighty hard to know how he could have reconciled himself to the adaptation of barbaric tales to the drawing-room. He must have often said to himself: She wouldn’t bowdlerise the Bible in the interests of the drawing-room. And the constant repetition of a phrase like: And it wasn’t a chair they gave him but a stool, and it not in the corner, must have ended by boring him, for no one is so easily bored by the repetition of a phrase as Yeats; it must have been that phrase that drove him out of Coole and sent him off again in pursuit of the golden-haired Isolde, whom, perhaps, the poet missed or found in Brittany or in Passy.
And it was on one of those journeys that he discovered Synge, a man of such rough and uncultivated aspect that he looked as if he had come out of Derrinrush. He was not a peasant as Yeats first supposed, but came, like all great writers, from the middle classes; his mother had a house in Kingstown which he avoided as much as possible, and it was in the Rue d’Arras that Yeats found him, dans une chambre meublée on the fifth floor. He was on his way back to Ireland, and might stay at Kingstown for a while, till his next quarter’s allowance came in (he had but sixty pounds a year), but as soon as he got it he would be away to the West, to the Arran Islands. Yeats gasped; and it was the romance of living half one’s life in the Latin Quarter and the other half in the Arran Islands that captured Yeats’s imagination. He must have lent a willing ear to Synge’s tale of an unpublished manuscript, a book which he had written about the Arran Islands; but his interest in it doubtless flagged when Synge told him that it was not written in peasant speech. Synge must have answered: But peasant speech in Arran is Irish. Yeats remembered with regret that this was so, for he would have preferred Anglo-Irish; and he listened to Synge telling him that he had some colloquial knowledge of the Irish language. He had had to pick up a little Irish; life in Arran would be impossible without Irish, and Yeats awoke from his meditation.
This strange Irishman was a solitary, who only cared to talk with peasants, and was interested in things rather than ideas. In the Rue d’Arras it must have been Yeats that did all the admiration, and Synge must have been a little bored, but quite willing that Yeats should discover in him a man of genius, a strange experience for Synge, who, however convinced he was inly of his own genius, must have wondered how Yeats had divined it, for Yeats had not pretended to feel any interest in the articles on French writers that Synge had sent round to the English Press, adding thereby sometimes a few pounds to his income, but only sometimes, for these articles were so trite that they were seldom accepted; John Eglinton confesses once a year that he could not stomach the article that Synge sent to him for publication in Dana; and they were so incorrectly written that Best, who knew Synge in the Rue d’Arras, tells that h
e used to go over them, for Synge could not write correctly at that time. Only one out of three was accepted, and the one that came to Dana no doubt came with all the edges worn by continual transmission through the post. It is Best that should write about Synge, for he helped him to furnish his room in the Rue d’Arras; Synge was very helpless in the actual affairs of life; he could not go out and buy furniture; Best had to go with him, and they brought home a mattress and some chairs and a bed on a barrow, and then returned to fetch the rest. There was a fiddle hanging on the wall of the garret in the Rue d’Arras, but as Synge never played it, Best began to wonder if Synge could play, and as if suspecting Best of disbelief in his music, Synge took it down one evening and drew the bow across the strings in a way that convinced Best, who played the fiddle himself; and, as if satisfied, he returned the fiddle to its nail, saying that he only played it in the Arran Islands in the evenings when the peasants wanted to dance. They have no ear for music, he said, and do not recognise a melody. What! exclaimed Best. Only as they recognise the cry of a bird or animal, not as a musician. Only the beat of the jig enters their ears, Best replied in a voice tinged with melancholy.
In Yeats’s imagination, playing the fiddle to the Arran Islanders, and reciting poems to them, are one and the same thing, and he recognised instantly in Synge the Gleeman that was in himself, but had remained, and would remain for ever, unrealised; and his imagination caught fire at the conjunction of the Rue d’Arras and the Arran Islands. And whosoever has followed this narrative so far can see Yeats leaning forward in Synge’s chair, getting more and more interested in him at every moment, his literary passions rising till they carried him to his feet and set him walking about the dusty carpet from the window to the table at which Synge worked, crying: Come to Ireland and write folk-plays for me. A play about Arran.
