by George Moore
But the play I’ve shown you —
Is of no account. The language will help you to know your own people.
And, better than any description, this dialogue represents the meeting of Yeats and Synge in the Rue d’Arras, Synge’s large impassive face into which hardly any light of expression ever came, listening to Yeats with a look of perplexity moving over its immobility, and Yeats’s passion, purely literary, steadily mounting. You must come back and perfect yourself in the language; you must live among the people again, he reports himself to have said. You must come to Ireland. A theatre is building in Dublin for the production of folk-plays, or soon will be building; and he told Synge how Miss Horniman, a lady of literary tastes and ample income, had decided to give to Dublin what no other city in an English-speaking country possessed — a subventioned theatre. Write me an Arran play. We will open the theatre with it; and he began to speak of Synge’s immediate return to Arran. I should die, Synge is reported to have answered. Not before you have written the masterpiece, Yeats answered, and he continued day after day to subjugate Synge’s mind, till one Saturday evening, after a talk lasting till long past midnight, Synge declared his adherence to the new creed of living speech.
When a man’s mind is made up, his feet must set out on the way, Yeats replied. Synge acquiesced, and when he had received two little cheques which were due to him for articles, he folded his luggage according to promise, and a few days after presented himself at the Nassau Hotel, and was introduced to Lady Gregory, who encouraged him to confide in her; and he told her the story of his health, and she very kindly took his part against Yeats, who was all for Arran, not for the middle island, for there only Irish is spoken. And the dialect is what we want. That may be, Mr Yeats, but Mr Synge may not be able to stand the climate in the autumn. And she turned to Synge, who told her that the best time would be a little later, when the people would be out digging in their potato fields. Lady Gregory agreed that this was so, and after some demur Yeats yielded, as he always does to Lady Gregory, and the three were of one mind that the mild climate of Wicklow was suitable to Synge’s health, and also to the study of living speech, for the tinkers met in Wicklow in the autumn, Yeats cried. You mustn’t miss the gathering. And a few days later Synge wrote that he had been fortunate enough to fall in with a band of tinkers. He had heard a tall, lean man cry after a screaming girl: Black Hell to your sowl! you’ve followed me so far, you’ll follow me to the end! And driving their shaggy ponies and lean horses up a hillside, the tinkers made for their annual assemblage, exchanging their wives and arranging the roads they were to take, the signs to be left at the cross roads, the fairs they were to attend, and the meeting-places for the following year. But this was not all the good news. Synge had gained the good-will of a certain tinker and his wife, and was learning their life and language as they strolled along the lanes, cadging and stealing as they went, squatting at eventide on the side of a dry ditch. Like a hare in a gap he listened, and when he had mastered every turn of their speech he left the tinker and turned into the hills, spending some weeks with a cottager, joining a little later another group of tinkers accompanied by a servant-girl who had suddenly wearied of scrubbing and mangling, boiling for pigs, cooking, and working dough, and making beds in the evening. It would be better, she had thought, to lie under the hedgerow; and in telling me of this girl, Synge seemed to be telling me his own story. He, too, disliked the regular life of his mother’s house, and preferred to wander with the tinkers, and when tired of them to lie abed smoking with a peasant, and awake amid the smells of shag and potato-skins in the sieve in the corner of the room. In answer to an inquiry how the day passed in the cottage, he told me that after breakfast he scrambled over a low wall out of which grew a single hawthorn, and looked round for a place where he might loosen his strap, and when that job was done he kept on walking ahead thinking out the dialogue of his plays, modifying it at every stile after a gossip with some herdsman or pig-jobber, whomever he might meet, returning through the cold spring evening, when the stars shine brightly through the naked trees, licking his lips, appreciating the fine flavour of some drunkard’s oath or blasphemy.
Yeats was at this time in the hands of the Fays and a Committee, and the performances of the National Theatre were given in different halls; and when Synge came up from the country to read Riders to the Sea to the company, Yeats, who did not wish to have any misunderstanding on the subject, cried: Sophocles! across the table, and, fearing that he was not impressive enough, he said: No, Aeschylus! And that same afternoon he said to me in Grafton Street: I would I were as sure of your future and of my own as I am of Synge’s. Irishmen, he said, had written well before Synge, but they had written well by casting off Ireland; but Synge was the first man that Ireland had inspired; and I asked if he were going to find his fortune in Ireland, his literary fortune, for The Well of the Saints had very nearly emptied the Abbey Theatre. We were but twenty in the stalls: the Yeats family, Sarah Purser, William Bailey, John Eglinton, AE, Longworth, and dear Edward, who supported the Abbey Theatre, though he was averse from peasant plays. All this sneering at Catholic practices is utterly distasteful to me, he said to me. I can hear the whining voice of the proselytiser through it all. I never will go against my opinions, and when I hear the Sacred Name I assure you — You mean the name of God, Edward, don’t you? I never like to mention it. The Sacred Name is enough. But if you are speaking French you say Mon Dieu at every sentence. If it isn’t wrong in one language, how can it be wrong in another? A smile trickled across Edward’s face, round and large and russet as a ripe pumpkin, and he muttered: Mon ami Moore, mon ami Moore.
He was in the Abbey the first night of the Playboy, and on my return from Paris he told me that though the noise was great, he had heard enough blasphemy to keep him out of the theatre thenceforth, and next morning he had read in the papers that Ireland had been exhibited in a shameful light as an immoral country. And oddly enough, the scene of the immorality is your own native town, George. He told me that the hooting had begun about the middle of the third act at the words: If all the women of Mayo were standing before me, and they in their — He shrank from completing the sentence, and muttered something about the evocation of a disgusting spectacle.
I agree with you, Edward, that shift evokes a picture of blay calico; but the delightful underwear of Madame —
Now, George.
And then, amused at his own folly, which he can no more overcome than anybody else, he began to laugh, shaking like a jelly, puffing solemnly all the while at his churchwarden.
The indignation was so great that I thought sometimes the pit was going to break in. Lower the bloody curtain, and give us something we bloody well want, a crowded pit kept on shouting. And looking at Edward I imagined I could see him in the stalls near the stage, turning round in terror, his face growing purpler and purpler. All the same, he said, though the pain that Synge’s irreverent remarks caused me is very great, I disapprove altogether of interrupting a performance. But Yeats shouldn’t have called in the police. A Nationalist should never call for the police.
But, Edward, supposing a housebreaker forces his way in here or into Tillyra?
He said that that was different, and after wasting some time in discussion regarding the liberty of speech and the rights of property, he asked me if I had read the play, and I told him that on reading about the tumult in the Abbey Theatre I had telegraphed from Paris for a copy, and that the first lines convinced me that Ireland had at last begotten a masterpiece — the first lines of Pegeen Mike’s letter to Mr Michael O’Flaherty, general dealer, in Castlebar, for six yards of stuff for to make a yellow gown, a pair of boots with lengthy heels on them and brassy eyes, a hat as suited for a wedding day, a fine-tooth comb. Never was there such a picture of peasant life in a few lines; and at every sentence my admiration increased. At the end of the act I cried out: A masterpiece! a masterpiece! Of course, they felt insulted. The girls coming in with presents for the young stra
nger pleased me, but a cold wind of doubt seemed to blow over the pages when the father came on the stage, a bloody bandage about his head, and — Edward — you’re asleep!
No, I’m listening.
So clearly did I see disaster in that bloody bandage that I could hardly read through the third act. But you see nothing in the play.
Yes, I do, only it’s a little thing. Shawn Keogh is a very good character, and the Widow Quinn is not bad either.
But the language, Edward?
You have made up your mind that this play is a masterpiece, but I am not going to give in to you.
But the style, Edward?
It isn’t English. I like the Irish language and the English language, but I don’t like the mixture; and then puffing at his pipe for a few seconds he said: I like the intellectual drama.
The conversation turned upon Ibsen, and we talked pleasantly until one in the morning, and then bidding him good night I returned to Ely Place, delighted at my own perspicacity, for there could be no doubt that it was the bloody bandage that caused the row in the Abbey Theatre. The language is beautiful, but — I had admitted to Edward that I had only glanced through the third act, and Edward had answered: If you had read the whole of it you might be of my opinion. It wasn’t likely that Edward and I should agree about the Playboy, but it might well be that I was judging it hurriedly, and it would have been wiser, I reflected, to have read the play through before attempting to explain why the humour of the audience had changed suddenly, and I resolved to read the play next morning. But my dislike of reading is so great that I overlooked it, and when Yeats came to see me, instead of the praise which he had come to hear, and which he was craving for, he heard some rather vain dissertations and only half-hearted praise. Again my impulsiveness was my ruin. The play would have been understood if it had been read carefully, and the evening would have been one of exaltation, whereas it went by mournfully, Yeats in the chimney-corner listening to suggestions that would preserve the comedy note. He went away depressed, saying, however, that it would be as well that I should write to Synge about his play, since I liked the greater part. But he did not think that Synge would make any alterations. And the letter I sent to Synge was superficial. I hope he destroyed it. He was glad that his play had pleased me, but he could not alter the third act. It had been written again and again — thirteen times. That is all I remember of his letter, interesting on account of the circumstances in which it was written and the rarity of Synge’s correspondence. It is a pity his letter was destroyed and no copy kept; our letters would illuminate the page that I am now writing, exhibiting us both in our weakness and our strength — Synge in his strength, for if the play had been altered we should have all been disgraced, and it was Yeats’s courage that saved us in Dublin. He did not argue, he piled affirmation upon affirmation, and he succeeded in the end ... but we will not anticipate.
But if Dublin would not listen to the Playboy, Dublin read the text; edition after edition was published, and we talked the Playboy round our firesides. How we talked! Week after week, month after month, the Abbey Theatre declining all the while, till at last the brothers Fay rose in revolt against Yeats’s management, accusing him of hindering the dramatic movement by producing no plays except those written by his intimate friends. Yeats repelled the accusation by offering to submit those that he had rejected to the judgment of Professor Tyrrell, a quite unnecessary concession on the part of Yeats, for Willie Fay is but an amusing Irish comedian, and it was presumptuous for him and his brother to set themselves against a poet. They resigned, and one night Yeats came to me with the grave news that the Fays had seceded.
I feel I must talk to somebody he said, flinging himself into a chair.
AE is the only man who can distribute courage, but Yeats and AE were no longer friends, and I was but a poor purveyor. It is true that I told him, and without hesitation, that the secession of the Fays was a blessing in disguise, and that now he was master in his own house the Abbey Theatre would begin to flourish, and it would have been well if I had confined myself to pleasant prophesying; but very few can resist the temptation to give good advice. One thing, Yeats, I have always had in mind, but never liked to tell you; it is that the way you come down the steps from the stage and stride up the stalls and alight by Lady Gregory irritates the audience, and if you will allow me to be perfectly frank, I will tell you that she is a little too imposing, too suggestive of Corinne or Madame de Staël. Corinne and Madame de Staël were one and the same person, weren’t they? But you don’t know, Yeats, do you? And so I went on pulling the cord, letting down volumes of water upon poor Yeats, who crouched and shivered. The water, always cold, was at times very icy, for instance when I said that his dreams of reviving Jonson’s Volpone must be abandoned. If you aren’t very careful, Yeats, the Academic idea will overgrow the folk.
And Yeats went away overwhelmed, and I saw no more of him for many months, not until it became known that Synge’s persistent ill health had at last brought him to a private hospital, where he lay waiting an operation. He lives by the surgeon’s knife. Yeats said to me, and I welcomed his advice to save myself from the anguish of going to see a man dying of cancer. And while Synge perished slowly, Gogarty recovered in the same hospital after an operation for appendicitis. One man’s scale drops while another goes up. As I write this line I can see Synge, whom I shall never see again with my physical eyes, sitting thick and straight in my armchair, his large, uncouth head, and flat, ashen-coloured face with two brown eyes looking at me, not unsympathetically. A thick, stubbly growth of hair starts out of a strip of forehead like black twigs out of the head of a broom. I see a ragged moustache, and he sits bolt upright in my chair, his legs crossed, his great country shoe spreading over the carpet. The conversation about us is of literature, but he looks as bored as Jack Yeats does in the National Gallery.... Synge and Jack Yeats are like each other in this, neither takes the slightest interest in anything except life, and in their own deductions from life; educated men, both of them, but without aesthetics, and Yeats’s stories that Synge read the classics and was a close student of Racine is a piece of Yeats’s own academic mind. Synge did not read Racine oftener than Jack Yeats looks at Titian, and no conclusion should be drawn from the fact that among his scraps of verse are to be found translations from Villon and Marot; they are merely exercises in versification; he was curious to see if Anglo-Irish idiom could be used in poetry. Villon wrote largely in the slang of his time, therefore Villon was selected; and whosoever reads Villon dips into Marot and reads Une Ballade à Double Refrain. And that is all, for, despite his beautiful name, Marot is an insipid poet. I am sorry that Yeats fell into the mistake of attributing much reading to Synge; he has little love of character and could not keep himself from putting rouge on Synge’s face and touching up his eyebrows. He showed greater discrimination when he said: You will never know as much about French poetry as Arthur Symons. Come to Ireland and write plays for me. And for his great instinct we must forgive him his little sins of reason. He very rightly speaks of Synge as a solitary, and it is interesting to speculate what made him a solitary. Was it the sense that death was lurking round the corner always, and the sense that he possessed no social gifts, that helped to drive him out into the Arran Islands where he knew nobody, and to the Latin Quarter behind the Luxembourg Gardens where nobody knew him? A man soon perceives if he is interested in others and if others are interested in him, and if he contribute nothing and gets nothing, he will slink away as Synge did.
It seemed a cruel fate that decreed that Synge must die before his play could be revived in Dublin, but his fate was cruel from the beginning. Yeats tells me that these lines were found among his papers: I am five-and-twenty today; I wonder will the five-and-twenty years before me be as unhappy as those I have passed through. He received Yeats’s belief in his genius, and that was all he got from life. He wrote but little, but that little was his own: Mon verre n’est pas grand, mais je bois dans mon verre. His last stre
ngth he reserved for Deirdre, working at the play whenever he could, determined to finish it before he died. But he wrote slowly, and the disease moved quickly from cell to cell, and before the last writing was accomplished Synge laid aside the pen and resigned himself to death. It is curious that he should have met his old friend Best on his way to the hospital. Best tells these things significantly. He asked Synge if he were going in for an operation. Synge answered no; and when Best called to see him in the hospital, he found Synge clinging to a little hope, though he knew there was none, saying that people often get better when nobody expected them to get better; and he seemed to experience some disappointment when Best did not answer promptly that that was so.
He used to speak of Deirdre as his last disappointment; but another waited him. An hour before he died he asked the nurse to wheel his bed into a room whence he could see the Wicklow mountains, the hills where he used to go for long solitary walks, and he was wheeled into the room, but the mountains could not be seen from the windows; to see them it was necessary to stand up, and Synge could not stand or sit up in his bed, so his last wish remained ungratified, and he died with tears in his eyes.
VIII
SYNGE’S DEATH SEEMS to have done him a great deal of good; he was not cold in his grave when his plays began to sell like hot cakes and a complete edition of his writings was contemplated, comprising the plays and his Wicklow Sketches and The Blasket Islands; the newspaper articles that he had written upon the French poets were sought for and discovered, and, what was still more important, Yeats decreed a revival of the Playboy at the Abbey. We were all agog and prayed that the play would be allowed to pass without protest; it seemed very likely that this would be permitted, for Synge’s success had sobered Dublin, especially its journalists. A sad thing it is for a journalist to find the play that he has described as contemptible, as an insult to Ireland, accepted by all the world as a masterpiece, and the newspaper that smells like a musty sacristy held its peace, or only sent one poor little voice to utter a faint squeak in the gallery from time to time. The play was the same, the text was the same, the cast was the same with one exception. The part of the Playboy was entrusted to Fred O’Donovan, and thereby hangs a tale that I should like to tell.
