Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  Synge had written the play knowing that the part of Christy Mahon was going to be played by Willie Fay, a little man five feet three or four; allusions to his size had crept into the text, and Willie Fay, who is a true artist, had exhibited Christy Mahon in the conditions of a wayfarer who had been wandering for at least a fortnight, sleeping in a barn when he could find an open door, and a dry ditch when he could not find a barn, and if Willie Fay had been a broad-shouldered, stalwart, fine young fellow, he might have carried the illusion so far as to send some whiffs of Christy across the footlights. But his diminutive appearance, and the very qualities which made him so admirable an exponent of the part of Michael O’Dowd in The Well of the Saints were against him in the Playboy. An actor’s stock-in-trade is his personality, and Fay’s personality is of the crab-apple kind, and it was necessary that the story that Christy had to tell should be told with an engaging simplicity; the audience must sympathise with the son whom the father persecuted because he would not marry an old woman; the audience must see the father raise the scythe, and poor Christie the loy, to defend himself. The father is cloven by the loy, but that is an accident. I did not see Willie Fay in the part, but it is easy to imagine how his reading would alienate the sympathy of the audience. He might point to certain passages which would support his reading; no doubt he could; but these are not the passages that should be brought into light. It just comes to this, that no man living can play the two parts, the Playboy and the blind man in The Well of the Saints, any more than any man can play Hamlet and Othello satisfactorily. A different personality is required, and Fred O’Donovan is a well-favoured young man whom any girl would like for his appearance, and he told the story of how he had killed his father, simply, almost innocently, as an unfortunate accident that had happened to him, and Pegeen Mike pitied him. He was no doubt occasionally against the words, but that was unavoidable; the part cannot be played any other way. A few phrases were dropped out here and there; in the second act the bandage was no longer blood-stained, and in the third, when Christy went out to kill his father for the second time, the father came in on all fours; this kept the comedy note, which was in danger of being lost, for Pegeen Mike is very angry with Christy in the third act, believing him to be a mere braggart — the weak spot in the play, but it passes rapidly; and it was interesting to speak about it to Miss Maire O’Neill, who played Pegeen Mike out of a very clear vision of the character and with all the finish of a true artist.

  However we look at it, I said, it is difficult to see how Pegeen Mike could have brought the peat from the fire to burn her lover’s feet, and three minutes after rush to the door to watch him leaving her for ever; going away with his father back to their own countryside. Miss O’Neill said she didn’t think she could speak the words so that the audience would understand that her anger against Christy was simulated. Well, imperfection is often a zest, I answered, and left the theatre thinking that Fate had allowed Synge to accomplish very little; two one-act plays, purely tentative, a three-act play upon an old theme, The Tinker’s Wedding, and a dramatic version of the legend of Deirdre, which it would have been well for me to have read before writing this page, for the printed page alone is veracious; our ears, however quick, cannot take in the whole of a play. But the book is not on the table, nor in the house, nor at the bookseller’s round the corner, and it is well that it isn’t, for it is pleasant sometimes to believe that one’s ears are trustworthy, and, amid my aural experiences, I have none more agreeable than the music of the dialogue about Naisi’s grave, though memory recalls but one tiny phrase: Death is a poor untidy thing. The writing of Deirdre in peasant speech was Yeats’s idea; and the text bears witness that when Synge had written an act he began to feel that peasant speech is unsuited to tragedy. Only the second and third acts are of much account, only these are finished, and to finish the first act Synge would have had to redeem it from peasant speech, ridiculous and out of place at the court of Kings, though the Kings be but shepherd Kings. There is less idiom in the second act than in the first, and none at all in the third; and when I mentioned these things to Yeats he told me that Synge had begun to weary of the limitations of peasant speech.... It is difficult to imagine Synge writing about the middle classes and their tea-parties, or the upper classes and their motor-cars, and we may exercise our wits trying to discover the turn his talent would have taken, but it is more practical to tell how Lady Gregory came to the rescue of the Abbey Theatre and saved it after the secession of the Fays.

  She could write easily and well, and had shown aptitude for writing rural anecdotes in dialogue, and it is an open secret that she was Yeats’s collaborator in the Pot of Broth and in Cathleen ni Houlihan; and feeling that the fate of the movement depended upon her, she undertook the great responsibility of keeping the theatre open with her pen, writing play after play, three or four a year, writing in the space of ten years something like thirty plays. And is there one among us who would undertake such a job of work and accomplish it as well as Lady Gregory? The plays that flowed from her pen so rapidly are not of equal merit, nor is there any one that compares with the Playboy, but all are meritorious, all are conceived and written in the same style. She is herself, in her little plays, a Galway woman telling rural anecdotes that amuse her woman’s mind, and telling them gracefully, never trying to philosophise, to explain, but just content to pick her little flower, to place it in a vase for our amusement, and go on to another flower. The Rising of the Moon is a very pretty bit of artless dramatic writing, with a fine folk flavour, hardly written, told as the people would tell it by their firesides. Hyacinth Halvey has been played all over the world with success; and one must not look too scornfully at success; a certain measure is necessary in a theatre. Spreading the News is even more natural than The Rising of the Moon; it is just the gossip of a village thrown easily into dramatic form. Nobody could have done Lady Gregory’s plays as well as she did them herself, and The Workhouse Ward must not be forgotten, a trifle somewhat sentimental, but just what was wanted to carry on the Abbey Theatre, which, for a moment, could do very well without the grim humours of Synge. We must get it into our heads that the Abbey Theatre would have come to naught but for Lady Gregory’s talent for rolling up little anecdotes into one-act plays. She has written three-act plays, but her art and her humour and her strength rarely carry her beyond a one-act. The best of her three-act plays is probably The Image, in which she sets a whole village prattling; the characters go on talking about very little, yet always talking pleasantly, and we go away pleasantly amused and pleasantly weary. The telling of The Jackdaw is a little confused, but whosoever writes thirty plays in ten years will sometimes be sprightly, sometimes confused, sometimes languid, and will sometimes choose subjects that cannot very well be written. She has told that she wrote plays in the first instance because she believed it to be her duty to write for the Abbey Theatre, and afterwards, no doubt, took an interest in the writing for its own sake, and in this her story nowise differs from many another’s, chance playing in our lives a greater part than we would care to admit. She never would have written a play if she had not met Yeats, nor would Synge, who is now looked upon as an artist as great as Donatello or Benvenuto Cellini, and perhaps I should not have gone to Ireland if I had not met Yeats; and if I had not gone to Ireland I should not have written The Lake or The Untilled Field, or the book I am now writing.

  So all the Irish movement rose out of Yeats and returns to Yeats. He wrote beautiful lyrics and narrative poems from twenty till five-and-thirty, and then he began to feel that his mission was to give a literature to Ireland that should be neither Hebrew, nor Greek, nor French, nor German, nor English — a literature that should be like herself, that should wear her own face and speak with her own voice, and this he could do only in a theatre. We have all wanted repertory theatres and art theatres and literary theatres, but these words are vain words and mean nothing. Yeats knew exactly what he wanted; he wanted a folk theatre, for if Ireland were ever to produ
ce any literature he knew that it would have to begin in folk, and he has his reward. Ireland speaks for the first time in literature in the Abbey Theatre.

  IX

  BUT MY THOUGHTS have begun to wander from Synge and Lady Gregory and Yeats to all the critics who have complained that in this book, instead of creating types of character like Esther Waters or Dick Lennox, I have wasted my time describing my friends, mere portrait-painting. But was not Dick Lennox Dick Maitland? And in writing Esther Waters did I not think of one heroic woman? We all have models, and if we copy the model intelligently, a type emerges. In writing Patience, Gilbert thought he was copying Oscar Wilde, whereas he was drawing Willie Yeats out of the womb of Time; and when Flaubert wrote Bouvard and Pecuchet he thought he was creating, but he was really performing the same kind offices for Plunkett and Gill, giving them names much more significant than the names they are known by in Ireland, but doing no more. A letter from Plunkett regretting that a broken leg prevented him from being present at the great dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel has been alluded to, and he was whirled rapidly before the reader’s eyes as he repaired on an outside car to an agricultural meeting with Yeats, but no portrait of him has appeared, and the reader has not heard how we became acquainted. It was dear Edward who brought the meeting about, overriding Plunkett, who is a timid man, and fears to meet any one with a sense of humour; he dreads laughter as a cat dreads cold water. But Edward insisted. You are both public men and you cannot avoid knowing each other sooner or later, and now is the moment for you both to take the plunge.

  And one evening at the end of a long summer’s day a lean man of medium height, courteous and dignified, clearly of the Protestant ascendancy, came forward through the dusk of a drawing-room — the lamps had just been lighted — to thank me for having accepted his invitation to dinner. I liked his well-designed oval face, his scanty beard, and his eyes pleasantly grey and pleasantly perplexed. A long, straight, well-formed nose divided the face, and a broad strip of forehead lay underneath the brown stubbly crop of hair that covered a small round skull. The arrival of a guest obliged him to turn away, but before doing so he shook hands with me a second time, and in this supplementary handshake it seemed to me that that something which is genuine in him had passed into his hand. What is in the mind transpires in the hand; and this is quite natural, and it is still more natural that what is not in the mind should not transpire in the hand. There is no grip in Gill’s hand; one remembers its colour and its dangle, that is all; and his manner, though pleasing, is flimsy; not that Plunkett’s manners are hard and disagreeable; on the contrary, they are rather soft and affable. But there is something pathetic in him which strikes one at first in the brow, in the grey eyes under it, and all over the flat face marked with a prominent nose, and in the hesitancy of his speech, which straggles with his beard, and his exclamation: Er — er — er, without which he cannot speak half a dozen words.

  So much did I see of Plunkett in the red twilight, with glimpses through it of silken gowns, of shoulders and arms, all effaced, a dim background. One felt on entering his room that his dinner was not a sexual one. Everybody seemed anxious to speak on what is known as serious subjects, but restrained himself out of deference to the gowns. But as soon as sex had retired cigars were lighted and important matters were on the verge of discussion. Plunkett was visibly relieved, and with brightening face he began to talk. He talked rapidly, he broke down, now he lost the thread and sought for it: Er — er — er, the uneconomic man in his economic holding, er — er — er, is a danger to the State, and the economic man in his uneconomic holding, er — er — er, is probably a greater danger, and to relieve the producer of the cost of distribution is the object of the Co-operative movement. It seemed to me that we could have discovered what he was saying in any sixpenny text-book, but Plunkett was so interested that it is not likely he perceived he was boring the company and me.

  Plunkett, I said to myself, is one of those men whose genius is in practical work, and who, in order to obtain foundation for his work, seeks blindly for first principles; as soon as we get to practical work he will talk quite differently. And I looked forward to questioning him on matters about which I had definite information. But as I was about to speak, a pallid parliamentarian, whose name I have forgotten, weary like myself of the economic man and the uneconomic holding, turned to me to get news of O’Brien, whose headquarters were in the County of Mayo, thinking that as I came from that part of the country, I should be able to tell him something regarding the chances of an anti-grazing movement. It so happened that I had had that morning a long talk with my agent about Mayo, and forgetful for the moment of my intention to question Plunkett about the egg industry, overborne by a desire to escape from platitudes, I began to repeat all I had heard, saying I could vouch for the facts, my agent being an old friend on whose veracity and accuracy of observation I could depend. The parliamentarian leaned forward anxious to get the truth from me, and whatever information might be picked up on the way, to pad his speeches for the next session; and perhaps what I was saying, by force of contrast with Plunkett’s generalities, attracted the attention of those present, and as they leaned forward interested to hear some facts the humour of the situation began to tickle me. The absent O’Brien had become the centre of interest, and a cloud of melancholy appeared in Plunkett’s face, his mechanical smile broke down, he seemed troubled and irritated. Then, I thought, it is really true that he delights in his talk of the economic man and the uneconomic holding — er — er — er, and vice versa; and I began to doubt if Nature in her endless discrepancies had really created such a discrepancy as I had imagined: a practical man unable to get to practical work before drinking platitudes from a sixpenny text-book. By this time my knowledge of O’Brien’s movement was exhausted, and I should have been pleased to change the subject, but the parliamentarian was insistent, and had it not been for the intervention of Plunkett I should not have been able to rid myself of him. But Plunkett, unable to endure rivalry with O’Brien for another moment, turned to the pallid parliamentarian, saying that in two or three years his co-operative followers would be masters of all local assemblies, and he spoke in such a way as to lead the gentleman to understand that enough had been said about O’Brien.

  At last my chance seemed to have come to get a word with Plunkett regarding the details of his scheme for the regeneration of Ireland. I was at that time interested in a Co-operative Egg Society, which had been started at Plunkett’s instigation by my brother, who had discovered, after a little experience, that more extended business arrangements were necessary if the profits were to cover the expenses; and knowing more of this matter than I did about O’Brien’s anti-grazing movement I moved up toward Plunkett, anxious to hear his opinion and to try and induce him to modify the measures he was taking for spreading these societies all over the country. At the mention of the blessed word co-operation Plunkett’s face brightened, and he began to discuss the subject, but in general terms, more, it seemed to me, for the edification of the parliamentarian than for any practical purpose. As I knew from my brother all about the general theory and only wanted to study its application, I returned to the details again and again, going into figures, showing how the system could not be carried out exactly as Plunkett had dreamed it, and having some experience about the conveying of eggs from Pulborough to London (they arrived nearly always broken; true that the South Coast Railway paid for the breakage without murmuring; all the same it was annoying to have one’s eggs broken), I tried to learn from him if more reliance could be placed upon Irish railways.

  One cannot discuss, I remember him saying, the fate of the individual egg.

  But, Plunkett, your whole system rests on the individual egg, a fact which he could not contravene and so he became melancholy again. Nothing, I said to myself, bores him so much as detail. He loves dreaming, like every other Irishman; and we did not see each other for many a month until we met in Gill’s rooms in Clare Street, or in the offices of the Da
ily Express, after the Boer War had driven me out of England. The Daily Express had been bought by Plunkett, or it had come into Plunkett’s control, and Gill had been appointed editor, and feeling, I suppose, that it was necessary to redeem the Express from its sectarian tone, Gill dared one day to write of Dr Walsh as the Archbishop of Dublin, causing a great uproar among the subscribers. An attack on the Great Southern Railway caused the withdrawal of a great advertisement; but nothing mattered so long as Plunkett and Gill succeeded in convincing Gerald Balfour that what Ireland needed was a new State Department of Agriculture and Art. Like all dreamers, Plunkett is an inveigling fellow, and he inveigled Gerald Balfour, and Gerald Balfour inveigled his brother, and his brother inveigled the ministry, and the end of all this inveigling was a grant of one hundred and seventy thousand a year to found a Department of Agriculture and Art in Ireland. But the inveigler had been inveigled; Gill’s ambition stretched beyond mere agriculture; how Art was gathered into the scheme I do not know, probably as a mere makeweight; the mission of the Department was the reformation of Ireland, and, from end to end, the very task that Flaubert’s heroes ... but it would be well to tell my readers who were the heroes of this not very well-known book.