In My Good Books

by V. S. Pritchett

  It is common in the eulogies of Synge to say that the unfinished Deirdre of the Sorrows hints at heights to which Synge’s genius might have attained. For me Deirdre marks a dubious phase in his development. Even when I allow for the blind spot which English taste has in the matter of legendary or mythological subjects, I cannot help feeling that, in attempting Deirdre Synge put himself into a literary straitjacket and went back on the sound opinions he gave in his prefaces to the plays and poems. No doubt anyone who knew Yeats at that time was simply ordered into the Celtic twilight and had to take his dose of it; but one hopes that Synge would have had the sanity to return to the doctrine he set out in the preface to The Tinker’s Wedding:

  Of the things which nourish the imagination humour is one of the most useful, and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it.

  More important:

  I have often thought that at the side of the poetic diction which everyone condemns, modern verse contains a great deal of poetic material, using poetry in the same special sense. The poetry of exaltation will be always the highest; but when men lose their poetic feelings for ordinary life and cannot write poetry of ordinary things, their exalted poetry is likely to lose its strength of exaltation, in the way men cease to build beautiful churches when they have lost happiness in building shops.

  And more important still, these words from the introduction to his book of poems and translations:

  The drama is made serious—in the French sense of the word—not by the degree in which it is taken up with the problems that are serious in themselves, but by the degree in which it gives nourishment, not very easy to define, on, which our imaginations live.

  So Riders to the Sea seems to me genuinely tragic tragedy but Deirdre to be simply poetic material for tragedy where Synge’s genius moves stiffly.

  Like the Russians in the ’seventies, Synge “returned to the people” when he went to Aran. Unlike the Russians he does not seem to have felt any mystical faith in doing this, and knew quite well that the heroic, primitive life of the West was doomed. There is always the sensation in Synge’s work of being one of the last men on earth, the survivor of a dying family. One feels the loneliness of men and women in a lonely scene, and one is also made to feel the personal, inaccessible loneliness of Synge himself. At the back of the plays there is, for all his insistence on the necessity of joy and feasting in the theatre, a dark and rather fin de siècle shadow, and there is more than a hint, in the character of the Playboy, of the art-for-art’s-sake artist of the ’nineties who lives only in words and illusions. Joyce’s legendary Dublin is, in a sense, the answer to Synge’s legendary West. Ulysses is an assertion that modern urban man can have his myth and Joyce’s “ordinary men” are the sort of “ordinary men” whom Synge would have found lifeless. Synge was too soon to see the enormous contribution of the American vernacular to popular culture in the towns, and too cut off from the knowledge of urban people to know what resources common urban speech had. Nowadays (and without mistaking courage for the Heroic pattern of living) we can discern the new heroic status of cities in their Æschylean devastation and their curious mass stoicism. Cities seem now to have become greater, in this sense, than individual men.

  In one obvious way Synge does belong to an earlier world than ours, and that is in his humour. It is the strong, sculptured, corporeal and baroque humour of knavery, tricks and cunning. We have almost entirely lost the literature of roguery, the life of which has been prolonged in Ireland by the tradition of disrespect for foreign law. To his handling of roguery, Synge brought all the subtlety he had learned from Molière. This has, of course, often been said and it stands out a mile in his handling of the dramatist’s use of continual contrast, whereby almost every speech creates a new situation or farcically reverses its predecessor. There is no falsity in his farces; one does not feel that the situation is an artificial one. How easily The Playboy could have become Aldwych knockabout; and yet how easily Synge makes us accept his preposterous idea, by trying it first upon the main character before our eyes. The texture of his drama is a continuous interweaving of challenge and riposte, a continuous changing of the threads in a single motif; so that we are involved in far more than a mere anecdote which has a jerk of astonishment in the beginning and a sting in the tail at the end. At the height of farce we may instantly, by a quick shift of focus, be faced by that sense of the evanescence of life which is Synge’s especially, or we may be jogged by the sharp elbow of mortality. And as a piece of music will start on two or three plain notes before its theme is given a head, so these plays start in the simple household accents and come with the same domesticity to their end. The old man having got rid of his wife, changes his tone and calls for the drink, the tinkers escape from the curse of the priest to their old life on the roads, Pegeen is left to clear up at the inn, the blind whom the saint has healed go back to their blindness. All are ordinary people once more, leaving us (as the comic genius does) to eye each other with new, unholy expectation, warming us with the love of human antics, fattening our thin wits, so that like Sir Mammon in The Alchemist we cry out as we put the book down, “Oh, my voluptuous mind!”

  The Steeple House Spires

  One hesitates, since Freud, to admit to a strong personal feeling for church steeples, and yet who does not respond to the ring and vividness of that phrase which occurs again and again in George Fox’s Journal and which puts the man and his book a key higher than the common chord of living:

  As I was walking in a close with several Friends, I lifted up my head and espied three steeple house spires and they struck at my life?

  They do still strike at our lives, though with the stab of reminiscence rather than of faith, when we see them rising over the fields and elms of the English countryside. In the towns—and Fox, on this occasion was speaking of “the bloody city of Lichfield”—the steeple commands the skyline no longer. Those words of Fox, more than any others of his, take us back to the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century the steeple must still have denominated the towns to the arriving traveller, as it continues today to mark our villages, but did the steeple strike at the eighteenth-century traveller’s life? That is very doubtful. The decisiveness, the militance, the poignancy have gone out of English religious fervour. After the seventeenth century what religion has there been in England? There is only the revivalism of Wesley, a fruit of personal conflict, and Wesley side-tracked a revolution where the “prophesyings” of the Puritans made one.

  That is perhaps too great a simplification; Fox himself was a poor short-term revolutionary when one compares him with Cromwell’s sectarian soldiers; the mysticism of the Quakers provided, in their own time, an alternative to the revolution, such as we see in the gospels of non-resistance, pacifism, non-attachment, etc., etc., today. If we continue that quotation from Fox’s Journal, we cannot doubt that it contains a revolutionary emotion which is more dynamic than the feeling of Winstanley’s peasant communists, for example, who, having taken the land, were content to keep the clergy and the gentry off by singing a song about “conquering with love”.

  I asked [Fox goes on] what place that was and they said, Lichfield. Immediately the word of the Lord came to me that thither I must go…. I stepped away, and went by my eye over hedge and ditch till I came within a mile of Lichfield, where in a great field, there were shepherds keeping their sheep. I was commanded of the Lord to untie my shoes and put them off.

  And then, his feet burning like fire in the winter fields, he walked into the town where:

  the word of the Lord came to me again, to cry “Woe unto the bloody city of Lichfield!” So I went up and down the streets, crying with a loud voice, “Woe to the bloody city of Lichfield!” … And no one laid hands on me; but as I went thus crying through the streets, there seemed to me to be a channel of blood running down the streets, and the market place appeared like a pool of blood.

  That is authentic and so is the characteristic English reaction: “Alack George,” the inhabi
tants said, “where are thy shoes?” The woe could take care of itself; what bothered the kindly, respectable, practical souls of Lichfield was the condition of George Fox’s feet.

  There is the attraction of Fox’s Journal in a few lines. In his writing the personal fanatic cry of the visionary and the words of the homely are blended. The huge Leicestershire shepherd with his loud voice and his curling hair (which a disapproving Puritan lady in Wales tried to snip off with her scissors), with his horn of snuff and his leathern suit, has his feet on the soil, on the roads of the seventeenth-century English wilderness and in the streets of the muddy towns. He has “great openings”. He “sees” this and that. The imps and devils are chained to his foot, the “inner light” burns vividly in him and is easily distinguished from the “false light” of other people’s “vain imaginings”; but he also knows the price of oats and how to obstruct magistrates. He can put off a pretentious theologian with the truly peasant remark that if the man thinks he is God, does he know if it is going to rain tomorrow? Unlike Bunyan’s Christian traveller, Fox is a real man, travelling on real roads. He knows the inns, the houses of friends, the jails. He was worn out on the Welsh hills, mired on the Yorkshire roads and saw the sea from the edge of Lancashire. From the age of twenty he was wandering all over England, from steeple to steeple, meeting the soldiers on the way to the Battle of Worcester, being beaten by the mobs, taken up by the sheriffs, arguing the Scriptures with Papists, Brownites, Independents, Ranters, “rude jangling Baptists”, and the “hireling priests”. He was in Cumberland:

  Now were great threatenings given forth in Cumberland that if ever I came there again they would take away my life. When I heard it I was drawn to go into Cumberland….

  If he feared any danger it was the danger of remaining in one place where long contact with people would blunt the edge of conscience and dull his ear for the word of the Lord. A man of little education, he is no great writer; his jogtrot Puritan prose ambles like his horse and cannot be compared with Bunyan’s. But his own obstinate, innocent alarming character bursts through the repetitions. And the rest of his prose is made up of Biblical echoes, the sound of Hebraic incantation common to evangelical writings but in his time not yet mechanised and turned into cant.

  A man of visions Fox lacks the introspective intellect. His mind, for all its exaltation, is even commonplace and he has frequently to fall back upon a dramatic muddle of Biblical metaphor when he is trying to describe his moments of darkness. There was a mysterious temptation, for example,

  that all was of nature, and the elements and storm came over me, so that I was in a manner quite clouded with it.

  But the mood, whatever it may have been, passed and

  I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new.

  Then the Leicestershire shepherd breaks at last into his own voice:

  All the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter.

  The virtues and vices of Quakerism lie in a startling mildness and literalness of mind. The other sects of the period were in ecstasies of expectation or fear; they bore on their shoulders a back-breaking load of hopes of bliss and fears of damnation. The Quakers, those practical children of the Quietists and the non-attached, dissolved the coagulations of dogma and doctrine, and experienced their heaven and their hell in the present moment. They were in Abraham’s bosom now. One sees the other Puritans fighting their way towards God as if towards an enemy; the Quakers purified themselves and waited for God to speak like a friend in their hearts. Unoppressed by dogma, unfettered by a programme, they were free to go on with their work or their philanthropy while the factions fought. They went on with their business—hence the jealousy of their wealth. Their affinity is, of course, with Santa Teresa, with her “The Lord walks among the pots and pans”—a mysticism so tamed in their case that from the unreason of “the inner light” sprang the necessity of Tolerance, the first break with the exorbitance of the age of revolution, the first glimmer of the age of Reason, as Professor Trevelyan has pointed out in his book on the Stuarts.

  But Fox, the founder, belongs to the dynamic age of Quakerism. We see the familiar human dilemma. Fox preached “the inner light” by throwing many into the outer darkness. “Drowned.” “Had a miserable end”—how often one meets this comment on the fate of those who opposed him. A butcher put his tongue out at Fox; the tongue swelled up and would not go back. This is not said gloatingly, but with the fervour of fanaticism for its own logic. If a miraculous healing was impermanent, the patient had “disobeyed the Lord”. Those who “see” the truth are “tender” or “very tender”; those who reject it are “rude” or “light chaffy men”. Accused of witchcraft himself—when he was beaten Fox did not bleed, or bled very little, for there was a curious lack of blood in his huge frame—he is, of course, expert at discerning witchcraft in others. He speaks of seeing several women who were witches working in a field as he passed. One unhappy woman “with an unclean spirit” had to be turned out of a meeting before he would speak. (His dramatic sense was enormous.) A pistol is fired point-blank at him; naturally it does not go off. And then there is the row about refusing to take the oath. One must sympathise with revolutionary authorities when they are faced by revolutionaries even more revolutionary than themselves. For Fox and his fellow quietists, apostles of non-violence, might turn the other cheek to physical violence but they provoked riots with their tongues. They marched into the steeple-houses crying “Peace be unto you” and in the next breath were denouncing the preacher as a “hireling”, preaching him down in his own church, and then became indignant when the police or the soldiers had to come in to restore order. And they were even more indignant when asked to swear the oath of allegiance. Mysticism has always been recognised as a disintegrating force in society. The last thing successful revolutionaries can dispense with is loyalty.

  It was an age of hatred and hats. One thinks of each century in terms of some article of fashion or clothing. In the nineteenth century the frock-coat symbolises the cult of political respectability; in the eighteenth century the wig is the emblem of political elegance. In the seventeenth century, there is the hat, the hat jammed down implacably on the brow and worn with a vehemence which has been equalled in the last decade of our own time by the feeling for the shirt. When the Quakers refused to raise their hats to their friends in the street, or in the Courts, they were part of that anti-doffing movement to which Puritans in general subscribed as a protest against the long, feathery and sweeping bows of the Cavaliers. Lilbourne, when brought before the Council of State, had refused to remove his hat to people who had “no more legal authority than myself”. It took the Quakers, with their obstinacy, their literalness of mind and their simple way of finding a precise moral justification in the Scriptures, to appeal beyond the courts to God. One cannot decide whether they were vexatious or remarkable in that wonderful judicial comedy which George Fox provoked at Launceston. He writes with pain, but surely with a sly peasant smile of private triumph:

  When we were brought into the Court, we stood a pretty while with our hats on, and all was quiet; and I was moved to say, “Peace be among you!” Judge Glynne, a Welchman, the Chief Justice of England, said to the jailer, “What be these you have brought here into the Court?” “Prisoners, my lord,” said he. “Why do you not put off your hats?” said the judge to us; we said nothing. “Put off your hats,” said the judge again. Still we said nothing. Then said the judge, “The Court commands you to put off your hats.” Then I spoke and said “Where did ever any magistrate, king or judge from Moses to Daniel, command any to put off their hats, when they came before them in their courts, either amongst the Jews, the people of God, or among the heathen? And if the law of England doth command any such thing, shew me that law either written or printed.” Then the judge grew angry and said “I do not carry my law-books on my back…. Take him away, prevaricator. I’ll ferk him.”

  Presentl
y the judge cooled down and called the prisoner back:

  “Come,” said he, “where had they hats from Moses to Daniel? Come, answer me. I have you fast now.”

  But George Fox knew the scriptures.

  “Thou mayest read,” he replied, “in the 3rd of Daniel that the three children were cast into the fiery furnace by Nebuchadnezzar’s command, with their coats, their hose and their hats on.” This plain instance stopped him so that not having anything else to say to the point, he cried again, “Take them away, jailer.”

  True anarchists, the Quakers would make a Star Chamber matter of a triviality. Yet their history shows them to have been both conservative and opportunist. They accepted Cromwell, they accepted Charles II; they would accept anybody. What they did not accept was the rule of bureaucracy in matters of belief; and it is interesting that neither Cromwell nor Charles persecuted Fox. Cromwell admired “a people he could not buy”, Charles was amused and indifferent. The persecution came from the underlings.

  In two countries, Scotland and Ireland, the Leicestershire peasant was not at home. In Scotland he came up against pedants; Presbyterianism was an obdurate enemy of the Quakers. In Ireland, for the first time in the Journal, there is a suggestion of bewilderment, distaste and even fear; “The earth smelt, me thought, of the corruption of the nation.” The smell, as in Lichfield, was of blood. In Lichfield, the blood shed by Diocletian; in Dublin the blood of the Popish massacres. Not, be it noted, of the Cromwellian massacres. In Cork he felt the peeping eyes at the windows; spies were everywhere; a description of him was sent on a hundred miles ahead in the manner of a sinister jungle message. “A grim black fellow”—an evil spirit—appeared to be chained to his foot. He rode in fear of “the Tories”—gangs of disbanded soldiers—and was relieved to escape them. The voyage back to Liverpool was made in a tempest and in the end of the adventure so prosaically recorded, one sees one last sardonic thrust from the corrupt island. Fox was slanderously accused of having taken to drink.