by J. M. Synge
That passed the woodland, singing, warmly wild
Through lilies lulled, late bees from harvesting,
And still sad songs intoning touched in me
A quivering of passions pale with ecstasy.
Toward banking violets in dreaming rest,
A woman from the shadow passed to sight
And I beheld drowse on her drooping breast
A babe that breathed with bliss of bland delight
Till both a dual joy self-solaced seemed
As some calm incarnation soul of seraph dreamed.
Then I awoke. — The morn was cold and keen,
I viewed the grey-faced, straggling Paris street
Where fouler sight in life hath sorrow seen
Than starved disease in bitter rains and sleet?...
A week ago the lilacs flowered in the Luxembourg, but it rained yesterday and there is nothing left but a mass of withered petals. Do flowers mourn like women for their briefness? In the Luxembourg I see also girls from eighteen to twenty in the blossom of their beauty, and women with a few babies who are withered.
Are men durable by contrast? A young man cannot express; a man who has passed thirty is not able to experience. We go out among the woods and mountains and kiss the lips of girls in wild efforts to remember. We are less fortunate than women. The frailest suckling is robust beside the offspring we have borne in travail darker than a woman’s, and all our honour and glory is in the shadow of a dream....
Nature is cruel to living things. Rubies and crystals that do not feel are beautiful for ever, but flowers and women and artists fulfil their swift task of propagation and pass in a day...
This person that I am now will not be next year, and the child that I was twenty years ago has perished and left no trace but the scars upon my body and my mind. If I should beget a child who resembles me he would be a more real survival of my childhood than I am. His body would have passed out of my body as directly, in a certain sense, as my present body has passed out of the body of my childhood. He would have fair hair and skin as I had, not the dark hair and sallow skin that I have....
I remembered spring in Ireland.... Soft grey days came first with quiet clouds, and the woods grew purple with sap, while a few birches that stood out before them like candle-sticks with wrought silver stems covered themselves with a mist of red. Then the hazels came out and hung the woods with straight ear-rings of gold, till one morning after rain spectres of pale green and yellow and pink began to look out between the trees. Then everything stood waiting for a moment till warmth came in the beginning of May, and the whole country broke out into wonderful glory — infinitely timid greens and yellows and whites, and birds singing everywhere, and strange odours creeping up into my room.
I used to he in the evening while my nurse sat in her white veil by the window with the twilight on the hills behind her and read out old books from my uncle’s library.
We do wrong to seek a foundation for ecstasy in philosophy or the hidden things of the spirit — if there is spirit — for when life is at its simplest, with nothing beyond or before it, the mystery is greater than we can endure. Every leaf and flower and insect is full of deeper wonder than any sign the cabbalists have invented.... We must live like the birds that have been singing or will soon be singing over the way. They are shot and maimed and tortured, yet they go on singing — I mean those that are left — and what does the earth care or what do we care for the units? The world is an orchestra where every living thing plays one entry and then gives his place to another. We must be careful to play all the notes; it is for that we are created. If we play well we are not exorbitantly wretched.
ÉTUDE MORBIDE
OR ‘AN IMAGINARY PORTRAIT’
May 3. This evening the Celliniani destroyed a print from Leonardo that hung over my bed. She says there are some things so full of beauty that they fill her with unendurable excitement. We are not good companions.
May 6. A letter from a new pupil — a Mademoiselle Chouska; I have never known such a week. First there was my engagement to play at Lemerre’s concert in the autumn, then this extraordinary Celliniani, and now a new pupil who will keep us through the summer.
May 7. It is a queer business. I have written to explain...
‘Chère Mademoiselle For three nights before my engagement for the autumn I dreamed of a woman who led me into strange adventures that I cannot recollect. When Lemerre’s letter came I went out on the Boulevards to walk off my excitement, and as I was coming out of a café I found the woman I had dreamed of watching me from the corner of the terrace. An hour later you drove past us as we were passing under the arches of the Louvre, and I saw that you were also a version of my dream. I am telling you these things to explain my embarrassment when I found that you were the pupil who had written to me, and also my relation with the woman you saw me with...
May 14. Second lesson with the Chouska. I keep comparing her with the Celliniani. The first is like an oak or fir tree, the other some vague growth of the sea. We were at Meudon last night. At first she seemed like an intruder, then she changed and showed a strange instinct for colour and sound. We are a queer pair.
May 17. The heat is intense, and my nerves are a trouble, yet I must practise.
May 19. A Sunday of delicious rain. I walked all the morning in the Luxembourg to feel the green smell of the leaves, and then went to the Louvre where the Celliniani came to meet me from St. Germain des Prés. I looked a long time at the Joconde and the Victoire, for they remind me of my two friends — the Celliniani has something of Mona Lisa and the Chouska when moved by music is like the statue. I seem to love two parts of one ideal, rather than two separate women. I do not know how it will end, but for the moment I am finding new power of expression in this strange attachment.
June 12. The personality tends to assimilate itself with the ideal that is formed of it by love; hence in the fullest friendship my ideal of my friend goes about with her ideal of myself, and a man with two friends of different tendencies is developed in opposite ways neither of which is really his own. Perhaps this is the reason why a man who does not know love is usually narrow.
My dreams which came true were less strange than this truth which is like a dream. It is midnight. The Celliniani had a terrible nightmare last night. I fear her nervousness is increasing. I am far from well.
June 18. The Chouska has gone away for the rest of the summer, and has left a blank behind her, though the Celliniani is jubilant. It is so sultry that I can only practise in the evening, and sometimes my exaltation grows so strong in the twilight I seem to lose all hold on my existence, and to know nothing but the passion of sound and the shadowy Celliniani who sits and listens by the window.
I wish there was some hall where recognised musicians might play when they liked for people that came and went as in the churches. If I could slip down now, and beginning softly to myself, wake out gradually to my full power! In a vulgar concert I am not likely to succeed. I depend too much on my surroundings.
The Celliniani thinks no one ever played as I do. I am her religion, yet I doubt if this musical excitement is good for her, she is sometimes hysterical and we both sleep badly.
Sept. 25. The concert is in a month. I am playing well — better I think than many who succeed, — but my nervousness is appalling. Would to Heaven the thing were over, the heat and agitation are killing us!
Oct. 24. I have written to the Chouska to try and distract my thoughts....
‘My concert is tomorrow and I am terribly unwell. I have been trying all the week to draw off my attention to natural science or pictures or anything that used to interest me, but it is no use.... I have given up everything for music, and tomorrow I am going to fail utterly. I must go to the rehearsal....’
Later. When we reached the hall night had fallen and the rehearsal was going on. I stood for a while with the Celliniani at the dark end of the hall and listened to the orchestra playing Beethoven’s ‘Marche Funèbre’. The vague shadows
of the hall gave me courage and I had an absolute success. Lemerre was delighted. Everybody congratulated me. But tomorrow? — I shall not sleep tonight.
Oct. 23. The concert is this afternoon. I am trembling like a leaf. Everything is going round. I am bent double with pain. Failure is certain, yet I must play. The poor Celliniani is in terrible distress to see my degradation, — it is nothing less. Whatever happens I am bound to her for ever. Her goodness could not be surpassed....
Nov l. I have the same name and features as last week. I am not the same man. The Celliniani is still in the mad-house.
Nov. 15. I have forced myself to write to the Chouska: —
.. ‘We reached the hall. The people in the artists’ room talked and laughed with me and gave me wine. It was no use. My face was grey when I saw it in the glass, and I spilt the wine on the carpet. I saw them whispering about me: it made me worse. I do not remember how I came on the platform. When I reached the difficult phrases I woke a little and felt a sort of hope, but my fingers were trembling and I missed everything. I heard the gallery hissing: it got worse. I thought I ought to give up, but was uncertain.... Then someone cried out most terribly: it was the Celliniani. They had to take her away. Her hysteria has been increasing through the summer, and this shock upset her altogether.’
Nov. 20. They say I must give up music and be cheerful. The damned fools.
Nov. 29. The snow is beginning. I am trying to read, — philosophy science, anything. Sometimes I follow easily, sometimes I cannot get rid of the concert, and the Celliniani, and the dread that I may follow her.
Nov. 30. A man is mad who believes that he has a disease which he is really without. Suppose he believes himself insane. Is he mad? If so his conviction is well founded and he is so far sane. Is he sane?
Then he believes delusively that he is mad: therefore he is mad. Are these the uses of adversity?
Dec 1. I have been reading Herbert Spencer and my creed is now very simple. Humanity has evolved from the conditions of the world, and will return to the nothing it has come from. Each separate life is but a ripple on the waves, — a blade of grass on the roadside. For those who fail, there is no hope. They are like the dead leaves in autumn, blown here and there before their final dissolution. In my useless agony I am only hurtful to my fellows. Why should I endure it? It is not now:— ‘To sleep: perchance to dream: ay; there’s the rub,’ but to sleep eternally and completely; to be free from the present and the past and from forebodings which are still more frightful. The dread of imprisonment is enough to deter any ruffian from the crime he desires, and shall I go forward to wake up by and by in the four walls of a madhouse, caged and barred like a dangerous animal and without hope of release?
Dec. 10. Every day some new morbid idea strikes through my brain like the thrust of a poisoned dagger. How long can it continue? I have no delusion, no definite mania, yet I watch myself day and night with appalling apprehension.
Dec. 12. I caught my face in the glass today as I sat at my table; I had the terrified look I have sometimes seen in trapped animals. Even when other matters enter my mind I keep a hold on my torture, as a man with the bag of jewels in his pocket feels again and again to know of its security’. My nervousness is increasing. My brain by some horrible decadence is grown a register for appalling things, and my almost preternatural destiny throws such things continually about me. In the newspapers I read of men who have gone mad and slain their kindred; in reviews I find analysis of nerve decay; if I go among the streets I fall in with wretched beings on the brink of total alienation. Today I am not able to read, I dare not play, I have no one to visit, and I sit here turning over my anguish with half triumphant ecstasy of pain. I love music, it is barred from me; I was ambitious, I am thrust aside, I have loved this strange woman with immeasurable passion, and my love for her has crushed us. I know the fives of men who were supremely miserable, yet their grief seems nothing to my own. In this community of madness, this delirium of two souls begotten and wrought by a more than human exaltation, the earth seems to have invented a new torture, to have added a new ingenious instrument to the rack-chamber of life. I feel a lack in my scepticism which leaves no name for malediction, and envy Job who had his choice to curse God and die.
Dec. 24. Is it I — I — who am cowering here on the brink of insanity? To-night when I had made my supper and sat down alone and very cold, my gorge rose in revolt at my own misery, and I almost did the deed I am approaching. I am not able to endure it. Cursed be God.
‘Bonum nobis est quod aliquando habemus aliquas gravitates et contrarietates, quia saepe hominem ad cor revocant quatenus se in exilio esse cognoscat, nec spent suarn in alia re mundi ponat.’
This monk seems never wholly in the wrong and I ask myself as I read over this passage what it may signify in the language of the day. It may be that the misery which makes the individual unit an instrument of immeasurable torture, forces a man from his own limits to regain a sympathy with the world. ‘O veritas Dei, fac me unum tecum in caritate perpétua.’ The unyielding quiet of this book has rescued yet appalled me. Am I so utterly debased — I who have known the country and the hills — that I yield up my life to the first stroke of destiny? If I am anything I am equal to the saints. I will endure as they endured.
Jan. 2. Chère mademoiselle Chouska, ‘I have found one of your books, this is how it happened... When I had read the letter I rushed from the house. I avoided crowded streets where the people shunned yet dogged me. I reached the quai Voltaire, and kicked an old book under my feet. It was a copy of the Imitation of Christ with your name on the flyleaf. All thought of suicide seemed to leave me in an instant, and I walked home up the Bd. St. Michel, wondering how the book had fallen on the quay. Then I read it till daylight and grew as quiet as a child. “Post hiemem sequitur aestas; post noctem redit dies; et post tempestatem magna screnitas.” For a week I have nurtured myself in a more than saintly exaltation. I am forming from my own spirit a divine and beautiful existence and I am as much an artist in my peculiar precincts as Beethoven or Wagner.’...
Jan. 4. I am trying to co-ordinate the inner life of this monk and my own inner life as a musician. It seems as I read him that his joy in its essence was identical with my own. As all thirst is quenched by liquid, so perhaps the inner longing of the personality is only assuaged by an ecstasy which is as multiform as the varieties of liquid, and exists as essentially in prayer as in the sound of the violin. Even in the preparatory discipline there is much that is similar in the saint’s life and in the artist’s. We have the same joy of progress, the same joy in infinitely exact manipulation, (the saint with his daily actions, the artist with his materials) the same joy of creation, for the saints and I suppose the Stoics create their own powerful yet exquisite personality.
Jan. 6. I am distraught again and miserably nervous. Have I power to redeem my brain by one desperate resolution, or am I doomed to madness with my eyes on a possible release?
‘Think nothing great,’ says Marcus Aurelius (I am reading the Stoics also) ‘but to act as nature leads thee, and to suffer as the all-nature may decree.’
‘God, use me as it may please Thee,’ says Epictetus, ‘I refuse nothing that Thou mayst send me, and will defend Thy justice before all men.’
In the Imitation:— ‘Fili, non potes perfectam possidere libertatem nisi totaliter abnegas temet ipsum. Demitte omnia et invenies omnia.’
I realised today that the nearly miraculous power of the saint lies in his system of daily self-suggestion which he calls prayer and meditation. I will try something similar.
Jan. 10. I have never been so happy. Beyond my readings of the saints and philosophers which I turn to three times a day, to suggest my will with power, I take some beautiful thing every morning and regard it till my admiration ends in a moment of passionate ecstasy. This is my equivalent for the adoration of the saints.
Feb. 2. The Celliniani is dead. I have just come from her funeral. In the face of death what are all my plans
of adoration?
Feb. 22. All living things demand their share of joy, and I see no permanent joy apart from the creation or touching of beautiful forms or ideas. This is the immortal fragment of religion. As art may decorate what is useful or exist for its own beauty in itself, so an action done with a beautiful motive is decorated and joyful, and for souls that are barred from the joy of activity there is still the quiescent ecstasy of resignation.
Feb. 28.1 question sometimes whether this religious ecstasy I live in is not a morbid growth, — a glad infatuation I have wrought to heal the sad one. I try to persuade myself that my personality is also my universe, and that the difficulties in my system only enhance its perfection by the joy I gain as I surmount them. Yet I feel at times that I am a fool.
March 11. A magnificent spring day. In thus moulding myself upon the model of the saints am I gaining the glory of a marble statue, or only the contortion of mosaics? Is my personality worth the effort I spend upon it? Could any sculptor work with real ecstasy if he had only decayed wood for his material?
April 3. The Chouska writes that she cannot return to Paris till the autumn. I am almost glad. I seem to have passed whole epochs in the limits of my own delight. How will this appear when I show it to another? She says also that she has made a profound study of mysticism, and recommends me to read Spinoza as a change from the saints.
April 6. I have found another flaw in my spiritual system. A great part of my happiness has lain in the evergrowing perfection of my personality. I opened Spinoza the other day and found this great definition:— ‘Laetitia est hominis transitio a minore ad majorem perfectionem.’ It follows that as we approach perfection our progress is likely to become less rapid and therefore less joyful; and at perfection joy must cease. Is this the Eastern doctrine of Nirvana? For the moment I am perfect, my will is strong, moral, altruistic. What remains to seek for? Yet joy is an element of perfection and if my joy is lost I am fallen and must recommence. It is the old symbol — the serpent with its tail in its mouth.
