by J. M. Synge
Davray a parlé de lui il y a déjà longtemps, tandis que dans le Mercure de France son nom a été vu plus d’une fois. Je me borne donc à signaler ici l’étrange beauté de ses poèmes lyriques, sans pouvoir omettre, toutefois, les noms de deux livres, The Secret Rose, en prose, et The Shadowy Waters, petit drame en vers d’une distinction de langue et de sentiment des plus rares.
A part M. Yeats, nous avons un poète, M. George Russell, dont l’imagination extraordinaire n’arrive pas toujours à s’exprimer dans une forme pleinement satisfaisante. Dans les deux volumes qu’il a déjà publiés, on trouve quelques petits poèmes à peu près parfaits, à côté de beaucoup de pièces sans valeur.
Deux ou trois poètes moins importants out fait paraître dernièrement des recueils assez intéressants, mais je les passe sous silence pour parler de The Literary Theatre, théâtre littéraire qui peut être considéré comme le point central du mouvement intellectuel. Les premières représentations eurent lieu au mois de mai 1899. On donna d’abord une pièce de M. Yeats, intitulée: The Countess Cathleen. On y voit la comtesse Cathleen, sorte de châtelaine, qui, au moment d’une disette en Irlande, vend son âme aux démons afin de venir en aide aux gens qui meurent de faim autour de son château. Cela semble bien innocent, mais à Dublin une partie du public est encore assez orthodoxe pour se trouver froissée devant une action pareille. Le clergé exprima une certaine désapprobation et, à chaque séance, on voyait des ivrognes scandalisés qui débitaient, du haut des galeries, des observations morales à l’adresse de M. Yeats et de ses confrères.
Cette pièce fut suivie d’un drame, The Heather Field, par M. Edward Martyn, disciple d’Ibsen, au moins par sa façon d’écrire. L’intrigue y est des plus simples. Un propriétaire irlandais demeurant dans sa propriété au milieu de ses fermiers, se trouve embarrassé par l’insuffisance de ses moyens. Rêveur idéaliste, au lieu de chercher des remèdes pratiques, il se figure qu’il peut arriver à convertir en des prairies fertiles le Heather Field, vaste bruyère non loin de sa maison, et réaliser, de la sorte, des bénéfices considérables. Bientôt des travaux sont entamés; on brûle les bruyères et on ensemence le terrain, tout en dépensant des sommes d’argent importantes. La femme du propriétaire, femme d’une nature dure et matérielle, se désole, prévoyant très nettement que c’est la ruine et non pas l’aisance qu’on va tirer du Heather Field. Enfin, à bout de patience, elle fait venir deux médecins pour constater l’aliénation mentale de son mari, afin de pouvoir prendre elle-même la direction de ses affaires. Cependant les médecins n’osent pas s’exprimer d’une façon définitive, et cet état de choses se prolonge jusqu’au printemps. Un jour, le petit garçon du propriétaire s’en va faire un tour à cheval dans le Heather Field. Vers midi il revient bruyant et joyeux. Ah! papa, s’écrie-t-il, c’est bien joli dans le Heather Field, la bruyère pousse partout. Et il en jette aux pieds de son père un grand bouquet qu’il vient de cueillir. Le père voyant ainsi tous ses rêves s’évanouir devient effectivement fou.
Dans cette courte analyse, on ne voit rien du drame. L’auteur a su faire de ce rêveur qui se console par de grands espoirs chimériques un personnage véritablement attirant. A côté de sa femme brutalement réaliste, il gagne toutes les sympathies. C’est du moins ce qui est arrivé quand on a joué cette pièce à Dubbn. Ensuite, encouragé par un tel succès, on est allé donner une représentation du Heather Field à Londres, mais là, exception faite de quelques lettrés, personne n’a rien compris du sens intime de l’action. L’auditoire resta froid, et dans les journaux on trouva que c’était la femme qui avait raison, et que le mari n’était qu’a dangerous impractical person.
La deuxième année du Literary Theatre on donna des pièces de MM. Edward Martyn et George Moore avec un succès considérable, et au mois d’octobre de l’année passée les dernières représentations eurent lieu. On joua un drame, Diarmuid and Grainne, écrit en collaboration par MM. W. B. Yeats et George Moore et, ensuite, une petite pièce charmante, écrite en irlandais pour l’occasion par M. Douglas Hyde. Ce fut la première fois qu’on joua une pièce en irlandais sur une grande scène, et les places à bon marché du théâtre furent prises d’assaut par les enthousiastes de la Gaelic League. Malgré l’importance de cette association on sent presque toujours, dans les manifestations qu’elle organise (ainsi qu’il arrive si souvent dans tous les mouvements foncièrement populaires) le ridicule coudoyer des sentiments d’une profondeur insondable. Ainsi au commencement de la première représentation, on ne pouvait pas s’empêcher de sourire en voyant tout autour de la salle les belles Irlandaises de la Gaelic League qui baragouinaient dans un fort mauvais irlandais avec de jeunes commis tout pâles d’enthousiasme. Mais dans un entr’acte de Diarmuid and Grainne il arriva que, selon l’habitude de ce théâtre, les gens qui occupaient les galeries se mirent à chanter. Ce furent de vieilles chansons populaires. Jusqu’alors on n’avait jamais entendu ces mélodies chantées à l’unisson par beaucoup de voix avec les anciennes paroles irlandaises. L’auditoire tressaillit. Il y eut dans ces notes traînantes, d’une mélancolie que rien ne peut égaler, comme le râle d’une nation. On voyait une tête, puis une autre se pencher sur le programme. On pleurait.
Puis le rideau se leva, la pièce recommença au milieu d’une vive émotion. On venait de sentir flotter un instant dans la salle l’âme d’un peuple.
THE OLD AND NEW IN IRELAND
TEN YEARS AGO, in the summer of 1892, an article on Literary Dublin, by Miss Barlow, author of Borland Studies and some other charming work, appeared in a leading English weekly. After dealing with Professor Mahaffy, some other Irish writers, and the periodicals of Dublin, she summed up in these words: ‘This bird’s-eye view has revealed no brilliant prospect, and the causes of dimness considered, it is difficult to point out any quarter of the horizon as a probable source of rising light.’
No one who knows Ireland and Irish life will be likely to charge Miss Barlow with lack of insight, although when she wrote the literary movement which is now so apparent was beginning everywhere through the country. Ten years ago all, or nearly all, the writers who have since done well, W. B. Yeats, George Russell, Standish O’Grady, Edward Martyn, Lady Gregory, and Douglas Hyde were at work, but so obscurely that they were quite away from the eye of the general public. It is not easy to realise the change these years have made. In those days if an odd undergraduate of Trinity felt a vague longing to know more of Ireland and her past than he could learn from his teachers or companions, he had to wander on Aston’s Quay and Bachelor’s Walk, picking up ugly pamphlets with Grattan’s Speeches in them, or Davis’s Poems, or the true History of Ireland from before the Flood. If he wished to learn a little of the Irish language and went to the professor appointed to teach it in Trinity College, he found an amiable old clergyman who made him read a crabbed version of the New Testament, and seemed to know nothing, or at least to care nothing, about the old literature of Ireland, or the fine folk-tales and folk-poetry of Munster and Connaught. In the libraries he could find a few books on the antiquities of Ireland that had interest and scholarship, and with a few other volumes, such as W. Stokes’ Life of Petrie, the antiquarian, he could make the beginning of an intellectual atmosphere for himself that gave life to Dublin. Most of the figures he called up were respectable students and scribes, but there were one or two men, like Clarence Mangan, who had the peculiar restlessness that goes everywhere with artistic life.
Those days had the incitement of the early spring in Ireland when there are wild evenings that are filled with uneasiness and hope, because they promise everything and give nothing but their promise. Now everything is changed. We have fine editions of books by W. B. Yeats and other Irish writers in all our bookshop windows. One evening we can read the Shadowy Waters and catch a tenuous sadness, such as we find in Aglavaine et Selysette, and the next evening we can go on to some new writer in the Irish language, and read some little work like Faith and Famine, by Father Dineen, where we have vigour and talent, using a form
and psychology that recall the predecessors of Titus Andronicus or Tamburlaine.
This double way in which the new Irish spirit is showing itself has many points of interest. With the present generation the linguistic atmosphere of Ireland has become definitely English enough, for the first time, to allow work to be done in English that is perfectly Irish in its essence, yet has sureness and purity of form. A generation or two ago a few writers like Aubrey de Vere, who penetrated themselves with English thought and English traditions of literature, wrote of Ireland with a certain easiness and grace, but writers who lived close to the soul of their country were kept back by the uncertainty of her linguistic sense, and nearly always failed to reach the finer cadences of English.
Perhaps English critics when dealing with Irish men of talent have not always remembered this matter of language. The faults of early Anglo-Irish work are not due to this cause alone, yet it is accountable for many things, and no criticism can take us very far that does not make allowance for the phases of material. In this special case Ireland is not alone. The number of foreigners in America for whom English is a language they have either learned for themselves or picked up from parents who had learned it, tends more than anything else to cause the uncertainty of literary taste in that country. American artists and musicians are to be met with everywhere who have fine taste in their own art, yet who speak a crude jargon, and have comparatively little feeling for the intimate qualities of literature. Again, roughness of the spoken language — when it is not a primitive roughness — leads, or tends to lead, to burlesque writing, and with this in one’s mind it is interesting to compare the school of Mark Twain with the crudely humorous ‘typical Irishman’, who was present everywhere in Irish writing till quite recently.
To return to Ireland. While the new blossom due, if these views are correct, to the final decay of Irish among the national classes of Leinster was beginning to open, the old roots in Munster and the West began also to put out a new growth. Some of this new Irish work has very considerable value, but what, one cannot but ask, will be its influence on the culture of Ireland? Will the Gaelic stifle the English once more, or will the English stifle the new hope of the Gaels?
The Gaelic League with the whole movement for language revival is so powerful that it is hard to think it will pass away without leaving a mark upon Ireland, yet its more definite hope seems quite certain to end in disappointment. No small island placed between two countries which speak the same language, like England and America, can hope to keep up a different tongue. English is likely to remain the language of Ireland, and no one, I think, need regret the likelihood. If Gaelic came back strongly from the West the feeling for English which the present generation has attained would be lost again, and in the best circumstances it is probable that Leinster and Ulster would take several centuries to assimilate Irish perfectly enough to make it a fit mode of expression for the finer emotions which now occupy literature. In the meantime, the opening culture of Ireland would be thrown back indefinitely, and there would, perhaps, be little gain to make up for this certain loss. Modern peasant Gaelic is full of rareness and beauty, but if it was sophisticated by journalists and translators — as it would certainly be sophisticated in the centuries I have spoken of — it would lose all its freshness, and then the limits, which now make its charm, would tend to prevent all further development. It is a different thing to defile a well and an inlet of the sea.
If, however, the Gaelic League can keep the cruder powers of the Irish mind occupied in a healthy and national way till the influence of Irish literature, written in English, is more definite in Irish life, the half-cultured classes may come over to the side of the others, and give an intellectual unity to the country of the highest value.
For the future of the Anglo-Irish writers everything is hopeful. The Irish reading public is still too limited to keep up an independent school of Irish men of letters, yet Irish writers are recognised, to some extent, as the best judges of Irish literary work, and it may be hoped that we have seen the last of careless writing addressed to an English public that was eager to be amused, and did not always take the trouble to distinguish in Irish books between what was futile and what had real originality and merit.
Religious questions, also, are beginning to put less restriction on Irish culture. Everywhere the Catholic population are becoming more alive to intellectual matters, and the harder forms of Protestantism are losing ground. There have been many fine scholars of this latter persuasion in Ireland, due to the influence of Trinity College, but as a class they have too often shown their kinship with the early reformers of whom Erasmus wrote: ‘Evangelicos istos, cum multis aliis, turn hoc nomine praecipue odi, quod per eos ubique languent, fugent, jacent, intereunt bonae literae sine quibus quid est hominum vita?’
THE FAIR HILLS OF IRELAND
WHEN THIS ATTRACTIVE and leisurely book made its appearance, a few days ago, its author, Mr. Stephen Gwynn, was standing as member of Parliament for Galway, and fighting, in the face of rotten eggs and decayed fish, what is said to have been the stormiest election that has taken place in Ireland for the last ten years. He is to be congratulated on the success of both his ventures. The Fair Hills of Ireland — the words are the refrain of a very well-known Irish song — is a guide-book, in the best sense of the words, addressed to travellers and friends of Ireland rather than to ordinary tourists. At the same time it is a sort of popular history, telling its story topographically instead of chronologically, and yet so effectively that one does not grumble at the confusion of the ages some are likely to fall into, as the author passes back and forward from the times of Cuchulain to those of O’Connell and from the rout of the Danes at Clontarf to the modern affairs of the new Irish creameries. Thus in one of the opening chapters we are brought to the Boyne valley and told about the wonderful pagan monuments at New Grange and Dowth, the early Christian antiquities at Monasterboice, the more advanced Norman buildings at Mellifont, and finally the doings of Sarsfield, William, and James at the Battle of the Boyne, the whole pleasantly united with a living description of the places as they are at present. The more legendary side of Irish history is treated of in the chapters on Tara, the famous home of the kings; on Armagh, with Emain Macha, a sort of Irish Troy, within a mile’s walk; and on the town of Sligo, which lies under Benbulben, where Diarmuid ended his wanderings with Grannia. Kincora and Slemish bring us to the histories of Brian and St. Patrick respectively, and so the book proceeds. Throughout it is charmingly written — with an eye on the trout streams that Mr. Gwynn has so often dealt with before, — in an excellent patriotic spirit, kept in check by a scholarly urbanity which has been absent too frequently from patriotic writings in Ireland. The illustrations by Mr. Hugh Thomson add to the pleasantness of the book, which is likely to bring many minds into a more intelligent sympathy with Ireland, where, for good and for bad, the past is so living and the present so desirous to live.
THE WINGED DESTINY
IN THE WINGED Destiny Miss Fiona Macleod uses once more the rather ambitious style she has been building up in her more recent books. This style has met with a good deal of admiration, and, in many passages, it has, there is no doubt, an elaborate music that can only be attained by writers with a fine ear and a good command of the vocal elements of language. Yet unfortunately, while many of the sentences she delights in are so constructed that they can only be read slowly, their form and meaning do not satisfy when dwelt on. As one reads diligently forward one comes too often on sentences or phrases like these: ‘The sea was a jubilation of blue and white, with green in the shaken tents of the loud-murmuring nomad host of billows.... A swirl of long-winged terns hung above a shoal of mackerel fry, screaming as they splashed continually into the moving dazzle.
And one ends with a feeling of uneasiness and distrust instead of the peculiarly intimate sympathy which work of this kind demands. With the matter one does not get on a great deal better. When we look into the depths of her heart for ‘the pattern
s both of time and eternity’, which one of her critics has found there, we come on passages like this: ‘How futile all human longing, all passion of the heart, all travail of the spirit, beside this terrible reality of wind and vastness, of wind baying like a hound in a wilderness — a wilderness where the hound’s voice would fall away at last, and the hound’s shadow fade, and infinitude and eternity be beyond and above and behind and beneath.’ Words which may have profound meaning, but which, it is to be feared, will appear to many as a terrible reality of wind and vastness. The first and better part of The Winged Destiny consists of studies and stories which deal with the more mystical side of Highland life, and are sometimes of considerable interest. All through them, however, there is rather too much reflection, that is made up of a sort of esoteric platitude, and rather too much description, that is so nearly over-written that one grows afraid of it, as one grows afraid of a singer who is working on the limit of his compass. Besides these stories there is a collection of essays on various writers of the Irish movement and similar subjects. Some of these essays are judicious and sympathetic, and quietly written, but they have no very particular merit as contributions to criticism, and they do not show a very great surety of taste. In the whole book one sympathises most, perhaps, with the keen feeling apparent in it — beneath the details of which one cannot approve — for the islands of Scotland, other out-of-the-way places, and those who live in them.
