by J. M. Synge
Sometimes I was absorbed by the ideas that beset men at this period and thought myself a low miscreant because I had a tendency which was really natural and healthy. Often, however, I worked myself into a sort of mystical ecstasy with music and the works of Carlyle and Wordsworth which usually ended by throwing me back into all manner of forebodings. I began to write verses and compose. I wished to be at once Shakespeare, Beethoven and Darwin; my ambition was boundless and amounted to a real torture in my life. I would go down on my knees at times with my music paper on a chair before me and cry to God for a melody.
I lay awake whole nights planning poems or struggling with geometrical problems — which I was now studying for my entrance to Trinity — creeping downstairs at daybreak for a piece of bread or if it was fine slipping out to watch the sun-rise, and then going back to bed for a couple of hours’ sleep. When I was fiddling I mourned over the books I wished to read; when I was reading I yearned for all manner of adventures. Vulgar sensuality did not attract me but I was haunted by dreams of the verdant liberty that seemed to reign in pagan forests of the south. Often I threw my books or music aside and darted off on my bicycle among the loneliest hollows of the hills in vain hopes of an adventure.
In my childhood the presence of furze bushes and rocks and flooded streams and strange mountain fogs and sunshine gave me a strange sense of enchantment and delight but I think when I rested on a mountain I sat quite as gladly looking on the face of a boulder as at the finest view of glen and river. My wish was that nature should be untouched by man, whether the view was beautiful or not did not interest me. A wood near Rathfarnham represented my idea of bliss until someone told me it was a piece of artificially arranged planting on an artificial hillock. I hated the neighbourhood from that day. This feeling has never entirely left me, and I remember fifteen years later after a long afternoon in a French forest that I enquired in the evening with real anxiety whether or not this forest was a mere recent plantation. It was the same with the people who were round me. There is no doubt that I was sensible to beauty but I distinguished only forces that attracted or repelled me. I remember when I was very young, watching a lady in the pew before me in church and wishing vaguely to stroke her cheek, but I did not know for years that she was considered singularly beautiful. About puberty when the boy begins to look out with an uneasy awakened gaze that lingers because it is not satisfied, I saw in one hour that both nature and women were alive with indescribable radiance — with beauty. Even when the animal feelings were at their height a beautiful woman seemed an always intangible glory. All earth was transfigured in a moment. I became a pilgrim to the sun and used to arrange my excursions to reach a certain corner where there was a fine outlook of hill and sky half an hour before twilight....
I think the consciousness of beauty is awakened in persons as in peoples by a prolonged unsatisfied desire.... Perhaps the modern feeling for the beauty of nature as a particular quality — an expression of divine ecstasy rather than a mere decoration of the world — arose when men began to look on everything about them with the unsatisfied longing which has its proper analogue in puberty.... The feeling of primitive people is still everywhere the feeling of the child; an adoration that has never learned or wished to admire its divinity. This feeling everyone will recognize in Wordsworth’s Ode, though he does not seem perhaps to give it its truest interpretation.
When I realized that the life about could not give me any real satisfaction my desire for study came on me again. I ran through history, chemistry, physics, botany, Hebrew, Irish, Latin, Greek, something of French and German and made a really serious study of the history and theory of music. English literature also I read with much care though I was painfully conscious of my uncertain judgement and formed my opinions reluctantly for fear a blunder might lower me in my proper estimation. I believe I never allowed myself to like a book that was not famous, though there were many famous books, such as Tennyson’s poems, that I did not care for. The Irish ballad poetry of ‘The Spirit of the Nation’ school engrossed me for a while and made me commit my most serious literary error; I thought it excellent for a considerable time and then repented bitterly.
Soon after I had relinquished the Kingdom of God I began to take a real interest in the kingdom of Ireland. My politics went round from a vigorous and unreasoning loyalty to a temperate Nationalism. Everything Irish became sacred... and had a charm that was neither quite human nor divine, rather perhaps as if I had fallen in love with a goddess, although I had still sense enough not to personify Erin in the patriotic verse I now sought to fabricate.
Patriotism gratifies Man’s need for adoration and has therefore a peculiar power upon the imaginative sceptic, as we see in France at the present time.
About this time I entered Trinity, but did not gain much after the first emotion had gone over. All my time was given to the violin and vague private reading, and the work for my examinations received just enough attention to attain the pass standard.
I joined an amateur orchestra, which gave me unusual pleasure.The collective passion produced by a band working together with one will and ideal is unlike any other exaltation.... We played the Jupiter Symphony of Mozart. It was in an academy and a Jewess was playing at the desk before me. No other emotion that I have received was quite so puissant or complete. A slight and altogether subconscious avidity of sex wound and wreathed itself in the extraordinary beauty of the movement, not unlike the sexual element that exists in all really fervent ecstasies of faith... I found the mysterious mansion I had dreamed, and I played with morbid assiduity. I remember particularly the long blue days of a June that I spent looking out over the four strings of my violin into the filling leaves and white erect florescence of a chestnut and a wilderness of plants beneath it that crushed and strangled each other in a green and silent frenzy of expression.... One is lost in a blind tempest of music that wails round one with always beautiful passion, the identity is merged in a... symmetrical joy, cathedrals build themselves about one with the waves of purple storm, yet one remains sane and a man.Then there were the slow movements which perhaps fulfil more exactly the peculiar mission of harmony. This sigh of beautiful relief which comes as an explanation rather than as a mere cessation of an excitement near to pain is perhaps the greatest utterance of man. It resembles the assuagement of morning and spring which follows feverish nights and desolate winters, and the assuagement of autumn and evening which follows the passions of summer and sultry days, the first depending on the cessation of pain, the other on the cessation of indulgence.A cycle of experience is the only definite unity, and when all has been passed through, and every joy and pain has been resolved in one passion of relief, the only rest that can follow is in the dissolution of the person.
This extraordinary instinct of music which leads to such ecstasy, the suave balm that draws out intricate characteristics from places not open to the world helped me to realize that all emotions depend upon and answer the abstractions of ideal form and that humanity as God is but the first step toward a full comprehension of this art. For the hypersensitive organization the musical excitement is perhaps too powerful, too nearly a physical intoxication, but it is not surprising that when I found in the orchestra the world of magical beauty I dreamed of, I threw aside all reasonable counsel and declared myself a professional musician.
The Biographies
Synge, c. 1900
Synge and the Ireland of His Time by W. B. Yeats
WITH A NOTE CONCERNING A WALK THROUGH CONNEMARA WITH HIM BY JACK BUTLER YEATS
CONTENTS
PREFACE
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
WITH SYNGE IN CONNEMARA
PREFACE
AT TIMES DURING Synge’s last
illness, Lady Gregory and I would speak of his work and always find some pleasure in the thought that unlike ourselves, who had made our experiments in public, he would leave to the world nothing to be wished away — nothing that was not beautiful or powerful in itself, or necessary as an expression of his life and thought. When he died we were in much anxiety, for a letter written before his last illness, and printed in the selection of his poems published at the Cuala Press, had shown that he was anxious about the fate of his manuscripts and scattered writings. On the evening of the night he died he had asked that I might come to him the next day; and my diary of the days following his death shows how great was our anxiety. Presently however, all seemed to have come right, for the Executors sent me the following letter that had been found among his papers, and promised to carry out his wishes.
‘May 4th, 1908
‘Dear Yeats,
‘This is only to go to you if anything should go wrong with me under the operation or after it. I am a little bothered about my ‘papers.’ I have a certain amount of verse that I think would be worth preserving, possibly also the 1st and 3rd acts of ‘Deirdre,’ and then I have a lot of Kerry and Wicklow articles that would go together into a book. The other early stuff I wrote I have kept as a sort of curiosity, but I am anxious that it should not get into print. I wonder could you get someone — say ... who is now in Dublin to go through them for you and do whatever you and Lady Gregory think desirable. It is rather a hard thing to ask you but I do not want my good things destroyed or my bad things printed rashly — especially a morbid thing about a mad fiddler in Paris which I hate. Do what you can — Good luck.
‘J.M. Synge’
In the summer of 1909, the Executors sent me a large bundle of papers, cuttings from newspapers and magazines, manuscript and typewritten prose and verse, put together and annotated by Synge himself before his last illness. I spent a portion of each day for weeks reading and re-reading early dramatic writing, poems, essays, and so forth, and with the exception of ninety pages which have been published without my consent, made consulting Lady Gregory from time to time the Selection of his work published by Messrs. Maunsel. It is because of these ninety pages, that neither Lady Gregory’s name nor mine appears in any of the books, and that the Introduction which I now publish, was withdrawn by me after it had been advertised by the publishers. Before the publication of the books the Executors discovered a scrap of paper with a sentence by J.M. Synge saying that Selections might be taken from his Essays on the Congested Districts. I do not know if this was written before his letter to me, which made no mention of them, or contained his final directions. The matter is unimportant, for the publishers decided to ignore my offer to select as well as my original decision to reject, and for this act of theirs they have given me no reasons except reasons of convenience, which neither Lady Gregory nor I could accept.
W.B. Yeats.
I
ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 26th, 1907, I was lecturing in Aberdeen, and when my lecture was over I was given a telegram which said, ‘Play great success.’ It had been sent from Dublin after the second Act of ‘The Playboy of the Western World,’ then being performed for the first time. After one in the morning, my host brought to my bedroom this second telegram, ‘Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift.’ I knew no more until I got the Dublin papers on my way from Belfast to Dublin on Tuesday morning. On the Monday night no word of the play had been heard. About forty young men had sat on the front seats of the pit, and stamped and shouted and blown trumpets from the rise to the fall of the curtain. On the Tuesday night also the forty young men were there. They wished to silence what they considered a slander upon Ireland’s womanhood. Irish women would never sleep under the same roof with a young man without a chaperon, nor admire a murderer, nor use a word like ‘shift;’ nor could anyone recognise the country men and women of Davis and Kickham in these poetical, violent, grotesque persons, who used the name of God so freely, and spoke of all things that hit their fancy.
A patriotic journalism which had seen in Synge’s capricious imagination the enemy of all it would have young men believe, had for years prepared for this hour, by that which is at once the greatest and most ignoble power of journalism, the art of repeating a name again and again with some ridiculous or evil association. The preparation had begun after the first performance of ‘The Shadow of the Glen,’ Synge’s first play, with an assertion made in ignorance but repeated in dishonesty, that he had taken his fable and his characters, not from his own mind nor that profound knowledge of cot and curragh he was admitted to possess, but ‘from a writer of the Roman decadence.’ Some spontaneous dislike had been but natural, for genius like his can but slowly, amid what it has of harsh and strange, set forth the nobility of its beauty, and the depth of its compassion; but the frenzy that would have silenced his master-work was, like most violent things artificial, the defence of virtue by those that have but little, which is the pomp and gallantry of journalism and its right to govern the world.
As I stood there watching, knowing well that I saw the dissolution of a school of patriotism that held sway over my youth, Synge came and stood beside me, and said, ‘A young doctor has just told me that he can hardly keep himself from jumping on to a seat, and pointing out in that howling mob those whom he is treating for venereal disease.’
II
THOMAS DAVIS, WHOSE life had the moral simplicity which can give to actions the lasting influence that style alone can give to words, had understood that a country which has no national institutions must show its young men images for the affections, although they be but diagrams of what it should be or may be. He and his school imagined the Soldier, the Orator, the Patriot, the Poet, the Chieftain, and above all the Peasant; and these, as celebrated in essay and songs and stories, possessed so many virtues that no matter how England, who as Mitchell said ‘had the ear of the world,’ might slander us, Ireland, even though she could not come at the world’s other ear, might go her way unabashed. But ideas and images which have to be understood and loved by large numbers of people, must appeal to no rich personal experience, no patience of study, no delicacy of sense; and if at rare moments some ‘Memory of the Dead’ can take its strength from one; at all other moments manner and matter will be rhetorical, conventional, sentimental; and language, because it is carried beyond life perpetually, will be as wasted as the thought, with unmeaning pedantries and silences, and a dread of all that has salt and savour. After a while, in a land that has given itself to agitation over-much, abstract thoughts are raised up between men’s minds and Nature, who never does the same thing twice, or makes one man like another, till minds, whose patriotism is perhaps great enough to carry them to the scaffold, cry down natural impulse with the morbid persistence of minds unsettled by some fixed idea. They are preoccupied with the nation’s future, with heroes, poets, soldiers, painters, armies, fleets, but only as these things are understood by a child in a national school, while a secret feeling that what is so unreal needs continual defence makes them bitter and restless. They are like some state which has only paper money, and seeks by punishments to make it buy whatever gold can buy. They no longer love, for only life is loved, and at last, a generation is like an hysterical woman who will make unmeasured accusations and believe impossible things, because of some logical deduction from a solitary thought which has turned a portion of her mind to stone.
III
EVEN IF WHAT one defends be true, an attitude of defence, a continual apology, whatever the cause, makes the mind barren because it kills intellectual innocence; that delight in what is unforeseen, and in the mere spectacle of the world, the mere drifting hither and thither that must come before all true thought and emotion. A zealous Irishman, especially if he lives much out of Ireland, spends his time in a never-ending argument about Oliver Cromwell, the Danes, the penal laws, the rebellion of 1798, the famine, the Irish peasant, and ends by substituting a traditional casuistry for a country; and if he be a Catholic, yet anothe
r casuistry that has professors, schoolmasters, letter-writing priests, and the authors of manuals to make the meshes fine, comes between him and English literature, substituting arguments and hesitations for the excitement at the first reading of the great poets which should be a sort of violent imaginative puberty. His hesitations and arguments may have been right, the Catholic philosophy may be more profound than Milton’s morality, or Shelley’s vehement vision; but none the less do we lose life by losing that recklessness Castiglione thought necessary even in good manners, and offend our Lady Truth, who would never, had she desired an anxious courtship, have digged a well to be her parlour.
I admired though we were always quarrelling on some matter, J.F. Taylor, the orator, who died just before the first controversy over these plays. It often seemed to me that when he spoke Ireland herself had spoken, one got that sense of surprise that comes when a man has said what is unforeseen because it is far from the common thought, and yet obvious because when it has been spoken, the gate of the mind seems suddenly to roll back and reveal forgotten sights and let loose lost passions. I have never heard him speak except in some Irish literary or political society, but there at any rate, as in conversation, I found a man whose life was a ceaseless reverie over the religious and political history of Ireland. He saw himself pleading for his country before an invisible jury, perhaps of the great dead, against traitors at home and enemies abroad, and a sort of frenzy in his voice and the moral elevation of his thoughts gave him for the moment style and music. One asked oneself again and again, ‘Why is not this man an artist, a man of genius, a creator of some kind?’ The other day under the influence of memory, I read through his one book, a life of Owen Roe O’Neill, and found there no sentence detachable from its context because of wisdom or beauty. Everything was argued from a premise; and wisdom, and style, whether in life or letters come from the presence of what is self-evident, from that which requires but statement, from what Blake called ‘naked beauty displayed.’ The sense of what was unforeseen and obvious, the rolling backward of the gates had gone with the living voice, with the nobility of will that made one understand what he saw and felt in what was now but argument and logic. I found myself in the presence of a mind like some noisy and powerful machine, of thought that was no part of wisdom but the apologetic of a moment, a woven thing, no intricacy of leaf and twig, of words with no more of salt and of savour than those of a Jesuit professor of literature, or of any other who does not know that there is no lasting writing which does not define the quality, or carry the substance of some pleasure. How can one, if one’s mind be full of abstractions and images created not for their own sake but for the sake of party, even if there were still the need, find words that delight the ear, make pictures to the mind’s eye, discover thoughts that tighten the muscles, or quiver and tingle in the flesh, and stand like St. Michael with the trumpet that calls the body to resurrection?
