by J. M. Synge
To speak of one’s emotions without fear or moral ambition, to come out from under the shadow of other men’s minds, to forget their needs, to be utterly oneself, that is all the Muses care for. Villon, pander, thief, and man-slayer, is as immortal in their eyes, and illustrates in the cry of his ruin as great a truth as Dante in abstract ecstasy, and touches our compassion more. All art is the disengaging of a soul from place and history, its suspension in a beautiful or terrible light, to await the Judgement, and yet, because all its days were a Last Day, judged already. It may show the crimes of Italy as Dante did, or Greek mythology like Keats, or Kerry and Galway villages, and so vividly that ever after I shall look at all with like eyes, and yet I know that Cino da Pistoia thought Dante unjust, that Keats knew no Greek, that those country men and women are neither so lovable nor so lawless as ‘mine author sung it me;’ that I have added to my being, not my knowledge.
XV
I WROTE THE most of these thoughts in my diary on the coast of Normandy, and as I finished came upon Mont Saint Michel, and thereupon doubted for a day the foundation of my school. Here I saw the places of assembly, those cloisters on the rock’s summit, the church, the great halls where monks, or knights, or men at arms sat at meals, beautiful from ornament or proportion. I remembered ordinances of the Popes forbidding drinking-cups with stems of gold to these monks who had but a bare dormitory to sleep in. Even when imagining, the individual had taken more from his fellows and his fathers than he gave; one man finishing what another had begun; and all that majestic fantasy, seeming more of Egypt than of Christendom, spoke nothing to the solitary soul, but seemed to announce whether past or yet to come an heroic temper of social men, a bondage of adventure and of wisdom. Then I thought more patiently and I saw that what had made these but as one and given them for a thousand years the miracles of their shrine and temporal rule by land and sea, was not a condescension to knave or dolt, an impoverishment of the common thought to make it serviceable and easy, but a dead language and a communion in whatever, even to the greatest saint, is of incredible difficulty. Only by the substantiation of the soul I thought, whether in literature or in sanctity, can we come upon those agreements, those separations from all else that fasten men together lastingly; for while a popular and picturesque Burns and Scott can but create a province, and our Irish cries and grammars serve some passing need, Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe and all who travel in their road with however poor a stride, define races and create everlasting loyalties. Synge, like all of the great kin, sought for the race, not through the eyes or in history, or even in the future, but where those monks found God, in the depths of the mind, and in all art like his, although it does not command — indeed because it does not — may lie the roots of far-branching events. Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not persuade, which does not condescend, which does not explain is irresistible. It is made by men who expressed themselves to the full, and it works through the best minds; whereas the external and picturesque and declamatory writers, that they may create kilts and bagpipes and newspapers and guide-books, leave the best minds empty, and in Ireland and Scotland England runs into the hole. It has no array of arguments and maxims, because the great and the simple (and the Muses have never known which of the two most pleases them) need their deliberate thought for the day’s work, and yet will do it worse if they have not grown into or found about them, most perhaps in the minds of women, the nobleness of emotion, associated with the scenery and events of their country, by those great poets, who have dreamed it in solitude, and who to this day in Europe are creating indestructible spiritual races, like those religion has created in the East.
W. B. Yeats.
September 14th. 1910.
WITH SYNGE IN CONNEMARA
I HAD OFTEN spent a day walking with John Synge, but a year or two ago I travelled for a month alone through the west of Ireland with him. He was the best companion for a roadway any one could have, always ready and always the same; a bold walker, up hill and down dale, in the hot sun and the pelting rain. I remember a deluge on the Erris Peninsula, where we lay among the sand hills and at his suggestion heaped sand upon ourselves to try and keep dry.
When we started on our journey, as the train steamed out of Dublin, Synge said: ‘Now the elder of us two should be in command on this trip.’ So we compared notes and I found that he was two months older than myself. So he was boss and whenever it was a question whether we should take the road to the west or the road to the south, it was Synge who finally decided.
Synge was fond of little children and animals. I remember how glad he was to stop and lean on a wall in Gorumna and watch a woman in afield shearing a sheep. It was an old sheep and must have often been sheared before by the same hand, for the woman hardly held it; she just knelt beside it and snipped away. I remember the sheep raised its lean old head to look at the stranger, and the woman just put her hand on its cheek and gently pressed its head down on the grass again.
Synge was delighted with the narrow paths made of sods of grass alongside the newly-metalled roads, because he thought they had been put there to make soft going for the bare feet of little children. Children knew, I think, that he wished them well. In Bellmullet on Saint John’s eve, when we stood in the market square watching the fire-play, flaming sods of turf soaked in paraffine, hurled to the sky and caught and skied again, and burning snakes of hay-rope, I remember a little girl in the crowd, in an ecstasy of pleasure and dread, clutched Synge by the hand and stood close in his shadow until the fiery games were done.
His knowledge of Gaelic was a great assistance to him in talking to the people. I remember him holding a great conversation in Irish and English with an innkeeper’s wife in a Mayo inn. She had lived in America in Lincoln’s day. She told us what living cost in America then, and of her life there; her little old husband sitting by and putting in an odd word. By the way, the husband was a wonderful gentle-mannered man, for we had luncheon in his house of biscuits and porter, and rested there an hour, waiting for a heavy shower to blow away; and when we said good-bye and our feet were actually on the road, Synge said, ‘Did we pay for what we had?’ So I called back to the innkeeper, ‘Did we pay you?’ and he said quietly, ‘Not yet sir.’
Synge was always delighted to hear and remember any good phrase. I remember his delight at the words of a local politician who told us how he became a Nationalist. ‘I was,’ he said plucking a book from the mantlepiece (I remember the book — it was ‘Paul and Virginia’) and clasping it to his breast— ‘I was but a little child with my little book going to school, and by the house there I saw the agent. He took the unfortunate tenant and thrun him in the road, and I saw the man’s wife come out crying and the agent’s wife thrun her in the channel, and when I saw that, though I was but a child, I swore I’d be a Nationalist. I swore by heaven, and I swore by hell and all the rivers that run through them.’
Synge must have read a great deal at one time, but he was not a man you would see often with a book in his hand; he would sooner talk, or rather listen to talk — almost anyone’s talk.
Synge was always ready to go anywhere with one, and when there to enjoy what came. He went with me to see an ordinary melodrama at the Queen’s Theatre, Dublin, and he delighted to see how the members of the company could by the vehemence of their movements and the resources of their voices hold your attention on a play where everything was commonplace. He enjoyed seeing the contrite villain of the piece come up from the bottom of the gulch, hurled there by the adventuress, and flash his sweating blood-stained face up against the footlights; and, though he told us he had but a few short moments to live, roar his contrition with the voice of a bull.
Synge had travelled a great deal in Italy in tracks he beat out for himself, and in Germany and in France, but he only occasionally spoke to me about these places. I think the Irish peasant had all his heart. He loved them in the east as well as he loved them in the west, but the western men on the Aran Islan
ds and in the Blaskets fitted in with his humour more than any; the wild things they did and said were a joy to him.
Synge was by spirit well equipped for the roads. Though his health was often bad, he had beating under his ribs a brave heart that carried him over rough tracks. He gathered about him very little gear, and cared nothing for comfort except perhaps that of a good turf fire. He was, though young in years, ‘an old dog for a hard road and not a young pup for a tow-path.’
He loved mad scenes. He told me how once at the fair of Tralee he saw an old tinker-woman taken by the police, and she was struggling with them in the centre of the fair; when suddenly, as if her garments were held together with one cord, she hurled every shred of clothing from her, ran down the street and screamed, ‘let this be the barrack yard,’ which was perfectly understood by the crowd as suggesting that the police strip and beat their prisoners when they get them shut in, in the barrack yard. The young men laughed, but the old men hurried after the naked fleeting figure trying to throw her clothes on her as she ran.
But all wild sights appealed to Synge, he did not care whether they were typical of anything else or had any symbolical meaning at all. If he had lived in the days of piracy he would have been the fiddler in a pirate-schooner, him they called ‘the music—’ ‘The music’ looked on at every thing with dancing eyes but drew no sword, and when the schooner was taken and the pirates hung at Cape Corso Castle or The Island of Saint Christopher’s, ‘the music’ was spared because he was ‘the music.’
Jack B. Yeats
Brief Biography: J. M. Synge by William Kirkpatrick Magee
JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE (1871-1909), Irish dramatic author, came of an Anglo-Irish family, which had contributed several bishops to the Irish church. He was born near Dublin April 16 1871. A delicate child, he was left much to himself, and as a youthful member of the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club took long rambles over the Dublin and Wicklow hills. At Trinity College, where he graduated in 1892, he obtained prizes in Irish and Hebrew, and he knew something of several modern languages. At this period his chief interest was in music and he gained a scholarship in counterpoint and harmony in the Royal Irish Academy of Music. A sonnet, moreover, contributed to Kottabos, shows not a little of the accomplishment of verse, as well as his innate passion for primitive things. During the next few years (1893-8), Synge travelled in Germany, Austria, Italy, finally making Paris his headquarters. He managed to spend a third of the year in Paris, a third in the W. of Ireland, and a third in London or Dublin. W. B. Yeats found him in Paris (1898) preoccupied with theories of language and literature, and advised him to return to Ireland. He went to the Aran Is., where he shared the life of the islanders, and he gave an account of it in a series of sketches afterwards collected in the volume, The Aran Islands (1907). In these and other sketches of the same period he had not quite shaken off the obsession of “stylism,” and still had a wish “to do for the W. of Ireland what Pierre Loti had done for the Bretons.” Gradually, however, Ireland got hold of him, and, turning to the dramatization of incidents in the life he now knew intimately, he began to elaborate, partly from his note-books and partly from the writings of Lady Gregory and Dr. Douglas Hyde, that richly imaginative though largely artificial dialect of Anglo-Irish which he carried to its furthest capacities. The Abbey theatre was opened towards the close of 1904, with Synge as one of the directors. He had already produced two one-act plays, In the Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea (1903), of which the first had acquired some notoriety for the author as an affront to Irish morals; he had also written a farcical play, The Tinker’s Wedding, which proved a failure when acted (1909) after his death. The beautiful three-act play, The Well of the Saints, produced before a few dozen people in the early months of the Abbey (1905), was regarded as a new affront; and in Jan. 1907, rumour having got about of its subject matter, the performance of The Playboy of the Western World was interrupted by an organized disturbance which continued night after night for a week. This affair, when the merits of the play came to be known, made the fame of the Abbey theatre. Synge’s health was now shattered, and with death in prospect he worked at his fine play Deirdre of the Sorrows, all but completing it before the end came on March 24 1909. Just before he had collected his curious Poems (1900).
Synge appeared at a peculiar moment in the development of Irish literature, which had begun to address a largely increased public, blended of the two main elements of the population. By descent and culture he was of the Anglo-Irish stock, and he really saw the Irish subject matter in the detached spirit of an artist. It was probably something like this that part of his audience detected in the Playboy, and it caused his work for a while to be rejected in his own country. Time, however, has already proved the depth of Synge’s insight into the soul of peasant Ireland. The Playboy is by general consent his masterpiece. In this play, the fantastically rich imagery of his dialogue, which elsewhere has often a somewhat monotonous effect, has full dramatic justification; the play has even, like Hamlet, the supreme mark of vitality, that it conveys the suggestion of a permanent human enigma. There are good critics, however, who assign the highest place among his works to Deirdre.
A collected edition of Synge’s works, in four volumes, was published in 1910. In John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre (1913), M. Maurice Bourgeois has given, in great detail, an account of his life and writings; and there is a critical study of him by P. P. Howe
(1912).
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