# Irish Plays and Playwrights/Chapter 7

CHAPTER VII
JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE
It is Synge himself who puts the just phrase on what his life was to him, and it is, as it could not else be, from the lips of his Deirdre that it falls. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and richest, if it's for a short space only." It is Deirdre alone of his men and women that is introspective at all, Deirdre—and Naisi when he is mastered by thoughts of home that will not down. Synge wrote the play of her triumph over death as he himself was dying, and he wrote it with high heart, and, what is higher, gladness, despite his foreknowledge of his doom. It was to fulfill his dream of the most queenly girl of old Irish legend that he wrote "Deirdre of the Sorrows," but he could not keep out of his writing, had he wished to keep it out, his own love that death was so soon to end, and the thoughts of what was the worth of life. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and richest, if it's for a short space only." It is not a new saying, but it is not to be identified with the proverbial "a short life and a merry," with which some confuse it, and of Synge it was a true saying. There are those who, because of the irony of his writing, an irony that is new to literature, and, maybe, to some cruel, or at least disillusionizing, may think there was little joy for him; but the truth is there was never a writer in whom there was more joy. This "strange still ​ JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE ​man" as he was even to those who knew him best, gentle or simple, found all life that was natural life, even of the barest and rudest, as thrilling as first love. It is this man, his enemies at home the sated Parisian, who knew a gusto in living greater than that of any English writer since Borrow. Let no one forget those lines with which Christy Mahon cries defiance to the Mayo folk who have known his greatness and his fall: "Ten thousand blessings upon all that's here, for you've turned me a likely gaffer in the end of all, the way I'll go romancing through a romping lifetime from this hour to the dawning of the judgment day." I do not deny that these words are in a sense wrung from the Playboy, but what I do hold is that they prove how vital was the genius of the man who wrote them, who saw the joy there was yet in life for this braggart wastrel just as he saw that even such a miserable boyhood as Christy's knew a kind of poacher's joy in running wild on the bogs. Even for poor Nora, turned out on the roads with a tramp for companion, there is the joy of the road once she learns to know it. The tramp knows it surely:—
You'll be hearing the herons crying out over the black lakes, and you'll be hearing the grouse and the owls with them, and the larks and the big thrushes when the days are warm: and it's not from the like of them you'll be hearing a tale of getting old like Peggy Cavanagh, and losing the hair off you and the light of your eyes, but it's fine songs you'll be hearing when the sun goes up, and there'll be no old fellow wheezing the like of a sick sheep, close to your ear.
Of like gusto, too, is the joy of Martin Doul and Mary Doul in their blindness; and the joy of the three tinkers in ​the escape of themselves and their half-sovereign from the priest and in the prospect of "A great time drinking that bit with the trampers in the green of Clash." And from such joys as these, wild and earthy and rallying, his exultations range to the exalted serenity and sadness of Naisi and Deirdre as they look back on their seven year of love in Glen Masain, of love almost too perfect and too happy to be human.
Yes, joy is as distinctive as irony and extravagance of the writing of Synge, joy in mere living, in life even at the worst, and joy, too, in life at the best. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and richest, if it's for a short space only." It was for a short space of years that Synge had "what is best and richest," hardly for the seven years of his great lovers. He did not have it when his thought homed to Ireland in 1899, as a result of a meeting with Mr. Yeats in Paris. His writing, then, was of little moment, but it grew better when, at home again, he realized what Irish life was to him, when once renewed contact with the Irish peasant brought back the familiarity that had been his in the nursery. It was the Wicklow glens, to which memories of his people drew him, and the Aran Islands, where he went to study Irish—until then little more than a book language to him—and to live a life perhaps "more primitive than any in Europe," that enabled him to find himself. Further 'prentice work, though of a new sort, followed his sojourns in Wicklow and Aran, but by 1903 his art had matured to the ripe power of "In the Shadow of the Glen" and "Riders to the Sea," which, after adjustment to the stage, were ​put on respectively October 8, 1903, and February 25, 1904, at Molesworth Hall, Dublin. "The Tinker's Wedding" which has been played only once, and then in London, dates from about the same time. "The Well of the Saints" was produced on February 4, 1905, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and "The Playboy of the Western World" on January 26, 1907, at the same place, to the accompaniment of an uproar that a certain element of Irishmen have considered it proper to create ever since on its first appearance in all cities whatsoever, whether in Great Britain or America. One wonders what they would have done had he made it as biting as Ibsen made "Peer Gynt." "Deirdre of the Sorrows," which Synge left unrevised, was first produced at the Abbey Theatre on January 13, 1910, the last of the six plays of his maturity. It was in the years from 1902 to 1909 that he had "what is best and richest"—a full life, lived largely in the Ireland that he loved; the artist's joy in making that life into a new beauty, a beauty that was all compact of exaltation and extravagance and irony; and love for a woman in whom his man's life and his artist's life were united, for her who embodied his dream of Pegeen Mike and added her life and her art of the stage to his dream of Deirdre, as day by day it emerged from his mind. And so great was his joy in these good things that his precarious health, and even his year—long last illness, could not, while he had any strength, lessen the high spirit of his writing. There is none of his plays more vital than "Deirdre of the Sorrows."
And yet this joy that is basic in Synge, this exaltation, ​is no more basic than emotions and attitudes of mind that are often, in other men, at war with joy and exaltation—irony and grotesquerie, keen insight into "the black thoughts of men," and insistent awareness of the quick passing of all good things, diablerie and mordancy. Strange, then, should be his love passages and strange too, they are at times, ranging from the bizarre delight of "In Kerry" to the triumphing nobility of Deirdre's farewell to Alban. One thinks of Mr. Hardy and one thinks of Donne as one reads "In Kerry":—
"We heard the thrushes by the shore and sea, And saw the golden stars' nativity, Then round we went the lane by Thomas Flynn, Across the church where bones lie out and in; And there I asked beneath a lonely cloud Of strange delight, with one bird singing loud, What change you'd wrought in graveyard, rock and sea, This new wild paradise to wake for me ... Yet knew no more than knew those merry sins Had built this stack of thigh-bones, jaws and shins."
One thinks of no other writer at all, however, when one reads Christy's wooing of Pegeen, even when one puts down the book in the quiet that always comes on one in the presence of something great; one thinks of no other writer, of course, when one sees the lovers and listens to their words, on the stage, for one is rapt out of one's self by the perfect accord of drama and actors at one in the service of beauty:—
Christy (indignantly). Starting from you, is it? (He follows her.) I will not, then, and when the airs is warming, in four months or five, it's then yourself and me should be pacing ​Neifin in the dews of night, the times sweet smells do be rising, and you'll see a little, shiny new moon, maybe, sinking on the hills.
Pegeen (looking at him playfully). And it's that kind of a poacher's love you'd make, Christy Mahon, on the sides of Neifin, when the night is down?
Christy. It's little you'll think if my love's a poacher's, or an earl's itself, when you'll feel my two hands stretched around you, and I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips, till I'd feel a kind of pity for the Lord God is all ages sitting lonesome in His golden chair.
Pegeen. That'll be right fun, Christy Mahon, and any girl would walk her heart out before she'd meet a young man was your like for eloquence, or talk at all.
Christy (encouraged). Let you wait, to hear me talking, till we're astray in Erris, when Good Friday's by, drinking a sup from a well, and making mighty kisses with our wetted mouths, or gaming in a gap of sunshine, with yourself stretched back unto your necklace, in the flowers of the earth.
Pegeen (in a low voice, moved by his tone). I'd be nice, so, is it?
Christy (with rapture). If the mitred bishops seen you that time, they'd be the like of the holy prophets, I'm thinking, do be straining the bars of Paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of Troy, and she abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in her golden shawl.
Borrow, who comes to mind more often than any other writer as one reads Synge, chose to avoid love scenes, and Borrow's follower, Mr. Hewlett, for all his gusto, has no such exaltation as this. Had Harry Richmond taken to the road with Kiomi we might have known something like it. A chapter out of the early life of Juggling Jerry and his "Old Girl," done in the manner of "Love in the Valley," would be still nearer to it. As it is, this passage ​of the third act of "The Playboy of the Western World" stands alone. I doubt if Synge had read Meredith, and even had he, the life of the roads and their cottages that Synge knew so well was his master, and no writer at all. In a way, of course, the Irish-English of Dr. Hyde's translations of "The Love Songs of Connacht" was an influence, and you will find many expressions common to them and Synge. It is not important, however, whether these expressions have a common source, or whether Synge took them from "The Love Songs" rather than from his own note-book. Whatever their source it was Synge who made out of them a great style, his peasant style. It is another and a severer style that he uses in his "Deirdre of the Sorrows," the courtly subject demanding dignity and restraint. This latter style has borrowed some of the bare simplicity of the personal style of Synge, that style, I mean, in which he records his own experience in the Aran Islands or in Wicklow and Kerry.
Romancing, which is the very atmosphere of "The Playboy of the Western World," would be out of place in any telling of the greatest of old Irish legends; so it is that Synge has found for "Deirdre of the Sorrows," or rather for its great moments, an austere epic speech that seems native to the story. The passionate words are nobly adequate to the passionate resignation they have to tell, a resignation that has come of the unwilling belief of the lovers that so great a love as theirs cannot last longer "without fleck or flaw" than the seven years it has lasted. Says Deirdre, when she has come to know it is fate that they will return to Ireland, and death:—
​Neifin in the dews of night, the times sweet smells do be rising, and you'll see a little, shiny new moon, maybe, sinking on the hills.</noinclude>The dawn and evening are a little while, the winter and the summer pass quickly, and what way would you and I, Naisi, have joy forever.... It's this hour we're between the daytime and a night where there is sleep forever, and isn't it better thing to be following on to a near death than to be bending the head down, and dragging with the feet, and seeing one day a blight showing upon love where it is sweet and tender?
Naisi (his voice broken with distraction). If a near death is coming what will be my trouble losing the earth and the stars over it, and you, Deirdre, are their flame and bright crown? Come away into the safety of the woods.
Deirdre (shaking her head slowly). There are as many ways to wither love as there are stars in a night of Samhain; but there is no way to keep life, or love with it, a short space only.... It's for that there's nothing lonesome like a love is watching out the time most lovers do be sleeping.... It's for that we're setting out for Emain Macha when the tide turns on the sand.
Naisi (giving in). You're right, maybe. It should be a poor thing to see great lovers and they sleepy and old.
Deirdre (with a more tender intensity). We're seven years without roughness or growing weary; seven years so sweet and shining, the gods would be hard set to give us seven days the like of them. It's for that we're going to Emain, where there'll be a rest forever, or a place for forgetting, in great crowds and they making a stir.
Naisi (very softly). We'll go, surely, in place of keeping a watch on a love had no match and it wasting away. (They cling to each other, then Naisi looks up.)
And this is from the unfinished second act, that Synge thought would scarcely be worth preserving. I have quoted it rather than the great keen over the body of Naisi that brings the play to a close, because that must of necessity follow the old poem, and this is as Synge ​imagined it. Each is "a thing will be a joy and triumph to the ends of life and time."
I have thrown what I have to say about the exaltation of Synge to the forefront of what I have to say of him, that all may be read in the memory of this emphasis and of the exaltation of what I quote, no matter how fantastic or grotesque or disillusionizing or even ghoulish it may be. Whatever other quality may be dominant at any moment in Synge there is always, along with it, exaltation.
It is the extravagance and grotesquerie, of both language and situation, that is the most immediately arresting of the qualities of Synge. And this extravagance and grotesquerie have marked his writing from the start. The old husband playing dead, that he may catch his young wife with her lover, of his first play, "In the Shadow of the Glen," is a very old motive, and familiar in the meliorized form that made it known to the theatre in "Conn the Shaughraun" (1875). Before that, Crofton Croker had given it currency, in "The Corpse Watchers," among those outside of the circles in which it was a familiar folk-story. It might, indeed, be said of "In the Shadow of the Glen" that it begins in the manner of Boucicault and ends in the manner of Ibsen, for Nora Burke is in a way a peasant Hedda Gabler. Such a criticism would, of course, be very superficial. The story is a folk-story of many countries and Synge was told the version he worked from by the old shanachie of Inishmaan whom he calls Pat Dirane in "The Aran Islands." At moments the play approaches farce, as when the supposed corpse rises ​from the bed where he is stretched and drinks whiskey with a tramp who has happened in while Nora is gone to meet her young man. From such a situation it turns to keen pathos, as Nora sits with tramp and lover and the old husband she thinks dead, and listens to the wind and rain sweeping through the high glens about the hut and thinks of "the young growing behind her," and the old passing. Where else will you find cheek by jowl such sardonic humor as this and such poignancy of lament for the passing of youth? Nora speaks as she pours out whiskey for her young man:—
Why would I marry you, Mike Dara? You'll be getting old and I'll be getting old, and in a little while, I'm telling you, you'll be sitting up in your bed—the way himself was sitting—with a shake in your face, and your teeth falling, and the white hair sticking out round you like an old bush where sheep do be leaping a gap.
(Dan Burke sits up noiselessly from under the sheet, with his hand to his face. His white hair is sticking out round his head. Nora goes on slowly without hearing him.)
It's a pitiful thing to be getting old, but it's a queer thing surely. It's a queer thing to see an old man sitting up there in his bed with no teeth in him, and a rough word in his mouth, and his chin the way it would take the bark from the edge of an oak board you'd have building a door.... God forgive me, Michael Dara, we'll all be getting old, but it's a queer thing surely.
Michael. It's too lonesome you are from living a long time with an old man, Nora, and you're talking again like a herd that would be coming down from the thick mist (he puts his arm round her), but it's a fine life you'll have now with a young man—a fine life, surely.
(Dan sneezes violently. Michael tries to get to the door, but before ​he can do so Dan jumps out of the bed in queer white clothes, with the stick in his hand, and goes over and puts his back against it.)
Michael. Son of God deliver us!
Equal extravagance and equal grotesquerie, and irony biting beyond any in any other of his plays, you will find in "The Well of the Saints."
This, too, is built up out of Synge's experience of life in Aran and Wicklow. Old Mourteen, a "dark man," who taught him Gaelic on Aranmor, suggested Martin Doul, the chief character of the play, and it was Mourteen told him, too, the story of the well whose water would give sight to blind eyes. A story told Synge on Inishere supplied the saint, and a tramp in Wicklow the thoughts of Martin Doul and Mary Doul as to the glory their hair would be to them in age. As you read his travel sketches, in fact, you are always coming on passages that very evidently are the suggestions for situations in this play or that, and sometimes more than suggestions—stories and situations and very phrases that you remember as on the lips of the peasants in his plays. In these travel sketches, too, you find the background of the plays. There is but the germ of "The Playboy of the Western World" in the story told Synge in Inishmaan of the hiding there from the police of the man that killed his father, but there is old Mourteen's comparison of an unmarried man to "an old jackass straying in the rocks," which later we find transferred to Michael James Flaherty almost as Synge heard it—"an old braying jackass straying upon the rocks."
​It may be, too, that the famous Lynchehaun case confirmed Synge in taking the Aran story of the man who killed his father as the basis of "The Playboy," but it is little he got for his plays from his reading of "the fearful crimes of Ireland," and little that he got for them from any of his reading. There are situations in "The Tinker's Wedding"—the tying-up of the priest in the bag, for instance—that suggest as source "The Lout and his Mother," included by Dr. Hyde in his "Religious Songs of Connacht," but Synge records, in "At a Wicklow Fair," that a herd told him the story of the tinker couple that would be wed, as he and the herd met the man in the case in Aughrim.
No one who knows Ireland at all would hold that Synge's plays are typical of the Irish peasant generally, but any one who knows Irish literature at all, and the life of the roads in Ireland, will admit that wildness and extravagance are to be found in that literature from the beginning and in that life even at this day of supposed civilization. You will find one kind of extravagance in the distortions of Cuchulain in bardic literature, another kind of extravagance in "Little Red Mary and the Goat with the Chime of Bells" that your gardener tells you in a prosaic American suburban town; you will find the primitiveness of prehistoric life in the burning of poor old Mrs. Cleary by her neighbors in Tipperary (1895), to drive a demon out of her, and the savage that is but under the skin of all men in the description of the Spinsters' Ball at Ballinasloe in "A Drama in Muslin." Said an old shanachie to Synge on Inishere, when Synge had told him of a ​stock exchange trick, "Isn't it a great wonder to think that those men are as big rogues as ourselves?" It is idle to pretend that it is not true that, in some moods, all men the world over have sympathy for the rogue. Why do we read of Reynard the Fox with delight, and Robin Hood, and Uncle Remus, and not only in the days of our own infantile roguery, but as grown men and women? This man or that may say it is because of the cleverness of Reynard, the daring of Robin Hood or his wild-woods setting, and the resourcefulness of Bre'r Rabbit; but the honest man will admit it is because of an innate and deeply rooted human sympathy with roguery as well as our natural human sympathy with the under dog and the man hunted by a merciless or an alien law. Very often, if the roguery is very great, or we are brought face to face with its effects and realize it is a real thing in real life, we will be shocked out of our sympathy with it, and realize, as did Pegeen Mike, the difference between a "gallous story and a dirty deed." But sometimes, if we are a people living a primitive life, we will no more awaken to the reality of the wrong of roguery than we would as children have been able to sympathize with the farmer whose pumpkin patch we raided on the eve of Hallowe'en. A sneaking sympathy with roguery, however, is a very different thing from a delight in extravagance. That, too, is a universal passion, but not so native to the Teuton as to Celt or Finn or Oriental. Its absence is what most differentiates Old Norse literature from Old Irish, with which it so early came into contact. It is in travelers' tales and in the tales of seamen and in the writing that ​was based on these, in rare moments of religious or romantic ecstasy, or in borrowings from Celt or Oriental that you will find the most of what extravagance there is in English literature. In America you find extravagance in our humor, and this humor, perhaps, owes as much of its extravagance to an Irish ancestry as to an environment of new wonders that could not be well expressed save in hyperbole.
It is not only the extravagance of the change wrought in Christy by unexpected hero-worship and an awakening of self-confidence through love for the first time known and returned that we wonder at, and the extravagance of that hero-worship, but the extravagance of the imagination of his creator, and the beautiful extravagance of his speech. The freshness and audacity of that imagination, and the beautiful extravagance of that speech, a speech modulated to a rhythm that Synge was the first to catch, are in themselves enough to give distinction to almost any subject. There was granted Synge more than this, however,—a keenness of vision into the pathetic humanity of ugly things and a power to realize this with a beauty that was granted to no one before, though to Swift it was granted to see the ugliness as a bitter thing. Borrow had, indeed, a glimpse now and then of the pathetic beauty there is in ugliness, as in the story of Isopel Berners and the Flaming Tinman, and Whitman, too; but no man before Synge had the power at once to see the ugly subject as beautiful from a new angle of vision, humanize it, irradiate it with a new glow of imagination, reveal it through a style that for the first time ennobles English ​prose drama as blank verse has long ennobled English verse drama.
Take "The Tinker's Wedding," for instance. The theme is the desire of a tinker woman, youngish if not young, to wed the man who has long been her mate; his mother's unstudied frustration of that scheme by stealing, to swap for drink, the can they were to give to the priest along with a half-sovereign for marrying them; and their joy, in the end, that they have escaped matrimony and the wasting of good money. And yet this theme is underlaid with an emotion so vital, the emotion of a wild free life, and invested with a pathos so poignant of the quick passing of all good things, that no understanding heart can but be profoundly moved by that pathos and racily rejoiced at that wildness.
It is thus, for instance, soliloquizes Mary Byrne, the rapscalliony old tinker woman of outrageous behavior of "The Tinker's Wedding." She is stealing the aforesaid can, in the absence of her son and his Sarah "to get two of Tim Flaherty's hens": "Maybe the two of them have a good right to be walking out the little short while they'd be young; but if they have itself, they'll not keep Mary Byrne from her full pint when the night's fine, and there's a dry moon in the sky." One thinks, as one reads, of Villon's old woman and her lament for yesteryear, but there are not many writers anywhere in the world, of old time or of to-day, who have such power of blending pathos and ugliness into beauty, and no other one that I know who can infuse humor into the blend, and make one at the one time laugh ironically and be thrilled as with great poetry.
​There are those, of course, to whom this earthiness and wildness are repulsive, to whom old Martin Doul's love pleading to Molly Byrne is unendurable. A dirty "shabby stump of a man," a beggar, blind and middle-aged, is asking a fine white girl, young, and as teasing as an ox-eyed and ox-minded colleen may be, to go away with him. Not an exalting situation, exactly, as you read of it or see it on the stage, but once you see it on the stage, where its animality you would expect would be heightened, you realize—and it is strange to you that you do so realize—first of all its pathos, and again its pathos, and always, the scene through, its pathos. Had Molly gone with old Martin it would have revolted you, for it would have been unnatural, but since she did not, and since she was not the sort to be easily insulted, you only wonder at the power of passion and realize its pathos, and the irony of it.
There is, however, a situation ironical of love in "In the Shadow of the Glen" that is more appalling to some than any irony of "The Well of the Saints." I mean the scene at the end, where Nora, turned out by her husband and forsaken by her lover, goes out into the rain with the tramp, leaving husband and lover drinking together in utmost amity. The pathos of this and the irony of it are of a part with the pathos of the close of "Hedda Gabler." Hedda and Nora, selfish and willful both, if you like, are yet fine women both, and human, as Zenobia and Eustacia are human, and pathetic in their fates, with a pathos that even Hawthorne and Mr. Hardy have seldom the power to make us feel. But the fate of Nora was ironic as the fate of none of the others, for all ​three of them escaped the ennui and misery of life, while Nora but begins a new life, freer for the moment than her old life, but promising, in the end, only the old dull round.
The irony of it! "The irony of it" is always in Synge's writing even in its most exalted moments. A seven years' love "without fleck or flaw" is "surely a wonder," but it is just as surely ironical that it, like all good things, shall so soon come to an end. That, of course, is but the way of nature, and so we much question if, after all, the irony of Synge is more insistent than the irony of nature. If it is it is because he takes more care to uncover it, but basically his irony is but the irony of nature. He is in reality less ironical than Mr. Hardy, the great ironist of English literature of our day, and he is never bitter, for bitterness comes seldom except to the writer who is interested in morals, and morals interest Synge only in so far as they are natural. It is life—not any conventional way of life, or any ideal of life—that interests Synge, so he escapes ensnarement in any of the questions of the day. So frankly does he accept life that there is in him no note of protest whatsoever, which is again fortunate, for protest, too, will lead a man to morals and leave on his work the taint of a passing system of morality as it did even on Ibsen.
If there is symbolism to be found in Synge, it is there only by accident, never as the result of definite intent. He may have had, in the back of his mind, as he wrote "The Playboy of the Western World," the thought of chance making a man, of a man finding himself through ​others believing in him who has no belief in himself but that there is in the play any parable of young Ireland losing its allegiance to a previous ideal of Ireland, I do not for a moment believe. There is, of course, in "The Well of the Saints" the old and oft-uttered truth that men prefer blindness in many things to correct vision of them, that truth that drives Mr. Shaw to blind anger. Synge has no resentment against that truth, only interest in it as a fact that is true of people as he sees them. The play is an unforgettable symbol of that truth, but to make it such was not why Synge wrote it. He wrote it with a purpose akin to that which inspired Burns to write his "Jolly Beggars." He wrote it to make something beautiful out of the life of the beggars of the Wicklow mountains, and I have no doubt he had a wild joy in the idea of it, in the irony of its truth, in the grotesquerie of the situations he garnered from his memory to illustrate its beauty and truth.
Many wonders are possible even to-day in the wild life of the roads and of the sea-haunted islands that Synge knew, but he was wise to put "The Well of the Saints" back a hundred years or more. Aran islanders told him of rye that turned to oats in their fields and of phantom ships that passed them at sea, but a miracle of healing such as that of "The Well of the Saints" they were familiar with only in folk-song such as "Mary's Well," and such a miracle, too, would hardly be attempted by a priest of to-day.
Synge had the great advantage of writing all his plays, after the earliest, for the stage. He knew as he wrote that ​he could test that writing's stage effect in rehearsal and change it if need be. So he did change "The Playboy of the Western World," revealing the incident of the supposed patricide as a bit of narrative addressed by Christy to the admiring girls of the Mayo village, instead of, as he had intended, a scene on the stage in "a windy corner of rich Munster land." Had he written "Riders to the Sea" later, Synge would surely never have crowded into it incidents that took far longer in the happening than in the portrayal of that happening on the stage. It is this technical shortcoming that for me takes away somewhat from the exceeding beauty of this tragedy of Aran. The story of the finding of the clothes that tell of the death at sea of the last but one of the five sons of Maurya, and of the death on the very shore itself of the last son, is in its very nature a dirge, and demands a slower movement than is possible with its incidents arranged as he was content to leave them in the play as we have it. "Riders to the Sea" is less representative of Synge, moreover, than any other of his plays, for it is written on one note, the note of the dirge, of the dirge of the tides that sound their menace of the sea through Inishmaan. It is less representative of Synge because it has in it no humor, no quick changes of mood, no revelation of tumult of soul. It is less representative of Synge in that it is less original than any other of his plays, reminiscent in fact in all but its style, now of Ibsen, now of M. Maeterlinck, now even of Mr. Edward Martyn. And his style itself is not what his style was in "In the Shadow of the Glen," nor what it became again in "The Well of the Saints."
​One wonders where that speech came from, that speech that is, as he would have it, "fully flavored as a nut or apple." Mr. Yeats and Lady Gregory tell us that he did not have it until he had been made free, through residence there, of the life of the Aran Islands. If one has read, however, the English of the prose translations of Dr. Hyde's "Love Songs of Connacht," one may see in their style the genesis of the style of "Riders to the Sea," and if one has read the "Dialogue between Two Old Women" of "The Religious Songs of Connacht," and "The Lout and his Mother," one may come to believe that these turned Synge toward the even more fully flavored and more rhythmic speech of the other plays. Perhaps, too, there were memories of the rhythm and of the flavor of the speech of him who made these words for Jasper Petulengro: "Life is sweet, brother, ... there's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die!"
The speech of Connacht folk-song rendered into the English of Connacht by Dr. Hyde, however, and the speech of Borrow were no more than the start, if they were as much as the start, that put him on the right road. If ever a man made his style himself, it was Synge. He made it out of his memory and out of his imagination, using "one or two words only that I have not heard," he said, "among the country people of Ireland, or spoken in my own nursery before I could read the newspaper," but evolving from that memory by his imagination a speech ​that is in harmony with the imagination of the people an imagination that is, he tells us, "fiery and magnificent and tender," though no such actual speech would be possible of reproduction from any one of them.
Synge is very definite in his statement of what he believes drama should be, and what he would make his own drama of Irish life, expressing his belief in the preface to "The Tinker's Wedding":—
The drama is made serious ... not by the degree in which it is taken up with problems that are serious in themselves, but by the degree in which it gives the nourishment, not very easy to define, on which our imaginations live....
We should not go to the theatre as we go to a chemist's or a dramshop, but as we go to a dinner where the food we need is taken with pleasure and excitement....
The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything....
Of the things which nourish the imagination, humor is one of the most needful and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it. Baudelaire calls laughter the greatest sign of the Satanic element in man; and where a country loses its humor, as some towns in Ireland are doing, there will be a morbidity of mind, as Baudelaire's mind was morbid. In the greater part of Ireland, however, the whole people, from the tinkers to the clergy, have still a life, and view of life, that are rich and genial and humorous. I do not think that these country people, who have so much humor themselves, will mind being laughed at without malice, as the people in every country have been laughed at, in their own comedies.
In the preface to "The Playboy of the Western World" is this paragraph, completing his credo as to drama:—
On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy; and that is why the intellectual modern drama has failed, and ​people have grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy, that has been given them in place of the rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality.
Although there are only about forty characters, all told, in the six plays of Synge, and ten of these are in "Deirdre of the Sorrows," which for all its humanity is a play out of a life that is gone, there are men and women a-plenty to give us this "rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality." Nora is "superb and wild" in her longings, and Maurya in her sorrow; and old Martin Doul "superb and wild" in his dream of life in the South; Sarah Casey and Pegeen Mike "superb and wild" in the most direct sense of the phrase; and these are all real, if not representative of the poorer peasantry. And in the high way of romance who has dreamed what is more superb and wilder than the lament of Deirdre over Naisi! In the creation of character, as in style, and in technique of drama, Synge has done what he would. In only one of his plays, in "Riders to the Sea," are his leading characters representative Irish peasants; and even Maurya and her children, not only because of the isolation of their home in Aran, but because of the fate which has marked her mankind for death at sea, are somewhat apart from the fisher-people of the west coast. In all his four other plays of modern life, Synge has chosen characters who are, in his own words, "variations from the ordinary types of manhood,"—chosen them because of his deep-seated love of the unconventional. In "In the Shadow of the Glen," Michael Dara, the herd, is a common type, and Dan Burke, the old sheep farmer, not an uncommon type, ​but the tramp and Nora, the one by his wandering and the other by her brooding, are "variations," though very human both. Of the cottager class, too, are Timmy the Smith, Molly Byrne, and the "villagers" of "The Well of the Saints," as are, too, the girls and men of "The Playboy of the Western World" other than the Mahons and Michael James. Shawn Keogh, indeed, is a cut above cottagers, being almost a strong farmer, and Michael James himself was, no doubt, of a similar cottager respectability before he took to shebeen-keeping. Almost all the other characters of these modern plays are, with the exception of the priest of "The Tinker's Wedding" and the saint of "The Well of the Saints," squatters, beggars, and tinkers. Among them, few as they are all told, are very differing personalities—Christy the Playboy and his father, "a dirty man, God forgive him, and he getting old and crusty"; Martin Doul, a "shabby stump of a man," "of queer talk," middle-aged and blind and a beggar; Michael Byrne, the hardy, thieving, unimaginative tinker; and the romancing young tramp who gallants Nora when her own husband turns her out on the road;—"variations" all, perhaps, but human, and compelling, all of them, our interest, and greater or less sympathy. And the women! Nora, whom we leave as road-woman, I have likened to Hedda Gabler, and Sarah Casey in externals to Isopel Berners, but I do not know to whom to compare the others save Mary Byrne, as slightly suggestive of Villon's old woman. Mary Doul, blind Martin's blind wife, has a general likeness to some old witch out of a fairy tale, but she is far from being a witch; and ​Widow Quinn the incomparable might be compared, were she not too high-hearted, to the hag of "The Lout and Mother" in being
"indecent-spoken, carneying, lying, Plausible, full of poems and prophecies and sharp edged."
Of the women of the cottager class, Nora, for all her wildness and bitterness, is the most lovable, and Molly Byrne the least lovable; the girls of "Riders to the Sea" are not fully enough individualized to make us feel we know them; but Pegeen Mike, Synge has put before us in appearance and temperament, character and personality. "A wild-looking but fine girl," he describes her, "with a divil's own temper," "the fright of seven town-lands"—as she says—"for my biting tongue," but susceptible of softening toward a boy of good looks and coaxing ways such as Christy. He gets around her with "his poet's talking" and his popularity, his "mighty spirit" and "gamey heart" until she gives him "words would put you thinking on the holy Brigid speaking to the infant saints."
There might be incongruity, if one were writing of any other than Synge, in speaking of Deirdre in such a company. Incongruity, however, is of the very texture of Synge's art, which has reconciled qualities, as I have said, never before reconciled in English literature. It is on Deirdre that Synge has lavished all the ideality that was in him, not because he had a dream of woman he wished to fulfill, but because to him Deirdre was all that was queenly. And yet even Deirdre is a "variation," as nobility and beauty must ever be. So lofty is she that ​words even in praise of her are almost impertinent. Just how lofty her words that I quoted at the outset show, as does also, by way of contrast, the mention of her here among these half-tragic, half-grotesque women of the cottages and of the roads. There is scarcely a poet, of all that have written of Ireland from the time of Ferguson to our time, that has not written his dream of Deirdre as he finds her in the old legends of Ireland, but to my mind no one of them has dreamed her so triumphantly as has Synge.
It is not, however, of such "variations" as Deirdre that the critics fall foul, but of the "variations" he puts on Irish roads and in Irish cottages when he presents the life of to-day. Why he replied to this criticism when to most criticism he was, if not indifferent, at least impervious, it is not easy to say. It is more than likely, however, that it was rather to explain his ideas than to justify his characters that he did answer. This criticism of the reality of his peasants began with his "Shadow of the Glen" and is still to be heard in many places to-day. It rose to its highest pitch of denunciation at the time of the production of "The Playboy of the Western World" in Dublin, but it was before that that he answered it fully, in the last paragraph of "The Vagrants of Wicklow," a travel sketch he made out of his wanderings in his native country. Here it is, as effective in its answer to subsequent criticism as to that which it was definitely intended to answer:—
In all the circumstances of this tramp life there is a certain wildness that gives it romance and a peculiar value for those who look at life in Ireland with an eye that is aware of the arts ​also. In all the healthy movements of art, variations from the ordinary types of manhood are made interesting for the ordinary man, and in this way only the higher arts are universal. Beside this art, however, founded on the variations which are a condition and effect of all vigorous life, there is another art—sometimes confounded with it—founded on the freak of nature, in itself a mere sign of atavism or disease. This latter art, which is occupied with the antics of the freak, is of interest only to the variation from ordinary minds, and, for this reason, is never universal. To be quite plain, the tramp in real life, Hamlet and Faust, in the arts, are variations; but the maniac in real life, and Des Esseintes and all his ugly crew in the arts, are freaks only.
It is well to consider all his characters in the light of this statement, I think, and to re-read, keeping in mind a possible further application of it, those phrases in the plays that so outrage many at their hearing in the theatre, I would not for a moment seem to want to soften the hardness of the life he pictures or to explain away his delightfully sardonic humor as in reality a reconciling sort of humor, but I do wish to say that the more I read him the less cruel and sardonic that humor seems. The impersonality of the man as dramatist grows on you as you read, you realize more and more his abstention from playing chorus to his characters, and you come to know that the seeming cruelty and sardonic joy are largely only the direct outcome of his courage in allowing Nature to speak for herself. If you turn again to the plays after learning of their background from his travel sketches, you see many things in a new light. The irony, the grotesquerie, the tonic earthiness never grow less, but one learns to discount somewhat the effect of the hardness of speech on ​the recipients of that speech, as through experience one learns—after one's second attendance at a wake—to discount something of the too voluble sorrow of keening.
That the candor of Synge, in allowing his people of hard nature or of careless nature to say the ruthless things native to their minds and temper, hurts many, there is proof every time one sees a play of his on the stage. You will hear women about you gasp with mingled surprise and disgust, their sensibilities wholly outraged, but unwilling laughter in their minds when the Widow Quinn says to Christy, after his praise of Pegeen, "There's poetry talk for a girl you'd see itching and scratching, and she with a stale stink of poteen on her from selling in the shop." Such gasps are nothing, however, to those they utter when they hear Mary Doul tell Molly Byrne "when the skin shrinks on your chin, Molly Byrne, there won't be the like of you for a shrunk hag in the four quarters of Ireland."
Very different is the kind of laughter aroused by the sly malice, native to the rogue story from the days in which its characters masqueraded as animals, that is revealed in the remark of Mary Byrne to the priest, "It's destroyed you must be hearing the sins of the rural people in a fine spring"; and different again the childish delight in the extravagance at Christy's threat to send Shawn Keogh "coaching out through Limbo with my father's ghost"; and still different the breathless, delighted wonderment in the sense of moral values exhibited by Michael James, when, fearing that Christy's threatened murder of Shawn, if carried out, would give his secret trade away, he jumps ​up with a shriek, exclaiming, "Murder is it? Is it mad you's are? Would you go making murder in this place, and it piled with poteen for our drink to-night?" Different too, is the laughter at the Rabelaisian touches and at the farcical situations in which the plays abound.
If ever there were characters that lived a life apart from their author's, those characters are Synge's. It is in the verses and in the travel sketches that we get the man himself, the man back of the dramatist that gives to his characters a life independent of his own, a life that he knows partly in reality and partly in imagination, but that he himself has lived chiefly as an observer and imaginer. There is no humor in these verses and travel sketches, not even when he is describing a humorous scene such as that of the upsetting by pigs running wild of the constabulary busy about evictions on Inishmaan. We get the man himself, I say, in these verses and travel sketches, a man exulting in primitiveness, in wildness, in beauty of woman and child, in beauty of landscape; but exulting, more than in all else, in his own moods aroused by these things that he loved. Even here, however, he is at times almost impossibly impersonal, so that you feel in a certain description that there is no man between you and the thing described, but that, to adapt a phrase of Thoreau, it is the hills and the sea and the atmosphere writing. This impersonality persists even in "The Aran Islands," so large a part of which is very personal in that it is a statement of his daily life on Inishmaan. It is not, however, from the impersonal writing that I would quote,—though I would emphasize this impersonality because it ​is part of the very nature of the man,—but from the personal parts, because they reveal more of the positive part of him. After a day of storm on Inishmaan, the middle island of the three that make up the Aran group, Synge writes: "About the sunset the clouds broke and the storm turned to a hurricane. Bars of purple cloud stretched across the sound where immense waves were rolling from the west, wreathed with snowy fantasies of spray. Then there was the bay full of green delirium and the Twelve Pins touched with mauve and scarlet in the east." That is the Connacht coast, and this the next paragraph is Synge: "The suggestion from this world of inarticulate power was immense, and now at midnight, when the wind is abating, I am still trembling and flushed with exultation." And here is Synge again, in another temper, which came to him on the seas about Inishmaan: "The black curagh working slowly through this world of gray, and the soft hissing of the rain, gave me one of the moods in which we realize with immense distress the short moment we have left us to experience all the wonder and beauty of the world."
"The Aran Islands" is most memorable of his travel writings, because he spent more time on these rocks at the world's end and came closest here to the soul of Irish life. There are passages, however, in his description of the Kerry coast, and even in his newspaper sketches of the coast of Connemara, that tell not only of the places but of their visitor. "I got on a long road running through a bog," he writes in "In West Kerry," "with a smooth mountain on one side and the sea on the other, and ​Brandon in front of me, partly covered with clouds. As far as I could see there were little groups of people on their way to the chapel at Ballyferriter, the men in homespun and the women wearing blue cloaks, or, more often, black shawls twisted over their heads. This procession along the olive bogs, between the mountains and the sea, on this gray day of autumn, seemed to wring me with the pang of emotion one meets everywhere in Ireland, an emotion that is partly local and patriotic, and partly a share of the desolation that is mixed everywhere with the supreme beauty of the world."
The comment on Ireland, her ways and her place among the peoples, that many a dramatist would have permitted himself to express through some character chosen to play chorus to the action, Synge now and then permits himself in the travel sketches. In "From Galway to Gorumna," which he wrote for the "Manchester Guardian's" investigation of the congested districts, is one of such rare avowals, an avowal to treasure along with those of his all too short prefaces: "It is part of the misfortune of Ireland that nearly all the characteristics which give color and attractiveness to Irish life [he has been speaking of 'men dressed in homespuns of the gray natural wool, and the women in deep madder-dyed petticoats and bodices, with brown shawls over their heads'] are bound up with a social condition that is near to penury, while in countries like Brittany the best external features of the local life—the rich embroidered dresses, for instance, or the carved furniture—are connected with a decent and comfortable social condition."
​It is this penury, perhaps, and its gray background that by way of contrast emphasize so strongly the moments of splendor that Irish landscape knows. One such moment Synge saw as he looked southward across the bay from the Dingle peninsula toward Killarney: "The blueness of the sea and the hills from Carrantuohill to the Skelligs, the singular loneliness of the hillside I was on, with a few choughs and gulls in sight only, had a splendor that was almost a grief in the mind."
This splendor Synge found also in his own Wicklow, a lonelier country than Aran, if loneliness comes from absence of human life. And if there is not the loneliness of the sea in the inland glens that Synge knew so well, there is in them the equal loneliness of the mountains. It is this county of Wicklow that is the background of "In the Shadow of the Glen" and of "The Well of the Saints" and of "The Tinker's Wedding." And perhaps had not the Abbey Theatre grown to be a theatre for folk-drama and for poetic drama of court romance alone, Synge would have made Wicklow the background of dramas of a high life of yesterday. Certain it is that in these passages he is thinking of it:—
Every one is used in Ireland to the tragedy that is bound up with the lives of farmers and fishing-people; but in this garden one seemed to feel the tragedy of the landlord class also, and of the innumerable old families that are quickly dwindling away. These owners of the land are not much pitied at the present day, or much deserving of pity; and yet one cannot quite forget that they are the descendants of what was at one time, in the eighteenth century, a high-spirited and highly cultivated aristocracy. The broken greenhouses and ​mouse-eaten libraries, that were designed and collected by men who voted with Grattan, are perhaps as mournful in the end as the four mud walls that are so often left in Wicklow as the only remnants of a farmhouse. The desolation of this life is often of a peculiarly local kind, and if a playwright chose to go through the Irish country houses he would find material, it is likely, for many gloomy plays that would turn on the dying away of these old families, and on the lives of the one or two delicate girls that are left so often to represent a dozen hearty men who were alive a generation or two ago.
I have dwelt on these travel sketches of Synge not alone for their own sake, but because they are, as I have said, the background of the plays, and because they contain what are in a sense the diary notes out of which the plays grew. In a sense, too, they are a commentary on the plays, and as I have also said a revelation of the playwright. All must be read for a thorough understanding of the plays, though these alone should be a delight to all, even if they know no more of Ireland than that share of human nature which is axiomatically the same in all men of all races. If you do not read the travel sketches, you may fail to see how deeply sympathetic Synge is with the Irish peasant, and in no patronizing way. In "The Aran Islands" he takes the greatest care to disguise the identity of those he knew intimately lest they be pained by anything he wrote of them. No one could write with higher courtesy of those whose guest he had been than Synge. You, reading, are made one of their home circle, but no family secrets are betrayed. You are made aware of their weaknesses, but there is never any disloyalty; and always in his records of them their virtues of courage and ​endurance, of adaptiveness and simplicity, of family stanchness and communal helpfulness, outweigh the drunkenness and roguery that one expects from the primitive. Synge is, indeed, not only loyal, but full of respect and liking for the Aran Islanders, and of admiration for their rich humanity.
It was out of his island life and out of his life of the roads, and out of his mood, once he knew his doom, that he made the twenty-two poems of his that are retained of a great deal that he had written, most of it in his younger years. That Synge faced his fate with bravery the triumphant tone of "Deirdre of the Sorrows" that I have instanced is proof, but there could not but be moments when the thought of death was too instant to be denied. It was in such mood he wrote, either toward the end, or in earlier moments of anticipation of it, "Queens," "On an Anniversary," "To the Oaks of Glencree," "A Question," and "I've Thirty Months." There is in these verses a certain morbidity, an almost ghoulishness, that is very seldom present elsewhere in his writing. And yet I may be wrong in attributing it to his certainty of approaching death, for there is a more intense preoccupation with death in the plays of M. Maeterlinck's youth and a greater ghoulishness in the verse of Mr. Hardy's youth. It is of Mr. Hardy's verses that one thinks oftenest as one reads these verses of Synge, and not only because of certain likenesses in subject-matter, but because of the imperfect mastery of both over the verse forms and a certain epigrammatic gnomic quality common to both. The verses of Synge are not relatively so important in ​comparison with the rest of his writing as Mr. Hardy's verses are in comparison with the rest of his writing, for they are not needed to explain a philosophy of life as are Mr. Hardy's verses. Fortunately, Synge attempted no philosophy, had the rare wisdom to rest content with observation.
In regard to poetry, as to all his art, Synge had, however, definite views, though his verse is almost too little in bulk to exemplify them. It was the poetry of exaltation, as it was the drama of exaltation, as it was the exaltation in living, of change and speed and danger and love, that meant most to him. He held further that "in these days poetry is usually a flower of evil or good; but it is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms." The verse of Synge, as all his art, was so rooted, surely. "Even if we grant," he continues, "that exalted poetry can be kept successful by itself, the strong things of life are needed in poetry also, to show that what is exalted or tender is not made by feeble blood. It may almost be said that before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal."
It is sayings of this sort that bring to mind his kinship with Whitman, to whom he is also bound by the freemasonry of the roads. Both men felt the call of the road; both loved the changing landscape and the little adventures of the caravansaries; both loved most of all the men and women they met. Once only Synge seems to have forgotten humanity when he took to the road, that time which he has recorded in "Prelude":—
"Still south I went and west and south again, Through Wicklow from the morning till the night, And far from cities, and the sights of men, Lived with the sunshine, and the moon's delight.
"I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds, The gray and wintry sides of many glens, And did but half remember human words, In converse with the mountains, moors, and fens."
It is to this, to the wandering wayside life of Synge that one's thought of him always returns, and rightly, for it was the road that most inspired him. It is the memory of the road that most kindles him; and so it is always to the man of the road that he gives his most lyric passages; or, perhaps, I should say it is the speech that the thought of the man of the roads or of the woman of wild heart raises in his mind that is his most beautiful speech, with the very wildness of the wandering heart in it, and with the long swing that comes, with second wind, when you have been a day abroad on the road.
What if the words have now the clauber of the roads upon them, and even the muck, and now the reek of the shebeen or of the tinker's fire in a roadside ditch; they have, too, the bog smell, and the smell of the whin, the smell of ploughed land and of the sea, and they fall into cadences that are cadences of the wind and of the tides, of full rivers and clucking streams that sudden rains have filled, as well as the cadences of the voices of boy and girl and they love-making, and of the voices of the wild folk of the roads coaxing or loudly quarreling, and the voices of women and men, young and old, lamenting the hard way of life and of the sorrow that waits for all in the end. ​Why quarrel with Synge, in short, because his style is of the very essence of life, and of nature, which is the background of life?
To attain a style that is his very self, that is of the very color of his life, and of the very color of the extravagant phases of the life of his country, to attain a style that embodies all this, and that for the first time sets English dramatic prose to a rhythm as noble as the rhythm of blank verse, is surely in itself title to greatness. But Synge has other titles, too. In the few characters that he has created, forty in all, characters all natively Irish, he has attained universality, because these Irish men and women, Nora and Martin Doul, Sarah Casey and Christy Mahon, Maurya and Deirdre, are so human that they are prototypes of men and women the world over. And of dialogue, where style and characterization blend, he has sure control. Each character of the six great characters that I have just mentioned speaks and acts just as such a character would, and not only these, but every other character that occupies the stage for more than a moment. Michael Dara and Timmy the Smith, the Priest or Philly Cullen, Bartley and Owen, each one has an individuality clearly defined.
There is less that is great in the structure of his plays than in any other component of them, but that structure always clearly reveals the action which arises from the emotion and theme underlying each,—the menacing sea in "Riders to the Sea"; the loneliness of the mountain glens that drives men fey in "The Shadow of the Glen"; the blindness, the blessed self-delusion of mankind, in ​"The Well of the Saints"; the wildness of the life of the roads that law may not tame, in "The Tinker's Wedding"; the boy's finding of himself through his having to live up to a community's mistaken ideal of him, in "The Playboy of the Western World"; and the benison of death that prevents a great love from dying, in "Deirdre of the Sorrows."
Always the joy of making something beautiful out of his experience and dream of life is what inspires Synge to write, and though the intention to read life truly is a passion with him, there is never a suggestion of didacticism, or even of moralizing, though "The Well of the Saints" is unquestionably, whether he wills it so or not, a symbol of man's discontent with things as they are, his preference in some things of the lie to the truth. I think that Synge did not will to make "The Well of the Saints" a symbol, and that the play was to him but a reading of life, as life is, in his characteristic, exalted, ironic, extravagant way of writing, and that if he was aware of the symbolism, he was not keenly aware of it or much interested in it. He gives us life untroubled by the passing agitation of the day, and for that we should be thankful, and thankful, too, that he has given in his plays "the nourishment, not very easy to define, on which our imaginations live." His irony, as desolating to some as the irony of Swift, gives pause to all, as insight always will, but to me his extravagance is a joy unalloyed, and his exaltation, so rare a thing in modern literature, should bring to all men delight and refreshment of spirit. No reading, or seeing and hearing, of his plays leaves me ​without a feeling of richness or without wonder and large content. He gives back my youth to me, both in the theatre and in my library, and, in the glow that is mine in such recapture, I call him the greatest dramatist in English that our stage has known in a century. That I know him to be on sober second thought, second thought that has been concerned with his art, as I followed it developing during the slow years from "Riders to the Sea" to "Deirdre of the Sorrows."