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SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

WITH A NOTE CONCERNING A WALK THROUGH CONNEMARA WITH HIM BY JACK BUTLER
YEATS







CHURCHTOWN DUNDRUM MCMXI



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.


       *       *       *       *       *




J.M. SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME

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 another 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?




IV


Young Ireland had taught a study of our history with the glory of
Ireland for event, and this for lack, when less than Taylor studied, of
comparison with that of other countries wrecked the historical
instinct. An old man with an academic appointment, who was a leader in
the attack upon Synge, sees in the 11th century romance of Deirdre a
re-telling of the first five act tragedy outside the classic languages,
and this tragedy from his description of it was certainly written on
the Elizabethan model; while an allusion to a copper boat, a marvel of
magic like Cinderella's slipper, persuades him that the ancient Irish
had forestalled the modern dockyards in the making of metal ships. The
man who doubted, let us say, our fabulous ancient kings running up to
Adam, or found but mythology in some old tale, was as hated as if he
had doubted the authority of Scripture. Above all no man was so
ignorant, that he had not by rote familiar arguments and statistics to
drive away amid familiar applause, all those had they but found strange
truth in the world or in their mind, whose knowledge has passed out of
memory and become an instinct of hand or eye. There was no literature,
for literature is a child of experience always, of knowledge never; and
the nation itself, instead of being a dumb struggling thought seeking a
mouth to utter it or hand to show it, a teeming delight that would
re-create the world, had become, at best, a subject of knowledge.




V


Taylor always spoke with confidence though he was no determined man,
being easily flattered or jostled from his way; and this, putting as it
were his fiery heart into his mouth made him formidable. And I have
noticed that all those who speak the thoughts of many, speak
confidently, while those who speak their own thoughts are hesitating
and timid, as though they spoke out of a mind and body grown sensitive
to the edge of bewilderment among many impressions. They speak to us
that we may give them certainty, by seeing what they have seen; and so
it is, that enlargement of experience does not come from those
oratorical thinkers, or from those decisive rhythms that move large
numbers of men, but from writers that seem by contrast as feminine as
the soul when it explores in Blake's picture the recesses of the grave,
carrying its faint lamp trembling and astonished; or as the Muses who
are never pictured as one-breasted amazons, but as women needing
protection. Indeed, all art which appeals to individual man and awaits
the confirmation of his senses and his reveries, seems when arrayed
against the moral zeal, the confident logic, the ordered proof of
journalism, a trifling, impertinent, vexatious thing, a tumbler who has
unrolled his carpet in the way of a marching army.




VI


I attack things that are as dear to many as some holy image carried
hither and thither by some broken clan, and can but say that I have
felt in my body the affections I disturb, and believed that if I could
raise them into contemplation I would make possible a literature, that
finding its subject-matter all ready in men's minds would be, not as
ours is, an interest for scholars, but the possession of a people. I
have founded societies with this aim, and was indeed founding one in
Paris when I first met with J.M. Synge, and I have known what it is to
be changed by that I would have changed, till I became argumentative
and unmannerly, hating men even in daily life for their opinions. And
though I was never convinced that the anatomies of last year's leaves
are a living forest, or thought a continual apologetic could do other
than make the soul a vapour and the body a stone; or believed that
literature can be made by anything but by what is still blind and dumb
within ourselves, I have had to learn how hard in one who lives where
forms of expression and habits of thought have been born, not for the
pleasure of begetting but for the public good, is that purification
from insincerity, vanity, malignity, arrogance, which is the discovery
of style. But it became possible to live when I had learnt all I had
not learnt in shaping words, in defending Synge against his enemies,
and knew that rich energies, fine, turbulent or gracious thoughts,
whether in life or letters, are but love-children.




VII


Synge seemed by nature unfitted to think a political thought, and with
the exception of one sentence, spoken when I first met him in Paris,
that implied some sort of nationalist conviction, I cannot remember
that he spoke of politics or showed any interest in men in the mass, or
in any subject that is studied through abstractions and statistics.
Often for months together he and I and Lady Gregory would see no one
outside the Abbey Theatre, and that life, lived as it were in a ship at
sea, suited him, for unlike those whose habit of mind fits them to
judge of men in the mass, he was wise in judging individual men, and as
wise in dealing with them as the faint energies of ill-health would
permit; but of their political thoughts he long understood nothing. One
night when we were still producing plays in a little hall, certain
members of the Company told him that a play on the Rebellion of '98
would be a great success. After a fortnight he brought them a scenario
which read like a chapter out of Rabelais. Two women, a Protestant and
a Catholic, take refuge in a cave, and there quarrel about religion,
abusing the Pope or Queen Elizabeth and Henry VIII, but in low voices,
for the one fears to be ravished by the soldiers, the other by the
rebels. At last one woman goes out because she would sooner any fate
than such wicked company. Yet, I doubt if he would have written at all
if he did not write of Ireland, and for it, and I know that he thought
creative art could only come from such preoccupation. Once, when in
later years, anxious about the educational effect of our movement, I
proposed adding to the Abbey Company a second Company to play
international drama, Synge, who had not hitherto opposed me, thought
the matter so important that he did so in a formal letter.

I had spoken of a German municipal theatre as my model, and he said
that the municipal theatres all over Europe gave fine performances of
old classics but did not create (he disliked modern drama for its
sterility of speech, and perhaps ignored it) and that we would create
nothing if we did not give all our thoughts to Ireland. Yet in Ireland
he loved only what was wild in its people, and in 'the grey and wintry
sides of many glens.' All the rest, all that one reasoned over, fought
for, read of in leading articles, all that came from education, all
that came down from Young Ireland--though for this he had not lacked a
little sympathy--first wakened in him perhaps that irony which runs
through all he wrote, but once awakened, he made it turn its face upon
the whole of life. The women quarrelling in the cave would not have
amused him, if something in his nature had not looked out on most
disputes, even those wherein he himself took sides, with a mischievous
wisdom. He told me once that when he lived in some peasant's house, he
tried to make those about him forget that he was there, and it is
certain that he was silent in any crowded room. It is possible that low
vitality helped him to be observant and contemplative, and made him
dislike, even in solitude, those thoughts which unite us to others,
much as we all dislike, when fatigue or illness has sharpened the
nerves, hoardings covered with advertisements, the fronts of big
theatres, big London hotels, and all architecture which has been made
to impress the crowd. What blindness did for Homer, lameness for
Hephaestus, asceticism for any saint you will, bad health did for him
by making him ask no more of life than that it should keep him living,
and above all perhaps by concentrating his imagination upon one
thought, health itself. I think that all noble things are the result of
war