天涯在线书库《www.tianyabook.com》 《Synge And The Ireland Of His Time》 PREFACE At times during Synges last illness, Lady Gregory and I would speak of his work and always find some pleasure ihought 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 muxiety, for a le藏书网tter written before his last illness, and printed in the sele 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 e to him the day; and my diary of the days following his death shows how great was our ay. Presently however, all seemed to have e right, for the Executors sehe followier 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 g with me uhe 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 Dubli99lib?n to gh 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 ??Good luck. J.M. Synge In the summer of 1909, the Executors sent me a large bundle of papers, cuttings from neers and magazines, manuscript and typewritten prose and verse, put together and annotated by Syng9９ｌib?e 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 y pages which have been published without my sent, made sulting Lady Gregory from time to time the Sele of his work published by Messrs. Maunsel. It is because of these y pages, that her Lady Gregorys name nor mine appears in any of the books, and that the Introdu which I now publish, was withdrawn by me afte藏书网r it had been advertised by the publishers.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 Seleight be taken from his Essays on the gested Districts. I do not know if this was written before his letter to me, which made ion of them, or tained his final dires. The matter is unimportant, for the publishers decided to ignore my offer to select as well as my inal decision to reject, and for this act of theirs they have .９9lib?given me no reasons except reasons of venience, whieither Lady Gregory nor I could accept. W.B. Yeats. I 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 bee from Dublin after the sed Act of The Playboy of the Western World, then being performed for the first time. After one in the m, my host brought to my bedroom this sed 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 m. On the Monday night no word of the play had been heard. About forty young men had sat on the fros of t..he pit, and stamped and shouted and blown trumpets from the rise to the fall of the curtain. Ouesday night also the forty young mehere. They wished to silence what they sidered a slander upon Irelands womanhood. Irish women would never sleep uhe same roof with a young man without a chaperon, nor admire a murderer, nor use a word like shift; nor could anyhe try 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 Synges capricious imagination the enemy of all it would have young men believe, had for years prepared for this hour, by that which is at ohe 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, Synges first play, with an assertion made in ignora repeated in dishoy, 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 dece. Some spontaneous dislike had been but natural, fenius like his but slowly, amid what it has of harsh and strange, set forth the nobility of its beauty, and the depth of its passion; but t?99ｌｉｂ.he 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 watg, knowihat 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 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 give to as the lasting influehat style alone give to words, had uood that a try which has no national institutions must show its young men images for the affes, although they be but diagrams of what it should be or may be. He and his sagihe 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 e at the worlds other ear, might go her way unabashed. But ideas and images which have to be u>ood and loved by large numbers of people, must appeal to no rich personal experieno patience of study, no delicacy of sense; and if at rare moments some Memory of the Dead take its strength from o all other moments manner and matter will be rhetorical, ventional, seal; and language, because it is carried beyond life perpetually, will be as wasted as the thought, with unmeaniries 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 mens minds and Nature, who never does the same thing twiakes one man like aill minds, whose patriotism is perhaps great enough to carry them to the scaffold, cry down natural impulse with the morbid persisteninds uled by some fixed idea. They are preoccupied with the nations future, with heroes, poets, soldiers, painters, armies, fleets, but only as these things are uood by a child in a national school, while a secret feeling that what is so unreal needs tinual defence makes them bitter aless. They are like some state which has only paper money, and seeks by punishments to make it buy whatever gold buy. They no longer love, for only life is loved, and at last, a geion is like an hysterical woman who will make unmeasured accusations and believe impossible things, because of some logical dedu 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 tinual apology, whatever the cause, makes the mind barren because it kills intellectual innoce; that delight in what is unforeseen, and in the mere spectacle of the world, the mere drifting hither and thither that must e before all true thought aion. A zealous Irishman, especially if he lives much out of Ireland, spends his time in a never?ending argument about Oliver well, the Dahe penal laws, the rebellion of 1798, the famihe Irish peasant, and ends by substituting a traditional casuistry for a try; and if he be a Catholic, yet another casu９9lｉｂ?istry that has professors, sasters, letter?writing priests, and the authors of manuals to make the meshes fine, es between him and English literature, substituting arguments aations 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 Miltons morality, or Shelleys vehement vision; but he less do we lose life by losing that recklessness Castigliohought 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 troversy over these plays. It often seemed to me that when he spoke Ireland herself had spoken, o that sense of surprise that es when a man has said what is unforeseen because it is far from the on thought, a obvious because when it has been spoken, the gate of the mind seems suddenly to roll bad reveal fotten sights a loose lost passions. I have never heard him speak except in some Irish literary or political society, but there at any rate, as in versation, I found a man whose life was a ceaseless reverie over the religious and political history of Ireland. He saw himself pleading for his try before an invisible jury, perhaps of the great dead, against traitors at home and enemies abroad, and a sort of frenzy in his void the moral elevation of his thoughts gave him for the moment style and musie asked oneself again and again, Why is not this man an artist, a man of genius, a creator of some kind? The other day uhe influenemory, I read through his one book, a life of Owen Roe ONeill, and found there eachable from its text because of wisdom or beauty. Everything was argued from a premise; and wisdom, and style, whether in life or letters e 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 goh the living voice, with the nobility of will that made one uand what he saw a in what was now but argument and logic. I found myself in the presence of a mind like some noisy and powerful mae, 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 defihe quality, or carry the substance of some pleasure. How one, if ones mind be full of abstras 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 minds 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 resurre? IV Young Ireland had taught a study of our history with the glory of Ireland for event, and this for lack, whehan Taylor studied, of parison with that of other tries wrecked the historical instinct. An old man with an academic app９9ｌｉｂ?oi, who was a leader iack upon Synge, sees ih tury romance of Deirdre a re?telling of the first five act tragedy outside the classiguages, and this tragedy from his description of it was certainly writ９9lib?en on the Elizabethan model; while an allusion to a copper boat, a marvel of magic like derellas slipper, persuades him that the a Irish had forestalled the modern dockyards in the making of metal ships. The man who doubt?ed, let us say, our fabulous a 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 straruth in the world or in their mind, whose knowledge has passed out of memory and bee 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 bee, at best, a subject of knowledge. V Taylor always spoke with fidehough he was ermined 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 fidently, while those who speak their own thoughts are hesitating and timid, as though they spoke out of a mind and body growive >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 e from those oratorical thinkers, or from those decisive rhythms that move large numbers of men, but from writers that seem by trast as feminine as the soul when it explores in Blakes picture the recesses of the grave, carrying 藏书网its faint lamp trembling and astonished; or as the Muses who are never pictured as one?breasted amazons, but as women needing prote. Indeed, all art which appeals to individual man and awaits the firmation of his senses and his reveries, seems when arrayed against the moral zeal, the fident logic, the ordered proof of journalism, a trifling, imperti, vexatious thing, a tumbler who has unrolled his carpet in the way of a marg army. VI I attack things that are as dear to many as some holy image carried hither and thither by some broken , and but say that I have felt in my body the affes I disturb, and believed that if I could raise them into plation I would make possible a literature, that finding its subject?matter all ready in mens minds would be, not as ours is, an i for scholars, but the possession of a people. I have founded societies with this aim, and was indeed founding one in Paris ?9９ｌiｂ?when I first met with J.M. Synge, and I have known what it is to be ged by that I would have ged, till I became argumentative and unmannerly, hating men even in daily life for their opinions. And though I was never vihat t.he anatomies of last years leaves are a living forest, or thought a tinual apologetic could do other than make the soul a vapour and the body a stone; or believed that literature be made by anything but by what is still blind and dumb within ours.９９ｌｉｂ.elves, 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 insiy, 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 khat riergies, fiurbulent racious 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 oence, spoken when I first met him in Paris, that implied some sort of nationalist vi, I ot remember that he spoke of politics or showed any i in men in the mass, or in any subject that is studied through abstras and statistics. Often for months together he and I and Lady Gregory would see no oside the Abbey Theatre, and that life, lived as it were in a ship at sea, suited him, for uhose 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 uood nothing. One night when we were still produg plays in a little hall, certain members of the pany told him that a play on the Rebellion of 98 would be a great success. After a fht he brought them a sario which read like a chapter out of Rabelais. Two women, a Protestant and a Catholic, take refuge in a cave, and there quarrel abion, abusing the Pope or Queen Eliz.９9liｂ?abeth 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 pany. 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 e from such preoccupation. Once, when in later years, anxious about the educational effect of our movement, I proposed adding to the Abbey pany a sed pany to play iional 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 ig) 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..he 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 ohat when he lived in some peasants house, he tried to make those about him fet 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 plative, and made him dislike, even in solitude, those thoughts whiite us to others, much as we all dislike, when fatigue or illness has sharpehe nerves, hs 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 trating his imagination upohought, health itself. I think that all hings are the result of warfare; great nations and classes, of warfare in the visible world, great poetry and philosophy, of invisible warfare, the division of a mind within itself, a victory, the sacrifice of a man to himself. I am certain that my friends , so full of passion and heroic beauty, is the victory of a man who in poverty and siess created from the delight of expression, and in the plation that is born of the minute and delicate arra of images, happiness, ah of mind. Some early poems have a morbid melancholy, and he himself spoke of early work he had destroyed as morbid, for as yet the craftmanship was not fine enough t the artists joy which is of one substah that of sanctity. In one poem he waits at some street er for a friend, a erhaps, and while he waits and gradually uands that nobody is ing, sees two funerals and shivers at the future; and in another written on his 25th birthday, he wonders if the 25 years to e shall be as evil as those gone by. Later on, he see himself as but a part of the spectacle of the world and mix into all he sees that flavour of extravagance, or of humour, or of philosophy, that makes op://..uand that he plates even his owh as if it were anothers, and finds in his owiny but as it were a proje through a burning glass of that general to men. There is in the creative joy an acceptance of what life brings, because we have uood the beauty of what it brings, or a hatred of death for what it takes away, which arouses within us, through some sympathy perhaps with all other men, an energy so noble, so powerful, that we laugh aloud and mock, ierror or the sweetness of our exaltation, at death and oblivion. In no modern writer that has written of Irish life before him, except it may be Miss Edgeworth in Castle Rat, was there anything to ge a mans thought about the world or stir his moral nature, for they but play with pictures, persons, as, that whether well or ill observed are but an amusement for the mind where it escapes from meditation, a childs show that makes the fables of his art as signifit by trast as some procession painted on aian wall; for in these fables, an intelligence, on which the tragedy of the world had been thrust in so few years, that Life had no time to brew her sleepy drug, has spoken of the moods that are the expression of its wisdom. All minds that have a wisdom e ic reality seem morbid to those that are aced to writers who have not faced reality at all; just as the saints, with that Obscure Night of the Soul, which fell so certainly that they numbered it among spiritual states, one among other asding steps, seem morbid to the rationalist and the old?fashioned Protestant troversialist. The thought of journalists, like that of the Irish s, is her healthy nor uhy, for it has not risen to that state where either is possible, nor should we call it happy; for who would have sought happiness, if happiness were not the supreme attai of man, in heroic toils, in the cell of the ascetiagi above the cheerful neers, above the clouds? VIII Not that Synge brought out of the struggle with himself any definite philosophy, for philosophy in the eaning of the word is created out of an ay for sympathy or obedience, and he was that rare, that distinguished, that most hing, which of all things still of the world is o being suffit to itself, the pure artist. Sir Philip Sidney plains of those who could hear sweet tunes (by which he uands could look upon his lady) and not be stirred to ravishing delight. Or if they do delight therei are so closed with wit, As with seious lips to set a title vain on it; Oh let them hear these sacred tunes, and learn in Wonders schools To be, in things past bonds of wit, fools if they be not fools! Ireland for three geions has been like those churlish logis. Everything is argued over, everything has to take its trial before the dull sense and the hasty judgment, and the character of the nation has so ged that it hardly keeps but among ..try people, or where some family tradition is still stubborn, those lis that made Borrow cry out as he came from among the Irish monks, his friends aertainers for all his Spanish Bible scattering, Oh, Ireland, mother of the bravest soldiers and of the most beautiful women! It was as I believe, to seek that old Ireland which took its mould from the duellists and scholars of the 18th tury and from geions older still, that Syurned again and again to Aran, to Kerry, and to the wild Blaskets. IX When I got up this m he writes, after he had been a long time in Innismaan, I found that the people had goo Mass and latched the kit door from the outside, so that I could not open it to give myself light. I sat for nearly an hour beside the fire with a curious feeling that I should be quite alone in this little cottage. I am so used to sitting here with the people that ..t>I have never felt the room before as a place where any man might live and work by himself. After a while as I waited, with just light enough from the ey to let me see the rafters and the greyness of the walls, I became indescribably mournful, for I felt that this little er on the face of the world, and the people who live in it, have a pead dignity fr藏书网om which we are shut for ever. This life, which he describes elsewhere as the most primitive left in Europe, satisfied some y of his nature. Before I met him in Paris he had wandered over much of Europe, listening to stories in the Black Forest, making friends with servants and with poor people, and this from ahetiterest, for he had gathered no statistics, had no m..oo give, and cared nothing for the wrongs of the poor, being tent to pay for the pleasure of eye and ear with a tune upon the fiddle. He did not love them the better because they were poor and miserable, and it was only when he found Innismaan and the Blaskets, where there is her riches nor poverty, her what he calls the nullity of the rior the squalor of the poor that his writing lost its old morbid brooding, that he found his genius and his peace. Here were men and women who uhe weight of their y lived, as the artist lives, in the presence of death and childhood, and the great affes and the iastient when life outleaps its limits, and who, as it is always with those who have refused or escaped the trivial and the temporary,9９ｌiｂ? had dignity and good manners where manners mattered. Here above all was silence from all reat orator took delight in, from formidable men, from moral indignation, from the sciolist who is never sad, from all in modern life that would destroy the arts; and here, to take a thought from another playwright of our school, he could love Time as only women and great artists do and need never sell it. X As I read The Aran Islands right through for the first time since he showed it me in manuscript, I e to uand how muowledge of the real life of Irelao the creation of a world which is yet as fantastic as the Spain of Cervantes. Here is the story of The Playboy, of The Shadow of the Glen; here is the ghost on horsebad the finding of the young mans body of Riders to the Sea, numberless ways of speed vehement pictures that had seemed to owe nothing to observation, and all to some overflowing of himself, or to some mere y of dramatistru. I had thought the violent quarrels of The Well of the Saints came from his love of bitter ents, but here is a couple that quarrel all day long amid neighbours who gather as for a play. I had defehe burning of Christy Mahons leg on the ground that an artist need but make his characters self?sistent, ahat too was observation, for although these people are kindly towards each other and their children, they have no sympathy for the suffering of animals, and little sympathy for paihe person who feels it is not in danger. I had thought it was in the wantonness of fancy Martin Dhoul accused the smith of plug his living ducks, but a few lines further on, in this book where moral indignation is unknown, I read, Sometimes when I go into a cottage, I find all the women of the place down on their knees plug the feathers from live ducks and geese. He loves all that has edge, all thbbr>..at is salt in the mouth, all that is rough to the hand, all that heightens the emotions by test, all that stings into life the sense edy; and in this book, uhe plays where nearo his audience moves him to mischief, he shows it without thought of other taste than his. It is so stant, it is all set out so simply, so naturally, that it suggests a correspondeween a lasting mood of the soul and this life that shares the harshness of rocks and wind. The food of the spiritual?minded is sweet, an Indian scripture says, but passionate minds love bitter food. Yet he is no indifferent observer, but is certainly kind and sympathetic to all about him. When an old and ailing man, dreading the ing winter, cries at his? leaving, not thinking to see him again; aices that the old mans mitten has a hole in it where the palm is aced to the stick, one knows that it is with eyes full of ied affe as befits a simple man and not in the curiosity of study. When he had left the Blaskets for the last time, he travelled with a lame pensioner who had drifted there, why heaven knows, and one m having missed him from the inhey were staying, he believed he had gone back to the island and searched everywhere and questioned everybody, till he uood of a sudden that he was jealous as though the island were a woman. The book seems dull if you read much at a time, as the later Kerry essays do not, but nothing that he has written recalls so pletely to my sehe man as he was in daily life; and as I read, there are moments when every line of his face, every iion of his voice, grows so clear in memory that I ot realize that he is dead. He was no nearer when we walked and talked than now while I read these unarranged, unspeculating pages, wherein the only life he loved with his whole heart reflects itself as iill water of a pool. Thought es to him slowly, and only after long seemingly uative watg, and when it es, (and he had the same character in matters of business) it is spoken without hesitation and never ged. His versation was not an experimental thing, an instrument of research, and this made him silent; while his essays recall events, on whi..e feels that he pronouno judgment even in the depth of his own mind, because the labour of Life itself had not yet brought the philosophieralization, which was almost as much his object as the emotional generalization of beauty. A mind that generalizes rapidly, tinually prevents the experiehat would have made it feel and see deeply, just as a man whose character is too plete in youth seldom grows into any energy of moral beauty. Synge had indeed no obvious ideals, as these are uood by young men, and even as I think disliked them, for he onplaio me that our moderry was but the poetry of the lyrical boy, and this lack makes his art have a strange wildness and ess, as of a man born in some far?off spacious land and time. XI There are artists like Byron, like Goethe, like Shelley, who have impressive personalities, active wills and all their faculties at the service of the will; but he beloo those who like Wordsworth, like Ce, like Goldsmith, like Keats, have little personality, so far as the casual eye see, little personal will, but fiery and brooding imagination. I agine him anxious to impress, or vin any pany, or saying more than was suffit to keep the talk cirg. Such men have the advahat all they write is a part of knowledge, but they are powerless before events and have often but one visible strength, the strength to reject from life and thought all th9９lｉｂ?at would mar their work, or deafen them in the doing of it; and only this so long as it is a passive act. If Synge had married young or taken some profession, I doubt if he would have written books or beely ied in a movement like ours; but he refused various opportunities of making money in what must have been an almost unscious preparation. He had no life outside his imagination, little i in anything that was not its chosen subject. He hardly seemed aware of the existence of other writers. I never knew if he cared for work of mine, and do not remember that I had from him even a ventional pliment, a he had the most perfect modesty and simplicity in daily intercobbr>９9ｌiｂ?urse, self?assertion was impossible to him. Oher hand, he was useless amidst suddes. He was much shaken by the Playboy riot; on the first night fused aed, knowing not what to do, and ill before many days, but it made no differen his work. He her exaggerated out of defianor softened out of timidity. He wrote on as if nothi..ng had happened, altering The Tinkers Wedding to a more unpopular form, but writing a beautiful serene Deirdre, with, for the first time since his Riders to the Sea, no touch of sarcasm or defiance. Misfortune shook his physiature while it left his intelled his moral nature untroubled. The external self, the mask, the persona was a shadow, character was all. XII He was a drifting silent man full of hidden passion, and loved wild islands, because there, set out in the light of day, he saw what lay hidden in himself. There is passage after passage in which he dwells upon some moment of excitement. He describes the shipping of pigs at Kilronan on the North Island for the English market: wheeamer was getting near, the whole drove was moved down upon the slip and the curraghs were carried out close to the sea. Then each beast was caught in its turn and thrown on its side, while its legs were hitched together in a single knot, with a tag of rope remaining, by which it could be carried. Probably the pain inflicted was not great, yet the animals shut their eyes and shrieked with almost human intonations, till the suggestion of the noise became so intehat the men and women who were merely looking on grew wild with excitement, and the pigs waiting their turn foamed at the mouth and tore each other with their teeth. After a while there ause. The whole slip was covered with amass of sobbing animals, with here and there a terrified woman croug among the bodies and patting some special favourite, to keep it quiet while the curraghs were being lauhen the screaming began again while the pigs were carried out and laid in their places, with a waistcoat tied round their feet to keep them from damaging the vas. They seemed to know where they were going, and looked up at me over the gunnel with an ignoble desperation that made me shudder to think that I had eaten this whimpering flesh. When the last curragh went out, I was left on the slip with a band of women and children, and one old boar who sat looking out over the sea. The women were over?excited, and when I tried to talk to them they crowded round me and began jeering and shrieking at me because I am not married. A dozen screamed at a time, and so rapidly that I could not uand all they were saying, yet I was able to make out that they were taking advantage of the absence of their husbands to give me the full volume of their pt. Some little boys who were listening threw themselves down, writhing with laughter among the sea?weed, and the young girls grew red and embarrassed and stared down in the surf. The book is full of such ses. Now it is a crowd going by train to the Parnell celebration, now it is a woman cursing her son who made himself a spy for the poliow it is an old woman keening at a funeral. Kio his delight in the harsh grey stones, in the hardship of the life there, in the wind and in the mist, there is always delight in every moment of excitement, whether it is but the.t> hysterical excitement of the womehe pigs, or some primary passion. Ondeed, the hidden passion instead of finding expression by its choice among the passions of others, shows itself in the most direct way of all, that of dream. Last night, he writes, at Innismaan, after walking in a dream among buildings with strangely intense light on them, I heard a faint rhythm of music beginning far away on some stringed instrument. It came closer to me, gradually increasing in quiess and volume with an irresistibly definite progression. When it was quite he sound began to move in my nerves and blood, te me to dah them. I khat if I yielded I would be carried away into some moment of terrible agony, so I struggled to remain quiet, holding my kogether with my hands. The musicreased tinually, sounding like the strings of harps tuo a fotten scale, and having a resonance as searg as the strings of the cello. Then the luriement became more powerful than my will, and my limbs moved in spite of me. In a moment I was swept away in a whirlwind of notes. My breath and my thoughts and every impulse of my body became a form of the d..aill I could not distinguish between the instrument or the rhythm and my own person or sciousness. For a while it seemed aement that was filled with joy; then it grew into aasy where all existence was lost in the vortex of movement. I could not think that there had been a life beyond the whirling of the dance. Then with a shock, the ecstasy turo agony and rage. I struggled to free myself but seemed only to increase the passion of the steps I moved to. When I shrieked I could only echo the notes of the rhythm. At last, with a movement of untrollable frenzy I broke back to sciousness and awoke. I dragged myself trembling to the window of the cottage and looked out. The moon was glittering across the bay and there was no sound anywhere on the island. XIII In all drama which would give direct expression to reverie, to the speech of the soul with itself, there is some device that checks the rapidity of dialogue. When Oedipus speaks out of the most vehement passions, he is scious of the presence of the chorus, men before whom he must keep up appearances children latest born of Cadmus line who do not share his passion. Nobody is hurried or breathless. We listen to reports and discuss them, taking part as it were in a cil of state. Nothing happens before our eyes. The dignity of Greek drama, and in a lesser degree of that of eille and Rae depends, as trasted with the troubled life of Shakespearean drama, on an almost even speed of dialogue, and on a so tinuous exclusion of the animation of on life, that thought remains lofty and language rich. Shakespeare, upon whose stage everything may happen, even the blinding of Gloster, and who has no formal check except what is implied in the slow, elaborate structure of blank verse, obtains time for reverie by an often encumbering Euphuism, and by such a loosening of his plot as will give his characters the leisure to look at life from without. Maeterlinck, to he first modern of the old way who es to mind??reaches the same end, by choosing instead of human beings persons who are as faint as a breath upon a looking?glass, symbols who speak a language slow and heavy with dreams because their own life is but a dream. Modern drama, oher hand, which accepts the tightness of the classic plot, while expressing life directly, has been driven to make i its expression of the mind, which it leaves to be inferred from some on?place sentence esture as we i in ordinary life; and this is, I believe, the cause of the perpetual disappoi of the hope imagihis hundred years that France or Spain ermany or Sdinavia will at last produce the master we await. The divisions is are almost all in the first instaeical, and the great schools of drama have been divided from one another by the form or the metal of their mirror, by the check chosen for the rapidity of dialogue. Synge found the check that suited his temperament in an elaboration of the dialects of Kerry and Aran. The ce is long aative, as befits the thought of men who are much alone, and who when they meet in one anothers houses??as their way is at the days end??listen patiently, each man speaking in turn and for some little time, and taking pleasure in the vaguer meaning of the words and in their sound. Their thought, when not merely practical, is as full of traditional ..dom aravagant pictures as that of some Aeschylean chorus, and no matter what the topic is, it is as though the present were held at arms length. It is the reverse of rhetoric, for the speaker serves his own delight, though doubtless he would tell you that like Rafterys whiskey? drinking it was but for the panys sake. A medial manner of speech too, for it could not even express, so little abstract it is and so rammed with life, those weneralizations of national propaganda. Ill be telling you the fi story youd hear any place from Dundalk to Ballinacree with great queens in it, making themselves matches from the start to the end, and they with shiny silks on them ... Ive a grand story of the great queens of Ireland, with white necks ohe like of Sarah Casey, and fine arms would hit you a slap.... What good am I this night, God help me? What good are the grand stories I have when its few would listen to an old woman, few but a girl maybe would be i fear the time her hour was e, or a little child wouldnt be sleeping with the hunger on a cold night. That has the flavour of Homer, of the Bible, of Villon, while Cervantes would have thought it sweet in the mouth though not his food. This use of Irish dialect for noble purpose by Synge, and by Lady Gregory, who had it already in her Cuchulain of Muirthemne, and by Dr. Hyde in those first translations he has not equalled since, has done much for National dignity. When I was a boy I was often troubled and sorrowful because Scottish dialect was capable of noble use, but the Irish of obvious roystering humour only; and this error fixed on my imagination by so many s and rhymers made me listen badly. Synge wrote down words and phrases wherever he went, and with that knowledge .９９ｌｉb.of Irish which made all our try idioms easy to his hand, found it so rich a thing, that he had begun translating into it fragments of the great literatures of the world, and had planned a plete version of the Imitation of Christ. It gave him imaginative riess a left to him the sting and tang of reality. How vivid in his translation from Villohose eyes with a big gay look out of them would bring folly from a great scholar. More vivid surely than anything in Swinburnes version, and how hose words which are yet simple try speech, in which his Petrarch mourns that death came upon Laura just as time was making chastity easy, and the day e when lovers may sit together and say out all things ar their hearts, and my sweet enemy was making a start, little by little, to give over her great wariness, the way she was wringing a sweet thing out of my sharp sorrow. XIV Once when I had been saying that though it seemed to me that a ventional descriptive passage encumbered the a at the moment of crisis. I liked The Shadow of the Gleer than Riders to the Sea that is, for all the nobility of its end, its mood of Greek tragedy, too passive in suffering; and had quoted from Matthew Arnolds introdu to Empedocles ona, Synge answered, It is a curious thing that "The Riders to the Sea" succeeds with an English but not with an Irish audience, and "The Shadow of the Glen" which is not liked by an English audience is always liked in Ireland, though it is disliked there in theory. Sihen The Riders to the Sea has grown into great popularity in Dublin, partly because with the tactical instinct of an Irish mob, the demonstratainst The Playboy both in the press and iheatre, where it began the evening, selected it for applause. It is now what Shelleys Cloud was for many years, a fort to those who do not like to deny altogether the genius they ot uand. Yet I am certain that, in the long run, his grotesque plays with their lyric beauty, their violent laughter, The Playboy of the Western World most of all, will be loved for holding so much of the mind of Ireland. Synge has written of The Playboy anyone who has lived in real intimacy with the Irish peasantry will know that the wildest sayings in this play are tame indeed pared with the fancies one may hear at any little hillside cottage of Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay. It is the stra, the most beautiful expression in drama of that Irish fantasy, which overflowing through all Irish Literature that has e out of Ireland itself (pare the fantastic Irish at of the Battle of tarf with the sober Norse at) is the unbroken character of Irish genius. In modern days this genius has delighted in mischievous extravagance, like that of the Gaelic poets curse upon his children, There are three things that I hate, the devil that is waiting for my soul, the worms that are waiting for my body, my children, who are waiting for my wealth and care her for my body nor my soul: Oh, Christ hang all in the same noose! I think those words were spoken with a delight in their vehemehat took out of anger half the bitterness with all the gloom. An old man on the Aran Islands told me the very tale on which The Playboy is founded, beginning with the words, If aleman has done a crime well hide him. There was a gentleman that killed his father, & I had him in my own house six months till he got away to America. Despite the solemnity of his slow speech his eyes shone as the eyes must have shone in that Trinity College branch of the Gaelic League, which began every meeting with prayers for the death of an old Fellow of College who disliked their movement, or as they certainly do when patriots are telling how short a time the prayers took to the killing of him. I have seen a crowd, wheain Dublin papers had wrought themselves into an imaginary loyalty, so possessed by what seemed the very genius of satiritasy, that one all but looked to find some feathered heel among the cobble stones. Part of the delight of crowd or individual is always that somebody will be angry, somebody take the sport floomy ear. We are mog at his solemnity, let us therefore so hide our malice that he may be more solemn still, and the laugh run higher yet. Why should we speak his language and so wake him from a dream of all those emotions which men feel because they should, and not because they must? Our minds, being suffit to themselves, do not wish for victory but are tent to elaborate our extravagance, if fortune aid, into wit or lyric beauty, and as for the rest There are nights when a king like chobar would spit upon his arm?ring and queens will stick out their to the rising moon. This habit of the mind has made Oscar Wilde and Mr. Bernard Shaw the most celebrated makers of edy to our time, and if it has sounded plaiill in the versation of the one, and in some few speeches of the other, that is but because they have not been able to turn out of their plays an alien trick of zeal picked up in struggling youth. Yet, in Synges plays also, fantasy gives the form and not the thought, for the core is always as in all great art, an over?p vision of certain virtues, and our capacity for sharing in that vision is the measure of our delight. Great art chills us at first by its ess or its strangeness, by what seems capricious, a is from these qualities it has authority, as though it had fed on locust and wild hohe imaginative writer shows us the world as a painter does his picture, reversed in a looking?glass that we may see it, not as it seems to eyes habit has made dull, but as we were Adam and this the first m; and when the new image bees .as little strange as the old we shall stay with him, because he has, beside the strangeness, not strao him, that made us share his vision, siy that makes us share his feeling. To speak of oions without fear or moral ambition, to e out from uhe shadow of other mens minds, tet their needs, to be utterly oneself, that is all the Muses care for. Villon, pahief, 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 passion more. All art is the disengaging of a soul from plad history, its suspension in a beautiful or terrible light, to await the Judgement, a, because all its days were a Last Day, judged already. It may show the crimes of Italy as Dante did, reek mythology like Keats, or Kerry and Galway villages, and so vividly that ever after I shall look at all with like eyes, a I know that o da Pistoia thought Dante unjust, that Keats knew no Greek, that those try men and women are her so lovable nor so lawless as mihor 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 rocks summit, the church, the great halls where monks, or knights, or men at arms sat at meals, beautiful from or 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 majestitasy, seeming more of Egypt than of Christendom, spoke nothing to the solitary soul, but seemed to announce whether past or yet to e 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 dession to knave or dolt, an impoverishment of the on thought to make it serviceable and easy, but a dead language and a union 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, we e upon those agreements, those separations from all else that fasteogether lastingly; for while a popular a.nd picturesque Burns and Scott 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 raot through the eyes or in history, or even iure, but where those monks found God, in the depths of the mind, and in all art like his, although it does not and??indeed because it does not??m99lｉb.ay lie the roots of far?brang events. Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not persuade, which does not desd, 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 neers and guide?books, leave the best miy, and in Ireland and Scotland England runs into the hole. It has no array uments and maxims, because the great and the simple (and the Muses have never known which of the two most pleases them) heir deliberate thought for the days work, a 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 sery as of their try, by those great poets, who have dreamed it in solitude, and who to this day in Europe are creating iructible spiritual races, like thion has created in the East. W. B. Yeats. September 14th. 1910. WITH SYNGE IN CONNEMARA I had ofte a day walking with John Synge, but a year or two ago I travelled for a month alohrough the west of Ireland with him. He was the best panion for a roadway any one could have, always ready and always the same; a bold walker, up hill and down dale, i 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. Whearted on our journey, as the train steamed out of Dublin, Synge said: Now the elder of us two should be in and on this trip. So we pared notes and I found that he was two months older than myself. So he was boss and whe was a questioher 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 k 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 aly 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 Johns eve, wheood in the market square watg 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 aasy 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 assistao him in talking to the people. I remember him holding a great versation in Irish and English with an innkeepers wife in a Mayo inn. She had lived in Ameri Lins 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 lun in his house of biscuits and porter, aed 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 politi who told us how he became a Nationalist. I was, he said plug a book from the mantlepiece (I remember the book??it aul 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 unfortuenant and thrun him in the road, and I saw the mans wife e out g and the agents wife thrun her in the el, and when I saw that, though I was but a child, I swore Id 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 oime, but he was not a man you would see often with a book in his hand; he would sooalk, or rather listen to talk??almost aalk. Synge was always ready to go anywhere with one, and wheo enjoy what came. He went with me to see an ordinary melodrama at the Queens Theatre, Dublin, and he delighted to see how the members of the pany could by the vehemence of their movements and the resources of their voices hold your attention on a play where everything was onplace. He enjoyed seeing the trite villain of the piee 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 trition 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 Islands 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 f.or 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 fort 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 ses. He told me how o the fair of Tralee he saw an old tinker?woman taken by the police, and she was struggling with them in the tre of the fair; when suddenly, as if her garments were held together with one cord, she hurled every shred of clothing from her, ran dowreet and screamed, let this be the barrack yard, which erfectly uood by the crowd as suggesting that the police strip aheir 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? ser, him they called the music?? The music looked on at every thing with dang eyes but drew no sword, and when the ser was taken and the pirates hung at Cape Corso Castle or The Island of Saint Christophers, the music ared because he was the music. Jack B. Yeats天涯在线书库《www.tianyabook.com》