Synge and the Ireland of his Time: IX
By William Butler Yeats
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IX
'When I got up this morning' he writes, after he had been a long time in
Innismaan, 'I found that the people had gone to Mass and latched the
kitchen 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 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 chimney to let me see the rafters and the
greyness of the walls, I became indescribably mournful, for I felt that
this little corner on the face of the world, and the people who live in
it, have a peace and dignity from which we are shut for ever.' This life,
which he describes elsewhere as the most primitive left in Europe,
satisfied some necessity 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 an
aesthetic interest, for he had gathered no statistics, had no money to
give, and cared nothing for the wrongs of the poor, being content 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 neither
riches nor poverty, neither what he calls 'the nullity of the rich' nor
'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 under
the weight of their necessity lived, as the artist lives, in the presence
of death and childhood, and the great affections and the orgiastic moment
when life outleaps its limits, and who, as it is always with those who
have refused or escaped the trivial and the temporary, had dignity and
good manners where manners mattered. Here above all was silence from all
our great 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.
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