Synge and the Ireland of his Time: VII
By William Butler Yeats
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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 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 friend's noble art, so full of passion and heroic beauty, is the
victory of a man who in poverty and sickness created from the delight of
expression, and in the contemplation that is born of the minute and
delicate arrangement of images, happiness, and health 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 to
bring the artist's joy which is of one substance with that of sanctity.
In one poem he waits at some street corner for a friend, a woman perhaps,
and while he waits and gradually understands that nobody is coming, sees
two funerals and shivers at the future; and in another written on his
25th birthday, he wonders if the 25 years to come shall be as evil as
those gone by. Later on, he can 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 one understand
that he contemplates even his own death as if it were another's, and
finds in his own destiny but as it were a projection through a burning
glass of that general to men. There is in the creative joy an acceptance
of what life brings, because we have understood 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, in the terror 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 Rackrent,' was there anything to change
a man's thought about the world or stir his moral nature, for they but
play with pictures, persons, and events, that whether well or ill
observed are but an amusement for the mind where it escapes from
meditation, a child's show that makes the fables of his art as
significant by contrast as some procession painted on an Egyptian 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 come of tragic reality seem morbid to those that
are accustomed 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 ascending steps,
seem morbid to the rationalist and the old-fashioned Protestant
controversialist. The thought of journalists, like that of the Irish
novelists, is neither healthy nor unhealthy, 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 attainment
of man, in heroic toils, in the cell of the ascetic, or imagined it above
the cheerful newspapers, above the clouds?
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