Synge and the Ireland of his Time by W.B. Yeats

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?