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

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.