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

'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.