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

As I read 'The Aran Islands' right through for the first time since he / showed it me in manuscript, I come to understand how much knowledge of / the real life of Ireland went to the creation of a world which is yet / as fantastic as the Spain of Cervantes. Here is the story of 'The / Playboy,' of 'The Shadow of the Glen; ' here is the 'ghost on horseback' / and the finding of the young man's body of 'Riders to the Sea,' / numberless ways of speech and vehement pictures that had seemed to owe / nothing to observation, and all to some overflowing of himself, or to / some mere necessity of dramatic construction. I had thought the violent / quarrels of 'The Well of the Saints' came from his love of bitter / condiments, but here is a couple that quarrel all day long amid / neighbours who gather as for a play. I had defended the burning of / Christy Mahon's leg on the ground that an artist need but make his / characters self-consistent, and yet, that too was observation, for / 'although these people are kindly towards each other and their / children, they have no sympathy for the suffering of animals, and / little sympathy for pain when the person who feels it is not in / danger. ' I had thought it was in the wantonness of fancy Martin Dhoul / accused the smith of plucking his living ducks, but a few lines further / on, in this book where moral indignation is unknown, I read, 'Sometimes / when I go into a cottage, I find all the women of the place down on / their knees plucking the feathers from live ducks and geese.'

He loves all that has edge, all that is salt in the mouth, all that is / rough to the hand, all that heightens the emotions by contest, all that / stings into life the sense of tragedy; and in this book, unlike the / plays where nearness to his audience moves him to mischief, he shows it / without thought of other taste than his. It is so constant, it is all / set out so simply, so naturally, that it suggests a correspondence / between a lasting mood of the soul and this life that shares the / harshness of rocks and wind. The food of the spiritual-minded is sweet, / an Indian scripture says, but passionate minds love bitter food. Yet he / is no indifferent observer, but is certainly kind and sympathetic to / all about him. When an old and ailing man, dreading the coming winter, / cries at his leaving, not thinking to see him again; and he notices / that the old man's mitten has a hole in it where the palm is accustomed / to the stick, one knows that it is with eyes full of interested / affection as befits a simple man and not in the curiosity of study. / When he had left the Blaskets for the last time, he travelled with a / lame pensioner who had drifted there, why heaven knows, and one morning / having missed him from the inn where they were staying, he believed he / had gone back to the island and searched everywhere and questioned / everybody, till he understood of a sudden that he was jealous as though / the island were a woman.

The book seems dull if you read much at a time, as the later Kerry / essays do not, but nothing that he has written recalls so completely to / my senses the man as he was in daily life; and as I read, there are / moments when every line of his face, every inflection of his voice, / grows so clear in memory that I cannot realize that he is dead. He was / no nearer when we walked and talked than now while I read these / unarranged, unspeculating pages, wherein the only life he loved with / his whole heart reflects itself as in the still water of a pool. / Thought comes to him slowly, and only after long seemingly unmeditative / watching, and when it comes, (and he had the same character in matters / of business) it is spoken without hesitation and never changed. His / conversation was not an experimental thing, an instrument of research, / and this made him silent; while his essays recall events, on which one / feels that he pronounces no judgment even in the depth of his own mind, / because the labour of Life itself had not yet brought the philosophic / generalization, which was almost as much his object as the emotional / generalization of beauty. A mind that generalizes rapidly, continually / prevents the experience that would have made it feel and see deeply, / just as a man whose character is too complete in youth seldom grows / into any energy of moral beauty. Synge had indeed no obvious ideals, as / these are understood by young men, and even as I think disliked them, / for he once complained to me that our modern poetry was but the poetry / 'of the lyrical boy,' and this lack makes his art have a strange / wildness and coldness, as of a man born in some far-off spacious land / and time.