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

In all drama which would give direct expression to reverie, to the / speech of the soul with itself, there is some device that checks the / rapidity of dialogue. When Oedipus speaks out of the most vehement / passions, he is conscious of the presence of the chorus, men before / whom he must keep up appearances 'children latest born of Cadmus' line' / who do not share his passion. Nobody is hurried or breathless. We / listen to reports and discuss them, taking part as it were in a council / of state. Nothing happens before our eyes. The dignity of Greek drama, / and in a lesser degree of that of Corneille and Racine depends, as / contrasted with the troubled life of Shakespearean drama, on an almost / even speed of dialogue, and on a so continuous exclusion of the / animation of common life, that thought remains lofty and language rich. / Shakespeare, upon whose stage everything may happen, even the blinding / of Gloster, and who has no formal check except what is implied in the / slow, elaborate structure of blank verse, obtains time for reverie by / an often encumbering Euphuism, and by such a loosening of his plot as / will give his characters the leisure to look at life from without. / Maeterlinck, to name the first modern of the old way who comes to / mind -- reaches the same end, by choosing instead of human beings persons / who are as faint as a breath upon a looking-glass, symbols who can / speak a language slow and heavy with dreams because their own life is / but a dream. Modern drama, on the other hand, which accepts the / tightness of the classic plot, while expressing life directly, has been / driven to make indirect its expression of the mind, which it leaves to / be inferred from some common-place sentence or gesture as we infer it / in ordinary life; and this is, I believe, the cause of the perpetual / disappointment of the hope imagined this hundred years that France or / Spain or Germany or Scandinavia will at last produce the master we / await.

The divisions in the arts are almost all in the first instance / technical, and the great schools of drama have been divided from one / another by the form or the metal of their mirror, by the check chosen / for the rapidity of dialogue. Synge found the check that suited his / temperament in an elaboration of the dialects of Kerry and Aran. The / cadence is long and meditative, as befits the thought of men who are / much alone, and who when they meet in one another's houses -- as their / way is at the day's end -- listen patiently, each man speaking in turn / and for some little time, and taking pleasure in the vaguer meaning of / the words and in their sound. Their thought, when not merely practical, / is as full of traditional wisdom and extravagant pictures as that of / some Aeschylean chorus, and no matter what the topic is, it is as / though the present were held at arms length. It is the reverse of / rhetoric, for the speaker serves his own delight, though doubtless he / would tell you that like Raftery's whiskey-drinking it was but for the / company's sake. A medicinal manner of speech too, for it could not even / express, so little abstract it is and so rammed with life, those worn / generalizations of national propaganda. 'I'll be telling you the finest / story you'd hear any place from Dundalk to Ballinacree with great / queens in it, making themselves matches from the start to the end, and / they with shiny silks on them. I've a grand story of the great / queens of Ireland, with white necks on them the like of Sarah Casey, / and fine arms would hit you a slap. What good am I this night, God / help me? What good are the grand stories I have when it's few would / listen to an old woman, few but a girl maybe would be in great fear the / time her hour was come, or a little child wouldn't be sleeping with the / hunger on a cold night.'

That has the flavour of Homer, of the Bible, / of Villon, while Cervantes would have thought it sweet in the mouth / though not his food. This use of Irish dialect for noble purpose by / Synge, and by Lady Gregory, who had it already in her Cuchulain of / Muirthemne, and by Dr. Hyde in those first translations he has not / equalled since, has done much for National dignity. When I was a boy I / was often troubled and sorrowful because Scottish dialect was capable / of noble use, but the Irish of obvious roystering humour only; and this / error fixed on my imagination by so many novelists and rhymers made me / listen badly. Synge wrote down words and phrases wherever he went, and / with that knowledge of Irish which made all our country idioms easy to / his hand, found it so rich a thing, that he had begun translating into / it fragments of the great literatures of the world, and had planned a / complete version of the Imitation of Christ. It gave him imaginative / richness and yet left to him the sting and tang of reality. How vivid / in his translation from Villon are those 'eyes with a big gay look out / of them would bring folly from a great scholar. ' More vivid surely than / anything in Swinburne's version, and how noble those words which are / yet simple country speech, in which his Petrarch mourns that death came / upon Laura just as time was making chastity easy, and the day come when / 'lovers may sit together and say out all things arc in their hearts,' / and 'my sweet enemy was making a start, little by little, to give over / her great wariness, the way she was wringing a sweet thing out of my / sharp sorrow.'