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

Once when I had been saying that though it seemed to me that a / conventional descriptive passage encumbered the action at the moment of / crisis. I liked 'The Shadow of the Glen' better than 'Riders to the / Sea' that is, for all the nobility of its end, its mood of Greek / tragedy, too passive in suffering; and had quoted from Matthew Arnold's / introduction to 'Empedocles on Etna,' Synge answered, 'It is a curious / thing that "The Riders to the Sea" succeeds with an English but not / with an Irish audience, and "The Shadow of the Glen" which is not liked / by an English audience is always liked in Ireland, though it is / disliked there in theory. ' Since then 'The Riders to the Sea' has grown / into great popularity in Dublin, partly because with the tactical / instinct of an Irish mob, the demonstrators against 'The Playboy' both / in the press and in the theatre, where it began the evening, selected / it for applause. It is now what Shelley's 'Cloud' was for many years, a / comfort to those who do not like to deny altogether the genius they / cannot understand. Yet I am certain that, in the long run, his / grotesque plays with their lyric beauty, their violent laughter, 'The / Playboy of the Western World' most of all, will be loved for holding so / much of the mind of Ireland. Synge has written of 'The Playboy' 'anyone / who has lived in real intimacy with the Irish peasantry will know that / the wildest sayings in this play are tame indeed compared with the / fancies one may hear at any little hillside cottage of Geesala, or / Carraroe, or Dingle Bay.'

It is the strangest, the most beautiful / expression in drama of that Irish fantasy, which overflowing through / all Irish Literature that has come out of Ireland itself (compare the / fantastic Irish account of the Battle of Clontarf with the sober Norse / account) is the unbroken character of Irish genius. In modern days this / genius has delighted in mischievous extravagance, like that of the / Gaelic poet's curse upon his children, 'There are three things that I / hate, the devil that is waiting for my soul, the worms that are waiting / for my body, my children, who are waiting for my wealth and care / neither for my body nor my soul: Oh, Christ hang all in the same / noose! ' I think those words were spoken with a delight in their / vehemence that took out of anger half the bitterness with all the / gloom. An old man on the Aran Islands told me the very tale on which / 'The Playboy' is founded, beginning with the words, 'If any gentleman / has done a crime we'll hide him. There was a gentleman that killed his / father, & I had him in my own house six months till he got away to / America. ' Despite the solemnity of his slow speech his eyes shone as / the eyes must have shone in that Trinity College branch of the Gaelic / League, which began every meeting with prayers for the death of an old / Fellow of College who disliked their movement, or as they certainly do / when patriots are telling how short a time the prayers took to the / killing of him.

I have seen a crowd, when certain Dublin papers had / wrought themselves into an imaginary loyalty, so possessed by what / seemed the very genius of satiric fantasy, that one all but looked to / find some feathered heel among the cobble stones. Part of the delight / of crowd or individual is always that somebody will be angry, somebody / take the sport for gloomy earnest. We are mocking at his solemnity, let / us therefore so hide our malice that he may be more solemn still, and / the laugh run higher yet. Why should we speak his language and so wake / him from a dream of all those emotions which men feel because they / should, and not because they must? Our minds, being sufficient to / themselves, do not wish for victory but are content to elaborate our / extravagance, if fortune aid, into wit or lyric beauty, and as for the / rest 'There are nights when a king like Conchobar would spit upon his / arm-ring and queens will stick out their tongues at the rising moon. ' / This habit of the mind has made Oscar Wilde and Mr. Bernard Shaw the / most celebrated makers of comedy to our time, and if it has sounded / plainer still in the conversation of the one, and in some few speeches / of the other, that is but because they have not been able to turn out / of their plays an alien trick of zeal picked up in struggling youth. / Yet, in Synge's plays also, fantasy gives the form and not the thought, / for the core is always as in all great art, an over-powering vision of / certain virtues, and our capacity for sharing in that vision is the / measure of our delight. Great art chills us at first by its coldness or / its strangeness, by what seems capricious, and yet it is from these / qualities it has authority, as though it had fed on locust and wild / honey.

The imaginative writer shows us the world as a painter does his / picture, reversed in a looking-glass that we may see it, not as it / seems to eyes habit has made dull, but as we were Adam and this the / first morning; and when the new image becomes as little strange as the / old we shall stay with him, because he has, beside the strangeness, not / strange to him, that made us share his vision, sincerity that makes us / share his feeling.