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

I wrote the most of these thoughts in my diary on the coast of / Normandy, and as I finished came upon Mont Saint Michel, and thereupon / doubted for a day the foundation of my school. Here I saw the places of / assembly, those cloisters on the rock's summit, the church, the great / halls where monks, or knights, or men at arms sat at meals, beautiful / from ornament or proportion. I remembered ordinances of the Popes / forbidding drinking-cups with stems of gold to these monks who had but / a bare dormitory to sleep in. Even when imagining, the individual had / taken more from his fellows and his fathers than he gave; one man / finishing what another had begun; and all that majestic fantasy, / seeming more of Egypt than of Christendom, spoke nothing to the / solitary soul, but seemed to announce whether past or yet to come an / heroic temper of social men, a bondage of adventure and of wisdom. Then / I thought more patiently and I saw that what had made these but as one / and given them for a thousand years the miracles of their shrine and / temporal rule by land and sea, was not a condescension to knave or / dolt, an impoverishment of the common thought to make it serviceable / and easy, but a dead language and a communion in whatever, even to the / greatest saint, is of incredible difficulty. Only by the substantiation / of the soul I thought, whether in literature or in sanctity, can we / come upon those agreements, those separations from all else that fasten / men together lastingly; for while a popular and picturesque Burns and / Scott can but create a province, and our Irish cries and grammars serve / some passing need, Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe and all who travel / in their road with however poor a stride, define races and create / everlasting loyalties.

Synge, like all of the great kin, sought for the / race, not through the eyes or in history, or even in the future, but / where those monks found God, in the depths of the mind, and in all art / like his, although it does not command -- indeed because it does not -- may / lie the roots of far-branching events. Only that which does not teach, / which does not cry out, which does not persuade, which does not / condescend, which does not explain is irresistible. It is made by men / who expressed themselves to the full, and it works through the best / minds; whereas the external and picturesque and declamatory writers, / that they may create kilts and bagpipes and newspapers and guide-books, / leave the best minds empty, and in Ireland and Scotland England runs / into the hole. It has no array of arguments and maxims, because the / great and the simple (and the Muses have never known which of the two / most pleases them) need their deliberate thought for the day's work, / and yet will do it worse if they have not grown into or found about / them, most perhaps in the minds of women, the nobleness of emotion, / associated with the scenery and events of their country, by those great / poets, who have dreamed it in solitude, and who to this day in Europe / are creating indestructible spiritual races, like those religion has / created in the East.

WITH SYNGE IN CONNEMARA

I had often spent a day walking with John Synge, but a year or two ago / I travelled for a month alone through the west of Ireland with him. He / was the best companion for a roadway any one could have, always ready / and always the same; a bold walker, up hill and down dale, in the hot / sun and the pelting rain. I remember a deluge on the Erris Peninsula, / where we lay among the sand hills and at his suggestion heaped sand / upon ourselves to try and keep dry.

When we started on our journey, as the train steamed out of Dublin, / Synge said: 'Now the elder of us two should be in command on this / trip. ' So we compared notes and I found that he was two months older / than myself. So he was boss and whenever it was a question whether we / should take the road to the west or the road to the south, it was Synge / who finally decided.

Synge was fond of little children and animals. I remember how glad he / was to stop and lean on a wall in Gorumna and watch a woman in afield / shearing a sheep. It was an old sheep and must have often been sheared / before by the same hand, for the woman hardly held it; she just knelt / beside it and snipped away. I remember the sheep raised its lean old / head to look at the stranger, and the woman just put her hand on its / cheek and gently pressed its head down on the grass again.

Synge was delighted with the narrow paths made of sods of grass / alongside the newly-metalled roads, because he thought they had been / put there to make soft going for the bare feet of little children. / Children knew, I think, that he wished them well. In Bellmullet on / Saint John's eve, when we stood in the market square watching the / fire-play, flaming sods of turf soaked in paraffine, hurled to the sky / and caught and skied again, and burning snakes of hay-rope, I remember / a little girl in the crowd, in an ecstasy of pleasure and dread, / clutched Synge by the hand and stood close in his shadow until the / fiery games were done.

His knowledge of Gaelic was a great assistance to him in talking to the / people. I remember him holding a great conversation in Irish and / English with an innkeeper's wife in a Mayo inn. She had lived in / America in Lincoln's day. She told us what living cost in America then, / and of her life there; her little old husband sitting by and putting in / an odd word. By the way, the husband was a wonderful gentle-mannered / man, for we had luncheon in his house of biscuits and porter, and / rested there an hour, waiting for a heavy shower to blow away; and when / we said good-bye and our feet were actually on the road, Synge said, / 'Did we pay for what we had? ' So I called back to the innkeeper, 'Did / we pay you? ' and he said quietly, 'Not yet sir.'