I have spoken of Lady Gregory as translator, as collector of folk-lore, as essayist, and as dramatist; but there is another rôle in which she has brought no less advantage to the Celtic Renaissance, though it is a rôle that has not brought her, as have these other, the joys of recapturing or of creating beautiful things. Always objective, though never wholly able to subordinate personality, however near she may have come to effacing it in her plays, Lady Gregory has in this rôle considered herself solely as an agent in the service of Irish letters. The Irishman is naturally a pamphleteer, and Mr. Yeats, poet of the Other World though he be, can give as good blows in controversy as Mr. George Moore. Almost all who have part in the Renaissance have skill in the art of publicity. They have needed no publicists to fight their battles as the Pre-Raphaelites needed Ruskin. Still, in some measure in the way of publicity, and in large measure in other ways, Lady Gregory has been to the Celtic Renaissance what Ruskin was to that last renaissance of wonder. She has edited pamphlets on things national and artistic in Ireland, she has helped Dr. Hyde and Mr. Yeats in their collecting of folk-lore and to a deeper knowledge of the people; she has been one of the forces that have made possible the Abbey Theatre, giving to it her power of organization as well as plays and patronage. More than this, she has welcomed to Coole Park many a worker in the movement, who in the comfort of a holiday there has been refreshed by the gray and green land so near the sea and reinspired by the contact with that Irish Ireland so close to her doors. Like Ruskin, Lady Gregory is a great patron of letters, but like Ruskin she is much more. Lady Gregory is an artist in words who is to be valued as a presenter of Irish life, past and present, with a beauty that was not in English literature before she made it.
Chapter VII
John Millington Synge
It is Synge himself who puts the just phrase on what his life was to him, and it is, as it could not else be, from the lips of his Deirdre that it falls. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and richest, if it's for a short space only." It is Deirdre alone of his men and women that is introspective at all, Deirdre—and Naisi when he is mastered by thoughts of home that will not down. Synge wrote the play of her triumph over death as he himself was dying, and he wrote it with high heart, and, what is higher, gladness, despite his foreknowledge of his doom. It was to fulfill his dream of the most queenly girl of old Irish legend that he wrote "Deirdre of the Sorrows," but he could not keep out of his writing, had he wished to keep it out, his own love that death was so soon to end, and the thoughts of what was the worth of life. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and richest, if it's for a short space only." It is not a new saying, but it is not to be identified with the proverbial "a short life and a merry," with which some confuse it, and of Synge it was a true saying. There are those who, because of the irony of his writing, an irony that is new to literature, and, maybe, to some cruel, or at least disillusionizing, may think there was little joy for him; but the truth is there was never a writer in whom there was more joy. This "strange still man" as he was even to those who knew him best, gentle or simple, found all life that was natural life, even of the barest and rudest, as thrilling as first love. It is this man, his enemies at home the sated Parisian, who knew a gusto in living greater than that of any English writer since Borrow. Let no one forget those lines with which Christy Mahon cries defiance to the Mayo folk who have known his greatness and his fall: "Ten thousand blessings upon all that's here, for you've turned me a likely gaffer in the end of all, the way I'll go romancing through a romping lifetime from this hour to the dawning of the judgment day." I do not deny that these words are in a sense wrung from the Playboy, but what I do hold is that they prove how vital was the genius of the man who wrote them, who saw the joy there was yet in life for this braggart wastrel just as he saw that even such a miserable boyhood as Christy's knew a kind of poacher's joy in running wild on the bogs. Even for poor Nora, turned out on the roads with a tramp for companion, there is the joy of the road once she learns to know it. The tramp knows it surely:—
You'll be hearing the herons crying out over the black lakes, and you'll be hearing the grouse and the owls with them, and the larks and the big thrushes when the days are warm: and it's not from the like of them you'll be hearing a tale of getting old like Peggy Cavanagh, and losing the hair off you and the light of your eyes, but it's fine songs you'll be hearing when the sun goes up, and there'll be no old fellow wheezing the like of a sick sheep, close to your ear.
Of like gusto, too, is the joy of Martin Doul and Mary Doul in their blindness; and the joy of the three tinkers in the escape of themselves and their half-sovereign from the priest and in the prospect of "A great time drinking that bit with the trampers in the green of Clash." And from such joys as these, wild and earthy and rallying, his exultations range to the exalted serenity and sadness of Naisi and Deirdre as they look back on their seven year of love in Glen Masain, of love almost too perfect and too happy to be human.
