Irish Plays and Playwrights

by Cornelius Weygandt

Christy (with rapture). If the mitred bishops seen you that time, they'd be the like of the holy prophets, I'm thinking, do be straining the bars of Paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of Troy, and she abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in her golden shawl.

Borrow, who comes to mind more often than any other writer as one reads Synge, chose to avoid love scenes, and Borrow's follower, Mr. Hewlett, for all his gusto, has no such exaltation as this. Had Harry Richmond taken to the road with Kiomi we might have known something like it. A chapter out of the early life of Juggling Jerry and his "Old Girl," done in the manner of "Love in the Valley," would be still nearer to it. As it is, this passage of the third act of "The Playboy of the Western World" stands alone. I doubt if Synge had read Meredith, and even had he, the life of the roads and their cottages that Synge knew so well was his master, and no writer at all. In a way, of course, the Irish-English of Dr. Hyde's translations of "The Love Songs of Connacht" was an influence, and you will find many expressions common to them and Synge. It is not important, however, whether these expressions have a common source, or whether Synge took them from "The Love Songs" rather than from his own note-book. Whatever their source it was Synge who made out of them a great style, his peasant style. It is another and a severer style that he uses in his "Deirdre of the Sorrows," the courtly subject demanding dignity and restraint. This latter style has borrowed some of the bare simplicity of the personal style of Synge, that style, I mean, in which he records his own experience in the Aran Islands or in Wicklow and Kerry.

Romancing, which is the very atmosphere of "The Playboy of the Western World," would be out of place in any telling of the greatest of old Irish legends; so it is that Synge has found for "Deirdre of the Sorrows," or rather for its great moments, an austere epic speech that seems native to the story. The passionate words are nobly adequate to the passionate resignation they have to tell, a resignation that has come of the unwilling belief of the lovers that so great a love as theirs cannot last longer "without fleck or flaw" than the seven years it has lasted. Says Deirdre, when she has come to know it is fate that they will return to Ireland, and death:—

The dawn and evening are a little while, the winter and the summer pass quickly, and what way would you and I, Naisi, have joy forever.... It's this hour we're between the daytime and a night where there is sleep forever, and isn't it better thing to be following on to a near death than to be bending the head down, and dragging with the feet, and seeing one day a blight showing upon love where it is sweet and tender?

Naisi (his voice broken with distraction). If a near death is coming what will be my trouble losing the earth and the stars over it, and you, Deirdre, are their flame and bright crown? Come away into the safety of the woods.

Deirdre (shaking her head slowly). There are as many ways to wither love as there are stars in a night of Samhain; but there is no way to keep life, or love with it, a short space only.... It's for that there's nothing lonesome like a love is watching out the time most lovers do be sleeping.... It's for that we're setting out for Emain Macha when the tide turns on the sand.

Naisi (giving in). You're right, maybe. It should be a poor thing to see great lovers and they sleepy and old.

Deirdre (with a more tender intensity). We're seven years without roughness or growing weary; seven years so sweet and shining, the gods would be hard set to give us seven days the like of them. It's for that we're going to Emain, where there'll be a rest forever, or a place for forgetting, in great crowds and they making a stir.

Naisi (very softly). We'll go, surely, in place of keeping a watch on a love had no match and it wasting away. (They cling to each other, then Naisi looks up.)

And this is from the unfinished second act, that Synge thought would scarcely be worth preserving. I have quoted it rather than the great keen over the body of Naisi that brings the play to a close, because that must of necessity follow the old poem, and this is as Synge imagined it. Each is "a thing will be a joy and triumph to the ends of life and time."