Irish Plays and Playwrights

by Cornelius Weygandt

No one who knows Ireland at all would hold that Synge's plays are typical of the Irish peasant generally, but any one who knows Irish literature at all, and the life of the roads in Ireland, will admit that wildness and extravagance are to be found in that literature from the beginning and in that life even at this day of supposed civilization. You will find one kind of extravagance in the distortions of Cuchulain in bardic literature, another kind of extravagance in "Little Red Mary and the Goat with the Chime of Bells" that your gardener tells you in a prosaic American suburban town; you will find the primitiveness of prehistoric life in the burning of poor old Mrs. Cleary by her neighbors in Tipperary (1895), to drive a demon out of her, and the savage that is but under the skin of all men in the description of the Spinsters' Ball at Ballinasloe in "A Drama in Muslin." Said an old shanachie to Synge on Inishere, when Synge had told him of a stock exchange trick, "Isn't it a great wonder to think that those men are as big rogues as ourselves?" It is idle to pretend that it is not true that, in some moods, all men the world over have sympathy for the rogue. Why do we read of Reynard the Fox with delight, and Robin Hood, and Uncle Remus, and not only in the days of our own infantile roguery, but as grown men and women? This man or that may say it is because of the cleverness of Reynard, the daring of Robin Hood or his wild-woods setting, and the resourcefulness of Bre'r Rabbit; but the honest man will admit it is because of an innate and deeply rooted human sympathy with roguery as well as our natural human sympathy with the under dog and the man hunted by a merciless or an alien law. Very often, if the roguery is very great, or we are brought face to face with its effects and realize it is a real thing in real life, we will be shocked out of our sympathy with it, and realize, as did Pegeen Mike, the difference between a "gallous story and a dirty deed." But sometimes, if we are a people living a primitive life, we will no more awaken to the reality of the wrong of roguery than we would as children have been able to sympathize with the farmer whose pumpkin patch we raided on the eve of Hallowe'en. A sneaking sympathy with roguery, however, is a very different thing from a delight in extravagance. That, too, is a universal passion, but not so native to the Teuton as to Celt or Finn or Oriental. Its absence is what most differentiates Old Norse literature from Old Irish, with which it so early came into contact. It is in travelers' tales and in the tales of seamen and in the writing that was based on these, in rare moments of religious or romantic ecstasy, or in borrowings from Celt or Oriental that you will find the most of what extravagance there is in English literature. In America you find extravagance in our humor, and this humor, perhaps, owes as much of its extravagance to an Irish ancestry as to an environment of new wonders that could not be well expressed save in hyperbole.

It is not only the extravagance of the change wrought in Christy by unexpected hero-worship and an awakening of self-confidence through love for the first time known and returned that we wonder at, and the extravagance of that hero-worship, but the extravagance of the imagination of his creator, and the beautiful extravagance of his speech. The freshness and audacity of that imagination, and the beautiful extravagance of that speech, a speech modulated to a rhythm that Synge was the first to catch, are in themselves enough to give distinction to almost any subject. There was granted Synge more than this, however,—a keenness of vision into the pathetic humanity of ugly things and a power to realize this with a beauty that was granted to no one before, though to Swift it was granted to see the ugliness as a bitter thing. Borrow had, indeed, a glimpse now and then of the pathetic beauty there is in ugliness, as in the story of Isopel Berners and the Flaming Tinman, and Whitman, too; but no man before Synge had the power at once to see the ugly subject as beautiful from a new angle of vision, humanize it, irradiate it with a new glow of imagination, reveal it through a style that for the first time ennobles English prose drama as blank verse has long ennobled English verse drama.

Take "The Tinker's Wedding," for instance. The theme is the desire of a tinker woman, youngish if not young, to wed the man who has long been her mate; his mother's unstudied frustration of that scheme by stealing, to swap for drink, the can they were to give to the priest along with a half-sovereign for marrying them; and their joy, in the end, that they have escaped matrimony and the wasting of good money. And yet this theme is underlaid with an emotion so vital, the emotion of a wild free life, and invested with a pathos so poignant of the quick passing of all good things, that no understanding heart can but be profoundly moved by that pathos and racily rejoiced at that wildness.

It is thus, for instance, soliloquizes Mary Byrne, the rapscalliony old tinker woman of outrageous behavior of "The Tinker's Wedding." She is stealing the aforesaid can, in the absence of her son and his Sarah "to get two of Tim Flaherty's hens": "Maybe the two of them have a good right to be walking out the little short while they'd be young; but if they have itself, they'll not keep Mary Byrne from her full pint when the night's fine, and there's a dry moon in the sky." One thinks, as one reads, of Villon's old woman and her lament for yesteryear, but there are not many writers anywhere in the world, of old time or of to-day, who have such power of blending pathos and ugliness into beauty, and no other one that I know who can infuse humor into the blend, and make one at the one time laugh ironically and be thrilled as with great poetry.

There are those, of course, to whom this earthiness and wildness are repulsive, to whom old Martin Doul's love pleading to Molly Byrne is unendurable. A dirty "shabby stump of a man," a beggar, blind and middle-aged, is asking a fine white girl, young, and as teasing as an ox-eyed and ox-minded colleen may be, to go away with him. Not an exalting situation, exactly, as you read of it or see it on the stage, but once you see it on the stage, where its animality you would expect would be heightened, you realize—and it is strange to you that you do so realize—first of all its pathos, and again its pathos, and always, the scene through, its pathos. Had Molly gone with old Martin it would have revolted you, for it would have been unnatural, but since she did not, and since she was not the sort to be easily insulted, you only wonder at the power of passion and realize its pathos, and the irony of it.

There is, however, a situation ironical of love in "In the Shadow of the Glen" that is more appalling to some than any irony of "The Well of the Saints." I mean the scene at the end, where Nora, turned out by her husband and forsaken by her lover, goes out into the rain with the tramp, leaving husband and lover drinking together in utmost amity. The pathos of this and the irony of it are of a part with the pathos of the close of "Hedda Gabler." Hedda and Nora, selfish and willful both, if you like, are yet fine women both, and human, as Zenobia and Eustacia are human, and pathetic in their fates, with a pathos that even Hawthorne and Mr. Hardy have seldom the power to make us feel. But the fate of Nora was ironic as the fate of none of the others, for all three of them escaped the ennui and misery of life, while Nora but begins a new life, freer for the moment than her old life, but promising, in the end, only the old dull round.

The irony of it! "The irony of it" is always in Synge's writing even in its most exalted moments. A seven years' love "without fleck or flaw" is "surely a wonder," but it is just as surely ironical that it, like all good things, shall so soon come to an end. That, of course, is but the way of nature, and so we much question if, after all, the irony of Synge is more insistent than the irony of nature. If it is it is because he takes more care to uncover it, but basically his irony is but the irony of nature. He is in reality less ironical than Mr. Hardy, the great ironist of English literature of our day, and he is never bitter, for bitterness comes seldom except to the writer who is interested in morals, and morals interest Synge only in so far as they are natural. It is life—not any conventional way of life, or any ideal of life—that interests Synge, so he escapes ensnarement in any of the questions of the day. So frankly does he accept life that there is in him no note of protest whatsoever, which is again fortunate, for protest, too, will lead a man to morals and leave on his work the taint of a passing system of morality as it did even on Ibsen.

If there is symbolism to be found in Synge, it is there only by accident, never as the result of definite intent. He may have had, in the back of his mind, as he wrote "The Playboy of the Western World," the thought of chance making a man, of a man finding himself through others believing in him who has no belief in himself but that there is in the play any parable of young Ireland losing its allegiance to a previous ideal of Ireland, I do not for a moment believe. There is, of course, in "The Well of the Saints" the old and oft-uttered truth that men prefer blindness in many things to correct vision of them, that truth that drives Mr. Shaw to blind anger. Synge has no resentment against that truth, only interest in it as a fact that is true of people as he sees them. The play is an unforgettable symbol of that truth, but to make it such was not why Synge wrote it. He wrote it with a purpose akin to that which inspired Burns to write his "Jolly Beggars." He wrote it to make something beautiful out of the life of the beggars of the Wicklow mountains, and I have no doubt he had a wild joy in the idea of it, in the irony of its truth, in the grotesquerie of the situations he garnered from his memory to illustrate its beauty and truth.

Many wonders are possible even to-day in the wild life of the roads and of the sea-haunted islands that Synge knew, but he was wise to put "The Well of the Saints" back a hundred years or more. Aran islanders told him of rye that turned to oats in their fields and of phantom ships that passed them at sea, but a miracle of healing such as that of "The Well of the Saints" they were familiar with only in folk-song such as "Mary's Well," and such a miracle, too, would hardly be attempted by a priest of to-day.

Synge had the great advantage of writing all his plays, after the earliest, for the stage. He knew as he wrote that he could test that writing's stage effect in rehearsal and change it if need be. So he did change "The Playboy of the Western World," revealing the incident of the supposed patricide as a bit of narrative addressed by Christy to the admiring girls of the Mayo village, instead of, as he had intended, a scene on the stage in "a windy corner of rich Munster land." Had he written "Riders to the Sea" later, Synge would surely never have crowded into it incidents that took far longer in the happening than in the portrayal of that happening on the stage. It is this technical shortcoming that for me takes away somewhat from the exceeding beauty of this tragedy of Aran. The story of the finding of the clothes that tell of the death at sea of the last but one of the five sons of Maurya, and of the death on the very shore itself of the last son, is in its very nature a dirge, and demands a slower movement than is possible with its incidents arranged as he was content to leave them in the play as we have it. "Riders to the Sea" is less representative of Synge, moreover, than any other of his plays, for it is written on one note, the note of the dirge, of the dirge of the tides that sound their menace of the sea through Inishmaan. It is less representative of Synge because it has in it no humor, no quick changes of mood, no revelation of tumult of soul. It is less representative of Synge in that it is less original than any other of his plays, reminiscent in fact in all but its style, now of Ibsen, now of M. Maeterlinck, now even of Mr. Edward Martyn. And his style itself is not what his style was in "In the Shadow of the Glen," nor what it became again in "The Well of the Saints."