Irish Plays and Playwrights

by Cornelius Weygandt

"The Aran Islands" is most memorable of his travel writings, because he spent more time on these rocks at the world's end and came closest here to the soul of Irish life. There are passages, however, in his description of the Kerry coast, and even in his newspaper sketches of the coast of Connemara, that tell not only of the places but of their visitor. "I got on a long road running through a bog," he writes in "In West Kerry," "with a smooth mountain on one side and the sea on the other, and Brandon in front of me, partly covered with clouds. As far as I could see there were little groups of people on their way to the chapel at Ballyferriter, the men in homespun and the women wearing blue cloaks, or, more often, black shawls twisted over their heads. This procession along the olive bogs, between the mountains and the sea, on this gray day of autumn, seemed to wring me with the pang of emotion one meets everywhere in Ireland, an emotion that is partly local and patriotic, and partly a share of the desolation that is mixed everywhere with the supreme beauty of the world."

The comment on Ireland, her ways and her place among the peoples, that many a dramatist would have permitted himself to express through some character chosen to play chorus to the action, Synge now and then permits himself in the travel sketches. In "From Galway to Gorumna," which he wrote for the "Manchester Guardian's" investigation of the congested districts, is one of such rare avowals, an avowal to treasure along with those of his all too short prefaces: "It is part of the misfortune of Ireland that nearly all the characteristics which give color and attractiveness to Irish life [he has been speaking of 'men dressed in homespuns of the gray natural wool, and the women in deep madder-dyed petticoats and bodices, with brown shawls over their heads'] are bound up with a social condition that is near to penury, while in countries like Brittany the best external features of the local life—the rich embroidered dresses, for instance, or the carved furniture—are connected with a decent and comfortable social condition."

It is this penury, perhaps, and its gray background that by way of contrast emphasize so strongly the moments of splendor that Irish landscape knows. One such moment Synge saw as he looked southward across the bay from the Dingle peninsula toward Killarney: "The blueness of the sea and the hills from Carrantuohill to the Skelligs, the singular loneliness of the hillside I was on, with a few choughs and gulls in sight only, had a splendor that was almost a grief in the mind."

This splendor Synge found also in his own Wicklow, a lonelier country than Aran, if loneliness comes from absence of human life. And if there is not the loneliness of the sea in the inland glens that Synge knew so well, there is in them the equal loneliness of the mountains. It is this county of Wicklow that is the background of "In the Shadow of the Glen" and of "The Well of the Saints" and of "The Tinker's Wedding." And perhaps had not the Abbey Theatre grown to be a theatre for folk-drama and for poetic drama of court romance alone, Synge would have made Wicklow the background of dramas of a high life of yesterday. Certain it is that in these passages he is thinking of it:—

Every one is used in Ireland to the tragedy that is bound up with the lives of farmers and fishing-people; but in this garden one seemed to feel the tragedy of the landlord class also, and of the innumerable old families that are quickly dwindling away. These owners of the land are not much pitied at the present day, or much deserving of pity; and yet one cannot quite forget that they are the descendants of what was at one time, in the eighteenth century, a high-spirited and highly cultivated aristocracy. The broken greenhouses and mouse-eaten libraries, that were designed and collected by men who voted with Grattan, are perhaps as mournful in the end as the four mud walls that are so often left in Wicklow as the only remnants of a farmhouse. The desolation of this life is often of a peculiarly local kind, and if a playwright chose to go through the Irish country houses he would find material, it is likely, for many gloomy plays that would turn on the dying away of these old families, and on the lives of the one or two delicate girls that are left so often to represent a dozen hearty men who were alive a generation or two ago.

I have dwelt on these travel sketches of Synge not alone for their own sake, but because they are, as I have said, the background of the plays, and because they contain what are in a sense the diary notes out of which the plays grew. In a sense, too, they are a commentary on the plays, and as I have also said a revelation of the playwright. All must be read for a thorough understanding of the plays, though these alone should be a delight to all, even if they know no more of Ireland than that share of human nature which is axiomatically the same in all men of all races. If you do not read the travel sketches, you may fail to see how deeply sympathetic Synge is with the Irish peasant, and in no patronizing way. In "The Aran Islands" he takes the greatest care to disguise the identity of those he knew intimately lest they be pained by anything he wrote of them. No one could write with higher courtesy of those whose guest he had been than Synge. You, reading, are made one of their home circle, but no family secrets are betrayed. You are made aware of their weaknesses, but there is never any disloyalty; and always in his records of them their virtues of courage and endurance, of adaptiveness and simplicity, of family stanchness and communal helpfulness, outweigh the drunkenness and roguery that one expects from the primitive. Synge is, indeed, not only loyal, but full of respect and liking for the Aran Islanders, and of admiration for their rich humanity.

It was out of his island life and out of his life of the roads, and out of his mood, once he knew his doom, that he made the twenty-two poems of his that are retained of a great deal that he had written, most of it in his younger years. That Synge faced his fate with bravery the triumphant tone of "Deirdre of the Sorrows" that I have instanced is proof, but there could not but be moments when the thought of death was too instant to be denied. It was in such mood he wrote, either toward the end, or in earlier moments of anticipation of it, "Queens," "On an Anniversary," "To the Oaks of Glencree," "A Question," and "I've Thirty Months." There is in these verses a certain morbidity, an almost ghoulishness, that is very seldom present elsewhere in his writing. And yet I may be wrong in attributing it to his certainty of approaching death, for there is a more intense preoccupation with death in the plays of M. Maeterlinck's youth and a greater ghoulishness in the verse of Mr. Hardy's youth. It is of Mr. Hardy's verses that one thinks oftenest as one reads these verses of Synge, and not only because of certain likenesses in subject-matter, but because of the imperfect mastery of both over the verse forms and a certain epigrammatic gnomic quality common to both. The verses of Synge are not relatively so important in comparison with the rest of his writing as Mr. Hardy's verses are in comparison with the rest of his writing, for they are not needed to explain a philosophy of life as are Mr. Hardy's verses. Fortunately, Synge attempted no philosophy, had the rare wisdom to rest content with observation.

In regard to poetry, as to all his art, Synge had, however, definite views, though his verse is almost too little in bulk to exemplify them. It was the poetry of exaltation, as it was the drama of exaltation, as it was the exaltation in living, of change and speed and danger and love, that meant most to him. He held further that "in these days poetry is usually a flower of evil or good; but it is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms." The verse of Synge, as all his art, was so rooted, surely. "Even if we grant," he continues, "that exalted poetry can be kept successful by itself, the strong things of life are needed in poetry also, to show that what is exalted or tender is not made by feeble blood. It may almost be said that before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal."

It is sayings of this sort that bring to mind his kinship with Whitman, to whom he is also bound by the freemasonry of the roads. Both men felt the call of the road; both loved the changing landscape and the little adventures of the caravansaries; both loved most of all the men and women they met. Once only Synge seems to have forgotten humanity when he took to the road, that time which he has recorded in "Prelude":—

"Still south I went and west and south again,