There is less that is great in the structure of his plays than in any other component of them, but that structure always clearly reveals the action which arises from the emotion and theme underlying each,—the menacing sea in "Riders to the Sea"; the loneliness of the mountain glens that drives men fey in "The Shadow of the Glen"; the blindness, the blessed self-delusion of mankind, in "The Well of the Saints"; the wildness of the life of the roads that law may not tame, in "The Tinker's Wedding"; the boy's finding of himself through his having to live up to a community's mistaken ideal of him, in "The Playboy of the Western World"; and the benison of death that prevents a great love from dying, in "Deirdre of the Sorrows."
Always the joy of making something beautiful out of his experience and dream of life is what inspires Synge to write, and though the intention to read life truly is a passion with him, there is never a suggestion of didacticism, or even of moralizing, though "The Well of the Saints" is unquestionably, whether he wills it so or not, a symbol of man's discontent with things as they are, his preference in some things of the lie to the truth. I think that Synge did not will to make "The Well of the Saints" a symbol, and that the play was to him but a reading of life, as life is, in his characteristic, exalted, ironic, extravagant way of writing, and that if he was aware of the symbolism, he was not keenly aware of it or much interested in it. He gives us life untroubled by the passing agitation of the day, and for that we should be thankful, and thankful, too, that he has given in his plays "the nourishment, not very easy to define, on which our imaginations live." His irony, as desolating to some as the irony of Swift, gives pause to all, as insight always will, but to me his extravagance is a joy unalloyed, and his exaltation, so rare a thing in modern literature, should bring to all men delight and refreshment of spirit. No reading, or seeing and hearing, of his plays leaves me without a feeling of richness or without wonder and large content. He gives back my youth to me, both in the theatre and in my library, and, in the glow that is mine in such recapture, I call him the greatest dramatist in English that our stage has known in a century. That I know him to be on sober second thought, second thought that has been concerned with his art, as I followed it developing during the slow years from "Riders to the Sea" to "Deirdre of the Sorrows."
Chapter VIII
The Younger Dramatists—Mr. Padraic Colum—Mr. William Boyle—Mr. T.c. Murray—Mr. S. Lennox Robinson—Mr. Rutherford Mayne—"Norreys Connell"—Mr. St. John G. Ervine—Mr. Joseph Campbell
One wonders whether it is not of himself Mr. Padraic Colum is writing as "The dawn-man ... in the sunset." That phrase arrests one on the first page of his little book of verse "Wild Earth" (1909), in the first poem, "The Plougher." It refers, of course, to an elemental man of to-day, to the peasant of the great central plain of Ireland, who is "brute-tamer, plough-maker, earth-breaker," just as truly as it does to the breaker of horses who drove furrows with a tree-knee through primordial mould; and it carries us in imagination back to the man of the Stone Age by way of many other ploughmen, by way of the last man we saw between plough-handles who appealed to our imagination, a man limned against an April sky from which the sun had passed to leave all the west that gold-green that the greatest of Westmoreland dalesmen loved; by way of that Dumfries peasant whose
"conquering share
Upturned the fallow fields of truth anew";
by way of Wayland Smith, whose anvils dot the shores of Britain; by way of Tubal Cain, "an artificer in brass and iron," of the seed of Cain, "a tiller of the ground."