Essays Irish and American

by John Butler Yeats

In Ireland we are still medieval, and think that how to live is more important than how to get a living. When I was a young man if I announced that I intended next morning at break of day to start on some enterprise of amusement, or it might be of high duty, the whole family would get up to see me off; but if it were on some matter of mere commercial gain, I would breakfast in the care of the servants. It was thus through the whole of Irish life. If Curran, for instance, fought a duel in Phœnix Park at some unearthly hour, five hundred sleepy Dublin citizens would rouse themselves out of their beds and be there to see the fight, to witness the courage of the combatants and enjoy the wit of Curran, that never failed when danger threatened—and in those days and in that country people shot to kill. We Irish are still what we’ve always been, a people of leisure; like people sitting at a play, we watch the game of life, we enjoy our neighbours, whether we love or hate them.

Because of this enjoyment of the spectacle of life, we have produced the ablest dramatists of latter-day England: Farquhar, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Oscar Wilde, G. B. Shaw, and finally John Synge. And of these, Synge, though he died so young, is the greatest. He stands apart from them all, because he portrays peasant poetry and passion, and a humour which cuts deep into the mystery and terror of life. In the other dramatists we have abundance of wit and liveliness, great powers of enjoyment, and a commendable contempt for the prudential virtues; but there is also a denial of spirituality and but a modicum of poetry; the deeper feelings are never sounded, while their pathos is only a dainty pity, not the genuine article: not one of them could have written “Riders to the Sea.” Behind the Irish humour and pity are will and intellect, as in Swift. In the drawing-room plays of Synge’s predecessors there is merely the sensitive nature, so easily chilled by what is not nice, becoming, and charming. Those who object to Synge’s plays are suffering from the delicate stomach of people who have lived effeminate lives. Dr. Swift would have come to Synge’s plays and applauded them.

A good many years ago cultivated people and others began to take an interest in the Irish peasant; it added something to the gaiety of London and Dublin drawing-rooms. But socialism and communism, the labour party and anarchy, had not then been invented to teach people the seriousness of starving poverty. So Carleton and other writers set to work to exploit the Irish peasant and make him into something “fit for a lady’s chamber.” Hence has arisen the foolish tradition that the Irish are all gentleness and innocence, and, though wildly amusing, still within the bounds of good taste; hence also came the comic Irishman, a buffoon without seriousness who lived by making laughter for his patrons.

Synge’s plays exist to prove the contrary of all this. And yet there is some truth in the picture. The Irish character has a side which is turned toward spirituality and poetry, a musical instrument exquisitely attuned to the beauties of nature and life. Among this fighting race, square-chinned and with short features, is scattered another type, with long, oval faces and soft eyes, born to all hoping gentleness and affection, with imagination fed on the mysteries of life and death and religion. This type Stella might have discovered had she not been too English; Swift could not, because probably he frightened it away. Yet Dr. Goldsmith was as true an Irishman as Dr. Swift. How vividly Synge knew this side of the Irish mind is shown in his book on the Aran Islands. The other side is in his plays.

“A picture,” said Blake, “should be like a lawyer presenting a writ.” Synge presents us with such a picture. Let us be patient; people brought up on the literature of good taste cannot be expected all at once to enjoy the literature of power.

“I can look at a knot in a piece of wood until I am frightened by it,” so spake William Blake. This is the creative imagination, and it is that of folklore and of the Aran Islands. These people know no distinction between natural and supernatural; they believe everything to be carried on by miracle; and the civilized man who does not know that behind all science and reason and all moral systems there is a something transcending all knowledge and which is a continued miracle of love and beauty is not only incapable of culture, he is incapable of desiring it. To him the Bible is as inscrutable as Shelley. These peasants are not as well educated as, say, Mr. Rockefeller, yet they have this feeling, this feeling which is the religion of children and poets, and which is not subject for reason at all—even though it be the source of our whole intellectual life.

False education is like the pressure which the Chinese mother applies to the feet of her infant. True education liberates. The industrial movement would turn these peasants into smug artisans, without a thought that consoles or a hope that elevates, greedy, envious, and covetous, seeking only the triumphs of selfishness. And yet man is naturally a singing bird; sometimes he is singing in a cage of childish and brutish ignorance; and sometimes, though the cage be roomy and handsome, he does not sing at all, has not the heart to do so. True education would liberate him so that he could sing in the open sky of knowledge and power and desire.

Synge says of these people that they have “some of the emotions thought peculiar to people who have lived with the arts.” He also speaks of “the singularly spiritual expression which is so marked” on the faces of some of these women. And again he says that “they are a people whose lives have the strange quality that is found in the oldest legend and poetry.” A priest told me that on his return from America the servant said she was glad to see him back, “for,” said she, “while you were away there was a colour of loneliness in the air.” In these people’s words, as in their lives, is the colour of beauty, as the blue sky reflects itself in every little pool of water among the rocks.

As to Synge’s great comedy, “The Playboy of the Western World,” could Synge have chosen a better type for his hero than Christy Mahon? Despite certain newspaper critics who have written of the play, he is neither a weakling nor a fool, but a young poet in the supreme difficulty of getting born; only in this case the struggle is a little worse than usual. He has a drink-maddened father of great strength and most violent passions, whose cruelty, backed by his strength, has driven away all his family except this young boy. Of course, Christy has no education, and his circumstances are altogether so dreadful that to live at all he must live the life of the imagination, wandering on the hills poaching and snaring rabbits. Finally he strikes his father with a spade, and in his terror runs away from home. After travelling for many days he arrives in Mayo and finds himself a hero; not because he is a murderer, but because he is a good-looking fellow in distress, and, as the sequel proves, spirited withal and athletic. His talk about the murder is a sudden freak of self-advertisement; no one so cunning as your young poet! Besides, he liked to be frightening himself. No one really believes it, and the Widow Quinn is scornfully sceptical; and when, later on, as they think, he actually murders his father, every one turns against him—his sweetheart, though it breaks her heart, joining actively in handing him over to justice.