In every well-constructed drama there is some central point of interest around which all the other incidents are grouped. The personality of the girl Pegeen, Christy’s sweetheart, is here the central interest. She towers over every one, not only by her force, but by her maidenly purity and Diana-like fierceness; nothing, neither the coarseness she herself utters in wild humour, nor what the others say or do, can soil her sunshine. And in the love-talk between the lovers, he is all imagination and poet’s make-believe, and she all heart and passion and actuality, which is the peasant woman’s good sense! It is among peasants of the west of Ireland that the poetical dramatist must henceforth find his opportunity. Young gentlemen and young ladies in America have doctrinaire minds; they have grown up attending classes and listening to lectures in the atmosphere of a specious self-improvement, and know nothing of the surroundings amid which this peasant girl grew up straight and tall as a young tree. Some day people will recognize in this play Synge’s tribute to the Irish peasant girl. “And to think it’s me is talking sweetly, Christy Mahon, and I the fright of seven townlands for my biting tongue. Well, the heart’s a wonder, and I’m thinking there won’t be our like in Mayo for gallant lovers from this hour.”
The peasants of the west of Ireland are like Christy Mahon; sorrow and danger and ignorance are their daily portion, yet like him they live the life of the imagination. Liberate them from what oppresses, but so that they may still live the life of the imagination.
Synge’s history was peculiar. He took up music as his profession and studied it in Germany, Rome, and Paris; and having only a very small income, for economy’s sake always lived with poor people. In Paris he stayed with a man cook and his wife, who was a couturière. He told me that they had but one sitting-room, in which the man did his cooking and the wife her sewing, with another sewing-woman who helped. When, as sometimes happened, a large order for hats came in, Synge, who by this time had given up music for philology, would drop his studies and apply himself also to hat-making, bending wires, etc. After a year or so he moved into a hotel, where he met my son, who urged him to leave Paris for the west of Ireland and apply himself to the study of Irish. Among these western peasants he thenceforth spent a great part of every winter, living as one of the family, they calling one another by their Christian names; and he told me that he would rather live among them than in the best hotel.
Synge was morally one of the most fastidious men I ever met, at once too sensitive and too proud and passionate for anything unworthy. He was a well-built, muscular man, with broad shoulders, carrying his head finely. He had large, light-hazel eyes which looked straight at you. His conversation, like his book on the Aran Islands, had the charm of entire sincerity, a quality rare among men and artists, though it be the one without which nothing else matters. He neither deceived himself nor anybody else, and yet he had the enthusiasm of the poet. In this combination of enthusiasm and veracity he was like that other great Irishman, Michael Davitt. Like Davitt, also, he was without any desire to be pugnacious; resolute, yet essentially gentle, he was a man of peace.
[THE MODERN WOMAN]
Reflections on a New and Interesting Type
