Out of his habit of mind the egotist gains two valuable qualities. First of all he learns how to manage himself. This, of course, is not the same as the high and difficult art of self-mastery, yet it counts for much that a man should know how to get the best and leave out the worst from his life, even though that life be in its essential mean and meagre or vicious and self-indulgent. Self-management, smooth and adroit, is eminently the Englishman’s accomplishment. The other quality is still more important; the egotist makes the best of all husbands if regard be had to the ordinary woman’s needs; for what are these if they are not all summed up in the one word—companionship? Now a wife cannot find a sufficing companionship in her husband’s business concerns. Here she is beaten by the confidential clerk. There is, however, one kind of friendship, one kind of companionship, which she alone can supply in the required abundance; it is when the husband talks of himself. Here is the chamber into which the wife enters willingly when everybody else keeps away: the husband’s talk of his pains and aches and tribulations. There is the pain in his knee or his elbow, or the never-to-be-sufficiently-indicated pain in his head or his back, or his cough, and how it differs from every previous cough in his experience, or bears a dangerous resemblance to some other body’s cough, together with the innumerable aches of his wounded and exaggerated self-love. All this wearisome detail about what is mostly nothing at all and which everybody else flees from, the “pleasing wife” listens to with an attentive and intelligent and credulous ear. It is her duty, or so she thinks it, and the greater the intelligence the greater the credulity. There are happy wives married to husbands whom it would bore to talk about themselves, but the happiest woman, in whom content ripens to its fullest, is the egotist’s wife. Like a bee in a flower, she hides herself almost out of sight in wifely devotion. He finds happiness in living in and for himself, she in living out of herself and in him. Both are pleased. This is English conjugal life as I have observed it; and here in perfection we have side by side our two methods of human growth.
[SYNGE AND THE IRISH.]
HE acrimonious dispute carried on in the newspapers over John M. Synge and his plays is the eternal dispute between the man of prose and the man of imagination. Synge’s plays, his prefaces to his plays, and his book on the Aran Islands, like his conversation, describe a little community rich in natural poetry, in fancy, in wild humour, and in wild philosophy; as wild flowers among rocks, these qualities spring out of their lives of incessant danger and incessant leisure; there are also bitter herbs. When I used to listen to Synge’s conversation, so rare and sudden, as now when I read or listen to what he has written, I can say to myself, “Here among these peasants is the one spot in the British Islands, the one spot among English-speaking people, where Shakespeare would have found himself a happy guest.”
The people in Mr. Shaw’s plays would not have bored him, only because nothing human would have ever bored Shakespeare; but they would not have inspired him. And though in their company he might have stayed for a time and been perhaps as witty as Oscar Wilde or Shaw, the lyrical Shakespeare, the poetical and creating Shakespeare, would soon have tired of their arid gaieties, and have gone to sit with the courteous peasants round their turf fires, that he might listen to their words, musical sentences, musical names, folk tales, and tales of apparitions, embodying images and thoughts and theories of life and a whole variegated world of lovely or bitter and sometimes savage emotion out of which to construct poetical drama—a very different thing from the drama of wit or satire or sensationalism whose inspiration is prose.
It was Synge’s luck that he found this people before the modern reformer had improved them off the face of the earth. Each of us has his destiny, and this was his. Every event in his life and every chance encounter did but help to push him along till he found his real self by living among them in the intimacy of their family life and in the closer intimacy that came from speaking with them a language into which they put their inmost feelings and longings, using English for what was merely external. It was his destiny to know these people and reveal them, and then die; and to be denounced as an obscene and indecent writer and artist by a set of people who will not listen and therefore cannot know, and whose service to Ireland consists in striving to shout down every distinguished Irishman.
Synge’s people are primitive in the sense that they are unspoiled. A lady of fashion among the Chinese would regard the foot of a European woman as primitive; we think it is unspoiled. Synge’s offence consists in showing that these people have never been moulded into the pattern that finds favour with the convent parlour and in the fashionable drawing-room. New York is proud of its progress and makes pretensions to high culture; and yet New York might do worse than turn aside and learn of these humble people. A young girl told a friend of mine that what she and her companions always look forward to in Ireland are the long winter evenings around the kitchen fire when the neighbours come in to talk. I fancy all New York is in constant conspiracy to cut as short as possible its dull winter evenings.