wh aye a os iby, PR 4 S534. a" nS S ISzZe2 CORNELL UNIVERSITY THE Joseph WuitmoreE Barry —- DRAMATIC LIBRARY THE GIFT OF TWO FRIENDS OF CorNneELL Universrry 1934 ee ee ornell University Libra TTT By the same Author THE REPERTORY THEATRE A RECORD AND A CRITICISM Mr. WILLIAM ARCHER writes: “Mr. Howe has a very pretty literary sense, without preciosity or affectation. . . . He studies the movement seriously, sympathetically, and with an _ intelligent attention to detail. It ought to be a real encouragement to everyone concerned in the Repertory enterprise to find their work followed with such eager interest and keen observation. The book is altogether a healthy sign of the theatrical times.” J. M. SYNGE UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME: HENRIK IBSEN By R. Extis Rogerrs WILLIAM MORRIS By Joun Drinkwater. THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK By A. Martin Freeman J. M. SYNGE A CRITICAL STUDY BY P. P. HOWE NEW YORK MITCHELL KENNERLEY MCMXII Re . yeh To MAIRE O’NEILL (Nora: Cathleen: Molly Pegeen: Deirdre) NOTE Tuts is not a biographical study of J. M. Synge. “Lies and lives will be written of him,” said Mr. Masefield, who was Synge’s friend: it is my wish not to add to either. It is more particularly my wish, since a book is shortly to make its appearance that will tell from direct reminiscence all that the world is entitled to hear, written by those who knew Synge well. This book is an essay in dramatic criticism merely, seeking to make clear the beauty and the value of the plays, and their place in English drama. I wish to make the fullest acknowledgment to Messrs. Maunsel and Company, Limited, the publishers of Synge’s complete works. I am indebted also to Sir Hugh Lane, for his consent to the reproduction, for the first time, of the portrait by Mr. J. B. Yeats, R.u.a., which is one of the series of portraits painted 9 J. M. SYNGE under the Lane Gift hanging in the Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modern Art; and to Mr. D. J. O'Donoghue, Librarian of University College, Dublin, for some kind assistance in drawing up a short Bibliography, which aims at being a mere sketch only. Py. Po Es Lonpown, 1912. 10 CONTENTS OHAPTER I. PRELIMINARIES Il. THE PLAYS [i] Ill. THE PLAYS [ii] IV. THE NOTEBOOKS V. DESIGN AND COMPOSITION VI. MEN AND WOMEN VII. THE PREFACES BIBLIOGRAPHY 1] PAGE 13 33 61 100 126 158 199 214 I PRELIMINARIES THERE is need for an essay On the Misuse of the Word Dramatic. Drama, by its nature, can come into being only when men are moved powerfully and suddenly to record the circumstances of life: for the dramatic form is the most exacting of literary forms, demanding a high and sustained emotion in the author ; and in its choice there lies implicit a certain impatience with other and less height- ened forms, with the slower and more detailed revelation of the epic or novel, with the moment- ariness of the lyric. The great ages of drama have thus been those when life has been raised to an unusual intensity, or viewed with an excited surprise. The ages of the novel have been those of calmer, more urbane contempla- tion. The artist in any sort may take what he desires from life, and, letting all else drop away, may raise this to a sudden height; or he may wind himself into life like a skein of silk about 13 J. M. SYNGE its heart. ‘What would he do,” asks Hamlet, in an intensity of feeling, “had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have? He would drown the stage with tears.” It is not altogether fanciful to think the dramatist impatient of the disability under which the novelist works: the novelist must sustain the march of a narrative ; the she said and said he and manner of the sun’s setting or a cab-horse’s passing while they said it —these things are the camp-followers of the novelist’s progress; excellent camp-followers ministering, under proper leadership, to truth and to our pleasure, but irking by their impor- tunity the creative artist of certain temperament in accertainmood. The dramatist is for striking out his words and actions in the round, as it were; his people must stand by virtue of their own concreteness—like chessmen ready to a player’s hand, rather than figures worked in silk on an arras. Everything felt by the dramatist shall go into them, and find expression through their mouths only; in his high mood, all else but direct speech and visible action is tiresome and redundant. Thus the dramatist lifts his art out of the literary, and may escape, as Ibsen’s Master Builder wished to escape when his own imagination moved him, from the “irrelevancy ” of books in a library. The motive and the cue for the dramatist’s passion, then, is this quick 14 PRELIMINARIES desire to make real his imaginings—under the influence, if our supposition be accurate, of surprise; of pleased or excited surprise. The method of realization need not be rapid—so only that the finished work stand quick and eager, leap- ing to the spectator’s imagination, a thing of essen- tials only. The dramatist’s impatience is with in- essentials, his disposition is to eliminate them ; in actual fact, a patient process, if he go on to observe the further critical canon of Hamlet, and “use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and—as I may say—whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temper- ance, that may give it smoothness”; but a process flattering to his impatience in the achieve- ment, by the very smoothness and temper of the finished work. If poetry be “emotion remem- bered in tranquillity,” as Wordsworth said, then drama is, or must seem to be, emotion visualized inaction; howsoever tranquil the after-mood of the dramatist. It is not dramatic that a distraught coal- heaver should execute sudden death upon a wife and seven children, nor that a commercial traveller should be reunited with a long-lost mother; these things are but newspaper “tragedy,” and newspaper “drama” ; neither of them undramatic of necessity but, until some dramatist’s imagination has come to them with 15 J. M. SYNGE pleasure and surprise, incidents merely in a vast and distracting universe. The Dramatic is not some quality inherent in, and common to, such incidents in the daily round as stand out by their violence or curiosity, as sub-editors believe ; notwithstanding they give the lie daily to their belief by tucking away such “ dramatic” circum- stances in a minor crevice of their sheet, since in a newspapered age these affairs of distraction and coincidence have become a daily occurrence. Nor are sub-editors alone in their misapprehen- sion; many a would-be dramatist shows a confi- dent belief in the essential dramatic virtue of a firearm. A pistol may or may not be dramatic in just the same degree as a beer-jug may or may not be dramatic; Mr. Masefield has drawn drama from the one, but half a hundred practis- ing dramatists have failed to get anything from the other but the bang; for the Dramatic is a quality not in things but in the imagination of the artist who can give to these things an extra- ordinary significance and purport. There might well be drama behind any little story of the courts ; but the drama does not lie in the police report, and evades the police-reporter’s manner. He is a supreme dramatist who can move us with some such story, let us say of a youth who killed, or tried to kill, his father, while digging potatoes in a field, and leave us saying at the 16 PRELIMINARIES end: “Fancy—all that sorrow and beauty out of a little story I wouldn’t have given a minute to in the police reports!” There is nothing undramatie or dramatic but imagination makes it so. The late Lionel Johnson, with his acute critical pen, scratched Boswell and found in him the dramatist; found in him “a dramatic instinct of seizing upon the quickest, liveliest, fullest aspect of things ; an unconquerable determination to make the most of life.” Boswell “dramatized ” Dr. Johnson, then, not recorded him merely: great biography has much akin with great drama: in another and less unsurprised age, Boswell might even have been a dramatist. Who, however, were the dramatists amongst Boswell’s con- temporaries? Who but Goldsmith, who had returned from wandering on the Continent to find London, whether viewed with his Chinese philosopher’s eyes or with his own, full of strange pleasure and excitement ; and Sheridan, who came fresh to London also, not a patient Scotsman like Boswell (Boswell would never, one thinks, have abandoned himself to the sustained emotional exaltation necessary to the writing of great drama), but with all an Irish- man’s capacity to be continually pleased and excited at the surprising exercise of his own wits. B 17 J. M. SYNGE The present is not the moment for the essay we have desiderated. May we, however, since it will prove to our purpose in a moment, go but such a little way into the nature of the Dramatic as to agree upon this: That to come to life, and thus to the theatre, “with pleasure and excite- ment,” is of the essence of the making of drama ? The dramatist will have the instinct to seize upon things at their quickest, liveliest, and fullest; we have added, as corollary to this, that he will be impatient of the other literary forms with their various restrictions. In Eng- land, religion has never lent to life an intensity which has eventuated in drama of the first magnitude, as it did for a splendid century in Greece ; nevertheless, in England also religion was the first motive to drama. But it was temporal excitement, the sudden splendour of a newly illumined world, that possessed the age called Elizabethan, and thrust it hot-foot into drama; minor men even, without being in any full sense dramatists, struck out plays in their divine impatience, plays that can still give pleasure, a thing that can be said of the theatri- cal journey-work of no other epoch ; other men, of less passionate mood, struck into lyric, the common by-product of an age of drama: while Shakespeare came fresh and unspoiled to London, to look on at all the wonders with new eyes. 18 PRELIMINARIES How much less fresh and unspoiled the enthu- siasm of the dramatists of the Restoration : still, they came to their restored theatre, rescued from the Puritans, with real pleasure and excitement, and there were real dramatists amongst them. With Goldsmith and Sheridan the excited surprise was in themselves only, and not in their age ; an accidental outcome of individual environ- ment, but present nevertheless. We may say the same of Wilde and of Mr. Bernard Shaw ; of Mr. Shaw in particular, whose unfailing sur- prise at a world of his own witty invention sufficed to make him, and has sufficed to keep him, a dramatist. For the rest, the theatre has been supplied for a century by its own craftsmen, unsurprisable. Congreve and Vanbrugh, having nothing to say, did say it very well; whereas Pinero and Jones, having nothing to say, do not say it very well ; they merely shape it very well. Journeymen at work, for no better cue nor motive than to keep the theatres open, cannot be surprised into making great drama. In all the English drama, from Sheridan and Goldsmith to Mr. Shaw, there is only one name that will go up amongst the greatest, and that is the name of another Irishman, J. M. Synge. 19 J. M. SYNGE ii John Millington Synge was born at Rath- farnham, co. Dublin, April 16, 1871, of an old Wicklow family which had given, one is told, a long line of bishops and archbishops to the ascendancy party. He was educated at Trinity College. After taking his degree he went first to Germany, where he had some idea of training himself for the musical profession, but contented himself with reading German liter- ature. By January 1895 he appears to have been living alone in Paris. We hear of him in Rome, and travelling on foot through France and Bavaria; he travelled much, and on an in- come of some forty pounds a year, but, although he played his fiddle, as Goldsmith played his flute, it is unlikely that he ever did so for a livelihood, but in return for stories only, from Bavarian peasants and Italian sailors. In Paris he lived in a top-floor room of a students’ hotel in the Latin quarter: here he read a great deal of French literature, chiefly the classics ; and wrote a little for Irish periodicals, occasionally to the augment- ation of his income. An Irishman who met him at this period in literary company did not find Synge “impressive.” In 1899 Mr. W. B. Yeats discovered him in his Paris room reading Racine, and looked at one or two of his pieces, 20 PRELIMINARIES and found that what was wrong with them was that all the vivid life Synge had known had cast no light into his writings. At Mr. Yeats’ sug- gestion Synge went back to live in Ireland: to utilize the Irish which he had learned in youth but was beginning to forget; to “express a life that has never found expression”; and to write for the national theatre Mr. Yeats was then starting. For the next few years he lived a part of every year in Aran, in the extreme west; he liked the life so well that it was not long before he made a journey back to Paris, to sell his books and his bed. He wrote a book about his daily life on the islands, which did not at first find a publisher, and about this time (1900-1901) con- tributed some articles on Irish literature to the London Speaker. Henceforward he divided his year between London, Dublin, and the wilder parts of Ireland. In 1903 Mr. Masefield found him in his room in Handel Street, Bloomsbury, typing his earliest plays on the old-fashioned machine which he used always. The first of these plays was performed in a Dublin hall at the end of 1903, and others quickly after, by the little company which soon, because of its suc- cess, moved into the Abbey Theatre. From this time Synge lived a great deal in the theatre, engaged in its practical work with Lady Gregory and Mr. Yeats. He liked this life, “lived as 21 J. M. SYNGE it were in a ship at sea.” In January 1907, The Playboy of the Western World was per- formed; and Mr. Birrell, making his first appearance in Ireland about this time, was astonished to find Dublin obsessed not with any matter of Home Rule but with the question whether the new play was or was not a vilification of Irish womanhood. Riots and abuse shook Synge’s physical nature, which was never strong ; but they left his intellect untroubled, and his determination to do his own clear work unin- fluenced. He was in London again with the Abbey Theatre company at the Great Queen Street Theatre in June 1907; when his plays were first seen on the London stage, and granted immediate recognition by the discerning. He went back to Dublin in a bad state of health, and worked there on his last play, and at pre- paring his poems for the press. He was a drifting, silent man, who never spoke of himself; at the end, he went into a nursing home, and died there, March 24, 1909. He was never married. When an old man on the road in Wicklow asked him about himself, Synge writes: “I told him that I was born in Dublin, but that I had travelled afterwards and been in Paris and Rome, and seen the Pope Leo XIII.” Outside of the work he left, that is his life, one thinks, as he would have it told. 22 PRELIMINARIES iil However far beyond Ireland the appeal and in- fluence of Synge’s work may now go, it is impor- tant, in an examination of that work, to look a little further at the outset into the immediate circumstances that called it forth, It can by no means be set down to accident that the sole major dramatist who has written in English in our time should have been moved to write in a country where life still has its aspects that are free and wild, and where speech is unconscious of the newspapers; and for a theatre that is young and vigorous and unobscured. London, since it outgrew the just proportions of a city, has produced no great drama. Paris does not produce great drama. No great drama has come out of the United States of America, where the life is young and its sudden expansion such as should have moved men powerfully to express themselves in the stronger arts. It is noteworthy that the one supreme dramatist of the century which has passed emerged from a small nation, where the face of life was still simple, although beginning to be distracted ; and that his plays at first were laughed at as parochial. Is this fancied antipathy between great drama and great cities—where the confu- sion of irrelevant business obscures the things 23 J. M. SYNGE it is the dramatist’s concern, above all other artists, to seize at their quickest and most lively— no more than fanciful? Mr. Yeats himself has noted the disconcerting contradiction, that drama has need of cities that it may find men in suffi- cient numbers, and that great cities destroy the emotions to which drama appeals; but Mr. Yeats had the good fortune, or the good sense, to work for a theatre in a city less than the largest, and incalculably less a prey to distrac- tion. Dublin is a great deal nearer to Periclean Athens or Elizabethan London than to modern London or modern Paris. A man may see life in a city the size of Dublin, in every sense but that of the cosmopolitan guide-book; he may even, without ricking his powers of comprehen- sion, see it whole ; in Paris, in New York, above all in London, it is not possible to see life for the lives. We may surely conclude that it was not by accident that Ireland came by a dramatist, nor that Synge, having found in the older life there the clearness of vision that the cities of Europe had failed to give him, shaped his plays for the Dublin stage. In 1899 Mr. George Moore, another sojourner in Paris, but one who, unlike Synge, had drunk deeply of its influences and been satisfied, took his way to Dublin, in response—as he has himself told us—to a vision not unlike that summoning 24 PRELIMINARIES the apostle to Damascus ; and found “the poets singing in all the bowers of Merrion Square; and all in a new language that the poets had learned, the English language having been dis- covered by them, as it had been discovered by me, to be a declining language, a language that was losing its verbs.” This was eight years after the formation of the Irish National Literary Society ; Mr. Yeats, with Mr. George Russell, Mr. Edward Martyn, and the late Lionel John- son for henchmen, had done good work in clear- ing a way for the arts in Ireland, by their criticism setting Clarence Mangan, who wrote “ Dark Rosaleen,” at the head of the national poets in the place of Thomas Davis the politician: and now the Irish National Theatre was about to come to birth, with the assistance of actors imported from London, it is true, and with no more dramatic justification than Mr. Yeats’ own beautiful and shadowy Countess Cathleen, and a fairly capable imitation from Ibsen by Mr. Martyn. Once born, however—and Mr. Moore has given an account of the birth-pains, irreverent as Sterne’s account of the arrival of Tristram Shandy—the theatre quickly grew into some- thing of account. The London actors returned to grace their native stage, and their places were taken by young people, Dublin born, who worked by day in shops and offices, and had 25 J. M. SYNGE this great virtue, that they could speak the “new language” of the national drama that, in one way and another, soon came to be written for them. By 1902 the little company was able to pay a visit to the St. George’s Hall in London; with such effect, that in a single night the Irish peasant of Boucicault, and of universal English acceptance, with his pipe in his hat and his shillelagh and his vocabulary of faix-bedad-at all- at all, was destroyed for ever. The dramatists at this time were Mr. Yeats, whose Cathleen- ni- Houlihan was a genuinely dramatic little play of real national character; and Lady Gregory. For two years after this the company still per- formed in Dublin in halls of one sort or another ; and for presentation in one of these the first plays of J. M. Synge were written. The third of his plays was performed in a theatre. The Abbey Theatre, converted from a corn-store, in the centre of the city, is a genuine theatre, although possessing a certain conscious remoteness from the upholstered and gilt temples where sacrifice is made to the goddess of the Box Office; it seats some five or six hundred, and is fully equipped with all necessary matters of the stage. This is the theatre for which J. M. Synge worked, getting no money in his lifetime from the performance of his plays. He was a thorough man of the theatre, happy in its activi- 26 PRELIMINARIES ties, incessant in rehearsal, and in teaching the actors with his own lips the long, peculiar rhythm of the speech of the plays. By the time The Playboy of the Western World was presented, it is probable that the Abbey Theatre in Dublin was the best theatre—the theatre possessing in the highest perfection all the essentials of its art—in the English-speaking world. iv The best portrait of the man—the portrait that seems to show most of the author of the plays—hangs in the new Municipal Gallery at Dublin.’ It shows a homely Irish face, gallicized just a little deliberately ; with features that are insignificant, save for remarkable eyes. The black hair is in a careless sweep, the attire negligent but determinedly ordinary. The hands are the delicate hands of the crafts- man. You come back to the eyes—eyes that assert nothing, that begin by questioning your assertions merely, that hold you under their calm, amused gaze, a gaze tolerant and a little cynical. They are curiously wide eyes, lidded a little lazily. ... As you look, the impartial gaze appears to have shifted ; it is beyond you, on the things of eternal concern. 1 By Mr. J. B. Yeats, n.u.a., reproduced as frontispiece. 27 J. M. SYNGE The portrait shows Synge ‘sitting still,” as he said: Mr. Masefield found him so, in a roomful of people in London, the least con- spicuous of the company; “watching with the singular grave intensity with which he watched life.” Another good portrait shows him sitting, watching, at rehearsal. ‘“ His mind was too busy with the life to be busy with the affairs or the criticism of life.”? « All wild sights appealed to Synge, he did not care whether they were typical of anything else or had any symbolical meaning at all. If he had lived in the days of piracy he would have been the fiddler in a pirate- schooner, him they called ‘the music.’ ‘The music’ looked on at everything with dancing eyes but drew no sword.” “He was a solitary, undemonstrative man, never asking pity, nor complaining, nor seeking sympathy... all folded up in brooding intellect, knowing nothing of new books and newspapers, reading the great masters alone.”*? Mr. Masefield finds the man in the Poems, Mr. Yeats in the unarranged, unspeculating pages of the book on the Aran Islands. In the chapters that follow, our more particular concern will be with the plays, to find the dramatist there. 1 Mr. Masefield. 2 Mr. Jack B. Yeats. 3 Mr. W. B. Yeats. 28 PRELIMINARIES Vv Mr. Yeats has expressed the doubt whether Synge would ever have written at all had he not chanced to re-discover Ireland. Perhaps there is the pardonable pride of the friend in this, who has seen his counsel bear fruit ; but one need not think so. Certainly Synge came back to life, from letters, with pleasure and excitement. It would be hard to find a parallel in literature to the suddenness with which the world was simplified and illumined for this silent, contemplative man, conscious from the first of the wish to be a writer, and until past his thirtieth year achieving nothing. The little impressionist essays he had to show in Paris seemed to Mr. Yeats pale and remote from life “as images reflected from mirror to mirror.” He had put nothing into them of the spirit of the circuses on the outer Boulevards, that he took pleasure in watching. Like Goldsmith, he had wandered over a lot of Europe, living in close touch with its people; they had not moved him to make drama. He had passed places, when travelling by night in France or Bavaria, “that seemed so enshrined in the blue silence of night one could not believe they reawaken”; their beauty had not stirred in him the means to its expression. Enormous mobs 29 J. M. SYNGE in Rome or Paris did not make him feel the tension of human excitement he felt, he writes, when he came ‘among an insignificant crowd in Connaught. Something in Ireland fired him: something in Wicklow, in the “ grey and wintry sides” of its many glens; something in the islands of the West, “filled with people whose lives have the strange quality that is found in the oldest poetry and legend.” His mind and temperament and preparation were like a train well laid, waiting only for a spark to fire it; something in the life he found in Ireland supplied this spark—he cannot himself define it. We find him writing in his journal : I got on a long road running through a bog, 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 in Ballyferriter, the men in home- spun 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 grey 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 intense insular clearness one sees only in Ireland,” he notes again; and it was Ireland that brought clearness to his own mind, always 30 PRELIMINARIES given to musing, and up to now a little dark. Henceforward he was on the roads a great deal, with those olive bogs of the West for back- ground to his thoughts; and for part of each year he made his home on Aran, among “the men who live forgotten in those worlds of mist,” giving his whole care and concern to the daily trifles of their life, and speaking their curiously simple yet dignified language. Here, among people filled with the oldest passions of the world, life took on an intensity of clearness that made of Synge a dramatist. Here there came to him the mood, “in which we realise with im- mense distress the short moment we have left us to experience all the wonder and beauty of the world.” It is the mood of all Synge’s work, the mood of passion and tenderness we shall find in one after another of the plays. Synge did not merely find Ireland, he came back to it. To see life with new eyes is a good motive to art; but to see a well-known and well-loved life with a new and vivid intensity after absence, is perhaps a better. Synge’s was no passing mood, with motivity in it to an ode on Ireland Revisited. He knew that his mind had ended its wanderings, and his imagination entered into its kingdom. No writer has seen Ireland with such intimacy at the same time with such detachment. ‘The plays of no drama- 31 J. M. SYNGE tist present so over-powering a vision of general reality. In his first play, is it fanciful to think we may hear Synge speaking in the words of the blind beggar whose eyes have found light? “I’m thinking by the mercy of God,” says he, “it’s few sees anything but them is blind for a space.” For the sudden intense glory with which life illumined itself for Synge was the motive to his art, as it is the cue to its under- standing. 32 II THE PLAYS For performance in Dublin between 1908 and 1909, J. M. Synge wrote six plays. Three, The Well of the Saints, The Playboy of the Western World and Deirdre of the Sorrows, are in three acts; two, Riders to the Sea and In the Shadow of the Glen, are one-act plays. A play in two acts, The Tinker’s Wedding, has not yet been performed in Dublin, but after Synge’s death was seen in London. The play we may regard as Synge’s earliest—although not the first to be seen on the stage—is The Well of the Saints. ii One or more centuries ago, a saint, going his round through the churches of Ireland with a long cloak on him and naked feet, came from the west into the east, and brought with him, slung at his side, a sup of water from across a bit of the sea where there was an island and c 33 J. M. SYNGE a well and the grave of the four beautiful saints. The play opens at a cross-roads near by a Wicklow village, and a church; and here, seated that the people may see them who are passing to the fair, are Martin Doul and Mary Doul, a pair of blind and weather-beaten beggars. Through their ears, sharpened to the smallest sounds of the warm country-side, to the nicest distinctions in temper of Timmy the smith breathing in his forge and Molly Byrne walking and swinging her legs upon the road, we hear of the approach of the Saint, to do a wonder and to bring seeing to the blind. At first Martin Doul and Mary Doul will have none of his wonders, when Timmy and Molly and the others bring them the news; for they are wonder enough themselves, with a right to the crossing of the roads, and a great contempt for the seeing rabble. Mary Doul, however, is overawed that a saint, a fine saint, should come walking to her; and Martin Doul is worked upon by a desire to look upon his wife, a woman he has heard called the wonder of the western world. The Saint cures them; we hear the voice of Martin Doul crying out that he sees the walls of the church and the green bits of ferns in them, and the Saint, and the great width of the sky. He runs in half-foolish with joy, and sees Molly Byrne, with her grand hair and 34 THE WELL OF THE SAINTS soft skin and eyes, sitting in Mary Doul’s seat. When Molly makes game of him, and the people laugh, he goes from one young girl to another, and the people laugh louder ; then he turns to face Mary Doul coming from the church with her sight cured also. They stare blankly at one another. .. . The Saint is seen in the church-door with his head bent in prayer. ‘ Let me hit her one good one, for the love of Almighty God,” cries Martin Doul, “and I'll be quiet after till I die.” The Saint rebukes them, urges them to look not upon their two pitiful selves but upon the splendour of the spirit of God, and goes on to where there are a deaf woman, and two men without sense, and children blind from their birth. When the curtain rises again, it is to show the village roadside, with Martin Doul at the door of the forge, working for Timmy the smith— working hard, according to his thinking, and getting less than when he was sitting blinded at the cross-road. Martin Doul, indeed, is turn- ing against his sight ; for now he sees the world for an ugly place and his wife for an ugly woman, instead of seeing all with his mind’s eye just as he chose to see it, and himself a wonder into the bargain. The grand day of his life proved but a bad day after all—a bad day for 35 J. M. SYNGE Martin Doul and for Mary Doul; and, thinks Timmy the smith, for every other person, setting them, as it has, “talking of nothing, and think- ing of nothing, but the way they do be looking in the face.” But if Martin Doul is not the wonder he was, he is still a wonder; for it is few, he is thinking, that see anything, but those that have been blind for a space. Under the nose of Timmy, he tries to tempt away Molly Byrne ; for the reason that only himself has fit eyes to look on her beauty, and not a man who has been looking out a long while on the bad days of the world. Molly is half-amused and half-mesmerized for a moment; then turns from him, and puts shame upon him before the smith and Mary Doul. Once more Mary Doul and Martin Doul face one another. But he cannot see her clearly, and he appeals to her frantically to know whether it is the darkness of thunder, or are they both dimming again? She hits him with an empty sack across the face, and goes off; Timmy and Molly go together into the forge ; and we leave Martin Doul turning to grope out, with hell’s long curse on his tongue. When the third act opens, Martin Doul and Mary Doul are blind again, sitting back at the cross-road relishing an early spring day in the sounds of all the little things that are stirring. Sight is a queer thing for upsetting a man, is 36 THE WELL OF THE SAINTS Martin Doul’s conclusion. They can no longer think themselves beautiful; but there is great consolation in the thought that the hair Mary Doul has seen reflected in the pools will be white in a short while, and then she will have a face that will be a great wonder, with the soft white hair falling around it. And Martin Doul will be letting his beard grow, a beautiful, long, white, silken, streamy beard. There will be a fine warmth soon in the sun, and a sweetness in the air. They listen to the fine stir of the bleating lambs and the laying hens a mile off on the face of the hill. . . . To them, listening, comes a faint sound of a bell. It is the old Saint returning! In despair, they grope into a gap in the hedge; for what good will their grey hairs be themselves, if they have their sight, and see them falling each day, and turning dirty in the rain? The Saint comes in; and with him Timmy and Molly to be married, with kind hearts for the thought of Martin Doul and Mary Doul sitting dark again, after seeing awhile and working for their bread. Those the Saint cures a second time go on seeing till the hour of death. Saint. Kneel down, I’m saying, the ground’s dry at your feet. Martin Dout (with distress). Let you go on your own way, holy father. We're not calling you at all. 37 J. M. SYNGE Saint. I’m not saying a word of penance, or fasting itself, for I'm thinking the Lord has brought you great teaching in the blinding of your eyes; so you've no call- now to be fearing me, but let you kneel down till I give you your sight. Martin Dour (more troubled). We're not asking our sight, holy father, and let you walk on your own way, and be fasting, or praying, or doing anything that you will, but leave us here in our peace, at the crossing of the roads, for it’s best we are this way, and we're not asking to see. Saint (to the People). Is his mind gone that he’s no wish to be cured this day, or to be living or working, or looking on the wonders of the world? Martin Dout. It’s wonders enough I seen in a short space for the life of one man only. “'There’s little use talking with the like of them,” is the Saint’s conclusion. Mary Doul, however, is persuaded; and Martin Doul, letting himself appear to be, kneels also, and, when the Saint holds up his little can with the water, knocks it rocketing across the stage. If he is a poor dark sinner, he has sharp ears; and if some have a right to be working and sweating like Timmy the smith, or fasting and praying and talking holy talk like the Saint, they themselves have a right to be sitting blind, “hearing a soft wind turning round the little leaves of the spring and feeling the sun, and we not tormenting our souls with the sight of the gray days, and the holy men, and the 38 THE WELL OF THE SAINTS dirty feet is trampling the world.” For the seeing are not understanding them at all. In this at last the Saint acquiesces; he puts his blessing upon them as they go off the two of them to the towns of the south, and Molly Byrne and Timmy the smith and the people go with the Saint into the church. iil “ At times during Synge’s last illness,” Mr. W. B. Yeats has written, “ Lady Gregory and I would speak of his work and always find some pleasure in the thought that unlike ourselves, who had made our experiments in public, he would leave to the world nothing to be wished away.” There is nothing experimental in The Well of the Saints. It is so complete and powerful a play, that one can think only of the experiments which must have preceded it and made it possible ; Synge’s consideration, perhaps, of Les Aveugles of Maeterlinck, by which he was enabled to secure for the theatre the whole of the tingling sensitiveness of the blind, and to reject the paleness of their humanity as they come from the cold hands of Maeter- linck. Synge’s blind people are the “happy and blind”; not the poor imperfect things dependent upon one who can see, tragic in themselves and overwhelmed by tragedy so soon as his support 39 J. M. SYNGE is withdrawn from them; fit symbols, if you so choose to make them, of a generation of men moving feebly in the dark and stretching out hands for the hand that is denied them. ‘There is nothing for the symbolists in The Well of the Saints. Symbolism may be forced upon any work of art: when Mary Doul says, “And what good’ll our gray hairs be itself, if we have our sight, the way we'll see them falling each day, and turning dirty in the rain?”—you may think, if you choose, of the superiority of the imaginative life over that of the reason, and find in the remark all that is to be found in the prophetic books of Blake; but Mary Doul and Martin Doul will remain happy, self-sufficient human figures to mock at you for your pains. Synge came back from ten years spent in close contact with Maeterlinck and Mallarmé and Huysmans, to look on life rather with the eyes of Moliére and Rabelais and Villon, and clearest of all with his own. What we shall be better employed in finding in this first play is evidence of Synge’s astonishingly certain sense of the theatre; his command of a dialogue apt and pointed for comedy, and capable at the same time of every effect of increased tensity ; the racy clearness of the characterization, and the form and finish and personality of the whole work. We may note the excellence and economy of the stage-directions, 40 } THE WELL OF THE SAINTS as that when Timmy comes with the first news of the wonder to be done, Martin Doul is “amused, but incredulous ”—a whole revelation of his character. Timmy is a strong man and a sensible, but blind to many things that Martin Doul is all alive to; so that the bright beauty of Molly Byrne comes less acytely to him than to the sharpened senses of the man who has no eyes to look on her. Molly Byrne is beautiful, but shallow like a little dancing stream. The Saint is a fine saint, but with no humour at all. Of the others, we may note another girl, the Bride, who is hushed a little from Molly’s noisiness, and looks out with some reverence for the coming of the Saint—all these are sharp and eager characters, no mere “ persons of the play.” We may notice too how Mary Doul is clearly distinguished from Martin Doul; sharing his concern to be thought a great wonder, his relish for the little things for the ear and scent, but having no such turn for the men as Martin has for the young girls, and not the half of his bravery or defiance; she going off a little despondingly in the end of all, while he is turned “a likely man” again. Impossible now to speak of them as “two blind, weather-beaten beggars”; they are Martin Doul and Mary Doul, with the great sense of individuality of the Irish peasant, and of all Synge’s people. 41 J. M. SYNGE At the back of all the play hangs that extra- ordinary atmosphere of reality, imparted, made palpable almost, through the sense of sownd—of the lambs and hens stirring, little sticks break- ing, and the grass moving, not for their own sakes merely, but together creating an illusion of real life behind, of the life of the village, and of the whole of life behind that. Partly this illusion comes to us in this play with the par- ticularity of the blind ; but we shall find it in all the work of Synge. A “queerness,” if you will; but followed a little further, we shall find this power of Synge’s used always in the service of reality. And see the normality of the ending. After the queer distortion of the point of view—“the seeing is a queer lot”—we are left to contemplate marriage for Timmy and Molly, and the daily life of the forge; while the blind pair cease troubling them, and go out to the different joy of tramping the roads. It is an equal triumph; and all sorts, normal and ab- normal, have an equal right to live: an equal right to live in art, so that they be not poor things, nor freaks merely. The Well of the Saints deals, if you will, with the sorrow of the vanishing of beauty and the irony of fulfilled desire ; but it will be well not to make too much of the statement, for Synge, we shall find, “deals with” very little other than the broad passing 42 THE WELL OF THE SAINTS of life itself, before watchful, humorous eyes. But when Mary Doul speaks of “setting fools mad a short while, and then to be turning a thing would drive off the little children from your feet,” it is a note we shall hear again in the plays. And in all Synge’s people there is something of the little children of whom Martin Doul speaks, who “do be listening to the stories of an old woman, and do be dreaming after in the dark night that it’s in grand houses of gold they are, with speckled horses to ride, and do be waking again, in a short while, and they destroyed with the cold, and the thatch dripping, maybe, and the starved ass braying in the yard.” iv Upon three plays, The Well of the Saints, Riders to the Sea, and In the Shadow of the Glen, it is probable that Synge was working at one time; together with a first draft of The Tinker’s Wedding, which was set aside, however, and not brought to completion until several years later. In the Shadow of the Glen’ was per- formed some four or five months before Riders to the Sea; in the latter play, Synge has gone for his inspiration, we shall find, from the moun- 1 This play was first performed and printed under the title of The Shadow of the Glen. Synge, however, ina note to The Tinker’s Wedding, writes of the play under the above title ; and this seems to be the form that his publishers have finally adopted. 43 J. M. SYNGE tains and glens of Wicklow to the islands of the West. It will be convenient to treat the Wicklow plays together. Vv In the kitchen of the last cottage at the head of a long glen in County Wicklow, there is a body lying, covered with a sheet, on a bed against the wall. It is the master of the house ; his young wife is moving about the room, settling a few things, lighting candles, and looking now and then uneasily at the bed. When a knock comes softly at the door, she hastily takes up a stocking with money from the table and puts it ' in her pocket. She opens the door; it is a wild night, with rain falling ; and she asks the tramp who is knocking for admittance, to come in. He is a young tramp, who brings with him some of the romance of the roads beyond the glen. Over the threshold, he starts at the sight of the bed, and will not put out his hand, when she pulls back a bit of the sheet, to feel whether the body is cold ; but he settles down by the fire to a glass of whisky and one of the dead man’s pipes. The oppression of the hills is over the two of them, as they speak of the dead: of the old man who was always cold, every day and every night since Nora knew him; and of Patch Darcy, a fine man, who ran up into the back 44, THE SHADOW OF THE GLEN hills with nothing on him but an old shirt and died mad, to be eaten by the crows. But another young man, a kind of a farmer, has come up now from the sea to live in a cottage beyond ; and Nora goes out in the rain to find him, so that he may, she says, go down into the glen and tell the people that the old man is dead. When the door closes on her the tramp seats himself again and with her needle and thread begins stitching his coat; when, in an instant, the sheet is drawn slowly down and Dan Burke looks out from the bed. The tramp falls back in terror from his stool, and begins to say a prayer for the soul of the dead man; when at once, outside in the night, a long whistle is heard. Then Dan Burke sits right up in his bed and speaks fiercely ; he has, says he, a bad wife in the house. The tramp gives him a sup of the whisky, and a heavy stick from the cupboard ; then hastily covers the old man over again, for there is a voice on the path. The tramp goes back to his stitching; Nora comes in with Michael Dara, the young herd. The two of them settle to tea-drinking, and speak of Patch Darcy and the lonesome life it has been for Nora with nobody but the old man, in the long nights and the long days; “when you do be sitting looking out from a door the like of that door, and seeing nothing but the mists rolling 45 J. M. SYNGE down the bog, and the mists again and they rolling up the bog, and hearing nothing but the wind crying out in the bits of broken trees were left from the great storm, and the streams roaring with the rain.” She will not be talking that way, however, when she marries a young man now; they will have nothing they will be afraid to let their minds on when the mist is down. If it isa lonesome place, Michael Dara is thinking it is a good sum the old man has left behind. Michael has his arm round Nora by now; and we see Dan Burke sit up noiselessly in his bed. . . . Dan sneezes violently. Michael jumps for the door, but Dan, in his queer white clothes, is there before him. Nora turns slowly to the tramp with the stifled question, “Is it dead he is or living?” Then Dan orders her from the house, and the tramp speaks up for Nora; while Michael contributes the suggestion that there is a fine Union below in Rathdrum. She answers Dan fiercely, then plaintively ; and then the tramp breaks in with the joys of the road, for he knows all the ways a man can put food in his mouth. Tramp (at the door). Come along with me now, lady of the house, and it’s not my blather you'll be hearing only, but you'll be hearing the herons crying out over the black lakes, and you'll be hearing the grouse and the owls with them, and the larks and the big thrushes when the days are warm; and it’s not from the like of them you'll be 46 THE SHADOW OF THE GLEN hearing a tale of getting old like Peggy Cavanagh, and losing the hair off you, and the light of your eyes, but it’s fine songs you'll be hearing when the sun goes up, and there'll be no old fellow wheezing, the like of a sick sheep, close to your ear. Nora. I'm thinking it’s myself will be wheezing that time with lying down under the Heavens when the night is cold; but you’ve a fine bit of talk, stranger, and it’s with yourself Pll go. (She goes towards the door, then turns to Dan.) You think it’s a grand thing you're after doing with your letting on to be dead, but what is it at all? What way would a woman live in a lonesome place the like of this place, and she not making a talk with the men passing? And what way will yourself live from this day, with none to care you? What is it you'll have now but a black life, Daniel Burke? and it’s not long, I’m telling you, till you'll be lying again under that sheet, and you dead surely. [She goes out with the tramp. And Dan and Michael have peace for their drinks. vi There is no one-act play in the language for compression, for humanity, and for perfection of form, to put near In the Shadow of the Glen. From the moment of the rise of the curtain on that little Wicklow interior, to its fall—about half an hour—we are let into the lives of three | people, and the life and death of a fourth. It is a selected half-hour, that marches moment by AT J. M. SYNGE moment with true occurrence, and yet opens out into years that have passed and years that are to come. A typical half-hour, then, for purposes of drama; one of life’s supreme moments, in which character becomes concrete in action, and from which, as though from a high tableland, retrospect and prospect in equal streams flow down and away in the plains. Synge spoke poorly of Ibsen, but chiefly for his contentment with joyless and pallid words; outside Ibsen, perhaps we may say outside Rosmersholm, there is no match for the way in which the past is summarised for us while a group of people move and speak, with a perfectly natural regard for present truth, before our eyes. Ibsen’s people and Synge’s people, indeed the people of all good dramatists, move and speak with a heightened significance in every word and gesture, because of this elevation upon which they stand for their short traffic of the stage. It is the reason why Maeterlinck’s people for ever live as though in a room into which we look through a window with the Old Man in L’Intérieur; but Synge’s people do not appear unnaturally strange and solemn, like Maeterlinck’s, only extraordin- arily arresting and important; and Synge, unlike Ibsen in Rosmersholm, has only a few lines, and not four acts, in which to resume their 48 THE SHADOW OF THE GLEN past. Every line, therefore, must speak of their past, must reveal their character in the present, and must point us forward; and all this with perfect deference to reality. Impossible, you would say, that a story of how a rather comic old man shammed to be dead in order to spy upon his young wife, and how he turned her out of doors with a tramp, should reach the heights of tragic in- tensity! Before you have been five minutes looking into that Wicklow interior, the drama- tist will have his spell upon you. Nor is it the calm spell of a Dutch genre picture; the uneasy movements of Nora about the room, her look over her shoulder at the bed, the little soft knock coming at the door, these things, before a word is spoken, are contributing to your mood of expectant fear. The surprised start of the tramp is yours; as he lights his pipe, there is great virtue in that sharp light beneath his haggard face; their tone in the talk about Patch Darcy is telling you Nora’s story, but it is doing more also. You laugh, maybe, as the tramp falls back in terror from his chair, but laughter is soon caught at the throat by deeper feeling; this old man in his bed is no merely funny figure. Sharp upon his rising comes the long whistle in the wild night outside; sharp again upon that, the sound of Nora and the D 49 J. M. SYNGE young man on the path. It is a heart-wringing thing to see Nora sitting at the table speaking out the sorrows of childlessness, and lonesome- ness, and of beauty passing, to the chink of the coins she is counting and putting without care into little heaps, while the young man is taking them and counting them again and thinking not at all of what she is saying, but only that it is a good sum the old man has left behind. Be- tween the three men she sits—the old, cold man she thinks to be dead ; the innocent, worthless young man she will marry (for what way would she live if she didn’t ?) ; the young tramp, about whom we know little, who still sits there in the half light, piquing our interest. It is to him she turns, after that dreadful moment when the sight of Dan Burke stifles all words in her throat; then a half turn, no more, to Michael Dara; then, when at last she moves to face her husband, “passion propels her like a screw.”! It is inevitable that she should go out with the Tramp; he is the best man of them, as fine a man maybe as Patch Darcy, that fine man turned “‘queer,” whose queerness is there to be felt behind all the play. This feeling is nothing decadent or morbid, merely the sense of the sorrow of life passing without fulfilment; of 1 C. E. Montague, in the best criticism of the acting of Synge’s plays (In Dramatic Values). 50 RIDERS TO THE SEA sitting alone, and hearing the winds crying, and not knowing on what thing your mind would stay. Those who do not feel this sorrow, are left to sit down to a long life and a quiet life, and good health with it, and to a little taste of the stuff. Perhaps the Tramp speaks for Synge when he slowly says, “ It’s true, surely, and the Lord have mercy on us all.” vii Riders to the Sea is set in an island off the West of Ireland. The scene is again a cottage kitchen ; but here there are nets and oilskins upon the wall, and by the fire is the primitive pot-oven, for we have moved to one of the out- posts of the older life in Kurope. Here men’s fear is of the sea, from which alone they may snatch a livelihood. Standing by the wall are some new white boards; for there is sorrow upon this house. ~The old woman of the house is lying down within ; Cathleen, a girl of about twenty, finishes kneading a cake, puts it down in the pot-oven, wipes her hands, and begins to spin at the wheel; then Nora, a younger girl, comes softly in at the door. She has a bundle under her shawl; when she sees that the old woman is not in the kitchen, she takes it out: it is a shirt and a plain stocking, got off a 51 J. M. SYNGE drowned man. Are they Michael’s? If they are Michael’s, then the girls, the young priest has said, are to tell their mother that he’s got a clean burial, by the grace of God ; if not, then let no one say a word about them, for Maurya will cry and lament for the son of another woman, and hasn’t she been crying and keening nine days for Michael, and making great sorrow in the house? They hear the old woman moving about on the bed; Cathleen puts the ladder against the gable of the chimney, and hides the bundle in the turf-loft. Maurya comes from the inner room, and seats herself on a stool at the fire, complaining querulously that they should be getting more turf. There is a cake baking at the fire for Bartley, says Cath- leen; he will want it when the tide turns and he goes to the fair on the mainland, if the sea by the white rocks should not be too bad for the hooker to go when the tide has turned to the wind. A gust blew the door open after Nora came in; now Bartley comes, hur- riedly and quietly, and makes his preparations to be off. He will ride down to the sea on the red mare, and the grey pony shall run behind him. It will be a good fair for horses, they are saying below; this is the one boat for two weeks or more, and they will be hard set from now with only the one man left to work. With 52 RIDERS TO THE SEA the blessing of God on them, Bartley goes; but Maurya, her old woman’s sorrow become a grievance with her saying it over, will not give him her blessing. The girls send her after him with the forgotten cake; she may go down by the short way to the spring well, and give it to him as he passes, and with it her blessing also. The moment she is gone, the girls get down the bundle from the loft. Nora (who has taken up the stocking and counted the stitches, crying out). It’s Michael, Cathleen, it’s Michael ; God spare his soul, and what will herself say when she hears this story, and Bartley on the sea? CaTHLrENn (taking the stocking). It’s a plain stocking. Nora. It’s the second one of the third pair I knitted, and I put up three-score stitches, and I dropped four of them. CaTHLEEN (counts the stitches). It’s that number is in it. (Crying out). Ah, Nora, isn’t it a bitter thing to think of him floating that way to the far north, and no one to keen him but the black hags that do be flying on the sea? Nora (swinging herself half round, and throwing out her arms on the clothes). And isn’t it a pitiful thing when there is nothing left of a man who was a great rower and fisher but a bit of an old shirt and a plain stocking ? CaTHtEEN (after an instant), Tell me is herself coming, Nora? I hear a little sound on the path. They slip the shirt and the stocking into a hole in the chimney corner; and Maurya 53 J. M. SYNGE comes in, very slowly, with the cake still in her hand. She crosses to the fire without saying a word and begins to keen softly. Has she not seen Bartley? She has seen the fearfullest thing. She stood at the spring well, and Bartley came first on the red mare, and she tried to give him Godspeed, but something choked the words in her throat, and she looked up then at the grey pony, and there was Michael upon it—with fine clothes on him, and new shoes on his feet... . Through the half-open door behind them the girls hear a noise: someone is crying out by the seashore. Maurya continues her lament without hearing anything: her lament for the husband, and the husband’s father, and the six fine sons; some of whom were found, and some of whom were not found—gone now, the lot of them. She pauses, and the door opens softly, and old women begin to come in; crossing themselves on the threshold, and kneeling down in front of the stage with red petticoats over their heads. CaTHLEEN. It’s Michael, God spare him, for they're after sending us a bit of his clothes from the far north. [She reaches out and hands Maurya the clothes that belonged to Michael. Maurya stands up slowly, and takes them in her hands. Nora looks out. Nora. They're carrying a thing among them, and there’s water dripping out of it and leaving a track by the big stones. 54 RIDERS TO THE SEA CaTHLEEN (in a whisper to the women who have come in). Is it Bartley it is? One or rHE Women. It is, surely, God rest His soul. [Two younger women come in and pull out the table. Then men carry in the body of Bartley, laid on a plank, with a bit of a sail over it, and lay it on the table.] CaTHLEEN (to the women as they are doing so). What way was he drowned ? OnE or THE Women. The grey pony knocked him over into the sea, and he was washed out where there is a great surf on the white rocks. Maurya spreads out the pieces of Michael’s clothes beside the body, and sprinkles them with Holy Water. Then she puts the empty cup mouth downwards on the table, and lays her hands together on Bartley’s feet. They are all together now, and the end is come. Bartley will have a fine coffin out of the white boards, and a deep grave surely. “No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied.” Vill Going to that “wet rock in the Atlantic,” where he found a life “almost patriarchal,” Synge yet found a tragedy more instant, per- haps, in its appeal to the big world than any other of his plays. “In the big world,” says the old mother, when she goes out leaning upon the stick of the son whose dead body has 55 J. M. SYNGE already been found, to bid farewell to the last of her sons, “In the big world the old people do be leaving things after them for their sons and children, but in this place it is the young men do be leaving things behind for them that do be old.” More than most of the great tragedies, this tragedy is localized; to the place where it is the life of a young man to be going on the sea, and the life of an old woman to be down looking by the sea for the son whom the sea has taken; localized down very plainly to the island of Inismaan, for when the young girls watch the old woman go, “Is she gone round by the bush?” they say—a bush being a thing of note on this forgotten island, where men thrash out upon the rocks the wheat they have “reaped with knives because of the stones.” When Shelley wrote a tragedy around the piti- ful fate of the daughter of an incestuous tyrant, it failed of its full effect; just as the incestuous and beautiful tragedies of Webster did not keep their hold—because incest is not a very general motive to tragedy: whereas the agony of mind of Sophocles’ hero who married with his mother moves us still—although none of us is likely to come to the same predicament—for the reason that it goes very much wider than its merely local cause, and speaks to us of the men- tal agony which is man’s when he slowly finds 56 RIDERS TO THE SEA himself the plaything of tragic circumstance. Riders to the Sea, the most Greek of Synge’s plays, in the immensity of its issues, in the high | tableland chosen for their presentment, makes an_appeal, despite its own localization, just so universal. “If it was a hundred horses, or a thousand horses, you had itself, what is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only ?”—In what degree is that cry local to the middle island of Aran? ‘And isn’t it a pitiful thing when there is nothing left of a man who was a great rower and fisher but a bit of an old shirt and a plain stocking?” It is the very epitome of pity ; the archetype of all good tragedy. It follows that this play of Synge’s has been everywhere the first to be recognized ; to gain its place in the theatre, one is told, from Melbourne to Buda-Pesth. And yet Riders to the Sea is not so perfect a masterpiece in one-act as we have seen In the Shadow of the Glen to be. The reason we shall see in a minute. The language is again perfect in its aptness to the dramatic intention. The rhythm is now not long and meditative, only checked for a moment of ecstasy or quick decision, like a break in the mist rolling over the hills; it is checked con- stantly and in terminations more abrupt, almost as though each sentence were snatched from the 57 J. M. SYNGE lips of its speaker by the rising wind, servant of the inappeasable sea. The progress is swifter, partly for the reason that there is less to be revealed by the dialogue. Nora’s tragedy was rather that of a particular woman left to think thoughts in the dark mist; here the tragedy is the common lot, and is less dependent, there- fore, upon character. It is given swiftness also by the marvellous intensity Synge has given it ; the temper of the play is like a white flame, in which everything that is irrelevant, or ordin- arily below this terrible significance, has been burned up. Look at the importance, from the opening words, with which the shirt and plain stock- ing, the white rocks and the tide, the pig with the black feet and: the bit of new rope, are invested : the shirt and stocking that are all that are left of one son, the white rocks and tide that are to destroy another, the pig with the black feet that must be sold to the jobber by a woman now the last son has gone, and the rope that will surely be wanted to lower Bartley into his deep grave. The fine white boards bought for a big price in Connemara take on a visual significance almost intolerable as they stand against the kitchen wall. Synge never wrote a play—never, surely, has a play been written— in which such a complete intensification of 58 RIDERS TO THE SEA the dramatist’s materials is achieved. And yet with this flaming momentum upon it, Synge has put into the play the little humorous touches of the pig eating the rope, of the girl’s impatience with the old woman’s griev- ing, of her greater fondness for the one son than for the other, of her not thinking of the nails with all the coffins she had seen made already ; the play, in all its swiftness, is packed with humanity. It is this very swiftness which is the cause of the structural defect in Riders to the Sea ; its action does not succeed, like that of the former play, in advancing step by step with reality, for in its half hour’s occupation of the stage we are asked to suppose that Bartley should be knocked over into the sea, and washed out where there is a great surf on the white rocks, and his body recovered, and brought back again ; when he himself allows for half an hour to ride down only. ‘This unreality is an un- deniable difficulty in the theatre; and the keen- ing women, serving at once as messengers and chorus on a Greek convention a little difficult to us of acceptability, are another. A tragic intensity which on the printed page is sublime somehow does not, without reduction, bear this visual embodiment. It may even be that here we are up against the natural limitations of the 59 J. M. SYNGE theatre. At all events, if Riders to the Sea, beautiful and moving play as it is, be better in the library than the theatre, then, by that very fact, its readier popularity notwithstanding, it is not the most perfect of Synge’s plays. 60 Ill THE PLAYS (Continued) THE three plays we have considered were per- formed and printed between the end of 1903 and the beginning of 1905. Two years elapse before the second group of three plays opens with The Playboy of the Western World. In these two years, Synge continued to live in real and increasing intimacy with the “fine people” to whose imagination he acknowledged how much he owed in a preface to this play—“a popular imagination that is fiery, and magnificent, and tender.” The Playboy of the Western World : brought to the contemporary stage the most rich and eopious store of character since Shake- speare. ii The action is still in the west, near a village on a wild coast of Mayo. In a rough shebeen, or wayside public-house, a wild-looking but fine girl, Pegeen, the daughter of the publican, is 61 J. M. SYNGE sitting writing the orders to the neighbouring town, for porter, for six yards of yellow stuff, and for sundries that are suited for a wed- ding-day. Outside one may fancy the cows breathing and sighing in the stillness of the air, and not a step moving, save up at the cross- roads where Michael James is meeting a couple more who are going along with him to celebrate a wake. across the sands. To Pegeen comes ‘Shawn Keogh;, a fat and fair young man be- trothed to marry her, and awaiting only Father Reilly’s dispensation ; after him comes Michael James, followed by Philly Cullen and Jimmy Farrell; and they speak of a kind of fellow above in the furzy ditch, groaning and going mad or getting hisdeath. Pegeen works herself up into a great state, that she should be asked to stay alone in the shop, without so much as a pot-boy, while her father quits off for the whole night ; ; and° Shawn, “the Christian man, when it is proposed that he should stay along with her, runs off and leaves his coat in Michael’s hands, rather than he should displease Father Reilly. After 2 moment, back comes Shawn, his terrified face, over the half of the door, white against the dark night. The queer dying fellow is looking over the ditch—is following him now. For a perceptible moment they watch the door ; someone coughs outside, then, tired and fright- 62 THE PLAYBOY ened and dirty, Christy Mahon comes in. He looks a decent lad. He is too miserable, as he sits with his glass by the fire, to feel that they are staring at him with curiosity; he has no thought of pride in the deed for which he is © wanting, until their evident delight in the mys- | tery flatters him into the belief that maybe he has done something big. It is not, however, the delighted curiosity of them all, it is not the as- | persion of Pegeen Mike that he has done nothing at all, that brings him to the avowal; it_is Pegeen’s mock rage and her threat to knock the head of him with a broom. - --._ PEGEEN (coming from counter). He’s done nothing, so. (To Christy.) If you didn’t commit murder or a bad, nasty thing; or false coining, or robbery, or butchery, or the like of them, there isn’t anything that would be worth your troubling for to run from now. You did nothing at all. Curisty (his feelings hurt). 'That’s an unkindly thing to be saying to a poor orphaned traveller, has a prison behind him, and hanging before, and hell’s gap gaping below. PrcEEN (with a sign to the men to be quiet). You're only saying it. You did nothing at all. A soft lad the like of you wouldn’t slit the windpipe of a screeching sow. Cunisry (offended). You're not speaking the truth. PrcEeEn (in mock rage). Not speaking the truth, is it? Would you have me knock the head of you with the butt of the broom ? Cnuisty (twisting round on her with a sharp cry of 63 J. M. SYNGE horror). Don’t strike me. I killed my poor father, Tuesday was a week, for doing the like of that. PrcEEn (with blank amazement). Is it killed your father? Cunisty (subsiding). With the help of God I did, surely, and that the Holy Immaculate Mother may intercede for his soul. Paty (retreating with Jimmy). ‘There’s a daring fellow. Jimmy. Oh, glory be to God! MicuakEt (with great respect). That was a hanging crime, mister honey. You should have had good reason for doing the like of that. The great respect of the men steadies Christy, and sets him considering ; the swift and sudden championship of Pegeen swells him with sur- prise and triumph, and embarks him on a gallous story of how he hit his tyrant of a father with a “loy,” a story full of picturesque self- justification. He would surely have the sense of Solomon for a pot-boy. Now Pegeen will be safe indeed, with a man that killed his father holding danger from the door. ‘The men, with the blessing of God upon him, go off to the wake, and Christy and Pegeen are left together. He expands in her presence, under her delightful curiosity ; we may watch him expand moment by moment as she busies herself about his wants ; he is still very naive, but her assurance that the poets are his like—“ fine fiery fellows with great rages when their temper’s roused ”—gives him final confidence in his deed as a meritorious 64 % THE PLAYBOY emancipation from the naked parish where he grew a man. Then someone knocks, and he clings to Pegeen in a sudden terror. When it is only the Widow Quin who comes in, Christy shrinks shyly from her half-amused curiosity. Father Reilly and Shawn Keogh have sent her to divide the pair; but Pegeen is short and fierce with the widow. The kindness of Pegeen, and her flattering sense of ownership in him, have so worked upon Christy by the fall of the first curtain that we leave him in perfect honesty’ thinking that he was a foolish fellow not to have killed his father in the years gone by. In the morning Christy wakes bright and cheerful and fairly reassured, to a consciousness of the material advantages earned for him by the blow of a spade. When all sorts begin to bring him their food and clothing, he is meek and shy at first, with the young girls and the Widow Quin ; but his story, which he tells better than ever, goes splendidly. Pegeen, after a moment of severity with him because of his leaguing with the girls (which he takes bitterly and grimly rather than in the abject spirit he would have taken it the night before), is able to reassure him that there isno word out about his murder ; and when 1 Note particularly the development of this first act. The deliberate distortion to which this play has been subjected, by political and other persons, is amazing; and it has even suffered some misrepresentation on the stage. E 65 J. M. SYNGE Shawn brings him his new suit and the half of a ticket for the Western States, Christy is per- fectly ready to make the best of the one and to scorn the other. The only hope for Shawn now looks to be that the Widow Quin should marry Christy. Natty and swaggering in his new suit, he feels quite sincerely the gallant orphan who cleft his father with one blow to the breeches belt. Just as sincere his wild terror, when there appears in the doorway his murdered father’s walking spirit ; just as sincere his own half-articulate despair and rage, when he looks out and sees Old Mahon crossing the sands, and wishes that the Lord God would send a high wave to wash him from the world. Christy’s terror, however, is no longer of the consequences of his own act (as it was last night); his fear now is lest the father whom he evidently did not kill should come to spoil his new-won repu- tation as the only playboy of the Western World. The Widow Quin has fooled Old Mahon, while Christy, behind the door, looked out like a hare through a gap ; and it has amused her greatly. But when Christy curses, or when Christy prays for aid to win Pegeen, then even the Widow Quin has to confess that Christy is a poet, and not a murderous little rascal only. When the curtain rises on the third act, just a little later in the same day, Christy, thanks to 66 THE PLAYBOY the contriving of the Widow Quin, is once more mounted on the spring-tide of the stars of luck. We hear of his great success in the sports they are holding on the sands below; then Pegeen brings him in triumphant with his prizes, and hustles the crowd out, and sits down radiant, to wipe the sweat from his face with her shawl. Curisty (looking at her with delight), Yl have great times if I win the crowning prize I’m seeking now, and that’s your promise that you'll wed me in a fortnight, when our banns is called. PrceeEn (backing away from him). You've right daring to go ask me that, when all knows you'll be starting to some girl in your own townland, when your father’s rotten in four months, or five. Curisty (indignantly), Starting from you, is it? I will not, then, and when the airs is warming, in four months or five, it’s then yourself and me should be pacing Neifin in the dews of night, the times sweet smells do be rising, and you'd see a little, shiny new moon, maybe, sinking on the hills. PrcrEn (looking at him playfully), And it’s that kind of a poacher’s love you’d make, Christy Mahon, on the sides of Neifin, when the night is down ? Cueisry. It’s little you'll think if my love’s a poacher’s, or an earl’s itself, when you'll feel my two hands stretched around you, and I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips, till I’d feel a kind of pity for the Lord God is all ages sitting lonesome in His golden chair. Pecrren. That'll be right fun, Christy Mahon, and any 67 J. M. SYNGE girl would walk her heart out before she’d meet a young man was your like for eloquence, or talk at all. Then she adds, “But we're only talking, maybe.” ... Michael James comes in, sup- ported in his weight of drink by the faithful Shawn. The consent of Michael drunk is soon obtained. ; MicuakEt (standing up in the centre, holding on to both of them). It’s the will of God, ’'mthinking, that all should win an easy or a cruel end, and it’s the will of God that all should rear up lengthy families for the nurture of the earth. What’s a single man, I ask you, eating a bit in one house and drinking a sup in another, and he with no place of his own, like an old braying jackass strayed upon the rocks? (To Christy.) It’s many would be in dread to bring your like into their house for to end them, maybe, with a sudden end; but I’m a decent man of Ireland, and I liefer face the grave untimely and I seeing a score of grandsons growing up little gallant swearers by the name of God, than go peopling my bedside with puny weeds the like of what you'd breed, I’m thinking, out of Shaneen Keogh. (He joins their hands.)