Irish Plays and Playwrights Part 9

The characters, even when they are purposely almost caricatures, have in them the possibility of complete portrayals. There is no flagging of the invention in any of them, no slipshod or careless composition. Her technique, too, at least in farce, is masterful, and in her plays of modern life of other form adequate. That she could master historical drama, as I have said, I must doubt, but that she need restrict herself so largely to farce and farce comedy in her plays of modern life, I do not for a moment believe. "The Gaol Gate," in fact, proved that she need not so restrict herself, and "MacDaragh's Wife" (1911), written by Lady Gregory at sea on her way to America, but perhaps for that all the fuller of the wild old life of her native Connacht. It would almost seem that with "Grania" (1912), a tragedy too, following "MacDaragh's Wife,"

Lady Gregory is widening the scope of her work, as she well can, now that there are other dramatists to provide comedies and farces for the Abbey Theatre. It is a haunting story that "MacDaragh's Wife" tells, and largely a true story, the story of a piper who, though a pauper, draws all the countryside to the funeral of his wife, draws them, through the wild lamenting of his pipes, from the fair where they are sporting to follow, with a full fellowship, to the grave, her who died all but alone. Lady Gregory tells us in a note just what of it she gathered from old people about her girlhood's home at Roxborough, and what about her home of to-day at Coole, how she has shaped it, and what emotion is back of it, the "lasting pride of the artist of all ages."

As Lady Gregory had restricted herself, until recently, in the forms of modern life which she wrote of and in the kinds of people she selected to write of, so, too, she had restricted herself, until recently, in the motives she considered. It is true that the motive most recurrent in her plays, that of fear of the opinion of the neighbor, an att.i.tude probably sprung of the clan system, is dominant in Irish life; and it is equally true that the motive most notably absent, love, was until yesterday far from a dominant motive in the Irish life that Lady Gregory presents: yet there are many other motives that, in true comedy, and even in farcical comedy, might well have place. That these motives are not there is, I think, not only that Lady Gregory, self-effacingly, put into her plays what was wanted to make them foils to the plays of Mr. Yeats and Synge, but also because of the practice of one type of gentlewoman in literature, of which Jane Austen is characteristic. And yet the mere mention of Jane Austen increases the wonderment that Lady Gregory has not written of people of every condition in her neighborhood, whether that be London or Dublin or Gort, as Miss Austen did of people of every condition in her neighborhood, whether that be Steventon or Bath or Chawton. It can hardly be said, even, that "Grania" her last play, is a play about love. In her note to the play, Lady Gregory declares, "Love itself, with its shadow Jealousy, is the true protagonist!" And yet, I think it is Jealousy only that is the true protagonist. There is much talk about love, but it is not from love, but from jealousy that the action of the play arises. Among all this talk about love, among many eloquent sayings about love, true readings of love, there stands out most clearly in my memory this part of a speech of Finn, a speech uttered before Grania had turned from him to Diarmuid--

And as for youngsters, they do not know how to love because there is always some to-morrow's love possible in the shadow of the love of to-day. It is only the old it goes through and through entirely because they know all the last honey of the summer-time has come to its ferment in their cup, and there is no new summer coming to meet them forever.

This I remember not only for its thought but for its style, the rhythm of its prose. It is Lady Gregory at her best, as "Grania" as a whole is Lady Gregory at her best in tragedy. If "Grania" in every detail were as inspired as its explanation of the queen's quick turn from Diarmuid to Finn, it would be a great play, indeed. Grania is no light woman, and yet she turns, in the old legend, from the man who sacrificed all but all for her, on his death, to the High King who brought about his death, with a suddenness inexplicable. Lady Gregory makes that sudden turn plausible, for two reasons. One is that for seven years of wandering all over Ireland, Diarmuid by his own will and because of loyalty to Finn, had kept Grania a maid, making her his wife only after he found her being carried off by the King of Foreign. The other reason is that as Diarmuid lies dying, wounded to death by that King of Foreign whom he has killed, his thoughts are all of his long-delayed disloyalty to Finn, and not at all of Grania. Thus, she justifies herself, speaking to Finn:--

_Grania_. He had no love for me at any time. It is easy to know it now. I knew it all the while, but I would not give in to believe it. His desire was all the time with you yourself and Almhuin. He let on to be taken up with me, and it was but letting on. Why would I fret after him that so soon forgot his wife, and left her in a wretched way?

_Finn_. You are not judging him right. You are distracted with the weight of your loss.

_Grania_. Does any man at all speak lies at the very brink of death, or hold any secret in his heart? It was at that time he had done with deceit, and he showed where his thought was, and had no word at all for me that had left the whole world for his sake, and that went wearing out my youth, pushing here and there as far as the course of the stars of Heaven. And my thousand curses upon death not to have taken him at daybreak, and I believing his words!

It is then I would have waked him well and would have cried my seven generations after him! And I have lost all on this side of the world, losing that trust and faith I had, and finding him to think of me no more than of a flock of stars would cast their shadow on his path. And I to die with this scald upon my heart; it is hard thistles would spring up out of my grave.

I have spoken of Lady Gregory as translator, as collector of folk-lore, as essayist, and as dramatist; but there is another role in which she has brought no less advantage to the Celtic Renaissance, though it is a role that has not brought her, as have these other, the joys of recapturing or of creating beautiful things. Always objective, though never wholly able to subordinate personality, however near she may have come to effacing it in her plays, Lady Gregory has in this role considered herself solely as an agent in the service of Irish letters.

The Irishman is naturally a pamphleteer, and Mr. Yeats, poet of the Other World though he be, can give as good blows in controversy as Mr.

George Moore. Almost all who have part in the Renaissance have skill in the art of publicity. They have needed no publicists to fight their battles as the Pre-Raphaelites needed Ruskin. Still, in some measure in the way of publicity, and in large measure in other ways, Lady Gregory has been to the Celtic Renaissance what Ruskin was to that last renaissance of wonder. She has edited pamphlets on things national and artistic in Ireland, she has helped Dr. Hyde and Mr. Yeats in their collecting of folk-lore and to a deeper knowledge of the people; she has been one of the forces that have made possible the Abbey Theatre, giving to it her power of organization as well as plays and patronage. More than this, she has welcomed to Coole Park many a worker in the movement, who in the comfort of a holiday there has been refreshed by the gray and green land so near the sea and reinspired by the contact with that Irish Ireland so close to her doors. Like Ruskin, Lady Gregory is a great patron of letters, but like Ruskin she is much more. Lady Gregory is an artist in words who is to be valued as a presenter of Irish life, past and present, with a beauty that was not in English literature before she made it.

CHAPTER VII

JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE

It is Synge himself who puts the just phrase on what his life was to him, and it is, as it could not else be, from the lips of his Deirdre that it falls. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and richest, if it's for a short s.p.a.ce only." It is Deirdre alone of his men and women that is introspective at all, Deirdre--and Naisi when he is mastered by thoughts of home that will not down. Synge wrote the play of her triumph over death as he himself was dying, and he wrote it with high heart, and, what is higher, gladness, despite his foreknowledge of his doom. It was to fulfill his dream of the most queenly girl of old Irish legend that he wrote "Deirdre of the Sorrows," but he could not keep out of his writing, had he wished to keep it out, his own love that death was so soon to end, and the thoughts of what was the worth of life. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and richest, if it's for a short s.p.a.ce only." It is not a new saying, but it is not to be identified with the proverbial "a short life and a merry," with which some confuse it, and of Synge it was a true saying. There are those who, because of the irony of his writing, an irony that is new to literature, and, maybe, to some cruel, or at least disillusionizing, may think there was little joy for him; but the truth is there was never a writer in whom there was more joy. This "strange still man" as he was even to those who knew him best, gentle or simple, found all life that was natural life, even of the barest and rudest, as thrilling as first love.

It is this man, his enemies at home the sated Parisian, who knew a gusto in living greater than that of any English writer since Borrow. Let no one forget those lines with which Christy Mahon cries defiance to the Mayo folk who have known his greatness and his fall: "Ten thousand blessings upon all that's here, for you've turned me a likely gaffer in the end of all, the way I'll go romancing through a romping lifetime from this hour to the dawning of the judgment day." I do not deny that these words are in a sense wrung from the Playboy, but what I do hold is that they prove how vital was the genius of the man who wrote them, who saw the joy there was yet in life for this braggart wastrel just as he saw that even such a miserable boyhood as Christy's knew a kind of poacher's joy in running wild on the bogs. Even for poor Nora, turned out on the roads with a tramp for companion, there is the joy of the road once she learns to know it. The tramp knows it surely:--

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 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.

Of like gusto, too, is the joy of Martin Doul and Mary Doul in their blindness; and the joy of the three tinkers in the escape of themselves and their half-sovereign from the priest and in the prospect of "A great time drinking that bit with the trampers in the green of Clash." And from such joys as these, wild and earthy and rallying, his exultations range to the exalted serenity and sadness of Naisi and Deirdre as they look back on their seven year of love in Glen Masain, of love almost too perfect and too happy to be human.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Yes, joy is as distinctive as irony and extravagance of the writing of Synge, joy in mere living, in life even at the worst, and joy, too, in life at the best. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and richest, if it's for a short s.p.a.ce only." It was for a short s.p.a.ce of years that Synge had "what is best and richest," hardly for the seven years of his great lovers. He did not have it when his thought homed to Ireland in 1899, as a result of a meeting with Mr. Yeats in Paris. His writing, then, was of little moment, but it grew better when, at home again, he realized what Irish life was to him, when once renewed contact with the Irish peasant brought back the familiarity that had been his in the nursery. It was the Wicklow glens, to which memories of his people drew him, and the Aran Islands, where he went to study Irish--until then little more than a book language to him--and to live a life perhaps "more primitive than any in Europe," that enabled him to find himself.

Further 'prentice work, though of a new sort, followed his sojourns in Wicklow and Aran, but by 1903 his art had matured to the ripe power of "In the Shadow of the Glen" and "Riders to the Sea," which, after adjustment to the stage, were put on respectively October 8, 1903, and February 25, 1904, at Molesworth Hall, Dublin. "The Tinker's Wedding"

which has been played only once, and then in London, dates from about the same time. "The Well of the Saints" was produced on February 4, 1905, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and "The Playboy of the Western World" on January 26, 1907, at the same place, to the accompaniment of an uproar that a certain element of Irishmen have considered it proper to create ever since on its first appearance in all cities whatsoever, whether in Great Britain or America. One wonders what they would have done had he made it as biting as Ibsen made "Peer Gynt." "Deirdre of the Sorrows," which Synge left unrevised, was first produced at the Abbey Theatre on January 13, 1910, the last of the six plays of his maturity.

It was in the years from 1902 to 1909 that he had "what is best and richest"--a full life, lived largely in the Ireland that he loved; the artist's joy in making that life into a new beauty, a beauty that was all compact of exaltation and extravagance and irony; and love for a woman in whom his man's life and his artist's life were united, for her who embodied his dream of Pegeen Mike and added her life and her art of the stage to his dream of Deirdre, as day by day it emerged from his mind. And so great was his joy in these good things that his precarious health, and even his year--long last illness, could not, while he had any strength, lessen the high spirit of his writing. There is none of his plays more vital than "Deirdre of the Sorrows."

And yet this joy that is basic in Synge, this exaltation, is no more basic than emotions and att.i.tudes of mind that are often, in other men, at war with joy and exaltation--irony and grotesquerie, keen insight into "the black thoughts of men," and insistent awareness of the quick pa.s.sing of all good things, _diablerie_ and mordancy. Strange, then, should be his love pa.s.sages and strange too, they are at times, ranging from the bizarre delight of "In Kerry" to the triumphing n.o.bility of Deirdre's farewell to Alban. One thinks of Mr. Hardy and one thinks of Donne as one reads "In Kerry":--

"We heard the thrushes by the sh.o.r.e and sea, And saw the golden stars' nativity, Then round we went the lane by Thomas Flynn, Across the church where bones lie out and in; And there I asked beneath a lonely cloud Of strange delight, with one bird singing loud, What change you'd wrought in graveyard, rock and sea, This new wild paradise to wake for me ...

Yet knew no more than knew those merry sins Had built this stack of thigh-bones, jaws and shins."

One thinks of no other writer at all, however, when one reads Christy's wooing of Pegeen, even when one puts down the book in the quiet that always comes on one in the presence of something great; one thinks of no other writer, of course, when one sees the lovers and listens to their words, on the stage, for one is rapt out of one's self by the perfect accord of drama and actors at one in the service of beauty:--

_Christy_ (_indignantly_). Starting from you, is it? (_He follows her._) 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'll see a little, shiny new moon, maybe, sinking on the hills.

_Pegeen_ (_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?

_Christy_. 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 G.o.d is all ages sitting lonesome in His golden chair.

_Pegeen_. That'll be right fun, Christy Mahon, and any girl would walk her heart out before she'd meet a young man was your like for eloquence, or talk at all.

_Christy_ (_encouraged_). Let you wait, to hear me talking, till we're astray in Erris, when Good Friday's by, drinking a sup from a well, and making mighty kisses with our wetted mouths, or gaming in a gap of sunshine, with yourself stretched back unto your necklace, in the flowers of the earth.

_Pegeen_ (_in a low voice, moved by his tone_). I'd be nice, so, is it?

_Christy_ (_with rapture_). If the mitred bishops seen you that time, they'd be the like of the holy prophets, I'm thinking, do be straining the bars of Paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of Troy, and she abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in her golden shawl.

Borrow, who comes to mind more often than any other writer as one reads Synge, chose to avoid love scenes, and Borrow's follower, Mr. Hewlett, for all his gusto, has no such exaltation as this. Had Harry Richmond taken to the road with Kiomi we might have known something like it. A chapter out of the early life of Juggling Jerry and his "Old Girl," done in the manner of "Love in the Valley," would be still nearer to it. As it is, this pa.s.sage of the third act of "The Playboy of the Western World" stands alone. I doubt if Synge had read Meredith, and even had he, the life of the roads and their cottages that Synge knew so well was his master, and no writer at all. In a way, of course, the Irish-English of Dr. Hyde's translations of "The Love Songs of Connacht" was an influence, and you will find many expressions common to them and Synge.

It is not important, however, whether these expressions have a common source, or whether Synge took them from "The Love Songs" rather than from his own note-book. Whatever their source it was Synge who made out of them a great style, his peasant style. It is another and a severer style that he uses in his "Deirdre of the Sorrows," the courtly subject demanding dignity and restraint. This latter style has borrowed some of the bare simplicity of the personal style of Synge, that style, I mean, in which he records his own experience in the Aran Islands or in Wicklow and Kerry.

Romancing, which is the very atmosphere of "The Playboy of the Western World," would be out of place in any telling of the greatest of old Irish legends; so it is that Synge has found for "Deirdre of the Sorrows," or rather for its great moments, an austere epic speech that seems native to the story. The pa.s.sionate words are n.o.bly adequate to the pa.s.sionate resignation they have to tell, a resignation that has come of the unwilling belief of the lovers that so great a love as theirs cannot last longer "without fleck or flaw" than the seven years it has lasted. Says Deirdre, when she has come to know it is fate that they will return to Ireland, and death:--

The dawn and evening are a little while, the winter and the summer pa.s.s quickly, and what way would you and I, Naisi, have joy forever.... It's this hour we're between the daytime and a night where there is sleep forever, and isn't it better thing to be following on to a near death than to be bending the head down, and dragging with the feet, and seeing one day a blight showing upon love where it is sweet and tender?

_Naisi_ (_his voice broken with distraction_). If a near death is coming what will be my trouble losing the earth and the stars over it, and you, Deirdre, are their flame and bright crown? Come away into the safety of the woods.

_Deirdre_ (_shaking her head slowly_). There are as many ways to wither love as there are stars in a night of Samhain; but there is no way to keep life, or love with it, a short s.p.a.ce only.... It's for that there's nothing lonesome like a love is watching out the time most lovers do be sleeping.... It's for that we're setting out for Emain Macha when the tide turns on the sand.

_Naisi_ (_giving in_). You're right, maybe. It should be a poor thing to see great lovers and they sleepy and old.

_Deirdre_ (_with a more tender intensity_). We're seven years without roughness or growing weary; seven years so sweet and shining, the G.o.ds would be hard set to give us seven days the like of them. It's for that we're going to Emain, where there'll be a rest forever, or a place for forgetting, in great crowds and they making a stir.

_Naisi_ (_very softly_). We'll go, surely, in place of keeping a watch on a love had no match and it wasting away. (_They cling to each other, then Naisi looks up._)

And this is from the unfinished second act, that Synge thought would scarcely be worth preserving. I have quoted it rather than the great keen over the body of Naisi that brings the play to a close, because that must of necessity follow the old poem, and this is as Synge imagined it. Each is "a thing will be a joy and triumph to the ends of life and time."

I have thrown what I have to say about the exaltation of Synge to the forefront of what I have to say of him, that all may be read in the memory of this emphasis and of the exaltation of what I quote, no matter how fantastic or grotesque or disillusionizing or even ghoulish it may be. Whatever other quality may be dominant at any moment in Synge there is always, along with it, exaltation.

It is the extravagance and grotesquerie, of both language and situation, that is the most immediately arresting of the qualities of Synge. And this extravagance and grotesquerie have marked his writing from the start. The old husband playing dead, that he may catch his young wife with her lover, of his first play, "In the Shadow of the Glen," is a very old motive, and familiar in the meliorized form that made it known to the theatre in "Conn the Shaughraun" (1875). Before that, Crofton Croker had given it currency, in "The Corpse Watchers," among those outside of the circles in which it was a familiar folk-story. It might, indeed, be said of "In the Shadow of the Glen" that it begins in the manner of Boucicault and ends in the manner of Ibsen, for Nora Burke is in a way a peasant Hedda Gabler. Such a criticism would, of course, be very superficial. The story is a folk-story of many countries and Synge was told the version he worked from by the old shanachie of Inishmaan whom he calls Pat Dirane in "The Aran Islands." At moments the play approaches farce, as when the supposed corpse rises from the bed where he is stretched and drinks whiskey with a tramp who has happened in while Nora is gone to meet her young man. From such a situation it turns to keen pathos, as Nora sits with tramp and lover and the old husband she thinks dead, and listens to the wind and rain sweeping through the high glens about the hut and thinks of "the young growing behind her,"

and the old pa.s.sing. Where else will you find cheek by jowl such sardonic humor as this and such poignancy of lament for the pa.s.sing of youth? Nora speaks as she pours out whiskey for her young man:--

Why would I marry you, Mike Dara? You'll be getting old and I'll be getting old, and in a little while, I'm telling you, you'll be sitting up in your bed--the way himself was sitting--with a shake in your face, and your teeth falling, and the white hair sticking out round you like an old bush where sheep do be leaping a gap.

(_Dan Burke sits up noiselessly from under the sheet, with his hand to his face. His white hair is sticking out round his head. Nora goes on slowly without hearing him._)

It's a pitiful thing to be getting old, but it's a queer thing surely. It's a queer thing to see an old man sitting up there in his bed with no teeth in him, and a rough word in his mouth, and his chin the way it would take the bark from the edge of an oak board you'd have building a door.... G.o.d forgive me, Michael Dara, we'll all be getting old, but it's a queer thing surely.

_Michael_. It's too lonesome you are from living a long time with an old man, Nora, and you're talking again like a herd that would be coming down from the thick mist (_he puts his arm round her_), but it's a fine life you'll have now with a young man--a fine life, surely.

(_Dan sneezes violently. Michael tries to get to the door, but before he can do so Dan jumps out of the bed in queer white clothes, with the stick in his hand, and goes over and puts his back against it._)

_Michael_. Son of G.o.d deliver us!