It

Did Irish people, drunk or sober, ever speak with just the richness and copiousness of Michael James? It does not matter. is likely, despite Synge's assertion that the wildest sayings in his plays "are tame indeed compared with the fancies one may hear in any little hillside cabin in Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay," that the touch of golden alchemy-of which Pater speaks-is on them. In the result, and that is all that matters, we have a speech that is apt for every demand put upon it for character and beauty; an instrument for dramatic expression so fine that it may be at once ecstatic and plaintive, may rise into sudden defiance or sink to a plausible whine, may turn in a moment from easy volubility to the sharpest fear.

VI

MEN AND WOMEN

"I HAVE been accused in certain quarters," wrote Lover, in an address prefixed to Handy Andy, "of giving flattering portraits of my countrymen. Against this charge I may plead that, being a portrait painter by profession, the habit of taking the best view of my subject, so long prevalent in my eyes, has gone deeper, and influenced my mind."

Synge has been accused, in certain quarters, of giving portraits of his countrymen the reverse of flattering. Having no such professional concern as Lover to take them in their "best view," his people have disappointed, and even enraged, those to whom an Irishman is ever a broth of a bhoy, a Handy Andy or a Shaughraun, and no young Irish woman recognizable, except she be moulded in the likeness of the "poor, beautiful, angel-hearted" Colleen Bawn. It is not likely that Samuel Lover, however acceptable his

pictures, was a very good portrait painter; in his concern for the best view he would, unlike Samuel Cooper, have idealized Cromwell's wart into non-existence. His plea, however, in defence of his literary portraiture is at least humorous, like his excellent novels; but a person to whom a Boucicault drama is the highest national romance, is quite passionate and humourless in his short-sightedness.

Synge's art is by no means local; to the appreciation, that is to say, of the store of character that he brought to drama, a knowledge of Ireland is no more necessary than a knowledge of Spain to the appreciation of Don Quixote, or a knowledge of the Highlands to Guy Mannering, or of Wessex to the novels of Mr. Hardy. The difficulty immediately confronting Synge, however, in his own country, was very much like that confronting the authors of Lyrical Ballads a century earlier in England, when they wrote: "Readers accustomed to the inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will perhaps have frequently to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness. . . . It is desirable that readers, for their own sakes, should not suffer the ordinary word poetry, a word of very disputed meanings, to stand in the way of their gratification; but that while they

are perusing the book they should ask themselves if it contains a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents; and if the answer be favourable to the author's wishes, they should consent to be pleased in spite of that most dreadful enemy to our pleasures, established codes of decision."

Synge, with an originality more absolute than Wordsworth's, insisted that his readers should regain their poetic feeling for ordinary life; and presented them with Pegeen with the stink of poteen on her, and a playboy wet and crusted with his father's blood. There is no poetry in poteen, they said, except it go to the tune of Slainte, and Slainte, and Slainte agin; and a gallant young Irishman, in drama, has never been known to win acceptance unless it be an agent or an informer he has killed. These were established codes of decision, a dreadful enemy not only to pleasure in art, but to its making; and they stood in the way of people's gratification by plays containing a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents, unequalled on the stage for their poetic feeling by anything since Shakespeare.1

1 In Ireland The Playboy of the Western World has been given some ten or a dozen times only since its original production. This fact is, of course, of no particular importance so long as the play continues to win acceptance in England and America.

ii

"There are some," says Pater, "to whom nothing has any real interest, or real meaning, except as operative in a given person." Synge is one of these. Nothing in the plays is ever argued from a premise. There are some dramatists who see life but as opinions walking; there are no opinions in Synge's plays, but only men and women passionately speaking out their nature.

His confession would have been, one thinks, very like Goldsmith's to Sir Joshua Reynolds: "I should prove myself, at best, an indifferent politician." In a play that did not get beyond its scenario, Synge tried his hand once at the Rebellion of '98, because the members of the company told him that a play on this subject would be a great success. In his play, when he brought it to them, two women, a Protestant and a Catholic, were found to be at refuge in a cave, and there they came to quarrelling about religion. One abused the Pope, and one Queen Elizabeth and Henry VIII, in low voices; for the fear that ruled them was of ravishment, one at the hands of the soldiers and the other at the hands of the rebels. In the end, one woman went away out of the cave, for, rather than stay longer in such wicked company, she would meet any fate.1 We have not got this play, for Synge, 1 Mr. Yeats, J. M. Synge and the Ireland of His Time.