‘The Lonely returns to the
Lonely, the Divine to the Divinity.’
Proclus
I-
While this work was passing through
the press Mr. J. M. Synge died. Upon the morning
of his death one friend of his and mine, though away
in the country, felt the burden of some heavy event,
without understanding where or for whom it was to
happen; but upon the same morning one of my sisters
said, ’I think Mr. Synge will recover, for last
night I dreamed of an ancient galley labouring in
a storm and he was in the galley, and suddenly I saw
it run into bright sunlight and smooth sea, and I heard
the keel grate upon the sand.’ The misfortune
was for the living certainly, that must work on, perhaps
in vain, to magnify the minds and hearts of our young
men, and not for the dead that, having cast off the
ailing body, is now, as I believe, all passionate and
fiery, an heroical thing. Our Daimon is as dumb
as was that of Socrates, when they brought in the
hemlock; and if we speak among ourselves, it is of
the thoughts that have no savour because we cannot
hear his laughter, of the work more difficult because
of the strength he has taken with him, of the astringent
joy and hardness that was in all he did, and of his
fame in the world.
II-
In his Preface he speaks of these
poems as having been written during the last sixteen
or seventeen years, though the greater number were
written very recently, and many during his last illness.
An Epitaph and On an Anniversary show
how early the expectation of death came to him, for
they were made long ago. But the book as a whole
is a farewell, written when life began to slip from
him. He was a reserved man, and wished no doubt
by a vague date to hide when still living what he felt
and thought, from those about him. I asked one
of the nurses in the hospital where he died if he
knew he was dying, and she said, ’He may have
known it for months, but he would not have spoken of
it to anyone.’ Even the translations of
poems that he has made his own by putting them into
that melancholy dialect of his, seem to express his
emotion at the memory of poverty and the approach
of death. The whole book is of a kind almost
unknown in a time when lyricism has become abstract
and impersonal.
III-
Now and then in history some man will
speak a few simple sentences which never die, because
his life gives them energy and meaning. They affect
us as do the last words of Shakespeare’s people
that gather up into themselves the energy of elaborate
events, and they in their turn put strange meaning
into half-forgotten things and accidents, like cries
that reveal the combatants in some dim battle.
Often a score of words will be enough, as when we
repeat to ourselves, ’I am a servant of the
Lord God of War and I understand the lovely art of
the Muses,’ all that remains of a once famous
Greek poet and sea rover. And is not that epitaph
Swift made in Latin for his own tomb more immortal
than his pamphlets, perhaps than his great allegory?
’He has gone where fierce indignation will lacerate
his heart no more.’ I think this book too
has certain sentences, fierce or beautiful or melancholy
that will be remembered in our history, having behind
their passion his quarrel with ignorance, and those
passionate events, his books.
But for the violent nature that strikes
brief fire in A Question, hidden though it
was under much courtesy and silence, his genius had
never borne those lion cubs of his. He could not
have loved had he not hated, nor honoured had he not
scorned; though his hatred and his scorn moved him
but seldom, as I think, for his whole nature was lifted
up into a vision of the world, where hatred played
with the grotesque and love became an ecstatic contemplation
of noble life.
He once said to me, ’We must
unite asceticism, stoicism, ecstasy; two of these
have often come together, but not all three:’
and the strength that made him delight in setting
the hard virtues by the soft, the bitter by the sweet,
salt by mercury, the stone by the elixir, gave him
a hunger for harsh facts, for ugly surprising things,
for all that defies our hope. In The Passing
of the Shee he is repelled by the contemplation
of a beauty too far from life to appease his mood;
and in his own work, benign images ever present to
his soul must have beside them malignant reality,
and the greater the brightness, the greater must the
darkness be. Though like ‘Usheen after the
Fenians’ he remembers his master and his friends,
he cannot put from his mind coughing and old age and
the sound of the bells. The old woman in The
Riders to the Sea, in mourning for her six fine
sons, mourns for the passing of all beauty and strength,
while the drunken woman of The Tinker’s Wedding
is but the more drunken and the more thieving because
she can remember great queens. And what is it
but desire of ardent life, like that of Usheen for
his ‘golden salmon of the sea, cleen hawk of
the air,’ that makes the young girls of The
Playboy of the Western World prefer to any peaceful
man their eyes have looked upon, a seeming murderer?
Person after person in these laughing, sorrowful,
heroic plays is, ’the like of the little children
do be listening to the stories of an old woman, and
do be dreaming after in the dark night 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-
It was only at the last in his unfinished
Deirdre of the Sorrows that his mood changed.
He knew some twelve months ago that he was dying,
though he told no one about it but his betrothed, and
he gave all his thought to this play, that he might
finish it. Sometimes he would despond and say
that he could not; and then his betrothed would act
it for him in his sick room, and give him heart to
write again. And now by a strange chance, for
he began the play before the last failing of his health,
his persons awake to no disillusionment but to death
only, and as if his soul already thirsted for the
fiery fountains there is nothing grotesque, but beauty
only.
V-
He was a solitary, undemonstrative
man, never asking pity, nor complaining, nor seeking
sympathy but in this book’s momentary cries:
all folded up in brooding intellect, knowing nothing
of new books and newspapers, reading the great masters
alone; and he was but the more hated because he gave
his country what it needed, an unmoved mind where
there is a perpetual last day, a trumpeting, and coming
up to judgment.
April 4, 1909.