BOOKS.

THE WORK OF J. M. SYNGE.*

THE death of the late J. M. Synge, at a moment when he Teemed to be entering upon the period of his full maturity, was not only a loss to Leland. His work had qualities which

made it universal. It was impossible not to recognise in it the awakening of a new influence, strongly individual, wonderfully expressive in its rich and glowing idiom, full of vitality and passion. His instincts were admirably sound and sane. He understood that it is not so much the ultimate object of life, as life itself, which bewilders and fascinates us. He saw, too, that to be a master of character a writer has to discover not the difference of one man from another, but the resemblance of one to all; and it is this elemental quality of his characters which gives to them an extended significance, and fills some of his work with a sense of tragedy almost Aeschylean in its depth and power. Maurya, in Riders to the Sea, when her son Bartley is brought home dead, says :—

" They're all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me. . . I'll have no call now to be up crying and pray- ing when the wind breaks from the south, and you can hear the surf is in the east, and the surf is in the west, making a great stir with the two noises, and they hitting one on the other. I'll have no call now to be going down and getting Holy Water in the dark nights after Samhain, and I won't care what way the sea is when I hear the other women keening. . . . It isn't that I haven't prayed for you, Bartley, to the Almighty God. It isn't that I haven't said prayers in the dark night till you wouldn't know what I'd be saying ; but it's a great rest have now, and it's time, surely. It's a great rest I'll have now, and great sleeping in the long nights after Sambain, if it's only a bit of wet flour we do have to eat, and maybe a fish that would be stinking."

The simplicity of this passage, its stark realism, the poignant intensity of its emotion are all extraordinarily Greek in feeling. The fact that his characters are drawn from simple and primitive people, herds and fishermen, whose life is alternately a conflict with the blind forces of nature and an acquiescence in them, tends ultimately to raise them to heroic proportions, and they become for us types or personifications of mankind's eternal and unprofitable strife with fate. They are great because nothing stands between them and the direct shock of circumstance. Mr. Synge, however, was not pre- occupied exclusively with tragedy. He saw clearly enough that tragedy and comedy deal with the same material and are merely different modes of representation, that the ultimate object of both and the real business of the artist is with life itself. He had too sure an instinct about life, too keen a delight in its gaiety, in the extraordinary power of humanity to recreate itself through imagination, to cloud his work with a uniform pessimism. The laughter of his people is as full and spontaneous as their sorrow. There is not a page of The Playboy of the Western World which does not us erflow with humour and vivacity, and with that peculiar attribute of the Irish people—a genius for full-flavoured over- whelming abuse. Christy Mahon describes the Widow Casey

as " a walking terror from beyond the hills, and she two score and five years, and two hundredweights and five pounds in the weighing scales, with a limping leg on her and a blinded eye, and she a woman of noted misbehaviour with the old and young " ; and a little later as "she a hag this day with a

tongue on her has the crows and sea-birds scattered, the way

• The Work of John M. Synge. Four Vole. Dublin: Manneell and CO. [24n. net.] they wouldn't cast a shadow on her garden with the dread of her curse." But Pegeen's abuse of the Widow Quin is even more eloquent :— "regeen (with noisy scorn) : 'It's true the Lord God formed you to contrive indeed. Doesn't the world know you reared a black ram at your own breast so that the Lord Bishop of Connaught felt the elements of a Christian, and he eating it after in a kidney stew? Doesn't the world know you've been seen shaving the foxy skipper from France, for a threepenny bit and a sop of grass tobacco would wring the liver from a mountain goat you'd meet leaping the hills?' Widow Quin with amusement): `Do you hear her now, young fellow? Do you hear the way she'll be rating at your own self when a week is by?"

The vitality of all this, the spontaneous fertility of invention, the extreme flexibility of expression, are quite admirable.

Mr. Synge drew his material from the life about him, the life which he describes, from a more detached point of view, in his prose essays, The Aran Islands, In Wicklow, and In West Kerry. It was in the Aran Islands that he heard the story of the man who killed his father with a spade; which he uses in The Playboy; and he describes the moral attitude of the people who sheltered the criminal in their own words : " Such a man, they say, will be quiet all the rest of his life, and if you suggest that punishment is needed as an example, they ask, ` Would any man kill his.

father if he was able to help it? ' " He laid the scene of the play, however, in Wicklow; and the races on the sands,

the Stooks of the Dead Women, and perhaps even the foxy French skipper, prove to us, when we come upon them in, his prose account of Wicklow, how closely he followed,

reality. It was in the Aran Islands, also, that he heard from an old man the tale which forms the plot of The Shadow of the Glen; and it was from a herd at the fair of Aughrim, in Wicklow, that he bad the tale of The Tinker's Wedding, as, the tinker himself strode away from them into the darkness. When he tells us bow the Aran Islanders ride their horses, with a halter instead of a bridle, sitting sideways on the

withers, at full gallop, we think of how Bartley met his death_ in Riders to the Sea ; and when he speaks of the strong maternal instinct which fills the women with a continual dread of the sea, we think of old Maurya. The life itself, which he- studied with such tender fidelity, in its follies and vices as

well as in its heroisms, had become a part of his consciousness.. Compare The Playboy of the Western World with John Bull's. Other Island, to see the difference between life handled finely and imaginatively and what is, after all, nothing but vanity and vexation of spirit. The difference is simply that Mr. Shaw is always concerned with those conditions of life: which are transient and irrelevant, while Mr. Synge is always concerned with the passions and emotions which are eternal and universal.

It is because Mr. Synge was chiefly an artist in life, a poet in the sense of being a creator, that we prefer his tragedies to.

his comedies. He returned to tragedy in Deirdre of the- Sorrows, the play in which he revealed his powers more completely than in any other. Here again his material is drawn from the life of the people ; but it has been shifted back into that twilight of myth and legend of which it seems.

at times to be only a strange survival; and the light and shadow are more delicately graduated, the emotions more exquisitely strung. He is always a poet in his handling of life, but here he is more of a poet than ever : the fatalism and the emotion suffuse and transfigure the reality. The Medea. of Euripides knows whither fate is leading her, but the con- sciousness of it cannot shake her resolve. It is the same with Deirdre. She sees that her love for Naisi will bring death, upon him and his brothers and herself, but the imperious necessity of love overmasters her. Her speeches have an extraordinary beauty of phrase, full of a haunting music, as. 'she speaks of the fatality that follows after all joy and beauty given to man :—

.‘ It's this hour we're between the daytime and a night where there is sleep for ever, and isn't it a 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 on love where it is sweet and tender? We're seven years without roughness or growing weary; seven, years so sweet and shining, the, gods 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 for ever, or a place for forgetting, in great crowds, and they making a stir."

She speaks thus after Fergus has told her and Naisi that that they will grow weary of each other, and their love wither.

Her words are curiously Greek in feeling. We think ha- mediately of the Greek epigram :--

Tls SUra,rat rte ip4p.evov ei wapaxpiCeg, wawa warrior alrni ftwr lurokeiwilitevor ; TFs 86rar' eva ap‘trat r4v oilhcpov, ?xeis apiescow;

el Eitipicrei, rl Team agfuov eta apicrsi ; * Such a passion as Deirdre's is not remote from us, however greatly it transcends human experience, because it springs from a sense of mortality common to all. Greek, too, in some aspects, is her lament over the grave of Naisi and his brothers : " It's you three will not see age or death coming—you that were my company when the fires on the hill- tops were put out, and the stars were our friends only. I'll turn my thoughts back from this night that's pitiful for the lack of pity, to the time it was your rods and cloaks made a little tent for me where there'd be a birch tree making shelter, and a dry stone; though, from this day, my own fingers will be making a tent for me, spreading out my hairs and they knotted with the rain."

We have scarcely spoken about the literary quality of Synge's work, and perhaps there is no need that we should, as with all fine art there is a perfect adaptation of the means to the end ; the matter and the style here are inseparable. One of the most delightful characteristics of his work is his power of showing us, without any apparent break in the dia- logue, glimpses of landscape, " twilight in the woods with Naisi, when beech trees were silver and copper, and ash-trees were fine gold," and " the stars among the clear trees of Glen da Ruadh, or the moon pausing to rest her on the edges of the hills," and flights of birds, and the sheep pasturing, the pools of the rivers, and the cool ferns. These glimpses illuminate all his work, and are clearest in Deirdre, though there we should do wrong to separate them from the bewildering beauty of the play itself, a beauty that seems borrowed of woods and waters with the wind stirring them, a thing scarcely to be spoken about, but to be felt inwardly, and treasured up in the heart.