THE DEATH OF SYNGE EXTRACTS FROM A DIARY KEPT IN 1909

THE DEATH OF SYNGE EXTRACTS FROM A DIARY KEPT IN 1909

Why does the struggle to come at truth take away our pity, and the struggle to overcome our passions restore it again?

National feeling could be roused again if some man of good education-if a Catholic, he should have been educated outside Ireland-gathered about him a few men like himself, and founded a new Nation newspaper, forbidding it all personal attacks, all arguments that assume a base motive in an opponent, and choosing for its national policy, not what seems most desirable in the abstract, but such policy as may stir the imagination and yet gather to its support the greatest possible number of educated men. Ireland is ruined by abstractions, and should prefer what may seem a worse policy if it gathers better men. So long as all is ordered for attack, and that alone, leaders will instinctively increase the number of enemies that they may give their followers something to do, and Irish enemies rather than English because they are the more easily injured. The greater the enemy, the greater the hatred, and therefore the greater seems the power. They would give a nation the frenzy of a sect. A sign that this method, powerful in the time of Parnell, no longer satisfies the nation is that parties are drifting into the hands of feebler and more ignorant men.

III

The education of our Irish secondary schools, especially the Catholic schools, substitutes pedantry for taste. Men learn the dates of writers, the external facts of masterpieces, and not sense of style or feeling for life. I have met no young man out of these schools who has not been injured by the literature and the literary history learned there. The arts have nothing to give but that joy of theirs which is the other side of sorrow, that exhausting contemplation: and in youth before habits have been formed---unless our teachers be wise men---we turn from it to pedantry, which opens to the mind a kind of sensual ease. The young Catholic men and women who have not been through the secondary schools are upon the other hand more imaginative than Protestant boys and girls of the same age. Catholic secondary education destroys, I think, much that the Catholic religion gives. Provincialism destroys the nobility of the Middle Ages.

March 17.

As I go to and from my bedroom, here at Coole, I pass a wall covered with Augustus John’s etchings and drawings. I notice a woman with strongly marked shoulder-blades and a big nose, and a pencil drawing called Epithalamium. In the Epithalamium an ungainly, ill-grown boy holds out his arms to a tall woman with thin shoulders and a large stomach. Near them is a vivid etching of a woman with the same large stomach and thin shoulders. There is not one of these fifty or sixty clerks and seamstresses and students that has not been broken by labour or wasted by sedentary life. A gymnast would find in all something to amend; and the better he mended the more would those bodies, as with the voice of Durer, declare that ancient canon discovered in the Greek gymnasium, which, whenever present in painting or sculpture, shows a compact between the artist and society. John is not interested in the social need, in the perpetual thirst for greater health, but in character, in the revolt from all that makes one man like another. The old art, if carried to its logical conclusion, would have led to the creation of one single type of man, one single type of woman; gathering up by a kind of deification a capacity for all energy and all passion, into a Krishna, a Christ, a Dionysus; and at all times a poetical painter, a Botticelli, a Rossetti, creates as his supreme achievement one type of face, known afterwards by his name. The new art can create innumerable personalities, but in each of these the capacity for passion has been sacrificed to some habit of body or of mind. That woman with the big shoulder-blades has, for instance, a nature too keen, too clever for any passion, with the cleverness of people who cannot rest, and that young lad with his arms spread out will sink back into disillusionment and exhaustion after the brief pleasure of a passion which is in part curiosity. Some limiting environment or idiosyncrasy is displayed; man is studied as an individual fact, and not as that energy which seems measureless and hates all that is not itself. It is a powerful but prosaic art, celebrating the ‘fall into division’ not the ‘resurrection into unity’. Did not even Balzac, who looked at the world so often with similar eyes, find it necessary to deny character to his great ladies and young lovers that he might give them passion? What beautiful woman delights us by her look of character? That shows itself when beauty is gone, being the creation of habit, the bare stalk when the flower of spring has withered. Beauty consumes character with what Patmore calls ‘the integrity of fire’.

It is this lack of the capacity for passion which makes women dislike the schools of characterization, and makes the modern artist despise woman’s judgment. Women, for the same reason, dislike pure comedy. How few women like Moliere!

Here at Coole my room is hung with Arundel prints from Botticelli, Benozzo Gozzoli, Giorgione, Mantegna and the Van Eycks. Here everywhere is the expression of desire, though in the Van Eycks the new interest has begun. All display bodies to please an amorous woman’s eyes or the eyes of a great King. The martyrs and saints even must show the capacity for all they have renounced.

These notes are morbid, but I heard a man of science say that all progress is at the outset pathological, and I write for my own good.

The pain others give passes away in their later kindness, but that of our own blunders, especially when they hurt our vanity, never passes away. Our own acts are isolated and one act does not buy absolution for another. They are always present before a strangely abstract judgment. We are never a unity, a personality to ourselves. Small acts of years ago are so painful in the memory that often we start at the presence a little below ‘the threshold of consciousness’ of a thought that remains unknown. It sheds a vague light like that of the moon before it rises, or after its setting. Vanity is so intimately associated with our spiritual identity that whatever hurts it, above all if it came from it, is more painful in the memory than serious sin, and yet I do not think it follows that we are very vain. The harm we do to others is lost in changing events and passes away and so is healed by time, unless it was very great. Looking back, I find only one offence which is as painful to me as a hurt to vanity. It was done to a man who died shortly after. Because of his death, it has not been touched by the transforming hand---tolerant Nature has not rescued it from Justice.

I think that all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other self; that all joyous or creative life is a rebirth as something not oneself, something which has no memory and is created in a moment and perpetually renewed. We put on a grotesque or solemn painted face to hide us from the terrors of judgment, invent an imaginative Saturnalia where one forgets reality, a game like that of a child, where one loses the infinite pain of self-realization. Perhaps all the sins and energies of the world are but its flight from an infinite blinding beam.

VII

F--- is learning Gaelic. I would sooner see her in the Gaelic movement than in any Irish movement I can think of. I fear some new absorption in political opinion. Women, because the main event of their lives has been a giving themselves and giving birth, give all to an opinion as if it were some terrible stone doll. Men take up an opinion lightly and are easily false to it, and when faithful keep the habit of many interests. We still see the world, if we are of strong mind and body, with considerate eyes, but to women opinions become as their children or their sweethearts, and the greater their emotional capacity the more do they forget all other things. They grow cruel, as if in defence of lover or child, and all this is done for ‘something other than human life’. At last the opinion is so much identified with their nature that it seems a part of their flesh becomes stone and passes out of life. It was a part of F---’s power in the past that though she made this surrender with her mind, she kept the sweetness of her voice and much humour, and yet I am afraid. Women should have their play with dolls finished in childish happiness, for if they play with them again it is amid hatred and malice.

VIII

Women should find in the mask enough joy to forget the doll without regret. There is always a living face behind the mask.

Last night at ‘The Theatre of Ireland’ I talked to the man next to me. ‘I have been to your theatre also’, he said. ‘I like your popular plays, The Suburban Groove and those plays by the Frenchman, I do not remember his name’ (evidently Moliere), ‘but I don’t like your mysteries.’ I thought he meant something of mine, as the word ‘mystery’ is a popular reproach since The Shadowy Waters, but I found he meant Kincora. I said, ‘Why do you find that mysterious?’ He said, ‘O, I know nothing about all that history’. I replied, ‘When I was young every Irish Nationalist young man knew as much about King Brian as about Saint Patrick’. He thought I was talking of the peasants and said he was afraid that sort of knowledge was dying out amongst them. He evidently thought it their business alone, like the rath and the blessed well.

March 23.

MacDonagh called to-day. Very sad about Ireland. Says that he finds a barrier between himself and the Irish-speaking peasantry, who are ‘cold, dark and reticent’ and ‘too polite’. He watches the Irish-speaking boys at his school, and when nobody is looking, or when they are alone with the Irish-speaking gardener, they are merry, clever and talkative. When they meet an English speaker or one who has learned Gaelic, they are stupid. They are in a different world. Presently he spoke of his nine years in a monastery and I asked what it was like. ‘O,’ he said, ‘everybody is very simple and happy enough. There is a little jealousy sometimes. If one brother goes into a town with a Superior, another brother is jealous.’ He then told me that the Bishop of Raphoe had forbidden anybody in his See to contribute to the Gaelic League because its Secretary ‘has blasphemed against the holy Adamnan’. The Secretary had said, ‘The Bishop is an enemy, like the founder of his See, Saint Adamnan, who tried to injure the Gaelic language by writing in Latin’. MacDonagh says, ‘Two old countrymen fell out and one said, “I have a brother who will make you behave”, meaning the Bishop of Raphoe, and the other said, “I have a son who will put sense into you”, meaning Cardinal Logue.’

Molly Allgood came to-day to ask where I would be to-morrow, as Synge wishes to send for me if strong enough. He wants ‘to make arrangements’. He is dying. They have ceased to give him food.

Should we close the Abbey or keep it open while he still lives? Poor Molly is going through her work as always. Perhaps that is best for her. I feel Synge’s coming death less now than when he first became ill. I am used to the thought of it and I do not find that I pity him. I pity her. He is fading out of life. I felt the same when I saw M--- in the madhouse. I pitied his wife. He seemed already dead. One does not feel that death is evil when one meets it, — evil, I mean, for the one who dies. Our Daimon is silent as was that other before the death of Socrates. The wildest sorrow that comes at the thought of death is, I think, ‘Ages will pass over and no one ever again look on that nobleness or that beauty’. What is this but to pity the living and to praise the dead?

XII

March 24.

Synge is dead. In the early morning he said to the nurse, ‘It is no use fighting death any longer’ and he turned over and died. I called at the hospital this afternoon and asked the assistant matron if he knew he was dying. She answered, ‘He may have known it for weeks, but he would not have said so to anyone. He would have no fuss. He was like that.’ She added, with emotion in her voice, ‘We were devoted to him’.

XIII

March 28.

Mr. Stephens, Synge’s brother-in-law, said he suffered no pain but only great weakness. On Sunday he questioned the doctor and convinced himself that he was dying. He told his brother-in-law next day and was quite cheerful, even making jokes. In the evening he saw Molly and told her to be brave and sent her to me that I might arrange about his writings. On the morning when I heard of his death a heavy storm was blowing and I doubt not when he died that it had well begun. That morning Lady Gregory felt a very great depression and was certain that some evil was coming, but feared for her grandchild, feared it was going to be ill. On the other hand, my sister Lolly said at breakfast, ‘I think it will be all right with Synge, for last night I saw a galley struggling with a storm and then it shot into calm and bright sunlight and I heard the keel grate on the shore’. One remembers the voyages to Tir- nan-oge, certainly the voyages of souls after death to their place of peace.

XIV

I have been looking through his poems and have read once more that on page 21, ‘I asked if I got sick and died’. Certainly they were there at the funeral, his ‘idiot’ enemies: A--- who against all regulations rushed up to the dressing-rooms during the Playboy riot to tell the actors they should not have played in so disgraceful a play; B--- who has always used his considerable influence with the company against Synge, and has spoken against him in public; there, too, were the feeble friends who pretended to believe but gave no help. And there was C--- whose obituary notice speaks of Synge’s work as only important in promise, of the exaggeration of those who praise it, and then claims that its writer spent many hours a day with Synge in Paris (getting the date wrong by two years, however), with Synge who was proud and lonely, almost as proud of his old blood as of his genius, and had few friends. There was D---, the Secretary of the Society — it had sent a wreath---whose animosity had much to do with the attacks in Sinn Fein. It was, to quote E---, a funeral ‘small but select’. A good friend of Synge’s quoted to me:

How shall the ritual then be read, The requiem how be sung By you, by yours the evil eye, By yours the slanderous tongue, That did to death the innocence That died, and died so young?

Yet these men came, though but in remorse; they saw his plays, though but to dislike; they spoke his name, though but to slander. Well-to-do Ireland never saw his plays nor spoke his name. Was he ever asked to any country house but Coole? Was he ever asked to a dinner-party? How often I have wished that he might live long enough to enjoy that communion with idle, charming and cultivated women which Balzac in one of his dedications calls ‘the chief consolation of genius’!

In Paris Synge once said to me, ‘We should unite stoicism, asceticism and ecstasy. Two of them have often come together, but the three never.’

XVI

I believe that some thing I said may have suggested ‘I asked if I got sick and died’. S--- had frequently attacked his work while admitting him a man of genius. He attacked it that he might remain on good terms with the people about him. When Synge was in hospital to be operated upon, S--- was there too as a patient, and I told Synge that whenever I spoke of his illness to any man that man said, ‘And isn’t it sad about S---?’ until I could stand it no longer and burst out with ‘I hope he will die’, and now, as someone said, I was ‘being abused all over the town as without heart’. I had learned that people were calling continually to inquire how S--- was, but hardly anybody called to ask for Synge. Two or three weeks later Synge wrote this poem. Had my words set his mind running on the thought that fools flourish, more especially as I had prophesied that S--- would flourish, and in my mood at the moment it seemed that for S--- to be operated on at the same time with Synge was a kind of insolence? S---’s illness did, indeed, win for him so much sympathy that he came out to lucrative and honourable employment, and now when playing golf he says with the English accent he has acquired of late, to some player who needs a great man’s favour, ‘I know him well, I will say a word in that quarter’.

The Irish weekly papers notice Synge’s death with short and for the most part grudging notices. There was an obscure Gaelic League singer who was a leader of the demonstration against the Playboy. He died on the same day. Sinn Fein notices both deaths in the same article and gives three-fourths of it to the rioter. For Synge it has but grudging words, as was to be expected.

Molly tells me that Synge went to see Stephen MacKenna and his wife before going into hospital and said good-bye with ‘You will never see me again’.

CELEBRATIONS

1. — He was one of those unmoved souls in whom there is a perpetual ‘Last Day’, a perpetual trumpeting and coming up for judgment.

2. — He did not speak to men and women, asking judgment, as lesser writers do; but knowing himself part of judgment he was silent.

3. — We pity the living and not such dead as he. He has gone upward out of his ailing body into the heroical fountains. We are parched by time.

4. — He had the knowledge of his coming death and was cheerful to the end, even joking a little when that end had all but come. He had no need of our sympathies. It was as though we and the things about us died away from him and not he from us.

XVIII

DETRACTIONS

He had that egotism of the man of genius which Nietzsche compares to the egotism of a woman with child. Neither I nor Lady Gregory had ever a compliment from him. After Hyacinth Lady Gregory went home the moment the curtain fell, not waiting for the congratulation of friends, to get his supper ready. He was always ailing and weakly. All he said of the triumphant Hyacinth was, ‘I expected to like it better.’ He had under charming and modest manners, in almost all things of life, a complete absorption in his own dream. I have never heard him praise any writer, living or dead, but some old French farce-writer. For him nothing existed but his thought. He claimed nothing for it aloud. He never said any of those self-confident things I am enraged into saying, but one knew that he valued nothing else. He was too confident for self- assertion. I once said to George Moore, ‘Synge has always the better of you, for you have brief but ghastly moments during which you admit the existence of other writers; Synge never has.’ I do not think he disliked other writers---they did not exist. One did not think of him as an egotist. He was too sympathetic in the ordinary affairs of life and too simple. In the arts he knew no language but his own.

I have often envied him his absorption as I have envied Verlaine his vice. Can a man of genius make that complete renunciation of the world necessary to the full expression of himself without some vice or some deficiency? You were happy or at least blessed, ‘blind old man of Scio’s rocky isle’.

XIX

Two plays last night, Time, a play of suggestion, Cross-roads, a logical play. We accepted this last play because of its central idea, a seeming superstition of its creator, a promise of a new attitude towards life, of something beyond logic. In the four morning papers Time is cursed or ignored and Cross-roads given great praise, but praise that is never for the central idea, and the only critic who speaks of that idea misunderstands it completely. State a logical proposition and the most commonplace mind can complete it. Suggestion is richest to the richest and so grows unpopular with a democracy like this. They misunderstood Robinson’s idea, luckily for his popularity, and so turned all into commonplace. They allow their minds to dwell so completely on the logic that they do not notice what, as it were, swims upon it or juts up from its river-bed. That is how they combine religion with a journalism which accepts all the implications of materialism. A thought that stirs me in Time is that ‘only women and great artists love time, others sell it’, but what is Blake’s ‘naked beauty displayed’, visible audible wisdom, to the shopkeeping logicians?

How can they love time or anything but the day’s end?

To-day Molly told me that Synge often spoke of his coming death, indeed constantly for a year past, and tried hard to finish Deirdre. Sometimes he would get very despondent, thinking he could not finish it, and then she would act it for him and he would write a little more, and then he would despond again, and so the acting would begin again.

My sister Lily says that the ship Lolly saw on the night of Synge’s death was not like a real ship, but like the Shadowy Waters ship on the Abbey stage, a sort of allegorical thing. There was also a girl in a bright dress, but she seemed to vanish as the ship ran ashore; all about the girl, and indeed everything, was broken and confused until the bow touched the shore in bright sunlight.

XXI

I see that between Time, suggestion, and Cross-roads, logic, lies a difference of civilization. The literature of suggestion belongs to a social order when life conquered by being itself and the most living was the most powerful, and not to a social order founded upon argument. Leisure, wealth, privilege were created to be a soil for the most living. The literature of logic, the most powerful and the most empty, conquering all in the service of one metallic premise, is for those who have forgotten everything but books and yet have only just learnt to read. They fill their minds with deductions, as they fill their empty houses, where there is nothing of the past, with machine-made furniture. I used to think that the French and Irish democracies follow, as John O’Leary used to say, a logical deduction to its end, no matter what suffering it brings, from a resemblance in the blood. I now believe that they do this because they have broken from the past, from the self-evident truths, from ‘naked beauty displayed’. The English logicians maybe as ignorant but they are timid.

Robinson should become a celebrated dramatist if this theatre lasts long enough. He does not argue like the imitators of Ibsen, though his expression of life is as logical, hence his grasp on active passion. Passion is logical when bent on action. In the drama of suggestion there must be sufficient loosening and slackening for meditation and the seemingly irrelevant, or else a Greek chorus, and neither is possible without rich leisurely minds in the audience, lovers of Father Time, men who understand Faust’s last cry to the passing moment.

Florence Farr once said to me, ‘If we could say to ourselves, with sincerity, “This passing moment is as good as any I shall ever know”, we would die upon the instant, or be united to God’. Desire would have ceased, and logic the feet of desire.

XXII

April 5.

Walked home from Gurteen Dhas with D--- and walked through the brick-kilns of Egypt. He states everything in a slightly argumentative form and the soul is starved by the absence of self- evident truth. Good conversation unrolls itself like the spring or like the dawn; whereas effective argument, mere logical statement, founds itself on the set of facts or of experiences common to two or more. Each hides what is new or rich.

XXIII

The element which in men of action corresponds to style in literature is the moral element. Books live almost entirely because of their style, and the men of action who inspire movements after they are dead are those whose hold upon impersonal emotion and law lifts them out of immediate circumstance. Mitchel wrote better prose than Davis, Mangan better poetry, D’Arcy Magee better popular verse, Fintan Lalor saw deeper into a political event, O’Connell had more power and Meagher more eloquence, but Davis alone has influenced generations of young men, though Mitchel’s narrower and more faulty nature has now and again competed with him. Davis showed this moral element not merely in his verse--- I doubt if that could have had great effect alone---but in his action, in his defence, for instance, of the rights of his political opponents of the Royal Irish Academy. His verses were but an illustration of principles shown in action. Men are dominated by self-conquest; thought that is a little obvious or platitudinous if merely written, becomes persuasive, immortal even, if held to amid the hurry of events. The self-conquest of the writer who is not a man of action is style.

Mitchel’s influence comes mainly, though not altogether, from style, that also a form of power, an energy of life. It is curious that Mitchel’s long martyred life, supported by style, has had less force than that of a man who died at thirty, was never in the hulks, did not write very well, and achieved no change of the law.

The act of appreciation of any great thing is an act of self- conquest. This is one reason why we distrust the serene moralist who has not approved his principles in some crisis. He would be troubled, broken even, if he had made that conquest. Yet the man who has proved himself in a crisis may be serene in words, for his battle was not in contemplation where words are combatants.

XXIV

Last night my sister told me that this book of Synge’s (his poems) was the only book they began to print on a Friday. They tried to avoid this but could not, and it is not at all well printed. Do all they could, it would not come right.

XXV

Molly Allgood has just told me of three pre-visions. Some years ago, when the company were in England on that six weeks’ tour, she, Synge and D--- were sitting in a tea-shop, she was looking at Synge, and suddenly the flesh seemed to fall from his face and she saw but a skull. She told him this and it gave him a great shock, and since then she had not allowed images to form before her eyes of themselves, as they often used to do. Synge was well at the time. Again last year, but before the operation and at a time when she had no fear, she dreamed that she saw him in a coffin being lowered into a grave, and a ‘strange sort of cross’ was laid over the coffin. (The company sent a cross of flowers to his funeral and it was laid upon the grave.) She told this also to Synge and he was troubled by it. Then some time after the operation she dreamed that she saw him in a boat. She was on the shore, and he waved his hand to her and the boat went away. She longed to go to him but could not.

XXVI

March 11, Stratford-on-Avon.

Some weeks ago C--- wrote to me that it was a phase of M---’s madness to believe himself in heaven. All the great poets of other times were there, and he was helping to prepare for the reception of Swinburne. The angels were to stand in groups of three. And now I have just heard that Swinburne is dead.

XXVII

Dined with Ricketts and Shannon. Ricketts spoke of the grief Synge’s death gave him---the ending of all that work. We talked of the disordered and broken lives of modern men of genius and the so different lives of the Italian painters. He said in those days men of genius were cared for, but now the strain of life is too heavy, no one thinks of them till some misfortune comes---madness or death. He then spoke, as he often does, of the lack of any necessary place for the arts in modern life and said, ‘After all, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was the Pope’s ceiling’. Later he said in comment upon some irascible act of Hugh Lane’s, ‘Everybody who is doing anything for the world is very disagreeable, the agreeable people are those for whom the world is doing something’.

XXVIII

Our modern public arts, architecture, plays, large decorations, have too many different tastes to please. Some taste is sure to dislike and to speak its dislike everywhere, and then because of the silence of the rest---partly from apathy, partly from dislike of controversy, partly from the difficulty of defence, as compared with the ease of attack — there is general timidity. All creation requires one mind to make and one mind of enjoyment. The theatre can at rare moments create this one mind of enjoyment, and once created, it is like the mind of an individual in solitude, immeasurably bold---all is possible to it. The only building received with enthusiasm during my time has been the Catholic Cathedral of Westminster---religion or the politics of religion created that one mind.

XXIX

I asked Molly if any words of hers made Synge write ‘I asked if I got sick and died’ and she said, ‘He used often to joke about death with me and one day he said, “Will you go to my funeral?” and I said, “No, for I could not bear to see you dead and the others living”.’

XXX

Went to S---’s the other night---everybody either too tall or too short, crooked or lop-sided. One woman had an excited voice, an intellect without self-possession, and there was a man with a look of a wood-kern, who kept bringing the conversation back and back to Synge’s wrongdoing in having made a girl in the Playboy admire a man who had hamstrung ‘mountain ewes’. He saw nothing else to object to but that one thing. He declared that the English would not give Home Rule because they thought Ireland cruel, and no Irishman should write a sentence to make them go on thinking that. There arose before my mind an image of this man arguing about Ireland with an endless procession of second-rate men. At last I said, ‘When a country produces a man of genius he never is what it wants or believes it wants; he is always unlike its idea of itself. In the eighteenth century Scotland believed itself religious, moral and gloomy, and its national poet Burns came not to speak of these things but to speak of lust and drink and drunken gaiety. Ireland, since the Young Irelanders, has given itself up to apologetics. Every impression of life or impulse of imagination has been examined to see if it helped or hurt the glory of Ireland or the political claim of Ireland. A sincere impression of life became at last impossible, all was apologetics. There was no longer an impartial imagination, delighting in whatever is naturally exciting. Synge was the rushing up of the buried fire, an explosion of all that had been denied or refused, a furious impartiality, an indifferent turbulent sorrow. His work, like that of Burns, was to say all the people did not want to have said. He was able to do this because Nature had made him incapable of a political idea.’ The wood-kern made no answer, did not understand a word I said, perhaps; but for the rest of the evening he kept saying to this person or to that person that he objected to nothing but the passage about the ‘mountain ewes’.

XXXI

July 8.

I dreamed this thought two nights ago: ‘Why should we complain if men ill-treat our Muses, when all that they gave to Helen while she still lived was a song and a jest?’

XXXII

September 20.

An idle man has no thought, a man’s work thinks through him. On the other hand a woman gets her thought through the influence of a man. A man is to her what work is to a man. Man is a woman to his work and it begets his thoughts.

XXXIII

The old playwrights took old subjects, did not even arrange the subject in a new way. They were absorbed in expression, that is to say in what is most near and delicate. The new playwrights invent their subjects and dislike anything customary in the arrangement of the fable, but their expression is as common as the newspapers where they first learned to write.

XXXIV

October.

I saw Hamlet on Saturday night, except for the chief ‘Ophelia’ scenes, and missed these (for I had to be in the Abbey) without regret. Their pathos, as they are played, has always left me cold. I came back for Hamlet at the graveside: there my delight always begins anew. I feel in Hamlet, as so often in Shakespeare, that I am in the presence of a soul lingering on the storm-beaten threshold of sanctity. Has not that threshold always been terrible, even crime-haunted? Surely Shakespeare, in those last seeming idle years, was no quiet country gentleman, enjoying, as men like Dowden think, the temporal reward of an unvalued toil. Perhaps he sought for wisdom in itself at last, and not in its passionate shadows. Maybe he had passed the threshold, and none the less for Jonson’s drinking bout. Certainly one finds here and there in his work praise of country leisure sweetened by wisdom.

XXXV

Am I going against nature in my constant attempt to fill my life with work? Is my mind as rich as in idle days? Is not perhaps the poet’s labour a mere rejection? If he seek purity---the ridding of his life of all but poetry---will not inspiration come? Can one reach God by toil? He gives Himself to the pure in heart. He asks nothing but attention.

XXXVI

I have been looking at Venetian costumes of the sixteenth century as pictured in The Mask — all fantastic; bodily form hidden or disguised; the women with long bodices, the men in stuffed doublets. Life had become so learned and courtly that men and women dressed with no thought of bodily activity. If they still fought and hunted, their imagination was not with these things. Does not the same happen to our passions when we grow contemplative and so liberate them from use? They also become fantastic and create the strange lives of poets and artists.

December 15.

Deirdre of the Sorrows (first performances). I was anxious about this play and on Thursday both Lady Gregory and I felt the strain of our doubts and fears. Would it seem mere disjointed monotony? Would the second act be intelligible? The audience seemed to like it, and I was greatly moved by certain passages in the last act. I thought the quarrel at the graveside with its last phrase, ‘And isn’t it a poor thing we should miss the safety of the grave, and we trampling its edge?’ and Deirdre’s cry to the quarrelling Kings, ‘Draw a little back with the squabbling of fools’, as noble and profound drama as any man has written. On the first night the thought that it was Synge’s reverie over death, his own death, made all poignant. ‘The filth of the grave’, ‘death is a poor, untidy thing, though it’s a queen that dies’, and the like, brought him dying before me. I remembered his extreme gentleness in the last weeks, that air of being done with ambition and conflict. Last night the audience was small---under ten pounds---and less alive than the first night. No one spoke of the great passages. Someone thought the quarrel in the last act too harsh. Others picked out those rough peasant words that give salt to his speech, as ‘of course adding nothing to the dialogue, and very ugly’. Others objected to the little things in the costuming of the play which were intended to echo these words, to vary the heroic convention with something homely or of the fields. Then as I watched the acting I saw that O’Donovan and Molly (Maire O’Neill) were as passionless as the rest. Molly had personal charm, pathos, distinction even, fancy, beauty, but never passion---never intensity; nothing out of a brooding mind All was but observation, curiosity, desire to please. Her foot never touched the unchanging rock, the secret place beyond life; her talent showed like that of the others, social, modern, a faculty of comedy. Pathos she has, the nearest to tragedy the comedian can come, for that is conscious of our presence and would have our pity. Passion she has not, for that looks beyond mankind and asks no pity, not even of God. It realizes, substantiates, attains, scorns, governs, and is most mighty when it passes from our sight.

XXXVIII

December 16.

Last night Molly had so much improved that I thought she may have tragic power. The lack of power and of clarity which I still find amid great charm and distinction, comes more from lack of construction, through lack of reflection and experience, than from mere lack of emotion. There are passages where she attempts nothing, or where she allows herself little external comedy impulses, more, I now think, because they are habitual than because she could not bring emotion out of herself. The chief failure is towards the end. She does not show immediately after the death of Naoise enough sense of what has happened, enough normal despair to permit of a gradual development into the wild unearthly feeling of the last speeches, though these last speeches are exquisitely spoken. My unfavourable impression of Friday came in part from the audience, which was heavy and, I thought, bored. Yesterday the audience---the pit entirely full---was enthusiastic and moved, raising once again my hope for the theatre and for the movement.

XXXIX

May 25.

At Stratford-on-Avon the Playboy shocked a good many people, because it was a self-improving, self-educating audience, and that means a perverted and commonplace audience. If you set out to educate yourself you are compelled to have an ideal, a model of what you would be; and if you are not a man of genius, your model will be commonplace and prevent the natural impulses of the mind, its natural reverence, desire, hope, admiration, always half unconscious, almost bodily. That is why a simple round of religious duties, things that escape the intellect, is often so much better than its substitute, self-improvement.

September 18, S.S. ‘Zeeland’.

I noticed in the train, as I came to Queenstown, a silent, fairly well- dressed man, who struck me as vulgar. It was not his face, which was quite normal, but his movements. He moved from his head only. His arm and hand, let us say, moved in direct obedience to the head, had not the instinctive motion that comes from a feeling of weight, of the shape of an object to be touched or grasped. There were too many straight lines in gesture and in pose. The result was an impression of vulgar smartness, a defiance of what is profound and old and simple. I have noticed that beginners sometimes move this way on the stage. They, if told to pick up something, show by the movement of their body that their idea of doing it is more vivid than the doing of it. One gets an impression of thinness in the nature. I am watching Miss V--- to find out if her inanimate movements when on the stage come from lack of experience or if she has them in life. I watched her sinking into a chair the other day to see if her body felt the size and shape of the chair before she reached it. If her body does not so feel she will never be able to act, just as she will never have grace of movement in ordinary life. As I write I see through the cabin door a woman feeding a child with a spoon. She thinks of nothing but the child, and every movement is full of expression. It would be beautiful acting. Upon the other hand her talk---she is talking to someone next her---in which she is not interested, is monotonous and thin in cadence. It is a mere purpose in the brain, made necessary by politeness.

XLI

October.

A good writer should be so simple that he has no faults, only sins.

THE END