The curse of popularity lingers like a pall over Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski and John Millington Synge, ready to swoop down at any minute, like the Pharaonic chicken (Neophron percnopterus) of Holy Writ, and bear them off to the department stores and the quartered oak bookcases. A metaphor perhaps of lamen-table heterogeneity, but none the less you gather the idea behind it, and, let me hope, perceive the danger.
It would never do for Conrad, for one, to reach and inflame the vulgar, for the reason that the vulgar would at once translate his True Romance into shoddy romance, just as they translated Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” into a suffragist tract and “Huckleberry Finn” into bad Oliver Optic.1 Imagine “Lord Jim” illustrated by the Cruikshanks of the best sellers, with Jim stretching seven feet three inches into the blue, and wearing patent leather slippers in the midst of the Bornese jungle! Imagine “Heart of Darkness” done into a drama of fustian by some literary demi-mondain—and Kurtz carried upon the stage by four supers in burnt cork and black undershirts! Imagine the elocutionists of the Chautauquas—may the Fire be hot for them Beyond!—giving readings from “The Nigger of the Narcissus” and “Typhoon”! And yet such scandals impend, for the publishers, awaking from their lewd dreams of new Oppenheims and undiscovered McCutcheons,2 announce extensive second editions of various Conrad tales—and by the same token, Synge appears in an elegant library edition, suitable for the built-in bookcase beside the open fireplace of any Ladies’ Home Journal bungalow in the land.
Four or five years ago, while Synge still lived, the people of his own country tore up their theater seats and threw them at him, and the people of America dismissed him suspiciously, as but one more of the recondite devils praised by James Huneker, that agent of the incomprehensible and immoral. Only in such savage places as Vienna, Munich and Copenhagen was he hailed as artist. But now, as I have said, he appears suddenly in all the panoply of “The Works of—”—four stately and highly respectable volumes, bound in buckram and with uncut leaves—and before long, perhaps, we shall hear that the Ancient Order of Hibernians has forgiven him, and that he has been elevated to the national valhalla, along with Charles Lever and Mr. Dooley.3 Wherefore, and as in duty bound, I pronounce a curse upon the publishers who thus make him so seductive to the newly intellectual, and at the same time offer them my congratulations for doing it so well. They have put into these four volumes not only “The Playboy of the Western World,” “Riders to the Sea” and the other plays of Synge, but also his sketch books of Kerry, Wicklow and the Aran Islands, his scattered poems and some of his translations from the French and Italian, not to mention four fine portraits of him, all in photogravure. In the volume on the Aran Islands the drawings by Jack B. Yeats are reproduced, but Mr. Yeats’s equally excellent illustrations for the Kerry and Wicklow sketches are omitted. Other defects are the absence of an adequate introduction reciting the circumstances of Synge’s strange life and showing his precise relation to the other Neo-Celts, and the lack of a bibliography. But allowing for all this, it is a very satisfactory edition, done soberly and in good taste, and so it should get a welcome, despite its invitation to the Goths and Huns.
Synge made his flash so unexpectedly and so recently, and it was so blinding when it came, that it is difficult, this near to it, to achieve a sound estimate of it and him. Down to 1903 or thereabout he was an obscure intellectual waster, living idly in Paris on four dollars a week or doing hack work for second rate periodicals. No one save a few Irish editors and poets had ever heard of him, and only W. B. Yeats believed that there was anything in him. Even the production of “In the Shadow of the Glen” and “Riders to the Sea” in Dublin (at the end of 1903 and the beginning of 1904, respectively) brought him the notice of only a few specialists in the drama. But when these one-acters were published in a modest shilling pamphlet, in 1905, whispers about him began to go abroad, and when “The Playboy” followed two years later, to the tune of Celtic yelps and cat calls, Synge began to come into his own. That was rather less than six years ago. Today this fantastic and eerie fellow, whose whole published work fills less space than “Vanity Fair” and little more than “Peer Gynt,” is accepted as a genuine genius by all the critics of Christendom, and more than one of them, forgetting Sheridan and Goldsmith and disdaining all lesser men, has called him the greatest dramatist working in English since the age of Elizabeth. Staggering praise, and, to me at least, praise considerably overladen, but nevertheless its very exuberance shows that it has some basis in fact. Synge, in truth, was an artist of extraordinary talents, a dramatist who apparently accomplished with ease what others failed to accomplish by the severest painstaking, a sharp and relentless observer of human character, a contributor of new music to the English tongue—and if he had lived ten years longer, there is no doubt whatever that he would have justified the enthusiasm of some of his least compromising admirers, and taken his secure place beside Marlowe, Scott, Congreve, Coleridge and the other sublime sccond-raters, who are no less venerable because they are not of the true blood royal.
I have spoken of Synge’s apparent ease of manner, but I do not mean thereby that he struck the perfect note by intuition and without effort. As a matter of fact, he was an extremely conscious and conscientious craftsman, and if we had his notebooks we should probably find, as we have from Ibsen’s, that much careful toil intervened between his first grappling with an idea and its ultimate incomparable expression. In “Deirdre of the Sorrows,” indeed, there is proof of this, for Synge died before the play got its final touches, and so its dialogue, instead of showing an advance upon that of “Riders to the Sea,” shows an actual retrogression. It lacks the perfect music; one trips, now and then, upon a harsh progression, an awkward cadence. But where Synge exceeded all other dramatists of his time was in his capacity for attaining to that perfect music when he bent his whole endeavor to the task. He was not the inventor of his medium, by any means. You will find the same haunting Irish-English, with its queer enallages and hyperbata, its daring use of ancillary clauses, its homely vocabulary, its richness in idiom, in the plays and fairy tales of Lady Augusta Gregory—and particularly in her Kilkartan Molière—and in the plays, too, of a number of other Neo-Celts, including Lennox Robinson and Seumas O’Kelly. But it was Synge, and Synge alone, who lifted it to consummate beauty, who penetrated to its farthest possibilities, who made it sing like the angels. No man, in truth, ever brought to the writing of English a more sensitive ear, a more certain feeling for color and rhythm. Read “Riders to the Sea” or “The Well of the Saints” or one of the translations from Villon, and you will go drunk with the sheer music of the words, as you go drunk over the Queen Mab speech in “Romeo and Juliet,” or Faustus’s apostrophe to Helen, or the One Hundred and Third Psalm. Here any merely intellectual analysis must needs fail. The appeal is not to the intelligence at all, but to the midriff and the pulses. One feels such stuff more than one ever understands it.
But Synge, it should be said, is not all manner; there is matter in him, too. Translate it into ordinary English and “The Playboy” would still be a well built and effective comedy, with real Irishmen in it and irresistible humor. “Riders to the Sea,” structurally, is an almost perfect piece of craftsmanship. Even “Deirdre,” the least of the plays, is immeasurably better made than Lady Gregory’s “Grania,” or, to come still nearer home, the “Deirdre” of Mr. Yeats. As P. P. Howe points out, in “J. M. Synge: A Critical Study,” the dramatist’s acute sense of form, his instinct for balance, proportions, rhythm, is visible in the way his plots are managed as well as in the way his dialogue burbles and flows. But here it is easy to overestimate him, and Mr. Howe succumbs to the temptation. As dramatic contrivances and even as studies of character his plays have been more than matched by the inventions of other dramatists. Nothing that Synge ever wrote, not “The Playboy” nor “Riders to the Sea,” shows the superb design of Galsworthy’s “Strife,” Strindberg’s “The Father” and Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” and in the delineation of Irish peasant types, for all his wanderings over the countryside, he has nothing to teach to Lady Gregory. It is only as stylist that he leaves all rivals behind him, but here his lead is so great that he really has no rivals at all. He got into words the surge and splendor, the ground bass and overtones, of mighty music. He made prose that had more of Aurora’s light in it than nine-tenths of English poetry.