J.M. Synge and the Drama of Art

J.M.SYNGE AND THE DRAMA OF ART' THE NEWSPAPER ATTACKS THAT GREETED Synge's first play, In the Shad.. Ow Of the Glen, and the famous riots at the opening performance of The Playboy of the Western World took as their theme the notion that Synge was a traducer of Irish womanhood and a corrupter of the Irish nation.1 That the depiction in the first play of a peasant girl discontented with a crass, cold, miserly husband or the mention in the second of a ladies' undergarment could subvert the institution of marriage or demonstrate that the people of Ireland were unfit for home rule seems at this date unlikely. The student of Synge may by now be excused from defending him against these charges or even against the slightly more coherent assertions that his works are untrue to Irish life and language.2 Synge's plays are valid representations of the human world of thought and feeling which we all inhabit, and whether or not the pattern of life and speech portrayed in them is precisely coincident with that of the Irish peasantry at the tum of the century is a question irrelevant to matters of literary analysis or judgment. Unfortunately, much of the writing on Synge has been too partisan or simply too general to deal with him as a literary and dramatic artist . When we turn form the quarrels they have evoked to the works themselves, we find that they are essentially personal rather than social. Synge's plays are, in fact, more expressive than has been generally supposed of certain questions concerning the nature and function of art prevalent both in Synge's day and in ours. Yeats told Synge to go to Aran to "express a life that has never found expression,"3 but in reality Synge expressed not so much the life of the Irish peasant as his own feelings about the relation of art to existence and of the artist to the society around him. Searching for a career in art, first as a musician and then as a literary critic, Synge left Dublin, where no such career seemed practicable, to live in Paris, and the spiritual exile of the romantic artist, reflected in his move, remained permanent in both his work and his life even after he returned to live in Ireland and to take his subject matter from it. Though Aran and the west of 1 The best accounts of these occurrences are contained in David H. Greene' and Edward M. Stephens, J. M. Synge (New York, 1959). pp. 143-149, 234-250. 2 A reader interested in such a defense will find it fully presented in Alan Price, Synge and Anglo-Irish Drama (London, 1961). pp. 28-51. S W. B. Yeats, "Preface to the First Edition of The Well of the Saints," Essays and Introductions (New York, 1961), p. 299. 57 S8 MODERN DRAMA MayIreland released Synge's creative imagination and gave him a language,.. the expression of Irish life is not in itself his most important aim~ Theending of his preface to The Playboy of the Western World suggests. Synge's attitude toward his material: In Ireland for a few years more, we have a popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent, and tender; so that those of us who· wish to write start with a chance that is not given to writers in places where the springtime of local life has been forgotten, and the harvest is memory only, and the straw has been turned into bricks. (p. 4)4 Synge has here let slip the truth, that Irish life is material for "thoseof us who wish to write." That wish is Synge's central impulse. More than anything else, he desired to create an image of beauty that would stand against the sense of the absoluteness of death that rarely seems to have been far from his mind. Just as the "springtime of Ioca! life" is threatened by the encroachments of a vulgar urban civilization,. so in Synge's plays, the beauty that he longs for is subject to destruction by the forces of life and time unless it is metamorphosed into the eternal...