Daniel Corkery's Cultural Criticism: Selected Writings

Synge and Ireland

even those who may not be greatly interested in Synge will find much to attract them in professor Corkery’s volume. He writes frankly from a ‘native’ point of view throughout, and is prepared to incur the penalty of loss of publicity and practical suppression which such a view entails. i need not tell readers of this journal how such suppression is brought about.Thirty years’ boycott and silence has been the result of our labours, and any man who is unwilling to sneak to ascendancy and anti-Christianity will meet the same fate, to be ignored and forgotten by his fellow-Christians. for the antiChristian forces are, if anything, stronger in such matters, and have more influence among Christians than even in matters of jobbery. He who writes Christian and writes well will write for the irish alone, and for a very small class among them. Such a man is daniel Corkery. My congratulations, therefore, to the Cork College for having chosen such a man as its teacher of literature. * * * Synge and ireland1 in the pages of Mr. George Moore’s Hail and Farewell, the english reader may learn much about the political and religious odds against which the new poetry and drama of ireland had to struggle for independence.2 The Playboy controversy has been forgotten by the world and Synge’s plays have long ago won the affection of irish audiences. But the freedom of the artistic conscience is still ungranted, and every succeeding writer of originality must fight his own cause. Mr. Corkery’s book is the first essay in literary criticism which has come from ireland in recent years, and it is disturbing to find that this distinguished writer believes in more than argument. Writing of Sean o’Casey’s plays, he says: ‘to remain silent in the midst of that noisy gaiety, even to fling brickbats about, protesting against it, is, one thinks, to avoid the deeper vulgarity.’3 Mr. Corkery, who has just been appointed to the Chair of english Literature at university College, Cork, has undertaken to explain the grievance of the brickbatters. His own novels and stories have distinction: they accept and present irish life in subdued and quiet tones. His orthodoxy is unquestionable, despite the fact that his recent study in later Gaelic literature, The Hidden Ireland, unconsciously upset a pious legend and caused a flutter in ecclesiastical circles. But if Mr. Corkery is a novelist of melancholy charm, as a controversialist he is vehement and unsparing. His Part Four. Contemporary Reception 199 book shows the difficulties against which younger irish writers of liberal mind must contend. Briefly, Mr. Corkery regards the entire anglo-irish school as an abnormal phenomenon. it was the attempt of a small ascendancy class, protestant in outlook and education, to express the life and emotions of the irish Catholic majority for the benefit of a foreign public. The comicalities of Lover and Lever yielded to the depredations of poets who seized on the ‘wraith-like wisps of vanished beliefs that still float in the minds of a tiny percentage of the people.’4 Synge, of course, reacted against the Celtic twilight: he bid adieu to ‘the skinny Sidhe’: but he tumbled too deeply into red dan’s ditch.5 Synge came nearer than his contemporaries to the mind of the folk, for he lived in remote glens and on islands, but his temperament was peculiar. Moreover, in common with all ascendancy writers, he had ‘an inherent lack of spiritual delicacy.’6 There is a clear case against Synge, for those who dislike naturalism, and no amount of tubbing will wash out the pagan dye of his genius. it is this feeling of paganism which Mr. Corkery dislikes so intensely. His study of the plays is careful and conscientious, though a trifle academic. He employs an elaborate critical apparatus that is unnecessary, for the limitations of Synge’s method and overwrought style are immediately recognisable. He finds fault with Synge’s free use of holy names and his cordial dislike of priests. But he admits that Synge, in his one early tragic play, Riders to the Sea, showed sympathy with and knowledge of the spiritual consciousness of the irish peasantry as distinct from religious institutionalism. if Mr. Corkery demands more from the plays than Synge could give, we may, nevertheless, agree with his final summary: The creations of Synge’s genius have now passed by, as in a frieze.They were all peasants, even...