Synge and the Ireland of his Time: I
By William Butler Yeats
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I
On Saturday, January 26th, 1907, I was lecturing in Aberdeen, and when my lecture was over I was given a telegram which said, 'Play great success.' It had been sent from Dublin after the second Act of 'The Playboy of the
Western World,' then being performed for the first time. After one in the morning, my host brought to my bedroom this second telegram, 'Audience
broke up in disorder at the word shift.' I knew no more until I got the
Dublin papers on my way from Belfast to Dublin on Tuesday morning. On the Monday night no word of the play had been heard. About forty young men had sat on the front seats of the pit, and stamped and shouted and blown trumpets from the rise to the fall of the curtain. On the Tuesday night also the forty young men were there. They wished to silence what they considered a slander upon Ireland's womanhood. Irish women would never sleep under the same roof with a young man without a chaperon, nor admire
a murderer, nor use a word like 'shift;' nor could anyone recognise the
country men and women of Davis and Kickham in these poetical, violent,
grotesque persons, who used the name of God so freely, and spoke of all things that hit their fancy.
A patriotic journalism which had seen in Synge's capricious imagination
the enemy of all it would have young men believe, had for years prepared
for this hour, by that which is at once the greatest and most ignoble
power of journalism, the art of repeating a name again and again with
some ridiculous or evil association. The preparation had begun after the
first performance of 'The Shadow of the Glen,' Synge's first play, with
an assertion made in ignorance but repeated in dishonesty, that he had
taken his fable and his characters, not from his own mind nor that
profound knowledge of cot and curragh he was admitted to possess, but
'from a writer of the Roman decadence.' Some spontaneous dislike had been
but natural, for genius like his can but slowly, amid what it has of
harsh and strange, set forth the nobility of its beauty, and the depth of
its compassion; but the frenzy that would have silenced his master-work
was, like most violent things artificial, the defence of virtue by those
that have but little, which is the pomp and gallantry of journalism and
its right to govern the world.
As I stood there watching, knowing well that I saw the dissolution of a
school of patriotism that held sway over my youth, Synge came and stood
beside me, and said, 'A young doctor has just told me that he can hardly
keep himself from jumping on to a seat, and pointing out in that howling
mob those whom he is treating for venereal disease.'
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