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What distinctive contributions to the modern drama have Pinero, Shaw, and Barrie made? Describe the work of Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Synge. In what does Synge's special power consist? Alex. 1603-1660: Prose Writers. Poets and Dramatists. 1660-1740: Dramatists of the Restoration. Prose Writers. Poets. 1740-1780: Prose Writers. Poets. 1780-1837: Philosophers. Historians. Essayists.
Ascher thoroughly about the art of Synge's plays, and Lady Gregory's and Yeats', and the art of the players. But it is merely silly to talk about the soil and whitewashed cottages, and self-revelation of peasant souls. Neither the dramatists nor the players are peasants or ever were.
If we are to apply art to great work we must distinguish art from artifice. We find the two well contrasted in Synge's "Riders to the Sea" and his "Playboy." The first was written straight from the heart.
It must have facts, and again facts, not only in the present and the past, but in the future. And it demands facts of that, which alone cannot glibly give it facts. It goes on asking facts of Art, or, rather, such facts as Art cannot give for, after all, even "flower of author" is fact in a sort of way. Consider, for instance, Synge's masterpiece, "The Playboy of the Western World!"
For, where there is a seeming blend of lyricism and naturalism, it will on examination be found, I think, to exist only in plays whose subjects or settings as in Synge's "Playboy of the Western World," or in Mr. Masefield's "Nan" are so removed from our ken that we cannot really tell, and therefore do not care, whether an absolute illusion is maintained.
Her genius, like Synge's, opened its eyes one day and saw spread below it the immense sea of Irish common speech, with its colour, its laughter, and its music. It is a sort of second birth which many Irish men and women of the last generation or so have experienced.
The sting of bitterness is drawn from death, and sorrow changes into a solemn rapture. In commenting on Synge's poem, The Curse, I spoke of the delight the Irish have in hyperbolic curses; an excellent illustration of this may be found in Mr. Stephens' latest volume, Reincarnations.
In one of his later moments of self-consciousness he uttered a sentence of criticism worthy to be treasured by the modern poet, and perhaps by the Irish poet especially. "It may almost be said that before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal." What would we not give to have Synge's "brutality" introduced into the over-idealised and sonorous poetry of Mr. Yeats?
The love of brutal strength in Synge's work may have been partly the projection of his sickness, just as the invalid Stevenson delighted in the creation of powerful ruffians; but the brooding on his own death is quite modern, and is, I think, part of the egoism that is so distinguishing a feature in contemporary poetry.
The poems are mainly realistic, pictures of slimy city streets with slimy creatures crawling on the pavements. It is an interesting fact that they appeared the same year of Synge's Poems with Synge's famous Preface counselling brutality, counselling anything to bring poetry away from the iridescent dreams of W. B. Yeats down to the stark realities of life and nature.
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