BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1138, 27 May 1911, Page 9

BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

VERSES OLD AND NEW.

THE' UNDER-WORLD.

So much of me is dead-Oh, why not all! The years ore cast upon mo as a pall; The hairs are turned to ashes en my head; My footsteps are through ashes everywhere— . So much of mo is dead! ("But not the living fiery spark of thy despair.' , )

So much of me is dead-Oh why not nil! Those' who once called me dear are past

Into tho boundless Night they all are- fled. I lived in them, and they in me by rightSo much of mo is dead!

("Bat not thy Memory's steady alabastrine 1 light.") • .

So much of mo is dead —Oh, why not all! Hourly, from mine own self away I fall, Hope and Desire and Will already shed, And Knowledge fading as a candle spent— So much of me is dead!

("But not some kindling Knowledge of tho Immanent.") ■ i-Edith M. Thomas, in "Harper's." : - ' SUB TJKKB. (.After Verlaino.)^ The graveyard iv} - , hanging grey and frail In the wan glitter of the frozen day, Quakes in the loosened fury of the sale. On. tombs yet littered with the new-turned clay The little wooden crosses strain and grind, As with some secret agony to say. Silent as dormant waters, but behind Their culm tears many as ihc waves to shed, ■ / . Mothers, sons, widows in procession wind. Slow through tho sombre garden of the (lead; , Sorrow's black votaries, whose low sobs beat The motifs of their homage anguished. • The "ravel slips and grinds beneath their feet, . - . And overhead, in rag, and wisp, and .wreath, ' ■ Tho great swept turmoils of the storm ;. wrack.fleet. ■

Savage as old remorse, the Winter's teeth Grip the .numbed heart, and sure in each damp mound ' Chill the grey trances of the dead beneath.

The poor dead, each within its strait house bound, lone in the dark, for ever shivering, Wept, vet forgotten in the hungry ground.

Oh, baste the coming of the joyous Spring; Oh, hasto her smiles, her blessed sun-flood dower And all her choirs of glad birds triumphing'

Enchantress, bring again thy blossom Hour, Thy glories on the. fields, and gardens strow, ' And cleave the chains of bitter Winter's power.

And may, from dawn until the afterglow, The bourneless skies in golden beauty clad, With all sweet songs, and all sweet, scents that blow,

Dear sleepers, soothe your lonely slumbers' sad. — F. O'Neill Gallachcr, in the "Daily News." J. M. SYNGE. The death of the late J. M. Synge, at a moment when he seemed to bo entering upon the period of his full maturity, was not only a .loss to Ireland. Hi,s work had .qualities which made-' it universal. It was impossible not'to-recog-nise in it the awakening of ■β-iwmtf- , lluenco, strongly individual, wonderfully -expresciv'p in its rich and glowing idiom, full of vitality and passion. His instincts wero admirably sound and sane. He understood that it is not so much the ultimate object of life, as lifo itself, which bewilders and fascinates us. He saw', too, that to be a'master ■ of character a writer has to discover not the difference of one man from another, but the. resemblance of one all; and it is this elemental quality of his characters which gives to them an extended significance, and fills some of his work with a sense of tragedy almost Aeschylean in its depth and power. Maurya, in "Riders to the Sea," when her son Bartley is brought homo de.id savs: — "They're all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me. . . I'll have no call now to be up crying and praying when the win 1 breaks from the south, and. you can lie.'.rtbe surf is in the cast, and tho surf is in the west, making a great stir with the two noises, and they hitting one on the other. I'll have no call now to be going down and getting Holy AVatcr in the dark nights after Samhain, and I won't care what way the sea is when I hear the other women keening. . . . It isn't that I haven't prayed for you, Bartley, to the Almighty God. It isn't that I haven't said prayers in the dark night till you wouldn't know what I'd be saying; but it's a great rest I'll have now, and it's time, surely. It's a great rest I'll have now, and great sleeping in tho lima, nights after Samhain, it it's onl,a bit of wet flour wo do have to eat, and maybe a fish that would be stinking'" The simplicity of this passage, its darj; realism, the poignant intensity of :ts emotion are all extraordinarily Greek in feeling. The fact that his characters (ire drawn from simple and primitive, people, herds and fishermen, whose lifo is alternately a conflict with tho bliiyl fci.ces of nature and an acquiescence- iii thorn, tends ultimately to raise them to aicroic proportions, and they become for us types or personifications of mankind's eternal and unprofitable strife with fate. They are great because nothing stands between them and tho direct shock of circumstances. Mr. Syngc, however, was not preoccupied exclusively with tragedy. He saw clearlv enough that tragedy and co;npdy deal with the.same material and are merely different modes of representation, that tho ultimate object of both and the real business of the artist is with life itself. He had too sure an instinct about lifo, too keen a delight in its gaiety, in the extraordinary power of humanity to recreate itself through imagination, to cloud his work with a uniform pessimism. The laughter of his people ii as full and spontaneous as their sorrow. There is not, a iwg? of "The Playboy of the Western World" which does not overflow with humour and vivacity, and with that peculiar attribute of the Irish people—a genius for full-flavoured overwhelming abuse. , Christy Jfahon describes tho Widow Casey as "a. walking terror from beyond tho hills, and she two score and five years, and two hundredweights and five pounds in the weighing scales, with a limping leg on her and a blinded oye, and she a woman of noted misbehaviour with the old and young": and a little later as "she a hag this day with a tongue on her has the crows and seabirds scattered, the way they wouldn't cast a shadow on her garden with tho dread of her curse." But Pcgcen's abuse of the Widow Quin is even moro eloquent:—

"Pogoon (with noisy scorn): 'It's truo the Lord God formed you to contrive indeed. Doesn't the world know you reared a black ram at your own breast no that the Lord Bishop of Connaughfc felt the elements of a Christian, and ho eating it after in a kidney stew? Doesn't tho world know .you've boon Been shaving the foxy skipper from France, for a threepenny bit and a sop of grass tobacco would "wring tho lirafrom n mountain float you'd meet looping tho hills?' Widow Quiii (with amusement): 'Do you hear her now, young fellow? Do your bear the wnv she'll lie rating at your own self when a week is by ?' "

Tho vitality of all this, the spontaneous fertility of invention, tho extreme, flexibility of expression, are quito admirable. Mr. Syngo drew his material from the life about him, the life which ho describes, from a more detached point of view, in his prose essays, "The Aran Islands, Li Wieklow," mid "In West Kerry." It was in the Aran Islands that be heard the story of the man who killed his father with a spade; which he uses in "The Playboy"; and liu describes tho moral attitude of the people who sheltered the. criminal in their own words: "Such a man, they say, will be quiet all the rest of his life, and if you suggest that punishment is needed as an example, they ask, 'Would any man kill his father if ho was able to help it?' " Ho laid the seeno of tho play, however, in Wicldow; and the races on the sands, tho Stooks of the Dead Women, and perhaps even the foxy French skipper, prove- to us, when wo come upon them in his pioso aceomit of Wicklow, how closely he followed reality. It was in the Aran Islands, also, that he heard from an old man the tale which forms the plot of "The Shadow of tho Glen" and it was from a herd at the fair of Auglirim, in Wieklow, that he had tho talo of "Tho Tinker's Wedding," as the tinker himself strode away from them into the darkness. "When ho tells us how tho Aran Islanders .ide their horses', with a halter instead of a bridle, sitting sideways on tho withers, at full dallop, we think of how Bartlcy mot his death in. "Kiclers to the Sea"; and when he speaks of the strong maternal ineUnet which fills the women with a continual dread of the sea, wo think of old Maurya. The lifo itself, which ho studied with such tender fidelity, in its follies and vices as well as m its heroisms, had become a part of his consciousness. Compare "The Playboy of tho Western World" with "John Bull's Other Island," to sen the difference between life 'handled finely and imaginatively and what is, after all, nothing but vanity and vexation of spirit. The difference" is simply that 31r. Shaw is always concerned with those conditions of life which aro transient and irrelevant, while Mr. Syngo is always concerned with the passions and emotions which aro eternal arid universal.

It is because Mr. Synge was chiefly ah urtist in life, a yael in the sense of being a creator, that wo prefer his tragedies tn his comedies. He returned to tragedy in "Deirdre. of tho Sorrows," the play in which lie revealed his powers more completely than in any other. Here again his'material is drawn from the life of the people; but it has been shifted back into that twilight of myth and legend of which it seems at times to bo only a strange survival; and the light and shadow are more delicately graduated, the emotions more exquisitely strung. He is always a poet in his handling of life, but here ho is more of a poet than ever: the fatalism and the emotion suffuse and transfigure the reality. The Medea of Euripides knows whither fate is leading her, but the consciousness of it cannot shako her resolve. It is the same with Deirdre. She sees that her love for Naisi will bring death upon him and his brothers and herself, but the imperious necessity of lovo overmasters her. Her speeches have an extraordinary beauty of phrase, full of a haunting music, as sbo speaks of the fatality that follows after all joy and beauty given to man: — "It's tliis hour we're between the daytime and a night where there is sleep for ever, and isn't it a better thing to be following on to a near death, than to bo bending the head down, and dragging with tho feet, and seeing one day a blight showing on love where it is sweet and tender? . . . We're seven years without- roughness or growing wearv; seven years so sweet and shining, the gods would,bo har.d set to give us seven days the like of them* It's for that we're going, to, Emain, where there'll be a rest for ever, or a place for forgetting, in great crowds, and they making a stir." She speaks thus after Fergus lias told her and Naisi that that they will grow: weary of each other, and their love wither. Her words are curiously week in feeling. Such a passion as Deirdre's is not remote from us, however greatly it transcends human experience, because it springs from a sense •of mortality common to all. Greek, too, in some aspects, is her lament over the grave of Naisi and his brothers:' "Its you three will not seo age or death coming —you that were my company when the fires 'on tho hill-tops wore put out, and the stars were our friends only. 11l turn my thoughts back from this night that's pitiful for the lack of pity, to tho time it was your rods and cloaks made a little tent forme where there d be a birch tree making shelter, and a dry stone; thougli, from this day, my own fingers will be making a tent for me, spreading out my hairs and they knotted with the rain." We have scarcely spoken about tho literary quality of Synge's work, and perhaps there is no -..need that _wo should, as with all fine art there is a perfect adaptation of tho means.to the end: the matter and tho style here are inseparable. One of tho most delightful characteristics of his work is his power of showing us, without any apparent break in the dialogue glimpses of landscapes, "twilight in the woods with Naisi, when beech trees wero silver and copper, and ash trees were finecrold," and "the stars among the clear trees of Glen da Ruadh, or the moon pausing to rest her on the edges or the hills," and flights of birds, and the sheep pasturing, the pools of the rivers, and tho coo ferns. These climpses illuminate all.his work, and arc clearest in "De.rdre," . though there wo should do wrong to separate them from the bewildering beauty of fplav a beauty that seems borrowed of woods and waters w.th the wind stirring them, a thing scarcely to be spoken about, but to be felt inwardly, and treasured up in the heait. —"Spectator."