Part 7 (1/2)

Reading the second of these lines one feels as if one of the mourners had stubbed his foot against a sharp stone on the mountain-path. And yet, if Browning invented a harsh speech of his own far common use, he uttered it in all the varied rhythms of genius and pa.s.sion. There may often be no music in the individual words, but there is always in the poems as a whole a deep undercurrent of music as from some hidden river.

His poems have the movement of living things. They are lacking only in smooth and static loveliness. They are full of the hoof-beats of Pegasus.

We find in his poems, indeed, no fastidious escape from life, but an exalted acceptance of it. Browning is one of the very few poets who, echoing the Creator, have declared that the world is good. His sense of the goodness of it even in foulness and in failure is written over half of his poems. _Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came_ is a fable of life triumphant in a world tombstoned with every abominable and hostile thing--a world, too, in which the hero is doomed to perish at devilish hands. Whenever one finds oneself doubting the immensity of Browning's genius, one has only to read _Childe Roland_ again to restore one's faith. There never was a landscape so alive with horror as that amid which the knight travelled in quest of the Dark Tower. As detail is added to detail, it becomes horrible as suicide, a shrieking progress of all the torments, till one is wrought up into a very nightmare of apprehension and the Tower itself appears:--

The round squat tower, blind as the fool's heart.

Was there ever such a pause and gathering of courage as in the verses that follow in which the last of the knights takes his resolve?:--

Not see? because of night perhaps?--why, day Came back again for that! before it left, The dying sunset kindled through a cleft: The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay-- ”Now stab and end the creature--to the heft!”

Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears, Of all the lost adventurers my peers-- How such a one was strong, and such was bold, And such was fortunate, yet each of old Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.

There they stood, ranged along the hillside, met To view the last of me, a living frame For one more picture! in a sheet of flame I saw them and I knew them all. And yet Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set.

And blew. ”_Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came_.”

There, if anywhere in literature, is the summit of tragic and triumphant music. There, it seems to me, is as profound and imaginative expression of the heroic spirit as is to be found in the English language.

To belittle Browning as an artist after such a poem is to blaspheme against art. To belittle him as an optimist is to play the fool with words. Browning was an optimist only in the sense that he believed in what Stevenson called ”the ultimate decency of things,” and that he believed in the capacity of the heroic spirit to face any test devised for it by inquisitors or devils. He was not defiant in a fine att.i.tude like Byron. His defiance was rather a form of magnanimity. He is said, on Robert Buchanan's authority, to have thundered ”No,” when in his later years he was asked if he were a Christian. But his defiance was the defiance of a Christian, the dauntlessness of a knight of the Holy Ghost. Perhaps it is that he was more Christian than the Christians.

Like the Pope in _The Ring and the Book_, he loathed the a.s.sociation of Christianity with respectability. Some readers are bewildered by his respectability in trivial things, such as dress, into failing to see his hatred of respectability when accepted as a standard in spiritual things. He is more sympathetic towards the disreputable suicides in _Apparent Failure_ than towards the vacillating and respectable lovers in _The Statue and the Bust._ There was at least a hint of heroism in the last madness of the doomed men. Browning again and again protests, as Blake had done earlier, against the mean moral values of his age.

Energy to him as to Blake meant endless delight, and especially those two great energies of the spirit--love and heroism. For, though his work is not a philosophic expression of moral ideas, it is an imaginative expression of moral ideas, as a result of which he is, above all, the poet of lovers and heroes. Imagination is a caged bird in these days; with Browning it was a soaring eagle. In some ways Mr. Conrad's is the most heroic imagination in contemporary literature. But he does not take this round globe of light and darkness into his purview as Browning did.

The whole earth is to him shadowed with futility. Browning was too lyrical to resign himself to the shadows. He saw the earth through the eyes of a lover till the end. He saw death itself as no more than an interlude of pain, darkness, and cold before a lovers' meeting. It may be that it is all a rapturous illusion, and that, after we have laid him aside and slept a night's broken sleep, we sink back again naturally into the little careful hopes and infidelities of everyday. But it seems to me that here is a whole heroic literature to which the world will always do well to turn in days of inexorable pain and horror such as those through which it has but recently pa.s.sed.

VIII

THE FAME OF J.M. SYNGE

The most masterly piece of literary advertising in modern times was surely Mr. Yeats's enforcement of Synge upon the coteries--or the choruses--as a writer in the great tradition of Homer and Shakespeare.

So successful has Mr. Yeats been, indeed, in the exaltation of his friend, that people are in danger of forgetting that it is Mr. Yeats himself, and not Synge, who is the ruling figure in modern Irish literature. One does not criticize Mr. Yeats for this. During the Synge controversy he was a man raising his voice in the heat of battle--a man, too, praising a generous comrade who was but lately dead. The critics outside Ireland, however, have had none of these causes of pa.s.sion to prevent them from seeing Synge justly. They simply bowed down before the idol that Mr. Yeats had set up before them, and danced themselves into ecstasies round the image of the golden playboy.

Mr. Howe, who wrote a sincere and able book on Synge, may be taken as a representative apostle of the Synge cult. He sets before us a G.o.d, not a man--a creator of absolute beauty--and he asks us to accept the common view that _The Playboy of the Western World_ is his masterpiece. There can never be any true criticism of Synge till we have got rid of all these obsessions and idolatries. Synge was an extraordinary man of genius, but he was not an extraordinarily great man of genius. He is not the peer of Shakespeare: he is not the peer of Sh.e.l.ley: he is the peer, say, of Stevenson. His was a byway, not a high-road, of genius. That is why he has an immensely more enthusiastic following among clever people than among simple people.

Once and once only Synge achieved a piece of art that was universal in its appeal, satisfying equally the artistic formula of Pater and the artistic formula of Tolstoi. This was _Riders to the Sea. Riders to the Sea_, a lyrical pageant of pity made out of the destinies of fisher-folk, is a play that would have been understood in ancient Athens or in Elizabethan London, as well as by an audience of Irish peasants to-day.

Here, incidentally, we get a foretaste of that preoccupation with death which heightens the tensity in so much of Synge's work. There is a corpse on the stage in _Riders to the Sea_, and a man laid out as a corpse in _In the Shadow of the Glen_, and there is a funeral party in _The Playboy of the Western World._ Synge's imagination dwelt much among the tombs. Even in his comedies, his laughter does not spring from an exuberant joy in life so much as from excitement among the incongruities of a world that is due to death. Hence he cannot be summed up either as a tragic or a comic writer. He is rather a tragic satirist with the soul of a lyric poet.

If he is at his greatest in _Riders to the Sea_, he is at his most personal in _The Well of the Saints_, and this is essentially a tragic satire. It is a symbolic play woven out of the illusions of two blind beggars. Mr. Howe says that ”there is nothing for the symbolists in _The Well of the Saints_,” but that is because he is anxious to prove that Synge was a great creator of men and women. Synge, in my opinion at least, was nothing of the sort. His genius was a genius of decoration, not of psychology. One might compare it to firelight in a dark room, throwing fantastic shapes on the walls. He loved the fantastic, and he was held by the darkness. Both in speech and in character, it was the bizarre and even the freakish that attracted him. In _Riders to the Sea_ he wrote as one who had been touched by the simple tragedy of human life. But, as he went on writing and working, he came to look on life more and more as a pattern of extravagances, and he exchanged the n.o.ble style of _Riders to the Sea_ for the gauded and overwrought style of _The Playboy._

”With _The Playboy of the Western World_,” says Mr. Howe, ”Synge placed himself among the masters.” But then Mr. Howe thinks that ”Pegeen Mike is one of the most beautiful and living figures in all drama,” and that she ”is the normal,” and that

Synge, with an originality more absolute than Wordsworth's, insisted that his readers should regain their poetic feeling for ordinary life; and presented them with Pegeen with the stink of poteen on her, and a playboy wet and crusted with his father's blood.

The conception of ordinary life--or is it only ordinary Irish life?--in the last half-sentence leaves one meditating.

But, after all, it is not Synge's characters or his plots, but his language, which is his great contribution to literature. I agree with Mr. Howe that the question how far his language is the language of the Irish countryside is a minor one. On the other hand, it is worth noting that he wrote most beautifully in the first enthusiasm of his discovery of the wonders of Irish peasant speech. His first plays express, as it were, the delight of first love. He was always a shaping artist, of course, in search of figures and patterns; but he kept his pa.s.sion for these things subordinate to reality in the early plays. In _The Playboy_ he seemed to be determined to write riotously, like a man straining after vitality. He exaggerated everything. He emptied bagfuls of wild phrases--the collections of years--into the conversations of a few minutes. His style became, in a literary sense, vicious, a thing of tricks and conventions: blank-verse rhythms--I am sure there are a hundred blank-verse lines in the play--and otiose adjectives crept in and spoilt it as prose. It became like a parody of the beautiful English Synge wrote in the noon of his genius.

I cannot understand the special enthusiasm for _The Playboy_ except among those who read it before they knew anything of Synge's earlier and better work. With all its faults, however, it is written by the hand of genius, and the first hearing or reading of it must come as a revelation to those who do not know _Riders to the Sea_ or _The Well of the Saints._ Even when it is played, as it is now played, in an expurgated form, and with sentimentality subst.i.tuted for the tolerant but Mephistophelean malice which Synge threaded into it, the genius and originality are obvious enough. _The Playboy_ is a marvellous confection, but it is to _Riders to the Sea_ one turns in search of Synge the immortal poet.