J.M. SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME
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 bee from Dublin after the sed Act of The Playboy of the Western World, then being performed for the first time. After one in the m, my host brought to my bedroom this sed 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 m. On the Monday night no word of the play had been heard. About forty young men had sat on the fros of the pit, and stamped and shouted and blown trumpets from the rise to the fall of the curtain. Ouesday night also the forty young mehere. They wished to silence what they sidered a slander upon Irelands womanhood. Irish women would never sleep uhe same roof with a young man without a chaperon, nor admire a murderer, nor use a word like shift; nor could anyhe try 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 Synges capricious imagination the enemy of all it would have young men believe, had for years prepared for this hour, by that which is at ohe 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, Synges first play, with an assertion made in ignora repeated in dishoy, 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 dece. Some spontaneous dislike had been but natural, fenius like his but slowly, amid what it has of harsh and strange, set forth the nobility of its beauty, and the depth of its passion; 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 watg, knowihat 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 hardly keep himself from jumping on to a seat, and pointing out in that howling mob those whom he is treating for venereal disease.