Irish Folk Tales Read Online Free PDF

published verse in the manner of Wordsworth, whom he admired for his clarity, but he had not yet found his voice. Still, there was much in Synge to appeal to Yeats. Like Lady Gregory he came of an old Irish Protestant family. In Irish matters, he was a nationalist. Politically, he was a socialist. He had read William Morris, who encouraged Yeats’ early interest in folklore and efforts in poetry, and whom Yeats would always call “my chief of men.” John Synge wandered alone in youth through the Wicklow hills, meeting the country people and becoming a serious naturalist. Contemplating Darwin in isolated terror, he denounced Christianity. In college at Trinity in Dublin, an interest in Irish antiquities led him through study of the Irish language into familiarity with ancient Irish literature. Paris may have been the place for an aspiring poet, but Synge’s calling was higher than sprinkling pages with pretty words. “Give up Paris,” Yeats told him. “Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.”
    John Synge did not go to the Arans immediately, and when he did it cannot have been easy for him. Bedeviled by pains in his body, big butnatively shy, Synge entertained his hosts with little magic tricks and set up his music stand in the kitchen to perform upon the violin, for he had trained at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. None of his four trips to the Arans was long, he drew his friends from the margins of society and spent much time lying on his back and watching the clouds go east, yet his experience there gave him his career and the book he wrote to tell of his adventure is a masterpiece.
    The Aran Islands
brings together Synge’s interests in evolution and socialism. That mix characterized the folklore scholarship of his period, when folk culture was defined as a survival from an earlier evolutionary stage, marked by a generous and happy collective spirit. But Synge’s book was not conventional folklore writing, which was one reason it took years to find its publisher. Nor was
The Aran Islands
anything like the old sketches of peasant life, though the sketching idea remained alive in hands like those of Seumas MacManus. And Synge’s book was not journalism. Its prose was clear and new and beautiful. John Synge observed like a naturalist, and like others of his time who belonged to naturalists’ clubs in Ireland, he was a pioneer photographer of rural life. He observed like a naturalist and wrote like a poet to invent a new genre of emotional ethnography.
    While
The Aran Islands
was being rejected by a series of publishers, John Synge entered a state of white-hot creativity. In six years he wrote all of his plays, all but one influenced by his time on the Arans, two of them founded directly upon traditional narratives he heard there. Familiarity with the idea of the sketch breeds misunderstanding of Synge’s achievement. He does not depict Irish life as it is or was, but like the old teller of tales, he enters and enacts the Irish consciousness. Do not think of the country people he knew as playing upon the stage but as sitting beside him in the darkened theater, laughing and crying and twitching at his restatement of their ideas.
    “All art,” John Synge said, “is a collaboration.” No mere association between like-minded artists, the collaboration that powered his movement unified the artist with the national tradition. This is the structure of collaboration: in order to locate deep truths and to gain wide appeal, to avoid the trivializing constraints of academic endeavor, the artist roots his work in the folk culture and then accepts two responsibilities: to preserve the old tradition intact for the future; to do battle with the tradition so as to answer the needs of the self while creating new works for new worlds. In
The Aran Islands
and its companion,
In Wicklow and West Kerry
, Synge recorded the old ways as Lady