Irish Folk Tales Read Online Free PDF Page B

Gregory said the folklorist should, with patience and reverence. All of his plays bear a relation to the tradition and two of them at least,
Riders to the Sea
and
The Playboy of the Western World
, are among the first great works of modern drama.
    John Synge’s oeuvre provides one pristine example of the perfection of Carleton’s solution. In
The Aran Islands
he quotes Pat Dirane’s folktale from which his play
In the Shadow of the Glen
was constructed. The story that inspired
The Playboy
is not presented as a text, and the rest of his plays are less specifically drawn from folk art. Scientist and artist, John Synge was an artist first, so we will relocate the center of his movement by balancing him with Douglas Hyde, who did write plays based on folktales, but who dedicated himself primarily to the collection and preservation of folklore.
    Only Ireland could choose a folklorist for its first president. Douglas Hyde’s election in 1937 capped a career that commenced in serious linguistic study. The son of a Protestant minister from Roscommon, Hyde studied Hebrew and Greek and Irish at Trinity. To improve his Irish, he went into the countryside, listened to the aged speakers, and wrote down their stories and songs. To preserve Irish, he founded the Gaelic League in 1893. The League extended its mission from linguistic to national revival and provided the context in which the spirit of rebellion was nurtured until it broke forth in war in 1916. While others pressed toward armed action, Hyde withdrew to protect his culture by writing his monumental
Literary History of Ireland
and by publishing, between 1889 and 1939, a sequence of volumes filled with folk texts.
    Douglas Hyde, wrote William Butler Yeats, “knows the people thoroughly.… His work is neither humorous nor mournful; it is simply life.” Accuracy was Hyde’s concern. He surveyed the works that preceded his own in a kindly mood, but still found their stories manipulated, padded, and cooked. “Attempts,” he wrote in
Beside the Fire
, published in 1890, “have been made from time to time during the present century to collect Irish folk-lore, but these attempts, though interesting from a literary point of view, are not always successes from a scientific one.” Art and science obey different rules. Before Hyde, some writers of folktales leaned more toward art, others more toward science, but all created imperfect blends. In Hyde’s day, his friends W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Synge separated science and art and performed differently in different contexts to meet different responsibilities. After Hyde, division became complete. Some devoted themselves to art, others to science.
    In 1902, W. B. Yeats and James Joyce met for the first time on a street in Dublin. Joyce told the poet that his reliance on folklore was a sign of his deterioration. Yeats constructed a long counterargument, contending that art depends on the popular tradition to prevent the pursuit of individualism from ending in sterility. The twenty-year-old Joyce replied, or so Yeats tells it, that it was a pity Yeats was too old to receive his influence. The next year Joyce met Synge, read
Riders to the Sea
and did not like it, and reviewing Lady Gregory’s new
Poets and Dreamers
he described her storytellers assenile, feeble, and sleepy. Then the next year, with a little gift from Lady Gregory in his pocket, Joyce flew by the nets of home and religion to lodge in exile. Early in
Ulysses
, when the clever college boys speak of Hyde and Synge and “that old hake Gregory,” they do so to divorce themselves from the dominant Irish literary movement of their day, but the adult Joyce incorporated the school of Yeats and about everything else into his unreadable masterpiece named after a folksong,
Finnegans Wake
. In it James Joyce makes the Irish land, its rivers and ancient murmurs, heroic to the modern world, and from Joyce on, profoundly in Samuel Beckett, contentiously in Patrick