580
PARTISAN REVIEW
French. Irish "eloquence" is highly overrated, as any critical examina–
tion of Irish literature will show. Wilde once said to Yeats: "We
Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant fail–
ures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks." Wilde's own
"elegance," O'Casey's meanderings, Joyce's purple passages ("his
soul swooned slowly"), Synge's "keening," Shaw's attempt to be
poetical with Marchbanks, George Moore's sentences ("squeezed"
out of a tooth paste tube, as Yeats said ) , O 'Neill's attempts at
"poetry": all these-Yeats alone excepted- show a singular poverty
of genuine and organic eloquence. The real forte of the Irish is just
in talking, and talking in a special way, histrionically: striking a comic
pose and exaggerating it into a burlesque. The funniest parts of
Ulysses- "Cyclops"
or "Nausicaa"-consist of just this. And O'Neill
is only at ease, rhetorically speaking, in similar situations, as, witness,
the Hogan episode quoted above, or the performance of Jamie Ty–
rone which will be quoted below. Loquacity, besides humorous ex–
aggeration, implies repetition. Critics have complained that
Long
Day's Journey
is too long ; it all could have been said in shorter
compass and could have been, therefore, of greater artistic impact. I
don't agree with this criticism from an esthetic point of view, and from
the point of view I am adopting-the playas cultural artifact- this
criticism is completely off the point.
3
For the motto of the Irish, es–
pecially the drinking Irish, is that a thing is not said unless it has
been repeated almost
ad infinitum.
This verbal repetitiousness, this
insistent urge to exaggerate and repeat, colors Irish literature as well.
O'Casey's autobiographical volumes are filled with it: "But the
O'Briens, the Dillons, and the Healy's, mudmen, madmen, badmen,
bedmen, deadmen, spedmen, spudmen, dudmen, ..."; or, a descrip–
tion of Hell-Fire ". . . in a sea of fire, surgin', singing', scourgin',
scorchin', scarifyin', skimmin', waves o'fire . . ."
As
O'Casey himself
says in
Drums Under the Windows:
Keltic blood is usually accompanied by excited brains and a reckless tem–
perament, and is always an excuse for exaggeration. When not whin–
ing or wheedling, the Kelt is usually in a state of bluff, or funk, and
can always wind up to the kind of rhetoric no housemaid can resist.
In
the words of the immortal washerwoman in
Finnegan's Wake:
"Wash quit and don't be dabbling. Tuck up your sleeves and loosen
