The Miracle They Refused

Synge and Saints

The Well of the Saints by J. M. Synge

No wonder J. M. Synge, now lauded, romanticised, made into a fine young hero from myth (he died at 37), was not universally loved by the traditionalists in his day. This play is a pretty satiric one, a vicious go. Set a century or more even before it was first performed, the play’s located in the rural wastes of Ireland, where poverty and boredom and village rumour mix insidiously. There are local graves, relics, places of veneration; at the graves of the saints there is a place where holy water emerges. It is said to cure many things. And a poor thin beggarly character, who travels the land in his cloak claiming to disperse these miracles attributable to the water, he is a living Saint. The man himself.

Permit me to digress. I wish to have the reader imagine. Think for a moment about living blind and poor. Poor and blind and by the side of the road off a small place where there is nothing and almost no one. You cannot work, of course, because you cannot see. You sit by the side of the road — you are married, and there are two of you, both blind — and you call out when you hear footfalls. Give us a penny, you cry out. Give us something to buy our bread. And the good people — they know you, you’re famous for them — they might come and plant a coin in your palm, and tell you something patronising about keeping up your spirit, or give you some purposeless advice about surviving the dark and bitter winter. They may well have reasons. But you are blind, so everything is but a degree of darkness to you. Winter is colder; winter is dangerous; but it has no less beauty than the spring and the summer. Nothing is not less a thing than other varieties of nothing.

You are, in your own way, happy. You’re an old man, but you have a wife and the two of you live together. You talk as two who have loved each other years. Your wife lets you know that though you cannot see it, she is very fair. And you tell her how proud you are, though you cannot see it, to have married so fine a woman as she; that the men call her a wonder and it makes you happy to hear her say it. You imagine from her voice form and features. Her voice is not as pretty as some of the young girls’ voices are. You can try to imagine what their voices might mean and correspond to. Your mind is not without imagination.

And your poverty, although pitiable, is no more than your lot. You know it; you curse it. But it is cool in the summer if you can avoid the heat of the day and it is warm in winter if you know the tricks. And you can smell the green of the country and you know when someone who means you well is walking by. You can hail them. They might give you coin.

One day arrives the blacksmith, halting in speech — the result of running hard. The Saint, a holy man beyond compare, has arrived in the hamlet. He was with him a cask or coop of water from the graves of the saints. He travels this way and that doing the work of the Lord. But he does not stay long. The smith tells you that you must seek the Saint, make him give you audience, and permit him restore your sight with the powers and mercies of the Lord your God.

You finally accede to this. The Saint arrives and, quite imperiously, restores your sight. The sight of your wife, also. And together you find that the two of you are old, that you are poor, that she is not a phenomenon nor a wonder. That you are a weak old man now expected to work. And that there is much beauty in the world but it is not yours, cannot be yours; that you are condemned to your lot, to see but not to have.

For many people with sight, this daily torture is a background fact. For those newly given sight, the excruciation is more acute.