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Updated: May 3, 2025
He was never noisy or explosive, like a dog whose barks are discounted, to whom one soon ceases to pay any attention; we all know the futile and petty irascibility of the shallow-minded. Synge was like a mastiff who bites without warning. Irony was the common chord in his composition. He studied life and hated death; hated the gossip of the world, which seemed to him the gabble of fools.
I have founded societies with this aim, and was indeed founding one in Paris when I first met with J.M. Synge, and I have known what it is to be changed by that I would have changed, till I became argumentative and unmannerly, hating men even in daily life for their opinions.
Synge wrote few poems, and they came at intervals during a period of sixteen or seventeen years. Objectively, they are unimportant; his contributions to English literature are his dramas and his prose sketches. But as revelations of his personality they have a deep and melancholy interest; and every word of his short Preface, written in December, 1908, a few months before his death, is valuable.
Ever after the coming of the locomotive, it needed only imagination and a map to see all British North America clamped by an iron band. Engineers like Bonnycastle and Synge and Carmichael-Smyth wrote of the possibility in the forties.
The other force which has been operating through these years is, in a sense, obliged to give the lie to the pretensions of the Gaelic League. Yeats and Synge have showed how completely it is possible to be Irish while using the English language.
The transformation of one of the characters from a gay, debonnair bachelor past middle age into a penurious miser of the Blueberry-Jones type is bold, and in less skilful hands would be a blemish, but Mr. Synge has amply justified it, and admirably uses it to cement the structure of his plot.
Howe says that "there is nothing for the symbolists in The Well of the Saints," but that is because he is anxious to prove that Synge was a great creator of men and women. Synge, in my opinion at least, was nothing of the sort. His genius was a genius of decoration, not of psychology. One might compare it to firelight in a dark room, throwing fantastic shapes on the walls.
John Millington Synge was born near Dublin on the sixteenth of April, 1871, and died in Dublin on the twenty-fourth of March, 1909. It is a curious thing that the three great Irishmen of the Celtic renaissance the only men who were truly inspired by genius originally studied another form of art than literature. Mr.
J.M. Synge, in the earlier years of his manhood, lived entirely abroad, leading the life of a wandering scholar from city to city and country to country till he was persuaded to give up the Continent and the criticism and imitation of French literature, to return to England, and to go and live on the Aran Islands.
He told me that once, in Paris, he had gone to hear a brilliant talker a French poet, now dead. It was like him that he did not speak to the talker. "We sat round on chairs and the great man talked." During the evening, I spoke a few words to Synge about some Irish matter. We pushed back our chairs out of the circle and discussed it. I did not know at that time that he was a writer.
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