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Updated: May 3, 2025
"Tousjours vieil synge est desplaisant," says the burglar-poet, and he means that the old buffoon is tiresome; the young man with the newest phases of city slang at his tongue's end is most acceptable in merry company. Very few people can read Villon's longer poems at all, for they are almost entirely written in cant language, and the glossary must be in constant requisition.
The beggar on the road, the piper at the door, the old people in the workhouse, are henceforth accepted as a sort of aristocracy in exile. Lady Gregory obviously sought out their company as the heirs to a great inheritance an inheritance of imaginative and humorous speech. Not that she plundered them of their fantastic tropes so greedily as Synge did.
Everything is argued over, everything has to take its trial before the dull sense and the hasty judgment, and the character of the nation has so changed that it hardly keeps but among country people, or where some family tradition is still stubborn, those lineaments that made Borrow cry out as he came from among the Irish monks, his friends and entertainers for all his Spanish Bible scattering, 'Oh, Ireland, mother of the bravest soldiers and of the most beautiful women! It was as I believe, to seek that old Ireland which took its mould from the duellists and scholars of the 18th century and from generations older still, that Synge returned again and again to Aran, to Kerry, and to the wild Blaskets.
In Bellmullet on Saint John's eve, when we stood in the market square watching the fire-play, flaming sods of turf soaked in paraffine, hurled to the sky and caught and skied again, and burning snakes of hay-rope, I remember a little girl in the crowd, in an ecstasy of pleasure and dread, clutched Synge by the hand and stood close in his shadow until the fiery games were done.
It is by never departing far from the high-road of common fact that Synge suggests to us the fascinations, the dangers, and romance of the by-paths. I think that when he travels a very long way from that high-road he does not hold us with so firm a hand.
If he considers it important it will go in. We have so much correspondence. I understand, Stephen said. Thanks. God ild you. The pigs' paper. Bullockbefriending. Synge has promised me an article for Dana too. Are we going to be read? I feel we are. The Gaelic league wants something in Irish. I hope you will come round tonight. Bring Starkey. Stephen sat down.
His two early plays, Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen, were read aloud to about a dozen friends at the rooms of one who was always most generously helpful to writers not yet sure of their road. A lady read the plays very beautifully. Afterwards we all applauded. Synge learned his metier that night. Until then, all his work had been tentative and in the air.
When her lover is slain, this true and tender queen of the North loosens the knot of life to accompany him. Synge belongs in the first rank of modern dramatists. The forty Irish characters that he has created reveal the basal elements of universal human nature. His purpose is like Shakespeare's, to reveal throbbing life, not to talk in his own person, nor to discuss problems.
This use of Irish dialect for noble purpose by Synge, and by Lady Gregory, who had it already in her Cuchulain of Muirthemne, and by Dr. Hyde in those first translations he has not equalled since, has done much for National dignity.
I find a very different note, not merely in the work of Synge, of Boyle, Colum, Lennox Robinson, and the rest of the Abbey dramatists, but even in the books of which Miss Somerville was joint author. When Ireland is seen with the eyes, for instance, of her Major Yeates, is not the whole attitude one of amused and acquiescent resignation?
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