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Updated: May 3, 2025
His voice, very guttural and quick, with a kind of lively bitterness in it, was of a kind of Irish voice new to me at that time. I had known a good many Irish people; but they had all been vivacious and picturesque, rapid in intellectual argument, and vague about life. There was nothing vivacious, picturesque, rapid or vague about Synge.
Synge discovered there a lost kingdom of the imagination, a place where spontaneous feeling and primitive imagination had not been repressed by the outside world's customs and discipline, and where the constant voice of the ocean, the touch of the mysterious, all-embracing mist, and the gleam of the star through a rift in the clouds banished all sense of difference between the natural and the supernatural.
That is why he has an immensely more enthusiastic following among clever people than among simple people. Once and once only Synge achieved a piece of art that was universal in its appeal, satisfying equally the artistic formula of Pater and the artistic formula of Tolstoi. This was Riders to the Sea.
To say this is not to disparage the genius of Yeats and Synge; it is merely a statement of fact and an illustration of the eternal dualism of the Irish temperament, which Moore himself realized when he wrote of "Erin, the tear and the smile in thine eye."
But it became possible to live when I had learnt all I had not learnt in shaping words, in defending Synge against his enemies, and knew that rich energies, fine, turbulent or gracious thoughts, whether in life or letters, are but love-children.
Hewlett, the plays of J.M. Synge, occupied with the vigorous and coarse-grained life of tinkers and peasants, are all in their separate ways a reaction against an age in which the overwhelming majority of men and women have sedentary pursuits.
So he was boss and whenever it was a question whether we should take the road to the west or the road to the south, it was Synge who finally decided. Synge was fond of little children and animals. I remember how glad he was to stop and lean on a wall in Gorumna and watch a woman in afield shearing a sheep.
Yet they are all of this new movement in their very different ways, because they are sincere. The word "serious," in fact, has too narrow a significance and admits a deal of pompous stuff which is not sincere. Look, for example, at the work of those two whom we could so ill spare Synge and St. John Hankin.
Not that Synge brought out of the struggle with himself any definite philosophy, for philosophy in the common meaning of the word is created out of an anxiety for sympathy or obedience, and he was that rare, that distinguished, that most noble thing, which of all things still of the world is nearest to being sufficient to itself, the pure artist.
I pray you all synge merily Qui estis in convivio."
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