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Updated: September 3, 2025
During the Synge controversy he was a man raising his voice in the heat of battle a man, too, praising a generous comrade who was but lately dead. The critics outside Ireland, however, have had none of these causes of passion to prevent them from seeing Synge justly. They simply bowed down before the idol that Mr.
The melancholy, the philosophic irony, the elaborate music of a play by John Synge, the simplicity, the sense of splendour of living in Lady Gregory's lamentation of Emer, Mr.
If Synge had married young or taken some profession, I doubt if he would have written books or been greatly interested in a movement like ours; but he refused various opportunities of making money in what must have been an almost unconscious preparation. He had no life outside his imagination, little interest in anything that was not its chosen subject.
But the whole group of writers, of whom it may be said that their writings are almost as unmistakably Irish as the work of Burns is Scotch, have followed Mr. Yeats and Synge in this, that in writing they assume an Irish public, not an English one; they make no explanations, they speak as to those who share their own inheritance.
Among them were men of education, graduates of universities both in America and abroad; you might hear one of the group about these camp-fires telling about slave-revolts in ancient Egypt and Greece; or quoting Strindberg and Stirner, or reciting a scene from Synge, or narrating how he had astounded the family of some lonely farm-house by playing Rachmaninoff's "Prelude" on a badly out-of-tune piano.
Even when it is played, as it is now played, in an expurgated form, and with sentimentality substituted for the tolerant but Mephistophelean malice which Synge threaded into it, the genius and originality are obvious enough. The Playboy is a marvellous confection, but it is to Riders to the Sea one turns in search of Synge the immortal poet.
In addition to his original work, one of his foremost services to humanity was his advice to that strange genius, John Synge for it was partly owing to the influence of his friend that Synge became a creative writer, and he had, alas! little time to lose. Mr. Yeats published his first poem in 1886.
Perhaps his one-act Deirdre is the nearest approach to real drama he has done. Some of Lady Gregory's earlier one-act farces, such as The Workhouse-Ward, are very amusing; The Rising of the Moon is a little dramatic gem, and The Gaol Gate is touched with genuine tragedy. Synge wrote only one play Riders to the Sea that acts well.
Synge had indeed no obvious ideals, as these are understood by young men, and even as I think disliked them, for he once complained to me that our modern poetry was but the poetry 'of the lyrical boy, and this lack makes his art have a strange wildness and coldness, as of a man born in some far-off spacious land and time.
Stephen laughed. Quickly, warningfully Buck Mulligan bent down. The tramper Synge is looking for you, he said, to murder you. He heard you pissed on his halldoor in Glasthule. He's out in pampooties to murder you. Me! Stephen exclaimed. That was your contribution to literature. Buck Mulligan gleefully bent back, laughing to the dark eavesdropping ceiling. Murder you! he laughed.
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