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The conception of ordinary life or is it only ordinary Irish life? in the last half-sentence leaves one meditating. But, after all, it is not Synge's characters or his plots, but his language, which is his great contribution to literature. I agree with Mr. Howe that the question how far his language is the language of the Irish countryside is a minor one.
I wrote down these memories in January and February, 1911, two years after Synge's death, and three and a half years after I had parted from him. Four years have passed since I wrote this account, and in reading it over today one or two little things, as the use of particular words in what I quote from him, etc., have made me pause, as possibly inexact.
Yet, in Synge's plays also, fantasy gives the form and not the thought, for the core is always as in all great art, an over-powering vision of certain virtues, and our capacity for sharing in that vision is the measure of our delight.
For, where there is a seeming blend of lyricism and naturalism, it will on examination be found, I think, to exist only in plays whose subjects or settings as in Synge's "Playboy of the Western World," or in Mr. Masefield's "Nan" are so removed from our ken that we cannot really tell, and therefore do not care, whether an absolute illusion is maintained.
Yeats studied painting for years; A. E. is a painter of distinction; Synge an accomplished musician before he became a of letters. There is not the slightest doubt the effect of these sister arts upon the literary work of the Great Three is pervasive and powerful. The books of Mr. Yeats and Mr. Russell are full of word-pictures; and the rhythm of Synge's strange prose, which Mr.
A patriotic journalism which had seen in Synge's capricious imagination the enemy of all it would have young men believe, had for years prepared for this hour, by that which is at once the greatest and most ignoble power of journalism, the art of repeating a name again and again with some ridiculous or evil association.
She had to pay for everything, down to her share of the wine-bills and the horses' fodder, down to Bertie Hammond Synge's fare in the "underground" when he went to the City for her. She had been left with just money enough to turn her head; and it hadn't even been put in trust, nothing prudent or proper had been done with it.
I cannot understand the special enthusiasm for The Playboy except among those who read it before they knew anything of Synge's earlier and better work. With all its faults, however, it is written by the hand of genius, and the first hearing or reading of it must come as a revelation to those who do not know Riders to the Sea or The Well of the Saints.
March, 1909. and was buried two days later in a family vault in the Protestant graveyard of Mount Jerome, Harold's Cross, Dublin. He had been betrothed, but not married. One thing more needs to be said. People have stated that Synge's masters in art were the writers of the French Decadent school of the eighteen nineties, Verlaine, Mallarme, J. K. Huysmans, etc.
There is a corpse on the stage in Riders to the Sea, and a man laid out as a corpse in In the Shadow of the Glen, and there is a funeral party in The Playboy of the Western World. Synge's imagination dwelt much among the tombs. Even in his comedies, his laughter does not spring from an exuberant joy in life so much as from excitement among the incongruities of a world that is due to death.
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