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Updated: June 1, 2025
Riders to the Sea, a lyrical pageant of pity made out of the destinies of fisher-folk, is a play that would have been understood in ancient Athens or in Elizabethan London, as well as by an audience of Irish peasants to-day. Here, incidentally, we get a foretaste of that preoccupation with death which heightens the tensity in so much of Synge's work.
It must have facts, and again facts, not only in the present and the past, but in the future. And it demands facts of that, which alone cannot glibly give it facts. It goes on asking facts of Art, or, rather, such facts as Art cannot give for, after all, even "flower of author" is fact in a sort of way. Consider, for instance, Synge's masterpiece, "The Playboy of the Western World!"
Yeats, at a moment when the Abbey Theatre seemed about to become popular, was threatened by a fiat of this mob-dictatorship; he was told that his theatre must become unpopular unless he would throw overboard most of Synge's work.
The preparation had begun after the first performance of 'The Shadow of the Glen, Synge's first play, with an assertion made in ignorance but repeated in dishonesty, that he had taken his fable and his characters, not from his own mind nor that profound knowledge of cot and curragh he was admitted to possess, but 'from a writer of the Roman decadence. Some spontaneous dislike had been but natural, for genius like his can but slowly, amid what it has of harsh and strange, set forth the nobility of its beauty, and the depth of its compassion; but the frenzy that would have silenced his master-work was, like most violent things artificial, the defence of virtue by those that have but little, which is the pomp and gallantry of journalism and its right to govern the world.
I have been asked to add to these memories a few notes, and the chief dates in Synge's life, as far as we know them. His life, like that of any other artist, was dated not by events but by sensations. I know no more of his significant days than the rest of the world, but the known biographical facts are these. He was born on 16th. April, 1871, at Newtown Little, near Dublin. His mother in 1908.
When I sat at the other end of the room my chair was opposite Synge's chair. Whenever I raised my eyes I saw him, and wondered who he could be. Disordered people look disordered, unusual people look unusual. A youth with long hair, a velvet coat, extravagant manners, and the other effeminacies of emptiness looks the charlatan he is.
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.
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