J. M. Synge
From a drawing by Robert Gregory in 1904
I asked him here and we became friends at once. I said of him in a letter: “One never has to rearrange one’s mind to talk to him.” He was quite direct, sincere, and simple, not only a good listener but too good a one, not speaking much in general society. His fellow guests at Coole always liked him, and he was pleasant and genial with them, though once, when he had come straight from life on a wild coast, he confessed that a somewhat warlike English lady in the house was “civilisation in its most violent form.” There could be a sharp edge to his wit, as when he said that a certain actress (not Mrs. Campbell), whose modern methods he disliked, had turned Yeats’ Deirdre into The Second Mrs. Conchubar. And once, when awakened from the anæsthetic after one of those hopeless operations, the first words that could be understood were, “Those damned English can’t even swear without vulgarity.”
He sent me later, when we had been long working at the Theatre, some reviews of his work from a German newspaper. “What gives me a sympathy with this new man is that he does not go off into sentimentality. Behind this legend I see a laughing face; then he raises his eyebrows in irony and laughs again. Herr Synge may not be a dramatist, he may not be a great poet, but he has something in him that I like, a thing that for many good Germans is a book with seven seals, that is, Humour.” He writes a note with this, “I’d like to quote about ‘Humour,’ but I don’t want to tell Dublin I’m maybe no dramatist; that wouldn’t do.”
Of his other side, Mr. J. B. Yeats wrote to me: “Coleridge said that all Shakespeare’s characters from Macbeth to Dogberry are ideal realities, his comedies are poetry as an unlimited jest, and his tragedies ‘poetry in deepest earnest.’ Had he seen Synge’s plays he would have called them, ‘Poetry in unlimited sadness.’”
While with us, he hardly looked at a newspaper. He seemed to look on politics and reforms with a sort of tolerant indifference, though he spoke once of something that had happened as “the greatest tragedy since Parnell’s death.” He told me that the people of the play he was writing often seemed the real people among whom he lived, and I think his dreamy look came from this. He spent a good deal of time wandering in our woods where many shy creatures still find their homes—marten cats and squirrels and otters and badgers,—and by the lake where wild swans come and go. He told Mr. Yeats he had given up wearing the black clothes he had worn for a while, when they were a fashion with writers, thinking they were not in harmony with nature, which is so sparing in the use of the harsh colour of the raven.
Simple things always pleased him. In his long illness in a Dublin hospital where I went to see him every day, he would ask for every detail of a search I was making for a couple of Irish terrier puppies to bring home, and laugh at my adventures again and again. And when I described to him the place where I had found the puppies at last, a little house in a suburb, with a long garden stretching into wide fields, with a view of the hills beyond, he was excited and said that it was just such a Dublin home as he wanted, and as he had been sure was somewhere to be found. He asked me at this time about a village on the Atlantic coast, where I had stayed for a while, over a post-office, and where he hoped he might go for his convalescence instead of to Germany, as had been arranged for him. I said, in talking, that I felt more and more the time wasted that was not spent in Ireland, and he said: “That is just my feeling.”
The rich, abundant speech of the people was a delight to him. When my Cuchulain of Muirthemme came out, he said to Mr. Yeats he had been amazed to find in it the dialect he had been trying to master. He wrote to me: “Your Cuchulain is a part of my daily bread.” I say this with a little pride, for I was the first to use the Irish idiom as it is spoken, with intention and with belief in it. Dr. Hyde indeed has used it with fine effect in his Love Songs of Connacht, but alas! gave it up afterwards, in deference to some Dublin editor. He wrote to me after his first visit: “I had a very prosperous journey up from Gort. At Athenry an old Irish-speaking wanderer made my acquaintance. He claimed to be the best singer in England, Ireland, and America. One night, he says, he sang a song at Moate, and a friend of his heard the words in Athenry. He was so much struck by the event, he had himself examined by one who knew, and found that his singing did not come out of his lungs but out of his heart, which is a ‘winged heart’!”
At the time of his first visit to Coole he had written some poems, not very good for the most part, and a play, which was not good at all. I read it again after his death when, according to his written wish, helping Mr. Yeats in sorting out the work to be published or set aside, and again it seemed but of slight merit. But a year later he brought us his two plays, The Shadow of the Glen, and the Riders to the Sea, both masterpieces, both perfect in their way. He had got emotion, the driving force he needed, from his life among the people, and it was the working in dialect that had set free his style.
He was anxious to publish his book on Aran and these two plays, and so have something to add to that “£40 a year and a new suit when I am too shabby,” he used with a laugh to put down as his income. He wrote to me from Paris in February, 1902: “I don’t know what part of Europe you may be in now, but I suppose this will reach you if I send it to Coole. I want to tell you the evil fate of my Aran book and ask your advice. It has been to two London publishers, one of whom was sympathetic, though he refused it, as he said it would not be a commercial success, and the other inclined to be scornful.