John Masefield

“ What that personality did may matter. What that personality was does not matter. Man’s task is to leave the dead alone. Life would be finer if we did not drag that caddis-worm’s house of the past behind us.
I have not set down all my memories of him. Much of what he told and said to me was told and said in the confidence of friendship. I have set down only a few odd fragments to show those who care to know what sort of a man he was. Lies and lives will be written of him; plenty of both. Enough should be said to defeat the malice and stupidity of detractors. ”

“ I do not feel that the plays are cynical. They seem heartless at first sight. The abundant malicious zest in them gives them an air of cruelty. But in the plays, Synge did with his personality as he did in daily life. ”

“ 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. Synge gave one from the first the impression of a strange personality. He was of a dark type of Irishman, though not black-haired. Something in his air gave one the fancy that his face was dark from gravity. Gravity filled the face and haunted it, as though the man behind were forever listening to life’s case before passing judgment. ”

“ He found the life in a man very well worth wonder, even though the man were a fool, or a knave, or just down from Oxford. At the end of the play I saw him standing in his box, gravely watching the actors as the curtain rose and again rose during the applause. Presently he turned away to speak to the lady who had read his plays on the night of his first success. The play was loudly applauded. Some people behind me—a youth and a girl—began to hiss. I remember thinking that they resembled the bird they imitated. I only saw Synge on two other occasions. ”

“ Few people born out of old, sunny countries talk well. I never heard him engaged with a brilliant talker, either man or woman. He told me that once, in Paris, he had gone to hear a brilliant talker–a French poet, now dead. It was like him that he did not speak to the talker. “We sat round on chairs and the great man talked.”
During the evening, I spoke a few words to Synge about some Irish matter. We pushed back our chairs out of the circle and discussed it. I did not know at that time that he was a writer. I knew by name most of the writers in the Irish movement. ”

“ He had a prejudice against one Roman Catholic district, because the people in it were rude. Otherwise his mind was untroubled. Life was what interested him. He would have watched a political or religious riot with gravity, with pleasure in the spectacle, and malice for the folly. He would have taken no side, and felt no emotion, except a sort of pity when the losers could go on no longer. The question was nothing to him. All that he asked for was to hear what it made people say and to see what it made people do.
Towards one in the morning, our host asked Synge and me to sup with him. ”

“ Very few people can read a dead man's character from a portrait. Life is our concern; it was very specially synge's concern. Doubtless he would prefer us not to bother about how he looked, but to think of him as one who
"Held Time's fickle glass his fickle hour" ”

“ The place where Synge and I used to sit has now been improved away. We spent happy hours there, talking, rolling cigarettes, and watching the life. “Those were great days,” he used to say. He was the best companion for that kind of day.
Our talk was always about life. When we talked about writers (modern French and ancient English writers) it was not about their writings that we talked, but about the something kindling in them, which never got expressed. His theory of writing was this:—"No good writer can ever be translated." ”

“ While at Trinity he studied music at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, where he won a scholarship in Harmony and Counterpoint.
He left College undecided about a career, but was inclined to make music his profession. He went to Germany (Coblentz and Wurtzburg) to study music; but in 1894, owing to a disappointed love, he gave up this, and went to Paris, with some thought of becoming a writer. He was much in France for the next few years writing constantly to little purpose; he went to Italy in 1896, and in May 1898 made his first visit to the Aran Islands. ”

“ Sometimes his little finger flicked off the ash on to the floor. His manner was that of a man too much interested in the life about him to wish to be more than a spectator. His interest was in life, not in ideas. ”

“ He said that he had just come to London from Paris, and that he found Bloomsbury strange after the Quartier Latin. He was puzzled by the talk of the clever young men from Oxford. “That’s a queer way to talk. They all talk like that. I wonder what makes them talk like that? I suppose they’re always stewing over dead things.”
Synge lodged in a front room on the second floor of No. 4, Handel Street, Bloomsbury. It was a quiet house in a quiet, out-of-the-way street. His room there was always very clean and tidy. The people made him very comfortable. ”

“ During the next few years, though he was not often in town, I met him fairly often whenever the Irish players came to London. Once I met him for a few days together in Dublin. He was to have stayed with me both in London and in Ireland; but on both occasions his health gave way, and the visit was never paid. I remember sitting up talking with him through the whole of one winter night (in 1904.) Later, when the Roke—by Velasquez was being talked of, I went with him to see the picture. We agreed that it was the kind of picture people paint when mind is beginning to get languid. ”

“ He asked for one, so that he might wash. The people brought him a wooden box, worn smooth with much use. In the morning he was roused by his host with the cry, “Have you washed yourself yet? Herself is wanting the box to make up the bread in.”
I remember asking him what sensations an author had when his play was being performed for the first time. “I sit still in my box,” he said “and curse the actors.” He was in a very gay mood that afternoon, though his health was fast failing. He spoke with his usual merry malice about his throat. ”

“ He was at work on The Aran Islands, and on his three early one act plays, The Tinker’s Wedding, Riders to the Sea, and The Shadow of the Glen. He came to London in the winter of 1902–3, where I saw him as I have described. London did not suit him and he did not stay long. He gave up his room in Paris at this time, with some searching of the heart; for at thirty one clings to youth. After this, he was mostly in Ireland, in the wilder West and elsewhere; writing and perfecting. At the end of 1904 he was in Dublin, for the opening of the Abbey Theatre of which he was one of the advisers. ”

“ That was in late May or early June, 1907, when the Irish players gave a few performances at the Kingsway Theatre. I met him in the foyer of the theatre just before the first London performance of The Playboy of the Western World.
I had some talk with him then. During the performance I saw him in his box, “sitting still,” as he said, watching with the singular grave intensity with which he watched life. It struck me then that he was the only person there sufficiently simple to be really interested in living people ”

“ And we’ve the sun on rock and garden.”
gives me, whenever I read it, the feeling that he is in the room, looking up with his hard, quick guttural laugh and kindling eyes, from the rolling of a cigarette. The issue of Samhain for December, 1904, contains a portrait of him by Mr. J. B. Yeats. It is difficult to believe that there can be any portrait more like him.
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. ”