John M. Synge | Page 6

would soon get
itself into another body, and come here again to look on and listen.
When a life ends, it is a sign that Nature's purpose in that life is over.
When a personality has passed from us it is a sign that life has no
further need of it. 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 caddisworm'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. Those who want to know what he was in himself should
read the poems. The poems are the man speaking. They are so like him
that to read them is to hear him. The couplet--
"But they are rotten (I ask their pardon,) 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. They were printed in the Contemporary Review for April, 1911,
and are reprinted here through the kindness of the Editor and
Proprietors, whom I wish to thank. 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. I have not altered these things, because,
when I wrote this account, my memory of the events and words was
sharper than it is today. Memory is a bad witness, and inexact in very
little things, such as the precise words used in talk some years before.
The reader must however believe that the words quoted, if not the very
words used by Synge, are as near to the very words as my memory can
make them.
* * * * *
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. He
was the youngest son and eighth child of John Hatch Synge, barrister,
and of Kathleen, his wife, (born Traill.) His father died in 1872. His
mother in 1908. He went to private schools in Dublin and in Bray, but
being seldom well, left school when about fourteen and then studied
with a tutor; was fond of wandering alone in the country, noticing birds
and wild life, and later took up music, piano, flute and violin. All
through his youth, he passed his summer holidays in Annamoe, Co.
Wicklow, a strange place, which influenced him.
He entered Trinity College, Dublin, on June 18, 1888, won prizes in
Hebrew and Irish in Trinity Term, 1892, and took his B. A. degree
(second class) in December, 1892. 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. During this visit he began the first drafts of the
studies which afterwards grew to be his book, 'The Aran Islands.'
His writings, up to this time, had been tentative and imitative, being
mainly reflections from (and upon) what had most struck him