John M. Synge | Page 7

an English translation was published at the time) and for a critical study of Racine, whose pure and noble art always meant much to him. Some critical and other writings of this period exist in manuscript. They are said to be carefully written, but wanting in inner impulse.
Throughout this period if not throughout his life he lived with the utmost ascetic frugality, bordering always, or touching, on poverty. He used to say that his income was "forty pounds a year and a new suit of clothes, when my old ones get too shabby." He had no expensive habits, he was never self-indulgent, he had no wish to entertain nor to give away, no desire to make nor to own money, no taste for collection nor zest for spending. He eschewed all things that threatened his complete frugal independence and thereby the integrity of his mind.
The superficial man, not seeing this last point, sometimes felt that he "did not know how to abound."
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When in Paris in 1899, he met Mr. W. B. Yeats who, having seen his work suggested that he would do well to give up writing criticism, and go again to the Aran Islands to study the life there, and fill his mind with real and new images, so that, if he wrote later, his writing might be lively and fresh and his subject a new discovery. He did as Mr. Yeats suggested and went back to the Aran Islands and passed some weeks in Inishmaan. In all, he made five or six visits to the Aran Islands, these two of 1898 and 1899, and certainly three more in the autumns of 1900, 1901, 1902. The Islanders liked him but were a little puzzled by him. He was an unassertive, unassuming man, with a genius for being inconspicuous. He has told us that his usual method in a poor man's cabin was to make them forget that he was there, but in Aran on these visits he always tried to add to the fun, and to his personal prestige with conjuring tricks, fiddling, piping, taking photographs, etc. Some of the Islanders were much attached to him. I suppose that their main impression was that he was a linguist who had committed a crime somewhere and had come to hide.
His next three or four years, 1899-1902 were passed between Paris and Ireland; Paris in the winter and spring and Ireland in the other seasons. 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. In June, 1905, he went through the Congested Districts of Connemara, with Mr. Jack B. Yeats. After this expedition, which lasted a month, he was generally in or near Dublin, in Kingstown and elsewhere, though he made summer excursions to Dingle, the Blasket Islands, Kerry, etc. About once a year, when the Abbey Theatre Company was touring in England, he came with it if his health allowed, to watch the performances in London, Manchester or Edinburgh, wherever they might be. His life was always mainly within himself; the record of these years is very meagre, all that can be said of them is that he passed them mostly in Ireland, writing and re-writing, in failing health and with increasing purpose. His general health was never robust, and for at least the last six years of his life his throat troubled him. He used to speak of the trouble as "his glands;" I cannot learn its exact nature; but I have been told that it was "cancer" or "some form of cancer," which caused him "not very great pain," but which "would have been excessively painful had he lived a little longer." Doctors may be able to conclude from these vague statements what it was. He was operated upon in May, 1908, but the growth could not be removed, and from that time on he was under sentence of death. He passed his last few months of life trying to finish his play of Deirdre and writing some of his few poems. He died in a private nursing home in Dublin on the 24th. March, 1909. and was buried two days later in