Synge

Abstract

And it was on one of those journeys¹ that he² discovered Synge, a man of such rough and uncultivated aspect that he looked as if he had come out of Derrinrush. He was not a peasant as Yeats first supposed, but came, like all great writers, from the middle classes; his mother had a house in Kingstown which he avoided as much as possible, and it was in the Rue d’Arras [sic]that Yeats found him, dans une chambre meublée³ on the fifth floor. He was on his way back to Ireland, and might stay at Kingstown for a while, till his next quarter’s allowance came in (he had but sixty pounds a year), but as soon as he got it he would be away to the West, to the Aran Islands. Yeats gasped; and it was the romance of living half one’s life in the Latin Quarter and the other half in the Aran Islands that captured Yeats’s imagination. He must have lent a willing ear to Synge’s tale of an unpublished manuscript, a book which he had written about the Aran Islands;⁴ but his interest in it doubtless flagged when Synge told him it was not written in peasant speech. Synge must have answered, ‘But peasant speech in Aran is Irish.’ Yeats remembered with regret that this was so, for he would have preferred Anglo-Irish; and he listened to Synge telling him that he had some colloquial knowledge of the Irish language. He had had to pick up a little Irish; life in Aran would be impossible without Irish, and Yeats awoke from his meditation.

English Review (London) xvi (Feb 1914) 353–64, reprinted in Vale (London: William Heinemann, 1914) pp. 183–200.