Synge Read Free Page A

conception of eternal pain. In the morning I renewed my lamentations and my mother was sent for. She comforted me with the assurance that the Holy Ghost was convicting me of sin and thus preparing me for ultimate salvation. This was a new idea and I rather approved.
    Between the ages of four and twenty-one Synge took part in his family’s annual move to Greystones in County Wicklow, where his mother had friends and associates among the evangelical community. These ‘summer visits to the seaside,’ Synge remembered, ‘were delightful.’ His mother had the policy on holidays as well as during the rest of the year of gathering together as many members of her family as were available. When they were not available in great numbers, she invited friends, usually women of the missionary persuasion, to share the family sojourn in Wicklow, which often lasted for three months.
    Nicholas Grene writes about Synge’s relationship to his family:
There is nothing very unusual about a writer or artist from a conventional middle-class background diverging from his family’s political, social and religious views. What is striking about Synge’s case is that he maintained such close relations with the family in spite of his dissidence.
    However, while he spent most of his life in Ireland under his mother’s roof, sharing even her holidays, he seems to have been seldom alone with her and this might have helped to maintain close relations. Mrs Synge’s house in Orwell Park had an entrance in the dividing wall to her mother’s adjoining house, where her daughter Annie, her husband and their children, including the young Edward Stephens, lived, as did Aunt Jane, Mr Synge’s sister. On April 13 1890, after Mrs Synge’s mother’s death, when the Stephens family decided to leave Rathgar, Mrs Synge wrote to her son about her prayers to the Lord:
I am … asking Him to find us two houses together as we are here. He can do all things, so if he pleases to do that for me it is quite easy for Him.
    The Lord came to her aid. He was assisted by Mr Talbot Coall, the estate agent; they combined to find two adjoining houses at Crosthwaite Park in Kingstown, now Dun Laoghaire. Thus the extended family remained together and Mrs Synge could continue to instruct her grandchildren in the ways of righteousness, as she had her children. While four of her five children carried her instruction faithfully into adulthood, it remained a great sadness to her that John, the youngest, did not. In her letter about the Lord assisting the estate agent, she also wrote: ‘Dear Sam [her son who became a missionary to China] is always a comfort when I see him. My poor Johnnie is not a comfort yet.’ Soon after the move she wrote:
John – poor boy. I am so sorry for him, he looks unhappy. He has not found the Saviour yet and until he does, how can he be happy?
    Her son, who had not found the Saviour, had found much comfort instead in the natural sciences and in his own imagination. In his autobiographical sketch, he wrote about an awakening which changed everything for him:
When I was about fourteen I obtained a book of Darwin’s. It opened in my hands at a passage where he asks how can we explain the similarity between a man’s hand and a bird’s or a bat’s wings except by evolution. I flung the book aside and rushed out into the open air – it was summer and we were in the country – the sky seemed to have lost its blue and the grass its green. I lay down and writhed in an agony of doubt … Incest and parricide were but a consequence of the idea that possessed me … Soon afterwards I turned my attention to works of Christian evidence, reading them at first with pleasure, soon with doubt, and at last in some cases with derision.
    Synge was not naturally social. Because of ill-health he had been educated at home for much of the time. Thus, when he went to Trinity College in Dublin, he took no great part in academic or student life. His reading had been intense