Synge Read Free Page B

and sporadic. His study of science and archaeology had been done for their own sake. His most notable attribute was his reserve. By seventeen he did not seem to have shared his doubts and derisions with his mother who wrote:
This is Johnnie’s birthday. I can hardly fancy he is seventeen. I have been looking back to the time he was born. I was so dreadfully delicate and he, poor child, was the same … I see no spiritual life in my poor Johnnie; there may be some but it is not visible to my eyes. He is very reserved and shut up on the subject and if I say anything to him he never answers me, so I don’t know in the least his state of mind – it is a trying state, very trying. I long so to be able to see behind that close reserve, but I can only wait and pray and hope …
    But it was hopeless. He could not be spoken to about matters either spiritual or temporal. Within a year, she was writing again:
He does not know how to take care of his clothes and won’t take advice; he has much to learn, poor boy; he is very headstrong.
    That summer she sent for a clergyman, who discussed religion with her son in private, leading her son to the view that he would have to come clean about his unbelief. The Sunday before Christmas, his mother wrote in her diary: ‘Fine, damp, mild day – church very hot – I felt overpowered. Johnnie would not come – very sad.’ And then on Christmas Day: ‘Very peaceful, happy day; went to church – my own sorrow Johnnie – he did not come.’
    Later, Synge wrote:
Soon after I relinquished the Kingdom of God I began to take a real interest in the Kingdom of Ireland. My patriotism went round from a vigorous and unreasoning loyalty to a temperate nationalism and everything Irish became sacred.
    This was a piece of easy subsequent self-positioning, however, and it is unlikely that a shift in faith as swift and facile as he suggests actually took place. It is much more likely that his religious faith, if replaced by anything, was replaced by an interest in music. As well as attending Trinity, he attended the Academy of Music in Westland Row where he studied the violin, becoming one of the many Irish playwrights whose first love was music. His mother was impressed by his musical ability. A month before his seventeenth birthday, she wrote:
Johnnie’s ear is wonderfully good now, he hears if the piano is at all out of tune … [He] and I play together sometimes … He is greatly improved in time; at first he never kept with me and still runs away when he ought to rest, so I have to try and watch him as well as play my own part. We played some nice slow melodies last night, and it sounded wonderfully nice.
    In these letters, written to her son Robert who was in Argentina, she compared her two youngest sons.
Johnnie certainly is the literary man of the family. I never saw such a love of reading as he has – he would spend any amount of money on books if he had it … I think Johnnie takes after my father.
    Sam, on the other hand, ‘can’t help being slow. He is very like his dear father in that as well as other things.’ Sam followed his mother in religion ‘and his virtues make him a comfort to me’. Yet John, who his mother believed had ‘a good opinion of himself’, which she thought a pity, impressed her in ways which might have mattered to her more and which she could not take for granted. Although his lack of religion made her sad, mother and son did not fall out and he was included in all family events and outings, the silent, stubborn dissenter at the table. Nonetheless, she lamented his state of ungrace year after year, in letter after letter; she was the only keener of the eastern seaboard. ‘Oh! My dear Johnnie is a great sorrow to my heart,’ she wrote in 1896 when he was twenty-five,
his belief or mis-belief has no joy in it and his residence abroad has been no help to him – he is wonderfully separate from us. I show him all the love I can. I pity him so much and love him so