Personality
Synge is commonly described as an enigma, a person who is hard to read and understand. John Masefield, Synge's acquaintance, said that he "gave one from the first the impression of a strange personality". Not even the members of his own family were close enough to understand him. He was quiet and reserved, and Yeats thought that he was "meditative". However, Synge was open when he would write letters to women, and, according to David H. Greene, he acted like "an ordinary human being but not a particularly eloquent one". Not all of his letters were kind, especially his letters to Allgood, an actress that Synge wrote to often. Those letters are filled with condescending remarks and by a man who is, as Greene argues, "not only unattractive but also incompatible with the complex personality of the man who wrote the plays".
Masefield felt that Synge's problems and thoughts about life originated with his poor health. In particular, Masefield claims that "His relish of the savagery made me feel that he was a dying man clutching at life, and clutching most wildly at violent life, as the sick man does". In stanza IV of Yeats's "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory", he summarizes his view that Synge was unhealthy, sick and in pain throughout his career:
- And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,
- That dying chose the living world for text
- And never could have rested in the tomb
- But that, long travelling, he had come
- Towards nightfall upon certain set apart
- In a most desolate stony place,
- Towards nightfall upon a race
- Passionate and simple like his heart.
Read more about this topic: John Millington Synge
Famous quotes containing the word personality:
“The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behoves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style c’est l’homme, what is likely to happen if l’homme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual?”
—Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944)
“Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially St. Pancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understand—my mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt. But my mother had not the strength to put even some physical distance between them, let alone keep the old monster at emotional arm’s length.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“The great pines stand at a considerable distance from each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks alone. They do not intrude upon each other. The Navajos are not much in the habit of giving or of asking help. Their language is not a communicative one, and they never attempt an interchange of personality in speech. Over their forests there is the same inexorable reserve. Each tree has its exalted power to bear.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)