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:
“A personality is an indefinite quantum of traits which is subject to constant flux, change, and growth from the birth of the individual in the world to his death. A character, on the other hand, is a fixed and definite quantum of traits which, though it may be interpreted with slight differences from age to age and actor to actor, is nevertheless in its essentials forever fixed.”
—Hubert C. Heffner (1901–1985)
“Talent alone can not make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which by birth and quality is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise; holding things because they are things.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Western man represents himself, on the political or psychological stage, in a spectacular world-theater. Our personality is innately cinematic, light-charged projections flickering on the screen of Western consciousness.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)