Synge and the Ireland of his Time by W.B. Yeats

There are artists like Byron, like Goethe, like Shelley, who have / impressive personalities, active wills and all their faculties at the / service of the will; but he belonged to those who like Wordsworth, like / Coleridge, like Goldsmith, like Keats, have little personality, so far / as the casual eye can see, little personal will, but fiery and brooding / imagination. I cannot imagine him anxious to impress, or convince in / any company, or saying more than was sufficient to keep the talk / circling. Such men have the advantage that all they write is a part of / knowledge, but they are powerless before events and have often but one / visible strength, the strength to reject from life and thought all that / would mar their work, or deafen them in the doing of it; and only this / so long as it is a passive act. If Synge had married young or taken / some profession, I doubt if he would have written books or been greatly / interested in a movement like ours; but he refused various / opportunities of making money in what must have been an almost / unconscious preparation. He had no life outside his imagination, little / interest in anything that was not its chosen subject. He hardly seemed / aware of the existence of other writers. I never knew if he cared for / work of mine, and do not remember that I had from him even a / conventional compliment, and yet he had the most perfect modesty and / simplicity in daily intercourse, self-assertion was impossible to him. / On the other hand, he was useless amidst sudden events. He was much / shaken by the Playboy riot; on the first night confused and excited, / knowing not what to do, and ill before many days, but it made no / difference in his work.

He neither exaggerated out of defiance nor / softened out of timidity. He wrote on as if nothing had happened, / altering 'The Tinker's Wedding' to a more unpopular form, but writing a / beautiful serene 'Deirdre,' with, for the first time since his 'Riders / to the Sea,' no touch of sarcasm or defiance. Misfortune shook his / physical nature while it left his intellect and his moral nature / untroubled. The external self, the mask, the persona was a shadow, / character was all.