partly in imagination, but that
he himself has lived chiefly as an observer and imaginer. There is no
humor in these verses and travel sketches, not even when he is
describing a humorous scene such as that of the upsetting by pigs
running wild of the constabulary busy about evictions on Inishmaan. We
get the man himself, I say, in these verses and travel sketches, a man
exulting in primitiveness, in wildness, in beauty of woman and child, in
beauty of landscape; but exulting, more than in all else, in his own
moods aroused by these things that he loved. Even here, however, he is
at times almost impossibly impersonal, so that you feel in a certain
description that there is no man between you and the thing described,
but that, to adapt a phrase of Thoreau, it is the hills and the sea and
the atmosphere writing. This impersonality persists even in "The Aran
Islands," so large a part of which is very personal in that it is a
statement of his daily life on Inishmaan. It is not, however, from the
impersonal writing that I would quote,--though I would emphasize this
impersonality because it is part of the very nature of the man,--but
from the personal parts, because they reveal more of the positive part
of him. After a day of storm on Inishmaan, the middle island of the
three that make up the Aran group, Synge writes: "About the sunset the
clouds broke and the storm turned to a hurricane. Bars of purple cloud
stretched across the sound where immense waves were rolling from the
west, wreathed with snowy fantasies of spray. Then there was the bay
full of green delirium and the Twelve Pins touched with mauve and
scarlet in the east." That is the Connacht coast, and this the next
paragraph is Synge: "The suggestion from this world of inarticulate
power was immense, and now at midnight, when the wind is abating, I am
still trembling and flushed with exultation." And here is Synge again,
in another temper, which came to him on the seas about Inishmaan: "The
black curagh working slowly through this world of gray, and the soft
hissing of the rain, gave me one of the moods in which we realize with
immense distress the short moment we have left us to experience all the
wonder and beauty of the world."

"The Aran Islands" is most memorable of his travel writings, because he
spent more time on these rocks at the world's end and came closest here
to the soul of Irish life. There are passages, however, in his
description of the Kerry coast,