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Synge seemed by nature unfitted to think a political thought, and with the exception of oence, spoken when I first met him in Paris, that implied some sort of nationalist vi, I ot remember that he spoke of politics or showed any i in men in the mass, or in any subject that is studied through abstras and statistics. Often for months together he and I and Lady Gregory would see no oside the Abbey Theatre, and that life, lived as it were in a ship at sea, suited him, for uhose whose habit of mind fits them to judge of men in the mass, he was wise in judging individual men, and as wise in dealing with them as the faint energies of ill?health would permit; but of their political thoughts he long uood nothing. One night when we were still produg plays in a little hall, certain members of the pany told him that a play on the Rebellion of 98 would be a great success. After a fht he brought them a sario which read like a chapter out of Rabelais. Two women, a Protestant and a Catholic, take refuge in a cave, and there quarrel abion, abusing the Pope or Queen Eliz.９9liｂ?abeth and Henry VIII, but in low voices, for the one fears to be ravished by the soldiers, the other by the rebels. At last one woman goes out because she would sooner any fate than such wicked pany. Yet, I doubt if he would have written at all if he did not write of Ireland, and for it, and I know that he thought creative art could only e from such preoccupation.Once, when in later years, anxious about the educational effect of our movement, I proposed adding to the Abbey pany a sed pany to play iional drama, Synge, who had not hitherto opposed me, thought the matter so important that he did so in a formal letter.
I had spoken of a German municipal theatre as my model, and he said that the municipal theatres all over Europe gave fine performances of old classics but did not create (he disliked modern drama for its sterility of speech, and perhaps ig) and that we would create nothing if we did not give all our thoughts to Ireland.
Yet in Ireland he loved only what was wild in its people, and in the grey and wintry sides of many glens. All the rest, all that one reasoned over, fought for, read of in leading articles, all that came from education, all that came down from Young Ireland??though for this he had not lacked a little sympathy??first wakened in him perhaps that irony which runs through all he wrote, but once awakened, he made it turn its face upon..he whole of life. The women quarrelling in the cave would not have amused him, if something in his nature had not looked out on most disputes, even those wherein he himself took sides, with a mischievous wisdom. He told me ohat when he lived in some peasants house, he tried to make those about him fet that he was there, and it is certain that he was silent in any crowded room. It is possible that low vitality helped him to be observant and plative, and made him dislike, even in solitude, those thoughts whiite us to others, much as we all dislike, when fatigue or illness has sharpehe nerves, hs covered with advertisements, the fronts of big theatres, big London hotels, and all architecture which has been made to impress the crowd. What blindness did for Homer, lameness for Hephaestus, asceticism for any saint you will, bad health did for him by making him ask no more of life than that it should keep him living, and above all perhaps by trating his imagination upohought, health itself. I think that all hings are the result of warfare; great nations and classes, of warfare in the visible world, great poetry and philosophy, of invisible warfare, the division of a mind within itself, a victory, the sacrifice of a man to himself. I am certain that my friends , so full of passion and heroic beauty, is the victory of a man who in poverty and siess created from the delight of expression, and in the plation that is born of the minute and delicate arra of images, happiness, ah of mind. Some early poems have a morbid melancholy, and he himself spoke of early work he had destroyed as morbid, for as yet the craftmanship was not fine enough t the artists joy which is of one substah that of sanctity. In one poem he waits at some street er for a friend, a erhaps, and while he waits and gradually uands that nobody is ing, sees two funerals and shivers at the future; and in another written on his 25th birthday, he wonders if the 25 years to e shall be as evil as those gone by. Later on, he see himself as but a part of the spectacle of the world and mix into all he sees that flavour of extravagance, or of humour, or of philosophy, that makes op://..uand that he plates even his owh as if it were anothers, and finds in his owiny but as it were a proje through a burning glass of that general to men. There is in the creative joy an acceptance of what life brings, because we have uood the beauty of what it brings, or a hatred of death for what it takes away, which arouses within us, through some sympathy perhaps with all other men, an energy so noble, so powerful, that we laugh aloud and mock, ierror or the sweetness of our exaltation, at death and oblivion.
In no modern writer that has written of Irish life before him, except it may be Miss Edgeworth in Castle Rat, was there anything to ge a mans thought about the world or stir his moral nature, for they but play with pictures, persons, as, that whether well or ill observed are but an amusement for the mind where it escapes from meditation, a childs show that makes the fables of his art as signifit by trast as some procession painted on aian wall; for in these fables, an intelligence, on which the tragedy of the world had been thrust in so few years, that Life had no time to brew her sleepy drug, has spoken of the moods that are the expression of its wisdom. All minds that have a wisdom e ic reality seem mo<u></u>rbid to those that are aced to writers who have not faced reality at all; just as the saints, with that Obscure Night of the Soul, which fell so certainly that they numbered it among spiritual states, one among other asding steps, seem morbid to the rationalist and the old?fashioned Protestant troversialist. The thought of journalists, like that of the Irish s, is her healthy nor uhy, for it has not risen to that state where either is possible, nor should we call it happy; for who would have sought happiness, if happiness were not the supreme attai of man, in heroic toils, in the cell of the ascetiagi above the cheerful neers, above the clouds?
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