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 Elizabeth 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 the 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