een expressed. I did not divine his genius, but I felt he needed
something to take him out of his morbidity and melancholy. Perhaps I would
have given the same advice to any young Irish writer who knew Irish, for I
had been that summer upon Inishmaan and Inishmore, and was full of the
subject. My friends and I had landed from a fishing boat to find ourselves
among a group of islanders, one of whom said he would bring us to the
oldest man upon Inishmaan. This old man, speaking very slowly, but with
laughing eyes, had said, "If any gentleman has done a crime, we'll hide
him. There was a gentleman that killed his father, and I had him in my
own house six months till he got away to America."

From that on I saw much of Synge, and brought him to Maude Gonne's, under
whose persuasion perhaps, he joined the "Young Ireland Society of Paris,"
the name we gave to half a dozen Parisian Irish, signed, but resigned
after a few months because "it wanted to stir up Continental nations
against England, and England will never give us freedom until she feels
she is safe," the one political sentence I ever heard him speak. Over a
year was to pass before he took my advice and settled for a while in an
Aran cottage, and became happy, having escaped at last, as he wrote, "from
the squalor of the poor and the nullity of the rich." I almost forget the
prose and verse he showed me in Paris, though I read it all through again
when after his death I decided, at his written request, what was to be
published and what not. Indeed, I have but a vague impression, as of a man
trying to look out of a window and blurring all that he sees by breathing
upon the window. According to my Lunar parable, he was a man of the
twenty-third Phase, a man whose subjective lives--for a constant return to
our life is a part of my dream--were over, who must not pursue an image,
but fly from it, all that subjective dreaming, that had once been power
and joy, now corrupting within him. He had to take the first plunge into
the world beyond himself, the first plunge away from himself that is
always pure technique, the delight in doing, not because one would or
should, but merely because one can do.

He once said to me, "a man has to bring up his family and be as virtuous
as is compatible with so doing, and if he does more than that he is a
puritan; a dramatist has to express his subject and to find as much
beauty as is compatible with that, and if he does more he is an aesth