not write of
Ireland, and for it, and I know that he thought creative art could only
come from such preoccupation. Once, when in later years, anxious about
the educational effect of our movement, I proposed adding to the Abbey
Company a second Company to play international 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 ignored it), 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
once that when he lived in some peasant's house, he tried to make those
about him forget 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 contemplative, and made him dislike, even in solitude,
those thoughts which unite us to others, much as we all dislike, when
fatigue or illness has sharpened the nerves, hoardings 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 concentrating his
imagination upon one thought, health itself. I think that all noble
things 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 cert