a
woman.

The book seems dull if you read much at a time, as the later Kerry
essays do not, but nothing that he has written recalls so completely to
my senses the man as he was in daily life; and as I read, there are
moments when every line of his face, every inflection of his voice,
grows so clear in memory that I cannot realise that he is dead. He was
no nearer when we walked and talked than now while I read these
unarranged, unspeculating pages, wherein the only life he loved with his
whole heart reflects itself as in the still water of a pool. Thought
comes to him slowly, and only after long seemingly unmeditative
watching, and when it comes (and he had the same character in matters of
business), it is spoken without hesitation and never changed. His
conversation was not an experimental thing, an instrument of research,
and this made him silent; while his essays recall events, on which one
feels that he pronounces no judgment even in the depth of his own mind,
because the labour of Life itself had not yet brought the philosophic
generalisation, which was almost as much his object as the emotional
generalisation of beauty. A mind that generalises rapidly, continually
prevents the experience that would have made it feel and see deeply,
just as a man whose character is too complete in youth seldom grows into
any energy of moral beauty. Synge had indeed no obvious ideals, as
these are understood by young men, and even as I think disliked them,
for he once complained to me that our modern poetry was but the poetry
'of the lyrical boy,' and this lack makes his art have a strange
wildness and coldness, as of a man born in some far-off spacious land
and time.

X

There are artists like Byron, like Goethe, like Shelley, who have
impressive personalities, active wills and all their faculties at the
service of the will; but he belonged to those who like Wordsworth, like
Coleridge, like Goldsmith, like Keats, have little personality, so far
as the casual eye can see, little personal will, but fiery and brooding
imagination. I cannot imagine him anxious to impress, or convince in any
company, or saying more than was sufficient to keep the talk circling.
Such men have the advantage that all they write is a part of knowledge,
but they are powerless before events and have often but one visible
strength, the strength to reject from life and thought all that would
mar their work, or deafen them in the doing of it; and only this