er in the movement,
who in the comfort of a holiday there has been refreshed by the gray and
green land so near the sea and reinspired by the contact with that Irish
Ireland so close to her doors. Like Ruskin, Lady Gregory is a great
patron of letters, but like Ruskin she is much more. Lady Gregory is an
artist in words who is to be valued as a presenter of Irish life, past
and present, with a beauty that was not in English literature before she
made it.

CHAPTER VII

JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE

It is Synge himself who puts the just phrase on what his life was to
him, and it is, as it could not else be, from the lips of his Deirdre
that it falls. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and
richest, if it's for a short space only." It is Deirdre alone of his men
and women that is introspective at all, Deirdre--and Naisi when he is
mastered by thoughts of home that will not down. Synge wrote the play of
her triumph over death as he himself was dying, and he wrote it with
high heart, and, what is higher, gladness, despite his foreknowledge of
his doom. It was to fulfill his dream of the most queenly girl of old
Irish legend that he wrote "Deirdre of the Sorrows," but he could not
keep out of his writing, had he wished to keep it out, his own love that
death was so soon to end, and the thoughts of what was the worth of
life. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and richest, if
it's for a short space only." It is not a new saying, but it is not to
be identified with the proverbial "a short life and a merry," with which
some confuse it, and of Synge it was a true saying. There are those who,
because of the irony of his writing, an irony that is new to literature,
and, maybe, to some cruel, or at least disillusionizing, may think there
was little joy for him; but the truth is there was never a writer in
whom there was more joy. This "strange still man" as he was even to
those who knew him best, gentle or simple, found all life that was
natural life, even of the barest and rudest, as thrilling as first love.
It is this man, his enemies at home the sated Parisian, who knew a gusto
in living greater than that of any English writer since Borrow. Let no
one forget those lines with which Christy Mahon cries defiance to the
Mayo folk who have known his greatness and his fall: "Ten thousand
blessings upon all that's here, for you've turned me a likely gaffer in
the end of all, the way I'll go romancing throu