aim, and was indeed founding one in
Paris when I first met with J. M. Synge, and I have known what it is to
be changed by that I would have changed, till I became argumentative and
unmannerly, hating men even in daily life for their opinions. And though
I was never convinced that the anatomies of last year's leaves are a
living forest, nor thought a continual apologetic could do other than
make the soul a vapour and the body a stone; nor believed that
literature can be made by anything but by what is still blind and dumb
within ourselves, I have had to learn how hard in one who lives where
forms of expression and habits of thought have been born, not for the
pleasure of begetting but for the public good, is that purification from
insincerity, vanity, malignity, arrogance, which is the discovery of
style. But it became possible to live when I had learnt all I had not
learnt in shaping words, in defending Synge against his enemies, and
knew that rich energies, fine, turbulent or gracious thoughts, whether
in life or letters, are but love-children.

Synge seemed by nature unfitted to think a political thought, and with
the exception of one sentence, spoken when I first met him in Paris,
that implied some sort of nationalist conviction, I cannot remember that
he spoke of politics or showed any interest in men in the mass, or in
any subject that is studied through abstractions and statistics. Often
for months together he and I and Lady Gregory would see no one outside
the Abbey Theatre, and that life, lived as it were in a ship at sea,
suited him, for unlike those 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 understood nothing. One night when
we were still producing plays in a little hall, certain members of the
Company told him that a play on the Rebellion of '98 would be a great
success. After a fortnight he brought them a scenario which read like a
chapter out of Rabelais. Two women, a Protestant and a Catholic, take
refuge in a cave, and there quarrel about religion, 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 company.
Yet, I doubt if he would have written at all if he did