ll
so certainly that they numbered it among spiritual states, one among
other ascending steps, seem morbid to the rationalist and the
old-fashioned Protestant controversialist. The thought of journalists,
like that of the Irish novelists, is neither healthy nor unhealthy, for
it has not risen to that state where either is possible, nor should we
call it happy; for who would have sought happiness, if happiness were
not the supreme attainment of man, in heroic toils, in the cell of the
ascetic, or imagined it above the cheerful newspapers, above the clouds?

VII

Not that Synge brought out of the struggle with himself any definite
philosophy, for philosophy in the common meaning of the word is created
out of an anxiety for sympathy or obedience, and he was that rare, that
distinguished, that most noble thing, which of all things still of the
world is nearest to being sufficient to itself, the pure artist. Sir
Philip Sidney complains of those who could hear 'sweet tunes' (by which
he understands could look upon his lady) and not be stirred to
'ravishing delight.'

'Or if they do delight therein, yet are so closed with wit,
As with sententious lips to set a title vain on it;
Oh let them hear these sacred tunes, and learn in Wonder's schools
To be, in things past bonds of wit, fools if they be not fools!'

Ireland for three generations has been like those churlish logicians.
Everything is argued over, everything has to take its trial before the
dull sense and the hasty judgment, and the character of the nation has
so changed that it hardly keeps but among country people, or where some
family tradition is still stubborn, those lineaments that made Borrow
cry out as he came from among the Irish monks, his friends and
entertainers for all his Spanish Bible scattering, 'Oh, Ireland, mother
of the bravest soldiers and of the most beautiful women!' It was, as I
believe, to seek that old Ireland which took its mould from the
duellists and scholars of the eighteenth century and from generations
older still, that Synge returned again and again to Aran, to Kerry, and
to the wild Blaskets.

VIII

'When I got up this morning,' he writes, after he had been a long time
in Innismaan, 'I found that the people had gone to Mass and latched the
kitchen door from the outside, so that I could not open it to give
myself light.

'I sat for nearly an hour beside the fire with a curious feeling that I
should be quite alone in t