so long
as it is a passive act. If Synge had married young or taken some
profession, I doubt if he would have written books or been greatly
interested in a movement like ours; but he refused various opportunities
of making money in what must have been an almost unconscious
preparation. He had no life outside his imagination, little interest in
anything that was not its chosen subject. He hardly seemed aware of the
existence of other writers. I never knew if he cared for work of mine,
and do not remember that I had from him even a conventional compliment,
and yet he had the most perfect modesty and simplicity in daily
intercourse, self-assertion was impossible to him. On the other hand, he
was useless amidst sudden events. He was much shaken by the _Playboy_
riot; on the first night confused and excited, knowing not what to do,
and ill before many days, but it made no difference in his work. He
neither exaggerated out of defiance nor softened out of timidity. He
wrote on as if nothing had happened, altering _The Tinker's Wedding_ to
a more unpopular form, but writing a beautiful serene _Deirdre_, with,
for the first time since his _Riders to the Sea_, no touch of sarcasm or
defiance. Misfortune shook his physical nature while it left his
intellect and his moral nature untroubled. The external self, the mask,
the persona, was a shadow, character was all.

XI

He was a drifting silent man full of hidden passion, and loved wild
islands, because there, set out in the light of day, he saw what lay
hidden in himself. There is passage after passage in which he dwells
upon some moment of excitement. He describes the shipping of pigs at
Kilronan on the North Island for the English market: 'when the steamer
was getting near, the whole drove was moved down upon the slip and the
curraghs were carried out close to the sea. Then each beast was caught
in its turn and thrown on its side, while its legs were hitched together
in a single knot, with a tag of rope remaining, by which it could be
carried.

'Probably the pain inflicted was not great, yet the animals shut their
eyes and shrieked with almost human intonations, till the suggestion of
the noise became so intense that the men and women who were merely
looking on grew wild with excitement, and the pigs waiting their turn
foamed at the mouth and tore each other with their teeth.

'After a while there was a pause. The whole slip was covered with a mass
of sobbing animals, wit