He had
wandered among people whose life is as picturesque as the middle ages,
playing his fiddle to Italian sailors, and listening to stories in
Bavarian woods, but life had cast no light into his writings. He had
learned Irish years ago, but had begun to forget it, for the only
language that interested him was that conventional language of modern
poetry which has begun to make us all weary. I was very weary of it, for
I had finished _The Secret Rose_, and felt how it had separated my
imagination from life, sending my Red Hanrahan, who should have trodden
the same roads with myself, into some undiscoverable country. I said,
'Give up Paris, you will never create anything by reading Racine, and
Arthur Symons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to
the Arran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people
themselves; express a life that has never found expression.' I had just
come from Arran, and my imagination was full of those grey islands
where men must reap with knives because of the stones.

He went to Arran and became a part of its life, living upon salt fish
and eggs, talking Irish for the most part, but listening also to the
beautiful English which has grown up in Irish-speaking districts, and
takes its vocabulary from the time of Malory and of the translators of
the Bible, but its idiom and its vivid metaphor from Irish. When Mr.
Synge began to write in this language, Lady Gregory had already used it
finely in her translations of Dr. Hyde's lyrics and plays, or of old
Irish literature, but she had listened with different ears. He made his
own selection of word and phrase, choosing what would express his own
personality. Above all, he made word and phrase dance to a very strange
rhythm, which will always, till his plays have created their own
tradition, be difficult to actors who have not learned it from his lips.
It is essential, for it perfectly fits the drifting emotion, the
dreaminess, the vague yet measureless desire, for which he would create
a dramatic form. It blurs definition, clear edges, everything that
comes from the will, it turns imagination from all that is of the
present, like a gold background in a religious picture, and it
strengthens in every emotion whatever comes to it from far off, from
brooding memory and dangerous hope. When he brought _The Shadow of the
Glen_, his first play, to the Irish National Theatre Society, the
players were puzzled by the rhythm, but gradually