her as a contemplative Buddha to a Japanese Samurai,
against a French critic who would persuade her to take into her heart in
their stead a Post-Impressionist picture of a fat, ruddy, nude woman lying
upon a Turkey carpet.

There are indeed certain men whose art is less an opposing virtue than a
compensation for some accident of health or circumstance. During the riots
over the first production of the _Playboy of the Western World_ Synge was
confused, without clear thought, and was soon ill--indeed the strain of
that week may perhaps have hastened his death--and he was, as is usual
with gentle and silent men, scrupulously accurate in all his statements.
In his art he made, to delight his ear and his mind's eye, voluble
daredevils who "go romancing through a romping lifetime ... to the dawning
of the Judgment Day." At other moments this man, condemned to the life of
a monk by bad health, takes an amused pleasure in "great queens ... making
themselves matches from the start to the end." Indeed, in all his
imagination he delights in fine physical life, in life where the moon
pulls up the tide. The last act of _Deirdre of the Sorrows_, where his art
is at its noblest, was written upon his death-bed. He was not sure of any
world to come, he was leaving his betrothed and his unwritten play--"Oh,
what a waste of time," he said to me; he hated to die, and in the last
speeches of Deirdre and in the middle act he accepted death and dismissed
life with a gracious gesture. He gave to Deirdre the emotion that seemed
to him most desirable, most difficult, most fitting, and maybe saw in
those delighted seven years, now dwindling from her, the fulfilment of his
own life.

III

When I think of any great poetical writer of the past (a realist is an
historian and obscures the cleavage by the record of his eyes) I
comprehend, if I know the lineaments of his life, that the work is the
man's flight from his entire horoscope, his blind struggle in the network
of the stars. William Morris, a happy, busy, most irascible man, described
dim colour and pensive emotion, following, beyond any man of his time, an
indolent muse; while Savage Landor topped us all in calm nobility when the
pen was in his hand, as in the daily violence of his passion when he had
laid it down. He had in his _Imaginary Conversations_ reminded us, as it
were, that the Venus de Milo is a stone, and yet he wrote when the copies
did not come from the printer as soon as he