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 not write of Ireland, and
for it, and I know that he thought creative art could only come from such
preoccupation. Once, when in later years, anxious about the educational
effect of our movement, I proposed adding to the Abbey Company a second
Company to play international drama, Synge, who had not hitherto opposed
me, thought the matter so important that he did so in a formal letter.

I had spoken of a German municipal theatre as my model, and he said that
the municipal theatres all over Europe gave fine performances of old
classics but did not create (he disliked modern drama for its sterility
of speech, and perhaps ignored it) and that we would create nothing if we
did not give all our thoughts to Ireland. Yet in Ireland he loved only
what was wild in its people, and in 'the grey and wintry sides of many
glens.' All the rest, all that one reasoned over, fought for, read of in
leading articles, all that came from education, all that came down from
Young Ireland--though for this he had not lacked a little sympathy--first
wakened in him perhaps that irony which runs through all he wrote, but
once awakened, he made it turn its face upon the whole of life. The women