in the curiosity of study. When he had left the Blaskets for the last
time, he travelled with a lame pensioner who had drifted there, why
heaven knows, and one morning having missed him from the inn where they
were staying, he believed he had gone back to the island and searched
everywhere and questioned everybody, till he understood of a sudden that
he was jealous as though the island were a woman.

The book seems dull if you read much at a time, as the later Kerry essays
do not, but nothing that he has written recalls so completely to my
senses the man as he was in daily life; and as I read, there are moments
when every line of his face, every inflection of his voice, grows so
clear in memory that I cannot realize that he is dead. He was no nearer
when we walked and talked than now while I read these unarranged,
unspeculating pages, wherein the only life he loved with his whole heart
reflects itself as in the still water of a pool. Thought comes to him
slowly, and only after long seemingly unmeditative watching, and when it
comes, (and he had the same character in matters of business) it is
spoken without hesitation and never changed. His conversation was not an
experimental thing, an instrument of research, and this made him silent;
while his essays recall events, on which one feels that he pronounces no
judgment even in the depth of his own mind, because the labour of Life
itself had not yet brought the philosophic generalization, which was
almost as much his object as the emotional generalization of beauty. A
mind that generalizes rapidly, continually prevents the experience that
would have made it feel and see deeply, just as a man whose character is
too complete in youth seldom grows into any energy of moral beauty. Synge
had indeed no obvious ideals, as these are understood by young men, and
even as I think disliked them, for he once complained to me that our
modern poetry was but the poetry 'of the lyrical boy,' and this lack
makes his art have a strange wildness and coldness, as of a man born in