Boulevard St Jacques for little over a shilling. Someone, whose name I forget, told me there was a poor Irishman at the top of the house, and presently introduced us. Synge had come lately from Italy, and had played his fiddle to peasants in the Black Forest; six months of travel upon fifty pounds; and was now reading French literature and writing morbid and melancholy verse. He told me that he had learned Irish at Trinity College, so I urged him to go to the Aran Islands and find a life that had never been expressed in literature, instead of a life where all had been expressed. I did not divine his genius, but I felt he needed something to take him out of his morbidity and melancholy. Perhaps I would have given the same advice to any young Irishman who knew Irish, for I had been that summer upon Inishmaan and Inishmore, and was full of the subject. My friends and I had landed from a fishing boat to find ourselves among a group of islanders, one of whom offered to bring us to the oldest man upon Inishmaan. He brought us to an old man who said, speaking very slowly, "If any gentleman has done a crime, we'll hide him. There was a gentleman that killed his father, and I had him in my own house six months till he got away to America."
From that on I saw much of Synge, and brought him to Mme Gonne's, under whose persuasion perhaps, he joined the Young Ireland Society of Paris, the name we gave to half a dozen Parisian Irish, but resigned after a few months because "it wanted to stir up Continental nations against England, and England will never give us freedom until she feels she is safe," the one political sentence I ever heard him speak. Over a year was to pass before he took my advice and settled for a while in an Aran Cottage, and became happy, having escaped at last, as he wrote "from the squalor of the poor and the nullity of the rich." I almost forget the prose and verse he showed me in Paris, though I read it all through again when after his death I decided at his written request what was to be published and what not. Indeed I have but a vague impression, as of a man trying to look out of a window and blurring all that he sees by breathing upon the glass. According to my lunar parable he was a man of the twenty-third phase, a man whose subjective lives—for a constant return to our life is a part of my dream—were over, who must not pursue an image but fly from it, all that subjective dreaming that had once been power and joy now corrupting within him. He had to take the first plunge into the world beyond himself,
