Irish exaggeration is as often seen in plenary curses as in plenary blessings; both have the quality of humour. The curses are partly compounded of robust delight, like the joy of London cabmen in repartee; and the blessings are doubtless commingled with irony. But Synge had a savage heart. He was essentially a wild man, and a friend of mine had a vision of him that seems not without significance. He was walking in a desolate part of Ireland in a bleak storm of rain; when suddenly over the hills came the solitary figure of Synge, dressed in black, with a broad hat pulled over his brows. As a stranger and sojourner he walked this earth. In the midst of Dublin he never mentioned politics, read no newspapers, and little contemporary literature, not even the books of his few intimate friends. Every one who knew him had such immense respect for the quality of his intellect that it is almost laughable to think how eagerly they must have awaited criticism of the books they gave him--criticism that never came. Yet he never seems to have given the impression of surliness; he was not surly, he was silent. He must have been the despair of diagnosticians; even in his last illness, it was impossible for the doctors and nurses to discover how he felt, for he would not tell. I think his burning mind consumed his bodily frame. Synge wrote few poems, and they came at intervals during a period of sixteen or seventeen years. Objectively, they are unimportant; his contributions to English literature are his dramas and his prose sketches. But as revelations of his personality they have a deep and melancholy interest; and every word of his short Preface, written in December, 1908, a few months before his death, is valuable. He knew he was a dying man, and not only wished to collect these fugitive bits of verse, but wished to leave behind him his theory of poetry. With characteristic bluntness, he says that the poems which follow the Preface were mostly written "before the views just stated, with which they have little to do, had come into my head." No discussion of modern verse should omit consideration of this remarkable Preface--for while it has had no effect on either Mr. Yeats or Mr. Russell--it has influenced other Irish poets, and many that are not Irish. Indeed much aggressively "modern" work is trying, more or less successfully, to fit this theory. In the advance, Synge was more prophet than poet. Many of the older poets, such as Villon and Herrick and Burns, used the whole of their personal life as their material, and the verse written in this way was read by strong men, and thieves, and deacons, not by little cliques only. Then, in the town writing of the eighteenth century, ordinary life was put into verse that was not poetry, and when poetry came back with Coleridge and Shelley, it went into verse that was not always human. [This last clause shows the difference between Synge and his friends, Yeats and Russell.]