Page:John M. Synge - Masefield - Dublin 1915.djvu/40

 passed from us it is a sign that life has no further need of it. What that personality did may matter. What that personality was does not matter. Man’s task is to leave the dead alone. Life would be finer if we did not drag that caddis-worm’s house of the past behind us.

I have not set down all my memories of him. Much of what he told and said to me was told and said in the confidence of friendship. I have set down only a few odd fragments to show those who care to know what sort of a man he was. Lies and lives will be written of him; plenty of both. Enough should be said to defeat the malice and stupidity of detractors. Those who want to know what he was in himself should read the poems. The poems are the man speaking. They are so like him that to read them is to hear him. The couplet–

“But they are rotten (I ask their pardon,)

And we’ve the sun on rock and garden.”

gives me, whenever I read it, the feeling that he is in the room, looking up with his hard,