in the trees that Deirdre and Naisi heard about the tent; his touches for the eye-Conchubor, first seen from the window, "should be in his tempers from the way he's stepping out, and he swinging his hands." Each act has its own separate atmosphere, and each passage even; from Deirdre standing, between the going of Conchubor and the coming of Naisi, "stiff with excitement," to the moment when Deirdre tells Fergus and the High King, squabbling fools only in the face of her sorrows, to draw a little back; the intensity of each moment is imparted to us unerringly. Never has Synge's sense of contrast been more powerful, than when Conchubor in the moment of his triumph speaks of the splendours of Emain; and Emain breaks into flames.

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Certainly this play in essentials is worked upon to a most beautiful completeness. Only in a phrase here and a phrase there did Synge leave work lower than his best. "Say the word "-" a sight nearer "-" getting the cold shoulder," these might have been made to receive Synge's more characteristic impress; a phrase might have received, one thinks, Synge's customary racy clearness, "What is it has you that way ever coming this place?" asks Deirdre of Conchubor. It disappoints and surprises when

Naisi falls into that modern trick for the securing of intensity, the repetition of spoken words, and says after Deirdre, "Messengers are coming?"

The new temper in the last of Synge's plays we have seen; an acquiescence: "The dawn and evening are a little while, the winter and the summer pass quickly, and what way would you and I, Naisi, have joy for ever?" An acquiescence that is not occasional only, as in old Maurya's closing words in Riders to the Sea, leaving Cathleen yet to find her man, and to contend for him and for her own sons against the sea; Deirdre and Conchubor, Fergus and Lavarcham, alike bow the head and pass out. In the matter of antagonism to age, there is almost a reversal: "I tell you there's little hurt getting old," says Lavarcham, though young girls and poets do be storming at the shapes of age." This spirit of resignation leads to one of the most lovely scenes in all the plays, when Lavarcham comes to Deirdre sorrowing over the grave: "Let you rise up, Deirdre, and come off while there are none to heed us"; a scene lovely as that between Emilia and Desdemona. Deirdre of the Sorrows passes, no longer fiery and magnificent and tender, like a

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sunset over the hills and islands of the West; but burning up to a clear white flame-" four white bodies are laid down together; four clear lights are quenched in Ireland"-a flame that is not quenched, but a torch that may be handed on.

IV

THE NOTEBOOKS

1

"SUPPOSING a writer of dramatic genius were to appear in Ireland, where would he look for the subject of national drama?" This was the question literary Dublin was asking itself in the year of The Countess Cathleen's appearance the words are those of Mr. "John Eglinton," an excellent critic. 1 "In the great countries of Europe," he went on, "although literature is apparently as prosperous as ever and is maintained with a circumstance which would seem to ensure its eternal honour, yet the springs from which the modern literary movements have been fed are probably dried up--the springs of simplicity, hope, belief, and an absolute originality like that of Wordsworth. If also, as seems likely, the approaching ages on the Continent are to be filled with great social and political questions and events which

1 Literary Ideals in Ireland: controversy in "Dublin Daily Express," 1899.

can hardly have immediate expression in literature, it is quite conceivable that literature, as it did once before, would migrate to a quiet country like Ireland. At the moment this critic wrote, Synge, in his top-floor room in Paris, was arriving, perhaps, at the decision to re-migrate to Ireland.

1

We know where Synge looked for the subject of drama. "If a playwright chose to go through the Irish country houses he would find material, it is likely, for many gloomy plays," he wrote, "that would turn on the dying away of these old families, and on the lives of the one or two delicate girls that are left so often to represent a dozen hearty men who were alive a generation or two ago." Synge did not choose to go through the Irish country houses in search of material for many gloomy plays. "When I was writing The Shadow of the Glen, some years ago," he said, in speaking for the first time of his method and intentions, in the preface to the Playboy: "I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen." Synge, it is probable, never cared at all for the "great social 1 In A Landlord's Garden in County Wicklow.

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