read him, for anything but the perfection of his workmanship. If he allowed himself to be swayed greatly by Maeterlinck or Huysmans, then he succeeded, as Wilde did not, in keeping the fact a secret from his work. In all his writings, Synge's only reference to a school to which he is said by some to have delivered himself bound hand and foot a pupil, is a peremptory arraignment of Baudelaire for "morbidity," because he had no humour.

However, there is no reason to doubt that during his residence in Paris Synge was aware, in one degree or another, of the new books and plays. In 1901 there was performed and printed a one-act play by M. Georges Clemenceau, called Le Voile du Bonheur, which may well have started Synge thinking about The Well of the Saints.

The setting of M. Clemenceau's little play, for some reason not unconnected with the advantages of picturesque scenic and musical accompaniment, is in China. A mandarin, Tchang-I, whose wife Si-Tchun is a pearl of chastity, whose little son is all that is hopeful, and who is pleased to do good work in the reformation of criminals, is blind. A great doctor, in mistaken beneficence, causes to fall from Tchang-I the veil which hides from him the world. What a vision of happiness is to be

his! At once he sees that his wife Si-Tchun, who holds his hand, holds with her other that of her lover, his own best friend Tou-fou; behind his back, his little son is making game of him; while a reformed convict, who spoke so sweetly, is running off with his valuables. "Alas!” cries Tchang-I, "my blindness was my vision of happiness." His blindness, his blindness, he must have his blindness, so that he may once again have joy in the only reality that, for him, is happiness! Willingly he reassumes the veil which cloaks from his eyes the disillusionizing world. "It is wonders enough he has seen in a short space for the life of one man only." Once the veil is reassumed, he is able again to say:

Le ciel est bon. La terre est douce. La Chine est un prodige des Dieux. Le printemps vient, paré de verdure et couronné de fleurs, pour le grand rite de l'amour. . . . Je ne suis qu'un homme, dans mon habit orné de dragons d'or, mais je me sens égal aux Dieux.

In a word, he is himself, like Martin Doul, "a wonder." The blind mandarin's conclusion is certainly very like the blind beggar's "Well, sight's a queer thing for upsetting a man." For the lover of the literary parallel, we may even point to the words of M. Clemenceau's Tchang-I when the sight is coming upon him—" Je vois ! Je vois! ... Le ciel! le soleil! quel éblouissement!" and leave it to him to recall that

Synge's blind Martin saw the walls of the church, and the green bits of fern in them, and the great width of the sky.

It is perfectly probable, then, that Synge read, or knew of, M. Clemenceau's graceful little Chinese play. It is possible that the germ of the Well of the Saints came with him from Paris, and did not enter his mind only as he listened on Aran to the quarrelsome pair who became Martin and Mary Doul. If the fact of his indebtedness could be established, it would detract without doubt from Synge's absolute originality in the idea of his play. It would detract nothing whatever from the magic of his treatment of the idea. As Hazlitt remarked, when it was said that Gay took from Tibullus one of the prettiest of his songs in The Beggar's Opera, there is nothing about Covent Garden in Tibullus. Mary Doul and Martin Doul, the happy and blind, will remain in the memory, one fancies, when Tchang-I and Si-Tchun are forgotten-as M. Clemenceau has quite possibly already forgotten them. It is possible that M. Clemenceau, in his turn, had read and remembered Sir Harry Wildair in Farquhar's comedy, who, though he saw his angelic wife in the arms of another, would have "thought the devil had raised the phantom," and refused his belief to the vision. The truth is the people

who have never written a play, but who dislike the play someone else has written, are disposed to put an altogether unnatural emphasis on the need for originality of plot in drama. Shakespeare, they should remember, may possibly once have invented a plot, and Sheridan certainly never. Our judgment may perhaps be suffered to stand, that Synge, above most dramatists, went straight to life for his material. If our interest is in understanding the Playboy, we shall learn more by looking into Synge's notebook of his life on the Aran Islands than by remembering that Baudelaire once opened a conversation with the remark that he had come from killing his father.1

1 Those who wish to read more regarding the alleged French "morbidity" of J. M. Synge must be referred to the Dublin Press passim. So far as the controversy has attained the levels of ordinary sanity, it has resolved itself into a difference of opinion between Mr. W. B. Yeats and Mr. D. J. O'Donohue. Mr. Yeats does not remember that Synge ever shewed himself aware of contempory French literature. Mr. O'Donohue remembers occasions on which he did. Also, we have it on the word of Mr. Masefield that Synge thought Pierre Loti "the best living writer of prose." A meeting of the Irish National Literary Society on January 22, 1912, was devoted to the subject.

V

DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

"INTENSIFICATION," a simple recourse to the dictionary will give assurance, is the act of intensifying; and to intensify, if we may believe our counsellor, is to make more intense. But in accepting still further guidance there is danger, for the connotation of "strain," when one of the arts is under consideration, is likely to be something violent, some suggestion of force unwisely or uneconomically applied; and this can have no application to Synge, in whom there is nothing of violence or consciousness of effort.

The word may stand, however, if we rid it of any such suggestion of powers overtasked, and think only of the passionate embrace the artist may give to life, or of the extreme effort by which he may raise his chosen material to the highest degree. We are often conscious of feelings akin to anguish in face of the most exquisite beauty; the sensitive heart is wrung