ties, incessant in rehearsal, and in teaching the actors with his own lips the long, peculiar rhythm of the speech of the plays. By the time The Playboy of the Western World was presented, it is probable that the Abbey Theatre in Dublin was the best theatre-the theatre possessing in the highest perfection all the essentials of its art-in the English-speaking world.

iv

The best portrait of the man-the portrait that seems to show most of the author of the plays-hangs in the new Municipal Gallery at Dublin.1 It shows a homely Irish face, gallicized just a little deliberately; with features that are insignificant, save for remarkable eyes. The black hair is in a careless sweep, the attire negligent but determinedly ordinary. The hands are the delicate hands of the craftsman. You come back to the eyes--eyes that assert nothing, that begin by questioning your assertions merely, that hold you under their calm, amused gaze, a gaze tolerant and a little cynical. They are curiously wide eyes, lidded a little lazily. . . . As you look, the impartial gaze appears to have shifted; it is beyond you, on the things of eternal concern.

By Mr. J. B. Yeats, R.H.A., reproduced as frontispiece.

The portrait shows Synge "sitting still," as he said Mr. Masefield found him so, in a roomful of people in London, the least conspicuous of the company; "watching with the singular grave intensity with which he watched life." Another good portrait shows him sitting, watching, at rehearsal. "His mind was too busy with the life to be busy with the affairs or the criticism of life."1 "All wild sights appealed to Synge, he did not care whether they were typical of anything else or had any symbolical meaning at all. If he had lived in the days of piracy he would have been the fiddler in a pirateschooner, him they called the music.' The music' looked on at everything with dancing eyes but drew no sword."2 "He was a solitary, undemonstrative man, never asking pity, nor complaining, nor seeking sympathy . . all folded up in brooding intellect, knowing nothing of new books and newspapers, reading the great masters alone."3 Mr. Masefield finds the man in the Poems, Mr. Yeats in the unarranged, unspeculating pages of the book on the Aran Islands. In the chapters that follow, our more particular concern will be with the plays, to find the dramatist there.

1 Mr. Masefield. 2 Mr. Jack B. Yeats.

3 Mr. W. B. Yeats.

V

Mr. Yeats has expressed the doubt whether Synge would ever have written at all had he not chanced to re-discover Ireland. Perhaps there is the pardonable pride of the friend in this, who has seen his counsel bear fruit; but one need not think so. Certainly Synge came back to life, from letters, with pleasure and excitement. It would be hard to find a parallel in literature to the suddenness with which the world was simplified and illumined for this silent, contemplative man, conscious from the first of the wish to be a writer, and until past his thirtieth year achieving nothing. The little impressionist essays he had to show in Paris seemed to Mr. Yeats pale and remote from life" as images reflected from mirror to mirror." He had put nothing into them of the spirit of the circuses on the outer Boulevards, that he took pleasure in watching. Like Goldsmith, he had wandered over a lot of Europe, living in close touch with its people; they had not moved him to make drama. He had passed places, when travelling by night in France or Bavaria, "that seemed so enshrined in the blue silence of night one could not believe they reawaken"; their beauty had not stirred in him the means to its expression. Enormous mobs

in Rome or Paris did not make him feel the tension of human excitement he felt, he writes, when he came among an insignificant crowd in Connaught. Something in Ireland fired him : something in Wicklow, in the "grey and wintry sides" of its many glens; something in the islands of the West, "filled with people whose lives have the strange quality that is found in the oldest poetry and legend." His mind and temperament and preparation were like a train well laid, waiting only for a spark to fire it; something in the life he found in Ireland supplied this spark-he cannot himself define it. We find him writing in his journal:

I got on a long road running through a bog, with a smooth mountain on one side and the sea on the other, and Brandon in front of me, partly covered with clouds. As far as I could see there were little groups of people on their way to the chapel in Ballyferriter, the men in homespun and the women wearing blue cloaks, or, more often, black shawls twisted over their heads. This procession along the olive bogs, between the mountains and the sea, on this grey day of autumn, seemed to wring me with the pang of emotion one meets everywhere in Ireland-an emotion that is partly local and patriotic, and partly a share of the desolation that is mixed everywhere with the supreme beauty of the world.

"The intense insular clearness one sees only in Ireland," he notes again; and it was Ireland that brought clearness to his own mind, always

given to musing, and up to now a little dark. Henceforward he was on the roads a great deal, with those olive bogs of the West for background to his thoughts; and for part of each year he made his home on Aran, among "the men who live forgotten in those worlds of mist,” giving his whole care and concern to the daily trifles of their life, and speaking their curiously simple yet dignified language. Here, among people filled with the oldest passions of the world, life took on an intensity of clearness that made of Synge a dramatist. Here there came to him the mood, "in which we realise with immense distress the short moment we have left us to experience all the wonder and beauty of the world." It is the mood of all Synge's work, the mood of passion and tenderness we shall find in one after another of the plays.

Synge did not merely find Ireland, he came back to it. To see life with new eyes is a good motive to art; but to see a well-known and well-loved life with a new and vivid intensity after absence, is perhaps a better. Synge's was no passing mood, with motivity in it to an ode on Ireland Revisited. He knew that his mind had ended its wanderings, and his imagination entered into its kingdom. No writer has seen Ireland with such intimacy at the same time with such detachment. The plays of no drama