here he went to study Irish--until then
little more than a book language to him--and to live a life perhaps
"more primitive than any in Europe," that enabled him to find himself.
Further 'prentice work, though of a new sort, followed his sojourns in
Wicklow and Aran, but by 1903 his art had matured to the ripe power of
"In the Shadow of the Glen" and "Riders to the Sea," which, after
adjustment to the stage, were put on respectively October 8, 1903, and
February 25, 1904, at Molesworth Hall, Dublin. "The Tinker's Wedding"
which has been played only once, and then in London, dates from about
the same time. "The Well of the Saints" was produced on February 4,
1905, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and "The Playboy of the Western
World" on January 26, 1907, at the same place, to the accompaniment of
an uproar that a certain element of Irishmen have considered it proper
to create ever since on its first appearance in all cities whatsoever,
whether in Great Britain or America. One wonders what they would have
done had he made it as biting as Ibsen made "Peer Gynt." "Deirdre of the
Sorrows," which Synge left unrevised, was first produced at the Abbey
Theatre on January 13, 1910, the last of the six plays of his maturity.
It was in the years from 1902 to 1909 that he had "what is best and
richest"--a full life, lived largely in the Ireland that he loved; the
artist's joy in making that life into a new beauty, a beauty that was
all compact of exaltation and extravagance and irony; and love for a
woman in whom his man's life and his artist's life were united, for her
who embodied his dream of Pegeen Mike and added her life and her art of
the stage to his dream of Deirdre, as day by day it emerged from his
mind. And so great was his joy in these good things that his precarious
health, and even his year--long last illness, could not, while he had
any strength, lessen the high spirit of his writing. There is none of
his plays more vital than "Deirdre of the Sorrows."

And yet this joy that is basic in Synge, this exaltation, is no more
basic than emotions and attitudes of mind that are often, in other men,
at war with joy and exaltation--irony and grotesquerie, keen insight
into "the black thoughts of men," and insistent awareness of the quick
passing of all good things, _diablerie_ and mordancy. Strange, then,
should be his love passages and strange too, they are at times, ranging
from the bizarre delight of "In Kerry" to the triumphi