ss comes from absence of human life. And if there
is not the loneliness of the sea in the inland glens that Synge knew so
well, there is in them the equal loneliness of the mountains. It is this
county of Wicklow that is the background of "In the Shadow of the Glen"
and of "The Well of the Saints" and of "The Tinker's Wedding." And
perhaps had not the Abbey Theatre grown to be a theatre for folk-drama
and for poetic drama of court romance alone, Synge would have made
Wicklow the background of dramas of a high life of yesterday. Certain it
is that in these passages he is thinking of it:--

Every one is used in Ireland to the tragedy that is bound up with
the lives of farmers and fishing-people; but in this garden one
seemed to feel the tragedy of the landlord class also, and of the
innumerable old families that are quickly dwindling away. These
owners of the land are not much pitied at the present day, or much
deserving of pity; and yet one cannot quite forget that they are
the descendants of what was at one time, in the eighteenth century,
a high-spirited and highly cultivated aristocracy. The broken
greenhouses and mouse-eaten libraries, that were designed and
collected by men who voted with Grattan, are perhaps as mournful in
the end as the four mud walls that are so often left in Wicklow as
the only remnants of a farmhouse. The desolation of this life is
often of a peculiarly local kind, and if a playwright chose to go
through the Irish country houses he would find material, it is
likely, for many gloomy plays 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.

I have dwelt on these travel sketches of Synge not alone for their own
sake, but because they are, as I have said, the background of the plays,
and because they contain what are in a sense the diary notes out of
which the plays grew. In a sense, too, they are a commentary on the
plays, and as I have also said a revelation of the playwright. All must
be read for a thorough understanding of the plays, though these alone
should be a delight to all, even if they know no more of Ireland than
that share of human nature which is axiomatically the same in all men of
all races. If you do not read the travel sketches, you may fail to