only Synge achieved a piece of art that was universal in
its appeal, satisfying equally the artistic formula of Pater and the
artistic formula of Tolstoi. This was _Riders to the Sea. Riders to the
Sea_, a lyrical pageant of pity made out of the destinies of
fisher-folk, is a play that would have been understood in ancient Athens
or in Elizabethan London, as well as by an audience of Irish peasants
to-day.

Here, incidentally, we get a foretaste of that preoccupation with death
which heightens the tensity in so much of Synge's work. There is a
corpse on the stage in _Riders to the Sea_, and a man laid out as a
corpse in _In the Shadow of the Glen_, and there is a funeral party in
_The Playboy of the Western World._ Synge's imagination dwelt much among
the tombs. Even in his comedies, his laughter does not spring from an
exuberant joy in life so much as from excitement among the incongruities
of a world that is due to death. Hence he cannot be summed up either as
a tragic or a comic writer. He is rather a tragic satirist with the soul
of a lyric poet.

If he is at his greatest in _Riders to the Sea_, he is at his most
personal in _The Well of the Saints_, and this is essentially a tragic
satire. It is a symbolic play woven out of the illusions of two blind
beggars. Mr. Howe says that "there is nothing for the symbolists in _The
Well of the Saints_," but that is because he is anxious to prove that
Synge was a great creator of men and women. Synge, in my opinion at
least, was nothing of the sort. His genius was a genius of decoration,
not of psychology. One might compare it to firelight in a dark room,
throwing fantastic shapes on the walls. He loved the fantastic, and he
was held by the darkness. Both in speech and in character, it was the
bizarre and even the freakish that attracted him. In _Riders to the Sea_
he wrote as one who had been touched by the simple tragedy of human
life. But, as he went on writing and working, he came to look on life
more and more as a pattern of extravagances, and he exchanged the noble
style of _Riders to the Sea_ for the gauded and overwrought style of
_The Playboy._

"With _The Playboy of the Western World_," says Mr. Howe, "Synge placed
himself among the masters." But then Mr. Howe thinks that "Pegeen Mike
is one of the most beautiful and living figures in all drama," and that
she "is the normal," and that

Synge, with an originality more absolute than Wordsworth's,
insist