ed in that
city in 1909. His brief span of life has yielded only scanty
biographical data. He came of an old Wicklow family; he was graduated
from Trinity College, Dublin; afterwards he wandered through much of
Europe, finally settling in France.

[Illustration: JOHN SYNGE.]

In 1899, William Butler Yeats discovered him in Paris, a "man all
folded up in brooding intellect," writing essays on French
authors,--on Moliere, for example, from whom he learned the trick of
characterization; on Racine, who taught him concentration; on
Rabelais, who infected him with love of deep laughter. Yeats,
suspecting that Synge could be an original writer as well as an
interpreter of others, persuaded him to go back to Ireland, to the
Aran Islands, off Galway. Synge discovered there a lost kingdom of the
imagination, a place where spontaneous feeling and primitive
imagination had not been repressed by the outside world's customs and
discipline, and where the constant voice of the ocean, the touch of
the mysterious, all-embracing mist, and the gleam of the star through
a rift in the clouds banished all sense of difference between the
natural and the supernatural.

When Synge died in his thirty-eighth year, he had written only six
short plays, all between 1903 and 1909. Two of these, _In the Shadow
of the Glen_ and _Riders to the Sea_, contain only one act. _The
Tinker's Wedding_ has two acts, and the rest are three-act plays.

_In the Shadow of the Glen, Riders to the Sea_, and _The Well of the
Saints_, produced respectively in 1903, 1904, and 1905, show that
Synge came at once into full possession of his dramatic power. Even in
his earliest written play, _The Well of The Saints_, we find a style
stripped of superfluous verbiage and vibrant with emotion. _In the
Shadow of the Glen_, his first staged play, consumes only a half hour.
The scene is laid in a cabin far off in a lonely glen, and the four
actors,--a woman oppressed by loneliness, an unfeeling husband who
feigns death, and two visitors,--make a singularly well-knit
impressive drama.

_Riders to the Sea_ has been pronounced the greatest drama of the
modern Celtic school. Some critics consider this the most significant
tragedy produced in English since Shakespeare. Simple and impressive
as a Greek tragedy, it has for its central figure an old mother whose
husband and five sons have been lost at sea. The simple but poignant
feeling of the drama focuses on the death of Maurya's