gh a romping lifetime
from this hour to the dawning of the judgment day." I do not deny that
these words are in a sense wrung from the Playboy, but what I do hold is
that they prove how vital was the genius of the man who wrote them, who
saw the joy there was yet in life for this braggart wastrel just as he
saw that even such a miserable boyhood as Christy's knew a kind of
poacher's joy in running wild on the bogs. Even for poor Nora, turned
out on the roads with a tramp for companion, there is the joy of the
road once she learns to know it. The tramp knows it surely:--

You'll be hearing the herons crying out over the black lakes, and
you'll be hearing the grouse and the owls with them, and the larks
and the big thrushes when the days are warm: and it's not from the
like of them you'll be hearing a tale of getting old like Peggy
Cavanagh, and losing the hair off you and the light of your eyes,
but it's fine songs you'll be hearing when the sun goes up, and
there'll be no old fellow wheezing the like of a sick sheep, close
to your ear.

Of like gusto, too, is the joy of Martin Doul and Mary Doul in their
blindness; and the joy of the three tinkers in the escape of themselves
and their half-sovereign from the priest and in the prospect of "A great
time drinking that bit with the trampers in the green of Clash." And
from such joys as these, wild and earthy and rallying, his exultations
range to the exalted serenity and sadness of Naisi and Deirdre as they
look back on their seven year of love in Glen Masain, of love almost too
perfect and too happy to be human.

[Illustration]

Yes, joy is as distinctive as irony and extravagance of the writing of
Synge, joy in mere living, in life even at the worst, and joy, too, in
life at the best. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and
richest, if it's for a short space only." It was for a short space of
years that Synge had "what is best and richest," hardly for the seven
years of his great lovers. He did not have it when his thought homed to
Ireland in 1899, as a result of a meeting with Mr. Yeats in Paris. His
writing, then, was of little moment, but it grew better when, at home
again, he realized what Irish life was to him, when once renewed contact
with the Irish peasant brought back the familiarity that had been his in
the nursery. It was the Wicklow glens, to which memories of his people
drew him, and the Aran Islands, w