"Deirdre of the Sorrows."

Always the joy of making something beautiful out of his experience and
dream of life is what inspires Synge to write, and though the intention
to read life truly is a passion with him, there is never a suggestion of
didacticism, or even of moralizing, though "The Well of the Saints" is
unquestionably, whether he wills it so or not, a symbol of man's
discontent with things as they are, his preference in some things of the
lie to the truth. I think that Synge did not will to make "The Well of
the Saints" a symbol, and that the play was to him but a reading of
life, as life is, in his characteristic, exalted, ironic, extravagant
way of writing, and that if he was aware of the symbolism, he was not
keenly aware of it or much interested in it. He gives us life untroubled
by the passing agitation of the day, and for that we should be thankful,
and thankful, too, that he has given in his plays "the nourishment, not
very easy to define, on which our imaginations live." His irony, as
desolating to some as the irony of Swift, gives pause to all, as insight
always will, but to me his extravagance is a joy unalloyed, and his
exaltation, so rare a thing in modern literature, should bring to all
men delight and refreshment of spirit. No reading, or seeing and
hearing, of his plays leaves me without a feeling of richness or
without wonder and large content. He gives back my youth to me, both in
the theatre and in my library, and, in the glow that is mine in such
recapture, I call him the greatest dramatist in English that our stage
has known in a century. That I know him to be on sober second thought,
second thought that has been concerned with his art, as I followed it
developing during the slow years from "Riders to the Sea" to "Deirdre of
the Sorrows."

CHAPTER VIII

THE YOUNGER DRAMATISTS--MR. PADRAIC COLUM--MR. WILLIAM BOYLE--MR. T.C.
MURRAY--MR. S. LENNOX ROBINSON--MR. RUTHERFORD MAYNE--"NORREYS
CONNELL"--MR. ST. JOHN G. ERVINE--MR. JOSEPH CAMPBELL

One wonders whether it is not of himself Mr. Padraic Colum is writing as
"The dawn-man ... in the sunset." That phrase arrests one on the first
page of his little book of verse "Wild Earth" (1909), in the first poem,
"The Plougher." It refers, of course, to an elemental man of to-day, to
the peasant of the great central plain of Ireland, who is "brute-tamer,
plough-maker, earth-breaker," just as truly as it does to the breaker of
horses who dro