people have grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy, that has been given them in place of the rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality.
Although there are only about forty characters, all told, in the six plays of Synge, and ten of these are in "Deirdre of the Sorrows," which for all its humanity is a play out of a life that is gone, there are men and women a-plenty to give us this "rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality." Nora is "superb and wild" in her longings, and Maurya in her sorrow; and old Martin Doul "superb and wild" in his dream of life in the South; Sarah Casey and Pegeen Mike "superb and wild" in the most direct sense of the phrase; and these are all real, if not representative of the poorer peasantry. And in the high way of romance who has dreamed what is more superb and wilder than the lament of Deirdre over Naisi! In the creation of character, as in style, and in technique of drama, Synge has done what he would. In only one of his plays, in "Riders to the Sea," are his leading characters representative Irish peasants; and even Maurya and her children, not only because of the isolation of their home in Aran, but because of the fate which has marked her mankind for death at sea, are somewhat apart from the fisher-people of the west coast. In all his four other plays of modern life, Synge has chosen characters who are, in his own words, "variations from the ordinary types of manhood,"—chosen them because of his deep-seated love of the unconventional. In "In the Shadow of the Glen," Michael Dara, the herd, is a common type, and Dan Burke, the old sheep farmer, not an uncommon type,
