Here then was a new motive set before Synge, a new direction for his literary energies, and one wherein he repudiated the art of the decadents, based as it was on the complicated experience and adjustment of modern life, for a return to nature as fresh and sincere in its courage and originality as the previous return had been of Coleridge and Wordsworth to the simple standard of truth and beauty. On this motive he acted, and in 1898 we find him, for the first time, in the Aran Islands.