). If the mitred bishops seen you that
time, they'd be the like of the holy prophets, I'm thinking, do be
straining the bars of Paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of
Troy, and she abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in
her golden shawl.

Borrow, who comes to mind more often than any other writer as one reads
Synge, chose to avoid love scenes, and Borrow's follower, Mr. Hewlett,
for all his gusto, has no such exaltation as this. Had Harry Richmond
taken to the road with Kiomi we might have known something like it. A
chapter out of the early life of Juggling Jerry and his "Old Girl," done
in the manner of "Love in the Valley," would be still nearer to it. As
it is, this passage of the third act of "The Playboy of the Western
World" stands alone. I doubt if Synge had read Meredith, and even had
he, the life of the roads and their cottages that Synge knew so well was
his master, and no writer at all. In a way, of course, the Irish-English
of Dr. Hyde's translations of "The Love Songs of Connacht" was an
influence, and you will find many expressions common to them and Synge.
It is not important, however, whether these expressions have a common
source, or whether Synge took them from "The Love Songs" rather than
from his own note-book. Whatever their source it was Synge who made out
of them a great style, his peasant style. It is another and a severer
style that he uses in his "Deirdre of the Sorrows," the courtly subject
demanding dignity and restraint. This latter style has borrowed some of
the bare simplicity of the personal style of Synge, that style, I mean,
in which he records his own experience in the Aran Islands or in Wicklow
and Kerry.

Romancing, which is the very atmosphere of "The Playboy of the Western
World," would be out of place in any telling of the greatest of old
Irish legends; so it is that Synge has found for "Deirdre of the
Sorrows," or rather for its great moments, an austere epic speech that
seems native to the story. The passionate words are nobly adequate to
the passionate resignation they have to tell, a resignation that has
come of the unwilling belief of the lovers that so great a love as
theirs cannot last longer "without fleck or flaw" than the seven years
it has lasted. Says Deirdre, when she has come to know it is fate that
they will return to Ireland, and death:--

The dawn and evening are a little while, the winter and the summer
pass quickly