children have been able to sympathize with the farmer whose
pumpkin patch we raided on the eve of Hallowe'en. A sneaking sympathy
with roguery, however, is a very different thing from a delight in
extravagance. That, too, is a universal passion, but not so native to
the Teuton as to Celt or Finn or Oriental. Its absence is what most
differentiates Old Norse literature from Old Irish, with which it so
early came into contact. It is in travelers' tales and in the tales of
seamen and in the writing that was based on these, in rare moments of
religious or romantic ecstasy, or in borrowings from Celt or Oriental
that you will find the most of what extravagance there is in English
literature. In America you find extravagance in our humor, and this
humor, perhaps, owes as much of its extravagance to an Irish ancestry as
to an environment of new wonders that could not be well expressed save
in hyperbole.

It is not only the extravagance of the change wrought in Christy by
unexpected hero-worship and an awakening of self-confidence through love
for the first time known and returned that we wonder at, and the
extravagance of that hero-worship, but the extravagance of the
imagination of his creator, and the beautiful extravagance of his
speech. The freshness and audacity of that imagination, and the
beautiful extravagance of that speech, a speech modulated to a rhythm
that Synge was the first to catch, are in themselves enough to give
distinction to almost any subject. There was granted Synge more than
this, however,--a keenness of vision into the pathetic humanity of ugly
things and a power to realize this with a beauty that was granted to no
one before, though to Swift it was granted to see the ugliness as a
bitter thing. Borrow had, indeed, a glimpse now and then of the pathetic
beauty there is in ugliness, as in the story of Isopel Berners and the
Flaming Tinman, and Whitman, too; but no man before Synge had the power
at once to see the ugly subject as beautiful from a new angle of vision,
humanize it, irradiate it with a new glow of imagination, reveal it
through a style that for the first time ennobles English prose drama as
blank verse has long ennobled English verse drama.

Take "The Tinker's Wedding," for instance. The theme is the desire of a
tinker woman, youngish if not young, to wed the man who has long been
her mate; his mother's unstudied frustration of that scheme by stealing,
to swap for drink, the can they were