to give to the priest along with a
half-sovereign for marrying them; and their joy, in the end, that they
have escaped matrimony and the wasting of good money. And yet this theme
is underlaid with an emotion so vital, the emotion of a wild free life,
and invested with a pathos so poignant of the quick passing of all good
things, that no understanding heart can but be profoundly moved by that
pathos and racily rejoiced at that wildness.

It is thus, for instance, soliloquizes Mary Byrne, the rapscalliony old
tinker woman of outrageous behavior of "The Tinker's Wedding." She is
stealing the aforesaid can, in the absence of her son and his Sarah "to
get two of Tim Flaherty's hens": "Maybe the two of them have a good
right to be walking out the little short while they'd be young; but if
they have itself, they'll not keep Mary Byrne from her full pint when
the night's fine, and there's a dry moon in the sky." One thinks, as one
reads, of Villon's old woman and her lament for yesteryear, but there
are not many writers anywhere in the world, of old time or of to-day,
who have such power of blending pathos and ugliness into beauty, and no
other one that I know who can infuse humor into the blend, and make one
at the one time laugh ironically and be thrilled as with great poetry.

There are those, of course, to whom this earthiness and wildness are
repulsive, to whom old Martin Doul's love pleading to Molly Byrne is
unendurable. A dirty "shabby stump of a man," a beggar, blind and
middle-aged, is asking a fine white girl, young, and as teasing as an
ox-eyed and ox-minded colleen may be, to go away with him. Not an
exalting situation, exactly, as you read of it or see it on the stage,
but once you see it on the stage, where its animality you would expect
would be heightened, you realize--and it is strange to you that you do
so realize--first of all its pathos, and again its pathos, and always,
the scene through, its pathos. Had Molly gone with old Martin it would
have revolted you, for it would have been unnatural, but since she did
not, and since she was not the sort to be easily insulted, you only
wonder at the power of passion and realize its pathos, and the irony of
it.

There is, however, a situation ironical of love in "In the Shadow of the
Glen" that is more appalling to some than any irony of "The Well of the
Saints." I mean the scene at the end, where Nora, turned out by her
husband and forsaken by her lover, goes out