into the rain with the
tramp, leaving husband and lover drinking together in utmost amity. The
pathos of this and the irony of it are of a part with the pathos of the
close of "Hedda Gabler." Hedda and Nora, selfish and willful both, if
you like, are yet fine women both, and human, as Zenobia and Eustacia
are human, and pathetic in their fates, with a pathos that even
Hawthorne and Mr. Hardy have seldom the power to make us feel. But the
fate of Nora was ironic as the fate of none of the others, for all
three of them escaped the ennui and misery of life, while Nora but
begins a new life, freer for the moment than her old life, but
promising, in the end, only the old dull round.

The irony of it! "The irony of it" is always in Synge's writing even in
its most exalted moments. A seven years' love "without fleck or flaw" is
"surely a wonder," but it is just as surely ironical that it, like all
good things, shall so soon come to an end. That, of course, is but the
way of nature, and so we much question if, after all, the irony of Synge
is more insistent than the irony of nature. If it is it is because he
takes more care to uncover it, but basically his irony is but the irony
of nature. He is in reality less ironical than Mr. Hardy, the great
ironist of English literature of our day, and he is never bitter, for
bitterness comes seldom except to the writer who is interested in
morals, and morals interest Synge only in so far as they are natural. It
is life--not any conventional way of life, or any ideal of life--that
interests Synge, so he escapes ensnarement in any of the questions of
the day. So frankly does he accept life that there is in him no note of
protest whatsoever, which is again fortunate, for protest, too, will
lead a man to morals and leave on his work the taint of a passing system
of morality as it did even on Ibsen.

If there is symbolism to be found in Synge, it is there only by
accident, never as the result of definite intent. He may have had, in
the back of his mind, as he wrote "The Playboy of the Western World,"
the thought of chance making a man, of a man finding himself through
others believing in him who has no belief in himself but that there is
in the play any parable of young Ireland losing its allegiance to a
previous ideal of Ireland, I do not for a moment believe. There is, of
course, in "The Well of the Saints" the old and oft-uttered truth that
men prefer blindness in many things to correct v