that
he did answer. This criticism of the reality of his peasants began with
his "Shadow of the Glen" and is still to be heard in many places to-day.
It rose to its highest pitch of denunciation at the time of the
production of "The Playboy of the Western World" in Dublin, but it was
before that that he answered it fully, in the last paragraph of "The
Vagrants of Wicklow," a travel sketch he made out of his wanderings in
his native country. Here it is, as effective in its answer to subsequent
criticism as to that which it was definitely intended to answer:--

In all the circumstances of this tramp life there is a certain
wildness that gives it romance and a peculiar value for those who
look at life in Ireland with an eye that is aware of the arts
also. In all the healthy movements of art, variations from the
ordinary types of manhood are made interesting for the ordinary
man, and in this way only the higher arts are universal. Beside
this art, however, founded on the variations which are a condition
and effect of all vigorous life, there is another art--sometimes
confounded with it--founded on the freak of nature, in itself a
mere sign of atavism or disease. This latter art, which is occupied
with the antics of the freak, is of interest only to the variation
from ordinary minds, and, for this reason, is never universal. To
be quite plain, the tramp in real life, Hamlet and Faust, in the
arts, are variations; but the maniac in real life, and Des
Esseintes and all his ugly crew in the arts, are freaks only.

It is well to consider all his characters in the light of this
statement, I think, and to re-read, keeping in mind a possible further
application of it, those phrases in the plays that so outrage many at
their hearing in the theatre, I would not for a moment seem to want to
soften the hardness of the life he pictures or to explain away his
delightfully sardonic humor as in reality a reconciling sort of humor,
but I do wish to say that the more I read him the less cruel and
sardonic that humor seems. The impersonality of the man as dramatist
grows on you as you read, you realize more and more his abstention from
playing chorus to his characters, and you come to know that the seeming
cruelty and sardonic joy are largely only the direct outcome of his
courage in allowing Nature to speak for herself. If you turn again to
the plays after learning