of their background from his travel sketches,
you see many things in a new light. The irony, the grotesquerie, the
tonic earthiness never grow less, but one learns to discount somewhat
the effect of the hardness of speech on the recipients of that speech,
as through experience one learns--after one's second attendance at a
wake--to discount something of the too voluble sorrow of keening.

That the candor of Synge, in allowing his people of hard nature or of
careless nature to say the ruthless things native to their minds and
temper, hurts many, there is proof every time one sees a play of his on
the stage. You will hear women about you gasp with mingled surprise and
disgust, their sensibilities wholly outraged, but unwilling laughter in
their minds when the Widow Quinn says to Christy, after his praise of
Pegeen, "There's poetry talk for a girl you'd see itching and
scratching, and she with a stale stink of poteen on her from selling in
the shop." Such gasps are nothing, however, to those they utter when
they hear Mary Doul tell Molly Byrne "when the skin shrinks on your
chin, Molly Byrne, there won't be the like of you for a shrunk hag in
the four quarters of Ireland."

Very different is the kind of laughter aroused by the sly malice, native
to the rogue story from the days in which its characters masqueraded as
animals, that is revealed in the remark of Mary Byrne to the priest,
"It's destroyed you must be hearing the sins of the rural people in a
fine spring"; and different again the childish delight in the
extravagance at Christy's threat to send Shawn Keogh "coaching out
through Limbo with my father's ghost"; and still different the
breathless, delighted wonderment in the sense of moral values exhibited
by Michael James, when, fearing that Christy's threatened murder of
Shawn, if carried out, would give his secret trade away, he jumps up
with a shriek, exclaiming, "Murder is it? Is it mad you's are? Would you
go making murder in this place, and it piled with poteen for our drink
to-night?" Different too, is the laughter at the Rabelaisian touches and
at the farcical situations in which the plays abound.

If ever there were characters that lived a life apart from their
author's, those characters are Synge's. It is in the verses and in the
travel sketches that we get the man himself, the man back of the
dramatist that gives to his characters a life independent of his own, a
life that he knows partly in reality and