; they have, too, the bog smell, and the smell of the
whin, the smell of ploughed land and of the sea, and they fall into
cadences that are cadences of the wind and of the tides, of full rivers
and clucking streams that sudden rains have filled, as well as the
cadences of the voices of boy and girl and they love-making, and of the
voices of the wild folk of the roads coaxing or loudly quarreling, and
the voices of women and men, young and old, lamenting the hard way of
life and of the sorrow that waits for all in the end. Why quarrel with
Synge, in short, because his style is of the very essence of life, and
of nature, which is the background of life?

To attain a style that is his very self, that is of the very color of
his life, and of the very color of the extravagant phases of the life of
his country, to attain a style that embodies all this, and that for the
first time sets English dramatic prose to a rhythm as noble as the
rhythm of blank verse, is surely in itself title to greatness. But Synge
has other titles, too. In the few characters that he has created, forty
in all, characters all natively Irish, he has attained universality,
because these Irish men and women, Nora and Martin Doul, Sarah Casey and
Christy Mahon, Maurya and Deirdre, are so human that they are prototypes
of men and women the world over. And of dialogue, where style and
characterization blend, he has sure control. Each character of the six
great characters that I have just mentioned speaks and acts just as such
a character would, and not only these, but every other character that
occupies the stage for more than a moment. Michael Dara and Timmy the
Smith, the Priest or Philly Cullen, Bartley and Owen, each one has an
individuality clearly defined.

There is less that is great in the structure of his plays than in any
other component of them, but that structure always clearly reveals the
action which arises from the emotion and theme underlying each,--the
menacing sea in "Riders to the Sea"; the loneliness of the mountain
glens that drives men fey in "The Shadow of the Glen"; the blindness,
the blessed self-delusion of mankind, in "The Well of the Saints"; the
wildness of the life of the roads that law may not tame, in "The
Tinker's Wedding"; the boy's finding of himself through his having to
live up to a community's mistaken ideal of him, in "The Playboy of the
Western World"; and the benison of death that prevents a great love from
dying, in