ings persons who are as faint as a
breath upon a looking-glass, symbols who can speak a language slow and
heavy with dreams because their own life is but a dream. Modern drama,
on the other hand, which accepts the tightness of the classic plot,
while expressing life directly, has been driven to make indirect its
expression of the mind, which it leaves to be inferred from some
common-place sentence or gesture as we infer it in ordinary life; and
this is, I believe, the cause of the perpetual disappointment of the
hope imagined this hundred years that France or Spain or Germany or
Scandinavia will at last produce the master we await.

The divisions in the arts are almost all in the first instance
technical, and the great schools of drama have been divided from one
another by the form or the metal of their mirror, by the check chosen
for the rapidity of dialogue. Synge found the check that suited his
temperament in an elaboration of the dialects of Kerry and Aran. The
cadence is long and meditative, as befits the thought of men who are
much alone, and who when they meet in one another's houses--as their way
is at the day's end--listen patiently, each man speaking in turn and for
some little time, and taking pleasure in the vaguer meaning of the words
and in their sound. Their thought, when not merely practical, is as full
of traditional wisdom and extravagant pictures as that of some AEschylean
chorus, and no matter what the topic is, it is as though the present
were held at arm's length. It is the reverse of rhetoric, for the
speaker serves his own delight, though doubtless he would tell you that
like Raftery's whiskey-drinking it was but for the company's sake. A
medicinal manner of speech too, for it could not even express, so little
abstract it is and so rammed with life, those worn generalisations of
national propaganda. 'I'll be telling you the finest story you'd hear
any place from Dundalk to Ballinacree with great queens in it, making
themselves matches from the start to the end, and they with shiny silks
on them.... I've a grand story of the great queens of Ireland, with
white necks on them the like of Sarah Casey, and fine arms would hit you
a slap.... What good am I this night, God help me? What good are the
grand stories I have when it's few would listen to an old woman, few but
a girl maybe would be in great fear the time her hour was come, or
little child wouldn't be sleeping with the hunger on a cold night.'