That
has the flavour of Homer, of the Bible, of Villon, while Cervantes
would have thought it sweet in the mouth though not his food. This use
of Irish dialect for noble purpose by Synge, and by Lady Gregory, who
had it already in her _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_, and by Dr. Hyde in
those first translations he has not equalled since, has done much for
National dignity. When I was a boy I was often troubled and sorrowful
because Scottish dialect was capable of noble use, but the Irish of
obvious roystering humour only; and this error fixed on my imagination
by so many novelists and rhymers made me listen badly. Synge wrote down
words and phrases wherever he went, and with that knowledge of Irish
which made all our country idioms easy to his hand, found it so rich a
thing, that he had begun translating into it fragments of the great
literatures of the world, and had planned a complete version of _The
Imitation of Christ_. It gave him imaginative richness and yet left to
him the sting and tang of reality. How vivid in his translation from
Villon are those 'eyes with a big gay look out of them would bring
folly from a great scholar.' More vivid surely than anything in
Swinburne's version, and how noble those words which are yet simple
country speech, in which his Petrarch mourns that death came upon Laura
just as time was making chastity easy, and the day come when 'lovers may
sit together and say out all things are in their hearts,' and 'my sweet
enemy was making a start, little by little, to give over her great
wariness, the way she was wringing a sweet thing out of my sharp
sorrow.'

XIII

Once when I had been saying that though it seemed to me that a
conventional descriptive passage encumbered the action at the moment of
crisis, I liked _The Shadow of the Glen_ better than _Riders to the
Sea_, that is, for all the nobility of its end, its mood of Greek
tragedy, too passive in suffering, and had quoted from Matthew Arnold's
introduction to _Empedocles on Etna_, Synge answered, 'It is a curious
thing that _The Riders to the Sea_ succeeds with an English but not with
an Irish audience, and _The Shadow of the Glen_, which is not liked by
an English audience, is always liked in Ireland, though it is disliked
there in theory.' Since then _The Riders to the Sea_ has grown into
great popularity in Dublin, partly because with the tactical instinct of
an Irish mob, the demonstrators against _The Playboy_ both in the press
and i