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the sport for gloomy earnest. We are mocking at his solemnity, let us
therefore so hide our malice that he may be more solemn still, and the
laugh run higher yet. Why should we speak his language and so wake him
from a dream of all those emotions which men feel because they should,
and not because they must? Our minds, being sufficient to themselves,
do not wish for victory but are content to elaborate our extravagance,
if fortune aid, into wit or lyric beauty, and as for the rest 'There are
nights when a king like Conchobar would spit upon his arm-ring and
queens will stick out their tongues at the rising moon.' This habit of
the mind has made Oscar Wilde and Mr. Bernard Shaw the most celebrated
makers of comedy to our time, and if it has sounded plainer still in the
conversation of the one, and in some few speeches of the other, that is
but because they have not been able to turn out of their plays an alien
trick of zeal picked up in struggling youth. Yet, in Synge's plays also,
fantasy gives the form and not the thought, for the core is always as in
all great art, an over-powering vision of certain virtues, and our
capacity for sharing in that vision is the measure of our delight. Great
art chills us at first by its coldness or its strangeness, by what seems
capricious, and yet it is from these qualities it has authority, as
though it had fed on locust and wild honey. The imaginative writer
shows us the world as a painter does his picture, reversed in a
looking-glass that we may see it, not as it seems to eyes habit has made
dull, but as we were Adam and this the first morning; and when the new
image becomes as little strange as the old we shall stay with him,
because he has, besides, the strangeness, not strange to him, that made
us share his vision, sincerity that makes us share his feeling.

To speak of one's emotions without fear or moral ambition, to come out
from under the shadow of other men's minds, to forget their needs, to be
utterly oneself, that is all the Muses care for. Villon, pander, thief
and man-slayer, is as immortal in their eyes, and illustrates in the cry
of his ruin as great a truth as Dante in abstract ecstasy, and touches
our compassion more. All art is the disengaging of a soul from place and
history, its suspension in a beautiful or terrible light, to await the
Judgment, and yet, because all its days were a Last Day, judged already.
It may show the crimes of Italy as Dante did, or Greek my