they became certain
that his woman of the glens, as melancholy as a curlew, driven to
distraction by her own sensitiveness, her own fineness, could not speak
with any other tongue, that all his people would change their life if
the rhythm changed. Perhaps no Irish countryman had ever that exact
rhythm in his voice, but certainly if Mr. Synge had been born a
countryman, he would have spoken like that. It makes the people of his
imagination a little disembodied; it gives them a kind of innocence even
in their anger and their cursing. It is part of its maker's attitude
towards the world, for while it makes the clash of wills among his
persons indirect and dreamy, it helps him to see the subject-matter of
his art with wise, clear-seeing, unreflecting eyes; to preserve the
innocence of good art in an age of reasons and purposes. Whether he
write of old beggars by the roadside, lamenting over the misery and
ugliness of life, or of an old Arran woman mourning her drowned sons, or
of a young wife married to an old husband, he has no wish to change
anything, to reform anything; all these people pass by as before an open
window, murmuring strange, exciting words.

If one has not fine construction, one has not drama, but if one has not
beautiful or powerful and individual speech, one has not literature, or,
at any rate, one has not great literature. Rabelais, Villon,
Shakespeare, William Blake, would have known one another by their
speech. Some of them knew how to construct a story, but all of them had
abundant, resonant, beautiful, laughing, living speech. It is only the
writers of our modern dramatic movement, our scientific dramatists, our
naturalists of the stage, who have thought it possible to be like the
greatest, and yet to cast aside even the poor persiflage of the
comedians, and to write in the impersonal language that has come, not
out of individual life, nor out of life at all, but out of necessities
of commerce, of parliament, of board schools, of hurried journeys by
rail.

If there are such things as decaying art and decaying institutions,
their decay must begin when the element they receive into their care
from the life of every man in the world, begins to rot. Literature
decays when it no longer makes more beautiful, or more vivid, the
language which unites it to all life, and when one finds the criticism
of the student, and the purpose of the reformer, and the logic of the
man of science, where there should hav