nto the world,
but in what somebody would describe, perhaps, as 'the inevitable
contest,' arising out of economic causes, between the country-places and
small towns on the one hand, and, upon the other, the great city of
Troy, representing one knows not what 'tendency to centralisation.'

Mr. Synge has in common with the great theatre of the world, with that
of Greece and that of India, with the creator of Falstaff, with Racine,
a delight in language, a preoccupation with individual life. He
resembles them also by a preoccupation with what is lasting and noble,
that came to him, not as I think from books, but while he listened to
old stories in the cottages, and contrasted what they remembered with
reality. The only literature of the Irish country-people is their songs,
full often of extravagant love, and their stories of kings and of kings'
children. 'I will cry my fill, but not for God, but because Finn and
the Fianna are not living,' says Oisin in the story. Every writer, even
every small writer, who has belonged to the great tradition, has had his
dream of an impossibly noble life, and the greater he is, the more does
it seem to plunge him into some beautiful or bitter reverie. Some, and
of these are all the earliest poets of the world, gave it direct
expression; others mingle it so subtly with reality, that it is a day's
work to disentangle it; others bring it near by showing one whatever is
most its contrary. Mr. Synge, indeed, sets before us ugly, deformed or
sinful people, but his people, moved by no practical ambition, are
driven by a dream of that impossible life. That we may feel how
intensely his woman of the glen dreams of days that shall be entirely
alive, she that is 'a hard woman to please' must spend her days between
a sour-faced old husband, a man who goes mad upon the hills, a craven
lad and a drunken tramp; and those two blind people of _The Well of the
Saints_ are so transformed by the dream, that they choose blindness
rather than reality. He tells us of realities, but he knows that art has
never taken more than its symbols from anything that the eye can see or
the hand measure.

It is the preoccupation of his characters with their dream that gives
his plays their drifting movement, their emotional subtlety. In most of
the dramatic writing of our time, and this is one of the reasons why our
dramatists do not find the need for a better speech, one finds a simple
motive lifted, as it were, into the f