ature. But he does not take
this round globe of light and darkness into his purview as Browning did.
The whole earth is to him shadowed with futility. Browning was too
lyrical to resign himself to the shadows. He saw the earth through the
eyes of a lover till the end. He saw death itself as no more than an
interlude of pain, darkness, and cold before a lovers' meeting. It may
be that it is all a rapturous illusion, and that, after we have laid him
aside and slept a night's broken sleep, we sink back again naturally
into the little careful hopes and infidelities of everyday. But it seems
to me that here is a whole heroic literature to which the world will
always do well to turn in days of inexorable pain and horror such as
those through which it has but recently passed.

VIII

THE FAME OF J.M. SYNGE

The most masterly piece of literary advertising in modern times was
surely Mr. Yeats's enforcement of Synge upon the coteries--or the
choruses--as a writer in the great tradition of Homer and Shakespeare.
So successful has Mr. Yeats been, indeed, in the exaltation of his
friend, that people are in danger of forgetting that it is Mr. Yeats
himself, and not Synge, who is the ruling figure in modern Irish
literature. One does not criticize Mr. Yeats for this. During the Synge
controversy he was a man raising his voice in the heat of battle--a man,
too, praising a generous comrade who was but lately dead. The critics
outside Ireland, however, have had none of these causes of passion to
prevent them from seeing Synge justly. They simply bowed down before the
idol that Mr. Yeats had set up before them, and danced themselves into
ecstasies round the image of the golden playboy.

Mr. Howe, who wrote a sincere and able book on Synge, may be taken as a
representative apostle of the Synge cult. He sets before us a god, not a
man--a creator of absolute beauty--and he asks us to accept the common
view that _The Playboy of the Western World_ is his masterpiece. There
can never be any true criticism of Synge till we have got rid of all
these obsessions and idolatries. Synge was an extraordinary man of
genius, but he was not an extraordinarily great man of genius. He is not
the peer of Shakespeare: he is not the peer of Shelley: he is the peer,
say, of Stevenson. His was a byway, not a high-road, of genius. That is
why he has an immensely more enthusiastic following among clever people
than among simple people.

Once and once