Once when I had been saying that though it seemed to me that a ventional descriptive passage encumbered the a at the moment of crisis. I liked The Shadow of the Gleer 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 Arnolds introdu to Empedocles ona, 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. Sihen The Riders to the Sea has grown into great popularity in Dublin, partly because with the tactical instinct of an Irish mob, the demonstratainst The Playboy both in the press and iheatre, where it began the evening, selected it for applause. It is now what Shelleys Cloud was for many years, a fort to those who do not like to deny altogether the genius they ot uand. Yet I am certain that, in the long run, his grotesque plays with their lyric beauty, their violent laughter, The Playboy of the Western World most of all, will be loved for holding so much of the mind of Ireland. Synge has written of The Playboy anyone who has lived in real intimacy with the Irish peasantry will know that the wildest sayings in this play are tame indeed pared with the fancies one may hear at any little hillside cottage of Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay.
It is the stra, the most beautiful expression in drama of that Irish fantasy, which overflowing through all Irish Literature that has e out of Ireland itself (pare the fantastic Irish at of the Battle of tarf with the sober Norse at) is the unbroken character of Irish genius. In modern days this genius has delighted in mischievous extravagance, like that of the Gaelic poets curse upon his children, There are three things that I hate, the devil that is waiting for my soul, the worms that are waiting for my body, my children, who are waiting for my wealth and care her for my body nor my soul: Oh, Christ hang all in the same noose! I think those words were spoken with a delight in their vehemehat took out of anger half the bitterness with all the gloom. An old man on the Aran Islands told me the very tale on which The Playboy is founded, beginning with the words, If aleman has done a crime well hide him. There was a gentleman that killed his father, & I had him in my own house six months till he got away to America. Despite the solemnity of his slow speech his eyes shone as the eyes must have shone in that Trinity College branch of the Gaelic League, which began every meeting with prayers for the death of an old Fellow of College who disliked their movement, or as they certainly do when patriots are telling how short a time the prayers took to the killing of him. I have seen a crowd, wheain Dublin papers had wrought themselves into an imaginary loyalty, so possessed by what seemed the very genius of satiritasy, that one all but looked to find some feathered heel among the cobble stones. Part of the delight of crowd or individual is always that somebody will be angry, somebody take the sport floomy ear. We are mog 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 suff