hearing a tale of getting old like Peggy Cavanagh, and losing the hair off you, and the light of your eyes, but it's fine songs you'll be hearing when the sun goes up, and there'll be no old fellow wheezing, the like of a sick sheep, close to your ear.

NORA. I'm thinking it's myself will be wheezing that time with lying down under the Heavens when the night is cold; but you've a fine bit of talk, stranger, and it's with yourself I'll go. (She goes towards the door, then turns to Dan.) You think it's a grand thing you're after doing with your letting on to be dead, but what is it at all? What way would a woman live in a lonesome place the like of this place, and she not making a talk with the men passing? And what way will yourself live from this day, with none to care you? What is it you'll have now but a black life, Daniel Burke? and it's not long, I'm telling you, till you'll be lying again under that sheet, and you dead surely.

[She goes out with the tramp. And Dan and Michael have peace for their drinks.

vi

There is no one-act play in the language for compression, for humanity, and for perfection of form, to put near In the Shadow of the Glen. From the moment of the rise of the curtain on that little Wicklow interior, to its fall-about half an hour-we are let into the lives of three people, and the life and death of a fourth. It is a selected half-hour, that marches moment by

moment with true occurrence, and yet opens out into years that have passed and years that are to come.

A typical half-hour, then, for purposes of drama; one of life's supreme moments, in which character becomes concrete in action, and from which, as though from a high tableland, retrospect and prospect in equal streams flow down and away in the plains. Synge spoke poorly of Ibsen, but chiefly for his contentment with joyless and pallid words; outside Ibsen, perhaps we may say outside Rosmersholm, there is no match for the way in which the past is summarised for us while a group of people move and speak, with a perfectly natural regard for present truth, before our eyes. Ibsen's people and Synge's people, indeed the people of all good dramatists, move and speak with a heightened significance in every word and gesture, because of this elevation upon which they stand for their short traffic of the stage. It is the reason why Maeterlinck's people for ever live as though in a room into which we look through a window with the Old Man in L'Intérieur; but Synge's people do not appear unnaturally strange and solemn, like Maeterlinck's, only extraordinarily arresting and important; and Synge, unlike Ibsen in Rosmersholm, has only a few lines, and not four acts, in which to resume their

past. Every line, therefore, must speak of their past, must reveal their character in the present, and must point us forward; and all this with perfect deference to reality.

Impossible, you would say, that a story of how a rather comic old man shammed to be

dead in order to spy upon his young wife,

and how he turned her out of doors with a tramp, should reach the heights of tragic intensity! Before you have been five minutes looking into that Wicklow interior, the dramatist will have his spell upon you. Nor is it the calm spell of a Dutch genre picture; the uneasy movements of Nora about the room, her look over her shoulder at the bed, the little soft knock coming at the door, these things, before a word is spoken, are contributing to your mood of expectant fear. The surprised start of the tramp is yours; as he lights his pipe, there is great virtue in that sharp light beneath his haggard face; their tone in the talk about Patch Darcy is telling you Nora's story, but it is doing more also. You laugh, maybe, as the tramp falls back in terror from his chair, but laughter is soon caught at the throat by deeper feeling; this old man in his bed is no merely funny figure. Sharp upon his rising comes the long whistle in the wild night outside; sharp again upon that, the sound of Nora and the

young man on the path. It is a heart-wringing thing to see Nora sitting at the table speaking out the sorrows of childlessness, and lonesomeness, and of beauty passing, to the chink of the coins she is counting and putting without care into little heaps, while the young man is taking them and counting them again and thinking not at all of what she is saying, but only that it is a good sum the old man has left behind. Between the three men she sits-the old, cold man she thinks to be dead; the innocent, worthless young man she will marry (for what way would she live if she didn't?); the young tramp, about whom we know little, who still sits there in the half light, piquing our interest. It is to him she turns, after that dreadful moment when the sight of Dan Burke stifles all words in her throat; then a half turn, no more, to Michael Dara; then, when at last she moves to face her husband, "passion propels her like a screw."1 is inevitable that she should go out with the Tramp; he is the best man of them, as fine a man maybe as Patch Darcy, that fine man turned

66

It

queer," whose queerness is there to be felt behind all the play. This feeling is nothing decadent or morbid, merely the sense of the sorrow of life passing without fulfilment; of

1 C. E. Montague, in the best criticism of the acting of Synge's plays (In Dramatic Values).

sitting alone, and hearing the winds crying, and not knowing on what thing your mind would stay. Those who do not feel this sorrow, are left to sit down to a long life and a quiet life, and good health with it, and to a little taste of the stuff. Perhaps the Tramp speaks for Synge when he slowly says, "It's true, surely, and the Lord have mercy on us all."

vii

Riders to the Sea is set in an island off the West of Ireland. The scene is again a cottage kitchen; but here there are nets and oilskins upon the wall, and by the fire is the primitive pot-oven, for we have moved to one of the outposts of the older life in Europe. Here men's fear is of the sea, from which alone they may snatch a livelihood. Standing by the wall are some new white boards; for there is sorrow upon this house.

The old woman of the house is lying down within; Cathleen, a girl of about twenty, finishes kneading a cake, puts it down in the pot-oven, wipes her hands, and begins to spin at the wheel; then Nora, a younger girl, comes softly in at the door. She has a bundle sees that the old

under her shawl; when she

woman is not in the kitchen, she takes it out: it is a shirt and a plain stocking, got off a