e compared, were she not too high-hearted, to the
hag of "The Lout and Mother" in being

"indecent-spoken, carneying, lying,
Plausible, full of poems and prophecies and sharp edged."

Of the women of the cottager class, Nora, for all her wildness and
bitterness, is the most lovable, and Molly Byrne the least lovable; the
girls of "Riders to the Sea" are not fully enough individualized to make
us feel we know them; but Pegeen Mike, Synge has put before us in
appearance and temperament, character and personality. "A wild-looking
but fine girl," he describes her, "with a divil's own temper," "the
fright of seven town-lands"--as she says--"for my biting tongue," but
susceptible of softening toward a boy of good looks and coaxing ways
such as Christy. He gets around her with "his poet's talking" and his
popularity, his "mighty spirit" and "gamey heart" until she gives him
"words would put you thinking on the holy Brigid speaking to the infant
saints."

There might be incongruity, if one were writing of any other than Synge,
in speaking of Deirdre in such a company. Incongruity, however, is of
the very texture of Synge's art, which has reconciled qualities, as I
have said, never before reconciled in English literature. It is on
Deirdre that Synge has lavished all the ideality that was in him, not
because he had a dream of woman he wished to fulfill, but because to him
Deirdre was all that was queenly. And yet even Deirdre is a "variation,"
as nobility and beauty must ever be. So lofty is she that words even in
praise of her are almost impertinent. Just how lofty her words that I
quoted at the outset show, as does also, by way of contrast, the mention
of her here among these half-tragic, half-grotesque women of the
cottages and of the roads. There is scarcely a poet, of all that have
written of Ireland from the time of Ferguson to our time, that has not
written his dream of Deirdre as he finds her in the old legends of
Ireland, but to my mind no one of them has dreamed her so triumphantly
as has Synge.

It is not, however, of such "variations" as Deirdre that the critics
fall foul, but of the "variations" he puts on Irish roads and in Irish
cottages when he presents the life of to-day. Why he replied to this
criticism when to most criticism he was, if not indifferent, at least
impervious, it is not easy to say. It is more than likely, however, that
it was rather to explain his ideas than to justify his characters