n
imagination, so wide a knowledge of the folk, and such genius for
creation, should have produced only this for his life-work. And then
we remember the lamentable fact of his early death--he was born in
1871--and the no less important fact that he was one for whom
experience of living counted equally with the experience of art, and
that he wrought as few English authors work, being at the pains to
write and re-write till he had the result to his mind.

And so in these four volumes there is nothing whatever to
regret--nothing that can be passed over as dull or indifferent,
nothing that has not both a hard basis of actuality and also an
intensity of imagination that lifts it into the region of poetry. In
one of his later moments of self-consciousness he uttered a sentence
of criticism worthy to be treasured by the modern poet, and perhaps by
the Irish poet especially. "It may almost be said that before verse
can be human again it must learn to be brutal." What would we not give
to have Synge's "brutality" introduced into the over-idealised and
sonorous poetry of Mr. Yeats? He does not mean the brutality of our
English realists, or ugliness, sheer fact, mis-called truth, without
beauty; what he wants is fidelity to _common_ truth, a realisation of
the root, primitive facts--the most grim primitive facts--that hard
basis of fact which must be accepted before the imagination can bear
fruit.

One of the most singular qualities of Synge is the extraordinary
common sense which sustains the gruesomeness of his tragic imagination
on the one side, and his no less gruesome humour on the other. It
holds together this humour and this grimness which are so truthfully
united in his work. It is the common sense of the old-fashioned poet,
the common sense which is all-pervading in Homer's Odyssey--based upon
a strong, keen sense for the concrete, ordinary things of life. It is
this which makes him find the masterly conclusion to _Riders of the
Sea_, when old Maurya, lamenting the death of her sons, comforts
herself, "No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be
satisfied;" it is this which gives Naisi the ancient love of life,
"It's a hard and bitter thing leaving the earth;" which produces so
admirable a proverb as, "Who would listen to an old woman with one
thing and she saying it over?"; and enables Pegeen, in _The Playboy of
the Western World_, to perceive, if only from pique, the
preposterousness of her infatuation--"The