re's a great gap," she
says--and this is the gist of the matter--"between a gallous story and
a dirty deed." But never does such common sense stay the flight of the
poetic dream. Pegeen may know the difference "between a gallous story
and a dirty deed," but that does not stop her from breaking out into
wild lamentations: "Oh, my grief, I've lost him surely. I've lost the
only Playboy of the Western World."

It is by never departing far from the high-road of common fact that
Synge suggests to us the fascinations, the dangers, and romance of the
by-paths. I think that when he travels a very long way from that
high-road he does not hold us with so firm a hand. Beautiful as is the
prose-poetry of _Deirdre of the Sorrows_, and fine as is the idealised
portrait of Deirdre, yet, as a whole, this play does not grip so well
as his other, even his slighter, plays. Is it not because he is moving
away from the common life, which he knows so well how to light up into
the uncommon atmosphere of the grim, the fanciful, the romantic, into
the already half-conventionalised art atmosphere of the old heroic
Saga? Most of his success in _Deirdre of the Sorrows_ is due to the
fact that he has treated Deirdre as if she were just one of the
peasant women whom he has known; but the ready-made plot has hampered
him, and he is shut off from the use of those little "brutalities"
which give savour to his modern plays. The actual life is not there to
secure him, and he falls into the characteristic Irish vagueness in
praising the poet-hero--even Pegeen, in _The Playboy_, had spoken of
poets as "fine, fiery fellows with great rages when their temper's
roused" (it is just so that the Irish poets like to be pictured; and
Mr. Jack Yeats, in a drawing usually much admired, has transformed
Synge himself into just such a "fine, fiery fellow" of the tradition).
In _Deirdre of the Sorrows_, Synge could not, of course, free his mind
from the traditional story, or from the poetry of all the poets who
have sung of Deirdre; but should Deirdre herself, at the tragic moment
when her lover lies dead, be thinking of "the way there will be a
story told of a ruined city and a raving king and a woman will be
young for ever?" This is like many Irish poets, but it is not worthy
of Synge.

It was his genius to be able to tell the stories that have not been
traditionalised, and to tell them in a wonderful dialect which may or
may not be true to any actual speech, but wh