Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/212

 184 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 that he did answer. This criticism of the reality of his peasants began with his "Shadow of the Glen" and is still to be heard in many places to-day. It rose to its highest pitch of denunciation at the time of the production of "The Playboy of the Western World" in Dublin, but it was before that that he answered it fully, in the last paragraph of "The Vagrants of Wicklow," a travel sketch he made out of his wanderings in his native country. Here it is, as effective in its answer to subsequent criticism as to that which it was definitely intended to answer:—

In all the circumstances of this tramp life there is a certain wildness that gives it romance and a peculiar value for those who look at life in Ireland with an eye that is aware of the arts