Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/214

 186 the recipients of that speech, as through experience one learns—after one's second attendance at a wake—to discount something of the too voluble sorrow of keening.

That the candor of Synge, in allowing his people of hard nature or of careless nature to say the ruthless things native to their minds and temper, hurts many, there is proof every time one sees a play of his on the stage. You will hear women about you gasp with mingled surprise and disgust, their sensibilities wholly outraged, but unwilling laughter in their minds when the Widow Quinn says to Christy, after his praise of Pegeen, "There's poetry talk for a girl you'd see itching and scratching, and she with a stale stink of poteen on her from selling in the shop." Such gasps are nothing, however, to those they utter when they hear Mary Doul tell Molly Byrne "when the skin shrinks on your chin, Molly Byrne, there won't be the like of you for a shrunk hag in the four quarters of Ireland."

Very different is the kind of laughter aroused by the sly malice, native to the rogue story from the days in which its characters masqueraded as animals, that is revealed in the remark of Mary Byrne to the priest, "It's destroyed you must be hearing the sins of the rural people in a fine spring"; and different again the childish delight in the extravagance at Christy's threat to send Shawn Keogh "coaching out through Limbo with my father's ghost"; and still different the breathless, delighted wonderment in the sense of moral values exhibited by Michael James, when, fearing that Christy's threatened murder of Shawn, if carried out, would give his secret trade away, he jumps