It is not only the extravagance of the change wrought in Christy by unexpected hero-worship and an awakening of self-confidence through love for the first time known and returned that we wonder at, and the extravagance of that hero-worship, but the extravagance of the imagination of his creator, and the beautiful extravagance of his speech. The freshness and audacity of that imagination, and the beautiful extravagance of that speech, a speech modulated to a rhythm that Synge was the first to catch, are in themselves enough to give distinction to almost any subject. There was granted Synge more than this, however,--a keenness of vision into the pathetic humanity of ugly things and a power to realize this with a beauty that was granted to no one before, though to Swift it was granted to see the ugliness as a bitter thing. Borrow had, indeed, a glimpse now and then of the pathetic beauty there is in ugliness, as in the story of Isopel Berners and the Flaming Tinman, and Whitman, too; but no man before Synge had the power at once to see the ugly subject as beautiful from a new angle of vision, humanize it, irradiate it with a new glow of imagination, reveal it through a style that for the first time ennobles English prose drama as blank verse has long ennobled English verse drama.
Take "The Tinker's Wedding," for instance. The theme is the desire of a tinker woman, youngish if not young, to wed the man who has long been her mate; his mother's unstudied frustration of that scheme by stealing, to swap for drink, the can they were to give to the priest along with a half-sovereign for marrying them; and their joy, in the end, that they have escaped matrimony and the wasting of good money. And yet this theme is underlaid with an emotion so vital, the emotion of a wild free life, and invested with a pathos so poignant of the quick passing of all good things, that no understanding heart can but be profoundly moved by that pathos and racily rejoiced at that wildness.
It is thus, for instance, soliloquizes Mary Byrne, the rapscalliony old tinker woman of outrageous behavior of "The Tinker's Wedding." She is stealing the aforesaid can, in the absence of her son and his Sarah "to get two of Tim Flaherty's hens": "Maybe the two of them have a good right to be walking out the little short while they'd be young; but if they have itself, they'll not keep Mary Byrne from her full pint when the night's fine, and there's a dry moon in the sky." One thinks, as one reads, of Villon's old woman and her lament for yesteryear, but there are not many writers anywhere in the world, of old time or of to-day, who have such power of blending pathos and ugliness into beauty, and no other one that I know who can infuse humor into the blend, and make one at the one time laugh ironically and be thrilled as with great poetry.