his characters the leisure to look at life from without. Maeterlinck, to
name the first modern of the old way who comes to mind--reaches the same
end, by choosing instead of human beings persons who are as faint as a
breath upon a looking-glass, symbols who can speak a language slow and
heavy with dreams because their own life is but a dream. Modern drama, on
the other hand, which accepts the tightness of the classic plot, while
expressing life directly, has been driven to make indirect its expression
of the mind, which it leaves to be inferred from some common-place
sentence or gesture as we infer it in ordinary life; and this is, I
believe, the cause of the perpetual disappointment of the hope imagined
this hundred years that France or Spain or Germany or Scandinavia will at
last produce the master we await.

The divisions in the arts are almost all in the first instance technical,
and the great schools of drama have been divided from one another by the
form or the metal of their mirror, by the check chosen for the rapidity
of dialogue. Synge found the check that suited his temperament in an
elaboration of the dialects of Kerry and Aran. The cadence is long and
meditative, as befits the thought of men who are much alone, and who when
they meet in one another's houses--as their way is at the day's
end--listen patiently, each man speaking in turn and for some little time,
and taking pleasure in the vaguer meaning of the words and in their sound.
Their thought, when not merely practical, is as full of traditional
wisdom and extravagant pictures as that of some Aeschylean chorus, and no
matter what the topic is, it is as though the present were held at arms
length. It is the reverse of rhetoric, for the speaker serves his own
delight, though doubtless he would tell you that like Raftery's whiskey-
drinking it was but for the company's sake. A medicinal manner of speech
too, for it could not even express, so little abstract it is and so
rammed with life, those worn generalizations of national propaganda.