that is in harmony with the imagination of the people an imagination that is, he tells us, "fiery and magnificent and tender," though no such actual speech would be possible of reproduction from any one of them.
Synge is very definite in his statement of what he believes drama should be, and what he would make his own drama of Irish life, expressing his belief in the preface to "The Tinker's Wedding":—
The drama is made serious ... not by the degree in which it is taken up with problems that are serious in themselves, but by the degree in which it gives the nourishment, not very easy to define, on which our imaginations live....
We should not go to the theatre as we go to a chemist's or a dramshop, but as we go to a dinner where the food we need is taken with pleasure and excitement....
The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything....
Of the things which nourish the imagination, humor is one of the most needful and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it. Baudelaire calls laughter the greatest sign of the Satanic element in man; and where a country loses its humor, as some towns in Ireland are doing, there will be a morbidity of mind, as Baudelaire's mind was morbid. In the greater part of Ireland, however, the whole people, from the tinkers to the clergy, have still a life, and view of life, that are rich and genial and humorous. I do not think that these country people, who have so much humor themselves, will mind being laughed at without malice, as the people in every country have been laughed at, in their own comedies.
In the preface to "The Playboy of the Western World" is this paragraph, completing his credo as to drama:—
On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy; and that is why the intellectual modern drama has failed, and
