to find his subject not in Helens beauty, that every man has desired, nor in the wisdom and endurance of Odysseus that has been the desire of every woman that has come into the world, but in what he would describe, perhaps, as the 'inevitable contest,' arising out of economic causes, between the country places and small towns on the one hand, and, upon the other, the great city of Troy, representing one knows not what 'tendency to centralization.'" What hope, then, is there for poetic drama of a fine imaginative quality? There is every hope in the world, just because of the supreme need.
A new order of poetic playwrights must be created—will be created if we dare prophesy so much, in answer to the demand that is already manifested in many subtle ways. Would there be so many organizations hopefully devoted to the cause of the drama if there were not this hunger for vital, imaginative plays? The attempt of the manager to satisfy this special kind of hunger with dramatized fairy tales and romantic spectacles is in itself significant. But these, after all, are not what we want; we want plays immediate to our life, lifted into that larger life which mirrors a nation, an individual, or a community. We want something at much of us as Synge's plays are of the life of the Irish people. In them we find the complete fusion of realism and poetic imagination, and that is what we need in America. Deirdre is not merely a queen, but a woman. One trouble with our poet playwrights is usually that their queens are consistently queens, their kings, kings. They serve as counters, and we neither grieve with them very deeply nor love
[33]
