Anyone who has lived in real
intimacy with the Irish peasantry will know that the wildest sayings and ideas
in this play are tame indeed, compared with the fancies one may hear in any
little hillside cabin in Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay. All art is a
collaboration; and there is little doubt that in the happy ages of literature,
striking and beautiful phrases were as ready to the story-teller's or the
playwright's hand, as the rich cloaks and dresses of his time. It is probable
that when the Elizabethan dramatist took his ink-horn and sat down to his work
he used many phrases that he had just heard, as he sat at dinner, from his
mother or his children. In Ireland, those of us who know the people have the
same privilege. When I was writing "The Shadow of the Glen," some years ago,
I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor
of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being
said by the servant girls in the kitchen. This matter, I think, is of
importance, for in countries where the imagination of the people, and the
language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich
and copious in his words, and at the same time to give the reality, which is
the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form. In the modern
literature of towns, however, richness is found only in sonnets, or prose
poems, or in one or two elaborate books that are far away from the profound
and common interests of life.
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