of production has never been possible, and in modern complex conditions is least of all to be expected.

What we want to do, therefore, is to adjust it only as nearly as possible, and to adjust it as nearly as possible means to make demand call forth as nearly as possible the corresponding supply.

Now demand calls forth a supply in proportion to its intensity. The more intense, peremptory and exact the demand, the more supply will have to meet it precisely or go begging.

How are we then to intensify demand?

If people simply would not accept houses save of such a sort as would make a modern town tolerable to look upon, then the modern town would not be the hideous thing it is. If people would not accept bread below a certain standard of breadfulness, then no amount of trade trickery, nor no cheapness of an insufficient flour, would have the power to put an unsatisfactory bread upon the market. We must intensify demand, we must make in some way or other the proportion between the various parts of demand as strong a thing in the mind of the demander as it was when our civilization was properly supplied, and before this modern disease came upon us.

Now, the weakening of demand, which is the true source of all our trouble, has a wide aspect easy to define. People are slack. How far this slackness is in general due to economic, how far (as the present writer is inclined to believe) to moral causes which lie behind economic phenomena, it is not our purpose here to examine. But there is one particular economic cause which can be got at and remedied, and it is a cause so patent that no one who has properly examined the subject has ever thought of denying it. That particular economic cause of the slackness of demand, and of its lack of

LIVING AGE. VOL. LI. 2659

proportion, is the insufficient economic power of the mass of modern purchasers in an industrial State-in plain words, their poverty.

For the poverty of the mass of purchasers affects the intensity of demand (and therefore the adjustment of supply to it) in every possible fashion: through their ignorance; through their haste; through their terrible and acute necessities; through their lack of power to make the producer feel their needs by political action; through their lack of control over contracts, advertisements, and the modern method of expression, which is the Press. All the rest of the problem is, as we have seen, connected with the necessary differentiation and the necessary complexity of modern production, on which there is no going back; but this part of the problem is in no way connected with that necessary complexity and necessary differentiation. The differentiation and the complexity would exist just as much as if the proper distribution of economic demand gave to the mass of purchasers a power of emphasizing the nature and the proportion of their demand; at present they have no such power, and without a doubt their lack of that power may be traced to that ill-distribution of wealth for which our time and our industrial civilization are particularly remarkable.

On the re-creation of a proper power of demand in the mass of the people, two forms of advice are tendered: the one distributivist, the other collectivist.

He who favors a collective remedy is either a Socialist or that opposite extreme, a man who conceives of large property (with its consequent power of demand--intense, proportioned and reasoned) as the natural purveyor of wealth to a mass of dependents. I have called these types extreme opposites, and so they are in their ideas of political mechanism; but they are not

opposed in relation to this particular economic question. The Socialist says, for instance, "Let the community" (that is, of course, the politicians) "order the cottages for a village, and, with the power of the public purse, the power of equal bargaining, or rather of masterful bargaining, the power of waiting until the order is exactly satisfied, the desire of the community for cottages not only habitable but serviceable in every other way (such as in the way of beauty) to human need, will be satisfied." This, says the Socialist, is true even with the imperfect Socialism in which a local body deals with contractors. It will be still more true in the perfect Socialist State, where the community shall directly employ and control all the labor that goes to the building of cottages.

The other type of those who approve a collective solution, says, "Let the big landlord provide the cottages, and with his leisure, power of bargaining, and all the rest of it, with his proportioned desire representing what is really the mind of his dependents, a satisfactory type of cottage will appear."

Of these two types the second certainly has the advantage of example. No one has ever seen a parish council or a municipal corporation giving effect to an intense popular demand, and we do see on all sides the big landlord giving effect to what is, if not a popular, at least a human and an organic demand. There is no one in his senses who would not rather trust the wealthy landlord for the purpose of getting a human village produced, than he would trust the politician.

But are either of them what they claim to be? The politician would be what he claims to be. if delegacy and voting could handle intimate human desires. The second would be what he claims to be. if a rich man (who is only rich because property is ill distributed) naturally, and in some way

necessarily, bore in himself the intimate human demands of his numerous poor dependents. For him to do this he must not only care for their way of living more than for his own, he must also know more about their way of living that he does about his own, and, finally, he must be more concerned in fulfilling their will than he is in fulfilling his own. If such rich men exist, they are certainly not numerous, and can never be. I have chosen a . favorable example in talking of cottages. Had I talked of public-houses, chairs and tables. cooking or bedding, the force of the argument would be greater.

I confess that in this, as in so many other departments of thought where economics touch upon politics, I can see no solution but a distributive one.

Unless, or until, a determinant mass of the families of the State possess sufficient property to make their demand reasoned, leisurely and complex, I do not see how we are to have an adjustment between economic motive and the process of production. The man himself must ask for what he wants, and he must be able to ask for what he wants with some leisure and culture in which to frame his demand, and with some power of holding out until he obtains it.

I may be told that, were wealth better distributed, the small citizen would still be much too small to intensify his demand, or to make it appreciably more effective than that of the present proletariat. That contention is a common modern contention, and it is made because modern thought has broken with tradition. that is, with reality in Time. As a matter of fact, all human history and tradition give the lie to such a contention. A determinant mass of small owners creates in a State an economic public opinion which a proletariat can never do. It acts, or at least has always acted, in a manner

highly co-operative, and produces naturally, by methods instinctive and human, what the Socialist desires and even hopes to produce mechanically, and what the modern defender of large The Dublin Review.

ownership believes t

i

nd exaltation,

of her life and

be a joy and

and have during the last three centuries had, sincere, capable, whimsical, and brilliant dramatists, but the few plays of theirs that survive (and how few they are!), survive not by their imaginative force but by those other qualities for which one looks in the comedy of manners. The truth is that the writing of plays requires a greater intensity of imagination than any other form of literature. The novelist can trace his characters back through the labyrinth of ancestry, and pursue them with description, epigram, apostrophe and exposition from the cradle to the grave. He can take 500 pages, if he will, to marshal his facts and work up his climax. With the dramatist it is otherwise. His creatures must express themselves in a few paltry thousand words apiece. He must work by suggestion, not by exposition. Every word must mean more than it says. Every character must strike its own note boldly and immediately, and walk in its

"The Works of J. M. 8ynge." Four Vols. (Dublin: Maunsel. 24s. net.)

own visible aura from the rise ofthe curtain to its fall. It was in this quality of imagination that Synge excelled, and it was that which enabled him to give to the little corner of life depicted in his peasant plays a universality of significance that lifts them into the ranks of the great literature.

One is apt to suspect writers who find all their inspiration in the life of one class or one countryside. Too often they see only the superficial qualities of that life, and use them to lend an artificial vitality to their own emotional experience. With Synge it was not so. When he first went to the west of Ireland, after a youth spent in wandering, like Goldsmith, with his fiddle, through Southern Europe, or brooding in a Paris garret on the classics of English and French literature, he came like an exile to the home of his childhood. Inherited instincts and sympathies that slumbered in his blood woke at the touch of kinship, and the love and knowledge of life came on him in a flood. It is in his book on the Aran Islands, and in the slighter sketches of wanderings in Wicklow, Kerry and Connemara (now collected for the first time) that one finds the key to his development. There have been no more fascinating, no more stimulating books of errantry written since Borrow died. They have not, it is true, Borrow's whimsicality, his power of slipping into his leisurely chronicle some strange, incongruous, impossible, laughable event, yet making it seem inevitably true. He is a poet where

romancer. He felt the eauty of the life he saw there was no room for rice. He could scarce

economic quest for instance, (that is, of cours,

fied, for

der the cottage living on those strange with the power where men must reap power of equal because of the stones"; of masterful b sit of soil is as a gold waiting unt ence men make fields by digfew scant basketfuls, mixing em with sand and seaweed, and spreading them upon a sheltered rock; where, through the barrenness of the soil, all seasons are the same. A land of many moods, all of them savage or mysterious; and inhabited by a people who seem to have a strange archaic sympathy with its changes-secret and strange as its rocks are mysterious and cold in hours of calm, but bursting as suddenly as its seas into a frenzy of rage or sorrow. So isolated are they that each man must be a skilled fisherman and manage his canoe with courage and dexterity, must be able to farm simply, burn seaweed for kelp, cut out his own leather sandals, mend nets, build and thatch a house and make a cradle or a coffin; and thus the race, knowing no divison of labor, has grown into a kind of natural aristocracy, agile, and passionate as wild animals, yet blending with an animal's qualities a touch of the refinement of old societies. Synge lived among this strange and simple people and their hardly less primitive neighbors of the mainland, till their life and language became the natural medium for the expression of his profound and passionate sense of the sweetness and tragedy of the world. The desolate beauty of rock and bog and mountain grew so into his soul that sometimes as he sat in the dark September nights by the rustling sea he seemed to exist merely in his perception of the waves and of the crying birds and of the smell of seaweed; sometimes, as he climbed a dark mountain under the stars, the earth

seemed to have dwindled away to a mere platform from which an astrologer might watch.

In these two volumes, as in the plays, suggestion takes the place of description, and a few common words convey the keenest and most complex emotions. And these short records have a further interest. It is not only that they show many of the actual incidents and impressions that inspired the plays; one sees in them how he gained that sympathy with the sights and sounds and incidents of common life which gives his plays their peculiar imaginative quality; how his life among this tender, fierce, and primitive people raised him, in an age devoted to social causes and social ethics, above society and above morality; how he learned from the lips of those he loved a speech that is living and yet beautiful. One begins to understand, too, something of the oddly elusive quality of many of his characters. Well as he knew the people with whom he lived, he felt always that they were strangely far away from him. "They have." he writes, "the same emotions as I have and the animals have, yet I cannot talk to them when there is much to say more than to the dog that whines beside me in a mountain fog." There is something inarticulate in all his characters and something inexplicable, as there is in all characters that are greatly conceived. The world is still debating the exact degree of Hamlet's madness, Malvolio's folly, Falstaff's courage, Wolsey's honesty, yet no one can doubt that their characters are exactly true. One cannot analyze their minds any more than one could that of their creator. Only that which is mechanically constructed can be mechanically resolved. In Nora Burke, The Tramp, The Playboy, and the blind couple in The Well of the Saints one finds the same qualities. One cannot understand, one must accept, them.

So, too, in spite of the cruelty and grossness that runs through many of the plays, one cannot feel that the persons of the play are gross or cruel. These qualities are but the shadows in the world in which Synge lived, a world whose splendor "was almost a grief of the mind," a world more splendid for the briefness of our vision of it and the blackness of its shadows.

The new edition contains, besides the two books of travel and the five plays that are already well known, Synge's last play, Deirdre of the Sorrows, which was first performed in London last June. This play was something of a disappointment when acted, and though on reading it one feels that it has a dignity which the Abbey Theatre Company (so excellent in plays of common life) failed somehow to realize, the sense of disappointment still remains. The play is well conceived, and in parts finely worked out; the meeting of Naisi and Deirdre on one of those nights of bravery "when a king would spit upon his arm ring and queens will stick their tongues out at the rising moon" has much beauty, as has the scene in which they determine to return to the King's Palace and certain death after their seven years of love in Alban. One gets a glimpse of many motives, some expressed, some inarticulate, over all of which there broods the fear that they will outlive the perfection of their love, the feeling that a love which is not nourished on active life and noble deeds must wither, and the sense of the doom that is on them, "the way there will be a story told of a ruined city and a raving king and a woman will be young for ever." Fine, too, is the way in which Deirdre, tortured beyond endurance by the immanence of separation, drives Naisi to the death he cannot avoid with an unfathomable cruelty, and after his fall, when there is no more to strive for, "puts away sorrow like a shoe that is worn out

and muddy," and goes to her selfsought death in peace and exaltation, conscious of the nobility of her life and of her end "that shall be a joy and triumph to the ends of life and time." Yet the play fails as a whole. It is not kept at the necessary imaginative pitch, and the characters lack solidity. Perhaps the approach of his last illness had somewhat sapped his powers, or it may be that the old legend, like the "plumed yet skinny shee" of one of his poems, could not give him the inspiration he found in the common life of his people. Certainly the plumes are fine, but the body something skinny.

The volume which contains Deirdre also gives us some new verse which certainly heightens one's opinion of Synge's powers as a poet. He approached poetry with a theory (always a dangerous attitude for a poet) that poetry had become too remote from common life, and that "before it can be human again it must learn to be brutal." The result in such of his work as had been previously published was a certain crudity and ugliness; force there was undoubtedly, but one missed the rhythm and beauty which haunt the exquisite cadence of his prose. Three poems in the present volume, "The 'Mergency Man," "Danny," and "Patch-Shaneen," show his theory at its best. In them he comes, perhaps, nearer to the true spirit of the ballad than any poet of our time. The second, with its description of the blackguard coming unsuspecting to his death

It wasn't long till Danny came

From Bangor making way, And he was damning moon and stars And whistling grand and gay

is perhaps the most striking of the three. If Synge had lived longer (he died at 39, after a literary life of only eight or nine years) and written a greater body of verse, there can be lit