When literature is not passionate it does not touch the spirit to lift and spread its wings and soar to finer air.
That is the great want about all the clever books now being turned out--they often give us excitement; they never give us ecstasy.

Then there is an obvious feeling of something lacking which men try to make up with art; and they produce work faultless in form and fastidious in phrase, but still it lacks the touch of fire that would lift it from common things to greatness.
III If we are to apply art to great work we must distinguish art from artifice.

We find the two well contrasted in Synge's "Riders to the Sea" and his "Playboy." The first was written straight from the heart.

We feel Synge must have followed those people carrying the dead body, and touched to the quick by the _caoine_, passed the touch on to us, for in the lyric swell of the close we get the true emotion.

Here alone is he in the line of greatness.