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and drove it into the heart of the tradition. At the end of
Tales and Stories
, Carleton, now learned, now prosperous, merges with his people once more, retelling an old folktale of a blacksmith who beats the Devil, and witnessing to the rural belief in ghosts, with all the literary might he could muster.
    William Carleton is no man for easy schemes, yet his works yield three approaches to the folktale. In one, he utilizes the tale as a colorful element in a piece of his own in which the styles of the author and his characters, their diction and conduct, are set distinctly apart. The author, like Chaucer on the road to Canterbury, is an observer, amused, amazed, confused, offended. In another, Carleton takes the tale over and tells it again to suit a new audience, much as Shakespeare made old tales into new drama. The author becomes a storyteller, at one with the tradition. William Butler Yeats called William Carleton a “novelist” and a “storyteller” and a “historian,” and the third of Carleton’s approaches, the historian’s, was to present the tale as a fact, worthy of preservation for the information it contains about people who are not the author. William Carleton, who was born in 1794 and who died in 1869, was an exact contemporary of Croker, Keightley, and Lover, and he epitomizes their period, the period of Thomas Moore, James Clarence Mangan, Gerald Griffin, and the first maturing of Irish literature in the English language. Carleton had two ways to make folklore into literature, the Chaucerian and the Shakespearean. At the same time, he was interested in folklore as it flourished in country places far removed from the drawing room and the office of the literary gazette. But Carleton was too close to the people, too bothered by his separation from them, to perfect his own solution to the problem of the relationship between the writer and the storyteller. That would wait until the nineteenth century was at an end. Then the perfection of Carleton’s solution would become a fundamental principle of the movement that spun around William Butler Yeats and generated out of Ireland the greatest body of literature in the modern world.
    “Folk art,” wrote W. B. Yeats, closing
The Celtic Twilight
, “is, indeed,the oldest of the aristocracies of thought, and because it refuses what is passing and trivial, the merely clever and pretty, as certainly as the vulgar and insincere, and because it has gathered into itself the simplest and most unforgettable thoughts of the generations, it is the soil where all great art is rooted.” So grandly did Yeats’ own art flower from the tradition of his nation that when age began settling upon him, he was elected a senator of the new Irish Free State, and in the next year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In Stockholm in 1923, addressing the Swedish Royal Academy, he said that when he received the Nobel medal, two others should have been standing beside him, “an old woman sinking into the infirmity of age, and a young man’s ghost”: Lady Augusta Gregory and John Millington Synge.
    Together with Lady Gregory, Yeats had collected folktales. Each of them published clear texts, fresh from the lips of country people. Both built original works of art out of their experiences with the Irish tradition. But John Synge, because his life was brutally short, and because he was attracted both to science and art, provides us with the simplest case of the successful dynamic of their movement.
    When Synge met Yeats in Paris in 1896, Yeats was the author of
The Wanderings of Oisin, The Countess Cathleen, The Land of Heart’s Desire
, and
The Celtic Twilight
. He had edited a volume of Carleton’s sketches and assembled two anthologies,
Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
and
Irish Fairy Tales
, intermingling old texts from Croker, Lover, and Carleton with newly collected stories from Douglas Hyde. His career was more than begun. Synge, six years his junior, had