Now, since Synge has shown us that the poetry in the peasant heart does utter itself spontaneously, in fitting language, we must be careful how we deny, even to these peasants who are not Celts, a natural power of poetic expression. But there is a difference. That spontaneous poetry of simple folk which is caught for us in _The Playboy of the Western World or The Well of the Saints_, is generally a lyric utterance springing directly out of emotion. It is not, as here, the result of a mental process, operating amongst ideas and based on knowledge which the peasant is unlikely to possess. One may be justified, therefore, in a show of protest at the incongruity; we feel that such people do not talk like that. The poet has transferred to them too much of his own intellectuality. Yet it will probably be a feeble protest, proportionate to the degree that we are disturbed by it, which is practically not at all. For as these people speak, we are convinced of their reality: they live and move before us. And when we consider their complete and robust individuality, it would appear that the poet's method is vindicated by the dramatic force of the presentment. It needs no other vindication, and is no doubt a reasoned process. For Mr Abercrombie makes no line of separation between thought and emotion; and having entered by imagination into the hearts of his people, he might claim to be merely interpreting them--making conscious and vocal that which was already in existence there, however obscurely. There is a hint of this at a point in _The End of the World_ where one of the men says that he had _felt_ a certain thought go through his mind--"though 'twas a thing of such a flight I could not read its colour." And in this way Deborah, being a human soul of full stature, sound of mind and body and all her being flooded with emotion, would be capable of feeling the complex thought attributed to her, even if no single strand of its texture had ever been clear in her mind. While as to the fiddling lyrist, rogue and poet, one sees no reason why the whole argument should not be closed by a gesture in the direction of Heine or Villon. We turn now to the content of thought in Mr Abercrombie's poetry--an aspect of his genius to be approached with diffidence by a writer conscious of limitations. For though we believed we saw that his affinity with the democratic spirit of his age is instinctive, deeply rooted and persistent, his genius is by no means ruled by instinct. It is intellectual to an extreme degree, moving easily in abstract thought and apparently trained in philosophic speculation. Indeed, his speculative tendency had gone as far as appeared to be legitimate in poetry, when he wisely chose another medium for it in the volume of prose _Dialogues_ published in 1913.