gifts of fancy, analysis and idiosyncratic music.  They insist that we shall also admit that he knew the human heart better than Shakespeare.  It may be all we like sheep have gone astray in this kind of literary riot.  And so long as the exaggeration of a good writer’s genius is an honest personal affair, one resents it no more than one resents the large nose or the bandy legs of a friend.  It is when men begin to exaggerate in herds—­to repeat like a lesson learned the enthusiasm of others—­that the boom becomes offensive.  It is as if men who had not large noses were to begin to pretend that they had, or as if men whose legs were not bandy were to pretend that they were, for fashion’s sake.  Insincerity is the one entirely hideous artistic sin—­whether in the creation or in the appreciation of art.  The man who enjoys reading The Family Herald, and admits it, is nearer a true artistic sense than the man who is bored by Henry James and denies it:  though, perhaps, hypocrisy is a kind of homage paid to art as well as to virtue.  Still, the affectation of literary rapture offends like every other affectation.  It was the chorus of imitative rapture over Synge a few years ago that helped most to bring about a speedy reaction against him.  Synge was undoubtedly a man of fine genius—­the genius of gloomy comedy and ironic tragedy.  His mind delved for strangenesses in speech and imagination among people whom the new age had hardly touched, and his discoveries were sufficiently magnificent to make the eyes of any lover of language brighten.  His work showed less of the mastery of life, however, than of the mastery of a theme.  It was a curious by-world of literature, a little literature of death’s-heads, and, therefore, no more to be mentioned with the work of the greatest than the stories of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.  Unfortunately, some disturbances in Dublin at the first production of The Playboy turned the play into a battle-cry, and the artists, headed by Mr. Yeats, used Synge to belabour the Philistinism of the mob.  In the excitement of the fight they were soon talking about Synge as though Dublin had rejected a Shakespeare.  Mr. Yeats even used the word “Homeric” about him—­surely the most inappropriate word it would be possible to imagine.  Before long Mr. Yeats’s enthusiasm had spread to England, where people who ignored the real magic of Synge’s work, as it is to be found in Riders to the Sea, In the Shadow of the Glen, and The Well of the Saints, went into ecstasies over the inferior Playboy.  Such a boom meant not the appreciation of Synge but a glorification of his more negligible work.  It was almost as if we were to boom Swinburne on the score of his later political poetry.  Criticism makes for the destruction of such booms.  I do not mean that the critic has not the right to fling about superlatives like any other man.  Criticism, in one aspect, is the art of flinging about superlatives finely.  But they must be personal superlatives, not boom superlatives.  Even when they are showered on an author who is the just victim of a boom—­and, on a reasonable estimate, at least fifty per cent of the booms have some justification—­they are as unbeautiful as rotten apples unless they have this personal kind of honesty.