s that sound their menace of the sea
through Inishmaan. It is less representative of Synge because it has in
it no humor, no quick changes of mood, no revelation of tumult of soul.
It is less representative of Synge in that it is less original than any
other of his plays, reminiscent in fact in all but its style, now of
Ibsen, now of M. Maeterlinck, now even of Mr. Edward Martyn. And his
style itself is not what his style was in "In the Shadow of the Glen,"
nor what it became again in "The Well of the Saints."

One wonders where that speech came from, that speech that is, as he
would have it, "fully flavored as a nut or apple." Mr. Yeats and Lady
Gregory tell us that he did not have it until he had been made free,
through residence there, of the life of the Aran Islands. If one has
read, however, the English of the prose translations of Dr. Hyde's "Love
Songs of Connacht," one may see in their style the genesis of the style
of "Riders to the Sea," and if one has read the "Dialogue between Two
Old Women" of "The Religious Songs of Connacht," and "The Lout and his
Mother," one may come to believe that these turned Synge toward the even
more fully flavored and more rhythmic speech of the other plays.
Perhaps, too, there were memories of the rhythm and of the flavor of the
speech of him who made these words for Jasper Petulengro: "Life is
sweet, brother, ... there's night and day, brother, both sweet things;
sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind
on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die!"

The speech of Connacht folk-song rendered into the English of Connacht
by Dr. Hyde, however, and the speech of Borrow were no more than the
start, if they were as much as the start, that put him on the right
road. If ever a man made his style himself, it was Synge. He made it out
of his memory and out of his imagination, using "one or two words only
that I have not heard," he said, "among the country people of Ireland,
or spoken in my own nursery before I could read the newspaper," but
evolving from that memory by his imagination a speech that is in
harmony with the imagination of the people an imagination that is, he
tells us, "fiery and magnificent and tender," though no such actual
speech would be possible of reproduction from any one of them.

Synge is very definite in his statement of what he believes drama should
be, and what he would make his own drama of Irish life, expres