y
the artist, but which, as it would seem, are rapidly departing from us.
It is only in the far places, where solitary communion may be had with
the elements, that this dynamic life is still to be found continuously,
and it is accordingly thither that the dramatist, who would deal with
spiritual life disengaged from the environment of an intellectual maze,
must go for that experience which will beget in him inspiration for
his art. The Aran Islands from which Synge gained his inspiration are
rapidly losing that sense of isolation and self-dependence, which has
hitherto been their rare distinction, and which furnished the motivation
for Synge's masterpiece. Whether or not Synge finds a successor, it is
none the less true that in English dramatic literature "Riders to the
Sea" has an historic value which it would be difficult to over-estimate
in its accomplishment and its possibilities. A writer in The Manchester
Guardian shortly after Synge's death phrased it rightly when he wrote
that it is "the tragic masterpiece of our language in our time; wherever
it has been played in Europe from Galway to Prague, it has made the word
tragedy mean something more profoundly stirring and cleansing to the
spirit than it did."

The secret of the play's power is its capacity for standing afar off,
and mingling, if we may say so, sympathy with relentlessness. There is a
wonderful beauty of speech in the words of every character, wherein the
latent power of suggestion is almost unlimited. "In the big world the
old people do be leaving things after them for their sons and children,
but in this place it is the young men do be leaving things behind for
them that do be old." In the quavering rhythm of these words, there is
poignantly present that quality of strangeness and remoteness in beauty
which, as we are coming to realise, is the touchstone of Celtic
literary art. However, the very asceticism of the play has begotten a
corresponding power which lifts Synge's work far out of the current of
the Irish literary revival, and sets it high in a timeless atmosphere of
universal action.

Its characters live and die. It is their virtue in life to be lonely,
and none but the lonely man in tragedy may be great. He dies, and then
it is the virtue in life of the women mothers and wives and sisters to
be great in their loneliness, great as Maurya, the stricken mother, is
great in her final word.

"Michael has a clean burial in the far north, by the