himself the plaything of tragic circumstance. Riders to the Sea, the most Greek of Synge's plays, in the immensity of its issues, in the high tableland chosen for their presentment, makes an appeal, despite its own localization, just so universal. "If it was a hundred horses, or a thousand horses, you had itself, what is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?"-In what degree is that cry local to the middle island of Aran? "And isn't it a pitiful thing when there is nothing left of a man who was a great rower and fisher but a bit of an old shirt and a plain stocking?" It is the very epitome of pity; the archetype of all good tragedy. It follows that this play of Synge's has been everywhere the first to be recognized; to gain its place in the theatre, one is told, from Melbourne to Buda-Pesth.

be.

And yet Riders to the Sea is not so perfect a masterpiece in one-act as we have seen In the Shadow of the Glen to The reason we shall see in a minute. The language is again perfect in its aptness to the dramatic intention. The rhythm is now not long and meditative, only checked for a moment of ecstasy or quick decision, like a break in the mist rolling over the hills; it is checked constantly and in terminations more abrupt, almost as though each sentence were snatched from the

lips of its speaker by the rising wind, servant of the inappeasable sea. The progress is swifter, partly for the reason that there is less to be revealed by the dialogue. Nora's tragedy was rather that of a particular woman left to think thoughts in the dark mist; here the tragedy is the common lot, and is less dependent, therefore, upon character. It is given swiftness also by the marvellous intensity Synge has given it; the temper of the play is like a white flame, in which everything that is irrelevant, or ordinarily below this terrible significance, has been burned up.

Look at the importance, from the opening words, with which the shirt and plain stocking, the white rocks and the tide, the pig with the black feet and the bit of new rope, are invested: the shirt and stocking that are all that are left of one son, the white rocks and tide that are to destroy another, the pig with the black feet that must be sold to the jobber by a woman now the last son has gone, and the rope that will surely be wanted to lower Bartley into his deep grave. The fine white boards bought for a big price in Connemara take on a visual significance almost intolerable as they stand against the kitchen wall. Synge never wrote a play-never, surely, has a play been writtenin which such a complete intensification of

the dramatist's materials is achieved. And yet with this flaming momentum upon it, Synge has put into the play the little humorous touches of the pig eating the rope, of the girl's impatience with the old woman's grieving, of her greater fondness for the one son than for the other, of her not thinking of the nails with all the coffins she had seen made already; the play, in all its swiftness, is packed with humanity.

It is this very swiftness which is the cause of the structural defect in Riders to the Sea; its action does not succeed, like that of the former play, in advancing step by step with reality, for in its half hour's occupation of the stage we are asked to suppose that Bartley should be knocked over into the sea, and washed out where there is a great surf on the white rocks, and his body recovered, and brought back again; when he himself allows for half an hour to ride down only. This unreality is an undeniable difficulty in the theatre; and the keening women, serving at once as messengers and chorus on a Greek convention a little difficult to us of acceptability, are another. A tragic intensity which on the printed page is sublime somehow does not, without reduction, bear this visual embodiment. It may even be that here we are up against the natural limitations of the

theatre. At all events, if Riders to the Sea, beautiful and moving play as it is, be better in the library than the theatre, then, by that very fact, its readier popularity notwithstanding, it is not the most perfect of Synge's plays.

III

THE PLAYS (Continued)

THE three plays we have considered were performed and printed between the end of 1903 and the beginning of 1905. Two years elapse before the second group of three plays opens with The Playboy of the Western World. In these two years, Synge continued to live in real and increasing intimacy with the "fine people" to whose imagination he acknowledged how much he owed in a preface to this play" a popular imagination that is fiery, and magnificent, and tender." The Playboy of the Western World brought to the contemporary stage the most rich and copious store of character since Shakespeare.

ii

The action is still in the west, near a village on a wild coast of Mayo. In a rough shebeen, or wayside public-house, a wild-looking but fine girl, Pegeen, the daughter of the publican, is