the materials which lay ready to his hand, and by the power of
sympathy woven them, with little modification, into a tragedy
which, for dramatic irony and noble pity, has no equal among
its contemporaries. Great tragedy, it is frequently claimed
with some show of justice, has perforce departed with the
advance of modern life and its complicated tangle of interests
and creature comforts. A highly developed civilisation, with
its attendant specialisation of culture, tends ever to lose
sight of those elemental forces, those primal emotions, naked
to wind and sky, which are the stuff from which great drama is
wrought by 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