RIDERS TO THE SEA, by John Milling ton Synge, is the most nearly perfect tragedy i in one act modern literature. The very sim ple plot is basal-,no con the traditional conflict of human wills but on the hopeless struggle of man against the impersonal but relentless cruelty of -the sea. It•has,tidteil from Maurya four of her six sons, • their father, and their father's Lather. The fifth, son is :missing and her daughters get -proof that •he too has been drowned while Matuya is .entreating Bartley, the last of them all, not to ride his horses down to they boat for the Connemara fair. (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?* But Bartley will -110/ listen. and when the sea swallows him toe, . the tragedy of the mother's previous revolt pales before 'the- utter tragedy of her resignation. (They're all gone- now and there isn't eitything more the pea•can do to me. . . . I won't care what way the ,sea -is when the other women are keening.' In all of Synge's plays except 'Deirdre of die Sorrows,' one can trace his inspiration to his stay in the Aran Islands,— usually to a story he has heard on the road or by the turf fire — but in 'Riders to the Sea' we have the most direct transcript of his own sympathetic knowledge of the peo pie and of those wind-swept, sea swept isles where life seems only the sweeter for being purchased by daily struggle with barren soil' and warring 'elements. In this
struggle it is inevitably the mothers who lest out. The maternal feelIng ' is so strong ip these islands,' Synge Writes, "th it 'gives A life of torment to the women.' The contrast between 'Riders to the Sea) and 'The' Playboy of the Western 'World) indicates the ,gamut of 'Synge's genius. The former is as remarkable for the exquisite consistency of its theme, treat ment and 'atmosphere as the latter is for its variety and its piquant contradictions; the one almost defies criticism, the other challenges it. 'Riders to the Sea) was first produced by the Irish National Theatre Society at Molesworth Hall in Dublin on 25 Feb. 1904. It was in the -repertory of the Irish Players on tour in the 'United States in 1912-13. Consult Synge, J. M., The Aran Islands); id., prefaces to The ,Playboy of the Western World' and Tinker's Bickley, Francis Millington Synge); Boyd, Ernest, (t. o?tero rary Drama in Ireland' ; Howe, P. Ii., Johp it ington Synge' ; Weygandt, Cornelius, and Playwrights.) ..