RIDERS TO THE SEA
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.
X
