ision of them, that
truth that drives Mr. Shaw to blind anger. Synge has no resentment
against that truth, only interest in it as a fact that is true of people
as he sees them. The play is an unforgettable symbol of that truth, but
to make it such was not why Synge wrote it. He wrote it with a purpose
akin to that which inspired Burns to write his "Jolly Beggars." He wrote
it to make something beautiful out of the life of the beggars of the
Wicklow mountains, and I have no doubt he had a wild joy in the idea of
it, in the irony of its truth, in the grotesquerie of the situations he
garnered from his memory to illustrate its beauty and truth.

Many wonders are possible even to-day in the wild life of the roads and
of the sea-haunted islands that Synge knew, but he was wise to put "The
Well of the Saints" back a hundred years or more. Aran islanders told
him of rye that turned to oats in their fields and of phantom ships that
passed them at sea, but a miracle of healing such as that of "The Well
of the Saints" they were familiar with only in folk-song such as "Mary's
Well," and such a miracle, too, would hardly be attempted by a priest of
to-day.

Synge had the great advantage of writing all his plays, after the
earliest, for the stage. He knew as he wrote that he could test that
writing's stage effect in rehearsal and change it if need be. So he did
change "The Playboy of the Western World," revealing the incident of the
supposed patricide as a bit of narrative addressed by Christy to the
admiring girls of the Mayo village, instead of, as he had intended, a
scene on the stage in "a windy corner of rich Munster land." Had he
written "Riders to the Sea" later, Synge would surely never have crowded
into it incidents that took far longer in the happening than in the
portrayal of that happening on the stage. It is this technical
shortcoming that for me takes away somewhat from the exceeding beauty of
this tragedy of Aran. The story of the finding of the clothes that tell
of the death at sea of the last but one of the five sons of Maurya, and
of the death on the very shore itself of the last son, is in its very
nature a dirge, and demands a slower movement than is possible with its
incidents arranged as he was content to leave them in the play as we
have it. "Riders to the Sea" is less representative of Synge, moreover,
than any other of his plays, for it is written on one note, the note of
the dirge, of the dirge of the tide