Yeats’s plays reflect the childlike superstitions and lively imagination of his country.  He loves the fairies, the dreams of eternal youth, the symbolizing of things of the spirit by lovely things of earth.  His plays are poetical, fanciful, and romantic.

John Millington Synge.—­One of the most notable of the Irish writers, J.M.  Synge, was born near Dublin in 1871 and died in that city in 1909.  His brief span of life has yielded only scanty biographical data.  He came of an old Wicklow family; he was graduated from Trinity College, Dublin; afterwards he wandered through much of Europe, finally settling in France.

[Illustration:  JOHN SYNGE.]

In 1899, William Butler Yeats discovered him in Paris, a “man all folded up in brooding intellect,” writing essays on French authors,—­on Moliere, for example, from whom he learned the trick of characterization; on Racine, who taught him concentration; on Rabelais, who infected him with love of deep laughter.  Yeats, suspecting that Synge could be an original writer as well as an interpreter of others, persuaded him to go back to Ireland, to the Aran Islands, off Galway.  Synge discovered there a lost kingdom of the imagination, a place where spontaneous feeling and primitive imagination had not been repressed by the outside world’s customs and discipline, and where the constant voice of the ocean, the touch of the mysterious, all-embracing mist, and the gleam of the star through a rift in the clouds banished all sense of difference between the natural and the supernatural.

When Synge died in his thirty-eighth year, he had written only six short plays, all between 1903 and 1909.  Two of these, In the Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea, contain only one act. The Tinker’s Wedding has two acts, and the rest are three-act plays.

In the Shadow of the Glen, Riders to the Sea, and The Well of the Saints, produced respectively in 1903, 1904, and 1905, show that Synge came at once into full possession of his dramatic power.  Even in his earliest written play, The Well of The Saints, we find a style stripped of superfluous verbiage and vibrant with emotion. In the Shadow of the Glen, his first staged play, consumes only a half hour.  The scene is laid in a cabin far off in a lonely glen, and the four actors,—­a woman oppressed by loneliness, an unfeeling husband who feigns death, and two visitors,—­make a singularly well-knit impressive drama.

Riders to the Sea has been pronounced the greatest drama of the modern Celtic school.  Some critics consider this the most significant tragedy produced in English since Shakespeare.  Simple and impressive as a Greek tragedy, it has for its central figure an old mother whose husband and five sons have been lost at sea.  The simple but poignant feeling of the drama focuses on the death of Maurya’s sixth and last son, Bartley.  This tragic episode, simply presented, touches the depths of human sympathy.  In old Maurya, Synge created an impressive figure of what Macbeth calls “rooted sorrow.”