Another school of drama, homogeneous and quite apart from the rest, remains.  We have seen how the “Celtic Revival,” as the Irish literary movement has been called by its admirers, gave us a new kind of romantic poetry.  As an offshoot from it there came into being some ten years ago an Irish school of drama, drawing its inspiration from two sources—­the body of the old Irish legends and the highly individualized and richly-coloured life of the Irish peasants in the mountains of Wicklow and of the West, a life, so the dramatists believed, still unspoiled by the deepening influences of a false system of education and the wear and tear of a civilization whose values are commercial and not spiritual or artistic.  The school founded its own theatre, trained its own actors, fashioned its own modes of speech (the chief of which was a frank restoration of rhythm in the speaking of verse and of cadence in prose), and having all these things it produced a series of plays all directed to its special ends, and all composed and written with a special fidelity to country life as it has been preserved, or to what it conceived to be the spirit of Irish folk-legend.  It reached its zenith quickly, and as far as the production of plays is concerned, it would seem to be already in its decline.  That is to say, what in the beginning was a fresh and vivid inspiration caught direct from life has become a pattern whose colours and shape can be repeated or varied by lesser writers who take their teaching from the original discoverers.  But in the course of its brief and striking course it produced one great dramatist—­a writer whom already not three years after his death, men instinctively class with the masters of his art.

J.M.  Synge, in the earlier years of his manhood, lived entirely abroad, leading the life of a wandering scholar from city to city and country to country till he was persuaded to give up the Continent and the criticism and imitation of French literature, to return to England, and to go and live on the Aran Islands.  From that time till his death—­some ten years—­he spent a large part of each year amongst the peasantry of the desolate Atlantic coast and wrote the plays by which his name is known.  His literary output was not large, but he supplied the Irish dramatic movement with exactly what it needed—­a vivid contact with the realities of life.  Not that he was a mere student or transcriber of manners.  His wandering life among many peoples and his study of classical French and German literature had equipped him as perhaps no other modern dramatist has been equipped with an imaginative insight and a reach of perception which enabled him to give universality and depth to his pourtrayal of the peasant types around him.  He got down to the great elemental forces which throb and pulse beneath the common crises of everyday life and laid them bare, not as ugly and horrible, but with a sense of their terror, their beauty and their strength.  His earliest play,