Many have found and felt these things, but they have been silent, for they have been restrained from speech by a sense that such things could not be interpreted in words. Synge was the first to find the medium by which they might be expressed. "He was a solitary, undemonstrative man," says his friend Yeats, "never asking pity, nor complaining, nor seeking sympathy; all folded up in brooding intellect, knowing nothing of new books and newspapers, reading the great masters alone; and he was but the more hated because he gave his country what it needed, an unmoved mind, where there is a perpetual last day, a trumpeting and coming up to judgment." Thus, it seems to me, Synge will be slow in winning recognition from the masses of his countrymen. He saw them too clearly, and painted too accurate a portrait of them to be flattering; they recognize their weaknesses and are indignant, while they fail to see that he has painted also their fine poetical qualities, their romance, and their tenderness. Again the same writer: "In Ireland, he loved only what was wild in its people and in the grey wintry sides of many glens." All the rest, all that one reasoned over, fought for, read of in leading articles, all that came from Education, all that came down from young Ireland--aroused in him little interest. Perhaps its only effect on him was to awaken in him first that irony which, once awakened, he turned upon the whole of life. The scene of Synge's later literary work--the work which counts--was the Abbey Theatre, a small and unpretentious building, hidden away in a side street near the Dublin quays. Here is a central point for the Irish Dramatic Movement, a movement recognized by all competent critics as being one of the most significant things in modern literature. Lovers of literature of the present generation who have been walking in a vain shadow, groping their way uneasily amid realistic novels, paradoxical problem plays, pale poems, and epigrammatic essays, turn with relief to a literature which is realistic, and at the same time rich and poetical, and which shows unmistakable signs of real vitality.