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, _The Well of the Saints_, treats of a sorrow that is as old as Helen of the vanishing of beauty and the irony of fulfilled desire.

The great realities of death pass through the _Riders to the Sea_, till the language takes on a kind of simplicity as of written words shrivelling up in a flame.

_The Playboy of the Western World_ is a study of character, terrible in its clarity, but never losing the savour of imagination and of the astringency and saltness that was characteristic of his temper.