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.  He had at his command an instrument of incomparable fineness and range in the language which he fashioned out the speech of the common people amongst whom he lived.  In his dramatic writings this language took on a kind of rhythm which had the effect of producing a certain remoteness of the highest possible artistic value.  The people of his imagination appear a little disembodied.  They talk with that straightforward and simple kind of innocency which makes strange and impressive the dialogue of Maeterlinck’s earlier plays.  Through it, as Mr. Yeats has said, he saw the subject-matter of his art “with wise, clear-seeing, unreflecting eyes—­and he preserved the innocence of good art in an age of reasons and purposes.”  He had no theory except of his art; no “ideas” and no “problems”; he did not wish to change anything or to reform anything; but he saw all his people pass by as before a window, and he heard their words.  This resolute refusal to be interested in or to take account of current modes of thought has been considered by some to detract from his eminence.  Certainly if by “ideas” we mean current views on society or morality, he is deficient in them; only his very deficiency brings him nearer to the great masters of drama—­to Ben Johnson, to Cervantes, to Moliere—­even to Shakespeare himself.  Probably in no single case amongst our contemporaries could a high and permanent place in literature be prophesied with more confidence than in his.

In the past it has seemed impossible for fiction and the drama, i.e. serious drama of high literary quality, to flourish, side by side.  It seems as though the best creative minds in any age could find strength for any one of these two great outlets for the activity of the creative imagination.  In the reign of Elizabeth the drama outshone fiction; in the reign of Victoria the novel crowded out the drama.  There are signs that a literary era is commencing, in which the drama will again regain to the full its position as a literature.  More and more the bigger creative artists will turn to a form which by its economy of means to ends, and the chance it gives not merely of observing but of creating and displaying character in action, has a more vigorous principle of life in it than its rival.

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