That one believed he had a sword upstairs:
Yet would be now, could I but have my wish,
Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish.
This coldness closing on his heart and congealing all his generous emotions, causes him, at the end of a graceful book, "Reveries Over Childhood and Youth" (in itself, significant of the age-obsession which possesses his mind) to declare that "all life, weighed in the scales of my own life, seems to me a preparation for something that never happens," and leaves his readers wondering why a man who began his life by singing songs with such airs "that one believed he had a sword upstairs" should stumble into dismal prose towards the end of it, pronouncing life to be a cheerless deceit.
His effect on young men is peculiar. His brilliant conversation is very attractive to them, but his insensibility to the presence of human beings repels them. "A. E." once told me that Mr. Arthur Griffith, the founder of the Sinn Fein movement, drew young people to him by the strength of his hatred, but finally repelled them by his complete lack of charity and love. A nature compounded principally or exclusively of hatred must be destructive. No man can construct anything unless love and charity predominate in his heart. Mr. Griffith, throughout his career, has never been notable for his power to make things. He could not even make his own movement grow, for Sinn Fein became a popular and appealing force only after Padraic Pearce and Thomas Macdonagh and James Connolly had put a fire into the machinery of it on Easter Monday, 1916. There is something terribly ironical in the fact that James Connolly, to whom Mr. Griffith offered every possible opposition in his lifetime, should by his death have helped to put Mr. Griffith in a position of authority to which his own intellectual and spiritual qualities could never have raised him. Mr. Yeats has something of the unhumanity of Mr. Griffith. His talk is brilliant, indeed, but it is not comradely talk. It never lapses from high quality to the easy familiarities which humanize all relationships. He is more fastidious about his speech than he is about his friends. It would shock him more to use a bad word than to make a bad friend, because he is more aware of bad words than of bad men; and he would be quicker to forgive a crime than to forgive a vulgar phrase. I have never heard him use a common expression. He once repeated an angry speech of William Morris to me with an air almost apologetic for using profane language, not because it was profane but because it was inelegant. He never says "Damn!" or "Blast!" when he is angry.... He is one of the loneliest men in the world, for he cannot express himself except in a crowd. Dr. Stockman said that the strongest man in the world is the man who stands absolutely alone—a feat which is surely impossible—and this specious statement has supported many ineffective egoists in their belief that neurosis is strength and misbehaviour a sign of individuality. But the penalty of isolation is that the isolated cannot dispense with an amenable crowd. The hermit must have a succession of respectful pilgrims to his cave, each one murmuring, "There is but one God and Thou art His Prophet!" until at last the hermit begins to believe that he is God and God is his prophet. Hermits have followers, or, perhaps one ought to say, curious visitors, but they have no friends. Why should they have friends? They have not got the social sense nor can they take part in the common labours of mankind. They live in caves and desert places because they are not fit to live in houses and places that are inhabited. But even the hermits, wrapped in self-sufficiency, realize that no man is effective without his fellows, and so, though they cannot make friends, they make disciples. This is a truth which all the great lonely men from Adam to Robinson Crusoe have discovered, that a man by himself is ineffective and without interest. Life for Adam remained uneventful until the arrival of Eve: the island of Juan Fernandez was livelier after Man Friday came to keep Crusoe company. For fellowship is life, as Morris said, and lack of fellowship is death.
There is no poet, not even Keats or Shelley, who has so much of pure poetry in his work as Mr. Yeats has in his, and perhaps that is enough; but there is no other poet, not even Mr. Kipling, who has so little understanding of human kind. It is an odd commentary on his relationship to his countrymen that while he was writing the bitter poem, entitled "September, 1913," with the desolating refrain:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone—
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
Thomas Macdonagh and Padraic Pearse and James Connolly were preparing themselves for a romantic death.
John Davidson, in a book called "Sentences and Paragraphs," writes of Keats that, "beginning and ending his intemperate period with the too ample verge and room, the trailing fringe and sample-like embroidery of 'Endymion,' he was soon writing the most perfect odes in the language." Mr. Yeats, in spite of some reluctant instructions into enthusiastic movements, escaped "the intemperate period"; but he did so at the cost of his youth and ardour. Like the Magi in his poem of that name, he, "being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied," seeks "to find once more" "the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor"; but it eludes him, and will always elude him, because he thinks of its habitation as "a bestial floor." It can only be found by a poet who, whatever happens, still believes that the earth is a place where God may yet walk in safety. Mr. Yeats is the greatest poet that Ireland has produced, but he has meant very little to the people of Ireland, for he has forgotten the ancient purpose of the bards, to urge men to a higher destiny by reminding them of their high origin, and has lived, aloof and disdainful, as far from human kind as he can conveniently get.