But for the violent nature that strikes brief fire in A Question, hidden though it was under much courtesy and silence, his genius had never borne those lion cubs of his. He could not have loved had he not hated, nor honoured had he not scorned; though his hatred and his scorn moved him but seldom, as I think, for his whole nature was lifted up into a vision of the world, where hatred played with the grotesque and love became an ecstatic contemplation of noble life.
He once said to me, ‘We must unite asceticism, stoicism, ecstasy; two of these have often come together, but not all three:’ and the strength that made him delight in setting the hard virtues by the soft, the bitter by the sweet, salt by mercury, the stone by the elixir, gave him a hunger for harsh facts, for ugly surprising things, for all that defies our hope. In The Passing of the Shee he is repelled by the contemplation of a beauty too far from life to appease his mood; and in his own work, benign images ever present to his soul must have beside them malignant reality, and the greater the brightness, the greater must the darkness be. Though like ‘Usheen after the Fenians’ he remembers his master and his friends, he cannot put from his mind coughing and old age and the sound of the bells. The old woman in The Riders to the Sea, in mourning for her six fine sons, mourns for the passing of all beauty and strength, while the drunken woman of The Tinker’s Wedding is but the more drunken and the more thieving because she can remember great queens. And what is it but desire of ardent life, like that of Usheen for his ‘golden salmon of the sea, cleen hawk of the air,’ that makes the young girls of The Playboy of the Western World prefer to any peaceful man their eyes have looked upon, a seeming murderer? Person after person in these laughing, sorrowful, heroic plays is, ‘the like of the little children do be listening to the stories of an old woman, and do be dreaming after in the dark night it’s in grand houses of gold they are, with speckled horses to ride, and do be waking again in a short while and they destroyed with the cold, and the thatch dripping, maybe, and the starved ass braying in the yard.’
IV
It was only at the last in his unfinished Deirdre of the Sorrows that his mood changed. He knew some twelve months ago that he was dying, though he told no one about it but his betrothed, and he gave all his thought to this play, that he might finish it. Sometimes he would despond and say that he could not; and then his betrothed would act it for him in his sick room, and give him heart to write again. And now by a strange chance, for he began the play before the last failing of his health, his persons awake to no disillusionment but to death only, and as if his soul already thirsted for the fiery fountains there is nothing grotesque, but beauty only.
V
He was a solitary, undemonstrative man, never asking pity, nor complaining, nor seeking sympathy but in this book’s momentary cries: 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.
April 4, 1909.