III

Now and then in history some man will speak a few simple sentences which never die, because his life gives them energy and meaning. They affect us as do the last words of Shakespeare’s people that gather up into themselves the energy of elaborate events, and they in their turn put strange meaning into half-forgotten things and accidents, like cries that reveal the combatants in some dim battle. Often a score of words will be enough, as when we repeat to ourselves, ‘I am a servant of the Lord God of War and I understand the lovely art of the Muses,’ all that remains of a once famous Greek poet and sea rover. And is not that epitaph Swift made in Latin for his own tomb more immortal than his pamphlets, perhaps than his great allegory? ‘He has gone where fierce indignation will lacerate his heart no more.’ I think this book too has certain sentences, fierce or beautiful or melancholy that will be remembered in our history, having behind their passion his quarrel with ignorance, and those passionate events, his books.

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.’