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.'