'When I got up this morning,' he writes, after he had been a long time
in Innismaan, 'I found that the people had gone to Mass and latched the
kitchen door from the outside, so that I could not open it to give
myself light.
'I sat for nearly an hour beside the fire with a curious feeling that I
should be quite alone in this little cottage. I am so used to sitting
here with the people that I have never felt the room before as a place
where any man might live and work by himself. After a while as I
waited, with just light enough from the chimney to let me see the
rafters and the greyness of the walls, I became indescribably mournful,
for I felt that this little corner on the face of the world, and the
people who live in it, have a peace and dignity from which we are shut
for ever.' This life, which he describes elsewhere as the most primitive
left in Europe, satisfied some necessity of his nature. Before I met him
in Paris he had wandered over much of Europe, listening to stories in
the Black Forest, making friends with servants and with poor people, and
this from an aesthetic interest, for he had gathered no statistics, had
no money to give, and cared nothing for the wrongs of the poor, being
content to pay for the pleasure of eye and ear with a tune upon the
fiddle. He did not love them the better because they were poor and
miserable, and it was only when he found Innismaan and the Blaskets,
where there is neither riches nor poverty, neither what he calls 'the
nullity of the rich' nor 'the squalor of the poor' that his writing
lost its old morbid brooding, that he found his genius and his peace.
Here were men and women who under the weight of their necessity lived,
as the artist lives, in the presence of death and childhood, and the
great affections and the orgiastic moment when life outleaps its limits,
and who, as it is always with those who have refused or escaped the
trivial and the temporary, had dignity and good manners where manners
mattered. Here above all was silence from all our great orator took
delight in, from formidable men, from moral indignation, from the
'sciolist' who 'is never sad,' from all in modern life that would
destroy the arts; and here, to take a thought from another playwright of
our school, he could love Time as only women and great artists do and
need never sell it.