I have written already that he is not happy with an individual: he must
have an audience; and I remember now something that he said to me which
supports my belief. We had been talking about Synge and his habit of
listening at key-holes and cracks in the floor in order to hear scraps
of conversation that he might put into his plays. I said I had been
told that Synge, though excessively shy and silent in company, was a
very companionable person with an individual. He was a good comrade
on a country road, talking easily and naturally, and had the gift of
friendliness with plain and simple people. Labourers and countrymen
would talk to him as easily as they talked to one another, and would
confide in him. I wondered whether there were as many entertaining
tales to be heard from working-people in England as were to be heard
from working-people in Ireland. Mr. Yeats thought that perhaps there
were. He told me that the woman who cooked his meals and cleaned his
rooms had begun to tell some story of a love affair to him, but that he
had been too diffident to encourage her to go on with it. He thought
that if he had talked to her more than he had, she would have told him
many stories of her youth in the country; but all his talk to her had
been of food and household things. He is not a man in whom poor men and
women confide. His civility to them is magnificent, but it overawes
them and makes them as uneasy in one way as it pleases them in another.
He is an excellent entertainer in a crowded room, but he is a poor
companion on a road. He can talk well to a company of educated men and
women, but he is tongue-tied in the presence of those who have little
learning. When I survey my acquaintance with Yeats, I find strangely
diverse thoughts rising in my mind. I am drawn to him and repelled by
him. He stimulates me and depresses me. I am moved by the beauty of
his work and distracted by its vagueness. I find in his writing and in
his speech, great spiritual loveliness but curiously little humanity,
and I have often wondered why it is that while Irishmen, even such as
I am, are deeply moved by his little play, "Kathleen ni Houlihan,"
men of other countries--not only Englishmen--are left unmoved by it,
unable, without a note in the program, to understand it. I have seen
this play performed very many times. I never missed seeing it, when
it was done at the Abbey during the time that I was manager there. It
moved me as much when I last saw it as it did when I first saw it; and
I do not doubt that if I live to be an old man, it will move me as much
in my old age as it has moved me in my youth. But it does not move men
of other races. That is a singular thing. It denotes, I suppose, that
while there is much that is national in Mr. Yeats's work, there is less
that is universal.
One rises from his work, as one comes from his company, with a feeling
of chilled respect that may settle into disappointment. It is as if
one had been taken into a richly-decorated drawing-room when one had
hoped to be taken into a green field. I have read Blake's poems and
then I have read his and sought to see the resemblance that I am told
is between them, but have not always found it. Blake wrote about
things that he felt, but Mr. Yeats writes about the things that he
thinks; and thought changes and perishes, but feeling is permanent and
unchangeable; thought separates and divides men, but feeling brings
them together; and it may be that Mr. Yeats's aloofness from men is
due to the fact that he thinks too much and feels too little.