Delphi Complete Poetry and Plays of W. B. Yeats (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)

by W. B. Yeats

  X

  March 23.

  MacDonagh called to-day. Very sad about Ireland. Says that he finds a barrier between himself and the Irish-speaking peasantry, who are ‘cold, dark and reticent’ and ‘too polite’. He watches the Irish-speaking boys at his school, and when nobody is looking, or when they are alone with the Irish-speaking gardener, they are merry, clever and talkative. When they meet an English speaker or one who has learned Gaelic, they are stupid. They are in a different world. Presently he spoke of his nine years in a monastery and I asked what it was like. ‘O,’ he said, ‘everybody is very simple and happy enough. There is a little jealousy sometimes. If one brother goes into a town with a Superior, another brother is jealous.’ He then told me that the Bishop of Raphoe had forbidden anybody in his See to contribute to the Gaelic League because its Secretary ‘has blasphemed against the holy Adamnan’. The Secretary had said, ‘The Bishop is an enemy, like the founder of his See, Saint Adamnan, who tried to injure the Gaelic language by writing in Latin’. MacDonagh says, ‘Two old countrymen fell out and one said, “I have a brother who will make you behave”, meaning the Bishop of Raphoe, and the other said, “I have a son who will put sense into you”, meaning Cardinal Logue.’

  XI

  Molly Allgood came to-day to ask where I would be to-morrow, as Synge wishes to send for me if strong enough. He wants ‘to make arrangements’. He is dying. They have ceased to give him food.

  Should we close the Abbey or keep it open while he still lives? Poor Molly is going through her work as always. Perhaps that is best for her. I feel Synge’s coming death less now than when he first became ill. I am used to the thought of it and I do not find that I pity him. I pity her. He is fading out of life. I felt the same when I saw M--- in the madhouse. I pitied his wife. He seemed already dead. One does not feel that death is evil when one meets it, — evil, I mean, for the one who dies. Our Daimon is silent as was that other before the death of Socrates. The wildest sorrow that comes at the thought of death is, I think, ‘Ages will pass over and no one ever again look on that nobleness or that beauty’. What is this but to pity the living and to praise the dead?

  XII

  March 24.

  Synge is dead. In the early morning he said to the nurse, ‘It is no use fighting death any longer’ and he turned over and died. I called at the hospital this afternoon and asked the assistant matron if he knew he was dying. She answered, ‘He may have known it for weeks, but he would not have said so to anyone. He would have no fuss. He was like that.’ She added, with emotion in her voice, ‘We were devoted to him’.

  XIII

  March 28.

  Mr. Stephens, Synge’s brother-in-law, said he suffered no pain but only great weakness. On Sunday he questioned the doctor and convinced himself that he was dying. He told his brother-in-law next day and was quite cheerful, even making jokes. In the evening he saw Molly and told her to be brave and sent her to me that I might arrange about his writings. On the morning when I heard of his death a heavy storm was blowing and I doubt not when he died that it had well begun. That morning Lady Gregory felt a very great depression and was certain that some evil was coming, but feared for her grandchild, feared it was going to be ill. On the other hand, my sister Lolly said at breakfast, ‘I think it will be all right with Synge, for last night I saw a galley struggling with a storm and then it shot into calm and bright sunlight and I heard the keel grate on the shore’. One remembers the voyages to Tir- nan-oge, certainly the voyages of souls after death to their place of peace.

  XIV

  I have been looking through his poems and have read once more that on page 21, ‘I asked if I got sick and died’. Certainly they were there at the funeral, his ‘idiot’ enemies: A--- who against all regulations rushed up to the dressing-rooms during the Playboy riot to tell the actors they should not have played in so disgraceful a play; B--- who has always used his considerable influence with the company against Synge, and has spoken against him in public; there, too, were the feeble friends who pretended to believe but gave no help. And there was C--- whose obituary notice speaks of Synge’s work as only important in promise, of the exaggeration of those who praise it, and then claims that its writer spent many hours a day with Synge in Paris (getting the date wrong by two years, however), with Synge who was proud and lonely, almost as proud of his old blood as of his genius, and had few friends. There was D---, the Secretary of the Society — it had sent a wreath---whose animosity had much to do with the attacks in Sinn Fein. It was, to quote E---, a funeral ‘small but select’. A good friend of Synge’s quoted to me:

  How shall the ritual then be read, The requiem how be sung By you, by yours the evil eye, By yours the slanderous tongue, That did to death the innocence That died, and died so young?

  Yet these men came, though but in remorse; they saw his plays, though but to dislike; they spoke his name, though but to slander. Well-to-do Ireland never saw his plays nor spoke his name. Was he ever asked to any country house but Coole? Was he ever asked to a dinner-party? How often I have wished that he might live long enough to enjoy that communion with idle, charming and cultivated women which Balzac in one of his dedications calls ‘the chief consolation of genius’!

  XV

  In Paris Synge once said to me, ‘We should unite stoicism, asceticism and ecstasy. Two of them have often come together, but the three never.’

  XVI

  I believe that some thing I said may have suggested ‘I asked if I got sick and died’. S--- had frequently attacked his work while admitting him a man of genius. He attacked it that he might remain on good terms with the people about him. When Synge was in hospital to be operated upon, S--- was there too as a patient, and I told Synge that whenever I spoke of his illness to any man that man said, ‘And isn’t it sad about S---?’ until I could stand it no longer and burst out with ‘I hope he will die’, and now, as someone said, I was ‘being abused all over the town as without heart’. I had learned that people were calling continually to inquire how S--- was, but hardly anybody called to ask for Synge. Two or three weeks later Synge wrote this poem. Had my words set his mind running on the thought that fools flourish, more especially as I had prophesied that S--- would flourish, and in my mood at the moment it seemed that for S--- to be operated on at the same time with Synge was a kind of insolence? S---’s illness did, indeed, win for him so much sympathy that he came out to lucrative and honourable employment, and now when playing golf he says with the English accent he has acquired of late, to some player who needs a great man’s favour, ‘I know him well, I will say a word in that quarter’.

  The Irish weekly papers notice Synge’s death with short and for the most part grudging notices. There was an obscure Gaelic League singer who was a leader of the demonstration against the Playboy. He died on the same day. Sinn Fein notices both deaths in the same article and gives three-fourths of it to the rioter. For Synge it has but grudging words, as was to be expected.

  Molly tells me that Synge went to see Stephen MacKenna and his wife before going into hospital and said good-bye with ‘You will never see me again’.

  CELEBRATIONS

  1. — He was one of those unmoved souls in whom there is a perpetual ‘Last Day’, a perpetual trumpeting and coming up for judgment.

  2. — He did not speak to men and women, asking judgment, as lesser writers do; but knowing himself part of judgment he was silent.

  3. — We pity the living and not such dead as he. He has gone upward out of his ailing body into the heroical fountains. We are parched by time.

  4. — He had the knowledge of his coming death and was cheerful to the end, even joking a little when that end had all but come. He had no need of our sympathies. It was as though we and the things about us died away from him and not he from us.

  XVIII

  DETRACTIONS

  He had that egotism of the man of genius which Nietzsche compares to the egotism of a woman with child. Neither I nor Lady Gregory had e
ver a compliment from him. After Hyacinth Lady Gregory went home the moment the curtain fell, not waiting for the congratulation of friends, to get his supper ready. He was always ailing and weakly. All he said of the triumphant Hyacinth was, ‘I expected to like it better.’ He had under charming and modest manners, in almost all things of life, a complete absorption in his own dream. I have never heard him praise any writer, living or dead, but some old French farce-writer. For him nothing existed but his thought. He claimed nothing for it aloud. He never said any of those self-confident things I am enraged into saying, but one knew that he valued nothing else. He was too confident for self- assertion. I once said to George Moore, ‘Synge has always the better of you, for you have brief but ghastly moments during which you admit the existence of other writers; Synge never has.’ I do not think he disliked other writers---they did not exist. One did not think of him as an egotist. He was too sympathetic in the ordinary affairs of life and too simple. In the arts he knew no language but his own.

  I have often envied him his absorption as I have envied Verlaine his vice. Can a man of genius make that complete renunciation of the world necessary to the full expression of himself without some vice or some deficiency? You were happy or at least blessed, ‘blind old man of Scio’s rocky isle’.

  XIX

  Two plays last night, Time, a play of suggestion, Cross-roads, a logical play. We accepted this last play because of its central idea, a seeming superstition of its creator, a promise of a new attitude towards life, of something beyond logic. In the four morning papers Time is cursed or ignored and Cross-roads given great praise, but praise that is never for the central idea, and the only critic who speaks of that idea misunderstands it completely. State a logical proposition and the most commonplace mind can complete it. Suggestion is richest to the richest and so grows unpopular with a democracy like this. They misunderstood Robinson’s idea, luckily for his popularity, and so turned all into commonplace. They allow their minds to dwell so completely on the logic that they do not notice what, as it were, swims upon it or juts up from its river-bed. That is how they combine religion with a journalism which accepts all the implications of materialism. A thought that stirs me in Time is that ‘only women and great artists love time, others sell it’, but what is Blake’s ‘naked beauty displayed’, visible audible wisdom, to the shopkeeping logicians?

  How can they love time or anything but the day’s end?

  XX

  To-day Molly told me that Synge often spoke of his coming death, indeed constantly for a year past, and tried hard to finish Deirdre. Sometimes he would get very despondent, thinking he could not finish it, and then she would act it for him and he would write a little more, and then he would despond again, and so the acting would begin again.

  My sister Lily says that the ship Lolly saw on the night of Synge’s death was not like a real ship, but like the Shadowy Waters ship on the Abbey stage, a sort of allegorical thing. There was also a girl in a bright dress, but she seemed to vanish as the ship ran ashore; all about the girl, and indeed everything, was broken and confused until the bow touched the shore in bright sunlight.

  XXI

  I see that between Time, suggestion, and Cross-roads, logic, lies a difference of civilization. The literature of suggestion belongs to a social order when life conquered by being itself and the most living was the most powerful, and not to a social order founded upon argument. Leisure, wealth, privilege were created to be a soil for the most living. The literature of logic, the most powerful and the most empty, conquering all in the service of one metallic premise, is for those who have forgotten everything but books and yet have only just learnt to read. They fill their minds with deductions, as they fill their empty houses, where there is nothing of the past, with machine-made furniture. I used to think that the French and Irish democracies follow, as John O’Leary used to say, a logical deduction to its end, no matter what suffering it brings, from a resemblance in the blood. I now believe that they do this because they have broken from the past, from the self-evident truths, from ‘naked beauty displayed’. The English logicians maybe as ignorant but they are timid.

  Robinson should become a celebrated dramatist if this theatre lasts long enough. He does not argue like the imitators of Ibsen, though his expression of life is as logical, hence his grasp on active passion. Passion is logical when bent on action. In the drama of suggestion there must be sufficient loosening and slackening for meditation and the seemingly irrelevant, or else a Greek chorus, and neither is possible without rich leisurely minds in the audience, lovers of Father Time, men who understand Faust’s last cry to the passing moment.

  Florence Farr once said to me, ‘If we could say to ourselves, with sincerity, “This passing moment is as good as any I shall ever know”, we would die upon the instant, or be united to God’. Desire would have ceased, and logic the feet of desire.

  XXII

  April 5.

  Walked home from Gurteen Dhas with D--- and walked through the brick-kilns of Egypt. He states everything in a slightly argumentative form and the soul is starved by the absence of self- evident truth. Good conversation unrolls itself like the spring or like the dawn; whereas effective argument, mere logical statement, founds itself on the set of facts or of experiences common to two or more. Each hides what is new or rich.

  XXIII

  The element which in men of action corresponds to style in literature is the moral element. Books live almost entirely because of their style, and the men of action who inspire movements after they are dead are those whose hold upon impersonal emotion and law lifts them out of immediate circumstance. Mitchel wrote better prose than Davis, Mangan better poetry, D’Arcy Magee better popular verse, Fintan Lalor saw deeper into a political event, O’Connell had more power and Meagher more eloquence, but Davis alone has influenced generations of young men, though Mitchel’s narrower and more faulty nature has now and again competed with him. Davis showed this moral element not merely in his verse--- I doubt if that could have had great effect alone---but in his action, in his defence, for instance, of the rights of his political opponents of the Royal Irish Academy. His verses were but an illustration of principles shown in action. Men are dominated by self-conquest; thought that is a little obvious or platitudinous if merely written, becomes persuasive, immortal even, if held to amid the hurry of events. The self-conquest of the writer who is not a man of action is style.

  Mitchel’s influence comes mainly, though not altogether, from style, that also a form of power, an energy of life. It is curious that Mitchel’s long martyred life, supported by style, has had less force than that of a man who died at thirty, was never in the hulks, did not write very well, and achieved no change of the law.

  The act of appreciation of any great thing is an act of self- conquest. This is one reason why we distrust the serene moralist who has not approved his principles in some crisis. He would be troubled, broken even, if he had made that conquest. Yet the man who has proved himself in a crisis may be serene in words, for his battle was not in contemplation where words are combatants.

  XXIV

  Last night my sister told me that this book of Synge’s (his poems) was the only book they began to print on a Friday. They tried to avoid this but could not, and it is not at all well printed. Do all they could, it would not come right.

  XXV

  Molly Allgood has just told me of three pre-visions. Some years ago, when the company were in England on that six weeks’ tour, she, Synge and D--- were sitting in a tea-shop, she was looking at Synge, and suddenly the flesh seemed to fall from his face and she saw but a skull. She told him this and it gave him a great shock, and since then she had not allowed images to form before her eyes of themselves, as they often used to do. Synge was well at the time. Again last year, but before the operation and at a time when she had no fear, she dreamed that she saw him in a coffin being lowered into a grave, and a ‘strange sort of cross’ was laid over the coffin. (The company sent a
cross of flowers to his funeral and it was laid upon the grave.) She told this also to Synge and he was troubled by it. Then some time after the operation she dreamed that she saw him in a boat. She was on the shore, and he waved his hand to her and the boat went away. She longed to go to him but could not.

  XXVI

  March 11, Stratford-on-Avon.

  Some weeks ago C--- wrote to me that it was a phase of M---’s madness to believe himself in heaven. All the great poets of other times were there, and he was helping to prepare for the reception of Swinburne. The angels were to stand in groups of three. And now I have just heard that Swinburne is dead.

  XXVII

  Dined with Ricketts and Shannon. Ricketts spoke of the grief Synge’s death gave him---the ending of all that work. We talked of the disordered and broken lives of modern men of genius and the so different lives of the Italian painters. He said in those days men of genius were cared for, but now the strain of life is too heavy, no one thinks of them till some misfortune comes---madness or death. He then spoke, as he often does, of the lack of any necessary place for the arts in modern life and said, ‘After all, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was the Pope’s ceiling’. Later he said in comment upon some irascible act of Hugh Lane’s, ‘Everybody who is doing anything for the world is very disagreeable, the agreeable people are those for whom the world is doing something’.

  XXVIII