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.




X


As I read 'The Aran Islands' right through for the first time since he
showed it me in manuscript, I come to understand how much knowledge of
the real life of Ireland went to the creation of a world which is yet as
fantastic as the Spain of Cervantes. Here is the story of 'The Playboy,'
of 'The Shadow of the Glen;' here is the 'ghost on horseback' and the
finding of the young man's body of 'Riders to the Sea,' numberless ways
of speech and vehement pictures that had seemed to owe nothing to