confused and excited, knowing not what to do, and ill before many days,
but it made no difference in his work. He neither exaggerated out of
defiance nor softened out of timidity. He wrote on as if nothing had
happened, altering 'The Tinker's Wedding' to a more unpopular form, but
writing a beautiful serene 'Deirdre,' with, for the first time since his
'Riders to the Sea,' no touch of sarcasm or defiance. Misfortune shook
his physical nature while it left his intellect and his moral nature
untroubled. The external self, the mask, the persona was a shadow,
character was all.




XII


He was a drifting silent man full of hidden passion, and loved wild
islands, because there, set out in the light of day, he saw what lay
hidden in himself. There is passage after passage in which he dwells upon
some moment of excitement. He describes the shipping of pigs at Kilronan
on the North Island for the English market: 'when the steamer was getting
near, the whole drove was moved down upon the slip and the curraghs were
carried out close to the sea. Then each beast was caught in its turn and
thrown on its side, while its legs were hitched together in a single
knot, with a tag of rope remaining, by which it could be carried.

Probably the pain inflicted was not great, yet the animals shut their
eyes and shrieked with almost human intonations, till the suggestion of
the noise became so intense that the men and women who were merely
looking on grew wild with excitement, and the pigs waiting their turn