tual destiny of our race and
praised the night's work, for the play was refined and the people really
very attentive, and he could not understand my discontent; but presently
he was silenced by the patter of jokes.

I had my breakfast by myself the next morning, for the players had got
up in the middle of the night and driven some ten miles to catch an
early train to Dublin, and were already on their way to their shops and
offices. I had brought the visitor's book of the hotel to turn over its
pages while waiting for my bacon and eggs, and found several pages full
of obscenities, scrawled there some two or three weeks before, by Dublin
visitors it seemed, for a notorious Dublin street was mentioned. Nobody
had thought it worth his while to tear out the page or block out the
lines, and as I put the book away impressions that had been drifting
through my mind for months rushed up into a single thought. 'If we poets
are to move the people, we must reintegrate the human spirit in our
imagination. The English have driven away the kings, and turned the
prophets into demagogues and you cannot have health among a people if
you have not prophet, priest and king.'

PERSONALITY AND THE INTELLECTUAL ESSENCES

My work in Ireland has continually set this thought before me, 'How can
I make my work mean something to vigorous and simple men whose attention
is not given to art but to a shop, or teaching in a National School, or
dispensing medicine?' I had not wanted to 'elevate them' or 'educate
them,' as these words are understood, but to make them understand my
vision, and I had not wanted a large audience, certainly not what is
called a national audience, but enough people for what is accidental and
temporary to lose itself in the lump. In England where there have been
so many changing activities and so much systematic education one only
escapes from crudities and temporary interests among students, but here
there is the right audience could one but get its ears. I have always
come to this certainty, what moves natural men in the arts is what moves
them in life, and that is, intensity of personal life, intonations that
show them in a book or a play, the strength, the essential moment of a
man who would be exciting in the market or at the dispensary door. They
must go out of the theatre with the strength they live by strengthened
with looking upon some passion that could, whatever its chosen way of
life, strike down an enemy,