er 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 blacken 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, fill a long stocking with
money or move a girl's heart. They have not much to do with the
speculations of science, though they have a little, or with the
speculations of metaphysics, though they have a little. Their legs will
tire on the road if there is nothing in their hearts but vague
sentiment, and though it is charming to have an affectionate feeling
about flowers, that will not pull the cart out of the ditch. An exciting
person, whether the hero of a play or the maker of poems, wi