By the way, he
illustrated the fact that that kind of patriotism that assumes the King
can do no wrong,--that is, that the Irish people can do no wrong,--and
that whoever exposes their wrongdoing is no patriot, is a mistaken sort
of patriotism.

Late in 1906 his "Deirdre" was successfully produced at the Abbey
Theatre, Dublin. It presents only the last chapter of this, the saddest
tale of the three heart-burdening tales that are known as "The Three
Sorrows of Story-Telling," but it presents it so poignantly and with so
keen an emphasis on the quick-passing of all things sweet, that it takes
place, for all its slightness, with the world's greatest tragedies that
are tragedies because of the overthrow therein of "queens ... young and
fair." There are few Irish writers whose concern is with things Irish
who have not retold this, the greatest love story of Ireland, but none
of them, from Sir Samuel Ferguson down to our own day, have retold it so
nobly as Mr. Yeats, save only Synge, and his restatement of it, of the
whole story from Deirdre's girlhood to her death, has about it a
grandeur and triumphing beauty that make further retellings not to be
tolerated.

It is not lines, "purple patches," one remembers from "Deirdre," but the
whole play, its every situation, its setting. That setting so
quintessentializes, in the words Mr. Yeats used to describe it, the
romance of the old haunted woods where any adventure is possible, that I
must quote it in full:--

A Guest-house in a wood. It is a rough house of timber; through the
doors and some of the windows one can see the great spaces of the
wood, the sky dimming, night closing in. But a window to the left
shows the thick leaves of a coppice; the landscape suggests
silence and loneliness. There is a door to right and left, and
through the side windows one can see anybody who approaches either
door, a moment before he enters. In the centre, a part of the house
is curtained off; the curtains are drawn. There are unlighted
torches in brackets on the walls There is, at one side, a small
table with a chessboard and chessmen upon it, and a wine flagon and
loaf of bread. At the other side of the room there is a brazier
with a fire; two women, with musical instruments beside them,
crouch about the brazier: they are comely women of about forty.
Another woman, who carries a stringed instrument, enters hurriedly;