Jack B. Yeats An Appreciation and an Interpretation

A Machine Readable Version

Thomas MacGreevy

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The writing of this essay was undertaken in the first instance as an act of homage to a great artist and a great Irishman. It was written, however, not at home where I think I write best, but in London, and with a view to publication in London. That meant that I had to take account of London standards of art criticism. These, ever since the beginning of English art criticism with the publication of Burke's essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, have been increasingly secularist in tendency. But the Irish mind, though nearly a century of regular English education has given it understanding of the English mind, is not secularist. So there, as Henry James would say, I precariously was, an Irishman writing about an Irish artist, but faced with the problem of dealing with my subject in such a way as to interest an England that had no such advantage in the matter of Irish education as Ireland had had in that of English education. A lesser complication was the fact that the London of those days was the London of appeasement whereas my feelings were those of a premature anti-Fascist. The obvious thing to do seemed to be to concede whatever was valid in English critical standards, but to reason out those standards to the point where their limitations began at least to be evident. I had English friends who were taken with the idea. They were interested in Ireland and anxious for a better understanding of and with [p.4] Ireland on the part of their own countrymen. They knew as I knew that art criticism is usually regarded as only a minor department of philosophy, but they believed with me that even there understanding is important—for understanding is important, always and everywhere

However, their view of the matter was not shared by London publishers, at least a dozen of whom rejected my essay. Now, after nearly eight years, an Irish publisher insists on bringing it out and I must only hope that it will not seem as un-Irish in Ireland as apparently it seemed un-English in England. I have made few substantial and no critically significant alterations, merely adding the short postscript in which I try to suggest the developments of Mr. Yeats's art since the essay was written.

I may be permitted to add that I do not feel called upon to apologise for introducing questions of either religion or patriotism in this essay or in writing about art anywhere. If art is concerned with religion and patriotism I do not see why art criticism should ignore them. And art is much more frequently concerned with them than is generally realised. Thus, outwardly, Cézanne's art is seldom religious and never patriotic, yet when Monet wrote to him that the very secularist Clemenceau was ready to take such an interest in his work as would bring it to the world's notice the unworldly great artist replied: Je suis prét á vous croire, mon cher Monet, que Monsieur Clemenceau est un brave homme, et un patriote méme, mais il vaut mieux pour moi de m'appuyer sur Rome. He could hardly say fairer than that.

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If I were asked by an outsider what Jack Yeats paints that makes his work as important as I think it, I should probably begin by answering obscurely, "He paints the Ireland that matters." Obscurely, for then the elucidations and amplifications would have to begin. It would have to be agreed that technically Jack Yeats is a master. But technical mastery is a thing that is either self-evident or not evident at all. I should not waste much time trying to demonstrate its presence to a man who could not perceive it for himself. Besides, technical mastery is only a point of departure. What is important is the use to which the technical mastery is put. What does the master do with his mastery ?

For me then, Jack Yeats uses his mastery to depict and express the Ireland that matters. Ireland, it will be said, is small. Does it matter? Does anything in Ireland matter? The answer is that every place in which there are human beings matters. The smallest and most allegedly backward community includes precisely the same essential elements as the most highly civilized aggregation of human beings. Only the superficialities change. Essentially Ibsen's Enemy of the People in his remote Norwegian small town is Prometheus at odds with the gods on Olympus. The one is the over-obstinate man of goodwill, the other the over-obstinate god of goodwill. Human beings can but attribute their own qualities [p.6] to the gods, and the hero-god of mythology does not differ essentially in their eyes from the hero-man of reality. The Prometheus of Aeschylus speaks the language of a more exalted poetic order than that of Ibsen's hero. But the impulses behind their speech are the same.

If my interlocutor were willing to discuss the question further and, allowing that anything in Ireland could matter, enquired what that thing might be, I should have to answer with apparent platitudinousness that what matters in Ireland is what has mattered at all times in all places, and in art as in life, the classical trinity of the true, the good and the beautiful. That trinity constitutes the part of the Kingdom of God that even profane philosophers allow to be within us. Le vrai, one of them has said, qui est le pere et qui engendre le bon qui est le fils, d'oú procede le beau qui est le saint-esprit. The art of any epoch expresses these enduring things in terms of that epoch. Outward appearances alter with time but as long as the human race is known to have existed the things it has, against all temptation, cherished most in itself have been the bases of its self-expression.

The need for self-preservation ^expression is fundamental in all creatures but only man achieves it consciously in enduring forms through the arts of imitation. Man can imitate not only material forms but also immaterial moods. A building or a musical composition is not an imitation of any material form in nature, but a builder or a composer will be able to make it expressive, to make it gracious or awe-inspiring, colourful or formal, according to the occasion. It is only when a building or a musical composition, (or even a definitive imitation), has some human expressiveness of that kind that we consider it a work of [p.7] art. In spite of a widely propagated theory to the contrary, the merely functional is not enough to give man aesthetic delight. The modern world is full of things that perfectly fulfil their functions, the motor car, the telephone, the zip fastener. But nobody has ever meditated philosophically on these things as, since the world began, men have meditated on works of art. For works of art are essential and these things are inessential—the world went on without them for thousands of years. What has never been inessential is the impulse in humanity to delight in its own potential truth, goodness and beauty. So great is man's delight in these qualities that he cannot but believe they have their source in an external Spirit which is all truth, goodness and beauty. And in art man rates highest that which most convincingly imitates them.

The artist may, of course, imitate forms that are the reverse of delightful. Thus the Gothic sculptor imitated the forms of nightmare. But he represented them as vanquished by more sympathetic forms. There are troubled artists who emphasize the unpleasing aspect of things but such artists obviously imply a canon of the true, the good and the beautiful as surely as the artist who emphasizes the pleasing aspect of things affirms such a canon. Many artists emphasize now one aspect and now the other. In the uneasy world of the present day an artist like Pablo Picasso who often represents nightmare forms will sometimes turn away from them to paint figures of more or less orthodox classical perfection as, in the disintegrating mediaeval world of the fifteenth century, Hieronymus Bosch would occasionally turn from his usual forms of terror to paint such relatively orthodox and sympathetic figures as those in The Adoration of the Shepherds at Brussels—not to speak of the natural loveliness of the landscape and atmosphere against which, by [p.8] way of contrast, he always depicted the forms of horror that haunted his imagination.

Jack Yeats, however, is not a Bosch or a Picasso. He has nothing to do with nightmare. He does not imply the true, the good and the beautiful. He states them directly in terms of human beings and of landscape. He is classical instinctively, not by an effort of will. I mean, needless to say, classical in temper not classicist in manner. There is nothing to be classicist about in the Irish landscape or in Irish attire. The Irish landscape is different in character from the Mediterranean landscape. And it has no ruins from classical antiquity. Nor do the common people of Ireland look as though they had strayed out of classical antiquity as represented by its own artists or as imagined by the artists of the Renaissance. Again, they are less elegantly arrayed than the members of the luxurious societies of Renaissance Florence, Renaissance Venice, and seventeenth and eighteenth century France or even the puritan society of seventeenth century Holland. But like every genuine artist, Jack Yeats knows that the humanities are far more important than the brocades or the rags in which they are clothed. He also knows, as, for instance, Jacopo Bassano and Velazquez had known before him, that paint can make rags as humanly beautiful if not as socially elegant as the brocades. And thus he has been able to express the humanities in terms of an under-dog, conquered people. It is through him that, after centuries of repression had brought them down to zero in all the arts, the under-dog, conquered people of Ireland came for the first time to a measure of self-expression in the modern art of painting. Whether they were or were not conscious of being his models is of no [p.9] importance. What is of importance is that they drew him, an Anglo-Irishman by origin, to themselves and held him so that he came to identify himself with them, found himself in them and in all his painting years has scarcely ever gone outside of their lives for the subject matter of his pictures. He and they between them have expressed a way of life that had not previously been expressed in paint. His work, therefore, is a new chapter in the history of art. The life depicted in his pictures is the life of the petit peuple in Ireland. Many artists in many countries have, of course, depicted the life of the petit peuple round them. The Gothic sculptors and stained glass painters depicted it in thirteenth century France. The fourteenth century French illuminator, Pol de Limbourg was probably the first artist who carried it into painting, and through the Le Nains, Chardin, Millet and Courbet it has held its own in French art right down to our own day. Jacopo Bassano and a few others depicted it in sixteenth century and seventeenth century Italy. All the artists of seventeenth century Spain depicted it in both their religious and profane pictures. A comparatively large number of painters depicted it in seventeenth century Holland. But in each and every one of those countries the life of the petit peuple was but part of the varied life of a society that, though organized in classes, was a unity, and the depicting of it in art constituted nothing more than one genre in a national art that included numerous genres. What was unique in Ireland was that the life of the people considered itself, and was in fact, spiritually and culturally as well as politically, the whole life of the nation. Those who acted for the nation officially were outside the nation. They had a stronger sense of identity with the English governing class than with the people of Ireland and their art was no more than a province of English art. The [p.10] first genuine artist, therefore, who so identified himself with the people of Ireland as to be able to give true and good and beautiful artistic expression to the life they lived, and to that sense of themselves as the Irish nation, inevitably became not merely a genre painter like the painters of the petit peuple in other countries and not merely a national painter in the sense that Pol de Limbourg, Louis Le Nain, Bassano, Ostade or Jan Steen were national painters, but the national painter in the sense that Rembrandt and Velazquez and Watteau were national painters, the painter who in his work was the consummate expression of the spirit of his own nation at one of the supreme points in its evolution. That Rembrandt was influenced by Caravaggio, Velazquez by Bassano and Watteau by Rubens does not make them less Dutch or Spanish or French. They used Caravaggio and Bassano and Rubens for a peculiarly Dutch, peculiarly Spanish and peculiarly French purpose in each case. With men of genius influences are things to use not things to be used by.

The outside influences to which Jack Yeats may have submitted himself in the process of his formation as a painter are hard to discern. His painted work seems to have been extremely personal from the beginning. We may allow ourselves to believe that he would readily acknowledge the qualities of a Constable, a Daumier, a Millet. Yet it is to be doubted whether he has ever got anything more than encouragement to go his own way from them or from any painter. There is no trace of even remotely approximate imitation of other painters in his work. He has obviously found his own way to artistic maturity. I have thought, looking at Constable's Salisbury Cathedral, (No. 2651), in the English National Gallery and Leaping [p.11] Horse , (No. 986), in the Sheepshanks Collection at South Kensington, that Jack Yeats may, at one time, have used Constable's technique in landscape as a point of departure. It would be natural for a young Irish art student of nearly forty years ago to do so. There was no known Irish point of departure in painting and the great landscape painters of the continent were not represented by any very inspiring works in public or private Irish collections. Of the Irish painters then living, Nathaniel Hone, who, at his best, is worthy to be ranked with Jacob Ruisdael, worked in seclusion. And in any case the austere gravity that was his habitual mood could not be expected to appeal to a young artist who was all eager sympathy. Nor was the charming but rather tenuous work of Walter Osborne likely to detain him. There had been other Irish and Anglo-Irish artists of merit. The greatest of them was the eighteenth century painter, James Barry, a genius of truly metropolitan intellect and artistic equipment. But Barry had had to work out of Ireland, and now he was out of favour, almost forgotten. The following was added in MacGreevy's hand: "Actually it was through acquaintance with the Impressionists in the Lane collection that Jack Yeats came to Impressionism as a technique. Lane's pictures were on exhibition in Dublin for years after 1908." N

On the other hand Constable's fame was being definitively established. Jack Yeats could see his work in London and as a young artist as much interested in landscape as in figure painting he would probably study it. His objective, however, was not Constable's objective. Jack Yeats was concerned with human values. Constable was not. It was not only that Constable had no interest in depicting either the sins of society like Hogarth of its airs and graces like Reynolds, Gainsborough and Lawrence — that his portraits are negligible. It was that, so far as we can see, he had no preoccupation whatever with humanity apart from himself. The inhabitants of the rustic scenes he painted are mere conventions, animated objects appropriate to the landscape, like birds and beasts, [p.12] nothing more. It is clear from his work even if we never had Leslie's memoir that in the matter of human beings Constable was a man of very limited sympathies. He identified himself with the earth and the things that grow in the earth, and with the sky, much more than with humanity. He certainly could not be described as a humanist. Jack Yeats was all humanist. If he did use Constable's technique as a point of departure — I do not know that he did — it was to follow a very different road. Constable had all but eliminated humanity from the natural scene. Jack Yeats was to keep the natural scene as natural, as unconventionalized, as Constable had left it but he was to people it with human beings who had character as well as functional appropriateness to the scene. And his concern with the natural scene itself was a human concern. He occasionally depicted it unpeopled, a solitude, but such a solitude as could clearly provide an enlargement of one's human experience. For it had features not likely to be perceived in the relative automatism of everyday life, infinite distances, mountains, the ethereal light of the west of Ireland coast, magical effects of green, gold and white against depths of glowing and gleaming blue splashed with vermillion. And yet as true and substantial as they were magical — one has only to read Dr. Lloyd Praeger's descriptions of Irish landscape in The Way That I Went to find science confirming the objective truth of the artist's vision.

Most frequently, however, Jack Yeats depicted the natural scene as the normal environment of the humanity he is chiefly concerned with. He does not in the slightest degree scamp it. His humanism comprehends the wonder of it but he is no tasteless Wordsworthian pantheist moralizing about the meanest flower that blows. Nor does his work suggest that he considers one subject as [p.13] good as another. He knew all the loveliness of the common scene but he knew too that in view of the circumstances in which we live some scenes are more inspiring than others. And so, though he could realize the inherent quality of each of the varied aspects of the Irish landscape and make his impressions of them haunt the memory as the scenery depicted by Perugino or Claude or Constable or Corot haunts the memory, it was not at any sacrifice of the interest of the human life that perceived them or that was associated with them.

I do not, just here, want to speak of Jack Yeats's landscape as a mere background to his human figures and human scenes because I think he has struck a new balance between the landscape and the figure. In the matter of relative amounts of space it is much the same balance as in Renaissance Italian painting. The Perugino landscape is as important in relation to the whole picture as the Jack Yeats landscape. But with Perugino the figures are conventionalized whereas with Jack Yeats they always have character. Again, with Millet at a later date, the spatial balance is similar. But the Millet scene is as conventional as the Perugino figures. Those cornfields at Chailly, those glades in the forest of Fontainebleau, are little more than appropriate décors for Millet's touchingly real gleaners and woodcutters. With Jack Yeats, the landscape is as real as the figures. It has its own character as they have theirs. It is impersonal. They are the reverse. But the sense of the impersonal is an enrichment of the personal, a new element added to the humanity of the figures. And conversely, the opposition heightens the sense of the impersonal character of the landscape. The great humanist painters of Italy, even in Venice, had subdued the landscape to the mood of the figures. With the rise of the great landscape painters the situation was [p.14] reversed. For Salvator Rosa, for Poussin when he concentrated his attention seriously on landscape, for Claude at all times, for Ruisdael and for Constable, the figures are mere conventions. I do not think I am claiming too much for Jack Yeats when I say that nobody before him had juxtaposed landscape and figure without subduing the character of either to that of the other. I am quite certain that nobody before him did it consistently. Association and apartness at one and the same time have never been more clearly stated in terms of art.

It would be doing a disservice to Jack Yeats to over-state the importance of his position in the history of art but I think I have not overstated it here. It is obvious that the elucidation of any artist's position in relation to his great predecessors, the establishing of the points in which he resembles them and differs from them, can help one to estimate the full extent and true limits of his achievement. Thus Perugino's name appears here only because of his surprisingly perfect feeling for the landscape of Central Italy. Even the best of his figures, those in the Collegio del Cambio at Perugia, are almost devoid of character and have validity chiefly as decoration. Nor is there any question here of the grandiose, either the instinctive grandiose of a Titian or a Rubens or the more self-conscious grandiose of a Mantegna or a Poussin, any more than there is of the artistic meanness, (what Aristotle called ΤαπεινσΤης), of an Ostade or a Dou. Jack Yeats does not deal in either the grandiose or the mean. He is neither superhuman nor sub-human. He is something it is often less easy to be. He is human.

A few months ago Samuel Beckett wrote me that he had been looking at some recent works by Jack Yeats. "He [p.15] grows Watteauer and Watteauer." he commented. I was startled by the comparison, for, superficially, nothing could be more different than the work of the two artists, Watteau's figures being in the first instance all linear draughtsmanship of the most exquisitely pencilled quality, whereas with Jack Yeats's figures the drawing is a matter of swift and summary, though extraordinarily telling, brushwork. But the association held its own in my mind and when I had got over the surprise of having to co-relate the actual images which the works of the two painters had left in my memory, I found myself establishing points of similarity, not in their techniques but in their human approach. I realized that their subjects were oddly akin. Humanly speaking, it may be said that Watteau's lords and ladies and Jack Yeats's peasants differ only in externals, as Jack Yeats's clowns differ from Gilles and Mezzetin only to the degree that the human (as distinct from the animal) element in the circus and music-hall differs from the commedia dell' arte, which is to say that it is but a question of time and place. Juan Ramon Jimenez used to tell a story of a Spanish tramp who said to a grandee, "You are above the law and I am below the law so we are equals." In Ireland the whole people were below the law so something of the same kind might be said in comparing Watteau's figures and Jack Yeats's. For the human beings represented in the works of the two painters are equals in that they are artists in living. No aristocracy in history has consisted exclusively of consciously beautiful people. Watteau's imaginary aristocracy does. His aristocrats are all artists in living as his artists are all aristocrats in art. It is their pleasure to be, perfectly, their essential selves and that pleasure in integrity is their life, though it isolates them from everyday humanity and the sense of that isolation gives many of them an air of [p.16] melancholy. Jack Yeats's people are frequently depicted in the pursuit of pleasure, at the circus or music-hall, at race meetings, or simply in conversation with each other. Yet often the expression on their faces suggests restraint, thoughtfulness, an inner discipline. Outwardly they so obviously belong to a more primitive state of society than has ever been depicted without condescension in Western European painting that their attitude to existence, their human significance, may easily be overlooked. In reality they express a philosophy of existence all the more clearly for being untrammelled by the airs and graces, the outward mannerisms, of a privileged class in a highly organized society. Watteau's characters are so consciously pleasing that the superficial observer might miss the thoughtfulness of their expression, the discretion of their gesture, and assume that they were hedonist rather than epicurean. No such mistake is possible with Jack Yeats's characters. The epicureanism is clear. It is generally accepted that the Irish are a pleasure-loving people and Jack Yeats often represents them as such. Yet the figures in his pictures are not elegant — their clothes bag about their lean bodies; they are not sensual — their faces are ascetic, thin and careworn; and their expression is thoughtful — they are bemused as much as amused. Temperate people and individualistic people, in the sense that they are not mere stereotyped conventions. Pleasing, friendly, they yet have enough character to stand out in relief against each other, apart, as they are apart from the landscape, though not, since they are human and the landscape is unhuman, to the same degree. Which is simply to say that they are epicurean in the primitive, virtuous and beautiful sense of the word.

It goes without saying that all Irish people are not like that any more than all French people are like the [p.17] figures in Watteau's pictures. But the sensitive Frenchman cherishes Watteau as an artist who elucidated and depicted something that was a peculiarly French statement of an attitude to life which is sympathetic to the French character. And similarly an Irishman of the people may feel that Jack Yeats has elucidated and depicted certain qualities in his race which it has, instinctively and against enormous, even desperate, odds, cherished and feels justified in cherishing.

When Jack Yeats was a small boy the mind of the Irish people was centred on politics though, dispossessed of the direction of their own affairs for centuries, they could have only a very slight sense of political reality. They had, of course, considerable experience of Realpolitik, meaning the mailed fist. Coercion acts were very real things in the Ireland of the 'eighties. The reaction of the dispossessed masses to the harsh realities with which an unrepresentative possessing class confronted them was a despairing concentration on the little they had left which they could feel was their own. There was a strange passionate love of the land amongst the people. Material possessions were low or gone, the arts were a broken tradition, the ideal of beauty had gone into the soil and the physical body. Their eyes had long dwelt on the form, colour and structure of the landscape. It had become personal; its praise had been sung by joyous poets or despairing poets, and had been felt by the people. An old soil well loved had given much to them, and they had put much into it. They clung to this last treasure and solace with imagination and with physical senses. On Another Man's Wound. By Earnán O'Malley. N

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Thus an Irish writer speaking of a later day when Realpolitik was flourishing again in Ireland. Politically the Irish people of the 'eighties placed their faith in one man, Charles Stewart Parnell. There were men of the people who had greater genius for political reality than the romantic Parnell, but they might not speak aloud to the people and their books when they wrote books, as some of them fortunately did, were not easily accessible. The regime and the vested interests saw to that. Then came the Parnell disaster. And that was the beginning of the end of political romanticism as an Irish characteristic. The national concentration on politics became less intense. The minds of the people began to turn to other than political preoccupations or at least to preoccupations that were only indirectly political. A handful of men remained faithful to Parnell's memory. Another handful, working underground, prepared the way for the physical force movement of twenty-five years later. But the mass of the people began for the first time in three hundred years to live like the mass of the people in other countries. They were nationalist as the people of all countries, let alone conquered countries, invariably are. But they were not as morbidly nationalist as they had been. Scepticism as to the disinterestedness of politicians began to spread and gained ground to such an extent as to provide some justification for a still widely held belief that had the leaders of the 1916 Rising not been executed (in order to satisfy the self-conceit of the representatives of that aggressive imperialism which is the only true begetter of exaggerated nationalism), the people of Ireland would probably have remained dispassionate and gone about the varied business of living as people do in all countries and as they had themselves been doing for a quarter of a century, quietly and common-sensibly, taking such interest as their private [p.19] affairs allowed in the life immediately about them, considering its problems, and amongst others the problem of its self-expression in art.

During the twenty odd years preceding 1916, Jack Yeats filled a need that had become immediate in Ireland for the first time in three hundred years, the need of the people to feel that their own life was being expressed in art. By now there was some measure of popular education, some measure of economic prosperity, some measure of political liberty, conditions that in every society have favoured the growth and spread of artistic consciousness. In the very worst times there had been good and sometimes great literature that was Irish in spirit even when, as in the cases of Moore and Mangan, it was written in English. Literature can be produced when there is no more than a bare minimum of social organisation, but architecture and the plastic arts can only flourish under a securely established social order. This last the Anglo-Irish had had for a long time but the Irish people had no place in it. Consequently the admirable buildings, sculptures and even paintings of eighteenth century Dublin, though in very many instances the work of Irishmen, meant little (except taxation) to the mass of the Irish people. Architecture and the plastic arts had had no recognised place in their lives for three hundred years. After Catholic Emancipation in 1829 there had been an outburst of ecclesiastical building, some of it very good indeed, though as the age of imperialist expansion developed in England we had to put up with rather more than our share of Gothic, and still worse, Tudor, revivalism. But now the Irish people's critical instinct began to become articulate. They began to look for reality in art, religious reality in religious art — I think particularly of the beautiful stained glass work of Michael Healy — [p.20] for living, human immediate reality in secular art. They began, in fact, to look for matter and a manner that were not alien. "Realism" was not, of course, what they were looking for. "Realist," which is to say exclusively disagreeable, art may become an imperative necessity in rotting societies, but modern Irish Ireland, so far from being rotten, was in its first youth. The rottennesses that existed in Ireland were, with a good deal of justification, attributed to the centuries of mis-government to which the country had been subjected. The Irish Ireland movement recognized their existence but it took it for granted that when its own day came it would have no difficulty in abolishing them. It would turn the country into an earthly paradise. It was a young movement and, if it had the defects, it had all the qualities of youth. It was generous-minded, tender-hearted, serious, optimistic, cheerful. For years its world was all glad confident morning. And as the Irish Irish had raw experience of the abuse of authority in every department of life, they had learned to trust, in the last resort, only in God. The corollary to which was that in regard to the things of this world they had come to a sense of high comedy — that kind of comedy sense that faces potentially tragic issues with the conviction that normally goodwill directed by intelligence can avert disaster. Irish Ireland was getting a grip on the essential humanities.

That is, I think, a fair picture of the Ireland in which Jack Yeats's genius first showed itself. He, himself, was Anglo-Irish by origin, but under the influence of the French Revolution, a small, generous-minded minority of Anglo-Irishmen had been friendly to the people ever [p.21] since the days of Wolfe Tone and Edward Fitzgerald — occasional individuals had been friendly even earlier. Jack Yeats's father was a philosopher as well as an artist and though he was a portrait painter, which meant that he spent much of his working life depicting the members of the professional and upper, that is to say the culturally non-Irish, classes, he was nationalist in his sympathies. His son, therefore, had no gulf of prejudice to bridge when his instinct impelled him towards Irish genre and landscape. Jack Yeats had spent a considerable part of his boyhood in County Sligo with his grandfather and was allowed to mix freely with the people. He knew their life from the inside to a degree that very few Anglo-Irishmen before him had known it and when he came to paint it he could paint it truthfully. He could also, since God had created him sympathetic, paint it sympathetically. He knew that it was not made up of quaint insects to be laughed at and then brushed out of the way as one might gather from some Anglo-Irish novels, nor of repulsive monsters to be pitied and preached about as one might gather from some others. He knew that when it came to personal matters the Irish Irish were up against much the same problems as the Anglo-Irish and every other people in the world and dealt with those problems in much the same way, according to the degree of intelligence and honesty which character and their circumstances made possible. And since he was born with that genius for drawing and painting, that perfect balance between perception, selection and execution, the origins of which are as inexplicable as all origins and which may be analyzed only through its outward manifestations, he drew and painted Irish life and the Irish scene beautifully.

My own first acquaintance with Jack Yeats's work dates from those peaceful days of thirty years ago when [p.22] I was set to master the language of my fathers through the medium of Miss Norma Borthwick's Irish Readers which he had illustrated. I was only a boy, but I clearly remember how surprising and yet how immediate those illustrations seemed after the conventional illustrations in my "regular" school books — for our own language was an "extra" subject. It was several years before I saw any of Jack Yeats's painted work but the spirit of it was familiar and when I did come to it, it was to find something that was already part of myself brought into consciousness and expressed fully and radiantly. For all that the artist was hardly a generation older than myself and lived in Dublin, and Devonshire and London, I had, as it were, inherited him from my childhood in the remote south-west of Ireland.

By the earlier years of the century he was beginning to be well-known. He had done some work of an illustrative character in England but it was only when he returned home that he truly found himself. Then, during the years up to 1916, he continually drew and painted the Irish scene and practically every phase and every type of out-of-doors Irish life in peace time. Even in his earliest adolescent illustrations the Irish landscape, and preferably the Irish mountain landscape, was usually the background. The foreground might be a field, a stretch of bogland or seashore, a village street or even a city street, but in Ireland the city street often provides glimpses of the mountains and it was against that mountain background, so suggestive of unchanging, extra-human, transcendent things, and, by implication, of the precariousness of all human achievement, that he painted the people of Ireland, men, women and children, at work and play, farmers, labourers, car-drivers, jockeys, ballad-singers, tramps, women, old and young, barefooted boys in rakish-looking [p.23] caps — "men with the eyes of people do be looking at the sea," as I once heard it expressed, girls with the eyes of those who belong to people do be looking at the sea.

Jack Yeats found no occasion to go outside of the everyday scene for his material and there is no excess of emphasis in his statement. We may read satire and revolution into that early sketch in which a ragged boy tries to gain a few coppers standing on the roadside on a stormy night singing, of all songs, The Big Turf Fire. His arms are raised above his head in a wild gesture of desperation as he marks the rhythm with the pair of bones in his hand. But the artist was more than a satirist or revolutionist in the everyday sense. The incident was obviously but one of a variety of incidents he noted, and he perceived the import of it and found the appropriate statement of it as he perceived the import and found the appropriate statement of others that were utterly dissimilar. Of course every genuine artist is a revolutionist by the mere fact of being a genuine artist. Genuineness, truth, however peaceable, is always revolutionary — it is usually the counter-revolutionaries who make revolution bloody.

He went on painting the people, at work — ploughing, loading turf, herding, breeding horses, going to the fair, going to the creamery, going home — islanders going home in boats — and at play — sitting in the circus, staring in at shop windows, talking together, dreaming alone. Sometimes he represented them completely idle, as for instance, he represents that retired old seaman leaning against an anchor on a quayside, whose mood gives the picture Derelict its title. Usually, however, gravity and animation were blended. Now it is a girl with delicately cut features sitting beside her stall of fruit at a fair to which farmers are riding prancing horses. Again it may be the scene in a circus with the crowd intent on the doings of [p.24] a ring-master in naively exotic attire. Occasionaly, as though the painter drew new sustenance from the natural scene undisturbed by any human presence, it is mountain or wood or lake under a radiant sky or a sky clouded over and grey with rain to come. Always, then, the horizon has the clear line that comes of a moist atmosphere, but always too the distances have the unearthly light and unearthly colours that come in unindustrialized country where ram is frequent and the sea is near—for there is no place in Ireland more than fifty miles from the sea. I remember one picture of Jack Yeats's in which a boat was pulling out from a harbour. The human subject was the crew settling down to its rowing but beyond the end of the darkly shaded pier the painter had represented a distant island in light so magical in quality that one was set dreaming of Hy Brasil, the Isle of the Blest. Human endeavour was given most prominence but there was the reminder that "human" means more than endeavour, means, for instance, appreciation of the wonders of creation—which are so very near to one in the west of Ireland and which, practically without one's realizing it, turn one's perception into something very like prayer.

The artist had, however, many less solemn moments, moments of gay and tender vivacity, especially in his pictures that included horses. There are no lovelier horses in all painting than Jack Yeats's. They have a miraculous elegance and he has always loved to paint them when they looked as though mere existence was sufficiently exhilarating, playing themselves in a field or spanking along under that light vehicle, the outside car, with heads high and manes flying.

The more stoical donkey he painted with no less sympathy. Perhaps the donkey being less nervous than the horse evokes less sympathy in most of us, but if there [p.25] is comedy in Jack Yeats's pictures of donkeys it is very affectionate comedy indeed.

With the renewal of the struggle for national liberty in 1916, the relatively calm Irish life of the preceding quarter of a century disappeared. For several years the country was given over to warfare, but to warfare that could not be faithfully represented in art since it was a warfare against imperial authority waged by hunted handfuls of men who lived (or died) "on their keeping." All of that warfare that an artist was likely to see was the tanks and lorries of imperial terrorists patrolling the country roads and streets of the towns with their rifles and machine guns levelled at the passers-by.

But what an artist might see of the life of the people in such circumstances Jack Yeats painted. Here, for instance it is a poor flower girl giving from her store "in remembrance" of the dead who died for their own traditions. There it is a man singing a patriotic song to a section of the crowd at a sports gathering in Croke Park, a centre of national expression which, like the great nineteenth century bishop from whom it took its name, had become anathema to authority.

The end of the prolonged struggle was that Ireland had not the one parliament it wanted but the two it didn't want imposed on it. Divide and rule. The country was partitioned. The imperial connection remained. And with the adroitness of experienced politicians the imperialists laid the final odium of moral defeat on the Irish themselves. Ireland was launched on a civil war.

Of the Civil War period two pictures by Jack Yeats are outstanding. One is of women prisoners who, having [p.26] broken the windows high up in the great tower of Kilmainham Gaol, are calling out messages to friends congregated in the street a little distance away. The other is of the funeral of Harry Boland, a young Republican who, was shot by troops sent to arrest him. In this picture Jack Yeats rose the full height of the heroic in art and, like Gros in The Battle of Eylau , lifted the contemporary scene on to the plane of historical painting.

The Civil War ended in 1923.

Since then, the sensitive minds that first reveal the direction in which a society is moving have shown two of the major tendencies that, in more settled countries than Ireland, were already clearly identifiable and distinguishable one from the other. The first tendency is to use such liberty as has been achieved to attain to greater abundance of individual life, a subjective tendency. The second is to insist on the need for a definitive solution of Ireland's political and, more particularly, social problems which is a more objective tendency.

The latter tendency is still too obscure to have become completely articulate in art. But the fact that the people who represent it belong to every political party and yet pay homage to the sociologist, James Connolly, as well as to the nationalist, Padraic Pearse—both of whom were executed in 1916—is probably significant. For the time being one cannot say much more than that it fulfils the perennial need to check up on authority's liability to abuse its privileges.

It is not likely that Jack Yeats has remained untouched by this objective tendency. But as he has always painted the people, "the workers," in town and country, it would be difficult to trace any such influence as a new [p.27] thing in art. It is not yesterday or the day before that Jack Yeats discovered labouring humanity. At the Celtic Races Congress in Paris in 1923, he read a paper in which he gave it as his opinon that the most stirring sights in the world are a man ploughing and a ship on the sea. He still paints the people, and with even more passionate directness in recent years than in his earlier days. Sometimes there is more outward calm but more inward intensity, fire and imagination than there used to be. I think here particularly of the timeless figure of The Breaker-Out. Impassive now, but still desperate, he might be the child of The Big Turf Fire painted twenty-five years later.

The other tendency to which I have referred, the subjective tendency, is clearly perceptible in Jack Yeats's later work, some of which is of great imaginative quality. In the life of Ireland fact and poetry had parted company. Jack Yeats's work became a passionate recall to poetry—to the splendour of essential truth. The tendency would seem to coincide with a modification of technique which dates from about 1924. The handling then began to be more summary. The palette knife was frequently substituted for the brush. Movement and colour began to predominate over form which became more fluid than hitherto. Movement and gesture are now more dramatic. Colour invention grows richer and richer and colour harmonies at once more delicate and more brilliant. In the treatment of objective reality, a drastic selective sense comes into play and form is deferred to only in so far as it is congenial to a much more self-consciously fastidious artistic temperament than of old. The balance between observation and imagination [p.28] has, in fact, altered. The artist particularises less, generalises more. At times he will make some quite humble scene look positively apocalyptic.

Imagination is primarily the faculty of relating the ephemeral to the unchanging. This faculty Jack Yeats has always had. We have seen him relating the personal to the impersonal. We have seen him, further, relating the activity of the moment to the essential elements of character. We have, above all, seen him relating observation of local and temporary occurrences in Ireland to the unchanging elements of reality in life and art. Now he turns from recorded observation to paint scenes from memory or history, and treats them more arbitrarily, more purely imaginatively, than strict adherence to the observed fact would have permitted. I have suggested that this development was due to the turn of events in Ireland, but it may also be that it was an inevitable phase of his evolution as an artist. Perhaps both factors must be taken into account. But art is never divorced from the conditions of life in which it is produced, is never wholly personal. If it were it could not mean anything to anyone except the artist. That Jack Yeats's work shows something of the subjective tendency should simply mean that he remains as Irish as ever, but as a mature man and artist, in a new Ireland realising itself with less interference from outside, has been able to deepen the springs of personal consciousness as he has found necessary, and able also to project the forms he has found at the springs of consciousness with as great mastery as those he perceives objectively. However, it be, there is no question as to the expressiveness of his later, more subjective works.

The titles of some of these pictures which I saw recently are significant. They were California , In Memory of Boucicault and Bianconi , The South Pacific , Once on a [p.29] Day and A Race in Hy-Brasil . To the popular imagination the California of the middle nineteenth century seemed scarcely less legendary and wonderful than the Hy-Brasil of Irish lore. Hy-Brasil itself might be taken as representing something of what the world of Ovid's Metamorphoses represented for the artists of the early Renaissance. Similarly the stories of the "forty-niners" of America took on something of the inspiring quality that the stories of early France in Ronsard's Franciade had for the sixteenth century tapestry designers of Beauvais or that the stories of the crusaders in Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata had for the painters of the seventeenth century. There was adventure, struggle, the glamour of achievement in a world where the things that mattered were a man's own strength, goodwill and intelligence. A world in which such politics as existed were simple, comprehensible and undisgusting. A world in which human respect was not confused with the humanities.

Jack Yeats's California is an imaginary representation of the effect of the arrival of a young woman amongst the men settlers in the western America of seventy or eighty years ago. The artist has not, so far as I know, seen the real California, but it stirs one to think that the real country and the real human beings in the scene depicted could ever, even in the imagination of an artist, have flashed simultaneously into the pure fire of living poetry as they do here. In this different world of the imagination landscape and figures can be and are at one with each other. The colour harmonies, the drawing, the composition, the expression, even the high comedy sense revealed in the untidy though extraordinarily beautiful white garments of the man in the centre of the picture, are all fused into a single mood of glowing, yet tender imaginative sympathy.

[p.30]

In Memory of Boucicault and Bianconi ostensibly represents a group of travellers—presumably actors of Boucicault's plays—at a point on a road in Ireland where a Bianconi car has halted in the dusk of the evening—the mail car service of the years before railways were laid down in Ireland was directed by an Italian named Carlo Bianconi. In the picture, the dim trees that clothe the high bank in the background, the white of a waterfall gleaming amongst them, the shadowy forms of the figures in the glimmer of the lamps of the car in the foreground, all combine to suggest the loveliness of the world and the strangeness of the human odyssey. Strolling players, men and women whose life it is to go about the world giving pleasure, a roaming Italian who made it easier for Irishmen to roam their own land, darkness, a chance light, earth, vegetation, water—they are all suggestive symbols. But mere symbols are not enough. In the wrong hands they can be platitudinous, trite. Here they are given validity by unemphatic but vital and coherent utterance.

The world of punditry may dismiss such pictures as "escapist." If it does it must also dismiss many of the works in which some of the greatest painters, Titian and Poussin and Watteau, for instance, plumbed and expressed depths of human consciousness, states of feeling, which are beyond the reach of the pundit mind as such. Otherwise the pundits must admit that like everything else the "escapism" they presume to despise implies a quality as well as a defect, an essential as well as an inessential, an affirmation as well as an evasion. Actually these critics admit all the subjectivism of horror but reject the subjectivism of loveliness, though it is just as real and just as valid. The quality of the "escapist" is of course Ulysses' quality, wit, not merely wit in the [p.31] verbal sense, but wit to make the best of things by going or staying as seems wiser. Man's life on earth is a warfare, to-day no less than three thousand years ago, and the Caesars and would-be Caesars who claim to be able to establish peace are not the least of the causes of that warfare. We know that their representatives want us to surrender not only such money as we may have and, when they want them, our lives, but also our integrity as individuals. They want our complete allegiance. It is not enough to give them the material things that alone are due to them as the servants of humanity they are supposed to be. They want more, they want everything.

In such a world, the intelligent man cannot but realize that there is only reassurance to be drawn from the deeper contemplation of the Kingdom of God, of the truth, goodness and beauty, that are to be found for the searching even within the human heart itself; that he must inevitably return from that contemplation with a renewed and steadied sense of the eternal, simple values in living ; and that he must, consequently, be of more actual use in the world than if he remained fighting it out, arguing the point, chewing the rag, all the time. Withdrawal is only dangerous when it is dictated by cowardice or by egotism, by the desire to pose as an indifférent or as an infallible expert on the unseen. In the case of Jack Yeats there is obviously no such danger. He takes all his human values into his subjective world, his sense of humour no less than his capacity for sympathy. His imagined scenes are all potentially true. And, then he returns from them to paint the objective everyday scene—with even greater mastery than before. There is a time to withdraw as there is a time to stay, a time for contemplation and a time for action, and it is through a wise alternation of the two processes and a reasonable blending of [p.32] the two elements in our nature, that fulness of being and a surer understanding of essentials are attained.

Ireland was more than adult in experience of unpleasant reality and the opportunity to develop a greater leaven of humanism, of sympathetic imagination, in the make-up of the people, was overdue. Now it has come. And for the present at any rate, there seems to be no danger of its leading to any divorce from reality, to any of the fake mysticisms. It should on the contrary, make for a more comprehensive grasp of reality, a deeper and wider understanding of essentials in living, and for the expression of that understanding in art.

That the artist is the truest register of the spirit of the community to which he belongs is not to be doubted. It is implicit even in the pronouncements of those who are remotest from the artists, the men of affairs. Thus, King Charles IX of France , addressing Ronsard, says: Ta lyre, qui ravit par de si doux accords, Te soumet les esprits, dont je n'ai que les corps. And Napoleon Buonaparte in one of his less self-centred moments observed that posterity judges a régime by the quality of the artistic monuments it leaves behind it.

To-day men of affairs are not often as intelligent or as modest as the Valois prince or as Buonaparte. The Caesars and the would-be Caesars in every country tend to claim that they represent the people in everything, though we know that in their concern for vested interests they hardly represent even the people's most elementary political need, the need for material order. Actually the peoples are represented only by disinterested men, and more particularly by artists. In resurgent Ireland the pioneer and first representative man in the art of painting was Jack B. Yeats. He has, and he will have, successors. But it remains true that, to-day as thirty years ago, his [p.33] work is the most vital statement in paint of the Ireland that has always most mattered and always will most matter, the true and good and beautiful Ireland that, to put it very simply, has a heart.

London, January, 1938.

Some little time after this essay was finished I saw the first of the large-scale masterpieces that have marked Jack Yeats's later years. That one was the Helen. For me it was in the nature of a vindication of all I had said in my last pages. For in it the artist though ostensibly concerned with Homeric Greece was being as vitally contemporary as ever. The picture shows the Queen of Sparta, her great adventure over, preparing to relaunch the ships on the voyage home. The ships crowd the sea and the whole scene is ablaze with light reflected from the fires of burning Troy. And crouching on the pier as the Queen passes is a ragged figure who has chalked the word Ilium on the pavement.

It might be suggested that here the artist had retreated (or escaped) into his ivory tower and ceased to concern himself with realities. After all Homeric Greece seems very remote from modern Ireland. But let us see. Presumably the scribbler on the pavement is the poet who begged his bread through the Ionian cities of three thousand years ago, and whose poetry as a whole, but more particularly the figure of Helen in his poetry, brought into consciousness and, for the Greeks of the time as for the [p.34] world ever since, determined, the concept of Hellas. Pictorially Jack Yeats's Helen is tremendous. But things tremendous are not produced in ivory towers. If the picture is tremendous it is because the artist conceived and executed it under the stress of the rediscovery of a great truth, the truth as to the artist's essential significance to society. The artist, poet or painter perceives and in terms of the imagination projects, the idea that the people to whom he belongs have of themselves, and thus creates the attitude that the world will have to them afterwards. Realistically considered, Queen Helen's dream ended disastrously, but for Homer it had set the soul of Greece on fire, and in Homer's writing it became the vision of the universe that the word Hellas has meant to the world ever since.

The dream of the Ireland of Jack Yeats's youth ended disastrously too. But as Homeric Greece had its poet, so that Ireland had its artist and, even if we had no other evidence, we should know on the evidence of Jack Yeats's pictures that what took possession of the soul of Ireland in the early twentieth century was in the nature of a Pentecost. When it can be said of an artist's work that it conveys that Pentecostal sense, when it can be said that the Holy Spirit, to whatever degree, informs it, then the significance of that work, and the significance of the world it expresses, are valid in themselves and destined to immortality.

I began and ended my essay with the statement that Jack Yeats painted the Ireland that mattered. I did not mean to suggest more than that he did so instinctively, but the Helen made it clear that he had evolved to full intellectual consciousness of what he was doing. And it is interesting to note that that intellectual consciousness did not lower the emotional content of his work but [p.35] heightened it. The divine fire was realised with divine fire. The Irish resurgence had seemed to end in ignominy. There were those who had come to esteem it without honour. But Jack Yeats saw beyond those who afflicted it and in his own defence called Homer to witness.

I did not see another new work by Jack Yeats for nearly three years after the Helen , but in the spring of 1941 I came home to Ireland and at the Academy Exhibition of that year found myself in the presence of a picture which in colour glowed with the mystic brilliance of a window at Chartres Cathedral. It included, however, numerous small figures which, in so far as concerned the design, seemed to be perfectly placed, but which, in the matter of human relationship, seemed difficult to connect with each other. The somewhat puzzling title was Tinkers' Encampment—The Blood of Abel .

The pictorial quality of this astonishing work could be appreciated without difficulty. It was self-evidently a great masterpiece of colour and design—probably the greatest that Jack Yeats had produced to date. But what was the literary, the intellectual, content of it? What did it mean? "Tinkers' Encampment" explained itself. The artist had always treated strollers, tinkers, gypsies and tramps of every kind, seriously, with respect. They were symbolical of the whole human odyssey. The world, after all, is no more than a temporary camping place, to which men come, and from which they go, like travelling tinkers. But The Blood of Abel! Obviously there was a reference to strife between brothers. But phrased like that what was the connotation? Unexpectedly I found it. I happened to open a Missal at the Gospel for Saint Stephen's Day and read: . . . all the just blood that hath been shed upon the earth from the blood of Abel the just, even unto the [p.36] blood of Zacharias, the son of Barachias, whom you killed between the temple and the altar. Amen, I say to you, all these things shall come upon this generation. Upon this generation! Surely the wonderful picture was a statement about the most terrible war that had ever come upon any generation, the war that had been brought about through a succession of the most revoltingly cynical treasons against the unoffending just that history has recorded. Studying the picture more closely it seemed to lend itself fully to the suggested interpretation. All the scattered figures in the foreground are in shadow. One of them has switched on an electric torch and by the light of it one sees that the ground is red with the red of blood. A world that is dark, a world in which individual human beings are isolated from each other, a world in disorder, above all a world in which blood has been spilt. What in 1941 should that mean but the world of war that was all about us? And then, beyond the middle distance in the picture, looking past the dark foreground, there is a river. Perhaps it is the river of Time. For beyond it again there is a land of more romantic aspect, a hilly, rather Irish-looking land, indistinctly defined but brighter of atmosphere. And from between the hills, dim figures, which by the rules of perspective seem to be larger than those in the foreground, are advancing. Do they represent the men of a happier world that should replace this immediate world of darkness and spilt blood?

The interpretation may or may not be the correct one. But at least it fits both the picture and the picture's title. And the mere fact that it fits suggests that the painter, far from being preoccupied with purely personal subjective fantasies, was keenly sensitive to the trend of events in the objective world outside and to their [p.37] significance in relation to values which are not personal and ephemeral but absolute and as old as the Gospel.

Since The Blood of Abel there has been a large-scale Jack Yeats masterpiece every year, most notably, perhaps, the Two Travellers of 1943 and Nil sgeach i mbeal an chuain (There is no bush at the mouth of the harbour, the phrase being a contradiction of a fatalistic proverb which says that the sea will have its own). Two Travellers, representing an apparently casual encounter in a world of mystery, is akin in temper to some earlier pictures but where there had been pathos there is now exalted tragic consciousness, stated with power at once impressive and beautifully in control. Nil sgeach i mbeal an chuain surpassed even The Blood of Abel in splendour of colour. But in the matter of colour all Jack Yeats's pictures during these last years, even the smallest, have tended to be masterpieces. I think particularly of such incomparable jewels as Low Tide on the Garavoge and Regatta Evening as well as of the grander Homage to Bret Harte , Death For Only One, Dumas , Dawn, The Dark Bathe, About to Write a Letter, the miraculous Breakfast Room and another Low Tide—on the Lee—which for our good fortune now forms part of the permanent collection at the Dublin Municipal Gallery.

One of the earliest of all these greater pictures brings us to a point that sometimes arises in discussions about the Jack Yeats of to-day. The picture is Going to Wolfe Tone's Grave and the point is the validity of the extent to which colour predominates over form in the artist's later work. In Going to Wolfe Tone's Grave (where, incidentally, the national note is struck as clearly as ever in the past), the figures, shown in the penumbra of the vestibule at Kingsbridge Station, are presented, not formally, solidly, but impressionistically, absorbed into [p.38] the scheme of light and shade. Sticklers for formal art tend to question the validity of such treatment of the figure. But for those who have no preconceived theories on the subject, and who remember that elsewhere the artist has treated the figure formally when formal treatment seemed to him to be called for, the interest is in the fact that the artistic vitality is just as great here, where colour predominates over form as in those pictures where form predominates over colour. And artistic vitality is surely more important than any casuistries of academic discussion.

It is this capacity of Jack Yeats's to get a quiveringly intensive vitality of effect by the most economic means, by a few strokes of the brush or the palette knife, which gives artistic justification to these marvellous colour compositions of his later years—as also to some few pictures where an effect of mystery is achieved through the definitive and conscious elimination of three-dimensional form. The most outstanding of these last is, perhaps, The Salt Marshes, where, in a naturalistic landscape, a ghostly and extraordinarily beautiful white horse appears but, so swift is his movement, hardly materialises. From this picture, it is quite clear that where the artist does eliminate or minimise three-dimensional form, he does so deliberately and to produce a particular effect.

Writing recently of all these pictures in which form is suggested rather than realised, and colour and movement predominate, I said that they reminded me of some of the later works of Titian and Rembrandt. Friends in the home art world took alarm at the invocation of the consecrated names of artists of universal outlook and supreme mastery in discussing the work of a contemporary Irish artist. I understood the alarm. But I had not written [p.39] what I did write without reflection, and now on further reflection I have only to repeat what I said and try to explain. The pictures by the masters that I had in mind were a certain number of Titians at the Prado and the Escorial, as also the little Madonna and Child in the Mond Collection at the English National Gallery; and then a Portrait by Rembrandt at the Louvre, in which the subject is an ageing man, presumed to be the artist's brother. In these works of the two great artists' later years the actual picture seems as informal, as undeliberate, as casual, as if it had flowered on to the canvas instead of being painted on it. And yet, if it be closely examined, every smallest passage is seen to be charged with subtle significance, artistic significance and human significance. It seems to me that the same is true of these later "informal" Jack Yeats pictures. And after all, why not? If universality of outlook and the last refinement of artistic technique were attainable for a religious painter in the little republic of Venice in the sixteenth century, and for a bourgeois painter in the little republic of Holland in the seventeenth century, why should they not be attainable for an artist of the life of the people in the little almost-republic of Ireland in the twentieth ? Universality of outlook and technical mastery in art are both a question of the capacity to understand, the capacity that is the second gift of the Holy Ghost, that was the one gift Solomon asked of the Lord. I am of opinion that the Lord bestowed the capacity to understand on Jack Yeats.

Dublin, April, 1945.