FullReads

In writing of Jack Yeats mention must be made of his black and white work, which at its best has a primitive intensity. The lines have a kind of Gothic quality, reminding one of the rude glooms, the lights and lines of some half-barbarian cathedral. They are very expressive and never undecided. The artist always knows what he is going to do. There is no doubt he has a clear image before him when he takes up pen or brush. A strong will is always directing the strong lines, forcing them to repeat an image present to the inner eye. In his early days Jack Yeats loafed about the quays at Sligo, and we may be sure he was at all the races, and paid his penny to go into the side-shows, and see the freaks, the Fat Woman and the Skeleton Man. It was probably at this period of his life he was captured by pirates of the Spanish Main. My remembrance of Irish county towns at that time is that no literature flourished except the Penny Dreadful and the local press. I may be doing Jack Yeats an injustice when hailing him at the beginning of a fascinating career I yet suspect a long background of Penny Dreadfuls behind it. How else could he have drawn his pirates? They are the only pirates in art who manifest the true pride, glory, beauty, and terror of their calling as the romantic heart of childhood conceives of it. The pirate has been lifted up to a strange kind of poetry in some of Jack Yeats’ pictures. I remember one called “Walking the Plank.” The solemn theatrical face, lifted up to the blue sky in a last farewell to the wild world and its lawless freedom, haunted me for days. There was also a pen-and-ink drawing I wish I could reproduce here. A young buccaneer, splendid in evil bravery, leaned across a bar where a strange, beastly, little, old, withered, rat-like figure was drawing the drink. The little figure was like a devil with the soul all concentrated into malice, and the whole picture affected one with terror like a descent into some ferocious human hell.

In all these figures, pirates or peasants, there is an ever present suggestion of poetry; it is in the skies, or in the distance, or in the colors; and these people who laugh in the fairs will have after hours as solemn as the quiet star-gazer in the “Midsummer Eve.” This poetry is evident in the oddest ways, and escapes analysis, so elusive and so original is it, as in the “Street of Shows.” Nothing at first thought seems more hopelessly remote from poetry than the country circus, with its lurid posters of the Giant Schoolgirl, the Petrified Man, and the Mermaid, all in strong sunlight; but the heart carries with it its own mood, and this flaring scene has undergone some indefinite transformation by the alchemy of genius, and it assumes the character of a fairy tale or Arabian Nights Entertainment imagined in the fantastic dreams of childhood. The sleepy doorkeeper is a goblin or gnome. Perhaps the charm of it all is that it is so evidently illusion, for when the heart is strong in its own surety it can look out on the world, and smile on things which would be unendurable if felt to be permanent, knowing they are only dreams.

Many of these sketches have a largeness, almost a nobility, of conception, which is, I think, a gift from father to son. “After the Harvest’s Saved” is something elemental. The “Post-car” suggests the horses of the sun, or the stage coach in De Quincey’s extraordinary dream, when the opium had finally rioted in his brain, and transformed his stage-coach into a chariot carrying news of some everlasting victory. Blake has said “exuberance is genius,” and there is an excess of energy or passion, or a dilation of the forms, or a peace deeper than mere quietude in the figures of Mr. Yeats’ pictures, which gives them that symbolic character which genius always impresses on its works.

The coloring grows better every year; it is more varied and purer. It is sometimes sombre, as in the tragic and dramatic “Simon the Cyrenian,” and sometimes rich and flowerlike, but always charged with sentiment, and there is a curious fitness in it even when it is evidently unreal. These blues and purples and pale greens–what crowd ever seemed clad in such twilight colors? And yet we accept it as natural, for this opalescence is always in the mist-laden air of the West; it enters into the soul today as it did into the soul of the ancient Gael, who called it Ildathach–the many-colored land; it becomes part of the atmosphere of the mind; and I think Mr. Yeats means here to express, by one of the inventions of genius, that this dim radiant coloring of his figures is the fitting symbol of the fairyland which is in their hearts. I have not felt so envious of any artist’s gift for a long time; not envy of his power of expression, but of his way of seeing things. We are all seeking today for some glimpse of the fairyland our fathers knew; but all the fairylands, the Silver Cloud World, the Tirnanoge, the Land of Heart’s Desire, rose like dreams out of the human soul, and in tracking them there Mr. Yeats has been more fortunate than us all, for he has come to the truth, perhaps hardly conscious of it himself.

1902