An Artist of Gaelic Ireland

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AN ARTIST OF GAELIC IRELAND. By A. E. I WROTE a few days ago about the art of Hone and the elder Yeats, an art, which, while in spirit filled with a sentiment which was the persistence of ancient moods into modern times, still had not the external characteristics of Gaeldom; and in looking at the exhibition, now open, of the younger Yeats it seemed to me that for the first time I saw something which could be called altogether Gaelic. The incompleteness of these sketches suggests the term "folk" as expressing exactly the inspiration of this very genuine art. We have had abundance of Irish folk-lore, but we knew nothing of folk art until the figures of Jack Yeats first romped into our imagination a few years ago. It was the folk feeling lit up by genius and interpreted by love. It was not, and is now less than ever, the patronage bestowed by the intellectual artist on the evidently picturesque forms of a life below his own. I suspect Jack Yeats thinks the life of the Sligo fisherman is as good a method of life as any, and that he could share it for a long time without being in the least desirous of a return to the comfortable life of convention. The name of Douglas Hyde suggests itself to me as a literary parallel. These sketches have all the prodigality of invention, the exuberance of gesture, and the animation of "The Twisting of the Rope," and the poetry is of as high or higher an order. In the drawing called "Midsummer Eve" there is a mystery which is not merely the mystery of night and shadow. It is the mystery of the mingling of spirit with spirit which is suggested by the solitary figure with face upturned to the stars. We have all memories of such summer nights when into the charmed heart falls the enchantment we call ancient, though the days have no fellows, nor will ever have any, when the earth glows with the dusky hues of rich pottery, and the stars, far withdrawn into faery altitudes, dance with a gaiety which is more tremendous and solemn than any repose. The night of this picture is steeped in such a dream, and I know not whether it is thought turns from the stars to the flowers with no feeling of descent into an alien world. But this mood is rare in life as in art, and it is only occasionally that the younger Yeats becomes the interpreter of the spirituality of the peasant. He is more often the recorder of the extravagant energies of the race-course and the market place, where he finds herded together all the grotesque humours of West Irish life. Yet in all these there is an ever present suggestion of poetry; it is in the skies, or in the distance, or in the colours; 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 Gia…