dental, as when the Word had become flesh and
dwelt among us. His inspiration is akin to that of the prophets of old,
whose words rang but for an instant and were still, yet they created
nations whose only boundaries were the silences where their speech had
not been heard. His majestical figures are prophecies. His ecstatic
landscapes bring us nigh to the beauty which was in Eden. His art is a
divine adventure, in which he, like all of us who are traveling in so
many ways, seeks, consciously or unconsciously, to regain the lost unity
with nature and the knowledge of his own immortal being, and it is so
you will best understand it.

1906

AN ARTIST OF GAELIC IRELAND

The art of Hone and the elder Yeats, while in spirit filled with a
sentiment which was the persistence of ancient moods into modern times,
still has not the external characteristics of Gaeldom; but looking at
the pictures of the younger Yeats it seemed to me that for the first
time we had something which could be called altogether Gaelic. The
incompleteness of the 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 Muglas Hyde suggests itself to me as a
literary parallel. These sketches have all the prodigality of invention,
the exuberance of gesture, and 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,