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dusky hues of rich pottery, and the stars, far withdrawn into faery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 communicated, or a feeling arising in myself; but
there seems everywhere in it the breathing of life, subtle, exultant,
penetrating. It is conceived in the mood of awe and prayer, which makes
Millet's pictures as religious as any whichever hung over the altar, for
surely the "Angelus" is one of the most spiritual of pictures, though
the peasants bow their heads and worship in a temple not built with
hands. I do not, of course, compare otherwise than in the mood the
"Midsummer Eve" to such a masterpiece; but there is a kinship between
the beauty revealed in great and in little things, and our 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 humors of West Irish life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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