But to return to Mr. Yeats. Some earlier pictures show him attempting to
paint directly the ideal world of romance and poetry; yet interesting
as these are, they do not convey the same impression of mystery as the
pictures of today. Indeed, the light seen behind or through a veil
is always more suggestive than the unveiled light. It may be that
the spirit is a formless breath which pervades form, and it is better
revealed as a light in the eyes, as a brooding expression, than by the
choice of ancient days and other-world subjects, where the shapes can be
molded to ideal forms by the artist's will. However it is, it is certain
that Millet, the realist, is more spiritual than Moreau or Burne-Jones
for all their archaic design; and Mr. Yeats, who, as his King Goll
shows, might have been a great romantic painter, has probably chosen
wisely, and has painted more memorable pictures than if he had gone back
to the fairyland of Celtic mythology.
To turn from Yeats to Hone is to turn from the lighted hearth to the
wilderness. Humanity is very far away, or is huddled up under immense
skies, where it seems of less importance than the rocks. The earth on
which men have lived, where the work of their hand is evident, with all
the sentiment of the presence of man, with smoke arising from numberless
homes, is foreign to Mr. Hone. The monsters of the primeval world might
sprawl on the rocks, for all the evidence of lapse of time since their
day, in many of his pictures. He, too, has refined away his world until
only fragments of the earth remain to him where he can dream in; and
these are waste places, where the salt of the sea is in the wind, and
the skies are gray and vapor-laden, or the loneliness of dim twilights
are over level sands. Whatever else he paints is devoid of its proper
interest, for he seems to impose on the cattle in the fields and on the
habitable places a sentiment alien to their nature. He has a mind with
but one impressive mood, and his spirit is never kindled, save in the
society where none intrude; but in his own domain he is a master, and is
always sure of himself and his effect. There is no tentative, undecisive
brushwork, such as we often see in the subtle search for the unrevealed,
which makes or mars Mr. Yeats' work. He is at home in his peculiar
world, while the other is always seeking for it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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