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Jack B. Yeats Once More
- Cork University Press
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from becoming a native language for us, we having sovereign power over it. as things are we cannot do this. we are anchored here, side by side with England; we are also a nation, even if our nationhood is strangled; and these two facts explain why we must get on with the work of putting Irish on top if we wish to express ourselves adequately and naturally. It is either that or, eventually, the extinction of a national consciousness. Fortunately the day when national consciousnesses refuse to be extinguished is come upon the world. * * * Jack B. Yeats once More1 No, too much has not been written about the Jack B. Yeats exhibition.2 The promoters have been thanked, certainly not thanked too much.to establish such a precedent as they have done, is obviously an outstandingly good deed. to those who placed the works so happily upon the walls (no small task ever) a word of praise is also due. I have found myself unwittingly feeding my eye on a grouping here and there without taking stock of any particular picture in it. perhaps some few other words may also be said, for the evaluing of such an exhibition – an artist’s mind in its most significant moods unveiled before us – is not so simple, while the implications in that evaluing may be far-reaching. The vital fount from which this refreshing and spontaneous treasure-trove has issued would seem to be in a very special sense the discovery that the Irish scene in all its moods and tenses was worth while.That discovery was induced in Jack B. Yeats, as in so many others, by the national revival that roughly began in the opening years of this century. The mists lifted more and more, and as is so frequent in such recoveries began then to settle down again. perhaps for twenty years they have been thickening and re-settling about us – disturbingly.There has been in those years far too much running about after strange gods. writers in English and Irish have been doing it, painters too, architects, and others. The value of what has been wrought out under such influences is now being questioned. It seems to lack staying power.That much of it, if any, will have even any sort of public tribute paid to it twenty years hence seems unlikely. Surely only a well-sprung, resilient, hardy and daring native culture could afford to take in such measures of heterogeneous foreignism as we have been taking in for twenty years (and with such assurance and wild words!). and our national Part Two. Representing Ireland 153 culture at present, and indeed for long, long years to come, seeking, struggling anxiously, to come upon its own self! In our most fecund period, before the mists began to fall again, this groping of ours searched for the roots of the national being either in the heroism of our sagas, these so indubitably ours, or in that distinctive way of living, and praying and dying, which still survives, but less and less, in the far-off country places – a way not quite utterly forgetful either of those selfsame sagas. Both legitimate sources, and perhaps the only sources. Some of the pioneers worked in the heroic literature, others in the living tradition; few only were gifted enough to become happily intimate with both. Jack B. Yeats fortunately for him, and us, took to the country places. It is too facile to say that he had to, his genius shying at the magniloquent as at the academic. How do we know it did? If he had taken to the heroic with aplomb and youthful daring, wrestling with it long enough to test his powers; and then come from the fierce labour with more or less empty hands, we might be justified in assuming that he had not known himself. But he does not seem so to have tested his powers. and it would equally be too facile to say that he chose the easier way. as if questing among living men and women, ‘in their ordinary attire’, as whitman would have them,3 behind their counters or at large in the fair, were simpler work than picking and choosing among sagas and legends, themselves in a way already picked and chosen. Life itself is never so simple as any representation of it, nor does it so easily deliver up its secrets. Has the life of our own countryside, except in the...