Letters of Jack B. Yeats to Joseph Hone, 1921–1955

Jack B. Yeats wrote more than fifty letters to Joseph Hone over a period of thirty-four years which now reside in the Yeats Family Correspondence Collection at the University of Kansas Kenneth Spencer Research Library. These letters, and other materials, are part of the extensive P. S. O'Hegarty collection that KU acquired from O'Hegarty's wife, Mina, in 1955. Yeats's letters to Hone, as yet unpublished, contain the Irish painter's thoughts on a number of important issues, some of the most attractive of which are his numerous casual observations on art, painting, and philosophy, of great interest if only because the artist spoke so little about art during his life. Aside from a lecture Yeats gave on painting at the Irish Race Congress held in Paris in January 1922 (which was printed later that year as Modern Aspects of Irish Art and has been out of print since), these letters contain some of the painter's only surviving thoughts upon his craft, and in many ways both confirm and add depth to the observations he gave in the formal lecture.¹ Yeats's reflections in the letters on painting, art in general, and Ireland are important to consider alongside the comments Thomas MacGreevy advanced in Jack B. Yeats: An Appreciation and Interpretation, published in 1945.² The letters in the collection from 1921 contain many of the painting topics that Yeats would raise in the lecture he gave about a year later. Yet there is much more of interest in the letters: the painter's insights into society, art, and politics frequently intertwine with his personality as well as his painting theory. One early example is his criticism of a play by his good friend John Masefield, demonstrating the characteristic casual philosophical depth with which Yeats often wrote.³

Aside from all of this, perhaps the most important material in the letters for Yeats scholars has to do with the addressee Joseph Hone. Hone was a prolific author who wrote numerous articles on the subjects of politics, literature, and philosophy for the New Statesman, London Mercury, and the Dublin Magazine between 1907 and 1953. He authored a number of books beginning in the 1930s, such as one coauthored with Mario Rossi on Bishop George Berkeley's philosophy (1931, featuring an introduction by W. B. Yeats); The Life of George Moore (1936); the first biography of W. B. Yeats, W. B. Yeats 1865–1939 (1942); and the first edition of a collection of John Butler Yeats's letters (1944). In addition, Hone was a translator of German and Italian (he published a translation of Daniel Halévy's Life of Friedrich Nietzsche). He also cofounded, with James Starkey, in 1905 Maunsel & Co., which would publish many important authors of the Irish Literary Renaissance, such as J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, Æ (George Russell), Stephen Gwynn, and of course W. B. Yeats.⁴ In fact, as R. F. Foster points out, W. B. Yeats's desire to have his works published by an Irish publisher led him to woo A. H. Bullen as a backer to get the company started.⁵ Hone certainly helped thrust W. B. Yeats forward, and this is particularly evident in the short literary biography he published in 1915 entitled William Butler Yeats: The Poet in Contemporary Ireland.⁶ In addition to the material on painting noted above, the letters Jack B. Yeats wrote to Joseph Hone contain much information regarding family matters, such as the circumstances surrounding W. B. Yeats's death, as well as some back and forth about what should not be included in the 1944 edition of John Butler Yeats's letters. Finally, there are also numerous letters that discuss prominent literary figures and politics; it is no secret that Jack Yeats had personal acquaintance with a number of important writers such as Samuel Beckett and George Bernard Shaw.

It is clear that on some occasions Jack Yeats seeks to suppress certain information that Hone would have known due to his closeness both to W. B. and John Butler Yeats. While Hone was editing a...