Under the seat
J. G. FARRELL
lack B. Yeats Hilary Pyle (Routledge and Kegan Paul 105s) Some years after his wife had died in the Portobello nursing home in Dublin the old gentleman went to live there himself, just for the winters at first, then permanently. He chose a room at the top of the ancient, gloomy house from where he had a view over the roof-tops, and spent his days reading or going for walks along the banks of the Grand Canal where small boys fish for sticklebacks among the drifting swans. Later, as he became more infirm, he had to aban- don the walks but instead travelled about in a taxi accompanied by one of the nurses. And he was still hale enough to demonstrate boxing and conjuring for a visitor and to sing an old song of Marie Lloyd's. In due course, at the age of eighty-five, he died leav- ing this epitaph with a friend: 'I have travelled all my life without a ticket: and, therefore, I was never to be seen when In- spectors came round because then I was under the seats. It was rather dusty, but I used to get the sun on the floor sometimes. When we are asked about it all in the end, we who travel without tickets, we can say with that vanity which takes the place of self-confidence: even though we went with- out tickets we never were commuters.'
The old gentleman was Jack B. Yeats, the brother of the famous poet, and before he died he had become recognised as Ireland's greatest painter. Throughout his life Jack Yeats, unlike his brother, carefully steered clear of all movements, whether cultural or political, devoting himself to his own affairs with a single-mindedness which must have become the despair of his biographer, Miss Pyle. One of the difficulties in writing about artists is that very often the poor fellows live such outwardly uneventful lives that the harassed biographer is driven to recording the most trivial detail in his attempt to flesh out his portrait to proportions that come anywhere near matching the stature of his subject.
After one of those lengthy and debilitating searches for inherited artistic traits up the Yeats family tree, we clamber down again, past his father John B. who was a portrait painter, to find Jack Yeats starting out as an illustrator. Much of this early work is con- ventional, often jocular or quaint, and fre- quently dull. Similarly Yeat's early life, seen at this remove, has that dull sheen that only happiness can give. He married soon and happily, for example, without any of the romantic shenanigans that W.B. indulged in. He and his wife lived in a cottage in Devon called Cashlauna Shelmiddy (Snails Castle) and as far as the mating urge is concerned that appears to have been the end of the matter.
Nor did Jack share his brother's sophistic- ated tastes in entertainment: he was fond of sport, particularly boxing and horse racing. He loved circuses and spent a great deal of time sketching at fairs. He devised a miniature theatre in which Gordon Craig, among others, took an interest, designing his own characters and writing his own plays for it. With the poet John Masefield he built and sailed model boats, concocting elaborate fantasies of piracy and the high seas. He was fond of children and remained childlike him- self for longer than most. Miss Pyle quotes a charming story to illustrate this sympathy for children: 'One day at a party at Sarah Purser's a Purser child found herself pinioned between the piano and W. B. Yeats's back as he talked to another guest. She was in despair as she wriggled and struggled to free herself without disturbing the great poet. The next moment a head appeared over W.B.'s shouldei and two eyes looked at her: Jack Yeats put out his hand and drew her through, asking her to come into the garden with him and pick gooseberries.'
In 1905 at the suggestion of Masefield who was working for the Manchester Guardian Yeats accompanied Synge to the West of Ireland to illustrate some articles that Synge was to write about the life of Connemara and North Mayo. Yeats found Synge an excellent companion . . always ready and always the same; a bold walker, up hill and down dale, in the hot sun and the pelting rain. I remember a deluge on the Erris Penin- sula, where we lay among the sand hills and at his suggestion heaped sand upon ourselves to try and keep dry.' The articles were a great success, though Synge was piqued at being paid less than Yeats.
But this trip was also important in reviv- ing Yeat's interest in his Irishness. He told John Quinn, the American art patron, that he missed much of the joys of life through living in an alien country. But he also told Quinn not to have such idealistic notions about Irishmen: 'There are braggarts and fakirs here as everywhere else. In a word, or in a lot of words, Ireland consists of drunk- ards, murderers, thieves, humbugs, ex-police- men, Unionists—and honest men—You ask what I think of Sinn Feiners. Well, I don't think a great lot of a great many of the Sinn Feiners but I believe in the Sinn Fein idea. . .' For all that he declined any active part in the ensuing political upheavals.
It was after he had moved to Dublin in 1910 that Yeats changed his medium to oils and began gradually to develop away from the descriptive mode of his water colours towards the free composition and impasto technique of his finest work. Miss Pyle gives two significant comments by Yeats on this crucial change of direction. In 1913 Yeats, who normally ignored the work of other Painters, remarked in a letter: 'The great good those post-Impressionists and futurists will do will be that they will knock the hand- cuffs off all the painters.' Years later Sir John Rothenstein asked him why the artist's vision developed all but invariably in the direction of increased generalisation, and his handling of paint in that of breadth. 'I believe,' he replied, 'that the painter always begins by expressing himself with line—that is, by the most obvious means; then he be- comes aware that line, once so necessary, is in fact hemming him in, and as soon as he feels strong enough, he breaks out of its confines!
Miss Pyle has researched her book dili-
gently but written it with a respect for its subject that stops only a little way short of hagiography, a not unusual state of affairs in books about famous Irishmen. Only once does she permit herself some mildly adverse comments about Yeats as a painter. About Yeats as a man she has only nice things to say, leaving the reader to speculate about a number of intriguing questions. What did ing: 'The word "art" I don't care much for,' example? Dimly, through the respectful mist that cloaks him, we see a simple, kindly, no- nonsense sort of person emerge. He had an off-beat sense of humour. He disliked theoris- ing: 'The word "art" I don't care much for,' he wrote to Quinn, 'because it doesn't mean anything much to me . . . I believe that all fine pictures, and fine literature too, to be fine must have some of the living ginger of Life in them.'
He dismissed old masters as painters of 'brown pictures' . . . with the exception of Goya whom he admired. I somehow like to think of him sitting there silently at Lady Gregory's with his intellectual brother and friends talking his ears off in what must have been one of the most garrulous floods of aesthetic and political verbification of modern times. And I wonder what he may be thinking.
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