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There is nothing peculiar in that: Beckett’sare eloquent and authoritative statements,for reasons that have perhaps to do morewith his stature than with the attention paidto his insights. Yet sketchy as Beckett’sstatements are, the accounts that invoke hisauthority make little effort to elaborate orto engage with the writer’s quiteidiosyncratic and solitary apprehension ofYeats’s achievement and value. Theinvocation of the authority seems in no wayto influence the approach to the paintings.Second, and no less puzzling, given thepresent general acceptance of the singularityand originality of Yeats’s painterly techniquein his later work, is how rarely criticsundertake the formal analysis of it. HilaryPyle, in her numerous and indispensablecatalogues, gives us detailed accounts ofeach of the works reproduced, but eventhese remain essentially descriptive ratherthan analytical and are marked by theimpressionistic, tonal vocabulary that hasbeen the hallmark of Yeats criticism to date:‘exuberant’, ‘ruminative’, ‘elated’, ‘sombre’,even ‘Wordsworthian.’1 Such impressionisticaccounts of the paintings seek to rendertheir undoubted force, but they do so atgreat cost. On the one hand, they do notpause to attend to the remarkable artifice,the compositional exactitude, of Yeats’smost powerful work, giving instead animpression of Yeats’s virtually naïve,notoriously untaught, spontaneity in hismedium. In related ways, Bruce Arnold’speculiarly extended emphasis on the

youthful artist’s childlike fascination withminiature theatres and paper boats eclipsesattention to the mature artist’s reflections,political or aesthetic, in a way thatultimately sells short the seriousness of hisengagements.2 On the other hand, thoseimpressionistic readings and the fascinationwith the apparent spontaneity of the artist’sprocedures, foreclose all too rapidly on thealmost belligerent orneriness of thepaintings and the unabashed difficulty withwhich they refuse to resolve to the viewer’sgaze. Not for nothing did Yeats decline topermit reproductions of his works: prints,transparencies and digital images alikesoften and flatten the sculpted dimensionsof his brushwork, the stark transitionsbetween virtually, sometimes even actually,bare canvas and astonishingly thickimpasto, the unstable oscillation betweenthe emergence of the figure and theforegrounding of the medium that dissolveseven as it reveals. This difficulty thatconfronts the viewer has on occasionprovoked hostility and mystification in faceof the work and, precisely for that reason,should not be ignored or diminished.Indeed, if one wishes for an account of thedifficulty of seeing a Yeats painting, anantagonistic and satirical cartoon in DublinOpinion (Fig. 1) may serve better thanmuch of what passes for art criticism.3

Where the latter seeks to make the workexplicable and palatable, the cartoon has atleast the virtue of capturing the labour of

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Republics of Difference Yeats, MacGreevy, BeckettDavid Lloyd

Two puzzled observations: first, virtually every study ofnote devoted to Jack B. Yeats invokes the testimony ofSamuel Beckett to the artist’s singular greatness.

1 See Hilary Pyle, Yeats:Portrait of an ArtisticFamily (London, 1997).The epithets are selectedmore or less at randomfrom her descriptions ofthe paintings.

2 Bruce Arnold, Jack Yeats(New Haven andLondon, 1998), ch. 6–8

3 Dublin Opinion, 8 (May1929), 73

Fig. 1: Dublin Opinion, 8(May 1929), 73. Courtesyof the National Library ofIreland.

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attention that the paintings exact andconcludes, however sardonically, with anacknowledgement of their possiblyunsettling effects.

But if we wish, as I believe we should, totake Yeats’s not-so-modest claim to be ‘thefirst living painter in the world’ with someseriousness, we have surely to pay thepaintings the more exacting attention theydemand and begin at least to decipher thegrounds of their originality and theircontinuing difficulty for the eye.4 Beckett’svaluation of him as being ‘with the great ofour time’, which places him in the companyof Kandinsky, Klee and Braque, amongstothers, is scarcely to be dismissed: he wasnot given to flattery and his associations arehardly conventional.5 The harder task is todecipher what Beckett’s acute eye saw inYeats’s work (or, for that matter, tounderstand what Joyce meant in claimingthat Yeats and he shared a ‘method’ or whyan artist of the international stature ofOscar Kokoschka might have estimatedYeats so highly).6 Beckett’s remarks in histwo published notices are not only too briefbut also characteristically too enigmatic andreserved for us to do more than speculateon the grounds for Yeats’s apparentlypowerful impact on him. This essay is,nonetheless, an attempt to understandBeckett’s homage to Yeats through anapproach to what he may have seen asformally significant in the paintings.Beckett’s capacity for attention to visualwork is notorious, and it is clear that hisregard for the paintings that he valued wasbased on the significance of their formsrather than on any symbolic or allegoricalmeaning they might hold. Indeed, as weshall see further, the whole tendency ofBeckett’s writings on art (and not solely onYeats) was antagonistic to either symbolismor allegory and even to representation itself.That antagonism places him, rightly orwrongly, in direct opposition to thepredominant reception of Yeats, whether hebe seen as the painter who gives expression

to the spirit of the nation or as one whoseworks are achieved, if enigmatic, symbols ofemotional states or of individual memories.The question here is not so much whetherBeckett was correct in his readings as it is tosee what in Yeats’s paintings might lenditself to such a radically antithetical vision.

The dominant view of Yeats in Beckett’sown moment, which gave occasion for hisfirst extended remarks on the painting, was that of their mutual friend ThomasMacGreevy. According to Beckett, theleading conviction in MacGreevy’s shortessay is that Jack B. Yeats is, in every sense,the most representative painter of the Irish nation. Beckett quotes MacGreevy as follows:

What was unique in Ireland was that thelife of the people considered itself, andwas in fact, spiritually and culturally aswell as politically, the whole life of thenation. Those who acted for the nationofficially were outside the nation. Theyhad a stronger sense of identity with theEnglish governing class than with thepeople of Ireland, and their art was nomore than a province of English art. Thefirst genuine artist, therefore, who soidentified himself with the people ofIreland as to be able to give true and goodand beautiful expression to the life theylived, and to that sense of themselves asthe Irish nation, inevitably became notmerely a genre painter like the painters ofthe petit peuple in other countries, andnot merely a nation’s painter in the sensethat Pol de Limburg, Louis le Nain,Bassano, Ostade or Jan Steen werenational painters, but the national painterin the sense that Rembrandt andVelasquez and Watteau were nationalpainters, the painter who in his work wasthe consummate expression of the spiritof his own nation at one of the supremepoints in its evolution.7

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4 Arnold, Jack Yeats, 2345 Anthony Cronin’s

dismissive comments onthe relationship betweenthe two are especiallyegregious in this respect.Finding Yeats’s workRomantic, he is surprisedat Beckett’s admirationand attributes it topersonal needs:‘conceived as it was at atime in Beckett’s lifewhen he sadly neededsomeone to admire orlook up to, it is atriumph of personalaffection over critical oraesthetic considerations’.See Cronin, SamuelBeckett: The LastModernist (New York,1997), 140.

6 For Yeats’s relation toJoyce and to Kokoschka,see Arnold, Jack Yeats,235–36 and 220–21respectively.

7 Samuel Beckett, Disjecta:Miscellaneous Writingsand a DramaticFragment, ed. RubyCohn (New York, 1984),96; apart from adding acouple of commas,Beckett’s citationsubstitutes ‘a nation’spainter’ for MacGreevy’s‘a national painter’. SeeThomas MacGreevy,Jack B. Yeats (Dublin,1945), 10. Beckett,Disjecta, hereafter citedin text as D, andMcGreevy, Jack B. Yeatsas JBY.

MacGreevy’s reading of Yeats’s painting as‘the consummate expression of the spirit ofhis own nation’ may itself be theconsummate expression of a culturalnationalist aesthetic. Intrinsic to thisaesthetic, which in Ireland dates back atleast to the Young Ireland movement of the1840s, is the conception of both theartwork and the artist as representative. As MacGreevy puts it:

Actually the peoples [sic] are representedonly by disinterested men, and moreparticularly by artists. In resurgentIreland the pioneer and firstrepresentative man in the art of paintingwas Jack B. Yeats.8

The play on the relation between thepolitical and the mimetic usage of the term‘representation’ is deliberate and explicit.The artist himself becomes representative ofthe national spirit by representing the life ofthe nation in painting. Not, as MacGreevymakes clear, that representing the nationalspirit requires ‘strict adherence to theobserved fact’; on the contrary, for anationalist aesthetic, the transformativecapacity of imagination redeems a damagednation. One might say, drawing again onfamiliar Romantic precepts, that the act ofrepresentation is redemptivelytransformative in itself, in so far as it raisesthe scattered particulars to the permanentand universal, or to what MacGreevy terms‘the unchanging elements of reality’.9

In such terms, re-presentation is not meredepiction of the particular but an alwaystransformative elevation of the particular tothe universal that is a return of the nation toits essential self. The poetry of this paintingis ‘the splendour of essential truth’.10

Even without MacGreevy’s emphaticevocation of the symbolic dimensions ofpaintings like In Memory of Boucicault and Bianconi, the insistent deployment of a vocabulary of translucence — ‘glowing’,‘mystic brilliance’, ‘light and fire’, ‘inwardintensity’, ‘radiance’ — would be sufficient

to betray MacGreevy’s investment in asymbolist reading of Yeats, a reading whichhas certainly been influential in subsequentreadings of Yeats’s work.11

In the terms of this nationalist/symbolistaesthetic, the representation of theparticular is the outward manifestation ofan inward spirit — the ‘expression of thespirit of [the] nation’, as MacGreevy puts it.An expressive aesthetic of this order thusassumes as given a discrete spirit or essence.This spirit is translucent in the outwardform. The fragmented particular becomesconsubstantial with the whole of which it ispart. Representation here has the doublesense of standing in for and of manifestingsomething. Thus the very process ofrepresentation restores the fragmentedelements of the nation to wholeness bymaking each an aspect of the expression ofthe national spirit. In MacGreevy’s account,Yeats’s work answers to the need of the Irishin the early twentieth century ‘to feel theirown life was being expressed in art.’ [JBY,19] The very term ‘life’ here marks thethreshold at which the expressive act issituated — on the boundary that marks thedifference between and the fragile continuityof the inner life of a people (its spirit or vitalforce) and the outward manifestations of amore or less unreflective ‘daily life’ — thelabours, pleasures, and habits of a people.Painting, as it were, opens a door betweenthe damaged life of a heretofore hiddenIreland and the secret realm of its spirit.

The nationalist view of art, in which apolitical and an aesthetic parti pris arecombined, that governs MacGreevy’s essayon Yeats, could only be anathema toBeckett. His review of the work articulateswhat appears to have been a longstandingand a well-understood difference in the twowriters’ approaches to Yeats and to art ingeneral. Pointedly distinguishing in thesubtitles of his review between the aspect ofYeats that MacGreevy emphasizes as TheNational Painter and that which he himselfpromotes as The Artist, Beckett insists that

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8 MacGreevy, Jack B.Yeats, 32. Onrepresentation, see DavidLloyd, Nationalism andMinor Literature: JamesClarence Mangan andthe Emergence of IrishCultural Nationalism(Berkeley, 1987), 95–98.

9 MacGreevy, Jack B.Yeats, 28

10 MacGreevy, Jack B.Yeats, 27

11 Though one might betempted in each case toecho Gabriel Conroy’sperplexed query, ‘Ofwhat was it a symbol?’.See James Joyce, ‘TheDead’, in Dubliners(Harmondsworth, 1975), 207.

the ‘national aspects of Mr. Yeats’s geniushave … been overstated’ and proceeds toimply, briefly, curtly even, both theinterested or aesthetically ‘impure’ groundsfor that overstatement and reasons tosuspect the validity of ascribing to Yeats an‘imaginative sympathy’ with the Irish people(‘How sympathetic?’, the review almostmaliciously enquires). In fact, the term Yeatshimself invoked was ‘affection’. As he putsit in ‘The Future of Painting in Ireland’, abrief lecture included in the appendix to thisessay, ‘And every day there are more Irishartists painting their own country and theirown people, with the greatest equipment ofthe artist, affection. That affection for theirfellows and for every rock, every little flashof water, every handful of soil, and everyliving thing in Ireland.’ There is little doubtthat in his sceptical approach to thequestion of ‘imaginative sympathy’, Beckettreads Yeats against his grain, if only to shedlight on other qualities in his work. [D, 96]In what must be one of Beckett’s mostresonant locutions, he dismisses any notionthat Yeats’s paintings might represent adoorway between inner truth and outerreality, preferring instead a powerful imageof closure: Yeats ‘is with the great of ourtime … because he brings light, as only thegreat dare to bring light, to the issuelesspredicament of existence, reduces the darkwhere there might have been,mathematically at least, a door.’ [D, 97]Beckett’s image here is at once deft,succinct, and devastating. The very valenceof light, as that which shines through theparticular to imbue it with possiblyuniversal meaning, is reversed here, as thelight becomes a dismally demystifying force,reducing darkness only to expose theabsence of communication, of doors in orout. Not only does the image uncannilypredict Beckett’s later short texts and plays,like Lessness (1970) and The Lost Ones(1970), Not I (1972) or Eh Joe (1966), italso catches the ambiguous quality of manyof Yeats’s paintings, where the angled beamof light seems to be no conventional

indicator of optimism or hope, but a balefuland melancholy illumination, that servesonly to enhance the gloom.

Clearly, for Beckett, what is illuminated inthe imaginative glow of Yeats’s painting isnot the particular restored to wholeness, buta series of disjunctive images deprived eitherof connection or determinate significanceand expressive only of the missed encounter:

The being in the street, when it happensin the room, the being in the room whenit happens in the street, the turning togaze from land to sea, from sea to land,the backs to one another and the eyesabandoning, the man alone trudging inthe sand, the man alone thinking(thinking!) in his box — these arecharacteristic notations … [D, 97]

Beckett’s terse and uncompromisingstatement of his utterly differentapprehension of the painter can scarcely havesurprised MacGreevy. Beckett had alreadymade his understanding of Yeats clear inletters (to some of which MacGreevy alludes)that emphasize, in similar tones, hisperception of the paintings as images ofalienation, suspension, disjunction —anything but representations of thecontinuity of artist and people, inner andouter, spirit and body. Beckett’s view of Yeatsresonates rather with the post-Cartesianpredicament of scission and disaggregation,between mind and matter, subject and object,that notoriously informs all of the writer’swork. As he wrote to MacGreevy, even asthe latter was composing the first draft of theessay on Yeats:

I find something terrifying for example inthe way Yeats puts down a man’s headand a woman’s head side by side, or faceto face, the awful acceptance of 2 entitiesthat will never mingle. And do youremember the picture of a man sittingunder a fuchsia hedge, reading with hisback turned to the sea and the thunder

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clouds? One does not realize how still hispictures are till one looks at others,almost petrified, a sudden suspension ofthe performance, of convention ofsympathy and antipathy, meeting andparting, joy and sorrow.12

It is probably impossible to tell to which ofYeats’s paintings Beckett is referring to inrecalling ‘puts down a man’s head and awoman’s head side by side, or face to face’,though the second painting is identifiable asA Storm (1936; Fig. 2). But it is clear thatwhat holds his attention is precisely notwhat MacGreevy celebrates in the painter— ‘movement and colour’, fluidity and, ofcourse, translucence of expression. [JBY, 27]It is, rather, this quality of petrification andsuspension that seems to him quiteantithetical to the ‘sympathy’ that

MacGreevy names as a dominant quality inYeats. In the same letter, Beckett insists onthe separateness, not only of human beingsfrom one another, but also of the humanand the natural in Yeats’s work: ‘What I feelhe gets so well, dispassionately, nottragically like Watteau, is the heterogeneityof nature and the human denizens, theunalterable alienness of the 2phenomena.’13 Unlike the painting ofConstable or Turner, whose ‘nature is reallyinfested with “spirit”’, Yeats’s ‘final quale’ is‘the ultimate inorganism of everything’. Thisinorganism is for Beckett not merely aquality of the represented of the paintings,but a matter of what the forms of thepaintings articulate: ‘A painting of pureinorganic juxtapositions, where nothing canbe taken or given and there is no possibilityof change or exchange.’14 Nothing could be

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12 Beckett to MacGreevy,14 Aug. 1937, cited in James Knowlson,Damned to Fame: TheLife of Samuel Beckett(New York, 1996),267–68

13 Beckett to MacGreevy, inKnowlson, Damned toFame, 267

14 Knowlson, Damned toFame, 755n.

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Fig. 2:Jack B. YeatsA Storm1936oil on canvas46 x 61 cmprivate collection

further it seems, from MacGreevy’sassertion that Yeats’s ‘concern with thenatural scene itself was a human concern.He occasionally depicted it unpeopled, asolitude, but such a solitude as could clearlyprovide an enlargement of one’s humanexperience.’ [JBY, 12]

Such intense differences in perception and inthe evaluation of the paintings signal,perhaps, the capaciousness of the paintingsthemselves, their openness to divergentreadings that Yeats himself is known tohave desired. At the same time, they derivefrom a marked difference in the aestheticand the political assumptions of each writer.For MacGreevy, as we have seen, Yeats isthe first and quintessential national painter;for Beckett, Yeats explores rather what hehad described in a 1934 review, ‘RecentIrish Poetry’, as ‘the new thing that hashappened, or the old thing that hashappened again, namely the breakdown ofthe object’ or ‘the breakdown of the subject’— in either case, the rupture ofcommunication. [D, 70] Awareness of thissituation makes it the artist’s task to achievea statement ‘of the space that intervenesbetween him and the world of objects.’ And,already in 1934, it is ‘a picture by Mr. JackYeats’ that he invokes, alongside T. S. Eliot’sThe Wasteland, as exemplary of thisawareness. MacGreevy appears to assimilateYeats to a nationalist agenda, emphasizingthe representative status of both the artistand his figurations, foregrounding thoseelements of his work that can be read asexpressive of the national spirit,appropriating Yeats to an aesthetic thataffirms the continuity of the spirit in theface of the disintegrative force of anunrepresentative colonial power. Beckettemphasizes rupture and discontinuity andthe radically unreconciled relation of subjectand object, and appropriates the painter noless forcefully to his apprehension of the‘issueless predicament of existence’. Yeats’spaintings become the contested zone of tworadically opposed conjunctures of aestheticand political principles.

But doubtless, in following the terms thatBeckett establishes in his review ofMacGreevy on Yeats, one is drawn toexaggerate the differences, stark assometimes they are. MacGreevy’s essay is insome ways a much less coherent productionthan at first appears, and is marked bycontradictions and countercurrents thattrouble its ostensibly nationalist agenda.While Beckett’s contempt for the Saorstát(the post-treaty Irish Free State) has oftenbeen emphasized, less has been made of thelongstanding republicanism that MacGreevyand Yeats shared and which forms a barelyoccluded subtext of the essay. In the wakeof the Civil War, which pitted republicanradicals against the forces of the new FreeState — to which MacGreevy refersdisparagingly as ‘the little almost republic ofIreland’ — the identification of nationalismand republicanism is no simple matter.

Indeed, MacGreevy’s essay on Yeats notonly makes no secret of his own politicalaffiliations, but insists on articulating both arepublican interpretation of recent Irishhistory and his sense of the relation ofYeats’s work to republicanism. This subtextranges from references to ‘the tanks andlorries of imperial terrorists’ to an openlyrepublican interpretation of partition:

The end of the prolonged struggle wasthat Ireland had not the one parliamentthat it wanted but the two it didn’t wantimposed on it. Divide and rule. Thecountry was partitioned. The imperialconnection remained. And with theadroitness of experienced politicians theimperialists laid the final odium of moraldefeat on the Irish themselves. Irelandwas launched on a civil war. [JBY, 25]

In this context, the discussion, or even theinvocation of several paintings of Yeats’s,gains implicit political significance:Bachelor’s Walk, In Memory (1915), withits reference to the murder of Irishnationalists by the British army; Singing theDark Rosaleen, Croke Park (1921), which

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depicts the singing of that patriotic ballad atthe Gaelic sports arena that had becomeinfamous for the Black and Tan massacre ofBloody Sunday the year before thepainting’s completion;15 Communicatingwith Prisoners (c.1924), which represents agroup of women shouting up to republicanwomen prisoners in Kilmainham Gaolduring the Civil War; The Funeral of HarryBoland (1922), commemorating the deathof the prominent republican leader; and, inthe postscript of 1945, the peculiarlysombre painting Going to Wolfe Tone’sGrave (1929), of which MacGreevyparenthetically and somewhat redundantlyremarks ‘the national note is struck asclearly as ever in the past’. [JBY, 37] As if it were necessary, that last remarkserves to underline the significance of thiscanon of Yeats’s paintings and the kind ofhistorical and political claim that is entailedin the assertion that Yeats is the preeminentIrish painter. In the first place, byestablishing that the painter’s work affiliatedhim with republicanism and that his claimsas an historical painter rest on paintingsthat commemorate the high points and thedefeats of republican struggle, MacGreevylinks Yeats’s own trajectory as an artist todisaffiliation from the present order and toa more or less proleptic relation to thenation he represents. Betrayed by thecollusion with its imperial saboteurs of thenation that claims to be ‘once again’, therepublican artist represents the nation thatis ‘yet to be’, the still damaged butrecalcitrant people. If, in the immediateaftermath of the Civil War, ‘fact and poetryhad parted company’, it becomes inevitablethat ‘Jack Yeats’s work became a passionaterecall to poetry’. [JBY, 27] It is to thismoment also that MacGreevy dates themajor ‘modification of technique’ thatbegins to constitute Yeats’s later, moreaesthetically uncompromising style. Bothstylistically and politically, MacGreevysuggests, Yeats’s work is a refusal of thestatus quo, of the state that is in being.This trajectory of Yeats’s work, which

MacGreevy understands as belonging withthe ‘subjective tendency’ of post-warIreland, correlates to an ‘objective tendency’both in the painter’s work and in Irelanditself. In these tendencies, we might say,republicanism withdraws into a kind ofpermanent if ‘obscure’ and dispersedopposition. The objective tendency, which is‘to insist on the need for a definitivesolution of Ireland’s political and, moreparticularly, social problems’, maintains thelegacy not only of Pearse, but also ofConnolly. Its oppositionality, in themoment, is ‘that it fulfills the perennial needto check up on authority’s liability to abuseits privileges.’ [JBY, 26] What may appearhere as a strangely muted version ofrepublican ideals in fact embodies anunderstated but no less significant principleof non-domination that, as Philip Pettit hasargued, is critical to the specificunderstanding of freedom that is articulatedthroughout republican political thought.16

If the ‘subjective tendency’ of the movementmanifests itself in the formal changes inYeats’s work, the objective tendency appearsin the content of his work. However, thechanges are less marked than the continuity.Yeats’s longstanding devotion to depictingthe common people of Ireland links him tothe radical tradition of republicanism.MacGreevy’s implication, scarcely mutedhere, is that Yeats’s work has always alliedhim to the left-wing republicanism of ‘thesociologist [sic], James Connolly’:

It is not likely that Jack Yeats hasremained untouched by this objectivetendency. But as he has always paintedthe people, ‘the workers,’ in town andcountry, it would be difficult to trace anysuch influence as a new thing in his art.It is not yesterday or today that JackYeats discovered labouring humanity. At the Celtic Race Congress in Paris in1923, he read a paper in which he gave itas his opinion that the most stirringsights in the world are a man ploughing

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15 On this episode, seeMike Cronin, Sport andNationalism in Ireland:Gaelic Games, Soccerand Irish Identity since1884 (Dublin, 1999), 87–88.

16 See Philip Pettit,Republicanism: A Theory of Freedomand Government(Oxford, 1997). SeanKennedy, in his essay‘“The Artist who StakesHis Being is fromNowhere”: Beckett andThomas MacGreevy onthe Art of Jack B. Yeats’,in Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui, 14 (Fall2004), 61–74, collapsesthis crucial distinctionbetween the officialnationalism expressed inthe Free State and themore recalcitrantrepublicanism espousedby MacGreevy and, itappears, Yeats. He alsocollapses both Yeats andMacGreevy with theviews of Daniel Corkerywhich a reading ofMacGreevy’s text orYeats’s paintings doesnot really sustain. ForBeckett’s critical relationto Corkery, see my‘Writing in the Shit:Beckett, Nationalism andthe Colonial Subject’, inAnomalous States: IrishWriting and the Post-Colonial Moment(Dublin, 1993), 41–58.

and a ship on the sea. He still paints thepeople, and with an even morepassionate directness in recent years thanin his earlier days. Sometimes there ismore outward calm but more inwardintensity, fire and imagination than thereused to be. I think here particularly ofthe timeless figure of The Breaker-Out.Impassive now, but still desperate, hemight be the child of The Big Turf Firepainted twenty-five years later. [JBY, 26–27]

MacGreevy’s final allusion connects the1925 oil of a departing sailor, The Breaker-Out, with an early sketch of unmistakablepolitical import that he analyzes earlier inthe essay:

Jack Yeats found no occasion to gooutside of the everyday scene for hismaterial and there is no excess ofemphasis in his statement. We may readsatire and revolution into that earlysketch in which a ragged boy tries togain a few coppers standing on theroadside on a stormy night singing, of allsongs, The Big Turf Fire. His arms areraised above his head in a wild gesture ofdesperation as he marks the rhythm witha pair of bones in his hand. But the artistwas more than a satirist or revolutionistin the everyday sense. The incident wasone of a variety of incidents he noted,and he perceived the import of it andfound the appropriate statement of it ashe perceived the import and found theappropriate statement of others that wereutterly dissimilar. Of course everygenuine artist is a revolutionist by themere fact of being a genuine artist.Genuineness, truth, however peaceable, isalways revolutionary — it is usually thecounter-revolutionaries who makerevolution bloody. [JBY, 23]

The ‘truth’ that is so revolutionary, and thatthe Irish counter-revolution of the Civil Warperiod had bloodily suppressed, entails adifferent Ireland than that established and

made respectable by the official andconservative Catholic nationalism of theFree State. The Ireland mobilized by the leftwing republicanism of Mellows, O’Malley,O’Donnell, Markievicz and Gonne was notthat of the big farmers and graziers, the‘nation building’ class of the new order, northat of the small and larger businessinterests that, as Connolly had alwayspredicted, would ultimately continue toserve the interests of British capital — whatMacGreevy termed ‘imperial masters’ —even in a formally independent nation. Itwas, rather, the Ireland of the dispossessed,of the landless labourers and the workerswho had fought for unionization and, insome cases, for soviet-style co-operatives, ofthe marginal people, the ‘tinkers’ andtramps, the rogues and derelicts, the balladsingers and roving musicians that populateYeats’s pre-war images of Ireland and who,in actual practice, so often provedrecalcitrant to assimilation into the officialnationalist movement with its need to refineand purify the spirit of the nation.17 In thisrespect, Yeats’s art could be seen to continuethe traditions of recalcitrance to the lawthat MacGreevy sees as characteristic of an Irish anti-colonial mentality, so that his later painting projects decolonization as a process beyond the moment of formal independence. MacGreevy was right;Yeats saw his own work as an act ofdecolonization of the Irish visualimagination. As he puts it in ‘The Future ofPainting in Ireland’, ‘If he is a free man in afree country his eye is open and free. If hebecome a slave in a slave country he neednever open a full eye. His masters will seeall for him, and he becomes unable toexpress himself, except as the earth andstones express themselves.’

It is, indeed, no accident that whenMacGreevy seeks to characterize thementality of the dispossessed Irish on theeve of the War of Independence, it is not toa conventional historian that he turns but tothe recently published memoir of ErnieO’Malley, the republican guerrilla,

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17 See David Lloyd,‘Adulteration and theNation’, in AnomalousStates, 88–124.

imprisoned by the Free State during theCivil War, who became a close friend of thepainter and one of the earliestcommentators on his work.18 The pointersthroughout the essay ask us to re-examinethe pre-1922 body of Yeats’s work inIreland, on which — rather than on the laterand most formally innovative paintings —his reputation as Ireland’s foremost nationalpainter is still based. Indeed, in so far as itsbroad public acceptance is concerned, thatreputation probably rests on a mere handfulof works, and principally those mostfrequently reproduced under his sisters’Cuala Press imprint and in subsequent mass-produced reproductions. Little wonder thatin the 1930s he refused to permit reprints ofthose editions and, indeed, virtuallyrepudiated them. Even his determined, iffruitless, attempt to ban reproductions of hiswork beyond his own death signals his vividappreciation of the function of selection indefining — and domesticating — thereception of his œuvre as much as it does hisdesire to preserve the artistic integrity of hispaintings as paintings.

The most cursory survey of Yeats’s earlierdrawings, paintings and illustrations of Irishmaterial indicates how the selection anddissemination of his work has operated tocontain and limit its range. The tendency ofthe reproductions is to emphasize theelement of gentle whimsy in his depictionsof Irish rural life, or the elements offanciful, even boyish romanticism in theCuala Press prints and broadsides.19 A fullsense of his engagement with a certaindemotic, or even daemonic energy in themargins of Irish life (the sort of energyMacGreevy indicates in his description ofThe Big Turf Fire, an energy ofcontradiction and deprivation) seems to slipaway through the refining filters ofselection. This loss is not merely a matter ofthe content of the representations, though itis true that a principle of selection thatemphasized his rogues and derelicts wouldgive a quite different impression of his

understanding of the ‘national spirit’. It isalso a matter of what gets lost if oneoverlooks the compositional qualities thatunderwrite the scenes that energize him,qualities that emphasize an unruliness andinsubordination that MacGreevy may beright to find more deeply internalized in thepost-1922 paintings. As with his friend andtravelling companion J. M. Synge, whoseworks on Aran and west Kerry and whosearticles on the Congested Districts ofConnemara he illustrated, it would provetoo easy for even the most acute of critics todismiss Yeats’s work in this area as mereethnographic romanticization.20 The ethicalcomfort with which by now we dismiss thesupposedly ethnographic gaze of earlytwentieth-century nationalists, as if theywere simply primitivizing in the manner ofRobert O’Flaherty, or as if the undoubtedelement of projection in their critiques ofmodernity fell on nothing more than ablank screen, risks missing their perceptionof more complex and subversive dynamicsin the West’s negotiations with modernity.But even as gently comic a drawing as ThePoteen Makers (1912; Fig. 3), with its deftcaricatures of the magistrates and of theonlookers — at once sympathetic andmalicious — secretes an observation on Irishsocial life that easily passes unnoticed. Forits focus on the magistrates’ bench distractsfrom the peculiar fact that the accusedthemselves, whom the picture claims by itstitle to depict, are strangely absent from thescene. Their backs are turned to us; it is asif they abscond from our gaze as, perhaps,they seek to elude the force of the law thatcondemns them. Or in The Wake House (c.1908; Fig. 4), the scene of the crowdedroom frames the intent figure of a speakeroccupying the vital site of the hearth, themourning of the dead deflected, or, it maybe, more fully realized in what seem to bethe passions of political speech.21 The facesof the crowd are again turned from artistand viewer, disregarding the act ofrepresentation as if the focus of the action istangential or oblique to the gaze that seeks

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18 JBY, 17, cites O’Malley’sOn Another Man’sWound, published in 1936.

19 Terence de Vere Whiteremarks: ‘Most peopleby then [1920s] knew adrawing of a donkey byJack Yeats. It wasprinted by the CualaPress, which his sistersmanaged. The peoplewho were disapprovingof Bohemians wouldhave wished that oneYeats should continue toreproduce that prettylittle donkey, and theother the lake-isle ofInnisfree, over and overagain.’ See ‘ThePersonality of Jack B.Yeats’, in RogerMcHugh, ed., Jack B.Yeats: A CentenaryGathering, (Dublin,1971), 23.

20 For example, LukeGibbons, ‘Synge,Country and Western:The Myth of the West in Irish and AmericanCulture’, inTransformations in IrishCulture (Cork, 1996),23: ‘The equation ofrural life with all that istruly Irish has dominatedthe work of manymodern Irish painters,but is particularlyevident in the work ofJack Yeats, Paul Henryand Seán Keating.’Gibbons associates thiswith ‘the idealization ofthe west’, though hisessay does much tocomplicate that equationin the case of Synge.Yeats’s difference fromeither Henry or Keatingwill be suggested later inthe present essay.

to render and make sense of the occasion.22

Or, to end with but one more of dozens ofsuch images, in The Felons of our Land(1910; Fig. 5), as in the later Singing theDark Rosaleen, the action of the ballad-singing is depicted at the margins of thesporting event, the ragged and derelict-looking assembly taking place at the edgesof the main social gathering in which anationalist like Daniel Corkery, or evenMacGreevy himself on occasion, wouldhave traced the image of the nationperforming itself.23 The title of the drawingin turn nicely poses the ambiguity as towhether ‘felons’ refers to the ballad itself orto those who sing and listen to it.

My point is, of course, that there issomething in such works, modest in their‘appropriate statement’ as they are, thatalready exceeds the merely ethnographic, asit does the simply nationalist, precisely byforegrounding what MacGreevy seems alsoto have observed, that ‘in Ireland, the wholepeople were below the law’. [JBY, 15] Thereis something in these events that defies theforce of the law, the social order of the stateand the gazes of its representatives, whetherthe police, the magistrate, or theethnographic stranger — including ourselvesas viewers. As these are representations ofthose who ‘cannot represent themselves’ andtherefore ‘must be represented’, they arealso no less representations of that which

eludes representation, which disappearsfrom representation even in the glare ofwhat it renders visible.24 It is no paradox,then, as MacGreevy seems to suggest, thatthe condition under which Jack Yeatsbecomes the representative national painteris precisely one of a failure of representationin which the petit peuple is set over against‘an unrepresentative possessing class’ and inwhich ‘those who acted for the nationofficially were outside the nation.’ [JBY, 9,17] The counter-revolutionary Free Statedoes not, from a republican perspective,overcome that rift in representation, but in asense exacerbates it, dividing the peoplefrom itself rather than unifying it, as adecolonizing nationalism seemed to, againstthe imperial power. The rift cannot behealed by the official nationalist means ofoffering a symbolic common ground, anidealized West, for example, in whichdifference might appear to be sublated. For this reason, MacGreevy could neverconsider Paul Henry as a potentiallyrepresentative Irish artist in the same way ashe did Yeats. For in Henry, more often thannot, the effect of Irishness (the spirit ofIreland, in nationalist terms) is renderedthrough the evacuation of the landscape ofthe population that works it, fights over it,fights for it, that makes it a site of strugglerather than of reconciliation or repose. Or,where the peasants are represented, they arerepresented as an element, if a naturally

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21 Travellers in Ireland, likeThomas Croker andMrs. S. C. Hall, whowitnessed keening andwakes in the nineteenthcentury, generallyregarded them asprobable sites ofsedition, political talk,and general impropriety.See David Lloyd, ‘TheMemory of Hunger’, inDavid L. Eng and DavidKazanjian, eds., Loss:The Politics of Mourning(Berkeley and LosAngeles, 2003), 208–12.

22 See John Barrell, TheDark Side of theLandscape: The RuralPoor in English Painting1730–1840 (Cambridge,1980).

23 For Daniel Corkery’s useof such a scene as aninstance of the ‘life ofthis people’, see hisclassic Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature(Cork, 1966), 22. I have commented onCorkery’s culturalnationalism and onBeckett’s distance from it in ‘Writing in the Shit:Beckett, Nationalism and the ColonialSubject’, in AnomalousStates, 43–44.

24 Gibbons, ‘Synge,Country and Western’,27, in the context of theAmerican homesteadercites this famous formulaof Marx’s 18thBrumaire. All thissuggests that, for Yeats,to be outsiderepresentation, in theposition of the‘subaltern’, is in nounambiguous way tooccupy a position ofdisempowerment.

Fig. 3:Jack B YeatsThe Poteen Makers1912pen, ink and watercolour on card30.5 x 19.5 cmNational Gallery ofIreland, Dublin

embattled element, of the landscape itself, asin The Potato Diggers (1912; Fig. 6).

Refusal of the subordination of the humanfigure to the landscape or, by the same token,of the heroic domination of the landscape bythe human, is intrinsic to Yeats’s work,according to both MacGreevy and Beckett.Indeed it is precisely here that both criticsconverge, in their recognition of Yeats’srecalcitrance to any mode of prematurereconciliation. Where Beckett apprehends thisin terms of the ‘petrification’ of figure andlandscape, MacGreevy approaches it throughwhat he understands as Yeats’s singularinnovation in the history of painting, thestriking of ‘a new balance between thelandscape and the figure’:

With Jack Yeats, the landscape is as realas the figures. It has its own character asthey have theirs. It is impersonal. Theyare the reverse. But the sense of theimpersonal is an enrichment of thehumanity of the figures. And conversely,the opposition heightens the sense of theimpersonal character of the landscape …I do not think I am claiming too much forJack Yeats when I say that nobody beforehim had juxtaposed landscape and figure

without subduing the character of eitherto that of the other … Association andapartness at one and the same time havenever been more clearly stated in terms ofart. [JBY, 13–14]

This is an extraordinary insight byMacGreevy into what provides theunderlying dynamic of so many of Yeats’slater works. It is an observation that Iwould want to extend from the relation oflandscape to figure (its justness here beingexemplified by any number of paintings,from O’Connell Bridge [1925], where thelandscape is urban, to Men of Destiny[1946] or Many Ferries [1948]) to otherrelations, formal and figurative, in thepaintings — from the relationships amongfigures themselves to the relation offiguration to the material aspects of themedium itself. What MacGreevy variouslycomprehends as balance, or as ‘associationand apartness’, seems to me to lie at theheart of the dynamic tensions that troublethe viewer’s gaze before the most achievedof these canvases. It is as if the recalcitranceto representation that was depicted over andagain as a quality of the figures in the earlyworks is drawn into the very process offiguration, as if, to bend MacGreevy’s terms

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Fig. 4:Jack B. YeatsThe Wake Housec.1908pen and ink on paper22.5 x 29.4 cmNational Gallery ofIreland, Dublin

only slightly, an objectivetendency in relation torepresentation becomes asubjective tendency ofrepresentation.

It is well known that the mostimmediately striking aspect of thetransformation of Yeats’s stylethrough the 1920s and 1930s ishis gradual abandonment of line.The early oils are marked by thepredominance of sharp outlinesbounding the figures and thevisual foci of the image, whatBruce Arnold aptly refers to as‘drawing in oil paint’.25 This istrue not only for the illustrationsto Irishmen All, whose technicalqualities Arnold nicely analyses,associating them with the linedrawing of A Broadside or withYeats’s experience of poster-work.It is no less true of free-standingoil paintings like Bachelor’s Walkor The Double Jockey Act (1916;Fig. 7). In the former, the figuresof the flower girl and the boy ather side stand out starkly fromthe street, the pavement and thewalls behind them, as if backlit,or even as if collaged onto thealready-painted scene (Yeats’sminiature theatres come to mindat once). Facial features and thedivisions of skin from fabric, aswell as from the background, areclearly delineated. Here figurestands out from its groundemphatically. In The DoubleJockey Act, painted only a yearlater, already within the figures afreer brushwork seems to beemerging — the different tones ofthe skewbald horse and thefeatures and clothing of thejockeys and the clown have lostsharpness of definition andboundary in a way that

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contributes to the demotic sense of energythat radiates from the painting. The effect ofthe very visible brushstrokes here, and ofthe pointillistic texture of the arena floor,begins to oppose the tendency to boundingline.26 Nonetheless, the overall compositionis strongly delineated, the red-striped canvasof the tent and the upright poles clearlydistinguishing and outlining the variousfields and depths of vision. There is a distinct tension in the work between the impulse of the draughtsman and that ofthe painter.

Just as the sharp illustrator’s outlines makethe often-reproduced drawings of Life in theWest and other Irish scenes susceptible, ifwrongly, of an ethnographic or a

sentimentalizing appropriation, so the clearoutlines and the relief into which they throwthe figures against the backgroundpredispose a painting like Bachelor’s Walkto being ‘used as a nationalist ikon, and asymbol’.27 The very ‘standing forth’ of thehuman figures projects them into arepresentational status that is both their‘standing for’ the nation as its types and amode of pictorial clarity or accessibility.Nothing obscures the significance of the actand its pathos. Indeed, by a kind of visualpun one might say that the clarity of outlinecorrelates with the clarity of expressivevisual communication, the translucence ofthe meaning in the image, of the general inthis particular, that composes the symbol. In such a painting, in fact, Yeats comes

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25 Arnold, Jack Yeats, 180.See also 198 and 229–30for further remarks onthe transition in Yeats’swork away from line and on the later oiltechnique that emergeswith that break.

26 Pyle, Yeats, 204,comments on a numberof these features in thepainting.

27 Arnold, Jack Yeats, 191

Fig. 5:Jack B. YeatsThe Felons of Our Land1910ink and watercolour on card30.5 x 19.5 cmNational Gallery ofIreland, Dublin

Fig. 6:Paul HenryThe Potato Diggers 1912oil on canvas51 x 46 cmNational Gallery ofIreland, Dublin

closest to the formal qualities of an epichistorical and unambiguously nationalpainter like Seán Keating, whose canvasesare marked by strong typological figuration,deliberate symbolic, even allegoricalsignificance, and, above all, a starkoutlining of figure against background.

This is not intended as a reductivecomparison, but rather to mark thetechnical and formal transfiguration ofYeats’s work in both its radical nature andits political significance. Neither of them liessimply in a shift in content or subjectmatter, from ‘a perception of countrymen inrelaxation’ to ‘the loneliness of theindividual soul’, as Ernie O’Malley put it, orfrom specificity to images ‘less firmly fixedin time and space’, as John Rothensteinclaimed.28 There is, obviously, nothingintrinsically less poetic or less lonely andindividual, or even more specific, in TheCircus Dwarf (1912) or Derelict (1910)than in No Flowers (1945) or A Morning inthe City (1937). We are obliged, rather, toturn to the significance of the actual modeof representation rather than to the objectsrepresented to grasp the import of thepaintings, the way in which they seize andwork on the viewer’s gaze.

Any number of Yeats’s later paintings wouldserve to exemplify the activity of the gazethat his canvases demand and provoke. We will focus on two here that manifestsomewhat different aspects of the painter’stechnique and its effects. Two Travellers(1942; Fig. 8) is one of Yeats’s better-knownpaintings, partly because the Tate Gallerypurchased it, partly because it has beenassociated with the set of Beckett’s Waitingfor Godot.29 Thematically, the paintingresumes many of Yeats’s visualpreoccupations. Two men, in well-wornclothing, encounter one another on a roughtrack in a coastal landscape. Heavy cloudssuggest an imminent rainstorm, though theskyscape is lighter over a choppy sea inwhat is presumably the West, where a faint

rose light illuminates the clouds and falls onone traveller’s face. The encounter remainsan enigma: are they strangers oracquaintances? Of what do they speak?How far are they travelling? What bringsthem to this otherwise desolate andapparently uninhabited terrain? Where iseach headed? In this respect, the painting isof course susceptible either of Beckett’sunderstanding of Yeats’s images asdisjunctive and suspended, or ofMacGreevy’s reading of this painting as ‘anapparently casual encounter in a world ofmystery’, revealing a new ‘exalted tragicconsciousness’. [JBY, 37] It is alsopotentially open to Brian O’Doherty’sdismissive criticism of Yeats’sromanticization of the figure of the traveller,in the course of which he effectively reducesthe later work to identity with the earlyillustrations and broadsides, all equivalentin their representation and mythologizationof the national character as that of theoutsider.30 And yet to turn from thethematic paraphrase of the painting (theaspect of the painting that reproductiontends to foreground by flattening out thetexture of the medium) to its formal andtechnical qualities is to engage with a muchless stable phenomenon that obliges whatBeckett calls the ‘labour’ that is engaged‘between such a knower and such anunknown’. [D, 95] The obligation to labourconstitutes the difficulty that obtrudes inalmost every instance of the later paintingbetween a thematic statement that can bereduced for conventional consumption or, asO’Doherty complains, national self-flattery,and the work itself, in every sense of thatword. That labour evoked by the workdeparts markedly from the lucidity ofrepresentation that makes earlier paintingslike Bachelor’s Walk so much more readilyavailable for iconic use.

Confronting Two Travellers, one is almostcertainly struck at once by the paint surfaceitself and by the difficulty of resolving theimage out of the paintwork. The same effect

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28 Ernie O’Malley, ‘ThePainting of Jack B.Yeats’, in McHugh,Centenary Gathering,68; John Rothenstein,director of the TateGallery, quoted inArnold, Jack Yeats, 231

29 See, for example,Knowlson, Damned toFame, 378–79. PeggyPhelan, in her article‘Lessons in Blindnessfrom Samuel Beckett’,Proceedings of theModern LanguageAssociation, 119, 5 (Oct.2004), 1279–92, whichappeared as this essaywas in press, sees Yeats’sThe Graveyard Wall(1945) as a possiblesource for the play. Icannot corroborate hersense, but am pleased tosee how closely herdescription of Beckett’s‘rhythm of looking’correlates to my ownsense both of Beckett’sgaze and of Yeats’smature style and thedemands it makes of theviewer. She writes: ‘Itoscillates between seeingand blindness, betweenfiguration andabstraction, between thevoid at the center ofsight and the contour ofthe slender ridge thatbrooks it.’

30 Brian O’Doherty, ‘JackB. Yeats: Promise andRegret’, in McHugh,Centenary Gathering,80–81 and passim

Fig. 7:Jack B. YeatsThe Double Jockey Act 1916oil on canvas61 x 46 cmNational Gallery ofIreland, Dublin

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can be observed in many of Yeats’s latepaintings, notably, for example, Grief(1951; Fig. 9) or Above the Fair (1946; Fig.10): it is often extremely difficult to achievea total image of the painting no matterwhere one stands before the canvas, andwherever one stands, one has the impressionof seeing the work at a different depth offocus, so to speak. It is as if the representedof the painting continually dissolves backinto the medium of the representation,resisting totalization and renewing the workof the gaze at every turn.31 In TwoTravellers, not atypically, the layering of theoils is at very different thicknesses, rangingfrom the thinnest of layers to a denseimpasto. The grey cloudscape that stretchesfrom the expanse of sky in the upper leftcorner across the line of the hill ormountain that becomes an abrupt cliff tothe right is a thin film through which thebare canvas can at points be glimpsed. Tothe far mid-right, the dark blue of the sea isthickly layered, but scored at points bybrush handle or palette knife to reveal barecanvas, producing the effect of lines of surffoam at the cliff’s base. Just right of centre,along the side of the road or path that

bisects the painting, an extraordinary stretchof primary colours — predominantly yellow,red and green — is dashed unmixed andthickly on to the canvas and apparently,from the lack of brushmarks, applieddirectly from the tube or perhaps the fingerto the canvas. Similar patches of brightprimary colour appear to the left of the twofigures, but in neither case do these vividand heady patches of colour resolve into theconventional outlines of the vegetation theymust be taken to represent. The thickestimpasto composes the two figures. Inevident contrast to the earlier oils, however,no firm bounding lines enclose them. On thecontrary, they are composed largely out ofthe same oil tones as the landscapeimmediately surrounding them; at points,such as the right leg of the left-handtraveller, they are literally carved out of thedepth of the paint by, presumably, the tip ofthe brush handle. The figures seem at onemoment to be sculpted almost three-dimensionally out of the surface of the oilpaint, at another to merge back into it, thefigure becoming consubstantial with themedium. In such a technique, ‘drawing inoils’ takes on an entirely new meaning.

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31 This is precisely theeffort that the DublinOpinion cartooncaptures: see Fig. 1.

Fig. 8:Jack B. YeatsTwo Travellers1942oil on wood91.5 x 122 cmTate Gallery, London

The mobility of the gaze that is obliged bythis highly plastic application of the oils isreinforced by the overall composition of thepainting. With an effect that is again largelylost in the flattening of reproduction, thecanvas appears to be constructed ofoverlapping and competing zones of focus.While at one moment the two figures in theforeground appear to dominate, the eye isalmost immediately led either to the upperleft quadrant of the lowering sky by thefigure’s vertical posture, or by the intenseprimary colours to the roadway and then,by a sharp rightward turn of the linedescribed by those pigments at the base ofthe cliff and its continuation in a fine line ofred, to the sea- and skyscape of the upperright quadrant. These various zones of focusare not discrete, however, but overlap andpenetrate each other while being linked bythe roadway whose line of sight projectsdiagonally from the lower left through thestanding figures towards the upper right.The effect of these distinct but overlappingcompositional zones is to prevent the eyefrom coming to repose. In this sense, thepainting forcefully confirms MacGreevy’sinsight, based on earlier work of Yeats’s, asto the ‘balance’ between figure and

landscape, but does so in a way remarkablymore dynamic in every respect. It is not onlythat within the representation the eye moveswithout dominative hierarchy between whatwould otherwise be ‘figure’ and ‘ground’,but that the gaze moves, is obliged to move,simultaneously between the representation,the image in the painting, and the mediumof the representation, the material of thepainting. The dimension of artifice, thematerial that composes the image, is notsubordinated to the image: rather, itssurfaces, depths and plastic textures areforegrounded in a way that dissolves thefigure even as they supply the mediumthrough which it emerges. The oscillation ofthe eye between material and representationproduces the paradoxical effect ofsuspension to which Beckett refers, like asustained tremolo in musical composition.

In this relative autonomy of medium andrepresentation, Yeats’s rejection ofreproductions is aimed at the preservationof the work as work, as the difficult locus of an unachievable labour of looking. The rejection does not have as its aim areactionary preservation of aura, in whichthe symbolist translucence of the image

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Fig. 9:Jack B. YeatsGrief 1951oil on canvas102 x 153 cmNational Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

through the transparent medium might bemaintained. Instead it is based on the wishto retain the sometimes vertiginousoscillation between the image and itsmaterial medium. The relation here between the visual ‘content’ and the formalor technical means is much as TheodorAdorno describes the relation of contentand technique with regard to the new music that was emerging more or lesscontemporaneously with Yeats’s career as an artist:

Content and technique are both identicaland non-identical because a work of artacquires its life in the tension betweeninner and outer; because it is a work ofart only if its manifest appearance pointsto something beyond itself … Theunmediated identity of content andappearance would annul the idea of art.For all that, the two are also identical.For in composition, that which has beenmade real is all that counts. Onlyphilistines can entertain the notion of aready-made and self-contained artisticcontent that is then projected into theexternal world with the aid of a

technique conceived of in similarly thing-like terms. Inner experience and outerform are created by a reciprocal processof interaction.32

This dialectic of content and technique isless formally implied in Yeats’s own remarksto interviewer Shotaro Oshima concerningthe stylistic changes in his work: ‘Things inthe external world may seem always thesame to some people, but an artist findsthem different when a change is broughtabout in him. He must not try to go againstthis inner change.’33

What this conception of the mutualautonomy of content and technique suggestsis no less that every occasion, every imageto be produced, requires a differenttechnical solution; that composition, inpainting as in music, requires differentmodes of deployment of its medium, specificto that occasion. To turn from TwoTravellers to The Old Walls (1945; Fig. 11)is to see Yeats deploy a similar repertoire oftechniques modified for a quite differentconjunction and to equally different effects.Here, a solitary figure stands enclosed by a

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32 Theodor W. Adorno,‘Music and Technique’,in Sound Figures, trans.Rodney Livingstone(Stanford, 1999), 197–98

33 Shotaro Oshima, ‘AnInterview with JackButler Yeats’, inMcHugh, CentenaryGathering, 52–53

Fig. 10:Jack B. YeatsAbove the Fair1946oil on canvas91 x 122 cmNational Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

space of ruins, the whole being suffused bya yellow light that is totally appropriate tothose melancholy light effects that I referredto earlier. If the dark patch to the left of thestanding figure is, as it appears to be, hisshadow rather than a bush or clump ofweeds, then the light that enters the ruinedstructure is the low light of a rising orsetting sun. This painting, which Beckettcould have seen on his immediate post-warvisit to Ireland, shares some of the colourtones of A Storm, on which he commentedin his letter to MacGreevy and of AMorning (1935–36), that he had purchasedfrom Yeats in the mid-1930s. Here, thevariation in the application of the oils is noless marked than in Two Travellers, but toquite different tonal effect. The figureupper-centre and his shadow to the left arezones of thick, dark impasto while the wallsthat constitute the upper segment and thesides of the painting are composed of anastonishingly thin layer of paint, in manyplaces consisting of virtually bare canvas.There is a certain bravura in this willingnessto compose so much of the painting fromthe exposed canvas that underlies the image,

pushing what MacGreevy refers to as the‘swift and summary … brushwork’ thatshapes his figures to a further limit. [JBY,15] Here, however, the treatment is not ofthe figure, but of the walls between whichthe figure stands, a structure that becomesattenuated to apparent translucence: it isvirtually the formal antithesis of the twopaintings that MacGreevy singles out onaccount of the disappearance of the figuresinto, respectively, background and motion,Going to Wolfe Tone’s Grave and The SaltMarshes (n.d.). In The Old Walls it is thehuman figure that bears the substance of thepainting, while the ruins around him seemto fade and dissolve from representation. It is an effect that recurs with remarkablefrequency in the later paintings, where evenwhat appear to be still-whole structures losesubstance and solidity in relation to the lightand to the human figures that move acrossthem (see, for example, The BreakfastRoom [1944], A Silence [1944], The Music[1946], In the City’s Heart [1950], or Grief[1951]). The paradoxical effect of this is, onthe one hand, to make the human figureseem more solid and substantial than its

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Fig. 11:Jack B. YeatsThe Old Walls1945oil on canvas46 x 61cmNational Gallery ofIreland, Dublin

material environment: we might then see thecontemplative figure of The Old Wallsstanding out against the structures he hasoutlasted; on the other, it is to make thehuman presence seem, by virtue of its verysolidity, a ghostly remnant of things thathave passed away, seeking to summon themonce more to presence.34 The veryapplication of the paint thus enacts theoscillation of memory and loss,representation and the evanescent present,staging technically the insubstantiality ofsubstance and the accumulated patina ofperception and reflection that makesmemory a filter or screen rather than atranslucent medium. The formal as well asiconic tension that insists here between thefigure and its ground transforms the‘balance’ between landscape and figure thatMacGreevy noted into a reflection on themedium of representation itself. The canvasas painted becomes in its technical bravuraan index of the extent to which the opacityof the subject, with its dense layerings ofmemory, obtrudes between therepresentation and the object that eludes it,fading ultimately into ruination.

This rigorous foregrounding of the technicalproblems of representation constitutes theenduring difficulty of viewing Yeats’spaintings as visual totalities: standing beforehis canvases, one is constantly forced tomove back and forth between technique andimage, figure and medium, undecided as towhich dominates. This recalcitrance to visualconsumption of the image belies equallythose who seek to celebrate Yeats for hisromantic nationalism and those who, likeBrian O’Doherty, deprecate him for thesame. Both appropriations of his work are asreductive of the aesthetic concept ofromanticism as they are of the paintingsthemselves, levelling one to mere fancifulidealization and the other to mere iconicthematics. Yeats’s painting defies every effortto reduce it to figurative translucence,whether in the form of the translucence ofthe symbol that informs a nationalist

aesthetic or in that of a classical painting inwhich, as Louis Marin has argued, ‘thematerial “canvas” and “real” surface mustbe posited and neutralized in what isessentially a technical, theoretical andideological assumption of transparency’.35

On the contrary, Yeats’s paintingforegrounds its material conditions ofrepresentation with an effect that is theantithesis of mimetic reflection of the world.It is to this formal recalcitrance of Yeats’spainting, rather than simply to anycontingent affinity with his representationsof tramps, clowns or derelicts, that we canmost fruitfully trace Beckett’s high estimationof the painter. The period during whichBeckett befriended and engaged most closelywith Yeats was also that in which he wasbeginning to articulate his own approach toart and was singularly exercised by theproblem of representation and with theproblematic relation, already cited, of subjectto object. Where for Yeats the difficultrelation of representation to represented wasarticulated in a painting that foregroundedthe tension between figure and medium, forBeckett, most notably in his critical essays ofthis period and throughout the restlessexperimentation of his writing, an analogoustension first emerges in the relation betweenlanguage and its objects. For Beckett, thatrelation later ceased to be phrased as aquestion of two distinct domains — whetherof language and self-consciousness or oflanguage and percepts — and became (as forAdorno and Yeats) more precisely a questionof one domain in which medium andrepresentation are undecidable aspects of thework. From at least The Unnamable on, therecan be no distinction between medium andcontent: representation is what is represented;what can be represented is representation.

But through the 1930s and 1940s, Beckettcontinues to articulate the problem of thewriter through what may have been for himat first a necessary distinction between thetwo. As he writes in 1937 to his Germanfriend Axel Kaun:

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34 This may be especiallytrue of A Silence, whichhas been seen as anassembly of dead andliving friends, including,in the foreground, J. M. Synge.

35 See Louis Marin, ToDestroy Painting, trans.Mette Hjort (Chicago,1995), 47.

And more and more my own languageappears to me like a veil that must be tornapart to get at the things (or theNothingness) behind it … As we cannoteliminate language all at once, we shouldat least leave nothing undone that mightcontribute to its falling in disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it — be itsomething or nothing — begins to seepthrough; I cannot imagine a higher goalfor a writer today. Or is literature aloneto remain behind in the old lazy ways thathave been so long ago abandoned bymusic and painting? [D, 171–72]

Language for Beckett at this point remainsconceived of metaphorically as a veilbetween the object external to it and therepresentation that it constitutes, althoughthe counter-analogy with music and paintingsuggests that he may already be grasping fora notion of an art in which there is nodistinction between form and matter.

As he proceeds, he articulates a project that,though the analogy here is to music,remarkably resembles Yeats’s use of hisartistic materials:

Is there any reason why that terriblemateriality of the word surface should notbe capable of being dissolved, like forexample the sound surface, torn byenormous pauses, of Beethoven’s seventhSymphony, so that through whole pageswe can perceive nothing but a path ofsounds suspended in giddy heights,linking unfathomable abysses of silence?[D, 172]

And it is, in fact, to painting that Beckettmost consistently turns to find analogies forhis own predicament as a writer. What isstriking, however, is that despite theantagonism to representation and toexpression that informs his criticism ofMacGreevy and his art criticism in general,

Beckett does not turn for a solution toabstraction, as one might expect, but ratherto artists who seem to be linked only intheir exploration of the limits of figuration:Yeats, Bram Van Velde, and, later in his life,Avigdor Arikha. He remarks in his review ofDenis Devlin’s Intercessions that ‘it isnaturally in the image that this profoundand abstruse self-consciousness first emergeswith least loss of integrity … First emerges.’[D, 94] That insistent repetition (separatedfrom the first instance by several sentences,thus requiring a noticeable effort of recall) is also a qualification. Beckett’s fascinationwith the qualities and paradoxes of theimage remains a constant of his work, somuch so that the images he isolates fromYeats’s paintings remarkably anticipatethose of the short texts and plays of the1960s. But the condition of the image’semergence, as the representative of self-consciousness, is no less the condition of itsfading, a point on which those texts, withtheir cyclical fadings in and out of visibility,insist. This is already for Beckett in hiswritings on painting, the crux of the gazethat painting obliges in its staging of theundecidable relation between image and medium:

Whence comes this impression of a thingin the void? Of artifice [de la façon]? It’sas if one were to say that the impressionof blue comes from the sky. [D, 125; mytranslation]

This perplexity as to the object ofrepresentation, in representation, and to itsreferents is bound up with the act oflooking itself, in which the viewer’sdisequilibrium becomes a kind of self-referential slapstick. Beckett’s ‘amateurs’ inthe museum or gallery ‘look first from faraway, then close up, and … in particularlythorny cases, assess with their thumbs thedepth of the impasto.’ [D, 120; mytranslation] Though this passage concernspainting in general and the Van Velde

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brothers in particular, perhaps no better ormore succinct account of the process anddifficulty of looking at a Yeats paintingcould be achieved.

But none of this resolves the question of therelation of the medium to the represented.Which is it that is recalcitrant, the figure thatinsists on its emergence or the medium intowhich again it dissolves before the oscillatinggaze? For Beckett, this ‘issuelesspredicament’, the aporia into which soreflexive an artwork throws the viewer, isthoroughly melancholic. It is a condition thatleads him to speak, writing still of the VanVeldes, Geer and Bram, of le deuil de l’objet,mourning for the object (or the mourning ofthe object — the ambiguity of the Frenchgenitive is carefully poised). This mourning isnot one that can be alleviated, least of all byabandoning the attempt to represent:

It seems absurd to speak, as Kandinskydid, of a painting liberated from theobject. That from which painting isliberated is the illusion that there existsmore than one object of representation,perhaps even of the illusion that thisunique object would let itself berepresented … For what remains ofrepresentation if the essence of the objectis to abscond from representation? [D,136; my translation]

The persistence of an obligation torepresent, because painting cannot be freedfrom the very object that eludes it, leads toa painting whose condition is a ceaselessunveiling that reveals only further veils, as ifthe medium cannot dispense with themedium that hinders its ends, any morethan language, as the Unnamable willdiscover, can put an end to the obstructionof language: ‘An endless unveiling, veilbehind veil, plane on plane of imperfecttransparencies, an unveiling towards theununveilable, the nothing, the thing yetagain.’ [D, 137; my translation] This thing

that insists and is at once no-thing, thisthing that eludes representation, remains themelancholic ‘core of the eddy’, encryptedbeyond the reach of a subject thatnonetheless cannot abandon the urge tocapture it.36 ‘Siege laid again to theimpregnable without,’ as Beckett later writesof his friend Arikha. [D, 152] Though itmay seem absurd to align Jack B. Yeats withthe Van Veldes, whose work in quitedifferent ways pushes the boundariesbetween figuration and abstraction to thevery limit, yet it is the association thatBeckett makes from the outset. All arepainters whose work, like ‘the best ofmodern painting’, is a critique, a refusal ‘ofthe old subject-object relation’. In each case,and not least in Yeats’s, it is the dynamicoscillation between material and image thatsets that critique in play.

The dynamic of Yeats’s paintings, then, isthe enactment of a failure of representation,a failure either to retrieve or to abandon theobject. The formal means employed in thisvirtually obsessive work of representationare at once the analogue and theperformance of that predicament. It is apredicament to which Beckett himselfcontinually recurs in his writings and thatlinks his own profoundly obsessive, orsingle-minded practice with Yeats’s own.His critical works, from Proust (1931) tothe Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit(1949), repeatedly address it, and the earlywritings in English through Watt (1953),continually thematize it, but it is not untilthe trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, TheUnnamable, 1951–53) that he will withassurance achieve the capacity to enact inwriting the utter imbrication of medium andrepresentation that Yeats’s paintings assumein their own domain. It is well known thatYeats produced these paintings through actsof memory, the records of which are thevoluminous sketchbooks that he mined forlater treatment.37 This is, of course, aremarkable transition for an artist whose

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36 The phrase comes fromBeckett’s essay, ‘Proust’,in Proust and ThreeDialogues with GeorgesDuthuit (London, 1976),65–66.

37 Pyle, Yeats, 24, quotes aletter of Yeats to JosephHone: ‘No one creates …The artist assemblesmemories.’ She alsoremarks on the collection of smallnotebooks in which hekept sketches from which later paintingscould be ‘assembled’; see Yeats, 26.

early work was, often perforce, based on therapid notation of daily events. Painting frommemory, even without the intermediary ofthe retrieved sketch, is inevitably therepresentation of an object alreadyinternalized, the representation of a (mental)representation, rather than that of an objectpresented to view. It is painting asanamnesis rather than mimesis. Memoryhere is neither the retrieval of time past northe repossession of a lost object, but theperformance of that occultating light inwhich the figure merges and dissolves. Thusmany of Yeats’s later paintings foreground afigure watching, gazing, as if the painter’s orthe viewer’s gaze passes perforce throughanother’s. Beckett’s term ‘suspension’ againseems utterly apt, rendering acutely not onlythe sense of the figure’s apprehensivefixation before the scene, but also thesuspension in turn of the viewer’s gaze asthe medium dissolves the specular image ofthe gazing figure, even as it emerges. Inthese paintings, memory is presented, not asthe past regained, but as an enigma for thepresent. And that enigma is only reinforcedby the teasing, highly literary titles affixedto the paintings, titles that seem to allude toan explanatory framework outside thecanvases, to a tale in which they mightbecome clear, but which yet eludes theviewer. They transform what might havebeen symbols into allegories, but intoallegories that cannot be reduced toconceptual clarity, to interpretativemapping. This is a figuration without apossible turn to the literal.

We face, then, an œuvre that answers inadvance to Beckett’s desire for an art thatabandons the ‘possessional’ drive that hascontinually renewed westernrepresentational art. [D, 135] The internaldynamics by which figure and ground,material and image, technique and contentare held in suspended, oscillatingequilibrium correlates to a refusal ofdomination that is the aesthetic counterpart

of a radical republicanism, a republicanism,that is, that remains profoundly at oddswith the representational structures thatundergird the cultural projects ofnationalism and the modern state. I do not,evidently, mean to suggest that either Yeatsor, least of all, Beckett, programmatically setout to subserve the political projects of Irishrepublicanism, though Yeats’s commitmentto depicting the marginal sectors of Irishsocial life, urban and rural, has oftenenough been understood in those terms. Itis, rather, that the post-colonial disaffectionof both artists from the nation-state thatemerged stands not only as anacknowledgement of the failure of a certainpolitical promise but also spells thedisintegration of a coeval aesthetic projectof representation. Pettit has suggested thatthe displacement of a long-standingtradition of republican thought by theemergence of political liberalism andrepresentative forms of democracy in theearly nineteenth century follows from theradicalization of republicanism in the lateeighteenth century into a will to extend theprinciple of non-domination universally,rather than restricting it to white men ofproperty.38 This displacement in politicalthought coincides with the emergence, noless in reaction to radical republicanism, ofan aesthetic and cultural philosophy thatdetours the antagonistic and potentiallyrevolutionary claims of democratic socialmovements into and through representation.In this tradition, which runs most evidentlyfrom Kant and Schiller in Germany throughMill and Arnold in Britain, distinct domainsof representation are conjoined andarticulated together to produce a field ofidentities in which the disinterested ethicalcitizen willingly learns to be represented.Aesthetic representation prefigures politicalrepresentation, regulating the identificationof the subject with the common ground ofthe state.39 One might say that the wholetendency of the aesthetic that is devoted tothe moment of representation, in which the

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38 Pettit, Republicanism,101

39 For an historical accountof the emergence of thiscultural and politicalformation, see PaulThomas and DavidLloyd, Culture and theState (London, 1997).For the Irish context, I have elaborated someof these terms in theintroduction toNationalism and Minor Literature.

formal supervenes on the material, derivesfrom and corresponds to the continuinganxiety provoked by the radical claims of arepublicanism of differences. The need foran aesthetic education to produce in thespectator that disposition by which he (she)becomes representative of the species is noother than the moment in which Kantresponds to the French Revolution byproclaiming a republic that would berestricted to the learned, to thephilosophers. In each case, thesubordination of the singular, potentiallyeruptive manifestation of difference to anarrative of representation establishes atrajectory whereby the spectre of intractableelements can be contained and assimilatedto identity. Realism, in which themultiplicity of social forms is disciplinedinto narrative resolutions that integrate theindividual into the ‘second nature’ of thesocial, and symbolism, in which theparticular stands in, translucently, for theuniversal, are the twin stylistic modes of this trajectory.

Cultural nationalism by and largereproduces that model in forms complicatedby the need that MacGreevy acknowledgesto find in culture alternative institutions tothose that the colonizer occupies politically.This at first insurgent cultural nationalismseeks to enter into representation a peoplethat has never before been represented, andto regulate the forms of representation insuch a way that the unity and identity of aheterogeneous population can be producedand affirmed. The failure of the nationalproject thus throws into relief both thelogical contradictions of the drive torepresentation, revealing the necessarilyselective requirements of its inclusive claims,and the dominative ends that subtend it.The nationalism that proclaims the unity ofthe people in difference from the imperialstate cannot accommodate the proliferationof difference that constitutes the inner spaceof the popular. And in so far as the

contradictions of nationalist culture repeatthose of the metropolis, only in forms writlarger by the exacerbated conditions of thecolony, the foundering of this model ofrepresentation in the periphery resonates at the centre also. It is no accident that themodernist critique of representation was sooften generated from peripheral culturallocations, since it was at the margins and in sites of more or less violent struggle thatthe aesthetic politics of the nation-statebegan to unravel.

The critical aesthetic impulse that drawstogether Yeats the painter and Beckett thewriter dwells, with a certain compulsionborn of necessity, on the ruin ofrepresentation that follows in the wake ofthe national project. It is not that eitherartist promotes an immediately cognizablepolitical aesthetic. On the contrary, it israther the inevitable imbrication of thepolitical with the aesthetic withinnationalism that makes of their intensepreoccupation with the conditions ofrepresentation a deeply implicit politicalaffair. The disengagement of the aestheticfrom apparent political ends serves in theircase no longer as the means to furnish theseparate space for aesthetic formation in awell-articulated state. We might view itrather, to borrow a term from Pettit, as theaesthetic correlative of a ‘deontologicalrepublicanism’, one that regards thefoundations of ‘freedom-as-non-domination’rather than the institutions that promote orsafeguard its realization. In other words,where an aesthetic of representation thathad become tied to a mode of politicalthinking becomes, along with the politicalstate, a means to domination, only in theruins of that aesthetic can an alternative beexcavated. The excavation that follows is atonce positive and negative: positive in itsmaking space once more for the recalcitrant,for figures of those that had been deniedrepresentation: the tramps, rogues andderelicts that populate both artists’ works;

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negative, in the relentless interrogation ofthe means of representation that bothengage formally and technically. However, it is precisely the tension between the act offiguration and its formal questioning thatprevents the dimension of the political ineither artist’s work from ever congealinginto a concrete utopian project. The spaceof their work is, rather, the place made overand again for the unfit in representation, forthose that dwell only among the ruins. Inthe ruins of representation alone, where thenation meets its end, the anticipatory traceof a republic emerges as that thing that yeteludes representation.

This is a version of a paper given at the Notre DameIrish Studies Summer Seminar in 2003.

'The Future of Painting in Ireland' and all art-works byJack B.Yeats reproduced in this article © The Estate ofJack B.Yeats 2005.All Rights reserved, DACS.

APPENDIX

The Future of Painting in Ireland1

Jack B.Yeats

When a country lifts itself up under the sun,a country where the people live for Life inthis world and beyond, where conventionsfor the sake of conventions are notappraised beyond their value, and where theold rules of the copyists and the new rulesof the searchers for a hokus pokusallacupain, with which to open the treasurehouse door, are taken at the their face valueonly. In that country painting will rise also.

In the eastern loop of the Atlantic Ocean anisland people are ready to rise up and taketheir own. This island and its people arebetter equipped to lead painting to theground where it must stand if it is to be themighty force it should be, for a mighty forceit should and will be. Painting is thememory and communication of all whichlives within the eyes’ sweep. This nation,though some of its people are sometimes,for a little while, lead [sic] to accept what isforced upon them at the giver’s valuation,always turns again with a bitter andassaying eye. In the end it looks every gift-horse in the mouth. And so this country hasonly staggered, not fallen, under theenervating waves of false ideas as to themeaning and end of painting.

Here is a curious little fact. The comic opera‘Patience’ with its velvet-coated aestheteshas all over the world dealt a blow to theprestige of the painters from which theyhave not yet revovered [sic]. Before thatthey have been wild, impecunious, andtattered figures. But ‘Patience’ made themridiculous. Now, that wave of ridicule didnot reach Ireland with any force and theposition of the painter in Ireland to-day isone of dignity.

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1 Library of the NationalGallery of Ireland, JackB. Yeats Archive/YeatsMuseum Y17-1: thisfour-page typescript,signed by Jack B. Yeats,is the text of a lecturegiven at the Celtic RaceCongress, Paris, 1923; itwas formerly in thepapers of RobertBrennan, Irishambassador to the US inWorld War II, whosegranddaughter YvonneJerrold donated it to thelibrary in 1993;transcribed by HeatherEdwards.

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For a time the Irish painters were anxious to do what was‘being done’ in other countries, largely because most of thepainters were of Dublin where the imitation mind of thechildren of the Pale still made the Pale pace. But though thesaid Irish painters of the past turned with humility to imitatethe painters of other countries every now and then thenative eye and the native memory would take charge. Andevery day there are more Irish artists painting their owncountry and their own people, with the greatest equipmentof the artist — affection. That affection for their fellows andfor every rock, every little flash of water, every handful ofsoil, and every living thing in Ireland. I believe this power of wide affection is racial with the Irish. All the finest Irishpainters of the past — even when they painted other lands— had this affection.

The imitativeness of the artists of the Pale came partly fromservile humility and partly from a feeling that it was morepolite to have a something of the amateur about them thanto be as the painter who painting from himself is ready tostand or fall by his work. Responsibility and irresponsibilitymeet in him. His eye sees and his spirit catches up thewonders which are about him. But he did not invent thosewonders, how could he? He is himself a part of them. If heis a free man in a free country his eye is open and free. If hebecome a slave in a slave country he need never open a fulleye. His masters will see all for him, and he becomes unableto express himself, except as the earth and stones expressthemselves. But if he has in him the spark of freedom he willlose nothing, but time, while silent in the soil. He will riseagain strengthened and take up again the responsibility ofthe true painter, part of his own day and his own land, withwhose flood he rises and with whose ebb he falls.

I read the other day in a review an extract from a book onthe Evolution of Civilization:—

Great Art — or periods of great Art — belong to theearlier phases of civilization. The possibility of themseems to grow fainter as the intellectual part of mangrows stronger … The Artistic future in general mustconsist of raising the sentiment for Art, the power ofappreciating Art in the mass of the people. That would bean immeasurably greater service than a new galaxy ofartistic Geniuses.

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In fact UPLIFT, and I never fully realised before where thepoison lay in Uplift. Under the Uplifter’s banner mediocrityis to be encouraged and genius smothered, for the geniusmight take the bit in his teeth and clear for the mountaintops, beyond the reach of the Uplift instructor, and beforehis Department could get out a sedative pamphlet.

But the painters of Ireland will not be content to mildly andlazily browse in the valleys, occasionally enjoying a littlefeeling of superiority by drawing some dull one’s attentionto the distant and unattainable mountain top. We will not sitsmirking over the old lovers’ anthologies. We will make ourown love-songs. But when this writer on Civilization wrotethat Great Art belongs to the earlier phases of civilization Ithink, without knowing what his definition of civilization is,that perhaps he wrote the truth.

Now, Ireland’s civilization as far as the pictorial arts areconcerned is an arrested civilization. Before the Normanscame an individual decorative Art had grown to power, butit sank away; and the native strength of the Irish paintershas since lain under the weight of a super-imposedcivilization. But the finest of the Irish painters had thatselflessness which makes the painter look on himself not asthe journey’s end, but as the vehicle which conveys thewonders and the mysteries he meets upon his way. Thedanger lay where sometimes this very selflessness lead [sic]the painter to become the bravo of paint itself.

Literature is enfeebled. Words have been nearly squeezed dryin the linotype machines, and the hour has come forcommunication by the memory of the eye to take its rightfulplace. And painting is the poetry of the eye. It is notnecessarily patriotism to paint your own country. It is butcommonsense to paint the only country which you are partof. But it is patriotism to paint with all your power. Truepainting must be national and the true painter will be nocompromiser. Now there is a something in the Irish nationwhich refuses to compromise, and its painters — springingfrom such a nation — will stand out boldly and paint whatthey see and what they feel. They will lead and not follow.They will cut out their own floatation [?].