E admire some because of their accomplishment, others because of what they are. I admire Mr. John Yeats as an artist as much as any, but I feel that nature’s best gift to him was a humanity which delights in the humanity of others. Few artists I think found it more easy to be interested in the people they met or painted. All his portraits, whether of men or women, seem touched with affection. Rarely has he pourtrayed any, young or old, where something like a soul does not look at us through the eyes. I have liked people after seeing Mr. Yeats’ portraits of them, and I am sure I would not have liked them so much if I had not first looked at them with his vision. In his delightful letters, of which extracts have been already published, and in his essays he lets us unconsciously into the secret of his meditation about his sitters. He is always discriminating between themselves and their ideas, searching for some lovable natural life. He complains in one of his essays that the American women whom he admires cannot be easily natural. They want so much to be the ideal daughter or the ideal wife or the ideal friend that poor ordinary human nature is not good enough for them. He perhaps never heard of Laotze—how few people know of that fount of wisdom—but Mr. Yeats, who is, I fancy, unhappy in the society of metaphysicians, economists or theorists, would, I believe, have loved the Chinese sage who made a religion with this law, “Be ye natural.” All the other religions draw us away from hearth and home and love and dominate us by an overlaw, but Laotze alone among religious teachers heaves a sigh when he hears of someone setting out to reform the world because he knows there will be no end to it. When Laotze says in his ideal state people would be contented in themselves, think their poor clothes beautiful and their plain food sweet, I think of Mr. Yeats and his fear that the reformer will improve the Irish peasant off the face of the earth. He delights in him as he is. Why should anybody want to alter what is already natural, wild and eloquent? To be primitive is to be unspoiled. Mr. Yeats seems to be seeking everywhere in art and letters for the contours and emotions which are the natural mould of face or mind. Mr. Orpen can astonish us with technical accomplishment and Mr. John with masterly drawing, but if we look at the face of a woman painted by Mr. Yeats we will be attracted, not by the transient interest of novelty in treatment, but because of some ancient and sweet tradition of womanhood in the face, the eyes, the lips. We find the eyes so kind that it is so we imagine mothers or wives from the beginning of time have looked upon their children or have bewitched men to build about them the shelter of home and civilisation. Mr. Yeats in his art had this intimacy with the heart’s desire, which is not external beauty, as those who have degenerated art into the pourtrayal of prettiness suppose, but beauty of spirit. Those who knew Mr. Yeats will remember that enchanting flow of conversation which lightened the burden of sitting; and nature was wise in uniting the gift of conversation with the gift of portrait painting, because the artist was so happy in his art and so reluctant to finish his work; without that grace of speech few sitters could have endured to the end with an artist always following up some new light of the soul, obliterating what already seemed beautiful to substitute some other expression which seemed more natural or characteristic. To those who knew Mr. Yeats these essays will recall that conversation with which we did not always agree but which always excited us and started us thinking on our own account. The reader will find here thoughts which are profound, said so simply that their wisdom might be overlooked, and also much delightful folly uttered with such vivacity and gaiety that it seems to have the glow of truth. Perhaps these fantasies and freaks of judgment are as good as if they were true. One of the most delightful inventions of nature is the kitten chasing its own tail, and this and many other inventions of nature seem to indicate that a beautiful folly is one of the many aspects of wisdom. What is it but mere delight in life for its own sake, in invention for its own sake, or, as Mr. Yeats puts it elsewhere, a disinterested love of mischief for its own dear sake. How dear that is to us Irish who have often had nothing but love of mischief to console us when all the substantial virtues and prizes of life had been amassed by our neighbours. How witty Mr. Yeats is those who read these essays will discover. “When a belief rests on nothing you cannot knock away its foundations,” he says, perhaps half slyly thinking how secure were some of his own best sayings from attack. I refuse to argue over or criticise the philosophy of the man who wrote that, for I do not know how to get at him. I am content to enjoy, as I am sure his friends will, and new friends also who will be made by a reading of this book, and who will be grateful to Mrs. Bellinger of New York, who cut out and preserved from various papers these essays as they appeared; for the writer, unlike the kitten, had no interest in chasing his own tail, and had forgotten what he had written or where it had appeared. Gathered in one book these essays reflect a light upon each other and recreate for us a personality which has deserted Dublin, but which none who knew would wish to forget.

A. E.