exultant, penetrating. It is conceived in the mood of awe and prayer,
which makes Millet's pictures as religious as any whichever hung
over the altar, for surely the "Angelus" is one of the most spiritual
of pictures, though the peasants bow their heads and worship in a
temple not built with hands. I do not, of course, compare otherwise
than in the mood the "Midsummer Eve" to such a masterpiece; but
there is a kinship between the beauty revealed in great and in
little things, and our thought turns from the stars to the flowers
with no feeling of descent into an alien world. But this mood is
rare in life as in art, and it is only occasionally that the younger
Yeats becomes the interpreter of the spirituality of the peasant.
He is more often the recorder of the extravagant energies of the
race-course and the market-place, where he finds herded together
all the grotesque humors of West Irish life.

We recognize his figures as distinctly Irish. Here the old rollicking
Lever and Lover type of Irishmen reappear, hunting like the very devil,
with faces set in the last ecstasy of rapid motion. There is an
excess of energy in these furious riders which almost gives them a
symbolic character. They seem to ride on some passionate business
of the soul rather than for any transitory excitement of the body.
And besides these wild horse-men there are quiet and lovely figures
like "A Mother of the Rosses," holding her child to her breast in
an opalescent twilight, through which the boat that carries her moves.
There are always large and noble outlines, which suggest that if
Jack Yeats had more grandiose ambitions he might have been the Millet
of Irish rural life, but he is too much the symbolist, hating all
but essentials, to elaborate his art.

In writing of Jack Yeats mention must be made of his black and white