on its works.

The coloring grows better every year; it is more varied and purer.
It is sometimes sombre, as in the tragic and dramatic "Simon the
Cyrenian," and sometimes rich and flowerlike, but always charged
with sentiment, and there is a curious fitness in it even when it
is evidently unreal. These blues and purples and pale greens--what
crowd ever seemed clad in such twilight colors? And yet we accept
it as natural, for this opalescence is always in the mist-laden air
of the West; it enters into the soul today as it did into the
soul of the ancient Gael, who called it Ildathach--the many-colored
land; it becomes part of the atmosphere of the mind; and I think
Mr. Yeats means here to express, by one of the inventions of genius,
that this dim radiant coloring of his figures is the fitting symbol
of the fairyland which is in their hearts. I have not felt so
envious of any artist's gift for a long time; not envy of his
power of expression, but of his way of seeing things. We are all
seeking today for some glimpse of the fairyland our fathers knew;
but all the fairylands, the Silver Cloud World, the Tirnanoge, the
Land of Heart's Desire, rose like dreams out of the human soul,
and in tracking them there Mr. Yeats has been more fortunate than
us all, for he has come to the truth, perhaps hardly conscious of
it himself.

1902




TWO IRISH ARTISTS