sleepy doorkeeper is a goblin or gnome. Perhaps
the charm of it all is that it is so evidently illusion, for when the
heart is strong in its own surety it can look out on the world, and
smile on things which would be unendurable if felt to be permanent,
knowing they are only dreams.

Many of these sketches have a largeness, almost a nobility, of
conception, which is, I think, a gift from father to son. "After the
Harvest's Saved" is something elemental. The "Post-car" suggests the
horses of the sun, or the stage coach in De Quincey's extraordinary
dream, when the opium had finally rioted in his brain, and transformed
his stage-coach into a chariot carrying news of some everlasting
victory. Blake has said "exuberance is genius," and there is an excess
of energy or passion, or a dilation of the forms, or a peace deeper than
mere quietude in the figures of Mr. Yeats' pictures, which gives them
that symbolic character which genius always impresses 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

It is unjust to an artist to write on the spur of the moment of his
work--of the just seen picture which pleases or displeas