There Is No Night

Irish Arts Review

There Is No NightAuthor(s): Hilary PyleSource: Irish Arts Review (1984-1987), Vol. 3, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), pp. 36-40Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20491877 .

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

THERE IS NO NIGHT

W ords, in the individual and varied way in which Jack Yeats

used them, are what make his painting stand apart from Degas, Munch and

Kokoschka, the artists with whom he can be most closely compared. Other Irish artists have given their composi tions original titles, which have increased the clarity or the poetry of the work1; but with Yeats the use of words was necessary to his creative sense, and this verbal element cannot be separated from the pigment it accompanies. He was completedly fearless in his choice of titles for paintings, and relished lengthy rhythmical phrases, and proper names,

which lent a lilt to his compositions.

"But for Ben Bulbin and Knocknarea Many a poor sailor would be cast away," and

'The German who played "O'Donnell Aboo" in the Rosses' are titles of two of his early water-colours, which as artistic works need no explanatory label, but whose content is made immediate by the addition of words. This is also true of the joyous oil of 1948, with the original chant title

"Left- Left We Left Our Name On the Road On the Road On the Famous Road On the Famous Road On the Famous Road Of Fame"

and of the great emotional landscape of his middle period, 'From Portacloy to Rathlin O'Beirne'. One suspects that Yeats painted this view of Donegal from the north coast of Mayo as much for the enjoyment of the place-names as for his pleasure in the colours of his palette.

He poured poetry into his late landscapes by way of their lyrical titles,

where, with views of the 1920's and earlier, simple place-names had sufficed. A recognisable County Sligo landscape of 1947 is called 'Among Horses'; another late landscape, 'The Beautiful City of Sligo'; a third, 'Queen Maeve Walked upon this Strand'. So he encouraged the spectator into succes sive emotions: a feeling of gaiety in the first painting, nostalgia in the second, and a more reflective cast of mind in

the last. The title 'The Banquet Hall Deserted'

reminds us that, with his love of literature and song, Jack Yeats borrowed

Hilary Pyle, whose complete catalogue of all the paintings and drawings by Jack B. Yeats in the

National Gallery of Ireland has just been published and heralded by a.

show there of that entire collection, writes here of the

painter's fascination with, and use of, words in his work.

considerably from other writers. In doing so, he was not only following his own inclination, but acting on advice given to him by his father. 'All the great artists and poets have been shameless plagiarists', wrote John Butler Yeats,

'indeed these ... men have been compared to bees who steal from the flowers to make their hives of honey ... Dante, Michael

Angelo, Shelley, Blake and Shakespeare all were plagiarists and you yourself know that large swarm of little artists who refuse to imitate anybody and come to nothing.. . '2

In 'The Banquet Hall Deserted' of 1942, Jack Yeats takes the phrase, and

much of the emotion of his painting, from a verse of Thomas Moore's poem, 'Oft in the Stilly Night'.

'I feel like one Who treads alone Some banquet hall - deserted,

Whose lights are fled, Whose garlands dead, And all but he departed.'

In this theatrical painting, there is a strong sense of glory departed. The artist is surrounded by the faded riches of a music hall interior, seen by day, without the accompanying excitement of an audience. In the empty auditorium stands, grotesquely, a boxing ring: it, too, is empty.

Yeats could borrow any idea or phrase for a theme or title, even using well known proverbs: but one of his chief, and most original, literary sources was a folk one, the Irish ballad. 'Willy Reilly' or 'The Colleen Bawn', is a famous Ulster love song of the late eighteenth century about a Catholic farmer who eloped with the daughter of a landowner of high Orange principles. The first verse is sung in Scene One of Yeats's miniature play, The Treasure of the Garden, which he published in 1903.

'Oh, rise up, Willy Reilly, and come along with me, I mean for to go with you and leave this coun- te-rie,

To leave my father's dwelling, his houses and fine land; And away goes Willie (sic) Reilly and his dear Colleen Bawn.'

The two lovers are caught, and 'Poor Reilly all in Sligo jail lay on the stony

ground'; and, though the Colleen Bawn does all she can to plead his cause, Willy Reilly is deported for life.

The song has a natural attraction for Yeats, with its Sligo associations, but, in his oil of 1945, 'Rise Up Willy Reilly', he forgets Sligo, and shows a woman ballad singer performing for a young man in a generalized landscape. Every thing is'hugely universal'.3 The woman's shawl has become a transparent scarf, very like a lace mantilla. Her face is alight with some inspiration outside of herself; the man kneels on the ground before her with his head bowed. Her call to the kneeling youth to 'rise up', vocalized in the words of the song, while grounded in the artist's memory of having once heard the song sung, acquires an esoteric significance through the poetic style in which the figures, and the vague unrealistic landscape sur rounding them, are treated.

The picture was painted in the year the Second World War ended, and may be interpreted as a call to mankind to embark upon a new and uncorrupt life. It is redolent with joy and relief on the part of the artist, who had painted the grimmer 'Tinker's Encampment. The Blood of Abel' five years before. But the theme is only one of many of a period when the artist was detaching himself more and more from preoccupa tion with mundane things, and realizing an abstract vision of ultimate joy for man. He was still to paint canvases of overwhelming tragedy, or inspired by irrational violence, such as 'The Great

Tent has Collapsed' and 'Humanity's Alibi'; but, as Samuel Beckett wrote in a contemporary review, 'he brings light as only the great dare bring light to the issueless predicament of existence, reduces the dark where there might have been mathematically at least, a door.'4 'The Great Tent' of child hood's circus is related in Yeats's imagery with the sky5: 'Humanity's

Alibi' is the barrel man, or whipping boy, who was the object of physical abuse in the fair-ground. The use of such popular symbols to carry his

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

THERE IS NO NIGHT

strident themes freed Yeats's paintings of bitterness or pessimism.

'Eileen Aroon', of eight years later, evokes another famous Irish love song, reversing the roles this time, for a yellow-haired boy sings to a girl. The song has none of the tragic associations that 'Willy Reilly' has; the joyous domi nant figure of the handsome youth, in a gay lyrical landscape, represents love epitomized, as well as, on a more visionary plane, a hope of regeneration for mankind.

All of the late visionary paintings draw additional significance from their metaphorical titles. 'Eileen Aroon', for example, becomes the artist's own song of love, which is aroused, in the first instance, by memories of his Sligo past.

The song is now sung to an internat ional audience, and, in the painting, is intimately related to the emotional, limitless landscape (derived from an Irish one), which responds to the ten derness of the lyric with its glowing harmonious colours.

Yeats was never specific about the

kind of vision he saw, but instead painted uplifted characters and scenes, leaving it to the spectator to formulate his own interpretation of the images. He expressed his attitude neatly, in a whim sical paragraph in Sligo:

'There are more up-lifters in the world than subjects of uplift. Let them uplift us, shoulder high. Then we will be able to see over their heads to the several promised lands, from which we have come, to which

we trust to go.'6

He is convinced about the existence of 'each's own promised land', and so, in the various paintings prophesying a future for humanity, relied on the typical imagery he had always used to arouse some intuitive understanding in the spectator, without wishing for any literal explanation. The manner of presentation sufficed to express his intention.

A monosyllabic title gives the added punch to 'Glory' and 'Shouting', both late works of exalted mood. These paintings may be seen as forming a group with the National Gallery of

Ireland's 'Grief', exploring man's positive emotions in various ways, the last two great paintings carrying their themes on to a metaphorical plane of vision.

Marilyn Gaddis Rose has suggested that 'Shouting' has 'ominous interpretations

open to US'7: but it must be viewed as a paean on the same ecstatic level as 'Glory'. In 'Shouting', a sailor, a jockey

and a ballad singer roar out their joy to the landscape. Two elderly men, counterparts of the artist's two selves, merge with the ecstasy of nature, in the company of a golden-haired child, harbinger of the future, in 'Glory'. "But still I call out 'Glory"', wrote Yeats in

Ah Well, "and every one of you gets a lift in the upper garret of his stomach, isn't that so?"8

There is a doctrinal note in a few of these late works. The artist not only recognises the existence of 'each's own promised land', but implies a spiritual awakening for tattered humanity, and ultimate happiness. He leaves it to the spectator to interpret for himself what form salvation will take: but there is no

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-37



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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

THERE IS NO NIGHT

doubt that each individual will recognise it when it comes. There is none of the fearful anticipation, and final horror, suggested in W. B. Yeats's poem 'The Second Coming':

'The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs.'

Jack B. Yeats's 'vast image' in 'The Expected' of 1948 is a helmeted hero of an ideal world, with companions, two of them children. He is revealed to a man, identifiable with the spectator, in the foreground of the painting. 'In Glory', of 1954, one of Yeats's last works is more abstract. The vision is like a mirage. In both, the imagery has classical, or Celtic overtones; but the

method of presentation recalls earlier paintings by the artist of some specta cular entrance in theatre or circus.

The most perfect expression of his optimistic message is to be found in a painting which uses an idiom that comes naturally to Yeats, and has little to equate it immediately with conven tional belief. 'There is no Night' is a figurative landscape, which shows a horseman, who has been asleep on the ground near his mount, wakening and looking up at the sky. It was not the first time that Yeats had painted an adventurer seeking his fortune in the saddle. In theme and composition, the painting recalls 'A Homage to Bret Harte', of 1943. There the traveller sleeps with his head on his pack, in the shelter of trees, rather than on an open

moor. His horse is tethered, and not galloping free. The notion of an unfettered life, which first drew him to the adventure tales of Bret Harte, appealed to Yeats so much that he repeated the same form of composition in 'Glory to the Brave Singer', a year after 'There is no Night', in 1950. The recumbent figure, now on his own,

without a horse, wakes from his sleep in the open to sing aloud for joy.

The traveller acquires greater signi ficance for the artist by being translated

into an Irish setting. 'There is no Night' can be interpreted on three levels. First, it is a pictorial representation of a man resting on his journey. He wakes from his sleep on an Irish moor, under the stars, and sees his horse racing about in the moonlight. Some personal experi ence from boyhood may have inspired the picture, as well as the memory of a story he once read.

The title adds a second dimension. 'There is no Night'. The artist affirms his optimism in a poetic fashion. Night tends to be equated with doubt, fear, darkness of spirit, and death, and day with hope and life. Instead of saying, 'It is day', Yeats asserts unequivocally, 'There is no Night'. He is reiterating the sentiments of a picture he painted shortly after his wife's death, which he entitled, 'The Night has Gone'. Over coming his grief, in the painting, the artist is seen walking in a dark land scape, over which dawn is breaking.

Now, two years later, his message is universal, and completely optimistic.

The third aspect of the painting, alongside its memory and poetic ele ments,' has been derived also in a manner typical of Yeats. Ready, like his father, to plagiarize, he bases the title on a phrase taken from The Revelation of Saint John, and altered to his own liking. He may have heard the passage read at his wife's funeral,9 and kept it in his mind; or he may have been familiar with the Apocalypse, and have drawn on it automatically. 'And there shall be no night there' is changed into a more dramatic, and concise, statement: 'There is no Night'.

Again the Revelation reads, 'And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse: and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True'. Yeats appears to ignore the second part of the sentence, visually at least, and shows his rider on the ground, waking to see a

white horse, racing on the moorland, beneath a visionary sky. Through the eyes of the prone man, the spectator is allowed to see 'heaven opened', to know that'There is no Night'.

The human reality of the spiritual experience is undoubtedly a reference by the artist to actual experience, because it is a fact that the eye

unaccustomed to electric light will rarely see a sky that is totally black,

without hints of the coming day. But the uplift he excites is totally in the

manner of painting, and in the choice of title.

So, taking his inspiration from a passage in The Revelation of Saint John, Yeats expresses his theme in a personal way, siting his message of optimism in reality - that is, a recognisable Irish landscape; adding an element of fantasy in the traveller's vision of heaven opened, and the sky illuminated with a soft light; and, through the essential quality of the words in the title, 'There is no Night', giving his painting a prophetic weight, which the spectator may interpret in his or her own way.

This is one of many examples of the manner in which Jack Yeats combined his love of words with his genius as a painter into a successful and original com position. The literary element through out his whole painting career is one of its many riches. He himself provided an explanation for it:

'It is very difficult to break up your thoughts and keep them apart. We are nearly all chain Thinkers. And if anyone ever succeeded in working his thoughts in independents jolts, he would soon find himself seeking a specialist in these things.'IO

Hilary Pyle

NOTES

1. In particular, Patrick Collins and Camille

Souter, who both show the influence of Yeats

in some respects. 2. J. B. Yeats to Jack B. Yeats, December 9, 1919.

The artist's estate.

3. Bruce Arnold in Eire-Ireland 6, No. 8, Summer

1971, p. 57.

4. 'MacGreevy on Yeats' by Samuel Beckett, Irish

Times, August 4, 1945, p. 2.

5. Jack B. Yeats, The Careless Flower, London,

1947, p. 130.

6. Jack B. Yeats, Sligo, London, 1930, p. 32.

7. Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Jack B. Yeats: painter and poet (European University Papers series

XVIII, vol. 3) Berne/Frankfurt M., 1972,

p. 49. 8. Jack B. Yeats, Ah We?, London, 1942, p. 56.

9. Revelation of St John, chapter 22, verse 5; a

passage sometimes read at funeral services.

10. Sligo, p. 28.

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There Is No Night