Imaginations and Reveries

The art of Hone and the elder Yeats, while in spirit filled with a sentiment which was the persistence of ancient moods into modern times, still has not the external characteristics of Gaeldom; but looking at the pictures of the younger Yeats it seemed to me that for the first time we had something which could be called altogether Gaelic. The incompleteness of the sketches suggests the term folk as expressing exactly the inspiration of this very genuine art. We have had abundance of Irish folk-lore, but we knew nothing of folk-art until the figures of Jack Yeats first romped into our imagination a few years ago.