It is pleasant to think of Blake arriving at Collins' Farm, then after the
friendly greetings emerging by the Bull and Bush, sacred meeting-house of
many artists, crossing the road to Rotten Row, mounting the hillock and
viewing the fir-trees which still stand in all their mysterious beauty. If
only North End had been south instead of north! Blake declared with
seeming perverseness that the North upset his stomach. Varley would have
explained to him that his ruling sign being Leo, he required like all
lions the warm sunny south.
Linnell introduced him to many of his young friends, who, catching the
infection, hailed Blake as a master and sat at his feet to learn. We note
this deference because it is what Blake so richly deserved; but even among
his new young friends there was nothing like complete discipleship.
Blake's art was an inseparable part of his whole passionate, chequered
spiritual life. No one whose inner life does not repeat the same broad
outlines can really approach near to him as an artist. James Holmes, with
his easy, superficial, courtly life, might teach Blake to brighten his
water-colours, but he was completely outside of his spiritual travail, and
could only wonder mildly why young idealists like Calvert, Palmer, and
Richmond could be so preoccupied with Blake's half-crazed thoughts.
Even among those chosen three, there were no sons of thunder.
Edward Calvert caught Blake's spirit in his lovely and simple woodcuts,
but quite rightly followed his own bent, which led him ultimately along a
different path from Blake's zigzag lightning tract. The master always
transpierced Nature, and lived in a transcendental region: Calvert, serene
and calm, detected the heart of the Divine beating equally in Nature, and
reproduced what he heard and saw in musical and sweet landscapes, where
storms never come, and which modern artists would probably prefer to see
disturbed by an earthquake.
Samuel Palmer, with youthful impulse and generosity, gave himself to
Blake, and, rendered receptive by his love and enthusiasm, soon
assimilated all the master's principles. Palmer's rich nature allowed of
much reverence for Linnell too, and in his early work it is easy to find
examples first of Blake's influence and then of Linnell's. Like Calvert,
he was deeply and equably devout. He did not demand that austerity which
drew Linnell to the baptist, John Martin; nor that passion for which Blake
went to hell. The gentler elements of his soul led him away from harsh
sects to the more temperate Church of England, which can, among other
things, still nourish those souls that require the kind of diet that
George Herbert could provide so bountifully.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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