Monday, September 29, 2014

E.V. Lucas on Art. . .

As I have written elsewhere, my favourite author is a rather obscure English writer named E.V. Lucas. Lucas was born way back in 1868 and died in 1938. Though he was said to be a gentle, casual, soft-spoken sort of man (the kind you might find well illustrated on the pages of a P.G. Wodehouse novel), he was remarkably hard-working and prolific. He published over a hundred books on a dizzying number of topics. He wrote books on dogs and books on cricket. Lucas compiled a number of excellent books of poetry as well as a number of books of interesting correspondence. He wrote a number of interesting travel books on major European cities known as the "Wanderer" books for their titles such as "Wanderer in Paris" and "Wanderer in Rome." Perhaps Lucas' most widely read books today are his handful of biographical works which include his exhaustive biography of Charles Lamb. Lucas was very fond of visual art and wrote a number of books on his favourite painters. The subjects of these books include Rembrandt,  Michelangelo, Vermeer, Constable, Edwin Abbey, and half a dozen others.

E.V. Lucas in 1897


Lucas wasn't a painter himself and, more importantly, he was not at all a pretentious or verbose writer. Thus, when Lucas wrote about art and artists it was with the straightforward and entertaining style with which he approached every subject. What follows is one of my very favourite E.V. Lucas essays. He was a brilliant essayist and this short, but excellent one very nicely brings the subject of art into life and life into art. Enjoy -

Seen from the Line -

    An ingenious friend, many of whose ideas I have from time to time borrowed or frankly stolen, projected once a series of guide-books, to be subsidized by railway companies, which were to bear the same title as this essay, and to enlarge upon the towns, villages, cathedrals, mansions, parks, and other objects of interest, glimpses of which could be obtained from carriage windows. Like too many of his schemes, it has as yet come to nothing; but I have often thought of it when travelling, and particularly when, as the train rushed through Redhill, I used to catch sight once or twice a week of the bleak white house among the trees on the slope immediately to the east of the station, because that house was built by a man of genius who has always attracted me, and who deliberately placed it there (and allowed no blinds in it) that he might have the pageant of the sunset over the weald of Surrey and Sussex before his eyes.
   But there was another reason, of far greater importance and shiningly unique, for lookin for this white house among the hillside trees, and that is that it is a link between the very ordinary, matter-of-fact person whom I know as myself and the inspired mystic who wrote "Tiger, Tiger, burning bright " and "Jerusalem," and drew portraits of the prophets from his inner vision - none other than William Blake.
   That there should be any other bond between us than my admiration of his genius will probably come as a surprise to most of my friends. But it is so, as I will explain; for the bleak white house on the hill is Redstone House, built by John Linnell the landscape painter in 1851; and among John Linnell's sons was William, the godson of William Blake, named William after him, who as a child was held in Blake's arms; and in 1880, when I was at school at Redhill, William Linnell was the drawing-master; a rather testy old gentleman with a very white beard, who was possessed of that curious sensitive antipathy to cats which informed him instantly if one was in hiding anywhere near.
   Although no one who as ever seen my pencil at work would credit the statement, I was in a manner of speaking "taught drawing" by this elderly professor. During the period of his instruction the privilege was not valued; but now that he is dead and I am older, I look back upon it with pride and excitement, for the association, by bringing me so near the great visionary, gives me a caste almost apart. In however many ways I may approximate to the mass of mankind, I am aloofly superior to them in this remarkable respect: I was taught to draw by one who had sat on the knee of the author and illustrator of the Songs of Innocence. Common persons have no idea how a thought such as this can invigorate and uplift.
   John Linnell I never saw. He was still living in 1880; but he was enormously old, nearly ninety, and we heard terrifying things about him; of his patriarchal despotism in the house where this white-haired drawing-master who kept us so nervously busy with our india-rubber was treated still as a mere boy; of his alarming venerableness, resembling awe-inspiring figure in Blake's pictures; of his uncompromising austerities of life. As to how far these stories were true, I have no knowledge; but that is what we heard, and it was enough to keep us on half-holidays from Redstone Wood. Of course I am sorry now. Could the chance come again - which are quite as sad words as those which stand at the head of "Maud Müller" - I should have many questions to ask him, chiefly of course of Blake, but also of that other curious character and even more intimate (because nearer earth) friend of Linnell, John Varley, the watercolour painter. For it was to Linnell that Varley, in the midst of a thicker crowd of misfortunes than ever - writs and imprisonment for debt and domestic embroilments - made the immortal remark which should have won him, under any decent dean, a niche of honour in Westminster Abbey with the words in imperishable gold - "But all these troubles are necessary for me. If it were not for my troubles I should burst with joy." It would be good to hear at first hand more of the man who could say that.