XIV
百度搜索 Four Years 天涯 或 Four Years 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.
leship said to me: Has Edwin Ellis ever said anything about the effect of drink upon my genius? No, I answered. I ask, he said, because I have always thought that Ellis has some strange medical insight. Though I had answered no, Ellis had only a few days before used these words: leship drank his genius away.Ellis, but lately returned from Perugia, where he had lived many years, was <bdi></bdi>another old friend of my fathers but some years youhaleship or my father. leship had found his simplifying image, but in his painting had turned away from it, while Ellis, the son of Alexander Ellis, a once famous man of sce, who erhaps the last man in England to run the circle of the sces without superficiality, had never found that image at all. He ainter and poet, but his painting, which did not i me, showed no influe that of Leighton. He had started perhaps a couple of years too late for Pre?Raphaelite influence, for no great Pre?Raphaelite picture ainted after 1870, a England too soon for that of the French painters.
He was, however, sometimes moving as a poet and still more often an astonishment. I have known him cast something just said into a dozen lines of musical verse, without apparently ceasing to talk; but the work once done he could not or would not amend it, and my father thought he lacked all ambitio he had at times nobility of rhythm??an instinct frandeur??and after thirty years I still repeat to myself his address to Mother Earth: O mother of the hills, five our towers; O mother of the clouds, five our dreams and there are certain whole poems that I read from time to time or try to make others read. There is that poemwhere the manner is unworthy of the matter, being loose and facile, describing Adam and Eve fleeing from Paradise. Adam asks Eve what s<samp>?</samp>he carries so carefully and Eve replies that it is a little of the apple core kept for their children. There is that vision of Christ the Less, a too hurriedly written ballad, where the half of Christ, sacrificed to the divine half that fled to seek felicity, wanders wailing through Golgotha; and there is The Saint and the Youth in which I discover no fault at all. He loved plexities??seven silences like dles round her face is a line of his??and whether he wrote well or ill had always a manner, which I would have known from that of any other poet. He would say to me, I am a mathemati with the mathematics left out??his father was a great mathemati??or A woman once said to me, "Mr. Ellis why are your poems like sums?" aainly he loved symbols and abstras. He said once, when I had asked him not to mention something or other, Surely you have discovered by this time that I know of no means whereby I mention a fa versation.
He had a passion for Blake, picked up in Pre?Raphaelite studios, and early in our acquainta into my hands a scrap of note paper on which he had written some years before an interpretation of the poem that begins The fields from Islington to Maryleboo Primrose Hill and St. Johns Wood Were builded over with pillars of gold And there Jerusalems pillars stood.
The four quarters of London represented Blakes freat mythological persohe Zoas, and also the four elements. These few sentences were the foundation of all study of the philosophy of William Blake, that requires a knowledge for its pursuit and that traces the e between his system and that of Swedenb or of Boehme. I reised certain attributions, from what is sometimes called the Christian Cabala, of which Ellis had never heard, and with this proof that his interpretation was more than phantasy, he and I began our four years work upon the Prophetic Books of William Blake. We took it as almost a sign of Blakes personal help when we discovered that the spring of 1889, when we first joined our knowledge, was one hundred years from the publication of The Book of Thel, the first published of the Prophetic Books, as though it were firmly established that the dead delight in anniversaries. After months of discussion and reading, we made a cordance of all Blakes mystical terms, and there was much copying to be done in the Museum & at Red Hill, where the desdants of Blakes friend and patron, the landscape painter, John Linnell, had many manuscripts. The Linnellswere narrow in their religious ideas & doubtful of Blakes orthodoxy, whom they held, however, i honour, and I remember a timid old lady who had known Blake when a child saying: He had very wrong ideas, he did not believe in the historical Jesus. One old man sat always beside us ostensibly to sharpen our pencils, but perhaps really to see that we did not steal the manuscripts, and they gave us very old port at lund I have upon my dining room walls their present of Blakes Dante engravings. Going thither aurning Ellis would eain me by philosophical discussion, varied with improvised stories, at first folk tales which he professed to have picked up in Scotland; and though I had read and collected many folk tales, I did not see through the deceit. I have a partial memory of two more elaborate tales, one of an Italian spirator flying barefoot from I fet what advehrough I fet what Italian city, in the early m. Fearing to be reised by his bare feet, he slipped past the sleepy porter at an hotel calling out number so and so as if he were some belated guest. Then passing from bedroom door to door he tried on the boots, and just as he got a pair to fit a voice cried from the room Who is that?
Merely me, sir, he called back, taking your boots. The other was of a Martyrs Bible round which the cardinal virtues ha<cite></cite>d taken personal form??this a fragment of Blakes philosophy. It was in the possession of an old clergyman when a certain jockey called upon him, and the cardinal virtues, fused between jockey and clergymaed themselves to the jockey. As whenever he sinned a cardinal virtue interfered and turned him back to virtue, he lived i credit and made, but for oence, a very holy death. As his wife and family k round in admiration and grief, he suddenly said Damn. O my dear, said his wife, what a dreadful expression. He answered, I am going to heaven and straightway died. It was a long tale, for there were all the jockeys vain attempts to sin, as well as all the adventures of the clergyman, who became very sinful indeed, but it ended happily, for when the jockey died the cardinal virtues returo the clergyman. I think he would talk to any audiehat offered, one audience being the same as another in his eyes, and itmay have been for this reason that my father called him unambitious. When he was a young man he had befriended a reformed thief and had asked the grateful thief to take him round the thieves quarters of London.
The thief, however, hurried him away from the worst saying, Another minute and they would have found you out. If they were not the stupidest men in London, they had done so already. Ellis had gohrough a no doubt romantid witty at of all the houses he had robbed, and all the throats he had cut in one short life.
His versation would often pass out of my prehension, or indeed I think of any mans, into a labyrinth of abstra and subtilty, and then suddenly return with some verbal ceit or turn of wit. The mind is known to attain, iain ditions of trance, a quiess so extraordinary that we are pelled at times to imagine a dition of unendurable intellectual iy, from which we are saved by the merciful stupidity of the body; & I think that the mind of Edwin Ellis was stantly upon the edge of trance. Once we were discussing the symbolism of sex, in the philosophy of Blake, and had been in disagreement all the afternoon. I began talking with a new sense of vi, and after a moment Ellis, who was at his easel, threw down his brush and said that he had just seen the same explanation in a series of symbo<u>..</u>lic visions. In another moment,
he said, I should have been off. We went into the open air and walked up and down to get rid of that feeling, but presently we came in again and I began again my explanation, Ellis lying upon the sofa. I had been talking some time when Mrs. Ellis came into the room and said: Why are you sitting in the dark? Ellis answered, But we are not, and then added in a voice of wonder, I thought the lamp was lit and that I was sitting up, and I find I am in the dark and lying down. I had seen a flicker of light over the ceiling, but had thought it a refle from some light outside the house, which may have been the case.
百度搜索 Four Years 天涯 或 Four Years 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.