Eccentrics and Visionaries
Tracks in the Snow. By Ruthven Todd. (Grey Walls Press. 12s. 6d.)
THE romantic revival in painting, reinforced by war-time isolation from those external influences we customarily acknowledge in the arts, has, in recent years, focused attention upon some of the eccen- trics and visionaries of the early nineteenth century—a period of flux and transition akin in some respects to our own. The renewed interest in these painters, whom we now find so close to us, is scarcely to be satisfied by the standard reference books, in which, so frequently, as Mr. Ruthven Todd says in his new book, they "are neatly pigeon-holed with an accepted line or two written on the labels round their necks." One therefore welcomes these four essays upon Blake, Fuseli, John Martin and his family, and, in the study that gives the volume its title, the early scientists and "natural philosophers" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The rather tenuous thread by which these disparate sections are held together is the author's concern to show how the theories and writings of the scientists "impacted upon those who followed them and whose interests were more purely aesthetic," and in the case of the three artists to relate their work to the current mythologies and dogmas of their day.
The subject is so fascinating that any exploration is bound to be exciting and rewarding. The desperate attempts to relate Scriptural truths to developing knowledge when men still used the Bible "as a sort of combined Pears' Encyclopadia and Mrs. Emily Post on etiquette" and "the world was still an object small enough to cuddle in their hands like a bubble-glass of brandy" seem remote enough to us. In fact, however, it was largely from such material that Blake drew his visions, and I think the present volume does shed some new light on Blake's mythology. For the rest, Fuseli, the renegade priest, the entomologist, the legendary monster, the by no means negligible artist, is foolproof as a subject for study, as are John Martin and his brothers—William, the crazed inventor ; Richard, the Quartermaster Sergeant and pedestrian poet Jonathan, the insane incendiarist. Concerning all these the author Makes some valuable points.
And yet Tracks In The Snow leaves one with a curiously indeter- minate feeling. Mr. Todd's aim being "historical „rather than critical," he has not attempted to see his subject in the round, but only certain aspects of it. Indeed, the numerous quotations from period sources checked by careful research though they are, provide little more than a series of footnotes to essays as yet unwritten, and the essays themselves glosses to the major work one sincerely hopes he will one day undertake. The illustrations, many of them reproduced for the first time, are especially valuable, though I wish there had been room for one drawing of John Brown's.
M. H. MIDDLETON.
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