One of his pictures is vivid in my mind just now. There is a print of it in that wonderful illustrated magazine, ‘Scribner’s Monthly,’ where engravings look like paintings or idealised photographs.
It is called ‘The Sower,’ the dim figure of a labourer scattering seed over a ploughed field with one hand, and holding his apron filled with embryo life in the other. In the distance, and lighted up by the sun, a team of bullocks are dragging the plough, and a flight of birds over beyond the seed. That is the whole composition put into bald words.
But as it has been rendered by this painter, it is an embodiment of all which I have tried to explain, the spirit and body of living, working, suffering nature.
What would I not give (if I had it) to see a photograph done like that! and it can be done if you labour enough, know enough, and feel enough.
‘The Sower!’ As I look upon it I am drawn into it, mesmerised and rendered clairvoyant. I am en rapport with the freed spirit which has left along with the delicate aroma of its departing wings a portion of its own personality, its own immortality—vague and tender—greater than Raphael, or Rembrandt, or Albert Dürer, for it has taken the deepest root within humanity.
Tenderly I look upon it, not too boldly, for it seems vibrating with a sensuous existence; it clutches at my heart—sinews as it reveals the parables of Christ, accompanied by sobbing notes of melancholy spirit-music; the far-off strikings of angel harp-strings, indefinite but ravishing.
And the painter’s body, that St. John face, with its misty development of hair, lies under the earth. A maddened stag was driven by the hunters and the hounds over the garden fence into the snow-covered garden on that January morning of 1875[6], past the dying man’s window, and ruthlessly slaughtered under the eyes of the dying man—yielding up its noble life for a bit of sport; the hot-red blood sinking through the cold, white snow, and soaking into the covered hearts of the green plants beneath. One up-turned glance of the glazing eyes met the down-turned glance of the glazing eyes, and so, filled with despair and pity, two souls—the soul of a stag and the soul of a painter—drifted out into the morning light.
