3. Mr. Horton, who is a disciple of “The Brotherhood of the New Life,” which finds the way to God in waking dreams, has his waking dreams, but more detailed and vivid than mine; and copies them in his drawings as if they were models posed for him by some unearthly master. A disciple of perhaps the most mediæval movement in modern mysticism, he has delighted in picturing the streets of mediæval German towns, and the castles of mediæval romances; and, at moments, as in All Thy waves are gone over me, the images of a kind of humorous piety like that of the mediæval miracle-plays and moralities. Always interesting when he pictures the principal symbols of his faith, the woman of Rosa Mystica and Ascending into Heaven, who is the Divine womanhood, the man-at-arms of St. George and Be Strong, who is the Divine manhood, he is at his best in picturing the Magi, who are the wisdom of the world, uplifting their thuribles before the Christ, who is the union of the Divine manhood and the Divine womanhood. The rays of the halo, the great beams of the manger, the rich ornament of the thuribles and of the cloaks, make up a pattern where the homeliness come of his pity mixes with an elaborateness come of his adoration. Even the phantastic landscapes, the entangled chimneys against a white sky, the dark valley with its little points of light, the cloudy and fragile towns and churches, are part of the history of a soul; for Mr. Horton tells me that he has made them spectral, to make himself feel all things but a waking dream; and whenever spiritual purpose mixes with artistic purpose, and not to its injury, it gives it a new sincerity, a new simplicity. He tried at first to copy his models in colour, and with little mastery over colour when even great mastery would not have helped him, and very literally: but soon found that you could only represent a world where nothing is still for a moment, and where colours have odours and odours musical notes, by formal and conventional images, midway between the scenery and persons of common life, and the geometrical emblems on mediæval talismans. His images are still few, though they are becoming more plentiful, and will probably be always but few; for he who is content to copy common life need never repeat an image, because his eyes show him always changing scenes, and none that cannot be copied; but there must always be a certain monotony in the work of the Symbolist, who can only make symbols out of the things that he loves. Rossetti and Botticelli have put the same face into a number of pictures; M. Maeterlinck has put a mysterious comer, and a lighthouse, and a well in a wood into several plays; and Mr. Horton has repeated again and again the woman of Rosa Mystica, and the man-at-arms of Be Strong; and has put the crooked way of The Path to the Moon, “the straight and narrow way” into St. George, and an old drawing in The Savoy; the abyss of The Gap, the abyss which is always under all things, into drawings that are not in this book; and the wave of The Wave, which is God’s overshadowing love, into All Thy waves are gone over me.
These formal and conventional images were at first but parts of his waking dreams, taken away from the parts that could not be drawn; for he forgot, as Blake often forgot, that you should no more draw the things the mind has seen than the things the eyes have seen, without considering what your scheme of colour and line, or your shape and kind of paper can best say: but his later drawings, Sancta Dei Genitrix and Ascending into Heaven for instance, show that he is beginning to see his waking dreams over again in the magical mirror of his art. He is beginning, too, to draw more accurately, and will doubtless draw as accurately as the greater number of the more visionary Symbolists, who have never, from the days when visionary Symbolists carved formal and conventional images of stone in Assyria and Egypt, drawn as accurately as men who are interested in things and not in the meaning of things. His art is immature, but it is more interesting than the mature art of our magazines, for it is the reverie of a lonely and profound temperament.
W. B. YEATS.
