DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.31830#0044
arising from man’s necessity of shelter, food and clothing; the
phase of pastoral life, associated with Dionysus; and as a pastoral
people cherish their legends, which grow and become associated
with living beauties of wood and fountain, and these tales hnd not
only credence but “ full persuasion of a present likelihood,” the
third or Mythic Phase, associated with Hermes, rises out of this,
when “their hamlets are charmed with another life, and their
forests and mountain-paths peopled by their visionary minds with
rustic apparitions to their expectancy.” And, lastly, comes the
consciousness of “ moral powers, of gods still higher, of Divine
attributes, all impersonated”; and man enters on the Votive
Phase, associated with Phoebus. Calvert grouped all his designs
under these four headings.
His friends Palmer and Richmond, who had not been given
a Virgil as a baptismal gift, were a good deal perturbed by the
Pagan language in which Calvert spoke of his art and religious
ideas, though it caused no break in their friendship and affection.
The cadences of Calvert’s fragments of prose betray his
sensitiveness to a certain order of impressions no less vividly than
those later oil-paintings of his, in which the aim is to evoke from
the outer world something musically responsive to desires and
aspirations in the mind; not to assert, but to suggest; the touches
of the brush caress, not outline or texture, but the mysterv that
is in every living form, while all coheres in singleness of mood
through chosen, modulated tones—pearl and gold, or the blues
and greys of morning haze.
“Hills rock-crested—the sainted seats that the evening and
the morning suns have kissed for ages.” “I have a fondness
for the earth, and rather a Phrygian mood of regarding it. I feel
a yearning to see the glades and the nooks receding like vistas
into the Gardens of Heaven.” And again : “How grateful to
see some storm-tossed bark that has reached her little harbour
of refuge at last,—masts that have long left their native forests,
again associated with vegetation, as the hulk lies under sheltering
ledges, tree-crowed. Cordage and spars and sailcloth are locked
in peace with shapes of leafage of oak and bosses of ivy on bole
or crag. How sweet to see wagons, still destined for long
journeys, in rest, and to watch slow preparations under sheltering
thatch and woodwork. Wheels that have made many revolutions
in wilderness and desert, now motionless and half-buried in dry
28
U. B. HEIDEL6ERG
phase of pastoral life, associated with Dionysus; and as a pastoral
people cherish their legends, which grow and become associated
with living beauties of wood and fountain, and these tales hnd not
only credence but “ full persuasion of a present likelihood,” the
third or Mythic Phase, associated with Hermes, rises out of this,
when “their hamlets are charmed with another life, and their
forests and mountain-paths peopled by their visionary minds with
rustic apparitions to their expectancy.” And, lastly, comes the
consciousness of “ moral powers, of gods still higher, of Divine
attributes, all impersonated”; and man enters on the Votive
Phase, associated with Phoebus. Calvert grouped all his designs
under these four headings.
His friends Palmer and Richmond, who had not been given
a Virgil as a baptismal gift, were a good deal perturbed by the
Pagan language in which Calvert spoke of his art and religious
ideas, though it caused no break in their friendship and affection.
The cadences of Calvert’s fragments of prose betray his
sensitiveness to a certain order of impressions no less vividly than
those later oil-paintings of his, in which the aim is to evoke from
the outer world something musically responsive to desires and
aspirations in the mind; not to assert, but to suggest; the touches
of the brush caress, not outline or texture, but the mysterv that
is in every living form, while all coheres in singleness of mood
through chosen, modulated tones—pearl and gold, or the blues
and greys of morning haze.
“Hills rock-crested—the sainted seats that the evening and
the morning suns have kissed for ages.” “I have a fondness
for the earth, and rather a Phrygian mood of regarding it. I feel
a yearning to see the glades and the nooks receding like vistas
into the Gardens of Heaven.” And again : “How grateful to
see some storm-tossed bark that has reached her little harbour
of refuge at last,—masts that have long left their native forests,
again associated with vegetation, as the hulk lies under sheltering
ledges, tree-crowed. Cordage and spars and sailcloth are locked
in peace with shapes of leafage of oak and bosses of ivy on bole
or crag. How sweet to see wagons, still destined for long
journeys, in rest, and to watch slow preparations under sheltering
thatch and woodwork. Wheels that have made many revolutions
in wilderness and desert, now motionless and half-buried in dry
28
U. B. HEIDEL6ERG