Camels and Snow By CECIL ROBERTS New York to Springfield, on we go Through woodlands white with sunlit snow, And, suddenly, the speeding train Poor slaves of man! whom business guides Not yours the only tragedy In Life's queer-stocked menagerie! 66 DEVON," and in a moment I JOHN HANCOCK: ARTIST-PROPHET By R. L. MÉGROZ FAIRIES. By John Hancock [N 1896 one John Hancock was born of middle-class English parents. In November 1918, in the dawn hour of a Sunday morning, he drowned himself in the Regent's Canal, London. His act of euthanasy was excusable and perhaps inevitable. Just as Keats knew his death sentence in advance, so did John Hancock, the jolly, sociable, energetic and apparently strong young fellow, an idolised son at home, and a most popular figure among the students at the St. John's Wood Art School. Virulent Bright's disease had racked his body for nearly two years, and his agonies, physical and mental, remained hidden even from his most devoted parents. His mind had blazed perpetually with an imaginative vision which kept him labouring to clothe bodiless ideas with the veils of language or to lend the imagery of his dreams external form and colour. To find his companion we must go back a century to the poet-prophets Shelley and Blake; but Shelley's death in 1822 was at the age of 30, and Blake was 70 when he died in 1827. Half a century later, indeed, the revolving wheel of time left us that hothouse flower, Oliver Madox Brown, poet, novelist, painter, who died aged 19 years. The century completed its cycle and left John Hancock, a genius whose work reached maturity before his death at 22. But, John Hancock ? Early in 1918, a few discerning connoisseurs betrayed an unusual interest in some pictures that were reproduced, particularly "Grass" in the "Studio," and "The Tiger ” in “Colour.” The young artist's tragic death cut short an exhibition at the Little Art Gallery, and little has since been heard of him. Both sides of his work, the pictorial and the literary, but especially the literary, are closely involved in the mystical philosophy which he worked out for himself. The foundation of this thought-structure was the eternal progress of every individual— every grain of sand, every insect, every plant, every animal, every man, every God-through infinite transformations. All existence was a state of becoming, on the triple planes of Matter, Thought and Spirit. The development of every individual would be first through the body, secondly through the mind, thirdly through the soul. Lower forms of existence were developing towards the Man State; Man was striving towards the first of the God States; and, subject to the universal process, casting off first Body and then Mind, the God of tradition Himself would as pure Soul wing away from his lower nature in pursuit of the next God State. Amongst Hancock's black-and-white work are three amazing symbolic drawings intended to show the history of the Creation according to this triple evolution of the Universe. Such a vast intellectual scheme very few artists have or ever could have embodied in their art. From the age of 19 until his death, Hancock was striving to do it in line and colour, and in verse and prose. His pictures succeed. One poem, "The Privileges of God," is a glorious failure to express the enormous thought. A 3,000 word story, "Incarnations Nine," is one of many allegories that he wrote. Hancock's prose is comparatively unpolished, but it has a wide, swinging rhythm which carries easily the long stretches of thought and sustains the sometimes inadequate vacabulary. Unfortunately it would be quite impossible here to describe the complex contents of Hancock's essays and stories. Besides the thread of argument in "Incarnations Nine," other aspects of psychic experience occur as themes. In one story Hancock regards failure as the road to 66 achievement. Constantly, individual self-communion is treated as the key to progress. Communities are condemned. Every man must be "a complete whole to himself." He is often epigrammatic. " Cheering is often a melancholy sound," he says. The greatest revolutionaries are pessimists, optimistic about the future." "We talk of pride of country. I suppose the devil swears to the superiority of Hell over every palace of Heaven." Although himself an instinctive master of decoration, he complains that art is still "the soulless production of the great technical masters of the past," and not yet "the outburst into reality of prophetic visions, philosophical knowledge and reasonings." (He had never read Shelley.) He ends a remarkable allegorical story, "The Ring, the Tiger and the Leaf," with a piece of typical pessimism : "The tragedy of life is that he who sees To-day cannot see To-morrow, and he who sees To-morrow cannot see To-day." But to him all objects, however trivial, may prove keys to revelation, and one of his lighter poems associated the daisy and the star thus :— I saw a star shine o'er a hill, I saw a thread of union run, A silver strak 'twixt earth and sky, On which dead daisies climbed on high. 'My daisy's arms embraced my star, The starry lips caressed the flower,; Left angel by who slept an hour. |