ell upon waves of fire and
filth; yet the lugubrious arches of the caverns in the perspective
reveal Blake's fantasy, so quick to respond to external stimuli.
Martin saw the earth as in an apocalyptic swoon, its forms distorted,
its meanings inverted; a mad world, the world of an older theogony.
But if there was little human in his visions, he is enormously
impersonal; if he assailed heaven's gates on wings of melting wax, or
dived deep into the pool of iniquity, he none the less caught glimpses
in his breathless flights of strange countries across whose sill no
human being ever passes. There is genuine hallucination. He must have
seen his ghosts so often that in the end they petrified him, as did
the Statue Don Giovanni. Martin was a species of reversed Turner. He
spied the good that was in evil, the beauty in bituminous blacks. He
is the painter of black music, the deifier of Beelzebub, and also one
who caught the surge and thunder of the Old Testament, its majesty and
its savagery. As an illustrator of sacred history, the world may one
day return to John Martin.

ZORN

Anders Zorn--what's in a name? Possibly the learned and amiable father
of Tristram Shandy or that formidable pedant Professor Slawkenbergius
might find much to arouse his interest in the patronymic of the great
Swedish painter and etcher. What Zorn means in his native tongue we do
not profess to know; but in German it signifies anger, wrath, rage.
Now, the Zorn in life is not an enraged person--unless some lady
sitter asks him to paint her as she is not. He is, as all will testify
who have met him, a man of rare personal charm and sprightly humour.
He, it may be added, calls yellow yellow, and he never paints a
policeman like a poet. In a word, a man of robust, normal vision, a
realist and an artist. False realism with its hectic, Zola-like
romanticism is distasteful to Zorn. He is near Degas among the
Frenchmen and Zuloaga among the new Spaniards; near them in a certain
forthright quality of depicting life, though unlike them in technical
and individual methods.

Yes, Zorn, that crisp, bold, short name, which begins with a letter
that abruptly cuts both eye and ear, quite fits the painter's
personality, fits his art. He is often ironic. Some fanciful theorist
has said that the letters Z and K are important factors in the career
of the men who possess them in their names. Camille Saint-Saens has
spoken of Franz Liszt and his lucky letter.