empt to paint. I merely let the boy come to me day by day, get
accustomed to the studio, and listen to my talk--which was often of the
sea. I very soon found that my intention had led me to the right mind
for my purpose; for the starved gaze that had been fixed on the rainbow
could turn itself, with equal wonder, similar rapture, on other things.
And the mind also could be brought to see what was not visible to the
eye. My studio--you must see it some day--is full of recollections of
sea days and nights. Jack explored them. I eliminated from the studio
important objects of art which might lead him to think of towns, of
villages inland, of wonderful foreign interiors. I fixed all his nature
upon this marvellous element which had never murmured round his life
before. I played to him music in which the sea could be heard. I
described to him the onward gallop of the white horses, racing over
impenetrable depths. I painted for him in words the varying colours of
waves in different seas, the black purple of tropical waters, the
bottle-green turmoil of a Cornish sea on a choppy day, the brown channel
waves near shore, the jewelled smoothness of the Mediterranean in early
morning sunshine, its silver in moonrise, melting into white and black.
I told him of the crowd of voices that cry in the sea, expressing all
the emotions which are uttered on land by the voices of men; of the
childish voices that may be heard on August evenings in fiords, of the
solemn sobbing that fills an autumn night on the Northumbrian coast, of
the passionate roaring in mid Atlantic, of the peculiar and frigid
whisper of waters struggling to break from the tightening embrace of ice
in extreme northern latitudes, of the level moan of the lagoons. I
explained to him how this element is so much alive that it is never for
a moment absolutely still, even when it seems so to the eyes, as it
sleeps within the charmed embrace of a coral reef, extended, like an
arm, by some Pacific island far away. I drew for him the thoughts of the
sea, its intentions, its desires, its regrets, its griefs, its savage
and its quiet joys. I narrated the lives in it, of fishes, of monsters;
its wonders of half human lives, too, the mermaids who lie on the rocks
at night to see the twinkling lights on land, the mermen who swim round
them, wondering what those lights may mean. I made him walk with me on
the land under the sea, where go the divers through the wrecks, and
ascend the rock