Chapter 15

Nettleship said to me: 'Has Edwin Ellis ever said anything about
the effect of drink upon my genius?' 'No,' I answered. 'I ask,' he
said, 'because I have always thought that Ellis has some strange
medical insight.' Though I had answered 'no,' Ellis had only a few
days before used these words: 'Nettleship drank his genius away.'
Ellis, but lately returned from Perugia, where he had lived many
years, was another old friend of my father's but some years
younger than Nettleship or my father. Nettleship had found his
simplifying image, but in his painting had turned away from it,
while Ellis, the son of Alexander Ellis, a once famous man of
science, who was perhaps the last man in England to run the circle
of the sciences without superficiality, had never found that image
at all. He was a painter and poet, but his painting, which did not
interest me, showed no influence but that of Leighton. He had
started perhaps a couple of years too late for Pre-Raphaelite
influence, for no great Pre-Raphaelite picture was painted after
1870, and left England too soon for that of the French painters.
He was, however, sometimes moving as a poet and still more often
an astonishment. I have known him cast something just said into a
dozen lines of musical verse, without apparently ceasing to talk;
but the work once done he could not or would not amend it, and my
father thought he lacked all ambition. Yet he had at times
nobility of rhythm--an instinct for grandeur--and after thirty
years I still repeat to myself his address to Mother Earth:

O mother of the hills, forgive our towers;
O mother of the clouds, forgive our dreams

and there are certain whole poems that I read from time to time or
try to make others read. There is that poem where the manner is
unworthy of the matter, being loose and facile, describing Adam
and Eve fleeing from Paradise. Adam asks Eve what she carries so
carefully and Eve replies that it is a little of the apple core
kept for their children. There is that vision of 'Christ the
Less,' a too hurriedly written ballad, where the half of Christ,
sacrificed to the divine half 'that fled to seek felicity,'
wanders wailing through Golgotha; and there is 'The Saint and the
Youth' in which I can discover no fault at all. He loved
complexities--'seven silences like candles round her face' is a
line of his--and whether he wrote well or ill had always a manner,
which I would have known from that of any other poet. He would say
to me, 'I am a mathematician with the mathematics left out'--his
father was a great mathematician--or 'A woman once said to me,
"Mr. Ellis why are your poems like sums?"' and certainly he loved
symbols and abstractions. He said once, when I had asked him not