Just such a
look as Watts's "Minotaur" wears in the Tate Gallery in London.
In an instant he was away in a world which was as far off from this world
as Jupiter is from Mars. It was the world of his soul's origin--a place
of beautiful and yet of noisome creations also; of white mountains and
green hills, and yet of tarns in which crawled evil things; a place of
vagrant, hurricanes and tidal-waves and cloud-bursts, of forests alive
with quarrelling! and affrighted beasts. It was a place where birds
sang divinely, yet where obscene fowls of prey hovered in the blue or
waited by the dying denizens of the desert or the plain; where dark-eyed
women heard, with sidelong triumph, the whispers of passion; where sweet-
faced children fled in fear from terrors undefined; where harpies and
witch-women and evil souls waited in ambush; or scurried through the
coverts where men brought things to die; or where they fled for futile
refuge from armed foes. It was a world of unbridled will, this, where
the soul of Jethro Fawe had its origin; and to it his senses fled
involuntarily when he put Sarasate's fiddle to his chin this Autumn
evening.
From that well of the First Things--the first things of his own life, the
fount from which his forebears drew, backwards through the centuries,
Jethro Fawe quickly drank his fill; and then into the violin he poured
his own story--no improvisation, but musical legends and classic
fantasies and folk-breathings and histories of anguished or joyous haters
or lovers of life; treated by the impressionist who made that which had
been in other scenes to other men the thing of the present and for the
men who are.
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