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HROUGHOUT my early artistic development," once wrote Laurence Derrick to a very intimate friend, "I suffered from a peculiar difficulty—an inability to see things as all others appeared to see them. I had always to force myself into line, as it were, with alien perceptions in order to be understood; to distinguish between the positive and the adventitious in recognised forms; to define for myself the limits of the actual as patent to the common view. This difficulty ceased in me with the cessation of celibacy; but while it lasted it was a very definite one, bewildering and distressing at times, though blessed with some rare compensations. Thus, to my abnormal vision, every human being was possessed of an aura, a luminous emanation, varying in its density, and eloquent somehow of the nature it enshrined; and every beast was likewise adorned, though in a lesser and duller degree. Moreover, I seemed ever conscious of a spiritual environment, now perilous, now sympathetic, but generally emotional, whose invisibility found me entirely without the scepticism common to those who believe in no evidence but such as their senses afford them. And, again, I could hear things inaudible to most.
"Now, the capacity for hearing, as for utterance, does not cease arbitrarily on a given note—that must be patent. Then where need it cease, for those who have, literally, ears to hear? Are there such? I suppose that, for the 'general,' attenuated sound, like attenuated atmosphere, means, beyond a certain point, death. Nevertheless, when I tell you that I could once distinguish the low intercourse of the spirits of the dead, you will most certainly question my sanity.
"But, question it as you will, you must understand in what manner my constitution affected my art, and with what infinite caution I had to realise and prune that art's early exuberances. All that was not to be done in a day, or in a year, or in many years; and no doubt it was the gradual process of elimination which gave my etchings their characteristic quality, since I could not at once learn to see 'sanely' with other men's eyes. I am married now; I have exchanged the vision for the reality; my art, I hope, is sounder and stronger for its loss; yet there come times when I could regret the older faculty, and, for the sake of that seer's atmosphere, could barter much present rationality. And so, what then? Why, the dolefullest void where is now the essential presence."
The change to which the letter refers occurred at an acute crisis of Derrick's life, and physiologists, for their part, found a sufficient explanation for it. It is quite unnecessary to attempt to trace here its anterior evolutions. Up to a certain date the man was a brilliant Fantastic; after that date he was a brilliant Rationalist—no more needs to be said. We all remember how he was called the Meryon of London, and what prices we were willing to give for good examples of his earlier period. He was, indeed, the very genius of etching, to which he brought a soul nearly akin to that of the wild French visionary. Only Derrick's visions found something beyond gloom and terror in his 'City of Dreadful Night.' His Saxon blood saved him.
This is by way of a prelude to a strange episode in the artist's career here recorded.
On a certain still afternoon in mid-winter a man loitered along the "Mud-cliffs" of Norfolk, at about the point where the coast-line bends definitely to sweep westwards under the Lynn Deeps and Cross-Keys Wash. Land and sea, it was all a desolate prospect attuned to a desolate soul. During the whole twenty-five years of his young life Laurence Derrick never remembered a time when he had held other than aloof, in all that stood for instinctive comradeship, from his fellow-creatures. He was born to loneliness and self-sufficiency—a virile, potent spirit, nevertheless, and no truckler to Destiny. Already at this early age he was famous, and without a shadow of arrogance. Socially a shy man, in all that pertained to his art he was the embodiment of independence and individuality. You seemed to read it in his large absorbed eyes, which were the fine feature of a face otherwise lean, hollow-chapped, and somewhat breathless in suggestion. In figure he was tall, gaunt, strong-shouldered, and in habit inclined to slouch. His "London Visions" had at this date won him the very first of reputations as an etcher.