Page:Arthur Racham (1922).djvu/21

 thousand emergent eyes frowning down upon you. The labyrinths of their forked branches are the habitations of bats and disfigured beasts, and they stretch their long-reaching arms amidst the decaying foliage in every direction, like troubling hallucinations. Mysterious mountain fastnesses where fearless knights seek adventures, dark defiles where dragons love to hide, spirits armed with a disquieting beauty, wrinkled old crones and many-headed ogres, wizened dwarfs and forbidding spectres with curious shifty eyes, grottoes where the Norns weave, and all the phantasmata of the little Dutch masters, constitute the sombre side of his subject matter. Had some of these shown a morbid, diabolical or sensual element, they would have been acceptable to Huysmans. Rackham’s art, however, is always conditioned by a moral quality of mind, and a breezy healthfulness of feeling. Even his most fearsome grotesques and terrifying nightmares are invested with a certain delicacy and touched with an ethereal beauty. No matter in what strange realm we may find ourselves, he is always credible because truth underlies his invention and gives it the indispensable note of actuality, and no other artist could have converted a familiar park like Kensington