Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/312

 300 F L E F L E which was ultimately effected in 1816. In 1817 we find him returning to his old practice of classical outline illustra tions, and producing the happiest of all his series in that kind, the designs to Hesiod, engraved by the friendly hand of Blake. Immediately afterwards ho is much engaged designing for the goldsmiths a testimonial cup in honour of John Kemble, and, following that, the great labour of the famous Shield of Achilles. Almost at the same time he undertakes a frieze of Peace, Liberty, and Plenty, for the duke of Bedford s sculpture gallery at Woburn, and an heroic group of Michael overthrowing Satan, for Lord Egremont s house at Petworth. In 1820 died Mrs Flaxman, after a first warning from paralysis six years earlier. Her younger sister, Maria Denman, and the sculptor s own sister, Maria Flaxman, remained in his house, and his industry was scarcely at all relaxed. In 1822 he delivered at the Academy a lecture in memory of his old friend and generous fellow-craftsman, Canova, then lately dead; in 1823 he received from A. VV. Von Schlegel a visit of which that writer has left us the record. From an illness occurring soon after this he recovered sufficiently to resume both work and exhibition, but on the 26th of December 1826, he caught cold in church, and died three days later, in his seventy-second year. Among a few intimate associates, he left a memory singularly dear ; having been in companionship, although susceptible and obstinate when his religious creed a devout Christianity with Swedcnborgian admixtures was crossed or slighted, yet in other things genial and sweet tempered beyond all men, full of modesty, full of playfulness and of a homely dignity withal, the truest friend, the kindest master, the purest and most blameless spirit. Posterity will doubt whether it was the fault of Flaxman or of his age, which in England offered neither training nor much encouragement to a sculptor, that he is weakest when he is most ambitious, and then most inspired when he makes the least effort ; but so it is. Not merely does he fail when he seeks to illustrate the intensity of Dante, or to rival the tumultuousness of Michelangelo to be intense or tumultuous he was never made ; but he fails, it may almost be said, in proportion as his work is elaborate and far carried, and succeeds in proportion as it is partial and suggestive. Of his completed ideal sculptures, the St Michael at Petworth is by far the best, and is indeed admir ably composed from all points of view ; but it lacks fire and force, and it lacks the finer touches of the chisel; a little bas-relief like the diploma piece of the Apollo and Mar- pessa in the Royal Academy compares with it favourably. Again, of Flaxman s complicated monuments in the round we speak of the three in Westminster Abbey and the four in St Paul s there is scarcely one which has not something heavy and infelicitous in the arrangement, and something empty and unsatisfactory in the surface execu tion. But when we come to his simple monuments in relief, in these we find usually an almost complete felicity. The truth is, that he did not thoroughly understand com position on the great scale and in the round ; but ho thoroughly understood relief, and found scope in it for all his unrivalled gifts of rhythmical design, and tender, grave, and penetrating feeling. Of pity and love he is a perfect master, and shows, as no one had ever shown before, how poignantly those passions can be expressed in the simplest conceivable combinations of human shapes and gestures. But if we would see even these the happiest of his concep tions at their best, we must study them, not in the finished monument, but rather in the casts from his studio sketches, of which so precious a collection is preserved in the Flax- rnan gallery at University College. And the same is true of his happiest efforts in the classical and poetical vein, like the well-known relief of Pandora conveyed to Earth by Mercury, Nay, going further back still among the rudi ments and first conceptions of his art, we can realize the most essential charm of his genius in the study, not of his modelled work at all, but of his outlined and tinted sketches on paper. Of these, too, there is at University College a choice collection, and many others are dispersed in public and private cabinets. Every one knows the ex cellence of the engraved designs to Homer, Dante, ^Eschy- lus, and Hesiod, in all cases save when the designer aims at that which he cannot hit, the terrible or the grotesque. To know Flaxman at his best, it is necessary to be acquainted not only with the original studies for such designs as these, but still more with those almost innumer able studies from real life which he was continually producing with pen, tint, or pencil. These are the most delightful and suggestive sculptor s notes, so to speak, in existence ; in them it was his habit to set down, with a perfect feeling and directness, the leading or expressive lines, and generally no more, of every group that struck his fancy. There are groups of Italy and London, groups of the parlour and the nursery, of the street, the garden, and the gutter ; and of each group the artist knows how to seize at once the structural and the spiritual secret, expressing perfectly the value and suggestive ness, for his art of sculpture, of the contacts, intervals, interlacements, and balancings of the various figures in any given group, and not less perfectly the charm of the affections which link the figures together and harmonize their gestures. The materials for the life of Flaxman are scattered in various biographical and other publications ; the principal are the follow ing: An anonymous sketch in the European Magazine for 1823; an anonymous &quot;Brief Memoir,&quot; prefixed to Flaxman s Lectures, ed. 1829, and reprinted in subsequent editions; the chapter in Allan Cunningham s Lives of the, Most Eminent British Painters, &c., vol. iii. ; notices in the Life of Nollckcns, by John Thomas Smith; in the Life of Josiah Wedgwood, by Miss G. Meteyard, London, 18(35; in the Diaries and Reminiscences of II. Crabbe Robinson, London, 1869, the latter an authority of great importance; in the Lives of Stothard, by Mrs Bray, of Constable, by Leslie, of Watson, by Pr Lonsdale, and of Blake, by Messrs Gilchrist and Rossetti; a series of illustrated essays, principally on the monumental sculpture of Flaxman, in the Art Journal for 1867 and 1868, by Mr G. F. Teniswood ; Essays in English Art, by Frederick Wedmore ; The Drawings of Flaxman, in 32 plates, with Descriptions, and an Intro ductory Essay on the Life and Genius of Flaxman, by Prof. Sidney Colviu, M.A., atlas fol., London, 1876. (S. C.) FLEA, an Anglo-Saxon name, probably derived from &quot; fleogan,&quot; to fly, typically applied to Pulex irritans, a blood-sucking insect-parasite of man and other mammal^, remarkable for its powers of leaping, and unfortunately too well known, even in our own temperate climate. Its position in classification has long been somewhat undecided ; a separate order was erected for it and its allies under the various names of Suctoria, Siphonaptera, Rophoteira, and Aphaniptera, by De Geer, Latreille, Clairville, and Kirby respectively ; and it is included in the Aptera of Lamarck, MacLeay, and others, and in the RJn/iiyota of Fabricius. Various affinities have also been attributed to the group, which has been supposed to have relations with tho Hymenoptera, Jfemiptera, and Anophira, and even with the Coleoptera (beetles). As regards the latter order, it is noteworthy that a recently discovered allied group, Platy- psyllidce, founded upon a parasite on the beaver (and con sidered as a separate order by Westwood, under the name Achreioptera], has been with considerable show of reason referred to the beetles by so sound an entomologist as Dr Lcconte. As regards the flea, however, it is now generally accepted that its true affinities are with the Dip/era or two-winged flies, as suggested by Lamarck and Strauss Durckheim. In that order, it is by some held to occupy, as a family Pulicidae (with the J tati/psyllida 1 ), the position of a sub-order, at the end, under the name Aphamptcra (see DIPTEEA, vol. vii. p. 25G) ; but by others it is placed