Remembering forward

"The hand becomes an eye that fuses and concentrates all five senses and sees things whole." -Lee Ufan. 'In the beginning was the eye not the word', wrote the art historian Otto Pacht, and it is an aphorism which I believe would have earned Stevenson's approbation. One of the finest (and perhaps shrewdest) compliments he ever received came from the distinguished painter Sir John Millais who asked Sidney Colvin to tell Stevenson that in his opinion 'he is the very first of living artists. I don't mean writers merely, but painters and all of us. Nobody living can see with such an eye as that fellow, and nobody is such a master of his tools'. Millais, we must remember, was widely regarded as 'a shrewd and very independent judge of books', and a very well-informed observer of his artistic milieu. What he is responding to here is, I believe, the artistry and skill in Stevenson's compositions, the clarity of his vision and the intuitive exercising of what Wordsworth called 'the intellectual eye'. That Millais should bracket together writers and artists is altogether significant.