...
But this speculation--I thought--is going beyond the bounds of vagueness.
Let there be some thread of coherence in your thoughts, as there is in
the progress of this evening, fast fading into night. Return to the
consideration of the nature and purposes of Art! And recognize that much
of what you have thought will seem on the face of it heresy to the school
whose doctrine was incarnated by Oscar Wilde in that admirable apotheosis
of half-truths: "The Decay of the Art of Lying." For therein he said:
"No great artist ever sees things as they really are." Yet, that
half-truth might also be put thus: The seeing of things as they really
are--the seeing of a proportion veiled from other eyes (together with the
power of expression), is what makes a man an artist. What makes him a
great artist is a high fervour of spirit, which produces a superlative,
instead of a comparative, clarity of vision.
Close to my house there is a group of pines with gnarled red limbs
flanked by beech-trees. And there is often a very deep blue sky behind.
Generally, that is all I see. But, once in a way, in those trees against
that sky I seem to see all the passionate life and glow that Titian
painted into his pagan pictures. I have a vision of mysterious meaning,
of a mysterious relation between that sky and those trees with their
gnarled red limbs and Life as I know it. And when I have had that vision
I always feel, this is reality, and all those other times, when I have no
such vision, simple unreality.
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