666 MODERN PAINTING 



motion. The step from the symbolic outlines of the early Nara 

 painters to the depth and intensity of the concentrated ink-poems 

 of the fifteenth century, the change from the archaic drawings on the 

 Etruscan vases to the mystery of color-equations as conceived by 

 your living master, John LaFarge, presents such a contrast as to 

 make them seem totally different. Yet the agony and the joy of the 

 later workers have been equally shared by the primitive artists. 

 They all belong to the common brotherhood of the brush who with 

 infinite patience devoted themselves to the adjustment of styles and 

 materials in order to create and appease the craving for beauty. It 

 must not be supposed that the task of an earlier age was lighter 

 because it was simpler. The burden of artistic effort must have 

 been proportionately the same, for the desire of its real votaries is 

 to carry all that it can bear. Life is eternal, and so is art. The ancient 

 and the modern meet within ourselves on the hazy borderland where 

 yesterday parts from to-morrow. 



In this age of classification we often forget that the eternal flow of 

 life joins us with our predecessors. Classification is after all a con- 

 venience to arrange our thoughts, and, like all objects of convenience, 

 becomes in the end troublesome. The modern scientific mind is apt 

 to consider itself to have conquered matter by simply labeling it. 

 But definitions are limitations, and thus the barriers to our insight. 

 A seventeenth century Japanese poet has written that we feel the 

 coldness of things on our lips like a blast of autumn whenever we 

 begin to speak. Laotze, in his supreme adoration of the Unspeakable, 

 has pointed out that the reality of a house is not in the roof nor the 

 walls, but in the spaces which it creates. So the reality of painting 

 consists in its innate beauty, not in the names of the schools or 

 periods in which we love to arrange it on the shelves of our historical 

 consciousness. 



The demarcations into the classical, romantic, or the realistic 

 schools, are meaningly applied to the great masters, for they meant to 

 represent one and all of those modes. They are in a sense anachron- 

 isms, for they transcend all time. They are each a separate world in 

 themselves, reflecting the universal formulas with the particular 

 phases of the life around them. The age belongs to them as much 

 a.s they themselves belong to the age. 



It has been said that romanticism is the distinctive characteristic 

 of modern art. But which of the so-called classic masters have not 

 been romanticists? If the term means individualism, the expression 

 of the self instead of impersonal ideals, it must be the common pro- 

 perty, nay, the very essence, of all creative efforts. If the term means 

 the emotional side of the art-impulse, in contradistinction to the 

 intellectual, or the sensuous, which respectively represent the classic 

 or the realistic, it is again a name for art itself, because art is emotion. 



