Great poetry is rarely superficially plain to the casual reader.
Great music is never superficially plain to the casual hearer.
But the attitude of the public is that great painting shall always be superficially plain to the casual observer.
A painter may paint things every one understands at a glance, but is it not his right, if he wishes, to paint things no one understands but himself?
In other words, what right have we to say to the poet, “If you don’t write things we understand you are no poet,” or to the painter, “If you don’t paint things we understand you are no painter?”
The only difference between poet and painter is that one uses a pen, the other a brush to express himself.
Without employing any allegorical or symbolical literary artifice, merely by inflections of lines and colors, a painter can show, in the same picture, a Chinese city, a French town, together with mountains, oceans, fauna, and flora, and nations with their histories and their desires—all that separates them in external reality. Distance or time, concrete fact, or pure conception, nothing refuses to be uttered in the language of the painter, as in that of the poet, the musician, or the scientist.
Here is a most significant statement of a truth and an assertion of freedom.
We all know how the poet in a dozen lines may give us glimpses of the universe; he may leap from flower to star, from city to city, nation to nation, age to age; nothing confines him, he knows no restraint.