just as many poems lose themselves in not a wealth but a confused mass of irrelevant illustrations.
The assertion of freedom is one thing, the exercise of it is quite another.
The point is that, fundamentally, there is no reason why a painter should not show in one canvas things and events unrelated in either space or time, leaving the observer to work out the more or less hidden meaning of it all.
There is no reason why he should be tied down to the realistic painting of an apple or an apple tree if he prefers to paint some flight of the imagination into which apple and apple tree enter together with strange glimpses of temples and pyramids, playing children and armed battalions, weeping women and fighting men.
Read the foregoing lines once more. Eight objects are mentioned—apple, apple tree, temples, pyramids, children, battalions, weeping women, fighting men—by no possibility could these strangely diverse objects be found grouped together in actual life, yet it is safe to say that as you read them no feeling of utter incongruity was experienced. On the contrary your imagination unconsciously created a picture, vague and indistinct because fleeting, which combined them all, possibly a strange, poetic scene with orchards and playing children, temples and pyramids in the distance, with armed battalions, weeping women and fighting men passing by in clouds or fanciful shapes.
Thousands of such pictures are painted every year and they are mostly rather poor works of the imagination.
There is, however, no reason why the same freedom, the same arbitrary indifference to actualities, should not be exercised in the painting of good pictures.
No reason why, for instance, painters should not experiment freely with all the so-called laws of art, and that is what the Cubists and others of the moderns are doing.