“There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character, that is to say, that which offers no outer or inner truth.
“Whatever is false, whatever is artificial, whatever seeks to be pretty rather than expressive, whatever is capricious and affected, whatever smiles without motive, bends or struts without cause, is mannered without reason; all that is without soul and without truth; all that is only a parade of beauty and grace; all, in short, that lies, is ugliness in art.
“When an artist, intending to improve upon nature, adds green to the springtime, rose to the sunrise, carmine to young lips, he creates ugliness because he lies.
“When he softens the grimace of pain, the shapelessness of age, the hideousness of perversion, when he arranges nature—veiling, disguising, tempering it to please the ignorant public—then he is creating ugliness because he fears the truth.
“To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth.
“He has only to look into a human face in order to read there the soul within—not a feature deceives him; hypocrisy is as transparent as sincerity—the line of a forehead, the least lifting of a brow, the flash of an eye, reveal to him all the secrets of a heart.
“Or he may study the hidden mind of the animal. A mixture of feelings and of thoughts, of dumb intelligences and of rudimentary affections, he reads the whole humble moral life of the beast in its eyes and in its movements.
“He is even the confidant of nature. The trees, the plants talk to him like friends. The old gnarled oaks speak to him of their kindliness for the human race whom they protect beneath their sheltering branches. The flowers commune with him by the gracious swaying of their stalks, by the singing tones of their petals—each blossom amidst the grass is a friendly word addressed to him by nature.
“For him life is an endless joy, a perpetual delight, a mad intoxication. Not that all seems good to him, for suffering, which must often come to those he loves and to himself, cruelly contradicts his optimism. But all is beautiful to him because he walks forever in the light of spiritual truth.
“Yes, the great artist, and by this I mean the poet as well as the painter and the sculptor, finds even in suffering, in the death of loved ones, in the treachery of friends, something which fills him with a voluptuous though tragic admiration.