Now we all agreed, every one of us, that completeness and harmony were beauty. But the children had started time and again to bring up instances in art which to them seemed not to fit, and which they thoroughly misunderstood.
“You see,” I said, “that the beautiful thing is the same as that which seems to us most true and good.”
Marian said again that one idea seemed to cover everything, and that we came to conclusions quickly.
“Now I will tell you,” I said, “what I mean by art and the artist. In speaking of art here to-day I mean not only painting—as one of you thought—but everything which expresses beauty; poetry, the novel and drama, sculpture, music, acting. You see the difference between science and art?”
“Science gives us knowledge,” said Marian.
“Yes,” I answered, “or, rather, science gives us facts, truths, but never at all the complete truth. It gives us parts as parts, never the whole. Philosophy, on the other hand, does what we are doing here. It reaches out for the complete whole, for understanding, for unity, but it knows well that it can never attain the end. It reaches out for the complete good, and is satisfied with nothing less than that unattainable whole. But art does another thing; it tells us a lie—the most wonderful lie in the world—truer than any truth. It says: Look, here is completeness, harmony, wholeness, in this one small shape. And we know it cannot be so, but still we feel it to be there. That lie gives us, as no truth can, the thing we long for, and know to be most true.
“Now, what do you mean by the word genius? What is genius?” I asked.
“Usually,” said Virginia, “a genius is a crank. There is a girl in my art class who is the frousiest, queerest crank in the world, and every one calls her a genius.”
“Geniuses are often queer,” said Henry.
Ruth said, too, that many geniuses were anything but great and good in their private lives.