“No,” I answered; “and originality simply means truth in the writer.”
“We feel,” said Virginia, “that he didn’t take the trouble to think for himself.” Then she spoke of having been made, in school, to compare the like thoughts of different authors, and asked whether their being alike made them less original.
“No,” I answered, “for two might see life in the same way, each for himself.”
I went on to speak of music. “To me,” I said, “it seems the most perfect of arts, because it is in itself harmony, the very word we associate with this idea of completeness. I don’t know much of the laws of musical composition, but I know they are the laws of rhythm and harmony, the laws of all motion. Of course, it is figurative to speak of the music of the stars, and yet in a sense their motion is music, because it follows the laws of music. Music is the least definite of all arts, yet the most real and near. It arouses our emotions as nothing else can do.”
Most of them felt as I, that music was most gripping in its effects. Marian, however, did not, since she is not at all musical. I spoke of words and intellectual ideas in relation to music. Virginia said it made her feel glad to hear music, that she had to beat time. The others all enjoy music most when it has a literary annotation, either in opera, or in concerts with verbal explanations. At least they want to know the name of every melody. In this I said I agreed with them, because knowing the name immediately put me into the mood the composer wished, and saved me those first five minutes of uncertainty which every strange music awakens.
Henry said: “When I learn a new piece on the piano my teacher and I always talk it over. I have a piece called ‘Spring in the Wood.’ We say, ‘Now we are in the border of the wood, now we hear the water rippling far off, now there are the ferns at the edge.’”
We spoke of painting.
I explained to them the point of interest, the point around which all other lines, colors and interests must centre, to which all are made subordinate. Virginia said: “But it need not be in the centre of the picture.”
“No,” I answered, “it had better not, since that would be monotonous and stiff. But wherever it is, it makes itself a centre, and makes the picture a complete whole.”
Virginia told of the plan of completing the central figure in a sketch, and leaving the rest unfinished—as a substitute, as I showed her, for the effectiveness of color. All eyes should be directed to the central figure.