“Do you know that was a good idea you gave me over in that water-front restaurant that day—about getting down to realities, expressing the world of the masses,” he said gravely. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it.”
“Oh, I do mean it!” she said, her face lighting up with the rare enthusiasm that gave it the touch of animation it needed to make it bewildering to his eyes. “No one seems to paint New York—to look for what he can find here. They’re all painting and sculpturing as others used to do hundreds of years ago.”
“Inventing and not interpreting,” he said, nodding.
“Yes; that’s it—you express it better than I can. But that’s what I mean—an artist ought to interpret all he sees around him, express his time, its manners, its customs, the joy and the misery of the streets. It’s not only that, but when he does that, when he lives with the people, he can’t lose his enthusiasm.”
“And if he does the other thing, gets into society, society only comes to prey upon him, to exhaust him, to waste his energies and corrupt his imagination—that’s what you mean?”
She nodded.
“Just that!”
“Inga, you’re right,” he said abruptly. “That’s the trouble with us all over here. We don’t keep to ourselves; we aren’t savage enough. Our aim, after all, is the same as the business parvenu; we want to do the things others do at the top—what we call the top! No; it’s wrong, all wrong. Art was not produced like that in the great days. Artists should live to themselves—yes, be savage about it. The two things can’t mingle—don’t I know it!”
“Mr. Dan,” she said, her face aglow, “don’t you see that you have got rid of all that?”
He was silent, moody. Then he placed his hand on her shoulders with a smile.