“Only to prove that truth is not art.”
“How so?”
“To photograph life in literature is no more art than a reproduction of our street sounds would be music.”
“Painting and sculpture are copying.”
“And the closer the copy, the less the art.”
“Then you would define art as”—
“The vivifying of work with the personality of the workman.”
“That is not very far from Saadi’s thought that art is never produced without love.”
“I have to confess that you mention an author of whom I had never even heard till I read The Debatable Lands. The extracts printed there made me think he must be one of the great philosopher poets of the world. Yet there is no copy of his works at the Lenox.”
“There are copies of all his writings here.”