This takes in all the schools, as well as the fiery, untamed spirits who would break away from schools altogether. Art is always the same; temperaments differ and become warped. The academician’s temperamental glass is ruled off into formal geometrical patterns, and he sees nature as a kind of problem in perspective. The rabid “impressionist” looks within himself, and away from nature, and “sees things” which don’t exist for anyone else. The true artist gazes straight out upon nature, and forgets himself, and art comes to him “as easily as lying.”
“What the poet writes.
He writes: mankind accepts it if it suits,
And that’s success. If not, the poem’s passed
From hand to hand, and yet from hand to hand.
Until the unborn snatch it, crying out
In pity on their fathers’ being so dull,—
And that’s success, too.”
