Atherton. A pleasant little knot to set us, Gower,—to determine the conditions of your art.
Willoughby. And after dinner, too, of all times.
Gower. Why not? If the picture-critics would only write their verdicts after dinner, many a poor victim would find his dinner prospects brighter. This is the genial hour; the very time to discuss æsthetics, where geniality is everything.
Willoughby. Do you remember that passage in one of our old plays (I think it was in Lamb I saw it), where the crazed father asks all sorts of impossible things from the painter. He wants him to make the tree shriek on which his murdered son hangs ghastly in the moonlight.
Gower. Salvator has plenty of them, splintered with shrieking.
Willoughby. But this man’s frenzy demands more yet:—make me cry, make me mad, make me well again, and in the end leave me in a trance,—and so forth.
Atherton. Fortunate painter—a picture gallery ordered in a breath!
Willoughby. By no means. Now does this request, when you come to think of it, so enormously violate the conditions of the art? Seriously, I should state the matter thus:—The artist is limited to a moment only, and yet is the greater artist in proportion as he can not only adequately occupy, but even transcend that moment.
Gower. I agree with you. Painting reaches its highest aim when it carries us beyond painting; when it is not merely itself a creation, but makes the spectator creative, and prompts him with the antecedents and the consequents of the represented action.
Atherton. But all are not equal to the reception of such suggestions.