"Things as they are" may mean so much as to be meaningless. If we mean things as they are in themselves, only God can so see them as to enclose them and leave nothing outside but falsehood. For us, we see but as in a mirror darkly. We have a few imperfect senses, and such moral faculties as we manage to distinguish the one from the other, and which we have to complete by making one act upon the others.
So that for us there exist many truths. We have truths of smell, before which all things are absorbed in one or more impressions of odor. We have the truths of the eyes, for which all is appearance. We have the truths of intelligence, for which there are ideas; truths of feeling for which there are impressions; and many others in a long list perhaps exhaustless; and I only use these definitions for our momentary convenience.
Now, in connection with which of these truths must the painter represent the manner of existence of objects?
That is the question the painter must ask himself—that must be his canon of æsthetics. He cannot exile the truths that affect his specialty, however much he may care for the others. It is possible for him to let the truths of one kind affect his own, but his own must predominate, or the work of art will not exist.
Persons like Mr. Ruskin think that they are fighting the cause of truth against falsehood. In fact, they are making one truth fight another, with injury to both.
It is not possible that a work of art should define like science and still move like poetry.
It is precisely that point of which I spoke first, that tendency of the artist which makes him not a reasoner but a seer, which gives him the unexplainable power of impressing us in a way that we can only analyze afterward. It is because he can escape from the rule of his intelligence, can become a being that does not judge, can become as a little child, no longer see things through ideas, but merely feel the agitation of a love, an unexplainable passion. As if he felt the breath that animates the world behind a covering of what we call realities.
It is in this way that he is an awkward man when he tries to handle the tools which we generally call language—that is to say, words and phrases; in so far, at least, as he has to use them, to explain the ideas and sentiments involved in his own language. This is all the more difficult in that literature, the language of words, has not become acquainted as yet with this mind of the artist, and has not furnished to the artist special tools to define his intentions and position. It is because of the peculiarities of his work, which we have just considered, that no person can explain that work perfectly in terms of words; while he, the artist himself, grows continually more averse to handle words which seem unsatisfactory, and, naturally, becomes more and more unfit to use them.
J. L. F.