And dominating the night of silence and hatred,
The terrible thunderous flight of hertzian waves.
The Artist as Master
The Japanese Print: An Interpretation, by Frank Lloyd Wright. [Ralph Fletcher Seymour Company, Chicago.]
Henry Blackman Sell
“‘A flower is beautiful,’ we say—but why? Because in its geometry and its sensuous qualities it is an embodiment and significant expression of that precious something in ourselves which we instinctively know to be Life, ‘an eye looking out upon us from the great inner sea of beauty,’ a proof of the eternal harmony in the nature of a universe which is too vast and intimate and real for the mere intellect to grasp.”
Yet our materialists would solve the Problem with their material intellects. And our theologians would solve it with their ecclesiastical deductions. The one would put Life in the cold hands of the scientist, expert in fact and figure; the other, gropingly indefinite, in the hands of the spiritual formulaist. Yet both are wrong. The Problem can be solved. The literal, objective guesses of the materialist are but flimsy realisms far from true. The indefinite, abstract dreams of the theologian are but the futile inaptitudes of man calculated to define that which cannot be defined.
But definitions are not what the world needs. The Solution would be interesting, but the Problem is fascinating. It is the Going and not the Goal that holds us to the bitter and the sweet, through mornings, noons, and nights, year by year.
If, then, we grant the Solution but a cold conclusion, and the Goal but a stagnation point, to whom can we turn but to the artists—those spiritual children of that great master who wept when he could find no imperfection in his masterpiece.
The artist, whose interests are in the interpretations, and not in the translations of Life, and whose interpretations have given Life all that it holds sacred.