Page:Clarence S. Darrow - Realism in Literature and Art (1899).djvu/7

 Rh can be moved by the gentle breeze as well as by the winter's gale; that it can see greater beauty in a statement true to life than in the inflated tales, which children read.

Most of the art and literature the world has known has been untrue. The pictures of the past have been painted from the distorted minds of visionists, and the pliant brains of tools. They have represented impossible gods and unthinkable saints; angels and cherubs and demons; everything but men and women. Saints may be all right in their place, but a saint with a halo around his head was born of myth and not of art. Angels may be well enough, but all rational men prefer an angel with arms to an angel with wings. When these artists were not drawing saints and madonnas, they were spending their time in painting kings and royal knaves; and the pictures of the rulers were as unlike the men and women that they were said to represent as the servile attitude of the painter was unlike that of the true artist of to-day. Of course an artist would not paint the poor; these had no clothes that would adorn a work of art, and no money or favors that would remunerate the toil. An ancient artist could no more afford to serve the poor than a modern lawyer could afford to defend the weak.

After literature had so far advanced as to con-