Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/293

THE TRUE IMPRESSIONISM with any youngster who raises the old cry—false as it is. It is a phase—one of the growing pains of adolescence which are normal and to be expected. If we only remember that, we shall have no cause to worry. I believe that every young painter must at some time worship at the shrine of technique, just as every youth who is to grow up to true and generous manhood must at some period of his boyish career be a socialist. But it is a sign of mental atrophy—of arrested development, when the youth or the artist fails to graduate out of this chrysalis stage.

Nature is not all beautiful by any means. But why should we choose to perpetuate her ugly side? I believe it to be one of the artist's chief functions, as it should be his chief delight, to watch for the rare mood when she wafts aside the veil of the commonplace and [229]