Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/294

LANDSCAPE PAINTING shows us her inner soul in some bewildering vision of poetic beauty. I should not care personally to hold a brief for the opponents of this view—nor should I know how to support it. Yet a painter of world-wide reputation once said to me that he positively hated a picture in which there was a moon. He declared that any picture which depended for its appeal upon the beauty of the subject was weak-kneed art, publicly advertising its own weakness. The very perfection of craftsmanship could not save such a picture, he said. The best and only answer to this sincere critique is that the painter who made it has remained all his life a craftsman—a craftsman of the highest distinction if you will, but never an artist.

Now from all that has been said above, it would appear that originality must be the easiest of all qualities to attain. [230]