Page:Margaret Sherwood--A Puritan in Bohemia.djvu/159

A Puritan Bohemia "Mr. Stanton has attempted the impossible with commendable courage," wrote the critic, "but without succeeding in making it convincing. In facing 'Art and Need' we stand in the full blast of the orchestral colour-box. His gorgeous skies, of greenish hue, combine with his trees of violet to set forth an idea better adapted to the lecture-platform than to canvas. This is mere rhetoric."

"The idiot!" remarked Mr. Stanton politely, tossing the paper across the room.

He was not comforted even by the mystic notice in the Spectator.

"While it might be urged that Mr. Stanton's design is rather decorative than pictorial, suited rather to large architectural spaces than to a single canvas, there is an unspeakable something about the work that holds the spectator. In this, reduced as it is to the indifferent naked typical, one detects a soaring quality. Here is a constant aspiration toward the unattainable. Here is an insatiable need of the beyond. A brilliant future"