Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/69

 grandeur of Van Gogh.

But the translator, whether a painter or a maker of manuels or of song, loses or gains in the appeal according to the individuality he infuses into his work. The human touch is unfailing no matter how slight or how strong. It can hold you spellbound before a fern or send you scampering through the fields, chasing a butterfly or a will-o'-the-wisp. For Nature, like man, will tyrannize when she can. And when the translator is conquered by her, he loses the quality that makes his art supreme. He becomes a dryasdust master of definitions and classifications. For to be impersonal as the elements, is unhuman, unnatural. One may be sublime, as Emerson; but it is an arid sublimity void of the one great element of genius—passion.

To copy Nature? A boy with a camera can do that. To get the spirit of Nature? A woodman or a shepherd can follow the trail of the whistling wind to hoarded sunshine in distant wolds. But to interpret Nature and inform it with a human