Page:The Pacific Monthly volumes 1-3.djvu/590

172 feeling. It is even more in the careful, loving, hard touches of the earlier ones than in the splendid mastery of Velasquez or Rembrandt. In this sense art is always the same—Ars longa vita brevis est.

There is, of course, much to be had from judicious criticism, but I am not competent to criticize. I can only say—and I take painting again as the most popular art field—there must be mystery, not hard, dry reality; there must be imagination, not mere fact. If it be a still life of pots and pans, still there must be mystery and imagination. There must be beauty—even if it be the beauty of wrinkled old age.

And if the essay be in color, there must be a joy in the color for itself alone, or the whole is a failure. And good color is as subtle, as illusive of definition as any other quality in aesthetics. It mayor may not be bright color, usually not. Still it may be. It never is raw, crude color, for then it is not subtle. It is not imitative color, for paint is not leaves of grass, canvass is not the air and the earth. It must be suggestive, just as the whole picture must be suggestive rather than photographically imitative. A good landscape or portrait does not imitate, it suggests the beauty of the view, or the quality of the person, and it does more. There has been put into it something of the artist's soul, something of man himself. That is why true art work speaks to us even more than nature herself, for the art work is man's soul speaking to man's soul. Nature, though she be the source of all inspiration, is herself soulless and distant. A mere imitation of her is neither nature nor man.

ITUATED at Yaquina, on the coast of Oregon, is an old, deserted lighthouse. It stands upon a promontory that juts out dividing the bay from the ocean, and is exposed to every wind that blows. ' Its weather-beaten walls are wrapped in mystery. Of an afternoon when the fog comes drifting in from the sea and completely envelopes the lighthouse, and then stops in its course as if its object had been attained, it is the loneliest place in the world. At such times those who chance to be in the vicinity hear a moaning sound like the cry of one in pain, and sometimes a frenzied call for help pierces the death-like stillness of the waning day. Far out at sea, ships passing in the night are often guided in their course by a light that gleams from the lantern tower where no lamp is ever trimmed.

In the days when Newport was but a handful of cabins, roughly built, and flanked by an Indian camp, across the bar there sailed a sloop, grotesquely rigged and without a name. The arrival of . a vessel was a rare event, and by the time the stranger had dropped anchor abreast the village the whole population were gathered on the strip of sandy beach to welcome her. She was manned by a swarthy crew, and her skipper was a beetle-browed ruffian with a scar across his cheek from mouth to ear. A boat was lowered, and in it a man about 40 years of age, accompanied by a young girl, were rowed ashore. The man was tall and dark, and his manner and speech indicated gentle breeding. He explained that the sloop's water casks were empty, and was directed to the spring that poured down the face of the yellow sandstone cliff a few yards up the beach. Issuing instructions in some heathenish, unfamiliar tongue to the boatmen, he de-