Page:The thirty-six dramatic situations (1921).djvu/129

 CONCLUSION 127 if you will, this freedom and this power - - he will use, not only in the choice, the limitation and fertilization of his subject, but in his observation and meditation. And he will no more run the risk of falsifying, through pre-conceived ideas, the vision of reality than does the painter, for example, in his application of laws equally general, and likewise controlled by constant experi- mentation, — the divine laws of perspective! Proportion, finally realizable in the calm bestowed by complete possession of the art of combining, and recov- ering the supreme power long ago usurped by "good taste" and by "imagination," will bring about the recog- nition of that quality more or less forgotten in modern art, - "beauty." By this I mean, not the skilful selection of material from nature, but the skilful and exact representation -with no groping, no uncertainly, no retention of superfluities -of the particular bit of nature under observation. But it is more than this, for these two definitions, the eclectic and the naturalist, concern but a limited number of the arts, and but one side of them; thai small number to which imitation is open (painting, literature of character, and, in a limited way, sculp- ture), and that side of them which is purely imitative. What sijmificanee have these two definitions (both of which real upon the reproduction of reality, the one exalting and the other belittling it) if they be eon- fronted with Music, with the didactic poetry of a Hesiod, with the Vedic incantations, with true statuary, simpli- fied and significant, from the mighty chisel-strokes of Phidias or of the XIII Century, With purely ornamental or decorative art, 'he "beauty" of ;i demonstration in geometry, or finally with Architecture, now reviv- ing in silence and obscurity, that arl which comes periodi- cally i" reunite and, like an ark, to rescue the others, that art which shall once more return to lead us away from the prematurely senile follies of our delettanti and sectarians. Upon ;i like heighl stands a principle greater than Naturalism with its experimental method, or Ideal- ism which gives battle to it, Logic.