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 CHAPTER X

Personality of the Impersonal. Spirit Beauty.

Children love fairy tales. Primitive folk had tradition or folk-lore for mental food. They loved, in fact they created, the myth. The Norsemen peopled their sagas and myths with imaginary beings; not gods and goddesses done in marble, as did the Greeks, theirs were nature-made, such as dainty ethereal wraiths, fleeting as morning mist, brilliant as the sun-kissed dew. Their whispers were the breezes, their laughter rippled with the waterfall; they lived in the trees; hid under the ferns; supped with bee and butterfly from honey-laden flowers. They are the imagined souls of things that live under the heavens; they bring joy to humans who believe in them, and look for them because they are the first children of nature.

A few artists have painted with the delicacy of color and touch that suggests the ethereal. Woman's form idealized has served such art, expressive of the invisible.

Can you see Love? Love centers in the babe, the child. Then let the child represent love. So came the boy Cupid to human fancy and our vocabulary.

In the French salon of 1899, M. Gussier exhibited a canvas representing "Cupid and Psyche." Psyche, mid the deep grass, stands native before the Creator as the flower of the field. She is unconscious of the little god of Love following not far away. Both figures are as lovely and pure as the flowers and leaves that partially veil their beauty. As one looks at the painting it is with bated breath, expecting the vanishing of such elusive loveliness.

Of the many painters who have essayed the subject of Life, in various mediums with varying degrees of success, Eva Withrow seems to have given from her imagination a most elusive presentation of the subjective. The young girl in the attitude of going forward extends her hand is if feeling her way through a curtain of mist, the left having caught a wave of the filmy uncertainty; she has thrown the arm over her head, which is slightly lifted as she gazes earnestly into the future. A lamp at her feet burns the incense of life and wreathes its vapor all about her. A bubble, symbolizing the brevity and uncertainty of life, floats above her. An ephemeral feeling pervades the picture, or rather an atmosphere of the spiritual.

You cannot see the voice, nor the saucy echo sent back from the hill slope or rocky wall; yet in an art production we may see "Echo" in harmony with 65