firing verbal rockets or playing practical jokes, when he paints or criticizes painting or philosophizes about painting. He may take part in politics—he was active, for instance, in the campaign for intervention—but he always sees the map and the war with an artist’s eye, and his affections go out to the land that has given him the richest spiritual and artistic gifts.
Deep in the heart of this skeptic there is one faith: art. Behind the melancholy of this pessimist there is one joy: art. In other men he esteems only intelligence, and for him intelligence means the achievement of art or at least the understanding of art. Even in life he seeks that intellectual or physical refinement which after all is art. Even in poverty and in hunger you would find him ready to see and to catch the picturesque or the comic or the colorful aspect of his ill luck, and to turn it into a marvelous page in his memoirs.
This characteristic, the very spinal column of his being, is rarer nowadays than Philistines think. For the Philistine is prone to believe that every man who breaks the rectangular habits of Philistia is an artist—every drawing-teacher, every dauber with disheveled hair, every third-rate journalist. But the true and complete artist—the lyrist, in short, whether he expresses himself in signs, in colors, or in words—is the rarest creature in the whole world. Few, indeed,
