Description

IT is difficult to believe that any man is able to do first-rate things both in subjective and objective work. I stumbled upon this sentence the other day in a review of Louis Stevensons romances, and I fancy it embodies a notion acceptable to the superficial observer, to the critic who works by individual comparisons, by canons, and, generally, by avoiding views either broad or deep in judging a work of art. And yet it amounts to little less than a denial of possible solution to the one problem which every artist has to solve before he can become efficient, not to say great. If a fairly complete work of art, in any medium whatever, is not a happily consunnated union between elements objective and elements subjective, each being duly controlled, it will be difficult indeed to say what it is. Let me try to illustrate this by following the successive stages in the making of an artist, as the process would appear to himself were it conscious and deliberate. The boy begins, as soon as he call look, by taking an interest in the life he sees in action about him. It is not by objects in themselves that his senses are excited it is by their movement, their variation, the presage they give of some awakening power within himsclf. IIe is like a young cat...