A MAN's philosophy is borrowed; his art is his own. What a man thinks of things is doubtless interesting and characteristic; result of his breeding and education, it is his contemporary patent; he takes of the stream as engineers take of the power of wind and water. But what he does, what he makes, the use to which he puts his heritage, is the measure both of his value to us and of himself.

the man

Yet our quaint habit is to look, almost exclusively, for philosophies, the ideas that are involved, in Sophocles and in Shakespeare. "If you've got the idea," said the famous German professor, whose name, unfortunately, I have forgotten, and whose subject was the madonna motive in painting, "if you've got the idea, you've got the whole thing." And he proceeded to prove this with lantern-slides in black and white. Think of that. Ruskin used to say that truths of color are the least important of all truths; and his ingenious and malapropos argument is made from the standpoint of a child who has achieved a drawing in outline, and who then by a happy afterthought proceeds to color it. Did Ruskin really believe that paintings are made in that way? Does anybody have to be told that paintings are color? Yet we

1 From Composition in Narration. Reprinted through the courtesy of John Russell Taylor and Henry Holt and Company.

keep to our naïve critical program, as if one should give a dinner composed only of printed bills of fare, voluptuous orgy, or of books about digestion, ethical uplift; the idea of it, you know.

Great are ideas, our only available source of supply of power. That was a great idea that first gave into our hands, by the burning of sticks, a little of the sun's stored power to use for ourselves. That was a great idea that put to our use the coal and the oil and the gas stored in the earth; and they are great ideas that foresee the exhaustion of this source, that have taught us to use water as "white fire," and are teaching us to store power in corn-leaves and mirrors. One supposes the ideas themselves originally came from the sun. These are means to life; it is life itself that dreams and remembers by the hearth-fire, and whose fire-driven journeys end in lover's meeting. And do you need to be told again that life is art? Art uses ideas; it is not a philosophy, it is imagination.

We, therefore, who in trying to tell our stories are dealing with the practice of an art must deal at once with the whole product, the idea and the image. If we keep in mind always our purpose and end, we shall be the less distracted with ways and means. We are to find out what to tell, we are to determine and fix and make unmistakably sure this "what"; and we are not to concern ourselves too much with how to tell it. At times it seems that our books of composition are so excessively helpful that they embarrass us; and many of our courses in composition are so rich in "stunts" that one's writing remains a "stunt," and in the multiplication of means one loses sight of the end. The end is that we shall tell the truth; two things, "truth," and "telling," two things in one. The end is a perfect narration.

Description, which is a means to that end, is commonly set apart for separate practice. But the practice is false that develops one's skill in narrating ideas on the one hand and one's skill in describing images separately on the other hand. The two are one practice, one process, and together simultaneously build the story. They are never really separate. If we use the restricted and partial meaning of narration, in the sense of a process, without reference to results, we may say it is equivalent to that function of painting which we call, variously, the drawing, or the outline, or the composition; and by the same analogy we may call description the equivalent of color. Every painter knows that these two are inseparately and simultaneously one. A line is where two colors meet. Color is the light by which you see the line. The painter's attention, to be sure, may be relatively more occupied with line, or it may be more occupied with light; but this by no means indicates that drawing and coloring, or in music melody and harmony, or in writing narration and description, are separate processes. Of themselves, the terms are nothing. You do not need names for your processes. One question is enough for your attention; how shall you express what you have seen to be the truth, how shall you get it into words?

II

Let us try an experiment with a relic of antique art; the armless Venus, a familiar image in our houses; a fragment of stone put to the use, we say, of expressing an idea of womanhood, and there are books and controversies aplenty about that idea. Place her before you in full front view, at your eye's level, and fully illuminated

with light from behind you. Thus seen, her features, the mold of her body, the folds of the draperies flatten and melt and fuse into the white silhouette we know so well. You get most of all the broad sweep of line, the sure and subtle rhymes of the attitude, the head tilted to the right on the droop of the right shoulder and the lift of the right hip.

Now place her, again in full opposition to your eye, against the window light. The silhouette is the same, but details are lost in its flat darkness, and it has become suddenly keen and crystalline of outline. This remains most of all, the outline; and it is accentuated by the slender silver lines of light caught on her throat and her sides. One gets, more sleek and slender than before, the flowing continuity, the crisp sure-footed balance, of her

pose.

And now put her, still in full front view, in a single side-light, say first from your right. The full figure starts immediately and dramatically into vivid revelation. You are given a bold harmony of details; the sweep of the hair back from the left temple, the almost sullen sweetness of the lips, the dimple in the throat, the shadow of the breast on the fragment of the round arm, the projection of the knee toward you. Your impression is intensive, and those perfect outlines are half forgotten in richness of detail, in the brilliance and daring of her modeling. Or, reverse this, let the side-light come from your left. The image is instantly softer; the shadows are less obvious, the lights are broader and merge into each other. It is like a change of mood; and the motionless, flexible, buxom creature, full weight on light foot, seems much more shy and musing.

All these have been with the full opposition of the front view. Return now, for a moment more, to the

side-light from your right, and keep that illumination constant while we try other points of view, turning the statue by degrees in a circle away from the light. With this motion, the draped projection of the left knee accentuates itself, and the crevices of shadow on the bare torso enrich and deepen and mingle until a totally new impression strikes you with the figure in profile, its back to the light, and the front of the body outlined in narrow shadow. There is thus a richer coquetry of the tilted head; the body is sharply and gracefully slender; and on the forward knee the slipping draperies are deepened into something like the breadth of modern costume.

If you turn her until the armless shoulder seems to touch the chin, so that the head inclines directly away from you, you find that the back is charming too; you take new delight in those delicate flat contours that run from the shoulder blades to the neck, where is the loose lock of hair; and when she has turned entirely away from you, you will have to hunt out new words for the new impression. The artful richness of the hair is now more evident, and the bold oblique curves of the draperies, so fine a correction and balance of the figure's sway to the right. From this point of view the figure is most completely given, with the profile of the right side following down the straight curves of the draped right leg. And in that smooth flat rondure of the bare back you get an impression of firm and frank good health, the clear sweet excellence of the flesh, together with an added quality about the whole pose; it looks virginal, abstracted, pensive; it has a dear humility, it is almost comically tender; and out of the unfamiliar look upon so familiar a creature you get new admiration and new pity.

And last, finishing the circle, bring her around to the