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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 Excerpt: ...of wind. What did it matter whether you had anything to express, so long as you expressed it? That only was pure aesthetics, as he often said. To place before the public eye something so exquisitely purged of thick and muddy actuality that it might be as perfectly without direct appeal to-day as it would be two thousand years hence--this was an ambition to which in truth he nearly always attained; this only was great art. He would assert with his last breath--which was rather short, for he suffered from indigestion--that one must never concrete anything in terms of ordinary nature. No! one must devise pictures of life that would be equally unfamiliar to men in A. D. 2520 as they had been in A. D. 1920; and when an inconsiderate person drew his attention to the fact that to the spectator in 2520 the most naturalistic pictures of the life of 1920 would seem quite convincingly fantastic, so that there was no need for him to go out of his way to devise fantasy--he would stare. For he was emphatically not one of those who did not care a button what the form was so long as the spirit of the artist shone clear and potent through the pictures he drew. No, no; he either demanded the poetical, the thing that got off the ground, with the wind in its hair (and he himself would make the wind, rather perfumed); or--if not the poetical--something observed with extreme fidelity and without the smallest touch of that true danger to art, the temperamental point of view. No! he would say; it's our business to put it down just as it is, to see it, not to feel it. In feeling damnation lies. And nothing gave him greater uneasiness than to find the emotions of anger, scorn, love, reverence, or pity surging within him as he worked, for he knew t...

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