Or you, whose sun-steeped brush brings to life on canvas the golden trances
of August noons, the high, still splendor of its mountain-tops, which the
sun caresses with fiery languor, the unrippled slumber of its warm streams,
the broad glory of its woods and meadows fused with light and heat into the
resplendent haze that earth exhales in her day of prime, till he who sees
the picture hears the cricket's chirping in its moveless grasses, and
scents the rich aromatic breath of its summer-passion and its rapturous
noon,--do you dream, when at last the perfect work repeats your thought,
and you rest in the tropie atmosphere you have created, that in very truth
the picture itself is full of inward heat and breathless languor? For you
have poured out the colors that light makes out of heat, and in them the
still inevitable light shall ever stir the recreating heat that clothes
itself in color, and bring your thought, no more a dead abstraction, but a
living power, into the very substance whereby you have expressed it. And
even so far as you were creative, so shall your work be informed by you,
and not mere dead pigment and dried oil and dull canvas be your autograph,
but the vivid and inspiring blazon of an inspired idea shall glow life-like
on some friendly wall, and in its turn inspire some other soul, whose light
within needs but the breath from without to burst upward in clear flame.
Or you, who unveil from its marble tomb that figure of a chained and
stainless woman, whose atmosphere is as a nun's veil, whose sad divinity is
a crown,--do you dare imagine that the holy despair you have imaged, the
pause of a saint's resignation and a martyr's courage, is but the outline
and the faultless contour of a stone? Come back, Pygmalion, from your
mythic sleep! return, Art's divinest mystery, germ of all its power, from
the deep dust of ages! and teach these modern men that his story whose
passion fired a statue's breast was but an immortal fable, a similitude of
the truth you feel, but do not see,--that even as our Creator shared His
life with His creatures, so do you pour, in far less measure, but obedient
to that precedent which is law, your own life and the magnetic instincts of
that life, into what you create!
Keep your hearts pure and your hands clean, therefore; for these things
that you sell for dead shall one day livingly confront you, and tell their
own story of your life and your nature with terrible honesty to men and
angels.
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