For my own part, my introduction to Mr. Kemeys's studio was the opening
to me of a new world, where it has been my good fortune to spend many
days of delightful and enlightening study. How far the subject of this
writing may have been already familiar to the readers of it, I have no
means of knowing; but I conceive it to be no less than my duty, as a
countryman of Mr. Kemeys's and a lover of all that is true and original
in art, to pay the tribute of my appreciation to what he has done.
There is no danger of his getting more recognition than he deserves,
and he is not one whom recognition can injure. He reverences his art
too highly to magnify his own exposition of it; and when he reads what
I have set down here, he will smile and shake his head, and mutter that
I have divined the perfect idea in the imperfect embodiment. Unless I
greatly err, however, no one but himself is competent to take that
exception. The genuine artist is never satisfied with his work; he
perceives where it falls short of his conception. But to others it will
not be incomplete; for the achievements of real art are always invested
with an atmosphere and aroma--a spiritual quality perhaps--proceeding
from the artist's mind and affecting that of the beholder. And thus it
happens that the story or the poem, the picture or the sculpture,
receives even in its material form that last indefinable grace, that
magic light that never was on sea or land, which no pen or brush or
graving-tool has skill to seize. Matter can never rise to the height of
spirit; but spirit informs it when it has done its best, and ennobles
it with the charm that the artist sought and the world desired.
*** Since the above was written, Mr. Kemeys has removed his studio to
Perth Amboy, N. J.
End of Project Gutenberg's Confessions and Criticisms, by Julian Hawthorne
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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