Take the three pictures by Sousa Cardoza. Suppose they have no more significance than so many illustrations to a fairy tale; they are interesting in line and fascinating in color. If the “Stronghold” had been on a Delft platter, or the “Leap of the Rabbit” on a piece of Persian pottery, everyone would have lauded their beauty, and collectors would give ten or twenty times the modest prices of the canvases. When put to people in that matter-of-fact way the response is almost always favorable to the pictures. In an interesting monograph entitled “Is It Art?”[39] the writer says: It will be seen, therefore, that the efforts of these men to give a subjective rendering of actuality results in nothing better than a poorly realized form of objectivity which is as much the creation of the spectator as of the artist, inasmuch as the vaguely adumbrated forms in the picture simply serve as a hint to that reality of which it is a wilfully distorted symbol, and the discovery of the “mustard pot” would scarcely have been possible without the happy cooperation of the title with the spectator’s previous knowledge of the actual appearance of a mustard pot. Without the intervention of the title and the association of ideas called forth thereby through the memory of past experiences with actuality, these pictures would be totally meaningless even to the most recondite. They would inevitably be reduced to a personal system of shorthand, an individual code, as it were, comprehensible only to the originator. Regarded from that viewpoint, these enigmatic paintings and drawings may very possibly be altogether successful. At all events it is only fair to assume that these works express to the originator what he intended them to express. But it is quite obvious that they express something quite different to the spectator who has not been initiated into the meaning of this personal form of shorthand, and the appending of an objective title to what is intended as a subjective impression of the actual world hardly help him over the difficulty. On the contrary it takes him just that far away from the impression the artist desires to produce, plunging him deeper into that world of reality out of which he was to be extricated by this new art, and there is no doubt that in the minds of even the most intelligent spectator it only serves to reenforce his conception of reality upon which he is forced to fall back by the objective titles as well as the concrete representations of what is supposed to be a subjective mood.