Read the foregoing lines once more. Eight objects are mentioned--apple, apple tree, temples, pyramids, children, battalions, weeping women, fighting men--by no possibility could these strangely diverse objects be found grouped together in actual life, yet it is safe to say that _as you read them_ no feeling of utter incongruity was experienced. On the contrary your imagination unconsciously created a picture, vague and indistinct because fleeting, which combined them all, possibly a strange, poetic scene with orchards and playing children, temples and pyramids in the distance, with armed battalions, weeping women and fighting men passing by in clouds or fanciful shapes. Thousands of such pictures are painted every year and they are mostly rather poor works of the imagination. There is, however, no reason why the same freedom, the same arbitrary indifference to actualities, should not be exercised in the painting of good pictures. No reason why, for instance, painters should not _experiment freely with all the so-called laws of art_, and that is what the Cubists and others of the moderns are doing. * * * * * That the ultimate aim of painting is to touch the crowd we have admitted; but painting must not address the crowd in the language of the crowd; it must employ its own language, in order to move, dominate, and direct the crowd, not in order to be understood. It is so with religions and philosophies. The artist who concedes nothing, who does not explain himself and relates nothing, accumulates an internal strength whose radiance shines on every hand. It is in consummating ourselves within ourselves that we shall purify humanity; it is by increasing our own riches that we shall enrich others; it is by kindling the heart of the star for our own pleasure that we shall exalt the universe. * * * * * To explain Cubism, or any attempt in art to suppress the objective, one must fall back on music. Grieg calls a certain composition “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” Not for a moment did he attempt realistically to suggest a hall, a mountain, a king or any object; to have done so would have been folly. And if that particular composition were played for the first time before a body of keen musicians, no title mentioned, and not a word said about its being a part of the Peer Gynt suite, no two would agree as to what the composer had in mind, though many might have very interesting impressions regarding the _mood of the composer in writing it_. But once understand it is part of the Peer Gynt suite and once told it is “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” the weird and fascinating music explains itself, it is recognized as a wonderfully successful attempt to realize an impressive scene by a combination of sounds. * * * * *