“Then you must have noticed his wonderful sympathy with, and understanding of, the devil himself. He saw the tremendous contrasts of life, and understood them.” “I must read that,” said Virginia, “if he wrote with understanding sympathy of the devil. Don’t you think,” she asked, “that those who write books for children generally understand life very well, and have true genius?” “Perhaps,” I said. “What do you think? How about those artists who write for children in the Sunday comic papers?” Now I spoke of the artist in us all, who sees things ever as distinct wholes, who picks out, as he goes through life, complete visions of beauty to reproduce in his mind. These visions have to be distant, separate from himself. For life is so distracting and full of contradictory passions, so vast, and, as we know it in our limited lives, so incomplete, that we must get rid of it, we must separate ourselves, with our universal and unfinished relations, from the perfect and whole beauty which we wish to see in the artistic vision. “You must have noticed,” I said, “and you have often heard, that far-off things are most beautiful. It is because our life, interwoven with endless distracting circumstances, does not seem to touch those far-off things.” “Autumn leaves,” said Marian, “far off look so beautiful, and near by are full of imperfections.” Virginia said: “And perfection of detail in a picture, as if the things were very near and real, does not make it better. It does not seem good. You know Millet’s ‘Sower,’ at the Metropolitan Museum: when you go close, it is all streaks.” “This dimness of detail is for two reasons, in most great pictures,” I said. “First, the artist often paints a picture with the intention of having it looked upon from a distance. Second, in the perfect whole, detail is merged. All must blend and harmonize.” “I never thought of that,” said Virginia. “The too precise details in a picture attract a person’s attention, and want to be looked at for their own sake, and so break in on the harmony and wholeness of the picture.” “Yes, just so,” I answered. I spoke again of the sublime lie of art—the untruth which is most true. I said: “I once had an English teacher who used to tell us that in art one was not to give the truth, but the impression of truth. Truths often break in and destroy the impression of that whole truth. “Now,” I asked, “what is the one, the only object, of art in the world?” We decided, all of us, that it was complete understanding and sympathy. Art is a symbol of that completeness for which our whole life longs. One of them—I think it was Henry—said its aim was progress. I said it was rather the picturing and prophecy of the end and aim of progress itself.