of things strike an individual mind as beautiful, one sees the method
with which it deals with artistic difficulties. The most interesting
things of the kind I have ever seen are the portfolios of sketches by
Leonardo da Vinci in the Royal library at Windsor; outlines of heads,
features, flowers, backgrounds, strange engines of war, wings of
birds--the _debris_, almost, of the studio--are there piled up in
confusion. And in a lesser degree the same is true of all such
collections, though perhaps this shows that one is more interested in
personality than in artistic performance.
A good many people, too, have a gift for presenting a simple impression
of a beautiful thing, who have not the patience or the power of
combination necessary for working out a finished design; and surely it
is foolish to let the convention of art overrule a man's capacities?
To allow that, to acquiesce in silence, to say that because one cannot
express a thing in a certain way, one will not express it at all, seems
to me to be making an instinct into a moral sanction. One must express
whatever one desires to express, as clearly and as beautifully as
possible, and one must take one's chance as to whether it is a work of
art. To hold one's tongue, if anything appears to be worth saying,
because one does not know the exact code of the professionals, is as
foolish as if a man born in a certain class of society were to say that
he would never go to any social gathering except those of his precise
social equals, because he was afraid of making mistakes of etiquette.
Etiquette is not a matter of principle; it was not one of the things of
which Moses saw the pattern in the Mount! The only rule is not to be
pretentious or assuming, not to claim that one's efforts are
necessarily worthy of admiration and attention.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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