e Decay of the Art of Lying." For therein he said:
"No great artist ever sees things as they really are." Yet, that
half-truth might also be put thus: The seeing of things as they really
are--the seeing of a proportion veiled from other eyes (together with the
power of expression), is what makes a man an artist. What makes him a
great artist is a high fervour of spirit, which produces a superlative,
instead of a comparative, clarity of vision.

Close to my house there is a group of pines with gnarled red limbs
flanked by beech-trees. And there is often a very deep blue sky behind.
Generally, that is all I see. But, once in a way, in those trees against
that sky I seem to see all the passionate life and glow that Titian
painted into his pagan pictures. I have a vision of mysterious meaning,
of a mysterious relation between that sky and those trees with their
gnarled red limbs and Life as I know it. And when I have had that vision
I always feel, this is reality, and all those other times, when I have no
such vision, simple unreality. If I were a painter, it is for such
fervent vision I should wait, before moving brush: This, so intimate,
inner vision of reality, indeed, seems in duller moments well-nigh
grotesque; and hence that other glib half-truth: "Art is greater than
Life itself." Art is, indeed, greater than Life in the sense that the
power of Art is the disengagement from Life of its real spirit and
significance. But in any other sense, to say that Art is greater than
Life from which it emerges, and into which it must remerge, can but
suspend the artist over Life, with his feet in the air and his head in
the clouds--Prig masquerading as Demi-god. "Nature is no great Mother
who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she
quickens to life." Such is the highest hyperbole of the aesthetic creed.
But what is creative instinct, if not an incessant living sympathy with
Nature, a constant craving like that of Nature's own, to fashion
something new out of all that comes within the grasp of those faculties
with which Nature has endowed us? The qualities of vision, of fancy, and
of imaginative power, are no more divorced from Nature, than are the
qualities of common-sense and courage. They are rarer, that is all. But
in truth, no one holds such views. Not even those who utter them. They
are the rhetoric, the over-statement of half-truths, by such as wish to
condemn what they call "Realism,