n the same.

To a great extent all art is controlled by fad and fashion; and all the
fashions in the polite arts easily drifted from Italy into Spain. The
works of Titian carried to Madrid produced a swarm of imitators, some of
whom, like Velasquez, Zurbaran, Ribera and Murillo, having spun their
cocoons, passed through the chrysalis stage, developed wings, and soared
to high heaven. But the generations of imitators who followed these have
usually done little better than gape.

And although Spain has been a kind mother to art for four hundred years,
yet the modern school of Spanish art shows no "apostolic succession" from
the past. It is a thing separate and alone: gorgeous, dazzling, strong,
and rarely beautiful. Totally unlike the art of the old masters, it takes
its scenes from Nature and actual living life--depending not on myth,
legend or fable. It discards pure imagination, and by holding a mirror up
to Nature has done the world the untold blessing of introducing it to
itself.

The average man sees things in the mass, and therefore sees nothing;
everything, to his vision, is run together in hopeless jumble: all is
discord, confusion--inextricable confusion worse confounded.

But the artist who is also a scientist (whether he knows it or not)
discovers that in the seeming confusion, order, method and law yet reign
supreme. And to prove his point he lifts from the tangle of things one
simple, single scene and shows this, and this alone, in all its full and
rounded completeness--beautiful as a snow-crystal on the slide of a
microscope.

All art consists in this: to show the harmony of a part. And having seen
the harmony of a part we pass on to a point where we can guess the
harmony of the whole. Whether you be painter, sculptor, musician or
writer, all your endeavors are toward lifting from the mass of things a
scene, a form, a harmony, a truth, and, relieving it from all that
distracts, catch it in immortal amber.

The writer merely unearths truth: truth has always existed: he lifts it
out of the mass, and holding it up where others can see it, the
discerning cry, "Yes, yes--we recognize it!" The musician takes the sound
he needs from the winds blowing through the forest branches, constructs a
harp strung with Apollo's golden hair, and behold, we have a symphony!
The wrongs of a race in bondage never touched the hearts of men until a
woman lifted out a single, solitary black man and showed us the stripes
upon