picture he evoked in the
reader's mind was not the same as the picture in his own mind--but that
is to me pure symbolism."

"Exactly," said Herries, "and the more symbolical that art becomes, the
purer it becomes--that is precisely what I am aiming at."

"Well," I said, "that gives me an opportunity of making a confession.
I have never really been able to understand what technical symbolism
in art is. A symbol in the plain sense is something which recalls
or suggests to you something else; and thus the whole of art is pure
symbolism. The flick of colour gives you a distant woodland, the phrase
gives you a scene or an emotion. Five printed words upon a page make one
suffer or rejoice imaginatively; and my idea of the most perfect art is
not the art which gives one a sense of laborious finish, but the art
in which you never think of the finish at all, but only of the thing
described. The end of effort is to conceal effort, as the old adage
says. Some people, I suppose, attain it through a series of misses; but
the best art of all goes straight to the heart of the thing."

"Yes," said Musgrave, "my own feeling is that the mistake is to consider
it can only be done in one way. Each person has his own way; but I agree
in thinking that the best art is the most effortless."

"From the point of view of the onlooker, perhaps," said Herries, "but
not from the point of view of the craftsman. The pleasure of art, for
the craftsman, is to see what the difficulty was, and to discern how the
artist triumphed over it. Think of the delightful individual roughness
of old work as opposed to modern machine-made things. There is an
appropriate irregularity, according to the medium employed. The
workmanship of a gem is not the same as that of a building; the essence
of the gem is to be flawless; but in the building there is a pleasure in
the tool-dints, like the pleasure of the rake-marks on the gravel
path. Of course music must be flawless too--firm, resolute, inevitable,
because the medium demands it; but in a big picture--why, the other day
I saw a great oil-painting, a noble piece of art--I came upon it in
the Academy, by a side door close upon it. The background was a great
tangled mass of raw crude smears, more like coloured rags patched
together than paint; but a few paces off, the whole melted into a great
river-valley, with deep water-meadows of summer grass and big clumps
of trees. That is the perfect combination. The man knew