temper that attended them. They
understood what this was better than anyone, and the results in
varying degrees of genius attest to the quality of the American
imagination at its best.

I should like, for purposes of reference, to see a worthy exhibition
of all of these men in one place. It would I am sure prove my
statement that the eastern genius is naturally a tragic one, for all
of these men have hardly once ventured into the clear sunlight of the
world of every day. It would offset highly also, the superficial
attitude that there is no imagination in American painting. We should
not find so much of form or of colour in them in the stricter meaning
of these ideas, as of mood. They might have set themselves to be
disciples of William Blake's significant preachment, "put off
intellect and put on imagination, the imagination is the man"; the
intellect being the cultivated man, and the imagination being the
natural man. There is imagination which by reason of its power and
brilliance exceeds all intellectual effort, and effort at
intellectualism is worse than a fine ignorance by far. Men who are
highly imaginative, create by feeling what they do not or cannot
know. It is the sixth sense of the creator.

These artists were men alone, touched with the pristine significance
of nature. It was pioneering of a difficult nature, precarious as all
individual investigation of a spiritual or esthetic character is sure
to be. Its first requisite is isolation, its last requisite is
appreciation. All of these painters are gone over into that place they
were so eager to investigate, illusion or reality. Their pictures are
witness here to their seriousness. They testify to the bright
everlastingness of beauty. If they have not swayed the world, they
have left a dignified record in the art of a given time. Their
contemporary value is at least inestimable. They are among the very
first in the development of esthetics in America in point of merit.
They made no compromise, and their record is clear.

If one looks over the record of American art up to the period of
ultra-modernism, it will be found that these men are the true
originals among American painters. We shall find outside of them and a
very few others, so much of sameness, a certain academic convention
which, however pronounced or meagre the personalities are, leave those
personalities in the category of "safe" painters. They do not disturb
by an excessively intimate point of