of a #tableau vivant#. There you have real,
living people. But what an awful deathlike stillness is felt when the
curtain is drawn aside. The nearer you approach the actual in all its
completeness, the more evident is the lack of that #movement# which
always accompanies life. You cannot express life by copying laboriously
natural appearances. Those things in the appearance that convey vital
expression and are capable of being translated into the medium he is
working with, have to be sought by the artist, and the painted symbols
of his picture made accordingly. This lack of the movement of life is
never noticed in a good picture, on the other hand the figures are often
felt to move.

Pictures are blamed for being conventional when it is lack of vitality
that is the trouble. If the convention adopted has not been vitalised by
the emotion that is the reason of the painting, it will, of course, be a
lifeless affair. But however abstract and unnaturalistic the manner
adopted, if it has been truly felt by the artist as the right means of
expressing his emotional idea, it will have life and should not be
called conventional in the commonly accepted offensive use of the term.

It is only when a painter consciously chooses a manner not his own,
which he does not comprehend and is incapable of firing with his own
personality, that his picture is ridiculous and conventional in the dead
sense.

But every age differs in its temperament, and the artistic conventions
of one age seldom fit another. The artist has to discover a convention
for himself, one that fits his particular individuality. But this is
done simply and naturally--not by starting out with the intention of
flouting all traditional conventions on principle; nor, on the other
hand, by accepting them all on principle, but by simply following his
own bent and selecting what appeals to him in anything and everything
that comes within the range of his vision. The result is likely to be
something very different from the violent exploits in peculiarity that
have been masquerading as originality lately. #Originality is more
concerned with sincerity than with peculiarity.#

The struggling and fretting after originality that one sees in modern
art is certainly an evidence of vitality, but one is inclined to doubt
whether anything really original was ever done in so forced a way. The
older masters, it seems, were content sincerely to try and do the best
they were capable of d