t the sky of it--the vast, unkempt, unbounded sky of it, to which it
sings and lifts itself--with a strange, cold, hidden dread down in his
heart. To him it is a mere vast, dizzy, dreary, troubled formlessness.
Its literature--its art with its infinite life in it, is a blur of
vagueness. He complains because mobs of images are allowed in it. It
is full of huddled associations. When Carlyle appeared, the
Stucco-Greek mind grudgingly admitted that he was 'effective.' A man
who could use words as other men used things, who could put a pen down
on paper in such a way as to lift men out from the boundaries of their
lives and make them live in other lives and in other ages, who could
lend them his own soul, had to have something said about him;
something very good and so it was said, but he was not an "artist."
From the same point of view and to the same people Browning was a mere
great man (that is: a merely infinite man). He was a man who went
about living and loving things, with a few blind words opening the
eyes of the blind. It had to be admitted that Robert Browning could
make men who had never looked at their brothers' faces dwell for days
in their souls, but he was not a poet. Richard Wagner, too, seer,
lover, singer, standing in the turmoil of his violins conquering a new
heaven for us, had great conceptions and was a musical genius without
the slightest doubt, but he was not an "artist." He never worked his
conceptions out. His scores are gorged with mere suggestiveness. They
are nothing if they are not played again and again. For twenty or
thirty years Richard Wagner was outlawed because his music was
infinitely unfinished (like the music of the spheres). People seemed
to want him to write cosy, homelike music.

IV

SYMBOLISM IN MODERN ART

"_So I drop downward from the wonderment
Of timelessness and space, in which were blent
The wind, the sunshine and the wanderings
Of all the planets--to the little things
That are my grass and flowers, and am content._"

This prejudice against the infinite, or desire to avoid as much as
possible all personal contact with it, betrays itself most commonly,
perhaps, in people who have what might be called the domestic feeling,
who consciously or unconsciously demand the domestic touch in a
landscape before they are ready to call it beautiful. The typical
American woman, unless she has unusual gifts or training, if she is
left entirely to herself, prefers nic