_ideals held in common_. Then will the architect conceive the city's
monument which will no longer be a temple, a prison, or a fortress;
then will the painter, the sculptor, the carver, the ornament-worker
know where to put their canvases, their statues, and their decoration;
deriving their power of execution from the same vital source, and
gloriously marching all together towards the future.

But till then art can only vegetate. The best canvases of modern artists
are those that represent nature, villages, valleys, the sea with its
dangers, the mountain with its splendours. But how can the painter
express the poetry of work in the fields if he has only contemplated it,
imagined it, if he has never delighted in it himself? If he only knows
it as a bird of passage knows the country he soars over in his
migrations? If, in the vigour of early youth, he has not followed the
plough at dawn, and enjoyed mowing grass with a large sweep of the
scythe next to hardy haymakers vying in energy with lively young girls
who fill the air with their songs? The love of the soil and of what
grows on it is not acquired by sketching with a paint-brush--it is only
in its service; and without loving it, how paint it? This is why all
that the best painters have produced in this direction is still so
imperfect, not true to life, nearly always merely sentimental. There is
no _strength_ in it.

You must have seen a sunset when returning from work. You must have been
a peasant among peasants to keep the splendour of it in your eye. You
must have been at sea with fishermen at all hours of the day and night,
have fished yourself, struggled with the waves, faced the storm, and
after rough work experienced the joy of hauling a heavy net, or the
disappointment of seeing it empty, to understand the poetry of fishing.
You must have spent time in a factory, known the fatigues and the joys
of creative work, forged metals by the vivid light of a blast furnace,
have felt the life in a machine, to understand the power of man and to
express it in a work of art. You must, in fact, be permeated with
popular feelings, to describe them.

Besides, the works of future artists who will have lived the life of
the people, like the great artists of the past, will not be destined for
sale. They will be an integral part of a living whole that would not be
complete without them, any more than they would be complete without it.
Men will go to the artist's own city to ga