d. Thus Delacroix exclaimed ironically, "In order to
present an ideal head of a negro, our teachers make him resemble as
far as possible the profile of Antinoeus, and then say, 'We have done
our utmost; if, nevertheless, we fail to make the negro beautiful,
then we ought not to introduce into our pictures such a freak of
nature, the squat nose and thick lips, which are so unendurable to the
eyes.'" True idealism treats everything after its own kind, making it
more intensely itself than it is in the play of nature; the athlete is
more heroically an athlete, the negro more vividly a negro. True
idealism seeks to express the tendency by virtue of which an object
is what it is. The abstraction which art effects is not an unreality but
a higher reality. It is not the mere type, that art presents, for the type
as such does not exist in nature. The individual is not lost but
affirmed by this reference to the inner principle of its being. A good
portrait has in it an element of caricature; the difference between
portraiture and caricature is the difference between emphasis and
exaggeration. Art is not the falsification of nature, but the fuller
realization of it. It is the interpretation of nature's truth, the
translation of it, divined by the artist, into simpler terms to be read
and understood by those of less original insight. The deeper the
penetration into the life-force and shaping principle of nature, the
greater is the measure of truth.

In representative art the truth of nature is the work's objective base.
What the artist finally expresses is the relation of the object to his
own experience. A work of art is the statement of the artist's insight
into nature, moulded and suffused by the emotion attending his
perception. Of the object, he uses that aspect and that degree of truth
which serve him for the expression of his feeling toward it. What is
called "realism" is one order of truth, one way of seeing.
"Impressionism" is another order of truth. "Idealism" is still another.
But all three elements blend in varying proportion in any work.
Even the realist, who "paints what he sees," has his ideal, which is
the effect he sets himself to produce by his picture, and he paints
according to his impression. He renders not the object itself but his
mental image of it; and that image is the result of his way of seeing
and feeling, his habit of mind, his interest, and his store of memories.
The idealist must base his work upon s