Reading over the list of things in your notebook I was impressed by several facts. It is well to set down everything that impresses you. But--I cannot help thinking that you do not look for the highest,--that you miss a universe of beautiful things. The obtrusive, the eccentric, the sharply bitter, the "Distorted Souls" as you call them, naturally compel attention first,--just as in real life the forward, the selfish, the aggressive, force themselves upon us. It is of the highest possible value, as a means of self-preservation, to understand them. But I suspect that it is of no value at all to draw them, to photograph them, to give them artistic treatment _except in a contrast-study_. They are not beautiful. They are not good. They are, using the word in the Miltonic sense, obscene--like owls. On the other hand the beautiful in life must be sought, and coaxed, and caressed to make it show its colours. It does not appear very often spontaneously. Yet I feel convinced it is all about us. It travels on railroads too, and lodges at hotels. It fights for life against ugliness and wickedness and apathy and selfishness: it is Ormuzd against Ahriman. Now what is the artist's moral duty? (Of course he may take any subject he pleases and be great in it.) But what is his duty in the eternal order of things, to art and to ethics? Is it not to extract the gold from the ore,--the rubies and emeralds from the rubble? I think it is--though many may laugh at me. Thus newer and higher ideals are created. We advance only by new ideals. I don't mean to say we should make statues of pure gold, or a table, like that of some Caliph, out of a single emerald. But I think that in modern life we should use the dross and slag only when their lightness, worthlessness, or rudeness brings out in higher relief the light of the pure jewel, the weight of the pure metal, the value of that which gives the radiance or the gravity. And in the order of research I would seek the lodes and veins first;--the rest is always easy to find and handle, though requiring much scientific skill, of course, to use artistically.
There _is_ a world, I suppose, almost as barren as the Alkali Plains, where convention has strangled all feeling, and where the development of selfish capacities has choked the other growths. But either below this world or above it there are Americas to discover--full of warmth, light, and beauty--continents chained to each other by snow-peaks, watered by Amazons and Mississippis.