“All are to be men of genius in their degree—rivulets or rivers, it does not matter, so that the souls be clear and pure.”
This, they said, was exactly our idea of genius in all.
“Good work is never done for hatred, any more than for hire—but for love only.”
Surely, then, not for controversy, we said.
“Neither a great fact, nor a great man, nor a great poem, nor a great picture, nor any other great thing, can be fathomed to the bottom in a moment of time.”
“Every great man is always being helped by everybody, for his gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.”
This, I reminded them, was what we had said when we spoke of the good and bad, that we must use all things for good.
“The ennobling difference between one man and another—between one animal and another—is precisely in this, that one feels more than another.”
“Doesn’t it seem,” said Florence, “as if Ruskin had written those papers especially for us?”
“That last one,” I said, “expresses exactly our idea; here ‘feeling’ means the same as ‘sympathy,’ or ‘feeling with.’ So you find, all through the old books, the striving for this same truth, always vaguely expressed, never fully understood, as an ideal, as a religion of life.”
Ruth asked: “Don’t you think all great religions have always believed in that final unity?”
“Not quite in this way,” I answered. “They have vaguely striven for it and implied it, but never realized it as the one meaning in life, the moving force of the universe.”
I gave each of them a pencil and a piece of paper, and said we would find out and write down what were the chief laws of all arts, and then follow that written paper throughout our meetings. I said: “It looks like a party, with the candy and the paper and pencils.”
“Yes,” said Florence; “and now we are going to play a guessing game!”
The first law upon which we decided, after some conversation, was:
1. Art is the symbol of completeness, in a definite shape.
On this last part, “in a definite shape,” I especially insisted, showing them how the definite, the particular, the finite—the drop as opposed to the mist—symbolized completeness. I said for them Goethe’s poem, “Ueber allen Gipfeln,” to show them how so short, clearcut and simple a thing gave us the sense of immensity.